Podcast appearances and mentions of David Marks

Ever wondered what really happens behind closed doors in dental practice sales and private equity deals? In this episode, Emmet Scott sits down with Eric Scalzo and David Marks, Partners at Holland & Knight, to uncover the evolving world of dental M&A. They break down what buyers are really looking for, why compliance and culture go hand-in-hand, and how to build a business others actually want to buy. If you're thinking about scaling, selling, or simply leading smarter—this one's for you.

Julia Hobsbawm is joined by David Marks and Jason Blank, the co-founders of Brockton Everlast, the company behind Fora, the flexible workplace provider.  Recorded at Fora's building on Soho's Broadwick Street, they discuss how mixing “workboots and wingtips”, building expertise and business acumen, has shaped their approach to building a better future of work. They also explore property development, the ascendence of small businesses, and how smart, human-centred buildings are reshaping cities. The conversation also marks the launch of The Fora Institute of Work. The Nowhere Office is a Fully Connected production in partnership with Sandstone Global Productions. Music by Julian Brezon. Discover more at workathon.io. Links: Recorded at Soho Radio: https://sohoradiolondon.com/ Fora: https://www.foraspace.com/ ⁠Brockton Everlast: https://www.brocktoneverlast.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Listen to ASCO's Journal of Clinical Oncology Art of Oncology article, "Writing a Medical Memoir: Lessons From a Long, Steep Road” by David Marks, consultant at University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust. The article is followed by an interview with Marks and host Dr. Mikkael Sekeres. Marks shares his challenging journey of writing a memoir describing his patients and career. Transcript Narrator: Writing a Medical Memoir: Lessons From a Long, Steep Road, by David Marks, PhD, MBBS, FRACP, FRCPath  The purpose of this essay is to take hematologist/oncologist readers of the Journal on my challenging journey of trying to write a memoir describing my patients and career. This piece is not just for those who might wish to write a book, it also can be generalized to other creative writing such as short stories or other narrative pieces intended for publication. My experience is that many of my colleagues have considered doing this but do not know where to start and that many embarking on this journey lack the self-confidence most writers require. I also describe other issues that unexpectably arose, particularly my struggle to get the book to its intended target audience, and of writing about myself in such a personal way. In my book of semifiction, I tell the stories of my patients with leukemia, but also describe what it is like to be a physician looking after young patients with curable but life-threatening diseases. I recount my medical career and working in the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS), a very different health system to the one I experienced when I worked in Philadelphia during the early 1990s. Telling the stories of my patients with leukemia (and my story) was my main motivation but I also wanted to challenge my creative writing skills in a longer format. As a young person, I wrote essays and some poetry. As a hemato-oncologist, the major outputs of my writing have been over 300 scientific papers and a 230-page PhD thesis. The discipline required to write papers does help with writing a nonfiction book, and as with writing scientific papers, the first step is having a novel idea. I admired the work of Siddhartha Mukherjee (“The Emperor of all Maladies”) and Mikkael Sekeres (“When Blood Breaks Down”), but I wanted to write about my patients and their effect upon me from a more personal perspective. I obtained written consent from the patients I wrote about; nearly all of them were happy for me to use their first name; they trusted me to tell their stories. All of the patients' stories have a substantial basis in fact. I also wrote about colleagues and other people I encountered professionally, but those parts were semifiction. Names, places, times, and details of events were changed to preserve anonymity. For example, one subchapter titled “A tale of two managers” comprises events that relate to a number of interactions with NHS medical managers over 30 years. The managers I wrote about represent a combination of many people, but it would not have been possible to write this while still working at my hospital. I had wanted to write a book for years but like most transplanters never had the sustained free time to jot down more than a few ideas. In the second UK lockdown of 2020 when we were only allowed to go out to work and for an hour of exercise, we all had more time on our hands. A columnist in the Guardian said that people should have a “lockdown achievement”; this would be mine. This is how I went about it. I knew enough about writing to know that I could not just go and write a book. I considered a university writing degree, but they were all online: There was not the nourishment of meeting and interacting with fellow writers. I joined two virtual writing groups and got some private sessions with the group's leader. We had to write something every week, submitted on time, and open for discussion. In one writing group, there was a no negative criticism rule, which I found frustrating, as I knew my writing was not good enough and that I needed to improve. I had no shortage of ideas, stories to tell, and patients and anecdotes to write about. I have a pretty good memory for key conversations with patients but learned that I did not have to slavishly stick to what was said. I also wrote about myself: my emotions and the obstacles I encountered. To understand how I guided my patients' journeys, my readers would need to understand me and my background. I carried a notebook around and constantly wrote down ideas, interesting events, and phrases. Every chapter underwent several drafts and even then much was totally discarded. I was disciplined and tried to write something every day, realizing that if I did not make progress, I might give up. Most days the words flowed; refining and editing what I wrote was the difficult part. Very different to Graham Greene in Antibes. He would go to his local café, write 200-400 words, then stop work for the day and have his first glass of wine with lunch before an afternoon siesta. How would I tell the story? My story was chronological (in the main), but I felt no need for the patient stories to be strictly in time order. The stories had titles and I did not avoid spoilers. “Too late” is the story of a patient with acute promyelocytic leukemia who died before she could receive specialist medical attention. This had a devastating effect on the GP who saw her that morning. So, there were plenty of patient stories to tell, but I needed to learn the craft of writing. Visual description of scenes, plots, and giving hints of what is to come—I had to learn all these techniques. Everything I wrote was looked at at least once by my mentor and beta readers, but I also submitted my work for professional review by an experienced editor at Cornerstones. This person saw merit in my work but said that the stories about myself would only interest readers if I was “somebody like David Attenborough.” Other readers said the stories about me were the most interesting parts. So far, I have focused on the mechanics and logistics of writing, but there is more to it than that. My oncology colleague Sam Guglani, who has successfully published in the medical area, was very useful. I asked him how his second book was progressing. “Not very well.” “Why?” “It takes a lot of time and I'm not very confident.” Sam writes such lovely prose; Histories was positively reviewed yet even he still has self-doubt. Hematologists/oncologists, transplanters, and chimeric antigen receptor T cell physicians are often confident people. Most of the time we know what to do clinically, and when we give medical advice, we are secure in our knowledge. This is because we have undergone prolonged training in the areas we practice in and possess the scientific basis for our decisions. This is not the case when doctors take on creative writing. Few of us have training; it is out of our comfort zone. Nearly all new writers are insecure, in a constant state of worry that our outpourings are not “good enough,” that “nobody will like it.” Even high-quality memoirs may be hard to get published. I did not enter this thinking I would fail, and I have received feedback that I “can write.” But when you look at people who can really write, who have already been published, and earn a living from writing, you think that you will never be as good. Does this matter for a medical memoir? Yes, it does. I came to realize to improve it is important to surround yourself with people who read a lot and preferably with some who are well-regarded published writers. These people should offer unrestrained feedback, and you should take note. However, I learned you do not need to do everything they say—it is not like responding to the reviewers of scientific papers—your book should retain your individual stamp and cover what you think is important. I found there are risks in writing a memoir. Private matters become public knowledge to your family and friends. In a hospital you have lots of work relationships, not all of which are perfect. It can be a tense environment; you often have to keep quiet. Writing about them in a book, even if colleagues and events are disguised or anonymized, runs the risk of colleagues recognizing themselves and not being happy with how they are portrayed. Writing a book's first draft is hard; getting it to its final draft even harder but perhaps not harder than writing a major paper for JCO or Blood. (For me writing the discussion section of a paper was the most difficult task). However, finding an agent is perhaps the hardest of all. Every agent has their own laborious submission system. About a third of agents do not respond at all; they may not even read your book. Another third may send you a response (after up to 3 months) saying that the book is “not for me.” Three agents told me that their own experiences with cancer made it impossible for them to read the book while others said it was a worthwhile project but it was not their area of interest. That encouraged me. It required resilience to get Life Blood published. I did not have the skills to self-publish, but I found a publisher that would accept the book, provided I contributed to the costs of publishing. This was not easy either because my book did not have as much final editing as a conventional publisher provides. Getting the book to its target audience was another major challenge. A number of hematologic journals agreed to consider reviews of the book, and my colleagues were generous in offering to review it. However, I wanted my book to be read by people with cancer and their families: nearly all of us at some point in our lives. A digital marketing consultant helped me publicize the book on social media and construct a user-friendly Web site. I hope this reflection offers some encouragement for budding authors who are hematologists/oncologists. However, as all writers reading this will know, writing is a lonely pursuit; it is something you do on your own for long periods and you cannot be sure your work will ever see the light of day. One of the main ingredients is persistence; this is probably the main difference between people who finish books and those who do not. Of course there may be benefits to physicians from writing per se, even if it is never published, although most hematologists/oncologists I know are quite goal oriented. Was it all worthwhile? Yes, I think so. Writing about my career stirred up lots of memories and has been quite cathartic. Physicians often feel they have insufficient time to reflect on their practice. It made me reflect on my achievements and what I could have done better. Could I have worked harder for my patients (rarely) or thought of therapeutic interventions earlier (sometimes)? What about my professional relationships? In my efforts to do the best for my patients, was I sometimes too impatient (yes)? I hope the book inspires young people contemplating a career in hematology/oncology but also gives them a realistic idea of the commitment it requires; even relatively successful doctors encounter adversity. To all my hematologic/oncologic and transplant colleagues worldwide, if you think you have a book in you, find the time and the intellectual space, start writing but also get help. In telling the story of your patients you honor them; it is a very satisfying thing to do but there are risks. I have had lots of feedback from friends and colleagues, the great majority of it positive, but when my book was published, I prepared myself for more critical reviews. I learned a lot from writing Life Blood; at the end, I was a stronger, more secure writer and hematologist/oncologist, more confident that the story of my patients and career was worth telling and relevant to a wider audience. Dr. Mikkael Sekeres: Hello, and welcome to JCO's Cancer Stories: The Art of Oncology, which features essays and personal reflections from authors exploring their experience in the oncology field. I'm your host, Dr. Mikkael Sekeres. I'm Professor of Medicine and Chief of the Division of Hematology at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, University of Miami. And what a pleasure it is today to be joined by Professor David Marks, a consultant at University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust in the UK. In this episode, we will be discussing his Art of Oncology article, "Writing a Medical Memoir: Lessons from a Long, Steep Road." Our guest's disclosures will be linked in the transcript. David, welcome to our podcast, and thanks so much for joining us. Professor David Marks: Thank you very much for inviting me. It's a real honor. Dr. Mikkael Sekeres: David, I really enjoyed your piece. We've never had a "how to write a memoir" sort of piece in Art of Oncology, so it was a great opportunity. And, you know, I think 30 years ago, it was extraordinarily rare to have a doctor who also was a writer. It's become more common, and as we've grown, still among our elite core of doctor-writers, we've also birthed some folks who actually write in long form—actual books, like you did. Professor David Marks: I'd sort of become aware that I wasn't the only person doing this, that there were lots of people who liked creative writing, but they had difficulties sort of turning that into a product. This was the reason for sort of writing this. I'm hardly an expert; I've only written one book, but I sort of hope that my experiences might encourage others. Dr. Mikkael Sekeres: I think it's a terrific idea. And before we get started about the book, I, of course, know you because you and I run in some of the same academic circles, but I wonder if you could tell our listeners a little bit about yourself. Professor David Marks: So, I'm Australian. That's where I did my internal medical and hematology training in Melbourne. And then I did a PhD to do with acute lymphoblastic leukemia at the University of Melbourne. I then moved to London for three years to do some specialist training in bone marrow transplantation and some lab work, before spending three years in Philadelphia, where I did transplant, leukemia, and some more lab work. And then, mainly for family reasons, moved back to the UK to take up a post in Bristol. I have retired from patient-facing practice now, although I still give medical advice, and I'm doing some consulting for a CAR T-cell company based in LA. Dr. Mikkael Sekeres: Great. And can I ask you, what drew you to focus on treating people with leukemia and doing research in that area? Professor David Marks: I think leukemia is just such a compelling disease. From really the first patient I ever looked after, there was a person who is both life-threateningly ill, has had their life turned upside down. Yet, there is—increasingly now—there's an opportunity to cure them or, at the very least, prolong their life significantly. And also, its sort of proximity to scientific research—that was the attraction for me. Dr. Mikkael Sekeres: There is something compelling about cancer stories in general. I think we talk about the privilege of doing what we do, and I think part of that is being invited into people's lives at probably one of the most dramatic moments of those lives. We're, of course, unwelcome visitors; nobody wants a diagnosis of cancer and having to have that initial conversation with an oncologist. But I wonder if, as doctors and as writers, we feel compelled to share that story and really celebrate what our patients are going through. Professor David Marks: So, that absolutely is one of my main motivations. I thought- there aren't, to my mind, all that many books out there that sort of try and tell things from both the patient with leukemia's point of view and the doctors looking after them. And I thought that their stories should be told. It's such a dramatic and frightening time, but I think the struggles that people go through in dealing with this—I think this is something I sort of felt people should have the opportunity to learn about. Dr. Mikkael Sekeres: Yeah, we're really honoring our patients, aren't we? Professor David Marks: Absolutely. When you think of the patients you've looked after, their courage, their steadfastness in dealing with things, of just battling on when they're not well and they're scared of things like dying—you've just got to admire that. Dr. Mikkael Sekeres: Yeah, yeah. David, you have a tremendous number of academic publications and have been transformative in how we treat people who have acute lymphoblastic leukemia. How did you first get into writing narrative medicine? Professor David Marks: Although I have written quite a lot scientifically, although that is incredibly different to creative writing, some of the same sort of care that one needs with a scientific paper, you do need for creative writing. I always liked English at school, and, you know, even as a teenager, I wrote some, you know, some poetry; it frankly wasn't very good, but I had a go. I came to a point where I wanted to write about my patients and a bit about my career. I had trouble finding the time; I had trouble finding the sort of intellectual space. But then COVID and lockdown occurred, and, you know, all of us had a lot more time; you know, we weren't even allowed to leave the house apart from working. So, at that point, I started writing. Prior to that, though, I had sort of kept a notebook, a quite big notebook, about stories I wanted to tell and events in my career and life that I wanted to tell. So there was something of a starting point there to go from. But when I first started writing, I realized that I just didn't know enough about writing. I needed to learn the craft of writing, and so I also joined a couple of writing groups. Dr. Mikkael Sekeres: That's—I find that absolutely fascinating. I think there are a lot of people who want to write, and there are some who have the confidence to go ahead and start writing, right? Whether they know the craft or not. And there are others who pause and say, "Wait a second, I've done a lot of reading, I've done a lot of academic writing, but I'm not sure I know how to do this in a creative way." So, what was your first step? Professor David Marks: I had sort of notes on these stories I wanted to write, and I did just try and write the sort of two- to five-page story, but I then sort of realized that it was just—it just wasn't very good. And I needed to learn really all the basic things that writers need, like developing a plot, like giving hints of what's to come, using visual description. Those things are obviously completely different to scientific writing, and I—it was a bit like going back to school, really. Dr. Mikkael Sekeres: And how did you even find writing groups that were at the right level for someone who was starting on this journey? Professor David Marks: So, I got a recommendation of a sort of local group in Bristol and a very established sort of mentor who has actually mentored me, Alison Powell. But it is difficult because some people on the group had written and published a couple of books; they were way ahead of me. And some people were just really starting out. But there were enough people at my level to give me sort of useful criticism and feedback. But yes, finding the right writing group where there's a free interchange of ideas—that is difficult. And, of course, my—what I was writing about was pretty much different to what everybody else was writing about. Dr. Mikkael Sekeres: So, you joined a writing group that wasn't specific to people in healthcare? Professor David Marks: There was something at my hospital; it was a quite informal group that I joined, and that had a whole number of healthcare professionals, but that didn't keep going. So, I joined a group that was really a mixture of people writing memoirs and also some people writing fiction. And I actually found a lot of the things that people writing fiction write, I needed to learn. A lot of those skills still apply to a sort of non-fictional or semi-fiction book. Dr. Mikkael Sekeres: You write in your Art of Oncology piece—I think a very insightful portion of it—where you're identifying people who can give you feedback about your writing, and you're looking for honest feedback. Because there are a lot of people where you might show them a piece and they say, "Gee, this is David Marks, I better say something nice. I mean, it's David Marks after all.” Right? So, you don't want that sort of obsequiousness when you're handing over a piece of writing because you need truth to be told if it's compelling or if it's not compelling. How did you identify the people who could give you that honest feedback, but also people you trust? Because there are also people who might read a piece and might be jealous and say, "Gee, David's already going on this journey, and I wish I had done this years ago," and they might not give you the right kind of feedback. Professor David Marks: Yeah, I mean, one of the writing groups I joined, there was a sort of "no criticism, no negative criticism" rule, and I did not find that to be useful because I knew my writing, frankly, wasn't good enough. So, funnily enough, my wife—she's very lucky—she has this reading group that she's had for 25 years, and these are—they're all women of her age, and they are just big, big readers. And those were my principal beta readers. And I sort of know them, and they knew that I wanted direction about, you know, what was working and what was not working. And so they were fairly honest. If they liked something, they said it. And if there was a chapter they just didn't think worked, they told me. And I was really very grateful for that. The other thing I did at a sort of critical moment in the book, when I just thought I was not on track, is I sent it to a professional editor at Cornerstones. And that person I'd never met, so they had no—you know, they didn't need to sort of please me. And that review was very helpful. I didn't agree with all of it, but it was incredibly useful. Dr. Mikkael Sekeres: That's fascinating. So, I've submitted pieces in venues where people can post comments, and I always force myself to read the comments. And sometimes that hurts a little bit when you get some comments back and think, "Oh my word, I didn't mean that." Sometimes those comments illuminate things that you never intended for people to take away from the piece. And sometimes you get comments where people really like one aspect, and you didn't even know that would resonate with them. So, any comments you can think of that you got back where you thought, "Oh my word, I never intended that," or the opposite, where the comments were actually quite complimentary and you didn't anticipate it? Professor David Marks: I was reviewed by an independent reviewer for The Lancet Haematology. And you've read my book, so you sort of know that looking after people with leukemia, you do encounter quite a lot of people who die. And she sort of, almost as a criticism, said, "Professor David Marks seems to have encountered an extraordinary number of people who've died." And I thought—almost as a sort of criticism—and I thought, "I'm sort of sorry, but that's the area we occupy, unfortunately." There's lots of success, but there is, you know, sometimes we don't succeed. So I found that—I found that hard to read. But when you open yourself up as a writer, when you talk about your personal things, you've got to develop a bit of a thick skin. And I really haven't ego about my writing. I sort of still feel it's very much in its formative stages, so I'm quite open to criticism. Dr. Mikkael Sekeres: And were there comments that you got that were—you were pleasantly surprised that people liked one aspect of the book, and you didn't know it would really hit with them that way? Professor David Marks: I think they particularly liked the patient stories. There's one thing in the book about a young woman who has this amazing experience of being rescued by CAR T-cell therapy. This young lady's still alive. And that very much sort of captured the imagination of the readers. They really identified her and wanted to sort of know about her and, you know, was she still okay and so on. Dr. Mikkael Sekeres: I remember there was a piece I wrote, and included a patient, and it was an entree to write about a medical topic, and my editor got back to me and said, "What happened to the patient?" Right? People get invested in this. We've done this our entire careers for, for decades for some people who've been in the field for that long, and you forget that it's still a diagnosis, a disease that most people don't encounter in their lives, and they get invested in the patients we describe and are rooting for them and hope that they do okay. Professor David Marks: Yeah, I found people got very involved with the patients, and I've had actually several sort of inquiries; they want to know if the patients are still okay. And I think that I can definitely understand that from a sort of human level. Dr. Mikkael Sekeres: So, you wrote a memoir. How long did it take you? Professor David Marks: I suppose from the time I really started writing properly, I'd say about two and a half years. So, quite a long time. Dr. Mikkael Sekeres: Two and a half years. That can be daunting to some people. What advice would you give them if they're thinking about going down this path? Professor David Marks: I think it's a very rewarding thing to do. It is hard work, as you and I know, and it's sort of extra work. The only way to find out if you can do it is to try to do it. And try and find some time to do it, but get help. You know, seek the company of other people who are more experienced writers and sort of find a mentor. Somehow, you've got to, I guess, believe in yourself, really, and trust yourself that what you're writing about is worthwhile. And yeah, I don't know that I have specific advice for people about that aspect of things. Dr. Mikkael Sekeres: Well, I think that's a great place actually to end: to tell people to believe in themselves and trust in themselves. And I want to encourage everyone listening to this podcast to please check out Professor David Marks' book, Lifeblood: Tales of Leukemia Patients and Their Doctor. It's a terrific read. David, thank you so much for joining us today. Professor David Marks: Thanks very much, Mikkael. It's been a pleasure. Dr. Mikkael Sekeres: It's been delightful from my perspective. Until next time, thank you for listening to JCO's Cancer Stories: The Art of Oncology. Don't forget to give us a rating or review, and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. You can find all of ASCO's shows at asco.org/podcasts. Until next time, thank you, everyone.   The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.   Show Notes: Like, share and subscribe so you never miss an episode and leave a rating or review. ADD URLhttps://ascopubs.org/journal/jco/cancer-stories-podcast Guest Bio: Professor David Marks is a consultant at University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust in the UK.   Additional Reading: Life Blood: Stories of Leukaemia Patients and Their Doctor, by David Marks

