American singer-songwriter, artist, and former model
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7 episodes with Grace Slick
4 episodes with Grace Slick
4 episodes with Grace Slick
4 episodes with Grace Slick
2 episodes with Grace Slick
3 episodes with Grace Slick
4 episodes with Grace Slick
3 episodes with Grace Slick
3 episodes with Grace Slick
Episode 428 of Friends Talking Nerdy is a celebration of women who didn't just rock the stage but bent the rules of the game, reshaped culture, and left scorch marks on the history of music. Professor Aubrey and Tim the Nerd dive into their favorite women rock and roll stars, not just rattling off names but unpacking what made these artists lightning rods for change.The conversation moves track by track like a lovingly curated mixtape, which they made availble on YouTube. They start with Pat Benatar's anthemic “We Belong,” discussing how Benatar combined powerhouse vocals with a sense of vulnerability that made her a radio staple without softening her edge. From there, they barrel into the raw energy of Janis Joplin's “Move Over,” talking about how Joplin embodied a feral, unapologetic energy that made her voice feel like a declaration of war. Kathleen Hanna and Le Tigre's “Much Finer” prompts Aubrey to bring in the riot grrrl movement, with Tim marveling at how Hanna's blend of activism and art feels more vital now than ever.When Jefferson Airplane's “Somebody to Love” comes up, they highlight Grace Slick's psychedelic snarl and how she stood toe-to-toe with the male counterculture icons of her era. Joan Jett's “Bad Reputation” naturally gets both of them fired up—Tim noting how Jett weaponized punk's simplicity, while Aubrey points out that her career longevity is proof she wasn't just a “bad girl” novelty. They lean into Stevie Nicks' “Edge of Seventeen,” marveling at her voice's mythic qualities and the way she carved out her own witchy rock persona that still resonates across generations.From The Pretenders' “Back on the Chain Gang” to Blondie's “One Way or Another,” the hosts highlight the unique blend of grit and sophistication Chrissie Hynde and Debbie Harry brought to the table. Tina Turner's “Private Dancer” inspires a passionate sidebar on resilience, survival, and the way Turner reinvented herself against impossible odds. And Hole's “Celebrity Skin” brings the discussion full circle, with Aubrey making the case that Courtney Love's voice—half sneer, half scream—was a necessary counterweight to the sanitized pop machine of the late ‘90s.After the amps cool down, the duo pivot to television, giving their first impressions of South Park's Season 27 debut. They note how the new season takes aim at the current American political landscape with a sharpness and weird clarity the show hasn't always nailed in recent years. Tim points out that the difference between South Park's take on the first Trump Administration years and now is like night and day—back then, the writers seemed shell-shocked, unsure how to lampoon chaos that already felt like satire. Professor Aubrey adds that the new season feels more like the show's golden years, where cultural absurdity is filtered through the bizarre but laser-focused worldview of four Colorado kids. Together, they agree that this season might mark a creative resurgence for the long-running series.The episode balances music history and cultural commentary with the usual Friends Talking Nerdy flavor—part nerdy scholarship, part passionate fan energy. By the end, listeners get both a playlist of iconic women who changed the sound of rock forever and a thoughtful dive into how South Park still finds a way to speak to the strange moment we're all living through.As always, we wish to thank Christopher Lazarek for his wonderful theme song. Head to his website for information on how to purchase his EP, Here's To You, which is available on all digital platforms.Head to Friends Talking Nerdy's website for more information on where to find us online.
In this bonus episode, we speak with Cathy Richardson, Lead Singer of Jefferson Starship for the last 17 years. We discuss how the band is honoring the late Paul Kantner's wishes to keep the music and legacy of Jefferson Starship alive. We also talk about their Runaway Again tour and their upcoming performance at the Arcada Theatre in St. Charles, IL
It's the "We Built This City on Rock and Roll" show, featuring Grace Slick, Jerry Slick, Darby Slick, and a real slick interview with Megan C. Reynolds, author of "Like: A History of the World's Most Hated and Misunderstood Word." This show could end up feeling as comfy as toilet paper. Give it a roll.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
It's the "We Built This City on Rock and Roll" show, featuring Grace Slick, Jerry Slick, Darby Slick, and a real slick interview with Megan C. Reynolds, author of "Like: A History of the World's Most Hated and Misunderstood Word." This show could end up feeling as comfy as toilet paper. Give it a roll.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Sometimes the universe doesn't operate on a level playing field. What we learned in preschool. Song lyrics that are saving us now. The Thunderbirds at the Chicago Air and Water Show have wrought chaos at Turi's house. Marci admits to liking the Hamburger Helper Hand on her daughter's but...or at least preferring it to the ear guages.
In this episode, I take you on a journey through the electrifying world of rock music, spotlighting the legendary women who have shaped the genre. From trailblazers like Joan Jett and Stevie Nicks to modern icons like Hayley Williams, I explore their groundbreaking contributions and enduring legacies. Join me as I uncover the stories behind their most famous hits and how they've inspired generations of musicians. Tune in for an unforgettable journey through the powerful voices and unforgettable riffs that define rock history. FEMALE ROCKERS AND SOME TOP SONGS...Janis Joplin - "Piece of my Heart" and "Me and Bobby McGee"Joan Jett - "I Love Rock 'n Roll"Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac - "Rhiannon", "Dreams", and "Edge of Seventeen"Pat Benatar - "Love is a Battlefield"Debbie Harry of Blondie - "Call Me" and "Heart of Glass"Ann Wilson of Heart - "Barracuda"Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders - "Brass in Pocket"Delores O'Riordan of The Cranberries - "Zombie"Courtney Love of Hole - "Celebrity Skin" and "Violet"Shirley Manson of Garbage - "Only Happy When it Rains"Amy Lee of Evanescence - "Bring Me to Life" and "My Immortal"Hayley Williams of Paramore - "Misery Business"Lzzy Hale of Halestorm - "Darkness Always Wins"Taylor Momsen of The Pretty Reckless - "Heaven Knows" and "Going to Hell"Florence Welch of Florence + The Machine - "Shake it Out" and "What Kind of Man"Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane - "White Rabbit"Alanis Morissette - Jagged Little Pill albumMelissa Etheridge - "Come to my Window" and "I'm the Only One"Patti Smith - Horses albumKim Deal of Pixies and The Breeders - "Cannonball"What did you think of this episode? Support the showKeep listening, keep grooving, and let the music in you continue to shine. Thank you, and see you soon!CONTACT TERI:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/terirosborg/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/teri.rosborgYouTube: The Music in MeTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@terirosborgPodcast Facebook Page: The Music in Me Podcast Facebook pageTHEME SONG BY: Hayley GremardINTRODUCTION BY: Gavin Bruno
Lacy J Dalton Meets Gothic Author Alistair Cross Lacy J Dalton Meets Gothic Author Alistair Cross Alistair Cross Early Life and Influences: Born in the western United States, Cross began writing at a young age, inspired by horror novels and movies. His literary influences include authors such as Stephen King, Dean Koontz, John Saul, Tamara Thorne, Ira Levin, and William Peter Blatty. Early Career: Cross' first novel, a collaboration titled "Beautiful Monster," was published in 2012 under the pseudonym Jared S. Anderson. He was first published by Damnation Books in 2012. Collaboration with Tamara Thorne: In 2012, Cross partnered with international bestselling author Tamara Thorne. As "Thorne & Cross," they co-authored the successful Gothic series, The Ravencrest Saga, starting with "The Ghosts of Ravencrest" in 2014. Their collaborative novel, "The Cliffhouse Haunting," became an Amazon bestseller. They have also worked on other projects together, including "Grandma's Rack". Solo Work: Cross' debut solo novel, "The Crimson Corset," a vampire-themed horror story, quickly became a bestseller and received positive reviews from notable authors like Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Jay Bonansinga. This novel is the first book in The Vampires of Crimson Cove series. "Haunted Nights LIVE!" Radio Show: In 2014, Cross and Thorne started an internet radio show called "Thorne & Cross: Haunted Nights LIVE!", featuring interviews with renowned figures in the horror genre, including authors, paranormal investigators, and discussions of ghost stories. The show has featured guests like Anne Rice, Charlaine Harris, Jeff Lindsay, and Christopher Moore. Current Projects: As of recent accounts, Alistair Cross is continuing to work on both solo novels and new collaborations with Tamara Thorne. He is also noted as the author of dark fiction. Note: Information regarding hobbies and "turn-ons" listed in some sources (playing with fire, conquering ant colonies, bloodletting, etc.) may be intended for humorous effect and should be interpreted with caution. LACY J. DALTON BIOGRAPHY Lacy J. Dalton (born Jill Lynne Byrem on October 13, 1946 in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania), is an American country singer and songwriter with a career that has spanned many decades and touched the hearts of millions of music fans. In March 2017 Lacy J Dalton was inducted into the North American Country Music Association International Hall of Fame, and in 2022 she was awarded a Lifetime Career Achievement Award from the Josie Music Awards, the largest independent music awards show in the country. She's one of the most instantly recognizable voices in music – the woman People Magazine called “Country's Bonnie Raitt.” From the first time Lacy J Dalton caught the public's ear, that soulful delivery, full of texture and grit, has been a mainstay of Country Music. When you sit to listen to a Lacy J Dalton album, you find yourself pulled in by the very power and heart of this vocalist, because she's not merely performing a ten-song set, she's bringing each and every tune to life. It's as if they were all written especially for her. Prior to recording with Harbor Records in 1978 as Jill Croston, she like many before her, held many jobs to survive and support her family. As a truck stop waitress and singer, she would wait tables and then take the stage to sing a few songs. In June 1979, Lacy J Dalton was signed by Columbia Records and quickly rose to national prominence with Crazy Blue Eyes, which she wrote with her longest friend, Mary McFadden, and which raced to #7 on the Billboard Country Charts. Her hard work and dedication paid off in 1979 when she was awarded the Academy of Country Music's Top New Female Vocalist of the Year. Lacy's success was powered not just by the artist's recordings, but by a stage show that truly electrified audiences. She quickly became one of the few women who could successfully open a show for the likes of Hank Williams, Jr., Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard or Charlie Daniels. Not only could she do it, but she left audiences across the country hollering for more. Her signature song 16th Avenue, became the Anthem for Nashville songwriters. Her other hit records are legendary million-airplay cuts and include Crazy Blue Eyes, Takin' It Easy, Everybody Makes Mistakes, Hillbilly Girl with the Blues, Hard Times, and the worldwide hit Black Coffee. In addition to her Top New Female Vocalist award, she also brought home numerous Grammy nominations and 3 prestigious, back to back (1979, 1980, 1981) Bay Area Music Awards for Best Country-Folk Recordings. Lacy appeared on those shows with the likes of Neil Young, The Grateful Dead, Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane. Lacy's collaboration with Willie Nelson on his platinum Half Nelson CD was a high spot for her. Lacy is the only woman featured on that recording (which included singing legends Ray Charles, Neil Diamond, Merle Haggard, Julio Iglesias, George Jones, Leon Russell, Carlos Santana, Mel Tillis, Hank Williams Sr., and Neil Young), and was awarded a Platinum Record for it. She also received a Gold Record from Hank Williams Jr. in 1985 for her support performances throughout his Five-0 Tour, where she opened for him at a time when it was unusual for a woman to do so. Her career includes accomplishments in music, film and radio. In music, they range from her instantly recognizable charted hit songs to her notable duets recorded with George Jones, Willie Nelson, Bobby Bare, Glen Campbell, Eddie Rabbit, David Allen Coe and many others. Her film debut was in the motion picture Take This Job And Shove It, and her acting has also included live stage and theater performances. Until recently, Lacy J Dalton also hosted a weekly radio show called Mustang Matters. Podcasts of past shows are available to listeners on the internet at www.americamatters.us Following a successful career in country music, Lacy decided to draw on all her musical experiences including country, rock and folk, and cross over into the Americana genre. This blend of musical styles allows her to express herself in a way that demonstrates all the facets of who she is as a singer/songwriter. She became an independent artist and formed her own label called Song Dog Records. Under this label, she has released three albums to date. The first was Wild Horse Crossing in 1999, followed by the Last Wild Place Anthology which went #1 on the World Independent Chart, and a year later went #1 on the American Western Music Chart. Then Allison Eastwood, Clint Eastwood's daughter, used the hit song Slip Away from the Anthology CD on the sound track of her independent film, Don't Tell. In 2010 Lacy also released a tribute to Hank Williams Sr. entitled Here's To Hank. Today, Lacy continues to record new music and perform live shows whenever possible. She tours mainly west of the Mississippi and loves small boutique venues and old theaters with great sound quality and warm, receptive audiences she can really connect with. She recently recorded some electrifying new music for an EP that was released in January 2019. When hearing the signature song Scarecrow, her good friend Reverend Barbara Ann Fletcher remarked “that song makes you a whole new you, and it makes me a whole new me.” And that's exactly the response Lacy was hoping for. In 2024 Lacy released an album titled For The Black Sheep, a collection of songs with meaningful lyrics and messages of unity and acceptance for all of us. In addition to her musical career, Lacy has been involved in various service projects through several charitable organizations – namely, the Let ‘em Run Foundation, William James Associates Arts in Corrections, and Rotary International.
Send us a textThis week on Jams 'N' Cocktails Live, we're turning the volume up and the calendar back as we celebrate the rock stars who are still melting faces and defying time. From iconic voices of the ‘60s to pop royalty of the early 2000s, we're giving flowers to the legends who are still kickin', strummin', singin', and straight-up slayin'. I'm joined by Jordyn and Elly—aka the Destruction Crew—as we serve up the ultimate mix of nostalgia, laughs, and one seriously weird cocktail of the week.We're diving into tributes, trading stories, sipping on a boozy candy-inspired concoction, and playing a special edition of Name That Tune featuring the latest tracks by these timeless titans. Plus, the Jordy Files bring the latest entertainment scoop, from Taylor Swift's hospital visit to Mariah Carey's record-setting chart streak. This is one throwback party you don't want to miss.LinksJNC Officialhttps://www.jncpodcast.comSupport us on Patreonhttps://www.patreon.com/jncpodcast
This last-minute interview promoting Jorma's appearance at The Hudson Valley Music Festival thankfully fell into my lap…because it'll be the first in an upcoming Jefferson Airplane Deep Dive Series featuring Jorma, Jack Casady, & (fingers crossed) Grace Slick, all the living members of the classic Airplane line-up. Tickets to The Hudson Valley Music Festival are going fast, so jump on it now: it's happening this Saturday, June 14th (2025), in Croton Point Park, Croton NY. Visit hudsonrivermusicfestival.com to check out the killer line-up and buy tickets (Admission is free for children 12 & under.)Here's just a few of the many things that Jorma discusses with Discograffiti in this podcast:Jorma's holy shit moment of creative epiphany that started it all;His early days in the South Bay folk scene coming up with Janis Joplin, Skip Spence, Billy Dean Andrus, and other legendary figures;My live pitch to get a Jefferson Airplane Discograffiti Deep Dive interview series going;How a reluctant Jorma was initially convinced to join the Airplane;The various factors that split up the band;The record of his that's most redolent of the ravages of substance abuse;And the wonders of getting and staying sober.Listen: linktr.ee/discograffitiSubscribe to Discograffiti's Patreon and receive a ceaseless barrage (4 shows a week) of must-hear binge-listening: Patreon.com/DiscograffitiCONNECTJoin our Soldiers of Sound Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1839109176272153Patreon: www.Patreon.com/DiscograffitiPodfollow: https://podfollow.com/1592182331YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClyaQCdvDelj5EiKj6IRLhwInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/discograffitipod/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Discograffiti/Twitter: https://twitter.com/DiscograffitiOrder the Digital version of the METAL MACHINE MUZAK 2xLP (feat. Lou Barlow, Cory Hanson, Mark Robinson, & W. Cullen Hart): www.patreon.com/discograffiti/shop/197404Order the $11 Digital version of the MMM 2xLP on Bandcamp: https://discograffiti.bandcamp.com/album/metal-machine-muzakOrder the METAL MACHINE MUZAK Double Vinyl + Digital package: www.patreon.com/discograffiti/shop/169954Merch Shop: https://discograffitipod.myspreadshop.com/allVenmo Dave A Tip: @David-GebroeWeb site: http://discograffiti.com/CONTACT DAVEEmail: dave@discograffiti.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/hooligandaveInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidgebroe/Twitter: https://twitter.com/DaveGebroeThere is no other Patreon in existence where you get more for your money. 4 shows a week is what it takes these days to successfully blot out our unacceptable reality…so do yourself a favor and give it a shot for at least one month to see what I'm talking about. If you're already a member, please comment below about your experience. www.Patreon.com/discograffiti#jormakaukonen #jackcasady #jeffersonairplane #graceslick #paulkantner #martybalin #spencerdryden #hottuna #psychedelicrock #vinyl #jerrygarcia ##acidrock #vinylcollection #jeffersonstarship #whiterabbit #classicrock #sanfrancisco #somebodytolove #recordcollection #davidcrosby #woodstock #vinylcollector #haightashbury #rock #papajohncreach #surrealisticpillow #discograffiti #andyourdreamscometrue #weirdherald #billydeanandrus
Nel 162° episodio di Illuminismo Psichedelico torna a grande richiesta il critico musicale Demented Burrocacao, con cui abbiamo divagato per tutto la puntata tra miti e leggende del rock psichedelico, partendo dall'opera e dalla mitologica biografia di alcuni personaggi chiave degli anni '60 e '70, tra cui Syd Barret, Skip Spence, Grace Slick, Romina Power, Janis Joplin, Brian Wilson e Jimi Hendrix. Non abbiamo alcuna pretesa di esaustività (sarebbe impossibile in così poco tempo), e anzi rivendichiamo il diritto a questo detour intessuto sin dal titolo nella "leggenda". In questa puntata mi sono finalmente ricordato di annunciare che quest'anno è possibile aiutare Illuminismo Psichedelico destinandogli il 5 x 1000. Il Codice Fiscale da indicare per sostenere Illuminismo Psichedelico è: 90072400477
Ain't no interview like a GRACE SLICK interview! That's right — the outspoken Rock-and-Roll-Hall-of-Fame singer of Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship, and Starship, and the voice of the psychedelic rock generation and beyond is on the show. Whether she's talking about the playing of great guitar players she has known (everyone from her legendary Airplane/Starship bandmates to other heroes, including Jimi Hendrix and Jerry Garcia) or tackling any other subject under the sun — sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll; '60s counterculture; DeLoreans; Miles Davis; '80s pop culture; hilarious drummer antics (yes, your ears are burning, Donny Baldwin) — Grace is gloriously unfiltered and a true musical treasure. As guitarist of Jefferson Starship since 2012, I was thrilled to finally dive deep into these topics and more with Grace, who — along with her and Paul Kantner's daughter, China Kantner Isler — I've been lucky enough to call a friend for a decade now. Please help me thank GUITAR PLAYER and guitarplayer.com for making this episode happen. GUITAR PLAYER: Play better, sound better. — Jude Gold | Host/creator, NO GUITAR IS SAFE podcast.
