Podcasts about Fonda

Mexican-born Michelin-starred chef Santiago Lastra – whose restaurants include KOL and Fonda – orders his dream meal this week. Now, where did we put the sea buckthorn juice? Santiago Lastra's new London restaurant Fonda is now open – go to fondalondon.com. And for details about KOL go to kolrestaurant.com. Follow Santiago on Instagram @santiagolas Off Menu is a comedy podcast hosted by Ed Gamble and James Acaster.Produced, recorded and edited by Ben Williams for Plosive.Video production by Megan McCarthy for Plosive.Artwork by Paul Gilbey (photography and design).Follow Off Menu on Twitter and Instagram: @offmenuofficial.And go to our website www.offmenupodcast.co.uk for a list of restaurants recommended on the show.Watch Ed and James's YouTube series 'Just Puddings'. Watch here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Join host Craig Dalton and Trek Travel's Rich Snodsmith as they take you on an exhilarating journey through the heart of gravel cycling in Italy. In this episode of The Gravel Ride podcast, they share their recent experience at the Strade Bianche Gran Fondo trip organized by Trek Travel. With over three decades of friendship, these two avid cyclists reminisce about their chance meeting at the Lugano Cycling World Championships in 1996 and their shared passion for the sport. Throughout the episode, Rich and Craig discuss their incredible adventures, from vintage bikes at L'Eroica and witnessing the Strade Bianche professional bike race, to participating in the challenging 140-kilometer Gran Fondo alongside 7,000 other riders. They also share their encounters with pro cyclists and the camaraderie of the Trek Travel group. If you're looking for an immersive and unforgettable gravel cycling experience, this episode will inspire you to find dirt under your wheels and explore the breathtaking landscapes of Italy. Topics discussed: Introducing the Strade Bianche Gran Fondo trip with Trek Travel  Riding an international Gran Fondo  Experiencing the energy and spectacle of professional bike races  Meeting pro cyclists and gaining insights into the sport  Challenges and rewards of gravel riding in Italy  Stunning scenery, castles, and brick towns on the route  The supportive and well-organized nature of Trek Travel trips  Exciting plans for future cycling adventures Full Transcript: Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:00:03 to 00:00:33 Hello and welcome to the Gravelride podcast, where we go deep on the sport of gravel cycling through in depth interviews with product designers, event organizers and athletes who are pioneering the sport. I'm your host, Craig Dalton, a lifelong cyclist who discovered gravel cycling back in 2016 and made all the mistakes you don't need to make. I approach each episode as a beginner to unlock all the knowledge you need to become a great gravel cyclist. This week on the show, we welcome Rich Snodsmith from Trek Travel. Rich is one of my oldest cycling friends. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:00:33 to 00:01:00 We met over 30 years ago, actually, in Italy. As you'll hear from our story, Rich and I were recently in Siena in Italy for the Strada Bianchi Gran Fondo trip. With track travel, we were able to watch both the professional bike race as well as participate in a 140 kilometer mass start. Gran Fondo across the white roads, the white gravel roads of Siena. Fantastic trip. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:01:00 to 00:01:10 I can't wait for you to hear more of the details. With that said, let's jump right into the show. Hey, Rich, welcome to the show. Hey, Craig, good to see you. Thanks for having me on. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:01:10 to 00:01:36 Yeah, absolutely. You and I just shared a magical experience on the roads and trails of Italy, which is the purpose of you joining this call. But you, you and I have a rich history, no pun intended, of cycling experiences in Italy. That's right. We met randomly in 1996 at the Lugano Cycling World Championships and have stayed friends ever since. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:01:36 to 00:01:51 Yeah, fortunately I. I eventually moved to San Francisco a few years later. So we were able to ride together, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, we were able to ride together for. Gosh, it's hard to believe it's three decades at this point, which is crazy to think about. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:01:51 to 00:02:14 My end of our Lugano story was I was working in Italy and my colleague, who we both know, Jeff Sanchez, said to me, going to go to the World Championships and oh, by the way, we have to go pick up Rich. He's going to be at the Duomo in Milan on the way. Pre cell phones, be there at 5:00. Don't be late. Yeah, exactly. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:02:14 to 00:02:34 So super fun to finally go back to Italy together. Obviously, we've been riding on the roads and trails of Marin county for a long time, but to finally have the stars align on this trip was fantastic. Yeah, it was great to get out there and do that again. We also saw another World Championships together in Richmond, Virginia. That's right, yeah. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:02:34 to 00:02:40 The thing for the World Championships, you've. Seen a few and we've got a future one. I Think in our plans, right? Oh, yeah. Montreal 2026. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:02:40 to 00:02:55 Let's go. There we go. See you there. So this, you put the idea of this trip in my mind probably December of last year. And the trip, to be specific, because I don't think we've mentioned it, although I probably mentioned it in the intro. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:02:55 to 00:03:09 Is the Strada Bianchi professional bike race trip with Trek Travel. Was it me that put it in your mind? I was asking you where you were going to go. I thought you. I thought you convinced me, but I was down as soon as you suggested it. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:03:11 to 00:03:52 It's interesting. Obviously, we're on a gravel cycling podcast and this is sort of a. A hybrid trip almost because we're road riding, but we're riding on the Strada Bianca, the white roads of Tuscany outside Siena. And for those listeners who are fans of both professional road racing and gravel cycling, I think Strada Bianchi is the race that gets us most excited because we see the coverage, we see the professional road riders riding on gravel, and the visuals are just awesome. And they're kind of like what we experience as gravel racers and riders routinely. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:03:52 to 00:04:19 But so cool to see all the pro bike teams go through and participate in the event. So I was super stoked, obviously. I'd been on a Trek Travel gravel tour in Girona a couple years prior, so I'd had that experience with Trek, but this is the first kind of pro bike race enabled tour that I'd ever been on. Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting to blend those things together. I mean, you being more of a gravel rider, me being more of a road rider. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:04:20 to 00:04:59 But the last few trips I've taken with Trek Travel have been gravel trips. You know, getting out there and trying new things, trying the Vermont trip, trying the Dolomites last year, this was just a really cool experience to put like my fandom of the road cycling and racing world along with this, like, almost instant classic. The race has only been around for 20 years and it's like, become a real fan favorite. Yeah, I was, I was looking up some of the history of the race and I didn't realize that it started out with Laroica, which is a. An event that many people have heard about where you ride vintage bikes on this course. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:04:59 to 00:05:18 And the professional bike race emerged. So the loraca started in 1997. In 2007 is when the professional bike race emerged. So it's interesting. And obviously being in that region and riding in that region, we saw signs of Loraka all over the place, right? Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:05:18 to 00:05:38 Yeah, we Even ate at the Laroica Cafe. That was incredible. Yeah, exactly. And I came home with a Loracha sweatshirt as well. And then the, the, the cool thing, and we probably failed to mention it at this point is there's the Gran Fondo the day after, after Strada Bianchi, which was awesome. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:05:38 to 00:05:59 So we actually get to go on a 140 kilometer rides. A ride on the similar roads as the professionals. Yeah, it's not the full men's road course, but it's pretty close to the women's road course and we cover all the last, you know, climbs, you know, that the. Both the men's and the women's race covered. That was really cool. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:05:59 to 00:06:21 Especially after seeing them finish the day before and then going out and riding those roads, seeing where Poga crashed and then, you know, doing that last 20k of climbs is just bananas, beautiful and hard. It was pretty rewarding that ride. I can't wait to get into that details a little bit more of the event later. I did. I'm. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:06:21 to 00:06:46 As I'm speaking, I misspoke because I have been to Europe once before around the Tour of Flanders and did the Tour of Flanders grandson do, which I noted. And in speaking to the Trek travel guides, you've got a series of awesome trips that month in Flanders of a similar vein. Right. You do have Perry Roubaix and. Or a Flanders trip. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:06:46 to 00:06:57 Yeah. You can choose the whole Holy Week, you could do both Flanders and Roubaix or you can break it into chunks and do one or the other. So it's. Yeah. If you're a pro race fan, that's a nice companion to Strat Bianca. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:06:57 to 00:07:10 The. The Flanders Roubaix ultimate weekend or ultimate week there. And then one of the highlights of the year, presumably for Trek travel is your Tour de France tours. For sure. We take over a couple hundred people there every year. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:07:11 to 00:07:19 We do usually do five or six trips through the Alps and the Pyrenees. It's. That's a pretty exciting one too, if you've never been to the Tour. For sure. Yeah. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:07:19 to 00:07:45 Well, let's talk through the trip a little bit that we participated in because I think it'll give people a flavor. I've talked about my, my experience with track in Girona and my general love of gravel travel. But more extensively, I love traveling by bike and having these experiences because it's just, it's just so much fun. So we start off the trip, it's a pretty quick trip relative to some others because in a five day timeline. Right. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:07:45 to 00:08:01 So we flew over. You'd Already been in Europe, but I flew over to Florence and met you the night before. And day one, we basically just get picked up by our guides and head on over to Siena, which is about an hour and a half away. Yep. And then the bikes. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:08:01 to 00:08:21 Yeah, straight onto the bikes. And the beauty of. The beauty of this trip and all the truck travel trips is they've got bikes already set up for you, so you send your measurements and if you want to ride your own saddles or pedals, you can, you're welcome to bring those, but they'll basically get it dialed. And that. That first day, I think we went for maybe an hour and a half shakeout ride just to see how the bike. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:08:21 to 00:08:31 30 miles. Yeah, yeah. And how many people were in our group. We had 19 with us and then three guides. Okay, so is that pretty typical on these pro bike? Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:08:31 to 00:08:46 Sort of. They tend to sell out. They're pretty popular. And guests will go back and forth between the Strada Bianca or. I think quite a few of the guests or folks that were on our trip had done the ultimate Holy Week trip before with Flanders and Roubaix and some had done the tour as well. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:08:46 to 00:09:03 Yeah. It was pretty fascinating talking to some of the men and women on our trip to learn just how many trips they had done with you guys. Yeah, it was neat to like show up and kind of already have the camaraderie of. A lot of the guests on that trip had been with Nick or Viba or Gio on previous trips. So they were. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:09:03 to 00:09:21 There was already sort of a built in fan base there. Yeah. And I suppose it's. I suppose it's the nature of this type of trip, but I felt like everybody in the crew was quite competent on the bike and there were some people who were faster than us, some people slower than us, but everybody was mostly faster. Yeah. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:09:21 to 00:09:25 There's an impressive riders on this trip. It was pretty, pretty great. Yeah. Yeah. And the. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:09:26 to 00:09:45 And the guides were equally impressive both, you know, across the week. Just getting to know them personally, seeing their fitness. A, but B. And more importantly, they're just understanding of all the sectors and the roads that we'd be riding and their, their love of Strada Bianchi. Yeah, the knowledge and passion for the race was definitely evident. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:09:45 to 00:09:57 It was pretty cool. Yeah. So we got a shakeout ride on the Monday or, sorry, on the first day of the trip. Yeah. And then the second day we went a bit longer and kind of got our first real look at some of the. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:09:57 to 00:10:19 The white roads. Yeah, we think it was a 50. It was a nice lead up to the Fondo because it was like a 30 mile day one, a 50 mile on day two, which was pretty challenging. It was, but not like back breaking. And then we went to the race to view the race viewing day, which was like a gentle 30 miles before the Fonda, which was kind of a nice way to structure the week. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:10:19 to 00:10:42 Yeah. When I think when I first looked at that mileage, I'm like, gosh, I'm going all the way to Italy. I just want to ride my ass off. But as, as it came down to it between like travel fatigue, it being earlier in the year, and the punchiness of those climbs we were experiencing on day two, like that was enough in sort of those first couple days. And I felt totally satisfied. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:10:42 to 00:10:56 Yeah, you can put in if you're doing the big options every day. You get 200 miles in, in four days, plus the race viewing. So it's, it's, I think it's a really well designed trip. It's, it is compact. But it's surprising how tired you can be after doing those four days. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:10:56 to 00:11:10 Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. The elevation is pretty. Every day has a nice chunk of elevation gain. Yeah. And I think for, for us, like we don't have a ton of rolling hills around where we live, they said they tend to be more sustained. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:11:10 to 00:11:28 So it definitely felt different to me. I was feeling a little underprepared that, that 50 mile day, thinking, Gosh, we've got to do 90 plus in the Gran Fondo. It's going to be a long day out there. I'm not gonna lie. I don't think I said it during the trip, but I was a little worried after the first two days. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:11:28 to 00:11:39 I was grateful for the race watching like cool down day before the Fondo. It all worked out. But yeah, yeah, yeah. So we should, I mean, we should talk through a little bit. We'll get into race day next. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:11:39 to 00:12:05 But you know, basically every day after the ride, you just leave your bike and the team cleans it, takes care of it, puts it away. You've got really nothing to do but show up and eat and enjoy yourself in Siena. Yeah, take a nap, whatever you need. We, we stayed at a great hotel, the Hotel Athena, just right outside, like in Siena, but just outside the wall. So it was easy to walk like 10 minutes into town. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:12:06 to 00:12:24 Really, really great location. I mean, one of the best things about the Fondo day was waking up to a completely clean, like just power wash, power dried, chain lubed. It was like a brand new bike getting Ready to ride out to the start. It was pretty great. Clean bike is a fast bike, so I appreciate that. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:12:24 to 00:12:40 And shammy time's training time. That's right. But yeah, those guys work their butts off to keep those bikes in great shape every morning when you show up. Yeah, no doubt about that one. Sort of topography. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:12:40 to 00:12:50 Topography note. Siena is up on a hill. Yeah. And you know, that was like warm down. There's no warm down and there's no sort of. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:12:50 to 00:13:08 In the, in the early mornings when we were rolling out, we're going downhill for 5, 10 minutes no matter what. So it was quite cool on the road out in the rollout in March, for sure. We lucked out. We, the guides every day were saying, it's not usually like this. Like it was. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:13:08 to 00:13:18 We had like mid-60s during the day, every day. And it was. Fortunately we saw almost zero rain, which was great. Would have been tough to ride those roads in the mud. A hundred percent. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:13:18 to 00:13:38 And I think it just would have taken away from how much fun we had out on the course on the third day, which is. So we, we did ride maybe 15, 20K out to, I think sector number two on the women's and men's road course. Got to see the women come through, which is a lot of fun. Right, right on one of the. Those gravel roads. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:13:38 to 00:13:49 Cheer them on. We had ridden that road the day before and then we went to a cafe. Totally overwhelmed. This local cafe with 23 people needing locusts. Yeah. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:13:49 to 00:14:07 Yeah. I think ebay went in there and basically said, I will buy your entire rack of baked goods. And he just walked him outside and he's like, get the cappuccino machine going and keep them going until we say stop. Yeah, that was great. It was a nice break between the women's and the men's race. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:14:07 to 00:14:26 It was incredible to see, like the riders go through, but then you just see the apparatus of like all the, the sort of security cars, then all the team cars. And at a certain point, both of our videos, all you can see is dust. When you're on the gravel, when everybody's raging by in the team cars, it's like, there they go. And here come. Here comes the caravan, the follow caravan. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:14:26 to 00:14:40 It's pretty cool when the safety motorcycles come by and sort of just casually brush people a little bit further to the side of the road. Get, get closer to the curb, will you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was interesting. I mean, we didn't. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:14:40 to 00:14:53 We couldn't see much of the run up of the women's race, but there was Seemingly a fracture. Even at the point in which we started watching, I think there might have been a crash before the women's race. Pretty broken up outside of the main pack. Yeah, yeah. So it was cool. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:14:53 to 00:15:21 Yeah, they were going slow enough that you could kind of really see your, your favorite athletes cruise by, which is a lot of fun. And to your point, it is always cool seeing all the support the professional athletes get in the team cars. Yeah, it was interesting to see the breakaway. You know, in the men's race you had like a two or three minute breakaway. To see them go by first and then their car, their follow cars and then seeing the, the whole peloton and like UAE on the front clearly just ready to rip it. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:15:21 to 00:15:43 It was pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we should mention that the, the night before with this trip, we had the opportunity, right, to meet the Lidl track team and we got to go on the, the, the tour bus, as I would call it, the, you know, the big bus that the riders hang out in before and after the race. No photos. Yeah, I was really excited to do some photos. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:15:43 to 00:15:53 Yeah. And they said no photos, no photos. And, and then we saw the, you know, the, the mechanics van with all the bikes. Mobile service course. That was incredible. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:15:53 to 00:16:01 Like. Yeah. How many bikes, wheels, chain, chain sets, tires. It's just like a. Incredible organization to get that all set up. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:16:01 to 00:16:09 Yeah. And then it was cool meeting. We got to meet the women's team and some of the men's team members. Do you remember who we got to talk to? We talked to the whole women's team. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:16:09 to 00:16:28 They all kind of came out. We sort of had dinner that night with them in the hotel. So we got to talk to mostly Ena Tutenberg, the director, Retta Hansen, great domestique. And then Lizzie Danan was pretty, they were pretty engaging, pretty, pretty fun to see them all chatting up and answering questions from our group. And we got to met. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:16:28 to 00:16:39 It was a little bit different with the men. They kind of came and went. But we got to meet the previous year's second place finisher Tom Scoins. That was really interesting to talk to him about his race. I think you talked a bit to Quinn Simmons. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:16:40 to 00:16:53 So we got to meet like a little bit of the whole team there, which was really cool. Yeah, it was cool. And probably not giving away any secrets. Say they, they had a buffet that was separate from our meal. They had scales to weigh their food. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:16:53 to 00:17:10 They were quite a bit more disciplined than our 19 person group. Yeah, that was, I was surprised to see that as well. I was with my back to them. So they're weighing their food, really, as I'm. As I'm shoveling my pescatarian options in. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:17:12 to 00:17:39 Um, so then we going back to race day, we see the men in the same location, then we ride ourselves back to Siena that day. Um, and I think we were able to go back to that. Well, I know we were able to go back to the hotel and then make it into the piazza for the time that the women were going to be finishing, which was awesome. We couldn't have timed it better. Yeah, it was great to get back to the hotel, drop off the bikes, grab a quick shower, and then head over there. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:17:39 to 00:18:06 To watch the last, like, 20k and see him come into the finish line was super, super exciting. It's just such a beautiful, scenic place to finish a bike race. We'll get into. I mentioned that it's up at the top of a hill, so we'll talk about what it's like finishing there, but just you've got this square that's not that big, a great, beautiful clock tower. And the imagery is just stunning. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:18:06 to 00:18:24 When they come around the final corner, there's people up in their apartments cheering them on from around the corner. And then you see a rider emerge or a sprint emerge to a slight downhill to the finish line. It's just an incredible scene. Yeah, it's pretty iconic. Like, if you think about, like, that finish line, compared to. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:18:24 to 00:18:44 You could compare it to, like, the finish in Roubaix on the velodrome or the finish on the Champs Elysees in France. It's a super, super different way to finish a bike race up that steep, the Santa Catarina steep climb into the compos. Just really unique. And we were able to get, I mean, super close to the. To the women's finish. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:18:44 to 00:18:51 Yeah, it was. That was sort of shocking how few people were there. It's sort of a bummer. We were there for the women's race. We're just going to say that now. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:18:51 to 00:19:16 So we were excited to be so close and to see the podium ceremony afterwards. But you got some great shots of Demi Vollering winning. And then we were standing right where they all finish, and they're all kind of, like, bottlenecked into this little corner and their whole team is surrounding them and people are congratulating them, and they all just look destroyed, and you're just like, wow, how can you get this close to such amazing athletes? But it was. It was really, really cool. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:19:16 to 00:19:36 Yeah, super cool. And then so we watched the celebration as they got their trophy and sprayed the champagne. We're almost close enough to get hit with champagne. I feel like that was cool. And then the track team had secured a lunch spot right on the piazza in one of the restaurants with the massive flat screen tv. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:19:36 to 00:20:02 So we were able to roll over there, joined lunch that was already in progress and watch the men's race on TV for a few hours. Yeah, that was like a really cool setup to see the women's finish go stuff our faces and, and keep track of the race while we did it and then be able to run right back outside to see the men finish in the same way. I mean it was pretty remarkable. I think we like getting kind of itchy with about 15, 20k to go. We're like, you ready? Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:20:02 to 00:20:35 Let's get out there, stake out our spot along the finish line. It was awesome. You know, being in North American, we don't always get to watch these events live as they're unfolding. So just sort of feel the energy and watch on the TV obviously that the Tom Pickock Pagachar breakaway was happening and we were all, I think all eyes were on the television at the point where they've got this great shot of Tade ripping around this corner and just hitting the deck. And I didn't think he was going to get up. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:20:35 to 00:20:47 I don't know about you. It looked, and the first time I saw it, it looked like he really wailed his head and he rolled far into the grass. Got catapulted into the grass. Yeah, yeah. I was absolutely shocked he was able to get up. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:20:47 to 00:21:22 And then it was nice to see Tom Pickock do the gentlemanly thing and you know, he, yeah, kind of shook his head after the crash but you know, clearly just soft pedaled until today came back to him. It was, it's incredible when you're either in the restaurant or like on the square with the Jumbotrons and something like that happens and you hear the whole crowd gasp, you know, like that, that like collective gasp of a few thousand people right next to you is like pretty like wow, that just happened. Exactly. A shocking mid race events for sure. Yeah, totally. