Podcasts about good golly miss molly

El “Aullido” de Ginsberg, el de la Beat Generation, el equivalente rockero «Awopbopaloobamboom» (“Tutti Frutti”) de Little Richard. 1955, el año, en el que una onomatopeya de segundos se convirtió en canción emblemática. Junto a Fats Domino o Larry Williams, acompañado por la flor y nata de los músicos de Nueva Orleans. "Long Tall Sally” o "Good Golly Miss Molly” clásicos del rock de los 50. Su imagen evolucionó hasta la "extravaganza" y su huella de Paul Mc Cartney a Prince. En EEUU un público segregado, emergente, juvenil, el mundo más tarde. Su historia merece ser contada, su aullido aún nos traspasa. Esta edición la prueba. Puedes hacerte socio del Club Babel y apoyar este podcast: mundobabel.com/club Si te gusta Mundo Babel puedes colaborar a que llegue a más oyentes compartiendo en tus redes sociales y dejar una valoración de 5 estrellas en Apple Podcast o un comentario en Ivoox. Para anunciarte en este podcast, ponte en contacto con: mundobabelpodcast@gmail.com.

El “Aullido” de Ginsberg, el de la Beat Generation, el equivalente rockero «Awopbopaloobamboom» (“Tutti Frutti”) de Little Richard. 1955, el año, en el que una onomatopeya de segundos se convirtió en canción emblemática. Junto a Fats Domino o Larry Williams, acompañado por la flor y nata de los músicos de Nueva Orleans. "Long Tall Sally” o "Good Golly Miss Molly” clásicos del rock de los 50. Su imagen evolucionó hasta la "extravaganza" y su huella de Paul Mc Cartney a Prince. En EEUU un público segregado, emergente, juvenil, el mundo más tarde. Su historia merece ser contada, su aullido aún nos traspasa. Esta edición la prueba. Puedes hacerte socio del Club Babel y apoyar este podcast: mundobabel.com/club Si te gusta Mundo Babel puedes colaborar a que llegue a más oyentes compartiendo en tus redes sociales y dejar una valoración de 5 estrellas en Apple Podcast o un comentario en Ivoox. Para anunciarte en este podcast, ponte en contacto con: mundobabelpodcast@gmail.com.

The will of Little Richard gave specific instructions of how to handle the publicity rights of his estate. His brother, who was also named as an executor in addition to being a beneficiary, failed to follow the terms of the will resulting in his removal as an executor and losing a share of the publicity rights.

Com diu el gran Tomeu Penya, tothom, si fa no fa, conviu amb els seus dimonis interiors, i tamb

On the October 15 edition of the Music History Today podcast, Chuck Berry gives his final performance, as does CBGB, plus Rick Nelson gets booed & writes a song about it. Also, happy birthday to Chris de Burgh. For more music history, subscribe to my Spotify Channel or subscribe to the audio version of my music history podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts from ALL MUSIC HISTORY TODAY PODCAST NETWORK LINKS - https://allmylinks.com/musichistorytoday On this date: In 1937, singer Jo Stafford married singer John Huddleston. * In 1955, the Grand Ole Opry TV show premiered on ABC TV. * In 1956, Little Richard recorded the song Good Golly Miss Molly. * In 1958, Jackie Wilson recorded his smash hit Lonely Teardrops. * In 1960, the Beatles, with Ringo Starr on drums instead of Pete Best, recorded together for the first time. * In 1963 Mary Travers of Peter, Paul, & Mary married photographer Barry Feinstein. * In 1965, Jimi Hendrix signed his first recording contract. * In 1966, The Four Tops hit #1 with the song Reach Out I'll Be There. * In 1966, The Monkees recorded the Neil Diamond - written song I'm a Believer. * In 1968, Led Zeppelin performed together for the first time, in England. * In 1971, Rick Nelson was booed at Madison Square Garden when he tried to perform newer songs instead of old hits during his concert. The experience went on to inspire him to write his comeback song Garden Party. * In 1973, Elvis entered the hospital for treatment of respiratory problems, which is where his doctor realized that Elvis was addicted to Demerol. * In 1977, Debbie Boone hit #1 with the song You Light Up My Life. * In 1981, Metallica formed. * In 1988, UB40 hit #1 with a cover version of Neil Diamond's song Red Red Wine. * In 1992, Madonna held her infamous Sex party in Manhattan to promote her Sex photo book. * In 2000, Dave Edmunds had triple bypass heart surgery. * In 2001, Slash of Guns N Roses married his wife Perla Ferrar. * In 2003, the Louis Armstrong House Museum opened in Queens, NY. * In 2006, Patti Smith was the final performer at the original New York City club CBGB. * In 2014, Chuck Berry played his final performance. It was at the Blueberry Hill Club in St Louis. * In 2016, the Lifetime Channel music docu-movie Surviving Compton: Dre, Suge, & Michel'le premiered. * In 2016, Winston Marshall of Mumford & Sons married singer and actress Dianna Agron. * In 2017, the music documentary series The Platinum Life premiered on the E! TV channel. In the world of classical music: * In 1886, Modest Mussorgsky's classical piece Night on Bald Mountain premiered in St. Petersburg, Russia. It would later become famous to an entire generation of kids in the Disney movie Fantasia. * In 1905, classical composer Claude Debussey's La Mer premiered. In 1925, the opera Beatrice from Willem Landre was performed for the first time. In 1994, Philip Glass premiered his Symphony No. 2 for string orchestra. In award ceremonies held on this date: * In 1969, Tammy Wynette & Johnny Cash won at the Country Music Association awards. * In 1973, Roy Clark won at the Country Music Association awards. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/musichistorytodaypodcast/support

Mo is joined by 5kinny000 with a call-in from Bradster X to talk about… Chinese Food Memory Kid Thumbs Talk Sex Talk Conspiracy Cognitive Dissonance  School Shooting Idaho Murder Case Politics Project 2025 Military Recruitment  Little Richard Chase Bank Glitch Venezuelan Gangs Immigrant Talk Streamer Talk Crip Dancers Video Game Talk Playstation Plus Cult of the Lamb Astrobot More Streamer Talk Music Talk Shoes and Clothes Taxes and Tariffs Sex Toys Ending Question - Show Links: https://www.patreon.com/apodcastwithmo https://apodcastwithmo.myspreadshop.com/ https://www.youtube.com/@apodcastwithmo Co-Producer Links: https://www.sirnasty74.com/ https://www.flatlinermusic.net/ - Featuring the songs: Dat Nigga Boy/Its the Green - Sir Nasty Huh - It'sYaBoiH2 Smoking Gun - Ashtone Untouchables - Sumiala Squire Who Needs Who - Nick Noon Won't Bite - Privacy Please Classy Flow 2 - A2thaMo --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/apodcastwithmo/support

"From Steel Pulse to Wu-Tang: A Festival of Musical Diversity"Larry Mishkin discusses a review of various experiences and performances, starting with a cannabis event called "Miracle in Mundelein," which took place over the past weekend. The main focus of the review is a discussion of a Grateful Dead show from September 9, 1987, at the Providence Civic Center in Rhode Island. The show was notable for being the second night of a three-show run, marking the opening of the Grateful Dead's 1987 East Coast fall tour.Key highlights include:"Hey Pocky Way" Performance: This was the first time the Grateful Dead performed the song "Hey Pocky Way," which is originally by the Meters, a New Orleans funk band. The song became a fan favorite, primarily due to the influence of Brent Mydland, the band's keyboardist. However, the song fell out of rotation after Brent's death in 1990."Jack Straw" Performance: Another song featured was "Jack Straw," a Grateful Dead classic written by Bob Weir and Robert Hunter. It was originally performed in 1971 and became a staple in the band's setlists. The song was performed in the second spot of the setlist during the 1987 show, indicating the band's tendency to feature it early in their concerts.Music News Segment: The transcript also includes a segment on music news, which starts with a brief history of the band Cheap Trick, particularly their song "I Want You to Want Me."Review of the Miracle in Mundelein Festival: The review shifts to discussing the recent "Miracle in Mundelein" festival, where several acts performed:Steel Pulse: A roots reggae band from Birmingham, England, who delivered a lively and energetic performance.The Soul Rebels: A New Orleans brass band known for their energetic live shows and collaborations with major artists. Their set featured Raekwon and GZA from the Wu-Tang Clan, adding a strong hip-hop element to the performance.Wiz Khalifa: The headliner of the event, Wiz Khalifa, is praised for his stage presence and connection with the audience. The review notes his strong advocacy for cannabis and how his music resonated well with the crowd.Overall, the review captures the blend of nostalgia with the Grateful Dead's classic performances and the fresh, dynamic energy of the Miracle in Mundelein festival, highlighting both the music and the culture of cannabis.https://www.cheaptrick.com/ Grateful DeadSeptember 9, 1987 (37 years ago)Providence Civic CenterProvidence, Rhode IslandGrateful Dead Live at Providence Civic Center on 1987-09-09 : Free Borrow & Streaming : Internet Archive Second night of a three show run, the opening shows of 1987 East Cost fall tour.  INTRO:                                 Hey Pocky Way                                                Track #1                                                :35 – 2:03 First time ever played Hey Pocky Way was written by George Porter Jr., Leo Nocentelli, Art Neville & Joseph Modeliste, founding members of The Meters, an American funk band formed in 1965 in New Orleans by Modeliste (drums), Porter Jr. (bass), Nocentelli (guitar) and Neville (keyboards). The band performed and recorded their own music from the late 1960s until 1977 and played an influential role as backing musicians for other artists, including Lee Dorsey, Robert Palmer, Dr. John, and Allen Toussaint. Song was released on Rejuvenation the band's fifth studio album in 1974. In 2003, the album was ranked number 138 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time,[6] and 139 in a 2012 revised list. Beginning with this show, the Dead began to feature Hey Pocky Way, usually as a show opener.  Sung by Brent who really got into it with both his keyboard playing and strong singing, it  became a fan favorite.  But as a Brent influenced tune, it died when he did. Played:  25 timesFirst:  September 9, 1987 at Providence Civic Center, Providence, RI, USALast: July 22, 1990 at World Music Theatre, Tinley Park, IL, USA (Brent's second to last show)  SHOW No. 1:                    Jack Straw                                                Track #2                                                4:00 – 5:50 "Jack Straw"  written by Bob Weir and Robert Hunter. The track first appeared on the album Europe '72. The song was first performed in concert on October 19, 1971, in Minneapolis, Minnesota at new keyboardist Keith Godchaux's first appearance with the band. In the song's earliest performances (c. 1971–72), Weir sang all of the vocals. By the time the 'Europe 72' version was recorded, (at the Olympia Theater in Paris on 5-03-72), Weir and Jerry Garcia were switching up the vocals - as they had on April 26th when 'Hundred Year Hall' was recorded. The song appeared in both the first and second sets until the band's short hiatus in 1974-1975. After re-forming, the song almost exclusively appeared in the first set. After Brent Mydland joined the band in 1979, the song almost exclusively opened the band's first set. The band also often extended the jam after the second verse after Mydland's joining, often extending the song to over six minutes. Dead and Company have also further extended the song, often adding an abstract opening jam prior to the song's first verse.[1] Bob Weir stated in a 2004 interview that the song's lyrics were partly based on John Steinbeck's novel Of Mice and Men.[2] The song's themes include riding the rails, the Great Depression, and hobo (homeless) camps of the era. Jack Straw is also—perhaps coincidentally—the name of the original plantation owner, who lived controversially with his gay lover, Peter Ochello, in Tennessee Williams's play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.[3] Always a great song to hear in concert, the fans loved it and it was always an omen of good things to come in the show. Played:  477 timesFirst:  October 19, 1971 at Northrop Auditorium, Minneapolis, MN, USALast:  July 8, 1995 at Soldier Field in Chicago MUSIC NEWS Miracle In Mundelein – second year of the festival in Mundelein a suburb northwest of Chicago.  Missed last year with JRAD but made it this year on Saturday with my sons Jonathan and Daniel, Jonathan's fiancé, Bella and Daniel's buddy AJ.  Different theme to this year's music focusing on hip hop and rap, not part of my regular music, but certainly a key genre for Daniel and AJ who filled me on details during the show. Acts:Steel Pulse - Steel Pulse are a roots reggae band from the Handsworth area of Birmingham, England. They originally formed at Handsworth Wood Boys School, and were composed of David Hinds (lead vocals, guitar), Basil Gabbidon (lead guitar, vocals), and Ronald McQueen (bass); along with Basil's brother Colin briefly on drums and Mykaell Riley (vocals, percussion). Steel Pulse were the first non-Jamaican act to win the Grammy Award for Best Reggae Album. They were initially refused live dates in Caribbean venues in Birmingham due to their Rastafarian beliefs. During the popularization of punk rock in the mid-1970's, Steel Pulse began to play punk venues such as the Hope and Anchor in London and The Electric Circus in Manchester in 1976.[1] Aligning themselves closely with the Rock Against Racism organization and featuring in its first music festival in early 1978, they chose to tour with sympathetic elements of the punk movement,[1] including the Stranglers and XTC. Eventually they found a more natural home in support slots for Burning Spear, which brought them to the attention of Island Records. Fun set that was in progress when we arrived, great sound and lots of energy that kept the crowd moving. The Soul Rebels - The Soul Rebels (also Soul Rebels Brass Band, Soul Rebels or The Rebels) are an eight-piece New Orleans based brass ensemble that incorporate elements of soul, jazz, funk, hip-hop, rock and pop music within a contemporary brass band framework.  Starting out as a local New Orleans favorite, The Soul Rebels have evolved into collaborating live with major artists in all worlds of music including:Katy PerryNasMetallicaGreen DayTrombone ShortyProdigyString Cheese IncidentUmphrey's McGeeGalacticSuzanne VegaEurythmicsLettuceGov't Mule                                               And many more The band has built its career around an eclectic live show that harnesses the power of horns and percussion in a funky party-like atmosphere. The band routinely plays over 250 shows a year. They have been described by the Village Voice as "the missing link between Public Enemy and Louis Armstrong.  The Soul Rebels consist of percussionists and founding members Lumar LeBlanc and Derrick Moss, trumpet players Julian Gosin and Marcus Hubbard, trombonists Corey Peyton and Paul Robertson, saxophonist Erion Williams, and sousaphonist Manuel Perkins Jr.                                                 On Saturday, they featured Raekwon and GZA from Wu Tang Clan.                                      RAEKWON - Corey Woods[2] (born January 12, 1970),[3][4] better known by his stage name Raekwon (/reɪˈkwɒn/, ray-KWON), is an American rapper. He rose to prominence as a founding member of the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan, which achieved mainstream success following the release of their debut album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), in 1993. Raekwon would subsequently pursue a solo career, releasing his first solo album, entitled Only Built 4 Cuban Linx..., in 1995. The album received critical acclaim, and is regarded by many critics as one of the greatest hip-hop albums of all time, as well as a staple of 1990s rap.                                     Raekwon attributes the name Raekwon to the Five-Percent Nation, an offshoot of the Nation of Islam, when he was a "young kid."[11] He converted to Islam in 2009.                                     Growing up, he witnessed his mother being hit and abused by different men, an experience which he said "affected [him] a lot."[10] As a young man, his mother kicked him out of their Park Hill home when Raekwon got into an argument with her boyfriend and his mother sided with the boyfriend. During this time, he spiraled into a pattern of hopelessness and violent behavior.[8] He became addicted to cocaine and crack cocaine until he became aware of how the crack epidemic was affecting those around him, at which point "it was an automatic stop."[10]Raekwon and rap partner Ghostface Killah attended junior high school together on Staten Island.[14] Raekwon attended New Dorp High School, where he befriended rappers Remedy, Method Man and Inspectah Deck.[15]             Woods first rapped as Sha Raider. In 1992, he joined the Wu-Tang Clan, an originally nine-member rap group drawing mainly from the Staten Island but also from the Brooklyn boroughs of New York City. He rapped as Raekwon The Chef, and also used the aliases Lex Diamonds, Shallah Raekwon, and Louis Rich. After being caught in a crossfire and accidentally shot four times, Raekwon began rapping in earnest. He later described being shot as an "important eye opener." In September 2009, MTV ranked Raekwon tenth among "hottest" rappers. In December, HipHopDx's 2009 awards named Only Built For Cuban Linx... Pt. II album of the year, calling it "the Hip Hop equivalent to The Godfather 2, with Rae as revitalized as Marlon was". Raekwon won Emcee of the Year—the prior year, Nas won—while HipHopDX staff explained, Raekwon brought it back to lyrical, dope rap. He released an album that spoke to teens, twenty-somethings, thirty-somethings, and beyond. Without compromising, the Chef made an edgy Hip Hop record that refused to bastardize the catalog he laid down 15 years ago. On top of that, Rae (along with Ghostface) was a go-to for numerous rappers making albums, ranging from the Playaz Circle to Jadakiss to BK One. That's beyond real, as was a year filled with performing in arenas, clubs and even churches. When it came to mastering the ceremony, Rae had 'em all following the leader.[28]— HipHopDX GZA - Gary Eldridge Grice[2] (born August 22, 1966), better known by his stage names GZA (/ˈdʒɪzə/JIZ-ə) and The Genius,[3] is an American rapper. A founding member of the hip hop group Wu-Tang Clan, GZA is the group's "spiritual head", being both the first member in the group to receive a record deal and being the oldest member.[4] He has appeared on his fellow Wu-Tang members' solo projects, and has maintained a successful solo career starting with his second album Liquid Swords (1995). His lyrical style often dismisses typical rap story lines in favor of science and wide-ranging philosophies and has been characterized as "armed with sharp metaphors and a smooth flow".[5][6][7][8] An analysis of GZA's lyrics found that he has the second largest vocabulary in popular hip hop music.[9][10] He teamed up with an education group to promote science education in New York City through hip hop. In 1992, GZA joined the Wu-Tang Clan, a group of nine, formed by his cousin RZA. GZA had some high-profile appearances on the group's debut album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) (1993), including a solo track, "Clan in da Front".[22] This, combined with appearances on other Clan members' albums such as Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version (1995) and Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... (1995) brought him much recognition. According to Method Man, "we form like Voltron and GZA happens to be the head".                         The combination of the Soul Rebels beat and Raekwon's and GZA's rapping made for an exceptional set of music that caught me off guard but was worth the price of admission.  With lots of cannabis references scattered throughout their lyrics and stage talk, they were a perfect match for this festival. Wiz Khalifa - Cameron Jibril Thomaz (born September 8, 1987),[2] better known by his stage name Wiz Khalifa, is an American rapper from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He signed with the local independent label Rostrum Records to release his debut studio album, Show and Prove (2006). His contract entered a short-lived joint venture with Warner Bros. Records the following year. His Eurodance-influenced 2008 single, "Say Yeah" received urban radio airplay and entered both the Rhythmic Top 40 and Hot Rap Songs charts, becoming his first minor hit.[3] Outside of music, Thomaz has delved into acting with television roles in Dickinson and The Eric Andre Show, the lead role alongside Snoop Dogg in the 2012 stoner comedy film Mac & Devin Go to High School, and voice roles in the animated series American Dad!, Duncanville, and Big City Greens. Thomaz founded the record label Taylor Gang Entertainment in 2008, through which he has signed artists including Juicy J, Ty Dolla Sign, and Berner. Known for his abundant usage of cannabis, Thomaz launched his own cannabis brand, Khalifa Kush, in 2016, which expanded for release in nationwide dispensaries in 2022. His stage name is derived from Khalifa, an Arabic word meaning "successor", and wisdom, which was shortened to Wiz when Khalifa was a young boy.[10] Khalifa stated to Spinner.com that the name also came from being called "young Wiz 'cause I was good at everything I did, and my granddad is Muslim, so he gave me that name; he felt like that's what I was doing with my music." He got a tattoo of his stage name on his 17th birthday.[11][12] By the age of 15, he was regularly recording his music at a local studio called I.D. Labs.[13] Impressed by the young teen's talent, E. Dan, the owner of the studio offered Khalifa an intern job at the studio in exchange for free recording time. Dan, being a veteran of the Pittsburgh hip-hop scene, would help develop and mentor the young artist early on in his career. He was the headliner and lived up to the billing.  Great tunes, great stage presence, great spokesperson for cannabis.  My first experience with his music and it was very positive. A great musical education for me with my tutors, Daniel and AJ. More in MJ News  Herbie Flowers  RIPJerry Miller  RIPGoose this week at the Salt Shed, Thursday and Friday   SHOW No. 2:                    Greatest Story Ever Told                                                Track #9                                                3:25 – end                                                 INTO                                                 Devil With a Blue Dress                                                Track #10                                                0:00 – 1:33 Greatest Story – written by Hunter/Bobby/Mickey, originally called “The Pump Song” on Mickey Hart's 1972 album Rolling Thunder.  As the opening tune of Ace, it is called Greatest Story Ever Told.  But this isn't about that song.  Here, it is the lead-in to a first set couple of “extras” thrown in for some fun. "Devil with a Blue Dress On" (also known as "Devil with the Blue Dress") is a song written by Shorty Long and William "Mickey" Stevenson, first performed by Long and released as a single in 1964. A later version recorded by Mitch Ryder and The Detroit Wheels in 1966 peaked at No. 4 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100.  "Devil with the Blue Dress" was originally released as Shorty Long's debut single on Motown in 1964, but the single failed to chart. The song describes a femme fatale in a blue dress and not an actual devil.[2] Two years later, Mitch Ryder and The Detroit Wheels recorded the song at Bell Sound Studios in New York City[3] as a medley with an original arrangement of Little Richard's "Good Golly, Miss Molly". Their version, released on their album, “Breakout . . . . !”,  was notably more up-tempo than Long's more blues-influenced rendition.[2] Reaching No. 4 on the Hot 100, their version of the track would end up becoming their most well-known and highest charting hit in the United States. Rolling Stone Magazine ranked it No. 428 on their list of Top 500 Songs of All Time. Basically, another great cover to showcase Brent's singing and keyboard skills.  This was the first of 3 times the Dead covered the song.  Another fun diversion by the band that kept the Deadheads guessing and not wanting to ever miss a show. The transition out of Greatest Story is seamless and makes it so you can't hear the end of Greatest Story without hearing the signature beat of Devil making it a “natural” fit. Played – 3 timesFirst:  September 9, 1987 at Providence Civic Center, Providence, RI, USALast:  October 4, 1987 at Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View, CA, USA  SHOW No. 3:                    Good Golly Miss Molly                                                Track #11                                                0:00 – end                                                 INTO                                                 Devil With a Blue Dress                                                Track #12                                                0:00 – 0:51"Good Golly, Miss Molly" is a rock 'n' roll song first recorded in 1956 by American musician Little Richard and released in January 1958 as single on the Specialty label, and later on the album, Little Richard in July 1958.[1] The song, a jump blues, was written by John Marascalco and producer Robert "Bumps" Blackwell. Although it was first recorded by Little Richard, Blackwell produced another version by the Valiants, who imitated the fast first version recorded by Little Richard, not released at that time. Although the Valiants' version was released first (in 1957), Little Richard had the hit, reaching No. 4.[2] Like all his early hits, it quickly became a rock 'n' roll standard and has subsequently been recorded by hundreds of artists. The song is ranked No. 92 on the Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Little Richard first heard the phrase "Good golly, Miss Molly" from a Southern DJ named Jimmy Pennick.[4] He modified the lyrics into the more suggestive "Good golly, Miss Molly/You sure like to ball." Little Richard himself later claimed that he took Ike Turner's piano intro from his influential 1951 rock and roll song "Rocket 88", and used it for "Good Golly, Miss Molly".[5] "I always liked that record," Richard recalled, "and I used to use the riff in my act, so when we were looking for a lead-in to 'Good Golly, Miss Molly', I did that and it fit." In 1966, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels incorporated "Good Golly Miss Molly" into their version of "Devil with a Blue Dress On". Their version scored a major hit, not only in Ryder's native Detroit, but nationwide, placing at No. 4 on the Billboard Top 100. As with Devil, a Brent thing.  Unfortunately, it was only around for a month.  Then vanished from the Dead's playlist thereafter.  Played:  3 times, makes senseFirst:  September 9, 1987 at Providence Civic Center, Providence, RI, USALast:  October 4, 1987 at Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View, CA, USA  MJ NEWS:             Miracle in Mudelein – a great event sponsored by Rise Dispensaries and Rhythm cultivators.  Second year, featuring great music, excellent food and drink and too many booths for dabbing from various types of rigs including a Studenglass Gravity Bong – my first time using one and it is not your father's four foot Graffix bong!  Daniel and AJ were all over it and as it turned out, the wait in line was well worth the experience.  Rather than try to explain it to you, just Google Gravity Bong and see for yourself!  Great high.             Miracle is that Lake County, a more conservative leaning county, and Mundelein permitted the event.  Attendees can bring in their own flower or extracts (supposedly only if purchased at an Illinois dispensary), smoking accessories, etc.  Rise also was selling products at the show.             A wonderful thing to attend an event and not have to hide and smuggle in your cannabis.  People lighting up everywhere, offering to share, talking strains, etc.  Police were there to keep order and otherwise let it all go on.  Very professional.             Excellent mellow crowd (what else would you expect?).  Well run.  Shot joints out of a canon.  A wonderful day and experience for those who enjoy cannabis, especially not having to hide it or pretend you don't have any when everyone knows attendees are smuggling it in anyway.             A great way to promote cannabis and help normalize it within the community.  And a fun event to be able to share with my boys, Bella and AJ.  Fun had by all.  SHOW No. 4:                    Not Fade Away                                                Track #24 (NOTE – this song is listed as Track #23 AND #24, be sure to use #24)                                                0:00 – end "Not Fade Away" is a song credited to Buddy Holly (originally under his first and middle names, Charles Hardin) and Norman Petty (although Petty's co-writing credit is likely to have been a formality[3]) and first recorded by Holly and his band, the Crickets. Holly and the Crickets recorded the song in Clovis, New Mexico, on May 27, 1957, the same day the song "Everyday" was recorded.[1] The rhythmic pattern of "Not Fade Away" is a variant of the Bo Diddley beat, "Not Fade Away" was originally released as the B-side of the hit single "Oh, Boy!" on 10.27.1957 and was included on the album The "Chirping" Crickets (1957). The Crickets' recording never charted as a single. In 2004, this song was ranked number 107 on Rolling Stone's list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time". The song is closely associated with the Grateful Dead as one of their signature tunes—one which the band transformed from Holly's 1950s boy/girl romanticism to one reflecting the 1960s' more spiritual universal love. Their 1971 recording of the song is included on their second live album, Skull and Roses, paired with Going Down The Road Feeling Bad, a regular happening in the early ‘70's. Primarily a second set tune that used to show up in the second half of the second set after Drums-Space.  Beginning in 1983, the Dead began to play it as the second set closer, trailing off with “Love is real will not fade away” as they exited the stage.  A few years later, the Deadheads starting chanting the line as the Dead left the stage and in some cases, kept it up until the band reappeared for their encore, when the band would pick back up on the beat and play it for another minute or so before their encore tune, such as with this show.    Great example of the Deadheads making their mark on the show and the band being tuned in enough to play along with it.  Although sometimes if the Dead took too long to come out for the encore, the chanting would start to fade off.  And sometimes even when the chant made it all the way to the band's return on stage, the band would ignore it and just dive straight into their encore.  Fun when it all came together like this show. Played:  561 timesFirst:  February 19, 1969 at Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA, USALast:  July 5, 1995 at Riverport Amphitheatre in Maryland Heights, MO (St. Louis) OUTRO:                               The Mighty Quinn                                                Track #25                                                2:11 – 3:48 Bob Dylan wrote and first recorded the song in 1967 during the Basement Tapes sessions, but did not release a version for another three years.  The song's first release was in January 1968 as "Mighty Quinn" in a version by the British band Manfred Mann, from their album Mighty Garvey, and became a great success. A demo of 14 of the 1967 Basement Tapes recordings, including the first of two takes of "Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)", was produced in 1968, but was not intended for release. Recordings taken from the demos began appearing on bootlegs, starting with Great White Wonder,[7] a double-album bootleg that came out in July 1969. The first official release of the song was in 1970 on Dylan's Self Portrait album,[14] a live recording from 1969's Isle of Wight Festival. The live version (titled "The Mighty Quinn (Quinn the Eskimo)") was also selected in 1971 for the second compilation of Dylan's career, Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II. Covered by:  the Hollies, Leon Russell and Phish, among others. Although they never played the song with Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead started playing "The Mighty Quinn" in concert in 1985. It became a favorite encore among the Grateful Dead's fans, and remained so to the end of their career. Last verses, end with, “when Quinn the Eskimo gets here, everybody's gonna want to doze” but the Deadheads heard it as “dose” and always gave it a big cheer. Played:  59 timesFirst:  December 30, 1985 at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena, Oakland, CA, USALast:  July 2, 1995 at Deer Creek Music Center, Noblesville, IN, USA  Shoutouts: Lary Vinocur – birthdayElena Mishkin – birthday .Produced by PodConx Deadhead Cannabis Show - https://podconx.com/podcasts/deadhead-cannabis-showLarry Mishkin - https://podconx.com/guests/larry-mishkinRob Hunt - https://podconx.com/guests/rob-huntJay Blakesberg - https://podconx.com/guests/jay-blakesbergSound Designed by Jamie Humiston - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-humiston-91718b1b3/Recorded on Squadcast

Nuevo episodio mensual dedicado a recordar canciones que alcanzaron su puesto más alto en listas estadounidenses hace 60 años, es decir, todo lo que escuches en los próximos llegó a su puesto más alto en ventas en junio de 1964. El Brill Building de Nueva York, los estudios de Los Ángeles, la factoría Motown en Detroit o la casa Stax en Memphis producen singles de altísima calidad que aguantan el envite de esas bandas británicas que siguen desembarcando en norteamérica.(Foto del podcast; The Dixie Cups)Playlist;(sintonía) B.B. KING “Rock me baby” (top 34)THE DIXIE CUPS “Chapel of love” (top 1)PETER and GORDON “A world without love” (top 1)BILLY J. KRAMER with THE DAKOTAS “Bad to me” (top 9)THE DAVE CLARK FIVE “Do you love me” (top 11)THE BEATLES “P.S. I love you” (top 10)THE SWINGING BLUE JEANS “Good Golly Miss Molly” (top 43)THE SEARCHERS “Sugar and spice” (top 44)THE RAY CHARLES SINGERS “Love me with all your heart (cuando calienta el Sol)” (top 3)ELVIS PRESLEY with THE JUBILEE FOUR and CAROLE LOMBARD QUARTET “What’d I said” (top 21)DIONNE WARWICK “Walk on by” (top 6)THE DRIFTERS “One way love” (top 55)BRENDA HOLLOWAY “Every little bit hurts” (top 13)THE ORLONS “Rules of love” (top 66)BERNADETTE CARROLL “Party girl” (top 47)THE RIP CHORDS “Three window coupe” (top 28)LESLEY GORE “I don't wanna be a loser” (top 37)BRENDA LEE “My dreams” (top 85)RUFUS and THOMAS “Night time is the right time” (top 94)Escuchar audio

What's your most loved and least favorite song on Little Richard's debut album, 1957's Here's Little Richard?! We finally delve into the 1950s by talking about the oldest album we've ranked yet. Adam repeatedly circles back to himself, talking about his short European tour with the red-hot Little Richards and interviews two of its main creators: Sparkle Gail Higgins, longtime London/NY/California vintage clothing queen and Heartbreakers road manager who named her San Diego store the Girl Can't Help It and her friend Robert Lopez (El Vez), who started the wild allstar act to play at her store. Listen at WeWillRankYouPod.com, Apple, Spotify and your favorite piano store.  Follow us and weigh in with your favorites on Facebook, Instagram & Threads and Twitter @wewillrankyoupod . Architect of Rock and Roll, Attitude, A-WOOOOOOO, a-wop-bop-a-loo-mop-a-lop-bam-boom, Baby, the beat, the beat, the beat, the Beatles, Pat Boone, Can't Believe You Wanna Leave, choreography, El Vez, energy, the Girl Can't Help It, Good Golly Miss Molly, the Heartbreakers, Sparkle Gail Higgins,  Benny Hill, Jenny, Jenny, Little Adam, Little Richard, Little Robert, the Little Richards, Long Tall Sally, Robert Lopez, Lucille, Dean Martin, Paul McCartney, Miss Ann, my band, my band, my band, Oh Why?, Richard Penniman, piano, Elvis Presley, Ready Teddy, Rip It Up, rock and roll, Rubber Duckie, saxophone solo, She's Got It, shut up, Slippin' and Slidin', Trio, True, Fine Mama, Tutti Frutti, 1957. US: http://www.WeWillRankYouPod.com wewillrankyoupod@gmail.comhttp://www.facebook.com/WeWillRankYouPodhttp://www.instagram.com/WeWillRankYouPodhttps://www.threads.net/@WeWillRankYouPod http://www.twitter.com/WeWillRankYouPo http://www.YourOlderBrother.com (Sam's music page) http://www.YerDoinGreat.com (Adam's music page)https://open.spotify.com/user/dancecarbuzz (Dan's playlists)

**Please note this is a Spookysode,  there is going to be subject matter present in this episode that aren't present in typical episodes, and could be triggering. Please listen with caution._-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-Good Golly Miss Molly!Join us this Samhain for tales of cowboys, flirtatious ghosts, an interview with a vampi- I mean, a ghost hunter, and (as always) lots of stories from you guys.A huge thank you to Theresa Mariesa for her time, knowledge, and for being a friend. Y'all have a rootin' tootin' Halloween, ya'hear!Today's Sponsor:Jupiter Ritualsjupiterrituals.comInstagram @jupiterritualsSimply CaptivatingCheck it out on Patreon.com/wbahpodcast on Thursdayswbahpodcast.com_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_Advertise with us!Just shoot us an email over to wbahpodcast@gmail.comWant to help support the Podcast? Consider becoming a Patron or OnlyFan!www.patreon.com/wbahpodcastonlyfans.com/wbahpodcastSnag yourself some WBAH Merch!teespring.com/stores/wbah-podcast-storeContact Us (Come Eat With Us)Instagram @WitchBitchAmateurHourTwitter @BitchHourFacebook @WitchAmateurHourOnlyfans.com/wbahpodcastwbahpodcast@gmail.comHandwritten letters are actual magic!PO Box 865Canton, Tx75103_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-Come Do Yoga With Macy:patreon.com/macyaniseyogaPlay The Sims With Charlyetwitch.tv/charlye_withawhyTwitter @charlyewithawhyOur Video EditorEldrich Kitchenm.youtube.com/channel/UC_CwBrVMhqezVz_fog716Ow_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-Support the showWe are not doctors, lawyers, or professionals. We are amateurs, and nothing we say should be taken as advice, instruction, or seriously. Any action taken based on what we say or imply can and will lead to illness, existential crisis, injury, your pets no longer loving you, and death. We make no promise or guarantee, expressed or implied, and assume no legal liability or responsibility for any injuries resulting from the use of information contained within our media.

