Podcast appearances and mentions of Connie Francis

President Trump mobilizes 700 active-duty U.S. Marines to Los Angeles in the wake of violent protests over ICE raids. A federal judge dismisses Justin Baldoni's $400 million countersuit against Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds. And legendary singer Connie Francis gains a Gen Z following on TikTok thanks to the viral success of "Pretty Little Baby." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Where is the Elon and Trump feud headed? Elon Musk will be speaking to some Trump Aids today. The GOP needs the money from Elon Musk for a Midterm victory. former white house press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre may be upset because her book promotion on the air got put to the side because of the Musk and Trump fight. Mark Interviews Writer Alan Zweibel. Alan tells Mark how in show business sometimes you have to break up two colleagues from going at each other, like the Trump and Musk fight. Everyone has a podcast or a new book out nowadays, what does Alan think of that? Nothing Elon Musk says will alter the Big Beautiful Bill. P Diddy did something yesterday at his trial that raised eyebrows. Did the Democratic Mayoral Debate for NYC add any fuel to the fire for any of the candidates, Mark explains. Z Gen's have blown up Singer Connie Francis's song "Pretty Little Baby". Mark Interviews Pollster John McLaughlin. John sees President Trump's approval ratings moving higher month after month right now it's at 51%. The recession fears have dropped in the last month. Are the Democratic issues such as Transgender rights and energy losing issue for the campaigns?

Where is the Elon and Trump feud headed? Elon Musk will be speaking to some Trump Aids today. The GOP needs the money from Elon Musk for a Midterm victory. former white house press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre may be upset because her book promotion on the air got put to the side because of the Musk and Trump fight. Mark Interviews Writer Alan Zweibel. Alan tells Mark how in show business sometimes you have to break up two colleagues from going at each other, like the Trump and Musk fight. Everyone has a podcast or a new book out nowadays, what does Alan think of that? Nothing Elon Musk says will alter the Big Beautiful Bill. P Diddy did something yesterday at his trial that raised eyebrows. Did the Democratic Mayoral Debate for NYC add any fuel to the fire for any of the candidates, Mark explains. Z Gen's have blown up Singer Connie Francis's song "Pretty Little Baby". Mark Interviews Pollster John McLaughlin. John sees President Trump's approval ratings moving higher month after month right now it's at 51%. The recession fears have dropped in the last month. Are the Democratic issues such as Transgender rights and energy losing issue for the campaigns? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We've told you about food delivery drivers getting upset when they don't get a tip. After a Door Dash worker did not get a cash tip he says he was promised, he returned to the home the next day and he had a gun. During a dramatic confrontation, the firearm ended up in the hands of the homeowner. The driver has been charged with provoking an assault and unlawful carrying of a weapon. He has pled not guilty. And she's the influencer with almost six million followers who also happens to be the granddaughter of President Trump. But along with the spotlight comes a scare for Kai Trump. A man has just been arrested after cops say he jumped the wall at Mar-a-Lago trying to get closer to the high school senior. Plus, dramatic testimony today in the sex trafficking trial of Sean Diddy Combs. A woman claims the rap mogul once dangled her from the 17th story balcony of a high rise. Combs has pleaded not guilty.  And if you've been on social media, you've seen influencers of all ages singing a song called Pretty Little Baby. No, it's not the latest hit by Sabrina Carpenter or Taylor Swift.... the tune is actually sixty-four years old... recorded by none other than Connie Francis, who's now a viral sensation at age 87. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hoary old tales retold – ideally in an Irish accent - and new ones prized from the giddy carousel of rock and roll news which, this week, features … … was there a better stage name than Rick Derringer? … Linda Ronstadt, Ronnie Spector, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and other new biopics under construction. … genuinely ‘iconic' rock images – the Ziggy lightning stipe, Johnny Cash at San Quentin, Elvis dancing in Jailhouse Rock, Dylan and Suze Rotolo in Jones Street … … our old pal Barry McIlheney, his Belfast band Shock Treatment and the time he asked U2 to draw a duck. … the thin wall that separates hilarity and grief. … how TikTok and a 1962 B-side booted the 87-year old Connie Francis.   … Banned words! – ‘iconic, circle back, reach out, Ramones-esque, eponymous sophomore effort' and other clichés that MUST be banished! … “Sgt Pepper: it's like the Beatles on acid!” … why 80 per cent of the stadium experience is beyond our control. ... how Freddie Mercury still makes headlines beyond the grave. … the real Rikki in ‘Rikki Don't Lose that Number'. … and when you find yourself at a Springsteen gig next to a Trump supporter. Watch the Barry McIlheney podcast here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cjw-6HZWa-EFind out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hoary old tales retold – ideally in an Irish accent - and new ones prized from the giddy carousel of rock and roll news which, this week, features … … was there a better stage name than Rick Derringer? … Linda Ronstadt, Ronnie Spector, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and other new biopics under construction. … genuinely ‘iconic' rock images – the Ziggy lightning stipe, Johnny Cash at San Quentin, Elvis dancing in Jailhouse Rock, Dylan and Suze Rotolo in Jones Street … … our old pal Barry McIlheney, his Belfast band Shock Treatment and the time he asked U2 to draw a duck. … the thin wall that separates hilarity and grief. … how TikTok and a 1962 B-side booted the 87-year old Connie Francis.   … Banned words! – ‘iconic, circle back, reach out, Ramones-esque, eponymous sophomore effort' and other clichés that MUST be banished! … “Sgt Pepper: it's like the Beatles on acid!” … why 80 per cent of the stadium experience is beyond our control. ... how Freddie Mercury still makes headlines beyond the grave. … the real Rikki in ‘Rikki Don't Lose that Number'. … and when you find yourself at a Springsteen gig next to a Trump supporter. Watch the Barry McIlheney podcast here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cjw-6HZWa-EFind out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hoary old tales retold – ideally in an Irish accent - and new ones prized from the giddy carousel of rock and roll news which, this week, features … … was there a better stage name than Rick Derringer? … Linda Ronstadt, Ronnie Spector, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and other new biopics under construction. … genuinely ‘iconic' rock images – the Ziggy lightning stipe, Johnny Cash at San Quentin, Elvis dancing in Jailhouse Rock, Dylan and Suze Rotolo in Jones Street … … our old pal Barry McIlheney, his Belfast band Shock Treatment and the time he asked U2 to draw a duck. … the thin wall that separates hilarity and grief. … how TikTok and a 1962 B-side booted the 87-year old Connie Francis.   … Banned words! – ‘iconic, circle back, reach out, Ramones-esque, eponymous sophomore effort' and other clichés that MUST be banished! … “Sgt Pepper: it's like the Beatles on acid!” … why 80 per cent of the stadium experience is beyond our control. ... how Freddie Mercury still makes headlines beyond the grave. … the real Rikki in ‘Rikki Don't Lose that Number'. … and when you find yourself at a Springsteen gig next to a Trump supporter. Watch the Barry McIlheney podcast here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cjw-6HZWa-EFind out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

2025 Tony nominees Jonathan Groff and Gracie Lawrence discuss their Broadway musical "Just in Time," which explores the life of singer Bobby Darin. Groff stars as Darin, while Lawrence plays singer Connie Francis.

La Minute Crooner Attitude, le billet d'humeur de Jean-Baptiste Tuzet, tous les jours de la semaine, 9 h 15 et 19 h 15 sur Crooner Radio. Plus d'informations et podcasts www.croonerradio.frHébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Morning Overnight News Sondra on the power outage Loz Dr issues Real News Fake News Ditts gym hero Roo hit the front page Rumour Mill GOAT quote Wheelie Bin Rob Thomas from Matchbox 20 Sport Airpod etiquette Best time to fly Connie Francis is back See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Sintonía: "Follow That Arab" - Corduroy "Sweet Nothin´s" - Brenda Lee; "Pink Shoe Laces" - Dodie Stevens; "Lucky Lips" - Ruth Brown; "I´ll Be True" - Faye Adams; "Broken Hearted Melody" - Sarah Vaughan; "Where Will The Dimple Be" - Rosemary Clooney; "I Can See An Angel" - Patsy Cline; "Tennessee Wig Walk" - Bonnie Lou; "Dreamboat" - Alma Cogan; "Kiss Me, Honey Honey, Kiss Me" - Shirley Bassey; "Memories Are Made Of This" - Gale Storm; "Walkin´ After Midnight" - Patsy Cline; "I Wanna Be Loved By You" - Marilyn Monroe; "This Ole House" - Rosemary Clooney; "Jim Dandy" - LaVern Baker; "Love and Marriage" - Dinah Shore; "You Always Hurt The One You Love" - Connie FrancisTodas las músicas extraídas de la recopilación (3xCD) "Fifties Girls: 75 Original Recordings on 3CDs" (Not Now Music, 2014)Escuchar audio

Episodio 7.11 de Las Cosas Que Hay Que Escuchar, en el cual nos preguntamos qué vamos a hacer de comer mientras escuchamos la música de Juanita y los Feos, Lisasinson, Jill Sobule, Connie Francis, Wanda Jackson, Janis Martin, Muddy Waters, Jimi Hendrix, Astrud, Laika, KTU, Kletka Red, Messer für Frau Müller, Carlos Perón y Yello. Y, obviamente, todo el delirio habitual de Saurio y las voces que lo atormentan. Si quieren convidar con un cafecito ☕, pueden hacerlo acá: https://cafecito.app/saurio

In this episode of Half Hour with Jeff & Richie, we dive into the Broadway musical Just In Time at Circle in the Square. We break down how the show reimagines the biopic musical, focusing on Bobby Darin's rise from East Harlem to stardom, and explore what makes this production stand out on Broadway right now. We talk about Jonathan Groff's dynamic, Tony-worthy performance as Darin, Gracie Lawrence's scene-stealing turn as Connie Francis, and how the immersive nightclub design puts you right in the middle of the action. Plus, we get into the show's fresh approach to storytelling, the emotional punch of the music, and our predictions for the Tony Awards. Tune in for our honest take on the performances, the creative team's choices, and why Just In Time is a must-see for theater fans. Follow and connect with all things @HalfHourPodcast on ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠, and ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠. Share your thoughts with us on ⁠⁠Just In Time on our podcast cover post on Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Arrancamos con otra centena: programa 301 en el Día Mundial del Jazz. Ahí les dejamos el orden de apartados y las canciones que han sonado ADIVINA LA PELÍCULA Shostakovich, Dmitry – Jazz Suite No2 – 6. Waltz 2. SAN TORAL. Louis Armstrong. MACK THE KNIFE. Connie Francis. BÉSAME MUCHO. CELEBRACIONES Emilia Aliaga. EL RATONCITO MICKEY […] The post Los Tres Tenores 30/04/2025 first appeared on Ripollet Ràdio.

Send us a textOn this Episode Tom and Bert introduce "The Spotlight Series" on entertainment influencers thru the decades!There are Stories to tell and the Guys will cover and discuss the beginnings and the careers of some of the greatest influencers throughout ALL of the entertainment industry.Today's Podcast will cover 3 Legends of the Music scene from the early rock n roll and country music genres. These female artists are 3 icons from the 1950's and 1960's era. Patsy Cline, Brenda Lee and Connie Francis!Listen in as we cover these Ladies!CHAPTERS:(1:08) Patsy Cline- "The most popular Female Country Singer in recording History!"(9:23) Brenda Lee- "Little Miss Dynamite"(22:23) Connie Francis- "The Queen of Song"Enjoy the Show!You can email us at reeldealzmoviesandmusic@gmail.com or visit our Facebook page, Reel Dealz Podcast: Movies & Music Thru The Decades to leave comments and/or TEXT us at 843-855-1704 as well.

Une émission super éclectique avec en diffusion : Joy, Oldelaf et Monsieur D, Ring of cash, Sugar Crush, Wheeland Brothers et Connie Francis. Et toi quel est ton morceau préféré ?Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

What if you could seamlessly blend the timeless charm of doo-wop and rock and roll with the vibrant traditions of Italian-American culture? Our special guest, Charlie Romo, takes us on a thrilling ride through the heart of these cherished worlds. Celebrating his 29th birthday with us, Charlie shares his stories of signing, balancing work and family life, and the delightful chaos of teaching students. Laughter and insights abound as we explore the cultural nuances of family gatherings and the importance of community in Italian American life.Foodies and music lovers alike will savor our exploration of Italian-American culinary traditions and the evolution of music from doo-wop to contemporary crooning. Charlie recounts his journey growing up in a musically inclined household, his participation in American Idol, and his mission to keep classic music alive for new generations. The episode is filled with nostalgia as we reminisce about icons like Bobby Darin and Connie Francis, highlighting Charlie's fascinating experiences with memorabilia and projects honoring these legends.As we wrap up, Charlie opens up about his musical evolution, from voice lessons to a brief hiatus for sports broadcasting, and his passion for collecting Bobby Darin memorabilia. We touch on personal legacies, the importance of heritage, and the joy of sharing classic music with younger audiences. Join us for a lively conversation that celebrates the intersection of cultural heritage and music, and stay tuned for his appearance on American Idol! Congrats once again Charlie!HIS SOCIALSInsta: @Charlie_romoWEBSITEhttps://charlieromo.com/home

Episode dedicated to Dino Baskovic (1974-2025) This is the third of four records from Connie Francis that my dad has in his collection. She WAS the top charting female US artist of the late 1950s and early 1960s.  Her popularity was due to her voice and being able to sing in multiple languages. And she was a hit maker during the early days of rock and roll. So get ready to hear a star who was estimated to have sold more than 200 million records worldwide in Volume 218: Rock and Roll Connie. More information about this album, see the Discogs webpage for it.  Credits and copyrights Connie Francis – Connie Francis Label: Metro Records – M-519 Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Mono Released: 1964 Genre: Pop Style: Vocal We will hear 7 of the 10 tunes on this album. Someone Else's Boy Written-By – Athena Hosey and Hal Gordon Too Many Rules Written-By – Don Stirling and Harold Temkin I'm Gonna Be Warm This Winter (did I hear a little flash of an Elvis impersonation?) Written-By – Hank Hunter and Mark Barkan We Have Something More (Than A Summer Love) Written-By – Jennie Lee Lambert and Mickey Gentile It Happened Last Night Written-By – Earl Wilson, Leonard Whitcup and Slugger Wilson Two for the road with a double shot of Francis penned tunes Plenty Good Lovin' Written-By – Connie Francis Vacation Written-By – Connie Francis, Gary Weston and Hank Hunter I do not own the rights to this music. ASCAP, BMI licenses provided by third-party platforms for music that is not under Public Domain. #conniefrancis #earlyrockandroll #musichistory #vinylrecordcollecting

In the 1970s, Norwegian Tor Sornes invented the hotel key card. He wanted to improve security in hotels after he heard the news that one of his favourite singers, Connie Francis, was attacked in her hotel room.After making a prototype in his garden shed, Tor then had the challenging task of selling his invention globally.Tor's son, Anders, tells Gill Kearsley how persistence paid off for Tor, and the hotel key card was adopted worldwide.Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there. For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more. Recent episodes explore everything from football in Brazil, the history of the ‘Indian Titanic' and the invention of air fryers, to Public Enemy's Fight The Power, subway art and the political crisis in Georgia. We look at the lives of some of the most famous leaders, artists, scientists and personalities in history, including: visionary architect Antoni Gaudi and the design of the Sagrada Familia; Michael Jordan and his bespoke Nike trainers; Princess Diana at the Taj Mahal; and Görel Hanser, manager of legendary Swedish pop band Abba on the influence they've had on the music industry. You can learn all about fascinating and surprising stories, such as the time an Iraqi journalist hurled his shoes at the President of the United States in protest of America's occupation of Iraq; the creation of the Hollywood commercial that changed advertising forever; and the ascent of the first Aboriginal MP.(Photo: A later version of a hotel key card. Credit: Getty Images)

Con las Hermanas Serrano y José Guardiola, Calexico, She & Him, Luis Lucena, los Castro, Percy Mayfield, Emilie.Claire Barlow, Bruce Dickinson, Hugo Montenegro, Connie Francis, Bebe, Marlango, la Húngara, Límbicos, los Amaya, Gipsy Kings y Mocedades

National Ding A Ling day. Entertainment from 2006. Penssylvania became 2nd state,1st state dinner, 1st Black to serve in US House of Representatives, Tide went on sale. Todays birthdays - Frank Sinatra, Bob Barker, Connie Francis, Dionne Warwick, Cy Curnin, Sheila E., Jennifer Connelly, Mayim Bialik. Charlie Pride died.Intro - Pour some sugar on me - Def Leppard     http://defleppard.com/My Ding-A-Ling - Chuck BerryI wanna love you - Akon  Snoop DoggMy wish for you - Rascal FlattsBirthday - The BeatlesBirthdays - In da club - 50 Cent     http://50cent.com/My way - Frank SinatraThe Price is right TV openingMy heart has a mind of its own - Connie FrancisI say a little prayer - Dionne WarwickOne thing leads to another - The FixxThe Glamourous life - Sheila EBlossom TV themeKiss an angel good morning - Charlie PrideExit - In my dreams - Dokken     https://www.dokken.net/

The after-party shenanigans, We have to book Connie Francis, Cursing Carols, Super Match + Why are you on Santa's naughty list?

Allison Applebaum stood by her dad Stanley as his caregiving partner, respecting his wishes and maintaining his quality of life through the very end of his life. Allison was previously the Founding Director of the Caregivers Clinic at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the first program of its kind in the United States to provide comprehensive psychosocial care to family members and friends of patients who are in the caregiving role. Her father Stanley, a talented and prolific composer and musician, worked with many great artists for the 50's and 60's, including Neil Sedaka, Ben E. King, and Connie Francis. Allison took a lead role as her dad's caregiver after the death of her mother, helping him deal with Lewy Body Disease (Lewy Body Dementia). After her mother died, Allison and Stan went forward, dealing with intense and traumatic grief. Allison's caregiving story is a beautiful tribute to her dad, and there are many caregivers across the U.S. doing the same job for someone they care about. LBD carries an unusual set of caregiving challenges. Stan defined quality of life as the ability to be creative, grow, and continue to compose his music. As a caregiver, Allison respected his wishes and ensured he lived fully until his death at 96. Some highlights from Allison's unique caregiving story include: Her dad retained his creativity and this contributed greatly to his quality of life Stan never had a DNR (Do Not Rescucitate) document, and Allison respected that wish through his death Intermittent hallucinations were part of his disease, a great source of pain for both Stan and his daughter. Allison considered them partners in caregiving, and worked to build a caregiving village customized to her dad's needs. Connect with Dr. Allison Applebaum: Website: allisonapplebaum.com Book: Stand By Me: A Guide to Navigating Modern, Meaningful Caregiving Socials: Twitter Instagram Interested in purchasing a GrandPad to stay connected with a senior loved one? Get more information at https://www.grandpad.net/thoh. GrandPad website: https://www.grandpad.net/ Social Media for GrandPad https://facebook.com/grandpad https://instagram.com/grandpad_social/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/grandpad https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuFAJCb7_tTneM_ikABq08Q Hospice Navigation Services is here for you. If you have questions about hospice care or need to troubleshoot the care you're already receiving, book a session with an expert Hospice Navigator at theheartofhospice.com. Connect with The Heart of Hospice Podcast and host Helen Bauer Website: theheartofhospice.com Email: helen@theheartofhospice.com More podcast episodes: The Heart of Hospice Podcast

A listener's question sparked a wave of nostalgia and inspired this episode. Today we discuss the incredibly talented Connie Francis. She gave us timeless hits like, WHERE THE BOYS ARE & WHO'S SORRY NOW. Tune in as we explore the memories behind the legend and celebrate the unforgettable Connie Francis. https://hollywoodgodfatherpodcast.com/ https://www.giannirusso.com/ https://corleonefineitalian.com/ Gianni Russo's Cameo videos are a must-have for any true Godfather fan! https://www.cameo.com/giannirusso?qid=1731978579&aaQueryId=0f543d0f3429d0ace3bf944ae3314bfe Follow us on... instagram.com/@hollywoodgodfather instagram.com/@realgiannirusso instagram.com/@Jeaniehollywoodgodfatherpod

A listener's question sparked a wave of nostalgia and inspired this episode. Today we discuss the incredibly talented Connie Francis. She gave us timeless hits like, WHERE THE BOYS ARE & WHO'S SORRY NOW. Tune in as we explore memories behind the legend and celebrate the unforgettable Connie Francis.

