Podcast appearances and mentions of Dave Van Ronk

If you were ever lucky enough to catch one of the late Dave Van Ronk's shows, you almost certainly heard “Green Rocky Road,” which became sort of his theme song over the years.He'd perform it in a variety of ways, sometimes at a lively clip, a tribute to its roots as a children's play party tune. Other times it would be slow and meditative, making you wonder if you were missing some secret tucked away in those seemingly simple lyrics.Dave's tune inspired an eclectic slew of followers, ranging from Peter, Paul and Mary (as “Rocky Road” in 1963), Tim Hardin (1966) and Fred Neil (1967) to Ricky Nelson (as “Promenade in Green” in 1967), Wendy Waldman (1975) and Van Morrison (2023).The Song's StoryVan Ronk remembered first hearing the song from beat poet Bob Kaufman who was hanging out in Greenwich Village's Gaslight Cafe in the early 1960s. Kaufman learned it as a child when he was growing up in New Orleans. It was a popular African American children's game song throughout the South, Kaufman said. In fact, the song is among those featured on a 1950 Folkways album called Ring Games: Line Games and Play Party Songs of Alabama, collected from the children of Lilly's Chapel School in York, Alabama, recorded by Harold Courlander.Of the game associated with the song, the album notes said, “The children form a circle with the leader in the center. The group sings ‘Green, green' and the leader answers, ‘Rocky road,' skipping around the ring. As the chorus is sung the leader is deciding which person to choose. As he picks one, the group sings the first line of the verse, naming the child selected. The leader brings his choice to the center and kisses her…” (Hence, “Tell me who you love, tell me who you love.”)Enter Len ChandlerBut the song as we know it today was largely composed by Len Chandler, who was, as writer Elijah Wald notes, “one of the most musically sophisticated writers on the Village folk scene. Chandler had been a classical oboe player in Akron, Ohio, and Dave recalled Variety referring to him as ‘musician turned folksinger.'”As Chandler always told it, Van Ronk was the first person to bring him down to Washington Square and introduce him around, and he shortly became the house musician at the Gaslight Cafe. Chandler came up with a new melody for the tune, Dave learned it from him, recorded it in 1963 and, for the rest of his life, it became one of the most enduring and requested songs in Dave's repertoire.Remembering KaufmanBut the real hero of this tale is Bob Kaufman, the poet who played a key role in preserving the song.As composer/singer Richard A. Séguin recently commented in an online article, “Bob (Robert Garnell) Kaufman (1925-1986) once famously said ‘I want to be anonymous. My ambition is to be completely forgotten.' I hope he will forgive me for disregarding his wishes, but he is too important an artist to forget.”Choosing San Francisco for his home, Kaufman founded and edited Beatitude poetry magazine and many argue that it was he — rather than the often-credited newspaper columnist Herb Caen — who actually coined the term “beatnik.”Wikipedia quotes writer Raymond Foye (from an introduction to a Kaufman poetry volume) as observing that Kaufman's life was filled with a great deal of suffering. In San Francisco, for instance, he was the target of beatings and harassment by the city police, while his years living in New York were filled with poverty, addiction and imprisonment. Kaufman often incurred the wrath of police simply for reciting his poetry aloud in public; it is said that in 1959 alone, he was arrested 39 times by the San Francisco cops on disorderly charges.In 1963, he was arrested for walking on the grass of Washington Square Park. He was incarcerated on Rikers Island, then sent as a “behavioral problem” to Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital.At Bellevue, Séguin notes, he “underwent electro-shock treatments that greatly affected his already bleak outlook on society.” After John F. Kennedy's assassination, Kaufman, a Buddhist, took a vow of silence that lasted 10 years.“Even though Bob Kaufman's life was filled with a great deal of suffering,” Séguin concludes, “many will remember him for his wonderful idea that became the musical butterfly we know as ‘Green Rocky Road.'” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Terri Thal was a vital presence in the 1960s Greenwich Village folk music world, where she played a pivotal role as Bob Dylan's first manager at just 21 years of age. At the heart of it all, she witnessed—and helped shape—one of the most important cultural movements of 20th-century America,"  Essayist Frank Matheis wrote those words about Terri Thal in his candid account, A Life of Grace and Grit: The Legacy of Terri Thal. Frank is also a guest on today's show and will share thoughts from his essay.   Terri was a multi-faceted music manager and lifelong activist. Thal has chronicled her remarkable journey in her tenderly-told 2023 memoir, My Greenwich Village – Dave, Bob and Me (McNidder & Grace). A multi-faceted music manager and lifelong activist, Thal has chronicled her remarkable journey in her tenderly-told 2023 memoir, My Greenwich Village – Dave, Bob and Me (McNidder & Grace), suffused with a candid account of the early folk scene and her intersection with two of its towering figures: Dave Van Ronk and Bob Dylan.  Her book comes at just the right time to tell the rest of the story outlined in the popular Dylan bio pic, A Complete Unknown. It was a good movie, she says - but incomplete. Characters were combined, or simply disappeared she says, and she's glad to fill in the spots with personal anecdotes that only she can tell. Matheis goes on, "In the early 1960s, New York's Greenwich Village was the epicenter of the American folk music revival. The Village pulsed with raw creativity and political passion, serving as the heart of the American folk music revival and a haven for artists, poets, activists, and dreamers. Its smoke-filled bars, clubs, and coffee houses overflowed with acoustic guitars, protest songs, and youthful rebellion.   Shortly after a 21-year-old Bob Dylan arrived in the city, Terri Thal became his first manager. She was already managing her husband, Dave Van Ronk—later dubbed the “Mayor of MacDougal Street”—and would go on to work with artists such as Maggie and Terre Roche, Paul Geremia, and the Holy Modal Rounders. In one of her most historically significant contributions, she recorded Dylan performing six songs at the Gaslight Café in September 1961—what would become known as “Bob Dylan's first demo tape.” That tape was the first step that propelled the “complete unknown” into national consciousness. She even reflects on the one that got away. Thal had a chance to manage James Taylor, but she turned him down. “He was just starting out,” she reminisces. “I thought he'd probably become very good, but he wasn't making the kind of music that excited me then, and I could only work with musicians who did.”  We'll be joined by Matheis who interviewed her for The Inspirational Art Group.  Frank Matheis is a music, arts and culture writer and a contributing writer to the Inspiration Art Group International. His two current book projects are titled “Outrage Channeled in Verse – American Protest Songs in the Trump Era,” and “Rooted in Wonder – My Journey from Earth Child to Naturalist” with Jenny Richards. He is also a contributing writer to Living Blues magazine (Center for Southern Culture Studies) and the publisher/editor of thecountryblues.com. Frank was formerly an award-winning radio producer. He is also a published photographer, curator and video producer. Terri's piece on the Rock and the Beat Generation Substack: https://simonwarner.substack.com/p/terri-thal-2-that-dylan-movie   Frank's Piece on Terri https://inspirationartgroup.org/essays/terri-thal/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hoy en La Gran Travesía os dejamos un programa donde podréis escuchar a Depeche Mode, Mother Love Bone, Paul Kossoff, Janis Joplin, Audioslave, Manic Street Preachers, Jethro Tull, T Rex, Bill Haley, Led Zeppelin, Dave Van Ronk, Temple of the Dog... y muchos más. Y aquí tenéis la lista con los 500 temas más destacados de la década de los 80. https://www.ivoox.com/500-mejores-canciones-80_bk_list_5787084_1.html También recordaros que ya podéis comprar La gran travesía del rock, un libro interactivo que además contará con 15 programas de radio complementarios, a modo de ficción sonora... con muchas sorpresas y voces conocidas... https://www.ivoox.com/gran-travesia-del-rock-capitulos-del-libro_bk_list_10998115_1.html Jimi y Janis, dos periodistas musicales, vienen de 2027, un mundo distópico y delirante donde el reguetón tiene (casi) todo el poder... pero ellos dos, deciden alistarse al GLP para viajar en el tiempo, salvar el rock, rescatar sus archivos ocultos y combatir la dictadura troyana del FPR. ✨ El libro ya está en diversas webs, en todostuslibros.com Amazon, Fnac y también en La Montaña Mágica, por ejemplo https://www.mdemagica.es/libro/gran-travesia-del-rock-la_53628 ▶️ Y ya sabéis, si os gusta el programa y os apetece, podéis apoyarnos y colaborar con nosotros por el simple precio de una cerveza al mes, desde el botón azul de iVoox, y así, además podéis acceder a todo el archivo histórico exclusivo. Muchas gracias también a todos los mecenas y patrocinadores por vuestro apoyo: Con, Piri, Don T, Gezkurra, Tete García, Jose Angel Tremiño, Marco Landeta Vacas, Oscar García Muñoz, Raquel Parrondo, Javier Gonzar, Eva Arenas, Poncho C, Nacho, Javito, Alberto, Tei, Pilar Escudero, Utxi 73, Blas, Moy, Juan Antonio, Dani Pérez, Santi Oliva, Vicente DC,, Leticia, JBSabe, Huini Juarez, Flor, Melomanic, Noni, Arturo Soriano, Gemma Codina, Raquel Jiménez, Francisco Quintana, Pedro, SGD, Raul Andres, Tomás Pérez, Pablo Pineda, Quim Goday, Enfermerator, María Arán, Joaquín, Horns Up, Victor Bravo, Fonune, Eulogiko, Francisco González, Marcos Paris, Vlado 74, Daniel A, Redneckman, Elliott SF, Guillermo Gutierrez, Sementalex, Jesús Miguel, Miguel Angel Torres, Suibne, Javifer, Matías Ruiz Molina, Noyatan, Estefanía, Iván Menéndez, Niksisley y a los mecenas anónimos.

Welcome to Light On Light Through, Episode 406, and my in-depth interview with Rolling Stone writer David Browne about his masterful book, Talkin' Greenwich Village. We talk at length about Dave Van Ronk, Joni Mitchell, Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, The Blues Project, Bob Lind, and a little less about many others, including Hegel and his spirit of an age. Relevant links: Get a copy of Talkin' Greenwich Village My review of Talkin' Greenwich Village Catch David Browne at Big Red Books in Nyack, NY, March 6 Catch me at Big Red Books, Nyack, NY, February 23, doing a dramatic reading from It's Real Life: An Alternate History of The Beatles, with Anthony Marinelli and Amanda Greer, real people who appear as characters in the novel, and Frank LoBuono and Denise Reed.

This is our unabridged interview with Tom Paxton. In the 1960s, during the folk music revival in a neighborhood of New York City called Greenwich Village, a small cafe called the Gaslight hosted many singer-songwriters who were up-and-coming at the time. You might know some of their names, like Bob Dylan and Dave Van Ronk. Among the regulars there was Tom Paxton, who, 60 years and 50 albums later, is still writing and performing folk songs that bear witness to profound societal truths. In this episode, hear from Tom what it was like to perform during those days, what role folk music plays in stirring up the status quo, and thoughts on vulnerability, notoriety, grief, an Show Notes Resources mentioned this episode: Tom's Website Doc Watson and Dolly Parton - Merlefest 2001 Similar NSE episodes: Amy Grant: Fame, Vulnerability, and Staying Grounded Martin Sheen: Actor and Activist Drew Holcomb and Audrey Assad: Vulnerable Art Transcript of Abridged Interview Want more NSE? JOIN NSE+ Today! Our subscriber only community with bonus episodes designed specifically to help you live a good life, ad-free listening, and discounts on live shows Subscribe to episodes: Apple | Spotify | Amazon | Google | YouTubeFollow Us: Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | YouTubeFollow Lee: Instagram | TwitterJoin our Email List: nosmallendeavor.com See Privacy Policy: Privacy Policy Amazon Affiliate Disclosure: Tokens Media, LLC is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.

In the 1960s, during the folk music revival in a neighborhood of New York City called Greenwich Village, a small cafe called the Gaslight hosted many singer-songwriters who were up-and-coming at the time. You might know some of their names, like Bob Dylan and Dave Van Ronk. Among the regulars there was Tom Paxton, who, 60 years and 50 albums later, is still writing and performing folk songs that bear witness to profound societal truths. In this episode, hear from Tom what it was like to perform during those days, what role folk music plays in stirring up the status quo, and thoughts on vulnerability, notoriety, grief, an Show Notes Resources mentioned this episode: Tom's Website Similar NSE episodes: Amy Grant: Fame, Vulnerability, and Staying Grounded Martin Sheen: Actor and Activist Drew Holcomb and Audrey Assad: Vulnerable Art Transcription Link This episode of No Small Endeavor is sponsored by Dwell—the audio bible app. To get 25% off your subscription visit dwellbible.com/nse Want more NSE? JOIN NSE+ Today! Our subscriber only community with bonus episodes designed specifically to help you live a good life, ad-free listening, and discounts on live shows Subscribe to episodes: Apple | Spotify | Amazon | Google | YouTubeFollow Us: Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | YouTubeFollow Lee: Instagram | TwitterJoin our Email List: nosmallendeavor.com See Privacy Policy: Privacy Policy Amazon Affiliate Disclosure: Tokens Media, LLC is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.

The band does a lot of time traveling at its rehearsals. In those two hours each week, the guys might start with a rock classic like “Hey Baby,” as they do in this track from last week's get-together.Then in the next moment The Flood Time Machine Lab might transport the lads back to, say, the Roarin' Twenties.There they can sample a song or two of the day, maybe “Dinah” or “Lady Be Good” or “My Blue Heaven.”Then switching gears again, they swoop down into the Thirties or the Forties to toy with tunes from the greats like Hoagy Carmichael (“Georgia on My Mind,” maybe) or Fats Waller (“Honeysuckle Rose”) or Duke Ellington (“Don't Get Around Much Any More”).Then it's back to the Sixties or the Seventies for a bit of Bob Dylan, John Prine or Tom Paxton, Jackson Browne or Neal Young. It's all about rocking the room.This Week's SongThe featured tune this week demonstrates the best part of all that temporal tramping, because it so often lets the guys revisit music of their youth. As reported earlier, “Hey Baby” was a 1961 chart-topper that 17-year-old Bruce Channel wrote with his friend Margaret Cobb. Over the past six decades, the song has brought joy to audiences ranging from the fledgling Beatles when they were starting out back in Liverpool to movie goers years later who packed theaters for films like Dirty Dancing. For more of the song's long history, click here.The Flood started revisiting “Hey Baby” a few years ago when the band was invited to perform it at a very special occasion: the wedding of Floodster Emerita Michelle Hoge; she and Rich Hoge married on May 21, 2022, and The Flood was there for the festivities. Since then, “Hey Baby” has lingered in the repertoire, as you'll hear in this track that started last week's rehearsal at the Bowen House.Want to Do Your Own Time Traveling?If you'd like ride shotgun in The Flood time machine, a new department in the newsletter helps you take your own dash through the decades.Called “Flood Tunes on the Timeline,” the page sorts dozens of the band's performances by the date of the songs' composition. Here's how to use it.Suppose you're in the mood for a little sumpin sumpin from the period that folksinger Dave Van Ronk once wryly called “The Great Folk Scare.” You could visit the tune timeline by clicking here, then scrolling down to “The Sixties” section, where you'll find songs grouped by individual years.For instance, Dylan's “Don't Think Twice, It's All Right” is tucked in under 1962. There's Bob Gibson's “Abilene” in the 1963 list. Paxton's “Ramblin' Boy” comes along in 1964, Eric Andersen's “Dusty Boxcar Wall” is in 1965, and Michael Peter Smith's “The Dutchman” shows up in 1968.Each listed song on the timeline is hyperlinked, so clicking its title takes you to a recent Flood performance. Each entry also has a little (or a lot) of the history of that particular song.The timeline indexes more than a century of music and is regularly updated as new songs and stories are added. Enjoy the ride! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

"REHEARSALS FOR RETIREMENT" WRITTEN AND PERFORMED BY PHIL OCHS-"IF i CAN DREAM" WRITTEN BY EARL BROWN AND RECORDED BY ELVIS PRESLEY IN HONOR OF ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR."THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED" DIRECTED BY ROBERT CORMAN AND NARRATED BY CHET HUNTLEY“There's something about the guy that I love…” This is what Rich remembered that I had said about DJT. I didn't remember saying it, but I think I can relate to the veracity of his accusation. It's the re-incarnation of the Trickster that I recognize from myth - the nihilist Puck, whose talent to amuse - to entertain us as he foments chaos - is something that, I, (as someone who spent half his life trying to understand the nature of charisma) - can appreciate. Rich, as life-long activist, sees it differently: this, he feels, might be, perhaps, the last election he'll see in his lifetime, and the end of every ideal he fought for in his youth. But, he's a scrappy, latter day Dead End Kid, who ain't ready to lie down in darkness. Dig our back and forth debate.-BILL MESNIKLet's get ready to rumble. In the blue corner, a childless, blackish Vice President from Oakland, CA who was inspired by John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" in her youth and presented with 107 days and a cat sandwich with which to salvage democracy. A piece of cake kids.In the Orange corner, a man  with the graceless moves of  Jerry Lewis on acid on and who has never met a "fuck you" he didn't like.A piece of  drek.Let the games begin.The ball is in your court America.I know you'll do the right  thing because it's about feeding your family, right?Wrong. It never was and once again we are forced to never forget.As Robert Duvall  recited in "Apocalypse Now", "I love the smell of Napalm in the morning".We do, don't we?Looking at my reflection in the mirror of social change I get it. Policy was replaced  by the red carpet pedigree of celebrity and the racist  molester won  every single demographic he insulted with vitality of  an an elderly pro wrestling heel.Orange is now truly the new black and blue.Good luck and Good night.-With gratitude to Norman Mailer, Barbara Dane, Dave Van Ronk, Tuli Kupferberg, Ed Sanders, Muhammad Ali, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Hunter S. Thompson, Medgar Evers,  Frannie Lou Hamer and  Ruby Bridges, the first black child to Integrate an All-White Elementary School in the South, on November 14, 1960, at the age of six.RICH BUCKLAND

This week on the Magazine we continue to offer a remedy for the challenges of daily life. Once again, the program features humorous songs from Dave Van Ronk, John Hartford, Robin and Linda Williams, Lou and Peter Berryman, Willie Nelson and lots more. So, turn away from the TV, put down your phone for a little bit, and and enjoy … this week on The Sing Out! Radio Magazine.Pete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian FolkwaysPeter Ostroushko / “Rumba de los Holsteins” / Presents the Mando Boys / Red HouseDave Van Ronk / “Georgie and the IRT” / Down in Washington Square / Smithsonian FolkwaysBill and the Belles / “Preacher and the Bear” / Dreamsongs, Etc. / JalopyWillie Nelson / “Still Not Dead” / God's Problem Child / LegacyOld Man Luedecke / “Sardine Song” / Easy Money / True NorthBill Morrissey & Greg Brown / “Fishing with Bill” / Friend of Mine / PhiloTim O'Brien and the O'Boys / “Farmer's Cursed Wife” / Oh Boy! Oh Boy! / Sugar HillBKO / “Berkeley” / Moon Over Mendocino / Mill GulchThe Chicken Chokers / “Lookin' for Money” / Chokers and Flies / RounderPeter Ostroushko / “Mando Boys War Hymn” / Presents the Mando Boys / Red HouseJohn Hartford / “Old Joe Clark” / Morning Bugle / RounderJohn Hartford / “Don't Leave Your Records in the Sun” / Mark Twang / RounderThe John Hartford Stringband / “She's Gone (And Bob's Gone With Her)” / Memories of John / Compass Lou and Peter Berryman / “Ketchup Wasn't Red” / The Universe in 14 Examples / CornbeltRobin & Linda Williams / “Marvin & Mavis Medley” / Radio Songs / Red HousePete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian Folkways

Welcome to SUPERSTARS WEEK! This week I'm rebroadcasting my interviews with five Superstars: Judy Collins, Al Kooper, David Amram, Ron Carter and Oscar Hammerstein II. Judy Collins is an iconic Renaissance Artist and Grammy Winning Singer/Songwriter with 55 albums and hit singles including Joni Mitchell's “Both Sides Now” and Stephen Sondheim's “Send In The Clowns”. She has been a dominating force in social activism, as a filmmaker, author and as a keynote speaker. And she had one of the greatest songs of the rock era written about her - “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” by Stephen Stills and Crosby Stills and Nash. In this wonderful interview we discuss her background and successes, including her artistic formative years in the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1960s with fellow artists Joan Baez, Dave Van Ronk, Richie Havens and Peter Paul and Mary, and she tells a few terrific stories. And we do a Double Songfest. In the first one we play and discuss several songs by other artists who she loves including Shawn Colvin and Joan Baez, and in the second one we play and discuss some of her greatest works. This is truly a “don't miss” episode. My featured song is “Stockbridge Fanfare” from the East Side Sessions album by my band Project Grand Slam. Spotify link.---------------------------------------------The Follow Your Dream Podcast:Top 1% of all podcasts with Listeners in 200 countries!For more information and other episodes of the podcast click here. To subscribe to the podcast click here.To subscribe to our weekly Follow Your Dream Podcast email click here.To Rate and Review the podcast click here.“Dream With Robert”. Click here.—----------------------------------------“THE GIFT” is Robert's new single featuring his song arranged by Grammy winning arranger Michael Abene. Praised by David Amram, John Helliwell, Joe La Barbera, Tony Carey, Fay Claassen, Antonio Farao, Danny Gottlieb and Leslie Mandoki.Click HERE for all links.—-------------------------------------“LOU'S BLUES” is Robert's recent single. Called “Fantastic! Great playing and production!” (Mark Egan - Pat Metheny Group/Elements) and “Digging it!” (Peter Erskine - Weather Report)!Click HERE for all links.—----------------------------------------“THE RICH ONES”. Robert's recent single. With guest artist Randy Brecker (Blood Sweat & Tears) on flugelhorn. Click HERE for all links.—---------------------------------------“MILES BEHIND”, Robert's debut album, recorded in 1994, was “lost” for the last 30 years. It's now been released for streaming. Featuring Randy Brecker (Blood Sweat & Tears), Anton Fig (The David Letterman Show), Al Foster (Miles Davis), Tim Ries (The Rolling Stones), Jon Lucien and many more. Called “Hip, Tight and Edgy!” Click here for all links.—--------------------------------------“IT'S ALIVE!” is Robert's latest Project Grand Slam album. Featuring 13 of the band's Greatest Hits performed “live” at festivals in Pennsylvania and Serbia.Reviews:"An instant classic!" (Melody Maker)"Amazing record...Another win for the one and only Robert Miller!" (Hollywood Digest)"Close to perfect!" (Pop Icon)"A Masterpiece!" (Big Celebrity Buzz)"Sterling effort!" (Indie Pulse)"Another fusion wonder for Project Grand Slam!" (MobYorkCity)Click here for all links.Click here for song videos—-----------------------------------------Audio production:Jimmy RavenscroftKymera Films Connect with Judy atwww.judycollins.com Connect with the Follow Your Dream Podcast:Website - www.followyourdreampodcast.comEmail Robert - robert@followyourdreampodcast.com Follow Robert's band, Project Grand Slam, and his music:Website - www.projectgrandslam.comYouTubeSpotify MusicApple MusicEmail - pgs@projectgrandslam.com

Here's a tune that has touched the hearts and minds of more than a hundred years' worth of Flood heroes.At the very start of the 20th century, it was one of the best-loved numbers in the repertoire of jazz legend Buddy Bolden down in the hot, dark streets of New Orleans.A couple decades later up in Memphis, W.C. Handy co-opted it, copyrighting a variation after he heard an old guy singing it in a railroad station.It was one of the first songs waxxed when the recording revolution began in the 1920s. Bessie Smith and a kid named Louis Armstrong had a huge hit with it in 1925.After that, it was recorded by … well, by everybody from Lula Jackson and Lonnie Johnson to Jack Teagarden and The Mills Brothers, from Kid Ory and Baby Dodds to Bunk Johnson and George Lewis.Country versions were done by The Texas Rangers, The Dixie Ramblers and by Riley Puckett, blues versions by Big Joe Turner and Josh White, straight-up jazz takes by Sidney Bechet and Billie Holiday, early rock and pop renditions by Fats Domino and Elvis Presley, Ray Charles and Nat “King” Cole, earnest folk treatments by Jean Ritchie and Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and Dave Van Ronk.The Song's OriginsThe origins of “Careless Love” are obscure indeed, though it is thought to be essentially British, re-made in America with new stylistic influences. In the US, for instance, folklorist Vance Randolph collected a version in 1948 that he was told was learned in 1880.In Father of the Blues, W.C. Handy's 1941 autobiography, the composer acknowledged that the song he copyrighted as “Loveless Love” was “based on the ‘Careless Love' melody that I had played first in Bessemer (Ala.) in 1892 and that has since become popular all over the South.”Meanwhile, uh, What About the Murders? ...Handy's autobiography also introduced a curious twist when a notorious double-murder case glommed onto the “Careless Love” story.While living in Henderson, Ky., with his new wife, Elizabeth, “I was told that the words of ‘Careless Love' were based on a tragedy in a local family,” Hardy wrote, “and one night a gentleman of that city's tobacco-planter aristocracy requested our band to play and sing this folk melody.”The tragedy in question was the April 1895 shooting death of one Archibald Dixon Brown, who happened to be the 32-year-old son of Kentucky Gov. John Young Brown. Newspapers across the country reported the scandal, how the jealous husband of Archie's 28-year-old lover, Nellie Gordon, caught the two of them in a bedroom in a disreputable neighborhood in Louisville and shot each of them to death. Fulton Gordon was captured by police several blocks away, where he confessed to the murders. Soon balladeers were hard at work, singing the news.Our Take on the Tune“Man, I love those chords you found!” Joe Dobbs used to say whenever The Flood played “Careless Love.” It's true that the country version of the song Joe grew up hearing — with its simple I-IV-V structure — made for a pretty boring tune to solo on. That's why when The Flood started doing the tune a couple of decades ago, Charlie Bowen dug around to find what Joe like to call “those Nawlins chords,” the changes favored by early jazz bands when they performed the song.And since then, each iteration of the band over the years has found lots of space for ad-libbing in those roomy chords inherited from the song's sweet Dixieland roots. Just listen, for instance, to all the ideas that Sam St. Clair, Danny Cox and Randy Hamilton come up with in this latest rendition from last week's rehearsal.The FakebookOh, and by the way, if you'd like to pick along on this or other songs in The Flood catalog, visit the band's Fakebook section on its website.There you'll find chord charts for dozens of tunes in The Flood songbag, along with links to the band's renditions over the years. Click here to check it out. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Our guest Aaron J. Leonard is most unusual for an historian, or indeed any kind of guest. For a great deal of his adult life he was a member of arguably the most radical political organization in the United States, the Revolutionary Communist Party, something which he and many now admit is a cult.  His unique experiences as a thoroughgoing activist gives me great insight not only into the history of the United States working class economic cycles but developed in Leonard a knowledge about and sensitivity to the relationship of the state to  free expression, censorship and political activity in the twentieth century. I really enjoyed our discussion for the uniqueness that only somebody of Leonard's life experience and scholarship could bring.  His Meltdown Expected is an exploration of the late 70s and he has authored books on the histories of radicalism in the United States. More about Aaron, here: Aaron J. Leonard is an author and historian with a particular focus on the interplay of radicalism and repression. He is the author of "Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists,” and "A Threat of the First Magnitude," pathbreaking books that revealed the untold story of the FBI's efforts in the 60s-early 70s against US Maoism. Along with those works he, with colleague Conor A. Gallagher, published examinations based on secret information about the FBI's role in the killing of Black Panther Party member, Fred Hampton.      Following his first two books he turned to writing about contention in the cultural realm. In "The Folk Singers & the Bureau," and "Whole World in an Uproar,” he tracks the interplay of artists such as Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Sis Cunningham, Dave Van Ronk, Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, and a host of others who sparred with forces of the status quo in producing their music. In May 2024 he will publish "Meltdown Expected: Crisis, Disorder & Upheaval at the end of the 1970s" (Rutgers Univ. Press), reframing the map of the end of the much-maligned Seventies decade. He is currently working on a history of the repression leveled at the Communist Party USA, which will also be published by Rutgers Univ. Press. He has a BA in Social Sciences and History magna cum laude, from New York University. Originally from the Central New York town of Herkimer, Leonard lived most of his adult life in Brooklyn, but he now calls Los Angeles home. Links to Aarons many wonderful works, here: Website: http://www.aaronleonard.net/index.html #Meltdown Expected #marxism #marxistleninist #newleft #oldleft #communism #capitalism #1970s #1960s #politics #activism #bobavakian #carldix #china #sds #blackpanther #maoism #feminism #culturalrevolution #industrialism #factory #christianity #islam #judaism #zionism #afghanistan #1978 #1979 #brucespringsteen #theclash #joestrummer #philochs #peteseeger #woodyguthrie #theweavers #beegees #disco #theghostoftomjoad #bornintheusa #revolution #mujahideen #taliban #iran #khomeini cpusa #earlbrowder #theinternational #scottsboroboys #eldridgecleaver #symbioneseliberationarmy #pattyhearst #richardnixon #georgejackson #hrapbrown #bobbyseale #california #joandidion #tomwolfe #newjournalism #inflation #energycrisis #jamesfallows #crisisofconfidence #iranhsotagecrisis #threemileisland #thechinasyndrome #janefonda jessejackson #rainbowcoalition #gushall #angeladavis #progressivelaborpart #revolutionarycommunistparty #jimjones #guyana #harveymilk #georgemoscone #danwhite #twinkiedefense #anitabryant #jerryfalwell #fundamentalism #opec #saudioarabia #stagflation #inflation #geraldford #christpherlasch #studentsforademocraticsociety #tomhayden #freespeech #stonewall  --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/mitch-hampton/support

Judy Collins is an iconic Renaissance Artist and Grammy Winning Singer/Songwriter with 55 albums and hit singles including Joni Mitchell's “Both Sides Now” and Stephen Sondheim's “Send In The Clowns”. She has been a dominating force in social activism, as a filmmaker, author and as a keynote speaker. And she had one of the greatest songs of the rock era written about her - “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” by Stephen Stills and Crosby Stills and Nash. In this wonderful interview we discuss her background and successes, including her artistic formative years in the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1960s with fellow artists Joan Baez, Dave Van Ronk, Richie Havens and Peter Paul and Mary, and she tells a few terrific stories. And we do a Double Songfest. In the first one we play and discuss several songs by other artists who she loves including Shawn Colvin and Joan Baez, and in the second one we play and discuss some of her greatest works. This is truly a “don't miss” episode. My featured song is “Stockbridge Fanfare” from the East Side Sessions album by my band Project Grand Slam. Spotify link.---------------------------------------------The Follow Your Dream Podcast:Top 1% of all podcasts with Listeners in 200 countries!For more information and other episodes of the podcast click here. To subscribe to the podcast click here.To subscribe to our weekly Follow Your Dream Podcast email click here.To Rate and Review the podcast click here.“Dream With Robert”. Click here.—----------------------------------------“LOU'S BLUES” is Robert's new single. Called “Fantastic! Great playing and production!” (Mark Egan - Pat Metheny Group/Elements) and “Digging it!” (Peter Erskine - Weather Report)!Click HERE for all links.—----------------------------------------“THE RICH ONES”. Robert's recent single. With guest artist Randy Brecker (Blood Sweat & Tears) on flugelhorn. Click HERE for all links.—---------------------------------------“MILES BEHIND”, Robert's debut album, recorded in 1994, was “lost” for the last 30 years. It's now been released for streaming. Featuring Randy Brecker (Blood Sweat & Tears), Anton Fig (The David Letterman Show), Al Foster (Miles Davis), Tim Ries (The Rolling Stones), Jon Lucien and many more. Called “Hip, Tight and Edgy!” Click here for all links.—--------------------------------------“IT'S ALIVE!” is Robert's latest Project Grand Slam album. Featuring 13 of the band's Greatest Hits performed “live” at festivals in Pennsylvania and Serbia.Reviews:"An instant classic!" (Melody Maker)"Amazing record...Another win for the one and only Robert Miller!" (Hollywood Digest)"Close to perfect!" (Pop Icon)"A Masterpiece!" (Big Celebrity Buzz)"Sterling effort!" (Indie Pulse)"Another fusion wonder for Project Grand Slam!" (MobYorkCity)Click here for all links.Click here for song videos—-----------------------------------------Intro/Outro Voiceovers courtesy of:Jodi Krangle - Professional Voiceover Artisthttps://voiceoversandvocals.com Audio production:Jimmy RavenscroftKymera Films Connect with Judy atwww.judycollins.com Connect with the Follow Your Dream Podcast:Website - www.followyourdreampodcast.comEmail Robert - robert@followyourdreampodcast.com Follow Robert's band, Project Grand Slam, and his music:Website - www.projectgrandslam.comYouTubeSpotify MusicApple MusicEmail - pgs@projectgrandslam.com