Created and produced by Donnie Kehr, best known for his originated roles in Broadway's Jersey Boys and Billy Elliot, The Greatest Piano Men is an electrifying production that celebrates the world's greatest piano icons and showmen in music history - from the 50s and 60s hits of Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Ray Charles to the 70s and 80s hits of Stevie Wonder, Elton John, and Billy Joel - and even the legendary works of Beethoven and Liberace. The Greatest Piano Men features Pete Peterkin - a singer, actor, dancer, comic, master impressionist, and multi-instrumentalist, best known for his appearance on Season 4 of “America's Got Talent,” Bill Conners - the gold standard when it comes to impersonating Sir Elton John, perfectly captures the voice, mannerisms, and fabulous showmanship of the rock icon, as well as David K. Maiocco - award-winning musical director, pianist, and actor, considered one of the most well recognized Liberace tribute artists.  This electrifying music celebration features a rockin' 8-piece band, sensational back-up vocalists, and captivating multimedia storytelling, as The Greatest Piano Men bring along 25 hit songs including, “Good Golly Miss Molly,” “Superstition,” “I'm Still Standing,” “Hit the Road Jack,” “New York State of Mind,” and many more! This episode features recordings from The Greatest Piano Men's 2022 performance at Big Top Chautauqua.       First broadcast in 1994, Tent Show Radio is a weekly one-hour radio program showcasing the best live recordings from acclaimed music acts and entertainers who grace the Big Top Chautauqua stage each summer in beautiful Bayfield, WI. In the program's nearly 30-year history it has featured artists like Johnny Cash, B.B King, Brandi Carlile, Willie Nelson, Don McLean, and many more. Hosted by celebrated New York Times best-selling author Michael Perry-who weaves stories and humor throughout each episode - Tent Show Radio features performances from renowned national & regional artists, with regular appearances featuring Big Top's own unique brand of shows that feature songs and stories performed by its acclaimed house band, The Blue Canvas Orchestra. Tent Show Radio is independently produced by Big Top Chautauqua, a non-profit performing arts organization, with a mission to present performances and events that celebrate history and the environment - along with their annual summer concert series - nestled in the woods on the shores of Lake Superior and the Apostle Islands.    EPISODE CREDITSMichael Perry - Host Phillip Anich - Announcer Jaime Hansen - Engineer Gina Nagro - Marketing Support FOLLOW BIG TOP CHAUTAUQUA https://www.facebook.com/bigtopchautauqua/ https://www.instagram.com/bigtopchautauqua/ https://www.tiktok.com/@bigtopchautauqua https://twitter.com/BigBlueTent FOLLOW MICHAEL PERRYhttps://sneezingcow.com/ https://www.facebook.com/sneezingcow https://www.instagram.com/sneezingcow/ https://twitter.com/sneezingcow/ 2023 TENT SHOW RADIO SPONSORSAshland Area Chamber of Commerce - https://www.visitashland.com/  Bayfield Chamber and Visitor Bureau - https://www.bayfield.org/  Bayfield County Tourism - https://www.bayfieldcounty.wi.gov/150/Tourism  The Bayfield Inn - https://bayfieldinn.com/  Cable Area Chamber of Commerce - https://www.cable4fun.com/  Washburn Area Chamber of Commerce - https://washburnchamber.com/ SPECIAL THANKSWisconsin Public Radio - https://www.wpr.org/ 

¡Vótame en los Premios iVoox 2023! La irrupción de jóvenes talentos en el fútbol español, especialmente si son españoles (y del Barça), es jaleada entusiásticamente por los ciudadanos periodistas. No importa que algunos lleven apenas cuatro ratos mal contados en primera división, son elevados a los altares y considerados una bendición para sus equipos. El caso de Jude Bellingham es diferente. Alguno dice que todavía hay que esperar para emitir un juicio, otros que, en el fondo, sus actuaciones no hacen sino desnudar los problemas del Real Madrid. Min. 01 Seg. 46 - Intro Min. 10 Seg. 45 - Nadie le habría comprado Min. 16 Seg. 50 - En el partido grande, desapareció Min. 21 Seg. 51 - Hay que respetar a los rivales (menos a los del Madrid) Min. 30 Seg. 00 - Enfadado porque le engañaron Min. 34 Seg. 43 - Hay ganas de jubilarle Min. 40 Seg. 15 - Periodismo de ciencia-ficción Min. 45 Seg. 47 - Un día antes, estaba bien Min. 51 Seg. 15 - Hay que cambiar de portero para que la pifie Min. 57 Seg. 12 - El regreso del tonto útil Min. 62 Seg. 35 - Despedida Van Morrison (Aarhus 09/09/2000) Hello Josephine > Good Golly Miss Molly > Tutti Frutti > Roll Over Beethoven > Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On Outskirts Of Town Real Real Gone Goin' Down Geneva > Rainy Day Women > Brand New Cadillac Precious Time In The Midnight Vanlose Stairway Old Black Joe If You Love Me Cleaning Windows Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band - Hollywood Nights (Detroit, MI 16/06/1980)

Nobody embodies the spirit of Rock n Roll more than Little Richard. It could be argued that his whole career was a misadventure in music so he's THE perfect subject for our latest podcast. Our guest is the much-respected author/broadcaster, Spencer Leigh, whose biography of the man himself, Send Me Some Lovin', is out now. Born Richard Wayne Penniman, Little Richard claimed he invented rock'n' roll.  He didn't, but his songs - Tutti Frutti, Lucille, Good Golly Miss Molly and many more - changed the rock 'n' roll landscape forever. He was a huge influence on the Beatles, Hendrix and Prince and he lived his life as though he was continually on stage. There really was no one like Little Richard." find out more here:   http://www.spencerleigh.co.uk/

Very near and dear friend of the Pod, Molly Dennis, joins Chris and Drew on. this vivacious episode of The Good Bottle Podcast. Stories: Bacardi reneges on promise to quit Russia, sees profits triple (thebell.io) Top 10 best-selling rum brands - The Spirits Business Dope Follows: @leeannewong @mauiunited @raymondatlas Book: "Surviving to Drive: A Year Inside Formula 1" by Guenter Steiner --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/goodbottlepodcast/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/goodbottlepodcast/support

The boys test their knowledge of rock ‘n roll urban legends, marvel at Molly's bountiful ballin', and use the scientific method to conduct an autopsy on the corpse of Little Richard's 1956 barnstormer, “Good Golly, Miss Molly” --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/rocknrollautopsy/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/rocknrollautopsy/support

Let's start by laughing at yourself Yes you can be funny if you are human Episode 165 (June is based in Georgia) In this conversation with June Cline we explore: Why use humor in a business presentation The risks of using humor and why some speaker avoid it How laughter can bring people together and move them towards a goal The undiscovered value of our flaws and foibles How to find your humor even if you believe you aren't funny How to use humor in your presentations The four humor styles and why some don't laugh You can still be taken seriously About our guest, June Cline: A certified, speaking professional showing you how to craft an engagingly powerful speech. She is an official coach for TEDx St. George, Utah, and known as “The Talking Strategist.” For 18 years, June has been known as the southern, sassy, and savvy Harley-riding Humorist. She named her motorcycle, "Good Golly Miss Molly". ----- Learn how June can work with you at https://standouttalking.com/   Take the humor quiz to determine your humor style at https://junecline.com/     Excerpts from this conversation with June Cline: 02:25 I've talked to some executives and they say, Well, you know, we're serious. This is serious business. This is this is trucking, or this is banking, or this is just serious business. We can't be laughing all the time and making jokes. What do you say to them? 02:42 You know what I, I've heard that. And I've gotten major pushback through the many, many years that I've been teaching this. And I just know that's wrong. And especially if you can come up with what I call an IMO, which executives and everybody hates because it's an idiot moment. But don't we all have them? Haven't we all experienced locking our keys in the car. And as one client executive found out after we'd call the tow truck and everything his window was down, all they had to do was reach. So it's just fun stuff like that. And there are some execs and entrepreneurs that will not go there. T hey just don't want to drop that wall down and allow people in but if you can tell, not a crazy idiot moment, but something that they all happen every day all the time. So I encourage you to find that IMO idiot moment that will connect you with others. ----- ----more---- Your host is George Torok George is a specialist in executive communication skills. That includes conversation and presentation. He's fascinated by way we communicate and influence behaviors. He delivers training and coaching programs to help leaders and promising professionals deliver the intended message for greater success.   Connect with George www.SpeechCoachforExecutives.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgetorokpresentations/ https://www.youtube.com/user/presentationskills https://www.instagram.com/georgetorok/  

Helen and Gavin chat about No Hard Feelings, and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and it's Week 82 from the list of Rolling Stone's 500 Best Songs Ever, numbers 95 to 91; Wonderwall by Oasis, I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston, Since U Been Gone by Kelly Clarkson, Good Golly Miss Molly by Little Richard, and International Players Anthem (I Choose You) by UKG ft Outkast.

Regresamos a aquella primera mitad de los años 60. Todos los estilos que confluyeron en las listas de éxitos y dieron forma a la música popular de esos días son el manantial inagotable del que extraemos las canciones de este coleccionable.Playlist;(sintonía) THE CHANTAYS “Pipeline”THE SURFARIS “Surfer Joe”STEVIE WONDER “Fingertips (part 2)”THE MARVELETTES “Please Mr Postman”CHUBBY CHECKER “Pony time”BOBBY RYDELL and CHUBBY CHECKER “Teach me to twist”LITTLE EVA “He is the boy”DIONNE WARWICK “Walk on by”ARETHA FRANKLIN “Rock-a-bye your baby with a dixie melody”ERMA FRANKLIN “I don’t want no mama’s boy”LITTLE RICHARD “Memories are made of this”SWINGIN BLUE JEANS “Good Golly Miss Molly”THE ANIMALS “I’m cryin’”ALAN PRICE “I put a spell on you”SCREAMIN’ JAY HAWKINS “Nitty Gritty”THE SHADOWS “F.B.I.”KATHY KIRBY “Dance on”ARTHUR ALEXANDER “Call me lonesome” Escuchar audio

Created and Produced by Donnie Kehr, best known for his originated roles in Broadway's Jersey Boys and Billy Elliot, The Greatest Piano Men is an electrifying production that celebrates the world's greatest piano icons and showmen in music history - from the 50s and 60s hits of Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Ray Charles to the 70s and 80s hits of Stevie Wonder, Elton John, and Billy Joel - and even the legendary works of Beethoven and Liberace. The Greatest Piano Men features Pete Peterkin - a singer, actor, dancer, comic, master impressionist, and multi-instrumentalist, best known for his appearance on Season 4 of “America's Got Talent,” Bill Conners - the gold standard when it comes to impersonating Sir Elton John, perfectly captures the voice, mannerisms, and fabulous showmanship of the rock icon, as well as David K. Maiocco - award-winning musical director, pianist, and actor, considered one of the most well recognized Liberace tribute artists. This electrifying music celebration features a rockin' 8-piece band, sensational back-up vocalists, and captivating multimedia storytelling, as The Greatest Piano Men bring along 25 hit songs including, “Good Golly Miss Molly,” “Superstition,” “I'm Still Standing,” “Hit the Road Jack,” “New York State of Mind,” and many more! This episode features recordings from The Greatest Piano Men's July 2022 performance at Big Top Chautauqua.    First broadcast in 1994, Tent Show Radio is a weekly one-hour radio program showcasing the best live recordings from acclaimed music acts and entertainers who grace the Big Top Chautauqua stage each summer in beautiful Bayfield, WI. In the program's nearly 30-year history it has featured artists like Johnny Cash, B.B King, Brandi Carlile, Willie Nelson, Don McLean, and many more. Hosted by celebrated New York Times best-selling author Michael Perry-who weaves stories and humor throughout each episode - Tent Show Radio features performances from renowned national & regional artists, with regular appearances featuring Big Top's own unique brand of shows that feature songs and stories performed by its acclaimed house band, The Blue Canvas Orchestra. Tent Show Radio is independently produced by Big Top Chautauqua, a non-profit performing arts organization, with a mission to present performances and events that celebrate history and the environment - along with their annual summer concert series - nestled in the woods on the shores of Lake Superior and the Apostle Islands.   EPISODE CREDITSMichael Perry - Host Phillip Anich - Announcer Jaime Hansen - Engineer Gina Nagro - Marketing Support FOLLOW BIG TOP CHAUTAUQUA https://www.facebook.com/bigtopchautauqua/ https://www.instagram.com/bigtopchautauqua/ https://www.tiktok.com/@bigtopchautauqua https://twitter.com/BigBlueTent FOLLOW MICHAEL PERRYhttps://sneezingcow.com/ https://www.facebook.com/sneezingcow https://www.instagram.com/sneezingcow/ https://twitter.com/sneezingcow/ 2023 TENT SHOW RADIO SPONSORSAshland Area Chamber of Commerce - https://www.visitashland.com/  Bayfield Chamber and Visitor Bureau - https://www.bayfield.org/  Bayfield County Tourism - https://www.bayfieldcounty.wi.gov/150/Tourism  The Bayfield Inn - https://bayfieldinn.com/  Cable Area Chamber of Commerce - https://www.cable4fun.com/  Washburn Area Chamber of Commerce - https://washburnchamber.com/ SPECIAL THANKSWisconsin Public Radio - https://www.wpr.org/ 

Lien vers la playlist de cet épisode : linktr.ee/djwildroseCrédits :Animatrice : DJ WildroseDirectrice éditoriale : DJ WildroseRéalisateur : Kevin AbadieIngénieur du son : Kevin AbadieMusique :. C'mon Everybody, Eddie Cochran, Liberty Records. Johnny B. Goode, Chuck Berry, Chess Records. Good Golly Miss Molly, Little Richard, Specialty Records. Pelvis On Fire, Volbeat, Universal Records. Blue Suede Shoes, Elvis Presley, Sun Records. Rumble, Link Wray, Cadence Records Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

Episode 240, Little Richard, explores the life and music of one of the true pioneers of rock and roll. Recordings include Good Golly Miss Molly, Tutti Fruiti, Ready Teddy, Taxi Blues, By the Light of... Read More The post Episode 240, Little Richard appeared first on Sam Waldron.

Episode 366... Grow a funky mustache, take an "I voted" selfie, and bust your flashlight out at 5PM now. Regardless, stay pissed with some usual brain melting punk tunes. Lots of 2022 Bandcampers this week. Along with some regulars. Enjoy! Download and stream here (iTunes and Google Podcasts as well):BROS GRIM 366!!!!!!Airing Wednesdays 7pm PST on PUNK ROCK DEMONSTRATION. Also Fridays and Saturdays 7pm PST on RIPPER RADIO.Send us stuff  to brothersgrimpunk@gmail.com. Punk affect...Boston Trump or Die 0:55 Ugly 7/11 Was A Part-Time Job Novia Scotia Afraid To Make Change 0:54 Mutated Void Roses Forever LP still a hunger 1:30 Contorture Contorture/Insidious Process split 7'' Outta Vogue 1:31 Sick Burn A Grand Exclamation of GO​!​-​ing (Japan Tour 2019) (Thrash#6) Angry Generation (bkgrd) 2:11 Lee Hazlewood's Woodchucks Cruisin' for Surf Bunnies RAWHEADS - Right Wing Extinction 1:52 V/A Crust Punk Comp. 2020 D-BEATING Vol.1  Overcome Yourself 1:46 Death Side All Is Here Now 7" (1994) Quarantine Blues 1:17 Courtroom Sketches Demo Break The Mold 1:30 Jerry's Kids Is This My World? I Have A Dream 2:11 Guttermouth Gorgeous House Party (bkgrd) 2:33 Number 9 Hard The Collective Underground Vol. 1 My Crew 1:13 DEAD CITY Trap Tapes, Vol. 1 Catch 22 1:30 UX Vileheads Catch 22 Death Wish Kids 2:15 Poison Idea Kings Of Punk Falsas conciencias 1:22 Rapiña Apocalipsis y Miedo Going Nowhere 0:42 The Transgressions Waste My Time Dying Breed (bkgrd) 2:12 The Capones The Collective Underground Vol. 1 Chile Subsistir 0:30 Mandril MANDRIL: I France Tanga Miranda 0:52 The Benches Illusions of fragmented realities London Neon Bastard 1:47 Revival of Death Demo 0 MO Dirtbag Distro Mutually Assured Suicide 1:52 PROTON SPLIT w/ Total ShamGermany Gun Shot 1:00 Crawl Space Demo 2022_ STTW Records Berlin Air Pollution 1:05 Nukelickers 3 Promo Trax of Raw Noise Not Music Good Golly Miss Molly (bkgrd) 2:43 Creedence Clearwater Revival Greatest HitsIndonesia Pro Kontra 1:10 D.I.S Angkara Murka Terminal Greedfucker 0:20 IRA GRAVES DEMO 2011 Pigstomper 1:31 Ripfacer Lost Tracks Split Indiana State of Affairs 1:28 Use Of Force Use of Force Kick Me 2:16 The Vandals Live Fast, Diarrhea Big Trip (bkgrd) 3:22 Step Up! S.F.H.C. Radio Riot! Vol. 3 Punk 1:49 Seein Red SeeinRed/Hunam Alert split Horrific consequences 1:39 Löckheed Löckheed//Affect Split EP NO FUN - Lie 1:26 knochentapes FAST // VIOLENCE Never Adjust 1:17 Last Words Last Words LP Disco Killers 2:32 POR035 CINDERBLOCK S/t CS Philly Silhouettes 1:28 DARK THOUGHTS MUST BE NICE Spain Bad Communication 1:59 Metrics Demo 2022

Support our #Kickasskorean of the week: Chef Esther Choi @choibites

Detroit gave us the rowdiest blue-eyed soul band of the '60s, and this CD packs in 20 of their best including every hit! Includes Jenny Take a Ride!; Devil with a Blue Dress On & Good Golly Miss Molly; Sock It to Me-Baby!; Little Latin Lupe Lu and more.

Good Golly Miss Molly, its a Panel Episode. Arron and Rocky sit down with Journalist Rachel Christian, Local Comic Rob Smiles and Musician Billy Floyd to talk about the Slapening of Chris Rock. We then dive into the dangers of method acting. And then a deep dive into the Depp v. Heard case.Welcome to the Chaos... Happy Birthday Adri

The debate is on.  Was Saturday night at UFC London 2022 the greatest single night for British MMA on British soil so far? Nine bonus cheques dished out due to a heap of highlight reel knock outs and the best of the lot came from a little scouser who goes by the name of 'Meatball'. Buckle up because this review deserves extra long attention. TWO HOUR SHOW. FIGHT DISCIPLES IS A MULTI AWARD WINNING PODCAST WINNERS OF THE BEST SPORT PODCAST AT THE BRITISH PODCAST AWARDS 2017 AND 2018 *Please leave a review on iTunes http://apple.co/2wijpC1 *Follow us on Facebook www.facebook.com/fightdisciples *Follow us on Twitter www.twitter.com/fightdisciples *Follow us on Instagram www.instagram.com/thefightdisciples *Subscribe on YouTube www.youtube.com/fightdisciples #FIGHT #BOXING #MMA #UFC #UFCLONDON #MOLLYMCCANN #PADDYPIMBLETT #TOMASPINALL #MUHAMMADMOKAEV #ARNOLDALLEN #JACKSHORE #PAULCRAIG #LONDON 