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:21:22 to 00:21:50 And then once it was back on, like you said, I think with, with, you know, 15k today attacked maybe with 18k to go. And by 15 or 10k we were like, we gotta get out there and get on the streets and get right by the finish line again to see this. Yeah, it was incredible to see him come over the line first all battered and bloodied and he had, was so full of Adrenaline. He didn't say much until he got into the interviewing room. It's like right before he was going to go get his trophy that it kind of hurts now. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:21:50 to 00:22:15 It's like he had so much adrenaline to attack and finish the race, but as soon as the race is done, he's like, oh, I'm really scratched up. Yeah, he was totally tore up. And then the other interesting thing for me at the finish line was that, you know, not a lot of people actually finish the race, which is. I mean, as a professional, I get it. Like, you do your job, and then you and I will talk about how hard it is to get to the finish and. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:22:15 to 00:22:25 And why, if. If you weren't required to get there, maybe you don't get there. So I think maybe only, like, 20, 25 riders finished. Does that feel right to you? That sounds about right. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:22:25 to 00:22:39 Once. Once you're out of contention, there's not a whole lot of reason to struggle through. It was. It was incredible to stand there and watch the finishes that come through that just covered in dust, sometimes dust and blood and just looking shattered. Uh, and, yeah, was a little scary. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:22:39 to 00:22:53 Thinking about what we were going to do the next morning didn't help the nerves. No. Real quick shout out to Tade. I thought it was so classy. When he was being interviewed after the finish, they're like, hey, you're the first world champion to. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:22:53 to 00:23:00 To win Strada Bianche. And he's like, no, Lada Kapeki won last year. She was the champion. I love. I love that. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:23:00 to 00:23:08 It was so great. It's just, like, such a classy guy and sort of respect for the sport and his fellow athletes. Pretty cool. Yeah. 100%. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:23:09 to 00:23:26 Well giddy with our. Our race day experience, we then kind of went off to dinner and back to the hotel and needed to get our heads around what 140km on that course was going to look like for us in the gran fondo with 7,000 of our closest friends. Yeah. I'm not gonna lie. I was a little nervous about that start. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:23:26 to 00:23:33 Just not. Not about the. Well, okay. Maybe a little bit about the distance and the elevation, but just. Yeah. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:23:33 to 00:23:48 Do you want to talk about what that was like? Yeah. Like a starting bell go off and 7,000 people take off. I know you've done, like, SBT and Unbound, so it's probably not that different, but the scale was pretty large. Yeah. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:23:48 to 00:24:02 Yeah. I think, you know, the guides did a really good job of one, previewing us some of the terrain we were going to be on. Yeah. They gave us a lot of confidence that the Trek van was going to be there. So we, we had multiple drop bag locations. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:24:02 to 00:24:31 We knew they were going to be there for us, that we didn't have to go to the mass, you know, rest stop areas, which was a super luxury. So we're on the Trek Checkpoint SLR bikes with 45C gravel tires on them. So, you know, pretty robust bicycle for this kind of event. When you compare to what a lot of people were riding. I think the professionals were still on 28 or 30s and full slicks. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:24:31 to 00:24:46 So interesting from an equipment perspective. And that'll come up, I think, in our conversation. But we get up at 6am we go down to breakfast. You and I are roommates. We go down to breakfast at like 6:01 and every single table is occupied. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:24:46 to 00:25:02 We're sort of fighting for space. This is clearly everybody's fueling up. There's, you know, dozens and dozens and dozens of people in the hotel who are going to go on the same journey we are. I think our rollout time from the hotel was 7:00am does that sound right? That sounds right. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:25:02 to 00:25:12 Yeah. Yeah. So we, we had to go down a hill. This detail wasn't clear in my mind morning of. But we had to ride somewhere to start the event. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:25:12 to 00:25:29 And of course, being in Siena, we had to ride downhill. And then right back then we, and then we rode back up to another part of town. And there were multiple different staging areas based on a color on your number plate. So we kind of fumbled around. Maybe there was five or five different colors out there. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:25:29 to 00:25:41 I think we were in the, the green sector and there's. There had to have been 1500 people in our sector alone. Yeah, it was. I think it was based on distance you were doing and maybe the speed you were going to ride. I'm not sure. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:25:41 to 00:26:10 Yeah, yeah, there could be something like if you're demonstrably a fast person, you're going to go in a different color than us. But, you know, we've been, we be in particular had mentioned, like, it's crazy town to begin with in this event. And I think in addition to 7,000 people being around you, we started with a massive downhill. Yeah, there were a lot of people going really fast. It was good advice. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:26:10 to 00:26:30 He was saying, you know, kind of keep your space and kind of stay to the right because people are going to want to pass on the left. And they were certainly doing that. So, yeah, I think we stayed together or within close proximity just to, you know, for the first. Like you said, the first Hour or so to navigate some of that. But once we hit that first section of dirt, I saw the. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:26:30 to 00:26:46 I saw the robot eyes go on, and you were gone. You're like, dirt. My comfort zone. I wasn't so comfortable with all these people flying around me. I remember at one point you and I were sort of casually riding maybe like three feet apart. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:26:46 to 00:27:07 Yeah. And someone just splits the middle. And I was like, okay, I guess we gotta ride closer if we're gonna discourage these people from dive bombing. And they were dive bombing left, right, and center, no matter what we did. Yeah, there was a lot of passing on the right, passing in weird places, and a lot of people just sinistra passing on the left. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:27:07 to 00:27:13 I'm on your left. I'm going hard. It was like. And. And my problem is I never internalized which one was right or left. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:27:13 to 00:27:22 So I would just kind of keep it a straight line whenever possible. Hold still. Yeah. So, yeah, there's. I mean, I think blissfully in terms of the amount of mileage we needed to cover. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:27:22 to 00:27:57 It was nice that there was, I don't know, call it 20k of riding on pavement to break things up a little bit before we hit the first dirt section. First dirt section was 2.1km long. Still pretty packed in terms of people being around, but definitely, like, I felt more personally in my comfort zone at that point. I knew that from an equipment perspective, with the 45C tires, I had a lot more control than a lot of the. My Italian compatriots who were riding 25s and 28s on their full arrow road bikes. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:27:57 to 00:28:16 There were a lot of flat tires in that first couple hours. Yeah, yeah, no doubt there was. There was some parallels with the unbound experience where it's just crazy and flat tires are happening all the time. That was the nice thing about the checkpoint. Like, the tires are, you know, a little bit bigger, but no, no one on the ride got a flat. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:28:16 to 00:28:30 And that's just really comfortable. Like in a ride like that where it's. It can be pretty challenging, both from a elevation perspective, but also just a terrain perspective, just getting bounced around a bit. It was, if I felt pretty. Pretty good at the end, surprisingly. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:28:30 to 00:28:48 Yeah. I think for. I think for. For people who haven't done a ton of gravel riding, it was a confidence inspiring choice to set them up that way because you could go in as someone who's ridden on the road a ton and ride that gravel and not feel like the bike was all over the place. Yeah. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:28:48 to 00:29:06 Totally sketchy. I mean, it's Totally stable under you. Yeah, I witnessed some sketchy, sketchy stuff out there with people and not nothing to do with their bikes handling talents. It was just equipment choice. They like literally could not stay on their line because of their tires being. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:29:06 to 00:29:29 So much smaller and rim brakes on some of those things. The descents, I mean there's. We talk about the climbs but like even some of the descents were, you know, somewhat challenging to navigate, especially with a group. It really kind of opened up once you made the turn to the, the longer part of the event. The, the full fondo and then it kind of really opened up for us like where there was riders but not nearly. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:29:30 to 00:29:51 Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. And I think it's a good, it's a good point. On the descending it definitely was. You could definitely see the people who had either just confidence warranted or unwarranted or the right bike for the situation. Yeah, because I was, you know, there were definitely stutter bumps from all the riders out there. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:29:51 to 00:30:11 So you definitely got into situations where you were, you were getting a lot of feedback from the trail. Yeah, it's amazing to have ridden some of those roads in the first couple of days. I think they actually go through and they grade it before the race. Like they try to kind of smooth it out a little bit. But after, you know, two races go through with all the cars and all the riders, the conditions have changed in one day pretty significantly. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:30:11 to 00:30:23 It was pretty interesting. Yeah. Yeah. In total there's 10 different gravel sectors in this event over the 140km. I think there's 50km of gravel riding. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:30:23 to 00:30:43 So it was a nice mix of. Felt like more in a good way. Yeah, for me, for me I was just like, I was way more comfortable on the. Not way more comfortable, but I was having way more fun. Yeah, I think you alluded to like after the, after the two, first two gravel sections I would just hit one and be like, okay, it's on. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:30:43 to 00:31:07 And I was having, I was just having a blast. And yeah, some of these climbs, I mean they were 15, 18% grade, both up and down and a lot of. Them are in the last 20k. Yeah, that's for sure. I remember one, one sector I was just kind of talking to myself and having fun because most everybody speaks Italian and I didn't. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:31:07 to 00:31:35 So I remember at one point a writer just closed the door on the left hand side to another rider and I, I sort of jokingly said, but fairly loud, I guess that door is closed. And it turned out the guy was from the UK and He was just dying laughing because I think he was having the same experience with me. Like, nothing I said really landed with anybody. So it's hard to kind of. You just sort of make noise to make yourself aware and obviously ride as safely as possible. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:31:35 to 00:31:55 Yeah, it was, it was a super, like, challenging experience, but it was like. I don't know if you felt the same as super rewarding, especially like getting through that last 20k and hitting, you know, the Toll Fe climb, getting up the Santa Catarina, like, those are. Those are steep climbs. I don't talk about that experience that you had coming up. A couple of those. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:31:55 to 00:32:19 Yeah, for sure. I mean, those were later in the day. And we're talking 10 kilometer long sectors at this point, which was cool because the earlier ones were shorter, you know, as I mentioned, like 4k, 5k. So to get on the longer ones and then some of the. You were just looking at these beautiful gravel roads going through the Tuscan hillsides. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:32:19 to 00:32:34 Yeah, it was super cool. And we, we sort of hadn't mentioned in the previous days we'd seen castles and old brick towns and, like, we definitely had this. It was, it was a beautiful ride. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Even when you're suffering, at least you got something to look at. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:32:35 to 00:32:45 That's pretty. Exactly. And I didn't know enough about the route. Like, I didn't agonize over it. Like, you know, I might have done unbound to try to figure out, like, how am I going to survive this thing? Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:32:45 to 00:33:06 It was kind of more by the seat of our pants. And that, that one long climb up. I think it's the Tofe pass where we met Gio in the van. Like, that was more than I had expected because it was like, just felt like a long gravel grind. And it was interesting just experiencing that and seeing the fans on the side of the road encouraging you. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:33:06 to 00:33:21 And then you, you kind of crest out on the ridge line back onto the pavement. Yeah. And the van's there and you're just. Like, oh, great, thank goodness, just where you're supposed to be. And you could look back watching everybody coming up the hill. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:33:21 to 00:33:33 And it was so funny. So you, you hadn't arrived yet. We had gotten separated for a bit, and an Irish rider comes up with two friends. And he. And he's like, hey, do you guys have any tape? Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:33:33 to 00:33:44 Oh, yeah, yeah. Maybe you were there. Gio's like, well, what do you need tape for? And he's like, my, my look pedal. The entire back end of the pedal has fallen off. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:33:44 to 00:33:54 So basically he's got Zero purchase. Yeah. And he's like, my friends are tired of pushing me up these hills. Do you have any tape? And Gio's like, don't be ridiculous. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:33:54 to 00:34:06 Like, tape's not gonna do anything. How about breaking away? Yeah. How about we give you a set of pedals, a set of cleats, you just return them. Back in Siena, we're all going to the same place. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:34:06 to 00:34:12 Yeah. Yeah. Such a nice gesture. The guy sat there, put his cleats on, then ended up finishing the race. That was cool. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:34:12 to 00:34:34 Or the ride. Yeah. That's super cool. Gio also mentioned that Quinn Simmons, the professional rider from Lidl Trek, he had flatted out of the race the day before. And it turns out he showed up at the Trek van because he was riding the Gran Fondo with his mom and dad, and he had yet another flat, and Geo gave him a tube to kick him down the road. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:34:35 to 00:34:51 Mobile bike shop. Yeah. Gotta love it. And that. Once we got on that ridgeline, it was awesome because we did have a substantial amount of road riding ahead of us for a while, which I'm sure I could speak for both of us was a bit of a relief to just be able to cruise. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:34:51 to 00:35:00 It was a lot of downhilling at that point. We got into some good groups, and we were just. Just kind of motoring and putting some kilometers under our belt. And you can start to see the city. So you. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:35:00 to 00:35:12 You got your sight line for your finish. Yeah, it's pretty cool. And then I think we were in good spirits. We rolled up with a couple of our. Our trip mates along the way, which was fun to kind of ride with those guys. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:35:12 to 00:35:17 Roll up. Patrick and Perry. Exactly. Good guys. Very strong. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:35:17 to 00:35:23 Yeah. Roll up to that van. And we're like. They're like, great. You know, great you guys are here. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:35:23 to 00:35:34 Let's get you situated. What do you need? Let's get you some more food, et cetera. And then it kind of dawned on, I think, both of us that we knew how much elevation we were needing to have done. I think It's. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:35:34 to 00:35:45 Was it 7,000ft over the course of the day? Yeah. And we hadn't yet hit 5.5,000ft of. Climbing, and there wasn't much longer to go. Yeah, I'm like, there's a. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:35:45 to 00:36:07 There's a big disconnect here. I got a big problem because it seems like we don't have a lot of mileage, and we've got a lot of vertical feet to cover. So that was a little bit of a heady moment, but it was nice to like, have sort of had a reset, get some food, get a little more warm clothes on if we needed it, and then head off on those last sectors. It's like, yeah. That's why I knew I could make it. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:36:07 to 00:36:15 I knew it was going to be hard, but I was like, okay, I'm just going to kind of strap in. Let's go. Yeah. Yeah, we had that. I think both of us misunderstood. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:36:16 to 00:36:41 We had asked about this steep climb we had ridden two days before and how far up it was, and I think they were thinking about the dirt sector, and we were talking about this vicious road, and it was right after the rest stop. Yeah, it's right after the rest stop. Like, oh, there it is. It's right here. And this was like the type of climb, even fresh, you sort of think about doing the paper boy weave back and forth on the course. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:36:41 to 00:36:50 When you. You can see it from a half mile away, you're like, oh, no. Is that where we're going? Yeah. And then a couple more tough gravel climbs after that point. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:36:50 to 00:36:55 Yeah. Then we got into. Really. Yeah, it was. It was. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:36:55 to 00:37:05 Yeah. And it's funny, I mean, that very much felt like, to me, like the. The end of a big gravel event. Where, you know, you're like almost single tracky. Like, when you get up to the ridge, there was kind of. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:37:05 to 00:37:24 Yeah. Switch back, little single track, kind of super cool. I got some good pictures of you and Perry coming up there, and. And then we kind of. We get into some small towns and starts feeling like we're getting close to Siena because we'd ridden back into Siena a few times, cruising, riding with Patrick and a few other guys. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:37:24 to 00:37:42 And then we hit the climb into Siena, and. Holy God. I mean, this thing is, I don't know, maybe 16, 17% at the end. You kind of climb up the pavement just to soften your legs up a little bit. You go through one of the gates of Siena, one of the. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:37:42 to 00:38:13 From the wall of Siena, and then you. These big cobbles, and you're riding up this chute that you just see probably a quarter mile up ahead of you, and there's fans on the side of the road, there's riders struggling to get up. And it's just this epic scene that you have seen now from watching the pro bike race. You'd seen the riders go up it. And I just remember feeling like just very part of the cycling community and cycling world in Siena at that moment. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:38:13 to 00:38:26 Yeah, it was fun. There are a lot of friends and family for tons of those riders out there. So they Were still cheering people on late in the day. So it kind of felt like you were like wrapping up your own personal strada bianchi race. A lot of people shouting at you to keep, keep pushing. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:38:26 to 00:38:41 It was really fun to kind of come into the city like that. I had a little bit of a break in my story because I kind of crusted that climb. And then we came to an intersection and there was riders going both ways. And I took a left and I'm. And then I. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:38:41 to 00:38:48 I'm riding and like, this doesn't feel right. And I. I asked some riders, I'm like, is this the way to the finish? And they're. They were. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:38:48 to 00:38:57 It was English as a second language. They're like, no, this is the pasta party. I didn't hear, Jesus. Oh, Jesus. I went the wrong way. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:38:57 to 00:39:17 So I turned around and then rolled around the corner. And then you roll into the piazza. You got this, you know, the big clock tower. You go across the same finish line as the pros that we watched before. Just super cool conclusion to an amazing day out there. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:39:18 to 00:39:25 And you get your metal, your finisher metal. Got my meter. Yeah, exactly. The 10 years of the Gran Fondo. Yeah, that was pretty. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:39:25 to 00:39:33 That was a pretty nicely designed metal. I didn't realize it was the 10th anniversary. That was pretty cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I think everybody. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:39:33 to 00:39:47 Everybody on the team finished. Yeah, on our crew, we had some doing the. The medium length one, some doing the long one, which we did. I think everybody, at minimum has some great stories to tell their friends when they went home. Yeah, it was. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:39:47 to 00:40:08 It was a big day, but it was definitely worth it. I think everybody. I think no one really said anything the night before, but I think a few people were a little bit nervous about it, but everybody was, like, super just stoked to arrive in the compo after the ride and just be like, that was amazing. Especially after watching the race the day before. Yeah, a hundred percent. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:40:08 to 00:40:19 Yeah. In hindsight, like, it was. It was a week that was packed with. Packed with things to do. There was a nice progression of the mileage. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:40:19 to 00:40:34 We didn't overcook my grits prior to the event, so I gave myself the best chance of having a good day out there. Yeah, it was hard and intimidating, which I loved. Right. But totally doable and. And certainly well supported along the way. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:40:34 to 00:40:49 Whether it was from the. The Gran Fondo organizers or Trek's additional support level. Like, it just felt like a great accomplishment and felt it couldn't be more satisfied with my trip to Italy. Yeah, I'm Glad to hear it. It was great to have you there. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:40:49 to 00:41:06 It was 30 years in the making, so, yeah, it wouldn't have been nearly as fun without you there, so. Exactly. Well, it was fun reminiscing a bit, as I'm sure we'll continue to do over the years. It's such a monumental trip we had. And thanks for coming on. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:41:06 to 00:41:42 Thanks for everything you guys do at Trek Travel, for sure. I think you're the third Trek travel person we've had over here. I've appreciated, as I've advocated to the audience, like, Trek's put a lot of energy into gravel tourism and gravel travel, and it's a great way to go see some of these communities you've read about. And particularly in the. For me, the European trips, just to experience the culture and have the guides with local knowledge has always been this, like, additional bit of je ne sais quoi about what that European experience is like. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:41:42 to 00:41:52 Yeah, there's a lot of great gravel over there. Yeah. Check us out, travel.com a good pitch. Lots of good trips in the States and in Europe, so. Yeah, exactly. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:41:52 to 00:42:03 And if you're interested in Strada Bianca, it is a trip that sells out. It's obviously in March every year. I think you can already sort of reserve a spot on Trek Travels website. It's getting close. Yeah. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:42:03 to 00:42:12 You can sort of put yourself on a wait list. Yeah. And there's still. I don't know if there's still room in the Holy Week trips to Flanders and Roubaix. Okay. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:42:12 to 00:42:19 That one goes fast. Like, we're pretty close to sold out for that one. You got to get in early. And same with the Tour. It's pretty well booked. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:42:19 to 00:42:42 Even the Tour de Familes, the Women's Tour de France, is nearly sold out for this year, which is really exciting. Amazing. And I can't wait for you to have some gravel race trips in the future as well. I think it would be a fun way of doing some of these events. People who aren't necessarily racing but want to go to somewhere like SBT or to Unbound or. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:42:42 to 00:42:53 I know you already have a trip to Bentonville, but it is kind of an interesting idea. I think you guys should play around with, connect the two. Yeah. Yeah. What would it be like to bring a group of people who just want to experience that. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:42:53 to 00:43:04 That area in a deeper way and have a little bit of extra support in some of these milestone gravel events? Yeah, for sure. I think Unbound would be an interesting one, for sure. Yeah. Cool. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:43:04 to 00:43:15 All right, well, I will let you go. Hopefully I even see you this weekend and we can do some riding and reminisce some more. Yeah. See you up in up in Marin. Sounds good. Rich Snodsmith (Guest) | 00:43:15 to 00:43:31 Take care, Craig. Good to see you. That's going to do it for this week's edition of the Gravel Ride Podcast. Big thanks to Rich for coming on the show. And a big thanks to Trek Travel for all the great gravel cycling experiences they offer around the world. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:43:31 to 00:44:13 Top notch organization that's dedicating a lot of time and energy into the gravel world. So if you're a fan of professional bike racing and want to have an experience like I did at Stradabianca, go check them out@trektravel.com obviously they've got the other spring classics and the Tour de France, both men and women, as options for you, but also a bunch of fantastic gravel trips to Bentonville, to Switzerland, to Vermont, to Girona, all over the world. So again, go hit them up@trektravel.com and let them know that the Gravel Ride podcast sent you. Until next time, here's to finding some dirt under your wheels. Craig Dalton (Host) | 00:44:27 to 00:44:27 SA.  

