Podcasts about Golden Gate Park

Have you ever thought about taking a spin on the SkyStar Observation Wheel in Golden Gate Park?  Well, the clock may be ticking on that opportunity, as city officials are contemplating the relocation of this colossal Ferris wheel to Fisherman's Wharf. For more, Eric Thomas and Margie Shafer spoke with KCBS Insider Phil Matier and former Mayor of San Francisco Willie Brown.

Many of us rely on digital maps and GPS to get anywhere these days. Hear what happens when Producer Amanda McGowan finds herself lost in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park for a sport you may have never heard of – orienteering – which forces participants to navigate checkpoints with old fashioned maps and compasses.MORE: If you think you might want to try orienteering, find a local group here.

As the 2023 tour continues to move from north to south, we're gonna get you prepared for the Austin shows by covering the last non-festival show that was played in the Texas capital way back in 1995. This was a make-up show for the postponed date that stemmed from Ed's bout of food poisoning back at the Golden Gate Park show. This show in Austin had it's own fair share of controversies, including a set time change that threw a large portion of the fans off that thought that 7pm was the start to the show. This barnburner of a set will have two major talking points - Mike and Jack. Jack Irons was clearly in a groove after nine months of playing and traveling with the band, and while not every song had been fully polished just yet, you can see what spots Jack was having a major influence on and where he thrived the most. Mike on the other hand had numerous moments where his guitar solos shot out of the amps like a cannon on fire. We're gonna gush over Mike's presence on songs such as Go, Animal, Corduroy, Why Go, Even Flow, State Of Love And Trust, Immortality, Black and Porch. No shortage of conversation there! We'll kick off the episode addressing the recent Indianapolis show postponement and what this may mean for the rest of the 2023 tour. Visit the Concertpedia - http://liveon4legs.com Contact the show - liveon4legspodcast@gmail.com Donate to the Show - http://patreon.com/liveon4legs

In this episode of Inside Golf Podcast, Andy is joined by Jay Blasi of Jay Blasi Design, one of the most talented young American architects to discuss his design work on Chambers Bay, Sharp Park, Golden Gate Park & much. Jay discusses working with Robert Trent Jones on Chambers Bay and the challenges an architect faces in designing a modern championship golf course. Jay weighs in on the distance debate, and how that has affected modern architecture. Finally, they discuss an exciting new project in the heart of San Francisco that Jay is currently working on, the restoration of the Golden Gate Park Par Three course, as well as working with Tom Doak on Sharp Park. Thanks for listening and subscribing to Inside Golf Podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today, in two stories from Uncuffed, we hear how getting back into the dating world after incarceration can be challenging. Then, San Francisco author Cecelia Rabess reads from her book about an unlikely romance. And, we meet Golden Gate Park's hairiest denizens. Plus, our featured local music is Mighty Mules Blues Band from Oakland. They're playing at the Soundroom this Friday.

In today's show, two men share how they grew up watching their mother's hustle. We'll hear about their childhoods and what they want for their own kids in this new story from Uncuffed. Then, San Francisco author Jilanne Hoffmann reads from her new environmental children's book. And, we'll listen to the stories and music of two Bay Area bands.

In today's show, we hear a new story from the Uncuffed team. It's about how reconnecting with a sport changed a person's life. Then, we have a conversation with a bilingual musician, who uses her craft to erase borders. Plus, we put our dancing shoes on and head to Golden Gate Park. With local music from Oakland's Hook-Ups.

Edie Tanem is our host on Bob Tanem In The Garden, and today she talked to Jeff Harris of the San Francisco Orchid Society about next weekends' orchid show in Golden Gate Park.  Later in the hour we also talked to Mike Boss of the Hidden Forest Nursery in Sebastopol, where there are some very interesting classes happening this coming week. Finally.. we talked to all of you, our listeners who called up with gardening questions for Edie!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Edie Tanem is our host on Bob Tanem In The Garden, and today she talked to Jeff Harris of the San Francisco Orchid Society about next weekends' orchid show in Golden Gate Park.  Later in the hour we also talked to Mike Boss of the Hidden Forest Nursery in Sebastopol, where there are some very interesting classes happening this coming week. Finally.. we talked to all of you, our listeners who called up with gardening questions for Edie!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Glide Memorial Church believes that all stories are sacred.  For decades we have been helping cultivate their stories through congregational life groups, care and support, sermons, and poetry.  Word on the Street is a series that features storytelling recorded on the streets of San Francisco.  This episode was recorded on July 16, 2023 in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park during the San Francisco AIDS Walk.

What does the Gospel have to do with being an entrepreneur? EVERYTHING! Benjamin Dunn, author of the Happy Gospel, carries one of the most joyful and clear articulations of the Gospel in this generation! Listen and be inspired to walk in New Creation realities as a Sales Professional or an Entrepreneur! A true revelation of the Gospel releases a confidence and a joy that is unmatched by any thing the world has to offer! Imagine a world where hard work is replaced by an abundant flow of oil, where sweat and toil are no longer the only paths to success. Through the Finished Work of Jesus the curse has been reversed! We are all being called to step into what has been called "Garden Works"! You have a choice: You can continue to hustle and toil, or you can embrace the gift of rest and trust in divine provision. This paradigm shift will transform the way you approached work and life. Disclaimer: This is not advocating for laziness or disregarding diligence. Hard work has its place, but it should never overshadow the power of rest. When we learn to rest in the assurance that Jesus provides for us, a new level of effectiveness and ease unfolds. In fact, it has been said that the lovers will out work the workers! When under the divine influence of Grace we are actually filled with a supernatural energy that enables us to work even harder and effectively but all from a place of ease! More about Benjamin Dunn: Follow him on IG @the_benjamin_dunn Benjamin Dunn also known as 'The Wild Wild', 'Benjamin Dunn & Friends', 'Benjamin Dunn & The Animal Orchestra' & 'The Feral American' - is an endless road-traveled, world traversed, heart-on-his-sleeve American artist living in San Diego. Born in Illinois, at 18 he headed west. Hitchhiking as a teenager out to the West Coast, camping in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and the beaches of Santa Cruz - spending months in Bulgaria enjoying week long parties with gypsies - visiting slums and garbage dumps all over India, Asia and Africa - Theology school, devouring literature and to ultimately writing books & speaking around the world - making records through it all. His narrative is genuinely “The Wild Wild”. He takes all of that raw energy and experience, speaks & creates from an interesting perspective of the universe at play and in love. Puerile play. 
 His lyrics, words & poetry are largely influenced by mythology, the mystics, philosophical and spiritual literature including C.S. Lewis, Scripture, Meister Eckhart, the Tao, writers like Huxley, George McDonald, Kerouac & Hunter Thompson. His musical art has been synched in numerous worldwide campaigns for film, tv and brands; Snapchat, Levis, BMW Visit Orlando etc. as well as receiving acclamations from major press and magazines like Neon Gold, Alternative Press, FuseTV, Forever 21 and Baebel. He is the happy and proud father of one son. If this episode impacted you in anyway don't forget to subscribe and leave some of those 5 star reviews! Be sure to follow your host @willrest on IG If you would like to connect with more wild and crazy Spirit-filled Entrepreneurs join our Facebook Group called Spirit-Filled Sales Professionals and Entrepreneurs!

Raised in musical family, Giulio Xavier Cetto's musical influences range from his Venezuelan-Italian heritage to Bay Area rap. Giulio can play multiple styles and genres with ease, but at the intersection of jazz and hip hop is where his artistry truly shines. He brings an electric energy to his performances, encouraging audiences to not only vibe, but to get up and dance. Playing tribute to these genres, Giulio hosts and performs at a reoccurring "Sunday Slaps" night at San Francisco's beloved jazz venue, Black Cat. He also curates a weekly jazz set at Golden Gate Park's Stowe Lake Boathouse. Between gigging and recording with notable musicians including Kev Choice, Spelling, Kassa Overall, and Fantastic Negrito, he leads and composes original music for his own jazz band, Big Trippin. On their debut album, which drops this year, you can hear Giulio's passion for jazz and hip hop. On Rightnowish, Giulio talks about his favorite San Francisco venues to perform in, how the synthesis between jazz and hip-hop shape his sound and why the bass (upright and electric) is the heart of music.

Hellloooo, today I share all my thoughts on San Francisco! First impressions, misconceptions, and all of the cafe/restaurant/park reviews! See below for the full list, hope you enjoy :) San Francisco  COFFEE / BAKERIES  Red Bay Coffee✔️ iced vanilla latte (10/10) -> ferry building  Ritual Coffee✔️ iced oat milk sweet latte (10/10) -> Haight Ashbury Duboce Park Cafe✔️ egg sammy and iced oat milk vanilla latte (10/10) -> Duboce Park Blue Bottle✔️ sweet iced latte (8/10) -> Hayes Valley  La Boulangerie✔️ iced vanilla latte (6/10) -> Hayes Valley SightGlass✔️iced vanilla latte (5/10) -> Divisadero Wooden Coffee House✔️iced vanilla latte with whole milk? (3/10) -> Cole Valley The Mill✔️egg in a hole toast(7/10), earl grey olive oil cake (10/10), iced syrup latte (5/10) -> Divisadero Cafe Reveille✔️ iced vanilla latte with whole milk (3/10) -> Duboce Triangle Jane the Bakery✔️iced sweet latte, chocolate chip toffee cookie, banana bread, and turkey/caramelized onion sandwich, $30 (9/10) ->  Jane on Larkin Jane on Fillmore Fifty/fifty✔️iced vanilla latte (8/10) -> Lone Mountain Stable Cafe -> the mission  As Quoted -> Presidio Heights  Andy Town Coffee Roasters -> Outer Richmond and Outer Sunset Thorough Bread -> Castro Cinderella Bakery Cafe Trieste Paris Baguette Kantine Tartine BAGELS / BREAKFAST   Shlock's Bagels & Lox✔️ iced chai tea and cream cheese salt bagel (9/10) -> Divisadero The Laundromat✔️ salt bagel (10/10) -> Outer Richmond Fiddle Fig, russian hill - breakfast sandwiches Cracked and Battered -> Marina  AÇAÍ Bowl'd Palmetto superfoods SALADS  original Joe's (Dungeness crab Louie) DRINKS (and tapas) Zeitgeist✔️Beer bar in Mission The saloon - live blues bar in north beach Smuggler's Cove - Tiki Bar just north of Mission Phone Booth - dive bar in Mission 500 Club✔️dive bar in Mission Arcana - natural wine bar with live music in Mission NoPa✔️ gin & juice, lentil soup  Phononbar✔️ summer summer summertime (8/10) TrickDog✔️ scooby snack shot  Lost Resort✔️ ABV Red Window (live music every sat/sun 11-3)  Little Red Window  House of Shields  Madrone's (Motown Mondays!)  Irvin street and 19th  The View Lounge, for sunset, downtown Arbor Patio, for wine, Hayes Valley  SEAFOOD Scoma's - fancy and $$$ Hog Island Oyster Co.  Hook Fish✔️ fish tacos and fish&chips (8/10) MEXICAN  Nopalito Mission burritos✔️ Lolo✔️ Valencia in the mission (10/10) ITALIAN  Square Pie Guys Original Joe's Tony's Pizza Casaro Osteria, Union street  Flour and Water - special occasions  JAPANESE Nora✔️ blazing glory (6/10) Tsunami✔️ papa San, volcano roll, spicy tuna (10/10) Marfuku - ramen  No Joe's - Hayes valley, ramen  THAI  Mangrove Kitchen✔️chicken pad Thai  Farmhouse ✔️ chicken pad Thai  INDIAN  Dancing Yak (Nepalese) VIETNAMESE  PPQ Dragon Eats - bon mi BURMESE Burma Superstar  DESSERTS salt and straw✔️ Hayes Valley Hot cookie✔️Castro Bi-Rite Creamery✔️Alamo Square  Swenson's  Smitten Ice Cream✔️ the Mission  ACTIVITIES Dolores Park - great for a view of the city skyline, lots of people watching, get a mission burrito while you're there Headlands Lookout - best view of the Golden Gate Bridge/city Golden Gate Park - bigger than Central Park The Mission - Mexican/hipstery neighborhood with great food and bars, near Dolores park. Mission street and Valencia street are both awesome North Beach - Italian neighborhood, very picturesque also great food/drinks Alamo Square Park - good view, painted ladies from Full House Hike up twin peaks for a good view Bernal heights hill also a good view  Lands end is like SFs version of discovery park in Seattle Bonfire on ocean beach  Devils slide trail in Pacifica - more of a chill walk than a hiking trail but pretty views and it's like 20 mins from SF 

