Podcasts about have no mercy

Show #1100 Covers 01. Blue Moon Marquee - Saint James Infirmary (4:30) (New Orleans Sessions, Blue Moon Marquee Music, 2024) 02. Walk That Walk - On The Road Again (4:41) (Red Devil Lye, self-release, 2024) 03. Knock-Out Greg & the Blue Flames - Serves Me Right To Suffer (3:58) (Serves Me Right To Suffer, Rhythm Bomb Records, 2024) 04. JD Simo & Luther Dickinson - Serves Me Right To Suffer (3:49) (Do The Rump!, Forty Below Records, 2024) 05. Egidio Juke Ingala & the Jacknives - Blues Stay Away (5:34) (Keep On Dreamin', Rhythm Bomb Records, 2024) 06. Albert Castiglia - All Our Past Times (5:40) (Righteous Souls, Gulf Coast Records, 2024) 07. Big Dave McLean - I Had My Fun (3:10) (This Old Life, Cordova Bay Records, 2024) 08. Benny Turner - Goin' Down Slow (5:35) (BT, Nola Blue Records, 2024) 09. Jennifer Porter - Good Ol' Wagon (3:16) (Yes, I Do, Cougar Moon Music, 2024) 10. Hitman Blues Band - Sunday Morning Coming Down (4:44) (Calling Long Distance, Nerus Records, 2024) 11. Alastair Greene - Bullfrog Blues (4:08) (Standing Out Loud, Ruf Records, 2024) 12. Shakedown Tim & the Rhythm Revue - You're the Boss (3:11) (Way Up!, Rhythm Bomb Records, 2024) 13. Jimi Fiano - As The Years Go Passing By (8:27) (Sweat And Pray, self-release, 2024) 14. Parlor Greens - My Sweet Lord (2:19) (In Green We Dream, Colemine Records, 2024) 15. Blues People - Hey Joe (Revisited) (5:50) (The Skin I'm In, self-release, 2024) 16. Liquid & Bones - Love In Vain (4:58) (Let's Have A Drink, self-release, 2024) 17. Sierra Green & the Giants - Same Old Blues (3:43) (Here We Are, Big Radio Records, 2024) 18. Albert Cummings - Why Don't We Do It In The Road (3:07) (Strong, Ivy Music, 2024) 19. Rusty Apollo - Why Don't We Do It In The Road (3:21) (Apollo III, Big Records, 2024) 20. Mick Clarke - Walking Dental Bill (aka Walking Doctor Bill) (3:06) (Dirty Work, Rockfold Records, 2024) 21. Katie Henry - Nobody's Fault But Mine (2:41) (Get Goin', Ruf Records, 2024) 22. Kid & Lisa Andersen - Nobody's Fault But Mine (3:54) (Spirits & Soul, Little Village Records, 2024) 23. Rick Estrin & The Nightcats - Everybody Knows (3:42) (The Hits Keep Coming, Alligator Records, 2024) 24. Mike Zito - Death Don't Have No Mercy (4:05) (Life is Hard, Gulf Coast Records, 2024) 25. The B. Christopher Band - Peter Gunn Theme (3:23) (106 Miles To Chicago, Guitar One Records, 2024) Bandana Blues is and will always be a labor of love. Please help Spinner deal with the costs of hosting & bandwidth. Visit www.bandanablues.com and hit the tipjar. Any amount is much appreciated, no matter how small. Thank you.

It's Hot ‘Lanta! This week, our hosts FiG and Knob are joined by David Davis, author of the new book “The Economic History of the Grateful Dead,” aka Grateful Seconds. They're heading down to Atlanta for the Grateful Dead's April 2nd, 1990 show at The Omni Coliseum. Along the way, discussions abound about the future of the Grateful Dead vault, the Kennedy Center Honors, and why the band dropped Death Don't Have No Mercy. Email davidadavis@gmail.com to order signed first copy editions of the book! Also available on Amazon. Feel Like A Stranger Mississippi Half Step Uptown Toodleloo > The Weight Queen Jane Approximately Easy To Love You Brown Eyed Women Let It Grow Foolish Heart > Looks Like Rain He's Gone > The Last Time > Drums > Space > The Other One > Death Don't Have No Mercy Around & Around > Good Lovin' Black Muddy River

Playlist: Tanya Tagaq & Vince Pope - CaribouKim Gordon - I'm a ManMETZ - Wet Blanket (BBC Maida Vale Session)LA MÉCANIQUE - D​é​jà VuHaviah Mighty & Eesah Yasuke - Starting BlocksHot Sugar - DoomAlina Pasha - Malanka / Lighting BoltStereopolina / Стереополина - Plastine / ПластинDie Arkiteket - Kaval (ft. Kid Moxie)Rezz - Can You See Me?Kontravoid - ReckoningRUN DMC - Raising HellEternia & MoSS - Day In The Life (ft. Tona & Maestro Fresh Wes)Beastie Boys - Get It TogetherThe Clash - Armagideon Time (Live Featuring Mikey Dread)Black Uhuru - UtteranceBlind Gary Davis - Death Don't Have No Mercy

Show #1038 Waterman Blues 01. Bukka White - Parchman Farm Blues (2:35) (78 RPM Shellac, Okey Records, 1940) 02. Reverend Gary Davis - Death Don't Have No Mercy (4:43) (Harlem Street Singer, Bluesville Records, 1960) 03. Gina Sicilia - Death Don't Have No Mercy (6:18) (Unchange, VizzTone Records, 2022) 04. Lightnin' Hopkins - Bad Things On My Mind [1953] (2:53) (Out Came The Blues, Ace Of Hearts, 1964) 05. Jesse Fuller - San Francisco Bay Blues [1962] (3:24) (Friends of Old Time Music, Smithsonian Folkways, 2006) 06. Eric Clapton - San Francisco Bay Blues (3:23) (Unplugged, WEA International, 1992) 07. Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee - Brownie's Blues (5:19) (In London, Nixa/Marble Arch Records, 1958) 08. Son House - Trouble Blues [1960s] (4:58) (The Real Delta Blues, Blue Goose Records, 1975) 09. John Lee Hooker - Hobo Blues [1965] (2:36) (American Folk Blues Festival 1962-1966 Vol. 1, Hip-O DVD, 2003) 10. Mississippi Fred McDowell - Kokomo Blues (2:05) (Delta Blues, Arhoolie Records, 1964) 11. Bonnie Raitt - Write Me A Few Of Your Lines / Kokomo Blues (3:52) (Lenox Music Inn, August 25, 1973) 12. Mississippi John Hurt - Coffee Blues (3:46) (Today!, Vanguard Records, 1966) 13. Lovin' Spoonful - Day Blues (3:14) (Daydream, Kama Sutra REcords, 1966) 14. Elizabeth Cotten - Freight Train (2:46) (Folksongs and Instrumentals with Guitar, Folkways Racords, 1958) 15. Taj Mahal - Freight Train (4:37) (Music Fuh Ya', Warner Bros Records, 1977) 16. Sleepy John Estes - Drop Down Mama (3:16) (78 RPM Shellac, Champion Records, 1935) 17. Bert Deivert & Copperhead Run - Drop Down Mama (3:43) (Blood In My Eyes For You, rootsy.nu, 2015) 18. Skip James - Cypress Grove Blues (3:16) (78 RPM Shellac, Paramont Records, 1931) 19. Robert Connely Farr - Cypress Grove (3:52) (Country Supper, self-release, 2020) 20. Muddy Waters - My Home Is In The Delta (4:01) (Folk Singer, Chess Records, 1964) 21. Doc Watson - You Don't Know My Mind Blues (3:03) (Memories, United Artists Records, 1976) 22. Hugh Laurie - You Don't Know My Mind (3:39) (Let Them Talk, Warner Bros Records, 2011) 23. Willie Dixon & Memphis Slim - Go Easy (5:54) (Willie's Blues, Prestige Bluesville Records, 1959) Bandana Blues is and will always be a labor of love. Please help Spinner deal with the costs of hosting & bandwidth. Visit www.bandanablues.com and hit the tipjar. Any amount is much appreciated, no matter how small. Thank you.