Episode 141 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “River Deep Mountain High'”, and at the career of Ike and Tina Turner.  Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Also, this episode was recorded before the sad death of the great Ronnie Spector, whose records are featured a couple of times in this episode, which is partly about her abusive ex-husband. Her life paralleled Tina Turner's quite closely, and if you haven't heard the episode I did about her last year, you can find it at https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-110-be-my-baby-by-the-ronettes/. I wish I'd had the opportunity to fit a tribute into this episode too. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Wild Thing" by the Troggs. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, all the songs excerpted in the podcast can be heard in full at Mixcloud. Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era by Ken Emerson is a good overview of the Brill Building scene, and I referred to it for the material about Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. I've referred to two biographies of Phil Spector in this episode, Phil Spector: Out of His Head by Richard Williams and He's a Rebel by Mark Ribkowsky. Tina Turner has written two autobiographies. I Tina is now out of print but is slightly more interesting, as it contains interview material with other people in her life. My Love Story is the more recent one and covers her whole life up to 2019. Ike Turner's autobiography Takin' Back My Name is a despicable, self-serving, work of self-justification, and I do not recommend anyone buy or read it. But I did use it for quotes in the episode so it goes on the list. Ike Turner: King of Rhythm by John Collis is more even-handed, and contains a useful discography. That Kat Sure Could Play! is a four-CD compilation of Ike Turner's work up to 1957. The TAMI and Big TNT shows are available on a Blu-Ray containing both performances. There are many compilations available with some of the hits Spector produced, but I recommend getting Back to Mono, a four-CD overview of his career containing all the major singles put out by Philles. There are sadly no good compilations of Ike and Tina Turner's career, as they recorded for multiple labels, and would regularly rerecord the hits in new versions for each new label, so any compilation you find will have the actual hit version of one or two tracks, plus a bunch of shoddy remakes. However, the hit version of "River Deep, Mountain High" is on the album of the same name, which is a worthwhile album to get,. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today's episode is unfortunately another one of those which will require a content warning, because we're going to be talking about Ike and Tina Turner. For those of you who don't know, Ike Turner was possibly the most famously abusive spouse in the whole history of music, and it is literally impossible to talk about the duo's career without talking about that abuse. I am going to try not to go into too many of the details -- if nothing else, the details are very readily available for those who want to seek them out, not least in Tina's two autobiographies, so there's no sense in retraumatising people who've experienced domestic abuse by going over them needlessly -- but it would be dishonest to try to tell the story without talking about it at all. This is not going to be an episode *about* Ike Turner's brutal treatment of Tina Turner -- it's an episode about the record, and about music, and about their musical career -- but the environment in which "River Deep, Mountain High" was created was so full of toxic, abusive, destructive men that Ike Turner may only be the third-worst person credited on the record, and so that abuse will come up. If discussion of domestic abuse, gun violence, cocaine addiction, and suicide attempts are likely to cause you problems, you might want to read the transcript rather than listen to the podcast. That said, let's get on with the story. One of the problems I'm hitting at this point of the narrative is that starting with "I Fought the Law" we've hit a run of incredibly intertangled stories  The three most recent episodes, this one, and nine of the next twelve, all really make up one big narrative about what happened when folk-rock and psychedelia hit the Hollywood scene and the Sunset Strip nightclubs started providing the raw material for the entertainment industry to turn into pop culture. We're going to be focusing on a small number of individuals, and that causes problems when trying to tell a linear narrative, because people don't live their lives sequentially -- it's not the case that everything happened to Phil Spector, and *then* everything happened to Cass Elliot, and *then* everything happened to Brian Wilson. All these people were living their lives and interacting and influencing each other, and so sometimes we'll have to mention something that will be dealt with in a future episode. So I'll say here and now that we *will* be doing an episode on the Lovin' Spoonful in two weeks. So when I say now that in late 1965 the Lovin' Spoonful were one of the biggest bands around, and possibly the hottest band in the country, you'll have to take that on trust. But they were, and in late 1965 their hit "Do You Believe in Magic?" had made the top ten: [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Do You Believe in Magic?"] Phil Spector, as always, was trying to stay aware of the latest trends in music, and he was floundering somewhat. Since the Beatles had hit America in 1964, the hits had dried up -- he'd produced a few minor hit records in 1964, but the only hits he'd made in 1965 had been with the Righteous Brothers -- none of his other acts were charting. And then the Righteous Brothers left him, after only a year. In late 1965, he had no hit acts and no prospect of having any. There was only one thing to do -- he needed to start making his own folk-rock records. And the Lovin' Spoonful gave him an idea how to do that. Their records were identifiably coming from the same kind of place as people like the Byrds or the Mamas and the Papas, but they were pop songs, not protest songs -- the Lovin' Spoonful weren't doing Dylan covers or anything intellectual, but joyous pop confections of a kind that anyone could relate to. Spector knew how to make pop records like that. But to do that, he needed a band. Even though he had been annoyed at the way that people had paid more attention to the Righteous Brothers, as white men, than they had to the other vocalists he'd made hit records with (who, as Black women, had been regarded by a sexist and racist public as interchangeable puppets being controlled by a Svengali rather than as artists in their own right), he knew he was going to have to work with a group of white male vocalist-instrumentalists if he wanted to have his own Lovin' Spoonful. And the group he chose was a group from Greenwich Village called MFQ. MFQ had originally named themselves the Modern Folk Quartet, as a parallel to the much better-known Modern Jazz Quartet, and consisted of Cyrus Faryar, Henry Diltz, Jerry Yester, and Chip Douglas, all of whom were multi-instrumentalists who would switch between guitar, banjo, mandolin, and bass depending on the song. They had combined Kingston Trio style clean-cut folk with Four Freshmen style modern harmonies -- Yester, who was a veteran of the New Christy Minstrels, said of the group's vocals that "the only vocals that competed with us back then was Curt Boettcher's group", and  they had been taken under the wing of manager Herb Cohen, who had got them a record deal with Warner Brothers. They recorded two albums of folk songs, the first of which was produced by Jim Dickson, the Byrds' co-manager: [Excerpt: The Modern Folk Quartet, "Sassafras"] But after their second album, they had decided to go along with the trends and switch to folk-rock. They'd started playing with electric instruments, and after a few shows where John Sebastian, the lead singer of the Lovin' Spoonful, had sat in with them on drums, they'd got themselves a full-time drummer, "Fast" Eddie Hoh, and renamed themselves the Modern Folk Quintet, but they always shortened that to just MFQ. Spector was convinced that this group could be another Lovin' Spoonful if they had the right song, and MFQ in turn were eager to become something more than an unsuccessful folk group. Spector had the group rehearsing in his house for weeks at a stretch before taking them into the studio. The song that Spector chose to have the group record was written by a young songwriter he was working with named Harry Nilsson. Nilsson was as yet a complete unknown, who had not written a hit and was still working a day job, but he had a talent for melody, and he also had a unique songwriting sensibility combining humour and heartbreak. For example, he'd written a song that Spector had recorded with the Ronettes, "Here I Sit", which had been inspired by the famous graffito from public toilet walls -- "Here I sit, broken-hearted/Paid a dime and only farted": [Excerpt: The Ronettes, "Here I Sit"] That ability to take taboo bodily functions and turn them into innocent-sounding love lyrics is also at play in the song that Spector chose to have the MFQ record. "This Could be the Night" was written by Nilsson from the perspective of someone who is hoping to lose his virginity -- he feels like he's sitting on dynamite, and he's going to "give her some", but it still sounds innocent enough to get past the radio censors of the mid-sixties: [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, "This Could Be the Night (demo)"] Spector took that song, and recorded a version of it which found the perfect balance between Spector's own wall of sound and the Lovin' Spoonful's "Good Time Music" sound: [Excerpt: MFQ, "This Could be the Night"] Brian Wilson was, according to many people, in the studio while that was being recorded, and for decades it would remain a favourite song of Wilson's -- he recorded a solo version of it in the 1990s, and when he started touring solo for the first time in 1998 he included the song in his earliest live performances. He also tried to record it with his wife's group, American Spring, in the early 1970s, but was unable to, because while he could remember almost all of the song, he couldn't get hold of the lyrics. And the reason he couldn't get hold of the lyrics is that the record itself went unreleased, because Phil Spector had found a new performer he was focusing on instead. It happened during the filming of the Big TNT Show, a sequel to the TAMI Show, released by American International Pictures, for which "This Could Be the Night" was eventually used as a theme song. The MFQ were actually performers at the Big TNT Show, which Spector was musical director and associate producer of, but their performances were cut out of the finished film, leaving just their record being played over the credits. The Big TNT Show generally gets less respect than the TAMI Show, but it's a rather remarkable document of the American music scene at the very end of 1965, and it's far more diverse than the TAMI show. It opens with, of all people, David McCallum -- the actor who played Ilya Kuryakin on The Man From UNCLE -- conducting a band of session musicians playing an instrumental version of "Satisfaction": [Excerpt: David McCallum, "Satisfaction"] And then, in front of an audience which included Ron and Russel Mael, later of Sparks, and Frank Zappa, who is very clearly visible in audience shots, came performances of every then-current form of popular music. Ray Charles, Petula Clark, Bo Diddley, the Byrds, the Lovin' Spoonful, Roger Miller, the Ronettes, and Donovan all did multiple songs, though the oddest contribution was from Joan Baez, who as well as doing some of her normal folk repertoire also performed "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'" with Spector on piano: [Excerpt: Joan Baez and Phil Spector, "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'"] But the headline act on the eventual finished film was the least-known act on the bill, a duo who had not had a top forty hit for four years at this point, and who were only on the bill as a last-minute fill-in for an act who dropped out, but who were a sensational live act. So sensational that when Phil Spector saw them, he knew he needed to sign them -- or at least he needed to sign one of them: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner with the Ikettes, "Please, Please, Please"] Because Ike and Tina Turner's performance at the Big TNT Show was, if anything, even more impressive than James Brown's performance on the TAMI Show the previous year. The last we saw of Ike Turner was way back in episode eleven. If you don't remember that, from more than three years ago, at the time Turner was the leader of a small band called the Kings of Rhythm. They'd been told by their friend B.B. King that if you wanted to make a record, the person you go to was Sam Phillips at Memphis Recording Services, and they'd recorded "Rocket '88", often cited as the first ever rock and roll record, under the name of their sax player and vocalist Jackie Brenston: [Excerpt: Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats, "Rocket '88"] We looked at some of the repercussions from that recording throughout the first year and a half or so of the podcast, but we didn't look any more at the career of Ike Turner himself. While "Rocket '88" was a minor hit, the group hadn't followed it up, and Brenston had left to go solo. For a while Ike wasn't really very successful at all -- though he was still performing around Memphis, and a young man named Elvis Presley was taking notes at some of the shows. But things started to change for Ike when he once again turned up at Sam Phillips' studio -- this time because B.B. King was recording there. At the time, Sun Records had still not started as its own label, and Phillips' studio was being used for records made by all sorts of independent blues labels, including Modern Records, and Joe Bihari was producing a session for B.B. King, who had signed to Modern. The piano player on the session also had a connection to "Rocket '88" -- when Jackie Brenston had quit Ike's band to go solo, he'd put together a new band to tour as the Delta Cats, and Phineas Newborn Jr had ended up playing Turner's piano part on stage, before Brenston's career collapsed and Newborn became King's pianist. But Phineas Newborn was a very technical, dry, jazz pianist -- a wonderful player, but someone who was best suited to playing more cerebral material, as his own recordings as a bandleader from a few years later show: [Excerpt: Phineas Newborn Jr, "Barbados"] Bihari wasn't happy with what Newborn was playing, and the group took a break from recording to get something to eat and try to figure out the problem. While they were busy, Turner went over to the piano and started playing. Bihari said that that was exactly what they wanted, and Turner took over playing the part. In his autobiography, Turner variously remembers the song King was recording there as "You Know I Love You" and "Three O'Clock Blues", neither of which, as far as I can tell, were actually recorded at Phillips' studio, and both of which seem to have been recorded later -- it's difficult to say for sure because there were very few decent records kept of these things at the time. But we do know that Turner played on a lot of King's records in the early fifties, including on "Three O'Clock Blues", King's first big hit: [Excerpt: B.B. King, "Three O'Clock Blues"] For the next while, Turner was on salary at Modern Records, playing piano on sessions, acting as a talent scout, and also apparently writing many of the songs that Modern's artists would record, though those songs were all copyrighted under the name "Taub", a pseudonym for the Bihari brothers, as well as being a de facto arranger and producer for the company. He worked on many records made in and around Memphis, both for Modern Records and for other labels who drew from the same pool of artists and musicians. Records he played on and produced or arranged include several of Bobby "Blue" Bland's early records -- though Turner's claim in his autobiography that he played on Bland's version of "Stormy Monday" appears to be incorrect, as that wasn't recorded until a decade later. He did, though, play on Bland's “Drifting from Town to Town”, a rewrite of Charles Brown's “Driftin' Blues”, on which, as on many sessions run by Turner, the guitarist was Matt “Guitar” Murphy, who later found fame with the Blues Brothers: [Excerpt: Bobby "Blue" Bland with Ike Turner and his Orchestra, "Driftin' Blues"] Though I've also seen the piano part on that credited as being by Johnny Ace – there's often some confusion as to whether Turner or Ace played on a session, as they played with many of the same artists, but that one was later rereleased as by Bobby “Blue” Bland with Ike Turner and his Orchestra, so it's safe to say that Ike's on that one. He also played on several records by Howlin' Wolf, including "How Many More Years", recorded at Sam Phillips' studio: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "How Many More Years?"] Over the next few years he played with many artists we've covered already in the podcast, like Richard Berry and the Flairs, on whose recordings he played guitar rather than piano: [Excerpt: The Flairs, "Baby Wants"] He also played guitar on records by Elmore James: [Excerpt: Elmore James, "Please Find My Baby"] and played with Little Junior Parker, Little Milton, Johnny Ace, Roscoe Gordon, and many, many more. As well as making blues records, he also made R&B records in the style of Gene and Eunice with his then-wife Bonnie: [Excerpt: Bonnie and Ike Turner, "My Heart Belongs to You"] Bonnie was his fourth wife, all of them bigamous -- or at least, I *think* she was his fourth. I have seen two different lists Turner gave of his wives, both of them made up of entirely different people, though it doesn't help that many of them also went by nicknames. But Turner started getting married when he was fourteen, and as he would often put it "you gave a preacher two dollars, the papers cost three dollars, that was it. In those days Blacks didn't bother with divorces." (One thing you will see a lot with Turner, unfortunately, is his habit of taking his own personal misbehaviours and claiming they were either universal, or at least that they were universal among Black people, or among men. It's certainly true that some people in the Southeastern US had a more lackadaisical attitude towards remarrying without divorce at the time than we might expect, but it was in no way a Black thing specifically -- it was a people-like-Ike-Turner thing -- see for example the very similar behaviour of Jerry Lee Lewis. I'm trying, when I quote him, not to include too many of these generalisations, but I thought it important to include that one early on to show the kind of self-justification to which he was prone throughout his entire life.) It's largely because Bonnie played piano and was singing with his band that Turner switched to playing guitar, but there was another reason – while he disliked the attention he got on stage, he also didn't want a repeat of what had happened with Jackie Brenston, where Brenston as lead vocalist and frontman had claimed credit for what Ike thought of as his own record. Anyone who saw Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm was going to know that Ike Turner was the man who was making it all happen, and so he was going to play guitar up front rather than be on the piano in the background. So Turner took guitar lessons from Earl Hooker, one of the great blues guitarists of the period, who had played with Turner's piano inspiration Pinetop Perkins before recording solo tracks like "Sweet Angel": [Excerpt: Earl Hooker, "Sweet Angel"] Turner was always happier in the studio than performing live -- despite his astonishing ego, he was also a rather shy person who didn't like attention -- and he'd been happy working on salary for Modern and freelancing on occasion for other labels like Chess and Duke. But then the Biharis had brought him out to LA, where Modern Records was based, and as Joel Bihari put it "Ike did a great job for us, but he was a country boy. We brought him to L.A., and he just couldn't take city life. He only stayed a month, then left for East St. Louis to form his own band. He told me he was going back there to become a star." For once, Turner's memory of events lined up with what other people said about him. In his autobiography, he described what happened -- "Down in Mississippi, life is slow. Tomorrow, you are going to plough this field. The next day, you going to cut down these trees. You stop and you go on about your business. Next day, you start back on sawing trees or whatever you doing. Here I am in California, and this chick, this receptionist, is saying "Hold on, Mr Bihari, line 2... hold line 3... Hey Joe, Mr Something or other on the phone for you." I thought "What goddamn time does this stop?"" So Turner did head to East St. Louis -- which is a suburb of St. Louis proper, across the Mississippi river from it, and in Illinois rather than Missouri, and at the time a thriving industrial town in its own right, with over eighty thousand people living there. Hardly the laid-back country atmosphere that Turner was talking about, but still also far from LA both geographically and culturally. He put together a new lineup of the Kings of Rhythm, with a returning Jackie Brenston, who were soon recording for pretty much every label that was putting out blues and R&B tracks at that point, releasing records on RPM, Sue, Flair, Federal, and Modern as well as several smaller labels. usually with either Brenston or the group's drummer Billy Gayles singing lead: [Excerpt: Billy Gayles with Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm, "Just One More Time"] None of these records was a success, but the Kings of Rhythm were becoming the most successful band in East St. Louis. In the mid-fifties the only group that was as popular in the greater St. Louis metro area was the Johnny Johnson trio -- which soon became the Chuck Berry trio, and went on to greater things, while the Kings of Rhythm remained on the club circuit. But Turner was also becoming notorious for his temper -- he got the nickname "Pistol-Whippin' Ike Turner" for the way he would attack people with his gun, He also though was successful enough that he built his own home studio, and that was where he recorded "Boxtop". a calypso song whose middle eight seems to have been nicked from "Why Do Fools Fall In Love?" and whose general feel owes more than a little to "Love is Strange": [Excerpt: Ike Turner, Carlson Oliver, and Little Ann, "Boxtop"] The female vocals on that track were by Turner's new backing vocalist, who at the time went by the stage name "Little Ann". Anna Mae Bullock had started going to see the Kings of Rhythm regularly when she was seventeen, because her sister was dating one of the members of the band, and she had become a fan almost immediately. She later described her first experience seeing the group: "The first time I saw Ike on stage he was at his very best, sharply dressed in a dark suit and tie. Ike wasn't conventionally handsome – actually, he wasn't handsome at all – and he certainly wasn't my type. Remember, I was a schoolgirl, all of seventeen, looking at a man. I was used to high school boys who were clean-cut, athletic, and dressed in denim, so Ike's processed hair, diamond ring, and skinny body – he was all edges and sharp cheekbones – looked old to me, even though he was only twenty-five. I'd never seen anyone that thin! I couldn't help thinking, God, he's ugly." Turner didn't find Bullock attractive either -- one of the few things both have always agreed on in all their public statements about their later relationship was that neither was ever particularly attracted to the other sexually -- and at first this had caused problems for Anna Mae. There was a spot in the show where Turner would invite a girl from the audience up on stage to sing, a different one every night, usually someone he'd decided he wanted to sleep with. Anna Mae desperately wanted to be one of the girls that would get up on stage, but Turner never picked her. But then one day she got her chance. Her sister's boyfriend was teasing her sister, trying to get her to sing in this spot, and passed her the microphone. Her sister didn't want to sing, so Anna Mae grabbed the mic instead, and started singing -- the song she sang was B.B. King's "You Know I Love You", the same song that Turner always remembered as being recorded at Sun studios, and on which Turner had played piano: [Excerpt: B.B. King, "You Know I Love You"] Turner suddenly took notice of Anna Mae. As he would later say, everyone *says* they can sing, but it turned out that Anna Mae could. He took her on as an occasional backing singer, not at first as a full member of the band, but as a sort of apprentice, who he would teach how to use her talents more commercially. Turner always said that during this period, he would get Little Richard to help teach Anna Mae how to sing in a more uncontrolled, exuberant, style like he did, and Richard has backed this up, though Anna Mae never said anything about this. We do know though that Richard was a huge fan of Turner's -- the intro to "Good Golly Miss Molly": [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Good Golly Miss Molly"] was taken almost exactly from the intro to "Rocket '88": [Excerpt: Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats, "Rocket '88"] and Richard later wrote the introduction to Turner's autobiography. So it's possible -- but both men were inveterate exaggerators, and Anna Mae only joined Ike's band a few months before Richard's conversion and retirement from music, and during a point when he was a massive star, so it seems unlikely. Anna Mae started dating Raymond Hill, a saxophone player in the group, and became pregnant by him -- but then Hill broke his ankle, and used that as an excuse to move back to Clarksdale, Mississippi, to be with his family, abandoning his pregnant teenage girlfriend, and it seems to be around this point that Turner and Anna Mae became romantically and sexually involved. Certainly, one of Ike's girlfriends, Lorraine Taylor, seems to have believed they were involved while Anna Mae was pregnant, and indeed that Turner, rather than Hill, was the father. Taylor threatened Bullock with Turner's gun, before turning it on herself and attempting suicide, though luckily she survived. She gave birth to Turner's son, Ike Junior, a couple of months after Bullock gave birth to her own son, Craig. But even after they got involved, Anna Mae was still mostly just doing odd bits of backing vocals, like on "Boxtop", recorded in 1958, or on 1959's "That's All I Need", released on Sue Records: [Excerpt: Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm, "That's All I Need"] And it seemed that would be all that Anna Mae Bullock would do, until Ike Turner lent Art Lassiter eighty dollars he didn't want to pay back. Lassiter was a singer who was often backed by his own vocal trio, the Artettes, patterned after Ray Charles' Raelettes. He had performed with Turner's band on a semi-regular basis, since 1955 when he had recorded "As Long as I Have You" with his vocal group the Trojans, backed by "Ike Turner and his Orchestra": [Excerpt: The Trojans, Ike Turner and His Orchestra, "As Long as I Have You"] He'd recorded a few more tracks with Turner since then, both solo and under group names like The Rockers: [Excerpt: The Rockers, "Why Don't You Believe?"] In 1960, Lassiter needed new tyres for his car, and borrowed eighty dollars from Turner in order to get them -- a relatively substantial amount of money for a working musician back then. He told Turner that he would pay him back at a recording session they had booked, where Lassiter was going to record a song Turner had written, "A Fool in Love", with Turner's band and the Artettes. But Lassiter never showed up -- he didn't have the eighty dollars, and Turner found himself sat in a recording studio with a bunch of musicians he was paying for, paying twenty-five dollars an hour for the studio time, and with no singer there to record. At the time, he was still under the impression that Lassiter might eventually show up, if not at that session, then at least at a future one, but until he did, there was nothing he could do and he was getting angry. Bullock suggested that they cut the track without Lassiter. They were using a studio with a multi-track machine -- only two tracks, but that would be enough. They could cut the backing track on one track, and she could record a guide vocal on the other track, since she'd been around when Turner was teaching Lassiter the song. At least that way they wouldn't have wasted all the money. Turner saw the wisdom of the idea -- he said in his autobiography "This was the first time I got hip to two-track stereo" -- and after consulting with the engineer on the session, he decided to go ahead with Bullock's plan. The plan still caused problems, because they were recording the song in a key written for a man, so Bullock had to yell more than sing, causing problems for the engineer, who according to Turner kept saying things like "Goddammit, don't holler in my microphone". But it was only a demo vocal, after all, and they got it cut -- and as Lassiter didn't show up, Turner took Lassiter's backing vocal group as his own new group, renaming the Artettes to the Ikettes, and they became the first of a whole series of lineups of Ikettes who would record with Turner for the rest of his life. The intention was still to get Lassiter to sing lead on the record, but then Turner played an acetate of it at a club night where he was DJing as well as performing, and the kids apparently went wild: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "A Fool in Love"] Turner took the demo to Juggy Murray at Sue Records, still with the intention of replacing Anna Mae's vocal with Lassiter's, but Murray insisted that that was the best thing about the record, and that it should be released exactly as it was, that it was a guaranteed hit. Although -- while that's the story that's told all the time about that record by everyone involved in the recording and release, and seems uncontested, there does seem to be one minor problem with the story, which is that the Ikettes sing "you know you love him, you can't understand/Why he treats you like he do when he's such a good man". I'm willing to be proved wrong, of course, but my suspicion is that Ike Turner wasn't such a progressive thinker that he was writing songs about male-male relationships in 1960. It's possible that the Ikettes were recorded on the same track as Tina's guide vocals, but if the intention was to overdub a new lead from Lassiter on an otherwise finished track, it would have made more sense for them to sing their finished backing vocal part. It seems more likely to me that they decided in the studio that the record was going to go out with Anna Mae singing lead, and the idea of Murray insisting is a later exaggeration. One thing that doesn't seem to be an exaggeration, though, is that initially Murray wanted the record to go out as by Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm featuring Little Ann, but Turner had other ideas. While Murray insisted "the girl is the star", Turner knew what happened when other people were the credited stars on his records. He didn't want another Jackie Brenston, having a hit and immediately leaving Turner right back where he started. If Little Ann was the credited singer, Little Ann would become a star and Ike Turner would have to find a new singer. So he came up with a pseudonym. Turner was a fan of jungle women in film serials and TV, and he thought a wild-woman persona would suit Anna Mae's yelled vocal, and so he named his new star after Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, a female Tarzan knock-off comic character created by Will Eisner and Jerry Iger in the thirties, but who Turner probably knew from a TV series that had been on in 1955 and 56. He gave her his surname, changed "Sheena" slightly to make the new name alliterative and always at least claimed to have registered a trademark on the name he came up with, so if Anna Mae ever left the band he could just get a new singer to use the name. Anna Mae Bullock was now Tina Turner, and the record went out as by "Ike and Tina Turner": [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "A Fool in Love"] That went to number two on the R&B charts, and hit the top thirty on the pop charts, too. But there were already problems. After Ike had had a second son with Lorraine, he then got Tina pregnant with another of his children, still seeing both women. He had already started behaving abusively towards Tina, and as well as being pregnant, she was suffering from jaundice -- she says in the first of her two autobiographies that she distinctly remembered lying in her hospital bed, hearing "A Fool in Love" on the radio, and thinking "What's love got to do with it?", though as with all such self-mythologising we should take this with a pinch of salt. Turner was in need of money to pay for lawyers -- he had been arrested for financial crimes involving forged cheques -- and Juggy Murray wouldn't give him an advance until he delivered a follow-up to "A Fool in Love", so he insisted that Tina sneak herself out of the hospital and go into the studio, jaundiced and pregnant, to record the follow-up. Then, as soon as the jaundice had cleared up, they went on a four-month tour, with Tina heavily pregnant, to make enough money to pay Ike's legal bills. Turner worked his band relentlessly -- he would accept literally any gig, even tiny clubs with only a hundred people in the audience, reasoning that it was better for the band's image to play  small venues that had to turn people away because they were packed to capacity, than to play large venues that were only half full. While "A Fool in Love" had a substantial white audience, the Ike and Tina Turner Revue was almost the epitome of the chitlin' circuit act, playing exciting, funky, tightly-choreographed shows for almost entirely Black audiences in much the same way as James Brown, and Ike Turner was in control of every aspect of the show. When Tina had to go into hospital to give birth, rather than give up the money from gigging, Ike hired a sex worker who bore a slight resemblance to Tina to be the new onstage "Tina Turner" until the real one was able to perform again. One of the Ikettes told the real Tina, who discharged herself from hospital, travelled to the venue, beat up the fake Tina, and took her place on stage two days after giving birth. The Ike and Tina Turner Revue, with the Kings of Rhythm backing Tina, the Ikettes, and male singer Jimmy Thomas, all of whom had solo spots, were an astonishing live act, but they were only intermittently successful on record. None of the three follow-ups to "A Fool in Love" did better than number eighty-two on the charts, and two of them didn't even make the R&B charts, though "I Idolize You" did make the R&B top five. Their next big hit came courtesy of Mickey and Sylvia. You may remember us talking about Mickey and Sylvia way back in episode forty-nine, from back in 2019, but if you don't, they were one of a series of R&B duet acts, like Gene and Eunice, who came up after the success of Shirley and Lee, and their big hit was "Love is Strange": [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "Love is Strange"] By 1961, their career had more or less ended, but they'd recorded a song co-written by the great R&B songwriter Rose Marie McCoy, which had gone unreleased: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "It's Gonna Work Out Fine"] When that was shelved they remade it as an Ike and Tina Turner record, with Mickey and Sylvia being Ike -- Sylvia took on all the roles that Ike would normally do in the studio, arranging the track and playing lead guitar, as well as joining the Ikettes on backing vocals, while Mickey did the spoken answering vocals that most listeners assumed were Ike, and which Ike would replicate on stage. The result, unsurprisingly, sounded more like a Mickey and Sylvia record than anything Ike and Tina had ever released before, though it's very obviously Tina on lead vocals: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "It's Gonna Work Out Fine"] That made the top twenty on the pop charts -- though it would be their last top forty hit for nearly a decade as Ike and Tina Turner. They did though have a couple of other hits as the Ikettes, with Ike Turner putting the girl group's name on the label so he could record for multiple labels. The first of these, "I'm Blue (The Gong Gong Song)" was a song Ike had written which would later go on to become something of an R&B standard. It featured Dolores Johnson on lead vocals, but Tina sang backing vocals and got a rare co-production credit: [Excerpt: The Ikettes, "I'm Blue (The Gong Gong Song)"] The other Ikettes top forty hit was in 1965, with a song written by Steve Venet and Tommy Boyce -- a songwriter we will be hearing more about in three weeks -- and produced by Venet: [Excerpt: The Ikettes, "Peaches 'n' Cream"] Ike wasn't keen on that record at first, but soon came round to it when it hit the charts. The success of that record caused that lineup of Ikettes to split from Ike and Tina -- the Ikettes had become a successful act in their own right, and Dick Clark's Caravan of Stars wanted to book them, but that would have meant they wouldn't be available for Ike and Tina shows. So Ike sent a different group of three girls out on the road with Clark's tour, keeping the original Ikettes back to record and tour with him, and didn't pay them any royalties on their records. They resented being unable to capitalise on their big hit, so they quit. At first they tried to keep the Ikettes name for themselves, and got Tina Turner's sister Alline to manage them, but eventually they changed their name to the Mirettes, and released a few semi-successful records. Ike got another trio of Ikettes to replace them, and carried on with Pat Arnold, Gloria Scott, and Maxine Smith as the new Ikettes,. One Ikette did remain pretty much throughout -- a woman called Ann Thomas, who Ike Turner was sleeping with, and who he would much later marry, but who he always claimed was never allowed to sing with the others, but was just there for her looks. By this point Ike and Tina had married, though Ike had not divorced any of his previous wives (though he paid some of them off when Ike and Tina became big). Ike and Tina's marriage in Tijuana was not remembered by either of them as a particularly happy experience -- Ike would always later insist that it wasn't a legal marriage at all, and in fact that it was the only one of his many, many, marriages that hadn't been, and was just a joke. He was regularly abusing her in the most horrific ways, but at this point the duo still seemed to the public to be perfectly matched. They actually only ended up on the Big TNT Show as a last-minute thing -- another act was sick, though none of my references mention who it was who got sick, just that someone was needed to fill in for them, and as Ike and Tina were now based in LA -- the country boy Ike had finally become a city boy after all -- and would take any job on no notice, they got the gig. Phil Spector was impressed, and he decided that he could revitalise his career by producing a hit for Tina Turner. There was only one thing wrong -- Tina Turner wasn't an act. *Ike* and Tina Turner was an act. And Ike Turner was a control freak, just like Spector was -- the two men had essentially the same personality, and Spector didn't want to work with someone else who would want to be in charge. After some negotiation, they came to an agreement -- Spector could produce a Tina Turner record, but it would be released as an Ike and Tina Turner record. Ike would be paid twenty thousand dollars for his services, and those services would consist of staying well away from the studio and not interfering. Spector was going to go back to the old formulas that had worked for him, and work with the people who had contributed to his past successes, rather than leaving anything to chance. Jack Nitzsche had had a bit of a falling out with him and not worked on some of the singles he'd produced recently, but he was back. And Spector was going to work with Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich again. He'd fallen out with Barry and Greenwich when "Chapel of Love" had been a hit for the Dixie Cups rather than for one of Spector's own artists, and he'd been working with Mann and Weill and Goffin and King instead. But he knew that it was Barry and Greenwich who were the ones who had worked best with him, and who understood his musical needs best, so he actually travelled to see them in New York instead of getting them to come to him in LA, as a peace offering and a sign of how much he valued their input. The only problem was that Spector hadn't realised that Barry and Greenwich had actually split up.  They were still working together in the studio, and indeed had just produced a minor hit single for a new act on Bert Berns' label BANG, for which Greenwich had written the horn arrangement: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Solitary Man"] We'll hear more about Neil Diamond, and about Jeff Barry's work with him, in three weeks. But Barry and Greenwich were going through a divorce and weren't writing together any more, and came back together for one last writing session with Spector, at which, apparently, Ellie Greenwich would cry every time they wrote a line about love. The session produced four songs, of which two became singles. Barry produced a version of "I Can Hear Music", written at these sessions, for the Ronettes, who Spector was no longer interested in producing himself: [Excerpt: The Ronettes, "I Can Hear Music"] That only made number ninety-nine on the charts, but the song was later a hit for the Beach Boys and has become recognised as a classic. The other song they wrote in those sessions, though, was the one that Spector wanted to give to Tina Turner. "River Deep, Mountain High" was a true three-way collaboration -- Greenwich came up with the music for the verses, Spector for the choruses, and Barry wrote the lyrics and tweaked the melody slightly. Spector, Barry, and Greenwich spent two weeks in their writing session, mostly spent on "River Deep, Mountain High". Spector later said of the writing "Every time we'd write a love line, Ellie would start to cry. I couldn't figure out what was happening, and then I realised… it was a very uncomfortable situation. We wrote that, and we wrote ‘I Can Hear Music'…. We wrote three or four hit songs on that one writing session. “The whole thing about ‘River Deep' was the way I could feel that strong bass line. That's how it started. And then Jeff came up with the opening line. I wanted a tender song about a chick who loved somebody very much, but a different way of expressing it. So we came up with the rag doll and ‘I'm going to cuddle you like a little puppy'. And the idea was really built for Tina, just like ‘Lovin' Feelin” was built for the Righteous Brothers.” Spector spent weeks recording, remixing, rerecording, and reremixing the backing track, arranged by Nitzsche, creating the most thunderous, overblown, example of the Wall of Sound he had ever created, before getting Tina into the studio. He also spent weeks rehearsing Tina on the song, and according to her most of what he did was "carefully stripping away all traces of Ike from my performance" -- she was belting the song and adding embellishments, the way Ike Turner had always taught her to, and Spector kept insisting that she just sing the melody -- something that she had never had the opportunity to do before, and which she thought was wonderful. It was so different from anything else that she'd recorded that after each session, when Ike would ask her about the song, she would go completely blank -- she couldn't hold this pop song in her head except when she was running through it with Spector. Eventually she did remember it, and when she did Ike was not impressed, though the record became one of the definitive pop records of all time: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "River Deep, Mountain High"] Spector was putting everything on the line for this record, which was intended to be his great comeback and masterpiece. That one track cost more than twenty thousand dollars to record -- an absolute fortune at a time when a single would normally be recorded in one or two sessions at most. It also required a lot of work on Tina's part. She later estimated that she had sung the opening line of the song a thousand times before Spector allowed her to move on to the second line, and talked about how she got so hot and sweaty singing the song over and over that she had to take her blouse off in the studio and sing the song in her bra. She later said "I still don't know what he wanted. I still don't know if I pleased him. But I never stopped trying." Spector produced a total of six tracks with Tina, including the other two songs written at those Barry and Greenwich sessions, "I'll Never Need More Than This", which became the second single released off the "River Deep, Mountain High" album, and "Hold On Baby", plus cover versions of Arthur Alexander's "Every Day I Have to Cry Some", Pomus and Shuman's "Save the Last Dance", and "A Love Like Yours (Don't Come Knocking Everyday)" a Holland-Dozier-Holland song which had originally been released as a Martha and the Vandellas B-side. The planned album was to be padded out with six tracks produced by Ike Turner, mostly remakes of the duo's earlier hits, and was planned for release after the single became the hit everyone knew it would. The single hit the Hot One Hundred soon after it was released: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "River Deep, Mountain High"] ...and got no higher up the charts than number eighty-eight. The failure of the record basically destroyed Spector, and while he had been an abusive husband before this, now he became much worse, as he essentially retired from music for four years, and became increasingly paranoid and aggressive towards the industry that he thought was not respectful enough of his genius. There have been several different hypotheses as to why "River Deep Mountain High" was not a success. Some have said that it was simply because DJs were fed up of Spector refusing to pay payola, and had been looking for a reason to take him down a peg. Ike Turner thought it was due to racism, saying later “See, what's wrong with America, I think, is that rather than accept something for its value… what it's doing, America mixes race in it. You can't call that record R&B. But because it's Tina… if you had not put Tina's name on there and put ‘Joe Blow', then the Top 40 stations would have accepted it for being a pop record. But Tina Turner… they want to brand her as being an R&B artist. I think the main reason that ‘River Deep' didn't make it here in America was that the R&B stations wouldn't play it because they thought it was pop, and the pop stations wouldn't play it because they thought it was R&B. And it didn't get played at all. The only record I've heard that could come close to that record is a record by the Beach Boys called ‘Good Vibrations'. I think these are the two records that I've heard in my life that I really like, you know?” Meanwhile, Jeff Barry thought it was partly the DJs but also faults in the record caused by Phil Spector's egomania, saying "he has a self-destructive thing going for him, which is part of the reason that the mix on ‘River Deep' is terrible, he buried the lead and he knows he buried the lead and he cannot stop himself from doing that… if you listen to his records in sequence, the lead goes further and further in and to me what he is saying is, ‘It is not the song I wrote with Jeff and Ellie, it is not the song – just listen to those strings. I want more musicians, it's me, listen to that bass sound. …' That, to me, is what hurts in the long run... Also, I do think that the song is not as clear on the record as it should be, mix-wise. I don't want to use the word overproduced, because it isn't, it's just undermixed." There's possibly an element of all three of these factors in play. As we've discussed, 1965 seems to have been the year that the resegregation of American radio began, and the start of the long slow process of redefining genres so that rock and roll, still considered a predominantly Black music at the beginning of the sixties, was by the end of the decade considered an almost entirely white music. And it's also the case that "River Deep, Mountain High" was the most extreme production Spector ever committed to vinyl, and that Spector had made a lot of enemies in the music business. It's also, though, the case  that it was a genuinely great record: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "River Deep, Mountain High"] However, in the UK, it was promoted by Decca executive Tony Hall, who was a figure who straddled both sides of the entertainment world -- as part of his work as a music publicist he had been a presenter on Oh Boy!, written a column in Record Mirror, and presented a Radio Luxembourg show. Hall put his not-inconsiderable weight behind promoting the record, and it ended up reaching number two in the UK -- being successful enough that the album was also released over here, though it wouldn't come out in the US for several years. The record also attracted the attention of the Rolling Stones, who invited Ike and Tina to be their support act on a UK tour, which also featured the Yardbirds, and this would be a major change for the duo in all sorts of ways. Firstly, it got them properly in contact with British musicians -- and the Stones would get Ike and Tina as support artists several times over the next few years -- and also made the UK and Europe part of their regular tour itinerary. It also gave the duo their first big white rock audience, and over the next several years they would pivot more and more to performing music aimed at that audience, rather than the chitlin' circuit they'd been playing for previously. Ike was very conscious of wanting to move away from the blues and R&B -- while that was where he'd made his living as a musician, it wasn't music he actually liked, and he would often talk later about how much he respected Keith Richards and Eric Clapton, and how his favourite music was country music. Tina had also never been a fan of blues or R&B, and wanted to perform songs by the white British performers they were meeting. The tour also, though, gave Tina her first real thoughts of escape. She loved the UK and Europe, and started thinking about what life could be like for her not just being Ike Turner's wife and working fifty-one weeks a year at whatever gigs came along. But it also made that escape a little more difficult, because on the tour Tina lost one of her few confidantes in the organisation. Tina had helped Pat Arnold get away from her own abusive partner, and the two had become very close, but Arnold was increasingly uncomfortable being around Ike's abuse of Tina, and couldn't help her friend the way she'd been helped. She decided she needed to get out of a toxic situation, and decided to stay in England, where she'd struck up an affair with Mick Jagger, and where she found that there were many opportunities for her as a Black woman that simply hadn't been there in the US. (This is not to say that Britain doesn't have problems with racism -- it very much does, but those problems are *different* problems than the ones that the US had at that point, and Arnold found Britain's attitude more congenial to her personally). There was also another aspect, which a lot of Black female singers of her generation have mentioned and which probably applies here. Many Black women have said that they were astonished on visiting Britain to be hailed as great singers, when they thought of themselves as merely average. Britain does not have the kind of Black churches which had taught generations of Black American women to sing gospel, and so singers who in the US thought of themselves as merely OK would be far, far, better than any singers in the UK -- the technical standards were just so much lower here. (This is something that was still true at least as late as the mid-eighties. Bob Geldof talks in his autobiography about attending the recording session for "We Are the World" after having previously recorded "Do They Know It's Christmas?" and being astonished at how much more technically skilled the American stars were and how much more seriously they took their craft.) And Arnold wasn't just an adequate singer -- she was and is a genuinely great talent -- and so she quickly found herself in demand in the UK. Jagger got her signed to Immediate Records, a new label that had been started up by the Stones manager Andrew Oldham, and where Jimmy Page was the staff producer. She was given a new name, P.P. Arnold, which was meant to remind people of another American import, P.J. Proby, but which she disliked because the initials spelled "peepee". Her first single on the label, produced by Jagger, did nothing, but her second single, written by a then-unknown songwriter named Cat Stevens, became a big hit: [Excerpt: P.P. Arnold, "The First Cut is the Deepest"] She toured with a backing band, The Nice, and made records as a backing singer with artists like the Small Faces. She also recorded a duet with the unknown singer Rod Stewart, though that wasn't a success: [Excerpt: Rod Stewart and P.P. Arnold, "Come Home Baby"] We'll be hearing more about P.P. Arnold in future episodes, but the upshot of her success was that Tina had even fewer people to support her. The next few years were increasingly difficult for Tina, as Ike turned to cocaine use in a big way, became increasingly violent, and his abuse of her became much more violent. The descriptions of his behaviour in Tina's two volumes of autobiography are utterly harrowing, and I won't go into them in detail, except to say that nobody should have to suffer what she did. Ike's autobiography, on the other hand, has him attempting to defend himself, even while admitting to several of the most heinous allegations, by saying he didn't beat his wife any more than most men did. Now the sad thing is that this may well be true, at least among his peer group. Turner's behaviour was no worse than behaviour from, say, James Brown or Brian Jones or Phil Spector or Jerry Lee Lewis, and it may well be that behaviour like this was common enough among people he knew that Turner's behaviour didn't stand out at all. His abuse has become much better-known, because the person he was attacking happened to become one of the biggest stars in the world, while the women they attacked didn't. But that of course doesn't make what Ike did to Tina any better -- it just makes it infinitely sadder that so many more people suffered that way. In 1968, Tina actually tried to take her own life -- and she was so fearful of Ike that when she overdosed, she timed it so that she thought she would be able to at least get on stage and start the first song before collapsing, knowing that their contract required her to do that for Ike to get paid. As it was, one of the Ikettes noticed the tablets she had taken had made her so out of it she'd drawn a line across her face with her eyebrow pencil. She was hospitalised, and according to both Ike and Tina's reports, she was comatose and her heart actually stopped beating, but then Ike started yelling at her, saying if she wanted to die why didn't she do it by jumping in front of a truck, rather than leaving him with hospital bills, and telling her to go ahead and die if this was how she was going to treat him -- and she was so scared of Ike her heart started up again. (This does not seem medically likely to me, but I wasn't there, and they both were). Of course, Ike frames this as compassion and tough love. I would have different words for it myself. Tina would make several more suicide attempts over the years, but even as Tina's life was falling apart, the duo's professional career was on the up. They started playing more shows in the UK, and they toured the US as support for the Rolling Stones. They also started having hits again, after switching to performing funked-up cover versions of contemporary hits. They had a minor hit with a double-sided single of the Beatles' "Come Together" and the Stones' "Honky-Tonk Women", then a bigger one with a version of Sly and the Family Stone's "I Want to Take You Higher", then had their biggest hit ever with "Proud Mary". It's likely we'll be looking at Creedence Clearwater Revival's original version of that song at some point, but while Ike Turner disliked the original, Tina liked it, and Ike also became convinced of the song's merits by hearing a version by The Checkmates Ltd: [Excerpt: The Checkmates Ltd, "Proud Mary"] That was produced by Phil Spector, who came briefly out of his self-imposed exile from the music business in 1969 to produce a couple of singles for the Checkmates and Ronnie Spector. That version inspired Ike and Tina's recording of the song, which went to number four on the charts and won them a Grammy award in 1971: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "Proud Mary"] Ike was also investing the money they were making into their music. He built his own state-of-the-art studio, Bolic Sound, which Tina always claimed was a nod to her maiden name, Bullock, but which he later always said was a coincidence. Several other acts hired the studio, especially people in Frank Zappa's orbit -- Flo and Eddie recorded their first album as a duo there, and Zappa recorded big chunks of Over-Nite Sensation and Apostrophe('), two of his most successful albums, at the studio. Acts hiring Bolic Sound also got Tina and the Ikettes on backing vocals if they wanted them, and so for example Tina is one of the backing vocalists on Zappa's "Cosmik Debris": [Excerpt: Frank Zappa, "Cosmik Debris"] One of the most difficult things she ever had to sing in her life was this passage in Zappa's song "Montana", which took the Ikettes several days' rehearsal to get right. [Excerpt: Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, "Montana"] She was apparently so excited at having got that passage right that she called Ike out of his own session to come in and listen, but Ike was very much unimpressed, and insisted that Tina and the Ikettes not get credit on the records they made with Zappa. Zappa later said “I don't know how she managed to stick with that guy for so long. He treated her terribly and she's a really nice lady. We were recording down there on a Sunday. She wasn't involved with the session, but she came in on Sunday with a whole pot of stew that she brought for everyone working in the studio. Like out of nowhere, here's Tina Turner coming in with a rag on her head bringing a pot of stew. It was really nice.” By this point, Ike was unimpressed by anything other than cocaine and women, who he mostly got to sleep with him by having truly gargantuan amounts of cocaine around. As Ike was descending further into paranoia and abuse, though, Tina was coming into her own. She wrote "Nutbush City Limits" about the town where she grew up, and it reached number 22 on the charts -- higher than any song Ike ever wrote: [Excerpt: Ike and Tina Turner, "Nutbush City Limits"] Of course, Ike would later claim that he wrote the music and let Tina keep all the credit. Tina was also asked by the Who to appear in the film version of their rock opera Tommy, where her performance of "Acid Queen" was one of the highlights: [Excerpt: Tina Turner, "Acid Queen"] And while she was filming that in London, she was invited to guest on a TV show with Ann-Margret, who was a huge fan of Ike and Tina, and duetted with Tina -- but not Ike -- on a medley of her hits: [Excerpt: Tina Turner and Ann-Margret, "Nutbush City Limits/Honky Tonk Woman"] Just as with "River Deep, Mountain High", Tina was wanted for her own talents, independent of Ike. She was starting to see that as well as being an abusive husband, he was also not necessary for her to have a career. She was also starting to find parts of her life that she could have for herself, independent of her husband. She'd been introduced to Buddhist meditation by a friend, and took it up in a big way, much to Ike's disapproval. Things finally came to a head in July 1976, in Dallas, when Ike started beating her up and for the first time she fought back. She pretended to reconcile with him, waited for him to fall asleep, and ran across a busy interstate, almost getting hit by a ten-wheel truck, to get to another hotel she could see in the distance. Luckily, even though she had no money, and she was a Black woman in Dallas, not a city known for its enlightened attitudes in the 1970s, the manager of the Ramada Inn took pity on her and let her stay there for a while until she could get in touch with Buddhist friends. She spent the next few months living off the kindness of strangers, before making arrangements with Rhonda Graam, who had started working for Ike and Tina in 1964 as a fan, but had soon become indispensable to the organisation. Graam sided with Tina, and while still supposedly working for Ike she started putting together appearances for Tina on TV shows like Cher's. Cher was a fan of Tina's work, and was another woman trying to build a career after leaving an abusive husband who had been her musical partner: [Excerpt: Cher and Tina Turner, "Makin' Music is My Business"] Graam became Tina's full-time assistant, as well as her best friend, and remained part of her life until Graam's death a year ago. She also got Tina booked in to club gigs, but for a long time they found it hard to get bookings -- promoters would say she was "only half the act". Ike still wanted the duo to work together professionally, if not be a couple, but Tina absolutely refused, and Ike had gangster friends of his shoot up Graam's car, and Tina heard rumours that he was planning to hire a hit man to come after her. Tina filed for divorce, and gave Ike everything -- all the money the couple had earned together in sixteen years of work, all the property, all the intellectual property -- except for two cars, one of which Ike had given her and one which Sammy Davis Jr. had given her, and the one truly important thing -- the right to use the name "Tina Turner", which Ike had the trademark on. Ike had apparently been planning to hire someone else to perform as "Tina Turner" and carry on as if nothing had changed. Slowly, Tina built her career back up, though it was not without its missteps. She got a new manager, who also managed Olivia Newton-John, and the manager brought in a song he thought was perfect for Tina. She turned it down, and Newton-John recorded it instead: [Excerpt: Olivia Newton-John, "Physical"] But even while she was still playing small clubs, her old fans from the British rock scene were boosting her career. In 1981, after Rod Stewart saw her playing a club gig and singing his song "Hot Legs", he invited her to guest with him and perform the song on Saturday Night Live: [Excerpt: Rod Stewart and Tina Turner, "Hot Legs"] The Rolling Stones invited Tina to be their support act on a US tour, and to sing "Honky Tonk Women" on stage with them, and eventually when David Bowie, who was at the height of his fame at that point, told his record label he was going to see her on a night that EMI wanted to do an event for him, half the record industry showed up to the gig. She had already recorded a remake of the Temptations' "Ball of Confusion" with the British Electric Foundation -- a side project for two of the members of Heaven 17 -- in 1982, for one of their albums: [Excerpt: British Electric Foundation, "Ball of Confusion"] Now they were brought in to produce a new single for her, a remake of Al Green's "Let's Stay Together": [Excerpt: Tina Turner, "Let's Stay Together"] That made the top thirty in the US, and was a moderate hit in many places, making the top ten in the UK. She followed it up with another BEF production, a remake of "Help!" by the Beatles, which appears only to have been released in mainland Europe. But then came the big hit: [Excerpt: Tina Turner, "What's Love Got to Do With It?"] wenty-six years after she started performing with Ike, Tina Turner was suddenly a major star. She had a string of successes throughout the eighties and nineties, with more hit records, film appearances, a successful autobiography, a film based on the autobiography, and record-setting concert appearan

