POPULARITY
10 episodes with Don Felder
4 episodes with Don Felder
6 episodes with Don Felder
2 episodes with Don Felder
3 episodes with Don Felder
3 episodes with Don Felder
4 episodes with Don Felder
2 episodes with Don Felder
2 episodes with Don Felder
This week we have NEW Rock and Roll music that DESERVES to be heard from In Theory, Don Felder, Dazr, Spider Rockets, Innocents Torn, Nancy Wilson, The Mercury Riots, Jade Elephant and Smith/Kotzen along with some awesome music from Ted Nugent & The Amboy Dukes, Crossbone Skully, Dennis DeYoung, Triumph, and Sammy Hagar! Songlist:Ted Nugent & The Amboy Dukes - The Great White BuffaloCrossbone Skully - The Sin EaterIn Theory & Tommy Henricksen - RetributionDon Felder - Heavy MetalDazr - UnsatisifiedDennis DeYoung - Private JonesSpider Rockets - Monster Of Your DreamsInnocents Torn - Diggin'Nancy Wilson - Fight The Good FightTriumph - Somebody's Out ThereThe Mercury Riots - Save Me A DrinkJade Elephant - Hallway DarkSmith/Kotzen - DarksideSammy Hagar - Remember The Heroes
May 19th - Lee from Malibu's, B-Rad, Shaun Thompson, Deborah Norville, Don Felder
There's a rumor that The Eagles are getting along with Don Felder again, and Joe Walsh sets the record straight.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
This week we have NEW Rock and Roll music that DESERVES to be heard from SatchVai, Chase The Bear, Mad Invasion, Kurt Deimer, Velvet Grave, Don Felder, Agents Of Your Demise, Smash Atoms, The Fifth, Ray Of Light, Rebel Road, Drew Cagle & The Reputation, and Frank Hannon. We also have music from Austin Mo, Tesla, and Alice In Chains! Turn It Up!Songlist:Austin Mo - WantedTesla - Children's HeritageSatchVai - I Wanna Play My GuitarChase The Bear - FoolMad Invasion - Crack In The SkyKurt Deimer - DanceVelvet Grave - Higher GroundDon Felder - I Like The Things You DoAgents Of Your Demise - Sick ExistenceSmash Atoms - Buried Under The Open SkyThe Fifth - We Are OneRay Of Light - Ray Of LightDrew Cagle & The Reputation - Live RightRebel Road - 24/7 365Frank Hannon - Into The BlueAlice In Chains - Sickman
On this week's episode of The Eddie Trunk Podcast - Eddie shares his interview with rock legend Don Felder who shared the story behind his new album 'The Vault,' born from discovering decades of forgotten recordings in storage. He revealed how his slide guitar changed the Eagles' sound, the surprising origin of 'Hotel California,' and his journey from writing music beds for the band to creating his own path. With remarkable candor, Felder reflects on making peace with his Eagles past while embracing his creative freedom today. After that, Eddie brings you his conversation with Wendy Dio who discussed the upcoming Rock for Ronnie cancer benefit concert (on May 18th) and the Dio Cancer Fund's groundbreaking research. Catch Eddie Trunk every M-F from 3:00-5:00pm ET on Trunk Nation on SiriusXM Faction Talk Channel 103.And don't forget to follow Eddie on Twitter and Instagram!Follow the link to get your free 3-month trial of SiriusXM: http://siriusxm.com/eddietrunk Find all episodes of Trunk Nation: https://siriusxm.com/trunknation
(00:00:00) News & Sports(00:14:31) Entertainment News(00:44:03) Stupid Adult Fights(01:14:46) Bizarre File, Philadelphia Take Steps Walk(01:30:53) Totally Presbo(01:57:57) Ryan Ogle 2026 PGA Championship(02:14:11) Don Felder, Bizarre File(02:37:16) Hollywood Trash & Music News(02:45:41) Wrap Up
Lamont interviewed Don Felder. Don Felder's new album "The Vault - Fity Years Of Music" will be released on May 23rd. Click here to pre-order. Listen to Don Felder's new song "Free At Last." Styx, Kevin Cronin & Don Felder will be at the Toyota Pavilion at Concord on Friday, June 13th. For more info go to: toyotapavilionatconcord.com For tickets go to: livenation.com Listen to The Lamont Show Monday through Friday, 6-10am, on 107.7 The Bone. For more of 107.7 The Bone go to: 1077thebone.com Connect with 107.7 The Bone on Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube and TikTok. Connect with 107.7 The Bone on Apple, Spotify or Amazon Music.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Lamont interviewed Don Felder. Don Felder's new album "The Vault - Fity Years Of Music" will be released on May 23rd. Click here to pre-order. Listen to Don Felder's new song "Free At Last." Styx, Kevin Cronin & Don Felder will be at the Toyota Pavilion at Concord on Friday, June 13th. For more info go to: toyotapavilionatconcord.com For tickets go to: livenation.com Listen to The Lamont Show Monday through Friday, 6-10am, on 107.7 The Bone. For more of 107.7 The Bone go to: 1077thebone.com Connect with 107.7 The Bone on Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube and TikTok. Connect with 107.7 The Bone on Apple, Spotify or Amazon Music.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Don Felder, músico estadounidense que fue guitarrista principal de la banda de rock ‘Eagles', habla en La W de su trayectoria artística y sus nuevos lanzamientos.
In this listener discussion episode, you give us 3 choices of various things ranging from music to food and all things in between and we discuss, deciding which is a Smash, which is Trash, and which is just plain Meh. WE NEED YOUR HELP!! It's quick, easy, and free - Please consider doing one or all of the following to help grow our audience: Leave Us A Five Star Review in one of the following places: Apple Podcast Podchaser Spotify Connect with us Email us growinuprock@gmail.com Contact Form Like and Follow Us on FaceBook Follow Us on Twitter Leave Us A Review On Podchaser Join The Growin' Up Rock Loud Minority Facebook Group Do You Spotify? Then Follow us and Give Our Playlist a listen. We update it regularly with kick ass rock n roll Spotify Playlist Buy and Support Music From The Artist We Discuss On This Episode Growin' Up Rock Amazon Store Pantheon Podcast Network Music in this Episode Provided by the Following: Badlands, Fate, Widowmaker, Metallica, Don Felder, Whitesnake, Kobra & The Lotus, Warrant, Ratt, Glenn Hughes, Black Sabbath, Jimi Hendrix. Dokken, Kiss, Hollywood Undead Crank It Up New Music Spotlight Fate - "Around The Sun" If you dig what you are hearing, go pick up the album or some merch., and support these artists. A Special THANK YOU to Restrayned for the Killer Show Intro and transition music!! Restrayned Website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This week we have NEW Rock and Roll music that DESERVES to be heard from Smith/Kotzen, The Fifth, Crashing Wayward, L.A. Guns, In Theory, Frank Hannon, Soul Sign, Pat Travers and Don Felder. We also have music from Iron Maiden, Foghat, Leatherwolf, Sebastian Bach, and Jack Starr! Songlist:Iron Maiden - Deja VuSmith/Kotzen - Muddy WaterThe Fifth - BlindPat Travers - Snortin' Whiskey (Live)Foghat - Stay With MeCrashing Wayward - Going BlindL.A. Guns - The GrinderIn Theory with Eric Gales - Since I've Been Loving YouFrank Hannon - A Hundred MilesSoul Sign - Desert FireLeatherwolf - Too MuchSebastian Bach - F.U.Don Felder - Hollywood VictimJack Starr - Fire & Rain
This week we have NEW Rock and Roll music that DESERVES to be heard from Anthony Gomes, Frank Hannon, Don Felder, Dan Sindel, Overdrivers, Jack Starr, Myth Carver, Grosh, Michael Schenker, Dorothy, and The Outfit. We also have music from ZZ Top, Aerosmith, The Ides Of March, and Rogue! Play it LOUD!!Songlist:Anthony Gomes - Praise The LoudFrank Hannon - Walk In The RainDon Felder - Free At LastDan Sindel - BlindsidedZZ Top - Heard It On The XOverdrivers - Guitar PlayboyJack Starr - Rise UpMyth Carver - ThunderkillGrosh - Small TalkMichael Schenker - This KidsDorothy - Tombstone TownAerosmith - Pandora's BoxThe Outfit - Hard On MeThe Ides Of March - VehicleRogue - Stop
Pat chats with legendary REO Speedwagon vocalist and hit maker Kevin Cronin to discuss his career in music and promote the upcoming "Brotherhood Of Rock" tour featuring Styx, Don Felder and The Kevin Cronin Band!!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
REBEL HEART EMISIÓN EN ASALTO MATA RADIO N.10 CON SEÑOR MELODICO Y PACO JIMENEZ. Argi lost in paradise.(SINTONIA) Soul Seller - City Of Dragons (SINGLE). Outlasted weight of the world.(2025) Everon Until We Meet Again.(2025) Stereorize Holding on real version.(2025) Perfect Plan Heart of Lion Too Tough.(2025) Heaven's Reign - Northern Lights (2025)Born to fly. Jordi Castilla Calles vacías..(2025) Ginevra lightning roses.(2025) Blue Ambition seduction of the inocent.(2025) Laurenne Lohimo the cradle.(2025) Heartbanger - Once In A Bluemoon Why Feat. Marc Quee.(2025) Romathica Historias de Amor.(2025) Harem scarem chasing euphoria.(2025) Don Felder free at last.(2025) H.E.A.T - Bad Time For Love.(2025) Sacred Season - Tomorrow.(2025) Art Nation Julia.(2025) Siguenos cada semana te vamos a soprender!!