Super-Special-not-so-Secret Friend Don returns to the diningroom table for another thrilling bonus episode. Deon and Jay welcome his ass with arms wide open, as Lightnin' Lickers are want to do. Twelve crackin' tracks are lifted from wax and stitched back onto a mixtape after an in-depth discussion of the artists who created said cuts takes place. It's good to be back. Happy (Merry) St. Patrick's Day (Bay City Christmas)!Sonic contributors to the latest bonus episode of Lightnin'Licks Radio podcast include: Max Heath, Prince and the Revolution, Alan Silvestri, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Arc of All, Junkyard Band, Roberta Flack, Donald Trump, Jimmy Webb, The Beatles, Tim Hardin, Holland Dozier Holland, Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel, Chris Whitley, Bonnie Tyler, Jim Steinman, Missing Persons, Mitchell Froom, Guns N' Roses, Stephen Malkmus, the Jicks, KMFDM, MC 900 Ft. Jesus, Beck, Revolting Cocks, Led Zepplin, Greta Van Fleet, Grace Slick, Bjork, Black Flag, Grateful Dead, Henry Rollins Band, Mike Judge's Beavis & Butthead, A Tribe Called Quest, Ubiquity, Digible Planets, Abe Jefferson, Billy Woods, ELUCID, Raekwon the Chef, Outkast, Ms. Judy, Quelle Chris, Don Messick as Zorac, Sade, Mr. K and Boyd Jarvis.Jay noted he was snacking on the sonic deliciousness of theSound Symposium, Noel and the Red Wedge, Wartime, and Fazerdaze.Deon is with Sarah Shook and the Disarmers, Pavement, Roy Ayers, Cavalier and Child Actor. Don suggested checking out the Hard Lessons, Balthazar, S.G. Goodman, and MaidaVale. In a world full of and Stephen Millers and Ted Cruzes, be aMr. Studinger or a Tom Cedarberg. Share joy and buy music from your local record store. We suggest Electric Kitsch in beautiful Bay City, Michigan. BONUS #25 mixtape:[SIDE 1] (1) S.G. Goodman - If You Were Someone I Loved {edit} (2) Pavement - Grounded (3) Noel & the Red Wedge - Special to You (4) Balthazar - Bunker (5) Roy Ayers - Slow Motion (6) Wartime - The Whole Truth [SIDE 2] (1) The Sound Symposium - America (2) The Hard Lessons - Milk & Sugar (3) Cavalier & Child Actor - Judy is Forever (4) Fazerdaze - A Thousand Years (5) MaidaVale - Daybreak (6) Sarah Shook & the Disarmers - Backsliders
Send us a textAn expanded episode of TrackTalk with my old friend, legendary drummer, Rock & Roll HOF inductee, and returning champion, Aynsley Dunbar! In this episode we do a deep dive into several of Aynsley's iconic recordings including Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation, Frank Zappa, David Bowie, Journey, Jefferson Starship and Whitesnake. I had selected 6-7 songs to discuss, but Aynsley called several "audibles" during the show so this episode is chock full of music! And many laughs! So come along for the ride and please subscribe! Aynsley was my guest on episode #73 Feb 12, 2022, so be sure to check it that episode! • E73: Live From My Drum Room With Ayns... Live From My Drum Room Hoodies are now available! • NEW Live From My Drum Room Merch! Made of a soft 52% cotton 48% polyester blend. Sizes: MD, LG & XL = $50 USD (including shipping) *Size 2XL = $55 USD (including shipping) * US orders only. Venmo payment only. Live From My Drum Room T-shirts are made of soft 60%cotton/40% polyester. Available in XS-2XL = $25 (including shipping) * Venmo only. 100% of the proceeds from Live From My Drum Room merchandise goes toward a Live From My Drum Room Scholarship with the Percussive Arts Society! https://pas.org/pasic/scholarships/ Payment with Venmo: @John-DeChristopher-2. Be sure to include your size and shipping address. Very important! Email or text: livefrommydrumroom@gmail.com. Thank you to everyone who's bought a shirt and or hoodie to help support this endeavor!Live From My Drum Room With John DeChristopher! is a series of conversations with legendary drummers and Music Industry icons, hosted by drummer and music industry veteran, John DeChristopher, drawing from his five decades in the Music Industry. Created in 2020, and ranked BEST Drum Podcast, "Live From My Drum Room With John DeChristopher!" gives the audience an insider's view that only John can offer. And no drummers are harmed on any shows! Please subscribe!https://linktr.ee/live_from_my_drum_roomwww.youtube.com/c/JohnDeChristopherLiveFromMyDrumRoom
In this jam-packed edition of Pick One, Dave and Coop go head-to-head on a variety of sports, entertainment, and pop culture dilemmas. Would you rather be a master of fantasy baseball or poker? Is flopping a bigger issue in college football or the NBA? The guys also debate legendary female rock stars, Grace Slick vs. Debbie Harry, and imagine Denzel Washington or Tom Hanks stepping into Nicolas Cage's most outrageous roles. Plus, reality talent shows vs. dating shows, parade participation, pet raccoons vs. snakes, and the ultimate question—could you survive 72 hours without your smartphone or music? Tune in for the laughs, hot takes, and impossible choices!
In this jam-packed edition of Pick One, Dave and Coop go head-to-head on a variety of sports, entertainment, and pop culture dilemmas. Would you rather be a master of fantasy baseball or poker? Is flopping a bigger issue in college football or the NBA? The guys also debate legendary female rock stars, Grace Slick vs. Debbie Harry, and imagine Denzel Washington or Tom Hanks stepping into Nicolas Cage's most outrageous roles. Plus, reality talent shows vs. dating shows, parade participation, pet raccoons vs. snakes, and the ultimate question—could you survive 72 hours without your smartphone or music? Tune in for the laughs, hot takes, and impossible choices!
Even though Grace Slick was not a fan of the song, here's why she did it anyway.
WBCQ/The Planet airdate - 2/22/25 Welcome to Fluxedo Junction. Each episode we bring you the best music of all genres from throughout the World, and this week we'll be speaking with “The Most Famous Musician You've Never Heard of”, multi-instrumentalist Andy Cahan. Andy has been a fixture in the music industry since the 1960's, having crossed paths with some of the most famous and influential musicians in the world, including Jimmy Webb, Frank Zappa, Chuck Berry, Kinky Friedman, Lou Reed, and Eric Carmen, among many others. His latest book is titled “The Most Famous Musician You've Never Heard Of: A Rock and Roll Scrapbook starring Hendrix, Ringo, Nilsson, The Turtles, Little Richard, Dr. John, Seals & Crofts, Billy Bob Thornton, Ray Bolger, Grace Slick, Me and More!".
S4-Ep. 4 Jefferson Airplane-Surrealistic Pillow (RCA) Released Feb 1, 1967, and Recorded between October 31-Nov 22, 1966 Surrealistic Pillow (1967) is a defining album of the 1960s psychedelic rock era, marking the debut of Grace Slick as Jefferson Airplane's lead vocalist. The album blends folk, rock, and experimental sounds, with standout tracks like “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit,” which became anthems of the counterculture. With contributions from multiple band members, the album offers diverse vocals and songwriting styles, including Grace Slick's powerful delivery, Marty Balin's emotive ballads, and Paul Kantner's folk-rock influences. The album's success helped propel the band into mainstream recognition, while its psychedelic experimentation captured the spirit of the San Francisco scene. Produced with help from Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia, Surrealistic Pillow is considered a genre masterpiece, with its influence still felt today. The cover art further symbolized the album's surreal, rebellious vibe, marking a cultural milestone in rock history. Signature Tracks "Somebody to Love," "Today," "White Rabbit" Playlist YouTube Playlist, Spotify Playlist Full Album Full Album on YouTube Full Album on Spotify
Mickey Thomas is the former lead singer of Jefferson Starshipbuilt this city on Rock n Roll...Mickey has a new holiday album called, 'A Classic Christmas'Mickey talked:-Christmas album-Danny Kaye from 'White Christmas'-Find your way back, Jane, Rock Music - all his voice-Pete's walk up song at the gym is Mickey's song-Talks #1 hit 'We Built This City, "I never considered 'We Built This City' as a single...a great A & R guy from RCA Records ... picked that as the first single and obviously, he knew what he was doing"-The Beatles were his biggest influence To subscribe to The Pete McMurray Show Podcast just click here
The year is 1967. A lot of popular musicians are moving towards psychedelia. It's kind of a buttoned up movement still--on the surface people still look business casual, even if their hair is getting long. The San Francisco hippie scene hasn't yet merged with the British invasion. But all that would change during the "Summer of Love", when they all came together and made a promise to "turn on, tune in, and drop out." Jefferson Airplane took center stage as the group most representative of that ethos, with their recent addition of model-turned-singer, Grace Slick on vocals. She brought with her a few songs from her previous group, The Great Society that would come to define the hippie movement as a whole; the pop hit "Somebody to Love" and the moody psychedelic anthem "White Rabbit". The concept behind Surrealistic Pillow...? Acid... It's a lot of acid. Links: "White Rabbit" Music Video:https://youtu.be/WANNqr-vcx0?si=-Kwhq_O-c7Onj2iv Full Livestream of the episode: https://youtube.com/live/uWHVQC3hw3M?feature=share OUR DISCORD: https://discord.gg/2stA2P7pTC https://www.youtube.com/flyoverstatepark EVERYTHING ELSE: https://linktr.ee/FlyoverStatePark --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/albumconcepthour/support
National candy corn day. Entertainment from 1970. Time clock invented, Soviets detonate largest nuclear bomb ever, Bosphorous Bridge opened in Turkey. Todays birthdays - John Adams, Ruth Gordon, Grace Slick, Henry Winkler, Harry Hamlin, T. Graham Brown, Kevin Pollack, Gavin Rossdale. Steve Allen died.Intro - Pour some sugar on me - Def Leppard http://defleppard.com/Candy corn song - JensensI'll be there - Jackson 5Run woman run - Tammy WynetteBirthdays - In da club - 50 Cent http://50cent.com/I want to be a cowboys sweetheart - Patsy MontanaSomebody to love - Jefferson AirplaneI aint got nothing - The TemptationsHell and High water - T. Graham BrownComedown - BushExit - In my dreams - Dokken http://dokken.net/Follow Jeff Stampka on facebook and cooolmedia.com
On the October 14 edition of the Music History Today podcast, Pearl Jam breaks a record, JoJo finally gets to release a record, & Pulp Fiction breathes life into older music. Also, happy birthday to Usher. For more music history, subscribe to my Spotify Channel or subscribe to the audio version of my music history podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts from ALL MUSIC HISTORY TODAY PODCAST NETWORK LINKS - https://allmylinks.com/musichistorytoday On this date: * In 1906, legendary entertainer and civil rights activist Paul Robeson was not allowed to play for the Rutgers University football team because their opponents that day, Washington and Lee University, refused to play against a team that had a black person on it. * In 1939, music company BMI started operations. * In 1954, the musical movie White Christmas premiered. * In 1964, Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones married his wife Shirley Shepherd. * In 1966, Grace Slick first appeared with Jefferson Airplane. * In 1968, the Beatles finished work on the White Album. * In 1971, John Lennon & Yoko Ono appeared on the Dick Cavett Show. * In 1994, the movie Pulp Fiction premiered. From a musical standpoint, the movie helped revive interest in Dick Dale's music (he did the song Misirlou: the song with the crazy surf guitar & the screaming in the beginning of it). It also sparked interest in the early Kool & the Gang funk classic Jungle Boogie & Link Wray's classic Rumble. * In 2000, Pearl Jam broke a record on Billboard's albums chart when 5 of their released live albums from their European tour hit the chart in the same week. * In 2006, Rascal Flatts' opening act Eric Church was kicked off the tour after he repeatedly played over his allotted opening slot time. Apparently, that was the last straw with Rascal Flatts. Eric's replacement was a hotshot country newcomer at the time: Taylor Swift. * In 2006, singer Melina Leon married her husband Ruy Fernando Delgado. * In 2014, singer Kesha started her lawsuit against producer Dr. Luke in order to be released from her contract with him. * In 2017, country singer Kacey Musgraves married singer-songwriter Ruston Kelly. * In 2018, Steppenwolf performed in Baxter Springs, Kansas, which was their final show. * In 2023, Madonna started her Celebration tour, after having to delay it to deal with a bacterial infection which sent her to the hospital. In the world of classical music: * In 1924, the opera Die Gluckliche Hand premiered. * In 1956, the overture Robert Browning by Charles Ives premiered. In the world of theater: * In 1930, the Gershwin musical Girl Crazy premiered on Broadway & made stars out of Ginger Rogers & especially Ethel Merman. * In 1961, the Frank Loesser musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying premiered on Broadway. In award ceremonies that were held on this date: * In 1970, Merle Haggard won at the Country Music Association awards. * In 1974, Charlie Rich won at the Country Music Association awards. * In 1985, Ricky Skaggs won at the Country Music Association awards. In 2009, opera superstar Placido Domingo received the first Birgit Nilsson million dollar prize. In 2020, Post Malone & Billie Eilish were the big winners at the Billboard Music Awards. In 2022, Jefferson Airplane received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/musichistorytodaypodcast/support
¡bienvenidos! A little bit of everything, a little bit of nothing. Whakarongo! Mohamad Karzo - C'est La Vie Marlena Shaw - Where Can I go?, California Soul, I'm Satisfied Nathan Haines - Squire for Hire, RIGHT NOW featuring Marlena Shaw Willie West - Baby, Baby I Love You, After The Storm Grace Slick - Didn't Think So, Often As I May, Nature Boy Carlos Dafé - Cantar Com o Coraçā, Bem querer Kia ora The Tuning Fork !