We were joined by countercultural historian Pat Thomas, and Peter Hale, manager of the Ginsberg estate, and discover their new collaboration Material Wealth Mining the Personal Archive of Allen Ginsberg.*A prolific poet, raconteur, activist, and thinker, Allen Ginsberg was also a prolific collector, meticulously saving letters, postcards, draft notes and manuscripts, photographs and snapshots, appearance bills and rally broadsheets, not only featuring him personally, but also his fellow poets, singers, lovers, writers, journey companions, friends, and agitators. Gathered here publicly for the first time is his personal archive of events and experiences documenting his life as a young man, breakaway poet, expansive spirit, curious intellectual traveler, and relentless enthusiast of the provocative and the profane.There are hundreds of thousands of items carefully stored and archived at Stanford University's Allen Ginsberg collection. Counterculture historian Pat Thomas, with the full cooperation of the Allen Ginsberg Estate's Peter Hale, has compiled and annotated a remarkable volume of material, unearthing in the process one astounding find after another. The result is a tome of previously unpublished historical paperwork and vintage graphics and photographs and ephemera that promises an unprecedented look inside one of the most prolific poets and agitators of cultural mores of the 20th century.*Pat Thomas is a counterculture historian and archival music producer (and liner-note writer) whose expertise and interests have helped him author such books as Listen, Whitey! The Sights & Sounds of Black Power 1965–1975 and Did It! Jerry Rubin: An American Revolutionary. He has co-curated Invitation to Openness: The Jazz & Soul Photography of Les McCann 1960-1980, co-edited My Week Beats Your Year: Encounters with Lou Reed, an anthology of interviews about the iconic musician, and contributed to The (Original) Adventures of Ford Fairlane: The Long Lost Rock n' Roll Detective and Kerouac on Record: A Literary Soundtrack. Thomas was a consultant on the PBS documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution and compiled the 3-CD box set The Last Word on First Blues for the Allen Ginsberg Estate (1970s recordings of Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, and Arthur Russell), and the 2-CD set Songs of Innocence and Experience of Ginsberg's 1969 recordings (with Don Cherry and Elvin Jones) putting William Blake poems to music with vocals by Allen.Peter Hale grew up in Italy, Germany, and then Boulder, CO where he earned a BA in Classics, Greek & Latin, from the University of Colorado, all the while attending classes in music, poetry and meditation at Naropa University. He became part of the staff at Allen Ginsberg's office in 1992, and in 1997 helped craft his posthumous estate, which he currently manages. He studied Guitar with Dave Van Ronk & Danny Kalb, and Piano with Peter Barbieri. He currently produces his own music, and djs around NYC. He lives in Ridgewood, Queens.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a sequel of sorts to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman's latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For those who haven't heard the announcement I just posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a multi-episode look at the Byrds in 1966-69 and the birth of country rock. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode, on "With a Little Help From My Friends" by Joe Cocker. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud at this time as there are too many Byrds songs in the first chunk, but I will try to put together a multi-part Mixcloud when all the episodes for this song are up. My main source for the Byrds is Timeless Flight Revisited by Johnny Rogan, I also used Chris Hillman's autobiography, the 331/3 books on The Notorious Byrd Brothers and The Gilded Palace of Sin, I used Barney Hoskyns' Hotel California and John Einarson's Desperadoes as general background on Californian country-rock, Calling Me Hone, Gram Parsons and the Roots of Country Rock by Bob Kealing for information on Parsons, and Requiem For The Timeless Vol 2 by Johnny Rogan for information about the post-Byrds careers of many members. Information on Gary Usher comes from The California Sound by Stephen McParland. And this three-CD set is a reasonable way of getting most of the Byrds' important recordings. The International Submarine Band's only album can be bought from Bandcamp. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we begin, a brief warning – this episode contains brief mentions of suicide, alcoholism, abortion, and heroin addiction, and a brief excerpt of chanting of a Nazi slogan. If you find those subjects upsetting, you may want to read the transcript rather than listen. As we heard in the last part, in October 1967 Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman fired David Crosby from the Byrds. It was only many years later, in a conversation with the group's ex-manager Jim Dickson, that Crosby realised that they didn't actually have a legal right to fire him -- the Byrds had no partnership agreement, and according to Dickson given that the original group had been Crosby, McGuinn, and Gene Clark, it would have been possible for Crosby and McGuinn to fire Hillman, but not for McGuinn and Hillman to fire Crosby. But Crosby was unaware of this at the time, and accepted a pay-off, with which he bought a boat and sailed to Florida, where saw a Canadian singer-songwriter performing live: [Excerpt: Joni Mitchell, "Both Sides Now (live Ann Arbor, MI, 27/10/67)"] We'll find out what happened when David Crosby brought Joni Mitchell back to California in a future story... With Crosby gone, the group had a major problem. They were known for two things -- their jangly twelve-string guitar and their soaring harmonies. They still had the twelve-string, even in their new slimmed-down trio format, but they only had two of their four vocalists -- and while McGuinn had sung lead on most of their hits, the sound of the Byrds' harmony had been defined by Crosby on the high harmonies and Gene Clark's baritone. There was an obvious solution available, of course, and they took it. Gene Clark had quit the Byrds in large part because of his conflicts with David Crosby, and had remained friendly with the others. Clark's solo album had featured Chris Hillman and Michael Clarke, and had been produced by Gary Usher who was now producing the Byrds' records, and it had been a flop and he was at a loose end. After recording the Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers album, Clark had started work with Curt Boettcher, a singer-songwriter-producer who had produced hits for Tommy Roe and the Association, and who was currently working with Gary Usher. Boettcher produced two tracks for Clark, but they went unreleased: [Excerpt: Gene Clark, "Only Colombe"] That had been intended as the start of sessions for an album, but Clark had been dropped by Columbia rather than getting to record a second album. He had put together a touring band with guitarist Clarence White, bass player John York, and session drummer "Fast" Eddie Hoh, but hadn't played many gigs, and while he'd been demoing songs for a possible second solo album he didn't have a record deal to use them on. Chisa Records, a label co-owned by Larry Spector, Peter Fonda, and Hugh Masekela, had put out some promo copies of one track, "Yesterday, Am I Right", but hadn't released it properly: [Excerpt: Gene Clark, "Yesterday, Am I Right"] Clark, like the Byrds, had left Dickson and Tickner's management organisation and signed with Larry Spector, and Spector was wanting to make the most of his artists -- and things were very different for the Byrds now. Clark had had three main problems with being in the Byrds -- ego clashes with David Crosby, the stresses of being a pop star with a screaming teenage fanbase, and his fear of flying. Clark had really wanted to have the same kind of role in the Byrds that Brian Wilson had with the Beach Boys -- appear on the records, write songs, do TV appearances, maybe play local club gigs, but not go on tour playing to screaming fans. But now David Crosby was out of the group and there were no screaming fans any more -- the Byrds weren't having the kind of pop hits they'd had a few years earlier and were now playing to the hippie audience. Clark promised that with everything else being different, he could cope with the idea of flying -- if necessary he'd just take tranquilisers or get so drunk he passed out. So Gene Clark rejoined the Byrds. According to some sources he sang on their next single, "Goin' Back," though I don't hear his voice in the mix: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Goin' Back"] According to McGuinn, Clark was also an uncredited co-writer on one song on the album they were recording, "Get to You". But before sessions had gone very far, the group went on tour. They appeared on the Smothers Brothers TV show, miming their new single and "Mr. Spaceman", and Clark seemed in good spirits, but on the tour of the Midwest that followed, according to their road manager of the time, Clark was terrified, singing flat and playing badly, and his guitar and vocal mic were left out of the mix. And then it came time to get on a plane, and Clark's old fears came back, and he refused to fly from Minneapolis to New York with the rest of the group, instead getting a train back to LA. And that was the end of Clark's second stint in the Byrds. For the moment, the Byrds decided they were going to continue as a trio on stage and a duo in the studio -- though Michael Clarke did make an occasional return to the sessions as they progressed. But of course, McGuinn and Hillman couldn't record an album entirely by themselves. They did have several tracks in a semi-completed state still featuring Crosby, but they needed people to fill his vocal and instrumental roles on the remaining tracks. For the vocals, Usher brought in his friend and collaborator Curt Boettcher, with whom he was also working at the time in a band called Sagittarius: [Excerpt: Sagittarius, "Another Time"] Boettcher was a skilled harmony vocalist -- according to Usher, he was one of the few vocal arrangers that Brian Wilson looked up to, and Jerry Yester had said of the Modern Folk Quartet that “the only vocals that competed with us back then was Curt Boettcher's group” -- and he was more than capable of filling Crosby's vocal gap, but there was never any real camaraderie between him and the Byrds. He particularly disliked McGuinn, who he said "was just such a poker face. He never let you know where you stood. There was never any lightness," and he said of the sessions as a whole "I was really thrilled to be working with The Byrds, and, at the same time, I was glad when it was all over. There was just no fun, and they were such weird guys to work with. They really freaked me out!" Someone else who Usher brought in, who seems to have made a better impression, was Red Rhodes: [Excerpt: Red Rhodes, "Red's Ride"] Rhodes was a pedal steel player, and one of the few people to make a career on the instrument outside pure country music, which is the genre with which the instrument is usually identified. Rhodes was a country player, but he was the country pedal steel player of choice for musicians from the pop and folk-rock worlds. He worked with Usher and Boettcher on albums by Sagittarius and the Millennium, and played on records by Cass Elliot, Carole King, the Beach Boys, and the Carpenters, among many others -- though he would be best known for his longstanding association with Michael Nesmith of the Monkees, playing on most of Nesmith's recordings from 1968 through 1992. Someone else who was associated with the Monkees was Moog player Paul Beaver, who we talked about in the episode on "Hey Jude", and who had recently played on the Monkees' Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones, Ltd album: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Star Collector"] And the fourth person brought in to help the group out was someone who was already familiar to them. Clarence White was, like Red Rhodes, from the country world -- he'd started out in a bluegrass group called the Kentucky Colonels: [Excerpt: The Kentucky Colonels, "Clinch Mountain Backstep"] But White had gone electric and formed one of the first country-rock bands, a group named Nashville West, as well as becoming a popular session player. He had already played on a couple of tracks on Younger Than Yesterday, as well as playing with Hillman and Michael Clarke on Gene Clark's album with the Gosdin Brothers and being part of Clark's touring band with John York and "Fast" Eddie Hoh. The album that the group put together with these session players was a triumph of sequencing and production. Usher had recently been keen on the idea of crossfading tracks into each other, as the Beatles had on Sgt Pepper, and had done the same on the two Chad and Jeremy albums he produced. By clever crossfading and mixing, Usher managed to create something that had the feel of being a continuous piece, despite being the product of several very different creative minds, with Usher's pop sensibility and arrangement ideas being the glue that held everything together. McGuinn was interested in sonic experimentation. He, more than any of the others, seems to have been the one who was most pushing for them to use the Moog, and he continued his interest in science fiction, with a song, "Space Odyssey", inspired by the Arthur C. Clarke short story "The Sentinel", which was also the inspiration for the then-forthcoming film 2001: A Space Odyssey: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Space Odyssey"] Then there was Chris Hillman, who was coming up with country material like "Old John Robertson": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Old John Robertson"] And finally there was David Crosby. Even though he'd been fired from the group, both McGuinn and Hillman didn't see any problem with using the songs he had already contributed. Three of the album's eleven songs are compositions that are primarily by Crosby, though they're all co-credited to either Hillman or both Hillman and McGuinn. Two of those songs are largely unchanged from Crosby's original vision, just finished off by the rest of the group after his departure, but one song is rather different: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Draft Morning"] "Draft Morning" was a song that was important to Crosby, and was about his -- and the group's -- feelings about the draft and the ongoing Vietnam War. It was a song that had meant a lot to him, and he'd been part of the recording for the backing track. But when it came to doing the final vocals, McGuinn and Hillman had a problem -- they couldn't remember all the words to the song, and obviously there was no way they were going to get Crosby to give them the original lyrics. So they rewrote it, coming up with new lyrics where they couldn't remember the originals: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Draft Morning"] But there was one other contribution to the track that was very distinctively the work of Usher. Gary Usher had a predilection at this point for putting musique concrete sections in otherwise straightforward pop songs. He'd done it with "Fakin' It" by Simon and Garfunkel, on which he did uncredited production work, and did it so often that it became something of a signature of records on Columbia in 1967 and 68, even being copied by his friend Jim Guercio on "Susan" by the Buckinghams. Usher had done this, in particular, on the first two singles by Sagittarius, his project with Curt Boettcher. In particular, the second Sagittarius single, "Hotel Indiscreet", had had a very jarring section (and a warning here, this contains some brief chanting of a Nazi slogan): [Excerpt: Sagittarius, "Hotel Indiscreet"] That was the work of a comedy group that Usher had discovered and signed to Columbia. The Firesign Theatre were so named because, like Usher, they were all interested in astrology, and they were all "fire signs".  Usher was working on their first album, Waiting For The Electrician or Someone Like Him, at the same time as he was working on the Byrds album: [Excerpt: The Firesign Theatre, "W.C. Fields Forever"] And he decided to bring in the Firesigns to contribute to "Draft Morning": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Draft Morning"] Crosby was, understandably, apoplectic when he heard the released version of "Draft Morning". As far as Hillman and McGuinn were concerned, it was always a Byrds song, and just because Crosby had left the band didn't mean they couldn't use material he'd written for the Byrds. Crosby took a different view, saying later "It was one of the sleaziest things they ever did. I had an entire song finished. They just casually rewrote it and decided to take half the credit. How's that? Without even asking me. I had a finished song, entirely mine. I left. They did the song anyway. They rewrote it and put it in their names. And mine was better. They just took it because they didn't have enough songs." What didn't help was that the publicity around the album, titled The Notorious Byrd Brothers minimised Crosby's contributions. Crosby is on five of the eleven tracks -- as he said later, "I'm all over that album, they just didn't give me credit. I played, I sang, I wrote, I even played bass on one track, and they tried to make out that I wasn't even on it, that they could be that good without me." But the album, like earlier Byrds albums, didn't have credits saying who played what, and the cover only featured McGuinn, Hillman, and Michael Clarke in the photo -- along with a horse, which Crosby took as another insult, as representing him. Though as McGuinn said, "If we had intended to do that, we would have turned the horse around". Even though Michael Clarke was featured on the cover, and even owned the horse that took Crosby's place, by the time the album came out he too had been fired. Unlike Crosby, he went quietly and didn't even ask for any money. According to McGuinn, he was increasingly uninterested in being in the band -- suffering from depression, and missing the teenage girls who had been the group's fans a year or two earlier. He gladly stopped being a Byrd, and went off to work in a hotel instead. In his place came Hillman's cousin, Kevin Kelley, fresh out of a band called the Rising Sons: [Excerpt: The Rising Sons, "Take a Giant Step"] We've mentioned the Rising Sons briefly in some previous episodes, but they were one of the earliest LA folk-rock bands, and had been tipped to go on to greater things -- and indeed, many of them did, though not as part of the Rising Sons. Jesse Lee Kincaid, the least well-known of the band, only went on to release a couple of singles and never had much success, but his songs were picked up by other acts -- his "Baby You Come Rollin' 'Cross My Mind" was a minor hit for the Peppermint Trolley Company: [Excerpt: The Peppermint Trolley Company, "Baby You Come Rollin' 'Cross My Mind"] And Harry Nilsson recorded Kincaid's "She Sang Hymns Out of Tune": [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, "She Sang Hymns Out of Tune"] But Kincaid was the least successful of the band members, and most of the other members are going to come up in future episodes of the podcast -- bass player Gary Marker played for a while with Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, lead singer Taj Mahal is one of the most respected blues singers of the last sixty years, original drummer Ed Cassidy went on to form the progressive rock band Spirit, and lead guitarist Ry Cooder went on to become one of the most important guitarists in rock music. Kelley had been the last to join the Rising Sons, replacing Cassidy but he was in the band by the time they released their one single, a version of Rev. Gary Davis' "Candy Man" produced by Terry Melcher, with Kincaid on lead vocals: [Excerpt: The Rising Sons, "Candy Man"] That hadn't been a success, and the group's attempt at a follow-up, the Goffin and King song "Take a Giant Step", which we heard earlier, was blocked from release by Columbia as being too druggy -- though there were no complaints when the Monkees released their version as the B-side to "Last Train to Clarksville". The Rising Sons, despite being hugely popular as a live act, fell apart without ever releasing a second single. According to Marker, Mahal realised that he would be better off as a solo artist, but also Columbia didn't know how to market a white group with a Black lead vocalist (leading to Kincaid singing lead on their one released single, and producer Terry Melcher trying to get Mahal to sing more like a white singer on "Take a Giant Step"), and some in the band thought that Terry Melcher was deliberately trying to sink their career because they refused to sign to his publishing company. After the band split up, Marker and Kelley had formed a band called Fusion, which Byrds biographer Johnny Rogan describes as being a jazz-fusion band, presumably because of their name. Listening to the one album the group recorded, it is in fact more blues-rock, very like the music Marker made with the Rising Sons and Captain Beefheart. But Kelley's not on that album, because before it was recorded he was approached by his cousin Chris Hillman and asked to join the Byrds. At the time, Fusion were doing so badly that Kelley had to work a day job in a clothes shop, so he was eager to join a band with a string of hits who were just about to conclude a lucrative renegotiation of their record contract -- a renegotiation which may have played a part in McGuinn and Hillman firing Crosby and Clarke, as they were now the only members on the new contracts. The choice of Kelley made a lot of sense. He was mostly just chosen because he was someone they knew and they needed a drummer in a hurry -- they needed someone new to promote The Notorious Byrd Brothers and didn't have time to go through a laborious process of audtioning, and so just choosing Hillman's cousin made sense, but Kelley also had a very strong, high voice, and so he could fill in the harmony parts that Crosby had sung, stopping the new power-trio version of the band from being *too* thin-sounding in comparison to the five-man band they'd been not that much earlier. The Notorious Byrd Brothers was not a commercial success -- it didn't even make the top forty in the US, though it did in the UK -- to the presumed chagrin of Columbia, who'd just paid a substantial amount of money for this band who were getting less successful by the day. But it was, though, a gigantic critical success, and is generally regarded as the group's creative pinnacle. Robert Christgau, for example, talked about how LA rather than San Francisco was where the truly interesting music was coming from, and gave guarded praise to Captain Beefheart, Van Dyke Parks, and the Fifth Dimension (the vocal group, not the Byrds album) but talked about three albums as being truly great -- the Beach Boys' Wild Honey, Love's Forever Changes, and The Notorious Byrd Brothers. (He also, incidentally, talked about how the two songs that Crosby's new discovery Joni Mitchell had contributed to a Judy Collins album were much better than most folk music, and how he could hardly wait for her first album to come out). And that, more or less, was the critical consensus about The Notorious Byrd Brothers -- that it was, in Christgau's words "simply the best album the Byrds have ever recorded" and that "Gone are the weak--usually folky--tracks that have always flawed their work." McGuinn, though, thought that the album wasn't yet what he wanted. He had become particularly excited by the potentials of the Moog synthesiser -- an instrument that Gary Usher also loved -- during the recording of the album, and had spent a lot of time experimenting with it, coming up with tracks like the then-unreleased "Moog Raga": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Moog Raga"] And McGuinn had a concept for the next Byrds album -- a concept he was very excited about. It was going to be nothing less than a grand sweeping history of American popular music. It was going to be a double album -- the new contract said that they should deliver two albums a year to Columbia, so a double album made sense -- and it would start with Appalachian folk music, go through country, jazz, and R&B, through the folk-rock music the Byrds had previously been known for, and into Moog experimentation. But to do this, the Byrds needed a keyboard player. Not only would a keyboard player help them fill out their thin onstage sound, if they got a jazz keyboardist, then they could cover the jazz material in McGuinn's concept album idea as well. So they went out and looked for a jazz piano player, and happily Larry Spector was managing one. Or at least, Larry Spector was managing someone who *said* he was a jazz pianist. But Gram Parsons said he was a lot of things... [Excerpt: Gram Parsons, "Brass Buttons (1965 version)"] Gram Parsons was someone who had come from a background of unimaginable privilege. His maternal grandfather was the owner of a Florida citrus fruit and real-estate empire so big that his mansion was right in the centre of what was then Florida's biggest theme park -- built on land he owned. As a teenager, Parsons had had a whole wing of his parents' house to himself, and had had servants to look after his every need, and as an adult he had a trust fund that paid him a hundred thousand dollars a year -- which in 1968 dollars would be equivalent to a little under nine hundred thousand in today's money. Two events in his childhood had profoundly shaped the life of young Gram. The first was in February 1956, when he went to see a new singer who he'd heard on the radio, and who according to the local newspaper had just recorded a new song called "Heartburn Motel".  Parsons had tried to persuade his friends that this new singer was about to become a big star -- one of his friends had said "I'll wait til he becomes famous!" As it turned out, the day Parsons and the couple of friends he did manage to persuade to go with him saw Elvis Presley was also the day that "Heartbreak Hotel" entered the Billboard charts at number sixty-eight. But even at this point, Elvis was an obvious star and the headliner of the show. Young Gram was enthralled -- but in retrospect he was more impressed by the other acts he saw on the bill. That was an all-star line-up of country musicians, including Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters, and especially the Louvin Brothers, arguably the greatest country music vocal duo of all time: [Excerpt: The Louvin Brothers, "The Christian Life"] Young Gram remained mostly a fan of rockabilly music rather than country, and would remain so for another decade or so, but a seed had been planted. The other event, much more tragic, was the death of his father. Both Parsons' parents were functioning alcoholics, and both by all accounts were unfaithful to each other, and their marriage was starting to break down. Gram's father was also, by many accounts, dealing with what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder from his time serving in the second world war. On December the twenty-third 1958, Gram's father died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Everyone involved seems sure it was suicide, but it was officially recorded as natural causes because of the family's wealth and prominence in the local community. Gram's Christmas present from his parents that year was a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and according to some stories I've read his father had left a last message on a tape in the recorder, but by the time the authorities got to hear it, it had been erased apart from the phrase "I love you, Gram." After that Gram's mother's drinking got even worse, but in most ways his life still seemed charmed, and the descriptions of him as a teenager are about what you'd expect from someone who was troubled, with a predisposition to addiction, but who was also unbelievably wealthy, good-looking, charming, and talented. And the talent was definitely there. One thing everyone is agreed on is that from a very young age Gram Parsons took his music seriously and was determined to make a career as a musician. Keith Richards later said of him "Of the musicians I know personally (although Otis Redding, who I didn't know, fits this too), the two who had an attitude towards music that was the same as mine were Gram Parsons and John Lennon. And that was: whatever bag the business wants to put you in is immaterial; that's just a selling point, a tool that makes it easier. You're going to get chowed into this pocket or that pocket because it makes it easier for them to make charts up and figure out who's selling. But Gram and John were really pure musicians. All they liked was music, and then they got thrown into the game." That's not the impression many other people have of Parsons, who is almost uniformly described as an incessant self-promoter, and who from his teens onwards would regularly plant fake stories about himself in the local press, usually some variant of him having been signed to RCA records. Most people seem to think that image was more important to him than anything. In his teens, he started playing in a series of garage bands around Florida and Georgia, the two states in which he was brought up. One of his early bands was largely created by poaching the rhythm section who were then playing with Kent Lavoie, who later became famous as Lobo and had hits like "Me and You and a Dog Named Boo". Lavoie apparently held a grudge -- decades later he would still say that Parsons couldn't sing or play or write. Another musician on the scene with whom Parsons associated was Bobby Braddock, who would later go on to co-write songs like "D-I-V-O-R-C-E" for Tammy Wynette, and the song "He Stopped Loving Her Today", often considered the greatest country song ever written, for George Jones: [Excerpt: George Jones, "He Stopped Loving Her Today"] Jones would soon become one of Parsons' musical idols, but at this time he was still more interested in being Elvis or Little Richard. We're lucky enough to have a 1962 live recording of one of his garage bands, the Legends -- the band that featured the bass player and drummer he'd poached from Lobo. They made an appearance on a local TV show and a friend with a tape recorder recorded it off the TV and decades later posted it online. Of the four songs in that performance, two are R&B covers -- Little Richard's "Rip It Up" and Ray Charles' "What'd I Say?", and a third is the old Western Swing classic "Guitar Boogie Shuffle". But the interesting thing about the version of "Rip it Up" is that it's sung in an Everly Brothers style harmony, and the fourth song is a recording of the Everlys' "Let It Be Me". The Everlys were, of course, hugely influenced by the Louvin Brothers, who had so impressed young Gram six years earlier, and in this performance you can hear for the first time the hints of the style that Parsons would make his own a few years later: [Excerpt: Gram Parsons and the Legends, "Let it Be Me"] Incidentally, the other guitarist in the Legends, Jim Stafford, also went on to a successful musical career, having a top five hit in the seventies with "Spiders & Snakes": [Excerpt: Jim Stafford, "Spiders & Snakes"] Soon after that TV performance though, like many musicians of his generation, Parsons decided to give up on rock and roll, and instead to join a folk group. The group he joined, The Shilos, were a trio who were particularly influenced by the Journeymen, John Phillips' folk group before he formed the Mamas and the Papas, which we talked about in the episode on "San Francisco". At various times the group expanded with the addition of some female singers, trying to capture something of the sound of the New Chrisy Minstrels. In 1964, with the band members still in school, the Shilos decided to make a trip to Greenwich Village and see if they could make the big time as folk-music stars. They met up with John Phillips, and Parsons stayed with John and Michelle Phillips in their home in New York -- this was around the time the two of them were writing "California Dreamin'". Phillips got the Shilos an audition with Albert Grossman, who seemed eager to sign them until he realised they were still schoolchildren just on a break. The group were, though, impressive enough that he was interested, and we have some recordings of them from a year later which show that they were surprisingly good for a bunch of teenagers: [Excerpt: The Shilos, "The Bells of Rhymney"] Other than Phillips, the other major connection that Parsons made in New York was the folk singer Fred Neil, who we've talked about occasionally before. Neil was one of the great songwriters of the Greenwich Village scene, and many of his songs became successful for others -- his "Dolphins" was recorded by Tim Buckley, most famously his "Everybody's Talkin'" was a hit for Harry Nilsson, and he wrote "Another Side of This Life" which became something of a standard -- it was recorded by the Animals and the Lovin' Spoonful, and Jefferson Airplane, as well as recording the song, included it in their regular setlists, including at Monterey: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "The Other Side of This Life (live at Monterey)"] According to at least one biographer, though, Neil had another, more pernicious, influence on Parsons -- he may well have been the one who introduced Parsons to heroin, though several of Parsons' friends from the time said he wasn't yet using hard drugs. By spring 1965, Parsons was starting to rethink his commitment to folk music, particularly after "Mr. Tambourine Man" became a hit. He talked with the other members about their need to embrace the changes in music that Dylan and the Byrds were bringing about, but at the same time he was still interested enough in acoustic music that when he was given the job of arranging the music for his high school graduation, the group he booked were the Dillards. That graduation day was another day that would change Parsons' life -- as it was the day his mother died, of alcohol-induced liver failure. Parsons was meant to go on to Harvard, but first he went back to Greenwich Village for the summer, where he hung out with Fred Neil and Dave Van Ronk (and started using heroin regularly). He went to see the Beatles at Shea Stadium, and he was neighbours with Stephen Stills and Richie Furay -- the three of them talked about forming a band together before Stills moved West. And on a brief trip back home to Florida between Greenwich Village and Harvard, Parsons spoke with his old friend Jim Stafford, who made a suggestion to him -- instead of trying to do folk music, which was clearly falling out of fashion, why not try to do *country* music but with long hair like the Beatles? He could be a country Beatle. It would be an interesting gimmick. Parsons was only at Harvard for one semester before flunking out, but it was there that he was fully reintroduced to country music, and in particular to three artists who would influence him more than any others. He'd already been vaguely aware of Buck Owens, whose "Act Naturally" had recently been covered by the Beatles: [Excerpt: Buck Owens, "Act Naturally"] But it was at Harvard that he gained a deeper appreciation of Owens. Owens was the biggest star of what had become known as the Bakersfield Sound, a style of country music that emphasised a stripped-down electric band lineup with Telecaster guitars, a heavy drumbeat, and a clean sound. It came from the same honky-tonk and Western Swing roots as the rockabilly music that Parsons had grown up on, and it appealed to him instinctively.  In particular, Parsons was fascinated by the fact that Owens' latest album had a cover version of a Drifters song on it -- and then he got even more interested when Ray Charles put out his third album of country songs and included a version of Owens' "Together Again": [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "Together Again"] This suggested to Parsons that country music and the R&B he'd been playing previously might not quite be so far apart as he'd thought. At Harvard, Parsons was also introduced to the work of another Bakersfield musician, who like Owens was produced by Ken Nelson, who also produced the Louvin Brothers' records, and who we heard about in previous episodes as he produced Gene Vincent and Wanda Jackson. Merle Haggard had only had one big hit at the time, "(My Friends Are Gonna Be) Strangers": [Excerpt: Merle Haggard, "(My Friends are Gonna Be) Strangers"] But he was about to start a huge run of country hits that would see every single he released for the next twelve years make the country top ten, most of them making number one. Haggard would be one of the biggest stars in country music, but he was also to be arguably the country musician with the biggest influence on rock music since Johnny Cash, and his songs would soon start to be covered by everyone from the Grateful Dead to the Everly Brothers to the Beach Boys. And the third artist that Parsons was introduced to was someone who, in most popular narratives of country music, is set up in opposition to Haggard and Owens, because they were representatives of the Bakersfield Sound while he was the epitome of the Nashville Sound to which the Bakersfield Sound is placed in opposition, George Jones. But of course anyone with ears will notice huge similarities in the vocal styles of Jones, Haggard, and Owens: [Excerpt: George Jones, "The Race is On"] Owens, Haggard, and Jones are all somewhat outside the scope of this series, but are seriously important musicians in country music. I would urge anyone who's interested in them to check out Tyler Mahan Coe's podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones, season one of which has episodes on Haggard and Owens, as well as on the Louvin Brothers who I also mentioned earlier, and season two of which is entirely devoted to Jones. When he dropped out of Harvard after one semester, Parsons was still mostly under the thrall of the Greenwich Village folkies -- there's a recording of him made over Christmas 1965 that includes his version of "Another Side of This Life": [Excerpt: Gram Parsons, "Another Side of This Life"] But he was encouraged to go further in the country direction by John Nuese (and I hope that's the correct pronunciation – I haven't been able to find any recordings mentioning his name), who had introduced him to this music and who also played guitar. Parsons, Neuse, bass player Ian Dunlop and drummer Mickey Gauvin formed a band that was originally called Gram Parsons and the Like. They soon changed their name though, inspired by an Our Gang short in which the gang became a band: [Excerpt: Our Gang, "Mike Fright"] Shortening the name slightly, they became the International Submarine Band. Parsons rented them a house in New York, and they got a contract with Goldstar Records, and released a couple of singles. The first of them, "The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming" was a cover of the theme to a comedy film that came out around that time, and is not especially interesting: [Excerpt: The International Submarine Band, "The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming"] The second single is more interesting. "Sum Up Broke" is a song by Parsons and Neuse, and shows a lot of influence from the Byrds: [Excerpt: The international Submarine Band, "Sum Up Broke"] While in New York with the International Submarine Band, Parsons made another friend in the music business. Barry Tashian was the lead singer of a band called the Remains, who had put out a couple of singles: [Excerpt: The Remains, "Why Do I Cry?"] The Remains are now best known for having been on the bill on the Beatles' last ever tour, including playing as support on their last ever show at Candlestick Park, but they split up before their first album came out. After spending most of 1966 in New York, Parsons decided that he needed to move the International Submarine Band out to LA. There were two reasons for this. The first was his friend Brandon DeWilde, an actor who had been a child star in the fifties -- it's him at the end of Shane -- who was thinking of pursuing a musical career. DeWilde was still making TV appearances, but he was also a singer -- John Nuese said that DeWilde sang harmony with Parsons better than anyone except Emmylou Harris -- and he had recorded some demos with the International Submarine Band backing him, like this version of Buck Owens' "Together Again": [Excerpt: Brandon DeWilde, "Together Again"] DeWilde had told Parsons he could get the group some work in films. DeWilde made good on that promise to an extent -- he got the group a cameo in The Trip, a film we've talked about in several other episodes, which was being directed by Roger Corman, the director who worked a lot with David Crosby's father, and was coming out from American International Pictures, the company that put out the beach party films -- but while the group were filmed performing one of their own songs, in the final film their music was overdubbed by the Electric Flag. The Trip starred Peter Fonda, another member of the circle of people around David Crosby, and another son of privilege, who at this point was better known for being Henry Fonda's son than for his own film appearances. Like DeWilde, Fonda wanted to become a pop star, and he had been impressed by Parsons, and asked if he could record Parsons' song "November Nights". Parsons agreed, and the result was released on Chisa Records, the label we talked about earlier that had put out promos of Gene Clark, in a performance produced by Hugh Masekela: [Excerpt: Peter Fonda, "November Nights"] The other reason the group moved West though was that Parsons had fallen in love with David Crosby's girlfriend, Nancy Ross, who soon became pregnant with his daughter -- much to Parsons' disappointment, she refused to have an abortion. Parsons bought the International Submarine Band a house in LA to rehearse in, and moved in separately with Nancy. The group started playing all the hottest clubs around LA, supporting bands like Love and the Peanut Butter Conspiracy, but they weren't sounding great, partly because Parsons was more interested in hanging round with celebrities than rehearsing -- the rest of the band had to work for a living, and so took their live performances more seriously than he did, while he was spending time catching up with his old folk friends like John Phillips and Fred Neil, as well as getting deeper into drugs and, like seemingly every musician in 1967, Scientology, though he only dabbled in the latter. The group were also, though, starting to split along musical lines. Dunlop and Gauvin wanted to play R&B and garage rock, while Parsons and Nuese wanted to play country music. And there was a third issue -- which record label should they go with? There were two labels interested in them, neither of them particularly appealing. The offer that Dunlop in particular wanted to go with was from, of all people, Jay Ward Records: [Excerpt: A Salute to Moosylvania] Jay Ward was the producer and writer of Rocky & Bullwinkle, Peabody & Sherman, Dudley Do-Right and other cartoons, and had set up a record company, which as far as I've been able to tell had only released one record, and that five years earlier (we just heard a snippet of it). But in the mid-sixties several cartoon companies were getting into the record business -- we'll hear more about that when we get to song 186 -- and Ward's company apparently wanted to sign the International Submarine Band, and were basically offering to throw money at them. Parsons, on the other hand, wanted to go with Lee Hazlewood International. This was a new label set up by someone we've only talked about in passing, but who was very influential on the LA music scene, Lee Hazlewood. Hazlewood had got his start producing country hits like Sanford Clark's "The Fool": [Excerpt: Sanford Clark, "The Fool"] He'd then moved on to collaborating with Lester Sill, producing a series of hits for Duane Eddy, whose unique guitar sound Hazlewood helped come up with: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, "Rebel Rouser"] After splitting off from Sill, who had gone off to work with Phil Spector, who had been learning some production techniques from Hazlewood, Hazlewood had gone to work for Reprise records, where he had a career in a rather odd niche, producing hit records for the children of Rat Pack stars. He'd produced Dino, Desi, and Billy, who consisted of future Beach Boys sideman Billy Hinsche plus Desi Arnaz Jr and Dean Martin Jr: [Excerpt: Dino, Desi, and Billy, "I'm a Fool"] He'd also produced Dean Martin's daughter Deana: [Excerpt: Deana Martin, "Baby I See You"] and rather more successfully he'd written and produced a series of hits for Nancy Sinatra, starting with "These Boots are Made for Walkin'": [Excerpt: Nancy Sinatra, "These Boots are Made for Walkin'"] Hazlewood had also moved into singing himself. He'd released a few tracks on his own, but his career as a performer hadn't really kicked into gear until he'd started writing duets for Nancy Sinatra. She apparently fell in love with his demos and insisted on having him sing them with her in the studio, and so the two made a series of collaborations like the magnificently bizarre "Some Velvet Morning": [Excerpt: Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra, "Some Velvet Morning"] Hazlewood is now considered something of a cult artist, thanks largely to a string of magnificent orchestral country-pop solo albums he recorded, but at this point he was one of the hottest people in the music industry. He wasn't offering to produce the International Submarine Band himself -- that was going to be his partner, Suzi Jane Hokom -- but Parsons thought it was better to sign for less money to a label that was run by someone with a decade-long string of massive hit records than for more money to a label that had put out one record about a cartoon moose. So the group split up. Dunlop and Gauvin went off to form another band, with Barry Tashian -- and legend has it that one of the first times Gram Parsons visited the Byrds in the studio, he mentioned the name of that band, The Flying Burrito Brothers, and that was the inspiration for the Byrds titling their album The Notorious Byrd Brothers. Parsons and Nuese, on the other hand, formed a new lineup of The International Submarine Band, with bass player Chris Ethridge, drummer John Corneal, who Parsons had first played with in The Legends, and guitarist Bob Buchanan, a former member of the New Christy Minstrels who Parsons had been performing with as a duo after they'd met through Fred Neil. The International Submarine Band recorded an album, Safe At Home, which is now often called the first country-rock album -- though as we've said so often, there's no first anything. That album was a mixture of cover versions of songs by people like Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard: [Excerpt: The International Submarine Band, "I Must Be Somebody Else You've Known"] And Parsons originals, like "Do You Know How It Feels To Be Lonesome?", which he cowrote with Barry Goldberg of the Electric Flag: [Excerpt: The International Submarine Band, "Do You Know How It Feels To Be Lonesome?"] But the recording didn't go smoothly. In particular, Corneal realised he'd been hoodwinked. Parsons had told him, when persuading him to move West, that he'd be able to sing on the record and that some of his songs would be used. But while the record was credited to The International Submarine Band, everyone involved agrees that it was actually a Gram Parsons solo album by any other name -- he was in charge, he wouldn't let other members' songs on the record, and he didn't let Corneal sing as he'd promised. And then, before the album could be released, he was off. The Byrds wanted a jazz keyboard player, and Parsons could fake being one long enough to get the gig. The Byrds had got rid of one rich kid with a giant ego who wanted to take control of everything and thought his undeniable talent excused his attempts at dominating the group, and replaced him with another one -- who also happened to be signed to another record label. We'll see how well that worked out for them in two weeks' time.  