REO Speedwagon have been one of the most reliable American rock bands for over 50 years. Certain members may come and go, but that name, that quality, and the excellent songs of lead singer Kevin Cronin have been a constant for decades. Unfortunately, that recently came to an end with the departure of founding member Bruce Hall. Plus, Bruce took the name with him. The good news is that most of the same players are playing most of the same songs you've grown to love and rely on, they're just called the Kevin Cronin Band now. Kevin joins us this week to explain the new reality before he goes out on tour with Styx and Don Felder where he'll play the entire Hi-Infidelity album as well as the hits. We also discuss his relationship with original guitarist Gary Richrath, the stories behind songs and albums, how they became known for ballads, and much more. Kevin is a genuinely nice man and he's working hard to continue to deliver the goods (and set the record straight). We're lucky he's still at it. www.kevincronin.com www.patreon.com/c/thehustlepod
A very exciting, fun, positive, instructional, inspiring Video podcast interview with Bret Michael's bass player Stormin' Norman Voss on the Charron Zone Music Business podcast with Tim Charron . FOLLOW NORMAN at https://www.facebook.com/norman.voss.50 Norman and Tim talk about: Performing with Bret Michaels The rock band Poison Relationship building in the music business How to be a successful guitar player or bass player KISS, Mark McGrath of Sugar Ray, Dee Snider of Twisted Sister, 80 Rock bands, Don Felder , Journey , Lou Reed, Marketing and social media in the music business Normans advice to all musicians
Derek Downham is an award-winning songwriter/producer. A formidable multi-instrumentalist, Derek has recorded and played live/toured with many of Canada's finest bands and artists. He has performed/recorded/written with (in no particular order): The Beauties, Gordon Downie, Don Felder (of The Eagles), Broken Social Scene, Andy Kim, James Burton, Albert Lee, July Talk, Alex Lifeson, Serena Ryder, Sarah Slean, Nels Cline, Redd Volkert, Cindy Cashdollar, Junior Brown, Kellie Loder, Jim Cuddy, Whitehorse, Sam Roberts, Lights, Paul Pigat, Amos Garrett, Brent Mason, Julian Taylor, Jeffery Straker, Freeman Dre, Hayden Neale, Sloan, Jason Collett, Kim Stockwood, Jully Black, Jeen O'Brien, Amy Millan, Colin Cripps, Ron Sexsmith, Justin Rutledge, Rik Emmett, Jeff Healey, Emm Gryner, Damhnait Doyle, Holy F*ck, Beans, Elliott Brood and many more. Contact Derek:Website: https://www.derekdownham.com/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/derekdownham/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/derekdownham This Episode is brought to you by..Go to BETTERHELP.com/apologue for confidential online counselling.use the code word Apologue for a 7 day free trial Checkout my YouTube Channel with long form interviews from the Subversives | the History of Lowest of the Low. A weekly release on Tuesdays .https://www.youtube.com/@simonhead666 Pledge monthly with Patreon https://www.patreon.com/apologueShop Apologue products at http://apologue.ca/shopCheck out new Four Square Here: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/foursquare/brighton-beach-ephttps://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/foursquare/seven-oh-sevenhttps://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/foursquare/industry-at-home--21st-anniversary-remix-remasteredhttps://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/foursquare/when-weeks-were-weekends
Joyce talks about the Trump Administration choosing to communicate more often with the American people, President Trump keeping his promises despite push back from the left, JD Vance calling out Europe for censorship, the Trump administration promising to go after officials who do not follow the new laws, democrat judges blocking executive orders, Valentines Day and more. Derek from TMZ calls in to talk about Kanye and Bianca, Brittany Mahomes' $72,000 necklace, Taylor Swift being booed at the Super Bowl, Shaq using the F word on the TV, and Don Felder's medical episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Joyce talks about the Trump Administration choosing to communicate more often with the American people, President Trump keeping his promises despite push back from the left, JD Vance calling out Europe for censorship, the Trump administration promising to go after officials who do not follow the new laws, democrat judges blocking executive orders, Valentines Day and more. Derek from TMZ calls in to talk about Kanye and Bianca, Brittany Mahomes' $72,000 necklace, Taylor Swift being booed at the Super Bowl, Shaq using the F word on the TV, and Don Felder's medical episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Send us a textHere in Episode 203 of the No Name Music Cast, it is Tim's turn to pick the topic and he chooses to talk about his 2024 Spotify Wrapped!We cover Led Zeppelin, Foo Fighters, Styx and Don Felder to mention only a few.We also talk about NPR, Ellen's Stardust Diner, John Williams and Electrica Salsa!https://www.facebook.com/NoNameMusicCast/Support the show
ce format est aussi à vous : n'hésitez pas à jouer avecj'ai pris l'ost du dessin animé heavy metal (métal hurlant) de 1981et me suis amusé à écrire une histoire dérivé de l'histoire du film.les chansons : "Heavy Metal" (Original Version) Sammy Hagar 3:50 "Heartbeat" Riggs 4:20 "Working in the Coal Mine" Devo 2:48 "Veteran of the Psychic Wars" Blue Öyster Cult 4:48 "Reach Out" Cheap Trick 3:35 "Heavy Metal (Takin' a Ride)" Don Felder 5:00 "True Companion" Donald Fagen 5:02 "Crazy (A Suitable Case for Treatment)" Nazareth 3:24 "Radar Rider" Riggs 2:40 "Open Arms" Journey 3:20 "Queen Bee" Grand Funk Railroad 3:11 "I Must Be Dreamin'" Cheap Trick 5:37 "The Mob Rules" (alternate version) Black Sabbath 3:16 "All of You" Don Felder 4:18 "Prefabricated" Trust 2:59 "Blue Lamp" Stevie Nicks 3:48 vignette de Mu
Send us a textThis week, we dive into the first 3 albums from the greatest American rock band of the 1970's! Def Dave, Mike Vermillion, and Dayton share opinions on these albums. Playlisthttps://open.spotify.com/playlist/6NvGPwdaV6bXsXfJRzkHiL?si=HaeQcaoTQ0qrwX7k5Pj8kg&pi=Du0ZvSOcR_GhbTwitter @dockingbay77podFacebook @dockingbay77podcastdockingbay77podcast@gmail.compatreon.com/dockingbay77podcasthttps://discord.gg/T8Nt3YB7
A new tour got announced for 2025 featuring Styx...Kevin Cronin of REO...and Don Felder. Plus, Jamie Foxx will address his health scare in a new Netflix special coming soon!
PROCOL HARUM BROKEN BARRICADES PLUS TRIBUTES TO JD SOUTHER AND WILL JENNINGS ARTISTS INCLUDE James Taylor, Jimmy Buffett, Celine Dion, Jennifer Warnes/Joe Cocker, Dobie Gray, Randy Crawford, and JD Souther. SENSATIONAL GUITARISTS INCLUDE Rodney Crowell, Steve Winwood, and Don Felder, Joe Walsh (Eagles). COPYCATS ARE COOL CATS! ORIGINAL VERSION— PRISONER IN DISGUISE— LINDA RONSTADT AND JD SOUTHER COVER VERSION — COLCANNON. PRESENTED BY :- James Gee as in, Gee, If my memory was any worse, I could plan my own surprise party! www.singersongwritersandsensationalguitarists.com
Bobby starts talking about being surprised by his UberEats driver's rating last night that led him to a moral dilemma. Bobby reveals what he did after being dissatisfied with his service. We then get into a discussion of pronunciation and the Mona Lisa. Bobby talks about Don Felder, formerly of the Eagles, being on the BobbyCast this week. Amy asks how often Bobby gets messages from celebs about them enjoying interviews. Amy then has to address an issue she is having with her skull.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
A decade after what fans feared would be the last flight of The Eagles — SoCal's ultimate 1970s soft rockers — band mates Timothy Schmit and Don Felder teamed up with friends to try to create a new band, one they wanted to call “The Malibu Men's Choir.”Well, that effort failed — the new group never got off the ground — but their songwriting collaboration with Jim Capaldi and Paul Carrack did produce a hit for a re-energized Eagles when the band rebounded for its 1994-96 “Hell Freezes Over” Tour.As diehard Eagles enthusiasts know, the tour's name hearkened back a dozen years. Asked in 1982 by People magazine if he'd ever get the band back together, Don Henley was snide. Sure, he said, “When hell freezes over."When the reunion did come to pass — with a lineup of Henley, Felder, Schmit, Glenn Frey and Joe Walsh performing live in April 1994 at Warner Bros. Studios for an MTV special — Frey quipped, "For the record, we never broke up. We just took a 14-year vacation."Here Comes The SongHowever, The Eagles didn't have much new material for the subsequent tour and accompanying album.That brings us to “Love Will Keep Us Alive.” Schmit already knew this song, because Capaldi and Carrack wrote it a few years earlier during that ill-fated Malibu Men's Choir project.On The Eagles' tour album, the song reached No. 1 on the Adult Contemporary chart despite not being released as a single. Critics noted that Schmit's rare lead vocal gave the ballad a tender fragility. The song was nominated at the Grammy Awards for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals.Meanwhile, Carrack — who may have had his own voice in mind when he co-wrote it — also recorded song on his 1996 album, Blue Views. Then 15 years later, he and Schmit recorded it together in London with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra for a release on the Carrack label.Our Take on the TuneBack in June, rolling into Huntington's West End to play at a picnic to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the city's beloved Sacred Heart Catholic Church, the band played its then-new cover of The Eagles' first big hit, “Peaceful Easy Feeling.”“That was great!” the hostess said. “Play another Eagles tune.” Uh-oh, there wasn't another Eagles song in the Flood repertoire. Well, not yet, anyway. Then Randy Hamilton stepped up.“I think I got one,” Randy said at a later band rehearsal. It turned out that for years Randy had been singing “Love Will Keep Us Alive,” ever since he had performed it at his sister's wedding. “It's her favorite song,” he added.When he started singing for his Flood brothers, the tune just naturally slipped into a groove. Here from last week's rehearsal is Randy leading the way! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com
(1:30) Kirk and Blind Mike recap the John Dales experience. (3:00) Kirk teases a surprise producer candidate who is the favorite to land the job. (4:19) Kirk addresses Mut's big announcement and reminds us that all the #KirkWasRight. (19:25) Sounds like Mut already regrets this move. (29:40) Mut's new co-host blindly makes 4.8k betting sports. (32:50) Kirk and Blind Mike dig in on co-host and Barstool hater Eytan Shander. (46:30) We call Big Cat to get his thoughts on Mut and touch on some Surviving Barstool talk. (55:20) Sound of Mut and Eytan doing an old show together is uncovered. (59:15) Blind Mike is surprised Mut is willing to do a show with a guy like Eytan Shander. (1:04:10) Taking calls, the Minifans weigh in on Mut. (1:20:00) We wrap up calls, Kirk and Blind Mike give their final thoughts on Mut. (1:31:45) Kirk says the new producer might be announced on Thursday, Don Felder interview dropping 6pm today, Kirk and Justin are going to Don's show together.You can find every episode of this show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube. Prime Members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. For more, visit barstool.link/kminshow
Todd Muench joins John Landecker in the studio to talk about the Antenna TV Nostalgia Stories Podcast. This time, Todd breaks down some of the August segments and some of the exciting interviews they have coming up in the month which include Chazz Palminteri, Sam Jones, Don Felder, and Nick Feldman!
Ty Bailie is currently on tour with Mitzki playing keys and organ. He moved to Nashville in 2021 after a stint in LA where his main gig was touring with Katy Perry. Since coming to Nashville, he has also performed with Joss Stone, Don Felder, Tanya Tucker, Wilder Woods, and his own group Uncle Bronco featuring Petar Jancic on drums and Adam MacPhail on guitar. In this episode, Ty talks about: Touring with Mitzki, and buying into at artist's vision Being musically agnostic and seeing validity in all types music, musicians, and music fans What makes a good organ drummer - "don't panic" Moving from Seattle to LA to Nashville, and the differences between those scenes Finding different versions of yourself while still being yourself
Every Thursday we gather the JMN crew and sound off about some interesting weekend activities. Every kind of fun can be found this weekend! Concerts? Don Felder, Staind, Billy Strings, and the Flaming Lips all have shows. Sports? Take your pick from the Icemen, the Sharks, or the Jumbo Shrimp! Want to get out and about? Neptune Beach Artwalk is on, and there's the Touch-A-Truck event this weekend! Check out the Weekend Spotlight for these and more events!
