Song composed by Lennon-McCartney
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5 episodes with Eleanor Rigby
7 episodes with Eleanor Rigby
3 episodes with Eleanor Rigby
4 episodes with Eleanor Rigby
6 episodes with Eleanor Rigby
2 episodes with Eleanor Rigby
3 episodes with Eleanor Rigby
2 episodes with Eleanor Rigby
2 episodes with Eleanor Rigby
durée : 00:03:45 - "Eleanor Rigby", la musique de chambre selon les Beatles - par : Max Dozolme - À l'occasion de la réédition de "Revolver", le septième album des Beatles, Max Dozolme nous raconte l'histoire de la chanson "Eleanor Rigby", un des joyaux du disque.
Chappaqua Stan Getz Jazz en Buenos Aires Everything Happens to Me Jimmy Raney, Jim Hall Two of a KindOwl Song 2 (con Bill Frisell & Herlin Riley) Ambrose Akinmusire Owl SongLove in the Garden Joe Lovano, Marcin Wasilewski Trio Love in the GardenMagical Distance Kamasi Washington LazarusStreet Singer Tina Brooks American Jazz SaxHullo Bolinas Chano Domínguez Con AlmaEleanor Rigby Caetano Veloso Qualquer CoisaEscuchar audio
La maison mitoyenne de deux chambres où David Bowie a vécu enfant à Bromley est désormais sur le marché pour 449.500 livres sterling. Un enregistrement inédit de Yes reprenant "Eleanor Rigby" des Beatles vient d'être dévoilé en ligne. Après AC/DC : INXS, Dua Lipa a tenu sa promesse de reprendre une chanson d'un artiste local dans chaque ville où s'arrête sa tournée ‘'Radical Optimism'', en interprétant sa version du classique "Never Tear Us Apart" d'INXS à la Qudos Bank Arena de Sydney, en Australie, le 26 mars. Après plus de 25 ans d'absence discographique, Bachman-Turner Overdrive fait son grand retour avec "60 Years Ago''. Bien que Sum 41 ait terminé sa tournée d'adieu en janvier et sorti son dernier album ‘'Heaven : x : Hell'' l'an dernier, le groupe punk canadien offre encore quelques surprises à ses fans. Mots-Clés : icône, 1953, famille, East End, propriété, quartier résidentiel, Bickley, frontière, annonce immobilière, tranquillité, 1969, sessions, studios, Polydor, Londres, direction, producteur, John Anthony, publié, document d'archives, version, introduction psychédélique, guitariste, Peter Banks, claviériste, Tony Kaye, basse, Chris Squire, relais, performance, Jon Anderson, fin, morceau, rappel, chanteuse, coup d'envoi, tournée mondiale, Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne, héros locaux, pop star,Highway To Hell, Extraordinaire, foule,extrait, Randy Bachman, genèse, hommage, Winnipeg, ville, Tal Bachman, KoKo Bachman, Fred Turner, chant, solo, Neil Young, scène musicale, local, créativité, Liverpool, Amérique du Nord, véritable, melting-pot, talent, Victoria, Colombie-Britannique, États-Unis, reprise explosive, Sleep Now in the Fire, Rage Against the Machine, version acoustique, Landmines", extrait, sessions, communiqué, gratitude, fans, session, célébrer, monde. --- Classic 21 vous informe des dernières actualités du rock, en Belgique et partout ailleurs. Le Journal du Rock, en direct chaque jour à 7h30 et 18h30 sur votre radio rock'n'pop. Merci pour votre écoute Plus de contenus de Classic 21 sur www.rtbf.be/classic21 Ecoutez-nous en live ici: https://www.rtbf.be/radio/liveradio/classic21 ou sur l'app Radioplayer BelgiqueRetrouvez l'ensemble des contenus de la RTBF sur notre plateforme Auvio.be Et 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. Découvrez nos autres podcasts : Le journal du Rock : https://audmns.com/VCRYfsPComic Street (BD) https://audmns.com/oIcpwibLa chronique économique : https://audmns.com/NXWNCrAHey Teacher : https://audmns.com/CIeSInQHistoires sombres du rock : https://audmns.com/ebcGgvkCollection 21 : https://audmns.com/AUdgDqHMystères et Rock'n Roll : https://audmns.com/pCrZihuLa mauvaise oreille de Freddy Tougaux : https://audmns.com/PlXQOEJRock&Sciences : https://audmns.com/lQLdKWRCook as You Are: https://audmns.com/MrmqALPNobody Knows : https://audmns.com/pnuJUlDPlein Ecran : https://audmns.com/gEmXiKzRadio Caroline : https://audmns.com/WccemSkAinsi que nos séries :Rock Icons : https://audmns.com/pcmKXZHRock'n Roll Heroes: https://audmns.com/bXtHJucFever (Erotique) : https://audmns.com/MEWEOLpEt découvrez nos animateurs dans cette série Close to You : https://audmns.com/QfFankxDistribué par Audiomeans. Visitez audiomeans.fr/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.
Eleanor Rigby fun French Fuse Lucy scatte Covers : The Kiffness : Conselho Moyun : Carmen à la cythare Xing Canen : Ain't no sunshine PostModern Jukebox : Black Hole Sun Music Travel Love : Stand by me Elodie Fiat fait des bruits La sonothèque Sons zarbi : Helena Cruz : musique de salle de bain Rudy Mancuso : elevator music Hymne à la joie aux flûtes à bec Fron Reilly et son Fron2 Les Beatles dans un seul écouteur Silence Radio Gabigabi Trucs en vrac : Ally et son trombone Rolling with the tiger Improver beatbox Marianne Faithfull dans "Made in U.S.A." La +BCdM : Barbra Streisand : Memory par Elaine Page - Jennifer Hudson - Nicole Scherzinger - Prisca Demarez - Barry Manilow - Joseph William Morgan - Lucy Thomas La Playlist de la +BCdM : sur le Tube à Walter sur Spotify (merci John Cytron) sur Deezer (merci MaO de Paris) sur Amazon Music (merci Hellxions) et sur Apple Music (merci Yawourt) Vote pour la Plus Belle Chanson du Monde Le son mystère (40'48) : Pierre Dumayet, Pierre Desgraupes et M.Fricotot Avec : Aude David jdlp Pop goes the WZA MaO Tarvich Causmic Beast Merci à : Pop goes the WZA Stéphane Didier Pat Hogun David jdlp Michidar Laurent Doucet Podcasts & liens cités : Tumyxo saison 2 : récit au jour le jour Walter sur BlueSky Walter sur Mastodon Walter sur Instagram Les 100 +BCdM Le générique de fin est signé Cousbou
Hace 50 años que Caetano Veloso publicó en Brasil, de forma simultánea, dos discos -quiso que fueran dos y no un doble LP- de características opuestas y complementarias: 'Jóia' y 'Qualquer coisa'. Del primero, más conceptual y vanguardista, escuchamos las canciones 'Minha mulher', 'Guá', 'Pelos olhos', 'Lua, lua, lua, lua', 'Canto do povo de um lugar', 'Gravidade', 'Jóia' y 'Help'; del segundo, disco más de intérprete que de compositor, 'Qualquer coisa', 'Da maior importância', 'A tua presença', 'Samba e amor', 'Eleanor Rigby', 'For no one' y 'Drume negrinha'.Escuchar audio
Rediscovering the RhythmIntro by: Gail NoblesStory by: Gail NoblesHey, hey, hey! Gather 'round, music lovers, because you're tuned into “The Sound of the Cat Bear,” your go-to podcast where we're spinning those hits in true Gail Nobles style! We're diving deep into the heart of the rhythms and rhymes, revisiting the golden days when music wasn't just something to hear—it was a way of life, a feeling, a visceral connection to the world around us. Let's roll back the clock to a time when rock ‘n' roll emerged from the streets—raw, real, and electric! Back then, you didn't just listen to a song; you felt it pulse through your veins. Artists were the truth-tellers, weaving tales of love, heartbreak, struggle, and triumph into melodies that had us dancing and crying, often at the same time. They sang about the things we all experienced but sometimes couldn't put into words.But hold on! Sometimes we groove so hard to the beat that we miss the deeper meanings hidden in the lyrics. That's where “The Sound of the Cat Bear” steps in! We're peeling back those layers to expose the stories behind the songs—the narratives that connect with our own life's adventures. Ever thought about what the Beatles were really feeling when they sang “Eleanor Rigby”? It's not just about a lonely woman; it's about our collective human experience of isolation in a crowded world!Let's take a journey through the grooves of history, dissecting those classics that made us sway and sing. From the soulful sounds of Motown to the electrifying riffs of classic rock, we'll revisit the moments when music became the voice of a generation. Remember Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'”? It was more than a catchy tune; it was a rallying cry for change during a pivotal era.And we won't stop there, folks! We'll celebrate the unsung heroes—the songwriters whose names we might not know but whose words dance on the tongues of every music fan out there. These wordsmiths captured our mood, mapping our lives note by note.So if you think you know the music, think again! Let's make sense of the messages that might have slipped through the cracks while you were lost in the rhythm.“The Sound of the Bear”—where the podcast brings a new revelation, and every song has a story waiting to be told! I'm Gail Nobles. Thank you for listening.
Today's episode finds McKay guiding the audience on a path to sustain one's personal energy. He opens the episode by discussing Bitcoin's mining scarcity and how it negatively impacted the personal will power of those like James Halls, who misplaced his Bitcoin retrieve code worth millions of dollars. This story prefaces his statement that personal energy drives will power and emotional sustenance. McKay goes on to use the neutrino discovery and the radish v.s. cookie experiment to articulate how emotional energy continues or stops. He urges us to subscribe to habits like clearing clutter, focusing on being the best version of ourselves, and engaging in healthy lifestyles to sustain high energy levels, while also warning us that when we chase status and titles, we lose our sense of place and purpose. McKay goes on to state that a variety of healthy lifestyle practices in tandem with human connection are key to energetic sustenance. As he brings this episode to a close, McKay tells the story of Paul McCartney and the woman who inspired the song ‘Eleanor Rigby', concluding that some of the greatest sources of energy are found in the solace of a fellow human being. The Finer Details of This Episode:James Halls' storyPersonal energy drives will powerNeutrinos discoveryRadish vs cookie experimentEmotional energy sustenanceHow listening to stories boosts a broader vocabularyWhy cleaning the clutter is calmingTitles don't fuel us in the long runBecome the best version of yourselfThe importance of healthy food and activitySpecific adaptations to imposed demandsPaul McCartney's ‘Eleanor Rigby' inspirationQuotes:“A study out of UC Berkeley concluded that listening to narrative stories, like the ones you find in this podcast, can stimulate multiple parts of your brain in healthy ways. And this stimulus reduces stress and anxiety.”“In May of 2020, researchers at York University showed that symptoms of Alzheimer's are halted by up to five years in people that fluently speak more than one language.”“Clutter represents unfinished business.”“Instead of just focusing on limiting sugars, carbs or inflammatory foods, be sure to increase the variety of nutrients in your diet with plenty of vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds, healthy fats, and lean protein.”“‘The benefits of having such a diverse gut microbiome from a rich variety of food are impressive.”“Workout variety is important for both your physical and mental health because it helps keep you from being bored with your existing routine. And research shows that adding variety to an exercise program helps us adhere to it better, because we enjoy our workouts more.”“Remember, improving your energy in life is done on purpose. Try a few new ways to bring energy to your life.”“Bring variety to your life, to your diet, and exercise. And remember, people may in fact, be the greatest source of energy in your life.”Show Links:Open Your Eyes with McKay Christensen
Lords: * Andrew * Kate Topics: * Is it okay to make a game that is boring * My friend wants me to play WoW. Should I? * How to melt chocolate * Kate's Wallace and Gromit song * https://bsky.app/profile/hownottodraw.bsky.social/post/3lfctso62a22q * VFX is like cooking, game design is like baking * Looksmaxxing Microtopics: * Adam Atomic's Pico-8 renaissance. * Vampire vs. Pope Army * Still Kate. * Grass and flowers and touching them. * The bifurcation of Bluesky into Twitter 2 and Mastodon into Not Twitter. * The different kinds of people who tell you you're doing it wrong on different social media services. * Looking at Bluesky and realizing it's just like Twitter, and having a reaction to that realization. * Comparing your mood before using an internet service to your mood afterwards. * You're the cow, baby! * A story about living in a village of fewer than twenty people where nothing happens for thirty years. * Countervailing forces preventing your game design from becoming a worry stone. * Going outside and being bored until being bored stops feeling like an assault on all your senses. * Talking to your mates in the pub about your new socks. * Your mayonnaise manufacturing district. * YAGNI. * That time your ex-husband stole your knife and without a knife you can't cut food! Or ropes! * Needing medical help and asking the guy in your village who owns half an encyclopedia. * A miserable experience that is worth doing. * The big advantage of playing World of Warcraft in Hardcore mode. * WoW Classic and WoW Classic Classic. * A game about killing 40 rats. * The game for children that do annoying dances. * Who knows about causality? * The two year period when game designers played nothing but World of Warcraft. * Getting addicted to an MMO and never contributing anything to society ever again. * Entering into an activity with a miserly determination to not have fun. * What it takes to do a dungeon. * The spaces between the exciting parts. * Melting chocolate on top of parchment paper. * Melting chocolate with a hair dryer. * A Fraught Bark Experience. * Mouthfuls of raw flour. * Cake Batter Bark. * Rescuing seized chocolate. * Counterintuitive chocolate behavior. * Baking: It's Stupid. * Adding a tart cheese to cream of mushrooms soup. * Reading the poem as if you're not singing it in your head. * Asking the vicar to share a stir-fry. * Adding swear words to the Wallace and Gromit theme. * Leggy Desert Boy, by Percy Bysshe Shelley. * The verse in Eleanor Rigby where they talk about cooking and eating dinner. * Words that rhyme with "pint." * Rhyming "pint" with "2019." * Inventing an OC named "blorange" to solve your rhyming problems. * Taking flavors and synthesizing new flavors. * Hammering on the "fun" button for forty or fifty years. * Having the one hit and not needing another hit. * Exploring a multidimensional design space and tapping on all the walls to see which ones are destructible. * Starting to make a game and finding out whether it's an easy game to make. * Langoliers. * Night Snacker. * Releasing games exclusively in the Topic Lords discord. * The art of turning your mortal vessel into a weapon. * Softmaxxing vs. Hardmaxxing. * Doing tongue exercises to sharpen your jaw. * The Wikipedia page with the most scare quotes on it. * Limb-lengthening surgery. * Dabbing: it's just extremely short-term looksmaxxing. * When two subcultures have two different words for the same idea. * Whether the Xes in "Looksmaxxing" are the kisses and the Os the hugs, or vice versa. * Whether the Xes in are the kisses and the Os are the hugs or whether the Xes are the dead eyes on the cartoon face. * Archiving the VODs.
