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Stranger things are happening here at From The Top! and Steven and Mary are still dismayed and delighted about it, Demogorgon be damned, because at least Barb got her justice in this week's Show Notes! covering Stranger Sings: A Musical Parody.Notes From A Director finds a few facts gone upside down of the DnD variety. Actors Nightmare spooks our duo with a few nosebleed worthy missed items and a few clips from another dimension at Life's But A Song Podcast with Jon Reilly. Quick Cast runs up that hill SO HARD, they may be hallucinating.What If? makes them face their fears and be… serious?Happy Listening!Spotify - Stranger Sings: A Parody MusicalSpotify - Stranger Things Official PlaylistApple Music - Stranger Sings: A Parody MusicalApple Music - Stranger Things Netflix Soundtrack: Season 1Give a thumbs up, follow, and rate! It really helps out the podcast, so thank you! Share with your friends and castmates, and never miss an episode by turning on notifications. Thanks FTT! Fam. No better followers out there that take each week… FROM THE TOP!Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your PodcastsINSTAGRAMGoosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive PlaylistStranger Sings Song List1. Welcome to Hawkins2. Forever3. The Adventure Song4. The Dad I Never Had5. In These Woods6. Crazy7. Getting Closer8. Stranger9. Where There's a Will10. Nice11. Barb's Turn12. Final Battle13. The Dad I Never Had (Reprise)14. Upside Down/Welcome to Hawkins (Reprise)
Steven and Mary return from the Upside Down to give you this raucous, irreverent take on the raucous and irreverent off-Broadway sensation, Stranger Sings: A Parody Musical, in this week's installment of From The Top!Spotify - Stranger Sings: A Parody MusicalSpotify - Stranger Things Official PlaylistApple Music - Stranger Things Netflix Soundtrack: Season 1Give a thumbs up, follow, and rate! It really helps out the podcast, so thank you! Share with your friends and castmates, and never miss an episode by turning on notifications. Thanks FTT! Fam. No better followers out there that take each week… FROM THE TOP!Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your PodcastsINSTAGRAMGoosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive PlaylistStranger Sings Song List1. Welcome to Hawkins2. Forever3. The Adventure Song4. The Dad I Never Had5. In These Woods6. Crazy7. Getting Closer8. Stranger9. Where There's a Will10. Nice11. Barb's Turn12. Final Battle13. The Dad I Never Had (Reprise)14. Upside Down/Welcome to Hawkins (Reprise)
"From The Top," which broadcasts in 45 states, features student musicians from across the country. This week's episode includes some from the Kansas City area. The episode will air on 91.9 Classical KC Saturday at 10 a.m. and Sunday at 7 p.m.
Life Is But A Song Podcast - Stranger Sings Episode with Jon! If you like what you hear give us a thumbs up, follow, and rating. :) It really does help out the podcast, so thank you! Share with your friends and castmates, and never miss an episode and get notified by hitting that bell button. Thank FTT! Fam. No better followers out there that take each week… FROM THE TOP! INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist
The pilgrimage through the desert continues. Will Steven and MAry find a well made of people and drink from? Will they encounter a burning bush and talk to it? Or will they be “thirsty” and “burn up” because they cast too sexy again in this week's Quick Cast? Happy Listening to this week's From the Top Show Notes episode for the Prince of Egypt! The Prince of Egypt (Original Cast Recording) - Spotify The Prince of Egypt (Original Cast Recording) - Apple Music The Prince of Egypt (Music from the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) - Spotify The Prince of Egypt (Music from the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) - Apple Music If you like what you hear give us a thumbs up, follow, and rating. :) It really does help out the podcast, so thank you! Share with your friends and castmates, and never miss an episode and get notified by hitting that bell button. Thank FTT! Fam. No better followers out there that take each week… FROM THE TOP! Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist
This week, Mary and Steven try to part the Red Sea that is this grand biblical tale of two brothers and some bloody tricks, but the real miracle is if they don't offend anyone. Join in for From The Top's fun and raucous coverage of The Prince of Egypt: The Musical! The Prince of Egypt (Original Cast Recording) - Spotify The Prince of Egypt (Original Cast Recording) - Apple Music The Prince of Egypt (Music from the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) - Spotify The Prince of Egypt (Music from the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) - Apple Music If you like what you hear give us a thumbs up, follow, and rating. :) It really does help out the podcast, so thank you! Share with your friends and castmates, and never miss an episode and get notified by hitting that bell button. Thank FTT! Fam. No better followers out there that take each week… FROM THE TOP! Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist
Join Mary and Steven's Encore of Outcasts in this week's From The Top! episode where they revisit previous episode's themes and characters and take a look at them from an Outcast's lens. Plus, Steven gives Mary the ultimate test... Hugh Jackman. Oklahoma! (1998 Royal National Theatre Company) Hairspray (Original Broadway Cast Recording) Violet (Original Broadway Cast Recording) A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder (Original Broadway Cast Recording) Wicked (Original Broadway Cast Recording / Deluxe Edition) If you like what you hear give us a thumbs up, follow, and rating. :) It really does help out the podcast, so thank you! Share with your friends and castmates, and never miss an episode and get notified by hitting that bell button. Thank FTT! Fam. No better followers out there that take each week… FROM THE TOP! Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist
Join Mary and Steven as they continue on their pink adventure to prove in the court of law that Legally Blonde is the perfect musical (or close to it) in this weeks Show Notes episode of From The Top! Listen in to LIFE IS BUT A SONG Podcast with Jon Reilly, to hear other talking points with our longtime friend of the Pod. Go show some support! Spotify EPISODE LINK HERE Legally Blonde The Musical (Original Broadway Cast Recording) - Spotify Legally Blonde the Musical (Original Cast Recording) [Recorded Live at the Savoy Theatre, London] - Spotify Legally Blonde The Musical (Original Broadway Cast Recording) - Apple Music Legally Blonde The Musical (Original London Cast Recording) - Apple Music Legally Blonde Original Cast Album - YouTube Legally Blonde Full Show MTV Broadcast If you like what you hear give us a thumbs up, follow, and rating. :) It really does help out the podcast, so thank you! Share with your friends and castmates, and never miss an episode and get notified by hitting that bell button. Thank FTT! Fam. No better followers out there that take each week… FROM THE TOP! Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist “Omigod You Guys” - Elle, Serena, Margot, Pilar, and Ensemble “Serious” - Elle and Warner “Daughter of Delta Nu” - Serena, Margot, Pilar, and Ensemble “What You Want (Part 1)” - Elle, Serena, Margot, Pilar, Kate, Elle's Dad, Elle's Mom, Grandmaster Chad, and Ensemble “What You Want (Part 2)” - Elle, Ensemble “The Harvard Variations” - Emmett, Aaron, Enid, Padamadan, and Harvard Students “Blood in the Water” - Callahan and Ensemble “Positive” - Elle, Serena, Margot, Pilar, and Greek Chorus “Ireland” - Paulette “Ireland - Reprise” - Paulette “Serious - Reprise” - Elle and Warner “Chip on My Shoulder” - Elle, Emmett, Greek Chorus, and Company “So Much Better” - Elle, Greek Chorus, and Company “Whipped Into Shape” - Brooke, Callahan, and Company “Delta Nu Nu Nu” - Brooke and Elle “Take It Like A Man” - Elle, Emmett, and Salespeople “Bend and Snap” - Elle, Paulette, Serena, Margot, Pilar, Bend and Snap Guys, and Salon Folks “Gay or European?” - Elle, Callahan, Emmett, Brooke, Vivienne, Warner, Enid, Judge, Nikos, Carlos, and Company “Legally Blonde” - Elle and Emmett “Legally Blonde - Remix” - Vivienne, Elle, Enid, Brooke, Mr. Woods, Mrs. Woods, and Company “Scene of the Crime” - Elle, Judge, Serena, Margot, Pilar, and Company “Find My Way/Finale” - Elle, Paulette, Emmett, and Company
Y'all better Bend and Snap for this latest addition to From The Top!, cause it takes a lot of blonde ambition to dive into Legally Blonde: The Musical, and Mary and Steven have the peroxide and toner ready. Listen in to LIFE IS BUT A SONG Podcast with Jon Reilly, to hear other talking points with our longtime friend of the Pod. Go show some support! Spotify EPISODE LINK HERE Legally Blonde The Musical (Original Broadway Cast Recording) - Spotify Legally Blonde the Musical (Original Cast Recording) [Recorded Live at the Savoy Theatre, London] - Spotify Legally Blonde The Musical (Original Broadway Cast Recording) - Apple Music Legally Blonde The Musical (Original London Cast Recording) - Apple Music Legally Blonde Original Cast Album - YouTube Legally Blonde Full Show MTV Broadcast If you like what you hear give us a thumbs up, follow, and rating. :) It really does help out the podcast, so thank you! Share with your friends and castmates, and never miss an episode and get notified by hitting that bell button. Thank FTT! Fam. No better followers out there that take each week… FROM THE TOP! Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist “Omigod You Guys” - Elle, Serena, Margot, Pilar, and Ensemble “Serious” - Elle and Warner “Daughter of Delta Nu” - Serena, Margot, Pilar, and Ensemble “What You Want (Part 1)” - Elle, Serena, Margot, Pilar, Kate, Elle's Dad, Elle's Mom, Grandmaster Chad, and Ensemble “What You Want (Part 2)” - Elle, Ensemble “The Harvard Variations” - Emmett, Aaron, Enid, Padamadan, and Harvard Students “Blood in the Water” - Callahan and Ensemble “Positive” - Elle, Serena, Margot, Pilar, and Greek Chorus “Ireland” - Paulette “Ireland - Reprise” - Paulette “Serious - Reprise” - Elle and Warner “Chip on My Shoulder” - Elle, Emmett, Greek Chorus, and Company “So Much Better” - Elle, Greek Chorus, and Company “Whipped Into Shape” - Brooke, Callahan, and Company “Delta Nu Nu Nu” - Brooke and Elle “Take It Like A Man” - Elle, Emmett, and Salespeople “Bend and Snap” - Elle, Paulette, Serena, Margot, Pilar, Bend and Snap Guys, and Salon Folks “Gay or European?” - Elle, Callahan, Emmett, Brooke, Vivienne, Warner, Enid, Judge, Nikos, Carlos, and Company “Legally Blonde” - Elle and Emmett “Legally Blonde - Remix” - Vivienne, Elle, Enid, Brooke, Mr. Woods, Mrs. Woods, and Company “Scene of the Crime” - Elle, Judge, Serena, Margot, Pilar, and Company “Find My Way/Finale” - Elle, Paulette, Emmett, and Company
Some of y'all being singin' "For Forever" like the lyrics be "I see wrinkle lines, for forever," and Mary and Steven get into it and so much more, covering the missed, forgotten, and incorrect whoopsie daisies. We were just lying on the ground waiting to see if anyone would say something. Happy Listening! If you like what you hear give us a thumbs up, follow, and rating. :) It really does help out the podcast, so thank you! Share with your friends and castmates, and never miss an episode by hitting that bell button. Thank you FTT! Fam. No better followers out there that take each week… FROM THE TOP! Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist Dear Evan Hansen (Original Broadway Cast Recording) - Spotify Dear Evan Hansen (Original Broadway Cast Recording) - Apple Music Dear Evan Hansen (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) - Spotify Dear Evan Hansen (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) - Apple Music Dear Evan Hansen Comparisons - YouTube Song List "Anybody Have a Map" – Heidi, Cynthia, Evan, Larry, Connor, Zoe "Waving Through a Window" – Evan "For Forever" – Evan "Sincerely, Me" – Connor, Evan, Jared "Requiem" – Zoe, Cynthia, Larry "If I Could Tell Her" – Evan, Zoe "Disappear" – Connor, Evan, Alana, Jared, Larry, Cynthia, Zoe "You Will Be Found" – Company" To Break in a Glove"– Larry, Evan "Only Us" – Zoe, Evan "Good for You" – Heidi, Alana, Jared, Evan, Connor"Words Fail" – Evan "So Big/So Small" – Heidi "Finale"– Company
Dear FTT Fam, Today is gonna be a good day. Do you know why?! Mary and Steven are back to kick off season three of From The Top! covering Dear Evan Hansen. The struggle is real on if intentions justify means when good comes from being deplorable, if parents are insane or just clueless, and who's to blame in this rollercoaster of a show that hit the scene in 2016. Elevate that casted arm, wave through that window, or create a brand new nonprofit orchard while you enjoy From The Top!'s Season 3 kick-off on a season about Outcasts. Happy Listening!!! If you like what you hear give us a thumbs up, follow, and rating. :) It really does help out the podcast, so thank you! Share with your friends and castmates, and never miss an episode and get notified by hitting that bell button. Thank FTT! Fam. No better followers out there that take each week… FROM THE TOP! Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist Dear Evan Hansen (Original Broadway Cast Recording) - Spotify Dear Evan Hansen (Original Broadway Cast Recording) - Apple Music Dear Evan Hansen (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) - Spotify Dear Evan Hansen (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) - Apple Music Dear Evan Hansen Comparisons - YouTube Just One Day : Freaky Friday The Musical - YouTube Song List "Anybody Have a Map" – Heidi, Cynthia, Evan, Larry, Connor, Zoe "Waving Through a Window" – Evan "For Forever" – Evan "Sincerely, Me" – Connor, Evan, Jared "Requiem" – Zoe, Cynthia, Larry "If I Could Tell Her" – Evan, Zoe "Disappear" – Connor, Evan, Alana, Jared, Larry, Cynthia, Zoe "You Will Be Found" – Company" To Break in a Glove"– Larry, Evan "Only Us" – Zoe, Evan "Good for You" – Heidi, Alana, Jared, Evan, Connor"Words Fail" – Evan "So Big/So Small" – Heidi "Finale"– Company
Mary and Steven return to give you a show notes episode of epic proportion with all 5 shows in their season ending gauntlet run extravaganza. Happy Listening! From The Top is a musical theater review podcast that breaks down the origins of a show, its content, and its relevancy in the world today. If you like what you hear give us a thumbs up, follow, and rating. :) It really does help out the podcast, so thank you! Share with your friends and castmates, and never miss an episode and get notified by hitting that bell button. Thank FTT! Fam. No better followers out there that take each week… FROM THE TOP! Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
Your favorite Musical Theatre Podcast and Review returns with a season 2 wrap-up with lots of fun and news to be had. Learn about what has taken so long to return for your listening pleasure, see Mary and Steven's favorite Season 2 moments, lessons learned, and what's to come in the future. Happy Listening! Two Strangers - Spotify Album Link If you like what you hear give us a thumbs up, follow, and rating. :) It really does help out the podcast, so thank you! Share with your friends and castmates, and never miss an episode and get notified by hitting that bell button. Thank FTT! Fam. No better followers out there that take each week… FROM THE TOP! Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
Hello FTT Fam! It's been a minute since we've been able to connect, but never fear! We are still around, and still stirring up some wonderful things for our third season of From the Top! Unfortunately, as we know, life can sometimes be nothing but chaos, and FTT host Steven has needed to take some much needed R&R after being in two shows back to back. But never fear! We still have some **amazing** content to keep you company while you wait. Make sure to check out our other episodes about black and white stripped suited demons, or plants from another world that crave human blood. Or, check out the FTT hosts cameo on Life's But A Song pod wherever you can get your podcasts. We promise we'll be back soon. Thank you for your patience - we love you guys! If you like what you hear give us a thumbs up, follow, and rating. :) It really does help out the podcast, so thank you! Share with your friends and castmates, and never miss an episode and get notified by hitting that bell button. Thank FTT! Fam. No better followers out there that take each week… FROM THE TOP! Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist INSTAGRAM --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
Does GiANT work? This is something we hear from potential clients often. It's one thing to learn leadership tools in theory; it's another to put them into practice within a team or organization in an every day work environment. Thousands of companies around the world are doing it every day, so we wanted you to hear from one. Our guest is Keith Glover and he is a true people developer who seeks to serve his people day in and day out and make the culture at AHSG an environment of learning, where everyone is encouraged and equipped to grow. Headquartered in Edmond, Oklahoma and with five offices around the country, AHSG is a nationwide, diversified healthcare staffing platform that serves over 2,500 endpoints across health systems, hospitals, and outpatient clinics in all 50 states.You can can hear Keith's love and passion for developing his own leadership skills and the leadership of people in his care. Listen as he shares why it's important and the plan forward to help every employee become the healthiest leader that can be. And it has started at the top and is lived out even in the difficult time of the company's journey.If you would like to ask Keith questions about how he and AHS have integrated the GiANT tools into their culture, feel free to reach out to him on LinkedIn.You'll hear the practical ways AHS is using GiANT in the next episode, but for now, look what the emplyees are saying about what the content has done for them.93% of the program participants stated that their expectations were exceeded or mostly met.94% were Very Satisfied or Satisfied with the overall programSome comments were:One positive outcome is being able to understand myself and habits more throughout this experience. I have had some pretty big ah-ha moments throughout the process that have helped me became a more aware leader. Knowing my teams 5 voices has helped tremendously with effective communication.It's helped me present myself in a way that is more approachable to my team. To be open to suggestions and be in collaboration to improve outcomes.I am more attuned to becoming a liberating leader and the role that challenging my staff must play in that process. Supporting my team comes naturally to me. I'm now actively working to ensure that team members are adequately challenged and can develop and grow more within and beyond their current roles.I have connected with other leaders in the organization, outside of my department, where I wouldn't have done that previously. I have recognized the areas I need to improve as a leader and am taking action to work on those. I've had more positive interactions with my employees, and have received positive feedback from them about my leadership!I have become more self-aware and self-reflective. I was really impacted by the Developing Others content and realized that I need to be more patient in walking others through new skill-building. Additionally, the support challenge matrix helped me realize that I may be sheltering new peers from challenges and that really robs them of opportunity to grow.Helps me better recognize why people communicate the way they do, and how I need to look for the ways other people are motivated/encouraged/discouraged, rather than assuming they think like me.The 70/30 principle has profoundly transformed my approach to work. Although I was introduced to it a few years back, a recent podcast on the topic truly reshaped my viewpoint. Now, rather than approaching tasks, I'm less inclined towards (my 30%) with dread, I give myself grace and embrace them with patience and eagerness for the learning opportunity they present. This shift in perspective energizes me rather than sapping my strength. It has also enabled me to guide my team in reevaluating their approaches to daunting tasks. I've become more attuned to assessing my team's workload balance, ensuring it aligns with the 70/30 principle. If/when imbalances arise, we strategize together to restore equilibrium, fostering success and ongoing learning.
