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This week TCM programmer Ben Cheeves and I are going back to the hallowed halls of high school and navigating the world of teenagedom and hard drugs in High School Confidential (1958).Follow the Cult Movies Podcast on InstagramFollow Ben on LetterboxdFollow Anthony on Letterboxd, Instagram, and Bluesky
Do high-school students – including those fortunate to attend America's most prestigious universities – enter college with a solid understanding of American civics (i.e., the republic's origin and design) or is it more a case of remedial learning? In this installment of Renewing Civics Education – Preparing for American Citizenship, Paul Peterson, a Hoover Institution senior fellow and Harvard University professor, reflects on his experiences teaching an introductory government course and offers thoughts on education reform – school choice, standardized testing – with Volker Senior Fellow (adjunct) “Checker” Finn, one of the nation's preeminent authorities on education policy and innovation. Recorded on January 9, 2025. ABOUT THE SERIES Educators across the land are preparing for Civic Learning Week in mid-March—with the capstone National Forum at the Hoover Institution on March 13—as the nation also gets ready for next year's 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. In anticipation of both—and recognizing the urgent need to rekindle civic literacy via our schools and colleges—Renewing Civics Education – Preparing for American Citizenship, a five-part podcast series, takes on the challenges of citizenship education: why it matters, what it needs to do differently, what shortcomings it must overcome. The series features distinguished members of Hoover's Working Group on Good American Citizenship, led by Volker Senior Fellow Chester Finn.
This is part of a series about overlooked movies from 2005. ***Referenced media:“Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest” (Gore Verbinski, 2006)“Shaft” (Gordon Parks, 1971)“Thelma” (Josh Margolin, 2024)“Looper” (Rian Johnson, 2012)“Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi” (Rian Johnson, 2017)“Blade Runner” (Ridley Scott, 1982)“Sin City” (Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller 2005)“The Greatest Show on Earth” (Cecil B. DeMille, 1952)“Bugsy Malone” (Alan Parker, 1976)“The Big Sleep” (Howard Hawks, 1946)“A Clockwork Orange” (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)“Witness” (Peter Weir, 1985)“Knives Out” (Rian Johnson, 2019)“Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” (Rian Johnson, 2022)“The Shining” (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)“Wages of Fear” (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953)“Sorcerer” (William Friedkin, 1977)“High School Confidential!” (Jack Arnold, 1958)Audio quotation:“Brick” (Rian Johnson, 2005), including “Emily's Theme” by Nathan Johnson, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-uEelZadhAUjORNgSynf4dEnFeJ2qgpd“Blade Runner” (Ridley Scott, 1982, including “Main Titles” by Vangelis, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3ABE2FBA2900C03E“Sin City” (Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller, 2005), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRtz8JQw01A“Fight On” (Milo Sweet, 1922), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX1YxF8ClgE“The Greatest Show on Earth” (Cecil B. DeMille, 1952), including “Prelue (March” by Victor Young“Police Siren Sound Effect” by SoundEffectsFactory, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKieGUH9pzg“High School Confidential!” (Jack Arnold, 1958), including “High School Confidential” by Jerry Lee Lewis and Ron Hargrave, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xx3RmTNHbE
DP Todd students cast ballots of their own.