Send us a message, so we know what you're thinking!In case you hadn't noticed, we love a good cover version! This episode, we're looking at covers - staples, covers from strange sources, and some songs that have had a LOT of covers, including a bunch of covers of Bowie's “Heroes”. Our Album You Must Hear before You Die is “Is This It?” by The Strokes. This punk/Britpop-influenced album got rave reviews on release in 2001 from Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, and New Musical Express. We're not convinced. In Knockin' on Heaven's Door, we mourn the loss of Wayne Osmond (of the Osmond Brothers), Chad Morgan, the Aussie country great, and Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary. We hope they get to sing a rousing chorus of “Puff the Magic Dragon together. As usual, there's heaps of fun. Enjoy!! Playlist (all the songs and artists referenced in the episode) Playlist – “Heroes” covers References: Heroes, REM, Leonard Cohen, “Suzanne”, “Hallelujah", Bob Dylan, “All along the Watchtower”, "If Not for You”, Olivia Newton-John, Johnny Cash, American Recordings, “All the Young Dudes”, Mott the Hoople, Ian Hunter, XTC, White Music, “This is Pop”, Devo, “(I can't get no) Satisfaction”, Zoot, “Eleanor Rigby”, Rick Springfield, Howard Gable, Alison Durbin, 801, “Tomorrow Never Knows”, ” 801 Live, "You Really Got Me”, Ministry, “Lay Lady Lay”, Al Jourgenson, “Heartbreak Hotel”, Elvis Presley, John Cale, June 1, 1974, Slow Dazzle, Fragments of a Rainy Season, Nirvana, "The Man Who Sold The World", “Unplugged”, Mick Ronson, Linda Ronstadt, “Different Drum”, Stone Ponies, Mike Nesmith, “You're No Good”, “Poor Poor Pitiful Me”, Cowboy Junkies, “Sweet Jane”, Fine Young Cannibals, “Suspicious Minds”, Talking Heads, “Take Me to The River”, Elvis Costello, “(What's So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, And Understanding”, George Benson, “On Broadway”, Mia Dyson, “The Passenger”, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Sara Blasko, “Flame Trees”, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”, Reg Livermore, “Celluloid Heroes”, The Kinks, Peter Gabriel, Scratch My Back, I'll Scratch Yours, Motorhead, David Hasselhoff, Blondie, Oasis, Nico, Moby (with Mindy Jones), Phillip Glass, “Superman”, Lifes Rich Pageant, “There She Goes Again”, “Pale Blue Eyes”, “First we take Manhattan”,
Stacy and Eric start the episode with some follow up from past episodes; but HOLD please, first they need to talk about Muzak, weepy dentist office music, the hunky-dancer-guy-with-a-dog movie, and fish tanks. They also workshop ideas for dentist office ceiling distractions and ponder why Oral B and not A? The episode is filled with convo bombs including Eleanor Rigby and Stitch as Elvis. Speaking of iconic performers, Eric talks about Battersea's recent show. Somehow Canadian snack talk leads to a Gilbert Godfrey impression and talk about Dil Pickles. Hear me out, it's a fun episode! Follow DAMTT on Facebook and Instagram @dontaskmetotalk. Email us at asking@dontaskmetotalk.com Next time: Spend or Save
Wir haben Interpretationssache live auf die Bühne gebracht! Roland geht dem besonderen Sound des Beatles-Klassikers "Eleanor Rigby" auf den Grund, und Musiker:innen der Hochschule für Musik Saar spielen drei exklusive, elektrisierende Versionen.
Victoria aka Jiggy with Viggy joins the podcast for a fun exploration of arranging songs for ukulele, what it's like to be a big deal on social media, and how "Vicky" became "Viggy"!Jiggy with Viggy: https://jiggywithviggy.com/ @jiggywithviggyViggy's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/jiggywithviggy-Jake Shimabukuro "Eleanor Rigby": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UM7CXjzXRA- James Hill "Viva La Vida": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIsvlEijJk8Support the showJoin my newsletter! It's free and I won't spam you. Get updates on new lessons and access to exclusive resources: https://liveukulele.com/signup/Support the podcast: Become a supporting member: https://liveukulele.com/register/supporting-member/?coupon=SUPPORT5 Buy video lessons or a book: https://liveukulele.com/store/ Use my Sweetwater affiliate link next time you need to buy some gear! https://sweetwater.sjv.io/9WbER0. Enter their gear giveaway every month while you're there (affiliate link): https://sweetwater.sjv.io/rQ4n9G Gear I use to create this podcast: https://sweetwater.sjv.io/eKJb6zCREDITS- Hosted, produced, edited, and mixed by Brad Bordessa - Theme music by Brad Bordessa; available on If Only: https://bradbordessa.bandcamp.com/album/if-only
This week Ari sits down with Cody Fry, a multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, and orchestral arranger known for his symphonic arrangements of his own music and other artists' songs. Cody has been nominated for two grammys for arranging: this year for his adaptation of “The Sound of Silence” and previously for “Eleanor Rigby.” An incredible musician all around, Cody has found his niche fronting orchestras in a way that appeals to pop music lovers around the world.Cody has played Walt Disney Concert Hall with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, the Kennedy Center, and has hundreds of millions of streams online. In 2021, his song “I Hear a Symphony” (which had already been out for five years) went viral on TikTok and landed Cody a major record deal. In this episode, Cody talks about what it was like working with a major label and the specifics of his record deal. He also tells Ari why he decided to eventually leave the label and go independent once again. https://www.codyfry.com/Chapters00:00 The Artist's Journey: From Aspiration to Independence02:50 Cody Fry: The Orchestral Innovator06:02 Crafting Sound: The Art of Orchestration08:52 Finding Your Unique Sound as an Artist11:58 The Viral Breakthrough: TikTok and Its Impact15:08 Navigating Record Deals: Insights and Experiences18:02 The Transition to Independence: A New Chapter20:52 Performing with Orchestras: A Unique Experience23:55 The Future of Music: Independence and Innovation39:54 Navigating the Music Business Without a Manager42:44 The Importance of Team Members in Music43:14 Non-Traditional Team Members and Their Roles46:07 Managing Sheet Music and Publishing Rights54:35 Exploring Alternative Revenue Streams for Artists01:01:09 Creating Engaging Content for a Niche Audience01:04:02 Future Aspirations and New Music Projects01:08:13 Understanding the Value of Record Deals01:19:37 The Evolving Landscape of the Music BusinessEdited and mixed by Ari DavidsMusic by Brassroots DistrictProduced by the team at Ari's TakeOrder the THIRD EDITION of How to Make It in the New Music Business: https://book.aristake.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Canciones de los Beatles para despedir el año: 'Drive my car' (Bobby McFerrin), 'Minha vida'/'In my life' y 'Michelle' (Rita Lee), 'Norwegian wood' (Milton Nascimento), 'The long and winding road' (Danilo Rea), 'Across the universe' (André Mehmari), 'Because' (André Mehmari & Ná Ozzetti), 'Mother´s nature son', 'Julia' y 'She´s leaving home' (Uakti), 'She´s leaving home' (Toninho Horta), 'Martha, my dear' (Madeleine Peyroux), 'Eleanor Rigby' (Caetano Veloso) y 'Blackbird' (Brad Mehldau).Escuchar audio
Der Song „Eleanor Rigby" erschien im Jahr 1966 auf dem Album „Revolver" der Beatles und geht vermutlich zu großen Teilen auf die Autorschaft Paul McCartneys zurück, der auch die Lead-Vocals singt. Eleanor Rigby ist eine erfundene Figur wie auch der im Song erwähnte Pater McKenzie. Der Titel handelt von einsamen Menschen in unserer Gesellschaft. Instrumental ist keiner der Beatles zu hören. Der Produzent George Martin hatte den Song für zwei Streichquartette arrangiert - eine für jene Zeit außergewöhnliche Besetzung, die dem Titel klanglich eine klassisch-romantische Anmutung verleiht. Dabei wählte Martin eine ungewöhnliche Aufnahmetechnik, die weniger den Raumklang einfing, vielmehr den Klang der Streichinstrumente ganz nah erleben lässt.
A song from an experimental phase that is utterly complete and fully formed, and a cover that should sound like a gimmick but a brilliant band makes it polished and natural. Eleanor Rigby, originally by The Beatles, covered by Kansas with the London Symphony Orchestra. Outro music is Mama Told Me Not To Come, by Three Dog Night with the London Symphony Orchestra.
Tim and Frank play "Guess the Movie Soundtrack: Halloween Edition!" Beers of the Week Hoegaarden Citizen Cider Wit's Up Dry Ale-Style Cider
Hannibal Lecter (parody of "Eleanor Rigby" by The Beatles) Ah, look at all the tasty people... Happy Halloween from Joe's Dump! Lyrics and Singing by Joe J Thomas Copyright 2024, Joe J Thomas, Joe's Dump, JoesDump.com All Rights Reserved. Not a Quinn-Martin Production.
In Episode 376 of Friends Talking Nerdy, Professor Aubrey and Tim the Nerd dive into a lively discussion about their favorite Beatles songs. The eclectic mix of tracks they highlight includes gems like "Eleanor Rigby," "Dear Prudence," "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," and lesser-known tracks such as "You Know My Name (Look Up The Number)" and "Only A Northern Song." Don't miss their insightful commentary on these classic tunes, and be sure to check out the YouTube Music playlist to hear them all for yourself! Tim the Nerd also shares a nostalgic and humorous story from 1988 when he organized a Royal Rumble-inspired wrestling match at his elementary school in snowy Grand Rapids, Michigan. Find out what led to the teachers discovering a full-blown kid battle in the snow! Finally, Tim revisits the “1974 in Music” episode to offer an update. He tracks down the Three's Company season 6 episode titled “Strangers In The Night,” where the song "You Are So Beautiful To Me" was performed, connecting a fun pop culture moment to his earlier discussion. As always, we wish to thank Christopher Lazarek for his wonderful theme song. Head to his website for information on how to purchase his EP, Here's To You, which is available on all digital platforms. Support our sponsor, Coffee Bros. Head to their website and when you make an order, put in promo code FTN10 to save 10% on your order. Head to our Linktree for more information on where to find us online. Friends Talking Nerdy is a proud member of the Deluxe Edition Network. Head to their website to find out more information about all the shows available on the Network.
Whitney Elkins-Hutten of PassiveInvesting.com interviews the founder of Streamline Capital Group, Brian Briscoe, to share how he accomplished his recent acquisition, the 43-unit Eleanor Rigby Apartments in Salt Lake City, UT. This stunning 43-unit apartment complex, built in 1929 and boasting a complete renovation, was originally listed for a cool $12 million; through strategic negotiation and market timing, Brian secured the property for a steal at $10.1 million. Perhaps even more impressive than the purchase price is the financing Briscoe secured; by assuming the existing loan, he landed an unbelievable 3.1% interest rate – a true game-changer in today's rising rate environment. Brian isn't interested in flipping this property for a quick buck; he has a vision for a long-term hold with a 20-year horizon. His challenges and triumphs in acquiring this property are a great real estate rollercoaster ride you don't want to miss. With a sound acquisition strategy, a long-term vision, and a focus on investor returns, Brian Briscoe's acquisition of Eleanor Rigby Apartments is a masterclass in multifamily investing. So, join Brian Briscoe today as he reveals how a savvy and strategic investor navigates the field of real estate investing.