2021 marks the 50th anniversary of the release of the Beatles' final album, Let it Be. To commemorate the occasion, the remaining members of the band have remixed the album and unleashed an eight-hour-plus documentary directed by Peter Jackson that lays bare the making of the record. For super-fans this video memoir reveals a lot about the messiness of the creative process: The Beatles nearly broke up while making it! Author Tim Riley says that the band approached Let It Be with an aesthetic challenge: to get back to playing as a live band. But the original release of the album deviated from that mission and received mixed reviews. Over the decades, The Beatles have revisited this work with multiple mixes and alternative takes that try to show the original spirit of this direct-to-tape, live album. Charlie and Nate listen back, warts and all, to get to the heart of this enigmatic project. Songs Discussed The Beatles - I Saw Her Standing There, I Want To Hold Your Hand, Strawberry Fields, Dig A Pony, Good Golly Miss Molly, I've Got A Feeling, One After 909, Get Back, Two Of Us, The Long & Winding Road, Let It Be, I Me Mine Little Richard - Tutti Frutti More Read Tim Riley's works on The Beatles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mix 1Ronn Matlock . I Can't Forget About You . CotillionNicolas Godin . Love Theme feat. Kadhja Bonet . Because MusicAdult Oriented Pop . Good Golly Miss Molly . Lazy OctopusRosin Murphy . Murphy's Law . Skint Fier d'être DijonnaisThe George Kaplan Conspiracy . La Femme d'Argent (Air Cover) . Alter K Mix 2 Special Jungle FireVoilaaa . Jungle Fire . FavoriteJungle . Fire . CaiolaPucho And The Latin Soul Brothers . Friendship Train (from Jungle Fire! album) . PrestigeJungle Fire . La Kossa (Snake In Da Bronx Dub) . Razor-N-Tape L'info du 20 hLa Femme . Va . Born Bad Mix 3 Carte Postale Régis de St AmourKiwi . We are here . Toy TonicsE.Vax . Manila . Because MusicMonsieur Doumani . Kalikandjari . GlitterbeatZe Bigode Orquestra . Tikulafe (Melodiesinfonie remix) . Little Beat MoreDelay Ok . Modern Uganda . U Know MeJpye & Renato . Cosa ti va . Claremont 56 Mix 4Bonobo . Rosewood . Ninja TuneRami Fortis . London Tel Aviv Berlin or Brussels (Red Axes Edit) . NaNa DiscDombrance . Taubira (Prins Thomas Remix) . Gouranga MusicQuixosis . Vitamina que . Eck Echo Bonux : La Carte Postal de Régis de St Amour : Cher Mister B Je suis bien arrivé où tu sais mais je peux pas dire où parce que pour le moment j'ai pas vu un pigeon mais je peux pas exclure que ceux de la rue Berbisey aient mis un contrat tropical sur ma tête. Pour le moment il fait assez beau même si ça sent un peu l'orage, par contre la nuit il fait super chaud décidément je comprends pas pourquoi tout le monde n'a de cesse de partir au bout de la planète (13h sans compter l'escale à Londres) alors qu'on est si bien à la maison. D'autant plus que comme tu le sais je suis venu ici pour passer quelques jours avec Rihanna et ce matin en prenant mon café au Petit Gourmet à Nassau (c'est la Menuiserie en 10 fois plus cher et le patron est beaucoup moins drole qu'Antoine) j'ai appris qu'en fait elle était à New York pour faire du shopping avec Cardi B (apparemment elles sont plus tellement brouillées) du coup je pense que la semaine va être longue pour moi. Heureusement je suis tombé sur Hervé qui m'a raconté qu'hier soir il était en concert à Massy et que le public était bien chelou à part ma soeur et sa mère. Ce mec est quand même un peu bizarre, il ne s'arrête jamais de danser même quand il boit son cappuccino. La déprime c'est surtout qu'il y a un seul disquaire ici et on dirait un peu le Black Market mais qui fait la taille du Laser Game de Saint Apo, je sens que je vais pas y trouver la nouvelle compile Bongo Joe. J'ai dégoté une petite librairie sympa avec plein de bouquins sur la musique caribéenne, je t'en ramènerai aucun car ils sont tous en anglais avec très peu de photos. Par contre j'ai vérifié ils vendent pas le livre de Zemmour, vraiment ça fait des vacances !! Bref j'ai déjà hate de rentrer pour faire une belle émission avec toi vendredi prochain, dans le froid et le brouillard. Passe le bonjour à personne, j'aurai le temps cette semaine d'écrire au moins 50 cartes postales. Et je te laisse le soin de calmer Julien parce que j'ai pas encore envoyé ma programmation d'octobre avant la fameuse date limite que personne ne connait même pas lui. Whizzz BizzzRégis de St Amour On The Beach

Peter Boykin sings Popular songsI do not make money from these songs but if you would like to support please consider.To Tip: https://paypal.me/magafirstnewsTo Support: https://Patreon.com/PeterBoykin#PeterBoykin #PeterBoykinSings #KaraokeFollow https://T.Me/RealPeterBoykinSmule: https://www.smule.com/peterboykinYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfjAL7ElwO7gFB1uKNSW78wContact: peterboykin@gorightnews.comNote: Peter Boykin enjoys singing and has a range of vocals, this is pure fun and sometimes the songs come out Excellent and sometimes the songs come out bad... There is no tougher critic than Peter Boykin on his own self. He knows some of these you might just want to hit skip. :)Note: the lyrics and themes in these songs do not always reflect the views of Peter Boykin. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and a song is just a song.

CBD is the Wild West so understanding it can be tricky and confusing. But it doesn't have to be. In fact, taking the right amount of quality CBD can actually be helpful for many of the symptoms of menopause. Join Lauren as she talks to Shaina Kerrigan, founder of Molly J small batch, CBD-infused confections all about the ins and outs of CBD. Topics include, the difference between CBD and THC, how to make sure what you are buying is quality, how to know what dosage to be taking and some life hacks involving CBD.

This is one loaded-cookie of an episode! And that's because it's an All-Stephanie episode!! This week is all about the two storiez Stephanie has to tell - it's double the storiez, double the Stephanie, Double The Fun!!! The first story is about a spooky almost-ghost town in Pennsylvania called "Centralia". What was once a small coal mining town is now inhabited by only 11 people (and it was the inspiration for "Silent Hill"!). And get ready, because the second story is one roller coaster of a ride. Not only is it about our (easily forgotten) Northern-most state Alaska: it also features gossip, booze-cookies, and some juicy voicemails! It's definitely an episode you DON'T want to miss!

Join us for our latest installment, in which we discuss two recent episodes of The Conners, “An Old Dog, New Tricks and a Ticket to Ride,” and “A Fast Car, a Sudden Loss and a Slow Decline.” These episodes serve up a major dose of nostalgia in the form of Molly Tilden (played by Danielle … Continue reading S3 E11: Good Golly, Miss Molly

Good Golly Miss Molly! Kevin and Gerrit are back to crush this spoiler-filled Mortal Kombat chat! They also chat about the DMV, voting, toxic fanbases, Steven Spielberg and of course, the new 2021 Warner Bros./HBO Max film "Mortal Kombat." Leave your comments wherever you can! YouTube, Tweet, send an email, Facebook comment or message the page - whatever you want to do. Leave a review! What did YOU think of the movies talked about and/or the episode itself? CONTACT ►► https://www.facebook.com/KerritPod/ https://www.twitter.com/KerritPod/ KerritPod@gmail.com HELP ASIAN COMMUNITIES ►► https://nymag.com/strategist/article/where-to-donate-to-help-asian-communities-2021.html/ HELP END SYSTEMIC RACISM ►► https://www.theradicaldatabase.com/ If you're a YouTube podcast viewer, check for the episode there, available ASAP! SUBSCRIBE ►► https://www.youtube.com/user/GerritElzinga22?sub_confirmation=1 PLAYLIST ►► https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL56PxH8R3cilMBPQuFA8YbHVkDprztbkp After the mid-season break on this feed, you will be hearing Kevin and Gerrit ramble while also dissecting the iconic Batman series, but if you are wanting a more streamlined experience of those ramblings, head over to the other podcast feed, or the YouTube playlist for "Something Serial." For your convenience, those links are provided below. AUDIO ►► https://anchor.fm/somethingserial/ PLAYLIST ►► https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL56PxH8R3cilcgUJZWgFo_WHGd59QhNKg/ Music is provided by The Barn. SOUNDCLOUD ►► https://www.soundcloud.com/the-barn-5/sets/essential #FilmCriticisms #Movies #Comedy --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/kerritpod/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/kerritpod/support

Elepé original español de 1964, acoplado en España, sin equivalente en el mercado europeo. Antología de música Beat. El título "The Authentic Liverpool Sound" es equivoco porque de los siete artistas solo dos son de Liverpool. The Animals son de Newcastle, Dave Clark de Tottenham, Manfred Mann nació en Sudáfrica, The Hollies y Billy J.Kramer eran de Manchester. Solo Gerry y los Swinging tenian acento Scouser y procedían del Mersey. Por tanto, es un elepé variopinto y muy valioso. Ponemos un ejemplar de primera edición española, en mono, sin digitalizar. Suena divino. Haré 3 programas con esta serie. V.A. – The Authentic Liverpool Sound España 1964. Odeon – MOCL 124 Serie: The Authentic Liverpool Sound Lista de Títulos A1 The Animals– The House Of The Rising Sun A2 The Dave Clark Five– Because A3 Manfred Mann– Do Wah Diddy Diddy A4 The Hollies– Baby That's All A5 The Swinging Blue Jeans– Hippy Hippy Shake A6 Billy J. Kramer Con The Dakotas – I'll Keep You Satisfied (Lennon-McCartney) A7 Gerry And The Pacemakers – It's Just Because B1 The Animals– I'm Crying B2 The Dave Clark Five– That's What I said B3 Manfred Mann– Sha La La B4 The Hollies– We're Through B5 The Swinging Blue Jeans– Good Golly Miss Molly B6 Billy J. Kramer Con The Dakotas – I Know B7 Gerry And The Pacemakers - It's Gonna Be All Right   Bonus Gerry And The Pacemakers - Ferry cross the Mersey Jeanette - Manchester y Liverpool Marie Laforet - Manchester et Liverpool (fragmento). Escuchar audio

Join us this week as we celebrate the 15th anniversary of Hannah Montana with our very first Dolly episode! Topics may include: Dolly's history with the Cyrus family, as well as just how much Corey and Tom love Dolly. Follow us (@sweetnibletspod) on Instagram and Twitter for updates!

A recap of our visit to Arena Stage's Molly's Salon program last night, our favorite Arena Stage memories, and tomorrow's guest revealed! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/connerandsmithshow/message

This exhibit is called The Vietnam War: The Music. Our mission here at the Music Museum is to support all Vietnam Veterans and those who serve the United States, then and now. We thank you for your service. **** Early-on, in Vietnam, soldiers turned to music as a lifeline to the home front they promised to defend. Rock & roll (R&R) really became rest & relaxation (R&R) for the troops. It was this music that got you through another day, another day closer to going home. Music was a big part of a soldier’s down time that centered within the hooches of Vietnam. The music that was popular during the Vietnam War was, and is still, therapy. There are songs you can remember, and then there are songs you REALLY remember. Many of these songs will have a special meaning for you. A place, a brother, a time gone by. This program is for you, the Vietnam Vets, who will never forget. **** Our goal with The Vietnam War: The Music is to honor the fallen and the survivors with the music that got them through “just one more day”. Our shows are broadcast around the world. They say thank you & “welcome home” to all Vietnam Vets. There is no opinion offered on the War. It’s all about the music. **** For your service and your sacrifice, this is The Vietnam War: The Music. This episode is called “Saigon Warriors (REMF)” **** Join the conversation on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008232395712 **** or by email at: dannymemorylane@gmail.com You’ll hear: 1) We Gotta Get Out Of This Place by The Animals 2) No Surrender by Bruce Springsteen 3) 96 Tears by ? & The Mysterians 4) Welcome Home by Country Joe McDonald 5) Born On The Bayou by John Fogerty & Kid Rock 6) Rag Doll by The Four Seasons 7) Good Man by India.Arie 8) Spoonful by Cream 9) Quarter To Three by Gary U.S. Bonds 10) Roll On Down the Highway by Bachman-Turner Overdrive 11) Soldiers Get Strange by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit 12) Respect Yourself by The Staple Singers 13) All Together Now by The Beatles 14) Knock On Wood by Eddie Floyd 15) The Streets Of Bakersfield by Dwight Yoakam & Buck Owens 16) The Tears Of A Clown by Smokey Robinson & The Miracles 17) Jolly Green [To the tune of George Hamilton IV's 1963 hit, "Abilene"] by Bull Durham (lead), Robin Thomas, Saul Broudy & Tom Price 18) Panama Red by New Riders Of The Purple Sage 19) Plastic Fantastic Lover by Jefferson Airplane 20) The Ballad of Uneasy Rider by The Charlie Daniels Band 21) Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I'm Yours) by Stevie Wonder 22) Devil With A Blue Dress On & Good Golly Miss Molly by Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels 23) My Little Marine by Jamie Horton 24) Going Mobile by The Who 25) I Fall To Pieces by Patsy Cline 26) All You Ever Do Is Bring Me Down by The Mavericks 27) Mr. Pitiful by Otis Redding 28) California Girls by The Beach Boys 29) Jumpin' Jack Flash by The Rolling Stones 30) Out Of Sight by James Brown 31) All Day And All Of The Night by The Kinks 32) Back Where I Come From by Kenny Chesney 33) Simple Man by Graham Nash 34) Wake Up Everybody by Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes 35) If Tomorrow Never Comes by Garth Brooks 36) The Long And Winding Road by The Beatles

This episode features highlights some of the best of the best from the Fall Tour run in 1987 at Madison Square Garden. This episode is part 1 of 2 and we tried to cover a lot of ground, but I am sure some of the stuff we didn't include will pop up in later editions of Heady Jams. Please enjoy and Happy Holidays!!! 9/15/1987 Hey Pocky Way The Wheel> Gimme Some Lovin' Black Peter Sugar Magnolia 9/16/1987 Bertha> Greatest Story Ever Told> Devil in a Blue Dress> Good Golly Miss Molly> Devil in a Blue Dress> He's Gone 9/18/1987 Shakedown Street> Women R Smarter Terrapin Station 9/20/1987 Morning Dew

Little Richard left behind a legacy of enormously popular songs like “Good Golly Miss Molly” and “Lucille”. He was also a preacher, touring the country sharing God's word. During that time he recorded several gospel albums. Tune in for a look at a different side of Little Richard.

Little Richard left behind a legacy of enormously popular songs like “Good Golly Miss Molly” and “Lucille”. He was also a preacher, touring the country sharing God's word. During that time he recorded several gospel albums. Tune in for a look at a different side of Little Richard.

What Insecure is teaching us about friendship --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/sosc/message

It's REPORT CARD TIME! Join Anthony Jay, Chantel and one other special guest in grading this week's most newsworthy events from A-F. Which story do you think deserves the gold star and detention? Check out our social media pages to leave your grade! Email: no.classpodcast@gmail.com IG/Facebook: No Class Podcast Tumblr: No-ClassPodcast Twitter: no_classpodcast --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/no-class/support

De la vida y tiempos de Little Richard, el "Liberace de bronce" del Rock'n' Roll que nos dejó un 9 de Mayo, entre "hashtags" y fríos obituarios. Junto a Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Elvis o Jerry Lee, parte de un selecto grupo que cambió la faz de la música en apenas 3 años (56-59). Un quasar que desde la "extravaganza", maquillado, enjoyado, chillón y lenguaraz, incendió la America segregada de Eisenhower, el Liverpool de los Beatles, la España de los Teen Tops. Canciones como "Tutti Frutti", "Long Tall Sally","Lucille" o "Good Golly Miss Molly", R &B reciclado para público juvenil. Postales sonoras de un tiempo quizás más auténtico que vio desvanecerse a Larry Williams o Esquerita pero que difícilmente olvidará al reverendo Penniman o a la Drag Queen Richard en que podía convertirse, ida y vuelta. Sin dejar de ser el mismo. ¡Rock'n Roll! Escuchar audio

Twitter announced on Tuesday that its employees who can work from home can continue to work from home -- for forever, if they want. One wonders how many companies will follow suit -- and how employees will feel about such an arrangement. And: Ryan Murphy is the showrunner behind things like Nip/Tuck, Glee, American Horror Story, 9-1-1, and The Politician. In 2018, Murphy signed the largest development deal in the history of television with Netflix. His new miniseries, Hollywood, is the second project to come out of that deal. Some other stuff that happened this week, give or take: Little Richard, Founding Father of Rock Who Broke Musical Barriers, Dead at 87Pianist-singer behind "Tutti Frutti," "Good Golly Miss Molly," and "Long Tall Sally" set the template that a generation of musicians would follow Column: Will the new coronavirus kill spitting in sports? The pandemic has reminded us: We don't need more sports in our lives -- we need less Robot dogs are patrolling Singapore parks telling people to socially distance How Analog Clocks Can Give Us More by Giving Us Less Nearly Half of Men Say They Do Most of the Home Schooling. 3 Percent of Women Agree. New Banksy art unveiled at hospital to thank doctors, nurses Contact-Free Movie Theaters Being Tested in South Korea Solstice Studios' Russell Crowe Road Rage Thriller 'Unhinged' To Be First Film Back In Movie Theaters July 1 'Hamilton' Movie Will Stream on Disney Plus on July 3In a surprise move, the film of the original Broadway production is being released 15 months early. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 and 2 are being remastered for PS4, Xbox One, and PCTwo classics in one package A million people are pretending to be ants on Facebook -- and it could be therapeuticMore than 18,000 Facebook users responded to a post of ants on ice cream, writing comments like, "NOM," "SLURP" and "LIFT.TO.THE.QUEEN." Ex-Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga wants MLB to recognize 2010 perfect game, overturn blown call Bob Dylan Cancels U.S. Summer Tour in 'Interest of Public Health and Safety'"We hope to be back out on the road at the earliest possible time," he says Inside HBO Max, the $4 Billion Bet to Stand Out in the Streaming Wars GUESTS: Carolyn Paine - An actress, comedian, and dancer; she is founder, director, and choreographer of CONNetic Dance Irene Papoulis - Teaches writing at Trinity College Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. Colin McEnroe and Cat Pastor contributed to this show.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Little Richard  https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8303373/Little-Richard-dead-87-Rock-music-legend-Good-Golly-Miss-Molly-passes-away.html?ito=push-notification&ci=14801&si=761150 2 )Recession – coming – https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8316019/UK-faces-recession-end-recessions-GDP-set-plunge-30.html?ito=push-notification&ci=15122&si=761150 3) The miracle cure – https://amp.abc.net.au/article/12242150?__twitter_impression=true 4) the Jews or Covid 19 https://twitter.com/PeterTatchell/status/1259989640624422914?s=20 5) The Boss is Watching https://www.npr.org/2020/05/13/854014403/your-boss-is-watching-you-work-from-home-boom-leads-to-more-surveillancetGb9WYM  6) Kraftwerk – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQIYEPe6DWY 7) Trans - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8303753/Transgender-inmates-carried-seven-sex-attacks-women-jail.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/22/trans-children-banned-surgery-change-gender-equalities-minister/  8) IVF for Gay Couple – https://metro.co.uk/2020/05/05/first-male-gay-couple-offered-ivf-nhs-will-welcome-baby-son-summer-12656437/ 9) VE Day – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFipp3Ar7go 10) The White Album – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cqHtGb9WYM 11) Billy and Elizabeth Graham – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGpzyR4NeRI Play out with this….Simon Kennedy - https://www.facebook.com/simonkennedy81/videos/10222719755600137/?d=n

The Powell men discuss a bevy of subjects including the late Little Richard, Zoom and Drive By Covid celebrations, and the murder of Ahmaud Arbery

Hey Geeks. This week we're not quite a full house yet but we manage to talk about the tragedy that is Elon Musk’s son's name, we give a Destiny 2 update and what we think will happen with Destiny 3, we address The Last of Us 2 spoilers (NO SPOILERS REVEALED), Jedi Fallen Order is going to be a franchise, Xbox Inside learns the meaning of gameplay, Star Wars Clone Wars final season, and finally the combination genitalia of CyberPunk 2077. Close: “Long Tall Sally,” “Good Golly Miss Molly,” and “All Around the World” by Little Richard

Little Richard nous a quittés, à l'âge de 87 ans, mais sa musique est éternelle. En démarrant avec "Tutti Frutti" fin 1955, Little Richard a enchaîné les tubes sur seulement quelques années comme "Long Tall Sally", "Rip It Up" en 1956, "Lucille" en 1957 et "Good Golly Miss Molly", sorti en 1958. Son influence fut massive : James Brown, Otis Redding, les Beatles, les Stones, Jimi Hendrix (qui a travaillé pour lui un moment), tous vénéraient littéralement Little Richard.

Join us this week as we pay tribute to Little Richard and explore the early rumblings of rock and roll! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Good Golly Miss Molly!  The Burger's gone nuttier than a squirrel's nest today Folks!  Our 16th episode marks the show's first guest!  It is our pleasure to introduce an old friend into the mix:  Joseph Okemos.  He's here to uproot some fond memories he and Francis shared years ago when they were roommates back in the midwest.  We're talking busted teeth, precious heirlooms from ugly Christmas sweater white elephant gift exchanges, removing your body hair, and a whole slew of other nonsensical treats!  Now don't be shy!  Cozy up on the couch with a nice warm blanket and your favorite jammies; it's time we get weird.  And don't forget your homework assignment after today's class:  rate, review, and subscribe to the show so we know we're tickling ya pink out there!  Love you little lily pads.  Until next time.  

This episode was originally published on September 24th, 2019. === With Rick out of commission, it's time for Molly to fly the Arrow to victory against Grooor! There's just one problem: she is babey. And Disney's standards and practices won't let her say the f*ck word. Luckily, your humble hosts are unbound by the gripping claw of the Mouse. (If the Disney corporation is interested in purchasing the Super Nuclear Group and our wealth of culture-redefining intellectual properties, please have your people call our people.) === Follow us on Twitter at @super_nuclear, or send us your feedback at supernucleargroup@gmail.com! Or you can support us on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/supernucleargroup . Cover art by Zhampy! Find more of their work at http://rainydayskies.bigcartel.com or @zhampip. Our intro/outro is "Race to the Skies" by Matt of Avana Music! Find more of Matt's work at https://soundcloud.com/avanamusic.

Motown misses by failing to recognize the R&B potential of a song. I know, I don't get it either. Devil With A Blue Dress, originally by Shorty Long, covered by Mitch Ryder and The Detroit Wheels, and by The Cramps. Outro music is Good Golly Miss Molly by Little Richard.