EPISODE 29 - “Jan Sterling: Old Hollywood Star of the Month” - 04/01/2024 Our “Star of the Month” is the fabulous JAN STERLING, who was married to our March “Star of the Month,” PAUL DOUGLAS. Blonde, beautiful, and often deadly on screen, Sterling started in theatre, but made a name for herself portraying tough dames, femme fatales, and sexy seductresses in films such as “Caged,” “Ace In the Hole” and “The High and the Mighty.” However, her upbringing was quite different from these wayward women she played so convincingly; she was actually from a very wealthy and prominent family. She had a stellar career, but many heartbreaks off camera. This week, we discuss the life and career of this most memorable lady. SHOW NOTES: Sources: Jan Sterling: Everything You Need To Know (2014), by Billy Vasquez; The Encyclopedia of Film Actors (2003), by Barry Monush; The Illustrated Who's Who of the Cinema (1983), by Ann Lloyd and Graham Fuller; Quinlan's Illustrated Registry of Film Stars (1986), by David Quinlan; “Jan Sterling, 82, Blonde Actress Who Made Film Noir A Specialty” Obituary, March 29, 2004, The New York Times; IMDBPro.com; Wikipedia.com; Movies Mentioned: Tycoon (1947), starring John Wayne, Laaine Day, and Anthony Quinn; Johnny Belinda (1948), starring Jane Wyman, Lew Ayres, and Agnes Moorhead; Caged (1950), starring Eleanor Parker, Agnes Moorhead, and Faye Emerson; Appointment With Danger (1950), starring Robert Walker and Joan Leslie; The Mating Season (1950), starring Gene Tierney, John Lund, and Thelma Ritter; Ace In The Hole (1951), starring Kirk Douglas; Rhubarb (1951), starring Ray Miland; Flesh and Fury (1952), starring Tony Curtis; Sky Full of Moon (1952), starring Split Second (1953), starring Stephen McNally; Pony Express (1953), starring Charlton Heston and Rhonda Fleming; The Vanquished (1953), starring John Payne and Coleen Gray; Alaska Seas (1954), starring Robert Ryan; The High and the Mighty (19543), starring John Wayne, Robert Stack, Claire Trevor, and Laraine Day; Woman's Prison (1955), starring Ida Lupino, Pyllis Thaxter, Audrey Totter, and Howard Duff; Female on the Beach (1955), starring Joan Crawford and Jeff Chandler; The Harder They Fall (1956), starring Humphrey Bogart and Rod Steiger; 1984 (1956), starring Edmond O'Brien and Michael Redgrave; The Female Animal (1958), starring Hedy Lamar, Jane Powell, and George Nader; Kathy O (1958), starring Dan Duryea and Patty McCormick; High School Confidential (1958), starring Russ Tamblyn and Mamie Van Doren; Love In A Goldfish Bowl (1961), staring Fabian, Tommy Sands, and Majel Barrett; The Incident (1967), Starring Martin Sheen, Beau Bridges, and Tony Musante; The Minx (1969), starring Robert Roden and Shirley Parker; First Monday in October (1981), Starring Walter Matthau and Jill Clayburgh; --------------------------------- http://www.airwavemedia.com Please contact sales@advertisecast.com if you would like to advertise on our podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Garrett Chaffin-Quiray and Ed Rosa assess prestige kitsch and consider carrying a spathae to defend a London-born Egyptian matriarch.***Referenced media:“My Fair Lady” (George Cukor, 1964)“Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf” (Mike Nichols, 1966)“Rome” (John Milius, William J. MacDonald, and Bruno Heller, 2005-2007)“All in the Family” (Norman Lear, 1971-1979)“Kill Bill: Volume 1” (Quentin Tarantino, 2003)“Kill Bill: Volume 2” (Quentin Tarantino, 2004)“National Velvet” (Clarence Brown, 1944)“Doctor Dolittle” (Richard Fleischer, 1967)“Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope” (George Lucas, 1977)“Star Trek” (Gene Roddenberry, 1966-1969)“Flaming Creatures” (Jack Smith, 1963)“Bye Bye Birdie” (George Sidney, 1963), “Hud” (Martin Ritt, 1963)“The Nutty Professor” (Jerry Lewis, 1963)“The Terror” (Roger Corman, 1963)“The Little Shop of Horrors” (Roger Corman, 1960)“Jason and the Argonauts” (Don Chaffey, 1963)“PT 109” (Leslie H. Martinson and Lewis Milestone, 1963)“The Great Escape” (John