They, like, never do this, but Mary and Steven are giving you the most fetch bonus episode, sexier than Aaron Samuels' hair when it's, well... you know. From The Top! takes on Mean Girls: The Musical. Mean Girls (Original Broadway Cast Recording) - Spotify Mean Girls (Music From The Motion Picture) Musical - Spotify Mean Girls Broadway - Apple Music Mean Girls Musical Film - Apple Music If you like what you hear give us a thumbs up, follow, and rating. :) It really does help out the podcast, so thank you! Share with your friends and castmates, and never miss an episode and get notified by hitting that bell button. Thank FTT! Fam. No better followers out there that take each week… FROM THE TOP! Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist Song List - Act One *"A Cautionary Tale" – Janis and Damian *"It Roars" – Cady and Ensemble "It Roars (Reprise)"† – Cady and Ensemble *"Where Do You Belong?" – Damian, Janis, Cady, and Ensemble *"Meet the Plastics" – Regina, Gretchen, Karen, Janis, Damian, and Cady "Stupid With Love" – Cady *"Apex Predator" – Janis and Cady "What's Wrong with Me?" – Gretchen "Stupid with Love (Reprise)" – Cady and Aaron *"Sexy" – Karen and Ensemble "Someone Gets Hurt" – Regina, Aaron, and Ensemble *"Revenge Party" – Janis, Damian, Cady, and Ensemble *"Fearless" – Cady, Gretchen, Karen, Taylor, and Ensemble "Someone Gets Hurt (Reprise 1)" – Regina Act Two "A Cautionary Tale (Reprise)" – Janis and Damian *"Stop" – Damian and Ensemble "What's Wrong With Me (Reprise)" – Gretchen and Mrs. George *"Whose House Is This?" – Kevin, Cady, Gretchen, Karen, and Ensemble "More Is Better" – Cady and Aaron "Someone Gets Hurt (Reprise 2)" – Janis and Damian "World Burn" – Regina and Ensemble *"I'd Rather Be Me" – Janis and Ensemble "Fearless (Reprise)"† – Cady *"Do This Thing" – Cady, Ms. Norbury, Kevin, Mathletes, and Ensemble *"I See Stars" – Cady and Full Company --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
A larger-than-life Bard said to his wife, "That's the way it is," about an overprotected girl, not yet a woman, setting off a domino effect that's about to blow... Steven and Mary cover & Juliet in the Season 2 Finale episode of From The Top! & Juliet (Original Broadway Cast Recording) - 2022 Spotify & Juliet (Original London Cast Recording) - 2019 Spotify & Juliet (Original Broadcast Recording) - 2022 iTunes The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Share with your friends and castmates and remember to rate us where you are listening! Thank You :) Also, tap the button to get notified, so you never miss an episode. Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist Featured Songs:“Larger Than Life”“I Want It That Way”“…Baby One More Time”“Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely”“Domino”“Show Me Love”“Blow”“I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman”“Overprotected”“Confident”“Teenage Dream” / “Break Free”“Oops!...I Did It Again”“I Kissed a Girl”“It's My Life”“Love Me Like You Do”“Since U Been Gone”“Whataya Want From Me”“One More Try”“Problem” / “Can't Feel My Face”“That's the Way It Is”“Everybody”“As Long As You Love Me”“It's Gonna Be Me”“Shape Of My Heart”“Stronger”“Fuckin' Perfect”“Roar”“I Want It That Way - Reprise”“Can't Stop the Feeling!” --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
SynopsisLike everyone else, young composers indulge in daydreams from time to time. One can easily imagine a 15-year-old composer wanna-be staring out the window and fantasizing that one day her music will be performed by big-name virtuosos and heard coast-to-coast on a national broadcast.That is exactly what did happen on today's date in 2002, when 15-year-old composer Athena Adamopoulos heard Yo-Yo Ma and Christopher O'Riley perform her Soliloquy for cello and piano at a taping of From the Top — a nationally broadcast public radio program that showcases young classical musicians from around the country. Occasionally, the show also spotlights young composers, too, as it did the day Ma stopped by as a special guest.Adamopoulos said, “When I heard the piece in my head originally, I heard it something like this, but this is about 10 times better! It's the most touching feeling in the world.”Even at 15, Adamopoulos was already a somewhat “experienced” composer. She had written several other chamber works by that date and had actually performed one of her first pieces on The Sally Jesse Raphael Show on TV when she was just 8.Music Played in Today's ProgramAthena Adamopoulos (b. 1987) Soliloquy; Yo Yo Ma, cello; Christopher O'Riley, piano; live recording courtesy of ‘From The Top' (PRI)
Prom night is the least of Mary and Steven's problems in this week's episode of From The Top! covering a blood-covered Carrie: The Musical. Is it In? Does it shine? Or Should it have done everyone a favor and stayed with mom instead? Carrie: The Musical (Premiere Cast Recording) Riverdale: Special Episode - Carrie The Musical (Original Television Soundtrack) Original 1988 - Carrie The Musical Supercut FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Share with your friends and castmates and remember to rate us where you are listening! Thank You :) Also, tap the button to get notified, so you never miss an episode. Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
Come to the Bechdel Funeral Home Baby!!! in this week's episode of From The Top! where Mary and Steven tackle a ring of keys, a three-in-one lesbian, and a life surrounding death in the funnest of homes and musicals, Fun Home! Fun Home (A New Broadway Musical) - 2015 Broadway Cast Album FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Share with your friends and castmates and remember to rate us where you are listening! Thank You :) Also, tap the button to get notified, so you never miss an episode. Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
Don't turn around is the name of the game this week as Mary and Steven begin their decent "way down under the ground" to a little place called Hadestown in this week's episode of From The Top! Hadestown (Original Broadway Cast Recording) FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Share with your friends and castmates and remember to rate us where you are listening! Thank You :) Also, tap the button to get notified, so you never miss an episode. Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
Mary and Steven dive deep into the recesses of their manic brains to deliver personal and gutting takes on this week's From The Top! episode covering a show so powerful, it might just have you wondering if it was even real with Next To Normal. Next To Normal (Original Broadway Cast Recording) - 2009 FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Share with your friends and castmates and remember to rate us where you are listening! Thank You :) Also, tap the button to get notified, so you never miss an episode. Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
From The Top! keeps Defying Gravity in Show Notes for Wicked, and in typical fashion, there's a perfect balance of dancing through life and a bit of loathing. Notes From A Director - Steven was not that girl who didn't get a note, but unlike spells in this show, fixes them quickly. Actor's Nightmare - It's not easy being green, or any color as Mary and Steven discuss politics around the land, how bad optics can affect perception, and other topics in a place scarier than the witch's castle. Quick Cast - Hollywood having done the lifting already, Steven and Mary discuss the upcoming Wicked film casting choices, and offer some substitutions that might have you riffing like Ariana Grande and saying "Mamma Mia!" What If? - What if Glinda had followed Elphaba that day in the Emerald City? Wicked Cast Album - 2003 FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Share with your friends and castmates and remember to rate us where you are listening! Thank You :) Also, tap the button to get notified, so you never miss an episode. Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts FTT! INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
Mary and Steven Continue their coverage of a contemporary staple brought to life from the land of Oz in Part 2 of From The Top! Wicked. Steven poses some tough questions this go around and Mary explains the nuances of each character's battles "for good" in this raucous musical. Then they both answer their questions in Table Read that have them surprising each other, in a "good" way? Happy Listening! Wicked Original Broadway Cast Recording Wizard and I - Elphaba Riff Option Compilation FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Share with your friends and castmates and remember to rate us where you are listening! Thank You :) Also, tap the button to get notified, so you never miss an episode. Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
We interview Rosanne Katon Walden, the mother of Adam Mandela Walden, a young man with autism with remarkable musical talent. At the age of 2 he taught himself harmonica, and to sign opera phonetically. Rosanne nurtured this budding talent and at age 6 bought Adam a thrift store cello, and Adam fell in love with it. Now after years of training and performance, Adam is a student at Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he is further developing his skills, including composition and conducting. Jill and Roseanne discuss Adam's early years, the nature of his musical gifts, how, with help, he navigates college, and what the future might look like.Note: the opening music is Adam playing Bach at the recent Stars of the Spectrum concert at Fenway Park. Links:Fantastic Cellist's Deep Musical Connectionhttps://www.daily-joy.org/video/fantastic-cellists-deep-musical-connection/Cellist with autism finds his purpose, voice in musichttps://spectrumnews1.com/ca/la-east/arts/2021/12/21/cellist-with-autism-finds-his-purpose-and-his-voice-in-music There are a lot of other videos and articles to see including Adam's interview in “From The Top” if you just google "Adam Mandela Walden"https://youtu.be/mLoGBJRxsZ4?si=oudW4TaShenEOq8h
From The Top! Hosts Mary and Steven clean up a few Candarian Demon bodies this week in their Show Notes episode of their coverage of the necronomicon-ical production of five college students on their way to an old abandoned cabin in the woods... Evil Dead: The Musical. Notes From A Director - Another message from a fellow FTT Fam member, otherwise the bloodbath was light today. Actors Nightmare - Steven discusses an OG show member, and then brings up a fact that has Mary needing to leave the studio. Quick Cast - Mary is in the driver's seat this time around as a true Evil Dead stan, and feels the heat from hell as Steven brings out some Broadway staples to cast this camptastic production. What If? - What if Linda hadn't turned into a deadite? Evil Dead: The Musical 2007 Cast Album FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Share with your friends and castmates and remember to rate us where you are listening! Thank You :) Also, tap the button to get notified, so you never miss an episode. Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts FTT! INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
What could go wrong with five college students venturing to an abandoned cabin in the woods? What. Stupid. Bitches. Join us, Mary and Steven, From The Top! as they take on and blood gush over this cult classic, horror trope-filled, irreverent, blue-collar comedy-laced production of Evil Dead: The Musical. Evil Dead: The Musical 2007 Cast Album FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Share with your friends and castmates and remember to rate us where you are listening! Thank You :) Also, tap the button to get notified, so you never miss an episode. Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
Mary and Steven continue the conversation in their coverage of Kinky Boots The Musical in this week's Show Notes Episode of From The Top! where not even a drag queen's heel hit to the forehead could stop them from loving this fabulous spectacle of a show. Notes From A Director - Steven tripped in his heels only a couple of times, but wanted to rectify the missteps and they have some fan mail with a question! Actors Nightmare - What did Steven and Mary not talk about in the factory corner? Relationship woes? Queer community travesties and debaucheries? The ugly shoes coworkers where to work?... Quick Cast - Mary has some deep casts that has Steven pulling up Google, and Steven uses his "Executized" privileges, inspired by Lauren, for the first time in a long time. What If? - What if Lola hadn't graciously let Don win the boxing Match? FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Share with your friends and castmates and remember to rate us where you are listening! Thank You :) Also, tap the button to get notified, so you never miss an episode. Kinky Boots (Original Broadway Cast Recording) Kinky Boots (Original West End Cast Recording) Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
From The Top! takes on the amazing musical theater production that is firmly six inches above the rest of the crowd. Mary and Steven talk about Kinky Boots, and it really may be the most beautiful thing in the world. Happy Listening! FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Share with your friends and castmates and remember to rate us where you are listening! Thank You :) Also, tap the button to get notified, so you never miss an episode. Kinky Boots (Original Broadway Cast Recording) Kinky Boots (Original West End Cast Recording) Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
Show Notes for From The Top's Coverage of A Gentleman's Guide To Love and Murder with Steven and Mary! Notes From A Director - Steven Has Quite a few this time, but all in good fun when looking down the barrel of a gun. Actors Nightmare - The Plot of This show has some questions still to uncover, and Mary and Steven dig a little deeper into the characters, the under-appreciation of character actors' plights, and 1900's female autonomy. Quick Cast - Mary has some doozies that have Steven feeling a little woozy as if he looked off the top of a cathedral tower. What If? - What if Monty ended up having to kill Lord Asquith D'Ysquith Sr? FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Share with your friends and castmates and remember to rate us where you are listening! Thank You :) Also, tap the button to get notified, so you never miss an episode. Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist A Gentleman's Guide To Love and Murder Broadway Cast Album --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
In this weeks episode of From The Top!, Mary and Steven chat about how having 8 people in your way to a fortune is just a small speedbump. Join in on a fun musical review that has our two ending in tears of joy. Happy Listening! FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Share with your friends and castmates and remember to rate us where you are listening! Thank You :) Also, tap the button to get notified, so you never miss an episode. Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist 2013 Geneltmen's Guide Cast Album WICKED RIFF COMPARISON - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSVOXSSVmlw --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
The "Dianassance" is in full swing this episode as Mary and Steven continue with corrections and coverage in Show Notes of From The Top! for Diana The Musical. Notes From A Director - As curt and simple this week as Diana in the Basement at Camilla's sisters birthday party. Actors Nightmare - Jon had a few corrections to bring up and Steven clarifies a few minor details and apologizes. Quick Cast - Mary hits Steven so hard it might have been the next Thrilla in Manilla (this time without Camilla) What If? - Steven asks what if all parties were fine with a little side-piece action? @butasongpod - Life Is But A Song Podcast Instagram Spotify Link to Life Is But A Song Podcast FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Share with your friends and castmates and remember to rate us where you are listening! Thank You :) Also, tap the button to get notified, so you never miss an episode. Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist Diana The Musical Album on Spotify --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
Come join the Dianassance, as From The Top! hosts Mary and Steven have a friend of the Pod, Jon Reilly on from Life is But a Song Podcast to talk about one pretty pretty girl in a pretty pretty dress who is underestimated, and took a decade by storm. From The Top! covers Diana: The Musical. Turn on some rock and roll, and enjoy a glass of champagne. Might as well slip into a sexy little black dress too. Happy Listening! @butasongpod - Life Is But A Song Podcast Instagram Spotify Link to Life Is But A Song Podcast FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Share with your friends and castmates and remember to rate us where you are listening! Thank You :) Also, tap the button to get notified, so you never miss an episode. Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist Diana The Musical Album on Spotify --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
Tomorrow is a latter day, but Mary and Steven can't wait that long to give you even more gospel on this amazing show. From The Top! gives another Show Notes on their coverage of The Book Of Mormon. Notes From A Director - Steven keeps it short and sweet unlike some unwarranted visits from Elders can be. Actors Nightmare - Mary talks about the relevance of this show and why these characters at their core are important to be seen in a larger-than-life stage experience, and then they both rave about the music with some fun inside stories. Quick Cast - Only three people up for roles this week, but did Steven and Mary let divine inspiration lead the way or did they allow Satan to cloud their judgment? What If? What if our Elders we female missionaries? That might change the game to something... incredible. So grab a cup of hot cocoa or Tang and enjoy the hilarious, irreverent musings of our cohost's mission to bring this musical to the world. Happy Listening! FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Share with your friends and castmates and remember to rate us where you are listening! Thank You :) Also, tap the button to get notified, so you never miss an episode. Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist The Book Of Mormon Broadway Cast Recording - Spotify --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
This week in Show Notes for From The Top! Sweeney Todd episode: Notes From A Director - Steven has to apologize to France. Actors Nightmare - Perelli is finally given his moment, and a lot of Mrs. Lovett's backstory is in question. Quick Cast - Mary goes mad dropping some interesting, some amazing, and some random picks for Steven down the chute this week. What If? - Lovett was actually honest? Have a spot of gin, if you can, cause you'll need it. Happy Listening! *** 2023 Released Songs on Spotify - Sweeney Todd FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Share with your friends and castmates and remember to rate us where you are listening! Thank You :) Also, tap the button to get notified, so you never miss an episode. Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist 2003 Broadway Cast Album - Sweeney Todd 1979 Original Broadway Cast Recording - Sweeney Todd --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
This week's musical has Mary and Steven taking a trip to Fleet Street in an episode of From The Top! that will leave you gasping for air... but impeccably shaved by the one and only Sweeney Todd. Steven becomes so obsessed with trying to uncover the truth about the mythical barber he almost throws himself into the oven, and Mary unveils her undying love for these characters and themes like they are her friends. Enjoy a meat pie and just sit back and relax while they do what they do best, cause this episode is on the house... Don't mind the blood. Happy Listening! *** 2023 Released Songs on Spotify - Sweeney Todd FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Share with your friends and castmates and remember to rate us where you are listening! Thank You :) Also, tap the button to get notified, so you never miss an episode. Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist 2003 Broadway Cast Album - Sweeney Todd 1979 Original Broadway Cast Recording - Sweeney Todd --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
This week in From The Top! Show NotesnSteven and Mary take one last trip to see a strange and interesting plant at Mushnik's shop, covering their episode of Little Shop of Horrors. Notes From A Director - Not a lot to feed you this week, so it'll leave you craving even more. Actors Nightmare: - Steven sprinkles a few strange fun facts on Mary about the entire lifetime of this show Quick Cast - Only a few people to cast create a discussion that would feed a lot of CO2 to Audrey II. What If - A main protagonist shift is given more thought than a worldwide eclipse. FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Share with your friends and castmates and remember to rate us where you are listening! Thank You :) Also, tap the button to get notified, so you never miss an episode. Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
Mary and Steven are so excited to share the studio this week with the director that brought them together. From The Top! takes on the mean green machine from outer space, covering Little Shop of Horrors with one of their dear friends, Errol Koch. So toss a salad, spray those houseplants, and make a green goddess smoothie. You aren't ready for part one of this two-part episode, cause these little podcasters' roots are about to go deep. Happy Listening! FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Share with your friends and castmates and remember to rate us where you are listening! Thank You :) Also, tap the button to get notified, so you never miss an episode. Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist ----------- Original 1982 Broadway Cast Album - Little Shop of Horrors 2003 Broadway Revival Cast Album - Little Shop of Horrors 2019 Broadway Revival New Cast Album - Little Shop of Horrors --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
Part 2 of Mary, Steven, and Errol's conversation in From The Top!'s coverage of Little Shop of Horrors gets even deeper and grows to new heights Audrey II could only dream about. Weed that garden and set up the atrium or plant shelf, but put away that plant food. No, no... Your arms and le- you know what, best just avoid that plant store and commit to a goldfish. Happy Listening! FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Share with your friends and castmates and remember to rate us where you are listening! Thank You :) Also, tap the button to get notified, so you never miss an episode. Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
"From The Top" Genesis 35:1-8 Dr. Paul Cannings, Pastor | Living Word Fellowship Church June 18, 2023 - 8:00 a.m. Worship Service - To learn more about Living Word, https://www.lwfellowshipchurch.org
Are you blind when you're born? Can you see in the dark? Are you able to sit through this entire show without needing an adult? Or do you just try and erase this show from your... memory...? From The Top! takes on CATS. =^.^= Steven has poured over the TS Eliot poems, the history of the feline, and the circumstances of how this show came to be which has uncovered some Cat-tastic discoveries, and some that will make you feel like you huffed some catnip. Mary has questions, no answers, and feels like she's the one who's been abandoned in a junkyard full of lycra and a death cult. Walk away with some knowledge to share with your other CATS-STANS or love to hate-listen at every conjuring turn. So grab a bowl of cream and some fancy feast for the trip to the Heaviside Layer cause it starts right meow. Happy Listening! FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Share with your friends and castmates and remember to rate us where you are listening! Thank You :) Also, tap the button to get notified, so you never miss an episode. Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
In Show Notes this week for From The Top!'s coverage of Violet, Steven and Mary have a few thoughts hotter than a stuffy bus ride through the south or a tent filled with faithful hopefuls on a hot summer day. Notes From a Director finds that our duo skipped a page and needs to circle back to some content on some major tread lightly topics. Actor's Nightmare brings up some hard-hitting finds they weren't able to discuss within these characters, and Mary and Steven talk about some repercussions of actions as well that drive our plot harder than the 7 rotating bus drivers. Quick Cast has Stevens's head rolling with choices for modern casting. What If? changes a plot point that flips this story on a new trajectory, and even starts a conspiracy theory. Make sure to use the restroom and grab a bag of candy, cause the bus is leaving with or without you as Mary and Steven enjoy another hilarious discussion over a heartfelt and wonderful musical. Happy Listening! FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Share with your friends and castmates and remember to rate us where you are listening! Thank You :) Also, tap the button to get notified, so you never miss an episode. Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist VIOLET THE MUSICAL ALBUM - Spotify --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
After their own psychotic break, "Killing Time" is not quite over yet at From The Top! as Steven and Mary return to the booth to finish their coverage of American Psycho: The Musical in this week's episode of Show Notes. Not many Notes From a Director this week, but that lets Steven and Mary Dive a little more into the relationship dynamics of this crazy cast. Actor's Nightmare includes some Tom Cruise roasting and explores the roles of the male and female relationships. This Quick Cast is different as it needs to create a picture and Mary has some interesting picks for Steven to create it with. A swift trip to the magical world of What If? turns the sinister allegory into reality. Take a seat or run for your life as you listen in to another "bloody" fun show. Happy Listening! FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Share with your friends and castmates and remember to rate us where you are listening! Thank You :) Also, tap the button to get notified, so you never miss an episode. Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
The Style Section is placed and the plastic draping is up as Steven and Mary navigate the psycho within themselves in this week's episode of From The Top! covering Brett Easton Ellis's novel, Christian Bale's Cult Classic, and a musical that may have been axed a little too early. That's right... Turn up Huey Lewis and the News, and enjoy going a little crazy with American Psycho: The Musical. Steven returns again to the booth with Mary and all that can be said is... They went a little Psycho... Steven quotes the author verbatim on how this story of yuppie culture came to fruition and wishes Duncan Sheik hadn't been able to book his reservation as composer, and Mary finds vindication in such our main, sinfully delicious, character, and attempts to understand what was going on in the minds of these insane 80's tropes. Hell... Even Elmo makes a cameo Tom Cruise would be proud of. So sit back and don't drink that glass of really great champagne, turn up your Walkman, and enjoy the honey almond body wash aroma as you dive into madness for a spell. Happy Listening! FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Share with your friends and castmates and remember to rate us where you are listening! Thank You :) Also, tap the button to get notified, so you never miss an episode. Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
This week Steven and Mary take a journey back to France and wish they had some meats and wine with their cheese, as they correct themselves, surprise themselves, and make fools of themselves as per usual in this installment of Show Notes of their From The Top! episode covering Les Misérables. More in-depth coverage and Mary has changed her tune now that she isn't wading in water like Val Jean, and Steven has trekked far to be in the studio so you know crazy ensues with more fun facts and deep diving. A crazy Quick Cast and a surprising What If? has our duo spinning, plus the next show announcement is to die for. Happy listening!!! FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Share with your friends and castmates and remember to rate us where you are listening! Thank You :) Also, tap the button to get notified, so you never miss an episode. Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
The only thing more rickety than a wall made of furniture in this week's episode of From The Top! are Mary and Steven as they fight their own dramatic French angst to get through a review of the iconic and, dare they say, (in an overly exaggerated French accent) superb spectacle that is Les Misérables. Steven digs up the history of what was happening in France for the setting of this musical and shares some insight into Victor Hugo as to why he would write his second popular work about a June Rebellion. Mary focuses on the major themes of this show and how the characters are affected by worldly forces, trying to understand what makes her so tepid about such a high-energy, very awe-inspired, production that Cameron Mackintosh has swept the world with. So visit the Thenardier's Inn and sit a spell (just check your pockets before you leave) and listen in to some great discussion over a thief, a love triangle for the ages, a lady of the night and Rapunz-... I mean, Joanna-... I mean... her daughter, and a hyper-focused po-po. Happy Listening! FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Share with your friends and castmates and remember to rate us where you are listening! Thank You :) Tap the button to get notified, so you never miss an episode. Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
The Netherworld realigns and unfreezes as Mary and Steven reach a modicum of synergy once again from the fright of their lives in their initial coverage of From The Top! Beetlejuice The Musical in this weeks installment of Show Notes! Steven corrects himself on Episode blips in "Notes From a Director" and apologizes on difficulties. In "Actors Nightmare" our duo discusses Steven's own Netherworld-ly live-in and the controversy that surrounds what our friendly house ghosts reincarnate into among some other missed tpoics, and Mary recants a trip to Broadway and shares even more love for this scare-tacular show. They round it out with a Quick Cast that has Steven wishing he could haunt the theater this imaginary show would mount in. Mary tackles a change to our story in the magical land of "What If?" that changes our would be stepmother forever. So buckle up and ride Sandy the Sandworm all through this weeks episode with every bit of antic-filled, irreverent humor along the way. Just remember, don't say their name three times (unless you like want to...). FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Share with your friends and castmates and remember to rate us where you are listening! Thank You :) Also, tap the button to get notified, so you never miss an episode. Listen Anywhere You Enjoy Your Podcasts INSTAGRAM Goosebump Worthy Broadway Playlist - FTT Spotify Exclusive Playlist ***** Please note that some cursing involving quotes from the show happens around 37:00 time mark where Mary and Steven quote the shows script and the performances surrounding them, so please skip that minute or two and the end bumper as well if you would not like to hear that language used. Thank you for understanding! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
Life is a Cabaret, so why not keep Dancing Through Life and look back and say "Look at What I Did For love?". Mary and Steven take a side plot at From The Top! Season 1. Everything from the Hot Toxic Love they had for some shows, and some that ended up Shakin' the Blues Away every now and then. You Can't Stop the Beat (just don't tell your mama who bore you) so if you find a moment, spare a thought (listen) and enjoy a recap of Your Favorite Musical Theatrecast and Review. Happy Listening!!! FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Also, TAP THE BELL BUTTON above so you never miss an episode. https://linktr.ee/fromthetoppodcast https://www.instagram.com/fromthetop_podcast/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
If you, or someone you know, is having a hard time and would like someone to talk to, there is always an option: US - DIAL 988 | UK - DIAL 0800 689 5652 Lifeline Crisis Chathttp://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/gethelp/lifelinechat.aspx Worldwide Serviceshttp://www.befrienders.org *** Content Warning of Suicide, Teen Suicidal Ideation, School Violence, and Adult Themes best suited for those over the age of 13. Our dynamic duo takes on their season's end installment of Show Notes in their coverage of Heathers: The Musical, for the Season Finale of From The Top! This week in Notes From a Director, Steven gets some hate mail! And then educates on some croquet history and how it may pertain to this cult show. In Actors Nightmare, Mary digs in deep, trying to understand how a smart girl can be so coerced by the crazy around her, and what the implications of that are and Steven brings some stats about the late 2010's suicide spike. A nice little Quick Cast is in the style of Clueless, and the "What If" question creates an "explosive" end, worthy of a cult film and a budding young Podcast's season finale. So tighten that scrunchie and pop open a fresh bag of BBQ Corn Nuts, cause it's gonna be... beautiful. Happy Listening!!! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
In the second installment of this iconic cult classic of Heathers: The Musical on this episode of From The Top!, Mary and Steven go all in and LICK. IT. UP! Emotions get elevated, and the conversation as always shows the true power of even the mundane things in musical theater. Yes. Even Slurpees and Scrunchies. Enjoy the last official episode of Season 1! Make sure to tune in for Show Notes where corrections abound from the coverage in this and last episode, and look for fun bonus episodes this upcoming month. One thing's for sure... It'll be BIG FUN. Happy Listening, FTT Fam! *CONTENT WARNING: Suicide, Rape, Teenage Sexual Activity, Mental Abuse, Strong Language. FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. If you like what you hear, please take a few moments and leave a star rating and write a review where ever you get your podcasts, as it really helps us gain more listeners like you. It is so appreciated. Also, TAP THE BELL BUTTON up above so you never miss an episode of your favorite MUSICAL THEATRECAST AND REVIEW :) https://linktr.ee/fromthetoppodcast https://www.instagram.com/fromthetop_podcast/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
In the season finale musical Mary and Steven will cover on From The Top!, they have one name on the tip of their tongue (just don't wash it down with blue liquid) and you'll be singing it too by the time they're finished waxing poetic, like a suicide note written by... well who knows. Join in for the fun, the debauchery, the death, and above all the Corn Nuts and Slurpees in HEATHERS: The Musical. *CONTENT WARNING: Suicide, Rape, Teenage Sexual Activity, Mental Abuse, Strong Language. FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Also, TAP THE BELL BUTTON up above so you never miss an episode of your favorite MUSICAL THEATRECAST AND REVIEW :) https://linktr.ee/fromthetoppodcast https://www.instagram.com/fromthetop_podcast/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
