POPULARITY
Le groupe de rock français The Liminanas pour leur nouvel album "Faded". “Can I have your autograph?" He said to the fat blonde actress "You know, I know everything you've done" » chante Doug Yule sur « New Age » du Velvet Underground. L'amour et la violence envers une actrice qui a franchi des décennies, star considérée comme fanée, faded. C'est ce que raconte le nouvel album des Limiñanas, qui place à nouveau les stars dites déchues sous le feu des projecteurs. Aux femmes oubliées qui, des années 50 à aujourd'hui, ont disparu des écrans comme par un cruel enchantement, condamnées par le temps qui passe. Cinéphiles voraces, conscients que le sordide se révèle lorsqu'on gratte sous le glamour hollywoodien, Lionel et Marie Limiñana ont voulu leur rendre ici hommage. Merci pour votre écoute Entrez sans Frapper c'est également en direct tous les jours de la semaine de 16h à 17h30 sur www.rtbf.be/lapremiere Retrouvez l'ensemble des épisodes et les émission en version intégrale (avec la musique donc) de Entrez sans Frapper sur notre plateforme Auvio.be : https://auvio.rtbf.be/emission/8521 Abonnez-vous également à la partie "Bagarre dans la discothèque" en suivant ce lien: https://audmns.com/HSfAmLDEt si vous avez apprécié ce podcast, n'hésitez pas à nous donner des étoiles ou des commentaires, cela nous aide à le faire connaître plus largement. Vous pourriez également apprécier ces autres podcasts issus de notre large catalogue: Le voyage du Stradivarius Feuermann : https://audmns.com/rxPHqEENoir Jaune Rouge - Belgian Crime Story : https://feeds.audiomeans.fr/feed/6e3f3e0e-6d9e-4da7-99d5-f8c0833912c5.xmlLes Petits Papiers : https://audmns.com/tHQpfAm Des rencontres inspirantes avec des artistes de tous horizons. Galaxie BD: https://audmns.com/nyJXESu Notre podcast hebdomadaire autour du 9ème art.Nom: Van Hamme, Profession: Scénariste : https://audmns.com/ZAoAJZF Notre série à propos du créateur de XII et Thorgal. Franquin par Franquin : https://audmns.com/NjMxxMg Ecoutez la voix du créateur de Gaston (et de tant d'autres...)
This week, we are joined by Paisley Underground legend MATT PIUCCI (Rain Parade, Crazy Horse) to discuss the TODD HAYNES' documentary, THE VELVET UNDERGROUND. We also talk about Haynes' body of work including Velvet Goldmine & Safe, the perfect run of Velvet Underground records, Chris' emotional breakdown after seeing the film in the theater, Roky Music & The Doors, does a biopic need to be truthful, how being on stage is similar to Matt's forensic courtroom work (and would any member of The Velvets been good forensic scientists), the multiple screen and sound work within the film, how so much of art is because of chance encounters, how Andy Warhol's prescence allowed the Velvets to get through the gatekeepers of a label, honoring Warhol's visual identiy in the the film, the NYC underground filmmaking scene, how they edited this film, Lou Reed scrambling the narrative of his life, drones in music, Miles Davis, the mid 60s L.A. rock scene vs the NYC rock scene, seeing John Cale live, Chris hearing the first Velvet's record as a 7 year old & Matt seeing The Byrds live as a child, Mick Ronson & Transformer, Jeff Beck playing with Ziggy Stardust, how without Mo Tucker the Velvets were never the same, the Grateful Dead comparisons that confuses us, Can, Jonathan Richman's presence in the film, The Velvet's love of Neil Young, Matt talks about recording with Billy Talbot of Crazy Horse and smoking bowls with Neil Young, how Haynes' struggled making the film because of lack of archival footage of the band, John Cale's departure from the band and the pain of band lineup changes, Songs For Drella and the vilification of Doug Yule.So let's have The Velvet Underground hypnotize us once again on this episode of Revolutions Per Movie!!!MATT PIUCCI:@mattpiuccihttps://rainparade.bandcamp.comREVOLUTIONS PER MOVIE:Host Chris Slusarenko (Eyelids, Guided By Voices, owner of Clinton Street Video rental store) is joined by actors, musicians, comedians, writers & directors who each week pick out their favorite music documentary, musical, music-themed fiction film or music videos to discuss. Fun, weird, and insightful, Revolutions Per Movie is your deep dive into our life-long obsessions where music and film collide.The show is also a completely independent affair, so the best way to support it is through our Patreon at patreon.com/revolutionspermovie. By joining, you can get weekly bonus episodes, physical goods such as Flexidiscs, and other exclusive goods.Revolutions Per Movies releases new episodes every Thursday on any podcast app, and additional, exclusive bonus episodes every Sunday on our Patreon. If you like the show, please consider subscribing, rating, and reviewing it on your favorite podcast app. Thanks!SOCIALS:@revolutionspermovieBlueSky: @revpermovie Click here to get EXCLUSIVE BONUS WEEKLY Revolutions Per Movie content on our Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Label: Sundazed 201Year: 2009Condition: MPrice: $75.00Here's a beautiful, limited-edition box set honoring New York's legendary Velvet Underground. This new, sealed set includes all of the group's very rare 7" vinyl output in their original mono versions, featuring exact reproductions of the labels and, in two cases, with their original picture sleeves. The box set includes rare vintage photos and new liner notes by Rolling Stone's David Fricke. The Velvet Underground whose membership included Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Maureen Tucker, Doug Yule and Nico introduced numerous sonic and thematic innovations that laid much of the groundwork for punk and alternative rock. Although they're now acknowledged as one of the most influential bands in rock history, during their existence the Velvets barely registered on mainstream radar, and were often reviled by mainstream observers as well as hippie-era arbiters of cool. But, as Fricke writes in the new set's liner notes, "Somewhere, in another rock & roll universe, the Velvet Underground are more than a legendary band. They are stars, with hit singles, the original seven-inch masterpieces inside this box." Although they never came close to scoring a hit, the Velvet Underground was ideally suited to the 7" single format. "The Velvet Underground were a great singles band," David Fricke notes, adding that the Velvets "invented modern rock with searing guitar distortion, throbbing improvisation and brutally realistic tales of life on the wild side. But they did it all in these classic pop songs�compact miracles of raw drive, intimate beauty and Top 40 ecstasy, heard again in the original, thrilling mono single mixes." The seven singles included in The Velvet Underground Singles 1966�69 comprise the four Velvets singles originally released in the U.S. on the Verve and MGM labels, plus an additional pair of singles that were prepared for release but never made it to the marketplace and a special radio-only promotional single. The singles feature alternate mono versions that differ in significant ways from the songs' better-known stereo album versions. For instance, the band's 1966 debut single "All Tomorrow's Parties" appears here in a special mono edit that amplifies the song's melodic beauty and sonic tension, and a mono mix of their sophomore single "Sunday Morning" emphasizes the song's haunting quality. Meanwhile, the mono single version of "White Light/White Heat" exemplifies the vintage Velvets' stark, distortion-laden fury, while a mono edit of "What Goes On" accentuates that song's inherent pop jangle. Here is a listing of the included singles: All Tomorrow's Parties / I'll Be Your Mirror—Verve VK-10427 Sunday Morning / Femme Fatale—Verve VK-10466 White Light/White Heat / Here She Comes Now—Verve VK-10560 White Light/White Heat / I Heard Her Call My Name—Cancelled single Temptation Inside Your Heart / Stephanie Says—Cancelled single What Goes On / Jesus—MGM K-14057 VU Radio Spot / VU Radio Spot—MGM VU-1
Rob and I were excited to talk to Elizabeth about the fantastic new Paranoid Style album The Interrogator. And Anna Wintour's attack on Pitchfork, and playing live in Athens later this month, and Doug Yule, and no-money-in-this-deal professions, and stuff like that there. With the addition of Peter Holsapple the new album is the best […] The post LGM Podcast: Elizabeth Nelson Presents…The Interrogator appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.
Rob and I were excited to talk to Elizabeth about the fantastic new Paranoid Style album The Interrogator. And Anna Wintour’s attack on Pitchfork, and playing live in Athens later this month, and Doug Yule, and no-money-in-this-deal professions, and stuff like that there. With the addition of Peter Holsapple the new album is the best […] The post LGM Podcast: Elizabeth Nelson Presents…The Interrogator appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.
En este episodio de El Álbum Esencial conversamos sobre “Loaded”, el cuarto álbum de The Velvet Underground, lanzado el año 1970.