Jorma Kaukonen Live on Game Changers With Vicki Abelson Let your fingers do the running to the play button. Please! One of the greatest, funnest, most illuminating conversations I've had the privilege to share, Jorma Kaukonen, iconic legend, musical hero, rock god, (I mean, come on!) exceeded all expectations and then some. From early days in Pakistan with one pop 45 to Ricky Nelson, and Buddy Holly, 15-year-old returning expat Jorma, took up guitar and soon was in his first band, The Triumphs, with bandmate, Jack Casady, still his bandmate and best friend today, 65+ years later. Beyond amazing. And the fact that they were rehearsing moments before Jorma and I went Live blows my mind. A testament to their ongoing greatness. We talked about Antioch, and not exactly being encouraged to return. Janis, and The Typewriter Tape, San Francisco, Monterey, Hendrix, Jerry, Marty, Paul, Grace, and Jorma's nickname that became the Jefferson Airplane - his invite to Jack Casady. Psychedelia, Surrealistic Pillow, the making of––in my top 5, and it was made in less than two weeks! Woodstock - getting in and getting out and Grace Slick's unforgettable - “Good Morning, People.” What was unforgettable for Jorma. Goosebumps for me. Hot Tuna, how and why it started and continues to flourish. Jorma and Jack! The recent end of Hot Tuna Electric - the why - simple - not totally undoable. The Book, Been So Long - chock full of golden nuggets like those shared here. Years of teaching and concerts culminating in The Fur Peace Ranch, now sold, but will be picking up in Jorma and Vanessa's new locale. To keep up with the indefatigable Mr. Kaukonen https://jormakaukonen.com The cherry on top of this chat that seemed to fly by in an instant was Jorma indulging this rabid Airplane/Surrealistic Pillow fan, playing his Embryonic Journey, with a fab Jack sidebar (see the Live comments) and then a gorgeous, Take Your Time, for his daughter. This is one for the books. I'll cherish it always. Because Jorma's so important to me it was important that I do right by him. So grateful it was so much fun. I'm gonna be smiling for a long time to come. Jorma Kaukonen Live on Game Changers With Vicki Abelson Wednesday, 9/18/24, 5 pm PT, 8 pm ET Streamed Live on my Facebook Replay here: https://bit.ly/3XowPt2
Country Music Hall of Famer Lacy J. Dalton The Queen of Country Music LACY'S BIO Lacy J. Dalton (born Jill Lynne Byrem on October 13, 1946 in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania), is an American country singer and songwriter with a career that has spanned many decades and touched the hearts of millions of music fans. In March 2017 Lacy J Dalton was inducted into the North American Country Music Association International Hall of Fame, and in 2022 she was awarded a Lifetime Career Achievement Award from the Josie Music Awards, the largest independent music awards show in the country. She's one of the most instantly recognizable voices in music – the woman People Magazine called “Country's Bonnie Raitt.” From the first time Lacy J Dalton caught the public's ear, that soulful delivery, full of texture and grit, has been a mainstay of Country Music. When you sit to listen to a Lacy J Dalton album, you find yourself pulled in by the very power and heart of this vocalist, because she's not merely performing a ten-song set, she's bringing each and every tune to life. It's as if they were all written especially for her. Prior to recording with Harbor Records in 1978 as Jill Croston, she like many before her, held many jobs to survive and support her family. As a truck stop waitress and singer, she would wait tables and then take the stage to sing a few songs. In June 1979, Lacy J Dalton was signed by Columbia Records and quickly rose to national prominence with Crazy Blue Eyes, which she wrote with her longest friend, Mary McFadden, and which raced to #7 on the Billboard Country Charts. Her hard work and dedication paid off in 1979 when she was awarded the Academy of Country Music's Top New Female Vocalist of the Year. Lacy's success was powered not just by the artist's recordings, but by a stage show that truly electrified audiences. She quickly became one of the few women who could successfully open a show for the likes of Hank Williams, Jr., Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard or Charlie Daniels. Not only could she do it, but she left audiences across the country hollering for more. Her signature song 16th Avenue, became the Anthem for Nashville songwriters. Her other hit records are legendary million-airplay cuts and include Crazy Blue Eyes, Takin' It Easy, Everybody Makes Mistakes, Hillbilly Girl with the Blues, Hard Times, and the worldwide hit Black Coffee. In addition to her Top New Female Vocalist award, she also brought home numerous Grammy nominations and 3 prestigious, back to back (1979, 1980, 1981) Bay Area Music Awards for Best Country-Folk Recordings. Lacy appeared on those shows with the likes of Neil Young, The Grateful Dead, Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane. Lacy's collaboration with Willie Nelson on his platinum Half Nelson CD was a high spot for her. Lacy is the only woman featured on that recording (which included singing legends Ray Charles, Neil Diamond, Merle Haggard, Julio Iglesias, George Jones, Leon Russell, Carlos Santana, Mel Tillis, Hank Williams Sr., and Neil Young), and was awarded a Platinum Record for it. She also received a Gold Record from Hank Williams Jr. in 1985 for her support performances throughout his Five-0 Tour, where she opened for him at a time when it was unusual for a woman to do so. Her career includes accomplishments in music, film and radio. In music, they range from her instantly recognizable charted hit songs to her notable duets recorded with George Jones, Willie Nelson, Bobby Bare, Glen Campbell, Eddie Rabbit, David Allen Coe and many others. Her film debut was in the motion picture Take This Job And Shove It, and her acting has also included live stage and theater performances. Until recently, Lacy J Dalton also hosted a weekly radio show called Mustang Matters. Podcasts of past shows are available to listeners on the internet at www.americamatters.us Following a successful career in country music, Lacy decided to draw on all her musical experiences including country, rock and folk, and cross over into the Americana genre. This blend of musical styles allows her to express herself in a way that demonstrates all the facets of who she is as a singer/songwriter. She became an independent artist and formed her own label called Song Dog Records. Under this label, she has released three albums to date. The first was Wild Horse Crossing in 1999, followed by the Last Wild Place Anthology which went #1 on the World Independent Chart, and a year later went #1 on the American Western Music Chart. Then Allison Eastwood, Clint Eastwood's daughter, used the hit song Slip Away from the Anthology CD on the sound track of her independent film, Don't Tell. In 2010 Lacy also released a tribute to Hank Williams Sr. entitled Here's To Hank. Today, Lacy continues to record new music and perform live shows whenever possible. She tours mainly west of the Mississippi and loves small boutique venues and old theaters with great sound quality and warm, receptive audiences she can really connect with. She recently recorded some electrifying new music for an EP that was released in January 2019. When hearing the signature song Scarecrow, her good friend Reverend Barbara Ann Fletcher remarked “that song makes you a whole new you, and it makes me a whole new me.” And that's exactly the response Lacy was hoping for. In addition to her musical career, Lacy has been involved in various service projects through several charitable organizations – namely, the Let ‘em Run Foundation, William James Associates Arts in Corrections, and Rotary International. In 1999, Lacy co-founded the Let ‘em Run Foundation which received its 501(c)3 designation from the IRS in 2004. The Let 'em Run Foundation is dedicated to rescuing, rehabilitating and re-homing America's wild horses and burros who have no voice. Let ‘em Run's mission is to serve as an educational, fund-raising and public relations entity, through its own efforts and in assisting similar non-profit organizations, to promote the appropriate and compassionate management of the wild horse, estray horse, and mustang population of the U.S. and other species of endangered or mistreated animals. From 2015 through November 2018, Lacy and her partner, Dale Poune, worked with the William James Arts in Corrections program at High Desert State Prison in Susanville, California. Their work there has been focused on teaching basic song writing skills and techniques, music theory and guitar playing to level 4 inmates. Through their classes, a select group of inmates got the opportunity to learn the basic principles of guitar playing and song writing which they then used to develop songs and lyrics, both individually and as a group. The class culminated with the inmates recording those musical compositions and giving a live performance to an audience of prison and non-prison personnel. In addition, several inmates were able to go on to teach basic guitar to other inmates in the classic “each one teach one” teaching tradition. Finally, Lacy is an honorary member of the Rotary Club of Reno, and a Paul Harris Fellow. Lacy has written two songs for Rotary, which she then recorded on a CD to be used as a fundraising opportunity for the Reno club. Lacy also performed at the Rotary International Convention in New Orleans in 2011, and has been a key note speaker and headline performer at several club meetings and district conferences.
Send us a Text Message.Mickey Thomas is a powerhouse vocalist whose distinctive voice became the driving force behind the success of Starship, one of the most iconic rock bands of the 1980s. Born in Cairo, Georgia, Thomas first gained national recognition as the lead vocalist on the 1976 hit “Fooled Around and Fell in Love” with The Elvin Bishop Band. This breakthrough performance showcased his soulful, soaring voice, setting the stage for his future career.In 1979, Thomas joined Jefferson Starship as the lead singer, following the departure of Grace Slick and Marty Balin. His arrival marked a new era for the band, which had been a significant force in the 1970s rock scene. With Thomas at the helm, Jefferson Starship produced several hits, including "Jane," "No Way Out," "Find Your Way Back," "Stranger," and "Layin' It on the Line." His dynamic vocal range and powerful performances breathed new life into the band, helping them maintain their relevance during a time of significant transition in the music industry.In 1985, the band rebranded as Starship, marking a new chapter in its storied history. Under this new name, they achieved immense commercial success, with Thomas's voice leading the charge on a string of chart-topping hits. "We Built This City," "Sara," and "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" became anthems of the era, dominating the airwaves and solidifying Starship's place in rock history. These songs, characterized by their catchy hooks and polished production, became staples on MTV and VH1, further cementing Thomas's reputation as one of rock's most recognizable voices.Today, Mickey Thomas continues to tour with Starship, performing both the classic hits of Starship and Jefferson Starship, along with a few nods to Jefferson Airplane's legacy. His enduring talent and passion for music have kept Starship's legacy alive for new generations of fans.http://www.betterhelp.com/TheBarnThis episode is sponsored by www.betterhelp.com/TheBarn and brought to you as always by The Barn Media Group. YOUTUBE https://www.youtube.com/@TheBarnPodcastNetwork SPOTIFY https://open.spotify.com/show/09neXeCS8I0U8OZJroUGd4?si=2f9b8dfa5d2c4504 APPLE https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1625411141 I HEART RADIO https://www.iheart.com/podcast/97160034/ AMAZON https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/7aff7d00-c41b-4154-94cf-221a808e3595/the-barn
The walls are melting again. Free your mind and feed your head with another episode of THE STORY SONG PODCAST. Join your hosts on a strange journey down the rabbit hole as they conclude THE SUMMER OF SYMBOLISM with a review of the 1967 psychedelic-rock classic, “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane. Nothing's gonna stop us as we get knee-deep in the hoopla to discuss starships, great societies, and Grace Slick's husband's brother's sister-in-law. Don't you want a podcast to love? It's probably this episode of THE STORY SONG PODCAST. Don't believe us? Go ask Alice. “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane (from the album Surrealistic Pillow) is available on Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Tidal, Pandora, Spotify, or wherever you listen to music. Continue the conversation; follow THE STORY SONG PODCAST on social media. Follow us on Instagram (storysongpodcast), and Facebook (thestorysongpodcast), Threads (storysongpodcast), GoodPods, and Podchaser. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Send us a Text Message.Melissa Greene-Anderson grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Since high school she was a part of her family's music business; Gotham Distribution, Collectables Records, and the direct-to-consumer website Oldies.com. Melissa's father started in a record store in Times Square NYC. At a very young age, Jerry Greene bought the rights to The Capri's “There's A Moon Out Tonight” which was released in 1959 and didn't chart. He re-released it in 1961 and it went to #3 on the Billboard Charts. With that money, Jerry Greene moved to Philadelphia and opened up a chain of record stores called The Record Museum. As straight as they come, he knew the business and made a killing on selling paraphernalia in the Philadelphia area, which often led to visits from Grace Slick and Jerry Garcia. After spending thousands of dollars on one visit, Jerry Garcia got busted crossing a bridge from Philadelphia to New Jersey with his haul. Melissa was the Executive Vice President of Gotham Distribution and started selling to Tower Records. At one point, she even hired the singles buyer from the brand new Washington DC store to help run their singles business. Licensing songs from labels and making albums and eventually CDs in conjunction with Oldies radio stations helped launch the Collectables album and CD part of the business. Eventually, Melissa got the go-ahead to rack the Tower stores with vinyl singles as cassingles and CD singles were taking over. Remember those bright gold 45 sleeves that got shipped back to send new product? Melissa worked with each store on an individual basis to make sure the program worked. She talks about a humiliating experience with a Tower Manager who refused to deal with her on their rollout. But most of her memories are good ones. Join us for a wide-ranging conversation about music, family, Philadelphia restaurants, and Tower Records.
Rock & roll journalist, author, and photographer Michael Goldberg is back on the podcast. He's got a brand new book titled Jukebox: 1967-2023 Photographs.Michael is best known as a writer, but for over 50 years he's also been photographing musicians and the photos in Jukebox are drawn from the thousands he's taken over the years. Included are photos of the Sex Pistols, Devo, the Clash, Bruce Springsteen, Jim Morrison, Lou Reed, Janis Joplin, Muddy Waters, Patti Smith, the Who, Neil Young, Jerry Garcia, Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa, Grace Slick and Paul Kantner, Tom Waits, The Ramones, and many many more.Most of the photos in this book have never been seen before, including rare 1970 photos of Jerry Garcia in his Larkspur home months before recording began for the group's classic album, American Beauty. Some of the photographs were taken at the homes of the artists or in their hotel rooms. The Ramones photograph was shot from the doorway of Goldberg's room at the Tropicana in L.A. Michael is here to share some stories behind the photos in the book.Purchase a copy of Jukebox: 1967-2023 Photographs ---------- BookedOnRock.com The Booked On Rock YouTube Channel Follow The Booked On Rock with Eric Senich:FACEBOOKINSTAGRAMTIKTOKX Find Your Nearest Independent Bookstore Contact The Booked On Rock Podcast: thebookedonrockpodcast@gmail.com The Booked On Rock Music: “Whoosh” by Crowander / “Last Train North” & “No Mercy” by TrackTribe
Ubicado en el 3138 de Fillmore Street, en el barrio bohemio de San Francisco, The Matrix fue un pequeño club para apenas 100 personas, con mesitas bajas en las que podías tomarte un cóctel mientras escuchabas bandas en directo. Lo puso en funcionamiento Marty Balin, cantante y líder de Jefferson Airplane, en agosto de 1965 y rápidamente se convirtió en uno de los enclaves más importantes de la ciudad, para acabar siendo reconocido como el lugar desde el que emergió el sonido de San Francisco. El club contaba con una mesa de grabación de cuatro pistas con la que registraron algunos de los conciertos que pasaron por el local. Hoy escuchamos grabaciones en directo de The Great Society en 1966, la banda desde la que emergió la icónica cantante Grace Slick. Y también una actuación de Big Brother and the Holding Company en enero de 1967, con Janis Joplin a la voz antes de que grabaran su primer álbum.Playlist;THE GREAT SOCIETY “Sally go ‘round the roses”THE GREAT SOCIETY “Somebody to love”THE GREAT SOCIETY “Darkly smiling”THE GREAT SOCIETY “Nature boy”THE GREAT SOCIETY “Often as I may”THE GREAT SOCIETY “Father Bruce”THE GREAT SOCIETY “White rabbit”BIG BROTHER and THE HOLDING COMPANY “Bye bye baby”BIG BROTHER and THE HOLDING COMPANY “Turtle blues”BIG BROTHER and THE HOLDING COMPANY “Hi heel sneakers”BIG BROTHER and THE HOLDING COMPANY “It’s a deal”BIG BROTHER and THE HOLDING COMPANY “Caterpillar”Escuchar audio
George Beckerman joined me to talk about early TV, his first writing job, 1983's NBC Yummy Awards; Paul Winchell and Pinky Lee; growing up in Forest Hills; going to high school with Jerry Springer; going into the textile business; getting his suits on the cover of GQ; selling his business and moving to LA; writing a screenplay "Beverly Hills Shrink" for Fred Weintraub; writing a special "Blondes vs. Brunettes" directed by Steve Binder; seeing Joan Collins sans makeup and working with Don Novello; pitching 30 episode ideas to the producers of Alice; getting a job on TBS sitcom Safe at Home with pissed off cast; hiring Dan O'Shannon and Tom Anderson; an arrest during rehearsal; pitching for Head of the Class and a movie for Gene Wilder; first head of the Class "The Russians are Coming"; the problems and greatness of multi-cam comedies; writing "Child of the 60's" and meeting Lori Petty; writing "Parent's Night" and having 23 characters to write; writing Trouble in Perfectville for Robin Givens and having it changed; working with Tannis Vallely and her father on two different shows; Howard Hesseman; becoming friends with Robin Givens and her mother and needing to get Mike Tyson off the set; Leslie Bega and Khrystyne Haje; creating and leaving "Molloy"; becoming friends with Mayim Bialik; Jennifer Aniston; fighting with Bill Bixby on the set of "Man of the People"; Monty has great cast including Henry Winkler, David Schwimmer, and China Kantner - daughter of Grace Slick and Paul Kantner, but was short lived; The Jackie Thomas show was the most fun he had; trying to turn Jackie Thomas into a modern day Dick Van Dyke; playing tennis with Norm MacDonald; working with Chris Farley; meeting his wife Geraldine Leder writing for "Secret Service Guy" a show that never aired; having his film script optioned by Ben Stiller and not getting a budget; writing a Lifetime movie for Kirstie Alley; a Hallmark time travel movie; writing for children's television; making a short film "Autocowrecked"; writing a song with a member of Foster the People; the current state of TV as a business; Adam I. Lapidus and the Simpsons
You can either credit or blame host Abby's middle school guitar teacher for her enduring fascination with today's Doll. It's the Acid Queen herself, Grace Slick! Bold, brazen, and razor-sharp, she was a pioneer of 60s rock music and figurehead of the Summer of Love. Learn about Grace's life and career on episode 2 of the Dolls Podcast!Follow us on Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/thedollspod/
Broken Record with Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell, Bruce Headlam and Justin Richmond
Ann Wilson is the powerhouse lead singer of the band Heart, whose celebrated classic debut album, Dreamboat Annie, came out nearly 50 years ago. Last week we featured an interview with her sister and longtime bandmate Nancy Wilson, so make sure to check that out if you haven't already. Today we'll hear from Ann, who's responsible for belting out and co-writing some of Heart's most iconic early hits, like “Magic Man,” “Barracuda,” and “Crazy On You.” Four years older than Nancy, Ann was the first Wilson sister to join Heart, a band that started out as a cabaret cover band. Despite undergoing multiple lineup changes since the '70s, Heart has released top 10 albums in nearly every decade in the last 50 years, and sold over 20 million albums worldwide. Outside of Heart, Ann has also released solo material, including an album in 2023 with her band, Tripsitter. On today's episode Leah Rose talks to Ann Wilson about Heart's current world tour, and the Elton John album she sings before every show to warm up her voice. Ann also explains how she would strategically place guitars around her house when having parties at her Seattle home in the '90s to encourage jam sessions with guests like Lane Staley and Chris Cornell. And she remembers singing on stage with Grace Slick and Stevie Nicks, who Ann says really is a good witch. You can hear a playlist of some of our favorite Heart songs HERE.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Episode 250 is here! Join Joe and Kari for Part One of the milestone episode. They welcome friend of the podcast Michael to the show for a supersized Just a Bit Outside segment, for a look at those songs that hit the Hot 100, but didn't make it to the famed Top 40. You'll hear about songs from Shooting Star, Guy, Grace Slick and the B-52s, among others. Episode 250 is so big, it had to be split into 2 episodes! Stay tuned for the finale next week with some big surprises!
We are ending our special series on our favourite soundtrack music with this classic track from 1987's Mannequin. Now, this Andrew McCarthy vehicle was certainly no award winner, but it remains surprisingly watchable 37 years later. Grace Slick may have written off "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now," but we won't turn our backs on this positive anthem to the enduring power of love! Official Video Mixtape You can find us on Instagram, Facebook, and our website. You can email us at BandFGuiltFree@gmail.com, too. Feel free to rate and review us wherever you listen! Here is our Spotify playlist featuring every song we've featured. Our theme music is by the incredibly talented Ian McGlynn.
From September 17, 2017: Jorma Kaukonen, founding member of Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna, talked about his career and his memoir Been So Long.ABOUT JORMA KAUKONENAs a founding member of two legendary bands, Jefferson Airplane and the still-touring Hot Tuna, Jorma Kaukonen has achieved incredible success. A member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and a Grammy recipient, Kaukonen has played with many well-known and historic musicians, including his contemporaries Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan. For the first time, he is sharing his story in BEEN SO LONG: My Life and Music. The book will also include an exclusive five track companion album. The tracks include live recordings of "Been So Long," "Song for the High Mountain," "Broken Highway," "River of Time," and "In My Dreams."With a foreword by Grace Slick and an afterword by bandmate Jack Casady, BEEN SO LONG is an intimate portrait of an artist who was at the forefront of Psychedelic Rock and has since become one of the most highly respected interpreters of American roots music, blues, and Americana. Kaukonen's memoir reveals the stories behind the songs, lessons from a life in the music industry, and his reflections on a remarkable decades-long career.BEEN SO LONG charts not only Jorma's association with the bands that made him famous but goes into never-before-told details about his addiction and recovery, his troubled first marriage and still-thriving second, the creation of the Fur Peace Ranch Guitar Camp, which he operates with his wife, Vanessa, and more. Interspersed with diary entries, personal correspondence, and song lyrics, this memoir is as unforgettable and inspiring as Jorma's music itself.
