Podcasts about happy xmas war

Welcome to a special Christmas and Hanukkah episode of Have Kids They Said! Nicole and Rich dive into holiday cheer as they chat about Christmas songs, Rich's love for living on the edge, and how Mariah Carey's rendition of O Holy Night never fails to bring Nicole to tears. Rich sings the praises of classic Jewish dishes like kugel, latkes, brisket, and a unique apple kugel. Meanwhile, Nicole reveals her husband Matt Ryan's favorite tearjerker Christmas song, John Lennon's Happy Xmas (War is Over), sparking a debate about the song's singers—and everyone gets it wrong.Rich shares his list of favorite Christmas movies, declaring the classic A Christmas Story overrated, which leads to a heated argument about whether Die Hard is truly a Christmas movie. The holiday chaos doesn't stop there—Nicole's elf has a disastrous Florida accident, leading to a cascade of lies for the kids. And finally, Nicole spills the tea about her cousin's unexpected crush on Jesus—do you think he was hot?Get ready for laughs, debates, and plenty of holiday spirit in this festive episode! Have Kids, They Said... is a SiriusXM Network Podcast made by Nicole Ryan and Rich Davis.If you'd like to send us a message or ask a question email us at HKTSpod@gmail.comFollow on social media:Instagram @havekidstheysaidpodNicole @mashupnicoleRich @richdavisand @siriusxm

Sad news this week as we mark the passing of both novelist David A McIntee and fellow podcaster  Siobahn Gallichan, and we extend our sympathies to their loved ones at a difficult time. There's also news of Season 7 coming to the Doctor Who Collection Blu-ray series, the lead up to Doctor Who Christmas Week (culminating in “Joy To The World” on Christmas Day), extended badinage about a mail order Dalek model kit that extends over the next decade(!), Tom Baker's Xmas message, and an interview previewing “The War Games in Colour” with Mark Ayres and Kieran Highman! Links: Support Radio Free Skaro on Patreon New trailer for “Joy to the World” Steven Moffat on the Doctor Who Podcast Russell T Davies and Writer Steven Moffat Tease Christmas Special Rose Ayling-Ellis MBE to guest star in Doctor Who Season 2 Build your own 1:2 scale Dalek Season 7 Collection blu-ray set announced Season 7 PDF content, courtesy Richard Bignell Doctor Who Season 25 Canada preorder link, North American release due Feb 25 Radio Times Tom Baker 50th Anniversary Bookazine Tom Baker Christmas 2024 message Big Finish The Worlds of Doctor Who – Dark Gallifrey: Missy Parts One to Three starts April 2025 David A McIntee died Siobhan Gallichan died Interview: Chicago TARDIS Mark Ayres Kieran Highman

Get into the holiday spirit with this special episode of The After Party! Originally released on December 13, 2021, Chris and Chris dive into John Lennon and Yoko Ono's timeless anthem “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).” From its powerful anti-war message to its enduring place in holiday music history, they explore how this 1971 classic became both a protest song and a seasonal favorite. If you enjoy this trip down memory lane, consider treating yourself to ad-free episodes and exclusive content by joining the Patreon at ChrisDeMakes.com. For now, enjoy this festive After Party and celebrate the season with a song that's as meaningful today as ever! Chris DeMakes A Podcast is brought to you by DistroKid, the ultimate partner for taking your music to the next level. Get 30% off your first YEAR with DistroKid by signing up at http://distrokid.com/vip/demakes  If you love Chris DeMakes A Podcast and you'd like to support the show AND get weekly bonus episodes of The After Party podcast, head to http://www.ChrisDeMakes.com to sign up for the Supporting Cast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this annual Christmas Episode, host Paul Romanuk digs into a song that is well on the way (if it isn't already) to being a traditional Christmas season standard: the 1971 John Lennon/Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band song Happy Xmas (War Is Over).EPISODE NOTES:-The song was inspired by and grew out of John & Yoko's 1969 global billboard peace campaign. Here is a photo (from NYC) of one of the billboards they had put up in 12 major cities around the world.-The producer of the song, Phil Spector, produced a Christmas album in 1963 called A Christmas Gift To You, which I talk about in the episode. Here's the story behind that album. -Here's the original 45 sleeve for the song.-Here's an original pressing, which was on green vinyl, featuring the John & Yoko morphing faces label.

Merry Christmas to all of our Classic Vinyl Podcast listeners. This episode, Justin and Tyler review John Lennon and The Plastic Ono Band's 1971 Christmas song release of Happy XMAS (War Is Over). Both a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year song along with an anti-war song all in one, give it a listen and let us know what you think, If You Want It! Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year from Justin and Tyler! Support our podcast and buy us a beer https://www.buymeacoffee.com/classicvinylpod

We're taking a break for the holiday season, so we pulled a fun and timely discussion from our back catalog. In this episode from December, 2018, we look at the two most famous—and most polarizing—holiday songs from the solo Beatles: Paul's "Wonderful Christmastime" and John's "Happy Xmas (War is Over)." Are these two songs as far apart from each other as they seem? Other songs/versions we reference in the episode: “Wonderful Christmastime” — Shins cover (2012) “Wonderful Christmastime” — Monkees cover (2018) Miley Cyrus, Mark Ronson ft. Sean Ono Lennon - "Happy Xmas (War is Over)" Official Performance (2018) “Listen, the Snow is Falling” (Plastic Ono Band, 1971) --------------------- +Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter/X for photos, videos, and more from this episode & past episodes — we're @bcthebeatles everywhere. +Follow BC the Beatles on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening now. +Buy us a coffee! www.ko-fi.com/bcthebeatles +Contact us at bcthebeatles@gmail.com

Mark, Bryson, Jacob and NEW permanent co-host Josh are back to weigh in on the Blue Jays missing out on Shohei Ohtani, as well as where the team should pivot to next. Does Cody Bellinger make sense? What about Christian Yelich or Jorge Soler? Any chance of a Marcus Stroman reunion?Subscribe to Section 138 on YouTube for video podcasts. Follow @section138pod on Instagram, Twitter and TikTok. Join the Discord community or support our podcast at linktr.ee/section138pod.Music: Intro - "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year," Andy Williams. Outro - "Happy Xmas (War is Over)," John Lennon.

A modo de sensibilizar sobre la situación de la guerra en Ucrania, en Radio Recital hemos recreado el video musical de Happy Xmas (War is Over) de John Lennon y Yoko Ono, esta vez con imágenes de la guerra en Ucrania, y el desastre y la destrucción que está provocando el kremlin con su invasión a Ucrania.

Friedensnoten # 22 – wann sind sie glaubwürdiger als an Weihnachten? Die Jazzsängerin und Lyrikerin Alexa Rodrian setzt sich mit dem Song Happy X-mas – War is over von John Lennon auseinander, flicht Gedanken zur Dissonanz hinein und hat den Song neu arrangiert. Link zum Song: https://youtu.be/P7yHbWE_8a8 Link zum Text: https://www.rubikon.news/artikel/leben-im-vielklang

Tune in every Friday for more WOW Report. 10) “One Day at Christmas” by Lizzo @01:00 9) “Mi Burrito” by Choco @04:16 8) “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday” by Wizzard @07:30 7) “What Child is This?” by Mary J Blige & Andreas Bocelli @11:10 6) “In Our World” by Emmet Otter's Jugband Christmas @13:50 5) “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” by John Lennon @16:20 4) “River” by Joni Mitchell @19:40 3) “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” by Judy Garland @22:22 2) “Last Christmas” by WHAM! @24:12 1) “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” by Darlene Love "Christmas Time Is Here" by Vince Guaraldi Trio @29:33