In Production: Tales from Topographic OceansListening guide Sign up to the e-newsletter updates for exclusive access to the PRESALE! TormatoBook.com Produced by Wayne Hall, Joseph Cottrell, Jeffrey Crecelius and Ken Fuller This week, Mark and I took a listen to some of the existing Yes songs and versions that have already been added to official reissued albums and collections and classed as ‘previously unreleased'. We have chosen some of our favourites and discuss what we like about them. This activity was partly prompted by Yes aficionado Jon Dee who, in his own words on Facebook says the following: “I'm currently listening to YES playing ‘Eleanor Rigby'… IN THE STUDIO!! There are 3 takes and it sounds like they're doing a studio run through. Sounds like a single microphone was used to record it as a demo - but it's very good quality.Getting this on top of the multi-tracks for some ‘Time and a Word' songs has made this a great week!I have let the record label and management know about this as the first two albums will be getting rereleased at some point. How many of you would like to hear ‘Eleanor Rigby' by YES - plus an orchestra free version of ‘No Opportunity', ‘Sweet Dreams' and ‘Clear Days'?? ‘No Opportunity' will blow people away when they hear a no orchestra version with Kaye, Squire and Banks far more to the fore. It seriously rocks. In addition to his full electric guitar track, there is also a Spanish guitar track from Banks on the multi-track for ‘No Opportunity'. Peter plays some very cool acoustic guitar on that track.” It's another set of very exciting discoveries for us Yes fans so keep your ears peeled for more news of that, hopefully soon. What could we hear in the future? What are our favourite previously unreleased songs? Could any of them have been on official albums? Let us know if you agree with us! https://youtu.be/m2RljIXD8yU?si=ptP4FmrTAfDjuySM https://youtu.be/9Yr9ckFVvVM?si=hhGzUjlzdXP4cPj0 https://youtu.be/4mQqfXLwmB0?si=HDK0ATmQay92k3th https://youtu.be/MOqJyxJr_jQ?si=pDMccrQj66MLqKjC https://youtu.be/X3Jc6-0wY80?si=W5oLPrVAL-pPFH29 https://youtu.be/IPg_YY09I0E?si=J3Ryahd4cZMtVfiT There are only 100 of these packs available, so buy yours now! (Opens in a new window) Check out the progress on my other podcast - https://anthem52.com/ Yes - The Tormato Story Available now! TormatoBook.com YMP Patrons: Producers: Joseph Cottrell Wayne Hall Ken Fuller Jeffrey Crecelius Patrons: Jim Morrison Jon Pickles Declan Logue Gary Betts Aaron SteelmanMichael Handerhan Barry Gorsky Steve Perry Doug Curran Martin Kjellberg Todd Dudley Rachel Hadaway Lind Paul Hailes Craig Estenes Mark James Lang Steve Rode David Bob Martilotta John Holden Stephen LambeDem Fred Barringer Scott Colombo Chris Bandini David Heyden John Thomson Mark Baggs John Cowan John Parry Dave Owen Simon Barrow Steve Scott Terence Sadler Steve Dill Robert Nasir Fergus Cubbage William Hayes Geoff Bailie Steven Roehr Lobate Scarp Geoffrey Mason David Watkinson Tim Stannard Robert VandiverBrian Sullivan David Pannell Jamie McQuinnMiguel Falcão Paul Tomei Michael O'ConnorBrian HarrisHogne Bø PettersenGuy DeRome Become a Patron! Our Facebook YMP Discussion Group is open to anyone to join. One of the advantages of the new format is that all members of the group have the same ability to post content, so it's a bit more egalitarian, or somesuch. Please do search for the group and join in. https://www.facebook.com/groups/3216603008606331/ Please follow/subscribe! If you are still listening to the podcast on the website, please consider subscribing so you don't risk missing anything: Theme music The music I use is the last movement of Stravinsky's Firebird Suite. This has been used as introduction music at many Yes concerts.
Joe Jackson “Summer In The City”Live In New York - Joe Jackson/Graham Maby/Gary Burke :“Summer In The City”“Obvious Song” “Another World” “Fools In Love / For Your Love”“Mood Indigo “The In Crowd / Down To London”Medley:-“Eleanor Rigby” - “Be My Number Two”- “Home Town”- “It's Different For Girls” Medley:- “King Of The World” - “You Can't Get What You Want”“One More Time”Escuchar audio
This week Anna Piper is here to get her second chance at TTAB glory. Join in and play along to see which contestant will be coming back again next week! CARD 1 CLUE: Don't Separate CATEGORY: Beatles Songs ANSWERS: Help, Let It Be, Hey Jude, Eleanor Rigby, Penny Lane, Come Together, Yellow Submarine CARD 2 CLUE: It's a Big Place CATEGORY: Asian Countries ANSWERS: China, India, Japan, Philippines, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand CARD 3 CLUE: Looks Better Online CATEGORY: European Landmarks ANSWERS: Eiffel Tower, Colosseum, Stonehenge, Big Ben, Leaning Tower, Arc de Triomphe, Trevi Fountain CARD 4 CLUE: This Is Life CATEGORY: Things on a Beach ANSWERS: Towel, Umbrella, Sand Castle, Sunblock, Chair, Raft, Lifeguard CARD 5 CLUE: Here's Lookin' at You CATEGORY: Things You Put on Your Face ANSWERS: Makeup, Glasses, Mask, Lotion, Smile, Expression, Hands CARD 6 CLUE: You Bored? CATEGORY: Card Games ANSWERS: Poker, Gin, Solitaire, Blackjack, Rummy, War, Go Fish
We here at ATTT HQ hope you aren't cooking up some hate mail for us in the wake of what happened in Classic Albums Worst To First : Revolver Part 1. Feelings were definitely hurt and toes were stepped on. However, we've decided that since we're now highlighting the best of the best in Part 2, no one shall be allowed to be butthurt by the Worst To First placements of the 7 songs making up the top half of our list. This is rarified air, to be in the top half of the songs on The Beatles all-time classic album Revolver. The song quality is off the charts, as we find Fab Four entering their prime in 1966. Whatever order you'd prefer, the songs of Revolver redefined what rock n roll could be. Thanks again to the great Shannon Hurley and 2 of our favorite people, Marina V and Nick Baker for a hilarious good time.If you missed our presentation of picks 14-8 in Part 1, get it here on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get yours:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-623-classic-albums-worst-to-first-revolver/id573735994?i=1000660781993Nick and Marina are always working on new material and there's exciting stuff happening these days. Find out more athttps://marinav.com/Shannon Hurley is the consummate and constant creator. Her work new and old can be heard and seen at:https://shannonhurley.com/All hail the beloved Patreon people! These upstanding citizens put their money where their mouth is and keep the show afloat by contributing $5 a month. In return they're rewarded with a monthly bonus episode using our patented Emergency Pod format, our improv game where we pull a playlist out of our butts in real time. Shannon Hurley was kind enough to join for July's new episode and we couldn't be more excited to share it with you. FInd out more at:https://www.patreon.com/alltimetoptenChat with us! On Facebook! Get more involved in the ATTT cinematic universe by chatting with us on the Facebook Music Chat Group. Start a conversation about music!https://www.facebook.com/groups/940749894391295
Rafa Panadero resuelve el acertijo de la semana pasada y se mete de lleno en la historia del grupo español C.R.A.G., formado por Cánovas, Rodrigo, Adolfo y Guzmán. Continúa después con su repaso a la discografía y temas más característicos de The Beatles, "Eleanor Rigby". No sin el amigo secreto, claro, que se ha atrevido con su propia versión de la canción.
Simon Maher, Founder of 8Radio.com
PropsAndPraise everybody as we bring you another edition Of A Cup Of J.O.E. with selections ranging from Audio Directions to an wonderful rendition of Eleanor Rigby. .Thank you so so much for joining us so ENJOY!!!! & BLACK LIVES STILL MATTER!!!!For more info and tracklisting, visit: https://thefaceradio.com/a-cup-of-j-o-e/Tune into new broadcasts of A Cup of J.O.E, LIVE ,Wednesdays from 9 AM - NOON EST / 2 - 5 PM GMT//Dig this show? Please consider supporting The Face Radio: http://support.thefaceradio.com Support The Face Radio with PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/thefaceradio. Join the family at https://plus.acast.com/s/thefaceradio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Otra lista y sigo sin ser yo. "Los adversarios" John Grisham "El último vuelo de la abeja reina" Marta Platel "Una herencia en juego" Jennifer Lynn Barnes "Pedro Páramo" Juan Rulfo "El laberinto español" Gerald Brenan "La metamorfosis" Kafka "La señora Dalloway" Virginia Wolf "Noches blancas" Dostoievski "La señorita Mackenzie" Anthony Tropolle "El curioso incidente del perro a medianoche" Mark Haddon "La cala" Gregg Dunnet "Patricia Brent solterona" Herbert George Jenkins "La teoría del amor" Ali Hazelwood "Promesa de sangre" Melinda Leigh "Fuera de mi liga" Eleanor Rigby
Guy Chambers was a teenager in Liverpool and at John Lennon's old school - "same headmaster, Mister Pobjoy". He remembers the Beatles, Queen, Abba and Jesus Christ Superstar sparking his interest in the "perfect song package" and went on to work with Tina Turner, Rufus Wainwright, Kylie, Diana Ross and scores of others. He talks here about early shows he saw, records bought and his own tour in the autumn, "An Evening With Guy Chambers", stopping off at various points on the way, among them ...... how YOU can write a song with him. ... Bowie's reaction on discovering he was third on the bill below George Michael and Robbie Williams at Netaid. ... seeing XTC and Generation X at the teen shows at Eric's. ... Benny Hill's Ernie, the Scaffold's Lily the Pink and other singles bought at Probe Records. ... "the great harmony bands" like the Eagles, Byrds and the Mamas & the Papas...."A Is For Banana", his song about dyslexia. ... writing a string quartet aged 11 and the magic of hearing four people bring his sheet music to life. ... "the wastage": composers who write 50 songs and throw 40 away. .. the cinematic internal worlds of the Cocteau Twins and Lana Del Ray. ... the "subversive harmonies" on Strawberry Fields Forever and what makes Eleanor Rigby so perfect.... everything that now needs to be in place to get a hit record. ... mass song-writing teams and how he can't operate with more than three people in the room. ... and what you can expect from his upcoming tour. Tickets for An Evening With Guy Chambers here …https://www.guychambers.co.uk/liveWe've been podcasting since 2006 and every bit of support we receive helps us keep the conversation going. Find out more about how you can support Word In Your Ear into the future here: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In the last episode, I briefly described my grandfather, who was a lifelong mystic, and his reactions to the dream I'd had about my father and his ring, which was followed by its mysterious disappearance. I also mentioned another unusual incident concerning the ring that took place about twenty years later, when a friend told me about a vivid dream he'd had where my father had given him a message for me, saying that I should “remember the ring.” Now this wasn't a childhood friend, he knew nothing about my father, and had no idea if this message was going to mean anything to me at all. As you can imagine, the fact that it had come through a completely objective third party and had happened a full twenty years after the original incident made quite an impact on me. So, that completes this part of the narrative. In summary, even though my life had been turned upside down by the sudden death of my father, which had been accompanied by two inexplicable events that had defied all logic, I put it all behind me, or so I thought. I continued with my eleventh-grade life, which basically meant that I returned to my everyday state of constant activity. Now, as I've mentioned a few times earlier, this podcast narrative focuses on the massive evolution of consciousness that began in the early1960s, as experienced through my own individual lens, which brings us now to the middle of 1966. On a larger level, at this time two huge influences were beginning to shake American society to its core – First, the enormous evolution of the Beatles and their profound impact on popular culture, and second, the war in Vietnam. With the Beatles, as we mentioned in the last episode, at the end of 1965, they had come out with their revolutionary album, Rubber Soul, which George Harrison said was the first music they made when they were all regularly smoking marijuana. It had enormous appeal and was having a major effect on all of popular music. By the way, their old friend Bob Dylan was breaking some new ground of his own. In March of 1966, he brought out a radical new song that caught everyone's attention. Its free-wheeling, raucous sound was far more in the style of a New Orleans Dixieland band than of rock and roll. And in the wild chorus, with his background musicians singing along in high hysterics, he kept repeating the signature line, “Everybody must get stoned.” The song was over four and a half minutes long and got a ton of airplay on almost every pop radio station. So, on a daily basis, with a clever twist of words and a message that was unmistakable, millions of music fans would listen to Dylan constantly urge them to try marijuana. It was quite an advertisement. A few months later, the Beatles took it all one step further when they released their groundbreaking album, Revolver. Again, according to George Harrison, while Rubber Soul was the first album they made under the influence of marijuana, Revolver was the first one they made under the regular influence of LSD. The easiest way to describe this remarkable collection of songs is that it was incredibly trippy. One song, “Love to You” followed the form of a classic Indian raga, complete with sitar and tablas. Nothing like it had ever been heard in the west before. Another major breakthrough was the soul-stirring “Eleanor Rigby,” which brought an entirely new level of depth to the Beatles repertoire. All the other songs on the album became instant classics as well, but one track, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” deserves some special attention because it was specifically designed to boost the evolution of consciousness. Apparently, John Lennon had been influenced by a book called, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner. The book claimed that under the influence of LSD, it was possible to shed the limiting nature of constant ego identification and emerge into a higher, more enlightened level of awareness. And it gave step by step instructions on how to do it. Supposedly, after Lennon bought the book, he took LSD and followed the instructions to a tee. Soon after that, he wrote the song, with the psychedelic nature of the music combined with the mind-expanding lyrics. He said he wanted to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting on top of a mountain, as he enlightened the public to the message of possible God realization that underlies the LSD experience. “Turn off your mind relax and float downstream,” he sang. “It is not dying, it is not dying. Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void. It is shining, it is shining. That you may see the meaning of within. It is being, it is being. That love is all and love is everyone. It is knowing, it is knowing…” Some years later, George Harrison offered an interesting perspective on the song as well as on their evolving perspective at the time. “From birth to death all we ever do is think: we have one thought, we have another thought, another thought, another thought,” he said. “Even when you are asleep you are having dreams, so there is never a time from birth to death when the mind isn't always active with thoughts. But you can turn off your mind. “The whole point is that…the self is coming from a state of pure awareness, from the state of being. All the rest that comes about in the outward manifestation of the physical world. . . is just clutter.” Then he concluded, “The true nature of each soul is pure consciousness. So, the song is really about transcending, and about the quality of the transcendent.” Of course, this understanding about the higher nature of our consciousness was extremely advanced for its time. And whether the public understood it or not, the message was still pouring out to millions of people on a daily basis, subtly or not so subtly affecting their consciousness. The innovative album caught on in a flash and the influence of psychedelic music began to grow significantly. Over the next few months, the Grateful Dead, the Byrds, the Jefferson Airplane, the Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, Traffic, Jimi Hendrix and the Doors all gained enormous popularity, along with many, many other groups. A new idea of a higher, more evolved state of being was clearly being born in the culture. And speaking of the culture, in a larger context, something called the “counter culture” was beginning to emerge, which not only challenged the mainstream norms and values, but also advocated for social change. Embracing ideals of peace, love, and unity, it was all vibrant, inspiring, alive, and unmistakably - young. But at the same time, another enormous, yet rather sinister influence was in the early stages of taking over the consciousness of the country as well. As you probably know, it was the ever-broadening tragedy of the war in Vietnam. Even though no one seemed to be paying much attention to it, like an undiagnosed cancer, it just kept metastasizing. President Lyndon Johnson continued to insist that the constant build-up of US troops was the right thing to do because at all costs, we had to prevent communism from taking over the Pacific Rim. And the costs were getting pretty serious. In 1964, we spent $53.4 billion on the effort in Vietnam. In 1965, we spent another $54.5 billion and in 1966, it escalated to 66.4 billion. That's a total of $174.4 billion. Not that anyone looked at it this way, but in those three years, instead of being used for warfare, that amount of money could have abundantly fed well over a billion people. And the human costs were building as well. The US troops which had numbered 23,300 in 1964, grew to 184,300 in 1965, then onto 385,300 by the end of 1966. And with that, the truly horrible number - how many people actually died there – kept swelling. In 1964, 216 US soldiers died. It grew to 1,928 in 1965, then onto 6,350 in 1966. Now that's just US troops. When it comes to how many of the North and South Vietnamese people died, no one really knows for sure, but an estimate of 10-1 is used as a conservative approximation. So here are the basically revolting numbers related to those three years of war - $174.43 billion just plain wasted on destruction, with a total of over 96,000 human beings needlessly killed. Even so, at that point, there still was very little opposition to the war and President Johnson stood resolute and strong. Afterall, he wasn't about to let the Pacific Rim go communist. And on a side note, he was damned if he was going to be the first US President to ever lose a war. So that brings us to 1967, which would go down in history as a truly magical year. Many volumes have been written about it and there's not a whole lot to say that hasn't already been said. On the grim side, the US involvement in Vietnam got much worse, to nobody's surprise. We went up another 100,000 troops to a deployment of a staggering 485,600 soldiers. And US deaths went up an additional five thousand to 11,363. That's 17,713 families who buried their young sons and daughters who had died trying to protect the Pacific Rim from going communist. Not that any of us even knew what that concept meant. So. the dark side had gotten darker. But incredibly, the light side was about to get much lighter. On May 26, 1967, the Beatles released what was probably the most monumental album of their entire career, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band. This major phenomenon, turned the pop world completely upside down. The album was filled with references to transcendent states of consciousness that were being now being experienced by millions of baby boomers around the world. It featured the most psychedelic song anyone had ever heard yet, called “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” The music was absolutely hypnotic and the mind-altering lyrics broke radical new ground on many levels. The initials of the title happened to be LSD, but according to John Lennon, that was just a coincidence. However he always said it with a smile. George Harrison took his Indian raga theme one step further in his song, “Within You, Without You.” It was what is called a “Satsang Song” in the Indian tradition because it expresses some of the deeper truths of their ancient wisdom. “Try to realize that it's all within yourself, no one else can make you change,” he sang. “When you see beyond yourself you may find that peace of mind is waiting there. And the time will come when you realize that we're all one and life flows on within you and without you.” Meanwhile, on the very last song of the album, “A Day in the Life,” after a mind-blowing journey through some seemingly random news of the day, to mesmerizing music played by a 40-piece orchestra John hypnotically repeats the stanza, “I'd love to turn you on.” By then, several million people knew exactly what he was talking about. Now, I still wasn't one of them yet, but that part of the story is coming up soon. Which makes this an ideal place to end this episode. As you might guess, things keep on evolving, so as always, keep your eyes, mind and heart opened and let's get together in the next one.