"Oh My Heart" - R.E.M."Rose Tattoo" - Dropkick Murphys"What's Left of the Flag" - Flogging Molly"Whiskey in the Jar" - Thin Lizzy"The Tempest" - The Real McKenzies"Hang Me, Oh Hang Me" - Dave Van Ronk"Hair Down" - Cold War Kids"Three Angels" - Headstones"Lock, Step, & Gone" - Rancid"Sheena is a Punk Rocker" - Ramones"Mint Car" - The Cure"MFC" - Pearl Jam"Lost in the Supermarket" - The Clash"Ole" - The Bouncing Souls"Straight Up" - Me First and the Gimme Gimmeshttps://open.spotify.com/playlist/3rmpEt0PSPq8Heag297tVk?si=101f14aaa4594705

Episode 170 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Astral Weeks", the early solo career of Van Morrison, and the death of Bert Berns.  Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-minute bonus episode available, on "Stoned Soul Picnic" by Laura Nyro. 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 At one point I, ridiculously, misspeak the name of Charles Mingus' classic album. Black Saint and the Sinner Lady is not about dinner ladies. Also, I say Warren Smith Jr is on "Slim Slow Slider" when I meant to say Richard Davis (Smith is credited in some sources, but I only hear acoustic guitar, bass, and soprano sax on the finished track). Resources As usual, I've created Mixcloud playlists, with full versions of all the songs excerpted in this episode. As there are so many Van Morrison songs in this episode, the Mixcloud is split into three parts, one, two, and three. The information about Bert Berns comes from Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues by Joel Selvin. I've used several biographies of Van Morrison. Van Morrison: Into the Music by Ritchie Yorke is so sycophantic towards Morrison that the word “hagiography” would be, if anything, an understatement. Van Morrison: No Surrender by Johnny Rogan, on the other hand, is the kind of book that talks in the introduction about how the author has had to avoid discussing certain topics because of legal threats from the subject. Howard deWitt's Van Morrison: Astral Weeks to Stardom is over-thorough in the way some self-published books are, while Clinton Heylin's Can You Feel the Silence? is probably the best single volume on the artist. Information on Woodstock comes from Small Town Talk by Barney Hoskyns. Ryan Walsh's Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 is about more than Astral Weeks, but does cover Morrison's period in and around Boston in more detail than anything else. The album Astral Weeks is worth hearing in its entirety. Not all of the music on The Authorized Bang Collection is as listenable, but it's the most complete collection available of everything Morrison recorded for Bang. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we start, a quick warning -- this episode contains discussion of organised crime activity, and of sudden death. It also contains excerpts of songs which hint at attraction to underage girls and discuss terminal illness. If those subjects might upset you, you might want to read the transcript rather than listen to the episode. Anyway, on with the show. Van Morrison could have been the co-writer of "Piece of My Heart". Bert Berns was one of the great collaborators in the music business, and almost every hit he ever had was co-written, and he was always on the lookout for new collaborators, and in 1967 he was once again working with Van Morrison, who he'd worked with a couple of years earlier when Morrison was still the lead singer of Them. Towards the beginning of 1967 he had come up with a chorus, but no verse. He had the hook, "Take another little piece of my heart" -- Berns was writing a lot of songs with "heart" in the title at the time -- and wanted Morrison to come up with a verse to go with it. Van Morrison declined. He wasn't interested in writing pop songs, or in collaborating with other writers, and so Berns turned to one of his regular collaborators, Jerry Ragavoy, and it was Ragavoy who added the verses to one of the biggest successes of Berns' career: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] The story of how Van Morrison came to make the album that's often considered his masterpiece is intimately tied up with the story we've been telling in the background for several episodes now, the story of Atlantic Records' sale to Warners, and the story of Bert Berns' departure from Atlantic. For that reason, some parts of the story I'm about to tell will be familiar to those of you who've been paying close attention to the earlier episodes, but as always I'm going to take you from there to somewhere we've never been before. In 1962, Bert Berns was a moderately successful songwriter, who had written or co-written songs for many artists, especially for artists on Atlantic Records. He'd written songs for Atlantic artists like LaVern Baker, and when Atlantic's top pop producers Leiber and Stoller started to distance themselves from the label in the early sixties, he had moved into production as well, writing and producing Solomon Burke's big hit "Cry to Me": [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Cry to Me"] He was the producer and writer or co-writer of most of Burke's hits from that point forward, but at first he was still a freelance producer, and also produced records for Scepter Records, like the Isley Brothers' version of "Twist and Shout", another song he'd co-written, that one with Phil Medley. And as a jobbing songwriter, of course his songs were picked up by other producers, so Leiber and Stoller produced a version of his song "Tell Him" for the Exciters on United Artists: [Excerpt: The Exciters, "Tell Him"] Berns did freelance work for Leiber and Stoller as well as the other people he was working for. For example, when their former protege Phil Spector released his hit version of "Zip-a-Dee-Do-Dah", they got Berns to come up with a knockoff arrangement of "How Much is that Doggie in the Window?", released as by Baby Jane and the Rockabyes, with a production credit "Produced by Leiber and Stoller, directed by Bert Berns": [Excerpt: Baby Jane and the Rockabyes, "How Much is that Doggie in the Window?"] And when Leiber and Stoller stopped producing work for United Artists, Berns took over some of the artists they'd been producing for the label, like Marv Johnson, as well as producing his own new artists, like Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters, who had been discovered by Berns' friend Jerry Ragovoy, with whom he co-wrote their "Cry Baby": [Excerpt: Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters, "Cry Baby"] Berns was an inveterate collaborator. He was one of the few people to get co-writing credits with Leiber and Stoller, and he would collaborate seemingly with everyone who spoke to him for five minutes. He would also routinely reuse material, cutting the same songs time and again with different artists, knowing that a song must be a hit for *someone*. One of his closest collaborators was Jerry Wexler, who also became one of his best friends, even though one of their earliest interactions had been when Wexler had supervised Phil Spector's production of Berns' "Twist and Shout" for the Top Notes, a record that Berns had thought had butchered the song. Berns was, in his deepest bones, a record man. Listening to the records that Berns made, there's a strong continuity in everything he does. There's a love there of simplicity -- almost none of his records have more than three chords. He loved Latin sounds and rhythms -- a love he shared with other people working in Brill Building R&B at the time, like Leiber and Stoller and Spector -- and great voices in emotional distress. There's a reason that the records he produced for Solomon Burke were the first R&B records to be labelled "soul". Berns was one of those people for whom feel and commercial success are inextricable. He was an artist -- the records he made were powerfully expressive -- but he was an artist for whom the biggest validation was *getting a hit*. Only a small proportion of the records he made became hits, but enough did that in the early sixties he was a name that could be spoken of in the same breath as Leiber and Stoller, Spector, and Bacharach and David. And Atlantic needed a record man. The only people producing hits for the label at this point were Leiber and Stoller, and they were in the process of stopping doing freelance work and setting up their own label, Red Bird, as we talked about in the episode on the Shangri-Las. And anyway, they wanted more money than they were getting, and Jerry Wexler was never very keen on producers wanting money that could have gone to the record label. Wexler decided to sign Bert Berns up as a staff producer for Atlantic towards the end of 1963, and by May 1964 it was paying off. Atlantic hadn't been having hits, and now Berns had four tracks he wrote and produced for Atlantic on the Hot One Hundred, of which the highest charting was "My Girl Sloopy" by the Vibrations: [Excerpt: The Vibrations, "My Girl Sloopy"] Even higher on the charts though was the Beatles' version of "Twist and Shout". That record, indeed, had been successful enough in the UK that Berns had already made exploratory trips to the UK and produced records for Dick Rowe at Decca, a partnership we heard about in the episode on "Here Comes the Night". Berns had made partnerships there which would have vast repercussions for the music industry in both countries, and one of them was with the arranger Mike Leander, who was the uncredited arranger for the Drifters session for "Under the Boardwalk", a song written by Artie Resnick and Kenny Young and produced by Berns, recorded the day after the group's lead singer Rudy Lewis died of an overdose: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Under the Boardwalk"] Berns was making hits on a regular basis by mid-1964, and the income from the label's new success allowed Jerry Wexler and the Ertegun brothers to buy out their other partners -- Ahmet Ertegun's old dentist, who had put up some of the initial money, and Miriam Bienstock, the ex-wife of their initial partner Herb Abramson, who'd got Abramson's share in the company after the divorce, and who was now married to Freddie Bienstock of Hill and Range publishing. Wexler and the Erteguns now owned the whole label. Berns also made regular trips to the UK to keep up his work with British musicians, and in one of those trips, as we heard in the episode on "Here Comes the Night", he produced several tracks for the group Them, including that track, written by Berns: [Excerpt: Them, "Here Comes the Night"] And a song written by the group's lead singer Van Morrison, "Gloria": [Excerpt: Them, "Gloria"] But Berns hadn't done much other work with them, because he had a new project. Part of the reason that Wexler and the Erteguns had gained total control of Atlantic was because, in a move pushed primarily by Wexler, they were looking at selling it. They'd already tried to merge with Leiber and Stoller's Red Bird Records, but lost the opportunity after a disastrous meeting, but they were in negotiations with several other labels, negotiations which would take another couple of years to bear fruit. But they weren't planning on getting out of the record business altogether. Whatever deal they made, they'd remain with Atlantic, but they were also planning on starting another label. Bert Berns had seen how successful Leiber and Stoller were with Red Bird, and wanted something similar. Wexler and the Erteguns didn't want to lose their one hit-maker, so they came up with an offer that would benefit all of them. Berns' publishing contract had just ended, so they would set up a new publishing company, WEB IV, named after the initials Wexler, Ertegun, and Berns, and the fact that there were four of them. Berns would own fifty percent of that, and the other three would own the other half. And they were going to start up a new label, with seventeen thousand dollars of the Atlantic partners' money. That label would be called Bang -- for Bert, Ahmet, Neshui, and Gerald -- and would be a separate company from Atlantic, so not affected by any sale. Berns would continue as a staff producer for Atlantic for now, but he'd have "his own" label, which he'd have a proper share in, and whether he was making hits for Atlantic or Bang, his partners would have a share of the profits. The first two records on Bang were "Shake and Jerk" by Billy Lamont, a track that they licensed from elsewhere and which didn't do much, and a more interesting track co-written by Berns. Bob Feldman, Richard Gottehrer, and Jerry Goldstein were Brill Building songwriters who had become known for writing "My Boyfriend's Back", a hit for the Angels, a couple of years earlier: [Excerpt: The Angels, "My Boyfriend's Back"] With the British invasion, the three of them had decided to create their own foreign beat group. As they couldn't do British accents, they pretended to be Australian, and as the Strangeloves -- named after the Stanley Kubrick film Dr  Strangelove -- they released one flop single. They cut another single, a version of "Bo Diddley", but the label they released their initial record through didn't want it. They then took the record to Atlantic, where Jerry Wexler said that they weren't interested in releasing some white men singing "Bo Diddley". But Ahmet Ertegun suggested they bring the track to Bert Berns to see what he thought. Berns pointed out that if they changed the lyrics and melody, but kept the same backing track, they could claim the copyright in the resulting song themselves. He worked with them on a new lyric, inspired by the novel Candy, a satirical pornographic novel co-written by Terry Southern, who had also co-written the screenplay to Dr Strangelove. Berns supervised some guitar overdubs, and the result went to number eleven: [Excerpt: The Strangeloves, "I Want Candy"] Berns had two other songs on the hot one hundred when that charted, too -- Them's version of "Here Comes the Night", and the version of Van McCoy's song "Baby I'm Yours" he'd produced for Barbara Lewis. Three records on the charts on three different labels. But despite the sheer number of charting records he'd had, he'd never had a number one, until the Strangeloves went on tour. Before the tour they'd cut a version of "My Girl Sloopy" for their album -- Berns always liked to reuse material -- and they started performing the song on the tour. The Dave Clark Five, who they were supporting, told them it sounded like a hit and they were going to do their own version when they got home. Feldman, Gottehrer, and Goldstein decided *they* might as well have the hit with it as anyone else. Rather than put it out as a Strangeloves record -- their own record was still rising up the charts, and there's no reason to be your own competition -- they decided to get a group of teenage musicians who supported them on the last date of the tour to sing new vocals to the backing track from the Strangeloves album. The group had been called Rick and the Raiders, but they argued so much that the Strangeloves nicknamed them the Hatfields and the McCoys, and when their version of "My Girl Sloopy", retitled "Hang on Sloopy", came out, it was under the band name The McCoys: [Excerpt: The McCoys, "Hang on Sloopy"] Berns was becoming a major success, and with major success in the New York music industry in the 1960s came Mafia involvement. We've talked a fair bit about Morris Levy's connection with the mob in many previous episodes, but mob influence was utterly pervasive throughout the New York part of the industry, and so for example Richard Gottehrer of the Strangeloves used to call Sonny Franzese of the Colombo crime family "Uncle John", they were so close. Franzese was big in the record business too, even after his conviction for bank robbery. Berns, unlike many of the other people in the industry, had no scruples at all about hanging out with Mafiosi. indeed his best friend in the mid sixties was Tommy Eboli, a member of the Genovese crime family who had been in the mob since the twenties, starting out working for "Lucky" Luciano. Berns was not himself a violent man, as far as anyone can tell, but he liked the glamour of hanging out with organised crime figures, and they liked hanging out with someone who was making so many hit records. And so while Leiber and Stoller, for example, ended up selling Red Bird Records to George Goldner for a single dollar in order to get away from the Mafiosi who were slowly muscling in on the label, Berns had no problems at all in keeping his own label going. Indeed, he would soon be doing so without the involvement of Atlantic Records. Berns' final work for Atlantic was in June 1966, when he cut a song he had co-written with Jeff Barry for the Drifters, inspired by the woman who would soon become Atlantic's biggest star: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Aretha"] The way Berns told the story in public, there was no real bad blood between him, Wexler, and the Erteguns -- he'd just decided to go his own way, and he said “I will always be grateful to them for the help they've given me in getting Bang started,” The way Berns' wife would later tell the story, Jerry Wexler had suggested that rather than Berns owning fifty percent of Web IV, they should start to split everything four ways, and she had been horrified by this suggestion, kicked up a stink about it, and Wexler had then said that either Berns needed to buy the other three out, or quit and give them everything, and demanded Berns pay them three hundred thousand dollars. According to other people, Berns decided he wanted one hundred percent control of Web IV, and raised a breach of contract lawsuit against Atlantic, over the usual royalty non-payments that were endemic in the industry at that point. When Atlantic decided to fight the lawsuit rather than settle, Berns' mob friends got involved and threatened to break the legs of Wexler's fourteen-year-old daughter, and the mob ended up with full control of Bang records, while Berns had full control of his publishing company. Given later events, and in particular given the way Wexler talked about Berns until the day he died, with a vitriol that he never used about any of the other people he had business disputes with, it seems likely to me that the latter story is closer to the truth than the former. But most people involved weren't talking about the details of what went on, and so Berns still retained his relationships with many of the people in the business, not least of them Jeff Barry, so when Barry and Ellie Greenwich had a new potential star, it was Berns they thought to bring him to, even though the artist was white and Berns had recently given an interview saying that he wanted to work with more Black artists, because white artists simply didn't have soul. Barry and Greenwich's marriage was breaking up at the time, but they were still working together professionally, as we discussed in the episode on "River Deep, Mountain High", and they had been the main production team at Red Bird. But with Red Bird in terminal decline, they turned elsewhere when they found a potential major star after Greenwich was asked to sing backing vocals on one of his songwriting demos. They'd signed the new songwriter, Neil Diamond, to Leiber and Stoller's company Trio Music at first, but they soon started up their own company, Tallyrand Music, and signed Diamond to that, giving Diamond fifty percent of the company and keeping twenty-five percent each for themselves, and placed one of his songs with Jay and the Americans in 1965: [Excerpt: Jay and the Americans, "Sunday and Me"] That record made the top twenty, and had established Diamond as a songwriter, but he was still not a major performer -- he'd released one flop single on Columbia Records before meeting Barry and Greenwich. But they thought he had something, and Bert Berns agreed. Diamond was signed to Bang records, and Berns had a series of pre-production meetings with Barry and Greenwich before they took Diamond into the studio -- Barry and Greenwich were going to produce Diamond for Bang, as they had previously produced tracks for Red Bird, but they were going to shape the records according to Berns' aesthetic. The first single released from Diamond's first session, "Solitary Man", only made number fifty-five, but it was the first thing Diamond had recorded to make the Hot One Hundred at all: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Solitary Man"] The second single, though, was much more Bert Berns' sort of thing -- a three-chord song that sounded like it could have been written by Berns himself, especially after Barry and Greenwich had added the Latin-style horns that Berns loved so much. Indeed according to some sources, Berns did make a songwriting suggestion -- Diamond's song had apparently been called "Money Money", and Berns had thought that was a ridiculous title, and suggested calling it "Cherry Cherry" instead: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Cherry Cherry"] That became Diamond's first top ten hit. While Greenwich had been the one who had discovered Diamond, and Barry and Greenwich were the credited producers on all Diamond's records  as a result, Diamond soon found himself collaborating far more with Barry than with Greenwich, so for example the first number one he wrote, for the Monkees rather than himself, ended up having its production just credited to Barry. That record used a backing track recorded in New York by the same set of musicians used on most Bang records, like Al Gorgoni on lead guitar and Russ Savakus on bass: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "I'm a Believer"] Neil Diamond was becoming a solid hit-maker, but he started rubbing up badly against Berns. Berns wanted hits and only hits, and Diamond thought of himself as a serious artist. The crisis came when two songs were under contention for Diamond's next single in late 1967, after he'd had a whole run of hits for the label. The song Diamond wanted to release, "Shilo", was deeply personal to him: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Shilo"] But Bert Berns had other ideas. "Shilo" didn't sound like a hit, and he knew a hit when he heard one. No, the clear next single, the only choice, was "Kentucky Woman": [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Kentucky Woman"] But Berns tried to compromise as best he could. Diamond's contract was up for renewal, and you don't want to lose someone who has had, as Diamond had at that point, five top twenty hits in a row, and who was also writing songs like "I'm a Believer" and "Red Red Wine". He told Diamond that he'd let "Shilo" come out as a single if Diamond signed an extension to his contract. Diamond said that not only was he not going to do that, he'd taken legal advice and discovered that there were problems with his contract which let him record for other labels -- the word "exclusive" had been missed out of the text, among other things. He wasn't going to be recording for Bang at all any more. The lawsuits over this would stretch out for a decade, and Diamond would eventually win, but the first few months were very, very difficult for Diamond. When he played the Bitter End, a club in New York, stink bombs were thrown into the audience. The Bitter End's manager was assaulted and severely beaten. Diamond moved his wife and child out of Manhattan, borrowed a gun, and after his last business meeting with Berns was heard talking about how he needed to contact the District Attorney and hire a bodyguard. Of the many threats that were issued against Diamond, though, the least disturbing was probably the threat Berns made to Diamond's career. Berns pointed out to Diamond in no uncertain terms that he didn't need Diamond anyway -- he already had someone he could replace Diamond with, another white male solo singer with a guitar who could churn out guaranteed hits. He had Van Morrison: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl"] When we left Van Morrison, Them had just split up due to the problems they had been having with their management team. Indeed, the problems Morrison was having with his managers seem curiously similar to the issues that Diamond was having with Bert Berns -- something that could possibly have been a warning sign to everyone involved, if any of them had known the full details of everyone else's situation. Sadly for all of them, none of them did. Them had had some early singles success, notably with the tracks Berns had produced for them, but Morrison's opinion of their second album, Them Again, was less than complimentary, and in general that album is mostly only remembered for the version of Bob Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue", which is one of those cover versions that inspires subsequent covers more than the original ever did: [Excerpt: Them, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue"] Them had toured the US around the time of the release of that album, but that tour had been a disaster. The group had gained a reputation for incredible live shows, including performances at the Whisky A-Go-Go with the Doors and Captain Beefheart as their support acts, but during the tour Van Morrison had decided that Phil Solomon, the group's manager, was getting too much money -- Morrison had agreed to do the tour on a salary, rather than a percentage, but the tour had been more successful than he'd expected, and Solomon was making a great deal of money off the tour, money that Morrison believed rightfully belonged to him. The group started collecting the money directly from promoters, and got into legal trouble with Solomon as a result. The tour ended with the group having ten thousand dollars that Solomon believed -- quite possibly correctly -- that he was owed. Various gangsters whose acquaintance the group had made offered to have the problem taken care of, but they decided instead to come to a legal agreement -- they would keep the money, and in return Solomon, whose production company the group were signed to, would get to keep all future royalties from the Them tracks. This probably seemed a good idea at the time, when the idea of records earning royalties for sixty or more years into the future seemed ridiculous, but Morrison in particular came to regret the decision bitterly. The group played one final gig when they got back to Belfast, but then split up, though a version of the group led by the bass player Alan Henderson continued performing for a few years to no success. Morrison put together a band that played a handful of gigs under the name Them Again, with little success, but he already had his eyes set on a return to the US. In Morrison's eyes, Bert Berns had been the only person in the music industry who had really understood him, and the two worked well together. He had also fallen in love with an American woman, Janet Planet, and wanted to find some way to be with her. As Morrison said later “I had a couple of other offers but I thought this was the best one, seeing as I wanted to come to America anyway. I can't remember the exact details of the deal. It wasn't really that spectacular, money-wise, I don't think. But it was pretty hard to refuse from the point of view that I really respected Bert as a producer. I'd rather have worked with Bert than some other guy with a bigger record company. From that angle, it was spectacular because Bert was somebody that I wanted to work with.” There's little evidence that Morrison did have other offers -- he was already getting a reputation as someone who it was difficult to work with -- but he and Berns had a mutual respect, and on January the ninth, 1967, he signed a contract with Bang records. That contract has come in for a lot of criticism over the years, but it was actually, *by the standards in operation in the music business in 1967*, a reasonably fair one. The contract provided that, for a $2,500 a year advance, Bang would record twelve sides in the first year, with an option for up to fifty more that year, and options for up to four more years on the same terms. Bang had the full ownership of the masters and the right to do what they wanted with them. According to at least one biographer, Morrison added clauses requiring Bang to actually record the twelve sides a year, and to put out at least three singles and one album per year while the contract was in operation. He also added one other clause which seems telling -- "Company agrees that Company will not make any reference to the name THEM on phonograph records, or in advertising copy in connection with the recording of Artist." Morrison was, at first, extremely happy with Berns. The problems started with their first session: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl (takes 1-6)"] When Morrison had played the songs he was working on for Berns, Berns had remarked that they sounded great with just Morrison and his guitar, so Morrison was surprised when he got into the studio to find the whole standard New York session crew there -- the same group of session players who were playing for everyone from the Monkees to Laura Nyro, from Neil Diamond to the Shangri-Las -- along with the Sweet Inspirations to provide backing vocals. As he described it later "This fellow Bert, he made it the way he wanted to, and I accepted that he was producing it... I'd write a song and bring it into the group and we'd sit there and bash it around and that's all it was -- they weren't playing the songs, they were just playing whatever it was. They'd say 'OK, we got drums so let's put drums on it,' and they weren't thinking about the song, all they were thinking about was putting drums on it... But it was my song, and I had to watch it go down." The first song they cut was "Brown-Eyed Girl", a song which Morrison has said was originally a calypso, and was originally titled "Brown-skinned Girl", though he's differed in interviews as to whether Berns changed the lyric or if he just decided to sing it differently without thinking about it in the session. Berns turned "Brown-Eyed Girl" into a hit single, because that was what he tended to do with songs, and the result sounds a lot like the kind of record that Bang were releasing for Neil Diamond: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl"] Morrison has, in later years, expressed his distaste for what was done to the song, and in particular he's said that the backing vocal part by the Sweet Inspirations was added by Berns and he disliked it: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl"] Morrison has been very dismissive of "Brown-Eyed Girl" over the years, but he seems not to have disliked it at the time, and the song itself is one that has stood the test of time, and is often pointed to by other songwriters as a great example of the writer's craft. I remember reading one interview with Randy Newman -- sadly, while I thought it was in Paul Zollo's "Songwriters on Songwriting" I just checked that and it's not, so I can't quote it precisely -- in which he says that he often points to the line "behind the stadium with you" as a perfect piece of writing, because it's such a strangely specific detail that it convinces you that it actually happened, and that means you implicitly believe the rest of the song. Though it should be made very clear here that Morrison has always said, over and over again, that nothing in his songs is based directly on his own experiences, and that they're all products of his imagination and composites of people he's known. This is very important to note before we go any further, because "Brown-Eyed Girl" is one of many songs from this period in Morrison's career which imply that their narrator has an attraction to underage girls -- in this case he remembers "making love in the green grass" in the distant past, while he also says "saw you just the other day, my how you have grown", and that particular combination is not perhaps one that should be dwelt on too closely. But there is of course a very big difference between a songwriter treating a subject as something that is worth thinking about in the course of a song and writing about their own lives, and that can be seen on one of the other songs that Morrison recorded in these sessions, "T.B. Sheets": [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "T.B. Sheets"] It seems very unlikely indeed that Van Morrison actually had a lover die of tuberculosis, as the lover in the song does, and while a lot of people seem convinced that it's autobiographical, simply because of the intensity of the performance (Morrison apparently broke down in tears after recording it), nobody has ever found anyone in Morrison's life who fits the story in the song, and he's always ridiculed such suggestions. What is true though is that "T.B. Sheets" is evidence against another claim that Morrison has made in the past - that on these initial sessions the eight songs recorded were meant to be the A and B sides of four singles and there was no plan of making an album. It is simply not plausible at all to suggest that "T.B. Sheets" -- a slow blues about terminal illness, that lasts nearly ten minutes -- was ever intended as a single. It wouldn't have even come close to fitting on one side of a forty-five. It was also presumably at this time that Berns brought up the topic of "Piece of My Heart". When Berns signed Erma Franklin, it was as a way of getting at Jerry Wexler, who had gone from being his closest friend to someone he wasn't on speaking terms with, by signing the sister of his new signing Aretha. Morrison, of course, didn't co-write it -- he'd already decided that he didn't play well with others -- but it's tempting to think about how the song might have been different had Morrison written it. The song in some ways seems a message to Wexler -- haven't you had enough from me already? -- but it's also notable how many songs Berns was writing with the word "heart" in the chorus, given that Berns knew he was on borrowed time from his own heart condition. As an example, around the same time he and Jerry Ragavoy co-wrote "Piece of My Heart", they also co-wrote another song, "Heart Be Still", a flagrant lift from "Peace Be Still" by Aretha Franklin's old mentor Rev. James Cleveland, which they cut with Lorraine Ellison: [Excerpt: Lorraine Ellison, "Heart Be Still"] Berns' heart condition had got much worse as a result of the stress from splitting with Atlantic, and he had started talking about maybe getting open-heart surgery, though that was still very new and experimental. One wonders how he must have felt listening to Morrison singing about watching someone slowly dying. Morrison has since had nothing but negative things to say about the sessions in March 1967, but at the time he seemed happy. He returned to Belfast almost straight away after the sessions, on the understanding that he'd be back in the US if "Brown-Eyed Girl" was a success. He wrote to Janet Planet in San Francisco telling her to listen to the radio -- she'd know if she heard "Brown-Eyed Girl" that he would be back on his way to see her. She soon did hear the song, and he was soon back in the US: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl"] By August, "Brown-Eyed Girl" had become a substantial hit, making the top ten, and Morrison was back in the States. He was starting to get less happy with Berns though. Bang had put out the eight tracks he'd recorded in March as an album, titled Blowin' Your Mind, and Morrison thought that the crass pseudo-psychedelia of the title, liner notes, and cover was very inappropriate -- Morrison has never been a heavy user of any drugs other than alcohol, and didn't particularly want to be associated with them. He also seems to have not realised that every track he recorded in those initial sessions would be on the album, which many people have called one of the great one-sided albums of all time -- side A, with "Brown-Eyed Girl", "He Ain't Give You None" and the extended "T.B. Sheets" tends to get far more love than side B, with five much lesser songs on it. Berns held a party for Morrison on a cruise around Manhattan, but it didn't go well -- when the performer Tiny Tim tried to get on board, Carmine "Wassel" DeNoia, a mobster friend of Berns' who was Berns' partner in a studio they'd managed to get from Atlantic as part of the settlement when Berns left, was so offended by Tim's long hair and effeminate voice and mannerisms that he threw him overboard into the harbour. DeNoia was meant to be Morrison's manager in the US, working with Berns, but he and Morrison didn't get on at all -- at one point DeNoia smashed Morrison's acoustic guitar over his head, and only later regretted the damage he'd done to a nice guitar. And Morrison and Berns weren't getting on either. Morrison went back into the studio to record four more songs for a follow-up to "Brown-Eyed Girl", but there was again a misunderstanding. Morrison thought he'd been promised that this time he could do his songs the way he wanted, but Berns was just frustrated that he wasn't coming up with another "Brown-Eyed Girl", but was instead coming up with slow songs about trans women. Berns overdubbed party noises and soul backing vocals onto "Madame George", possibly in an attempt to copy the Beach Boys' Party! album with its similar feel, but it was never going to be a "Barbara Ann": [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Madame George (Bang version)"] In the end, Berns released one of the filler tracks from Blowin' Your Mind, "Ro Ro Rosey", as the next single, and it flopped. On December the twenty-ninth, Berns had a meeting with Neil Diamond, the meeting after which Diamond decided he needed to get a bodyguard. After that, he had a screaming row over the phone with Van Morrison, which made Berns ill with stress. The next day, he died of a heart attack. Berns' widow Ilene, who had only just given birth to a baby a couple of weeks earlier, would always blame Morrison for pushing her husband over the edge. Neither Van Morrison nor Jerry Wexler went to the funeral, but Neil Diamond did -- he went to try to persuade Ilene to let him out of his contract now Berns was dead. According to Janet Planet later, "We were at the hotel when we learned that Bert had died. We were just mortified, because things had been going really badly, and Van felt really bad, because I guess they'd parted having had some big fight or something... Even though he did love Bert, it was a strange relationship that lived and died in the studio... I remember we didn't go to the funeral, which probably was a mistake... I think [Van] had a really bad feeling about what was going to happen." But Morrison has later mostly talked about the more practical concerns that came up, which were largely the same as the ones Neil Diamond had, saying in 1997 "I'd signed a contract with Bert Berns for management, production, agency and record company,  publishing, the whole lot -- which was professional suicide as any lawyer will tell you now... Then the whole thing blew up. Bert Berns died and I was left broke." This was the same mistake, essentially, that he'd made with Phil Solomon, and in order to get out of it, it turned out he was going to have to do much the same for a third time.  But it was the experience with Berns specifically that traumatised Morrison enough that twenty-five years later he would still be writing songs about it, like "Big Time Operators": [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Big Time Operators"] The option to renew Morrison's contracts with Berns' companies came on the ninth of January 1968, less than two weeks after Berns' death. After his death, Berns' share of ownership in his companies had passed to his widow, who was in a quandary. She had two young children, one of whom was only a few weeks old, and she needed an income after their father had died. She was also not well disposed at all towards Morrison, who she blamed for causing her husband's death. By all accounts the amazing thing is that Berns lived as long as he did given his heart condition and the state of medical science at the time, but it's easy to understand her thinking. She wanted nothing to do with Morrison, and wanted to punish him. On the other hand, her late husband's silent partners didn't want to let their cash cow go. And so Morrison came under a huge amount of pressure in very different directions. From one side, Carmine DiNoia was determined to make more money off Morrison, and Morrison has since talked about signing further contracts at this point with a gun literally to his head, and his hotel room being shot up. But on the other side, Ilene Berns wanted to destroy Morrison's career altogether. She found out that Bert Berns hadn't got Morrison the proper work permits and reported him to the immigration authorities. Morrison came very close to being deported, but in the end he managed to escape deportation by marrying Janet Planet. The newly-married couple moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to get away from New York and the mobsters, and to try to figure out the next steps in Morrison's career. Morrison started putting together a band, which he called The Van Morrison Controversy, and working on new songs. One of his earliest connections in Massachusetts was the lead singer of a band called the Hallucinations, who he met in a bar where he was trying to get a gig: [Excerpt: The Hallucinations, "Messin' With the Kid"] The Hallucinations' lead singer was called Peter Wolf, and would much later go on to become well-known as the singer with the J. Geils Band. He and Morrison became acquaintances, and later became closer friends when they realised they had another connection -- Wolf had a late-night radio show under the name Woofa Goofa, and he'd been receiving anonymous requests for obscure blues records from a fan of the show. Morrison had been the one sending in the requests, not realising his acquaintance was the DJ. Before he got his own band together, Morrison actually guested with the Hallucinations at one show they did in May 1968, supporting John Lee Hooker. The Hallucinations had been performing "Gloria" since Them's single had come out, and they invited Morrison to join them to perform it on stage. According to Wolf, Morrison was very drunk and ranted in cod-Japanese for thirty-five minutes, and tried to sing a different song while the band played "Gloria". The audience were apparently unimpressed, even though Wolf shouted at them “Don't you know who this man is? He wrote the song!” But in truth, Morrison was sick of "Gloria" and his earlier work, and was trying to push his music in a new direction. He would later talk about having had an epiphany after hearing one particular track on the radio: [Excerpt: The Band, "I Shall Be Released"] Like almost every musician in 1968, Morrison was hit like a lightning bolt by Music From Big Pink, and he decided that he needed to turn his music in the same direction. He started writing the song "Brand New Day", which would later appear on his album Moondance, inspired by the music on the album. The Van Morrison Controversy started out as a fairly straightforward rock band, with guitarist John Sheldon, bass player Tom Kielbania, and drummer Joey Bebo. Sheldon was a novice, though his first guitar teacher was the singer James Taylor, but the other two were students at Berklee, and very serious musicians. Morrison seems to have had various managers involved in rapid succession in 1968, including one who was himself a mobster, and another who was only known as Frank, but one of these managers advanced enough money that the musicians got paid every gig. These musicians were all interested in kinds of music other than just straight rock music, and as well as rehearsing up Morrison's hits and his new songs, they would also jam with him on songs from all sorts of other genres, particularly jazz and blues. The band worked up the song that would become "Domino" based on Sheldon jamming on a Bo Diddley riff, and another time the group were rehearsing a Grant Green jazz piece, "Lazy Afternoon": [Excerpt: Grant Green, "Lazy Afternoon"] Morrison started messing with the melody, and that became his classic song "Moondance": [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Moondance"] No recordings of this electric lineup of the group are known to exist, though the backing musicians remember going to a recording studio called Ace recordings at one point and cutting some demos, which don't seem to circulate. Ace was a small studio which, according to all the published sources I've read, was best known for creating song poems, though it was a minor studio even in the song-poem world. For those who don't know, song poems were essentially a con aimed at wannabe songwriters who knew nothing about the business -- companies would advertise you too could become a successful, rich, songwriter if you sent in your "song poems", because anyone who knew the term "lyric" could be presumed to know too much about the music business to be useful. When people sent in their lyrics, they'd then be charged a fee to have them put out on their very own record -- with tracks made more or less on a conveyor belt with quick head arrangements, sung by session singers who were just handed a lyric sheet and told to get on with it. And thus were created such classics prized by collectors as "I Like Yellow Things", "Jimmy Carter Says 'Yes'", and "Listen Mister Hat". Obviously, for the most part these song poems did not lead to the customers becoming the next Ira Gershwin, but oddly even though Ace recordings is not one of the better-known song poem studios, it seems to have produced an actual hit song poem -- one that I don't think has ever before been identified as such until I made a connection, hence me going on this little tangent. Because in researching this episode I noticed something about its co-owner, Milton Yakus', main claim to fame. He co-wrote the song "Old Cape Cod", and to quote that song's Wikipedia page "The nucleus of the song was a poem written by Boston-area housewife Claire Rothrock, for whom Cape Cod was a favorite vacation spot. "Old Cape Cod" and its derivatives would be Rothrock's sole evident songwriting credit. She brought her poem to Ace Studios, a Boston recording studio owned by Milton Yakus, who adapted the poem into the song's lyrics." And while Yakus had written other songs, including songs for Patti Page who had the hit with "Old Cape Cod", apparently Page recorded that song after Rothrock brought her the demo after a gig, rather than getting it through any formal channels. It sounds to me like the massive hit and classic of the American songbook "Old Cape Cod" started life as a song-poem -- and if you're familiar with the form, it fits the genre perfectly: [Excerpt: Patti Page, "Old Cape Cod"] The studio was not the classiest of places, even if you discount the song-poems. Its main source of income was from cutting private records with mobsters' wives and mistresses singing (and dealing with the problems that came along when those records weren't successful) and it also had a sideline in bugging people's cars to see if their spouses were cheating, though Milton Yakus' son Shelly, who got his start at his dad's studio, later became one of the most respected recording engineers in the industry -- and indeed had already worked as assistant engineer on Music From Big Pink. And there was actually another distant connection to Morrison's new favourite band on these sessions. For some reason -- reports differ -- Bebo wasn't considered suitable for the session, and in his place was the one-handed drummer Victor "Moulty" Moulton, who had played with the Barbarians, who'd had a minor hit with "Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?" a couple of years earlier: [Excerpt: The Barbarians, "Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?"] A later Barbarians single, in early 1966, had featured Moulty telling his life story, punctuated by the kind of three-chord chorus that would have been at home on a Bert Berns single: [Excerpt: The Barbarians, "Moulty"] But while that record was credited to the Barbarians, Moulton was the only Barbarian on the track, with the instruments and backing vocals instead being provided by Levon and the Hawks. Shortly after the Ace sessions, the Van Morrison Controversy fell apart, though nobody seems to know why. Depending on which musician's story you listen to, either Morrison had a dream that he should get rid of all electric instruments and only use acoustic players, or there was talk of a record deal but the musicians weren't good enough, or the money from the mysterious manager (who may or may not have been the one who was a mobster) ran out. Bebo went back to university, and Sheldon left soon after, though Sheldon would remain in the music business in one form or another. His most prominent credit has been writing a couple of songs for his old friend James Taylor, including the song "Bittersweet" on Taylor's platinum-selling best-of, on which Sheldon also played guitar: [Excerpt: James Taylor, "Bittersweet"] Morrison and Kielbania continued for a while as a duo, with Morrison on acoustic guitar and Kielbania on double bass, but they were making very different music. Morrison's biggest influence at this point, other than The Band, was King Pleasure, a jazz singer who sang in the vocalese style we've talked about before -- the style where singers would sing lyrics to melodies that had previously been improvised by jazz musicians: [Excerpt: King Pleasure, "Moody's Mood for Love"] Morrison and Kielbania soon decided that to make the more improvisatory music they were interested in playing, they wanted another musician who could play solos. They ended up with John Payne, a jazz flute and saxophone player whose biggest inspiration was Charles Lloyd. This new lineup of the Van Morrison Controversy -- acoustic guitar, double bass, and jazz flute -- kept gigging around Boston, though the sound they were creating was hardly what the audiences coming to see the man who'd had that "Brown-Eyed Girl" hit the year before would have expected -- even when they did "Brown-Eyed Girl", as the one live recording of that line-up, made by Peter Wolf, shows: [Excerpt: The Van Morrison Controversy, "Brown-Eyed Girl (live in Boston 1968)"] That new style, with melodic bass underpinning freely extemporising jazz flute and soulful vocals, would become the basis of the album that to this day is usually considered Morrison's best. But before that could happen, there was the matter of the contracts to be sorted out. Warner-Reprise Records were definitely interested. Warners had spent the last few years buying up smaller companies like Atlantic, Autumn Records, and Reprise, and the label was building a reputation as the major label that would give artists the space and funding they needed to make the music they wanted to make. Idiosyncratic artists with difficult reputations (deserved or otherwise), like Neil Young, Randy Newman, Van Dyke Parks, the Grateful Dead, and Joni Mitchell, had all found homes on the label, which was soon also to start distributing Frank Zappa, the Beach Boys, and Captain Beefheart. A surly artist who wants to make mystical acoustic songs with jazz flute accompaniment was nothing unusual for them, and once Joe Smith, the man who had signed the Grateful Dead, was pointed in Morrison's direction by Andy Wickham, an A&R man working for the label, everyone knew that Morrison would be a perfect fit. But Morrison was still under contract to Bang records and Web IV, and those contracts said, among other things, that any other label that negotiated with Morrison would be held liable for breach of contract. Warners didn't want to show their interest in Morrison, because a major label wanting to sign him would cause Bang to raise the price of buying him out of his contract. Instead they got an independent production company to sign him, with a nod-and-wink understanding that they would then license the records to Warners. The company they chose was Inherit Productions, the production arm of Schwaid-Merenstein, a management company set up by Bob Schwaid, who had previously worked in Warners' publishing department, and record producer Lewis Merenstein. Merenstein came to another demo session at Ace Recordings, where he fell in love with the new music that Morrison was playing, and determined he would do everything in his power to make the record into the masterpiece it deserved to be. He and Morrison were, at least at this point, on exactly the same page, and bonded over their mutual love of King Pleasure. Morrison signed to Schwaid-Merenstein, just as he had with Bert Berns and before him Phil Solomon, for management, record production, and publishing. Schwaid-Merenstein were funded by Warners, and would license any recordings they made to Warners, once the contractual situation had been sorted out. The first thing to do was to negotiate the release from Web IV, the publishing company owned by Ilene Berns. Schwaid negotiated that, and Morrison got released on four conditions -- he had to make a substantial payment to Web IV, if he released a single within a year he had to give Web IV the publishing, any album he released in the next year had to contain at least two songs published by Web IV, and he had to give Web IV at least thirty-six new songs to publish within the next year. The first two conditions were no problem at all -- Warners had the money to buy the contract out, and Merenstein's plans for the first album didn't involve a single anyway. It wouldn't be too much of a hardship to include a couple of Web IV-published tracks on the album -- Morrison had written two songs, "Beside You" and "Madame George", that had already been published and that he was regularly including in his live sets. As for the thirty-six new songs... well, that all depended on what you called a song, didn't it? [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Ring Worm"] Morrison went into a recording studio and recorded thirty-one ostensible songs, most of them lasting one minute to within a few seconds either way, in which he strummed one or two chords and spoke-sang whatever words came into his head -- for example one song, "Here Comes Dumb George", just consists of the words "Here Comes Dumb George" repeated over and over. Some of the 'songs', like "Twist and Shake" and "Hang on Groovy", are parodying Bert Berns' songwriting style; others, like "Waiting for My Royalty Check", "Blowin' Your Nose", and "Nose in Your Blow", are attacks on Bang's business practices. Several of the songs, like "Hold on George", "Here Comes Dumb George", "Dum Dum George", and "Goodbye George" are about a man called George who seems to have come to Boston to try and fail to make a record with Morrison. And “Want a Danish” is about wanting a Danish pastry. But in truth, this description is still making these "songs" sound more coherent than they are. The whole recording is of no musical merit whatsoever, and has absolutely nothing in it which could be considered to have any commercial potential at all. Which is of course the point -- just to show utter contempt to Ilene Berns and her company. The other problem that needed to be solved was Bang Records itself, which was now largely under the control of the mob. That was solved by Joe Smith. As Smith told the story "A friend of mine who knew some people said I could buy the contract for $20,000. I had to meet somebody in a warehouse on the third floor on Ninth Avenue in New York. I walked up there with twenty thousand-dollar bills -- and I was terrified. I was terrified I was going to give them the money, get a belt on the head and still not wind up with the contract. And there were two guys in the room. They looked out of central casting -- a big wide guy and  a tall, thin guy. They were wearing suits and hats and stuff. I said 'I'm here with the money. You got the contract?' I remember I took that contract and ran out the door and jumped from the third floor to the second floor, and almost broke my leg to get on the street, where I could get a cab and put the contract in a safe place back at Warner Brothers." But the problem was solved, and Lewis Merenstein could get to work translating the music he'd heard Morrison playing into a record. He decided that Kielbania and Payne were not suitable for the kind of recording he wanted -- though they were welcome to attend the sessions in case the musicians had any questions about the songs, and thus they would get session pay. Kielbania was, at first, upset by this, but he soon changed his mind when he realised who Merenstein was bringing in to replace him on bass for the session. Richard Davis, the bass player -- who sadly died two months ago as I write this -- would later go on to play on many classic rock records by people like Bruce Springsteen and Laura Nyro, largely as a result of his work for Morrison, but at the time he was known as one of the great jazz bass players, most notably having played on Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch: [Excerpt: Eric Dolphy, "Hat and Beard"] Kielbania could see the wisdom of getting in one of the truly great players for the album, and he was happy to show Davis the parts he'd been playing on the songs live, which Davis could then embellish -- Davis later always denied this, but it's obvious when listening to the live recordings that Kielbania played on before these sessions that Davis is playing very similar lines. Warren Smith Jr, the vibraphone player, had played with great jazz musicians like Charles Mingus and Herbie Mann, as well as backing Lloyd Price, Aretha Franklin, and Janis Joplin. Connie Kay, the drummer, was the drummer for the Modern Jazz Quartet and had also played sessions with everyone from Ruth Brown to Miles Davis. And Jay Berliner, the guitarist, had played on records like Charles Mingus' classic The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady: [Excerpt: Charles Mingus: "Mode D - Trio and Group Dancers, Mode F - Single Solos & Group Dance"] There was also a flute player whose name nobody now remembers. Although all of these musicians were jobbing session musicians -- Berliner came to the first session for the album that became Astral Weeks straight from a session recording a jingle for Pringles potato chips -- they were all very capable of taking a simple song and using it as an opportunity for jazz improvisation. And that was what Merenstein asked them to do. The songs that Morrison was writing were lyrically oblique, but structurally they were very simple -- surprisingly so when one is used to listening to the finished album. Most of the songs were, harmonically, variants of the standard blues and R&B changes that Morrison was used to playing. "Cyprus Avenue" and "The Way Young Lovers Do", for example, are both basically twelve-bar blueses -- neither is *exactly* a standard twelve-bar blues, but both are close enough that they can be considered to fit the form. Other than what Kielbania and Payne showed the musicians, they received no guidance from Morrison, who came in, ran through the songs once for them, and then headed to the vocal booth. None of the musicians had much memory of Morrison at all -- Jay Berliner said “This little guy walks in, past everybody, disappears into the vocal booth, and almost never comes out, even on the playbacks, he stayed in there." While Richard Davis later said “Well, I was with three of my favorite fellas to play with, so that's what made it beautiful. We were not concerned with Van at all, he never spoke to us.” The sound of the basic tracks on Astral Weeks is not the sound of a single auteur, as one might expect given its reputation, it's the sound of extremely good jazz musicians improvising based on the instructions given by Lewis Merenstein, who was trying to capture the feeling he'd got from listening to Morrison's live performances and demos. And because these were extremely good musicians, the album was recorded extremely quickly. In the first session, they cut four songs. Two of those were songs that Morrison was contractually obliged to record because of his agreement with Web IV -- "Beside You" and "Madame George", two songs that Bert Berns had produced, now in radically different versions: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Madame George"] The third song, "Cyprus Avenue", is the song that has caused most controversy over the years, as it's another of the songs that Morrison wrote around this time that relate to a sexual or romantic interest in underage girls. In this case, the reasoning might have been as simple as that the song is a blues, and Morrison may have been thinking about a tradition of lyrics like this in blues songs like "Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl". Whatever the cause though, the lyrics have, to put it mildly, not aged well at all: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Cyprus Avenue"] That song would be his standard set-closer for live performances for much of the seventies. For the fourth and final song, though, they chose to record what would become the title track for the album, "Astral Weeks", a song that was a lot more elliptical, and which seems in part to be about Morrison's longing for Janet Planet from afar, but also about memories of childhood, and also one of the first songs to bring in Morrison's fascination with the occult and spirituality,  something that would be a recurring theme throughout his work, as the song was partly inspired by paintings by a friend of Morrison's which suggested to him the concept of astral travel: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Astral Weeks"] Morrison had a fascination with the idea of astral travel, as he had apparently had several out-of-body experiences as a child, and wanted to find some kind of explanation for them. Most of the songs on the album came, by Morrison's own account, as a kind of automatic writing, coming through him rather than being consciously written, and there's a fascination throughout with, to use the phrase from "Madame George", "childhood visions". The song is also one of the first songs in Morrison's repertoire to deliberately namecheck one of his idols, something else he would do often in future, when he talks about "talking to Huddie Leadbelly". "Astral Weeks" was a song that Morrison had been performing live for some time, and Payne had always enjoyed doing it. Unlike Kielbania he had no compunction about insisting that he was good enough to play on the record, and he eventually persuaded the session flute player to let him borrow his instrument, and Payne was allowed to play on the track: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Astral Weeks"] Or at least that's how the story is usually told -- Payne is usually credited for playing on "Madame George" too, even though everyone agrees that "Astral Weeks" was the last song of the night, but people's memories can fade over time. Either way, Payne's interplay with Jay Berliner on the guitar became such a strong point of the track that there was no question of bringing the unknown session player back -- Payne was going to be the woodwind player for the rest of the album: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Astral Weeks"] There was then a six-day break between sessions, during which time Payne and Kielbania went to get initiated into Scientology -- a religion with which Morrison himself would experiment a little over a decade later -- though they soon decided that it wasn't worth the cost of the courses they'd have to take, and gave up on the idea the same week. The next session didn't go so well. Jay Berliner was unavailable, and so Barry Kornfeld, a folkie who played with people like Dave Van Ronk, was brought in to replace him. Kornfeld was perfectly decent in the role, but they'd also brought in a string section, with the idea of recording some of the songs which needed string parts live. But the string players they brought in were incapable of improvising, coming from a classical rather than jazz tradition, and the only track that got used on the finished album was "The Way Young Lovers Do", by far the most conventional song on the album, a three-minute soul ballad structured as a waltz twelve-bar blues, where the strings are essentially playing the same parts that a horn section would play on a record by someone like Solomon Burke: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "The Way Young Lovers Do"] It was decided that any string or horn parts on the rest of the album would just be done as overdubs. It was two weeks before the next and final session for the album, and that featured the return of Jay Berliner on guitar. The session started with "Sweet Thing" and "Ballerina", two songs that Morrison had been playing live for some time, and which were cut in relatively quick order.  They then made attempts at two more songs that didn't get very far, "Royalty", and "Going Around With Jesse James", before Morrison, stuck for something to record, pulled out a new lyric he'd never performed live, "Slim Slow Slider". The whole band ran through the song once, but then Merenstein decided to pare the arrangement down to just Morrison, Payne (on soprano sax rather than on flute), and Warren Smith Jr: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Slim Slow Slider"] That track was the only one where, after the recording, Merenstein didn't compliment the performance, remaining silent instead – Payne said “Maybe everyone was just tired, or maybe they were moved by it.” It seems likely it was the latter. The track eventually got chosen as the final track of the album, because Merenstein felt that it didn't fit conceptually with anything else -- and it's definitely a more negative track than the oth