Today we're proud to present a recording from the Esalen archives: Timothy Leary, speaking to a rapt audience in June of 1981. Leary rose to national prominence in the early 1960's, as a clinical psychologist from Harvard who along with Richard Alpert was eventually fired for introducing students to mushrooms and LSD. After his dismissal from the realm of the Ivy League, Leary's mystique only grew. In 1964, Leary and Alpert visited Esalen for the first time, where they ended up taking LSD with among others, Esalen co-founder Michael Murphy. In 1966, Leary attempted unsuccessfully to form a religion based around the idea of LSD as a sacrament, which would have legally protected the use of LSD. His legal troubles had already begun by this point. While at Millbrook he endured raids and arrests, engineered by the local district attorney, G. Gordon Liddy, who would later become famous as one of Nixon's dirty tricks squad and an engineer of the Watergate break-ins. In January of 1967, he attended the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, where he delivered the now famous invitation to tune in, turn on, and drop out. It became kind of a catch phrase for Leary and a shorthand for the psychedelic movement. In 1968 his story began to get truly crazy. He was arrested in Laguna Beach for possession of marijuana, he appealed the conviction, and then somehow in 1970, he received a ten year sentence for the infraction. He went to jail and then in September of the same year the leftist revolutionary group the Weathermen smuggled him out of jail . Leary ended up in Algeria, where he paid Eldrige Cleaver and the Black Panther Party to protect him, but Cleaver ended up putting him under house arrest, due to “exasperation with his socialite lifestyle.” In 1971 Leary and his wife fled to Switzerland, aided, abetted, and ultimately imprisoned by an arms dealer; in 72, Richard Nixon's AG John Erlichman convinced the Swiss government to imprison him, but ultimately was not able to extradite Leary. He ended up in Afghanistan, where the US government finally seized him. He was transported to Folsom State prison , where he was placed in a cell next to Charles Manson. In order to shorten his prison sentence, he became an FBI informant. In 1974, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Alpert, and Leary's son denounced him a “cop informant” and a paranoid schizophrenic. In 1976, Governor Jerry Brown released Leary from prison, whereupon he moved to Laurel Canyon, got re-married to filmmaker Barbara Blum, and took on Winona Ryder as his goddaughter. He started touring and lecturing, speaking about his new interests, which included space colonization, life extension, and virtual reality. He even teamed up with G. Gordon Liddy, an ex-convict himself by this point, to debate issues like gay rights, abortion, and welfare. And this is where we find ourselves with Leary, visiting Esalen for the first time in 17 years, in 1981. I think you'll find this speech entertaining, thought-provoking, and ultimately very enjoyable. I know I did. He's the high priest of LSD, speaking to an audience of highly sympathetic hippies and weirdos in the Reagan 80's.

This piece was originally a part of Rightnowish's 2021 series, Roll With Us, all about the Bay Area's community and culture on wheels. Every Sunday San Francisco's Richard Humphrey teaches weekly roller dance classes in San Leandro; his students have the honor of learning from someone who has been on quad skates for five decades. From 1979 to 1988, Richard was a part of the Golden Rollers, a trio of skaters who regularly performed in Golden Gate Park. By now, Richard has taught thousands of people his signature skating style of "roller dance" (even Dr. Oz) through in-person classes and video tutorials. After noticing the rise of skating's popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, Richard wanted to make sure folks knew that skating has a deep-seated culture with a history that pre-dates the internet, and moves that sparkled on the rink long before most viral stars were born. This week on Rightnowish, we roll into Memorial Day weekend-- the unofficial start of summer-- with the legendary Richard Humphrey.

The Deadcast visits one of the Dead's most legendary hometown shows with the band, crew, & Bay Area Dead freaks, featuring 3 sets in the Golden Gate Park sunshine, technological innovations, & an important paper by the Haight Street Free Medical Clinic.Guests: Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay, Dave Smith, Bob Barsotti, Ron Wickersham, Jerry Pompili, Steve Brown, Sally Mann Romano, Mike Dolgushkin, David Gans, Strider Brown, Bob Student, Mike Crater, David Lemieux, Nicholas MeriwetherSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On this episode, Kirk takes a deep dive into Sufjan Stevens's "Chicago," the centerpiece of his brilliant 2005 album Illinois. It's a towering construction supported by four chords, with building blocks of vibraphones, wurlitzers, strings, and choral harmonies.D, A, C, G. Eyes on the road; all things go.Artist: Sufjan StevensAlbum: Illinois (2005)Written by: Sufjan StevensListen/Buy: Apple Music | Amazon | SpotifyALSO FEATURED:"The Bird Women of Golden Gate Park" by Kirk Hamilton from The Exited Door, 2009"Supernova" by Meklit from When The People Move, The Music Moves Too (2017)"Come on! Feel the Illinoise!" by Sufjan Stevens from Illinois, 2005"X. Section 8" by Steve Reich from Music for 18 Musicians, 1978"Clocks" by Coldplay from A Rush of Blood to the Head, 2002OUTRO SOLOIST: Kirk HamiltonKirk is, well, the host of Strong Songs. He decided to finally record an outro solo at the start of 2020. He's playing tenor sax, and there's actually a video of him recording the solo here: https://twitter.com/kirkhamilton/status/1214319584959877123-----LINKS-----SUPPORT STRONG SONGSPaypal | Patreon.com/StrongsongsMERCH STOREstore.strongsongspodcast.comSOCIAL MEDIA@StrongSongs | @Kirkhamilton | IG: @Kirk_HamiltonNEWSLETTERhttps://kirkhamilton.substack.com/subscribeJOIN THE DISCORDhttps://discord.gg/GCvKqAM8SmOUTRO SOLO PLAY-A-LONG:https://soundcloud.com/kirkhamilton/strong-songs-outro-music-no-soloSTRONG SONGS PLAYLISTSSpotify | Apple Music | YouTube Music--------------------MAY 2023 WHOLE-NOTE PATRONSCatherine WarnerDamon WhiteKaya WoodallDan AustinJay SwartzMiriam JoySEAN D WINNIERushDaniel Hannon-BarryElliot RosenAshley HoagChristopher MillerJamie WhiteChristopher McConnellDavid MascettiJoe LaskaKen HirshJezMelanie AndrichJenness GardnerNarelle HornAidan CoughlanJeanneret Manning Family FourDave SharpeSami SamhuriAccessViolationRyan TorvikElliot Jay O'NeillAndre BremerMark SchechterDave FloreyMAY 2023 HALF-NOTE PATRONSBen SteinSusan Greencase faubsJake YumatillaAlan BroughRandal VegterGo Birds!Jeff SpeckSamuel MillettAbraham BenrubiWhit SidenerChance McClainRobert Granatdave malloyTim RosenwongNick Gallowayjohn halpinPeter HardingDavidAnthony MahramusMeghan O'LearyJohn BaumanDax and Dane HuddlestonMartín SalíasTim HowesStu BakerSteve MartinoDr Arthur A GrayCarolinaGary PierceMatt BaxterGiantPredatoryMolluskCasey FaubionLuigi BocciaRob AlbrightE Margaret WartonCharles McGeeCatherine ClauseEthan BaumanRenee DowningKenIsWearingAHatJordan BlockAaron WadeTravis PollardJamieDeebsPortland Eye CareAnupama RaghavanCarrie SchneiderAlenka GrealishRichard SneddonJulian RoleffJanice BerryDoreen CarlsonDavid McDarbyAbigail DuffieldWendy GilchristLisa TurnerPaul WayperBruno GaetaKenneth JungAdam StofskyZak RemerRishi SahayJason ReitmanAilie FraserVonKaren ArnoldNATALIE MISTILISJosh SingerPhino DeLeonAmy Lynn ThornsenAdam WKelli BrockingtonStephen RawlingsVictoria YuKevin RiversBrad Clarkmino caposselaSteve PaquinDavid JoskeEmma SklarBernard KhooRobert HeuerMatthew GoldenDavid NoahGeraldine ButlerRichard CambierMadeleine MaderJason PrattStewart OakAbbie BergDoug BelewDermot CrowleyAchint SrivastavaRyan RairighMichael BermanOlivia BishopJohn GisselquistLinda DuffySharon TreeLiz SegerEoin de BurcaKevin PotterM Shane BordersDallas HockleyJason GerryNathan GouwensLauren ReayEric PrestemonCookies250Damian BradyAngela LivingstoneDavid FriedmanSarah SulanDiane HughesJo SutherlandMichael CasnerLowell MeyerStephen TsoneffLorenz SchwarzWenJack SjogrenGeoff GoldenRobyn FraserPascal RuegerRandy SouzaJCClare HolbertonDiane TurnerTom ColemanMark PerryDhu WikMelEric HelmJake RobertsJonathan DanielsMichael FlahertyCaro Fieldmichael bochnerNaomi WatsonDavid CushmanAlexanderGavin DoigSam FennTanner MortonAJ SchusterJennifer BushDavid StroudAmanda FurlottiAndrew BakerJules BaileyAndrew FairL.B. MorseBrian AmoebasBrett DouvilleJeffrey OlsonMatt BetzelMuellerNate from KalamazooMelanie StiversRichard TollerAlexander PolsonEarl LozadaJustin McElroyArjun SharmaJames JohnsonKevin MorrellColin Hodo

Saying goodbye to my family in the Bay Area, we headed back to Living Waters. We had enjoyed our long vacation, which was a change of pace from our lifestyle at the ranch. So much had happened during those few weeks. Especially, revisiting San Francisco, which turned out to be a special day for our little family. It reminded us of the days we had spent there, when we first came to California. We were totally into our hippie life, and hoping to starting afresh after a difficult year living together in Berlin. Thomas had brought his instruments with him. He had dreams of being a musician, in the scene of San Francisco, the way he had experienced it, growing up in Berlin. He was also looking forward to finding new friends in the drug scene to “turn on” with. Walking through Golden Gate Park with Naomi that day, it really hit us, we were completely different people. God had saved us out of the darkness, given us a new purpose in life. Our hearts were filled with thankfulness, realizing that God himself had set us on a new path, to teach us His ways. We didn't know what the next steps would be along that path, but we had confidence that the Lord would guide us. On the drive home towards Garberville, we talked about the subjects that had come up with my parents. Now they knew, that we might go to Germany, sometime in the future. And Thomas said, he felt sorry for dad that he had to turn down his offer to work for him. Since we had been somewhat integrated into their Methodist church group, it could have given dad the impression that we might want to stay and get involved. But for both of us, that was the farthest thing from our minds. Its true, that our circumstances were changing, we would be leaving the Living Waters Ranch. One of the leaders who used to live there, had moved with his family, a few months before that to Eureka. He was already making arrangements for Thomas and I, to live in one of the communal houses. We would only be a couple of hours farther away from my parents, but we could still visit them, after our baby was born. Turning off at Garberville, we had another half hour drive before we arrived at the ranch. When Thomas pulled into the dirt road of the Big House, we knew we were going into, the final countdown, of our last couple of weeks living in that cosy cabin.

Author Dave Eggers has made his home in San Francisco, founding McSweeney's Publishing and co-founding the 826 Valencia writing workshop. His latest book, "The Eyes & the Impossible" may be his most S.F. book yet, following the adventures and poetic thoughts of a dog in a loosely fictionalized version of Golden Gate Park. Eggers joins Total SF hosts Peter Hartlaub and Heather Knight to talk about archery, the inspiration he finds in the park, his optimism about San Francisco and the greatness of "So I Married an Axe Murderer." Produced by Peter Hartlaub. Music from the Sunset Shipwrecks off their album "Community," Castro Theatre organist David Hegarty and cable car bell-ringing by 8-time champion Byron Cobb. Follow Total SF adventures at www.sfchronicle.com/totalsf  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ava Roy and We Players return to The Commonwealth Club to show highlights from their new adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, which is being performed in Golden Gate Park from April 27 to the end of May. Roy will share clips and shots of their late April performances, and will also share how fond she is of both creatively adapting Alice and the interplay of logic and illogic in the looking-glass world we find ourselves in. She will also explain how We Players survived to tell the tale of being shut down in 2020 in the midst of rehearsals for an earlier adaptation of Alice—when the COVID pandemic struck. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Serene is a hacker in the truest sense of the word. She's applied a hacker mindset to learn coding, piano, and blend art and engineering in fascinating ways. You'll find her collaborating on-stage with Grimes one night and coding censorship resistant technologies the next day. As a self-taught coder she was the first engineer hired into Google Ideas when she was just a teenager. At Google she pioneered work on WebRTC proxies that she continued as a fellow at the Open Tech Fund and was eventually released as a Tor-enabling tool called Snowflake. Serene took a hiatus from working as a full-time engineer to pursue a career as a concert pianist where she quickly gained recognition for her incredible talent. She became one of the few self-taught concert pianists to perform Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 (which I highly recommend checking out on YouTube). Serene is also known for the audiovisual artistry of her shows which is drawn from her own experiences with synesthesia that results in her seeing music as colors. As the conflict in Ukraine started, Snowflake started to see exponential usage patterns as Russian citizens looked to circumvent state censorship and Serene decided to build a company around the technology to enhance development and build independent deployment models. That company is called Snowstorm. With Snowstorm, Serene is focused on saving cyberspace from balkanization and censorship and ensuring that all global citizens have unfiltered access to the Internet. In this OODAcast, we explore Serene's career and then dive into ways we can preserve the original intent of the Internet with censorship resistant and privacy enhancing technology stacks that can be easily deployed and scaled. Official Bio: SERENE is a concert pianist from a most unexpected trajectory. Though she never attended conservatory, her solo performances have been described by The Paris Review as a “spectacle to match the New York Philharmonic”, and today Serene has become one of the most talked about young talents in classical music, and beyond. Beyond concertizing, Serene enjoys other collaborations such as her role as composer for Kanye West's Opera, premiered at Lincoln Center & Art Basel, as well as pianist & technologist with Blue Man Group's founder, bringing futuristic innovations at the intersection of music and technology while also highlighting her own audiovisual synesthesia. Previously, Serene was a computer scientist, Google Engineer, and senior research fellow on various projects, before leaving to fully focus on the piano. In the brief years since, she has cultivated a disciplined, personal, and spiritual approach to her music. With her intersections of many disciplines, plus the “ability to enthrall audiences”, she has grown an international following. Serene is one of very few self-taught pianists who've performed Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3, which was described as “unprecedented” —Liszt Academy. Serene loves sharing the beauty and power of classical music with all audiences, everywhere, in all venues ranging from the Vienna Musikverein, to a full orchestra in Golden Gate Park, to a decommissioned Boeing 747. Additional Links: Official Website Snowstorm Serene on Instagram Serene Rachmaninoff Concerto Book Recommendations: A Thousand Years of Non-linear History The Making of the Atomic Bomb The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect: a novel of the singularity Accelerando

