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Canada's exciting new female R&B trio, BLK, releases their sophomore single and video, “FWM” today on all platforms. “FWM” follows the R&B trio's successful debut single, “Got It,” the global-buzzing track that earned the newcomers looks from BBC 1Xtra, Flow 93.5 and a remix by the legendary Fatman Scoop. Toronto based artists, Bexk, Lilac X, & Khatalia-Korahjay (BLK) combine their talents & vision to prove that strong women soar by sharing their strengths and maintaining their individuality. Their style described as unabashed sexuality and fearless individualism comes naturally to the girls. “We're not trying to chase a certain vibe, sound, or look. We are just, BLK.” Each member of the multi-talented girl group writes, produces and performs. The girls agree that the relationship was special from the beginning; and the talent and creativity produces music that will give them a seat at the table. “FWM” is proof positive. In the tradition of Destiny's Child and TLC… BLK's chemistry works. Bexk, Lilac X & Khatalia-Korahjay are here to stay.
I’m Laying Everything Out Here, Explaining How I Invested Everything In My Businesses & Went Broke Doing So. Imagine Eating & Doing Whatever You Wanted, To Relying On Food Stamps & McDonald’s Deals To Survive. Eviction Letter, Got It. Card Declines, Been There. I Do Get Emotional In This, So Bare With Me, But This Truth Will Change Someone’s Life! Just Tag Me, If It Does. Feel Free To Share Your Story With Me As Well.
Beastie Boys "Jimmy James"The Black Crowes "God's Got It"Ranie Burnette "Miss Mabelle"Bonnie Raitt "Everybody's Cryin' Mercy"Bessie Smith "Backwater Blues"James McMurtry "I'm Not From Here"Bo Diddley "Cops and Robbers"Johnny Horton "First Train Headin' South"Drag the River "Losing Everyone"Junior Brown "Sugarfoot Rag"Elizabeth Cotten "Vastopol"Cindy Cashdollar "That's No Way for Me to Get Along"Hezekiah & The House Rockers "I'm Gonna Move To The Outskirts Of Town"Eilen Jewell "I'm Gonna Dress In Black"Pretenders "Mystery Achievement"Dinosaur Jr. "Keeblin'"Beastie Boys "Gratitude"Howlin' Wolf "Drinkin' C.V. Wine"Harry "The Hipster" Gibson "Who Put the Benzedrine In Mrs Murphy's Ovaltine"Elvis Costello & The Attractions "Beaten To the Punch"Lula Reed "Watch Dog"George Jones "Who Shot Sam"Maria Muldaur/Alvin Youngblood Hart "I'm Goin' Back Home"Floyd Dixon "Hey Bartender"Bessie Smith "St. Louis Blues"Andrew Bird;Jimbo Mathus "Poor Lost Souls"Tuba Skinny "Banjoreno"Ray Wylie Hubbard "Redneck Mother"Slim & Slam "Flat Fleet Floogie"Asie Payton "Back To The Bridge"Pete "Guitar" Lewis "Ooh Midnight"Billy Bragg;Wilco "Ingrid Bergman"The White Stripes "Take, Take, Take"Neil Young "Pocahontas"The Lonesome Doves "Love Letters"Bob Dylan "Tough Mama"Bessie Smith "Hard Driving Papa"Beastie Boys "Pass the Mic"Superchunk "Sick to Move"Buddy Guy "Outskirts of Town"Spiritualaires of Columbia "Lay This Body Down"fIREHOSE "Walking The Cow"Fisk Jubilee Singers "Nobody Knows The Trouble I See"Valerie June "You And I"Beastie Boys "Namaste"Waylon Jennings "Taos, New Mexico"
On the 18th Episode of the Album Review Crew, Tom & Zeus & Sonny review the 1979 legendary album from ACDC, Highway To Hell. This is the 5th international album and 6th album overall (TNT released in Australia) released by ACDC and their last with lead singer Bon Scott. The album is loaded with classic ACDC riffs and Bon's inimitable style. With new producer "Mutt" Lange at the helm, Highway To Hell was the breakthrough album that really pushed ACDC into one of the biggest bands of all time. As usual the guys breakdown the tracks and rank the songs. They then rank the album and album cover against the previous 16 albums reviewed on the Album Review Crew Episodes. So If You Want Blood, You've Got It! Interested in more Shout It Out Loudcast content? Care to help us out? Come join us on Patreon by clicking below: SIOL Patreon Please go to Klick Tee Shop for all your Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise by clicking below: SIOL Merchandise at Klick Tee Shop Please Email us comments or suggestions by clicking below: ShoutItOutLoudcast@Gmail.com Please subscribe to us and give us a 5 Star (Child) review on the following places below: iTunes Podchaser Stitcher iHeart Radio Spotify Please follow us and like our social media pages clicking below: Twitter Facebook Page Facebook Group Page Shout It Out Loudcasters Instagram YouTube Proud Member of the Pantheon Podcast click below to see the website: Pantheon Podcast Network
Join me as and my special Holley Kelley, a certified Gerontologist, Thanantology Fellow, Journelist, Entrpeneur, and Founder of Latter-Life Planning Institute. She is an Author of a #1 Amazon seller Sunrises and Sunsets: Final Affairs Forger with Flair, Finesse, and Funtionality. Today we discuss a wide range of topics surrounding the discussion of ageing and death. Focusing on why it is important to bring this topic to an open discussion with people. Along with Is it better to try and live a longer life or live with the time that we have, and lastly how to plan for a funeral but with a FUN little twist to it. Followed by musical interview with artist Blsng. Talking about her inspirations behind her music, upbringing in music, and what to look forward to in the future. Also sharing her song You've Got It. For Information pertaining to Holley Kelleys work along with Blsng's music links are posted below. I do not own the rights to the music played in this episode. Music: You've Got It "Copyright" and produced 2019 by Blsng Tee Time-video game version "Copyright" produced 2020 by Woody Goss Holley Kelley Website: https://www.ctrnetwork.com/holleykelley Blsng's Information: https://www.instagram.com/blsngmusic/ https://open.spotify.com/artist/0xV67gxNuTDgWR6CZe0n3y
March 7, 2021 1. Selwyn Birchwood / Living in a Burning House 2. Chris Cain / I Believe I Got Off Cheap 3. BB King / If I Lost You 4. Etta James / A Sunday Kind of Love 5. Johnny Iguana /Stop Breaking Down Blues 6. Jimmy Johnson / Somebody Loan Me a Dime 7. John Lee Hooker w/ Eric Clapton /Boogie Chillen 8. Rex Granite Band / What the Good Lord Had in Mind 9. Dave Steen / Let's Get You Home 10. Larry Williams / Bony Mornie 11. The Beatles / Dizzy Miss Lizzy 12. Little Richard / I Need Love 13. Little Richard / She's Got It 14. SRV / The Sky is Crying 15. Elmore James / Madison Blues 16. Jimmy Reed / Baby, What You Want Me to Do 17. Dr. John / Sick and Tired 18. Warren Haynes / Sick of My Shadow 19. Joe Bonamassa / Sick in Love 20. Aerosmith / Sick as a Dog
The post We’ve Got It, Let’s Use It! by John Gilligan appeared first on Living Faith Outreach - Dickinson, TX.
Nu Disco Blend > Jazz Broken Beat > Out... 01. Flowersons - Up Up (Original Mix). 02. JazzMan Wax (Ft. Larsen & Espinosa) - This Is Love. 03. Fuminori Kagajo (Ft. Angela Johnson) - No Pressure (Dr Packer Remix). 04. Sartorial - Together (THE Colchester `Gilly Groove` Mix). 05. Ken@Work - Here For You. 06. Brickman Beats - Just Ain`t Nothing.(...about as DISCO as you can possibly get...MIX), 07. Clean Is Good - Close (Teddy Door2Door Mix). 08. Ferrari & Bergamasco (Ft. Sherrita Duran) - Baby, You`ve Got It! (Food & Beverage Mix). 09. Erik Ellmann - Somebody Else. 10. Ezirk - I Gotta Skitty (Vote Pedro Mix). 11. HP Vince - That Feeling. 12. JOSES - Watch Me (Landon Terrace Remix). 13. FizzikX - Afro Route (BB NJ Mix). Dx
Johnny Baker - It's Your Night Leon Ware - On the island Jack Tyson Charles - Love Is Pain The R&R Soul Orchestram - The Way Your Body Moves D.C.R. - Positive Vibes Reel People - It Will Be KEM, Mark F - Lonely (Vocal Mix) Mr.Eclectic - Black Out (Original Mix) Antonello Ferrari, Aldo Bergamasco, Sherrita Duran - Baby, You've Got It! (F-B Retouched Mix) Carmen Brown - Throw Your Hands Up (Mark Francis 201 Mix) V - In Time (MAW Mix) Bah Samba feat. The Fatback Band - Let The Drums Speak (Phil Asher's Restless Soul Mix) Sugarpie and The Candymen - Quando, Quando, Quando Paolo Achenza - Settimo Continente Dianne Mower - The Secret Sign J.D’s Time Machine Ft.Cleveland P Jones, Agapesoul, & U Nam - Kiss Of Freedom Hil St Soul - Heaven Must Be Like This Lamone - Born To Be A King Gabriels - Love and Hate in a Different Time The Dells - Rather Be With You Jerry Butler - Ordinary Joe Terry Callier - Look At Me Now Hesitations - Is This The Way To Treat A Girl (You Bet It Is) Ellerine Harding - I know something you don't know Marva Whitney - Don't Let Our Love Fade Away The Exits - Under The Street Lamp The Family Brick - I'll Fly to Your Open Arms Jimmy Williams - Standing There
Making a Scene Presents Turn it up with Gerry Casey Show #74Ben Reel is this week’s guest on the Turn it Up interview. Back in 1985 when Bruce Springsteen played Slane Castle a 13 year old boy from Silverbridge Co Armagh knew what he wanted to do for the rest of his life . Write and play his own music and tour around the world. All those years later that young boy has made the dream come true. On his latest album “The Nashville Calling “the role of bass player was none other than Gary Talent the bass player with the legendary “E Street Band”. Little did that boy from Silverbridge realize that day in Slane when he attended the Bruce Springsteen concert, that one day he would work with the bass guitarist from that legendary band, that inspired him to start his journey in the world of music all those years ago.The Dead Show Dealers(NEW MUSIC WORLD EXCLUSIVE),Emma Mae(A Ghost Story 2021) Evergrey, Eternal Nocturnal The Mojo Preachers,Jesus Sandals (New Single 2021)Amanda St John,Muscle Shoals (Title Track 2019)Andy Watts , Supergroove( Title Track 2020)Wild Cherry ,Play That Funky Music( Wild Cherry 1976)Katrina And The Waves,Walking On Sunshine (Single 1985)Brian Adams ,Long Gone,Reckless 1984)Bryan Ferry ,Let’s Stick Together Title Track 1976)Ben Reel ,Tough People (The Nashville Calling 2020)Jim Basnight,Rock N’Roll Cowboy,(Jokers Idols And Misfits 2020)Brothers Osbourne,Shoot Me Straight (Live At The Ryman Auditorium Nashville)Chris Stapleton, Cold ( Single 2020)Crooked Eyed Tommy,Hot Coffee And Pain(Title Track 2020)Ana Cristina Cash,Renegade Rose (Shine 2020)Otis Taylor,Hey Joe(Hey Joe Opus Red Meat 2015)The Graham Bond Organisation featuring Jack Bruce , Ginger Baker,Harmonica The Kokomo Kings, The Smile Of A Shark( Single 2020)Mark Selby,Don’t You Throw That Mojo On Me (More Storms’ Coming 2000)Steve Wright, Black Eyed Bruiser(The Definitive Collection 1974)Spooky Tooth,Better By You , Better Than Me.(Spooky Two 1969)"Leo Kottke &Mike Gordon, Oh well(Sixty Six Steps 2005)Myles Kennedy,Devil On The Wall.( Year Of The Tiger 2018)Thin Lizzy ,Black Rose, (Title Track 1979)The Wild,King Of This Town(Still Believe In Rock N’Roll 2020)The Dust Coda,Limbo Man(Single 2020)John Lindbergh Trio,Down In The Jungle Room(Single 2020)The Cold Stares,In The Middle (Single 2020)Lynyrd Skynyrd,The Last Of The Street Survivors (Single 2020)Alice Cooper, I’m Eighteen (Love It To Death 1971)Ratt,Round And Round (Out Of The Cellar 1984)Wishbone Ash,We Stand As One (Single 2020)Whitesnake,Trouble Is Your Middle Name(Flesh And Blood 2019)Neil Young,Vacancy (Single 2020)Heart,Barracuda (Little Queen 1977)Rush , Tom Sawyer(Moving Pictures 1981)Scorpions,Rock You Like A Hurricane (Love At First Sting 1984)Van Halen,Panama,(1984/ 1984)Aerosmith,Walk This Way (Greatest hits 1980)AC/DC,Bad Boy Boogie Live !(If You Want Blood You’ve Got It 1978)Ben Reel,Up There In The SkyBen Reel,New JerusalemBen Reel,Round The Next Bend.
"Your weekly dose of Funky House Music from Around the World." - DJ MIDIMACK Jan 2021 Funky House Mix Pt. 3 (Ep 161) Playlist: Shake (Your Body) by Sidwho? (Australia) She's Got It by Sugarstarr (Austria)/Emiliano (Italy) Riding High by Andrey Exx (Russia)/Milk & Sugar (Germany) Save Me by Andre Rizo (Bucharest) Really by Disaia (Spain) The Sun Will Never Go Down by Andre Rizo (Bucharest) If I Can't Get Down by Mike Dunn (USA) Don't Stop by Da Funk Junkies (UK) Glory Days by Di Saronno (Italy)/Gangs of Naples (Italy) Promise by Illyus & Barrientos (UK) Never Stop by Disco Gurls (Spain) Don't Stop Yes Ya by Jackin' Social Club (?) Feelin' Yeah by Jackin' Social Club (?) Rockin It by Block & Crown (The Netherlands)/Scotty Boy (USA) Feel Your Body by Majkol Jay (Italy)/Milk Bar (Italy) Movin' On by Block & Crown (The Netherlands) I Can Make It by Yvvan Back (Italy)/David Novacek (The Czech Republic)/Zetaphunk (Italy) www.themixbagpodcast.com www.patreon.com/djmidimack Thank you for listening! Support this podcast
Rockin' Eddy playing plays the Golden Age of American Rock & Roll featuring Jackie Brenston - "Rocket 88", Ralph Materie - "Skokiaan", The Clovers - "Love, Love, Love", Teresa Brewer - "Til I Waltz Again With You", Jimmy Beasley - "Little Coquette", George Hamilton IV - "A Rose and a Baby Ruth", The Ravens - "Rock Me All Night Long", Deanne Hawley - "Bossman", (Twin Spin) The Marvelettes - "Please Mr. Postman" (A-side) / "So Long Baby" (B-side), Darlene Love - "Today I Met The Boy I'm Gonna Mary", Jesse Belvin - "Guess Who", Nina Simone - "Come On Back Jack", The Du Droppers - "I Wanna Know What You Do", Johnnie Taylor - "Never Never", Jon Thomas - "Heartbreak", The Crew Cuts - "Angels In The Sky", Dave Orrell - "Be My Baby", Slim Harpo - "I'm A King Bee", The Mills Brothers - "Till Then", Leroy Anderson - "The Syncopated Clock".Rockin' Eddy playing the Golden Age of American Rock & Roll featuring The Five Discs - "Never Let You Go", David Clowney - "Soft Lights", Little Richard - "She's Got It", The Drifters - "White Christmas", (Twin Spin) Dion & The Belmonts - "A Teenager In Love" (A-side) / "I've Cried Before" (B-side), Merry Clayton - "It's In His Kiss" (Shoop Shoop Song - first recording ever), Jerry Lee Lewis - "Good Rockin' Tonight", Tommy Ridgley - "Baby Do Little", The Singing Roulettes - "Hasten Jason", The Riffs - "Little Girl", Johnnie Jackson - "I Dig 'Em All", Judy Clay - "Do You Think It's Right", Sonny Burgess - "Red Headed Woman", The Native Boys - "Strange Love", The Four Dates - "I'm Happy", Bobby Helms - "Jingle Bell Rock", Robert Maxwell - "Ebb Tide", The Four Deuces - "WPLJ", Anne Kaye - "Dilly Dally Darling", Joe Houston - "All Night Long", Brenda Lee - "Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree", Christmas is Radio courtesy of Biro Ladd.
Tye energy in this week's episode is kinda hard to explain. Tyler got himself some interviews off of twitter and will indeed be written up in the New York Times, Tay pitched our podcast to a stranger she met at an electronics store, and we dive into 2 sets of reviews. First is a rather odd Liquor Store Review segment, and second is a buck-wild Hardee's review where some sicko tried to order a nonexistent menu item and GOT IT. Stop in, and we're sorry. -Socials- Shapeless Media: Twitter.com/ShapelessMedia Tory: http://bit.ly/ToryTwitter Tyler: http://bit.ly/TylerTwitterSG Tay: http://bit.ly/TayTwitter Instagram: instagram.com/ShapelessGaming Baseless Claims Facebook: facebook.com/BaselessClaims
Today I share 4 ways to go from wallowing to WONDERING what life would be like IF… If you’re wallowing in your life, you’re drowning in it. A wallow is “an area of mud or shallow water where mammals go to wallow, typically developing into a depression in the ground over long use.” DEPRESSION. Please… STOP. Try these 4 things instead: 1. Spit it out. Don’t drink poison. Even if it’s coming from the inside of you. Speak up. Say what you need to say. Release it. Get IT out of you. 2. Swallow it. Humility is a brave and powerful antidote to wallowing in whatever it is you’re wallowing in. Swallow it. Digest it. Then turn it into fuel for your body and soul. BUT whatever you do, DON’T continue to swallow the poison of “unforgiveness” anymore! Stop drinking poison thinking that somehow someone else is going to pay the price. YOU’RE PAYING FOR IT…WITH YOUR OWN LIFE. STOP. Forgive yourself. Release yourself and others. Stop playing “NOT to LOSE.” Start playing to WIN. Start living the life you desire to live. 3. SIP ON IT. Drop by drop, you can handle just about anything…except poison! What are you REALLY thirsty for? Identify what you LOVE and begin to SIP ON IT. Stop trying to quench your thirst with dirt! Or by EATING YOU from the inside out. OR by allowing someone else to feed on you and your life. Feel it, but don’t feed it. Swallow, don’t wallow. Sip on it. Don’t drown in it. HONOR YOURSELF TODAY, DEAR SOUL. Begin Sipping On Your Life, and ENJOY every drop. Release anything in your life that’s not working and no longer fits. It doesn't belong to you or in YOU. Honor yourself. 4. Be WONDER-FILLED with whatever it is YOU desire to SIP ON. GOT IT? Please grab your SACRED S.O.L. D.A.T.E. JOURNAL (Daily Action To Engage yourself.) TODAY’S SACRED S.O.L. STEP: Identify what it is that you’ve been wallowing in. What is it? If you’re wallowing in any area of your life, there’s likely “UNFORGIVENESS” that must be SPIT OUT. Let it out, and let yourself go. Make a decision. Take at least one step today that'll allow you to be filled with wonder. Thank you for being here, and allowing me to Sip On Life with you. Request a FREE copy of my best-selling book, Date Yourself Well — The Best-Selling 12 Engagements Of Becoming The Great Lover Of Your Life (all you'll pay for is shipping.) www.dateyourselfwell.com I’m going to be inviting listeners onto the program. If you have a story you'd like to share — a song to sing (but not a Poor Me Story) — send me an email at: drshannon@doctorshannon.com and put SHARE MY STORY in the subject line. If you've received value from the podcast, please let me know. I'd LOVE to hear from you — please email me at: drshannon@doctorshannon.com AND PLEASE TELL YOUR BESTIES AND INVITE THEM TO SIP ON LIFE WITH US. FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM @doctorshannon! See you there... And learn about an incredible opportunity for a select sacred group of 25 women who are ready and willing to RISE UP AND BE THE WOMAN. If you’ve been feeling like you’re stuck, overwhelmed, or perhaps you still feel like you’re drowning, please don’t hesitate to reach out. I’d be more than happy to schedule a Discovery Call with you to see if Healing Life Coaching is a good fit for you. Email me at drshannon@doctorshannon.com Come over to the WOMEN SIPPING ON LIFE S.O.L. MOVEMENT Closed FB Group and Join the MOVEMENT: https://www.facebook.com/groups/WSOLMovement/ By the way, if you haven't already listened/downloaded my new song (EPISODE 291), you can also listen to it here: letsnottalkaboutex.com, and cast your vote for your favorite version. Visit WomenSippingOnLife.com for more free resources, including my CHECKLIST FOR CHANGE, Engagement Checklist + Evaluation Rating, Six Sacred S.O.L. DATE Secrets…and a FREE copy of my best-selling book, Date Yourself Well. You can also check out my Dr. Shannon Facebook Page for more daily S.O.L. TRAINING. I look forward to seeing you again tomorrow. Please invite your best girlfriends to come and join our S.O.L. PARTY. xo Dr. Shannon. Inspiring minds that want to grow and hearts that want to know, so you can love you, your life, and your life’s work well. ONE SIP AT A TIME. A special thanks to the following souls for helping me launch our WOMEN SIPPING ON LIFE podcast… Intro/Outro done by UNI V. SOL Outro music by Jay Man: Mind Over Matter (www.ourmusicbox.com) Podcast cover design and web site done by: Pablo Aguilar (www.webdesigncreator.com) Podcast cover photo by Kate Montague of KM Captured (www.kmcaptured.com)
Governor Newsom And Cuomo Reaction To Trump Helping With Coronavirus. Step away from the negative. Here's some positive from those that needed help and GOT IT from a President that never uses politics to avoid helping those in need. Ask anyone that has worked with him.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/trifectaairsoft)
Episode 139- you want it, you GOT IT. We talk NFL Week 7, we talk best woods.... yes, best woods. And we relive Brandana gambling bets in a wild week. Buckle up- we're getting NUTS.
Guests Nicholas Osborne and Chester Parks join Tyler and Aaron for a hard seltzer taste test. They're picking some obscure brands folks! So no white claws here GOT IT? Will someone throw up?
God’s Got It. We’ve heard that before. But what about the real stuff—the meat and potatoes stuff of life? Does he have my needs for food, shelter, safety and my occasional wants? Jesus in this discourse of Blueprints for a Belonging Community, encourages us to put worry aside and trust the God who knows us best and loves us most. In this message, Pastor James shares Jesus’ plan of trust and contentment for life.
God’s Got It. We’ve heard that before. But what about the real stuff—the meat and potatoes stuff of life? Does he have my needs for food, shelter, safety and my occasional wants? Jesus in this discourse of Blueprints for a Belonging Community, encourages us to put worry aside and trust the God who knows us best and loves us most. In this message, Pastor James shares Jesus’ plan of trust and contentment for life.
Jackson and Peter begin the show with the latest NFL news and a quick lookahead towards Saturday's Red River Rivalry (6:35). NFL Awards are back for Week 4, including the Fantasy MVP, "Hold My Beer", Most Overblown Offseason Storyline, and "I Still F'ing Got It" awards (9:15). Next, we hear from Adam Gase, Matt Patricia, Dan Quinn, and Anthony Lynn in "Post-Game Pressers" (19:45). "Bankroll Builders" continues after another profitable week (34:30), and the boys close the show with their thoughts on who will replace Bill O'Brien and the Lakers Game 4 win over Miami (1:01:57). Hosts: Jackson Stoever and Peter Mitchell Follow us on social media: Instagram - @fanfuelsports Twitter - @fanfuelsports Find our content at fanfuelsports.com and subscribe to our YouTube channel here.
Join Al Mega for part 10 of this podcast series where we chat with Dion Wilson about THE MULTIVERSE™ team! Learn about the creative and experienced professionals behind this amazing technology! Please submit questions, comments, we will mention them on the podcast! Stay up-to-date on this project via: WEBSITE (Now Live): www.themultiverse.cloud Facebookwww.facebook.com/Multiverse Discordhttps://discord.gg/gWjVNVz Slackhttps://heroledger.slack.com Twitterhttps://twitter.com/ourmverse Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/rmultiverse/ If you have any questions/comments please leave them below. Thanks for listening! Host: Al Mega: @TheRealAlMega / @AlMegaPodcast Network: @UndercoverCapes / https://www.facebook.com/undercovercapes1/Parent Site: https://www.comiccrusaders.com/Sister Sites: http://www.geekerymagazine.com/ / http://www.splinteredpress.com/ NOTE: This podcast is for informational purposes only. The information presented in this podcast should not be taken as investment advice. Please consult your financial consultant for investment advice…etc. etc. etc. Comic Crusaders does not directly sale market or endorse the crypto products mentioned in this podcast etc. etc. etc….” Got It?!
I believe we are in a new civil war now. We have intimidation squads now operating around the country. I explore how these mobs caused a prosecutor in Omaha Nebraska to empanel a grand jury after he had otherwise declined to charge owner of the Omaha bar the hive Jacob Gardner. 126 - We are in a New Civil War - The Jacob Gardner Case 00:00:05 - 00:05:16 And? Welcome, Republic. Uber Podcast Name is Brian Kelly. I will be your host for today's program. Broadcasting from the forest, just outside of the anarchists zone in Seattle Washington. My name is Brian Kelly again this is the republic keeping podcast. Our facebook. Number One, twenty, six. Republic Uber Dot Com website etcetera for the social media connections and more and let's kick this off like every other broadcast in. Thank God for good health and the ability to be here sharing. With you today and. Wondering where that extra sound is coming from and I just figured it out I was like, wow, weird. ECHO in my. Ear. I forgot to turn the volume down on one of my Monitoring Devices, not that you all care but anyway good morning. Welcome and thanks for joining lots to go through today. Today's program. titled. America's new civil war. And at the risk of that being hyperbole, let me talk to you a little bit about why I'm saying this. This has been a conversation I've been having for. Literally, decades I remember. Over twenty years ago. Sitting in a parking, lot of the newspaper I was working out with my friend Julian and we were discussing the political landscape in America, and I told him at that point that I thought that the country was going to break up into four or five countries someday. That was my view then and it's still not very different today. My view was that the west coast would split off and become its own country. That the mid West would separate into at least one country. And, the eastern seaboard would separate into. Two Countries a northeast and southeast country along, and these would be along values in ideological lines was my view and because the reality is that there's nothing about Nebraska. And Kansas and Iowa. That's like Oregon. Or Florida. And it's not just the geography of climate. It's the attitudes and the people and the things that they value. Now people are people but the culture you grow up in determines a lot about what you value in consider. To be important and So I, told Julian years ago that I thought that the country was going to break up into. Three four or five countries and along ideological lines, and we are seeing these ideological divisions happen and IT IS A. To say IT'S A it's a war. That's hyperbole, right? Well, I don't know. You know typically in a war you have. Military engaged on both sides right and sometimes in guerrilla wars, the military aren't official military. There are a paramilitary group right or a loosely organized group and the Sikh Kita station seems to be the. Once these things start to invade your neighborhood. And stop being just police chasing criminals. It's the point to me. It seems that there's a line that's crossed, and so I've collected together quite a few pieces of video and audio from around the country of these intimidation squads at work and this has resulted in. The death of a man named Jake Gardner and we're GONNA go in depth into that one case before the show is over today. So let's jump right in here with some of the first things these intimidation squads are as I say ramping up all over the country and you've seen some of the violence that's happened at the protests including some shootings, right? Well, this is just real quick. This is a man who was beat up a few weeks ago. I think just like August twentieth. So about a month ago, I guess in Portland take a listen and here is the video this man. Hearing. From the truck driver who was brutally beaten over the weekend by demonstrators in Portland. Meanwhile, protesters are renewing their battles with federal agents correspondent. Dan Springer has the latest tonight. Tonight Portland Police are wondering where the next attack will be last night. It was back at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Office with of federal officers inside Portland. Police declared a riot after protesters started a fire broke several windows and through softball sized rocks at officers we all should be condemning the violence that's occurring increasingly. There are calls for citizens to rise up and say, no more police chief Chuck Lavelle wrote the solution is in a critical mass of community and partners coming together to denounce this criminal activity and call it out for the first time since his brutal beating over the weekend at heinous speaking out saying he stopped to help a transgender woman who has been. 00:05:17 - 00:10:04 Hearing from the truck driver who was brutally beaten over the weekend by demonstrators in Portland meanwhile, protesters are renewed. On the side of the road and she's trying to figure out what happened to me. Hater says he was called a racist during the attack police are still looking for their main suspect. Marquees love who reportedly posted on social media. Video. Bunny. Sorry about that. But that guy was beat up there in. PORTLAND. Okay. So that's okay. Fine gets beat up at the protest. You know that's not a big surprise. You went down the protest, right? You had it coming. Well, what about the Los Angeles police chief? Did He have it come instructors vandalized the home of LAPD chief Michael. Moore last night tonight. There's new concern that this type of activism is doing more harm than good to the Social Justice Movement and drowning out peaceful protests more now from NBC Forest Kim Bulletin Auto. It's a trend many find disturbing protesters going directly to the homes of public officials. Last night, the black future project vandalize the home of La Police chief Michael Moore and plastered signs laced with obscenities on his garage windows in front door. I'm very concern I know that I participated in a number of protests and demonstrations. During my time they've always been at a public place in front of a public facility earl. Affari Hutchinson is president of the L. E. Urban Policy Roundtable, and says protesting his point there. It's always been in a public place in front of a public forum right and so that that's fine that makes sense. You know the protests should be in know used to be down at the courthouse or whatever. Right? It didn't use to ever be. At anybody's home. So that was the LA police chief. That's a big city, right so you know he's a target that makes sense right? Well, how about we start with new video of the Olympia Mayor's home being vandalized this happened during protests last night watch closely there's this one person who appear to spray painted Blm by the door. They're the mayor sent us this video and it also looks like a sign saying Blm, which is obviously stiffer. Black lives matter throughout these protests was already in her window so she's along. So. That's the Olympia Washington mayor and that's The capital of the state of Washington here, and that's not a big city. It's it's a relatively small city. In fact, it didn't have the capital I don't know what what else it would have their. So, then Tucker Carlson is the course of the Fox host right. This is a report from the Australian TV about what happened to him. Now, this stuff isn't in nine enough the media partisanship with the cancel culture with a liberal lift same intent on silencing. Any opposing views? Well, it's played out in another ugly why in the United States influential conservative commentator Tucker Carlson has gone public now about how the Liberal Lift New York Times newspaper has targeted him. Two years ago left-wing journalists publicized our home address in Washington a group of screaming antiques lunatic showed up while I was at work vandalized are home they threatened my wife she called nine one one while hiding in a closet a few weeks later they showed up again at our house for the next year, they sent letters to our home threatening to kill us try to ignore it. It felt cowardly to sell our home and leave. We raised our kids there in the neighborhood and we loved it. But in the end, that's what we did. We have four children it just wasn't worth it. But the New York Times followed us the paper is assigned to political activists called Murray Carpenter to write a story about where we are. Now they've hired a photographer called tristen spins ski to take pictures their story about where we live is slated to run in the paper. This week editors there know exactly what will happen to my family when it does. Run I call them today and I told them but they didn't care. They hate my politics they want this show off the air. If one of my children gets hurt because of a story they wrote they won't consider it Claro damage. They know it's the whole point of the exercise to inflict pain on our family to terrorize us to control what we say. Because this is one of the big concerns I had in starting the show is what is it going to mean to my family? If I make the wrong person angry. Do I want to be a public person and this is what they're trying to do is to keep people from shutting up. And keep people for speaking out or shut people I remember when I. Was Beginning discussing this. Concept I was talking with my boys who both serve in the military and explaining them. 00:10:05 - 00:15:06 This was a real concern. What if the mob comes to my house and you know attacks my wife and my grandkids are my children or anybody else my neighbors? and My boys said to be dad you know were literally there literally people shooting at us. And you're worried about some criticism in this from guys might come to your house. Well, it's you know yeah, it's not just criticism. It's I'm I'm kind of worried that they might actually hurt somebody because it's what they do. Here is outside of Derek Children's home this morning we're also learning more about the now former officers who were involved in George Floyd's death. We go right to Christiane Cordeiro, she is at the scene a thirty eight in Chicago where she was yesterday morning with what she knows today Christiane. Cool Jason We know that there were for responding officers initially we. Understood that there were at least two of them and we now. Have confirmed the identity of one of those responding officers former Minneapolis police officer, Derek Show van was one of the four who responded Monday night he's represented by Attorney Tom? Kelly Kelly represented Saint Anthony Police. Officer your Janas acquitted in the death of Landau Casteel in it 2017 we also learned. was put on leave at least once before and twenty eleven. He was one of five officers involved in a police shooting and little earth. In that case, we're told officers were responding to a shooting the suspect fled and when he didn't stop, he was shot in the Torso Minneapolis police later said that the officers acted appropriately and courageously very different reactions from NPD Cheese Madeira air when he fired Shelvin and his three colleagues yesterday. I stand before you in the city. Of Minneapolis here to say that our deepest condolences, the vast majority of the men and women who probably put on this uniform each and every day understand the important role in relationship we must have. We must have. With all of our community members and when tragedy strikes, it absolutely strikes to the core and we should all be impacted by this. There was a protest massive want here. Of course, you can hear a couple of people who actually just showed up just to show a little bit more of their support. There was also a smaller protests over in Oakdale at Derek Shaw Wtn's home a we understand that about a few dozen people showed up there. Yesterday protesters said enough is enough that they wanted to their presence known the chief of Oakdale. Police also showed up he said that given the circumstances he understands why people are so. Home protested him there and Then we had a repair Ginsberg died the other day and now people are protesting outside of. Mitch McConnell's house. Vote Him out and vote him out they WANNA get rid of Mitch so we go to now. Protest. Washington DC. Bureau bouncers house. See Mayor. Any murder. Cutting a majority. An During So these demonstrations are now happening outside of people's houses right here is the looking at a live picture right now happening now, protesters refusing to leave the condo complex they believe is the home to mayor Ted Wheeler. giving. Him a list of demands tonight. This is coin six news at ten o'clock. Good evening everyone. I'm Jeff Gianola all this comes after around two hundred people marched through northwest Portland earlier this evening before making their way to that condo complex are Jennifer dowling on the scene right now what is the latest Jennifer? Here behind me, there's a massive dance party going on is alive. Cut Her off right there because this is what happens every time the reporters come on and say it's just a dance party. It's a lively crowd. It's nice to be here. But. What happens every time is that the party is early and the people committed a violence or there later, and the violence happens later and every single time the reporters of all gone home and the violence happens and I saw here in Seattle I mean I've witnessed this with my own eyes. This isn't just some speculation. I'm not some guy in some remote place who hasn't seen it. I've been down at the protests repeatedly Seattle and I've seen it these are organized. Events with people, coordinating them, and so on and so forth now. 00:15:08 - 00:20:06 After the break I've got one more to plan were come into the. Break and then we're gonNA come back and we're explore one man's real story that's ended in tragedy now. After the break. So I wanted to hear from this police captain here I. This is a Richmond Virginia, our police chief I guess in Richmond take a listen to Let's see if I got this cute up right and I don't think I'd do. Go, take a listen to this guy. And again there's a there's one incident I think is particularly pointed that truly illustrates. The The seriousness of the issues that we're facing. The mayor mentioned this last night protesters intentionally set a fire to unoccupied building on broad street. This is not the only occupied building that has been set fire to the last two days. But they prohibited us from getting on seeing. We had to force our way. To make a clear path for the department. Protesters intercepted that fire apparatus several blocks away with vehicles. Department scrambling. To the structure far. Inside that home was a child. Officers were able to. GET COMPOSURE BACK Officers were able to help those people out of the House. We were able to get the Fire Department there safely. Can Barely get through it. But when you take a Legitimate issue. And hijack it. For unknown reasons that is unacceptable to me, it's unacceptable to the right police department unacceptable to the city rich. As the mayor said, this isn't Richmond. And it truly is not Richmond. Virginia. Is Not even the mid Atlantic. Intelligence that we're working on presently so that we hope to be able to file charges following up from this, we have people from across the country have traveled. Many states to be here. We know that this is an organized effort. We're committed to try and identify those that are behind it. And we're doing our level best to arrest those that are perpetrating the balance in our community, our city, and our citizens. So. So these guys started fire to building set fire to a building that had people in it. And the adults were able to get out. And a baby was not able to get out. Now I don't know what you call that when they're attacking civilians. For no other reason apparently they lived in the wrong neighborhood. And I I don't know what you call that. So I'm saying, yeah, we're in a civil war because we have what is effectively a traveling funded paramilitary guerilla group the travels around the country and attacks. Anybody who doesn't agree with them who doesn't see it their way now I'm not sure about you but that sounds a lot like a civil war to me. So we get back. We're going to dig into the Jake Gardner case out of Omaha Nebraska in depth and I think you're gonNA find it fascinating and we'll see if you do we'll be right back in a minute and we'll. Explore what's happened there and We'll go from there. Thanks be right back. Welcome back to the Republika podcast broadcasts were we'll call it in. Hell. Thanks for those of you who are joining live on the livestream on facebook on twitter. Youtube appreciate it welcome good morning and There's been this Thing going on all around the country those plan these. Things that people being intimidated right public officials, police, officers, police, chiefs, mayors, etcetera, and you know one of the people that have been intimidated places are prosecutors right? Sometimes the prosecutors get intimidated if they don't act the way that the public wants them to because after all. The. Public has the best view of what's going on. That's why instead of juries now, we're just GONNA go to whatever the crowd thinks. It's ridiculous, right we're not going to do that. But what happens is if the crowd doesn't like the prosecutor's decision, sometimes they show up at the prosecutors house, and so we're going to go through the story now of a man named Jake Gardner. 