Trong số các bản tình ca của Elvis Presley, nhạc phẩm « Are you lonesome tonight » có lẽ là giai điệu buồn và đẹp nhất. Vào đầu những năm 1960, sau hai năm thi hành nghĩa vụ quân sự, nam danh ca Elvis đã ghi âm lại bài hát này theo gợi ý của nhà quản lý Colonel Parker, đơn giản là vì vợ ông (bà Marie Mott) rất thích nghe bản nhạc này (phiên bản của Al Jolson), từng ăn khách nhiều năm trước đó  Mặc dù đã được hoàn tất vào mùa xuân năm 1960, nhưng bản ghi âm « Are You Lonesome Tonight » của Elvis Presley lại bị hãng đĩa RCA « cầm chân », trì hoãn thời điểm phát hành đến hơn 6 tháng. Chủ yếu cũng vì ban giám đốc điều hành thời bấy giờ nghĩ rằng bản ballad này không phù hợp với hình ảnh và phong cách của Elvis, họ muốn anh hát nhạc rock để thu hút giới trẻ thay vì hát nhạc tình theo kiểu crooner, hợp hơn với lứa tuổi trung niên.Bất ngờ thay, khi được phát hành vào tháng 11 năm 1960, bài hát này thành công ngay lập tức trên thị trường Mỹ, đứng đầu bảng xếp hạng nhạc pop của Billboard, về hạng ba trong hạng mục R&B. Một tháng sau khi chinh phục Hoa Kỳ giai điệu này lại giành luôn ngôi vị quán quân tại vương quốc Anh và hạng đầu thị trường châu Âu.Có thể nói là « Are You Lonesome Tonight » là một bản nhạc xưa. Được nhóm sáng tác Tin Pan Alley (gồm các nhạc sĩ Roy Turk và Lou Handman) viết vào năm 1926, bản nhạc này đã thành công vang dội lần đầu tiên vào năm 1927 với bản ghi âm của Charles Hart. Hai thập niên sau, bài hát « Are You Lonesome Tonight » ăn khách một lần nữa với Harry Freidman, ca sĩ chính của dàn nhạc Blue Barron và nhất là phiên bản của nam danh ca Al Jolson, với giọng đọc khá truyền cảm thay vì giọng hát ở trong đoạn giữa.Khi cover lại bài hát này, Elvis có lẽ đã muốn chiều ý nhà quản lý của anh là Colonel Parker. Lúc đầu, ông chỉ yêu cầu anh hát thử, nếu không thích thì không cần phải thu thanh, nào ngờ lối hát thần sầu của Elvis lại nâng bản nhạc này lên một tầm cao mới, có phần vượt trội so với các phiên bản trước. Đoạn khó nhất đối với Elvis là phần độc thoại khi anh mô tả mối tình như một vở kịch ba màn, yêu nhau trong màn đầu, bẽ bàng khổ đau trong màn hai, để rồi chia tay nhau trong màn cuối. Khi vở kịch buông màn, cũng là lúc tình yêu đã đi vào hồi kết, sân khấu cô đơn trống rỗng để lại trong màn đêm một dấu chấm hết. Tuy không phải là sở trường so với giọng hát, nhưng giọng nói của Elvis trong phần thoại lại đầy sức thuyết phục.Ông hoàng Elvis đã ghi âm bản nhạc này tại Studio B ở Nashville vào đầu tháng 04/1960. Tuy nổi tiếng là một ca sĩ nhạc rock, nhưng vào thời bất giờ anh đang chuyển sang ghi âm những bài hát xưa, điển hình là bài hát rất ăn khách của anh trước đó « It's Now Or Never » được phóng tác từ giai điệu « O Sole Mio », và sau đó đến bài « Surender » (Torna a Surriento/Trở về mái nhà xưa trong tiếng Việt) cũng như bài « No more », chuyển thể từ « La Paloma », khúc đàn Tây Ban Nha nổi tiếng trong làng nhạc cổ điển.Bản thân danh ca Elvis thích sự chuyển hướng này trong sự nghiệp của mình, xem đó là cơ hội để mở rộng tầm nhìn, thử hát nhiều thể loại âm nhạc khác nhau. Điều mà ban giám đốc điều hành hãng đĩa RCA lo ngại, rốt cuộc đã không xảy ra. Dù bị dời lại hơn nửa năm, nhưng đến khi được phát hành, « Are You Lonesome Tonight » lại giúp cho Elvis chinh phục được thêm nhiều thành phần người hâm mộ mới (thế hệ trên 35 tuổi), mà vẫn giữ lại hầu hết những người yêu mến chất giọng của Elvis (chủ yếu là giới trẻ) luôn trung thành với giọng ca này từ lúc anh mới vào nghề.Cũng như bài hát « Will you still love me tomorrow » (Mai có còn yêu em) của Carole King đã cho ra đời nhiều bản nhạc hồi âm như « Tomorrow & Always  » (Yêu đến ngàn sau), phiên bản của Elvis « Are You Lonesome Tonight » sau khi thành công, đã có ít nhất 5 ca khúc đối đáp của những giọng ca nữ khác nhau được tung ra thị trường. Đó là trường hợp của Dodie Stevens, Linda Lee, Ricky Page, Thelma Carpenter và Jeanne Black.Các giọng ca nữ này đã hồi âm Elvis khi cho phát hành nhạc phẩm mang tựa đề « Yes, I'm lonesome tonight » (Vâng em cô đơn đêm nay) giữ nguyên giai điệu nhưng thay đổi lời hát. Ngoài ra, cũng có một bài hát thứ nhì với góc nhìn khác mang tên là « Oh, how I miss you tonight » (Đêm nay sao quá nhớ anh).Tuy được đề cử đi tranh giải Grammy trong hạng mục bản ghi âm xuất sắc nhất, nhưng bài hát của Elvis rốt cuộc lại nhường hạng đầu cho nhạc phẩm « Georgia On My Mind » của Ray Charles. Dù vậy bài hát này lại rất thành công trên thị trường và sau Elvis, đến phiên nhiều nghệ sĩ quốc tế ghi âm lại bài này như Frank Sinatra, Connie Francis, Doris Day, Bobby Solo …Gần một thế kỷ sau ngày ra đời, giai điệu « Are You Lonesome Tonight » tính đến nay đã có gần cả ngàn phiên bản trong 16 thứ tiếng. Trong tiếng Việt, bài này có nhiều lời khác nhau. Lời đầu tiên « Tình bơ vơ » của tác giả Trầm Tử Thiêng do Elvis Phương ghi âm. Lời thứ nhì « Đêm Buồn » của tác giả Nguyễn Hoàng Đô qua phần trình bày của các nghệ sĩ Thanh Duyên hay Quỳnh Dao, lời thứ ba « Em còn cô đơn tối nay » được nhiều nguồn ghi chép là do Trung Hành tự đặt lời và ghi âm.« Are You Lonesome Tonight » là một trong những bài hát buồn và đẹp nhất từng được viết. Theo bảng xếp hạng (năm 2008) của tạp chí Billboard, bản nhạc này đứng hạng thứ 81 trên danh sách 100 bài hát hay nhất mọi thời đại. Tưởng chừng nhân vật trong bài hát thầm hỏi người yêu, nhưng thực ra lại tự hỏi lòng : có ai nào ngờ đâu, tấn trò đời sân khấu. Yêu ngay từ lúc đầu, trao ánh mắt cho nhau. Nhưng không hiểu vì sao, tình lạc lối đêm thâu. Cho cô đơn buông màn, tim ngập tràn nỗi đau.

Trong số các bản tình ca của Elvis Presley, nhạc phẩm « Are you lonesome tonight » có lẽ là giai điệu buồn và đẹp nhất. Vào đầu những năm 1960, sau hai năm thi hành nghĩa vụ quân sự, nam danh ca Elvis đã ghi âm lại bài hát này theo gợi ý của nhà quản lý Colonel Parker, đơn giản là vì vợ ông (bà Marie Mott) rất thích nghe bản nhạc này (phiên bản của Al Jolson), từng ăn khách nhiều năm trước đó  Mặc dù đã được hoàn tất vào mùa xuân năm 1960, nhưng bản ghi âm « Are You Lonesome Tonight » của Elvis Presley lại bị hãng đĩa RCA « cầm chân », trì hoãn thời điểm phát hành đến hơn 6 tháng. Chủ yếu cũng vì ban giám đốc điều hành thời bấy giờ nghĩ rằng bản ballad này không phù hợp với hình ảnh và phong cách của Elvis, họ muốn anh hát nhạc rock để thu hút giới trẻ thay vì hát nhạc tình theo kiểu crooner, hợp hơn với lứa tuổi trung niên.Bất ngờ thay, khi được phát hành vào tháng 11 năm 1960, bài hát này thành công ngay lập tức trên thị trường Mỹ, đứng đầu bảng xếp hạng nhạc pop của Billboard, về hạng ba trong hạng mục R&B. Một tháng sau khi chinh phục Hoa Kỳ giai điệu này lại giành luôn ngôi vị quán quân tại vương quốc Anh và hạng đầu thị trường châu Âu.Có thể nói là « Are You Lonesome Tonight » là một bản nhạc xưa. Được nhóm sáng tác Tin Pan Alley (gồm các nhạc sĩ Roy Turk và Lou Handman) viết vào năm 1926, bản nhạc này đã thành công vang dội lần đầu tiên vào năm 1927 với bản ghi âm của Charles Hart. Hai thập niên sau, bài hát « Are You Lonesome Tonight » ăn khách một lần nữa với Harry Freidman, ca sĩ chính của dàn nhạc Blue Barron và nhất là phiên bản của nam danh ca Al Jolson, với giọng đọc khá truyền cảm thay vì giọng hát ở trong đoạn giữa.Khi cover lại bài hát này, Elvis có lẽ đã muốn chiều ý nhà quản lý của anh là Colonel Parker. Lúc đầu, ông chỉ yêu cầu anh hát thử, nếu không thích thì không cần phải thu thanh, nào ngờ lối hát thần sầu của Elvis lại nâng bản nhạc này lên một tầm cao mới, có phần vượt trội so với các phiên bản trước. Đoạn khó nhất đối với Elvis là phần độc thoại khi anh mô tả mối tình như một vở kịch ba màn, yêu nhau trong màn đầu, bẽ bàng khổ đau trong màn hai, để rồi chia tay nhau trong màn cuối. Khi vở kịch buông màn, cũng là lúc tình yêu đã đi vào hồi kết, sân khấu cô đơn trống rỗng để lại trong màn đêm một dấu chấm hết. Tuy không phải là sở trường so với giọng hát, nhưng giọng nói của Elvis trong phần thoại lại đầy sức thuyết phục.Ông hoàng Elvis đã ghi âm bản nhạc này tại Studio B ở Nashville vào đầu tháng 04/1960. Tuy nổi tiếng là một ca sĩ nhạc rock, nhưng vào thời bất giờ anh đang chuyển sang ghi âm những bài hát xưa, điển hình là bài hát rất ăn khách của anh trước đó « It's Now Or Never » được phóng tác từ giai điệu « O Sole Mio », và sau đó đến bài « Surender » (Torna a Surriento/Trở về mái nhà xưa trong tiếng Việt) cũng như bài « No more », chuyển thể từ « La Paloma », khúc đàn Tây Ban Nha nổi tiếng trong làng nhạc cổ điển.Bản thân danh ca Elvis thích sự chuyển hướng này trong sự nghiệp của mình, xem đó là cơ hội để mở rộng tầm nhìn, thử hát nhiều thể loại âm nhạc khác nhau. Điều mà ban giám đốc điều hành hãng đĩa RCA lo ngại, rốt cuộc đã không xảy ra. Dù bị dời lại hơn nửa năm, nhưng đến khi được phát hành, « Are You Lonesome Tonight » lại giúp cho Elvis chinh phục được thêm nhiều thành phần người hâm mộ mới (thế hệ trên 35 tuổi), mà vẫn giữ lại hầu hết những người yêu mến chất giọng của Elvis (chủ yếu là giới trẻ) luôn trung thành với giọng ca này từ lúc anh mới vào nghề.Cũng như bài hát « Will you still love me tomorrow » (Mai có còn yêu em) của Carole King đã cho ra đời nhiều bản nhạc hồi âm như « Tomorrow & Always  » (Yêu đến ngàn sau), phiên bản của Elvis « Are You Lonesome Tonight » sau khi thành công, đã có ít nhất 5 ca khúc đối đáp của những giọng ca nữ khác nhau được tung ra thị trường. Đó là trường hợp của Dodie Stevens, Linda Lee, Ricky Page, Thelma Carpenter và Jeanne Black.Các giọng ca nữ này đã hồi âm Elvis khi cho phát hành nhạc phẩm mang tựa đề « Yes, I'm lonesome tonight » (Vâng em cô đơn đêm nay) giữ nguyên giai điệu nhưng thay đổi lời hát. Ngoài ra, cũng có một bài hát thứ nhì với góc nhìn khác mang tên là « Oh, how I miss you tonight » (Đêm nay sao quá nhớ anh).Tuy được đề cử đi tranh giải Grammy trong hạng mục bản ghi âm xuất sắc nhất, nhưng bài hát của Elvis rốt cuộc lại nhường hạng đầu cho nhạc phẩm « Georgia On My Mind » của Ray Charles. Dù vậy bài hát này lại rất thành công trên thị trường và sau Elvis, đến phiên nhiều nghệ sĩ quốc tế ghi âm lại bài này như Frank Sinatra, Connie Francis, Doris Day, Bobby Solo …Gần một thế kỷ sau ngày ra đời, giai điệu « Are You Lonesome Tonight » tính đến nay đã có gần cả ngàn phiên bản trong 16 thứ tiếng. Trong tiếng Việt, bài này có nhiều lời khác nhau. Lời đầu tiên « Tình bơ vơ » của tác giả Trầm Tử Thiêng do Elvis Phương ghi âm. Lời thứ nhì « Đêm Buồn » của tác giả Nguyễn Hoàng Đô qua phần trình bày của các nghệ sĩ Thanh Duyên hay Quỳnh Dao, lời thứ ba « Em còn cô đơn tối nay » được nhiều nguồn ghi chép là do Trung Hành tự đặt lời và ghi âm.« Are You Lonesome Tonight » là một trong những bài hát buồn và đẹp nhất từng được viết. Theo bảng xếp hạng (năm 2008) của tạp chí Billboard, bản nhạc này đứng hạng thứ 81 trên danh sách 100 bài hát hay nhất mọi thời đại. Tưởng chừng nhân vật trong bài hát thầm hỏi người yêu, nhưng thực ra lại tự hỏi lòng : có ai nào ngờ đâu, tấn trò đời sân khấu. Yêu ngay từ lúc đầu, trao ánh mắt cho nhau. Nhưng không hiểu vì sao, tình lạc lối đêm thâu. Cho cô đơn buông màn, tim ngập tràn nỗi đau.

On this episode, Gianni dives into listeners' questions taking us back to the golden area of the Tropicana, sharing vivid memories of the time he spent in the iconic venue. He recalls unforgettable moments watching legendary superstars like Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. Wayne Newton and Elvis Presly light up the stage.. He also answers questions revealing his second favorite film role and reflecting on the life of legendary Connie Francis. Have questions or ideas for future episodes? Write in, and let's keep the conversation going!

On this episode, Gianni dives into listeners' questions taking us back to the golden area of the Tropicana, sharing vivid memories of the time he spent in the iconic venue. He recalls unforgettable moments watching legendary superstars like Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. Wayne Newton and Elvis Presly light up the stage.. He also answers questions revealing his second favorite film role and reflecting on the life of legendary Connie Francis. Have questions or ideas for future episodes? Write in, and let's keep the conversation going! Go tohttps://www.allstarwine.com/brands/Don-Corleone-Organic-Italian-Vodkahttps://www.giannirusso.com/https://hollywoodgodfatherpodcast.com/https://corleonefineitalian.com/Follow us on...instagram.com/@hollywoodgodfatherinstagram.com/@realgiannirussoinstagram.com/@Jeaniehollywoodgodfatherpod

In this episode we dive into the remarkable life of Bobby Darin, a musical sensation whose talent and ambition left an indelible mark on the entertainment world. Know for hits like Mack the Knife and Beyond the Sea, Bobby Darin lived with a unique urgency. He was aware of his limited time and channeled every ounce of energy into making a lasting impact. We explore his passionate relationship with the legendary Connie Francis, and the lasting impact it had on both of them. Years after Darin's passing, his brother put some of his personal possessions up for auction, including deeply personal love letters exchanged between Darin and Francis. Connie herself entered the auction hoping to reclaim this cherished part of their history, only to be outbid. But in a touching twist the winning bidder generously decided to return the letters to her allowing a piece of Darin's memory to return to someone who loved him dearly. Join us as we celebrate Bobby Darin's life, love and legacy that endures long after his short life.

In this episode we dive into the remarkable life of Bobby Darin, a musical sensation whose talent and ambition left an indelible mark on the entertainment world. Know for hits like Mack the Knife and Beyond the Sea, Bobby Darin lived with a unique urgency. He was aware of his limited time and channeled every ounce of energy into making a lasting impact. We explore his passionate relationship with the legendary Connie Francis, and the lasting impact it had on both of them. Years after Darin's passing, his brother put some of his personal possessions up for auction, including deeply personal love letters exchanged between Darin and Francis. Connie herself entered the auction hoping to reclaim this cherished part of their history, only to be outbid. But in a touching twist the winning bidder generously decided to return the letters to her allowing a piece of Darin's memory to return to someone who loved him dearly. Join us as we celebrate Bobby Darin's life, love and legacy that endures long after his short life.

Legendary singer/original founding member of The Mystics George Galfo talks about the 65th anniversary of the '59 megahit “Hushabye” and the story behind the song and more! George has been at the helm for 22+ years and inducted into the Doo-Wop Hall of Fame in '05 & nominated into the Brooklyn HOF Legends & Legacies, the group began as the Overtons later becoming The Mystics and have backed up numerous acts including Judy Allen, Rusty Lane, and Connie Francis plus their previous releases “Don't Take The Stars”, “All Through The Night”, “White Cliffs of Dover” , “Star Crossed Lovers” and George shares his stories about his amazing career plus the story behind the music! Check out the amazing George Galfo of The Mystics on all major platforms and www.theoriginalmystics.com today! #georgegalfo #themystics #65thanniversary #doowophalloffame #hushabye #brooklynhalloffamelegends #theovertons #laurierecords #donttakethestars #whitecliffsofdover #theoriginalmystics #conniefrancis #spreaker #iheartradio #spotify #applemusic #youtube #anchorfm #bitchute #rumble #mikewagner #themikewagnershow #mikewagnergeorgegalfo #themikewagnershowgeorgegalfo      Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-mike-wagner-show--3140147/support.