Peaceful Golden Gate Park by Henry by 826 Valencia

For this episode of Making Movies Great Again, Sebastian and Chris Kohls, AKA "Mr. Reagan," review the iconic "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan," from its surprisingly cheap production value, to how it succeeded despite its director having never seen an episode of "Star Trek" before.Support the show: https://www.sebgorka.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

One evening David made a surprising announcement, all of us would be participating in an upcoming outreach in Los Angeles. Our ministry in Eureka, was planning a big event that they titled the LA Invasion. This was at the height of the Jesus People movement that had been developing in Los Angeles. There were already some communal groups from our ministry living down there. The plan was, to join them in sharing the gospel, out on the streets. It was mid August 1974 and Thomas wrote to his mother, Nadja, that we were packing up everything we needed as a family, to drive down to Los Angeles. Thomas told Nadja that approximately 100 brothers and sisters from Eureka, the Lighthouse Ranch, Living Waters, the Lords Land and the Evangelistic Team would be staying in LA for one month. It would be at least a 10 hour drive from Garberville, considering we would be traveling in old cars and vans. From Eureka many would be traveling in old school buses. I recently saw some photos of those days, one of the buses had a scripture painted on it. It said; The Bible says, the fool has said in his heart, there is no God! What do you say? You can imagine the reaction of fellow drivers out on the highways, and then pulling into downtown LA, with that sign. There must have been a lot of coordination plans taking place between all of our communities, to arrange the housing for all of us “LA Invaders.” Thomas and David, were responsible for organizing the transportation of our groups from Living Waters. Adults, our children and babies would be piling into the vans for the long ride. But most of us, had already been used to this type of traveling, when we went out on tree planting teams in the mountains.   We were getting excited about this adventure and were filled with expectation. For sure, there would be a lot of singing and fun fellowship, out on those highways. We knew though it would be a challenge, entering into that famous city, after living quietly in our little cabins in the forest. The name of the city is Spanish and means the City of Angels. Of course it is known for the sunshine, the beautiful beaches, and the culture of Hollywood. We were aware that it was filled with both light and fame, and spiritually speaking much darkness. Our prayers in preparation, was that God would open peoples hearts, to receive the light of Jesus. For Thomas and I, it would be our first time together in LA, except for the day we landed at the airport there from Germany, in October of 1971. It had been almost three years, since we had come to California, with our hippie dreams of partaking in the Summer of Love happenings in San Francisco. We were sure that we could relate to the hippies that lived in LA. The same scene with the Rock concerts, like I had gone to at the Fillmore were still going on with the bands, like the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Who, and Crosby Stills and Nash. Also the New Age spiritual movement, that we had experienced in Berkeley and San Francisco, was growing. I had talked in my earlier episodes about our visits to the Hare Krishna temple in Berkeley, and that we went to a large parade of the Krishna worshippers, in Golden Gate Park.

Alex Aquino the founder of the event 420 Hippie Hill. Come hang out on April 4th 2023 from 10am - 5pm it's The biggest FREE cannabis event in California! 21+ only.  Cannabis Talk 101, The World's #1 Source for Everything Cannabis. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There was a break in the rain so Charles and Samantha took advantage and walked around Golden Gate Park. Charles thought it was an amazing first date, but maybe Samantha didn't because she's dipped out. Let's get her on the phone and ask.

We get to know our wildest neighbors in this episode. An apex predator is among us and it's their pupping season. What does the presence of coyotes mean for the city? We'll also meet a few of Golden Gate Park's heaviest and hairiest residents. A reading from Alameda Poet Laureate Kimi Sugioka. Plus, we visit a hospital for animals who should be swimming in the water.

The upscale neighborhood of Presidio Heights; in the north side of San Francisco - is a whole world unto itself. You can get anywhere in the city 30 minutes from here. Walking distance to Golden Gate Park with stunning views of the bay. Today, it's known as one of the safest neighborhoods in Northern California.  In downtown San Francisco, the sounds of the sirens fill the neighborhoods. In the late 1960's, the city was a beacon of peace, light, and freedom to love anyway you wanted.  What a time to live.  In 1967, RollingStone was created among the inspiration of music that dominated radio, and every corner of the city. As important as that was, the city served as ground zero for civil rights battles, anti war demonstrations and the rise of the black power movement.  The San Francisco Chronicle was founded in 1865 by brothers Charles and Michael De Young. And it's a massive part of our next story. But we'll talk about that later.  The 60's weren't all love and light though. One story made things really dark. A story that loomed over the country and the world like a storm that just wouldn't stop coming. A still unidentified man, relentlessly stalked the San Francisco bay area, striking abject terror into the hearts of it's citizens for years to come. When all was said and done, our next subject claimed the lives of five victims and has been reportedly credited with up to 32 more, all the while, taunting newspapers, and the media with his crimes.  Sound familiar?  We've covered a lot of bad people on this show. Serial killers, hijackers, pirates, and assassins. But only one of them is known world wide by a symbol and single name that still fascinates and horrifies everyone that's ever investigated him.  Welcome back to Vanished, and our multi part investigation into the man known only as Zodiac. LINKS Our Website  Vanished on Twitter  Vanished on Instagram  Vanished on TikTok Vanished on Facebook  Vanished Facebook Discussion Group  Raven Rollins and Mandy McNeely appear courtesy of the Sirens Network  Sirens on Twitter  Sirens on Facebook  Sirens on Instagram  Sirens on TikTok  Michael Cole's Website for Zodiac Revisited Kristi Hawthorne appears courtesy of the Oceanside Historical Society   Kristi Hawthorne's Blog  SHOW NOTES & FURTHER READING  "60 Year Old Cold Case Remains Unsolved - The Murder of Ray Davis"  "How Mathematicians Cracked the Zodiac Killer's Cipher" Richard Grinell's Website Zodiac Ciphers

Bison may not be native to San Francisco, but they have a lasting legacy in the history of the city and Golden Gate Park. Western Neighborhoods Project executive director Nicole Meldahl joins Total SF hosts Heather Knight and Peter Hartlaub to talk about the 1891 bison arrival in S.F., numerous escapes, Dianne Feinstein's weird bison gift and that time the Golden Gate Park superintendent wanted to feed excess bison to the bears. Knight and Hartlaub also give an Official Animal of San Francisco update — talking about the demise of the seagulls. Learn more about Western Neighborhoods Project at outsidelands.org. Produced by Peter Hartlaub. Music from the Sunset Shipwrecks off their album "Community," Castro Theatre organist David Hegarty and cable car bell-ringing by 8-time champion Byron Cobb. Follow Total SF adventures at www.sfchronicle.com/totalsf  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Steile Straßen, ein Nebel, der seinen eigenen Spitznamen hat und Zebrastreifen in Regenbogenfarben: San Francisco ist ungewöhnlich in jeglicher Hinsicht. Die Stadt der Subkultur fällt bis heute mit kommunistischer Kunst und alternativer Kultur auf. Als Spitze des Silicon Valleys ist sie inzwischen außerdem ein Mekka für Tech-Begeisterte. Immer wieder sind Impulse von hier ausgegangen, die die Welt geprägt haben. Nirgends in den USA wird Toleranz so sichtbar gefeiert wie im LGBTQ-Viertel Castro. Regiert wird die San Francisco von London Breed, einer schwarzen Frau aus armen Verhältnissen. Und doch gibt es kaum irgendwo so viel Obdachlosigkeit wie zwischen der Golden Gate Bridge und der Bay Bridge. Wir suchen im Golden Gate Park nach den letzten Hippies und schlendern durch das größte China-Town außerhalb Asiens. Außerdem erklimmen wir den Telegraph Hill, einen der schönsten Berge San Franciscos, wo schon Frida Kahlo und Diego Rivera gemalt haben.

The Bay Area's trees are starting to bloom and it's beautiful. Magnificent magnolia, plum and even, in some areas, cherry blossoms. With global warming, some plants have been leafing and blooming earlier. We'll talk to experts on seasonal change and the local flora about the whys, hows and whens of blooms and what it all means for pollination, insects and birds. And we'll want to hear from you. What are you seeing on your walks and in your backyards? Guests: Ryan Guillou, director of collections and conservation, Gardens of Golden Gate Park, includes the botanical gardens, conservatory of flowers and Japanese tea garden Libby Ellwood, ecologist and director of education, outreach, diversity, & inclusion and global collaborations, iDigBio

This vibrant blue invertebrate and San Francisco resident that fell victim to the city's development. We're talking streetcars, sand dunes and sayonara for this beautiful insect on this episode of Extinction Event.