He taught himself guitar and learned to play piano in a pool hall in St. Louis. He's worked as an elevator operator, a radio DJ and sat in with traveling musicians who came thru his town. From blues and boogie-woogie big bands, he splits off and invents Rock 'N Roll with his song Rocket-88. Young Elvis Presley use to watch him play piano at the clubs. He discovered Blues Icon BB King. His main competition coming up was Sir John's Trio with Chuck Berry. Little Richard copied the piano opening for Good Golly Miss Molly note for note from him. Phil Spector produced his wife at the time, Tina Turner's first songs. They open for the Rolling Stones on both European and US tours and he even goes on to sing a duet with our first podcast guest ever, Rick James! He got introduced to cocaine from his friends in Las Vegas, "The King", Elvis Presley and comedian Redd Foxx. Liking the side effect of reducing the need for sleep, so he could write more music, he spent an estimated $11 Million dollars on cocaine over his lifetime. When the SWAT team busted into to his state of the art recording studio, Bolic Studios, he had a .357 magnum, a live hand grenade and was trying to flush 7 grams of cocaine down the toilet. A short while later he watched as Bolic Studios burned to the ground for 18 hours! Ben & I have sidebars on: the duties of and responsibilities of an elevator operator, the climbing habits of porcupines and venison recipes to sneak people venison. Ben recommends some blues bars in Chicago and we answer the age old question about Ramen, to drain or not to drain? Hear an amazing theory about holes that basically sums up the universe, it's the Tale of Ike Turner! Leave an Anonymous SpeakPipe Voice Msg: www.crimeinmusic.com Tweet Us: www.twitter.com/crimeinmusic IG: www.instagram.com/crimeinusic FaceBook: www.facebook.com/crimeinmusic  

Episode sixty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “You Send Me” by Sam Cooke Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Little Darlin'” by The Gladiolas. Also, an announcement — the book version of the first fifty episodes is now available for purchase. See the show notes, or the previous mini-episode announcing this, for details.  —-more—- Resources The Mixcloud is slightly delayed this week. I’ll update the post tonight with the link. My main source for this episode is Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick. Like all Guralnick’s work, it’s an essential book if you’re even slightly interested in the subject. This is the best compilation of Sam Cooke’s music for the beginner. A note on spelling: Sam Cooke was born Sam Cook, the rest of his family all kept the surname Cook, and he only added the “e” from the release of “You Send Me”, so for almost all the time covered in this episode he was Cook. I didn’t feel the need to mention this in the podcast, as the two names are pronounced identically. I’ve spelled him as Cooke and everyone else as Cook throughout. Book of the Podcast Remember that there’s a book available based on the first fifty episodes of the podcast. You can buy it at this link, which will take you to your preferred online bookstore. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We’ve talked before about how the music that became known as soul had its roots in gospel music, but today we’re going to have a look at the first big star of that music to get his start as a professional gospel singer, rather than as a rhythm and blues singer who included a little bit of gospel feeling. Sam Cooke was, in many ways, the most important black musician of the late fifties and early sixties, and without him it’s doubtful whether we would have the genre of soul as we know it today. But when he started out, he was someone who worked exclusively in the gospel field, and within that field he was something of a superstar. He was also someone who, as admirable as he was as a singer, was far less admirable in his behaviour towards other people, especially the women in his life, and while that’s something that will come up more in future episodes, it’s worth noting here. Cooke started out as a teenager in the 1940s, performing in gospel groups around Chicago, which as we’ve talked about before was the city where a whole new form of gospel music was being created at that point, spearheaded by Thomas Dorsey. Dorsey, Mahalia Jackson, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe were all living and performing in the city during young Sam’s formative years, but the biggest influence on him was a group called the Soul Stirrers. The Soul Stirrers had started out in 1926 as a group in what was called the “jubilee” style — the style that black singers of spiritual music sang in the period before Thomas Dorsey revolutionised gospel music. There are no recordings of the Soul Stirrers in that style, but this is probably the most famous jubilee recording: [Excerpt: The Fisk Jubilee Singers, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”] But as Thomas Dorsey and the musicians around him started to create the music we now think of as gospel, the Soul Stirrers switched styles, and became one of the first — and best — gospel quartets in the new style. In the late forties, the Soul Stirrers signed to Specialty Records, one of the first acts to sign to the label, and recorded a series of classic singles led by R.H. Harris, who was regarded by many as the greatest gospel singer of the age: [Excerpt: The Soul Stirrers feat. R.H. Harris, “In That Awful Hour”] Sam Cooke was one of seven children, the son of Reverend Charles Cook and his wife Annie Mae, and from a very early age the Reverend Cook had been training them as singers — five of them would perform regularly around churches in the area, under the name The Singing Children. Young Sam was taught religion by his father, but he was also taught that there was no prohibition in the Bible against worldly success. Indeed the Reverend Cook taught him two things that would matter in his life even more than his religion would. The first was that whatever it is you do in life, you try to do it the best you can — you never do anything by halves, and if a thing’s worth doing it’s worth doing properly. And the second was that you do whatever is necessary to give yourself the best possible life, and don’t worry about who you step on to do it. After spending some time with his family group, Cooke joined a newly-formed gospel group, who had heard him singing the Ink Spots song “If I Didn’t Care” to a girl. That group was called the Highway QCs, and a version of the group still exists to this day. Sam Cooke only stayed with them a couple of years, and never recorded with them, but they replaced him with a soundalike singer, Johnnie Taylor, and listening to Taylor’s recordings with the group you can get some idea of what they sounded like when Sam was a member: [Excerpt: Johnnie Taylor and the Highway QCs, “I Dreamed That Heaven Was Like This”] The rest of the group were decent singers, but Sam Cooke was absolutely unquestionably the star of the Highway QCs. Creadell Copeland, one of the group’s members, later said “All we had to do was stand behind Sam. Our claim to fame was that Sam’s voice was so captivating we didn’t have to do anything else.” The group didn’t make a huge amount of money, and they kept talking about going in a pop direction, rather than just singing gospel songs, and Sam was certainly singing a lot of secular music in his own time — he loved gospel music as much as anyone, but he was also learning from people like Gene Autry or Bill Kenny of the Ink Spots, and he was slowly developing into a singer who could do absolutely anything with his voice. But his biggest influence was still R.H. Harris of the Soul Stirrers, who was the most important person in the gospel quartet field. This wasn’t just because he was the most talented of all the quartet singers — though he was, and that was certainly part of it — but because he was the joint leader of a movement to professionalise the gospel quartet movement. (Just as a quick explanation — in both black gospel, and in the white gospel music euphemistically called “Southern Gospel”, the term “quartet” is used for groups which might have five, six, or even more people in them. I’ll generally refer to all of these as “groups”, because I’m not from the gospel world, but I’ll use the term “quartet” when talking about things like the National Quartet Convention, and I may slip between the two interchangeably at times. Just know that if I mention quartets, I’m not just talking about groups with exactly four people in them). Harris worked with a less well known singer called Abraham Battle, and with Charlie Bridges, of another popular group, the Famous Blue Jays: [Excerpt: The Famous Blue Jay Singers, “Praising Jesus Evermore”] Together they founded the National Quartet Convention, which existed to try to take all the young gospel quartets who were springing up all over the place, and most of whom had casual attitudes to their music and their onstage appearance, and teach them how to comport themselves in a manner that the organisation’s leaders considered appropriate for a gospel singer. The Highway QCs joined the Convention, of course, and they considered themselves to be disciples, in a sense, of the Soul Stirrers, who they simultaneously considered to be their mentors and thought were jealous of the QCs. It was normal at the time for gospel groups to turn up at each other’s shows, and if they were popular enough they would be invited up to sing, and sometimes even take over the show. When the Highway QCs turned up at Soul Stirrers shows, though, the Soul Stirrers would act as if they didn’t know them, and would only invite them on to the stage if the audience absolutely insisted, and would then limit their performance to a single song. From the Highway QCs’ point of view, the only possible explanation was that the Soul Stirrers were terrified of the competition. A more likely explanation is probably that they were just more interested in putting on their own show than in giving space to some young kids who thought they were the next big thing. On the other hand, to all the younger kids around Chicago, the Highway QCs were clearly the group to beat — and people like a young singer named Lou Rawls looked up to them as something to aspire to. And soon the QCs found themselves being mentored by R.B. Robinson, one of the Soul Stirrers. Robinson would train them, and help them get better gigs, and the QCs became convinced that they were headed for the big time. But it turned out that behind the scenes, there had been trouble in the Soul Stirrers. Harris had, more and more, come to think of himself as the real star of the group, and quit to go solo. It had looked likely for a while that he would do so, and when Robinson had appeared to be mentoring the QCs, what he was actually doing was training their lead singer, so that when R.H. Harris eventually quit, they would have someone to take his place. The other Highway QCs were heartbroken, but Sam took the advice of his father, the Reverend Cook, who told him “Anytime you can make a step higher, you go higher. Don’t worry about the other fellow. You hold up for other folks, and they’ll take advantage of you.” And so, in March 1951, Sam Cooke went into the studio with the Soul Stirrers for his first ever recording session, three months after joining the group. Art Rupe, the head of Specialty Records, was not at all impressed that the group had got a new singer without telling him. Rupe had to admit that Cooke could sing, but his performance on the first few songs, while impressive, was no R.H. Harris: [Excerpt: the Soul Stirrers, “Come, Let Us Go Back to God”] But towards the end of the session, the Soul Stirrers insisted that they should record “Jesus Gave Me Water”, a song that had always been a highlight of the Highway QCs’ set. Rupe thought that this was ridiculous — the Pilgrim Travellers had just had a hit with the song, on Specialty, not six months earlier. What could Specialty possibly do with another version of the song so soon afterwards? But the group insisted, and the result was absolutely majestic: [Excerpt: The Soul Stirrers, “Jesus Gave Me Water”] Rupe lost his misgivings, both about the song and about the singer — that was clearly going to be the group’s next single. The group themselves were still not completely sure about Cooke as their singer — he was younger than the rest of them, and he didn’t have Harris’ assurance and professionalism, yet. But they knew they had something with that song, which was released with “Peace in the Valley” on the B-side. That song had been written by Thomas Dorsey fourteen years earlier, but this was the first time it had been released on a record, at least by anyone of any prominence. “Jesus Gave Me Water” was a hit, but the follow-ups were less successful, and meanwhile Art Rupe was starting to see the commercial potential in black styles of music other than gospel. Even though Rupe loved gospel music, he realised when “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” became the biggest hit Specialty had ever had to that point that maybe he should refocus the label away from gospel and towards more secular styles of music. “Jesus Gave Me Water” had consolidated Sam as the lead singer of the Soul Stirrers, but while he was singing gospel, he wasn’t living a very godly life. He got married in 1953, but he’d already had at least one child with another woman, who he left with the baby, and he was sleeping around constantly while on the road, and more than once the women involved became pregnant. But Cooke treated women the same way he treated the groups he was in – use them for as long as they’ve got something you want, and then immediately cast them aside once it became inconvenient. For the next few years, the Soul Stirrers would have one recording session every year, and the group continued touring, but they didn’t have any breakout success, even as other Specialty acts like Lloyd Price, Jesse Belvin, and Guitar Slim were all selling hand over fist. The Soul Stirrers were more popular as a live act than as a recording act, and hearing the live recording of them that Bumps Blackwell produced in 1955, it’s easy to see why: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, “Nearer to Thee”] Bumps Blackwell was convinced that Cooke needed to go solo and become a pop singer, and he was more convinced than ever when he produced the Soul Stirrers in the studio for the first time. The reason, actually, was to do with Cooke’s laziness. They’d gone into the studio, and it turned out that Cooke hadn’t written a song, and they needed one. The rest of the group were upset with him, and he just told them to hand him a Bible. He started flipping through, skimming to find something, and then he said “I got one”. He told the guitarist to play a couple of chords, and he started singing — and the song that came out, improvised off the top of his head, “Touch the Hem of His Garment”, was perfect just as it was, and the group quickly cut it: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, “Touch the Hem of His Garment”] Blackwell knew then that Cooke was a very, very special talent, and he and the rest of the people at Specialty became more and more insistent as 1956 went on that Sam Cooke should become a secular solo performer, rather than performing in a gospel group. The Soul Stirrers were only selling in the low tens of thousands — a reasonable amount for a gospel group, but hardly the kind of numbers that would make anyone rich. Meanwhile, gospel-inspired performers were having massive hits with gospel songs with a couple of words changed. There’s an episode of South Park where they make fun of contemporary Christian music, saying you just have to take a normal song and change the word “Baby” to “Jesus”. In the mid-fifties things seemed to be the other way — people were having hits by taking Gospel songs and changing the word “Jesus” to “baby”, or near as damnit. Most famously and blatantly, there was Ray Charles, who did things like take “This Little Light of Mine”: [Excerpt: The Louvin Brothers, “This Little Light of Mine”] and turn it into “This Little Girl of Mine: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “This Little Girl of Mine”] But there were a number of other acts doing things that weren’t that much less blatant. And so Sam Cooke travelled to New Orleans, to record in Cosimo Matassa’s studio with the same musicians who had been responsible for so many rock and roll hits. Or, rather, Dale Cook did. Sam was still a member of the Soul Stirrers at the time, and while he wanted to make himself into a star, he was also concerned that if he recorded secular music under his own name, he would damage his career as a gospel singer, without necessarily getting a better career to replace it. So the decision was made to put the single out under the name “Dale Cook”, and maintain a small amount of plausible deniability. If necessary, they could say that Dale was Sam’s brother, because it was fairly well known that Sam came from a singing family, and indeed Sam’s brother L.C. (whose name was just the initials L.C.) later went on to have some minor success as a singer himself, in a style very like Sam’s. As his first secular recording, they decided to record a new version of a gospel song that Cooke had recorded with the Soul Stirrers, “Wonderful”: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, “Wonderful”] One quick rewrite later, and that song became, instead, “Lovable”: [Excerpt: Dale Cook, “Lovable”] Around the time of the Dale Cook recording session, Sam’s brother L.C. went to Memphis, with his own group, where they appeared at the bottom of the bill for a charity Christmas show in aid of impoverished black youth. The lineup of the show was almost entirely black – people like Ray Charles, B.B. King, Rufus Thomas, and so on – but Elvis Presley turned up briefly to come out on stage and wave to the crowd and say a few words – the Colonel wouldn’t allow him to perform without getting paid, but did allow him to make an appearance, and he wanted to support the black community in Memphis. Backstage, Elvis was happy to meet all the acts, but when he found out that L.C. was Sam’s brother, he spent a full twenty minutes talking to L.C. about how great Sam was, and how much he admired his singing with the Soul Stirrers. Sam was such a distinctive voice that while the single came out as by “Dale Cook”, the DJs playing it would often introduce it as being by “Dale Sam Cook”, and the Soul Stirrers started to be asked if they were going to sing “Lovable” in their shows. Sam started to have doubts as to whether this move towards a pop style was really a good idea, and remained with the Soul Stirrers for the moment, though it’s noticeable that songs like “Mean Old World” could easily be refigured into being secular songs, and have only a minimal amount of religious content: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, “Mean Old World”] But barely a week after the session that produced “Mean Old World”, Sam was sending Bumps Blackwell demos of new pop songs he’d written, which he thought Blackwell would be interested in producing. Sam Cooke was going to treat the Soul Stirrers the same way he’d treated the Highway QCs. Cooke flew to LA, to meet with Blackwell and with Clifton White, a musician who had been for a long time the guitarist for the Mills Brothers, but who had recently left the band and started working with Blackwell as a session player. White was very unimpressed with Cooke – he thought that the new song Cooke sang to them, “You Send Me”, was just him repeating the same thing over and over again. Art Rupe helped them whittle the song choices down to four. Rupe had very particular ideas about what made for a commercial record – for example, that a record had to be exactly two minutes and twenty seconds long – and the final choices for the session were made with Rupe’s criteria in mind. The songs chosen were “Summertime”, “You Send Me”, another song Sam had written called “You Were Made For Me”, and “Things You Do to Me”, which was written by a young man Bumps Blackwell had just taken on as his assistant, named Sonny Bono. The recording session should have been completely straightforward. Blackwell supervised it, and while the session was in LA, almost everyone there was a veteran New Orleans player – along with Clif White on guitar there was René Hall, a guitarist from New Orleans who had recently quit Billy Ward and the Dominoes, and acted as instrumental arranger; Harold Battiste, a New Orleans saxophone player who Bumps had taken under his wing, and who wasn’t playing on the session but ended up writing the vocal arrangements for the backing singers; Earl Palmer, who had just moved to LA from New Orleans and was starting to make a name for himself as a session player there after his years of playing with Little Richard, Lloyd Price, and Fats Domino in Cosimo Matassa’s studio, and Ted Brinson, the only LA native, on bass — Brinson was a regular player on Specialty sessions, and also had connections with almost every LA R&B act, to the extent that it was his garage that “Earth Angel” by the Penguins had been recorded in. And on backing vocals were the Lee Gotch singers, a white vocal group who were among the most in-demand vocalists in LA. So this should have been a straightforward session, and it was, until Art Rupe turned up just after they’d recorded “You Send Me”: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, “You Send Me”] Rupe was horrified that Bumps and Battiste had put white backing vocalists behind Cooke’s vocals. They were, in Rupe’s view, trying to make Sam Cooke sound like Billy Ward and his Dominoes at best, and like a symphony orchestra at worst. The Billy Ward reference was because René Hall had recently arranged a version of “Stardust” for the Dominoes: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, “Stardust”] And the new version of “Summertime” had some of the same feel: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, “Summertime”] If Sam Cooke was going to record for Specialty, he wasn’t going to have *white* vocalists backing him. Rupe wanted black music, not something trying to be white — and the fact that he, a white man, was telling a room full of black musicians what counted as black music, was not lost on Bumps Blackwell. Even worse than the whiteness of the singers, though, was that some of them were women. Rupe and Blackwell had already had one massive falling-out, over “Rip it Up” by Little Richard. When they’d agreed to record that, Blackwell had worked out an arrangement beforehand that Rupe was happy with — one that was based around piano triplets. But then, when he’d been on the plane to the session, Blackwell had hit upon another idea — to base the song around a particular drum pattern: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Rip it Up”] Rupe had nearly fired Blackwell over that, and only relented when the record became a massive hit. Now that instead of putting a male black gospel group behind Cooke, as agreed, Blackwell had disobeyed him a second time and put white vocalists, including women, behind him, Rupe decided it was the last straw. Blackwell had to go. He was also convinced that Sam Cooke was only after money, because once Cooke discovered that his solo contract only paid him a third of the royalties that the Soul Stirrers had been getting as a group, he started pushing for a greater share of the money. Rupe didn’t like that kind of greed from his artists — why *should* he pay the artist more than one cent per record sold? But he still owed Blackwell a great deal of money. They eventually came to an agreement — Blackwell would leave Specialty, and take Sam Cooke, and Cooke’s existing recordings with him, since he was so convinced that they were going to be a hit. Rupe would keep the publishing rights to any songs Sam wrote, and would have an option on eight further Sam Cooke recordings in the future, but Cooke and Blackwell were free to take “You Send Me”, “Summertime”, and the rest to a new label that wanted them for its first release, Keen. While they waited around for Keen to get itself set up, Sam made himself firmly a part of the Central Avenue music scene, hanging around with Gaynel Hodge, Jesse Belvin, Dootsie Williams, Googie Rene, John Dolphin, and everyone else who was part of the LA R&B community. Meanwhile, the Soul Stirrers got Johnnie Taylor, the man who had replaced Sam in the Highway QCs, to replace him in the Stirrers. While Sam was out of the group, for the next few years he would be regularly involved with them, helping them out in recording sessions, producing them, and more. When the single came out, everyone thought that “Summertime” would be the hit, but “You Send Me” quickly found itself all over the airwaves and became massive: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, “You Send Me”] Several cover versions came out almost immediately. Sam and Bumps didn’t mind the versions by Jesse Belvin: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, “You Send Me”] Or Cornell Gunter: [Excerpt: Cornell Gunter, “You Send Me”] They were friends and colleagues, and good luck to them if they had a hit with the song — and anyway, they knew that Sam’s version was better. What they did object to was the white cover version by Teresa Brewer: [Excerpt: Teresa Brewer, “You Send Me”] Even though her version was less of a soundalike than the other LA R&B versions, it was more offensive to them — she was even copying Sam’s “whoa-oh”s. She was nothing more than a thief, Blackwell argued — and her version was charting, and made the top ten. Fortunately for them, Sam’s version went to number one, on both the R&B and pop charts, despite a catastrophic appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, which accidentally cut him off half way through a song. But there was still trouble with Art Rupe. Sam was still signed to Rupe’s company as a songwriter, and so he’d put “You Send Me” in the name of his brother L.C., so Rupe wouldn’t get any royalties. Rupe started legal action against him, and meanwhile, he took a demo Sam had recorded, “I’ll Come Running Back To You”, and got René Hall and the Lee Gotch singers, the very people whose work on “You Send Me” and “Summertime” he’d despised so much, to record overdubs to make it sound as much like “You Send Me” as possible: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, “I’ll Come Running Back To You”] And in retaliation for *that* being released, Bumps Blackwell took a song that he’d recorded months earlier with Little Richard, but which still hadn’t been released, and got the Specialty duo Don and Dewey to provide instrumental backing for a vocal group called the Valiants, and put it out on Keen: [Excerpt: The Valiants, “Good Golly Miss Molly”] Specialty had to rush-release Little Richard’s version to make sure it became the hit — a blow for them, given that they were trying to dripfeed the public what few Little Richard recordings they had left. As 1957 drew to a close, Sam Cooke was on top of the world. But the seeds of his downfall were already in place. He was upsetting all the right people with his desire to have control of his own career, but he was also hurting a lot of other people along the way — people who had helped him, like the Highway QCs and the Soul Stirrers, and especially women. He was about to divorce his first wife, and he had fathered a string of children with different women, all of whom he refused to acknowledge or support. He was taking his father’s maxims about only looking after yourself, and applying them to every aspect of life, with no regard to who it hurt. But such was his talent and charm, that even the people he hurt ended up defending him. Over the next couple of times we see Sam Cooke, we’ll see him rising to ever greater artistic heights, but we’ll also see the damage he caused to himself and to others. Because the story of Sam Cooke gets very, very unpleasant.

Episode sixty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “You Send Me” by Sam Cooke Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Little Darlin'” by The Gladiolas. Also, an announcement — the book version of the first fifty episodes is now available for purchase. See the show notes, or the previous mini-episode announcing this, for details.  —-more—- Resources The Mixcloud is slightly delayed this week. I’ll update the post tonight with the link. My main source for this episode is Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke by Peter Guralnick. Like all Guralnick’s work, it’s an essential book if you’re even slightly interested in the subject. This is the best compilation of Sam Cooke’s music for the beginner. A note on spelling: Sam Cooke was born Sam Cook, the rest of his family all kept the surname Cook, and he only added the “e” from the release of “You Send Me”, so for almost all the time covered in this episode he was Cook. I didn’t feel the need to mention this in the podcast, as the two names are pronounced identically. I’ve spelled him as Cooke and everyone else as Cook throughout. Book of the Podcast Remember that there’s a book available based on the first fifty episodes of the podcast. You can buy it at this link, which will take you to your preferred online bookstore. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We’ve talked before about how the music that became known as soul had its roots in gospel music, but today we’re going to have a look at the first big star of that music to get his start as a professional gospel singer, rather than as a rhythm and blues singer who included a little bit of gospel feeling. Sam Cooke was, in many ways, the most important black musician of the late fifties and early sixties, and without him it’s doubtful whether we would have the genre of soul as we know it today. But when he started out, he was someone who worked exclusively in the gospel field, and within that field he was something of a superstar. He was also someone who, as admirable as he was as a singer, was far less admirable in his behaviour towards other people, especially the women in his life, and while that’s something that will come up more in future episodes, it’s worth noting here. Cooke started out as a teenager in the 1940s, performing in gospel groups around Chicago, which as we’ve talked about before was the city where a whole new form of gospel music was being created at that point, spearheaded by Thomas Dorsey. Dorsey, Mahalia Jackson, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe were all living and performing in the city during young Sam’s formative years, but the biggest influence on him was a group called the Soul Stirrers. The Soul Stirrers had started out in 1926 as a group in what was called the “jubilee” style — the style that black singers of spiritual music sang in the period before Thomas Dorsey revolutionised gospel music. There are no recordings of the Soul Stirrers in that style, but this is probably the most famous jubilee recording: [Excerpt: The Fisk Jubilee Singers, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”] But as Thomas Dorsey and the musicians around him started to create the music we now think of as gospel, the Soul Stirrers switched styles, and became one of the first — and best — gospel quartets in the new style. In the late forties, the Soul Stirrers signed to Specialty Records, one of the first acts to sign to the label, and recorded a series of classic singles led by R.H. Harris, who was regarded by many as the greatest gospel singer of the age: [Excerpt: The Soul Stirrers feat. R.H. Harris, “In That Awful Hour”] Sam Cooke was one of seven children, the son of Reverend Charles Cook and his wife Annie Mae, and from a very early age the Reverend Cook had been training them as singers — five of them would perform regularly around churches in the area, under the name The Singing Children. Young Sam was taught religion by his father, but he was also taught that there was no prohibition in the Bible against worldly success. Indeed the Reverend Cook taught him two things that would matter in his life even more than his religion would. The first was that whatever it is you do in life, you try to do it the best you can — you never do anything by halves, and if a thing’s worth doing it’s worth doing properly. And the second was that you do whatever is necessary to give yourself the best possible life, and don’t worry about who you step on to do it. After spending some time with his family group, Cooke joined a newly-formed gospel group, who had heard him singing the Ink Spots song “If I Didn’t Care” to a girl. That group was called the Highway QCs, and a version of the group still exists to this day. Sam Cooke only stayed with them a couple of years, and never recorded with them, but they replaced him with a soundalike singer, Johnnie Taylor, and listening to Taylor’s recordings with the group you can get some idea of what they sounded like when Sam was a member: [Excerpt: Johnnie Taylor and the Highway QCs, “I Dreamed That Heaven Was Like This”] The rest of the group were decent singers, but Sam Cooke was absolutely unquestionably the star of the Highway QCs. Creadell Copeland, one of the group’s members, later said “All we had to do was stand behind Sam. Our claim to fame was that Sam’s voice was so captivating we didn’t have to do anything else.” The group didn’t make a huge amount of money, and they kept talking about going in a pop direction, rather than just singing gospel songs, and Sam was certainly singing a lot of secular music in his own time — he loved gospel music as much as anyone, but he was also learning from people like Gene Autry or Bill Kenny of the Ink Spots, and he was slowly developing into a singer who could do absolutely anything with his voice. But his biggest influence was still R.H. Harris of the Soul Stirrers, who was the most important person in the gospel quartet field. This wasn’t just because he was the most talented of all the quartet singers — though he was, and that was certainly part of it — but because he was the joint leader of a movement to professionalise the gospel quartet movement. (Just as a quick explanation — in both black gospel, and in the white gospel music euphemistically called “Southern Gospel”, the term “quartet” is used for groups which might have five, six, or even more people in them. I’ll generally refer to all of these as “groups”, because I’m not from the gospel world, but I’ll use the term “quartet” when talking about things like the National Quartet Convention, and I may slip between the two interchangeably at times. Just know that if I mention quartets, I’m not just talking about groups with exactly four people in them). Harris worked with a less well known singer called Abraham Battle, and with Charlie Bridges, of another popular group, the Famous Blue Jays: [Excerpt: The Famous Blue Jay Singers, “Praising Jesus Evermore”] Together they founded the National Quartet Convention, which existed to try to take all the young gospel quartets who were springing up all over the place, and most of whom had casual attitudes to their music and their onstage appearance, and teach them how to comport themselves in a manner that the organisation’s leaders considered appropriate for a gospel singer. The Highway QCs joined the Convention, of course, and they considered themselves to be disciples, in a sense, of the Soul Stirrers, who they simultaneously considered to be their mentors and thought were jealous of the QCs. It was normal at the time for gospel groups to turn up at each other’s shows, and if they were popular enough they would be invited up to sing, and sometimes even take over the show. When the Highway QCs turned up at Soul Stirrers shows, though, the Soul Stirrers would act as if they didn’t know them, and would only invite them on to the stage if the audience absolutely insisted, and would then limit their performance to a single song. From the Highway QCs’ point of view, the only possible explanation was that the Soul Stirrers were terrified of the competition. A more likely explanation is probably that they were just more interested in putting on their own show than in giving space to some young kids who thought they were the next big thing. On the other hand, to all the younger kids around Chicago, the Highway QCs were clearly the group to beat — and people like a young singer named Lou Rawls looked up to them as something to aspire to. And soon the QCs found themselves being mentored by R.B. Robinson, one of the Soul Stirrers. Robinson would train them, and help them get better gigs, and the QCs became convinced that they were headed for the big time. But it turned out that behind the scenes, there had been trouble in the Soul Stirrers. Harris had, more and more, come to think of himself as the real star of the group, and quit to go solo. It had looked likely for a while that he would do so, and when Robinson had appeared to be mentoring the QCs, what he was actually doing was training their lead singer, so that when R.H. Harris eventually quit, they would have someone to take his place. The other Highway QCs were heartbroken, but Sam took the advice of his father, the Reverend Cook, who told him “Anytime you can make a step higher, you go higher. Don’t worry about the other fellow. You hold up for other folks, and they’ll take advantage of you.” And so, in March 1951, Sam Cooke went into the studio with the Soul Stirrers for his first ever recording session, three months after joining the group. Art Rupe, the head of Specialty Records, was not at all impressed that the group had got a new singer without telling him. Rupe had to admit that Cooke could sing, but his performance on the first few songs, while impressive, was no R.H. Harris: [Excerpt: the Soul Stirrers, “Come, Let Us Go Back to God”] But towards the end of the session, the Soul Stirrers insisted that they should record “Jesus Gave Me Water”, a song that had always been a highlight of the Highway QCs’ set. Rupe thought that this was ridiculous — the Pilgrim Travellers had just had a hit with the song, on Specialty, not six months earlier. What could Specialty possibly do with another version of the song so soon afterwards? But the group insisted, and the result was absolutely majestic: [Excerpt: The Soul Stirrers, “Jesus Gave Me Water”] Rupe lost his misgivings, both about the song and about the singer — that was clearly going to be the group’s next single. The group themselves were still not completely sure about Cooke as their singer — he was younger than the rest of them, and he didn’t have Harris’ assurance and professionalism, yet. But they knew they had something with that song, which was released with “Peace in the Valley” on the B-side. That song had been written by Thomas Dorsey fourteen years earlier, but this was the first time it had been released on a record, at least by anyone of any prominence. “Jesus Gave Me Water” was a hit, but the follow-ups were less successful, and meanwhile Art Rupe was starting to see the commercial potential in black styles of music other than gospel. Even though Rupe loved gospel music, he realised when “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” became the biggest hit Specialty had ever had to that point that maybe he should refocus the label away from gospel and towards more secular styles of music. “Jesus Gave Me Water” had consolidated Sam as the lead singer of the Soul Stirrers, but while he was singing gospel, he wasn’t living a very godly life. He got married in 1953, but he’d already had at least one child with another woman, who he left with the baby, and he was sleeping around constantly while on the road, and more than once the women involved became pregnant. But Cooke treated women the same way he treated the groups he was in – use them for as long as they’ve got something you want, and then immediately cast them aside once it became inconvenient. For the next few years, the Soul Stirrers would have one recording session every year, and the group continued touring, but they didn’t have any breakout success, even as other Specialty acts like Lloyd Price, Jesse Belvin, and Guitar Slim were all selling hand over fist. The Soul Stirrers were more popular as a live act than as a recording act, and hearing the live recording of them that Bumps Blackwell produced in 1955, it’s easy to see why: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, “Nearer to Thee”] Bumps Blackwell was convinced that Cooke needed to go solo and become a pop singer, and he was more convinced than ever when he produced the Soul Stirrers in the studio for the first time. The reason, actually, was to do with Cooke’s laziness. They’d gone into the studio, and it turned out that Cooke hadn’t written a song, and they needed one. The rest of the group were upset with him, and he just told them to hand him a Bible. He started flipping through, skimming to find something, and then he said “I got one”. He told the guitarist to play a couple of chords, and he started singing — and the song that came out, improvised off the top of his head, “Touch the Hem of His Garment”, was perfect just as it was, and the group quickly cut it: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, “Touch the Hem of His Garment”] Blackwell knew then that Cooke was a very, very special talent, and he and the rest of the people at Specialty became more and more insistent as 1956 went on that Sam Cooke should become a secular solo performer, rather than performing in a gospel group. The Soul Stirrers were only selling in the low tens of thousands — a reasonable amount for a gospel group, but hardly the kind of numbers that would make anyone rich. Meanwhile, gospel-inspired performers were having massive hits with gospel songs with a couple of words changed. There’s an episode of South Park where they make fun of contemporary Christian music, saying you just have to take a normal song and change the word “Baby” to “Jesus”. In the mid-fifties things seemed to be the other way — people were having hits by taking Gospel songs and changing the word “Jesus” to “baby”, or near as damnit. Most famously and blatantly, there was Ray Charles, who did things like take “This Little Light of Mine”: [Excerpt: The Louvin Brothers, “This Little Light of Mine”] and turn it into “This Little Girl of Mine: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “This Little Girl of Mine”] But there were a number of other acts doing things that weren’t that much less blatant. And so Sam Cooke travelled to New Orleans, to record in Cosimo Matassa’s studio with the same musicians who had been responsible for so many rock and roll hits. Or, rather, Dale Cook did. Sam was still a member of the Soul Stirrers at the time, and while he wanted to make himself into a star, he was also concerned that if he recorded secular music under his own name, he would damage his career as a gospel singer, without necessarily getting a better career to replace it. So the decision was made to put the single out under the name “Dale Cook”, and maintain a small amount of plausible deniability. If necessary, they could say that Dale was Sam’s brother, because it was fairly well known that Sam came from a singing family, and indeed Sam’s brother L.C. (whose name was just the initials L.C.) later went on to have some minor success as a singer himself, in a style very like Sam’s. As his first secular recording, they decided to record a new version of a gospel song that Cooke had recorded with the Soul Stirrers, “Wonderful”: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, “Wonderful”] One quick rewrite later, and that song became, instead, “Lovable”: [Excerpt: Dale Cook, “Lovable”] Around the time of the Dale Cook recording session, Sam’s brother L.C. went to Memphis, with his own group, where they appeared at the bottom of the bill for a charity Christmas show in aid of impoverished black youth. The lineup of the show was almost entirely black – people like Ray Charles, B.B. King, Rufus Thomas, and so on – but Elvis Presley turned up briefly to come out on stage and wave to the crowd and say a few words – the Colonel wouldn’t allow him to perform without getting paid, but did allow him to make an appearance, and he wanted to support the black community in Memphis. Backstage, Elvis was happy to meet all the acts, but when he found out that L.C. was Sam’s brother, he spent a full twenty minutes talking to L.C. about how great Sam was, and how much he admired his singing with the Soul Stirrers. Sam was such a distinctive voice that while the single came out as by “Dale Cook”, the DJs playing it would often introduce it as being by “Dale Sam Cook”, and the Soul Stirrers started to be asked if they were going to sing “Lovable” in their shows. Sam started to have doubts as to whether this move towards a pop style was really a good idea, and remained with the Soul Stirrers for the moment, though it’s noticeable that songs like “Mean Old World” could easily be refigured into being secular songs, and have only a minimal amount of religious content: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, “Mean Old World”] But barely a week after the session that produced “Mean Old World”, Sam was sending Bumps Blackwell demos of new pop songs he’d written, which he thought Blackwell would be interested in producing. Sam Cooke was going to treat the Soul Stirrers the same way he’d treated the Highway QCs. Cooke flew to LA, to meet with Blackwell and with Clifton White, a musician who had been for a long time the guitarist for the Mills Brothers, but who had recently left the band and started working with Blackwell as a session player. White was very unimpressed with Cooke – he thought that the new song Cooke sang to them, “You Send Me”, was just him repeating the same thing over and over again. Art Rupe helped them whittle the song choices down to four. Rupe had very particular ideas about what made for a commercial record – for example, that a record had to be exactly two minutes and twenty seconds long – and the final choices for the session were made with Rupe’s criteria in mind. The songs chosen were “Summertime”, “You Send Me”, another song Sam had written called “You Were Made For Me”, and “Things You Do to Me”, which was written by a young man Bumps Blackwell had just taken on as his assistant, named Sonny Bono. The recording session should have been completely straightforward. Blackwell supervised it, and while the session was in LA, almost everyone there was a veteran New Orleans player – along with Clif White on guitar there was René Hall, a guitarist from New Orleans who had recently quit Billy Ward and the Dominoes, and acted as instrumental arranger; Harold Battiste, a New Orleans saxophone player who Bumps had taken under his wing, and who wasn’t playing on the session but ended up writing the vocal arrangements for the backing singers; Earl Palmer, who had just moved to LA from New Orleans and was starting to make a name for himself as a session player there after his years of playing with Little Richard, Lloyd Price, and Fats Domino in Cosimo Matassa’s studio, and Ted Brinson, the only LA native, on bass — Brinson was a regular player on Specialty sessions, and also had connections with almost every LA R&B act, to the extent that it was his garage that “Earth Angel” by the Penguins had been recorded in. And on backing vocals were the Lee Gotch singers, a white vocal group who were among the most in-demand vocalists in LA. So this should have been a straightforward session, and it was, until Art Rupe turned up just after they’d recorded “You Send Me”: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, “You Send Me”] Rupe was horrified that Bumps and Battiste had put white backing vocalists behind Cooke’s vocals. They were, in Rupe’s view, trying to make Sam Cooke sound like Billy Ward and his Dominoes at best, and like a symphony orchestra at worst. The Billy Ward reference was because René Hall had recently arranged a version of “Stardust” for the Dominoes: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, “Stardust”] And the new version of “Summertime” had some of the same feel: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, “Summertime”] If Sam Cooke was going to record for Specialty, he wasn’t going to have *white* vocalists backing him. Rupe wanted black music, not something trying to be white — and the fact that he, a white man, was telling a room full of black musicians what counted as black music, was not lost on Bumps Blackwell. Even worse than the whiteness of the singers, though, was that some of them were women. Rupe and Blackwell had already had one massive falling-out, over “Rip it Up” by Little Richard. When they’d agreed to record that, Blackwell had worked out an arrangement beforehand that Rupe was happy with — one that was based around piano triplets. But then, when he’d been on the plane to the session, Blackwell had hit upon another idea — to base the song around a particular drum pattern: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Rip it Up”] Rupe had nearly fired Blackwell over that, and only relented when the record became a massive hit. Now that instead of putting a male black gospel group behind Cooke, as agreed, Blackwell had disobeyed him a second time and put white vocalists, including women, behind him, Rupe decided it was the last straw. Blackwell had to go. He was also convinced that Sam Cooke was only after money, because once Cooke discovered that his solo contract only paid him a third of the royalties that the Soul Stirrers had been getting as a group, he started pushing for a greater share of the money. Rupe didn’t like that kind of greed from his artists — why *should* he pay the artist more than one cent per record sold? But he still owed Blackwell a great deal of money. They eventually came to an agreement — Blackwell would leave Specialty, and take Sam Cooke, and Cooke’s existing recordings with him, since he was so convinced that they were going to be a hit. Rupe would keep the publishing rights to any songs Sam wrote, and would have an option on eight further Sam Cooke recordings in the future, but Cooke and Blackwell were free to take “You Send Me”, “Summertime”, and the rest to a new label that wanted them for its first release, Keen. While they waited around for Keen to get itself set up, Sam made himself firmly a part of the Central Avenue music scene, hanging around with Gaynel Hodge, Jesse Belvin, Dootsie Williams, Googie Rene, John Dolphin, and everyone else who was part of the LA R&B community. Meanwhile, the Soul Stirrers got Johnnie Taylor, the man who had replaced Sam in the Highway QCs, to replace him in the Stirrers. While Sam was out of the group, for the next few years he would be regularly involved with them, helping them out in recording sessions, producing them, and more. When the single came out, everyone thought that “Summertime” would be the hit, but “You Send Me” quickly found itself all over the airwaves and became massive: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, “You Send Me”] Several cover versions came out almost immediately. Sam and Bumps didn’t mind the versions by Jesse Belvin: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, “You Send Me”] Or Cornell Gunter: [Excerpt: Cornell Gunter, “You Send Me”] They were friends and colleagues, and good luck to them if they had a hit with the song — and anyway, they knew that Sam’s version was better. What they did object to was the white cover version by Teresa Brewer: [Excerpt: Teresa Brewer, “You Send Me”] Even though her version was less of a soundalike than the other LA R&B versions, it was more offensive to them — she was even copying Sam’s “whoa-oh”s. She was nothing more than a thief, Blackwell argued — and her version was charting, and made the top ten. Fortunately for them, Sam’s version went to number one, on both the R&B and pop charts, despite a catastrophic appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, which accidentally cut him off half way through a song. But there was still trouble with Art Rupe. Sam was still signed to Rupe’s company as a songwriter, and so he’d put “You Send Me” in the name of his brother L.C., so Rupe wouldn’t get any royalties. Rupe started legal action against him, and meanwhile, he took a demo Sam had recorded, “I’ll Come Running Back To You”, and got René Hall and the Lee Gotch singers, the very people whose work on “You Send Me” and “Summertime” he’d despised so much, to record overdubs to make it sound as much like “You Send Me” as possible: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, “I’ll Come Running Back To You”] And in retaliation for *that* being released, Bumps Blackwell took a song that he’d recorded months earlier with Little Richard, but which still hadn’t been released, and got the Specialty duo Don and Dewey to provide instrumental backing for a vocal group called the Valiants, and put it out on Keen: [Excerpt: The Valiants, “Good Golly Miss Molly”] Specialty had to rush-release Little Richard’s version to make sure it became the hit — a blow for them, given that they were trying to dripfeed the public what few Little Richard recordings they had left. As 1957 drew to a close, Sam Cooke was on top of the world. But the seeds of his downfall were already in place. He was upsetting all the right people with his desire to have control of his own career, but he was also hurting a lot of other people along the way — people who had helped him, like the Highway QCs and the Soul Stirrers, and especially women. He was about to divorce his first wife, and he had fathered a string of children with different women, all of whom he refused to acknowledge or support. He was taking his father’s maxims about only looking after yourself, and applying them to every aspect of life, with no regard to who it hurt. But such was his talent and charm, that even the people he hurt ended up defending him. Over the next couple of times we see Sam Cooke, we’ll see him rising to ever greater artistic heights, but we’ll also see the damage he caused to himself and to others. Because the story of Sam Cooke gets very, very unpleasant.