“What has Jane Fonda done to her face?” Someone asked that question on social media after the eighty-seven year old actress was featured prominently in photos and videos from the screen actors guild award show. Fonda did not look like your average almost ninety year old woman. She was one of many high profile celebrities who have had cosmetic surgery of a variety of types in an effort to thwart the effects of time on the human body in order to maintain an appearance of youthfulness. Have you noticed the growing number of people who appear, as they say, to look like they've had work done? This trend will only continue as we seek to find our identity not in who we are in terms of our inward character, but in outward appearance. Reports show that more and more teens are opting for non-surgical and surgical cosmetic procedures. Friends, if we are to be new creations, as Paul says in second Corinthians, it is only through being born again through faith in Jesus Christ.

This Academy-award-winning 80s Flick is a captivating, emotionally charged drama that beautifully captures the complexities of love, aging, and family. Set in the tranquil, golden hues of a New England lake, the film brings together screen legends Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn in a final, unforgettable collaboration. Fonda portrays Norman Thayer, a witty but grumpy elderly man facing the challenges of growing older, while Hepburn shines as his vibrant and supportive wife, Ethel. When their daughter and her fiancé arrive for a summer visit, the peaceful lake becomes the backdrop for deep reflections and heartwarming moments of reconciliation. So power up the motorboat, grab your fishing poles, and watch out for the rocks in Pergatory Cove as Tim Williams and guest co-hosts, Ben Carpenter and Bethany Wells, discuss “On Golden Pond” from 1981 on this episode of the 80s Flick Flashback Podcast.Here are some additional behind-the-scenes trivia we were unable to cover in this episode:Leftover footage of Henry Fonda and Katherine Hepburn driving through the countryside of New Hampshire, as shown in the opening credits, was incorporated for the beginning of the 1982-1990 CBS sitcom "Newhart".Sources:Wikipedia, IMDB, Box Office Mojohttps://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/golden-pondhttps://www.afi.com/news/afi-movie-club-on-golden-pond/Some sections were composed or edited by ChatGPT We'd love to hear your thoughts on our podcast! You can share your feedback with us via email or social media. Your opinions are incredibly valuable to us, and we'd be so grateful to know what you enjoyed about our show. If we missed anything or if you have any suggestions for 80s movies, we'd love to hear them too! If you're feeling extra supportive, you can even become a subscription member through "Buy Me A Coffee". For more details and other fun extensions of our podcast, check out this link. Thank you for your support!https://linktr.ee/80sFlickFlashback

At this year's SAG Awards, Jane Fonda was named the 60th recipient of the Life Achievement Award. The legendary actor and activist sat down with SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher in an Actor to Actor conversation about her remarkable career spanning five decades. Fonda reflects on her early struggles finding meaningful roles, her emotional journey on ‘Grace and Frankie,' and the challenges of being a woman in Hollywood. She also discusses her passionate advocacy for women's rights and her insights about her growth as both an artist and an activist. *The views expressed are those of the speakers and not necessarily those of SAG-AFTRA.

Valerie and Veronica Tapacio left their corporate day jobs to dedicate their time to their Seattle band, La Fonda and their vintage clothing shop, Delusional Bird, which is named after one of their songs. Last year was the first year they made more money doing music and running their business than they did at their 8-5 desk jobs. The sisters talk about how their father’s detainment by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2008 forced them into corporate work early and how the pandemic helped them reevaluate their life and priorities. Support the show: https://www.kexp.org/sound/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Allie Rigby has roots in the chaparral and deserts of California. She is the author of Moonscape for a Child, published by Bored Wolves in 2024, and she's a recipient of a Fulbright grant to Romania. Her writing explores health, climate change, ecology, and community, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2020.Allie reads "Poem as Ghost Ally," "For the Hole in Fonda," "Late March," and "Orange Peel."

Jane Fonda and her son Troy Garity join our show the week of the 2025 SAG Awards, where Fonda was honored with SAG-AFTRA's highest tribute — the Life Achievement Award. She talks about the origin of her iconic Klute shag haircut, how she once fought off a bear in New Mexico, and what she looks forward to doing next in her best decade yet. Garity shares the helpful advice his mother gave him for his first film, Bandits, and how remaining empathetic, creative, and hopeful as an actor creates a path for finding solutions in a chaotic world. Listen to more from Netflix Podcasts.

OMG I just realized i never circled back to SAG. It's ok. It wasn't terribly eventful but for a Fonda on fire. Anyway, the dopest take took our full attention in the form of Hunter Schafer calling out Trump Admin for being really weird and targeting trans ppl when, i don't know, there are literally children going hungry in the richest country in the world. We also tap into the next person we being floated in the culture re our hopeful for '28. Obvs internally Newsome, but we go where we're needed. Will Stephen A. Smith or Jon Stewart step in? It's our stuff im most concerned with rn. We got this, i got u. Jump in w/ Janaya Future Khan. SUPPORT THE SHOW  Patreon - https://patreon.com/@darkwoke Tip w/ a One Time Donation SUBSCRIBE + FOLLOW IG: www.instagram.com/darkwokejfk Youtube: www.youtube.com/@darkwoke TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@janayafk

Settimana da dimenticare per le squadre italiane che nell'andata dei play-off di Champions League ottengono solo il successo con la Juventus. Milan e Atalanta cadono con Feyenoord e Brugge aprendo la strada alla Spagna per il sorpasso nel ranking.

Leben unter einem offenem Himmel - Richard und Fonda Hays - 09.02.2025 by Leuchtfeuer Gemeinde

"Mēs neesam tik daudz, lai mēs nevaram vienoties. Mēs varam vienoties. Mēs varam atrast veidu, kā būt kopā šajā laivā, šajā straumē."Šajā epizodē kopā ar Ievu Moricu – Sarunu festivāla LAMPA dibinātāju, fonda DOTS direktori  un sertificētu supervizori – runājam par līderību, dialoga kultūru un to, kā sarunas ietekmē organizāciju vidi un sabiedrību kopumā.Vai demokrātija organizācijās ir iespējama? Kā vadītāji var veidot kultūru, kurā cilvēki var brīvi izteikties un justies uzklausīti?Kā atpazīt un pārvarēt morālo pārākumu? Kā izvairīties no vēlmes pierādīt savu taisnību un attīstīt prasmi klausīties, lai dialogs kļūtu jēgpilnāks?Kas ir demokrātija un kā veidojas dialogs?Kāpēc mēs tik ļoti steidzamies un kā izkāpt no “ātrvilciena”? Kā atrast balansu starp darbiem, pienākumiem un refleksiju par to, kas patiesi svarīgs?Kāda ir sarunu kultūras loma sabiedrības attīstībā? Kā efektīva komunikācija var palīdzēt mums labāk sadzīvot, risināt sarežģītus jautājumus un veidot iekļaujošāku vidi?Sarunas organizācijās: no konfliktiem līdz uzticībai. Sarunā pieminētās grāmatas:Tomass Mūrs – Care of the Soul Mary Pipher – Women Rowing North Rupi Kaur – The Sun and Her Flowers HR PODCAST ir sarunas par tēmām, kas aktuālas personāla vadības ekspertiem, CEO, vadītājiem organizācijās, ikvienam, kam svarīga darba vide. Raidieraksts, kurā tiekamies ar cilvēkresursu vadības ekspertiem, profesionāļiem, praktiķiem. Uzklausām viedokļus un pieredzes, kā arī uzdodam jautājumus par jaunākajiem rīkiem, kādus lietot, lai vēl labāk sniegtu stratēģisku atbalstu biznesam. Sarunas vada Ilze Medne.Rubrika CEO dienasgrāmata: Sarunas ar vadītājiem un uzņēmumu CEO, par viņu ikdienas pieredzi esot vadītāja amatā. Par līderību, organizācijas attīstību un sadarbību ar HR.

También conocida como la Fonda Sarita, tiene una historia ultraterrenal desde su origen, en los barrios antigios de la ciudad de México.

Do you have the patience to make the right choice? That question was asked of both films this week, Juror #2 (2024) and 12 Angry Men (1957). Both casts were asked to decide the fate of another individual, and only by analyzing all of the information and possibilities, could they come to a unified decision. How would you respond if placed in their position?Also Play:Cinema Chain Game--------------------------------------------Subscribe, rate, and review:Apple Podcasts: Our Film FathersSpotify: Our Film FathersYouTube: Our Film Fathers---------------------------------------------Follow Us:Instagram: @ourfilmfathersTwitter: @ourfilmfathersEmail: ourfilmfathers@gmail.com

12. Fonda and Tyler close out 2024 by recounting some of their holiday traditions and enjoying an afternoon meal at one of Denver's favorite dive burger joints.

This BCR Podcast series will be asking American peace activists a question borrowed from Raymond Carver:“What are we talking about when we talk about ‘The American' ?”This episode looks at an anti-Vietnam War, anti-nuclear peace activist, longtime incarcerated American criminal – and Catholic priest – Philip Berrigan. Brad Wolf joined me via Zoom to help. Recently, Brad edited a collection of Berrigan's writings, entitled -- “A Ministry of Risk”. Brad is a former lawyer, persecutor, professor and community college dean and is the executive director and co-founder of Peace Action Network of Lancaster PA. and he organized the "Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal." Brad was featured on Bar Crawl Radio when we covered the Kateri Peace Conference in Fonda, New York earlier this year – BCR #236. Alan Winsonbarcrawlradio@gmail.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Bill Maher's made a quite comfortable living pointing out how Fox News & right wing talk radio has manipulated a bloc of voters - in his brand of comedic political satire from "Politically Incorrect" to "Real Time" to ... well, now, this era where he doesn't sound all that awfully different than Joe Rogan, honestly. Rogan, of course, is also a white male whose political views are actually very closely aligned to Maher's - and Maher's recent guest, Jane Fonda. Jane and Bill sat down for his "Club Random" podcast a few weeks ago, and I had a long drive back from Savannah last night, so I finally got around to eavesdropping on them. In this sit-down tequila swig, Fonda - age 87 - proved to be still sharp as a tack and didn't hold back when occasionally callhing Maher out for losing his liberal way. Bill's spent the past few years grousing about "far left" things like the NAACP issuing a travel advisory for anyone going to Florida as examples of "wokeism" run amok, but also confesses Demoratic politicians aren't governng in response to it and that Republicans just use these salacious headlines as fodder to campaign on. Fonda, meanwhile, spent the entire conversation parsing out valid points of view to support opposition to the sort of right wing dogwhistles ("Defund the police!" or trans carciturization) Maher himself has fallen victim to.