Episode 313, Signature Songs, presents the songs most associated with 17 performers including The Everly Brothers, Ricky Nelson, the bands of Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller, Connie Francis, Tony Bennett, Brenda Lee, Gene Autry, and... Read More The post Episode 313, Signature Songs appeared first on Sam Waldron.

Vanessa Racci, the beloved jazzy Italian, takes center stage as we paint vivid portraits of Italian American music icons Bobby Darin and Connie Francis. Our heart beats with excitement as Vanessa unveils her latest passion project, "Forbidden Love," a mini musical poised to captivate audiences with its debut at Yorktown Stage in Westchester, New York. She shares her journey and collaboration with the talented Charlie Romo, all while nestled in the historical backdrop of Little Italy, thanks to the encouragement of Dr. Joseph Schelsa. Together, they breathe new life into the compelling and overlooked love story of Darin and Francis, adding depth to their legacies. Our conversation celebrates the indomitable spirit of Connie Francis, exploring her touching embrace of her Italian roots through music, even as she navigated personal trials and the challenging dynamics of fame. Her father's insistence on her mastering the accordion and the resulting success of "Who's Sorry Now?" serve as testament to her resilience and talent. We reflect on her extraordinary journey and ponder her mysterious exclusion from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Vanessa and I weave personal anecdotes that underscore the lasting impact of these musical greats, as we announce the ambitious plans to elevate their story from a mini musical to a grand Broadway spectacle. Music becomes the powerful thread connecting past and present, as we reminisce about the resonant beauty of Italian songs like "Non pensare a me" and "Al di là." These melodies carry the weight of family memories, driven by the emotive power of the Neapolitan cry and the unique vocal qualities that define Italian music. We further explore the nurturing of future Italian American talents, celebrating figures like Charlie Romo who is staring in this production with Vanessa, and discuss the discipline and talent required to excel as a singer. As we traverse through genres, with nods to jazz and R&B legends like Alicia Keys and Etta James, this episode becomes a rich tapestry of music's enduring influence on our lives and the vibrant legacy of Italian American contributions to the musical landscape. To find out about the performance see the links below! Get tickets at: https://www.yorktownstage.org/forbidden-love-the-love-story-of-bobby-darin-and-connie-francis/ Vaness's Website: https://vanessaracci.com/ Vanessa's socials Youtube:  @vanessaracci  Instagram: @vanessaracci X: @vanessaracci --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/italianamerican/support

Send us a Text Message.Welcome to Guess the Year! This is an interactive, competitive podcast series where you will be able to play along and compete against your fellow listeners. Here is how the scoring works:1 point: get the year correct within 10 years (e.g., you guess 1975 and it is between 1965-1985)4 points: get the year correct within 5 years (e.g., you guess 2004 and it is between 1999-2009)7 points: get the year correct within 2 years (e.g., you guess 1993 and it is between 1991-1995)10 points: get the year dead on!Guesses can be emailed to drandrewmay@gmail.com or texted using the link at the top of the show notes (please leave your name).I will read your scores out before the next episode, along with the scores of your fellow listeners! Please email your guesses to Andrew no later than 12pm EST on the day the next episode posts if you want them read out on the episode (e.g., if an episode releases on Monday, then I need your guesses by 12pm EST on Wednesday; if an episode releases on Friday, then I need your guesses by 12 pm EST on Monday). Note: If you don't get your scores in on time, they will still be added to the overall scores I am keeping. So they will count for the final scores - in other words, you can catch up if you get behind, you just won't have your scores read out on the released episode. All I need is your guesses (e.g., Song 1 - 19xx, Song 2 - 20xx, Song 3 - 19xx, etc.). Please be honest with your guesses! Best of luck!!The answers to today's ten songs can be found below. If you are playing along, don't scroll down until you have made your guesses. .....Have you made your guesses yet? If so, you can scroll down and look at the answers......Okay, answers coming. Don't peek if you haven't made your guesses yet!.....Intro song: My Girl by The Temptations (1964)Song 1: Cotton Eye Joe by Rednex (1994)Song 2: Possibly Maybe by Bjork (1995)Song 3: Kids by MGMT (2007)Song 4: Seaside Shuffle by Terry Dactyl & the Dinosaurs (1971)Song 5: Stupid Cupid by Connie Francis (1959)Song 6: Goin' to See My Baby by The Fatback Band (1972)Song 7: Islands in the Stream by Kenny Rogers & Dolly Parton (1983)Song 8: Beautiful by Eminem (2009)Song 9: Want U Back by Cher Lloyd (2012)Song 10: The Sweetest Taboo by Sade (1985)

In this modern world, it's a struggle to get by enough as it is without some damn fool in your face every waking moment. Fortunately we know the best way to deal with fools. Much like paranoia, the cure is through laughs and of course music. Our good friend and fellow music nerd Ryan Stockstad knows this all too well, and was nice enough to join the pod for TOP TEN SONGS FOR "FOOLS", our favorite songs that have the word "Fool" in the title. Picks 10-6 are featured here in Part 1.Ryan is always up to fun stuff on YouTube and other places. Follow his Instagram for all things Stockstad:https://www.instagram.com/hollywoodpsychic/All hail the beloved Patreon people! These upstanding citizens put their money where their mouth is and keep the show afloat by contributing $5 a month. In return they're rewarded with a monthly bonus episode using our patented Emergency Pod format, our improv game where we pull a playlist out of our butts in real time. On August 1st we released an all-new Emergency Pod episode with the always affable Dustin Prince. Get this and every episode weve done, plus a new one every month, Find out more at:https://www.patreon.com/alltimetoptenChat with us! On Facebook! Get more involved in the ATTT cinematic universe by chatting with us on the Facebook Music Chat Group. Start a conversation about music!https://www.facebook.com/groups/940749894391295

Nuevo capítulo de la serie Billboard Hits en donde cada mes te invitamos a retroceder 60 años en el tiempo para recordar algunas de las canciones que alcanzaron su puesto más alto en el Billboard Hot 100 en este mismo mes de hace seis décadas. Los grupos de la invasión británica, el soul de la Motown y los girl groups conviven en las listas de éxitos convirtiéndose, independientemente de su estilo, en la música popular.(Foto del podcast; Florence Ballard, Mary Wilson y Diana Ross, The Supremes en Londres, 1964)Playlist;(sintonía) THE VENTURES “Walk don’t run 64” (top 8)THE BEATLES “A hard day's night” (top 1)THE BEATLES “I should have known better” (top 53)PETER and GORDON “Nobody I know” (top 12)DEAN MARTIN “Everybody loves somebody” (top 1)THE SUPREMES “Where did our love go” (top 1)THE MIRACLES “I like it like that” (top 27)THE MARVELETTES “You’re my remedy” (top 48)EARL JEAN “I’m into something” (top 38)THE DRIFTERS “Under the boardwalk” (top 4)THE ROLLING STONES “Tell me (you’re coming back)” (top 24)THE RONETTES “Do I love you?” (top 34)THE JELLY BEANS “I wanna love him so bad” (top 9)PATTY and THE EMBLEMS “Mixed-up, shook-up girl” (top 37)CONNIE FRANCIS “Looking for love” (top 45)BARBARA LYNN “Oh baby we got a good thing going” (top 69)DIONNE WARWICK “A house is not a home” (top 71)DUSTY SPRINGFIELD “Whisin’ and hopin’” (top 6)THE DIXIE CUPS “People say” (top 12)Escuchar audio

Dürfte ich eine Romanfigur erfinden, sie wäre wie Alli Neumann. Gesegnet mit zahllosen Talenten und einem von Solarenergie betriebenen Temperament, ein von innen und außen schöner Mensch mit überbordender Phantasie. 1995 kam sie in Solingen zur Welt als Tochter einer Polin und eines Deutschen. Als Mädchen tritt Alli in Altersheimen auf, singt Lieder von Connie Francis und France Gall, beginnt mit 12, eigene Songs zu schreiben, zieht 14jährig nach Hamburg, raus aus der Schule, rein in die Schule, wieder raus, alles ist immer in Bewegung, vor allem Alli selbst. 2018 spielt die Autodidaktin in Kim Franks Spielfilm „Wach“ und wird bejubelt, sie bringt ihre ersten Songs raus, spielt 2022 für 6 Konzerte als Vorband von Coldplay und ist 2023 bei „Sing meinen Song“ dabei. What a Life! Bei „Toast Hawaii“ erzählt Alli von polnischen Salzgurken, Letscho Suppe und Zapiekanka (Sie werden erfahren, was genau das ist), wir sprechen über Borschtsch und Pieroggen, aber auch über sehr simple Dinge wie Pralinenschachteln, Zwiebeln und chinesisches Porzellan.

We are thrilled to welcome Mr. Ernie Rossi of E. Rossi Company to the newly minted Red Sauce Studio in the heart of Little Italy. With a legacy dating back to 1910, Ernie shares captivating stories about his family's significant contributions to Neapolitan music in America. From his grandfather's early days publishing sheet music to producing records, this episode offers a tribute to the enduring legacy of Italian culture in Little Italy. Travel back with us to the nostalgic Italian American neighborhoods where cultural dynamics and traditions shaped everyday life. Ernie paints a vivid picture of how the family business evolved from a music-focused enterprise to a broader Italian American resource, emphasizing the cultural significance of traditional coffee pots like the Neapolitan flip coffee pot. Personal anecdotes, such as children being given coffee in their milk to keep them hyperactive, enrich our discussion of memories that continue to shape Italian American heritage today. From our sit down with Ernie we explore kitchen mishaps, traditional Italian cookware, and share humorous stories about encounters with famous Italian Americans like Martin Scorsese and Connie Francis. As we wrap up, we dive into planning an Italian American Christmas album, including a playful debate about Dominic the Donkey and creating a new holiday hit. Join us for an episode brimming with rich history, personal connections, and a heartfelt celebration of Italian American culture. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/italianamerican/support

On the latest episode of the podcast, Doug sings the praises of the majority of the cast in this horrible movie, Jamie thinks she's watching a movie starring Connie Francis and Perry Mason, and we both marvel at the decision to allow Dan Akyroyd to do whatever voice work this is. Put on your loudest formal-wear, allow an unhinged laser to give you an atomic wedgie , and join us as we get distracted throughout our discussion of one of the worst films in history (Doug would disagree) Caddyshack II!Visit our YouTube ChannelMerch on TeePublic Follow us on TwitterFollow on InstagramFind us on FacebookVisit our Website

Ginny MacColl is the world's oldest female competitive ninja athlete, but her journey didn't begin until her mid-60s. She talks about what it takes to become a warrior.

- Your Favorite Mothers Day Songs, featuring Connie Francis, Al Jolson, Yehoram Gaon, Dudu Fisher, Shira Kobren Wasserman of Central Synagogue and others - A Yiddish Expression appropriate for this day

Dennis and Julie open with first impressions …is this a good, intelligent, charming, or wealthy person?  Do you have a goodness detector?  How can you assess one's goodness? Knowledge and intelligence are not synonymous.  We all have micro and macro beliefs... one might have great micro beliefs and atrocious macro beliefs.  Who influences people more high school or college teachers?  Do you remember your teachers?  The definition of courage is ...one who tells the truth.  Younger generations aren't gowing up like they used to… meeting people… being independent… is it tougher to be a young person today than it was in the past.  What are the factors, now versus then, that have changed?  In the past there was no war on reality, more patriotism, more religion, and two parents in the home.  Younger folks were not as jaded… there was less gender confusion in the past.  Tearing things down is easy, building things up is much tougher.  Dennis uses Where the Boys Are -1961 Connie Francis, to show how popular music reflects the change in young people over the years.  They address technology and pornography... and its effect on intimacy.  We are a sex obsessed society, but have less intimacy.  Dennis shares his drivers test fail.  What is self-gifting.  Julie points out that "manifesting" is secular praying, and  "the universe" is secular God. Music: Straight to the Point c 2022Richard Friedman Music Publishing 100%Richard Friedman Writers 100%ASCAP (PRO)IPI128741568RichardFriedmanMusic.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dennis and Julie open with first impressions …is this a good, intelligent, charming, or wealthy person?  Do you have a goodness detector?  How can you assess one's goodness? Knowledge and intelligence are not synonymous.  We all have micro and macro beliefs... one might have great micro beliefs and atrocious macro beliefs.  Who influences people more high school or college teachers?  Do you remember your teachers?  The definition of courage is ...one who tells the truth.  Younger generations aren't gowing up like they used to… meeting people… being independent… is it tougher to be a young person today than it was in the past.  What are the factors, now versus then, that have changed?  In the past there was no war on reality, more patriotism, more religion, and two parents in the home.  Younger folks were not as jaded… there was less gender confusion in the past.  Tearing things down is easy, building things up is much tougher.  Dennis uses Where the Boys Are -1961 Connie Francis, to show how popular music reflects the change in young people over the years.  They address technology and pornography... and its effect on intimacy.  We are a sex obsessed society, but have less intimacy.  Dennis shares his drivers test fail.  What is self-gifting.  Julie points out that "manifesting" is secular praying, and  "the universe" is secular God. Music: Straight to the Point c 2022Richard Friedman Music Publishing 100%Richard Friedman Writers 100%ASCAP (PRO)IPI128741568RichardFriedmanMusic.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode 291, Top Hits of 1960, features 17 best-selling songs from that year plus a few memories of pop culture in 1960. Performers include Elvis Presley, Connie Francis, Chubby Checker, Ray Charles, The Ventures, The... Read More The post Episode 291, Top Hits of 1960 appeared first on Sam Waldron.

Alli Neumann spricht im Podcast über Fettnäpfchen, stressige Geburtstage und kopflose Hühner. Die Sängerin beschreibt den Outlaw unter den Instrumenten, redet über das Lebenswerk ihrer polnischen Mutter und erinnert sich, ab welchem Moment sie stolz war über ihre Herkunft. Über eine Oma im Harz, die es nie gab, Deutschlernen mit Nicht-Muttersprachlerinnen und warum sie es bereut, nicht von der Polizei zur Schule eskortiert worden zu sein https://www.allineumann.com/ (02:20) Passkontrolle (10:35) Klischee-Check: Pep-Talk, Polenwitze & Oma im Harz (23:45) Kulturliebender Haushalt, kopfloses Huhn & Deutschlernen mit Connie Francis (37 :00) Wilde Musik, Sommerferien in Polen & Ärger mit dem Jugendamt (43:00) Plattenvertrag mit 13 und Back to School (56:50) Neues Album & Migrant Parents & Mamas Lebenswerk BETTHUPFERL: https://www.ardaudiothek.de/episode/betthupferl-gute-nacht-geschichten-fuer-kinder/frank-joung-rocco-im-topf-schlechte-laune-geburtstagsfolge-mit-adam/bayern-2/94827180/ T-SHIRTS: Halbe Katoffl T-Shirts: https://shop.halbekatoffl.de/ SUPPORT: Halbe Katoffl unterstützen: https://halbekatoffl.de/unterstuetzen/ Website: https://halbekatoffl.de Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/halbekatoffl/ Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/HalbeKatoffl LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frank-joung-76-fjo/

The 60s was a fun and a unique experience. You had to be there to understand. Just talk to any baby boomer who was an adolescent during the 60s and they will tell you how fun and how fortunate they were to grow up in the 1960s. School dances and the dance crazes during that period were something else. I couldn't even begin to write about or even talk about what dances are popular today. I guess I possess a generation gap. I am lost in the 60s and 70s.The first dance craze I remember was "The Stroll." Of course it came out in the 50s but its popularity was still present in the 60s. You could stroll to almost any slow song. The Diamonds made the song famous in January 1958 and is still played today at many parties and weddings. It was close to being the first line dance. Girls on one side and boys on the other and the line moved up as each couple would meet one at a time in the center at the beginning of the line and stroll to the music down the line between the others and take their place at the end of the line.The Twist was a rock and roll dance popular in the early 1960s named after the song that originated it, The Twist. It was the first major international rock and roll dance style in which the couples did not have to touch each other while dancing. The dance was first popularized by Chubby Checker in 1960 with a hit cover of the 1959 minor hit "The Twist" written by Hank Ballard. Checker's single became a smash hit, reaching #1 on the US charts. The song set a record, being the only single to reach #1 in two different chart runs (as it reached #1 in 1960, and then resurfaced, reaching #1 again in 1962). This has never happened again in rock history. Faced with explaining to the youthful audience how to do the dance, a member of Checker's entourage came up with the following description:"It's like putting out a cigarette with both feet, and wiping your bottom with a towel, to the beat of the music."In 1961, at the height of the Twist craze, patrons at New York's hot Peppermint Lounge on West 45th Street were twisting to the music of the house band, a local group from Jersey, Joey Dee and The Starliters. Their house song, "Peppermint Twist (Part 1)," became the number one song in the United States for three weeks in January 1962. We even had a Peppermint Lounge in Circleville, Ohio. Of course it wasn't as famous as the one in New York. The lounge closed after a short period of time.The Mashed Potato is a dance move which was a popular dance craze of 1962. It was danced to songs such as Dee Dee Sharp's Mashed Potato Time. Also referred to as "mash potato" or "mashed potatoes", the move vaguely resembles that of the twist, by Sharp's fellow Philadelphian, Chubby Checker.The dance begins by stepping backward with one foot with that heel tilted inward. The foot is positioned slightly behind the other (stationary) foot. With the weight on the ball of the starting foot, the heel is then swiveled outward. The same process is repeated with the other foot: step back and behind with heel inward, pivot heel out, and so on. The pattern is continued for as many repetitions as desired. The step may be incorporated in various dances either as a separate routine or as a styling of standard steps.James Brown had two Mashed Potato-related chart hits, "(Do the) Mashed Potatoes" (1960; released under a pseudonym and "Mashed Potatoes U.S.A." in 1962. Brown also featured the dance prominently in his live performances during the 50s and 60s. The dance was also referred to in Connie Francis' 1962 hit "V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N" ("...we'll Mashed Potato to a jukebox tune..."), "Do You Love Me" by The Contours, "Harry the Harry Ape" a 1963 Top-20 pop and R&B novelty hit by Ray Stevens, and "Land of 1000 Dances", a song made popular by Wilson Pickett.The Monster Mash came out around the same time that the song "The mashed potatoes" was popular ... and it was a vari