The guitar solo has been ubiquitous in rock music since its inception. On this week's Loudini Rock & Roll Circus Podcast, we discuss 20 of the most influential guitar solos of all time and tell you the stories behind them #stevelukather #davidgilmour #scottymoore Topics Discussed: What we did this week: Loudini: Conan, NAMM 2024, the A-Team, gibson; no longer for working musicians, frank zappa/Adrian belew/David bowie, guitologist on gibson reissue amps, rick and tim on the changing studio scene Mr Pittsburgh: spark, handcare Lou: Heart Break Hotel; Scotty Moore Rock Around the Clock; Danny Cedrone Let it Be; George Harrison Stairway To Heaven; Jimmy Page Kid Charlemagne; Larry Carlton Crossroads; Eric Clapton Little Wing; Jimi Hendrix Comfortably Numb; David Gilmour While My Guitar Gently Weeps; Eric Clapton Smells Like Teen Spirit; Kurt Cobain Sultans of Swing; Mark Knoffler Free Bird; Allen Collins 25 or 6 to 4; Terry Kath Do You Feel Like We Do(live version); Peter Frampton More Than a Feeling; Tom Scholz Hotel California; Don Felder & Joe Walsh Bohemian Rhapsody; Brian May Hey Joe; Jimi Hendrix Rosanna; Steve Lukather Beat It; Eddie Van Halen My Old School; Jeff Baxter Boys of Summer; Mike Campbell And She Was; David Byrne Ain't Talking Bout Love; Eddie Van Halen Looking Out My Back Door; John Fogarty Johnny B. Goode; Chuck Berry Limelight; Alex Lifeson YouTube(ers) reference: New & Notable: Kevin: Courtney Hadwin; Monsters Loudini: Julia Lage; The Ride Loudini's Great Moments in YouTube: This Day In Music https://www.thisdayinmusic.com top40weekly.com Viewer's Comments Offer: Get a FREE EP HERE: http://LouLombardiMusic.com if you love great guitar driven rock from the 70s, 80s, 90s and even today, you will want to get my EP "The Bad Years". Get your copy while supplies last!
Nick Cellini and Chris Dimino talk everything Atlanta Sports, the National Sports picture and the current (and WAY back when) in pop culture! Get the latest and your fill of Atlanta Braves, Georgia Bulldogs, Atlanta Falcons, Atlanta Hawks daily from two "Southern" Yankees daily Mon-Fri from 11a-2p! Georgia Tech Head Coach Danny Hall Beyond the Goatee presented by Pella Windows & Doors Poison's Bret Michaels CrossTalk with Matt Chernoff and Chuck Oliver Back In Time See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Bret Michaels, former Poison lead singer, is coming back to Atlanta for Party Gras 2.0 Tour on Saturday, August 3rd at Ameris Bank Amphitheater. He joined Nick Cellini and Chris Dimino to talk about coming back to Atlanta, how he lines up great special guest like Chris Janson, Don Felder, Dee Snider, Lou Gramm and whom will all be joining him in Atlanta and much more Get tickets for Party Gras 2.0 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Nick Cellini and Chris Dimino talk everything Atlanta Sports, the National Sports picture and the current (and WAY back when) in pop culture! Get the latest and your fill of Atlanta Braves, Georgia Bulldogs, Atlanta Falcons, Atlanta Hawks daily from two "Southern" Yankees daily Mon-Fri from 11a-2p! Georgia Tech Head Coach Danny Hall Beyond the Goatee presented by Pella Windows & Doors Poison's Bret Michaels CrossTalk with Matt Chernoff and Chuck Oliver Back In Time See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
SUMMARY:Songwriters Hall of Famer JD Souther joins Scott and Paul for an in-depth interview to kick off the New Year! PART ONE:Paul and Scott welcome two very special guests (ages 8 and 5) to help set the tone for the new year. Plus they reveal the clever message a listener sent in to win the Stax Christmas LP from the last episode. PART TWO:Our in-depth conversation with JD SoutherABOUT JD SOUTHER:JD Souther is perhaps best known for writing or co-writing ten songs recorded by the Eagles, including “Victim of Love,” “The Sad Café,” “How Long,” and the #1 hits “Best of My Love,” “New Kid in Town,” and “Heartache Tonight.” Another ten of his songs were recorded by Linda Ronstadt, among them “Faithless Love,” “Prisoner in Disguise,” and “Simple Man, Simple Dream.” The list of other artists who have drawn from the JD Souther songbook includes Bonnie Raitt, Rod Stewart, Conway Twitty, Glen Campbell, George Strait, Trisha Yearwood, Tom Jones, Roy Orbison, Raul Malo, Michael Buble, India.Arie, and Crosby, Stills & Nash. Additionally, JD co-wrote three songs with Don Henley on his End of the Innoncence album, including “Heart of the Matter,” and found success with the Dixie Chicks' cover of his “I'll Take Care of You.” As an artist, JD launched his career with the group Longbranch / Pennywhistle, which he founded with future Eagle Glenn Frey. Soon after, he co-founded the Souther-Hillman-Furay Band with Chris Hillman of The Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers, and Richie Furay of Buffalo Springfield and Poco. In total, JD has released seven solo studio albums between 1972 and 2015, and landed two Top 10 hits as a recording artist with “You're Only Lonely” and the James Taylor duet “Her Town Too.” Souther was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2013.
“You should reach out to Joni.” I'm reading a text from my step-mom and she is suggesting I contact a dear friend of hers because her focus on Musical Improv can take performances to the next level. I've met Joni and she's fantastic. The challenge is: I'm directing a big Improv show this Friday… and it's already Tuesday. So there's not much time to bring her in. I'm thinking, “What if introducing music now ends up throwing off the performers or intimidating those who aren't so musically inclined?” I decided to go for it anyway. I invited Joni to our Tuesday evening class so she could be part of our rehearsal and get to know the players before Friday's show. And I create a game set list that involves everyone–from those highly inclined in Musical Improv to those who have zero experience. I want them all to feel like musical superheroes. After the class is over, my phone starts blowing up with text messages from different students. Everyone loved the addition of Joni and her music. And she had a great time too! Experiences like this are just a reminder that it's good to mix things up sometimes. When you try new things and put yourself even a little out of your comfort zone, you open yourself up to a new story of possibility. And when it comes to music, my special guest Dan Kalisher knows a lot about mixing it up. In this episode of the Storytelling School Podcast, you'll learn how music can impact the story you're telling (whether in a performance or a Talk), as well as get answers to questions such as: Why does music transcend spoken language? And what's one reason why people can feel creatively stuck or like they've hit a roadblock? What you will learn in this episode: How the emotional side of storytelling in front of a live audience differs from that in a studio How location can influence you as a storytelling artist What key aspect can help you keep your creativity well-flowing Who is Dan? Dan Kalisher is a session guitar and pedal steel player, producer, and songwriter based in Los Angeles. He has played all over the world performing and recording with artists such as Noah Cyrus, Grace Potter, Louis Tomlinson, Fitz and the Tantrums, Bea Miller, AJ McClean, Don Felder, Matthew Morrison, JC Chasez, and Jesse McCartney. He has also performed at countless music festivals, with regional orchestras nationwide, and has appeared on several major network morning and late-night television shows. As an award-winning songwriter and producer, Dan has over 25 placements of original music in network TV and worldwide ad campaigns. Most recently, he contributed over 100 original songs for the Meta Sound Collection. Links and Resources: @dankalisher on Instagram @dankalisher on TikTok Storytelling School Website @storytellingschool on Instagram @storytellingSchool on Facebook
This is a pre-pandemic revisit to a previous episode from Aug 9, 2019 in which touring and session guitarist Greg Suran visited the TGS studios to talk about his globe-trotting experiences playing in his own Chicago-based band Cupcakes and BlueManGroup before joining The B-52's in which he still enjoys frequent gigs. He later joined Sunny Day Real Estate for their last two studio albums and subesequent tours, and has worked since that time steadily as a session player with the likes of Joe Walsh and Don Felder of the Eagles. He later was asked to join the house band on the set of the American Idol TV show, and most recently has enjoyed a long touring stint with the legendary Lionel Richie. His revisit to the TGS studio here is relevant because since he's been busy with Lionel, Greg was kind enough to ask your host AE to fill in for him in SDRE so it's a great recap with a man who's made music his life and his experiences have forged a human with a rich DNA tapestry.
Guitarist and pedal steel player Dan Kalisher (Noah Cyrus, Grace Potter, Don Felder) shares insights on the six areas to develop as a musician and how imagination and uniqueness might be the most important tool in mastering your skills.
Guitarist Greg Suran (Lionel Ritchie, American Idol, Joe Walsh, Don Felder) joins Jimmy Warren on Guitar Talk. www.guitartalkofficial.com
Brian Tichy is one of the most in demand performers today. Brian studied music at, and has a degree from, the prestigious Berklee College of Music. Brian has performed and recorded with artists: Billy Idol, Foreigner, Whitesnake, Steven Tyler, Joe Perry, Ozzy Osbourne, WASP, Don Felder, B'Z, Lynch Mob, Vinnie Moore, Michael Schenker, Seether, Velvet Revolver, Zakk Wylde's Pride & Glory, The Dead Daisies, Glenn Hughes, Slash's Snakepit and is also the founder of the popular celebration events, Bonzo Bash and Randy Rhoads Remembered. In this episode, Brian talks about: Drummers that connect with the people Touring with the Dead Daisies Being able to adapt on sessions Different tours/sessions and managing it all Playing with Don Felder Recording the album Pride and Glory w/ Zakk Wylde Great playing over good networking Hand and feet exercise for desks and floors only : 0
Marc has played guitar and toured with Warner Bros. recording artists Toy Matinee along with producer/composer Kevin Gilbert as well as recording two critically-acclaimed guitar instrumental albums for Reprise, “EE Ticket” and “American Matador” and has just released a third highly-anticipated album “Celluloid Debris”. He has also produced, recorded and performed with several artists including Keith Emerson, Ronnie Montrose, Gamma, Glenn Hughes (Deep Purple), Eddie Jobson (U.K.), Slash, Rob Halford, David Coverdale, Peter Frampton, Sammy Hagar, Paul Rogers, Joe Perry, Edgar Winter, Ambrosia, The Manhattans, The Chi-Lites, Robbie Kreiger (The Doors), Tesla, Ricky Martin, Don Felder, Harry Shearer (Spinal Tap), Felix Calvaliere (Rascals), Mickey Dolenz, Steve Lukather and Steve Porcaro (Toto), Jordan Rudess (Dream Theater), Rick Wakeman ( Yes), Thomas Lang, and many others. Check Marc's website: https://marcbonillamusic.com/ Subscribe to the email list and get yourself some free goodies: https://producelikeapro.com Want to create radio ready mixes from the comfort of your home? Go check out https://promixacademy.com/courses/ Check out all other services here: https://linktr.ee/producelikeapro
Don Felder, formerly of the Eagles was a great interview. He's still getting paid for writing Hotel California and Victim of Love and he's opening for El Monstero. The KSHE Tapes is a good one this week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Don Felder, formerly of the Eagles was a great interview. He's still getting paid for writing Hotel California and Victim of Love and he's opening for El Monstero. The KSHE Tapes is a good one this week. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Don Felder joined Nancy in 2017 to talk about his music journey from the early years in Gainesville with Stephen Stills and Tom Petty and battle of the bands with the Allmans, to his time with the Eagles, solo projects, and collaboration with other bands like Styx. Plus, Felder discusses how his love for making music has driven his world. Read the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Essay for the Eagles and Don Felder here. Get up to date information via Don Felder's website. Visit Nancy's website.