If you don't know Tom Paxton & John McCutcheon, you should. And their new album (the first one they've done together) is called 'Together.' It was written over weekly Zoom calls where they would talk and hang out and, occasionally break out the instruments. 'Together' is available now and the two are doing several dates on the east coast of the US to support the record- they are definitely worth checking out.For more information, check out Tom's website, or check in on John's website.

When The Flood first started doing this song some 40 years ago, Charlie's sweet mother asked where such an odd little tune came from. We didn't want to tell her the truth.“Mom, it was a popular party song in the late 1920s.” Well, that wasn't a complete lie. It's just that the “parties” where this song was born started very late at night and were in a part of town where nice girls generally didn't go. Stump's SongThe song we've always called “Yas Yas Duck” is an old hokum jazz tune that has been recorded under a lot of different names for nearly a century now.The first recording was made in St. Louis by the great piano pounder James “Stump” Johnson who released it in January 1929 as “The Duck Yas-Yas-Yas.” He recorded his song at least three times during his career, which ended with his death at 67 in 1969.Also in 1929, new versions started cropping up. Flood heroes Tampa Red and Georgia Tom recorded a version on May 13, 1929. That's where we learned it.But a particularly popular rendition also was done by Oliver Cobb and his Rhythm Kings on Aug. 16, 1929, about a year before his untimely death. In most versions, the song is perhaps best known for its opening lyrics: Mama bought a rooster, Thought it was a duck. Brought it to the table with its legs straight up …And, Uh, About That “Party”…Wikipedia just tells it like it is (or was). “The song,” it reports, “is a ‘whorehouse tune,' a popular St. Louis party song." (See there, mom? It says it right there! “Party song …”) The title, Wikipedia goes on, is explained by the verse that goes, Shake your shoulders, shake 'em fast, if you can't shake your shoulders, shake your yas-yas-yas.The Duck in the ‘60sFolkies learned the song in 1961 when the legendary Dave Van Ronk released it as "Yas Yas Yas" on his Van Ronk Sings album (though Dave's source was a variant recorded in the Bahamas by Blind Blake & his Royal Victoria Hotel Calypso Band, released as "Yes! Yes! Yes!" in 1951).Meanwhile, in 1967 cartoonist R. Crumb used the song in his comic strip album Zap Comix, No. 0, quoting it in the first panel of a story called "Ducks Yas Yas." Crumb also later recorded the tune with his band, The Good Tone Banjo Boys, on a transparent red vinyl 78 rpm stereo record in 1972.Our Take on the TuneFor us, “Yas Yas Duck” became a kind of connective tissue between today and our jug band roots of the 1970s and '80s. That's why we put it on our first commercial album back in 2001, and why it still gets trotted out regularly at rehearsals, just so newer folks coming to the band room can learn it. Recently, it was Jack Nuckols' turn. As you can hear here, Jack's drumming has brought us a whole new class of cool. Whether it's his tasty solos, or rocking along with Randy's bass under Charlie's vocals, or making his wise and witty contributions to the ensemble supporting Danny and Sam's solos, Jack's rhythms have us all wanting to get up and dance. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Maggie speaks with Aaron J. Leonard, author and historian whose intriguing and insightful works include "Heavy Radicals: The FBI's Secret War on America's Maoists," "A Threat of the First Magnitude—FBI Counterintelligence & Infiltration" and "The Folk Singers & the Bureau." His latest book is "Whole World In An Uproar: Music, Rebellion and Repression 1955-1972" which we discuss is detail in this interview. Leonard has established himself as a leading expert when it comes to accessing and researching FBI files. He deftly sorts through these documents to demonstrate the breadth of state surveillance against musicians who offended those in power.— Scott Costen, Morning Star (UK)Whole World in an Uproar is a great trip back for those who were there and, more importantly, an excellent and very readable history for those who weren't.—Ron Jacobs, CounterPunch.A fascinating counter-history of the 1960s music revolution through the eyes of the persecutors, paranoiacs, and culture warriors who tried to stop it—Dorian Lynskey, 33 Revolutionary Per Minute.What happened when HUAC, the FBI, Jim Crow, corporate media outlets, drug warriors, the religious right, and even the Old Left tried to stop a freight train? Drawing on a broad range of sources, including FBI files, Whole World in an Uproar recounts that momentous story—Peter Richardson, No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful DeadAaron Leonard integrates an amazing amount of research into a story that ranges from FBI surveillance of the Old Left to the rock scene to the social dissension around the anti-Vietnam War and Black liberation movements...a well-thought-through, fascinating documentary about movements and people who were affected by oppressive societal actions—Terri Thal, early manager of Bob Dylan, then-husband Dave Van Ronk, the Holy Modal Rounders, and others.******Artists such as Jim Morrison, Miriam Makeba, Bob Dylan, and Nina Simone transformed pop music in the 1960s, but they did not do so without a fight. They were confronted by deeply entrenched forces within the status quo who pushed back against them. This book charts the rise of these artists, the opposition they encountered, and how they responded—all amid the unprecedented upheaval of the Black freedom movement, opposition to the war in Vietnam, and the arising of the counterculture. Through the use of previously unreleased FBI files and other government documents, interviews, extensive research of the media of the day, and other works, the book brings to light a hidden and unexplored aspect of a period in history that continues to impact our world. Whole World in an Uproar is a great trip back for those who were there and, more importantly, an excellent and very readable history for those who weren't.Source: http://aaronleonard.net/index.htmlHost Maggie LePique, a radio veteran since the 1980's at NPR in Kansas City Mo. She began her radio career in Los Angeles in the early 1990's and has worked for Pacifica station KPFK Radio in Los Angeles since 1994.Support the show

Steve Katz has had a fascinating career. From his earliest days hanging out in Greenwich Village, to touring the world with Blood, Sweat and Tears, Steve has seen a lot.We talked with Steve about his career, the new documentary on the band and his wonderful memoir. (Our giveaway of Alan Paul's new book on the Allman Brothers, "Brothers & Sisters" is still going... Email us to enter!)For more information, check out Steve's website, and for the film, check out their site to find out when the film is screening near you.

Dr. Dom Flemons comes off as older than his 40 years and I think it's because he seems like he is of a different era. This is thanks in part to his work in teaching and interpreting such old songs, such as his work with the Carolina Chocolate Drops that he was in alongside Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson. Originally from Phoenix, Dom is considered an expert player on the banjo, guitar, harmonica, jug, percussion, quills, fife and rhythm bones. When he was 18 years old, he saw Dave Van Ronk in concert and was completely taken with the way Van Ronk told the stories and history behind the old songs he was playing in concert. From then on, Dom also would give the background of the songs he performed in concert, leading to much intense research for songs and their backstories.On his latest album Traveling Wildfire, he began work on the album during the pandemic. He wanted “to figure out a way to give the listener a way to process the world around them without being too didactic.” The record is filled with Dom's most personal songs about his family, history and, of course, interpretations of very old songs. We talk about all this and his strong outfit game, which, I'm sure, no one is surprised by. Follow Basic Folk on social media: https://basicfolk.bio.link/Sign up for Basic Folk's newsletter: https://bit.ly/basicfolknewsHelp produce Basic Folk by contributing: https://basicfolk.com/donate/Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