00:20:07 - 00:25:09 and. This Omaha Nebraska. So this is the first news story. This is the morning after. So let me give you the setup real quick This man Jake Gardner owns a bar. And apparently there were protests there was some damage done. It has bar. As I understand it his father was there and his father and one of the protesters got into a shoving match and I I think maybe his dad's started it not certain how that worked out. But either way this man of Jake Gardner was pulled into it. was armed and a man jumped on him and he shot and fired in what was initially determined to be self. Defense? Here is the first news story from the day after protester is shot and killed in downtown. Omaha last night with the shooter in police custody as the investigation is ongoing senior reporter Jake was a cousy is live with the latest. John More than one hundred people are out here supporting James Skirl Lock. Let me go ahead and step out of the shot. As you can see just eighteen hours ago he was killed less than half a block away where at Thirteenth Harney here. Chance to support him as well as is. Violence especially after so much happened last night right here in the old market. For James Reds? No No justice. No peace. That's legit. Right there. No justice no p fighting back tears diamond Davis fights to keep his name known her friend James Scurr lock the twenty two year old was shot and killed outside the Gatsby bar formerly known as the high that twelve and Harney, last night I everybody to know just keep his name while i. Don't let his name. I said. He pretty cool kid if you get to know. Hundreds of people protesting in the area and many witnessed. The shooting was recorded by several people in videos like this one have been circulating since last night and social media. Police haven't said much as to what happened, but the shooter is not on the streets and charges would have to come from the county attorney the Police Department did detain. Somebody who fired that weapon that individual remains in Omaha police customers jake shooter has not been identified by police but many are talking about who he is is racist. He's a known homophobic. He's a known big at. This is not the first time that's happened. He's been the news several times. And I hope he's held accountable for what he's done. It's not okay. It's not acceptable. I'm not going to speculate as to the the. The content of the character of this individual. I think that will come out and police investigations over time and I think we need to wait for that Davis says screw lock was peacefully protesting like everyone else when he saw a man goes important. Is No peace. No justice, no peace. No justice no peace. Now hear how they set up. He was a white supremacist right that this guy has an. On Thirteenth Street here maybe offer diamond just a few minutes ago and let them know that the alleged shooter is actually in police custody, which was something that they had not known yet, and that he wasn't that person was never actually released. Gardner that they took into custody there now, they were setting up the idea that Jake Gardner is a bad man if you heard that. Because Jake Gardner apparently is a racist they said and so regardless here is the father of. James Spurlock who's the man who was shot by? Gardner good evening John father just wrapped up moments ago. He decided to go ahead and speak out here at the Malcolm X.. Center here in North Omaha. Now, it was a huge turnout, lots of family members and just emotion. That's the easiest way for me to describe it as raw motion is heard tears i. saw tears heard a few laughs. You know remembering him and family members are really hurting right now and wanting you know obviously answers and most of all wanting justice. Now Senator Justin Wayne was here he spoke on behalf of the family said he'd be representing them and they would not take any questions today they asked that. You just provide the family with the space that they need and also with closure for them. So really just lots of people here supporting this family and we'll have more for you coming up at ten o'clock tonight reporting. Against, supporting, the family. You know whatever happened their family didn't do. Whatever they're young man did if you did anything right So of course, there were more protests were visible but remained in the background as dozens of protesters showed up tonight at three different locations including for a protest downtown at the site where two other planned events were called off. 00:25:09 - 00:30:18 That's where three news now reporter Sydney grade joins us live with Lake City. John Good evening. So I'm not in the shot right now because I want you all to take a good look at what is happening right now police officers and protesters from earlier this evening have escorted those protesters rather over to the area near the hive were they've taken that wreath that Lock now, if you can see the woman and the biggest church. Walk down the street There is a large group of protesters. It's not just the two people you see how? They're going to. Protest continue once again in Omaha tonight, this time, not just for James Kerouac book for what's happening in Portland reporter Sydney Gray was at the gathering house more. Hey John did evening well, dozens of protesters gathered in the mid area. They tell me that the fight for justice locally and the country must continue until they begin to see a real change. Now, the group Pro Block as the one who led the event today it started at Turner Boulevard and Form Street organizers. Say they wanted to shine a light on the city's own racial injustices such as the murder of James? Skirl he's the twenty two year old black man no. Is Anybody missing something important here. The entire issue is supposed to be about police brutality, right? Jay Gardner the shooter is a businessman. He owns a bar. And whether or not he's a racist or not I don't know. Any may be. But being racist is reprehensible and disgusting, but I don't think it's illegal. And I don't think it's a capital crime. At least not last I checked it wasn't now the district attorney there of course is the one who determines whether or not charge right the police go ahead and do the investigation and gathered the evidence they bring it over to the DA and the DA decides whether or not to charge. Here is Mr Klein, the district attorney old market intentional report. Tonight County. Attorney explains his answer senior reporter Jake Gorski was there and brings us the latest strike. Would J first off those peaceful protesters here at five o'clock right outside the courthouse have since moved on their outside the courthouse and City Building County Attorney Don Klein says after reviewing all the surveillance video. GonNa, pause him for a second. Did you notice how he said those peaceful protesters they couldn't just say protesters they always have to all the media. It's like an order say the word peaceful because peaceful gives us sympathy L. and witnesses that he heard from including the shooter prosecutors all agreed it was self defense or the father of the victim says doesn't want violence, but he does want something to happen in court. Cell Phone and surveillance video showed the altercation that leads to the death of twenty two year old James Scurr lock late Saturday night. The shooter is identified as Jacob Gardner the owner of the HIVE and gatsby bars. It shows a scuffle with gardeners dad push a protester and his pushed back. Gardner backs up when approached and showed a gun when two people jumped on him, he fired two shots but didn't hit anyone and then skirl jumped on his back. That's been Gardner said he was being choked and shot him once and the clavicle his version is an IP felt that I felt that. Determines that pretty of getting serious bodily injury getting pummeled or choked out with this guy on top of me and I asked the guy to get off me you wouldn't off me Klein says he based decision off the evidence in the case and not on emotions which are still very high screw locks case. So now this Guy Klein goes out and The district attorney either he says, no charges self-defense. What do you think happens next? I don't have video that nobody got it. But the mob shore leasing if anybody got it, I couldn't find it. The mob showed up at Klein's house. No justice. No peace outside the District Attorney's House no justice. No peace. No justice. No peace. So here's a guy who spent his entire life. Prosecuting crime. He knows a crime when he sees it, he knows self defense when he sees it. And he says, we're not going to prosecute this guy because it was self defense. But. Then the mob shows about side is house and here's what happens. Next good evening I'm trying to Brazil wall though Douglas County Attorney Down Klein feels the shooting was justified and self defense he's taking a step let others take a look at the case senior reporter Dick was Kathy joins US live J.. Jetty right now, we have Senator Ernie Chambers addressing a group of citizens rallying outside of the City Hall and courthouse area talking about the importance of voting as well as standing up for their rights and they heard the community they heard the protests Klein says he will ask for a grand jury to review the killing of James. 00:30:18 - 00:35:02 KEROUAC. He will petitioned the District Court to convene a grand jury for a special prosecutor to examine the case late Saturday night James spurlock was shot and killed outside the hive and gatsby bars in the old market. Surveillance video shows the owner of the Bar J. Garner in a confrontation with protesters when he's backing up and flashes a gun. To people jump on him and he fires two shots. Then spurlock gets on his back. And Gardner shoots him killing him Gardner said it was in self defense and Klein agreed. Now, that there will be a grand jury squawks family wants more witnesses and videos to come forward. I certainly believe in transparency and I have no problem with any oversight about decisions that we've made I think the black community for goodness grand jury painful. I understand the pressures on everybody. From the judicial, board to the community, and when we raise our voice about an injustice that we can make a difference I think that was huge for our community to see I think that was huge when I say our community I'm not just talking North Omaha but the entire, Omaha community. To Munich and so they pressured Don Client, and the family says there. Are from justice, but on the right track, grand jury impaneled right. But that grant and in the grand jury jury gets empanelled and in the meantime there is this entire. Public Relations campaign going on. This is part of reason the crowd has outside today is protest the. Douglas County not putting charges on the killer of James Spurlock a twenty, two year old male who was shot at the corner of thirteenth and Harney on Saturday yesterday out of the protest I talked with skirl ox brother and his mother who told me a little bit about the guy they called you. He by Davis, he lived life to the full. Adventurous. Yes, that's the big heart. And use a Momma's boy emotions apparent never wants to feel this is the new reality for those closest James Skirt I've of. All Life. With that, kid his goal to tell you that anybody can tell you that Nicholas Harden was James Girl, ox brother, and so. James Skirt lock apparently was saint, James Saint. James was absolutely the best I guess Saint James. Could. Do. No wrong. But Saint James jumped a man who had just fired his weapon twice. And then the man fired his weapon at James. Sherlock. and. So it James Scarlett may have been. The greatest guy ever and pure is the wind driven snow but at least on this one night. It didn't work out so well. So here's what happens next. Panel the grand jury. Right. In the grand jury becomes a place for the case to be made not that this man. was in fear for his life. But that this man was a racist and therefore anything he did was suspect and because he was a racist, he was going to be indicted and so we don't know what went on in the grand jury jury for sure. But here is the report special prosecutor. Frederic Franklin said tonight it was new evidence that led the grand jury to make its decision to indict Jake Gardner. Most of that evidence he says came from Gardner himself three news. Now, reporter Rudolph Tonight has more on the charges, what they mean and what happens next. When they came from Gardner himself what that means is that that they found things on his facebook page or in his life. That were evidence that he was a racist and so therefore it because of his attitude. He. Doesn't have the right of self defense is what it appears like. On May thirtieth during night violent protesting regarding the death of George Floyd twenty two year old James Skirl was shot and killed by former old market bar owner jake. Gardner shortly after Douglas County Attorney Don Klein determined that Gardner acted in self defense and no charges were filed. Then after pushback from the public, a grand jury was called as well as a special prosecutor to look into the case client himself petition for the grand jury to review his decision, the investigation continued and about sixty people were interviewed by the Omaha. 00:35:02 - 00:40:04 Police Department the jury had the chance to look at new evidence and deliberated last. BA- grand jury at the point in time that they made their decision. It's also slam dunk. Much more information available to them Then what was had at the time that the initial decision was made special prosecutor Frederic Franklin said, most of the new evidence came from Gardner himself through his phone and facebook messages. There was evidence that was gathered and presented to the grand jury about activity. That Jim Gardner was engaged in. Prior to even coming in contact with James Go lock the grand jury routine Heen people indicted Gardner on four charges manslaughter the use of a firearm in the Commission of a felony attempted first degree assault and terroristic threats. Her restrict stem from the verbal exchange between Gardner and Scurr lock that night. Franklin also said the jury spent more time to liberate here's. The prosecutor I think the Monday after. James Locke was was shot and killed the press conference conducted by Don Klein and Brenda Beetle indicated that There wouldn't be charges forthcoming because there was a determination that the action by Jay Gardner was self defense within a few days there became a request for a grand jury to do the investigation. The Omaha Police Department did continue with their investigation. They interviewed approximately sixty people in conjunction with This homicide investigation, they received video clips from members of the public who were down any all market, the grand jury. At, the point in time that they made their decision. It's almost a slam dunk that they had much more information available to them. Than what was had at the time that the initial decision was made and of course, we have more information so because they had sixty days and all this other time. So you're a back in just a minute and we'll show you what happened with Jay Gardner you're not gonNA believe how this turned out Republican for PODCASTS. Again, my name is Brian Kelly enthusiast. Show the way this works listener supported broadcasting, and what that means. There's no big company behind it. It's your meet together. I do the work that you support the show. Simple I asked listeners three things from. People pray for me because I I need wisdom inside any balance and he'd energy and all the things we need to do this well. On top of the fulltime job in fulltime life and. I asked people share the show whatever device you're on right now probably has a share and subscribe button. Make sure you're subscribed in good and hit that share button and share it to. All of your social media, and even if you've done that before, it's good to do it once a week every. So often let people know you're listening to the show and that you've found something valuable here so that they will see that in join you in the last thing is visit the link to support show financially Patriot dot com slash republic keeper if you'd be so kind that would be awesome. If you can find the time to do that. So Jake Gardner Jacob Gardner is the bar owner here in Omaha who? was indicted then by the grand jury. And the indictment just happened a few days ago last week I believe and. So we saw the video tape there of the prosecutor and the then appointed a special prosecutor who impaneled a grand jury, and so this is video I believe this is from just yesterday. This. Is well I'll just play the report developing tonight a bar owner from Omaha Nebraska recently indicted in the shooting death of a black man related to protests. There was found dead in Hillsborough today Jacob Gardner faced four charges in the shooting death of twenty two year old James, scurr? Lock. Gardner shots scurr lock outside his bar as protests were happening nearby early reports of that incident show that bar was being vandalized at the time. A judge issued a warrant for gardeners arrest on Friday. Hillsborough police reported finding Gardner's body near a medical clinic off northeast. Ninth Street this afternoon in his attorney confirmed that Gardner died by suicide. So the District Attorney. Says that Jake Gardner? Acted in self defense. The videotapes submitted to the district attorney caused the district attorney to say. 00:40:05 - 00:45:03 That Jake Gardner. Acted in self defense. Then, the mob shows up and demands a grand jury impaneled. Now, the grand jury gets empanelled, and of course, in the environment where if you don't do it the mob once. They're gonNA come to your house. The grand jury. decided. That, they would charge him. And he decided. That, he couldn't get a trial. Apparently. He didn't WANNA come back and face justice and you know I don't know maybe he's guilty. Maybe. He's guilty maybe the grand jury got it. Right and the prosecutor got it. Wrong to begin with I don't know. I know that the mob drew drove this. Here's Jacob. Gardeners attorneys. Missing Martin. By one. Price. Only a are. had. Terrible. Is. Tolleson. Lavar. Laura. Yeah, and so obviously, it's a terrible tragedy when somebody commits suicide for any reason. And But I think it's especially tragic when they're driven to it. There was the case couple years ago I think of the young woman. Who? Was I. don't remember her name now and I just I wasn't thinking about it. So it's our looked it up but. I think he has probably remember the young woman who is encouraging her boyfriend to take his life. You know just go ahead and commit suicide, and then he did and she ended up prosecuted for it because she incited him to it and I, think that there. I. Don't know if there's anything criminal that's happened here. Maybe the only criminal thing that happened was that Jacob. Gardner. Shot. James spurlock when he shouldn't have maybe the grand jury. Got It. Right I don't know. What I know is that had the vigilante mob not shown up. To Don Klein's house. There wouldn't have been a grand jury. So I, guess if Jacob Gardner was in fact guilty. And we will never know. Because he didn't, there's not going to be a trial right and whatever evidence was given a grand jury to compel them to make the indictment is grand juries are secret and sealed, and so that evidence is not gonna come out now because there won't be a trial, maybe it'll be leaked. But. If in fact. Jacob Gardner was guilty of a crime and should have been punished. Then the actions, the mob. Ended up in a grand jury and an indictment that should have happened. That case the mob was I guess. Righteous in what they accomplished. But I would still say that even if. Even so You. Don't go to somebody's house. You could maybe just protest bigger louder longer at City Hall. There's got to be at some level. And this is part of why I open the show saying it's a civil war. You know there there's the old saying says, all's fair. In love and war. Translation there are no rules. When IT COMES TO CONFLICT The rule is survive. Because the other guy wants to kill you. I hate to be so. Blunt. But the other side in this conflict wants to kill us who are conservatives they want to kill us who are religious people. And they are doing it. And if you stand in the way, they're okay with you as long as you're the kind of religious person that says, I'll go ahead and adapt my religion to you. Know, I had an episode a lot long ago where I Read that right from the DNC platform. Do you know what the DNC? Platform says on religion. It says that we embrace a progressive view of religion. That is not discriminatory toward anyone. 00:45:04 - 00:50:15 Translation. Your views about homosexuality. In your church, they're not going to be allowed anymore. You're old fashioned. Marriage and divorce or not allow that. and. So the idea is that we are literally I don't think it's figurative. We are in a war. And I remember in the. Pamphlet Commonsense. Published way back at the Revolutionary War time by Thomas Paine home not a fan of honest as early but regardless. When That was passed way back then or when that was written way back. Then one of the things Thomas Paine said these are the Times that try men's souls right and he was putting in there put in there something about that if you're not. Willing to step up to the battle that maybe you're not worthy of the prize that will be achieved afterwards. And I would say that to all of you listening and to myself. At this point that it's time to prepare to do battle? And Battle is ideological and battle maybe physical depending on what's happening, and so I'm attempting here with the Republican broadcast to be in the ideological side of the fight. On the idea that if we can win the argument, we don't have to win the armed conflict. And I'm trying to help provide. Ammunition to our side. If you will in the conflict so that it doesn't become an armed conflict anymore than it's already become. But realistically, at this point, we are going to see I'll just give you the future here. So you know what we're GONNA see. There are several events coming up that are going to that are going to be Convulsive. The president is going to appoint. A Supreme Court justice probably. Amy conybeare. The Senate is going to hold hearings. Are Going to have a confirmation hearing and all of that before the election. Those are going to cost protests. The officers in the Jacob Blake? Shooting. will or will not be charged. That'll cost protests doesn't matter that they're charger not. Charged, it won't be enough if they're charged with a maximum crime, the trial won't be over yet. So it doesn't matter they're going to be protests. The Minneapolis officers are going to get their day in court and those. Verdicts are gonNA come out and whether or not that will happen before the election or not doesn't matter when those verdicts come out it doesn't matter what the verdicts are. There will be protests. So, there are already several events queued up. In the calendar of the left to disrupt America. and to try and create less trust. In how things work. So I'm going to grab a real quick break phones are open if you want to call in and if not great, we'll be right back and we'll go from there. So. Will Offer just a minute I'll be right back. Thanks. Welcome Max. Republic. Keeper podcast. Again, my name is Brian Kelly. Thanks for joining and. Sponsoring the show those you do and all that sort of stuff. So. Wrapped up today you know the been going forward as we think about this and think about what is your role In the coming conflict and first of all in the avoidance thereof. Right. And so I would say the the first and foremost. The thing we gotta do is we make sure that we're going to get Donald. Trump. reelected. And I mean that. I know that in the short term. It probably means more violence. In. The short term reelecting Donald Trump probably means more violence. That when he's reelected, the left is GONNA lose their mind even more. The good news is. When he's reelected. He won't have to be concerned about being reelected and what that means is that you're going to see these protests and ANTIFA violent leftist movements. Absolutely crushed. Crushed into oblivion. People. are going to be prosecuted into long-term jail sentences my noses in here. Sorry. Trying to avoid sneezing. One of those things, right So Once. The reelection happens I do think that trump is going to have the freedom to use all of the policing powers that they have. At their disposal to end this and what I'm hoping is that many of these arrests that have been happening in the last couple of months have been pulling some of the ringleaders of these things out of the situation, and hopefully, what that'll mean is that there will be less violence at the night of the election. 00:50:15 - 00:54:44 And we'll find out but I expect that on election night we are GonNa see lots and lots of violence when the trump landslide is announced And again, I, it is going to be a trump landslide and it's very, very easy. To, understand you know if you look at Donald Trump and I know that some of you who don't like Donald Trump thinks that he is the consummate liar. and. Perhaps that's true. But he's genuinely appears to be just having a great time on the campaign trail. and. What that means to me is that. The internals that they have. don't have them concerned. He doesn't look rattled. They don't appear to be behaving in panic mode he's speaking about the future. In a way that sounds like he really does believe he will be there. and. Joe Biden is more tentative in his approach. So on one quick little Vignette with you about. The way these things work the way people. Work Guess. In. and. I have had an opportunity to meet with. A public official locally a couple of. Times. Let's just say this this way I'm careful I don't WANNA reveal it is A local public official, a couple of times this public official has an important objective to accomplish in from a communication standpoint. In terms of getting the word out about certain things and. The audience for this show is not small. It's growing like crazy. The livestream doesn't have a big audience, but the podcast has a large audience in the livestream is only ten days old or two weeks old and it's growing. But. I met with this guy in the reside. Tell the story is the first time I met met with him. I handed him a business card for the podcast and I said you know I know you've really got story that you want told in your frustrated that you're not getting. The coverage. So why don't you come on the show and then you can we can repurpose that audio video into other things to, and you know we'll. We'll do in his yeah. That would that sounds great. Why don't you reach out to my team? and. Okay I'll do that. So I did. No response didn't the answer. So, then I encountered this individual at another event. And reintroduce myself. And he said. Yeah. He I remember. Weren't you going to get a hold of my communications person wherever it wasn't see I did and? I didn't hear back. All. Really. Well. Why don't you? Why don't you go ahead and just reach out to them again And I said, well, how about this? I'm handing you business car. How about you reach out. and. That resulted in. No. Response. And so the reason I tell the story is. This was a person who has a mon- Yana. Somebody else not me. Instead of a a right now, and I'll do it kind of an attitude and I can see the difference in results in people based on leadership style and I'm watching Joe Biden, and he is in the Montana. Not Me Camp. And I'm seeing Donald trump very much in the. Man of action, Champ And those are very different kinds of ways approaching the world and. I'll just leave you those thoughts. Tomorrow. I don't know I. Think we'RE GONNA dig into Seattle Anarchist Zone A. Little Bit. Not sure some of the things going on. So all these welcome to Jimmy topic suggestions. So on on the facebook messenger at the Republican Uber Dot. com or call the phone number eight, six, six, nine, hundred, eighty, three eleven and leave me your show ideas, topic ideas at Cetera. So thanks for your time and attention this morning please. Do visit the Website Republic keeper Dot Com and find time to sponsor the show if you'd be so kind. Thanks again have a great day and talk to you. Tomorrow.
Join Al Mega for part 9 of this podcast series where we chat with Dion Wilson about how THE MULTIVERSE™ handles data! Please submit questions, comments, we will mention them on the podcast! Stay up-to-date on this project via: WEBSITE (Now Live): www.themultiverse.cloud Facebookwww.facebook.com/Multiverse Discordhttps://discord.gg/gWjVNVz Slackhttps://heroledger.slack.com Twitterhttps://twitter.com/ourmverse Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/rmultiverse/ If you have any questions/comments please leave them below. Thanks for listening! Host: Al Mega: @TheRealAlMega / @AlMegaPodcast Network: @UndercoverCapes / https://www.facebook.com/undercovercapes1/Parent Site: https://www.comiccrusaders.com/Sister Sites: http://www.geekerymagazine.com/ / http://www.splinteredpress.com/ NOTE: This podcast is for informational purposes only. The information presented in this podcast should not be taken as investment advice. Please consult your financial consultant for investment advice…etc. etc. etc. Comic Crusaders does not directly sale market or endorse the crypto products mentioned in this podcast etc. etc. etc….” Got It?!
Tune in to part 8 of 5 of our series on The Multiverse™, today Dion Wilson and Jorn van Zwanenburg are back to discuss more elements the make up the Multiverse™, with Comic Chain™ and Arbiter™, tune in to learn how it works and more…… Stay up-to-date on this project via: WEBSITE (Now Live): https://themultiverse.cloud Facebookwww.facebook.com/Multiverse Discordhttps://discord.gg/gWjVNVz Slackhttps://heroledger.slack.com Twitterhttps://twitter.com/ourmverse Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/rmultiverse/ If you have any questions/comments please leave them below. Thanks for listening! Host: Al Mega: @TheRealAlMega / @AlMegaPodcast Network: @UndercoverCapes / https://www.facebook.com/undercovercapes1/Parent Site: https://www.comiccrusaders.com/Sister Sites: http://www.geekerymagazine.com/ / http://www.splinteredpress.com/ This podcast is for informational purposes only. The information presented in this podcast should not be taken as investment advice. Please consult your financial consultant for investment advice...etc. etc. etc. Comic Crusaders does not directly sale market or endorse the crypto products mentioned in this podcast etc. etc. etc...." Got It?!
R.I.P. Michi Calhoun, aka the original W(S)P mascot and greatest German Shepherd who ever lived. We're going deep again, homies. Grab your scuba gear. It's the W(S)P State of the Union address on this episode. I'm discussing all of the difficult world issues from the BLM movement to world wide sex trafficking to the divisive media coverage to all sorts of gum bumping. I finish up with some brief fight talk and this weekend's Overeem vs. Saki card. Come rock with your boy Moody Hank; I'm not going anywhere, hawmies. The W(S)P, If We Don't Got It, You Don't Want It. Seth Geko Music: https://open.spotify.com/artist/517vwx86G0DIBCnea6ubTX?si=jXi3-N1wSbGFp8-Rk-iujw Instagram: @therealsethgeko The W(S)P official playlist on Spotify: "That Ol' Dope Shit" Seth Geko MMA Blog: https://shittingatwork.wordpress.com
With all the commotion here tomorrow, I think it'll be yet another night time show, 6 to 9PM ET, 3 to 6PM PT! “album Tracks APlenty! THREE HOURS WORTH! I won't forget the featured artists of the week Ronnie Dark, Clay Howard, and Joe Benoit! The Music Authority LIVE STREAM Show & Podcast...recorded and on Mixcloud, Player FM, Stitcher, Tune In, Podcast Addict, Cast Box, Radio Public, and Pocket Cast, APPLE iTunes, AND Google Play Music! AND NOW ON MORNINGS IN CANADA! https://s1.citrus3.com:2000/public/HCRRadio Hamilton Co-Op Radio! Follow the show on TWITTER JimPrell@TMusicAuthority! Are you listening? How does and can one listen in? Let me list the ways...Listen LIVE here - https://fastcast4u.com/player/jamprell/ Podcast recorded here - https://themusicauthority.transistor.fm/ Take a moment and share this post! Share it! Share it!! Share It!!! SHARED! The Music Authority LIVE STREAM Show & Podcast! Please check out my shows special recorded hour, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at 7PM UK time, 2PM ET, 11AM PT Now Rocking The KOR! www.koradio.rocks ALSO! Hear a completely different recorded hour of Power Pop, Rock, Soul, Rhythm & Blues...NO TWO LIVE SHOWS THE SAME, Friday, Saturday and Sunday on Pop Radio UK 6PM UK, 1PM ET, 10AM PT!July 6, 2020, Monday, set three…The Bookends - She's Got It (Jem Records)Nick Eng - Between You And MeNick Eng - On Cloud 9Microcosm – ScenesNorth Of Never - The RiverJoe Benoit - The Longest WeekendWatchmen - Get SoloSignal 13 - Stay With MeSalamander Jive - Zappatron [Raymond]Ronnie Dark - B1 Bitter Pill [Sky]Paper Fishes - Orange PaintPatrick James - Give Me A PieceReclaim Vienna - 1. InfamousClay Howard - 08 - Let You Fall [Clay Howard Doesn't Know Who You Are Either]Glass Ankle - For Another DaySoulBird – Thank You [Raven Kings]
This Is New - Really "What was I thinking of?!!!!???" Have you ever said that just after doing something that just wasn't good enough, in fact, well below what you expect of yourself? I know I have and not in so nice words ,O/ It wasn't us but it was and if we try to fudge it, make excuses we don't feel right - do we? In fact, we are uncomfortable inside, misaligned, and incongruent. We know we underperformed and really don't need anyone to tell us because we know better than anyone. And there's nothing more simple to never let it happen again, well nearly never. This is new, it's complicated and never told before - NOT! It's been around for bloomin' ages, from the times of ancient stoicism. What is it? You know by now all will be revealed to you when you listen and when you do you will say "Got It!" Then you will probably email me feedback@personaldevelopmentunplugged.com and share with me your thoughts and 'takeaways' Talking of sharing, please pay this forward and share this podcast https://personaldevelopmentunplugged.com/188-this-is-new-really/ Shine brightly Paul Please remember you can leave a comment or email me with questions, requests and feedback. If you have enjoyed this or any other episode please share and subscribe. Just email me feedback@personaldevelopmentunplugged.com Go to paulclough.co.uk/subscribe to learn more Or simply click here to go straight to Apple Music / iTunes to subscribe OR leave a review If you want to access my FREE HYPNOSIS tracks go to paulcloughonline.com/podcast Follow and inter-react on twitter @pcloughie Why not look for me and the podcast on > SPOTIFY AND the app Castbox I'm also in iHeart radio YouTube - copy n paste UC3BlpN4voq8aAN7ePsIMt2Q into search bar The Libsyn podcast page http://personaldevelomentunplugged.libsyn.com Stitcher, tunein, learnoutloud, Google Play Music Here is your show on RadioPublic: Listen to Personal Development Unplugged on RadioPublic
On episode 244, Appa's back to say goodbye, at least for now - but we get to celebrate his time on the show and catch up with him. There's some news to cover with the 17.4 patch including a huge battlegrounds update. There's a lot to look forward to with Masters Tour Jönköping in the tournament section and there's a season of GM to wrap up - and for Decksplanations, the three hosts get together for one last Got It or Goofed It. Thank you for everything, Appa! News - 33:24 Firere Festival of Music and Vengeance 17.4 Patch Tournaments - 51:43 Grandmasters Qualifiers Ladder Decksplanations - 1:18:06 Got it or Goofed it The Show Notes for this week’s episode are on our Website You can monetarily support our show on Patreon Join us every week live, by following us on Twitch Join our community chats in our Discord channels and write in to our Email Follow us on Twitter as well as like share and follow us on Facebook Save our RSS feed or subscribe to us on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Music Play And please leave a review on iTunes or Stitcher
i was craving sugar so i bought the worst cheesecake i could find.DOWNLOAD RECORDINGsubscribe to the podcast here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/5432fun(intro by omar)Las Robertas “Alto Astral” from Waves of the NewTough Tits “Anxious” from Anxious/No KnowMore Eaze “heteronymic” from firesid3 ch@t r00mFuture Girls “Middle America” from (The) Problem Of Motivation (Demos)Drahla “Burden of Proof” from Faux TextThe Trolls “Summer Song” from Treasure Mountain EPHoop “Good Dregs” from Super GenuineHovvdy “Friend” from TasterSchande “What If It’s In Calligraphy?” from I Wrote ThatSarcasm “Instant Automaton” from Malarial Bog EPspit-take “something sometimes” from frog rockKindling “Can’t Hardly Wait” from Kindling / Kestrels SplitKestrels “Thorn” from Kindling / Kestrels Splittough boy “sleep” from helloInspector 22 “Lesson Learnin'” from Devil Is FriendLaser Background “Hymnals” from Dark Nuclear Bogstricot “Namu” from 3Piss Test “Nerd Zoo” from Piss TestSam Gas Can “I’m Sick (of Rock & Roll)” from KING ZOLO EPDiners “You’ve Got It” from SplitMr. Husband “Shake That Dream” from Plaid On PlaidWurld Series “Landslide” from Air Goofybeing a living thing “necromancy” from live songs
Professor Wouassa - Fallou Fall - Yobale Ma! (Matasuna)Erik Truffaz - Lune Rouge - Lune Rouge (Warner France)Yazz Ahmed - Barbara - Polyhymnia (Ropeadope)E1sbar - Star World - The Legend Of (polar vortex)Wilroy - 4F3D63 Hex - Future Bubblers 3.0 (Brownswood)The Mighty Mocambos - Macumba - 2066 (Fat Beats)Mark De Clive Lowe - Mystic Brew - Church Session (World Galaxy/Alpha Pup)Shigeto - MCW - Versions (Ghostly International)Jukka Eskola Soul Trio - Old Stones - Steamy! (Timmion)GoGo Penguin - Control Shift - Ocean In A Drop (Music For Film) (Blue Note)Joe Farrell - Great Gorge - Moon Germs (CTI)Chambime - Rumba Pacifica - RespirarRobert Glasper - Aah Whoa (feat. Muhsinah & Queen Sheba) - Fuck Yo Feelings (Loma Vista)Black Pumas - Touch The Sky - Black Pumas (ATO / Fontana North)Roy Ayers Ubiquity - Red, Black & Green - Red, Black & Green (Polydor)Electro Deluxe - Hold On - Apollo (Stardown)Kizzy Crawford - Real Love - The Way I Dream (Freestyle)Kaidi Tatham - You Find That I've Got It (2000black)Ursula 1000 - Bossa Hey (feat. Isabelle Antena) - Esoterique (Insect Queen Music)Golden Dawn Arkestra - Darkness Falls - Darkness Falls On The Edge Of Time (self)Down To The Bone - Watch Me Fly (Earth Sold Remix) [feat. Imaani] - Funkin' Around: A Collection Of Remixes & Reworks (Dome)
Ashley Benjamin – “Never Enough” (Random Soul) Damond Ramsey, Greg Lewis & Thommy Davis – “Lets Make Love” (Greg Lewis & Thommy Davis) Steven Stone & Pete Simpson – “You’ve Got It” (Original) The Shapeshifters – “Second Chance” (Club) Mo’Key – “So Close To You” (Original) TRACK OF THE WEEK Seamus Haji ft Bryan Chambers […] The post Essential House 30th Mar 2020 appeared first on SSRadio.
Hello Gorgeous Souls! You guys asked for it, so now you GOT IT! In this episode of the Manifestation Babe podcast, Brennan and I are going to talk about the topic we left out last episode, sex. We are going to be very OPEN and TRANSPARENT today. I promise you, we go places I NEVER thought we would go on this podcast. You guys will not be disappointed! We are going to shed some light on how to keep the SPARK alive when you spend 24/7 with your partner. Brennan and I have been spending most of our time together for the past three years. Over time, it would have been easy for us to get sick of each other and take each other for granted. We would have lost that passion and polarity that most couples have at the beginning of a relationship or if they spend hours, days or weeks apart. However, we are not only going to share our personal tips to combat this, but we are also going to share content we have learned from other experts that have helped us take our relationship to the next level. We are going to talk about the different needs of the masculine and feminine energies, accelerators versus breakers in the bedroom, and we will teach you about Orgasmic Manifestation! Today, you will have our JUICY insight around intimacy, and you’ll get the perspective of someone with masculine energy, Brennan. If you feel like this episode resonated with you or you know someone who needs to hear it, please be sure to tag Brennan at @brennankingokeefe, and me @manifestationbabe on Instagram and share it with your community to spread the word! Also if you have any questions please email us at hello@manifestationbabe.com. P.s. Did you hear the big news?! We decided to RE-OPEN the doors to Manifestation Babe Academy! I wanted to come up with a way to support you during this time and at the HIGHEST level possible, and I knew this program was the way! Right now, I am offering a 12-month INTEREST FREE installment plan for MBA, something I have never done before. This is the LAST time MBA will be offered this year and in this iteration! If you’re ready to take back your power and learn to manifest the reality of your wildest dreams, sign up for Manifestation Babe Academy here! Doors CLOSE on April 1st @ 11:59pm PST. In This Episode You Will Learn: Why were we out of breath at the beginning of this podcast ;)? (4:05) The difference between masculine and feminine energies (13:55) The 3 needs of the masculine energy (19:20) The 3 needs of the feminine energy (20:14) Three things that shut down the masculine (21:49) Three things that shut down the Feminine (23:43) Being a generous lover (29:50) What are breaks and accelerators mean when it comes to your sex life (34:45) The importance of communication (47:30) The concept of desire and its struggles (54.37) Questions We Answer: How do you resist the comfort level of feeling like roommates and bringing back the passion? (10:37) What fires up intimacy and what shuts it down? (17:48) Why is sex such an important need of the masculine? (26:10) What happens if the other person is not meeting your needs? (30:16) What is “The Erotic Blueprint”? (40:11) What are Brennan’s breaks and accelerators as a masculine? (45:25) What practical tips have helped us with intimacy? (58:25) How do we see intimacy? (1:07:25) What is “Orgasmic Manifestation”? (1:08:28) Links/Resources Alison Armstrong's Website Jaiya's website: The Erotic Blueprint Tony Robbins’ Date With Destiny The Manifestation Babe Academy Manifestationbabe.com/links Follow me on Instagram Join our Manifestation Babe community! Visit our website!
Steven Stone & Pete Simpson – “You’ve Got It” (Original) The Shapeshifters – “Second Chance” (Club) Mo’Key – “So Close To You” (Original) Groove Junkies & Reelsoul ft Indeya – “Good Love” (Groove N Soul Classic Vox) Frankstar ft Becka – “The Real Thing” (Soulful) TRACK OF THE WEEK Damond Ramsey, Greg Lewis & Thommy […] The post Essential House 16th Mar 2020 appeared first on SSRadio.
The Shapeshifters – “Second Chance” (Club) Mo’Key – “So Close To You” (Original) Groove Junkies & Reelsoul ft Indeya – “Good Love” (Groove N Soul Classic Vox) Frankstar ft Becka – “The Real Thing” (Soulful) Shane D – “Shock The Beat” (Original) TRACK OF THE WEEK Steven Stone & Pete Simpson – “You’ve Got It” […] The post Essential House 9th Mar 2020 appeared first on SSRadio.