Sturges, 1963)“Blood Feast” (Herschell Gordon Lewis, 1963)“Beach Party” (William Asher, 1963)“Flipper” (James B. Clark, 1963),“The Cool World” (Shirley Clarke, 1963)“The V.I.P.s” (Anthony Asquith, 1963)“Dementia 13” (Francis Ford Coppola, 1963)“Tom Jones” (Tony Richardson, 1963)“The Haunting” (Robert Wise, 1963)"High School Confidential" (Jack Arnold, 1958)“Cleopatra” (Cecil B. DeMille, 1934) Audio quotation:“Cleopatra” (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963), including “Overture” and “Requiem”, written by Alex North“Indiana Jones Whip sound FX” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMQ4A1n4NU“Theme from “The Dick Van Dyke Show”, written by Earle Hagen, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QK_8QW8LO-c
Support the Preacher Boys Podcast:https://www.patreon.com/preacherboysPurchase a Preacher Boys shirt, mask, sticker, or other merch to rep the show! https://www.teepublic.com/user/preacher-boys-podcast✖️✖️✖️Sharon Liese is an Emmy® winning filmmaker who is known for having her finger on the Zeitgeist. Her documentary projects have aired on premium networks and streamers and screened at many prestigious film festivals.Sharon is the director of Let Us Prey: A Ministry of Scandals, a docuseries exposing the predatory and insidious behavior within Independent Fundamental Baptist Churches, and the struggles of survivors to find justice.Premiering on Disney+ in 2022, Liese's short documentary, The Flagmakers, was Oscar® shortlisted, nominated for a Critics Choice Documentary Award, and nominated for an Emmy. The film also won Best Documentary Short at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, an Audience Award at the Denver International Film Festival, and has been optioned for a Broadway musical produced by Mark Gordon.In January 2023, her short film, Parker, had its World Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.Liese's award-winning feature documentary, Transhood, premiered on HBO in 2020 and was featured on The Ellen Show and GMA. The film won several awards, including Audience Award for Best Feature Documentary at AFI Docs. Liese also created and executive produced Pink Collar Crimes, a true crime series for CBS.Liese created and directed the award-winning documentary series High School Confidential, filmed over four years, which broke ratings records on WEtv. She also directed and produced The Gnomist (CNN Films), which had its World Premiere at the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival and went on to win 15 festival awards, including the Jury Award for Best Short Documentary at LA Shorts Fest, qualifying it for Oscar consideration before being acquired by CNN Films.Liese's film, Selfie, created in collaboration with Dove and The Sundance Institute, premiered during the 2014 Sundance Film Festival before being the focus of a special multi-episode series on Good Morning America.In addition to producing and directing documentary programming for Disney+, HBO, CNN, MTV, FOX, Lifetime, WEtv, OWN, DiscoveryID, and PBS, Sharon Liese is the founder and owner of Herizon Productions.✖️✖️✖️CONNECT WITH THE SHOW:- preacherboyspodcast.com- https://www.facebook.com/preacherboysdoc/- https://twitter.com/preacherboysdoc- https://www.instagram.com/preacherboysdoc/To connect with a community that shares the Preacher Boys Podcast's mission to expose abuse in the IFB, join the OFFICIAL Preacher Boys Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1403898676438188/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/preacher-boys-podcast/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
Esse é o AutoRadio Podcast. AutoRadio Podcast Apresenta #36 - Dia Mundial do Rock 2023 Powered by Wisdomtech http://www.wisdomtech.com.br
In this very special episode, Phil and Keith talk about Season 5, Episode 10 of Family Ties. They discuss pests, Nintendo, high school, carpools, Gorbachev, streaming, Joe Claro, Scott Valentine, Thai food, Brian Bonsall, 80s hair, verbs, peanuts, and more.