The Doc invites legendary guitarist Joe Bonamassa on the show! The two talk about his upcoming Keep the Blues Alive Cruise, playing with Don Felder, recording with Marc Broussard, getting his hand bit by a spider in Louisiana, recording a new live album and super weenies in West Virginia! Make sure to listen!! Monologue (The Comeback): 0:00:20 Birthday Suit 1: 11:47 Ripped From the Headlines: 17:00 Joe Bonamassa - Drive: 31:11 Shoutouts: 38:31 Previously on the Doc G Show: 41:32 Miscellaneous File: 44:52 Joe Bonamassa Interview: 49:42 Joe Bonamassa - Notches: 1:03:42 The Doc G Top 3: 1:12:52 Birthday Suit 2: 1:26:51 Birthday Suit 3: 1:30:14
Hotel California Review by William Ruhlmann The Eagles took 18 months between their fourth and fifth albums, reportedly spending eight months in the studio recording Hotel California. The album was also their first to be made without Bernie Leadon, who had given the band much of its country flavor, and with rock guitarist Joe Walsh. As a result, the album marks a major leap for the Eagles from their earlier work, as well as a stylistic shift toward mainstream rock. An even more important aspect, however, is the emergence of Don Henley as the band's dominant voice, both as a singer and a lyricist. On the six songs to which he contributes, Henley sketches a thematic statement that begins by using California as a metaphor for a dark, surreal world of dissipation; comments on the ephemeral nature of success and the attraction of excess; branches out into romantic disappointment; and finally sketches a broad, pessimistic history of America that borders on nihilism. Of course, the lyrics kick in some time after one has appreciated the album's music, which marks a peak in the Eagles' playing. Early on, the group couldn't rock convincingly, but the rhythm section of Henley and Meisner has finally solidified, and the electric guitar work of Don Felder and Joe Walsh has arena-rock heft. In the early part of their career, the Eagles never seemed to get a sound big enough for their ambitions; after changes in producer and personnel, as well as a noticeable growth in creativity, Hotel California unveiled what seemed almost like a whole new band. It was a band that could be bombastic, but also one that made music worthy of the later tag of "classic rock," music appropriate for the arenas and stadiums the band was playing. The result was the Eagles' biggest-selling regular album release, and one of the most successful rock albums ever. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/comics-in-motion-podcast/message
On the 11th Episode of Dorm Damage With Tom & Zeus, the guys discuss their favorite guitarists and then give a top ten list each. On Shout It Out Loudcast, Album Review Crew and The Zeppelin Chronicles, Tom & Zeus always point out songs that are dominated by incredible riffs, solos and melody. The guitar is rock's most identifiable instrument. Many of their favorite guitarists are in KISS, Led Zeppelin and a ton of bands that are features on ARC. The guys discuss what they look for in a guitarist and the various types of guitar gods. They each give their unique list of favorite guitarists. Their lists contain many suprises and some omitted famous names as well.A fun discussion about guitar gods is great way to end 2022! For all things Shout It Out Loudcast check out our amazing website by clicking below: www.ShoutItOutLoudcast.com Interested in more Shout It Out Loudcast content? Care to help us out? Come join us on Patreon by clicking below: SIOL Patreon Get all your Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise by clicking below:Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise at AMAZON Shop At Our Amazon Store by clicking below:Shout It Out Loudcast Amazon Store Please Email us comments or suggestions by clicking below:ShoutItOutLoudcast@Gmail.com Please subscribe to us and give us a 5 Star (Child) review on the following places below:iTunesPodchaserStitcheriHeart RadioSpotify Please follow us and like our social media pages clicking below:TwitterFacebook PageFacebook Group Page Shout It Out LoudcastersInstagramYouTube Proud Member of the Pantheon Podcast click below to see the website:Pantheon Podcast Network
On the 11th Episode of Dorm Damage With Tom & Zeus, the guys discuss their favorite guitarists and then give a top ten list each. On Shout It Out Loudcast, Album Review Crew and The Zeppelin Chronicles, Tom & Zeus always point out songs that are dominated by incredible riffs, solos and melody. The guitar is rock's most identifiable instrument. Many of their favorite guitarists are in KISS, Led Zeppelin and a ton of bands that are features on ARC. The guys discuss what they look for in a guitarist and the various types of guitar gods. They each give their unique list of favorite guitarists. Their lists contain many suprises and some omitted famous names as well.A fun discussion about guitar gods is great way to end 2022! For all things Shout It Out Loudcast check out our amazing website by clicking below: www.ShoutItOutLoudcast.com Interested in more Shout It Out Loudcast content? Care to help us out? Come join us on Patreon by clicking below: SIOL Patreon Get all your Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise by clicking below:Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise at AMAZON Shop At Our Amazon Store by clicking below:Shout It Out Loudcast Amazon Store Please Email us comments or suggestions by clicking below:ShoutItOutLoudcast@Gmail.com Please subscribe to us and give us a 5 Star (Child) review on the following places below:iTunesPodchaserStitcheriHeart RadioSpotify Please follow us and like our social media pages clicking below:TwitterFacebook PageFacebook Group Page Shout It Out LoudcastersInstagramYouTube Proud Member of the Pantheon Podcast click below to see the website:Pantheon Podcast Network
Episode 152 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “For What It's Worth”, and the short but eventful career of Buffalo Springfield. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" by Glen Campbell. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, there's a Mixcloud mix containing all the songs excerpted in the episode. This four-CD box set is the definitive collection of Buffalo Springfield's work, while if you want the mono version of the second album, the stereo version of the first, and the final album as released, but no demos or outtakes, you want this more recent box set. For What It's Worth: The Story of Buffalo Springfield by Richey Furay and John Einarson is obviously Furay's version of the story, but all the more interesting for that. For information on Steve Stills' early life I used Stephen Stills: Change Partners by David Roberts. Information on both Stills and Young comes from Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young by David Browne. Jimmy McDonough's Shakey is the definitive biography of Neil Young, while Young's Waging Heavy Peace is his autobiography. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before we begin -- this episode deals with various disabilities. In particular, there are descriptions of epileptic seizures that come from non-medically-trained witnesses, many of whom took ableist attitudes towards the seizures. I don't know enough about epilepsy to know how accurate their descriptions and perceptions are, and I apologise if that means that by repeating some of their statements, I am inadvertently passing on myths about the condition. When I talk about this, I am talking about the after-the-fact recollections of musicians, none of them medically trained and many of them in altered states of consciousness, about events that had happened decades earlier. Please do not take anything said in a podcast about music history as being the last word on the causes or effects of epileptic seizures, rather than how those musicians remember them. Anyway, on with the show. One of the things you notice if you write about protest songs is that a lot of the time, the songs that people talk about as being important or impactful have aged very poorly. Even great songwriters like Bob Dylan or John Lennon, when writing material about the political events of the time, would write material they would later acknowledge was far from their best. Too often a song will be about a truly important event, and be powered by a real sense of outrage at injustice, but it will be overly specific, and then as soon as the immediate issue is no longer topical, the song is at best a curio. For example, the sentencing of the poet and rock band manager John Sinclair to ten years in prison for giving two joints to an undercover police officer was hugely controversial in the early seventies, but by the time John Lennon's song about it was released, Sinclair had been freed by the Supreme Court, and very, very few people would use the song as an example of why Lennon's songwriting still has lasting value: [Excerpt: John Lennon, "John Sinclair"] But there are exceptions, and those tend to be songs where rather than talking about specific headlines, the song is about the emotion that current events have caused. Ninety years on from its first success, for example, "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" still has resonance, because there are still people who are put out of work through no fault of their own, and even those of us who are lucky enough to be financially comfortable have the fear that all too soon it may end, and we may end up like Al begging on the streets: [Excerpt: Rudy Vallee, "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?"] And because of that emotional connection, sometimes the very best protest songs can take on new lives and new meanings, and connect with the way people feel about totally unrelated subjects. Take Buffalo Springfield's one hit. The actual subject of the song couldn't be any more trivial in the grand scheme of things -- a change in zoning regulations around the Sunset Strip that meant people under twenty-one couldn't go to the clubs after 10PM, and the subsequent reaction to that -- but because rather than talking about the specific incident, Steve Stills instead talked about the emotions that it called up, and just noted the fleeting images that he was left with, the song became adopted as an anthem by soldiers in Vietnam. Sometimes what a song says is nowhere near as important as how it says it. [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "For What It's Worth"] Steve Stills seems almost to have been destined to be a musician, although the instrument he started on, the drums, was not the one for which he would become best known. According to Stills, though, he always had an aptitude for rhythm, to the extent that he learned to tapdance almost as soon as he had learned to walk. He started on drums aged eight or nine, after somebody gave him a set of drumsticks. After his parents got sick of him damaging the furniture by playing on every available surface, an actual drum kit followed, and that became his principal instrument, even after he learned to play the guitar at military school, as his roommate owned one. As a teenager, Stills developed an idiosyncratic taste in music, helped by the record collection of his friend Michael Garcia. He didn't particularly like most of the pop music of the time, but he was a big fan of pre-war country music, Motown, girl-group music -- he especially liked the Shirelles -- and Chess blues. He was also especially enamoured of the music of Jimmy Reed, a passion he would later share with his future bandmate Neil Young: [Excerpt: Jimmy Reed, "Baby, What You Want Me To Do?"] In his early teens, he became the drummer for a band called the Radars, and while he was drumming he studied their lead guitarist, Chuck Schwin. He said later "There was a whole little bunch of us who were into kind of a combination of all the blues guys and others including Chet Atkins, Dick Dale, and Hank Marvin: a very weird cross-section of far-out guitar players." Stills taught himself to play like those guitarists, and in particular he taught himself how to emulate Atkins' Travis-picking style, and became remarkably proficient at it. There exists a recording of him, aged sixteen, singing one of his own songs and playing finger-picked guitar, and while the song is not exactly the strongest thing I've ever heard lyrically, it's clearly the work of someone who is already a confident performer: [Excerpt: Stephen Stills, "Travellin'"] But the main reason he switched to becoming a guitarist wasn't because of his admiration for Chet Atkins or Hank Marvin, but because he started driving and discovered that if you have to load a drum kit into your car and then drive it to rehearsals and gigs you either end up bashing up your car or bashing up the drum kit. As this is not a problem with guitars, Stills decided that he'd move on from the Radars, and join a band named the Continentals as their rhythm guitarist, playing with lead guitarist Don Felder. Stills was only in the Continentals for a few months though, before being replaced by another guitarist, Bernie Leadon, and in general Stills' whole early life is one of being uprooted and moved around. His father had jobs in several different countries, and while for the majority of his time Stills was in the southern US, he also ended up spending time in Costa Rica -- and staying there as a teenager even as the rest of his family moved to El Salvador. Eventually, aged eighteen, he moved to New Orleans, where he formed a folk duo with a friend, Chris Sarns. The two had very different tastes in folk music -- Stills preferred Dylan-style singer-songwriters, while Sarns liked the clean sound of the Kingston Trio -- but they played together for several months before moving to Greenwich Village, where they performed together and separately. They were latecomers to the scene, which had already mostly ended, and many of the folk stars had already gone on to do bigger things. But Stills still saw plenty of great performers there -- Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonius Monk in the jazz clubs, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, and Richard Pryor