Episode 160 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Flowers in the Rain" by the Move, their transition into ELO, and the career of Roy Wood. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "The Chipmunk Song" by Canned Heat. 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/ Note I say "And on its first broadcast, as George Martin's theme tune for the new station faded, Tony Blackburn reached for a record." -- I should point out that after Martin's theme fades, Blackburn talks over a brief snatch of a piece by Johnny Dankworth. Resources As so many of the episodes recently have had no Mixcloud due to the number of songs by one artist, I've decided to start splitting the mixes of the recordings excerpted in the podcasts into two parts. Here's part one . I had problems uploading part two, but will attempt to get that up shortly. There are not many books about Roy Wood, and I referred to both of the two that seem to exist -- this biography by John van der Kiste, and this album guide by James R Turner.  I also referred to this biography of Jeff Lynne by van der Kiste, The Electric Light Orchestra Story by Bev Bevan, and Mr Big by Don Arden with Mick Wall.  Most of the more comprehensive compilations of the Move's material are out of print, but this single-CD-plus-DVD anthology is the best compilation that's in print. This is the one collection of Wood's solo and Wizzard hits that seems currently in print, and for those who want to investigate further, this cheap box set has the last Move album, the first ELO album, the first Wizzard album, Wood's solo Boulders, and a later Wood solo album, for the price of a single CD. Transcript Before I start, a brief note. This episode deals with organised crime, and so contains some mild descriptions of violence, and also has some mention of mental illness and drug use, though not much of any of those things. And it's probably also important to warn people that towards the end there's some Christmas music, including excerpts of a song that is inescapable at this time of year in the UK, so those who work in retail environments and the like may want to listen to this later, at a point when they're not totally sick of hearing Christmas records. Most of the time, the identity of the party in government doesn't make that much of a difference to people's everyday lives.  At least in Britain, there tends to be a consensus ideology within the limits of which governments of both main parties tend to work. They will make a difference at the margins, and be more or less competent, and more or less conservative or left-wing, more or less liberal or authoritarian, but life will, broadly speaking, continue along much as before for most people. Some will be a little better or worse off, but in general steering the ship of state is a matter of a lot of tiny incremental changes, not of sudden u-turns. But there have been a handful of governments that have made big, noticeable, changes to the structure of society, reforms that for better or worse affect the lives of every person in the country. Since the end of the Second World War there have been two UK governments that made economic changes of this nature. The Labour government under Clement Atlee which came into power in 1945, and which dramatically expanded the welfare state, introduced the National Health Service, and nationalised huge swathes of major industries, created the post-war social democratic consensus which would be kept to with only minor changes by successive governments of both major parties for decades. The next government to make changes to the economy of such a radical nature was the Conservative government which came to power under Margaret Thatcher in 1979, which started the process of unravelling that social democratic consensus and replacing it with a far more hypercapitalist economic paradigm, which would last for the next several decades. It's entirely possible that the current Conservative government, in leaving the EU, has made a similarly huge change, but we won't know that until we have enough distance from the event to know what long-term changes it's caused. Those are economic changes. Arguably at least as impactful was the Labour government led by Harold Wilson that came to power in 1964, which did not do much to alter the economic consensus, but revolutionised the social order at least as much. Largely because of the influence of Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary for much of that time, between 1964 and the end of the sixties, Britain abolished the death penalty for murder, decriminalised some sex acts between men in private, abolished corporal punishment in prisons, legalised abortion in certain circumstances, and got rid of censorship in the theatre. They also vastly increased spending on education, and made many other changes. By the end of their term, Britain had gone from being a country with laws reflecting a largely conservative, authoritarian, worldview to one whose laws were some of the most liberal in Europe, and society had started changing to match. There were exceptions, though, and that government did make some changes that were illiberal. They brought in increased restrictions on immigration, starting a worrying trend that continues to this day of governments getting ever crueler to immigrants, and they added LSD to the list of illegal drugs. And they brought in the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act, banning the pirate stations. We've mentioned pirate radio stations very briefly, but never properly explained them. In Britain, at this point, there was a legal monopoly on broadcasting. Only the BBC could run a radio station in the UK, and thanks to agreements with the Musicians' Union, the BBC could only play a very small amount of recorded music, with everything else having to be live performances or spoken word. And because it had a legal obligation to provide something for everyone, that meant the tiny amount of recorded music that was played on the radio had to cover all genres, meaning that even while Britain was going through the most important changes in its musical history, pop records were limited to an hour or two a week on British radio. Obviously, that wasn't going to last while there was money to be made, and the record companies in particular wanted to have somewhere to showcase their latest releases. At the start of the sixties, Radio Luxembourg had become popular, broadcasting from continental Europe but largely playing shows that had been pre-recorded in London. But of course, that was far enough away that it made listening to the transmissions difficult. But a solution presented itself: [Excerpt: The Fortunes, "Caroline"] Radio Caroline still continues to this day, largely as an Internet-based radio station, but in the mid-sixties it was something rather different. It was one of a handful of radio stations -- the pirate stations -- that broadcast from ships in international waters. The ships would stay three miles off the coast of Britain, close enough for their broadcasts to be clearly heard in much of the country, but outside Britain's territorial waters. They soon became hugely popular, with Radio Caroline and Radio London the two most popular, and introduced DJs like Tony Blackburn, Dave Lee Travis, Kenny Everett, and John Peel to the airwaves of Britain. The stations ran on bribery and advertising, and if you wanted a record to get into the charts one of the things you had to do was bribe one of the big pirate stations to playlist it, and with this corruption came violence, which came to a head when as we heard in the episode on “Here Comes the Night”, in 1966 Major Oliver Smedley, a failed right-wing politician and one of the directors of Radio Caroline, got a gang of people to board an abandoned sea fort from which a rival station was broadcasting and retrieve some equipment he claimed belonged to him. The next day, Reginald Calvert, the owner of the rival station, went to Smedley's home to confront him, and Smedley shot him dead, claiming self-defence. The jury in Smedley's subsequent trial took only a minute to find him not guilty and award him two hundred and fifty guineas to cover his costs. This was the last straw for the government, which was already concerned that the pirates' transmitters were interfering with emergency services transmissions, and that proper royalties weren't being paid for the music broadcast (though since much of the music was only on there because of payola, this seems a little bit of a moot point).  They introduced legislation which banned anyone in the UK from supplying the pirate ships with records or other supplies, or advertising on the stations. They couldn't do anything about the ships themselves, because they were outside British jurisdiction, but they could make sure that nobody could associate with them while remaining in the UK. The BBC was to regain its monopoly (though in later years some commercial radio stations were allowed to operate). But as well as the stick, they needed the carrot. The pirate stations *had* been filling a real need, and the biggest of them were getting millions of listeners every day. So the arrangements with the Musicians' Union and the record labels were changed, and certain BBC stations were now allowed to play a lot more recorded music per day. I haven't been able to find accurate figures anywhere -- a lot of these things were confidential agreements -- but it seems to have been that the so-called "needle time" rules were substantially relaxed, allowing the BBC to separate what had previously been the Light Programme -- a single radio station that played all kinds of popular music, much of it live performances -- into two radio stations that were each allowed to play as much as twelve hours of recorded music per day, which along with live performances and between-track commentary from DJs was enough to allow a full broadcast schedule. One of these stations, Radio 2, was aimed at older listeners, and to start with mostly had programmes of what we would now refer to as Muzak, mixed in with the pop music of an older generation -- crooners and performers like Englebert Humperdinck. But another, Radio 1, was aimed at a younger audience and explicitly modelled on the pirate stations, and featured many of the DJs who had made their names on those stations. And on its first broadcast, as George Martin's theme tune for the new station faded, Tony Blackburn reached for a record. At different times Blackburn has said either that he was just desperately reaching for whatever record came to hand or that he made a deliberate choice because the record he chose had such a striking opening that it would be the perfect way to start a new station: [Excerpt: Tony Blackburn first radio show into "Flowers in the Rain" by the Move] You may remember me talking in the episode on "Here Comes the Night" about how in 1964 Dick Rowe of Decca, the manager Larry Page, and the publicist and co-owner of Radio Caroline Phil Solomon were all trying to promote something called Brumbeat as the answer to Merseybeat – Brummies, for those who don't know, are people from Birmingham. Brumbeat never took off the way Merseybeat did, but several bands did get a chance to make records, among them Gerry Levene and the Avengers: [Excerpt: Gerry Levene and the Avengers, "Dr. Feelgood"] That was the only single the Avengers made, and the B-side wasn't even them playing, but a bunch of session musicians under the direction of Bert Berns, and the group split up soon afterwards, but several of the members would go on to have rather important careers. According to some sources, one of their early drummers was John Bohnam, who you can be pretty sure will be turning up later in the story, while the drummer on that track was Graeme Edge, who would later go on to co-found the Moody Blues.  But today it's the guitarist we'll be looking at. Roy Wood had started playing music when he was very young -- he'd had drum lessons when he was five years old, the only formal musical tuition he ever had, and he'd played harmonica around working men's clubs as a kid. And as a small child he'd loved classical music, particularly Tchaikovsky and Elgar. But it wasn't until he was twelve that he decided that he wanted to be a guitarist. He went to see the Shadows play live, and was inspired by the sound of Hank Marvin's guitar, which he later described as sounding "like it had been dipped in Dettol or something": [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Apache"] He started begging his parents for a guitar, and got one for his thirteenth birthday -- and by the time he was fourteen he was already in a band, the Falcons, whose members were otherwise eighteen to twenty years old, but who needed a lead guitarist who could play like Marvin. Wood had picked up the guitar almost preternaturally quickly, as he would later pick up every instrument he turned his hand to, and he'd also got the equipment. His friend Jeff Lynne later said "I first saw Roy playing in a church hall in Birmingham and I think his group was called the Falcons. And I could tell he was dead posh because he had a Fender Stratocaster and a Vox AC30 amplifier. The business at the time. I mean, if you've got those, that's it, you're made." It was in the Falcons that Wood had first started trying to write songs, at first instrumentals in the style of the Shadows, but then after the Beatles hit the charts he realised it was possible for band members to write their own material, and started hesitantly trying to write a few actual songs. Wood had moved on from the Falcons to Gerry Levene's band, one of the biggest local bands in Birmingham, when he was sixteen, which is also when he left formal education, dropping out from art school -- he's later said that he wasn't expelled as such, but that he and the school came to a mutual agreement that he wouldn't go back there. And when Gerry Levene and the Avengers fell apart after their one chance at success hadn't worked out, he moved on again to an even bigger band. Mike Sheridan and the Night Riders had had two singles out already, both produced by Cliff Richard's producer Norrie Paramor, and while they hadn't charted they were clearly going places. They needed a new guitarist, and Wood was by far the best of the dozen or so people who auditioned, even though Sheridan was very hesitant at first -- the Night Riders were playing cabaret, and all dressed smartly at all times, and this sixteen-year-old guitarist had turned up wearing clothes made by his sister and ludicrous pointy shoes. He was the odd man out, but he was so good that none of the other players could hold a candle to him, and he was in the Night Riders by the time of their third single, "What a Sweet Thing That Was": [Excerpt: Mike Sheridan and the Night Riders, "What a Sweet Thing That Was"] Sheridan later said "Roy was and still is, in my opinion, an unbelievable talent. As stubborn as a mule and a complete extrovert. Roy changed the group by getting us into harmonies and made us realize there was better material around with more than three chords to play. This was our turning point and we became a group's group and a bigger name." -- though there are few other people who would describe Wood as extroverted, most people describing him as painfully shy off-stage. "What a  Sweet Thing That Was" didn't have any success, and nor did its follow-up, "Here I Stand", which came out in January 1965. But by that point, Wood had got enough of a reputation that he was already starting to guest on records by other bands on the Birmingham scene, like "Pretty Things" by Danny King and the Mayfair Set: [Excerpt: Danny King and the Mayfair Set, "Pretty Things"] After their fourth single was a flop, Mike Sheridan and the Night Riders changed their name to Mike Sheridan's Lot, and the B-side of their first single under the new name was a Roy Wood song, the first time one of his songs was recorded. Unfortunately the song, modelled on "It's Not Unusual" by Tom Jones, didn't come off very well, and Sheridan blamed himself for what everyone was agreed was a lousy sounding record: [Excerpt: Mike Sheridan's Lot, "Make Them Understand"] Mike Sheridan's Lot put out one final single, but the writing was on the wall for the group. Wood left, and soon after so did Sheridan himself. The remaining members regrouped under the name The Idle Race, with Wood's friend Jeff Lynne as their new singer and guitarist. But Wood wouldn't remain without a band for long. He'd recently started hanging out with another band, Carl Wayne and the Vikings, who had also released a couple of singles, on Pye: [Excerpt: Carl Wayne and the Vikings, "What's the Matter Baby"] But like almost every band from Birmingham up to this point, the Vikings' records had done very little, and their drummer had quit, and been replaced by Bev Bevan, who had been in yet another band that had gone nowhere, Denny Laine and the Diplomats, who had released one single under the name of their lead singer Nicky James, featuring the Breakaways, the girl group who would later sing on "Hey Joe", on backing vocals: [Excerpt: Nicky James, "My Colour is Blue"] Bevan had joined Carl Wayne's group, and they'd recorded one track together, a cover version of "My Girl", which was only released in the US, and which sank without a trace: [Excerpt: Carl Wayne and the Vikings, "My Girl"] It was around this time that Wood started hanging around with the Vikings, and they would all complain about how if you were playing the Birmingham circuit you were stuck just playing cover versions, and couldn't do anything more interesting.  They were also becoming more acutely aware of how successful they *could* have been, because one of the Brumbeat bands had become really big. The Moody Blues, a supergroup of players from the best bands in Birmingham who featured Bev Bevan's old bandmate Denny Laine and Wood's old colleague Graeme Edge, had just hit number one with their version of "Go Now": [Excerpt: The Moody Blues, "Go Now"] So they knew the potential for success was there, but they were all feeling trapped. But then Ace Kefford, the bass player for the Vikings, went to see Davy Jones and the Lower Third playing a gig: [Excerpt: Davy Jones and the Lower Third, "You've Got a Habit of Leaving"] Also at the gig was Trevor Burton, the guitarist for Danny King and the Mayfair Set. The two of them got chatting to Davy Jones after the gig, and eventually the future David Bowie told them that the two of them should form their own band if they were feeling constricted in their current groups. They decided to do just that, and they persuaded Carl Wayne from Kefford's band to join them, and got in Wood.  Now they just needed a drummer. Their first choice was John Bonham, the former drummer for Gerry Levene and the Avengers who was now drumming in a band with Kefford's uncle and Nicky James from the Diplomats. But Bonham and Wayne didn't get on, and so Bonham decided to remain in the group he was in, and instead they turned to Bev Bevan, the Vikings' new drummer.  (Of the other two members of the Vikings, one went on to join Mike Sheridan's Lot in place of Wood, before leaving at the same time as Sheridan and being replaced by Lynne, while the other went on to join Mike Sheridan's New Lot, the group Sheridan formed after leaving his old group. The Birmingham beat group scene seems to have only had about as many people as there were bands, with everyone ending up a member of twenty different groups). The new group called themselves the Move, because they were all moving on from other groups, and it was a big move for all of them. Many people advised them not to get together, saying they were better off where they were, or taking on offers they'd got from more successful groups -- Carl Wayne had had an offer from a group called the Spectres, who would later become famous as Status Quo, while Wood had been tempted by Tony Rivers and the Castaways, a group who at the time were signed to Immediate Records, and who did Beach Boys soundalikes and covers: [Excerpt: Tony Rivers and the Castaways, "Girl Don't Tell Me"] Wood was a huge fan of the Beach Boys and would have fit in with Rivers, but decided he'd rather try something truly new. After their first gig, most of the people who had warned against the group changed their minds. Bevan's best friend, Bobby Davis, told Bevan that while he'd disliked all the other groups Bevan had played in, he liked this one. (Davis would later become a famous comedian, and have a top five single himself in the seventies, produced by Jeff Lynne and with Bevan on the drums, under his stage name Jasper Carrott): [Excerpt: Jasper Carrott, "Funky Moped"] Most of their early sets were cover versions, usually of soul and Motown songs, but reworked in the group's unique style. All five of the band could sing, four of them well enough to be lead vocalists in their own right (Bevan would add occasional harmonies or sing novelty numbers) and so they became known for their harmonies -- Wood talked at the time about how he wanted the band to have Beach Boys harmonies but over instruments that sounded like the Who. And while they were mostly doing cover versions live, Wood was busily writing songs. Their first recording session was for local radio, and at that session they did cover versions of songs by Brenda Lee, the Isley Brothers, the Orlons, the Marvelettes, and Betty Everett, but they also performed four songs written by Wood, with each member of the front line taking a lead vocal, like this one with Kefford singing: [Excerpt: The Move, "You're the One I Need"] The group were soon signed by Tony Secunda, the manager of the Moody Blues, who set about trying to get the group as much publicity as possible. While Carl Wayne, as the only member who didn't play an instrument, ended up the lead singer on most of the group's early records, Secunda started promoting Kefford, who was younger and more conventionally attractive than Wayne, and who had originally put the group together, as the face of the group, while Wood was doing most of the heavy lifting with the music. Wood quickly came to dislike performing live, and to wish he could take the same option as Brian Wilson and stay home and write songs and make records while the other four went out and performed, so Kefford and Wayne taking the spotlight from him didn't bother him at the time, but it set the group up for constant conflicts about who was actually the leader of the group. Wood was also uncomfortable with the image that Secunda set up for the group. Secunda decided that the group needed to be promoted as "bad boys", and so he got them to dress up as 1930s gangsters, and got them to do things like smash busts of Hitler, or the Rhodesian dictator Ian Smith, on stage. He got them to smash TVs on stage too, and in one publicity stunt he got them to smash up a car, while strippers took their clothes off nearby -- claiming that this was to show that people were more interested in violence than in sex. Wood, who was a very quiet, unassuming, introvert, didn't like this sort of thing, but went along with it. Secunda got the group a regular slot at the Marquee club, which lasted several months until, in one of Secunda's ideas for publicity, Carl Wayne let off smoke bombs on stage which set fire to the stage. The manager came up to try to stop the fire, and Wayne tossed the manager's wig into the flames, and the group were banned from the club (though the ban was later lifted). In another publicity stunt, at the time of the 1966 General Election, the group were photographed with "Vote Tory" posters, and issued an invitation to Edward Heath, the leader of the Conservative Party and a keen amateur musician, to join them on stage on keyboards. Sir Edward didn't respond to the invitation. All this publicity led to record company interest. Joe Boyd tried to sign the group to Elektra Records, but much as with The Pink Floyd around the same time, Jac Holzman wasn't interested. Instead they signed with a new production company set up by Denny Cordell, the producer of the Moody Blues' hits. The contract they signed was written on the back of a nude model, as yet another of Secunda's publicity schemes. The group's first single, "Night of Fear" was written by Wood and an early sign of his interest in incorporating classical music into rock: [Excerpt: The Move, "Night of Fear"] Secunda claimed in the publicity that that song was inspired by taking bad acid and having a bad trip, but in truth Wood was more inspired by brown ale than by brown acid -- he and Bev Bevan would never do any drugs other than alcohol. Wayne did take acid once, but didn't like it, though Burton and Kefford would become regular users of most drugs that were going. In truth, the song was not about anything more than being woken up in the middle of the night by an unexpected sound and then being unable to get back to sleep because you're scared of what might be out there. The track reached number two on the charts in the UK, being kept off the top by "I'm a Believer" by the Monkees, and was soon followed up by another song which again led to assumptions of drug use. "I Can Hear the Grass Grow" wasn't about grass the substance, but was inspired by a letter to Health and Efficiency, a magazine which claimed to be about the nudist lifestyle as an excuse for printing photos of naked people at a time before pornography laws were liberalised. The letter was from a reader saying that he listened to pop music on the radio because "where I live it's so quiet I can hear the grass grow!" Wood took that line and turned it into the group's next single, which reached number five: [Excerpt: The Move, "I Can Hear the Grass Grow"] Shortly after that, the group played two big gigs at Alexandra Palace. The first was the Fourteen-Hour Technicolor Dream, which we talked about in the Pink Floyd episode. There Wood had one of the biggest thrills of his life when he walked past John Lennon, who saluted him and then turned to a friend and said "He's brilliant!" -- in the seventies Lennon would talk about how Wood was one of his two favourite British songwriters, and would call the Move "the Hollies with balls". The other gig they played at Alexandra Palace was a "Free the Pirates" benefit show, sponsored by Radio Caroline, to protest the imposition of the Marine Broadcasting (Offences) Act.  Despite that, it was, of course, the group's next single that was the first one to be played on Radio One. And that single was also the one which kickstarted Roy Wood's musical ambitions.  The catalyst for this was Tony Visconti. Visconti was a twenty-three-year-old American who had been in the music business since he was sixteen, working the typical kind of jobs that working musicians do, like being for a time a member of a latter-day incarnation of the Crew-Cuts, the white vocal group who had had hits in the fifties with covers of "Sh'Boom" and “Earth Angel”. He'd also recorded two singles as a duo with his wife Siegrid, which had gone nowhere: [Excerpt: Tony and Siegrid, "Up Here"] Visconti had been working for the Richmond Organisation as a staff songwriter when he'd met the Move's producer Denny Cordell. Cordell was in the US to promote a new single he had released with a group called Procol Harum, "A Whiter Shade of Pale", and Visconti became the first American to hear the record, which of course soon became a massive hit: [Excerpt: Procol Harum, "A Whiter Shade of Pale"] While he was in New York, Cordell also wanted to record a backing track for one of his other hit acts, Georgie Fame. He told Visconti that he'd booked several of the best session players around, like the jazz trumpet legend Clark Terry, and thought it would be a fun session. Visconti asked to look at the charts for the song, out of professional interest, and Cordell was confused -- what charts? The musicians would just make up an arrangement, wouldn't they? Visconti asked what he was talking about, and Cordell talked about how you made records -- you just got the musicians to come into the studio, hung around while they smoked a few joints and worked out what they were going to play, and then got on with it. It wouldn't take more than about twelve hours to get a single recorded that way. Visconti was horrified, and explained that that might be how they did things in London, but if Cordell tried to make a record that way in New York, with an eight-piece group of session musicians who charged union scale, and would charge double scale for arranging work on top, then he'd bankrupt himself. Cordell went pale and said that the session was in an hour, what was he going to do? Luckily, Cordell had a copy of the demo with him, and Visconti, who unlike Cordell was a trained musician, quickly sat down and wrote an arrangement for him, sketching out parts for guitar, bass, drums, piano, sax, and trumpets. The resulting arrangement wasn't perfect -- Visconti had to write the whole thing in less than an hour with no piano to hand -- but it was good enough that Cordell's production assistant on the track, Harvey Brooks of the group Electric Flag, who also played bass on the track, could tweak it in the studio, and the track was recorded quickly, saving Cordell a fortune: [Excerpt: Georgie Fame, "Because I Love You"] One of the other reasons Cordell had been in the US was that he was looking for a production assistant to work with him in the UK to help translate his ideas into language the musicians could understand. According to Visconti he said that he was going to try asking Phil Spector to be his assistant, and Artie Butler if Spector said no.  Astonishingly, assuming he did ask them, neither Phil Spector nor Artie Butler (who was the arranger for records like "Leader of the Pack" and "I'm a Believer" among many, many, others, and who around this time was the one who suggested to Louis Armstrong that he should record "What a Wonderful World") wanted to fly over to the UK to work as Denny Cordell's assistant, and so Cordell turned back to Visconti and invited him to come over to the UK. The main reason Cordell needed an assistant was that he had too much work on his hands -- he was currently in the middle of recording albums for three major hit groups -- Procol Harum, The Move, and Manfred Mann -- and he physically couldn't be in multiple studios at once. Visconti's first work for him was on a Manfred Mann session, where they were recording the Randy Newman song "So Long Dad" for their next single. Cordell produced the rhythm track then left for a Procol Harum session, leaving Visconti to guide the group through the overdubs, including all the vocal parts and the lead instruments: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "So Long Dad"] The next Move single, "Flowers in the Rain", was the first one to benefit from Visconti's arrangement ideas. The band had recorded the track, and Cordell had been unhappy with both the song and performance, thinking it was very weak compared to their earlier singles -- not the first time that Cordell would have a difference of opinion with the band, who he thought of as a mediocre pop group, while they thought of themselves as a heavy rock band who were being neutered in the studio by their producer.  In particular, Cordell didn't like that the band fell slightly out of time in the middle eight of the track. He decided to scrap it, and get the band to record something else. Visconti, though, thought the track could be saved. He told Cordell that what they needed to do was to beat the Beatles, by using a combination of instruments they hadn't thought of. He scored for a quartet of wind instruments -- oboe, flute, clarinet, and French horn, in imitation of Mendelssohn: [Excerpt: The Move, "Flowers in the Rain"] And then, to cover up the slight sloppiness on the middle eight, Visconti had the wind instruments on that section recorded at half speed, so when played back at normal speed they'd sound like pixies and distract from the rhythm section: [Excerpt: The Move, "Flowers in the Rain"] Visconti's instincts were right. The single went to number two, kept off the top spot by Englebert Humperdinck, who spent 1967 keeping pretty much every major British band off number one, and thanks in part to it being the first track played on Radio 1, but also because it was one of the biggest hits of 1967, it's been the single of the Move's that's had the most airplay over the years. Unfortunately, none of the band ever saw a penny in royalties from it. It was because of another of Tony Secunda's bright ideas. Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister at the time, was very close to his advisor Marcia Williams, who started out as his secretary, rose to be his main political advisor, and ended up being elevated to the peerage as Baroness Falkender. There were many, many rumours that Williams was corrupt -- rumours that were squashed by both Wilson and Williams frequently issuing libel writs against newspapers that mentioned them -- though it later turned out that at least some of these were the work of Britain's security services, who believed Wilson to be working for the KGB (and indeed Williams had first met Wilson at a dinner with Khrushchev, though Wilson was very much not a Communist) and were trying to destabilise his government as a result. Their personal closeness also led to persistent rumours that Wilson and Williams were having an affair. And Tony Secunda decided that the best way to promote "Flowers in the Rain" was to print a postcard with a cartoon of Wilson and Williams on it, and send it out. Including sticking a copy through the door of ten Downing St, the Prime Minister's official residence. This backfired *spectacularly*. Wilson sued the Move for libel, even though none of them had known of their manager's plans, and as a result of the settlement it became illegal for any publication to print the offending image (though it can easily be found on the Internet now of course), everyone involved with the record was placed under a permanent legal injunction to never discuss the details of the case, and every penny in performance or songwriting royalties the track earned would go to charities of Harold Wilson's choice. In the 1990s newspaper reports said that the group had up to that point lost out on two hundred thousand pounds in royalties as a result of Secunda's stunt, and given the track's status as a perennial favourite, it's likely they've missed out on a similar amount in the decades since. Incidentally, while every member of the band was banned from ever describing the postcard, I'm not, and since Wilson and Williams are now both dead it's unlikely they'll ever sue me. The postcard is a cartoon in the style of Aubrey Beardsley, and shows Wilson as a grotesque naked homunculus sat on a bed, with Williams naked save for a diaphonous nightgown through which can clearly be seen her breasts and genitals, wearing a Marie Antoinette style wig and eyemask and holding a fan coquettishly, while Wilson's wife peers at them through a gap in the curtains. The text reads "Disgusting Depraved Despicable, though Harold maybe is the only way to describe "Flowers in the Rain" The Move, released Aug 23" The stunt caused huge animosity between the group and Secunda, not only because of the money they lost but also because despite Secunda's attempts to associate them with the Conservative party the previous year, Ace Kefford was upset at an attack on the Labour leader -- his grandfather was a lifelong member of the Labour party and Kefford didn't like the idea of upsetting him. The record also had a knock-on effect on another band. Wood had given the song "Here We Go Round the Lemon Tree" to his friends in The Idle Race, the band that had previously been Mike Sheridan and the Night Riders, and they'd planned to use their version as their first single: [Excerpt: The Idle Race, "Here We Go Round the Lemon Tree"] But the Move had also used the song as the B-side for their own single, and "Flowers in the Rain" was so popular that the B-side also got a lot of airplay. The Idle Race didn't want to be thought of as a covers act, and so "Lemon Tree" was pulled at the last minute and replaced by "Impostors of Life's Magazine", by the group's guitarist Jeff Lynne: [Excerpt: The Idle Race, "Impostors of Life's Magazine"] Before the problems arose, the Move had been working on another single. The A-side, "Cherry Blossom Clinic", was a song about being in a psychiatric hospital, and again had an arrangement by Visconti, who this time conducted a twelve-piece string section: [Excerpt: The Move, "Cherry Blossom Clinic"] The B-side, meanwhile, was a rocker about politics: [Excerpt: The Move, "Vote For Me"] Given the amount of controversy they'd caused, the idea of a song about mental illness backed with one about politics seemed a bad idea, and so "Cherry Blossom Clinic" was kept back as an album track while "Vote For Me" was left unreleased until future compilations. The first Wood knew about "Cherry Blossom Clinic" not being released was when after a gig in London someone -- different sources have it as Carl Wayne or Tony Secunda -- told him that they had a recording session the next morning for their next single and asked what song he planned on recording. When he said he didn't have one, he was sent up to his hotel room with a bottle of Scotch and told not to come down until he had a new song. He had one by 8:30 the next morning, and was so drunk and tired that he had to be held upright by his bandmates in the studio while singing his lead vocal on the track. The song was inspired by "Somethin' Else", a track by Eddie Cochran, one of Wood's idols: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, "Somethin' Else"] Wood took the bass riff from that and used it as the basis for what was the Move's most straight-ahead rock track to date. As 1967 was turning into 1968, almost universally every band was going back to basics, recording stripped down rock and roll tracks, and the Move were no exception. Early takes of "Fire Brigade" featured Matthew Fisher of Procol Harum on piano, but the final version featured just guitar, bass, drums and vocals, plus a few sound effects: [Excerpt: The Move, "Fire Brigade"] While Carl Wayne had sung lead or co-lead on all the Move's previous singles, he was slowly being relegated into the background, and for this one Wood takes the lead vocal on everything except the brief bridge, which Wayne sings: [Excerpt: The Move, "Fire Brigade"] The track went to number three, and while it's not as well-remembered as a couple of other Move singles, it was one of the most influential. Glen Matlock of the Sex Pistols has often said that the riff for "God Save the Queen" is inspired by "Fire Brigade": [Excerpt: The Sex Pistols, "God Save the Queen"] The reversion to a heavier style of rock on "Fire Brigade" was largely inspired by the group's new friend Jimi Hendrix. The group had gone on a package tour with The Pink Floyd (who were at the bottom of the bill), Amen Corner, The Nice, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and had become good friends with Hendrix, often jamming with him backstage. Burton and Kefford had become so enamoured of Hendrix that they'd both permed their hair in imitation of his Afro, though Burton regretted it -- his hair started falling out in huge chunks as a result of the perm, and it took him a full two years to grow it out and back into a more natural style. Burton had started sharing a flat with Noel Redding of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Burton and Wood had also sung backing vocals with Graham Nash of the Hollies on Hendrix's "You Got Me Floatin'", from his Axis: Bold as Love album: [Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "You Got Me Floatin'"] In early 1968, the group's first album came out. In retrospect it's arguably their best, but at the time it felt a little dated -- it was a compilation of tracks recorded between late 1966 and late 1967, and by early 1968 that might as well have been the nineteenth century. The album included their two most recent singles, a few more songs arranged by Visconti, and three cover versions -- versions of Eddie Cochran's "Weekend", Moby Grape's "Hey Grandma", and the old standard "Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart", done copying the Coasters' arrangement with Bev Bevan taking a rare lead vocal. By this time there was a lot of dissatisfaction among the group. Most vocal -- or least vocal, because by this point he was no longer speaking to any of the other members, had been Ace Kefford. Kefford felt he was being sidelined in a band he'd formed and where he was the designated face of the group. He'd tried writing songs, but the only one he'd brought to the group, "William Chalker's Time Machine", had been rejected, and was eventually recorded by a group called The Lemon Tree, whose recording of it was co-produced by Burton and Andy Fairweather-Low of Amen Corner: [Excerpt: The Lemon Tree, "William Chalker's Time Machine"] He was also, though the rest of the group didn't realise it at the time, in the middle of a mental breakdown, which he later attributed to his overuse of acid. By the time the album, titled Move, came out, he'd quit the group. He formed a new group, The Ace Kefford Stand, with Cozy Powell on drums, and they released one single, a cover version of the Yardbirds' "For Your Love", which didn't chart: [Excerpt: The Ace Kefford Stand, "For Your Love"] Kefford recorded a solo album in 1968, but it wasn't released until an archival release in 2003, and he spent most of the next few decades dealing with mental health problems. The group continued on as a four-piece, with Burton moving over to bass. While they thought about what to do -- they were unhappy with Secunda's management, and with the sound that Cordell was getting from their recordings, which they considered far wimpier than their live sound -- they released a live EP of cover versions, recorded at the Marquee. The choice of songs for the EP showed their range of musical influences at the time, going from fifties rockabilly to the burgeoning progressive rock scene, with versions of Cochran's "Somethin' Else", Jerry Lee Lewis' "It'll Be Me", "So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star" by the Byrds, "Sunshine Help Me" by Spooky Tooth, and "Stephanie Knows Who" by Love: [Excerpt: The Move, "Stephanie Knows Who"] Incidentally, later that year they headlined a gig at the Royal Albert Hall with the Byrds as the support act, and Gram Parsons, who by that time was playing guitar for the Byrds, said that the Move did "So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star" better than the Byrds did. The EP, titled "Something Else From the Move", didn't do well commercially, but it did do something that the band thought important -- Trevor Burton in particular had been complaining that Denny Cordell's productions "took the toughness out" of the band's sound, and was worried that the group were being perceived as a pop band, not as a rock group like his friends in the Jimi Hendrix Experience or Cream. There was an increasing tension between Burton, who wanted to be a heavy rocker, and the older Wayne, who thought there was nothing at all wrong with being a pop band. The next single, "Wild Tiger Woman", was much more in the direction that Burton wanted their music to go. It was ostensibly produced by Cordell, but for the most part he left it to the band, and as a result it ended up as a much heavier track than normal. Roy Wood had only intended the song as an album track, and Bevan and Wayne were hesitant about it being a single, but Burton was insistent -- "Wild Tiger Woman" was going to be the group's first number one record: [Excerpt: The Move, "Wild Tiger Woman"] In fact, it turned out to be the group's first single not to chart at all, after four top ten singles in a row.  The group were now in crisis. They'd lost Ace Kefford, Burton and Wayne were at odds, and they were no longer guaranteed hitmakers. They decided to stop working with Cordell and Secunda, and made a commitment that if the next single was a flop, they would split up. In any case, Roy Wood was already thinking about another project. Even though the group's recent records had gone in a guitar-rock direction, he thought maybe you could do something more interesting. Ever since seeing Tony Visconti conduct orchestral instruments playing his music, he'd been thinking about it. As he later put it "I thought 'Well, wouldn't it be great to get a band together, and rather than advertising for a guitarist how about advertising for a cellist or a French horn player or something? There must be lots of young musicians around who play the... instruments that would like to play in a rock kind of band.' That was the start of it, it really was, and I think after those tracks had been recorded with Tony doing the orchestral arrangement, that's when I started to get bored with the Move, with the band, because I thought 'there's something more to it'". He'd started sketching out plans for an expanded lineup of the group, drawing pictures of what it would look like on stage if Carl Wayne was playing timpani while there were cello and French horn players on stage with them. He'd even come up with a name for the new group -- a multi-layered pun. The group would be a light orchestra, like the BBC Light Orchestra, but they would be playing electrical instruments, and also they would have a light show when they performed live, and so he thought "the Electric Light Orchestra" would be a good name for such a group. The other band members thought this was a daft idea, but Wood kept on plotting. But in the meantime, the group needed some new management. The person they chose was Don Arden. We talked about Arden quite a bit in the last episode, but he's someone who is going to turn up a lot in future episodes, and so it's best if I give a little bit more background about him. Arden was a manager of the old school, and like several of the older people in the music business at the time, like Dick James or Larry Page, he had started out as a performer, doing an Al Jolson tribute act, and he was absolutely steeped in showbusiness -- his wife had been a circus contortionist before they got married, and when he moved from Manchester to London their first home had been owned by Winifred Atwell, a boogie piano player who became the first Black person to have a UK number one -- and who is *still* the only female solo instrumentalist to have a UK number one -- with her 1954 hit "Let's Have Another Party": [Excerpt: WInifred Atwell, "Let's Have Another Party"] That was only Atwell's biggest in a long line of hits, and she'd put all her royalties into buying properties in London, one of which became the Ardens' home. Arden had been considered quite a promising singer, and had made a few records in the early 1950s. His first recordings, of material in Yiddish aimed at the Jewish market, are sadly not findable online, but he also apparently recorded as a session singer for Embassy Records. I can't find a reliable source for what records he sang on for that label, which put out budget rerecordings of hits for sale exclusively through Woolworths, but according to Wikipedia one of them was Embassy's version of "Blue Suede Shoes", put out under the group name "The Canadians", and the lead vocal on that track certainly sounds like it could be him: [Excerpt: The Canadians, "Blue Suede Shoes"] As you can tell, rock and roll didn't really suit Arden's style, and he wisely decided to get out of performance and into behind-the-scenes work, though he would still try on occasion to make records of his own -- an acetate exists from 1967 of him singing "Sunrise, Sunset": [Excerpt: Don Arden, "Sunrise, Sunset"] But he'd moved first into promotion -- he'd been the promoter who had put together tours of the UK for Gene Vincent, Little Richard, Brenda Lee and others which we mentioned in the second year of the podcast -- and then into management. He'd first come into management with the Animals -- apparently acting at that point as the money man for Mike Jeffries, who was the manager the group themselves dealt with. According to Arden -- though his story differs from the version of the story told by others involved -- the group at some point ditched Arden for Allen Klein, and when they did, Arden's assistant Peter Grant, another person we'll be hearing a lot more of, went with them.  Arden, by his own account, flew over to see Klein and threatened to throw him out of the window of his office, which was several stories up. This was a threat he regularly made to people he believed had crossed him -- he made a similar threat to one of the Nashville Teens, the first group he managed after the Animals, after the musician asked what was happening to the group's money. And as we heard last episode, he threatened Robert Stigwood that way when Stigwood tried to get the Small Faces off him. One of the reasons he'd signed the Small Faces was that Steve Marriott had gone to the Italia Conti school, where Arden had sent his own children, Sharon and David, and David had said that Marriott was talented. And David was also a big reason the Move came over to Arden. After the Small Faces had left him, Arden had bought Galaxy Entertaimnent, the booking agency that handled bookings for Amen Corner and the Move, among many other acts. Arden had taken over management of Amen Corner himself, and had put his son David in charge of liaising with Tony Secunda about the Move.  But David Arden was sure that the Move could be an albums act, not just a singles act, and was convinced the group had more potential than they were showing, and when they left Secunda, Don Arden took them on as his clients, at least for the moment. Secunda, according to Arden (who is not the most reliable of witnesses, but is unfortunately the only one we have for a lot of this stuff) tried to hire someone to assassinate Arden, but Arden quickly let Secunda know that if anything happened to Arden, Secunda himself would be dead within the hour. As "Wild Tiger Woman" hadn't been a hit, the group decided to go back to their earlier "Flowers in the Rain" style, with "Blackberry Way": [Excerpt: The Move, "Blackberry Way"] That track was produced by Jimmy Miller, who was producing the Rolling Stones and Traffic around this time, and featured the group's friend Richard Tandy on harpsichord. It's also an example of the maxim "Good artists copy, great artists steal". There are very few more blatant examples of plagiarism in pop music than the middle eight of "Blackberry Way". Compare Harry Nilsson's "Good Old Desk": [Excerpt: Nilsson, "Good Old Desk"] to the middle eight of "Blackberry Way": [Excerpt: The Move, "Blackberry Way"] "Blackberry Way" went to number one, but that was the last straw for Trevor Burton -- it was precisely the kind of thing he *didn't* want to be doing,. He was so sick of playing what he thought of as cheesy pop music that at one show he attacked Bev Bevan on stage with his bass, while Bevan retaliated with his cymbals. He stormed off stage, saying he was "tired of playing this crap". After leaving the group, he almost joined Blind Faith, a new supergroup that members of Cream and Traffic were forming, but instead formed his own supergroup, Balls. Balls had a revolving lineup which at various times included Denny Laine, formerly of the Moody Blues, Jackie Lomax, a singer-songwriter who was an associate of the Beatles, Richard Tandy who had played on "Blackberry Way", and Alan White, who would go on to drum with the band Yes. Balls only released one single, "Fight for My Country", which was later reissued as a Trevor Burton solo single: [Excerpt: Balls, "Fight For My Country"] Balls went through many lineup changes, and eventually seemed to merge with a later lineup of the Idle Race to become the Steve Gibbons Band, who were moderately successful in the seventies and eighties. Richard Tandy covered on bass for a short while, until Rick Price came in as a permanent replacement. Before Price, though, the group tried to get Hank Marvin to join, as the Shadows had then split up, and Wood was willing to move over to bass and let Marvin play lead guitar. Marvin turned down the offer though. But even though "Blackberry Way" had been the group's biggest hit to date, it marked a sharp decline in the group's fortunes.  Its success led Peter Walsh, the manager of Marmalade and the Tremeloes, to poach the group from Arden, and even though Arden took his usual heavy-handed approach -- he describes going and torturing Walsh's associate, Clifford Davis, the manager of Fleetwood Mac, in his autobiography -- he couldn't stop Walsh from taking over. Unfortunately, Walsh put the group on the chicken-in-a-basket cabaret circuit, and in the next year they only released one record, the single "Curly", which nobody was happy with. It was ostensibly produced by Mike Hurst, but Hurst didn't turn up to the final sessions and Wood did most of the production work himself, while in the next studio over Jimmy Miller, who'd produced "Blackberry Way", was producing "Honky Tonk Women" by the Rolling Stones. The group were getting pigeonholed as a singles group, at a time when album artists were the in thing. In a three-year career they'd only released one album, though they were working on their second. Wood was by this point convinced that the Move was unsalvageable as a band, and told the others that the group was now just going to be a launchpad for his Electric Light Orchestra project. The band would continue working the chicken-in-a-basket circuit and releasing hit singles, but that would be just to fund the new project -- which they could all be involved in if they wanted, of course. Carl Wayne, on the other hand, was very, very, happy playing cabaret, and didn't see the need to be doing anything else. He made a counter-suggestion to Wood -- keep The Move together indefinitely, but let Wood do the Brian Wilson thing and stay home and write songs. Wayne would even try to get Burton and Kefford back into the band. But Wood wasn't interested. Increasingly his songs weren't even going to the Move at all. He was writing songs for people like Cliff Bennett and the Casuals. He wrote "Dance Round the Maypole" for Acid Gallery: [Excerpt: Acid Gallery, "Dance Round the Maypole"] On that, Wood and Jeff Lynne sang backing vocals. Wood and Lynne had been getting closer since Lynne had bought a home tape recorder which could do multi-tracking -- Wood had wanted to buy one of his own after "Flowers in the Rain", but even though he'd written three hit singles at that point his publishing company wouldn't give him an advance to buy one, and so he'd started using Lynne's. The two have often talked about how they'd recorded the demo for "Blackberry Way" at Lynne's parents' house, recording Wood's vocal on the demo with pillows and cushions around his head so that his singing wouldn't wake Lynne's parents. Lynne had been another person that Wood had asked to join the group when Burton left, but Lynne was happy with The Idle Race, where he was the main singer and songwriter, though their records weren't having any success: [Excerpt: The Idle Race, "I Like My Toys"] While Wood was writing material for other people, the only one of those songs to become a hit was "Hello Suzie", written for Amen Corner, which became a top five single on Immediate Records: [Excerpt: Amen Corner, "Hello Suzie"] While the Move were playing venues like Batley Variety Club in Britain, when they went on their first US tour they were able to play for a very different audience. They were unknown in the US, and so were able to do shows for hippie audiences that had no preconceptions about them, and did things like stretch "Cherry Blossom Clinic" into an eight-minute-long extended progressive rock jam that incorporated bits of "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring", the Nutcracker Suite, and the Sorcerer's Apprentice: [Excerpt: The Move, "Cherry Blossom Clinic Revisited (live at the Fillmore West)"] All the group were agreed that those shows were the highlight of the group's career. Even Carl Wayne, the band member most comfortable with them playing the cabaret circuit, was so proud of the show at the Fillmore West which that performance is taken from that when the tapes proved unusable he kept hold of them, hoping all his life that technology would progress to the point where they could be released and show what a good live band they'd been, though as things turned out they didn't get released until after his death. But when they got back to the UK it was back to the chicken-in-a-basket circuit, and back to work on their much-delayed second album. That album, Shazam!, was the group's attempt at compromise between their different visions. With the exception of one song, it's all heavy rock music, but Wayne, Wood, and Price all co-produced, and Wayne had the most creative involvement he'd ever had. Side two of the album was all cover versions, chosen by Wayne, and Wayne also went out onto the street and did several vox pops, asking members of the public what they thought of pop music: [Excerpt: Vox Pops from "Don't Make My Baby Blue"] There were only six songs on the album, because they were mostly extended jams. Other than the three cover versions chosen by Wayne, there was a sludge-metal remake of "Hello Suzie", the new arrangement of "Cherry Blossom Clinic" they'd been performing live, retitled "Cherry Blossom Clinic Revisited", and only one new original, "Beautiful Daughter", which featured a string arrangement by Visconti, who also played bass: [Excerpt: The Move, "Beautiful Daughter"] And Carl Wayne sang lead on five of the six tracks, which given that one of the reasons Wayne was getting unhappy with the band was that Wood was increasingly becoming the lead singer, must have been some comfort. But it wasn't enough. By the time Shazam! came out, with a cover drawn by Mike Sheridan showing the four band members as superheroes, the band was down to three -- Carl Wayne had quit the group, for a solo career. He continued playing the cabaret circuit, and made records, but never had another hit, but he managed to have a very successful career as an all-round entertainer, acting on TV and in the theatre, including a six-year run as the narrator in the musical Blood Brothers, and replacing Alan Clarke as the lead singer of the Hollies. He died in 2004. As soon as Wayne left the group, the three remaining band members quit their management and went back to Arden. And to replace Wayne, Wood once again asked Jeff Lynne to join the group. But this time the proposition was different -- Lynne wouldn't just be joining the Move, but he would be joining the Electric Light Orchestra. They would continue putting out Move records and touring for the moment, and Lynne would be welcome to write songs for the Move so that Wood wouldn't have to be the only writer, but they'd be doing it while they were planning their new group.  Lynne was in, and the first single from the new lineup was a return to the heavy riff rock style of "Wild Tiger Woman", "Brontosaurus": [Excerpt: The Move, "Brontosaurus"] But Wayne leaving the group had put Wood in a difficult position. He was now the frontman, and he hated that responsibility -- he said later "if you look at me in photos of the early days, I'm always the one hanging back with my head down, more the musician than the frontman." So he started wearing makeup, painting his face with triangles and stars, so he would be able to hide his shyness. And it worked -- and "Brontosaurus" returned the group to the top ten. But the next single, "When Alice Comes Back to the Farm", didn't chart at all. The first album for the new Move lineup, Looking On, was to finish their contract with their current record label. Many regard it as the group's "Heavy metal album", and it's often considered the worst of their four albums, with Bev Bevan calling it "plodding", but that's as much to do with Bevan's feeling about the sessions as anything else -- increasingly, after the basic rhythm tracks had been recorded, Wood and Lynne would get to work without the other two members of the band, doing immense amounts of overdubbing.  And that continued after Looking On was finished. The group signed a new contract with EMI's new progressive rock label, Harvest, and the contract stated that they were signing as "the Move performing as The Electric Light Orchestra". They started work on two albums' worth of material, with the idea that anything with orchestral instruments would be put aside for the first Electric Light Orchestra album, while anything with just guitar, bass, drums, keyboard, and horns would be for the Move. The first Electric Light Orchestra track, indeed, was intended as a Move B-side. Lynne came in with a song based around a guitar riff, and with lyrics vaguely inspired by the TV show The Prisoner, about someone with a number instead of a name running, trying to escape, and then eventually dying.  But then Wood decided that what the track really needed was cello. But not cello played in the standard orchestral manner, but something closer to what the Beatles had done on "I am the Walrus". He'd bought a cheap cello himself, and started playing Jimi Hendrix riffs on it, and Lynne loved the sound of it, so onto the Move's basic rhythm track they overdubbed fifteen cello tracks by Wood, and also two French horns, also by Wood: [Excerpt: The Electric Light Orchestra, "10538 Overture"] The track was named "10538 Overture", after they saw the serial number 1053 on the console they were using to mix the track, and added the number 8 at the end, making 10538 the number of the character in the song. Wood and Lynne were so enamoured with the sound of their new track that they eventually got told by the other two members of the group that they had to sit in the back when the Move were driving to gigs, so they couldn't reach the tape player, because they'd just keep playing the track over and over again. So they got a portable tape player and took that into the back seat with them to play it there. After finishing some pre-existing touring commitments, the Move and Electric Light Orchestra became a purely studio group, and Rick Price quit the bands -- he needed steady touring work to feed his family, and went off to form another band, Mongrel. Around this time, Wood also took part in another strange project. After Immediate Records collapsed, Andrew Oldham needed some fast money, so he and Don Arden put together a fake group they could sign to EMI for ten thousand pounds.  The photo of the band Grunt Futtock was of some random students, and that was who Arden and Oldham told EMI was on the track, but the actual performers on the single included Roy Wood, Steve Marriott, Peter Frampton, and Andy Bown, the former keyboard player of the Herd: [Excerpt: Grunt Futtock, "Rock 'n' Roll Christian"] Nobody knows who wrote the song, although it's credited to Bernard Webb, which is a pseudonym Paul McCartney had previously used -- but everyone knew he'd used the pseudonym, so it could very easily be a nod to that. The last Move album, Message From The Country, didn't chart -- just like the previous two hadn't. But Wood's song "Tonight" made number eleven, the follow-up, "Chinatown", made number twenty-three, and then the final Move single, "California Man", a fifties rock and roll pastiche, made the top ten: [Excerpt: The Move, "California Man"] In the US, that single was flipped, and the B-side, Lynne's song "Do Ya", became the only Move song ever to make the Hot One Hundred, reaching number ninety-nine: [Excerpt: The Move, "Do Ya"] By the time "California Man" was released, the Electric Light Orchestra were well underway. They'd recorded their first album, whose biggest highlights were Lynne's "10538 Overture" and Wood's "Whisper in the Night": [Excerpt: The Electric Light Orchestra, "Whisper in the Night"] And they'd formed a touring lineup, including Richard Tandy on keyboards and several orchestral instrumentalists. Unfortunately, there were problems developing between Wood and Lynne. When the Electric Light Orchestra toured, interviewers only wanted to speak to Wood, thinking of him as the band leader, even though Wood insisted that he and Lynne were the joint leaders. And both men had started arguing a lot, to the extent that at some shows they would refuse to go on stage because of arguments as to which of them should go on first. Wood has since said that he thinks most of the problems between Lynne and himself were actually caused by Don Arden, who realised that if he split the two of them into separate acts he could have two hit groups, not one. If that was the plan, it worked, because by the time "10538 Overture" was released as the Electric Light Orchestra's first single, and made the top ten -- while "California Man" was also still in the charts -- it was announced that Roy Wood was now leaving the Electric Light Orchestra, as were keyboard playe