David Marks never stayed in one place for long after leaving The Beach Boys. In this special episode, David Marks biographer and Beach Boys author Jon Stebbins steps aboard the Discograffiti train to address the ridiculous controversy behind the volatile David Marks season opener interview, before transitioning into a blow-by-blow account of a consistently fascinating career that has as its trademark the appearance of having very little connective thread of which to speak. Here's just a few of the many things that Jon discusses with Discograffiti in this podcast:A postscript commentary on Discograffiti's controversial David Marks interview with his biographer, a man who knows him better than most;Some of the wild behavior that got David sacked from The Beach Boys;How David's income was cut off months before David was actually removed from the band;Murry Wilson's bizarre, vengeful campaign to squash any chances that David Marks & The Marksmen may have had at being successful…while simultaneously offering them assistance, too;And the ways in which LSD began to color his musical stylings during the late 1960s.Listen: linktr.ee/discograffitiI support a wife and a six-year-old son with Discograffiti as my sole source of income. If you're a Beach Boys superfan like me, you'll want The Director's Cut of this episode. It's ad-free and features 11 additional minutes of essential material. Purchase it as a one-off, get the entire Season 1 Series as a bundle (listed under Collections), or better yet…Subscribe to Discograffiti's Patreon and receive a ceaseless barrage (4 shows a week!) of must-hear binge-listening: Patreon.com/DiscograffitiCONNECTJoin our Soldiers of Sound Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1839109176272153Patreon: www.Patreon.com/DiscograffitiPodfollow: ⁠⁠https://podfollow.com/1592182331⁠⁠YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClyaQCdvDelj5EiKj6IRLhwInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/discograffitipod/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Discograffiti/Twitter: https://twitter.com/DiscograffitiOrder the Digital version of the METAL MACHINE MUZAK 2xLP (feat. Lou Barlow, Cory Hanson, Mark Robinson, & W. Cullen Hart): www.patreon.com/discograffiti/shop/197404Order the $11 Digital version of the MMM 2xLP on Bandcamp: https://discograffiti.bandcamp.com/album/metal-machine-muzakOrder the METAL MACHINE MUZAK Double Vinyl + Digital package: www.patreon.com/discograffiti/shop/169954Merch Shop: https://discograffitipod.myspreadshop.com/allVenmo Dave A Tip: @David-GebroeWeb site: http://discograffiti.com/CONTACT DAVEEmail: dave@discograffiti.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/hooligandaveInstagram:  https://www.instagram.com/davidgebroe/Twitter: https://twitter.com/DaveGebroeThere is no other Patreon in existence where you get more for your money. 4 shows a week is what it takes these days to successfully blot out our unacceptable reality…so do yourself a favor and give it a shot for at least one month to see what I'm talking about.  If you're already a member, please comment below about your experience.  www.Patreon.com/discograffiti#jonstebbins #davidmarks #thebeachboys #brianwilson #beachboys #denniswilson #mikelove #carlwilson #music #vinyl #aljardine #thebeatles #brucejohnston #rock #petsounds #pattismith #goodvibrations #davidmarksandthemarksmen #surf #rocknroll #themoon #nuggets #surfing #california #beach #surfrock #discograffiti #metalmachinemuzak #soldiersofsound #andyourdreamscometrue

This interview began with an innocent phone call placed to Beach Boy David Marks asking if it was possible to one day do an interview, and it became clear very quickly that this WAS the interview.  No prep, no notes, no Zoom even…honestly, I was just holding on for dear life.   What followed, in my opinion, was the most honest interview in Discograffiti history.   Here's just a few of the many things David discusses with Discograffiti in this podcast: The Beach Boys songs on which David feels he's getting screwed out of royalties; The real truth behind his ousting from the band, as David sees it; His wildly honest assessment of The Beach Boys albums that came after Pet Sounds; And, in a Director's Cut exclusive, the incredible story of how his two blank-check budget LPs with The Moon came together. Listen: linktr.ee/discograffiti I support a wife and a six-year-old son with Discograffiti as my sole source of income.  If you're a BEACH BOYS superfan like me, you'll want THE DIRECTOR'S CUT of this episode. It's ad-free and features 11 ADDITIONAL MINUTES of essential material! Purchase it as a one-off or better yet…  SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PATREON and receive a ceaseless barrage (4 shows a week!) of must-hear binge-listening! And now with Discograffiti's 2025 Patreon Membership Super-Drive, you'll also get a FREE copy of Metal Machine Muzak and an episode all about YOU at the Lieutenant Tier or higher. SUBSCRIBE NOW!: Patreon.com/Discograffiti A very special thanks to Joe Kennedy for his audio wizardry and that killer new theme song. TIPS: VENMO GEBROE @David-Gebroe PayPal @davidbgebroe@gmail.com Even a $1 tip will be massively helpful. Thank you. CONNECT Join our Soldiers of Sound Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1839109176272153 Patreon: www.Patreon.com/Discograffiti Podfollow: ⁠⁠https://podfollow.com/1592182331⁠⁠ YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClyaQCdvDelj5EiKj6IRLhw Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/discograffitipod/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Discograffiti/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Discograffiti Order the Digital version of the METAL MACHINE MUZAK 2xLP (feat. Lou Barlow, Cory Hanson, Mark Robinson, & W. Cullen Hart): www.patreon.com/discograffiti/shop/197404 Order the $11 Digital version of the MMM 2xLP on Bandcamp: https://discograffiti.bandcamp.com/album/metal-machine-muzak Order the METAL MACHINE MUZAK Double Vinyl + Digital package: www.patreon.com/discograffiti/shop/169954 Merch Shop: https://discograffitipod.myspreadshop.com/all Venmo Dave A Tip: @David-Gebroe Web site: http://discograffiti.com/ CONTACT DAVE Email: dave@discograffiti.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hooligandave Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/davidgebroe/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DaveGebroe There is no other Patreon in existence where you get more for your money. 4 shows a week is what it takes these days to successfully blot out our unacceptable reality…so do yourself a favor and give it a shot for at least one month to see what I'm talking about.   If you're already a member, please comment below about your experience.   www.Patreon.com/discograffiti #thebeachboys #brianwilson #beachboys #denniswilson #mikelove #carlwilson #music #vinyl #aljardine #thebeatles #brucejohnston #rock #petsounds #vinylcollection #goodvibrations #paulmccartney #surf #rocknroll #davidmarks #records #surfing #california #beach #surfrock #summer #offthebeatenpath #discograffiti #metalmachinemuzak #soldiersofsound #andyourdreamscometrue

This interview began with an innocent phone call placed to Beach Boy David Marks asking if it was possible to one day do an interview, and it became clear very quickly that this WAS the interview.  No prep, no notes, no Zoom even…honestly, I was just holding on for dear life.   What followed, in my opinion, was the most honest interview in Discograffiti history.  There was no other way to begin this season (Catch A Wave: 1961-1964), not to mention the series as a whole. Although not representative of what's to follow, welcome to the first free episode of Discograffiti's epic Beach Boys series “And Your Dreams Come True.”  Here's just a few of the many things David discusses with Discograffiti in this podcast: How embarrassed he is by the music he created with The Beach Boys; The attempts Murry Wilson made to get with David's mother; His true feelings about each of the guys in the band; And the unheralded touches of production genius that Murry Wilson brought to The Beach Boys' early material. Listen: linktr.ee/discograffiti I support a wife and a six-year-old son with Discograffiti as my sole source of income.  If you're a BEACH BOYS superfan like me, you'll want THE DIRECTOR'S CUT of this episode. It's ad-free and features 10 ADDITIONAL MINUTES of essential material! Purchase it as a one-off or better yet…  SUBSCRIBE TO OUR PATREON and receive a ceaseless barrage (4 shows a week!) of must-hear binge-listening! And now with Discograffiti's 2025 Patreon Membership Super-Drive, you'll also get a FREE copy of Metal Machine Muzak and an episode all about YOU at the Lieutenant Tier or higher. SUBSCRIBE NOW!: Patreon.com/Discograffiti TIPS: VENMO GEBROE @David-Gebroe PayPal @davidbgebroe@gmail.com Even a $1 tip will be massively helpful. Thank you. CONNECT Join our Soldiers of Sound Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1839109176272153 Patreon: www.Patreon.com/Discograffiti Podfollow: ⁠⁠https://podfollow.com/1592182331⁠⁠ YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClyaQCdvDelj5EiKj6IRLhw Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/discograffitipod/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Discograffiti/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Discograffiti Order the Digital version of the METAL MACHINE MUZAK 2xLP (feat. Lou Barlow, Cory Hanson, Mark Robinson, & W. Cullen Hart): www.patreon.com/discograffiti/shop/197404 Order the $11 Digital version of the MMM 2xLP on Bandcamp: https://discograffiti.bandcamp.com/album/metal-machine-muzak Order the METAL MACHINE MUZAK Double Vinyl + Digital package: www.patreon.com/discograffiti/shop/169954 Merch Shop: https://discograffitipod.myspreadshop.com/all Venmo Dave A Tip: @David-Gebroe Web site: http://discograffiti.com/ CONTACT DAVE Email: dave@discograffiti.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hooligandave Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/davidgebroe/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DaveGebroe There is no other Patreon in existence where you get more for your money. 4 shows a week is what it takes these days to successfully blot out our unacceptable reality…so do yourself a favor and give it a shot for at least one month to see what I'm talking about.   If you're already a member, please comment below about your experience.   www.Patreon.com/discograffiti #thebeachboys #brianwilson #beachboys #denniswilson #mikelove #carlwilson #music #vinyl #aljardine #thebeatles #brucejohnston #rock #petsounds #vinylcollection #goodvibrations #paulmccartney #surf #rocknroll #davidmarks #records #surfing #california #beach #surfrock #summer #offthebeatenpath #discograffiti #metalmachinemuzak #soldiersofsound #andyourdreamscometrue

Matt gets into the mixer with his friend David Marks. They discuss the following. Arsenal's Missed Golden Era: Reflecting on how Arsenal's move to the Emirates Stadium, with high hopes of dominating Europe, was derailed by Roman Abramovich's Chelsea and Manchester City's financial power. The Wenger Worm Turn: The exact moment Arsène Wenger's reign turned sour for long-time fans—when project youth failed, leaving Arsenal far behind rivals. Arteta's Dark Arts: How Mikel Arteta is mastering the ‘dark arts' by strategically resting overworked players like Thomas Partey and Kai Havertz during international breaks, unlike Wenger's more lenient approach. Manchester City's War with the Premier League: A spicy dive into Manchester City's ongoing battle with the Premier League over financial scrutiny and the potential long-term impact on Pep Guardiola and the club's future. Tottenham's Hysterical Collapse: Glee over Spurs' comical meltdown against Southampton, highlighting Ange Postecoglou's tactical stubbornness, and predicting continued struggles for Spurs this season. Please enjoy responsibly. x Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this part 2 episode, Jimmy Purdy and David Marks discuss the critical role of effective communication in auto repair services. David highlights how understanding customer needs and tailoring communication can significantly improve service delivery and enhance customer satisfaction. The duo also explores the importance of creating a respectful and supportive work environment to retain employees and foster team morale. Finally, they discuss the transformative impact of proper training and education in the industry to maintain high standards and adapt to evolving customer expectations.00:00 He sought feedback, got honesty, and she quit.04:53 Dealer techs face challenges transitioning to independent shops.08:17 Employees stay for appreciation, trust, and flexibility.12:25 Addressing missed targets despite best efforts hard.13:30 Hire professionals for expertise; avoid gray areas.18:00 Many shops prioritize hierarchy over collaborative leadership.19:53 Admit mistakes first; easier to approach others.23:49 Upbringing influences adults' understanding of responsibilities.27:30 Build meaningful community-focused jobs, not just paychecks.29:54 Adapt to generational and demographic differences in business.32:09 Consumers may need dealers for advanced repairs.38:35 Major issue: Consumer education lacking, focus on entertainment.39:48 Better communication with businesses leads to satisfaction.43:06 Willing to pay more for quality service. Thanks to our sponsor, Shop Boss! See how they can simplify your auto shop HERE

Jimmy Purdy is joined by David Marks, owner of a full-service auto repair and used car dealership. David emphasizes the importance of having the diagnosing mechanic perform the repair to avoid blame-shifting and unresolved issues. Jimmy and David dive into the challenges of managing multiple employees, stressing the need for integrity and effective leadership. They also explore the financial viability of flipping cars versus just performing repairs, sharing insights from their personal experiences.00:00 Keeping local tax revenue for well-managed municipalities.04:12 America's evolution: Horse to car to electric vehicles.09:33 Stopped accepting cars, too many waiting repairs.10:47 Nothing wrong with being an auto repairer.15:41 Issued repair credit to a dissatisfied customer.17:59 What do we do in tough situations?21:53 Let the diagnostician fix the identified issue.22:57 Plug cat causing Kia CVT transmission issues, possibly.27:03 Employees' home responsibilities affect job performance.29:57 Experienced interviewees often make the worst employees.33:32 Soft skills matter more than technical qualifications.37:20 Overconfidence leads to disillusionment and financial trouble.40:25 Dedication matters more than certification in automotive.42:56 Modernize training programs to meet industry standards.45:32 Committed automotive experience vital for dedicated applicants. Thanks to our sponsor, Shop Boss! See how they can simplify your auto shop HERE

People living near Sittingbourne are worried sewage leaks could get worse as plans for nearly 300 new homes have been approved.Residents of Frognal Lane in Teynham say waste water regularly runs down the street and into their gardens. Our reporter Joe Crossley's been chatting to Wayne Kennett who lives there.Also in today's podcast, a survey's being sent out to 75,000 households in Kent to find out how you want police to deal with crime and anti-social behaviour.The police and crime commissioner's office has identified 25 known 'hot spots' and they want to see if targeted local patrolling can drive down offences.A man who's hoping to build an eco-home near Ashford says he's disappointed with the lack of local support.David Marks has plans for a five-bed single-storey property with solar panels behind The Bell pub in Smarden.A dance teacher in Kent who trained professionals and celebrities on Strictly is retiring.Margaret Preedy has run studios in Maidstone for 24 years and was involved in the series for its first five seasons.A silent disco is going to be taking to the streets of Canterbury later this year to mark 40 years of the city's festival.The two week event in October includes theatre, music, comedy, talks and family shows.In sport, we've been chatting to a former Olympian from Kent who thinks both Team GB hockey squads could get a medal.Mel Clewlow competed at the 2000 and 2008 Games - and is now director of sport at the University of Kent.And in football, Gillingham remain undefeated in their pre-season friendlies.It finished 3-1 at Southend United on Saturday and we've got reaction from manager Mark Bonner.

Torrey kicks off the show with a discussion about Baltimore County Executive, Johnny Olszewski, vetoing legislation to avoid school overcrowding.  Baltimore County Councilman, David Marks, joins the program to discuss. We discuss whether substance addiction is a disease or a behavior with Hopkins professor, Dr. Jeffrey Schaler.  We also discuss Trump's public endorsement of Larry Hogan and what his motives are.  Finally, we get an update from retired Brig Gen Ed "Chewy" Jones on the A-10 flight mission at Middle River.

In this episode of "Your HR Business Partner," join us as we explore the journey of resilience and innovation in the HR world. Our host dives deep with guest David Marks, a veteran in the food service industry, as they discuss the evolution from a single unit manager to an owner of 15 franchise locations along the Gulf Coast. Discover effective strategies for managing high turnover, adapting through COVID, and maintaining high standards in challenging times. Whether you're a small business owner or an aspiring leader, this episode offers practical advice, expert insights, and a dose of real-life humor to empower you to build a thriving team and business.