Episode 164 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "White Light/White Heat" and the career of the Velvet Underground. This is a long one, lasting three hours and twenty minutes. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on "Why Don't You Smile Now?" by the Downliners Sect. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I say the Velvet Underground didn't play New York for the rest of the sixties after 1966. They played at least one gig there in 1967, but did generally avoid the city. Also, I refer to Cale and Conrad as the other surviving members of the Theater of Eternal Music. Sadly Conrad died in 2016. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Velvet Underground, and some of the avant-garde pieces excerpted run to six hours or more. I used a lot of resources for this one. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story by Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga is the best book on the group as a group. I also used Joe Harvard's 33 1/3 book on The Velvet Underground and Nico. Bockris also wrote one of the two biographies of Reed I referred to, Transformer. The other was Lou Reed by Anthony DeCurtis. Information on Cale mostly came from Sedition and Alchemy by Tim Mitchell. Information on Nico came from Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon by Richard Witts. I used Draw a Straight Line and Follow it by Jeremy Grimshaw as my main source for La Monte Young, The Roaring Silence by David Revill for John Cage, and Warhol: A Life as Art by Blake Gopnik for Warhol. I also referred to the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of the 2021 documentary The Velvet Underground. The definitive collection of the Velvet Underground's music is the sadly out-of-print box set Peel Slowly and See, which contains the four albums the group made with Reed in full, plus demos, outtakes, and live recordings. Note that the digital version of the album as sold by Amazon for some reason doesn't include the last disc -- if you want the full box set you have to buy a physical copy. All four studio albums have also been released and rereleased many times over in different configurations with different numbers of CDs at different price points -- I have used the "45th Anniversary Super-Deluxe" versions for this episode, but for most people the standard CD versions will be fine. Sadly there are no good shorter compilation overviews of the group -- they tend to emphasise either the group's "pop" mode or its "avant-garde" mode to the exclusion of the other. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I begin this episode, there are a few things to say. This introductory section is going to be longer than normal because, as you will hear, this episode is also going to be longer than normal. Firstly, I try to warn people about potentially upsetting material in these episodes. But this is the first episode for 1968, and as you will see there is a *profound* increase in the amount of upsetting and disturbing material covered as we go through 1968 and 1969. The story is going to be in a much darker place for the next twenty or thirty episodes. And this episode is no exception. As always, I try to deal with everything as sensitively as possible, but you should be aware that the list of warnings for this one is so long I am very likely to have missed some. Among the topics touched on in this episode are mental illness, drug addiction, gun violence, racism, societal and medical homophobia, medical mistreatment of mental illness, domestic abuse, rape, and more. If you find discussion of any of those subjects upsetting, you might want to read the transcript. Also, I use the term "queer" freely in this episode. In the past I have received some pushback for this, because of a belief among some that "queer" is a slur. The following explanation will seem redundant to many of my listeners, but as with many of the things I discuss in the podcast I am dealing with multiple different audiences with different levels of awareness and understanding of issues, so I'd like to beg those people's indulgence a moment. The term "queer" has certainly been used as a slur in the past, but so have terms like "lesbian", "gay", "homosexual" and others. In all those cases, the term has gone from a term used as a self-identifier, to a slur, to a reclaimed slur, and back again many times. The reason for using that word, specifically, here is because the vast majority of people in this story have sexualities or genders that don't match the societal norms of their times, but used labels for themselves that have shifted in meaning over the years. There are at least two men in the story, for example, who are now dead and referred to themselves as "homosexual", but were in multiple long-term sexually-active relationships with women. Would those men now refer to themselves as "bisexual" or "pansexual" -- terms not in widespread use at the time -- or would they, in the relatively more tolerant society we live in now, only have been in same-gender relationships? We can't know. But in our current context using the word "homosexual" for those men would lead to incorrect assumptions about their behaviour. The labels people use change over time, and the definitions of them blur and shift. I have discussed this issue with many, many, friends who fall under the queer umbrella, and while not all of them are comfortable with "queer" as a personal label because of how it's been used against them in the past, there is near-unanimity from them that it's the correct word to use in this situation. Anyway, now that that rather lengthy set of disclaimers is over, let's get into the story proper, as we look at "White Light, White Heat" by the Velvet Underground: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "White Light, White Heat"] And that look will start with... a disclaimer about length. This episode is going to be a long one. Not as long as episode one hundred and fifty, but almost certainly the longest episode I'll do this year, by some way. And there's a reason for that. One of the questions I've been asked repeatedly over the years about the podcast is why almost all the acts I've covered have been extremely commercially successful ones. "Where are the underground bands? The alternative bands? The little niche acts?" The answer to that is simple. Until the mid-sixties, the idea of an underground or alternative band made no sense at all in rock, pop, rock and roll, R&B, or soul. The idea would have been completely counterintuitive to the vast majority of the people we've discussed in the podcast. Those musics were commercial musics, made by people who wanted to make money and to get the largest audiences possible. That doesn't mean that they had no artistic merit, or that there was no artistic intent behind them, but the artists making that music were *commercial* artists. They knew if they wanted to make another record, they had to sell enough copies of the last record for the record company to make another, and that if they wanted to keep eating, they had to draw enough of an audience to their gigs for promoters to keep booking them. There was no space in this worldview for what we might think of as cult success. If your record only sold a thousand copies, then you had failed in your goal, even if the thousand people who bought your record really loved it. Even less commercially successful artists we've covered to this point, like the Mothers of Invention or Love, were *trying* for commercial success, even if they made the decision not to compromise as much as others do. This started to change a tiny bit in the mid-sixties as the influence of jazz and folk in the US, and the British blues scene, started to be felt in rock music. But this influence, at first, was a one-way thing -- people who had been in the folk and jazz worlds deciding to modify their music to be more commercial. And that was followed by already massively commercial musicians, like the Beatles, taking on some of those influences and bringing their audience with them. But that started to change around the time that "rock" started to differentiate itself from "rock and roll" and "pop", in mid 1967. So in this episode and the next, we're going to look at two bands who in different ways provided a model for how to be an alternative band. Both of them still *wanted* commercial success, but neither achieved it, at least not at first and not in the conventional way. And both, when they started out, went by the name The Warlocks. But we have to take a rather circuitous route to get to this week's band, because we're now properly introducing a strand of music that has been there in the background for a while -- avant-garde art music. So before we go any further, let's have a listen to a thirty-second clip of the most famous piece of avant-garde music ever, and I'll be performing it myself: [Excerpt, Andrew Hickey "4'33 (Cage)"] Obviously that won't give the full effect, you have to listen to the whole piece to get that. That is of course a section of "4'33" by John Cage, a piece of music that is often incorrectly described as being four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. As I've mentioned before, though, in the episode on "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", it isn't that at all. The whole point of the piece is that there is no such thing as silence, and it's intended to make the listener appreciate all the normal ambient sounds as music, every bit as much as any piece by Bach or Beethoven. John Cage, the composer of "4'33", is possibly the single most influential avant-garde artist of the mid twentieth century, so as we're properly introducing the ideas of avant-garde music into the story here, we need to talk about him a little. Cage was, from an early age, torn between three great vocations, all of which in some fashion would shape his work for decades to come. One of these was architecture, and for a time he intended to become an architect. Another was the religious ministry, and he very seriously considered becoming a minister as a young man, and religion -- though not the religious faith of his youth -- was to be a massive factor in his work as he grew older. He started studying music from an early age, though he never had any facility as a performer -- though he did, when he discovered the work of Grieg, think that might change. He later said “For a while I played nothing else. I even imagined devoting my life to the performance of his works alone, for they did not seem to me to be too difficult, and I loved them.” [Excerpt: Grieg piano concerto in A minor] But he soon realised that he didn't have some of the basic skills that would be required to be a performer -- he never actually thought of himself as very musical -- and so he decided to move into composition, and he later talked about putting his musical limits to good use in being more inventive. From his very first pieces, Cage was trying to expand the definition of what a performance of a piece of music actually was. One of his friends, Harry Hay, who took part in the first documented performance of a piece by Cage, described how Cage's father, an inventor, had "devised a fluorescent light source over which Sample" -- Don Sample, Cage's boyfriend at the time -- "laid a piece of vellum painted with designs in oils. The blankets I was wearing were white, and a sort of lampshade shone coloured patterns onto me. It looked very good. The thing got so hot the designs began to run, but that only made it better.” Apparently the audience for this light show -- one that predated the light shows used by rock bands by a good thirty years -- were not impressed, though that may be more because the Santa Monica Women's Club in the early 1930s was not the vanguard of the avant-garde. Or maybe it was. Certainly the housewives of Santa Monica seemed more willing than one might expect to sign up for another of Cage's ideas. In 1933 he went door to door asking women if they would be interested in signing up to a lecture course from him on modern art and music. He told them that if they signed up for $2.50, he would give them ten lectures, and somewhere between twenty and forty of them signed up, even though, as he said later, “I explained to the housewives that I didn't know anything about either subject but that I was enthusiastic about both of them. I promised to learn faithfully enough about each subject so as to be able to give a talk an hour long each week.” And he did just that, going to the library every day and spending all week preparing an hour-long talk for them. History does not relate whether he ended these lectures by telling the housewives to tell just one friend about them. He said later “I came out of these lectures, with a devotion to the painting of Mondrian, on the one hand, and the music of Schoenberg on the other.” [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte"] Schoenberg was one of the two most widely-respected composers in the world at that point, the other being Stravinsky, but the two had very different attitudes to composition. Schoenberg's great innovation was the creation and popularisation of the twelve-tone technique, and I should probably explain that a little before I go any further. Most Western music is based on an eight-note scale -- do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do -- with the eighth note being an octave up from the first. So in the key of C major that would be C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C: [demonstrates] And when you hear notes from that scale, if your ears are accustomed to basically any Western music written before about 1920, or any Western popular music written since then, you expect the melody to lead back to C, and you know to expect that because it only uses those notes -- there are differing intervals between them, some having a tone between them and some having a semitone, and you recognise the pattern. But of course there are other notes between the notes of that scale. There are actually an infinite number of these, but in conventional Western music we only look at a few more -- C# (or D flat), D# (or E flat), F# (or G flat), G# (or A flat) and A# (or B flat). If you add in all those notes you get this: [demonstrates] There's no clear beginning or end, no do for it to come back to. And Schoenberg's great innovation, which he was only starting to promote widely around this time, was to insist that all twelve notes should be equal -- his melodies would use all twelve of the notes the exact same number of times, and so if he used say a B flat, he would have to use all eleven other notes before he used B flat again in the piece. This was a radical new idea, but Schoenberg had only started advancing it after first winning great acclaim for earlier pieces, like his "Three Pieces for Piano", a work which wasn't properly twelve-tone, but did try to do without the idea of having any one note be more important than any other: [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Three Pieces for Piano"] At this point, that work had only been performed in the US by one performer, Richard Buhlig, and hadn't been released as a recording yet. Cage was so eager to hear it that he'd found Buhlig's phone number and called him, asking him to play the piece, but Buhlig put the phone down on him. Now he was doing these lectures, though, he had to do one on Schoenberg, and he wasn't a competent enough pianist to play Schoenberg's pieces himself, and there were still no recordings of them. Cage hitch-hiked from Santa Monica to LA, where Buhlig lived, to try to get him to come and visit his class and play some of Schoenberg's pieces for them. Buhlig wasn't in, and Cage hung around in his garden hoping for him to come back -- he pulled the leaves off a bough from one of Buhlig's trees, going "He'll come back, he won't come back, he'll come back..." and the leaves said he'd be back. Buhlig arrived back at midnight, and quite understandably told the strange twenty-one-year-old who'd spent twelve hours in his garden pulling the leaves off his trees that no, he would not come to Santa Monica and give a free performance. But he did agree that if Cage brought some of his own compositions he'd give them a look over. Buhlig started giving Cage some proper lessons in composition, although he stressed that he was a performer, not a composer. Around this time Cage wrote his Sonata for Clarinet: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Sonata For Clarinet"] Buhlig suggested that Cage send that to Henry Cowell, the composer we heard about in the episode on "Good Vibrations" who was friends with Lev Termen and who created music by playing the strings inside a piano: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] Cowell offered to take Cage on as an assistant, in return for which Cowell would teach him for a semester, as would Adolph Weiss, a pupil of Schoenberg's. But the