In this 2 part special of Comes A Time, photographer Rosie McGee shares stories behind her iconic photos of the Grateful Dead and San Francisco music scene in the 1960s. She started taking photos at age 12 and lived with the Dead when they moved to LA in 1966, capturing intimate behind-the-scenes moments. Her photos show the band as fresh-faced kids, like a baby-faced Bob Weir looking similar to Mike's daughter. She has great photos of Pigpen, describing him as very sweet and quiet offstage. Some of Rosie's favorite photos include young Jerry Garcia backstage with a Les Paul goldtop and lamb chops, a whimsical Grace Slick looking elf-like in Central Park, Jorma Kaukonen of Jefferson Airplane who she knew before the Dead, and a rare candid of Jerry with Owsley "Bear" Stanley which she slyly shot hiding behind a palm frond since he hated being photographed. The photos provide a fascinating look into the vibrant 1960s San Francisco music scene. Rosie reminisces about the early days and characters like Kesey, the Airplane, and more. Her photos capture intimate unguarded moments that show the humanity and bonds between these legendary figures when they were just young creative souls. Stay tuned for Part 2 with more stories behind Rosie's classic archives. Comes A Time Podcast and content posted by Comes A Time is presented solely for general informational, educational, and entertainment purposes. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from this podcast is at the user's own risk. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional, diagnosis, or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice for any medical or mental health condition they may have and should seek the assistance of their healthcare professionals for any such conditions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this 2 part special of Comes A Time, photographer Rosie McGee shares stories behind her iconic photos of the Grateful Dead and San Francisco music scene in the 1960s. She started taking photos at age 12 and lived with the Dead when they moved to LA in 1966, capturing intimate behind-the-scenes moments. Her photos show the band as fresh-faced kids, like a baby-faced Bob Weir looking similar to Mike's daughter. She has great photos of Pigpen, describing him as very sweet and quiet offstage. Some of Rosie's favorite photos include young Jerry Garcia backstage with a Les Paul goldtop and lamb chops, a whimsical Grace Slick looking elf-like in Central Park, Jorma Kaukonen of Jefferson Airplane who she knew before the Dead, and a rare candid of Jerry with Owsley "Bear" Stanley which she slyly shot hiding behind a palm frond since he hated being photographed. The photos provide a fascinating look into the vibrant 1960s San Francisco music scene. Rosie reminisces about the early days and characters like Kesey, the Airplane, and more. Her photos capture intimate unguarded moments that show the humanity and bonds between these legendary figures when they were just young creative souls. Stay tuned for Part 2 with more stories behind Rosie's classic archives. Comes A Time Podcast and content posted by Comes A Time is presented solely for general informational, educational, and entertainment purposes. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from this podcast is at the user's own risk. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional, diagnosis, or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice for any medical or mental health condition they may have and should seek the assistance of their healthcare professionals for any such conditions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Flavien Le Bailly La guitare à manche cylindrique rotatif Covers : Steve'n'Seagulls : Antisocial Daughter : Get Lucky JP Cooper : Let it be The Moon Theme from Duck Tales Anissa Baroudi : Inas inas Le Dan Bau à triple manche de Nicolas Bras Sons zarbi : La basse en Lego Thunderstruck (Tubulum cover) Best saxophonist Max Gaertner : Bluesen The Collins Kids : Shortnin' bread rock Hoy hoy ! Wild Cat Great balls of fire Saint Louis Woman Collins Kids in San Francisco 1993 The adventures of Ozzie & Hariett Laurie Collins & Ricky Nelson : Just because Two Mad Men and a string quartet Trucs en vrac : Grace Slick (isolated voice) : Somebody to love Daft Punk vs Red Hot Chili Pepper : Lose yourself to Calfornication Thye Byrds vs The Beatles : Nowhere to turn Parton, Harris & Ronstadt : Burry me beneath the willow La +BCdM : Moriarty : Jimmy par L.E.J. - Octogone - Two minutes before midnight - Joachim Pastor & Romain Dalman - La cage d'air - Moriarty (live acoustique) La Playlist de la +BCdM : sur le Tube à Walter sur Spotify (merci John Cytron) sur Deezer (merci MaO de Paris) sur Amazon Music (merci Hellxions) et sur Apple Music (merci Yawourt) Vote pour la Plus Belle Chanson du Monde Le son mystère (28'37) : Sérénade de pies australiennes Avec : Fanny Bibou & son orchestre Aude MaO Merci à : Michel Buffa Pat Hogun Didier RandallFlagg Fanny Doc Retro LYC podcast Pop goes the WZA Yschwen Laurent Doucet Podcasts & liens cités : Passion Médiévistes & co Je déteste les podcasts Flavien Le Bailly Walter sur Mastodon Walter sur BlueSky Le générique de fin est signé Cousbou
For those who haven't heard the announcement I just posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a multi-episode look at the Byrds in 1966-69 and the birth of country rock. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode on "My World Fell Down" by Sagittarius. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud at this time as there are too many Byrds songs in this chunk, but I will try to put together a multi-part Mixcloud when all the episodes for this song are up. My main source for the Byrds is Timeless Flight Revisited by Johnny Rogan, I also used Chris Hillman's autobiography, the 331/3 books on The Notorious Byrd Brothers and The Gilded Palace of Sin, For future parts of this multi-episode story I used Barney Hoskyns' Hotel California and John Einarson's Desperadoes as general background on Californian country-rock, Calling Me Hone, Gram Parsons and the Roots of Country Rock by Bob Kealing for information on Parsons, and Requiem For The Timeless Vol 2 by Johnny Rogan for information about the post-Byrds careers of many members. Information on Gary Usher comes from The California Sound by Stephen McParland. And this three-CD set is a reasonable way of getting most of the Byrds' important recordings. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript When we left the Byrds at the end of the episode on "Eight Miles High", they had just released that single, which combined folk-rock with their new influences from John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar, and which was a group composition but mostly written by the group's lead singer, Gene Clark. And also, as we mentioned right at the end of the episode, Clark had left the group. There had been many, many factors leading to Clark's departure. Clark was writing *far* more material than the other band members, of whom only Roger McGuinn had been a writer when the group started, and as a result was making far more money than them, especially with songs like "She Don't Care About Time", which had been the B-side to their number one single "Turn! Turn! Turn!" [Excerpt: The Byrds, "She Don't Care About Time"] Clark's extra income was making the rest of the group jealous, and they also didn't think his songs were particularly good, though many of his songs on the early Byrds albums are now considered classics. Jim Dickson, the group's co-manager, said "Gene would write fifteen to twenty songs a week and you had to find a good one whenever it came along because there were lots of them that you couldn't make head or tail of. They didn't mean anything. We all knew that. Gene would write a good one at a rate of just about one per girlfriend." Chris Hillman meanwhile later said more simply "Gene didn't really add that much." That is, frankly, hard to square with the facts. There are ten original songs on the group's first two albums, plus one original non-album B-side. Of those eleven songs, Clark wrote seven on his own and co-wrote two with McGuinn. But as the other band members were starting to realise that they had the possibility of extra royalties -- and at least to some extent were starting to get artistic ambitions as far as writing goes -- they were starting to disparage Clark's work as a result, calling it immature. Clark had, of course, been the principal writer for "Eight Miles High", the group's most experimental record to date: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Eight Miles High"] But there he'd shared co-writing credit with David Crosby and Roger McGuinn, in part because that was the only way he could be sure they would agree to release it as a single. There were also internal rivalries within the band unrelated to songwriting -- as we've touched on, Crosby had already essentially bullied Clark off the guitar and into just playing tambourine (and McGuinn would be dismissive even of Clark's tambourine abilities). Crosby's inability to get on with any other member of any band he was in would later become legendary, but at this point Clark was the major victim of his bullying. According to Dickson "David understood when Gene left that ninety-five percent of why Gene left could be brought back to him." The other five percent, though, came from Clark's fear of flying. Clark had apparently witnessed a plane crash in his youth and been traumatised by it, and he had a general terror of flying and planes -- something McGuinn would mock him for a little, as McGuinn was an aviation buff. Eventually, Clark had a near-breakdown boarding a plane from California to New York for a promotional appearance with Murray the K, and ended up getting off the plane. McGuinn and Michael Clarke almost did the same, but in the end they decided to stay on, and the other four Byrds did the press conference without Gene. When asked where Gene was, they said he'd "broken a wing". He was also increasingly having mental health and substance abuse problems, which were exacerbated by his fear, and in the end he decided he just couldn't be a Byrd any more. Oddly, of all the band members, it was David Crosby who was most concerned about Clark's departure, and who did the most to try to persuade him to stay, but he still didn't do much, and the group decided to carry on as a four-piece and not even make a proper announcement of Clark's departure -- they just started putting out photos with four people instead of five. The main change as far as the group were concerned was that Hillman was now covering Clark's old vocal parts, and so Crosby moved to Clark's old centre mic while Hillman moved from his position at the back of the stage with Michael Clarke to take over Crosby's mic. The group now had three singer-instrumentalists in front, two of whom, Crosby and McGuinn, now thought of themselves as songwriters. So despite the loss of their singer/songwriter/frontman, they moved on to their new single, the guaranteed hit follow-up to "Eight Miles High": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "5D (Fifth Dimension)"] "5D" was written by McGuinn, inspired by a book of cartoons called 1-2-3-4 More More More More by Don Landis, which I haven't been able to track down a copy of, but which seems to have been an attempt to explain the mathematical concept of higher dimensions in cartoon form. McGuinn was inspired by this and by Einstein's theory of relativity -- or at least by his understanding of relativity, which does not seem to have been the most informed take on the topic. McGuinn has said in the past that the single should really have come with a copy of Landis' booklet, so people could understand it. Sadly, without the benefit of the booklet we only have the lyrics plus McGuinn's interviews to go on to try to figure out what he means. As far as I'm able to understand, McGuinn believed -- completely erroneously -- that Einstein had proved that along with the four dimensions of spacetime there is also a fifth dimension which McGuinn refers to as a "mesh", and that "the reason for the speed of light being what it is is because of that mesh." McGuinn then went on to identify this mesh with his own conception of God, influenced by his belief in Subud, and with a Bergsonian idea of a life force. He would talk about how most people are stuck in a materialist scientific paradigm which only admits to the existence of three dimensions, and how there are people out there advocating for a five-dimensional view of the world. To go along with this mystic view of the universe, McGuinn wanted some music inspired by the greatest composer of sacred music, and he asked Van Dyke Parks, who was brought in to add keyboards on the session, to play something influenced by Bach -- and Parks obliged, having been thinking along the same lines himself: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "5D (Fifth Dimension)"] Unfortunately for the group, McGuinn's lyrical intention wasn't clear enough and the song was assumed to be about drugs, and was banned by many radio stations. That plus the track's basically uncommercial nature meant that it reached no higher than number forty-four in the charts. Jim Dickson, the group's co-manager, pointed to a simpler factor in the record's failure, saying that if the organ outro to the track had instead been the intro, to set a mood for the track rather than starting with a cold vocal open, it would have had more success. The single was followed by an album, called Fifth Dimension, which was not particularly successful. Of the album's eleven songs, two were traditional folk songs, one was an instrumental -- a jam called "Captain Soul" which was a version of Lee Dorsey's "Get Out My Life Woman" credited to the four remaining Byrds, though Gene Clark is very audible on it playing harmonica -- and one more was a jam whose only lyrics were "gonna ride a Lear jet, baby", repeated over and over. There was also "Eight Miles High" and the group's inept and slightly-too-late take on "Hey Joe". It also included a third single, a country track titled "Mr. Spaceman": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mr. Spaceman"] McGuinn and, particularly, Hillman, had some country music background, and both were starting to think about incorporating country sounds into the group's style, as after Clark's departure from the group they were moving away from the style that had characterised their first two albums. But the interest in "Mr. Spaceman" was less about the musical style than about the lyrics. McGuinn had written the song in the hopes of contacting extraterrestrial life -- sending them a message in his lyrics so that any aliens listening to Earth radio would come and visit, though he was later disappointed to realise that the inverse-square law means that the signals would be too faint to make out after a relatively short distance: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mr. Spaceman"] "Mr. Spaceman" did better on the charts than its predecessor, scraping the lower reaches of the top forty, but it hardly set the world alight, and neither did the album -- a typical review was the one by Jon Landau, which said in part "This album then cannot be considered up to the standards set by the Byrds' first two and basically demonstrates that they should be thinking in terms of replacing Gene Clark, instead of just carrying on without him." Fifth Dimension would be the only album that Allen Stanton would produce for the Byrds, and his replacement had actually just produced an album that was a Byrds record by any other name: [Excerpt: Gene Clark, "So You Say You've Lost Your Baby"] We've looked at Gary Usher before, but not for some time, and not in much detail. Usher was one of several people who were involved in the scene loosely centred on the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean, though he never had much time for Jan Berry and he had got his own start in the music business slightly before the Beach Boys. As a songwriter, his first big successes had come with his collaborations with Brian Wilson -- he had co-written "409" for the Beach Boys, and had also collaborated with Wilson on some of his earliest more introspective songs, like "The Lonely Sea" and "In My Room", for which Usher had written the lyrics: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "In My Room"] Usher had built a career as a producer and writer for hire, often in collaboration with Roger Christian, who also wrote with Brian Wilson and Jan Berry. Usher, usually with Christian, and very occasionally Wilson wrote the songs for several of American International Pictures' Beach Party films: [Excerpt: Donna Loren, "Muscle Bustle"] And Usher and Christian had also had bit parts in some of the films, like Bikini Beach, and Usher had produced records for Annette Funicello, the star of the films, often with the Honeys (a group consisting of Brian Wilson's future wife Marilyn plus her sister and cousin) on backing vocals. He had also produced records for the Surfaris, as well as a whole host of studio-only groups like the Four Speeds, the Super Stocks, and Mr. Gasser and the Weirdoes, most of whom were Usher and the same small group of vocalist friends along with various selections of Wrecking Crew musicians making quick themed albums. One of these studio groups, the Hondells, went on to be a real group of sorts, after Usher and the Beach Boys worked together on a film, The Girls on the Beach. Usher liked a song that Wilson and Mike Love had written for the Beach Boys to perform in the film, "Little Honda", and after discovering that the Beach Boys weren't going to release their version as a single, he put together a group to record a soundalike version: [Excerpt: The Hondells, "Little Honda"] "Little Honda" made the top ten, and Usher produced two albums for the Hondells, who had one other minor hit with a cover version of the Lovin' Spoonful's "Younger Girl". Oddly, Usher's friend Terry Melcher, who would shortly produce the Byrds' first few hits, had also latched on to "Little Honda", and produced his own version of the track, sung by Pat Boone of all people, with future Beach Boy Bruce Johnston on backing vocals: [Excerpt: Pat Boone, "Little Honda"] But when Usher had got his version out first, Boone's was relegated to a B-side. When the Byrds had hit, and folk-rock had started to take over from surf rock, Usher had gone with the flow and produced records like the Surfaris' album It Ain't Me Babe, with Usher and his usual gang of backing vocalists augmenting the Surfaris as they covered hits by Dylan, the Turtles, the Beach Boys and the Byrds: [Excerpt: The Surfaris, "All I Really Want to Do"] Usher was also responsible for the Surfaris being the first group to release a version of "Hey Joe" on a major label, as we heard in the episode on that song: [Excerpt: The Surfaris, "Hey Joe"] After moving between Capitol, Mercury, and Decca Records, Usher had left Decca after a round of corporate restructuring and been recommended for a job at Columbia by his friend Melcher, who at that point was producing Paul Revere and the Raiders and the Rip Chords and had just finished his time as the Byrds' producer. Usher's first work at Columbia was actually to prepare new stereo mixes of some Byrds tracks that had up to that point only been issued in mono, but his first interaction with the Byrds themselves came via Gene Clark: [Excerpt: Gene Clark, "So You Say You've Lost Your Baby"] On leaving the Byrds, Clark had briefly tried to make a success of himself as a songwriter-for-hire in much the same mould as Usher, attempting to write and produce a single for two Byrds fans using the group name The Cookie Fairies, while spending much of his time romancing Michelle Phillips, as we talked about in the episode on "San Francisco". When the Cookie Fairies single didn't get picked up by a label, Clark had put together a group with Bill Rinehart from the Leaves, Chip Douglas of the Modern Folk Quartet, and Joel Larson of the Grass Roots. Just called Gene Clark & The Group, they'd played around the clubs in LA and cut about half an album's worth of demos produced by Jim Dickson and Ed Tickner, the Byrds' management team, before Clark had fired first Douglas and then the rest of the group. Clark's association with Douglas did go on to benefit him though -- Douglas went on, as we've seen in other episodes, to produce hits for the Turtles and the Monkees, and he later remembered an old song by Clark and McGuinn that the Byrds had demoed but never released, "You Showed Me", and produced a top ten hit version of it for the Turtles: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "You Showed Me"] Clark had instead started working with two country singers, Vern and Rex Gosdin, who had previously been with Chris Hillman in the country band The Hillmen. When that band had split up, the Gosdin Brothers had started to perform together as a duo, and in 1967 they would have a major country hit with "Hangin' On": [Excerpt: The Gosdin Brothers, "Hangin' On"] At this point though, they were just Gene Clark's backing vocalists, on an album that had been started with producer Larry Marks, who left Columbia half way through the sessions, at which point Usher took over. The album, titled Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers, featured a mix of musicians from different backgrounds. There were Larson and Rinehart from Gene Clark and the Group, there were country musicians -- a guitarist named Clarence White and the banjo player Doug Dillard. Hillman and Michael Clarke, the Byrds' rhythm section, played on much of the album as a way of keeping a united front, Glen Campbell, Jerry Cole, Leon Russell and Jim Gordon of the Wrecking Crew contributed, and Van Dyke Parks played most of the keyboards. The lead-off single for Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers, "Echoes", is one of the tracks produced by Marks, but in truth the real producer of that track is Leon Russell, who wrote the orchestral arrangement that turned Clark's rough demo into a baroque pop masterpiece: [Excerpt: Gene Clark, "Echoes"] Despite Clark having quit the band, relations between him and the rest were still good enough that in September 1966 he temporarily rejoined the band after Crosby lost his voice, though he was gone again as soon as Crosby was well. But that didn't stop the next Byrds album, which Usher went on to produce straight after finishing work on Clark's record, coming out almost simultaneously with Clark's and, according to Clark, killing its commercial