«Happy Xmas (War is Over)» es una canción del músico británico John Lennon grabada en los Record Plant Studios de Nueva York a finales de octubre de 1971 y publicada como sencillo. Con la asistencia en la producción de Phil Spector, incluye un coro de niños procedente del Harlem Community Choir, acreditados en el tema. Si bien el tema figura como una canción protesta contra la Guerra de Vietnam, se convirtió pronto en un himno navideño, apareciendo en numerosos álbumes recopilatorios de canciones navideñas. ¿Esto de matarnos entre nosotros es algo que viene de fabrica? ¿Es el Homo Sapiens un predador sin remedio? ¿Es el hombre un lobo para el hombre como decía Hobbes? Dos antropólogos, llamados Steven LeBlanc y ‎Katherine Register, calcularon en un libro titulado Bata que, aproximadamente, un tercio de la humanidad habría muerto por causas violentas. La primera guerra mundial fue la muestra de como el avance tecnológico podía convertir el campo de batalla en una maquina de picar carne. Las trincheras, los obuses, las ametralladoras, los gases venenosos, los primeros tanques, todo un museo del horror en pos del arte de matar. Y sin embargo entre toda esa desolación hubo un episodio que rompió el patrón de la guerra como la de la Nochebuena del año 1914. Web: http://www.amadag.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Asociacion.Agorafobia/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amadag.psico/ Youtube Amadag TV: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC22fPGPhEhgiXCM7PGl68rw Escuela de Ansiedad: http://www.escuelaansiedad.com