It's the end of the road for an Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning comedy series. “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” is back for its fifth and final season, with episodes dropping weekly starting April 14 on Amazon Prime Video.  For this episode of Streamed & Screened, hosts Bruce Miller and Terry Lipshetz, provide a (mostly) spoiler-free analysis of the the program, which is a favorite of both. Also hear from the stars, including clips from Rachel Brosnahan (Miriam "Midge" Maisel), Alex Borstein (Susie Myerson), Tony Shalhoub (Abraham "Abe" Weissman) and Kevin Pollak (Moishe Maisel) who reflect on the characters, the series and whether we might see them all reprise their roles in the future as part of a feature-length movie. Bruce also has an interview with Michael Zegen, who plays Midge's ex-husband Joel Maisel, who offers thoughts of his own on the program. Whether you're a longtime fan of the show or looking for an introduction before you binge the whole thing over a long weekend, you'll want to give this episode a listen. About the show Read more: REVIEW: 'Mrs. Maisel' ends with marvelous update Where to watch: Amazon Prime Video Cast: Rachel Brosnahan as Miriam "Midge" Maisel Alex Borstein as Susie Myerson Michael Zegen as Joel Maisel Marin Hinkle as Rose Weissman Tony Shalhoub as Abraham "Abe" Weissman Kevin Pollak as Moishe Maisel Caroline Aaron as Shirley Maisel Luke Kirby as Lenny Bruce Jane Lynch as Sophie Lennon Created by: Amy Sherman-Palladino Executive producers: Amy Sherman-Palladino, Daniel Palladino Producers: Dhana Gilbert, Matthew Shapiro, Salvatore Carino, Sheila Lawrence About the show Streamed & Screened is a podcast about movies and TV hosted by Bruce Miller, a longtime entertainment reporter who is now the editor of the Sioux City Journal in Iowa and Terry Lipshetz, a senior producer for Lee Enterprises based in Madison, Wisconsin. Episode transcript Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically: A lot of young women trying standup comedy for the first time, which is so awesome and long overdue. It's been incredible to hear how his legacy has already affected people, and I'm really excited to see how she lives on. That voice you just heard was Rachel Brosnahan, who stars as Miriam ‘Midge' Maisel in ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel' I'm Terry Lipshetz, a senior producer at Lee Enterprises and a co-host of Streamed and Screened, an entertainment podcast about movies and TV. Joining me, as always, is the incomparable Bruce Miller, editor of the Sioux City Journal and a longtime entertainment reporter. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is back for its fifth and final season with episodes dropping weekly starting April 14th on Amazon Prime Video. Bruce It will be an end of an era for one of the most popular shows on that platform. Certainly big shoes to fill. First of all, why was it not the marvelous Bruce Miller? This is now this is how this should be. This is how he introduced me. Right. It's interesting because this is a show that I think people lost track of because of the big gaps between seasons. Was it over? Is it over? And when they see this fifth season and I've seen the whole thing, they will go, Oh my God, there's so much in that fifth season because they do a lot of time jumps. So you're not going to just see one season, one year play out. It goes into the future and you find out things about her children. You find out things about her husband, her ex-husband, her friends, Susie. All of those people come into play at some point. And so it flashes back and forth and it's I think it pays. It rewards the people who have been loyal. And you get to see a lot of fun. So there is and I you know, I'm really I should say nothing. But there is one kind of cute thing where they're showing, you know, did she have a lot of dresses? And they show the racks of her clothes all. My God, what is this? She did have it because I don't think she ever wore anything twice. No, I don't remember it. And you also, I think, see growth in Mrs. Maysles comedy career, how she's able to tell, you know, I always thought, is she making this crap up on the fly? And every night, is she not writing this down so that she can, you know, retell it at another place? It seemed like every every routine she did was just of the moment. And you see how she does all that. And there is a scene in the last episode that is on Be Livable, and that's as much as I can tell you on the spoiler end of things. But okay, no spoilers. You know, when you first watched it, what surprised you most about it? For me personally, I was sucked in because I'm a native of New York City, okay? And for me, my wife is from just outside of Green Bay, Wisconsin. And it's been an interesting ride because she's she's Catholic. I was raised Catholic, but my dad was Jewish. But for me, it's kind of seeing that cultural the cultural phenomenon of New York, the Jewish culture, even though I'm I didn't grow up in the fifties or sixties, I was born in the mid seventies, but for me I could relate to it. And I thought that they kept this show like it's fiction, but it's also really easy. And I think it was that reality that kind of kept bringing me back. So a couple of things, if you don't mind me throwing these out, because we're going to be talking a lot about I mean, we're basically going to just talk about the show with Mrs. Basil. Yes, this is the Mrs. Maisel episode. So first off, the beauty of streaming is if you have not watched this show yet, just go back and watch it. You know, go get Amazon Prime if you don't have it already and start cranking through them. My wife and I didn't start this until the 2020 lockdown. There was already in between season three and seven season for that really long gap they were talking about. But we had nothing to watch during it. So we're kind of crushing through Netflix and Hulu and anything we could find. And we hopped into Mrs. Maisel and for some reason I didn't know much about it at the time. I was saying, What is this like some superhero thing? Because it kind of played with some of those Marvel titles that you hear. But it's a it's a comedy. It takes place, I guess, you know, like late 1950s, early 1960s. Rachael Brosnahan plays Miriam Midge Maisel. She's a housewife with very strong Jewish personalities in her life. Between her her husband and her parents and her in-laws. Alex Borstein plays Susie Myerson. She manages The Gaslight Cafe. Becomes a manager. She wants to be a manager. She's there. Michael Zegen is Joel Maseil while her husband and there's a Tony Shalhoub is in it as her father. There's a lot of actors you will know. Kevin Pollak is her father in law. It was a Jane. Lynch turned up as. Jane Lynch. Yeah. So it's it's an awesome ensemble cast. So and it's also a lot of reality. So Luke Kirby plays Lenny. Bruce. Right? So he's a real person, very controversial comic of the time, but becomes Midge's friend over time and helps guide her career. Midge Maisel, a fictional character, but she's based on Joan Rivers, who had a relationship with Lenny Bruce and started at the Gaslight Cafe, which was a real location. It's where, if you've ever heard of a musician named Bob Dylan, you've heard of Bob Dylan before.Bruce Never heard of him. Never heard of him. So he was a young man. Robert Zimmerman out of Hibbing, Minnesota. Probably did. Well, is he did. He did well. So he came to New York City and was kind of brought under the wing of a folk singer named Dave Van Ronk, who is who is the mayor of MacDougal Street down in the village of New York City. They performed at the Gaslight. This is a real location. So it's the beauty of this show is, you know, you're getting a little bit of a history lesson of the time and it but it's still a fictional comedy. It's hilarious. I love it. It's very you know, some of it is kind of on the surface kind of comedy and you pick it up really quick. But some of it's very deep, too, and it kind of gets into, you know, the place of women at the time in the 1950s and, you know, kind of being you're the housewife. Take care of the kids. Joel wants to be the comic. He's the one that's going to be the comedian. And of course, the tables get turned. But yeah, you're right. I mean, with the dresses, even as the show progresses and, you know, she's short on cash, sometimes it's like, how can you afford this apartment? Where are all these dresses coming from? It's ridiculous. The clothing budget does not suffer. She will always have a great outfit. What I find fascinating was each year it got bigger. You know, you start out and it's kind of like, Oh, this is doing a period show is expensive. And they didn't. They just threw it out there. They went to a summer camp, you know, and that can't be easy to recreate, particularly of that era. Then they go to a USO show, which is huge in an airplane hangar. They go to Paris, for God's sakes. This season, you're going to see them in New York and you're going to see a lot of landmarks in New York, particularly Rockefeller Center, which they use like a drum. They are around that building all the time. So that's that's fascinating to see. And the cast, there are so many people over those four seasons that get a return visit in the fifth. So it's it's kind of like a reunion. And you go, Oh my God, That was from remember when they did that? And she was in that. And then there's also a bit of, Oh, how can I how can I say this without saying this? It reminds you of if you saw my favorite year, if you saw laughter on the 23rd floor, if you saw any of those kind of looks at what Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner and Howard Morris did during the early days of television. With your show of shows, there are references to those kinds of things, so you get a real sense of the time. I think you really get to see what the fifties and sixties were like. There's a sort of Johnny Carson character. They mentioned Jack Paar in the course of the the series. What I love are these time jumps where you find out exactly what happened to Mrs. Maisel. What did she fizzle out and become? Nothing. Did she come a big star? Was she like Joan Rivers? You know, that is an easy comparison. But there were other female comics of the time, Tony Fields, if you remember that name. I don't know if it moms Mabley, these were all ones who were working that Phyllis Diller. And they kind of had to be aggressive in their approach to comedy because otherwise they were going to just be bulldozed over. And I think that's what you get out of out of Midge, is that she is not going to take no, but she is going to get knocked down. I can't wait to dive into this. It's exciting. I always love those just the characters. They even if they're playing such a really small role, it feels like they're playing a much larger role than it actually turns out to be. There are little in this one, you know. I don't know if you ever remember those kind of industrial shows that used to be big in New York, where it would be like, Oh, soap or whatever. And they do a huge thing for all of their their corporate people around the country. They'd come in for a day or whatever a weekend, and they do an industrial show, which we are. A lot of Broadway people would get on stage and sing the praises of, you know, Lox or whatever it might have been, or a new car. And they did these elaborate stage shows and fact there's a documentary out about them that is just fascinating because it's a world we don't know. We weren't in that industry. We weren't in that that thing. But people made a lot of money off that writing those shows. And you get a sense of that as well. There's a big convention of sorts that that Midge happens to be involved in. So you get another you know, it's this history lesson that you're getting a lot of stuff, even though it's not a real person. You know, if she were real, I think you'd look at it differently. You would say, Oh, well, you've got to have this moment. You've got to have that, and you really don't know what could happen. And Joel does not get shortchanged either. You know, I thought that maybe he would kind of just disappear as the years go by. And he has a very, very strong presence in the final season. That's great. I always loved his character. I always was afraid that as the ex-husband, estranged husband, he might just kind of slowly walk out of the show. And in the fact that not only has he remained at the forefront and kind of done his own thing, too, he's found his place and kind of escaped the shadow of his very overbearing parents. But the fact that he's still in it and that his parents are still in it just really makes the whole program him. And they do interweave those things, too, you know, that he was building a club. He was trying to get a club off the ground. And you'll see more of that in the next season. And his parents are big players with Mrs. Maysles parents. Interestingly, I don't think you see enough of Tony Shalhoub. I think he has a very secondary presence in in this year's show, and that's surprising because he won an Emmy for it, and I would have thought they would have leaned in a little more, maybe he just wasn't available to do a lot more. That's interesting. I also wonder, too, if it's is it part of character development, too, where they they want to highlight certain characters each season kind of give them because he did seem to have a very prominent role last year. When he was doing The Village Voice and he's a critic. And now he's getting the reaction to what life is like as a critic, which is I think, just fascinating. That's your favorite part, isn't it? Yeah, that's the cool part. Yeah. I lean into the critic aspect. I don't do I care about the comic? I don't know if I do, but I do care about the critic. You know, you talk a little bit about the characters and the reality and whatnot. One of my favorite things from the series and this is because, you know, and we've talked about this my my fan of of I'm such a huge fan of music. I have a very large record collection and just I feel like I have a pretty solid knowledge and I'm watching I think it was season it was season three when Midge was out on tour, was Shy Baldwin. Right. So she was doing comedy to open up for his big band performance. So he was performing. He had that ensemble band behind him. There was the one character who kind of became her friend of sorts. Carol Keane, who is a fictional musician. However, she was based on a real person. She played. Carol Kaye, if you at all familiar with her, is a legendary bassist, and she's part of what's known as The Wrecking Crew. The Wrecking Crew in the 1960s was this group of musicians that would come in and they were studio musicians. So you would have performers who weren't necessarily the best bands. They would go out live. But when it came to actually recording the albums, the producers were like, Let's you guys are in quite good enough. And it was even the Beach Boys, like the Beach Boys, didn't perform their own instruments in the studio. In a lot of cases. It was a lot of times it was The Wrecking Crew. So Carol Kaye, the real person was the basis to put down the bass line. That famous bass line in In These Boots by Nancy Sinatra. The bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. So that was Carol Kaye and the fictional character in Mrs. May's All, who is also the bassist in the band and a befriended Midge and that season. So that was for me, another piece that I just really love about this. That's where rewards you for being astute in other areas, correct? If you if you know things like if you you know, if you don't if you don't know these things, that's that's totally fine. You're just going to be entertained for for an hour or however long the episode is. But if you if you're familiar with pop culture in any way, you don't need to just know the real people like Lenny Bruce. But it's knowing little things like The Gaslight Cafe. Carol Kaye, These types of people, you know, they are based on actual folks, even if it's just very loosely. Yeah, it's fun to see who they might be. You know, Sophie Lennon, Who is she referring to? Who is she trying to be that you would know as a fellow comedian? You know, is she somebody that or is she just whole cloth, a fresh character? And that's I think that's kind of picking the brain of Amy Sherman Palladino, the creator of this show. If you know her from Gilmore Girls, you know that she loves dance scripts, she loves the idea that there's there are more words there than really you need to do a half hour or 45 minutes of a show, but she packs it and I would assume it would be very difficult to to learn all those lines, particularly when she wants that kind of rapid fire way of talking. And that's how she is. She's just like that. She usually wears a hat, too. She loves wearing hats. She's short. She's not unlike Susie. I would assume that a lot of Susie's personality comes from Amy, and her husband. Daniel is also a producer on the show, and he writes as well. So they're they're kind of in sync with what this mindset is all about. And I'm sure she had a grand plan as to where she was going to take this whole thing. Now, you can easily see that they might have gone seven or eight years with this, but I think the idea of cutting it off now opens up other opportunities like a movie. And I think for them, let's let's try and make the fifth season as packed as we can and then we can go on and do those other things and not have to worry about time limitations or we've got to meet a deadline to get this on the air by a certain time because it's it's expensive. It is hugely expensive. Bruce, I don't think you know this, but you have just set up the perfect segue way into, oh, wow, some audio here. So we already heard from Rachel. Now we're going to hear from Tony Shalhoub, who plays Midge's father. He talks about how they didn't know how long this series was going to go, but felt that both Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino were able to wrap up the story perfectly the way it was supposed to be. So let's let's cut ahead to that clip. From what I understand, even though we didn't know how many seasons it may go or may not go, Amy and Dan always had, they always had the final scene in their heads. They always they didn't know exactly how we were going to get there, but they knew where we were going to land and then I think we all by osmosis, we all felt that cool. All right, so that was Tony Shalhoub. Bruce, does that sound accurate, like what he's talking about? Does it feel like the series wraps up perfectly? I think it does for me it did anyway. And I thought, like I say, the last episode is one you can't miss because it's and I, I cheated, all right? Because I was afraid I was doing an interview and I thought I better see the end just in case this character is dead. I don't want to end up asking, Well, like, you know, what about those later years are, well, I'm dead, so I won't be in those later years. But that wasn't the case. There wasn't anything. But I did watch the last episode before I finished off the other ones before it, and the last episode is a great example of standalone television. You could take that episode out, not see any of the rest of the series, and you would still get a really good sense of a story. It's like a little mini movie in itself, and it's interesting how they all are able to get friends in. There is a roast at one point that has a lot of comedians that you know, are friends of a lot of the actors that are in the shows. And there are ties. I think Rachel's husband is a character in the show. There are people that are all people who've been on Gilmore Girls, people who've been on Bunheads, people who have been, if you will, loyal over the years. And they repay that loyalty by giving them a shot in this last season. I mean, it's remarkable. If I sat and made a list of all the people that I saw, I, you know, a character that they introduced last season played by Gideon Glick, he's this magician and kind of an offbeat magician. And you go, What is this? I love that character. And he returns this season and he has a lot of really goofy things. He's afraid of flying. So that's a fear factor. And there there is a picture that you'll see out there somewhere that is JFK, the the airport. So you'll be able to see what that looks like inside. And it's just fascinating to see these characters. The last time I saw it was Catch Me if you can, and just to look at that and now there's a hotel there that you can stay at there. It's very commercial where you could go and actually do tourism things there. But it is featured in this season. Again, huge, huge landmarks that they're using in New York. I think it's fascinating to to realize that somebody didn't say no. Nobody was saying them, No, you can't do that. We can't afford to do that. It's like I'm sure she dreamed it. And very much like Susie, where she's not going to let somebody else tell her no, she's just going to keep going ahead and doing it. And I think that's in a nutshell. Amy. Amy Palladino I can't remember the timing of this. Was the JFK airport at the time, or was it still Idlewild? Yeah, it was, Yeah, it was, but as I know it is. I know I always wondered because it transitioned. It was not named. No, it was not named JFK because, you know, and interestingly, I don't remember that they've even mentioned that Kennedy has died at that point. But you'll see the eighties, you'll see the nineties, you'll see the seventies, you'll see various different time frames over the course of the of the of the episodes. Wow. So another character that was mentioned and we talked briefly about her was that of Alex Borstein. She plays Susie Myerson. You know, you had mentioned the connection with her to Amy Sherman-Palladino and whether it's the connection there. But we have a we have a clip of her also. Now, if you're familiar with her, she's also the voice of Lois on Family Guy. She's a comedian. She's been around for a really long time. But I think this is kind of like probably her biggest breakthrough screen role that I can think of on screen role. So we have a short clip of her talking about her relationship with Midge. So let's go to that. For a bit. Like Mutton, Jeff, It makes no sense. And yet there's just this chemistry. There's something that draws these women together and they've got each other's backs and it's not about finding a mate. It's about achieving something in their lives that they want. It's about filling a hole within and they complete each other. All right, Bruce So that was Alex Borstein talking about the relationship that Susie and Midge have. Is that connection? Because that was always one of my favorite things was the interactions between Midge and Susie and kind of the weird polar opposites that they are, but they have this great presence on screen together. Do we get more of that in this first season? We do. And you also get fighting. And that's as much as I can say about that. You know how they it's like on a soap opera where they love to put people together and then they like to tear them apart. And I think this falls into that. You know, there's there's a reason for them to be at each other's throats and maybe they both don't pay attention enough to what the needs are of the other person. But you see how how Susie is just giving her life for this person that maybe she might be a little too protected. You know, Mitch can Mitch has the ability to go and do this because she has her parents to fall back on if she really needs them. Her husband, her ex-husband is still there in the picture for her. She doesn't have that kind of if I don't do this, I don't know what will happen to my life. There is a safety net for her, and we've seen that over the years where she's taken jobs at other places and done other things and she gets a new job this year. And that's a safety net of sorts, too. But there's always this comedy where Susie has nothing. Susie is like she's all in and she will do whatever she needs to do to further the career of her client. Hopefully there will be more clients, but you know, you look at it and you say, Oh my God, she's just doing all this for one person. Is that friendship? Is that is that, you know, just survival? Is it? She's enamored with her. What is the what is the deal for her and why is she doing this? And you get answers to all of that stuff. It's just it's really fascinating. I remember when they went to the to the Catskills and they were staying there and I think she had a hammer or something. And she was like trying to do things with the hammer. And you go, Oh my God, this is unreal. And she's always treated like dirt by everybody. Everybody sees her as like their batboy for anything that goes wrong. Susie, we're going to go to you. Yeah, She said that season at the Catskills was just incredible. I mean, they basically took it was pretty much the entire season was more or less on location up there. And you still had to work her in somehow. And she obviously she doesn't dress like somebody that belongs there. So she just walked around with that hammer and like, I think a plunger, too, just looking like a maintenance worker and nobody would question it because that's what she did. But that relationship, you know, even though we're we're avoiding spoilers for season five, we had that adversarial give and take relationship between them throughout all the seasons. Because you're right, she didn't have anybody. Susie doesn't have anybody to fall back on, so she has to make a living, which meant at times taking on other clients. You know, she didn't want to be Sophie Lemon's manager, but she needed the money and then kind of had to deal with that abuse as well as the abuse of of Midge, who couldn't believe that she would support Sophie Lennon, who is her her nemesis. Right. Yeah. So, you know, that that to me has been just a great, you know, relationship. But it always comes back to when they meet in the diner, which is such an iconic New York thing. Like, I just love I miss diners so much. Bruce Living in Wisconsin, there's no diners out here. People who think there's diners out here, there is no diners out here that is. Have a drive thru with it, too, right? But it's such a it's just such a new York, New Jersey, East Coast cultural thing where you go to a diner and you get that triple decker club sandwich or the pastrami or whatever it is and a pile of food. You come all the other way, it's on you. Who knows everybody's order. Yeah. You know, you get that big pickle spear which probably sits on every plate, and they just move it from plate to plate so I don't touch it. The end. They do. Go back to the diner. You'll be seeing that and you'll be seeing various and sundry combinations of people talking. So it's a it's a key place. And like I say, these sets that they build the apartments, the business places they go to, it's unbelievable. I don't know how I would love to see what the budget was for this because it had to be huge because it looks good. And I there's a thing and there's this coming season where they mention something as a giveaway, okay? And I thought, oh no, that it's it's wrong. It's not the same time. And I had to look it up to make sure that that was within that time span. It was exactly in that time span. You know how you would say I like a yo I don't want to see what it is because again, this is one of those things. But if it was a yo yo and you say, well, yo, yo, what year was a Rubik's cube? That would be one a Rubik's Cube. Why are they giving away Rubik's cubes? They weren't available in 62 or 61 were they. I don't I think they didn't come until the seventies, but that's not yet. But there is another thing like that. And damn, if they didn't nail it. And I looked it up and it was exactly right, it it fit with the time frame. You'll see stuff like that that it just you want to play gotcha with them and they, they already know they're much better than we are at vetting these kinds of things. Yeah, they, they're really good. It's just nailing history. It is a history. Even though it is fiction, it is a history lesson throughout pop culture, history lesson. Were there characters that you really like that maybe aren't around or have, you know, dropped in for an episode or two? Well, you know, the Carol K one was one that I really liked. The magician that was in there in season four when Midge was working at that theater. And, you know, it's kind of the adult content. It's not quite a strip club, but it's that kind of like a doll that the manager of that club was. It's just a lot of those little characters like that. I really love the characters that I really felt a personal connection to, and we'll kind of kind of move this forward too, with some some clips that we have coming up. So we have Michael Zegen, who plays Joel Maze, all his parents. Kevin Pollack plays Moisi Maisel, his father, and then Caroline Aaron plays Shirley Mays or his mother. So I had mentioned earlier that that my mom was Catholic, my dad is Jewish. His parents, um, his mother died. My, my paternal grandmother died. I was probably about 15 years old when she passed away. She wasn't a very devout Jewish person. My grandfather was he was it could be. Yes, it was. That was probably about it. My grandfather was always a little bit more religious. And then after my grandmother died, he got remarried a year or two later is very quick. And the woman that he married, her name was Mildred. We all called her Millie and they became very devout again. He would go to temple. They kept kosher, but but Millie had a very unique personality. So when the show started and I started watching it, and when Joel's parents were finally introduced and Shirley Hazel comes on screen, I turned to my wife immediately and I'm like, Oh my goodness, that is Millie. That's Bella. Is Millie. Looks like Millie. Sounds like Millie. Acts like Millie. This is not like you can think that that there's there's acting here and we're over the top and there's no way people could be like this in real life. Surely Basil is Millie or Millie was Shirley. Mabel, whichever reality. So it to me there was just that personal connection that that strong, very strong personality with her. And in the father, I would I don't think my grandfather was any way like my she they had certain crossovers but you know Shirley and Millie were two peas in a pod. Shirley is a big fan of pop culture, and she knows all the names that Midge might throw out there. She has like she could give you an encyclopedia about the person, and she's so excited about everything. And of course, when Midge invites them to come to various and sundry things, oh, she's right there. She's ready to come. Whereas her own mother is like, well, this interrupt with what I'm doing. I don't know if I want to come and see you perform in front row is always Shirley. Shirley is there. She's all, This is wonderful. You're doing a great job. I love you, you're great. And you'll see they do a lot with them during this next year, so you'll enjoy that. I'm looking forward to that because that interaction with them and in some ways to my my maternal grandparents who were Catholic, they never interacted that often with each other. But there is always a very strange relationship between like my mom and her parents and my dad and his parents when they would interact. It was very I don't know if his adversarial is quite the way, but culturally very different. And I kind of get that with this show, like like Midge and her parents were very much one way, and Joel and his parents are very much another. And there is that that onscreen dynamic that I just love. And it kind of clicks with me a bit. Yeah, and they're together a lot. The four of them do a lot of things together. You'll be you'll be thrilled. You know, speaking of Moisi, Mazal, we do have one more clip of Kevin Pollak, and he's talking a little bit about the future of Mrs. Maisel. So let's go to that. Yeah, we're not going to ever say goodbye. And I predict now for you, in 4.3 years we'll be here talking about the amazing movie. There I said it. Kevin Pollak leaves a little bit of that door open. Could we see Mrs. May's old movie? I think it's the door has been cracked. Look, the way they need content these days and you know that it'd be an Amazon film in a minute. And, you know, so they put it in theaters. They could get a lot of attention for it. And then you just put it on streaming again. I think we've seen the model for all of this. And like I said, it would help pay the bills for all that expensive stuff that they're using because it looks like a Cinemascope film. It's shot. Well, it has great I mean, the scoring, they created original songs for this. Now, really for a half hour you're going to do that. And the sets, the costumes, the whole and, you know, the first season they won a lot of Emmys for those kind of below the line things. And I think this year they're going to be well rewarded for what they've done because it is so vast and so unbelievable. But, you know, it did not go unnoticed by the actors. I think they believe that they landed into a great situation. And I don't think it was by chance either that they were selected. I think these people, they knew who were the hard workers, they knew who the ones that would deliver for them. And it it it seems like it's a brutal show to do because it isn't just getting up and saying a line against somebody. You know, what's interesting is you'll see a little a clip of a TV show that stars Hank Azaria and Sutton Foster within the show. It looks it has a bit of Dick Van Dike to the quality of it. And Sutton Foster kind of seems like a mary Tyler Moore. And you think the idea that they would write this script for a show within a show that really isn't seen that much, you get a couple of lines out of it. And, you know, they did you know, they probably wrote the whole script or this sitcom that they were trying to reference in some way. And it's done in black and white. And you get all of that that kind of little homage. But clearly they are fans of the medium. They are ones who want to make sure that it comes across and you do get that sense of what the time was like. You know, it was not easy being a female comedian in New York, Hollywood, wherever. And I don't I think now it just seems too easy because we see comedians all over the place, you know, doing a one hour special on Netflix. But the idea that somebody would have had that or got that an unreal, unreal. And if I was able to interview Joan Rivers Times and she net, you know, as much as she was kind of oh what's the term I want to use not boisterous but she was you know, she seemed like a very like she would just tell it like it is and not worry about the consequences. That was not Joan. It was a character that she was portraying. She was the most loving, wonderful person who would would take you under her arms and just treat you like a friend. And that's the I think that's the same kind of disconnect you get here with Mrs. Maisel. She is two different people, but I can see easily that she is the the Joan Rivers is the template for Mrs. Maisel, even though their lives are much different. They don't they don't wind up the same way. They don't have the same dynamics. There aren't the same, you know, cards being played. But there is that kind of idea that I'm alone. I really am alone in this venture and I've got to do what I want to. Another series that it kind of seems similar to is Hacks, because you see Jean Smart showing what a comedian's like after the big days are over and how does she keep that going? And there's a glimpse of that with this fascinating because I think I think Joan Rivers is the mothership for all these kinds of things because of what she did do and the idea that look at Joan went to QVC and sold crap just to make money, you know, and what she had to do, she alienated Johnny Carson at one point and then she had her own show. But the one thing that she valued most was The Tonight Show. And there was no way they were going to let her back on with that because she had, you know, went as she had. She'd gone against the master and she wasn't sorry enough for Johnny to make this really work. And I think that was a big failing in Joan's life, is that she felt that somehow that relationship was not really repaired and she never got The Tonight Show. She didn't get things she wanted, but in the end, she did get a lot. And she is viewed as somebody they all look up to. You know, they say, well, I wouldn't be here if it weren't for Joan Rivers. And I think that's the path that you're looking at with Mrs. Maisel as well. So with Mrs. May's all leaving Prime Well, not really leaving. It's going to be there, but but this is a big tentpole production for them. What's left for Prime. They do have a lot of shows, but I also don't find myself going to Prime very often for original programing. It feels like a weird, weird platform to me compared some of the others in some ways, maybe a little bit like Apple Tv+, which has several big productions. But when there's nothing there, you know, when you run out of something like Ted Lasso, it feels like there's a long gap until something else comes. What what's your thinking on on Prime right now? I think, though, they're doing movies and a lot of those movies will draw the attention. And so I think that's where they'll get whatever. And they also have a lot of limited series that are ten and down or eight and done. And I think that for them is a better model then a series that who knows if you know the the the suits the executives who are in power may not like that series. And there it's just like network TV. As soon as one regime is out, there's do we have support? You know, unless you're the number one show on television they'll be looking to dump. Yeah. So we've been sprinkling clips throughout this episode, which has been fun because we don't always have audio from so many different people. But we do have one more and it's a little bit more than just a 1015 second clip. We have an interview. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I got to talk to it to Michael Zegen, who plays Mr. Maisel. And it's fascinating because I was always under the impression that his job could be gone at any minute. I really thought that Joel is not necessary to this show. He was important in the first year, but would you stick around? And so we got to talk about that and what this last season was like and what, you know, what what comes next. He is working on the Penguin, which is the new I think his HBO Max series with Colin Farrell, and he's a mobster in that. And so that's an excellent he'll be doing it Fascinating. And he feels very blessed, very blessed that he was a part of this because he knows it's magic in a bottle and you don't get that many times. Michael, how is it to say goodbye to this? I would think that would be very, very difficult. It is You're you're correct in you're you're sentiments. Yeah it's it's it's definitely difficult but it's some I don't know it doesn't feel like it's ended just yet especially you know we we still have all this and we're going to France together and I you know we still have this group text chain. So it's I don't think it'll ever quite feel over over. But I, I, you know, I know the reality of it. And we're not going to be filming anymore, which is devastating. Well, the last season is so stuffed with information. I mean, there's a lot there to unpack. What was it like when you were doing it? Did you say, Oh, my God, I can't believe this happened? And that happened. And, you know, there's a lot. There is, but there's always a lot. I feel like, yeah. And, you know, there's a lot of dialog. I actually think this year the scripts, they're always long, you know and I guess in our show is is supposed to be like, you know, 55 to 60 pages, our scripts are like 90 pages to 100 pages. So they're always long. I do feel like this this season, though, they were longer than most. And the locations, I mean, you're everywhere, you're doing the years, the whole all of it. That's why I thought it seemed like an awful lot. But maybe it's let's get it done and then move on to something else. Well, the show is big. It's been big from the beginning. You know, we went to Paris in the in the second season and the Catskills and Miami. So it's it's it's always been very big. And yeah, I mean, there's a lot of stuff, but somehow it just it still flows just as nicely as ever. And it's, you know, it's still. Mazal. When it started, did you feel, oh, they're going to get rid of my character at some point. I, I was just saying this in a in a previous interview. Yeah. In the first episode when I read it, I thought that was it for Joel and I thought it was going to be a guest star. I didn't even I, I looked at the you know, I was auditioning for it. They send you the cast breakdown and it said that he was a series regular. So I was like, Oh, even better. I had no idea. I really honestly thought this is it for him. And later. But but, you know, luckily that wasn't the case. And they were able to to create this this whole journey for and this evolution for this character. And there have been so many subplots of his that he just kind of owns. That must be a real cool feeling to have them kind of right for you, if you will. Yeah, we all get our subplots. But yeah, I mean, I think Joel's is is probably, I guess the most separate from from everybody else is they all kind of I mean, look, he's still in Midge's orbit, obviously, but but I think, you know, he's probably the he's like Pluto as opposed to, you know. Tony's not Venus. Right. What were you miss about this show? Because you had such a huge cast and of really great people? Well, that's what I mean. That's in that's it in a nutshell is the cast I, I, I, I'll miss everyone terribly isn't. And really, it's not just the cast, it's the crew. It's it's you know, our writers, Amy and Dan, obviously, I I'll miss everything about this show. Literally everything. This has been the greatest experience of my life so far, you know, work wise. I don't I was just talking to Tony and Kevin Pollak and they were saying, you know, by the way, no way, you're going to top this. So, like, they felt bad for me because they they were saying they're like, you have like years and years left. We only have like three and, you know, and I'm on it. It's over for me, basically. But I mean, I don't believe that, but I do I do believe that it's going to be very hard to top something like this. Do you think it's because of the writing that made it such an iconic show or was it something else? Is it spending a lot of money and doing a lot of things, making it bigger than normal? I think that the money is certainly helps. You know, luckily we had Amazon behind us and anything really Amy and Dan wanted they got because I think, you know, Amazon loved the show just as much as we did. But what was the first part of the question? Well, did did you think that it was going to be this this big, this kind of whatever, or was it the writing that really kind of sold all of this thing? It's really everything. It's the writing. It's like I said before, the crew, I mean, we had, you know, people at the top of their game in every, you know, whether it's lighting or set design or acting. I mean, it was just the whole the whole project was just lightning in a bottle. And and I think that's that's really just what made it so special. But yeah, did I have any idea I, I didn't know that it was going to be this big. I knew people were going to like it. I liked it. So, you know, I, I think I've got pretty good taste. And, you know, my if you look at my resume like I've done really good shows before and I've done shows that people watch. But but this was this took it to a new level. And, you know, right out of the gate, we we got nominated for all these awards and we won and we won the Golden Globe, you know, And that that was like, okay, yeah, we were right. Like, this is something special. And and now, you know, then we had to top that. And you got the Emmy. So there you go. Yes, We did. Talk about, though, Amy, as a as a force. I have my views of what she'd be like. I always see her in a hat and I always think she's like, she's marshaling troops. But is it like that or what is she like on on set? She's honestly just the best. You know, you talked about the writing. It doesn't get better than that. And and honestly, like, I'm a little sore about the fact that for, you know, the past couple of years at the Emmys, she's not even nominated for writing. I mean, this is the best written show on TV, you know. Yes. There's succession. There's all these other shows. But like in terms of comedy, it doesn't get better than this. And, you know, it's so rare for me to read something, especially when I'm home alone and I laugh out loud. That doesn't happen. And that's been happening on this show from day one. The minute I read the pilot, I was I was laughing. And and so, yeah, she's she's just, you know, there's there's a level of trust involved with her that that is unparalleled that I haven't I haven't experienced with anybody else. She shows up to set. I mean she's a former dancer, you know, and she thinks like a dancer. So, so even even our background actors, a lot of them are dancers. I don't know if you know that, but it's true. A lot of them are dancers and it's it's always a dance when we're rehearsing a scene because we don't have rehearsals, like prior to showing up to set and doing the scene. We, we, we get there on the day like, you know, 530 in the morning, whatever it is, and then we start blocking it out. And sometimes they're huge scenes. But I mean, you know, she's she's obviously in charge and there's this level of trust that I'll just do anything she wants because, you know, she knows what she wants. And to have a director who knows what they want is sometimes I mean, honestly, in my experience, it's rare. So what is it like watching Rachel do stand up? I mean, Rachel can do anything. You know, she's she always talks about how nervous she is. Like, I don't buy it. Like she's she's a she can do anything. She she's that type of actor where again, it's that level of trust. Like, I mean, any time I got to work with her was a joy and all of our I think you know all of our scenes that we got to do together were always my favorite. And yeah, I mean, you know, she talks about how nervous she is, how the audiences keep growing and growing for her character. And honestly, like, that stuff doesn't faze her. She was born to perform. And, you know, I don't I don't know if she would be a standup comedian, but but I'm sure she can handle that as well if she wanted to. Hey, and you can, too. So that might be even the next step. So. Hey, thank you so much, Michael. I appreciate it. And I thank you for all those years of really great television. Oh, thanks so much. I appreciate it. Thanks, Bruce, for that interview with Michael Zegen. What do we have on tap? Well, I'll tell you, I do. And tell me if you don't agree when you start watching this, this series by, because I think it's going to be in for a lot of Emmys, you know how they come and go. And they kind of had a down year. Never. They weren't getting nominated. And the things I think this year they're coming back with a vengeance. And I don't know how you could deny Rachel Brosnahan, the Emmy for best actress. Really? There are there is a moment there that you will go, Oh, my God, I'm glad I watch this series because it builds to this moment and it's unbelievable. And you'll, as you heard from Michael, you know, watching her was just unbelievable. But next week, we're going to talk about dead ringers. Here's another opportunity. And you wondered, where is Amazon going? Well, this is another series they've got, but it's a limited series. It's based off a movie. If you remember the movie by David Cronenberg, starring Jeremy Irons, he played brothers, twin brothers who were odd, to say the least, and they were involved in obstetrics and making all kinds of weird tools and instruments and whatnot. And they had freaky obsessions. They I mean, watch the movie. You'll see what I mean. It was one of those movies. Take me out for the longest time. Well, they've redone the movie and it's now a limited series, and it features two women as twins. Beverly and Elliot Mantle are now played by Rachel Weisz and Rachel really digs into it. She's and she has lots of fun. And you'll see a different Beverly and a different Elliot. And then it's at one point they play each other to try and dupe their friends. So it's a fascinating look at characters, but I do think they made a horrible land. I just kind of have that feeling knowing how the movie went. But that's next. We were talking to people who were involved in Dead Ringers, and that'll be coming as a limited series later this month. All right, Bruce, thanks again, as always. And tune in again next week for another episode of Streaming & Screened.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Such a great time talking to our friend Nathan about Dave Van Ronk's book The Mayor of MacDougal Street.

Growing up outside of Boston, multi-instrumentalist David Hamburger first picked up a guitar at the age of 12. Through his first guitar teacher he was exposed to bluegrass music, and at home his father was turning him on to Tin Pan Alley pop. Through his teens, Hamburger was also becoming more interested in blues and jazz, incorporating the various styles into his playing. His interest in blues was further stoked while attending Wesleyan University when a friend taught him to play slide. A stint at Manhattan's School of Music where he was studying jazz composition didn't last, as Hamburger left the graduate program to play with a then-unknown Freedy Johnston. Hamburger was also playing with an R&B band as well as performing solo, finally gathering some of his favorite local musicians to help him record King of the Brooklyn Delta in 1995. Extensive touring helped him to build a live following around New York and New England, while he continued to contribute guitar, dobro, and pedal steel to the recordings of others. Indigo Rose, recorded in a little more than a week, arrived in 1999.As a solo artist, David has appeared at Merlefest, the Philadelphia Folk Festival and the Old Settlers Music Festival, and venues including Passim, Cafe Lena and the Cactus Cafe. He has opened for Dave Van Ronk, Jorma Kaukonen, Rory Block and Roy Book Binder and jammed onstage with Duke Robillard, Gatemouth Brown and Tinsley Ellis. As a sideman and session musician, David has recorded with Freedy Johnston, toured the U.S. with Joan Baez, and appeared with Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen on Springsteen's remake of “The Ghost of Tom Joad.”David is also the author of two dozen instructional books and videos, including the award-winning Beginning Blues Guitar, which has sold over 100,000 copies and been released in a second edition after 20 continuous years in print.We talk all things acoustic blues, he even whips out a stunning sounding Martin and demos a bit for us so, not one to miss! Shoot me a question to cover in the upcoming episodes by emailing ben@thebluesguitarshow.comFollow me on instagram @bluesguitarshowpodcast Make a small donation at 'Buy me a coffee' https://www.buymeacoffee.com/bluesguitarshowAcoustic Blues Guitar Course: https://www.udemy.com/share/1086SM/Support the show

Authorship of “Sister Kate,” one of the first famous songs of the Roarin' Twenties, is a musical mystery.The composer of record is New Orleans bandleader/violinist Armand Piron, who had a publishing partnership with Clarence Williams. However, Piron's credits for the song frequently have been disputed, most famously by trumpeter Louis Armstrong, who always claimed he wrote the tune himself. Armstrong contended he sold the song for an overcoat (which he received) and a few dollars (which he did not).Piron — who copyrighted it in 1919 as “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate” (though it wasn't published till 1922) — told jazz historian Al Rose that “that's not Louis's tune or mine either. That tune is older than all of us. People always put different words to it. Some of them were too dirty to say in polite company.”For instance, the way Armstrong did the song didn't have anything to do with a sister Kate, but a lot to do with jiggling lady bits.Gotta have 'em before it's too late,They shake like jelly on a plate.Big ‘n' juicy, soft an' round,Sweetes' ones I ever found.“There's only so many places you could do a number like that,” Piron told Rose, “and not in my band.”The Skinny on The ShimmyCommenting on the song's history, bluesman/author Elijah Wald notes, “Though Piron and his band cleaned up the lyric, they kept the sense intact, since the generally accepted derivation of ‘shimmy' fits Armstrong's verse pretty well.”“The etymology isn't solid,” Wald adds, “but most authorities derive it from chemise — ‘shimmy' seems to have been American slang for a lightweight women's blouse as early as the 1840s — and the dance move was to ‘shake your shimmy' by vibrating the relevant area as rapidly as possible.”And Who Is Kate? Uh… Ask LouisSo, in Piron and Williams' telling, the song was associated with a suggestive shimmy dance move, but was there actually a “sister Kate?” And — poof! — just like that, we're back to Louis Armstrong.The trumpeter long claimed that he knew Kate before she ever shimmied. In his book Louis Armstrong, An Extravagant Life, author Laurence Bergreen said that when New Orleans trombonist Kid Ory hired Armstrong for his band, he told the youngster he should work up a number so they could feature him once in a while. Armstrong did and even created a little dance to go with it.The song was “an unashamedly filthy thing,” Bergreen wrote, called “Katie's Head,” reportedly inspired by the 1883 stabbing death of New Orleans madam Kate Townsend. This particular Kate, who ran a high-class house of prostitution on Basin Street, was murdered in a drunken quarrel with her longtime "fancy man" Troisville Sykes. Despite its dark and bloody subject matter, the song was a hit. Bergreen quoted Armstrong as saying that whenever he sang it, “Man, it was like a sporting event. All the guys crowded around, and they like to carry me up on their shoulders.” Armstrong's performance usually was accompanied by his dance, apparently a version of "The Shimmy,” which was just starting to appear around the country."One night, as I did this number,” Armstrong went on, “I saw this cat writing it all down on music paper. He was quick, man! He could write as fast as I could play and sing. When I had finished, he asked me if I'd sell the number to him. He mentioned $25. When you're only making a couple of bucks a night, that's a lot of money. But what really put the deal over was that I had just seen a hard-hitting steel gray overcoat that I really wanted for those cold nights. So I said `Okay' and he handed me some forms to sign and I signed them. He said he'd be back with the cash, but he never did come back."The stranger with the forms and the pen was Armand Piron's partner Clarence Williams, the ambitious music entrepreneur who would soon be leaving New Orleans for Chicago and then on to New York City.First RecordingsThe earliest recordings of the song were little known 1922 sides by The Original Memphis Five on Pathé Actuelle, by Mary Straine and Joseph Smith's Jazz Band on Black Swan Records and by The Virginians on Victor. A better received version was the 1923 release by vocalist Anna Jones with Fats Waller on piano.Arrangements over the years since then ranged from big band jazz to a hokum version by The Alabama Jug Band in 1934, a precursor to jug band revival and string band versions during the 1960s by Dave Van Ronk, Jim Kweskin and The Greenbriar Boys. Our Take on the TuneThe Flood has always been much enamored of those ‘60s string band renditions. Nowadays our version follows Jim Kweskin's idea on his jug band's 1966 Relax Your Mind album to combine “Sister Kate” with another Louis Armstrong standard, “Heebie Jeebies.”On this track, while everybody is on fire, bringing their own hot solos to the mix, we all agree that it is Danny — our newest Floodster — who, as Sam says, “becomes one” with Sister Kate. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, The Animals, and me.