Episode fifty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Keep A Knockin'" by Little Richard, the long history of the song, and the tension between its performer's faith and sexuality. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "At the Hop" by Danny and the Juniors.   ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of the information used here comes from The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Authorised Biography by Charles White, which is to all intents and purposes Richard's autobiography, as much of the text is in his own words. A warning for those who might be considering buying this though -- it contains descriptions of his abuse as a child, and is also full of internalised homo- bi- and trans-phobia. This collection contains everything Richard released before 1962, from his early blues singles through to his gospel albums from after he temporarily gave up rock and roll for the church. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum In the podcast I refer to a jazz band as "the Buddy Bolden Legacy Group". Their name is actually "the Buddy Bolden Legacy Band".   Transcript When last we looked at Little Richard properly, he had just had a hit with "Long Tall Sally", and was at the peak of his career. Since then, we've seen that he had become big enough that he was chosen over Fats Domino to record the theme tune to "The Girl Can't Help It", and that he was the inspiration for James Brown. But today we're going to look in more detail at Little Richard's career in the mid fifties, and at how he threw away that career for his beliefs. [Excerpt: Little Richard with his Band, "Keep A Knockin'"] Richard's immediate follow-up to "Long Tall Sally" was another of his most successful records, a double-sided hit with both songs credited to John Marascalco and Bumps Blackwell -- "Rip it Up" backed with "Ready Teddy". These both went to number one on the R&B charts, but they possibly didn't have quite the same power as RIchard's first two singles. Where the earlier singles had been truly unique artefacts, songs that didn't sound like anything else out there, "Rip it Up" and "Ready Teddy" were both much closer to the typical songs of the time -- the lyrics were about going out and having a party and rocking and rolling, rather than about sex with men or cross-dressing sex workers. But this didn't make Richard any less successful, and throughout 1956 and 57 he kept releasing more hits, often releasing singles where both the A and B side became classics -- we've discussed "The Girl Can't Help It" and "She's Got It" in the episode on "Twenty Flight Rock", but there was also "Jenny Jenny", "Send Me Some Lovin'", and possibly the greatest of them all, "Lucille": [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Lucille"] But Richard was getting annoyed at the routine of recording -- or more precisely, he was getting annoyed at the musicians he was having to work with in the studio. He was convinced that his own backing band, the Upsetters, were at least as good as the studio musicians, and he was pushing for Specialty to let him use them in the studio. And when they finally let him use the Upsetters in the studio, he recorded a song which had roots which go much further back than you might imagine. "Keep A Knockin'" had a long, long, history. It derives originally from a piece called "A Bunch of Blues", written by J. Paul Wyer and Alf Kelly in 1915. Wyer was a violin player with W.C. Handy's band, and Handy recorded the tune in 1917: [Excerpt: W.C. Handy's Memphis Blues Band, "A Bunch of Blues"] That itself, though, may derive from another song, "My Bucket's Got A Hole in It", which is an old jazz standard. There are claims that it was originally played by the great jazz trumpeter Buddy Bolden around the turn of the twentieth century. No recordings survive of Bolden playing the song, but a group called "the Buddy Bolden Legacy Group" have put together what, other than the use of modern recording, seems a reasonable facsimile of how Bolden would have played the song: [Excerpt: "My Bucket's Got a Hole in it", the Buddy Bolden Legacy Band] If Bolden did play that, then the melody dates back to around 1906 at the latest, as from 1907 on Bolden was in a psychiatric hospital with schizophrenia, but the 1915 date for "A Bunch of Blues" is the earliest definite date we have for the melody. "My Bucket's Got a Hole in it" would later be recorded by everyone from Hank Williams to Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant to Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis. It was particularly popular among country singers: [Excerpt: Hank Williams, "My Bucket's Got A Hole In It"] But the song took another turn in 1928, when it was recorded by Tampa Red's Hokum Jug Band. This group featured Tampa Red, who would later go on to be a blues legend in his own right, and "Georgia Tom", who as Thomas Dorsey would later be best known as the writer of much of the core repertoire of gospel music. You might remember us talking about Dorsey in the episode on Rosetta Tharpe. He's someone who wrote dirty, funny, blues songs until he had a religious experience while on stage, and instead became a writer of religious music, writing songs like "Precious Lord, Take My Hand" and "Peace in the Valley". But in 1928, he was still Georgia Tom and still recording hokum songs. We talked about hokum music right back in the earliest episodes of the podcast, but as a reminder, hokum music is a form which is now usually lumped into the blues by most of the few people who come across it, but which actually comes from vaudeville and especially from minstrel shows, and was hugely popular in the early decades of the twentieth century. It usually involved simple songs with a verse/chorus structure, and with lyrics that were an extended comedy metaphor, usually some form of innuendo about sex, with titles like "Meat Balls" and "Banana in Your Fruit Basket". As you can imagine, this kind of music is one that influenced a lot of people who went on to influence Little Richard, and it's in this crossover genre which had elements of country, blues, and pop that we find "My Bucket's Got a Hole in it" turning into the song that would later be known as "Keep A Knockin'". Tampa Red's version was titled "You Can't Come In", and seems to have been the origin not only of "Keep A Knockin'" but also of the Lead Belly song "Midnight Special" -- you can hear the similarity in the guitar melody: [Excerpt: Tampa Red's Hokum Jug Band, "You Can't Come In"] The version by Tampa Red's Hokum Jug Band wasn't the first recording to combine the "Keep a Knockin'" lyrics with the "My Bucket's Got a Hole In It" melody -- the piano player Bert Mays recorded a version a month earlier, and Mays and his producer Mayo Williams, one of the first black record producers, are usually credited as the songwriters as a result (with Little Richard also being credited on his version). Mays was in turn probably inspired by an earlier recording by James "Boodle It" Wiggins, but Wiggins had a different melody -- Mays seems to be the one who first combined the lyrics with the "My Bucket's Got a Hole In It" melody on a recording. But the idea was probably one that had been knocking around for a while in various forms, given the number of different variations of the melody that turn up, and Tampa Red's version inspired all the future recordings. As hokum music lies at the roots of both blues and country, it's not surprising that "You Can't Come in" was picked up by both country and blues musicians. A version of the song, for example, was recorded by, among others, Milton Brown -- who had been an early musical partner of Bob Wills and one of the people who helped create Western Swing. [Excerpt: Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies: "Keep A Knockin'"] But the version that Little Richard recorded was most likely inspired by Louis Jordan's version. Jordan was, of course, Richard's single biggest musical inspiration, so we can reasonably assume that the record by Jordan was the one that pushed him to record the song. [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Keep A Knockin'"] The Jordan record was probably brought to mind in 1955 when Smiley Lewis had a hit with Dave Bartholomew's take on the idea. "I Hear You Knockin'" only bears a slight melodic resemblance to "Keep A Knockin'", but the lyrics are so obviously inspired by the earlier song that it would have brought it to mind for anyone who had heard any of the earlier versions: [Excerpt: Smiley Lewis, "I Hear You Knockin'"] That was also recorded by Fats Domino, one of Little Richard's favourite musicians, so we can be sure that Richard had heard it. So by the time Little Richard came to record "Keep A Knockin'" in very early 1957, he had a host of different versions he could draw on for inspiration. But what we ended up with is something that's uniquely Little Richard -- something that was altogether wilder: [Excerpt: Little Richard and his band, "Keep A Knockin'"] In some takes of the song, Richard also sang a verse about drinking gin, which was based on Louis Jordan's version which had a similar verse: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Keep A Knockin'", "drinking gin" verse from take three] But in the end, what they ended up with was only about fifty-seven seconds worth of usable recording. Listening to the session recording, it seems that Grady Gaines kept trying different things with his saxophone solo, and not all of them quite worked as well as might be hoped -- there are a few infelicities in most of his solos, though not anything that you wouldn't expect from a good player trying new things. To get it to a usable length, they copied and pasted the whole song from the start of Richard's vocal through to the end of the saxophone solo, and almost doubled the length of the song -- the third and fourth verses, and the second saxophone solo, are the same recording as the first and second verses and the first sax solo. If you want to try this yourself, it seems that the "whoo" after the first "keep a knockin' but you can't come in" after the second sax solo is the point where the copy/pasting ends. But even though the recording ended up being a bit of a Frankenstein's monster, it remains one of Little Richard's greatest tracks. At the same session, he also recorded another of his very best records, "Ooh! My Soul!": [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Ooh! My Soul!"] That session also produced a single for Richard's chauffeur, with Richard on the piano, released under the name "Pretty Boy": [Excerpt: Pretty Boy, "Bip Bop Bip"] "Pretty Boy" would later go on to be better known as Don Covay, and would have great success as a soul singer and songwriter. He's now probably best known for writing "Chain of Fools" for Aretha Franklin. That session was a productive one, but other than one final session in October 1957, in which he knocked out a couple of blues songs as album fillers, it would be Little Richard's last rock and roll recording session for several years. Richard had always been deeply conflicted about... well, about everything, really. He was attracted to men as well as women, he loved rock and roll and rhythm and blues music, loved eating chitlins and pork chops, drinking, and taking drugs, and was unsure about his own gender identity. He was also deeply, deeply, religious, and a believer in the Seventh Day Adventist church, which believed that same-sex attraction, trans identities, and secular music were the work of the Devil, and that one should keep a vegetarian and kosher diet, and avoid all drugs, even caffeine. This came to a head in October 1957. Richard was on a tour of Australia with Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, and Alis Lesley, who was another of the many singers billed as "the female Elvis Presley": [Excerpt: Alis Lesley, "He Will Come Back To Me"] Vincent actually had to miss the first couple of shows on the tour, as he and the Blue Caps got held up in Honolulu, apparently due to visa issues, and couldn't continue on to Australia with the rest of the tour until that was sorted out. They were replaced on those early shows by a local group, Johnny O'Keefe and the Dee Jays, who performed some of Vincent's songs as well as their own material, and who managed to win the audiences round even though they were irritated at Vincent's absence. O'Keefe isn't someone we're going to be able to discuss in much detail in this series, because he had very little impact outside of Australia. But within Australia, he's something of a legend as their first home-grown rock and roll star. And he did make one record which people outside of Australia have heard of -- his biggest hit, from 1958, "Wild One", which has since been covered by, amongst others, Jerry Lee Lewis and Iggy Pop: [Excerpt: Johnny O'Keefe, "Wild One"] The flight to Australia was longer and more difficult than any Richard had experienced before, and at one point he looked out of the window and saw the engines glowing red. He became convinced that the plane was on fire, and being held up by angels. He became even more worried a couple of days later when Russia launched their first satellite, Sputnik, and it passed low over Australia -- low enough that he claimed he could see it, like a fireball in the sky, while he was performing. He decided this was a sign, and that he was being told by God that he needed to give up his life of sin and devote himself to religion. He told the other people on the tour this, but they didn't believe him -- until he threw all his rings into the ocean to prove it. He insisted on cancelling his appearances with ten days of the tour left to go and travelling back to the US with his band. He has often also claimed that the plane they were originally scheduled to fly back on crashed in the Pacific on the flight he would have been on -- I've seen no evidence anywhere else of this, and I have looked. When he got back, he cut one final session for Specialty, and then went into a seminary to start studying for the ministry. While his religious belief is genuine, there has been some suggestion that this move wasn't solely motivated by his conversion. Rather, John Marascalco has often claimed that Richard's real reason for his conversion was based on more worldly considerations. Richard's contract with Specialty was only paying him half a cent per record sold, which he considered far too low, and the wording of the contract only let him end it on either his own death or an act of god. He was trying -- according to Marascalco -- to claim that his religious awakening was an act of God, and so he should be allowed to break his contract and sign with another label. Whatever the truth, Specialty had enough of a backlog of Little Richard recordings that they could keep issuing them for the next couple of years. Some of those, like "Good Golly Miss Molly" were as good as anything he had ever recorded. and rightly became big hits: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Good Golly Miss Molly"] Many others, though, were substandard recordings that they originally had no plans to release -- but with Richard effectively on strike and the demand for his recordings undiminished, they put out whatever they had. Richard went out on the road as an evangelist, but also went to study to become a priest. He changed his whole lifestyle -- he married a woman, although they would later divorce as, among other things, they weren't sexually compatible. He stopped drinking and taking drugs, stopped even drinking coffee, and started eating only vegetables cooked in vegetable oil. After the lawsuits over him quitting Specialty records were finally settled, he started recording again, but only gospel songs: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Precious Lord, Take My Hand"] And that was how things stood for several years. The tension between Richard's sexuality and his religion continued to torment him -- he dropped out of the seminary after propositioning another male student, and he was arrested in a public toilet -- but he continued his evangelism and gospel singing until October 1962, when he went on tour in the UK. Just like the previous tour which had been a turning point in his life, this one featured Gene Vincent, but was also affected by Vincent's work permit problems. This time, Vincent was allowed in the country but wasn't allowed to perform on stage -- so he appeared only as the compere, at least at the start of the tour -- later on, he would sing "Be Bop A Lula" from offstage as well. Vincent wasn't the only one to have problems, either. Sam Cooke, who was the second-billed star for the show, was delayed and couldn't make the first show, which was a bit of a disaster. Richard was accompanied by a young gospel organ player named Billy Preston, and he'd agreed to the tour under the impression that he was going to be performing only his gospel music. Don Arden, the promoter, had been promoting it as Richard's first rock and roll tour in five years, and the audience were very far from impressed when Richard came on stage in flowing white robes and started singing "Peace in the Valley" and other gospel songs. Arden was apoplectic. If Richard didn't start performing rock and roll songs soon, he would have to cancel the whole tour -- an audience that wanted "Rip it Up" and "Long Tall Sally" and "Tutti Frutti" wasn't going to put up with being preached at. Arden didn't know what to do, and when Sam Cooke and his manager J.W. Alexander turned up to the second show, Arden had a talk with Alexander about it. Alexander told Arden he had nothing to worry about -- he knew Little Richard of old, and knew that Richard couldn't stand to be upstaged. He also knew how good Sam Cooke was. Cooke was at the height of his success at this point, and he was an astonishing live performer, and so when he went out on stage and closed the first half, including an incendiary performance of "Twistin' the Night Away" that left the audience applauding through the intermission, Richard knew he had to up his game. While he'd not been performing rock and roll in public, he had been tempted back into the studio to record in his old style at least once before, when he'd joined his old group to record Fats Domino's "I'm In Love Again", for a single that didn't get released until December 1962. The single was released as by "the World Famous Upsetters", but the vocalist on the record was very recognisable: [Excerpt: The World Famous Upsetters, "I'm In Love Again"] So Richard's willpower had been slowly bending, and Sam Cooke's performance was the final straw. Little Richard was going to show everyone what star power really was. When Richard came out on stage, he spent a whole minute in pitch darkness, with the band vamping, before a spotlight suddenly picked him out, in an all-white suit, and he launched into "Long Tall Sally". The British tour was a massive success, and Richard kept becoming wilder and more frantic on stage, as five years of pent up rock and roll burst out of him. Many shows he'd pull off most of his clothes and throw them into the audience, ending up dressed in just a bathrobe, on his knees. He would jump on the piano, and one night he even faked his own death, collapsing off the piano and lying still on the stage in the middle of a song, just to create a tension in the audience for when he suddenly jumped up and started singing "Tutti Frutti". The tour was successful enough, and Richard's performances created such a buzz, that when the package tour itself finished Richard was booked for a few extra gigs, including one at the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton where he headlined a bill of local bands from around Merseyside, including one who had released their first single a few weeks earlier. He then went to Hamburg with that group, and spent two months hanging out with them and performing in the same kinds of clubs, and teaching their bass player how he made his “whoo” sounds when singing. Richard was impressed enough by them that he got in touch with Art Rupe, who still had some contractual claim over Richard's own recordings, to tell him about them, but Rupe said that he wasn't interested in some English group, he just wanted Little Richard to go back into the studio and make more records for him. Richard headed back to the US, leaving Billy Preston stranded in Hamburg with his new friends, the Beatles. At first, he still wouldn't record any rock and roll music, other than one song that Sam Cooke wrote for him, "Well Alright", but after another UK tour he started to see that people who had been inspired by him were having the kind of success he thought he was due himself. He went back into the studio, backed by a group including Don and Dewey, who had been performing with him in the UK, and recorded what was meant to be his comeback single, "Bama Lama Bama Loo": [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Bama Lama Bama Loo"] Unfortunately, great as it was, that single didn't do anything in the charts, and Richard spent the rest of the sixties making record after record that failed to chart. Some of them were as good as anything he'd done in his fifties heyday, but his five years away from rock and roll music had killed his career as a recording artist. They hadn't, though, killed him as a live performer, and he would spend the next fifty years touring, playing the hits he had recorded during that classic period from 1955 through 1957, with occasional breaks where he would be overcome by remorse, give up rock and roll music forever, and try to work as an evangelist and gospel singer, before the lure of material success and audience response brought him back to the world of sex and drugs and rock and roll. He eventually gave up performing live a few years ago, as decades of outrageous stage performances had exacerbated his disabilities. His last public performance was in 2013, in Las Vegas, and he was in a wheelchair -- but because he's Little Richard, the wheelchair was made to look like a golden throne.

Episode fifty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Keep A Knockin'” by Little Richard, the long history of the song, and the tension between its performer’s faith and sexuality. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “At the Hop” by Danny and the Juniors.   —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of the information used here comes from The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Authorised Biography by Charles White, which is to all intents and purposes Richard’s autobiography, as much of the text is in his own words. A warning for those who might be considering buying this though — it contains descriptions of his abuse as a child, and is also full of internalised homo- bi- and trans-phobia. This collection contains everything Richard released before 1962, from his early blues singles through to his gospel albums from after he temporarily gave up rock and roll for the church. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum In the podcast I refer to a jazz band as “the Buddy Bolden Legacy Group”. Their name is actually “the Buddy Bolden Legacy Band”.   Transcript When last we looked at Little Richard properly, he had just had a hit with “Long Tall Sally”, and was at the peak of his career. Since then, we’ve seen that he had become big enough that he was chosen over Fats Domino to record the theme tune to “The Girl Can’t Help It”, and that he was the inspiration for James Brown. But today we’re going to look in more detail at Little Richard’s career in the mid fifties, and at how he threw away that career for his beliefs. [Excerpt: Little Richard with his Band, “Keep A Knockin'”] Richard’s immediate follow-up to “Long Tall Sally” was another of his most successful records, a double-sided hit with both songs credited to John Marascalco and Bumps Blackwell — “Rip it Up” backed with “Ready Teddy”. These both went to number one on the R&B charts, but they possibly didn’t have quite the same power as RIchard’s first two singles. Where the earlier singles had been truly unique artefacts, songs that didn’t sound like anything else out there, “Rip it Up” and “Ready Teddy” were both much closer to the typical songs of the time — the lyrics were about going out and having a party and rocking and rolling, rather than about sex with men or cross-dressing sex workers. But this didn’t make Richard any less successful, and throughout 1956 and 57 he kept releasing more hits, often releasing singles where both the A and B side became classics — we’ve discussed “The Girl Can’t Help It” and “She’s Got It” in the episode on “Twenty Flight Rock”, but there was also “Jenny Jenny”, “Send Me Some Lovin'”, and possibly the greatest of them all, “Lucille”: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Lucille”] But Richard was getting annoyed at the routine of recording — or more precisely, he was getting annoyed at the musicians he was having to work with in the studio. He was convinced that his own backing band, the Upsetters, were at least as good as the studio musicians, and he was pushing for Specialty to let him use them in the studio. And when they finally let him use the Upsetters in the studio, he recorded a song which had roots which go much further back than you might imagine. “Keep A Knockin'” had a long, long, history. It derives originally from a piece called “A Bunch of Blues”, written by J. Paul Wyer and Alf Kelly in 1915. Wyer was a violin player with W.C. Handy’s band, and Handy recorded the tune in 1917: [Excerpt: W.C. Handy’s Memphis Blues Band, “A Bunch of Blues”] That itself, though, may derive from another song, “My Bucket’s Got A Hole in It”, which is an old jazz standard. There are claims that it was originally played by the great jazz trumpeter Buddy Bolden around the turn of the twentieth century. No recordings survive of Bolden playing the song, but a group called “the Buddy Bolden Legacy Group” have put together what, other than the use of modern recording, seems a reasonable facsimile of how Bolden would have played the song: [Excerpt: “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in it”, the Buddy Bolden Legacy Band] If Bolden did play that, then the melody dates back to around 1906 at the latest, as from 1907 on Bolden was in a psychiatric hospital with schizophrenia, but the 1915 date for “A Bunch of Blues” is the earliest definite date we have for the melody. “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in it” would later be recorded by everyone from Hank Williams to Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant to Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis. It was particularly popular among country singers: [Excerpt: Hank Williams, “My Bucket’s Got A Hole In It”] But the song took another turn in 1928, when it was recorded by Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band. This group featured Tampa Red, who would later go on to be a blues legend in his own right, and “Georgia Tom”, who as Thomas Dorsey would later be best known as the writer of much of the core repertoire of gospel music. You might remember us talking about Dorsey in the episode on Rosetta Tharpe. He’s someone who wrote dirty, funny, blues songs until he had a religious experience while on stage, and instead became a writer of religious music, writing songs like “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” and “Peace in the Valley”. But in 1928, he was still Georgia Tom and still recording hokum songs. We talked about hokum music right back in the earliest episodes of the podcast, but as a reminder, hokum music is a form which is now usually lumped into the blues by most of the few people who come across it, but which actually comes from vaudeville and especially from minstrel shows, and was hugely popular in the early decades of the twentieth century. It usually involved simple songs with a verse/chorus structure, and with lyrics that were an extended comedy metaphor, usually some form of innuendo about sex, with titles like “Meat Balls” and “Banana in Your Fruit Basket”. As you can imagine, this kind of music is one that influenced a lot of people who went on to influence Little Richard, and it’s in this crossover genre which had elements of country, blues, and pop that we find “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in it” turning into the song that would later be known as “Keep A Knockin'”. Tampa Red’s version was titled “You Can’t Come In”, and seems to have been the origin not only of “Keep A Knockin'” but also of the Lead Belly song “Midnight Special” — you can hear the similarity in the guitar melody: [Excerpt: Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band, “You Can’t Come In”] The version by Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band wasn’t the first recording to combine the “Keep a Knockin'” lyrics with the “My Bucket’s Got a Hole In It” melody — the piano player Bert Mays recorded a version a month earlier, and Mays and his producer Mayo Williams, one of the first black record producers, are usually credited as the songwriters as a result (with Little Richard also being credited on his version). Mays was in turn probably inspired by an earlier recording by James “Boodle It” Wiggins, but Wiggins had a different melody — Mays seems to be the one who first combined the lyrics with the “My Bucket’s Got a Hole In It” melody on a recording. But the idea was probably one that had been knocking around for a while in various forms, given the number of different variations of the melody that turn up, and Tampa Red’s version inspired all the future recordings. As hokum music lies at the roots of both blues and country, it’s not surprising that “You Can’t Come in” was picked up by both country and blues musicians. A version of the song, for example, was recorded by, among others, Milton Brown — who had been an early musical partner of Bob Wills and one of the people who helped create Western Swing. [Excerpt: Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies: “Keep A Knockin'”] But the version that Little Richard recorded was most likely inspired by Louis Jordan’s version. Jordan was, of course, Richard’s single biggest musical inspiration, so we can reasonably assume that the record by Jordan was the one that pushed him to record the song. [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Keep A Knockin'”] The Jordan record was probably brought to mind in 1955 when Smiley Lewis had a hit with Dave Bartholomew’s take on the idea. “I Hear You Knockin'” only bears a slight melodic resemblance to “Keep A Knockin'”, but the lyrics are so obviously inspired by the earlier song that it would have brought it to mind for anyone who had heard any of the earlier versions: [Excerpt: Smiley Lewis, “I Hear You Knockin'”] That was also recorded by Fats Domino, one of Little Richard’s favourite musicians, so we can be sure that Richard had heard it. So by the time Little Richard came to record “Keep A Knockin'” in very early 1957, he had a host of different versions he could draw on for inspiration. But what we ended up with is something that’s uniquely Little Richard — something that was altogether wilder: [Excerpt: Little Richard and his band, “Keep A Knockin'”] In some takes of the song, Richard also sang a verse about drinking gin, which was based on Louis Jordan’s version which had a similar verse: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Keep A Knockin'”, “drinking gin” verse from take three] But in the end, what they ended up with was only about fifty-seven seconds worth of usable recording. Listening to the session recording, it seems that Grady Gaines kept trying different things with his saxophone solo, and not all of them quite worked as well as might be hoped — there are a few infelicities in most of his solos, though not anything that you wouldn’t expect from a good player trying new things. To get it to a usable length, they copied and pasted the whole song from the start of Richard’s vocal through to the end of the saxophone solo, and almost doubled the length of the song — the third and fourth verses, and the second saxophone solo, are the same recording as the first and second verses and the first sax solo. If you want to try this yourself, it seems that the “whoo” after the first “keep a knockin’ but you can’t come in” after the second sax solo is the point where the copy/pasting ends. But even though the recording ended up being a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster, it remains one of Little Richard’s greatest tracks. At the same session, he also recorded another of his very best records, “Ooh! My Soul!”: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Ooh! My Soul!”] That session also produced a single for Richard’s chauffeur, with Richard on the piano, released under the name “Pretty Boy”: [Excerpt: Pretty Boy, “Bip Bop Bip”] “Pretty Boy” would later go on to be better known as Don Covay, and would have great success as a soul singer and songwriter. He’s now probably best known for writing “Chain of Fools” for Aretha Franklin. That session was a productive one, but other than one final session in October 1957, in which he knocked out a couple of blues songs as album fillers, it would be Little Richard’s last rock and roll recording session for several years. Richard had always been deeply conflicted about… well, about everything, really. He was attracted to men as well as women, he loved rock and roll and rhythm and blues music, loved eating chitlins and pork chops, drinking, and taking drugs, and was unsure about his own gender identity. He was also deeply, deeply, religious, and a believer in the Seventh Day Adventist church, which believed that same-sex attraction, trans identities, and secular music were the work of the Devil, and that one should keep a vegetarian and kosher diet, and avoid all drugs, even caffeine. This came to a head in October 1957. Richard was on a tour of Australia with Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, and Alis Lesley, who was another of the many singers billed as “the female Elvis Presley”: [Excerpt: Alis Lesley, “He Will Come Back To Me”] Vincent actually had to miss the first couple of shows on the tour, as he and the Blue Caps got held up in Honolulu, apparently due to visa issues, and couldn’t continue on to Australia with the rest of the tour until that was sorted out. They were replaced on those early shows by a local group, Johnny O’Keefe and the Dee Jays, who performed some of Vincent’s songs as well as their own material, and who managed to win the audiences round even though they were irritated at Vincent’s absence. O’Keefe isn’t someone we’re going to be able to discuss in much detail in this series, because he had very little impact outside of Australia. But within Australia, he’s something of a legend as their first home-grown rock and roll star. And he did make one record which people outside of Australia have heard of — his biggest hit, from 1958, “Wild One”, which has since been covered by, amongst others, Jerry Lee Lewis and Iggy Pop: [Excerpt: Johnny O’Keefe, “Wild One”] The flight to Australia was longer and more difficult than any Richard had experienced before, and at one point he looked out of the window and saw the engines glowing red. He became convinced that the plane was on fire, and being held up by angels. He became even more worried a couple of days later when Russia launched their first satellite, Sputnik, and it passed low over Australia — low enough that he claimed he could see it, like a fireball in the sky, while he was performing. He decided this was a sign, and that he was being told by God that he needed to give up his life of sin and devote himself to religion. He told the other people on the tour this, but they didn’t believe him — until he threw all his rings into the ocean to prove it. He insisted on cancelling his appearances with ten days of the tour left to go and travelling back to the US with his band. He has often also claimed that the plane they were originally scheduled to fly back on crashed in the Pacific on the flight he would have been on — I’ve seen no evidence anywhere else of this, and I have looked. When he got back, he cut one final session for Specialty, and then went into a seminary to start studying for the ministry. While his religious belief is genuine, there has been some suggestion that this move wasn’t solely motivated by his conversion. Rather, John Marascalco has often claimed that Richard’s real reason for his conversion was based on more worldly considerations. Richard’s contract with Specialty was only paying him half a cent per record sold, which he considered far too low, and the wording of the contract only let him end it on either his own death or an act of god. He was trying — according to Marascalco — to claim that his religious awakening was an act of God, and so he should be allowed to break his contract and sign with another label. Whatever the truth, Specialty had enough of a backlog of Little Richard recordings that they could keep issuing them for the next couple of years. Some of those, like “Good Golly Miss Molly” were as good as anything he had ever recorded. and rightly became big hits: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Good Golly Miss Molly”] Many others, though, were substandard recordings that they originally had no plans to release — but with Richard effectively on strike and the demand for his recordings undiminished, they put out whatever they had. Richard went out on the road as an evangelist, but also went to study to become a priest. He changed his whole lifestyle — he married a woman, although they would later divorce as, among other things, they weren’t sexually compatible. He stopped drinking and taking drugs, stopped even drinking coffee, and started eating only vegetables cooked in vegetable oil. After the lawsuits over him quitting Specialty records were finally settled, he started recording again, but only gospel songs: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”] And that was how things stood for several years. The tension between Richard’s sexuality and his religion continued to torment him — he dropped out of the seminary after propositioning another male student, and he was arrested in a public toilet — but he continued his evangelism and gospel singing until October 1962, when he went on tour in the UK. Just like the previous tour which had been a turning point in his life, this one featured Gene Vincent, but was also affected by Vincent’s work permit problems. This time, Vincent was allowed in the country but wasn’t allowed to perform on stage — so he appeared only as the compere, at least at the start of the tour — later on, he would sing “Be Bop A Lula” from offstage as well. Vincent wasn’t the only one to have problems, either. Sam Cooke, who was the second-billed star for the show, was delayed and couldn’t make the first show, which was a bit of a disaster. Richard was accompanied by a young gospel organ player named Billy Preston, and he’d agreed to the tour under the impression that he was going to be performing only his gospel music. Don Arden, the promoter, had been promoting it as Richard’s first rock and roll tour in five years, and the audience were very far from impressed when Richard came on stage in flowing white robes and started singing “Peace in the Valley” and other gospel songs. Arden was apoplectic. If Richard didn’t start performing rock and roll songs soon, he would have to cancel the whole tour — an audience that wanted “Rip it Up” and “Long Tall Sally” and “Tutti Frutti” wasn’t going to put up with being preached at. Arden didn’t know what to do, and when Sam Cooke and his manager J.W. Alexander turned up to the second show, Arden had a talk with Alexander about it. Alexander told Arden he had nothing to worry about — he knew Little Richard of old, and knew that Richard couldn’t stand to be upstaged. He also knew how good Sam Cooke was. Cooke was at the height of his success at this point, and he was an astonishing live performer, and so when he went out on stage and closed the first half, including an incendiary performance of “Twistin’ the Night Away” that left the audience applauding through the intermission, Richard knew he had to up his game. While he’d not been performing rock and roll in public, he had been tempted back into the studio to record in his old style at least once before, when he’d joined his old group to record Fats Domino’s “I’m In Love Again”, for a single that didn’t get released until December 1962. The single was released as by “the World Famous Upsetters”, but the vocalist on the record was very recognisable: [Excerpt: The World Famous Upsetters, “I’m In Love Again”] So Richard’s willpower had been slowly bending, and Sam Cooke’s performance was the final straw. Little Richard was going to show everyone what star power really was. When Richard came out on stage, he spent a whole minute in pitch darkness, with the band vamping, before a spotlight suddenly picked him out, in an all-white suit, and he launched into “Long Tall Sally”. The British tour was a massive success, and Richard kept becoming wilder and more frantic on stage, as five years of pent up rock and roll burst out of him. Many shows he’d pull off most of his clothes and throw them into the audience, ending up dressed in just a bathrobe, on his knees. He would jump on the piano, and one night he even faked his own death, collapsing off the piano and lying still on the stage in the middle of a song, just to create a tension in the audience for when he suddenly jumped up and started singing “Tutti Frutti”. The tour was successful enough, and Richard’s performances created such a buzz, that when the package tour itself finished Richard was booked for a few extra gigs, including one at the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton where he headlined a bill of local bands from around Merseyside, including one who had released their first single a few weeks earlier. He then went to Hamburg with that group, and spent two months hanging out with them and performing in the same kinds of clubs, and teaching their bass player how he made his “whoo” sounds when singing. Richard was impressed enough by them that he got in touch with Art Rupe, who still had some contractual claim over Richard’s own recordings, to tell him about them, but Rupe said that he wasn’t interested in some English group, he just wanted Little Richard to go back into the studio and make more records for him. Richard headed back to the US, leaving Billy Preston stranded in Hamburg with his new friends, the Beatles. At first, he still wouldn’t record any rock and roll music, other than one song that Sam Cooke wrote for him, “Well Alright”, but after another UK tour he started to see that people who had been inspired by him were having the kind of success he thought he was due himself. He went back into the studio, backed by a group including Don and Dewey, who had been performing with him in the UK, and recorded what was meant to be his comeback single, “Bama Lama Bama Loo”: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Bama Lama Bama Loo”] Unfortunately, great as it was, that single didn’t do anything in the charts, and Richard spent the rest of the sixties making record after record that failed to chart. Some of them were as good as anything he’d done in his fifties heyday, but his five years away from rock and roll music had killed his career as a recording artist. They hadn’t, though, killed him as a live performer, and he would spend the next fifty years touring, playing the hits he had recorded during that classic period from 1955 through 1957, with occasional breaks where he would be overcome by remorse, give up rock and roll music forever, and try to work as an evangelist and gospel singer, before the lure of material success and audience response brought him back to the world of sex and drugs and rock and roll. He eventually gave up performing live a few years ago, as decades of outrageous stage performances had exacerbated his disabilities. His last public performance was in 2013, in Las Vegas, and he was in a wheelchair — but because he’s Little Richard, the wheelchair was made to look like a golden throne.