Sarah Diegnan is ChartHop's VP of Customer Experience, after leading implementations at Acuity Brands, Opower and Oracle, she brings operational excellence to creating and delivering a world class customer experience for all ChartHop's customers. She is an expert in leading a customer journey, partnering with customers from the first moments of onboarding through successful execution of all account goals, making sure customers are getting the most out of CharterHop. In addition to her SaaS experience, Sarah was a practicing structural engineer at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and worked for the commercial real estate developer, Tishman Speyer.   Questions   Can you share a little bit about your journey, how you got to where you are today? What catalyst got you into the customer experience journey? And just a little bit about who you are in your own words? Could you tell us a little bit about your company ChartHop and what is the service or product that you provide? What is your view on the customer journey through an HR lens. And how do you think EX impacts customer outcomes, the ins and outs of a customer health score? Are there any emerging trends that you've seen in the CX space, in the employee experience space that you think organization should really be paying greater attention to or tapping into as we embark on our new year? Could you share with us what's the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely can't live without in your business? Now could you also share with us maybe one or two books that have had a great impact on you, it could be a book that you read a very long time ago, or even one that you read quite recently, but it surely has created an impact maybe had great value in your leadership delivery and you just really would love to share it with us. Could you share with our listeners what's the one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? Either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people. Where can listeners find you online? In times of adversity or challenge, do you have a quote or saying that you tend to revert to, it kind of helps to get you back on track or get you back refocused if for any reason you get derailed.   Highlights   Sarah's Journey   Me: Now, we always like to give our guests an opportunity to share with us in their own words, a little bit about their journey, how you got to where you are today? What catalyst got you into the customer experience journey? And just a little bit about who you are in your own words?   Sarah shared that sometimes she likes to say that she has a bit of a meandering path to where she is today. But she thinks that's actually something that is common amongst customer experience professionals is it takes a lot of different skill sets and she thinks you can build those at a lot of different areas. And so, she started her career as a structural engineer, was something that she always wanted to be when she was a little kid, people would ask, what do you want to do, and she wanted to design buildings, she wanted to design skyscrapers.   And so, that is what she did, she set out to do it, and she went to school, she went to engineering school, and she loved it, she really did. And she thinks architecture and buildings will always have a very, very special place in her heart. However, what she started realizing when she hit about year 4, year 5, being a structural engineer is that it's a very narrow piece of a we'll call it building lifecycle, very, very narrow.   And she had the fortune to work with a project manager who was representing the owner, and she really had purview of the whole project, sort of end and all the pieces coming together to build these amazing buildings. And she had lunch with her and said, “I would like to do your job, can you tell me how to do it?” And one of the first things she said was, “Well, I went to business school, because you need to learn the business side of the business or of buildings.” She was like, great. So, she did that, she went to business school and coming out of business school, she thought working in real estate development was the place for her.   She did that for a couple years, and again, realized it was still a little too narrow in a lot of ways. And living in the Bay Area, it's really easy to get the start-up itch, you sort of look around, and tech is everywhere. And she had the fortune of literally running into a friend, running in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. And she said, “You need to talk to my sister. She is at a start-up and they're selling commercial lighting controls and they need an engineer who understands buildings, building operators, engineers.” And she said, “You know what, I know that person, that person is me.” And that was her very first job. We called it project operations and this was a long time ago. But it was customer experience.   It was the start of customer experience, and it was sort of the start of her journey to where she is today. ChartHop is her fourth start-up and throughout her career, she's sort of grown into taking on more and more teams and have gotten to a point today where she leads all of customer experience at ChartHop, and that includes professional services, their customer success team, their technical support team, and their account management slash renewals team.   So, sort of a crazy story how she got here, but the reality is, it's working with customers that she loves. It's the project management and the operational piece and she's sort of grown that throughout the years as an engineer, as a real estate professional and now as a tech professional.   About ChartHop and What Service or Product Does ChartHop Provide?   Me: Amazing. So, Sarah, you are at a company called ChartHop and for those of our listeners that don't know what ChartHop does, could you tell us a little bit about your company and what is the service or product that you provide?   Sarah stated that it's a great question, she's happy to talk a little bit about it. So, ChartHop is really transforming the way companies think about managing and supporting their people. So, what that means is, they can take people data from all your different systems, so your HR system, your talent acquisition, system equity, and put it all in one place.   And the thing that makes ChartHop really special is that it's not just for HR professionals, or it's not just for the CEO, it is truly for every single person at the company, your individual contributors, all the way through to your CEO. And the reason why that's so important is because what you're doing is you're creating a very transparent organization; you're creating a one stop shop for everybody in the organization to get all the information that they need.   If you're an individual contributor, it's really all the information that you need to understand and navigate the organization, or someone in her role, it gives her the ability to look in one place to understand everybody in her organization, where might they be on a vesting schedule? How long have they been at ChartHop? What has their performance look like over the years?   And so, it's, it's really designed to create a transparent organization. It's designed to make sure that leadership is making good decisions, especially when we start thinking about DEIB in the workplace. And one of the key attributes is really, it's for everyone at a company, not just the HR team.   Views on the Customer Journey – How Does EX Impact Customer Outcomes – Ins and Outs of a Customer Health Score   Me: So, HR plays a very important role in an organization. And I'd love for you to maybe take a few minutes and discuss with us your view on the customer journey through an HR lens. And how do you think EX impacts customer outcomes, the ins and outs of a customer health score?   Sarah shared thar those are all great questions. And she thinks part of what attracted her to ChartHop was this sort of, she'll call it intersection of HR and or employee experience and customer experience. Like most people that are listening to this podcast, if you're managing and leading a customer experience team, it probably means that you are leading a pretty big team. When you're talking about services in an organization, it's human capital. If robots could do our jobs, if a health score, which she'll get into in a minute, was just two plus two is four, we wouldn't be here.   And so, you have to take care of your people and she thinks that's first and foremost why EX and CX are in a lot of ways the same thing, and they influence each other. She thinks time and time again, we've learned that happy employees, employees that understand the mission, employees that are driven by that mission, are going to be your highest producers, and they're going to be the most productive.   And if you think about putting that motivated, high performer on a call with your customer, that's infectious, absolutely infectious. That motivation and that desire to drive value with the customer is going to translate every single time. And so, it is so important as CX leaders to really be thinking about that. And really thinking about how to engage your team, not just in, “Hey, these are the metrics, we need to hit as a company,” or “Hey, this is what you need to do with your customers.” But really investing time, investing professional development, and really thinking about the employee experience, because it is going to translate.   She also thinks one of the interesting things she's been able to do at ChartHop is really work closely with head of HR and think about how the employee experience is truly also how we think about a customer journey. If you think about those magic moments for a customer journey, there's onboarding and implementation, you have to nail that, you have to have customers coming out of that phase of the journey, and just feeling so excited and so pumped that they bought ChartHop and that they're using ChartHop, that's the same thing you want your employees to feel when they're coming out of onboarding, internal onboarding, you want them to feel so excited, you want them to feel so empowered. You want them to understand what they're doing at ChartHop.   And so, you can really see the overlap, and this is something she's worked really closely with their head of HR at ChartHop to make sure that they are tracking together so to speak. When you start thinking about driving adoption for customer journey, that is the exact same as working with someone on your team on what their professional development is. You chart out someone's professional development the exact same way you're going to chart out a customer's objective planning with you.   And so, really thinking about all of those things and making sure that they're aligned. And one of the questions asked also was to talk a little bit about health score. She thinks health scores are absolutely fascinating. And also, just really where you get to sort of like, leave your fingerprint, your true unique fingerprint on how you think about your customer base. She mentioned this before, two plus two is four, that's great and she's sure all the professionals out there could put together a really, really smart mathematical equation to take you to the number of support tickets, bugs, time to launch, outcome of a use case and sort of put a number together and come out with a magic number at the other end.   But that doesn't really capture everything that goes into customer health. It is truly an art and a science. And she thinks science is really important, it is important to calculate that number, that magic number that says, “Hey, if they're above 80%, they're happy, below 80% they're yellow, below 30% they're red.”   Great, so we have a stoplight. But what is the customer saying to you on the phone? What is the customer bringing to you in your weekly calls? What is the customer saying during quarterly business reviews?   That's going to be a different level of understanding of how happy that customer is.   And one example that she gives a lot to her team is just thinking through if you have a customer who is really excited about working with you on beta features, or alpha features, and it's like, “Hey, I want to be there, I want to test it with you.” Then if you're basing their health solely on sort of like number of bugs, it's not going to look pretty.   But if that customer is signing up for it, and excited about it, then there's a different overlay that you need to put on that customer. And so, she really truly thinks it's an art and a science of how you think about health score.   And again, just to sort of come full circle, it's the same exact thing with employees.   You can't just look at one dimension, humans are multi dimension, and you have to look at a lot of different factors to really assess. Is this person a flight risk or are you going to keep them for another couple of years. And so, it's really thinking about things both from just a pure human perspective and from a numbers.   Me: Brilliant, awesome, thank you for sharing all of that Sarah, great insights and nuggets as it relates to HR customer experience, the health score, integrating all of that looking at the human dimension is so, so important if you really want to create a strong culture.   Trends Emerging in 2023 as it Relates to Customer Experience and Employee Experience   Me: Now, you've been in the customer experience space for quite some time. And I just wanted to know, as we exit one calendar year and jump into another, are there any emerging trends that you've seen in the CX space, in the employee experience space that you think organizations should really be paying greater attention to or tapping into as we embark on our new year?   Sarah shared that this is such a great question. And something she's been definitely thinking a lot about, especially as she's sure most people are doing this too, going into planning, going into next year's fiscal planning. She thinks it's a couple of things. And she's used this word before, and so she doesn't want to overuse it, but it's relevant, is transparency.   If she thinks about the CX organization and just employees in general, they're sort of demanding, she thinks that's the right word. They're demanding more transparency.   We've seen a lot about pay transparency and really posting pay scales. And that ripples through all parts of the organization, it's not just pay, it's truly transparency in who reports to who and what are people working on and what deals are closing. And so, she thinks that's a really big trend that folks need to take a step back and make sure that they're being as transparent as possible with their employees.   She thinks that also leads true because of the remote environment. She knows a lot of companies ChartHop is one of them, they're still remote and so really focusing on transparency to her also means focusing on communication, sort of overly communicating with your employees, making sure they truly understand what we're all doing right, what direction are we pointed at, what is our mission? What should we be thinking about day in and day out.   And she thinks that that actually also is something that she's thinking about with their customers. Transparency with their customers looks a little bit different but it's something that she's continuing to see and think about.   Every one again, this goes back to sort of the human nature, like humans have different ways of learning and that is something that she's hearing customers really sort of demand again, use that word demand from us right now, as customer success professionals is customers want to learn how they want to learn.   And what she means by that is she actually truly spoke to a customer this morning, that was like, “Hey, your CSMs are great. But I sort of want to figure some of the stuff out myself. I want to read a help article.” She has other customers say to her, “I want more videos. I want more in app communication.”   And she sort of feels like all of that is about communication, all of that is about transparency, all of that is about sort of meeting people where they are. And so, she thinks that's a big trend to be thinking about as you're thinking through your customer journey for your specific product is all the different ways to communicate with your customer. And a not be annoying.   So not to be annoying, but just sort of meet the customer where they're at, like, “Hey, if you want to read something, here's the link to the doc, if you want to see a step by step video, here's driving to you're learning centre.” And so, that's a big trend that she's seeing right now is customers really wanting to choose their path and sort of choose how they want to learn about your product.   Me: It's interesting you said that because I actually attended a Customer Success Conference in Washington in October, and I sat in a session where they spoke about community and more organizations building out their community pages on their websites where if you do have an issue, you don't actually have to get in touch with the company because the community can help you because other people have had similar issues, and I thought that was so brilliant that if we could really get more of that.   When I think about my own devices, like even my Apple computer or my phone, if there's something wrong or something I'm not sure about, I automatically go to Google. And usually, Google populates based on the SEO, the Apple community comes up like in the first two or three resolution options that Google provides you with and 9 out of 10 times someone else has had that issue, and the answer is right there waiting for you. So, I totally get when they say they want to have the opportunity to be able to fix it on their own.   Sarah shared that she loves that. She thinks community is so important. She also thinks that that's where you get really cool thought Leadership. You get folks that are using your product in ways that you had no idea, you're like, wow, she would get on the phone with customers and be like, “Wow, that was super clever. I never thought about doing it that way.” And so, she loves the concept of a community, and we can all learn from our peers in so many ways. She loves that.   App, Website or Tool that Sarah Absolutely Can't Live Without in Her Business   When asked about an online resource that she can't live without in her business, Sarah stated that that's such a great question. So, first and foremost, she do have to say it is that again, she mentioned this a couple moments ago is that part of her job description is leading a large team, it's just always what it's like in a customer experience organization. So, to be totally true, ChartHop has really changed how she manage teams. And so, she'd say that's tool number one. Even at some point, if she were to leave, she would definitely advocate for that platform. It helps her navigate so many things with her team that it's so important.   She thinks number two, is video conferencing. She knows that there is Zoom fatigue in the world, she truly appreciates it, and she feels it. But being face to face with your customer is priceless. It is so hard to pick up on tone in an email, it's so hard to really convey what you're trying to say without having that face to face and with so much less travel, that is so critical. You have to put a face to a name, that's how you build relationships and build rapport.   And then the last one she's going to say, which goes back to her very nerdy engineering days because she at her core, she is an engineer is really Excel or Google Sheets. She uses Excel all the time, it's what she needs to run her business.   Me: Brilliant, brilliant Excel is a very powerful tool.   Sarah agreed absolutely, people don't get as jazzed about it, but she does, it's truly her go to.   Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Sarah   When asked about books that have had an impact, Sarah shared that she has one in mind that she read probably about 8 years ago, and she recently reread it, because their CEO loves it as well. And so, he had all the executive team read it, it's called The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable, the title of it is so great. It's by Patrick Lencioni. It's so great, because it's transferable both from a leadership team perspective, but also from a CX perspective.   And so, what she means by that is, the whole concept of the book is that there is a first team, and your first team is not who you think it is, a lot of people think that your first team are the people that report to you. And the concept is that that's not actually true. Your first team are your peers in the organization and the reason why it's your peers is because together you are a matrix. You're a matrix organization, and together, you all need to work to reach the ultimate company goal, not your own goal, it's not like “How does Sara reach her goals across customer experience?” No, no, no, it's how do we, as an executive team work together to reach our goals as a company?   And so, it's really this concept of you have to have a common goal number one, and like, your team goal can't outshine the common goal. And the reason why she likes it for customer experience, as well and it's something that she drives with her leadership team, is they are a matrix environment, they have four separate teams that report to her, but together, these four teams need to work together for the one common goal of creating the absolute best customer experience for their customers.   And so, if that is what we're keeping in mind, if truly every single day we show up and say our goal is to provide the best customer experience to our customers, then the right thing to do is very easy, or who does what becomes very clear. And so, it's a book that really resonates with her, and she recommends, it's a very quick read. And she recommends it as both a CX professional, but also just as you're continuing to sort of move up the ladder as you think about working across teams as well sort of cross functionally, it's an absolute great read.   Me: Very nice. So, we'll definitely have the link to that book in the show notes of this episode. While you were explaining what the book was about in summary, especially the example you gave off, one person's goal should not outshine the overall goal of the company. I thought of football, I guess because we're in World Cup season now. And I said to myself, one person's goal cannot outshine the overall team's goal, which is to win the game.   Sarah agreed, exactly. So, she coaches her two boys' soccer team. They call it Soccer, Football. There are some really great football soccer commercials happening now by the way.   And it's so true, it's something that she really talks to the kids about from a young age, both when you score a goal and when the team scores against you, it's not the goalie's fault, it went through every single player before it got to the goalie. And same concept, the person who scores it touched a lot of feet before it got to that person that eventually put the ball on the back of the net. So, you are exactly right. She is a sports nerd. Same concept, so she loves it.   Me: That just popped in my mind a while ago, I was like wow, it's such a simple statement. But it's so profound and you everybody kind of has that mindset in an organization, I think the employee and the customer experience can be phenomenal.   What Sarah is Really Excited About Now!   When asked about something she's really excited about, Sarah shared that that's a really great question. So, she'll give two answers. Personally, what she's working on, she's a member of an organization, it's a women's networking organization. And they meet once a month with a peer group, is actually interesting, this is now becoming a theme, a peer group. So, other women who are at her same level and sort of going through sort of the same things and they're all in the same macro environment.   And so, even if maybe some of them are not customer experience professionals, they're marketing professionals, most are in the start-up environment. But it's something that she's really embracing. And each month they meet and we all bring to the table something that they're facing or something that they're thinking about or challenge that they're going through with the company, and really working on being reflective, that is something that she's working on is, when you are in it every day with customers, you sort of create this world where you're sort of go, go, go, go go.   And she thinks that a little bit more reflection is always really good. And so, that is something that professionally she's working on is sort of taking those, it's only two hours once a month, but really taking the time to reflect like, sort of prepare for those meetings and sort of reflect on herself.   And then for her team, this might sound a little funny, but she's actually right now, hiring a new leader for the for the customer success team. And she's so excited to partner with this new leader because the customer success managers at ChartHop are absolutely phenomenal, truly phenomenal. And she's excited to get a leader in seat that is really going to work with them, both from a professional development standpoint, and also just a process perspective but really dive in and take that team to the next level. And so, that's really her focus is just finding and hiring such an amazing leader for an amazing team.   Where Can We Find Sarah Online   LinkedIn – Sarah Diegnan   Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Sarah Uses   When asked about a quote or saying that she tends to revert to, Sarah stated yes, that's a good one. One of the things she thinks about is, and the folks out there listening, and the customer experience org can sort of relate to this is that some days you show up and you have a list of things to do and none of those things get done. Because at the end of the day, we are going to follow the lead of our customers, and so, if a customer needs to talk to her, she's going to drop everything to talk to that customer and she's sure every single person that's listening does the same exact thing.   And so, in the moments when she's thinking to herself, “Wow, I am buried. Like, how am I going to get all of this done?” She goes back to something that her mom would always say to her, “It'll all get done, Sarah, it will all get done.” And it's something that she thinks about a lot. How it all gets done is sort of in the background, it's truly just believing in yourself, and believing that you're going to figure it out and having that confidence that as her mom would say, “It's all going get done, Sarah, it's all going to get done.”   Me: Thank you so much for sharing Sarah, for taking time out of your very busy schedule to hop on this podcast, have this great conversation, give our listeners greater insights as to what they can do, what they can improve on, what are some of the emerging trends that you've seen, the fact that we need to be more transparent, we need to be more collaborative. Some of the different applications that you've used and are continuing to use to enhance your work that you do daily to improve your productivity as well as to get your job done. And of course, working towards the overall goal which is to create that magical experience for your customers at ChartHop.   Please connect with us on Twitter @navigatingcx and also join our Private Facebook Community – Navigating the Customer Experience and listen to our FB Lives weekly with a new guest   Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners   Links The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni   The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience   Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience.”   The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty. This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately! This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others. Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience!