"Ti Bap Ti Bap" de Alphonso Et Son Orchestre Antillais es una de las canciones favoritas de los Hermanos Pizarro y como bien saben los pizarristas veteranos protagonizó una de las viejas cuñas del programa. Además de semejante maravilla, también sonarán cosas como “Shanghai Rooster Yodel”, “High School Confidential”, "Blues Everywhere I Go" y "Get Out And Get Under The Moon”. A partir de las 23.00 horas en la sintonía de Radio 3. Escuchar audio
This week we are getting into the filmography of one of the so-called Three M's of the 1950s (along with Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield). Mamie ended up firmly in the teen delinquent lane, playing rock n roll rebel babes (to great effect). We had a lot of fun watching Untamed Youth (1957), High School Confidential (1958), Guns, Girls, and Gangsters and Girls Town (1959). And of course we get into all that factored into the teen exploitation film explosion of the 1950s. You can watch all the Mamie movies we watched on YouTube for free. Check out our playlist here. - Music by René j Núñez Instagram: @release_pod Website: release.pictures
Welcome to another episode of TotemTalks! In today's Episode, we tackle some wild groups in our search for the musical GOAT! We start by reading the High School Confidential with Jerry Lee Lewis, we find our Valentine with 5 Seconds of Summer, and we get Paranoid with Black Sabbath! Enjoy! TotemTalks is a music podcast dedicated to breaking down a variety of musical artists in fun and educational ways. If that sounds interesting to you, please check it out! And if you enjoy listening, be sure to let us know by using #totemtalks, and following us on our Social Media! Peace and Love! Facebook: facebook.com/lowtotemband Instagram: low_totem Twitter: low_totem Website: lowtotemband.com Become a Member of Team Totem here: https://anchor.fm/lowtotem/support --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/lowtotem/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lowtotem/support
La famille, les amis et les fans de Jerry Lee Lewis se sont rassemblés ce samedi pour faire un dernier adieu au Killer en Louisiane lors d'une cérémonie chapeautée par l'évangéliste Jimmy Swaggart, cousin de Lewis et au Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Bruce Springsteen et John Mellencamp ont clôturé la cérémonie avec un bel hommage avec "High School Confidential" et "Great Balls of Fire". Parmi les collaborations surprises au Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, on remarquera celle de Dolly Parton et du groupe Judas Priest avec l‘ancien guitariste K.K. Downing et le batteur Les Binks, aux côtés d'Eminem, Duran Duran, Lionel Richie, Eurythmics, Pat Benatar, Carly Simon et d'autres à Los Angeles et le frontman Rob Halford a interpreté " Jolene " avec Dolly Parton. Andy Taylor, guitariste de Duran Duran, n'a pas assisté à l'intronisation du groupe au Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, il souffre d'un cancer de la prostate métastatique de stade 4 a expliqué Simon Le Bon. Duran Duran a interprété “Girls On Film”, “Hungry Like the Wolf” et “Ordinary World''. Lionel Richie a reçu sa distinction au Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame ce week-end et interprété " Easy " avec Dave Grohl des Foo Fighters pour l'occasion. Lenny Kravitz était le maître de cérémonie pour l'intronisation de Lionel Richie. Cette édition 2022 du Rock and Roll Hall of Fame a permis aux fans d'Eurythmics de retrouver leur groupe préféré sur scène, grâce à leur intronisation par The Edge, le guitariste de U2, avec " Would I Lie to You ?'', " Missionary Man " et "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)''. Le texte d'un des titres les plus connus d'Oasis , ‘'Wonderwall'', écrit par Noel Gallagher en 1995 a été vendu à 53709 euros lors d'une vente aux enchères. Une guitare Epiphone Casino de 1962 que Noel Gallagher avait achetée sur les conseils de Paul Weller pour l'enregistrement de ‘'Be Here Now'' et des démos de ‘'Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants'' a été vendue 64500 euros. --- Classic 21 vous informe des dernières actualités du rock, en Belgique et partout ailleurs. Le Journal du Rock, chaque jour à 7h30 et 18h30.
Our little open secret.