Episode 165 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Dark Stat” and the career of the Grateful Dead. This is a long one, even longer than the previous episode, but don't worry, that won't be the norm. There's a reason these two were much longer than average. 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 "Codine" by the Charlatans. Errata I mispronounce Brent Mydland's name as Myland a couple of times, and in the introduction I say "Touch of Grey" came out in 1988 -- I later, correctly, say 1987. (I seem to have had a real problem with dates in the intro -- I also originally talked about "Blue Suede Shoes" being in 1954 before fixing it in the edit to be 1956) Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Grateful Dead, and Grayfolded runs to two hours. I referred to a lot of books for this episode, partly because almost everything about the Grateful Dead is written from a fannish perspective that already assumes background knowledge, rather than to provide that background knowledge. Of the various books I used, Dennis McNally's biography of the band and This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead by Blair Jackson and David Gans are probably most useful for the casually interested. Other books on the Dead I used included McNally's Jerry on Jerry, a collection of interviews with Garcia; Deal, Bill Kreutzmann's autobiography; The Grateful Dead FAQ by Tony Sclafani; So Many Roads by David Browne; Deadology by Howard F. Weiner; Fare Thee Well by Joel Selvin and Pamela Turley; and Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads by David Shenk and Steve Silberman. Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is the classic account of the Pranksters, though not always reliable. I reference Slaughterhouse Five a lot. As well as the novel itself, which everyone should read, I also read this rather excellent graphic novel adaptation, and The Writer's Crusade, a book about the writing of the novel. I also reference Ted Sturgeon's More Than Human. For background on the scene around Astounding Science Fiction which included Sturgeon, John W. Campbell, L. Ron Hubbard, and many other science fiction writers, I recommend Alec Nevala-Lee's Astounding. 1,000 True Fans can be read online, as can the essay on the Californian ideology, and John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace". The best collection of Grateful Dead material is the box set The Golden Road, which contains all the albums released in Pigpen's lifetime along with a lot of bonus material, but which appears currently out of print. Live/Dead contains both the live version of "Dark Star" which made it well known and, as a CD bonus track, the original single version. And archive.org has more live recordings of the group than you can possibly ever listen to. Grayfolded can be bought from John Oswald's Bandcamp Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [Excerpt: Tuning from "Grayfolded", under the warnings Before we begin -- as we're tuning up, as it were, I should mention that this episode contains discussions of alcoholism, drug addiction, racism, nonconsensual drugging of other people, and deaths from drug abuse, suicide, and car accidents. As always, I try to deal with these subjects as carefully as possible, but if you find any of those things upsetting you may wish to read the transcript rather than listen to this episode, or skip it altogether. Also, I should note that the members of the Grateful Dead were much freer with their use of swearing in interviews than any other band we've covered so far, and that makes using quotes from them rather more difficult than with other bands, given the limitations of the rules imposed to stop the podcast being marked as adult. If I quote anything with a word I can't use here, I'll give a brief pause in the audio, and in the transcript I'll have the word in square brackets. [tuning ends] All this happened, more or less. In 1910, T. S. Eliot started work on "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", which at the time was deemed barely poetry, with one reviewer imagining Eliot saying "I'll just put down the first thing that comes into my head, and call it 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.'" It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature. In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut wrote "Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death", a book in which the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, comes unstuck in time, and starts living a nonlinear life, hopping around between times reliving his experiences in the Second World War, and future experiences up to 1976 after being kidnapped by beings from the planet Tralfamadore. Or perhaps he has flashbacks and hallucinations after having a breakdown from PTSD. It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature or of science fiction, depending on how you look at it. In 1953, Theodore Sturgeon wrote More Than Human. It is now considered one of the great classics of science fiction. In 1950, L. Ron Hubbard wrote Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. It is now considered either a bad piece of science fiction or one of the great revelatory works of religious history, depending on how you look at it. In 1994, 1995, and 1996 the composer John Oswald released, first as two individual CDs and then as a double-CD, an album called Grayfolded, which the composer says in the liner notes he thinks of as existing in Tralfamadorian time. The Tralfamadorians in Vonnegut's novels don't see time as a linear thing with a beginning and end, but as a continuum that they can move between at will. When someone dies, they just think that at this particular point in time they're not doing so good, but at other points in time they're fine, so why focus on the bad time? In the book, when told of someone dying, the Tralfamadorians just say "so it goes". In between the first CD's release and the release of the double-CD version, Jerry Garcia died. From August 1942 through August 1995, Jerry Garcia was alive. So it goes. Shall we go, you and I? [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dark Star (Omni 3/30/94)"] "One principle has become clear. Since motives are so frequently found in combination, it is essential that the complex types be analyzed and arranged, with an eye kept single nevertheless to the master-theme under discussion. Collectors, both primary and subsidiary, have done such valiant service that the treasures at our command are amply sufficient for such studies, so extensive, indeed, that the task of going through them thoroughly has become too great for the unassisted student. It cannot be too strongly urged that a single theme in its various types and compounds must be made predominant in any useful comparative study. This is true when the sources and analogues of any literary work are treated; it is even truer when the bare motive is discussed. The Grateful Dead furnishes an apt illustration of the necessity of such handling. It appears in a variety of different combinations, almost never alone. Indeed, it is so widespread a tale, and its combinations are so various, that there is the utmost difficulty in determining just what may properly be regarded the original kernel of it, the simple theme to which other motives were joined. Various opinions, as we shall see, have been held with reference to this matter, most of them justified perhaps by the materials in the hands of the scholars holding them, but none quite adequate in view of later evidence." That's a quote from The Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk Story, by Gordon Hall Gerould, published in 1908. Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five opens with a chapter about the process of writing the novel itself, and how difficult it was. He says "I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time. When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big." This is an episode several of my listeners have been looking forward to, but it's one I've been dreading writing, because this is an episode -- I think the only one in the series -- where the format of the podcast simply *will not* work. Were the Grateful Dead not such an important band, I would skip this episode altogether, but they're a band that simply can't be ignored, and that's a real problem here. Because my intent, always, with this podcast, is to present the recordings of the artists in question, put them in context, and explain why they were important, what their music meant to its listeners. To put, as far as is possible, the positive case for why the music mattered *in the context of its time*. Not why it matters now, or why it matters to me, but why it matters *in its historical context*. Whether I like the music or not isn't the point. Whether it stands up now isn't the point. I play the music, explain what it was they were doing, why they were doing it, what people saw in it. If I do my job well, you come away listening to "Blue Suede Shoes" the way people heard it in 1956, or "Good Vibrations" the way people heard it in 1966, and understanding why people were so impressed by those records. That is simply *not possible* for the Grateful Dead. I can present a case for them as musicians, and hope to do so. I can explain the appeal as best I understand it, and talk about things I like in their music, and things I've noticed. But what I can't do is present their recordings the way they were received in the sixties and explain why they were popular. Because every other act I have covered or will cover in this podcast has been a *recording* act, and their success was based on records. They may also have been exceptional live performers, but James Brown or Ike and Tina Turner are remembered for great *records*, like "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" or "River Deep, Mountain High". Their great moments were captured on vinyl, to be listened back to, and susceptible of analysis. That is not the case for the Grateful Dead, and what is worse *they explicitly said, publicly, on multiple occasions* that it is not possible for me to understand their art, and thus that it is not possible for me to explain it. The Grateful Dead did make studio records, some of them very good. But they always said, consistently, over a thirty year period, that their records didn't capture what they did, and that the only way -- the *only* way, they were very clear about this -- that one could actually understand and appreciate their music, was to see them live, and furthermore to see them live while on psychedelic drugs. [Excerpt: Grateful Dead crowd noise] I never saw the Grateful Dead live -- their last UK performance was a couple of years before I went to my first ever gig -- and I have never taken a psychedelic substance. So by the Grateful Dead's own criteria, it is literally impossible for me to understand or explain their music the way that it should be understood or explained. In a way I'm in a similar position to the one I was in with La Monte Young in the last episode, whose music it's mostly impossible to experience without being in his presence. This is one reason of several why I placed these two episodes back to back. Of course, there is a difference between Young and the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead allowed -- even encouraged -- the recording of their live performances. There are literally thousands of concert recordings in circulation, many of them of professional quality. I have listened to many of those, and I can hear what they were doing. I can tell you what *I* think is interesting about their music, and about their musicianship. And I think I can build up a good case for why they were important, and why they're interesting, and why those recordings are worth listening to. And I can certainly explain the cultural phenomenon that was the Grateful Dead. But just know that while I may have found *a* point, *an* explanation for why the Grateful Dead were important, by the band's own lights and those of their fans, no matter how good a job I do in this episode, I *cannot* get it right. And that is, in itself, enough of a reason for this episode to exist, and for me to try, even harder than I normally do, to get it right *anyway*. Because no matter how well I do my job this episode will stand as an example of why this series is called "*A* History", not *the* history. Because parts of the past are ephemeral. There are things about which it's true to say "You had to be there". I cannot know what it was like to have been an American the day Kennedy was shot, I cannot know what it was like to be alive when a man walked on the Moon. Those are things nobody my age or younger can ever experience. And since August the ninth, 1995, the experience of hearing the Grateful Dead's music the way they wanted it heard has been in that category. And that is by design. Jerry Garcia once said "if you work really hard as an artist, you may be able to build something they can't tear down, you know, after you're gone... What I want to do is I want it here. I want it now, in this lifetime. I want what I enjoy to last as long as I do and not last any longer. You know, I don't want something that ends up being as much a nuisance as it is a work of art, you know?" And there's another difficulty. There are only two points in time where it makes sense to do a podcast episode on the Grateful Dead -- late 1967 and early 1968, when the San Francisco scene they were part of was at its most culturally relevant, and 1988 when they had their only top ten hit and gained their largest audience. I can't realistically leave them out of the story until 1988, so it has to be 1968. But the songs they are most remembered for are those they wrote between 1970 and 1972, and those songs are influenced by artists and events we haven't yet covered in the podcast, who will be getting their own episodes in the future. I can't explain those things in this episode, because they need whole episodes of their own. I can't not explain them without leaving out important context for the Grateful Dead. So the best I can do is treat the story I'm telling as if it were in Tralfamadorian time. All of it's happening all at once, and some of it is happening in different episodes that haven't been recorded yet. The podcast as a whole travels linearly from 1938 through to 1999, but this episode is happening in 1968 and 1972 and 1988 and 1995 and other times, all at once. Sometimes I'll talk about things as if you're already familiar with them, but they haven't happened yet in the story. Feel free to come unstuck in time and revisit this time after episode 167, and 172, and 176, and 192, and experience it again. So this has to be an experimental episode. It may well be an experiment that you think fails. If so, the next episode is likely to be far more to your taste, and much shorter than this or the last episode, two episodes that between them have to create a scaffolding on which will hang much of the rest of this podcast's narrative. I've finished my Grateful Dead script now. The next one I write is going to be fun: [Excerpt: Grateful Dead, "Dark Star"] Infrastructure means everything. How we get from place to place, how we transport goods, information, and ourselves, makes a big difference in how society is structured, and in the music we hear. For many centuries, the prime means of long-distance transport was by water -- sailing ships on the ocean, canal boats and steamboats for inland navigation -- and so folk songs talked about the ship as both means of escape, means of making a living, and in some senses as a trap. You'd go out to sea for adventure, or to escape your problems, but you'd find that the sea itself brought its own problems. Because of this we have a long, long tradition of sea shanties which are known throughout the world: [Excerpt: A. L. Lloyd, "Off to Sea Once More"] But in the nineteenth century, the railway was invented and, at least as far as travel within a landmass goes, it replaced the steamboat in the popular imaginary. Now the railway was how you got from place to place, and how you moved freight from one place to another. The railway brought freedom, and was an opportunity for outlaws, whether train robbers or a romanticised version of the hobo hopping onto a freight train and making his way to new lands and new opportunity. It was the train that brought soldiers home from wars, and the train that allowed the Great Migration of Black people from the South to the industrial North. There would still be songs about the riverboats, about how ol' man river keeps rolling along and about the big river Johnny Cash sang about, but increasingly they would be songs of the past, not the present. The train quickly replaced the steamboat in the iconography of what we now think of as roots music -- blues, country, folk, and early jazz music. Sometimes this was very literal. Furry Lewis' "Kassie Jones" -- about a legendary train driver who would break the rules to make sure his train made the station on time, but who ended up sacrificing his own life to save his passengers in a train crash -- is based on "Alabamy Bound", which as we heard in the episode on "Stagger Lee", was about steamboats: [Excerpt: Furry Lewis, "Kassie Jones"] In the early episodes of this podcast we heard many, many, songs about the railway. Louis Jordan saying "take me right back to the track, Jack", Rosetta Tharpe singing about how "this train don't carry no gamblers", the trickster freight train driver driving on the "Rock Island Line", the mystery train sixteen coaches long, the train that kept-a-rollin' all night long, the Midnight Special which the prisoners wished would shine its ever-loving light on them, and the train coming past Folsom Prison whose whistle makes Johnny Cash hang his head and cry. But by the 1960s, that kind of song had started to dry up. It would happen on occasion -- "People Get Ready" by the Impressions is the most obvious example of the train metaphor in an important sixties record -- but by the late sixties the train was no longer a symbol of freedom but of the past. In 1969 Harry Nilsson sang about how "Nobody Cares About the Railroads Any More", and in 1968 the Kinks sang about "The Last of the Steam-Powered Trains". When in 1968 Merle Haggard sang about a freight train, it was as a memory, of a child with hopes that ended up thwarted by reality and his own nature: [Excerpt: Merle Haggard, "Mama Tried"] And the reason for this was that there had been another shift, a shift that had started in the forties and accelerated in the late fifties but had taken a little time to ripple through the culture. Now the train had been replaced in the popular imaginary by motorised transport. Instead of hopping on a train without paying, if you had no money in your pocket you'd have to hitch-hike all the way. Freedom now meant individuality. The ultimate in freedom was the biker -- the Hell's Angels who could go anywhere, unburdened by anything -- and instead of goods being moved by freight train, increasingly they were being moved by truck drivers. By the mid-seventies, truck drivers took a central place in American life, and the most romantic way to live life was to live it on the road. On The Road was also the title of a 1957 novel by Jack Kerouac, which was one of the first major signs of this cultural shift in America. Kerouac was writing about events in the late forties and early fifties, but his book was also a precursor of the sixties counterculture. He wrote the book on one continuous sheet of paper, as a stream of consciousness. Kerouac died in 1969 of an internal haemmorage brought on by too much alcohol consumption. So it goes. But the big key to this cultural shift was caused by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, a massive infrastructure spending bill that led to the construction of the modern American Interstate Highway system. This accelerated a program that had already started, of building much bigger, safer, faster roads. It also, as anyone who has read Robert Caro's The Power Broker knows, reinforced segregation and white flight. It did this both by making commuting into major cities from the suburbs easier -- thus allowing white people with more money to move further away from the cities and still work there -- and by bulldozing community spaces where Black people lived. More than a million people lost their homes and were forcibly moved, and orders of magnitude more lost their communities' parks and green spaces. And both as a result of deliberate actions and unconscious bigotry, the bulk of those affected were Black people -- who often found themselves, if they weren't forced to move, on one side of a ten-lane highway where the park used to be, with white people on the other side of the highway. The Federal-Aid Highway Act gave even more power to the unaccountable central planners like Robert Moses, the urban planner in New York who managed to become arguably the most powerful man in the city without ever getting elected, partly by slowly compromising away his early progressive ideals in the service of gaining more power. Of course, not every new highway was built through areas where poor Black people lived. Some were planned to go through richer areas for white people, just because you can't completely do away with geographical realities. For example one was planned to be built through part of San Francisco, a rich, white part. But the people who owned properties in that area had enough political power and clout to fight the development, and after nearly a decade of fighting it, the development was called off in late 1966. But over that time, many of the owners of the impressive buildings in the area had moved out, and they had no incentive to improve or maintain their properties while they were under threat of demolition, so many of them were rented out very cheaply. And when the beat community that Kerouac wrote about, many of whom had settled in San Francisco, grew too large and notorious for the area of the city they were in, North Beach, many of them moved to these cheap homes in a previously-exclusive area. The area known as Haight-Ashbury. [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Grayfolded"] Stories all have their starts, even stories told in Tralfamadorian time, although sometimes those starts are shrouded in legend. For example, the story of Scientology's start has been told many times, with different people claiming to have heard L. Ron Hubbard talk about how writing was a mug's game, and if you wanted to make real money, you needed to get followers, start a religion. Either he said this over and over and over again, to many different science fiction writers, or most science fiction writers of his generation were liars. Of course, the definition of a writer is someone who tells lies for money, so who knows? One of the more plausible accounts of him saying that is given by Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon's account is more believable than most, because Sturgeon went on to be a supporter of Dianetics, the "new science" that Hubbard turned into his religion, for decades, even while telling the story. The story of the Grateful Dead probably starts as it ends, with Jerry Garcia. There are three things that everyone writing about the Dead says about Garcia's childhood, so we might as well say them here too. The first is that he was named by a music-loving father after Jerome Kern, the songwriter responsible for songs like "Ol' Man River" (though as Oscar Hammerstein's widow liked to point out, "Jerome Kern wrote dum-dum-dum-dum, *my husband* wrote 'Ol' Man River'" -- an important distinction we need to bear in mind when talking about songwriters who write music but not lyrics). The second is that when he was five years old that music-loving father drowned -- and Garcia would always say he had seen his father dying, though some sources claim this was a false memory. So it goes. And the third fact, which for some reason is always told after the second even though it comes before it chronologically, is that when he was four he lost two joints from his right middle finger. Garcia grew up a troubled teen, and in turn caused trouble for other people, but he also developed a few interests that would follow him through his life. He loved the fantastical, especially the fantastical macabre, and became an avid fan of horror and science fiction -- and through his love of old monster films he became enamoured with cinema more generally. Indeed, in 1983 he bought the film rights to Kurt Vonnegut's science fiction novel The Sirens of Titan, the first story in which the Tralfamadorians appear, and wrote a script based on it. He wanted to produce the film himself, with Francis Ford Coppola directing and Bill Murray starring, but most importantly for him he wanted to prevent anyone who didn't care about it from doing it badly. And in that he succeeded. As of 2023 there is no film of The Sirens of Titan. He loved to paint, and would continue that for the rest of his life, with one of his favourite subjects being Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster. And when he was eleven or twelve, he heard for the first time a record that was hugely influential to a whole generation of Californian musicians, even though it was a New York record -- "Gee" by the Crows: [Excerpt: The Crows, "Gee"] Garcia would say later "That was an important song. That was the first kind of, like where the voices had that kind of not-trained-singer voices, but tough-guy-on-the-street voice." That record introduced him to R&B, and soon he was listening to Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, to Ray Charles, and to a record we've not talked about in the podcast but which was one of the great early doo-wop records, "WPLJ" by the Four Deuces: [Excerpt: The Four Deuces, "WPLJ"] Garcia said of that record "That was one of my anthem songs when I was in junior high school and high school and around there. That was one of those songs everybody knew. And that everybody sang. Everybody sang that street-corner favorite." Garcia moved around a lot as a child, and didn't have much time for school by his own account, but one of the few teachers he did respect was an art teacher when he was in North Beach, Walter Hedrick. Hedrick was also one of the earliest of the conceptual artists, and one of the most important figures in the San Francisco arts scene that would become known as the Beat Generation (or the Beatniks, which was originally a disparaging term). Hedrick was a painter and sculptor, but also organised happenings, and he had also been one of the prime movers in starting a series of poetry readings in San Francisco, the first one of which had involved Allen Ginsberg giving the first ever reading of "Howl" -- one of a small number of poems, along with Eliot's "Prufrock" and "The Waste Land" and possibly Pound's Cantos, which can be said to have changed twentieth-century literature. Garcia was fifteen when he got to know Hedrick, in 1957, and by then the Beat scene had already become almost a parody of itself, having become known to the public because of the publication of works like On the Road, and the major artists in the scene were already rejecting the label. By this point tourists were flocking to North Beach to see these beatniks they'd heard about on TV, and Hedrick was actually employed by one cafe to sit in the window wearing a beret, turtleneck, sandals, and beard, and draw and paint, to attract the tourists who flocked by the busload because they could see that there was a "genuine beatnik" in the cafe. Hedrick was, as well as a visual artist, a guitarist and banjo player who played in traditional jazz bands, and he would bring records in to class for his students to listen to, and Garcia particularly remembered him bringing in records by Big Bill Broonzy: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "When Things Go Wrong (It Hurts Me Too)"] Garcia was already an avid fan of rock and roll music, but it was being inspired by Hedrick that led him to get his first guitar. Like his contemporary Paul McCartney around the same time, he was initially given the wrong instrument as a birthday present -- in Garcia's case his mother gave him an accordion -- but he soon persuaded her to swap it for an electric guitar he saw in a pawn shop. And like his other contemporary, John Lennon, Garcia initially tuned his instrument incorrectly. He said later "When I started playing the guitar, believe me, I didn't know anybody that played. I mean, I didn't know anybody that played the guitar. Nobody. They weren't around. There were no guitar teachers. You couldn't take lessons. There was nothing like that, you know? When I was a kid and I had my first electric guitar, I had it tuned wrong and learned how to play on it with it tuned wrong for about a year. And I was getting somewhere on it, you know… Finally, I met a guy that knew how to tune it right and showed me three chords, and it was like a revelation. You know what I mean? It was like somebody gave me the key to heaven." He joined a band, the Chords, which mostly played big band music, and his friend Gary Foster taught him some of the rudiments of playing the guitar -- things like how to use a capo to change keys. But he was always a rebellious kid, and soon found himself faced with a choice between joining the military or going to prison. He chose the former, and it was during his time in the Army that a friend, Ron Stevenson, introduced him to the music of Merle Travis, and to Travis-style guitar picking: [Excerpt: Merle Travis, "Nine-Pound Hammer"] Garcia had never encountered playing like that before, but he instantly recognised that Travis, and Chet Atkins who Stevenson also played for him, had been an influence on Scotty Moore. He started to realise that the music he'd listened to as a teenager was influenced by music that went further back. But Stevenson, as well as teaching Garcia some of the rudiments of Travis-picking, also indirectly led to Garcia getting discharged from the Army. Stevenson was not a well man, and became suicidal. Garcia decided it was more important to keep his friend company and make sure he didn't kill himself than it was to turn up for roll call, and as a result he got discharged himself on psychiatric grounds -- according to Garcia he told the Army psychiatrist "I was involved in stuff that was more important to me in the moment than the army was and that was the reason I was late" and the psychiatrist thought it was neurotic of Garcia to have his own set of values separate from that of the Army. After discharge, Garcia did various jobs, including working as a transcriptionist for Lenny Bruce, the comedian who was a huge influence on the counterculture. In one of the various attacks over the years by authoritarians on language, Bruce was repeatedly arrested for obscenity, and in 1961 he was arrested at a jazz club in North Beach. Sixty years ago, the parts of speech that were being criminalised weren't pronouns, but prepositions and verbs: [Excerpt: Lenny Bruce, "To is a Preposition, Come is a Verb"] That piece, indeed, was so controversial that when Frank Zappa quoted part of it in a song in 1968, the record label insisted on the relevant passage being played backwards so people couldn't hear such disgusting filth: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Harry You're a Beast"] (Anyone familiar with that song will understand that the censored portion is possibly the least offensive part of the whole thing). Bruce was facing trial, and he needed transcripts of what he had said in his recordings to present in court. Incidentally, there seems to be some confusion over exactly which of Bruce's many obscenity trials Garcia became a transcriptionist for. Dennis McNally says in his biography of the band, published in 2002, that it was the most famous of them, in autumn 1964, but in a later book, Jerry on Jerry, a book of interviews of Garcia edited by McNally, McNally talks about it being when Garcia was nineteen, which would mean it was Bruce's first trial, in 1961. We can put this down to the fact that many of the people involved, not least Garcia, lived in Tralfamadorian time, and were rather hazy on dates, but I'm placing the story here rather than in 1964 because it seems to