It's that time of the year again! Festive bells, sparkly lights, caroling, visiting with friends and family, walking in the snow (or maybe on the beach?), and dreaming of good things to come. For this special episode, we're embracing as much of the season as possible. Let's call it "Solstimas".  You'll hear from a plethora of festive musical guests, who generously offer up their seasonal favourites.GUESTS: (2:56) Andy Maize - The Grinch That Stole Christmas………………..(5:14)  Lisa Sabino - "2,000 Miles" (performed by Skydiggers) / "Same Old Lang Syne" (Dan Folgelberg), "Happy Xmas (War is Over)" (John Lennon & Yoko Ono)……………….(8:57) Stephen Stanley - "Holly Leaves and Christmas Trees" (Elvis Presley)……………….(15:37) Ethan Deibert - "Run, Run Rudolph" (Chuck Berry)……………….(16:45) Koralee Tonack  - "25th of December" (Everything But the Girl)……………….(18:34) Alan Matheson - "Silent Night, Lonely Night" (Ron Collier)……………….(21:18) Emily Deibert - "Baby, It's Cold Outside" (performed by Zoey Deschanel and Leon Redbone)……………….(23:00) Steve Wright - "Fairytale of New York" (The Pogues)……………….(24:49) Simon Paradis - "Christmas is Coming" (The Payolas)……………….(26:30) Tim Vesely - "Es ist ein ros entsprungen" (performed by Daniel Taylor)……………….(29:00) Seth Feldman -"O Holy Night" (performed by David Phelps)……………….(31:34) Ryan Myshrall - "Christmas Time" (Salsoul Orchestra)……………….(36:58) Josh Finlayson - "If We Make it Through December" (Merle Haggard)……………….(38:51) Connie Kostiuk - "Shchedryk" (Performed by Pink Martini)……………….(41:37) Richard Wolfe - "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" (performed by Cat Power)……………….(43:44) Tomás Cassanelli - "Cancion de Navidad "(Silvio Rodriguez)……………….(45:17) David Kitching - "Song for a Winter's Night" (Gordon Lightfoot)……………….(48:23) Julian Taylor - "That Spirit of Christmas" (Ray Charles)……………….(50:50) Tim Falconer - "Tournament of Hearts" (The Weakerthans)……………….(54:44) Marnie Grey - "Tshekuan Mak Tshetutamak" (Groupe Folklorique Montagne). Marnie also chose "Friday I'm in Love" (The Cure), "Moon and Tree" (Blue Rodeo), "Take Me Home Country Roads" (performed by Mountain Man), and anything by the Killers :)……………….(58:24) Mike Downie - "A Penny More" (Skydiggers) / "The Lonely End of the Rink" (The Tragically Hip)……………….(1:05:44) Ron Deibert - "Winter"Support the showA Morning Run Productions ProjectMusic Buddy is nomated for a 2023 Canadian Podcast Award for "Outstanding Music Series", and "Outstanding Main Title Theme Music for a Series". Many thanks to the Canadian Podcast Awards, and congratulations to all the Nominees! You can see the full list of Nominees at canpodawards.ca Jane Gowan (host, producer, editor) Tim Vesely (co-producer/co-host) The show's theme song, "Human Stuff," is written by Jane Gowan and Tim Vesely, and performed by Jane and Tim, with additional vocals by Steve Wright and Connie KostiukEmail: jane@musicbuddy.caInstagram: @musicbuddypodcastFacebook: @musicbuddypodcastTwitter: @janegowanTikTok: @musicbuddypod

As we kick off things this last month of 2022, we are also starting another segment of Music Monday. Thanks for listening --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/robert-col363n/support

What is the best rocking Christmas song? Coach shares a list of famous song, from songs that were written to raise social consciousness during the season (think Happy Xmas-War is Over by John Lennon), to the Christmas gift of Cobra Ki season 3. Find the clips of some of the songs mentioned at coachcullen.com

The Santa Hits Podcast continues, as we discuss a variety of Christmas themed pop songs leading up to the holidays. And if you're a John Lennon fan, you may not like this episode. However, there's no denying that this is a Christmas classic. Hosted by @sliiiiip and @megamixdotcom, the Super Hits Podcast reviews a different retro single each episode! We're on all of the usual podcast platforms, so come find us. Come and give us a 5-star review! We're back to twice-a-week episodes, at least for the time being! To correct us if we miss a fact or get something wrong, to request a single, or to just say hello, hit us up at superhitspodcast@gmail.com Here's the song: https://open.spotify.com/track/27RYrbL6S02LNVhDWVl38b?si=1ae8282c6d4448e6 Here's our website: https://megamixdotcom.com/super-hits/ Here's our Twitter: @SuperHitsCast Here's our Instagram: @SuperHitsPodcast You can also find playlists for all of the songs we've covered on Spotify and Apple Music. Just search for Super Hits Podcast Playlist! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/superhitspodcast/message

The fabric of America in the 70s was rapidly changing with the anti-war mentality as a cause and effect from the Vietnam War. The Beatles had already split, and John Lennon was allowing himself to be ever more vocal about his disdain for war and his proclamations for peace. After seeing how the general public loved his single "Imagine", he wanted to try his hand at making a Christmas song that wasn't saturated with sentimentality, but instead had a meaningful message that everyone could stand by. To this day it's still one of the best holiday songs and is a chart topping single. Join me today in discovering exactly how John got inspired to write the song, and how he did it. Follow me for more music content, and how you can support OTM :) OTM Blog: https://onthemixpodcast.wordpress.com/blog/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/onthemixpodcast/ Donation/Tip: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/onthemixpodcast --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/on-the-mix/support

Freshly returned from a successful tour with the Goo Goo Dolls in support of their new album “Chaos in Bloom,” Robby Takac reminisces with Jeff Miers about the holiday music he loved in his youth, waxes rhapsodic about newer additions to the canon of holiday music, and even mentions a seasonal movie near and dear to his heart. Songs performed: "Christmas Time is Here," Harry Graser."River," Cami Clune accompanied by Rod Bonner."Happy Xmas (War is Over)," Grabbitz accompanied by Rod Bonner."Christmas Don't be Late," Robby Takac accompanied by Kevin Urso."O Holy Night," Richie English.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Smooth Jazz and Christmas carols 2022 Playlist: Roberto Vazquez – l’ll Be home for Christmas Vicent Ingala – Sleigh Ride Herb Alpert – All l Want For Christmas Chris Standring – O Little Tow Of Bethlehem Larry Carlton – The Christmas Song ( Ft. John Ferraro/ Clare Ficher Roberto Tola – A Christmas Ago Chris”Big Dog” Davis – White Christmas Dave Koz – Happy Xmas (War is Overy/ Imagine) (Ft. Rebecca Jade) Jessy J. – What Child is This Tom Braxton – Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas Castella – And So lts Christmas Pam Taylor – Abrams – Christmas on The Radio Günter Asbeck - The Jingle Bell Thing (Ft. Dennis LeGree) Avery - Sunshine For Christmas KnightHammer – Christmas, l Love You Jonathan Fritzen – Deck The Halls Ellis White - We 3 Kings Antonio Gomez – Silent Night Joyce Cooling – Christmas, Christmas ( Ft.Peter Michael Escobedo) Joyce Cooling – The Holiday’s On! Antoine Knight – Christmas ln Maputo Brooke Alford – The First Noel (in the Sun) Jessy J – We Whis You a Merry Christmas Vadim Tikhonov – Ring My Bell Brian Clay – Go Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen Chris Geith – Joy to the World Brian Clay – Angels We Have heard on High Dee Brown – lt’s Christmas Olivia Rox – Jingle Bells (Jazz Versión Brad Alexander – Angels We Have Heard on High Chris Standring – Hark The Herald Angels Sing Herb Alpert – Louis Armstrong – What a Wonderful World

Galen talks about the Bowling Green and Southcentral Kentucky weather, the private Facebook group called "Dad Rocks" and "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" by John Lennon and Yoko Ono on "A Rock Song Inquiry." --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/galen-smith3/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/galen-smith3/support

Hoje vamos entrar no clássico de 1971, a canção Happy Xmas (War Is Over) de John Lennon e Yoko Ono - Plastic Ono BandAlém da história, vou isolar também cada instrumento na canção pra uma experiência ainda mais completa!Direção, Produção e Apresentação - Leo Richter© Os áudios utilizados nesse e em todos os vídeos não são áudios originais e sim um cover, respeitando os direitos autorias.★ Link do documentário "Bed Peace" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRjjiOV003Q★ Playlist com vários vídeos da série "Por Dentro Da Canção" pra você maratonar: https://bit.ly/pdcplaylist★ Minhas redes sociais.Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/leorichteroficialFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/leorichteroficialTwitter: http://www.twitter.com/leo_richter★ Ouça também o Podcast Por Dentro Da Canção: https://linktr.ee/pdc_podcast★ Contato e Parcerias: producoesrichter@gmail.com★ Participe do grupo VIP do Telegram.https://bit.ly/chatpdc★ INSCREVA-SE NO CANAL e ative as notificações para não perder nenhum episódio, tem vídeo novo toda semana!#johnlennon #happyxmas #pordentrodacancao

Recorded before Christmas, but delayed by Covid and spontaneous travel, we are thrilled to get this episode to you by the 12th day of Christmas. Is wishing everyone a Merry Christmas aggressive?  Can you conduct a children's choir 3000 miles apart? How many Christmas words start with B?All of your questions will be answered as well as live youtube fireplace updates by my friend and bandmate Erin Sidney.Syd and I also goad our eldest children into singing Happy Xmas (War is Over).The song features our bandmate Lisa Piccirillo as well as Isla Sidney and Henry Cupples.Happy New Year!

The 12 Days of Christmas Music: Day 12Intro/Outro: Jingle Bells by Frank Sinatra3. Someday at Christmas by Stevie Wonder (Aaron)2. Happy Xmas (War is Over) by John Lennon & Yoko Ono (Andrew)2. Better Than Christmas Day by Dave Barnes (Aaron)1. Silent Night by Boyz II Men (Andrew)1. O Come, O Come by MercyMe (Aaron)Vote on your favorite song from today's episode!

Twee John Lennon-fanaten bespreken de kersthit van hun held. We vragen ons af: is Lennon in dit liedje ironisch, of is de boodschap hem bittere ernst?Zoals wel vaker bij Lennon lijkt het bij hem allebei tegelijk te kunnen zijn. Ook Paul McCartney's kersthit komt nog even voorbij.John Lennon - Happy Xmas (War is over)https://open.spotify.com/track/5uyij3UbVMQYsqPusvPf1B?si=d79cd1eb898e4ad4Lijstje van Lohues 1: Kersthttps://open.spotify.com/playlist/30rTu64NiOBWZKayjriYBN?si=4bf07415f23c433d Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi Folks!  Christmas is the winter holiday we choose to celebrate and this year for our Christmas bonus episode we wanted to cover John Lennon and Yoko Ono/The Plastic Ono Band's song 'Happy Xmas (War Is Over)'.  We ask the question: is this a protest song, Christmas song or both?  We discuss the history of the song and artists as well as talk about Miley Cyrus and Sean Ono Lennon's version. And of course we talk about Celine Dion's truly bombastic version.  Wherever you are this holiday season we thank you for listening and for your support this past year.  Thank you!Intro/Outro Music:Upbeat Forever by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/5011-upbeat-foreverLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Radiokeys members Emily and Stewart settle into their Christmas Spirit and talk about some little known facts about your favorite Holiday tunes! Stewart talks about "Thank God It's Christmas" By Queen, the dark reality of Do They Know It's Christmas?" by Band Aid and has some fun facts about your favorite holiday songs. Emily talks about the sad original meaning of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", John Lennon's "Happy XMas (War is Over)"   HAPPY HOLIDAYS AND MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM RADIOKEYS!!!!!!   We released three Holiday Songs from previous live recordings! Please check out A Radiokeys Christmas exclusively on our BandCamp page!   RadiokeysMusic.com Instagram: @RadiokeysMusic Twitter: @Radiokeys Facebook: Facebook.com/radiokeysmusic VINYL RECORDS OF OUR DEBUT, SELF-TITLED ALBUM ARE NOW AVAILABLE! CLICK HER FOR A PURCHASE LINK Intro music: “Run, Rudolph, Run'” by Radiokeys Outro music: "Lonely This Christmas" by Radiokeys If you like the podcast, please lend us a 5 Star Review on iTunes or the Apple Podcast App (the algorithms seem to like that!), tell a friend, and please subscribe, it'd mean the world to us! 

In questa diretta ti sei perso:-It's the most wonderul time of the year-Jingle bell rock-Happy Xmas (War is over)-Winter Wonderland Ascoltaci live su runtimeradio.it

On this episode we go back to a time period we have visited often, late 1982 and early 1983. Here are random tunes selected: Brian Adams – This Time The Runaways – School Days Sammy Hagar – Your Love is Driving Me Crazy The Call – The Walls Came Down The Thompson Twins – Lies Simple Minds – Promised You A Miracle Brothers Johnson – Get The Funk Outta My Face The Commodores – Machine Gun Kenny Rogers – The Gambler Chaka Khan – Got To Be There The Waitresses – Christmas Wrapping John Lennon – Happy Xmas (War is Over)

Mark is asking the questions as he is joined by ESPN senior football writer James Olley and Simon Collings of the Evening Standard. A quick look back over a good week on the pitch leads to questions over Arsenal's genuine top-four credentials. But the conversation quickly moved to the captaincy debate - Do leadership groups work? Why is Mark talking about The Damned United? Does Aubameyang have a future at the club? Who takes the armband moving forward? Stay safe and - hopefully - we will be reviewing the Leeds game on Monday, as well as looking forward to the Sunderland cup tie. Please remember to also rate and review The Arsenal Beat on whichever platform you listen.

It's time for that age-old holiday debate: Who's your favorite Beatle? Christmastime with John and Paul as we argue for the better Beatle Christmas song, "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" vs. "Wonderful Christmastime"! Will Paul's holiday cheer or John's goodwill towards man win out?

Galen talks about the Bowling Green and Southcentral Kentucky weather, Christmas Time in Bowling Green and the private Facebook group "Dad Rocks." He also talks about the Christmas song by John Lennon, "Happy Xmas (War Is Over). --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/galen-smith3/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/galen-smith3/support

1971: Erich Honecker wird Erster Sekretär des Zentralkomitees der SED - und John Lennon veröffentlicht "Happy Xmas (War is over)". Gerade zur Weihnachtszeit wollte Lennon damit ein Zeichen gegen den Vietnam-Krieg setzen.

Welcome back! It's Day Eight of our 25 Songs of Christmas where we will be spotlighting our DAY EIGHT ARTIST – Chelsea Lerner who will be singing Happy Xmas, War is Over originally written and sung by John Lennon. This song is celebrating its 50th Anniversary and the 8th parks the 41st anniversary of his death. Song Happy Xmas (War Is Over) (Ultimate Mix) Artist John Lennon, Yoko Ono Album Happy Xmas (War Is Over) Writers John Lennon, Yoko Ono Licensed to YouTube by UMG (on behalf of Calderstone-Beatles); IMPEL, Global Music Rights LLC, CMRRA, UMPI, UNIAO BRASILEIRA DE EDITORAS DE MUSICA - UBEM, LatinAutorPerf, LatinAutor - UMPG, and 16 Music Rights Societies --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/eric-jones6/message

Turns out there were 28 Glee covers we still had not yet ranked! The songs that never made air on FOX, or never even ended up released onto iTunes.... but it's time to talk about them all.  Songs included and ranked in this podcast: 1x11: Don't Make Me Over 1x14: Hello 12, Hello 13, Hello Love 1x15: Burning Up Season 2: Angels We Have Heard on High Season 2: Deck the Rooftop Season 2: God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman Season 2: Jingle Bells Season 2: O Christmas Tree Season 2: What Kind of Fool 2x05: Planet, Schmanet, Janet 2x15: Do Ya Think I'm Sexy 2x19: It's 10am and I'm Drunk Season 3: Christmas Eve with You Season 3: Do You Hear What I Hear Season 3: Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) Season 3: I Was Here Season 3: Little Drummer Boy Season 3: Seasons of Love 3x09: Santa Baby 3x11: I Want You Back 3x22: Not the End Season 4: Happy XMas (War is Over) Season 4: I'll Be Home for Christmas Season 4: Joy to the World Season 4: Silent Night 4x03: Mister Monotony 4x13: Dancing on My Own 5x13: Total Eclipse of the Heart Follow us on Twitter: @choirroompod E-mail us! Feedback, ideas, fact-checks, anything! choirroompodcast@gmail.com Want to help financially support the show? paypal.me/choirroompodcast

Happy Tuesday, Christmas fanatics! Welcome to the thirty-seventh official installment of “Another Christmas Story”! Due to some unforeseen scheduling confusion last week, this episode is a few days late - so apologies for that! In addition, this installment will not be read by our very own Thom Crowe. Instead, it will be read by Matt Spaulding of "2 Broke Geeks", "The F.B.I.'s Most Unwanted", and "Green Mountain Santa", who brings to life this installment of our tale: Chapter Thirty-Six, entitled, "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)"! We hope you like it! If you do, make sure to share this episode and our website, upon which the text of this installment is posted, to get it in front of as many ears and eyes as possible! Coming up on the show this upcoming Monday, October 18th, we will be continuing our journey through Spooky Month by covering the beloved, 1985 cartoon, “Garfield's Halloween Adventure”! And dropping in your feeds on Monday, October 25th, will an episode we're recording on Wednesday, October 13th, in which we will be joined by Ron Hogan (a.k.a. PresidentHotdog) and Jay Skipworth of "Film Strip Podcast" to talk about the iconic, 1978 horror film, "Halloween"! Meanwhile, this upcoming Thursday, October 14th (which just so happens to be the birthday of Anthony's mom, so Happy Birthday to her!), you'll get to hear Chapter Thirty-Seven of “Another Christmas Story” entitled “Fairytale of New York”, which - due to some confusion with the schedule - will be brought to life for you by both Kim Cooper of "Planning for Christmas" and our very own Thom Crowe! So, keep your eyes on your podcast feeds because there's lots of great stuff coming up! Enjoy, y'all!