Episode fifty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Keep A Knockin'” by Little Richard, the long history of the song, and the tension between its performer’s faith and sexuality. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “At the Hop” by Danny and the Juniors.   —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Most of the information used here comes from The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Authorised Biography by Charles White, which is to all intents and purposes Richard’s autobiography, as much of the text is in his own words. A warning for those who might be considering buying this though — it contains descriptions of his abuse as a child, and is also full of internalised homo- bi- and trans-phobia. This collection contains everything Richard released before 1962, from his early blues singles through to his gospel albums from after he temporarily gave up rock and roll for the church. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum In the podcast I refer to a jazz band as “the Buddy Bolden Legacy Group”. Their name is actually “the Buddy Bolden Legacy Band”.   Transcript When last we looked at Little Richard properly, he had just had a hit with “Long Tall Sally”, and was at the peak of his career. Since then, we’ve seen that he had become big enough that he was chosen over Fats Domino to record the theme tune to “The Girl Can’t Help It”, and that he was the inspiration for James Brown. But today we’re going to look in more detail at Little Richard’s career in the mid fifties, and at how he threw away that career for his beliefs. [Excerpt: Little Richard with his Band, “Keep A Knockin'”] Richard’s immediate follow-up to “Long Tall Sally” was another of his most successful records, a double-sided hit with both songs credited to John Marascalco and Bumps Blackwell — “Rip it Up” backed with “Ready Teddy”. These both went to number one on the R&B charts, but they possibly didn’t have quite the same power as RIchard’s first two singles. Where the earlier singles had been truly unique artefacts, songs that didn’t sound like anything else out there, “Rip it Up” and “Ready Teddy” were both much closer to the typical songs of the time — the lyrics were about going out and having a party and rocking and rolling, rather than about sex with men or cross-dressing sex workers. But this didn’t make Richard any less successful, and throughout 1956 and 57 he kept releasing more hits, often releasing singles where both the A and B side became classics — we’ve discussed “The Girl Can’t Help It” and “She’s Got It” in the episode on “Twenty Flight Rock”, but there was also “Jenny Jenny”, “Send Me Some Lovin'”, and possibly the greatest of them all, “Lucille”: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Lucille”] But Richard was getting annoyed at the routine of recording — or more precisely, he was getting annoyed at the musicians he was having to work with in the studio. He was convinced that his own backing band, the Upsetters, were at least as good as the studio musicians, and he was pushing for Specialty to let him use them in the studio. And when they finally let him use the Upsetters in the studio, he recorded a song which had roots which go much further back than you might imagine. “Keep A Knockin'” had a long, long, history. It derives originally from a piece called “A Bunch of Blues”, written by J. Paul Wyer and Alf Kelly in 1915. Wyer was a violin player with W.C. Handy’s band, and Handy recorded the tune in 1917: [Excerpt: W.C. Handy’s Memphis Blues Band, “A Bunch of Blues”] That itself, though, may derive from another song, “My Bucket’s Got A Hole in It”, which is an old jazz standard. There are claims that it was originally played by the great jazz trumpeter Buddy Bolden around the turn of the twentieth century. No recordings survive of Bolden playing the song, but a group called “the Buddy Bolden Legacy Group” have put together what, other than the use of modern recording, seems a reasonable facsimile of how Bolden would have played the song: [Excerpt: “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in it”, the Buddy Bolden Legacy Band] If Bolden did play that, then the melody dates back to around 1906 at the latest, as from 1907 on Bolden was in a psychiatric hospital with schizophrenia, but the 1915 date for “A Bunch of Blues” is the earliest definite date we have for the melody. “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in it” would later be recorded by everyone from Hank Williams to Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant to Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis. It was particularly popular among country singers: [Excerpt: Hank Williams, “My Bucket’s Got A Hole In It”] But the song took another turn in 1928, when it was recorded by Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band. This group featured Tampa Red, who would later go on to be a blues legend in his own right, and “Georgia Tom”, who as Thomas Dorsey would later be best known as the writer of much of the core repertoire of gospel music. You might remember us talking about Dorsey in the episode on Rosetta Tharpe. He’s someone who wrote dirty, funny, blues songs until he had a religious experience while on stage, and instead became a writer of religious music, writing songs like “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” and “Peace in the Valley”. But in 1928, he was still Georgia Tom and still recording hokum songs. We talked about hokum music right back in the earliest episodes of the podcast, but as a reminder, hokum music is a form which is now usually lumped into the blues by most of the few people who come across it, but which actually comes from vaudeville and especially from minstrel shows, and was hugely popular in the early decades of the twentieth century. It usually involved simple songs with a verse/chorus structure, and with lyrics that were an extended comedy metaphor, usually some form of innuendo about sex, with titles like “Meat Balls” and “Banana in Your Fruit Basket”. As you can imagine, this kind of music is one that influenced a lot of people who went on to influence Little Richard, and it’s in this crossover genre which had elements of country, blues, and pop that we find “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in it” turning into the song that would later be known as “Keep A Knockin'”. Tampa Red’s version was titled “You Can’t Come In”, and seems to have been the origin not only of “Keep A Knockin'” but also of the Lead Belly song “Midnight Special” — you can hear the similarity in the guitar melody: [Excerpt: Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band, “You Can’t Come In”] The version by Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band wasn’t the first recording to combine the “Keep a Knockin'” lyrics with the “My Bucket’s Got a Hole In It” melody — the piano player Bert Mays recorded a version a month earlier, and Mays and his producer Mayo Williams, one of the first black record producers, are usually credited as the songwriters as a result (with Little Richard also being credited on his version). Mays was in turn probably inspired by an earlier recording by James “Boodle It” Wiggins, but Wiggins had a different melody — Mays seems to be the one who first combined the lyrics with the “My Bucket’s Got a Hole In It” melody on a recording. But the idea was probably one that had been knocking around for a while in various forms, given the number of different variations of the melody that turn up, and Tampa Red’s version inspired all the future recordings. As hokum music lies at the roots of both blues and country, it’s not surprising that “You Can’t Come in” was picked up by both country and blues musicians. A version of the song, for example, was recorded by, among others, Milton Brown — who had been an early musical partner of Bob Wills and one of the people who helped create Western Swing. [Excerpt: Milton Brown and his Musical Brownies: “Keep A Knockin'”] But the version that Little Richard recorded was most likely inspired by Louis Jordan’s version. Jordan was, of course, Richard’s single biggest musical inspiration, so we can reasonably assume that the record by Jordan was the one that pushed him to record the song. [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Keep A Knockin'”] The Jordan record was probably brought to mind in 1955 when Smiley Lewis had a hit with Dave Bartholomew’s take on the idea. “I Hear You Knockin'” only bears a slight melodic resemblance to “Keep A Knockin'”, but the lyrics are so obviously inspired by the earlier song that it would have brought it to mind for anyone who had heard any of the earlier versions: [Excerpt: Smiley Lewis, “I Hear You Knockin'”] That was also recorded by Fats Domino, one of Little Richard’s favourite musicians, so we can be sure that Richard had heard it. So by the time Little Richard came to record “Keep A Knockin'” in very early 1957, he had a host of different versions he could draw on for inspiration. But what we ended up with is something that’s uniquely Little Richard — something that was altogether wilder: [Excerpt: Little Richard and his band, “Keep A Knockin'”] In some takes of the song, Richard also sang a verse about drinking gin, which was based on Louis Jordan’s version which had a similar verse: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Keep A Knockin'”, “drinking gin” verse from take three] But in the end, what they ended up with was only about fifty-seven seconds worth of usable recording. Listening to the session recording, it seems that Grady Gaines kept trying different things with his saxophone solo, and not all of them quite worked as well as might be hoped — there are a few infelicities in most of his solos, though not anything that you wouldn’t expect from a good player trying new things. To get it to a usable length, they copied and pasted the whole song from the start of Richard’s vocal through to the end of the saxophone solo, and almost doubled the length of the song — the third and fourth verses, and the second saxophone solo, are the same recording as the first and second verses and the first sax solo. If you want to try this yourself, it seems that the “whoo” after the first “keep a knockin’ but you can’t come in” after the second sax solo is the point where the copy/pasting ends. But even though the recording ended up being a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster, it remains one of Little Richard’s greatest tracks. At the same session, he also recorded another of his very best records, “Ooh! My Soul!”: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Ooh! My Soul!”] That session also produced a single for Richard’s chauffeur, with Richard on the piano, released under the name “Pretty Boy”: [Excerpt: Pretty Boy, “Bip Bop Bip”] “Pretty Boy” would later go on to be better known as Don Covay, and would have great success as a soul singer and songwriter. He’s now probably best known for writing “Chain of Fools” for Aretha Franklin. That session was a productive one, but other than one final session in October 1957, in which he knocked out a couple of blues songs as album fillers, it would be Little Richard’s last rock and roll recording session for several years. Richard had always been deeply conflicted about… well, about everything, really. He was attracted to men as well as women, he loved rock and roll and rhythm and blues music, loved eating chitlins and pork chops, drinking, and taking drugs, and was unsure about his own gender identity. He was also deeply, deeply, religious, and a believer in the Seventh Day Adventist church, which believed that same-sex attraction, trans identities, and secular music were the work of the Devil, and that one should keep a vegetarian and kosher diet, and avoid all drugs, even caffeine. This came to a head in October 1957. Richard was on a tour of Australia with Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, and Alis Lesley, who was another of the many singers billed as “the female Elvis Presley”: [Excerpt: Alis Lesley, “He Will Come Back To Me”] Vincent actually had to miss the first couple of shows on the tour, as he and the Blue Caps got held up in Honolulu, apparently due to visa issues, and couldn’t continue on to Australia with the rest of the tour until that was sorted out. They were replaced on those early shows by a local group, Johnny O’Keefe and the Dee Jays, who performed some of Vincent’s songs as well as their own material, and who managed to win the audiences round even though they were irritated at Vincent’s absence. O’Keefe isn’t someone we’re going to be able to discuss in much detail in this series, because he had very little impact outside of Australia. But within Australia, he’s something of a legend as their first home-grown rock and roll star. And he did make one record which people outside of Australia have heard of — his biggest hit, from 1958, “Wild One”, which has since been covered by, amongst others, Jerry Lee Lewis and Iggy Pop: [Excerpt: Johnny O’Keefe, “Wild One”] The flight to Australia was longer and more difficult than any Richard had experienced before, and at one point he looked out of the window and saw the engines glowing red. He became convinced that the plane was on fire, and being held up by angels. He became even more worried a couple of days later when Russia launched their first satellite, Sputnik, and it passed low over Australia — low enough that he claimed he could see it, like a fireball in the sky, while he was performing. He decided this was a sign, and that he was being told by God that he needed to give up his life of sin and devote himself to religion. He told the other people on the tour this, but they didn’t believe him — until he threw all his rings into the ocean to prove it. He insisted on cancelling his appearances with ten days of the tour left to go and travelling back to the US with his band. He has often also claimed that the plane they were originally scheduled to fly back on crashed in the Pacific on the flight he would have been on — I’ve seen no evidence anywhere else of this, and I have looked. When he got back, he cut one final session for Specialty, and then went into a seminary to start studying for the ministry. While his religious belief is genuine, there has been some suggestion that this move wasn’t solely motivated by his conversion. Rather, John Marascalco has often claimed that Richard’s real reason for his conversion was based on more worldly considerations. Richard’s contract with Specialty was only paying him half a cent per record sold, which he considered far too low, and the wording of the contract only let him end it on either his own death or an act of god. He was trying — according to Marascalco — to claim that his religious awakening was an act of God, and so he should be allowed to break his contract and sign with another label. Whatever the truth, Specialty had enough of a backlog of Little Richard recordings that they could keep issuing them for the next couple of years. Some of those, like “Good Golly Miss Molly” were as good as anything he had ever recorded. and rightly became big hits: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Good Golly Miss Molly”] Many others, though, were substandard recordings that they originally had no plans to release — but with Richard effectively on strike and the demand for his recordings undiminished, they put out whatever they had. Richard went out on the road as an evangelist, but also went to study to become a priest. He changed his whole lifestyle — he married a woman, although they would later divorce as, among other things, they weren’t sexually compatible. He stopped drinking and taking drugs, stopped even drinking coffee, and started eating only vegetables cooked in vegetable oil. After the lawsuits over him quitting Specialty records were finally settled, he started recording again, but only gospel songs: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”] And that was how things stood for several years. The tension between Richard’s sexuality and his religion continued to torment him — he dropped out of the seminary after propositioning another male student, and he was arrested in a public toilet — but he continued his evangelism and gospel singing until October 1962, when he went on tour in the UK. Just like the previous tour which had been a turning point in his life, this one featured Gene Vincent, but was also affected by Vincent’s work permit problems. This time, Vincent was allowed in the country but wasn’t allowed to perform on stage — so he appeared only as the compere, at least at the start of the tour — later on, he would sing “Be Bop A Lula” from offstage as well. Vincent wasn’t the only one to have problems, either. Sam Cooke, who was the second-billed star for the show, was delayed and couldn’t make the first show, which was a bit of a disaster. Richard was accompanied by a young gospel organ player named Billy Preston, and he’d agreed to the tour under the impression that he was going to be performing only his gospel music. Don Arden, the promoter, had been promoting it as Richard’s first rock and roll tour in five years, and the audience were very far from impressed when Richard came on stage in flowing white robes and started singing “Peace in the Valley” and other gospel songs. Arden was apoplectic. If Richard didn’t start performing rock and roll songs soon, he would have to cancel the whole tour — an audience that wanted “Rip it Up” and “Long Tall Sally” and “Tutti Frutti” wasn’t going to put up with being preached at. Arden didn’t know what to do, and when Sam Cooke and his manager J.W. Alexander turned up to the second show, Arden had a talk with Alexander about it. Alexander told Arden he had nothing to worry about — he knew Little Richard of old, and knew that Richard couldn’t stand to be upstaged. He also knew how good Sam Cooke was. Cooke was at the height of his success at this point, and he was an astonishing live performer, and so when he went out on stage and closed the first half, including an incendiary performance of “Twistin’ the Night Away” that left the audience applauding through the intermission, Richard knew he had to up his game. While he’d not been performing rock and roll in public, he had been tempted back into the studio to record in his old style at least once before, when he’d joined his old group to record Fats Domino’s “I’m In Love Again”, for a single that didn’t get released until December 1962. The single was released as by “the World Famous Upsetters”, but the vocalist on the record was very recognisable: [Excerpt: The World Famous Upsetters, “I’m In Love Again”] So Richard’s willpower had been slowly bending, and Sam Cooke’s performance was the final straw. Little Richard was going to show everyone what star power really was. When Richard came out on stage, he spent a whole minute in pitch darkness, with the band vamping, before a spotlight suddenly picked him out, in an all-white suit, and he launched into “Long Tall Sally”. The British tour was a massive success, and Richard kept becoming wilder and more frantic on stage, as five years of pent up rock and roll burst out of him. Many shows he’d pull off most of his clothes and throw them into the audience, ending up dressed in just a bathrobe, on his knees. He would jump on the piano, and one night he even faked his own death, collapsing off the piano and lying still on the stage in the middle of a song, just to create a tension in the audience for when he suddenly jumped up and started singing “Tutti Frutti”. The tour was successful enough, and Richard’s performances created such a buzz, that when the package tour itself finished Richard was booked for a few extra gigs, including one at the Tower Ballroom in New Brighton where he headlined a bill of local bands from around Merseyside, including one who had released their first single a few weeks earlier. He then went to Hamburg with that group, and spent two months hanging out with them and performing in the same kinds of clubs, and teaching their bass player how he made his “whoo” sounds when singing. Richard was impressed enough by them that he got in touch with Art Rupe, who still had some contractual claim over Richard’s own recordings, to tell him about them, but Rupe said that he wasn’t interested in some English group, he just wanted Little Richard to go back into the studio and make more records for him. Richard headed back to the US, leaving Billy Preston stranded in Hamburg with his new friends, the Beatles. At first, he still wouldn’t record any rock and roll music, other than one song that Sam Cooke wrote for him, “Well Alright”, but after another UK tour he started to see that people who had been inspired by him were having the kind of success he thought he was due himself. He went back into the studio, backed by a group including Don and Dewey, who had been performing with him in the UK, and recorded what was meant to be his comeback single, “Bama Lama Bama Loo”: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “Bama Lama Bama Loo”] Unfortunately, great as it was, that single didn’t do anything in the charts, and Richard spent the rest of the sixties making record after record that failed to chart. Some of them were as good as anything he’d done in his fifties heyday, but his five years away from rock and roll music had killed his career as a recording artist. They hadn’t, though, killed him as a live performer, and he would spend the next fifty years touring, playing the hits he had recorded during that classic period from 1955 through 1957, with occasional breaks where he would be overcome by remorse, give up rock and roll music forever, and try to work as an evangelist and gospel singer, before the lure of material success and audience response brought him back to the world of sex and drugs and rock and roll. He eventually gave up performing live a few years ago, as decades of outrageous stage performances had exacerbated his disabilities. His last public performance was in 2013, in Las Vegas, and he was in a wheelchair — but because he’s Little Richard, the wheelchair was made to look like a golden throne.

Molly Schuyler shares her journey from a waitress and mom to professional competitive eater. Weighing in at a mere 120lbs, Molly is still a heavyweight in the competitive eating world.  Molly chronicles her start in competitive eating, the challenges of doing food challenges while raising four kids and some of her favorite records over the years.  Molly’s great sense of humor and humble demeanor are a distinct contrast to her killer instinct when it comes to downing food.     Molly also discusses: Her reasons for getting into competitive eating Her relationship with food when not competitive eating The challenges and dangers of competitive eating Her career highlights that include appearances on America’s Got Talent and The Gong Show     Links from the podcast:   Molly Schuyler videos   Alicyn Yaffee (Theme Music)   Marc Yaffee Comedy    Marc Yaffee Corporate website    How Does That Happen on iTunes

Welcome to episode eleven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we’re looking at “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Both “Rocket 88” and the Howlin’ Wolf tune used here are on Memphis Vol. 3 – Recordings from the Legendary Sun Studios, the third in a series of ludicrously cheap ten-CD box sets (this one currently selling on Amazon for £12!) which between them cover every single and B-side recorded in Sam Phillips’ studio in the 1950s. Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll by Peter Guralnick is the definitive biography of Phillips. A content warning, though — the book contains racial slurs, always in quoted speech and used to illustrate historical racism, but some may still find that upsetting. Ike Turner wrote an autobiography, but I’m not going to recommend a book which exists solely to minimise his abuse of his wife. However, Turner was also interviewed by ghostwriter Kurt Loder for Tina Turner’s autobiography I, Tina, and his description of the recording of “Rocket 88” is in there, so if you want to hear his take on the story, buy that. Content Note As you may have noticed from the above, this episode deals with Ike Turner, a man who is now as widely known for his spousal abuse as for his music. I mention this disclaimer episode in the podcast, and everything there goes for this episode. This episode is about the music, and about music he made before his horrific acts, but I don’t want to give the impression I’m condoning or ignoring those. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There is, of course, no actual “first rock and roll record”, and if there is, it’s not “Rocket 88”. But nonetheless, “Rocket 88” has been officially anointed “the first rock and roll record ever made” by generations of white male music journalists, and so we need to talk about it. And it is, actually, quite a good record of its type, even if not especially innovative.   Before I talk about this, go and listen if you haven’t already to the disclaimer episode I did after episode two (I’ll link it in the show notes) about my attitudes towards misogynistic abusers who happen also to have played on some great records. I don’t want to repeat all that here, but at the same time I definitely want to go on record that I’m not an admirer of Ike Turner. Because as it is, here at the official “beginning of rock” according to thousands of attempts to set a canon, we also have the beginning of rock being created by abusive men. Literally at the beginning in this case — Ike Turner plays the opening piano part. And here we see how impossible it is to untangle the work of people like him from this history, as that piano part is one that would echo down the ages, becoming part of the bloodstream of popular music.   Anyway, enough about that.   To talk about “Rocket 88” we first have to talk about the Honeydrippers, and about the Liggins Brothers.   Joe Liggins was a piano player, with a small-time band called Sammy Franklin and the California Rhythm Rascals. In 1942, Liggins wrote a song called “The Honeydripper”, which the California Rhythm Rascals used to perform quite regularly. It’s a pleasant, enjoyable, boogie-flavoured jump band piece, which had a very catchy, unusual, riff, based loosely around the riff from “Shortenin’ Bread”. It was mostly just an excuse for soloing and extended improvisation — sometimes it could last for fifteen minutes or more when performed live — but it was surprisingly catchy nonetheless.   Liggins believed it had some commercial potential, so he went to his boss, Franklin, with a deal. He said he thought it could be a big hit, and they should make a record of it. If Sammy Franklin would pay $500 towards the cost of making the record, Liggins would give Franklin half the composer rights for the song. Sammy Franklin turned him down, and Liggins believed in his song so much that he quit the band and formed his own jump band, which he named after the song. Eventually, three years later, Joe Liggins and the Honeydrippers went into the studio and recorded “The Honeydripper Parts 1 & 2” for a small indie label, Exclusive Records, and it was released in April 1945.   [Excerpt: “The Honeydripper” by Joe Liggins and the Honeydrippers]   It doesn’t sound that much now — pleasant enough, but hardly the most exceptional record ever. But that’s with seventy-three years of hindsight. It went to number thirteen on the pop charts — which is a remarkable feat for an R&B record in itself — but its performance on the R&B charts was just ludicrous. It went to number one on the race charts (later the R&B charts) for eighteen weeks straight, from September 1945 through January 1946. The only reason it didn’t stay at the top for longer was because the record label simply couldn’t keep up with the demand, and it was replaced at number one by Louis Jordan, but at number two was Jimmie Lunceford playing… “The Honeydripper”   [Excerpt: Jimmie Lunceford’s version of “The Honeydripper”].   At number three, meanwhile, was Roosevelt Sykes playing… “The Honeydripper”. Later in 1946, Cab Calloway also had a number three hit with the song.   Joe Liggins and the Honeydrippers’ version, alone, sold over two million copies in 1945 and 46, and it still, seventy-three years later, is joint holder of the title for longest stay at number one in the race or R&B charts (“Choo Choo Ch’Boogie” is the other joint holder, and that came a few months later). It’s likely that nobody will ever beat that record. “The Honeydripper” was a sensation.   Meanwhile the California Rhythm Rascals had renamed themselves Sammy Franklin and his Atomics, in an attempt to sound more up to date and modern, with the atomic bomb having so recently gone off. They recorded their own version of “The Honeydripper”. It sank without trace — but you’ll remember from last week that that record launched the production career of Ralph Bass. “The Honeydripper” made money and careers for everyone in the music industry, except for Sammy Franklin.   Sammy Franklin may not have been the single most unwise person in the history of rock and roll — he didn’t turn down Elvis or quit the Beatles or anything like that — but still, one has to imagine that he spent the whole rest of his life regretting that he hadn’t just spent that five hundred dollars.   Joe Liggins never had another success as big as “The Honeydripper”, but he had a few minor successes to go along with it, and that was enough for him to give his brother Jimmy a job as the band’s driver — at that time, it was *very* rare for bands to have actual employees, rather than doing their own driving and carrying their own instruments, and for Jimmy it was certainly an improvement on his previous career as a boxer under the name Kid Zulu.   But Jimmy also played a bit of guitar, and so he decided, inspired by his brother’s success, to try his hand at his own music career, and he formed his own jump band, the Drops of Joy.   The Drops of Joy signed up to Specialty Records, a label we’ll be hearing a *lot* about in upcoming episodes. But the Drops of Joy would normally not be a band that we’d be talking about. They weren’t the most imaginative or innovative band by a long way, and they only had minor hits. Their songs were mostly generic boogies, called things like “Saturday Night Boogie Woogie Man” or “Night Life Boogie” — all perfectly good music of its type, but nothing that set the world on fire.   But one B-side, “Cadillac Boogie” was, indirectly, responsible for a great deal of the music that would follow…   [Excerpt “Cadillac Boogie” by Jimmy Liggins and the Drops of Joy]   To see why “Cadillac Boogie” was a big influence, we now need to turn to Sam Phillips. It’s safe to say that he’s one of the two or three most important people in the history of rock and roll music — and it’s also safe to say that even if rock and roll had never happened at all, we’d still be talking about Sam Phillips because of his influence on country and blues music. He may well have been the single most important record producer of the 1950s — he’s as important to the history of American music as anyone who ever lived.   Phillips had started out as a DJ, but had moved sideways from there into recording bands for radio sessions. He had very strong opinions about the way things should sound, and he was willing to work hard to get the sound the way he wanted it. In particular, when he recorded big bands for sessions, he would mic the rhythm section far more than was traditional — when you heard a big band recorded by Sam Phillips, you could hear the guitar and the bass in a way you couldn’t when you heard that band on the records.   He had a real ear for sound, but he also had an ear for *performance*.   Like a lot of the men we’re dealing with at this point, Sam Phillips was a white man who was motivated by a deeply-felt anger at racial injustice, which expressed itself as a belief that if other white people could just see the humanity, and the talent, in black people the way he could, the world would be a much better place. The racial attitudes of people like him can seem a little patronising these days, as if the problems in America were just down to a few people’s feelings, and if those feelings could be changed everything would be better, but given the utterly horrendous attitudes expressed by the people around him, Phillips was at least partly right — if he could get his fellow white people to just stop being vicious towards black people, well, that wouldn’t fix all the problems by any means, but it would have been a good start.   He was also someone who was very much of the opinion that if a problem needed fixing, he should try to fix it himself. During the Cuban missile crisis he decided that since Castro seemed a reasonable sort of person and a good progressive like Phillips himself, the whole thing could be sorted out if a decent American just had a one-to-one chat with him. And since no-one else was doing that, he decided he might as well do it himself. So he phoned Cuba, and while he couldn’t get through to Fidel Castro himself, he did get through to Castro’s brother Raul, and had a long conversation with him. History does not relate whether it was Sam Phillips’ intervention that saved the world from nuclear war.   And what Sam Phillips thought he could do to stop the evil of racism — and also to improve the world in other ways — was to capture the music that the black people he saw around him in Memphis were making. The world seemed to him to be full of talented, idiosyncratic, people who were making music like nothing else he had heard.   And so he started Memphis Recording Services, with the help of his mistress Marion Keisker, who acted as his assistant and was herself a popular radio presenter. Both kept their jobs at the radio station while starting the business, and they tried to get the business on a sound financial footing by recording things like weddings and funerals (yes, funerals, they’d mic up the funeral home and get a recording of the service which they’d put on an acetate disc — apparently this was a popular service).   But the real purpose of the business was to be somewhere where real musicians could come and record. Phillips didn’t have a record label, but he had arrangements with a couple of small labels to send them recordings, and sometimes those labels would put the recordings out. Musicians of all kinds would come into Memphis Recording Services, and Phillips would spend hours trying to get their sound onto disc and, later, tape. Not trying to perfect it, but trying to get the most authentic version of that person’s artistry onto the tape.   In 1951 Memphis Recording Services hadn’t been open that long, and Phillips had barely recorded anything worth a listen — but he *had* made some recordings with a local DJ called Riley King, who had recently started going by the name “Blues Boy”, or just “B.B.” for short. To my mind they’re actually some of King’s best material — much more my kind of thing than the later recordings that made his name. Here, for example, is one of those recordings that wasn’t released at the time, but has made compilations later — “Pray For You”:   [excerpt: B.B. King “Pray For You”]   That was the kind of music that Sam Phillips liked, and it’s the kind of thing I like too. The piano player there, incidentally, was a young man called Johnny Ace, about whom we’ll hear a lot more later.   A couple of years earlier, King had met a young musician in Clarksdale Mississippi called Ike Turner, who led a big band called the Top Hatters. Turner had sat in with King on the piano and had impressed King with his ability, and King had even stopped over a couple of nights at Turner’s house. The two hadn’t stayed in touch, but they both liked each other.   The Top Hatters had later split up into two bands — there was the Dukes of Swing, who played classy big band music, and the Kings of Rhythm, who were a jump band after the Louis Jordan fashion, led by Turner. One day, the Kings of Rhythm were coming back from a gig when they noticed a large number of cars parked outside a venue which had a poster advertising one “B.B. King”. Ike Turner had noticed that name on posters before, but didn’t know who it was, but thought he should check out why there were so many people wanting to see him.   The band stopped and went inside, and discovered that B.B. King was Ike Turner’s old acquaintance Riley. Turner asked King if his band could get up and play a number, and King let him, and was hugely impressed, telling Turner that he should make records. Turner said he’d like to, but he had no idea how one actually went about making a record.   King said that the way he did it was there was a guy in Memphis called Sam who recorded him. King would call Sam up and tell him to give Turner a call on Monday. Monday came around, and indeed Sam Phillips did call Ike Turner on the telephone, and asked when they could come up to record. “Straight away”, Ike replied, and they set off — five men, two saxes, a guitar, and a drum kit in a single car, with the guitar amp and bass drum strapped to the roof.   The drive from Mississippi to Memphis was not without incident — they got arrested and fined, ostensibly for a traffic violation but actually for being black in the deep South, and they also got a flat tyre, and when they changed it the guitar amp fell on the road.   At least, that’s one story as to what happened to the guitar amp — like everything when it comes to this music, there are three or four different stories told by different people, but that’s definitely one of them.   Anyway, when they got to the studio, and got their gear set up, the amplifier made a strange sound. The band were horrified — their big break, and it was all going to be destroyed because their amp was making this horrible dirty sound. The speaker cone had been damaged.   Sam Phillips, however, was very much not horrified. He was delighted. He got some brown paper from the restaurant next door to stuff inside as a temporary repair, but said that the damaged amp would sound different, and different, to Sam Phillips at least, was always good.   The song they chose to record that day was one that was written by the saxophone player, Jackie Brenston.   Well, I say written by… as with so many of the songs we’ve seen here, the song was not so much written as remembered (as indeed that line is — I remembered it from Leslie Halliwell, talking about Talbot Rothwell’s scripts for the Carry On films, so I thought I should give it credit here). Specifically, he was remembering “Cadillac Boogie”, as you can tell if you listen to it for even a few seconds:   [insert a chunk of Rocket 88]   Now the main difference in the songwriting is simply the car that’s being talked about — the 88 was a new, exciting, model, and Brenston made the song more hip and current as a result. But *musically* there are a few things of note here.   Firstly, there’s the piano part, written and played by Ike Turner — that part is one that Little Richard adored, to the point that he copied it on the intro to “Good Golly Miss Molly”. Compare and contrast; here’s the intro to “Rocket 88”:   [intro to Rocket 88]   and here’s Little Richard playing “Good Golly Miss Molly”:   [intro to Good Golly Miss Molly]   There’s another difference as well — the guitar sound. There’s distortion all over it, thanks to that cone.   Now, this probably won’t even have been something that anyone listening at the time noticed — if you’re listening in the context of early fifties R&B, on the poor-quality 78 RPM discs that the music was released on, you’d probably think that buzzing boogie line was a baritone sax — the line it’s playing is the kind of thing that a horn would normally play, and the distortion sounds the same way as many of the distorted sax lines at the time did. But that was enough that when white music critics in the seventies were looking for a “first rock and roll record”, they latched on to this one — because in the seventies rock and roll *meant* distorted guitar.   When the record came out, Ike Turner was horrified — because he’d assumed it would be released as by Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm, but instead it was under the name “Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats”. And the record was successful enough to make Jackie Brenston decide to quit the Kings of Rhythm and go solo. He released a few more singles, mostly along the same lines as Rocket 88, but they did nothing.   Brenston’s solo career fizzled out quite quickly, and he joined the backing band for Lowell Fulson, the blues star. After a couple of years with Fulson, he returned to play with Ike Turner’s band. He stayed with Turner from 1955 through 1962, a sideman once more, and Turner wouldn’t let Brenston sing his hit on stage — he was never going to be upstaged by his sax player again.   Eventually Jackie Brenston became an alcoholic, and from 1963 until his death in 1979, he worked as a part-time truck driver, never seeing any recognition for his part in starting rock and roll.   But “Rocket 88” had repercussions for a lot of other people, even if it was only a one-off hit for Brenston. For Ike Turner, after “Rocket 88” was released, half of his band quit and stayed with Brenston, so for a long time he was without a full band. He started to work for Phillips as a talent scout and musician, and it was Turner who brought Phillips several artists, including the artist who Phillips later claimed was the greatest artist and greatest human being he ever worked with — Howlin’ Wolf.   [excerpt “How Many More Years” — version from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lTpcKnp-NQ ]   That’s a recording that was made at Phillips’ studio, with Turner on piano. Phillips licensed several singles by Howlin’ Wolf and others to Chess Records, but then the Chess brothers, the owners of that label, used contractual shenanigans to cut Phillips out of the loop and record the Wolf directly. So Phillips made a resolution to start his own record label, where no-one would steal his artists. Sun Records was born out of this frustration. Meanwhile, Ike Turner resolved that he would never again see his name removed from the credits for a record he was on. When he got a new Kings of Rhythm together, he switched from playing piano, where you’re sat at the side of the stage, to playing guitar, where you can be up front and in the spotlight And when the Kings of Rhythm got a new singer, Annie-Mae Bullock, Turner made sure he would always have equal billing, by giving her his surname as a stage name, so any records she made would be by the new act, “Ike and Tina Turner”.   And finally, “Rocket 88” was going to have a profound effect on the career of one man who would later make a big difference to rock and roll. The lead singer of the country band the Saddlemen — a singer who was best known as a champion yodeller — was also working as a DJ for a small Pennsylvania station, and he noticed that Louis Jordan records were popular among the country audience, and he decided to start incorporating a Louis Jordan style in his own music   But Jordan’s records were so popular with a crossover audience that when the Saddlemen came to make their first records in this new style, they chose to cover something by someone other than Jordan – someone that hadn’t crossed over into the country market yet. And so they chose to record “Rocket 88”, which had been a big R&B hit but hadn’t broken through into the white audience. Their version of the song is *also* credited by some as the first rock and roll record. But it’ll be a few weeks until Bill Haley becomes a full part of our story…