in the comedy ones, and Simon and Garfunkel, Richie Havens, Fred Neil and Tim Hardin in the folk ones -- Stills said that other than Chet Atkins, Havens, Neil, and Hardin were the people most responsible for his guitar style. Stills was also, at this time, obsessed with Judy Collins' third album -- the album which had featured Roger McGuinn on banjo and arrangements, and which would soon provide several songs for the Byrds to cover: [Excerpt: Judy Collins, "Turn, Turn, Turn"] Judy Collins would soon become a very important figure in Stills' life, but for now she was just the singer on his favourite record. While the Greenwich Village folk scene was no longer quite what it had been a year or two earlier, it was still a great place for a young talented musician to perform. As well as working with Chris Sarns, Stills also formed a trio with his friend John Hopkins and a banjo player called Peter Tork who everyone said looked just like Stills. Tork soon headed out west to seek his fortune, and then Stills got headhunted to join the Au Go Go Singers. This was a group that was being set up in the same style as the New Christy Minstrels -- a nine-piece vocal and instrumental group that would do clean-sounding versions of currently-popular folk songs. The group were signed to Roulette Records, and recorded one album, They Call Us Au-Go-Go Singers, produced by Hugo and Luigi, the production duo we've previously seen working with everyone from the Tokens to the Isley Brothers. Much of the album is exactly the same kind of thing that a million New Christy Minstrels soundalikes were putting out -- and Stills, with his raspy voice, was clearly intended to be the Barry McGuire of this group -- but there was one exception -- a song called "High Flyin' Bird", on which Stills was able to show off the sound that would later make him famous, and which became so associated with him that even though it was written by Billy Edd Wheeler, the writer of "Jackson", even the biography of Stills I used in researching this episode credits "High Flyin' Bird" as being a Stills original: [Excerpt: The Au-Go-Go Singers, "High Flyin' Bird"] One of the other members of the Au-Go-Go Singers, Richie Furay, also got to sing a lead vocal on the album, on the Tom Paxton song "Where I'm Bound": [Excerpt: The Au-Go-Go Singers, "Where I'm Bound"] The Au-Go-Go Singers got a handful of dates around the folk scene, and Stills and Furay became friendly with another singer playing the same circuit, Gram Parsons. Parsons was one of the few people they knew who could see the value in current country music, and convinced both Stills and Furay to start paying more attention to what was coming out of Nashville and Bakersfield. But soon the Au-Go-Go Singers split up. Several venues where they might otherwise have been booked were apparently scared to book an act that was associated with Morris Levy, and also the market for big folk ensembles dried up more or less overnight when the Beatles hit the music scene. But several of the group -- including Stills but not Furay -- decided they were going to continue anyway, and formed a group called The Company, and they went on a tour of Canada. And one of the venues they played was the Fourth Dimension coffee house in Fort William, Ontario, and there their support act was a rock band called The Squires: [Excerpt: The Squires, "(I'm a Man And) I Can't Cry"] The lead guitarist of the Squires, Neil Young, had a lot in common with Stills, and they bonded instantly. Both men had parents who had split up when they were in their teens, and had a successful but rather absent father and an overbearing mother. And both had shown an interest in music even as babies. According to Young's mother, when he was still in nappies, he would pull himself up by the bars of his playpen and try to dance every time he heard "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie": [Excerpt: Pinetop Smith, "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie"] Young, though, had had one crucial experience which Stills had not had. At the age of six, he'd come down with polio, and become partially paralysed. He'd spent months in hospital before he regained his ability to walk, and the experience had also affected him in other ways. While he was recovering, he would draw pictures of trains -- other than music, his big interest, almost an obsession, was with electric train sets, and that obsession would remain with him throughout his life -- but for the first time he was drawing with his right hand rather than his left. He later said "The left-hand side got a little screwed. Feels different from the right. If I close my eyes, my left side, I really don't know where it is—but over the years I've discovered that almost one hundred percent for sure it's gonna be very close to my right side … probably to the left. That's why I started appearing to be ambidextrous, I think. Because polio affected my left side, and I think I was left-handed when I was born. What I have done is use the weak side as the dominant one because the strong side was injured." Both Young's father Scott Young -- a very famous Canadian writer and sports broadcaster, who was by all accounts as well known in Canada during his lifetime as his son -- and Scott's brother played ukulele, and they taught Neil how to play, and his first attempt at forming a group had been to get his friend Comrie Smith to get a pair of bongos and play along with him to Preston Epps' "Bongo Rock": [Excerpt: Preston Epps, "Bongo Rock"] Neil Young had liked all the usual rock and roll stars of the fifties -- though in his personal rankings, Elvis came a distant third behind Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis -- but his tastes ran more to the more darkly emotional. He loved "Maybe" by the Chantels, saying "Raw soul—you cannot miss it. That's the real thing. She was believin' every word she was singin'." [Excerpt: The Chantels, "Maybe"] What he liked more than anything was music that had a mainstream surface but seemed slightly off-kilter. He was a major fan of Roy Orbison, saying, "it's almost impossible to comprehend the depth of that soul. It's so deep and dark it just keeps on goin' down—but it's not black. It's blue, deep blue. He's just got it. The drama. There's something sad but proud about Roy's music", and he would say similar things about Del Shannon, saying "He struck me as the ultimate dark figure—behind some Bobby Rydell exterior, y'know? “Hats Off to Larry,” “Runaway,” “Swiss Maid”—very, very inventive. The stuff was weird. Totally unaffected." More surprisingly, perhaps, he was a particular fan of Bobby Darin, who he admired so much because Darin could change styles at the drop of a hat, going from novelty rock and roll like "Splish Splash" to crooning "Mack The Knife" to singing Tim Hardin songs like "If I Were a Carpenter", without any of them seeming any less authentic. As he put it later "He just changed. He's completely different. And he's really into it. Doesn't sound like he's not there. “Dream Lover,” “Mack the Knife,” “If I Were a Carpenter,” “Queen of the Hop,” “Splish Splash”—tell me about those records, Mr. Darin. Did you write those all the same day, or what happened? He just changed so much. Just kinda went from one place to another. So it's hard to tell who Bobby Darin really was." And one record which Young was hugely influenced by was Floyd Cramer's country instrumental, "Last Date": [Excerpt: Floyd Cramer, "Last Date"] Now, that was a very important record in country music, and if you want to know more about it I strongly recommend listening to the episode of Cocaine and Rhinestones on the Nashville A-Team, which has a long section on the track, but the crucial thing to know about that track is that it's one of the earliest examples of what is known as slip-note playing, where the piano player, before hitting the correct note, briefly hits the note a tone below it, creating a brief discord. Young absolutely loved that sound, and wanted to make a sound like that on the guitar. And then, when he and his mother moved to Winnipeg after his parents' divorce, he found someone who was doing just that. It was the guitarist in a group variously known as Chad Allan and the Reflections and Chad Allan and the Expressions. That group had relatives in the UK who would send them records, and so where most Canadian bands would do covers of American hits, Chad Allan and the Reflections would do covers of British hits, like their version of Geoff Goddard's "Tribute to Buddy Holly", a song that had originally been produced by Joe Meek: [Excerpt: Chad Allan and the Reflections, "Tribute to Buddy Holly"] That would later pay off for them in a big way, when they recorded a version of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates' "Shakin' All Over", for which their record label tried to create an air of mystery by releasing it with no artist name, just "Guess Who?" on the label. It became a hit, the name stuck, and they became The Guess Who: [Excerpt: The Guess Who, "Shakin' All Over"] But at this point they, and their guitarist Randy Bachman, were just another group playing around Winnipeg. Bachman, though, was hugely impressive to Neil Young for a few reasons. The first was that he really did have a playing style that was a lot like the piano style of Floyd Cramer -- Young would later say "it was Randy Bachman who did it first. Randy was the first one I ever heard do things on the guitar that reminded me of Floyd. He'd do these pulls—“darrr darrrr,” this two-note thing goin' together—harmony, with one note pulling and the other note stayin' the same." Bachman also had built the first echo unit that Young heard a guitarist play in person. He'd discovered that by playing with the recording heads on a tape recorder owned by his mother, he could replicate the tape echo that Sam Phillips had used at Sun Studios -- and once he'd attached that to his amplifier, he realised how much the resulting sound sounded like his favourite guitarist, Hank Marvin of the Shadows, another favourite of Neil Young's: [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Man of Mystery"] Young soon started looking to Bachman as something of a mentor figure, and he would learn a lot of guitar techniques second hand from Bachman -- every time a famous musician came to the area, Bachman would go along and stand right at the front and watch the guitarist, and make note of the positions their fingers were in. Then Bachman would replicate those guitar parts with the Reflections, and Neil Young would stand in front of him and make notes of where *his* fingers were. Young joined a band on the local circuit called the Esquires, but soon either quit or was fired, depending on which version of the story you choose to believe. He then formed his own rival band, the Squires, with no "e", much to the disgust of his ex-bandmates. In July 1963, five months after they formed, the Squires released their first record, "Aurora" backed with "The Sultan", on a tiny local label. Both tracks were very obviously influenced by the Shadows: [Excerpt: The Squires, "Aurora"] The Squires were a mostly-instrumental band for the first year or so they were together, and then the Beatles hit North America, and suddenly people didn't want to hear surf instrumentals and Shadows covers any more, they only wanted to hear songs that sounded a bit like the Beatles. The Squires started to work up the appropriate repertoire -- two songs that have been mentioned as in their set at this point are the Beatles album track "It Won't Be Long", and "Money" which the Beatles had also covered -- but they didn't have a singer, being an instrumental group. They could get in a singer, of course, but that would mean splitting the money with another person. So instead, the guitarist, who had never had any intention of becoming a singer, was more or less volunteered for the role. Over the next eighteen months or so the group's repertoire moved from being largely instrumental to largely vocal, and the group also seem to have shuttled around a bit between two different cities -- Winnipeg and Fort William, staying in one for a while and then moving back to the other. They travelled between the two in Young's car, a Buick Roadmaster hearse. In Winnipeg, Young first met up with a singer named Joni Anderson, who was soon to get married to Chuck Mitchell and would become better known by her married name. The two struck up a friendship, though by all accounts never a particularly close one -- they were too similar in too many ways; as Mitchell later said “Neil and I have a lot in common: Canadian; Scorpios; polio in the same epidemic, struck the same parts of our body; and we both have a black sense of humor". They were both also idiosyncratic artists who never fit very well into boxes. In Fort William the Squires made a few more records, this time vocal tracks like "I'll Love You Forever": [Excerpt: The Squires, "I'll Love You Forever"] It was also in Fort William that Young first encountered two acts that would make a huge impression on him. One was a group called The Thorns, consisting of Tim Rose, Jake Holmes, and Rich Husson. The Thorns showed Young that there was interesting stuff being done on the fringes of the folk music scene. He later said "One of my favourites was “Oh Susannah”—they did this arrangement that was bizarre. It was in a minor key, which completely changed everything—and it was rock and roll. So that idea spawned arrangements of all these other songs for me. I did minor versions of them all. We got into it. That was a certain Squires stage that never got recorded. Wish there were tapes of those shows. We used to do all this stuff, a whole kinda music—folk-rock. We took famous old folk songs like “Clementine,” “She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain,” “Tom Dooley,” and we did them all in minor keys based on the Tim Rose arrangement of “Oh Susannah.” There are no recordings of the Thorns in existence that I know of, but presumably that arrangement that Young is talking about is the version that Rose also later did with the Big 3, which we've heard in a few other episodes: [Excerpt: The Big 3, "The