En este mensaje, los pastores hablan de la celebración del nacimiento de Jesús, de cómo a través de este nacimiento, todos son invitados a ser parte de su familia y de la importancia de regocijarse y alegrarse en su presencia, especialmente porque Él nos ha dado la vida a través de Su hijo. VERSÍCULO BASE: Salmo 68:1-3, "Levántate, Dios, y sean esparcidos tus enemigos; y huyan de tu presencia los que te aborrecen. Como se disipa el humo, así tú los disiparás; como se derrite la cera ante el fuego, así perecerán los impíos ante Dios. Mas los justos se alegrarán; se regocijarán delante de Dios y saltarán de alegría." Este pasaje establece el contexto de la intervención de Dios y la alegría que deben experimentar los justos en su presencia. PUNTOS CLAVES DEL MENSAJE: 1. Intervención de Dios: Se destaca que Dios se levanta para destruir a nuestros enemigos, comparándolos con cera frente al fuego, lo que simboliza Su poder y autoridad sobre las adversidades. 2. Alegría y regocijo: Se enfatiza la importancia de regocijarse en la presencia de Dios. Los justos deben alegrarse y experimentar un "extremo gozo" por la salvación y las bendiciones que Dios les ofrece. 3. Salvación a través de Jesús: El nacimiento de Jesús es presentado como el evento central que trae salvación y esperanza a la humanidad, invitando a todos a conocer a un Dios vivo y a ser parte de Su familia. 4. Familia de Dios: Se menciona que Dios es un padre que cuida y defiende a los desamparados, ofreciendo inclusión y comunidad a aquellos que se sienten solos. 5. Liberación de cadenas: Se habla de cómo Dios libera a aquellos que están encarcelados por sus problemas y sufrimientos, permitiéndoles experimentar la prosperidad y la capacidad de cantar en medio de sus circunstancias. 6. Agradecimiento y celebración: Se invita a los oyentes a vivir con una actitud de agradecimiento por las bendiciones recibidas y a celebrar la grandeza de Dios, reconociendo Su don inefable. LLAMADO A LA ACCIÓN: Este llamado a la acción busca movilizar a los oyentes a tomar decisiones concretas que fortalezcan su fe y su relación con Dios, así como a vivir de manera activa en Su propósito. CONCLUSIÓN: La conclusión del mensaje se centra en la celebración de la llegada de Jesús y la transformación que esto trae a nuestras vidas. Se reafirma que, a través de Su nacimiento, Dios nos ofrece salvación, inclusión en Su familia y la oportunidad de vivir en gozo y libertad. Se destaca que, aunque enfrentemos dificultades y adversidades, podemos confiar en que Dios está a nuestro lado, resolviendo nuestros problemas desde el cielo y brindándonos la fuerza para regocijarnos en medio de cualquier situación. El mensaje finaliza con un llamado a vivir con gratitud y alegría, recordando que somos beneficiarios de un don inefable que sigue multiplicándose en nuestras vidas. Se invita a todos a abrir sus corazones a Dios, a experimentar Su amor y a compartir este mensaje de esperanza con aquellos que nos rodean. En esencia, en Dios, siempre hay motivo para celebrar y vivir en victoria.  

Maggie and Tim continue the conversation with special guest Joel McHale live from the Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles. The trio dives deeper into cherished memories, hilarious moments, and behind-the-scenes tales as they wrap up their discussion of Psych 2: Lassie Come Home. Sponsors: Leesa: Use code: Pineapple to get 25% OFF all mattress orders and two free pillows! Visit Leesa.com today! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

En este mensaje, la pastora Fonda aborda la fe, la confianza en Dios, la superación de temores y la importancia de buscar refugio en Él como pilares fundamentales para vivir una vida plena y sin falta. VERSÍCULO BASE: Salmo 23, destaca la provisión y protección de Dios. En particular, hace referencia a la idea de que "nada nos falta" cuando el Señor es nuestro pastor. Es fundamental para ilustrar la confianza en la guía y el cuidado divino en nuestras vidas. PUNTOS CLAVES DEL MENSAJE: 1. Dios como proveedor: Dios provee todo lo necesario para nuestras vidas, y con Él a nuestro lado, no nos falta nada. 2. Superación de temores: Los temores pueden paralizarnos, pero se nos anima a no dejar que estos nos detengan. La confianza en Dios nos permite enfrentar y superar esos miedos. 3. Refugio en Dios: Es mejor confiar en Dios que en las personas o instituciones. Dios es nuestro verdadero refugio y fuente de seguridad. 4. Importancia de la oración: Se hace un llamado a la oración y a buscar la ayuda de Dios en momentos de necesidad, recordando que Él escucha y responde. 5. Acción y Fe: Se anima a los oyentes a actuar con fe y a no quedarse estancados. Dios nos ha dado todo lo que necesitamos para avanzar en nuestros propósitos. 6. Liberación espiritual: Se invita a los asistentes a dejar atrás cargas y pecados, buscando la liberación que solo Dios puede ofrecer. 7. Temor de Dios: Se menciona la importancia de tener un temor reverente hacia Dios, que es visto como un tesoro y una fuente de sabiduría. LLAMADO A LA ACCIÓN: Se motiva a los oyentes a tomar decisiones concretas que les permitan experimentar la libertad, la paz y la provisión que Dios ofrece en sus vidas. CONCLUSIÓN: 1. Confianza en la provisión de Dios: Se reafirma que, al tener a Dios como nuestro pastor, no nos falta nada. Su cuidado y provisión son constantes, y podemos confiar en que Él se ocupa de nuestras necesidades diarias. 2. Superación de temores: Se enfatiza que los temores no deben gobernar nuestras vidas. Al poner nuestra fe en Dios y elevarlo por encima de nuestras preocupaciones, podemos encontrar la libertad y la paz que necesitamos para avanzar. 3. Llamado a la acción: Se invita a los oyentes a tomar pasos concretos hacia la liberación de sus temores y cargas, buscando la ayuda de Dios y de la comunidad. La confesión y la oración son herramientas poderosas para experimentar la sanidad y la restauración. 4. Vivir en Fe: Se concluye con un llamado a vivir en fe, recordando que Dios nos ha equipado con todo lo necesario para cumplir con Su propósito en nuestras vidas. La fe activa nos permite enfrentar los desafíos con confianza y esperanza. El mensaje invita a los oyentes a confiar plenamente en Dios, a liberarse de los temores y a actuar con fe, asegurando que, con Él, no les falta nada para vivir una vida plena y significativa.  

Maggie and Tim are joined by special guest Joel McHale for a special edition of the podcast, recorded live from Los Angeles for the very first time! The trio takes a trip down memory lane, sharing some favorite moments from their friendship, before diving into a discussion of Psych 2: Lassie Come Home. Enjoy Part 1 of 2, live from The Fonda Theatre! Sponsors: Leesa: Use code: Pineapple to get 25% OFF all mattress orders and two free pillows! Visit Leesa.com today! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the Rarified Heir Podcast, we are talking to Carrie Mitchum, daughter of actor Christopher Mitchum, granddaughter to iconic actor Robert Mitchum and mother to actor Grace Van Dien. And while that's a lot of actors in your family, we haven't even mentioned her actor brother, her actor uncle, her great actor or her own acting career! I'm talking actors! That's quite a family business! The Fonda's, the Bridges' and the Douglas's aint got nothing on The Mitchum's. Although maybe the Huston's rival all this. Anyway, I digress…. We jumped around on the latest episode with Carrie because there was frankly so much to talk about. Of course we wanted to know what life was like with Grampa Robert – and we do. But we also heard so much about her own acting career starting with the soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful as well as her time growing up in Europe and Asia on movie sets starring her father. Moreover, it's a total trip to know she had cookies on sitting on the lap of one of Europe's most feared dictators as part of that experience. We also talk to Carrie about her grandfather's film and his recording career, her father's films with John Wayne, growing up at the Green Acres estate with Harold Lloyd and our prior guest Suzanne Lloyd, the poetry of Robert Mitchum, her daughters time on Stranger Things, grampa's favorite food, being on the set of the film, That Championship Season, how no one really knows a family dynamic just by reading a tabloid, what NAR means, The Mitchum Steakhouse, being married to a “sex symbol” and much more. This is the Rarified Heir Podcast and everyone has a story.  

Ok, im standing on business for this one: Joe Biden did the right thing by doing the wrong thing in pardoning Hunter Biden, and I've got a solid defense for why...that, and see how Jane Fonda mollywopped Bill Maher by simply reflecting him to himself, and lastly...well, it was a weird news day so we're definitely headed to a weird place on this one. F it, a weird place is exactly where we need to be. Jump in w/ Janaya Future Khan. SUPPORT THE SHOW  Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/JanayaFK Tip w/ a One Time Donation - https://buymeacoffee.com/janayafk SUBSCRIBE + FOLLOW IG - www.instagram.com/jfktodayshow/ YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@JanayaFK TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@janayafk

BILL MAHER Schools Woke Jane Fonda On The FAR LEFTBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/radio-baloney-the-richie-baloney-show--4036781/support.

*The Morning After* (1986), directed by Sidney Lumet, is a gripping neo-noir thriller that combines mystery, suspense, and a character-driven narrative. Jane Fonda stars as Alex Sternbergen, a washed-up actress with a drinking problem who wakes up one morning in a stranger's apartment with no memory of the previous night — and a dead man lying next to her. Fearing she may be the killer, Alex panics and flees the scene. As she struggles to piece together what happened, she crosses paths with Turner Kendall (Jeff Bridges), an ex-cop turned likable everyman who decides to help her unravel the truth. Together, they dive deeper into the mystery, uncovering dark secrets and confronting the demons from Alex's troubled past. Fonda's raw and vulnerable performance earned her an Academy Award nomination, while Bridges brings depth to his role as her unlikely ally. With Lumet's expert direction, the film explores themes of guilt, redemption, and trust, set against the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles. *The Morning After* is a taut, atmospheric thriller that keeps viewers guessing until the very end.If you are new to the podcast then please consider following us on the platform that you love, we can be found most anywhere that you listen to your favorite podcasts. Please leave us a rating and review if you listen on iTunes and a 5 star rating if you listen on Spotify. If you like what you hear then please share the show with your friends and family. If you would like to help support the podcast by donating a small amount or any custom amount you choose then please visit the following link:https://retrolife4u.com/supportThis is not a membership or anything just a way for you to help support us without paying a reoccurring monthly fee when you feel like you are able to help. If you have any questions, comments, suggestions for shows or you have a question you would like us to read on air then email us at retrolife4you@gmail.com You can find us on social media at the following places:FacebookInstagramTik TokYouTubeRetro Life 4 You Website

Today's cast: Dan, Stugotz, Amin, Chris, Jeremy, Jessica, Roy, and Tony. On today's shadow show: would you rather take the kick from Jon Jones that he delivered over the weekend or tackle Derrick Henry? And Stugotz delivers his Top 5 People In Sports With What Their Names Would Be If They Were Penises. Then, as the show starts, the crew discusses Give Miami Day, Denzel Washington admitting to both alcoholism and dabbling with heroin, and Dan's feelings after watching a Ted Turner Documentary. Does Dan know Turner is alive? Plus, Roy and Chris each had some horrible flubs while doing ad reads, and the rest of the crew wants to enjoy them for the rest of time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

No one embodies the concept of change and staying power like Jane Fonda. She started out as the daughter of Hollywood royalty. Her father was the revered actor Henry Fonda. Jane Fonda has appeared in more than 50 films, earning Oscars for Best Actress for her roles in Klute and Coming Home. And she's also famous in political circles for her anti-war activism and demonstrations against climate change. As an 86-year three-time divorcee, Fonda says she's no longer interested in romance or sex. She just wants to make the world a better place.

En la 1358-a E_elsendo el la 05.11.2024 ĉe www.pola-retradio.org: • Hieraŭ estis lanĉita en Parizo arkivejo dediĉita al la bicikla veturo de Lucien Péraire kadre de la projekto Savespero. Lime de la 20-aj kaj 30-aj jaroj li entreprenis eksterordinaran biciklan veturon tra Eŭropo, Sovetunio, Manĝurio, Japanio, la suda Ĉinio, Indoĉinio kaj Indonezio por i.a. kompreni la militkaŭzojn. Pri li kaj lasitaj de li arkivaĵoj ni interparolis kun Pascal Dubourg Glatigny dum ARKONES, kaj tiun interparolon ni prezentas en nia hodiaŭa elsendo. Jen la adreso de la retejo: https://peraire.huma-num.fr/ • En la komencaj aktualaĵoj ni informas pri atentigo de la eksa finna prezidento, ke civitanoj de Unio devus kolekti kaze de bezono necesajn provizojn por 72 horoj; pri Pollando kiel produktanto de tombotorĉoj; pri akuzoj de la ukraina prezidento rilate Pollandon. • La sciencbultenan rubrikon ni dediĉas al laŭreatoj de la Fondaĵo por la Pola Scienco. • Hodiaŭ ni elektis por la elsendo la kanton de Feri Floro „Por la paco”, bazitan sur la vortoj de la sveda esperantisto Åke Näsholm. • La interreta foto akompananta la programinformon prezentas varian sortimenton de tombotorĉoj, kiujn oni flamigas ĉe la tomboj komence de novembro. • En unuopaj rubrikoj de nia paĝo eblas konsulti la paralele legeblajn kaj aŭdeblajn tekstojn el niaj elsendoj, kio estas tradicio de nia Redakcio ekde 2003. Pere de jutubo https://www.youtube.com/results?q=pola+retradio&sp=CAI%253D, konforme al individua bezono, eblas rapidigi aŭ malrapidigi la parolritmon de la sondokumentoj, transsalti al iu serĉata fragmento de la elsendo.

After a lifetime of successful acting and passionate activism, Jane Fonda is far from done. At 86, she's now pouring all of her efforts into pushing for action that will stop climate change, and she's willing to put it all on the line for this fight. From protesting and getting arrested in DC to talks and appearances across the country, Fonda is lending her famous face and using her platform every chance she gets to ensure our planet has a future. Her latest book, from 2020, is called “What Can I Do? My Path From Climate Despair to Action.”Journalist Katie Couric interviews Fonda at the 2024 Aspen Ideas Festival about this stage of her life and activism. Their conversation was recorded in June. aspenideas.org

The Shred is a weekly roundup of who's raised funds, who's getting acquired and who's on the move in the world of recruitment. The Shred is brought to you today by Jobcase.