Summary: Today's podcast is an oldie but goodie. A podcast we first released in May 2019 was so popular we decided to share it again! In this episode, we take you on a journey of how self-service has woven its way into so many of our daily activities from paying for gas to checking in for a flight and really what are the consumer expectations for these types of offerings. Resources: Chart your Path for Retail Growth - Connect with our Retail Experts here Blog: Retail Self-Service: Today, it's WAY more than self-checkout Transcription: Amy Lombardo: Hello again, this is Amy Lombardo, your host for this episode of Commerce Now. In today's episode we're joined by Matt Redwood who is the head of self service checkout for Diebold Nixdorf's retail division. And today we'll discuss how self- service has woven its way into so many of our daily activities from paying for gas to checking into a flight and really what are the consumer expectations for these types of offerings. So hi, Matt and welcome to COMMERCE NOW. Matt Redwood: Thank you for having me. Amy Lombardo: Always a pleasure to talk to our friends in the retail division. So Matt, let's talk a little bit about your background first. Can you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself? Matt Redwood: Absolutely. So as you said, my title is head of self service for Diebold Nixdorf. Been in the company about 15 months now. It was brand new position within the company and DN saw the need to put more focus on the self-service checkout. So look after the self-service checkout business for Europe, Middle East and Africa. I've been in and around self-service my whole career. I've been in retail for a nearly 10 years. So, I've worked with multiple different retailers all across the globe on their self-service strategy. But also that self-service implementations to make sure they're deploying the right solution into the right place. Amy Lombardo: Very good. So Matt, what I wanted to do was start at a very high level and talk about some macro trends that are shaping the retail industry because you can't get away with reading any headline of any major industry publication these days without seeing something about self-service in there. So can you talk a little bit about some of those macro trends that are shaping the retail industry today? Matt Redwood: Sure. So self-service in the form that we see at most grocery stores has been around for 15 years, which you know in the retail landscape is a long time. But it's taken a long time I think for retailers really to understand self-service checkout to get to a position that deploying it in the right way and of course for the consumers to adopt it in the right way. I think we're really at a tipping point now where from a consumer perspective is, there's self-service in every part of our life. Whether you go to the gas station, whether you go to the train station on the app or you go to the grocery, there is a self-service option and what we see in our data is that consumers really now see it as point of convenience for them. They see the benefits of self-service checkout and they've moved past the point of not only wanting it but they actually now dictate it to retain it. Matt Redwood: So we have a lot of retail customers that come and want to work with us purely because that's [00:02:30] amazing that stores are actually demanding it. I think when self-service initially came on the scene and a lot of retailers saw it as a great way to strip costs out of that store. And so a lot of retailers, particularly in grocery, really went for very very high density self-service checkout deployment. They stripped a lot of stuff out of their stores but what they came to realize that actually they saw a bit of a drop in the consumer experience within their stores and I think the assumption was that they put self-service checkout and they remove staff, customers will use it and everything will be fine. But actually what happened is that had a detrimental effect on the consumer experience in the store because there weren't staff to help where consumers really valued the experience within the store. Matt Redwood: So what other retailers now do is actually, it's not about a reduction in staff, it's about a redistribution in staff. Amy Lombardo: Right. Matt Redwood: If you take tasks that were normally done by the system and you give it to the customer to do, that frees up that member of staff to then be in other areas of the store to make sure that customers can find products, or the shelves are well stocked, they're well priced. So actually getting the experience right or getting the efficiency right at the self-service checkout as a knock on effect on the customer experience all the way right back through the store. Amy Lombardo: Right. So Matt, can you explain how consumer's knowledge and their comfort level is shifting in terms of how consumers are engaging with the self-service technology today versus maybe what they did when retailers first started introducing it many years ago? Matt Redwood: Sure. So I think there's really a perception shift with self-service checkout that's happened over recent years. I think when self-service was first introduced to stores, there was a bit of negativity and a bit of push back from consumers because they saw it as a replacement of the members of staff within the store, especially very loyal consumers that went to the same store every single week to do their shopping. They built a reputation with the member of staff. The thought of that member of staff being taken away and replaced by a machine was hit with a lot of negativity from consumers. The shift that's really happened over the last couple of years is consumers value the choice, the choice to check out or to interact with a brand, a retailer in the way that they want. Matt Redwood: So now what we see a lot of retailers doing is focusing on giving consumers as many channels to shop within their stores or checkout within their stores as possible. So the role of the assistant has changed completely from just a member of staff and the checkout to really kind of a customer experience manager within the store. So the tasks that would normally be done by an assistant at a point of sale system will now be done by the consumer either on a mobile device or self-service checkout or a kiosk. Matt Redwood: And that frees up that member of staff to actually deliver the right level of customer experience within that store. So I think the perceptional shift has been away from that machine is taking a member of staff's job to actually that machine is an option for me to check out of the store and it's freed up the member of staff to deliver a better customer experience somewhere else in the store where I wouldn't normally get it. Amy Lombardo: So Matt, I wanted to comment on what you just said because I think about how when I go to my local grocery store and I use self-checkout all the time, maybe because I'm a control freak and I like to see what I'm actually scanning and paying for. I let my kids do it sometimes, but then I hear time and time again, you'll see certain generations that come up and they say, I don't want to use this, this takes longer. And there's always a problem with it. And I'm just wondering is that a perception issue? Is it a training issue? You know, can you comment on that a little bit in terms of maybe just generational preferences and using self-service? Matt Redwood: Sure. I always say to retailers, deploying self-service checkout is not as simple as deploying a point of sale solution because innately it's a change in so many processes in your store. So we really refer to self-service checkout as a business change solution because it enables retailers A. To make their stores more efficient and but also B. Delivering a much, much better customer experience to their consumers. But the byproduct of that is because of the interaction is so different between the brand and the consumer, that retailer has to change so many processes in their stores for self-service to really be efficient and work well. Matt Redwood: So things like cash management, how they staff their stores, how the staff interact with the customers, how their customers interact with them as a brand, all changes. So there's a huge amount of operational shift that has to happen. So I'd say a big part of getting self-service right is how you operationalize it. Ultimately it puts a lot more onus on the staff to deliver a better customer experience because you're taking away so much human interaction within the store. But when [00:07:30] staff do interact with consumers, it's that much more important that they deliver a much, much better service. So I think it's probably a combination of not just the technology but how you staff the stores, how you operationalize your stores. It all comes together to really deliver the right customer experience. Amy Lombardo: Got It. And so in self-checkout or really varying ways to shop, it goes beyond just self-checkout. So there's smart phones, there's handheld scanning devices in the stores, [00:08:00] all of these different types of self service options. How have these changed the way consumers engage with brands? Matt Redwood: Well, I think it's giving consumers a lot more choice in terms of how they do interact with the brand. If you think about a customer journey of a grocery shopper five years ago, they'd make the decision that they want to go shopping and that may be influenced by family or what they're going to eat tonight, what they have in the fridge. [00:08:30] They'd make the choice to go to the store. They'd shop that store, they'd pick their products, they'd go to the checkout, they'd check out and they'd leave. Matt Redwood: Now what we're seeing is the customer journey is actually a lot more cyclical and yeah, retailers really have to focus on the digital journey. So how do I influence that consumer when they're away from my store, when they're away from my brand? So yeah, while they're watching type TV, how do I influence them to actually shop at my store, rather go to a competitor store and then how do I drive that consumer into that store [00:09:00] and enrich that customer journey when they get there? Matt Redwood: So give them the choice to shop your brand in the way that they want. Once they get to your store, enable them to shop the store in the way that they want, but put the right technology in there to enrich that consumer experience. Apply the right level of staffing to the store as well to supplement that technology journey. Allow them to check out in the way that they want. I think now more than ever we're seeing retailers really put the most amount of choice in that technology [00:09:30] that consumers can use to interact with a brand than ever before. Matt Redwood: But then it doesn't stop when they leave the store. Once they left the store, how do I influence that consumer to come back my store and actually driving the consumer into the store and actually making sure they come back is as a bigger part of the customer journey as the in store piece. So just giving the consumer a good in store experience isn't enough anymore. You've really got to enrich the consumer experience all the way around the circle. Amy Lombardo: [00:10:00] Do we see custom retail apps tied into self service options? So I think of Target for example, and I have their cartwheel app and I always get special discounts given to me just through the app. And then a lot of times then it's for the ease of self service. So do we see that customized apps maybe have any type of leverage on how self-service is used? Matt Redwood: Yeah, absolutely. So [00:10:30] when you think about a mobile app, and more than ever, every single consumer has a mobile, a piece of technology that allows them to effectively never go to a store again. But what retailers can do with that app is they can actually influence that consumer come to that particular brand or that particular store. And as you said that may be through personalized adverts, it could be through promotions or through a loyalty system. But ultimately that's an amazing tool for retailers to, I wouldn't say target [00:11:00] specific consumers, but definitely engage with consumers when they're away from that store or make sure they come into their store. And then really the use case flips because if you take the online second screening type of example of, I want to buy a TV. I might go into a store and look at TVs, but there I'll be using my mobile phone to second screen. And actually I'm researching prices all the time. Matt Redwood: So I'm now a professional shopper because I'm price matching as I'm going through the consumer journey. So it's really important that [00:11:30] retailers don't shy away from mobile. They actually embrace it because consumers don't like to be forced down a particular path. They want choice and they want clarity as well. Clarity of what they're buying. Clarity of pricing. So really retailers have to accept that every consumer has that mobile device and really put a lot of focus on using that to enrich the in store experience. Matt Redwood: Of course., as well, consumers could apply the application to allow them to actually shop the store. So scanning products and [00:12:00] actually use it as the checkout. So yeah, self-service checkout then becomes a supplement to a mobile application because it allows them to finalize the journey within the store, potentially pay cash or pay card or get help from an assistant or coupons or loyalty. So really the self-service checkout on the mobile device shouldn't be seen as competing technologies. They really supplement each other. Amy Lombardo: That's an interesting way of looking at it. So when a retailer is ready to make the shift to self-service or they need to modify their existing plan, something's not working right, maybe they are ready to add on some new functionality. What's your advice on how that retailer begins? And I ask you this because I go back to one of your initial comments here was the over simplification of self-service solution. So you can't just set it and forget it. So you know, talk to us a little bit about some of those advice pieces. Matt Redwood: [00:13:00] Absolutely. So really important, as I said previously, not to consider self-service checkout as another point of sale solution. And as you said, which I'm going to use actually set and forget. We don't want any sets and forgets because it's not a guarantee that our consumer is going to use that device. So if anyone wants any help with that process, we have some great advisory services where we work with retailers specifically on identifying the right solution to put into their stores A. For what they're trying to achieve as a [00:13:30] business but B. For their consumers. So staff from a data point of view work out what the trading profiles of your store are. Work out what you're trying to achieve by putting self-service checkout at the store. Is it efficiency, is it customer experience or is it just because everyone else is doing it or your biggest competitor is doing it? Matt Redwood: That's quite an important [inaudible 00:13:51] to start from. And then I think really focused on the customer journey. So why do your shoppers shop at your store and what kind of customer experience are they [00:14:00] expecting? If you can nail those three points, then you can really identify what type of self-service checkout to put into your store. But then more importantly, how you operationalize it within your store. Matt Redwood: So the landscape that we see now with retailers, particularly with retailers that are quite far advanced down the self-service checkout journey, they're not just putting one type of self-service checkout in to a store, they're putting three, four, five different types of self-service into a store and really focusing that particular solution [00:14:30] at a particular customer demographic. A. It delivers them the best operational efficiencies but it also delivers the best customer experience for their consumer, because it gives them the choice. So I would say focus on the operations and focus on getting the right solution for your stores and for your customers and then operationalize it in the right way. Amy Lombardo: That was a good way of listing it out here for our listeners. So you talked about some of these new industries or just [00:15:00] the fact that retailers want to get on board if they're not there with self-service. Can you talk a little bit about maybe some of the unexpected types of industries that you're seeing? Because we all know of the grocery model or the C-store that it's pretty easy to grab something quickly, pay and go. But what are some of those like unexpected industries? Matt Redwood: Sure. Self-service has been around for almost 15 years in the grocery industry, but for the first time I think retailers outside of grocery are starting [00:15:30] to sit up and notice self-service checkout as a way of enabling them to deliver the right in-store experience. So we're talking to fashion retailers, the petrol retailers, the GM retailers, the DIY retailers. Ultimately there should be no bounds to self-service checkout. The same person that shops in a grocery store is going to be the same person that goes to the DIY store on a Saturday because they're renovating the house or goes to the petrol convenience store because they want to buy petrol for their car [00:16:00] or takes their family shopping and goes through a fashion retailer. It's the same consumer. So I think we as a supplier to the industry really need to realize that actually every consumer is the same whatever shopping type their shopping in. And so if a consumer is demanding self-service in a grocery environment, why wouldn't they expect it in any other shopping environment? Amy Lombardo: I think it makes our lives much easier and it gives you that piece of empowerment and control your shopping experience a little bit. If you're making the list [00:16:30] and you're checking your coupons, why shouldn't you just be able to finish the transaction as well? But maybe that's just me. Matt Redwood: I completely agree. Amy Lombardo: So Matt, I think this is a good place to wrap up our discussion today and I thank you for joining us here and sharing your insights. And to our listeners out there, if you're interested in more information on self service and retail, go to dieboltnixdorf.com/retailgrowth or click on the link in the podcast show notes. Until next time, please keep checking back on iTunes or however [00:17:00] you listen to podcasts for new topics on COMMERCE NOW.
Got a very good buddy of mine that has been a diehard Kobe fan since he first came into the league... The irony is that this dude, who we will call “The Bullet,” is also one of the few people in this world that is close to Michael Jordan... Soon after the news of Kobe's tragic accident, The Bullet sent me a YouTube video titled “The Mindset Of A Winner,” which is a very recent sit down in-depth interview with KB... When the host asked Kobe how he got so mentally and emotionally strong without being phased by naysayers and critics, this was his response.: “You got to look at the reality of the situation... You got to get over yourself... It's not about you man... You are worried about how people are going to perceive you and you are embarrassed because you shot 5 air balls... You are not that important... GET OVER YOURSELF.... And then after that, you gotta ask yourself, why did those airballs happen? GOT IT...” Kobe then proceeded to talk about how he played 35 games spread out over a high school season and then went directly to the NBA where he played an 82 game schedule with a ton of back to back games... He then went and studied the tape of the multiple air balls that were happening late in games and figured out each shot was right on line but just short... The problem was evident, he didn't have the strength in his legs. The solution was simple, he needed to build strength in his lower body... Fucking incredible. Without the host asking for any specific moment in which he was criticized or ridiculed, Kobe immediately addressed a very specific time in which he struggled physically and mentally... Kobe revealed that it was through these struggles that he was able to develop a very liberating perspective about self-importance, while also figuring out exactly what he needed to do to address the issue and get better. Professional athletes are so often driven by ego and can be very hard-headed when it comes to making adjustments. When critiqued, a common response is either denial of any shortcomings or a dire urge to fight back... As huge of a superstar that Kobe Bryant was, even he was able to realize that no matter who you are, don't ever think you are so big that the entire world gives two fucks about you and your problems... We all have our own lives and our own issues that we need to address. So instead of preoccupying ourselves with the superficial opinions of irrelevant outsiders, let's spend that time and energy figuring out what we have to do to get better because at the end of the day, our moment by moment improvement is the absolute only thing that matters... Bottom line is exactly what Kobe so brilliantly laid out for all of us… GET OVER YOURSELF. -EB
Top Listing Agent Show - Real Estate Coaching & Training with Chadi Bazzi
Hey there. Welcome to another episode of the top listing agent show, this week, I am going to be sharing with you another book review. This one I am super pumped about sharing with you. It is a very small book that I bought about a year ago and it is one of the very few books that I buy that I do not read right away. I think the reason I did not read into it is because of its size, you see sometimes in life we judge things and this is what I did, I thought to myself its is a small book therefore it might now have the Big ideas or strategies I need right now so I will get to it later. Boy, that was a mistake cause this small book spoke to me big time, yes a lot of what is shared in it is not new to me, but it had all these little reminders that I needed for me and some that I want to pass on to you as your Mentor. The book is How Successful People Grow by John Maxwell, the famous author on everything Leadership. I think it would be safe for me to say this, any book you read by John Maxwell is going to be a great book, whether it is a small book or a big book. Let me remind you again, that each book review has 3 objectives. 1- For me to share with you whether you should invest your time and money on the book. 2. To extract some inspiration from the book to share with you. 3. To extract one exercise to share with you. Ok, Lets begin. The book has 139 small pages and 15 Chapters in all. The only thing that I did not like about the book was that the letters are a bit small, made it a bit hard for me to make out what I was reading, but I got through it. The author hooks from the get go as he titled the introduction of the book “Growth is the pathway to your potential.” He goes on to say and I am quoting him word for word here. That potential is one of the most wonderful words in any language. Think about it, how many times has someone used that word on you, someone telling you that they see the potential in you and or you see the potential in them or within yourself you recognize the potential in you. He goes on to say, that potential looks forward with optimism. It is filled with hope. It promises success. It implies fulfillment. It hints at greatness. Potential is a word based on possibilities. Think about you potential as a human being and you get excited, right? Do you have personal potential? Absolutely. Your personal potential is what you could be - the person you become. And since you are listening to this podcast, I believe you also have the desire to reach your potential. SO now the question becomes, how do you do it? John says, the answer is Growth. And I know you have heard me say the following a few times, if you want to go for it, you have to grow it. As a matter of fact, I am going to keep on bouncing what he is referencing in this book to what I have shared with you on this podcast show to illustrate a big point at the end of this episode. In Chapter one the author shares the following statement that I wanted to relay to you and that is … If you focus on goals, you may hit goals - but that doesn’t guarantee growth. If you on growth, you will grow and always hit goals. Get it, do you understand what I just said, becareful what you focus on, he says that it is more important to focus on growth then it is to focus on a goal. I know what you maybe thinking well isn’t growth itself a goal, My Answer is NO. It is a Duty to oneself. Anyone who is committed to grow is going to encounter some growth traps and John shares 8 of them with us and there are three that stuck out for me in reference to my conversation with real estate agents when I first meet them and they are. The timing gap - its not the right to begin, come on now, you know what I am talking about, you have said this a ton of times, and better yet, how many times a buyer or a seller says that to you. You got to give that up, anytime you see something that you can do or buy or experience that you know is going to cause you to grow, you got to go for it right away. Kill this excuse of time, and if you recall a few episodes ago I said to you, become like the kind of client you want to attract. AHA. Got It? 2. The Mistake Gap - Im afraid of making a mistake, in the words of a real estate agent, it sounds like, what if they ask me a question that I do not know the answer to? Or what if they give me an objection that I don’t know how to handle, ok, enough I think you get my point. And 3. The perfection Gap - I have to find the best way before I start. In the words or a real estate agent, it sounds like, I have to find the bets script, the best objection handler, the bets business card, the best open house sign, the best dialer, the best listing presentation, the best coach, etc. I get it, I have been there, here is my advice to you, these 3 gaps are killing your business and your potential. Again I remind you, we live in a very magnetic world of like attracts like. Become the Kind Of Person You Want TO work with. I also believe that most people have these gaps because they have secret fears. But here is the good news, we also have Faith. So the question you have to ask yourself when you are faced with fear is … Which emotion I am going to allow to be stronger, Fear or Faith? And the answer to this question is very important because the stronger emotion is going to be the one that wins. This means that it is time to begin to feed your faith and starve your fears. This also means that you must know yourself to grow - Gary Vaynerchuk talks about this a lot, he calls it self awareness and there is an entire chapter just on this topic in this book. John says that there are three kinds of people when it comes to having direction in life. People who don’t know what they would like to do People who know what they would like to do but don’t do it People who know what they would like to do and do it. Aha, which of these 3 are you? I say it don’t matter which one you have been, what matters is which one you are going to decide to be right now. I want you to be one of the very few who know what they would like to and do it. Easier said than done, right? Yes, I know that and most people do not follow through on anything not only because they have a fear but because they don’t have belief. They don’t believe in themselves. John says, you must see value in yourself to add value to yourself. Let me repeat that one, one more time for it to sink in. You must see value in yourself to add value to yourself. You get it now. He is talking about self confidence and self esteem of which most people do not have it. If you do not realize that you have genuine value and that you are worth investing in, then you will never put in the time and effort needed to grow to your potential. A great example would be an agent who knows that they need to learn how to prospect for new seller leads, they identify a mentor LIKE ME who can help them kill in on the phones and take a new listing at least once a week every week and they see that I have helped others do that, BUT, they don’t have belief in themselves therefore they talk themselves out of making the investment in the program, when in essence, they are not really investing in the program, they are investing in themselves, investing in their self growth, investing in their dreams and their vision. You Must Level Up Your Beliefs to Level Up Your Life. Self esteem is the single most significant key to a person behavior. Low self esteem puts a ceiling on your potential. The value we place on ourselves is usually the value others place on us. Think about that one, one more time. The value we place on ourselves is usually the value others place on us, and you wonder why so many people do not want to work with you. I get this point so much because a very long time I go, I saw no value in me and of course people can pick up on that energy and once I committed To my personal growth and I started to grow and I started to see me as the most valuable asset to anyone, everyone else saw it and just like that, just like magic, a new better, more powerful version of me was born and here I am hosting a podcast verses listening to one, although I do listen to a lot of podcasts by the way and I am so happy you are listening to mine right now when you can be listening to someone else, I so appreciate you. So now to meet objective 3 of the book review. I will share with you an exercise to build your self image, Guard your self talk. Yup, I know, you heard me tell you this before and the author says that whether you know it or not, there is a conversation going on in your head all the time, this conversation is either an encouraging, inspiring one or one that beats the crap out of you all the time. So watch your self talk. 2. Stop comparing yourself to others. 3. Move beyond your limiting beliefs. 4. Add value to others. 5. Do the right thing, even if its the hard thing. 6. Practice a small discipline daily in a specific area of your life. 7. Celebrate small victories. 8. Embrace a positive vision for your life based on what you value. 9. Practice one word strategy. If you pick just word to describe yourself, what would it be? 10. Take responsibility for your life. Once you do what I have shared with you thus far, seek out a positive environment., on page 53 of the book John shares with you a specific Easy to follow step by step process to do this. I have also told you a million times that you are a product of your environment. Some more inspiring thoughts from this book are as follows. Designing your life is more important that designing your career. You have to give up in order to grow up - letting go of what you love for what you value. Example, giving up financial security today for potential tomorrow. Immediate gratification for personal growth. Giving up addition for multiplication. Learn to ask more questions. Find a Mentor. READ FROM PAGE 115. Help others reach their potential. My friends, there you have it. Not to brag or anything like that, in the past episodes I have shared with you a lot of what is shared with you in this book. However, I am so happy that this is happening as it serves that you are in the right place and you have selected a podcast to listen to that is revealing to you not only how to grow your business but to also keep on growing as a human being. That is my commitment to you, to do whatever it takes to help you become the best version of yourself. And as I shared with you earlier that the author has learned most of what he has learned form people he never met in person, these are the people he met in a book. With that said, Have you read my little mini book The Top Listing Agent Black Book? If yes, thank you and if not, go get it now at TLAblackbook.com, its free and it comes with bonus training videos on how to create a mindset of champion, master lead generation and lead conversion. The entire books is all about how you can become a top listing agent, so go get your copy now at www.TLAblackbook.com Talk to you soon.
This week, Annette gets to have a conversation with Mary Susan McConnell, host of the popular Mama Bear Podcast. The Mama Bear Podcast is a place where women who are raising special needs children can come and hear stories and advice from other women in similar situations. Mary Susan says that men are welcome too of course! Mary Susan talks with Annette about her journey with her husband to adopt their daughter Abiella from a government orphanage in Ghana. It is a beautiful story that is heart wrenching at times as she speaks about the challenges they faced and what it took to finally secure their adoption and bring her home. Abi has Cerebral Palsy and they wanted to get her to her new home so they could provide more care. Mary Susan started the Mama Bear Podcast because she felt isolated and didn’t know where to turn at times. At one point, having not left her home for over two weeks, she realized that there must be many other moms out there just like her. She needed to find others that “Got It.” After connecting with many in social media groups, she started thinking about connecting through a podcast. She started her podcast one night after some encouragement from her husband and it has grown tremendously since that time and now has over 100 episodes. Annette and Mary Susan talk about how important it is for parents of special needs children to get out and find others that you can talk with and rely on for support. They talk about the many challenges of special needs parents such as taking vacations and date nights and how we can find joy in connecting with others. They wrap up by talking about how powerful relationships can be in the special needs community. Mary Susan has also created The Dream Team Coloring Book as a way for everyone to understand how inclusion works. It is available on her website for free and is a great tool for school aged children to learn more about how to be more inclusive. You can connect with Mary Susan McConnell on her website, find her podcast there as well as The Dream Team Coloring Book. https://www.marysusanmcconnell.com/
Penny & Sparrow is a folk music duo from Austin, TX. On their tour through Louisville, Andy Baxter and Kyle Jahnke, the talented guys behind the band, stopped by for a few bourbon pours. We talk about life on the road, their musical creation process, and how their fans give them bourbon at shows. You can catch their latest album, Finch, wherever you stream your music. Show Partners: * Barrell Craft Spirits is always trying to push the envelope of blending whiskey in America. Learn more at BarrellBourbon.com. * Receive $25 off your first order at RackHouse Whiskey Club with code "Pursuit". Visit RackhouseWhiskeyClub.com. * Distillery 291 is an award winning, small batch whiskey distillery located in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Learn more at Distillery291.com. Show Notes: * Pappy Map retires: http://bourbonr.com/blog/pappy-van-winkle-release-map-retires/ * This week’s Above the Char with Fred Minnick talks about the holidays. * How did you all get into music and start the band? * Where does your inspiration come from? * What is your craziest moment with a fan? * How did you get into bourbon hunting? * What bourbon got you hooked? * How does the band work when you live in different states? * Who is the messy one? * What's it like on the road? * What do you listen to on the road? * Have you been on the Bourbon Trail? * Where do you go when bourbon hunting? * Do you ever get free bourbon? * How did fans discover your were into bourbon? * What does it mean to you when someone says your music has changed their life? * Where did the name Penny & Sparrow come from? * Was there a moment where you felt like you made it? * Tell us about your latest album, Finch. 0:00 We like to call ourselves rose a rock occasionally was a rock yeah sleep folk sleep. Good music to procreate to Yeah. Yeah, these are the things that we call Yeah, we discover music as like nobody's working out to Penny and Sparrow like, at least to the best of our knowledge nobody's getting a good pump while they listen to your workout as a stroll. 0:32 Welcome back, everybody. It is Episode 228 of bourbon pursuit. I'm Kenny. And here's the news. The dates for the Kentucky bourbon festival 2020 have been announced. It will take place on September 16 through September 20 of 2020. The festival which draws novice and experienced bourbon lovers to Bardstown, Kentucky every year will celebrate the storied history of distilling America's native spirit during National bourbon Heritage Month. Tickets for the Kentucky bourbon 1:00 festival will be made available for purchase during the summer so make sure you continue to visit Kentucky bourbon festival at KY bourbon festival.com. To stay up to date on all the latest festival happenings and developments. Now for some pursuit series news Episode 15 is now hitting retail shelves across the state of Kentucky. If you're interested in getting a bottle, pay attention because here's the small list of stores that our distributor gave us so you can go out and find your own. Westport whiskey and wine, the party source go big blue liquors depths, fine wine, Ernie spirits bind pig bourbon market, the brown hotel and the brown barrel. We appreciate all the support for going out there and buying a bottle and we hope to bring more here in the future as well. Now it's a sad day in the bourbon world is Blake from bourbon or calm is announced that he's retiring his Pappy release map. It's something that many people around the country including myself used over the years to kind of know when Pappy was gonna be hitting in my state. And Blake he puts it all out there. 2:00 His latest article, that it's time to stop because there's a rare chance that you will ever get it. And if you do, the odds are you are not going to be paying MSRP. He also kind of throws a quick jab in there saying that Sazerac rock really isn't doing anything to prevent counterfeits, nor are they doing anything to stop stores or distributors from playing this game. And you can read more about this in this article within our show notes. Now for today's podcast, I met Andy and Kyle the guys that are behind the band, Penny and Sparrow for the first time back at the 2019 for castle Music Festival in Louisville, Kentucky. I won't ruin the beginning of the podcast for you. But besides being great musicians, and also being incredibly funny, these guys are also really into bourbon. And I'm going to anticipate that after you listen to the stories that these two have to tell about their life on the road, their creation process, and of course, their love for bourbon. You're gonna become a fan as well. Now, it's time for Joe to tell us a little bit about barrel 3:00 spirits. And then you've got Fred Minnick with above the char. 3:05 Hi, this is Joe from barrell craft spirits. We're always trying to push the envelope of blending whiskey in America. Find out more at barrel bourbon.com. 3:15 I'm Fred Minnick, and this is above the char. We're coming up on the holidays. What a wonderful time of year you have your family and your friends together. And you crack open the cork. You pour a little bourbon in your glass, you sip by the fire. It's so magical. It's so wonderful. I absolutely love the holidays. But here's the here's the kicker of it all, is that it is not easy to buy bourbon for people anymore. For God's sakes, I'm trying to figure out what to get some of my friends who I always get bourbon and they get everything already. So here's my recommendations for 4:00 Want to buy your friends who are bourbon fans? Come down to Kentucky or find someone who's in Kentucky and buy private barrel selections. I mean truly, and honestly, those are the best possible gifts that you can get because they are unique. They are unique to that particular store. And if you don't know what a private barrel selection is, it's when a liquor store or a club goes to the distillery and they actually select a barrel of bourbon that is bottled specifically for them. You'll see their sticker on it and then when you give that as a gift to somebody, you can tell them you know, that's one of only 75 or 200 bottles of that bourbon it when that bottles gone, you'll never have any of it again. And in fact, you don't have to go to Kentucky you'll find that whether it's a total wine or a local liquor store in your market or a big chain like Kroger, you'll find that there are excellent private barrel selections there. Just walk up to the cash register and say hey, you have any private 5:00 barrel pics. And if they look at you like you're crazy, you know you're in the wrong store. So hopefully by now if you're listening to this podcast, you've already found your bourbon store. And if you don't have your bourbon store, just ask us in the comments where you should be shopping. And that's this week's above the char. Hey, if you have an idea for above the char hit me up on Twitter or Instagram, hey, even my YouTube, just search my name Fred Minnick. Until next week. Cheers. 5:32 Welcome back to that episode of bourbon pursuit the official podcast of bourbon. Kenny here today just in the basement recording studio, but this is going to be an opportunity that we rarely get. I mean, it's an opportunity where we are trying to find new guests that are able to bring a new dynamic to the podcast. You know, we've had WWE superstars on before and today we're going to have a music artist on that. me you've maybe heard of and if not, you're going to learn more about them too. 6:00 Day. But I want to tell a quick story of how we all kind of got connected here. So, you know, we're starting to get involved with a lot of more music festivals, and, you know, for castle, bourbon and beyond, and so on and so forth. And when you do that, you get put on a media list. And with the media list, you kind of get spammed with a lot of band managers and PR people. And it's usually pretty generic. Sometimes it'll say like, hey, and then they'll be like a variable that says, like dollar sign, insert name here. And it says, like, you got to meet these people. They're great. You can see you can see him on stage at this time. And let me know if you want a chance to have them on your podcast or have them on, you know, maybe in your newspaper article because they don't really tailor it. It's just, you know, just something generic that goes out. But you know, shout out to Joe, Joe's, the PR manager for Penny and Sparrow. And he sent me a very personalized email and it kind of started off and saying like, Oh, hey, like, Listen, these guys are actually like really into bourbon. And that's kind of what kind of kick this off because usually people's 7:00 You know, you gotta have mon like, okay, sure what are we going to talk about? music that is because if we don't have any shared interest in bourbon, this is going to be a pretty, pretty lame for a bourbon podcast. And so we took an opportunity I said, Yeah, that's that's awesome. Let's go meet these guys so we had an opportunity to sync up at four castle after their set. And we talked and I mean, we talked for probably a solid 30 minutes there and I think we just we there's there's magic I mean, there's there's something was happening right all the all the stars were aligning, and, and we really kicked it off. And these guys are huge bourbon nerds. They're really into it. Plus, they make great music. And so I'm happy to be able to introduce these two guys to the show. So today, we've got Eddie Baxter, and Kyle Yankee. They are the duo behind Penny and Sparrow which has been featured in Rolling Stone and they're also came out with the latest album Finch. So fellas, welcome to the show. Hello. Thank you for having us. Greetings to you constant listener. 7:58 So, you know, I couldn't be 8:00 Usually like talk about bourbon like as we usually go into this like it's because we usually have a master distiller somebody get coming on but you know you guys bring a different dynamic to this so we'll talk about bourbon here in a little bit. I kind of want to learn more about you all like talk about the origins of the band. Maybe talk a little bit more about the type of music y'all do as well because I know it's kind of it's like folk music maybe like iron and wine mixed into it kind of talk about like, where you all get your you know, your vibe and everything. folk music iron line is very, very good. A good comparison. We like to call ourselves rose a rock occasionally was a rock Yeah, sleep folk sleep. That's good music to procreate too. Yeah. Yeah, these are the things that we call Yeah, we describe our music as like nobody's working out to Penny and Sparrow leads to the best of our knowledge. nobody's getting a good pump while they listen unless you enjoy your workout as a stroll. Yeah, cuz that is what we can provide a good stroll soundtrack can do that. We started doing music and 9:00 College because I needed a place to stay. My wife knew this guy and 11 other guys that lived in this huge house. That was basically a shithole frat house. 9:10 By the way, not at all. I'm just letting you know this was that many people in a small space with very little air conditioning is filthy is filthy. So I moved in and Kyle and I pretty quickly found out that we both liked music and both sounded pretty okay when we sang together. And man, the rest as they say sort of history. We just kept plugging along and on a small home rig that his mom and dad got him for Christmas, we recorded our first song with the sheer expressed intent of having music that our kids could someday listen to. And here we are eight years later with no kids. 9:46 That's pretty cool for one day they'll listen to it. Yeah, if we procreate Yeah, they'll be able to hear it. They'll be able to they'll be able to get down on it. But I mean that your all's vibe like what you all do. You know I think I read that you make serious songs, but you're not very serious people. 10:00 All right. And that's kind of like the kind of vibe y'all put. I mean, we were down here talking before we started recording here. And we were just cracking jokes left and right. So kind of talk about the music, like where the inspiration comes from the lyrics, everything like that. Yeah, we that's I mean, what we mainly try to do is write basically autobiographical songs, things that we're working through things that would be cathartic to us. 10:26 But that's usually the more internal stuff, which is great. I mean, we talked about it all the time. It's the the deeper conversations Andy and I have. 10:35 But yeah, I mean, I don't we don't live in that part of our we have, I feel like the majority of what we do is, as humans is just light hearted. Yeah. And I remember years ago, when we started doing this, we started taking ourselves really seriously on the front end, right? Like we were we featured ourselves being serious guys writing heartfelt music with good lyrics and the least on stage. Yeah. 11:00 So we'd show up to these shows, and then we would, you know, barely move an inch and not talk and not laugh in between songs just to try and, you know, sing our ass off. And then I remember my dad talking to us after a show one time and more or less said, Jesus Christ, let him come up for air. I think the point he was getting at was like, Look, this isn't who you are, when you're not onstage like, this is sort of more of a character, you're creating this overly serious, you know, facade. So just do you see like that I didn't raise an overly sensitive son that would happen to all that he definitely raised an overly sensitive side is true, he did do that. But he also raised a sort of a goofball as the his old man. And so for what it's worth, it felt so much more free just to be the same person on stage and off. So the same dumb shit jokes that we make in the van is what you get here on a podcast is what you get on stage and we do a show and that feels really nice. Yeah, I mean, I had the opportunity last night to go and check you guys out on the show because you guys are doing your your nationwide tour right? 