make more sense that Garcia would be involved in a trial based on an incident in San Francisco than one in New York. Garcia got the job, even though he couldn't type, because by this point he'd spent so long listening to recordings of old folk and country music that he was used to transcribing indecipherable accents, and often, as Garcia would tell it, Bruce would mumble very fast and condense multiple syllables into one. Garcia was particularly impressed by Bruce's ability to improvise but talk in entire paragraphs, and he compared his use of language to bebop. Another thing that was starting to impress Garcia, and which he also compared to bebop, was bluegrass: [Excerpt: Bill Monroe, "Fire on the Mountain"] Bluegrass is a music that is often considered very traditional, because it's based on traditional songs and uses acoustic instruments, but in fact it was a terribly *modern* music, and largely a postwar creation of a single band -- Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys. And Garcia was right when he said it was "white bebop" -- though he did say "The only thing it doesn't have is the harmonic richness of bebop. You know what I mean? That's what it's missing, but it has everything else." Both bebop and bluegrass evolved after the second world war, though they were informed by music from before it, and both prized the ability to improvise, and technical excellence. Both are musics that involved playing *fast*, in an ensemble, and being able to respond quickly to the other musicians. Both musics were also intensely rhythmic, a response to a faster paced, more stressful world. They were both part of the general change in the arts towards immediacy that we looked at in the last episode with the creation first of expressionism and then of pop art. Bluegrass didn't go into the harmonic explorations that modern jazz did, but it was absolutely as modern as anything Charlie Parker was doing, and came from the same impulses. It was tradition and innovation, the past and the future simultaneously. Bill Monroe, Jackson Pollock, Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac, and Lenny Bruce were all in their own ways responding to the same cultural moment, and it was that which Garcia was responding to. But he didn't become able to play bluegrass until after a tragedy which shaped his life even more than his father's death had. Garcia had been to a party and was in a car with his friends Lee Adams, Paul Speegle, and Alan Trist. Adams was driving at ninety miles an hour when they hit a tight curve and crashed. Garcia, Adams, and Trist were all severely injured but survived. Speegle died. So it goes. This tragedy changed Garcia's attitudes totally. Of all his friends, Speegle was the one who was most serious about his art, and who treated it as something to work on. Garcia had always been someone who fundamentally didn't want to work or take any responsibility for anything. And he remained that way -- except for his music. Speegle's death changed Garcia's attitude to that, totally. If his friend wasn't going to be able to practice his own art any more, Garcia would practice his, in tribute to him. He resolved to become a virtuoso on guitar and banjo. His girlfriend of the time later said “I don't know if you've spent time with someone rehearsing ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown' on a banjo for eight hours, but Jerry practiced endlessly. He really wanted to excel and be the best. He had tremendous personal ambition in the musical arena, and he wanted to master whatever he set out to explore. Then he would set another sight for himself. And practice another eight hours a day of new licks.” But of course, you can't make ensemble music on your own: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia and Bob Hunter, "Oh Mary Don't You Weep" (including end)] "Evelyn said, “What is it called when a person needs a … person … when you want to be touched and the … two are like one thing and there isn't anything else at all anywhere?” Alicia, who had read books, thought about it. “Love,” she said at length." That's from More Than Human, by Theodore Sturgeon, a book I'll be quoting a few more times as the story goes on. Robert Hunter, like Garcia, was just out of the military -- in his case, the National Guard -- and he came into Garcia's life just after Paul Speegle had left it. Garcia and Alan Trist met Hunter ten days after the accident, and the three men started hanging out together, Trist and Hunter writing while Garcia played music. Garcia and Hunter both bonded over their shared love for the beats, and for traditional music, and the two formed a duo, Bob and Jerry, which performed together a handful of times. They started playing together, in fact, after Hunter picked up a guitar and started playing a song and halfway through Garcia took it off him and finished the song himself. The two of them learned songs from the Harry Smith Anthology -- Garcia was completely apolitical, and only once voted in his life, for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to keep Goldwater out, and regretted even doing that, and so he didn't learn any of the more political material people like Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and Bob Dylan were doing at the time -- but their duo only lasted a short time because Hunter wasn't an especially good guitarist. Hunter would, though, continue to jam with Garcia and other friends, sometimes playing mandolin, while Garcia played solo gigs and with other musicians as well, playing and moving round the Bay Area and performing with whoever he could: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia, "Railroad Bill"] "Bleshing, that was Janie's word. She said Baby told it to her. She said it meant everyone all together being something, even if they all did different things. Two arms, two legs, one body, one head, all working together, although a head can't walk and arms can't think. Lone said maybe it was a mixture of “blending” and “meshing,” but I don't think he believed that himself. It was a lot more than that." That's from More Than Human In 1961, Garcia and Hunter met another young musician, but one who was interested in a very different type of music. Phil Lesh was a serious student of modern classical music, a classically-trained violinist and trumpeter whose interest was solidly in the experimental and whose attitude can be summed up by a story that's always told about him meeting his close friend Tom Constanten for the first time. Lesh had been talking with someone about serialism, and Constanten had interrupted, saying "Music stopped being created in 1750 but it started again in 1950". Lesh just stuck out his hand, recognising a kindred spirit. Lesh and Constanten were both students of Luciano Berio, the experimental composer who created compositions for magnetic tape: [Excerpt: Luciano Berio, "Momenti"] Berio had been one of the founders of the Studio di fonologia musicale di Radio Milano, a studio for producing contemporary electronic music where John Cage had worked for a time, and he had also worked with the electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Lesh would later remember being very impressed when Berio brought a tape into the classroom -- the actual multitrack tape for Stockhausen's revolutionary piece Gesang Der Juenglinge: [Excerpt: Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Gesang Der Juenglinge"] Lesh at first had been distrustful of Garcia -- Garcia was charismatic and had followers, and Lesh never liked people like that. But he was impressed by Garcia's playing, and soon realised that the two men, despite their very different musical interests, had a lot in common. Lesh was interested in the technology of music as well as in performing and composing it, and so when he wasn't studying he helped out by engineering at the university's radio station. Lesh was impressed by Garcia's playing, and suggested to the presenter of the station's folk show, the Midnight Special, that Garcia be a guest. Garcia was so good that he ended up getting an entire solo show to himself, where normally the show would feature multiple acts. Lesh and Constanten soon moved away from the Bay Area to Las Vegas, but both would be back -- in Constanten's case he would form an experimental group in San Francisco with their fellow student Steve Reich, and that group (though not with Constanten performing) would later premiere Terry Riley's In C, a piece influenced by La Monte Young and often considered one of the great masterpieces of minimalist music. By early 1962 Garcia and Hunter had formed a bluegrass band, with Garcia on guitar and banjo and Hunter on mandolin, and a rotating cast of other musicians including Ken Frankel, who played banjo and fiddle. They performed under different names, including the Tub Thumpers, the Hart Valley Drifters, and the Sleepy Valley Hog Stompers, and played a mixture of bluegrass and old-time music -- and were very careful about the distinction: [Excerpt: The Hart Valley Drifters, "Cripple Creek"] In 1993, the Republican political activist John Perry Barlow was invited to talk to the CIA about the possibilities open to them with what was then called the Information Superhighway. He later wrote, in part "They told me they'd brought Steve Jobs in a few weeks before to indoctrinate them in modern information management. And they were delighted when I returned later, bringing with me a platoon of Internet gurus, including Esther Dyson, Mitch Kapor, Tony Rutkowski, and Vint Cerf. They sealed us into an electronically impenetrable room to discuss the radical possibility that a good first step in lifting their blackout would be for the CIA to put up a Web site... We told them that information exchange was a barter system, and that to receive, one must also be willing to share. This was an alien notion to them. They weren't even willing to share information among themselves, much less the world." 1962 brought a new experience for Robert Hunter. Hunter had been recruited into taking part in psychological tests at Stanford University, which in the sixties and seventies was one of the preeminent universities for psychological experiments. As part of this, Hunter was given $140 to attend the VA hospital (where a janitor named Ken Kesey, who had himself taken part in a similar set of experiments a couple of years earlier, worked a day job while he was working on his first novel) for four weeks on the run, and take different psychedelic drugs each time, starting with LSD, so his reactions could be observed. (It was later revealed that these experiments were part of a CIA project called MKUltra, designed to investigate the possibility of using psychedelic drugs for mind control, blackmail, and torture. Hunter was quite lucky in that he was told what was going to happen to him and paid for his time. Other subjects included the unlucky customers of brothels the CIA set up as fronts -- they dosed the customers' drinks and observed them through two-way mirrors. Some of their experimental subjects died by suicide as a result of their experiences. So it goes. ) Hunter was interested in taking LSD after reading Aldous Huxley's writings about psychedelic substances, and he brought his typewriter along to the experiment. During the first test, he wrote a six-page text, a short excerpt from which is now widely quoted, reading in part "Sit back picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall unto the sea of morning creep-very-softly mist ... and then sort of cascade tinkley-bell-like (must I take you by the hand, ever so slowly type) and then conglomerate suddenly into a peal of silver vibrant uncomprehendingly, blood singingly, joyously resounding bells" Hunter's experience led to everyone in their social circle wanting to try LSD, and soon they'd all come to the same conclusion -- this was something special. But Garcia needed money -- he'd got his girlfriend pregnant, and they'd married (this would be the first of several marriages in Garcia's life, and I won't be covering them all -- at Garcia's funeral, his second wife, Carolyn, said Garcia always called her the love of his life, and his first wife and his early-sixties girlfriend who he proposed to again in the nineties both simultaneously said "He said that to me!"). So he started teaching guitar at a music shop in Palo Alto. Hunter had no time for Garcia's incipient domesticity and thought that his wife was trying to make him live a conventional life, and the two drifted apart somewhat, though they'd still play together occasionally. Through working at the music store, Garcia got to know the manager, Troy Weidenheimer, who had a rock and roll band called the Zodiacs. Garcia joined the band on bass, despite that not being his instrument. He later said "Troy was a lot of fun, but I wasn't good enough a musician then to have been able to deal with it. I was out of my idiom, really, 'cause when I played with Troy I was playing electric bass, you know. I never was a good bass player. Sometimes I was playing in the wrong key and didn't even [fuckin'] know it. I couldn't hear that low, after playing banjo, you know, and going to electric...But Troy taught me the principle of, hey, you know, just stomp your foot and get on it. He was great. A great one for the instant arrangement, you know. And he was also fearless for that thing of get your friends to do it." Garcia's tenure in the Zodiacs didn't last long, nor did this experiment with rock and roll, but two other members of the Zodiacs will be notable later in the story -- the harmonica player, an old friend of Garcia's named Ron McKernan, who would soon gain the nickname Pig Pen after the Peanuts character, and the drummer, Bill Kreutzmann: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Drums/Space (Skull & Bones version)"] Kreutzmann said of the Zodiacs "Jerry was the hired bass player and I was the hired drummer. I only remember playing that one gig with them, but I was in way over my head. I always did that. I always played things that were really hard and it didn't matter. I just went for it." Garcia and Kreutzmann didn't really get to know each other then, but Garcia did get to know someone else who would soon be very important in his life. Bob Weir was from a very different background than Garcia, though both had the shared experience of long bouts of chronic illness as children. He had grown up in a very wealthy family, and had always been well-liked, but he was what we would now call neurodivergent -- reading books about the band he talks about being dyslexic but clearly has other undiagnosed neurodivergences, which often go along with dyslexia -- and as a result he was deemed to have behavioural problems which led to him getting expelled from pre-school and kicked out of the cub scouts. He was never academically gifted, thanks to his dyslexia, but he was always enthusiastic about music -- to a fault. He learned to play boogie piano but played so loudly and so often his parents sold the piano. He had a trumpet, but the neighbours complained about him playing it outside. Finally he switched to the guitar, an instrument with which it is of course impossible to make too loud a noise. The first song he learned was the Kingston Trio's version of an old sea shanty, "The Wreck of the John B": [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "The Wreck of the John B"] He was sent off to a private school in Colorado for teenagers with behavioural issues, and there he met the boy who would become his lifelong friend, John Perry Barlow. Unfortunately the two troublemakers got on with each other *so* well that after their first year they were told that it was too disruptive having both of them at the school, and only one could stay there the next year. Barlow stayed and Weir moved back to the Bay Area. By this point, Weir was getting more interested in folk music that went beyond the commercial folk of the Kingston Trio. As he said later "There was something in there that was ringing my bells. What I had grown up thinking of as hillbilly music, it started to have some depth for me, and I could start to hear the music in it. Suddenly, it wasn't just a bunch of ignorant hillbillies playing what they could. There was some depth and expertise and stuff like that to aspire to.” He moved from school to school but one thing that stayed with him was his love of playing guitar, and he started taking lessons from Troy Weidenheimer, but he got most of his education going to folk clubs and hootenannies. He regularly went to the Tangent, a club where Garcia played, but Garcia's bluegrass banjo playing was far too rigorous for a free spirit like Weir to emulate, and instead he started trying to copy one of the guitarists who was a regular there, Jorma Kaukonnen. On New Year's Eve 1963 Weir was out walking with his friends Bob Matthews and Rich Macauley, and they passed the music shop where Garcia was a teacher, and heard him playing his banjo. They knocked and asked if they could come in -- they all knew Garcia a little, and Bob Matthews was one of his students, having become interested in playing banjo after hearing the theme tune to the Beverly Hillbillies, played by the bluegrass greats Flatt and Scruggs: [Excerpt: Flatt and Scruggs, "The Beverly Hillbillies"] Garcia at first told these kids, several years younger than him, that they couldn't come in -- he was waiting for his students to show up. But Weir said “Jerry, listen, it's seven-thirty on New Year's Eve, and I don't think you're going to be seeing your students tonight.” Garcia realised the wisdom of this, and invited the teenagers in to jam with him. At the time, there was a bit of a renaissance in jug bands, as we talked about back in the episode on the Lovin' Spoonful. This was a form of music that had grown up in the 1920s, and was similar and related to skiffle and coffee-pot bands -- jug bands would tend to have a mixture of portable string instruments like guitars and banjos, harmonicas, and people using improvised instruments, particularly blowing into a jug. The most popular of these bands had been Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, led by banjo player Gus Cannon and with harmonica player Noah Lewis: [Excerpt: Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, "Viola Lee Blues"] With the folk revival, Cannon's work had become well-known again. The Rooftop Singers, a Kingston Trio style folk group, had had a hit with his song "Walk Right In" in 1963, and as a result of that success Cannon had even signed a record contract with Stax -- Stax's first album ever, a month before Booker T and the MGs' first album, was in fact the eighty-year-old Cannon playing his banjo and singing his old songs. The rediscovery of Cannon had started a craze for jug bands, and the most popular of the new jug bands was Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, which did a mixture of old songs like "You're a Viper" and more recent material redone in the old style. Weir, Matthews, and Macauley had been to see the Kweskin band the night before, and had been very impressed, especially by their singer Maria D'Amato -- who would later marry her bandmate Geoff Muldaur and take his name -- and her performance of Leiber and Stoller's "I'm a Woman": [Excerpt: Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, "I'm a Woman"] Matthews suggested that they form their own jug band, and Garcia eagerly agreed -- though Matthews found himself rapidly moving from banjo to washboard to kazoo to second kazoo before realising he was surplus to requirements. Robert Hunter was similarly an early member but claimed he "didn't have the embouchure" to play the jug, and was soon also out. He moved to LA and started studying Scientology -- later claiming that he wanted science-fictional magic powers, which L. Ron Hubbard's new religion certainly offered. The group took the name Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions -- apparently they varied the spelling every time they played -- and had a rotating membership that at one time or another included about twenty different people, but tended always to have Garcia on banjo, Weir on jug and later guitar, and Garcia's friend Pig Pen on harmonica: [Excerpt: Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions, "On the Road Again"] The group played quite regularly in early 1964, but Garcia's first love was still bluegrass, and he was trying to build an audience with his bluegrass band, The Black Mountain Boys. But bluegrass was very unpopular in the Bay Area, where it was simultaneously thought of as unsophisticated -- as "hillbilly music" -- and as elitist, because it required actual instrumental ability, which wasn't in any great supply in the amateur folk scene. But instrumental ability was something Garcia definitely had, as at this point he was still practising eight hours a day, every day, and it shows on the recordings of the Black Mountain Boys: [Excerpt: The Black Mountain Boys, "Rosa Lee McFall"] By the summer, Bob Weir was also working at the music shop, and so Garcia let Weir take over his students while he and the Black Mountain Boys' guitarist Sandy Rothman went on a road trip to see as many bluegrass musicians as they could and to audition for Bill Monroe himself. As it happened, Garcia found himself too shy to audition for Monroe, but Rothman later ended up playing with Monroe's Blue Grass Boys. On his return to the Bay Area, Garcia resumed playing with the Uptown Jug Champions, but Pig Pen started pestering him to do something different. While both men had overlapping tastes in music and a love for the blues, Garcia's tastes had always been towards the country end of the spectrum while Pig Pen's were towards R&B. And while the Uptown Jug Champions were all a bit disdainful of the Beatles at first -- apart from Bob Weir, the youngest of the group, who thought they were interesting -- Pig Pen had become enamoured of another British band who were just starting to make it big: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Not Fade Away"] 29) Garcia liked the first Rolling Stones album too, and he eventually took Pig Pen's point -- the stuff that the Rolling Stones were doing, covers of Slim Harpo and Buddy Holly, was not a million miles away from the material they were doing as Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions. Pig Pen could play a little electric organ, Bob had been fooling around with the electric guitars in the music shop. Why not give it a go? The stuff bands like the Rolling Stones were doing wasn't that different from the electric blues that Pig Pen liked, and they'd all seen A Hard Day's Night -- they could carry on playing with banjos, jugs, and kazoos and have the respect of a handful of folkies, or they could get electric instruments and potentially have screaming girls and millions of dollars, while playing the same songs. This was a convincing argument, especially when Dana Morgan Jr, the son of the owner of the music shop, told them they could have free electric instruments if they let him join on bass. Morgan wasn't that great on bass, but what the hell, free instruments. Pig Pen had the best voice and stage presence, so he became the frontman of the new group, singing most of the leads, though Jerry and Bob would both sing a few songs, and playing harmonica and organ. Weir was on rhythm guitar, and Garcia was the lead guitarist and obvious leader of the group. They just needed a drummer, and handily Bill Kreutzmann, who had played with Garcia and Pig Pen in the Zodiacs, was also now teaching music at the music shop. Not only that, but about three weeks before they decided to go electric, Kreutzmann had seen the Uptown Jug Champions performing and been astonished by Garcia's musicianship and charisma, and said to himself "Man, I'm gonna follow that guy forever!" The new group named themselves the Warlocks, and started rehearsing in earnest. Around this time, Garcia also finally managed to get some of the LSD that his friend Robert Hunter had been so enthusiastic about three years earlier, and it was a life-changing experience for him. In particular, he credited LSD with making him comfortable being a less disciplined player -- as a bluegrass player he'd had to be frighteningly precise, but now he was playing rock and needed to loosen up. A few days after taking LSD for the first time, Garcia also heard some of Bob Dylan's new material, and realised that the folk singer he'd had little time for with his preachy politics was now making electric music that owed a lot more to the Beat culture Garcia considered himself part of: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"] Another person who was hugely affected by hearing that was Phil Lesh, who later said "I couldn't believe that was Bob Dylan on AM radio, with an electric band. It changed my whole consciousness: if something like that could happen, the sky was the limit." Up to that point, Lesh had been focused entirely on his avant-garde music, working with friends like Steve Reich to push music forward, inspired by people like John Cage and La Monte Young, but now he realised there was music of value in the rock world. He'd quickly started going to rock gigs, seeing the Rolling Stones and the Byrds, and then he took acid and went to see his friend Garcia's new electric band play their third ever gig. He was blown away, and very quickly it was decided that Lesh would be the group's new bass player -- though everyone involved tells a different story as to who made the decision and how it came about, and accounts also vary as to whether Dana Morgan took his sacking gracefully and let his erstwhile bandmates keep their instruments, or whether they had to scrounge up some new ones. Lesh had never played bass before, but he was a talented multi-instrumentalist with a deep understanding of music and an ability to compose and improvise, and the repertoire the Warlocks were playing in the early days was mostly three-chord material that doesn't take much rehearsal -- though it was apparently beyond the abilities of poor Dana Morgan, who apparently had to be told note-by-note what to play by Garcia, and learn it by rote. Garcia told Lesh what notes the strings of a bass were tuned to, told him to borrow a guitar and practice, and within two weeks he was on stage with the Warlocks: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, “Grayfolded"] In September 1995, just weeks after Jerry Garcia's death, an article was published in Mute magazine identifying a cultural trend that had shaped the nineties, and would as it turned out shape at least the next thirty years. It's titled "The Californian Ideology", though it may be better titled "The Bay Area Ideology", and it identifies a worldview that had grown up in Silicon Valley, based around the ideas of the hippie movement, of right-wing libertarianism, of science fiction authors, and of Marshall McLuhan. It starts "There is an emerging global orthodoxy concerning the relation between society, technology and politics. We have called this orthodoxy `the Californian Ideology' in honour of the state where it originated. By naturalising and giving a technological proof to a libertarian political philosophy, and therefore foreclosing on alternative futures, the Californian Ideologues are able to assert that social and political debates about the future have now become meaningless. The California Ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism and is promulgated by magazines such as WIRED and MONDO 2000 and preached in the books of Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and others. The new faith has been embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, 30-something capitalists, hip academics, futurist bureaucrats and even the President of the USA himself. As usual, Europeans have not been slow to copy the latest fashion from America. While a recent EU report recommended adopting the Californian free enterprise model to build the 'infobahn', cutting-edge artists and academics have been championing the 'post-human' philosophy developed by the West Coast's Extropian cult. With no obvious opponents, the global dominance of the Californian ideology appears to be complete." [Excerpt: Grayfolded] The Warlocks' first gig with Phil Lesh on bass was on June the 18th 1965, at a club called Frenchy's with a teenage clientele. Lesh thought his playing had been wooden and it wasn't a good gig, and apparently the management of Frenchy's agreed -- they were meant to play a second night there, but turned up to be told they'd been replaced by a band with an accordion and clarinet. But by September the group had managed to get themselves a residency at a small bar named the In Room, and playing there every night made them cohere. They were at this point playing the kind of sets that bar bands everywhere play to this day, though at the time the songs they were playing, like "Gloria" by Them and "In the Midnight Hour", were the most contemporary of hits. Another song that they introduced into their repertoire was "Do You Believe in Magic" by the Lovin' Spoonful, another band which had grown up out of former jug band musicians. As well as playing their own sets, they were also the house band at The In Room and as such had to back various touring artists who were the headline acts. The first act they had to back up was Cornell Gunter's version of the Coasters. Gunter had brought his own guitarist along as musical director, and for the first show Weir sat in the audience watching the show and learning the parts, staring intently at this musical director's playing. After seeing that, Weir's playing was changed, because he also picked up how the guitarist was guiding the band while playing, the small cues that a musical director will use to steer the musicians in the right direction. Weir started doing these things himself when he was singing lead -- Pig Pen was the frontman but everyone except Bill sang sometimes -- and the group soon found that rather than Garcia being the sole leader, now whoever was the lead singer for the song was the de facto conductor as well. By this point, the Bay Area was getting almost overrun with people forming electric guitar bands, as every major urban area in America was. Some of the bands were even having hits already -- We Five had had a number three hit with "You Were On My Mind", a song which had originally been performed by the folk duo Ian and Sylvia: [Excerpt: We Five, "You Were On My Mind"] Although the band that was most highly regarded on the scene, the Charlatans, was having problems with the various record companies they tried to get signed to, and didn't end up making a record until 1969. If tracks like "Number One" had been released in 1965 when they were recorded, the history of the San Francisco music scene may have taken a very different turn: [Excerpt: The Charlatans, "Number One"] Bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Great Society, and Big Brother and the Holding Company were also forming, and Autumn Records was having a run of success with records by the Beau Brummels, whose records were produced by Autumn's in-house A&R man, Sly Stone: [Excerpt: The Beau Brummels, "Laugh Laugh"] The Warlocks were somewhat cut off from this, playing in a dive bar whose clientele was mostly depressed alcoholics. But the fact that they were playing every night for an audience that didn't care much gave them freedom, and they used that freedom to improvise. Both Lesh and Garcia were big fans of John Coltrane, and they started to take lessons from his style of playing. When the group played "Gloria" or "Midnight Hour" or whatever, they started to extend the songs and give themselves long instrumental passages for soloing. Garcia's playing wasn't influenced *harmonically* by Coltrane -- in fact Garcia was always a rather harmonically simple player. He'd tend to play lead lines either in Mixolydian mode, which is one of the most standard modes in rock, pop, blues, and jazz, or he'd play the notes of the chord that was being played, so if the band were playing a G chord his lead would emphasise the notes G, B, and D. But what he was influenced by was Coltrane's tendency to improvise in long, complex, phrases that made up a single thought -- Coltrane was thinking musically in paragraphs, rather than sentences, and Garcia started to try the same kind of th