Guy Chambers was a teenager in Liverpool and at John Lennon's old school - "same headmaster, Mister Pobjoy". He remembers the Beatles, Queen, Abba and Jesus Christ Superstar sparking his interest in the "perfect song package" and went on to work with Tina Turner, Rufus Wainwright, Kylie, Diana Ross and scores of others. He talks here about early shows he saw, records bought and his own tour in the autumn, "An Evening With Guy Chambers", stopping off at various points on the way, among them ...... how YOU can write a song with him. ... Bowie's reaction on discovering he was third on the bill below George Michael and Robbie Williams at Netaid. ... seeing XTC and Generation X at the teen shows at Eric's. ... Benny Hill's Ernie, the Scaffold's Lily the Pink and other singles bought at Probe Records. ... "the great harmony bands" like the Eagles, Byrds and the Mamas & the Papas...."A Is For Banana", his song about dyslexia. ... writing a string quartet aged 11 and the magic of hearing four people bring his sheet music to life. ... "the wastage": composers who write 50 songs and throw 40 away. .. the cinematic internal worlds of the Cocteau Twins and Lana Del Ray. ... the "subversive harmonies" on Strawberry Fields Forever and what makes Eleanor Rigby so perfect.... everything that now needs to be in place to get a hit record. ... mass song-writing teams and how he can't operate with more than three people in the room. ... and what you can expect from his upcoming tour. Tickets for An Evening With Guy Chambers here …https://www.guychambers.co.uk/liveWe've been podcasting since 2006 and every bit of support we receive helps us keep the conversation going. Find out more about how you can support Word In Your Ear into the future here: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Guy Chambers was a teenager in Liverpool and at John Lennon's old school - "same headmaster, Mister Pobjoy". He remembers the Beatles, Queen, Abba and Jesus Christ Superstar sparking his interest in the "perfect song package" and went on to work with Tina Turner, Rufus Wainwright, Kylie, Diana Ross and scores of others. He talks here about early shows he saw, records bought and his own tour in the autumn, "An Evening With Guy Chambers", stopping off at various points on the way, among them ...... how YOU can write a song with him. ... Bowie's reaction on discovering he was third on the bill below George Michael and Robbie Williams at Netaid. ... seeing XTC and Generation X at the teen shows at Eric's. ... Benny Hill's Ernie, the Scaffold's Lily the Pink and other singles bought at Probe Records. ... "the great harmony bands" like the Eagles, Byrds and the Mamas & the Papas...."A Is For Banana", his song about dyslexia. ... writing a string quartet aged 11 and the magic of hearing four people bring his sheet music to life. ... "the wastage": composers who write 50 songs and throw 40 away. .. the cinematic internal worlds of the Cocteau Twins and Lana Del Ray. ... the "subversive harmonies" on Strawberry Fields Forever and what makes Eleanor Rigby so perfect.... everything that now needs to be in place to get a hit record. ... mass song-writing teams and how he can't operate with more than three people in the room. ... and what you can expect from his upcoming tour. Tickets for An Evening With Guy Chambers here …https://www.guychambers.co.uk/liveWe've been podcasting since 2006 and every bit of support we receive helps us keep the conversation going. Find out more about how you can support Word In Your Ear into the future here: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Writer/director Ned Benson (The Greatest Hits; The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby) discusses writing an earnest love story, writing through the lens of a director, the delusions of belief, when to let go, and more.THE WRITERS PANEL IS A COMPLETELY INDEPENDENT PRODUCTION.Follow and support the show by subscribing to Ben Blacker's newsletter, Re:Writing, where you'll also get weekly advice from the thousands of writers he's interviewed over the years, as well as access to exclusive live Q&As, meet-ups, and more: benblacker.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Ned Benson is a writer, director, and producer known for his profound storytelling. His debut film, 'The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby,' premiered at Cannes in 2014, showcasing his unique narrative approach by exploring dual perspectives on love and loss. His recent film 'The Greatest Hits' follows a love story centering on the connection between music and memory and how they transport us, sometimes literally. In this interview, we talked about 'Eleanor Rigby', networking, how he got into 'Black Widow,' his latest film 'The Greatest Hits,' the process of moving from shorts to full features, and much more. Want more? Steal my first book, Ink by the Barrel - Secrets From Prolific Writers right now for free. Simply head over to www.brockswinson.com to get your free digital download and audiobook. If you find value in the book, please share it with a friend as we're giving away 100,000 copies this year. It's based on over 400 interviews here at Creative Principles. Enjoy! If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts? It only takes about 60 seconds and it really helps convince some of the hard-to-get guests to sit down and have a chat (simply scroll to the bottom of your iTunes Podcast app and click “Write Review"). Enjoy the show!
In this episode, Wynne Leon and Vicki Atkinson are talking with Edgerton award winning playwright, musician, and writer Jack Canfora. Talking with Jack is like attending a master class on creativity. In fact, our conversation with Jack is so rich with both writing practices and nuggets about authors and artists that we've split it into two episodes. In this first episode, we talk with Jack about depression and creative expression. He adds some fantastic and funny insight from comedian, Gary Gulman (HBO special: The Great Depresh). Jack also reveals a couple of his brilliant ways to experiment when he's hit a creative lull. His answer about whether he writes long-hand will have you giggling right along with Vicki and me. He tells us what is hard to teach and important to learn about creative attention. And he shares with us a delightful story about the Beatles song Eleanor Rigby that exposes an intimate insight into the creative process. (Here's a video clip of Jack telling this story) With all the food for thought and inspiration, we know you will have plenty of chew on until the conclusion of our incredible conversation airs next week. We love talking with the brilliant and funny Jack Canfora and leave each conversation a little bit smarter, much more inspired to hone the craft of writing, and in awe of a master creator. We know you'll love this episode! Links for this Episode: Episode 55 show notes Jack's website: Jack Canfora | Playwright | Podcaster | Writing Coach Jack's Online Theater Company: New Normal Rep Jericho by Jack Canfora on Amazon Jack Canfora on Instagram and Twitter: @jackcanfora From the hosts: Vicki's personal blog: Victoria Ponders Wynne's personal blog: Surprised by Joy Vicki's recently released book: Surviving Sue Wynne's book about her beloved father: Finding My Father's Faith
Epic month for the Jerry Garcia Band and U.S. Hockey...awesome audio snippets from 2-17-80...Garcia's wisdom on Positively 4th Street...Jer drops the steel jack hammer during Let it Rock...Ozzie Ahlers on Eleanor Rigby...a double encore for Oswego...more JGB next week
On this bonus episode from May 2022, Kirk goes through a handful of other covers of the three Beatles songs he recently discussed on the show."Gotta Get You Into My Life" by Paul McCartney/Lennon-McCartney as covered by Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers (1966) and Blood, Sweat & Tears (1975)"Eleanor Rigby" by Paul McCartney/Lennon-McCartney as covered by Aretha Franklin (1968), Cody Fry (2021), Joshua Bell and Frankie Moreno (2009) and Zoot (1970)"Blackbird" by Paul McCartney/Lennon-McCartney as covered by Crosby, Stills & Nash (1982) and the Brad Mehldau Trio (1996)Also Featured/Discussed:"Reelin' In The Years" by Steely Dan from Can't Buy a Thrill, 1972The score video of Cody Fry's arrangement of "Eleanor Rigby"Bicycle Race by Queen from Jazz, 1972----LINKS-----SUPPORT STRONG SONGS!Paypal | Patreon.com/StrongsongsMERCH STOREstore.strongsongspodcast.comSOCIAL MEDIAIG: @Kirk_Hamilton | Threads: @Kirk_HamiltonNEWSLETTERhttps://kirkhamilton.substack.com/subscribeJOIN THE DISCORDhttps://discord.gg/GCvKqAM8SmOUTRO SOLO PLAY-A-LONG:https://soundcloud.com/kirkhamilton/strong-songs-outro-music-no-soloSTRONG SONGS PLAYLISTSSpotify | Apple Music | YouTube Music
In the process of tracking down some missing friends, the lads hear some rumours. Lucas, as always, is fine. CW: Swearing, violence, eels, body horror, eye stuff, horses, discussion of inducing vomiting, misophonia (retching) Follow us on Twitter @podsontour, Instagram @ladsontourpod and Tumblr @podsontour Find us at ladsontourpodcast.com JJA Harwood is Bronwyn Michaels (@JJAHarwood) Fay Evans is Lucas Rossi (@onlythegirl) Sam Ferguson is Artem Volkov (@samkferguson) Ruaraidh MacDuff is Gregg Roumbax (@RuaraidhMacduff) Nate Rae is our DM (@NateRaeRae) Cover artwork by Fay Evans
Season 6 - Episode 37Linda's back from her Lake District getaway, and let me tell you, she had quite the adventure! She found herself in a spooky cottage in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by eerie stories and podcasts - including our very own!
Tell us who you pity and we'll tell you who you are! In episode 93 of Overthink, Ellie and David guide you through the philosophy behind this “well-meaning” emotion. From Aristotle's account of pity in theater, to problematic portrayals of disability in British charity telethons, pity has had an outsized role our social and cultural worlds. But who is the object of our pity, and why? Your hosts dissect various archetypes of pity, such as Father Mackenzie (a character in Eleanor Rigby by the Beatles) and the elusive Corn Man (a figure invented by Ellie while in Greece!). Where is the line between pity and compassion? How does pity interact with our social responsibilities and power structures? And, is pity a meaningful part of the good life, or is it an emotion we would all be better off without?Check out the episode's extended cut here!Works DiscussedAristotle, Poetics & RhetoricThe Beatles, Eleanor RigbyDavid Hume, A Treatise of Human NatureKristján Kristjánsson, “Pity: A Mitigated Defense”Martha Nussbaum, “Tragedy and Self-Sufficiency: Plato and Aristotle on Fear and Pity”Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and JewAdam Smith, The Theory of Moral SentimentsJoseph Stramondo, “How an Ideology of Pity is a Social Harm for People With Disabilities”Bernard Whitley, Mary Kite, and Lisa Wagner, Psychology of Prejudice and DiscriminationPatreon | patreon.com/overthinkpodcast Website | overthinkpodcast.comInstagram & Twitter | @overthink_podEmail | Dearoverthink@gmail.comYouTube | Overthink podcastSpecial thanks to Alexandra Peabody for her support in researching this episode!Support the show
Exploring the diverse talents of the Jerry Garcia Band through three shows at Kean College: 2-28-80 early and late shows, and 12-13-83 late show. Classic performances include After Midnight > Eleanor Rigby > After Midnight, Don't Let Go, Someday Baby, Rhapsody in Red plus much more.