12:00 Now and I know it's going to be finished by the time this this wraps up. But it's funny because you all you mean exactly exactly what you just said, right? It's it's serious songs, and then you all bring this different vibe to it where you like you try to bring it up lifting. I mean, at one point, Andy, you're doing this thing of like, All right, let's get the clap. Let's get the beat going. And then you would raise your hands slowly, slowly need said as I raise my hands. I want to see your hands in the air. And then when I make like this musical cue of like, stop, everybody stop. No, I don't want to see repeat. And it'd be great job too. Yeah, really impressive. Yeah. And I think I even told him when I do that, I want you to shut the hell up. Yeah. Which is aggressive to say to a crowd of paying customers who came to see you do a thing, but really, that just point needs to be gotten across. And they do they went into it. It's awesome when people are I mean, maybe it's because it's bourbon country. Everybody was slightly hammered, but they really they bought in which is nice. Yeah. I was about to say how many venues do you go to and there's like four roses posters just blasted everywhere over like Morgan headliners last night. Oh, dude. It's this is a different 13:00 chunk of the country okay like people here get the brown water and they're down with it as are we but I feel like we had three gifted bottles to us last night and they were all good Oh really? Yeah they were all nice we had an eagle rare we had a Woodford double oak forgetting one from a another distillery but we got gifted these bottles and I was like, man, it pays to play in Louisville. Yeah, so good. That's awesome. And yeah, free bourbon is always the best bourbon. It's a great bourbon. Yeah, it tastes better. Yeah, that's what we're down here to we were sitting there sampling from my bar before we started here. We had started with some dusty and I think we got we got Booker's right here is what we're sampling on right now. So that's a fact and constant listener. You should know that. We are in a layer. It's not just a studio, we are in a bourbon layer. There is lighting fixtures made out of barrel hoops. There are thousands of bottles surrounding it thousands. Like if it's a powder keg in here, one errant match and the whole blocks going up in flames. Yeah, we're gonna make sure we don't have a gas leak little bit later. He just 14:00 Right, yeah, positive of that. 14:02 And so, you know, the music is fun and it's interesting and you all are been going and I kind of want to talk a little bit more about, you know, the road and the tour because I'm sure you've got fans. I remember there was one fan last night and I think she tried standing up or waving she was she was on the right side about five rows back and every song she was just going crazy. What's your craziest like fan moment that you've had? That's a good question. I'm really good one you know, Skid Row comes to mind. Yeah, Skid Row probably comes to my most likely that mean Andy with a fan 14:36 who loved our stuff. The the man had a few too many drinks and was kind of shifting between being extremely excited and happy to see us like tears of joy seeing us and telling us how much he loved us to literally almost throwing punches at us. And he had some just Jacqueline 15:00 Hi, I'm going on while we were there, oh, he was a psychopath. And he shall remain nameless. But he went by will actually this is not on his birth certificate. So I think it's safe to say this. He introduced himself as joke. That was his name. Yeah. So rule number one. Yeah. Don't be friends with anybody named john. Sure. Yeah. But junk like Kyle said and met us with tears in his eyes saying I'm so glad we got you here. I'm so glad we got your you're going to show them you're going to show them and saying a lot of nonsensical like the hell does this guy mean? So Kyle, and I basically consoling him. Yeah. While he was meeting us, which was really sweet. Like I took it. We're here. We're here. Thank you. So we're also glad you're here. Thank you for this is a gig, right? Yeah, we can still play. And he then proceeds to, you know, basically ask us a really basic question. Like, you know, how far was a draft day? And he's slurring over himself. And as Kyle goes to answer the question, it was just act it out. Yeah. Let's just do a little role play. Yeah. Okay. We're used to this. Yeah. Okay. You I'll be 16:00 junk UBU Okay, and how how long was draft today? Oh the drive Shut up. fuck up, dude. 16:10 So the important parts of that interaction dude, buddy, buddy that's it. Yeah, I took away that took away that's the most important thing that you could Garner from that story is that he said shut the fuck up dude, buddy. And we have ever since us dude buddy as the perfect you know, hey, screw off they want to call somebody and that was with a fan so I don't really know what to do with that other than Hey, thanks, john I'm glad to exist in this weird world of ours. But no no crying outrage like on stage when you're up there and he was just cool calm and collected in a seat. Oh, no, there's no Well, there were some crying outrages he kept screaming out the phrase make them wonder over and over, which we still to this day are not sure what he meant by that. But we're doing our best still junk. If you're listening to this. We are trying to make them wonder every night every night. I think that's 17:00 That's the new lyric to our new new title though new song is what it's got to be. Yeah, it's totally true meta man named junk in Skid Row. We're going to make them 100 mega one day we are eight years later still making them. 17:13 Oh man, that's fantastic. So I guess we'll we'll kind of shift a little bit and we'll kind of talk about bourbon. So kind of talking about your all story with bourbon like, Where are you introduced to it? How did you kind of get into it? Because you know, Kyle, I know last time we talked it you know, you're part of like the r&d next and we talked you're part of like the the hunting party now like you're searching for bottle bottles and stuff. So I think we both got started, I guess similar in time, our our manager Paul's a big collector of bourbon. And he's got this thing called the steel speakeasy, which is really rad. And he was the one who showed us for the first time like, Hey, here's the really nice stuff. You've had a lot of the shitty stuff. Let's try some really good things. And I'm going to talk you through some of the taste notes, some of the flavor profiles just 18:00 Some of them get you get your feet wet a little bit. And I took to it really fast really enjoy it as this Kyle and for me one of the things that keeps me sane on the road is hunting for two things, where books and bourbon so I'll go to liquor stores just along the highway as I'm driving in the van or used bookstores and it's just really neat once you've been introduced to how big this world is. how big the world of dusty hunting is how big the world of rare bottle hunting is, and raffles are like the secondary market when you get invited into that and you see how crazy it is but also, you know, the community family aspect of people tagging you in a thing because they know you like Booker's 20th anniversary or they know you've always wanted to find the Booker's right bottle and so they tagged you in when they thinks a decent price in the secondary market. This world's huge man. And so once we got our feet wet into it, it was sort of snowballed from there and now, and now I'm a moderate alcoholic, and I really like bourbon a whole lot. That's where it's thermometer. It's good. 18:59 Good lottery 19:00 Good don't go over that that edge right? Yeah, that's all I need to worry about. Do you think like how early on when we were down in the speakeasy were you overwhelmed a bit when we were like down there with 1000 and a half bottles known because you and Paul are my Sherpas? 19:14 You guys tell me everything I need to know about. 19:18 I love that answer. Yeah, thank you. I felt comfortable. calm. You made me wonder down there. That's that's how I wanted your first experience. Be. I was it was I tender and affectionate Ender? Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. Laughing that's how that's Yes. No, that's how your first time should be tender. Whisper the notes. Yeah, it was a bourbon into my hand and give me a soft, gentle kiss on the cheek. Got It's hot. And I'm glad that I didn't know 24 proof 19:50 tenants. 19:55 Man, we just fell in love with it pretty early on and now it's on the writer every night. 20:01 It feels neat to be able to try local stuff and and go by I love baby distilleries. I've got like this massive affection for seeing someone knowing that the craft took so many years to make, like there are these people who gather buddies together started a small distillery, and all of a sudden, they're like putting juice and barrels, and they have to wait. It's a waiting game, and they hope and their fingers are crossed. And so when good stuff comes out of that, I know that for me, it's inspiring because I know what it's like to crockpot a creative idea and wait for it. And that hoping is part of the thing that you're doing, whether it be making music or making booze like you just have a hope you really desire to make a good thing. You put everything into that you can knowledge know how expertise, advice from other people, and then you sit and you wait and hope. And I have a lot of value for that. Which is one of the things I think I'm drawn to bourbon about and baby distilleries, because I think that that's hard to do. And it's risky as shit, man. Oh, yeah. And that's good. That's cool to me. I love that. Well, Andy, I mean, what 21:00 can talk about more about what was there like one bourbon or anything like that that got you kicked or hooked on it or anything like that. Like there's Oh yeah. So kind of talk about what that what that was. It was Booker's for sure it's my favorite to this day. I mean, the way that I always when people ask us our answers the same we both love Booker's and my usual response depending on who I'm talking to with why I love it so much is a the nostalgic pull of it being the first fancy bottle that someone bought me like the first fancy ish bottle and being blown away by how spicy it was. And I tell them the reason why it's my favorite is it it's a it's a bourbon you can have three ways. It's three Bourbons in one bottle. You that is a totally different flavor profile, if you haven't need versus how you have that with a drop of water swill let it open for a minute versus having a couple cubes in there. I mean, you are literally changing the flavor complexion three totally different ways. And as the ice melts, you're going to get a fourth and fifth and six depending on how long you sip on it. 22:00 So any chameleon bottle like that, that exists I'm fond of, which is normally Why go for the hazmat shit. I'm just a huge fan of high proof stuff like that a chameleon. I like that I don't think I've ever heard that one I'm Can I steal that you can share science yours now I'm gonna go ahead and pour in the ship for me and it's all yours will keep going. 22:19 So, Carl, what about you? I mean, I know he said, You know, he said he'd like Booker's as well. But I mean, was that your first introduction was somebody that said, like here drink this hundred 25 proof stuff. You're gonna love it. So I remember Andy and 2011 when he was like, man, I think I like bourbon. That's, that's great. That's really cool. And at the time, I didn't know too much about it. I just started doing a text message. Really? sweet man. Yeah, thanks, man. Cool personal epiphany. Yeah, enjoy a good Tuesday. And I remember you would you drink. 22:51 Just like all of the standards, just like a makers are bulletin, any of those and you are just learning about them. And I do remember when you got your 23:00 First, your first bottle of the good stuff daddy's first book. Yeah, it was very sweet. isn't good time. But then that was it. I feel like it just came over. And I mean, we at the time, were already spending so much time together that I was part of the whole process. And that's just not like yours like guiding Angel, like the whole thing. I'll continue on Go on. How would you say that I'm your enabler and that I to have made you a moderate alcoholic through this process? Because I'd like for you to not say that. I can't not say that. It's definitely true. Yeah, it's very true. Cool. Yeah, we're in the same spot. Yeah, I feel great about that. Our liver is fine. It's fine. We're young. It's length. And if anything, if anything is Old Ironsides Yeah, there that thing can take. And it's fine. I'm say take a look. And I don't know if I like that. But it's okay. Because you really can you have to look at the end. I'm working on that. But yeah, that's how I just and you is for sure my enabler. Through through all of it. My dad is more of a scotch guy. And so I knew about scotches and then I think Andy's 24:00 My whole family in fact about the bourbon world because my dad now will go and buy anytime he knows we're going to travel through hope by the biggest bottle of bourbon that is possible to buy and will be so excited about it. It looks like a super super soaker tank 24:16 it's literally like I didn't know they made them that big It looks like a novelty inflatable but it's real and it's full of Woodford any acid every fucking time. Yeah, I'm so grateful. 24:26 And it's almost cash by the time you leave. Well, I wouldn't gonna say it but yeah, but yeah, if I had a nickel for every like ambling midnight to 2am walking down the stairs at the young house. I've had that huge daddy bottle I'd have loads of nickels. 24:43 So kind of talk about more your your all's camaraderie because you know you grew up together went to school together in Austin. But you don't live in Austin together anymore? Correct. You guys are separated by a state now. So like that. Yeah, that's my talk. So kind of talk about like how that all works out. 25:00 You know the band The friendship, everything. Yeah. Will you talk about the band? I'll talk about the friendship. Yeah. So as a should we should we start with that? Let's go friendship then you do? Yeah. Okay. So I don't think that friends. In fact, I know this. Friends don't spend as much time around each other. Normally as Kyle and I do. I've lived with Kyle in three different homes, both as a married individual, me, my wifey, his wife and another buddy and his wife all lived in this house in Austin in this communal type setup, where we would be going on the road, and our wives and friends all get to always share meals together. And so we lived in married housing together, we lived on the road in various hotels, we lived in San Antonio and a house together. We have lived together in college so much time has been spent with this human. And over that time, you learn a few things not only about each other, but you learn about how to have interpersonal relationships, but 26:00 Right, like you learn like if I again, the amount of mercy extended and mercy received and hard conversations had and celebrations and things to be more and and births and funerals and everything that we've had as a friend group is so much higher than most people have just out of sheer proximity. We live together we work together, we have slept in the same lucky into bed more times than any friends have ever done before, at least to the best of my knowledge. And when we were recording back in the day, we would sleep on couches, just head to toe unlike one individual couch that that was a fact. Yeah, and we didn't enjoy that. One is not 26:42 to say somebody enjoys 26:44 that somebody is a me. 26:48 Yeah, we just with the sheer amount of time that we spend together I feel like not only is this my best friend, but there's there's something deeper than that. It's something that's close enough to begin and it comes 27:00 Out of hard fought years and time spent, there's no substitute for time spent ever. There's no sub for it. I've spent thousands of hours with this person talking about the scary shit in life, the beautiful things in life. And everything in between. And the end result of that has been something that, like I said, is closer to kin than most things that people will ever have. And closer than brothers, that I know like most people that I know don't even have this relationship with their kin. And that has definitely fed into how we do music. And this is a little bit weird for us to live in a different place. Now. It's the first time in our lives that we live in a different city different state. And granted, we still see each other hundreds of days a year as we toured together, but it's definitely affected the music in a good way but surprising. Which brings me to the next phase, the music kind of what would you say our friendship is when it comes to music and its creation. Well, me and Andy we hate each other. So we have to be separated by at least by at least a two to 300 28:00 jerril Simon and Garfunkel thing, right? Yeah. 28:03 And well So Andy we both moved to Alabama for a season. And Andy fell in love with it. I also loved it but wanted to come home to family were to be back in Texas. So I moved back. And so to record we wanted to stay home just because it's a lot of travel if if we don't. 28:21 And so we've just learned learned how we each have our own little individual studios that we go to we record with our buddy Chris Jacoby in San Antonio. And he goes and records with Chris buffet. We each have our own individual Chris's that we record in their studios. CRISPR get on the phone, right Mike Chris over here, his Chris over there is perfect. And we just do the method. I do a lot of the melody and he does a lot of the lyrics. And 28:48 when it comes time to record, we just do our own individual thing and kind of just mash it all together and see what works and technology allows it. Pretty crazy thing now. Sweet. Not so hard. Yeah. Sweet, sweet. 29:00 Internet. We couldn't stream it. Who knows where to be here, man? What was it I think, who was at the open for you all last night. Caroline Spence, Caroline Spence she had a she had a really funny kind of like opening to one of her songs and saying like, oh, I've got like a couple million downloads on Spotify with this one song. It's amazing that my parents have figured out how to use Spotify 29:21 solid Carolina. 29:24 So who's the messy one between you to me? No, I were both pretty messy. I would say I you're very sweet to say so. I think we can both be tidy when necessary. But I think I would probably get because he's more form and function like he would never asked me to pack up the van. What I do, and I've learned it now I've learned this about myself and it's fine. I am not efficient in a lot of movements. And so I look at Kyle and I'm like, Kyle, if you will please do this for you. Or will you do it and then teach me so that I can now know how to do it your way spatial reasoning I did not score very high. 30:00 On I knew lots of synonyms but I did not know how to put the blocks in the right order so that they would fit neatly into a van he does so I think that would mean that he's cleaner well that's that's like a dad move right you know to pack up a pack up the truck to go down to Myrtle Beach or to Florida or desk whatever it is and you're sitting there playing a game of Jenga with all your luggage I've got that I've got that gene whatever it is in my tool I it's so hot The other day I literally it did happen where you start waving fan and yourself like Oh, it's so nice to have a man around. 30:34 And I would honestly say something like that every time I see impacting man like I'm so proud of you. Amy peg the van the other day and the doors wouldn't shut up. He was like trying feebly trying to shut both of the doors to say Cleveland was not nice, but it was just calling it what it is and painting a picture. Yeah, typecast. Listen, it's here. It's banned. I think I literally pushed you out of the way was like I got this. Just 31:00 I'm out, and then I put it together. Oh my insolence my silliness that I would even tried to back the van but did but in terms of who's cleaner, both of our suitcases explode. That's why I'm entering every single hotel room we enter. That's true. They do so to answer your question, maybe it's a push, but the more organized of the two of us would be Kyle. Yeah, I don't be somebody I'll take her. Yeah, you'll have to look at its object. I'll take it. So when you're on the road, are you are you all constantly talking to each other is like one person napping while somebody else is driving? Or is it you know, you said like, you've talked about everything deep and everything here. So is that is that what does that what driving on the road is like for you also, we, the last four days. Before we got to local, we had four days of six hour drive days each. So within that six hours, there can still be two hours of talking, and a good two hour nap and then two hours of just 32:00 Looking at your phone or whatever else you want to do, or just staring off into the distance Yeah. And that's about what happens each time is just a mix of all of those and whoever is in the driver's seat gets the ox cord and gets to choose what we listening to. 32:15 So you got into on the road got a good system. Well, I mean, it's almost guaranteed. You're going to look at see a few things with Ryan, our tour manager, you're going to get a steady diet of pop divas, you're going to hear lover by Taylor Swift over and over again. Then you're going to hear him switch over to never getting to know Anderson's lover, that whole album on repeat that some Shania Twain and I will never weasel in when Kyle's in the seat recently. It's been a lot of RMB RMB Yeah, yeah, I don't I can't listen to anything but right now, which is just fine some slow moving kind of get you in low juniors. Yeah, that's what I'm looking in this home a little bit as I will always Yeah. Manny, what are you alluding to? I didn't 32:58 just like thank you. 33:00 Yeah, you mean you can make it look at Andy as much as you can, but it's like yeah, after a while you're just like, all right. I miss home a little bit. Yeah. Listen the RMB stuff. I get it, man. It's nice. It does. That's been that's been on the docket for him for a while now. So it'll probably bleed into the next record somehow. Yeah, for me, it's guaranteed I will sit in the front seat. Probably be quiet for like 20 minutes and then put on my Stephen King audiobook more Stephen King podcast. And they will both look at me smirk a little bit and put their headphones 33:32 such as life man such as life. So So I mean, so you're a podcast listener right. So the Stephen King stuff, so you don't you're not a fan of just like listening to whatever's happening. Going around as you're driving then. No, not so much for me. Yeah, I think we're gonna let him have a Stephen King. No, I'm sure he's a beautiful human, Stephen King, and I hope to meet him one day, but please, I I just haven't read his books yet. Now, I'm not a book reader either, but I can listen to a book 34:00 Totally that's like why they invented movies. Like why would you? Why would you read a book? Yeah, we made it past them. Yeah. It's like when you sit down with a book for a month when I can get finished in an hour and a half, and see the problems, my shit on y'all and I don't want a problem here in the zoo, Andy's a fast reader. And so he doesn't get that he can finish a book in a few hours. And that's where he finds enjoyment. And it still I've been reading the same book this whole tour and I think it's like 150 pages. Oh, God, and like it's half and more pictures. Right? Yeah, it's actually it's actually shell Silverstein it's a really good novel. He's gonna love it when he finished it. I could barely finish it goose goose bumps novel anymore, right. So man, choose your own adventure. Yeah, sweet RL Stine. I love you. 34:42 So, you know, kind of shifted a little bit back to bourbon real quick before we start losing listeners talking about this random. 34:49 So, you know, kind of talk about, you know, have you all visited the trail, you know, come into Louisville, Kentucky, like have you been to distilleries like is there something around there that that kind of fascinates you 35:03 As the saying goes, Portland is weird. Perhaps it's something in the water. It turns out that there might be some truth to that. The Oregon capitals primary water source is supplied by the bowl run watershed. It's also the key ingredient in one of the city's most popular watering holes, Bull Run distillery, the boulder and watershed is a very unique water source. It's protected by an act of Congress back in the 1870s. And the city's fathers got their hands on a beautiful lake up in the Cascade Mountains. And it's been that way since the 1870s. It used to flow through wooden pipes by gravity to Portland. 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But I got to see a lot of the stuff behind the scenes in terms of like I didn't know about the ALGEO and orphan barrel stuff and how I was involved with bullet and all that stuff is my first time ever being behind the door. That was my first experience was the bullet one and then I went to Buffalo Trace which sort of like the Cadillac for me. It was lovely. Never seen a brick house never been inside one before. I was the the perfect target for the guy that sits down and watches the video in Buffalo Trace and was just like 37:47 just just full, full geek Boehner and loved it so much and I'm sitting like asking questions of the tour guide I'm that guy. I was. I was really loving it. And like man, I again, if 38:00 I lived nearer to here I do it so much more often because it's such a cool thing man. I know that there are other worlds as big as this in the booze world like I know the the world of smelly A's and wine is huge and if you want to go to you've got favorite vintners and favorite years and all that famous and maybe sometime that'll be a thing that I get into but right now this is like the second most passionate affinity that I have is bourbon and I love that and Stephen King's a good number one to have it is pretty good 38:31 again selfish plug listener out there if you know Stephen please connect him with my people. 38:38 Hey, will you tell me Can you show your Somali a skills with this bourbon with what we're having? Oh, yeah, yeah, I mean, let's put you to the top I 38:48 want the listener to hear what I basically what I go through, but I get to go through Oh, and welcome to Andy's bourbon tasting. This is imagine you're my ear. Yeah. If you switched by normal 39:00 Take the left earphone out, put it back in, but the right one and I'm all around you. What I'm drinking today friend is Booker's right. This is the first fancy bottle I ever bought for myself. My wife was furious. I found it in Texas, or outside of lower Greenville. And here it comes to me via the bourbon pursuit podcast and his willingness to share his nice booze on the nose, a stringent rye smoky, very sour ish In my opinion, which I love very much very much right? But this drinks more like a bourbon very spicy, stays in the back of your throat right above the tongue just lingers there for much longer than it would the burning taste that you'll get with anything high proof and Booker's is always there and always present. But this even though it's Ryan astringent, in my mind still has a sweetness that is not normally present and rye whiskeys for me that I love, which is why I would compare it to a bourbon and that is my tasting note for today. On Booker's right, thank you don't fantastic, slow clap for that. Thank you so much. Thank you. That was nice. 40:00 Right yeah sure head guys into it. I mean, because Booker's ride this was this was one of the most, you know, highly anticipated and allocated releases that came out a few years ago. It's long gone from the market who knows if we're ever going to see something like this again, because this was a batch of ride that actually Booker know put down, right? I mean, this was this was something that happened a long time ago. But what was it that kind of got you into the kind of the hunting scene Andy like what got you into trying to find where bottles or anything like that? I think it was the first time that Paul described to me how few of these get made and the stories behind him like you just alluded to the fact that if I remember right, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but Booker Booker know when he was there, and like his latter years, this was the only project that outlasted in terms of his actual life. This is post mortem released. Absolutely. But he had his actual hands on the mash bill on the creation process on the front end. And the story of that to me, I knew this was a bottle that I had to hunt down and find which is why I have it in the bunker because 41:00 Booker's get that in style jackpot For me it was the first thing that made me fall in love with bourbon I collect as many of their offerings as I possibly can the best use of ever had my life is Booker's 25th anniversary and so for me hunting began with this bottle which is pretty cool that we're you know, having it in this podcast but the first time I ever remember bouncing over to multiple different liquor stores when I news release week for this, and I was just hoping, you know, and I was I was so green, like, didn't have a fucking clue. I'm literally walking to places like, do you have it? Yeah. And they're like, like, I would get laughed at so hard. But this one, like, younger clerk at this liquor store was like, I think I can probably get one. I mean, I think that the dude that we had promised to bailed, and it was just too high of a price point for him at the time, and I was like, I'll do it. And again, wife was none too pleased until I explained like, I'm not gonna do this all the time. We don't have the cash for it. But I saved up my money from the road. We're good. And it feels really cool to say that it began a love for 42:00 Hunting dusty is later on when I learned what they were finding out old distilleries that I occasionally can find on the secondary market that people sell. And where do you go for this? Like, how do you hunt? Yeah, that's good question. I mean, like, I would say that you're you're in a decent position. I wish I should I say you probably wish maybe when you started doing this, like six years ago, you were on the road. Yeah. When you're on the road. That was prime opportunity way back then. Right. Because even back in 2013 2012 timeframe, the stores were still littered back then they couldn't sell the stuff sure until 2014 hit 2015 then everything just was scarce. It was just a ghost town and some of these liquor stores to find allocated bourbon. So yeah, to talk about your story there. Well, the hunt for me like it begins not on the secondary market. For the most part, I love going to hole in the wall along the road hole in the wall, seemingly dilapidated liquor stores and checking behind the front rack and what I mean by that 43:00 I've had incredible luck in in and around smaller towns and Alabama checking package stores and looking at old like literally they'll put the new version of wild turkey one on one of the front. And then if you look behind you might be lucky enough to see like you can tell cork difference you can tell label difference that I've found at least six bottles of us Austin Nichols wild turkey that way just from looking in the back and that just means that nobody goes into that package store and buys wild turkey. They had to buy it to get the new label to keep their rep happy or whatever. I found age state at old charter and found some old log cabin some really great best old saying yeah some some really cool dusty finds just from people who've like only these package stores for years. And you know, don't know what they have and I'm not out there trying to scam them because I don't do any I don't resell anything. My my meager bourbon collection in my little closet of my house is all for drinking. I wanted to have specific bottles set aside for specific purposes in my life. 44:00 When a buddy has a kid, we're going to open up birthday bourbon. When there's a death in the family and I want to celebrate the life that has been extinguished, I want to open up the Booker's offering. I want to open up the dusty of the bottle and bomb bomb beam that I have from the 60s. That was there. I mean, he was in the barrel when Kennedy was alive, like, Are you kidding me? Like there's so much of this stuff that I see a bottle that there's limited number of and I immediately see a story. And I see who was alive when it was first in the cask and I see all of those things that matter to me as a storyteller and my other job. And so I admittedly I wax nostalgic and poetic on everything in my life. And I've done that Full Frontal with bourbon and I'm very pleased with it. It just makes the hunt so much easier because it makes it something fun to do. And so the secondary markets like the last stop the last stop I'm like, I really want to thing but I know that there's no chance I'm gonna be able to find it in the wild. But for a person who hasn't done that, what does that even look like the secondary market secondary markets tough man sometimes you can invite 45:00 The private Facebook's and lots of stuff, but you've got people online that'll buy a bottle for X number of dollars. And then they will take that MSRP and they will multiply it by 1000 million dollars. And then say yes, you can have this MSRP bottle of $170 for the meager pricing of 1200. Gotta and it's brutal but to be honest with you, and this is just being really blunt and whether this gets me castrated by bourbon fans or not, there are times where the story the juice is worth the squeeze the story of the bottle and me never being able to get access to that bottle outside of this really jacked up price on the secondary market is worth it. Like I'm saving up for the sheer fact that someday I'll be able to get a bottle of Booker's 25 be for probably 850. Now I think 600 was a couple years ago, but that about right azz pretty much on point or out there. So looking at that I'm like, okay, I want that and and is the story and the amount of time 46:00 And dinners that I'll be able to have that with and back porch conversations. 46:06 Is it worth it? And the answer is, of course, of course it is. To me and that's not for everybody but if you spread out that price point over the amount of time and stories that I'll be able to have it on it then yeah towards it. So there you go. So if your listener out there, you're a fan of these guys. You got a book or 2015 around. There's there might be a private private concert you could have in your backyard for a bottle who knows I'll rub your back. Lots of stuff. There's a lot of ways 46:33 so I mean, are you so Kyle I'll ask you so when when when you're on the road and Andy's driving or you're driving or whatever? Does a DC like a rundown liquor stores like pull the pull pulled over pulled over? We gotta go, Sam. Yeah, we both do, because I know that's what he did. So I'll see what it'll be like, is this a good looking one, we need to stop here. And most times, ZS there's really not a there's very rarely I know, to go into a liquor store. So we'll go pretty often and I know what to look for. 47:00 Now, which is really fun, I know how to say the things to the guys behind the counter to see if there's anything back there. Yeah to play that game game, and I'm in it now, which is nice, but I know that uh, whatever whatever we find whatever the bounty is. We'll go to Sir Baxter, which is great. And then I'll get a couple polls off at every once in a while. Pro tip for you hunters out there, just one. I won't spoil all the tricks. But one, a really great way to get in good with a local liquor store that sells fancy bottles is before you let them answer upon asking if they have that midwinter nights DRAM or whatever really cool bottle you're looking for you immediately say before you ask before you let them talk after you've said do you have this is Do you have anything in the back? You say also if you do have it will open it right here right now and will each have a poor and that is a great way to immediately be like I've seen people turn on a dime when they were going I gotta tell me No. And then I'm like, Is it worth 48:00 it for me to like have a poor of this stuff right now with the the owner then buy the bottle from him. Yeah, because it does two things in one thing you get to try the juice, you get to try the juice with a friend who also probably loves bourbon because he's selling the stuff he pedals it and then you're probably going to get future offers or future looks because that guy knows that you give a shit because then you're not going to resell an open bottle. Like for him I find it for most people I find that disarming because they know that I'm not in this to make cash. I'm in this because I love the juice. I love the story and I really want that bottle to open up and drink in my house and it'll get open eventually might as well now yeah, exactly as will make it happen. So take that and run with it listener So even with the with the fandom that you have anything like that nothing's like nothing's free coming your way. I mean, I talked about bourbon all the time and yeah, all I get samples sent to me But yeah, for the most part, nobody sitting here sending me allocated bourbon, but even in the music world. Nobody's like, Hey, I got all this Booker's in the back waiting for you guys, right. We got occasional offers 49:00 The occasional offers of people that are kind enough that want to bring us bottles and we get gifted because they know that we dig it we can give to a fair amount of booze on the road which we love the idol amazing. Please continue doing really great, really love that's a good trend. Let's keep that rolling at the end of every tour we do a bourbon lottery because we'll have 49:18 a decent amount that we've both accrued by ourselves and that we've accrued from GIFs from people and so we'll get to the end of a tour a leg of tour and we just go one for one we like rock paper scissor who goes first then we go one for one and first Captain second cap Yeah, and usually those bottles that we still share but we just keep in our house and get to slowly sip on but we're both at each other's houses enough that like we basically choosing which ones we want to have a little bit more of a drink anything at my house and whenever I'm over at his house like he's got bourbon, I'm drinking that too. And so it's literally like it's a first Captain second captain and the only way that he's not going to get it as if he doesn't show up in time for me to finish that bottle. 49:59 get hurt. Yeah. 50:00 So I guess the way to get in good graces, you gotta feed these guys bourbon. Yeah, you guys are bourbon bourbon geeks at the end of the day, which is awesome. And I think that's one of the main reasons why we love to have you on here is because I don't think there's a whole lot of people, we could go and talk to better musicians out there that could have this level of conversation with us as well. Because, you know, like you all are, you're in the trenches, too, right? You're, you're out there, you're hunting, you're driving, you're looking for stuff, and you know what to look for. Right? I think so. I mean, and again, this world's huge still learning what this is like, I've only known about dusty for like, three years. And so like the amount of knowledge that you can amass in this world is massive dude, so crazy to learn about who used to own Old Crow, what years were good. When did it stop being great? When is it is it making a resurgence? Like all these nuance things that you can figure out about this world is huge. And to me, that's just fun. It's just a fun thing to start studying. And so it's changing really quickly. Yeah. Like, especially some of the smaller distilleries around the nation that are happening. feel like there's no 51:00 More to know than ever. It seems like Yeah. It's just an exciting time to be somebody who loves this stuff. Yeah. So if I remember correctly last night, Andy, when you were on stage, you were drinking bourbon. That's fact. Yes. I mean, you were you're drinking bourbon between the songs like you had I think he had a poor with some some rocks in it or something like did you know I was getting we were both gifted that we were gifted 51:23 some old forester on stage. And before that, I was I was Yeah, and we had Eagle rare. In the cup Eagle rare walking onto stage. We had a good amount of bourbon last night just from people bringing us random poor, which is great. How did how did fans get to know that you all were into bourbon? I don't know if there's a time on stage that Andy or I are not drinking bourbon. And I think it think it became apparent after a few years of us just just constantly in between songs, having people. Yeah, okay. And so I think and then eventually people would buy us Bourbons, and send them 52:00 onstage and we started, we just would say how appreciative we were, and we would drink them, which is also great. And that on top of just talking about it, 52:11 whether it's social media or random interview questions like print interviews when they ask, I mean, again, like I said, it's like, second most touted affinity in myself. And so when it comes to both of us being asked on interviews, what do you into? What are you on the road to stay sane? Aside from drinking, we don't drink this thing saying, Yeah, but it complicated, complicated answer. 52:35 But But in all seriousness, when people ask us what we're into, like, it's one of the earliest things we can talk about, like we like drinking bourbon, we like collecting it. We like trying new stuff, local distilleries, like all that. It's a natural overflow of something that's already cool, that we have loved for years. And so when people caught on to that we are very grateful that they have decided to say like how cool this is a way that I can say, Hey, I like your music. It's given me a lot of solace. Have a pretty 53:00 It all the moments that have like music, your music has been a part of our life for a few years now and we'd like to give back. And a lot of times they choose to give back with sweet hundred proof goodness, we are pleased with that choice I was about to say and kind of tail off on that last one is like when somebody does come and says that, you know, your music has inspired their life, like kind of talk about that, right? Because I mean, this is we're getting a little deep with this, but kind of talk about like, what that means to you all as artists. To be honest with you, man, anytime we get to be a part of a thing that's been healing for somebody. Anytime somebody comes up and says as it happens fairly regularly, now, we've toured enough and we've seen enough cities and met enough people that people get to come up and tell us a story of of a moment in their life that they got through with the helping hand of catharsis and music, and we've gotten to be a part of that. And so anytime someone steps up and says that a good thing resulted in emotionally beneficial thing healing. catharsis happened because of our tunes, and 54:01 I don't know that there's a better compliment you could give our music we a lot of why we write our music is is for that it's our own healing. A lot of the times it's it's pretty often autobiographical. And I know that's not the only way to write music. I mean, in the pop world, you're not looking to write something that's heavy or something that's that's going to be specifically cathartic. Yeah, I think carry on a grand day said, you know, leave your boyfriend for me or something. Yeah, yeah. So, a little is emotionally deep. Yeah. Like, there's a lot of shift, it really can be. 54:32 But the fact that someone else would also feel what we're going through kind of it just as pretty binding for us. It's a really cool thing. 54:39 To although our intention wasn't to be like, we want to write something specifically for other people, because we write it for ourselves to know that other people are also connecting with it is just really, it's a cool bond to have with somebody to be like, yeah, we're, we're in the same thing together a lot of the time. So it's really cool. It's really cool for us when anybody tells us right on absolutely 55:00 And so I guess another thing to kind of tail off on from the last question before then is you know you all are not also discriminated in the whiskey world as well because I think it was a city or two ago you did a shout on Instagram saying somebody sent you some of your favorite cinnamon flavored whiskey. Oh yeah, well let's Let the record reflect a few things one will drink it if it's wet and it tastes decent. We will 55:24 we will say the the honey whiskies we just have had we had too many bad experiences in college can't do it so much honey and few can't do it. Yeah, do not good. It's bad to like I just barely heard before. Okay, good I it's it's very triggering. I get I get like American honey shell shock and it's no good. But for the most part, if it's wet and curiously tasty enough to try we'll we'll do it and somebody said for whatever reason we didn't talk about it. They didn't talk about I think we I think we just 56:00 just mentioned it on a whim, did you? I don't remember. I don't remember doing that sometimes you just they're talking on stage you know and that's fair. We could have rambled and said something about fireball but like four shots of fireball appeared. Oh gosh, and well and four shots later like we were like crossing arms on stage and like newlywed couple shooting fireball and then they flirting with us on the line. Yeah, it was great. It was such a such a 56:26 fireball reached out to us is really great. We never responded to him. We need to offload it back. Don't get there sending us a care package. 56:34 No idea What's in the bag. I hope it's just a huge fucking beach ball with fireball on the side. So take it Yeah. Cool. Sounds great. I think because last night you were talking about like, you know, trying to figure out how do you get sponsorships and you're like, you're like what do these guys actually stand for? Now? I think you figured out what you all stand for total fireball. Yeah. Honestly, it's like bring us your strange it like if you could say like, what's your thesis statement for how you want to 57:00 Like roping your sponsors like who's strange out there who wants to do something really weird? Because we're into that that's great for us. We're we gave a random shout out to white claw and great hopes that they'd flirt back with us. We don't even know to what end we don't we're not asking for anything. It's just like what will they say if we start and I also just want to pit white clog against fireball second half storm of the century baby we say go for the highest bidder go for our affections. You don't care Be it cinnamon popery whiskey or if it be this sweet, sweet blackberry White Glove go Yes, sir. Vodka. There you go. You'll start wearing like fireball jerseys on stage now like when you're going out there. That's okay. We didn't sell out 10 out of 10 would do it but I would only do it if they didn't pay us money. I'm like I'm not getting paid for this. Just want the leather jacket. I just want this jacket because I think it's dope. 57:52 I guess one more thing about the band that I want to ask you because I don't think we ever talked about it back in forecast when we first met is the name 58:00 Penny Sparrow like, Where did the name originate from? And how did y'all come up with it? So when we were roommates, we had one other roommate in our room, and it was way too crowded for all three of us. It was basically bed dresser bed dresser bed dressing. And he was an author or a writer. 58:19 And he wrote under the pen name of Penny and Sparrow, and we were getting started. We used to just go by sports teams, because we Why not? It was nothing was really official for us. So anytime we would play a show, it would be like, Hey, we're the Utah Jazz happy to be here. I read the Dallas Cowboys. And by show he means like when somebody in the community was like, hey, we've got a fundraiser and there's gonna be like 13 needy people. We need we just need somebody to play matchbox. 20 covers and 58:48 we're like, oh, we know Rob Thomas. And so we did that a lot of media by sports. So you go by sports teams, and eventually we did one that was paid out, be it not very much money. 59:00 And so they came up to us and basically we're like, Hey, you can't be a sports team anymore. This is making me look bad. Please don't make me look bad we just pick we please just pick anything that's not Utah Jazz. Yeah. And so our roommate who went by opinion Sparrow, we basically just asked them were like, Hey, can we just use your name and then anything we do in this room will do under the guise of finance barrel? And that's where it just kind of stuck and we just kept it and here we are. We years later doing we picked that name when we saddled ourselves with that we didn't think that this was going to be where we would be no seven years later. Yeah, if we did w
Welcome back to the podcast! Today’s guest is Debra Atkinson. She is the creator of Flipping 50, a website, podcast, and blog dedicated to helping women, aged 50 and older, reach their health and fitness goals, and she is the author of, You still Got It, Girl! Enjoy! GUEST WEBSITE: https://www.flippingfifty.com GIVEAWAY: https://www.flippingfifty.com/hotnotbothered VIDEO VERSION: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5QiSqyzUEQ&feature=youtu.be NEW COURSE: https://waistaway.chantelrayway.com/videocourse To learn more about the principles of intermittent fasting, purchase Chantel's book, Waist Away: The Chantel Ray Way NOW by visiting http://amzn.to/2CVmTgs YouTube Channel Link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCteFjiVaY6n0SOAixcyZbWA Like us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/TheChantelRayWay Things we love: https://chantelrayway.com/things-i-love-2/ Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TheChantelRayWay ***As always, this podcast is not designed to diagnose, treat, prevent or cure any condition and is for information purposes only. Please consult with your healthcare professional before making any changes to your current lifestyle.***
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.