Go on home, you're mama's calling you to listen to the Help on the Way Podcast. This week, our hosts Game, FiG and Knob are heading to Santa Barbara for the Grateful Dead's January 17th, 1969 show. Discussions abound about our first Death Don't Have No Mercy, Playboy After Dark, and Knob gives a helpful lecture on what makes The Eleven work. Turn On Your Love Light Dark Star > St. Stephen > The Eleven > Death Don't Have No Mercy Cryptical Envelopment > Drums > The Other One > Cryptical Envelopment > Cosmic Charlie 

Vera Hall "Death, Have Mercy"Fleetwood Mac "Green Manalishi (With the Two Pronged Crown)"Bessie Smith "Graveyard Dream Blues"Billy Joe Shaver "The Devil Made Me Do It the First Time"Ted Leo and the Pharmacists "I'm A Ghost"Sister Rosetta Tharpe "Strange Things Happening Every Day"Tampa Red "Witchin' Hour Blues"Neil Young "Vampire Blues"Lefty Frizzell "The Long Black Veil"Muddy Waters "Got My Mojo Working"Dr. John "Black John the Conqueror"Leon Redbone "Haunted House"Little Willie John "I'm Shakin'"Shotgun Jazz Band "Old Man Mose"Lil Green "Romance In the Dark"The Make-Up "They Live By Night"Uncle Tupelo "Graveyard Shift"Bessie Jones "Oh Death"Albert King "Born Under a Bad Sign"Nina Simone "I Want a Little Sugar In My Bowl"Oscar Celestin "Marie Laveau"Reverend Gary Davis "Death Don't Have No Mercy"Roy Newman & His Boys "Sadie Green (The Vamp of New Orleans)"Jessie Mae Hemphill "She-Wolf"Screamin' Jay Hawkins "I Put a Spell On You"Eilen Jewell "It's Your Voodoo Working"George Olsen and His Music "Tain't No Sin to Dance Around in Your Bones"Son House "Death Letter"Johnny Cash "The Man Comes Around"Fleetwood Mac "Black Magic Woman"Blind Lemon Jefferson "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean"Elvis Costello & the Roots "Wise Up Ghost"Hank Williams "Howlin' At the Moon"Bob Dylan "That Old Black Magic"The Halo Benders "Scarin'"Blind Willie Johnson "Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground"Steve And Justin Townes Earle "Candy Man"Billie Holiday "Sugar"Jeff Beck "I Ain't Superstitious"Cab Calloway/Cab Calloway Orchestra "St. James Infirmary"Bonnie Raitt "Devil Got My Woman"Sebadoh "Vampire"Fred McDowell "Death Came In"Howlin' Wolf "Evil"Ella Fitzgerald "Chew-Chew-Chew (Your Bubble Gum)"Robert Johnson "Hellhound On My Trail"John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers "The Super-Natural"Tom Waits "Big Joe and Phantom 309"