We're closing out 2022 with a real treat. The legendary Tom Paxton joins Dan over the phone, and Dan is truly starstruck. We talk about Tom's favorite Randy songs, plus Woody Guthrie, Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, Chad Mitchell, and a whole lot of Pete Seeger. Then friend-of-the-show Mary from Lansdale joins us for an after-show, where we talk Inside Llewyn Davis, and help separate fact from fiction regarding the NYC Folk Scene. Plus Dan makes fun of Suzanne Vega. If you don't know Tom's work, here's a primer for you: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0mzkM10DEn5LKhvMhbdPTK?si=PvsrkBP2R9-SiSkoG8zRwA See you next year, wheelies!

Episode one hundred and fifty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “White Rabbit”, Jefferson Airplane, and the rise of the San Francisco sound. 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 "Omaha" by Moby Grape. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Erratum I refer to Back to Methuselah by Robert Heinlein. This is of course a play by George Bernard Shaw. What I meant to say was Methuselah's Children. Resources I hope to upload a Mixcloud tomorrow, and will edit it in, but have had some problems with the site today. Jefferson Airplane's first four studio albums, plus a 1968 live album, can be found in this box set. I've referred to three main books here. Got a Revolution!: The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane by Jeff Tamarkin is written with the co-operation of the band members, but still finds room to criticise them. Jefferson Airplane On Track by Richard Molesworth is a song-by-song guide to the band's music. And Been So Long: My Life and Music by Jorma Kaukonen is Kaukonen's autobiography. Some information on Skip Spence and Matthew Katz also comes from What's Big and Purple and Lives in the Ocean?: The Moby Grape Story, by Cam Cobb, which I also used for this week's bonus. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, I need to confess an important and hugely embarrassing error in this episode. I've only ever seen Marty Balin's name written down, never heard it spoken, and only after recording the episode, during the editing process, did I discover I mispronounce it throughout. It's usually an advantage for the podcast that I get my information from books rather than TV documentaries and the like, because they contain far more information, but occasionally it causes problems like that. My apologies. Also a brief note that this episode contains some mentions of racism, antisemitism, drug and alcohol abuse, and gun violence. One of the themes we've looked at in recent episodes is the way the centre of the musical world -- at least the musical world as it was regarded by the people who thought of themselves as hip in the mid-sixties -- was changing in 1967. Up to this point, for a few years there had been two clear centres of the rock and pop music worlds. In the UK, there was London, and any British band who meant anything had to base themselves there. And in the US, at some point around 1963, the centre of the music industry had moved West. Up to then it had largely been based in New York, and there was still a thriving industry there as of the mid sixties. But increasingly the records that mattered, that everyone in the country had been listening to, had come out of LA Soul music was, of course, still coming primarily from Detroit and from the Country-Soul triangle in Tennessee and Alabama, but when it came to the new brand of electric-guitar rock that was taking over the airwaves, LA was, up until the first few months of 1967, the only city that was competing with London, and was the place to be. But as we heard in the episode on "San Francisco", with the Monterey Pop Festival all that started to change. While the business part of the music business remained centred in LA, and would largely remain so, LA was no longer the hip place to be. Almost overnight, jangly guitars, harmonies, and Brian Jones hairstyles were out, and feedback, extended solos, and droopy moustaches were in. The place to be was no longer LA, but a few hundred miles North, in San Francisco -- something that the LA bands were not all entirely happy about: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Who Needs the Peace Corps?"] In truth, the San Francisco music scene, unlike many of the scenes we've looked at so far in this series, had rather a limited impact on the wider world of music. Bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company were all both massively commercially successful and highly regarded by critics, but unlike many of the other bands we've looked at before and will look at in future, they didn't have much of an influence on the bands that would come after them, musically at least. Possibly this is because the music from the San Francisco scene was always primarily that -- music created by and for a specific group of people, and inextricable from its context. The San Francisco musicians were defining themselves by their geographical location, their peers, and the situation they were in, and their music was so specifically of the place and time that to attempt to copy it outside of that context would appear ridiculous, so while many of those bands remain much loved to this day, and many made some great music, it's very hard to point to ways in which that music influenced later bands. But what they did influence was the whole of rock music culture. For at least the next thirty years, and arguably to this day, the parameters in which rock musicians worked if they wanted to be taken seriously – their aesthetic and political ideals, their methods of collaboration, the cultural norms around drug use and sexual promiscuity, ideas of artistic freedom and authenticity, the choice of acceptable instruments – in short, what it meant to be a rock musician rather than a pop, jazz, country, or soul artist – all those things were defined by the cultural and behavioural norms of the San Francisco scene between about 1966 and 68. Without the San Francisco scene there's no Woodstock, no Rolling Stone magazine, no Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, no hippies, no groupies, no rock stars. So over the next few months we're going to take several trips to the Bay Area, and look at the bands which, for a brief time, defined the counterculture in America. The story of Jefferson Airplane -- and unlike other bands we've looked at recently, like The Pink Floyd and The Buffalo Springfield, they never had a definite article at the start of their name to wither away like a vestigial organ in subsequent years -- starts with Marty Balin. Balin was born in Ohio, but was a relatively sickly child -- he later talked about being autistic, and seems to have had the chronic illnesses that so often go with neurodivergence -- so in the hope that the dry air would be good for his chest his family moved to Arizona. Then when his father couldn't find work there, they moved further west to San Francisco, in the Haight-Ashbury area, long before that area became the byword for the hippie movement. But it was in LA that he started his music career, and got his surname. Balin had been named Marty Buchwald as a kid, but when he was nineteen he had accompanied a friend to LA to visit a music publisher, and had ended up singing backing vocals on her demos. While he was there, he had encountered the arranger Jimmy Haskell. Haskell was on his way to becoming one of the most prominent arrangers in the music industry, and in his long career he would go on to do arrangements for Bobby Gentry, Blondie, Steely Dan, Simon and Garfunkel, and many others. But at the time he was best known for his work on Ricky Nelson's hits: [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, "Hello Mary Lou"] Haskell thought that Marty had the makings of a Ricky Nelson style star, as he was a good-looking young man with a decent voice, and he became a mentor for the young man. Making the kind of records that Haskell arranged was expensive, and so Haskell suggested a deal to him -- if Marty's father would pay for studio time and musicians, Haskell would make a record with him and find him a label to put it out. Marty's father did indeed pay for the studio time and the musicians -- some of the finest working in LA at the time. The record, released under the name Marty Balin, featured Jack Nitzsche on keyboards, Earl Palmer on drums, Milt Jackson on vibraphone, Red Callender on bass, and Glen Campbell and Barney Kessell on guitars, and came out on Challenge Records, a label owned by Gene Autry: [Excerpt: Marty Balin, "Nobody But You"] Neither that, nor Balin's follow-up single, sold a noticeable amount of copies, and his career as a teen idol was over before it had begun. Instead, as many musicians of his age did, he decided to get into folk music, joining a vocal harmony group called the Town Criers, who patterned themselves after the Weavers, and performed the same kind of material that every other clean-cut folk vocal group was performing at the time -- the kind of songs that John Phillips and Steve Stills and Cass Elliot and Van Dyke Parks and the rest were all performing in their own groups at the same time. The Town Criers never made any records while they were together, but some archival recordings of them have been released over the decades: [Excerpt: The Town Criers, "900 Miles"] The Town Criers split up, and Balin started performing as a solo folkie again. But like all those other then-folk musicians, Balin realised that he had to adapt to the K/T-event level folk music extinction that happened when the Beatles hit America like a meteorite. He had to form a folk-rock group if he wanted to survive -- and given that there were no venues for such a group to play in San Francisco, he also had to start a nightclub for them to play in. He started hanging around the hootenannies in the area, looking for musicians who might form an electric band. The first person he decided on was a performer called Paul Kantner, mainly because he liked his attitude. Kantner had got on stage in front of a particularly drunk, loud, crowd, and performed precisely half a song before deciding he wasn't going to perform in front of people like that and walking off stage. Kantner was the only member of the new group to be a San Franciscan -- he'd been born and brought up in the city. He'd got into folk music at university, where he'd also met a guitar player named Jorma Kaukonen, who had turned him on to cannabis, and the two had started giving music lessons at a music shop in San Jose. There Kantner had also been responsible for booking acts at a local folk club, where he'd first encountered acts like Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, a jug band which included Jerry Garcia, Pigpen McKernan, and Bob Weir, who would later go on to be the core members of the Grateful Dead: [Excerpt: Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, "In the Jailhouse Now"] Kantner had moved around a bit between Northern and Southern California, and had been friendly with two other musicians on the Californian folk scene, David Crosby and Roger McGuinn. When their new group, the Byrds, suddenly became huge, Kantner became aware of the possibility of doing something similar himself, and so when Marty Balin approached him to form a band, he agreed. On bass, they got in a musician called Bob Harvey, who actually played double bass rather than electric, and who stuck to that for the first few gigs the group played -- he had previously been in a band called the Slippery Rock String Band. On drums, they brought in Jerry Peloquin, who had formerly worked for the police, but now had a day job as an optician. And on vocals, they brought in Signe Toley -- who would soon marry and change her name to Signe Anderson, so that's how I'll talk about her to avoid confusion. The group also needed a lead guitarist though -- both Balin and Kantner were decent rhythm players and singers, but they needed someone who was a better instrumentalist. They decided to ask Kantner's old friend Jorma Kaukonen. Kaukonen was someone who was seriously into what would now be called Americana or roots music. He'd started playing the guitar as a teenager, not like most people of his generation inspired by Elvis or Buddy Holly, but rather after a friend of his had shown him how to play an old Carter Family song, "Jimmy Brown the Newsboy": [Excerpt: The Carter Family, "Jimmy Brown the Newsboy"] Kaukonen had had a far more interesting life than most of the rest of the group. His father had worked for the State Department -- and there's some suggestion he'd worked for the CIA -- and the family had travelled all over the world, staying in Pakistan, the Philippines, and Finland. For most of his childhood, he'd gone by the name Jerry, because other kids beat him up for having a foreign name and called him a Nazi, but by the time he turned twenty he was happy enough using his birth name. Kaukonen wasn't completely immune to the appeal of rock and roll -- he'd formed a rock band, The Triumphs, with his friend Jack Casady when he was a teenager, and he loved Ricky Nelson's records -- but his fate as a folkie had been pretty much sealed when he went to Antioch College. There he met up with a blues guitarist called Ian Buchanan. Buchanan never had much of a career as a professional, but he had supposedly spent nine years studying with the blues and ragtime guitar legend Rev. Gary Davis, and he was certainly a fine guitarist, as can be heard on his contribution to The Blues Project, the album Elektra put out of white Greenwich Village musicians like John Sebastian and Dave Van Ronk playing old blues songs: [Excerpt: Ian Buchanan, "The Winding Boy"] Kaukonen became something of a disciple of Buchanan -- he said later that Buchanan probably taught him how to play because he was such a terrible player and Buchanan couldn't stand to listen to it -- as did John Hammond Jr, another student at Antioch at the same time. After studying at Antioch, Kaukonen started to travel around, including spells in Greenwich Village and in the Philippines, before settling in Santa Clara, where he studied for a sociology degree and became part of a social circle that included Dino Valenti, Jerry Garcia, and Billy Roberts, the credited writer of "Hey Joe". He also started performing as a duo with a singer called Janis Joplin. Various of their recordings from this period circulate, mostly recorded at Kaukonen's home with the sound of his wife typing in the background while the duo rehearse, as on this performance of an old Bessie Smith song: [Excerpt: Jorma Kaukonen and Janis Joplin, "Nobody Loves You When You're Down and Out"] By 1965 Kaukonen saw himself firmly as a folk-blues purist, who would not even think of playing rock and roll music, which he viewed with more than a little contempt. But he allowed himself to be brought along to audition for the new group, and Ken Kesey happened to be there. Kesey was a novelist who had written two best-selling books, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion, and used the financial independence that gave him to organise a group of friends who called themselves the Merry Pranksters, who drove from coast to coast and back again in a psychedelic-painted bus, before starting a series of events that became known as Acid Tests, parties at which everyone was on LSD, immortalised in Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Nobody has ever said why Kesey was there, but he had brought along an Echoplex, a reverb unit one could put a guitar through -- and nobody has explained why Kesey, who wasn't a musician, had an Echoplex to hand. But Kaukonen loved the sound that he could get by putting his guitar through the device, and so for that reason more than any other he decided to become an electric player and join the band, going out and buying a Rickenbacker twelve-string and Vox Treble Booster because that was what Roger McGuinn used. He would later also get a Guild Thunderbird six-string guitar and a Standel Super Imperial amp, following the same principle of buying the equipment used by other guitarists he liked, as they were what Zal Yanovsky of the Lovin' Spoonful used. He would use them for all his six-string playing for the next couple of years, only later to discover that the Lovin' Spoonful despised them and only used them because they had an endorsement deal with the manufacturers. Kaukonen was also the one who came up with the new group's name. He and his friends had a running joke where they had "Bluesman names", things like "Blind Outrage" and "Little Sun Goldfarb". Kaukonen's bluesman name, given to him by his friend Steve Talbot, had been Blind Thomas Jefferson Airplane, a reference to the 1920s blues guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Match Box Blues"] At the band meeting where they were trying to decide on a name, Kaukonen got frustrated at the ridiculous suggestions that were being made, and said "You want a stupid name? Howzabout this... Jefferson Airplane?" He said in his autobiography "It was one of those rare moments when everyone in the band agreed, and that was that. I think it was the only band meeting that ever allowed me to come away smiling." The newly-named Jefferson Airplane started to rehearse at the Matrix Club, the club that Balin had decided to open. This was run with three sound engineer friends, who put in the seed capital for the club. Balin had stock options in the club, which he got by trading a share of the band's future earnings to his partners, though as the group became bigger he eventually sold his stock in the club back to his business partners. Before their first public performance, they started working with a manager, Matthew Katz, mostly because Katz had access to a recording of a then-unreleased Bob Dylan song, "Lay Down Your Weary Tune": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Lay Down Your Weary Tune"] The group knew that the best way for a folk-rock band to make a name for themselves was to perform a Dylan song nobody else had yet heard, and so they agreed to be managed by Katz. Katz started a pre-publicity blitz, giving out posters, badges, and bumper stickers saying "Jefferson Airplane Loves You" all over San Francisco -- and insisting that none of the band members were allowed to say "Hello" when they answered the phone any more, they had to say "Jefferson Airplane Loves You!" For their early rehearsals and gigs, they were performing almost entirely cover versions of blues and folk songs, things like Fred Neil's "The Other Side of This Life" and Dino Valenti's "Get Together" which were the common currency of the early folk-rock movement, and songs by their friends, like one called "Flower Bomb" by David Crosby, which Crosby now denies ever having written. They did start writing the odd song, but at this point they were more focused on performance than on writing. They also hired a press agent, their friend Bill Thompson. Thompson was friends with the two main music writers at the San Francisco Chronicle, Ralph Gleason, the famous jazz critic, who had recently started also reviewing rock music, and John Wasserman. Thompson got both men to come to the opening night of the Matrix, and both gave the group glowing reviews in the Chronicle. Record labels started sniffing around the group immediately as a result of this coverage, and according to Katz he managed to get a bidding war started by making sure that when A&R men came to the club there were always two of them from different labels, so they would see the other person and realise they weren't the only ones interested. But before signing a record deal they needed to make some personnel changes. The first member to go was Jerry Peloquin, for both musical and personal reasons. Peloquin was used to keeping strict time and the other musicians had a more free-flowing idea of what tempo they should be playing at, but also he had worked for the police while the other members were all taking tons of illegal drugs. The final break with Peloquin came when he did the rest of the group a favour -- Paul Kantner's glasses broke during a rehearsal, and as Peloquin was an optician he offered to take them back to his shop and fix them. When he got back, he found them auditioning replacements for him. He beat Kantner up, and that was the end of Jerry Peloquin in Jefferson Airplane. His replacement was Skip Spence, who the group had met when he had accompanied three friends to the Matrix, which they were using as a rehearsal room. Spence's friends went on to be the core members of Quicksilver Messenger Service along with Dino Valenti: [Excerpt: Quicksilver Messenger Service, "Dino's Song"] But Balin decided that Spence looked like a rock star, and told him that he was now Jefferson Airplane's drummer, despite Spence being a guitarist and singer, not a drummer. But Spence was game, and learned to play the drums. Next they needed to get rid of Bob Harvey. According to Harvey, the decision to sack him came after David Crosby saw the band rehearsing and said "Nice song, but get rid of the bass player" (along with an expletive before the word bass which I can't say without incurring the wrath of Apple). Crosby denies ever having said this. Harvey had started out in the group on double bass, but to show willing he'd switched in his last few gigs to playing an electric bass. When he was sacked by the group, he returned to double bass, and to the Slippery Rock String Band, who released one single in 1967: [Excerpt: The Slippery Rock String Band, "Tule Fog"] Harvey's replacement was Kaukonen's old friend Jack Casady, who Kaukonen knew was now playing bass, though he'd only ever heard him playing guitar when they'd played together. Casady was rather cautious about joining a rock band, but then Kaukonen told him that the band were getting fifty dollars a week salary each from Katz, and Casady flew over from Washington DC to San Francisco to join the band. For the first few gigs, he used Bob Harvey's bass, which Harvey was good enough to lend him despite having been sacked from the band. Unfortunately, right from the start Casady and Kantner didn't get on. When Casady flew in from Washington, he had a much more clean-cut appearance than the rest of the band -- one they've described as being nerdy, with short, slicked-back, side-parted hair and a handlebar moustache. Kantner insisted that Casady shave the moustache off, and he responded by shaving only one side, so in profile on one side he looked clean-shaven, while from the other side he looked like he had a full moustache. Kantner also didn't like Casady's general attitude, or his playing style, at all -- though most critics since this point have pointed to Casady's bass playing as being the most interesting and distinctive thing about Jefferson Airplane's style. This lineup seems to have been the one that travelled to LA to audition for various record companies -- a move that immediately brought the group a certain amount of criticism for selling out, both for auditioning for record companies and for going to LA at all, two things that were already anathema on the San Francisco scene. The only audition anyone remembers them having specifically is one for Phil Spector, who according to Kaukonen was waving a gun around during the audition, so he and Casady walked out. Around this time as well, the group performed at an event billed as "A Tribute to Dr. Strange", organised by the radical hippie collective Family Dog. Marvel Comics, rather than being the multi-billion-dollar Disney-owned corporate juggernaut it is now, was regarded as a hip, almost underground, company -- and around this time they briefly started billing their comics not as comics but as "Marvel Pop Art Productions". The magical adventures of Dr. Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts, and in particular the art by far-right libertarian artist Steve Ditko, were regarded as clear parallels to both the occult dabblings and hallucinogen use popular among the hippies, though Ditko had no time for either, following as he did an extreme version of Ayn Rand's Objectivism. It was at the Tribute to Dr. Strange that Jefferson Airplane performed for the first time with a band named The Great Society, whose lead singer, Grace Slick, would later become very important in Jefferson Airplane's story: [Excerpt: The Great Society, "Someone to Love"] That gig was also the first one where the band and their friends noticed that large chunks of the audience were now dressing up in costumes that were reminiscent of the Old West. Up to this point, while Katz had been managing the group and paying them fifty dollars a week even on weeks when they didn't perform, he'd been doing so without a formal contract, in part because the group didn't trust him much. But now they were starting to get interest from record labels, and in particular RCA Records desperately wanted them. While RCA had been the label who had signed Elvis Presley, they had otherwise largely ignored rock and roll, considering that since they had the biggest rock star in the world they didn't need other ones, and concentrating largely on middle-of-the-road acts. But by the mid-sixties Elvis' star had faded somewhat, and they were desperate to get some of the action for the new music -- and unlike the other major American labels, they didn't have a reciprocal arrangement with a British label that allowed them to release anything by any of the new British stars. The group were introduced to RCA by Rod McKuen, a songwriter and poet who later became America's best-selling poet and wrote songs that sold over a hundred million copies. At this point McKuen was in his Jacques Brel phase, recording loose translations of the Belgian songwriter's songs with McKuen translating the lyrics: [Excerpt: Rod McKuen, "Seasons in the Sun"] McKuen thought that Jefferson Airplane might be a useful market for his own songs, and brought the group to RCA. RCA offered Jefferson Airplane twenty-five thousand dollars to sign with them, and Katz convinced the group that RCA wouldn't give them this money without them having signed a management contract with him. Kaukonen, Kantner, Spence, and Balin all signed without much hesitation, but Jack Casady didn't yet sign, as he was the new boy and nobody knew if he was going to be in the band for the long haul. The other person who refused to sign was Signe Anderson. In her case, she had a much better reason for refusing to sign, as unlike the rest of the band she had actually read the contract, and she found it to be extremely worrying. She did eventually back down on the day of the group's first recording session, but she later had the contract renegotiated. Jack Casady also signed the contract right at the start of the first session -- or at least, he thought he'd signed the contract then. He certainly signed *something*, without having read it. But much later, during a court case involving the band's longstanding legal disputes with Katz, it was revealed that the signature on the contract wasn't Casady's, and was badly forged. What he actually *did* sign that day has never been revealed, to him or to anyone else. Katz also signed all the group as songwriters to his own publishing company, telling them that they legally needed to sign with him if they wanted to make records, and also claimed to RCA that he had power of attorney for the band, which they say they never gave him -- though to be fair to Katz, given the band members' habit of signing things without reading or understanding them, it doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that they did. The producer chosen for the group's first album was Tommy Oliver, a friend of Katz's who had previously been an arranger on some of Doris Day's records, and whose next major act after finishing the Jefferson Airplane album was Trombones Unlimited, who released records like "Holiday for Trombones": [Excerpt: Trombones Unlimited, "Holiday For Trombones"] The group weren't particularly thrilled with this choice, but were happier with their engineer, Dave Hassinger, who had worked on records like "Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones, and had a far better understanding of the kind of music the group were making. They spent about three months recording their first album, even while continually being attacked as sellouts. The album is not considered their best work, though it does contain "Blues From an Airplane", a collaboration between Spence and Balin: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Blues From an Airplane"] Even before the album came out, though, things were starting to change for the group. Firstly, they started playing bigger venues -- their home base went from being the Matrix club to the Fillmore, a large auditorium run by the promoter Bill Graham. They also started to get an international reputation. The British singer-songwriter Donovan released a track called "The Fat Angel" which namechecked the group: [Excerpt: Donovan, "The Fat Angel"] The group also needed a new drummer. Skip Spence decided to go on holiday to Mexico without telling the rest of the band. There had already been some friction with Spence, as he was very eager to become a guitarist and songwriter, and the band already had three songwriting guitarists and didn't really see why they needed a fourth. They sacked Spence, who went on to form Moby Grape, who were also managed by Katz: [Excerpt: Moby Grape, "Omaha"] For his replacement they brought in Spencer Dryden, who was a Hollywood brat like their friend David Crosby -- in Dryden's case he was Charlie Chaplin's nephew, and his father worked as Chaplin's assistant. The story normally goes that the great session drummer Earl Palmer recommended Dryden to the group, but it's also the case that Dryden had been in a band, the Heartbeats, with Tommy Oliver and the great blues guitarist Roy Buchanan, so it may well be that Oliver had recommended him. Dryden had been primarily a jazz musician, playing with people like the West Coast jazz legend Charles Lloyd, though like most jazzers he would slum it on occasion by playing rock and roll music to pay the bills. But then he'd seen an early performance by the Mothers of Invention, and realised that rock music could have a serious artistic purpose too. He'd joined a band called The Ashes, who had released one single, the Jackie DeShannon song "Is There Anything I Can Do?" in December 1965: [Excerpt: The Ashes, "Is There Anything I Can Do?"] The Ashes split up once Dryden left the group to join Jefferson Airplane, but they soon reformed without him as The Peanut Butter Conspiracy, who hooked up with Gary Usher and released several albums of psychedelic sunshine pop. Dryden played his first gig with the group at a Republican Party event on June the sixth, 1966. But by the time Dryden had joined, other problems had become apparent. The group were already feeling like it had been a big mistake to accede to Katz's demands to sign a formal contract with him, and Balin in particular was getting annoyed that he wouldn't let the band see their finances. All the money was getting paid to Katz, who then doled out money to the band when they asked for it, and they had no idea if he was actually paying them what they were owed or not. The group's first album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, finally came out in September, and it was a comparative flop. It sold well in San Francisco itself, selling around ten thousand copies in the area, but sold basically nothing anywhere else in the country -- the group's local reputation hadn't extended outside their own immediate scene. It didn't help that the album was pulled and reissued, as RCA censored the initial version of the album because of objections to the lyrics. The song "Runnin' Round This World" was pulled off the album altogether for containing the word "trips", while in "Let Me In" they had to rerecord two lines -- “I gotta get in, you know where" was altered to "You shut the door now it ain't fair" and "Don't tell me you want money" became "Don't tell me it's so funny". Similarly in "Run Around" the phrase "as you lay under me" became "as you stay here by me". Things were also becoming difficult for Anderson. She had had a baby in May and was not only unhappy with having to tour while she had a small child, she was also the band member who was most vocally opposed to Katz. Added to that, her husband did not get on well at all with the group, and she felt trapped between her marriage and her bandmates. Reports differ as to whether she quit the band or was fired, but after a disastrous appearance at the Monterey Jazz Festival, one way or another she was out of the band. Her replacement was already waiting in the wings. Grace Slick, the lead singer of the Great Society, had been inspired by going to one of the early Jefferson Airplane gigs. She later said "I went to see Jefferson Airplane at the Matrix, and they were making more money in a day than I made in a week. They only worked for two or three hours a night, and they got to hang out. I thought 'This looks a lot better than what I'm doing.' I knew I could more or less carry a tune, and I figured if they could do it I could." She was married at the time to a film student named Jerry Slick, and indeed she had done the music for his final project at film school, a film called "Everybody Hits Their Brother Once", which sadly I can't find online. She was also having an affair with Jerry's brother Darby, though as the Slicks were in an open marriage this wasn't particularly untoward. The three of them, with a couple of other musicians, had formed The Great Society, named as a joke about President Johnson's programme of the same name. The Great Society was the name Johnson had given to his whole programme of domestic reforms, including civil rights for Black people, the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts, and more. While those projects were broadly popular among the younger generation, Johnson's escalation of the war in Vietnam had made him so personally unpopular that even his progressive domestic programme was regarded with suspicion and contempt. The Great Society had set themselves up as local rivals to Jefferson Airplane -- where Jefferson Airplane had buttons saying "Jefferson Airplane Loves You!" the Great Society put out buttons saying "The Great Society Really Doesn't Like You Much At All". They signed to Autumn Records, and recorded a song that Darby Slick had written, titled "Someone to Love" -- though the song would later be retitled "Somebody to Love": [Excerpt: The Great Society, "Someone to Love"] That track was produced by Sly Stone, who at the time was working as a producer for Autumn Records. The Great Society, though, didn't like working with Stone, because he insisted on them doing forty-five takes to try to sound professional, as none of them were particularly competent musicians. Grace Slick later said "Sly could play any instrument known to man. He could have just made the record himself, except for the singers. It was kind of degrading in a way" -- and on another occasion she said that he *did* end up playing all the instruments on the finished record. "Someone to Love" was put out as a promo record, but never released to the general public, and nor were any of the Great Society's other recordings for Autumn Records released. Their contract expired and they were let go, at which point they were about to sign to Mercury Records, but then Darby Slick and another member decided to go off to India for a while. Grace's marriage to Jerry was falling apart, though they would stay legally married for several years, and the Great Society looked like it was at an end, so when Grace got the offer to join Jefferson Airplane to replace Signe Anderson, she jumped at the chance. At first, she was purely a harmony singer -- she didn't take over any of the lead vocal parts that Anderson had previously sung, as she had a very different vocal style, and instead she just sang the harmony parts that Anderson had sung on songs with other lead vocalists. But two months after the album they were back in the studio again, recording their second album, and Slick sang lead on several songs there. As well as the new lineup, there was another important change in the studio. They were still working with Dave Hassinger, but they had a new producer, Rick Jarrard. Jarrard was at one point a member of the folk group The Wellingtons, who did the theme tune for "Gilligan's Island", though I can't find anything to say whether or not he was in the group when they recorded that track: [Excerpt: The Wellingtons, "The Ballad of Gilligan's Island"] Jarrard had also been in the similar folk group The Greenwood County Singers, where as we heard in the episode on "Heroes and Villains" he replaced Van Dyke Parks. He'd also released a few singles under his own name, including a version of Parks' "High Coin": [Excerpt: Rick Jarrard, "High Coin"] While Jarrard had similar musical roots to those of Jefferson Airplane's members, and would go on to produce records by people like Harry Nilsson and The Family Tree, he wasn't any more liked by the band than their previous producer had been. So much so, that a few of the band members have claimed that while Jarrard is the credited producer, much of the work that one would normally expect to be done by a producer was actually done by their friend Jerry Garcia, who according to the band members gave them a lot of arranging and structural advice, and was present in the studio and played guitar on several tracks. Jarrard, on the other hand, said categorically "I never met Jerry Garcia. I produced that album from start to finish, never heard from Jerry Garcia, never talked to Jerry Garcia. He was not involved creatively on that album at all." According to the band, though, it was Garcia who had the idea of almost doubling the speed of the retitled "Somebody to Love", turning it into an uptempo rocker: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Somebody to Love"] And one thing everyone is agreed on is that it was Garcia who came up with the album title, when after listening to some of the recordings he said "That's as surrealistic as a pillow!" It was while they were working on the album that was eventually titled Surrealistic Pillow that they finally broke with Katz as their manager, bringing Bill Thompson in as a temporary replacement. Or at least, it was then that they tried to break with Katz. Katz sued the group over their contract, and won. Then they appealed, and they won. Then Katz appealed the appeal, and the Superior Court insisted that if he wanted to appeal the ruling, he had to put up a bond for the fifty thousand dollars the group said he owed them. He didn't, so in 1970, four years after they sacked him as their manager, the appeal was dismissed. Katz appealed the dismissal, and won that appeal, and the case dragged on for another three years, at which point Katz dragged RCA Records into the lawsuit. As a result of being dragged into the mess, RCA decided to stop paying the group their songwriting royalties from record sales directly, and instead put the money into an escrow account. The claims and counterclaims and appeals *finally* ended in 1987, twenty years after the lawsuits had started and fourteen years after the band had stopped receiving their songwriting royalties. In the end, the group won on almost every point, and finally received one point three million dollars in back royalties and seven hundred thousand dollars in interest that had accrued, while Katz got a small token payment. Early in 1967, when the sessions for Surrealistic Pillow had finished, but before the album was released, Newsweek did a big story on the San Francisco scene, which drew national attention to the bands there, and the first big event of what would come to be called the hippie scene, the Human Be-In, happened in Golden Gate Park in January. As the group's audience was expanding rapidly, they asked Bill Graham to be their manager, as he was the most business-minded of the people around the group. The first single from the album, "My Best Friend", a song written by Skip Spence before he quit the band, came out in January 1967 and had no more success than their earlier recordings had, and didn't make the Hot 100. The album came out in February, and was still no higher than number 137 on the charts in March, when the second single, "Somebody to Love", was released: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Somebody to Love"] That entered the charts at the start of April, and by June it had made number five. The single's success also pushed its parent album up to number three by August, just behind the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Monkees' Headquarters. The success of the single also led to the group being asked to do commercials for Levis jeans: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Levis commercial"] That once again got them accused of selling out. Abbie Hoffman, the leader of the Yippies, wrote to the Village Voice about the commercials, saying "It summarized for me all the doubts I have about the hippie philosophy. I realise they are just doing their 'thing', but while the Jefferson Airplane grooves with its thing, over 100 workers in the Levi Strauss plant on the Tennessee-Georgia border are doing their thing, which consists of being on strike to protest deplorable working conditions." The third single from the album, "White Rabbit", came out on the twenty-fourth of June, the day before the Beatles recorded "All You Need is Love", nine days after the release of "See Emily Play", and a week after the group played the Monterey Pop Festival, to give you some idea of how compressed a time period we've been in recently. We talked in the last episode about how there's a big difference between American and British psychedelia at this point in time, because the political nature of the American counterculture was determined by the fact that so many people were being sent off to die in Vietnam. Of all the San Francisco bands, though, Jefferson Airplane were by far the least political -- they were into the culture part of the counterculture, but would often and repeatedly disavow any deeper political meaning in their songs. In early 1968, for example, in a press conference, they said “Don't ask us anything about politics. We don't know anything about it. And what we did know, we just forgot.” So it's perhaps not surprising that of all the American groups, they were the one that was most similar to the British psychedelic groups in their influences, and in particular their frequent references to children's fantasy literature. "White Rabbit" was a perfect example of this. It had started out as "White Rabbit Blues", a song that Slick had written influenced by Alice in Wonderland, and originally performed by the Great Society: [Excerpt: The Great Society, "White Rabbit"] Slick explained the lyrics, and their association between childhood fantasy stories and drugs, later by saying "It's an interesting song but it didn't do what I wanted it to. What I was trying to say was that between the ages of zero and five the information and the input you get is almost indelible. In other words, once a Catholic, always a Catholic. And the parents read us these books, like Alice in Wonderland where she gets high, tall, and she takes mushrooms, a hookah, pills, alcohol. And then there's The Wizard of Oz, where they fall into a field of poppies and when they wake up they see Oz. And then there's Peter Pan, where if you sprinkle white dust on you, you could fly. And then you wonder why we do it? Well, what did you read to me?" While the lyrical inspiration for the track was from Alice in Wonderland, the musical inspiration is less obvious. Slick has on multiple occasions said that the idea for the music came from listening to Miles Davis' album "Sketches of Spain", and in particular to Davis' version of -- and I apologise for almost certainly mangling the Spanish pronunciation badly here -- "Concierto de Aranjuez", though I see little musical resemblance to it myself. [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "Concierto de Aranjuez"] She has also, though, talked about how the song was influenced by Ravel's "Bolero", and in particular the way the piece keeps building in intensity, starting softly and slowly building up, rather than having the dynamic peaks and troughs of most music. And that is definitely a connection I can hear in the music: [Excerpt: Ravel, "Bolero"] Jefferson Airplane's version of "White Rabbit", like their version of "Somebody to Love", was far more professional, far -- and apologies for the pun -- slicker than The Great Society's version. It's also much shorter. The version by The Great Society has a four and a half minute instrumental intro before Slick's vocal enters. By contrast, the version on Surrealistic Pillow comes in at under two and a half minutes in total, and is a tight pop song: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "White Rabbit"] Jack Casady has more recently said that the group originally recorded the song more or less as a lark, because they assumed that all the drug references would mean that RCA would make them remove the song from the album -- after all, they'd cut a song from the earlier album because it had a reference to a trip, so how could they possibly allow a song like "White Rabbit" with its lyrics about pills and mushrooms? But it was left on the album, and ended up making the top ten on the pop charts, peaking at number eight: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "White Rabbit"] In an interview last year, Slick said she still largely lives off the royalties from writing that one song. It would be the last hit single Jefferson Airplane would ever have. Marty Balin later said "Fame changes your life. It's a bit like prison. It ruined the band. Everybody became rich and selfish and self-centred and couldn't care about the band. That was pretty much the end of it all. After that it was just working and living the high life and watching the band destroy itself, living on its laurels." They started work on their third album, After Bathing at Baxter's, in May 1967, while "Somebody to Love" was still climbing the charts. This time, the album was produced by Al Schmitt. Unlike the two previous producers, Schmitt was a fan of the band, and decided the best thing to do was to just let them do their own thing without interfering. The album took months to record, rather than the weeks that Surrealistic Pillow had taken, and cost almost ten times as much money to record. In part the time it took was because of the promotional work the band had to do. Bill Graham was sending them all over the country to perform, which they didn't appreciate. The group complained to Graham in business meetings, saying they wanted to only play in big cities where there were lots of hippies. Graham pointed out in turn that if they wanted to keep having any kind of success, they needed to play places other than San Francisco, LA, New York, and Chicago, because in fact most of the population of the US didn't live in those four cities. They grudgingly took his point. But there were other arguments all the time as well. They argued about whether Graham should be taking his cut from the net or the gross. They argued about Graham trying to push for the next single to be another Grace Slick lead vocal -- they felt like he was trying to make them into just Grace Slick's backing band, while he thought it made sense to follow up two big hits with more singles with the same vocalist. There was also a lawsuit from Balin's former partners in the Matrix, who remembered that bit in the contract about having a share in the group's income and sued for six hundred thousand dollars -- that was settled out of court three years later. And there were interpersonal squabbles too. Some of these were about the music -- Dryden didn't like the fact that Kaukonen's guitar solos were getting longer and longer, and Balin only contributed one song to the new album because all the other band members made fun of him for writing short, poppy, love songs rather than extended psychedelic jams -- but also the group had become basically two rival factions. On one side were Kaukonen and Casady, the old friends and virtuoso instrumentalists, who wanted to extend the instrumental sections of the songs more to show off their playing. On the other side were Grace Slick and Spencer Dryden, the two oldest members of the group by age, but the most recent people to join. They were also unusual in the San Francisco scene for having alcohol as their drug of choice -- drinking was thought of by most of the hippies as being a bit classless, but they were both alcoholics. They were also sleeping together, and generally on the side of shorter, less exploratory, songs. Kantner, who was attracted to Slick, usually ended up siding with her and Dryden, and this left Balin the odd man out in the middle. He later said "I got disgusted with all the ego trips, and the band was so stoned that I couldn't even talk to them. Everybody was in their little shell". While they were still working on the album, they released the first single from it, Kantner's "The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil". The "Pooneil" in the song was a figure that combined two of Kantner's influences: the Greenwich Village singer-songwriter Fred Neil, the writer of "Everybody's Talkin'" and "Dolphins"; and Winnie the Pooh. The song contained several lines taken from A.A. Milne's children's stories: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil"] That only made number forty-two on the charts. It was the last Jefferson Airplane single to make the top fifty. At a gig in Bakersfield they got arrested for inciting a riot, because they encouraged the crowd to dance, even though local by-laws said that nobody under sixteen was allowed to dance, and then they nearly got arrested again after Kantner's behaviour on the private plane they'd chartered to get them back to San Francisco that night. Kantner had been chain-smoking, and this annoyed the pilot, who asked Kantner to put his cigarette out, so Kantner opened the door of the plane mid-flight and threw the lit cigarette out. They'd chartered that plane because they wanted to make sure they got to see a new group, Cream, who were playing the Fillmore: [Excerpt: Cream, "Strange Brew"] After seeing that, the divisions in the band were even wider -- Kaukonen and Casady now *knew* that what the band needed was to do long, extended, instrumental jams. Cream were the future, two-minute pop songs were the past. Though they weren't completely averse to two-minute pop songs. The group were recording at RCA studios at the same time as the Monkees, and members of the two groups would often jam together. The idea of selling out might have been anathema to their *audience*, but the band members themselves didn't care about things like that. Indeed, at one point the group returned from a gig to the mansion they were renting and found squatters had moved in and were using their private pool -- so they shot at the water. The squatters quickly moved on. As Dryden put it "We all -- Paul, Jorma, Grace, and myself -- had guns. We weren't hippies. Hippies were the people that lived on the streets down in Haight-Ashbury. We were basically musicians and art school kids. We were into guns and machinery" After Bathing at Baxter's only went to number seventeen on the charts, not a bad position but a flop compared to their previous album, and Bill Graham in particular took this as more proof that he had been right when for the last few months he'd been attacking the group as self-indulgent. Eventually, Slick and Dryden decided that either Bill Graham was going as their manager, or they were going. Slick even went so far as to try to negotiate a solo deal with Elektra Records -- as the voice on the hits, everyone was telling her she was the only one who mattered anyway. David Anderle, who was working for the label, agreed a deal with her, but Jac Holzman refused to authorise the deal, saying "Judy Collins doesn't get that much money, why should Grace Slick?" The group did fire Graham, and went one further and tried to become his competitors. They teamed up with the Grateful Dead to open a new venue, the Carousel Ballroom, to compete with the Fillmore, but after a few months they realised they were no good at running a venue and sold it to Graham. Graham, who was apparently unhappy with the fact that the people living around the Fillmore were largely Black given that the bands he booked appealed to mostly white audiences, closed the original Fillmore, renamed the Carousel the Fillmore West, and opened up a second venue in New York, the Fillmore East. The divisions in the band were getting worse -- Kaukonen and Casady were taking more and more speed, which was making them play longer and faster instrumental solos whether or not the rest of the band wanted them to, and Dryden, whose hands often bled from trying to play along with them, definitely did not want them to. But the group soldiered on and recorded their fourth album, Crown of Creation. This album contained several songs that were influenced by science fiction novels. The most famous of these was inspired by the right-libertarian author Robert Heinlein, who was hugely influential on the counterculture. Jefferson Airplane's friends the Monkees had already recorded a song based on Heinlein's The Door Into Summer, an unintentionally disturbing novel about a thirty-year-old man who falls in love with a twelve-year-old girl, and who uses a combination of time travel and cryogenic freezing to make their ages closer together so he can marry her: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Door Into Summer"] Now Jefferson Airplane were recording a song based on Heinlein's most famous novel, Stranger in a Strange Land. Stranger in a Strange Land has dated badly, thanks to its casual homophobia and rape-apologia, but at the time it was hugely popular in hippie circles for its advocacy of free love and group marriages -- so popular that a religion, the Church of All Worlds, based itself on the book. David Crosby had taken inspiration from it and written "Triad", a song asking two women if they'll enter into a polygamous relationship with him, and recorded it with the Byrds: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Triad"] But the other members of the Byrds disliked the song, and it was left unreleased for decades. As Crosby was friendly with Jefferson Airplane, and as members of the band were themselves advocates of open relationships, they recorded their own version with Slick singing lead: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Triad"] The other song on the album influenced by science fiction was the title track, Paul Kantner's "Crown of Creation". This song was inspired by The Chrysalids, a novel by the British writer John Wyndham. The Chrysalids is one of Wyndham's most influential novels, a post-apocalyptic story about young children who are born with mutant superpowers and have to hide them from their parents as they will be killed if they're discovered. The novel is often thought to have inspired Marvel Comics' X-Men, and while there's an unpleasant eugenic taste to its ending, with the idea that two species can't survive in the same ecological niche and the younger, "superior", species must outcompete the old, that idea also had a lot of influence in the counterculture, as well as being a popular one in science fiction. Kantner's song took whole lines from The Chrysalids, much as he had earlier done with A.A. Milne: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Crown of Creation"] The Crown of Creation album was in some ways a return to the more focused songwriting of Surrealistic Pillow, although the sessions weren't without their experiments. Slick and Dryden collaborated with Frank Zappa and members of the Mothers of Invention on an avant-garde track called "Would You Like a Snack?" (not the same song as the later Zappa song of the same name) which was intended for the album, though went unreleased until a CD box set decades later: [Excerpt: Grace Slick and Frank Zappa, "Would You Like a Snack?"] But the finished album was generally considered less self-indulgent than After Bathing at Baxter's, and did better on the charts as a result. It reached number six, becoming their second and last top ten album, helped by the group's appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in September 1968, a month after it came out. That appearance was actually organised by Colonel Tom Parker, who suggested them to Sullivan as a favour to RCA Records. But another TV appearance at the time was less successful. They appeared on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, one of the most popular TV shows among the young, hip, audience that the group needed to appeal to, but Slick appeared in blackface. She's later said that there was no political intent behind this, and that she was just trying the different makeup she found in the dressing room as a purely aesthetic thing, but that doesn't really explain the Black power salute she gives at one point. Slick was increasingly obnoxious on stage, as her drinking was getting worse and her relationship with Dryden was starting to break down. Just before the Smothers Brothers appearance she was accused at a benefit for the Whitney Museum of having called the audience "filthy Jews", though she has always said that what she actually said was "filthy jewels", and she was talking about the ostentatious jewellery some of the audience were wearing. The group struggled through a performance at Altamont -- an event we will talk about in a future episode, so I won't go into it here, except to say that it was a horrifying experience for everyone involved -- and performed at Woodstock, before releasing their fifth studio album, Volunteers, in 1969: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Volunteers"] That album made the top twenty, but was the last album by the classic lineup of the band. By this point Spencer Dryden and Grace Slick had broken up, with Slick starting to date Kantner, and Dryden was also disappointed at the group's musical direction, and left. Balin also left, feeling sidelined in the group. They released several more albums with varying lineups, including at various points their old friend David Frieberg of Quicksilver Messenger Service, the violinist Papa John Creach, and the former drummer of the Turtles, Johnny Barbata. But as of 1970 the group's members had already started working on two side projects -- an acoustic band called Hot Tuna, led by Kaukonen and Casady, which sometimes also featured Balin, and a project called Paul Kantner's Jefferson Starship, which also featured Slick and had recorded an album, Blows Against the Empire, the second side of which was based on the Robert Heinlein novel Back to Methuselah, and which became one of the first albums ever nominated for science fiction's Hugo Awards: [Excerpt: Jefferson Starship, "Have You Seen The Stars Tonite"] That album featured contributions from David Crosby and members of the Grateful Dead, as well as Casady on two tracks, but  in 1974 when Kaukonen and Casady quit Jefferson Airplane to make Hot Tuna their full-time band, Kantner, Slick, and Frieberg turned Jefferson Starship into a full band. Over the next decade, Jefferson Starship had a lot of moderate-sized hits, with a varying lineup that at one time or another saw several members, including Slick, go and return, and saw Marty Balin back with them for a while. In 1984, Kantner left the group, and sued them to stop them using the Jefferson Starship name. A settlement was reached in which none of Kantner, Slick, Kaukonen, or Casady could use the words "Jefferson" or "Airplane" in their band-names without the permission of all the others, and the remaining members of Jefferson Starship renamed their band just Starship -- and had three number one singles in the late eighties with Slick on lead, becoming far more commercially successful than their precursor bands had ever been: [Excerpt: Starship, "We Built This City on Rock & Roll"] Slick left Starship in 1989, and there was a brief Jefferson Airplane reunion tour, with all the classic members but Dryden, but then Slick decided that she was getting too old to perform rock and roll music, and decided to retire from music and become a painter, something she's stuck to for more than thirty years. Kantner and Balin formed a new Jefferson Starship, called Jefferson Starship: The Next Generation, but Kantner died in January 2016, coincidentally on the same day as Signe Anderson, who had occasionally guested with her old bandmates in the new version of the band. Balin, who had quit the reunited Jefferson Starship due to health reasons, died two years later. Dryden had died in 2005. Currently, there are three bands touring that descend directly from Jefferson Airplane. Hot Tuna still continue to perform, there's a version of Starship that tours featuring one original member, Mickey Thomas, and the reunited Jefferson Starship still tour, led by David Frieberg. Grace Slick has given the latter group her blessing, and even co-wrote one song on their most recent album, released in 2020, though she still doesn't perform any more. Jefferson Airplane's period in the commercial spotlight was brief -- they had charting singles for only a matter of months, and while they had top twenty albums for a few years after their peak, they really only mattered to the wider world during that brief period of the Summer of Love. But precisely because their period of success was so short, their music is indelibly associated with that time. To this day there's nothing as evocative of summer 1967 as "White Rabbit", even for those of us who weren't born then. And while Grace Slick had her problems, as I've made very clear in this episode, she inspired a whole generation of women who went on to be singers themselves, as one of the first prominent women to sing lead with an electric rock band. And when she got tired of doing that, she stopped, and got on with her other artistic pursuits, without feeling the need to go back and revisit the past for ever diminishing returns. One might only wish that some of her male peers had followed her example.