potential. Upon starting to work with the group, Usher quickly came to the conclusion that Chris Hillman was in many ways the most important member of the band. According to Usher "There was also quite a divisive element within the band at that stage which often prevented them working well together. Sometimes everything would go smoothly, but other times it was a hard road. McGuinn and Hillman were often more together on musical ideas. This left Crosby to fend for himself, which I might add he did very well." Usher also said "I quickly came to understand that Hillman was a good stabilising force within the Byrds (when he wanted to be). It was around the time that I began working with them that Chris also became more involved in the songwriting. I think part of that was the fact that he realised how much more money was involved if you actually wrote the songs yourself. And he was a good songwriter." The first single to be released from the new sessions was one that was largely Hillman's work. Hillman and Crosby had been invited by the great South African jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela to play on some demos for another South African jazzer, singer Letta Mbulu. Details are sparse, but one presumes this was for what became her 1967 album Letta Mbulu Sings, produced by David Axelrod: [Excerpt: Letta Mbulu, "Zola (MRA)"] According to Hillman, that session was an epiphany for him, and he went home and started writing his own songs for the first time. He took one of the riffs he came up with to McGuinn, who came up with a bridge inspired by a song by yet another South African musician, Miriam Makeba, who at the time was married to Masekela, and the two wrote a lyric inspired by what they saw as the cynical manipulation of the music industry in creating manufactured bands like the Monkees -- though they have both been very eager to say that they were criticising the industry, not the Monkees themselves, with whom they were friendly. As Hillman says in his autobiography, "Some people interpreted it as a jab at The Monkees. In reality, we had immense respect for all of them as singers and musicians. We weren't skewering the members of the Monkees, but we were taking a shot at the cynical nature of the entertainment business that will try to manufacture a group like The Monkees as a marketing strategy. For us, it was all about the music, and we were commenting on the pitfalls of the industry rather than on any of our fellow musicians." [Excerpt: The Byrds, "So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star?"] The track continued the experimentation with sound effects that they had started with the Lear jet song on the previous album. That had featured recordings of a Lear jet, and "So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star?" featured recordings of audience screams. Those screams were, according to most sources, recorded by Derek Taylor at a Byrds gig in Bournemouth in 1965, but given reports of the tepid response the group got on that tour, that doesn't seem to make sense. Other sources say they're recordings of a *Beatles* audience in Bournemouth in *1963*, the shows that had been shown in the first US broadcast of Beatles footage, and the author of a book on links between the Beatles and Bournemouth says on his blog "In the course of researching Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Beatles & Bournemouth I spoke to two people who saw The Byrds at the Gaumont that August and neither recalled any screaming at all, let alone the wall of noise that can be heard on So You Want To Be A Rock 'n' Roll Star." So it seems likely that screaming isn't for the Byrds, but of course Taylor had also worked for the Beatles. According to Usher "The crowd sound effects were from a live concert that Derek Taylor had taped with a little tape recorder in London. It was some outrageous crowd, something like 20,000 to 30,000 people. He brought the tape in, ran it off onto a big tape, re- EQ'd it, echoed it, cleaned it up and looped it." So my guess is that the audience screams in the Byrds song about the Monkees are for the Beatles, but we'll probably never know for sure: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star?"] The track also featured an appearance by Hugh Masekela, the jazz trumpeter whose invitation to take part in a session had inspired the song: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star?"] While Hillman was starting to lean more towards folk and country music -- he had always been the member of the band least interested in rock music -- and McGuinn was most interested in exploring electronic sounds, Crosby was still pushing the band more in the direction of the jazz experimentation they'd tried on "Eight Miles High", and one of the tracks they started working on soon after "So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star?" was inspired by another jazz trumpet great. Miles Davis had been partly responsible for getting the Byrds signed to Columbia, as we talked about in the episode on "Mr. Tambourine Man", and so the group wanted to pay him tribute, and they started working on a version of his classic instrumental "Milestones": [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "Milestones"] Sadly, while the group worked on their version for several days -- spurred on primarily by Crosby -- they eventually chose to drop the track, and it has never seen release or even been bootlegged, though there is a tiny clip of it that was used in a contemporaneous documentary, with a commentator talking over it: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Milestones (TV)"] It was apparently Crosby who decided to stop work on the track, just as working on it was also apparently his idea. Indeed, while the biggest change on the album that would become Younger Than Yesterday was that for the first time Chris Hillman was writing songs and taking lead vocals, Crosby was also writing more than before. Hillman wrote four of the songs on the album, plus his co-write with McGuinn on "So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star?", but Crosby also supplied two new solo compositions, plus a cowrite with McGuinn, and Crosby and McGuinn's "Why?", the B-side to "Eight Miles High", was also dug up and rerecorded for the album. Indeed, Gary Usher would later say "The album was probably 60% Crosby. McGuinn was not that involved, nor was Chris; at least as far as performing was concerned." McGuinn's only composition on the album other than the co-writes with Crosby and Hillman was another song about contacting aliens, "CTA-102", a song about a quasar which at the time some people were speculating might have been evidence of alien life. That song sounds to my ears like it's had some influence from Joe Meek's similar records, though I've never seen McGuinn mention Meek as an influence: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "CTA-102"] Crosby's growing dominance in the studio was starting to rankle with the other members. In particular two tracks were the cause of conflict. One was Crosby's song "Mind Gardens", an example of his increasing experimentation, a freeform song that ignores conventional song structure, and which he insisted on including on the album despite the rest of the group's objections: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mind Gardens"] The other was the track that directly followed "Mind Gardens" on the album. "My Back Pages" was a song from Dylan's album Another Side of Bob Dylan, a song many have seen as Dylan announcing his break with the folk-song and protest movements he'd been associated with up to that point, and his intention to move on in a new direction: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "My Back Pages"] Jim Dickson, the Byrds' co-manager, was no longer on speaking terms with the band and wasn't involved in their day-to-day recording as he had been, but he'd encountered McGuinn on the street and rolled down his car window and suggested that the group do the song. Crosby was aghast. They'd already recorded several songs from Another Side of Bob Dylan, and Fifth Dimension had been their first album not to include any Dylan covers. Doing a jangly cover of a Dylan song with a McGuinn lead vocal was something they'd moved on from, and he didn't want to go back to 1964 at the end of 1966. He was overruled, and the group recorded their version, a track that signified something very different for the Byrds than the original had for Dylan: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "My Back Pages"] It was released as the second single from the album, and made number thirty. It was the last Byrds single to make the top forty. While he was working with the Byrds, Usher continued his work in the pop field, though as chart pop moved on so did Usher, who was now making records in a psychedelic sunshine pop style with acts like the Peanut Butter Conspiracy: [Excerpt: The Peanut Butter Conspiracy, "It's a Happening Thing"] and he produced Chad and Jeremy's massive concept album Of Cabbages and Kings, which included a five-song "Progress Suite" illustrating history from the start of creation until the end of the world: [Excerpt: Chad and Jeremy, "Editorial"] But one of the oddest projects he was involved in was indirectly inspired by Roger McGuinn. According to Usher "McGuinn and I had a lot in common. Roger would always say that he was "out of his head," which he thought was good, because he felt you had to go out of your head before you could really find your head! That sums up McGuinn perfectly! He was also one of the first people to introduce me to metaphysics, and from that point on I started reading everything I could get my hands on. His viewpoints on metaphysics were interesting, and, at the time, useful. He was also into Marshall McLuhan; very much into the effects of electronics and the electronic transformation. He was into certain metaphysical concepts before I was, but I was able to turn him onto some abstract concepts as well" These metaphysical discussions led to Usher producing an album titled The Astrology Album, with discussions of the meaning of different star signs over musical backing: [Excerpt: Gary Usher, "Leo"] And with interviews with various of the artists he was working with talking about astrology. He apparently interviewed Art Garfunkel -- Usher was doing some uncredited production work on Simon and Garfunkel's Bookends album at the time -- but Garfunkel declined permission for the interview to be used. But he did get both Chad and Jeremy to talk, along with John Merrill of the Peanut Butter Conspiracy -- and David Crosby: [Excerpt: Gary Usher, "Leo"] One of the tracks from that album, "Libra", became the B-side of a single by a group of studio musicians Usher put together, with Glen Campbell on lead vocals and featuring Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys prominently on backing vocals. "My World Fell Down" was credited to Sagittarius, again a sign of Usher's current interest in astrology, and featured some experimental sound effects that are very similar to the things that McGuinn had been doing on recent Byrds albums: [Excerpt: Sagittarius, "My World Fell Down"] While Usher was continuing with his studio experimentation, the Byrds were back playing live -- and they were not going down well at all. They did a UK tour where they refused to play most of their old hits and went down as poorly as on their previous tour, and they were no longer the kings of LA. In large part this was down to David Crosby, whose ego was by this point known to *everybody*, and who was becoming hugely unpopular on the LA scene even as he was starting to dominate the band. Crosby was now the de facto lead vocalist on stage, with McGuinn being relegated to one or two songs per set, and he was the one who would insist that they not play their older hit singles live. He was dominating the stage, leading to sarcastic comments from the normally placid Hillman like "Ladies and gentlemen, the David Crosby show!", and he was known to do things like start playing a song then stop part way through a verse to spend five minutes tuning up before restarting. After a residency at the Whisky A-Go-Go where the group were blown off the stage by their support act, the Doors, their publicist Derek Taylor quit, and he was soon followed by the group's co-managers Jim Dickson and Eddie Tickner, who were replaced by Crosby's friend Larry Spector, who had no experience in rock management but did represent Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, two young film stars Crosby was hanging round with. The group were particularly annoyed by Crosby when they played the Monterey Pop Festival. Crosby took most lead vocals in that set, and the group didn't go down well, though instrumentally the worst performer was Michael Clarke, who unlike the rest of the band had never become particularly proficient on his instrument: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star (live at Monterey)"] But Crosby also insisted on making announcements from the stage advocating LSD use and describing conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination: [Excerpt: David Crosby on the Warren Commission, from the end of "Hey Joe" Monterey] But even though Crosby was trying to be the Byrds' leader on stage, he was also starting to think that they maybe didn't deserve to have him as their leader. He'd recently been spending a lot of time hanging out with Stephen Stills of the Buffalo Springfield, and McGuinn talks about one occasion where Crosby and Stills were jamming together, Stills played a blues lick and said to McGuinn "Can you play that?" and when McGuinn, who was not a blues musician, said he couldn't, Stills looked at him with contempt. McGuinn was sure that Stills was trying to poach Crosby, and Crosby apparently wanted to be poached. The group had rehearsed intensely for Monterey, aware that they'd been performing poorly and not wanting to show themselves up in front of the new San Francisco bands, but Crosby had told them during rehearsals that they weren't good enough to play with him. McGuinn's suspicions about Stills wanting to poach Crosby seemed to be confirmed during Monterey when Crosby joined Buffalo Springfield on stage, filling in for Neil Young during the period when Young had temporarily quit the group, and performing a song he'd helped Stills write about Grace Slick: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Rock 'n' Roll Woman (live at Monterey)"] Crosby was getting tired not only of the Byrds but of the LA scene in general. He saw the new San Francisco bands as being infinitely cooler than the Hollywood plastic scene that was LA -- even though Crosby was possibly the single most Hollywood person on that scene, being the son of an Oscar-winning cinematographer and someone who hung out with film stars. At Monterey, the group had debuted their next single, the first one with an A-side written by Crosby, "Lady Friend": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Lady Friend"] Crosby had thought of that as a masterpiece, but when it was released as a single, it flopped badly, and the rest of the group weren't even keen on the track being included on the next album. To add insult to injury as far as Crosby was concerned, at the same time as the single was released, a new album came out -- the Byrds' Greatest Hits, full of all those singles he was refusing to play live, and it made the top ten, becoming far and away the group's most successful album. But despite all this, the biggest conflict between band members when they came to start sessions for their next album wasn't over Crosby, but over Michael Clarke. Clarke had never been a particularly good drummer, and while that had been OK at the start of the Byrds' career, when none of them had been very proficient on their instruments, he was barely any better at a time when both McGuinn and Hillman were being regarded as unique stylists, while Crosby was writing metrically and harmonically interesting material. Many Byrds fans appreciate Clarke's drumming nonetheless, saying he was an inventive and distinctive player in much the same way as the similarly unskilled Micky Dolenz, but on any measure of technical ability he was far behind his bandmates. Clarke didn't like the new material and wasn't capable of playing it the way his bandmates wanted. He was popular with the rest of the band as a person, but simply wasn't playing well, and it led to a massive row in the first session: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Universal Mind Decoder (alternate backing track)"] At one point they joke that they'll bring in Hal Blaine instead -- a reference to the recording of "Mr. Tambourine Man", when Clarke and Hillman had been replaced by Blaine and Larry Knechtel -- and Clarke says "Do it. I don't mind, I really don't." And so that ended up happening. Clarke was still a member of the band -- and he would end up playing on half the album's tracks -- but for the next few sessions the group brought in session drummers Hal Blaine and Jim Gordon to play the parts they actually wanted. But that wasn't going to stop the bigger problem in the group, and that problem was David Crosby's relationship with the rest of the band. Crosby was still at this point thinking of himself as having a future in the group, even as he was increasingly convinced that the group themselves were bad, and embarrassed by their live sound. He even, in a show of unity, decided to ask McGuinn and Hillman to collaborate on a couple of songs with him so they would share the royalties equally. But there were two flash-points in the studio. The first was Crosby's song "Triad", a song about what we would now call polyamory, partly inspired by Robert Heinlein's counterculture science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. The song was meant to portray a progressive, utopian, view of free love, but has dated very badly -- the idea that the *only* reason a woman might be unhappy with her partner sleeping with another woman is because of her mother's disapproval possibly reveals more about the mindset of hippie idealists than was intended. The group recorded Crosby's song, but refused to allow it to be released, and Crosby instead gave it to his friends Jefferson Airplane, whose version, by having Grace Slick sing it, at least reverses the dynamics of the relationship: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Triad"] The other was a song that Gary Usher had brought to the group and suggested they record, a Goffin and King song released the previous year by Dusty Springfield: [Excerpt: Dusty Springfield, "Goin' Back"] Crosby was incandescent. The group wanted to do this Brill Building pap?! Hell, Gary Usher had originally thought that *Chad and Jeremy* should do it, before deciding to get the Byrds to do it instead. Did they really want to be doing Chad and Jeremy cast-offs when they could be doing his brilliant science-fiction inspired songs about alternative relationship structures? *Really*? They did, and after a first session, where Crosby reluctantly joined in, when they came to recut the track Crosby flat-out refused to take part, leading to a furious row with McGuinn. Since they were already replacing Michael Clarke with session drummers, that meant the only Byrds on "Goin' Back", the group's next single, were McGuinn and Hillman: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Goin' Back"] That came out in late October 1967, and shortly before it came out, McGuinn and Hillman had driven to Crosby's home. They told him they'd had enough. He was out of the band. They were buying him out of his contract. Despite everything, Crosby was astonished. They were a *group*. They fought, but only the way brothers fight. But McGuinn and Hillman were adamant. Crosby ended up begging them, saying "We could make great music together." Their response was just "And we can make great music without you." We'll find out whether they could or not in two weeks' time.
Wednesday morning news montage. The DHS Secretary delivered non sequiturs in response to important questions about the border crisis. Chinese teenager found alive in Utah woods after cyber-kidnapping scam. // Terror attack in Iran kills over 100. New dart champion is only 16-years-old. One woman was killed and another hurt after shooting on Highway 2 and Bryan speculates it might be gang violence. // Bryan notes the 84th birthday of Jefferson Airplane's lead singer Grace Slick. Aaron Rodgers says it will be revealed that Jimmy Kimmel had connections to Jeffrey Epstein.
Pat welcomes singer Mickey Thomas to the show to discuss his legendary career in Jefferson Starship/Starship and promote his new holiday release "A Classic Christmas."See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Comedian Rita Rudner joins Mase & Sue on the CULTURE POP PODCAST to discuss her path to becoming a stand-up, why she ditched her Broadway dance career, Woody Allen and Jack Benny's impact on her joke writing, the dynamic of penning scripts with producer husband, Martin Bergman, how he influenced her elegant style of dress on stage and an encounter with former NY Knick, Spencer Hayward. Plus, a ukulele event involving Grace Slick and how quarterback Patrick Mahome's lucky underwear launched into a conversation about an obsession with odd numbers.
I wanted to re-air John Morris's podcast. I had him on episode 11 back in 2018. John recently passed and was such an interesting human being and I'm so happy that he took the time during Indian Market in 2018 to come talk to me about his life. You know, John was a guy who was intimately involved in the 1969 Woodstock show.He booked all the people he worked with, all the acts. You know, he was if you look at the Woodstock movie. He was a unique man who had multiple interests and never took himself too seriously. He had all these interesting people like Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison or Paul McCartney, at he Rolling Stones, all of these musicians he knew and worked with. I knew him for 15 years before he even discussed the Woodstock. The only reason he did is that I saw the movie and I saw him on the TV. His real gift to our culture and the Native American world was that he loved Native American material and tribal art and he, along with Kim Martindale, promoted shows.They promoted different shows that were the objects of art shows, both in San Francisco as well as in Santa Fe. ohn did one in Seattle as well. So, you know, it's sad when you lose somebody of his magnitude, but I wanted to replay his podcast so we could all bask in the wonderful beauty of John Morris.