goal, which Cowell suggested, was always to have Cage study with Schoenberg himself. Schoenberg at first refused, saying that Cage couldn't afford his price, but eventually took Cage on as a student having been assured that he would devote his entire life to music -- a promise Cage kept. Cage started writing pieces for percussion, something that had been very rare up to that point -- only a handful of composers, most notably Edgard Varese, had written pieces for percussion alone, but Cage was: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Trio"] This is often portrayed as a break from the ideals of his teacher Schoenberg, but in fact there's a clear continuity there, once you see what Cage was taking from Schoenberg. Schoenberg's work is, in some senses, about equality, about all notes being equal. Or to put it another way, it's about fairness. About erasing arbitrary distinctions. What Cage was doing was erasing the arbitrary distinction between the more and less prominent instruments. Why should there be pieces for solo violin or string quartet, but not for multiple percussion players? That said, Schoenberg was not exactly the most encouraging of teachers. When Cage invited Schoenberg to go to a concert of Cage's percussion work, Schoenberg told him he was busy that night. When Cage offered to arrange another concert for a date Schoenberg wasn't busy, the reply came "No, I will not be free at any time". Despite this, Cage later said “Schoenberg was a magnificent teacher, who always gave the impression that he was putting us in touch with musical principles,” and said "I literally worshipped him" -- a strong statement from someone who took religious matters as seriously as Cage. Cage was so devoted to Schoenberg's music that when a concert of music by Stravinsky was promoted as "music of the world's greatest living composer", Cage stormed into the promoter's office angrily, confronting the promoter and making it very clear that such things should not be said in the city where Schoenberg lived. Schoenberg clearly didn't think much of Cage's attempts at composition, thinking -- correctly -- that Cage had no ear for harmony. And his reportedly aggressive and confrontational teaching style didn't sit well with Cage -- though it seems very similar to a lot of the teaching techniques of the Zen masters he would later go on to respect. The two eventually parted ways, although Cage always spoke highly of Schoenberg. Schoenberg later gave Cage a compliment of sorts, when asked if any of his students had gone on to do anything interesting. At first he replied that none had, but then he mentioned Cage and said “Of course he's not a composer, but an inventor—of genius.” Cage was at this point very worried if there was any point to being a composer at all. He said later “I'd read Cowell's New Musical Resources and . . . The Theory of Rhythm. I had also read Chavez's Towards a New Music. Both works gave me the feeling that everything that was possible in music had already happened. So I thought I could never compose socially important music. Only if I could invent something new, then would I be useful to society. But that seemed unlikely then.” [Excerpt: John Cage, "Totem Ancestor"] Part of the solution came when he was asked to compose music for an abstract animation by the filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, and also to work as Fischinger's assistant when making the film. He was fascinated by the stop-motion process, and by the results of the film, which he described as "a beautiful film in which these squares, triangles and circles and other things moved and changed colour.” But more than that he was overwhelmed by a comment by Fischinger, who told him “Everything in the world has its own spirit, and this spirit becomes audible by setting it into vibration.” Cage later said “That set me on fire. He started me on a path of exploration of the world around me which has never stopped—of hitting and stretching and scraping and rubbing everything.” Cage now took his ideas further. His compositions for percussion had been about, if you like, giving the underdog a chance -- percussion was always in the background, why should it not be in the spotlight? Now he realised that there were other things getting excluded in conventional music -- the sounds that we characterise as noise. Why should composers work to exclude those sounds, but work to *include* other sounds? Surely that was... well, a little unfair? Eventually this would lead to pieces like his 1952 piece "Water Music", later expanded and retitled "Water Walk", which can be heard here in his 1959 appearance on the TV show "I've Got a Secret". It's a piece for, amongst other things, a flowerpot full of flowers, a bathtub, a watering can, a pipe, a duck call, a blender full of ice cubes, and five unplugged radios: [Excerpt: John Cage "Water Walk"] As he was now avoiding pitch and harmony as organising principles for his music, he turned to time. But note -- not to rhythm. He said “There's none of this boom, boom, boom, business in my music . . . a measure is taken as a strict measure of time—not a one two three four—which I fill with various sounds.” He came up with a system he referred to as “micro-macrocosmic rhythmic structure,” what we would now call fractals, though that word hadn't yet been invented, where the structure of the whole piece was reflected in the smallest part of it. For a time he started moving away from the term music, preferring to refer to the "art of noise" or to "organised sound" -- though he later received a telegram from Edgard Varese, one of his musical heroes and one of the few other people writing works purely for percussion, asking him not to use that phrase, which Varese used for his own work. After meeting with Varese and his wife, he later became convinced that it was Varese's wife who had initiated the telegram, as she explained to Cage's wife "we didn't want your husband's work confused with my husband's work, any more than you'd want some . . . any artist's work confused with that of a cartoonist.” While there is a humour to Cage's work, I don't really hear much qualitative difference between a Cage piece like the one we just heard and a Varese piece like Ionisation: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] But it was in 1952, the year of "Water Music" that John Cage made his two biggest impacts on the cultural world, though the full force of those impacts wasn't felt for some years. To understand Cage's 1952 work, you first have to understand that he had become heavily influenced by Zen, which at that time was very little known in the Western world. Indeed he had studied with Daisetsu Suzuki, who is credited with introducing Zen to the West, and said later “I didn't study music with just anybody; I studied with Schoenberg, I didn't study Zen with just anybody; I studied with Suzuki. I've always gone, insofar as I could, to the president of the company.” Cage's whole worldview was profoundly affected by Zen, but he was also naturally sympathetic to it, and his work after learning about Zen is mostly a continuation of trends we can already see. In particular, he became convinced that the point of music isn't to communicate anything between two people, rather its point is merely to be experienced. I'm far from an expert on Buddhism, but one way of thinking about its central lessons is that one should experience things as they are, experiencing the thing itself rather than one's thoughts or preconceptions about it. And so at Black Mountain college came Theatre Piece Number 1: [Excerpt: Edith Piaf, "La Vie En Rose" ] In this piece, Cage had set the audience on all sides, so they'd be facing each other. He stood on a stepladder, as colleagues danced in and around the audience, another colleague played the piano, two more took turns to stand on another stepladder to recite poetry, different films and slides were projected, seemingly at random, onto the walls, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg played scratchy Edith Piaf records on a wind-up gramophone. The audience were included in the performance, and it was meant to be experienced as a gestalt, as a whole, to be what we would now call an immersive experience. One of Cage's students around this time was the artist Allan Kaprow, and he would be inspired by Theatre Piece Number 1 to put on several similar events in the late fifties. Those events he called "happenings", because the point of them was that you were meant to experience an event as it was happening rather than bring preconceptions of form and structure to them. Those happenings were the inspiration for events like The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, and the term "happening" became such an integral part of the counterculture that by 1967 there were comedy films being released about them, including one just called The Happening with a title track by the Supremes that made number one: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "The Happening"] Theatre Piece Number 1 was retrospectively considered the first happening, and as such its influence is incalculable. But one part I didn't mention about Theatre Piece Number 1 is that as well as Rauschenberg playing Edith Piaf's records, he also displayed some of his paintings. These paintings were totally white -- at a glance, they looked like blank canvases, but as one inspected them more clearly, it became apparent that Rauschenberg had painted them with white paint, with visible brushstrokes. These paintings, along with a visit to an anechoic chamber in which Cage discovered that even in total silence one can still hear one's own blood and nervous system, so will never experience total silence, were the final key to something Cage had been working towards -- if music had minimised percussion, and excluded noise, how much more had it excluded silence? As Cage said in 1958 “Curiously enough, the twelve-tone system has no zero in it.” And so came 4'33, the piece that we heard an excerpt of near the start of this episode. That piece was the something new he'd been looking for that could be useful to society. It took the sounds the audience could already hear, and without changing them even slightly gave them a new context and made the audience hear them as they were. Simply by saying "this is music", it caused the ambient noise to be perceived as music. This idea, of recontextualising existing material, was one that had already been done in the art world -- Marcel Duchamp, in 1917, had exhibited a urinal as a sculpture titled "Fountain" -- but even Duchamp had talked about his work as "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice". The artist was *raising* the object to art. What Cage was saying was "the object is already art". This was all massively influential to a young painter who had seen Cage give lectures many times, and while at art school had with friends prepared a piano in the same way Cage did for his own experimental compositions, dampening the strings with different objects. [Excerpt: Dana Gillespie, "Andy Warhol (live)"] Duchamp and Rauschenberg were both big influences on Andy Warhol, but he would say in the early sixties "John Cage is really so responsible for so much that's going on," and would for the rest of his life cite Cage as one of the two or three prime influences of his career. Warhol is a difficult figure to discuss, because his work is very intellectual but he was not very articulate -- which is one reason I've led up to him by discussing Cage in such detail, because Cage was always eager to talk at great length about the theoretical basis of his work, while Warhol would say very few words about anything at all. Probably the person who knew him best was his business partner and collaborator Paul Morrissey, and Morrissey's descriptions of Warhol have shaped my own view of his life, but it's very worth noting that Morrissey is an extremely right-wing moralist who wishes to see a Catholic theocracy imposed to do away with the scourges of sexual immorality, drug use, hedonism, and liberalism, so his view of Warhol, a queer drug using progressive whose worldview seems to have been totally opposed to Morrissey's in every way, might be a little distorted. Warhol came from an impoverished background, and so, as many people who grew up poor do, he was, throughout his life, very eager to make money. He studied art at university, and got decent but not exceptional grades -- he was a competent draughtsman, but not a great one, and most importantly as far as success in the art world goes he didn't have what is known as his own "line" -- with most successful artists, you can look at a handful of lines they've drawn and see something of their own personality in it. You couldn't with Warhol. His drawings looked like mediocre imitations of other people's work. Perfectly competent, but nothing that stood out. So Warhol came up with a technique to make his drawings stand out -- blotting. He would do a normal drawing, then go over it with a lot of wet ink. He'd lower a piece of paper on to the wet drawing, and the new paper would soak up the ink, and that second piece of paper would become the finished work. The lines would be fractured and smeared, broken in places where the ink didn't get picked up, and thick in others where it had pooled. With this mechanical process, Warhol had managed to create an individual style, and he became an extremely successful commercial artist. In the early 1950s photography was still seen as a somewhat low-class way of advertising things. If you wanted to sell to a rich audience, you needed to use drawings or paintings. By 1955 Warhol was making about twelve thousand dollars a year -- somewhere close to a hundred and thirty thousand a year in today's money -- drawing shoes for advertisements. He also had a sideline in doing record covers for people like Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Seventh Avenue Express"] For most of the 1950s he also tried to put on shows of his more serious artistic work -- often with homoerotic themes -- but to little success. The dominant art style of the time was the abstract expressionism of people like Jackson Pollock, whose art was visceral, emotional, and macho. The term "action paintings" which was coined for the work of people like Pollock, sums it up. This was manly art for manly men having manly emotions and expressing them loudly. It was very male and very straight, and even the gay artists who were prominent at the time tended to be very conformist and look down on anything they considered flamboyant or effeminate. Warhol was a rather effeminate, very reserved man, who strongly disliked showing his emotions, and whose tastes ran firmly to the camp. Camp as an aesthetic of finding joy in the flamboyant or trashy, as opposed to merely a descriptive term for men who behaved in a way considered effeminate, was only just starting to be codified at this time -- it wouldn't really become a fully-formed recognisable thing until Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964 -- but of course just because something hasn't been recognised doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and Warhol's aesthetic was always very camp, and in the 1950s in the US that was frowned upon even in gay culture, where the mainstream opinion was that the best way to acceptance was through assimilation. Abstract expressionism was all about expressing the self, and that was something Warhol never wanted to do -- in fact he made some pronouncements at times which suggested he didn't think of himself as *having* a self in the conventional sense. The combination of not wanting to express himself and of wanting to work more efficiently as a commercial artist led to some interesting results. For example, he was commissioned in 1957 to do a cover for an album by Moondog, the blind street musician whose name Alan Freed had once stolen: [Excerpt: Moondog, "Gloving It"] For that cover, Warhol got his mother, Julia Warhola, to just write out the liner notes for the album in her rather ornamental cursive script, and that became the front cover, leading to an award for graphic design going that year to "Andy Warhol's mother". (Incidentally, my copy of the current CD issue of that album, complete with Julia Warhola's cover, is put out by Pickwick Records...) But towards the end of the fifties, the work for commercial artists started to dry up. If you wanted to advertise shoes, now, you just took a photo of the shoes rather than get Andy Warhol to draw a picture of them. The money started to disappear, and Warhol started to panic. If there was no room for him in graphic design any more, he had to make his living in the fine arts, which he'd been totally unsuccessful in. But luckily for Warhol, there was a new movement that was starting to form -- Pop Art. Pop Art started in England, and had originally been intended, at least in part, as a critique