Join Mary and Steven for another installment of Show Notes in this Weeks Episode of From The Top! covering Ruthless: The Musical, to see what Tina might hang them over for what they got wrong. They dive into more intersting points with this show, do a off the cuff Quick Cast, and turn this show on it's head with a "What If" you'll just DIE over. Also, This show is potentially going to be banned in other states besides Tennessee! If you can, please consider a donation to the Human Rights Campaign to support those Trans Lives, Drag Queens, and Adult Workers. CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT THE HUMAN RIGHTS CAMPAIGN FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Also, TAP THE BELL BUTTON up above so you never miss an episode of your favorite MUSICAL THEATRECAST AND REVIEW :) https://linktr.ee/fromthetoppodcast https://www.instagram.com/fromthetop_podcast/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
Mary and Steven cover Ruthless: The Musical in this week's episode of From The Top!, now illegal to be produced in Tennessee! Support Trans Individuals and the life-affirming medications they will soon be denied to live as their full authentic selves. Support Drag Queens and Kings for their fearless community leadership. Support Adult Workers in their offered services we as a society demand, yet tend to overlook as a necessity. Nobody has ever died being read to by a person in a dress. Many have died at the hands of those that fear what they don't understand. ALWAYS CHOOSE LOVE. NEVER FEAR! If you find yourself able, please click below to support The Human Rights Campaign, in its efforts to combat bigotry. SUPPORT THE HUMAN RIGHTS CAMPAIGN Steven deep dives into the history of this cult musical, and its humble beginnings surrounding copyright laws. Mary tries to understand insanity, talent, and what makes a family with our individual characters, and it all culminates in an ending to DIE for. Happy Listening! FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Also, TAP THE BELL BUTTON up above so you never miss an episode of your favorite MUSICAL THEATRECAST AND REVIEW :) https://linktr.ee/fromthetoppodcast https://www.instagram.com/fromthetop_podcast/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
Episode 162 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Daydream Believer", and the later career of the Monkees, and how four Pinocchios became real boys. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "Born to be Wild" by Steppenwolf. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this time, as even after splitting it into multiple files, there are simply too many Monkees tracks excerpted. The best versions of the Monkees albums are the triple-CD super-deluxe versions that used to be available from monkees.com , and I've used Andrew Sandoval's liner notes for them extensively in this episode. Sadly, though, none of those are in print. However, at the time of writing there is a new four-CD super-deluxe box set of Headquarters (with a remixed version of the album rather than the original mixes I've excerpted here) available from that site, and I used the liner notes for that here. Monkees.com also currently has the intermittently-available BluRay box set of the entire Monkees TV series, which also has Head and 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee. For those just getting into the group, my advice is to start with this five-CD set, which contains their first five albums along with bonus tracks. The single biggest source of information I used in this episode is the first edition of Andrew Sandoval's The Monkees; The Day-By-Day Story. Sadly that is now out of print and goes for hundreds of pounds. Sandoval released a second edition of the book in 2021, which I was unfortunately unable to obtain, but that too is now out of print. If you can find a copy of either, do get one. Other sources used were Monkee Business by Eric Lefcowitz, and the autobiographies of three of the band members and one of the songwriters — Infinite Tuesday by Michael Nesmith, They Made a Monkee Out of Me by Davy Jones, I'm a Believer by Micky Dolenz, and Psychedelic Bubble-Gum by Bobby Hart. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript When we left the Monkees, they were in a state of flux. To recap what we covered in that episode, the Monkees were originally cast as actors in a TV show, and consisted of two actors with some singing ability -- the former child stars Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz -- and two musicians who were also competent comic actors, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork. The show was about a fictional band whose characters shared names with their actors, and there had quickly been two big hit singles, and two hit albums, taken from the music recorded for the TV show's soundtrack. But this had caused problems for the actors. The records were being promoted as being by the fictional group in the TV series, blurring the line between the TV show and reality, though in fact for the most part they were being made by session musicians with only Dolenz or Jones adding lead vocals to pre-recorded backing tracks. Dolenz and Jones were fine with this, but Nesmith, who had been allowed to write and produce a few album tracks himself, wanted more creative input, and more importantly felt that he was being asked to be complicit in fraud because the records credited the four Monkees as the musicians when (other than a tiny bit of inaudible rhythm guitar by Tork on a couple of Nesmith's tracks) none of them played on them. Tork, meanwhile, believed he had been promised that the group would be an actual group -- that they would all be playing on the records together -- and felt hurt and annoyed that this wasn't the case. They were by now playing live together to promote the series and the records, with Dolenz turning out to be a perfectly competent drummer, so surely they could do the same in the studio? So in January 1967, things came to a head. It's actually quite difficult to sort out exactly what happened, because of conflicting recollections and opinions. What follows is my best attempt to harmonise the different versions of the story into one coherent narrative, but be aware that I could be wrong in some of the details. Nesmith and Tork, who disliked each other in most respects, were both agreed that this couldn't continue and that if there were going to be Monkees records released at all, they were going to have the Monkees playing on them. Dolenz, who seems to have been the one member of the group that everyone could get along with, didn't really care but went along with them for the sake of group harmony. And Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, the production team behind the series, also took Nesmith and Tork's side, through a general love of mischief. But on the other side was Don Kirshner, the music publisher who was in charge of supervising the music for the TV show. Kirshner was adamantly, angrily, opposed to the very idea of the group members having any input at all into how the records were made. He considered that they should be grateful for the huge pay cheques they were getting from records his staff writers and producers were making for them, and stop whinging. And Davy Jones was somewhere in the middle. He wanted to support his co-stars, who he genuinely liked, but also, he was a working actor, he'd had other roles before, he'd have other roles afterwards, and as a working actor you do what you're told if you don't want to lose the job you've got. Jones had grown up in very severe poverty, and had been his family's breadwinner from his early teens, and artistic integrity is all very nice, but not as nice as a cheque for a quarter of a million dollars. Although that might be slightly unfair -- it might be fairer to say that artistic integrity has a different meaning to someone like Jones, coming from musical theatre and a tradition of "the show must go on", than it does to people like Nesmith and Tork who had come up through the folk clubs. Jones' attitude may also have been affected by the fact that his character in the TV show didn't play an instrument other than the occasional tambourine or maracas. The other three were having to mime instrumental parts they hadn't played, and to reproduce them on stage, but Jones didn't have that particular disadvantage. Bert Schneider, one of the TV show's producers, encouraged the group to go into the recording studio themselves, with a producer of their choice, and cut a couple of tracks to prove what they could do. Michael Nesmith, who at this point was the one who was most adamant about taking control of the music, chose Chip Douglas to produce. Douglas was someone that Nesmith had known a little while, as they'd both played the folk circuit -- in Douglas' case as a member of the Modern Folk Quartet -- but Douglas had recently joined the Turtles as their new bass player. At this point, Douglas had never officially produced a record, but he was a gifted arranger, and had just arranged the Turtles' latest single, which had just been released and was starting to climb the charts: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Happy Together"] Douglas quit the Turtles to work with the Monkees, and took the group into the studio to cut two demo backing tracks for a potential single as a proof of concept. These initial sessions didn't have any vocals, but featured Nesmith on guitar, Tork on piano, Dolenz on drums, Jones on tambourine, and an unknown bass player -- possibly Douglas himself, possibly Nesmith's friend John London, who he'd played with in Mike and John and Bill. They cut rough tracks of two songs, "All of Your Toys", by another friend of Nesmith's, Bill Martin, and Nesmith's "The Girl I Knew Somewhere": [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (Gold Star Demo)"] Those tracks were very rough and ready -- they were garage-band tracks rather than the professional studio recordings that the Candy Store Prophets or Jeff Barry's New York session players had provided for the previous singles -- but they were competent in the studio, thanks largely to Chip Douglas' steadying influence. As Douglas later said "They could hardly play. Mike could play adequate rhythm guitar. Pete could play piano but he'd make mistakes, and Micky's time on drums was erratic. He'd speed up or slow down." But the takes they managed to get down showed that they *could* do it. Rafelson and Schneider agreed with them that the Monkees could make a single together, and start recording at least some of their own tracks. So the group went back into the studio, with Douglas producing -- and with Lester Sill from the music publishers there to supervise -- and cut finished versions of the two songs. This time the lineup was Nesmith on guitar, Tork on electric harpsichord -- Tork had always been a fan of Bach, and would in later years perform Bach pieces as his solo spot in Monkees shows -- Dolenz on drums, London on bass, and Jones on tambourine: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (first recorded version)"] But while this was happening, Kirshner had been trying to get new Monkees material recorded without them -- he'd not yet agreed to having the group play on their own records. Three days after the sessions for "All of Your Toys" and "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", sessions started in New York for an entire album's worth of new material, produced by Jeff Barry and Denny Randell, and largely made by the same Red Bird Records team who had made "I'm a Believer" -- the same musicians who in various combinations had played on everything from "Sherry" by the Four Seasons to "Like a Rolling Stone" by Dylan to "Leader of the Pack", and with songs by Neil Diamond, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, Leiber and Stoller, and the rest of the team of songwriters around Red Bird. But at this point came the meeting we talked about towards the end of the "Last Train to Clarksville" episode, in which Nesmith punched a hole in a hotel wall in frustration at what he saw as Kirshner's obstinacy. Kirshner didn't want to listen to the recordings the group had made. He'd promised Jeff Barry and Neil Diamond that if "I'm a Believer" went to number one, Barry would get to produce, and Diamond write, the group's next single. Chip Douglas wasn't a recognised producer, and he'd made this commitment. But the group needed a new single out. A compromise was offered, of sorts, by Kirshner -- how about if Barry flew over from New York to LA to produce the group, they'd scrap the tracks both the group and Barry had recorded, and Barry would produce new tracks for the songs he'd recorded, with the group playing on them? But that wouldn't work either. The group members were all due to go on holiday -- three of them were going to make staggered trips to the UK, partly to promote the TV series, which was just starting over here, and partly just to have a break. They'd been working sixty-plus hour weeks for months between the TV series, live performances, and the recording studio, and they were basically falling-down tired, which was one of the reasons for Nesmith's outburst in the meeting. They weren't accomplished enough musicians to cut tracks quickly, and they *needed* the break. On top of that, Nesmith and Barry had had a major falling-out at the "I'm a Believer" session, and Nesmith considered it a matter of personal integrity that he couldn't work with a man who in his eyes had insulted his professionalism. So that was out, but there was also no way Kirshner was going to let the group release a single consisting of two songs he hadn't heard, produced by a producer with no track record. At first, the group were insistent that "All of Your Toys" should be the A-side for their next single: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "All Of Your Toys"] But there was an actual problem with that which they hadn't foreseen. Bill Martin, who wrote the song, was under contract to another music publisher, and the Monkees' contracts said they needed to only record songs published by Screen Gems. Eventually, it was Micky Dolenz who managed to cut the Gordian knot -- or so everyone thought. Dolenz was the one who had the least at stake of any of them -- he was already secure as the voice of the hits, he had no particular desire to be an instrumentalist, but he wanted to support his colleagues. Dolenz suggested that it would be a reasonable compromise to put out a single with one of the pre-recorded backing tracks on one side, with him or Jones singing, and with the version of "The Girl I Knew Somewhere" that the band had recorded together on the other. That way, Kirshner and the record label would get their new single without too much delay, the group would still be able to say they'd started recording their own tracks, everyone would get some of what they wanted. So it was agreed -- though there was a further stipulation. "The Girl I Knew Somewhere" had Nesmith singing lead vocals, and up to that point every Monkees single had featured Dolenz on lead on both sides. As far as Kirshner and the other people involved in making the release decisions were concerned, that was the way things were going to continue. Everyone was fine with this -- Nesmith, the one who was most likely to object in principle, in practice realised that having Dolenz sing his song would make it more likely to be played on the radio and used in the TV show, and so increase his royalties. A vocal session was arranged in New York for Dolenz and Jones to come and cut some vocal tracks right before Dolenz and Nesmith flew over to the UK. But in the meantime, it had become even more urgent for the group to be seen to be doing their own recording. An in-depth article on the group in the Saturday Evening Post had come out, quoting Nesmith as saying "It was what Kirshner wanted to do. Our records are not our forte. I don't care if we never sell another record. Maybe we were manufactured and put on the air strictly with a lot of hoopla. Tell the world we're synthetic because, damn it, we are. Tell them the Monkees are wholly man-made overnight, that millions of dollars have been poured into this thing. Tell the world we don't record our own music. But that's us they see on television. The show is really a part of us. They're not seeing something invalid." The press immediately jumped on the band, and started trying to portray them as con artists exploiting their teenage fans, though as Nesmith later said "The press decided they were going to unload on us as being somehow illegitimate, somehow false. That we were making an attempt to dupe the public, when in fact it was me that was making the attempt to maintain the integrity. So the press went into a full-scale war against us." Tork, on the other hand, while he and Nesmith were on the same side about the band making their own records, blamed Nesmith for much of the press reaction, later saying "Michael blew the whistle on us. If he had gone in there with pride and said 'We are what we are and we have no reason to hang our heads in shame' it never would have happened." So as far as the group were concerned, they *needed* to at least go with Dolenz's suggested compromise. Their personal reputations were on the line. When Dolenz arrived at the session in New York, he was expecting to be asked to cut one vocal track, for the A-side of the next single (and presumably a new lead vocal for "The Girl I Knew Somewhere"). When he got there, though, he found that Kirshner expected him to record several vocals so that Kirshner could choose the best. That wasn't what had been agreed, and so Dolenz flat-out refused to record anything at all. Luckily for Kirshner, Jones -- who was the most co-operative member of the band -- was willing to sing a handful of songs intended for Dolenz as well as the ones he was meant to sing. So the tape of "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You", the song intended for the next single, was slowed down so it would be in a suitable key for Jones instead, and he recorded the vocal for that: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You"] Incidentally, while Jones recorded vocals for several more tracks at the session -- and some would later be reused as album tracks a few years down the line -- not all of the recorded tracks were used for vocals, and this later gave rise to a rumour that has been repeated as fact by almost everyone involved, though it was a misunderstanding. Kirshner's next major success after the Monkees was another made-for-TV fictional band, the Archies, and their biggest hit was "Sugar Sugar", co-written and produced by Jeff Barry: [Excerpt: The Archies, "Sugar Sugar"] Both Kirshner and the Monkees have always claimed that the Monkees were offered "Sugar, Sugar" and turned it down. To Kirshner the moral of the story was that since "Sugar, Sugar" was a massive hit, it proved his instincts right and proved that the Monkees didn't know what would make a hit. To the Monkees, on the other hand, it showed that Kirshner wanted them to do bubblegum music that they considered ridiculous. This became such an established factoid that Dolenz regularly tells the story in his live performances, and includes a version of "Sugar, Sugar" in them, rearranged as almost a torch song: [Excerpt: Micky Dolenz, "Sugar, Sugar (live)"] But in fact, "Sugar, Sugar" wasn't written until long after Kirshner and the Monkees had parted ways. But one of the songs for which a backing track was recorded but no vocals were ever completed was "Sugar Man", a song by Denny Randell and Sandy Linzer, which they would later release themselves as an unsuccessful single: [Excerpt: Linzer and Randell, "Sugar Man"] Over the years, the Monkees not recording "Sugar Man" became the Monkees not recording "Sugar, Sugar". Meanwhile, Dolenz and Nesmith had flown over to the UK to do some promotional work and relax, and Jones soon also flew over, though didn't hang out with his bandmates, preferring to spend more time with his family. Both Dolenz and Nesmith spent a lot of time hanging out with British pop stars, and were pleased to find that despite the manufactured controversy about them being a manufactured group, none of the British musicians they admired seemed to care. Eric Burdon, for example, was quoted in the Melody Maker as saying "They make very good records, I can't understand how people get upset about them. You've got to make up your minds whether a group is a record production group or one that makes live appearances. For example, I like to hear a Phil Spector record and I don't worry if it's the Ronettes or Ike and Tina Turner... I like the Monkees record as a grand record, no matter how people scream. So somebody made a record and they don't play, so what? Just enjoy the record." Similarly, the Beatles were admirers of the Monkees, especially the TV show, despite being expected to have a negative opinion of them, as you can hear in this contemporary recording of Paul McCartney answering a fan's questions: Excerpt: Paul McCartney talks about the Monkees] Both Dolenz and Nesmith hung out with the Beatles quite a bit -- they both visited Sgt. Pepper recording sessions, and if you watch the film footage of the orchestral overdubs for "A Day in the Life", Nesmith is there with all the other stars of the period. Nesmith and his wife Phyllis even stayed with the Lennons for a couple of days, though Cynthia Lennon seems to have thought of the Nesmiths as annoying intruders who had been invited out of politeness and not realised they weren't wanted. That seems plausible, but at the same time, John Lennon doesn't seem the kind of person to not make his feelings known, and Michael Nesmith's reports of the few days they stayed there seem to describe a very memorable experience, where after some initial awkwardness he developed a bond with Lennon, particularly once he saw that Lennon was a fan of Captain Beefheart, who was a friend of Nesmith, and whose Safe as Milk album Lennon was examining when Nesmith turned up, and whose music at this point bore a lot of resemblance to the kind of thing Nesmith was doing: [Excerpt: Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, "Yellow Brick Road"] Or at least, that's how Nesmith always told the story later -- though Safe as Milk didn't come out until nearly six months later. It's possible he's conflating memories from a later trip to the UK in June that year -- where he also talked about how Lennon was the only person he'd really got on with on the previous trip, because "he's a compassionate person. I know he has a reputation for being caustic, but it is only a cover for the depth of his feeling." Nesmith and Lennon apparently made some experimental music together during the brief stay, with Nesmith being impressed by Lennon's Mellotron and later getting one himself. Dolenz, meanwhile, was spending more time with Paul McCartney, and with Spencer Davis of his current favourite band The Spencer Davis Group. But even more than that he was spending a lot of time with Samantha Juste, a model and TV presenter whose job it was to play the records on Top of the Pops, the most important British TV pop show, and who had released a record herself a couple of months earlier, though it hadn't been a success: [Excerpt: Samantha Juste, "No-one Needs My Love Today"] The two quickly fell deeply in love, and Juste would become Dolenz's first wife the next year. When Nesmith and Dolenz arrived back in the US after their time off, they thought the plan was still to release "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" with "The Girl I Knew Somewhere" on the B-side. So Nesmith was horrified to hear on the radio what the announcer said were the two sides of the new Monkees single -- "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You", and "She Hangs Out", another song from the Jeff Barry sessions with a Davy vocal. Don Kirshner had gone ahead and picked two songs from the Jeff Barry sessions and delivered them to RCA Records, who had put a single out in Canada. The single was very, *very* quickly withdrawn once the Monkees and the TV producers found out, and only promo copies seem to circulate -- rather than being credited to "the Monkees", both sides are credited to '"My Favourite Monkee" Davy Jones Sings'. The record had been withdrawn, but "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" was clearly going to have to be the single. Three days after the record was released and pulled, Nesmith, Dolenz and Tork were back in the studio with Chip Douglas, recording a new B-side -- a new version of "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", this time with Dolenz on vocals. As Jones was still in the UK, John London added the tambourine part as well as the bass: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (single version)"] As Nesmith told the story a couple of months later, "Bert said 'You've got to get this thing in Micky's key for Micky to sing it.' I said 'Has Donnie made a commitment? I don't want to go there and break my neck in order to get this thing if Donnie hasn't made a commitment. And Bert refused to say anything. He said 'I can't tell you anything except just go and record.'" What had happened was that the people at Columbia had had enough of Kirshner. As far as Rafelson and Schneider were concerned, the real problem in all this was that Kirshner had been making public statements taking all the credit for the Monkees' success and casting himself as the puppetmaster. They thought this was disrespectful to the performers -- and unstated but probably part of it, that it was disrespectful to Rafelson and Schneider for their work putting the TV show together -- and that Kirshner had allowed his ego to take over. Things like the liner notes for More of the Monkees which made Kirshner and his stable of writers more important than the performers had, in the view of the people at Raybert Productions, put the Monkees in an impossible position and forced them to push back. Schneider later said "Kirshner had an ego that transcended everything else. As a matter of fact, the press issue was probably magnified a hundred times over because of Kirshner. He wanted everybody thinking 'Hey, he's doing all this, not them.' In the end it was very self-destructive because it heightened the whole press issue and it made them feel lousy." Kirshner was out of a job, first as the supervisor for the Monkees and then as the head of Columbia/Screen Gems Music. In his place came Lester Sill, the man who had got Leiber and Stoller together as songwriters, who had been Lee Hazelwood's production partner on his early records with Duane Eddy, and who had been the "Les" in Philles Records until Phil Spector pushed him out. Sill, unlike Kirshner, was someone who was willing to take a back seat and just be a steadying hand where needed. The reissued version of "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" went to number two on the charts, behind "Somethin' Stupid" by Frank and Nancy Sinatra, produced by Sill's old colleague Hazelwood, and the B-side, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", also charted separately, making number thirty-nine on the charts. The Monkees finally had a hit that they'd written and recorded by themselves. Pinocchio had become a real boy: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (single version)"] At the same session at which they'd recorded that track, the Monkees had recorded another Nesmith song, "Sunny Girlfriend", and that became the first song to be included on a new album, which would eventually be named Headquarters, and on which all the guitar, keyboard, drums, percussion, banjo, pedal steel, and backing vocal parts would for the first time be performed by the Monkees themselves. They brought in horn and string players on a couple of tracks, and the bass was variously played by John London, Chip Douglas, and Jerry Yester as Tork was more comfortable on keyboards and guitar than bass, but it was in essence a full band album. Jones got back the next day, and sessions began in earnest. The first song they recorded after his return was "Mr. Webster", a Boyce and Hart song that had been recorded with the Candy Store Prophets in 1966 but hadn't been released. This was one of three tracks on the album that were rerecordings of earlier outtakes, and it's fascinating to compare them, to see the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches. In the case of "Mr. Webster", the instrumental backing on the earlier version is definitely slicker: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Mr. Webster (1st Recorded Version)"] But at the same time, there's a sense of dynamics in the group recording that's lacking from the original, like the backing dropping out totally on the word "Stop" -- a nice touch that isn't in the original. I am only speculating, but this may have been inspired by the similar emphasis on the word "stop" in "For What It's Worth" by Tork's old friend Stephen Stills: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Mr. Webster (album version)"] Headquarters was a group album in another way though -- for the first time, Tork and Dolenz were bringing in songs they'd written -- Nesmith of course had supplied songs already for the two previous albums. Jones didn't write any songs himself yet, though he'd start on the next album, but he was credited with the rest of the group on two joke tracks, "Band 6", a jam on the Merrie Melodies theme “Merrily We Roll Along”, and "Zilch", a track made up of the four band members repeating nonsense phrases: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Zilch"] Oddly, that track had a rather wider cultural resonance than a piece of novelty joke album filler normally would. It's sometimes covered live by They Might Be Giants: [Excerpt: They Might Be Giants, "Zilch"] While the rapper Del Tha Funkee Homosapien had a worldwide hit in 1991 with "Mistadobalina", built around a sample of Peter Tork from the track: [Excerpt: Del Tha Funkee Homosapien,"Mistadobalina"] Nesmith contributed three songs, all of them combining Beatles-style pop music and country influences, none more blatantly than the opening track, "You Told Me", which starts off parodying the opening of "Taxman", before going into some furious banjo-picking from Tork: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "You Told Me"] Tork, meanwhile, wrote "For Pete's Sake" with his flatmate of the time, and that became the end credits music for season two of the TV series: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "For Pete's Sake"] But while the other band members made important contributions, the track on the album that became most popular was the first song of Dolenz's to be recorded by the group. The lyrics recounted, in a semi-psychedelic manner, Dolenz's time in the UK, including meeting with the Beatles, who the song refers to as "the four kings of EMI", but the first verse is all about his new girlfriend Samantha Juste: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Randy Scouse Git"] The song was released as a single in the UK, but there was a snag. Dolenz had given the song a title he'd heard on an episode of the BBC sitcom Til Death Us Do Part, which he'd found an amusing bit of British slang. Til Death Us Do Part was written by Johnny Speight, a writer with Associated London Scripts, and was a family sitcom based around the character of Alf Garnett, an ignorant, foul-mouthed reactionary bigot who hated young people, socialists, and every form of minority, especially Black people (who he would address by various slurs I'm definitely not going to repeat here), and was permanently angry at the world and abusive to his wife. As with another great sitcom from ALS, Steptoe and Son, which Norman Lear adapted for the US as Sanford and Son, Til Death Us Do Part was also adapted by Lear, and became All in the Family. But while Archie Bunker, the character based on Garnett in the US version, has some redeeming qualities because of the nature of US network sitcom, Alf Garnett has absolutely none, and is as purely unpleasant and unsympathetic a character as has ever been created -- which sadly didn't stop a section of the audience from taking him as a character to be emulated. A big part of the show's dynamic was the relationship between Garnett and his socialist son-in-law from Liverpool, played by Anthony Booth, himself a Liverpudlian socialist who would later have a similarly contentious relationship with his own decidedly non-socialist son-in-law, the future Prime Minister Tony Blair. Garnett was as close to foul-mouthed as was possible on British TV at the time, with Speight regularly negotiating with the BBC bosses to be allowed to use terms that were not otherwise heard on TV, and used various offensive terms about his family, including referring to his son-in-law as a "randy Scouse git". Dolenz had heard the phrase on TV, had no idea what it meant but loved the sound of it, and gave the song that title. But when the record came out in the UK, he was baffled to be told that the phrase -- which he'd picked up from a BBC TV show, after all -- couldn't be said normally on BBC broadcasts, so they would need to retitle the track. The translation into American English that Dolenz uses in his live shows to explain this to Americans is to say that "randy Scouse git" means "horny Liverpudlian putz", and that's more or less right. Dolenz took the need for an alternative title literally, and so the track that went to number two in the UK charts was titled "Alternate Title": [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Randy Scouse Git"] The album itself went to number one in both the US and the UK, though it was pushed off the top spot almost straight away by the release of Sgt Pepper. As sessions for Headquarters were finishing up, the group were already starting to think about their next album -- season two of the TV show was now in production, and they'd need to keep generating yet more musical material for it. One person they turned to was a friend of Chip Douglas'. Before the Turtles, Douglas had been in the Modern Folk Quartet, and they'd recorded "This Could Be the Night", which had been written for them by Harry Nilsson: [Excerpt: The MFQ, "This Could Be The Night"] Nilsson had just started recording his first solo album proper, at RCA Studios, the same studios that the Monkees were using. At this point, Nilsson still had a full-time job in a bank, working a night shift there while working on his album during the day, but Douglas knew that Nilsson was a major talent, and that assessment was soon shared by the group when Nilsson came in to demo nine of his songs for them: [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, "1941 (demo)"] According to Nilsson, Nesmith said after that demo session "You just sat down there and blew our minds. We've been looking for songs, and you just sat down and played an *album* for us!" While the Monkees would attempt a few of Nilsson's songs over the next year or so, the first one they chose to complete was the first track recorded for their next album, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, and Jones, Ltd., a song which from the talkback at the beginning of the demo was always intended for Davy Jones to sing: [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, "Cuddly Toy (demo)"] Oddly, given his romantic idol persona, a lot of the songs given to Jones to sing were anti-romantic, and often had a cynical and misogynistic edge. This had started with the first album's "I Want to Be Free", but by Pisces, it had gone to ridiculous extremes. Of the four songs Jones sings on the album, "Hard to Believe", the first song proper that he ever co-wrote, is a straightforward love song, but the other three have a nasty edge to them. A remade version of Jeff Barry's "She Hangs Out" is about an underaged girl, starts with the lines "How old d'you say your sister was? You know you'd better keep an eye on her" and contains lines like "she could teach you a thing or two" and "you'd better get down here on the double/before she gets her pretty little self in trouble/She's so fine". Goffin and King's "Star Collector" is worse, a song about a groupie with lines like "How can I love her, if I just don't respect her?" and "It won't take much time, before I get her off my mind" But as is so often the way, these rather nasty messages were wrapped up in some incredibly catchy music, and that was even more the case with "Cuddly Toy", a song which