Episode 164 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "White Light/White Heat" and the career of the Velvet Underground. This is a long one, lasting three hours and twenty minutes. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on "Why Don't You Smile Now?" by the Downliners Sect. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I say the Velvet Underground didn't play New York for the rest of the sixties after 1966. They played at least one gig there in 1967, but did generally avoid the city. Also, I refer to Cale and Conrad as the other surviving members of the Theater of Eternal Music. Sadly Conrad died in 2016. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Velvet Underground, and some of the avant-garde pieces excerpted run to six hours or more. I used a lot of resources for this one. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story by Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga is the best book on the group as a group. I also used Joe Harvard's 33 1/3 book on The Velvet Underground and Nico. Bockris also wrote one of the two biographies of Reed I referred to, Transformer. The other was Lou Reed by Anthony DeCurtis. Information on Cale mostly came from Sedition and Alchemy by Tim Mitchell. Information on Nico came from Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon by Richard Witts. I used Draw a Straight Line and Follow it by Jeremy Grimshaw as my main source for La Monte Young, The Roaring Silence by David Revill for John Cage, and Warhol: A Life as Art by Blake Gopnik for Warhol. I also referred to the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of the 2021 documentary The Velvet Underground.  The definitive collection of the Velvet Underground's music is the sadly out-of-print box set Peel Slowly and See, which contains the four albums the group made with Reed in full, plus demos, outtakes, and live recordings. Note that the digital version of the album as sold by Amazon for some reason doesn't include the last disc -- if you want the full box set you have to buy a physical copy. All four studio albums have also been released and rereleased many times over in different configurations with different numbers of CDs at different price points -- I have used the "45th Anniversary Super-Deluxe" versions for this episode, but for most people the standard CD versions will be fine. Sadly there are no good shorter compilation overviews of the group -- they tend to emphasise either the group's "pop" mode or its "avant-garde" mode to the exclusion of the other. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I begin this episode, there are a few things to say. This introductory section is going to be longer than normal because, as you will hear, this episode is also going to be longer than normal. Firstly, I try to warn people about potentially upsetting material in these episodes. But this is the first episode for 1968, and as you will see there is a *profound* increase in the amount of upsetting and disturbing material covered as we go through 1968 and 1969. The story is going to be in a much darker place for the next twenty or thirty episodes. And this episode is no exception. As always, I try to deal with everything as sensitively as possible, but you should be aware that the list of warnings for this one is so long I am very likely to have missed some. Among the topics touched on in this episode are mental illness, drug addiction, gun violence, racism, societal and medical homophobia, medical mistreatment of mental illness, domestic abuse, rape, and more. If you find discussion of any of those subjects upsetting, you might want to read the transcript. Also, I use the term "queer" freely in this episode. In the past I have received some pushback for this, because of a belief among some that "queer" is a slur. The following explanation will seem redundant to many of my listeners, but as with many of the things I discuss in the podcast I am dealing with multiple different audiences with different levels of awareness and understanding of issues, so I'd like to beg those people's indulgence a moment. The term "queer" has certainly been used as a slur in the past, but so have terms like "lesbian", "gay", "homosexual" and others. In all those cases, the term has gone from a term used as a self-identifier, to a slur, to a reclaimed slur, and back again many times. The reason for using that word, specifically, here is because the vast majority of people in this story have sexualities or genders that don't match the societal norms of their times, but used labels for themselves that have shifted in meaning over the years. There are at least two men in the story, for example, who are now dead and referred to themselves as "homosexual", but were in multiple long-term sexually-active relationships with women. Would those men now refer to themselves as "bisexual" or "pansexual" -- terms not in widespread use at the time -- or would they, in the relatively more tolerant society we live in now, only have been in same-gender relationships? We can't know. But in our current context using the word "homosexual" for those men would lead to incorrect assumptions about their behaviour. The labels people use change over time, and the definitions of them blur and shift. I have discussed this issue with many, many, friends who fall under the queer umbrella, and while not all of them are comfortable with "queer" as a personal label because of how it's been used against them in the past, there is near-unanimity from them that it's the correct word to use in this situation. Anyway, now that that rather lengthy set of disclaimers is over, let's get into the story proper, as we look at "White Light, White Heat" by the Velvet Underground: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "White Light, White Heat"] And that look will start with... a disclaimer about length. This episode is going to be a long one. Not as long as episode one hundred and fifty, but almost certainly the longest episode I'll do this year, by some way. And there's a reason for that. One of the questions I've been asked repeatedly over the years about the podcast is why almost all the acts I've covered have been extremely commercially successful ones. "Where are the underground bands? The alternative bands? The little niche acts?" The answer to that is simple. Until the mid-sixties, the idea of an underground or alternative band made no sense at all in rock, pop, rock and roll, R&B, or soul. The idea would have been completely counterintuitive to the vast majority of the people we've discussed in the podcast. Those musics were commercial musics, made by people who wanted to make money and to  get the largest audiences possible. That doesn't mean that they had no artistic merit, or that there was no artistic intent behind them, but the artists making that music were *commercial* artists. They knew if they wanted to make another record, they had to sell enough copies of the last record for the record company to make another, and that if they wanted to keep eating, they had to draw enough of an audience to their gigs for promoters to keep booking them. There was no space in this worldview for what we might think of as cult success. If your record only sold a thousand copies, then you had failed in your goal, even if the thousand people who bought your record really loved it. Even less commercially successful artists we've covered to this point, like the Mothers of Invention or Love, were *trying* for commercial success, even if they made the decision not to compromise as much as others do. This started to change a tiny bit in the mid-sixties as the influence of jazz and folk in the US, and the British blues scene, started to be felt in rock music. But this influence, at first, was a one-way thing -- people who had been in the folk and jazz worlds deciding to modify their music to be more commercial. And that was followed by already massively commercial musicians, like the Beatles, taking on some of those influences and bringing their audience with them. But that started to change around the time that "rock" started to differentiate itself from "rock and roll" and "pop", in mid 1967. So in this episode and the next, we're going to look at two bands who in different ways provided a model for how to be an alternative band. Both of them still *wanted* commercial success, but neither achieved it, at least not at first and not in the conventional way. And both, when they started out, went by the name The Warlocks. But we have to take a rather circuitous route to get to this week's band, because we're now properly introducing a strand of music that has been there in the background for a while -- avant-garde art music. So before we go any further, let's have a listen to a thirty-second clip of the most famous piece of avant-garde music ever, and I'll be performing it myself: [Excerpt, Andrew Hickey "4'33 (Cage)"] Obviously that won't give the full effect, you have to listen to the whole piece to get that. That is of course a section of "4'33" by John Cage, a piece of music that is often incorrectly described as being four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. As I've mentioned before, though, in the episode on "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", it isn't that at all. The whole point of the piece is that there is no such thing as silence, and it's intended to make the listener appreciate all the normal ambient sounds as music, every bit as much as any piece by Bach or Beethoven. John Cage, the composer of "4'33", is possibly the single most influential avant-garde artist of the mid twentieth century, so as we're properly introducing the ideas of avant-garde music into the story here, we need to talk about him a little. Cage was, from an early age, torn between three great vocations, all of which in some fashion would shape his work for decades to come. One of these was architecture, and for a time he intended to become an architect. Another was the religious ministry, and he very seriously considered becoming a minister as a young man, and religion -- though not the religious faith of his youth -- was to be a massive factor in his work as he grew older. He started studying music from an early age, though he never had any facility as a performer -- though he did, when he discovered the work of Grieg, think that might change. He later said “For a while I played nothing else. I even imagined devoting my life to the performance of his works alone, for they did not seem to me to be too difficult, and I loved them.” [Excerpt: Grieg piano concerto in A minor] But he soon realised that he didn't have some of the basic skills that would be required to be a performer -- he never actually thought of himself as very musical -- and so he decided to move into composition, and he later talked about putting his musical limits to good use in being more inventive. From his very first pieces, Cage was trying to expand the definition of what a performance of a piece of music actually was. One of his friends, Harry Hay, who took part in the first documented performance of a piece by Cage, described how Cage's father, an inventor, had "devised a fluorescent light source over which Sample" -- Don Sample, Cage's boyfriend at the time -- "laid a piece of vellum painted with designs in oils. The blankets I was wearing were white, and a sort of lampshade shone coloured patterns onto me. It looked very good. The thing got so hot the designs began to run, but that only made it better.” Apparently the audience for this light show -- one that predated the light shows used by rock bands by a good thirty years -- were not impressed, though that may be more because the Santa Monica Women's Club in the early 1930s was not the vanguard of the avant-garde. Or maybe it was. Certainly the housewives of Santa Monica seemed more willing than one might expect to sign up for another of Cage's ideas. In 1933 he went door to door asking women if they would be interested in signing up to a lecture course from him on modern art and music. He told them that if they signed up for $2.50, he would give them ten lectures, and somewhere between twenty and forty of them signed up, even though, as he said later, “I explained to the housewives that I didn't know anything about either subject but that I was enthusiastic about both of them. I promised to learn faithfully enough about each subject so as to be able to give a talk an hour long each week.” And he did just that, going to the library every day and spending all week preparing an hour-long talk for them. History does not relate whether he ended these lectures by telling the housewives to tell just one friend about them. He said later “I came out of these lectures, with a devotion to the painting of Mondrian, on the one hand, and the music of Schoenberg on the other.” [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte"] Schoenberg was one of the two most widely-respected composers in the world at that point, the other being Stravinsky, but the two had very different attitudes to composition. Schoenberg's great innovation was the creation and popularisation of the twelve-tone technique, and I should probably explain that a little before I go any further. Most Western music is based on an eight-note scale -- do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do -- with the eighth note being an octave up from the first. So in the key of C major that would be C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C: [demonstrates] And when you hear notes from that scale, if your ears are accustomed to basically any Western music written before about 1920, or any Western popular music written since then, you expect the melody to lead back to C, and you know to expect that because it only uses those notes -- there are differing intervals between them, some having a tone between them and some having a semitone, and you recognise the pattern. But of course there are other notes between the notes of that scale. There are actually an infinite number of these, but in conventional Western music we only look at a few more -- C# (or D flat), D# (or E flat), F# (or G flat), G# (or A flat) and A# (or B flat). If you add in all those notes you get this: [demonstrates] There's no clear beginning or end, no do for it to come back to. And Schoenberg's great innovation, which he was only starting to promote widely around this time, was to insist that all twelve notes should be equal -- his melodies would use all twelve of the notes the exact same number of times, and so if he used say a B flat, he would have to use all eleven other notes before he used B flat again in the piece. This was a radical new idea, but Schoenberg had only started advancing it after first winning great acclaim for earlier pieces, like his "Three Pieces for Piano", a work which wasn't properly twelve-tone, but did try to do without the idea of having any one note be more important than any other: [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Three Pieces for Piano"] At this point, that work had only been performed in the US by one performer, Richard Buhlig, and hadn't been released as a recording yet. Cage was so eager to hear it that he'd found Buhlig's phone number and called him, asking him to play the piece, but Buhlig put the phone down on him. Now he was doing these lectures, though, he had to do one on Schoenberg, and he wasn't a competent enough pianist to play Schoenberg's pieces himself, and there were still no recordings of them. Cage hitch-hiked from Santa Monica to LA, where Buhlig lived, to try to get him to come and visit his class and play some of Schoenberg's pieces for them. Buhlig wasn't in, and Cage hung around in his garden hoping for him to come back -- he pulled the leaves off a bough from one of Buhlig's trees, going "He'll come back, he won't come back, he'll come back..." and the leaves said he'd be back. Buhlig arrived back at midnight, and quite understandably told the strange twenty-one-year-old who'd spent twelve hours in his garden pulling the leaves off his trees that no, he would not come to Santa Monica and give a free performance. But he did agree that if Cage brought some of his own compositions he'd give them a look over. Buhlig started giving Cage some proper lessons in composition, although he stressed that he was a performer, not a composer. Around this time Cage wrote his Sonata for Clarinet: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Sonata For Clarinet"] Buhlig suggested that Cage send that to Henry Cowell, the composer we heard about in the episode on "Good Vibrations" who was friends with Lev Termen and who created music by playing the strings inside a piano: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] Cowell offered to take Cage on as an assistant, in return for which Cowell would teach him for a semester, as would Adolph Weiss, a pupil of Schoenberg's. But the goal, which Cowell suggested, was always to have Cage study with Schoenberg himself. Schoenberg at first refused, saying that Cage couldn't afford his price, but eventually took Cage on as a student having been assured that he would devote his entire life to music -- a promise Cage kept. Cage started writing pieces for percussion, something that had been very rare up to that point -- only a handful of composers, most notably Edgard Varese, had written pieces for percussion alone, but Cage was: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Trio"] This is often portrayed as a break from the ideals of his teacher Schoenberg, but in fact there's a clear continuity there, once you see what Cage was taking from Schoenberg. Schoenberg's work is, in some senses, about equality, about all notes being equal. Or to put it another way, it's about fairness. About erasing arbitrary distinctions. What Cage was doing was erasing the arbitrary distinction between the more and less prominent instruments. Why should there be pieces for solo violin or string quartet, but not for multiple percussion players? That said, Schoenberg was not exactly the most encouraging of teachers. When Cage invited Schoenberg to go to a concert of Cage's percussion work, Schoenberg told him he was busy that night. When Cage offered to arrange another concert for a date Schoenberg wasn't busy, the reply came "No, I will not be free at any time". Despite this, Cage later said “Schoenberg was a magnificent teacher, who always gave the impression that he was putting us in touch with musical principles,” and said "I literally worshipped him" -- a strong statement from someone who took religious matters as seriously as Cage. Cage was so devoted to Schoenberg's music that when a concert of music by Stravinsky was promoted as "music of the world's greatest living composer", Cage stormed into the promoter's office angrily, confronting the promoter and making it very clear that such things should not be said in the city where Schoenberg lived. Schoenberg clearly didn't think much of Cage's attempts at composition, thinking -- correctly -- that Cage had no ear for harmony. And his reportedly aggressive and confrontational teaching style didn't sit well with Cage -- though it seems very similar to a lot of the teaching techniques of the Zen masters he would later go on to respect. The two eventually parted ways, although Cage always spoke highly of Schoenberg. Schoenberg later gave Cage a compliment of sorts, when asked if any of his students had gone on to do anything interesting. At first he replied that none had, but then he mentioned Cage and said “Of course he's not a composer, but an inventor—of genius.” Cage was at this point very worried if there was any point to being a composer at all. He said later “I'd read Cowell's New Musical Resources and . . . The Theory of Rhythm. I had also read Chavez's Towards a New Music. Both works gave me the feeling that everything that was possible in music had already happened. So I thought I could never compose socially important music. Only if I could invent something new, then would I be useful to society. But that seemed unlikely then.” [Excerpt: John Cage, "Totem Ancestor"] Part of the solution came when he was asked to compose music for an abstract animation by the filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, and also to work as Fischinger's assistant when making the film. He was fascinated by the stop-motion process, and by the results of the film, which he described as "a beautiful film in which these squares, triangles and circles and other things moved and changed colour.” But more than that he was overwhelmed by a comment by Fischinger, who told him “Everything in the world has its own spirit, and this spirit becomes audible by setting it into vibration.” Cage later said “That set me on fire. He started me on a path of exploration of the world around me which has never stopped—of hitting and stretching and scraping and rubbing everything.” Cage now took his ideas further. His compositions for percussion had been about, if you like, giving the underdog a chance -- percussion was always in the background, why should it not be in the spotlight? Now he realised that there were other things getting excluded in conventional music -- the sounds that we characterise as noise. Why should composers work to exclude those sounds, but work to *include* other sounds? Surely that was... well, a little unfair? Eventually this would lead to pieces like his 1952 piece "Water Music", later expanded and retitled "Water Walk", which can be heard here in his 1959 appearance on the TV show "I've Got a Secret".  It's a piece for, amongst other things, a flowerpot full of flowers, a bathtub, a watering can, a pipe, a duck call, a blender full of ice cubes, and five unplugged radios: [Excerpt: John Cage "Water Walk"] As he was now avoiding pitch and harmony as organising principles for his music, he turned to time. But note -- not to rhythm. He said “There's none of this boom, boom, boom, business in my music . . . a measure is taken as a strict measure of time—not a one two three four—which I fill with various sounds.” He came up with a system he referred to as “micro-macrocosmic rhythmic structure,” what we would now call fractals, though that word hadn't yet been invented, where the structure of the whole piece was reflected in the smallest part of it. For a time he started moving away from the term music, preferring to refer to the "art of noise" or to "organised sound" -- though he later received a telegram from Edgard Varese, one of his musical heroes and one of the few other people writing works purely for percussion, asking him not to use that phrase, which Varese used for his own work. After meeting with Varese and his wife, he later became convinced that it was Varese's wife who had initiated the telegram, as she explained to Cage's wife "we didn't want your husband's work confused with my husband's work, any more than you'd want some . . . any artist's work confused with that of a cartoonist.” While there is a humour to Cage's work, I don't really hear much qualitative difference between a Cage piece like the one we just heard and a Varese piece like Ionisation: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] But it was in 1952, the year of "Water Music" that John Cage made his two biggest impacts on the cultural world, though the full force of those impacts wasn't felt for some years. To understand Cage's 1952 work, you first have to understand that he had become heavily influenced by Zen, which at that time was very little known in the Western world. Indeed he had studied with Daisetsu Suzuki, who is credited with introducing Zen to the West, and said later “I didn't study music with just anybody; I studied with Schoenberg, I didn't study Zen with just anybody; I studied with Suzuki. I've always gone, insofar as I could, to the president of the company.” Cage's whole worldview was profoundly affected by Zen, but he was also naturally sympathetic to it, and his work after learning about Zen is mostly a continuation of trends we can already see. In particular, he became convinced that the point of music isn't to communicate anything between two people, rather its point is merely to be experienced. I'm far from an expert on Buddhism, but one way of thinking about its central lessons is that one should experience things as they are, experiencing the thing itself rather than one's thoughts or preconceptions about it. And so at Black Mountain college came Theatre Piece Number 1: [Excerpt: Edith Piaf, "La Vie En Rose" ] In this piece, Cage had set the audience on all sides, so they'd be facing each other. He stood on a stepladder, as colleagues danced in and around the audience, another colleague played the piano, two more took turns to stand on another stepladder to recite poetry, different films and slides were projected, seemingly at random, onto the walls, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg played scratchy Edith Piaf records on a wind-up gramophone. The audience were included in the performance, and it was meant to be experienced as a gestalt, as a whole, to be what we would now call an immersive experience. One of Cage's students around this time was the artist Allan Kaprow, and he would be inspired by Theatre Piece Number 1 to put on several similar events in the late fifties. Those events he called "happenings", because the point of them was that you were meant to experience an event as it was happening rather than bring preconceptions of form and structure to them. Those happenings were the inspiration for events like The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, and the term "happening" became such an integral part of the counterculture that by 1967 there were comedy films being released about them, including one just called The Happening with a title track by the Supremes that made number one: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "The Happening"] Theatre Piece Number 1 was retrospectively considered the first happening, and as such its influence is incalculable. But one part I didn't mention about Theatre Piece Number 1 is that as well as Rauschenberg playing Edith Piaf's records, he also displayed some of his paintings. These paintings were totally white -- at a glance, they looked like blank canvases, but as one inspected them more clearly, it became apparent that Rauschenberg had painted them with white paint, with visible brushstrokes. These paintings, along with a visit to an anechoic chamber in which Cage discovered that even in total silence one can still hear one's own blood and nervous system, so will never experience total silence, were the final key to something Cage had been working towards -- if music had minimised percussion, and excluded noise, how much more had it excluded silence? As Cage said in 1958 “Curiously enough, the twelve-tone system has no zero in it.” And so came 4'33, the piece that we heard an excerpt of near the start of this episode. That piece was the something new he'd been looking for that could be useful to society. It took the sounds the audience could already hear, and without changing them even slightly gave them a new context and made the audience hear them as they were. Simply by saying "this is music", it caused the ambient noise to be perceived as music. This idea, of recontextualising existing material, was one that had already been done in the art world -- Marcel Duchamp, in 1917, had exhibited a urinal as a sculpture titled "Fountain" -- but even Duchamp had talked about his work as "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice". The artist was *raising* the object to art. What Cage was saying was "the object is already art". This was all massively influential to a young painter who had seen Cage give lectures many times, and while at art school had with friends prepared a piano in the same way Cage did for his own experimental compositions, dampening the strings with different objects. [Excerpt: Dana Gillespie, "Andy Warhol (live)"] Duchamp and Rauschenberg were both big influences on Andy Warhol, but he would say in the early sixties "John Cage is really so responsible for so much that's going on," and would for the rest of his life cite Cage as one of the two or three prime influences of his career. Warhol is a difficult figure to discuss, because his work is very intellectual but he was not very articulate -- which is one reason I've led up to him by discussing Cage in such detail, because Cage was always eager to talk at great length about the theoretical basis of his work, while Warhol would say very few words about anything at all. Probably the person who knew him best was his business partner and collaborator Paul Morrissey, and Morrissey's descriptions of Warhol have shaped my own view of his life, but it's very worth noting that Morrissey is an extremely right-wing moralist who wishes to see a Catholic theocracy imposed to do away with the scourges of sexual immorality, drug use, hedonism, and liberalism, so his view of Warhol, a queer drug using progressive whose worldview seems to have been totally opposed to Morrissey's in every way, might be a little distorted. Warhol came from an impoverished background, and so, as many people who grew up poor do, he was, throughout his life, very eager to make money. He studied art at university, and got decent but not exceptional grades -- he was a competent draughtsman, but not a great one, and most importantly as far as success in the art world goes he didn't have what is known as his own "line" -- with most successful artists, you can look at a handful of lines they've drawn and see something of their own personality in it. You couldn't with Warhol. His drawings looked like mediocre imitations of other people's work. Perfectly competent, but nothing that stood out. So Warhol came up with a technique to make his drawings stand out -- blotting. He would do a normal drawing, then go over it with a lot of wet ink. He'd lower a piece of paper on to the wet drawing, and the new paper would soak up the ink, and that second piece of paper would become the finished work. The lines would be fractured and smeared, broken in places where the ink didn't get picked up, and thick in others where it had pooled. With this mechanical process, Warhol had managed to create an individual style, and he became an extremely successful commercial artist. In the early 1950s photography was still seen as a somewhat low-class way of advertising things. If you wanted to sell to a rich audience, you needed to use drawings or paintings. By 1955 Warhol was making about twelve thousand dollars a year -- somewhere close to a hundred and thirty thousand a year in today's money -- drawing shoes for advertisements. He also had a sideline in doing record covers for people like Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Seventh Avenue Express"] For most of the 1950s he also tried to put on shows of his more serious artistic work -- often with homoerotic themes -- but to little success. The dominant art style of the time was the abstract expressionism of people like Jackson Pollock, whose art was visceral, emotional, and macho. The term "action paintings" which was coined for the work of people like Pollock, sums it up. This was manly art for manly men having manly emotions and expressing them loudly. It was very male and very straight, and even the gay artists who were prominent at the time tended to be very conformist and look down on anything they considered flamboyant or effeminate. Warhol was a rather effeminate, very reserved man, who strongly disliked showing his emotions, and whose tastes ran firmly to the camp. Camp as an aesthetic of finding joy in the flamboyant or trashy, as opposed to merely a descriptive term for men who behaved in a way considered effeminate, was only just starting to be codified at this time -- it wouldn't really become a fully-formed recognisable thing until Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964 -- but of course just because something hasn't been recognised doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and Warhol's aesthetic was always very camp, and in the 1950s in the US that was frowned upon even in gay culture, where the mainstream opinion was that the best way to acceptance was through assimilation. Abstract expressionism was all about