of American consumerist capitalism. Pieces like "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" by Richard Hamilton (who went on to design the Beatles' White Album cover) are collages of found images, almost all from American sources, recontextualised and juxtaposed in interesting ways, so a bodybuilder poses in a room that's taken from an advert in Ladies' Home Journal, while on the wall, instead of a painting, hangs a blown-up cover of a Jack Kirby romance comic. Pop Art changed slightly when it got taken up in America, and there it became something rather different, something closer to Duchamp, taking those found images and displaying them as art with no juxtaposition. Where Richard Hamilton created collage art which *showed* a comic cover by Jack Kirby as a painting in the background, Roy Lichtenstein would take a panel of comic art by Kirby, or Russ Heath or Irv Novick or a dozen other comic artists, and redraw it at the size of a normal painting. So Warhol took Cage's idea that the object is already art, and brought that into painting, starting by doing paintings of Campbell's soup cans, in which he tried as far as possible to make the cans look exactly like actual soup cans. The paintings were controversial, inciting fury in some and laughter in others and causing almost everyone to question whether they were art. Warhol would embrace an aesthetic in which things considered unimportant or trash or pop culture detritus were the greatest art of all. For example pretty much every profile of him written in the mid sixties talks about him obsessively playing "Sally Go Round the Roses", a girl-group single by the one-hit wonders the Jaynettes: [Excerpt: The Jaynettes, "Sally Go Round the Roses"] After his paintings of Campbell's soup cans, and some rather controversial but less commercially successful paintings of photographs of horrors and catastrophes taken from newspapers, Warhol abandoned painting in the conventional sense altogether, instead creating brightly coloured screen prints -- a form of stencilling -- based on photographs of celebrities like Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and, most famously, Marilyn Monroe. That way he could produce images which could be mass-produced, without his active involvement, and which supposedly had none of his personality in them, though of course his personality pervades the work anyway. He put on exhibitions of wooden boxes, silk-screen printed to look exactly like shipping cartons of Brillo pads. Images we see everywhere -- in newspapers, in supermarkets -- were art. And Warhol even briefly formed a band. The Druds were a garage band formed to play at a show at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the opening night of an exhibition that featured a silkscreen by Warhol of 210 identical bottles of Coca-Cola, as well as paintings by Rauschenberg and others. That opening night featured a happening by Claes Oldenburg, and a performance by Cage -- Cage gave a live lecture while three recordings of his own voice also played. The Druds were also meant to perform, but they fell apart after only a few rehearsals. Some recordings apparently exist, but they don't seem to circulate, but they'd be fascinating to hear as almost the entire band were non-musician artists like Warhol, Jasper Johns, and the sculptor Walter de Maria. Warhol said of the group “It didn't go too well, but if we had just stayed on it it would have been great.” On the other hand, the one actual musician in the group said “It was kind of ridiculous, so I quit after the second rehearsal". That musician was La Monte Young: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] That's an excerpt from what is generally considered Young's masterwork, "The Well-Tuned Piano". It's six and a half hours long. If Warhol is a difficult figure to write about, Young is almost impossible. He's a musician with a career stretching sixty years, who is arguably the most influential musician from the classical tradition in that time period. He's generally considered the father of minimalism, and he's also been called by Brian Eno "the daddy of us all" -- without Young you simply *do not* get art rock at all. Without Young there is no Velvet Underground, no David Bowie, no Eno, no New York punk scene, no Yoko Ono. Anywhere that the fine arts or conceptual art have intersected with popular music in the last fifty or more years has been influenced in one way or another by Young's work. BUT... he only rarely publishes his scores. He very, very rarely allows recordings of his work to be released -- there are four recordings on his bandcamp, plus a handful of recordings of his older, published, pieces, and very little else. He doesn't allow his music to be performed live without his supervision. There *are* bootleg recordings of his music, but even those are not easily obtainable -- Young is vigorous in enforcing his copyrights and issues takedown notices against anywhere that hosts them. So other than that handful of legitimately available recordings -- plus a recording by Young's Theater of Eternal Music, the legality of which is still disputed, and an off-air recording of a 1971 radio programme I've managed to track down, the only way to experience Young's music unless you're willing to travel to one of his rare live performances or installations is second-hand, by reading about it. Except that the one book that deals solely with Young and his music is not only a dense and difficult book to read, it's also one that Young vehemently disagreed with and considered extremely inaccurate, to the point he refused to allow permissions to quote his work in the book. Young did apparently prepare a list of corrections for the book, but he wouldn't tell the author what they were without payment. So please assume that anything I say about Young is wrong, but also accept that the short section of this episode about Young has required more work to *try* to get it right than pretty much anything else this year. Young's musical career actually started out in a relatively straightforward manner. He didn't grow up in the most loving of homes -- he's talked about his father beating him as a child because he had been told that young La Monte was clever -- but his father did buy him a saxophone and teach him the rudiments of the instrument, and as a child he was most influenced by the music of the big band saxophone player Jimmy Dorsey: [Excerpt: Jimmy Dorsey, “It's the Dreamer in Me”] The family, who were Mormon farmers, relocated several times in Young's childhood, from Idaho first to California and then to Utah, but everywhere they went La Monte seemed to find musical inspiration, whether from an uncle who had been part of the Kansas City jazz scene, a classmate who was a musical prodigy who had played with Perez Prado in his early teens, or a teacher who took the class to see a performance of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra: [Excerpt: Bartok, "Concerto for Orchestra"] After leaving high school, Young went to Los Angeles City College to study music under Leonard Stein, who had been Schoenberg's assistant when Schoenberg had taught at UCLA, and there he became part of the thriving jazz scene based around Central Avenue, studying and performing with musicians like Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and Eric Dolphy -- Young once beat Dolphy in an audition for a place in the City College dance band, and the two would apparently substitute for each other on their regular gigs when one couldn't make it. During this time, Young's musical tastes became much more adventurous. He was a particular fan of the work of John Coltrane, and also got inspired by City of Glass, an album by Stan Kenton that attempted to combine jazz and modern classical music: [Excerpt: Stan Kenton's Innovations Orchestra, "City of Glass: The Structures"] His other major musical discovery in the mid-fifties was one we've talked about on several previous occasions -- the album Music of India, Morning and Evening Ragas by Ali Akhbar Khan: [Excerpt: Ali Akhbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] Young's music at this point was becoming increasingly modal, and equally influenced by the blues and Indian music. But he was also becoming interested in serialism. Serialism is an extension and generalisation of twelve-tone music, inspired by mathematical set theory. In serialism, you choose a set of musical elements -- in twelve-tone music that's the twelve notes in the twelve-tone scale, but it can also be a set of tonal relations, a chord, or any other set of elements. You then define all the possible ways you can permute those elements, a defined set of operations you can perform on them -- so you could play a scale forwards, play it backwards, play all the notes in the scale simultaneously, and so on. You then go through all the possible permutations, exactly once, and that's your piece of music. Young was particularly influenced by the works of Anton Webern, one of the earliest serialists: [Excerpt: Anton Webern, "Cantata number 1 for Soprano, Mixed Chorus, and Orchestra"] That piece we just heard, Webern's "Cantata number 1", was the subject of some of the earliest theoretical discussion of serialism, and in particular led to some discussion of the next step on from serialism. If serialism was all about going through every single permutation of a set, what if you *didn't* permute every element? There was a lot of discussion in the late fifties in music-theoretical circles about the idea of invariance. Normally in music, the interesting thing is what gets changed. To use a very simple example, you might change a melody from a major key to a minor one to make it sound sadder. What theorists at this point were starting to discuss is what happens if you leave something the same, but change the surrounding context, so the thing you *don't* vary sounds different because of the changed context. And going further, what if you don't change the context at all, and merely *imply* a changed context? These ideas were some of those which inspired Young's first major work, his Trio For Strings from 1958, a complex, palindromic, serial piece which is now credited as the first work of minimalism, because the notes in it change so infrequently: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Trio for Strings"] Though I should point out that Young never considers his works truly finished, and constantly rewrites them, and what we just heard is an excerpt from the only recording of the trio ever officially released, which is of the 2015 version. So I can't state for certain how close what we just heard is to the piece he wrote in 1958, except that it sounds very like the written descriptions of it I've read. After writing the Trio For Strings, Young moved to Germany to study with the modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. While studying with Stockhausen, he became interested in the work of John Cage, and started up a correspondence with Cage. On his return to New York he studied with Cage and started writing pieces inspired by Cage, of which the most musical is probably Composition 1960 #7: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Composition 1960 #7"] The score for that piece is a stave on which is drawn a treble clef, the notes B and F#, and the words "To be held for a long Time". Other of his compositions from 1960 -- which are among the few of his compositions which have been published -- include composition 1960 #10 ("To Bob Morris"), the score for which is just the instruction "Draw a straight line and follow it.", and Piano Piece for David Tudor #1, the score for which reads "Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over after the piano eats or decides not to". Most of these compositions were performed as part of a loose New York art collective called Fluxus, all of whom were influenced by Cage and the Dadaists. This collective, led by George Maciunas, sometimes involved Cage himself, but also involved people like Henry Flynt, the inventor of conceptual art, who later became a campaigner against art itself, and who also much to Young's bemusement abandoned abstract music in the mid-sixties to form a garage band with Walter de Maria (who had played drums with the Druds): [Excerpt: Henry Flynt and the Insurrections, "I Don't Wanna"] Much of Young's work was performed at Fluxus concerts given in a New York loft belonging to another member of the collective, Yoko Ono, who co-curated the concerts with Young. One of Ono's mid-sixties pieces, her "Four Pieces for Orchestra" is dedicated to Young, and consists of such instructions as "Count all the stars of that night by heart. The piece ends when all the orchestra members finish counting the stars, or when it dawns. This can be done with windows instead of stars." But while these conceptual ideas remained a huge part of Young's thinking, he soon became interested in two other ideas. The first was the idea of just intonation -- tuning instruments and voices to perfect harmonics, rather than using the subtly-off tuning that is used in Western music. I'm sure I've explained that before in a previous episode, but to put it simply when you're tuning an instrument with fixed pitches like a piano, you have a choice -- you can either tune it so that the notes in one key are perfectly in tune with each other, but then when you change key things go very out of tune, or you can choose to make *everything* a tiny bit, almost unnoticeably, out of tune, but equally so. For the last several hundred years, musicians as a community have chosen the latter course, which was among other things promoted by Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, a collection of compositions which shows how the different keys work together: [Excerpt: Bach (Glenn Gould), "The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II: Fugue in F-sharp minor, BWV 883"] Young, by contrast, has his own esoteric tuning system, which he uses in his own work The Well-Tuned Piano: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] The other idea that Young took on was from Indian music, the idea of the drone. One of the four recordings of Young's music that is available from his Bandcamp, a 1982 recording titled The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath, consists of one hour, thirteen minutes, and fifty-eight seconds of this: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath"] Yes, I have listened to the whole piece. No, nothing else happens. The minimalist composer Terry Riley describes the recording as "a singularly rare contribution that far outshines any other attempts to capture this instrument in recorded media". In 1962, Young started writing pieces based on what he called the "dream chord", a chord consisting of a root, fourth, sharpened fourth, and fifth: [dream chord] That chord had already appeared in his Trio for Strings, but now it would become the focus of much of his work, in pieces like his 1962 piece The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, heard here in a 1982 revision: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer"] That was part of a series of works titled The Four Dreams of China, and Young began to plan an installation work titled Dream House, which would eventually be created, and which currently exists in Tribeca, New York, where it's been in continuous "performance" for thirty years -- and which consists of thirty-two different pure sine wave tones all played continuously, plus purple lighting by Young's wife Marian Zazeela. But as an initial step towards creating this, Young formed a collective called Theatre of Eternal Music, which some of the members -- though never Young himself -- always claim also went by the alternative name The Dream Syndicate. According to John Cale, a member of the group, that name came about because the group tuned their instruments to the 60hz hum of the fridge in Young's apartment, which Cale called "the key of Western civilisation". According to Cale, that meant the fundamental of the chords they played was 10hz, the frequency of alpha waves when dreaming -- hence the name. The group initially consisted of Young, Zazeela, the photographer Billy Name, and percussionist Angus MacLise, but by this recording in 1964 the lineup was Young, Zazeela, MacLise, Tony Conrad and John Cale: [Excerpt: "Cale, Conrad, Maclise, Young, Zazeela - The Dream Syndicate 2 IV 64-4"] That recording, like any others that have leaked by the 1960s version of the Theatre of Eternal Music or Dream Syndicate, is of disputed legality, because Young and Zazeela claim to this day that what the group performed were La Monte Young's compositions, while the other two surviving members, Cale and Conrad, claim that their performances were improvisational collaborations and should be equally credited to all the members, and so there have been lawsuits and countersuits any time anyone has released the