at least is more overtly unpleasant -- it's very obvious that Nilsson doesn't intend the protagonist of the song to be at all sympathetic, which is possibly not the case in "She Hangs Out" or "Star Collector". But the character Jones is singing is *viciously* cruel here, mocking and taunting a girl who he's coaxed to have sex with him, only to scorn her as soon as he's got what he wanted: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Cuddly Toy"] It's a great song if you like the cruelest of humour combined with the cheeriest of music, and the royalties from the song allowed Nilsson to quit the job at the bank. "Cuddly Toy", and Chip Douglas and Bill Martin's song "The Door Into Summer", were recorded the same way as Headquarters, with the group playing *as a group*, but as recordings for the album progressed the group fell into a new way of working, which Peter Tork later dubbed "mixed-mode". They didn't go back to having tracks cut for them by session musicians, apart from Jones' song "Hard to Believe", for which the entire backing track was created by one of his co-writers overdubbing himself, but Dolenz, who Tork always said was "incapable of repeating a triumph", was not interested in continuing to play drums in the studio. Instead, a new hybrid Monkees would perform most of the album. Nesmith would still play the lead guitar, Tork would provide the keyboards, Chip Douglas would play all the bass and add some additional guitar, and "Fast" Eddie Hoh, the session drummer who had been a touring drummer with the Modern Folk Quartet and the Mamas and the Papas, among others, would play drums on the records, with Dolenz occasionally adding a bit of acoustic guitar. And this was the lineup that would perform on the hit single from Pisces. "Pleasant Valley Sunday" was written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, who had written several songs for the group's first two albums (and who would continue to provide them with more songs). As with their earlier songs for the group, King had recorded a demo: [Excerpt: Carole King, "Pleasant Valley Sunday (demo)"] Previously -- and subsequently -- when presented with a Carole King demo, the group and their producers would just try to duplicate it as closely as possible, right down to King's phrasing. Bob Rafelson has said that he would sometimes hear those demos and wonder why King didn't just make records herself -- and without wanting to be too much of a spoiler for a few years' time, he wasn't the only one wondering that. But this time, the group had other plans. In particular, they wanted to make a record with a strong guitar riff to it -- Nesmith has later referenced their own "Last Train to Clarksville" and the Beatles' "Day Tripper" as two obvious reference points for the track. Douglas came up with a riff and taught it to Nesmith, who played it on the track: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday"] The track also ended with the strongest psychedelic -- or "psycho jello" as the group would refer to it -- freak out that they'd done to this point, a wash of saturated noise: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday"] King was unhappy with the results, and apparently glared at Douglas the next time they met. This may be because of the rearrangement from her intentions, but it may also be for a reason that Douglas later suspected. When recording the track, he hadn't been able to remember all the details of her demo, and in particular he couldn't remember exactly how the middle eight went. This is the version on King's demo: [Excerpt: Carole King, "Pleasant Valley Sunday (demo)"] While here's how the Monkees rendered it, with slightly different lyrics: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday"] I also think there's a couple of chord changes in the second verse that differ between King and the Monkees, but I can't be sure that's not my ears deceiving me. Either way, though, the track was a huge success, and became one of the group's most well-known and well-loved tracks, making number three on the charts behind "All You Need is Love" and "Light My Fire". And while it isn't Dolenz drumming on the track, the fact that it's Nesmith playing guitar and Tork on the piano -- and the piano part is one of the catchiest things on the record -- meant that they finally had a proper major hit on which they'd played (and it seems likely that Dolenz contributed some of the acoustic rhythm guitar on the track, along with Bill Chadwick, and if that's true all three Monkee instrumentalists did play on the track). Pisces is by far and away the best album the group ever made, and stands up well against anything else that came out around that time. But cracks were beginning to show in the group. In particular, the constant battle to get some sort of creative input had soured Nesmith on the whole project. Chip Douglas later said "When we were doing Pisces Michael would come in with three songs; he knew he had three songs coming on the album. He knew that he was making a lot of money if he got his original songs on there. So he'd be real enthusiastic and cooperative and real friendly and get his three songs done. Then I'd say 'Mike, can you come in and help on this one we're going to do with Micky here?' He said 'No, Chip, I can't. I'm busy.' I'd say, 'Mike, you gotta come in the studio.' He'd say 'No Chip, I'm afraid I'm just gonna have to be ornery about it. I'm not comin' in.' That's when I started not liking Mike so much any more." Now, as is so often the case with the stories from this period, this appears to be inaccurate in the details -- Nesmith is present on every track on the album except Jones' solo "Hard to Believe" and Tork's spoken-word track "Peter Percival Patterson's Pet Pig Porky", and indeed this is by far the album with *most* Nesmith input, as he takes five lead vocals, most of them on songs he didn't write. But Douglas may well be summing up Nesmith's *attitude* to the band at this point -- listening to Nesmith's commentaries on episodes of the TV show, by this point he felt disengaged from everything that was going on, like his opinions weren't welcome. That said, Nesmith did still contribute what is possibly the single most innovative song the group ever did, though the innovations weren't primarily down to Nesmith: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daily Nightly"] Nesmith always described the lyrics to "Daily Nightly" as being about the riots on Sunset Strip, but while they're oblique, they seem rather to be about streetwalking sex workers -- though it's perhaps understandable that Nesmith would never admit as much. What made the track innovative was the use of the Moog synthesiser. We talked about Robert Moog in the episode on "Good Vibrations" -- he had started out as a Theremin manufacturer, and had built the ribbon synthesiser that Mike Love played live on "Good Vibrations", and now he was building the first commercially available easily usable synthesisers. Previously, electronic instruments had either been things like the clavioline -- a simple monophonic keyboard instrument that didn't have much tonal variation -- or the RCA Mark II, a programmable synth that could make a wide variety of sounds, but took up an entire room and was programmed with punch cards. Moog's machines were bulky but still transportable, and they could be played in real time with a keyboard, but were still able to be modified to make a wide variety of different sounds. While, as we've seen, there had been electronic keyboard instruments as far back as the 1930s, Moog's instruments were for all intents and purposes the first synthesisers as we now understand the term. The Moog was introduced in late spring 1967, and immediately started to be used for making experimental and novelty records, like Hal Blaine's track "Love In", which came out at the beginning of June: [Excerpt: Hal Blaine, "Love In"] And the Electric Flag's soundtrack album for The Trip, the drug exploitation film starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper and written by Jack Nicholson we talked about last time, when Arthur Lee moved into a house used in the film: [Excerpt: The Electric Flag, "Peter's Trip"] In 1967 there were a total of six albums released with a Moog on them (as well as one non-album experimental single). Four of the albums were experimental or novelty instrumental albums of this type. Only two of them were rock albums -- Strange Days by the Doors, and Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, & Jones Ltd by the Monkees. The Doors album was released first, but I believe the Monkees tracks were recorded before the Doors overdubbed the Moog on the tracks on their album, though some session dates are hard to pin down exactly. If that's the case it would make the Monkees the very first band to use the Moog on an actual rock record (depending on exactly how you count the Trip soundtrack -- this gets back again to my old claim that there's no first anything). But that's not the only way in which "Daily Nightly" was innovative. All the first seven albums to feature the Moog featured one man playing the instrument -- Paul Beaver, the Moog company's West Coast representative, who played on all the novelty records by members of the Wrecking Crew, and on the albums by the Electric Flag and the Doors, and on The Notorious Byrd Brothers by the Byrds, which came out in early 1968. And Beaver did play the Moog on one track on Pisces, "Star Collector". But on "Daily Nightly" it's Micky Dolenz playing the Moog, making him definitely the second person ever to play a Moog on a record of any kind: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daily Nightly"] Dolenz indeed had bought his own Moog -- widely cited as being the second one ever in private ownership, a fact I can't check but which sounds plausible given that by 1970 less than thirty musicians owned one -- after seeing Beaver demonstrate the instrument at the Monterey Pop Festival. The Monkees hadn't played Monterey, but both Dolenz and Tork had attended the festival -- if you watch the famous film of it you see Dolenz and his girlfriend Samantha in the crowd a *lot*, while Tork introduced his friends in the Buffalo Springfield. As well as discovering the Moog there, Dolenz had been astonished by something else: [Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "Hey Joe (Live at Monterey)"] As Peter Tork later put it "I didn't get it. At Monterey Jimi followed the Who and the Who busted up their things and Jimi bashed up his guitar. I said 'I just saw explosions and destruction. Who needs it?' But Micky got it. He saw the genius and went for it." Dolenz was astonished by Hendrix, and insisted that he should be the support act on the group's summer tour. This pairing might sound odd on paper, but it made more sense at the time than it might sound. The Monkees were by all accounts a truly astonishing live act at this point -- Frank Zappa gave them a backhanded compliment by saying they were the best-sounding band in LA, before pointing out that this was because they could afford the best equipment. That *was* true, but it was also the case that their TV experience gave them a different attitude to live performance than anyone else performing at the time. A handful of groups had started playing stadiums, most notably of course the Beatles, but all of these acts had come up through playing clubs and theatres and essentially just kept doing their old act with no thought as to how the larger space worked, except to put their amps through a louder PA. The Monkees, though, had *started* in stadiums, and had started out as mass entertainers, and so their live show was designed from the ground up to play to those larger spaces. They had costume changes, elaborate stage sets -- like oversized fake Vox amps they burst out of at the start of the show -- a light show and a screen on which film footage was projected. In effect they invented stadium performances as we now know them. Nesmith later said "In terms of putting on a show there was never any question in my mind, as far as the rock 'n' roll era is concerned, that we put on probably the finest rock and roll stage show ever. It was beautifully lit, beautifully costumed, beautifully produced. I mean, for Christ sakes, it was practically a revue." The Monkees were confident enough in their stage performance that at a recent show at the Hollywood Bowl they'd had Ike and Tina Turner as their opening act -- not an act you'd want to go on after if you were going to be less than great, and an act from very similar chitlin' circuit roots to Jimi Hendrix. So from their perspective, it made sense. If you're going to be spectacular yourselves, you have no need to fear a spectacular opening act. Hendrix was less keen -- he was about the only musician in Britain who *had* made disparaging remarks about the Monkees -- but opening for the biggest touring band in the world isn't an opportunity you pass up, and again it isn't such a departure as one might imagine from the bills he was already playing. Remember that Monterey is really the moment when "pop" and "rock" started to split -- the split we've been talking about for a few months now -- and so the Jimi Hendrix Experience were still considered a pop band, and as such had played the normal British pop band package tours. In March and April that year, they'd toured on a bill with the Walker Brothers, Cat Stevens, and Englebert Humperdinck -- and Hendrix had even filled in for Humperdinck's sick guitarist on one occasion. Nesmith, Dolenz, and Tork all loved having Hendrix on tour with them, just because it gave them a chance to watch him live every night (Jones, whose musical tastes were more towards Anthony Newley, wasn't especially impressed), and they got on well on a personal level -- there are reports of Hendrix jamming with Dolenz and Steve Stills in hotel rooms. But there was one problem, as Dolenz often recreates in his live act: [Excerpt: Micky Dolenz, "Purple Haze"] The audience response to Hendrix from the Monkees' fans was so poor that by mutual agreement he left the tour after only a handful of shows. After the summer tour, the group went back to work on the TV show and their next album. Or, rather, four individuals went back to work. By this point, the group had drifted apart from each other, and from Douglas -- Tork, the one who was still keenest on the idea of the group as a group, thought that Pisces, good as it was, felt like a Chip Douglas album rather than a Monkees album. The four band members had all by now built up their own retinues of hangers-on and collaborators, and on set for the TV show they were now largely staying with their own friends rather than working as a group. And that was now reflected in their studio work. From now on, rather than have a single producer working with them as a band, the four men would work as individuals, producing their own tracks, occasionally with outside help, and bringing in session musicians to work on them. Some tracks from this point on would be genuine Monkees -- plural -- tracks, and all tracks would be credited as "produced by the Monkees", but basically the four men would from now on be making solo tracks which would be combined into albums, though Dolenz and Jones would occasionally guest on tracks by the others, especially when Nesmith came up with a song he thought would be more suited to their voices. Indeed the first new recording that happened after the tour was an entire Nesmith solo album -- a collection of instrumental versions of his songs, called The Wichita Train Whistle Sings, played by members of the Wrecking Crew and a few big band instrumentalists, arranged by Shorty Rogers. [Excerpt: Michael Nesmith, "You Told Me"] Hal Blaine in his autobiography claimed that the album was created as a tax write-off for Nesmith, though Nesmith always vehemently denied it, and claimed it was an artistic experiment, though not one that came off well. Released alongside Pisces, though, came one last group-recorded single. The B-side, "Goin' Down", is a song that was credited to the group and songwriter Diane Hildebrand, though in fact it developed from a jam on someone else's song. Nesmith, Tork, Douglas and Hoh attempted to record a backing track for a version of Mose Allison's jazz-blues standard "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Mose Allison, "Parchman Farm"] But after recording it, they'd realised that it didn't sound that much like the original, and that all it had in common with it was a chord sequence. Nesmith suggested that rather than put it out as a cover version, they put a new melody and lyrics to it, and they commissioned Hildebrand, who'd co-written songs for the group before, to write them, and got Shorty Rogers to write a horn arrangement to go over their backing track. The eventual songwriting credit was split five ways, between Hildebrand and the four Monkees -- including Davy Jones who had no involvement with the recording, but not including Douglas or Hoh. The lyrics Hildebrand came up with were a funny patter song about a failed suicide, taken at an extremely fast pace, which Dolenz pulls off magnificently: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Goin' Down"] The A-side, another track with a rhythm track by Nesmith, Tork, Douglas, and Hoh, was a song that had been written by John Stewart of the Kingston Trio, who you may remember from the episode on "San Francisco" as being a former songwriting partner of John Phillips. Stewart had written the song as part of a "suburbia trilogy", and was not happy with the finished product. He said later "I remember going to bed thinking 'All I did today was write 'Daydream Believer'." Stewart used to include the song in his solo sets, to no great approval, and had shopped the song around to bands like We Five and Spanky And Our Gang, who had both turned it down. He was unhappy with it himself, because of the chorus: [Excerpt: John Stewart, "Daydream Believer"] Stewart was ADHD, and the words "to a", coming as they did slightly out of the expected scansion for the line, irritated him so greatly that he thought the song could never be recorded by anyone, but when Chip Douglas asked if he had any songs, he suggested that one. As it turned out, there was a line of lyric that almost got the track rejected, but it wasn't the "to a". Stewart's original second verse went like this: [Excerpt: John Stewart, "Daydream Believer"] RCA records objected to the line "now you know how funky I can be" because funky, among other meanings, meant smelly, and they didn't like the idea of Davy Jones singing about being smelly. Chip Douglas phoned Stewart to tell him that they were insisting on changing the line, and suggesting "happy" instead. Stewart objected vehemently -- that change would reverse the entire meaning of the line, and it made no sense, and what about artistic integrity? But then, as he later said "He said 'Let me put it to you this way, John. If he can't sing 'happy' they won't do it'. And I said 'Happy's working real good for me now.' That's exactly what I said to him." He never regretted the decision -- Stewart would essentially live off the royalties from "Daydream Believer" for the rest of his life -- though he seemed always to be slightly ambivalent and gently mocking about the song in his own performances, often changing the lyrics slightly: [Excerpt: John Stewart, "Daydream Believer"] The Monkees had gone into the studio and cut the track, again with Tork on piano, Nesmith on guitar, Douglas on bass, and Hoh on drums. Other than changing "funky" to "happy", there were two major changes made in the studio. One seems to have been Douglas' idea -- they took the bass riff from the pre-chorus to the Beach Boys' "Help Me Rhonda": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Help Me Rhonda"] and Douglas played that on the bass as the pre-chorus for "Daydream Believer", with Shorty Rogers later doubling it in the horn arrangement: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daydream Believer"] And the other is the piano intro, which also becomes an instrumental bridge, which was apparently the invention of Tork, who played it: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daydream Believer"] The track went to number one, becoming the group's third and final number one hit, and their fifth of six million-sellers. It was included on the next album, The Birds, The Bees, and the Monkees, but that piano part would be Tork's only contribution to the album. As the group members were all now writing songs and cutting their own tracks, and were also still rerecording the odd old unused song from the initial 1966 sessions, The Birds, The Bees, and the Monkees was pulled together from a truly astonishing amount of material. The expanded triple-CD version of the album, now sadly out of print, has multiple versions of forty-four different songs, ranging from simple acoustic demos to completed tracks, of which twelve were included on the final album. Tork did record several tracks during the sessions, but he spent much of the time recording and rerecording a single song, "Lady's Baby", which eventually stretched to five different recorded versions over multiple sessions in a five-month period. He racked up huge studio bills on the track, bringing in Steve Stills and Dewey Martin of the Buffalo Springfield, and Buddy Miles, to try to help him capture the sound in his head, but the various takes are almost indistinguishable from one another, and so it's difficult to see what the problem was: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Lady's Baby"] Either way, the track wasn't finished by the time the album came out, and the album that came out was a curiously disjointed and unsatisfying effort, a mixture of recycled old Boyce and Hart songs, some songs by Jones, who at this point was convinced that "Broadway-rock" was going to be the next big thing and writing songs that sounded like mediocre showtunes, and a handful of experimental songs written by Nesmith. You could pull together a truly great ten- or twelve-track album from the masses of material they'd recorded, but the one that came out was mediocre at best, and became the first Monkees album not to make number one -- though it still made number three and sold in huge numbers. It also had the group's last million-selling single on it, "Valleri", an old Boyce and Hart reject from 1966 that had been remade with Boyce and Hart producing and their old session players, though the production credit was still now given to the Monkees: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Valleri"] Nesmith said at the time he considered it the worst song ever written. The second season of the TV show was well underway, and despite -- or possibly because of -- the group being clearly stoned for much of the filming, it contains a lot of the episodes that fans of the group think of most fondly, including several episodes that break out of the formula the show had previously established in interesting ways. Tork and Dolenz were both also given the opportunity to direct episodes, and Dolenz also co-wrote his episode, which ended up being the last of the series. In another sign of how the group were being given more creative control over the show, the last three episodes of the series had guest appearances by favourite musicians of the group members who they wanted to give a little exposure to, and those guest appearances sum up the character of the band members remarkably well. Tork, for whatever reason, didn't take up this option, but the other three did. Jones brought on his friend Charlie Smalls, who would later go on to write the music for the Broadway musical The Wiz, to demonstrate to Jones the difference between Smalls' Black soul and Jones' white soul: [Excerpt: Davy Jones and Charlie Smalls] Nesmith, on the other hand, brought on Frank Zappa. Zappa put on Nesmith's Monkee shirt and wool hat and pretended to be Nesmith, and interviewed Nesmith with a false nose and moustache pretending to be Zappa, as they both mercilessly mocked the previous week's segment with Jones and Smalls: [Excerpt: Michael Nesmith and Frank Zappa] Nesmith then "conducted" Zappa as Zappa used a sledgehammer to "play" a car, parodying his own appearance on the Steve Allen Show playing a bicycle, to the presumed bemusement of the Monkees' fanbase who would not be likely to remember a one-off performance on a late-night TV show from five years earlier. And the final thing ever to be shown on an episode of the Monkees didn't feature any of the Monkees at all. Micky Dolenz, who directed and co-wrote that episode, about an evil wizard who was using the power of a space plant (named after the group's slang for dope) to hypnotise people through the TV, chose not to interact with his guest as the others had, but simply had Tim Buckley perform a solo acoustic version of his then-unreleased song "Song to the Siren": [Excerpt: Tim Buckley, "Song to the Siren"] By the end of the second season, everyone knew they didn't want to make another season of the TV show. Instead, they were going to do what Rafelson and Schneider had always wanted, and move into film. The planning stages for the film, which was initially titled Changes but later titled Head -- so that Rafelson and Schneider could bill their next film as "From the guys who gave you Head" -- had started the previous summer, before the sessions that produced The Birds, The Bees, and the Monkees. To write the film, the group went off with Rafelson and Schneider for a short holiday, and took with them their mutual friend Jack Nicholson. Nicholson was at this time not the major film star he later became. Rather he was a bit-part actor who was mostly associated with American International Pictures, the ultra-low-budget film company that has come up on several occasions in this podcast. Nicholson had appeared mostly in small roles, in films like The Little Shop of Horrors: [Excerpt: The Little Shop of Horrors] He'd appeared in multiple films made by Roger Corman, often appearing with Boris Karloff, and by Monte Hellman, but despite having been a working actor for a decade, his acting career was going nowhere, and by this point he had basically given up on the idea of being an actor, and had decided to start working behind the camera. He'd written the scripts for a few of the low-budget films he'd appeared in, and he'd recently scripted The Trip, the film we mentioned earlier: [Excerpt: The Trip trailer] So the group, Rafelson, Schneider, and Nicholson all went away for a weekend, and they all got extremely stoned, took acid, and talked into a tape recorder for hours on end. Nicholson then transcribed those recordings, cleaned them up, and structured the worthwhile ideas into something quite remarkable: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Ditty Diego"] If the Monkees TV show had been inspired by the Marx Brothers and Three Stooges, and by Richard Lester's directorial style, the only precursor I can find for Head is in the TV work of Lester's colleague Spike Milligan, but I don't think there's any reasonable way in which Nicholson or anyone else involved could have taken inspiration from Milligan's series Q. But what they ended up with is something that resembles, more than anything else, Monty Python's Flying Circus, a TV series that wouldn't start until a year after Head came out. It's a series of ostensibly unconnected sketches, linked by a kind of dream logic, with characters wandering from one loose narrative into a totally different one, actors coming out of character on a regular basis, and no attempt at a coherent narrative. It contains regular examples of channel-zapping, with excerpts from old films being spliced in, and bits of news footage juxtaposed with comedy sketches and musical performances in ways that are sometimes thought-provoking, sometimes distasteful, and occasionally both -- as when a famous piece of footage of a Vietnamese prisoner of war being shot in the head hard-cuts to screaming girls in the audience at a Monkees concert, a performance which ends with the girls tearing apart the group and revealing that they're really just cheap-looking plastic mannequins. The film starts, and ends, with the Monkees themselves attempting suicide, jumping off a bridge into the ocean -- but the end reveals that in fact the ocean they're in is just water in a glass box, and they're trapped in it. And knowing this means that when you watch the film a second time, you find that it does have a story. The Monkees are trapped in a box which in some ways represents life, the universe, and one's own mind, and in other ways represents the TV and their TV careers. Each of them is trying in his own way to escape, and each ends up trapped by his own limitations, condemned to start the cycle over and over again. The film features parodies of popular film genres like the boxing film (Davy is supposed to throw a fight with Sonny Liston at the instruction of gangsters), the Western, and the war film, but huge chunks of the film take place on a film studio backlot, and characters from one segment reappear in another, often commenting negatively on the film or the band, as when Frank Zappa as a critic calls Davy Jones' soft-shoe routine to a Harry Nilsson song "very white", or when a canteen worker in the studio calls the group "God's gift to the eight-year-olds". The film is constantly deconstructing and commenting on itself and the filmmaking process -- Tork hits that canteen worker, whose wig falls off revealing the actor playing her to be a man, and then it's revealed that the "behind the scenes" footage is itself scripted, as director Bob Rafelson and scriptwriter Jack Nicholson come into frame and reassure Tork, who's concerned that hitting a woman would be bad for his image. They tell him they can always cut it from the finished film if it doesn't work. While "Ditty Diego", the almost rap rewriting of the Monkees theme we heard earlier, sets out a lot of how the film asks to be interpreted and how it works narratively, the *spiritual* and thematic core of the film is in another song, Tork's "Long Title (Do I Have to Do This All Over Again?)", which in later solo performances Tork would give the subtitle "The Karma Blues": [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Long Title (Do I Have To Do This All Over Again?)"] Head is an extraordinary film, and one it's impossible to sum up in anything less than an hour-long episode of its own. It's certainly not a film that's to everyone's taste, and not every aspect of it works -- it is a film that is absolutely of its time, in ways that are both good and bad. But it's one of the most inventive things ever put out by a major film studio, and it's one that rightly secured the Monkees a certain amount of cult credibility over the decades. The soundtrack album is a return to form after the disappointing Birds, Bees, too. Nicholson put the album together, linking the eight songs in the film with collages of dialogue and incidental music, repurposing and recontextualising the dialogue to create a new experience, one that people have compared with Frank Zappa's contemporaneous We're Only In It For The Money, though while t
***Please consider a donation to the Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS Foundation.*** DONATE HERE Find Testing Sites near you, and info on PrEP - CLICK HERE If love is a quantifiable unit, Mary and Steven have found it in this week's installment of Show Notes, continuing their coverage of the cultural phenomenon that is RENT from last week's episode of From The Top! Blonde moments abound for Steven in "Notes From A Director" and "Actors Nightmare" and Mary gives some amazing options in this week's Quick Cast to flip this show on its head. They both end with a magical trip to "What If" land with a story change so large, it is almost unfathomable but lets them find even more depth in what it means to live for today, and measure in love. Happy Listening! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
***Please consider a donation to the Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS Foundation.*** DONATE HERE Find Testing Sites near you, and info on PrEP - CLICK HERE Sabrina is back, so you better MOOOOO with her!!! In this episode of From The Top! Mary and Steven have Sabrina back in the booth to take a look into a 90's cult classic musical that changed a generation of theatergoers, RENT. Steven takes a look at the tragic tale of this rock opera's origin story with Jonathan Larson and takes the lovely ladies on a journey through the original source material of a humble 1800s opera in a fun game of "compare and contrast" just how similar late 1800s was to the late 1900s. Mary speaks on how affecting this show is and her personal trials of how challenging it can be to perform, and what it takes to connect with all these amazing characters. Sabrina offers amazing perspectives on what it was like to be in this show as a main ensemble, the hard topics this show covers, and offers levity through the amazing songs this show offers. So come as you are, sit by the burning songs for some warmth, and light a candle while you hear about what it takes to measure love. Happy Listening! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
Our quadruple of sinners and/or saints are back in the second installment of From The Top! covering Jesus Christ Superstar. In this episode, Mēghan Scott and Sabrina Malecek join Mary and Steven once more to tell all the fun variations and empowering moments that performing a gender-unlocked version of this show entails, including chauvinistic statements from certain auditioners, awkward audience moments, and even a woman offering to pray for viewers souls (Not to mention acrobatic silk acts to DIE for). Enjoy part two of this gang's coverage, thoughts, and raucous ramblings of a 1970's Webber smash hit. Happy Listening! GUEST SOCIALS: Sabrina - BUMBLEBEE AERIAL FITNESS Mēghan - FACEBOOK FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Also, TAP THE BELL BUTTON up above so you never miss an episode of your favorite MUSICAL THEATRECAST AND REVIEW :) https://linktr.ee/fromthetoppodcast https://www.instagram.com/fromthetop_podcast/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
Resurrected from the great beyond (aka Portland) Steven is back with Mary in the booth for this week's episode of From The Top! They are also joined by not one, but TWO heavenly beings, Sabrina Malecek and Mēghan Scott, to hellishly dissect and interpret the 1970's Webber smash hit, Jesus Christ Superstar, in a "superstar" sized two-part episode. Part 1 is a light trip through the desert where Steven sets the groundwork for what took this concept album to the stage, where he will have to repent for his disdain of the creator and may be hung on a cross for some hot thoughts. Mēghan and Sabrina, having previously put on a production together, give an insightful, raucous, and sometimes even worldly vantage of our leading characters. Mary recants shows stories of biblical proportion bringing divine light to the trials and tribulations our guests went through for their roles, including dangling 20 feet in the air by little more than faith. So sit down, break bread, and drink some wine with our cast as they tell you what all the "buzz" is about. Happy Listening! GUEST SOCIALS: Sabrina - BUMBLEBEE AERIAL FITNESS Mēghan - FACEBOOK FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Also, TAP THE BELL BUTTON up above so you never miss an episode of your favorite MUSICAL THEATRECAST AND REVIEW :) https://linktr.ee/fromthetoppodcast https://www.instagram.com/fromthetop_podcast/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
If you gather around your family's table, chosen or biological, you can always say how thankful you are to have your favorite musical theatrecast and review in your life this year and into the next. If you find yourself having a perfectly peaceful thanks-living staycation, catch up or relisten to past episodes while that microwave meal is thawing, and laugh, get mad, disagree, and sing along through all the mix-ups and crazy theatre chat. Any and all support is more than Mary and Steven could ever be thankful for this upcoming holiday season, and that is because of all of you who listen.