This week, we welcome chef Santiago Lastra back to the studio to discuss his new London opening, Fonda, inspired by Mexico's laidback eateries. Also in the programme: Monocle's Petri Burtsoff meets Finnish chef Sami Tallberg to learn about the transformative flavours of fresh-foraged herbs. Plus: Monica Lillis heads to Lulu's, a South London neighbourhood restaurant taking the area's culinary reputation to the next level. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Yes, I have incorporated all the keywords into the show notes. Here is the updated version with all the keywords included:---**Show Notes: MMT50 - 212**Hey there, Pavement aficionados! jD is back with another episode of our Top 50 Countdown on the *Meeting Malkmus* podcast, exploring the essential tracks by the seminal indie rock band, **Pavement**. This week, we're diving into track number 12 on the countdown.Joining jD is Pavement superfan **Tim from Portland**, and trust us, you don't want to miss this one. It's a rollercoaster ride through **'90s indie rock** nostalgia, **Pavement concert stories**, and a heartfelt plea to support live music.---**Episode Highlights:****[0:00] Introduction and Tim's Pavement Origin Story**- **Discovering Pavement through the College Music Journal:** - Tim shares how he first stumbled upon Pavement in the summer of '94 through the *College Music Journal*, a pivotal moment in his journey into **'90s indie rock**. - *"Yeah, I ran down to Tower Records in San Diego and got the CD along with a few other ones... been cranking it ever since."*- **First Impressions of 'Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain':** - His immediate obsession after purchasing Pavement's seminal album, *Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain*. - *"Right out of the gate, this album was different, and I applauded that."***[1:57] Early Live Shows and Military Gear Coincidence**- **First Pavement Concert Experience in the San Diego Music Scene:** - Tim talks about seeing Pavement live for the first time in January '96 at Montezuma Hall, San Diego State University—a highlight in his **Pavement concert memories**. - **Silkworm as the Opening Act:**  - The concert featured **Silkworm** as the opening act, adding to the night's **indie music nostalgia**. - *"We decided to dress up... everyone put on some sort of military garb."*- **Serendipitous Moment with the Band:** - The hilarious coincidence of the band also wearing military attire, showcasing the quirky connection between Pavement and their fans. - *"We all looked at them and then at each other and just started laughing."***[4:13] Following the Band and Memorable Performances**- **Photographing Pavement at Bimbo's 365 Club:** - Tim recalls capturing the band during a show at **Bimbo's 365 Club in San Francisco**, adding to his collection of **Pavement fan experiences**. - *"I have some great shots from there... there was definitely, you know, kind of a whole San Francisco vibe going on."*- **Tibetan Freedom Concert Adventure [7:11]:** - Get the lowdown on Tim's experience at the massive **Tibetan Freedom Concert** in San Francisco, featuring a lineup that included **Sonic Youth** and cemented **Pavement's influence on indie rock**. - *"There were, I think, like a hundred thousand people there... It was a total bottleneck of a festival."***[9:05] Unforgettable Gigs and Onstage Antics**- **Mark Ibold's Onstage Incident:** - Hear about bassist **Mark Ibold's** mysterious onstage moment in Pomona, one of the more intriguing **Pavement concert stories**. - *"He couldn't play; he couldn't finish a song... the show ended shortly after that."*- **Bob Nastanovich's Live Performances:** - Discussing **Bob Nastanovich's** energetic contributions during live shows, highlighting the band's dynamic stage presence.**[11:01] Accidental HBO Appearance**- **HBO Reverb Special Featuring Pavement:** - Learn how Tim unknowingly became part of the **HBO Reverb Pavement** special during a gig at Cane's in San Diego, a unique highlight in his **Pavement concert memories**. - *"We didn't even know that was happening... Spiral was like, 'Oh, they're doing some fucking HBO show.' He didn't seem happy about it."***[12:20] Deep Dive into Track #12**- **Why Track #12 Matters in Pavement's Discography:** - Tim breaks down why this song is in his personal top five, offering insightful **Pavement song analysis**. - *"This song, you know, it's awesome. It's got rockets; it goes."*- **Personal Connection and Indie Music Nostalgia:** - How the song's themes resonate with Tim's own travels and experiences across California, enhancing his **indie music nostalgia**. - *"I know all the places it talks about... Hearing this the first times, we were just like, 'Who are these guys? What are they doing singing about our places?'"*- **The Quintessential Pavement Vibe:** - Discussing how Pavement's songs often mean everything and nothing all at once, reflecting their unique place in **alternative rock**. - *"It has kind of a theme but is totally non sequitur at the same time—it's right up my alley. It's cool."***[18:49] The Pavement Ethos and Live Music Today**- **Stephen Malkmus and the Band's Stance on Fame:** - Reflect on **Pavement's** unique approach to art over commercial success, and how **Stephen Malkmus** embodies this ethos. - *"They lean more art rather than commercialized... They always look painfully uncomfortable."*- **Memorable 2010 Reunion and 2022 LA Show:** - Tim and jD reminisce about the **Pavement 2010 reunion tour** and their first meeting at the epic **Pavement 2022 LA show**, standout events in the **Pavement fan community**. - *"Everybody that was there really wanted to be there... It just checked all the boxes for me."***[29:11] Support Live Music: An Impassioned Plea**- **Get Out and Go to Local Music Venues:** - Tim urges listeners to support live music by attending shows at local venues and supporting **local music venues in Portland** and beyond. - **Quote:** *"Go out, spend some money, and support the arts. When you go to a concert—even if you only stay for four songs—it has a positive impact on your body and your soul."*- **Local Venue Shoutouts in the Portland Music Scene:** - Tim mentions his favorite spots in the **Portland music scene**: Turn Turn Turn, the Kenton Club, and the Fixin' To, encouraging listeners to experience the thriving local music scene.---**Join the Conversation:**- **Twitter:** [@meetingmalkmus](https://twitter.com/meetingmalkmus)- **Facebook Group:** [facebook.com/groups/meetingmalkmus](https://facebook.com/groups/meetingmalkmus)- **Website:** [jd.meetingmalkmus.com](http://jd.meetingmalkmus.com)---**Extra Nuggets:**- **Exclusive Live Recording:** - Tim shares a rare live version of a song from Pavement's Toronto show. It's raw, it's real, and it's right here on the *Meeting Malkmus* podcast.- **Fun Fact:** - Did you know jD used an abacus and a goat with an extra leg to tabulate your Top 20 ballots in the **Pavement Top 50 Countdown**? Don't ask.- **Akin to a Pavement Band Interview:** - This episode feels like an intimate **Pavement band interview**, offering deep insights into the band's history and impact on **indie music**.- **Indie Music Podcast Community:** - As part of the broader **indie music podcast** scene, *Meeting Malkmus* continues to bring you in-depth discussions and interviews with **Pavement superfans** and insiders.---So grab your headphones, crank up the volume, and let's get amped together on this **indie rock** journey through Pavement's legacy.---Transcript: [0:00] Previously on the Pavement Top 50: That's right, song number 13 on the countdown is "Shady Lane," J vs. S. Ralph from Lincolnshire, what is your initial thought about this song?"Well, it's an amazing song. It's an amazing song. I mean, I think it might be—maybe I'm putting it third on my ranking of 'Brighten the Corners.' And I would almost say, you know, 'Brighten the Corners' is my favorite Pavement, so it is super up there. It's brilliant.""Hey, this is Westy from the rock and roll band Pavement, and you're listening to The Countdown."[0:39] "Hey, it's JD here, back for another episode of our Top 50 Countdown for seminal indie rock band Pavement. Week over week, we're going to count down the 50 essential Pavement tracks that you selected with your very own top 20 ballots. I tabulated the results using an abacus and a goat with an extra leg—don't ask. How will your favorite song fare in the ranking? You'll need to tune in to find out, so there's that."This week, we're joined by Pavement superfan Tim from Portland. Tim, how's it going, motherfucker?""Hey, hey, hey, it's going, motherfucker. It's going great.""That was very Canadian of me, motherfucker. Let's get right to it; let's not mess around here, let's not dilly-dally. Talk to me about your Pavement origin story.""Who? I discovered them through—I believe through College Music Journal, which was a publication back in the '90s. It was kind of—""I don't think so.""Okay. It was like a half-sized magazine, so I think it was an evolution from zines. I don't know. Anyways, I read a record review of 'Crooked Rain.'"[1:57] "And that's when I was introduced to them. So this was, you know, '94—summer of '94 probably—because I had just left uni and got a house with friends. And yeah, I ran down to Tower Records in San Diego and got the CD along with a few other ones. I would get this College Music Journal and read reviews and go buy albums; that was kind of my thing. So yeah, went down and got 'Crooked Rain' and have been cranking it ever since.""Yeah. So what was it like the first time you spun it?""Oh man, I loved it. You know, I had just graduated from uni; I was an art and business major of all things, and I was into everything that wasn't normal—trying, anyways. And that's what Pavement was for me, you know? Right out of the gate, this album was different, and I applauded the—I don't know, there's this sense of, like Beavis and Butthead said, trying and not trying, and I love that about this. I recently heard Jack Black say—somebody asked him what kind of bands he's into, and he's like, 'I only want to listen to bands'—this is an old interview—but he said, 'I only want to listen to bands who kick ass, who fucking take names.' And I was like, oof, I wonder if Jack Black's a Pavement fan because they do—they do, but they don't. But I love that about them."[3:40] "That, to me, oozed alternative. So yeah. But I didn't see them play live for, oh, a year and a half later. I was just this morning looking up shows I went to.""Oh, really?""Yeah. About half the shows I went to were before 2000 and half after. So the first time I saw them was in San Diego in '96 in January, and that was really fun. Just a quick story on that one."[4:13] "I went with a gang of friends, and they were playing at San Diego State University at this place called Montezuma Hall. I would say it holds like, I don't know, 500 people or something—not big. We were all pre-partying and talking about what we were going to wear; we decided to dress up. So everybody put on some sort of military garb—fatigues, whether pants or shirts or hats or what have you—which kind of looked like normal cool kid wear at the time. Then we go to the show, and Pavement walked out on stage, and they were in full military gear. Steve West had a safari hat with mosquito mesh draped over his shoulders, and he had his raccoon eyes—you know, paint around his eyes—and everybody was wearing military stuff, all the guys in the band.""Did you guys catch wind of that beforehand?""No, it was totally coincidental. We all looked at each other because we knew they were dressed up—they went out of their way—and we all looked at them and then at each other and just started laughing. It was a comical moment, and that was such a good show. JD, kind of like our LA show in May of '22, that first show in January of '96 was fucking awesome. They went nuts. After their encore, Malkmus said something to the effect of—they came back out and he was like, 'San Diego, huh? San Diego's alright. You guys think San Diego's okay? Yeah, San Diego's alright.' And then he said something like, 'Let's fucking fuzz out San Diego.' And then they just went into their last three songs.""Wow.""And just destroyed them. They were so, so good. I kind of followed them a little bit after that. I saw them in San Francisco weeks later; it was so fun for me, I had to get more.""Were they playing 'Brighten' stuff at this point? Because 'Brighten' was going to come out next year. Was it pretty much all 'Wowee'?""You know, I had a couple setlists pulled up. I have to go back and look. I'm not sure.""And my other question is, that San Diego show—was it opened by Silkworm?""Yeah, that was the one. They came out with, I don't know, '30s or '40s-looking sailor suits.""What the hell?""Like Navy sailor suits.""I guess San Diego, huh?""They looked cute. At the time, we had an amazing army surplus store downtown, and I just figured these guys went and hit it up."[7:11] "That's awesome.""None of them seemed sober that night. They were going for it. I saw them play in San Francisco after that and actually photographed that show at Bimbo's 365. I have some great shots from there.""Is that a good venue?""Yeah, it was cool. A cool bar-club, smallish—you know, medium-small size. There was definitely a whole San Francisco vibe going on. I brought some friends to that one from San Diego as well; instant fans. Then the Tibetan Freedom Concert in San Francisco the next summer.""You saw that?""Yeah.""That was kind of typical, you know, festival-type Pavement show.""Sure.""Quick and dirty. We were way in the back."[8:11] "Lots of people?""Oh, hordes. I think there were like a hundred thousand people there or something.""Holy shit.""It was giant. We were kind of there for the whole experience—you know, Beastie Boys.""So they did a show in New York City and one in San Francisco?""Yeah, June of '96.""How have we never talked about this before? I don't think we've ever talked about you going to Tibetan Freedom.""Yeah, it was amazing. I drove my truck and had like four people in the back of the camper shell. We just piled in, and it literally took us like five hours to drive two miles to get out of the city. It was a total bottleneck of a festival. That was one of my first festivals where I thought, 'You know, might not really need to go to festivals,' but I continued."[9:05] "The next time I saw them was the following year at this club called Soma in San Diego. That was a great show—small to medium-sized again. They didn't play in San Diego a whole heck of a lot. Then I saw them at the Glass House in Pomona, which is out in the desert east of LA. Ibold, at one point during the show, just kind of lost it—like his brain left his body.""Or he had a serious gear malfunction?""Because he couldn't play, and the show kind of ended.""Yeah, he couldn't play, he couldn't finish a song—he just couldn't do it. The show ended shortly after that. I remember everybody on stage going, 'What's the deal? What's going on?' Malkmus or Ibold had some sort of breakdown or meltdown. Something happened. Stuff started kicking, I don't know.""A couple of years later, at Cane's in San Diego—Cane's was a bar where they filmed the HBO Reverb special.""Oh, really?""Yeah, I went to that. We didn't even know that was happening. We just thought we were going to a Pavement gig.""Right.""Walked in—and I have so many stories about seeing these guys—walked in and Spiral was standing right there, just hanging out by himself. I said to him, 'What's going on tonight? What's up with all the cameras?' And he's like, 'Oh, they're doing some fucking HBO show.' He didn't seem happy about it, and that was kind of the vibe of the whole gig that night—they were punching the card, you know.""They're sort of shy that way, right?""Yeah. I think—I don't know, man."[11:01] "They're a different band, right? They lean more art rather than commercialized.""Yeah.""And I think when you produce something that way, you obviously don't care if you're making Billboard Top 100. So if someone approaches you and they're like, 'Hey, I'm Mike Jones from HBO Reverb. We'd love to film you guys; you're hot right now,' what's your reaction if you're Pavement? You're like, 'Fuck. Okay, here's another drill we got to do and get over with,' you know?""Yeah.""They always look painfully uncomfortable. Like that Jay Leno performance and even the one on—was it Conan when they did the 2010 reunion? Or maybe it was Jimmy Fallon, I'm not sure.""All I remember is the Leno one.""Yeah, that one's so awkward.""It's so good though.""That personifies them, you know.""They were a little more experienced by '99. By then they'd been playing a bit. Then I saw them at the Hollywood Bowl for the 2010 show with Sonic Youth."[12:20] "Amazing lineup.""Yeah. Both of those shows, in my opinion, were like, get it done. The highlight of all of it—I was hoping at one point either Malkmus coming out and playing with Sonic Youth or Thurston coming out and playing with Pavement.""Didn't happen though.""It seemed like such an opportunity.""Yeah. I was thinking, this might not happen ever again. These guys have to get on stage and play together.""Yes.""And they didn't. The highlight was at the Hollywood Bowl—there's this half wall around the orchestra pit, like out in the crowd, that separates the orchestra pit from box seats, which is kind of where we were. Bob paraded that catwalk—that half wall. He went back and forth—you probably could guess what song he was screaming a chorus to—but he was like, 'I'm trying' all the way across that thing. It's probably like 50 or 60 paces across; it's like a half-circle.""Oh, wow.""It was so fucking cool. Then at the end, even Malkmus was like, 'We're out of here. We're going to the Speedy Ortiz show,' or some shit like that. It was just lights out, you know."[13:41] "Damn.""But then it was a long, long time until I saw them at the Fonda with you, my friend.""Yeah.""That was our first meeting.""Yeah. My hair was too long for you.""Oh my gosh. I'm so glad you canceled your dreads appointment for the next day.""Yes. Well, I was going to ask you to just pour some Coke in my hair and roll them, but we didn't know each other that way.""Denny's at 3 a.m., or whenever we were there.""That's right. That was such a good show. That was so amazing. I know you've mentioned it, but man, that was such a good show. It just checked all the boxes for me. There was so much excitement, so much buzz in the air in that venue. Everybody that was there really wanted to be there. It felt like there weren't sort of pretentious Hollywood people just showing up because it's Pavement, you know.""Yeah. Well, except—maybe you caught a glimpse of this—except the short girl that got in the fight with the other gal there. We saw a chick fight at a Pavement gig in 2022. It was kind of weird. It was kind of awesome. I doubt either of those gals—or maybe one of them, maybe the taller one—is listening, but man, one of them got sent down, like down to the floor from our platform. That was amazing. When I saw that happen, I was like, 'Fuck yes.'"[15:25] "Because it just gave me reassurance that the vibe of Pavement—being all of these different things in indie alternative music, whatever—is still alive. To have something like that at a show. Way better than the 2010 reunion. That holds a special place in my heart because it was my first time seeing them. It was in Central Park; it was really cool. But seeing them with you that night was definitely the best show I've ever seen.""Yeah.""Yeah. Maybe of all the shows I've ever seen, not just Pavement—it was very good.""Yeah.""So anyways, we saw them in '22 a bunch, and I think I counted—from what I could remember—like 12 times I've seen them. So half before 2010, half after.""That's pretty cool.""Yeah. They've always been, you know, sure, superfan status. But more as time goes by, they're kind of a classic for me. If I want to put on something, I usually reach for an album—actual vinyl instead.""Which one is the one you go to? Do you have them all on vinyl?"[16:55] "No, I don't think so.""Okay."[17:00] "I go to 'Crooked Rain.'""Oh, okay.""That's the one I was first introduced to.""Yeah.""You know, it checks the boxes for me. It's got a big start. It's got a great song number three.""Yeah. We love your number three.""I know. It's got a great midway point. It's got an instrumental—'5 + 4 = Unity,' or '5 - 4 = Unity.' And it's got a lot of staple items that make Pavement Pavement that you can pick out from the beginning to the end of their recordings. It has a little bit of 'Wowee' in it to me. It's a really good mix of who they are.""Yeah, if there was a Pavement Bingo card, you would definitely get a line.""Yeah.""Maybe even a full box.""Yeah, 'Hit the Plane Down'—you couldn't get more punky than that for Pavement.""Yeah.""You know, it's got a hit, 'Cut Your Hair.'""Yeah.""It's got it all. 'Silence Kid.' When I first put this on, from song one, it became my go-to for when I kicked off things like road trips or moved into a new house. Anytime I've begun something monumental in my life, I would put this album on. It's such a good start. I clearly remember when I moved to LA, set up my stereo, and I put this album on.""Oh yeah.""It just gets me in a really fun, good mood. Creative, too.""Yeah, I like that with 'Pot Hot.'"[18:49] "It makes me fun and creative.""Me too. Well, what do you say we take a quick break and then come back and reveal track number 12? We are almost in the top 10, my friend.""All right.""We'll be right back."[19:04] "Hey, this is Bob Nastanovich from Pavement. Thanks for listening. And now, on with the countdown.""Twelve."[21:46] "All right. Track number 12 on the countdown. I couldn't imagine a better person to do this song, having spent some time in SoCal. It's 'Unfair'—the South taking what the North delivers.""That's right.""Were you delivering to the North?""I mean, when I sucked and kissed, it's sour.""This song, you know, it's awesome. On the album, it could be a song three for me. It's got rockets; it goes. That's amazing. I'm so glad it's number 12. That's in the top 20, so it definitely should be. It's really high up there for me; it's probably in my top five.""Oh, wow.""So yeah, I'm happy. I've already answered my 'Is it properly ranked' question.""Oh yeah, big time.""I love this one. I mean, it really personifies Pavement—being from Stockton, Sacto area, all of that. This song is about the supposed battle between the North and South of California. I know all the places it talks about. I've been to Shasta many times. We had family living for many years in the Tahoe area; we know all these places. And I guess the jury's still out on where that North-South boundary line really is, because I think this song—"[23:27] "Malkmus likely wrote this song. I think he's just not having the South. He's really dissing it. There's a total vibe here of him just dissing the South.""So it's amazing.""Well, we've seen in his later life him moving to Portland, your hometown. He didn't move to LA. He didn't pack up and move to LA or Nashville, I suppose, would be the other big music place. But yeah, he went to Portland and went with that indie vibe rather than that corporate vibe. So I wonder if he gets that feeling or something.""Yeah, I don't know. It's good—you know, I went back, I was searching through some of those gigs I went to, and I believe it was the San Francisco show I saw in '96 that they closed with 'Unfair.' I'll have to go back and look at this.""Oh, wow.""Such a good song for a closer, leaving on high energy."[24:35] "And just when you think you've maxed out energy-wise, you get to that chorus—a sort of chorus."[24:47] "You know, 'the foothills of our mind,' and when he's just screaming, it goes into a second gear or a third gear and really picks up steam. It's so good.""Yeah, I used to put this on mixtapes.""Oh, you did? That's cool.""Yeah, like road trip mixtapes. It feels really road-trippy to me because he's name-checking all that geography.""Yeah, yeah. That last question in the song, 'To the last psychedelic band'—are they talking about themselves? Is that giving themselves kudos? I don't know. I would love to find that out. But yeah, this song really hits home for me. I drove California so many times; I know all these places. Hearing this the first times—even talking about Shasta early on in the song, verse two—I mean, at the time, my roommate was from Redding, which is adjacent to Mount Shasta. So we were just like, 'Who are these guys? What are they doing singing about our places?' Where are they from? Stockton, which is hilarious because he's like, in the song—"[26:16] "He says, 'This ain't no Bakersfield' or whatever the line is.""Yeah.""And Bakersfield really is not that much different from Stockton.""Oh, no?""They're both armpit cities.""Oh, really?""Just armpit cities, yeah.""Like industrial or something?""Yeah, like farm—ag cities. They're just kind of wastelands.""Oh, wow.""But yeah, I dig this song, dude. It's something you can sing along to and scream along to. It's not a quiet song.""Great to drive to.""Yeah. I'm so glad it's number 12. I would rather have heard it was in the top 10, but I'll take it as number 12. That way, it's still more special for me because it didn't make it to the top 10.""Yeah.""And it would have been my drift. That's kind of like the Pavement thing—like, you don't know us, but you might know us, you know?""Oh, you're a Pavement fan. Okay. Yeah, you seem like that. I've heard people say that before.""But great, you film hack. I don't need your fade. There are so many good lines in here. There's a theme, but it's kind of all over, which is what I love about these guys. Also, one thing that really vibed with me in the mid-early '90s with these guys is the lyrics not meaning shit a lot of the time, because everything we were listening to around then—there was so much cheese, bro, in rock and indie and alternative. So much music that I just had a hard time being a fan of. I'm not a big singer-songwriter guy. I like quite a bit, but it's not my favorite genre. So to get somebody putting a song together like this—it has kind of a theme but is totally non sequitur at the same time—it's right up my alley. It's cool."[28:27] "That is very cool. Well, thanks so much for coming out today and doing this. This has been great.""Yeah, JD. It's been great. Thanks for doing what you do because there's no one like you who could put this together. So we're all grateful.""Buddy, thanks so much.""Yeah, thank you."[28:48] "That's—I don't know what else to say. That's pretty fucking cool of you to say. Thanks.""From Portland.""And now I'm going to go back into game show host mode. Tim from Portland, do you have anything you would like to plug?"[29:11] "Yeah, I just want to tell everybody out there to get off your ass and go to a gig. Go to a show. Go to your local bar that has a stage. Go to your venue that holds less than 250 people.""Nice.""And support the arts, you know? When you go to these places—here in Portland, Oregon, I have three great places within three or four miles: Turn Turn Turn, the Kenton Club, which is just down the hill from me, and the Fixin' To in St. John's. These are all amazing places to experience live music. If you go in and you pay $10, you don't buy a drink—that $10 is generally going to the band.""Fucking right.""If you don't buy a drink or some food, the bar isn't making any money. Go out, spend some money, and support the arts. This is supporting the arts, and it's such an awesome thing to do. When you go to a concert—even if you hear a gig and only stay for four songs—it has a positive impact on your body and your soul. We walk away with heightened endorphins, and it feels good. You ever leave a show where you're just like, 'God damn, that was amazing. I feel so good. I wish I could do that all over again.' That's the chase, and that's supporting the arts. Everybody's got to keep getting out and doing that. I'm not talking about the mega stadium shows or the big festivals—if you can afford to go to that enormous dome, go for it. I'm talking about hitting up your local spots, your local venues. And if you don't have any, then find the amazing ones and do a road trip. Just get out and go to some shows. That's my plug."[30:50] "That's nice. I like from where you came. So there's that. Hey, it's JD here, checking in from the present. That's right—it's October the 4th today. That episode with Tim and I was recorded way back in February—the Ides of February, in fact. So, you know, as I'm editing this episode—and hey, listen, I don't do a whole lot of editing; I want this to be sort of authentic and real and, you know, all the rest of that shit. So, listening back, Tim's impassioned plea for live music made me think of some of the gigs that we've been to. Tim and I were talking; he's like, 'Hey, remember the Toronto show where they played "Unfair"?' And I was like, 'Fuck yeah, do I?' And he's like, 'I have a file.' And I was like, 'Ooh, send it my way, motherfucker.' Here it is. This is 'Unfair,' live from Toronto, on 'Meeting Malkmus,' a Pavement podcast."[34:47] "All right, man. Thanks, buddy. Well, thanks again. That's what I got for you. Wash your goddamn hands."[34:53] "Thanks for listening to 'Meeting Malkmus,' a Pavement podcast, where we count down the top 50 Pavement tracks as selected by you. If you've got questions or concerns, please shoot me an email: jd.meetingmalkmus at gmail.com."Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/meeting-malkmus-a-pavement-podcast/exclusive-contentAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