Banjo Song"] The other big influence was, of course, Steve Stills, and the two men quickly found themselves influencing each other deeply. Stills realised that he could bring more rock and roll to his folk-music sound, saying that what amazed him was the way the Squires could go from "Cottonfields" (the Lead Belly song) to "Farmer John", the R&B song by Don and Dewey that was becoming a garage-rock staple. Young in turn was inspired to start thinking about maybe going more in the direction of folk music. The Squires even renamed themselves the High-Flying Birds, after the song that Stills had recorded with the Au Go Go Singers. After The Company's tour of Canada, Stills moved back to New York for a while. He now wanted to move in a folk-rock direction, and for a while he tried to persuade his friend John Sebastian to let him play bass in his new band, but when the Lovin' Spoonful decided against having him in the band, he decided to move West to San Francisco, where he'd heard there was a new music scene forming. He enjoyed a lot of the bands he saw there, and in particular he was impressed by the singer of a band called the Great Society: [Excerpt: The Great Society, "Somebody to Love"] He was much less impressed with the rest of her band, and seriously considered going up to her and asking if she wanted to work with some *real* musicians instead of the unimpressive ones she was working with, but didn't get his nerve up. We will, though, be hearing more about Grace Slick in future episodes. Instead, Stills decided to move south to LA, where many of the people he'd known in Greenwich Village were now based. Soon after he got there, he hooked up with two other musicians, a guitarist named Steve Young and a singer, guitarist, and pianist named Van Dyke Parks. Parks had a record contract at MGM -- he'd been signed by Tom Wilson, the same man who had turned Dylan electric, signed Simon and Garfunkel, and produced the first albums by the Mothers of Invention. With Wilson, Parks put out a couple of singles in 1966, "Come to the Sunshine": [Excerpt: The Van Dyke Parks, "Come to the Sunshine"] And "Number Nine", a reworking of the Ode to Joy from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: [Excerpt: The Van Dyke Parks, "Number Nine"]Parks, Stills, and Steve Young became The Van Dyke Parks Band, though they didn't play together for very long, with their most successful performance being as the support act for the Lovin' Spoonful for a show in Arizona. But they did have a lasting resonance -- when Van Dyke Parks finally got the chance to record his first solo album, he opened it with Steve Young singing the old folk song "Black Jack Davy", filtered to sound like an old tape: [Excerpt: Steve Young, "Black Jack Davy"] And then it goes into a song written for Parks by Randy Newman, but consisting of Newman's ideas about Parks' life and what he knew about him, including that he had been third guitar in the Van Dyke Parks Band: [Excerpt: Van Dyke Parks, "Vine Street"] Parks and Stills also wrote a few songs together, with one of their collaborations, "Hello, I've Returned", later being demoed by Stills for Buffalo Springfield: [Excerpt: Steve Stills, "Hello, I've Returned"] After the Van Dyke Parks Band fell apart, Parks went on to many things, including a brief stint on keyboards in the Mothers of Invention, and we'll be talking more about him next episode. Stills formed a duo called the Buffalo Fish, with his friend Ron Long. That soon became an occasional trio when Stills met up again with his old Greenwich Village friend Peter Tork, who joined the group on the piano. But then Stills auditioned for the Monkees and was turned down because he had bad teeth -- or at least that's how most people told the story. Stills has later claimed that while he turned up for the Monkees auditions, it wasn't to audition, it was to try to pitch them songs, which seems implausible on the face of it. According to Stills, he was offered the job and turned it down because he'd never wanted it. But whatever happened, Stills suggested they might want his friend Peter, who looked just like him apart from having better teeth, and Peter Tork got the job. But what Stills really wanted to do was to form a proper band. He'd had the itch to do it ever since seeing the Squires, and he decided he should ask Neil Young to join. There was only one problem -- when he phoned Young, the phone was answered by Young's mother, who told Stills that Neil had moved out to become a folk singer, and she didn't know where he was. But then Stills heard from his old friend Richie Furay. Furay was still in Greenwich Village, and had decided to write to Stills. He didn't know where Stills was, other than that he was in California somewhere, so he'd written to Stills' father in El Salvador. The letter had been returned, because the postage had been short by one cent, so Furay had resent it with the correct postage. Stills' father had then forwarded the letter to the place Stills had been staying in San Francisco, which had in turn forwarded it on to Stills in LA. Furay's letter mentioned this new folk singer who had been on the scene for a while and then disappeared again, Neil Young, who had said he knew Stills, and had been writing some great songs, one of which Furay had added to his own set. Stills got in touch with Furay and told him about this great band he was forming in LA, which he wanted Furay to join. Furay was in, and travelled from New York to LA, only to be told that at this point there were no other members of this great band, but they'd definitely find some soon. They got a publishing deal with Columbia/Screen Gems, which gave them enough money to not starve, but what they really needed was to find some other musicians. They did, when driving down Hollywood Boulevard on April the sixth, 1966. There, stuck in traffic going the other way, they saw a hearse... After Steve Stills had left Fort William, so had Neil Young. He hadn't initially intended to -- the High-Flying Birds still had a regular gig, but Young and some of his friends had gone away for a few days on a road trip in his hearse. But unfortunately the transmission on the hearse had died, and Young and his friends had been stranded. Many years later, he would write a eulogy to the hearse, which he and Stills would record together: [Excerpt: The Stills-Young Band, "Long May You Run"] Young and his friends had all hitch-hiked in different directions -- Young had ended up in Toronto, where his dad lived, and had stayed with his dad for a while. The rest of his band had eventually followed him there, but Young found the Toronto music scene not to his taste -- the folk and rock scenes there were very insular and didn't mingle with each other, and the group eventually split up. Young even took on a day job for a while, for the only time in his life, though he soon quit. Young started basically commuting between Toronto and New York, a distance of several hundred miles, going to Greenwich Village for a while before ending up back in Toronto, and ping-ponging between the two. In New York, he met up with Richie Furay, and also had a disastrous audition for Elektra Records as a solo artist. One of the songs he sang in the audition was "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing", the song which Furay liked so much he started performing it himself. Young doesn't normally explain his songs, but as this was one of the first he ever wrote, he talked about it in interviews in the early years, before he decided to be less voluble about his art. The song was apparently about the sense of youthful hope being crushed. The instigation for it was Young seeing his girlfriend with another man, but the central image, of Clancy not singing, came from Young's schooldays. The Clancy in question was someone Young liked as one of the other weird kids at school. He was disabled, like Young, though with MS rather than polio, and he would sing to himself in the hallways at school. Sadly, of course, the other kids would mock and bully him for that, and eventually he ended up stopping. Young said about it "After awhile, he got so self-conscious he couldn't do his thing any more. When someone who is as beautiful as that and as different as that is actually killed by his fellow man—you know what I mean—like taken and sorta chopped down—all the other things are nothing compared to this." [Excerpt: Neil Young, "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing (Elektra demo)"] One thing I should say for anyone who listens to the Mixcloud for this episode, that song, which will be appearing in a couple of different versions, has one use of a term for Romani people that some (though not all) consider a slur. It's not in the excerpts I'll be using in this episode, but will be in the full versions on the Mixcloud. Sadly that word turns up time and again in songs of this era... When he wasn't in New York, Young was living in Toronto in a communal apartment owned by a folk singer named Vicki Taylor, where many of the Toronto folk scene would stay. Young started listening a lot to Taylor's Bert Jansch albums, which were his first real exposure to the British folk-baroque style of guitar fingerpicking, as opposed to the American Travis-picking style, and Young would soon start to incorporate that style into his own playing: [Excerpt: Bert Jansch, "Angie"] Another guitar influence on Young at this point was another of the temporary tenants of Taylor's flat, John Kay, who would later go on to be one of the founding members of Steppenwolf. Young credited Kay with having a funky rhythm guitar style that Young incorporated into his own. While he was in Toronto, he started getting occasional gigs in Detroit, which is "only" a couple of hundred miles away, set up by Joni and Chuck Mitchell, both of whom also sometimes stayed at Taylor's. And it was in Detroit that Neil Young became, albeit very briefly, a Motown artist. The Mynah Birds were a band in Toronto that had at one point included various future members of Steppenwolf, and they were unusual for the time in that they were a white band with a Black lead singer, Ricky Matthews. They also had a rich manager, John Craig Eaton, the heir to the Eaton's department store fortune, who basically gave them whatever money they wanted -- they used to go to his office and tell him they needed seven hundred dollars for lunch, and he'd hand it to them. They were looking for a new guitarist when Bruce Palmer, their bass player, bumped into Neil Young carrying an amp and asked if he was interested in joining. He was. The Mynah Birds quickly became one of the best bands in Toronto, and Young and Matthews became close, both as friends and as a performance team. People who saw them live would talk about things like a song called “Hideaway”, written by Young and Matthews, which had a spot in the middle where Young would start playing a harmonica solo, throw the harmonica up in the air mid-solo, Matthews would catch it, and he would then finish the solo. They got signed to Motown, who were at this point looking to branch out into the white guitar-group market, and they were put through the Motown star-making machine. They recorded an entire album, which remains unreleased, but they did release a single, "It's My Time": [Excerpt: The Mynah Birds, "It's My Time"] Or at least, they released a handful of promo copies. The single was pulled from release after Ricky Matthews got arrested. It turned out his birth name wasn't Ricky Matthews, but James Johnson, and that he wasn't from Toronto as he'd told everyone, but from Buffalo, New York. He'd fled to Canada after going AWOL from the Navy, not wanting to be sent to Vietnam, and he was arrested and jailed for desertion. After getting out of jail, he would start performing under yet another name, and as Rick James would have a string of hits in the seventies and eighties: [Excerpt: Rick James, "Super Freak"] Most of the rest of the group continued gigging as The Mynah Birds, but Young and Palmer had other plans. They sold the expensive equipment Eaton had bought the group, and Young bought a new hearse, which he named Mort 2 – Mort had been his first hearse. And according to one of the band's friends in Toronto, the crucial change in their lives came when Neil Young heard a song on a jukebox: [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "California Dreamin'"] Young apparently heard "California Dreamin'" and immediately said "Let's go to California and become rock stars". Now, Young later said of this anecdote that "That sounds like a Canadian story to me. That sounds too real to be true", and he may well be right. Certainly the actual wording of the story is likely incorrect -- people weren't talking about "rock stars" in 1966. Google's Ngram viewer has the first use of the phrase in print being in 1969, and the phrase didn't come into widespread usage until surprisingly late -- even granting that phrases enter slang before they make it to print, it still seems implausible. But even though the precise wording might not be correct, something along those lines definitely seems to have happened, albeit possibly less dramatically. Young's friend Comrie Smith independently said that Young told him “Well, Comrie, I can hear the Mamas and the Papas singing ‘All the leaves are brown, and the skies are gray …' I'm gonna go down to the States and really make it. I'm on my way. Today North Toronto, tomorrow the world!” Young and Palmer loaded up Mort 2 with a bunch of their friends and headed towards California. On the way, they fell out with most of the friends, who parted from them, and Young had an episode which in retrospect may have been his first epileptic seizure. They decided when they got to California that they were going to look for Steve Stills, as they'd heard he was in LA and neither of them knew anyone else in the state. But after several days of going round the Sunset Strip clubs asking if anyone knew Steve Stills, and sleeping in the hearse as they couldn't afford anywhere else, they were getting fed up and about to head off to San Francisco, as they'd heard there was a good music scene there, too. They were going to