It's Mary and Steven's first crossover episode at From The Top! They are joined by the one-of-a-kind and magical in every way human, Jon Reilly, host of Lifes's But a Song podcast. They load up on chocolate frogs and butterbeer to dissect and enjoy StarKid Productions' first foray onto stage with A Very Potter Musical. Jon keeps Steven on his toes like Ron dodging a whomping willow's limbs, sharing many a fun tale in his own theatre life and hot thoughts, while Mary isn't shy about sharing her true feelings any less than Moaning Myrtle. You might even get a little en"lumos"ed as this trifecta of musical lovers whisks you away to Hogwarts (or Mars) in their very own Tri-Podcaster Tournament of comedy, wit, and clever quips. Happy Listening! ***Check out Jon's Podcasts! Movie Deja Vu https://linktr.ee/Moviedejavupod Life's But A Song: https://linktr.ee/Butasongpod FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Also TAP THE BELL BUTTON up above so you never miss an episode of your favorite musical theatrecast! https://linktr.ee/fromthetoppodcast https://www.instagram.com/fromthetop_podcast/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
Mary and Steven are back! And they have some director notes Julian Marsh himself would have had an over the top fit over in this week's episode of From The Top! Show Notes for 42nd Street. Steven nitpicks the details of production life and how it's portrayed in all the shows variations, while Mary brings comedic relief showing just how this show holds a mirror up to show life in all it's crazy. Then they hold their own heated audition process with a QuikCast, and of course, enter their magical land called "What If" and flip this show on its head. So get ready to sweat, laugh, and bring the heat as our dynamic duo return to the show. Happy Listening! FOLLOW US! For all the latest content and fun things to come, subscribe, hit that like button, and follow. Also TAP THE BELL BUTTON up above so you never miss an episode of your favorite MUSICAL THEATRECAST AND REVIEW. https://linktr.ee/fromthetoppodcast https://www.instagram.com/fromthetop_podcast/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
Tighten those pieces of metal on your shoe soles and learn the Broadway and a few time steps for this next episode of From The Top! Where Mary and Steven take a look at the show that birthed many tropes on shows about shows, 42nd Street. Steven paints the era of the depression with some history of the show finding some new source material to put forth, and Mary, without asking permission, touches and jabs all the misogyny in this show's source material sheds a light on in the early days of Broadway. They find many a fault and many a pleasure, but in the end the show goes on, and like it or not, they love to feel that beat. Happy Listening! https://linktr.ee/fromthetoppodcast https://www.instagram.com/fromthetop_podcast/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
Time to throw on your best festival gear and dance like there's no tomorrow as Dave Baker brings you another bass-fuelled live mix featuring the latest EDM bangers. Once again we kick off with some manic breaks before moving onto headliners Timmy Trumpet, David Guetta, Will Sparks and more! Play it loud, dance responsibly! https://www.djdavebaker.com/edm Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/djdavebaker 1. Make My Day (OnDaMike Remix) - Brothers Of Funk [ElectroBreakz] 2. Make U Sweat (Bass Rewrk Mix) - Ondamike, DJ DIlect [Ravesta Records] 3. When Doves Cry (Original Mix) - Rob Cokeless [Electro Echelon] 4. Let The Music Play (Bass ReWrk Mix) - Ondamike [Ravesta Records] 5. Goodies (Extended Mix) - Dillon Hart Francis [Astralwerks] 6. From The Top feat. Hosanna (Extended Mix) - Hosanna, No Signe [Hexagon] 7. Dipped In Sugar (Original Mix) - Yellow Claw, €URO TRA$H [Barong Family] 8. Heaven's Gates (Manila Killa Remix) - Devault, Izzy Camina [Ultra] 9. Dancing (Extended Mix) - Dubdisko, Liu, Dubdogz [Virgin Music Label And Artist Services (S&D)] 10. Step Correct (Extended Mix) - Shift K3Y, Billen Ted [Musical Freedom[ 11. Get Down (Extended Mix) - Mark Bale, Clambake & Rav3era [Hexagon] 12. Cathedral (Piece Of Me) [feat. JEN] (Extended Mix) - Jen, SEVEK [Spinnin' Records] 13. Three Little Birds (Extended Mix) - Prezioso, Timmy Trumpet, 71 Digits [Spinnin' Records] 14. I'm Good (Blue) (Extended) - David Guetta, Bebe Rexha [Parlophone UK] 15. In the End (2022 Remix) - Linkin Park, Malaa [Warner Records] 16. Satisfaction (Extended Mix) - Benny Benassi, David Guetta [Spinnin' Records] 17. E Samba (Wiwek Extended Remix) - David Jones [Spinnin' Records] 18. Come With Me (Extended Mix) - Will Sparks [Spinnin' Records] 19. Fortuna (Original Mix) - Asco [CAOS Label]
Steven and Mary continue their magical tale spun by a traveling troupe of actors in Part 2 of Pippin in From The Top! Mary is frustrated with Fastrada, and Steven is jealous of an arched foot. This episode dives into the heart and soul this tale brings forth, and why it binds us as humans. So grab your seat, and sit a spell, as you're transported again to a young man's journey of self discovery, that ends a little… different than anyone might have imagined. Happy Listening! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
In this accidental two part episode of From The Top!, Mary and Steven find a traveling troupe of players and get caught up in the wild tale of the life and times of Pippin! In part one, Steven gives a little history that involves a vanishing act of the origin material we know Pippin to be today, hypnotizes Mary with multiple Pippins, and gets giddy over finally getting to infect Mary with a Fosse “Amoeba”. Mary does a skillful highwire act looking at every character's angles, motives, and charms, or lack there of, in this anecdotal revue. Join them, or “us, as the leading player would say, and come and waste an hour… or two… Doodley Doo. Happy Listening! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
As they tighten their skate wheels, and tease their hair, Mary and Steven tackle their most controversial show to date, Xanadu! Loved by few, hated by many, this Box Office flop turned Broadway Stage Smash probably even turned Greek deities heads, and caused some infighting. Steven dives into what and where Xanadu may harken from, and Mary finds humanity in devilish and quirky characters within the cast. One thing is certain, you'll be looking up Roller Rinks in that Yellow Pages propping up the old couch in the basement by the end of this episode. So join in on the fun and hot thoughts and you just might find your Xanadu in this episode of From The Top! Happy listening! ***This episode is dedicated to the one, the only, the incomparable, Olivia Newton John. Rest well Goddess. We will always be hopelessly devoted to your perfection; your Xanadu.
In this week's episode, the cat's away so the mice stage a coup and make it a musical, or something like that. Tyler recuperates this week so Mary calls upon her From The Top! co-host-est with the… more than you bargained for. Steven returns to the Pod and the “and more” has never been so prevalent. Pride events, choreography, cocktails, David Archuleta, car songs, and upcoming trips to the PNW only scratch the surface of this weeks episode of your favorite mumblecast --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/marytylermorepod/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/marytylermorepod/support
This week Mary and Steven stay at a little farmhouse in the middle of nowhere Connecticut… AND THEY LOVE IT! Source material takes a backseat this week to uplift the voices that should be heard, all while feeling the spirit of the holidays in this reimagined take on a classic, feel-good story. So plant a tree, dye some eggs, and cut the fruit cake while the turkey roasts and the fireworks boom in this week's episode of From The Top! Happy listening! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
Pianist (and From The Top host) Christopher O'Riley joins forces with cellist Matt Haimovitz for their latest collaboration: TROIKA – a portrait of artistic rebellion in the face of political suppression. The two sat down with WGTE's Brad Cresswell to talk about the album, which pairs works by Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev and Shostakovich with modern protest songs by Viktor Tsoi, Pussy Riot, and the Beatles.
We've got a very special guest this week on the GRINDcast, local Emmy Award winning TV personality, Celina Pompeani Mathison! If you're from Western PA or you're a fan of the Pittsburgh Penguins, she needs zero introduction. Follow Celina on social media and subscribe to her podcast, "From The Top with Celina Pompeani" @Celina_Pompeani on Instagram & TikTok @CelinaPompeani on Twitter
Corrections are a b*tch of living, which Steven and Mary find out in this episode premiering the From The Top! Minisode series Show Notes fixing “dropped lines” aka “content” missed, explore more “from the wings” insight, and even enter a magical land called “What If”, all while deep diving more into the Tony Award winning hit that literally rocked Broadway, Spring Awakening. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/podcastfromthetop/message
All Around Classical: A Classical Music Podcast with World-Class Artists Over Coffee
Continuing to celebrate the AAPI Heritage Month, joining me today for a new episode of Tuesday Conversation with Friends is violinist, Cory (Corin) Lee, not your regular violinist. Juilliard trained, founder of The Liberated Performer (an organization to work with performers to overcome performance and audition anxiety), and a member of the string quartet ETHEL which is acclaimed as “unfailingly vital” (The New York Times), “brilliant,” “downtown's reigning string quartet” (The New Yorker), and “one of the most exciting quartets around” (Strad Magazine). In this interview we will start with an incredible work of ETHEL: CIRCUS WANDERING CITY, Cory's beginning (you won't want to miss this story!), managing performance anxiety, shifting from a skill centric conservatory mindset to be audience-focused. You get to watch him perform a humorous edition of Paganini's Caprice No. 5 and finish with his arrangement of Steve Reich's Violin Phase. Featured Guest Cory (Corin) Lee: Corin's collaborations include performances with Grammy Award-winning artists such as Native American flute player Robert Mirabal, jazz pianist Laurence Hobgood, Latin jazz pianist Pablo Ziegler, Pulitzer Prize-winner David Lang, MacArthur Genius composer Julia Wolfe, and DJ Mako. Corin has performed on, FOX, NBC, From The Top, TED, TEDx, SiriusXM, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. In addition to concert work, he is the founder of Liberated Performer®, a program that guides and trains musicians to defeat performance anxiety, prepare for auditions and concerts, and achieve peak performance. He has taught at National YoungArts Foundation (New York and Miami), directs the audition preparation programs at the New York Youth Symphony, and has given lectures at conservatories like The Juilliard School and San Francisco Conservatory. Corin studied with Ani Kavafian, Hyo Kang, Naoko Tanaka, Wei He, Camilla Wicks, Robert Mealy, and Cathryn Lee. He received degrees from Juilliard (BM), Yale (MM), and an honorary doctorate from Denison University. Your Hostess: Shirley Wang, Operatic Soprano, Pianist, Educator, International Best Selling Author, and Content Creator. Additional ways to stay updated with Tuesday Conversation with Friends: Facebook: www.Facebook.com/SimpleGiftsMusicStudio Instagram: @Simple.Gifts.Music.Studio YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/TuesdayConversationWithFriends Twitter:@SG_MusicStudio Clubhouse: @MsShirleyWang To watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ENg4TNP9Ark To stay in touch with the featured guest: Ethel: www.EthelCentral.org "A Wondrous Space" by Dorothy Lawson (ETHEL's Circus: Wandering City): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCuBK68DTZA Mini Paganini Caprice No. 5 by Corin Lee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_BIGkX_azQ Violin Phase by Steve Reich, Arr. by Corin Lee for Electronic Violin, Cello & Bass: https://youtu.be/Pxg1tuQiBF8 --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/shirley-wang6/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/shirley-wang6/support
Jack Sippel / @jackjsippel When talking to Jack Sippel, you are truly speaking with a theatre industry professional. From a very young age, Jack has been actively involved in professional theatre. He started at The Muny as a kid and was then asked to audition for their equity ensemble, which he booked and received his equity card at age 15! He then went on to land the Memphis National Tour as a senior in high school. Most recently, Jack has been the Dance Captain and Swing for The Prom on Broadway. He then joined the creative team for the Netflix film adaptation of The Prom as Assistant Choreographer. During the pandemic, he has also started his own podcast focusing on dance in theatre, called ""Again, From The Top""! www.builtforthestage.com - Schedule your one week trial today! www.broadwaypodcastnetwork.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jack Sippel / @jackjsippel When talking to Jack Sippel, you are truly speaking with a theatre industry professional. From a very young age, Jack has been actively involved in professional theatre. He started at The Muny as a kid and was then asked to audition for their equity ensemble, which he booked and received his equity card at age 15! He then went on to land the Memphis National Tour as a senior in high school. Most recently, Jack has been the Dance Captain and Swing for The Prom on Broadway. He then joined the creative team for the Netflix film adaptation of The Prom as Assistant Choreographer. During the pandemic, he has also started his own podcast focusing on dance in theatre, called ""Again, From The Top""! www.builtforthestage.com - Schedule your one week trial today! www.broadwaypodcastnetwork.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This week's episode of The GRIND Cast is a special one My friends over at Armina Stone had me as a guest on their podcast “From The Top” with Celina Pompeani. It was nice switching gears from interviewer to interviewee Looking forward to sharing my story with all of you. Check it out now!!!
He was the poster child of NPR's “From The Top,” went to Juilliard, and played in the house band for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert; but now Ibanda is transitioning from one wildly successful career to another as he carves out a comedy career in LA. He gives his thoughts on having interests outside of music, taking opportunities when they arise, and having the courage to say yes to something before you know exactly what you're doing.*LINKS*Ibanda's profile on UCB ComedyFollow Ibanda on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTubeIbanda's feature in Gossamer magazineSelected Videos:"My Life In Music" ShortBoogie On Reggae Woman by Stevie Wonder... on tuba!Thundercat w/ Stay Human on the Late ShowStay Wednesday - impromptu jam with Jon Batiste and Stay HumanTraining Trailer (newest comedy short)Follow us on Instagram at @Rising_Stars_Podcast_More about the host at caroljantsch.com
Director Neal Mulani discusses his short film, From The Top, with NFFTY Executive Director, Dan Hudson. From The Top screened in the Saturday Night Shorts screening at NFFTY 2020. Keep up with Neal Mulani: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neal.mulani More from Partyfish Media: https://instagram.com/partyfishmedia "NFFTY Podcast Theme" composed by Kurtis Skinner
Pianist and creator of "From The Top," Christopher O'Riley, remembers his mom Ceci Sommers, former manager and on air personality at WQED who died on February 2, 2021. Chris recalls her personality, her interest in politics, reading, her wit, passion and at times acerbic nature. Chris fills us in on his latest musical projects from his home in Los Angeles, remembers Joanne Rogers and much more in this conversation with Jim Cunningham.
I discuss my quest to spend less time on my phone. I also talk to pianist and host of NPR’s “From The Top,” Peter Dugan. We discuss that time there was a pig backstage at a comedy show, crossing genres on piano, learning the blues scale as a kid, using our instruments as outlets for emotion as teens, being the youngest in a big family, becoming a radio show host, Juilliard hangs, school plays, feeling useful as a kid, taping The Tonight Show, being a germaphobe pre-covid, how I don’t miss hugging, having too many cats, and more! New episodes every Tuesday! Be sure to subscribe. Follow me on Instagram and Twitter @isabelhagen_ and check out isabelhagen.com More from Peter at peterduganpiano.com
Take it "From The Top" Alexander... I'm playing a Christmas Carol from my piano to start this episode: What Child Is This? arranged by David Lanz This is a Podcast Piggyback Episode Extravaganza. My episode talks about another podcast called FROM THE TOP. From the Top, distributed by NPR, features the astounding performances and captivating personal stories of extraordinary classically-trained young musicians from across the country. I was in the audience when they recorded their episode, LIVE, on March 4, 2020 in Beverly Hills, CA, at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. At their event, I was moved by the talent and performances of these young artists. My Christmas wish is that after you listen to me talk about the power of classical music, and how it can expand your life, you'll hop over to their episode. I believe it's important for us to get out of our music listening ruts, and open ourselves up to new artists and different genres. https://viralmindfulness.com/126 For all the details. ***If you're currently in Apple Podcasts: Piggyback right now to From the Top. Here's the link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/from-the-top/id121493653?i=1000492866747
In this episode, Michael Harper and I discuss a lip injury he sustained during his college education, and what his road back to healthy playing looked like.Michael Harper joined the Jacksonville Symphony in January 2018 as 2nd trumpet. He has performed as a substitute musician with the Sydney Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, St. Louis Symphony, Atlanta Baroque Orchestra (on baroque trumpet), New World Symphony, and Chicago Civic Orchestra. Mr. Harper has spent his summers as a member of the Tanglewood, Verbier, Lucerne, Aspen, NOI, AIMS, Chosen Vale, and Interlochen music festivals. He performed the Arutunian Trumpet Concerto with the Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra under the baton of Maestro Jahja Ling in April 2016, having won the school’s concerto competition the fall prior. He won first prize in the 2016 Tuesday Musical Scholarship Competition brass division and second prize in the 2017 Edith Knox Performance Competition. In March 2010, Michael was featured on NPR’s From The Top with his trumpet trio, the only such ensemble to ever perform on the show.Mr. Harper earned his Bachelor of Music in Trumpet Performance and in Music Theory at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music, studying with Charles Geyer, Barbara Butler, Christopher Martin, and Robert Sullivan. He earned his Master of Music at the Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM), studying with Michael Sachs and Michael Miller. While studying at CIM, Mr. Harper also developed a strong interest and earned certificates in Eurhythmics Pedagogy and Early Music Performance; he began playing the baroque trumpet and performed in the Case Western Reserve University baroque orchestra and chamber groups. He earned a Professional Studies Certificate at the Colburn Conservatory of Music, studying with Jim Wilt. Michael was born in Annapolis, Maryland, and began his musical studies on the bugle at the age of eight, studying with his father. Support the show (https://thatsnotspit.com/support/)
Our first guest on the Violin Podcast is Gallia Kastner, a student at the Colburn school in Los Angeles, California, has performed in Aspen Music Festival and on NPR's From The Top, and is the current concertmaster of the American Youth Symphony. Please like and subscribe to the Violin Podcast. www.violinpodcast.com --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
Hi everyone! Welcome back for the second review this month from Jon-David, aka the Mafia Hairdresser, who is picking up today’s review for Oscar nominee MALEFICENT: MISTRESS OF EVIL as part of our cleanup week. Check social media to see if they took home the gold, as this episode was pre-produced before the ceremony. And regardless of whether it wins, Jon-David will be up in a minute with thoughts, along with a promo for his serial podcast The Mafia Hairdresser Chronicles. Don’t miss his previous two reviews for One Movie Punch, including RICHARD JEWELL (Episode #692) and last week’s review for THE CAVE (Episode #706). Speaking of Takeover Tuesday, do you think you have what it takes to guest on One Movie Punch? Head over to onemoviepunch.com/takeover-tuesday and learn more about how you can guest here at One Movie Punch. We still have three (3) slots available this quarter for aspiring and established film critics to take the reins for an episode. We’ll run your promo before the review and will place it in regular rotation for the quarter. If it sounds like something interesting to you, reach out to us over social media. Subscribe to stay current with the latest releases. Contribute at Patreon for exclusive content. Connect with us over social media to continue the conversation. Here we go! ///// > ///// JOSEPH: “And now, in Recording Room 26 at One Movie Punch Tower...” JON-DAVID: “Hello, this Jon-David aka Mafia Hairdresser, the writer and performer of the podcast “The Mafia Hairdresser Chronicles”, a campy crime comedy based on my time as a celebrity hairdresser in Hollywood in the 1980s. But, enough about my fairy tale, let’s talk about the Disney Film, MALEFICENT: MISTRESS OF EVIL.” JOSEPH: “Sorry, Jon-David. It’s MALEFICENT. Let’s take it from the top.” AMY: “He seems agitated today.” JOSEPH: “Yeah, I know. Keeps looking at his phone, too.” JON-DAVID: “Today’s movie review is the more sensationally titled sequel MALEFICENT: MISTRESS OF EVIL. Released in 2019, this fantasy family action film was directed by Joachim Rønning, and written for the screen by Linda Woolverton, who also wrote MALEFICENT.” JOSEPH: “Jon-David. MALEFICENT.” AMY: “Should I go talk to him, or...?” JOSEPH: “No, he seems fine...” JOSEPH: “Wait, where did he go?” AMY: “He was just there a minute ago!” JOSEPH: “Wait a minute...” AMY: “Is it a new sponsor?!” JOSEPH: “No. A text from Jon-David.” JOSEPH: “Dear Joseph. Sorry for bailing like that. I was hoping to finish recording, but some guy who paints houses needed me to cut some hair. Will be back as soon as I can. Jon-David.” JOSEPH: “He put paint houses and cut some hair in quotes. Not sure what that’s all about.” AMY: “Umm, don’t you remember in THE IRISHMAN...” JOSEPH: “Why should I remember THE IRISHMAN? The Academy sure didn’t.” JOSEPH: “Thank you, I’ll be here all night! Recording Jon-David’s review for him. Should have never agreed to the hair-cutting clause in our extensive contract. Can you get things set up to record?” AMY: “Sure thing.” AMY: “And, go!” JOSEPH: “But, enough about his fairy tale, let’s talk about the Disney Film, MALEFICENT: MISTRESS OF EVIL.” AMY: “Joseph. MALEFICENT.” JOSEPH: “Now he’s got me doing it... FROM THE TOP!” ///// Quick Note: I’m Joseph Dobzynski, Jr., reading for Jon-David, who was actually pulled away at the last moment and couldn’t finish recording the review. He did send me the written review, though, for MALEFICENT: MISTRESS OF EVIL and his dulcet tones will be back later in the month with a review for the Oscar-nominated PAIN AND GLORY. Without further ado... Today’s movie review is for MALEFICENT: MISTRESS OF EVIL, the more sensationally titled sequel to 2014’s MALEFICENT. Released in 2019, this fantasy family action film was directed by Joachim Rønning, and written for the screen by Linda Woolverton, Micah Fitzerman-Blue, and Noah Harpster. All characters are based on Charles Perrault’s short story, “La Belle Au Bois Dormant”. That’s right, Sleeping Beauty, in 1903. No spoilers. Hopefully you’ve heard the tale of Sleeping Beauty, the story of Princess Aurora who pricked her finger on an enchanted spindle which put her entire kingdom to sleep - until a prince rescued her. Maybe you’ve seen the Walt Disney Pictures classic animated film? Agh, no matter. Disney made a semi-reboot of this family friendly story starring Angelina Jolie as a powerful horned fairy, with spikey CGI wings and extreme cheekbones, and she’s the creature who actually created the sleeping curse and then bonded with the princess, which ultimately begot love and peace between humans and fairies, for a while. That film was 2014’s MALEFICENT. It had a decent box office of $758.5 million against its roughly $200 million budget. Disney’s MALEFICENT: MISTRESS OF EVIL did not do nearly as well, box office-wise, as its predecessor, probably because it came out nearly five years after the original hit. When a studio waits that long to stoke the fire, the flames may have died down a bit. MALEFICENT: MISTRESS OF EVIL was a nice tale and a pretty film, and yet, I thought, it could have been a little bit darker. In this film, there were battles between fairies and humans, but they wrapped up very quickly, with no epic battles with the big visual wow we are used to seeing in other films. At least Disney’s latest STAR WARS release, THE RISE OF SKYWALKER (Episode #672), had that visual ocean battle to draw people in, but this film had no such scenes. There was nothing particularly eerie, creepy, or spine-tingling about this film, unlike BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (Episode #030). It stayed too light. In fact, I wish that they geeked out a little bit more on the fantasy stuff. Maleficent finds “her people”, so to speak, and where she might have originated from. That would have been an interesting storyline to pursue, if not base the entire film on. Instead, this plotline was relegated only to illuminate the man-versus-nature theme that ran throughout the film. This film glossed over Maleficent’s special powers, how she got them, and her special relationship with her own kind. And the film, in my opinion, threw away a great new charismatic fairy character, introduced as Conall, played by Academy Award winner Chiwetel Ejiofor. I do love the casting of Elle Fanning as Aurora and Angelina Jolie as Maleficent. Opposites in every way and the scenes with these two have great tension in them due to Fanning’s unwavering hope and confidence that her mother, Jolie, will do the right thing when called to do so. Both actors fight each other hard and yet the love for each other is palpable and redeeming. Michelle Pfeiffer as Queen Ingrith is evilicious! I just wish this film could have been about the big battle between Queen Ingrith and Maleficent. That would have made me happier. Perhaps, having too many writers on this film and utilizing three or four good storylines watered down this film’s greatness potential for me I do recommend this film because it’s a feel-good movie. And the special effects and CGI... they’re fine, just fine. Especially when applied to the scenes Jolie are in. It's an enjoyable film to watch. There’s the CGI kingdom and the CGI forest. I remember that MALEFICENT came out in 3D. And personally, I know the man who did that film’s 3D for Sony. (So, I know, “stuff.”) But I didn’t see MISTRESS OF EVIL in 3D, and I think it might have been a better film in 3D, because this film was brighter than the darker-colored 2014 predecessor, meaning, not gray tones, which seems to be better for 3D movie watching. MALEFICENT: MISTRESS OF EVIL is the story of Sleeping Beauty’s much maligned adoptive mother, a powerful fairy bent on seeking revenge on the humans who continually threaten the life and beauty of her forest realm. This is a fun family film. I enjoyed it. And so did many others, with a Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score of 95%. Just not so great with the critics. Rotten Tomatoes: 40% Metacritic: 43 One Movie Punch: 6.5/10 MALEFICENT: MISTRESS OF EVIL (2019) is rated PG and is currently is available in limited theaters and on VOD.