 | Artist  | Title  | Album Name  | Album Copyright | Stacy Jones  | Juke  | World On Fire  |  | Jose Ramirez  | Here In The Delta  | Major League Blues  |  | Malone Sibun  | Restless Heart  | Ashes To Dust  |  | Jim Dan Dee  | Real Blues  | Real Blues  |  | Delta By The Beach  | Baby You Got What I Need  | Single Of The Month | The Actual Goners  | Changes  | Lost Highway  |  | Ben Hemming  | Cruel World  | Marked Man  |  | Gina Sicilia  | Death Don't Have No Mercy  | Unchange  |  | Son Of Dave  | Kick Your Butt  | Call Me KIng  |  | The Ragged Roses  | Tell Me  | Do Me Right  |  | Big Jack Johnson with Kim Wilson  | The Hully Gully Twist  | Stripped Down In Memphis | Diane Durrett & Soul Suga  | Make America Groove  | Put A Lid On It  |  | Gary Cain  | Keep On Comin'  | Next Stop  |   |  | Ian Siegal  | I'm The Shit  | Stone By Stone  |  | John Mayall  | Can't Take No More (Feat Marcus King)  | The Sun is Shining Down

Show #945 Just Bluesing On 01. Rebecca Downes - Hold On (3:38) (Single, Mad Hat Records, 2022) 02. Grace Kuch - Got That Style (3:09) (Single, self-release, 2022) 03. Eric's Blues Band - Next Train (3:37) (Rolling Avenue, self-release, 2022) 04. Kristian Montgomery & the Winterkill Band - Secret Watering Hole (4:22) (A Heaven For Heretics, self-release, 2022) 05. Kenny Neal - Louise Ana (4:50) (Straight From The Heart, Ruf Records, 2022) 06. Hogtown Allstars - Real Good Night (4:19) (Hog Wild, Stony Plain Records, 2022) 07. Anthony Geraci - Corner Of Heartache And Pain (5:53) (Blues Called My Name, Blue Heart Records, 2022) 08. Sean Poluk - Searching (5:12) (Single, self-release, 2022) 09. Bennett Matteo Band - Shiny Creatures (5:16) (Shake The Roots, Gulf Coast Records, 2022) 10. Tim Gartland - Outta Sight Outta Mind (4:09) (Truth, Taste Good Music, 2022) 11. Albert Castiglia - Freedomland (3:58) (I Got Love, Gulf Coast Records, 2022) 12. Big Al & the Heavyweights - It's Alright With Me (3:54) (Love One Another, VizzTone Records, 2022) 13. Ann Peebles - I'm Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down (3:23) (Live In Memphis, Memphis International Records, 2022) 14. Graham Parker & the Rumour - I'm Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down (3:26) (Stick To Me, Mercury Records, 1977) 15. Mizz Lowe & Bobby Rush - Take My Love (5:31) (Single, Mizz Lowe Records, 2022) 16. Jim Dan Dee - The Doctor (4:29) (Real Blues, self-release, 2022) 17. Ben Hemming - Cruel World (3:37) (Marked Man, self-release, 2022) 18. Delbert McClinton - Connecticut Blues (2:26) (Outdated Emotion, Hot Shot Records, 2022) 19. Gina Sicilia - Death Don't Have No Mercy (6:18) (Unchange, VizzTone Records, 2022) 20. The Cold Stares - Mojo Hand (3:04) (Single, Mascot Label Group, 2022) 21. Walter Rossi - Malagueña (Revisited) (5:52) (Six Strings Nine Lives, Aquarius Records, 1978) 22. Stan Fisher - Malagueña (2:53) (Harmonica Classics, Epic Records, 1953) Bandana Blues is and will always be a labor of love. Please help Spinner deal with the costs of hosting & bandwidth. Visit www.bandanablues.com and hit the tipjar. Any amount is much appreciated, no matter how small. Thank you.

WILLIAM BOYLE chats to Paul Burke about his novel SHOOT THE MOONLIGHT OUT, Noir, Haunted Catholicism, watching Blue Velvet at twelve and Oxford, Mississippi. SHOOT THE MOONLIGHT OUT An explosive crime drama, evokes a mystical Brooklyn where the sidewalks are cracked, where Virgin Mary statues tilt in fenced front yards, and where smudges of moonlight reflect in puddles even on the blackest nights.Southern Brooklyn, July 1996. Fire hydrants are open and spraying water on the sizzling blacktop. Punk kids have to make their own fun. Bobby Santovasco and his pal Zeke like to throw rocks at cars getting off the Belt Parkway. They think it's dumb and harmless until it's too late to think otherwise. Then there's Jack Cornacchia, a widower who lives with his high school age daughter Amelia and reads meters for Con Ed but also has a secret life as a vigilante, righting neighborhood wrongs through acts of violence. A simple mission to strong-arm a Bay Ridge con man, Max Berry, leads him to cross paths with a tragedy that hits close to home.Fast forward five years: June 2001. The summer before New York City and the world changed for good. Charlie French is a low-level gangster-wannabe trying to make a name for himself. When he stumbles onto a bowling alley locker stuffed with a bag full of cash, he brings it to his only pal, Max Berry, for safekeeping while he cleans up the mess surrounding it. Bobby Santovasco - with no real future mapped out and the big sin of his past shining brightly in his rearview mirror - has taken a job working as an errand boy for Max Berry. On a recruiting run for Max's Ponzi scheme, Bobby meets Francesca Clarke, born in the neighborhood but an outsider nonetheless. They hit it off. Bobby gets the idea to knock off Max's safe so he and Francesca can escape Brooklyn forever. Little does he know what Charlie French has stashed there.Meanwhile, Bobby's former stepsister, Lily Murphy, is back home in the neighborhood after college, teaching a writing class in the basement of St. Mary's church. She's also being stalked by her college boyfriend. One of her students is Jack Cornacchia. When she opens up to him about her stalker, Jack decides to take matters into his own hands.Shoot the Moonlight Out is tragic and tender and funny and strange. A sense of loss is palpable - what has been lost and what will be lost - and Boyle's characters face down old ghosts with grim determination, as ripples of consequence radiate in dangerous directions.William Boyle is from Brooklyn, New York. His debut novel, Gravesend, was published as #1,000 in the Rivages/Noir collection in France, shortlisted for the Prix Polar SNCF, nominated for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière and shortlisted for the CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger. Boyle is also the author of the Hammett Prize-nominated The Lonely Witness (No Exit Press), a book of short stories, Death Don't Have No Mercy and another novel, Tout est Brisè, released in France by Gallmeister. A Friend is a Gift You Give Yourself was published to enormous praise, it was an Amazon Best Book in 2019. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi.Recommendations Novels:Eli Cranor Don't Know ToughLewis Shiner Outside the Gates of EdenWilly VlautinLarry BrownMusic :Garland Jeffreys Shoot The Moonlight Out (American Boy and Girl)Jim CarrollProduced by Junkyard DogMusic courtesy of Southgate & LeighCrime TimePaul Burke writes for Crime Time, Crime Fiction Lover, NB Magazine and the European 

"The Barrel House" Hard Gritty blues with a a little southern rock. We do not do traditional blues. We do blues based rock n roll from hard/stoner/Psychedelic.  We find newer and emerging artists around the world that have that pure gritty sound.  If it's not Gritty, Raw & Pure; it ain't Cowboy's Juke Joint! With Hosts: Mike & Stone. Live Sunday's 8:00 PM EST on www.cowboysjukejoint.com1. Sand'n'Roll - (Rusty Chainsaw)2. The Lucid Furs - (A One Time Investment)3. The Lucid Furs - (Leave This Planet)4. Amplifier - (Panzer)5. The Blackwater Fever - (All Night Long)6. the Graveltones - (Bang Bang)7. Planet of the 8s - (Planet of the 8s - Green Lake)8. King Cig - (The Great Leveler)9. Howlin' Sun - (Nothing Like a Shelter)10. Blackberry Smoke - (Good One Coming On)11. Crow Black Chicken - (Freedom)12. Black Jesuses - (Death Don't Have No Mercy)13. Chase Walker Band - (Buffalo Bayou)14. Getaway Van - (The Island)15. Stoner Train - (Astrodendradon)16. Elbrus - (Break The Machine)17. The Dirty Earth - (I've Been Watching You)18. Cristina Vane - (Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed)19. Silent Monolith - (Feel Like I'm Dying)20. Ramblin' Roze - (Who's Fault)21. Kurt Mauser - (Ain't Seen The Sun)22. Big Daddy's Breakfast Voodoo - (Bag of Bones)23. GUTS - (Breakfast)24. The Naked High - (Blisters and Regrets)

This is such a rough one for me. R.I.P. Cliff Johnson, Cliff Burton, My mother Toni Lee Kensinger and our beloved 10 month old puppy Rocky. Burton and my Mom were anniversaries but Johnson and Rocky were Monday and Tuesday of this week. I wish that I could've saved my Son and God Daughter the pain of losing Rocky but I couldn't. Please listen to my musical tribute to all four of them. Metallica - To Live is to Die>Elvis Presley - Old Shep>Pink Floyd - Mother>Grateful Dead - Death Don't Have No Mercy>Grateful Dead - Box of Rain>Grateful Dead - Brokedown Palace>Phish - Lifeboy>Pink Floyd - Shine on you Crazy Diamond 1 through 9>Pink Floyd - Wish you Were Here>Smokey Robinson - Really Gonna Miss You.

We borrowed the title for this week's program from a wonderful just-published memoir by Mitch Greenhill that chronicles his life as a composer, musician, producer and manager. Mitch inherited Folklore Productions from his dad, Manny, and his life has been involved with many great artists including Doc & Merle Watson, John Renbourn, Rosalie Sorrels, Eric Von Schmidt, Mayne Smith and the Rev. Gary Davis. On this program, we'll feature many of those artists, as well as recordings by Mitch and his friends. Celebrating the Greenhills and Folklore Productions ... this week on The Sing Out! Radio Magazine. Episode #21-11: Raised by Musical Mavericks Host: Tom Druckenmiller Artist/”Song”/CD/Label Pete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian Folkways String Madness / “Snowy Evening Blues” / Eye of the Beholder / Self-Produced Mitch Greenhill / “Albion Turned Away” / Blues of an Ancient Bard / Folklore Mitch Greenhill / “Mobile and Tennesee Line” / Picking the City Blues / Prestige Mitch Greenhill & Mayne Smith / “Don't You Dee That Train” / Storm Coming / Bay The Lost Frontier / “Freight Train Blues” / The Lost Frontier / Self-Produced Sister Rosetta Tharpe / “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” / The Decca Singles / Verve Paul Robeson / “Ol' Man River” / Single / CTS Rolf Cahn / “The Four Maries” / California Concert / Folkways String Madness / “Merlefest Ramble” / Eye of the Beholder / Self Produced The Rev. Gary Davis / “Death Don't Have No Mercy” / Great Bluesmen-Newport / Vanguard Lightnin' Hopkins w/Sam Lay / “Shake That Thing” / Great Bluesmen-Newport / Vanguard Eric Von Schmidt / “Joshua Gone Barbados” / Living on the Trail / Tomato Jim Kweskin & Geoff Muldaur / “C-H-I-C-K-E-N” / Penny's Farm / Kingswood Ry Cooder / “Long Riders Theme” / The Long Riders / Warner Brothers Rosalie Sorrels / “If I Could Be the Rain” / If I Could Be the Rain / Folk Legacy Pete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian Folkways

ESPECIAL 14 ANIVERSARIO. 1- Junker´s Blues – Champion Jack Dupree 2- Please Stop Playing These Blues Boy – Jimmy Whiterspoon 3- Death Don´t Have No Mercy – Rev. Gary Davis 4- Country Road – John Mayall 5- Ain´t No Sunshine – FREDDIE KING 6- Another Night To Cry – Lonnie Johnson 7- My Dog Is Mean – Memphis Slim 8- Leaving Trunk – Taj Mahal 9- Someday Baby – Otis Spann 10- The Seventh Son – Mose Allison 11- Shaggy Dog – Lightnin Hopkins

Making a Scene Presents an interview with Andy Cohen!Andy Cohen grew up in a house with a piano and a lot of Dixieland Jazz records, amplified after a while by a cornet that his dad got him. At about fifteen, he got bitten by the Folk Music bug, and soon got to hear records by Big Bill Broonzy and the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, both of which reminded him of the music he grew up to. At sixteen, he saw Reverend Gary Davis, and his course was set. He knew he had it in him to follow, study, perform and promote the music of the southeast quadrant, America’s great musical fountainhead. Although he’s done other things, a certain amount of writing and physical labor from dishwashing and railroading to archeology, playing the old tunes is what he does best. Andy Cohen,Talkin' Casey,Tryin' To Get HomeAndy Cohen,Death Don't Have No Mercy,Tryin' To Get Homemakingascene,andy cohen,Andy Cohen & Moira Meltzer-Cohen,Talkin' Casey,Small But MightyAndy Cohen & Moira Meltzer-Cohen,Boob-I-Lak,Small But Mighty 

This is a look at some of the best Grateful Dead blues songs played throughout the entire run of the Dead. There is stuff on here from 66' all the way through 93'. There are many highlights here, particularly the Schoolgirl>U don't love me>Schoolgirl from 1966. You'll also dig the inspired Brent organ action on "Never trust a Woman", and if that weren't enough, catcht the double dose from the boys and Branford from MSG 91'. Follow us on Twitter @HeadyJamsPodcast, or subscribe on soundcloud, iTunes or The I of The World YouTube channel. Enjoy, and don't let these blues get you blue! Hey Bo Diddley>I'm a Man 3/25/72 Academy of Music NYC Schoolgirl>You Don't Love Me>Schoolgirl 2/25/66 Ivar theater LA Big Boss Man 4/11/72 Newcastle UK Little RedRooster 10/9/89 Hampton You win again 12/15/71 Hill Aud Ann Arbor MI King Bee 12/8/93 LA Sports Arena Death Don't Have No Mercy 2/28/69 Filmore West Never trust a Woman 5/22/82 Greek Theater It hurts me too 5/31/69 MacArthur Court Eugene OR CC Rider>It takes a train 9/10/91 MSG Same thing 3/18/67 Winterland Smokestack Lightning 2/19/71 Capitol theater

All physicians are taught, “First do no harm.” But what happens when a doctor does harm his patients?Dr. Robert Henderson was a veteran spinal surgeon in Dallas when he got an unusual phone call from a local hospital: a new surgeon had operated so poorly that a patient who’d walked in on her own two feet now couldn’t even wiggle her toes. Dr. Henderson had seen a lot, but he wasn't prepared for this. The surgery was so bad, in fact, he asked himself whether this person possibly be an impostor impersonating a physician?“Death Don’t Have No Mercy” performed by Delaney Davidson and Marlon Williams, courtesy of Rough Diamond Records.Please tell us what you think about our show and help us by answering a few questions at wondery.com/survey.