Episode fifty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Twenty Flight Rock" by Eddie Cochran, and at the first great rock and roll film 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 "Teen-Age Crush" by Tommy Sands. ----more---- Resources There are several books available on Cochran, but for this episode I mostly relied on Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran: Rock and Roll Revolutionaries by John Collis. I'll be using others as well in forthcoming episodes. While there are dozens of compilations of Cochran's music available, many of them are flawed in one way or another (including the Real Gone Music four-CD set, which is what I would normally recommend). This one is probably the best you can get for Cochran novices. And as always there's a Mixcloud with the full versions of all the songs featured in today's episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript To tell the story of rock music, it's important to tell the story of the music's impact on other media. Rock and roll was a cultural phenomenon that affected almost everything, and it affected TV, film, clothing and more. So today, we're going to look at how a film made the career of one of the greats of rock and roll music: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, "Twenty Flight Rock"] Eddie Cochran was born in Albert Lea, Minnesota, though in later life he would always claim to be an Okie rather than from Albert Lea. His parents were from Oklahoma, they moved to Minnesota shortly before Eddie was born, and they moved back to Oklahoma City when he was small, moved back again to Minnesota, and then moved off to California with the rest of the Okies. Cochran was a staggeringly precocious guitarist. On the road trip to California from Albert Lea, he had held his guitar on his lap for the entire journey, referring to it as his best friend. And once he hit California he quickly struck up a musical relationship with two friends -- Guybo Smith, who played bass, and Chuck Foreman, who played steel guitar. The three of them got hold of a couple of tape recorders, which allowed them not only to record themselves, but to experiment with overdubbing in the style of Les Paul. Some of those recordings have seen release in recent years, and they're quite astonishing: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran and Chuck Foreman, "Rockin' It"] Cochran plays all the guitars on that (except the steel guitar, which is Foreman) and he was only fourteen years old at the time. He played with several groups who were playing the Okie Western Swing and proto-rockabilly that was popular in California at the time, and eventually hooked up with a singer from Mississippi who was born Garland Perry, but who changed his name to Hank Cochran, allowing the duo to perform under the name "the Cochran Brothers". The Cochran Brothers soon got a record deal. When they started out, they were doing pure country music, and their first single was a Louvin Brothers style close harmony song, about Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams: [Excerpt: The Cochran Brothers, "Two Blue Singing Stars"] But while Hank was perfectly happy making this kind of music, Eddie was getting more and more interested in the new rock and roll music that was starting to become popular, and the two of them eventually split up over actual musical differences. Hank Cochran would go on to have a long and successful career in the country industry, but Eddie was floundering. He knew that this new music was what he should be playing, and he was one of the best guitarists around, but he wasn't sure how to become a rock and roller, or even if he wanted to be a singer at all, rather than just a guitar player. He hooked up with Jerry Capehart, a singer and songwriter who the Cochran Brothers had earlier backed on a single: [Excerpt: Jerry Capehart and the Cochran Brothers, "Walkin' Stick Boogie"] The two of them started writing songs together, and Eddie also started playing as a session musician. He played on dozens of sessions in the mid-fifties, mostly uncredited, and scholars are still trying to establish a full list of the records he played on. But while he was doing this, he still hadn't got himself a record contract, other than for a single record on an independent label: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, "Skinny Jim"] Cochran was in the studio recording demos for consideration by record labels when Boris Petroff, a B-movie director who was a friend of Cochran's collaborator Jerry Capehart, dropped in. Petroff decided that Cochran had the looks to be a film star, and right there offered him a part in a film that was being made under the working title Do-Re-Mi. Quite how Petroff had the ability to give Cochran a part in a film he wasn't working on, I don't know, but he did, and the offer was a genuine one, as Cochran confirmed the next day. There were many, many, rock and roll films made in the 1950s, and most of them were utterly terrible. It says something about the genre as a whole when I tell you that Elvis' early films, which are not widely regarded as cinematic masterpieces, are among the very best rock and roll films of the decade. The 1950s were the tipping point for television ownership in both the US and the UK, but while TV was quickly becoming a mass medium, cinema-going was still at levels that would stagger people today -- *everyone* went to the cinema. And when you went to the cinema, you didn't go just to see one film. There'd be a main film, a shorter film called a B-movie that lasted maybe an hour, and short features like cartoons and newsreels. That meant that there was a much greater appetite for cheap films that could be used to fill out a programme, despite their total lack of quality. This is where, for example, all the films that appear in Mystery Science Theater 3000 come from, or many of them. And these B-movies would be made in a matter of weeks, or even days, and so would quickly be turned round to cash in on whatever trend was happening right at that minute. And so between 1956 and 1958 there were several dozen films, with titles like "Rock! Rock! Rock!", "Don't Knock The Rock" and so on. [Excerpt: Bill Haley and the Comets, “Don't Knock the Rock”] In every case, these films were sold entirely on the basis of the musical performances therein, with little or no effort to sell them as narratives, even though they all had plots of sorts. They were just excuses to get footage of as many different hit acts as possible into the cinemas, ideally before their songs dropped off the charts. (Many of them also contained non-hit acts, like Teddy Randazzo, who seemed to appear in all of them despite never having a single make the top fifty. Randazzo did, though, go on to write a number of classic hits for other artists). Very few of the rock and roll films of the fifties were even watchable at all. We talked in the episode on "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" about the film "Rock! Rock! Rock!" which Chuck Berry appeared in -- that was actually towards the more watchable end of these films, terrible as it was. The film that Cochran was signed to appear in, which was soon renamed The Girl Can't Help It, is different. There are plenty of points at which the action stops for a musical performance, but there is an actual plot, and actual dialogue and acting. While the film isn't a masterpiece or anything like that, it is a proper film. And it's made by a proper studio. While, for example, Rock! Rock! Rock! was made by a fly-by-night company called Vanguard Productions, The Girl Can't Help It was made by Twentieth Century Fox. And it was made in both colour and Cinemascope. The budget for Rock! Rock! Rock! was seventy-five thousand dollars compared to the 1.3 million dollars spent on The Girl Can't Help It. [Excerpt: Little Richard, “The Girl Can't Help It”] Indeed, it seems to be as much an attempt to cash in on a Billy Wilder film as it is an attempt to cash in on rock and roll. The previous year, The Seven-Year Itch had been a big hit, with Tom Ewell playing an unassuming middle-aged man who becomes worryingly attracted to a much younger woman, played by Marilyn Monroe. The film had been a massive success (and it's responsible for the famous scene with Monroe on the air grate, which is still homaged and parodied to this day) and so the decision was taken to cast Tom Ewell as an unassuming middle-aged man who becomes worryingly attracted to a much younger woman, played by Jayne Mansfield doing her usual act of being a Marilyn Monroe impersonator. Just as the film was attempting to sell itself on the back of a more successful hit film, the story also bears a certain amount of resemblance to one by someone else. The playwright Garson Kanin had been inspired in 1955 by the tales of the jukebox wars -- he'd discovered that most of the jukeboxes in the country were being run by the Mafia, and that which records got stocked and played depended very much on who would do favours for the various gangsters involved. Gangsters would often destroy rivals' jukeboxes, and threaten bar owners if they were getting their jukeboxes from the wrong set of mobsters. Kanin took this idea and turned it into a novella, Do-Re-Mi, about a helpless schlub who teams up with a gangster named "Fatso" to enter the record business, and on the way more or less accidentally makes a young woman into a singing star. Do-Re-Mi later became a moderately successful stage musical, which introduced the song "Make Someone Happy". [Excerpt: Doris Day, “Make Someone Happy”] Meanwhile the plot of The Girl Can't Help It has a helpless schlub team up with a mobster named "Fats", and the two of them working together to make the mobster's young girlfriend into a singing star. I've seen varying accounts as to why The Girl Can't Help It was renamed from Do-Re-Mi and wasn't credited as being based on Kanin's novella. Some say that the film was made without the rights having been acquired, and changed to the point that Kanin wouldn't sue. Others say that Twentieth Century Fox acquired the rights perfectly legally, but that the director, Frank Tashlin changed the script around so much that Kanin asked that his credit be removed, because it was now so different from his novella that he could probably resell the rights at some future point. The latter seems fairly likely to me, given that Tashlin's next film, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, which also starred Jayne Mansfield, contained almost nothing from the play on which it was based. Indeed, the original play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? was by the author of the original play on which The Seven-Year Itch was based. The playwright had been so annoyed at the way in which his vision had been messed with for the screen that he wrote Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? as a satire about the way the film industry changes writers' work, and Mansfield was cast in the play. When Tashlin wanted Mansfield to star in The Girl Can't Help It but she was contractually obliged to appear in the play, Fox decided the easiest thing to do was just to buy up the rights to the play and relieve Mansfield of her obligation so she could star in The Girl Can't Help It. They then, once The Girl Can't Help It finished, got Frank Tashlin to write a totally new film with the title Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, keeping only the title and Mansfield's character. While The Girl Can't Help It has a reputation for satirising rock and roll, it actually pulls its punches to a surprising extent. For example, there's a pivotal scene where the main mobster character, Fats, calls our hero after seeing Eddie Cochran on TV: [excerpt: dialogue from "The Girl Can't Help It"] Note the wording there, and what he doesn't say. He doesn't say that Cochran can't sing, merely that he "ain't got a trained voice". The whole point of this scene is to set up that Jerry Jordan, Mansfield's character, could become a rock and roll star even though she can't sing at all, and yet when dealing with a real rock and roll star they are careful to be more ambiguous. Because, of course, the main thing that sold the film was the appearance of multiple rock and roll stars -- although "stars" is possibly overstating it for many of those present in the film. One thing it shared with most of the exploitation films was a rather slapdash attitude to which musicians the film would actually feature. And so it has the genuinely big rock and roll stars of the time Little Richard, the Platters, and Fats Domino, the one-hit wonder Gene Vincent (but what a one hit to have), and a bunch of… less well-known people, like the Treniers -- a jump band who'd been around since the forties and never really made a major impact, or Eddie Fontaine (about whom the less said the better), or the ubiquitous Teddy Randazzo, performing here with an accordion accompaniment. [Excerpt: Teddy Randazzo and the Three Chuckles, “Cinnamon Sinner”] And Cochran was to be one of those lesser-known acts, so he and Capehart had to find a song that might be suitable for him to perform in the film. Very quickly they decided on a song called "Twenty Flight Rock", written by a songwriter called Nelda Fairchild. There has been a lot of controversy as to who actually contributed what to the song, which is copyrighted in the names of both Fairchild and Cochran. Fairchild always claimed that she wrote the whole thing entirely by herself, and that Cochran got his co-writing credit for performing the demo, while Cochran's surviving relatives are equally emphatic in their claims that he was an equal contributor as a songwriter. We will almost certainly never know the truth. Cochran is credited as the co-writer of several other hit songs, usually with Capehart, but never as the sole writer of a hit. Fairchild, meanwhile, was a professional songwriter, but pieces like "Freddie the Little Fir Tree" don't especially sound like the work of the same person who wrote "Twenty Flight Rock". As both credited writers are now dead, the best we can do is use our own judgment, and my personal judgment is that Cochran probably contributed at least something to the song's writing. The original version of "Twenty Flight Rock", as featured in the film, was little more than a demo -- it featured Cochran on guitar, Guybo Smith on double bass, and Capehart slapping a cardboard box to add percussion. Cochran later recorded a more fully-arranged version of the song, which came out after the film, but the extra elements, notably the backing vocals, added little to the simplistic original: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, "Twenty Flight Rock"] It was that simpler version that appeared in the film, and which took its place alongside several other classic tracks in the film's soundtrack. The film was originally intended to have a theme tune recorded by Fats Domino, who appeared in the film performing his hit "Blue Monday", but when Bobby Troup mentioned this to Art Rupe, Rupe suggested that Little Richard would be a more energetic star to perform the song (and I'm sure this was entirely because of his belief that Richard would be the better talent, and nothing to do with Rupe owning Richard's label, but not Domino's). As a result, Domino's role in the film was cut down to a single song, while Richard ended up doing three -- the title song, written by Troup, "Ready Teddy" by John Marascalco and Bumps Blackwell, and "She's Got It". We've mentioned before that John Marascalco's writing credits sometimes seem to be slightly exaggerated, and “She's Got It” is one record that tends to bear that out. Listen to “She's Got It”, which has Marascalco as the sole credited writer: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “She's Got It”] And now listen to “I Got It”, an earlier record by Richard, which has Little Richard credited as the sole writer: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “I Got It”] Hmm… The Girl Can't Help It was rather poorly reviewed in America. In France it was a different story. There's a pervasive legend that the people of France revere Jerry Lewis as a genius. This is nonsense. But the grain of truth in it is that Cahiers du Cinema, the most important film magazine in France by a long way -- the magazine for which Godard, Truffaut, and others wrote, and which popularised the concept of auteur theory, absolutely loved Frank Tashlin. In 1957, Tashlin was the only director to get two films on their top ten films of the year list -- The Girl Can't Help It at number eight, and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter at number two. The other eight films on the list were directed by Chaplin, Fellini, Hitchcock, Bunuel, Ingmar Bergman, Nicholas Ray, Fritz Lang and Sidney Lumet. Tashlin directed several films starring Jerry Lewis, and those films, like Tashlin's other work, got a significant amount of praise in the magazine. And that's where that legend actually comes from, though Cahiers did also give some more guarded praise to some of the films Lewis directed himself later. Tashlin wasn't actually that good a director, but what he did have is a visual style that came from a different area of filmmaking than most of his competitors. Tashlin had started out as a cartoon director, working on Warner Brothers cartoons. He wasn't one of the better directors for Warners, and didn't direct any of the classics people remember from the studio -- he mostly made forgettable Porky Pig shorts. But this meant he had an animator's sense for a visual gag, and thus gave his films a unique look. For advocates of auteur theory, that was enough to push him into the top ranks. And so The Girl Can't Help It became a classic film, and Cochran got a great deal of attention, and a record deal. According to Si Waronker, the head of Liberty Records, Eddie Cochran getting signed to the label had nothing to do with him being cast in The Girl Can't Help It, and Waronker had no idea the film was being made when Cochran got signed. This seems implausible, to say the least. Johnny Olenn, Abbey Lincoln and Julie London, three other Liberty Records artists, appeared in the film -- and London was by some way Liberty's biggest star. Not only that, but London's husband, Bobby Troup, wrote the theme song and was musical director for the film. But whether or not Cochran was signed on account of his film appearance, "Twenty Flight Rock" wasn't immediately released as a single. Indeed, by the time it came out Cochran had already appeared in another film, in which he had backed Mamie Van Doren -- another Marilyn Monroe imitator in the same vein as Mansfield -- on several songs, as well as having a small role and a featured song himself. Oddly, when that film, Untamed Youth, came out, Cochran's backing on Van Doren's recordings had been replaced by different instrumentalists. But he still appears on the EP that was released of the songs, including this one, which Cochran co-wrote with Capehart: [Excerpt: Mamie Van Doren, "Ooh Ba La Baby"] It had originally been planned to release "Twenty Flight Rock" as Cochran's first single on Liberty, to coincide with the film's release but then it was put back for several months, as Si Waronker wanted Cochran to release "Sitting in the Balcony" instead. That song had been written and originally recorded by John D Loudermilk: [Excerpt: John D Loudermilk, "Sitting in the Balcony"] Waronker had wanted to release Loudermilk's record, but he hadn't been able to get the rights, so he decided to get Cochran to record a note-for-note cover version and release that instead: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, "Sitting in the Balcony"] Cochran was not particularly happy with that record, though he was happy enough once the record started selling in comparatively vast quantities, spurred by his appearance in The Girl Can't Help It, and reached number eighteen in the charts. The problem was that Cochran and Waronker had fundamentally different ideas about what Cochran actually was as an artist. Cochran thought of himself primarily as a guitarist -- and the guitar solo on "Sittin' in the Balcony" was the one thing about Cochran's record which distinguished it from Loudermilk's original -- and also as a rock and roller. Waronker, on the other hand, was convinced that someone with Cochran's good looks and masculine voice could easily be another Pat Boone. Liberty was fundamentally not geared towards making rock and roll records. Its other artists included the Hollywood composer Lionel Newman, the torch singer Julie London, and a little later novelty acts like the Chipmunks -- the three Chipmunks, Alvin, Simon, and Theodore, being named after Al Bennett, Si Waronker, and Theodore Keep, the three men in charge of the label. And their attempts to force Cochran into the mould of a light-entertainment crooner produced a completely forgettable debut album, Singin' to My Baby, which has little of the rock and roll excitement that would characterise Cochran's better work. (And a warning for anyone who decides to go out and listen to that album anyway -- one of the few tracks on there that *is* in Cochran's rock and roll style is a song called "Mean When I'm Mad", which is one of the most misogynist things I have heard, and I've heard quite a lot -- it's basically an outright rape threat. So if that's something that will upset you, please steer clear of Cochran's first album, while knowing you're missing little artistically.) “Twenty Flight Rock” was eventually released as a single, in its remade version, in November 1957, almost a year after The Girl Can't Help It came out. Unsurprisingly, coming out so late after the film, it didn't chart, and it would be a while yet before Cochran would have his biggest hit. But just because it didn't chart, doesn't mean it didn't make an impression. There's one story, more than any other, that sums up the impact both of "The Girl Can't Help It" and of "Twenty Flight Rock" itself. In July 1957, a skiffle group called the Quarrymen, led by a teenager called John Lennon, played a village fete in Woolton, a suburb of Liverpool. After the show, they were introduced to a young boy named Paul McCartney by a mutual friend. Lennon and McCartney hit it off, but the thing that persuaded Lennon to offer McCartney a place in the group was when McCartney demonstrated that he knew all the words to "Twenty Flight Rock". Lennon wasn't great at remembering lyrics, and was impressed enough by this that he decided that this new kid needed to be in the group. [Excerpt: Paul McCartney, “Twenty Flight Rock”] That's the impact that The Girl Can't Help It had, and the impact that "Twenty Flight Rock" had. But Eddie Cochran's career was just starting, and we'll see more of him in future episodes...
Episode fifty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Twenty Flight Rock” by Eddie Cochran, and at the first great rock and roll film 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 “Teen-Age Crush” by Tommy Sands. —-more—- Resources There are several books available on Cochran, but for this episode I mostly relied on Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran: Rock and Roll Revolutionaries by John Collis. I’ll be using others as well in forthcoming episodes. While there are dozens of compilations of Cochran’s music available, many of them are flawed in one way or another (including the Real Gone Music four-CD set, which is what I would normally recommend). This one is probably the best you can get for Cochran novices. And as always there’s a Mixcloud with the full versions of all the songs featured in today’s episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript To tell the story of rock music, it’s important to tell the story of the music’s impact on other media. Rock and roll was a cultural phenomenon that affected almost everything, and it affected TV, film, clothing and more. So today, we’re going to look at how a film made the career of one of the greats of rock and roll music: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, “Twenty Flight Rock”] Eddie Cochran was born in Albert Lea, Minnesota, though in later life he would always claim to be an Okie rather than from Albert Lea. His parents were from Oklahoma, they moved to Minnesota shortly before Eddie was born, and they moved back to Oklahoma City when he was small, moved back again to Minnesota, and then moved off to California with the rest of the Okies. Cochran was a staggeringly precocious guitarist. On the road trip to California from Albert Lea, he had held his guitar on his lap for the entire journey, referring to it as his best friend. And once he hit California he quickly struck up a musical relationship with two friends — Guybo Smith, who played bass, and Chuck Foreman, who played steel guitar. The three of them got hold of a couple of tape recorders, which allowed them not only to record themselves, but to experiment with overdubbing in the style of Les Paul. Some of those recordings have seen release in recent years, and they’re quite astonishing: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran and Chuck Foreman, “Rockin’ It”] Cochran plays all the guitars on that (except the steel guitar, which is Foreman) and he was only fourteen years old at the time. He played with several groups who were playing the Okie Western Swing and proto-rockabilly that was popular in California at the time, and eventually hooked up with a singer from Mississippi who was born Garland Perry, but who changed his name to Hank Cochran, allowing the duo to perform under the name “the Cochran Brothers”. The Cochran Brothers soon got a record deal. When they started out, they were doing pure country music, and their first single was a Louvin Brothers style close harmony song, about Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams: [Excerpt: The Cochran Brothers, “Two Blue Singing Stars”] But while Hank was perfectly happy making this kind of music, Eddie was getting more and more interested in the new rock and roll music that was starting to become popular, and the two of them eventually split up over actual musical differences. Hank Cochran would go on to have a long and successful career in the country industry, but Eddie was floundering. He knew that this new music was what he should be playing, and he was one of the best guitarists around, but he wasn’t sure how to become a rock and roller, or even if he wanted to be a singer at all, rather than just a guitar player. He hooked up with Jerry Capehart, a singer and songwriter who the Cochran Brothers had earlier backed on a single: [Excerpt: Jerry Capehart and the Cochran Brothers, “Walkin’ Stick Boogie”] The two of them started writing songs together, and Eddie also started playing as a session musician. He played on dozens of sessions in the mid-fifties, mostly uncredited, and scholars are still trying to establish a full list of the records he played on. But while he was doing this, he still hadn’t got himself a record contract, other than for a single record on an independent label: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, “Skinny Jim”] Cochran was in the studio recording demos for consideration by record labels when Boris Petroff, a B-movie director who was a friend of Cochran’s collaborator Jerry Capehart, dropped in. Petroff decided that Cochran had the looks to be a film star, and right there offered him a part in a film that was being made under the working title Do-Re-Mi. Quite how Petroff had the ability to give Cochran a part in a film he wasn’t working on, I don’t know, but he did, and the offer was a genuine one, as Cochran confirmed the next day. There were many, many, rock and roll films made in the 1950s, and most of them were utterly terrible. It says something about the genre as a whole when I tell you that Elvis’ early films, which are not widely regarded as cinematic masterpieces, are among the very best rock and roll films of the decade. The 1950s were the tipping point for television ownership in both the US and the UK, but while TV was quickly becoming a mass medium, cinema-going was still at levels that would stagger people today — *everyone* went to the cinema. And when you went to the cinema, you didn’t go just to see one film. There’d be a main film, a shorter film called a B-movie that lasted maybe an hour, and short features like cartoons and newsreels. That meant that there was a much greater appetite for cheap films that could be used to fill out a programme, despite their total lack of quality. This is where, for example, all the films that appear in Mystery Science Theater 3000 come from, or many of them. And these B-movies would be made in a matter of weeks, or even days, and so would quickly be turned round to cash in on whatever trend was happening right at that minute. And so between 1956 and 1958 there were several dozen films, with titles like “Rock! Rock! Rock!”, “Don’t Knock The Rock” and so on. [Excerpt: Bill Haley and the Comets, “Don’t Knock the Rock”] In every case, these films were sold entirely on the basis of the musical performances therein, with little or no effort to sell them as narratives, even though they all had plots of sorts. They were just excuses to get footage of as many different hit acts as possible into the cinemas, ideally before their songs dropped off the charts. (Many of them also contained non-hit acts, like Teddy Randazzo, who seemed to appear in all of them despite never having a single make the top fifty. Randazzo did, though, go on to write a number of classic hits for other artists). Very few of the rock and roll films of the fifties were even watchable at all. We talked in the episode on “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” about the film “Rock! Rock! Rock!” which Chuck Berry appeared in — that was actually towards the more watchable end of these films, terrible as it was. The film that Cochran was signed to appear in, which was soon renamed The Girl Can’t Help It, is different. There are plenty of points at which the action stops for a musical performance, but there is an actual plot, and actual dialogue and acting. While the film isn’t a masterpiece or anything like that, it is a proper film. And it’s made by a proper studio. While, for example, Rock! Rock! Rock! was made by a fly-by-night company called Vanguard Productions, The Girl Can’t Help It was made by Twentieth Century Fox. And it was made in both colour and Cinemascope. The budget for Rock! Rock! Rock! was seventy-five thousand dollars compared to the 1.3 million dollars spent on The Girl Can’t Help It. [Excerpt: Little Richard, “The Girl Can’t Help It”] Indeed, it seems to be as much an attempt to cash in on a Billy Wilder film as it is an attempt to cash in on rock and roll. The previous year, The Seven-Year Itch had been a big hit, with Tom Ewell playing an unassuming middle-aged man who becomes worryingly attracted to a much younger woman, played by Marilyn Monroe. The film had been a massive success (and it’s responsible for the famous scene with Monroe on the air grate, which is still homaged and parodied to this day) and so the decision was taken to cast Tom Ewell as an unassuming middle-aged man who becomes worryingly attracted to a much younger woman, played by Jayne Mansfield doing her usual act of being a Marilyn Monroe impersonator. Just as the film was attempting to sell itself on the back of a more successful hit film, the story also bears a certain amount of resemblance to one by someone else. The playwright Garson Kanin had been inspired in 1955 by the tales of the jukebox wars — he’d discovered that most of the jukeboxes in the country were being run by the Mafia, and that which records got stocked and played depended very much on who would do favours for the various gangsters involved. Gangsters would often destroy rivals’ jukeboxes, and threaten bar owners if they were getting their jukeboxes from the wrong set of mobsters. Kanin took this idea and turned it into a novella, Do-Re-Mi, about a helpless schlub who teams up with a gangster named “Fatso” to enter the record business, and on the way more or less accidentally makes a young woman into a singing star. Do-Re-Mi later became a moderately successful stage musical, which introduced the song “Make Someone Happy”. [Excerpt: Doris Day, “Make Someone Happy”] Meanwhile the plot of The Girl Can’t Help It has a helpless schlub team up with a mobster named “Fats”, and the two of them working together to make the mobster’s young girlfriend into a singing star. I’ve seen varying accounts as to why The Girl Can’t Help It was renamed from Do-Re-Mi and wasn’t credited as being based on Kanin’s novella. Some say that the film was made without the rights having been acquired, and changed to the point that Kanin wouldn’t sue. Others say that Twentieth Century Fox acquired the rights perfectly legally, but that the director, Frank Tashlin changed the script around so much that Kanin asked that his credit be removed, because it was now so different from his novella that he could probably resell the rights at some future point. The latter seems fairly likely to me, given that Tashlin’s next film, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, which also starred Jayne Mansfield, contained almost nothing from the play on which it was based. Indeed, the original play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? was by the author of the original play on which The Seven-Year Itch was based. The playwright had been so annoyed at the way in which his vision had been messed with for the screen that he wrote Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? as a satire about the way the film industry changes writers’ work, and Mansfield was cast in the play. When Tashlin wanted Mansfield to star in The Girl Can’t Help It but she was contractually obliged to appear in the play, Fox decided the easiest thing to do was just to buy up the rights to the play and relieve Mansfield of her obligation so she could star in The Girl Can’t Help It. They then, once The Girl Can’t Help It finished, got Frank Tashlin to write a totally new film with the title Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, keeping only the title and Mansfield’s character. While The Girl Can’t Help It has a reputation for satirising rock and roll, it actually pulls its punches to a surprising extent. For example, there’s a pivotal scene where the main mobster character, Fats, calls our hero after seeing Eddie Cochran on TV: [excerpt: dialogue from “The Girl Can’t Help It”] Note the wording there, and what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t say that Cochran can’t sing, merely that he “ain’t got a trained voice”. The whole point of this scene is to set up that Jerry Jordan, Mansfield’s character, could become a rock and roll star even though she can’t sing at all, and yet when dealing with a real rock and roll star they are careful to be more ambiguous. Because, of course, the main thing that sold the film was the appearance of multiple rock and roll stars — although “stars” is possibly overstating it for many of those present in the film. One thing it shared with most of the exploitation films was a rather slapdash attitude to which musicians the film would actually feature. And so it has the genuinely big rock and roll stars of the time Little Richard, the Platters, and Fats Domino, the one-hit wonder Gene Vincent (but what a one hit to have), and a bunch of… less well-known people, like the Treniers — a jump band who’d been around since the forties and never really made a major impact, or Eddie Fontaine (about whom the less said the better), or the ubiquitous Teddy Randazzo, performing here with an accordion accompaniment. [Excerpt: Teddy Randazzo and the Three Chuckles, “Cinnamon Sinner”] And Cochran was to be one of those lesser-known acts, so he and Capehart had to find a song that might be suitable for him to perform in the film. Very quickly they decided on a song called “Twenty Flight Rock”, written by a songwriter called Nelda Fairchild. There has been a lot of controversy as to who actually contributed what to the song, which is copyrighted in the names of both Fairchild and Cochran. Fairchild always claimed that she wrote the whole thing entirely by herself, and that Cochran got his co-writing credit for performing the demo, while Cochran’s surviving relatives are equally emphatic in their claims that he was an equal contributor as a songwriter. We will almost certainly never know the truth. Cochran is credited as the co-writer of several other hit songs, usually with Capehart, but never as the sole writer of a hit. Fairchild, meanwhile, was a professional songwriter, but pieces like “Freddie the Little Fir Tree” don’t especially sound like the work of the same person who wrote “Twenty Flight Rock”. As both credited writers are now dead, the best we can do is use our own judgment, and my personal judgment is that Cochran probably contributed at least something to the song’s writing. The original version of “Twenty Flight Rock”, as featured in the film, was little more than a demo — it featured Cochran on guitar, Guybo Smith on double bass, and Capehart slapping a cardboard box to add percussion. Cochran later recorded a more fully-arranged version of the song, which came out after the film, but the extra elements, notably the backing vocals, added little to the simplistic original: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, “Twenty Flight Rock”] It was that simpler version that appeared in the film, and which took its place alongside several other classic tracks in the film’s soundtrack. The film was originally intended to have a theme tune recorded by Fats Domino, who appeared in the film performing his hit “Blue Monday”, but when Bobby Troup mentioned this to Art Rupe, Rupe suggested that Little Richard would be a more energetic star to perform the song (and I’m sure this was entirely because of his belief that Richard would be the better talent, and nothing to do with Rupe owning Richard’s label, but not Domino’s). As a result, Domino’s role in the film was cut down to a single song, while Richard ended up doing three — the title song, written by Troup, “Ready Teddy” by John Marascalco and Bumps Blackwell, and “She’s Got It”. We’ve mentioned before that John Marascalco’s writing credits sometimes seem to be slightly exaggerated, and “She’s Got It” is one record that tends to bear that out. Listen to “She’s Got It”, which has Marascalco as the sole credited writer: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “She’s Got It”] And now listen to “I Got It”, an earlier record by Richard, which has Little Richard credited as the sole writer: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “I Got It”] Hmm… The Girl Can’t Help It was rather poorly reviewed in America. In France it was a different story. There’s a pervasive legend that the people of France revere Jerry Lewis as a genius. This is nonsense. But the grain of truth in it is that Cahiers du Cinema, the most important film magazine in France by a long way — the magazine for which Godard, Truffaut, and others wrote, and which popularised the concept of auteur theory, absolutely loved Frank Tashlin. In 1957, Tashlin was the only director to get two films on their top ten films of the year list — The Girl Can’t Help It at number eight, and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter at number two. The other eight films on the list were directed by Chaplin, Fellini, Hitchcock, Bunuel, Ingmar Bergman, Nicholas Ray, Fritz Lang and Sidney Lumet. Tashlin directed several films starring Jerry Lewis, and those films, like Tashlin’s other work, got a significant amount of praise in the magazine. And that’s where that legend actually comes from, though Cahiers did also give some more guarded praise to some of the films Lewis directed himself later. Tashlin wasn’t actually that good a director, but what he did have is a visual style that came from a different area of filmmaking than most of his competitors. Tashlin had started out as a cartoon director, working on Warner Brothers cartoons. He wasn’t one of the better directors for Warners, and didn’t direct any of the classics people remember from the studio — he mostly made forgettable Porky Pig shorts. But this meant he had an animator’s sense for a visual gag, and thus gave his films a unique look. For advocates of auteur theory, that was enough to push him into the top ranks. And so The Girl Can’t Help It became a classic film, and Cochran got a great deal of attention, and a record deal. According to Si Waronker, the head of Liberty Records, Eddie Cochran getting signed to the label had nothing to do with him being cast in The Girl Can’t Help It, and Waronker had no idea the film was being made when Cochran got signed. This seems implausible, to say the least. Johnny Olenn, Abbey Lincoln and Julie London, three other Liberty Records artists, appeared in the film — and London was by some way Liberty’s biggest star. Not only that, but London’s husband, Bobby Troup, wrote the theme song and was musical director for the film. But whether or not Cochran was signed on account of his film appearance, “Twenty Flight Rock” wasn’t immediately released as a single. Indeed, by the time it came out Cochran had already appeared in another film, in which he had backed Mamie Van Doren — another Marilyn Monroe imitator in the same vein as Mansfield — on several songs, as well as having a small role and a featured song himself. Oddly, when that film, Untamed Youth, came out, Cochran’s backing on Van Doren’s recordings had been replaced by different instrumentalists. But he still appears on the EP that was released of the songs, including this one, which Cochran co-wrote with Capehart: [Excerpt: Mamie Van Doren, “Ooh Ba La Baby”] It had originally been planned to release “Twenty Flight Rock” as Cochran’s first single on Liberty, to coincide with the film’s release but then it was put back for several months, as Si Waronker wanted Cochran to release “Sitting in the Balcony” instead. That song had been written and originally recorded by John D Loudermilk: [Excerpt: John D Loudermilk, “Sitting in the Balcony”] Waronker had wanted to release Loudermilk’s record, but he hadn’t been able to get the rights, so he decided to get Cochran to record a note-for-note cover version and release that instead: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, “Sitting in the Balcony”] Cochran was not particularly happy with that record, though he was happy enough once the record started selling in comparatively vast quantities, spurred by his appearance in The Girl Can’t Help It, and reached number eighteen in the charts. The problem was that Cochran and Waronker had fundamentally different ideas about what Cochran actually was as an artist. Cochran thought of himself primarily as a guitarist — and the guitar solo on “Sittin’ in the Balcony” was the one thing about Cochran’s record which distinguished it from Loudermilk’s original — and also as a rock and roller. Waronker, on the other hand, was convinced that someone with Cochran’s good looks and masculine voice could easily be another Pat Boone. Liberty was fundamentally not geared towards making rock and roll records. Its other artists included the Hollywood composer Lionel Newman, the torch singer Julie London, and a little later novelty acts like the Chipmunks — the three Chipmunks, Alvin, Simon, and Theodore, being named after Al Bennett, Si Waronker, and Theodore Keep, the three men in charge of the label. And their attempts to force Cochran into the mould of a light-entertainment crooner produced a completely forgettable debut album, Singin’ to My Baby, which has little of the rock and roll excitement that would characterise Cochran’s better work. (And a warning for anyone who decides to go out and listen to that album anyway — one of the few tracks on there that *is* in Cochran’s rock and roll style is a song called “Mean When I’m Mad”, which is one of the most misogynist things I have heard, and I’ve heard quite a lot — it’s basically an outright rape threat. So if that’s something that will upset you, please steer clear of Cochran’s first album, while knowing you’re missing little artistically.) “Twenty Flight Rock” was eventually released as a single, in its remade version, in November 1957, almost a year after The Girl Can’t Help It came out. Unsurprisingly, coming out so late after the film, it didn’t chart, and it would be a while yet before Cochran would have his biggest hit. But just because it didn’t chart, doesn’t mean it didn’t make an impression. There’s one story, more than any other, that sums up the impact both of “The Girl Can’t Help It” and of “Twenty Flight Rock” itself. In July 1957, a skiffle group called the Quarrymen, led by a teenager called John Lennon, played a village fete in Woolton, a suburb of Liverpool. After the show, they were introduced to a young boy named Paul McCartney by a mutual friend. Lennon and McCartney hit it off, but the thing that persuaded Lennon to offer McCartney a place in the group was when McCartney demonstrated that he knew all the words to “Twenty Flight Rock”. Lennon wasn’t great at remembering lyrics, and was impressed enough by this that he decided that this new kid needed to be in the group. [Excerpt: Paul McCartney, “Twenty Flight Rock”] That’s the impact that The Girl Can’t Help It had, and the impact that “Twenty Flight Rock” had. But Eddie Cochran’s career was just starting, and we’ll see more of him in future episodes…