In 2003, a deadly heat wave hit Paris, causing the death of over 15,000 people. It was one of the first weather events where scientists could use data to show climate change was to blame. Since that time, we've seen an increasing number of deadly natural disasters, from Hurricane Katrina to Hurricane Harvey, to the 2018 California wildfires, all irrefutably linked to climate change. In this episode, we talk to the activists who say not enough is being done by politicians and big corporations to slow down the warming. We follow Marlena Fontes of Climate Families NYC to this year's "Summer of Heat" protests, where she is arrested. She was galvanized into action five years ago, by a heat wave that hit New York City right as her son was born. "It was definitely part of my postpartum experience, looking at my baby and then thinking about what was happening in the world," she says. And we hear from protestors including legendary actress Jane Fonda, who wants justice. "We have to fight," Fonda says. "If enough of us fight, we're going to win."Lastly, we look at the upcoming U.S. presidential election and how the candidates plan to address (or not address) climate change.

The 26th Kateri Peace Conference held in Fonda, NY in mid-September, 2024 was entitled “What's Love Got to do with it?” The outcome of peace activism is the end of always-war. If, indeed, we are all connected on this minuscule green spot in a vast universe – if we are sisters and brothers who care for each other – why do we choose to kill each other in horrific and massive ways? Bar Crawl Radio hosts -- Rebecca McKean and Alan Winson -- moderated the Friday evening panel with Ann Wright, Brian Terrell, Brad Wolf, and Vera Anderson. The panel focused on three basic questions:Why do we consistently choose war? How do wars start? Are the causes really that complex? Are the causes of war knowable?If we know the root causes of war -- Can we come up with policies that would end war-making? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week Steve West calls in to chat with jD about a variety of things including song # 16Transcript:Track 2:[0:00] Previously on the Pavement Top 50. There you have it. Song number 17 is Zurich is Stained from the debut long play Slanted and Enchanted. Mike, is this song in fact slanted and or enchanted? Discuss. Yes, indeed. I love this song. This song, it really is. And it's sort of an oasis. I love where it appears on the record. it's coming straight out of the chaos of uh conduit for sale and right before the chaos of chelsea's little wrists and you get this like really light breezy but fast song i mean it's not a ballad it's not like here it is it is this breezy light almost feels like it would be, at home on the Velvet Underground's third record. Hey, this is Westy from the Rock and Roll Band Pavement.Track 3:[1:03] And you're listening to The Countdown. Hey, it's JD here, back for another episode of our Top 50 Countdown for Seminole Indie Rock Band Pavement. Week over week, we're going to count down the 50 essential pavement tracks that you selected with your very own Top 20 ballads. I then tabulated the results using an abacus and a motorcycle and sidecar driven by an orangutan. How will your favorite song fare in the rankings? You'll need to tune in to find out. So there's that. This week, we're joined by Pavement superfan. No, wait a minute. Pavement superstar, Steve fucking West. Westy, how the fuck are you? I'm doing pretty good today. Yes. It's a good day, right? Yeah. Good day. Well, let's get right into it. Everybody else has been coming on and talking about their pavement origin story. I feel like that's sort of a strange thing because we've talked about it a little bit in the past. But I'm curious what it was like for you, I don't know, getting the call or getting the letter or whatever it was, the communication, the telephone call or whatever, that they were looking to fill Gary's role or like how that looked like. What what did that look like on your end?Track 3:[2:25] Well, it was kind of a long process of, you know, knowing Bob from high school and then being in Manhattan and Brooklyn and meeting Stephen and Bob and David. And then knowing that they were having difficulties kind of with with Gary.Track 3:[2:46] I can't say that I didn't know that it might be coming. And there was a phone call, like you said. But um i didn't really you know you know it kind of blew me away when it when it happened i think it was on a pay phone in manhattan and i was working at a um at a gallery helping to put up some artwork for leo castelli oh wow and i talked to steven and he was like i don't know man just put those drumsticks in the oven and keep them worn because i don't know what it's going to happen. So, you know, he was, he was giving me a heads up, but he wasn't promising me anything and understandable because, you know, the things were up and down with Gary. And so, and then, uh, I really, when it actually happened, I don't really remember any other phone call where it was because we, Steven and I would see each other quite a lot. And we lived in Brooklyn and, And we would hang out together when he wasn't on tour.Track 3:[3:56] And, you know, we play music together with David. When Bobby wasn't around, we were I kind of sat in as a drummer for them for the Silver Dudes and those little jam sessions we'd have in Brooklyn. So that kind of was the thing that kind of eased me into the whole playing music with with Stephen as well as with David. Wow and I had a loft in Brooklyn on 1st and 1st I think it was.Track 3:[4:31] South fifth. And it was a really crappy loft and it had, you know, we can make a lot of noise and it was right next to the Williamsburg bridge. And yep. And there was a tiny room in the back that Steven and I rehearsed, all those crooked rain songs when, you know, Gary had broken up and I guess I had joined the band and then we were like there jamming he was kind of introducing me to those songs in this room you know smaller than the bedroom that you have right there it was a small room it was like 10 by 10 not even probably, and uh i remember the guys upstairs complaining and banging on the ceiling and i was like come on this is a loft this is what you do in brooklyn this is what you're here you're an artist and you're musicians, and you make noise. You get a loft, and you make art, and you make noise. Totally. Yeah, we rehearsed those a few times, and then went in to record in Manhattan.Track 3:[5:41] Wow. That's pretty whirlwind, too, then, right? Yeah, I mean, it happened over a couple of months, but over a summer, that summer of, I guess, 93, um spring when i think gary quit i'm not hard for me to remember all the logistics of that's that's cool that's cool this isn't uh uh that kind of podcast where we you know get too into the weeds yeah yeah so what do you remember about um like a first show or when did you meet the rest of the guys like you were you were jamming with steve and you guys were coming up with crooked rain stuff and you were you know laying down drums for it in manhattan at the um, at that uh oh my gosh i forget the name of it right now but that uh pseudo studio, right while i recorded that that's right yeah that's right um yes so i think what happened was that spring before we recorded Crooked Rain um.Track 3:[6:54] There was a Drag City Invitational, and it might have been late spring, early summer. And we drove out to Chicago and played that. And that was the first time I played with the full group.Track 3:[7:13] I played with Steven and his girlfriend, Alexa, and maybe Mark. And we played at a show in New York City for a matador like in reunion or something like that show but that wasn't really pavement and we just played new songs or whatever I don't know what it was but the first pavement show was at the drag city thing drag city invitational um it was at a club that was across the street from where Dillinger was uh captured caught shot and captured um in Chicago and uh you know a lot of great bands on Drag City were there and Silver Juice played and um I guess uh Royal Trucks played as.Track 3:[8:01] Well and they recorded those stood a bit of it in the basement and um I remember playing that show and we had never practiced so it was just kind of like guessing really about everything yeah I don't think we practiced at all no we just went out there and played it and i had played you know the some some of the songs with steven but you know the crooked rain songs but the old songs we had never played all together so i just had to kind of they knew them and i had to you know make sure i kind of knew them and we got through it was a short set but it was good yeah that's pretty cool that's that's pretty cool it would be a cool.Track 3:[8:43] Ticket stub to own for the, you know, the first complete Pavement Band show, you know? Yeah.Track 3:[8:53] So you getting your hands dirty with Crooked Rain, does that tend to be the record that you would go back to if you were the type of person to listen to your own content? I don't know if you do. Like, I don't know if you, you know, listen to records that you've been on or whether you, you know, sort of avoid it. Like, I don't listen to very many of these podcasts, for example, just because, you know, they're done. They're done. They're done. Exactly. Like, I got their history. Yeah. What is that like with you with records? Is there one that you go back to that you're really proud of or anything like that?Track 3:[9:30] No, I mean, technically, I just go back to listen to practice to them. So I'm prepared for whatever's coming ahead. But, you know, each one has different memories for me. And of course, Crooked Rain was this fresh guy trying to figure out how to play with Stephen as well as with the whole band live as well as the recording. Recording um and uh wowie dowie would probably be more of a band thing where i would be like that was nostalgic was a really fun recording session in memphis and everything so but you know they're all different and they all have good and bad memories so i don't go back to them to listen that way i'm not that old yet.Track 3:[10:24] But when i go to practice to him i try to practice to like our live stuff that we did this past year right as well as um the rehearsals that we did in portland and i have all like the hard drives of the breakdown of the songs and you know the tracks and everything so, i'm probably more prepared for what could be thrown at me as you know how we play the songs live as a as a six piece and how we record them over the years in different setups so right it's two different ways of you know being prepared for all the things to be thrown at you yeah i suppose so like i mean was this was this tour like the well i call it this tour but the 2022 tour was that the most you guys had rehearsed like for uh for a series of shows before.Track 3:[11:17] I think so. I mean, the 2010, I think we practiced about five or five to eight times. But this time was a much better environment. And I think we practiced at least 10 or 12 days to prepare for that Fonda show in, I guess it was L.A. Which was great. I was on that one. That was fantastic. That was fun. and we all worked really hard to you know learn a whole lot of songs and be prepared how many did you take on the road um i think it was around 60 jeez yeah 60 songs that we could somehow pull out you know yeah and do that's a lot that's a lot of songs yeah and i mean you You guys were playing like 25, 26 songs a night. So like Toronto shows, for example, I saw it back to back and it was like, they weren't completely different set lists, but it really kept it interesting, you know, to see you guys multiple times because you had this.Track 3:[12:26] You had this log of, of songs that you could just carry around. Right. And Bobby is the master of doing that. He keeps track of everything and really works hard at making the set list different every night, as well as having the standards that you should be playing, but not having those standards be the same standard every night. Yeah yeah i'll tell you what doing this top 50 countdown what i did was i asked people to send in their top 20 lists and when i when i did all the math there was 121 different songs that were chosen so obviously i'm only counting the 50 but there's that many songs in your catalog that people fucking dig like that's you know that's got to be daunting in a certain way when you know There's B-sides and things like that that you guys might not have even played once outside of recording. Yeah, recording. Yeah.Track 2:[13:27] Okay, so what do you say we give song number 16 a spin, Steve? That sounds great to me. All right, let's do it. We'll be back on the other side. Hey, this is Bob Nestanovich from Pavement. Thanks for listening. And now on with a countdown. 16 now.Track 2:[20:31] Fillmore Jive, number 16 on the countdown.Track 3:[20:35] It's the third song from Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, behind Stop Breathing at 28 and Cut Your Hair at 21. So this song actually beats Cut Your Hair, which is, I don't know. Is that surprising? Is that surprising to you? No, I'd rather pick Fillmore Jive over Cut Your Hair. But, I mean, Cut Your Hair is the pop song. So yeah yeah that's why i was surprised it wouldn't be in the top five or something i was you know just looking at the spotify uh the spotify plays you know cut your hair is like way up there and bill more jive is not right right so is is it do you consider it like a deep cut like when you guys went to it on the most recent tour was it um was it a deeper cut in the bag of songs that you brought? Yeah, I say a deeper cut because I don't think we did it in 2010. And we hadn't done it for years in the 90s. I think we did it in 94 and maybe they did it with Gary too before me.Track 3:[21:51] So I would say it's a deep cut live but in terms of records records you know for people to really enjoy but it's a pretty great number yeah pretty historic number and it really uh puts a nice end to that album yeah i think so yeah it leaves you wanting more for sure yes like in a good way you know not not like yeah okay i was like oh is that insulting thing um what.Track 2:[22:24] Do you say we get back to film our job sorry i'm.Track 3:[22:30] We recorded that, and I don't know if Stephen and I ever played that song except for when we recorded it in Manhattan at Walleye's Place. And then we played it a few times in 94, a handful of times, and didn't really play it again until this previous past couple of years. And it was always up. People loved it. Yeah, I was looking on Setlist FM, and it's like, Like, you guys played it 79 times in total, according to Setlist FM, but probably about 20 times this last tour, maybe something like that. Okay. And I got to tell you, I found it really interesting that you picked Billmore Jive, because it's the song that you're waiting a minute, almost a full minute before the drums come in. Yeah. Right? Right. And then it's that big cacophonous, you know, like I need to sleep with the with the cymbal crash. And yeah, the song really picks up steam at that point. Right now that.Track 3:[23:39] OK, so that song, I think, is where Stephen kind of the producer or the engineer, Bryce Goggin, who. who mixed the album. We recorded it in a different place, but he mixed the album. He was giving Carl Blanc to make it as big as he wanted. Do all the tricks. Do all the production tricks. And the only thing was that there was this previous recording of the intro, like you're talking about, and I don't know if that was recorded at Bob's apartment in Hoboken or at Gary's, you know, uh, studio, um, um.Track 3:[24:24] But they had that previous recording, which he thought was great.Track 3:[24:28] But he wanted to have, you know, a different take for the rest of the song. So that's kind of how we did it. And he kind of, I know that if you could hear the raw track, you'd probably hear him saying, okay, now, you know, we're playing along. He's like, okay, now we're going to get really loud and get crazy. West, go crazy. And now we're going to go quiet. So there's no way I knew that song that well, well because we wouldn't have practiced it it's a long song it's yeah it's almost seven minutes right right it's a feel song and um i think he just kind of like talked me through it and it was just the two of us so there wasn't all that other you know instrumentation to play off of it was more just him talking singing and playing um and trying to get a i feel and it definitely got a feel good or bad it got a good it got a feel oh it's yeah it's got a great it's got a great feel to it i just i can remember going for walks when i discovered crooked rain like you know in 2000 or whenever it was uh i was way off the beaten track and um just walking around listening to crooked rain and it would get to that song and there was just i don't know there's just something about that cymbal crash into the into the you know the main thrust of the song and then bringing it down again you know as he's talking about the punks with spikes and and things like that yeah.Track 3:[25:57] Just like he's kind of narrating uh narrating a music history for like a past couple decades up to that point and um you know making it kind of bringing out the history of it you know talking about the punks and the nightclubs and where he is you know it's not real you can't put your finger on it but you feel like you're being educated in a way about some weird world yeah i agree, yeah i mean doing this has been really fun because on this half you know we talk about the song and just getting people's impressions of what you know these songs are about out is fascinating is really fascinating because you know steve doesn't leave too many breadcrumb trails for you to figure things out it's it's just sort of um these cool phrases and cool little, you know vignettes almost and uh it's just really neat to hear what people think of them and i like like your take on, you know, going through a music history. That's, that's fabulous.Track 3:[27:08] Yeah. Yeah. It was fun. Anything else you want to say about, uh, Fillmore Jive?Track 3:[27:17] Um i love film or drive for its faults as for its um its feeling just as much, because like i said you know i don't think we did it more than once and of course you can always improve if you get a chance to take a test more than once right but you have to look at it that way i have to look at it that way and i listened to it today and i was like wow that's pretty great you know i can hear the things that i would change but um you know on my part not on okay anyone else's part but um you sometimes you just you just have to go with the flow and that's kind of what, being in pavement is and was about it's kind of going out there and and playing the songs and recording the songs and recording a lot and having a lot to throw away or to be on b-sides and um And then put the ones on the album that sound the best and live with the good and the bad, because a lot of times the mistakes are the happy mistakes. And people kind of endear themselves to that. Yeah, I think so. I think so. Happy mistakes is a good way to put it. Yeah. You got to have those happy mistakes. Yeah. Go away with a happy mistake is a great thing to feel when you hit the recorder. I didn't mean to do that, but that sounds awesome.Track 3:[28:44] Yeah, isn't that what they say? When you mess up, you just do it again, and everybody thinks you're jamming. Yeah. Yeah, but, you know, the next time it doesn't have the same feel. And, you know, when you think about the different albums, like the last album, there was a lot of time put into making that album problem as really crisp and time oriented in time, you know, cleaned up a lot of the pavement sound. Right. And I've always said that. There's a good part to that because i really enjoy that album and the production that nigel did um, but you do miss a little bit of the soul of the band too agreed and then when you step back and you go yes but over the five or whatever albums we did they're all different and that's the difference in this album and it's still a pretty great album so i'm all all for it Yeah. So what does 24 bring you guys? You're going to South America.Track 3:[29:55] Yes. When's the last time you played South America? 2010. We played South America. We played one or two shows. No, at least two shows there. And this time you're doing four or five, right? You were doing four shows, one big festival, and then three other cities and like three other countries and um it's like four shows in, six days or something so after that i don't know i think we're probably going to go into hibernation but and we'll see if we'll come out like the groundhog or not.Track 3:[30:35] Well it's been awesome talking to you about film or jive and the rest uh steve you're amazing with your time that's um it really means a lot that you would do this so thanks so much well thank you jamie it's always a pleasure when i see you in person and talk to you on the phone and all of this zoom business too that's right yeah well thanks a lot talk to you soon right wash your hands.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/meeting-malkmus-a-pavement-podcast/exclusive-contentAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

West Virginia Beer Roads podcast travels to Weathered Ground Brewery to talk beer with Sam Fonda. Fonda, WGB's co-owner and head of their brewing operations, shared four fresh beers that are perfect for September drinking. We get into detail about:… Continue Reading… The post Four fresh beers for drinking now appeared first on BrilliantStream.