Rockshow episode 169 Jerry Lee Lewis The show was scheduled for December but because of the recent death of Jerry Lee Lewis we moved it up the schedule. So watch and celebrate the the life of Jerry Lee Lewis and thank you for subscribing. Jerry Lee Lewis (September 29, 1935 – October 28, 2022) was an American singer, songwriter and pianist. Nicknamed "the Killer", he was described as "rock and roll's first great wild man and one of the most influential pianists of the 20th century". A pioneer of rock and roll and rockabilly music, Lewis made his first recordings in 1952 at Cosimo Matassa's J&M Studio in New Orleans, Louisiana, and early recordings in 1956 at Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee. "Crazy Arms" sold 300,000 copies in the South, and his 1957 hit "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" shot Lewis to fame worldwide. He followed this with the major hits "Great Balls of Fire", "Breathless", and "High School Confidential". His rock and roll career faltered in the wake of his marriage to Myra Gale Brown, his 13-year-old cousin once removed. Lewis had a dozen gold records in rock and country. He won four Grammy awards, including a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and two Grammy Hall of Fame Awards.Lewis was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986 and his pioneering contribution to the genre was recognized by the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. He was also a member of the inaugural class inducted into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2022. In 1989, his life was chronicled in the movie Great Balls of Fire, starring Dennis Quaid. In 2003, Rolling Stone listed his box set All Killer, No Filler: The Anthology at number 242 on their list of "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". In 2004, they ranked him No. 24 on their list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time. Lewis was the last surviving member of Sun Records' Million Dollar Quartet and the album Class of '55, which also included Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, and Elvis Presley. Music critic Robert Christgau said of Lewis: "His drive, his timing, his offhand vocal power, his unmistakable boogie-plus piano, and his absolute confidence in the face of the void make Jerry Lee the quintessential rock and roller." https://jerryleelewis.com/ https://m.facebook.com/JerryLeeLewis/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/jerry-lee-lewis-dead-obituary-1234616945/amp/ https://open.spotify.com/artist/2zyz0VJqrDXeFDIyrfVXSo https://www.instagram.com/jerryleelewisthekiller/?hl=en https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4bB5xL577r4&autoplay=1 https://twitter.com/jerryleelewis?lang=en @Jerryleelewis @Greatballsoffire @Thekiller @breathless @sunrecord @pianoplayer @rockabilly #Jerryleelewis #greatballsoffire #rockabilly #rocknroll #piano #sunrecord Please follow us on Youtube,Facebook,Instagram,Twitter,Patreon and at www.gettinglumpedup.com https://linktr.ee/RobRossi Get your T-shirt at https://www.prowrestlingtees.com/gettinglumpedup And https://www.bonfire.com/store/getting-lumped-up/ https://app.hashtag.expert/?fpr=roberto-rossi80 https://dc2bfnt-peyeewd4slt50d2x1b.hop.clickbank.net Subscribe to the channel and hit the like button This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/rob-rossi/support https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/getting-lumped-up-with-rob-rossi/id1448899708 https://open.spotify.com/show/00ZWLZaYqQlJji1QSoEz7a https://www.patreon.com/Gettinglumpedup --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/rob-rossi/support
Harvey Brownstone conducts an in-depth interview with Mamie Van Doren, Legendary Blonde Bombshell, Author, “China and Me: Wing Flapping, Feather Pulling, and Love on the Wing” About Harvey's guest: Today's special guest, Mamie Van Doren, is a glamorous Hollywood legend and sex symbol who's been lighting up the silver screen for over seven decades. Since first being discovered by Howard Hughes, she's appeared in many iconic movies, including “The All-American”, “Running Wild”, “Born Reckless”, “High School Confidential”, “The Beat Generation” and, of course, “Untamed Youth”, in which she was the first woman to perform rock & roll on the silver screen. After performing her rock & roll number for the second time, in “Teacher's Pet”, co-starring Clark Gable and Doris Day, she became forever known as “the girl who invented rock & roll”. Her performances in movies like “Vice Raid” and “Guns, Girls and Gangsters”, turned her into an icon in the film noir genre. Her provocative and courageous performances were WAY ahead of her time in movies like “Girls Town”, “The Private Lives of Adam and Eve”, “The Beautiful Legs of Sabrina”, and “Sex Kittens Go to College”. Here's a glimpse of some iconic moments in her amazing career. Throughout her career, Mamie Van Doren has reached out to new and diverse audiences. She did 2 memorable tours in Vietnam. She had a highly successful nightclub act in Las Vegas. She recorded 6 albums. She's performed in many theatre productions and appeared on dozens of TV shows. She's performed with my favourite band, “Pink Martini”, and recorded 2 songs with them. And she performs her song “Journey” on “The First Realm” album by Staunch Moderates. In 1987 she wrote a memoir, which she updated in 2013, entitled “Playing the Field”, which she updated in 2013. And now, she's released her brand new book, entitled “China and Me: Wing Flapping, Feather Pulling, and Love on the Wing”, about her poignant and sometimes rambunctious 40-plus year relationship with her beloved pet Moluccan cockatoo named “China”. For more interviews and podcasts go to: https://www.harveybrownstoneinterviews.com/ https://mamievandoreninsideout.wordpress.com/https://www.facebook.com/MamieVanDorenBeauty/https://twitter.com/mamievandoren #MamieVanDoren #harveybrownstoneinterviews