leave that day, and they were stuck in traffic on Sunset Boulevard, about to head off, when Stills and Furay came driving in the other direction. Furay happened to turn his head, to brush away a fly, and saw a hearse with Ontario license plates. He and Stills both remembered that Young drove a hearse, and so they assumed it must be him. They started honking at the hearse, then did a U-turn. They got Young's attention, and they all pulled into the parking lot at Ben Frank's, the Sunset Strip restaurant that attracted such a hip crowd the Monkees' producers had asked for "Ben Frank's types" in their audition advert. Young introduced Stills and Furay to Palmer, and now there *was* a group -- three singing, songwriting, guitarists and a bass player. Now all they needed was a drummer. There were two drummers seriously considered for the role. One of them, Billy Mundi, was technically the better player, but Young didn't like playing with him as much -- and Mundi also had a better offer, to join the Mothers of Invention as their second drummer -- before they'd recorded their first album, they'd had two drummers for a few months, but Denny Bruce, their second drummer, had become ill with glandular fever and they'd reverted to having Jimmy Carl Black play solo. Now they were looking for someone else, and Mundi took that role. The other drummer, who Young preferred anyway, was another Canadian, Dewey Martin. Martin was a couple of years older than the rest of the group, and by far the most experienced. He'd moved from Canada to Nashville in his teens, and according to Martin he had been taken under the wing of Hank Garland, the great session guitarist most famous for "Sugarfoot Rag": [Excerpt: Hank Garland, "Sugarfoot Rag"] We heard Garland playing with Elvis and others in some of the episodes around 1960, and by many reckonings he was the best session guitarist in Nashville, but in 1961 he had a car accident that left him comatose, and even though he recovered from the coma and lived another thirty-three years, he never returned to recording. According to Martin, though, Garland would still sometimes play jazz clubs around Nashville after the accident, and one day Martin walked into a club and saw him playing. The drummer he was playing with got up and took a break, taking his sticks with him, so Martin got up on stage and started playing, using two combs instead of sticks. Garland was impressed, and told Martin that Faron Young needed a drummer, and he could get him the gig. At the time Young was one of the biggest stars in country music. That year, 1961, he had three country top ten hits, including a number one with his version of Willie Nelson's "Hello Walls", produced by Ken Nelson: [Excerpt: Faron Young, "Hello Walls"] Martin joined Faron Young's band for a while, and also ended up playing short stints in the touring bands of various other Nashville-based country and rock stars, including Patsy Cline, Roy Orbison, and the Everly Brothers, before heading to LA for a while. Then Mel Taylor of the Ventures hooked him up with some musicians in the Pacific Northwest scene, and Martin started playing there under the name Sir Raleigh and the Coupons with various musicians. After a while he travelled back to LA where he got some members of the LA group Sons of Adam to become a permanent lineup of Coupons, and they recorded several singles with Martin singing lead, including the Tommy Boyce and Steve Venet song "Tomorrow's Gonna Be Another Day", later recorded by the Monkees: [Excerpt: Sir Raleigh and the Coupons, "Tomorrow's Gonna Be Another Day"] He then played with the Standells, before joining the Modern Folk Quartet for a short while, as they were transitioning from their folk sound to a folk-rock style. He was only with them for a short while, and it's difficult to get precise details -- almost everyone involved with Buffalo Springfield has conflicting stories about their own careers with timelines that don't make sense, which is understandable given that people were talking about events decades later and memory plays tricks. "Fast" Eddie Hoh had joined the Modern Folk Quartet on drums in late 1965, at which point they became the Modern Folk Quintet, and nothing I've read about that group talks about Hoh ever actually leaving, but apparently Martin joined them in February 1966, which might mean he's on their single "Night-Time Girl", co-written by Al Kooper and produced and arranged by Jack Nitzsche: [Excerpt: The Modern Folk Quintet, "Night-Time Girl"] After that, Martin was taken on by the Dillards, a bluegrass band who are now possibly most famous for having popularised the Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith song "Duellin' Banjos", which they recorded on their first album and played on the Andy Griffith Show a few years before it was used in Deliverance: [Excerpt: The Dillards, "Duellin' Banjos"] The Dillards had decided to go in a country-rock direction -- and Doug Dillard would later join the Byrds and make records with Gene Clark -- but they were hesitant about it, and after a brief period with Martin in the band they decided to go back to their drummerless lineup. To soften the blow, they told him about another band that was looking for a drummer -- their manager, Jim Dickson, who was also the Byrds' manager, knew Stills and his bandmates. Dewey Martin was in the group. The group still needed a name though. They eventually took their name from a brand of steam roller, after seeing one on the streets when some roadwork was being done. Everyone involved disagrees as to who came up with the name. Steve Stills at one point said it was a group decision after Neil Young and the group's manager Frazier Mohawk stole the nameplate off the steamroller, and later Stills said that Richey Furay had suggested the name while they were walking down the street, Dewey Martin said it was his idea, Neil Young said that he, Steve Sills, and Van Dyke Parks had been walking down the street and either Young or Stills had seen the nameplate and suggested the name, and Van Dyke Parks says that *he* saw the nameplate and suggested it to Dewey Martin: [Excerpt: Steve Stills and Van Dyke Parks on the name] For what it's worth, I tend to believe Van Dyke Parks in most instances -- he's an honest man, and he seems to have a better memory of the sixties than many of his friends who led more chemically interesting lives. Whoever came up with it, the name worked -- as Stills later put it "We thought it was pretty apt, because Neil Young is from Manitoba which is buffalo country, and Richie Furay was from Springfield, Ohio -- and I'm the field!" It almost certainly also helped that the word "buffalo" had been in the name of Stills' previous group, Buffalo Fish. On the eleventh of April, 1966, Buffalo Springfield played their first gig, at the Troubadour, using equipment borrowed from the Dillards. Chris Hillman of the Byrds was in the audience and was impressed. He got the group a support slot on a show the Byrds and the Dillards were doing a few days later in San Bernardino. That show was compered by a Merseyside-born British DJ, John Ravenscroft, who had managed to become moderately successful in US radio by playing up his regional accent so he sounded more like the Beatles. He would soon return to the UK, and start broadcasting under the name John Peel. Hillman also got them a week-long slot at the Whisky A-Go-Go, and a bidding war started between record labels to sign the band. Dunhill offered five thousand dollars, Warners counted with ten thousand, and then Atlantic offered twelve thousand. Atlantic were *just* starting to get interested in signing white guitar groups -- Jerry Wexler never liked that kind of music, always preferring to stick with soul and R&B, but Ahmet Ertegun could see which way things were going. Atlantic had only ever signed two other white acts before -- Neil Young's old favourite Bobby Darin, who had since left the label, and Sonny and Cher. And Sonny and Cher's management and production team, Brian Stone and Charlie Greene, were also very interested in the group, who even before they had made a record had quickly become the hottest band on the circuit, even playing the Hollywood Bowl as the Rolling Stones' support act. Buffalo Springfield already had managers -- Frazier Mohawk and Richard Davis, the lighting man at the Troubadour (who was sometimes also referred to as Dickie Davis, but I'll use his full name so as not to cause unnecessary confusion in British people who remember the sports TV presenter of the same name), who Mohawk had enlisted to help him. But Stone and Greene weren't going to let a thing like that stop them. According to anonymous reports quoted without attribution in David Roberts' biography of Stills -- so take this with as many grains of salt as you want -- Stone and Greene took Mohawk for a ride around LA in a limo, just the three of them, a gun, and a used hotdog napkin. At the end of the ride, the hotdog napkin had Mohawk's scrawled signature, signing the group over to Stone and Greene. Davis stayed on, but was demoted to just doing their lights. The way things ended up, the group signed to Stone and Greene's production company, who then leased their masters to Atlantic's Atco subsidiary. A publishing company was also set up for the group's songs -- owned thirty-seven point five percent by Atlantic, thirty-seven point five percent by Stone and Greene, and the other twenty-five percent split six ways between the group and Davis, who they considered their sixth member. Almost immediately, Charlie Greene started playing Stills and Young off against each other, trying a divide-and-conquer strategy on the group. This was quite easy, as both men saw themselves as natural leaders, though Stills was regarded by everyone as the senior partner -- the back cover of their first album would contain the line "Steve is the leader but we all are". Stills and Young were the two stars of the group as far as the audience were concerned -- though most musicians who heard them play live say that the band's real strength was in its rhythm section, with people comparing Palmer's playing to that of James Jamerson. But Stills and Young would get into guitar battles on stage, one-upping each other, in ways that turned the tension between them in creative directions. Other clashes, though were more petty -- both men had very domineering mothers, who would actually call the group's management to complain about press coverage if their son was given less space than the other one. The group were also not sure about Young's voice -- to the extent that Stills was known to jokingly apologise to the audience before Young took a lead vocal -- and so while the song chosen as the group's first A-side was Young's "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing", Furay was chosen to sing it, rather than Young: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing"] On the group's first session, though, both Stills and Young realised that their producers didn't really have a clue -- the group had built up arrangements that had a complex interplay of instruments and vocals, but the producers insisted on cutting things very straightforwardly, with a basic backing track and then the vocals. They also thought that the song was too long so the group should play faster. Stills and Young quickly decided that they were going to have to start producing their own material, though Stone and Greene would remain the producers for the first album. There was another bone of contention though, because in the session the initial plan had been for Stills' song "Go and Say Goodbye" to be the A-side with Young's song as the B-side. It was flipped, and nobody seems quite sure why -- it's certainly the case that, whatever the merits of the two tracks as songs, Stills' song was the one that would have been more likely to become a hit. "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing" was a flop, but it did get some local airplay. The next single, "Burned", was a Young song as well, and this time did have Young taking the lead, though in a song dominated by harmonies: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Burned"] Over the summer, though, something had happened that would affect everything for the group -- Neil Young had started to have epileptic seizures. At first these were undiagnosed episodes, but soon they became almost routine events, and they would often happen on stage, particularly at moments of great stress or excitement. Several other members of the group became convinced -- entirely wrongly -- that Young was faking these seizures in order to get women to pay attention to him. They thought that what he wanted was for women to comfort him and mop his brow, and that collapsing would get him that. The seizures became so common that Richard Davis, the group's lighting tech, learned to recognise the signs of a seizure before it happened. As soon as it looked like Young was about to collapse the lights would turn on, someone would get ready to carry him off stage, and Richie Furay would know to grab Young's guitar before he fell so that the guitar wouldn't get damaged. Because they weren't properly grounded and Furay had an electric guitar of his own, he'd get a shock every time. Young would later claim that during some of the seizures, he would hallucinate that he was another person, in another world, living another life that seemed to have its own continuity -- people in the other world would recognise him and talk to him as if he'd been away for a while -- and then when he recovered he would have to quickly rebuild his identity, as if temporarily amnesiac, and during those times he would find things like the concept of lying painful. The group's first album came out in December, and they were very, very, unhappy with it. They thought the material was great, but they also thought that the production was terrible. Stone and Greene's insistence that they record the backing tracks first and then overdub vocals, rather than singing live with the instruments, meant that the recordings, according to Stills and Young in particular, didn't capture the sound of the group's live performance, and