expressing the self, and that was something Warhol never wanted to do -- in fact he made some pronouncements at times which suggested he didn't think of himself as *having* a self in the conventional sense. The combination of not wanting to express himself and of wanting to work more efficiently as a commercial artist led to some interesting results. For example, he was commissioned in 1957 to do a cover for an album by Moondog, the blind street musician whose name Alan Freed had once stolen: [Excerpt: Moondog, "Gloving It"] For that cover, Warhol got his mother, Julia Warhola, to just write out the liner notes for the album in her rather ornamental cursive script, and that became the front cover, leading to an award for graphic design going that year to "Andy Warhol's mother". (Incidentally, my copy of the current CD issue of that album, complete with Julia Warhola's cover, is put out by Pickwick Records...) But towards the end of the fifties, the work for commercial artists started to dry up. If you wanted to advertise shoes, now, you just took a photo of the shoes rather than get Andy Warhol to draw a picture of them. The money started to disappear, and Warhol started to panic. If there was no room for him in graphic design any more, he had to make his living in the fine arts, which he'd been totally unsuccessful in. But luckily for Warhol, there was a new movement that was starting to form -- Pop Art. Pop Art started in England, and had originally been intended, at least in part, as a critique of American consumerist capitalism. Pieces like "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" by Richard Hamilton (who went on to design the Beatles' White Album cover) are collages of found images, almost all from American sources, recontextualised and juxtaposed in interesting ways, so a bodybuilder poses in a room that's taken from an advert in Ladies' Home Journal, while on the wall, instead of a painting, hangs a blown-up cover of a Jack Kirby romance comic. Pop Art changed slightly when it got taken up in America, and there it became something rather different, something closer to Duchamp, taking those found images and displaying them as art with no juxtaposition. Where Richard Hamilton created collage art which *showed* a comic cover by Jack Kirby as a painting in the background, Roy Lichtenstein would take a panel of comic art by Kirby, or Russ Heath or Irv Novick or a dozen other comic artists, and redraw it at the size of a normal painting. So Warhol took Cage's idea that the object is already art, and brought that into painting, starting by doing paintings of Campbell's soup cans, in which he tried as far as possible to make the cans look exactly like actual soup cans. The paintings were controversial, inciting fury in some and laughter in others and causing almost everyone to question whether they were art. Warhol would embrace an aesthetic in which things considered unimportant or trash or pop culture detritus were the greatest art of all. For example pretty much every profile of him written in the mid sixties talks about him obsessively playing "Sally Go Round the Roses", a girl-group single by the one-hit wonders the Jaynettes: [Excerpt: The Jaynettes, "Sally Go Round the Roses"] After his paintings of Campbell's soup cans, and some rather controversial but less commercially successful paintings of photographs of horrors and catastrophes taken from newspapers, Warhol abandoned painting in the conventional sense altogether, instead creating brightly coloured screen prints -- a form of stencilling -- based on photographs of celebrities like Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and, most famously, Marilyn Monroe. That way he could produce images which could be mass-produced, without his active involvement, and which supposedly had none of his personality in them, though of course his personality pervades the work anyway. He put on exhibitions of wooden boxes, silk-screen printed to look exactly like shipping cartons of Brillo pads. Images we see everywhere -- in newspapers, in supermarkets -- were art. And Warhol even briefly formed a band. The Druds were a garage band formed to play at a show at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the opening night of an exhibition that featured a silkscreen by Warhol of 210 identical bottles of Coca-Cola, as well as paintings by Rauschenberg and others. That opening night featured a happening by Claes Oldenburg, and a performance by Cage -- Cage gave a live lecture while three recordings of his own voice also played. The Druds were also meant to perform, but they fell apart after only a few rehearsals. Some recordings apparently exist, but they don't seem to circulate, but they'd be fascinating to hear as almost the entire band were non-musician artists like Warhol, Jasper Johns, and the sculptor Walter de Maria. Warhol said of the group “It didn't go too well, but if we had just stayed on it it would have been great.” On the other hand, the one actual musician in the group said “It was kind of ridiculous, so I quit after the second rehearsal". That musician was La Monte Young: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] That's an excerpt from what is generally considered Young's masterwork, "The Well-Tuned Piano". It's six and a half hours long. If Warhol is a difficult figure to write about, Young is almost impossible. He's a musician with a career stretching sixty years, who is arguably the most influential musician from the classical tradition in that time period. He's generally considered the father of minimalism, and he's also been called by Brian Eno "the daddy of us all" -- without Young you simply *do not* get art rock at all. Without Young there is no Velvet Underground, no David Bowie, no Eno, no New York punk scene, no Yoko Ono. Anywhere that the fine arts or conceptual art have intersected with popular music in the last fifty or more years has been influenced in one way or another by Young's work. BUT... he only rarely publishes his scores. He very, very rarely allows recordings of his work to be released -- there are four recordings on his bandcamp, plus a handful of recordings of his older, published, pieces, and very little else. He doesn't allow his music to be performed live without his supervision. There *are* bootleg recordings of his music, but even those are not easily obtainable -- Young is vigorous in enforcing his copyrights and issues takedown notices against anywhere that hosts them. So other than that handful of legitimately available recordings -- plus a recording by Young's Theater of Eternal Music, the legality of which is still disputed, and an off-air recording of a 1971 radio programme I've managed to track down, the only way to experience Young's music unless you're willing to travel to one of his rare live performances or installations is second-hand, by reading about it. Except that the one book that deals solely with Young and his music is not only a dense and difficult book to read, it's also one that Young vehemently disagreed with and considered extremely inaccurate, to the point he refused to allow permissions to quote his work in the book. Young did apparently prepare a list of corrections for the book, but he wouldn't tell the author what they were without payment. So please assume that anything I say about Young is wrong, but also accept that the short section of this episode about Young has required more work to *try* to get it right than pretty much anything else this year. Young's musical career actually started out in a relatively straightforward manner. He didn't grow up in the most loving of homes -- he's talked about his father beating him as a child because he had been told that young La Monte was clever -- but his father did buy him a saxophone and teach him the rudiments of the instrument, and as a child he was most influenced by the music of the big band saxophone player Jimmy Dorsey: [Excerpt: Jimmy Dorsey, “It's the Dreamer in Me”] The family, who were Mormon farmers, relocated several times in Young's childhood, from Idaho first to California and then to Utah, but everywhere they went La Monte seemed to find musical inspiration, whether from an uncle who had been part of the Kansas City jazz scene, a classmate who was a musical prodigy who had played with Perez Prado in his early teens, or a teacher who took the class to see a performance of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra: [Excerpt: Bartok, "Concerto for Orchestra"] After leaving high school, Young went to Los Angeles City College to study music under Leonard Stein, who had been Schoenberg's assistant when Schoenberg had taught at UCLA, and there he became part of the thriving jazz scene based around Central Avenue, studying and performing with musicians like Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and Eric Dolphy -- Young once beat Dolphy in an audition for a place in the City College dance band, and the two would apparently substitute for each other on their regular gigs when one couldn't make it. During this time, Young's musical tastes became much more adventurous. He was a particular fan of the work of John Coltrane, and also got inspired by City of Glass, an album by Stan Kenton that attempted to combine jazz and modern classical music: [Excerpt: Stan Kenton's Innovations Orchestra, "City of Glass: The Structures"] His other major musical discovery in the mid-fifties was one we've talked about on several previous occasions -- the album Music of India, Morning and Evening Ragas by Ali Akhbar Khan: [Excerpt: Ali Akhbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] Young's music at this point was becoming increasingly modal, and equally influenced by the blues and Indian music. But he was also becoming interested in serialism. Serialism is an extension and generalisation of twelve-tone music, inspired by mathematical set theory. In serialism, you choose a set of musical elements -- in twelve-tone music that's the twelve notes in the twelve-tone scale, but it can also be a set of tonal relations, a chord, or any other set of elements. You then define all the possible ways you can permute those elements, a defined set of operations you can perform on them -- so you could play a scale forwards, play it backwards, play all the notes in the scale simultaneously, and so on. You then go through all the possible permutations, exactly once, and that's your piece of music. Young was particularly influenced by the works of Anton Webern, one of the earliest serialists: [Excerpt: Anton Webern, "Cantata number 1 for Soprano, Mixed Chorus, and Orchestra"] That piece we just heard, Webern's "Cantata number 1", was the subject of some of the earliest theoretical discussion of serialism, and in particular led to some discussion of the next step on from serialism. If serialism was all about going through every single permutation of a set, what if you *didn't* permute every element? There was a lot of discussion in the late fifties in music-theoretical circles about the idea of invariance. Normally in music, the interesting thing is what gets changed. To use a very simple example, you might change a melody from a major key to a minor one to make it sound sadder. What theorists at this point were starting to discuss is what happens if you leave something the same, but change the surrounding context, so the thing you *don't* vary sounds different because of the changed context. And going further, what if you don't change the context at all, and merely *imply* a changed context? These ideas were some of those which inspired Young's first major work, his Trio For Strings from 1958, a complex, palindromic, serial piece which is now credited as the first work of minimalism, because the notes in it change so infrequently: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Trio for Strings"] Though I should point out that Young never considers his works truly finished, and constantly rewrites them, and what we just heard is an excerpt from the only recording of the trio ever officially released, which is of the 2015 version. So I can't state for certain how close what we just heard is to the piece he wrote in 1958, except that it sounds very like the written descriptions of it I've read. After writing the Trio For Strings, Young moved to Germany to study with the modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. While studying with Stockhausen, he became interested in the work of John Cage, and started up a correspondence with Cage. On his return to New York he studied with Cage and started writing pieces inspired by Cage, of which the most musical is probably Composition 1960 #7: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Composition 1960 #7"] The score for that piece is a stave on which is drawn a treble clef, the notes B and F#, and the words "To be held for a long Time". Other of his compositions from 1960 -- which are among the few of his compositions which have been published -- include composition 1960 #10 ("To Bob Morris"), the score for which is just the instruction "Draw a straight line and follow it.", and Piano Piece for David  Tudor #1, the score for which reads "Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over after the piano eats or decides not to". Most of these compositions were performed as part of a loose New York art collective called Fluxus, all of whom were influenced by Cage and the Dadaists. This collective, led by George Maciunas, sometimes involved Cage himself, but also involved people like Henry Flynt, the inventor of conceptual art, who later became a campaigner against art itself, and who also much to Young's bemusement abandoned abstract music in the mid-sixties to form a garage band with Walter de Maria (who had played drums with the Druds): [Excerpt: Henry Flynt and the Insurrections, "I Don't Wanna"] Much of Young's work was performed at Fluxus concerts given in a New York loft belonging to another member of the collective, Yoko Ono, who co-curated the concerts with Young. One of Ono's mid-sixties pieces, her "Four Pieces for Orchestra" is dedicated to Young, and consists of such instructions as "Count all the stars of that night by heart. The piece ends when all the orchestra members finish counting the stars, or when it dawns. This can be done with windows instead of stars." But while these conceptual ideas remained a huge part of Young's thinking, he soon became interested in two other ideas. The first was the idea of just intonation -- tuning instruments and voices to perfect harmonics, rather than using the subtly-off tuning that is used in Western music. I'm sure I've explained that before in a previous episode, but to put it simply when you're tuning an instrument with fixed pitches like a piano, you have a choice -- you can either tune it so that the notes in one key are perfectly in tune with each other, but then when you change key things go very out of tune, or you can choose to make *everything* a tiny bit, almost unnoticeably, out of tune, but equally so. For the last several hundred years, musicians as a community have chosen the latter course, which was among other things promoted by Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, a collection of compositions which shows how the different keys work together: [Excerpt: Bach (Glenn Gould), "The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II: Fugue in F-sharp minor, BWV 883"] Young, by contrast, has his own esoteric tuning system, which he uses in his own work The Well-Tuned Piano: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] The other idea that Young took on was from Indian music, the idea of the drone. One of the four recordings of Young's music that is available from his Bandcamp, a 1982 recording titled The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath, consists of one hour, thirteen minutes, and fifty-eight seconds of this: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath"] Yes, I have listened to the whole piece. No, nothing else happens. The minimalist composer Terry Riley describes the recording as "a singularly rare contribution that far outshines any other attempts to capture this instrument in recorded media". In 1962, Young started writing pieces based on what he called the "dream chord", a chord consisting of a root, fourth, sharpened fourth, and fifth: [dream chord] That chord had already appeared in his Trio for Strings, but now it would become the focus of much of his work, in pieces like his 1962 piece The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, heard here in a 1982 revision: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer"] That was part of a series of works titled The Four Dreams of China, and Young began to plan an installation work titled Dream House, which would eventually be created, and which currently exists in Tribeca, New York, where it's been in continuous "performance" for thirty years -- and which consists of thirty-two different pure sine wave tones all played continuously, plus purple lighting by Young's wife Marian Zazeela. But as an initial step towards creating this, Young formed a collective called Theatre of Eternal Music, which some of the members -- though never Young himself -- always claim also went by the alternative name The Dream Syndicate. According to John Cale, a member of the group, that name came about because the group tuned their instruments to the 60hz hum of the fridge in Young's apartment, which Cale called "the key of Western civilisation". According to Cale, that meant the fundamental of the chords they played was 10hz, the frequency of alpha waves when dreaming -- hence the name. The group initially consisted of Young, Zazeela, the photographer Billy Name, and percussionist Angus MacLise, but by this recording in 1964 the lineup was Young, Zazeela, MacLise, Tony Conrad and John Cale: [Excerpt: "Cale, Conrad, Maclise, Young, Zazeela - The Dream Syndicate 2 IV 64-4"] That recording, like any others that have leaked by the 1960s version of the Theatre of Eternal Music or Dream Syndicate, is of disputed legality, because Young and Zazeela claim to this day that what the group performed were La Monte Young's compositions, while the other two surviving members, Cale and Conrad, claim that their performances were improvisational collaborations and should be equally credited to all the members, and so there have been lawsuits and countersuits any time anyone has released the recordings. John Cale, the youngest member of the group, was also the only one who wasn't American. He'd been born in Wales in 1942, and had had the kind of childhood that, in retrospect, seems guaranteed to lead to eccentricity. He was the product of a mixed-language marriage -- his father, William, was an English speaker while his mother, Margaret, spoke Welsh, but the couple had moved in on their marriage with Margaret's mother, who insisted that only Welsh could be spoken in her house. William didn't speak Welsh, and while he eventually picked up the basics from spending all his life surrounded by Welsh-speakers, he refused on principle to capitulate to his mother-in-law, and so remained silent in the house. John, meanwhile, grew up a monolingual Welsh speaker, and didn't start to learn English until he went to school when he was seven, and so couldn't speak to his father until then even though they lived together. Young John was extremely unwell for most of his childhood, both physically -- he had bronchial problems for which he had to take a cough mixture that was largely opium to help him sleep at night -- and mentally. He was hospitalised when he was sixteen with what was at first thought to be meningitis, but turned out to be a psychosomatic condition, the result of what he has described as a nervous breakdown. That breakdown is probably connected to the fact that during his teenage years he was sexually assaulted by two adults in positions of authority -- a vicar and a music teacher -- and felt unable to talk to anyone about this. He was, though, a child prodigy and was playing viola with the National Youth Orchestra of Wales from the age of thirteen, and listening to music by Schoenberg, Webern, and Stravinsky. He was so talented a multi-instrumentalist that at school he was the only person other than one of the music teachers and the headmaster who was allowed to use the piano -- which led to a prank on his very last day at school. The headmaster would, on the last day, hit a low G on the piano to cue the assembly to stand up, and Cale had placed a comb on the string, muting it and stopping the note from sounding -- in much the same way that his near-namesake John Cage was "preparing" pianos for his own compositions in the USA. Cale went on to Goldsmith's College to study music and composition, under Humphrey Searle, one of Britain's greatest proponents of serialism who had himself studied under Webern. Cale's main instrument was the viola, but he insisted on also playing pieces written for the violin, because they required more technical skill. For his final exam he chose to play Hindemith's notoriously difficult Viola Sonata: [Excerpt: Hindemith Viola Sonata] While at Goldsmith's, Cale became friendly with Cornelius Cardew, a composer and cellist who had studied with Stockhausen and at the time was a great admirer of and advocate for the works of Cage and Young (though by the mid-seventies Cardew rejected their work as counter-revolutionary bourgeois imperialism). Through Cardew, Cale started to correspond with Cage, and with George Maciunas and other members of Fluxus. In July 1963, just after he'd finished his studies at Goldsmith's, Cale presented a festival there consisting of an afternoon and an evening show. These shows included the first British performances of several works including Cardew's Autumn '60 for Orchestra -- a piece in which the musicians were given blank staves on which to write whatever part they wanted to play, but a separate set of instructions in *how* to play the parts they'd written. Another piece Cale presented in its British premiere at that show was Cage's "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra": [Excerpt: John Cage, "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra"] In the evening show, they performed Two Pieces For String Quartet by George Brecht (in which the musicians polish their instruments with dusters, making scraping sounds as they clean them),  and two new pieces by Cale, one of which involved a plant being put on the stage, and then the performer, Robin Page, screaming from the balcony at the plant that it would die, then running down, through the audience, and onto the stage, screaming abuse and threats at the plant. The final piece in the show was a performance by Cale (the first one in Britain) of La Monte Young's "X For Henry Flynt". For this piece, Cale put his hands together and then smashed both his arms onto the keyboard as hard as he could, over and over. After five minutes some of the audience stormed the stage and tried to drag the piano away from him. Cale followed the piano on his knees, continuing to bang the keys, and eventually the audience gave up in defeat and Cale the performer won. After this Cale moved to the USA, to further study composition, this time with Iannis Xenakis, the modernist composer who had also taught Mickey Baker orchestration after Baker left Mickey and Sylvia, and who composed such works as "Orient Occident": [Excerpt: Iannis Xenakis, "Orient Occident"] Cale had been recommended to Xenakis as a student by Aaron Copland, who thought the young man was probably a genius. But Cale's musical ambitions were rather too great for Tanglewood, Massachusetts -- he discovered that the institute had eighty-eight pianos, the same number as there are keys on a piano keyboard, and thought it would be great if for a piece he could take all eighty-eight pianos, put them all on different boats, sail the boats out onto a lake, and have eighty-eight different musicians each play one note on each piano, while the boats sank with the pianos on board. For some reason, Cale wasn't allowed to perform this composition, and instead had to make do with one where he pulled an axe out of a single piano and slammed it down on a table. Hardly the same, I'm sure you'll agree. From Tanglewood, Cale moved on to New York, where he soon became part of the artistic circles surrounding John Cage and La Monte Young. It was at this time that he joined Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, and also took part in a performance with Cage that would get Cale his first television exposure: [Excerpt: John Cale playing Erik Satie's "Vexations" on "I've Got a Secret"] That's Cale playing through "Vexations", a piece by Erik Satie that wasn't published until after Satie's death, and that remained in obscurity until Cage popularised -- if that's the word -- the piece. The piece, which Cage had found while studying Satie's notes, seems to be written as an exercise and has the inscription (in French) "In order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." Cage interpreted that, possibly correctly, as an instruction that the piece should be played eight hundred and forty times straight through, and so he put together a performance of the piece, the first one ever, by a group he called the Pocket Theatre Piano Relay Team, which included Cage himself, Cale, Joshua Rifkin, and several other notable musical figures, who took it in turns playing the piece. For that performance, which ended up lasting eighteen hours, there was an entry fee of five dollars, and there was a time-clock in the lobby. Audience members punched in and punched out, and got a refund of five cents for every twenty minutes they'd spent listening to the music. Supposedly, at the end, one audience member yelled "Encore!" A week later, Cale appeared on "I've Got a Secret", a popular game-show in which celebrities tried to guess people's secrets (and which is where that performance of Cage's "Water Walk" we heard earlier comes from): [Excerpt: John Cale on I've Got a Secret] For a while, Cale lived with a friend of La Monte Young's, Terry Jennings, before moving in to a flat with Tony Conrad, one of the other members of the Theatre of Eternal Music. Angus MacLise lived in another flat in the same building. As there was not much money to be made in avant-garde music, Cale also worked in a bookshop -- a job Cage had found him -- and had a sideline in dealing drugs. But rents were so cheap at this time that Cale and Conrad only had to work part-time, and could spend much of their time working on the music they were making with Young. Both were string players -- Conrad violin, Cale viola -- and they soon modified their instruments. Conrad merely attached pickups to his so it could be amplified, but Cale went much further. He filed down the viola's bridge so he could play three strings at once, and he replaced the normal viola strings with thicker, heavier, guitar and mandolin strings. This created a sound so loud that it sounded like a distorted electric guitar -- though in late 1963 and early 1964 there were very few people who even knew what a distorted guitar sounded like. Cale and Conrad were also starting to become interested in rock and roll music, to which neither of them had previously paid much attention, because John Cage's music had taught them to listen for music in sounds they previously dismissed. In particular, Cale became fascinated with the harmonies of the Everly Brothers, hearing in them the same just intonation that Young advocated for: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "All I Have to Do is Dream"] And it was with this newfound interest in rock and roll that Cale and Conrad suddenly found themselves members of a manufactured pop band. The two men had been invited to a party on the Lower East Side, and there they'd been introduced to Terry Phillips of Pickwick Records. Phillips had seen their long hair and asked if they were musicians, so they'd answered "yes". He asked if they were in a band, and they said yes. He asked if that band had a drummer, and again they said yes. By this point they realised that he had assumed they were rock guitarists, rather than experimental avant-garde string players, but they decided to play along and see where this was going. Phillips told them that if they brought along their drummer to Pickwick's studios the next day, he had a job for them. The two of them went along with Walter de Maria, who did play the drums a little in between his conceptual art work, and there they were played a record: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] It was explained to them that Pickwick made knock-off records -- soundalikes of big hits, and their own records in the style of those hits, all played by a bunch of session musicians and put out under different band names. This one, by "the Primitives", they thought had a shot at being an actual hit, even though it was a dance-craze song about a dance where one partner lays on the floor and the other stamps on their head. But if it was going to be a hit, they needed an actual band to go out and perform it, backing the singer. How would Cale, Conrad, and de Maria like to be three quarters of the Primitives? It sounded fun, but of course they weren't actually guitarists. But as it turned out, that wasn't going to be a problem. They were told that the guitars on the track had all been tuned to one note -- not even to an open chord, like we talked about Steve Cropper doing last episode, but all the strings to one note. Cale and Conrad were astonished -- that was exactly the kind of thing they'd been doing in their drone experiments with La Monte Young. Who was this person who was independently inventing the most advanced ideas in experimental music but applying them to pop songs? And that was how they met Lou Reed: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] Where Cale and Conrad were avant-gardeists who had only just started paying attention to rock and roll music, rock and roll was in Lou Reed's blood, but there were a few striking similarities between him and Cale, even though at a glance their backgrounds could not have seemed more different. Reed had been brought up in a comfortably middle-class home in Long Island, but despised the suburban conformity that surrounded him from a very early age, and by his teens was starting to rebel against it very strongly. According to one classmate “Lou was always more advanced than the rest of us. The drinking age was eighteen back then, so we all started drinking at around sixteen. We were drinking quarts of beer, but Lou was smoking joints. He didn't do that in front of many people, but I knew he was doing it. While we were looking at girls in Playboy, Lou was reading Story of O. He was reading the Marquis de Sade, stuff that I wouldn't even have thought about or known how to find.” But one way in which Reed was a typical teenager of the period was his love for rock and roll, especially doo-wop. He'd got himself a guitar, but only had one lesson -- according to the story he would tell on numerous occasions, he turned up with a copy of "Blue Suede Shoes" and told the teacher he only wanted to know how to play the chords for that, and he'd work out the rest himself. Reed and two schoolfriends, Alan Walters and Phil Harris, put together a doo-wop trio they called The Shades, because they wore sunglasses, and a neighbour introduced them to Bob Shad, who had been an A&R man for Mercury Records and was starting his own new label. He renamed them the Jades and took them into the studio with some of the best New York session players, and at fourteen years old Lou Reed was writing songs and singing them backed by Mickey Baker and King Curtis: [Excerpt: The Jades, "Leave Her For Me"] Sadly the Jades' single was a flop -- the closest it came to success was being played on Murray the K's radio show, but on a day when Murray the K was off ill and someone else was filling in for him, much to Reed's disappointment. Phil Harris, the lead singer of the group, got to record some solo sessions after that, but the Jades split up and it would be several years before Reed made any more records. Partly this was because of Reed's mental health, and here's where things get disputed and rather messy. What we know is that in his late teens, just after he'd gone off to New