Today we have another in person episode for you. This is someone I'm really excited about interviewing today. We have been connected for almost 4 years now, going back to the pandemic. When I was trying to go from side hustle to full-time entrepreneur, he was one of the local business owners I connected with on Facebook and interviewed to help promote local businesses when everything shut down.Since then, we have been supporting each other along the way. He has attended both of my events I've thrown, both back in 2021 and just last week. He's currently a 1-1 personal branding client of mine with BOA, and is an absolute pleasure to work with. There's no way that knows more about networking to grow your business and he's the best in the auto repair business. My guest today is David Marks. He is the Owner of Quality Auto Repair Tire & Auto Sales here in St. Louis, located close by in Maryland Heights. David's Bio:My entrepreneurial story starts, Sep 2008 I bought a "Garage With A House In The Front Yard". In Dec 2009 I started working part-time (evenings/weekends) within year a and half (May 2011) What started with ZERO customers I turned into a full time business! 2013, I added Used Auto Sales, to my portfolio. I found people liked acquiring used vehicles from a Trusted Automotive Technician. 2016, I got involved with SCORE & Small Business Development Center, to learn how to be a business owner. (ANYONE CAN BE A BACKYARD MECHANIC, NOT EVERYONE CAN BE A BUSINESS OWNER). 2018, I added Used Car Detective, I found a need that consumers wanted to have Potential Used Vehicles inspected prior to being purchased. March 2019 I expanded my businesses to Maryland Heights with a 3 Bay Repair Facility, Full Service. This expansion will allow me to expand on my other 2 business Quality Auto Sales & Used Car Detective. The primary business will be Quality Auto Repair And Tire. To streamline my expansion, I formed a Management Company DSM Auto Family, LLC to oversee the day-day operations and still allow each of its 3 Business the ability to operate independently My business have evolved based on the principle of "People Won't Work For You And/Or Do Business With You If They Don't Feel Appreciated" We do that by providing "Trusted Services”Connect with David:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/davidscottmarks LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidsmarks/ Business Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/qualityautorepairandtireautosales Website: https://www.qualityautorepairtireautosales.com/ 

Join the Dairy Team and guest speaker David Marks with USDA Wildlife Services as they discuss the relationship between migratory birds and the HPAI virus.   USDA Wildlife Services Dave Marks Email:  David.R.Marks@aphis.usda.gov Office:  (515) 414-3292

Josh Gulrajani is Director of Planning, Performance and Student Statutory Returns at Aston University.    In this episode, Josh explains the remit of a planning director and, with my episode co-host HE consultant David Marks, delves into the topics of student number planning, the broader planning process and recent sector experience of Data Futures. Josh also shares his career path so far, discusses the value of engaging with wider professional activities and offers advice on getting into the planning profession.   This episode is kindly sponsored by Dixon Walter. Dixon Walter is a Search and Selection Firm devoted to the appointment of outstanding leaders within Higher Education. Since 2015, they have been delivering successful appointments across the full spectrum of senior Professional Services and Academic Leadership positions throughout the UK and across all mission groups. Hallmarks of their service include the supportive and insight-driven approach leading to innovative, diverse, and inspirational appointments that regularly exceed the expectations of both clients and candidates. 

David Marks from Quality Auto Repair Tire Auto Sale is our guest on this episode of the LIFT Your Shop Podcast. We take a deep dive into the importance of financial acumen in running a successful enterprise, stressing that having a clear vision of what one wants is pivotal. The magic happens when clarity in goals aligns with the efforts put into the business. 

Wednesday's Second Hour: We continue today from the Iowa Turkey Federation's annual Meeting! Bob chats to start the hour with David Marks from USDA Wildlife Services about their programs working to control highly pathogenic avian influenza. National Turkey Federation President and CEO Joel Brandenberger discusses his upcoming retirement, the importance of getting a Farm Bill done for the NTF, and potential for legislation similar to Prop-12 to target the turkey industry. We also hear more from David's day at the Nebraska Ag Expo! Jake Geiser from Sound Agriculture tells us about their products on display to apply to growers' fields. And to end the hour he talks with Kent Creighton from Sukup about the grain bin on display for attendees and the other equipment they are showing off.

The FDA Group's CEO Nick Capman, sits down with David Marks to discuss the intricacies of Quality culture and QA communication pathways in the life sciences. David is a strategic advisor and experienced executive with a proven track record in establishing global Quality, Operational, Corporate Stewardship, Change Management, and Integration programs across biopharma and CROs. Discussion points include: » The crucial role of a Quality culture, especially in biopharma and clinical settings. David discusses how a strong Quality culture leads to proactive organizations, reducing the frequency of audits and audit findings. » The separation of Quality from Operations to prevent conflicts of interest, and the importance of a partnership between these departments for effective decision-making and communication. » The responsibility of leaders in cultivating a culture of Quality, and how leaders should actively demonstrate and reinforce Quality values within the organization to build trust and openness. » The business case for Quality culture, and how it's more efficient and cost-effective to do things right the first time. David advises Operations to approach Quality issues without fear or ego, fostering open discussions. » How investing in Quality as a crucial preventive measure saves money and avoids future issues, particularly vital in life sciences. » Encouraging informal, trust-building discussions between QA and Operations. He stresses the importance of QA being approachable and open to discussions, which leads to significant organizational improvements. » A shift towards more open communication in modern Quality cultures. He highlights the importance of mechanisms for employees to ask questions anonymously in environments where fear or ego might be present. » The often-overlooked human element in Quality culture, underscoring the need for personal relationships, understanding, and cooperation between Quality and Operations teams. » The tangible benefits of a strong quality culture, such as improved efficiency, reduced costs, and enhanced organizational maturity. David is a distinguished executive in the bio-pharma and CRO industries, known for his strategic expertise in global Quality, Operational, Corporate Stewardship, Change Management, and Integration programs. His career spans leading and supporting Cross-Functional Strategic Partnerships, GxP Quality Assurance/Management Operations, and Sustainability/ESG initiatives. He has a proven track record of hands-on leadership and program oversight across North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, demonstrating his ability to navigate complex international environments. He is adept at managing high-level strategic initiatives and C-suite special assignments across multiple corporate divisions, showcasing his versatile leadership skills. Additionally, as an Emeritus Registered Quality Assurance Professional in Good Clinical Practice (RQAP-GCP) from the Society of Quality Assurance (SQA), he brings a deep commitment to quality assurance and extensive knowledge in Good Clinical Practice. His contributions have significantly influenced organizational success and set benchmarks in quality and operational excellence in the bio-pharma and CRO sectors. Who is The FDA Group? The FDA Group helps life science organizations rapidly access the industry's best consultants, contractors, and candidates. Our resources assist in every stage of the product lifecycle, from clinical development to commercialization, with a focus in Quality Assurance, Regulatory Affairs, and Clinical Operations. https://www.thefdagroup.com/

Join host Owoicho Adogwa, MD, MPH, FAANS as they interview the 2023 SRS Traveling Fellows about the program and their experiences. This year's traveling fellowship took place over three weeks ending at the 58th SRS Annual Meeting in Seattle, Washington, USA.*David Marks, FRCS, FRCS(Orth) | Senior Traveling Fellow, Orthopaedic Surgeon, United KingdomEmmanuelle Ferrero, MD, PhD | Orthopaedic Surgeon, FranceSeung-Jae Huyn, MD, PhD | Neurosurgeon, KoreaKenny Kwan, BMBCh(Oxon), FRCSEd | Orthopaedic Surgeon, Hong KongQianyu Zhuang, MD | Orthopaedic Surgeon, People's Republic of China

Opinion: Biased media coverage of RFK Jr. endangers fair elections. David Marks states that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ‘is condemned as a conspiracist and a critic of vaccination; he is punished by an enforced silence, without a chance to defend these charges.' https://tinyurl.com/39bwzw4s #Opinion #Columns #Commentary #DavidMarks #ReportFromPlanetEarth #RobertFKennedyJr #FairElections #BiasedMediaCoverage #PresidentialCandidate #Democrats #VaccinationCritic #ClarkCountyWa #ClarkCountyToday

Today we've got not one, but two guests: Composer Ben Lovett & Film Editor David Marks.  They were part of the team that brought us the fantastic new horror film, THE NIGHT HOUSE.  It stars Rebecca Hall in an unforgettable performance reminiscent of Julie Christie in DON'T LOOK NOW.  Movies are sight and sound…music and imagery spliced together to tell a story…and without the crafts of music and editing…well, we really wouldn't the movies. It's a great conversation about how a composer and an editor collaborate not just with a director, but with each other. We talk about how both of these artists found their way into filmmaking, and what inspires them to keep creating. It's a great talk!   Please listen, enjoy, and share! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Marks states that for the last few years, condescending media coverage of RFK Jr. has ignored his perspective and solutions for the problems of our era. https://bit.ly/3V1aGQ3 #Opinion #Columns #Commentary #DavidMarks #ReportFromPlanetEarth #RobertFKennedyJr #Candidate #PresidentOfTheUnitedStates #RobertFrancisKennedy #JohnFKennedy #ClarkCountyWa #ClarkCountyToday

As we're in the period between Christmas and New Year, the gap between episodes is going to be longer than normal, and the podcast proper is going to be back on January the ninth. So nobody has to wait around for another fortnight for a new episode, I thought I'd upload some old Patreon bonus episodes to fill the gap. Every year around Christmas the bonus episodes I do tend to be on Christmas songs and so this week I'm uploading three of those. These are older episodes, so don't have the same production values as more recent episodes, and are also shorter than more recent bonuses, but I hope they're still worth listening to. Transcript We talked in the last bonus episode about how the American Christmas music canon more or less ends in 1963. One record that just got in under that wire was "Little Saint Nick", recorded by the Beach Boys in October 1963 and released in December: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Little Saint Nick"] Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys' leader, was apparently inspired to write a Christmas song by Phil Spector -- Wilson turned up to at least one of the sessions for the Spector Christmas album, and had briefly played piano during a couple of takes of "Santa Claus is Coming to Town", although he wasn't actually on the record itself, as Spector decided he wasn't a good enough player. The date the Beach Boys recorded their Christmas song, October the twentieth 1963, was actually a historic date for the group. We'll talk about this more in a few weeks' time when we next look at the Beach Boys in the main podcast, but they had gone through a bit of a lineup shuffle, and David Marks had played his last gig with the group the night before, while Al Jardine had rejoined the band shortly before that. That meant that this was the first session since their first single at which the Beach Boys were the classic five-person lineup of Brian, Carl, and Dennis Wilson, Mike Love, and Al Jardine. There seems to be some confusion about what happened at that session, as they recorded two backing tracks. One of them became the "Little Saint Nick" that was a hit, but they also recorded a track that later became an album track called "Drive In": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Drive In"] But there also exists a recording of that backing track, but with the lyrics to "Little Saint Nick": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Drive In (Little Saint Nick version)"] I've seen conflicting accounts of how that track came to exist. Some say that they tried both backing tracks with the same lyrics at the original session, and that they then wrote the "Drive In" lyrics for the track that didn't make the cut as "Little Saint Nick", while others say that they actually sung the "Little Saint Nick" lyrics to the "Drive In" track as a joke a few months later, long after the original "Little Saint Nick" had already come out. Whichever is the truth, the version of "Little Saint Nick" that eventually came out as a single was this one, which became one of the last holiday classics in the US Christmas canon: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Little Saint Nick"] "Little Saint Nick" is very clearly modelled on an earlier hit by the group, "Little Deuce Coupe", and so it makes sense to me that the track that was chosen was the originally intended one, as musically that's quite close to the earlier song. "Little Saint Nick" was only a moderate success on the main chart, but it made number three on Billboard's Christmas Singles chart, which was enough of a success that the group decided the next year to record a full Christmas album. That album included a remixed version of "Little Saint Nick", with the backing track stripped down to sound more like the rest of the album's first side, which was rush-recorded with few overdubs. That album was recorded in a style that the Beach Boys did quite a bit at that time, with a side for "the kids" -- uptempo original songs -- and a side for "the adults", with orchestral versions of more traditional Christmas songs, arranged by the Four Freshmen's arranger Dick Reynolds, including a gorgeous version of "We Three Kings": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "We Three Kings"] The Beach Boys would have another attempt at making a Christmas album, in 1977, which went unreleased at the time -- mostly because much of it is truly terrible. However, there were a couple of worthwhile tracks on the album -- Brian Wilson's "Winter Symphony": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Winter Symphony"] And his brother Dennis' "Morning Christmas": [Excerpt: Dennis Wilson, "Morning Christmas"] Much of that album has since been released, with their 1964 Christmas album, on the compilation "Ultimate Christmas". Both Brian Wilson and Mike Love have since released solo Christmas albums. Both are patchy affairs, but Wilson's has a lovely version of "Joy to the World" as a bonus track: [Excerpt: Brian Wilson, "Joy to the World"] And it has a few other genuinely nice tracks, while the highlight of Love's is rather less impressive -- a reworking of "Shortenin' Bread" titled "Reason For the Season": [Excerpt: Mike Love, "Reason for the Season"] Both albums also include remakes of "Little Saint Nick", the one Beach Boys Christmas song that has really entered the consciousness of the general public. And while this podcast episode might have ended up being too late for you to still be hearing that one on the radio, I'm sure you'll start hearing it again, for the fifty-eighth straight year, come the last week of November 2021. Because some things, at least, stay the same no matter what's happening in the rest of the world.

When disasters and emergencies happen, one of the first things people affected seek is comfort wherever and however they can find it. It's been said, "Food is the most primitive form of comfort," and this week's guest on the Disaster Tough Podcast, David Marks, has been on the frontlines of making this a reality over the past decade.David is the Head of Business Development for Operation BBQ Relief. From Super Storm Sandy to recent refugee crises to the COVID-19 Pandemic, David has provided millions of meals to victims of these and other disasters all over the world. During COVID, he and Operation BBQ Relief distributed 4 million meals in conjunction with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania over a 9 week period, while also allowing restaurant owners and workers to continue working after their establishments were shut down.In this episode, David shares experiences of how providing a warm, high-quality meal to victims and emergency workers helps everyone feel that sense of comfort in a time of crisis they so desperately seek. He also talks about how collaboration and good partnerships make such efforts possible. For more information about Operation BBQ Relief, visit operationbbqrelief.org.Doberman Emergency Management owns and operates the Disaster Tough Podcast. Contact us here at: www.dobermanemg.com or email us at: info@dobermanemg.com.We are proud to endorse L3Harris and the BeOn PPT App. Learn more about this amazing product here: L3Harris.com/ResponderSupport.

David Marks shares that ‘a better world can only emerge from the crises on our planet with resolute adherence to the highest standards of freedom of expression.' https://bit.ly/3dFNkhS #Opinion #Column #DavidMarks #SalmonRushdie #FreedomOfSpeech #ABetterWorld #FreedomOfExpression #Governments #Media #IndependentThinking #DictatorialMandates #VancouverWa #ClarkCountyWa #ClarkCountyNews #ClarkCountyToday