Episode fifty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Twenty Flight Rock” by Eddie Cochran, and at the first great rock and roll film 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 “Teen-Age Crush” by Tommy Sands. —-more—- Resources There are several books available on Cochran, but for this episode I mostly relied on Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran: Rock and Roll Revolutionaries by John Collis. I’ll be using others as well in forthcoming episodes. While there are dozens of compilations of Cochran’s music available, many of them are flawed in one way or another (including the Real Gone Music four-CD set, which is what I would normally recommend). This one is probably the best you can get for Cochran novices. And as always there’s a Mixcloud with the full versions of all the songs featured in today’s episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript To tell the story of rock music, it’s important to tell the story of the music’s impact on other media. Rock and roll was a cultural phenomenon that affected almost everything, and it affected TV, film, clothing and more. So today, we’re going to look at how a film made the career of one of the greats of rock and roll music: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, “Twenty Flight Rock”] Eddie Cochran was born in Albert Lea, Minnesota, though in later life he would always claim to be an Okie rather than from Albert Lea. His parents were from Oklahoma, they moved to Minnesota shortly before Eddie was born, and they moved back to Oklahoma City when he was small, moved back again to Minnesota, and then moved off to California with the rest of the Okies. Cochran was a staggeringly precocious guitarist. On the road trip to California from Albert Lea, he had held his guitar on his lap for the entire journey, referring to it as his best friend. And once he hit California he quickly struck up a musical relationship with two friends — Guybo Smith, who played bass, and Chuck Foreman, who played steel guitar. The three of them got hold of a couple of tape recorders, which allowed them not only to record themselves, but to experiment with overdubbing in the style of Les Paul. Some of those recordings have seen release in recent years, and they’re quite astonishing: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran and Chuck Foreman, “Rockin’ It”] Cochran plays all the guitars on that (except the steel guitar, which is Foreman) and he was only fourteen years old at the time. He played with several groups who were playing the Okie Western Swing and proto-rockabilly that was popular in California at the time, and eventually hooked up with a singer from Mississippi who was born Garland Perry, but who changed his name to Hank Cochran, allowing the duo to perform under the name “the Cochran Brothers”. The Cochran Brothers soon got a record deal. When they started out, they were doing pure country music, and their first single was a Louvin Brothers style close harmony song, about Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams: [Excerpt: The Cochran Brothers, “Two Blue Singing Stars”] But while Hank was perfectly happy making this kind of music, Eddie was getting more and more interested in the new rock and roll music that was starting to become popular, and the two of them eventually split up over actual musical differences. Hank Cochran would go on to have a long and successful career in the country industry, but Eddie was floundering. He knew that this new music was what he should be playing, and he was one of the best guitarists around, but he wasn’t sure how to become a rock and roller, or even if he wanted to be a singer at all, rather than just a guitar player. He hooked up with Jerry Capehart, a singer and songwriter who the Cochran Brothers had earlier backed on a single: [Excerpt: Jerry Capehart and the Cochran Brothers, “Walkin’ Stick Boogie”] The two of them started writing songs together, and Eddie also started playing as a session musician. He played on dozens of sessions in the mid-fifties, mostly uncredited, and scholars are still trying to establish a full list of the records he played on. But while he was doing this, he still hadn’t got himself a record contract, other than for a single record on an independent label: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, “Skinny Jim”] Cochran was in the studio recording demos for consideration by record labels when Boris Petroff, a B-movie director who was a friend of Cochran’s collaborator Jerry Capehart, dropped in. Petroff decided that Cochran had the looks to be a film star, and right there offered him a part in a film that was being made under the working title Do-Re-Mi. Quite how Petroff had the ability to give Cochran a part in a film he wasn’t working on, I don’t know, but he did, and the offer was a genuine one, as Cochran confirmed the next day. There were many, many, rock and roll films made in the 1950s, and most of them were utterly terrible. It says something about the genre as a whole when I tell you that Elvis’ early films, which are not widely regarded as cinematic masterpieces, are among the very best rock and roll films of the decade. The 1950s were the tipping point for television ownership in both the US and the UK, but while TV was quickly becoming a mass medium, cinema-going was still at levels that would stagger people today — *everyone* went to the cinema. And when you went to the cinema, you didn’t go just to see one film. There’d be a main film, a shorter film called a B-movie that lasted maybe an hour, and short features like cartoons and newsreels. That meant that there was a much greater appetite for cheap films that could be used to fill out a programme, despite their total lack of quality. This is where, for example, all the films that appear in Mystery Science Theater 3000 come from, or many of them. And these B-movies would be made in a matter of weeks, or even days, and so would quickly be turned round to cash in on whatever trend was happening right at that minute. And so between 1956 and 1958 there were several dozen films, with titles like “Rock! Rock! Rock!”, “Don’t Knock The Rock” and so on. [Excerpt: Bill Haley and the Comets, “Don’t Knock the Rock”] In every case, these films were sold entirely on the basis of the musical performances therein, with little or no effort to sell them as narratives, even though they all had plots of sorts. They were just excuses to get footage of as many different hit acts as possible into the cinemas, ideally before their songs dropped off the charts. (Many of them also contained non-hit acts, like Teddy Randazzo, who seemed to appear in all of them despite never having a single make the top fifty. Randazzo did, though, go on to write a number of classic hits for other artists). Very few of the rock and roll films of the fifties were even watchable at all. We talked in the episode on “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” about the film “Rock! Rock! Rock!” which Chuck Berry appeared in — that was actually towards the more watchable end of these films, terrible as it was. The film that Cochran was signed to appear in, which was soon renamed The Girl Can’t Help It, is different. There are plenty of points at which the action stops for a musical performance, but there is an actual plot, and actual dialogue and acting. While the film isn’t a masterpiece or anything like that, it is a proper film. And it’s made by a proper studio. While, for example, Rock! Rock! Rock! was made by a fly-by-night company called Vanguard Productions, The Girl Can’t Help It was made by Twentieth Century Fox. And it was made in both colour and Cinemascope. The budget for Rock! Rock! Rock! was seventy-five thousand dollars compared to the 1.3 million dollars spent on The Girl Can’t Help It. [Excerpt: Little Richard, “The Girl Can’t Help It”] Indeed, it seems to be as much an attempt to cash in on a Billy Wilder film as it is an attempt to cash in on rock and roll. The previous year, The Seven-Year Itch had been a big hit, with Tom Ewell playing an unassuming middle-aged man who becomes worryingly attracted to a much younger woman, played by Marilyn Monroe. The film had been a massive success (and it’s responsible for the famous scene with Monroe on the air grate, which is still homaged and parodied to this day) and so the decision was taken to cast Tom Ewell as an unassuming middle-aged man who becomes worryingly attracted to a much younger woman, played by Jayne Mansfield doing her usual act of being a Marilyn Monroe impersonator. Just as the film was attempting to sell itself on the back of a more successful hit film, the story also bears a certain amount of resemblance to one by someone else. The playwright Garson Kanin had been inspired in 1955 by the tales of the jukebox wars — he’d discovered that most of the jukeboxes in the country were being run by the Mafia, and that which records got stocked and played depended very much on who would do favours for the various gangsters involved. Gangsters would often destroy rivals’ jukeboxes, and threaten bar owners if they were getting their jukeboxes from the wrong set of mobsters. Kanin took this idea and turned it into a novella, Do-Re-Mi, about a helpless schlub who teams up with a gangster named “Fatso” to enter the record business, and on the way more or less accidentally makes a young woman into a singing star. Do-Re-Mi later became a moderately successful stage musical, which introduced the song “Make Someone Happy”. [Excerpt: Doris Day, “Make Someone Happy”] Meanwhile the plot of The Girl Can’t Help It has a helpless schlub team up with a mobster named “Fats”, and the two of them working together to make the mobster’s young girlfriend into a singing star. I’ve seen varying accounts as to why The Girl Can’t Help It was renamed from Do-Re-Mi and wasn’t credited as being based on Kanin’s novella. Some say that the film was made without the rights having been acquired, and changed to the point that Kanin wouldn’t sue. Others say that Twentieth Century Fox acquired the rights perfectly legally, but that the director, Frank Tashlin changed the script around so much that Kanin asked that his credit be removed, because it was now so different from his novella that he could probably resell the rights at some future point. The latter seems fairly likely to me, given that Tashlin’s next film, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, which also starred Jayne Mansfield, contained almost nothing from the play on which it was based. Indeed, the original play Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? was by the author of the original play on which The Seven-Year Itch was based. The playwright had been so annoyed at the way in which his vision had been messed with for the screen that he wrote Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? as a satire about the way the film industry changes writers’ work, and Mansfield was cast in the play. When Tashlin wanted Mansfield to star in The Girl Can’t Help It but she was contractually obliged to appear in the play, Fox decided the easiest thing to do was just to buy up the rights to the play and relieve Mansfield of her obligation so she could star in The Girl Can’t Help It. They then, once The Girl Can’t Help It finished, got Frank Tashlin to write a totally new film with the title Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, keeping only the title and Mansfield’s character. While The Girl Can’t Help It has a reputation for satirising rock and roll, it actually pulls its punches to a surprising extent. For example, there’s a pivotal scene where the main mobster character, Fats, calls our hero after seeing Eddie Cochran on TV: [excerpt: dialogue from “The Girl Can’t Help It”] Note the wording there, and what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t say that Cochran can’t sing, merely that he “ain’t got a trained voice”. The whole point of this scene is to set up that Jerry Jordan, Mansfield’s character, could become a rock and roll star even though she can’t sing at all, and yet when dealing with a real rock and roll star they are careful to be more ambiguous. Because, of course, the main thing that sold the film was the appearance of multiple rock and roll stars — although “stars” is possibly overstating it for many of those present in the film. One thing it shared with most of the exploitation films was a rather slapdash attitude to which musicians the film would actually feature. And so it has the genuinely big rock and roll stars of the time Little Richard, the Platters, and Fats Domino, the one-hit wonder Gene Vincent (but what a one hit to have), and a bunch of… less well-known people, like the Treniers — a jump band who’d been around since the forties and never really made a major impact, or Eddie Fontaine (about whom the less said the better), or the ubiquitous Teddy Randazzo, performing here with an accordion accompaniment. [Excerpt: Teddy Randazzo and the Three Chuckles, “Cinnamon Sinner”] And Cochran was to be one of those lesser-known acts, so he and Capehart had to find a song that might be suitable for him to perform in the film. Very quickly they decided on a song called “Twenty Flight Rock”, written by a songwriter called Nelda Fairchild. There has been a lot of controversy as to who actually contributed what to the song, which is copyrighted in the names of both Fairchild and Cochran. Fairchild always claimed that she wrote the whole thing entirely by herself, and that Cochran got his co-writing credit for performing the demo, while Cochran’s surviving relatives are equally emphatic in their claims that he was an equal contributor as a songwriter. We will almost certainly never know the truth. Cochran is credited as the co-writer of several other hit songs, usually with Capehart, but never as the sole writer of a hit. Fairchild, meanwhile, was a professional songwriter, but pieces like “Freddie the Little Fir Tree” don’t especially sound like the work of the same person who wrote “Twenty Flight Rock”. As both credited writers are now dead, the best we can do is use our own judgment, and my personal judgment is that Cochran probably contributed at least something to the song’s writing. The original version of “Twenty Flight Rock”, as featured in the film, was little more than a demo — it featured Cochran on guitar, Guybo Smith on double bass, and Capehart slapping a cardboard box to add percussion. Cochran later recorded a more fully-arranged version of the song, which came out after the film, but the extra elements, notably the backing vocals, added little to the simplistic original: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, “Twenty Flight Rock”] It was that simpler version that appeared in the film, and which took its place alongside several other classic tracks in the film’s soundtrack. The film was originally intended to have a theme tune recorded by Fats Domino, who appeared in the film performing his hit “Blue Monday”, but when Bobby Troup mentioned this to Art Rupe, Rupe suggested that Little Richard would be a more energetic star to perform the song (and I’m sure this was entirely because of his belief that Richard would be the better talent, and nothing to do with Rupe owning Richard’s label, but not Domino’s). As a result, Domino’s role in the film was cut down to a single song, while Richard ended up doing three — the title song, written by Troup, “Ready Teddy” by John Marascalco and Bumps Blackwell, and “She’s Got It”. We’ve mentioned before that John Marascalco’s writing credits sometimes seem to be slightly exaggerated, and “She’s Got It” is one record that tends to bear that out. Listen to “She’s Got It”, which has Marascalco as the sole credited writer: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “She’s Got It”] And now listen to “I Got It”, an earlier record by Richard, which has Little Richard credited as the sole writer: [Excerpt: Little Richard, “I Got It”] Hmm… The Girl Can’t Help It was rather poorly reviewed in America. In France it was a different story. There’s a pervasive legend that the people of France revere Jerry Lewis as a genius. This is nonsense. But the grain of truth in it is that Cahiers du Cinema, the most important film magazine in France by a long way — the magazine for which Godard, Truffaut, and others wrote, and which popularised the concept of auteur theory, absolutely loved Frank Tashlin. In 1957, Tashlin was the only director to get two films on their top ten films of the year list — The Girl Can’t Help It at number eight, and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter at number two. The other eight films on the list were directed by Chaplin, Fellini, Hitchcock, Bunuel, Ingmar Bergman, Nicholas Ray, Fritz Lang and Sidney Lumet. Tashlin directed several films starring Jerry Lewis, and those films, like Tashlin’s other work, got a significant amount of praise in the magazine. And that’s where that legend actually comes from, though Cahiers did also give some more guarded praise to some of the films Lewis directed himself later. Tashlin wasn’t actually that good a director, but what he did have is a visual style that came from a different area of filmmaking than most of his competitors. Tashlin had started out as a cartoon director, working on Warner Brothers cartoons. He wasn’t one of the better directors for Warners, and didn’t direct any of the classics people remember from the studio — he mostly made forgettable Porky Pig shorts. But this meant he had an animator’s sense for a visual gag, and thus gave his films a unique look. For advocates of auteur theory, that was enough to push him into the top ranks. And so The Girl Can’t Help It became a classic film, and Cochran got a great deal of attention, and a record deal. According to Si Waronker, the head of Liberty Records, Eddie Cochran getting signed to the label had nothing to do with him being cast in The Girl Can’t Help It, and Waronker had no idea the film was being made when Cochran got signed. This seems implausible, to say the least. Johnny Olenn, Abbey Lincoln and Julie London, three other Liberty Records artists, appeared in the film — and London was by some way Liberty’s biggest star. Not only that, but London’s husband, Bobby Troup, wrote the theme song and was musical director for the film. But whether or not Cochran was signed on account of his film appearance, “Twenty Flight Rock” wasn’t immediately released as a single. Indeed, by the time it came out Cochran had already appeared in another film, in which he had backed Mamie Van Doren — another Marilyn Monroe imitator in the same vein as Mansfield — on several songs, as well as having a small role and a featured song himself. Oddly, when that film, Untamed Youth, came out, Cochran’s backing on Van Doren’s recordings had been replaced by different instrumentalists. But he still appears on the EP that was released of the songs, including this one, which Cochran co-wrote with Capehart: [Excerpt: Mamie Van Doren, “Ooh Ba La Baby”] It had originally been planned to release “Twenty Flight Rock” as Cochran’s first single on Liberty, to coincide with the film’s release but then it was put back for several months, as Si Waronker wanted Cochran to release “Sitting in the Balcony” instead. That song had been written and originally recorded by John D Loudermilk: [Excerpt: John D Loudermilk, “Sitting in the Balcony”] Waronker had wanted to release Loudermilk’s record, but he hadn’t been able to get the rights, so he decided to get Cochran to record a note-for-note cover version and release that instead: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, “Sitting in the Balcony”] Cochran was not particularly happy with that record, though he was happy enough once the record started selling in comparatively vast quantities, spurred by his appearance in The Girl Can’t Help It, and reached number eighteen in the charts. The problem was that Cochran and Waronker had fundamentally different ideas about what Cochran actually was as an artist. Cochran thought of himself primarily as a guitarist — and the guitar solo on “Sittin’ in the Balcony” was the one thing about Cochran’s record which distinguished it from Loudermilk’s original — and also as a rock and roller. Waronker, on the other hand, was convinced that someone with Cochran’s good looks and masculine voice could easily be another Pat Boone. Liberty was fundamentally not geared towards making rock and roll records. Its other artists included the Hollywood composer Lionel Newman, the torch singer Julie London, and a little later novelty acts like the Chipmunks — the three Chipmunks, Alvin, Simon, and Theodore, being named after Al Bennett, Si Waronker, and Theodore Keep, the three men in charge of the label. And their attempts to force Cochran into the mould of a light-entertainment crooner produced a completely forgettable debut album, Singin’ to My Baby, which has little of the rock and roll excitement that would characterise Cochran’s better work. (And a warning for anyone who decides to go out and listen to that album anyway — one of the few tracks on there that *is* in Cochran’s rock and roll style is a song called “Mean When I’m Mad”, which is one of the most misogynist things I have heard, and I’ve heard quite a lot — it’s basically an outright rape threat. So if that’s something that will upset you, please steer clear of Cochran’s first album, while knowing you’re missing little artistically.) “Twenty Flight Rock” was eventually released as a single, in its remade version, in November 1957, almost a year after The Girl Can’t Help It came out. Unsurprisingly, coming out so late after the film, it didn’t chart, and it would be a while yet before Cochran would have his biggest hit. But just because it didn’t chart, doesn’t mean it didn’t make an impression. There’s one story, more than any other, that sums up the impact both of “The Girl Can’t Help It” and of “Twenty Flight Rock” itself. In July 1957, a skiffle group called the Quarrymen, led by a teenager called John Lennon, played a village fete in Woolton, a suburb of Liverpool. After the show, they were introduced to a young boy named Paul McCartney by a mutual friend. Lennon and McCartney hit it off, but the thing that persuaded Lennon to offer McCartney a place in the group was when McCartney demonstrated that he knew all the words to “Twenty Flight Rock”. Lennon wasn’t great at remembering lyrics, and was impressed enough by this that he decided that this new kid needed to be in the group. [Excerpt: Paul McCartney, “Twenty Flight Rock”] That’s the impact that The Girl Can’t Help It had, and the impact that “Twenty Flight Rock” had. But Eddie Cochran’s career was just starting, and we’ll see more of him in future episodes…
On this episode of the Healthy, Wealthy and Smart Podcast, I welcome Dr. Stephanie Gray on the show to discuss bone health. Dr. Stephanie Gray, DNP, MS, ARNP, ANP-C, GNP-C, ABAAHP, FAARFM, is a functional medicine provider who helps men and women build sustainable and optimal health and longevity so that they can focus on what matters most to them. She is co-founder of Your Longevity Blueprint nutraceuticals with her husband, Eric. They own the Integrative Health and Hormone Clinic in Hiawatha, Iowa. In this episode, we discuss: -What is functional medicine and integrative medicine? -Hormones that impact your bone density as you age and how to find your deficiencies -The difference between natural and synthetic hormones -Your Longevity Blueprint: a guide to mastering each of your body systems -And so much more! Resources: Integrative Health and Hormone Clinic Website Your Longevity Blueprint Free gift: 10% off using code healthy10 Stephanie Gray Facebook Integrative Health and Hormone Clinic Facebook Stephanie Gray Instagram Your Longevity Blueprint Instagram Stephanie Gray Twitter Your Longevity Blueprint Youtube For more information on Dr. Gray Stephanie Gray, DNP, MS, ARNP, ANP-C, GNP-C, ABAAHP, FAARFM, is a functional medicine provider who helps men and women build sustainable and optimal health and longevity so that they can focus on what matters most to them! She has been working as a nurse practitioner since 2009. She completed her doctorate focusing on estrogen metabolism from the University of Iowa in 2011. Additionally, she has a Masters in Metabolic Nutritional Medicine from the University of South Florida’s Medical School. Her expertise lies within integrative, anti-aging, and functional medicine. She is arguably one of the midwest's’ most credentialed female healthcare providers combining many certifications and trainings. She completed an Advanced fellowship in Anti-Aging Regenerative and Functional medicine in 2013. She became the first BioTe certified provider in Iowa to administer hormone pellets also in 2013. She is the author of the FNP Mastery App and an Amazon best-selling author of her book Your Longevity Blueprint. She is co-founder of Your Longevity Blueprint nutraceuticals with her husband, Eric. They own the Integrative Health and Hormone Clinic in Hiawatha, Iowa. Read the full transcript below: Karen Litzy: 00:01 Hi, Dr. Stephanie Gray. Welcome to the podcast. I'm happy to finally have you on. This is taken forever between the two of our schedules. Stephanie Gray: 00:09 Thank you for having me on. I'm excited to speak with you today. Karen Litzy: 00:12 Yeah, I'm very excited. And we had met, Gosh, last year, maybe Stephanie Gray: 00:17 October. Karen Litzy: 00:18 Yeah, October of last year. Holy Cow. Yes. Well, I'm very excited to have you on because when we met at unfair advantage and I remember hearing your story and hearing you speak and I thought I need to talk to this woman because I think she's doing some really great work, so I'm happy to have you on and share all about what you're doing. We'll talk about your book, the longevity blueprint in a little bit, but first, can you let the audience know a little bit about your journey from your BS to your MS in nursing to doctorate to all these certifications and how that happened in the why behind it? Stephanie Gray: 00:58 Sure. Well, maybe the short version is that I was born and raised in the Midwest and I grew up in a very healthy family and I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do with my life as many people are I’m sure. My parents always took us to see a chiropractor, not a regular doctor. They were self employed, had a really high deductible. So they wanted to keep us healthy and growing up, I wanted to get into medicine. I kind of grew up wanting to be a doctor. I'd play with my doctor Kit, but I didn't necessarily want to prescribe drugs. And so I thought, well maybe I'll go into nursing. Right? So I went through the nursing program at University of Iowa and I love nurses, man, they're so important. We have a shortage, we need more nurses. But I thought I wanted to have more autonomy and more independence and I wanted to still be able to diagnose and treat patients. Stephanie Gray: 01:43 And so I did continue on to become a nurse practitioner and I ended up going through the master's and then the doctorate program. And I still was a little unsatisfied. I felt like, man, there's gotta be more to life than prescribing medications. Right? Nursing is a more holistic approach in general. And that's why I'm biased to nurse practitioners as primary care providers because I think they do provide a more holistic approach. I wanted some additional trainings so that I could incorporate nutrition, that I would have some credentials behind recommending things other than drugs. So I did also then pursue a master's in metabolic nutritional medicine, which taught me a lot about, you know, using supplements and herbs and whatnot, which I heavily applied in my practice. And then I also did complete the advanced fellowship in anti-aging, regenerative and functional medicine which helped me tremendously. I learned a lot about use of bioidentical hormones as well. And I really just became on fire for integrative and functional medicine and thought, this is it. This is what, especially my community in Iowa needs, because there weren't a lot of providers offering this sort of care. So that's, I guess that's kind of my story. Karen Litzy: 02:50 Well, that's a great story. I love it. Now you mentioned functional medicine and Integrative Medicine. Can you kind of help us out and talk about what those branches of medicine are? Stephanie Gray: 03:01 Sure. So integrative medicine combines or integrates conventional medicine with natural, uneven, complimentary forms of medicine. It's not, I'll say functional medicine also really more works to get to the root cause of the problem. That's kind of more of the definition of functional medicine. And I use both in my practice. I use functional medicine to kind of discover the why, but I also use integrative medicine because there is a time and place for medication use. Sometimes patients do need antibiotics or surgery. I've had to partake in them myself. But I want to provide my patients with the best of all worlds combined. So do I think chiropractic is important? Yes. Acupuncture? Yes. Use of supplements. Yes. Medications, all of the above. I think the major difference in the analogy I use with my patients that I did not create a colleague, Patrick, he mentions conventional medicine as being more of the fire department approach. Right? We need conventional medicine. If you have a big bad ugly tumor or whatnot, you need the fire department to put that out to remove it. But conventional medicines tools are drugs and surgery. Functional medicine is a little different. We described that in my practice as being more of like a carpenter approach and that's what I describe in my book. Really helping to repair and rebuild the body, figure out why the fire happened in the first place and try to get to that root cause of the problem, not just provide a bandaid approach. Karen Litzy: 04:16 Right. And that's a great analogy. Thank you for that. That’s definitely clear. It makes functional and integrative medicine a little bit clearer for everyone. Hopefully. So now I mentioned the book longevity blueprint and again we'll talk about that a little bit later, but there's a chapter in the book, Chapter Four where you discuss the importance of fixing nutritional deficiencies and specifically when it comes to our bones. So as mainly women, we all know as we get older and as we go through menopause, our hormones change and bone density can change along with that. So what nutrients I guess are specifically important for our bones? Stephanie Gray: 05:09 So I'll discuss several nutrients. So many women think calcium is a number one most important nutrient for their bones. And the truth is that your bones need a lot more than calcium. So vitamin D, magnesium, vitamin K2 and strontium are all nutrients that I recommend to my patients. I mentioned vitamin D in several different chapters of my book and that as many people know, helps your body absorb calcium and phosphorus from the foods you eat. And it helps with bone remodeling. Maybe I don't know how deep we should get into that. Maybe you shouldn't, but without enough magnesium though calcium can also collect in the wrong places in soft tissues and cause arthritis. And so magnesium is just as important as calcium. There have been several studies of women with Osteopenia or osteoporosis showing they're actually not deficient in calcium deficient, they’re deficient in magnesium yet. Stephanie Gray: 05:58 What's the number one most prescribed supplement? Menopausal woman. Again, it's calcium. I personally have had a kidney stone and they are not fun. So calcium can not only gain weight, it can cause bone spurs, but it can cause kidney stones. It can calcify our arteries. We don't want it getting absorbed in to the wrong places of our body. And that's where vitamin K2 comes in also. So vitaminK is really overlooked nutrient. It's one of the four fat soluble nutrients. So it really helps prevent calcium from accumulating in our vessels. And it can even, some people believe can help remove dangerous calcifications too. We know that low levels of k2 can directly be related to poor bone mineral density. So I like analogy. Stephanie Gray: 06:45 So here's another analogy on what vitamin K2 really does, and vitamin D. So vitamin D is the doorman that opens the door for calcium to enter the bloodstream. But once it's in the bloodstream, it could go anywhere. So I think if K2 is being that usher that's going to direct the calcium from the lobby, if we think of a hotel or whatnot, directing him to the appropriate seat in our bone matrix. So do we need vitamin D? Yes. Do we need magnesium? Yes. We also need vitaminK2. So there are different sort or different types of vitamin K. So vitaminK is broken down to K1 and K2. So if you are purchasing a supplement, if it just says vitaminK , you don't necessarily know what you're getting. Stephanie Gray: 07:26 You want to make sure that the label is really differentiating if specifying what is in that product. So vitamin K1 isn't as much needed to be supplemented. It's the deficiency is pretty rare. It's found in leafy Greens. Hopefully you're all getting your leafy Greens. But vitamin K2 comes from very specific foods and also bacterial synthesis. So think of it. Think of yourself as you know, if you don't have a healthy gut, unfortunately your body's not going to be able to convert. K1 to K2 in the gut if you've taken antibiotics, whatnot, if you have a lot of food sensitivities and gut inflammation. And so you really want to think about consuming foods with K2 and possibly supplementing in that as well. So vitamin K2 comes from fermented soybeans, which many of us probably are not consuming and also from the fat milk and organs of grass fed animals. Stephanie Gray: 08:16 So things like egg yolk, butter, and even liver with why we're coming, we're becoming more vitamin K deficient is that you are where you're what you eat, eat. So if you've heard of what Michael Poland has said, and I think that's really true with K2. So when we removed animals from the pasture, right? If we don't eat animals that are eating greens, they're not getting the K2 themselves and then we're not getting it from our products. So you want to make sure you are eating grass fed animals and think of wild game. Wild game is really what's can usually consuming the ingredients. So try to consume more pheasant, duck rabbit, venison, elk, or wild Turkey. I mean these are things that we don't all have access to, but that would actually help increase our K2 levels. So if you can't get some of those foods into your diet, then you could consider supplementing that. Stephanie Gray: 09:06 It could literally again consume the fermented soy beans. But MK7 has a pretty long half life, longer than MK4. So I recommend my patients take MK7, MK4 is actually extracted from a tobacco plant, which I don't like either, sometimes will come from fermented soybeans, geranium or chickpea. And the source that we use for our production is chickpea. It has a longer half life, so a single daily dose can provide longer protection. So many of my patients, we're putting on 45 90 or even 180 micrograms of MK7 per day. It's great to incorporate foods that have, you know, consumed grass Greens. You hit the chlorophyll to get the vitamin K and to have a great healthy gut that convert can indicate too, but if you can't, and supplementing with MK7 is what I recommend. Karen Litzy: 09:56 Yeah. And, just so people know, are you doing blood tests on people to find these levels? I just want to point that out so that people listening are like, well, I'm just going to go buy all this stuff, but you have to go and be evaluated first. Stephanie Gray: 10:15 Yeah. So in my book in chapter four I talk about, well, every chapter of the book discusses a functional medicine testing option that's available. And chapter four is all about examining micronutrient deficiencies. Which even my patients who eat organic, who grow their own food in their backyard are still nutritionally deficient because our food sources are just not as nutrient dense as they used to be. I mean, the magnesium content in our foods has been on a decline since the 1950s. It keeps going down and down and down, which is very sad. But because of that, we can see that evidenced on a test that we run on our patients. So one of the first tests for my patients with osteoporosis or Penia that we would run is this nutritional analysis, which is looking at vitamin, mineral, amino acid, antioxidant, and even Omega levels. And if you have the access to a functional medicine practitioner, definitely I would recommend getting this test because then you don't have to guess how much magnesium, how much do I need? It's better to really get the test to see what you need. Karen Litzy: 11:12 Right. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And I just wanted to point that out to people so that they know. I guess also, are there any dangers of taking these vitamins if you don't need them? Stephanie Gray: 11:28 So vitaminK to a high dose just can cause blood thinning. So if patients are taking anticoagulants, if they're on medications like Warfarin, you know, Coumadin, then this could potentiate those effects at really high dosages. So if you're listening to this and you want to take some K2, you probably need it. But talk to your doctor or nurse just so that they know so that they can monitor your levels. So that would the biggest, biggest side effects. Stephanie Gray: 12:04 The last nutrient for bone mineral density that I recommend to my patients is strontium. This was one of the first minerals that I really learned about for bone density. So I heavily used it initially even before I learned about the importance of K2. There have been randomized double blind placebo controlled clinical trials showing that strontium in a dose of about one gram per day could be equally as effective as a lot of the bisphosphonate medications without getting those nasty side effects. But I have seen this be effective in my patients too. Granted, I'm recommending they take minerals, optimize their hormones, reduce their stress, exercise, right? So all of those interventions are going to have an additive effect for improving bone density. But strontium can be very, very helpful for bone density as well. Karen Litzy: 12:48 Nice. All right, so we have vitamin D, vitaminK2, strontium and magnesium. Stephanie Gray: 12:56 And then calcium of course calcium. I don't put calcium on the top of the list, but yes. Karen Litzy: 13:01 But it's there. Okay. All right. Now you mentioned hormones for a quick second there, but is there value in optimizing hormones for bone density? Stephanie Gray: 13:13 You Bet. So about 25 well, I think it's 27% of women over 50 can have osteoporosis, right? Like a fourth of those patients of that population, which is pretty scary. Yeah. And I'll go 40% have osteopenia. There's also, I'm referencing women over 50 so what's the other common dominator for women over 50 usually you're going through menopause around that declining and this, the danger here is that this can increase risk for fractures. Of course, Osteoporosis Foundation says at 24% of those with hip fractures die within a year. That's, that's terrible. Very cool. So absolutely, I run a hormone clinic and I strongly believe that improving estrogen, progesterone, and even testosterone levels in women can help with bone density. And I can talk a little, I can go into depth with each of those hormones. Karen Litzy: 14:06 Yeah, I think I would like a little bit more in depth conversation on that and also the difference between synthetic and natural hormones. Stephanie Gray: 14:15 Sure, sure. So maybe first we'll talk a little bit about estrogen. So estrogen literally helps with a proper bone remodeling process. Progesterone helps promote osteoblastic activity. So osteoblast help build your bones while osteoclast break it down, right? So progesterone is going to help with the bone builders and testosterone has been proven to actually stimulate new bone growth and inhibit or block the osteoclastic that breaking down activity. Progesterone, I've even been heard called one time I heard it called a bone trophic hormone. Like it literally seems to promote bone formation, which is wonderful. So it's one of the first hormones I'll start my patients on even before their menopausal many peri-menopausal or younger are taking progesterone. And when I mentioned testosterone for women, some women kind of look at me sideways like, well I don't want to grow a beard or I don't think I need to. Stephanie Gray: 15:12 But actually it's extremely important if you even think of how testosterone helps with muscle mass, it can help strengthen the patient also, right? To improve balance, to minimize falls. Testosterone is great for many reasons. In my book I actually mentioned a study. I feel so strongly about how important testosterone can help really because of the study, because I've seen this, testosterone has shown an 8.3% improvement in bone mineral density, which is like unheard of. It's just dramatic. I've had patients who have received hormone replacement therapy, not overnight, but over a year, go from having osteoporosis, Osteopenia to even having normal bone density because after a year, their bones are improving and that is amazing. But conventional medicine, many times putting patients on drugs, we're just hoping that they don't have a decline. We're just hoping that they stabilize, not that they actually build bone density and hormones can really help do that. Stephanie Gray: 16:08 But in reference to your other question, anytime we talk about hormones, the cancer word is going to come up. So that's where I can differentiate between the synthetics and the naturals. And in my book in chapter six actually show the molecular structure of synthetic hormones like I synthetic progestin and natural progesterone aesthetic is faster on molecule and natural testosterone cause the hormones really need to fit like a key fitting in a key hole, right? And that's what the molecular structure of natural or bioidentical hormones are. I mean, they should fit like a key fitting in and thus caused your side effects. So most of the studies that showed hormones cause cancer were studies like the women's health initiative study, which was done on a lot of women, but they use synthetic horse urine and they use Premarin. Stephanie Gray: 16:54 That's literally what Premarin stands for, pregnant Mare's urine. So naturally I try to not replicate what was done in that study with my patients. I don't want to use synthetic hormones. I don't want to use oral estrogen either. That means estrogen taken by mouth in a pill form, right? Which is going to have to be cleared through the gut and the liver. So who was trained through, I should say in addition to the fellowship program that I went through was bio t, they're a hormone pellet company. They're the biggest hormone pellet company in the nation who very well trained their providers and their practitioners and they keep us up to date on all the current research and what's happening in Europe as well with hormones. And so they strongly believe that hormone is given an appellate version, which is an actual subcutaneous little implant that we put under the fatty tissue, kind of in the lower back. Stephanie Gray: 17:44 Upper bottom area is by far the safest. And that's what we're going for with our patients, right? We want to improve on density. We want them feeling better. We want to give them the safest version of the safest dosage. And so pellet therapy specifically is what can improve bone density the most. But again, we're using natural hormones that are plant-based, not synthetic. They should bind to your hormone receptors appropriately. And therefore the risks of, you know, what were shown in the women's health initiative study just can't be compared to what practitioners like myself use. Cause we're using natural hormones, not the synthetics and not by mouth. Karen Litzy: 18:19 And so what are the side effects or the downside of using these natural hormones versus a synthetic? Stephanie Gray: 18:26 Sure. So all of us are already making, well we should be making hormones, right? Which when we grow up we go through adolescence, our hormones peak and then in our twenties and thirties and forties and 50s we start seeing this decline. So really if hormones are dosed appropriately, patients shouldn't have side effects. However, if you think of younger women when they're cycling, sometimes before bleeding they may have some fluid retention or a little bit of breast tenderness or whatnot. And sometimes those symptoms can reoccur as we give patients hormones. The goal is that those would be very short lived. They wouldn't last once we refined the dose. But too much of estrogen can definitely cause fluid retention, breast tenderness, potentially some weight gain. Too much testosterone could cause acne, oily skin, hair growth. Too much. Progesterone can make you feel a little tired. Most menopausal women need help sleeping. So they like that effect, kind of calms them down. Or if women are real PMSing they need or have anxiety, they need some progesterone to calm them down. But we don't want to overdose patients. Right? We don't want to get them to high levels of the hormones, but we want to give them high enough levels that will protect their bones, that will help them sleep. Right. That will provide benefit. Karen Litzy: 19:34 Are there instances of cancer with the natural hormones? Stephanie Gray: 19:41 So there are always instances of cancer? I can't say definitively that. No, I've never seen it. I'd never had a patient ever have cancer. But from my experience, they're very rare. And Bio T are great to have as a resource because they track all of that. I mean, they're tracking all these hundreds and hundreds of thousands of patients with pellets and they're tracking the rights and if they confidently say the rates are extremely low. Karen Litzy: 20:07 Well, you know, cause we wanna give the listeners sort of like a balanced view of everything. So we want to give the, you know, as you know, and I'm sure this is the exact questions that your patients probably ask you. Stephanie Gray: 20:23 Yes. Karen Litzy: 20:25 Or hopefully that's what they ask you. Let's put it that way, So now talking about these hormones, how would one know if they are low on these hormones? Stephanie Gray: 20:37 Good question. Really get tested. Does every postmenopause woman with osteoporosis need testosterone? No, I can't say that I'm speaking to what has helped my patients. But the beauty of functional integrated medicine is that we personalize treatment, right? We test hormone levels to see what our patients need and we test them at the beginning of therapy and through the therapy and annually, right. To make sure we're not under or overdosing our patients. So, I recommend that women, even young women, and I should say men too, but we're kind of speaking to women today, get their hormone levels tested in their twenties, thirties, forties. Right? So they can get a baseline. They can track changes. So they start to feel different, start to feel something has gone awry, we can compare to see where their hormones were before. I think that's really important. But basic blood tests can tell you where your hormone levels are. Stephanie Gray: 21:27 And now that's for postmenopausal women and for men. Now if you're younger, another test that I utilize in my practice is saliva hormone testing. So for younger women whose hormones fluctuate, whose hormones fluctuate on a daily basis, many times I'll have them spit into a tube every couple of days over the course of a month so we can really see what's happening. Maybe they're getting headaches for population or maybe they're getting headaches before bleeding or having pms or whatnot. If we can correlate their labs with their symptoms, then we know exactly what's happening, which hormones fluctuation is triggering that, and then we can intervene appropriately. So that's the beauty of testing and not guessing. Really being able to examine on paper what's happening and match it with what the patient's plan. Karen Litzy: 22:09 And with osteoporosis or Osteopenia, let's say you are getting tested when you're younger to find out, you know, what are you deficient in vitamin or mineral wise and where are your hormones levels at? Can you through this process help to let's say ward off osteoporosis or Osteopenia even if it's a genetic thing within your family. Stephanie Gray: 22:40 I guess the easy answer there would be sure. That would be the goal of course. So we want to ward off all chronic disease. Karen Litzy: 22:47 Yeah, exactly. Stephanie Gray: 22:49 I'm sure there could be some rare genetic disorder. I'm not aware of that. Maybe, you know, we couldn't influence, but yes, that would absolutely be the goal is intervene soon. Absolutely. Karen Litzy: 23:03 Got It. And is there anything else when you're seeing patients coming to you with Osteopenia, osteoporosis, anything else that you're looking at or any other treatments that you may suggest? So that if anyone is listening to this, and let's say they are concerned that maybe they have osteoporosis or Osteopenia or they are post-menopausal or reaching that post-menopausal phase and they want to go to their doctor and they want to ask them about these tests, is there anything else aside from what we've already talked about that you would suggest? Stephanie Gray: 23:37 Oh, all kinds of things. So I'm back to the micronutrient deficiency possibility. Well, especially if that occurs, we're going to be looking at diet with the patient, right? I had a young woman my age who was drinking like six or seven cups of coffee per day. And I said, you know, that's just basically leaching minerals from your bones, right? It's a diuretic. It's essentially robbing you of all important nutrients, even nutrients you're supplementing with. So you still need to examine diet with all of our patients and make sure that we're eating well. Right? And not just drinking tons of carbonated beverages or caffeine or whatnot. So definitely looking at diet is important. Sometimes we do look at heavy metal toxicity with our patients, with these patients specifically. I don't want to say it's rare, but it's much more common and more easy to treat the patients, you know, by fixing the nutritional deficiencies and the hormones. Stephanie Gray: 24:32 But there are times where it is really important to look at heavy metals as well. And then I definitely always ask my patients about their stress, right? So if they have low hormone levels, that's part of that's natural, right? Your hormones are going to decline as you age, but you're super stressed out. Stress is your body's biggest hormone, hijacker stresses not helping your situation or your bombs. So we do need to think about lifestyle and really getting stressed under control, deep breathing, Yoga, meditation, and then examine if they're doing weight bearing activity as well. Yeah, of course. Needs to start really young, right? You build your phone mineral density in your 20s. So know that needs to start at a very young age. But I do want to make sure my patients are exercising as well. Karen Litzy: 25:20 Awesome. Well, I think that gives us a really nice holistic view of kind of looking at Osteopenia and osteoporosis from sort of bridging the gap really between that functional medicine and traditional medicine. As a physical therapist, I often get patients referred to me for osteoporosis to do those exactly what you said, those weight bearing exercises, stress reduction, things like that. And so it's good to know that as a physical therapist that we can team up with other healthcare professionals with our patient's wellbeing at the center. Stephanie Gray: 25:54 Absolutely, I would say that that's also a belief for functional medicine, that we need interdisciplinary care for our patients. You know, I don't have time during my visits to teach patients exercise for strength and balance. We have our own strengths, but we can work together as a team and really have a multidisciplinary approach for our patients, which is going to provide them with better outcomes. Karen Litzy: 26:17 Yeah, no question. I agree 100%. And now we had mentioned the book a little bit, it's called the longevity blueprint, can you tell the listeners a little bit more about the book and where they can find it? Stephanie Gray: 26:30 Maybe I'll go off on a little tangent here and just say why I wrote the book first. I think sometimes patients or consumers may think, oh, so-and-so just wrote a book, but she doesn't know because she hasn't experienced such and such or whatnot. And I'm definitely a provider who has gone through my own health challenges, unfortunately. But fortunately I've used them to my advantage to write this book. So I personally, I've struggled with a lot of things. The most challenging really was fast heart rate or a tachnocardic episodes, which, landed me at Mayo Clinic actually, well, firstly to be in the emergency room, but I eventually landed me at Mayo and conventional medicine's approach to my issue was to take a medication to control my heart rate. And although that could have worked and could have helped, I thought I need to figure out what's happening to me. Stephanie Gray: 27:25 I needed to figure out why my body's gonna ride, right, why my heart is racing like this. And so around the same time, my husband is actually our office manager at our clinic. We have integrated health clinic in Iowa and he said, you know, you should really use this to try to streamline the process as far as what we recommend to our patients. Can you outline all of what we offer? Because sometimes patients would come see a functional medicine practitioner who only offered gut health or only offered hormone health or detoxing or whatnot. And we really offered the whole Shebang. And so he said, why don't we try to create some sort of analogy to outline all of what we can offer patients really to provide them hope. And so I created this blueprint outlining a functional medicine and all the different principles of what we can offer patients with every organ system of the body. Stephanie Gray: 28:14 And then I kind of laced through my personal story as well as far as what I had to utilize to regain back my health. And so what I'm doing with the book is I'm trying to at least create this analogy between how we maintain our homes and the compare that to our body, right? So with our home, we have, well I have hair in my drain, right? I don't want hair clogging my drain. You probably mow your lawn. If you have a lawn, you probably change the furnace filters on your home right there. Just things you'd have, you know, you have to do to maintain your home. But we don't always know how to maintain our body. We don't know how to rebuild our body if we're sick or build that health period. And so I'm taking a room in each of our homes, right? Stephanie Gray: 28:55 And I'm comparing that to an organ system in the body. So chapter one is all about gut health because I believe that gut is the most important piece of our health, most important organ system that we have. And I'm comparing that to the foundation of the home. You have to have the strong foundation upon which to build good health. So then I go chapter by chapter. I'm comparing, you know, organ system. So we were talking a lot about chapter four today and chapter six, chapter six I'm comparing the heating and cooling in your home, right? And you don't want to be too cold, you want to be too hot, you have to have a good thermostat there. But I'm comparing that to the endocrine system in the body. And so I try to help patients rebuild their body, rebuild every organ system using functional medicine principles. So I talk about the tests that are important. I talk about the nutrients that are important and offer patients resources as well. Karen Litzy: 29:42 That's awesome and that's really great for patients. And just so everyone knows, we'll have a link to the book in the show notes over at podcast.healthywealthysmart.com. So if you're interested and you can go over, click a link and it'll take you right to Stephanie's books, you can read more about it and see if it's for you. And now, Stephanie, I ask everyone this question at the end of the podcast and that is knowing where you are now in your life and in your business, what advice would you give to yourself and in your case, since you have a plethora of degrees, let's say right after your bachelor degree, after you graduated with that bachelor's in nursing. Stephanie Gray: 30:26 Okay, so that's tough. I think what part of what I've learned through my health situation, I had to change my diet and nutrition and what not, but I also had to reduce stress big time. And so I think one I really recommend to all, well everyone but including the youth, I wish I would have as happy I as I am to be where I am and to have the knowledge I have so that I can ultimately help others. My health suffered along the way and so I could have, you know, done this over a longer period of time and instead of jamming it into fewer years, I think the advice to myself would be to physically set time in my calendar to deep breathe. Deep breathing has been extremely important to me to calm my nervous system. I'm obviously a fast talker and I needed to set aside time for my body to just mend and relax, rest and digest. So I think that's what my advice would be to take time for myself. As hard as it would've been, it probably would've been very difficult for me to do yoga. I probably couldn't have sat still, but I needed it. Yeah. That's probably the advice to just slow down, breathe slowly, take time. Karen Litzy: 31:39 Yeah. And that's great advice and it's advice that I give to a good majority of my patients as well. And so now is there anything else, I know that you had mentioned that you have an offer for listeners. Do you want to share that now? Stephanie Gray: 31:54 Sure. So if you're hearing about functional medicine for the first time today, I'd highly recommend you check out my book just because I think that it could provide you hope or hope for a loved one. I think many patients are just so dissatisfied, they keep going to the doctor, they keep being told that everything's normal and they know they don't feel normal and they know there are answers out there and there's a good potential that a functional medicine provider could help you. So I would definitely recommend grab a copy of my book, which is loaded with resources but also look for a functional medicine practitioner in your area. So the code on our website that can be used to purchase the book, although it's available at Barnes and noble and Amazon and everywhere books are sold is yourlongevityblueprint.com. So if you use the code healthy10, you can get 10% off order on the book or any of the supplements like vitamin K2 or anything you feel like you need. But after, you know, when you think of a home being built, there's always a contractor overseeing that process. And, that's what the last chapter of my book is about. Finding your contractor to help you personally as a community build your health. The book can help, but you do need a guide. You need a contractor. Karen Litzy: 33:01 Well thank you so much. This was great. I love learning different ways to kind of keep myself healthy and as I get older and I start, I mean I think I have a little while left, but kind of entering the phase of my life where a lot of this stuff is going to be very pertinent to me. So I thank you for sharing it all. Stephanie Gray: 33:25 Well, thank you for having me on. I hope this helps many of your viewers Karen Litzy: 33:28 And I think it will. Thank you so much Stephanie and everyone out there listening. Thanks so much. Have a great couple of days and stay healthy, wealthy, and smart. Thanks for listening and subscribing to the podcast! Make sure to connect with me on twitter, instagram and facebook to stay updated on all of the latest! Show your support for the show by leaving a rating and review on iTunes!