First it was JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park. Now some activists are eyeing San Francisco's Embarcadero as the City's next car-free zone. For more, KCBS Radio's Bret Burkahrt and Pat Thurston spoke with KCBS Insider Phil Matier.

#202 - Thanksgiving is the biggest day for running races in the United States. Over a million runners participate in races across the country. And Turkey Trots are so fun! One of the most fun is the neighborhood SF Turkey Trot! This year was special as it was the 20th Annual! This week, I review the race, as well as talk to runners before the race! Martha Runs the World websitehttps://www.martharunstheworld.com/Email:martharunstheworld@gmail.comInstagram:https://www.instagram.com/martha_runs_sf/

Episode one hundred and fifty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “White Rabbit”, Jefferson Airplane, and the rise of the San Francisco sound. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three-minute bonus episode available, on "Omaha" by Moby Grape. 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/ Erratum I refer to Back to Methuselah by Robert Heinlein. This is of course a play by George Bernard Shaw. What I meant to say was Methuselah's Children. Resources I hope to upload a Mixcloud tomorrow, and will edit it in, but have had some problems with the site today. Jefferson Airplane's first four studio albums, plus a 1968 live album, can be found in this box set. I've referred to three main books here. Got a Revolution!: The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane by Jeff Tamarkin is written with the co-operation of the band members, but still finds room to criticise them. Jefferson Airplane On Track by Richard Molesworth is a song-by-song guide to the band's music. And Been So Long: My Life and Music by Jorma Kaukonen is Kaukonen's autobiography. Some information on Skip Spence and Matthew Katz also comes from What's Big and Purple and Lives in the Ocean?: The Moby Grape Story, by Cam Cobb, which I also used for this week's bonus. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, I need to confess an important and hugely embarrassing error in this episode. I've only ever seen Marty Balin's name written down, never heard it spoken, and only after recording the episode, during the editing process, did I discover I mispronounce it throughout. It's usually an advantage for the podcast that I get my information from books rather than TV documentaries and the like, because they contain far more information, but occasionally it causes problems like that. My apologies. Also a brief note that this episode contains some mentions of racism, antisemitism, drug and alcohol abuse, and gun violence. One of the themes we've looked at in recent episodes is the way the centre of the musical world -- at least the musical world as it was regarded by the people who thought of themselves as hip in the mid-sixties -- was changing in 1967. Up to this point, for a few years there had been two clear centres of the rock and pop music worlds. In the UK, there was London, and any British band who meant anything had to base themselves there. And in the US, at some point around 1963, the centre of the music industry had moved West. Up to then it had largely been based in New York, and there was still a thriving industry there as of the mid sixties. But increasingly the records that mattered, that everyone in the country had been listening to, had come out of LA Soul music was, of course, still coming primarily from Detroit and from the Country-Soul triangle in Tennessee and Alabama, but when it came to the new brand of electric-guitar rock that was taking over the airwaves, LA was, up until the first few months of 1967, the only city that was competing with London, and was the place to be. But as we heard in the episode on "San Francisco", with the Monterey Pop Festival all that started to change. While the business part of the music business remained centred in LA, and would largely remain so, LA was no longer the hip place to be. Almost overnight, jangly guitars, harmonies, and Brian Jones hairstyles were out, and feedback, extended solos, and droopy moustaches were in. The place to be was no longer LA, but a few hundred miles North, in San Francisco -- something that the LA bands were not all entirely happy about: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Who Needs the Peace Corps?"] In truth, the San Francisco music scene, unlike many of the scenes we've looked at so far in this series, had rather a limited impact on the wider world of music. Bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company were all both massively commercially successful and highly regarded by critics, but unlike many of the other bands we've looked at before and will look at in future, they didn't have much of an influence on the bands that would come after them, musically at least. Possibly this is because the music from the San Francisco scene was always primarily that -- music created by and for a specific group of people, and inextricable from its context. The San Francisco musicians were defining themselves by their geographical location, their peers, and the situation they were in, and their music was so specifically of the place and time that to attempt to copy it outside of that context would appear ridiculous, so while many of those bands remain much loved to this day, and many made some great music, it's very hard to point to ways in which that music influenced later bands. But what they did influence was the whole of rock music culture. For at least the next thirty years, and arguably to this day, the parameters in which rock musicians worked if they wanted to be taken seriously – their aesthetic and political ideals, their methods of collaboration, the cultural norms around drug use and sexual promiscuity, ideas of artistic freedom and authenticity, the choice of acceptable instruments – in short, what it meant to be a rock musician rather than a pop, jazz, country, or soul artist – all those things were defined by the cultural and behavioural norms of the San Francisco scene between about 1966 and 68. Without the San Francisco scene there's no Woodstock, no Rolling Stone magazine, no Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, no hippies, no groupies, no rock stars. So over the next few months we're going to take several trips to the Bay Area, and look at the bands which, for a brief time, defined the counterculture in America. The story of Jefferson Airplane -- and unlike other bands we've looked at recently, like The Pink Floyd and The Buffalo Springfield, they never had a definite article at the start of their name to wither away like a vestigial organ in subsequent years -- starts with Marty Balin. Balin was born in Ohio, but was a relatively sickly child -- he later talked about being autistic, and seems to have had the chronic illnesses that so often go with neurodivergence -- so in the hope that the dry air would be good for his chest his family moved to Arizona. Then when his father couldn't find work there, they moved further west to San Francisco, in the Haight-Ashbury area, long before that area became the byword for the hippie movement. But it was in LA that he started his music career, and got his surname. Balin had been named Marty Buchwald as a kid, but when he was nineteen he had accompanied a friend to LA to visit a music publisher, and had ended up singing backing vocals on her demos. While he was there, he had encountered the arranger Jimmy Haskell. Haskell was on his way to becoming one of the most prominent arrangers in the music industry, and in his long career he would go on to do arrangements for Bobby Gentry, Blondie, Steely Dan, Simon and Garfunkel, and many others. But at the time he was best known for his work on Ricky Nelson's hits: [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, "Hello Mary Lou"] Haskell thought that Marty had the makings of a Ricky Nelson style star, as he was a good-looking young man with a decent voice, and he became a mentor for the young man. Making the kind of records that Haskell arranged was expensive, and so Haskell suggested a deal to him -- if Marty's father would pay for studio time and musicians, Haskell would make a record with him and find him a label to put it out. Marty's father did indeed pay for the studio time and the musicians -- some of the finest working in LA at the time. The record, released under the name Marty Balin, featured Jack Nitzsche on keyboards, Earl Palmer on drums, Milt Jackson on vibraphone, Red Callender on bass, and Glen Campbell and Barney Kessell on guitars, and came out on Challenge Records, a label owned by Gene Autry: [Excerpt: Marty Balin, "Nobody But You"] Neither that, nor Balin's follow-up single, sold a noticeable amount of copies, and his career as a teen idol was over before it had begun. Instead, as many musicians of his age did, he decided to get into folk music, joining a vocal harmony group called the Town Criers, who patterned themselves after the Weavers, and performed the same kind of material that every other clean-cut folk vocal group was performing at the time -- the kind of songs that John Phillips and Steve Stills and Cass Elliot and Van Dyke Parks and the rest were all performing in their own groups at the same time. The Town Criers never made any records while they were together, but some archival recordings of them have been released over the decades: [Excerpt: The Town Criers, "900 Miles"] The Town Criers split up, and Balin started performing as a solo folkie again. But like all those other then-folk musicians, Balin realised that he had to adapt to the K/T-event level folk music extinction that happened when the Beatles hit America like a meteorite. He had to form a folk-rock group if he wanted to survive -- and given that there were no venues for such a group to play in San Francisco, he also had to start a nightclub for them to play in. He started hanging around the hootenannies in the area, looking for musicians who might form an electric band. The first person he decided on was a performer called Paul Kantner, mainly because he liked his attitude. Kantner had got on stage in front of a particularly drunk, loud, crowd, and performed precisely half a song before deciding he wasn't going to perform in front of people like that and walking off stage. Kantner was the only member of the new group to be a San Franciscan -- he'd been born and brought up in the city. He'd got into folk music at university, where he'd also met a guitar player named Jorma Kaukonen, who had turned him on to cannabis, and the two had started giving music lessons at a music shop in San Jose. There Kantner had also been responsible for booking acts at a local folk club, where he'd first encountered acts like Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, a jug band which included Jerry Garcia, Pigpen McKernan, and Bob Weir, who would later go on to be the core members of the Grateful Dead: [Excerpt: Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, "In the Jailhouse Now"] Kantner had moved around a bit between Northern and Southern California, and had been friendly with two other musicians on the Californian folk scene, David Crosby and Roger McGuinn. When their new group, the Byrds, suddenly became huge, Kantner became aware of the possibility of doing something similar himself, and so when Marty Balin approached him to form a band, he agreed. On bass, they got in a musician called Bob Harvey, who actually played double bass rather than electric, and who stuck to that for the first few gigs the group played -- he had previously been in a band called the Slippery Rock String Band. On drums, they brought in Jerry Peloquin, who had formerly worked for the police, but now had a day job as an optician. And on vocals, they brought in Signe Toley -- who would soon marry and change her name to Signe Anderson, so that's how I'll talk about her to avoid confusion. The group also needed a lead guitarist though -- both Balin and Kantner were decent rhythm players and singers, but they needed someone who was a better instrumentalist. They decided to ask Kantner's old friend Jorma Kaukonen. Kaukonen was someone who was seriously into what would now be called Americana or roots music. He'd started playing the guitar as a teenager, not like most people of his generation inspired by Elvis or Buddy Holly, but rather after a friend of his had shown him how to play an old Carter Family song, "Jimmy Brown the Newsboy": [Excerpt: The Carter Family, "Jimmy Brown the Newsboy"] Kaukonen had had a far more interesting life than most of the rest of the group. His father had worked for the State Department -- and there's some suggestion he'd worked for the CIA -- and the family had travelled all over the world, staying in Pakistan, the Philippines, and Finland. For most of his childhood, he'd gone by the name Jerry, because other kids beat him up for having a foreign name and called him a Nazi, but by the time he turned twenty he was happy enough using his birth name. Kaukonen wasn't completely immune to the appeal of rock and roll -- he'd formed a rock band, The Triumphs, with his friend Jack Casady when he was a teenager, and he loved Ricky Nelson's records -- but his fate as a folkie had been pretty much sealed when he went to Antioch College. There he met up with a blues guitarist called Ian Buchanan. Buchanan never had much of a career as a professional, but he had supposedly spent nine years studying with the blues and ragtime guitar legend Rev. Gary Davis, and he was certainly a fine guitarist, as can be heard on his contribution to The Blues Project, the album Elektra put out of white Greenwich Village musicians like John Sebastian and Dave Van Ronk playing old blues songs: [Excerpt: Ian Buchanan, "The Winding Boy"] Kaukonen became something of a disciple of Buchanan -- he said later that Buchanan probably taught him how to play because he was such a terrible player and Buchanan couldn't stand to listen to it -- as did John Hammond Jr, another student at Antioch at the same time. After studying at Antioch, Kaukonen started to travel around, including spells in Greenwich Village and in the Philippines, before settling in Santa Clara, where he studied for a sociology degree and became part of a social circle that included Dino Valenti, Jerry Garcia, and Billy Roberts, the credited writer of "Hey Joe". He also started performing as a duo with a singer called Janis Joplin. Various of their recordings from this period circulate, mostly recorded at Kaukonen's home with the sound of his wife typing in the background while the duo rehearse, as on this performance of an old Bessie Smith song: [Excerpt: Jorma Kaukonen and Janis Joplin, "Nobody Loves You When You're Down and Out"] By 1965 Kaukonen saw himself firmly as a folk-blues purist, who would not even think of playing rock and roll music, which he viewed with more than a little contempt. But he allowed himself to be brought along to audition for the new group, and Ken Kesey happened to be there. Kesey was a novelist who had written two best-selling books, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion, and used the financial independence that gave him to organise a group of friends who called themselves the Merry Pranksters, who drove from coast to coast and back again in a psychedelic-painted bus, before starting a series of events that became known as Acid Tests, parties at which everyone was on LSD, immortalised in Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Nobody has ever said why Kesey was there, but he had brought along an Echoplex, a reverb unit one could put a guitar through -- and nobody has explained why Kesey, who wasn't a musician, had an Echoplex to hand. But Kaukonen loved the sound that he could get by putting his guitar through the device, and so for that reason more than any other he decided to become an electric player and join the band, going out and buying a Rickenbacker twelve-string and Vox Treble Booster because that was what Roger McGuinn used. He would later also get a Guild Thunderbird six-string guitar and a Standel Super Imperial amp, following the same principle of buying the equipment used by other guitarists he liked, as they were what Zal Yanovsky of the Lovin' Spoonful used. He would use them for all his six-string playing for the next couple of years, only later to discover that the Lovin' Spoonful despised them and only used them because they had an endorsement deal with the manufacturers. Kaukonen was also the one who came up with the new group's name. He and his friends had a running joke where they had "Bluesman names", things like "Blind Outrage" and "Little Sun Goldfarb". Kaukonen's bluesman name, given to him by his friend Steve Talbot, had been Blind Thomas Jefferson Airplane, a reference to the 1920s blues guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Match Box Blues"] At the band meeting where they were trying to decide on a name, Kaukonen got frustrated at the ridiculous suggestions that were being made, and said "You want a stupid name? Howzabout this... Jefferson Airplane?" He said in his autobiography "It was one of those rare moments when everyone in the band agreed, and that was that. I think it was the only band meeting that ever allowed me to come away smiling." The newly-named Jefferson Airplane started to rehearse at the Matrix Club, the club that Balin had decided to open. This was run with three sound engineer friends, who put in the seed capital for the club. Balin had stock options in the club, which he got by trading a share of the band's future earnings to his partners, though as the group became bigger he eventually sold his stock in the club back to his business partners. Before their first public performance, they started working with a manager, Matthew Katz, mostly because Katz had access to a recording of a then-unreleased Bob Dylan song, "Lay Down Your Weary Tune": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Lay Down Your Weary Tune"] The group knew that the best way for a folk-rock band to make a name for themselves was to perform a Dylan song nobody else had yet heard, and so they agreed to be managed by Katz. Katz started a pre-publicity blitz, giving out posters, badges, and bumper stickers saying "Jefferson Airplane Loves You" all over San Francisco -- and insisting that none of the band members were allowed to say "Hello" when they answered the phone any more, they had to say "Jefferson Airplane Loves You!" For their early rehearsals and gigs, they were performing almost entirely cover versions of blues and folk songs, things like Fred Neil's "The Other Side of This Life" and Dino Valenti's "Get Together" which were the common currency of the early folk-rock movement, and songs by their friends, like one called "Flower Bomb" by David Crosby, which Crosby now denies ever having written. They did start writing the odd song, but at this point they were more focused on performance than on writing. They also hired a press agent, their friend Bill Thompson. Thompson was friends with the two main music writers at the San Francisco Chronicle, Ralph Gleason, the famous jazz critic, who had recently started also reviewing rock music, and John Wasserman. Thompson got both men to come to the opening night of the Matrix, and both gave the group glowing reviews in the Chronicle. Record labels started sniffing around the group immediately as a result of this coverage, and according to Katz he managed to get a bidding war started by making sure that when A&R men came to the club there were always two of them from different labels, so they would see the other person and realise they weren't the only ones interested. But before signing a record deal they needed to make some personnel changes. The first member to go was Jerry Peloquin, for both musical and personal reasons. Peloquin was used to keeping strict time and the other musicians had a more free-flowing idea of what tempo they should be playing at, but also he had worked for the police while the other members were all taking tons of illegal drugs. The final break with Peloquin came when he did the rest of the group a favour -- Paul Kantner's glasses broke during a rehearsal, and as Peloquin was an optician he offered to take them back to his shop and fix them. When he got back, he found them auditioning replacements for him. He beat Kantner up, and that was the end of Jerry Peloquin in Jefferson Airplane. His replacement was Skip Spence, who the group had met when he had accompanied three friends to the Matrix, which they were using as a rehearsal room. Spence's friends went on to be the core members of Quicksilver Messenger Service along with Dino Valenti: [Excerpt: Quicksilver Messenger Service, "Dino's Song"] But Balin decided that Spence looked like a rock star, and told him that he was now Jefferson Airplane's drummer, despite Spence being a guitarist and singer, not a drummer. But Spence was game, and learned to play the drums. Next they needed to get rid of Bob Harvey. According to Harvey, the decision to sack him came after David Crosby saw the band rehearsing and said "Nice song, but get rid of the bass player" (along with an expletive before the word bass which I can't say without incurring the wrath of Apple). Crosby denies ever having said this. Harvey had started out in the group on double bass, but to show willing he'd switched in his last few gigs to playing an electric bass. When he was sacked by the group, he returned to double bass, and to the Slippery Rock String Band, who released one single in 1967: [Excerpt: The Slippery Rock String Band, "Tule Fog"] Harvey's replacement was Kaukonen's old friend Jack Casady, who Kaukonen knew was now playing bass, though he'd only ever heard him playing guitar when they'd played together. Casady was rather cautious about joining a rock band, but then Kaukonen told him that the band were getting fifty dollars a week salary each from Katz, and Casady flew over from Washington DC to San Francisco to join the band. For the first few gigs, he used Bob Harvey's bass, which Harvey was good enough to lend him despite having been sacked from the band. Unfortunately, right from the start Casady and Kantner didn't get on. When Casady flew in from Washington, he had a much more clean-cut appearance than the rest of the band -- one they've described as being nerdy, with short, slicked-back, side-parted hair and a handlebar moustache. Kantner insisted that Casady shave the moustache off, and he responded by shaving only one side, so in profile on one side he looked clean-shaven, while from the other side he looked like he had a full moustache. Kantner also didn't like Casady's general attitude, or his playing style, at all -- though most critics since this point have pointed to Casady's bass playing as being the most interesting and distinctive thing about Jefferson Airplane's style. This lineup seems to have been the one that travelled to LA to audition for various record companies -- a move that immediately brought the group a certain amount of criticism for selling out, both for auditioning for record companies and for going to LA at all, two things that were already anathema on the San Francisco scene. The only audition anyone remembers them having specifically is one for Phil Spector, who according to Kaukonen was waving a gun around during the audition, so he and Casady walked out. Around this time as well, the group performed at an event billed as "A Tribute to Dr. Strange", organised by the radical hippie collective Family Dog. Marvel Comics, rather than being the multi-billion-dollar Disney-owned corporate juggernaut it is now, was regarded as a hip, almost underground, company -- and around this time they briefly started billing their comics not as comics but as "Marvel Pop Art Productions". The magical adventures of Dr. Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts, and in particular the art by far-right libertarian artist Steve Ditko, were regarded as clear parallels to both the occult dabblings and hallucinogen use popular among the hippies, though Ditko had no time for either, following as he did an extreme version of Ayn Rand's Objectivism. It was at the Tribute to Dr. Strange that Jefferson Airplane performed for the first time with a band named The Great Society, whose lead singer, Grace Slick, would later become very important in Jefferson Airplane's story: [Excerpt: The Great Society, "Someone to Love"] That gig was also the first one where the band and their friends noticed that large chunks of the audience were now dressing up in costumes that were reminiscent of the Old West. Up to this point, while Katz had been managing the group and paying them fifty dollars a week even on weeks when they didn't perform, he'd been doing so without a formal contract, in part because the group didn't trust him much. But now they were starting to get interest from record labels, and in particular RCA Records desperately wanted them. While RCA had been the label who had signed Elvis Presley, they had otherwise largely ignored rock and roll, considering that since they had the biggest rock star in the world they didn't need other ones, and concentrating largely on middle-of-the-road acts. But by the mid-sixties Elvis' star had faded somewhat, and they were desperate to get some of the action for the new music -- and unlike the other major American labels, they didn't have a reciprocal arrangement with a British label that allowed them to release anything by any of the new British stars. The group were introduced to RCA by Rod McKuen, a songwriter and poet who later became America's best-selling poet and wrote songs that sold over a hundred million copies. At this point McKuen was in his Jacques Brel phase, recording loose translations of the Belgian songwriter's songs with McKuen translating the lyrics: [Excerpt: Rod McKuen, "Seasons in the Sun"] McKuen thought that Jefferson Airplane might be a useful market for his own songs, and brought the group to RCA. RCA offered Jefferson Airplane twenty-five thousand dollars to sign with them, and Katz convinced the group that RCA wouldn't give them this money without them having signed a management contract with him. Kaukonen, Kantner, Spence, and Balin all signed without much hesitation, but Jack Casady didn't yet sign, as he was the new boy and nobody knew if he was going to be in the band for the long haul. The other person who refused to sign was Signe Anderson. In her case, she had a much better reason for refusing to sign, as unlike the rest of the band she had actually read the contract, and she found it to be extremely worrying. She did eventually back down on the day of the group's first recording session, but she later had the contract renegotiated. Jack Casady also signed the contract right at the start of the first session -- or at least, he thought he'd signed the contract then. He certainly signed *something*, without having read it. But much later, during a court case involving the band's longstanding legal disputes with Katz, it was revealed that the signature on the contract wasn't Casady's, and was badly forged. What he actually *did* sign that day has never been revealed, to him or to anyone else. Katz also signed all the group as songwriters to his own publishing company, telling them that they legally needed to sign with him if they wanted to make records, and also claimed to RCA that he had power of attorney for the band, which they say they never gave him -- though to be fair to Katz, given the band members' habit of signing things without reading or understanding them, it doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that they did. The producer chosen for the group's first album was Tommy Oliver, a friend of Katz's who had previously been an arranger on some of Doris Day's records, and whose next major act after finishing the Jefferson Airplane album was Trombones Unlimited, who released records like "Holiday for Trombones": [Excerpt: Trombones Unlimited, "Holiday For Trombones"] The group weren't particularly thrilled with this choice, but were happier with their engineer, Dave Hassinger, who had worked on records like "Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones, and had a far better understanding of the kind of music the group were making. They spent about three months recording their first album, even while continually being attacked as sellouts. The album is not considered their best work, though it does contain "Blues From an Airplane", a collaboration between Spence and Balin: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Blues From an Airplane"] Even before the album came out, though, things were starting to change for the group. Firstly, they started playing bigger venues -- their home base went from being the Matrix club to the Fillmore, a large auditorium run by the promoter Bill Graham. They also started to get an international reputation. The British singer-songwriter Donovan released a track called "The Fat Angel" which namechecked the group: [Excerpt: Donovan, "The Fat Angel"] The group also needed a new drummer. Skip Spence decided to go on holiday to Mexico without telling the rest of the band. There had already been some friction with Spence, as he was very eager to become a guitarist and songwriter, and the band already had three songwriting guitarists and didn't really see why they needed a fourth. They sacked Spence, who went on to form Moby Grape, who were also managed by Katz: [Excerpt: Moby Grape, "Omaha"] For his replacement they brought in Spencer Dryden, who was a Hollywood brat like their friend David Crosby -- in Dryden's case he was Charlie Chaplin's nephew, and his father worked as Chaplin's assistant. The story normally goes that the great session drummer Earl Palmer recommended Dryden to the group, but it's also the case that Dryden had been in a band, the Heartbeats, with Tommy Oliver and the great blues guitarist Roy Buchanan, so it may well be that Oliver had recommended him. Dryden had been primarily a jazz musician, playing with people like the West Coast jazz legend Charles Lloyd, though like most jazzers he would slum it on occasion by playing rock and roll music to pay the bills. But then he'd seen an early performance by the Mothers of Invention, and realised that rock music could have a serious artistic purpose too. He'd joined a band called The Ashes, who had released one single, the Jackie DeShannon song "Is There Anything I Can Do?" in December 1965: [Excerpt: The Ashes, "Is There Anything I Can Do?"] The Ashes split up once Dryden left the group to join Jefferson Airplane, but they soon reformed without him as The Peanut Butter Conspiracy, who hooked up with Gary Usher and released several albums of psychedelic sunshine pop. Dryden played his first gig with the group at a Republican Party event on June the sixth, 1966. But by the time Dryden had joined, other problems had become apparent. The group were already feeling like it had been a big mistake to accede to Katz's demands to sign a formal contract with him, and Balin in particular was getting annoyed that he wouldn't let the band see their finances. All the money was getting paid to Katz, who then doled