Episode 192: “Once a beanbag chair is punctured, you just have to move away and burn the house down to the ground.”For this episode the boys discuss spy characters (that are NOT James Bond) and best chairs. · Actor/comedian Steve Martin writes an intense terrorist/spy flick that's not a comedy.· Richard Chamberlain or Matt Damon? · Grace Slick gets stuck in a La-Z-Boy® chair · How did Benjamin Franklin make so many chairs?· Which podcast host dreams of moonlighting as a Cracker Barrel greeter?· King Tut's folding chair?· What happened on the Condor's other 3 days?· The secret to translating Russian by getting a close-up of the speaker's mouthCHALLENGE: Take the Crispy Coated Robots funeral tailgating challenge and win prizes
What a Creep: Jann WennerSeason 22, Episode 1Jann Wenner was the editor of Rolling Stone magazine from 1967 to 2019, covering everything from the Beatles to Woodstock to Live Aid and even Hip Hop at some point in the 1990s. He made millions as rock culture's gatekeeper and key in developing the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. For decades, critics derided Rolling Stone as a bastion for a white, male-centered worldview with little appreciation for women or people of color. This past week, his interview with the New York Times over the release of his book The Masters: Conversations with Bono, Dylan, Garcia, Jagger, Lennon, Springsteen, and Townshend, which is a compilation of his interviews with seven artists he considers cultural icons that created the “Zeitgeist” that shines brightly to this day.When asked why he didn't include any women or people of color, his response:“When I was referring to the zeitgeist, I was referring to Black performers, not female performers,. It's not that they're not creative geniuses. It's not that they're inarticulate, although, go have a deep conversation with Grace Slick or Janis Joplin. Please, be my guest…The people I interviewed were the kind of philosophers of rock.Of Black artists — you know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right? I suppose when you use a word as broad as “masters,” the fault is using that word. Maybe Marvin Gaye, or Curtis Mayfield? I mean, they just didn't articulate at that level.Today, we discuss Wenner's long career and where he winds up in the Creep category. Trigger warnings: Racism, Misogyny, and Sexual Harassment.Sources for this episode:· Uproxx· The Daily Beast· NBC News· Vulture · NY Times· NPR· CNN· Vanity Fair· The Atlantic·, Billboard· The Guardian· Daily Kos· The Advocate· The Village Voice· Spin magazine editorial· Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine by Joe Hagan· The Masters: Jann WennerBuzzfeed (2017) Be sure to follow us on social media! But don't follow us too closely … don't be a creep about it!Subscribe to us on Apple PodcastsTwitter: https://twitter.com/CreepPod @CreepPodFacebook: Join the private group!Instagram @WhatACreepPodcastVisit our Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/whatacreepEmail: WhatACreepPodcast@gmail.comWe've got merch here! https://whatacreeppodcast.threadless.com/#Our website is www.whatacreeppodcast.comOur logo was created by Claudia Gomez-Rodriguez Follow her on Instagram @ClaudInCloudThis show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/5394615/advertisement
Too many women age themselves by saying they are too old to do something. That's not true. You know Diane Gilman from QVC and the Home Shopping Network. She does not believe there is any age women have to say it's too late to achieve their dreams. At the age of 60, she sparked a denim revolution by founding what became a multi-million dollar company called DG2 Jeans. Dubbed the Queen of Jeans, designer Diane Gilman revolutionized women's fashion, turned sexism on its head, and went on to sell millions of her blue jeans inspirations for mature women on television. She became the number tele-retailing company for nearly 20 years with the Diane Gilman Collection and DG2 Jeans. Diane is a champion for women and is also a breast cancer survivor. Her designs began at an early age when she sold be-jeweled jeans to stars like Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, Jim Morrison, and Jimmy Hendrix in the 1960s. She is now the author of a bestselling book Too Young to Be Old: 25 Secrets from TV's Blue Jean Queen. Learn what motivates this amazing lady and get inspired for your own success at any age in this episode of Women Road Warriors with Shelley Johnson and Kathy Tuccaro. Please subscribe to our podcast. It's free.https://thedianegilman.com/https://tncradio.live/#Women #EmpoweringWomen #Sexism #Ageism #Youth #ForeverYoung #WomensFashion #Success #Careers #Dreams #QueenOfJeans #DianeGilman #G2Jeans #DianeGilmanCollection #QVC #HSN #WomenRoadWarriors #ShelleyJohnson #ShelleyMJohnson #KathyTuccaro #TNCRadioLive
Aerosmith is a band in two acts. They were a highly successful group in the 70's, but arguments and drugs left the band a shade of its former self by 1980. A second chance was presented when the crossover collaboration between Aerosmith and Run-D.M.C. on "Walk this Way" became a number 4 US hit in 1986. The bad went into drug rehab at the insistence of manager Tim Collins, and had a major hit with their ninth studio album "Permanent Vacation."Aerosmith demonstrated that their second act was not just a fluke with their tenth studio album, Pump, which was even more successful than Permanent Vacation. This was a significant comeback, re-establishing the band as one of rock's premier acts. The album was polished and energetic, combining a gritty hard rock sound with pop sensibilities. The album was not only a commercial success, peaking at number 5 on the US charts and being certified 7x platinum by 1995, but was also a critical success, landing Aerosmith their first Grammy for "Janie's Got a Gun." Pump was the fourth best-selling album of the year 1990.The band lineup for this album had Steven Tyler on vocals, keyboards, and harmonica, Joe Perry on guitar and backing vocals, Brad Whitford on guitar, Tom Hamiilton on bass, and Joey Kramer on drums. Guitarist Brad Whitford explained the album title on a 1989 MTV special by saying "now that we're off drugs, we're all pumped up." John Lynch brings us this stellar rock and pop sensation this week. Water Song/Janie's Got a GunA 10-second instrumental called "Water Song" precedes the song written by Steven Tyler and Tom Hamilton. The second single from the album went to number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. It describes the revenge of a young woman for the childhood abuse she experienced. Aerosmith won the 1990 Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal for this song.Dulcimer Stomp/The Other SideAnother song with a brief instrumental lead-in, this was the fourth single released from the album. It was written by Jim Vallance and Steven Tyler, with Holland-Dozier-Holland receiving songwriting credit after threatening to file suit over similarities between this and their song "Standing in the Shadows of Love." The lyrics are about a turbulent relationship, with the singer wanting to get past the emotional roller-coaster. Monkey on My BackIt is difficult to find a deep cut on this album, but this is one that was not released as a single. Tyler and Perry wrote this track about the band's struggles with addiction. It was the first song that Tyler and Perry wrote for the album, and it was composed in November 1988 prior to the end of their Permanent Vacation tour.Going Down/Love In an ElevatorA double entendre-laden skit leads in this double entendre-laden song. Tyler and Perry wrote this piece, and it was inspired by an actual experience Steven Tyler had where he was making out with a woman in an elevator and the doors opened. It was nominated for a Grammy in 1990 for Best Hard Rock Performance, but Aerosmith lost out to Living Colour on that one. ENTERTAINMENT TRACK:Theme from the television music performance and dance program “American Bandstand” Dick Clark's music show which premiered in March 1952 had its final show on October 7, 1989. STAFF PICKS:Sowing the Seeds of Love by Tears for FearsBruce brings us a Beatles-esque song from the third Tears for Fears album, "Seeds of Love." It was written by Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith, and hit number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, their fourth and final entry into the top 10. Orzabal considers it to be the most overtly political song Tears for Fears had written at the time. Big Talk by WarrantRob's staff pick is a rocking tune from glam metal band Warrant's first album, "Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinking Rich." This third single from the album made it to number 30 on the Modern Rock Tracks chart, though it only made it to number 93 on the Billboard Hot 100. The album went to number 10 on the Billboard 200 chart.Pictures of Matchstick Men by Camper Van Beethoven Wayne brings us a cover of the first hit single by Status Quo, released in 1968. This rendition combines elements of pop, ska, punk, folks, alternative, and country. the "Matchstick men" reference is to the paintings of L.S. Lowry, and English painter who depicted Salford, Manchester, and other industrial scenes in his works.It's Not Enough by StarshipLynch's staff pick is the second single released off Starship's third album, the first album after Grace Slick left the band. It went to number 12 on the Billboard charts, the final top 40 hit for the band. This is the sound that most typified the produced sound of the late 80's. INSTRUMENTAL TRACK:Flying In a Blue Dream by the Joe SatrianiThe title track to Satriani's third studio album closes out this week's podcast.
Episode 164 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "White Light/White Heat" and the career of the Velvet Underground. This is a long one, lasting three hours and twenty minutes. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on "Why Don't You Smile Now?" by the Downliners Sect. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I say the Velvet Underground didn't play New York for the rest of the sixties after 1966. They played at least one gig there in 1967, but did generally avoid the city. Also, I refer to Cale and Conrad as the other surviving members of the Theater of Eternal Music. Sadly Conrad died in 2016. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Velvet Underground, and some of the avant-garde pieces excerpted run to six hours or more. I used a lot of resources for this one. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story by Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga is the best book on the group as a group. I also used Joe Harvard's 33 1/3 book on The Velvet Underground and Nico. Bockris also wrote one of the two biographies of Reed I referred to, Transformer. The other was Lou Reed by Anthony DeCurtis. Information on Cale mostly came from Sedition and Alchemy by Tim Mitchell. Information on Nico came from Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon by Richard Witts. I used Draw a Straight Line and Follow it by Jeremy Grimshaw as my main source for La Monte Young, The Roaring Silence by David Revill for John Cage, and Warhol: A Life as Art by Blake Gopnik for Warhol. I also referred to the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of the 2021 documentary The Velvet Underground. The definitive collection of the Velvet Underground's music is the sadly out-of-print box set Peel Slowly and See, which contains the four albums the group made with Reed in full, plus demos, outtakes, and live recordings. Note that the digital version of the album as sold by Amazon for some reason doesn't include the last disc -- if you want the full box set you have to buy a physical copy. All four studio albums have also been released and rereleased many times over in different configurations with different numbers of CDs at different price points -- I have used the "45th Anniversary Super-Deluxe" versions for this episode, but for most people the standard CD versions will be fine. Sadly there are no good shorter compilation overviews of the group -- they tend to emphasise either the group's "pop" mode or its "avant-garde" mode to the exclusion of the other. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I begin this episode, there are a few things to say. This introductory section is going to be longer than normal because, as you will hear, this episode is also going to be longer than normal. Firstly, I try to warn people about potentially upsetting material in these episodes. But this is the first episode for 1968, and as you will see there is a *profound* increase in the amount of upsetting and disturbing material covered as we go through 1968 and 1969. The story is going to be in a much darker place for the next twenty or thirty episodes. And this episode is no exception. As always, I try to deal with everything as sensitively as possible, but you should be aware that the list of warnings for this one is so long I am very likely to have missed some. Among the topics touched on in this episode are mental illness, drug addiction, gun violence, racism, societal and medical homophobia, medical mistreatment of mental illness, domestic abuse, rape, and more. If you find discussion of any of those subjects upsetting, you might want to read the transcript. Also, I use the term "queer" freely in this episode. In the past I have received some pushback for this, because of a belief among some that "queer" is a slur. The following explanation will seem redundant to many of my listeners, but as with many of the things I discuss in the podcast I am dealing with multiple different audiences with different levels of awareness and understanding of issues, so I'd like to beg those people's indulgence a moment. The term "queer" has certainly been used as a slur in the past, but so have terms like "lesbian", "gay", "homosexual" and others. In all those cases, the term has gone from a term used as a self-identifier, to a slur, to a reclaimed slur, and back again many times. The reason for using that word, specifically, here is because the vast majority of people in this story have sexualities or genders that don't match the societal norms of their times, but used labels for themselves that have shifted in meaning over the years. There are at least two men in the story, for example, who are now dead and referred to themselves as "homosexual", but were in multiple long-term sexually-active relationships with women. Would those men now refer to themselves as "bisexual" or "pansexual" -- terms not in widespread use at the time -- or would they, in the relatively more tolerant society we live in now, only have been in same-gender relationships? We can't know. But in our current context using the word "homosexual" for those men would lead to incorrect assumptions about their behaviour. The labels people use change over time, and the definitions of them blur and shift. I have discussed this issue with many, many, friends who fall under the queer umbrella, and while not all of them are comfortable with "queer" as a personal label because of how it's been used against them in the past, there is near-unanimity from them that it's the correct word to use in this situation. Anyway, now that that rather lengthy set of disclaimers is over, let's get into the story proper, as we look at "White Light, White Heat" by the Velvet Underground: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "White Light, White Heat"] And that look will start with... a disclaimer about length. This episode is going to be a long one. Not as long as episode one hundred and fifty, but almost certainly the longest episode I'll do this year, by some way. And there's a reason for that. One of the questions I've been asked repeatedly over the years about the podcast is why almost all the acts I've covered have been extremely commercially successful ones. "Where are the underground bands? The alternative bands? The little niche acts?" The answer to that is simple. Until the mid-sixties, the idea of an underground or alternative band made no sense at all in rock, pop, rock and roll, R&B, or soul. The idea would have been completely counterintuitive to the vast majority of the people we've discussed in the podcast. Those musics were commercial musics, made by people who wanted to make money and to get the largest audiences possible. That doesn't mean that they had no artistic merit, or that there was no artistic intent behind them, but the artists making that music were *commercial* artists. They knew if they wanted to make another record, they had to sell enough copies of the last record for the record company to make another, and that if they wanted to keep eating, they had to draw enough of an audience to their gigs for promoters to keep booking them. There was no space in this worldview for what we might think of as cult success. If your record only sold a thousand copies, then you had failed in your goal, even if the thousand people who bought your record really loved it. Even less commercially successful artists we've covered to this point, like the Mothers of Invention or Love, were *trying* for commercial success, even if they made the decision not to compromise as much as others do. This started to change a tiny bit in the mid-sixties as the influence of jazz and folk in the US, and the British blues scene, started to be felt in rock music. But this influence, at first, was a one-way thing -- people who had been in the folk and jazz worlds deciding to modify their music to be more commercial. And that was followed by already massively commercial musicians, like the Beatles, taking on some of those influences and bringing their audience with them. But that started to change around the time that "rock" started to differentiate itself from "rock and roll" and "pop", in mid 1967. So in this episode and the next, we're going to look at two bands who in different ways provided a model for how to be an alternative band. Both of them still *wanted* commercial success, but neither achieved it, at least not at first and not in the conventional way. And both, when they started out, went by the name The Warlocks. But we have to take a rather circuitous route to get to this week's band, because we're now properly introducing a strand of music that has been there in the background for a while -- avant-garde art music. So before we go any further, let's have a listen to a thirty-second clip of the most famous piece of avant-garde music ever, and I'll be performing it myself: [Excerpt, Andrew Hickey "4'33 (Cage)"] Obviously that won't give the full effect, you have to listen to the whole piece to get that. That is of course a section of "4'33" by John Cage, a piece of music that is often incorrectly described as being four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. As I've mentioned before, though, in the episode on "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", it isn't that at all. The whole point of the piece is that there is no such thing as silence, and it's intended to make the listener appreciate all the normal ambient sounds as music, every bit as much as any piece by Bach or Beethoven. John Cage, the composer of "4'33", is possibly the single most influential avant-garde artist of the mid twentieth century, so as we're properly introducing the ideas of avant-garde music into the story here, we need to talk about him a little. Cage was, from an early age, torn between three great vocations, all of which in some fashion would shape his work for decades to come. One of these was architecture, and for a time he intended to become an architect. Another was the religious ministry, and he very seriously considered becoming a minister as a young man, and religion -- though not the religious faith of his youth -- was to be a massive factor in his work as he grew older. He started studying music from an early age, though he never had any facility as a performer -- though he did, when he discovered the work of Grieg, think that might change. He later said “For a while I played nothing else. I even imagined devoting my life to the performance of his works alone, for they did not seem to me to be too difficult, and I loved them.” [Excerpt: Grieg piano concerto in A minor] But he soon realised that he didn't have some of the basic skills that would be required to be a performer -- he never actually thought of himself as very musical -- and so he decided to move into composition, and he later talked about putting his musical limits to good use in being more inventive. From his very first pieces, Cage was trying to expand the definition of what a performance of a piece of music actually was. One of his friends, Harry Hay, who took part in the first documented performance of a piece by Cage, described how Cage's father, an inventor, had "devised a fluorescent light source over which Sample" -- Don Sample, Cage's boyfriend at the time -- "laid a piece of vellum painted with designs in oils. The blankets I was wearing were white, and a sort of lampshade shone coloured patterns onto me. It looked very good. The thing got so hot the designs began to run, but that only made it better.” Apparently the audience for this light show -- one that predated the light shows used by rock bands by a good thirty years -- were not impressed, though that may be more because the Santa Monica Women's Club in the early 1930s was not the vanguard of the avant-garde. Or maybe it was. Certainly the housewives of Santa Monica seemed more willing than one might expect to sign up for another of Cage's ideas. In 1933 he went door to door asking women if they would be interested in signing up to a lecture course from him on modern art and music. He told them that if they signed up for $2.50, he would give them ten lectures, and somewhere between twenty and forty of them signed up, even though, as he said later, “I explained to the housewives that I didn't know anything about either subject but that I was enthusiastic about both of them. I promised to learn faithfully enough about each subject so as to be able to give a talk an hour long each week.” And he did just that, going to the library every day and spending all week preparing an hour-long talk for them. History does not relate whether he ended these lectures by telling the housewives to tell just one friend about them. He said later “I came out of these lectures, with a devotion to the painting of Mondrian, on the one hand, and the music of Schoenberg on the other.” [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte"] Schoenberg was one of the two most widely-respected composers in the world at that point, the other being Stravinsky, but the two had very different attitudes to composition. Schoenberg's great innovation was the creation and popularisation of the twelve-tone technique, and I should probably explain that a little before I go any further. Most Western music is based on an eight-note scale -- do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do -- with the eighth note being an octave up from the first. So in the key of C major that would be C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C: [demonstrates] And when you hear notes from that scale, if your ears are accustomed to basically any Western music written before about 1920, or any Western popular music written since then, you expect the melody to lead back to C, and you know to expect that because it only uses those notes -- there are differing intervals between them, some having a tone between them and some having a semitone, and you recognise the pattern. But of course there are other notes between the notes of that scale. There are actually an infinite number of these, but in conventional Western music we only look at a few more -- C# (or D flat), D# (or E flat), F# (or G flat), G# (or A flat) and A# (or B flat). If you add in all those notes you get this: [demonstrates] There's no clear beginning or end, no do for it to come back to. And Schoenberg's great innovation, which he was only starting to promote widely around this time, was to insist that all twelve notes should be equal -- his melodies would use all twelve of the notes the exact same number of times, and so if he used say a B flat, he would have to use all eleven other notes before he used B flat again in the piece. This was a radical new idea, but Schoenberg had only started advancing it after first winning great acclaim for earlier pieces, like his "Three Pieces for Piano", a work which wasn't properly twelve-tone, but did try to do without the idea of having any one note be more important than any other: [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Three Pieces for Piano"] At this point, that work had only been performed in the US by one performer, Richard