Episode one hundred and fifty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is the last of our four-part mini-series on LA sunshine pop and folk-rock in summer 1967. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Baby, Now That I've Found You" by the Foundations. 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 There is no Mixcloud this week, because there were too many Turtles songs in the episode. There's relatively little information available about the Turtles compared to other bands of their era, and so apart from the sources on the general LA scene referenced in all these podcasts, the information here comes from a small number of sources. This DVD is a decent short documentary on the band's career. Howard Kaylan's autobiography, Shell Shocked: My Life with the Turtles, Flo and Eddie, and Frank Zappa, Etc.,  is a fun read, if inevitably biased towards his own viewpoint. Jim Pons' Hard Core Love: Sex, Football, and Rock and Roll in the Kingdom of God is much less fun, being as it is largely organised around how his life led up to his latter-day religious beliefs, but is the only other book I'm aware of with a substantial amount of coverage of the Turtles. There are many compilations of the Turtles' material available, of which All The Singles is by far and away the best. The box set of all their albums with bonus tracks is now out of print on CD, but can still be bought as MP3s. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We've spent a lot of time recently in the LA of summer 1967, at the point where the sunshine pop sound that was created when the surf harmonies of the Beach Boys collided with folk rock was at its apex, right before fashions changed and tight sunny pop songs with harmonies from LA became yesterday's news, and extended blues-rock improvisations from San Francisco became the latest in thing. This episode is the last part of this four-episode sequence, and is going to be shorter than those others. In many ways this one is a bridge between this sequence and next episode, where we travel back to London, because we're saying goodbye for a while to the LA scene, and when we do return to LA it will be, for the most part, to look at music that's a lot less sunshine and a lot more shadow. So this is a brief fade-out while we sing ba-ba-ba, a three-minute pop-song of an episode, a last bit of sunshine pop before we return to longer, more complicated, stories  in two weeks' time, at which point the sun will firmly set. Like many musicians associated with LA, Howard Kaylan was born elsewhere and migrated there as a child, and he seems to have regarded his move from upstate New York to LA as essentially a move to Disneyland itself. That impression can only have been made stronger by the fact that soon after his family moved there he got his first childhood girlfriend -- who happened to be a Mouseketeer on the TV. And TV was how young Howard filtered most of his perceptions -- particularly TV comedy. By the age of fourteen he was the president of the Soupy Sales Fan Club, and he was also obsessed with the works of Ernie Kovacs, Sid Caesar, and the great satirist and parodist Stan Freberg: [Excerpt: Stan Freberg, "St. George and the Dragonet"] Second only to his love of comedy, though, was his love of music, and it was on the trip from New York to LA that he saw a show that would eventually change his life. Along the way, his family had gone to Las Vegas, and while there they had seen Louis Prima and Keeley Smith do their nightclub act. Prima is someone I would have liked to do a full podcast episode on when I was covering the fifties, and who I did do a Patreon bonus episode on. He's now probably best known for doing the voice of King Louis in the Jungle Book: [Excerpt: Louis Prima, "I Wanna Be Like You (the Monkey Song)"] But he was also a jump blues musician who made some very good records in a similar style to Louis Jordan, like "Jump, Jive, an' Wail" [Excerpt: Louis Prima, "Jump, Jive, an' Wail"] But like Jordan, Prima dealt at least as much in comedy as in music -- usually comedy involving stereotypes about his Italian-American ethnic origins. At the time young Howard Kaylan saw him, he was working a double act with his then-wife Keeley Smith. The act would consist of Smith trying to sing a song straight, while Prima would clown around, interject, and act like a fool, as Smith grew more and more exasperated, and would eventually start contemptuously mocking Prima. [Excerpt: Louis Prima and Keeley Smith, "Embraceable You/I've Got It Bad and That Ain't Good"] This is of course a fairly standard double-act format, as anyone who has suffered through an episode of The Little and Large Show will be all too painfully aware, but Prima and Smith did it better than most, and to young Howard Kaylan, this was the greatest entertainment imaginable. But while comedy was the closest thing to Kaylan's heart, music was a close second. He was a regular listener to Art Laboe's radio show, and in a brief period as a teenage shoplifter he obtained records like Ray Charles' album Genius + Soul = Jazz: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "One Mint Julep"] and the single "Tossin' and Turnin'" by Bobby Lewis: [Excerpt: Bobby Lewis, "Tossin' and Turnin'"] "Tossin' and Turnin'" made a deep impression on Kaylan, because of the saxophone solo, which was actually a saxophone duet. On the record, baritone sax player Frank Henry played a solo, and it was doubled by the great tenor sax player King Curtis, who was just playing a mouthpiece rather than a full instrument, making a high-pitched squeaking sound: [Excerpt: Bobby Lewis, "Tossin' and Turnin'"] Curtis was of course also responsible for another great saxophone part a couple of years earlier, on a record that Kaylan loved because it combined comedy and rock and roll, "Yakety Yak": [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Yakety Yak"] Those two saxophone parts inspired Kaylan to become a rock and roller. He was already learning the clarinet and playing part time in an amateur Dixieland band, and it was easy enough to switch to saxophone, which has the same fingering. Within a matter of weeks of starting to play sax, he was invited to join a band called the Nightriders, who consisted of Chuck Portz on bass, Al Nichol on guitar, and Glen Wilson on drums. The Nightriders became locally popular, and would perform sets largely made up of Johnny and the Hurricanes and Ventures material. While he was becoming a budding King Curtis, Kaylan was still a schoolkid, and one of the classes he found most enjoyable was choir class. There was another kid in choir who Kaylan got on with, and one day that kid, Mark Volman came up to him, and had a conversation that Kaylan would recollect decades later in his autobiography: “So I hear you're in a rock 'n' roll band.” “Yep.” “Um, do you think I could join it?” “Well, what do you do?” “Nothing.” “Nothing?” “Nope.” “Sounds good to me. I'll ask Al.” Volman initially became the group's roadie and occasional tambourine player, and would also get on stage to sing a bit during their very occasional vocal numbers, but was mostly "in the band" in name only at first -- he didn't get a share of the group's money, but he was allowed to say he was in the group because that meant that his friends would come to the Nightriders' shows, and he was popular among the surfing crowd. Eventually, Volman's father started to complain that his son wasn't getting any money from being in the band, while the rest of the group were, and they explained to him that Volman was just carrying the instruments while they were all playing them. Volman's father said "if Mark plays an instrument, will you give him equal shares?" and they said that that was fair, so Volman got an alto sax to play along with Kaylan's tenor. Volman had also been taking clarinet lessons, and the two soon became a tight horn section for the group, which went through a few lineup changes and soon settled on a lineup of Volman and Kaylan on saxes, Nichol on lead guitar, Jim Tucker on rhythm guitar, Portz on bass, and Don Murray on drums. That new lineup became known as the Crossfires, presumably after the Johnny and the Hurricanes song of the same name: [Excerpt: Johnny and the Hurricanes, "Crossfire"] Volman and Kaylan worked out choreographed dance steps to do while playing their saxes, and the group even developed a group of obsessive fans who called themselves the Chunky Club, named after one of the group's originals: [Excerpt: The Crossfires, "Chunky"] At this point the group were pretty much only playing instrumentals, though they would do occasional vocals on R&B songs like "Money" or their version of Don and Dewey's "Justine", songs which required more enthusiasm than vocal ability. But their first single, released on a tiny label, was another surf instrumental, a song called "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde": [Excerpt: The Crossfires, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde"] The group became popular enough locally that they became the house band at the Revelaire Club in Redondo Beach. There as well as playing their own sets, they would also be the backing band for any touring acts that came through without their own band, quickly gaining the kind of performing ability that comes from having to learn a new artist's entire repertoire in a few days and be able to perform it with them live with little or no rehearsal. They backed artists like the Coasters, the Drifters, Bobby Vee, the Rivingtons, and dozens of other major acts, and as part of that Volman and Kaylan would, on songs that required backing vocals, sing harmonies rather than playing saxophone. And that harmony-singing ability became important when the British Invasion happened, and suddenly people didn't want to hear surf instrumentals, but vocals along the lines of the new British groups. The Crossfires' next attempt at a single was another original, this one an attempt at sounding like one of their favourite new British groups, the Kinks: [Excerpt: The Crossfires, "One Potato, Two Potato"] This change to vocals necessitated a change in the group dynamic. Volman and Kaylan ditched the saxophones, and discovered that between them they made one great frontman. The two have never been excessively close on a personal level, but both have always known that the other has qualities they needed. Frank Zappa would later rather dismissively say "I regard Howard as a fine singer, and Mark as a great tambourine player and fat person", and it's definitely true that Kaylan is one of the truly great vocalists to come out of the LA scene in this period, while Volman is merely a good harmony singer, not anything particularly special -- though he *is* a good harmony singer -- but it undersells Volman's contribution. There's a reason the two men performed together for nearly sixty years. Kaylan is a great singer, but also by nature rather reserved, and he always looked uncomfortable on stage, as well as, frankly, not exactly looking like a rock star (Kaylan describes himself not inaccurately as looking like a potato several times in his autobiography). Volman, on the other hand, is a merely good singer, but he has a naturally outgoing personality, and while he's also not the most conventionally good-looking of people he has a *memorable* appearance in a way that Kaylan doesn't. Volman could do all the normal frontman stuff, the stuff that makes a show an actual show -- the jokes, the dancing, the between-song patter, the getting the crowd going, while Kaylan could concentrate on the singing. They started doing a variation on the routine that had so enthralled Howard Kaylan when he'd seen Louis Prima and Keeley Smith do it as a child. Kaylan would stand more or less stock still, looking rather awkward, but singing like an angel, while Volman would dance around, clown, act the fool, and generally do everything he could to disrupt the performance -- short of actually disrupting it in reality. It worked, and Volman became one of that small but illustrious group of people -- the band member who makes the least contribution to the sound of the music but the biggest contribution to the feel of the band itself, and without whom they wouldn't be the same. After "One Potato, Two Potato" was a flop, the Crossfires were signed to their third label. This label, White Whale, was just starting out, and the Crossfires were to become their only real hit act. Or rather, the Turtles were. The owners of White Whale knew that they didn't have much promotional budget and that their label was not a known quantity -- it was a tiny label with no track record. But they thought of a way they could turn that to their advantage. Everyone knew that the Beatles, before Capitol had picked up their contracts, had had their records released on a bunch of obscure labels like Swan and Tollie. People *might* look for records on tiny independent labels if they thought it might be another British act who were unknown in the US but could be as good as the Beatles. So they chose a name for the group that they thought sounded as English as possible -- an animal name that started with "the", and ended in "les", just like the Beatles. The group, all teenagers at the time, were desperate enough that they agreed to change their name, and from that point on they became the Turtles. In order to try and jump on as many bandwagons as possible, the label wanted to position them as a folk-rock band, so their first single under the Turtles name was a cover of a Bob Dylan song, from Another Side of Bob Dylan: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "It Ain't Me Babe"] That song's hit potential had already been seen by Johnny Cash, who'd had a country hit with it a few months before. But the Turtles took the song in a different direction, inspired by Kaylan's *other* great influence, along with Prima and Smith. Kaylan was a big fan of the Zombies, one of the more interesting of the British Invasion groups, and particularly of their singer Colin Blunstone. Kaylan imitated Blunstone on the group's hit single, "She's Not There", on which Blunstone sang in a breathy, hushed, voice on the verses: [Excerpt: The Zombies, "She's Not There"] before the song went into a more stomping chorus on which Blunstone sang in a fuller voice: [Excerpt: The Zombies, "She's Not There"] Kaylan did this on the Turtles' version of "It Ain't Me Babe", starting off with a quiet verse: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "It Ain't Me Babe"] Before, like the Zombies, going into a foursquare, more uptempo, louder chorus: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "It Ain't Me Babe"] The single became a national top ten hit, and even sort of got the approval of Bob Dylan. On the group's first national tour, Dylan was at one club show, which they ended with "It Ain't Me Babe", and after the show the group were introduced to the great songwriter, who was somewhat the worse for wear. Dylan said “Hey, that was a great song you just played, man. That should be your single", and then passed out into his food. With the group's first single becoming a top ten hit, Volman and Kaylan got themselves a house in Laurel Canyon, which was not yet the rock star Mecca it was soon to become, but which was starting to get a few interesting residents. They would soon count Henry Diltz of the Modern Folk Quartet, Danny Hutton, and Frank Zappa among their neighbours. Soon Richie Furay would move in with them, and the house would be used by the future members of the Buffalo Springfield as their rehearsal space. The Turtles were rapidly becoming part of the in crowd. But they needed a follow-up single, and so Bones Howe, who was producing their records, brought in P.F. Sloan to play them a few of his new songs. They liked "Eve of Destruction" enough to earmark it as a possible album track, but they didn't think they would do it justice, and so it was passed on to Barry McGuire. But Sloan did have something for them -- a pseudo-protest song called "Let Me Be" that was very clearly patterned after their version of "It Ain't Me Babe", and which was just rebellious enough to make them seem a little bit daring, but which was far more teenage angst than political manifesto: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Let Me Be"] That did relatively well, making the top thirty -- well enough for the group to rush out an album which was padded out with some sloppy cover versions of other Dylan songs, a version of "Eve of Destruction", and a few originals written by Kaylan. But the group weren't happy with the idea of being protest singers. They were a bunch of young men who were more motivated by having a good time than by politics, and they didn't think that it made sense for them to be posing as angry politicised rebels. Not only that, but there was a significant drop-off between "It Ain't Me Babe" and "Let Me Be". They needed to do better. They got the clue for their new direction while they were in New York. There they saw their friends in the Mothers of Invention playing their legendary residency at the Garrick Theatre, but they also saw a new band, the Lovin' Spoonful, who were playing music that was clearly related to the music the Turtles were doing -- full of harmonies and melody, and inspired by folk music -- but with no sense of rebelliousness at all. They called it "Good Time Music": [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Good Time Music"] As soon as they got back to LA, they told Bones Howe and the executives at White Whale that they weren't going to be a folk-rock group any more, they were going to be "good time music", just like the Lovin' Spoonful. They were expecting some resistance, but they were told that that was fine, and that PF Sloan had some good time music songs too. "You Baby" made the top twenty: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "You Baby"] The Turtles were important enough in the hierarchy of LA stars that Kaylan and Tucker were even invited by David Crosby to meet the Beatles at Derek Taylor's house when they were in LA on their last tour -- this may be the same day that the Beatles met Brian and Carl Wilson, as I talked about in the episode on "All You Need is Love", though Howard Kaylan describes this as being a party and that sounded like more of an intimate gathering. If it was that day, there was nearly a third Beach Boy there. The Turtles knew David Marks, the Beach Boys' former rhythm guitarist, because they'd played a lot in Inglewood where he'd grown up, and Marks asked if he could tag along with Kaylan and Tucker to meet the Beatles. They agreed, and drove up to the house, and actually saw George Harrison through the window, but that was as close as they got to the Beatles that day. There was a heavy police presence around the house because it was known that the Beatles were there, and one of the police officers asked them to drive back and park somewhere else and walk up, because there had been complaints from neighbours about the number of cars around. They were about to do just that, when Marks started yelling obscenities and making pig noises at the police, so they were all arrested, and the police claimed to find a single cannabis seed in the car. Charges were dropped, but now Kaylan was on the police's radar, and so he moved out of the Laurel Canyon home to avoid bringing police attention to Buffalo Springfield, so that Neil Young and Bruce Palmer wouldn't get deported. But generally the group were doing well. But there was a problem. And that problem was their record label. They rushed out another album to cash in on the success of "You Baby", one that was done so quickly that it had "Let Me Be" on it again, just as the previous album had, and which included a version of the old standard "All My Trials", with the songwriting credited to the two owners of White Whale records. And they pumped out a lot of singles. A LOT of singles, ranging from a song written for them by new songwriter Warren Zevon, to cover versions of Frank Sinatra's "It Was a Very Good Year" and the old standard "We'll Meet Again". Of the five singles after "You Baby", the one that charted highest was a song actually written by a couple of the band members. But for some reason a song with verses in 5/4 time and choruses in 6/4 with lyrics like "killing the living and living to kill, the grim reaper of love thrives on pain" didn't appeal to the group's good-time music pop audience and only reached number eighty-one: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Grim Reaper of Love"] The group started falling apart. Don Murray became convinced that  the rest of the band were conspiring against him and wanted him out, so he walked out of the group in the middle of a rehearsal for a TV show. They got Joel Larson of the Grass Roots -- the group who had a number of hits with Sloan and Barri songs -- to sub for a few gigs before getting in a permanent replacement, Johnny Barbata, who came to them on the recommendation of Gene Clark, and who was one of the best drummers on the scene -- someone who was not only a great drummer but a great showman, who would twirl his drumsticks between his fingers with every beat, and who would regularly engage in drum battles with Buddy Rich. By the time they hit their fifth flop single in a row, they lost their bass player as well -- Chuck Portz decided he was going to quit music and become a fisherman instead. They replaced him with Chip Douglas of the Modern Folk Quartet. Then they very nearly lost their singers. Volman and Kaylan both got their draft notices at the same time, and it seemed likely they would end up having to go and fight in the Vietnam war. Kaylan was distraught, but his mother told him "Speak to your cousin Herb". Cousin Herb was Herb Cohen, the manager of the Mothers of Invention and numerous other LA acts, including the Modern Folk Quartet, and Kaylan only vaguely knew him at this time, but he agreed to meet up with them, and told them “Stop worrying! I got Zappa out, I got Tim Buckley out, and I'll get you out.” Cohen told Volman and Kaylan to not wash for a week before their induction, to take every drug of every different kind they could find right before going in, to deliberately disobey every order, to fail the logic tests, and to sexually proposition the male officers dealing with the induction. They followed his orders to the letter, and got marked as 4-F, unfit for service. They still needed a hit though, and eventually they found something by going back to their good-time music idea. It was a song from the Koppelman-Rubin publishing company -- the same company that did the Lovin Spoonful's management and production. The song in question was by Alan Gordon and Gary Bonner, two former members of a group called the Magicians, who had had a minor success with a single called "An Invitation to Cry": [Excerpt: The Magicians, "An Invitation to Cry"] The Magicians had split up, and Bonner and Gordon were trying to make a go of things as professional songwriters, but had had little success to this point. The song on the demo had been passed over by everyone, and the demo was not at all impressive, just a scratchy acetate with Bonner singing off-key and playing acoustic rhythm guitar and Gordon slapping his knees to provide rhythm, but the group heard something in it. They played the song live for months, refining the arrangement, before taking it into the studio. There are arguments to this day as to who deserves the credit for the sound on "Happy Together" -- Chip Douglas apparently did the bulk of the arrangement work while they were on tour, but the group's new producer, Joe Wissert, a former staff engineer for Cameo-Parkway, also claimed credit for much of it. Either way, "Happy Together" is a small masterpiece of dynamics. The song is structured much like the songs that had made the Turtles' name, with the old Zombies idea of the soft verse and much louder chorus: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Happy Together"] But the track is really made by the tiny details of the arrangement, the way instruments and vocal parts come in and out as the track builds up, dies down, and builds again. If you listen to the isolated tracks, there are fantastic touches like the juxtaposition of the bassoon and oboe (which I think is played on a mellotron): [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Happy Together", isolated tracks] And a similar level of care and attention was put into the vocal arrangement by Douglas, with some parts just Kaylan singing solo, other parts having Volman double him, and of course the famous "bah bah bah" massed vocals: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Happy Together", isolated vocals] At the end of the track, thinking he was probably going to do another take, Kaylan decided to fool around and sing "How is the weather?", which Bonner and Gordon had jokingly done on the demo. But the group loved it, and insisted that was the take they were going to use: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Happy Together"] "Happy Together" knocked "Penny Lane" by the Beatles off the number one spot in the US, but by that point the group had already had another lineup change. The Monkees had decided they wanted to make records without the hit factory that had been overseeing them, and had asked Chip Douglas if he wanted to produce their first recordings as a self-contained band. Given that the Monkees were the biggest thing in the American music industry at the time, Douglas had agreed, and so the group needed their third bass player in a year. The one they went for was Jim Pons. Pons had seen the Beatles play at the Hollywood Bowl in 1964, and decided he wanted to become a pop star. The next day he'd been in a car crash, which had paid out enough insurance money that he was able to buy two guitars, a bass, drums, and amps, and use them to start his own band. That band was originally called The Rockwells, but quickly changed their name to the Leaves, and became a regular fixture at Ciro's on Sunset Strip, first as customers, then after beating Love in the auditions, as the new resident band when the Byrds left. For a while the Leaves had occasionally had guest vocals from a singer called Richard Marin, but Pons eventually decided to get rid of him, because, as he put it "I wanted us to look like The Beatles. There were no Mexicans in The Beatles". He is at pains in his autobiography to assure us that he's not a bigot, and that Marin understood. I'm sure he did. Marin went on to be better known as Cheech Marin of Cheech and Chong. The Leaves were signed by Pat Boone to his production company, and through that company they got signed to Mira Records. Their first single, produced by Nik Venet, had been a version of "Love Minus Zero (No Limit)", a song by Bob Dylan: [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Love Minus Zero (No Limit)"] That had become a local hit, though not a national one, and the Leaves had become one of the biggest bands on the Sunset Strip scene, hanging out with all the other bands. They had become friendly with the Doors before the Doors got a record deal, and Pat Boone had even asked for an introduction, as he was thinking of signing them, but unfortunately when he met Jim Morrison, Morrison had drunk a lot of vodka, and given that Morrison was an obnoxious drunk Boone had second thoughts, and so the world missed out on the chance of a collaboration between the Doors and Pat Boone. Their second single was "Hey Joe" -- as was their third and fourth, as we discussed in that episode: [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe"] Their third version of "Hey Joe" had become a top forty hit, but they didn't have a follow-up, and their second album, All The Good That's Happening, while it's a good album, sold poorly. Various band members quit or fell out, and when Johnny Barbata knocked on Jim Pons' door it was an easy decision to quit and join a band that had a current number one hit. When Pons joined, the group had already recorded the Happy Together album. That album included the follow-up to "Happy Together", another Bonner and Gordon song, "She'd Rather Be With Me": [Excerpt: The Turtles, "She'd Rather Be With Me"] None of the group were tremendously impressed with that song, but it did very well, becoming the group's second-biggest hit in the US, reaching number three, and actually becoming a bigger hit than "Happy Together" in parts of Europe. Before "Happy Together" the group hadn't really made much impact outside the US. In the UK, their early singles had been released by Pye, the smallish label that had the Kinks and Donovan, but which didn't have much promotional budget, and they'd sunk without trace. For "You Baby" they'd switched to Immediate, the indie label that Andrew Oldham had set up, and it had done a little better but still not charted. But from "Happy Together" they were on Decca, a much bigger label, and "Happy Together" had made number twelve in the charts in the UK, and "She'd Rather Be With Me" reached number four. So the new lineup of the group went on a UK tour. As soon as they got to the hotel, they found they had a message from Graham Nash of the Hollies, saying he would like to meet up with them. They all went round to Nash's house, and found Donovan was also there, and Nash played them a tape he'd just been given of Sgt Pepper, which wouldn't come out for a few more days. At this point they were living every dream a bunch of Anglophile American musicians could possibly have. Jim Tucker mentioned that he would love to meet the Beatles, and Nash suggested they do just that. On their way out the door, Donovan said to them, "beware of Lennon". It was when they got to the Speakeasy club that the first faux-pas of the evening happened. Nash introduced them to Justin Hayward and John Lodge of the Moody Blues, and Volman said how much he loved their record "Go Now": [Excerpt: The Moody Blues, "Go Now"] The problem was that Hayward and Lodge had joined the group after that record had come out, to replace its lead singer Denny Laine. Oh well, they were still going to meet the Beatles, right? They got to the table where John, Paul, and Ringo were sat, at a tense moment -- Paul was having a row with Jane Asher, who stormed out just as the Turtles were getting there. But at first, everything seemed to go well. The Beatles all expressed their admiration for "Happy Together" and sang the "ba ba ba" parts at them, and Paul and Kaylan bonded over their shared love for "Justine" by Don and Dewey, a song which the Crossfires had performed in their club sets, and started singing it together: [Excerpt: Don and Dewey, "Justine"] But John Lennon was often a mean drunk, and he noticed that Jim Tucker seemed to be the weak link in the group, and soon started bullying him, mocking his clothes, his name, and everything he said. This devastated Tucker, who had idolised Lennon up to that point, and blurted out "I'm sorry I ever met you", to which Lennon just responded "You never did, son, you never did". The group walked out, hurt and confused -- and according to Kaylan in his autobiography, Tucker was so demoralised by Lennon's abuse that he quit music forever shortly afterwards, though Tucker says that this wasn't the reason he quit. From their return to LA on, the Turtles would be down to just a five-piece band. After leaving the club, the group went off in different directions, but then Kaylan (and this is according to Kaylan's autobiography, there are no other sources for this) was approached by Brian Jones, asking for his autograph because he loved the Turtles so much. Jones introduced Kaylan to the friend he was with, Jimi Hendrix, and they went out for dinner, but Jones soon disappeared with a girl he'd met. and left Kaylan and Hendrix alone. They were drinking a lot -- more than Kaylan was used to -- and he was tired, and the omelette that Hendrix had ordered for Kaylan was creamier than he was expecting... and Kaylan capped what had been a night full of unimaginable highs and lows by vomiting all over Jimi Hendrix's expensive red velvet suit. Rather amazingly after all this, the Moody Blues, the Beatles, and Hendrix, all showed up to the Turtles' London gig and apparently enjoyed it. After "She'd Rather Be With Me", the next single to be released wasn't really a proper single, it was a theme song they'd been asked to record for a dire sex comedy titled "Guide for the Married Man", and is mostly notable for being composed by John Williams, the man who would later go on to compose the music for Star Wars. That didn't chart, but the group followed it with two more top twenty hits written by Bonner and Gordon, "You Know What I Mean" and "She's My Girl". But then the group decided that Bonner and Gordon weren't giving them their best material, and started turning down their submissions, like a song called "Celebrity Ball" which they thought had no commercial potential, at least until the song was picked up by their friends Three Dog Night, retitled "Celebrate", and made the top twenty: [Excerpt: Three Dog Night, "Celebrate"] Instead, the group decided to start recording more of their own material. They were worried that in the fast-changing rock world bands that did other songwriters' material were losing credibility. But "Sound Asleep", their first effort in this new plan, only made number forty-seven on the charts. Clearly they needed a different plan. They called in their old bass player Chip Douglas, who was now an experienced hitmaker as a producer. He called in *his* friend Harry Nilsson, who wrote "The Story of Rock & Roll" for the group, but that didn't do much better, only making number forty-eight. But the group persevered, starting work on a new album produced by Douglas, The Turtles Present The Battle of the Bands, the conceit of which was that every track would be presented as being by a different band. So there were tracks by  Chief Kamanawanalea and his Royal Macadamia Nuts,  Fats Mallard and the Bluegrass Fireball, The Atomic Enchilada, and so on, all done in the styles suggested by those band names. There was even a track by "The Cross Fires": [Excerpt: The Cross Fires, "Surfer Dan"] It was the first time the group had conceived of an album as a piece, and nine of the twelve tracks were originals by the band -- there was a track written by their friend Bill Martin, and the opening track, by "The US Teens Featuring Raoul", was co-written by Chip Douglas and Harry Nilsson. But for the most part the songs were written by the band members themselves, and jointly credited to all of them. This was the democratic decision, but one that Howard Kaylan would later regret, because of the song for which the band name was just "Howie, Mark, Johnny, Jim & Al". Where all the other songs were parodies of other types of music, that one was, as the name suggests, a parody of the Turtles themselves. It was written by Kaylan in disgust at the record label, who kept pestering the group to "give us another 'Happy Together'". Kaylan got more and more angry at this badgering, and eventually thought "OK, you want another 'Happy Together'? I'll give you another 'Happy Together'" and in a few minutes wrote a song that was intended as an utterly vicious parody of that kind of song, with lyrics that nobody could possibly take seriously, and with music that was just mocking the whole structure of "Happy Together" specifically. He played it to the rest of the group, expecting them to fall about laughing, but instead they all insisted it was the group's next single. "Elenore" went to number six on the charts, becoming their biggest hit since "She'd Rather Be With Me": [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Elenore"] And because everything was credited to the group, Kaylan's songwriting royalties were split five ways. For the follow-up, they chose the one actual cover version on the album. "You Showed Me" is a song that Roger McGuinn and Gene Clark had written together in the very early days of the Byrds, and they'd recorded it as a jangly folk-rock tune in 1964: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "You Showed Me"] They'd never released that track, but Gene Clark had performed it solo after leaving the Byrds, and Douglas had been in Clark's band at the time, and liked the song. He played it for the Turtles, but when he played it for them the only instrument he had to hand was a pump organ with one of its bellows broken. Because of this, he had to play it slowly, and while he kept insisting that the song needed to be faster, the group were equally insistent that what he was playing them was the big ballad hit they wanted, and they recorded it at that tempo. "You Showed Me" became the Turtles' final top ten hit: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "You Showed Me"] But once again there were problems in the group. Johnny Barbata was the greatest drummer any of them had ever played with, but he didn't fit as a personality -- he didn't like hanging round with the rest of them when not on stage, and while there were no hard feelings, it was clear he could get a gig with pretty much anyone and didn't need to play with a group he wasn't entirely happy in. By mutual agreement, he left to go and play with Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, and was replaced by John Seiter from Spanky and Our Gang -- a good drummer, but not the best of the best like Barbata had been. On top of this, there were a whole host of legal problems to deal with. The Turtles were the only big act on White Whale records, though White Whale did put out some other records. For example, they'd released the single "Desdemona" by John's Children in the US: [Excerpt: John's Children, "Desdemona"] The group, being the Anglophiles they were, had loved that record, and were also among the very small number of Americans to like the music made by John's Children's guitarist's new folk duo, Tyrannosaurus Rex: [Excerpt: Tyrannosaurus Rex, "Debora"] When Tyrannosaurus Rex supported the Turtles, indeed, Volman and Kaylan became very close to Marc Bolan, and told him that the next time they were in England they'd have to get together, maybe even record together. That would happen not that many years later, with results we'll be getting to in... episode 201, by my current calculations. But John's Children hadn't had a hit, and indeed nobody on White Whale other than the Turtles had. So White Whale desperately wanted to stop the Turtles having any independence, and to make sure they continued to be their hit factory. They worked with the group's roadie, Dave Krambeck, to undermine the group's faith in their manager, Bill Utley, who supported the group in their desire for independence. Soon, Krambeck and White Whale had ousted Utley, and Krambeck had paid Utley fifty thousand dollars for their management contract, with the promise of another two hundred thousand later. That fifty thousand dollars had been taken by Krambeck as an advance against the Turtles' royalties, so they were really buying themselves out. Except that Krambeck then sold the management contract on to a New York management firm, without telling the group. He then embezzled as much of the group's ready cash as he could and ran off to Mexico, without paying Utley his two hundred thousand dollars. The Turtles were out of money, and they were being sued by Utley because he hadn't had the money he should have had, and by the big New York firm, because  since the Turtles hadn't known they were now legally their managers they were in breach of contract. They needed money quickly, and so they signed with another big management company, this one co-owned by Bill Cosby, in the belief that Cosby's star power might be able to get them some better bookings. It did -- one of the group's first gigs after signing with the new company was at the White House. It turned out they were Tricia Nixon's favourite group, and so they and the Temptations were booked at her request for a White House party. The group at first refused to play for a President they rightly thought of as a monster, but their managers insisted. That destroyed their reputation among the cool antiestablishment youth, of course, but it did start getting them well-paid corporate gigs. Right up until the point where Kaylan became sick at his own hypocrisy at playing these events, drank too much of the complimentary champagne at an event for the president of US Steel, went into a drunken rant about how sick the audience made him, and then about how his bandmates were a bunch of sellouts, threw his mic into a swimming pool, and quit while still on stage. He was out of the band for two months, during which time they worked on new material without him, before they made up and decided to work on a new album. This new album, though, was going to be more democratic. As well as being all original material, they weren't having any of this nonsense about the lead singer singing lead. This time, whoever wrote the song was going to sing lead, so Kaylan only ended up singing lead on six of the twelve songs on what turned out to be their final album, Turtle Soup. They wanted a truly great producer for the new album, and they all made lists of who they might call. The lists included a few big names like George Martin and Phil Spector, but one name kept turning up -- Ray Davies. As we'll hear in the next episode, the Kinks had been making some astonishing music since "You Really Got Me", but most of it had not been heard in the US. But the Turtles all loved the Kinks' 1968 album The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, which they considered the best album ever made: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Animal Farm"] They got in touch with Davies, and he agreed to produce the album -- the first time he did any serious outside production work -- and eventually they were able to persuade White Whale, who had no idea who he was, to allow him to produce it. The resulting album is by far the group's strongest album-length work, though there were problems -- Davies' original mix of the album was dominated by the orchestral parts written by Wrecking Crew musician Ray Pohlman, while the group thought that their own instruments should be more audible, since they were trying to prove that they were a proper band. They remixed it themselves, annoying Davies, though reissues since the eighties have reverted to a mix closer to Davies' intentions. Some of the music, like Pons' "Dance This Dance With Me", perhaps has the group trying a little *too* hard to sound like the Kinks: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Dance This Dance With Me"] But on the other hand, Kaylan's "You Don't Have to Walk in the Rain" is the group's last great pop single, and has one of the best lines of any single from the sixties -- "I look at your face, I love you anyway": [Excerpt: The Turtles, "You Don't Have to Walk in the Rain"] But the album produced no hits, and the group were getting more and more problems from their label. White Whale tried to get Volman and Kaylan to go to Memphis without the other band members to record with Chips Moman, but they refused -- the Turtles were a band, and they were proud of not having session players play their parts on the records. Instead, they started work with Jerry Yester producing on a new album, to be called Shell Shock. They did, though bow to pressure and record a terrible country track called "Who Would Ever Think That I Would Marry Margaret" backed by session players, at White Whale's insistence, but managed to persuade the label not to release it. They audited White Whale and discovered that in the first six months of 1969 alone -- a period where they hadn't sold that many records -- they'd been underpaid by a staggering six hundred and fifty thousand dollars. They sued the label for several million, and in retaliation, the label locked them out of the recording studio, locking their equipment in there. They basically begged White Whale to let them record one last great single, one last throw of the dice. Jim Pons had, for years, known a keyboard player named Bob Harris, and had recently got to know Harris' wife, Judee Sill. Sill had a troubled life -- she was a heroin addict, and had at times turned to streetwalking to earn money, and had spent time in prison for armed robbery -- but she was also an astonishing songwriter, whose music was as inspired by Bach as by any pop or folk composer. Sill had been signed to Blimp, the Turtles' new production and publishing company, and Pons was co-producing some tracks on her first album, with Graham Nash producing others. Pons thought one song from that album, "Lady-O", would be perfect for the Turtles: [Excerpt: Judee Sill, "Lady-O"] (music continues under) The Turtles stuck closely to Sill's vision of the song. So closely that you haven't noticed that before I started talking, we'd already switched from Sill's record to the Turtles' version. [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Lady-O"] That track, with Sill on guitar backing Kaylan, Volman, and Nichol's vocals, was the last Turtles single to be released while the band were together. Despite “Lady O” being as gorgeous a melody as has ever been produced in the rock world, it sank without trace, as did a single from the Shell Shock sessions released under a pseudonym, The Dedications. White Whale followed that up, to the group's disgust, with "Who Would Ever Think That I Would Marry Margaret?", and then started putting out whatever they had in the vaults, trying to get the last few pennies, even releasing their 1965 album track version of "Eve of Destruction" as if it were a new single. The band were even more disgusted when they discovered that, thanks to the flurry of suits and countersuits, they not only could no longer perform as the Turtles, but White Whale were laying legal claim to their own names. They couldn't perform under those names -- Howard Kaylan, Mark Volman, and the rest were the intellectual property of White Whale, according to the lawyers. The group split up, and Kaylan and Volman did some session work, including singing on a demo for a couple of new songwriters: [Excerpt: Steely Dan, "Everyone's Gone to the Movies"] When that demo got the songwriters a contract, one of them actually phoned up to see if Kaylan wanted a permanent job in their new band, but they didn't want Volman as well, so Kaylan refused, and Steely Dan had to do without him. Volman and Kaylan were despondent, washed-up, has-been ex-rock stars. But when they went to see a gig by their old friend Frank Zappa, it turned out that he was looking for exactly that. Of course, they couldn't use their own names, but the story of the Phlorescent Leech and Eddie is a story for another time...