out money to the band when they asked for it, and they had no idea if he was actually paying them what they were owed or not. The group's first album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, finally came out in September, and it was a comparative flop. It sold well in San Francisco itself, selling around ten thousand copies in the area, but sold basically nothing anywhere else in the country -- the group's local reputation hadn't extended outside their own immediate scene. It didn't help that the album was pulled and reissued, as RCA censored the initial version of the album because of objections to the lyrics. The song "Runnin' Round This World" was pulled off the album altogether for containing the word "trips", while in "Let Me In" they had to rerecord two lines -- “I gotta get in, you know where" was altered to "You shut the door now it ain't fair" and "Don't tell me you want money" became "Don't tell me it's so funny". Similarly in "Run Around" the phrase "as you lay under me" became "as you stay here by me". Things were also becoming difficult for Anderson. She had had a baby in May and was not only unhappy with having to tour while she had a small child, she was also the band member who was most vocally opposed to Katz. Added to that, her husband did not get on well at all with the group, and she felt trapped between her marriage and her bandmates. Reports differ as to whether she quit the band or was fired, but after a disastrous appearance at the Monterey Jazz Festival, one way or another she was out of the band. Her replacement was already waiting in the wings. Grace Slick, the lead singer of the Great Society, had been inspired by going to one of the early Jefferson Airplane gigs. She later said "I went to see Jefferson Airplane at the Matrix, and they were making more money in a day than I made in a week. They only worked for two or three hours a night, and they got to hang out. I thought 'This looks a lot better than what I'm doing.' I knew I could more or less carry a tune, and I figured if they could do it I could." She was married at the time to a film student named Jerry Slick, and indeed she had done the music for his final project at film school, a film called "Everybody Hits Their Brother Once", which sadly I can't find online. She was also having an affair with Jerry's brother Darby, though as the Slicks were in an open marriage this wasn't particularly untoward. The three of them, with a couple of other musicians, had formed The Great Society, named as a joke about President Johnson's programme of the same name. The Great Society was the name Johnson had given to his whole programme of domestic reforms, including civil rights for Black people, the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts, and more. While those projects were broadly popular among the younger generation, Johnson's escalation of the war in Vietnam had made him so personally unpopular that even his progressive domestic programme was regarded with suspicion and contempt. The Great Society had set themselves up as local rivals to Jefferson Airplane -- where Jefferson Airplane had buttons saying "Jefferson Airplane Loves You!" the Great Society put out buttons saying "The Great Society Really Doesn't Like You Much At All". They signed to Autumn Records, and recorded a song that Darby Slick had written, titled "Someone to Love" -- though the song would later be retitled "Somebody to Love": [Excerpt: The Great Society, "Someone to Love"] That track was produced by Sly Stone, who at the time was working as a producer for Autumn Records. The Great Society, though, didn't like working with Stone, because he insisted on them doing forty-five takes to try to sound professional, as none of them were particularly competent musicians. Grace Slick later said "Sly could play any instrument known to man. He could have just made the record himself, except for the singers. It was kind of degrading in a way" -- and on another occasion she said that he *did* end up playing all the instruments on the finished record. "Someone to Love" was put out as a promo record, but never released to the general public, and nor were any of the Great Society's other recordings for Autumn Records released. Their contract expired and they were let go, at which point they were about to sign to Mercury Records, but then Darby Slick and another member decided to go off to India for a while. Grace's marriage to Jerry was falling apart, though they would stay legally married for several years, and the Great Society looked like it was at an end, so when Grace got the offer to join Jefferson Airplane to replace Signe Anderson, she jumped at the chance. At first, she was purely a harmony singer -- she didn't take over any of the lead vocal parts that Anderson had previously sung, as she had a very different vocal style, and instead she just sang the harmony parts that Anderson had sung on songs with other lead vocalists. But two months after the album they were back in the studio again, recording their second album, and Slick sang lead on several songs there. As well as the new lineup, there was another important change in the studio. They were still working with Dave Hassinger, but they had a new producer, Rick Jarrard. Jarrard was at one point a member of the folk group The Wellingtons, who did the theme tune for "Gilligan's Island", though I can't find anything to say whether or not he was in the group when they recorded that track: [Excerpt: The Wellingtons, "The Ballad of Gilligan's Island"] Jarrard had also been in the similar folk group The Greenwood County Singers, where as we heard in the episode on "Heroes and Villains" he replaced Van Dyke Parks. He'd also released a few singles under his own name, including a version of Parks' "High Coin": [Excerpt: Rick Jarrard, "High Coin"] While Jarrard had similar musical roots to those of Jefferson Airplane's members, and would go on to produce records by people like Harry Nilsson and The Family Tree, he wasn't any more liked by the band than their previous producer had been. So much so, that a few of the band members have claimed that while Jarrard is the credited producer, much of the work that one would normally expect to be done by a producer was actually done by their friend Jerry Garcia, who according to the band members gave them a lot of arranging and structural advice, and was present in the studio and played guitar on several tracks. Jarrard, on the other hand, said categorically "I never met Jerry Garcia. I produced that album from start to finish, never heard from Jerry Garcia, never talked to Jerry Garcia. He was not involved creatively on that album at all." According to the band, though, it was Garcia who had the idea of almost doubling the speed of the retitled "Somebody to Love", turning it into an uptempo rocker: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Somebody to Love"] And one thing everyone is agreed on is that it was Garcia who came up with the album title, when after listening to some of the recordings he said "That's as surrealistic as a pillow!" It was while they were working on the album that was eventually titled Surrealistic Pillow that they finally broke with Katz as their manager, bringing Bill Thompson in as a temporary replacement. Or at least, it was then that they tried to break with Katz. Katz sued the group over their contract, and won. Then they appealed, and they won. Then Katz appealed the appeal, and the Superior Court insisted that if he wanted to appeal the ruling, he had to put up a bond for the fifty thousand dollars the group said he owed them. He didn't, so in 1970, four years after they sacked him as their manager, the appeal was dismissed. Katz appealed the dismissal, and won that appeal, and the case dragged on for another three years, at which point Katz dragged RCA Records into the lawsuit. As a result of being dragged into the mess, RCA decided to stop paying the group their songwriting royalties from record sales directly, and instead put the money into an escrow account. The claims and counterclaims and appeals *finally* ended in 1987, twenty years after the lawsuits had started and fourteen years after the band had stopped receiving their songwriting royalties. In the end, the group won on almost every point, and finally received one point three million dollars in back royalties and seven hundred thousand dollars in interest that had accrued, while Katz got a small token payment. Early in 1967, when the sessions for Surrealistic Pillow had finished, but before the album was released, Newsweek did a big story on the San Francisco scene, which drew national attention to the bands there, and the first big event of what would come to be called the hippie scene, the Human Be-In, happened in Golden Gate Park in January. As the group's audience was expanding rapidly, they asked Bill Graham to be their manager, as he was the most business-minded of the people around the group. The first single from the album, "My Best Friend", a song written by Skip Spence before he quit the band, came out in January 1967 and had no more success than their earlier recordings had, and didn't make the Hot 100. The album came out in February, and was still no higher than number 137 on the charts in March, when the second single, "Somebody to Love", was released: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Somebody to Love"] That entered the charts at the start of April, and by June it had made number five. The single's success also pushed its parent album up to number three by August, just behind the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Monkees' Headquarters. The success of the single also led to the group being asked to do commercials for Levis jeans: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Levis commercial"] That once again got them accused of selling out. Abbie Hoffman, the leader of the Yippies, wrote to the Village Voice about the commercials, saying "It summarized for me all the doubts I have about the hippie philosophy. I realise they are just doing their 'thing', but while the Jefferson Airplane grooves with its thing, over 100 workers in the Levi Strauss plant on the Tennessee-Georgia border are doing their thing, which consists of being on strike to protest deplorable working conditions." The third single from the album, "White Rabbit", came out on the twenty-fourth of June, the day before the Beatles recorded "All You Need is Love", nine days after the release of "See Emily Play", and a week after the group played the Monterey Pop Festival, to give you some idea of how compressed a time period we've been in recently. We talked in the last episode about how there's a big difference between American and British psychedelia at this point in time, because the political nature of the American counterculture was determined by the fact that so many people were being sent off to die in Vietnam. Of all the San Francisco bands, though, Jefferson Airplane were by far the least political -- they were into the culture part of the counterculture, but would often and repeatedly disavow any deeper political meaning in their songs. In early 1968, for example, in a press conference, they said “Don't ask us anything about politics. We don't know anything about it. And what we did know, we just forgot.” So it's perhaps not surprising that of all the American groups, they were the one that was most similar to the British psychedelic groups in their influences, and in particular their frequent references to children's fantasy literature. "White Rabbit" was a perfect example of this. It had started out as "White Rabbit Blues", a song that Slick had written influenced by Alice in Wonderland, and originally performed by the Great Society: [Excerpt: The Great Society, "White Rabbit"] Slick explained the lyrics, and their association between childhood fantasy stories and drugs, later by saying "It's an interesting song but it didn't do what I wanted it to. What I was trying to say was that between the ages of zero and five the information and the input you get is almost indelible. In other words, once a Catholic, always a Catholic. And the parents read us these books, like Alice in Wonderland where she gets high, tall, and she takes mushrooms, a hookah, pills, alcohol. And then there's The Wizard of Oz, where they fall into a field of poppies and when they wake up they see Oz. And then there's Peter Pan, where if you sprinkle white dust on you, you could fly. And then you wonder why we do it? Well, what did you read to me?" While the lyrical inspiration for the track was from Alice in Wonderland, the musical inspiration is less obvious. Slick has on multiple occasions said that the idea for the music came from listening to Miles Davis' album "Sketches of Spain", and in particular to Davis' version of -- and I apologise for almost certainly mangling the Spanish pronunciation badly here -- "Concierto de Aranjuez", though I see little musical resemblance to it myself. [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "Concierto de Aranjuez"] She has also, though, talked about how the song was influenced by Ravel's "Bolero", and in particular the way the piece keeps building in intensity, starting softly and slowly building up, rather than having the dynamic peaks and troughs of most music. And that is definitely a connection I can hear in the music: [Excerpt: Ravel, "Bolero"] Jefferson Airplane's version of "White Rabbit", like their version of "Somebody to Love", was far more professional, far -- and apologies for the pun -- slicker than The Great Society's version. It's also much shorter. The version by The Great Society has a four and a half minute instrumental intro before Slick's vocal enters. By contrast, the version on Surrealistic Pillow comes in at under two and a half minutes in total, and is a tight pop song: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "White Rabbit"] Jack Casady has more recently said that the group originally recorded the song more or less as a lark, because they assumed that all the drug references would mean that RCA would make them remove the song from the album -- after all, they'd cut a song from the earlier album because it had a reference to a trip, so how could they possibly allow a song like "White Rabbit" with its lyrics about pills and mushrooms? But it was left on the album, and ended up making the top ten on the pop charts, peaking at number eight: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "White Rabbit"] In an interview last year, Slick said she still largely lives off the royalties from writing that one song. It would be the last hit single Jefferson Airplane would ever have. Marty Balin later said "Fame changes your life. It's a bit like prison. It ruined the band. Everybody became rich and selfish and self-centred and couldn't care about the band. That was pretty much the end of it all. After that it was just working and living the high life and watching the band destroy itself, living on its laurels." They started work on their third album, After Bathing at Baxter's, in May 1967, while "Somebody to Love" was still climbing the charts. This time, the album was produced by Al Schmitt. Unlike the two previous producers, Schmitt was a fan of the band, and decided the best thing to do was to just let them do their own thing without interfering. The album took months to record, rather than the weeks that Surrealistic Pillow had taken, and cost almost ten times as much money to record. In part the time it took was because of the promotional work the band had to do. Bill Graham was sending them all over the country to perform, which they didn't appreciate. The group complained to Graham in business meetings, saying they wanted to only play in big cities where there were lots of hippies. Graham pointed out in turn that if they wanted to keep having any kind of success, they needed to play places other than San Francisco, LA, New York, and Chicago, because in fact most of the population of the US didn't live in those four cities. They grudgingly took his point. But there were other arguments all the time as well. They argued about whether Graham should be taking his cut from the net or the gross. They argued about Graham trying to push for the next single to be another Grace Slick lead vocal -- they felt like he was trying to make them into just Grace Slick's backing band, while he thought it made sense to follow up two big hits with more singles with the same vocalist. There was also a lawsuit from Balin's former partners in the Matrix, who remembered that bit in the contract about having a share in the group's income and sued for six hundred thousand dollars -- that was settled out of court three years later. And there were interpersonal squabbles too. Some of these were about the music -- Dryden didn't like the fact that Kaukonen's guitar solos were getting longer and longer, and Balin only contributed one song to the new album because all the other band members made fun of him for writing short, poppy, love songs rather than extended psychedelic jams -- but also the group had become basically two rival factions. On one side were Kaukonen and Casady, the old friends and virtuoso instrumentalists, who wanted to extend the instrumental sections of the songs more to show off their playing. On the other side were Grace Slick and Spencer Dryden, the two oldest members of the group by age, but the most recent people to join. They were also unusual in the San Francisco scene for having alcohol as their drug of choice -- drinking was thought of by most of the hippies as being a bit classless, but they were both alcoholics. They were also sleeping together, and generally on the side of shorter, less exploratory, songs. Kantner, who was attracted to Slick, usually ended up siding with her and Dryden, and this left Balin the odd man out in the middle. He later said "I got disgusted with all the ego trips, and the band was so stoned that I couldn't even talk to them. Everybody was in their little shell". While they were still working on the album, they released the first single from it, Kantner's "The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil". The "Pooneil" in the song was a figure that combined two of Kantner's influences: the Greenwich Village singer-songwriter Fred Neil, the writer of "Everybody's Talkin'" and "Dolphins"; and Winnie the Pooh. The song contained several lines taken from A.A. Milne's children's stories: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil"] That only made number forty-two on the charts. It was the last Jefferson Airplane single to make the top fifty. At a gig in Bakersfield they got arrested for inciting a riot, because they encouraged the crowd to dance, even though local by-laws said that nobody under sixteen was allowed to dance, and then they nearly got arrested again after Kantner's behaviour on the private plane they'd chartered to get them back to San Francisco that night. Kantner had been chain-smoking, and this annoyed the pilot, who asked Kantner to put his cigarette out, so Kantner opened the door of the plane mid-flight and threw the lit cigarette out. They'd chartered that plane because they wanted to make sure they got to see a new group, Cream, who were playing the Fillmore: [Excerpt: Cream, "Strange Brew"] After seeing that, the divisions in the band were even wider -- Kaukonen and Casady now *knew* that what the band needed was to do long, extended, instrumental jams. Cream were the future, two-minute pop songs were the past. Though they weren't completely averse to two-minute pop songs. The group were recording at RCA studios at the same time as the Monkees, and members of the two groups would often jam together. The idea of selling out might have been anathema to their *audience*, but the band members themselves didn't care about things like that. Indeed, at one point the group returned from a gig to the mansion they were renting and found squatters had moved in and were using their private pool -- so they shot at the water. The squatters quickly moved on. As Dryden put it "We all -- Paul, Jorma, Grace, and myself -- had guns. We weren't hippies. Hippies were the people that lived on the streets down in Haight-Ashbury. We were basically musicians and art school kids. We were into guns and machinery" After Bathing at Baxter's only went to number seventeen on the charts, not a bad position but a flop compared to their previous album, and Bill Graham in particular took this as more proof that he had been right when for the last few months he'd been attacking the group as self-indulgent. Eventually, Slick and Dryden decided that either Bill Graham was going as their manager, or they were going. Slick even went so far as to try to negotiate a solo deal with Elektra Records -- as the voice on the hits, everyone was telling her she was the only one who mattered anyway. David Anderle, who was working for the label, agreed a deal with her, but Jac Holzman refused to authorise the deal, saying "Judy Collins doesn't get that much money, why should Grace Slick?" The group did fire Graham, and went one further and tried to become his competitors. They teamed up with the Grateful Dead to open a new venue, the Carousel Ballroom, to compete with the Fillmore, but after a few months they realised they were no good at running a venue and sold it to Graham. Graham, who was apparently unhappy with the fact that the people living around the Fillmore were largely Black given that the bands he booked appealed to mostly white audiences, closed the original Fillmore, renamed the Carousel the Fillmore West, and opened up a second venue in New York, the Fillmore East. The divisions in the band were getting worse -- Kaukonen and Casady were taking more and more speed, which was making them play longer and faster instrumental solos whether or not the rest of the band wanted them to, and Dryden, whose hands often bled from trying to play along with them, definitely did not want them to. But the group soldiered on and recorded their fourth album, Crown of Creation. This album contained several songs that were influenced by science fiction novels. The most famous of these was inspired by the right-libertarian author Robert Heinlein, who was hugely influential on the counterculture. Jefferson Airplane's friends the Monkees had already recorded a song based on Heinlein's The Door Into Summer, an unintentionally disturbing novel about a thirty-year-old man who falls in love with a twelve-year-old girl, and who uses a combination of time travel and cryogenic freezing to make their ages closer together so he can marry her: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Door Into Summer"] Now Jefferson Airplane were recording a song based on Heinlein's most famous novel, Stranger in a Strange Land. Stranger in a Strange Land has dated badly, thanks to its casual homophobia and rape-apologia, but at the time it was hugely popular in hippie circles for its advocacy of free love and group marriages -- so popular that a religion, the Church of All Worlds, based itself on the book. David Crosby had taken inspiration from it and written "Triad", a song asking two women if they'll enter into a polygamous relationship with him, and recorded it with the Byrds: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Triad"] But the other members of the Byrds disliked the song, and it was left unreleased for decades. As Crosby was friendly with Jefferson Airplane, and as members of the band were themselves advocates of open relationships, they recorded their own version with Slick singing lead: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Triad"] The other song on the album influenced by science fiction was the title track, Paul Kantner's "Crown of Creation". This song was inspired by The Chrysalids, a novel by the British writer John Wyndham. The Chrysalids is one of Wyndham's most influential novels, a post-apocalyptic story about young children who are born with mutant superpowers and have to hide them from their parents as they will be killed if they're discovered. The novel is often thought to have inspired Marvel Comics' X-Men, and while there's an unpleasant eugenic taste to its ending, with the idea that two species can't survive in the same ecological niche and the younger, "superior", species must outcompete the old, that idea also had a lot of influence in the counterculture, as well as being a popular one in science fiction. Kantner's song took whole lines from The Chrysalids, much as he had earlier done with A.A. Milne: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Crown of Creation"] The Crown of Creation album was in some ways a return to the more focused songwriting of Surrealistic Pillow, although the sessions weren't without their experiments. Slick and Dryden collaborated with Frank Zappa and members of the Mothers of Invention on an avant-garde track called "Would You Like a Snack?" (not the same song as the later Zappa song of the same name) which was intended for the album, though went unreleased until a CD box set decades later: [Excerpt: Grace Slick and Frank Zappa, "Would You Like a Snack?"] But the finished album was generally considered less self-indulgent than After Bathing at Baxter's, and did better on the charts as a result. It reached number six, becoming their second and last top ten album, helped by the group's appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in September 1968, a month after it came out. That appearance was actually organised by Colonel Tom Parker, who suggested them to Sullivan as a favour to RCA Records. But another TV appearance at the time was less successful. They appeared on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, one of the most popular TV shows among the young, hip, audience that the group needed to appeal to, but Slick appeared in blackface. She's later said that there was no political intent behind this, and that she was just trying the different makeup she found in the dressing room as a purely aesthetic thing, but that doesn't really explain the Black power salute she gives at one point. Slick was increasingly obnoxious on stage, as her drinking was getting worse and her relationship with Dryden was starting to break down. Just before the Smothers Brothers appearance she was accused at a benefit for the Whitney Museum of having called the audience "filthy Jews", though she has always said that what she actually said was "filthy jewels", and she was talking about the ostentatious jewellery some of the audience were wearing. The group struggled through a performance at Altamont -- an event we will talk about in a future episode, so I won't go into it here, except to say that it was a horrifying experience for everyone involved -- and performed at Woodstock, before releasing their fifth studio album, Volunteers, in 1969: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Volunteers"] That album made the top twenty, but was the last album by the classic lineup of the band. By this point Spencer Dryden and Grace Slick had broken up, with Slick starting to date Kantner, and Dryden was also disappointed at the group's musical direction, and left. Balin also left, feeling sidelined in the group. They released several more albums with varying lineups, including at various points their old friend David Frieberg of Quicksilver Messenger Service, the violinist Papa John Creach, and the former drummer of the Turtles, Johnny Barbata. But as of 1970 the group's members had already started working on two side projects -- an acoustic band called Hot Tuna, led by Kaukonen and Casady, which sometimes also featured Balin, and a project called Paul Kantner's Jefferson Starship, which also featured Slick and had recorded an album, Blows Against the Empire, the second side of which was based on the Robert Heinlein novel Back to Methuselah, and which became one of the first albums ever nominated for science fiction's Hugo Awards: [Excerpt: Jefferson Starship, "Have You Seen The Stars Tonite"] That album featured contributions from David Crosby and members of the Grateful Dead, as well as Casady on two tracks, but  in 1974 when Kaukonen and Casady quit Jefferson Airplane to make Hot Tuna their full-time band, Kantner, Slick, and Frieberg turned Jefferson Starship into a full band. Over the next decade, Jefferson Starship had a lot of moderate-sized hits, with a varying lineup that at one time or another saw several members, including Slick, go and return, and saw Marty Balin back with them for a while. In 1984, Kantner left the group, and sued them to stop them using the Jefferson Starship name. A settlement was reached in which none of Kantner, Slick, Kaukonen, or Casady could use the words "Jefferson" or "Airplane" in their band-names without the permission of all the others, and the remaining members of Jefferson Starship renamed their band just Starship -- and had three number one singles in the late eighties with Slick on lead, becoming far more commercially successful than their precursor bands had ever been: [Excerpt: Starship, "We Built This City on Rock & Roll"] Slick left Starship in 1989, and there was a brief Jefferson Airplane reunion tour, with all the classic members but Dryden, but then Slick decided that she was getting too old to perform rock and roll music, and decided to retire from music and become a painter, something she's stuck to for more than thirty years. Kantner and Balin formed a new Jefferson Starship, called Jefferson Starship: The Next Generation, but Kantner died in January 2016, coincidentally on the same day as Signe Anderson, who had occasionally guested with her old bandmates in the new version of the band. Balin, who had quit the reunited Jefferson Starship due to health reasons, died two years later. Dryden had died in 2005. Currently, there are three bands touring that descend directly from Jefferson Airplane. Hot Tuna still continue to perform, there's a version of Starship that tours featuring one original member, Mickey Thomas, and the reunited Jefferson Starship still tour, led by David Frieberg. Grace Slick has given the latter group her blessing, and even co-wrote one song on their most recent album, released in 2020, though she still doesn't perform any more. Jefferson Airplane's period in the commercial spotlight was brief -- they had charting singles for only a matter of months, and while they had top twenty albums for a few years after their peak, they really only mattered to the wider world during that brief period of the Summer of Love. But precisely because their period of success was so short, their music is indelibly associated with that time. To this day there's nothing as evocative of summer 1967 as "White Rabbit", even for those of us who weren't born then. And while Grace Slick had her problems, as I've made very clear in this episode, she inspired a whole generation of women who went on to be singers themselves, as one of the first prominent women to sing lead with an electric rock band. And when she got tired of doing that, she stopped, and got on with her other artistic pursuits, without feeling the need to go back and revisit the past for ever diminishing returns. One might only wish that some of her male peers had followed her example.