recordings. John Cale, the youngest member of the group, was also the only one who wasn't American. He'd been born in Wales in 1942, and had had the kind of childhood that, in retrospect, seems guaranteed to lead to eccentricity. He was the product of a mixed-language marriage -- his father, William, was an English speaker while his mother, Margaret, spoke Welsh, but the couple had moved in on their marriage with Margaret's mother, who insisted that only Welsh could be spoken in her house. William didn't speak Welsh, and while he eventually picked up the basics from spending all his life surrounded by Welsh-speakers, he refused on principle to capitulate to his mother-in-law, and so remained silent in the house. John, meanwhile, grew up a monolingual Welsh speaker, and didn't start to learn English until he went to school when he was seven, and so couldn't speak to his father until then even though they lived together. Young John was extremely unwell for most of his childhood, both physically -- he had bronchial problems for which he had to take a cough mixture that was largely opium to help him sleep at night -- and mentally. He was hospitalised when he was sixteen with what was at first thought to be meningitis, but turned out to be a psychosomatic condition, the result of what he has described as a nervous breakdown. That breakdown is probably connected to the fact that during his teenage years he was sexually assaulted by two adults in positions of authority -- a vicar and a music teacher -- and felt unable to talk to anyone about this. He was, though, a child prodigy and was playing viola with the National Youth Orchestra of Wales from the age of thirteen, and listening to music by Schoenberg, Webern, and Stravinsky. He was so talented a multi-instrumentalist that at school he was the only person other than one of the music teachers and the headmaster who was allowed to use the piano -- which led to a prank on his very last day at school. The headmaster would, on the last day, hit a low G on the piano to cue the assembly to stand up, and Cale had placed a comb on the string, muting it and stopping the note from sounding -- in much the same way that his near-namesake John Cage was "preparing" pianos for his own compositions in the USA. Cale went on to Goldsmith's College to study music and composition, under Humphrey Searle, one of Britain's greatest proponents of serialism who had himself studied under Webern. Cale's main instrument was the viola, but he insisted on also playing pieces written for the violin, because they required more technical skill. For his final exam he chose to play Hindemith's notoriously difficult Viola Sonata: [Excerpt: Hindemith Viola Sonata] While at Goldsmith's, Cale became friendly with Cornelius Cardew, a composer and cellist who had studied with Stockhausen and at the time was a great admirer of and advocate for the works of Cage and Young (though by the mid-seventies Cardew rejected their work as counter-revolutionary bourgeois imperialism). Through Cardew, Cale started to correspond with Cage, and with George Maciunas and other members of Fluxus. In July 1963, just after he'd finished his studies at Goldsmith's, Cale presented a festival there consisting of an afternoon and an evening show. These shows included the first British performances of several works including Cardew's Autumn '60 for Orchestra -- a piece in which the musicians were given blank staves on which to write whatever part they wanted to play, but a separate set of instructions in *how* to play the parts they'd written. Another piece Cale presented in its British premiere at that show was Cage's "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra": [Excerpt: John Cage, "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra"] In the evening show, they performed Two Pieces For String Quartet by George Brecht (in which the musicians polish their instruments with dusters, making scraping sounds as they clean them), and two new pieces by Cale, one of which involved a plant being put on the stage, and then the performer, Robin Page, screaming from the balcony at the plant that it would die, then running down, through the audience, and onto the stage, screaming abuse and threats at the plant. The final piece in the show was a performance by Cale (the first one in Britain) of La Monte Young's "X For Henry Flynt". For this piece, Cale put his hands together and then smashed both his arms onto the keyboard as hard as he could, over and over. After five minutes some of the audience stormed the stage and tried to drag the piano away from him. Cale followed the piano on his knees, continuing to bang the keys, and eventually the audience gave up in defeat and Cale the performer won. After this Cale moved to the USA, to further study composition, this time with Iannis Xenakis, the modernist composer who had also taught Mickey Baker orchestration after Baker left Mickey and Sylvia, and who composed such works as "Orient Occident": [Excerpt: Iannis Xenakis, "Orient Occident"] Cale had been recommended to Xenakis as a student by Aaron Copland, who thought the young man was probably a genius. But Cale's musical ambitions were rather too great for Tanglewood, Massachusetts -- he discovered that the institute had eighty-eight pianos, the same number as there are keys on a piano keyboard, and thought it would be great if for a piece he could take all eighty-eight pianos, put them all on different boats, sail the boats out onto a lake, and have eighty-eight different musicians each play one note on each piano, while the boats sank with the pianos on board. For some reason, Cale wasn't allowed to perform this composition, and instead had to make do with one where he pulled an axe out of a single piano and slammed it down on a table. Hardly the same, I'm sure you'll agree. From Tanglewood, Cale moved on to New York, where he soon became part of the artistic circles surrounding John Cage and La Monte Young. It was at this time that he joined Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, and also took part in a performance with Cage that would get Cale his first television exposure: [Excerpt: John Cale playing Erik Satie's "Vexations" on "I've Got a Secret"] That's Cale playing through "Vexations", a piece by Erik Satie that wasn't published until after Satie's death, and that remained in obscurity until Cage popularised -- if that's the word -- the piece. The piece, which Cage had found while studying Satie's notes, seems to be written as an exercise and has the inscription (in French) "In order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." Cage interpreted that, possibly correctly, as an instruction that the piece should be played eight hundred and forty times straight through, and so he put together a performance of the piece, the first one ever, by a group he called the Pocket Theatre Piano Relay Team, which included Cage himself, Cale, Joshua Rifkin, and several other notable musical figures, who took it in turns playing the piece. For that performance, which ended up lasting eighteen hours, there was an entry fee of five dollars, and there was a time-clock in the lobby. Audience members punched in and punched out, and got a refund of five cents for every twenty minutes they'd spent listening to the music. Supposedly, at the end, one audience member yelled "Encore!" A week later, Cale appeared on "I've Got a Secret", a popular game-show in which celebrities tried to guess people's secrets (and which is where that performance of Cage's "Water Walk" we heard earlier comes from): [Excerpt: John Cale on I've Got a Secret] For a while, Cale lived with a friend of La Monte Young's, Terry Jennings, before moving in to a flat with Tony Conrad, one of the other members of the Theatre of Eternal Music. Angus MacLise lived in another flat in the same building. As there was not much money to be made in avant-garde music, Cale also worked in a bookshop -- a job Cage had found him -- and had a sideline in dealing drugs. But rents were so cheap at this time that Cale and Conrad only had to work part-time, and could spend much of their time working on the music they were making with Young. Both were string players -- Conrad violin, Cale viola -- and they soon modified their instruments. Conrad merely attached pickups to his so it could be amplified, but Cale went much further. He filed down the viola's bridge so he could play three strings at once, and he replaced the normal viola strings with thicker, heavier, guitar and mandolin strings. This created a sound so loud that it sounded like a distorted electric guitar -- though in late 1963 and early 1964 there were very few people who even knew what a distorted guitar sounded like. Cale and Conrad were also starting to become interested in rock and roll music, to which neither of them had previously paid much attention, because John Cage's music had taught them to listen for music in sounds they previously dismissed. In particular, Cale became fascinated with the harmonies of the Everly Brothers, hearing in them the same just intonation that Young advocated for: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "All I Have to Do is Dream"] And it was with this newfound interest in rock and roll that Cale and Conrad suddenly found themselves members of a manufactured pop band. The two men had been invited to a party on the Lower East Side, and there they'd been introduced to Terry Phillips of Pickwick Records. Phillips had seen their long hair and asked if they were musicians, so they'd answered "yes". He asked if they were in a band, and they said yes. He asked if that band had a drummer, and again they said yes. By this point they realised that he had assumed they were rock guitarists, rather than experimental avant-garde string players, but they decided to play along and see where this was going. Phillips told them that if they brought along their drummer to Pickwick's studios the next day, he had a job for them. The two of them went along with Walter de Maria, who did play the drums a little in between his conceptual art work, and there they were played a record: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] It was explained to them that Pickwick made knock-off records -- soundalikes of big hits, and their own records in the style of those hits, all played by a bunch of session musicians and put out under different band names. This one, by "the Primitives", they thought had a shot at being an actual hit, even though it was a dance-craze song about a dance where one partner lays on the floor and the other stamps on their head. But if it was going to be a hit, they needed an actual band to go out and perform it, backing the singer. How would Cale, Conrad, and de Maria like to be three quarters of the Primitives? It sounded fun, but of course they weren't actually guitarists. But as it turned out, that wasn't going to be a problem. They were told that the guitars on the track had all been tuned to one note -- not even to an open chord, like we talked about Steve Cropper doing last episode, but all the strings to one note. Cale and Conrad were astonished -- that was exactly the kind of thing they'd been doing in their drone experiments with La Monte Young. Who was this person who was independently inventing the most advanced ideas in experimental music but applying them to pop songs? And that was how they met Lou Reed: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] Where Cale and Conrad were avant-gardeists who had only just started paying attention to rock and roll music, rock and roll was in Lou Reed's blood, but there were a few striking similarities between him and Cale, even though at a glance their backgrounds could not have seemed more different. Reed had been brought up in a comfortably middle-class home in Long Island, but despised the suburban conformity that surrounded him from a very early age, and by his teens was starting to rebel against it very strongly. According to one classmate “Lou was always more advanced than the rest of us. The drinking age was eighteen back then, so we all started drinking at around sixteen. We were drinking quarts of beer, but Lou was smoking joints. He didn't do that in front of many people, but I knew he was doing it. While we were looking at girls in Playboy, Lou was reading Story of O. He was reading the Marquis de Sade, stuff that I wouldn't even have thought about or known how to find.” But one way in which Reed was a typical teenager of the period was his love for rock and roll, especially doo-wop. He'd got himself a guitar, but only had one lesson -- according to the story he would tell on numerous occasions, he turned up with a copy of "Blue Suede Shoes" and told the teacher he only wanted to know how to play the chords for that, and he'd work out the rest himself. Reed and two schoolfriends, Alan Walters and Phil Harris, put together a doo-wop trio they called The Shades, because they wore sunglasses, and a neighbour introduced them to Bob Shad, who had been an A&R man for Mercury Records and was starting his own new label. He renamed them the Jades and took them into the studio with some of the best New York session players, and at fourteen years old Lou Reed was writing songs and singing them backed by Mickey Baker and King Curtis: [Excerpt: The Jades, "Leave Her For Me"] Sadly the Jades' single was a flop -- the closest it came to success was being played on Murray the K's radio show, but on a day when Murray the K was off ill and someone else was filling in for him, much to Reed's disappointment. Phil Harris, the lead singer of the group, got to record some solo sessions after that, but the Jades split up and it would be several years before Reed made any more records. Partly this was because of Reed's mental health, and here's where things get disputed and rather messy. What we know is that in his late teens, just after he'd gone off to New
Pete Weiss is a New England-based producer/engineer/mixer/musician. His unfussy, organic, "artist first" work has earned him a reputation as an outstanding producer who can adapt to many musical genres and is unafraid to ignore stylistic convention. Notable artists Weiss has worked with include Charlie Chesterman, Chris Brokaw, Peter Holsapple, Kustomized, Slim Cessna's Auto Club, Doug Yule, Moe Tucker, The Upper Crust, Aimee Mann, Lee Ranaldo, Bell X1, Willard Grant Conspiracy, Two Dollar Pistols, Bow Thayer & Levon Helm, Hayley Thompson-King and many others. In 1989 he co-founded Zippah Studio in Boston. In 2004, he built and opened Verdant Studio, an "open room" retreat-style studio with artist lodging in rural Vermont which he operated until late 2020, when he returned to Boston to concentrate on mixing and mastering at Jade Cow Music Post Production Services. When not in the studio, Weiss fronts the instrumental band The Weisstronauts and is a member of the experimental pop collective known as Sool. Since 2017, he has collaborated with eclectic vocalist/songwriter Hayley Thompson-King. He released a solo album in 1996 and three albums while fronting the subversive Pete Weiss & the Rock Band from 1995-2000. He has scored four independent films, "Methods" (1998), "Metal" (2001), "Bad Gravity" (with Sool 2006), and "The Arcadian Ideal" (2007). He is a Senior Contributor for Tape Op Magazine, writing reviews of audio equipment as well as conducting interviews with recording industry figures. Over the years he has served on many panels & workshops at Tape Op's and Potluck Audio's conferences. In the early 1990's Weiss authored two books on baseball, "Baseball's All Time Goats" and "Longshots!", both published by Adams Media. IN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN ABOUT: Working with track limitations Owning a retreat-style studio Finding clients while working in the middle of nowhere Attended sessions vs unattended sessions Setting guidelines for clients Working in an open-concept studio The relationship between kick and bass guitar: how to get the low-end feeling balanced How to track bass guitar The keys to getting a great guitar tone Making time for experimentation during a session To learn more about Pete Weiss, visit: https://www.weissy.com/ To learn more tips on how to improve your mixes, visit https://masteryourmix.com/ Download your FREE copy of the Ultimate Mixing Blueprint: https://masteryourmix.com/blueprint/ Get your copy of the #1 Amazon bestselling book, The Mixing Mindset – The Step-By-Step Formula For Creating Professional Rock Mixes From Your Home Studio: https://masteryourmix.com/mixingmindsetbook/ Join the FREE MasterYourMix Facebook community: https://links.masteryourmix.com/community To make sure that you don't miss an episode, make sure to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or on Android. Have your questions answered on the show. Send them to questions@masteryourmix.com Thanks for listening! Please leave a rating and review on iTunes!