  Episode ninety-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Song To Woody” by Bob Dylan, and at the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early sixties. 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 “Sherry” by the Four Seasons. 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—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This might not be available in the US, due to the number of Woody Guthrie songs in a row. Dylan’s first album is in the public domain in Europe, so a variety of reissues of it exist. An interesting and cheap one is this, which pairs it (and a non-album single by Dylan) with two Carolyn Hester albums which give a snapshot of the Greenwich Village scene, on one of which Dylan plays harmonica. The Harry Smith Anthology is also now public domain, and can be freely downloaded from archive.org.  I have used *many* books for this episode, most of which I will also be using for future episodes on Dylan: The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk and Elijah Wald is the fascinating and funny autobiography of Dylan’s mentor in his Greenwich Village period. Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald is the definitive book on Robert Johnson. Information on Woody Guthrie comes from Ramblin’ Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie by Ed Cray. Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan is a partial, highly inaccurate, but thoroughly readable autobiography. Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades. I’ve also used Robert Shelton’s No Direction Home, which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   1962 is the year when the sixties really started, and in the next few episodes we will see the first proper appearances of several of the musicians who would go on to make the decade what it was. By two weeks from now, when we get to episode one hundred and the end of the second year of the podcast, the stage will be set for us to look at that most mythologised of decades. And so today, we’re going to take our first look at one of the most important of the sixties musicians, the only songwriter ever to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, a man who influenced every single performer and songwriter for at least the next decade, and whose work inspired a whole subgenre, albeit one he had little but contempt for. We’re going to look at his first album, and at a song he wrote to his greatest influence. And we’re also going to look at how his career intersected with someone we talked about way back in the very first episode of this podcast. Today we’re going to look at Bob Dylan, and at “Song to Woody”: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “Song to Woody”] This episode is going to be a little different from several of the other episodes we’ve had recently. At the time he made his first album, Dylan was not the accomplished artist he quickly became, but a minor performer whose first record only contained two original songs. But he was from a tradition that we’ve looked at only in passing before. We’ve barely looked at the American folk music tradition, and largely ignored the musicians who were major figures in it, because those figures only really enter into rock and roll in a real way starting with Dylan. So as part of this episode, we’re going to have very brief, capsule, looks at a number of other musicians we’ve not touched on before. I’ll only be giving enough background for these people so you can get a flavour of them — in future episodes when we look at the folk and folk-rock scenes, we’ll also fill in some more of the background of these artists. That also means this episode is going to run a little long, just because there’s a lot to get through. Bob Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in the Minnesota Iron Range, an area of the US that was just beginning a slow descent into poverty, as the country suddenly needed a lot less metal after the end of World War II. He was born in Duluth, but moved to Hibbing, a much smaller town, when he was very young. As a kid, he was fascinated with music that sounded a little odd. He was first captivated by Johnnie Ray — and incidentally, Clinton Heylin, in his biography of Dylan, thinks that this must be wrong, and “Dylan has surely mixed up his names” and must be thinking of Johnny Ace, because “Ray’s main period of chart success” was 1956-58. Heylin’s books are usually very, very well researched, but here he’s showing his parochialism. Johnnie Ray’s biggest *UK* hits were in 1956-8, but in the US his biggest hits came in 1951, and he had a string of hits in the very early fifties.  Ray’s hits, like “Cry”, were produced by Mitch Miller, and were on Columbia records: [Excerpt: Johnnie Ray, “Cry”] Shortly after his infatuation with Ray’s music, he fell for the music of Hank Williams in a big way, and became obsessed with Williams’ songwriting: [Excerpt: Hank Williams, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”] He also became a fan of another Hank, Hank Snow, the country singer who had been managed by Colonel Tom Parker, and through Snow he became aware of the songs of Jimmie Rodgers, who Snow frequently covered, and who Snow admired enough that Snow’s son was named Jimmie Rodgers Snow.  But he soon also became a big fan of rhythm and blues and rock and roll. He taught himself to play rudimentary piano in a Little Richard style, and his ambition, as quoted in his high school yearbook, was to join Little Richard’s band. He was enough of a fan of rock and roll music that he went to see Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper on the penultimate date of their ill-fated tour. He later claimed to have seen a halo over Holly’s head during the performance. His first brush with fame came indirectly as a result of that tour. A singer from Fargo, North Dakota, named Bobby Vee, was drafted in to cover for Holly at the show that Holly had been travelling to when he died. Vee sounded a little like Holly, if you didn’t listen too closely, and he had a minor local hit with a song called “Suzy Baby”: [Excerpt: Bobby Vee, “Suzy Baby”] Dylan joined Vee’s band for a short while under the stage name Elston Gunn, playing the piano, though he was apparently not very good (he could only play in C, according to some sources I’ve read), and he didn’t stay in Vee’s band very long. But while he was in Vee’s band, he would tell friends and relatives that he *was* Bobby Vee, and at least some people believed him. Vee would go on to have a career as one of the wave of Bobbies that swarmed all over American Bandstand in the late fifties and early sixties, with records like “Rubber Ball”: [Excerpt: Bobby Vee, “Rubber Ball”] While Dylan made his name with a very different kind of music, he would always argue that Vee deserved rather more respect than he usually got, and that there was some merit to his music. But it wasn’t until he went to university in Minneapolis that Robert Zimmerman became Bob Dylan, and changed everything about his life. As many people do when they go to university, he reinvented himself — he took on a new name, which has variously been quoted as having been inspired by Marshall Dillon from the TV series Gunsmoke and by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. He stopped studying, and devoted his time to music and chasing women. And he also took on a new musical style. The way he tells it, he had an epiphany in a record shop listening booth, listening to an album by the folk singer Odetta. Odetta was an astonishing singer who combined elements of folk, country, and blues with an opera-trained voice, and Dylan was probably listening to her first album, which was largely traditional folk songs, plus one song each by Lead Belly and Jimmie Rodgers: [Excerpt: Odetta, “Muleskinner Blues”] Dylan had soon sold his electric guitar and bought an acoustic, and he immediately learned all of Odetta’s repertoire and started performing her songs, and Lead Belly’s, with a friend, “Spider” John Koerner, who would later become a fairly well-known folk blues musician in his own right: [Excerpt: Ray, Koerner, and Glover, “Hangman”] And then, at a coffee-shop, he got talking with a friend of his, Flo Castner, and she invited him to come round to her brother’s apartment, which was nearby, because she thought he might be interested in some of the music her brother had. Dylan discovered two albums at Lyn Castner’s house that day that would change his life. The first, and the less important to him in the short term, is one we’ve talked about before — he heard the Spirituals to Swing album, the record of the 1938 Carnegie Hall concerts that we talked about back in the first few episodes of the podcast: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner & Pete Johnson, “It’s Alright, Baby”] That album impressed him, but it was the other record he heard that day that changed everything for him immediately. It was a collection of recordings by Woody Guthrie. Guthrie is someone we’ve only mentioned in passing so far, but he was pivotal in the development of American folk music in the 1940s, and in particular he was important in the politicisation of that music. In the 1930s, there wasn’t really a distinction made between country music and folk — that distinction is one that only really came later — and Guthrie had started out as a country singer, singing songs inspired by the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, and other 1920s greats. For most of his early twenties he’d bummed around Oklahoma and Texas doing odd jobs as a sign painter, psychic, faith healer, and whatever else he could pick up a little money for. But then in 1936 he’d travelled out to California in search of work. When there, he’d hooked up with a cousin, Jack Guthrie, who was a Western singer, performing the kind of Western Swing that would later become rockabilly. We don’t have any recordings of Jack from this early, but when you listen to him in the forties, you can hear the kind of hard-edged California Western Swing that would influence most of the white artists we looked at in the first year or so of the podcast: [Excerpt: Jack Guthrie, “Oakie Boogie”] Woody and Jack weren’t musically compatible — this was when country and western were seen as very, very different genres, rather than being lumped into one — but they worked together for a while. Jack was the lead singer and guitarist, and Woody was his comedy sidekick, backing vocalist, and harmonica player. They performed with a group called the Beverly Hillbillies and got their own radio show, The Oakie and Woody Show, but it wasn’t successful, and Jack decided to give up the show. Woody continued with a friend, Maxine Crissman, who performed as “Lefty Lou From Old Mizzou”. The Woody and Lefty act became hugely popular, but Lefty eventually also quit, due to her health failing, and while at the time she seems to have been regarded as the major talent in the duo, her leaving the act was indirectly the best thing that ever happened to Guthrie. The radio station they were performing on was owned by a fairly left-wing businessman who had connections with the radical left faction of the Democratic Party (and in California in the thirties that could be quite radical, somewhere close to today’s Democratic Socialists of America), and when Lefty quit the act, the owner of the station gave Guthrie another job — the owner also ran a left-wing newspaper, and since Guthrie was from Oklahoma, maybe he would be interested in writing some columns about the plight of the Okie migrants?  Guthrie went and spent time with those people, and his shock at the poverty they were living in and the discrimination they were suffering seems to have radicalised him. He started hanging round with members of the Communist Party, though he apparently never joined — he wasn’t all that interested in Marxist theory or the party line, he just wanted to take the side of the victims against the bullies, and he saw the Communists as doing that. He was, though, enough of a fellow traveller that when World War II started he took the initial Communist line of it being a capitalist’s fight that socialists should have no part of (a line which was held until Russia joined the war, at which point it became a crusade against the evils of fascism). His employer was a more resolute anti-fascist, and so Guthrie lost his newspaper job, and he decided to move across the country to New York, where he hooked up with a group of left-wing intellectuals and folk singers, centring on Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, and Lead Belly. It was this environment, centred in Almanac House in Greenwich Village, that spawned the Almanac Singers and later the Weavers, who we talked about a few episodes back. And Guthrie had been the most important of all of them. Guthrie was a folk performer — a big chunk of his repertoire was old songs like “Ida Red”, “Stackolee”, and “Who’s Going to Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?” – but he also wrote songs himself, taking the forms of old folk and country songs, and reworking the lyrics — and sometimes, but not always, the music — creating songs that dealt with events that were happening at the time. There were songs about famous outlaws, recast as Robin Hood type figures: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “Pretty Boy Floyd”] There were talking blues with comedy lyrics: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “Talking Fishing Blues”] There were the famous Dust Bowl Ballads, about the dust storms that had caused so much destruction and hardship in the west: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “The Great Dust Storm”] And of course, there was “This Land is Your Land”, a radical song about how private property is immoral and unnatural, which has been taken up as an anthem by people who would despise everything that Guthrie stood for: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “This Land is Your Land”] It’s not certain which records by Guthrie Dylan heard that day — he talks about it in his autobiography, but the songs he talks about weren’t ones that were on the same album, and he seems to just be naming a handful of Guthrie’s songs. What is certain is that Dylan reacted to this music in a visceral way. He decided that he had to *become* Woody Guthrie, and took on Guthrie’s playing and singing style, even his accent. However, he soon modulated that slightly, when a friend told him that he might as well give up — Ramblin’ Jack Elliot was already doing the Guthrie-imitation thing. Elliot, like Dylan, was a middle-class Jewish man who had reinvented himself as a Woody Guthrie copy — in this case, Elliot Adnopoz, the son of a surgeon, had become Ramblin’ Jack the singing cowboy, and had been an apprentice of Guthrie, living with him and learning everything from him, before going over to Britain, where his status as an actual authentic American had meant he was one of the major figures in the British folk scene and the related skiffle scene. Alan Lomax, who had moved to the UK temporarily to escape the anti-Communist witch hunts, had got Elliot a contract with Topic Records, a folk label that had started out as part of the Workers’ Music Association, which as you can probably tell from the name was affiliated with the Communist Party of Great Britain. There he’d recorded an album of Guthrie songs, which Dylan’s acquaintance played for him: [Excerpt: Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, “1913 Massacre”] Dylan was shocked that there was someone out there doing the same thing, but then he just took on aspects of Elliot’s persona as well as Guthrie’s. He was going to be the next Woody Guthrie, and that meant inhabiting his persona utterly, and giving his whole repertoire over to Guthrie songs. He was also, though, making tentative efforts at writing his own songs, too. One which we only have as a lyric was written to a girlfriend, and was set to the same tune we just heard — Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre”. The lyrics were things like “Hey, hey Bonny, I’m singing to you now/The song I’m singing is the best I know how” Incidentally, the woman that was written for is yet another person in the story who now has a different name — she became a moderately successful actor, appearing in episodes of Star Trek and Gunsmoke, and changed her name to Jahanara Romney shortly after her marriage to the hippie peace activist Wavy Gravy (which isn’t Mr. Gravy’s birth name either). Their son, whose birth name was Howdy Do-Good Gravy Tomahawk Truckstop Romney, also changed his name later on, you’ll be unsurprised to hear. Dylan by this point was feeling as constrained by the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul as he had earlier by the small town Hibbing. In January 1961, he decided he was going to go to New York, and while he was there he was going to go and meet Woody Guthrie in person. Guthrie was, by this time, severely ill — he had Huntington’s disease, a truly awful genetic disorder that had also killed his mother. Huntington’s causes dementia, spasmodic movements, a loss of control of the body, and a ton of other mental and physical symptoms. Guthrie had been in a psychiatric hospital since 1956, and was only let out every Sunday to see family at a friend’s house.  Bob Dylan quickly became friendly with Guthrie, visiting him regularly in the hospital to play Guthrie’s own songs for him, and occasionally joining him on the family visits on Sundays. He only spent a few months doing this — Dylan has always been someone who moved on quickly, and Guthrie also moved towards the end of 1961, to a new hospital closer to his family, but these visits had a profound effect on the young man. When not visiting Guthrie, Dylan was spending his time in Greenwich Village, the Bohemian centre of New York. The Village at that time was a hotbed of artists and radicals, with people like the poet Allen Ginsberg, the street musician Moondog, and Tiny Tim, a ukulele player who sang Rudy Vallee songs in falsetto, all part of the scene. It was also the centre of what was becoming the second great folk revival. That revival had been started in 1952, when the most important bootleg ever was released, Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean”] Harry Smith was a record collector, experimental filmmaker, and follower of the occultist Aleister Crowley. His greatest work seems at least in part to have been created as a magickal work, with album covers designed by himself full of esoteric symbolism. Smith had a huge collection of old 78 records — all of them things that had been issued commercially in the late 1920s and early thirties, when the record industry had been in a temporary boom before the depression. Many of these records had been very popular in the twenties, but by 1952 even the most popular acts, like Blind Lemon Jefferson or the Carter Family, were largely forgotten. So Smith and Moe Asch, the owner of Folkways Records, took advantage of the new medium, the long-playing album, and put together a six-album set of these recordings, not bothering with trivialities like copyright even though, again, most of these had been recorded for major labels only twenty or so years earlier — but at this time there was not really such a thing as a market for back catalogue, and none of the record labels involved seem to have protested. Smith’s collection was an idiosyncratic one, based around his own tastes. It ran the gamut from hard blues: [Excerpt: Joe Williams’ Washboard Blues Singers, “Baby Please Don’t Go”] To the Carter Family’s country recordings of old ballads that date back centuries: [Excerpt: The Carter Family, “Black Jack Davey”] To gospel: [Excerpt: Sister Clara Hudmon, “Stand By Me”] But put together in one place, these records suggested the existence of a uniquely American roots music tradition, one that encompassed all these genres, and Smith’s Anthology became the favourite music of the same type of people who in the UK around the same time were becoming skifflers — many of them radical leftists who had been part of the US equivalent of the trad jazz movement (who were known as “mouldy figs”) and were attracted by the idea of an authentic music of the working man. The Harry Smith Anthology became the core repertoire for every American folk musician of the fifties, the seed around which the whole movement crystallised. Every folkie knew every single song on those records. Those folkies had started playing at coffee shops in Greenwich Village, places that were known as basket houses, because they didn’t charge for entry or pay the artists, but the performers could pass a basket and split whatever the audience decided to donate.  Originally, the folk musicians were not especially popular, and in fact they were booked for that reason. The main entertainment for those coffee shops was poetry, and the audience for poetry would mostly buy a single coffee and make it last all night. The folkies were booked to come on between the poets and play a few songs to make the audience clear out to make room for a new audience to come and buy new coffees. However, some of the people got good enough that they actually started to get their own audiences, and within a short time the roles were reversed, with the poets coming on to clear out the folk audience. Dylan’s first gigs were on this circuit, playing on bills put together by Fred Neil, a musician who was at this point mostly playing blues songs but who within a few years would write some of the great classics of the sixties singer-songwriter genre: [Excerpt: Fred Neil, “Everybody’s Talkin'”] By the time Dylan hit the scene, there were quite a few very good musicians in the Village, and the folk scene had grown to the point that there were multiple factions. There were the Stalinists, who had coalesced around Pete Seeger, the elder statesman of the scene, and who played a mixture of summer-camp singalong music and topical songs about news events. There were the Zionists, who were singing things like “Hava Nagilah”. There were bluegrass players, and there were the two groups that most attracted Dylan — those who sang old folk ballads, and those who sang the blues. Those latter two groups tended to cluster together, because they were smaller than the other groups, and also because of their own political views — while all of the scene were leftists, the blues and ballad singers tended either to be vaguely apolitical, or to be anarchists and Trotskyites rather than Stalinists. But they had a deeper philosophical disagreement with the Stalinists — Seeger’s camp thought that the quality of a song was secondary to the social good it could do, while the blues and ballad singers held that the important thing was the music, and any political or social good was a nice byproduct. There was a huge amount of infighting between these small groups — the narcissism of small differences — but there was one place they would all hang out. The Folklore Centre was a record and bookshop owned by a man named Izzy Young, and it was where you would go to buy every new book, to buy and sell copies of the zines that were published, and to hang out and find out who the new musicians on the scene were.  And it was at the Folklore Centre that Dylan met Dave Van Ronk: [Excerpt: Dave Van Ronk, “Cocaine Blues”] Van Ronk was the most important musician in the blues and ballads group of folkies, and was politically an anarchist who, through his connection with the Schachtmanites (a fringe-left group who were more Trotskyite than the Trotskyites, and whose views sometimes shaded into anarchism) was becoming converted to Marxism. A physically massive man, he’d started out as a traditional jazz guitarist and banjo player, but had slowly moved on into the folk side of things through his love of blues singers like Bessie Smith and folk-blues artists like Lead Belly. Van Ronk had learned a great deal from Rev. Gary Davis, a blind gospel-blues singer whose technique Van Ronk had studied: [Excerpt: Rev. Gary Davis, “Death Don’t Have No Mercy”] Van Ronk was one of the few people on the Village scene who was a native New Yorker, though he was from Queens rather than the Village, and he was someone who had already made a few records that Dylan had heard, mostly of the standard repertoire: [Excerpt: Dave Van Ronk, “See That My Grave is Kept Clean”] Dylan consciously sought him out as the person to imitate on the scene, and he was soon regularly sleeping on Van Ronk’s couch and being managed for a brief time by Van Ronk’s wife. Once again, Dylan was learning everything he could from the people he was around — but he had a much bigger ambition than anyone else on the scene. A lot of the people on that scene have been very bitter over the years about Dylan, but Van Ronk, who did more for Dylan than anyone else on the scene, never really was — the two stopped being close once he was no more use to Dylan, as so often happened, but they remained friendly, because Van Ronk was secure enough in himself and his own abilities that he didn’t need the validation of being important to the big star. Van Ronk was an important mentor to him for a crucial period of six months or so, and Dylan always acknowledged that, just as Van Ronk always acknowledged Dylan’s talent. And that talent, at least at first, was a performing talent rather than a songwriting one. Dylan was writing songs by now, but hardly any, and when he did perform them, he was not acknowledging them. His first truly successful song, a song about nuclear war, “Let Me Die in my Footsteps”, he would introduce as a Weavers song: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “Let Me Die in my Footsteps”] For the most part, his repertoire was still only Woody Guthrie songs, but people were amazed by his personal charisma, his humour — one comparison you see time and again when people talk about his early performances is Charlie Chaplin — and his singing. There are so many jokes about Dylan’s vocals that this sounds like a joke, but among the folk crowd, his phrasing in particular — as influenced by the R&B records he grew up listening to as by Guthrie — was considered utterly astonishing. Dylan started publishing some of his song lyrics in Broadside, a magazine for new topical songs, and in other magazines like Sing Out! These were associated with the Communist side of the folk movement, and Dylan had a foot in both camps through his association with Guthrie and Guthrie’s friends. Through these people he got to know Suze Rotolo, a volunteer with the Congress of Racial Equality, who became his girlfriend, and her sister Carla, who was the assistant to Alan Lomax, who was now back from the UK, and the Rotolos played a part in Dylan’s big breakthrough.  The timeline that follows is a bit confused, but Carla Rotolo recorded some of the best Village folk singers, and wrote to John Hammond about the tape, mentioning Dylan in particular. At the same time, Hammond’s son John Hammond Jr, another musician on the circuit and a friend of Dylan’s, apparently mentioned Dylan to his father. Dylan was also working on Robert Shelton, the folk critic of the New York Times, who eventually gave Dylan a massive rave review for a support slot he’d played at Gerde’s Folk City. And the same day that review came out, eight days after Carla Rotolo’s letter, Dylan was in the recording studio with the folk singer Carolyn Hester, playing harmonica on a few of her tracks, and Hammond was the producer: [Excerpt: Carolyn Hester, “I’ll Fly Away”] Hammond had, of course, organised the Spirituals to Swing concerts which had influenced Dylan. And not only that, he’d been the person to discover Billie Holiday, and Count Basie. And Charlie Christian. He was now working for Columbia Records, where he’d just produced the first secular records for a promising new gospel singer who had decided to turn pop, named Aretha Franklin: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “Today I Sing the Blues”] So Hammond was an important figure in many ways, and he had a lot of latitude at Columbia Records. He decided to sign Dylan, and even though Mitch Miller, Columbia’s head of A&R at the time, had no clue what Hammond saw in Dylan, Hammond’s track record was good enough that he was allowed to get on with it and put out an album. Hammond also gave Dylan an album to take home and listen to, a record which hadn’t come out yet, a reissue of some old blues records called “King of the Delta Blues Singers” by Robert Johnson: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, “Crossroads Blues”] There has been a hell of a lot of mythology about Johnson over the years, so much so that it’s almost impossible to give anyone who’s heard of him at all an accurate impression of Johnson’s place in music history. One question I have been asked repeatedly since I started this podcast is “How come you didn’t start with Robert Johnson?”, and if you don’t know about him, you’ll get an idea of his general perception among music fans from the fact that I recently watched an episode of a science fiction TV series where our heroes had to go back in time to stop the villains from preventing Johnson from making his recordings, because by doing that they could stop rock and roll from ever existing. There’s a popular perception that Johnson was the most important blues musician of his generation, and that he was hugely influential on the development of blues and R&B, and it’s simply false. He *was* a truly great musician, and he *was* hugely influential — but he was influential on white musicians in the sixties, not black musicians in the thirties, forties, and fifties. In his lifetime, his best selling records sold around five thousand copies, which to put it in perspective is about the same number of people who’ve listened to some of my more popular podcast episodes. Johnson’s biographer Elijah Wald — a man who, like I do, has a huge respect for Johnson’s musicianship, has said “knowing about Johnson and Muddy Waters but not about Leroy Carr or Dinah Washington [is] like knowing about, say, the Sir Douglas Quintet but not knowing about the Beatles.” I’d agree, except that the Sir Douglas Quintet were much, much, bigger in the sixties than Robert Johnson was in the thirties. Johnson’s reputation comes entirely from that album that Hammond had handed Dylan. Hammond had been one of the tiny number of people who had actually listened to Johnson at the time he was performing. Indeed, Hammond had wanted to get Johnson to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts, only to find that Johnson had died only a short time earlier — they’d got Big Bill Broonzy to play in his place, and played a couple of Johnson’s records from the stage. That had, in fact, kickstarted Broonzy’s later second career as a folk-blues musician playing for largely white audiences, rather than as a proto-Chicago-blues performer playing for Black ones. Hammond’s friend Alan Lomax had also been a fan of Johnson — he’d gone to Mississippi later, to try to record Johnson, also without having realised that Johnson had died. But far from Johnson being the single most important blues musician of the thirties, as he is now portrayed in popular culture, if you’d asked most blues musicians or listeners about Robert Johnson in the twenty-three years between his death and the King of the Delta Blues Singers album coming out, most of them would have looked at you blankly, or maybe asked if you meant Lonnie Johnson, the much more famous musician who was a big inspiration for Robert. When King of the Delta Blues Singers came out, it changed all that, and made Robert Johnson into a totemic figure among white blues fans, and we’ll see over the next year or two a large number of very important musicians who took inspiration from him — and deservedly so. While the myth of Robert Johnson has almost no connection to the real man, his music demonstrated a remarkable musical mind — he was a versatile, skilled guitarist and arranger, and someone whose musical palette was far wider than his recorded legacy suggests — Ramblin’ Johnny Shines, who travelled with Johnson for a time, describes him as particularly enjoying playing songs like “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby” and Jimmie Rodgers songs, and polkas, calling Johnson “a polka hound, man”. And even though in his handful of recording sessions he was asked only to play blues, you can still hear elements of that: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, “They’re Red Hot”] But the music wasn’t the main thing that grabbed Dylan. Dylan played the album for Dave Van Ronk, who was unimpressed — musically, Johnson just didn’t seem very original to Van Ronk, who played Dylan records by Skip James, Leroy Carr, and others, showing Dylan where Johnson had picked up most of his musical ideas. And Dylan had to agree with him that Johnson didn’t sound particularly original in that context — but he also didn’t care, reasoning that many of the Woody Guthrie songs he loved were rewrites of old Carter Family songs, so if Johnson was rewriting Leroy Carr songs that was fair enough. What got to Dylan was Johnson’s performance style, but also his ability with words. Johnson had a very sparse, economical, lyrical style which connected with Dylan on a primordial level. Most of those who became fans of Johnson following the release of King of the Delta Blues Singers saw Johnson as an exotic and scary figure — the myth commonly told about him is that he sold his soul at a crossroads to the Devil in return for the ability to play the guitar, though that’s a myth that was originally told about a different Mississippi blues man called Tommy Johnson, and there’s no evidence that anyone thought that of him at the time — and so these later fans see his music as being haunted. Dylan instead seems to see Johnson as someone very like himself — in his autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan talks about Johnson being a bothersome kid who played harmonica, who was later taught a bit of guitar and then learned the rest of his music from records, rather than from live performers. Dylan’s version of Johnson is closer to the reality, as far as we know it, than the Johnson of legend is, and Dylan seems to have been delighted when he found out much later that the name of the musician who taught Johnson to play guitar was Ike Zimmerman. Dylan immediately tried to incorporate Johnson’s style into his own songwriting, and we’ll see the effects of that in future episodes. But that songwriting wouldn’t be seen much on his debut album. And nor would his Woody Guthrie repertoire. Instead, Dylan performed a set of traditional ballads and blues numbers, most of which he never performed live normally, and at least half of which were arrangements that Dylan copied wholesale from Dave Van Ronk. [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “See That My Grave is Kept Clean”] The album was recorded quickly, in a couple of days. Hammond found Dylan incredibly difficult to work with, saying he had appalling mic technique, and for many of the songs Dylan refused to do a second take. There were only two originals on the album. One, “Talkin’ New York”, was a comedy talking blues about his early time in New York, very much in the style of Woody Guthrie’s talking blues songs. The other, “Song To Woody”, was a rewrite of his earlier “Song For Bonny”, which was itself a rewrite of Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre”. The song is a touching one, Dylan paying tribute to his single biggest influence: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “Song to Woody”] Dylan was moving on, and he knew he was moving on, but he had to say goodbye. Dylan’s first album was not a success, and he became known within Columbia Records as “Hammond’s Folly”, but nor did it lose money, since it was recorded so quickly. It’s a record that Dylan and Hammond both later spoke poorly of, but it’s one I rather like, and one of the best things to come out of the Greenwich Village folk scene. But by the time it came out, Dylan’s artistic heart was already elsewhere, and when we come back to him in a couple of months, we’ll be seeing someone who had completely reinvented himself.  