Episode 159 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Itchycoo Park” by the Small Faces, and their transition from Mod to psychedelia. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "The First Cut is the Deepest" by P.P. Arnold. 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 so many of the episodes recently have had no Mixcloud due to the number of songs by one artist, I've decided to start splitting the mixes of the recordings excerpted in the podcasts into two parts. Here's part one and part two. I've used quite a few books in this episode. The Small Faces & Other Stories by Uli Twelker and Roland Schmit is definitely a fan-work with all that that implies, but has some useful quotes. Two books claim to be the authorised biography of Steve Marriott, and I've referred to both -- All Too Beautiful by Paolo Hewitt and John Hellier, and All Or Nothing by Simon Spence. Spence also wrote an excellent book on Immediate Records, which I referred to. Kenney Jones and Ian McLagan both wrote very readable autobiographies. I've also used Andrew Loog Oldham's autobiography Stoned, co-written by Spence, though be warned that it casually uses slurs. P.P. Arnold's autobiography is a sometimes distressing read covering her whole life, including her time at Immediate. There are many, many, collections of the Small Faces' work, ranging from cheap budget CDs full of outtakes to hundred-pound-plus box sets, also full of outtakes. This three-CD budget collection contains all the essential tracks, and is endorsed by Kenney Jones, the band's one surviving member. And if you're intrigued by the section on Immediate Records, this two-CD set contains a good selection of their releases. ERRATUM-ISH: I say Jimmy Winston was “a couple” of years older than the rest of the band. This does not mean exactly two, but is used in the vague vernacular sense equivalent to “a few”. Different sources I've seen put Winston as either two or four years older than his bandmates, though two seems to be the most commonly cited figure. Transcript For once there is little to warn about in this episode, but it does contain some mild discussions of organised crime, arson, and mental illness, and a quoted joke about capital punishment in questionable taste which may upset some. One name that came up time and again when we looked at the very early years of British rock and roll was Lionel Bart. If you don't remember the name, he was a left-wing Bohemian songwriter who lived in a communal house-share which at various times was also inhabited by people like Shirley Eaton, the woman who is painted gold at the beginning of Goldfinger, Mike Pratt, the star of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), and Davey Graham, the most influential and innovative British guitarist of the fifties and early sixties. Bart and Pratt had co-written most of the hits of Britain's first real rock and roll star, Tommy Steele: [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, "Rock with the Caveman"] and then Bart had gone solo as a writer, and written hits like "Living Doll" for Britain's *biggest* rock and roll star, Cliff Richard: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard, "Living Doll"] But Bart's biggest contribution to rock music turned out not to be the songs he wrote for rock and roll stars, and not even his talent-spotting -- it was Bart who got Steele signed by Larry Parnes, and he also pointed Parnes in the direction of another of his biggest stars, Marty Wilde -- but the opportunity he gave to a lot of child stars in a very non-rock context. Bart's musical Oliver!, inspired by the novel Oliver Twist, was the biggest sensation on the West End stage in the early 1960s, breaking records for the longest-running musical, and also transferred to Broadway and later became an extremely successful film. As it happened, while Oliver! was extraordinarily lucrative, Bart didn't see much of the money from it -- he sold the rights to it, and his other musicals, to the comedian Max Bygraves in the mid-sixties for a tiny sum in order to finance a couple of other musicals, which then flopped horribly and bankrupted him. But by that time Oliver! had already been the first big break for three people who went on to major careers in music -- all of them playing the same role. Because many of the major roles in Oliver! were for young boys, the cast had to change frequently -- child labour laws meant that multiple kids had to play the same role in different performances, and people quickly grew out of the roles as teenagerhood hit. We've already heard about the career of one of the people who played the Artful Dodger in the original West End production -- Davy Jones, who transferred in the role to Broadway in 1963, and who we'll be seeing again in a few episodes' time -- and it's very likely that another of the people who played the Artful Dodger in that production, a young lad called Philip Collins, will be coming into the story in a few years' time. But the first of the artists to use the Artful Dodger as a springboard to a music career was the one who appeared in the role on the original cast album of 1960, though there's very little in that recording to suggest the sound of his later records: [Excerpt: Steve Marriott, "Consider Yourself"] Steve Marriott is the second little Stevie we've looked at in recent episodes to have been born prematurely. In his case, he was born a month premature, and jaundiced, and had to spend the first month of his life in hospital, the first few days of which were spent unsure if he was going to survive. Thankfully he did, but he was a bit of a sickly child as a result, and remained stick-thin and short into adulthood -- he never grew to be taller than five foot five. Young Steve loved music, and especially the music of Buddy Holly. He also loved skiffle, and managed to find out where Lonnie Donegan lived. He went round and knocked on Donegan's door, but was very disappointed to discover that his idol was just a normal man, with his hair uncombed and a shirt stained with egg yolk. He started playing the ukulele when he was ten, and graduated to guitar when he was twelve, forming a band which performed under a variety of different names. When on stage with them, he would go by the stage name Buddy Marriott, and would wear a pair of horn-rimmed glasses to look more like Buddy Holly. When he was twelve, his mother took him to an audition for Oliver! The show had been running for three months at the time, and was likely to run longer, and child labour laws meant that they had to have replacements for some of the cast -- every three months, any performing child had to have at least ten days off. At his audition, Steve played his guitar and sang "Who's Sorry Now?", the recent Connie Francis hit: [Excerpt: Connie Francis, "Who's Sorry Now?"] And then, ignoring the rule that performers could only do one song, immediately launched into Buddy Holly's "Oh Boy!" [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "Oh Boy!"] His musical ability and attitude impressed the show's producers, and he was given a job which suited him perfectly -- rather than being cast in a single role, he would be swapped around, playing different small parts, in the chorus, and occasionally taking the larger role of the Artful Dodger. Steve Marriott was never able to do the same thing over and over, and got bored very quickly, but because he was moving between roles, he was able to keep interested in his performances for almost a year, and he was good enough that it was him chosen to sing the Dodger's role on the cast album when that was recorded: [Excerpt: Steve Marriott and Joyce Blair, "I'd Do Anything"] And he enjoyed performance enough that his parents pushed him to become an actor -- though there were other reasons for that, too. He was never the best-behaved child in the world, nor the most attentive student, and things came to a head when, shortly after leaving the Oliver! cast, he got so bored of his art classes he devised a plan to get out of them forever. Every art class, for several weeks, he'd sit in a different desk at the back of the classroom and stuff torn-up bits of paper under the floorboards. After a couple of months of this he then dropped a lit match in, which set fire to the paper and ended up burning down half the school. His schoolfriend Ken Hawes talked about it many decades later, saying "I suppose in a way I was impressed about how he had meticulously planned the whole thing months in advance, the sheer dogged determination to see it through. He could quite easily have been caught and would have had to face the consequences. There was no danger in anybody getting hurt because we were at the back of the room. We had to be at the back otherwise somebody would have noticed what he was doing. There was no malice against other pupils, he just wanted to burn the damn school down." Nobody could prove it was him who had done it, though his parents at least had a pretty good idea who it was, but it was clear that even when the school was rebuilt it wasn't a good idea to send him back there, so they sent him to the Italia Conti Drama School; the same school that Anthony Newley and Petula Clark, among many others, had attended. Marriott's parents couldn't afford the school's fees, but Marriott was so talented that the school waived the fees -- they said they'd get him work, and take a cut of his wages in lieu of the fees. And over the next few years they did get him a lot of work. Much of that work was for TV shows, which like almost all TV of the time no longer exist -- he was in an episode of the Sid James sitcom Citizen James, an episode of Mr. Pastry's Progress, an episode of the police drama Dixon of Dock Green, and an episode of a series based on the Just William books, none of which survive. He also did a voiceover for a carpet cleaner ad, appeared on the radio soap opera Mrs Dale's Diary playing a pop star, and had a regular spot reading listeners' letters out for the agony aunt Marje Proops on her radio show. Almost all of this early acting work wa s utterly ephemeral, but there are a handful of his performances that do survive, mostly in films. He has a small role in the comedy film Heavens Above!, a mistaken-identity comedy in which a radical left-wing priest played by Peter Sellers is given a parish intended for a more conservative priest of the same name, and upsets the well-off people of the parish by taking in a large family of travellers and appointing a Black man as his churchwarden. The film has some dated attitudes, in the way that things that were trying to be progressive and antiracist sixty years ago invariably do, but has a sparkling cast, with Sellers, Eric Sykes, William Hartnell, Brock Peters, Roy Kinnear, Irene Handl, and many more extremely recognisable faces from the period: [Excerpt: Heavens Above!] Marriott apparently enjoyed working on the film immensely, as he was a fan of the Goon Show, which Sellers had starred in and which Sykes had co-written several episodes of. There are reports of Marriott and Sellers jamming together on banjos during breaks in filming, though these are probably *slightly* inaccurate -- Sellers played the banjolele, a banjo-style instrument which is played like a ukulele. As Marriott had started on ukulele before switching to guitar, it was probably these they were playing, rather than banjoes. He also appeared in a more substantial role in a film called Live It Up!, a pop exploitation film starring David Hemmings in which he appears as a member of a pop group. Oddly, Marriott plays a drummer, even though he wasn't a drummer, while two people who *would* find fame as drummers, Mitch Mitchell and Dave Clark, appear in smaller, non-drumming, roles. He doesn't perform on the soundtrack, which is produced by Joe Meek and features Sounds Incorporated, The Outlaws, and Gene Vincent, but he does mime playing behind Heinz Burt, the former bass player of the Tornadoes who was then trying for solo stardom at Meek's instigation: [Excerpt: Heinz Burt, "Don't You Understand"] That film was successful enough that two years later, in 1965 Marriott came back for a sequel, Be My Guest, with The Niteshades, the Nashville Teens, and Jerry Lee Lewis, this time with music produced by Shel Talmy rather than Meek. But that was something of a one-off. After making Live It Up!, Marriott had largely retired from acting, because he was trying to become a pop star. The break finally came when he got an audition at the National Theatre, for a job touring with Laurence Olivier for a year. He came home and told his parents he hadn't got the job, but then a week later they were bemused by a phone call asking why Steve hadn't turned up for rehearsals. He *had* got the job, but he'd decided he couldn't face a year of doing the same thing over and over, and had pretended he hadn't. By this time he'd already released his first record. The work on Oliver! had got him a contract with Decca Records, and he'd recorded a Buddy Holly knock-off, "Give Her My Regards", written for him by Kenny Lynch, the actor, pop star, and all-round entertainer: [Excerpt: Steve Marriott, "Give Her My Regards"] That record wasn't a hit, but Marriott wasn't put off. He formed a band who were at first called the Moonlights, and then the Frantiks, and they got a management deal with Tony Calder, Andrew Oldham's junior partner in his management company. Calder got former Shadow Tony Meehan to produce a demo for the group, a version of Cliff Richard's hit "Move It", which was shopped round the record labels with no success (and which sadly appears no longer to survive). The group also did some recordings with Joe Meek, which also don't circulate, but which may exist in the famous "Teachest Tapes" which are slowly being prepared for archival releases. The group changed their name to the Moments, and added in the guitarist John Weider, who was one of those people who seem to have been in every band ever either just before or just after they became famous -- at various times he was in Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Family, Eric Burdon and the Animals, and the band that became Crabby Appleton, but never in their most successful lineups. They continued recording unsuccessful demos, of which a small number have turned up: [Excerpt: Steve Marriott and the Moments, "Good Morning Blues"] One of their demo sessions was produced by Andrew Oldham, and while that session didn't lead to a release, it did lead to Oldham booking Marriott as a session harmonica player for one of his "Andrew Oldham Orchestra" sessions, to play on a track titled "365 Rolling Stones (One For Every Day of the Year)": [Excerpt: The Andrew Oldham Orchestra, "365 Rolling Stones (One For Every Day of the Year)"] Oldham also produced a session for what was meant to be Marriott's second solo single on Decca, a cover version of the Rolling Stones' "Tell Me", which was actually scheduled for release but pulled at the last minute. Like many of Marriott's recordings from this period, if it exists, it doesn't seem to circulate publicly. But despite their lack of recording success, the Moments did manage to have a surprising level of success on the live circuit. Because they were signed to Calder and Oldham's management company, they got a contract with the Arthur Howes booking agency, which got them support slots on package tours with Billy J Kramer, Freddie and the Dreamers, the Kinks, and other major acts, and the band members were earning about thirty pounds a week each -- a very, very good living for the time. They even had a fanzine devoted to them, written by a fan named Stuart Tuck. But as they weren't making records, the band's lineup started changing, with members coming and going. They did manage to get one record released -- a soundalike version of the Kinks' "You Really Got Me", recorded for a budget label who rushed it out, hoping to get it picked up in the US and for it to be the hit version there: [Excerpt: The Moments, "You Really Got Me"] But the month after that was released, Marriott was sacked from the band, apparently in part because the band were starting to get billed as Steve Marriott and the Moments rather than just The Moments, and the rest of them didn't want to be anyone's backing band. He got a job at a music shop while looking around for other bands to perform with. At one point around this time he was going to form a duo with a friend of his, Davy Jones -- not the one who had also appeared in Oliver!, but another singer of the same name. This one sang with a blues band called the Mannish Boys, and both men were well known on the Mod scene in London. Marriott's idea was that they call themselves David and Goliath, with Jones being David, and Marriott being Goliath because he was only five foot five. That could have been a great band, but it never got past the idea stage. Marriott had become friendly with another part-time musician and shop worker called Ronnie Lane, who was in a band called the Outcasts who played the same circuit as the Moments: [Excerpt: The Outcasts, "Before You Accuse Me"] Lane worked in a sound equipment shop and Marriott in a musical instrument shop, and both were customers of the other as well as friends -- at least until Marriott came into the shop where Lane worked and tried to persuade him to let Marriott have a free PA system. Lane pretended to go along with it as a joke, and got sacked. Lane had then gone to the shop where Marriott worked in the hope that Marriott would give him a good deal on a guitar because he'd been sacked because of Marriott. Instead, Marriott persuaded him that he should switch to bass, on the grounds that everyone was playing guitar since the Beatles had come along, but a bass player would always be able to find work. Lane bought the bass. Shortly after that, Marriott came to an Outcasts gig in a pub, and was asked to sit in. He enjoyed playing with Lane and the group's drummer Kenney Jones, but got so drunk he smashed up the pub's piano while playing a Jerry Lee Lewis song. The resulting fallout led to the group being barred from the pub and splitting up, so Marriott, Lane, and Jones decided to form their own group. They got in another guitarist Marriott knew, a man named Jimmy Winston who was a couple of years older than them, and who had two advantages -- he was a known Face on the mod scene, with a higher status than any of the other three, and his brother owned a van and would drive the group and their equipment for ten percent of their earnings. There was a slight problem in that Winston was also as good on guitar as Marriott and looked like he might want to be the star, but Marriott neutralised that threat -- he moved Winston over to keyboards. The fact that Winston couldn't play keyboards didn't matter -- he could be taught a couple of riffs and licks, and he was sure to pick up the rest. And this way the group had the same lineup as one of Marriott's current favourites, Booker T and the MGs. While he was still a Buddy Holly fan, he was now, like the rest of the Mods, an R&B obsessive. Marriott wasn't entirely sure that this new group would be the one that would make him a star though, and was still looking for other alternatives in case it didn't play out. He auditioned for another band, the Lower Third, which counted Stuart Tuck, the writer of the Moments fanzine, among its members. But he was unsuccessful in the audition -- instead his friend Davy Jones, the one who he'd been thinking of forming a duo with, got the job: [Excerpt: Davy Jones and the Lower Third, "You've Got a Habit of Leaving"] A few months after that, Davy Jones and the Lower Third changed their name to David Bowie and the Lower Third, and we'll be picking up that story in a little over a year from now... Marriott, Lane, Jones, and Winston kept rehearsing and pulled together a five-song set, which was just about long enough to play a few shows, if they extended the songs with long jamming instrumental sections. The opening song for these early sets was one which, when they recorded it, would be credited to Marriott and Lane -- the two had struck up a writing partnership and agreed to a Lennon/McCartney style credit split, though in these early days Marriott was doing far more of the writing than Lane was. But "You Need Loving" was... heavily inspired... by "You Need Love", a song Willie Dixon had written for Muddy Waters: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "You Need Love"] It's not precisely the same song, but you can definitely hear the influence in the Marriott/Lane song: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "You Need Loving"] They did make some changes though, notably to the end of the song: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "You Need Loving"] You will be unsurprised to learn that Robert Plant was a fan of Steve Marriott. The new group were initially without a name, until after one of their first gigs, Winston's girlfriend, who hadn't met the other three before, said "You've all got such small faces!" The name stuck, because it had a double meaning -- as we've seen in the episode on "My Generation", "Face" was Mod slang for someone who was cool and respected on the Mod scene, but also, with the exception of Winston, who was average size, the other three members of the group were very short -- the tallest of the three was Ronnie Lane, who was five foot six. One thing I should note about the group's name, by the way -- on all the labels of their records in the UK while they were together, they were credited as "Small Faces", with no "The" in front, but all the band members referred to the group in interviews as "The Small Faces", and they've been credited that way on some reissues and