Buhlig, and hadn't been released as a recording yet. Cage was so eager to hear it that he'd found Buhlig's phone number and called him, asking him to play the piece, but Buhlig put the phone down on him. Now he was doing these lectures, though, he had to do one on Schoenberg, and he wasn't a competent enough pianist to play Schoenberg's pieces himself, and there were still no recordings of them. Cage hitch-hiked from Santa Monica to LA, where Buhlig lived, to try to get him to come and visit his class and play some of Schoenberg's pieces for them. Buhlig wasn't in, and Cage hung around in his garden hoping for him to come back -- he pulled the leaves off a bough from one of Buhlig's trees, going "He'll come back, he won't come back, he'll come back..." and the leaves said he'd be back. Buhlig arrived back at midnight, and quite understandably told the strange twenty-one-year-old who'd spent twelve hours in his garden pulling the leaves off his trees that no, he would not come to Santa Monica and give a free performance. But he did agree that if Cage brought some of his own compositions he'd give them a look over. Buhlig started giving Cage some proper lessons in composition, although he stressed that he was a performer, not a composer. Around this time Cage wrote his Sonata for Clarinet: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Sonata For Clarinet"] Buhlig suggested that Cage send that to Henry Cowell, the composer we heard about in the episode on "Good Vibrations" who was friends with Lev Termen and who created music by playing the strings inside a piano: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] Cowell offered to take Cage on as an assistant, in return for which Cowell would teach him for a semester, as would Adolph Weiss, a pupil of Schoenberg's. But the goal, which Cowell suggested, was always to have Cage study with Schoenberg himself. Schoenberg at first refused, saying that Cage couldn't afford his price, but eventually took Cage on as a student having been assured that he would devote his entire life to music -- a promise Cage kept. Cage started writing pieces for percussion, something that had been very rare up to that point -- only a handful of composers, most notably Edgard Varese, had written pieces for percussion alone, but Cage was: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Trio"] This is often portrayed as a break from the ideals of his teacher Schoenberg, but in fact there's a clear continuity there, once you see what Cage was taking from Schoenberg. Schoenberg's work is, in some senses, about equality, about all notes being equal. Or to put it another way, it's about fairness. About erasing arbitrary distinctions. What Cage was doing was erasing the arbitrary distinction between the more and less prominent instruments. Why should there be pieces for solo violin or string quartet, but not for multiple percussion players? That said, Schoenberg was not exactly the most encouraging of teachers. When Cage invited Schoenberg to go to a concert of Cage's percussion work, Schoenberg told him he was busy that night. When Cage offered to arrange another concert for a date Schoenberg wasn't busy, the reply came "No, I will not be free at any time". Despite this, Cage later said “Schoenberg was a magnificent teacher, who always gave the impression that he was putting us in touch with musical principles,” and said "I literally worshipped him" -- a strong statement from someone who took religious matters as seriously as Cage. Cage was so devoted to Schoenberg's music that when a concert of music by Stravinsky was promoted as "music of the world's greatest living composer", Cage stormed into the promoter's office angrily, confronting the promoter and making it very clear that such things should not be said in the city where Schoenberg lived. Schoenberg clearly didn't think much of Cage's attempts at composition, thinking -- correctly -- that Cage had no ear for harmony. And his reportedly aggressive and confrontational teaching style didn't sit well with Cage -- though it seems very similar to a lot of the teaching techniques of the Zen masters he would later go on to respect. The two eventually parted ways, although Cage always spoke highly of Schoenberg. Schoenberg later gave Cage a compliment of sorts, when asked if any of his students had gone on to do anything interesting. At first he replied that none had, but then he mentioned Cage and said “Of course he's not a composer, but an inventor—of genius.” Cage was at this point very worried if there was any point to being a composer at all. He said later “I'd read Cowell's New Musical Resources and . . . The Theory of Rhythm. I had also read Chavez's Towards a New Music. Both works gave me the feeling that everything that was possible in music had already happened. So I thought I could never compose socially important music. Only if I could invent something new, then would I be useful to society. But that seemed unlikely then.” [Excerpt: John Cage, "Totem Ancestor"] Part of the solution came when he was asked to compose music for an abstract animation by the filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, and also to work as Fischinger's assistant when making the film. He was fascinated by the stop-motion process, and by the results of the film, which he described as "a beautiful film in which these squares, triangles and circles and other things moved and changed colour.” But more than that he was overwhelmed by a comment by Fischinger, who told him “Everything in the world has its own spirit, and this spirit becomes audible by setting it into vibration.” Cage later said “That set me on fire. He started me on a path of exploration of the world around me which has never stopped—of hitting and stretching and scraping and rubbing everything.” Cage now took his ideas further. His compositions for percussion had been about, if you like, giving the underdog a chance -- percussion was always in the background, why should it not be in the spotlight? Now he realised that there were other things getting excluded in conventional music -- the sounds that we characterise as noise. Why should composers work to exclude those sounds, but work to *include* other sounds? Surely that was... well, a little unfair? Eventually this would lead to pieces like his 1952 piece "Water Music", later expanded and retitled "Water Walk", which can be heard here in his 1959 appearance on the TV show "I've Got a Secret". It's a piece for, amongst other things, a flowerpot full of flowers, a bathtub, a watering can, a pipe, a duck call, a blender full of ice cubes, and five unplugged radios: [Excerpt: John Cage "Water Walk"] As he was now avoiding pitch and harmony as organising principles for his music, he turned to time. But note -- not to rhythm. He said “There's none of this boom, boom, boom, business in my music . . . a measure is taken as a strict measure of time—not a one two three four—which I fill with various sounds.” He came up with a system he referred to as “micro-macrocosmic rhythmic structure,” what we would now call fractals, though that word hadn't yet been invented, where the structure of the whole piece was reflected in the smallest part of it. For a time he started moving away from the term music, preferring to refer to the "art of noise" or to "organised sound" -- though he later received a telegram from Edgard Varese, one of his musical heroes and one of the few other people writing works purely for percussion, asking him not to use that phrase, which Varese used for his own work. After meeting with Varese and his wife, he later became convinced that it was Varese's wife who had initiated the telegram, as she explained to Cage's wife "we didn't want your husband's work confused with my husband's work, any more than you'd want some . . . any artist's work confused with that of a cartoonist.” While there is a humour to Cage's work, I don't really hear much qualitative difference between a Cage piece like the one we just heard and a Varese piece like Ionisation: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] But it was in 1952, the year of "Water Music" that John Cage made his two biggest impacts on the cultural world, though the full force of those impacts wasn't felt for some years. To understand Cage's 1952 work, you first have to understand that he had become heavily influenced by Zen, which at that time was very little known in the Western world. Indeed he had studied with Daisetsu Suzuki, who is credited with introducing Zen to the West, and said later “I didn't study music with just anybody; I studied with Schoenberg, I didn't study Zen with just anybody; I studied with Suzuki. I've always gone, insofar as I could, to the president of the company.” Cage's whole worldview was profoundly affected by Zen, but he was also naturally sympathetic to it, and his work after learning about Zen is mostly a continuation of trends we can already see. In particular, he became convinced that the point of music isn't to communicate anything between two people, rather its point is merely to be experienced. I'm far from an expert on Buddhism, but one way of thinking about its central lessons is that one should experience things as they are, experiencing the thing itself rather than one's thoughts or preconceptions about it. And so at Black Mountain college came Theatre Piece Number 1: [Excerpt: Edith Piaf, "La Vie En Rose" ] In this piece, Cage had set the audience on all sides, so they'd be facing each other. He stood on a stepladder, as colleagues danced in and around the audience, another colleague played the piano, two more took turns to stand on another stepladder to recite poetry, different films and slides were projected, seemingly at random, onto the walls, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg played scratchy Edith Piaf records on a wind-up gramophone. The audience were included in the performance, and it was meant to be experienced as a gestalt, as a whole, to be what we would now call an immersive experience. One of Cage's students around this time was the artist Allan Kaprow, and he would be inspired by Theatre Piece Number 1 to put on several similar events in the late fifties. Those events he called "happenings", because the point of them was that you were meant to experience an event as it was happening rather than bring preconceptions of form and structure to them. Those happenings were the inspiration for events like The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, and the term "happening" became such an integral part of the counterculture that by 1967 there were comedy films being released about them, including one just called The Happening with a title track by the Supremes that made number one: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "The Happening"] Theatre Piece Number 1 was retrospectively considered the first happening, and as such its influence is incalculable. But one part I didn't mention about Theatre Piece Number 1 is that as well as Rauschenberg playing Edith Piaf's records, he also displayed some of his paintings. These paintings were totally white -- at a glance, they looked like blank canvases, but as one inspected them more clearly, it became apparent that Rauschenberg had painted them with white paint, with visible brushstrokes. These paintings, along with a visit to an anechoic chamber in which Cage discovered that even in total silence one can still hear one's own blood and nervous system, so will never experience total silence, were the final key to something Cage had been working towards -- if music had minimised percussion, and excluded noise, how much more had it excluded silence? As Cage said in 1958 “Curiously enough, the twelve-tone system has no zero in it.” And so came 4'33, the piece that we heard an excerpt of near the start of this episode. That piece was the something new he'd been looking for that could be useful to society. It took the sounds the audience could already hear, and without changing them even slightly gave them a new context and made the audience hear them as they were. Simply by saying "this is music", it caused the ambient noise to be perceived as music. This idea, of recontextualising existing material, was one that had already been done in the art world -- Marcel Duchamp, in 1917, had exhibited a urinal as a sculpture titled "Fountain" -- but even Duchamp had talked about his work as "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice". The artist was *raising* the object to art. What Cage was saying was "the object is already art". This was all massively influential to a young painter who had seen Cage give lectures many times, and while at art school had with friends prepared a piano in the same way Cage did for his own experimental compositions, dampening the strings with different objects. [Excerpt: Dana Gillespie, "Andy Warhol (live)"] Duchamp and Rauschenberg were both big influences on Andy Warhol, but he would say in the early sixties "John Cage is really so responsible for so much that's going on," and would for the rest of his life cite Cage as one of the two or three prime influences of his career. Warhol is a difficult figure to discuss, because his work is very intellectual but he was not very articulate -- which is one reason I've led up to him by discussing Cage in such detail, because Cage was always eager to talk at great length about the theoretical basis of his work, while Warhol would say very few words about anything at all. Probably the person who knew him best was his business partner and collaborator Paul Morrissey, and Morrissey's descriptions of Warhol have shaped my own view of his life, but it's very worth noting that Morrissey is an extremely right-wing moralist who wishes to see a Catholic theocracy imposed to do away with the scourges of sexual immorality, drug use, hedonism, and liberalism, so his view of Warhol, a queer drug using progressive whose worldview seems to have been totally opposed to Morrissey's in every way, might be a little distorted. Warhol came from an impoverished background, and so, as many people who grew up poor do, he was, throughout his life, very eager to make money. He studied art at university, and got decent but not exceptional grades -- he was a competent draughtsman, but not a great one, and most importantly as far as success in the art world goes he didn't have what is known as his own "line" -- with most successful artists, you can look at a handful of lines they've drawn and see something of their own personality in it. You couldn't with Warhol. His drawings looked like mediocre imitations of other people's work. Perfectly competent, but nothing that stood out. So Warhol came up with a technique to make his drawings stand out -- blotting. He would do a normal drawing, then go over it with a lot of wet ink. He'd lower a piece of paper on to the wet drawing, and the new paper would soak up the ink, and that second piece of paper would become the finished work. The lines would be fractured and smeared, broken in places where the ink didn't get picked up, and thick in others where it had pooled. With this mechanical process, Warhol had managed to create an individual style, and he became an extremely successful commercial artist. In the early 1950s photography was still seen as a somewhat low-class way of advertising things. If you wanted to sell to a rich audience, you needed to use drawings or paintings. By 1955 Warhol was making about twelve thousand dollars a year -- somewhere close to a hundred and thirty thousand a year in today's money -- drawing shoes for advertisements. He also had a sideline in doing record covers for people like Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Seventh Avenue Express"] For most of the 1950s he also tried to put on shows of his more serious artistic work -- often with homoerotic themes -- but to little success. The dominant art style of the time was the abstract expressionism of people like Jackson Pollock, whose art was visceral, emotional, and macho. The term "action paintings" which was coined for the work of people like Pollock, sums it up. This was manly art for manly men having manly emotions and expressing them loudly. It was very male and very straight, and even the gay artists who were prominent at the time tended to be very conformist and look down on anything they considered flamboyant or effeminate. Warhol was a rather effeminate, very reserved man, who strongly disliked showing his emotions, and whose tastes ran firmly to the camp. Camp as an aesthetic of finding joy in the flamboyant or trashy, as opposed to merely a descriptive term for men who behaved in a way considered effeminate, was only just starting to be codified at this time -- it wouldn't really become a fully-formed recognisable thing until Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964 -- but of course just because something hasn't been recognised doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and Warhol's aesthetic was always very camp, and in the 1950s in the US that was frowned upon even in gay culture, where the mainstream opinion was that the best way to acceptance was through assimilation. Abstract expressionism was all about expressing the self, and that was something Warhol never wanted to do -- in fact he made some pronouncements at times which suggested he didn't think of himself as *having* a self in the conventional sense. The combination of not wanting to express himself and of wanting to work more efficiently as a commercial artist led to some interesting results. For example, he was commissioned in 1957 to do a cover for an album by Moondog, the blind street musician whose name Alan Freed had once stolen: [Excerpt: Moondog, "Gloving It"] For that cover, Warhol got his mother, Julia Warhola, to just write out the liner notes for the album in her rather ornamental cursive script, and that became the front cover, leading to an award for graphic design going that year to "Andy Warhol's mother". (Incidentally, my copy of the current CD issue of that album, complete with Julia Warhola's cover, is put out by Pickwick Records...) But towards the end of the fifties, the work for commercial artists started to dry up. If you wanted to advertise shoes, now, you just took a photo of the shoes rather than get Andy Warhol to draw a picture of them. The money started to disappear, and Warhol started to panic. If there was no room for him in graphic design any more, he had to make his living in the fine arts, which he'd been totally unsuccessful in. But luckily for Warhol, there was a new movement that was starting to form -- Pop Art. Pop Art started in England, and had originally been intended, at least in part, as a critique of American consumerist capitalism. Pieces like "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" by Richard Hamilton (who went on to design the Beatles' White Album cover) are collages of found images, almost all from American sources, recontextualised and juxtaposed in interesting ways, so a bodybuilder poses in a room that's taken from an advert in Ladies' Home Journal, while on the wall, instead of a painting, hangs a blown-up cover of a Jack Kirby romance comic. Pop Art changed slightly when it got taken up in America, and there it became something rather different, something closer to Duchamp, taking those found images and displaying them as art with no juxtaposition. Where Richard Hamilton created collage art which *showed* a comic cover by Jack Kirby as a painting in the background, Roy Lichtenstein would take a panel of comic art by Kirby, or Russ Heath or Irv Novick or a dozen other comic artists, and redraw it at the size of a normal painting. So Warhol took Cage's idea that the object is already art, and brought that into painting, starting by doing paintings of Campbell's soup cans, in which he tried as far as possible to make the cans look exactly like actual soup cans. The paintings were controversial, inciting fury in some and laughter in others and causing almost everyone to question whether they were art. Warhol would embrace an aesthetic in which things considered unimportant or trash or pop culture detritus were the greatest art of all. For example pretty much every profile of him written in the mid sixties talks about him obsessively playing "Sally Go Round the Roses", a girl-group single by the one-hit wonders the Jaynettes: [Excerpt: The Jaynettes, "Sally Go Round the Roses"] After his paintings of Campbell's soup cans, and some rather controversial but less commercially successful paintings of photographs of horrors and catastrophes taken from newspapers, Warhol abandoned painting in the conventional sense altogether, instead creating brightly coloured screen prints -- a form of stencilling -- based on photographs of celebrities like Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and, most famously, Marilyn Monroe. That way he could produce images which could be mass-produced, without his active involvement, and which supposedly had none of his personality in them, though of course his personality pervades the work anyway. He put on exhibitions of wooden boxes, silk-screen printed to look exactly like shipping cartons of Brillo pads. Images we see everywhere -- in newspapers, in supermarkets -- were art. And Warhol even briefly formed a band. The Druds were a garage band formed to play at a show at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the opening night of an exhibition that featured a silkscreen by Warhol of 210 identical bottles of Coca-Cola, as well as paintings by Rauschenberg and others. That opening night featured a happening by Claes Oldenburg, and a performance by Cage -- Cage gave a live lecture while three recordings of his own voice also played. The Druds were also meant to perform, but they fell apart after only a few rehearsals. Some recordings apparently exist, but they don't seem to circulate, but they'd be fascinating to hear as almost the entire band were non-musician artists like Warhol, Jasper Johns, and the sculptor Walter de Maria. Warhol said of the group “It didn't go too well, but if we had just stayed on it it would have been great.” On the other hand, the one actual musician in the group said “It was kind of ridiculous, so I quit after the second rehearsal". That musician was La Monte Young: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] That's an excerpt from what is generally considered Young's masterwork, "The Well-Tuned Piano". It's six and a half hours long. If Warhol is a difficult figure to write about, Young is almost impossible. He's a musician with a career stretching sixty years, who is arguably the most influential musician from the classical tradition in that time period. He's generally considered the father of minimalism, and he's also been called by Brian Eno "the daddy of us all" -- without Young you simply *do not* get art rock at all. Without Young there is no Velvet Underground, no David Bowie, no Eno, no New York punk scene, no Yoko Ono. Anywhere that the fine arts or conceptual art have intersected with popular music in the last fifty or more years has been influenced in one way or another by Young's work. BUT... he only rarely publishes his scores. He very, very rarely allows recordings of his work to be released -- there are four recordings on his bandcamp, plus a handful of recordings of his older, published, pieces, and very little else. He doesn't allow his music to be performed live without his supervision. There *are* bootleg recordings of his music, but even those are not easily obtainable -- Young is vigorous in enforcing his copyrights and issues takedown notices against anywhere that hosts them. So other than that handful of legitimately available recordings -- plus a recording by Young's Theater of Eternal Music, the legality of which is still disputed, and an off-air recording of a 1971 radio programme I've managed to track down, the only way to experience Young's music unless you're willing to travel to one of his rare live performances or installations is second-hand, by reading about it. Except that the one book that deals solely with Young and his music is not only a dense and difficult book to read, it's also one that Young vehemently disagreed with and considered extremely inaccurate, to the point he refused to allow permissions to quote his work in the book. Young did apparently prepare a list of corrections for the book, but he wouldn't tell the author what they were without payment. So please assume that anything I say about Young is wrong, but also accept that the short section of this episode about Young has required more work to *try* to get it right than pretty much anything else this year. Young's musical career actually started out in a relatively straightforward manner. He didn't