Flooding, camping delays, business woes, trying to get fit again (1:40); Latest from Minnedosa, where a local state of emergency has been declared (8:25); Which fictitious school would you attend? Inspired by Harry Potter (more to come later!) (14:10); Listener texts on fictitious schools (21:00); Camping and cottage country water woes...latest from the Whiteshell (23:40); Still raining, still cold. Gardening advice and latest from nurseries on demand for home grown, cheaper food (32:35); Have you returned to the gym? 2.5 months post restrictions, who is/isn't struggling (39:15); Winning text on fictitious schools (45:40); Kyle Connor nominated for Lady Byng Trophy / WSO Night at the Movies - Harry Potter, for the first time in 3 years! (50:00). See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Singles Going Around- Hasil AdkinsThe episode of the SGA podcast features the pure, raw power of Hasil Adkins. The wild man was a original one man band, his life and music were a testament to the power of music.Shake That Thing (Norton 168)No More Hot Dogs (Norton 201)You Gonna Miss Me (Fat Possum 80314)Rockin Robin (Norton 201)No Shoes (Fat Possum 80314)Get Out Of My Car (Norton 168)High School Confidential (Norton 201)Stay With Me (Fat Possum 80314)I'm Happy (Norton 201)Gone Gone Gone (Fat Possum 80314)Truly Ruly (Norton 201)
Our good buddy Tom is back this week for some casual chit-chat. We touch on D&D a few times throughout the episode, but we thought it would be fun to start a conversation and see where it took us. Throughout we talk about writing to different kinds of music, the classic summer vs winter debate, and sing Rough Trade's "High School Confidential." As well, thank you to this week's sponsor, Newsly. Go to https://newsly.me/ and use promo code MASTER2021 to get a one month free subscription. And of course as always, thanks for listening! Let us know if you enjoy these more casual podcast episodes on Instagram @dungeonmasterpod!
Compañeros Radio Network proudly presents episode xx of Movies About Girls. This episode was originally released on July 10, 2010. "Tonight! all the cool cats will dig it - It's High School Confidential!" Please support the Compañeros Radio Network Patreon, if you can! Check out the other Compañeros Radio Network shows: Movie Melt Songs on Trial Get Soft with Dr Snuggles Heavy Leather Horror Show Ballbusters In Search of the Perfect Podcast
AH MAH GAWD, we finally made it to the end of the trilogy! Killogy maybe? Yar, indeed it shall be called henceforth. The man and the film that stared out this huge endeavor of an ongoing series of historical audio documents rife with important charismatic commentary. I'm so pleased you made it to the end with me. Thank you! If you enjoy this show, please think about clicking on this so you can Buy me a Book(or coffee, or pants) There will be naughty language in this one, much like there was in the Lemmy episode because in both cases I'm directly quoting those particular kings of Rock n' Roll. https://www.amazon.com/Nick-Tosches/e/B000APVY46?ref_=dbs_p_pbk_r00_abau_000000 https://www.henryrollins.com/podcasts/2017/9/7/henry-heidi-podcast-jerry-lee-lewis https://www.elvis.com.au/presley/jerry-lee-lewis-arrested-at-the-gates-of-graceland.shtml Jerry tells his side of the "bringing a gun to Graceland after leaving the bar and then getting arrested" story in the link below (while it lasts). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUtlcwVriGM&t=82s My Insta: https://www.instagram.com/justtheworstever/
Rory and Shane are so pumped and honored to welcome long time Ween fan Michael C. Maronna to the show! You may have seen Mike in the teen comedy Slackers, the mega Nickelodeon hit Pete and Pete, or I don't know, maybe a little movie you may have seen pop up around Christmas time...Home Alone, maybe you've heard of it? Mike is co-host of the long running podcast "The Adventures of Danny and Mike" with his TV brother Danny Tamberelli. Among various Ween topics like how Mike got into Ween, his favorite albums and types of Ween songs, Shane and Rory also learn that Mike's first Ween show was literally the night before their first show on the 12 Golden Country Greats tour of 1996!! Kismet man!! Mike takes the guys on a mini Ween tour of the big apple and tells the tales of a couple shows he's been, with nice descriptions of the venues. Please sign up at www.patreon.com/weencastpodcast for more of this great conversation including memories from the Home Alone era, his thoughts on White Pepper and Quebec, and the highly sought after IMDB credit High School Confidential. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/weencastpodcast/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/weencastpodcast/support
We have 3 new films in the Screening Room: HOPE (2019) [16:10] | BEAST BEAST [24:55] | BILL TRAYLOR: CHASING GHOSTS [30:09] And we tackle Rian Johnson’s BRICK [37:40] for the 15thanniversary of the film’s release in our Programmer’s Picks section.