Dr. David A. Marks, MD and I discuss the importance of healthy lungs, breathing, and sleep for preventing illness, disease, and accidents as well as compliance with transportation regulations. Learn more about Dr. Marks and the Pulmonology and Sleep Institute at www.psidoctor.com. Join Todd Marquardt every week for exciting law talk on Talk Law Radio! The mission of Talk Law Radio is to help you discover your legal issue blind spots by listening to me talk about the law on the radio. The state bar of Texas is the state agency that governs attorney law licenses. The State Bar wants attorneys to inform the public about the law but does not want us to attempt to solve your individual legal problems upon the basis of general information. Instead, contact an attorney like Todd A. Marquardt at Marquardt Law Firm, P.C. to discuss your specific facts and circumstances of your unique situation.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Councilman David Marks discusses progress and election maps with Nestor at Conrad's in Perry Hall

Recording on-location at the CrossFit® UK & Eire Affiliate Gathering, we're talking with affiliate opening & ownership with some of the newest affiliate owners in the UK & Ireland.Roice Gummer, of CrossFit Thurrock, along with David Marks & Rebekah Thompson of Avenge CrossFit, Northern Ireland, share their experiences of opening during the last couple of years. From finding a premises to welcoming new members, there's plenty to cover!Chalking Fitness is sponsored by BoxMate, a UK leader in Gym Management, Member Engagement & Performance Tracking Software, that also offers Team Up integration! Head to boxmateapp.co.uk and use the code CHALKING2 to get 2 months free.Be sure to follow Chalking Fitness on Instagram & sign up for the Chalking Fitness Newsletter for more podcast insights & UK centric competition news & articles.Support the show

David Marks discusses why deriding Mass Formation and dismissing its influence during a global crisis is a verification of the phenomenon. https://loom.ly/oDh5mk8 #Opinion #Columns #Commentary #DavidMarks #MassFormation #GlobalCrisis #Pandemic #COVID19 #MattiasDesmet #AnalysisOfContemporaryExperts #DepartmentOfPsychologyAndEducationalSciences #GhentUniversity #ClarkCountyWa #ClarkCountyNews #ClarkCountyToday

An encounter with an ageing radio ventriloquist turns out to be unexpectedly poignant for Amy, and a burst water main threatens a local farmhouse. Peter Eden and David Marks guest star.