The identification of several earthquakes along the San Andreas fault occurring between 700 to 7,000 years ago provides deeper insight into the region's seismicity on a cyclical scale. Lead author Bryan Castillo joins us to answer questions about the research and explain the significance of such a discovery. Follow him on social media and learn more about his work at https://linktr.ee/earthquake_dude Source Material: https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geosphere/article/17/3/685/596773/Prehistoric-earthquakes-on-the-Banning-strand-of Bryan A. Castillo, Sally F. McGill, Katherine M. Scharer, Doug Yule, Devin McPhillips, James McNeil, Sourav Saha, Nathan D. Brown, Seulgi Moon; Prehistoric earthquakes on the Banning strand of the San Andreas fault, North Palm Springs, California. Geosphere 2021;; 17 (3): 685–710. Download the Callin app for iOS and Android to listen to this podcast live, call in, and more! Also available at callin.com
We deep dive into Todd Haynes' Velvet Underground documentary (2021) on AppleTV. Haynes talks to the surviving members of the band and a lot of New York art world and the Warhol Factory scene about this legendary group that blended drone, multimedia, and doo-wop. The first-person accounts are great and you get steeped in the heady New York days of yore.Our guest is music publicist and Velvets fan Daniel Gill, who runs Force Field PR. George makes an argument for the TCCU (Tony Conrad Cinematic Universe) and Daniel plays a very thorough Cast This Doc. No Jonathan Richman impressions were maimed.Daniel Gill runs the PR and management firm Force Field out of the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Force Field is best known for launching the careers of many of your present day brunch playlist favorites, such as Sufjan Stevens, St. Vincent, Beach House, Toro Y Moi, Real Estate, Neon Indian, Tennis, Lord Huron, Panda Bear, Woods, Kevin Morby, and many more. They've also handled PR for a slew of music documentaries including Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me, ZAPPA, Once Were Brothers, Crock of Gold, Danny Says, Other Music, etc. Gill is also serving as the producer on the newly launched music podcast Discograffiti.Follow Daniel on:Twitter: @forcefieldprFollow us on:Twitter: @supdocpodcastInstagram: @supdocpodcastFacebook: @supdocpodcastsign up for our mailing listAnd you can show your support to Sup Doc by donating on Patreon.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
As we conclude our series on The Velvet Underground we pick back up just after the band had split with one of it's founding members, John Cale. Leaving Lou Reed with full reign of the group in his pursuit for artistic notoriety and respect, but it was the addition of Doug Yule that lead to the release of their third album, the self titled "The Velvet Underground". And as this and their next record "Loaded", failed to reach the charts, the luster begins to fade for Lou, who would leave the group and go on to write the hit he had been striving for his entire career. Taking us out is PET MOSQUITO - I Hate Illinois Nazis Available at PET MOSQUITO on SoundCloud As always, Follow Marcus on Spotify to listen to all of the songs heard in this episode.
For my first program for Rocktober 2021, an audio primer for the very first documentary of one of the most important bands of the latter half of the 20th century, The Velvet Underground, directed by Portlander Todd Haynes and broadcasting on October 15th on Apple TV. The Velvet Underground are a band you have heard of, if not exactly heard. When you do hear them, it is usually in passing, or one of two tracks from the catalogue that are favorites of whomever is presenting them. Often, you hear about their their story in terms that have nothing to do with the music or their greatness: Andy Warhol, The 1960's, Avant Garde, banana peel, etc. The Velvet Underground, 1969: (l-r) Doug Yule, Lou Reed, Maureen Tucker and Sterling Morrison. Photographer unknown, courtesy of UMG. Originally calling themselves The Warlocks and The Falling Spikes (the latter a reference to using heroin intravenously), they adopted their now famous name after finding a book in the street by journalist Michael Leigh, which detailed the so-called deviant sexual behaviors of white suburbanites. They were a band that definitely broke the mold on many fronts, even with their line-ups: most of the members, like founder Lou Reed, were from or living in New York. Experimental musician John Cale and former model Nico were the exceptions, from Wales and Germany, respectively. Adding to this was that their "drummer" was a woman, Maureen Tucker; she played a partial kit, and did this standing up. "I wanted to write the great American novel, but I also liked Rock and Roll."Lou Reed The decade they formed in and released most of their material in, the 1960's, saw a seismic shift in demographics that would forever alter their musical style. Thanks to the growth of the suburbs and the Second Great Migration by Blacks, older eastern and Midwestern cities like Chicago and New York started to decay and fall apart, while places like California would flourish. If Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys invented the concept of California as being a magical paradise, then Lou Reed documented the fall of New York just as perfectly. John Cale, 1967, in New York City. Photographer unknown, courtesy of Getty Images. Their sometimes abrasive sound would make them truly fringe artists during their brief lifetime, which initially included just four studio albums (a fifth one called Squeeze in 1973 without Reed is discounted by all involved), and on a great many touring dates they were lucky if 20 people would show up to see them. Much of this was due to the subject matter of their songs, which, even for so-called "progressive" radio, was too much to handle: heroin, methamphetamines, drag queens, transsexuals, prostitutes, fellatio, orgies, etc. Radio refused to play them and only a handful of truly underground stations emerging on the FM dial would, and critics did not know what to make of them. Nico, 1967, in Monterrey, California. Photo by Elaine Mayes. All Music, founded in 1991 and the premier guide to all things music on the internet, ranks them at #5 among all artists in terms of influence. The joke, coined by Brian Eno, goes something like this: The Velvet Underground only sold 100 albums, but those 100 people went on to form bands of their own. These eleven songs were chosen as a representation of the sounds, subject matter and characters that made the Velvet Underground the premier 1960's New York bohemian icons they would indelibly become. First Part Rock & Roll (full-length version), 1970, Loaded ("Fully Loaded" version)Lady Godiva's Operation, 1968, White Light/White HeatI'm Waiting For The Man, 1967, The Velvet Underground and NicoStephanie Says, recorded 1968/released 1985, VUWhite Light/White Heat (live at the Matrix, San Francisco), recorded 1969/released 1974, 1969: The Velvet Underground Live Vol. 2 Second Part What Goes On, 1969, The Velvet UndergroundPale Blue Eyes, 1969, The Velvet UndergroundVenus In Furs, 1967,
We talk today about farmers' registrations for the federal ARC/PLC programs; Doug Yule of Countryside Cooperative also provides an update about liquid propane fuel-tank maintenance. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Lucas and Cail take a trip back to 1970 when Loaded, the fourth studio album by The Velvet Underground, is released. Find out if it's "loaded with hits" as Atlantic Records said, and hear their shock in learning just how much Doug Yule contributed to this record.We made a Spotify playlist for you here. Give it a follow.White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground Day-by-Day by Richie Unterberger is a key book we reference throughout the episode. Very in-depth, check it out if you're a VU fan.
Velvet Underground [00:33] a side: "Who Loves the Sun (mono)" b side: "Who Loves the Sun (stereo)" Cotillion Records 45-44107 1971 A suitably Lou Reed-esque lyric, sung but Doug Yule. Deerhoof w/ special Guest Marc Ribot a side: "Who Sleeps, Only Dreams" [06:09] Ceramic Dog b side: "Hide with Me" [09:20] Northern Spy Records NS 053 2014 Yup, this is pretty much my dream split. The first Bay Area band that flipped my switch after moving out here, and my favorite guitarist that I tried to see at every opportunity when I live in NYC. The Archies [14:48] a side: "Who's Your Baby" b side: "Senorita Rita" Kirshner Records 63-5003 1969 Bubblegum pop with a gospel break on the a-side, and a latin themed flipside? The Archies covering all the bases with this 45. DeBarge [20:17] a side: "Who's Holding Donna Now?" b side: "Be My Lady" Gordy Records 1793GF 1985 Now that is some smooth r&b. No wonder it made it all the way to number 6 on the Hot 100. Eurythmics [29:25] a side: "Who's that Girl?" b side: "Aqua" RCA Records PB-13800 1983 If you've never seen the video for this single (https://youtu.be/-5iDKWV6Chg), it's quite a treat. Bongwater a side: "Why Are We Sleeping?" [39:49] Uncle Wiggly a side: "With My" [43:48] Dean Wareham b side: "Indian Summer" [45:47] Beat Happening b side: "Foggy Eyes" [48:50] The Tinklers b side: "I Think We're Alone Now" [51:38] Chemical Imbalance #7 1990 Almost forgot about the Great Shakes ad intro to this Chemical Imbalance Issue #7 disc. Rock and Roll Adventure Kids [53:28] a side: "Wildman/She's a Dork and I Like Her/Twist 'n' Shout" b side: "Wildman/She's a Dork and I Like Her/Twist 'n' Shout" Soul Not Style Records SOUL 1 2001 Hot stuff featuring Bay Area Burger Guy Marc Ribak. Great Falls a side: "Wingwalker" [59:31] Thou b side: "Prayer to God" [01:05:54] Hell Comes Home HCH-014 A very heavy, very Shellac-y split. Music behind the DJ: "Gomez" by Vic Mizzy
By 1973 very little remained of the influential proto-punk group the Velvet Underground as their final studio album saw release. Long gone were founding members Lou Reed, John Cale, and Sterling Morrison, and backing members Maureen Tucker, Willie Alexander, and Walter Powers had been dismissed by the band's manager. That left only the hapless multi-instrumentalist Doug Yule (Who was originally brought in to replace John Cale's absence) to write and record the album which would bring their contract to a close entirely on his own.Said album was titled Squeeze, which was released to little fanfare, contained no singles, and was roundly rejected both commercially and critically for sounding nothing like a Velvet Underground record. To this day Squeeze is seen as a lone blemish on the legacy of a highly innovative and risky band, and made a pariah out of Doug Yule, whose worst crime was simply wanting to continue having a career in the music industry.On this episode of Jukebox Zeroes, Lilz & Patrick team up with Boston-based sound engineer and performer Joel Simches (Butterscott / Total Mass Retain / Count Zero) to dig into Squeeze, and decide for themselves whether its foul reputation is deserved.Local Music Feature: The Coward flowers - "Scarab Seam"
THE VELVET UNDERGROUND BECOME PEDESTRIAN! How could this happen? Thereminist Victoria Lundy (victorialundymusic.com) joins the panel to ask the pertinent questions: Who is Doug Yule, and why does he get to be the entire Velvet Underground by himself? Would a bad drummer had made this a better record? Can a whole album be nothing but filler? Would anyone buy a Doug Yule solo album, or should he stick to making violins? Does living a clean healthy life lead to making boring music but at least not dying? Wouldn't we all rather be talking about “Howard the Duck”? Join us this week as we pull back the banana peel of mystery and squeeze out some answers on Detours and Outliers.