Intro Song, Jimmy Dawkins, “I Ain't Got It”, Kant Sheck Dees Bluze First Set – Big Walter Horton, “Have A Good Time”, Self Titled George “Harmonica” Smith, “Tight Dress”, Now You Can Talk About Me Big Jack Johnson, “Oil Man”, The Oil Man Second Set – Hubert Sumlin with James Cotton and Little Mike & the Tornadoes, “Your Foxy Self”, Heart & Soul Big Bill Bronzy, “Big Bill's Guitar Blues”, Sings The Blues Carey Bell, “Love Her, Don't Shove Her”, Good Luck Man Third Set – WIB Koko Taylor, “Never Trust A Man”, From The Heart Of A Woman Pee Wee Crayton, “Red Rose Boogie”, Early Hour Blues Buddy Guy & Junior Wells, “Cut You Loose”, Alone & Acoustic Fourth Set – Jimmy Johnson, “Happy Home”, Bar Room Preacher Kenny Neal, “Yack Yack Yack”, Devil Child Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, “Alligator Boogaloo”, Alright Again!
Achieve Wealth Through Value Add Real Estate Investing Podcast
James: Hey audience, this is James Kandasamy from Achieve Wealth Podcast. Achieve Wealth Podcast, talks to and interviews, a lot of commercial real estate operators and focusing on a lot of our discussion about value-add real estate investing. Today, I have Neal Bower. Neal Bower is from Grow Capitas Commercial Real Estate Investment Company. He negotiates [00:32unintelligible] and acquires commercial real estate properties across the US. He has almost 400 investors right now. A total portfolio size of 1800 units, in which, like around 1400 is multifamily and another 400 student housing. And I would like to welcome, Neal. Hey, Neal, welcome to the show. Neal: Thanks for having me on the show. James. Very excited to be here. James: Good. So, Neil, he has been on a lot of podcasts and you know, a lot of discussion goes around the data collection and experiments that you do in your asset management and in terms of your operation and just finding the right cities, right? [01:14unintelligible] and also operation leasing. So there's a lot of data that's being collected. Right. So we can go to that in a short while. My question to you, Neal, in the first place, why did you start collecting all this data? Neal: Well, I started collecting the data because I screwed up big time. So I started my real estate career in reverse. I mean, most people will start with a single family rental, right? I was a technologist and I got a chance to actually build campuses from scratch. My boss, you know, helped me. He was the CEO of the company, I was the chief operations officer. This was a technology education company and we were growing so much that we decided we were not going to rent offices from somebody, we would build our own campuses. And so that project of building that campus was insanely complicated because, I mean, I hadn't even built a single-family home. Here I am, building a 27,000 square foot campus that's mixed use. It's got classrooms, administrative areas, and restrooms and I had to learn everything from, you know, egress and fire codes. And you know, doors that lock when there's a fire and you know, ceiling heights, air conditioning, cooling, heating, and 500 other things related to that. So it was a trial by fire. I learned very quickly and did that in 2006 and so 2003 then again in 2006 and got very confident about real estate. I think in my mind, I got overconfident and so I went and bought 10 single family homes in California, I timed them correctly due to no credit of my own. It was just, you know, 2008, 2009 and got crazy confidence. I thought I knew it all. I mean that the fact was I knew nothing and I didn't understand that. And so I went to Chicago and bought 10 triplexes and I screwed up really big time. I made massive mistakes. None of those 10 properties really ever made any money and I realized just how little I knew and I start because of that disaster, which basically was a million and a half that got tied up for five years with no returns in the middle of one of the greatest, you know, gain markets of all time, I realized that I needed to learn more. So I started collecting data about why those units never made any money. And what it came down to is that I was spending too much time looking at the rents and looking at the units themselves and not spending enough time looking at the area quality. The quality of the tenant base, the demographics of the area, the income levels, job road levels, the population growth. All of these demographics are mega factors that affect every single thing that we do. And they affect them in a way that's very difficult for us to ascertain. It's almost like you're being carried along on a boat that's going somewhere at 50 miles an hour, but you cannot see outside the boat, right? That is a situation that is the reality of what is happening. And so I started doing a lot of research and data collection. And the more I collected data, the more I realize how powerful it was if I could go beyond data collection to doing data analysis and applying the analysis from one city to another, applying these analyses from one neighborhood to another, from one state to another. And the more I did it, the better I got at it. And so I decided to do more and more and more of it. And that's how my journey started. James: Yeah. I think demographic analysis has been missed by a lot of gurus out there who are teaching real estate investing, especially even on the multifamily side, right? People are just looking at numbers right now and I think commercial real estate consists of two things and what is the user and the space, right? So and we are missing out the demographic side of it, which shows that the demand and I think that's what you're talking about in terms of demographic and also what is the submarket demand, right? What is changing over there? How is the crime rate, who is staying there, what is the renter profile, right? What's the percentage of renters versus owners? It's just not many people know how to analyze that and that's a very important factor. Neal: They don't even look at it. I mean, keep in mind a neighborhood that has 30% homeowners and 70% renters is very different. Both good and bad from one that has 70% homeowners, 30% renters, right? So these things matter so much that if you ignore them, then if you think that you're in control, that is an illusion. That is an absolute illusion because those things are really driving either your profit or your lack thereof. That's really what's driving things, right? And so one example is, I mean, I teach a course, it's called Real Focus. It's about the power of demographics and how to apply them to create profit. And I teach it Live to about 4,000 people a year. And I teach it online, to another 4,000 people so there are about 8,000 people that take that course. And one of the examples that I like to give people is this, one of the most common statements, in fact, it might be the most common statement of all in real estate is that real estate is local, right? So you hear that all the time, real estate is local. Well, actually real estate is not local. James, real estate is hyper-local. So one of the cities that I use in my examples when I'm doing demographics labs for students is I talk about Columbus, Ohio. Columbus is a good city to invest in, right? So doing really well, population growth, job growth, income growth, all kinds of good things are happening there. So in Columbus, there is a small neighborhood that has an average median household income of $183,000 right? That is not an A that is like an A++. So you couldn't really go much higher than that unless you're in the San Francisco Bay area, you couldn't get much higher than 183,000, no. Well, the point is that 500 yards away from this neighborhood is another neighborhood where the median household income is not 183,000 it's not even 18,000, it's 6,000. 500 yards between the richest neighborhood in Columbus, I think it's the second richest actually, and the poorest neighborhood in Columbus, that's how hyperlocal real estate is. And if you don't understand how much that impacts you, obviously in this $6,000 income area, that's a condemned area, no one there pays any rent. Everyone lives there for free in abandoned buildings to this underneath $83,000 area where there's absolutely no cash flow, right? Because the income levels there are very high, there's really nothing available for sale. Everything's taken, everyone there is rich, you know, single family homes that you know, probably are like 1 million bucks. The differences there are staggering. And that 500 yards shows you how much you're missing if you don't understand how demographics drive everything. James: So I mean, I definitely agree with you because I've seen deals in the hottest market in the country and people just talk about the city, right? But they don't talk about the submarket itself or the particular location, right? So how would you go about defining the boundaries of where you want to define the demand for a specific deal? Neal: You know, that's a very interesting question and what you're really talking about is, you know, where does the neighborhood stop? Where does the neighborhood end? So you could say something like half a mile from me is a Whole Foods and next to it is a Starbucks, therefore I'm in the best area. But the reality of the situation is half a mile is also a very long distance. It's a very short distance and it's a very long distance. Remember 183,000 to 6,000, right? That was half a mile. So what really could be the case? Is that right where that Whole Foods is, a hundred yards beyond that, there's a street, maybe it's a railway line, maybe it's a freeway, maybe it's just a regular street and everything beyond that is a different neighborhood, right? Different quality of neighborhood. So you can't really compare this neighborhood to the Whole Foods and Starbucks side. And maybe, just maybe that neighborhood is only half a mile wide and right where your property is, that street actually is another neighborhood, even lower class. So it's very common for people to say half a mile from me is Whole Foods. But actually, they are not in the Whole Foods neighborhood. They're not even in the neighborhood next to Whole Foods, which is lower grade, they're in a third lower neighborhood themselves, like two grades lower now. And that's what everyone has to figure out if you're looking to do syndications or if you're looking to invest in projects. How do you figure these things out there? There are many ways to figure them out, to figure out where neighborhoods start and where neighborhoods end. I use paid tools, so we'll talk about those and I'll also give you some free tools. Neighborhood Scout is the best neighborhood tool I've seen. I've seen many of them, but neighborhoodscout.com allows me to do two things. It allows me to basically plug in an address so it could be a 200 unit property, I plug in the address, I basically take, pull out a report and it shows me the neighborhood and it also shows me the micro-neighborhood. Now there's a difference between those two, right? The neighborhood itself is very powerful because it'll tell, you know, income levels, crime levels, you know, degree-granting levels, is it walkable? It'll tell you an insanely large amount of extremely useful and immediately actionable information. But the micro-neighborhood part is even more powerful. So you'll see a map and on the map, you'll see the neighborhood, right? You can clearly see what roads are part of this neighborhood, where does the neighborhood start, where does it end? Does it go all the way to that Starbucks, does it not go all the way? But then, inside of that map, you'll see a yellow dotted line, which will show you a micro-neighborhood, and the property that you just plugged in, the address is always inside that yellow. And what neighborhood scout is trying to tell you is, okay, the greater neighborhood, maybe it's a mile by a mile, right? That's the typical size for a neighborhood. You know, one mile by one mile is this, and then your property is part of a micro-neighborhood inside of that. And how does it figure that out? What it does is, it looks at your property, let's say it's a single family home and it looks at the home opposite it and says, are these comparable? Okay, yes, they are. Then it goes another block, are these comparable? Yes. Are these comparable? Yes. Are these comparable? No. This is a completely different kind of unit. So it says, okay, those units are really not inside your micro-neighborhood. Something changes there. Something's different. Maybe they're really ghetto or maybe they're really brand new. And so the neighborhood quality changes right at this line. So that dotted yellow line is very important to me because the moment I see that dotted yellow line, I put it on one of my monitors and on the second monitor, I bring up Google and I go switch into street view and I drive around the edges of that yellow dotted line because I'm driving around the outside edges of the neighborhood that I'm investing in. So that gives me a feeling about that neighborhood. And then I'd drive the insights of the neighborhood, it's a micro-neighborhood, so you can on Google, I can basically drive it in about 15-20 minutes. It gives me a really good idea of what's going on in that neighborhood. Obviously, boots on the ground are better, I get that. But at this point, I've just received this property and I want to make a decision on whether I even want to, you know, spend any time on the property and this gives me that information. And Neighborhood Scout is very inexpensive. I think you can even get like Neighborhood Scout for 39 bucks a month and you get 10 reports out of that. So essentially for $4, less than a cup of coffee at Starbucks, you're going to learn an astonishing amount about this neighborhood. James: But I mean, end of the day, we want to get rent comps and so let's say the property they're looking at is within that yellow dotted line but there's not a rent comp and now you have to go out of that yellow dotted line, you would you look at your rent comp, how would you compare the rent comp that point of time? Because it's two different demographics. Neal: It definitely is, right? So there's an art and a science to the rent comps. Some of your rent comps will be inside the dotted line so there'll be good and some of them will be outside the dotted line. I think it's still useful because it's telling you where's your micro-neighborhood and where's your neighborhood? But normally you'll find that the vast majority of the time, the comps from the broker are not inside the yellow line and they're not inside the neighborhood. James: They are in one-mile circle radius. Neal: Exactly. And so people are like, well this is only a mile away; are you kidding me? I mean, in San Jose we have areas where the average home value is $1 million and half a mile away, the average home value is $400,000 right? And those are bad areas like really high crime areas. So everything can change in a mile. And I think what this neighborhood scout does is it allows you to basically firstly figure out if you should even be using that rent comp, right? So it might only be three-quarters of a mile away but Neighborhoods Scout shows you that your neighborhood, your property, the one that you're looking at, is actually just at the end of that neighborhood. So that neighborhood is ending right next to your property and then this is three-quarters of a mile away in a completely different sort of neighborhoods so you shouldn't go in that direction looking at rent comps. But another rent comp that the broker provides, it may not be in the neighborhood, but it's on the edge of that neighborhood, it's still only three-quarters of a mile away. But that one makes more sense because your neighborhood ends right next to that comp. So that comp from the broker actually makes more sense. I'm not saying that every comp from a broker is fictional, that's not true. A lot of brokers work hard on the comps. All I'm telling you is that out of five comps that a broker will give you, truly two or three are your neighborhood's comps. And this tool will show you which ones to pick. And then there's going to be a couple that are going to be, geographically speaking, still be in that one-mile radius, but they have nothing to do with your neighborhood and that this tool will allow you to basically ignore them. And then on top of that, obviously there's rent comp tools, there's you know, tools like Rentometer and a number of others. That four a five or 10 you know, dollar report. There's another one, for the moment, you know, also starts with the word rent. There are these tools where you paid $14. I remember paying $14 for this report, rent something and it gives me a report that is specifically about a single family and multifamily rents, right? Nothing to do with anything else, not demographics, simply about rents. And it gives me all kinds of rent criteria, you know, it gives me occupancy levels. Now I'm paying another 14 bucks and I've got rental information for my area, right? It's not giving me comps, it's basically explaining the per square foot rent. It's explaining how many units in my neighborhoods are one bed, two bed, three bed, those sorts of things so that I understand what the unit mix in that area is and if it's a good unit mix. So now I've spent $18 but I've gotten a huge amount of information. And what I find is people are unwilling to spend these $18 right? And syndicators are unwilling to spend these $18 and here's my message to you, right? As a syndicator, you only make money if your clients make money because they usually have a pref, right? So they're going to make money first and then you have to make money. You realize that on a 300 unit property if it does well, you can make $1 million or even 2 million and if it does really, really poorly, you make $0 million so you're paid less than the janitor that cleans that property. And it might be that the only difference and I know this is best case scenario, but it might be that the only difference between that 2 million bucks and not even making the janitor's salary, it might be those $18. Because you forgot that part. You look at everything else in the property and you fell in love with it and it had a beautiful pool and it had a beautiful clubhouse and it had a beautiful this and a beautiful that but you forgot to look at the demographics. Because one of the things I can tell you is some of the worst properties have the best looking clubhouses, right? So don't look at a damn clubhouse because they made it that good looking because they want to sell the fricking property to you and get out. James: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean demographic analysis and in some markets like what we're discussing right now, it's very, very micro. And how do you really decide the deal has an upside in terms of rent, that's why we look for in a value-add deal. Unless you're not buying value-add deal, you just want cash flow. Neal: Well, I think more and more of those deals, I mean more and more of the value adds are becoming cashflow. I mean, let's be honest here, James, nobody that I know of, no syndicator that I know of is able to drive up rents as much today as they were two years ago and certainly not as much as they were four years ago. So I think that true value add is becoming less and less available. Even the deals that are a full value add where we say, okay, we're upgrading 80% of the units, I get that, that technically speaking, if you're upgrading 80% of the units, that's a full value add. But I would challenge whether 80% of those units would receive $150-200 rent bumps. Some will, some won't. I mean the market is changing, the environment is changing. There's only a certain number of people in that neighborhood that can afford to pay that higher rent. And as you rehab more and more and more of the properties in that neighborhood, it becomes more and more and more difficult to achieve those rent bumps. So I think more and more people are doing light value add. At least that's where I'm seeing the industry moving to. James: Oh No. Even myself, I moved from deep value add two years ago to lighter. I mean, I still do value add, but it's no more the deep value add I used to do and just because I'm doing more agency loan nowadays, no more bridge loans19:47inaudible] Neal: I think that's really wise because we have to be cognizant of where we are in the cycle. And so I think you're doing the right approach because a lot of these deeper value add projects, there's another name for them and that is they're higher risk. James: And you also pay a premium for it, right? Neal: Yeah. Yep. Absolutely. James: Nowadays, the sellers and brokers, you know, you're basically overbidding the price up and you're basically taking the value away by paying more. Neal: Unfortunately that's the case. I mean, our company right now has three rules. Number one, everyone is overpaying. Number two, everything we buy, we've overpaid. And number three, if you don't find new ways of adding value to the property after we buy it, we weren't at our performance. These are our three fundamental rules today in everything that we do. And none of these rules existed two years ago. James: Got it. So coming back to the submarket analysis because I think you have talked about a lot of CT level analysis in lots of other podcasts so I don't want to repeat that again here. Coming to sub-market analysis, so let's say you're trying to prospect a market, right? So let's say I know you like Boise, Idaho, right? That's the top market that is. So let's say now you have Boise, Idaho, how do you go about prospecting within this city, right? How do you look at whether the deal, because the cap rate in the southern part of the city may be different in a certain part of the city, right? So how do you go about prospecting or do you just get the deal and start going? Neal: The true answer is that you know, several years ago I didn't have the kind of broker and partner operator relationships that I have today. My initial approach was to use a tool like city-data. I use a number of different tools, but neighborhood scout is my favorite, neighborhood level tool, city data, plus local market monitor, plus housing alerts, these three are my favorite city level tools. And then, of course, there's Costar. Costar is not just a demographics tool, obviously. Costar has a huge number of other benefits. The biggest benefit of Costar is supply. It understands incoming supply in the market, which as far as I know, no other demographic tools understand. Simply because Costar has these 50 Prius cars that drive around 50 US Metros on a daily basis trying to figure out all new construction that's going on and totaling it up and trying to figure out if demand is in excess of supply. And in many great neighborhoods, really good neighborhoods, demand is often not in excess of supply.That's because the neighborhood is so great that people are building 3000 units in a two-mile radius of you, which means that everything might be hunky dory now, but two years from now you'll be in trouble. So I don't have a cheap answer to give you when it comes to neighborhoods supply levels, really, Costar is the best option to look at supply and make sure that you don't end up in a market where you'll have 3000 brand new units, you know, delivering and they'll have, you know, two months off as concessions and basically tank your rents for a year. So that's my feedback on supply. Now away from supply, looking at demographic trends, you can do that analysis on a tool called city-data.com. So when I look at city-data, there's a map on city-data so you plug in the city. So it could be Houston, could be Columbus, could be whatever city you're in; it works better on midsize and large-sized cities. Doesn't work well on like a really teeny tiny city like Saint George. You're not going to get as much value out of that too. So let's say you're in Houston, right? So go look at, you know, scroll down, you'll see this very nice blue colored map of Houston and you notice something very unique. This is something I haven't seen in any free tools. That map of Houston is already broken up into bits. And you'll notice that some of the bits are really tiny, like half a mile by half a mile and some of the bits are big, two miles by two miles, three miles by three miles. And what city data is telling you is that that tiny little bit, everything inside that resembled everything else inside there, but that big one that's next to it, the two mile by two mile, once again, the same principle applied, everything inside of that two mile radius resembled everything else. That's why some of these neighborhoods are tiny, some are mid-size, some are large size. So what you're really looking at in that map are the neighborhoods in that particular city. Right? And if you click on any one of those little tiles, a box will pop up and that box will give you information specifically about that neighborhood. And there are five metrics in that box that I like to use. Now keep in mind if you pay for neighborhood scout for that particular address, you'll see more information than this, but obviously you're paying for that. If you want something for free here it is. That box, the first thing we want to see in that box is the income level in that micro-neighborhood, remember it might be like 400 yards by 400 yards. You want the income level, the median household income level in that neighborhood, you want it to be above $40,000, 38 is still okay in some of the Midwest states, but what I find is when you're down to 35 it doesn't matter where in the US you are, you're going to have delinquency trouble. So the median household income of 38,000 is the minimum acceptable level for multifamily projects. Obviously, this number has to be higher if you happen to be in San Francisco, it has to be higher if you're in New York. So I'm going to basically say the rule doesn't, that 38K number is really for markets that cashflow, right? So Texas markets, Florida markets, you know, maybe not Miami, but the rest of the Florida markets, that cashflow, maybe not central Austin. So understand what I mean by cashflowing markets. Here's what you'll see at 38K; when that number, the median household income in that box, when it starts going below 38 K, your delinquency levels start rising. And the true killer of profit is not occupancy. The true killer of profit is churn. And churn is tied to delinquency. Delinquent tenants, some of them do care about their credit, and so they just simply move out. They just leave a key and move out and they basically say, yep, you know, I'm going to skip and let's see if this guy's going to chase me. Because they know 90% of the time, it's not worth your while to chase them and try and get that money. You just move on. You rent out your unit, you move on with your life. And these skips and the delinquency connected with them, the repainting, the time that it takes, the marketing costs, the effort, the people time, kills your profit. And what I found is by the time you dropped from $38,000 in median household income to 30, the property and the project, for the most part, has become viable. I do not know of any syndicators that can make a profit in a neighborhood that is under $30,000. I've made that mistake myself. I haven't been able to make money. So to me, that first number that is an absolute is, go into a neighborhood that has the income to support what you are trying to do. Keep in mind, you're trying to raise rents, right? So even 38 is kind of borderline, right? I tend to basically use 40,000 as my minimum number. I have properties that are at 42 44 46; if you're in the fifties you're doing really well. If you're in the 60s then your property is getting closer to a 'B' and by the time it hits $70,000, you are in a 'B' area. So a 'C' area, one of the definitions, my favorite definition of 'C' area is 40 to 70,000 income, right? And a 'D' area is $30,000 and below. So 'C' minus is 40 to 30. And obviously, these are metrics I made up myself. You could successfully come to me and argue, no. In my area a C minus is not 40 to 30, it's 35 to 25 I'll just say, okay, that's fine. These are rules of thumbs that appear to work in the vast majority of the United States that people are investing. It may not work in your area, no argument, but I think that within the bounds of them being rules of thumbs, they do work really well because they allow me to understand the quality of an area. James: Got it. Neal: There are states that have lower delinquency. Utah for example, for cultural reasons, you can go a little bit lower than that simply because 10% of their income is going to the church, right? Everybody in Utah, very religious people, they contribute 10% of the church, which means that when they do get in trouble the church helps them out, right? So many times in Utah you can have lower delinquency even in markets that are under 35K. So that's a cultural issue, a cultural benefit that they have, but it doesn't necessarily apply to most parts of the US. So that's the first thing that comes up in that box. Remember, we're in city-data, we're looking at the blue map. We're looking at the tiles and we're clicking on them in a black box comes up. Well, the first thing there was income. The second thing that comes up on that box is the poverty level, right? It's very much tied back to the income. And poverty level, you want to be below 15% as much as possible. If you can be below 10%, you're going to do really well, but 15% I think is acceptable. And if you don't mind taking more risk, if you're in a noose indicator and you really need to get going, then maybe 20, but I can tell you if that number is 30, you can't make money. It doesn't matter how high the rents are. It doesn't matter how many units have been bumped up by the previous guy and they have $200 in rent bumps and 300 and all that wonderful stuff, it doesn't matter. At 30% poverty levels, you cannot get 12 consecutive months of rent from your tenants. James: So do recommend, I mean, I know that's the job of the active sponsor when they find deals, right? So even the passive investors should go and look at deals... Neal: Why not? Everything I told you, if you, you know, take this podcast and it's going to be on James' website, you can go to Florida or whenever the heck you feel like. Right? So it shouldn't take you as a passive investor more than 10 minutes, the rule still applies. And keep in mind that a lot of class 'C's are going to be borderline on this so don't expect that good syndicators are really buying properties at 5% poverty levels. 5% is not a good deal; at 5%, that's a class A area. And your syndicators not going to make you any money, so there's no problem with it being borderline. You just don't want it to be too far from these numbers that I'm giving. James: Correct. Correct. So let's say you get a deal today on the neighborhood that meets all your criteria, right? Poverty level, household income and all that, so how would you go about underwriting that deal? What's the first thing that you will look at? Neal: Well, I look at the numbers, the same demographics numbers to determine what my delinquency numbers are going to be. Because I find that I can raise a property's occupancy so there are certain levers that I have that are typical syndicator doesn't have. Syndicators don't have marketing teams, right? Syndicators basically have a property manager. That property manager might be good at marketing or bad at marketing. They're typically bad but they're never excellent, right? So we basically decided early on that that extra value add that we have to add in that no one else is adding in, is marketing. And by marketing, I don't mean investor marketing, I mean tenant marketing. So for every property that we have, we're actually adding more leads on top of what the property manager is generating. For some properties, it's 30% more than they're generating; in other properties, it's three times more than they're generating. So they're generating a thousand leads a year, we're generating 3000 leads a year and giving those leads to them. So I can basically move occupancy numbers up, you know, and I'm very confident about those. So I go back to delinquency. So I look at the delinquency of that particular area. Obviously, Costar gives you delinquency numbers, so that's very good, useful information to have for that particular neighborhood. The other thing that I like to do is, and this is not always available, is you can get bank statements from friendly sellers. Not every seller gives it to you, but some do. And one of the nice things about the bank statements is that some property managers, previous property managers have basically put all the money in like in one check. But most of them actually put the money in like every few days. So they collect the checks and then they go to the bank every day or every other day and they put the checks in. So to understand what the quality of the tenant basis and what they're capable of absorbing in terms of rent hikes, simply look at the checks to see how much of the money is coming in in the first five days, how much of it is coming in the next five days, how much of it is coming in the five days after that? Then the five days after that, then the five days after that. They might be saying that my delinquency rate is 2% but what if their delinquency rate was 25% on the 15th of the month? Well, that area, that kind of area where you still have 25 30% of the rent hasn't come in on the 15th, you have to be careful about not being over bullish on how much you can really raise the rents. There's a limit in that market, right? It may not be $200, it might be $120 that you can raise. And accordingly, you want to also cut down on your rehab budget. Because your rehab budget can be 6,000, it can be 8,000 give me 12,000 but in an area where you know, overall income levels are low, let's say 38,000, and you can see that 20 30% of their tenants don't even pay until the 15th, I'm not sure there's any benefit to doing a $12,000 per unit rehab. I'm not even sure you want to do an $8,000 per unit rehab. I think six or four might be better. Rehabbing does have benefits. The velocity at which your lease increases tenants, like the newer units, but beyond a certain level, it's not that they don't like the units, of course, they love it, they're just not able to pay for it. And when you don't want to end up in a situation where the tenants, all of your new tenants that have come in, those are the guys that are becoming delinquent because really their capability was to get $850 a month units, but they're all in the thousand dollar upgraded units. And so now, all of your upgraded units are the ones that have very high delinquency so when I'm underwriting, those are the sort of things I'm looking at. James: Got it. Got it. Yeah, it's very interesting to see delinquency and you say Costar has the delinquency data? Neal: Costar has neighborhood level delinquency data. Yeah, some market levels. So you can basically go in. That very long report, that's like 86 pages, it has averaged delinquency for a particular market. I'm not sure how they get it. No, I have no idea. But what's nice is they also have expense data, right? So they have expense data. Obviously, you talk to property managers about expense data as well but Costar gives you, you know, kind of the average expense for the submarket, the average payroll for that particular submarket. I find that people trying to beat the average payroll by 20%, it's wishful thinking. James: Yeah. How do you differentiate delinquency between the property management's skill versus real delinquency for the area? Because it could be just the property managers are not doing a good job, right? Neal: I think so. So one of the services that we provide on in properties that have higher delinquency, sometimes we have operating partners that don't want to do it but most of the time we do it is we make my staff, our staff, not the property management staff, will make delinquency calls on the sixth or seven. So we don't do it all the time, we don't want to do it. But let's say the property has consistent delinquency problems, consistent; one of the ways to figure out the answer to your question is, is this a tenant problem? Is this a PM problem? Hire somebody, give them a script, have them call every tenant that is not showing as having paid by the sixth of the month, make three phone calls, actually make two phone calls and two text messages on the sixth and the seventh. Repeat the process on the 10th and the 11th. If you do that for three straight months and your delinquency is still high, it's not a property manager problem. James: Well, you find that out after the fact, after you bought the property. Is there any way to find before you buy? Neal: Well, other than the demographics information I gave you? No, not really because the truth is that it could still be a tenant-based problem. But it could be that the previous owner was self-managing the property and let a bunch of deadbeats that should not have been in there. That in my mind is a management issue but not a property manager issue and that's also an opportunity. You bought this property because you think rents can be at 1100 with low delinquency. Right now, they're at 900 with high delinquency. Maybe the guy just let in a bunch of deadbeats so you can ask for credit reports of the last 25 people that have been put in, what was the actual credit report? Some owners will give it to you, some won't. If they're not giving it to you, you have to question yourself why that is the case? Was he just basically trying to just fill up the property? And, in that case, it's not such a bad thing. You just have to know that when you go in, you're going to have a lot of evictions to deal with. But in that case, it's not a tenant base problem. It's not a property management problem. It's a previous owner problem and you are going to benefit once you churn through all those bad tenants, you're going to have four years of good tenants in your property so you can still hit your performer. You just need more maintenance budget, you need more operating budget and you need your investors to be a little bit more patients because your first 12 months are going to be very rocky. James: Yeah, absolutely. I'm sure you've seen a lot of financials when you're underwriting a deal, right? So is there any dirty secrets by sellers that you have found from the financials or when you walk the unit and see, aah, they are tweaking these numbers here to make the property more appealing to the buyer? Neal: I mean, everybody has their own stories about these financials, right? So the one that I find that is fairly common is that you're going into a property, you want to be able to tell during your due diligence, don't do this during their contract negotiation. But during your due diligence, you basically call them and say, hey, we'd like to talk to a bunch of your tenants. And you randomly, always pick a bunch of tenants to talk with and make sure that there's nothing shady about their rent. So you have a tenant that's at $900 and everybody else is at 800, let's pick that tenant and let's talk with him. Let's make sure that there isn't some side deal where that tenant actually is paying 900 bucks and is being reimbursed $200 in cash. James: Has that happened? Neal: that has happened; not in a 250 unit type property, but in a 70/80 unit property. Basically, what had happened was all the new tenants that had started in the last four months, were all receiving cash back, right? I think there were 12 tenants and between them, $2,400 a month of artificial rents were created, which is $2,400 a month is $30,000 a year, $30,000 a year at six cap is basically $480,000. So that $480,000 for the seller was created by him negotiating direct deals with those 10 people and giving them $200 kickbacks. So his cost was 2,400 a month for three months and his profit was 500. James: Wow. I never heard that. That's really sneaky. Neal: Very sneaky. But you think about how much of an incentive that guy has to do it, right? Technically it's not illegal, by the way. James: It's not illegal? Neal: It's not illegal. He has to disclose it to you that there's a side arrangement, but you can't actually send somebody to jail for this. I mean, you can't sue them and win, in my opinion. James: You can't say it's a fraud? Neal: I think you can. I think that that's going to be fought over in court. In my mind, it's something that you should basically, in due diligence, if you look at higher numbers, make sure you talk with those tenants. It doesn't take that much time; during due diligence, you're at the property for multiple days. Right? Why not have conversations with four or five people and make sure everything's above board. Say, hey, we were looking to buy this property and just checking your rental contract and it shows $900 a month, is that correct? And if there's anything shady, that guy is not going to fall on his sword for the previous seller. James: Yeah. I mean, I've done all the due diligence for my properties. I never talked to the tenants. Do they allow to talk to the tenants when you are doing? Neal: Usually they do. I mean, obviously, they won't allow you to talk to a hundred tenants, but if you randomly pick three or four, they do. It's just not something that people ask for commonly, but there's no reason for them to have an objection. So that's one that I've seen commonly. The other one that I've seen commonly is that everything that you're looking at is actually coming out of the property management software, not from the bank statements. So you look at the property management software and it says $111,000 in monthly rents. But when you look in the bank, it's just 88. So what they're doing is basically they're not allocating for bad debt properly. And they're saying, oh, I'm sorry, this the way that our property management, Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah software works. What they're trying to basically say is, Oh, I'm sorry you caught us, but we're going to try and explain it away as some idiosyncrasy of the way our property management software works. But you know, yeah, we didn't actually make 111 that month, we only made 88,000. So I think reconciling bank statements to what the property management software says, is very useful. They may not be trying to screw you over or anything so the difference may not be 88 to 111; it might be 88 to 91 but it still shows delinquency in that property. James: So have you had any of these cases and you backed out of the contract? Neal: Yeah, I have. James: Okay. It's also tricky nowadays, in the hot market nowadays because people are paying day 1, hot money. Neal: It's very difficult. That's what scares me a lot. I mean, you pay hard money and then you find something where they've tricked you. The only way to get that money back is to sue them. James: Correct. Because people are paying like in a hot market... Neal: Even $200,000. I mean, it's ridiculous. I mean, that tells me that something is wrong. In my mind, there is no conceivable reason why anyone should pay $200,000 hard on day one. This is all frenzy that has been created by brokers and it's a sign of an unbalanced market. There is no reason why that should ever happen. James: Yeah. Yeah. I mean they do have something called early access agreement where you can go and see the rent roll and all that, but you can do a thorough