foreign-market records. The group's official website is thesmallfaces.com but all the posts on the website refer to them as "Small Faces" with no "the". The use  of the word "the" or not at the start of a group's name at this time was something of a shibboleth -- for example both The Buffalo Springfield and The Pink Floyd dropped theirs after their early records -- and its status in this case is a strange one. I'll be referring to the group throughout as "The Small Faces" rather than "Small Faces" because the former is easier to say, but both seem accurate. After a few pub gigs in London, they got some bookings in the North of England, where they got a mixed reception -- they went down well at Peter Stringfellow's Mojo Club in Sheffield, where Joe Cocker was a regular performer, less well at a working-man's club, and reports differ about their performance at the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, though one thing everyone is agreed on is that while they were performing, some Mancunians borrowed their van and used it to rob a clothing warehouse, and gave the band members some very nice leather coats as a reward for their loan of the van. It was only on the group's return to London that they really started to gel as a unit. In particular, Kenney Jones had up to that point been a very stiff, precise, drummer, but he suddenly loosened up and, in Steve Marriott's tasteless phrase, "Every number swung like Hanratty" (James Hanratty was one of the last people in Britain to be executed by hanging). Shortly after that, Don Arden's secretary -- whose name I haven't been able to find in any of the sources I've used for this episode, sadly, came into the club where they were rehearsing, the Starlight Rooms, to pass a message from Arden to an associate of his who owned the club. The secretary had seen Marriott perform before -- he would occasionally get up on stage at the Starlight Rooms to duet with Elkie Brooks, who was a regular performer there, and she'd seen him do that -- but was newly impressed by his group, and passed word on to her boss that this was a group he should investigate. Arden is someone who we'll be looking at a lot in future episodes, but the important thing to note right now is that he was a failed entertainer who had moved into management and promotion, first with American acts like Gene Vincent, and then with British acts like the Nashville Teens, who had had hits with tracks like "Tobacco Road": [Excerpt: The Nashville Teens, "Tobacco Road"] Arden was also something of a gangster -- as many people in the music industry were at the time, but he was worse than most of his contemporaries, and delighted in his nickname "the Al Capone of pop". The group had a few managers looking to sign them, but Arden convinced them with his offer. They would get a percentage of their earnings -- though they never actually received that percentage -- twenty pounds a week in wages, and, the most tempting part of it all, they would get expense accounts at all the Carnaby St boutiques and could go there whenever they wanted and get whatever they wanted. They signed with Arden, which all of them except Marriott would later regret, because Arden's financial exploitation meant that it would be decades before they saw any money from their hits, and indeed both Marriott and Lane would be dead before they started getting royalties from their old records. Marriott, on the other hand, had enough experience of the industry to credit Arden with the group getting anywhere at all, and said later "Look, you go into it with your eyes open and as far as I was concerned it was better than living on brown sauce rolls. At least we had twenty quid a week guaranteed." Arden got the group signed to Decca, with Dick Rowe signing them to the same kind of production deal that Andrew Oldham had pioneered with the Stones, so that Arden would own the rights to their recordings. At this point the group still only knew a handful of songs, but Rowe was signing almost everyone with a guitar at this point, putting out a record or two and letting them sink or swim. He had already been firmly labelled as "the man who turned down the Beatles", and was now of the opinion that it was better to give everyone a chance than to make that kind of expensive mistake again. By this point Marriott and Lane were starting to write songs together -- though at this point it was still mostly Marriott writing, and people would ask him why he was giving Lane half the credit, and he'd reply "Without Ronnie's help keeping me awake and being there I wouldn't do half of it. He keeps me going." -- but for their first single Arden was unsure that they were up to the task of writing a hit. The group had been performing a version of Solomon Burke's "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love", a song which Burke always claimed to have written alone, but which is credited to him, Jerry Wexler, and Bert Berns (and has Bern's fingerprints, at least, on it to my ears): [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love"] Arden got some professional writers to write new lyrics and vocal melody to their arrangement of the song -- the people he hired were Brian Potter, who would later go on to co-write "Rhinestone Cowboy", and Ian Samwell, the former member of Cliff Richard's Drifters who had written many of Richard's early hits, including "Move It", and was now working for Arden. The group went into the studio and recorded the song, titled "Whatcha Gonna Do About It?": [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Whatcha Gonna Do About It?"] That version, though was deemed too raucous, and they had to go back into the studio to cut a new version, which came out as their first single: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Whatcha Gonna Do About It?"] At first the single didn't do much on the charts, but then Arden got to work with teams of people buying copies from chart return shops, bribing DJs on pirate radio stations to play it, and bribing the person who compiled the charts for the NME. Eventually it made number fourteen, at which point it became a genuinely popular hit. But with that popularity came problems. In particular, Steve Marriott was starting to get seriously annoyed by Jimmy Winston. As the group started to get TV appearances, Winston started to act like he should be the centre of attention. Every time Marriott took a solo in front of TV cameras, Winston would start making stupid gestures, pulling faces, anything to make sure the cameras focussed on him rather than on Marriott. Which wouldn't have been too bad had Winston been a great musician, but he was still not very good on the keyboards, and unlike the others didn't seem particularly interested in trying. He seemed to want to be a star, rather than a musician. The group's next planned single was a Marriott and Lane song, "I've Got Mine". To promote it, the group mimed to it in a film, Dateline Diamonds, a combination pop film and crime caper not a million miles away from the ones that Marriott had appeared in a few years earlier. They also contributed three other songs to the film's soundtrack. Unfortunately, the film's release was delayed, and the film had been the big promotional push that Arden had planned for the single, and without that it didn't chart at all. By the time the single came out, though, Winston was no longer in the group. There are many, many different stories as to why he was kicked out. Depending on who you ask, it was because he was trying to take the spotlight away from Marriott, because he wasn't a good enough keyboard player, because he was taller than the others and looked out of place, or because he asked Don Arden where the money was. It was probably a combination of all of these, but fundamentally what it came to was that Winston just didn't fit into the group. Winston would, in later years, say that him confronting Arden was the only reason for his dismissal, saying that Arden had manipulated the others to get him out of the way, but that seems unlikely on the face of it. When Arden sacked him, he kept Winston on as a client and built another band around him, Jimmy Winston and the Reflections, and got them signed to Decca too, releasing a Kenny Lynch song, "Sorry She's Mine", to no success: [Excerpt: Jimmy Winston and the Reflections, "Sorry She's Mine"] Another version of that song would later be included on the first Small Faces album. Winston would then form another band, Winston's Fumbs, who would also release one single, before he went into acting instead. His most notable credit was as a rebel in the 1972 Doctor Who story Day of the Daleks, and he later retired from showbusiness to run a business renting out sound equipment, and died in 2020. The group hired his replacement without ever having met him or heard him play. Ian McLagan had started out as the rhythm guitarist in a Shadows soundalike band called the Cherokees, but the group had become R&B fans and renamed themselves the Muleskinners, and then after hearing "Green Onions", McLagan had switched to playing Hammond organ. The Muleskinners had played the same R&B circuit as dozens of other bands we've looked at, and had similar experiences, including backing visiting blues stars like Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, and Howlin' Wolf. Their one single had been a cover version of "Back Door Man", a song Willie Dixon had written for Wolf: [Excerpt: The Muleskinners, "Back Door Man"] The Muleskinners had split up as most of the group had day jobs, and McLagan had gone on to join a group called Boz and the Boz People, who were becoming popular on the live circuit, and who also toured backing Kenny Lynch while McLagan was in the band. Boz and the Boz People would release several singles in 1966, like their version of the theme for the film "Carry on Screaming", released just as by "Boz": [Excerpt: Boz, "Carry on Screaming"] By that time, McLagan had left the group -- Boz Burrell later went on to join King Crimson and Bad Company. McLagan left the Boz People in something of a strop, and was complaining to a friend the night he left the group that he didn't have any work lined up. The friend joked that he should join the Small Faces, because he looked like them, and McLagan got annoyed that his friend wasn't taking him seriously -- he'd love to be in the Small Faces, but they *had* a keyboard player. The next day he got a phone call from Don Arden asking him to come to his office. He was being hired to join a hit pop group who needed a new keyboard player. McLagan at first wasn't allowed to tell anyone what band he was joining -- in part because Arden's secretary was dating Winston, and Winston hadn't yet been informed he was fired, and Arden didn't want word leaking out until it had been sorted. But he'd been chosen purely on the basis of an article in a music magazine which had praised his playing with the Boz People, and without the band knowing him or his playing. As soon as they met, though, he immediately fit in in a way Winston never had. He looked the part, right down to his height -- he said later "Ronnie Lane and I were the giants in the band at 5 ft 6 ins, and Kenney Jones and Steve Marriott were the really teeny tiny chaps at 5 ft 5 1/2 ins" -- and he was a great player, and shared a sense of humour with them. McLagan had told Arden he'd been earning twenty pounds a week with the Boz People -- he'd actually been on five -- and so Arden agreed to give him thirty pounds a week during his probationary month, which was more than the twenty the rest of the band were getting. As soon as his probationary period was over, McLagan insisted on getting a pay cut so he'd be on the same wages as the rest of the group. Soon Marriott, Lane, and McLagan were all living in a house rented for them by Arden -- Jones decided to stay living with his parents -- and were in the studio recording their next single. Arden was convinced that the mistake with "I've Got Mine" had been allowing the group to record an original, and again called in a team of professional songwriters. Arden brought in Mort Shuman, who had recently ended his writing partnership with Doc Pomus and struck out on his own, after co-writing songs like "Save the Last Dance for Me", "Sweets For My Sweet", and "Viva Las Vegas" together, and Kenny Lynch, and the two of them wrote "Sha-La-La-La-Lee", and Lynch added backing vocals to the record: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Sha-La-La-La-Lee"] None of the group were happy with the record, but it became a big hit, reaching number three in the charts. Suddenly the group had a huge fanbase of screaming teenage girls, which embarrassed them terribly, as they thought of themselves as serious heavy R&B musicians, and the rest of their career would largely be spent vacillating between trying to appeal to their teenybopper fanbase and trying to escape from it to fit their own self-image. They followed "Sha-La-La-La-Lee" with "Hey Girl", a Marriott/Lane song, but one written to order -- they were under strict instructions from Arden that if they wanted to have the A-side of a single, they had to write something as commercial as "Sha-La-La-La-Lee" had been, and they managed to come up with a second top-ten hit. Two hit singles in a row was enough to make an album viable, and the group went into the studio and quickly cut an album, which had their first two hits on it -- "Hey Girl" wasn't included, and nor was the flop "I've Got Mine" -- plus a bunch of semi-originals like "You Need Loving", a couple of Kenny Lynch songs, and a cover version of Sam Cooke's "Shake". The album went to number three on the album charts, with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the number one and two spots, and it was at this point that Arden's rivals really started taking interest. But that interest was quelled for the moment when, after Robert Stigwood enquired about managing the band, Arden went round to Stigwood's office with four goons and held him upside down over a balcony, threatening to drop him off if he ever messed with any of Arden's acts again. But the group were still being influenced by other managers. In particular, Brian Epstein came round to the group's shared house, with Graeme Edge of the Moody Blues, and brought them some slices of orange -- which they discovered, after eating them, had been dosed with LSD. By all accounts, Marriott's first trip was a bad one, but the group soon became regular consumers of the drug, and it influenced the heavier direction they took on their next single, "All or Nothing". "All or Nothing" was inspired both by Marriott's breakup with his girlfriend of the time, and his delight at the fact that Jenny Rylance, a woman he was attracted to, had split up with her then-boyfriend Rod Stewart. Rylance and Stewart later reconciled, but would break up again and Rylance would become Marriott's first wife in 1968: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "All or Nothing"] "All or Nothing" became the group's first and only number one record -- and according to the version of the charts used on Top of the Pops, it was a joint number one with the Beatles' double A-side of "Yellow Submarine" and "Eleanor Rigby", both selling exactly as well as each other. But this success caused the group's parents to start to wonder why their kids -- none of whom were yet twenty-one, the legal age of majority at the time -- were not rich. While the group were on tour, their parents came as a group to visit Arden and ask him where the money was, and why their kids were only getting paid twenty pounds a week when their group was getting a thousand pounds a night. Arden tried to convince the parents that he had been paying the group properly, but that they had spent their money on heroin -- which was very far from the truth, the band were only using soft drugs at the time. This put a huge strain on the group's relationship with Arden, and it wasn't the only thing Arden did that upset them. They had been spending a lot of time in the studio working on new material, and Arden was convinced that they were spending too much time recording, and that they were just faffing around and not producing anything of substance. They dropped off a tape to show him that they had been working -- and the next thing they knew, Arden had put out one of the tracks from that tape, "My Mind's Eye", which had only been intended as a demo, as a single: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "My Mind's Eye"] That it went to number four on the charts didn't make up for the fact that the first the band heard of the record coming out at all was when they heard it on the radio. They needed rid of Arden. Luckily for them, Arden wasn't keen on continuing to work with them either. They were unreliable and flakey, and he also needed cash quick to fund his other ventures, and he agreed to sell on their management and recording contracts. Depending on which version of the story you believe, he may have sold them on to an agent called Harold Davison, who then sold them on to Andrew Oldham and Tony Calder, but according to Oldham what happened is that in December 1966 Arden demanded the highest advance in British history -- twenty-five thousand pounds -- directly from Oldham. In cash. In a brown paper bag. The reason Oldham and Calder were interested was that in July 1965 they'd started up their own record label, Immediate Records, which had been announced by Oldham in his column in Disc and Music Echo, in which he'd said "On many occasions I have run down the large record companies over issues such as pirate stations, their promotion, and their tastes. And many readers have written in and said that if I was so disturbed by the state of the existing record companies why didn't I do something about it.  I have! On the twentieth of this month the first of three records released by my own company, Immediate Records, is to be launched." That first batch of three records contained one big hit, "Hang on Sloopy" by the McCoys, which Immediate licensed from Bert Berns' new record label BANG in the US: [Excerpt: The McCoys, "Hang on Sloopy"] The two other initial singles featured the talents of Immediate's new in-house producer, a session player who had previously been known as "Little Jimmy" to distinguish him from "Big" Jim Sullivan, the other most in-demand session guitarist, but who was now just known as Jimmy Page. The first was a version of Pete Seeger's "The Bells of Rhymney", which Page produced and played guitar on, for a group called The Fifth Avenue: [Excerpt: The Fifth Avenue, "The Bells of Rhymney"] And the second was a Gordon Lightfoot song performed by a girlfriend of Brian Jones', Nico. The details as to who was involved in the track have varied -- at different times the production has been credited to Jones, Page, and Oldham -- but it seems to be the case that both Jones and Page play on the track, as did session bass player John Paul Jones: [Excerpt: Nico, "I'm Not Sayin'"] While "Hang on Sloopy" was a big hit, the other two singles were flops, and The Fifth Avenue split up, while Nico used the publicity she'd got as an entree into Andy Warhol's Factory, and we'll be hearing more about how that went in a future episode. Oldham and Calder were trying to follow the model of the Brill Building, of Phil Spector, and of big US independents like Motown and Stax. They wanted to be a one-stop shop where they'd produce the records, manage the artists, and own the publishing -- and they also licensed the publishing for the Beach Boys' songs for a couple of years, and started publicising their records over here in a big way, to exploit the publishing royalties, and that was a major factor in turning the Beach Boys from minor novelties to major stars in the UK. Most of Immediate's records were produced by Jimmy Page, but other people got to have a go as well. Giorgio Gomelsky and Shel Talmy both produced tracks for the label, as did a teenage singer then known as Paul Raven, who would later become notorious under his later stage-name Gary Glitter. But while many of these records were excellent -- and Immediate deserves to be talked about in the same terms as Motown or Stax when it comes to the quality of the singles it released, though not in terms of commercial success -- the only ones to do well on the charts in the first few months of the label's existence were "Hang on Sloopy" and an EP by Chris Farlowe. It was Farlowe who provided Immediate Records with its first home-grown number one, a version of the Rolling Stones' "Out of Time" produced by Mick Jagger, though according to Arthur Greenslade, the arranger on that and many other Immediate tracks, Jagger had given up on getting a decent performance out of Farlowe and Oldham ended up producing the vocals. Greenslade later said "Andrew must have worked hard in there, Chris Farlowe couldn't sing his way out of a paper bag. I'm sure Andrew must have done it, where you get an artist singing and you can do a sentence at a time, stitching it all together. He must have done it in pieces." But however hard it was to make, "Out of Time" was a success: [Excerpt: Chris Farlowe, "Out of Time"] Or at least, it was a success in the UK. It did also make the top forty in the US for a week, but then it hit a snag -- it had charted without having been released in the US at all, or even being sent as a promo to DJs. Oldham's new business manager Allen Klein had been asked to work his magic on the US charts, but the people he'd bribed to hype the record into the charts had got the release date wrong and done it too early. When the record *did* come out over there, no radio station would play it in case it looked like they were complicit in