START Happy Trails: friends of non-Internal Combustion Engine transportation converged at the MassTrails conference last Saturday. MassBike E.D. Galen Mook interviews Namrit Kapur of HubLove. https://www.masstrailsconference.com/ 6:29 https://on.soundcloud.com/d8UzS Almost here: Eli Kaufman on Sunset 4 All's years-long effort of making 3.2 miles of iconic Sunset blvd a 2-way protected bike lane, transforming the “high injury network” street into a transit and pedestrian friendly one…also, LACBC's name change to “Bike LA.” https://www.sunset4all.com/ 13:47 https://on.soundcloud.com/p3ohG SF Props: voters say the Great Walkway and a stretch of Golden Gate Park's JFK Drive shall remain car free. Luke Bornheimer reports. Oldie But Goodie: “Yes On J” by John Elliot. 24:13 https://on.soundcloud.com/4Bcb4 The Wong Way: storied bike advocate, safe streets educator, t.v. producer and politician Dorothy Wong on the bike advocacy piece. Taylor Nichols interviews. 46:52 https://on.soundcloud.com/QBLKB See Me: UK's More Than A Cyclist campaign puts familiar faces on cyclists to combat windshield blindness. With Robert Andersen. https://www.morethanacyclist.org/ Editing by Kevin Burton. Closing Song, "Bike," by Mal Webb. Interstitial music, "Just Moving," by Don Ward. Visit BikeTalk.org to be involved.