In December, I had more good interviews than I had time for, so I ran episodes that featured excerpts from conversations with a number of artists. One such musician was Joey Burns of Calexico. Calexico released Seasonal Shift in time for last Christmas, and last December I ran the part of our conversation about their version of "Happy Xmas (War is Over)" and the political significance that Calexico's music has taken on.  This week, I'm returning to that conversation, which again ranges wildly from talking about their musical guests, their method, and their musical default settings (which aren't what you might expect.) Unfortunately, it sounds like someone is stacking poker chips throughout the interview. That sound wasn't audible when I talked to Burns, but it showed up on the recording for the first and only time so far. I wish it wasn't there, but since the alternatives were use the recording or don't, I went with it. I didn't find it too distracting; if you do, sorry. I wish it wasn't there either.  This episode also shines a spotlight on an album I consider to be a good but not great Christmas album: The Beach Boys' Christmas Album from 1964. I generally consider Christmas music to be a singles or playlist medium, but The Beach Boys' Christmas Album gets a lot of love. It deserves the praise it gets on the strength of a handful of songs, but the version of "Blue Christmas" illustrates some real problems that The Beach Boys just couldn't overcome.  

  Episode 110 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Be My Baby", and at the career of the Ronettes and Ronnie Spector.  Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Little Saint Nick" by the Beach Boys. 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/ ----more---- Erratum I say Ray Peterson's version of "Tell Laura I Love Her" was an American number one. It wasn't -- it only made number seven.   Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. A lot of resources were used for this episode. Be My Baby: How I Survived Mascara Miniskirts and Madness, or My Life as a Fabulous Ronette by Ronnie Spector and Vince Waldron is Ronnie's autobiography and was the main source. Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era by Ken Emerson is a good overview of the Brill Building scene, and provided me with the information on Barry and Greenwich. I've referred to two biographies of Spector in this episode, Phil Spector: Out of His Head by Richard Williams and He's a Rebel by Mark Ribkowsky. And information on the Wrecking Crew largely comes from The Wrecking Crew by Kent Hartman. There are many compilations available with some of the hits Spector produced, but I recommend getting Back to Mono, a four-CD overview of his career containing all the major singles put out by Philles. If you want something just covering Ronnie Spector and the Ronettes, The Very Best of Ronnie Spector  covers all the Ronettes hits and the best of her solo career. And the AFM contract listing the musicians on "Be My Baby" can be found here.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we're going to take a look at the record that, more than anything, ensured Phil Spector's place in popular music history -- a record that changed the lives of several people who heard it for the better, and changed the life of its singer for the worse, and one which has the most imitated drum intro in the world. We're going to look at "Be My Baby" by the Ronettes: [Excerpt: The Ronettes, "Be My Baby"] Before I start this one, two things need saying. The first is that this episode, by necessity, deals with spousal abuse. As always, I will try to discuss the issue with sensitivity, and touch on it as briefly as possible, but if you worry that it might upset you, please either skip this episode, or read the transcript to see if you'll be OK listening to it. I imagine that very few people will be upset by anything I say here, but it's always a possibility. And secondly, I'd like to apologise for this episode being so late. I had a major disruption in my personal life over Christmas -- one of those really bad life events that only happens once or twice in most people's lifetimes -- and that made it impossible for me to get any work done at all for the last couple of weeks. I'm now able to work again, and this should not be anything that affects the podcast for the rest of the year. Anyway, enough about that, let's get on with the story. The story of the Ronettes begins when Ronnie Bennett, a mixed-race girl from Harlem, became obsessed with the sound of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, "Why Do Fools Fall In Love?"] Ronnie became the Teenagers' biggest fan, and even managed to arrange a meeting between herself and Lymon when they were both thirteen, but had her illusions torn away when he turned up drunk and made a pass at her. But that didn't stop her from trying her best to imitate Lymon's vocals, and forming a vocal group with several friends and relatives. That group had a male lead singer, but when they made their first appearance on one of the Harlem Apollo's talent shows, the lead singer got stage fright and couldn't start singing when he got on stage. Ronnie stepped forward and took over the lead vocal, and the group went down well enough even with the Apollo's notoriously hostile audience that a smaller group of them decided to start performing regularly together. The group took the name Ronnie and the Relatives, and consisted of Ronnie, her sister Estelle, and their cousin Nedra Talley. They originally only performed at private parties, bar mitzvahs and the like, but they soon reached the attention of Stu Phillips at Colpix Records, a label owned by the film studio Columbia Pictures. The first single by Ronnie and the Relatives was not a success -- "I Want a Boy" came out in August 1961 and didn't chart: [Excerpt: Ronnie and the Relatives, "I Want a Boy"] And nor did their second, "I'm Gonna Quit While I'm Ahead": [Excerpt: Ronnie and the Relatives, "I'm Gonna Quit While I'm Ahead"] Those records did apparently sell to at least one person, though, as when Ronnie met President Clinton in 1997, he asked her to sign a record, and specifically got her to sign an album of those early recordings for Colpix. While the girls were not having any commercial success, they did manage to accidentally get themselves a regular gig at the most important nightclub in New York. They went to the Peppermint Lounge, just as the Twist craze was at its height, and as they were underage they dressed up especially well in order to make themselves look more grown up so they could get in. Their ruse worked better than they expected. As they were all dressed the same, the club's manager assumed they were the dancers he'd booked, who hadn't shown up. He came out and told them to get on stage and start dancing, and so of course they did what he said, and started dancing to the Twist sounds of Joey Dee and the Starliters: [Excerpt: Joey Dee and the Starliters, "The Peppermint Twist"] The girls' dancing went down well, and then the band started playing "What'd I Say?", a favourite song of Ronnie's and one the group did in their own act, and Ronnie danced over to David Brigati, who was singing lead on the song, and started dancing close to him. He handed her the mic as a joke, and she took over the song. They got a regular spot at the Peppermint Lounge, dancing behind the Starliters for their whole show and joining them on vocals for a few numbers every night. Inspired by the Bobbettes and the Marvelettes, Ronnie and Estelle's mother suggested changing the group's name. She suggested "the Rondettes", and they dropped the "d", becoming the Ronettes. The singles they released on ColPix under the new name did no better than the others, but they were such an important part of the Peppermint Lounge that when the Lounge's owners opened a second venue in Florida, the girls went down there with the Starliters and were part of the show.  That trip to Florida gave them two very different experiences. The first was that they got to see segregation firsthand for the first time, and they didn't like it -- especially when they, as light-skinned mixed-race women, were read as tanned white women and served in restaurants which then refused to serve their darker-skinned mothers. But the second was far more positive. They met Murray the K, who since Alan Freed had been driven out of his job had become the most popular DJ in New York. Murray was down in Florida for a holiday, and was impressed enough by the girls' dancing that he told them if they were ever in New York and wanted a spot on one of his regular shows at the Brooklyn Fox Theatre they should let him know. They replied that they lived in New York and went to those shows all the time -- of course they wanted to perform on his shows. They became regular performers at the Brooklyn Fox, where they danced between the other, bigger, acts, sang backing vocals, did a song or two themselves, and took part in comedy sketches with Murray. It was at these shows, as well, that they developed the look they would become famous with -- huge hair piled up on top of their heads, tons of mascara, and tight skirts slit to show their legs. It was a style inspired by street fashion rather than by what the other girl groups were wearing, and it made them incredibly popular with the Fox audience. But the Ronettes, even under their new name, and even with the backing of New York's most prominent DJ, were still not selling any records. They knew they were good, and the reaction to their stage performances proved as much, so they decided that the problem must be with Colpix. And so in 1963 they made a New Year's resolution -- they were going to get Phil Spector to produce them.  By this time, Spector was becoming very well known in the music industry as a hit maker. We already saw in the recent episode on the Crystals how he was making hits for that group and the Blossoms, but he was also making hits with studio groups like Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, who he took into the top ten with a remake of the old Disney song "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah": [Excerpt: Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah"] and as well as the records he was putting out on Philles, he was also working as a freelance producer for people like Connie Francis, producing her top ten hit "Second-Hand Love": [Excerpt: Connie Francis, "Second-Hand Love"] So the Ronettes were convinced that he could make them into the stars they knew they had the potential to be. The group had no idea how to get in touch with Spector, so they tried the direct route -- Estelle called directory enquiries, got the number for Philles Records, and called and asked to be put through to Spector. She was as astonished as anyone when he agreed to talk to her -- and it turned out that he'd seen the group regularly at the Brooklyn Fox and was interested in working with them.  At their audition for Spector, the group first performed a close-harmony version of "When the Red Red Robin Goes Bob-Bob-Bobbin' Along", which they'd been taught by their singing teacher. Spector told them that he wanted to hear what they did when they were singing for themselves, not for a teacher, and so Ronnie launched into "Why Do Fools Fall In Love?"  It only took her getting to the second line of the song before Spector yelled at her to stop -- "THAT is the voice I've been looking for!" The Ronettes' first recordings for Spector weren't actually issued as by the Ronettes at all. To start with, he had them record a version of a song by the writing team of Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, "Why Don't They Let Us Fall In Love?", but didn't release it at the time. It was later released as by "Veronica", the name under which he released solo records by Ronnie: [Excerpt: Veronica, "Why Don't They Let Us Fall In Love?"] But at the time, when Ronnie asked him when the record was coming out, Spector answered "Never". He explained to her that it was a good record, but it wasn't a number one, and he was still working on their first number one record. Their next few recordings were covers of then-current dance hits, like "The Twist": [Excerpt, "The Crystals", "The Twist"] And "The Wah-Watusi", one of the few times that one of the other Ronettes took the lead rather than Ronnie, as Nedra sang lead: [Excerpt, "The Crystals", "The Wah-Watusi"] But these, and two other tracks, were released as album tracks on a Crystals album, credited to the Crystals rather than the Ronettes. The song that eventually became the group's first hit, "Be My Baby", was mostly written by one of the many husband-and-wife songwriting teams that had developed at the Brill Building, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. Barry had started out as a performer who occasionally wrote, putting out records like "It's Called Rock and Roll": [Excerpt: Jeff Barry, "It's Called Rock and Roll"] But while his performing career had gone nowhere, he'd started to have some success as a songwriter, writing "Teenage Sonata" for Sam Cooke: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Teenage Sonata"] And "Tell Laura I Love Her", which was recorded by several people, but the biggest hit version was the American number one by Ray Peterson: [Excerpt: Ray Peterson, "Tell Laura I Love Her"] Ellie Greenwich had also started as a performer, recording "Silly Isn't It?" under the name Ellie Gaye: [Excerpt: Ellie Gaye, "Silly, Isn't It?"] She'd become one of the most important demo singers in New York, and had also started writing songs. She'd first collaborated with Doc Pomus, cowriting songs like "This is It", which had been a flop single for Jay and the Americans: [Excerpt: Jay and the Americans, "This is It"] She'd then been taken on by Trio Music, Leiber and Stoller's company, where she had largely collaborated with another writer named Tony Powers. Trio had first refusal on anything the two of them wrote, and if Leiber and Stoller didn't like it, they could take the song elsewhere. Greenwich and Powers had their biggest successes with songs that Leiber and Stoller rejected, which they sold to Aaron Schroeder. And they'd started up a collaboration with Phil Spector -- although Spector and Greenwich's first meeting had not exactly gone smoothly. He'd gone into her office to hear her play a song that she thought would be suitable for the Paris Sisters, but had kept wandering out of the office, and had kept looking at himself in a mirror and primping himself rather than listen to her song. Eventually she said to him  "Listen to me, you little prick. Did you come to look at yourself or to hear my songs?", and she didn't make that sale. But later on, Spector became interested in a song she'd sold to Schroeder, and made an appointment to meet her and talk about her writing some stuff for him -- that second meeting, which Spector didn't realise was with someone he'd already made a bad impression on, Spector turned up four hours late.  But despite that, Greenwich and Powers wrote several songs for Spector, who was also given songwriting credit, and which became big hits in versions he produced -- "(Today I Met) The Boy I'm Gonna Marry", a single by Darlene Love: [Excerpt: Darlene Love, "(Today I Met) The Boy I'm Gonna Marry"] And "Why Do Lovers Break Each Others' Hearts?", released as by Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, but with Love once again on lead vocals: [Excerpt: Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, "Why Do Lovers Break Each Others' Hearts?"] I say that Spector was also given songwriting credit on those records, because there is some debate about how much he contributed to the songs he's credited on. Some of his co-writers have said that he would often only change a word or a phrase, and get himself cut in on an already-completed song, while others have said that he contributed a reasonable amount to the songwriting, though he was never the primary writer -- for example Barry Mann has said that Spector came up with the middle section for "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'". I tend towards the belief that Spector's contribution to the writing on those songs he's co-credited on was minimal -- in his whole career, the number of songs he wrote on his own seems to be in the single figures, while those other writers wrote dozens of hit records without any contribution from Spector -- and so when I talk about records he produced I'll tend to use phrasing like "a Goffin and King song co-credited to Phil Spector" rather than "a song by Goffin, King, and Spector", but I don't want that to give the impression that I'm certain Spector made no contribution.  But while Greenwich and Powers were a mildly successful team, their partnership ended when Greenwich met Jeff Barry at a family Thanksgiving dinner -- Greenwich's uncle was Barry's cousin. As Greenwich later put it, when they started talking together about music and realised how much they had in common, "I went 'ooh', he went 'mmmhh', and his wife went 'I don't think I like this'". Soon their previous partnerships, both romantic and musical, were over, and Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich became the third of the great Brill Building husband-and-wife songwriting teams.  Where Goffin and King had a sophisticated edge to their writing, with a hint of sexual subversion and the mingling of pain and pleasure, and Mann and Weill tried to incorporate social comment into their songs, Barry and Greenwich were happy to be silly -- they were writing songs like "Hanky Panky", "Da Doo Ron Ron",  and "Doo Wah Diddy Diddy": [Excerpt: Ellie Greenwich "Doo Wah Diddy Diddy (demo)"] This worked extremely well for them, to the extent that after they broke up a few years later, Barry would continue this formula with songs such as "Sugar Sugar", "Jingle Jangle" and "Bang Shang A Lang". Barry and Greenwich's style was to jam in as many hooks as possible, maybe put in a joke or two, keep the lyrics simple, and get out in two minutes. Very few of their songs were masterpieces of songwriting, but they *were* absolutely perfect templates for masterpieces of production. It sounds like I'm damning them with faint praise, but I'm really not. There is a huge skill involved in what they were doing -- if you're writing some heartwrenching masterpiece about the human condition, people will forgive the odd lapse in craft, but if you're writing "My baby does the hanky panky", there's no margin for error, and you're not going to get forgiven if you mess it up.  Barry and Greenwich were good enough at this that they became the go-to writers for Spector for the next couple of years. He would record songs by most of the Brill Building teams, but when you think of the classic records Spector produced, they're far more likely than not to be Barry and Greenwich songs -- of the twenty-seven Philles singles released after Barry and Greenwich started writing together, fourteen are credited to Barry/Greenwich/Spector, and other than the joke release "Let's Dance the Screw", which we talked about back in the episode on the Crystals, there's a run of eleven singles released on the label between late 1962 and early 1964 which are credited either as Greenwich/Powers/Spector or Barry/Greenwich/Spector. And so it was naturally to Barry and Greenwich that Spector turned to write the first big hit for the Ronettes -- and he let Ronnie hear the writing session. By this time, Spector had become romantically involved with Ronnie, and he invited her into his apartment to sit in the next room and listen to them working on the song -- usually they got together in hotels rather than at Spector's home. While she was there, she found several pairs of women's shoes -- Spector hadn't told her he was married, and claimed to her when she asked that they belonged to his sister. This should probably have been a sign of things to come. Assuming that Spector did contribute to the writing, I think it's easy to tell what he brought to “Be My Baby”. If you listen to that Connie Francis record I excerpted earlier, on which Spector is also a credited co-writer, the melody line for the line “that you don't feel the same” leading into the chorus: [Excerpt: Connie Francis, “Second-Hand Love”] is identical to the melody line leading into the chorus of “Be My Baby”: [Excerpt: The Ronettes, “Be My Baby”] So that transition between the verse and the chorus is likely his work. After rehearsing Ronnie for several weeks in New York, Spector flew her out to LA to make the record in Gold Star Studios, where she spent three days recording the lead vocals. The backing vocals weren't provided by the other Ronettes, but rather by the Blossoms, with a few extra singers -- notably Spector's assistant Sonny Bono, and his new girlfriend Cher -- but what really made the track was not the vocals -- although the song was perfect for Ronnie -- but Hal Blaine's drum intro: [Excerpt: The Ronettes, "Be My Baby"] That intro was utterly simple -- Blaine was always a minimalist player, someone who would play for the song rather than play fussy fills -- but that simple part, combined with the powerful sound that the engineer Larry Levine got, was enough to make it one of the most memorable intros in rock music history. Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys talks to this day about how he had to pull over to the side of the road when he first heard it on his car radio, and he would listen to the record incessantly for hours at a time. Incidentally, since I'm talking about the musicians, a lot of sources credit Carol Kaye for playing the bass on this track, so I'm going to say something once, here, which should be taken as read whenever I'm talking about records made in LA in the sixties -- Carol Kaye is not only an unreliable source about what records she played on, she is an utterly dishonest one. For those who don't know, Ms. Kaye was one of the great bass players of the sixties, and also one of the better session guitarists. She played on hundreds of records in the sixties, including many, many, classics from the Beach Boys, Spector, Frank Zappa, and others, and she was the only woman getting regular session work in LA on a rock instrument -- there may have been session orchestral musicians who were women, but when it comes to guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, sax, and so on, she was the only one. For that, she deserves a huge amount of credit. Unfortunately, she has never been happy only being credited for the records she actually played on, and insists she played on many, many, more. Some of this can be reasonably put down to lapses in memory more than fifty years later -- if you're playing two or three sessions a day, and you play on a bunch of Beach Boys records, then it's easy enough to misremember having played on "Surfin' USA" when maybe you played on a similar-sounding record, and there are things like her claiming to have played on "Good Vibrations", where there were multiple sessions for that track, and it happened that the takes eventually used weren't the ones where she was playing bass, but she had no way of knowing that. That's completely forgivable. But Ms. Kaye also claims, with no evidence whatsoever on her side and a great deal of evidence against her, to have been responsible for playing almost the entire recorded works of James Jamerson, Motown's main bass player, claiming tapes were secretly shipped from Detroit to LA -- something that has been denied by every single person working at Motown, and which can be easily disproved just by listening to the tapes. She claims to have played the bass on "I'm a Believer" by the Monkees -- a track recorded in New York, by New York musicians. And whenever anyone points out the falsehoods, rather than saying "I may have made a mistake" she hurls abuse at them, and in some cases libels them on her website. So, Carol Kaye did not play on this record, and we know that because we have the AFM session sheets, which show that the bass players on the track were Ray Pohlman and Jimmy Bond. I'll link a PDF of that sheet in the show notes. So in future, when I mention someone other than Carol Kaye playing on a song, and Wikipedia or somewhere says she played on it, bear this in mind. Two people who did play on the record were Bill Pitman and Tommy Tedesco, and this is why the B-side, an instrumental, is named "Tedesco and Pitman". Spector was enough of a control freak that he didn't want DJs ever to play the wrong side of his singles, so he stuck instrumental jam sessions by the studio musicians -- with the songwriting credited to him rather than to them -- on the B-sides. I don't know about you, but I actually quite like "Tedesco and Pitman", but then I've always had a soft spot for the vibraphone: [Excerpt: "The Ronettes" (The Wrecking Crew), Tedesco and Pitman"] "Be My Baby" was a massive hit -- it went to number one on the Cashbox chart, though only number two on the Billboard chart, and sold millions of copies. The group were invited on to Dick Clark's Caravan of Stars tour, but Spector wanted Ronnie to be in California to record the follow-up, so the girls' cousin Elaine filled in for her for the first couple of weeks of the tour, while Ronnie recorded another Barry, Greenwich and Spector song, "Baby I Love You": [Excerpt: The Ronettes, "Baby I Love You"] Ronnie didn't realise it at the time, but Spector was trying to isolate her from the other group members, and from her family. But at first this seemed to her like a sensible way of solving the problem, and she rejoined the tour after the record was made. Soon after this, the group travelled to the UK for a brief tour in early 1964, during which they became friendly with the Beatles -- Ronnie had a brief chaste flirtation with John Lennon, and Estelle something a little more with George Harrison. They also got to know their support act on the tour, the Rolling Stones -- at least once Ronnie had had a row with Andrew Loog Oldham, as Spector had sent a telegram forbidding the Rolling Stones from spending time with the Ronettes. Once Ronnie pointed out that they were there and Spector wasn't, the two groups became very friendly -- and more than friendly, if Keith Richards' autobiography is to be believed. On their return to the US, they continued having hits through 1964 -- nothing was as big as "Be My Baby", but they had three more top forty hits that year, with two mediocre records, "The Best Part of Breaking Up" and "Do I Love You?", co-written by the team of Pete Andreoli and Vini Poncia, and then a return to form with the magnificent "Walking in the Rain", written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill: [Excerpt: The Ronettes Featuring Veronica, "Walking in the Rain"] But Spector was becoming more and more erratic in his personal life, and more and more controlling. I won't go into too many details here, because we're going to see a lot more of Phil Spector over the next year or so, but he recorded many great records with the Ronettes which he refused to release, claiming they weren't quite right -- Ronnie has later realised that he was probably trying to sabotage their career so he could have her all to himself, though at the time she didn't know that. Neither of the two singles they did release in 1965 made the top fifty, and the one single they released in 1966, a return to songs by Barry and Greenwich, only made number one hundred, for one week: [Excerpt: The Ronettes, "I Can Hear Music"] Also in 1966, the Ronettes were invited by the Beatles to be their support act on their last ever tour, but once again Spector insisted that Ronnie couldn't go, because she needed to be in the studio, so Elaine substituted for her again, much to the Beatles' disappointment. Nothing from the studio sessions during that tour was released. The group broke up in 1967, and the next year Ronnie married Phil Spector, who became ever more controlling and abusive. I won't go into details of the way he treated her, which you can read all about in her autobiography, but suffice to say that I was completely unsurprised when he murdered a woman in 2003. You'll probably get some idea of his behaviours when I talk about him in future episodes, but what Ronnie suffered in the years they were together was something no-one should have to go through. By the time she managed to leave him, in June 1972, she had only released one track in years, a song that George Harrison had written for her called "Try Some, Buy Some", which Spector had recorded with her at Harrison's insistence, during a period when Spector was working with several of the ex-Beatles and trying to rebuild his own career on the back of them: [Excerpt: Ronnie Spector, "Try Some, Buy Some"] Neither Ronnie nor Spector were particularly keen on the track, and it was a commercial flop -- although John Lennon later said that the track had inspired his "Happy Xmas (War is Over)". Ronnie eventually escaped from Spector's abuse -- leaving the house barefoot, as Spector had stolen her shoes so she couldn't leave -- and started to build a new life for herself, though she would struggle with alcoholism for many years. She got nothing in their divorce settlement, as Spector threatened to hire a hit man to kill her if she tried to get anything from him, and she made a living by touring the nostalgia circuit with various new lineups of Ronettes -- the others having given up on their music careers -- and while she never had another hit, she did have a recording career. Her solo career got its proper start because of a chance meeting in New York. Her old friend John Lennon saw her on the street and called her over for a chat, and introduced her to the friend he was with, Jimmy Iovine, who was producing an album for Southside Johnny and the Asbury Dukes. Bruce Springsteen had written a song for that band, and Iovine thought it might work well as a duet with Ronnie, and he invited her to the studio that day, and she cut the song with them: [Excerpt: Southside Johnny and the Asbury Dukes, "You Mean So Much To Me"] That song became one of the most popular songs on the album, and so when the Asbury Dukes toured supporting Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band, they brought Ronnie along with them to sing on that song and do a couple of her own hits. That led to the E-Street Band themselves backing Ronnie on a single -- a version of Billy Joel's "Say Goodbye to Hollywood", a song that Joel had written with her in mind: [Excerpt: Ronnie Spector and the E-Street Band, "Say Goodbye to Hollywood"] However, that was a flop, and so were all her later attempts to have comebacks, though she worked with some great musicians over the years. But she was able to continue having a career as a performer, even if she never returned to stardom, and she never made much money from her hits. She did, though, sing on one more top-ten hit, singing backing vocals on Eddie Money's "Take Me Home Tonight": [Excerpt: Eddie Money, "Take Me Home Tonight"] Phil Spector continued to earn money from his ex-wife for a long time after their divorce. By 1998, when the Ronettes finally sued Spector for unpaid royalties, they had earned, between them, a total of $14,482.30 in royalties from all their hit records -- the amount that came from a single 1964 royalty payment. In court, Spector argued that he didn't owe them any more, and indeed that *they* still owed *him* money, because the cost of recording their singles meant that they had never actually earned more money than they cost. Eventually, after a series of appeals, the group members each got about half a million dollars in 2002 -- obviously a great deal of money, but a small fraction of what they actually earned. Spector, who was on the board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, prevented the Ronettes from being inducted out of spite towards his ex until he was imprisoned, at which point they were finally recognised, in 2007.  Ronnie continues to perform, and seems to have a happy life. Estelle, sadly, did not -- she suffered from anorexia and schizophrenia, spent a period of time homeless, and died in 2009. Nedra became a born-again Christian shortly after the group split up, and recorded a couple of unsuccessful albums of Christian music in the seventies, before going off to work in real estate. In September last year, it was announced that a film is going to be made of Ronnie Spector's life story.  It's nice to know that there'll be something out there telling her story with her as the protagonist, rather than as a background character in the story of her abusive husband.