"Two Trains Running" - From The Blues Project Album "Projections"STEVE KATZ: It was Danny's tribute to Muddy Waters. Danny lived for Muddy Waters, which is sort of understandable given how wonderful, how monumental Muddy and some of his songs were. And that was one of his most monumental songs.AL KOOPER: We started playing it and as we became a better band it became a better arrangement. And there were amazing things in it. It was a really great arrangement. It's nothing like the Muddy Waters version.DANNY KALB: It's one of the great things done by any blues band there is, white or black. And we're going through it and it's powerful, it's like a rock opera but short. And it's Muddy Waters. But it's also us. And it's also showing that America was going down the road through music and a lot of other things of integration. The music was making people take a second look at the hatred.AL KOOPER: What's really funny is on the version that's on the album, Danny's string went out of tune and as part of the arrangement he tuned it back up. It was fabulous, we didn't have to stop. Normally you would stop. But he made it part of the arrangement. That was a great moment.DANNY KALB: We were up there in the studio and there's magic in the air. We were right before the end and I hit one bad note, but I quickly made the bad note into a good note in a quarter of a second. And the thing comes together and ends right and we've got a masterpiece.STEVE KATZ: There was no creativity on the engineers. They were busy setting up for Eric Burdon. They probably were bringing in microphones while we were doing our take.DANNY KALB: I'd been playing it for a long time. I was a folk guitarist and a blues guitarist. I studied with the great Dave Van Ronk, he was my teacher. Dave was one of the greatest. A great blues singer, a great teacher and a great soul. He died a few years ago. He changed my life, he changed [Bob] Dylan's life. We always gave tribute to our mentors. When we played on the same bill as Muddy Waters, who was our hero, a top man, we did "Two Trains Running." After the show, his band was packing up, the show was over and I was packing up and I saw Muddy leaving the Café au Go Go and I had to find out, in my deepest part, what he thought of our version of this tune that started out in the South many years ago, before he recorded it with any electric band. And these strange white people were doing this song. What was that about? So right before Muddy opened the door to go, I went up to Muddy Waters and I said to him, "Mr. Waters -- well, what did you think?" And I knew at that point that he knew what I was asking him. And he said to me, "You really got to me." If I had died then, it would have been enough.

More than a hundred years ago, musicologist John Lomax recorded an African American woman named "Dink" singing a song as she washed her man's clothes in a Texas work camp on the banks of the Brazos River near Houston.Lomax and his son, Alan, were the first to publish it, including it in American Ballads and Folk Songs, which Macmillan brought out in 1934.A decade later, the great Josh White put the song on his first album. Since then, it has been recorded by scores of performers — Pete Seeger and Cisco Houston, Bob Dylan and Fred Neil — sometimes as "Fare Thee Well," but most often simply as "Dink's Song."Now flash forward three quarters of a century and a highlight of Joel and Ethan Coen's extraordinary 2013 film “Inside Llewyn Davis,” set in one winter's week in 1961 Greenwich Village, is Oscar Isaac, in the title role, performing a moody rendition of the same tune.That moment especially resonates with all us folk music lovers, because most of us learned the song from a 1960s recording by the late folk genius Dave Van Ronk, whose work seems to have inspired the Coens' film in the first place. Dear Dave. They didn't call him “the mayor of MacDougal Street” for nothing.Our Take on the TuneHave you ever notice the magic in folk melodies, that they are both ancient and stunningly contemporary at the same time?And the magic doesn't end there. Besides their wonderful timelessness, these well-worn melodies also are almost universal in their emotional appeal.This song has floated around the Floodisphere for many years, but it didn't really take flight until Vanessa came along to blend it with a soulful Old World aire, and then Randy stepped up to take the lead on the vocals. Here, with pensive soloing by Dan and Sam, is our merging of the thoroughly American “Dink's Song” and the lovely Scottish “Loch Lomond.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Visit the pivotal developments of Bob Dylan's professional life in August and September of 1962 as we travel "A Highway of Diamonds" back 60 years ago. Dylan takes a trip back to Minnesota and, missing his girlfriend who was in Italy, calls up Dave Van Ronk in New York and tells John Cohen that he may never  return there without her. He legally changes his name to Bob Dylan, signs with Albert Grossman, plays parties for friends and joins the Carnegie Hall Hootenanny sixty years ago to the night of this episode's broadcast, where he unveils "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" to the world (he had debuted it before a small crowd at the Gaslight Cafe a few days earlier). A 60th anniversary is a diamond anniversary, so this week, and throughout the year, we will periodically take a trip on "a highway of diamonds," exploring the events of Bob Dylan's career sixty years ago. In "20 Pounds of Headlines," we bring you news from the world of Bob Dylan, both in August & September of 1962 and September of 2022. In "Who Did It Better?" we ask you to vote and tell us who did "Tomorrow is a Long Time" better: Ian & Sylvia or The Seldom Scene? Listen to the episode, then go to our Twitter page @RainTrains to vote!

"I Like the Power of the Simple Expression of a Musical Idea."Our guest for this episode of MFM Speaks Out is Jeff Slatnick. Jeff has been an employee and later the owner of Music Inn for over 54 years. Music Inn is one of the oldest music stores in New York City (second in longevity only to Sam Ash). It is a landmark music store in the West Village of NYC specializing in imported world and western instruments, rare and exotic music items, and records. Music Inn has been described as “a museum, rich with music history from around the world.” Music Inn is also the headquarters of Limulus, a company that designs and manufactures unique solid body string instruments.  Slatnick started at Music Inn in 1967 when it was a record and musical instrument store run by Jerry Halpern, the original owner (who'd opened the store in 1958). The Music Inn was frequented by the likes of Bob Dylan when he lived just a few doors down at 161 West 4th Street (and wrote the song “Positively 4th Street” about the time he lived there), as well as John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, John Sebastian, Paul Simon, Ritchie Havens, and many others. In 1968, he left Music Inn to attend the Ali Akbar Khan School of Music in California. He studied under many of today's acknowledged masters of Indian music, including Ali Akbar Khan, Nikhil Banergee, and Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York City in 1976 as an accomplished performer. In 1993, Halpren retired and Slatnick became the owner, in 1998.  They do musical instrument repairs, specializing in repairing instruments few others do.In addition to maintaining Music Inn as an importer and distributor of musical instruments, he and Andy Dowty founded Limulus Musical Instruments. Limulus manufactures unique solid body sitars, sarods, ouds, tamburas, guitars, bass guitars, and custom built hybrid instruments.Music Inn also hosts live performances and open mics.Slatnick is also an accomplished music teacher, specializing in Indian raga.   Topics discussed:Greenwich Village as a historical hub of musical creativity and why so much music and art came from that small geographic location, his beginnings working at Music Inn, mastering repairs on instruments from all over the world, interacting with musicians who frequented Music Inn such as Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, John Lennon, Dave Van Ronk, etc., Slatnick's time studying at the Ali Akbar College of Music, his eventual taking over ownership of Music Inn from original owner Jerry Halpren, the changes and innovations he made in the store's operations. him and Andy Dowty founding Limulus   Music on this episode:"Bluegrass improvisation," by Adrian Koss and the Moonskippers"Old City" by Good Judgement (a.k.a. Dina Pfifer)All music used with permission. 

Welcome to a new episode of I'll Show You Mine! This week, Elyse is showing James the Coen brothers' vision of the early 60s New York folk music scene, ‘Inside Llewyn Davis' from 2013.Join us as we talk about the Coen brothers' skill at depicting the poetic mundanity of life, the dreary setting of a wintry New York, and the real folk singer that inspired it all, Dave Van Ronk.Our next episode will be September 12th, when James shows Elyse ‘Super Paper Mario' for the Wii.Our theme song is by us! James Sparkman and Elyse Wietstock.Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch at @isympodcastIf you like the show please consider giving us a review on Apple Podcasts, and if you would like to chip in to the show and get access to an exclusive extended feed you can become a patron by going to our website, illshowyoumine.show, and clicking “Donate”!”

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Bruce. Dave Van Ronk, new releases, Canada Day. And more.Playlist: The Pan - Angel AwakeDave Van Ronk - Song of the Wandering AengusSteve Earle & The Dukes - Little BirdJay Kuchinsky - Georgia's Canada Day WaltzToronto Tabla Ensemble - O CanadaJocelyn Pettit - CowcaddensKelly McMichael - No Right Way, Louise (Live)Lennie Gallant - Which Way Does The RiverJackson Phibes - She Don't Speak EnglishThe Wretched Refuse String Band - Gaspe ReelPharis & Jason Romero - Been All Around This WorldAllison de Groot & Tatiana Hargreaves - Dead & Gone (Hen Cackle)The North Sound - This LandCarter Felker - FrancineReuben and the Dark - MarionetteMariel Buckley - Red CoyoteHarpoonist & Axe Murderer - RunningVarious Artists - Ana Alby Har Nar - Lebleba

Join us for a tour of Bob Dylan's professional life in May and June of 1962 as we travel "A Highway of Diamonds" back 60 years ago to the month and visit Dylan as he records a Broadside show on topical songwriting on WBAI in New York along with Cynthia Gooding, Pete Seeger, Izzy Young, Gil Turner, and Sis Cunningham and as he bids adieu to his love from a New York ship dock. A 60th anniversary is a diamond anniversary, so this week, and throughout the year, we periodically take a trip on "a highway of diamonds," exploring the events of Bob Dylan's career sixty years ago. In "20 Pounds of Headlines," we bring you news from the world of Bob Dylan, both in May and June of 1962 and May and June of 2022, including a special airing of three songs from the past week from Dylan's touring of the Pacific Northwest. In "Who Did It Better?" we ask you to vote and tell us who did "The Death of Emmett Till" better: Bob Dylan as performed on WBAI in May of 1962 or Coulson, Dean, McGuinness, Flint as recorded ten years later in 1972? Listen to the episode, then go to our Twitter page @RainTrains to vote!

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

Billie Holiday "I Cover the Waterfront"James Booker "Classified"Ike Gordon "Don't Let The Devil Ride"Ray Wylie Hubbard "Freeway Church Of Christ"Howlin' Wolf "Drinkin' C.V. Wine"Cedric Burnside "I Be Trying"Bob Dylan "Romance In Durango"Superchunk "City of the Dead"Emmylou Harris "Sweet Old World"Merle Haggard "I Think I'll Just Stay Here and Drink"Memphis Minnie "Night Watchman Blues (Take 2)"Wanda Jackson "Rip It Up"Fats Waller "Functionizin'"Sonny Boy Williamson "T.B. Blues"Jimmie Rodgers "Dreaming with Tears in My Eyes (Alternate Take)"Lucero "Sometimes"Hayes Carll "Another Like You"Gillian Welch "Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor"Josh White "Strange Fruit"Jack Purvis and His Orchestra "Poor Richard"Slim Harpo "Rainin' in My Heart"Kathleen Edwards "Empty Threat"Valerie June "Colors"Hank Williams "Cold, Cold Heart"Billie Holiday and His Orchestra "Long Gone Blues"George Henry Bussey "When I'm Sober I'm Drunk Blues"Neil Young "No Wonder"Adia Victoria "Lonely Avenue"Adia Victoria "Dead Eyes"The Mountain Goats "New Monster Avenue"Arliss Nancy "Abacus"Lefty Frizzell "Long Black Veil"Blaze Foley "The Moonlight Song"Lucinda Williams "Drunken Angel"Buddy Guy "I Smell a Rat"Built to Spill "Conventional Wisdom"Guitar Junior "The Crawl"Dave Van Ronk "God Bless The Child"Big Joe Turner "Ice Man Blues"Willie Nelson "Railroad Lady"Robert Wilkins "Old Jim Canan's"Albert Ammons "Bass Goin' Crazy"Drag the River "Lucky's"Tom Waits "I Wish I Was In New Orleans [in The Ninth Ward]"Jimi Hendrix "Red house"Billie Holiday, Eddie Heywood's Orchestra "I'll Be Seeing You"

The recording session with Victoria Spivey & Big Joe Williams, playing some tunes at a NYC apartment gathering, finishing "Let Me Die in My Footsteps, writing "Talking Folklore Center," and, of course, the debut of his first album: join us for a tour of Bob Dylan's professional life in March of 1962 as we travel "A Highway of Diamonds" back 60 years ago to the month. A 60th anniversary is a diamond anniversary, so this week, and throughout the year, we will periodically take a trip on "a highway of diamonds," exploring the events of Bob Dylan's career sixty years ago. This week, we listen to what Bob Dylan was up to in March of 1962. In "20 Pounds of Headlines," we bring you news from the world of Bob Dylan, both in March of 1962 and March of 2022. In "Who Did It Better?" we ask you to vote and tell us who did "You're No Good" better: Jesse Fuller or Bob Dylan off his debut album released on March 19, 1962? Listen to the episode, then go to our Twitter page @RainTrains to vote!