Lots of songwriters point to the idea that the best songs are the ones that tend to find the you, letting the writer be the vessel or medium. Much like "Yesterday" did for Paul, "Across The Universe" seemed to come to John from within a dreamstate, appearing in his subconscious while lying in bed, almost pushing him to get up and go write down the words and find the melody that seemingly appeared out of nowhere. An absolutely gorgeous lyric no doubt influenced by the band's recent immersion into meditation and easter philosophy, the song marks John at perhaps his most cosmic and peaceful. The irony is that from a recording standpoint, John never could figure out what he wanted to do with the song. Unlike "Yesterday," where George Martin seemed to know exactly what the song needed, that directive and inspiration was no where to be found for "Across The Universe." Lennon lead the band through multiple arrangement ideas but never captured what he thought he was hearing in his head, or where he thought the song should go. Which is a shame because I think although it's a really beautiful track (I love all the versions out there) the track ultimately suffers from an almost un-easy performance from John. As released, it never feels totally settled and comfortable in it's own skin. It's almost like it's missing the confidence in the delivery because John never seems sure of where he should be going. But even still, it's a beautiful song, one of John's best written songs, I just think it's a B- minus track of an A+ song. Joining us this week is jazz guitarist Dan Wilson! The Ohio-based virtuoso joins us to chat about making people move, jazz vs rock, coming into jazz from a church and funk background, and his newest album Things Eternal, which features a FANTASTIC version of "Eleanor Rigby." There's a taste here in the episode, but we highly recommend you check out the whole thing. Be sure to follow Dan on Facebook and at his website to hear more music and see when he's playing! What do you think about "Baby It's You" at #106? Too high? Too low? Or just right? Let us know in the comments on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter! Be sure to check out www.rankingthebeatles.com and grab a Rank Your Own Beatles poster, a shirt, a jumper, whatever you like! And if you're digging what we do, don't forget to Buy Us A Coffee! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/rankingthebeatles/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/rankingthebeatles/support
ELEANOR RIGBY lives in a dream, waits at the window, died in the church and was buried alone with her name!!! This is an episode of McCartney: A Life in Lyrics, a new podcast with Sir Paul McCartney himself from iHeartMedia, MPL, and Pushkin Industries. Listen and subscribe!
Face cream, a Bristol liquor business, and a lifelong reverence for the elderly are just a few of the rather ordinary and disparate inspirations Paul McCartney brought together in the creation of a masterpiece: “Eleanor Rigby.” In this episode, McCartney and Paul Muldoon tease out the song's lyrical inspirations and discuss the influence a Bernard Herrmann score for a Hitchcock film had on the lead single from 1966's “Revolver." “McCartney: A Life in Lyrics” is a co-production between iHeart Media, MPL and Pushkin Industries. The series was produced by Pejk Malinovski and Sara McCrea; written by Sara McCrea; edited by Dan O'Donnell and Sophie Crane; mastered by Jason Gambrell with sound design by Pejk Malinovski. The series is executive produced by Leital Molad, Justin Richmond, Lee Eastman and Scott Rodger. Thanks to Lee Eastman, Richard Ewbank, Scott Rodger, Aoife Corbett and Steve Ithell.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Listen to this special episode from another podcast you'll love called McCartney: A Life in Lyrics from iHeart Media, MPL and Pushkin Industries. Face cream, a Bristol liquor business, and a lifelong reverence for the elderly are just a few of the rather ordinary and disparate inspirations Paul McCartney brought together in the creation of a masterpiece: “Eleanor Rigby.” In this episode, McCartney and Paul Muldoon tease out the song's lyrical inspirations and discuss the influence a Bernard Herrman score for a Hitchcock film had on the lead single from 1966's “Revolver." Hear McCartney: A Life in Lyrics every Wednesday, available wherever you get your podcasts. (The series was produced by Pejk Malinovski and Sara McCrea; edited by Dan O'Donnell and Sophie Crane; mastered by Jason Gambrell with sound design by Pejk Malinovski. And executive produced by Leital Molad, Justin Richmond, Lee Eastman and Scott Rodger.Thanks to Lee Eastman, Richard Ewbank, Scott Rodger, Aoife Corbett and Steve Ithell.)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Here's a preview from a podcast from iHeart Media, MPL and Pushkin Industries, McCartney: A Life in Lyrics. Face cream, a Bristol liquor business, and a lifelong reverence for the elderly are just a few of the rather ordinary and disparate inspirations Paul McCartney brought together in the creation of a masterpiece: “Eleanor Rigby.” In this episode, McCartney and Paul Muldoon tease out the song's lyrical inspirations and discuss the influence a Bernard Herrman score for a Hitchcock film had on the lead single from 1966's “Revolver." Hear McCartney: A Life in Lyrics every Wednesday, available wherever you get your podcasts. (The series was produced by Pejk Malinovski and Sara McCrea; edited by Dan O'Donnell and Sophie Crane; mastered by Jason Gambrell with sound design by Pejk Malinovski. And executive produced by Leital Molad, Justin Richmond, Lee Eastman and Scott Rodger.Thanks to Lee Eastman, Richard Ewbank, Scott Rodger, Aoife Corbett and Steve Ithell.)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
It says it right on the tin, people. Pushkin Media reached out to us and asked if we would be interested in hearing a preview episode of the brand new "McCartney: A Life in Lyrics" podcast, which was just released today, October 4, 2023. What you will hear within this episode are the Blotto reactions to the first episode, which focuses on "Eleanor Rigby," followed by the McCartney episode, in full.Listen here, and then make sure to subscribe to this newcomer to Beatles Podcasting - we really think he's got something.Without further ado, Blotto Beatles Present: "McCartney: A Life in Lyrics." We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.--As always, you can find Team Blotto Beatles on Instagram (@blottobeatles) and Twitter (@blottobeatles), by emailing us (blottobeatles@gmail.com), or on the web (blottobeatles.com). We want to hear from you!Please also take the time to rate and review us on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.We have a shop! Grab some merch. You can always drunk dial us at 1.857.233.9793 to share your thoughts, feedback, confessions, and concerns and to be featured in an upcoming episode. Enjoying the show? Buy us a beer via the tip jar (don't forget to include a message telling us what we should drink with the money).You know we're making a list of it, see the canonical, argument-ending list of Beatles songs we are assembling here: https://www.blottobeatles.com/list & listen to it on Spotify here.Please remember to always enjoy Blotto Beatles responsibly.Peace and Love.Hosts: Becker and TommyExecutive Producer: Scotty C.Guests: Paul McCartney and Paul MuldoonMusical Supervisor: RB (@ryanobrooks)Associate Musical Supervision: Tim Clark (@nodisassemble)#PeteBestGetThatCheck
Episode 168 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Say a Little Prayer”, and the interaction of the sacred, political, and secular in Aretha Franklin's life and work. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "Abraham, Martin, and John" by Dion. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Aretha Franklin. Even splitting it into multiple parts would have required six or seven mixes. My main biographical source for Aretha Franklin is Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin by David Ritz, and this is where most of the quotes from musicians come from. Information on C.L. Franklin came from Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America by Nick Salvatore. Country Soul by Charles L Hughes is a great overview of the soul music made in Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville in the sixties. Peter Guralnick's Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream Of Freedom is possibly less essential, but still definitely worth reading. Information about Martin Luther King came from Martin Luther King: A Religious Life by Paul Harvey. I also referred to Burt Bacharach's autobiography Anyone Who Had a Heart, Carole King's autobiography A Natural Woman, and Soul Serenade: King Curtis and his Immortal Saxophone by Timothy R. Hoover. For information about Amazing Grace I also used Aaron Cohen's 33 1/3 book on the album. The film of the concerts is also definitely worth watching. And the Aretha Now album is available in this five-album box set for a ludicrously cheap price. But it's actually worth getting this nineteen-CD set with her first sixteen Atlantic albums and a couple of bonus discs of demos and outtakes. There's barely a duff track in the whole nineteen discs. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick warning before I begin. This episode contains some moderate references to domestic abuse, death by cancer, racial violence, police violence, and political assassination. Anyone who might be upset by those subjects might want to check the transcript rather than listening to the episode. Also, as with the previous episode on Aretha Franklin, this episode presents something of a problem. Like many people in this narrative, Franklin's career was affected by personal troubles, which shaped many of her decisions. But where most of the subjects of the podcast have chosen to live their lives in public and share intimate details of every aspect of their personal lives, Franklin was an extremely private person, who chose to share only carefully sanitised versions of her life, and tried as far as possible to keep things to herself. This of course presents a dilemma for anyone who wants to tell her story -- because even though the information is out there in biographies, and even though she's dead, it's not right to disrespect someone's wish for a private life. I have therefore tried, wherever possible, to stay away from talk of her personal life except where it *absolutely* affects the work, or where other people involved have publicly shared their own stories, and even there I've tried to keep it to a minimum. This will occasionally lead to me saying less about some topics than other people might, even though the information is easily findable, because I don't think we have an absolute right to invade someone else's privacy for entertainment. When we left Aretha Franklin, she had just finally broken through into the mainstream after a decade of performing, with a version of Otis Redding's song "Respect" on which she had been backed by her sisters, Erma and Carolyn. "Respect", in Franklin's interpretation, had been turned from a rather chauvinist song about a man demanding respect from his woman into an anthem of feminism, of Black power, and of a new political awakening. For white people of a certain generation, the summer of 1967 was "the summer of love". For many Black people, it was rather different. There's a quote that goes around (I've seen it credited in reliable sources to both Ebony and Jet magazine, but not ever seen an issue cited, so I can't say for sure where it came from) saying that the summer of 67 was the summer of "'retha, Rap, and revolt", referring to the trifecta of Aretha Franklin, the Black power leader Jamil Abdullah al-Amin (who was at the time known as H. Rap Brown, a name he later disclaimed) and the rioting that broke out in several major cities, particularly in Detroit: [Excerpt: John Lee Hooker, "The Motor City is Burning"] The mid sixties were, in many ways, the high point not of Black rights in the US -- for the most part there has been a lot of progress in civil rights in the intervening decades, though not without inevitable setbacks and attacks from the far right, and as movements like the Black Lives Matter movement have shown there is still a long way to go -- but of *hope* for Black rights. The moral force of the arguments made by the civil rights movement were starting to cause real change to happen for Black people in the US for the first time since the Reconstruction nearly a century before. But those changes weren't happening fast enough, and as we heard in the episode on "I Was Made to Love Her", there was not only a growing unrest among Black people, but a recognition that it was actually possible for things to change. A combination of hope and frustration can be a powerful catalyst, and whether Franklin wanted it or not, she was at the centre of things, both because of her newfound prominence as a star with a hit single that couldn't be interpreted as anything other than a political statement and because of her intimate family connections to the struggle. Even the most racist of white people these days pays lip service to the memory of Dr Martin Luther King, and when they do they quote just a handful of sentences from one speech King made in 1963, as if that sums up the full theological and political philosophy of that most complex of men. And as we discussed the last time we looked at Aretha Franklin, King gave versions of that speech, the "I Have a Dream" speech, twice. The most famous version was at the March on Washington, but the first time was a few weeks earlier, at what was at the time the largest civil rights demonstration in American history, in Detroit. Aretha's family connection to that event is made clear by the very opening of King's speech: [Excerpt: Martin Luther King, "Original 'I Have a Dream' Speech"] So as summer 1967 got into swing, and white rock music was going to San Francisco to wear flowers in its hair, Aretha Franklin was at the centre of a very different kind of youth revolution. Franklin's second Atlantic album, Aretha Arrives, brought in some new personnel to the team that had recorded Aretha's first album for Atlantic. Along with the core Muscle Shoals players Jimmy Johnson, Spooner Oldham, Tommy Cogbill and Roger Hawkins, and a horn section led by King Curtis, Wexler and Dowd also brought in guitarist Joe South. South was a white session player from Georgia, who had had a few minor hits himself in the fifties -- he'd got his start recording a cover version of "The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor", the Big Bopper's B-side to "Chantilly Lace": [Excerpt: Joe South, "The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor"] He'd also written a few songs that had been recorded by people like Gene Vincent, but he'd mostly become a session player. He'd become a favourite musician of Bob Johnston's, and so he'd played guitar on Simon and Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme albums: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "I am a Rock"] and bass on Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, with Al Kooper particularly praising his playing on "Visions of Johanna": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Visions of Johanna"] South would be the principal guitarist on this and Franklin's next album, before his own career took off in 1968 with "Games People Play": [Excerpt: Joe South, "Games People Play"] At this point, he had already written the other song he's best known for, "Hush", which later became a hit for Deep Purple: [Excerpt: Deep Purple, "Hush"] But he wasn't very well known, and was surprised to get the call for the Aretha Franklin session, especially because, as he put it "I was white and I was about to play behind the blackest genius since Ray Charles" But Jerry Wexler had told him that Franklin didn't care about the race of the musicians she played with, and South settled in as soon as Franklin smiled at him when he played a good guitar lick on her version of the blues standard "Going Down Slow": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Going Down Slow"] That was one of the few times Franklin smiled in those sessions though. Becoming an overnight success after years of trying and failing to make a name for herself had been a disorienting experience, and on top of that things weren't going well in her personal life. Her marriage to her manager Ted White was falling apart, and she was performing erratically thanks to the stress. In particular, at a gig in Georgia she had fallen off the stage and broken her arm. She soon returned to performing, but it meant she had problems with her right arm during the recording of the album, and didn't play as much piano as she would have previously -- on some of the faster songs she played only with her left hand. But the recording sessions had to go on, whether or not Aretha was physically capable of playing piano. As we discussed in the episode on Otis Redding, the owners of Atlantic Records were busily negotiating its sale to Warner Brothers in mid-1967. As Wexler said later “Everything in me said, Keep rolling, keep recording, keep the hits coming. She was red hot and I had no reason to believe that the streak wouldn't continue. I knew that it would be foolish—and even irresponsible—not to strike when the iron was hot. I also had personal motivation. A Wall Street financier had agreed to see what we could get for Atlantic Records. While Ahmet and Neshui had not agreed on a selling price, they had gone along with my plan to let the financier test our worth on the open market. I was always eager to pump out hits, but at this moment I was on overdrive. In this instance, I had a good partner in Ted White, who felt the same. He wanted as much product out there as possible." In truth, you can tell from Aretha Arrives