  Episode 110 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Be My Baby”, and at the career of the Ronettes and Ronnie Spector.  Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Little Saint Nick” by the Beach Boys. 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/ —-more—- Erratum I say Ray Peterson’s version of “Tell Laura I Love Her” was an American number one. It wasn’t — it only made number seven.   Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. A lot of resources were used for this episode. Be My Baby: How I Survived Mascara Miniskirts and Madness, or My Life as a Fabulous Ronette by Ronnie Spector and Vince Waldron is Ronnie’s autobiography and was the main source. Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era by Ken Emerson is a good overview of the Brill Building scene, and provided me with the information on Barry and Greenwich. I’ve referred to two biographies of Spector in this episode, Phil Spector: Out of His Head by Richard Williams and He’s a Rebel by Mark Ribkowsky. And information on the Wrecking Crew largely comes from The Wrecking Crew by Kent Hartman. There are many compilations available with some of the hits Spector produced, but I recommend getting Back to Mono, a four-CD overview of his career containing all the major singles put out by Philles. If you want something just covering Ronnie Spector and the Ronettes, The Very Best of Ronnie Spector  covers all the Ronettes hits and the best of her solo career. And the AFM contract listing the musicians on “Be My Baby” can be found here.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we’re going to take a look at the record that, more than anything, ensured Phil Spector’s place in popular music history — a record that changed the lives of several people who heard it for the better, and changed the life of its singer for the worse, and one which has the most imitated drum intro in the world. We’re going to look at “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes: [Excerpt: The Ronettes, “Be My Baby”] Before I start this one, two things need saying. The first is that this episode, by necessity, deals with spousal abuse. As always, I will try to discuss the issue with sensitivity, and touch on it as briefly as possible, but if you worry that it might upset you, please either skip this episode, or read the transcript to see if you’ll be OK listening to it. I imagine that very few people will be upset by anything I say here, but it’s always a possibility. And secondly, I’d like to apologise for this episode being so late. I had a major disruption in my personal life over Christmas — one of those really bad life events that only happens once or twice in most people’s lifetimes — and that made it impossible for me to get any work done at all for the last couple of weeks. I’m now able to work again, and this should not be anything that affects the podcast for the rest of the year. Anyway, enough about that, let’s get on with the story. The story of the Ronettes begins when Ronnie Bennett, a mixed-race girl from Harlem, became obsessed with the sound of Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers: [Excerpt: Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?”] Ronnie became the Teenagers’ biggest fan, and even managed to arrange a meeting between herself and Lymon when they were both thirteen, but had her illusions torn away when he turned up drunk and made a pass at her. But that didn’t stop her from trying her best to imitate Lymon’s vocals, and forming a vocal group with several friends and relatives. That group had a male lead singer, but when they made their first appearance on one of the Harlem Apollo’s talent shows, the lead singer got stage fright and couldn’t start singing when he got on stage. Ronnie stepped forward and took over the lead vocal, and the group went down well enough even with the Apollo’s notoriously hostile audience that a smaller group of them decided to start performing regularly together. The group took the name Ronnie and the Relatives, and consisted of Ronnie, her sister Estelle, and their cousin Nedra Talley. They originally only performed at private parties, bar mitzvahs and the like, but they soon reached the attention of Stu Phillips at Colpix Records, a label owned by the film studio Columbia Pictures. The first single by Ronnie and the Relatives was not a success — “I Want a Boy” came out in August 1961 and didn’t chart: [Excerpt: Ronnie and the Relatives, “I Want a Boy”] And nor did their second, “I’m Gonna Quit While I’m Ahead”: [Excerpt: Ronnie and the Relatives, “I’m Gonna Quit While I’m Ahead”] Those records did apparently sell to at least one person, though, as when Ronnie met President Clinton in 1997, he asked her to sign a record, and specifically got her to sign an album of those early recordings for Colpix. While the girls were not having any commercial success, they did manage to accidentally get themselves a regular gig at the most important nightclub in New York. They went to the Peppermint Lounge, just as the Twist craze was at its height, and as they were underage they dressed up especially well in order to make themselves look more grown up so they could get in. Their ruse worked better than they expected. As they were all dressed the same, the club’s manager assumed they were the dancers he’d booked, who hadn’t shown up. He came out and told them to get on stage and start dancing, and so of course they did what he said, and started dancing to the Twist sounds of Joey Dee and the Starliters: [Excerpt: Joey Dee and the Starliters, “The Peppermint Twist”] The girls’ dancing went down well, and then the band started playing “What’d I Say?”, a favourite song of Ronnie’s and one the group did in their own act, and Ronnie danced over to David Brigati, who was singing lead on the song, and started dancing close to him. He handed her the mic as a joke, and she took over the song. They got a regular spot at the Peppermint Lounge, dancing behind the Starliters for their whole show and joining them on vocals for a few numbers every night. Inspired by the Bobbettes and the Marvelettes, Ronnie and Estelle’s mother suggested changing the group’s name. She suggested “the Rondettes”, and they dropped the “d”, becoming the Ronettes. The singles they released on ColPix under the new name did no better than the others, but they were such an important part of the Peppermint Lounge that when the Lounge’s owners opened a second venue in Florida, the girls went down there with the Starliters and were part of the show.  That trip to Florida gave them two very different experiences. The first was that they got to see segregation firsthand for the first time, and they didn’t like it — especially when they, as light-skinned mixed-race women, were read as tanned white women and served in restaurants which then refused to serve their darker-skinned mothers. But the second was far more positive. They met Murray the K, who since Alan Freed had been driven out of his job had become the most popular DJ in New York. Murray was down in Florida for a holiday, and was impressed enough by the girls’ dancing that he told them if they were ever in New York and wanted a spot on one of his regular shows at the Brooklyn Fox Theatre they should let him know. They replied that they lived in New York and went to those shows all the time — of course they wanted to perform on his shows. They became regular performers at the Brooklyn Fox, where they danced between the other, bigger, acts, sang backing vocals, did a song or two themselves, and took part in comedy sketches with Murray. It was at these shows, as well, that they developed the look they would become famous with — huge hair piled up on top of their heads, tons of mascara, and tight skirts slit to show their legs. It was a style inspired by street fashion rather than by what the other girl groups were wearing, and it made them incredibly popular with the Fox audience. But the Ronettes, even under their new name, and even with the backing of New York’s most prominent DJ, were still not selling any records. They knew they were good, and the reaction to their stage performances proved as much, so they decided that the problem must be with Colpix. And so in 1963 they made a New Year’s resolution — they were going to get Phil Spector to produce them.  By this time, Spector was becoming very well known in the music industry as a hit maker. We already saw in the recent episode on the Crystals how he was making hits for that group and the Blossoms, but he was also making hits with studio groups like Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, who he took into the top ten with a remake of the old Disney song “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah”: [Excerpt: Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah”] and as well as the records he was putting out on Philles, he was also working as a freelance producer for people like Connie Francis, producing her top ten hit “Second-Hand Love”: [Excerpt: Connie Francis, “Second-Hand Love”] So the Ronettes were convinced that he could make them into the stars they knew they had the potential to be. The group had no idea how to get in touch with Spector, so they tried the direct route — Estelle called directory enquiries, got the number for Philles Records, and called and asked to be put through to Spector. She was as astonished as anyone when he agreed to talk to her — and it turned out that he’d seen the group regularly at the Brooklyn Fox and was interested in working with them.  At their audition for Spector, the group first performed a close-harmony version of “When the Red Red Robin Goes Bob-Bob-Bobbin’ Along”, which they’d been taught by their singing teacher. Spector told them that he wanted to hear what they did when they were singing for themselves, not for a teacher, and so Ronnie launched into “Why Do Fools Fall In Love?”  It only took her getting to the second line of the song before Spector yelled at her to stop — “THAT is the voice I’ve been looking for!” The Ronettes’ first recordings for Spector weren’t actually issued as by the Ronettes at all. To start with, he had them record a version of a song by the writing team of Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, “Why Don’t They Let Us Fall In Love?”, but didn’t release it at the time. It was later released as by “Veronica”, the name under which he released solo records by Ronnie: [Excerpt: Veronica, “Why Don’t They Let Us Fall In Love?”] But at the time, when Ronnie asked him when the record was coming out, Spector answered “Never”. He explained to her that it was a good record, but it wasn’t a number one, and he was still working on their first number one record. Their next few recordings were covers of then-current dance hits, like “The Twist”: [Excerpt, “The Crystals”, “The Twist”] And “The Wah-Watusi”, one of the few times that one of the other Ronettes took the lead rather than Ronnie, as Nedra sang lead: [Excerpt, “The Crystals”, “The Wah-Watusi”] But these, and two other tracks, were released as album tracks on a Crystals album, credited to the Crystals rather than the Ronettes. The song that eventually became the group’s first hit, “Be My Baby”, was mostly written by one of the many husband-and-wife songwriting teams that had developed at the Brill Building, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. Barry had started out as a performer who occasionally wrote, putting out records like “It’s Called Rock and Roll”: [Excerpt: Jeff Barry, “It’s Called Rock and Roll”] But while his performing career had gone nowhere, he’d started to have some success as a songwriter, writing “Teenage Sonata” for Sam Cooke: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, “Teenage Sonata”] And “Tell Laura I Love Her”, which was recorded by several people, but the biggest hit version was the American number one by Ray Peterson: [Excerpt: Ray Peterson, “Tell Laura I Love Her”] Ellie Greenwich had also started as a performer, recording “Silly Isn’t It?” under the name Ellie Gaye: [Excerpt: Ellie Gaye, “Silly, Isn’t It?”] She’d become one of the most important demo singers in New York, and had also started writing songs. She’d first collaborated with Doc Pomus, cowriting songs like “This is It”, which had been a flop single for Jay and the Americans: [Excerpt: Jay and the Americans, “This is It”] She’d then been taken on by Trio Music, Leiber and Stoller’s company, where she had largely collaborated with another writer named Tony Powers. Trio had first refusal on anything the two of them wrote, and if Leiber and Stoller didn’t like it, they could take the song elsewhere. Greenwich and Powers had their biggest successes with songs that Leiber and Stoller rejected, which they sold to Aaron Schroeder. And they’d started up a collaboration with Phil Spector — although Spector and Greenwich’s first meeting had not exactly gone smoothly. He’d gone into her office to hear her play a song that she thought would be suitable for the Paris Sisters, but had kept wandering out of the office, and had kept looking at himself in a mirror and primping himself rather than listen to her song. Eventually she said to him  “Listen to me, you little prick. Did you come to look at yourself or to hear my songs?”, and she didn’t make that sale. But later on, Spector became interested in a song she’d sold to Schroeder, and made an appointment to meet her and talk about her writing some stuff for him — that second meeting, which Spector didn’t realise was with someone he’d already made a bad impression on, Spector turned up four hours late.  But despite that, Greenwich and Powers wrote several songs for Spector, who was also given songwriting credit, and which became big hits in versions he produced — “(Today I Met) The Boy I’m Gonna Marry”, a single by Darlene Love: [Excerpt: Darlene Love, “(Today I Met) The Boy I’m Gonna Marry”] And “Why Do Lovers Break Each Others’ Hearts?”, released as by Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, but with Love once again on lead vocals: [Excerpt: Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, “Why Do Lovers Break Each Others’ Hearts?”] I say that Spector was also given songwriting credit on those records, because there is some debate about how much he contributed to the songs he’s credited on. Some of his co-writers have said that he would often only change a word or a phrase, and get himself cut in on an already-completed song, while others have said that he contributed a reasonable amount to the songwriting, though he was never the primary writer — for example Barry Mann has said that Spector came up with the middle section for “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'”. I tend towards the belief that Spector’s contribution to the writing on those songs he’s co-credited on was minimal — in his whole career, the number of songs he wrote on his own seems to be in the single figures, while those other writers wrote dozens of hit records without any contribution from Spector — and so when I talk about records he produced I’ll tend to use phrasing like “a Goffin and King song co-credited to Phil Spector” rather than “a song by Goffin, King, and Spector”, but I don’t want that to give the impression that I’m certain Spector made no contribution.  But while Greenwich and Powers were a mildly successful team, their partnership ended when Greenwich met Jeff Barry at a family Thanksgiving dinner — Greenwich’s uncle was Barry’s cousin. As Greenwich later put it, when they started talking together about music and realised how much they had in common, “I went ‘ooh’, he went ‘mmmhh’, and his wife went ‘I don’t think I like this'”. Soon their previous partnerships, both romantic and musical, were over, and Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich became the third of the great Brill Building husband-and-wife songwriting teams.  Where Goffin and King had a sophisticated edge to their writing, with a hint of sexual subversion and the mingling of pain and pleasure, and Mann and Weill tried to incorporate social comment into their songs, Barry and Greenwich were happy to be silly — they were writing songs like “Hanky Panky”, “Da Doo Ron Ron”,  and “Doo Wah Diddy Diddy”: [Excerpt: Ellie Greenwich “Doo Wah Diddy Diddy (demo)”] This worked extremely well for them, to the extent that after they broke up a few years later, Barry would continue this formula with songs such as “Sugar Sugar”, “Jingle Jangle” and “Bang Shang A Lang”. Barry and Greenwich’s style was to jam in as many hooks as possible, maybe put in a joke or two, keep the lyrics simple, and get out in two minutes. Very few of their songs were masterpieces of songwriting, but they *were* absolutely perfect templates for masterpieces of production. It sounds like I’m damning them with faint praise, but I’m really not. There is a huge skill involved in what they were doing — if you’re writing some heartwrenching masterpiece about the human condition, people will forgive the odd lapse in craft, but if you’re writing “My baby does the hanky panky”, there’s no margin for error, and you’re not going to get forgiven if you mess it up.  Barry and Greenwich were good enough at this that they became the go-to writers for Spector for the next couple of years. He would record songs by most of the Brill Building teams, but when you think of the classic records Spector produced, they’re far more likely than not to be Barry and Greenwich songs — of the twenty-seven Philles singles released after Barry and Greenwich started writing together, fourteen are credited to Barry/Greenwich/Spector, and other than the joke release “Let’s Dance the Screw”, which we talked about back in the episode on the Crystals, there’s a run of eleven singles released on the label between late 1962 and early 1964 which are credited either as Greenwich/Powers/Spector or Barry/Greenwich/Spector. And so it was naturally to Barry and Greenwich that Spector turned to write the first big hit for the Ronettes — and he let Ronnie hear the writing session. By this time, Spector had become romantically involved with Ronnie, and he invited her into his apartment to sit in the next room and listen to them working on the song — usually they got together in hotels rather than at Spector’s home. While she was there, she found several pairs of women’s shoes — Spector hadn’t told her he was married, and claimed to her when she asked that they belonged to his sister. This should probably have been a sign of things to come. Assuming that Spector did contribute to the writing, I think it’s easy to tell what he brought to “Be My Baby”. If you listen to that Connie Francis record I excerpted earlier, on which Spector is also a credited co-writer, the melody line for the line “that you don’t feel the same” leading into the chorus: [Excerpt: Connie Francis, “Second-Hand Love”] is identical to the melody line leading into the chorus of “Be My Baby”: [Excerpt: The Ronettes, “Be My Baby”] So that transition between the verse and the chorus is likely his work. After rehearsing Ronnie for several weeks in New York, Spector flew her out to LA to make the record in Gold Star Studios, where she spent three days recording the lead vocals. The backing vocals weren’t provided by the other Ronettes, but rather by the Blossoms, with a few extra singers — notably Spector’s assistant Sonny Bono, and his new girlfriend Cher — but what really made the track was not the vocals — although the song was perfect for Ronnie — but Hal Blaine’s drum intro: [Excerpt: The Ronettes, “Be My Baby”] That intro was utterly simple — Blaine was always a minimalist player, someone who would play for the song rather than play fussy fills — but that simple part, combined with the powerful sound that the engineer Larry Levine got, was enough to make it one of the most memorable intros in rock music history. Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys talks to this day about how he had to pull over to the side of the road when he first heard it on his car radio, and he would listen to the record incessantly for hours at a time. Incidentally, since I’m talking about the musicians, a lot of sources credit Carol Kaye for playing the bass on this track, so I’m going to say something once, here, which should be taken as read whenever I’m talking about records made in LA in the sixties — Carol Kaye is not only an unreliable source about what records she played on, she is an utterly dishonest one. For those who don’t know, Ms. Kaye was one of the great bass players of the sixties, and also one of the better session guitarists. She played on hundreds of records in the sixties, including many, many, classics from the Beach Boys, Spector, Frank Zappa, and others, and she was the only woman getting regular session work in LA on a rock instrument — there may have been session orchestral musicians who were women, but when it comes to guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, sax, and so on, she was the only one. For that, she deserves a huge amount of credit. Unfortunately, she has never been happy only being credited for the records she actually played on, and insists she played on many, many, more. Some of this can be reasonably put down to lapses in memory more than fifty years later — if you’re playing two or three sessions a day, and you play on a bunch of Beach Boys records, then it’s easy enough to misremember having played on “Surfin’ USA” when maybe you played on a similar-sounding record, and there are things like her claiming to have played on “Good Vibrations”, where there were multiple sessions for that track, and it happened that the takes eventually used weren’t the ones where she was playing bass, but she had no way of knowing that. That’s completely forgivable. But Ms. Kaye also claims, with no evidence whatsoever on her side and a great deal of evidence against her, to have been responsible for playing almost the entire recorded works of James Jamerson, Motown’s main bass player, claiming tapes were secretly shipped from Detroit to LA — something that has been denied by every single person working at Motown, and which can be easily disproved just by listening to the tapes. She claims to have played the bass on “I’m a Believer” by the Monkees — a track recorded in New York, by New York musicians. And whenever anyone points out the falsehoods, rather than saying “I may have made a mistake” she hurls abuse at them, and in some cases libels them on her website. So, Carol Kaye did not play on this record, and we know that because we have the AFM session sheets, which show that the bass players on the track were Ray Pohlman and Jimmy Bond. I’ll link a PDF of that sheet in the show notes. So in future, when I mention someone other than Carol Kaye playing on a song, and Wikipedia or somewhere says she played on it, bear this in mind. Two people who did play on the record were Bill Pitman and Tommy Tedesco, and this is why the B-side, an instrumental, is named “Tedesco and Pitman”. Spector was enough of a control freak that he didn’t want DJs ever to play the wrong side of his singles, so he stuck instrumental jam sessions by the studio musicians — with the songwriting credited to him rather than to them — on the B-sides. I don’t know about you, but I actually quite like “Tedesco and Pitman”, but then I’ve always had a soft spot for the vibraphone: [Excerpt: “The Ronettes” (The Wrecking Crew), Tedesco and Pitman”] “Be My Baby” was a massive hit — it went to number one on the Cashbox chart, though only number two on the Billboard chart, and sold millions of copies. The group were invited on to Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars tour, but Spector wanted Ronnie to be in California to record the follow-up, so the girls’ cousin Elaine filled in for her for the first couple of weeks of the tour, while Ronnie recorded another Barry, Greenwich and Spector song, “Baby I Love You”: [Excerpt: The Ronettes, “Baby I Love You”] Ronnie didn’t realise it at the time, but Spector was trying to isolate her from the other group members, and from her family. But at first this seemed to her like a sensible way of solving the problem, and she rejoined the tour after the record was made. Soon after this, the group travelled to the UK for a brief tour in early 1964, during which they became friendly with the Beatles — Ronnie had a brief chaste flirtation with John Lennon, and Estelle something a little more with George Harrison. They also got to know their support act on the tour, the Rolling Stones — at least once Ronnie had had a row with Andrew Loog Oldham, as Spector had sent a telegram forbidding the Rolling Stones from spending time with the Ronettes. Once Ronnie pointed out that they were there and Spector wasn’t, the two groups became very friendly — and more than friendly, if Keith Richards’ autobiography is to be believed. On their return to the US, they continued having hits through 1964 — nothing was as big as “Be My Baby”, but they had three more top forty hits that year, with two mediocre records, “The Best Part of Breaking Up” and “Do I Love You?”, co-written by the team of Pete Andreoli and Vini Poncia, and then a return to form with the magnificent “Walking in the Rain”, written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill: [Excerpt: The Ronettes Featuring Veronica, “Walking in the Rain”] But Spector was becoming more and more erratic in his personal life, and more and more controlling. I won’t go into too many details here, because we’re going to see a lot more of Phil Spector over the next year or so, but he recorded many great records with the Ronettes which he refused to release, claiming they weren’t quite right — Ronnie has later realised that he was probably trying to sabotage their career so he could have her all to himself, though at the time she didn’t know that. Neither of the two singles they did release in 1965 made the top fifty, and the one single they released in 1966, a return to songs by Barry and Greenwich, only made number one hundred, for one week: [Excerpt: The Ronettes, “I Can Hear Music”] Also in 1966, the Ronettes were invited by the Beatles to be their support act on their last ever tour, but once again Spector insisted that Ronnie couldn’t go, because she needed to be in the studio, so Elaine substituted for her again, much to the Beatles’ disappointment. Nothing from the studio sessions during that tour was released. The group broke up in 1967, and the next year Ronnie married Phil Spector, who became ever more controlling and abusive. I won’t go into details of the way he treated her, which you can read all about in her autobiography, but suffice to say that I was completely unsurprised when he murdered a woman in 2003. You’ll probably get some idea of his behaviours when I talk about him in future episodes, but what Ronnie suffered in the years they were together was something no-one should have to go through. By the time she managed to leave him, in June 1972, she had only released one track in years, a song that George Harrison had written for her called “Try Some, Buy Some”, which Spector had recorded with her at Harrison’s insistence, during a period when Spector was working with several of the ex-Beatles and trying to rebuild his own career on the back of them: [Excerpt: Ronnie Spector, “Try Some, Buy Some”] Neither Ronnie nor Spector were particularly keen on the track, and it was a commercial flop — although John Lennon later said that the track had inspired his “Happy Xmas (War is Over)”. Ronnie eventually escaped from Spector’s abuse — leaving the house barefoot, as Spector had stolen her shoes so she couldn’t leave — and started to build a new life for herself, though she would struggle with alcoholism for many years. She got nothing in their divorce settlement, as Spector threatened to hire a hit man to kill her if she tried to get anything from him, and she made a living by touring the nostalgia circuit with various new lineups of Ronettes — the others having given up on their music careers — and while she never had another hit, she did have a recording career. Her solo career got its proper start because of a chance meeting in New York. Her old friend John Lennon saw her on the street and called her over for a chat, and introduced her to the friend he was with, Jimmy Iovine, who was producing an album for Southside Johnny and the Asbury Dukes. Bruce Springsteen had written a song for that band, and Iovine thought it might work well as a duet with Ronnie, and he invited her to the studio that day, and she cut the song with them: [Excerpt: Southside Johnny and the Asbury Dukes, “You Mean So Much To Me”] That song became one of the most popular songs on the album, and so when the Asbury Dukes toured supporting Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band, they brought Ronnie along with them to sing on that song and do a couple of her own hits. That led to the E-Street Band themselves backing Ronnie on a single — a version of Billy Joel’s “Say Goodbye to Hollywood”, a song that Joel had written with her in mind: [Excerpt: Ronnie Spector and the E-Street Band, “Say Goodbye to Hollywood”] However, that was a flop, and so were all her later attempts to have comebacks, though she worked with some great musicians over the years. But she was able to continue having a career as a performer, even if she never returned to stardom, and she never made much money from her hits. She did, though, sing on one more top-ten hit, singing backing vocals on Eddie Money’s “Take Me Home Tonight”: [Excerpt: Eddie Money, “Take Me Home Tonight”] Phil Spector continued to earn money from his ex-wife for a long time after their divorce. By 1998, when the Ronettes finally sued Spector for unpaid royalties, they had earned, between them, a total of $14,482.30 in royalties from all their hit records — the amount that came from a single 1964 royalty payment. In court, Spector argued that he didn’t owe them any more, and indeed that *they* still owed *him* money, because the cost of recording their singles meant that they had never actually earned more money than they cost. Eventually, after a series of appeals, the group members each got about half a million dollars in 2002 — obviously a great deal of money, but a small fraction of what they actually earned. Spector, who was on the board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, prevented the Ronettes from being inducted out of spite towards his ex until he was imprisoned, at which point they were finally recognised, in 2007.  Ronnie continues to perform, and seems to have a happy life. Estelle, sadly, did not — she suffered from anorexia and schizophrenia, spent a period of time homeless, and died in 2009. Nedra became a born-again Christian shortly after the group split up, and recorded a couple of unsuccessful albums of Christian music in the seventies, before going off to work in real estate. In September last year, it was announced that a film is going to be made of Ronnie Spector’s life story.  It’s nice to know that there’ll be something out there telling her story with her as the protagonist, rather than as a background character in the story of her abusive husband.