#549 - Ron Hargrave Ron Hargrave is a special guest on The Paul Leslie Hour. Our guest is Ron Hargrave, a renowned ukulele and banjolele player, songwriter, performer and recording artist. He has also worked as a boxer and actor. Hargrave has performed and recording under his own name and as Johnny Deerfield. His song "High School Confidential," appeared on the very first Jerry Lee Lewis album and became known as one of Jerry's signature songs. The Paul Leslie Hour is a talk show dedicated to “Helping People Tell Their Stories.” Some of the most iconic people of all time drop in to chat. Frequent topics include Arts, Entertainment and Culture. SHOW LESS This podcast is powered by Pinecast.
Award-winning Canadian rock icon Carole Pope talks with Emmy Winner Charlotte Robinson host of OUTTAKE VOICES™ about her new single “World’s a Bitch” a collaboration with Canadian electro synth pop trio Church of Trees consisting of band members Bernard Frazer, Tara Hope and Allison Stanton. The song and music video relay a stirring sonic snapshot of the angst felt and coping mechanisms tapped when it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic and the world’s desperate need for vaccine distribution. The song is mixed and mastered by Jordon Zadorozny whose credits include Blinker the Star, Courtney Love, Chris Cornell and Lindsay Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac. The pairing of Pope with Church of Trees came by way of former Spoons/Honeymoon Suite keyboardist Rob Preuss. While working directly but separately with each artist he had a light bulb moment & suggested Frazer write something that might suit Pope’s voice. With her hit “High School Confidential'' recently inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame Carole Pope is the award-winning vocalist of Rough Trade and also known for leveraging her iconic status to openly table discussions around LGBTQ sexuality in her lyrics starting in the ‘70s. “World’s a Bitch” is one of several musical projects Pope is currently working on including “Attitude: The Art Rock Musical” a stage production based on the life of her late brother Howard a New York-based musician who passed away of AIDS in 1996. We talked to Carole about what she hopes to accomplish with “World’s a Bitch” and her spin on our LGBTQ issues. Carole Pope has won three Juno Awards (Canada’s version of the Grammy), a Genie (Canada’s Oscar) and multiple gold and platinum records to her credit. Pope is a certified rock legend fronting the infamous post-punk band Rough Trade in the 1980’s and is now a successful solo artist. Throughout her career she's been known as a musical agent provocateur writing and performing songs that make you "think and dance at the same time." Pope has performed at the Brooklyn Museum, Joe's Pub and the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival as well as LGBTQ Pride festivals around the world. Her music has been featured in movies and television shows including Transparent, The L Word and Queer as Folk. “World’s A Bitch” with Church of Trees is now available everywhere. For More Info... LISTEN: 500+ LGBTQ Chats @OUTTAKE VOICES
Mike chats with Carole Pope about Rough Trade, High School Confidential, the 1980 Juno Awards, Tears Are Not Enough, Dusty Springfield, her latest single with Church of Trees and more.