THE VELVET UNDERGROUND BECOME PEDESTRIAN! How could this happen? Thereminist Victoria Lundy (victorialundymusic.com) joins the panel to ask the pertinent questions: Who is Doug Yule, and why does he get to be the entire Velvet Underground by himself? Would a bad drummer had made this a better record? Can a whole album be nothing but filler? Would anyone buy a Doug Yule solo album, or should he stick to making violins? Does living a clean healthy life lead to making boring music but at least not dying? Wouldn't we all rather be talking about “Howard the Duck”? Join us this week as we pull back the banana peel of mystery and squeeze out some answers on Detours and Outliers.
In this special episode, Ryan and Joe duke it out over who is the most essential least essential member of the greatest band of all time, The Velvet Underground: Angus MacLise or Doug Yule. One of them never recorded a single note with the band while the other plays on more tracks than John Cale and Nico combined. One is unfairly maligned for his pop sensibilities and desire for fame and the other is unfairly praised for his staunch experimentalism and anti-consumerist proclivities. One was there at the onset and one witnessed the demise. The Clise versus The Squeeze. Subscribe to Highway Hi-Fi: iTunes | Stitcher | TuneIn | PocketCasts | Overcast | Google Play Twitter | Facebook | Spotify
In this episode, we discuss one of several eponymous albums by the Velvet Underground. This is the one with them sitting on a dingy couch. There's some solid tunes on here and then, there's not. Definitely a departure from 1968's White Light/White Heat with John Cale being replaced by Doug Yule and several songs that could use further editing. The Velvet Underground - The Velvet Underground A Few Minutes With [R.E.M. - Pale Blue Eyes][2] A Current Affair [Zettajoule - No Thank You][3]
'The Velvet Underground & Nico' de The Velvet Underground & Nico. El reconocimiento a una banda de culto (Parte 2) ¡Bienvenidos a los Vinilos de Barbarella! El podcast donde sólo se escucha música en formato de vinilo. ?En el programa de hoy hablaremos largo y tendido de cómo se creó la banda, así como de su discografía. Para ello contamos de nuevo con la inestimable compañía de mis buenos amigos que son Tomás Comendador ‘Tommy' y un habitual ya en nuestro podcasts como Eduardo Antón. Como bien sabéis los que nos escucháis, al final de algunos episodios contamos con un apartado llamado ‘El Rincón de Barbarella'. Dicho rincón va a ser presentado a partir de ahora, por nuestra compañera y ya podemos decir que amiga, Patricia Torres, también conocida como Cripatia, la podcaster que en su día nos acompañó en el programa 51 que dedicamos a Guns N' Roses. Patricia tiene también su propio Podcast, llamado ‘Hablemos de Montessori', donde habla de un método educativo de gran interés. Os recomendamos desde aquí su escucha, porque lo hace realmente bien. Los temas que reseñamos hoy son: ‘Heroin', 'There She Goes Again', 'I'll Be Your Mirror' y 'Europe Son'.. Hoy pincharemos una reedición española de 2008. Los datos de dicha edición son: Título: The Velvet Underground & Nico Artista: The Velvet Underground & Nico Sello Discográfico: Lilith Records Ltd. Código de barras: 8013252900051 Año: Reedición de 2008 País: Unión Europea Los enlaces que aparecen en el Podcast son los siguientes: Web de The Velvet Underground & Nico: http://olivier.landemaine.free.fr/vu/index.html Web de Lou Reed: http://www.loureed.com/news/ Web de John Cale: http://john-cale.com Web de Doug Yule: http://olivier.landemaine.free.fr/dougyule/dougyule.html Podcast de Patricia Torres, 'Hablemos de Montessori': https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/hablemos-de-montessori/id1403053008?mt=2 No olvides dejar tu comentarios y puntuaciones en iTunes, para nosotros son muy importantes. Ponte en contacto con nosotros: Web: http://www.vinilosbarbarella.com Facebook: http://facebook.com/barbarellavinyls2 Twitter: @barbarellavinyl Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/barbarellavinyls/ Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/116847885@N05/show/
'The Velvet Underground & Nico' de The Velvet Underground & Nico. El reconocimiento a una banda de culto (Parte 1) ¡Bienvenidos a los Vinilos de Barbarella! El podcast donde sólo se escucha música en formato de vinilo. Ya se ha acabado nuestro descanso estival, que nos ha servido para volver con fuerzas renovadas. Ha sido un descanso largo pero merecido. Volvemos a la carga con nuevos programas, con grandes discos en vinilo y mejores artistas que seguro que harán las delicias de todos vosotros. Vamos a empezar la temporada con un algo muy especial que hay que decir que ha sido largamente meditado: un programa dedicado a un disco de culto como es el álbum homónimo ‘The Velvet Underground & Nico'. Hoy nos acompaña un habitual del programa, Eduardo Antón y una persona que se estrena con nosotros: Tomás Comendador, al que todos llamamos cariñosamente Tommy. Los temas que reseñamos hoy son: ‘Sunday Morning', 'I'm Waiting For The Man', 'Femme Fatale', 'Venus In Furs', 'Run, Run, Run' y 'All Tomorrow Parties'.. Hoy pincharemos una reedición española de 2008. Los datos de dicha edición son: Título: The Velvet Underground & Nico Artista: The Velvet Underground & Nico Sello Discográfico: Lilith Records Ltd. Código de barras: 8013252900051 Año: Reedición de 2008 País: Unión Europea Los enlaces que aparecen en el Podcast son los siguientes: Web de The Velvet Underground & Nico: http://olivier.landemaine.free.fr/vu/index.html Web de Lou Reed: http://www.loureed.com/news/ Web de John Cale: http://john-cale.com Web de Doug Yule: http://olivier.landemaine.free.fr/dougyule/dougyule.html Podcast dedicado al álbum 'Transformer' de Lou Reed: https://barbarellavinyls.com/podcasts/0008-transformer-lou-reed/ Entrada en el blog a cargo de J. M. Escrihuela dedicado a Lou Reed: https://barbarellavinyls.com/blog/16-loureed/ Web de las JPOD Madrid 2018. Jornadas Nacionales de Podcasting: http://jpod.es No olvides dejar tu comentarios y puntuaciones en iTunes, para nosotros son muy importantes. Ponte en contacto con nosotros: Web: http://www.vinilosbarbarella.com Facebook: http://facebook.com/barbarellavinyls2 Twitter: @barbarellavinyl Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/barbarellavinyls/ Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/116847885@N05/show/
Working Class Audio #197 with Pete Weiss!!!Pete Weiss is a producer/engineer/mixer/musician. Weiss has worked with Charlie Chesterman, Chris Brokaw, Kustomized, Slim Cessna's Auto Club, Doug Yule, Moe Tucker, The Upper Crust, Aimee Mann, Lee Ranaldo, Bell X1, Drive By Wire, One Happy Island, Kingsley Flood, Willard Grant Conspiracy, Two Dollar Pistols, Bow Thayer & Levon Helm, Don Lennon, Hayley Thompson-King and many others. In 1989 he co-founded Zippah Studio in Boston. In 2004 he sold his share of Zippah. He then built and opened Verdant Studio, in rural Vermont. Weiss also fronts the instrumental band The Weisstronauts and is a member of the experimental pop collective known as Sool. He released a solo album in 1996 and three albums while fronting the subversive Pete Weiss & the Rock Band from 1995-2000. He has scored four independent films, "Methods" (1998), "Metal" (2001), "Bad Gravity" (with Sool 2006), and "The Arcadian Ideal" (2007). About this Interview:Pete joins me to talk aboutHis early career and decision making, His transition to building a rural studio, The lessons learned in that rural environment and His decision to sell and try a different recording adventure. Show Notes and Links Pete's site : Pete's SIte: www.weissy.com Verdant Studio: www.verdantstudio.com Verdant Studio for sale info / photos: https://goo.gl/AQ5Zy6 Pete's band: www.weisstronauts.com Pete's personal page on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pete.weiss.7 Instagram: peteweiss2000 Pete's work on Spotify.: https://goo.gl/QSEjJR
'The Velvet Underground & Nico' de The Velvet Underground & Nico. El reconocimiento a una banda de culto (Parte 1) ¡Bienvenidos a los Vinilos de Barbarella! El podcast donde sólo se escucha música en formato de vinilo. Ya se ha acabado nuestro descanso estival, que nos ha servido para volver con fuerzas renovadas. Ha sido un descanso largo pero merecido. Volvemos a la carga con nuevos programas, con grandes discos en vinilo y mejores artistas que seguro que harán las delicias de todos vosotros. Vamos a empezar la temporada con un algo muy especial que hay que decir que ha sido largamente meditado: un programa dedicado a un disco de culto como es el álbum homónimo ‘The Velvet Underground & Nico’. Hoy nos acompaña un habitual del programa, Eduardo Antón y una persona que se estrena con nosotros: Tomás Comendador, al que todos llamamos cariñosamente Tommy. Los temas que reseñamos hoy son: ‘Sunday Morning', 'I'm Waiting For The Man', 'Femme Fatale', 'Venus In Furs', 'Run, Run, Run' y 'All Tomorrow Parties'.. Hoy pincharemos una reedición española de 2008. Los datos de dicha edición son: Título: The Velvet Underground & Nico Artista: The Velvet Underground & Nico Sello Discográfico: Lilith Records Ltd. Código de barras: 8013252900051 Año: Reedición de 2008 País: Unión Europea Los enlaces que aparecen en el Podcast son los siguientes: Web de The Velvet Underground & Nico: http://olivier.landemaine.free.fr/vu/index.html Web de Lou Reed: http://www.loureed.com/news/ Web de John Cale: http://john-cale.com Web de Doug Yule: http://olivier.landemaine.free.fr/dougyule/dougyule.html Podcast dedicado al álbum 'Transformer' de Lou Reed: https://barbarellavinyls.com/podcasts/0008-transformer-lou-reed/ Entrada en el blog a cargo de J. M. Escrihuela dedicado a Lou Reed: https://barbarellavinyls.com/blog/16-loureed/ Web de las JPOD Madrid 2018. Jornadas Nacionales de Podcasting: http://jpod.es No olvides dejar tu comentarios y puntuaciones en iTunes, para nosotros son muy importantes. Ponte en contacto con nosotros: Web: http://www.vinilosbarbarella.com Facebook: http://facebook.com/barbarellavinyls2 Twitter: @barbarellavinyl Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/barbarellavinyls/ Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/116847885@N05/show/
'The Velvet Underground & Nico' de The Velvet Underground & Nico. El reconocimiento a una banda de culto (Parte 2) ¡Bienvenidos a los Vinilos de Barbarella! El podcast donde sólo se escucha música en formato de vinilo. En el programa de hoy hablaremos largo y tendido de cómo se creó la banda, así como de su discografía. Para ello contamos de nuevo con la inestimable compañía de mis buenos amigos que son Tomás Comendador ‘Tommy’ y un habitual ya en nuestro podcasts como Eduardo Antón. Como bien sabéis los que nos escucháis, al final de algunos episodios contamos con un apartado llamado ‘El Rincón de Barbarella’. Dicho rincón va a ser presentado a partir de ahora, por nuestra compañera y ya podemos decir que amiga, Patricia Torres, también conocida como Cripatia, la podcaster que en su día nos acompañó en el programa 51 que dedicamos a Guns N’ Roses. Patricia tiene también su propio Podcast, llamado ‘Hablemos de Montessori’, donde habla de un método educativo de gran interés. Os recomendamos desde aquí su escucha, porque lo hace realmente bien. Los temas que reseñamos hoy son: ‘Heroin', 'There She Goes Again', 'I'll Be Your Mirror' y 'Europe Son'.. Hoy pincharemos una reedición española de 2008. Los datos de dicha edición son: Título: The Velvet Underground & Nico Artista: The Velvet Underground & Nico Sello Discográfico: Lilith Records Ltd. Código de barras: 8013252900051 Año: Reedición de 2008 País: Unión Europea Los enlaces que aparecen en el Podcast son los siguientes: Web de The Velvet Underground & Nico: http://olivier.landemaine.free.fr/vu/index.html Web de Lou Reed: http://www.loureed.com/news/ Web de John Cale: http://john-cale.com Web de Doug Yule: http://olivier.landemaine.free.fr/dougyule/dougyule.html Podcast de Patricia Torres, 'Hablemos de Montessori': https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/hablemos-de-montessori/id1403053008?mt=2 No olvides dejar tu comentarios y puntuaciones en iTunes, para nosotros son muy importantes. Ponte en contacto con nosotros: Web: http://www.vinilosbarbarella.com Facebook: http://facebook.com/barbarellavinyls2 Twitter: @barbarellavinyl Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/barbarellavinyls/ Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/116847885@N05/show/