Eine Welt ohne Beatles? 1970 mussten die Fans sehr tapfer sein, weil sich die berühmteste Band der Welt getrennt hatte. Wie war das damals eigentlich? Und: wie sind die Solo-Alben der vier Beatles einzuschätzen? Peter Urban erinnert sich, er erzählt von Begegnungen mit John Lennon und Paul McCartney im Londoner Abbey Road Studio. Wie erfolgreich und relevant waren und sind eigentlich die vier als Solo- Musiker? Im Gespräch mit Ocke Bandixen geht es auch um den Schock in der Musikwelt, als im Dezember 1980 der Mord an John Lennon verübt wurde. Peter Urban wurde recht unsanft mit dieser Nachricht konfrontiert. Schreibt uns, wie euch der Podcast gefällt: urbanpop@ndr.de Barbara hat schon geschrieben, Ihr ist eine falsche Info aufgefallen, die schon seit den 70er Jahren herumgeistert: Linda McCartneys Familie (Eastman) hat nichts mit Eastman Kodak zu tun! Danke für den Hinweis, liebe Barbara! Wir haben das nachträglich korrigiert und freuen uns über jeden Hinweis. Musikliste: John Lennon Songs: Give peace a chance – Plastic Ono Band (1969) Cold Turkey – Plastic Ono Band (1969) Instant Karma! – John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970) Mother – John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970) God – John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970) Isolation – John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970) Working Class Hero – John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970) Do the Oz - John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1971, als Bonus auf der Remix-Version des Albums „John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band“, 2000) Power to the people - John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1971) Imagine (1971) Happy Xmas(War is over) - John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1971) Jealous guy (1971) How do you sleep (1971) Oh Yoko (1971) Gimme some truth (1971) Woman ist he nigger oft he world (1972) Mind Games (1973) #9 Dream (1974) Starting over, Cleanup time, I'm losing you, Beautiful boy, Watching the wheels, Woman (alle 1980) Alben: John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band (1970) Imagine (1971) Mind Games (1973) Walls and Bridges (1974) Double Fantasy (1980) Paul McCartney Songs: Another day (1970) Maybe I'm amazed (1970) 3 Legs, Too many people (1971) Dear friend (1971) My love (1973) Live and let die (1973) Band on the run (1973) Alben: McCartney (1970) Ram (Paul and Linda McCartney, 1971) Wild Life (Wings, 1971) Red Rose Speedway (Paul McCartney and Wings, 1973) Band on the run (Paul McCartney and Wings, 1973) George Harrison Songs: My Sweet Lord (1970) Isn't it a pity (1970) What is life (1970) Beware of darkness (1970) Give me love (Give me peace on earth, 1973) Alben: All Things Must Pass (1970) The Concert for Bangladesh (1971) Living in the Material World (1973) Traveling Wilburys Vol.1 (1988) Ringo Starr Songs: It don't come easy (1971) Photograph (1973) Alben: Sentimental Journey (1970) Beaucoups of Blues (1970) Ringo (1973)

durée : 00:03:54 - La Chanson qui fait du bien France Bleu Cotentin

This week we bring you Part 1 of our interview with longtime political strategist and ad maker, Chris Mottola. Chris begins by telling some stories about how he got started in the business and arrived at his process. Then, the boys share a brief holiday segment followed by a VERY special musical number by our pal Mike Bustin. Thanks to Chris and Mike, and all of you--Happy/Merry from us, we'll be back with Part 2 of the Mottola interview and more stuff next week. 

Peace on earth, love and mercy, My Friends.

❤️

Esta típica canção natalina traz uma mensagem que infelizmente poucos prestam atenção./This traditional Christmas song has a message that, unfortunately, only a few people pay attention to.

In this Christmas special we look at a man who was the head of one of the most famous boybands of all time, a man who spread peace and love everywhere he went and a man who wrote and sung one of the most beloved Christmas songs of all time, "Happy Xmas (War is Over)". However, was he really the great peace advocate that he proclaimed? Should he really have been offered the role of Jesus Christ? Or would he have been more suited to the role of the Dickhead Devil?

Le mois dernier, Alanis Morissette a sorti sa version officielle de "Happy Xmas (War is Over)" de John Lennon et Yoko Ono. Un documentaire sur Paul McCartney a été réalisé, en collaboration avec Rick Rubin. Un nouveau documentaire sur le pionnier du rock Little Richard est désormais dans les mains du producteur exécutif Dee Rees, et de la réalisatrice Lisa Cortés. --- Classic 21 vous informe des dernières actualités du rock, de Belgique et de partout ailleurs. Le Journal du Rock, chaque jour à 18h30 et le lendemain à 7h30.

Le mois dernier, Alanis Morissette a sorti sa version officielle de "Happy Xmas (War is Over)" de John Lennon et Yoko Ono. Un documentaire sur Paul McCartney a été réalisé, en collaboration avec Rick Rubin. Un nouveau documentaire sur le pionnier du rock Little Richard est désormais dans les mains du producteur exécutif Dee Rees, et de la réalisatrice Lisa Cortés. --- Classic 21 vous informe des dernières actualités du rock, de Belgique et de partout ailleurs. Le Journal du Rock, chaque jour à 18h30 et le lendemain à 7h30.

John Lennon's timeless song embodies themes of peace and love during the holidays, but what does the bible say about peace? Join us as JJ Doerksen deep dives into this iconic Christmas tune. We hope you enjoy!

Derek shares his thoughts about personal responsibility and world peace through the lyrics of John Lennon's famous Christmas song. This podcast is a recording of CSL Kelowna's weekly New Thought livestream service. You can enjoy the services in real-time on Facebook Live at 10:30am every Sunday morning. We hope you will be inspired by the uplifting music and thought-provoking message. The Centre for Spiritual Living Kelowna is a community of individuals dedicated to personal growth and development; spiritual practices like meditation, prayer and mindfulness; self-care; and conscious manifestation. We practice Science of Mind principles based on the teachings of philosopher and spiritual psychologist Ernest Holmes. Find out more at www.cslkelowna.org.