Episode one hundred and forty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “God Only Knows" by the Beach Boys, and the creation of the Pet Sounds album. 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 "Sunny" by Bobby Hebb. 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 There is no Mixcloud this week, because there were too many Beach Boys songs in the episode. I used many resources for this episode, most of which will be used in future Beach Boys episodes too. It's difficult to enumerate everything here, because I have been an active member of the Beach Boys fan community for twenty-four years, and have at times just used my accumulated knowledge for this. But the resources I list here are ones I've checked for specific things. Stephen McParland has published many, many books on the California surf and hot-rod music scenes, including several on both the Beach Boys and Gary Usher.  His books can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks Andrew Doe's Bellagio 10452 site is an invaluable resource. Jon Stebbins' The Beach Boys FAQ is a good balance between accuracy and readability. And Philip Lambert's Inside the Music of Brian Wilson is an excellent, though sadly out of print, musicological analysis of Wilson's music from 1962 through 67. I have also referred to Brian Wilson's autobiography, I Am Brian Wilson, and to Mike Love's, Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy. For material specific to Pet Sounds I have used Kingsley Abbot's The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds: The Greatest Album of the Twentieth Century and Charles L Granata's I Just Wasn't Made For These Times: Brian Wilson and the Making of Pet Sounds.  I also used the 126-page book The Making of Pet Sounds by David Leaf, which came as part of the The Pet Sounds Sessions box set, which also included the many alternate versions of songs from the album used here. Sadly both that box set and the 2016 updated reissue of it appear currently to be out of print, but either is well worth obtaining for anyone who is interested in how great records are made. Of the versions of Pet Sounds that are still in print, this double-CD version is the one I'd recommend. It has the original mono mix of the album, the more recent stereo remix, the instrumental backing tracks, and live versions of several songs. As a good starting point for the Beach Boys' music in general, I would recommend this budget-priced three-CD set, which has a surprisingly good selection of their material on it. The YouTube drum tutorial I excerpted a few seconds of to show a shuffle beat is here. Transcript We're still in the run of episodes that deal with the LA pop music scene -- though next week we're going to move away from LA, while still dealing with a lot of the people who would play a part in that scene. But today we're hitting something that requires a bit of explanation. Most artists covered in this podcast get one or at the most two episodes. Some get slightly more -- the major artists who are present for many revolutions in music, or who have particularly important careers, like Fats Domino or the Supremes. And then there are a few very major artists who get a lot more. The Beatles, for example, are going to get eight in total, plus there will be episodes on some of their solo careers. Elvis has had six, and will get one more wrap-up episode. This is the third Beach Boys episode, and there are going to be three more after this, because the Beach Boys were one of the most important acts of the decade. But normally, I limit major acts to one episode per calendar year of their career. This means that they will average at most one episode every ten episodes, so while for example the episodes on "Mystery Train" and "Heartbreak Hotel" came close together, there was then a reasonable gap before another Elvis episode. This is not possible for the Beach Boys, because this episode and the next two Beach Boys ones all take place over an incredibly compressed timeline. In May 1966, they released an album that has consistently been voted the best album ever in polls of critics, and which is certainly one of the most influential even if one does not believe there is such a thing as a "best album ever". In October 1966 they released one of the most important singles ever -- a record that is again often considered the single best pop single of all time, and which again was massively influential. And then in July 1967 they released the single that was intended to be the lead-off single from their album Smile, an album that didn't get released until decades later, and which became a legend of rock music that was arguably more influential by *not* being released than most records that are released manage to be. And these are all very different stories, stories that need to be told separately. This means that episode one hundred and forty-two, episode one hundred and forty-six, and episode one hundred and fifty-three are all going to be about the Beach Boys. There will be one final later episode about them, too, but the next few months are going to be very dominated by them, so I apologise in advance for that if that's not something you're interested in. Though it also means that with luck some of these episodes will be closer to the shorter length of podcast I prefer rather than the ninety-minute mammoths we've had recently. Though I'm afraid this is another long one. When we left the Beach Boys, we'd just heard that Glen Campbell had temporarily replaced Brian Wilson on the road, after Wilson's mental health had finally been unable to take the strain of touring while also being the group's record producer, principal songwriter, and leader. To thank Campbell, who at this point was not at all well known in his own right, though he was a respected session guitarist and had released a few singles, Brian had co-written and produced "Guess I'm Dumb" for him, a track which prefigured the musical style that Wilson was going to use for the next year or so: [Excerpt: Glen Campbell, "Guess I'm Dumb"] It's worth looking at "Guess I'm Dumb" in a little detail, as it points the way forward to a lot of Wilson's songwriting over the next year. Firstly, of course, there are the lyrical themes of insecurity and of what might even be descriptions of mental illness in the first verse -- "the way I act don't seem like me, I'm not on top like I used to be". The lyrics are by Russ Titelman, but it's reasonable to assume that as with many of his collaborations, Brian brought in the initial idea. There's also a noticeable change in the melodic style compared to Wilson's earlier melodies. Up to this point, Wilson has mostly been writing what get called "horizontal" melody lines -- ones with very little movement, and small movements, often centred on a single note or two. There are exceptions of course, and plenty of them, but a typical Brian Wilson melody up to this point is the kind of thing where even I can hit the notes more or less OK -- [sings] "Well, she got her daddy's car and she cruised through the hamburger stand now". It's not quite a monotone, but it's within a tight range, and you don't have to move far from one note to another. But "Guess I'm Dumb" is incorporating the influence of Roy Orbison, and more obviously of Burt Bacharach, and it's *ludicrously* vertical, with gigantic leaps all over the place, in places that are not obvious. It requires the kind of precision that only a singer like Campbell can attain, to make it sound at all natural: [Excerpt: Glen Campbell, "Guess I'm Dumb"] Bacharach's influence is also noticeable in the way that the chord changes are very different from those that Wilson was using before. Up to this point, when Wilson wrote unusual chord changes, it was mostly patterns like "The Warmth of the Sun", which is wildly inventive, but mostly uses very simple triads and sevenths. Now he was starting to do things like the line "I guess I'm dumb but I don't care", which is sort of a tumbling set of inversions of the same chord that goes from a triad with the fifth in the bass, to a major sixth, to a minor eleventh, to a minor seventh. Part of the reason that Brian could start using these more complex voicings was that he was also moving away from using just the standard guitar/bass/drums lineup, sometimes with keyboards and saxophone, which had been used on almost every Beach Boys track to this point. Instead, as well as the influence of Bacharach, Wilson was also being influenced by Jack Nitzsche's arrangements for Phil Spector's records, and in particular by the way Nitzsche would double instruments, and have, say, a harpsichord and a piano play the same line, to create a timbre that was different from either individual instrument. But where Nitzsche and Spector used the technique along with a lot of reverb and overdubbing to create a wall of sound which was oppressive and overwhelming, and which obliterated the sounds of the individual instruments, Wilson used the same instrumentalists, the Wrecking Crew, to create something far more delicate: [Excerpt: Glen Campbell, "Guess I'm Dumb (instrumental and backing vocals)"] Campbell does such a good job on "Guess I'm Dumb" that one has to wonder what would  have happened if he'd remained with the Beach Boys. But Campbell had of course not been able to join the group permanently -- he had his own career to attend to, and that would soon take off in a big way, though he would keep playing on the Beach Boys' records for a while yet as a member of the Wrecking Crew. But Brian Wilson was still not well enough to tour. In fact, as he explained to the rest of the group, he never intended to tour again -- and he wouldn't be a regular live performer for another twelve years. At first the group were terrified -- they thought he was talking about quitting the group, or the group splitting up altogether. But Brian had a different plan. From that point on, there were two subtly different lineups of the group. In the studio, Brian would sing his parts as always, but the group would get a permanent replacement for him on tour -- someone who could replace him on stage. While the group was on tour, Brian would use the time to write songs and to record backing tracks. He'd already started using the Wrecking Crew to add a bit of additional musical colour to some of the group's records, but from this point on, he'd use them to record the whole track, maybe getting Carl to add a bit of guitar as well if he happened to be around, but otherwise just using the group to provide vocals. It's important to note that this *was* a big change. A lot of general music history sources will say things like "the Beach Boys never played on their own records", and this is taken as fact by people who haven't investigated further. In fact, the basic tracks for all their early hits were performed by the group themselves -- "Surfin'", "Surfin' Safari", "409", "Surfer Girl", "Little Deuce Coupe", "Don't Worry Baby" and many more were entirely performed by the Beach Boys, while others like "I Get Around" featured the group with a couple of additional musicians augmenting them. The idea that the group never played on their records comes entirely from their recordings from 1965 and 66, and even there often Carl would overdub a guitar part. And at this point, the Beach Boys were still playing on the majority of their recordings, even on sophisticated-sounding records like "She Knows Me Too Well", which is entirely a group performance other than Brian's friend, Russ Titelman, the co-writer of "Guess I'm Dumb", adding some percussion by hitting a microphone stand with a screwdriver: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "She Knows Me Too Well"] So the plan to replace the group's instrumental performances in the studio was actually a bigger change than it might seem. But an even bigger change was the live performances, which of course required the group bringing in a permanent live replacement for Brian. They'd already tried this once before, when he'd quit the road for a while and they'd brought Al Jardine back in, but David Marks quitting had forced him back on stage. Now they needed someone to take his place for good. They phoned up their friend Bruce Johnston to see if he knew anyone, and after suggesting a couple of names that didn't work out, he volunteered his own services, and as of this recording he's spent more than fifty years in the band (he quit for a few years in the mid-seventies, but came back). We've seen Johnston turn up several times already, most notably in the episode on "LSD-25", where he was one of the musicians on the track we looked at, but for those of you who don't remember those episodes, he was pretty much *everywhere* in California music in the late fifties and early sixties. He had been in a band at school with Phil Spector and Sandy Nelson, and another band with Jan and Dean, and he'd played on Nelson's "Teen Beat", produced by Art Laboe: [Excerpt: Sandy Nelson, "Teen Beat"] He'd been in the house band at those shows Laboe put on at El Monte stadium we talked about a couple of episodes back, he'd been a witness to John Dolphin's murder, he'd been a record producer for Bob Keane, where he'd written and produced songs for Ron Holden, the man who had introduced "Louie Louie" to Seattle: [Excerpt: Ron Holden, "Gee But I'm Lonesome"] He'd written "The Tender Touch" for Richard Berry's backing group The Pharaos, with Berry singing backing vocals on this one: [Excerpt: The Pharaos, "The Tender Touch"] He'd helped Bob Keane compile Ritchie Valens' first posthumous album, he'd played on "LSD-25" and "Moon Dawg" by the Gamblers: [Excerpt: The Gamblers, "Moon Dawg"] He'd arranged and produced the top ten hit “Those Oldies but Goodies (Remind Me of You)” for Little Caesar and the Romans: [Excerpt Little Caesar and the Romans, "Those Oldies but Goodies (Remind Me of You)"] Basically, wherever you looked in the LA music scene in the early sixties, there was Bruce Johnston somewhere in the background. But in particular, he was suitable for the Beach Boys because he had a lot of experience in making music that sounded more than a little like theirs. He'd made cheap surf records as the Bruce Johnston Surfing Band: [Excerpt: Bruce Johnston, "The Hamptons"] And with his long-time friend and creative partner Terry Melcher he had, as well as working on several Paul Revere and the Raiders records, also recorded hit Beach Boys soundalikes both as their own duo, Bruce and Terry: [Excerpt: Bruce and Terry, "Summer Means Fun"] and under the name of a real group that Melcher had signed, but who don't seem to have sung much on their own big hit, the Rip Chords: [Excerpt: The Rip Chords, "Hey Little Cobra"] Johnston fit in well with the band, though he wasn't a bass player before joining, and had to be taught the parts by Carl and Al. But he's probably the technically strongest musician in the band, and while he would later switch to playing keyboards on stage, he was quickly able to get up to speed on the bass well enough to play the parts that were needed. He also wasn't quite as strong a falsetto singer as Brian Wilson, as can be heard by listening to this live recording of the group singing "I Get Around" in 1966: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Get Around (live 1966)"] Johnston is actually an excellent singer -- and can still hit the high notes today. He sings the extremely high falsetto part on "Fun Fun Fun" at the end of every Beach Boys show. But his falsetto was thinner than Wilson's, and he also has a distinctive voice which can be picked out from the blend in a way that none of the other Beach Boys' voices could -- the Wilson brothers and Mike Love all have a strong family resemblance, and Al Jardine always sounded spookily close to them. This meant that increasingly, the band would rearrange the vocal parts on stage, with Carl or Al taking the part that Brian had taken in the studio. Which meant that if, say, Al sang Brian's high part, Carl would have to move up to sing the part that Al had been singing, and then Bruce would slot in singing the part Carl had sung in the studio. This is a bigger difference than it sounds, and it meant that there was now a need for someone to work out live arrangements that were different from the arrangements on the records -- someone had to reassign the vocal parts, and also work out how to play songs that had been performed by maybe eighteen session musicians playing French horns and accordions and vibraphones with a standard rock-band lineup without it sounding too different from the record. Carl Wilson, still only eighteen when Brian retired from the road, stepped into that role, and would become the de facto musical director of the Beach Boys on stage for most of the next thirty years, to the point that many of the group's contracts for live performances at this point specified that the promoter was getting "Carl Wilson and four other musicians". This was a major change to the group's dynamics. Up to this point, they had been a group with a leader -- Brian -- and a frontman -- Mike, and three other members. Now they were a more democratic group on stage, and more of a dictatorship in the studio. This was, as you can imagine, not a stable situation, and was one that would not last long. But at first, this plan seemed to go very, very well. The first album to come out of this new hybrid way of working, The Beach Boys Today!, was started before Brian retired from touring, and some of the songs on it were still mostly or solely performed by the group, but as we heard with "She Knows Me Too Well" earlier, the music was still more sophisticated than on previous records, and this can be heard on songs like "When I Grow Up to Be a Man", where the only session musician is the harmonica player, with everything else played by the group: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "When I Grow Up to Be a Man"] But the newer sophistication really shows up on songs like "Kiss Me Baby", where most of the instrumentation is provided by the Wrecking Crew -- though Carl and Brian both play on the track -- and so there are saxophones, vibraphones, French horn, cor anglais, and multiple layers of twelve-string guitar: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Kiss Me Baby"] Today had several hit singles on it -- "Dance, Dance, Dance", "When I Grow Up to be a Man", and their cover version of Bobby Freeman's "Do You Wanna Dance?" all charted -- but the big hit song on the album actually didn't become a hit in that version. "Help Me Ronda" was a piece of album filler with a harmonica part played by Billy Lee Riley, and was one of Al Jardine's first lead vocals on a Beach Boys record -- he'd only previously sung lead on the song "Christmas Day" on their Christmas album: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Help Me Ronda"] While the song was only intended as album filler, other people saw the commercial potential in the song. Bruce Johnston was at this time still signed to Columbia records as an artist, and wasn't yet singing on Beach Boys records, and he recorded a version of the song with Terry Melcher as a potential single: [Excerpt: Bruce and Terry, "Help Me Rhonda"] But on seeing the reaction to the song, Brian decided to rerecord it as a single. Unfortunately, Murry Wilson turned up to the session. Murry had been fired as the group's manager by his sons the previous year, though he still owned the publishing company that published their songs. In the meantime, he'd decided to show his family who the real talent behind the group was by taking on another group of teenagers and managing and producing them. The Sunrays had a couple of minor hits, like "I Live for the Sun": [Excerpt: The Sunrays, "I Live for the Sun"] But nothing made the US top forty, and by this point it was clear, though not in the way that Murry hoped, who the real talent behind the group *actually* was. But he turned up to the recording session, with his wife in tow, and started trying to produce it: [Excerpt: Beach Boys and Murry Wilson "Help Me Rhonda" sessions] It ended up with Brian physically trying to move his drunk father away from the control panel in the studio, and having a heartbreaking conversation with him, where the twenty-two-year-old who is recovering from a nervous breakdown only a few months earlier sounds calmer, healthier, and more mature than his forty-seven-year-old father: [Excerpt: Beach Boys and Murry Wilson, "Help Me Rhonda" sessions] Knowing that this was the family dynamic helps make the comedy filler track on the next album, "I'm Bugged at My Old Man", seem rather less of a joke than it otherwise would: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I'm Bugged at My Old Man"] But with Murry out of the way, the group did eventually complete recording "Help Me Rhonda" (and for those of you reading this as a blog post rather than listening to the podcast, yes they did spell it two different ways for the two different versions), and it became the group's second number one hit: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Help Me, Rhonda"] As well as Murry Wilson, though, another figure was in the control room then -- Loren Daro (who at the time went by his birth surname, but I'm going to refer to him throughout by the name he chose).  You can hear, on the recording, Brian Wilson asking Daro if he could "turn him on" -- slang that was at that point not widespread enough for Wilson's parents to understand the meaning. Daro was an agent working for the William Morris Agency, and he was part of a circle of young, hip, people who were taking drugs, investigating mysticism, and exploring new spiritual ideas. His circle included the Byrds -- Daro, like Roger McGuinn, later became a follower of Subud and changed his name as a result -- as well as people like the songwriter and keyboard player Van Dyke Parks, who will become a big part of this story in subsequent episodes, and Stephen Stills, who will also be turning up again. Daro had introduced Brian to cannabis, in 1964, and in early 1965 he gave Brian acid for the first time -- one hundred and twenty-five micrograms of pure Owsley LSD-25. Now, we're going to be looking at acid culture quite a lot in the next few months, as we get through 1966 and 1967, and I'll have a lot more to say about it, but what I will say is that even the biggest proponents of psychedelic drug use tend not to suggest that it is a good idea to give large doses of LSD in an uncontrolled setting to young men recovering from a nervous breakdown. Daro later described Wilson's experience as "ego death" -- a topic we will come to in a future episode, and not considered entirely negative -- and "a beautiful thing". But he has also talked about how Wilson was so terrified by his hallucinations that he ran into the bedroom, locked the door, and hid his head under a pillow for two hours, which doesn't sound so beautiful to me. Apparently after those two hours, he came out of the bedroom, said "Well, that's enough of that", and was back to normal. After that first trip, Wilson wrote a piece of music inspired by his psychedelic experience. A piece which starts like this, with an orchestral introduction very different from anything else the group had released as a single: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "California Girls"] Of course, when Mike Love added the lyrics to the song, it became about far more earthly and sensual concerns: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "California Girls"] But leaving the lyrics aside for a second, it's interesting to look at "California Girls" musically to see what Wilson's idea of psychedelic music -- by which I mean specifically music inspired by the use of psychedelic drugs, since at this point there was no codified genre known as psychedelic music or psychedelia -- actually was. So, first, Wilson has said repeatedly that the song was specifically inspired by "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" by Bach: [Excerpt: Bach, "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring"] And it's odd, because I see no real structural or musical resemblance between the two pieces that I can put my finger on, but at the same time I can totally see what he means. Normally at this point I'd say "this change here in this song relates to this change there in that song", but there's not much of that kind of thing here -- but I still. as soon as I read Wilson saying that for the first time, more than twenty years ago, thought "OK, that makes sense". There are a few similarities, though. Bach's piece is based around triplets, and they made Wilson think of a shuffle beat. If you remember *way* back in the second episode of the podcast, I talked about how one of the standard shuffle beats is to play triplets in four-four time. I'm going to excerpt a bit of recording from a YouTube drum tutorial (which I'll link in the liner notes) showing that kind of shuffle: [Excerpt: "3 Sweet Triplet Fills For Halftime Shuffles & Swung Grooves- Drum Lesson" , from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CwlSaQZLkY ] Now, while Bach's piece is in waltz time, I hope you can hear how the DA-da-da DA-da-da in Bach's piece may have made Wilson think of that kind of shuffle rhythm. Bach's piece also has a lot of emphasis of the first, fifth, and sixth notes of the scale -- which is fairly common, and not something particularly distinctive about the piece -- and those are the notes that make up the bass riff that Wilson introduces early in the song: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "California Girls (track)"] That bass riff, of course, is a famous one. Those of you who were listening to the very earliest episodes of the podcast might remember it from the intros to many, many, Ink Spots records: [Excerpt: The Ink Spots, "We Three (My Echo, My Shadow, and Me)"] But the association of that bassline to most people's ears would be Western music, particularly the kind of music that was in Western films in the thirties and forties. You hear something similar in "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine", as performed by Laurel and Hardy in their 1937 film Way Out West: [Excerpt: Laurel and Hardy, "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine"] But it's most associated with the song "Tumbling Tumbleweeds", first recorded in 1934 by the Western group Sons of the Pioneers, but more famous in their 1946 rerecording, made after the Ink Spots' success, where the part becomes more prominent: [Excerpt: The Sons of the Pioneers, "Tumbling Tumbleweeds"] That song was a standard of the Western genre, and by 1965 had been covered by everyone from Gene Autry to the Supremes, Bob Wills to Johnnie Ray, and it would also end up covered by several musicians in the LA pop music scene over the next few years, including Michael Nesmith and Curt Boettcher, both people part of the same general scene as the Beach Boys. The other notable thing about "California Girls" is that it's one of the first times that Wilson was able to use multi-tracking to its full effect. The vocal parts were recorded on an eight-track machine, meaning that Wilson could triple-track both Mike Love's lead vocal and the group's backing vocals. With Johnston now in the group -- "California Girls" was his first recording session with them -- that meant that on the record there were eighteen voices singing, leading to some truly staggering harmonies: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "California Girls (Stack-O-Vocals)"] So, that's what the psychedelic experience meant to Brian Wilson, at least -- Bach, orchestral influences, using the recording studio to create thicker vocal harmony parts, and the old West. Keep that in the back of your mind for the present, but it'll be something to remember in eleven episodes' time. "California Girls" was, of course, another massive hit, reaching number three on the charts. And while some Beach Boys fans see the album it was included on, Summer Days... And Summer Nights!, as something of a step backward from the sophistication of Today!, this is a relative thing. It's very much of a part with the music on the earlier album, and has many wonderful moments, with songs like "Let Him Run Wild" among the group's very best. But it was their next studio album that would cement the group's artistic reputation, and which would regularly be acclaimed by polls of critics as the greatest album of all time -- a somewhat meaningless claim; even more than there is no "first" anything in music, there's no "best" anything. The impulse to make what became Pet Sounds came, as Wilson has always told the story, from hearing the Beatles album Rubber Soul. Now, we've not yet covered Rubber Soul -- we're going to look at that, and at the album that