sounded sterile. Stills and Young thought they'd fixed some of that in the mono mix, which they spent ten days on, but then Stone and Greene did the stereo mix without consulting the band, in less than two days, and the album was released at precisely the time that stereo was starting to overtake mono in the album market. I'm using the mono mixes in this podcast, but for decades the only versions available were the stereo ones, which Stills and Young both loathed. Ahmet Ertegun also apparently thought that the demo versions of the songs -- some of which were eventually released on a box set in 2001 -- were much better than the finished studio recordings. The album was not a success on release, but it did contain the first song any of the group had written to chart. Soon after its release, Van Dyke Parks' friend Lenny Waronker was producing a single by a group who had originally been led by Sly Stone and had been called Sly and the Mojo Men. By this time Stone was no longer involved in the group, and they were making music in a very different style from the music their former leader would later become known for. Parks was brought in to arrange a baroque-pop version of Stills' album track "Sit Down I Think I Love You" for the group, and it became their only top forty hit, reaching number thirty-six: [Excerpt: The Mojo Men, "Sit Down I Think I Love You"] It was shortly after the first Buffalo Springfield album was released, though, that Steve Stills wrote what would turn out to be *his* group's only top forty single. The song had its roots in both LA and San Francisco. The LA roots were more obvious -- the song was written about a specific experience Stills had had. He had been driving to Sunset Strip from Laurel Canyon on November the twelfth 1966, and he had seen a mass of young people and police in riot gear, and he had immediately turned round, partly because he didn't want to get involved in what looked to be a riot, and partly because he'd been inspired -- he had the idea for a lyric, which he pretty much finished in the car even before he got home: [Excerpt: The Buffalo Springfield, "For What it's Worth"] The riots he saw were what became known later as the Riot on Sunset Strip. This was a minor skirmish between the police and young people of LA -- there had been complaints that young people had been spilling out of the nightclubs on Sunset Strip into the street, causing traffic problems, and as a result the city council had introduced various heavy-handed restrictions, including a ten PM curfew for all young people in the area, removing the permits that many clubs had which allowed people under twenty-one to be present, forcing the Whisky A-Go-Go to change its name just to "the Whisk", and forcing a club named Pandora's Box, which was considered the epicentre of the problem, to close altogether. Flyers had been passed around calling for a "funeral" for Pandora's Box -- a peaceful gathering at which people could say goodbye to a favourite nightspot, and a thousand people had turned up. The police also turned up, and in the heavy-handed way common among law enforcement, they managed to provoke a peaceful party and turn it into a riot. This would not normally be an event that would be remembered even a year later, let alone nearly sixty years later, but Sunset Strip was the centre of the American rock music world in the period, and of the broader youth entertainment field. Among those arrested at the riot, for example, were Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda, neither of whom were huge stars at the time, but who were making cheap B-movies with Roger Corman for American International Pictures. Among the cheap exploitation films that American International Pictures made around this time was one based on the riots, though neither Nicholson, Fonda, or Corman were involved. Riot on Sunset Strip was released in cinemas only four months after the riots, and it had a theme song by Dewey Martin's old colleagues The Standells, which is now regarded as a classic of garage rock: [Excerpt: The Standells, "Riot on Sunset Strip"] The riots got referenced in a lot of other songs, as well. The Mothers of Invention's second album, Absolutely Free, contains the song "Plastic People" which includes this section: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Plastic People"] And the Monkees track "Daily Nightly", written by Michael Nesmith, was always claimed by Nesmith to be an impressionistic portrait of the riots, though the psychedelic lyrics sound to me more like they're talking about drug use and street-walking sex workers than anything to do with the riots: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daily Nightly"] But the song about the riots that would have the most lasting effect on popular culture was the one that Steve Stills wrote that night. Although how much he actually wrote, at least of the music, is somewhat open to question. Earlier that month, Buffalo Springfield had spent some time in San Francisco. They hadn't enjoyed the experience -- as an LA band, they were thought of as a bunch of Hollywood posers by most of the San Francisco scene, with the exception of one band, Moby Grape -- a band who, like them had three guitarist/singer/songwriters, and with whom they got on very well. Indeed, they got on rather better with Moby Grape than they were getting on with each other at this point, because Young and Stills would regularly get into arguments, and every time their argument seemed to be settling down, Dewey Martin would manage to say the wrong thing and get Stills riled up again -- Martin was doing a lot of speed at this point and unable to stop talking, even when it would have been politic to do so. There was even some talk while they were in San Francisco of the bands doing a trade -- Young and Pete Lewis of Moby Grape swapping places -- though that came to nothing. But Stills, according to both Richard Davis and Pete Lewis, had been truly impressed by two Moby Grape songs. One of them was a song called "On the Other Side", which Moby Grape never recorded, but which apparently had a chorus that went "Stop, can't you hear the music ringing in your ear, right before you go, telling you the way is clear," with the group all pausing after the word "Stop". The other was a song called "Murder in my Heart for the Judge": [Excerpt: Moby Grape, "Murder in my Heart for the Judge"] The song Stills wrote had a huge amount of melodic influence from that song, and quite a bit from “On the Other Side”, though he apparently didn't notice until after the record came out, at which point he apologised to Moby Grape. Stills wasn't massively impressed with the song he'd written, and went to Stone and Greene's office to play it for them, saying "I'll play it, for what it's worth". They liked the song and booked a studio to get the song recorded and rush-released, though according to Neil Young neither Stone nor Greene were actually present at the session, and the song was recorded on December the fifth, while some outbursts of rioting were still happening, and released on December the twenty-third. [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "For What it's Worth"] The song didn't have a title when they recorded it, or so Stills thought, but when he mentioned this to Greene and Stone afterwards, they said "Of course it does. You said, 'I'm going to play the song, 'For What It's Worth'" So that became the title, although Ahmet Ertegun didn't like the idea of releasing a single with a title that wasn't in the lyric, so the early pressings of the single had "Stop, Hey, What's That Sound?" in brackets after the title. The song became a big hit, and there's a story told by David Crosby that doesn't line up correctly, but which might shed some light on why. According to Crosby, "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing" got its first airplay because Crosby had played members of Buffalo Springfield a tape he'd been given of the unreleased Beatles track "A Day in the Life", and they'd told their gangster manager-producers about it. Those manager-producers had then hired a sex worker to have sex with Crosby and steal the tape, which they'd then traded to a radio station in return for airplay. That timeline doesn't work, unless the sex worker involved was also a time traveller, because "A Day in the Life" wasn't even recorded until January 1967 while "Clancy" came out in August 1966, and there'd been two other singles released between then and January 1967. But it *might* be the case that that's what happened with "For What It's Worth", which was released in the last week of December 1966, and didn't really start to do well on the charts for a couple of months. Right after recording the song, the group went to play a residency in New York, of which Ahmet Ertegun said “When they performed there, man, there was no band I ever heard that had the electricity of that group. That was the most exciting group I've ever seen, bar none. It was just mind-boggling.” During that residency they were joined on stage at various points by Mitch Ryder, Odetta, and Otis Redding. While in New York, the group also recorded "Mr. Soul", a song that Young had originally written as a folk song about his experiences with epilepsy, the nature of the soul, and dealing with fame. However, he'd noticed a similarity to "Satisfaction" and decided to lean into it. The track as finally released was heavily overdubbed by Young a few months later, but after it was released he decided he preferred the original take, which by then only existed as a scratchy acetate, which got released on a box set in 2001: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Mr. Soul (original version)"] Everyone has a different story of how the session for that track went -- at least one version of the story has Otis Redding turning up for the session and saying he wanted to record the song himself, as his follow-up to his version of "Satisfaction", but Young being angry at the idea. According to other versions of the story, Greene and Stills got into a physical fight, with Greene having to be given some of the valium Young was taking for his epilepsy to calm him down. "For What it's Worth" was doing well enough on the charts that the album was recalled, and reissued with "For What It's Worth" replacing Stills' song "Baby Don't Scold", but soon disaster struck the band. Bruce Palmer was arrested on drugs charges, and was deported back to Canada just as the song started to rise through the charts. The group needed a new bass player, fast. For a lipsynch appearance on local TV they got Richard Davis to mime the part, and then they got in Ken Forssi, the bass player from Love, for a couple of gigs. They next brought in Ken Koblun, the bass player from the Squires, but he didn't fit in with the rest of the group. The next replacement was Jim Fielder. Fielder was a friend of the group, and knew the material -- he'd subbed for Palmer a few times in 1966 when Palmer had been locked up after less serious busts. And to give some idea of how small a scene the LA scene was, when Buffalo Springfield asked him to become their bass player, he was playing rhythm guitar for the Mothers of Invention, while Billy Mundi was on drums, and had played on their second, as yet unreleased, album, Absolutely Free: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Call any Vegetable"] And before joining the Mothers, Fielder and Mundi had also played together with Van Dyke Parks, who had served his own short stint as a Mother of Invention already, backing Tim Buckley on Buckley's first album: [Excerpt: Tim Buckley, "Aren't You the Girl?"] And the arrangements on that album were by Jack Nitzsche, who would soon become a very close collaborator with Young. "For What it's Worth" kept rising up the charts. Even though it had been inspired by a very local issue, the lyrics were vague enough that people in other situations could apply it to themselves, and it soon became regarded as an anti-war protest anthem -- something Stills did nothing to discourage, as the band were all opposed to the war. The band were also starting to collaborate with other people. When Stills bought a new house, he couldn't move in to it for a while, and so Peter Tork invited him to stay at his house. The two got on so well that Tork invited Stills to produce the next Monkees album -- only to find that Michael Nesmith had already asked Chip Douglas to do it. The group started work on a new album, provisionally titled "Stampede", but sessions didn't get much further than Stills' song "Bluebird" before trouble arose between Young and Stills. The root of the argument seems to have been around the number of songs each got on the album. With Richie Furay also writing, Young was worried that given the others' attitudes to his songwriting, he might get as few as two songs on the album. And Young and Stills were arguing over which song should be the next single, with Young wanting "Mr. Soul" to be the A-side, while Stills wanted "Bluebird" -- Stills making the reasonable case that they'd released two Neil Young songs as singles and gone nowhere, and then they'd released one of Stills', and it had become a massive hit. "Bluebird" was eventually chosen as the A-side, with "Mr. Soul" as the B-side: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Bluebird"] The "Bluebird" session was another fraught one. Fielder had not yet joined the band, and session player Bobby West subbed on bass. Neil Young had recently started hanging out with Jack Nitzsche, and the two were getting very close and working on music together. Young had impressed Nitzsche not just with his songwriting but with his arrogance -- he'd played Nitzsche his latest song, "Expecting to Fly", and Nitzsche had said halfway through "That's a great song", and Young had shushed him and told him to listen, not interrupt. Nitzsche, who had a monstrous ego himself and was also used to working with people like Phil Spector, the Rolling Stones and Sonny Bono, none of them known for a lack of faith in their own abilities, was impressed. Shortly after that, Stills had asked Nitzsch
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