Episode 122 - Lara Downes. Dan Sterenchuk and Tommy Estlund are honored to have as our guest, Lara Downes. Lara Downes is among the foremost American pianists of her generation, an iconoclast dedicated to expanding the resonance and relevance of live music for diverse audiences. A trailblazer on and off-stage, she follows a musical roadmap that seeks inspiration from the legacies of history, family, and collective memory. Downes' playing has been called “ravishing” by Fanfare Magazine, "luscious, moody and dreamy” by The New York Times, and "addicting" by The Huffington Post. As a chart-topping recording artist, a powerfully charismatic performer, a curator and taste-maker, Downes is recognized as a cultural visionary on the national arts scene. Lara's forays into the broad landscape of American music have created a series of acclaimed recordings, including America Again, selected by NPR as one of "10 Albums that Saved 2016", and hailed as "a balm for a country riven by disunion" by the Boston Globe. Her Sony Classical debut release For Lenny debuted in the Billboard Top 20 and was awarded the 2017 Classical Recording Foundation Award. Downes enjoys creative collaborations with a range of leading artists, including folk icon Judy Collins, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, baritone Thomas Hampson, former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove, and multi-instrumentalist/composer/singer Rhiannon Giddens. Her close partnerships with prominent composers span genres and generations, with premieres and commissions coming from Jennifer Higdon, John Corigliano, Stephen Schwartz, Paola Prestini, Sarah Kirkland Snider and many others. Downes' fierce commitment to arts advocacy, mentorship and education sees her working in support of non-profit organizations including the Lower Eastside Girls Club of NY, PLAN International, the Sphinx Organization, and NPR's From The Top, where she will appear as a featured guest host in Spring 2019. Her Sony Masterworks recording Holes in the Sky, a celebration of the contributions of phenomenal women to the past, present and future of American music, was released in March 2019, debuting at the top of the Billboard charts. Her newest album, FOR LOVE OF YOU continues the strand of music by women, celebrating the 200th birthday of Clara Schumann. The album was featured in the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/28/arts/music/clara-schumann.html More info: http://www.laradownes.com/for-love-of-you Buy album: https://lnk.to/ForLoveOfYou Website: http://www.laradownes.com Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/2pSV3M4cqq8MUqT3SrXdpS YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTJh1m1BlPhkK7_deTexdXw Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/100002728555138 Instagram: http://instagram.com/laradownesmusic Twitter: https://twitter.com/laradownes All music excerpts in episode are used with permission from Lara Downes. Note: Guests create their own bio description for each episode. The Curiosity Hour Podcast is hosted and produced by Dan Sterenchuk and Tommy Estlund. Please visit our website for more information: thecuriosityhourpodcast.com The Curiosity Hour Podcast is listener supported! To donate, click here: thecuriosityhourpodcast.com/donate/ Please visit this page for information where you can listen to our podcast: thecuriosityhourpodcast.com/listen/ Disclaimers: The Curiosity Hour Podcast may contain content not suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion advised. The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are solely those of the guest(s). These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of The Curiosity Hour Podcast. This podcast may contain explicit language.
Barber Glen Tufuga swings by the podcast to talk about crossing paths in our former bands, learning every blink-182 song, music shaming, Glory of the Hour, Walking Plague, From The Top, Ride From A Stranger, band drama, staying straight edge, watching his parents hustle, texting his biological father in prison, 3 Ninjas, buying a pregnancy test on the Fourth of July, teaching his baby sign language, busting out of church, whether he'll fulfill his purpose, being the greatest Mario Kart player of all-time, and dreaming about his childhood dog. Follow him on Instagram: @glenxtufuga
AcaGeekz 14 – “Animal Kingdom” AcaGeekz is available on Apple Podcast and Sticher! If you like what you hear, please leave a 5-star rating and review and help support the show! Welcome! I’m celebrating the Animal Kingdom with some good ol’ a cappella! It’s my hope that AcaGeekz will introduce the casual listener and the hardcore a cappella fan alike to some groups and styles they’ve never heard before. Whether it be Barbershop, collegiate, doo wop, high school, choral, jazz, funk, pop, rock, or classical, there’s something for everyone! It’s time to give the tracks for this episode their due credit. So here they are, the tracks for AcaGeekz “Animals”! Apple Podcast and Sticher Promo Song Title: “Can’t Sleep Love” Artist: Pentatonix Album: Pentatonix (Deluxe) (2015) Website: www.ptxofficial.com You can purchase Pentatonix (Deluxe) by Pentatonix at: https://www.amazon.com/Pentatonix-Deluxe-Version/dp/B014PD0R0A INTRO: Song Title: “Paul” Artist: Paul Cingolani from +4db Album: +4db (2000) Website: N/A You can purchase the album +4db by +4db at: http://www.amazon.com/4db-Plus-Four-db/dp/B0001WW2KI SONG #1: Song Title: “Lion King Medley” Artist: VoicePlay Bass Spotlight: Geoff Castelucci Album: Once Upon An Ever After (2012) Website: http://thevoiceplay.com You can purchase Once Upon An Ever After by VoicePlay at: http://thevoiceplay.com SONG #2: Song Title: “Bumble Bee” Artist: The Real Group Album: Real Album (2009) Website: www.therealgroup.se You can purchase Real Album by The Real Group at: https://www.amazon.com/Real-Album-REAL-GROUP/dp/B004SH2OXW/182-4646616-6092532?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0 SONG #3: Song Title: “Get Your Monkey Off My Dog” Artist: The Bobs Album: Get Your Monkey Off My Dog (2008) Website: N/A You can purchase Get Your Monkey Off My Dog by The Bobs at: https://www.amazon.com/Get-Your-Monkey-Off-Dog/dp/B000Z7G8H2 SONG #4: Song Title: “The Disney Medley - Under The Sea” Artist: Home Free Album: From The Top Website: www.homefreemusic.com You Can purchase From The Top by Home Free at: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/homefree SONG #5: Song Title: “Giraffe Nightengale” Artist: Four Shadow Album: Live In Bemidji (2006) Website: N/A You can purchase Live In Bemidji by Four Shaodw at: https://www.amazon.com/Four-Shadow-Bemidji-Kevin-Steinman/dp/B000LV6MG4 SONG #6: Song Title: “Ode To MacDonald” Artist: Voice Trek Album: Harmony Sweepstakes A Cappella Festival 2001 Nationals (2001) Website: www.voicetreksings.com You can purchase Harmony Sweepstakes A Cappella Festival 2001 Nationals at: http://www.harmony-sweepstakes.com/hsrecordings.html SONG #7: Song Title: ”Eensie Weensie Spider” Artist: InsideOut Album: Primary Colors (2008) Website: www.insideout-acappella.com You can purchase Primary Colors by InsideOut at: SONG #8: Song Title: “Blackbird” Artist: Sixth Wave Album: Sixth Wave (2002) Website: N/A You can purchase Sixth Wave by Sixth Wave at: https://www.amazon.com/Sixth-Wave/dp/B00005JGQP?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0 SONG #9: Song Title: “Bear Necessities” Artist: Dick Van Dyke & The Vantastix Album: Put On A Happy Face (2008) Website: www.vantastix.com You can purchase Put On A Happy Face by Acoustix by Dick Van Dyke & The Vantastix at: http://www.vantastix.com OUTRO: Song Title: ”Interlude #3” Artist: Five O’Clock Shadow Album: Wonders Of The World (2000) Website: www.focs.com You can purchase Wonders Of The World by Five O’Clock Shadow at: http://www.focs.com SONG #10: Song Title: “Fluffy’s Master Plan For World Domination” Artist: The Bobs Album: Coaster (2000) Website: N/A You Can purchase Coaster by The Bobs at: https://www.amazon.com/Coaster-Bobs/dp/B000050HPA Thank you for listening to this brand new episode,! I want to invite you to come back next week for a Throwback episode! So be sure to subscribe for more great content! If you like what you hear, please leave a 5-star rating and review and help support the show! Follow on Twitter @AcaGeekz . If you’d like your group to be featured on a future episode, contact me by e-mail at: acageekz@gmail.com I’ll See you next week! ~Sean~
We love creating community! You may have seen our highlights on various creators throughout our FIT Life Creation lifestyle brand with health, wealth and business in 1 on the community via the blog, podcast, videos and more! This post is inspired by the creators, dreamers, and transformers who create to transform + inspire the world to create a life and business they love. We want to create community + shine a spotlight on those that light up those around them too! That’s why for 2019, for the first time ever, we’re opening up the opportunity to the public FIT Life Creation Creator search for the Next Creation Creator! Ten Winners will win two tickets each for Our Atlanta Creation Weekend - a total of twenty tickets for the two day experience to Create a Life and Business you Love supplied by FIT Life Creation. Creation Weekend will help you create, transform, and inspire. You will learn how to's and take action to get healthy, make money, and build brands all in one! ONE Grand Prize Winner will win a spot to our Brazil Retreat* Full experience + stay + excursions included. Air not included. HOW TO ENTER: 1) FOLLOW @FITLIFECREATION AND @KATRINAJULIAFIT FOR SERIOUS INSPIRATION ON HEALTH, WEALTH, BIZ, TRAVEL. 2) CREATE AN ENGAGING POST + CAPTION AS TO WHY YOU ARE AN AMAZING CREATOR AND MENTION @FITLIFECREATION #FITLIFECREATIONCREATOR #CONTEST IN YOUR POST BY 4/7/2019 THE TOP 100 WILL BE ANNOUNCED ON OR AROUND 4/22/2019. 3) FROM THE TOP 100, WE WILL REQUEST YOU SHARE WHY BEING IN TOP 100 IS IMPORTANT TO YOU, A SECOND POST by 5/15, AND A CUSTOM LINKS + TRACKING TO TRACK RESULTS. 4) WE WILL ANNOUNCE TOP 10 BY 5/31 FOR THOSE ATTENDING ATLANTA CREATION WEEKEND + ANY SPOTLIGHT SPEAKING FEATURES. 5) THE TOP TEN ATTENDING ATLANTA CREATION WEEKEND WIN WILL BE ELIGIBLE TO ENTER TO WIN A SPOT FOR BRAZIL WITH WHAT THEY SHARE BEFORE, DURING, AND AFTER THE ATLANTA EVENT! ONE GRAND PRIZE WINNER WILL WIN A SPOT AT OUR BRAZIL RETREAT FOR 8 DAYS! FULL RETREAT EXPERIENCE + STAY + EXCURSIONS INCLUDED. *AIRFARE NOT INCLUDED. Full post if you want the visual and the videos I mention and more! I share here in the episode on the contest, plus insight into our Atlanta Creation Weekend + Brazil Retreat! Want to create a community? Visit our freebies + online courses to jump start your transformation with health, wealth, and business all in 1! Each and every course includes our mastermind that includes health, wealth, and biz with tips, tools and tech! Think Amazon Meets Airbnb for Transformation with an Influencer Marketing + Fundraising Twist! Want to create with our experiences? or Jump Start with Our Creation Club: Mastermind Health, Wealth, Biz in 1 Free 14 Day Challenge Monthly Transformation Pack + Bonuses when you choose to create with our community after the Free 14 Days like Herbalife Nutrition Packs Monthly, Wealth and Business Bonuses like the course "Exponential Exposure" that gives you exact TIPS + LIST for Press Trips, Speaking Gigs, Affiliates and MORE! Over $1,000 in value easily! Tips + Tools + Tech mentioned above are (Included in various aspect in our experiences www.fitlifecreation.com/experiences) Along with hands on activities + how to's + behind the scenes in online + live experiences with FIT Life Creation: Lifestyle Brand: Health, Wealth, Biz in 1 Think Amazon Meets Airbnb for Transformation with Influencer Marketing (Revolve / Like it to Knowit) and Fundraising Twist. For upcoming events and workshops, visit www.fitlifecreation.com/events For retreats nationally and internationally, visit www.fitlifecreation.com/retreats Influencers www.fitlifecreation.com/ambassadors Brands to learn more + ways to work together: www.fitlifecreation.com/creator Let's create, transform, and inspire. What if… What if you focused on changing and replacing habits? What if you celebrated your progress step by step? What if you used lifestyle tools to help make it easier? What if you took accountability and action to a WHOLE NEW LEVEL? Imagine the return… Imagine the results… It is possible to create it. How do I know? Because I took ALL the education and experience from industries and brands served, and we did just that. How did we do it? I figured it was time to share it to serve others! Let’s start creating from the beginning! Let's simplify, simplify, simplify! Highlights: I am obsessed with simplifying transformation in health, wealth, and business. To learn more about my + our FLC story, explore here. Whether I am helping others transform mindset, health, wealth, business online, with influencers, with industries, with speaking, with speaking, and with brand integrations, I give my all! It was quite a journey to get here + what you see in this post If you are here, you want to simplify too. You are inspired and have been. Yet, you want to take action easily and effortlessly. You want life to be simpler and smoother. I. GET. IT. Reformed #complicatedhuman #selfsabatogeanyone #anyoneelsestrugglewithfear #fearoffailure #fearofsuccess Completely illogical with the external evidence I had in all the results I created, yet when I became a full-time entrepreneur, I got to face so many fears!! I am eternally grateful because I RELATE on ALL levels! Remember: Life is a journey! Let's Talk... ....... 7 Influencers We Love: Creating Community For over 15 years, I struggled with health, wealth, and integrating all the businesses I had served (>7 industries + >15 brands generating up 9 figure results per year. I bounced from role to role searching because my passion and purpose was not fulfilled and I was riddled with fears. Once I created transformation and unleashed inspiration in how not only may I be the hero in the story, but more importantly serve others, my world and everything around it changed. Here is to you creating a life and business you love step by step. Hear all about it!
As a Santa Barbara native, Dusty Baker’s established reputation and knowledge of the local market seamlessly integrates into a successful real estate career which includes designations such as “Agent of the Year” and “Top 40 Under 40.” For nearly a decade, Dusty has been serving the real estate needs of clients in Santa Barbara, Montecito, Goleta and Carpinteria. Dusty prides himself in truly connecting with his clients to ensure their complete satisfaction with his representation, which is one of the many reasons he is the area’s #1 rated real estate agent on Yelp. Client reviews consistently showcase themes of Dusty’s professionalism, caring personality, and local familiarity. Throughout his tenure in real estate, Dusty has educated and influenced thousands of colleagues in the industry through his speaking and writing. His writing portfolio includes penning articles for top real estate news source Inman News and authoring the foreword for the Amazon best-selling book, From The Top. He has also spoken as a marketing specialist on a national level at conferences and real estate offices. Dusty emphasizes robust marketing, skillful negotiating, uncompromised discretion, and concierge-level service. Buying and selling luxury real estate deserves nothing but the finest attention to detail, both in business practice and client experience. Dusty strives for excellence in every aspect of his business. Transcript Stefan: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the show Respect the Grind with Stefan Aarnio. This is the show where we interview people who achieve mastery and freedom through discipline. We interview entrepreneurs, athletes, authors, artists, real estate investors, anyone who has achieved mastery, and examined what it took to get there. Stefan: Today on the show, we have a new friend of mine, Dusty Baker. He's a Santa Barbara native, Top 40 Under 40. He's in the luxury real estate niche, and I'm really excited to have him in the luxury niche, because we get so many real estate people on this show, and it's super cool to have somebody in that super elite niche. He's also a speaker, he's also a marketing consultant. Dusty, welcome to the show, Respect the Grind. Thanks so much for joining me. Dusty: Hey, thanks for having me. This should be fun. Stefan: Awesome. Yeah, I'm sorry I can't say Santa Barbara. I don't know why I can't say it. Dusty: Santa Barbara native. Stefan: I can't say mash-chew-shits. Massachusetts. I can't say that either. Stefan: Awesome. Dusty, for the people at home who don't know who you are, how'd you get started in the business you're in? Dusty: Like you mentioned, stuttering over it, I'm a native here, and it's an incredible place if you've never been to Santa Barbara or heard of it. It's a really ... It's a small little town, about 100,000 people here, but the surrounding areas that make Santa Barbara up are about 200,000-250,000 people. It's a coastal beach town about an hour north of LA. It's radically expensive, it just is what it is. Montecito is the little portion most people know. Oprah has this huge compound. Estimates are it's worth probably $200 million at this point. Stefan: Wow. Dusty: Ellen DeGeneres buys and sells [inaudible 00:01:30]. We just have a lot of the celebrity crowd as well. But it's an area that's very different from LA, so it's this whole other vibe. But it's very expensive. I thought, since I'm going to stick around here, I better get into an industry that ... my pay is directly proportionate to paying to live here. Dusty: It's just a great lifestyle. I'm a surfer, I like to hike, get outside. It's a fantastic place, so when I was young and getting my business degree, actually, I was going to a university locally, and I got an internship for a real estate office. Unpaid intern, I worked for every agent there doing just the stupidest crap you could imagine, but I learned a lot. I met a lot of people, and that office really became my family. It's kind of fun, because instead of the competitive vibe, we still maintained a great family feel even though a lot of us are at different companies and we're competing, obviously. It was just a great, great entrance, and that was over a decade ago, so unpaid interns, you're growing and growing, really organically, actually, led me here. I loved it. I wouldn't change it for the world. I had lots of fun. Stefan: Wow. Yeah, well, it's amazing. They say riche in the niche, or rich in the niche, and you've got a really cool niche, niche there. I was down in LA in May, and I'm from Canada, up here in Winnipeg, Manitoba. I was down at Ty Lopez's house, actually, in May. I was at Bel Air or wherever he lives, and we went up to Orange County for a bit, and it's incredible, the money and the wealth there in California, right around Orange County, LA, Santa Barbara. It's absolutely incredible. Why is there so much freaking money over there between the mountains and the coast? Why do all these rich people want to live there? Dusty: The quality of life is sky high, which ... It's funny, actually. Besides the fact that it's just very nice to live at the beach with 70 degree year round weather, I've had a lot of clients I've represented from ... Actually, Denver was two of them, and people around the country, Michigan, where their doctors prescribed them to move somewhere like Santa Barbara, because you can live so much longer. Your body doesn't take a beating like it does in the winters or in the summers. It's a really great quality of life. In fact, Santa Barbara consistently ranks as one of the top cities in the country to live, and actually, they did a study of the longevity of life, and Santa Barbara is number one. We won by five days or something like that. Stefan: Wow. Dusty: But we have the longest average lifespan here. So really, it just comes down to that. People just want really nice quality of life. It starts with the weather, and then it goes to the type of life. Orange County is very different, even from Santa Barbara. My wife, I was living in Newport when we met. She now lives, obviously, in Santa Barbara with me. But we go and get breakfast burritos, and you see 20 Lamborghinis go by. People are driving their net worth. They like to show off their net worth. Santa Barbara, totally the opposite. You could get a billionaire driving up in a 1981 Mercedes or a truck. So, very, very, very different. We're a very casual affluent here. Orange County's definitely different. Stefan: You said something there, I was almost going to give you a gong for it too, but I was like, eh. It was, doctors prescribe for people to move there so they'll live longer. Man, that is crazy. I'm going to Costa Rica- Dusty: It's real nice. Stefan: Dude, that's incredible. Tomorrow I'm going to Costa Rica, I'm flying from Canada to Costa Rica, and I'm going to live in the jungle for 40 days on just water, water [crosstalk 00:04:59]. Dusty: Oh, wow. Stefan: Yeah. It's something I do. And it's crazy 'cause the guy runs the fasting center. He wants everyone to be a raw vegan, raw fruit kind of life. And I was like, man, when I go back to Canada, it's so cold. I can't stay warm, and I'm losing too much weight, and all these things. And he goes, well, dude. Just move. And I'm like, bro, maybe I should. After you say that, moving down there for the health, maybe I should move down to Cali or something. It's so beautiful. I was looking on your Instagram. It seems almost like a Barbie and Ken charmed life down there where everyone is beautiful and the sun in shining and it's just so nice. Stefan: Dust, tell me this, man. Top 40 Under 40. What does that mean? Dusty: There's a ... Pacific Coast Business Times does something. It's not just real estate related, which is why I'm really proud of it. It just looks at the top 40 under 40 business professionals in the Santa Barbara County region, and actually, I won that ... God, four years ago. I was 26 when I won that, so I felt really good, 'cause there were people at 39 winning, because they were technically under 40. So, really proud to win that. They just want to highlight people who excel in their fields. Stefan: Wow, that's great, man. Well, congrats. I think it's super cool. I've won some awards. I won Rich Dad International Hall of Fame 2014, which was cool, for Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Dusty: That's rad, yeah. Stefan: Thanks, man. But I'm not top 40 under 40. I'm 32, I've gotta get on that. Tell me this, Dusty. One of the things I think is super cool ... You're the luxury niche, so how much are these homes you're selling, typically ... How much do they cost, usually? Dusty: Right now, I don't focus only in the crazy high end. I have a $5 million listing, a $12 million listing, a few other up in that range. But I also have a $3 million home and a $1.5 million listing and some buyers in between. So define luxury. When I talk to agents in Tulsa, Oklahoma, anything over $600,000 is a mega mansion. Here, anything under $1 million is a piece of junk. So in terms of the national scale, the national median sale price is $225,000. So the fact that I basically don't have any sales under $1 million is very, very high. I'm focusing a lot more on probably the $4-20 million range. Stefan: Okay. Dude, I'm going to give you a gong for that. That's just cool as shit to me, because I live in Winnipeg. Do you even know where Winnipeg is? Dusty: I've heard of it. I haven't been there. Stefan: Yeah. Winnipeg Jets, they almost won the NHL last year. They made it to the final four against Vegas, so that puts Winnipeg on the map. But Winnipeg is like the Indianapolis of Canada. We're like the Indianapolis. If you go to Dallas and drive straight north, you end up in Winnipeg. It's crazy, 'cause we got a hardcore value market here. Average home is about $320,000, and then the market caps out at $2 million. If you go to $2 million in Winnipeg, you're done. Nobody is going to ... There is a lady here, I've talked about this story before. There was a lady here and she got $100 million in a divorce. I guess she divorced a construction guy or something. Got $100 million, and she built herself a $14 million California palace in the arctic Winnipeg. It's winter eight months of the year here. Dusty: And she sold it for, like, three. Stefan: Right. Dude, exactly. She gets $100 million, she builds a $14 million palace, $13.9 million, and then it sells for $3.9. The market just handled her. But the moral of the story is it wasn't her money anyway, so she ended up losing it. Stefan: Tell me, what does somebody get for $20 million down in Santa Barbara? Dusty: You get a lot. What's interesting, actually, is that obviously, Santa Barbara, Montecito, is very, very expensive. We're very, very cheap compared to other luxury markets, though. If you look at what's going on in LA, for instance, there are $100 million sales. We just don't see that here. And to buy something in [Bretwood 00:08:56], for instance, you're not spending less than $10 million unless you're buying a piece of crap. That's remarkable to me. Bretwood is so expensive, whereas Montecito, you get about $5 million, you're going to get a very, very nice house. For $20 million, you're getting an incredible, incredible house. There have been a few sales this year between the $16-25 million. Dusty: It's remarkable. It's amazing. It would be on a Homes Magazine, or on one of those inspirational Instagram luxury homes profiles. You'd see it and you'd think, wow, that is a spectacular, spectacular home. 10,000-15,000 square feet, one or two guest houses, pool, tennis court, views. For $20 million, you're getting something off the charts. Stefan: Right, right. It's almost like a compound. Dusty: Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. Stefan: Let me ask, for $20 million, are you getting a helicopter pad or no helicopter pad? Dusty: No, probably not. If it's a helicopter you're really interested in, most people with a $20 million house or even $10, they can have a helicopter, and people prefer that actually, and the pad is easy. The permitting, basically impossible. The neighbors are not fans of helicopters. If you had $20 million, would you want to live in a house where freaking helicopters are going over? No. So it's one of those not in my backyard things. Once in a while, there's a property that actually has the permitting and the zoning to land a helicopter, but that's pretty tough these days. Sometimes people just do it without any ... Stefan: If you're that rich, you just pay the fines, man. Dusty: Yeah, exactly. Stefan: Okay, let's talk about ... A $20 million house is cool, man. I get it. In the States, if you go to New York, there's $200 million condos that sell, some absolute retarded ... What kind of person is dropping that kind of coin? I know you dropped some names like Oprah, Ellen DeGeneres ... Let's forget about the mega celebrities. What kind of "average dude" would be buying those kinds of homes? Business owners? Who buys these homes, man? Dusty: I will say, I dropped the celebrity names. That's usually why people know about Montecito, but the average wealth in Montecito is people you have no idea who they are, and that's what's really opened my eyes growing up here, is you see celebrities that are ... At one point, their net worth is way higher than this now, but I remember at one point there was an article that said Kim Kardashian's net wealth is $40 million, and I was like, ha. That's a joke for most families- Stefan: Well, she made a porno tape. She's famous for having a porno tape and having a big butt. I don't get that, man. Dusty: No, that's crazy in and of itself. And even sane people are thinking that the $40 million is extremely high, which it is, don't get me wrong. I don't have $40 million. But most of the big time residents in Montecito and Santa Barbara are complete no names that have way more money than that. We have 14 billionaires just in Montecito. That's a big number for a small town, and a lot of people worth hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. You would not recognize their name. They're the average guy who ... There's one gentleman, I won't say his name, but he invented and patented a chip that's in every single cell phone. That dude's doing real well. There's a guy with one of my listings right now, like I said, I think it's 11 99 [inaudible 00:12:15]. The showings that we've had have been businessmen. It's been real estate developers, some Middle Eastern money, some Middle Eastern billionaires. So we get a lot of the no name wealthy people. There's a lot of people making a lot of money that are not celebrities. A lot. And that's what we get the majority of here. Stefan: That's cool, man. I love ... My background is I came from flipping homes, and I would go get a couple rich guys to back all my stuff. I'd get a couple rich guys and they'd back all my deals, and I'd buy it, fix it, sell it, whatever. Now I train people to do it as well. Stefan: Let me ask you this, Dusty. How do you handle the affluent and the wealthy versus maybe just the regular person? Is there a protocol for that? Do you get out the white glove service? How are these people different than the average Joe, and how are they the same? Dusty: The funny thing is they're very, very, very similar. I got in thinking, oh, maybe the crazy, crazy high end buyer, seller, they're the ones who are complete jerks, they just use and abuse you, just all the stereotypes. It's just not the case. Some of them are, some of them aren't, the same way that the average Joe Blow, some of them are jerks, some of them are nice. It's exactly the same thing in the ultra, ultra wealthy. Dusty: And frankly, I don't know ... This is going to sound so ... Dusty's tooting his own horn. I don't know how to do anything but white glove