due diligence. Some sellers allow it, but nowadays, even that nowadays they don't allow. Neal: Well, in my mind, James, I mean, if that is their intent, why don't they just say, okay, well we'll go hard on day five. When people want you to go hard on day one, there's no way to tell if they are doing it because they are unethical or simply because they weren't, you know, somebody who has enough skin in the game and enough confidence in his ability to close. The majority of the time, the reason is perfectly legitimate that they want you to close and so they want you to go hard on day one but I don't think that that's the reason 100% of the time or anywhere close to 100% of the time. James: Awesome. Yeah. It's a bit scary when you do day one hot money. So coming back to value-add, I presume all the deals that you're doing is value-add deals, is that right? Not a deep value-add or not completely. Neal: I have some deep value-adds but a lot of them are, you know, standard $6,500 type value-adds. James: So what is the most valuable value-adds that you see? Neal: Oh, it's easy. The single most valuable value-add are USB ports. One in the kitchen and one in the bedroom. So of all value adds, nothing comes close to that. James: Really, especially just because everybody needs a USB. Neal: Because everybody that comes in comments on it, right? So everybody that comes in comments on it and this is one of those universal things where men and women comment on it equally. And the better value add is, you know, these days, the wall plates, right? You get the wall plates with a two USB ports, correct? So if you wanted to really wow people, the new USB Dash C standard, pay $4 extra for one that has two standard USB ports, but the one in the middle is that new USB Dash C. So I think those are incredible, incredible value adds; they give you a hundred X return. James: Awesome. Awesome answer. That's absolutely helpful. So now let's go to a bit more personal side of questions, right? So why do you do what you do? Neal: The truth is I fell into it, right? So this hasn't been a conscious thing. I did technology. I started doing real estate because I was paying 50% in tax. So basically tax avoidance was the primary reason why I fell into real estate. But I think the bigger thing was that on the technology side, when I had W2 income, you know, many years I made more money than I made in real estate but I always felt nervous. It's like when you have $150,000 salary, you're always nervous about your position. Like, I always have to perform, I can never have a bad year, right? Because they might start thinking, well, we could hire two guys for 175 k each and get rid of this guy, Neil. So there was always that nervousness about not being in control of my destiny. And I don't feel that now. It doesn't matter if I have a bad year and I only make a hundred grand, but I still have control of my destiny and always make it up next year. So to me, I think it was less about ownership and more of our control over my destiny. James: Okay. But you will keep on buying deals? I mean, is that what your plan is? I mean, where do you want to stop? So what drives you to bite the next deal Neal: In my mind, what drives me is that I still feel like I'm creating value in each additional project. I'm finding some way to make those projects work. I'm contributing and I'm making investors happy and also, you know, increasing my own net worth. Will I keep doing it? No. I think that truth be told, I mean, I admire people like JC Castille who just love it so much. He says, Neil, I'm going to be doing this for 30 years. And I said, if I know one thing for sure, I mean you're very sure about what you just said JC, I met him recently. I know for sure I won't be doing this in 30 years and I know for sure I may not even be doing it in 10 years. I mean, to me, I think that life is an evolution and I don't mind telling my investors, look, I'm going to do this for five to 10 years and then I'd like to do something else because my career is very diverse. I've done solar education. I've done basically businesses around nursing. I've done high technology; like three different kinds of high technology, staffing, consulting, education services. I've even been a primary investor in a gas station. I'm an entrepreneur and what that means is at some point, I want to create the systems and processes so other people who are smarter than me can continue running the business forward. And so my most coveted title is not founder and it's not CEO, it is chairman. And so the longterm goal is that at some point, I want to switch to doing that. But I would not hesitate to shut down the business if I didn't feel I was adding value. This business only survives when it adds value if it doesn't add value, making it or forcing it to survive makes it a parasite. James: So when you say add value means, add value to your personal life? Neal: Add value to my investors. So by default, I don't say add value to my personal life because if I add value to my investors, the adding value to my personal is automatic. It happens by default, right? So to me, the only kind of add value that we should be looking at is adding value to our investors. And if it doesn't add value, we'll do something else. It doesn't mean I'll go out of real estate. You know, one of the things is I'm a very unusual syndicator in that half of my projects are new construction. And the project that I'm coming out with this week is called The Grid. It's a $30 million student housing project, new construction. And so why? Because as the market shifts and Class C properties become so expensive that everyone's buying six cap on actual or five and a half cap on actual, then in the back of my mind, I'm going, well, you know, I can make a brand new class A for seven cap. I know it's risky during construction, but let's say I get through the construction phase, isn't it less risky? Because at this point, you know, maybe it's not seven cap, maybe six and a half cap, but don't I have a six and a half cap, Class A building? What's the worst that could happen? Do we have a recession after dropped rents? So what? It's still a seven cap building and it's a brand new. That part of it is not going to change if I can't raise my rents. So I look at that and I go, you know, there's this whole business of buying Class C's at five and a half cap is scaring me. James: Yeah. I was talking to a broker the other day. He was trying to get me to buy a 1960s product at six cap. He says Austin is good now. Then I say what about the B class 1980s? Oh, it's like five and a half cap rate here. I'd rather buy the five and a half cap than buy the six cap; doesn't make sense, right? Neal: I agree with you. And honestly, you should not be, you know, between a B and a C, if there's a half gap difference always, by the B. James: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So is there anything that you do in your daily life that you think has contributed to your effectiveness in becoming very successful? Neal: I think structure. I'm a robot that has some human, characteristics and I like being a robot. I am extremely structured, absolutely structured, all the time and I feel that it's difficult for people to tie themselves to structure. That's a very hard thing to do because we feel like we are losing something about ourselves. We feel like we're losing a part of our humanity. What I have found is that it's actually the reverse. I'm very structured. I start my work, I work with an extremely high intensity and then I stop and when I stop, I completely stop. I have nothing to do with work because I make sure that every second of those 11 hours or 10 hours that I work really count. And to me, I think that that makes me have a significantly greater output than some other folks. James: Got It. Got It. Any advice for newbies who wants to start at multifamily? Neal: Yes. Right now be careful. Please understand that while there is no crash on the cards, I don't believe in all this nonsense about, you know, prices going down 20%. People say that they clearly don't understand macroeconomics, but you are buying at the peak. This may be a peak that is sustained for a significant amount of time, due to the fact that basically, it's very difficult for prices to come down because of macro reasons, but you certainly not going to see the kind of all ships rising effect that we have seen in the last five years. You're starting now, please do not apply the past to your present. This is a tough time. It's going to be very hard. If I was starting today in 2019, the 2013 version of me would advise the 2019 version, not to start. That's how frank I have to be. If you're starting that's fine, but I think you should be cautious and be aware of what kind of environment you're in. James: Got it. Got it. Well, Neil, thanks for coming to the show. Can you let the audience and listeners know how do get hold of you and how to find you? Neal: Sure. I think the best way is through education. I'm an educator, I connect with people through education. I have a portal called multifamilyyou.com. We have about 50 webinars that we do every year on multifamilyyou.com. We archive all of them. They're deep dive webinars. They're very different from podcasts because there's a lot of displayed content and tens of thousands of people attend those webinars each year. So that's probably the best way to connect with me. I don't mind people having my direct email address. My email is Neal, that's the Irish spelling, n e a l neal@multifamilyyou.com. So you connect with me. I also connect with people on Facebook. I think about 10,000 people connected with me on Facebook. And then multifamilyyou.com. If you want to learn more about demographics, I have a free course. It's at udemy.com/RealFocus. That course, I think right now has about a thousand people enrolled. So it usually has 1,000-1200 people enrolled at any given point in time. So that's also a completely free course. We don't believe in pitchers, if you're a presenter and would like to present our platform, approach us, but it has to be pitched free. James: Awesome, Neal. Thanks for coming and adding huge value to our audience and listeners, I'm sure everybody would have learned a ton of things today. Thank you. Neal: Thanks so much. Thanks for having me on the show. Bye, James.
On this episode of the Healthy, Wealthy and Smart Podcast, I welcome Evert Verhagen on the show to discuss qualitative research and how the outcomes can be useful for clinical sports practice. Evert Verhagen is a human movement scientist and epidemiologist. He holds a University Research Chair as a full professor at the Department of Public and Occupational Health of the VU University Medical Center and the Amsterdam Movement Science Research Institute. He chairs the department's research theme 'Sports, Lifestyle and Health', is the director of the Amsterdam Collaboration on Health and Safety in Sports (one of the 11 IOC research centers), and co-director of the Amsterdam Institute of Sports Sciences (AISS). In this episode, we discuss: -The difference between qualitative and quantitative research -How qualitative research influences sports medicine and injury prevention research and clinical practice -How to design a qualitative research study and control for biases -What is in store for the future of qualitative research in sports medicine -And so much more! Resources: Evert Verhagen Twitter Email: e.verhagen@amsterdamumc.nl Sports Lifestyle and Health Research Website IOC World Conference Prevention of Injury and Illness in Sport For more information on Evert: Evert Verhagen is a human movement scientist and epidemiologist. He holds a University Research Chair as a full professor at the Department of Public and Occupational Health of the VU University Medical Center and the Amsterdam Movement Science Research Institute. He chairs the department's research theme 'Sports, Lifestyle and Health', is the director of the Amsterdam Collaboration on Health and Safety in Sports (one of the 11 IOC research centers), and co-director of the Amsterdam Institute of Sports Sciences (AISS). His research revolves around the prevention of sports and physical activity related injuries; including monitoring, cost-effectiveness and implementation issues. He supervises several (inter-)national PhDs and post-docs on these topics, and has (co-)authored over 200 peer-reviewed publications around these topics. Read the full transcript below: Karen Litzy: 00:00 Hi Evert. Welcome to the podcast. I'm so happy to have you on. Evert Verhagen: 00:04 Yeah, thank you very much. I'm really happy to be here as well. Karen Litzy: 00:08 All right, so today we're going to be talking about qualitative research in mainly sports medicine. But before we even start, can you give the listeners the definitions and perhaps the difference between quantitative research and qualitative research? Evert Verhagen: 00:30 Sure. I think that is a really valid question to start with. I believe most people are familiar with quantitative research. It is what we do like in the word already, quantification of a problem by counting, by having numerical data or data that we can transform into statistics. And then we can quantify attitudes, opinions, define variables. And we can generalize that across the whole group of our population. So we can generate averages in given populations and we can compare averages between populations. Qualitative research on the other hand, doesn't go by numbers, it's more exploratory. And we try to get an understanding of reasons, opinions, motivations and instead of quantifying a problem. So, giving a number to it, giving a magnitude to it, we get insight into the problem and it helps us to develop new ideas and our policies. And that can be a precursor to do a bigger quantitative study in which you have an idea of where to look and where you would like to quantify and get some more thought. But you can also do it afterwards, where you have a quantifiable outcome and you want to understand better what that outcome actually means and what it means to your population and in the population. I think that is in essence the big difference. Karen Litzy: 02:06 Yeah. Thank you for that. And, now you have had over 200 peer reviewed articles in different journals and you yourself had done a lot of quantitative research. So why the shift now for you into more qualitative research? Evert Verhagen: 02:22 Oh, it's not the first time I get asked that question. I'm a trained quantitative research. I'm an epidemiologist. I'm a human movement scientist. So I kind of live and swear by numbers. If I can't measure it for me, it shouldn't count that many people think. Now, I learned that through the years, if you can count it, it still doesn't mean anything. It still needs to have a meaning. So a difference between two groups in a trial, it just gives you the difference between the groups in a trial. It doesn't tell you how the individuals within that trial actually experienced it. The same with trying to get your head around an injury problems so you can capture an injury problem in incidences in prevalences, in severity, in numbers of days, lost availability during games. But what does it actually mean for the individual athlete? Evert Verhagen: 03:23 What does it mean for the patient? And the same maybe with treatment outcomes, rehabilitation outcomes. It's nice to know that, you know, you reach a certain degree of range of motion after rehabilitation or reduced level of pain on a visual analog scale. But what is actually the opinion of, of that patient, does that actually align with what you can measure? And if not, where does the different come from? And if you do, it kind of shows you that you’re in the right direction. And over the years I learned that quantitative research can only help so much in solving the bigger issues we have where it concerns, prevention targets for presumed prevention. It stops at your number and then you need to do something with it. And the only way to do something with this, it's to understand where it comes from and also to understand what it means. That's where my interest kind of started. Karen Litzy: 04:23 Yeah. And that makes a lot of sense coming from myself from the clinical side of things. And I'll use the VAS scale when you're looking at pain as let's say one of those quantitative points. And I think this is a good example. Looking at the VAS scale, a four or five for me is a very different experience for someone else with the four or five out of 10 pain. Right? And so just looking at that number from quantitative research saying, well, this proves that this treatment, whatever it may be reduced pain by, I don't know, four points on the vas scale. Well, okay, that's great, but then what does that mean for the individual person and that you're just moving it because qualitative someone's opinion. This is an opinion of what my pain is and then we take it to quantitative data, but then it doesn't say how that patient is living with that pain. The pain has decreased, but I still can't walk to the store. I still can't play with my kids. So what does it mean? Evert Verhagen: 05:27 Exactly. I think that what you just said that is purely qualitative talks about what does it mean, what impact does it have as one little, one little thing I would like to specify is that a VAS scale in essence, which is a subjective outcome measure, is still a quantifiable objective measure. It's not qualitative and that is something I run into every now and then in a discussion where people seem to think that a subjective outcome on a scale or a subjective outcome measure in a survey is qualitative. It is not you have to look behind those measures. So why does someone report a reduction from eight to four on a visual analog scale? That is what we're looking at and you're completely right from eight to four in someone who has a seating job for instance. Mostly behind the computer means something completely different than someone who moves from eight to four who has a really active job and we have four is still really limiting for them. Evert Verhagen: 06:35 We may go to athletes, for instance, a pain of four today in preseason maybe or at the end of season when there's no big competitions around, I'm okay, I can skip the training, but a pain of four during competition when has a big game coming up? You probably will suck it up. And even though the pain level is the same, your experience and the burden it gives you is completely different. And those are the things we do work capturing in numbers. And those are the things that make the big difference for the individuals we do our research pool and our target population. Karen Litzy: 07:14 Yeah. And that actually leads nicely into the next thing I wanted to talk about and that's, how does qualitative research manifest itself in sports medicine or injury prevention? Evert Verhagen: 07:25 From the research perspective you mean? Or the practical perspective? Karen Litzy: 07:28 Let's take research perspective first. Evert Verhagen: 07:31 On a research perspective, I think it adds a new layer of information to what we already know. And you can think that in multiple ways. It gives you direction to where you would like to go with future research because you understand better your population, you understand their needs, their wishes, their opinions, their fears. You understand, their foci and based on that you can have more targeted either interventions or more targeted outcome measures to chart a problem or to monitor a problem. So it will guide quantitative research in that sense, which I would say is also really interesting in regards to machine learning and the complexity theories that are out there. We can't measure everything but if we get a sense already based on the public, the population where we should focus on it will gives direction to those novel technologies where we do data mining and all that. Evert Verhagen: 08:38 Also on the other hand, if we do interventions or if we do objective measures of what we try to assess in research, we need to find a way to translate that to the population. Research of course it is about putting it in a nice article and publish it in a high impact journal if at all possible. But in the end, and I'm speaking for myself here, I do research because I want to help people, I do research because I have a general question that I feel is valid to ask in relation to an issue or problem I see in athletes. So I want that number to come for athletes as well. And in order to do so, I need to talk to them and get their opinions about how they feel about this number, how they feel they can use it, how they feel they may not be able to use it. Evert Verhagen: 09:38 And based on that I can develop my next steps and I understand better what I did right, what I did wrong. I understand better what it means actually because I have my own opinion. And that's why I think qualitative and quantitative are synergetic to each other. Let me give you a clear example, which may be a bridge also to more the practical side of it. Maybe that's injury definition. If I ask athletes or students and fellow researchers how they would define an injury. Usually they come with the technical definitions. We also have in our manuscripts, like it is tissue damage. It leads to pain. That pain may lead to a diminished performance, maybe a limited availability, which is all fine. And if you ask athletes like, when are you injured? The elite athletes will say, well, pain is actually part of the game. Evert Verhagen: 10:34 I always have pain. I'm used to that and I know how to deal with that. And I will not think this pain is a problem unless my performance is limited, which is already a little bit of a different injury definition. So the problems we see and we have in terms of pain and availability may not even be the problems they perceive to be problems. So we solving maybe something they don't even see to be an issue. Now if you translate the same thing to maybe recreational athletes or novus athletes, people who sit on the couch and say, okay, let's be a bit more active. They're not used to pain, they're not used to how their body reacts to physical activity. So we think they have more injuries, but maybe their perception of injuries is simply different from the perception of injuries we see in most of the papers we read. And I think there's a clear clinical message there is that, perspective, context, experience of the patients you have in front of you determines their perception of the issue they have. But it also determines for you as a clinician what you need to do and how you need to approach that. Because the numbers you see in the quantifiable manuscript that's all based on averages and not on that one single person in front you. And this is where qualitative research can help a lot to understand that. Karen Litzy: 11:59 Yeah, and that makes a lot of sense to me. And as a clinician, I think sometimes we can get caught up in the quantitative data and those numbers and lose sight of the person in front of us. Meaning sometimes we may say, and I see this on social media threads and things like that, which I'm sure you've seen as well. Well this is the study and this is what the study says. This is what you should be doing with your patient. Yeah. Well, there are a lot of nuances to that because like you said, you're talking about averages and not the person in front of you. And, I love the example you gave. What is an injury and what does that mean to different stakeholders within, let's say, injury prevention realm if we will. So the athlete versus the average person versus the clinician? Karen Litzy: 12:56 Well we have three different definitions of what an injury is. So how can we fill those gaps to be a little bit closer? I mean I can say, let's say I'm the average person who's working out. I know I am not anywhere near a professional athlete, but the problem is, and you alluded to it a little bit, is that when people have an injury, they read about an athlete that has an injury and they say, well, this athlete had the injury and they were back at their sport in four weeks. How come I have to wait four months? And I think that's a big disconnect. And maybe that's where getting some better qualitative research and around these definitions can actually help with the perception of what an injury is across the board. Evert Verhagen: 13:49 Yeah, it's sort of framing but it's framing from both sides. It's framing for the patient so you can even better, why it takes for them four months instead of four weeks. Right. And usually in all honesty, by the time a professional athlete is already back training again, a recreational athlete maybe hasn't even seen a therapist. How then can you take a protocol or a guideline based on evidence that shows that on average after four to six weeks you need to be at a certain stage in the rehabilitation phase where that one single person in front of you as already been looking three weeks for a proper therapist to treat the injury and then they come in and they've seen this evidence like you said, but then you would like to know a bit better where they come from, what their context is and what they need to do, which is not shown in evidence is also not what the patient thinks about. Evert Verhagen: 14:55 So having some knowledge about such perceptions and where they come from and what they mean I think can really help to support you in your clinical practice to use the evidence to a better extent. You know, in some of the issues we have in objective quantifiable research also apply here. I would say there is, for instance the discussion started a couple of years ago about we should screen or not to predicting injury actually to see if someone's at an increased risk. And one of the main arguments in there is, well basically what we're doing is we create two normal distributions and normal distribution is the Garcian curve where we think most of the population is in the middle and we have a few outliers and that is nicely distributed. So we have a normal population with our risk factor and a normal population without a risk factor. And if you know, the averages don't overlap too much, then Oh, we have a significant difference. But that negates the outliers on the top side and on the bottom side of both. And then you talk about an average, but there's even an equal amount of people who are in that overlapping phase that we still give the average treatment. And if we understand better why these people are on the outskirts and why are they in a position, we can actually make that evidence for them work. Because we can model it to their specific situation. Karen Litzy: 16:31 Got It. So that qualitative research, like you said, can help to guide quantitative research, which can then help to guide actual treatment practices for the average clinician. In a very simplified, overly simplified nutshell. So yeah, very, very, very oversimplified of nutshell there. Can you give us an example of what a qualitative research project may look like? Can you give an example of what that looks like in it's sort of set up phase and then throughout the project. Evert Verhagen: 17:19 Okay. Well in essence, it looks a little bit simpler because for quantitative researching in big groups of people, because of those averages for qualitative research, you need smaller groups. One issue though is in case of how our specific needs, we would like to have groups that are quite specific. So if we have a group of elite athletes combined to recreational athletes and we want know perceptions about injury, like we were already talking about. That doesn't work because we get too many deviating perceptions in there. So you need to, you need to frame your research question correctly there. And the essence here is that you start doing your interviews until you reached so called saturation. So you do interviews, you get answers, and your next interview will give you a deeper understanding. You get different answers, you get more answers, you can ask a bit further. Evert Verhagen: 18:18 But at a certain point of time, you start hearing the same thing. So you don't add any new information. That's when you're done. And now, depending on your group or your specific focus, that can happen between eight to 15 interviews. So in that sense, it sounds really easy. Then what do you need to do is you need to type those interviews out. So you need to transcribe them. And then the analysis start. And for most people, this is boring, but this is actually where for qualitative researchers me as I'm a changed person. I like that too, because you start to go, so you start to read through the interviews and you start to look for clues of what people say and what it might mean. Now as we need statistics, there are several philosophies you can follow. The different philosophies make a big difference. The same as in qualitative research, but that on the side. Karen Litzy: 19:21 So you go through this series of interview questions and you keep narrowing those questions down until you reach a saturation point and then you can start the analysis. And so then my next question was what set of statistics do you use to analyze qualitative research? And this might be a stupid question. Evert Verhagen: 19:44 No, no, no, no, no. We don't use statistics. And that's not a stupid question because, you know, there's very few ways in qualitative research and arguably the most simple way to go is this so-called thematic analysis. So you do your analysis and you start to find themes in the interviews by coding. So you have overarching themes and within these overarching themes, you find sub themes, and you just report those themes. And that is really interesting because, for instance, if you're looking for barriers towards implementation of an injury prevention measure, you can say, okay, these are named barriers and these barriers can be categorized as time as disinterest or as non belief in the effectiveness. And then within those main categories you can have sub categories of where that comes from. That's I would say one of the simplest versions of how we can use qualitative research. Evert Verhagen: 20:46 Or you can also make it more intricate. You can build models, you can validate models. And for each of those research questions you have, you require a little bit of a different approach thematic analysis is easy. You just sit down, you have just semi structured interview, you ask people, about opinion, about a certain topic, they give you an answer and then basically you say, okay, can you give me an example of that? Can you explain that a little bit further than what you already know, the topics you're interested in. So you want to talk about barriers or facilitators so you can focus on that. You can also go open minded where you say, okay, I just want to know how elite athletes perceive an injury. So you need a different kind of approach of first you need, you would like to make them feel comfortable that they can talk about it, that it's a safe environment. Evert Verhagen: 21:42 You would like to ask them about their previous injuries. So you get a sense of which of those had a high impact. Then you can dive a little bit deeper into, so what did it mean for you? How did you feel, what were the consequences of it personally, how did you recover? Did it take longer or shorter than expected? So you kind of, you kind of follow a story and that story unfolds itself. And if you do it really open, then you can do one interview. It gives you a direction and your thoughts and based on that direction in your thoughts, you look for your next participant and you continue where you were with your previous and then a bigger story unfolds. And that takes a bit more time because you do it by interview. But it's a lot more deep and rich information. But it all starts with the research question I would say. And it's different types of research questions that we have in quantitative research. It's not to compare this to compare that, it's not how big is this problem, but it's really diving into beliefs. It's diving into opinion, diving into reasons. And that can be because of something you did, but that can also be to understand better what's going on in the minds of people. Karen Litzy: 23:17 As the interviewer within these studies, how do you control for that interviewers biases? So you know, the leading question. So let's say you're doing this long form where you interview someone, you get really in depth, they give you their answers, you go onto the next person. How do you not then guide that next person to kind of be like what the first person said and then the third person, like the first and second person. So how do you control for like leading as an interviewer you can lead the direction of that interview really in any way you want. Evert Verhagen: 23:52 Exactly. But isn't that the same in quantitative research? The way you're framing the question, you can already guide people towards answering questions. A really good example I encountered like last year in a project where the premise was that, there was a funding scheme and the premise was that projects that were driven by questions from practice would have a preference. So they asked in a particular sport and a particular association, two older members. Do you think injury prevention is important? That was the first question in a survey. Of course, everybody says yes. Then the second question was if you think it is important, do you feel that an app on an iPhone would be helpful? Yes or no? Of course. Many people say yes. So their conclusion was okay, 80% wants injury prevention and 80% want that in an app on an iPhone. Evert Verhagen: 24:51 So we should have a lot of money to develop such an app was well a disaster. Because they finally developed it and they kind of scoped already with the public what they had of an idea. Instead of really have something driven by the audience. And so I think by in that sense, it's not only applicable to qualitative research. Subjectivity maybe is because you as an interview, have an understanding most of the time on what the topic you're interested in. And that's why in qualitative research. You also see a little paragraph on reflection where the interviewer or the authors explain what their background is, where they come from. And of course it's really hard to take that out of the interviews. It's practice and it takes a lot of self control. You can tell you that and it's not always possible. So that's why you need to be frank upfront that you are a physical therapist and that you ask questions about physical therapy guidance or physical therapy conduct. Evert Verhagen: 25:58 And of course you have an opinion about them. And also of course it is the connection between interview or an interviewee that is important. If you interview someone who thinks you are a prick, you will not get much, much out of it. But if you have a good connection with someone and you really are empathetic, then they will open up. But that requires experience I would say. We do have some tricks in the analysis to reduce that. Two main tricks that may be of interest to say is we call that triangulation where you're not only interview patients but you also interview other stakeholders on similar topics and tried to find connections and similarities between answers. Because if three people from different perspectives say the same thing, that must be something that really counts, right? So it's not one thing and it's not just one person interpreting. That's one. And the other one is you can do is multiple coders. So you have one interviewer and you need to code the interviews. But you can do that with two people separately. Much like we do with systematic reviews where you check for the quality of papers. We have two independent reviews and then we compare notes. We can do the same here too. So you take a bit of that subjectivity out and that preoccupation out. Karen Litzy: 27:21 Yeah. Great. Thank you for that. And now where do you see the future of qualitative research moving? Evert Verhagen: 27:29 Hmm, that's an interesting one. For how a specific field I would say it as a lot of ground we have to cover. We're getting there. There's a lot of interest in it at the moment. There is more and more papers being published at the moment. One of the, not issues, but one of the fears I have is that most of these papers still get published in not the mainstream sports medicine literature that is being read by the clinicians even though the messages are supposed to be targeted to the clinicians or the therapists. So we need to find ways to grasp that clinical message in such a way that it doesn't become this lengthy qualitative research paper and it will become a succinct, easy to read paper with a clinical message though with a constructive, strong methodology. We've been battling with that for a couple of years now I would say. And, I just got the word this morning from one of our PhDs that she got a full qualitative study accepted in British journal of sports medicine. That's nice because that was a journal that said one and a half, two years ago. We're not interested in qualitative research. I think that whole movement is gaining ground and we're finding ways to communicate our messages that it really is helpful for clinicians and it's readable by those journals, which I think are a few big steps we have taken. Karen Litzy: 29:13 Yeah, I would say they're very huge steps because if the research is there but no one's reading it and no one's talking about it, where is it going? It doesn't make the research any less meaningful, but it doesn't make it applicable if no one's reading it cause no one can apply it to their populations. Evert Verhagen: 29:33 Hmm. But you know, the true theory is it's still quite difficult because if you want to write a manuscript that has the full qualitative methods and traditional version of the outcomes, in my opinion and probably people will be mad when I say that, it's kind of dry to read. It's not really interesting to read. So if you juice that a little bit so it becomes interesting and more concise and easy to digest for the more clinical oriented reader you lose a lot of information that for qualitative reader is required to assess the validity and the reliability of what you did. So we're kind of in the middle. We need to have suppression of information in there, in such a paper for the knowing reader that we did right. But it also need to be dumbed down to such an extent that for the unknowing reader, it's understandable and they see the method and understand the clinical meaningfulness of the message. And that is still a bit finding the balance. And I think that is one of the main challenges to do. Karen Litzy: 30:51 I will say that as the clinician, I very much appreciate your trying to kind of find that sweet spot between the dryness of what may be some people would think qualitative research write up would be to this applicable like you said, more juiced up version that a clinician can take and digest very easily. I think there is a space for that for sure. And I look forward to I guess more progress on that end. So it sounds like you're getting there but that there is maybe more work to be done, but I am sure there's always more work to be done, but you know, I think if you can find a way to blend those and make it digestible and allow clinicians to take this information very readily to their patient populations, then in the end, like you said, you got into research to help people. Clinicians are there to help people. So in the end it's hopefully this blending of research and clinical care that's there for one reason and to benefit the person in front of us. Evert Verhagen: 32:14 I believe so, yeah. I believe we can achieve that. I don't think we are there yet still finding a direction. But in all honesty, if you look at most journals 10, 15 years ago, even quantitative research, it was sort of dry, straightforward academic language as well. And we have made big grounds there and I think we can draw on those experiences and that expertise that has been created there. And our field of sports medicine has been in the forefront, I would say. There are some journals who really, really do that really well. And it has helped us to get this topic on the attention. One other sign that is gaining the attention I feel it deserves is for the last two additions we tried to get it on the program of the IOC prevention conference and this year for the first time we got a dedicated symposium on qualitative research in sports injury prevention on the program. So that already shows that in the wealth of proposals they can choose from ours stood out and the topic is found interesting at such a platform. So it's now up for us to grab this opportunity and make it count. Karen Litzy: 33:41 Yes, it's up to you to deliver on in that focus symposium. And just so people listening we will have a link to this, but that's the IOC, the International Olympic Committees Injury Prevention Conference, which is march of 2020 in Monaco. I don't have the exact dates, but I know it's march. I think it's like the 14th and around there. Maybe. I'm not a hundred percent sure. I think it's around there. But we'll have a link to it in the show notes at podcast.Healthywealthysmart.com if people want to check that out as well. So now if you could leave the listeners with let's say a highlight of the talk or a highlight in your opinion of the importance of qualitative research, what would that be? Evert Verhagen: 34:33 My highlight would be that qualitative research gives deeper understanding and deeper meaning to the quantitative evidence we have to use in daily practice. Karen Litzy: 34:47 Perfect. And one more question. I probably should have told you this ahead of time, but I forgot. So I'm going to surprise you with it, but it’s the question I ask everyone, and that is knowing where you are now in your life and in your career, what advice would you give to yourself, let's say straight out of your graduate program, let's do that. So maybe even before PhDs happened. So what advice would you give to yourself? Evert Verhagen: 35:22 I would give the advice to just follow your heart and follow wherever your thoughts lead you, don't plan ahead. Karen Litzy: 35:36 That is great advice and so difficult to do. I'm a planner. That is so hard to do, but I agree it's great advice. Evert Verhagen: 35:46 I plan next week but I don't plan two years ahead. So it hasn't disappointed me. Karen Litzy: 35:53 It's worked well. That's excellent. Well thank you so much for coming on. Where can people find you if they have extra questions? Evert Verhagen: 36:05 I'm sure you will share my email address. Karen Litzy: 36:08 I can if you want, or social media. Evert Verhagen: 36:15 Twitter account, just drop me a line there or private message. Karen Litzy: 36:19 Perfect. Evert Verhagen: 36:20 I have a website we should probably post as well. And most of the work we do also in qualitative research will be posted there once it's published. Karen Litzy: 36:32 Perfect. Perfect. So we will have all of those links for all the listeners. So thank you so much for coming on and sharing all this great information with us. I really appreciate it. And everyone, thanks so much for tuning in. Have a great couple of days and stay healthy, wealthy, and smart. Thanks for listening and subscribing to the podcast! 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