that it's a record that was being thought of as "product" rather than one being made out of any kind of artistic impulse. It's a fine album -- in her ten-album run from I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You through Amazing Grace there's not a bad album and barely a bad track -- but there's a lack of focus. There are only two originals on the album, neither of them written by Franklin herself, and the rest is an incoherent set of songs that show the tension between Franklin and her producers at Atlantic. Several songs are the kind of standards that Franklin had recorded for her old label Columbia, things like "You Are My Sunshine", or her version of "That's Life", which had been a hit for Frank Sinatra the previous year: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "That's Life"] But mixed in with that are songs that are clearly the choice of Wexler. As we've discussed previously in episodes on Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett, at this point Atlantic had the idea that it was possible for soul artists to cross over into the white market by doing cover versions of white rock hits -- and indeed they'd had some success with that tactic. So while Franklin was suggesting Sinatra covers, Atlantic's hand is visible in the choices of songs like "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and "96 Tears": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "96 Tears'] Of the two originals on the album, one, the hit single "Baby I Love You" was written by Ronnie Shannon, the Detroit songwriter who had previously written "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Baby I Love You"] As with the previous album, and several other songs on this one, that had backing vocals by Aretha's sisters, Erma and Carolyn. But the other original on the album, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)", didn't, even though it was written by Carolyn: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)"] To explain why, let's take a little detour and look at the co-writer of the song this episode is about, though we're not going to get to that for a little while yet. We've not talked much about Burt Bacharach in this series so far, but he's one of those figures who has come up a few times in the periphery and will come up again, so here is as good a time as any to discuss him, and bring everyone up to speed about his career up to 1967. Bacharach was one of the more privileged figures in the sixties pop music field. His father, Bert Bacharach (pronounced the same as his son, but spelled with an e rather than a u) had been a famous newspaper columnist, and his parents had bought him a Steinway grand piano to practice on -- they pushed him to learn the piano even though as a kid he wasn't interested in finger exercises and Debussy. What he was interested in, though, was jazz, and as a teenager he would often go into Manhattan and use a fake ID to see people like Dizzy Gillespie, who he idolised, and in his autobiography he talks rapturously of seeing Gillespie playing his bent trumpet -- he once saw Gillespie standing on a street corner with a pet monkey on his shoulder, and went home and tried to persuade his parents to buy him a monkey too. In particular, he talks about seeing the Count Basie band with Sonny Payne on drums as a teenager: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Kid From Red Bank"] He saw them at Birdland, the club owned by Morris Levy where they would regularly play, and said of the performance "they were just so incredibly exciting that all of a sudden, I got into music in a way I never had before. What I heard in those clubs really turned my head around— it was like a big breath of fresh air when somebody throws open a window. That was when I knew for the first time how much I loved music and wanted to be connected to it in some way." Of course, there's a rather major problem with this story, as there is so often with narratives that musicians tell about their early career. In this case, Birdland didn't open until 1949, when Bacharach was twenty-one and stationed in Germany for his military service, while Sonny Payne didn't join Basie's band until 1954, when Bacharach had been a professional musician for many years. Also Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet bell only got bent on January 6, 1953. But presumably while Bacharach was conflating several memories, he did have some experience in some New York jazz club that led him to want to become a musician. Certainly there were enough great jazz musicians playing the clubs in those days. He went to McGill University to study music for two years, then went to study with Darius Milhaud, a hugely respected modernist composer. Milhaud was also one of the most important music teachers of the time -- among others he'd taught Stockhausen and Xenakkis, and would go on to teach Philip Glass and Steve Reich. This suited Bacharach, who by this point was a big fan of Schoenberg and Webern, and was trying to write atonal, difficult music. But Milhaud had also taught Dave Brubeck, and when Bacharach rather shamefacedly presented him with a composition which had an actual tune, he told Bacharach "Never be ashamed of writing a tune you can whistle". He dropped out of university and, like most men of his generation, had to serve in the armed forces. When he got out of the army, he continued his musical studies, still trying to learn to be an avant-garde composer, this time with Bohuslav Martinů and later with Henry Cowell, the experimental composer we've heard about quite a bit in previous episodes: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] He was still listening to a lot of avant garde music, and would continue doing so throughout the fifties, going to see people like John Cage. But he spent much of that time working in music that was very different from the avant-garde. He got a job as the band leader for the crooner Vic Damone: [Excerpt: Vic Damone. "Ebb Tide"] He also played for the vocal group the Ames Brothers. He decided while he was working with the Ames Brothers that he could write better material than they were getting from their publishers, and that it would be better to have a job where he didn't have to travel, so he got himself a job as a staff songwriter in the Brill Building. He wrote a string of flops and nearly hits, starting with "Keep Me In Mind" for Patti Page: [Excerpt: Patti Page, "Keep Me In Mind"] From early in his career he worked with the lyricist Hal David, and the two of them together wrote two big hits, "Magic Moments" for Perry Como: [Excerpt: Perry Como, "Magic Moments"] and "The Story of My Life" for Marty Robbins: [Excerpt: "The Story of My Life"] But at that point Bacharach was still also writing with other writers, notably Hal David's brother Mack, with whom he wrote the theme tune to the film The Blob, as performed by The Five Blobs: [Excerpt: The Five Blobs, "The Blob"] But Bacharach's songwriting career wasn't taking off, and he got himself a job as musical director for Marlene Dietrich -- a job he kept even after it did start to take off. Part of the problem was that he intuitively wrote music that didn't quite fit into standard structures -- there would be odd bars of unusual time signatures thrown in, unusual harmonies, and structural irregularities -- but then he'd take feedback from publishers and producers who would tell him the song could only be recorded if he straightened it out. He said later "The truth is that I ruined a lot of songs by not believing in myself enough to tell these guys they were wrong." He started writing songs for Scepter Records, usually with Hal David, but also with Bob Hilliard and Mack David, and started having R&B hits. One song he wrote with Mack David, "I'll Cherish You", had the lyrics rewritten by Luther Dixon to make them more harsh-sounding for a Shirelles single -- but the single was otherwise just Bacharach's demo with the vocals replaced, and you can even hear his voice briefly at the beginning: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, "Baby, It's You"] But he'd also started becoming interested in the production side of records more generally. He'd iced that some producers, when recording his songs, would change the sound for the worse -- he thought Gene McDaniels' version of "Tower of Strength", for example, was too fast. But on the other hand, other producers got a better sound than he'd heard in his head. He and Hilliard had written a song called "Please Stay", which they'd given to Leiber and Stoller to record with the Drifters, and he thought that their arrangement of the song was much better than the one he'd originally thought up: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Please Stay"] He asked Leiber and Stoller if he could attend all their New York sessions and learn about record production from them. He started doing so, and eventually they started asking him to assist them on records. He and Hilliard wrote a song called "Mexican Divorce" for the Drifters, which Leiber and Stoller were going to produce, and as he put it "they were so busy running Redbird Records that they asked me to rehearse the background singers for them in my office." [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Mexican Divorce"] The backing singers who had been brought in to augment the Drifters on that record were a group of vocalists who had started out as members of a gospel group called the Drinkard singers: [Excerpt: The Drinkard Singers, "Singing in My Soul"] The Drinkard Singers had originally been a family group, whose members included Cissy Drinkard, who joined the group aged five (and who on her marriage would become known as Cissy Houston -- her daughter Whitney would later join the family business), her aunt Lee Warrick, and Warrick's adopted daughter Judy Clay. That group were discovered by the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, and spent much of the fifties performing with gospel greats including Jackson herself, Clara Ward, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. But Houston was also the musical director of a group at her church, the Gospelaires, which featured Lee Warrick's two daughters Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick (for those who don't know, the Warwick sisters' birth name was Warrick, spelled with two rs. A printing error led to it being misspelled the same way as the British city on a record label, and from that point on Dionne at least pronounced the w in her misspelled name). And slowly, the Gospelaires rather than the Drinkard Singers became the focus, with a lineup of Houston, the Warwick sisters, the Warwick sisters' cousin Doris Troy, and Clay's sister Sylvia Shemwell. The real change in the group's fortunes came when, as we talked about a while back in the episode on "The Loco-Motion", the original lineup of the Cookies largely stopped working as session singers to become Ray Charles' Raelettes. As we discussed in that episode, a new lineup of Cookies formed in 1961, but it took a while for them to get started, and in the meantime the producers who had been relying on them for backing vocals were looking elsewhere, and they looked to the Gospelaires. "Mexican Divorce" was the first record to feature the group as backing vocalists -- though reports vary as to how many of them are on the record, with some saying it's only Troy and the Warwicks, others saying Houston was there, and yet others saying it was all five of them. Some of these discrepancies were because these singers were so good that many of them left to become solo singers in fairly short order. Troy was the first to do so, with her hit "Just One Look", on which the other Gospelaires sang backing vocals: [Excerpt: Doris Troy, "Just One Look"] But the next one to go solo was Dionne Warwick, and that was because she'd started working with Bacharach and Hal David as their principal demo singer. She started singing lead on their demos, and hoping that she'd get to release them on her own. One early one was "Make it Easy On Yourself", which was recorded by Jerry Butler, formerly of the Impressions. That record was produced by Bacharach, one of the first records he produced without outside supervision: [Excerpt: Jerry Butler, "Make it Easy On Yourself"] Warwick was very jealous that a song she'd sung the demo of had become a massive hit for someone else, and blamed Bacharach and David. The way she tells the story -- Bacharach always claimed this never happened, but as we've already seen he was himself not always the most reliable of narrators of his own life -- she got so angry she complained to them, and said "Don't make me over, man!" And so Bacharach and David wrote her this: [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Don't Make Me Over"] Incidentally, in the UK, the hit version of that was a cover by the Swinging Blue Jeans: [Excerpt: The Swinging Blue Jeans, "Don't Make Me Over"] who also had a huge hit with "You're No Good": [Excerpt: The Swinging Blue Jeans, "You're No Good"] And *that* was originally recorded by *Dee Dee* Warwick: [Excerpt: Dee Dee Warwick, "You're No Good"] Dee Dee also had a successful solo career, but Dionne's was the real success, making the names of herself, and of Bacharach and David. The team had more than twenty top forty hits together, before Bacharach and David had a falling out in 1971 and stopped working together, and Warwick sued both of them for breach of contract as a result. But prior to that they had hit after hit, with classic records like "Anyone Who Had a Heart": [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Anyone Who Had a Heart"] And "Walk On By": [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Walk On By"] With Doris, Dionne, and Dee Dee all going solo, the group's membership was naturally in flux -- though the departed members would occasionally join their former bandmates for sessions, and the remaining members would sing backing vocals on their ex-members' records. By 1965 the group consisted of Cissy Houston, Sylvia Shemwell, the Warwick sisters' cousin Myrna Smith, and Estelle Brown. The group became *the* go-to singers for soul and R&B records made in New York. They were regularly hired by Leiber and Stoller to sing on their records, and they were also the particular favourites of Bert Berns. They sang backing vocals on almost every record he produced. It's them doing the gospel wails on "Cry Baby" by Garnet Mimms: [Excerpt: Garnet Mimms, "Cry Baby"] And they sang backing vocals on both versions of "If You Need Me" -- Wilson Pickett's original and Solomon Burke's more successful cover version, produced by Berns: [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "If You Need Me"] They're on such Berns records as "Show Me Your Monkey", by Kenny Hamber: [Excerpt: Kenny Hamber, "Show Me Your Monkey"] And it was a Berns production that ended up getting them to be Aretha Franklin's backing group. The group were becoming such an important part of the records that Atlantic and BANG Records, in particular, were putting out, that Jerry Wexler said "it was only a matter of common decency to put them under contract as a featured group". He signed them to Atlantic and renamed them from the Gospelaires to The Sweet Inspirations. Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham wrote a song for the group which became their only hit under their own name: [Excerpt: The Sweet Inspirations, "Sweet Inspiration"] But to start with, they released a cover of Pops Staples' civil rights song "Why (Am I treated So Bad)": [Excerpt: The Sweet Inspirations, "Why (Am I Treated So Bad?)"] That hadn't charted, and meanwhile, they'd all kept doing session work. Cissy had joined Erma and Carolyn Franklin on the backing vocals for Aretha's "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You"] Shortly after that, the whole group recorded backing vocals for Erma's single "Piece of My Heart", co-written and produced by Berns: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] That became a top ten record on the R&B charts, but that caused problems. Aretha Franklin had a few character flaws, and one of these was an extreme level of jealousy for any other female singer who had any level of success and came up in the business after her. She could be incredibly graceful towards anyone who had been successful before her -- she once gave one of her Grammies away to Esther Phillips, who had been up for the same award and had lost to her -- but she was terribly insecure, and saw any contemporary as a threat. She'd spent her time at Columbia Records fuming (with some justification) that Barbra Streisand was being given a much bigger marketing budget than her, and she saw Diana Ross, Gladys Knight, and Dionne Warwick as rivals rather than friends. And that went doubly for her sisters, who she was convinced should be supporting her because of family loyalty. She had been infuriated at John Hammond when Columbia had signed Erma, thinking he'd gone behind her back to create competition for her. And now Erma was recording with Bert Berns. Bert Berns who had for years been a colleague of Jerry Wexler and the Ertegun brothers at Atlantic. Aretha was convinced that Wexler had put Berns up to signing Erma as some kind of power play. There was only one problem with this -- it simply wasn't true. As Wexler later explained “Bert and I had suffered a bad falling-out, even though I had enormous respect for him. After all, he was the guy who brought over guitarist Jimmy Page from England to play on our sessions. Bert, Ahmet, Nesuhi, and I had started a label together—Bang!