service, which is why I push the high end, because the level of service I give, I wouldn't be able to give it to as many clients in, let's say, the $500,000 range, because I wouldn't be able to sell enough homes to make enough money. So that's why my whole career, I've really been focusing and pushing the luxury realm, because there's enough profit margin to do that. Dusty: When there's profit margin to fly to Europe on a moment's notice to get a document ... I've never had to do that but I've used that as an example. When the product margin's there, I like that. I much prefer the white glove service. I really want to take care of people in a remarkable way, because I'm always fascinated by that. Last week I was in Hawaii, actually, at the St. Regis with my wife, and the service was excellent. Excellent, excellent. We'd show up at the pool, and they'd say, hello, Mr. and Mrs. Baker, and they'd go and set up two lounge chairs. There was eight towels involved. One at the top, the bottom. My wife is pregnant, so they'd roll up another towel, put a pillow behind her neck. Just unbelievable service. Stefan: Yeah. Dusty: Wow. That's amazing. I don't think that I'm so cool that I deserve that in all my life, but I'd certainly love to give that. So, yeah. There's no difference for me in my business of really, really high end to the [inaudible 00:14:37], but once again, that's why I'm really focusing my attention in only the high end, because I really prefer that method of business, which is why you probably had other realtors on your show that had big teams, 20 person teams. Stefan: Right. Dusty: I have zero interest in that, because my clients, I'm marketing Dusty Baker and my experience. I don't feel right having people sign on for the Dusty Baker experience and getting minion number six actually negotiating on their behalf. I want to be involved in all the high level negotiations, conversations, showings, everything, and the only way to do that and maintain a certain volume in sales is obviously to increase the average sale price. Dusty: There are certain differences in terms of expectations. I had a client a couple months ago, and this person was a noteworthy person, I'll put it that way. And they had some expectations that probably the average person wouldn't. I'll put it that way. And you have to accommodate things that you may not want to typically accommodate. But at the end of the day, if you actually look at, frankly, how much money I'd be making through that deal, it's not an unrealistic request that this person would want A, B, C, and D, even if it seems a little ridiculous. I'm working for a lot of money here. So it's not that unworthy. Stefan: What are some of the things, Dusty ... I'm from Winnipeg up here. An agent will get you a box of cookies and a bottle of wine or something when they buy or sell a house. You get a gift card to a steak house or something. You mentioned flying to Europe. Obviously that's pretty extreme. What are some of the normal Dusty Baker experience things that you do that give that white glove service so the customer's like, wow. I've totally gotta refer Dusty to my other rich buddy, or whatever? Dusty: It's funny you mention that, the closing gifts. That's reason number 26 why I prefer the industry that I'm in, 'cause I get some of the stupidest gifts ever, and I get pitched by certain people, certain companies, hey, you really should send all your clients this gift, and I'm thinking, I'm not going to send that in a million years. I'm not going to brand a ... I can't even think of an example. A cheap knife set. I'm just not going to do that. I'd be embarrassed to do it. Dusty: A part of the white glove service ... I'm showing a property to a high end buying in a specific part or area that this person was familiar with. We were leaving, and I said, I don't know if you two, this person, their spouse, have plans tonight. There's a certain restaurant I think would be phenomenal. Do you have time? They said, actually, we do have time. I said, just get in your car. By the time you get there, you'll have reservations, you'll be taken care of. Dusty: So they got in their car. I called ahead, they were booked, and I said, listen, you really need to make this happen for me right now. This is who I am, this is who I work for. You have to make this work, and they made it work, which ... Fantastic. I gave them my credit cards, it doesn't matter what the order, it's on me. That's the type of experience. I really want people to feel the experience of, hey, I'm in Montecito. I'm in San [inaudible 00:17:36] Valley. I'm in [inaudible 00:17:38]. And I think that that's really, really nice, and people get to not even have to make decisions. People just point and say, go eat here, I'm paying for this, order this, and they get to just sit back and relax and experience a lifestyle that we know that they'll enjoy here. Stefan: You said a big word there, lifestyle, and it sounds like you got the everything's handled part of the experience down. That's such a premium. You go to Amazon.com, you push the button, everything's handled. It's a one button experience. One thing I've done with my clients is we do a lot of seminars and training of investors in my company, and we came out with an all-inclusive package. So the flight's included, the limo's included, the dinner's included. We drive you to a property that we flipped or someone else flipped, and it's amazing, because people pay such a premium. We have people, they're so happy to pay $2,000, $4,000 for that experience. And then we strip it all down, they don't even want to pay $300 for the base experience. It's amazing how as soon as you can say, everything's handled, one price, one mystery price, how everybody just gets on board with that. Would you agree? Dusty: Absolutely. You hit something else, too. Different than what you said is people will pay anything for the right experience. The number almost doesn't matter. Stefan: That's a gong. We got an instant replay of that. Instant replay, one more time. Dusty: People will pay anything for the right experience. Stefan: Damn. Dusty: Especially in the high end. Let's say we're in the $100 million. Do you care if a steak is $50 or $200? Absolutely, no, you don't. Who cares at all about that difference? You just want quality, you just want the experience. So, specifically in high end real estate, they need that experience, because no one needs a fifth house in Montecito. Absolutely not. I'm dealing with a very different buyer than, hey, my wife is pregnant, we live in a one bedroom condo, we just need to buy anything with two rooms. Stefan: Right. Dusty: So if you're not selling that lifestyle, then I don't know what you're doing. In the same way that you said everything's taken care of, people want that luxurious experience of ... They don't want the decision fatigue, I should say. They don't want to try and figure out the area. Why are you- Stefan: One more gong, dude, one more, 'cause decision fatigue. Damn, bro, stop hitting on me like that. Tell us about decision fatigue. Dusty: Okay. I go to a restaurant. One of my favorite restaurants, it's actually 40 minutes away from here. It's called the [Santa Ana's 00:20:05] Valley Kitchen. Santa Ana's Kitchen. Stefan: Right. Dusty: And they have this world-renowned chef, they're fantastic. And part of their lunch special usually is there's just, this is what we're making. There's no, I'm going to order this, this, or this. This is what we're cooking, and I love that crap. I'm going to show up ... world class restaurant. You are the world class chef. You tell me what to eat. Why am I going into a restaurant that's fantastic and I'm telling you what you should make me? That's ridiculous. It should be completely the opposite. Stefan: Right. Dusty: And the same thing when I'm showing someone an area. They don't want to ... I can't wait for them to express what they want to see, or the experience they want to have. I need to give them that experience and make them see what's going on and show them what they should see, because they don't even know what they don't know. They don't want to make those decisions. If I'm going to ... I always think about myself. I love New York City, I'd love to own a flat out there at some point and do sort of a bi-coastal ... Not selling, this would be later on in life. I would think, okay. If I'm flying to New York City, my realtor's picking me up, what experience would I want, I just want to sit back. You show me New York, it's your backyard. You show me the restaurants, you show me what area I should by in. You show me the building. I'm not the expert here. Dusty: You can't, at the risk of sounding too aggressive with them, you have to say, this is what you want. Stefan: Right. Right. I love what Henry Ford used to say. He said that if I made what my customers wanted, they would've wanted faster horses. Instead he made the car. Or Steve Jobs, he invented the iPad. Nobody knew that an iPad was coming, nobody knew they wanted that. But you're the taste maker, you're the brand experience, you're the expert, and I love how you're like, hey, man. I'm the doctor, here's the medicine, buckle up. People pay premiums for that, man. That's amazing. Stefan: Let me ask you this, Dusty. You're in the pretty high end, relative to the country of the United States, relative to the country of Canada, a pretty high end market. How do you find these high end clients? 'Cause that's something that I think everybody has this fear about. They're like, oh, I want to get more business, I want to get better clients, I want to get wealthier clients. How do you go about prospecting these wealthier clients? Dusty: The low end ... The typical real estate, if you were to go ... I use Tulsa, Oklahoma all the time, 'cause I have a buddy out there. [crosstalk 00:22:21] Stefan: Right. Bro, I love Tulsa. Let's love on it, man. Dusty: Yeah, yeah. Let's say you're there and you join Keller Williams or something, and they say, how do you grow your business? You should farm a geographical neighborhood, you should mail that neighborhood, door knock that neighborhood, because that's how you get to know people in that physical, geographic space. Okay. That's fantastic. Dusty: The high end doesn't have that quite as much. It's more of a group of people not in a physical location, but in a network of people. So the easiest way, obviously, is to infiltrate. That's a terrible word, but infiltrate a network, because most of my business is referral based. You do a bang up job on one person, and it gets out there. But that's why something like a country club would make sense, because it's not that they all live in that specific area, but they all congregate there. Certain types of industries like the equestrian industry, obviously, gather truly affluent people. A yacht club, yachting, high end activities. Dusty: Also, Santa Barbara specifically, I can't say the same thing for your market. But Santa Barbara, a lot of people have second, third, fourth, fifth homes. They have a little pied-a-terre out here. So for me to go about getting these clients, I have to do a decent amount of travel and tremendous amount of networking around the country in feeder markets. Our number one feeder market, of course, is Los Angeles. But San Francisco, New York, Palm Beach are big, big markets. I do a tremendous amount of networking with agents in these feeder markets, the financial advisors, the attorneys. A lot of homes are sold because someone passed away, unfortunately. Dusty: There's a lot of ways to getting ... It's extremely different than the ... for lack of a better term, the lower end real estate. I really compare the two as one is soccer, one is baseball. It's different sports altogether. What marketing would work in this area would kill you in this area, and the same way ... If you took this marketing and put it towards here, it would kill you. It's radically different. One's not better than the other. It's very, very different. You have to focus on client experience, it's different, the actual terms ... marketing and listings to get in front of buyers is completely different, and certainly the networking is different. Stefan: Yeah. It's a high trust game. Rich people, they really value their privacy. There's a great book, I don't know if you read it, or maybe you should read it. It's Dan Kennedy's Marketing to the Affluent. Dusty: Really? Stefan: And they talk about the affluent people, they value their privacy. They have fetishes. They'll have something they'll spend any amount of money on. I just ordered a $450 gold pen. I want this gold pen. I write my plans with my gold pen, I want my $450 gold pen. That's my fetish. But they also have things that they won't spend anything on. They'll still get the no name canned tuna. So you've gotta know their fetish, and there's a real trust based game. It's interesting. You're talking about, there's the high end marketing and the low end marketing. In our game, we're buying a lot of wholesale real estate, so messed up stuff. We do a handwritten letter on yellow, horrible loose leaf in black Sharpie and stuff it in a mailbox, and the low end, messed up wholesale buyer loves that message. Stefan: But then we're doing high trust sales, so we have a book, a nice book with gold foil on it, it looks high trust. It's so interesting. The high trust, low trust. Another thing you said that I thought was really cool was going into the sports, and you're wearing a sport coat, and the suit and sport coat comes from equestrian. That's where that fashion comes from, and it's interesting when you look at history and you look at fashion, if you go to the ghetto in, let's say, the Bronx or something, and you see guys wearing Adidas snap pants or they're wearing some basketball stuff, sport clothes have always been a symbol of status because it means you have enough resources to play sports and have leisure. Stefan: It's so interesting, what you said there about sports and getting to the good gyms and the good country clubs and the equestrian, 'cause that's where they all congregate, right? Do you ever do charities or churches or anything like that? Dusty: I am involved in my local church, and I've gotten a tremendous amount of business from that. But I never go that angle, I think that is absolutely the most classless way to get business, is to be that guy at church. I just happen to be a trusted resource. A lot of people go to me and that's fantastic. I'm never marketing at church. Dusty: Charities, though, absolutely. You mentioned if people are affluent enough to have the spare time to do sports, like you mentioned, in Santa Barbara it's the spare time to get involved, join a board, be a part of the nonprofit. People typically are in Santa Barbara ... I keep referencing my market. Other markets could be totally different. But the average person coming to Santa Barbara is someone who has that feeling of, you know what? I'm going to join this community, I'm going to make this community, I want to be a valuable citizen. We get some good, good people here, which is fantastic. But, yeah. Charities are fantastic for that. Dusty: I was even chatting with my business coach yesterday, and that's a bigger component of this 2019 marketing, is being a lot more involved in sponsoring charity, actually, which is great. If we're going to spend marketing dollars, that's not a bad way to do it. Stefan: Yeah. If you go to a dinner that's $150 a plate or $300 a plate and there's a celebrity or something- Dusty: Or much more. Stefan: Yeah, your market, I'm talking Winnipeg numbers here. Yeah, man, your plates out there could be $1,000 a plate or more. What's so interesting about that, whether you look at that from a sacred kind of look, biblical or something, or you look at it from a secular view, even in the book 48 Laws of Power, they talk about ... despise the free lunch, and the people who are making it, they're giving back, they congregate together. Charity is a real powerful thing for meeting people who ... They've got time, they've got money, they've got resources, and your message might work with them. Dusty: Sure, sure, absolutely. But you can't be the guy that's clearly there for business. They can sniff it out pretty quickly. So it has to be something you're actually passionate about. That's the other "problem". I thought about this a lot in the past, and I've been approached for certain nonprofit boards, and I've been like, you know what? I think that could be good for business, but I would burn out so fast. I have no passion and I probably would look like the guy that's just doing this for business. Dusty: So I ... I keep getting emails. Let me ... volume off, okay. I just joined, actually, a board for some other cause that I just have a ton of passion about. I actually bring something to the table, it's a great group. So I'm also trying to be wise about that, because if you just start spreading yourself too thin or doing something that isn't true to your heart, it doesn't work out, it shows through. Stefan: Right. You've gotta be congruent. That's the main thing with branding, it's gotta be congruent, it's gotta go together, the curtain's gotta match the carpet. Stefan: Let me ask this, Dusty. Switching gears a little bit, you do some speaking, you do some writing. Tell us a little bit about the content you put out there, and what are you an expert in, your writing and your speaking? Dusty: It's funny. I got involved in that ... I got a good ... I like to surround myself with really intelligent people. Why not? It's just a lot more fun for me. I have a tough time chatting with people who are just doing absolutely nothing with their life. What do you talk about at that point? So a lot of my friends are radically driven, really intelligent, really successful people. Dusty: One of my friends that runs a marketing company, he's just one of these incredible, incredible minds. So, starting years and years and years ago, he said, you have to get out there and start blogging. He said, I know you have a big social media presence, you've got all this. But if you don't own that domain, let's say Instagram goes out of business tomorrow. Where are you? Whereas if you own that website, that blog, you capture that audience. Dusty: So, fine, I'll do that. But I'm not doing the normal real estate blog where it's like, I'm your neighborhood realtor! I thought it was cheesy, even though it probably works. I'm going to go the opposite route. I'm going to actually start writing, blogging, towards educational ... to other agents, because I've been really blessed. When I did intern early on, it happened to be for a group of really top agents, and then I had a mentor early on that had been selling real estate longer than I'd been alive, and I've just been surrounded by this incredible, incredible group of people who have helped me so much, so I have a lot more than 10 years of wisdom in me because of everything that's been passed along. Dusty: So I said, okay, I'll start writing. I started writing articles, and started getting a pretty big following, actually. Because of that, I ended up writing for Inman News. Inman News, for the time, that's the largest real estate news source, Inman News. I've read Inman. It's fantastic. It's like, yeah, it's amazing. I got involved in that, writing for them. But the first article, I said, you know what? I'm going to go in, bring a bazooka to a knife fight. This has gotta be good. Dusty: So I did some backend analytics with my friend who owns this marketing company, and said, hey, we can run the stats, even on their website, what the most popular articles have been, the topics, the this, the that. We did all this research, and it turned out at the time ... This was a while ago ... It was around tagging, it was around social media, a lot of questions about that, about what to do with marketing. So I said, you know what, I'm going to write about that. I wrote about how I grew my Instagram portfolio and how I'm getting actually a lot of business from it, and just the real practicalities that no one else was going over, and it just exploded. Dusty: It ended up being the second most read article they've ever had. It's since been beaten, obviously, but right when it came out, it was just really, really, really popular, and that kind of pigeonholed me a bit. I wrote articles on a lot, and I wrote the foreword for a book called From the Top, which ended up being an Amazon bestseller, and that was more just ... It was just a foreword, so I was chatting about what this author spoke about. I've done speaking on other components as well, but a tremendous amount went around online marketing, social media marketing, and things like that. Dusty: It's funny, because it's not necessarily something I love talking about. I actually much prefer to talk about, hey, how do we up our game at the white glove service? How do we be straight up concierge, how do we be the most trusted resource where it's total anonymity for our clients, things like that. I really prefer that, the Four Seasons approach, but usually it ends up being about online marketing. Stefan: You know what my favorite part of that story is, Dusty, is where you went in with your marketing guy and analyzed what the market wanted. That one step is such a pro step. That's such a smart step, and I think everybody, when they get into marketing, get into business, they just start putting out whatever they want. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. Like Donna Karen, DKNY, she was making clothes for her baby and her husband, and then somehow she ended up with a clothing line. Sometimes it works out, most of the time, it doesn't. Stefan: But you went in and you figured out, what does the audience want, and you delivered exactly what they want. There's a huge lesson in there for the people at home. Why'd you have that instinct to go in like that and not just write something from your ego that you wanted? Dusty: 100% from my buddy. His name is Seth, he runs Nexa Marketing, N-E-X-A Marketing, and it was all him, 100%. He was even the one saying ... because my website got pretty big, and he said, okay. You've maxed it out. You know how you get even bigger? Instead of creating your own parade and gathering people and calling city officials and pulling permits, why don't you just find another parade and jump in front and start marching? It's like, oh, okay, I'd much rather do that. Dusty: He said reach out to other top blogs and start writing for them. He said, everyone on top websites, their job is to write. You'd be doing their job for them. They'll take you. I said, okay, great. I researched all the top real estate websites. In News, number one, absolutely number one, and I thought, I could never get in there. I'm going to go for the lower end, which is the lamest approach. I went after the lower end once, and they all said no. It was like, crap. He was like, why don't you go through Inman? I was like, oh, fine. So I went after Inman and they said yes. Like, oh my gosh. Dusty: His name is Seth. He said, okay, now that you've got your foot in the door, this has to be good, and I mean good. It was his idea. I'm going to run the backend analytics, we're going to go ever everything, figure out what's worked really, really well. And then I wrote the article. I had he and another friend that I've done a lot of brainstorming with go through a couple rounds. It really was just a fantastic article. You only get one first impression and I wanted it to be spectacular, and it worked out really well, and it created this ... Listen, that was just a one time thing. I ended up getting to know everyone at Inman, on the staff, the conferences, speaking. It's a wonderful family. It's kind of real estate meets TED Talks. I have the utmost respect for them. It's amazing. I was glad I was able to connect in that way. Stefan: I love that story, I think it's a great strategy, and I think anybody at home could do that. Dusty: Sure. Stefan: Anybody could do what you did there. But the way that you and your marketing guy masterminded that is just genius. Writing that one good article and getting that thing placed properly ... because content is one thing, placing it, it's another thing to get traffic. Then you mentioned you got on some speaking stages from that, right? Dusty: Yeah. Stefan: Okay, awesome. Are those paid gigs or they just let you sell stuff? How did that work? Dusty: No, I didn't even take it that far, to be honest. I probably could've had products to sell. I never even got that far. It was just unpaid, but it just grew my presence in a really spectacular way. A lot of people even ask, on the lower level, they ask, how do you have 15,000 followers on Instagram, and I say, years of hard work and a ton of speaking engagements. And a good number will ask, how do you get all these great referrals from agents all around the country? I say, years of hard work, travel, and speaking engagements. How incredible is it to get in front of 2,000 people and be seen as an expert? You would know, look at what you do. You're on stage and people just assume you're the expert. You could be the stupidest guy in the world, but you're on stage, you're the expert. Stefan: Yeah, man. I love that. And I've got a similar background. I blogged for 120 days when I started. I did a blog every day, and I shared it on social media every day. It was a consistent blog, it was a 1,000 word blog. It's crazy, because that turned into speaking engagements. People wanted me to come speak at their clubs. Then that turned into winning awards. Somehow I was visible. Then I started winning awards, people started giving me awards, and then people started, after the awards, I started getting calls for coaching. I got calls for classes and products, and then I turned those blogs into a book. It's crazy. Now I've got five books and an international coaching company. But it's crazy how that one little article or that one little thing can just snowball and snowball and snowball and just keep going. Dusty: Have you seen the videos? There's a video on Facebook ... No, on YouTube ... and it talks about the physics of dominoes. I'm sure that you've seen it. But a domino can knock over something one and a half times its size, so they have a video where it's like a little piece of gum or something, and they push that over, and seven or eight dominoes later, it's pushing over a 100 pound piece of marble that's 1,000 times its height, and that's what it is. You get that one little domino going, and then you go 150%, 150%, and just a few steps down the road, you're a lot further along than you thought. Stefan: Bro, you just got yourself a gong for that. That's a great concept, man. I love that. Dusty: Now, let me ask you. You said you wrote 120 blog posts in 120 days. I think people listening, they would say, oh, that's not too bad. I could probably do that. Okay. Well, where were you in life that time? I imagine you had work and bills to pay. How did you fit in those 120 articles? How did you have the bandwidth and the structure and the discipline to do that? People don't understand how hard that is. Stefan: Yeah. Well, I was broke, man. I was flipping, I don't know, maybe a dozen houses a year. I had some rental properties. I remember I went to conferences and they'd say, you gotta put out content, you've gotta get your web presence, get your brand together. So I was like, okay, okay. I remember I started a little website for $7. I got a Weebly website for $7, and I got a domain and I put a picture of myself up there, and then I looked at my site, and I'm like, man, my site sucks. There's nothing on it. Stefan: So I said, okay, man. Every night before I go to bed, I'm going to write a blog, and I can't go to bed 'til I write a blog. So I'd write a blog, I'd post it, put a picture up, and every night, I just did that. I said, I'm going to take some seminar notes, I'm going to turn those seminar notes into a blog. And it just consistently did that, and now I've written five books. My latest book, Hard Times Create Strong Men, is 150,000 words. It's a big-ass book, and I wrote it in 11 ... because that was shift writing. Stefan: I'm a writer by trade, and I say to people, look. If you want to do this, make it a shift. You show up to your shift, and the best times to write, I find, Dusty, is first thing in the morning out of bed when you're drowsy, or last thing at night before going to bed when you're drowsy. You get in that mid state where you're almost drunk, and you can just type and type and just write because you're not judging yourself. Stefan: So I think the best thing you can do is make it a shift. You're just like, I'm going to show up to work for my shift at the end of the day or beginning of the day. You write something, maybe you read something right before so you've got something to think about, and then just go. Dusty: Yeah. What I love about that story and why I wanted to hear a bit more is that I think one of your prompt questions I read on the piece of paper you sent over was, what do you think being an entrepreneur has led you to see and to experience life and things like that? And first of all, I will say that I think real estate is barely getting in the door of entrepreneurship, I really do. I think what you're doing and what other people do, actually creating a real different business out of nothing, is very, very different. Real estate agents and financial advisors already have a framework. They still have to kill what they want to eat. So I think we get in the door, but barely. Stefan: Right. Dusty: I have that much more respect for [inaudible 00:40:03], because I know how hard it's been for certain times in my life, when you have to ... No one's paying you. People don't get that. They think, oh, somebody just pays you? I'm like, no. They take money out of our paycheck. But they don't pay me. It's given me this incredible perspective to even hear a story like, hey, I wrote 120 articles. People, you don't know how hard that is until you've tried