Welcome to episode eleven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs. Today we're looking at "Rocket 88" by Jackie Brenston and the Delta Cats. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Both "Rocket 88" and the Howlin' Wolf tune used here are on Memphis Vol. 3 - Recordings from the Legendary Sun Studios, the third in a series of ludicrously cheap ten-CD box sets (this one currently selling on Amazon for £12!) which between them cover every single and B-side recorded in Sam Phillips' studio in the 1950s. Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock 'n' Roll by Peter Guralnick is the definitive biography of Phillips. A content warning, though -- the book contains racial slurs, always in quoted speech and used to illustrate historical racism, but some may still find that upsetting. Ike Turner wrote an autobiography, but I'm not going to recommend a book which exists solely to minimise his abuse of his wife. However, Turner was also interviewed by ghostwriter Kurt Loder for Tina Turner's autobiography I, Tina, and his description of the recording of "Rocket 88" is in there, so if you want to hear his take on the story, buy that. Content Note As you may have noticed from the above, this episode deals with Ike Turner, a man who is now as widely known for his spousal abuse as for his music. I mention this disclaimer episode in the podcast, and everything there goes for this episode. This episode is about the music, and about music he made before his horrific acts, but I don't want to give the impression I'm condoning or ignoring those. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There is, of course, no actual "first rock and roll record", and if there is, it's not "Rocket 88". But nonetheless, "Rocket 88" has been officially anointed "the first rock and roll record ever made" by generations of white male music journalists, and so we need to talk about it. And it is, actually, quite a good record of its type, even if not especially innovative.   Before I talk about this, go and listen if you haven't already to the disclaimer episode I did after episode two (I'll link it in the show notes) about my attitudes towards misogynistic abusers who happen also to have played on some great records. I don't want to repeat all that here, but at the same time I definitely want to go on record that I'm not an admirer of Ike Turner. Because as it is, here at the official "beginning of rock" according to thousands of attempts to set a canon, we also have the beginning of rock being created by abusive men. Literally at the beginning in this case -- Ike Turner plays the opening piano part. And here we see how impossible it is to untangle the work of people like him from this history, as that piano part is one that would echo down the ages, becoming part of the bloodstream of popular music.   Anyway, enough about that.   To talk about "Rocket 88" we first have to talk about the Honeydrippers, and about the Liggins Brothers.   Joe Liggins was a piano player, with a small-time band called Sammy Franklin and the California Rhythm Rascals. In 1942, Liggins wrote a song called "The Honeydripper", which the California Rhythm Rascals used to perform quite regularly. It's a pleasant, enjoyable, boogie-flavoured jump band piece, which had a very catchy, unusual, riff, based loosely around the riff from "Shortenin' Bread". It was mostly just an excuse for soloing and extended improvisation -- sometimes it could last for fifteen minutes or more when performed live -- but it was surprisingly catchy nonetheless.   Liggins believed it had some commercial potential, so he went to his boss, Franklin, with a deal. He said he thought it could be a big hit, and they should make a record of it. If Sammy Franklin would pay $500 towards the cost of making the record, Liggins would give Franklin half the composer rights for the song. Sammy Franklin turned him down, and Liggins believed in his song so much that he quit the band and formed his own jump band, which he named after the song. Eventually, three years later, Joe Liggins and the Honeydrippers went into the studio and recorded "The Honeydripper Parts 1 & 2" for a small indie label, Exclusive Records, and it was released in April 1945.   [Excerpt: "The Honeydripper" by Joe Liggins and the Honeydrippers]   It doesn't sound that much now -- pleasant enough, but hardly the most exceptional record ever. But that's with seventy-three years of hindsight. It went to number thirteen on the pop charts -- which is a remarkable feat for an R&B record in itself -- but its performance on the R&B charts was just ludicrous. It went to number one on the race charts (later the R&B charts) for eighteen weeks straight, from September 1945 through January 1946. The only reason it didn't stay at the top for longer was because the record label simply couldn't keep up with the demand, and it was replaced at number one by Louis Jordan, but at number two was Jimmie Lunceford playing... "The Honeydripper"   [Excerpt: Jimmie Lunceford's version of "The Honeydripper"].   At number three, meanwhile, was Roosevelt Sykes playing... "The Honeydripper". Later in 1946, Cab Calloway also had a number three hit with the song.   Joe Liggins and the Honeydrippers' version, alone, sold over two million copies in 1945 and 46, and it still, seventy-three years later, is joint holder of the title for longest stay at number one in the race or R&B charts ("Choo Choo Ch'Boogie" is the other joint holder, and that came a few months later). It's likely that nobody will ever beat that record. "The Honeydripper" was a sensation.   Meanwhile the California Rhythm Rascals had renamed themselves Sammy Franklin and his Atomics, in an attempt to sound more up to date and modern, with the atomic bomb having so recently gone off. They recorded their own version of "The Honeydripper". It sank without trace -- but you'll remember from last week that that record launched the production career of Ralph Bass. "The Honeydripper" made money and careers for everyone in the music industry, except for Sammy Franklin.   Sammy Franklin may not have been the single most unwise person in the history of rock and roll -- he didn't turn down Elvis or quit the Beatles or anything like that -- but still, one has to imagine that he spent the whole rest of his life regretting that he hadn't just spent that five hundred dollars.   Joe Liggins never had another success as big as "The Honeydripper", but he had a few minor successes to go along with it, and that was enough for him to give his brother Jimmy a job as the band's driver -- at that time, it was *very* rare for bands to have actual employees, rather than doing their own driving and carrying their own instruments, and for Jimmy it was certainly an improvement on his previous career as a boxer under the name Kid Zulu.   But Jimmy also played a bit of guitar, and so he decided, inspired by his brother's success, to try his hand at his own music career, and he formed his own jump band, the Drops of Joy.   The Drops of Joy signed up to Specialty Records, a label we'll be hearing a *lot* about in upcoming episodes. But the Drops of Joy would normally not be a band that we'd be talking about. They weren't the most imaginative or innovative band by a long way, and they only had minor hits. Their songs were mostly generic boogies, called things like "Saturday Night Boogie Woogie Man" or "Night Life Boogie" -- all perfectly good music of its type, but nothing that set the world on fire.   But one B-side, "Cadillac Boogie" was, indirectly, responsible for a great deal of the music that would follow...   [Excerpt "Cadillac Boogie" by Jimmy Liggins and the Drops of Joy]   To see why "Cadillac Boogie" was a big influence, we now need to turn to Sam Phillips. It's safe to say that he's one of the two or three most important people in the history of rock and roll music -- and it's also safe to say that even if rock and roll had never happened at all, we'd still be talking about Sam Phillips because of his influence on country and blues music. He may well have been the single most important record producer of the 1950s -- he's as important to the history of American music as anyone who ever lived.   Phillips had started out as a DJ, but had moved sideways from there into recording bands for radio sessions. He had very strong opinions about the way things should sound, and he was willing to work hard to get the sound the way he wanted it. In particular, when he recorded big bands for sessions, he would mic the rhythm section far more than was traditional -- when you heard a big band recorded by Sam Phillips, you could hear the guitar and the bass in a way you couldn't when you heard that band on the records.   He had a real ear for sound, but he also had an ear for *performance*.   Like a lot of the men we're dealing with at this point, Sam Phillips was a white man who was motivated by a deeply-felt anger at racial injustice, which expressed itself as a belief that if other white people could just see the humanity, and the talent, in black people the way he could, the world would be a much better place. The racial attitudes of people like him can seem a little patronising these days, as if the problems in America were just down to a few people's feelings, and if those feelings could be changed everything would be better, but given the utterly horrendous attitudes expressed by the people around him, Phillips was at least partly right -- if he could get his fellow white people to just stop being vicious towards black people, well, that wouldn't fix all the problems by any means, but it would have been a good start.   He was also someone who was very much of the opinion that if a problem needed fixing, he should try to fix it himself. During the Cuban missile crisis he decided that since Castro seemed a reasonable sort of person and a good progressive like Phillips himself, the whole thing could be sorted out if a decent American just had a one-to-one chat with him. And since no-one else was doing that, he decided he might as well do it himself. So he phoned Cuba, and while he couldn't get through to Fidel Castro himself, he did get through to Castro's brother Raul, and had a long conversation with him. History does not relate whether it was Sam Phillips' intervention that saved the world from nuclear war.   And what Sam Phillips thought he could do to stop the evil of racism -- and also to improve the world in other ways -- was to capture the music that the black people he saw around him in Memphis were making. The world seemed to him to be full of talented, idiosyncratic, people who were making music like nothing else he had heard.   And so he started Memphis Recording Services, with the help of his mistress Marion Keisker, who acted as his assistant and was herself a popular radio presenter. Both kept their jobs at the radio station while starting the business, and they tried to get the business on a sound financial footing by recording things like weddings and funerals (yes, funerals, they'd mic up the funeral home and get a recording of the service which they'd put on an acetate disc -- apparently this was a popular service).   But the real purpose of the business was to be somewhere where real musicians could come and record. Phillips didn't have a record label, but he had arrangements with a couple of small labels to send them recordings, and sometimes those labels would put the recordings out. Musicians of all kinds would come into Memphis Recording Services, and Phillips would spend hours trying to get their sound onto disc and, later, tape. Not trying to perfect it, but trying to get the most authentic version of that person's artistry onto the tape.   In 1951 Memphis Recording Services hadn't been open that long, and Phillips had barely recorded anything worth a listen -- but he *had* made some recordings with a local DJ called Riley King, who had recently started going by the name "Blues Boy", or just "B.B." for short. To my mind they're actually some of King's best material -- much more my kind of thing than the later recordings that made his name. Here, for example, is one of those recordings that wasn't released at the time, but has made compilations later -- "Pray For You":   [excerpt: B.B. King "Pray For You"]   That was the kind of music that Sam Phillips liked, and it's the kind of thing I like too. The piano player there, incidentally, was a young man called Johnny Ace, about whom we'll hear a lot more later.   A couple of years earlier, King had met a young musician in Clarksdale Mississippi called Ike Turner, who led a big band called the Top Hatters. Turner had sat in with King on the piano and had impressed King with his ability, and King had even stopped over a couple of nights at Turner's house. The two hadn't stayed in touch, but they both liked each other.   The Top Hatters had later split up into two bands -- there was the Dukes of Swing, who played classy big band music, and the Kings of Rhythm, who were a jump band after the Louis Jordan fashion, led by Turner. One day, the Kings of Rhythm were coming back from a gig when they noticed a large number of cars parked outside a venue which had a poster advertising one "B.B. King". Ike Turner had noticed that name on posters before, but didn't know who it was, but thought he should check out why there were so many people wanting to see him.   The band stopped and went inside, and discovered that B.B. King was Ike Turner's old acquaintance Riley. Turner asked King if his band could get up and play a number, and King let him, and was hugely impressed, telling Turner that he should make records. Turner said he'd like to, but he had no idea how one actually went about making a record.   King said that the way he did it was there was a guy in Memphis called Sam who recorded him. King would call Sam up and tell him to give Turner a call on Monday. Monday came around, and indeed Sam Phillips did call Ike Turner on the telephone, and asked when they could come up to record. "Straight away", Ike replied, and they set off -- five men, two saxes, a guitar, and a drum kit in a single car, with the guitar amp and bass drum strapped to the roof.   The drive from Mississippi to Memphis was not without incident -- they got arrested and fined, ostensibly for a traffic violation but actually for being black in the deep South, and they also got a flat tyre, and when they changed it the guitar amp fell on the road.   At least, that's one story as to what happened to the guitar amp -- like everything when it comes to this music, there are three or four different stories told by different people, but that's definitely one of them.   Anyway, when they got to the studio, and got their gear set up, the amplifier made a strange sound. The band were horrified -- their big break, and it was all going to be destroyed because their amp was making this horrible dirty sound. The speaker cone had been damaged.   Sam Phillips, however, was very much not horrified. He was delighted. He got some brown paper from the restaurant next door to stuff inside as a temporary repair, but said that the damaged amp would sound different, and different, to Sam Phillips at least, was always good.   The song they chose to record that day was one that was written by the saxophone player, Jackie Brenston.   Well, I say written by… as with so many of the songs we've seen here, the song was not so much written as remembered (as indeed that line is -- I remembered it from Leslie Halliwell, talking about Talbot Rothwell's scripts for the Carry On films, so I thought I should give it credit here). Specifically, he was remembering "Cadillac Boogie", as you can tell if you listen to it for even a few seconds:   [insert a chunk of Rocket 88]   Now the main difference in the songwriting is simply the car that's being talked about -- the 88 was a new, exciting, model, and Brenston made the song more hip and current as a result. But *musically* there are a few things of note here.   Firstly, there's the piano part, written and played by Ike Turner -- that part is one that Little Richard adored, to the point that he copied it on the intro to “Good Golly Miss Molly”. Compare and contrast; here's the intro to “Rocket 88”:   [intro to Rocket 88]   and here's Little Richard playing “Good Golly Miss Molly”:   [intro to Good Golly Miss Molly]   There's another difference as well -- the guitar sound. There's distortion all over it, thanks to that cone.   Now, this probably won't even have been something that anyone listening at the time noticed -- if you're listening in the context of early fifties R&B, on the poor-quality 78 RPM discs that the music was released on, you'd probably think that buzzing boogie line was a baritone sax -- the line it's playing is the kind of thing that a horn would normally play, and the distortion sounds the same way as many of the distorted sax lines at the time did. But that was enough that when white music critics in the seventies were looking for a "first rock and roll record", they latched on to this one -- because in the seventies rock and roll *meant* distorted guitar.   When the record came out, Ike Turner was horrified -- because he'd assumed it would be released as by Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm, but instead it was under the name "Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats". And the record was successful enough to make Jackie Brenston decide to quit the Kings of Rhythm and go solo. He released a few more singles, mostly along the same lines as Rocket 88, but they did nothing.   Brenston's solo career fizzled out quite quickly, and he joined the backing band for Lowell Fulson, the blues star. After a couple of years with Fulson, he returned to play with Ike Turner's band. He stayed with Turner from 1955 through 1962, a sideman once more, and Turner wouldn't let Brenston sing his hit on stage -- he was never going to be upstaged by his sax player again.   Eventually Jackie Brenston became an alcoholic, and from 1963 until his death in 1979, he worked as a part-time truck driver, never seeing any recognition for his part in starting rock and roll.   But "Rocket 88" had repercussions for a lot of other people, even if it was only a one-off hit for Brenston. For Ike Turner, after "Rocket 88" was released, half of his band quit and stayed with Brenston, so for a long time he was without a full band. He started to work for Phillips as a talent scout and musician, and it was Turner who brought Phillips several artists, including the artist who Phillips later claimed was the greatest artist and greatest human being he ever worked with -- Howlin' Wolf.   [excerpt "How Many More Years" -- version from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lTpcKnp-NQ ]   That's a recording that was made at Phillips' studio, with Turner on piano. Phillips licensed several singles by Howlin' Wolf and others to Chess Records, but then the Chess brothers, the owners of that label, used contractual shenanigans to cut Phillips out of the loop and record the Wolf directly. So Phillips made a resolution to start his own record label, where no-one would steal his artists. Sun Records was born out of this frustration. Meanwhile, Ike Turner resolved that he would never again see his name removed from the credits for a record he was on. When he got a new Kings of Rhythm together, he switched from playing piano, where you're sat at the side of the stage, to playing guitar, where you can be up front and in the spotlight And when the Kings of Rhythm got a new singer, Annie-Mae Bullock, Turner made sure he would always have equal billing, by giving her his surname as a stage name, so any records she made would be by the new act, "Ike and Tina Turner".   And finally, "Rocket 88" was going to have a profound effect on the career of one man who would later make a big difference to rock and roll. The lead singer of the country band the Saddlemen -- a singer who was best known as a champion yodeller -- was also working as a DJ for a small Pennsylvania station, and he noticed that Louis Jordan records were popular among the country audience, and he decided to start incorporating a Louis Jordan style in his own music   But Jordan's records were so popular with a crossover audience that when the Saddlemen came to make their first records in this new style, they chose to cover something by someone other than Jordan – someone that hadn't crossed over into the country market yet. And so they chose to record "Rocket 88", which had been a big R&B hit but hadn't broken through into the white audience. Their version of the song is *also* credited by some as the first rock and roll record. But it'll be a few weeks until Bill Haley becomes a full part of our story...

This week, another one guester as we call on Ricochet alumnus Mollie Hemingway to help us sort through Kanye, Kavanaugh, and other assorted issues of the day (she also gives us an instant review of the new Gosnell movie, which Mollie had just seen). Also, the Senate is looking brighter, and the guys recommend some Peak TV. Music from this week's podcast: Good Golly Miss Molly by Little Richard... Source

Good Golly Miss Molly, it's a great Tuesday as Joe goes to Asbury Park & freaks out some other Bed & Breakfast guests while Mark goes to L.A. to see Chad Daniels perform on Conan and to do a set himself on The Late Late Show! Check it out! Sponsored by: eero (Get $100 off the best-selling WiFi package and a year of eero Plus, by visiting eero.com/TUESDAYS and entering promo code 'TUESDAYS' at checkout) Subscribe to our Patreon where we're crankin' out bonus episodes every week! You can listen on any podcast app! www.patreon.com/tuesdays We have have NEW t-shirts. Get em' here! www.merchpump.com/product-category/tuesdays/ Download the Laughable app today! laughable.com/download

This episode is about the importance of place; where you grew up, and what music had an impact on your identity. (Note: Some tech issues are reflected in the audio quality). Nevertheless, this playlist was gathered from Yonkersonians and the songs they associate with YOTOWN! 1. Neil Simon “Lost in Yonkers” composed by Elmer Bernstein from Lost in Yonkers 2. Chip Taylor “Yonkers Girls” from Yonkers NY (2009) 3. Simon & Garfunkel “Cecilia” from Bridge Over Troubled Water (1970) on Columbia (USA) 4. Rex Smith “You Take My Breath Away” from Sooner or Later (1979) on Columbia/Legacy 5. Barbra Streisand & Louis Armstrong “Hello, Dolly!” from Hello, Dolly! (Soundtrack from the Motion Picture) (1969) 6. Ella Fitzgerald “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” from Ella Fitzgerald: The Voice of Jazz (1953) 7. Lovin Spoonful “Summer in the City” from A Real Spoonful of the Lovin Spoonful 8. Martha Reeves & The Vandellas “Jimmy Mack (Single Version (Mono))” from 50th Anniversary The Singles Collection 1962-1972 on UNI/MOTOWN 9. Martha Reeves & The Vandellas “(Love Is Like A) Heat Wave (Single)” from The Ultimate Collection: Martha Reeves & The Vandellas (1998) on Motown (USA) 10. Martha Reeves & The Vandellas “Dancing In the Street (Single Stereo)” from The Ultimate Collection: Martha Reeves & The Vandellas (1998) on Motown (USA) 11. Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels “Devil With a Blue Dress On; Good Golly Miss Molly” from Disc Jockey Hits on Craze Productions 12. Aerosmith “Walk this way” from Aerosmith / Toys In the Attic on Columbia (USA) 13. Lou Reed and the Tots “Vicious” from Vicious

In his first interview in several years, rock 'n' roll legend Little Richard, who has described himself as both "omnisexual" and "gay" in the past, says he's dedicating his final years to living holy "like Jesus" and insisted men should live as men, and women should live as women, the way God intended."Give everything you've got to Jesus and you'll feel oh, so much better," Richard, 84, told Danny Shelton of Three Angels Broadcast Network in an interview Richard, who is known for songs such as "Tutti Frutti," "Good Golly Miss Molly," and "Lucille," wore a lot of makeup and sported an effeminate look during his heyday. In the interview he spoke out against "unnatural affections" which he was once involved in.Richard, whose real name is Richard Wayne Penniman, is quoted in a 2012 GQ interview saying, "We are all both male and female. Sex to me is like a smorgasbord. Whatever I feel like, I go for. What kind of sexual am I? I am omnisexual!"He said his father, "put me out of the house. He said he wanted seven boys, and that I had spoiled it, because I was gay." When he was 19, his best friend Frank shot his father dead at the age of 39. Frank, however, was "out of jail in a week." "We never quite found out what really happened," he told the publication. We will compare Richards life to the prodigal son, and look at The shameful request The Scandalous Rebellion The sinners ruin The sober Repentance The son s reconciliation The savoir rejoicing The scornful Rejection YOU DON’T WANT TO MISS IT rocknrolllegendLittleRichard,gaylivingholylike Jesus

On this episode of The Eight Dollar Game Show, Molly Wilbanks Anderson tests her knowledge of drugs, pitches a new reality, and tells an amazing, totally true story.  Molly's playing for a new audio tape. But will she walk away with her assets, or go for the cassette, by putting it all her money on the line to answer The Pretty Hard Question?

Episode 048 - October 2016 Set 2Estimated Prophet-> Eyes Of The World-> Why Don't We Do It In The Road[1] (1984-06-27)I Fought The Law[1] (1993-03-14)Good Lovin'-> La Bamba-> Good Lovin' (1987-09-23)Louie Louie[1]-> Samson and Delilah (1988-04-05)Get Back[1] (1987-01-28)Greatest Story Ever Told-> Devil With The Blue Dress[1]-> Good Golly Miss Molly[1]-> Devil With The Blue Dress (1987-09-09)Foolish Heart-> I Want to Tell You[1] (1994-07-01)It's All Too Much[1] (1995-03-18)Take Me To The River[1] (1995-04-01)Let The Good Times Roll-> Feel Like A Stranger (1988-04-30)The Weight (1990-03-28)Satisfaction[1] (1980-11-26)Blackbird[1]-> Brokedown Palace (1988-06-23)[1] Dead Fantasy Debut

Disclosure: I am a Meathead, an avid fan of Meat Puppets. I have been since 1986 when I first heard their version of “Good Golly Miss Molly” from Out My Way. I’m even writing a book about the band. The problem, however, has always been lack of secondary data. There are no books detailing the career of this seminal punk/indie/alternative/psychedelic/country trio, until now. In Too High to Die: Meet the Meat Puppets (Lulu, 2012) Greg Prato offers up an exhaustive history of the band’s thirty-plus years of music making. As an oral history he includes stories from all three original band members, plus most of the band’s other members, past and present. He also includes interviews with many people familiar with the band: childhood friends, girlfriends, fellow musicians, label executives, managers, etc. The collection of stories is convincing. They trace the path of a band that has consistently defied categorization, always stuck to their artistic guns, battled the inner-demons that seem to haunt too many great artists, and in the twenty-first century, in their fourth decade as a band, come out on top of their game. Other than listening to Meat Puppets’ music (which is what y’all should do), reading Too High to Die is a great place to begin your path to becoming a Meathead. Greg Prato is a writer and author whose work appears regularly in Rolling Stone. He is the author of several books including Grunge is Dead: The Oral History of Seattle Rock Music, MTV Ruled the World: The Early Years of Music Video and, most recently, Dynasty: The Oral History of the New York Islanders, 1972-1984. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Disclosure: I am a Meathead, an avid fan of Meat Puppets. I have been since 1986 when I first heard their version of “Good Golly Miss Molly” from Out My Way. I’m even writing a book about the band. The problem, however, has always been lack of secondary data. There are no books detailing the career of this seminal punk/indie/alternative/psychedelic/country trio, until now. In Too High to Die: Meet the Meat Puppets (Lulu, 2012) Greg Prato offers up an exhaustive history of the band’s thirty-plus years of music making. As an oral history he includes stories from all three original band members, plus most of the band’s other members, past and present. He also includes interviews with many people familiar with the band: childhood friends, girlfriends, fellow musicians, label executives, managers, etc. The collection of stories is convincing. They trace the path of a band that has consistently defied categorization, always stuck to their artistic guns, battled the inner-demons that seem to haunt too many great artists, and in the twenty-first century, in their fourth decade as a band, come out on top of their game. Other than listening to Meat Puppets’ music (which is what y’all should do), reading Too High to Die is a great place to begin your path to becoming a Meathead. Greg Prato is a writer and author whose work appears regularly in Rolling Stone. He is the author of several books including Grunge is Dead: The Oral History of Seattle Rock Music, MTV Ruled the World: The Early Years of Music Video and, most recently, Dynasty: The Oral History of the New York Islanders, 1972-1984. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Disclosure: I am a Meathead, an avid fan of Meat Puppets. I have been since 1986 when I first heard their version of “Good Golly Miss Molly” from Out My Way. I’m even writing a book about the band. The problem, however, has always been lack of secondary data. There are no books detailing the career of this seminal punk/indie/alternative/psychedelic/country trio, until now. In Too High to Die: Meet the Meat Puppets (Lulu, 2012) Greg Prato offers up an exhaustive history of the band’s thirty-plus years of music making. As an oral history he includes stories from all three original band members, plus most of the band’s other members, past and present. He also includes interviews with many people familiar with the band: childhood friends, girlfriends, fellow musicians, label executives, managers, etc. The collection of stories is convincing. They trace the path of a band that has consistently defied categorization, always stuck to their artistic guns, battled the inner-demons that seem to haunt too many great artists, and in the twenty-first century, in their fourth decade as a band, come out on top of their game. Other than listening to Meat Puppets’ music (which is what y’all should do), reading Too High to Die is a great place to begin your path to becoming a Meathead. Greg Prato is a writer and author whose work appears regularly in Rolling Stone. He is the author of several books including Grunge is Dead: The Oral History of Seattle Rock Music, MTV Ruled the World: The Early Years of Music Video and, most recently, Dynasty: The Oral History of the New York Islanders, 1972-1984. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Happy Mother's Day!  In this Episode Aj talks about what's on her needles, Bahamian Rum Tea, the pattern that has gone awry, finished objects, Zombie BBQs and Vampire Knits!