the scam. But still, a UK number one wasn't too shabby, and so Immediate Records was back on track, and Oldham wanted to shore things up by bringing in some more proven hit-makers. Immediate signed the Small Faces, and even started paying them royalties -- though that wouldn't last long, as Immediate went bankrupt in 1970 and its successors in interest stopped paying out. The first work the group did for the label was actually for a Chris Farlowe single. Lane and Marriott gave him their song "My Way of Giving", and played on the session along with Farlowe's backing band the Thunderbirds. Mick Jagger is the credited producer, but by all accounts Marriott and Lane did most of the work: [Excerpt: Chris Farlowe, "My Way of Giving"] Sadly, that didn't make the top forty. After working on that, they started on their first single recorded at Immediate. But because of contractual entanglements, "I Can't Make It" was recorded at Immediate but released by Decca. Because the band weren't particularly keen on promoting something on their old label, and the record was briefly banned by the BBC for being too sexual, it only made number twenty-six on the charts. Around this time, Marriott had become friendly with another band, who had named themselves The Little People in homage to the Small Faces, and particularly with their drummer Jerry Shirley. Marriott got them signed to Immediate, and produced and played on their first single, a version of his song "(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me?": [Excerpt: The Apostolic Intervention, "(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me?"] When they signed to Immediate, The Little People had to change their name, and Marriott suggested they call themselves The Nice, a phrase he liked. Oldham thought that was a stupid name, and gave the group the much more sensible name The Apostolic Intervention. And then a few weeks later he signed another group and changed *their* name to The Nice. "The Nice" was also a phrase used in the Small Faces' first single for Immediate proper. "Here Come the Nice" was inspired by a routine by the hipster comedian Lord Buckley, "The Nazz", which also gave a name to Todd Rundgren's band and inspired a line in David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust": [Excerpt: Lord Buckley, "The Nazz"] "Here Come the Nice" was very blatantly about a drug dealer, and somehow managed to reach number twelve despite that: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Here Come the Nice"] It also had another obstacle that stopped it doing as well as it might. A week before it came out, Decca released a single, "Patterns", from material they had in the vault. And in June 1967, two Small Faces albums came out. One of them was a collection from Decca of outtakes and demos, plus their non-album hit singles, titled From The Beginning, while the other was their first album on Immediate, which was titled Small Faces -- just like their first Decca album had been. To make matters worse, From The Beginning contained the group's demos of "My Way of Giving" and "(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me?", while the group's first Immediate album contained a new recording of  "(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me?", and a version of "My Way of Giving" with the same backing track but a different vocal take from the one on the Decca collection. From this point on, the group's catalogue would be a complete mess, with an endless stream of compilations coming out, both from Decca and, after the group split, from Immediate, mixing tracks intended for release with demos and jam sessions with no regard for either their artistic intent or for what fans might want. Both albums charted, with Small Faces reaching number twelve and From The Beginning reaching number sixteen, neither doing as well as their first album had, despite the Immediate album, especially, being a much better record. This was partly because the Marriott/Lane partnership was becoming far more equal. Kenney Jones later said "During the Decca period most of the self-penned stuff was 99% Steve. It wasn't until Immediate that Ronnie became more involved. The first Immediate album is made up of 50% Steve's songs and 50% of Ronnie's. They didn't collaborate as much as people thought. In fact, when they did, they often ended up arguing and fighting." It's hard to know who did what on each song credited to the pair, but if we assume that each song's principal writer also sang lead -- we know that's not always the case, but it's a reasonable working assumption -- then Jones' fifty-fifty estimate seems about right. Of the fourteen songs on the album, McLagan sings one, which is also his own composition, "Up the Wooden Hills to Bedfordshire". There's one instrumental, six with Marriott on solo lead vocals, four with Lane on solo lead vocals, and two duets, one with Lane as the main vocalist and one with Marriott. The fact that there was now a second songwriter taking an equal role in the band meant that they could now do an entire album of originals. It also meant that their next Marriott/Lane single was mostly a Lane song. "Itchycoo Park" started with a verse lyric from Lane -- "Over bridge of sighs/To rest my eyes in shades of green/Under dreaming spires/To Itchycoo Park, that's where I've been". The inspiration apparently came from Lane reading about the dreaming spires of Oxford, and contrasting it with the places he used to play as a child, full of stinging nettles. For a verse melody, they repeated a trick they'd used before -- the melody of "My Mind's Eye" had been borrowed in part from the Christmas carol "Gloria in Excelsis Deo", and here they took inspiration from the old hymn "God Be in My Head": [Excerpt: The Choir of King's College Cambridge, "God Be in My Head"] As Marriott told the story: "We were in Ireland and speeding our brains out writing this song. Ronnie had the first verse already written down but he had no melody line, so what we did was stick the verse to the melody line of 'God Be In My Head' with a few chord variations. We were going towards Dublin airport and I thought of the middle eight... We wrote the second verse collectively, and the chorus speaks for itself." [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Itchycoo Park"] Marriott took the lead vocal, even though it was mostly Lane's song, but Marriott did contribute to the writing, coming up with the middle eight. Lane didn't seem hugely impressed with Marriott's contribution, and later said "It wasn't me that came up with 'I feel inclined to blow my mind, get hung up, feed the ducks with a bun/They all come out to groove about, be nice and have fun in the sun'. That wasn't me, but the more poetic stuff was." But that part became the most memorable part of the record, not so much because of the writing or performance but because of the production. It was one of the first singles released using a phasing effect, developed by George Chkiantz (and I apologise if I'm pronouncing that name wrong), who was the assistant engineer for Glyn Johns on the album. I say it was one of the first, because at the time there was not a clear distinction between the techniques now known as phasing, flanging, and artificial double tracking, all of which have now diverged, but all of which initially came from the idea of shifting two copies of a recording slightly out of synch with each other. The phasing on "Itchycoo Park" , though, was far more extreme and used to far different effect than that on, say, Revolver: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Itchycoo Park"] It was effective enough that Jimi Hendrix, who was at the time working on Axis: Bold as Love, requested that Chkiantz come in and show his engineer how to get the same effect, which was then used on huge chunks of Hendrix's album. The BBC banned the record, because even the organisation which had missed that the Nice who "is always there when I need some speed" was a drug dealer was a little suspicious about whether "we'll get high" and "we'll touch the sky" might be drug references. The band claimed to be horrified at the thought, and explained that they were talking about swings. It's a song about a park, so if you play on the swings, you go high. What else could it mean? [Excerpt: The Small Faces, “Itchycoo Park”] No drug references there, I'm sure you'll agree. The song made number three, but the group ran into more difficulties with the BBC after an appearance on Top of the Pops. Marriott disliked the show's producer, and the way that he would go up to every act and pretend to think they had done a very good job, no matter what he actually thought, which Marriott thought of as hypocrisy rather than as politeness and professionalism. Marriott discovered that the producer was leaving the show, and so in the bar afterwards told him exactly what he thought of him, calling him a "two-faced", and then a four-letter word beginning with c which is generally considered the most offensive swear word there is. Unfortunately for Marriott, he'd been misinformed, the producer wasn't leaving the show, and the group were barred from it for a while. "Itchycoo Park" also made the top twenty in the US, thanks to a new distribution deal Immediate had, and plans were made for the group to tour America, but those plans had to be scrapped when Ian McLagan was arrested for possession of hashish, and instead the group toured France, with support from a group called the Herd: [Excerpt: The Herd, "From the Underworld"] Marriott became very friendly with the Herd's guitarist, Peter Frampton, and sympathised with Frampton's predicament when in the next year he was voted "face of '68" and developed a similar teenage following to the one the Small Faces had. The group's last single of 1967 was one of their best. "Tin Soldier" was inspired by the Hans Andersen story “The Steadfast Tin Soldier”, and was originally written for the singer P.P. Arnold, who Marriott was briefly dating around this time. But Arnold was *so* impressed with the song that Marriott decided to keep it for his own group, and Arnold was left just doing backing vocals on the track: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Tin Soldier"] It's hard to show the appeal of "Tin Soldier" in a short clip like those I use on this show, because so much of it is based on the use of dynamics, and the way the track rises and falls, but it's an extremely powerful track, and made the top ten. But it was after that that the band started falling apart, and also after that that they made the work generally considered their greatest album. As "Itchycoo Park" had made number one in Australia, the group were sent over there on tour to promote it, as support act for the Who. But the group hadn't been playing live much recently, and found it difficult to replicate their records on stage, as they were now so reliant on studio effects like phasing. The Australian audiences were uniformly hostile, and the contrast with the Who, who were at their peak as a live act at this point, couldn't have been greater. Marriott decided he had a solution. The band needed to get better live, so why not get Peter Frampton in as a fifth member? He was great on guitar and had stage presence, obviously that would fix their problems. But the other band members absolutely refused to get Frampton in. Marriott's confidence as a stage performer took a knock from which it never really recovered, and increasingly the band became a studio-only one. But the tour also put strain on the most important partnership in the band. Marriott and Lane had been the closest of friends and collaborators, but on the tour, both found a very different member of the Who to pal around with. Marriott became close to Keith Moon, and the two would get drunk and trash hotel rooms together. Lane, meanwhile, became very friendly with Pete Townshend, who introduced him to the work of the guru Meher Baba, who Townshend followed. Lane, too, became a follower, and the two would talk about religion and spirituality while their bandmates were destroying things. An attempt was made to heal the growing rifts though. Marriott, Lane, and McLagan all moved in together again like old times, but this time in a cottage -- something that became so common for bands around this time that the phrase "getting our heads together in the country" became a cliche in the music press. They started working on material for their new album. One of the tracks that they were working on was written by Marriott, and was inspired by how, before moving in to the country cottage, his neighbours had constantly complained about the volume of his music -- he'd been particularly annoyed that the pop singer Cilla Black, who lived in the same building and who he'd assumed would understand the pop star lifestyle, had complained more than anyone. It had started as as fairly serious blues song, but then Marriott had been confronted by the members of the group The Hollies, who wanted to know why Marriott always sang in a pseudo-American accent. Wasn't his own accent good enough? Was there something wrong with being from the East End of London? Well, no, Marriott decided, there wasn't, and so he decided to sing it in a Cockney accent. And so the song started to change, going from being an R&B song to being the kind of thing Cockneys could sing round a piano in a pub: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Lazy Sunday"] Marriott intended the song just as an album track for the album they were working on, but Andrew Oldham insisted on releasing it as a single, much to the band's disgust, and it went to number two on the charts, and along with "Itchycoo Park" meant that the group were now typecast as making playful, light-hearted music. The album they were working on, Ogden's Nut-Gone Flake, was eventually as known for its marketing as its music. In the Small Faces' long tradition of twisted religious references, like their songs based on hymns and their song "Here Come the Nice", which had taken inspiration from a routine about Jesus and made it about a drug dealer, the print ads for the album read: Small Faces Which were in the studios Hallowed be thy name Thy music come Thy songs be sung On this album as they came from your heads We give you this day our daily bread Give us thy album in a round cover as we give thee 37/9d Lead us into the record stores And deliver us Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake For nice is the music The sleeve and the story For ever and ever, Immediate The reason the ad mentioned a round cover is that the original pressings of the album were released in a circular cover, made to look like a tobacco tin, with the name of the brand of tobacco changed from Ogden's Nut-Brown Flake to Ogden's Nut-Gone Flake, a reference to how after smoking enough dope your nut, or head, would be gone. This made more sense to British listeners than to Americans, because not only was the slang on the label British, and not only was it a reference to a British tobacco brand, but American and British dope-smoking habits are very different. In America a joint is generally made by taking the dried leaves and flowers of the cannabis plant -- or "weed" -- and rolling them in a cigarette paper and smoking them. In the UK and much of Europe, though, the preferred form of cannabis is the resin, hashish, which is crumbled onto tobacco in a cigarette paper and smoked that way, so having rolling or pipe tobacco was a necessity for dope smokers in the UK in a way it wasn't in the US. Side one of Ogden's was made up of normal songs, but the second side mixed songs and narrative. Originally the group wanted to get Spike Milligan to do the narration, but when Milligan backed out they chose Professor Stanley Unwin, a comedian who was known for speaking in his own almost-English language, Unwinese: [Excerpt: Stanley Unwin, "The Populode of the Musicolly"] They gave Unwin a script, telling the story that linked side two of the album, in which Happiness Stan is shocked to discover that half the moon has disappeared and goes on a quest to find the missing half, aided by a giant fly who lets him sit on his back after Stan shares his shepherd's pie with the hungry fly. After a long quest they end up at the cave of Mad John the Hermit, who points out to them that nobody had stolen half the moon at all -- they'd been travelling so long that it was a full moon again, and everything was OK. Unwin took that script, and reworked it into Unwinese, and also added in a lot of the slang he heard the group use, like "cool it" and "what's been your hang-up?": [Excerpt: The Small Faces and Professor Stanley Unwin, "Mad John"] The album went to number one, and the group were justifiably proud, but it only exacerbated the problems with their live show. Other than an appearance on the TV show Colour Me Pop, where they were joined by Stanley Unwin to perform the whole of side two of the album with live vocals but miming to instrumental backing tracks, they only performed two songs from the album live, "Rollin' Over" and "Song of a Baker", otherwise sticking to the same live show Marriott was already embarrassed by. Marriott later said "We had spent an entire year in the studios, which was why our stage presentation had not been improved since the previous year. Meanwhile our recording experience had developed in leaps and bounds. We were all keenly interested in the technical possibilities, in the art of recording. We let down a lot of people who wanted to hear Ogden's played live. We were still sort of rough and ready, and in the end the audience became uninterested as far as our stage show was concerned. It was our own fault, because we would have sussed it all out if we had only used our brains. We could have taken Stanley Unwin on tour with us, maybe a string section as well, and it would have been okay. But we didn't do it, we stuck to the concept that had been successful for a long time, which is always the kiss of death." The group's next single would be the last released while they were together. Marriott regarded "The Universal" as possibly the best thing he'd written, and recorded it quickly when inspiration struck. The finished single is actually a home recording of Marriott in his garden, including the sounds of a dog barking and his wife coming home with the shopping, onto which the band later overdubbed percussion, horns, and electric guitars: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "The Universal"] Incidentally, it seems that the dog barking on that track may also be the dog barking on “Seamus” by Pink Floyd. "The Universal" confused listeners, and only made number sixteen on the charts, crushing Marriott, who thought it was the best thing he'd done. But the band were starting to splinter. McLagan isn't on "The Universal", having quit the band before it was recorded after a falling-out with Marriott. He rejoined, but discovered that in the meantime Marriott had brought in session player Nicky Hopkins to work on some tracks, which devastated him. Marriott became increasingly unconfident in his own writing, and the writing dried up. The group did start work on some new material, some of which, like "The Autumn Stone", is genuinely lovely: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "The Autumn Stone"] But by the time that was released, the group had already split up. The last recording they did together was as a backing group for Johnny Hallyday, the French rock star. A year earlier Hallyday had recorded a version of "My Way of Giving", under the title "Je N'Ai Jamais Rien Demandé": [Excerpt: Johnny Hallyday, "Je N'Ai Jamais Rien Demandé"] Now he got in touch with Glyn Johns to see if the Small Faces had any other material for him, and if they'd maybe back him on a few tracks on a new album. Johns and the Small Faces flew to France... as did Peter Frampton, who Marriott was still pushing to get into the band. They recorded three tracks for the album, with Frampton on extra guitar: [Excerpt: Johnny Hallyday, "Reclamation"] These tracks left Marriott more certain than ever that Frampton should be in the band, and the other three members even more certain that he shouldn't. Frampton joined the band on stage at a few shows on their next few gigs, but he was putting together his own band with Jerry Shirley from Apostolic Intervention. On New Year's Eve 1968, Marriott finally had enough. He stormed off stage mid-set, and quit the group. He phoned up Peter Frampton, who was hanging out with Glyn Johns listening to an album Johns had just produced by some of the session players who'd worked for Immediate. Side one had just finished when Marriott phoned. Could he join Frampton's new band? Frampton said of course he could, then put the phone down and listened to side two of Led Zeppelin's first record. The band Marriott and Frampton formed was called Humble Pie, and they were soon releasing stuff on Immediate. According to Oldham, "Tony Calder said to me one day 'Pick a straw'. Then he explained we had a choice. We could either go with the three Faces -- Kenney, Ronnie, and Mac -- wherever they were going to go with their lives, or we could follow Stevie. I didn't regard it as a choice. Neither did Tony. Marriott was our man". Marriott certainly seemed to agree that he was the real talent in the group. He and Lane had fairly recently bought some property together -- two houses on the same piece of land -- and with the group splitting up, Lane moved away and wanted to sell his share in the property to Marriott. Marriott wrote to him saying "You'll get nothing. This was bought with money from hits that I wrote, not that we wrote," and enclosing a PRS statement showing how much each Marriott/Lane