The 26th annual Kateri Peace conference in Fonda will take place on Sept. 13 and 14. The theme this year is “ What's Love Got to Do With It? Our Survival Depends on It!” Retired Colonel Ann Wright, a former US Diplomat, is one of the keynote speakers and talks with Mark Dunlea for Hudson Mohawk Magazine. https://kateripeaceconference.org/

Welcome to the daily304 – your window into Wonderful, Almost Heaven, West Virginia.   Today is Saturday, Aug. 24, 2024. Learn all about the famous people, places and events that shaped West Virginia with The History Project…WVDNR's Wild Yards program encourages private landowners to help with wildlife conservation…and Summersville breaks ground on its new athletic complex…on today's daily304. #1 – From THE HISTORY PROJECT –  Perfectly centered among the Eastern states, West Virginia is where the thresholds of the North, South and Midwest all converge with the Appalachian Mountains, to tell the history of our nation in microcosm.  Major events like the Revolutionary and Civil wars, and famous people ranging from Daniel Boone to Katherine Johnson, mix with the rich heritage of Native Americans and men and women of all colors who reshaped the world and serve as guides through the American story. Check out The History Project's videos to learn more about the famous people, places and events that shaped West Virginia.  Watch the videos: https://daily304.wv.gov/programs/the-history-project/   #2 – From WV WATCH – Tomi Bergstrom skips the lawn mower on the lower half of her lawn in Charleston. She's growing native plants with the goal of protecting the state's native wildlife.  Bergstrom's yard is one of the 400 that have been certified by the West Virginia Division of Natural Resource's as a Wild Yard over the program's 25-year history. The program aims to help the state's wildlife by encouraging property owners to grow native plants and incorporate animal habitats.  The state's Wild Yards program is similar to a number of programs around the country that encourage planting native plants for wildlife, coordinator Michelle Fonda said. West Virginia's program is free to be certified. Certified lawns get signs letting neighbors know of their participation in the program.  “You can get started pretty easily by planting a few native wildflowers like milkweed, goldenrod, an oak tree,” said Fonda. Manuals for the program are available by calling the state Division of Natural Resources Wildlife Diversity Program at 304-637-0245.   Read more: https://westvirginiawatch.com/2024/08/13/dnrs-wild-yard-program-lets-private-landowners-get-in-on-wildlife-conservation/   #3 – From WSAZ-TV – When you hear Summersville, you probably think of Summersville Lake and with good reason. Now, Mayor Robert Shafer hopes to expand on that tourism aspect with a brand new project. The Summersville Athletic Complex will host soccer fields, mountain biking, hiking trails and much more. Shafer says more is coming to the Complex's 128 acres, including a baseball/softball complex, basketball, pickleball and dog park. City officials sought inspiration from the Shawnee Sports Complex in Kanawha County, which has hosted numerous national sporting events.  Read more: https://www.wsaz.com/2024/08/12/new-athletic-complex-headed-summersville-wva/   Find these stories and more at wv.gov/daily304. The daily304 curated news and information is brought to you by the West Virginia Department of Commerce: Sharing the wealth, beauty and opportunity in West Virginia with the world. Follow the daily304 on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram @daily304. Or find us online at wv.gov and just click the daily304 logo.  That's all for now. Take care. Be safe. Get outside and enjoy all the opportunity West Virginia has to offer.  

Devin & James are back in the saddle for another roundup of Italian flicks. A sampling of the cultiest of all cult genres, the SPAGHETTI WESTERNS! When Clint Eastwood rode through Spain and called it Mexico in 1964's Fistful of Dollars, it started a legit European phenomenon that would produce over 600 titles in barely over ten years! Whereas the American Westerns often whitewashed and mythologized its own westward history, the idea of the good guys always wearing white was losing steam by the 1960s, and the Italians had no sentimentality toward the Earp or James clans as historical figures. The Italian Western hero was the epitome of the anti-hero. Not so much straddling the line between good and bad, but rather stomping on it with their spurred boots. The settings may have been North American, but the politics were purely Italian. We start our discussion with the G.O.A.T., the transformative masterpiece that is Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST. We then move on to the sub-sub-genre of the Zapata Westerns (set within the Mexican Revolution) with Damiano Damiani's criminally underappreciated A BULLET FOR THE GENERAL. Then we lighten the mood a bit with a couple of Westerns that border on comedies while still being bloody and wild. The master Sergio Corbucci (so much more than "The Other Sergio") takes us on a wild ride across the border and back in COMPANEROS, and we finish up with the first film in Gianfranco Parolini's super-stylized hero-in-black series, SABATA! We've wrangled all your favorite Spaghetti West heroes: Nero, Milian, Van Cleef, Bronson, Fonda, Volonte, Kinski, and so many more. But when you hear the harmonica or banjo begin playing, you better run!

Matthias Ingelmann is the bar manager of Kol Mezcaleria and Kol Restaurant in London England. Matthias is German born and has worked in a lot of great bars around Europe, but once he started drinking mezcal he went down the rabbit hole with agave spirits, as many of us do. He has now built one of the UK's largest mezcal collections at Kol Mezcaleria and is continually expanding that collection as Kol expands. They just announced another restaurant with a cocktail heavy menu, called Fonda, which will open later in the year.Like at Kol the restaurant, there is a strict policy of only importing a few basic ingredients like corn, chocolate and dried chiles. So there are no limes to use in cocktails. No grapefruit juice for palomas. He talks about how he started importing verjus, unfermented grape juice, as one of the ingredients to provide the acidity in some drinks. And how he uses seasonal herbs like pineapple weed to bring tropical flavors into the bar. We also talk about Kol's partnership with the Sin Gusano project in Mexico, which is allowing them to work directly with several small producers for their own line of 6 different agave spirits from different parts of Mexico, to be used in the bar and sold at the bar nut not commercially.There is a lot going on with mezcal as it becomes more mainstream that you, the consumer, should be aware about. Commercial brands are coming in and locking small distillers into contracts, they are monocropping espadin all over Oaxaca and they are putting pressure to try to produce more and more mezcal in unsustainable ways. It's not at tequila levels yet. There are no Kardashians selling mezcal. At the rate mezcal is increasing in popularity we are not that far off. That's why it's extremely important if you are a bartender to buy mezcal from sources that champion small producers and educate your clientele.Read more at New Worlder.