1. (Sig) English Country Blues Band : The Italian Job from the CD Unruly (Weekend Beatnik) 2. Wu Fei & Abigail Washburn : Four Seasons Medley from the CD Wu Fei & Abigail Washburn (Smithsonian Folkways) 3. Najma Akhtar : Death Don't Have No Mercy from the CD Five Rivers (Last Minute Productions) 4. Joan Shelley : Cycle from the DL album Live At The Bomhard (Joan Shelley/ No Quarter) 5. Charlie Dore : Terrible Lie from the CD Like Animals (Black Ink Music) 6. Eliza Carthy & Ben Seal : The Lute Girl from the CD Through That Sound (My Secret Was Made Known) (Hem Hem) 7. Aynur Doğan : Govend E from the CD Hedûr – Solace Of Time (Dreyer Gaido) 8. Damir Imamovic : Adio Kerida from the CD Singer Of Tales (Wrasse) 9. Trio Tekke : The First Day from the CD Strovilos (Riverboat) 10. Victoria Spivey : Dope Head Blues from the CD Rough Guide To Blues Divas (World Music Network) 11. Charley Patton : Prayer Of Death (Part 1) from the CD Rough Guide To Spiritual Blues (World Music Network) 12. Raphael Callaghan : Poor Me from the CD Blue Lies (Blue Cee) 13. Pete Morton : Immigrant Child from the CD A Golden Thread (Further) 14. Ultan Conlon : Moments In Time from the CD There's A Waltz (Dark Side Out) 15. Sproatly Smith : The Thistle Doll from the DL album A Trip Of Hares (Weirdshire) 16. Elle Osborne : Birds Of The British Isles from the CD If You See A Rook On Its Own, It's A Crow (9th House) 17. Albin Paulus : Weiss Der Geier from the CD Pur (Non Food Factory 18. Tom Kitching : Old Molly Oxford from the CD Seasons Of Change (Talking Cat) 19. Pharis & Jason Romero : Old Chatelaine from the CD Bet On Love (Lula) 20. The Lowest Pair : Cast Away from the CD The Perfect Plan (Delicata/ Thirty Tigers) 21. The Magpies : No More Tears from the CD Tidings (The Magpies) 22. Edikanfo : Daa Daa Edikanfo from the CD The Pace Setters (Glitterbeat) 23. Deep Cabaret : Real Reality from the CD Matchless (Deep Cabaret) 24. Katie Spencer : Incense Skin from the DL album Live At Acoustic Roots (Katie Spencer) 25. Findlay Napier, Gillian Frame & Mike Vass : Mormond Braes from the CD The Ledger (Cheery Groove) 26. The Henrys : Dogwood from the DL album Paydirt (The Henrys) 27. Mike Cooper & Scot Ray : The Dark Side Of Glowing Fish from the DL album Dua Kepala Kelapa (Mike Cooper) 28. Geiger Von Müller : Wings From Angel James from the CD Ruby Red Run (Geiger Von Müller) 29. Varo : Streets Of Forbes from the CD Varo (Varo) 30. Spilar : Germaine from the CD Stormweere (Trad) 31. The Rude Mechanicals : Leeds Polka/ The Redowa from the CD Sergeant Early’s Dream (Rudemex) Podwireless can also be heard streamed live on Mixcloud. You can find more details including past playlists and links to labels at www.podwireless.com Follow the links for previous podcasts.