to do it, period. I bet you couldn't even get someone to run one mile for 120 straight days. You couldn't get people to do anything for 120 straight days. But look at what kind of fruit you can see from your labor. People just will not do it for the long run. They'll do it for four days and then they'll quit. Dusty: So I have the most respect for things like that, and it doesn't have to be rocket science, but that's what being an entrepreneur is like. You do things, and people ... How many people asked you, why are you doing this? And then you have to say, well, I don't necessarily know. I'm laying a foundation for an area that I don't even know if I'm going to build on, but I'm just going to do it, because why not? It's better to have a foundation than not to. Dusty: But how many people asked you why you're doing this? Stefan: Well, I do it for ... The real deep reason is my parents divorced when I was 17, and my dad wasn't making enough money, and he was an entrepreneur, but never educated himself. I'm here creating an education company to try to save my dad. Some deep, deep, psychological stuff. So I'm obsessed with education, I'm obsessed with books, I'm obsessed with training and coaching. We've got ... Some of our students are Canadian investor of the year in Real Estate World Magazine. We've got some guys buying, fixing, and selling 30 homes a year. We've got some guys who are 27 years old, they've done 82 properties, as an investor. Stefan: So it's really rewarding, it's crazy. I don't have kids, so this is my thing, is educating and helping people, and what you asked is a great question. Why do you do this? This is a great question for anybody, because you're going to get hit with buckets and buckets of this every day. People are going to yell at you, they're going to tell you you suck, you're going to have stuff not work. If your why is not very strong, you're just not going to make it, right? Dusty: Yeah. Stefan: That's money. I like what you said there, Dusty. There's one thing I really want to drill down on and point out, it's you said entrepreneurs, real estate investors, financial advisors, maybe insurance too, are like the beginning of entrepreneurship, because you've got the marketing, you've got the sales. But the product's done for you. One thing that I think is really, for me, has been a major struggle in entrepreneurship, hardcore, straight up entrepreneurship, is product market fit. You guys get a product, you get a luxury house, you get a piece of crap house or whatever house, and you've gotta somehow find that market. Stefan: What I think is so crazy about Elon Musk, let's say, is he's gotta make some stuff out of thin air. He makes a car or something, and he has to hope the market wants that, or he's gotta do enough research to know that that's where the lightning's going to strike next. If you study a guy ... You ever heard of Ray Kurzweil? Dusty: No. Stefan: Ray Kurzweil, he works for Google, and he's an inventor. What he realized that being an inventor was ... right invention at the wrong time works out to be nothing. So what he did was he started trending inventions in the market and he would predict in the future what people would need at what time, and he started to do that and he got super rich, he got super wealthy, and he's one of the guys behind AI right now. Ray Kurzweil is a big artificial intelligence dude, because it's not so much about, do you have the best car? The electric car, GM tried to do that years ago, it didn't work. Well, Elon Musk, he found that little sliver of the market and he went right in there- Dusty: But also, remember with Elon, I had buddies that worked for him 14 years ago. His first concept was a Lotus, a lease type of electric car, and that absolutely tanked. Tanked, tanked. He had to switch it to the current Tesla, where it's like, okay. It's actually a family car, but it's kind of sexy as well. He went [inaudible 00:43:57] go full sexy, went nowhere. Stefan: Right. Yeah, that's the product market fit. It's interesting. When I was down in Orange County, the Mercedes wasn't nice. The Jaguar's not nice. The Audi's not nice. It was the Tesla. People are driving these white Teslas everywhere, and that's the status symbol now. He cracked the code on how to make that thing a status symbol, and all the rich people wanted a Tesla 'cause, I don't know, it's cool or whatever. What do you- Dusty: It's also a political statement. That's something interesting that not many people talk about is ... What do they call those stupid Priuses? The Prius is one of the ugliest cars on the planet. But now it's the green car. So Montecito, it's pretty left leaning in Montecito and Santa Barbara. Prius was like a status symbol, because it's saying, listen, this is how good I am to the environment. This is what I do. That's the status. It's not necessarily a Lamborghini status, it's a lifestyle political status. Elon provided actually a good looking political status, so that's a huge component too. It looks nice that's great, but it's saying, hey, I'm green. Stefan: Yeah. He doubled down on that. Dust, we've gotta wrap up here in a couple minutes. I just want to ask you some of the questions I love asking everybody, 'cause I think these are just the coolest questions ever. If you go back in time, Dusty, to 15 year old Dusty, and give himself a piece of advice, what would you say to 15 year old Dusty? Dusty: Oh man, I'm so embarrassed of 15 year old Dusty. I can say the older I get ... Every time I think I hit the threshold of, wow, I'm working really hard, the next year I'm like, wow, I didn't do crap last year. I wasn't working hard enough. This is working hard, and so on and so forth. I would've just showcased to my 15 year old self, listen. You have no idea what hard work is, and I would've pushed him 1,000 times harder. I would've pushed him to go Ivy League and focus on the right things, don't screw around with all the crap that takes up time that does absolutely nothing. I'd just tell him to focus and work harder, because it's very rewarding. I'm happier now than I've ever been in my entire life, because I'm more focused and I'm working harder. Stefan: Yeah. Love that answer. It really is about focus. I know they had Bill Gates and Warren Buffett around the same table, and they asked all these very successful rich people, what is your number key to success? Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, the top five richest people in the world at any given time, both said focus. Dusty: Yeah. Stefan: You can't split your focus. That's it. What are the top three books that changed your life, Dusty? Dusty: You know, it's funny you mentioned Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I read that early on, and that's a great foundational book. It's not rocket science, but it's a great foundational book for how you look at life, money, and finances. I have to throw that in there. For young audiences, that's a great, great entry level book. Dusty: Another great book is, gosh. Others ... There's so many good books. I don't read quite as much as you and Ty, but ... Oh, gosh. Stefan: I don't know if Ty reads the books, man. He's got the summaries. Dusty: Yeah. He skims. Dusty: I enjoyed a lot of components ... I wouldn't put this top three, but Love Is the Killer App. I thought it was well done. Have you read that? Stefan: What's that one about? Love Is the Killer App? Dusty: It's before apps, so 15 years ago. It's not cell phone app, it's like an application of life, and it talks about how societal relationships can really have you jump forward in success, the love component. But it's a lot better than it sounds. If someone were to explain that to me, I'd say, oh, it sucks. But it's actually quite, quite good, and really logistically, how you stay involved with people, grow incredible relationships, and not utilize those relationships just for success, but success always begets success. So that's really, really, really well written. Dusty: This is going to be radically controversial, and I don't mean this ... I wish he wasn't in politics so I can say this, but I read this when I was really young. The Art of the Deal, I liked, because- Stefan: Great book, great book. Dusty: Not because of Trump's statement, but because I think that there's something within entrepreneurs that actually digs the art of the deal, that digs ... I remember one portion where he said he wanted to join this specific social club in New York that it's impossible to get a hold of, and he would just call once a month to say, as confidently as possible, good afternoon. My name is Donald Trump. I would like to talk to so and so. And of course they told him to pound sand the first eight times. The ninth time, they transferred him through. After that, my name's Donald Trump, and I'm going to be the next member. And he became ... Dusty: So it's one of those things where it's sort of a dichotomy of actually enjoying deals. I don't want to retire. I enjoy deals. And then the component of, you stand up straight, you have incredible confidence, and you say, I want this. I'm going after this right now. Dusty: So I thought it was well done. Like I said, I think the Kiyosaki and The Art of the Deal, I'd say have a high schooler read them. I wouldn't say a 40 year dude read those. But I think it's pretty cool foundational wisdom. Stefan: Yeah, well, people always forget that Trump is ... He's a fucking billionaire, dude. He started with a million dollars and he turned it into a billion. Sure. He's kind of like the modern Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great inherited the best army in the world to conquer the world by 30. Trump inherited the best real estate team in New York, good for him. Stefan: But dude, Art of the Deal is a good book, good real estate book. Another one that's good, a good Trump one, is Art of the Comeback. You ever read that one? Dusty: Yeah, that's good as well. That's very good. Stefan: Yeah, that's like when the chips are down, and when shit is going down and he's getting divorced, he did some brilliant stuff, and I don't think people give him enough credit. He did some really smart stuff. He knows how to make money. Dusty: On that note, really quick, I will say people crap on him because when you start with a million bucks, that sounds like a lot of money. Yeah. I don't care where people started. If someone's successful right now, I don't care if they were given $10 million. I bet the average person, if they were given $10 million, next year, would have $500,000. Stefan: They'd be in a cardboard box, bro. Dusty: [crosstalk 00:49:51] and grown it. I don't care if people came from money and I don't care if people have resources. You still have to work your ass off to get really successful. Even to use his daughter as an example, yeah, Ivanka Trump had to have the name of Trump and a ton of money and expertise. You don't create a clothing line like that without working very, very hard. So I've learned to really respect people, even if they came from a place with much, much, much more than me. I assure you they're working hard. Stefan: Yeah. Ivanka, she's amazing, man. She's, out of the kids, she's, I think, the smartest, the greatest. Dusty: Oh, yeah. Stefan: She's the empress over there. I've had George Ross, Donald Trump's lawyer, write the foreword to my book, 10 Commandments of Negotiation. Dusty: Oh, nice. Stefan: So I've heard some stories, and they would send those kids out to the farm in Germany or Russia or wherever, and they had to work. They put those kids to work. They're not spoiled brats, they're well behaved. Nobody's doing cocaine and crashing cars. If you've got good kids, you can't lie about good kids, man. That's awesome. Stefan: Dusty, the last question I got here that I love asking everybody is, what's the one thing that young people need to succeed these days? Dusty: The ability to be malleable, I think. I read a great book, I don't even know the name of it, actually, but it was ... chopped into each chapter was a different author, actually, so it truly was a book of experts writing each chapter. It had some statistic where 20 years ago ... 80% of the jobs that exist now didn't exist 20 years ago. Imagine if someone that's 25 years old was thinking from five years old on, oh, I want to be this position. Well, it probably doesn't exist anymore. Dusty: So be very, very malleable. I can't make any promise real estate will be the same, I have no idea. I can assure you my commission's going to go down in the next 20 years, no chance [inaudible 00:51:39], so maybe I need to be a tad malleable and move into something else. There's also incredible, incredible hedge funds for the new [eye 00:51:47] buyers. Real estate could change, even though that's such a fundamental thing. So the ability to basically make hard work your ... the foundation, your identity, and then carry that in a malleable fashion. Dusty: I have a one and a half year old daughter, for instance, and I have a little boy coming. My wife and I talk, okay. How do you parent? A lot of the books we've been reading, and I think this is fantastic is ... Her name's Kinsley. Let's say Kinsley is playing soccer, and she scores a goal. Instead of saying, hey, great job scoring that goal, you scored that goal, you're the best. Now she's like, well, the goal is the outcome. If I can't get the goal, I'm nothing. I say, hey, I saw you on the other side of the field, and you had to run harder and faster than everyone else to get to that ball. You worked your tail off. It didn't look like you were going to be able to get the ball and you did. You worked hard. I saw you sweating, I saw how hard you worked in practice this past week. That's what got you that goal, and praising the work ethic instead of the accomplishment, because accomplishments always come out of the work ethic. Dusty: So I think that the coming generation needs to have just an incredible work ethic, and that will go towards anything. The dollars will always follow that. If you have that work ethic and that's your id and you can focus it in a malleable fashion depending on what's happening to the economy, you're good to go. Stefan: Yeah, yeah. I'll always say it, man. You've gotta respect the grind. You've gotta understand that it's going to take repetitive actions, you've gotta have that work ethic, and then apply it to whatever is malleable in the market. I love that. Stefan: Dusty, how can people get in touch with you if they want to know more? Dusty: My phone number. I'm so online it's not even funny. Search Dusty Baker real estate, and dustybakerrealestate.com is my website. My phone number is on there and my Instagram handle and Twitter handle is @dustyjbaker, the reason being is because there's a famous baseball player I was named after. His name was Dusty Baker, he managed the Giants in fact. Stefan: Right. Dusty: So you look up Dusty Baker, and there's a buff black dude in a Giants jersey, that's him, not me, unfortunately. Stefan: You just play him on TV, man. Dusty: Exactly, exactly. I can't tell you how many people walked in who say, oh, you look different. I'm like, yeah, I know. I'm [inaudible 00:54:01]. Stefan: Nice, man. Okay, awesome. Thanks so much for being on the show, Dusty. I really appreciated having you, man. Great conversation, and respect the grind, brother. Dusty: Hey, thanks so much. Really appreciate it. Stefan: Thanks, man.
AcaGeekz 06 – “It’s Evolving!” AcaGeekz is available on Apple Podcast and Stitcher! If you like what you hear, please leave a 5-star rating and review and help support the show! Welcome! This week I take you on a silly Pokemon-esque journey through the evolution of five different groups! The format is simple, I play a song from an early recording, then later, the same song from a later recording to see the differences! I hope you enjoy my nerdy-ness! It’s my hope that AcaGeekz will introduce the casual listener and the hardcore a cappella fan alike to some groups and styles they’ve never heard before. Whether it be Barbershop, collegiate, doo wop, high school, choral, jazz, funk, pop, rock, or classical, there’s something for everyone! It’s time to give the tracks for this episode their due credit. So here they are, the tracks for AcaGeekz “It’s Evolving!” Apple Podcast and Stitcher Promo: Song Title: “Can’t Sleep Love” Artist: Pentatonix Album: Pentatonix (Deluxe) (2015) Website: www.ptxofficial.com You can purchase Pentatonix (Deluxe) by Pentatonix at: http://www.ptxofficial.com TRAVELING MUSIC: Song Title: “Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow – Route 1 A Cappella” Artist: Smooth McGroove YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/SmoothMcGroove View This Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivT33BM-Urc EVOLUTION MUSIC: Song Title: “Pokemon Blue/Rouge Evolution (A Cappella)” Artist: Skull YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7fUTPh9EtPbZlLSUCQsfQA?spfreload=5 View This Video: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7fUTPh9EtPbZlLSUCQsfQA SONG #1: Song Title: “Chili Con Carne” Artist: The Real Group Album: Nothing But The Real Group (1989 Website: www.therealgroup.se You can purchase Nothing But The Real Group by The Real Group at: https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-But-Real-Group/dp/B0042NFP2Y SONG #2: Song Title: “White Room” Artist: The Bobs Album: The Bobs Cover The Songs Of (1994) Website: www.bobs.com You can purchase The Bobs Cover The Songs Of by The Bobs at: https://www.amazon.com/Bobs-Cover-Songs/dp/B0000003L5 SONG #3: Song Title: “Shambala” Artist: Rockapella Album: Primer (1995 Website: www.rockapella.com You can purchase Primer by Rockapella at: https://www.amazon.com/Primer-Rockapella/dp/B000B765WO SONG #4: Song Title: “Life” Artist: 4:2:Five (aka VoicePlay) Album: EP (2001) Website: www.thevoiceplay.com You can purchase EP by 4:2:Five at: https://store.cdbaby.com/cd/42five SONG #5: Song Title: “Chili Con Carne” Artist: The Real Group (Feat. Frida) Album: Allt Det Basta (2001) Website: www.therealgroup.se You can purchase Allt Det Basta by The Real Group at: https://www.amazon.com/En-Samling-Allt-Det-Basta/dp/B000062WS9 SONG #6: Song Title: “Shambala” Artist: Rockapella Album: Smilin’ Website: www.rockapella.com You can purchase Smilin’ by Rockapella at: http://www.rockapella.com SONG #7: Song Title: “Life” Artist: 4:2:Five (Currently VoicePlay) Album: Unstoppable (2004) Website: www.thevoiceplay.com You can purchase Unstoppable by VoicePlay at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/unstoppable/526053417 SONG #8: Song Title: “God Bless The U.S.A.” Artist: Home Free Album: From The Top Website: www.homefreemusic.com You Can purchase From The Top by Home Free at: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/homefree SONG #9: Song Title: “White Room” Artist: The Bobs Album: Rhapsody In Bob (2005) Website: n/A You can purchase Rhapsody In Bob by The Bobs at: https://www.amazon.com/Rhapsody-Bob-Bobs/dp/B000FSMI16 SONG #10: Song Title: “God Bless The U.S.A.” Artist: Home Free Album: N/A Website: www.homefreemusic.com You can view “God Bless The U.S.A.” by Home Free at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFt9D6ZIjOQ Thank you for listening to this brand new episode, and please come back next week for another brand new episode! So be sure to subscribe for more great content! And if you like what you hear, please leave a 5-star rating and review to help support the show! Follow on Twitter @AcaGeekz . If you’d like your group to be featured on a future episode, contact me by e-mail at: acageekz@gmail.com I’ll See you next week! ~Sean~
Today on Parent Time we join the red stripy sock club as we chat to Australian sensations, Tina and Mark Harris, aka: Buzz and Lah-lah from Lah-lah’s big live band. In this candid interview, Tina and Mark open up about the inevitable beginnings of Lah-lah, Double Bass solo’s and the impeccable miming skills of their band. The post From The Top, With The Stripy Socks – Tina and Mark Harris appeared first on Benny Time.
Today on Parent Time we join the red stripy sock club as we chat to Australian sensations, Tina and Mark Harris, aka: Buzz and Lah-lah from Lah-lah's big live band. In this candid interview, Tina and Mark open up about the inevitable beginnings of Lah-lah, Double Bass solo's and the impeccable miming skills of their band. The post From The Top, With The Stripy Socks – Tina and Mark Harris appeared first on Benny Time.
Pianist (and From The Top host) Christopher O'Riley joins forces with cellist Matt Haimovitz for their latest collaboration: TROIKA – a portrait of artistic rebellion in the face of political suppression. The two sat down with WGTE's Brad Cresswell to talk about the album, which pairs works by Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev and Shostakovich with modern protest songs by Viktor Tsoi, Pussy Riot, and the Beatles.
Christopher O’Riley, acclaimed pianist and host of NPR's From the Top, stops by the WDAV John Clark Performance Studio for an interview and live performance. We’ll talk to him about some of the top young classical musicians featured in From the Top and will be treated to a performance as well. From The Top is coming to the Batte Center at Wingate University on Saturday, November 23 rd to tape an episode of their award-winning radio program. From the Top , which airs on WDAV each Sunday at 5pm, is the preeminent showcase for America’s best young musicians.
AcaGeekz 006 – “Disney … A Cappella-Style” AcaGeekz is now available on iTunes and Stitcher! If you like what you hear, please write a review and help support the show! Welcome! It’s my hope that AcaGeekz will introduce the casual listener and the hardcore a cappella fan alike to some groups and styles they’ve never heard before. Whether it be Barbershop, collegiate, doo wop, high school, choral, jazz, funk, pop, rock, or classical, there’s something for everyone! It’s time to give the tracks for this episode their due credit. So here they are, the tracks for AcaGeekz “Disney … A Cappella-Style”! iTunes and Stitcher Promo: Song Title: “Can’t Sleep Love” Artist: Pentatonix Album: Pentatonix (Deluxe) (2015) Website: www.ptxofficial.com You can purchase Pentatonix (Deluxe) by Pentatonix at: https://www.amazon.com/Pentatonix-Deluxe-Version/dp/B014PD0R0A INTRO: Song Title: “Paul” Artist: Paul Cingolani from +4db Album: +4db (2000) Website: N/A You can purchase +4db by +4db at: http://www.amazon.com/4db-Plus-Four-db/dp/B0001WW2KI SONG #1: Song Title: “Circle Of Life” Artist: The Undertones (Northwestern University) Album: Enter Sound (2008) Website:www.nuundertones.com You can purchase Enter Sound by The Undertones (Northwestern University) at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/enter-sound/id288609293 SONG #2: Song Title: “Cruella Deville” Artist: Vocal Spectrum Album: Vocal Spectrum Vol.I (2006) Website: www.vocalspectrum.com/ You can purchase Vocal Spectrum Vol. I by Vocal Spectrum at: http://www.vocalspectrum.com/#!recordings/c1vwf SONG #3: Song Title: “He’s A Tramp” Artist: No Strings Attached (University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana) Album:Dig And Be Dug (2001) Website: http://nostringsattachedjazz.weebly.com/ You can download Dig And Be Dug by No Strings Attached (University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana) at: http://uz-mp3.com/31707555-don-t-get-around-much-anymore.html SONG #4: Song Title: “I Wanna Be Like You” Artist: Straight No Chaser (University of Indiana) Album: Last Call (1998) Website: http://php.indiana.edu/~snc/SNC.htm You can find Last Call by Straight No Chaser (University of Indiana) at: http://musicmp3sites.com/album/bae08542-9f99-4ba6-a647-ea8413fd1366/ SONG #5: Song Title: “Eye To Eye” Artist: The X-tension Chords (University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana) Album: Creative Outlet (2007) Website: www.xtensionchords.com You can download Creative Outlet by The X-tensionchords (University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana) at: http://www.xtensionchords.com/#!store/c1d3c SONG #6: Song Title: “Zero To Hero” Artist: The Rip Chords (University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana) Album:Chordially Yours (2007) Website: www.theillinoisripchords.com/ You can purchase Chordially Yours by The Rip Chords (University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana) at: http://theripchords.webs.com/merchandise.htm SONG #7: Song Title: “Be Our Guest” Artist: Home Free Album: From The Top Website: www.homefreemusic.com You Can purchase From The Top by Home Free at: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/homefree SONG #8: Song Title: Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” Artist: Dick Van Dyke & The Vantastix Album: Put On A Happy Face (2008) Website: www.vantastix.com You can purchase Put On A Happy Face by Dick Van Dyke & The Vantastix at: https://www.amazon.com/Happy-Face-Dick-Dyke-Vantastix/dp/B001FHFWSM SONG #9: Song Title: “Let It Go” Artist: Pentatonix Album: That’s Christmas To Me (2014) Website: www.ptxofficial.com You can purchase That’s Christmas To Me by Pentatonix at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/thats-christmas-to-me/id918377263 SONG #10: Song Title: “It’s A Small World” Artist: Rockapella Album: Comfort And Joy (2002) Website: www.rockapella.com You can purchase Comfort And Joy by Rockapella at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/comfort-joy/id28076938 I invite you to come back next week when I’ll be paying tribute to Queen! So be sure to subscribe for more great content. Follow on Twitter @AcaGeekz . If you’d like your group to be featured on a future episode, contact me by e-mail at: acageekz@gmail.com I’ll See you next week! ~Sean~
AcaGeekz 005 – “A Cappella Americana” AcaGeekz is now available on iTunes and Stitcher! If you like what you hear, please write a review and help support the show! Welcome! It’s my hope that AcaGeekz will introduce the casual listener and the hardcore a cappella fan alike to some groups and styles they’ve never heard before. Whether it be Barbershop, collegiate, doo wop, high school, choral, jazz, funk, pop, rock, or classical, there’s something for everyone! It’s time to give the tracks for this episode their due credit. So here they are, the tracks for AcaGeekz “A Cappella Americana”! iTunes and Stitcher Promo: Song Title: “Can’t Sleep Love” Artist: Pentatonix Album: Pentatonix (Deluxe) (2015) Website: www.ptxofficial.com You can purchase Pentatonix (Deluxe) by Pentatonix at: https://www.amazon.com/Pentatonix-Deluxe-Version/dp/B014PD0R0A INTRO: Song Title: “Paul” Artist: Paul Cingolani from +4db Album: +4db (2000) Website: N/A You can purchase +4db by +4db at: http://www.amazon.com/4db-Plus-Four-db/dp/B0001WW2KI SONG #1: Song Title: “The Star-Spangled Banner” Artist: InVox Album: N/A Website: www.invoxchicago.com SONG #2: Song Title: “America” Artist: Alti E Bassi Album: Medley (2005) Website: www.altiebassi.it You can purchase Medley by Alti & Bassi at: https://www.amazon.com/Medley-Alti-Bassi/dp/B000F48CJC SONG #3: Song Title: “America The Beautiful” Artist: Academy Singers (Brentwood Academy) Album: Best Of High School A Cappella 2003 (2003) Website: www.academysingers.com You can purchase Best Of High School A Cappella 2003 at: https://www.amazon.com/Best-High-School-Cappella-2003/dp/B004MG2FZ6 SONG #4: Song Title: “God Bless America” Artist: Eclipse Album: For Show (2005) Website: www.eclipse6.com You can purchase For Show by Eclipse at: https://www.amazon.com/Show-Eclipse/dp/B0009JFCBY?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0 SONG #5: Song Title: “Route 66” Artist: The Trenchcoats (Currently The Coats) Album: Your Joy (1994) Website: www.thecoats.net You can purchase Your Joy by The Coats at: https://www.amazon.com/Your-Joy-Trenchcoats/dp/B000K41R62/183-7072835-8353921?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0 SONG #6: Song Title: “This Land Is Your Land” Artist: The Liberty Voices (AKA The Voices Of Liberty) Album: A Cappella Americana (2001) Website: www.libertyvoices.com You can purchase A Cappella Americana by The Liberty Voices at: https://www.amazon.com/Cappella-Americana-Liberty-Voices/dp/B00005RETL SONG #7: Song Title: “Shenandoah” Artist: The Octaves (University Of Richmond) Album: This Complete Breakfast (2003) Website: http://www.richmondoctaves.com/ You can purchase This Complete Breakfast by The Octaves (University Of Richmond) at: http://www.richmondoctaves.com/music-ThisCompleteBreakfast.asp SONG #8: Song Title: “God Bless The U.S.A.” Artist: Home Free Album: From The Top Website: www.homefreemusic.com You Can purchase From The Top by Home Free at: http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/homefree SONG #9: Song Title: “Firework” Artist: Mo5aic Album: 5 (2012) Website: www.mo5aic.com You can purchase 5 by Mo5aic at: http://www.mo5aic.com/shop/9trbou353te9ch5ybs6wlacc8oimmo SONG #10: Song Title: “1812 Overtuer” Artist: The Swingle Singers Album: Screen Tested (1998) Website: www.theswingles.co.uk You can purchase Screen Tested by The Swingle Singers at: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Screen-Tested-Swingle-Singers/dp/B00005GJYM I invite you to come back next week when I’ll be taking you to a Disney Dreamland, a cappella-style! So be sure to subscribe for more great content. Follow on Twitter @AcaGeekz . If you’d like your group to be featured on a future episode, contact me by e-mail at: acageekz@gmail.com I’ll See you next week! ~Sean~
D_Ture “Step 2 It” Candy Dulfer “Donja” Richard Elliot “People Make The World Go Round” Smooth Midnight Jazz” Devotion” Marion Mead “Romantica” Mike Phillips “Will You Stick With Me” Joe Johnson “ Don’t You Know” Larry Carlton “Don’t Break My Heart” Wayman Tisdale “Space Over Your Heart” Bobby Lyle “Give Me Your Heart Ronny Jordan “At Last” Jeff Bradshaw “Smooth Soul” Walter Beasley “With The Flow” Euge Groove “ From The Top” Bob Baldwin “Stand Tall” Jeff Lorber “Philly Style”
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