grow up in the most loving of homes -- he's talked about his father beating him as a child because he had been told that young La Monte was clever -- but his father did buy him a saxophone and teach him the rudiments of the instrument, and as a child he was most influenced by the music of the big band saxophone player Jimmy Dorsey: [Excerpt: Jimmy Dorsey, “It's the Dreamer in Me”] The family, who were Mormon farmers, relocated several times in Young's childhood, from Idaho first to California and then to Utah, but everywhere they went La Monte seemed to find musical inspiration, whether from an uncle who had been part of the Kansas City jazz scene, a classmate who was a musical prodigy who had played with Perez Prado in his early teens, or a teacher who took the class to see a performance of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra: [Excerpt: Bartok, "Concerto for Orchestra"] After leaving high school, Young went to Los Angeles City College to study music under Leonard Stein, who had been Schoenberg's assistant when Schoenberg had taught at UCLA, and there he became part of the thriving jazz scene based around Central Avenue, studying and performing with musicians like Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and Eric Dolphy -- Young once beat Dolphy in an audition for a place in the City College dance band, and the two would apparently substitute for each other on their regular gigs when one couldn't make it. During this time, Young's musical tastes became much more adventurous. He was a particular fan of the work of John Coltrane, and also got inspired by City of Glass, an album by Stan Kenton that attempted to combine jazz and modern classical music: [Excerpt: Stan Kenton's Innovations Orchestra, "City of Glass: The Structures"] His other major musical discovery in the mid-fifties was one we've talked about on several previous occasions -- the album Music of India, Morning and Evening Ragas by Ali Akhbar Khan: [Excerpt: Ali Akhbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] Young's music at this point was becoming increasingly modal, and equally influenced by the blues and Indian music. But he was also becoming interested in serialism. Serialism is an extension and generalisation of twelve-tone music, inspired by mathematical set theory. In serialism, you choose a set of musical elements -- in twelve-tone music that's the twelve notes in the twelve-tone scale, but it can also be a set of tonal relations, a chord, or any other set of elements. You then define all the possible ways you can permute those elements, a defined set of operations you can perform on them -- so you could play a scale forwards, play it backwards, play all the notes in the scale simultaneously, and so on. You then go through all the possible permutations, exactly once, and that's your piece of music. Young was particularly influenced by the works of Anton Webern, one of the earliest serialists: [Excerpt: Anton Webern, "Cantata number 1 for Soprano, Mixed Chorus, and Orchestra"] That piece we just heard, Webern's "Cantata number 1", was the subject of some of the earliest theoretical discussion of serialism, and in particular led to some discussion of the next step on from serialism. If serialism was all about going through every single permutation of a set, what if you *didn't* permute every element? There was a lot of discussion in the late fifties in music-theoretical circles about the idea of invariance. Normally in music, the interesting thing is what gets changed. To use a very simple example, you might change a melody from a major key to a minor one to make it sound sadder. What theorists at this point were starting to discuss is what happens if you leave something the same, but change the surrounding context, so the thing you *don't* vary sounds different because of the changed context. And going further, what if you don't change the context at all, and merely *imply* a changed context? These ideas were some of those which inspired Young's first major work, his Trio For Strings from 1958, a complex, palindromic, serial piece which is now credited as the first work of minimalism, because the notes in it change so infrequently: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Trio for Strings"] Though I should point out that Young never considers his works truly finished, and constantly rewrites them, and what we just heard is an excerpt from the only recording of the trio ever officially released, which is of the 2015 version. So I can't state for certain how close what we just heard is to the piece he wrote in 1958, except that it sounds very like the written descriptions of it I've read. After writing the Trio For Strings, Young moved to Germany to study with the modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. While studying with Stockhausen, he became interested in the work of John Cage, and started up a correspondence with Cage. On his return to New York he studied with Cage and started writing pieces inspired by Cage, of which the most musical is probably Composition 1960 #7: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Composition 1960 #7"] The score for that piece is a stave on which is drawn a treble clef, the notes B and F#, and the words "To be held for a long Time". Other of his compositions from 1960 -- which are among the few of his compositions which have been published -- include composition 1960 #10 ("To Bob Morris"), the score for which is just the instruction "Draw a straight line and follow it.", and Piano Piece for David Tudor #1, the score for which reads "Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over after the piano eats or decides not to". Most of these compositions were performed as part of a loose New York art collective called Fluxus, all of whom were influenced by Cage and the Dadaists. This collective, led by George Maciunas, sometimes involved Cage himself, but also involved people like Henry Flynt, the inventor of conceptual art, who later became a campaigner against art itself, and who also much to Young's bemusement abandoned abstract music in the mid-sixties to form a garage band with Walter de Maria (who had played drums with the Druds): [Excerpt: Henry Flynt and the Insurrections, "I Don't Wanna"] Much of Young's work was performed at Fluxus concerts given in a New York loft belonging to another member of the collective, Yoko Ono, who co-curated the concerts with Young. One of Ono's mid-sixties pieces, her "Four Pieces for Orchestra" is dedicated to Young, and consists of such instructions as "Count all the stars of that night by heart. The piece ends when all the orchestra members finish counting the stars, or when it dawns. This can be done with windows instead of stars." But while these conceptual ideas remained a huge part of Young's thinking, he soon became interested in two other ideas. The first was the idea of just intonation -- tuning instruments and voices to perfect harmonics, rather than using the subtly-off tuning that is used in Western music. I'm sure I've explained that before in a previous episode, but to put it simply when you're tuning an instrument with fixed pitches like a piano, you have a choice -- you can either tune it so that the notes in one key are perfectly in tune with each other, but then when you change key things go very out of tune, or you can choose to make *everything* a tiny bit, almost unnoticeably, out of tune, but equally so. For the last several hundred years, musicians as a community have chosen the latter course, which was among other things promoted by Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, a collection of compositions which shows how the different keys work together: [Excerpt: Bach (Glenn Gould), "The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II: Fugue in F-sharp minor, BWV 883"] Young, by contrast, has his own esoteric tuning system, which he uses in his own work The Well-Tuned Piano: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] The other idea that Young took on was from Indian music, the idea of the drone. One of the four recordings of Young's music that is available from his Bandcamp, a 1982 recording titled The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath, consists of one hour, thirteen minutes, and fifty-eight seconds of this: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath"] Yes, I have listened to the whole piece. No, nothing else happens. The minimalist composer Terry Riley describes the recording as "a singularly rare contribution that far outshines any other attempts to capture this instrument in recorded media". In 1962, Young started writing pieces based on what he called the "dream chord", a chord consisting of a root, fourth, sharpened fourth, and fifth: [dream chord] That chord had already appeared in his Trio for Strings, but now it would become the focus of much of his work, in pieces like his 1962 piece The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, heard here in a 1982 revision: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer"] That was part of a series of works titled The Four Dreams of China, and Young began to plan an installation work titled Dream House, which would eventually be created, and which currently exists in Tribeca, New York, where it's been in continuous "performance" for thirty years -- and which consists of thirty-two different pure sine wave tones all played continuously, plus purple lighting by Young's wife Marian Zazeela. But as an initial step towards creating this, Young formed a collective called Theatre of Eternal Music, which some of the members -- though never Young himself -- always claim also went by the alternative name The Dream Syndicate. According to John Cale, a member of the group, that name came about because the group tuned their instruments to the 60hz hum of the fridge in Young's apartment, which Cale called "the key of Western civilisation". According to Cale, that meant the fundamental of the chords they played was 10hz, the frequency of alpha waves when dreaming -- hence the name. The group initially consisted of Young, Zazeela, the photographer Billy Name, and percussionist Angus MacLise, but by this recording in 1964 the lineup was Young, Zazeela, MacLise, Tony Conrad and John Cale: [Excerpt: "Cale, Conrad, Maclise, Young, Zazeela - The Dream Syndicate 2 IV 64-4"] That recording, like any others that have leaked by the 1960s version of the Theatre of Eternal Music or Dream Syndicate, is of disputed legality, because Young and Zazeela claim to this day that what the group performed were La Monte Young's compositions, while the other two surviving members, Cale and Conrad, claim that their performances were improvisational collaborations and should be equally credited to all the members, and so there have been lawsuits and countersuits any time anyone has released the recordings. John Cale, the youngest member of the group, was also the only one who wasn't American. He'd been born in Wales in 1942, and had had the kind of childhood that, in retrospect, seems guaranteed to lead to eccentricity. He was the product of a mixed-language marriage -- his father, William, was an English speaker while his mother, Margaret, spoke Welsh, but the couple had moved in on their marriage with Margaret's mother, who insisted that only Welsh could be spoken in her house. William didn't speak Welsh, and while he eventually picked up the basics from spending all his life surrounded by Welsh-speakers, he refused on principle to capitulate to his mother-in-law, and so remained silent in the house. John, meanwhile, grew up a monolingual Welsh speaker, and didn't start to learn English until he went to school when he was seven, and so couldn't speak to his father until then even though they lived together. Young John was extremely unwell for most of his childhood, both physically -- he had bronchial problems for which he had to take a cough mixture that was largely opium to help him sleep at night -- and mentally. He was hospitalised when he was sixteen with what was at first thought to be meningitis, but turned out to be a psychosomatic condition, the result of what he has described as a nervous breakdown. That breakdown is probably connected to the fact that during his teenage years he was sexually assaulted by two adults in positions of authority -- a vicar and a music teacher -- and felt unable to talk to anyone about this. He was, though, a child prodigy and was playing viola with the National Youth Orchestra of Wales from the age of thirteen, and listening to music by Schoenberg, Webern, and Stravinsky. He was so talented a multi-instrumentalist that at school he was the only person other than one of the music teachers and the headmaster who was allowed to use the piano -- which led to a prank on his very last day at school. The headmaster would, on the last day, hit a low G on the piano to cue the assembly to stand up, and Cale had placed a comb on the string, muting it and stopping the note from sounding -- in much the same way that his near-namesake John Cage was "preparing" pianos for his own compositions in the USA. Cale went on to Goldsmith's College to study music and composition, under Humphrey Searle, one of Britain's greatest proponents of serialism who had himself studied under Webern. Cale's main instrument was the viola, but he insisted on also playing pieces written for the violin, because they required more technical skill. For his final exam he chose to play Hindemith's notoriously difficult Viola Sonata: [Excerpt: Hindemith Viola Sonata] While at Goldsmith's, Cale became friendly with Cornelius Cardew, a composer and cellist who had studied with Stockhausen and at the time was a great admirer of and advocate for the works of Cage and Young (though by the mid-seventies Cardew rejected their work as counter-revolutionary bourgeois imperialism). Through Cardew, Cale started to correspond with Cage, and with George Maciunas and other members of Fluxus. In July 1963, just after he'd finished his studies at Goldsmith's, Cale presented a festival there consisting of an afternoon and an evening show. These shows included the first British performances of several works including Cardew's Autumn '60 for Orchestra -- a piece in which the musicians were given blank staves on which to write whatever part they wanted to play, but a separate set of instructions in *how* to play the parts they'd written. Another piece Cale presented in its British premiere at that show was Cage's "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra": [Excerpt: John Cage, "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra"] In the evening show, they performed Two Pieces For String Quartet by George Brecht (in which the musicians polish their instruments with dusters, making scraping sounds as they clean them), and two new pieces by Cale, one of which involved a plant being put on the stage, and then the performer, Robin Page, screaming from the balcony at the plant that it would die, then running down, through the audience, and onto the stage, screaming abuse and threats at the plant. The final piece in the show was a performance by Cale (the first one in Britain) of La Monte Young's "X For Henry Flynt". For this piece, Cale put his hands together and then smashed both his arms onto the keyboard as hard as he could, over and over. After five minutes some of the audience stormed the stage and tried to drag the piano away from him. Cale followed the piano on his knees, continuing to bang the keys, and eventually the audience gave up in defeat and Cale the performer won. After this Cale moved to the USA, to further study composition, this time with Iannis Xenakis, the modernist composer who had also taught Mickey Baker orchestration after Baker left Mickey and Sylvia, and who composed such works as "Orient Occident": [Excerpt: Iannis Xenakis, "Orient Occident"] Cale had been recommended to Xenakis as a student by Aaron Copland, who thought the young man was probably a genius. But Cale's musical ambitions were rather too great for Tanglewood, Massachusetts -- he discovered that the institute had eighty-eight pianos, the same number as there are keys on a piano keyboard, and thought it would be great if for a piece he could take all eighty-eight pianos, put them all on different boats, sail the boats out onto a lake, and have eighty-eight different musicians each play one note on each piano, while the boats sank with the pianos on board. For some reason, Cale wasn't allowed to perform this composition, and instead had to make do with one where he pulled an axe out of a single piano and slammed it down on a table. Hardly the same, I'm sure you'll agree. From Tanglewood, Cale moved on to New York, where he soon became part of the artistic circles surrounding John Cage and La Monte Young. It was at this time that he joined Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, and also took part in a performance with Cage that would get Cale his first television exposure: [Excerpt: John Cale playing Erik Satie's "Vexations" on "I've Got a Secret"] That's Cale playing through "Vexations", a piece by Erik Satie that wasn't published until after Satie's death, and that remained in obscurity until Cage popularised -- if that's the word -- the piece. The piece, which Cage had found while studying Satie's notes, seems to be written as an exercise and has the inscription (in French) "In order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." Cage interpreted that, possibly correctly, as an instruction that the piece should be played eight hundred and forty times straight through, and so he put together a performance of the piece, the first one ever, by a group he called the Pocket Theatre Piano Relay Team, which included Cage himself, Cale, Joshua Rifkin, and several other notable musical figures, who took it in turns playing the piece. For that performance, which ended up lasting eighteen hours, there was an entry fee of five dollars, and there was a time-clock in the lobby. Audience members punched in and punched out, and got a refund of five cents for every twenty minutes they'd spent listening to the music. Supposedly, at the end, one audience member yelled "Encore!" A week later, Cale appeared on "I've Got a Secret", a popular game-show in which celebrities tried to guess people's secrets (and which is where that performance of Cage's "Water Walk" we heard earlier comes from): [Excerpt: John Cale on I've Got a Secret] For a while, Cale lived with a friend of La Monte Young's, Terry Jennings, before moving in to a flat with Tony Conrad, one of the other members of the Theatre of Eternal Music. Angus MacLise lived in another flat in the same building. As there was not much money to be made in avant-garde music, Cale also worked in a bookshop -- a job Cage had found him -- and had a sideline in dealing drugs. But rents were so cheap at this time that Cale and Conrad only had to work part-time, and could spend much of their time working on the music they were making with Young. Both were string players -- Conrad violin, Cale viola -- and they soon modified their instruments. Conrad merely attached pickups to his so it could be amplified, but Cale went much further. He filed down the viola's bridge so he could play three strings at once, and he replaced the normal viola strings with thicker, heavier, guitar and mandolin strings. This created a sound so loud that it sounded like a distorted electric guitar -- though in late 1963 and early 1964 there were very few people who even knew what a distorted guitar sounded like. Cale and Conrad were also starting to become interested in rock and roll music, to which neither of them had previously paid much attention, because John Cage's music had taught them to listen for music in sounds they previously dismissed. In particular, Cale became fascinated with the harmonies of the Everly Brothers, hearing in them the same just intonation that Young advocated for: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "All I Have to Do is Dream"] And it was with this newfound interest in rock and roll that Cale and Conrad suddenly found themselves members of a manufactured pop band. The two men had been invited to a party on the Lower East Side, and there they'd been introduced to Terry Phillips of Pickwick Records. Phillips had seen their long hair and asked if they were musicians, so they'd answered "yes". He asked if they were in a band, and they said yes. He asked if that band had a drummer, and again they said yes. By this point they realised that he had assumed they were rock guitarists, rather than experimental avant-garde string players, but they decided to play along and see where this was going. Phillips told them that if they brought along their drummer to Pickwick's studios the next day, he had a job for them. The two of them went along with Walter de Maria, who did play the drums a little in between his conceptual art work, and there they were played a record: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] It was explained to them that Pickwick made knock-off records -- soundalikes of big hits, and their own records in the style of those hits, all played by a bunch of session musicians and put out under different band names. This one, by "the Primitives", they thought had a shot at being an actual hit, even though it was a dance-craze song about a dance where one partner lays on the floor and the other stamps on their head. But if it was going to be a hit, they needed an actual band to go out and perform it, backing the singer. How would Cale, Conrad, and de Maria like to be three quarters of the Primitives? It sounded fun, but of course they weren't actually guitarists. But as it turned out, that wasn't going to be a problem. They were told that the guitars on the track had all been tuned to one note -- not even to an open chord, like we talked about Steve Cropper doing last episode, but all the strings to one note. Cale and Conrad were astonished -- that was exactly the kind of thing they'd been doing in their drone experiments with La Monte Young. Who was this person who was independently inventing the most advanced ideas in experimental music but applying them to pop songs? And that was how they met Lou Reed: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] Where Cale and Conrad were avant-gardeists who had only just started paying attention to rock and roll music, rock and roll was in Lou Reed's blood, but there were a few striking similarities between him and Cale, even though at a glance their backgrounds could not have seemed more different. Reed had been brought up in a comfortably middle-class home in Long Island, but despised the suburban conformity that surrounded him from a very early age, and by his teens was starting to rebel against it very strongly. According to one classmate “Lou was always more advanced than the rest of us. The drinking age was eighteen back then, so we all started drinking at around sixteen. We were drinking quarts of beer, but Lou was smoking joints. He didn't do that in front of many people, but I knew he was doing it. While we were looking at girls in Playboy, Lou was reading Story of O. He was reading the Marquis de Sade, stuff that I wouldn't even have thought about or known how to find.” But one way in which Reed was a typical teenager of the period was his love for rock and roll, especially doo-wop. He'd got himself a guitar, but only had one lesson -- according to the story he would tell on numerous occasions, he turned up with a copy of "Blue Suede Shoes" and told the teacher he only wanted to know how to play the chords for that, and he'd work out the rest himself. Reed and two schoolfriends, Alan Walters and Phil Harris, put together a doo-wop trio they called The Shades, because they wore sunglasses, and a neighbour introduced them to Bob Shad, who had been an A&R man for Mercury Records and was starting his own new label. He renamed them the Jades and took them into the studio with some of the best New York session players, and at fourteen years old Lou Reed was writing songs and singing them backed by Mickey Baker and King Curtis: [Excerpt: The Jades, "Leave Her For Me"] Sadly the Jades' single was a flop -- the closest it came to success was being played on Murray the K's radio show, but on a day when Murray the K was off ill and someone else was filling in for him, much to Reed's disappointment. Phil Harris, the lead singer of the group, got to record some solo sessions after that, but the Jades split up and it would be several years before Reed made any more records. Partly this was because of Reed's mental health, and here's where things get disputed and rather messy. What we know is that in his late teens, just after he'd gone off to New
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