John Lennon wasn’t one to do things small. Whether it was his activism or his music, he wanted to touch as many people as possible...which is probably why it’s no surprise that he set himself a goal to write a Christmas song that would last forever. Here’s the story of how a slogan from a billboard campaign would go on to fulfill Lennon’s lofty ambitions. Today, Behind the Christmas Hits features John Lennon’s Happy Xmas (War is Over).” #BehindTheChristmasHits is Presented by Pizza Pizza! All four Beatles have recorded solo Christmas songs but John Lennon’s was the first. According to Yoko Ono, she and John loved Christmas music. Whether it was Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer or White Christmas, there were always holiday songs playing when their son Sean was young. And it was John who’d put up most of the decorations. But this is a Christmas song that’s also a protest song. It began with John and Yoko’s famous “bed ins” in March 1969 to protest the Vietnam War. The first was at the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel and the second was at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal. As Christmas drew closer that year, John & Yoko decided to take their campaign in a new direction. They would buy billboards in Toronto, New York, Hong Kong and nine other cities with the message: WAR IS OVER…IF YOU WANT IT. In smaller letters along the bottom it read “Happy Christmas from John & Yoko.” That wasn’t a promotional campaign, teasing the release of a new song. It was simply a message to the world. War is Over...If You Want It was an anti-war slogan that had been used in other songs like The Unknown Solider by The Doors. But still...there was no idea to record a song using that slogan...at least...not yet. The song wouldn’t come for another two years, after Lennon’s biggest success as a solo artist. Imagine was John’s first #1 hit in Canada and around the world since leaving The Beatles. When reflecting on Imagine’s success, John said he now understood what you had to do to make your viewpoints heard. Quote: “Put your political message across with a little honey." He would go back to the words used in the billboard campaign as the foundation of a song that promoted unity and optimism for Christmas. The song was recorded in October of ’71. The legendary Phil Spector was the producer. Before dressing up in costume to go trick or treating on Halloween Day, 30 kids from the Harlem Community Choir, between the ages of 4 and 12, came in to record their backing vocals. It was released just about a month later - on December 1 — not as part of an album, but as a green see-through vinyl single. However, because it came out just 3 1/2 weeks before Christmas, it wasn’t a hit that year at all. A year later, when the song was finally released in the UK, people started to take notice. John once said he always wanted to write a Christmas record that would last forever. That was during a radio interview in the mid-70’s and before the song had become what it is now. The song has been covered by countless other artists and Lennon’s original has re-entered the charts numerous times, including in 2019, peaking at #42 on Billboard’s Hot 100. John Lennon never did record another Christmas song, but that doesn’t matter - he succeeded in his goal to write one that would last forever. Hit Subscribe for more stories Behind the Christmas Hits!

Selecci

40 years after he was taken from us, John Lennon's murder still hurts those of us who "remember where we were." A few years ago, Ray did a short story telling of his experience surrounding December 8, 1980. It's been one of our blog's most popular pages. This week, we discuss, and we remember...This special presentation includes a song that has always served to lift spirits disheartened by this dark anniversary. Happy Imbalanced Xmas...Listen to this cool episode, and then get caught up here!!!Thanks to our sponsors, Crooked Eye Brewery AND One CBD for their support of the podcast!This show is part of Pantheon Podcasts.

40 years after he was taken from us, John Lennon's murder still hurts those of us who "remember where we were." A few years ago, Ray did a short story telling of his experience surrounding December 8, 1980. It's been one of our blog's most popular pages. This week, we discuss, and we remember...This special presentation includes a song that has always served to lift spirits disheartened by this dark anniversary. Happy Imbalanced Xmas...Listen to this cool episode, and then get caught up here!!!Thanks to our sponsors, Crooked Eye Brewery AND One CBD for their support of the podcast!This show is part of Pantheon Podcasts.

40 years after he was taken from us, John Lennon's murder still hurts those of us who "remember where we were." A few years ago, Ray did a short story telling of his experience surrounding December 8, 1980. It's been one of our blog's most popular pages. This week, we discuss, and we remember... This special presentation includes a song that has always served to lift spirits disheartened by this dark anniversary. Happy Imbalanced Xmas... Listen to this cool episode, and then get caught up here!!! Thanks to our sponsors, Crooked Eye Brewery AND One CBD for their support of the podcast! This show is part of Pantheon Podcasts.

40 years after he was taken from us, John Lennon's murder still hurts those of us who "remember where we were." A few years ago, Ray did a short story telling of his experience surrounding December 8, 1980. It's been one of our blog's most popular pages. This week, we discuss, and we remember... This special presentation includes a song that has always served to lift spirits disheartened by this dark anniversary. Happy Imbalanced Xmas... Listen to this cool episode, and then get caught up here!!! Thanks to our sponsors, Crooked Eye Brewery AND One CBD for their support of the podcast! This show is part of Pantheon Podcasts.

Temas cantados por artistas tan diversos como José Feliciano, The Raveonettes, Flaming Lips o Pearl Jam. Desde su Help de la época inicial Beatle a su última grabación, de Double Fantasy, la música de uno de los de Liverpool sigue muy presente en la música popular. - José Feliciano, Help!- Roxy Music, Jealous Guy- Beck, Love- Duran Duran, Instant Karma!- Roger Taylor, Working Class Hero- The Raveonettes, One Day (At A Time)- David Bowie, Across the Universe- Arcade Fire, Mind Games - The Flaming Lips, Just Like Starting Over - Elton John, Imagine - Sarah McLachlan, Happy Xmas (War is Over)- Pearl Jam, Gimme Some Truth - Neil Young, Imagine- The Shadows, Imagine/Woman

This episode Kenny and Larson compare their Spotify 2020 Wrapped results and discuss whether or not Spotify has been unfairly criticized as of late. Plus an interview with up and coming blues/rock/funk musician Max Rogue hailing from Germany at the 1 hour 3 min mark. MUSIC REVIEWS: 1 hour 53 min mark“Wonder Why” – Ryk “Don't You Want To” – Jordan Xidas Fresh Finds: 10 min mark Death of an optimist – GrandsonWonder – Shawn MendesTHE LOST TAPES (VOL. 1) - Zeds Dead“Something” Billie Eilish beatles cover“Hi” Wu Tang Clan, Texas “Date Rape” – Pepper  “Mettawave” – Manic Science “I Believe” Flux Pavilion “Don't Wait” – EXES, Dashboard Confessional“Winter Time” – Sabrina Claudio, Alicia Keys –“A Dying Plea” – Anti Flag, DE'WAYNE, Marcia Richards, Jordan Montgomery, Tom Morello“Something” – Billie Ellish“The Captain is Drunk” – Jack Johnson “Real Shit” – Juice WRLD, benny blanco “the ground below ft. Royal Blood” – Run the Jewel “Christmas Must Be Tonight” – Futurebirds cover“River” – Margo Price “Santa Clause is Comin' to Town” – Galactic, Anjelika “Jelly” Joseph“Are U Live” – Chance the Rapper, Jeremih, ValeeNOTABLY BAD:“LIT” – LIT "Swimming in the Stars”-Brittney SpearsUNCUT SUGGESTIONS: 1 hour 38 min mark“Good Times Bad Times” – Camo & Krooked, Document One “Mettawave” – Manic Science “I Believe” – Flux Pavilion, Asha “Don't Care Darlin' – Nathaniel Ratliff & the Night Sweats, Fug Yep Soundation  “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” – Plastic Ono Band “The Christmas Song” – Nat King ColeBourbon Review:Eagle Rare 4.1 out 5 stars 

1971: Erich Honecker wird Erster Sekretär des Zentralkomitees der SED - und John Lennon veröffentlicht "Happy Xmas (War is over)".

Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” is one of America’s least-loved Christmas songs if you read the annual lists of worst Christmas songs, but it’s also one of the most popular, so much so that Forbes reported in 2010 that it likely earned him between $400,000 and $600,000 annually. A sense of economic injustice likely fuels the outrage that writer Chris Chase expressed toward it and John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Happy Xmas (War is Over)” in 2010: Them putting out this dreck is like if Irvin Berlin wrote The Thong Song. It’s like if Van Gogh had done macaroni art. I don’t care if the latest American Idol runner-up warbles his way through O, Holy Night, just don’t let me hear the great Paul McCartney butcher a song in the holiday season. Andrew Winistorfer defended the song for Vice.com in 2012 in a piece that often reads like an overcorrection—he claims the song is “the original--and by far best--Chillwave song”—and Annie Zaleski wrote at Salon.com in 2016 that “‘Wonderful Christmastime’ represents one of McCartney's biggest post-Beatles pivot points — a low-pressure song where he reasserted his independence and started a metamorphosis that would linger for years. Sometimes, the most unexpected (and most polarizing) gestures end up being the most enduring.” The song has proven to be very coverable, far more so than the biggest contemporary Christmas song, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You,” and on this episode I talk to two artists who have recorded versions of the song. Electro boogie duo Tuxedo cut an on-brand version in 2014, and New Orleans rock band The Breton Sound cut a pop-punk version a year later. For this episode, Alex Rawls talked to Tuxedo’s Jake One and The Breton Sound’s Jonathan Pretus about the song, versions of it, and their other Christmas songs. Tuxedo recently released its third album, Tuxedo III. 

Episodio del programma Rockonti: storie musicali ai confini tra fantasia e realtà – a cura di Massimo Bonelli. Playlist: 1. Happy Xmas (War is over) 2. (Just like) Starting over 3. Oh my love 4. Nobody loves you (When you're down) 5. Dream 6. Angela 7. Happy Xmas 8. Mind games 9. Love 10. Stand by me 11. Jealous Guy 12. Woman 13. God 14. Give peace a chance 15. Imagine

1) Feliz Navidad (Josè Feliciano)..2) Thank God it’s Christmas (Queen)..3) Christmas all over again (Tom Petty)..4) Please, Daddy don’t get drunk this Christmas (John Denver)..5) Here comes Santa Claus (Bob Dylan)..6) Christmas Sucks (Arrogant Worms)..7) Fairytale of New York (The Pogues)..8) It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas (Perry Como)..9) Happy Xmas (War is Over) (John Lennon) ..In studio Giuseppe Fiori, Cristian Zaffaroni, Paola Colombo (seconda parte)

1) Feliz Navidad (Josè Feliciano)..2) Thank God it’s Christmas (Queen)..3) Christmas all over again (Tom Petty)..4) Please, Daddy don’t get drunk this Christmas (John Denver)..5) Here comes Santa Claus (Bob Dylan)..6) Christmas Sucks (Arrogant Worms)..7) Fairytale of New York (The Pogues)..8) It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas (Perry Como)..9) Happy Xmas (War is Over) (John Lennon) ..In studio Giuseppe Fiori, Cristian Zaffaroni, Paola Colombo (seconda parte)

NOT Political News for end of a week in the Barometer ProgramHODGEPODGE NEWS "Happy Xmas, War Is Over"www.barometr.life

NOT Political News for end of a week in the Barometer ProgramHODGEPODGE NEWS "Happy Xmas, War Is Over"www.barometr.life

It's a Christmas Spectacular and mini Gilmore Guys reunion! Kevin Porter (Good Christian Fun) and fan favorite Anthony Troli drop by to help figure out why on gourd's green earth Patrons chose "Last Christmas" by Wham! as this month's 'you pick punch-up'. This episode would go off the rails but it is truly never on them. UNPUNCHABLE JAMS: "Christmas in LA" by Vulfpeck, "I'm Not Ready For Christmas" by Chris Farren feat. Mae Whitman, "Happy Xmas (War is Over)" by John Lennon, "White Christmas" by The Drifters

This holiday season, we look at the two most famous—and most polarizing holiday songs from the solo Beatles: Paul's "Wonderful Christmastime" and John's "Happy Xmas (War is Over)." Are these two songs as far apart from each other as they seem? Plus history, news, an amazing giveaway announcement, and our favorite Beatles thing of the week! 0:00: Opening/Banter 8:57: History 17:41: News 36:05: Feature: "Wonderful Christmastime" and "Happy Xmas (War is Over)" battle to the death! (Not really.) 1:12:29: Our favorite Beatles-related thing of the week

Hi guys, welcome back to Geeking Out Loud!    On our fifth episode of Season 2, Maria talks about Miley Cyrus’ new single with Mark Ronson, featuring Sean Ono Lennon. John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s son teamed up with Miley and Mark to bring back one of his parents’ amazing hits, (Happy Xmas) War is Over. The original Holiday tune came out in 1971, and now, these wonderful artist felt it was time to bring it back. Oh wow, SPOILER ALERT, they were right.    The single’s powerful lyrics and melodies carry this phenomenal and timeless tune. However, it feels a bit different than the original, and that’s because of Mark Ronson’s tricks as producer.    Let’s chat about the wonderful twists they did on this classic, and what they chose to keep like the original!    Song: Ikson - Heartbeat (Vlog No Copyright Music)   Music promoted by Vlog No Copyright Music.   Video Link: https://youtu.be/YQjlxD0IbtA     

Host Alex Rawls revisits familiar territory when he talks about Toronto and Southern Ontario among other things with Chris McKhool of the Canadian progressive string band Sultans of String, who released a Christmas album, Christmas Caravan, last year. They talk about Turkish strings, "Happy Xmas (War is Over)," and Mario Lanza during Christmas dinner. This week, Alex also talks to New Orleans musician Boyfriend about her affection for The Carpenters and particularly "Merry Christmas Darling," which found a new musical life when it appeared in the 2003 film, Love Actually.  You can find the Sultans of String on Facebook and the band's website, and you can hear Boyfriend on her Soundcloud page and find out more about her on her website. If you've got thoughts on this week's episode, please share them on the 12 Songs Facebook page.

Having reached the end of Matthew Cybulski's best-selling book, Find Your Playlist, the podcast shifts to a weekly deep dive into some of the best album's, artists, and songs of all-time. This week, Matt and Steve break down Phil Collins 1985 smash hit, No Jacket Required. This week's Playlist 1. Rock N Roll- Led Zeppelin 2. I Don't Wanna Know- Phil Collins 3. Easy Lover- Philip Bailey and Phil Collins 4. Happy XMas (War is Over)- John Lennon 5. The Christmas Song- Nat King Cole 6. Rockin Around the Christmas Tree- Brenda Lee https://open.spotify.com/user/12146513296/playlist/2ZhDKrNYdZMIUjdsMAMNKq For More information: @MthroughMPod on Twitter Email: motivationthroughmusicpod@gmail.com

No se nos ocurre mejor manera para desear felicidad a todos los oyentes de El Recuento que paseando por la historia de una canción que nos recuerda que, si ponemos todos de nuestra parte, el mundo puede ser un lugar en paz. Happy Xmas (War is over) de Jonh Lennon y Yoko Ono, es la protagonista de este distinto, en el que, como siempre, tendremos el colofón del montaje de las versiones que nos ofrece Jose Luis Machuca. Si quieres conocer  las canciones que suenan en el episodio visita mi página web. (listado de canciones).

  No se nos ocurre mejor manera para desear felicidad a todos los oyentes de El Recuento que paseando por la historia de una canción que nos recuerda que, si ponemos todos de nuestra parte, el mundo puede ser un lugar en paz. Happy Xmas (War is over) de Jonh Lennon y Yoko Ono, es Leer másEp.116 – Distinto con “Happy XMAS (War is over)” –[…]

Happy Holidays! It's a Dumb All Over Xmas special...which contains nothing about Xmas! We cover the Tax Bill, the end of Net Neutrality, Ajit Pai, and an interesting update on the Trump Russia investigation. We also talk about #CorkerKickback.  We also listen to Alex Jones ask for your prayers to help defeat the globalists! It's a shorter episode this week so you can spend an hour(ish) with us and then have some extra time to argue with  your family! It's a Festivus Miracle! No Beer this week, we went traditional Puerto Rican Xmas, and had some Coquito! 

No se nos ocurre mejor manera para desear felicidad a todos los oyentes de El Recuento que paseando por la historia de una canción que nos recuerda que, si ponemos todos de nuestra parte, el mundo puede ser un lugar en paz. Happy Xmas (War is over) de Jonh Lennon y Yoko Ono, es la protagonista de este distinto, en el que, como siempre, tendremos el colofón del montaje de las versiones que nos ofrece Jose Luis Machuca. Si quieres conocer las canciones que suenan en el episodio, te dejo un enlace con mi página web. (listado de canciones) Otros distintos de El Recuento Every breath you take Imagine Suspicious minds Jingle Bells Video killed the radio star I don´t like mondays. Dust in the wind Everlasting Love ¿Dónde encontrarnos? Para concluir, siempre nos gusta recordarte dónde nos puedes encontrar. Twitter: @El_Recuento Facebook: Página del Podcast El Recuento Web: Quesuenelabocina.com Email: ElRecuento@AVPodcast.Net Itunes: El Recuento en Itunes AVPodcast.Net: El Recuento en AVPodcast.Net Ivoox: El Recuento en Ivoox Spreaker: El Recuento en Spreaker El programa sonidos y de sonrisas. Margot Martin y su equipo, si les dejas, te cuentan una historia o dos. Cualquier sonido es bueno para buscar tu entretenimiento. La entrada Ep.116 – Distinto con “Happy XMAS (War is over)” – aparece primero en AVpodcast.

No se nos ocurre mejor manera para desear felicidad a todos los oyentes de El Recuento que paseando por la historia de una canción que nos recuerda que, si ponemos todos de nuestra parte, el mundo puede ser un lugar en paz. Happy Xmas (War is over) de Jonh Lennon y Yoko Ono, es la protagonista de este distinto, en el que, como siempre, tendremos el colofón del montaje de las versiones que nos ofrece Jose Luis Machuca. Si quieres conocer las canciones que suenan en el episodio, te dejo un enlace con mi página web. (listado de canciones) Otros distintos de El Recuento Every breath you take Imagine Suspicious minds Jingle Bells Video killed the radio star I don´t like mondays. Dust in the wind Everlasting Love ¿Dónde encontrarnos? Para concluir, siempre nos gusta recordarte dónde nos puedes encontrar. Twitter: @El_Recuento Facebook: Página del Podcast El Recuento Web: Quesuenelabocina.com Email: ElRecuento@AVPodcast.Net Itunes: El Recuento en Itunes AVPodcast.Net: El Recuento en AVPodcast.Net Ivoox: El Recuento en Ivoox Spreaker: El Recuento en Spreaker El programa sonidos y de sonrisas. Margot Martin y su equipo, si les dejas, te cuentan una historia o dos. Cualquier sonido es bueno para buscar tu entretenimiento. La entrada Ep.116 – Distinto con “Happy XMAS (War is over)” – aparece primero en AVpodcast.

Feliz Natal a todos :) *Baixe o PDF desta aula gratuitamente! Cadastre-se para ter livre acesso à biblioteca #aicm (Aprenda Inglês com música) https://www.teachermilena.com/aprenda-ingles-com-musica *Comprando o Super Pacotão você apoia o projeto "Aprenda Inglês com música". Saiba mais: https://www.teachermilena.com/aicm-super-pacotao Conheça os outros projetos da Teacher Milena: CURSO INTENSIVO http://www.workshop.teachermilena.com/ TEACHER MILENA FLIX https://www.teachermilena.com/flix Teacher Milena nas redes sociais: @teacher.milenagurgel

The story behind "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" by John Lennon

Recorded live at Arlington Street Church, Sunday, December 18, 2011.

It's Christmas! Dayve and Chill performed a Christmas set at The Box Christmas Party in Crewe on 18 December and here's the final song from the show, a cover of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Happy Xmas (War Is Over). It's a song which we performed with the full band last Christmas and have revived it this year with for the new line up, excluding Dan who is away on tour with Thea Gilmore. The video for this song is available on the HD and iPod quality video podcasts this week and the full show is available to view at youtube.com/dayvedean, facebook.com/dayvedean and myspace.com/dayvedean. Happy Christmas. War is over, if you want it...

Yo-Yo Ma & Friends - On this episode, Yo-Yo comments on the track Happy Xmas from the album Songs of Joy and Peace. Yo-Yo Ma & Friends-Songs of Joy & Peace @ Amazon.com