There's wine grapes being grown in San Francisco. In Part 2, Christopher tells us all about the 280 Project, a viticulture apprenticeship and wine school. He partnered with a winemaker from Napa, a professor at UC Davis, and others back at home to bring BIPOC, LGBTQIA, and people who feel marginalized and want to learn anything at all about wine together to do just that. The 280 Project is a very hands-on adventure, with apprentices taking frequent field trips, learning how grapes are grown from the ground-up. They also cover winemaking as well as the financial side of things. Then we take a walk through Alemany Farm, starting with their outdoor kitchen. Christopher talks about the importance of location for the farm and kitchen, situated as it is between a gentrifying and affluent neighborhood and a housing project. To the south and east, it's a virtual food desert, with corner stores and chain fast-food most abundant. Up the hill in Bernal Heights, it's quite a different story. We chat about the idea of using parts of Golden Gate Park to cultivate the land and grow food for the people. It's what some call "food parks," and it's not as radical an idea as you might think. Another project Christopher is working on is a Black indigenous seed bank, which he tells us about. Besides providing seeds, it would be a repository of people and their food stories and histories. Count us on board for that. Then our tour takes us up to the vines, appropriately. We end our little journey at the greenhouse. We want to thank Christopher for his time talking with us and showing us around. Shout out to Isaiah Powell of Dragonspunk GRO for introducing us to Christopher and the 280 Project. Photography by Michelle Kilfeather