JUNIOR ASPIRIN RADIO SESSION 22Hang on wait is this 7 hours of Sister Ray!? This is even more Ray than Steve Irwin done got. Collected, devised and selected by Thomas "Honey" Newth esq.SISTER RAY PODCAST HERE 0.00 (mystery extract)Who knows where this is from? It may even be elsewhere on this mix. Who can say? Bootlegs throw up funny things like this. They are also of, ahem, variable audio quality.2.13 The Gymnasium, NYC, April 7 or 8, 1967The song's about a year old now, having been trotted out in the summer of '66 according to a setlist, but they say this is the earliest recording. The Gymnasium, incidentally, was a real gymnasium that Andy thought was cool. The bootleg of this whole(?) show is really great. The Velvets are starting to form their Andy-less identity as a hard rock'n'rolling dance band.21.09 LP, NYC, mid-September, 1967 - alternate mixFamously, they did one take, with everything turned to 11. Masses of leakage. But no bass. 38.31 LP - Swan mixThere was a random compilation in the early 70s I think it was, with an ugly four-headed swan cover (and Lou billed separately) and the songs remixed (or at least remastered). "Sister Ray" and "Lady Godiva's Operation" are strikingly different.55.54 LP - stereoActually, Moe says they did maybe two takes. And she was pissed that Tom Wilson forgot to turn on some of the mics, so there's no rimshot after Lou says "Who's that knocking at my chamber door?".There's a mono version too, but I think this'll do.1.13.14 Boston Tea Party August 11 or 12, 1967The Velvets really liked to play the BTP. This is their third weekend there of 1967, and it would be their home away from home during a three-year more-or-less boycott of New York. They built an enthusiastic local following, including one J.Richman, who talked his way into opening for them a couple of times. This is the only time Andy went up there, with Paul Morrissey, and did the whole EPI thing. They shot a film at these shows, whence this audio, so it's rated A for Andy.1.26.45 Sweet Sister Ray, La Cave, Cleveland, April 30, 1968"Sister Ray" now has a part 1, apparently played quite a few times, as a lengthy, blissful workout before launching into the main bit. But there's only this one recording; and there's no recording of the slightly later part 3, "Sweet Rock'n'Roll", which got trotted out on a couple of occasions, by repute, heavier even than part 2. Actually, there was a recording in San Diego, but the tape got stolen right after the gig. The Velvets really did play a lot of shows, it's usually overlooked, and were a cooking band always ready to work up and rework their songs on stage, which is one reason the bootlegs are so important. And they liked to play for a long time.Also, it may be worth mentioning at this point that one of the reasons they sound so awesome is that for quite a stretch of the earlier days, after the Ostrich guitar got nicked, Lou was playing a 12-string Gretsch Country Gentleman with added preamp, speed, stereo and tremolo controls (and Fender pickups, and maybe an echo unit as well - Lou ended by fucking it up adding too much junk, and the guy who originally built for him wouldn' speak to him for a year; also, the band early managed to score endorsement deals on amps from Vox, then later Sunn; and Sterling and John would play with whatever effecgts pedals they could lay thier hands on.) Anyway, they say that at this point Lou could play 16 notes at once, and if that's not awesome I don't know what is.2.04.52 (not) Poor Richard's, Chicago, June-July, 1966 (excerpt)Sad to say, there's also very few recordings of John Cale playing on this song live ("Sweet Sister Ray" is the last one). This is not actually the first, tho it'd be cool if it were. The Poor Richard's stint marks the first time a song called "Searching" appears on an extant setlist. Sterl says it was still an instrumental jam at this point. Ingrid Superstar said it sounded like 12 million guitars and hurt her eardrums. Lou wasn't even there. It might be, in fact, that the song was mostly cooked up without him; apparently it only started to come together at this residency. After a busy first half of the year, Nico goes to Ibiza for the summer, Lou goes to hospital with hepatitis (not for the last time), and John, Sterl, Moe, and the whole EPI crowd set up shop in Chicago (also appearing at the Playboy Club). Actually, Andy didn't want to go either, so Ingrid played him in a strawberry-blonde wig. They seem to have no problem without Lou, and re-recruit percussionist-poet Angus MacLise, the original drummer. Moe plays bass. In fact, they go over so well the stay is extended by a week.This is totally not MacLise drumming. I can't remember where this snippet came from, nor the justification for its attribution. It too is probably nestled elsewhere in this mix.2.06.08 La Cave, Cleveland, October 4-6, 1968John's kicked out in September. Doug Yule is recruited rather randomly and within two days is on the road. The Velvets also play La Cave quite frequently and, as in Boston, could draw a good crowd enthusiastically familiar with the songs. Whatever the impact of the Cale/Yule swap, these two venues as much as anything else contribute to the Velvets' transformation from art noise to the "dance band from Long Island" as Lou would occasionally describe them.. Yule comports himself remarkably well.2.16.45 Music Hall, Cleveland, December 1, 19682.35.15 Boston Tea Party, December 12, 19683.01.03 Boston Tea Party, January 10, 19693.22.26 La Cave, Cleveland, January 31, 1969There's a few other gigs in between these, but none seem to have been bootlegged. Sister Ray is well-established as the set-closing rave-up by now, and Yule has settled right in. Best of all, Lou starts around now throwing in lyrics from "The Murder Mystery", which he'll do again from time to time. They never attempt the whole song live. Sterl said it was too hard.3.50.40 Boston Tea Party, March 13, 1969 A rare rundown of the characters from Lou (which you can't really hear). They are playing this right after "Jesus".4.13.22 Boston Tea Party, March 15, 1969 - Guitar AmpThat was Thursday and this is Saturday, and some enterprising fan puts a tape recorder right inside Lou's amp. This whole boot is one of my favourite recordings ever. Interestingly, it's not even all that helpful in determining which guitar is which on other recordings. That's really one of the many great things about the band, that the guitars weave together so beautifully that one ceases to care quite quickly who is playing what.Tho it's nice to know here. 4.39.20 Washington University, St Louis, May 11, 1969Despite the fact that even for those who wanted it, the recent LP (third) is really hard to get a hold of all over, a couple of thousand people turned up to this gig, to everyone's surprise. Perhaps this got Lou feeling playful, since "Foggy Notion" makes a neat cameo. Robert Quine taped it, as he would several other shows this year, before going on to shred guitar for Richard Hell and for Lou himself.5.08.02 Boston Tea Party, July 11, 19695.30.21 End of Cole, Dallas, October 19, 1969The Velvets played six nights on the trot here, apparently cos the rich kid owner was a fan. Two of the shows were recorded, rumour has it by an actual audio engineer, and this is where much of Live 1969 comes from. Sterl incidentally was a bit sniffy about that album cos he said the club was small - they would take this into account (to an extent) in arrangements and volume - but were at their best when they really felt free to let rip (obvs). Nonetheless, this is a particularly good rendition.5.43.31 The Family Dog, SF, November 7, 19696.07.33 The Matrix, SF, November 26 or 27, 1969Although the Velvets famously didn't get on with California (Bill Graham and Frank Zappa in particular) on their 1966 visit, they seemed happy enough to go back quite often. They had also played the Matrix the weekend between these two shows. It was another small club - capacity 100, but with a four-track hooked up to the soundboard. It was pressed into action for four sets over two nights of this stay (Quine also recorded some of the shows on his portable Sony; the Family Dog one previous is his too). Some of the Matrix soundboard cuts from the 19th got official releases (from hasty two-track mixdowns), but the whole set of tapes finally surfaced not long ago and it's absolutely stellar.6.44.25 Second Fret,Philadelphia, January 3, 1970This is actually a bit of a damp squib on which to end, but it seems to be the last recorded version - less than two weeks later she's vanished from all four setlists at the Quiet Knight in Chicago and (thankfully) doesn't appear on the Max's tapes from the summer. The Velvets are well-liked in Philly too, playing several times in this small club for which 200 was a definite squeeze. Here they're ending a ten-night stand that began on Christmas Day. But they are already showing signs of chilling out from their great '68-'69 run: another period of transition (i.e. The End). Moe's on pregnancy leave by April, and doesn't appear on Loaded at all, nor at the Max's summer residency. "Sister Ray" is well out of the set by the latter, tho for my money, without Moe it's no longer really the Velvet Underground at all. And the less said about the post-Lou band the better. There's a couple of live renditions from that era (now only Moe remains) but I am unlikely ever to listen to them.My obsession with the Velvets has been enabled by many things, first and foremost The Velvet Underground Handbook by M.C. Kostek (Hyperion, 1992), a bible for years until superceded by the remarkable http://olivier.landemaine.free.fr/vu/; and most recently White Light/White Heat: The Velvet Underground day-by-dayby Richie Unterberger (Jawbone, 2009) which I feel like an idiot for taking so long to getting around to read, for it really is the last word. Amazing, and not really for the casual fan.
Lou Reed, Mo Tucker, and Doug Yule of the Velvet Underground reunited at the Library in 2009 for a discussion with Rolling Stone journalist David Fricke. In this provocative conversation, the three legendary musicians talk about strange performance venues, the energy of New York, and how it felt to go where no musician had gone before.
Christian or not? Oursourcing touring, being a “cool” lawyer, “calling all lawyers”, Signalcast Webbie awards. do people eat breakfast during the week?, the movie Frailty? Fake “book of mormon” contest, Doug Yule's Velvet Underground/Mae Shi