This week on the pod I'm thrilled to be joined by Rebecca Clay Cole motherfuckers! We talk about her Pavement origin story, to joining the band on key, and breaking down song number 29!Transcript:Track 2:[0:00] Previously on the Pavement Top 50.Track 1:[0:02] At track 30, we have Spit on a Stranger. What the hell do you make of this song, Devin? I'm really glad I got this song because I love this song. And the thing about this song is that there's a real tension within the song that truly appeals to me. because I believe that musically and in the verses, this is the most romantic song that Pavement has ever recorded.Track 2:[0:31] Hey, this is Westy from the Rock and Roll Band, Pavement, and you're listening to The Countdown.Track 3:[0:39] Hey, it's JD here, back for another episode of our Top 50 Countdown for Seminole Indie Rock Band, Pavement. Week over week, we're going to count down the 50 essential Pavement tracks that you selected with your very own top 20 ballads. I then tabulated the results using an abacus and all my fingers on my left hand, except for my thumb. Fuck you, thumb. How will your favorite songs fare in the rankings? Well, you'll need to tune in to find out. So there's that.Track 2:[1:06] This week, we're joined by Pavement superfan, well, not Pavement superfan, Pavement superstar, Rebecca fucking Clay Cole. Rebecca, how the hell are you?Track 4:[1:17] Hello, I actually, I'm a fan. I don't know if I'm a super fan, because I've met some super fans. And I don't know if I have the level of technical knowledge. But I'm a fan and in the band. So nice to meet you.Track 3:[1:30] Nice to meet you as well. You definitely have the technical knowledge. I saw you guys play on the 22 reunion tour eight times, I think. And it was tremendous. I had so much fun. I was at the Fonda show. I saw two shows in Toronto and then like six shows in London.Track 4:[1:48] Oh, great.Track 3:[1:49] Or not London, but UK.Track 4:[1:51] Cool.Track 3:[1:52] So very, a lot of fun.Track 4:[1:54] A good range of shows there.Track 3:[1:55] Yeah, I think so. I was pleased. I wanted to go to Iceland really bad, but that didn't fall on the cards.Track 4:[2:02] Well, maybe we'll be in Iceland again someday.Track 3:[2:04] That would be cool.Track 4:[2:05] Join us if that happens.Track 3:[2:07] I will do that. So let's get right to the punch here and talk about, this is sort of funny to be talking about something, Sort of funny to be talking with somebody in the band about their Pavement Origins story, but obviously you came late to the band, and we'll talk about that. I really want to know what it's like to join a band that's an established band, but hasn't been on the road in a while. I want to know that as well, but I really want to know your Pavement Origins story.Track 4:[2:36] My Pavement Origins story. Well, I think the first time I was aware of Pavement was when they were opening for Sonic Youth. It was maybe Sonic Youth Mudhoney Pavement at Red Rocks.Track 3:[2:52] Oh, really?Track 4:[2:53] They were the first band to play and I had never heard of them. I hadn't heard of much because at this point I think I was six months in Denver. And before that I'd lived like on a farm and on an island. So I had no cultural touchstones at all for a teenager. I was really, I wouldn't say ignorant, but I just sort of formed my own musical education. I'd never been to a punk show. There were no punk shows in the Virgin Islands, you know, or in the farm in Kentucky. So all of that is to say some friends took me to Red Rocks to see this show. And Pavement was the first band. So that was my first introduction to Pavement.Track 3:[3:29] And what did you think?Track 4:[3:31] I did not understand it. I didn't understand it at all. But Gary was in fine form, and I remember not spending a lot of time behind his kit. And I just was confused what the performance was. I didn't understand it. I didn't have the language to understand it at the time.Track 3:[3:49] That's phenomenal. And Red Rocks, to boot. I've never been, but it's supposed to be just a fantastic venue, right?Track 4:[3:59] Maybe Pavement can play it again with me.Track 3:[4:02] Oh, that's awesome.Track 4:[4:04] I'll just plant that seed out there to the universe.Track 3:[4:06] Yeah.Track 4:[4:07] We'd like it to grow.Track 3:[4:08] So where did it go from there? Did you... At what point did you click? Did it go, oh, yeah, I get this?Track 4:[4:17] You know, not much later. Maybe a year or two later, I was... I found myself joined into an indie band. And this was 90... 94 maybe okay um 93 94 95 for sure um and so pavement was of course i should maybe it's not and of course but it was just like a touchstone you know it was like they were one of the coolest bands doing it and someone that everyone in my scene looked up to very very greatly and so i saw them touring wawi zawi they had my friends the apples and stereo opening for them for a section of that tour and so I got to see that show with Apple's opening which was great um so yeah I would say Wowie Zowie was that era where I like I definitely remember thrifting for my first set of stage clothes for the Minders like listening to that cassette going to the thrift store with my friend Tammy oh.Track 3:[5:12] That's a cool memory.Track 4:[5:13] Getting ready for our first gig yeah.Track 3:[5:15] That's so cool what What was the name.Track 4:[5:17] Of the band? The Minders.Track 3:[5:19] The Minders. Is there anything out there that people can find?Track 4:[5:24] Yeah. Check it out.Track 3:[5:26] Yeah, I will definitely check that out. Yeah. So from there, we fast forward a number of years, and it's now 2021, I'm guessing, when you got the call, or was it early in 2022?Track 4:[5:43] I actually, Steven had asked me in 2020, 19.Track 3:[5:50] Oh, right. Because they were going to go on the road in 2020.Track 4:[5:54] Because the Jicks were at Primavera, I think.Track 3:[5:59] Okay.Track 4:[5:59] If I'm not mistaken. This is how I remember it in my time. I'm friends with Joanna. She played briefly in The Minders. And we're just really close in addition to that. And the rest of the Jicks. I'm friends with all the Jicks. But anyway, Stephen had asked me about 2020 and not to tell anyone. And so I hadn't. And so then somehow, because they were in Barcelona, he must have mentioned that I was doing it or that it was happening or someone in Barcelona. I don't know. But I got a lot of angry texts from the jigs like, why didn't you tell us?Track 3:[6:30] Oh, man.Track 4:[6:31] It's like, well, I was asked not to say anything to anyone. It was really hard. I'm glad someone knows now.Track 3:[6:37] You're a person of your word. That's great.Track 4:[6:39] In this one case, I was, yeah. Usually I'm that terrible gossip. it so.Track 3:[6:45] That happens and then obviously covet happens so that doesn't that doesn't you know pan out but 2022 comes around and you guys all assemble in portland to um to jam and to rehearse like a shitload of songs.Track 4:[7:04] What was what.Track 3:[7:06] Was that like for you how much prep work did you have to do going into that.Track 4:[7:11] Um I took it pretty seriously and I did a lot of prep work I pretty much took the three months before those rehearsals were just me rehearsing for rehearsals and I set up my my rig basically the same rig I use live I set up a version of that in my living room, with a mixer and an amp and like you know tried all sorts of different keyboard configurations and tried to figure out what I wanted to use live. And then from there, sort of figuring out, you know, there was programming a lot of sounds. It was important for me to learn the catalog in such a way that, that my goal was like if steven just played any riff like kind of randomly started noodling it that i would be able to know like the song its title where to find it in my notes like does it have keyboard and do i have that part ready to go or percussion or vocals or anything so that was sort of the level i wanted to be prepared for practice the first full band rehearsal which i I think, actually, I think I met my goal. I took, I had extensive notes.Track 3:[8:16] You posted them on social, right?Track 4:[8:18] I think Bob posted that picture first.Track 3:[8:21] Yeah, yeah.Track 4:[8:22] I was surprised you wanted to, like, but yeah. Those were the distilled notes. I mean, like, some songs have pages and pages where I've just painstakingly, like, transcribed, you know, using music notation, like, how the part looks on the sheet so I could read it and understand it that way. Other notes are a little more esoteric and squiggly. So yeah, that was the prep, three months of that. And I got, of course, by the end thought I wasn't ready at all. And then I showed up to practice and realized I was pretty ready.Track 3:[9:00] So you walk into the room. I'm sorry to keep painting these pictures. But you walk into the room, and this is an established group of people. Although they haven't seen each other in 10 years probably or close to or some of them haven't seen each other. How difficult is that to insert yourself or be inserted in something that is already established like that?Track 4:[9:25] And something I love. Not just like something that it's established for me in that way.Track 3:[9:32] Yeah.Track 4:[9:33] It was sort of heavy actually. I made it heavy in the preparation I guess. Like, I was nervous. I was very nervous about, uh... I mean, it sounds silly to say now that I've spent some years with them, but I was just hoping everyone would like me. Not like personally, necessarily, but what I'm bringing to the songs. Was everyone in the band equally on board with having a keyboard player? Am I stepping on any parts? At first, I was concerned, does Bob still want to play some keyboard lines?Track 3:[10:06] Oh, yeah.Track 4:[10:07] I wasn't quite sure how it had all come to be. And so I just, I, I, I walked in to not timidly, but just like trying to get a read before I really started asserting myself. But I, but then I forget my filter only lasts for a little bit. And then it's like within an hour or two, I think it was fine.Track 3:[10:27] Oh, that's so cool to hear. Yeah.Track 4:[10:29] I forget to be nervous. And then I'm just myself for better or for worse.Track 3:[10:33] No, that's great. great so from there we go to LA and we go to the Fonda show which I gotta tell you that show like kicked all sorts of ass that was so good you guys played so long and such a varied like we didn't know going into it that the set list was going to be as varied as it was um you know we We knew that you guys had practiced a lot of songs, but it just, it was surreal. What was it like for you?Track 4:[11:06] Surreal.Track 3:[11:07] Surreal as well.Track 4:[11:08] I mean, we'd done all, we'd done the rehearsal in Portland and, you know, the team, you know, for musical building, but also for me, some team building, like who are these guys exactly? And like, and then we did some practice in LA on a soundstage before the Fonda as well. And I was nervous. It wasn't even like I was nervous. I was just unsure. I was really unsure what to expect. I now had practiced with them for like eight days, and I had watched so much YouTube of them live. But I hadn't been on stage to feel, like I wasn't sure what I was going to feel on stage, if that makes sense, like how it was actually going to feel to perform the music.Track 4:[11:48] And like rehearsal and performance are two different energies. Strategies, just wasn't sure what I was going to get from the five guys as far as all that went.Track 4:[11:56] And I also was really unsure what I was going to get from the crowd. It's like, I was like, yeah, I have eight days of practice with them. Like, I feel pretty good that they like my contribution. But now the question is, like, does anyone else like the contribution? Is it going to work?Track 4:[12:12] Will it be unfavorably compared? I had a lot a lot of that swirling in my head i was and it was uh yeah i wouldn't say nerves both under and overstates the situation it wasn't like i was shaking in my boots but it felt heavier than that it was like too heavy to be shaken in my boots but then steven did this really cool thing and maybe he could tell i was nervous i i will also say i don't think i was the only one with jitters i think they also hadn't played out in over a decade together so a lot of those questions maybe they're asking themselves as well um but steven rallied us really classic but and maybe like a little maybe it seemed pat to say it now but at the time it felt really good but he was just reminded us all that we practiced hard and it was going to be fun um and it's the strangest thing jd because as we walked on stage all of that tension left and that's really gifts that's been the hugest gift for me of playing in this band I got it on the first show and it's no fear it was just like this is fun these guys are fun the energy is fun and that is how it feels on stage to play with them I learned that night the reason the tension goes away is because it's about something.Track 4:[13:34] More important than And like, did you execute your part properly?Track 3:[13:37] Right.Track 4:[13:38] You know, it's like, are you in the right head and heart space? And they probably don't use these words for it. This is how I'm describing it. You know, to make the music matter, there has to be a feeling there. And they all excel at that. It turns out I had nothing to be worried about. Pure joy being on stage with those guys.Track 3:[13:54] Okay, I'm curious about your favorite songs to play. What are some that you had a lot of fun with?Track 4:[14:02] I mean, they're all so fun. And I'm not just saying that, I mean.Track 3:[14:06] No, that's cool.Track 4:[14:07] They're all pretty fun to play. Even when I'm just shaking a tambourine half of one chorus or something of a song, it's like, I can't believe I get to play the tambourine on this part. They didn't just invite me up. They're paying me to come up here and play this tambourine part.Track 3:[14:26] That's so cool.Track 4:[14:27] It's just like, what a dream gig.Track 3:[14:29] Yeah. I love how you did Trigger Cut, like how you did the sha-la-la-la-las in Trigger Cut.Track 4:[14:35] Oh, yeah. So cool. That's so fun. That's really fun. And that is a fun one to play. Like, obviously, like, anything that finds just me and Bob, like, in a tambourine party is fun. Like, any, you know, the more tambourines, the better. It's always good. It's always fun. That's just, there's never a night where I look up and see Bob playing tambourine and don't immediately get completely lifted.Track 3:[14:57] Oh, that's so cool.Track 4:[14:59] So anything where I'm doing that is fun. Working out something like Embassy Row was kind of fun because we, like, practiced the beginning part and, you know, then it rocks at the end. It's sort of like seeing those songs kind of work out in practice and then singing.Track 2:[15:13] Yeah, yeah, I get that. So what do you think? Should we get into the track, song 29?Track 4:[15:24] Let's do it. So it ranks 29 of 50?Track 2:[15:27] That's right, yeah. We'll be back on the other side with Rebecca Clay Cole. Hey, this is Bob Mastandovich from Pavement. Thanks for listening, and now on with a countdown. 29!Track 3:[21:05] There it is, the sixth song from Bright in the Corners on the Top 50 Countdown, also the sixth song on the record. This week, we're talking about song 29, the fantastic, the jammy type Slowly. Rebecca, what is your relationship with this song?Track 4:[21:21] Oh, I love this song so much. I mean, it wasn't on my first wave of songs to study, even though I knew we were going to play it. But it wasn't like, you know, there are other songs I felt like I had to nail more. So this was towards the end. I said, OK, let me get into this type slowly jam. And putting on the hat of Stephen playing that piano part and like figuring out where he put his hands and why for that song on that recording was like. I feel like a little peek behind the curtain there to the mind of the man.Track 3:[22:02] Wow.Track 4:[22:03] Because I play the piano most. That's my primary instrument. And so thinking about how he was approaching the piano on that song was cool. And I scored every note out. There's a score that I've written of everything he does. Because everything he did was so cool. And I wanted to be sure to capture not all of it verbatim, just understanding where he was coming from with all of those parts. So by the time we played it live, I had that sort of intimate relationship with it where I had been in my headphones on an edible and just flying high and really getting into the, was that a 32nd note rest or a 16th note rest? Really too over-processed on that probably, but in a fun way for me because that's how my brain works. And so by the time we put it live and I got to sort of use some of that and throw some of that out, it just kind of became a song in the set I always liked to see. I always like to see Types Lully in the set.Track 3:[23:09] That's fantastic. I like to see it as well. Bright in the Corners is one of my favorites. So I'm glad to see it's represented a lot on this top 50 list. And there's definitely more to come from Bright in the Corners. What do you think in terms of this ranking do you think it's properly rated overrated underrated like you seemed surprised when you said 29 out of 50 a and I don't know what that what that surprise meant.Track 4:[23:39] Yeah, I guess I don't know either, because I don't know what's 50 to 30.Track 3:[23:46] Right.Track 4:[23:46] So that's one of the things. So I don't know what came behind it. I can probably guess half of what's ahead, at least. But I don't know. To me, I think of it as a live track.Track 3:[24:00] Oh, OK.Track 4:[24:01] A song that was built for live. And I don't know if it was. but it just takes it takes so much life on on the stage um that it's almost like one of those songs that was made to do that when.Track 3:[24:18] You guys got it prepared to go on the road did you know you were going to do the jams in it or was that sort of like organic on the road the.Track 4:[24:29] Jams are organic they had jammed that song before so it wasn't a surprise at all that they'd be jamming and And the song as it is on the record is a bit of a jam. I mean, I did count it out measure for measure for the purpose of my scholastic exercise, but I knew we weren't going to deliver that just like that on stage. If I had to get out the sheet music to make sure I could make sense of it, I mean, no, you know, it's not worth that. So I knew there would be jams and the jams changed. Changed you know it was it's the for me type slowly is the most me i get to be on stage with pavement oh wow because i'm not yeah well it's a jam and so and there's a lot of freedom in the jam for me on the piano because the part was free to write it was very free freely written kind of thing and in and out play when i want don't play when i want stop playing the piano and just shake something else for a while or play one note and whatever I do kind of seems to work I don't even think Stephen has me in his monitor so it's not like but in my mind maybe he does but in my mind it's like you know the guitars and me and then I'm and sometimes I'm with the rhythm I'm kind of I get to jump into everyone's show on that song like I'll be with Mark for a couple minutes.Track 4:[25:51] Then I'll jump over and watch Steve West and then it's like what's Bob doing and then oh yeah yeah, Stephen's doing something cool. Let me pop over. Let me get my attention back over to the guitar and see what's going on. And Spiral will come over and jam. So for me in the set, that's like my most, I'm not really thinking about it as a pavement song, monolithic and unchangeable. I think about it as like a pavement song in the now that's still being kind of designed.Track 3:[26:17] Oh, that's a really cool way to look at it. Live music is, there's a singer that I've heard say that a song isn't finished until you play it live. You know, like you've got it written and performed, but until you take it on the stage, it sort of hasn't fully gestated.Track 4:[26:38] I think that might be true. Yeah. A song like this might never gestate. It might never be done. It's just a grower.Track 3:[26:47] Yeah, that's a good way to think of it.Track 4:[26:49] You know, it's always going to evolve live. Like, I'm sure the next time we play it, there'll be something that's not. Everyone takes different positions. musicians and yeah and then sometimes steve west will think it's time to end type slowly, and it's not or sometimes we're like we could totally end it like why hasn't it ended or and sometimes i'm the one out there like i'm still playing and it's like oh crap we're already to the next verse and i'm still oh the clouds like it just is so loose like that i love it you could never do it the same way twice which is probably why i love it so much that's.Track 3:[27:23] Very pavement as well Wow. It seems very pavement. Yeah.Track 4:[27:27] On brand.Track 3:[27:28] Is there anything else you want to say about Type Slowly?Track 4:[27:35] Um, no, there's nothing I really want to say about Type Slowly. I was wondering if you were going to ask me about Slowly Typed.Track 3:[27:42] Oh, I didn't even know. I didn't.Track 4:[27:45] But you didn't. So no, we don't, we don't have to talk about Slowly Typed.Track 3:[27:48] Well, now that you've opened the door. I would like to hear your thoughts.Track 4:[27:52] I mean, my only thought about Slowly Typed is that it shows the way that the scaffold that song hangs on now into that live jam that it's played on, I think, is how it was meant to be. Or how it does its boast power. The Slowly Typed version is, not going to ever be a nine minute epic live jam okay maybe i mean maybe i don't know maybe i'll throw that challenge out for the next round of shows but yeah um so i just think that's sort of an interesting thing to think about like i actually looked when i was doing all my homework for this tour i thought okay let me go see like if there's any like live slowly typed nine minute jams i can find on YouTube. And I couldn't find any, only the type slowly jams.Track 3:[28:40] It's, it's wild how YouTube has changed things, right? Like, I mean, the fact that you can just go and like, look at these shows to, to do your notations and to do the things that you want to do very neat that you didn't have to sort of fly by the seat of your pants.Track 4:[28:54] I mean, it felt like I was flying by the seat of my pants. But no doubt it was helpful. Like, because you listen to something on record, and it's like okay that's on record a record that was recorded 30 years ago and this band has probably played it live 500 times since then so they don't remember their body memory of the song is probably not like the recording version it's like some live version somewhere that i need to go find and there were a couple other songs not type slowly where i was sort of playing it true to the record and it would be like don't do that i'm like but it's like exactly this is exactly the parts too much or it's you know and i'm like and then i realized it's just oh yeah right because it hasn't been there for 30 years. So it's good to go back and look at the live versions of things to just sort of watch, kind of like what you just said about how a song, it doesn't really go until it's performed for an audience. But if you've performed that song for 30 years, it might have traveled somewhat from the recorded version.Track 3:[29:51] Yeah, I would guess so, now that you've said it. It wasn't something I considered before, but now that you've said it, It's like, yeah, that seems pretty clear.Track 4:[30:02] Yeah, I found that to be on a lot of songs. So YouTube was a really great resource. I would just be like listening to something. I'm like, there's no way Bob played this live on the keyboard. But I know he played the keyboard. So then I'd go back and watch the live version and watch what he was doing on keyboard and split the difference between Stephen's part recorded and Bob's part live.Track 3:[30:21] Oh, okay.Track 4:[30:21] But use that YouTube as a, it was a great resource for me. And it still is. I learn a lot of songs in general. So it's usually a little goldmine of knowledge.Track 3:[30:30] Are you always are you always finding yourself noodling and learning stuff yes yeah yeah i can't.Track 4:[30:39] Really not think about it.Track 3:[30:41] Just listening to you talk so far it's like yeah you seem to have that very analytical you know sort of uh view of things right um like to to to do this which is yeah i think.Track 4:[30:55] I'm more analytical than a lot of uh musicians or at least my creative flow is in an analytical way I like math, I like charts I like spreadsheets, and that just really helps me get into my own flows of things even when I was trying to figure out I went over to a friend of mine's studio when I first started learning these pavement songs and I was just like help, I don't even know where to start, there's like maybe a hundred songs, I just didn't even I'm like how do I even and start it.Track 3:[31:29] Yeah.Track 4:[31:30] And he was like, make a spreadsheet. That's what you do. And I totally did that. I made a spreadsheet with the album, the song. Does it have piano? Does it have percussion? Does it need me to go find some kind of synthesizer sound? I don't know what. Just like I made a spreadsheet, and that's how I, yeah, I'm pretty analytical. Yes.Track 3:[31:50] That's a pavement first, I would think, a spreadsheet.Track 4:[31:55] Well, for the music, maybe. Maybe. Maybe there's... No, I bet there's got to be a set list spreadsheet.Track 3:[32:01] Oh, okay.Track 4:[32:03] That's a lot to keep track of. Yeah.Track 3:[32:05] Maybe not.Track 4:[32:05] Maybe Bob does it all from his heart and head. But maybe if I were him, I would... But then again, I'm the one that loves the spreadsheets.Track 3:[32:14] Right. Yeah. Well, Rebecca, it's been dynamite talking to you. You know, especially seeing as it's tough to... It's been tough to hear from you these last couple of years, like to read in magazines or stuff like that. I haven't, you know, I haven't seen a tremendous amount of pavement information with you included. So this is really special to me. I'm really thankful that you decided to stop by and do this.Track 4:[32:44] Yeah, thanks for asking. It's fun to talk about it because it's just like a really fun experience that I've gotten to have. And I'm like the luckiest music fan on earth, I think, in certain ways.Track 3:[32:54] Oh, that's a great way to wrap it. That is great. Thank you so much.Track 4:[32:59] Thank you. Good luck with the rest of the countdown.Track 3:[33:01] All right. Wash your hands. Wash your goddamn hands.Track 2:[33:05] Thanks for listening to Meeting Malcolmists, a pavement podcast where we count down the top 50 pavement tracks as selected by you. If you've got questions or concerns, please shoot me an email. JD at Meeting Malcolmists dot com. Oh.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/meeting-malkmus-a-pavement-podcast/exclusive-contentAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Legendary actress Jane Fonda found her calling for activism in the 60s and never looked back. At age 86, she continues to pursue change with a contagious enthusiasm and necessary urgency.  The Oscar winner joins Sophia for a conversation that explores her complicated childhood, her relationship with her father, and how she untangled herself from the pressures of Hollywood. A true work in progress, Jane also examines her resilience and where she hopes to improve in what she calls her final act. These days, Fonda is busier than ever fighting climate change and invites listeners to join the Jane Fonda Climate Pac by texting JANE to 40506. For more information on the important work she's doing, visit JanePac.com. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Legendary actress Jane Fonda found her calling for activism in the 60s and never looked back. At age 86, she continues to pursue change with a contagious enthusiasm and necessary urgency.  The Oscar winner joins Sophia for a conversation that explores her complicated childhood, her relationship with her father, and how she untangled herself from the pressures of Hollywood. A true work in progress, Jane also examines her resilience and where she hopes to improve in what she calls her final act. These days, Fonda is busier than ever fighting climate change and invites listeners to join the Jane Fonda Climate Pac by texting JANE to 40506. For more information on the important work she's doing, visit JanePac.com. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Fashion Icon David Meister steps Behind The Rope. From a young age, David knew fashion was his calling, inspired by such fashion conscious TV shows like The Sonny & Cher show. Yes, Cher was his inspiration!  He has dressed them all as well. In this case all includes, but is not limited too, Olivia Palermo, Debra Messing, Whitney Port, Pamela Anderson, The Jane's Lynch and Fonda, Sofia Vergra, Sharon Stone, and Julia Louis Dreyfus. We also chat with David about Awards Shows, which is the most exciting to dress someone for and which is the biggest hassle. We also chat about some of the best and worst dressed celebrities - men and women. Of course, no chat with us leaves out Real Housewives. David has a new collection for HSN and let's face it, when we think of HSN, we think of everyone's favorite QVC icon, Lisa Rinna. We chat with David about what advice Rinna gave him as he ventures into this exciting new partnership with HSN and that time he dressed and attended the CFDA Awards with Rinna offspring and Fashion Icon, Miss Delilah Belle Hamlin!! Finally, we chat about Fashion in TV throughout the years - Fashion Police, Joan and Melissa Rivers and Project Runway. We figured today the perfect day to share this blast from the past chat with the one and only David Meister. @david_meister @behindvelvetrope @davidyontef BONUS & AD FREE EPISODES Available at - www.patreon.com/behindthevelvetrope  BROUGHT TO YOU BY: LOLAVIE - lolavie.com/VELVET (Use Code Velvet For 15% Off Jennifer Aniston's Award Winning Hair Care) INDEED - indeed.com/velvet (Seventy Five Dollar $75 Sponsored Job Credit To Get Your Jobs More Visibility)  BUBLY - bubly.com (Introducing Bubly Burst - Sparkling Water with an Extra Burst of Fruit Flavor, an Extra Burst of Fun. Purchase At a Store Near You)  WINONA - bywinona.com (25% Off w/ Code VelvetRope When You Begin Your Hormone Replacement Therapy Journey) ADVERTISING INQUIRIES - Please contact David@advertising-execs.com MERCH Available at - https://www.teepublic.com/stores/behind-the-velvet-rope?ref_id=13198 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

Legendary actress Jane Fonda found her calling for activism in the 60s and never looked back. At age 86, she continues to pursue change with a contagious enthusiasm and necessary urgency.  The Oscar winner joins Sophia for a conversation that explores her complicated childhood, her relationship with her father, and how she untangled herself from the pressures of Hollywood. A true work in progress, Jane also examines her resilience and where she hopes to improve in what she calls her final act. These days, Fonda is busier than ever fighting climate change and invites listeners to join the Jane Fonda Climate Pac by texting JANE to 40506. For more information on the important work she's doing, visit JanePac.com. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.