came after it, in three episodes' time -- but it is often regarded as a major artistic leap forward for the Beatles. The record Wilson heard, though, wasn't the same record that most people nowadays think of when they think of Rubber Soul. Since the mid-eighties, the CD versions of the Beatles albums have (with one exception, Magical Mystery Tour) followed the tracklistings of the original British albums, as the Beatles and George Martin intended. But in the sixties, Capitol Records were eager to make as much money out of the Beatles as they could. The Beatles' albums generally had fourteen songs on, and often didn't include their singles. Capitol thought that ten or twelve songs per album was plenty, and didn't have any aversion to putting singles on albums. They took the three British albums Help!, Rubber Soul, and Revolver, plus the non-album "Day Tripper"/"We Can Work It Out" single and Ken Thorne's orchestral score for the Help! film, and turned that into four American albums -- Help!, Rubber Soul, Yesterday and Today, and Revolver. In the case of Rubber Soul, that meant that they removed four tracks from the British album -- "Drive My Car", "Nowhere Man", "What Goes On" and "If I Needed Someone" -- and added two songs from the British version of Help!, "I've Just Seen a Face" and "It's Only Love". Now, I've seen some people claim that this made the American Rubber Soul more of a folk-rock album -- I may even have said that myself in the past -- but that's not really true. Indeed, "Nowhere Man" and "If I Needed Someone" are two of the Beatles' most overtly folk-rock tracks, and both clearly show the influence of the Byrds. But what it did do was remove several of the more electric songs from the album, and replace them with acoustic ones: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I've Just Seen a Face"] This, completely inadvertently, gave the American Rubber Soul lineup a greater sense of cohesion than the British one. Wilson later said "I listened to Rubber Soul, and I said, 'How could they possibly make an album where the songs all sound like they come from the same place?'" At other times he's described his shock at hearing "a whole album of only good songs" and similar phrases. Because up to this point, Wilson had always included filler tracks on albums, as pretty much everyone did in the early sixties. In the American pop music market, up to the mid sixties, albums were compilations of singles plus whatever random tracks happened to be lying around. And so for example in late 1963 the Beach Boys had released two albums less than a month apart -- Surfer Girl and Little Deuce Coupe. Given that Brian Wilson wrote or co-wrote all the group's original material, it wasn't all that surprising that Little Deuce Coupe had to include four songs that had been released on previous albums, including two that were on Surfer Girl from the previous month. It was the only way the group could keep up with the demand for new product from a company that had no concept of popular music as art. Other Beach Boys albums had included padding such as generic surf instrumentals, comedy sketches like "Cassius" Love vs. "Sonny" Wilson, and in the case of The Beach Boys Today!, a track titled "Bull Session With the Big Daddy", consisting of two minutes of random chatter with the photographer Earl Leaf while they all ate burgers: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys and Earl Leaf, "Bull Session With the Big Daddy"] This is not to attack the Beach Boys. This was a simple response to the commercial pressures of the marketplace. Between October 1962 and November 1965, they released eleven albums. That's about an album every three months, as well as a few non-album singles. And on top of that Brian had also been writing songs during that time for Jan & Dean, the Honeys, the Survivors and others, and had collaborated with Gary Usher and Roger Christian on songs for Muscle Beach Party, one of American International Pictures' series of Beach Party films. It's unsurprising that not everything produced on this industrial scale was a masterpiece. Indeed, the album the Beach Boys released directly before Pet Sounds could be argued to be an entire filler album. Many biographies say that Beach Boys Party! was recorded to buy Brian time to make Pet Sounds, but the timelines don't really match up on closer investigation. Beach Boys Party! was released in November 1965, before Brian ever heard Rubber Soul, which came out later, and before he started writing the material that became Pet Sounds. Beach Boys Party! was a solution to a simple problem -- the group were meant to deliver three albums that year, and they didn't have three albums worth of material. Some shows had been recorded for a possible live album, but they'd released a live album in 1964 and hadn't really changed their setlist very much in the interim. So instead, they made a live-in-the-studio album, with the conceit that it was recorded at a party the group were holding. Rather than the lush Wrecking Crew instrumentation they'd been using in recent months, everything was played on acoustic guitars, plus some bongos provided by Wrecking Crew drummer Hal Blaine and some harmonica from Billy Hinsche of the boy band Dino, Desi, and Billy, whose sister Carl Wilson was shortly to marry. The album included jokes and false starts, and was overlaid with crowd noise, to give the impression that you were listening to an actual party where a few people were sitting round with guitars and having fun. The album consisted of songs that the group liked and could play without rehearsal -- novelty hits from a few years earlier like "Alley Oop" and "Hully Gully", a few Beatles songs, and old favourites like the Everly Brothers hit "Devoted to You" -- in a rather lovely version with two-part harmony by Mike and Brian, which sounds much better in a remixed version released later without the party-noise overdubs: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Devoted to You (remix)"] But the song that defined the album, which became a massive hit, and which became an albatross around the band's neck about which some of them would complain for a long time to come, didn't even have one of the Beach Boys singing lead. As we discussed back in the episode on "Surf City", by this point Jan and Dean were recording their album "Folk 'n' Roll", their attempt at jumping on the folk-rock bandwagon, which included the truly awful "The Universal Coward", a right-wing answer song  to "The Universal Soldier" released as a Jan Berry solo single: [Excerpt: Jan Berry, "The Universal Coward"] Dean Torrence was by this point getting sick of working with Berry, and was also deeply unimpressed with the album they were making, so he popped out of the studio for a while to go and visit his friends in the Beach Boys, who were recording nearby. He came in during the Party sessions, and everyone was suggesting songs to perform, and asked Dean to suggest something. He remembered an old doo-wop song that Jan and Dean had recorded a cover version of, and suggested that. The group had Dean sing lead, and ran through a sloppy version of it, where none of them could remember the words properly: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Barbara Ann"] And rather incredibly, that became one of the biggest hits the group ever had, making number two on the Billboard chart (and number one on other industry charts like Cashbox), number three in the UK, and becoming a song that the group had to perform at almost every live show they ever did, together or separately, for at least the next fifty-seven years. But meanwhile, Brian had been working on other material. He had not yet had his idea for an album made up entirely of good songs, but he had been experimenting in the studio. He'd worked on a handful of tracks which had pointed in new directions. One was a single, "The Little Girl I Once Knew": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "The Little Girl I Once Knew"] John Lennon gave that record a very favourable review, saying "This is the greatest! Turn it up, turn it right up. It's GOT to be a hit. It's the greatest record I've heard for weeks. It's fantastic." But the record only made number twenty -- a perfectly respectable chart placing, but nowhere near as good as the group's recent run of hits -- in part because its stop-start nature meant that the record had "dead air" -- moments of silence -- which made DJs avoid playing it, because they believed that dead air, even only a second of it here and there, would make people tune to another station. Another track that Brian had been working on was an old folk song suggested by Alan Jardine. Jardine had always been something of a folkie, of the Kingston Trio variety, and he had suggested that the group might record the old song "The Wreck of the John B", which the Kingston Trio had recorded. The Trio's version in turn had been inspired by the Weavers' version of the song from 1950: [Excerpt: The Weavers, "The Wreck of the John B"] Brian had at first not been impressed, but Jardine had fiddled with the chord sequence slightly, adding in a minor chord to make the song slightly more interesting, and Brian had agreed to record the track, though he left the instrumental without vocals for several months: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Sloop John B (instrumental)"] The track was eventually finished and released as a single, and unlike "The Little Girl I Once Knew" it was a big enough hit that it was included on the next album, though several people have said it doesn't fit. Lyrically, it definitely doesn't, but musically, it's very much of a piece with the other songs on what became Pet Sounds: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Sloop John B"] But while Wilson was able to create music by himself, he wasn't confident about his ability as a lyricist. Now, he's not a bad lyricist by any means -- he's written several extremely good lyrics by himself -- but Brian Wilson is not a particularly articulate or verbal person, and he wanted someone who could write lyrics as crafted as his music, but which would express the ideas he was trying to convey. He didn't think he could do it himself, and for whatever reason he didn't want to work with Mike Love, who had co-written the majority of his recent songs, or with any of his other collaborators. He did write one song with Terry Sachen, the Beach Boys' road manager at the time, which dealt obliquely with those acid-induced concepts of "ego death": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Hang on to Your Ego"] But while the group recorded that song, Mike Love objected vociferously to the lyrics. While Love did try cannabis a few times in the late sixties and early seventies, he's always been generally opposed to the use of illegal drugs, and certainly didn't want the group to be making records that promoted their use -- though I would personally argue that "Hang on to Your Ego" is at best deeply ambiguous about the prospect of ego death.  Love rewrote some of the lyrics, changing the title to "I Know There's an Answer", though as with all such bowdlerisation efforts he inadvertently left in some of the drug references: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Know There's an Answer"] But Wilson wasn't going to rely on Sachen for all the lyrics. Instead he turned to Tony Asher. Asher was an advertising executive, who Wilson probably met through Loren Daro -- there is some confusion over the timeline of their meeting, with some sources saying they'd first met in 1963 and that Asher had introduced Wilson to Daro, but others saying that the introductions went the other way, and that Daro introduced Asher to Wilson in 1965. But Asher and Daro had been friends for a long time, and so Wilson and Asher were definitely orbiting in the same circles. The most common version of the story seems to be that Asher was working in Western Studios, where he was recording a jingle - the advertising agency had him writing jingles because he was an amateur songwriter, and as he later put it nobody else at the agency knew the difference between E flat and A flat. Wilson was also working in the studio complex, and Wilson dragged Asher in to listen to some of the demos he was recording -- at that time Wilson was in the habit of inviting anyone who was around to listen to his works in progress. Asher chatted with him for a while, and thought nothing of it, until he got a phone call at work a few weeks later from Brian Wilson, suggesting the two write together. Wilson was impressed with Asher, who he thought of as very verbal and very intelligent, but Asher was less impressed with Wilson. He has softened his statements in recent decades, but in the early seventies he would describe Wilson as "a genius musician but an amateur human being", and sharply criticise his taste in films and literature, and his relationship with his wife. This attitude seems at least in part to have been shared by a lot of the people that Wilson was meeting and becoming influenced by. One of the things that is very noticeable about Wilson is that he has no filters at all, and that makes his music some of the most honest music ever recorded. But that same honesty also meant that he could never be cool or hip. He was -- and remains -- enthusiastic about the things he likes, and he likes things that speak to the person he is, not things that fit some idea of what the in crowd like. And the person Brian Wilson is is a man born in 1942, brought up in a middle-class suburban white family in California, and his tastes are the tastes one would expect from that background. And those tastes were not the tastes of the hipsters and scenesters who were starting to become part of his circle at the time. And so there's a thinly-veiled contempt in the way a lot of those people talked about Wilson, particularly in the late sixties and early seventies. Wilson, meanwhile, was desperate for their approval, and trying hard to fit in, but not quite managing it. Again, Asher has softened his statements more recently, and I don't want to sound too harsh about Asher -- both men were in their twenties, and still  trying to find their place in the world, and I wouldn't want to hold anyone's opinions from their twenties against them decades later. But that was the dynamic that existed between them. Asher saw himself as something of a sophisticate, and Wilson as something of a hick in contrast, but a hick who unlike him had created a string of massive hit records. And Asher did, always, respect Wilson's musical abilities. And Wilson in turn looked up to Asher, even while remaining the dominant partner, because he respected Asher's verbal facility. Asher took a two-week sabbatical from his job at the advertising agency, and during those two weeks, he and Wilson collaborated on eight songs that would make up the backbone of the album that would become Pet Sounds. The first song the two worked on was a track that had originally been titled "In My Childhood". Wilson had already recorded the backing track for this, including the sounds of bicycle horns and bells to evoke the feel of being a child: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "You Still Believe in Me (instrumental track)"] The two men wrote a new lyric for the song, based around a theme that appears in many of Wilson's songs -- the inadequate man who is loved by a woman who is infinitely superior to him, who doesn't understand why he's loved, but is astonished by it. The song became "You Still Believe in Me": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "You Still Believe in Me"] That song also featured an instrumental contribution of sorts by Asher. Even though the main backing track had been recorded before the two started working together, Wilson came up with an idea for an intro for the song, which would require a particular piano sound. To get that sound, Wilson held down the keys on a piano, while Asher leaned into the piano and plucked the strings manually. The result, with Wilson singing over the top, sounds utterly lovely: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "You Still Believe in Me"] Note that I said that Wilson and Asher came up with new lyrics together. There has been some slight dispute about the way songwriting credits were apportioned to the songs. Generally the credits said that Wilson wrote all the music, while Asher and Wilson wrote the lyrics together, so Asher got twenty-five percent of the songwriting royalties and Wilson seventy-five percent. Asher, though, has said that there are some songs for which he wrote the whole lyric by himself, and that he also made some contributions to the music on some songs -- though he has always said that the majority of the musical contribution was Wilson's, and that most of the time the general theme of the lyric, at least, was suggested by Wilson. For the most part, Asher hasn't had a problem with that credit split, but he has often seemed aggrieved -- and to my mind justifiably -- about the song "Wouldn't it Be Nice". Asher wrote the whole lyric for the song, though inspired by conversations with Wilson, but accepted his customary fifty percent of the lyrical credit. The result became one of the big hits from the album: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Wouldn't It Be Nice?"] But -- at least according to Mike Love, in the studio he added a single line to the song: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Wouldn't it Be Nice?"] When Love sued Brian Wilson in 1994, over the credits to thirty-five songs, he included "Wouldn't it Be Nice" in the list because of that contribution. Love now gets a third of the songwriting royalties, taken proportionally from the other two writers. Which means that he gets a third of Wilson's share and a third of Asher's share. So Brian Wilson gets half the money, for writing all the music, Mike Love gets a third of the money, for writing "Good night baby, sleep tight baby", and Tony Asher gets a sixth of the money -- half as much as Love -- for writing all the rest of the lyric. Again, this is not any one individual doing anything wrong – most of the songs in the lawsuit were ones where Love wrote the entire lyric, or a substantial chunk of it, and because the lawsuit covered a lot of songs the same formula was applied to borderline cases like “Wouldn't it Be Nice” as it was to clearcut ones like “California Girls”, where nobody disputes Love's authorship of the whole lyric. It's just the result of a series of reasonable decisions, each one of which makes sense in isolation, but which has left Asher earning significantly less from one of the most successful songs he ever wrote in his career than he should have earned. The songs that Asher co-wrote with Wilson were all very much of a piece, both musically and lyrically. Pet Sounds really works as a whole album better than it does individual tracks, and while some of the claims made about it -- that it's a concept album, for example -- are clearly false, it does have a unity to it, with ideas coming back in different forms. For example, musically, almost every new song on the album contains a key change down a minor third at some point -- not the kind of thing where the listener consciously notices that an idea has been repeated, but definitely the kind of thing that makes a whole album hold together. It also differs from earlier Beach Boys albums in that the majority of the lead vocals are by Brian Wilson. Previously, Mike Love had been the dominant voice on Beach Boys records, with Brian as second lead and the other members taking few or none. Now Love only took two main lead vocals, and was the secondary lead on three more. Brian, on the other hand, took six primary lead vocals and two partial leads. The later claims by some people that this was a Brian Wilson solo album in all but name are exaggerations -- the group members did perform on almost all of the tracks -- but it is definitely much more of a personal, individual statement than the earlier albums had been. The epitome of this was "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times", which Asher wrote the lyrics for but which was definitely Brian's idea, rather than Asher's. [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times"] That track also featured the first use on a Beach Boys record of the electro-theremin, an electronic instrument invented by session musician Paul Tanner, a former trombone player with the Glenn Miller band, who had created it to approximate the sound of a Theremin while being easier to play: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times"] That sound would turn up on future Beach Boys records... But the song that became the most lasting result of the Wilson/Asher collaboration was actually one that is nowhere near as personal as many of the other songs on the record, that didn't contain a lot of the musical hallmarks that unify the album, and that didn't have Brian Wilson singing lead. Of all the songs on the album, "God Only Knows" is the one that has the most of Tony Asher's fingerprints on it. Asher has spoken in the past about how when he and Wilson were writing, Asher's touchstones were old standards like "Stella By Starlight" and "How Deep is the Ocean?", and "God Only Knows" easily fits into that category. It's a crafted song rather than a deep personal expression, but the kind of craft that one would find in writers like the Gershwins, every note and syllable perfectly chosen: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows"] One of the things that is often wrongly said about the song is that it's the first pop song to have the word "God" in the title. It isn't, and indeed it isn't even the first pop song to be called "God Only Knows", as there was a song of that name recorded by the doo-wop group the Capris in 1954: [Excerpt: The Capris, "God Only Knows"] But what's definitely true is that Wilson, even though he was interested in creating spiritual music, and was holding prayer sessions with his brother Carl before vocal takes, was reluctant to include the word in the song at first, fearing it would harm radio play. He was probably justified in his fears -- a couple of years earlier he'd produced a record called "Pray for Surf" by the Honeys, a girl-group featuring his wife: [Excerpt: The Honeys, "Pray For Surf"] That record hadn't been played on the radio, in part because it was considered to be trivialising religion. But Asher eventually persuaded Wilson that it would be OK, saying "What do you think we should do instead? Say 'heck only knows'?" Asher's lyric was far more ambiguous than it may seem -- while it's on one level a straightforward love song, Asher has always pointed out that the protagonist never says that he loves the object of the song, just that he'll make her *believe* that he loves her. Coupled with the second verse, which could easily be read as a threat of suicide if the object leaves the singer, it would be very, very, easy to make the song into something that sounds like it was from the point of view of a narcissistic, manipulative, abuser. That ambiguity is also there in the music, which never settles in a strong sense of key. The song starts out with an A chord, which you'd expect to lead to the song being in A, but when the horn comes in, you get a D# note, which isn't in that key, and then when the verse starts, it starts on an inversion of a D chord, before giving you enough clues that by the end of the verse you're fairly sure you're in the key of E, but it never really confirms that: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows (instrumental)"] So this is an unsettling, ambiguous, song in many ways. But that's not how it sounds, nor how Brian at least intended it to sound. So why doesn't it sound that way? In large part it's down to the choice of lead vocalist. If Mike Love had sung this song, it might have sounded almost aggressive. Brian *did* sing it in early attempts at the track, and he doesn't sound quite right either -- his vocal attitude is just... not right: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows (Brian Wilson vocal)"] But eventually Brian hit on getting his younger brother Carl to sing lead. At this point Carl had sung very few leads on record -- there has been some dispute about who sang what, exactly,  because of the family resemblance which meant all the core band members could sound a little like each other, but it's generally considered that he had sung full leads on two album tracks -- "Pom Pom Play Girl" and "Girl Don't Tell Me" -- and partial leads on two other tracks, covers of "Louie Louie" and "Summertime Blues". At this point he wasn't really thought of as anything other than a backing vocalist, but his soft, gentle, performance on "God Only Knows" is one of the great performances: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows (vocals)"] The track was actually one of those that required a great deal of work in the studio to create the form which now seems inevitable. Early attempts at the recording included a quite awful saxophone solo: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys "God Only Knows (early version)"] And there were a lot of problems with the middle until session keyboard player Don Randi suggested the staccato break that would eventually be used: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows"] And similarly, the tag of the record was originally intended as a mass of harmony including all the Beach Boys, the Honeys, and Terry Melcher: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows (alternate version with a capella tag)"] Before Brian decided to strip it right back, and to have only three voices on the tag -- himself on the top and the bottom, and Bruce Johnston singing in the middle: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows"] When Pet Sounds came out, it was less successful in the US than hoped -- it became the first of the group's albums not to go gold on its release, and it only made number ten on the album charts. By any objective standards, this is still a success, but it was less successful than the record label had hoped, and was taken as a worrying sign. In the UK, though, it was a different matter. Up to this point, the Beach Boys had not had much commercial success in the UK, but recently Andrew Loog Oldham had become a fan, and had become the UK publisher of their original songs, and was interested in giving them the same kind of promotion that he'd given Phil Spector's records. Keith Moon of the Who was also a massive fan, and the Beach Boys had recently taken on Derek Taylor, with his strong British connections, as their publicist. Not only that, but Bruce Johnston's old friend Kim Fowley was now based in London and making waves there. So in May, in advance of a planned UK tour set for November that year, Bruce Johnston and Derek Taylor flew over to the UK to press the flesh and schmooze. Of all the group members, Johnston was the perfect choice to do this -- he's by far the most polished of them in terms of social interaction, and he was also the one who, other than Brian, had the least ambiguous feelings about the group's new direction, being wholeheartedly in favour of it. Johnston and Taylor met up with Keith Moon, Lennon and McCartney, and other pop luminaries, and played them the record. McCartney in particular was so impressed by Pet Sounds and especially "God Only Knows", that he wrote this, inspired by the song, and recorded it even before Pet Sounds' UK release at the end of June: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Here, There, and Everywhere"] As a result of Johnston and Taylor's efforts, and the promotional work by Oldham and others, Pet Sounds reached number two on the UK album charts, and "God Only Knows" made number two on the singles charts. (In the US, it was the B-side to "Wouldn't it Be Nice", although it made the top forty on its own merits too). The Beach Boys displaced the Beatles in the readers' choice polls for best band in the NME in 1966, largely as a result of the album, and Melody Maker voted it joint best album of the year along with the Beatles' Revolver. The Beach Boys' commercial fortunes were slightly on the wane in the US, but they were becoming bigger than ever in the UK. But a big part of this was creating expectations around Brian Wilson in particular. Derek Taylor had picked up on a phrase that had been bandied around -- enough that Murry Wilson had used it to mock Brian in the awful "Help Me, Rhonda" sessions -- and was promoting it widely as a truism. Everyone was now agreed that Brian Wilson was a genius. And we'll see how that expectation plays out over the next few weeks.. [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Caroline, No"]