Help produce Basic Folk by contributing at basicfolk.com/donateEditor's note: Basic Folk is pleased to introduce our listeners to one of our favorite podcasts by sharing an episode in our feed! American Songcatcher with Nicholas Edward Williams, is an independent audio documentary-style podcast hosted by the folk musician and music history enthusiast.Each episode has five stories: starting with one traditional song's journey to America, followed by the stories of four musicians in American roots starting with legends of the past going all the way to current artists of the day.You'll hear the stories behind songs of immigrants from the British Isles and Europe who brought their tunes into the Appalachian mountains…To songs of the South: Gospel, Bluegrass, Ragtime, Blues, Old-Time, Country, and the Folk music derived from it all.This podcast goes behind the curtain of legends, and shines a light on integral artists who have influenced generations: Bessie Smith, Ola Belle Reed, Blind Blake, Odetta and Dave Van Ronk. I am SHOCKED that Nicholas does not have a journalism background. His approach is warm, insightful and he has the true spirit of a detective uncovering the mysteries of these songs and musicians. It's a wonderful listen!In this Season 2, Episode 2 of American Songcatcher, Nicholas has the following lineup:Traditional – “Lil' Liza Jane” (:28)Dock Boggs (11:22)Snooks Eaglin (25:54)Nina Simone (43:36)Billy Strings (1:04:18) Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Episode 143 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Summer in the City'”, and at the short but productive career of the Lovin' Spoonful.  Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Any More" by the Walker Brothers and the strange career of Scott Walker. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, all the songs excerpted in the podcast can be heard in full at Mixcloud. This box set contains all four studio albums by the Lovin' Spoonful, plus the one album by "The Lovin' Spoonful featuring Joe Butler", while this CD contains their two film soundtracks (mostly inessential instrumental filler, apart from "Darling Be Home Soon") Information about harmonicas and harmonicists comes from Harmonicas, Harps, and Heavy Breathers by Kim Field. There are only three books about the Lovin' Spoonful, but all are worth reading. Do You Believe in Magic? by Simon Wordsworth is a good biography of the band, while his The Magic's in the Music is a scrapbook of press cuttings and reminiscences. Meanwhile Steve Boone's Hotter Than a Match Head: My Life on the Run with the Lovin' Spoonful has rather more discussion of the actual music than is normal in a musician's autobiography. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Let's talk about the harmonica for a while. The harmonica is an instrument that has not shown up a huge amount in the podcast, but which was used in a fair bit of the music we've covered. We've heard it for example on records by Bo Diddley: [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "I'm a Man"] and by Bob Dylan: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Blowin' in the Wind"] and the Rolling Stones: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Little Red Rooster"] In most folk and blues contexts, the harmonicas used are what is known as a diatonic harmonica, and these are what most people think of when they think of harmonicas at all. Diatonic harmonicas have the notes of a single key in them, and if you want to play a note in another key, you have to do interesting tricks with the shape of your mouth to bend the note. There's another type of harmonica, though, the chromatic harmonica. We've heard that a time or two as well, like on "Love Me Do" by the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love Me Do"] Chromatic harmonicas have sixteen holes, rather than the diatonic harmonica's ten, and they also have a slide which you can press to raise the note by a semitone, meaning you can play far more notes than on a diatonic harmonica -- but they're also physically harder to play, requiring a different kind of breathing to pull off playing one successfully. They're so different that John Lennon would distinguish between the two instruments -- he'd describe a chromatic harmonica as a harmonica, but a diatonic harmonica he would call a harp, like blues musicians often did: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love These Goon Shows"] While the chromatic harmonica isn't a particularly popular instrument in rock music, it is one that has had some success in other fields. There have been some jazz and light-orchestral musicians who have become famous playing the instrument, like the jazz musician Max Geldray, who played in those Goon Shows the Beatles loved so much: [Excerpt: Max Geldray, "C-Jam Blues"] And in the middle of the twentieth century there were a few musicians who succeeded in making the harmonica into an instrument that was actually respected in serious classical music. By far the most famous of these was Larry Adler, who became almost synonymous with the instrument in the popular consciousness, and who reworked many famous pieces of music for the instrument: [Excerpt: Larry Adler, "Rhapsody in Blue"] But while Adler was the most famous classical harmonicist of his generation, he was not generally considered the best by other musicians. That was, rather, a man named John Sebastian. Sebastian, who chose to take his middle name as a surname partly to Anglicise his name but also, it seems, at least in part as tribute to Johann Sebastian Bach (which incidentally now makes it really, really difficult to search for copies of his masterwork "John Sebastian Plays Bach", as Internet searches uniformly think you're searching just for the composer...) started out like almost all harmonica players as an amateur playing popular music. But he quickly got very, very, good, and by his teens he was already teaching other children, including at a summer camp run by Albert Hoxie, a musician and entrepreneur who was basically single-handedly responsible for the boom in harmonica sales in the 1920s and 1930s, by starting up youth harmonica orchestras -- dozens or even hundreds of kids, all playing harmonica together, in a semi-militaristic youth organisation something like the scouts, but with harmonicas instead of woggles and knots. Hoxie's group and the various organisations copying it led to there being over a hundred and fifty harmonica orchestras in Chicago alone, and in LA in the twenties and thirties a total of more than a hundred thousand children passed through harmonica orchestras inspired by Hoxie. Hoxie's youth orchestras were largely responsible for the popularity of the harmonica as a cheap instrument for young people, and thus for its later popularity in the folk and blues worlds. That was only boosted in the Second World War by the American Federation of Musicians recording ban, which we talked about in the early episodes of the podcast -- harmonicas had never been thought of as a serious instrument, and so most professional harmonica players were not members of the AFM, but were considered variety performers and were part of the American Guild of Variety Artists, along with singers, ukulele players, and musical saw players. Of course, the war did also create a problem, because the best harmonicas were made in Germany by the Hohner company, but soon a lot of American companies started making cheap harmonicas to fill the gap in the market. There's a reason the cliche of the GI in a war film playing a harmonica in the trenches exists, and it's largely because of Hoxie. And Hoxie was based in Philadelphia, where John Sebastian lived as a kid, and he mentored the young player, who soon became a semi-professional performer. Sebastian's father was a rich banker, and discouraged him from becoming a full-time musician -- the plan was that after university, Sebastian would become a diplomat. But as part of his preparation for that role, he was sent to spend a couple of years studying at the universities of Rome and Florence, learning about Italian culture. On the boat back, though, he started talking to two other passengers, who turned out to be the legendary Broadway songwriting team Rodgers and Hart, the writers of such classic songs as "Blue Moon" and "My Funny Valentine": [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald, "My Funny Valentine"] Sebastian talked to his new friends, and told them that he was feeling torn between being a musician and being in the foreign service like his father wanted. They both told him that in their experience some people were just born to be artists, and that those people would never actually find happiness doing anything else. He took their advice, and decided he was going to become a full-time harmonica player. He started out playing in nightclubs, initially playing jazz and swing, but only while he built up a repertoire of classical music. He would rehearse with a pianist for three hours every day, and would spend the rest of his time finding classical works, especially baroque ones, and adapting them for the harmonica. As he later said “I discovered sonatas by Telemann, Veracini, Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Hasse, Marcello, Purcell, and many others, which were written to be played on violin, flute, oboe, musette, even bagpipes... The composer seemed to be challenging each instrument to create the embellishments and ornaments to suit its particular voice. . . . I set about choosing works from this treasure trove that would best speak through my instrument.” Soon his nightclub repertoire was made up entirely of these classical pieces, and he was making records like John Sebastian Plays Bach: [Excerpt: John Sebastian, "Flute Sonata in B Minor BWV1030 (J.S. Bach)"] And while Sebastian was largely a lover of baroque music above all other forms, he realised that he would have to persuade new composers to write new pieces for the instrument should he ever hope for it to have any kind of reputation as a concert instrument, so he persuaded contemporary composers to write pieces like George Kleinsinger's "Street Corner Concerto", which Sebastian premiered with the New York Philharmonic: [Excerpt: John Sebastian, "Street Corner Concerto"] He became the first harmonica player to play an entirely classical repertoire, and regarded as the greatest player of his instrument in the world. The oboe player Jay S Harrison once wrote of seeing him perform "to accomplish with success a program of Mr. Sebastian's scope is nothing short of wizardry. . . . He has vast technical facility, a bulging range of colors, and his intentions are ever musical and sophisticated. In his hands the harmonica is no toy, no simple gadget for the dispensing of homespun tunes. Each single number of the evening was whittled, rounded, polished, and poised. . . . Mr. Sebastian's playing is uncanny." Sebastian came from a rich background, and he managed to earn enough as a classical musician to live the lifestyle of a rich artistic Bohemian. During the forties and fifties he lived in Greenwich Village with his family -- apart from a four-year period living in Rome from 1951 to 55 -- and Eleanor Roosevelt was a neighbour, while Vivian Vance, who played Ethel Mertz on I Love Lucy, was the godmother of his eldest son. But while Sebastian's playing was entirely classical, he was interested in a wider variety of music. When he would tour Europe, he would often return having learned European folk songs, and while he was living in Greenwich Village he would often be visited by people like Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, and other folk singers living in the area. And that early influence rubbed off on Sebastian's son, John Benson Sebastian, although young John gave up trying to learn the harmonica the first time he tried, because he didn't want to be following too closely in his father's footsteps. Sebastian junior did, though, take up the guitar, inspired by the first wave rock and rollers he was listening to on Alan Freed's show, and he would later play the harmonica, though the diatonic harmonica rather than the chromatic. In case you haven't already figured it out, John Benson Sebastian, rather than his father, is a principal focus of this episode, and so to avoid confusion, from this point on, when I refer to "John Sebastian" or "Sebastian" without any qualifiers, I'm referring to the younger man. When I refer to "John Sebastian Sr" I'm talking about the father. But it was John Sebastian Sr's connections, in particular to the Bohemian folk and blues scenes, which gave his more famous son his first connection to that world of his own, when Sebastian Sr appeared in a TV show, in November 1960, put together by Robert Herridge, a TV writer and producer who was most famous for his drama series but who had also put together documentaries on both classical music and jazz, including the classic performance documentary The Sound of Jazz. Herridge's show featured both Sebastian Sr and the country-blues player Lightnin' Hopkins: [Excerpt: Lightnin' Hopkins, "Blues in the Bottle"] Hopkins was one of many country-blues players whose career was having a second wind after his discovery by the folk music scene. He'd been recording for fourteen years, putting out hundreds of records, but had barely performed outside Houston until 1959, when the folkies had picked up on his work, and in October 1960 he had been invited to play Carnegie Hall, performing with Pete Seeger and Joan Baez. Young John Sebastian had come along with his dad to see the TV show be recorded, and had an almost Damascene conversion -- he'd already heard Hopkins' recordings, but had never seen anything like his live performances. He was at that time attending a private boarding school, Blair Academy, and his roommate at the school also had his own apartment, where Sebastian would sometimes stay. Soon Lightnin' Hopkins was staying there as well, as somewhere he could live rent-free while he was in New York. Sebastian started following Hopkins around and learning everything he could, being allowed by the older man to carry his guitar and buy him gin, though the two never became close. But eventually, Hopkins would occasionally allow Sebastian to play with him when he played at people's houses, which he did on occasion. Sebastian became someone that Hopkins trusted enough that when he was performing on a bill with someone else whose accompanist wasn't able to make the gig and Sebastian put himself forward, Hopkins agreed that Sebastian would be a suitable accompanist for the evening. The singer he accompanied that evening was a performer named Valentine Pringle, who was a protege of Harry Belafonte, and who had a similar kind of sound to Paul Robeson. Sebastian soon became Pringle's regular accompanist, and played on his first album, I Hear America Singing, which was also the first record on which the great trumpet player Hugh Masakela played. Sadly, Paul Robeson style vocals were so out of fashion by that point that that album has never, as far as I can tell, been issued in a digital format, and hasn't even been uploaded to YouTube.  But this excerpt from a later recording by Pringle should give you some idea of the kind of thing he was doing: [Excerpt: Valentine Pringle, "Go 'Way From My Window"] After these experiences, Sebastian started regularly going to shows at Greenwich Village folk clubs, encouraged by his parents -- he had an advantage over his peers because he'd grown up in the area and had artistic parents, and so he was able to have a great deal of freedom that other people in their teens weren't. In particular, he would always look out for any performances by the great country blues performer Mississippi John Hurt. Hurt had made a few recordings for Okeh records in 1928, including an early version of "Stagger Lee", titled "Stack O'Lee": [Excerpt: Mississippi John Hurt, "Stack O'Lee Blues"] But those records had been unsuccessful, and he'd carried on working on a farm. and not performed other than in his tiny home town of Avalon, Mississippi, for decades. But then in 1952, a couple of his tracks had been included on the Harry Smith Anthology, and as a result he'd come to the attention of the folk and blues scholar community. They'd tried tracking him down, but been unable to until in the early sixties one of them had discovered a track on one of Hurt's records, "Avalon Blues", and in 1963, thirty-five years after he'd recorded six flop singles, Mississippi John Hurt became a minor star, playing the Newport Folk Festival and appearing on the Tonight Show. By this time, Sebastian was a fairly well-known figure in Greenwich Village, and he had become quite a virtuoso on the harmonica himself, and would walk around the city wearing a holster-belt containing harmonicas in a variety of different keys. Sebastian became a huge fan of Hurt, and would go and see him perform whenever Hurt was in New York. He soon found himself first jamming backstage with Hurt, and then performing with him on stage for the last two weeks of a residency. He was particularly impressed with what he called Hurt's positive attitude in his music -- something that Sebastian would emulate in his own songwriting. Sebastian was soon invited to join a jug band, called the Even Dozen Jug Band. Jug band music was a style of music that first became popular in the 1920s, and had many of the same musical elements as the music later known as skiffle. It was played on a mixture of standard musical instruments -- usually portable, "folky" ones like guitar and harmonica -- and improvised homemade instruments, like the spoons, the washboard, and comb and paper. The reason they're called jug bands is because they would involve someone blowing into a jug to make a noise that sounded a bit like a horn -- much like the coffee pot groups we talked about way back in episode six. The music was often hokum music, and incorporated elements of what we'd now call blues, vaudeville, and country music, though at the time those genres were nothing like as distinct as they're considered today: [Excerpt: Cincinnati Jug Band, "Newport Blues"] The Even Dozen Jug Band actually ended up having thirteen members, and it had a rather remarkable lineup. The leader was Stefan Grossman, later regarded as one of the greatest fingerpicking guitarists in America, and someone who will be coming up in other contexts in future episodes I'm sure, and they also featured David Grisman, a mandolin player who would later play with the Grateful Dead among many others;  Steve Katz, who would go on to be a founder member of Blood, Sweat and Tears and produce records for Lou Reed; Maria D'Amato, who under her married name Maria Muldaur would go on to have a huge hit with "Midnight at the Oasis"; and Joshua Rifkin, who would later go on to become one of the most important scholars of Bach's music of the latter half of the twentieth century, but who is best known for his recordings of Scott Joplin's piano rags, which more or less single-handedly revived Joplin's music from obscurity and created the ragtime revival of the 1970s: [Excerpt: Joshua Rifkin, "Maple Leaf Rag"] Unfortunately, despite the many talents involved, a band as big as that was uneconomical to keep together, and the Even Dozen Jug Band only played four shows together -- though those four shows were, as Muldaur later remembered, "Carnegie Hall twice, the Hootenanny television show and some church". The group did, though, make an album for Elektra records, produced by Paul Rothchild. Indeed, it was Rothchild who was the impetus for the group forming -- he wanted to produce a record of a jug band, and had told Grossman that if he got one together, he'd record it: [Excerpt: The Even Dozen Jug Band, "On the Road Again"] On that album, Sebastian wasn't actually credited as John Sebastian -- because he was playing harmonica on the album, and his father was such a famous harmonica player, he thought it better if he was credited by his middle name, so he was John Benson for this one album. The Even Dozen Jug Band split up after only a few months, with most of the band more interested in returning to university than becoming professional musicians, but Sebastian remained in touch with Rothchild, as they both shared an interest in the drug culture, and Rothchild started using him on sessions for other artists on Elektra, which was rapidly becoming one of the biggest labels for the nascent counterculture. The first record the two worked together on after the Even Dozen Jug Band was sparked by a casual conversation. Vince Martin and Fred Neil saw Sebastian walking down the street wearing his harmonica holster, and were intrigued and asked him if he played. Soon he and his friend Felix Pappalardi were accompanying Martin and Neil on stage, and the two of them were recording as the duo's accompanists: [Excerpt: Vince Martin and Fred Neil, "Tear Down the Walls"] We've mentioned Neil before, but if you don't remember him, he was one of the people around whom the whole Greenwich Village scene formed -- he was the MC and organiser of bills for many of the folk shows of the time, but he's now best known for writing the songs "Everybody's Talkin'", recorded famously by Harry Nilsson, and "The Dolphins", recorded by Tim Buckley. On the Martin and Neil album, Tear Down The Walls, as well as playing harmonica, Sebastian acted essentially as uncredited co-producer with Rothchild, but Martin and Neil soon stopped recording for Elektra. But in the meantime, Sebastian had met the most important musical collaborator he would ever have, and this is the start of something that will become a minor trend in the next few years, of important musical collaborations happening because of people being introduced by Cass Elliot. Cass Elliot had been a singer in a folk group called the Big 3 -- not the same group as the Merseybeat group -- with Tim Rose, and the man who would be her first husband, Jim Hendricks (not the more famous guitarist of a similar name): [Excerpt: Cass Elliot and the Big 3, "The Banjo Song"] The Big 3 had split up when Elliot and Hendricks had got married, and the two married members had been looking around for other musicians to perform with, when coincidentally another group they knew also split up. The Halifax Three were a Canadian group who had originally started out as The Colonials, with a lineup of Denny Doherty, Pat LaCroix and Richard Byrne. Byrne didn't turn up for a gig, and a homeless guitar player, Zal Yanovsky, who would hang around the club the group were playing at, stepped in. Doherty and LaCroix, much to Yanovsky's objections, insisted he bathe and have a haircut, but soon the newly-renamed Halifax Three were playing Carnegie Hall and recording for Epic Records: [Excerpt: The Halifax Three, "When I First Came to This Island"] But then a plane they were in crash-landed, and the group took that as a sign that they should split up. So they did, and Doherty and Yanovsky continued as a duo, until they hooked up with Hendricks and Elliot and formed a new group, the Mugwumps. A name which may be familiar if you recognise one of the hits of a group that Doherty and Elliot were in later: [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "Creeque Alley"] But we're skipping ahead a bit there. Cass Elliot was one of those few people in the music industry about whom it is impossible to find anyone with a bad word to say, and she was friendly with basically everyone, and particularly good at matching people up with each other. And on February the 7th 1964, she invited John Sebastian over to watch the Beatles' first performance on the Ed Sullivan Show. Like everyone in America, he was captivated by the performance: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Want to Hold Your Hand (live on the Ed Sullivan Show)"] But Yanovsky was also there, and the two played guitar together for a bit, before retreating to opposite sides of the room. And then Elliot spent several hours as a go-between, going to each man and telling him how much the other loved and admired his playing and wanted to play more with him. Sebastian joined the Mugwumps for a while, becoming one of the two main instrumentalists with Yanovsky, as the group pivoted from performing folk music to performing Beatles-inspired rock. But the group's management team, Bob Cavallo and Roy Silver, who weren't particularly musical people, and whose main client was the comedian Bill Cosby, got annoyed at Sebastian, because he and Yanovsky were getting on *too* well musically -- they were trading blues licks on stage, rather than sticking to the rather pedestrian arrangements that the group was meant to be performing -- and so Silver fired Sebastian fired from the group. When the Mugwumps recorded their one album, Sebastian had to sit in the control room while his former bandmates recorded with session musicians, who he thought were nowhere near up to his standard: [Excerpt: The Mugwumps, "Searchin'"] By the time that album was released, the Mugwumps had already split up. Sebastian had continued working as a session musician for Elektra, including playing on the album The Blues Project, which featured white Greenwich Village folk musicians like Eric Von Schmidt, Dave Van Ronk, and Spider John Koerner playing their versions of old blues records, including this track by Geoff Muldaur, which features Sebastian on harmonica and "Bob Landy" on piano -- a fairly blatant pseudonym: [Excerpt: Geoff Muldaur, "Downtown Blues"] Sebastian also played rhythm guitar and harmonica on the demos that became a big part of Tim Hardin's first album -- and his fourth, when the record company released the remaining demos. Sebastian doesn't appear to be on the orchestrated ballads that made Hardin's name -- songs like "Reason to Believe" and "Misty Roses" -- but he is on much of the more blues-oriented material, which while it's not anything like as powerful as Hardin's greatest songs, made up a large part of his repertoire: [Excerpt: Tim Hardin, "Ain't Gonna Do Without"] Erik Jacobsen, the producer of Hardin's records, was impressed enough by Sebastian that he got Sebastian to record lead vocals, for a studio group consisting of Sebastian, Felix Pappalardi, Jerry Yester and Henry Diltz of the Modern Folk Quartet, and a bass singer whose name nobody could later remember. The group, under the name "Pooh and the Heffalumps", recorded two Beach Boys knockoffs, "Lady Godiva" and "Rooty Toot", the latter written by Sebastian, though he would later be embarrassed by it and claim it was by his cousin: [Excerpt: Pooh and the Heffalumps, "Rooty Toot"] After that, Jacobsen became convinced that Sebastian should form a group to exploit his potential as a lead singer and songwriter. By this point, the Mugwumps had split up, and their management team had also split, with Silver taking Bill Cosby and Cavallo taking the Mugwumps, and so Sebastian was able to work with Yanovsky, and the putative group could be managed by Cavallo. But Sebastian and Yanovsky needed a rhythm section. And Erik Jacobsen knew a band that might know some people. Jacobsen was a fan of a Beatles soundalike group called the Sellouts, who were playing Greenwich Village and who were co-managed by Herb Cohen, the manager of the Modern Folk Quartet (who, as we heard a couple of episodes ago, would soon go on to be the manager of the Mothers of Invention). The Sellouts were ultra-professional by the standards  of rock groups of the time -- they even had a tape echo machine that they used on stage to give them a unique sound -- and they had cut a couple of tracks with Jacobsen producing, though I've not been able to track down copies of them. Their leader Skip Boone, had started out playing guitar in a band called the Blue Suedes, and had played in 1958 on a record by their lead singer Arthur Osborne: [Excerpt: Arthur Osborne, "Hey Ruby"] Skip Boone's brother Steve in his autobiography says that that was produced by Chet Atkins for RCA, but it was actually released on Brunswick records. In the early sixties, Skip Boone joined a band called the Kingsmen -- not the same one as the band that recorded "Louie Louie" -- playing lead guitar with his brother Steve on rhythm, a singer called Sonny Bottari, a saxophone player named King Charles, bass player Clay Sonier, and drummer Joe Butler. Sometimes Butler would get up front and sing, and then another drummer, Jan Buchner, would sit in in his place. Soon Steve Boone would replace Bonier as the bass player, but the Kingsmen had no success, and split up. From the ashes of the Kingsmen had formed the Sellouts, Skip Boone, Jerry Angus, Marshall O'Connell, and Joe Butler, who had switched from playing "Peppermint Twist" to playing "I Want to Hold Your Hand" in February 1964. Meanwhile Steve Boone went on a trip to Europe before starting at university in New York, where he hooked up again with Butler, and it was Butler who introduced him to Sebastian and Yanovsky. Sebastian and Yanovsky had been going to see the Sellouts at the behest of Jacobsen, and they'd been asking if they knew anyone else who could play that kind of material. Skip Boone had mentioned his little brother, and as soon as they met him, even before they first played together, they knew from his appearance that he would be the right bass player for them. So now they had at least the basis for a band. They hadn't played together, but Erik Jacobsen was an experienced record producer and Cavallo an experienced manager. They just needed to do some rehearsals and get a drummer, and a record contract was more or less guaranteed. Boone suggested Jan Buchner, the backup drummer from the Kingsmen, and he joined them for rehearsals. It was during these early rehearsals that Boone got to play on his first real record, other than some unreleased demos the Kingsmen had made. John Sebastian got a call from that "Bob Landy" we mentioned earlier, asking if he'd play bass on a session. Boone tagged along, because he was a fan, and when Sebastian couldn't get the parts down for some songs, he suggested that Boone, as an actual bass player, take over: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Maggie's Farm"] But the new group needed a name, of course. It was John Sebastian who came up with the name they eventually chose, The Lovin' Spoonful, though Boone was a bit hesitant about it at first, worrying that it might be a reference to heroin -- Boone was from a very conservative, military, background, and knew little of drug culture and didn't at that time make much of a distinction between cannabis and heroin, though he'd started using the former -- but Sebastian was insistent. The phrase actually referred to coffee -- the name came from "Coffee Blues" by Sebastian's old idol Mississippi John Hurt – or at least Hurt always *said* it was about coffee, though in live performance he apparently made it clear that it was about cunnilingus: [Excerpt: Mississippi John Hurt, "Coffee Blues"] Their first show, at the Night Owl Club, was recorded, and there was even an attempt to release it as a CD in the 1990s, but it was left unreleased and as far as I can tell wasn't even leaked. There have been several explanations for this, but perhaps the most accurate one is just the comment from the manager of the club, who came up to the group after their two sets and told them “Hey, I don't know how to break this to you, but you guys suck.” There were apparently three different problems. They were underrehearsed -- which could be fixed with rehearsal -- they were playing too loud and hurting the patrons' ears -- which could be fixed by turning down the amps -- and their drummer didn't look right, was six years older than the rest of the group, and was playing in an out-of-date fifties style that wasn't suitable for the music they were playing. That was solved by sacking Buchner. By this point Joe Butler had left the Sellouts, and while Herb Cohen was interested in managing him as a singer, he was willing to join this new group at least for the moment. By now the group were all more-or-less permanent residents at the Albert Hotel, which was more or less a doss-house where underemployed musicians would stay, and which had its own rehearsal rooms. As well as the Spoonful, Cass Elliot and Denny Doherty lived there, as did the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Joe Butler quickly fit into the group, and soon they were recording what became their first single, produced by Jacobsen, an original of Sebastian's called "Do You Believe in Magic?", with Sebastian on autoharp and vocals, Yanovsky on lead guitar and backing vocals, Boone on bass, Butler on drums, and Jerry Yester adding piano and backing vocals: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Do You Believe in Magic?"] For a long time, the group couldn't get a deal -- the record companies all liked the song, but said that unless the group were English they couldn't sell them at the moment. Then Phil Spector walked into the Night Owl Cafe, where the new lineup of the group had become popular, and tried to sign them up. But they turned him down -- they wanted Erik Jacobsen to produce them; they were a team. Spector's interest caused other labels to be interested, and the group very nearly signed to Elektra. But again, signing to Elektra would have meant being produced by Rothchild, and also Elektra were an album label who didn't at that time have any hit single acts, and the group knew they had hit single potential. They did record a few tracks for Elektra to stick on a blues compilation, but they knew that Elektra wouldn't be their real home. Eventually the group signed with Charley Koppelman and Don Rubin, who had started out as songwriters themselves, working for Don Kirshner. When Kirshner's organisation had been sold to Columbia, Koppelman and Rubin had gone along and ended up working for Columbia as executives. They'd then worked for Morris Levy at Roulette Records, before forming their own publishing and record company. Rather than put out records themselves, they had a deal to license records to Kama Sutra Records, who in turn had a distribution deal with MGM Records. Koppelman and Rubin were willing to take the group and their manager and producer as a package deal, and they released the group's demo of "Do You Believe In Magic?" unchanged as their first single: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Do You Believe in Magic?"] The single reached the top ten, and the group were soon in the studio cutting their first album, also titled Do You Believe In Magic? The album was a mix of songs that were part of the standard Greenwich Village folkie repertoire -- songs like Mississippi John Hurt's "Blues in the Bottle" and Fred Neil's "The Other Side of This Life" -- and a couple more originals. The group's second single was the first song that Steve Boone had co-written. It was inspired by a date he'd gone on with the photographer Nurit Wilde, who sadly for him didn't go on a second date, and who would later be the mother of Mike Nesmith's son Jason, but who he was very impressed by. He thought of her when he came up with the line "you didn't have to be so nice, I would have liked you anyway", and he and Sebastian finished up a song that became another top ten hit for the group: [Excerpt: (The Good Time Music of) The Lovin' Spoonful, "You Didn't Have to Be So Nice"] Shortly after that song was recorded, but before it was released, the group were called into Columbia TV with an intriguing proposition. Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson, two young TV producers, were looking at producing a TV show inspired by A Hard Day's Night, and were looking for a band to perform in it. Would the Lovin' Spoonful be up for it? They were interested at first, but Boone and Sebastian weren't sure they wanted to be actors, and also it would involve the group changing its name. They'd already made a name for themselves as the Lovin' Spoonful, did they really want to be the Monkees instead? They passed on the idea. Instead, they went on a tour of the deep South as the support act to the Supremes, a pairing that they didn't feel made much sense, but which did at least allow them to watch the Supremes and the Funk Brothers every night. Sebastian was inspired by the straight four-on-the-floor beat of the Holland-Dozier-Holland repertoire, and came up with his own variation on it, though as this was the Lovin' Spoonful the end result didn't sound very Motown at all: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Daydream"] It was only after the track was recorded that Yanovsky pointed out to Sebastian that he'd unconsciously copied part of the melody of the old standard "Got a Date With an Angel": [Excerpt: Al Bowlly, "Got a Date With an Angel"] "Daydream" became the group's third top ten hit in a row, but it caused some problems for the group. The first was Kama Sutra's advertising campaign for the record, which had the words "Lovin' Spoonful Daydream", with the initials emphasised. While the group were drug users, they weren't particularly interested in being promoted for that rather than their music, and had strong words with the label. The other problem came with the Beach Boys. The group were supporting the Beach Boys on a tour in spring of 1966, when "Daydream" came out and became a hit, and they got on with all the band members except Mike Love, who they definitely did not get on with. Almost fifty years later, in his autobiography, Steve Boone would have nothing bad to say about the Wilson brothers, but calls Love "an obnoxious, boorish braggart", a "marginally talented hack" and worse, so it's safe to say that Love wasn't his favourite person in the world. Unfortunately, when "Daydream" hit the top ten, one of the promoters of the tour decided to bill the Lovin' Spoonful above the Beach Boys, and this upset Love, who understandably thought that his group, who were much better known and had much more hits, should be the headliners. If this had been any of the other Beach Boys, there would have been no problem, but because it was Love, who the Lovin' Spoonful despised, they decided that they were going to fight for top billing, and the managers had to get involved. Eventually it was agreed that the two groups would alternate the top spot on the bill for the rest of the tour. "Daydream" eventually reached number two on the charts (and number one on Cashbox) and also became the group's first hit in the UK, reaching number two here as well, and leading to the group playing a short UK tour. During that tour, they had a similar argument over billing with Mick Jagger as they'd had with Mike Love, this time over who was headlining on an appearance on Top of the Pops, and the group came to the same assessment of Jagger as they had of Love. The performance went OK, though, despite them being so stoned on hash given them by the wealthy socialite Tara Browne that Sebastian had to be woken up seconds before he started playing. They also played the Marquee Club -- Boone notes in his autobiography that he wasn't impressed by the club when he went to see it the day before their date there, because some nobody named David Bowie was playing there. But in the audience that day were George Harrison, John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Spencer Davis, and Brian Jones, most of whom partied with the group afterwards. The Lovin' Spoonful made a big impression on Lennon in particular, who put "Daydream" and "Do You Believe in Magic" in his jukebox at home, and who soon took to wearing glasses in the same round, wiry, style as the ones that Sebastian wore. They also influenced Paul McCartney, who wasn't at that gig, but who soon wrote this, inspired by "Daydream": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Good Day Sunshine"] Unfortunately, this was more or less the high point of the group's career. Shortly after that brief UK tour, Zal Yanovsky and Steve Boone went to a party where they were given some cannabis -- and they were almost immediately stopped by the police, subjected to an illegal search of their vehicle, and arrested. They would probably have been able to get away with this -- after all, it was an illegal search, even though of course the police didn't admit to that -- were it not for the fact that Yanovsky was a Canadian citizen, and he could be deported and barred from ever re-entering the US just for being arrested. This was the first major drug bust of a rock and roll group, and there was no precedent for the group, their managers, their label or their lawyers to deal with this. And so they agreed to something they would regret for the rest of their lives. In return for being let off, Boone and Yanovsky agreed to take an undercover police officer to a party and introduce him to some of their friends as someone they knew in the record business, so he would be able to arrest one of the bigger dealers. This was, of course, something they knew was a despicable thing to do, throwing friends under the bus to save themselves, but they were young men and under a lot of pressure, and they hoped that it wouldn't actually lead to any arrests. And for almost a year, there were no serious consequences, although both Boone and Yanovsky were shaken up by the event, and Yanovsky's behaviour, which had always been erratic, became much, much worse. But for the moment, the group remained very successful. After "Daydream", an album track from their first album, "Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?" had been released as a stopgap single, and that went to number two as well. And right before the arrest, the group had been working on what would be an even bigger hit. The initial idea for "Summer in the City" actually came from John Sebastian's fourteen-year-old brother Mark, who'd written a bossa nova song called "It's a Different World". The song was, by all accounts, the kind of thing that a fourteen-year-old boy writes, but part of it had potential, and John Sebastian took that part -- giving his brother full credit -- and turned it into the chorus of a new song: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Summer in the City"] To this, Sebastian added a new verse, inspired by a riff the session player Artie Schroeck had been playing while the group recorded their songs for the Woody Allen film What's Up Tiger Lily, creating a tenser, darker, verse to go with his younger brother's chorus: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Summer in the City"] In the studio, Steve Boone came up with the instrumental arrangement, which started with drums, organ, electric piano, and guitar, and then proceeded to bass, autoharp, guitar, and percussion overdubs. The drum sound on the record was particularly powerful thanks to the engineer Roy Halee, who worked on most of Simon & Garfunkel's records. Halee put a mic at the top of a stairwell, a giant loudspeaker at the bottom, and used the stairwell as an echo chamber for the drum part. He would later use a similar technique on Simon and Garfunkel's "The Boxer". The track still needed another section though, and Boone suggested an instrumental part, which led to him getting an equal songwriting credit with the Sebastian brothers. His instrumental piano break was inspired by Gershwin, and the group topped it off with overdubbed city noises: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Summer in the City"] The track went to number one, becoming the group's only number one record, and it was the last track on what is by far their best album, Hums of the Lovin' Spoonful. That album produced two more top ten hits for the group, "Nashville Cats", a tribute to Nashville session players (though John Sebastian seems to have thought that Sun Records was a Nashville, rather than a Memphis, label), and the rather lovely "Rain on the Roof": [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Rain on the Roof"] But that song caused friction with the group, because it was written about Sebastian's relationship with his wife who the other members of the band despised. They also felt that the songs he was writing about their relationship were giving the group a wimpy image, and wanted to make more rockers like "Summer in the City" -- some of them had been receiving homophobic abuse for making such soft-sounding music. The group were also starting to resent Sebastian for other reasons. In a recent contract renegotiation, a "key member" clause had been put into the group's record contract, which stated that Sebastian, as far as the label was concerned, was the only important member of the group. While that didn't affect decision-making in the group, it did let the group know that if the other members did anything to upset Sebastian, he was able to take his ball away with him, and even just that potential affected the way the group thought about each other. All these factors came into play with a song called "Darling Be Home Soon", which was a soft ballad that Sebastian had written about his wife, and which was written for another film soundtrack -- this time for a film by a new director named Francis Ford Coppola. When the other band members came in to play on the soundtrack, including that track, they found that rather than being allowed to improvise and come up with their own parts as they had previously, they had to play pre-written parts to fit with the orchestration. Yanovsky in particular was annoyed by the simple part he had to play, and when the group appeared on the Ed Sullivan show to promote the record, he mugged, danced erratically, and mimed along mocking the lyrics as Sebastian sang. The song -- one of Sebastian's very best -- made a perfectly respectable number fifteen, but it was the group's first record not to make the top ten: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Darling Be Home Soon"] And then to make matters worse, the news got out that someone had been arrested as a result of Boone and Yanovsky's efforts to get themselves out of trouble the year before. This was greeted with horror by the counterculture, and soon mimeographed newsletters and articles in the underground papers were calling the group part of the establishment, and calling for a general boycott of the group -- if you bought their records, attended their concerts, or had sex with any of the band members, you were a traitor. Yanovsky and Boone had both been in a bad way mentally since the bust, but Yanovsky was far worse, and was making trouble for the other members in all sorts of ways. The group decided to fire Yanovsky, and brought in Jerry Yester to replace him, giving him a severance package that ironically meant that he ended up seeing more money from the group's records than the rest of them, as their records were later bought up by a variety of shell companies that passed through the hands of Morris Levy among others, and so from the late sixties through the early nineties the group never got any royalties. For a while, this seemed to benefit everyone. Yanovsky had money, and his friendship with the group members was repaired. He released a solo single, arranged by Jack Nitzsche, which just missed the top one hundred: [Excerpt: Zal Yanovsky, "Just as Long as You're Here"] That song was written by the Bonner and Gordon songwriting team who were also writing hits for the Turtles at this time, and who were signed to Koppelman and Rubin's company. The extent to which Yanovsky's friendship with his ex-bandmates was repaired by his firing was shown by the fact that Jerry Yester, his replacement in the group, co-produced his one solo album, Alive and Well in Argentina, an odd mixture of comedy tracks, psychedelia, and tributes to the country music he loved. His instrumental version of Floyd Cramer's "Last Date" is fairly listenable -- Cramer's piano playing was a big influence on Yanovsky's guitar -- but his version of George Jones' "From Brown to Blue" makes it very clear that Zal Yanovsky was no George Jones: [Excerpt: Zal Yanovsky, "From Brown to Blue"] Yanovsky then quit music, and went into the restaurant business. The Lovin' Spoonful, meanwhile, made one further album, but the damage had been done. Everything Playing is actually a solid album, though not as good as the album before, and it produced three top forty hits, but the highest-charting was "Six O'Clock", which only made number eighteen, and the album itself made a pitiful one hundred and eighteen on the charts. The song on the album that in retrospect has had the most impact was the rather lovely "Younger Generation", which Sebastian later sang at Woodstock: [Excerpt: John Sebastian, "Younger Generation (Live at Woodstock)"] But at Woodstock he performed that alone, because by then he'd quit the group. Boone, Butler, and Yester decided to continue, with Butler singing lead, and recorded a single, "Never Going Back", produced by Yester's old bandmate from the Modern Folk Quartet Chip Douglas, who had since become a successful producer for the Monkees and the Turtles, and written by John Stewart of the Kingston Trio, who had written "Daydream Believer" for the Monkees, but the record only made number seventy-eight on the charts: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful featuring Joe Butler, "Never Going Back"] That was followed by an album by "The Lovin' Spoonful Featuring Joe Butler", Revelation: Revolution 69, a solo album by Butler in all but name -- Boone claims not to have played on it, and Butler is the only one featured on the cover, which shows a naked Butler being chased by a naked woman with a lion in front of them covering the naughty bits. The biggest hit other than "Never Going Back" from the album was "Me About You", a Bonner and Gordon song which only made number ninety-one: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful Featuring Joe Butler, "Me About You"] John Sebastian went on to have a moderately successful solo career -- as well as his appearance at Woodstock, he released several solo albums, guested on harmonica on records by the Doors, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young and others, and had a solo number one hit in 1976 with "Welcome Back", the theme song from the TV show Welcome Back, Kotter: [Excerpt: John Sebastian, "Welcome Back"] Sebastian continues to perform, though he's had throat problems for several decades that mean he can't sing many of the songs he's best known for. The original members of the Lovin' Spoonful reunited for two performances -- an appearance in Paul Simon's film One Trick Pony in 1980, and a rather disastrous induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000. Zal Yanovsky died of a heart attack in 2002. The remaining band members remained friendly, and Boone, Butler, and Yester reunited as the Lovin' Spoonful in 1991, initially with Yester's brother Jim, who had played in The Association, latterly with other members. One of those other members in the 1990s was Yester's daughter Lena, who became Boone's fourth wife (and is as far as I can discover still married to him). Yester, Boone, and Butler continued touring together as the Lovin' Spoonful until 2017, when Jerry Yester was arrested on thirty counts of child pornography possession, and was immediately sacked from the group. The other two carried on, and the three surviving original members reunited on stage for a performance at one of the Wild Honey Orchestra's benefit concerts in LA in 2020, though that was just a one-off performance, not a full-blown reunion. It was also the last Lovin' Spoonful performance to date, as that was in February 2020, but Steve Boone has performed with John Sebastian's most recent project, John Sebastian's Jug Band Village, a tribute to the Greenwich Village folk scene the group originally formed in, and the two played together most recently in December 2021. The three surviving original members of the group all seem to be content with their legacy, doing work they enjoy, and basically friendly, which is more than can be said for most of their contemporaries, and which is perhaps appropriate for a band whose main songwriter had been inspired, more than anything else, to make music with a positive attitude.