All physicians are taught, “First do no harm.” But what happens when a doctor does harm his patients?Dr. Robert Henderson was a veteran spinal surgeon in Dallas when he got an unusual phone call from a local hospital: a new surgeon had operated so poorly that a patient who’d walked in on her own two feet now couldn’t even wiggle her toes. Dr. Henderson had seen a lot, but he wasn't prepared for this. The surgery was so bad, in fact, he asked himself whether this person possibly be an impostor impersonating a physician?“Death Don’t Have No Mercy” performed by Delaney Davidson and Marlon Williams, courtesy of Rough Diamond Records.Listen to the full season: wondery.fm/bestofwonderyDD.

Kimberly Morgan se sintió atraída por Christopher Duntsch desde un primer momento. Era encantador y parecía estar destinado a lograr grandes cosas. Pero también vio otro lado de él. El comportamiento de Duntsch hizo que muchas personas que estuvieron en contacto con él se preguntaran: ¿Era un cirujano incapacitado? ¿Un muy mal cirujano? ¿O un asesino a sangre fría? “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” interpretada por Delaney Davidson y Marlon Williams, cortesía de Rough Diamond Records.

Kimberly Morgan fut attirée par Christopher Duntsch dès leur rencontre. Il était charmant, et semblait destiné à de grandes choses. Mais elle vit aussi une autre facette de cet homme. Le comportement de Duntsch poussa bien des personnes qui le croisèrent à se demander : Était-il un médecin perturbé ? Un très mauvais chirurgien ? Ou un tueur de sang-froid ? « Death Don’t Have No Mercy », interprété par Delaney Davidson et Marlon Williams, avec la permission de Rough Diamond Records.

Chris Duntsch était un étudiant en médecine prometteur, avec un brillant avenir devant lui. Ses amis furent choqués d’apprendre quel médecin il finirait par devenir. « Pas Chris, disaient-ils. Ce n’est pas l’homme que je connais. » Le Chris Duntsch qu’ils connaissaient était déterminé, travailleur, intelligent, et avait le regard pétillant. Et personne ne pensait mieux connaître Chris Duntsch que son meilleur ami, Jerry Summers. « Death Don’t Have No Mercy », interprété par Delaney Davidson et Marlon Williams, avec la permission de Rough Diamond Records. N’hésitez pas à nous dire ce que vous pensez de notre émission et aidez-nous en répondant à quelques questions sur wondery.com/survey

Tous les médecins apprennent à « d’abord, ne pas nuire ». Mais que se passe-t-il lorsqu’un médecin finit par nuire à ses patients ?Le Dr Robert Henderson, un chirurgien rachidien vétéran à Dallas, reçut un coup de fil inhabituel de la part d’un hôpital du coin : un nouveau chirurgien avait si mal opéré une patiente que celle-ci, qui était pourtant arrivée sur ses deux jambes, pouvait à peine remuer ses orteils. Le Dr Henderson a vu beaucoup de choses dans sa vie, mais là, ça dépassait tout ce qu’il pouvait imaginer. D’ailleurs, l’intervention s’était tellement mal passée qu’il en vint à se demander si cette personne n’était pas un imposteur se faisant passer pour un médecin.« Death Don’t Have No Mercy », interprété par Delaney Davidson et Marlon Williams, avec la permission de Rough Diamond Records.

Chris Duntsch era un estudiante de medicina prometedor con un gran futuro por delante. Los amigos que lo conocían estaban sorprendidos por el gran médico en el que se convertiría. No es Chris, decían. Ese no es el hombre que conozco. El Chris Duntsch que conocían era resuelto, trabajador, inteligente, con un brillo especial en su mirada. Y nadie creía conocer más a Chris Duntsch que su mejor amigo, Jerry Summers. “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” interpretada por Delaney Davidson y Marlon Williams, cortesía de Rough Diamond Records. Dinos lo que piensas de nuestro programa y ayúdanos respondiendo algunas preguntas en wondery.com/survey

A todos los médicos les enseñan: “Lo primero es no lastimar a nadie”. ¿Pero qué sucede cuando un médico en verdad hace daño a sus pacientes? El Dr. Robert Henderson era un cirujano de columna experimentado de Dallas cuando recibió una llamada inusual de un hospital local: un cirujano nuevo había operado tan mal a un paciente que este había entrado caminando por su cuenta y ahora no podía ni mover los dedos de los pies. El Dr. Henderson había visto mucho, pero no estaba preparado para esto. De hecho, la cirugía estaba tan mal hecha que se preguntó si era posible que esta persona fuera un impostor que se hacía pasar por médico. “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” interpretada por Delaney Davidson y Marlon Williams, cortesía de Rough Diamond Records.

Kimberly Morgan was attracted to Christopher Duntsch from the moment she met him. He was charming and seemed destined for great things. But she also saw another side to him. Duntsch’s behavior led many people who came into contact with him to wonder: Was he an impaired physician? A terrible surgeon? Or a cold-blooded killer?“Death Don’t Have No Mercy” performed by Delaney Davidson and Marlon Williams, courtesy of Rough Diamond Records.Please tell us what you think about our show and help us by answering a few questions at wondery.com/surveySubscribe to Dr Death on Apple, Spotify, NPR One, Stitcher or sign up for email updates at wondery.com to stay up to date about future episodes.Support us by supporting our sponsors!Zip Recruiter - Try ZipRecruiter FOR FREE at ziprecruiter.com/death Bombas - Save 20% by visiting bombas.com/death and entering the offer death in the checkout code spaceHelix Sleep - Get up to $125 off your mattress at helixsleep.com/death. Audible - Start a 30-day trial and get your first audiobook free by going to audible.com/death or by texting DEATH to 500-500Brooklinen - Get $20 off AND free shipping by going to brooklinen.com and entering promo code deathSimplisafe - Visit simplisafe.com/doctor and start protecting your home today the right way

Chris Duntsch was a promising medical student, with a bright future ahead of him. The friends who knew him were shocked at the doctor he would later become. Not Chris, they said. That’s not the man I know. The Chris Duntsch they knew was driven, hard-working, smart, with a twinkle in his eye. And no one believed they knew Chris Duntsch better than his best friend, Jerry Summers.“Death Don’t Have No Mercy” performed by Delaney Davidson and Marlon Williams, courtesy of Rough Diamond Records.Please tell us what you think about our show and help us by answering a few questions at wondery.com/surveySubscribe to Dr Death on Apple, Spotify, NPR One, Stitcher or sign up for email updates at wondery.com to stay up to date about future episodes.Support us by supporting our sponsors!Zip Recruiter - Try ZipRecruiter FOR FREE at ziprecruiter.com/death Bombas - Save 20% by visiting bombas.com/death and entering the offer death in the checkout code spaceHelix Sleep - Get up to $125 off your mattress at helixsleep.com/death. Audible - Start a 30-day trial and get your first audiobook free by going to audible.com/death or by texting DEATH to 500-500Brooklinen - Get $20 off AND free shipping by going to brooklinen.com and entering promo code deathSimplisafe - Visit simplisafe.com/doctor and start protecting your home today the right way

All physicians are taught, “First do no harm.” But what happens when a doctor does harm his patients?Dr. Robert Henderson was a veteran spinal surgeon in Dallas when he got an unusual phone call from a local hospital: a new surgeon had operated so poorly that a patient who’d walked in on her own two feet now couldn’t even wiggle her toes. Dr. Henderson had seen a lot, but he wasn't prepared for this. The surgery was so bad, in fact, he asked himself whether this person possibly be an impostor impersonating a physician?“Death Don’t Have No Mercy” performed by Delaney Davidson and Marlon Williams, courtesy of Rough Diamond Records.Please tell us what you think about our show and help us by answering a few questions at wondery.com/surveySubscribe to Dr Death on Apple, Spotify, NPR One, Stitcher or sign up for email updates at wondery.com to stay up to date about future episodes.Support us by supporting our sponsors!Zip Recruiter - Try ZipRecruiter FOR FREE at ziprecruiter.com/death Bombas - Save 20% by visiting bombas.com/death and entering the offer death in the checkout code spaceHelix Sleep - Get up to $125 off your mattress at helixsleep.com/death. Audible - Start a 30-day trial and get your first audiobook free by going to audible.com/death or by texting DEATH to 500-500Brooklinen - Get $20 off AND free shipping by going to brooklinen.com and entering promo code deathSimplisafe - Go to simplisafe.com/doctor and start protecting your home today

Episode 30 features the music and words of SJ Downes, a musician that has traveled to 5 Never Records installations around the world. In 2011 we released an album of tracks that we recorded in Liverpool, Derry, and London. We made 10 copies only and of course sold out of the edition immediately. Why make an edition so small? In this world of disposable technology, where music can be downloaded with ease, we wanted to make objects that represented the rare and sacred value of our collaboration and friendship. All songs performed by SJ Downes: How Long written by Frank Stokes Lonesome Road based on Snook Eaglin Version Death Don’t Have No Mercy written by Reverend ‘Blind’ Gary Davis

William Boyle is originally from New York but now calls Oxford, Mississippi home. His first novel, Gravesend, was published in 2013, and his collection of short stories, Death Don't Have No Mercy, was recently released by Broken River books.

show#286 Suze's BluesBig George Brock - Poor Boy (2:00)Eric Burdon & War - Blues for Memphis Slim Medley(13:22)Spinner's Section:Mark Wenner: amazing graceJames Harman: somebody th'owd bad luck on meGuy Forsyth: true friendsRusty Zinn: sad old lonesome dayBlaze Foley: long goneJohnny Mastro & the Mama's Boys: howl all nightJerry Fish: true friendsBack To Beardo:Watermelon Slim - Truck Holler, No. 2 (1:00)Clarence Gatemouth Brown - Hurry Back Good News (2:47)Hot Tuna - Death Don't Have No Mercy (6:13)Erwin Helfer - St. James Infirmary (5:06)Charlie Musselwhite - My Road Lies In Darkness (3:19)Vaughan Brothers - Tick Tock (4:57)Billy Hector - I Wish You Would (4:09)Watermelon Slim - Cynical Old Bastard (2:33)Carolyn Wonderland - Still Alive and Well (2:58)I love ya Honey!!

It took me a bit to decide what to bring you this week, but after I ran across this show I knew it was the right choice.. This is one of those classic live Dead sets from 1969, this one comes from Boulder CO, April 13th. It features everything you'd expect - great Pigpen raps, wild, far-out jamming and some magnificent moments from Garcia - most notably on the Dark Star and the Eleven. Personally, I'm always blown away by a really well-played and heartfelt Death Don't Have No Mercy - it ends the set I'm bringing you this week. I hope you enjoy it... (note there are some anomalies - Lovelight cuts early, Doin' that Rag is cut at the start and the Dark Star has a splice.. still I think the outstanding quality more than makes up for them.... )Grateful Dead Ballroom - University of Colorado Boulder, CODate 4/13/69 - Sunday One [1:45:18 +] Turn On Your Love Light [24:55#] % Doin' That Rag [#4:18] ; [0:45] ; Good Morning Little Schoolgirl [8:09] ; [1:05] ; Morning Dew [11:02] [0:14] % Dark Star [24:01] > St. Stephen [7:50] > The Eleven [13:02] > Death Don't Have No Mercy [9:55] As always you can listen to this week's Deadpod here:http://media.libsyn.com/media/deadshow/deadpod092807.mp3