From its inception, I've said that HHAUSA is a mission that God put on my heart to honor our Veterans through the sport of archery. While in no need of validation that a higher power is behind our cause, my connection to David Marks of The Veteran Archery Project can only be described as nothing less than a divine appointment.New to the nonprofit world, David's organization is already transforming lives with bows and arrows and they are just getting started. After 20 years of serving our country, like many Veterans he was feeling a lack of purpose but couldn't escape the idea that God had a larger plan for his life. Marks found out quickly that encounters like the one he and I experienced were part of a much bigger picture and anything but a coincidence.Using archery and the outdoors as a means of connecting Veterans and those still on Active Duty, The Veteran Archery Project has a simple yet profound objective: shoot bows, build community, change lives. They are doing just that and HHAUSA couldn't be more excited to join forces with this inspiring, like minded ministry, working together to make a difference.

Episode 197 August 13, 2013 – David Marks from Wilbur's Revenge BBQ Team, owner of many Famous Dave's BBQ stores and the Chief Media Officer of Operation BBQ Relief…this was his first time on the show back in 2013…so if you aren't familiar with…

Please Let Me Wonder? No need. The results you've been waiting for are here.On this episode, we break down how each matchup in our Beach Boy Album bracket shook up, and I gotta say: THINGS! WERE! CLOSE! No real tangents in this episode, but we do talk about why Pet Sounds is the greatest album of all time, our recent experience at Brian Wilson's concert in Long Beach, and one quick mention of MTV's The Challenge. Also, Nia attempts to play God Only Knows on Garageband?!Wyatt Funderburk was our guest on Monday's pod, and if we've whetted your appetite for The Beach Boys, go check out his podcast Sail On: The Beach Boys Podcast :) And in Sail On tradition, there's another lil bonus if you stick around til the end ;) ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Al Redmer and David Marks are household names in Perry Hall and Baltimore County.  As private residents and public figures, they've in one way or another spent their adult lives serving the community.  On episode #30 of Mainstreet, we are pleased to have them as guests for a relaxed conversation about the past, present, and future of Perry Hall. Website: https://themainstreetpodcast.com/Facebook: @USAmainstreetEmail: info@themainstreetpodcast.comThe Mainstreet Podcast is sponsored by Your Pet AuPair! For the second year in a row, Harford County Living's Choice Award Winner for Best Pet Services Company. Visit belairaupair.com and and use promo code "Mainstreet" on the Get A Quote form to receive $10 off your first invoice of over $100.Support the show

On this episode of The Word on Medicine, we have an amazing program on Quality in Healthcare. We will explain everything you want to know about the quality of care you receive at hospitals in this country and how we strive to make your care the best care in the world. What goes into the assessment of quality, how we monitor medical outcomes and everything we do to safeguard you, especially when in the most vulnerable of positions – when you do not feel well, when you are under anesthesia and much much more. We have an amazing panel of experts; from the Department of Surgery, Dr. Jon Gould is our program chair who coordinated this program, along with Drs. Carrie Peterson and Colleen Trevino. They will be joined by Drs. Jonathon Truwit, David Marks and Sid Singh from the Department of Medicine and Mary Ann Moon, director of advanced practice nursing at Froedtert Hospital.

Hey everyone,It's Jay and David here from The Auto Authorities Podcast! It's Tuesday, and that means we are back with another very exciting episode. In this episode, we talk about modern maintenance for your car. David Marks with Quality Auto STL takes the lead and explains what you need to know! David runs his business with the motto, "Trusted services with no surprises! Thanks for listening and be sure to subscribe to the show! We can't thank you enough for the support! Until next time...The Auto Authorities

Hey everyone,Jay Grosman and David Marks here from The Auto Authorities podcast! We could not be more excited to announce the official launch of the show! This podcast will give you direct access to 47 years of combined experience in the automotive industry. This podcast's primary goal is to educate and equip you with the tools that you need to buy, sell, or repair your car.Join us for our first episode! In this episode, David and I share what you need to know to purchase a car like an expert. We'll cover how to navigate the crazy journey of buying your first car. This process can be overwhelming, but the expert tips and secrets we will share with you will remove all the stress from the process.Do you have a specific topic that you'd like us to cover or do you have a specific question? Go ahead and click here to send us a message. We might just answer your questions live!Subscribe to The Auto Authorities podcast today, text "car" to the number 57838

Reflections for International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Part III - Sam speaks with Dr. David Marks about pain psychiatry and what we might see in orthopaedics. What tools are available to help us as we treat acute and chronic pain?

Part II of Sam's conversation with Dr. David Marks about his work as a Pain Psychiatrist from the "fifth vital sign" to current guidelines.

David Marks, MD, is a pain psychiatrist, discussing the difference between acute and chronic pain, and the 4 A's of analgesia, in part 1 of a 3 part discussion.

David Lee Marks is best known for his work as a member of The Beach Boys. Growing up across the street from the Wilson family, Marks spent his formative years singing and playing with Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson.   At age 10, David received his first guitar for Christmas; he and Carl began studying with John Maus (later John Walker of the Walker Brothers) and developing their own electric guitar style, which caught the attention of Carl's oldest brother, budding composer Brian. David and Carl's rock ‘n' roll guitar sound blended with Brian's complex harmonies to help create the signature sound of the Beach Boys. ​ Thirteen-year-old Marks officially joined The Beach Boys in February 1962 and became one of the five signatories on the band's recording contract with Capitol Records. He remained a member through October 1963, performing in over 100 concerts across the United States, appearing on national television, and playing rhythm guitar and singing on the band's first four albums, and on hits like “Surfin' Safari,” “409,” “Surfin' U.S.A.,” “Shut Down,” “Surfer Girl,” “In My Room,” and “Be True to Your School.” While David's time in the band may be considered short, there's no denying the impact of the early years of the Beach Boys on their enduring and iconic legacy.  ​ Leaving the Beach Boys gave David the freedom to focus on his own songwriting with a new band, David Marks & The Marksmen. One of the first bands to sign to Herb Alpert's A&M Records, The Marksmen packed concert venues up and down the state of California but ultimately disbanded in 1965 after a release on the Warner Brother's label.  ​ Marks went on to record session-work for Murry Wilson's Sunrays. He also played with Casey Kasem's Band Without a Name, cult-classic psychedelic-pop bands The Moon and Colours, Delaney & Bonnie, and Warren Zevon. By age 21, he had been signed to five major record labels and had grown disillusioned with the Los Angeles music scene. In 1969, he relocated to Boston, where he studied jazz and classical guitar as a private student at the Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory. David went on to earn a reputation as a solid session guitarist without ever capitalizing on his previous association with the Beach Boys. Through it all, however, he remained friends and stayed in contact with members of the Beach Boys, even appearing as a special guest from time to time. David rejoined the band in as a full-time member in 1997, when Carl Wilson, fighting cancer, was unable to continue touring with the group. Marks left the band for a second time in 1999 after being diagnosed with hepatitis C. Since his diagnosis, he has become a leader in the hepatitis C community, often appearing in the media to raise awareness of the disease. ​ In 2007, David co-wrote his autobiography, The Lost Beach Boy, with Beach Boys historian Jon Stebbins. The book is a frank account of his career with and without the Beach Boys, his health problems, his musical development, and his recovery and acceptance within the Beach Boys community. ​ The Beach Boys celebrated their 50th Anniversary in 2012 when David Marks joined Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, and Bruce Johnston on a 73-date World Tour. The highly anticipated reunion kicked-off at the 54th Annual Grammy Awards where they performed two classic hits: Surfer Girl (with Foster the People) and Good Vibrations (with Maroon 5). Their studio efforts led to the release of That's Why God Made The Radio on Capitol Record, marking the first Beach Boys album of new material since 1992; for their efforts, the album broke in at Number #2 on the Billboard charts. The band's subsequent world tour took America's Band on 73 shows on four continents and included appearances on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, The Late Show with Jimmy Fallon, Charlie Rose, Good Morning America, the Jools Holland Show, SMAP, and the Today Show Australia. The also sang the National Anthem on opening day of Dodger's Stadium, which was also marking its 50th season.     Post reunion, David and Al Jardine joined Brian Wilson for a short US Summer Tour, followed that fall with a subsequent North American tour which included Jeff Beck. The collaboration was voted the #3 tour of 2013 and landed Wilson, Jardine, Marks & Beck another slot on the Jimmy Fallon Show.  David Marks also joined an illustrious group of artist who guested on Brian Wilson's 2015 solo release, No Pier Pressure – his guitar can be heard on the album's single, The Right Time, which charted #28 on the Billboard charts and #1 on BBC Radio Two, and  ​ David Marks toured as a part time member of Mike Love's Beach Boys from 2014 - 2016 and continues to perform with the Surf City All Stars and Dean Torrence of Jan & Dean.  David's also returned to his roots as a session guitarist, playing on several albums by artists such as the Smithereens, the Surf City All Stars, Mod Hippie, Jez Graham, and Miami Dan. ​ On his own, Marks has also released two studio albums in the last five years: David Marks & Friends: Live on the Sunset Strip (with guests artists Marilyn Wilson-Rutherford of the Honeys and John Walker of the Walker Brothers) and Back in the Garage featuring Los A-Phonics, from Valencia, Spain, with whom he toured Spain in 2016.  courtesy of davidleemarks.com

(October 16, 2018 - Hour One) Leading off, The 3rd Tuesday of the month regular guest, BBQ Hall of Fame inductee and author of The Barbecue Bible, Steven Raichlen joins me. Tonight we will talk about BBQ BootCamp, updates on "The Brisket Chronicles", Italian Steak and we will answer as many Facebook questions as we can get through. Steven might also make an acceptance speech as he was inducted in to the BBQ Central Show Guest Hall of Fame last month. Up next, Chief Marketing Officer for Operation BBQ Relief, David Marks! Hurricane Michael dominated the Florida panhandle a week ago and OBR has been on location serving hot BBQ meals to all who are in need. David will give us an update on operations there and what OBR needs most right now. For quick access to all show merch and important links, you can use this Linktree site! PLEASE SUPPORT THE SHOW SPONSORS The BBQ Guru Big Poppa Smokers Butchers BBQ Green Mountain Grills Cookshack Cookin Pellets FireBoard Smithfield Traeger Grills Southside Market & Barbeque National Barbecue News

Tonight, while Steven Raichlen is in Italy, I visit with first time guest and Senior writer for Sports Illustrated, Andy Staples.  Andy covers college football but is also known for being able to call out the best places to eat in every city across the country.  He also is co-host of the PATT podcast.  The natural disasters keep on coming this year...and Operation BBQ Relief continues to show up and support first responders and those displaced by these significant weather and natural disaster events.  David Marks, CMO for OBR, rejoins me this week to discuss the number of meals they have served over this stretch, their current deployment in Santa Rosa and what YOU can do to help...(hint:$$$$). Taylor Davis from Smithfield makes HER first appearance on the show.  We will talk about the 2018 Smithfield Grant program and the 2018 Committed Cooks Program. Helping me close the show tonight is the new "Official Beer Correspondent" of the BBQ Central Show, Matt Bougher.  Tonight we will cover all thing ALE!!  What are the types, kinds and makes...and what do they pair with!!   Shop at Amazon?  Now you can help the show while you shop Amazon.  If you save this link, the show will get a small % of your purchase that will be re-invested back into the production.  It does not make your purchase cost more...YOU just help the show!!  Thank you!! You can also subscribe to the show on I-Tunes or Google Play Music and never miss a segment or interview of the show ever again!!  PLEASE REVIEW THE SHOW IN I-TUNES!!! If you do not use I-Tunes or prefer a different podcast catcher, you can use the show RSS, which is www.thebbqcentralshow.com/feed/podcast to get the full archives.  I suggest using JUICE CATCHER but whatever you like is fine.  Plug in the RSS and grab the show at your convenience! Stream the show from anywhere on the Tune In Radio app available for ALL smartphone devices!!  Visit the Tune In website for more info!!  Once installed on your phone, search "BBQ Central" and then save to your "favorites" for easy access!!   The BBQ Central Show makes news in Cleveland!  Read about it HERE!   "The Rub" podcast interviewed me (7/31/17 and 8/7/17) about the BBQ Hall of Fame and gas being allowed in competition BBQ.   PLEASE SUPPORT THE SHOW SPONSORS The BBQ Guru Big Poppa Smokers Butchers BBQ Green Mountain Grills Cookshack Cookin Pellets Chop's Power Injector Pit Barrel Cooker Smithfield National Pro BBQ Tour

The actor, Brian Cox, joins John Wilson to talk The Carer, a new comedy about a retired Shakespearean actor suffering from a form of Parkinson's disease that has left him frustrated and gloriously grumpy.John travels to Brighton to climb what is now the world's tallest moving observation tower, the British Airways i360. At the top he meets its architects, David Marks and Julia Barfield, who also created the London Eye. Comedian Bob Slayer explains why he is enlisting fellow performers and the general public to help him read the Chilcot Report, all 2.6 million words, from start to finish, at this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival. As we continue our series of interviews with artists working in Rio, today Kirsty Laing visits the visual artist, Ernesto Neto, at his studio where he creates crocheted sculptures inspired by nature.

Hour 1: We will recap the results of the 2013 Jack Daniels Draw that happened a few days ago. I will give you some teams to be on the look out for, but, we will get in to the ture break down of the field in a future show (soon). In addition to that, tomorrow is the 12th anniversary of September 11, 2001. I close the show each week with the phrase "I will never forget"...and tonight I take a segment out of the normal BBQ and Grilling talk to reflect on that day and what it meant for so many of us. If you have thoughts or feelings on this event, now 12 years old, please email or call in during this time...I would love to hear from you! In the 9:35pm EST segment, I will finally announce who wins the Hawg with a Heart raffle that has been going on for the past 2 weeks. I will do the drawing live on camera and award the prize along with David Marks from operation BBQ Relief. Hour 2: In the second hour we visit with BBQ restaurant owner, a seller of fine sauces and the pitmaster of his competition BBQ team, Brad Orrison from The Shed will join me (hopefully) to talk about their eatery, the competition scene and their recent success in TV. Brad brings a ton of personality to everything he does so be sure to tune in for this part of the show. Tonight I will also announce a new 3 week contest! Starting September 17 and running until the 1st of October The BBQ Central Show, in conjunction with Pit Barrel Cookers, will be giving away one FREE Pit Barrel Cooker during each show. Be sure to tune in to get all of the details. Bottom line, you will need to listen live in order to win a cooker...more details tonight!! PLEASE SUPPORT THE SHOW SPONSORS The BBQ Guru Tasty Licks BBQ Supply Steven DiFranco Jewelers Butchers BBQ BBQ'rs Delight Wood Pellets Green Mountain Grills I-Grill  R&O Smokers