—where Bert produced Van Morrison's first album. But Bert also had a penchant for trouble. He courted the wise guys. He wanted total control over every last aspect of our business dealings. Finally it was too much, and the Erteguns and I let him go. He sued us for breach of contract and suddenly we were enemies. I felt that he signed Erma, an excellent singer, not merely for her talent but as a way to get back at me. If I could make a hit with Aretha, he'd show me up by making an even bigger hit on Erma. Because there was always an undercurrent of rivalry between the sisters, this only added to the tension.” There were two things that resulted from this paranoia on Aretha's part. The first was that she and Wexler, who had been on first-name terms up to that point, temporarily went back to being "Mr. Wexler" and "Miss Franklin" to each other. And the second was that Aretha no longer wanted Carolyn and Erma to be her main backing vocalists, though they would continue to appear on her future records on occasion. From this point on, the Sweet Inspirations would be the main backing vocalists for Aretha in the studio throughout her golden era [xxcut line (and when the Sweet Inspirations themselves weren't on the record, often it would be former members of the group taking their place)]: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)"] The last day of sessions for Aretha Arrives was July the twenty-third, 1967. And as we heard in the episode on "I Was Made to Love Her", that was the day that the Detroit riots started. To recap briefly, that was four days of rioting started because of a history of racist policing, made worse by those same racist police overreacting to the initial protests. By the end of those four days, the National Guard, 82nd Airborne Division, and the 101st Airborne from Clarksville were all called in to deal with the violence, which left forty-three dead (of whom thirty-three were Black and only one was a police officer), 1,189 people were injured, and over 7,200 arrested, almost all of them Black. Those days in July would be a turning point for almost every musician based in Detroit. In particular, the police had murdered three members of the soul group the Dramatics, in a massacre of which the author John Hersey, who had been asked by President Johnson to be part of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders but had decided that would compromise his impartiality and did an independent journalistic investigation, said "The episode contained all the mythic themes of racial strife in the United States: the arm of the law taking the law into its own hands; interracial sex; the subtle poison of racist thinking by “decent” men who deny they are racists; the societal limbo into which, ever since slavery, so many young black men have been driven by our country; ambiguous justice in the courts; and the devastation in both black and white human lives that follows in the wake of violence as surely as ruinous and indiscriminate flood after torrents" But these were also the events that radicalised the MC5 -- the group had been playing a gig as Tim Buckley's support act when the rioting started, and guitarist Wayne Kramer decided afterwards to get stoned and watch the fires burning down the city through a telescope -- which police mistook for a rifle, leading to the National Guard knocking down Kramer's door. The MC5 would later cover "The Motor City is Burning", John Lee Hooker's song about the events: [Excerpt: The MC5, "The Motor City is Burning"] It would also be a turning point for Motown, too, in ways we'll talk about in a few future episodes. And it was a political turning point too -- Michigan Governor George Romney, a liberal Republican (at a time when such people existed) had been the favourite for the Republican Presidential candidacy when he'd entered the race in December 1966, but as racial tensions ramped up in Detroit during the early months of 1967 he'd started trailing Richard Nixon, a man who was consciously stoking racists' fears. President Johnson, the incumbent Democrat, who was at that point still considering standing for re-election, made sure to make it clear to everyone during the riots that the decision to call in the National Guard had been made at the State level, by Romney, rather than at the Federal level. That wasn't the only thing that removed the possibility of a Romney presidency, but it was a big part of the collapse of his campaign, and the, as it turned out, irrevocable turn towards right-authoritarianism that the party took with Nixon's Southern Strategy. Of course, Aretha Franklin had little way of knowing what was to come and how the riots would change the city and the country over the following decades. What she was primarily concerned about was the safety of her father, and to a lesser extent that of her sister-in-law Earline who was staying with him. Aretha, Carolyn, and Erma all tried to keep in constant touch with their father while they were out of town, and Aretha even talked about hiring private detectives to travel to Detroit, find her father, and get him out of the city to safety. But as her brother Cecil pointed out, he was probably the single most loved man among Black people in Detroit, and was unlikely to be harmed by the rioters, while he was too famous for the police to kill with impunity. Reverend Franklin had been having a stressful time anyway -- he had recently been fined for tax evasion, an action he was convinced the IRS had taken because of his friendship with Dr King and his role in the civil rights movement -- and according to Cecil "Aretha begged Daddy to move out of the city entirely. She wanted him to find another congregation in California, where he was especially popular—or at least move out to the suburbs. But he wouldn't budge. He said that, more than ever, he was needed to point out the root causes of the riots—the economic inequality, the pervasive racism in civic institutions, the woefully inadequate schools in inner-city Detroit, and the wholesale destruction of our neighborhoods by urban renewal. Some ministers fled the city, but not our father. The horror of what happened only recommitted him. He would not abandon his political agenda." To make things worse, Aretha was worried about her father in other ways -- as her marriage to Ted White was starting to disintegrate, she was looking to her father for guidance, and actually wanted him to take over her management. Eventually, Ruth Bowen, her booking agent, persuaded her brother Cecil that this was a job he could do, and that she would teach him everything he needed to know about the music business. She started training him up while Aretha was still married to White, in the expectation that that marriage couldn't last. Jerry Wexler, who only a few months earlier had been seeing Ted White as an ally in getting "product" from Franklin, had now changed his tune -- partly because the sale of Atlantic had gone through in the meantime. He later said “Sometimes she'd call me at night, and, in that barely audible little-girl voice of hers, she'd tell me that she wasn't sure she could go on. She always spoke in generalities. She never mentioned her husband, never gave me specifics of who was doing what to whom. And of course I knew better than to ask. She just said that she was tired of dealing with so much. My heart went out to her. She was a woman who suffered silently. She held so much in. I'd tell her to take as much time off as she needed. We had a lot of songs in the can that we could release without new material. ‘Oh, no, Jerry,' she'd say. ‘I can't stop recording. I've written some new songs, Carolyn's written some new songs. We gotta get in there and cut 'em.' ‘Are you sure?' I'd ask. ‘Positive,' she'd say. I'd set up the dates and typically she wouldn't show up for the first or second sessions. Carolyn or Erma would call me to say, ‘Ree's under the weather.' That was tough because we'd have asked people like Joe South and Bobby Womack to play on the sessions. Then I'd reschedule in the hopes she'd show." That third album she recorded in 1967, Lady Soul, was possibly her greatest achievement. The opening track, and second single, "Chain of Fools", released in November, was written by Don Covay -- or at least it's credited as having been written by Covay. There's a gospel record that came out around the same time on a very small label based in Houston -- "Pains of Life" by Rev. E. Fair And The Sensational Gladys Davis Trio: [Excerpt: Rev. E. Fair And The Sensational Gladys Davis Trio, "Pains of Life"] I've seen various claims online that that record came out shortly *before* "Chain of Fools", but I can't find any definitive evidence one way or the other -- it was on such a small label that release dates aren't available anywhere. Given that the B-side, which I haven't been able to track down online, is called "Wait Until the Midnight Hour", my guess is that rather than this being a case of Don Covay stealing the melody from an obscure gospel record he'd have had little chance to hear, it's the gospel record rewriting a then-current hit to be about religion, but I thought it worth mentioning. The song was actually written by Covay after Jerry Wexler asked him to come up with some songs for Otis Redding, but Wexler, after hearing it, decided it was better suited to Franklin, who gave an astonishing performance: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Chain of Fools"] Arif Mardin, the arranger of the album, said of that track “I was listed as the arranger of ‘Chain of Fools,' but I can't take credit. Aretha walked into the studio with the chart fully formed inside her head. The arrangement is based around the harmony vocals provided by Carolyn and Erma. To add heft, the Sweet Inspirations joined in. The vision of the song is entirely Aretha's.” According to Wexler, that's not *quite* true -- according to him, Joe South came up with the guitar part that makes up the intro, and he also said that when he played what he thought was the finished track to Ellie Greenwich, she came up with another vocal line for the backing vocals, which she overdubbed. But the core of the record's sound is definitely pure Aretha -- and Carolyn Franklin said that there was a reason for that. As she said later “Aretha didn't write ‘Chain,' but she might as well have. It was her story. When we were in the studio putting on the backgrounds with Ree doing lead, I knew she was singing about Ted. Listen to the lyrics talking about how for five long years she thought he was her man. Then she found out she was nothing but a link in the chain. Then she sings that her father told her to come on home. Well, he did. She sings about how her doctor said to take it easy. Well, he did too. She was drinking so much we thought she was on the verge of a breakdown. The line that slew me, though, was the one that said how one of these mornings the chain is gonna break but until then she'll take all she can take. That summed it up. Ree knew damn well that this man had been doggin' her since Jump Street. But somehow she held on and pushed it to the breaking point." [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Chain of Fools"] That made number one on the R&B charts, and number two on the hot one hundred, kept from the top by "Judy In Disguise (With Glasses)" by John Fred and his Playboy Band -- a record that very few people would say has stood the test of time as well. The other most memorable track on the album was the one chosen as the first single, released in September. As Carole King told the story, she and Gerry Goffin were feeling like their career was in a slump. While they had had a huge run of hits in the early sixties through 1965, they had only had two new hits in 1966 -- "Goin' Back" for Dusty Springfield and "Don't Bring Me Down" for the Animals, and neither of those were anything like as massive as their previous hits. And up to that point in 1967, they'd only had one -- "Pleasant Valley Sunday" for the Monkees. They had managed to place several songs on Monkees albums and the TV show as well, so they weren't going to starve, but the rise of self-contained bands that were starting to dominate the charts, and Phil Spector's temporary retirement, meant there simply wasn't the opportunity for them to place material that there had been. They were also getting sick of travelling to the West Coast all the time, because as their children were growing slightly older they didn't want to disrupt their lives in New York, and were thinking of approaching some of the New York based labels and seeing if they needed songs. They were particularly considering Atlantic, because soul was more open to outside songwriters than other genres. As it happened, though, they didn't have to approach Atlantic, because Atlantic approached them. They were walking down Broadway when a limousine pulled up, and Jerry Wexler stuck his head out of the window. He'd come up with a good title that he wanted to use for a song for Aretha, would they be interested in writing a song called "Natural Woman"? They said of course they would, and Wexler drove off. They wrote the song that night, and King recorded a demo the next morning: [Excerpt: Carole King, "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman (demo)"] They gave Wexler a co-writing credit because he had suggested the title. King later wrote in her autobiography "Hearing Aretha's performance of “Natural Woman” for the first time, I experienced a rare speechless moment. To this day I can't convey how I felt in mere words. Anyone who had written a song in 1967 hoping it would be performed by a singer who could take it to the highest level of excellence, emotional connection, and public exposure would surely have wanted that singer to be Aretha Franklin." She went on to say "But a recording that moves people is never just about the artist and the songwriters. It's about people like Jerry and Ahmet, who matched the songwriters with a great title and a gifted artist; Arif Mardin, whose magnificent orchestral arrangement deserves the place it will forever occupy in popular music history; Tom Dowd, whose engineering skills captured the magic of this memorable musical moment for posterity; and the musicians in the rhythm section, the orchestral players, and the vocal contributions of the background singers—among them the unforgettable “Ah-oo!” after the first line of the verse. And the promotion and marketing people helped this song reach more people than it might have without them." And that's correct -- unlike "Chain of Fools", this time Franklin did let Arif Mardin do most of the arrangement work -- though she came up with the piano part that Spooner Oldham plays on the record. Mardin said that because of the song's hymn-like feel they wanted to go for a more traditional written arrangement. He said "She loved the song to the point where she said she wanted to concentrate on the vocal and vocal alone. I had written a string chart and horn chart to augment the chorus and hired Ralph Burns to conduct. After just a couple of takes, we had it. That's when Ralph turned to me with wonder in his eyes. Ralph was one of the most celebrated arrangers of the modern era. He had done ‘Early Autumn' for Woody Herman and Stan Getz, and ‘Georgia on My Mind' for Ray Charles. He'd worked with everyone. ‘This woman comes from another planet' was all Ralph said. ‘She's just here visiting.'” [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman"] By this point there was a well-functioning team making Franklin's records -- while the production credits would vary over the years, they were all essentially co-productions by the team of Franklin, Wexler, Mardin and Dowd, all collaborating and working together with a more-or-less unified purpose, and the backing was always by the same handful of session musicians and some combination of the Sweet Inspirations and Aretha's sisters. That didn't mean that occasional guests couldn't get involved -- as we discussed in the Cream episode, Eric Clapton played guitar on "Good to Me as I am to You": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Good to Me as I am to You"] Though that was one of the rare occasions on one of these records where something was overdubbed. Clapton apparently messed up the guitar part when playing behind Franklin, because he was too intimidated by playing with her, and came back the next day to redo his part without her in the studio. At this point, Aretha was at the height of her fame. Just before the final batch of album sessions began she appeared in the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, and she was making regular TV appearances, like one on the Mike Douglas Show where she duetted with Frankie Valli on "That's Life": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin and Frankie Valli, "That's Life"] But also, as Wexler said “Her career was kicking into high gear. Contending and resolving both the professional and personal challenges were too much. She didn't think she could do both, and I didn't blame her. Few people could. So she let the personal slide and concentrated on the professional. " Her concert promoter Ruth Bowen said of this time "Her father and Dr. King were putting pressure on her to sing everywhere, and she felt obligated. The record company was also screaming for more product. And I had a mountain of offers on my desk that kept getting higher with every passing hour. They wanted her in Europe. They wanted her in Latin America. They wanted her in every major venue in the U.S. TV was calling. She was being asked to do guest appearances on every show from Carol Burnett to Andy Williams to the Hollywood Palace. She wanted to do them all and she wanted to do none of them. She wanted to do them all because she's an entertainer who burns with ambition. She wanted to do none of them because she was emotionally drained. She needed to go away and renew her strength. I told her that at least a dozen times. She said she would, but she didn't listen to me." The pressures from her father and Dr King are a recurring motif in interviews with people about this period. Franklin was always a very political person, and would throughout her life volunteer time and money to liberal political causes and to the Democratic Party, but this was the height of her activism -- the Civil Rights movement was trying to capitalise on the gains it had made in the previous couple of years, and celebrity fundraisers and performances at rallies were an important way to do that. And at this point there were few bigger celebrities in America than Aretha Franklin. At a concert in her home town of Detroit on February the sixteenth, 1968, the Mayor declared the day Aretha Franklin Day. At the same show, Billboard, Record World *and* Cash Box magazines all presented her with plaques for being Female Vocalist of the Year. And Dr. King travelled up to be at the show and congratulate her publicly for all her work with his organisation, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Backstage at that show, Dr. King talked to Aretha's father, Reverend Franklin, about what he believed would be the next big battle -- a strike in Memphis: [Excerpt, Martin Luther King, "Mountaintop Speech" -- "And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy—what is the other bread?—Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven't been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying, they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right."] The strike in question was the Memphis Sanitation Workers' strike which had started a few days before. The struggle for Black labour rights was an integral part of the civil rights movement, and while it's not told that way in the sanitised version of the story that's made it into popular culture, the movement led by King was as much about economic justice as social justice -- King was a democratic socialist, and believed that economic oppression was both an effect of and cause of other forms of racial oppression, and that the rights of Black workers needed to be fought for. In 1967 he had set up a new organisation, the Poor People's Campaign, which was set to march on Washington to demand a program that included full employment, a guaranteed income -- King was strongly influenced in his later years by the ideas of Henry George, the proponent of a universal basic income based on land value tax -- the annual building of half a million affordable homes, and an end to the war in Vietnam. This was King's main focus in early 1968, and he saw the sanitation workers' strike as a major part of this campaign. Memphis was one of the most oppressive cities in the country, and its largely Black workforce of sanitation workers had been trying for most of the 1960s to unionise, and strike-breakers had been called in to stop them, and many of them had been fired by their white supervisors with no notice. They were working in unsafe conditions, for utterly inadequate wages, and the city government were ardent segregationists. After two workers had died on the first of February from using unsafe equipment, the union demanded changes -- safer working conditions, better wages, and recognition of the union. The city council refused, and almost all the sanitation workers stayed home and stopped work. After a few days, the council relented and agreed to their terms, but the Mayor, Henry Loeb, an ardent white supremacist who had stood on a platform of opposing desegregation, and who had previously been the Public Works Commissioner who had put these unsafe conditions in place, refused to listen. As far as he was concerned, he was the only one who could recognise the union, and he wouldn't. The workers continued their strike, marching holding signs that simply read "I am a Man": [Excerpt: Stevie Wonder, "Blowing in the Wind"] The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the NAACP had been involved in organising support for the strikes from an early stage, and King visited Memphis many times. Much of the time he spent visiting there was spent negotiating with a group of more militant activists, who called themselves The Invaders and weren't completely convinced by King's nonviolent approach -- they believed that violence and rioting got more attention than non-violent protests. King explained to them that while he had been persuaded by Gandhi's writings of the moral case for nonviolent protest, he was also persuaded that it was pragmatically necessary -- asking the young men "how many guns do we have and how many guns do they have?", and pointing out as he often did that when it comes to violence a minority can't win against an armed majority. Rev Franklin went down to Memphis on the twenty-eighth of March to speak at a rally Dr. King was holding, but as it turned out the rally was cancelled -- the pre-rally march had got out of hand, with some people smashing windows, and Memphis police had, like the police in Detroit the previous year, violently overreacted, clubbing and gassing protestors and shooting and killing one unarmed teenage boy, Larry Payne. The day after Payne's funeral, Dr King was back in Memphis, though this time Rev Franklin was not with him. On April the third, he gave a speech which became known as the "Mountaintop Speech", in which he talked about the threats that had been made to his life: [Excerpt: Martin Luther King, "Mountaintop Speech": “And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."] The next day, Martin Luther King was shot dead. James Earl Ray, a white supremacist, pled guilty to the murder, and the evidence against him seems overwhelming from what I've read, but the King family have always claimed that the murder was part of a larger conspiracy and that Ray was not the gunman. Aretha was obviously distraught, and she attended the funeral, as did almost every other prominent Black public figure. James Baldwin wrote of the funeral: "In the pew directly before me sat Marlon Brando, Sammy Davis, Eartha Kitt—covered in black, looking like a lost, ten-year-old girl—and Sidney Poitier, in the same pew, or nearby. Marlon saw me, and nodded. The atmosphere was black, with a tension indescribable—as though something, perhaps the heavens, perhaps the earth, might crack. Everyone sat very still. The actual service sort of washed over me, in waves. It wasn't that it seemed unreal; it was the most real church service I've ever sat through in my life, or ever hope to sit through; but I have a childhood hangover thing about not weeping in public, and I was concentrating on holding myself together. I did not want to weep for Martin, tears seemed futile. But I may also have been afraid, and I could not have been the only one, that if I began to weep I would not be able to stop. There was more than enough to weep for, if one was to weep—so many of us, cut down, so soon. Medgar, Malcolm, Martin: and their widows, and their children. Reverend Ralph David Abernathy asked a certain sister to sing a song which Martin had loved—“Once more,” said Ralph David, “for Martin and for me,” and he sat down." Many articles and books on Aretha Franklin say that she sang at King's funeral. In fact she didn't, but there's a simple reason for the confusion. King's favourite song was the Thomas Dorsey gospel song "Take My Hand, Precious Lord", and indeed almost his last words were to ask a trumpet player, Ben Branch, if he would play the song at the rally he was going to be speaking at on the day of his death. At his request, Mahalia Jackson, his old friend, sang the song at his private funeral, which was not filmed, unlike the public part of the funeral that Baldwin described. Four months later, though, there was another public memorial for King, and Franklin did sing "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" at that service, in front of King's weeping widow and children, and that performance *was* filmed, and gets conflated in people's memories with Jackson's unfilmed earlier performance: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord (at Martin Luther King Memorial)"] Four years later, she would sing that at Mahalia Jackson's funeral. Through all this, Franklin had been working on her next album, Aretha Now, the sessions for which started more or less as soon as the sessions for Lady Soul had finished. The album was, in fact, bookended by deaths that affected Aretha. Just as King died at the end of the sessions, the beginning came around the time of the death of Otis Redding -- the sessions were cancelled for a day while Wexler travelled to Georgia for Redding's funeral, which Franklin was too devastated to attend, and Wexler would later say that the extra emotion in her performances on the album came from her emotional pain at Redding's death. The lead single on the album, "Think", was written by Franklin and -- according to the credits anyway -- her husband Ted White, and is very much in the same style as "Respect", and became another of her most-loved hits: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Think"] But probably the song on Aretha Now that now resonates the most is one that Jerry Wexler tried to persuade her not to record, and was only released as a B-side. Indeed, "I Say a Little Prayer" was a song that had already once been a hit after being a reject. Hal David, unlike Burt Bacharach, was a fairly political person and inspired by the protest song movement, and had been starting to incorporate his concerns about the political situation and the Vietnam War into his lyrics -- though as with many such writers, he did it in much less specific ways than a Phil Ochs or a Bob Dylan. This had started with "What the World Needs Now is Love", a song Bacharach and David had written for Jackie DeShannon in 1965: [Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, "What the "World Needs Now is Love"] But he'd become much more overtly political for "The Windows of the World", a song they wrote for Dionne Warwick. Warwick has often said it's her favourite of her singles, but it wasn't a big hit -- Bacharach blamed himself for that, saying "Dionne recorded it as a single and I really blew it. I wrote a bad arrangement and the tempo was too fast, and I really regret making it the way I did because it's a good song." [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "The Windows of the World"] For that album, Bacharach and David had written another track, "I Say a Little Prayer", which was not as explicitly political, but was intended by David to have an implicit anti-war message, much like other songs of the period like "Last Train to Clarksville". David had sons who were the right age to be drafted, and while it's never stated, "I Say a Little Prayer" was written from the perspective of a woman whose partner is away fighting in the war, but is still in her thoughts: [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "I Say a Little Prayer"] The recording of Dionne Warwick's version was marked by stress. Bacharach had a particular way of writing music to tell the musicians the kind of feel he wanted for the part -- he'd write nonsense words above the stave, and tell the musicians to play the parts as if they were singing those words. The trumpet player hired for the session, Ernie Royal, got into a row with Bacharach about this unorthodox way of communicating musical feeling, and the track ended up taking ten takes (as opposed to the normal three for a Bacharach session), with Royal being replaced half-way through the session. Bacharach was never happy with the track even after all the work it had taken, and he fought to keep it from being released at all, saying the track was taken at too fast a tempo. It eventually came out as an album track nearly eighteen months after it was recorded -- an eternity in 1960s musical timescales -- and DJs started playing it almost as soon as it came out. Scepter records rushed out a single, over Bacharach's objections, but as he later said "One thing I love about the record business is how wrong I was. Disc jockeys all across the country started playing the track, and the song went to number four on the charts and then became the biggest hit Hal and I had ever written for Dionne." [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "I Say a Little Prayer"] Oddly, the B-side for Warwick's single, "Theme From the Valley of the Dolls" did even better, reaching number two. Almost as soon as the song was released as a single, Franklin started playing around with the song backstage, and in April 1968, right around the time of Dr. King's death, she recorded a version. Much as Burt Bacharach had been against releasing Dionne Warwick's version, Jerry Wexler was against Aretha even recording the song, saying later “I advised Aretha not to record it. I opposed it for two reasons. First, to cover a song only twelve weeks after the original reached the top of the charts was not smart business. You revisit such a hit eight months to a year later. That's standard practice. But more than that, Bacharach's melody, though lovely, was peculiarly suited to a lithe instrument like Dionne Warwick's—a light voice without the dark corners or emotional depths that define Aretha. Also, Hal David's lyric was also somewhat girlish and lacked the gravitas that Aretha required. “Aretha usually listened to me in the studio, but not this time. She had written a vocal arrangement for the Sweet Inspirations that was undoubtedly strong. Cissy Houston, Dionne's cousin, told me that Aretha was on the right track—she was seeing this song in a new way and had come up with a new groove. Cissy was on Aretha's side. Tommy Dowd and Arif were on Aretha's side. So I had no choice but to cave." It's quite possible that Wexler's objections made Franklin more, rather than less, determined to record the song. She regarded Warwick as a hated rival, as she did almost every prominent female singer of her generation and younger ones, and would undoubtedly have taken the implication that there was something that Warwick was simply better at than her to heart. [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer"] Wexler realised as soon as he heard it in the studio that Franklin's version was great, and Bacharach agreed, telling Franklin's biographer David Ritz “As much as I like the original recording by Dionne, there's no doubt that Aretha's is a better record. She imbued the song with heavy soul and took it to a far deeper place. Hers is the definitive version.” -- which is surprising because Franklin's version simplifies some of Bacharach's more unusual chord voicings, something he often found extremely upsetting. Wexler still though thought there was no way the song would be a hit, and it's understandable that he thought that way. Not only had it only just been on the charts a few months earlier, but it was the kind of song that wouldn't normally be a hit at all, and certainly not in the kind of rhythmic soul music for which Franklin was known. Almost everything she ever recorded is in simple time signatures -- 4/4, waltz time, or 6/8 -- but this is a Bacharach song so it's staggeringly metrically irregular. Normally even with semi-complex things I'm usually good at figuring out how to break it down into bars, but here I actually had to purchase a copy of the sheet music in order to be sure I was right about what's going on. I'm going to count beats along with the record here so you can see what I mean. The verse has three bars of 4/4, one bar of 2/4, and three more bars of 4/4, all repeated: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer" with me counting bars over verse] While the chorus has a bar of 4/4, a bar of 3/4 but with a chord change half way through so it sounds like it's in two if you're paying attention to the harmonic changes, two bars of 4/4, another waltz-time bar sounding like it's in two, two bars of four, another bar of three sounding in two, a bar of four, then three more bars of four but the first of those is *written* as four but played as if it's in six-eight time (but you can keep the four/four pulse going if you're counting): [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer" with me counting bars over verse] I don't expect you to have necessarily followed that in great detail, but the point should be clear -- this was not some straightforward dance song. Incidentally, that bar played as if it's six/eight was something Aretha introduced to make the song even more irregular than how Bacharach wrote it. And on top of *that* of course the lyrics mixed the secular and the sacred, something that was still taboo in popular music at that time -- this is only a couple of years after Capitol records had been genuinely unsure about putting out the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows", and Franklin's gospel-inflected vocals made the religious connection even more obvious. But Franklin was insistent that the record go out as a single, and eventually it was released as the B-side to the far less impressive "The House That Jack Built". It became a double-sided hit, with the A-side making number two on the R&B chart and number seven on the Hot One Hundred, while "I Say a Little Prayer" made number three on the R&B chart and number ten overall. In the UK, "I Say a Little Prayer" made number four and became her biggest ever solo UK hit. It's now one of her most-remembered songs, while the A-side is largely forgotten: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer"] For much of the
Welcome to "McCartney: A Life in Lyrics". This podcast will take you into the mind of one of the greatest songwriters of all time: Paul McCartney. The result is a combination master class, memoir, and improvised journey with one of the most beloved figures in popular music. Each episode focuses on one song from McCartney's iconic catalog – spanning early Beatles through his more recent solo work. McCartney, together with his friend, the poet Paul Muldoon, dissects the people, experiences, and art that inspired his songwriting. Season One drops weekly starting October 4th, and features the stories behind songs like Eleanor Rigby, Let It Be, Band on the Run and many more. Subscribe now.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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