You're back! And so are we. This week, Episode 2, “Traces to Nowhere,” which aired 4/12/90. Reminder: No spoilers, but this episode is fair game. Watch before listening!Herein: Colin on the imagery of surfaces and what lies beneath; Damon asks what makes the show “Lynchian”; Jonathan on Doc Hayward; and Jennifer with Laura's ghostly voice. Twist: The show's obsession with food and damn fine coffee!Find us via: BuzzSprout | Apple (Coming soon!) | Google | Spotify | RSS | and more!~S1, E1 NOTES: Dwayne Dunham, director of “Traces to Nowhere”Reflections: An Oral History of Twin Peaks (2014, book by Brad Dukes)Riverdale (2017-present, CW series) “Chapter Seventy-Five: Lynchian” (2020, Riverdale episode, S4, E18)Hill Street Blues (1981-1987, NBC series)Warren Frost (Doc Hayward and Mark Frost's father)Eraserhead (1977, film, written/directed by DL, feat. Jack Nance)Blue Velvet (1986, film, written/directed by DL, feat. Kyle MacLachlan)Dune (1984, film, written/directed by DL, feat. Kyle MacLachlan)David Lynch: The Art Life (2016, documentary film, dir. by Rick Barnes, Olivia Neergard-Holm, and Jon Nguyen)Character and Creative alignments in Dungeons and DragonsMary Jo Deschanel (Mrs. Hayward, wife of series director Caleb Deschanel)Russ Tamblyn (Doctor Jacoby)Peyton Place: 1956, novel; 1957, film; 1964-1969, ABC television series)High School Confidential (1958, film, directed by Jack Arnold, starring Russ Tamblyn)West Side Story (1961, film, directed by Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise, starring Russ Tamblyn and Richard Beymer)Full show notes at BackToTheDoubleR.com! Thanks to Silencio (music) and Chris Kalb (art)!
Fire up the hot rod and get ready to send up the squares. This Saturday we're talking all things High School Confidential, the 1958 teenage delinquent classic. And, to go with it, we went with a classic American style beer, American Lager, from Great Divide Brewing Company. Grab a beer and settle in for the ride. Join us. https://www.instagram.com/beer_and_b_movies/ https://twitter.com/beerand_bmovies
1. Derek & the Dominoes / Why Does Love Got to Be Sad? 2 . Jimmy Vaughan / Wheel of Fortune 3. Robert Cray / Don't You Even Care 4. Son House / Death Letter Blues 5. Lightin' Hopkins / Please Don't Go 6. Booka White / Aberdeen Blues 7. Phil Vassar / I Thank-You 8. Led Zeppelin / The Thank-You Song 9. Dr. John / Thank You for Letting Me Be Myself 10. Joni Mitchell / The River 11. K.D. Lang / Help Me 12. Sufjan Stevens / Free Man in Paris 13. Red Cadillac & a Black Mustache / 14. High School Confidential / 15. Wynonnie Harris / Good Rockin Tonight 16. Big Mama Thornton / Hound Dog 17. Rufus Thomas / Bear Cat 18. Roomful of Blues / Watch Your Back 19. Al Basile / It Ain't Broke 20. Southside Johnny / Ride the Night Away 21. Blood, Sweat, & Tears / Lucretia MacEvil
RAINBOW COUNTRY A 2 HOUR Syndicated Gay radio show & #1 LGBT Podcast working to give voice to the LGBT Community & BEYOND! Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame inductees Carole Pope & Kevan Staples from the Canadian ground breaking 80s group Rough Trade talk about their hit song High School Confidential & MORE! + RAINBOW COUNTRY CONTRIBUTOR Musician & Activist Anna Gutmanis with her take on Fair-weather #LGBT allyship
Found a yearbook from Campbell California, 1990, lots of sappy letters in it!
On the October 4, 2020 edition of the Richard Crouse Show we meet former Rough Trade keyboardist and “High School Confidential” co-writer Kevan Staples on the occasion of the song being inducted into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame, Then, Ace Frehley, former guitarist for KISS swings by to talk KISS Koffins and the release of his new solo album "Origins Vol. 2." Finally, we talk to Steve Earle, a Grammy award winning singer-songwriter, a record producer, author and actor whose song Copperhead Road is still a jukebox favorite thirty-three years after it made him a superstar. Earle Zooms in from his home in Tennessee to talk about how his new album “Ghosts of West Virginia” might bridge the political gap.
On the October 4, 2020 edition of the Richard Crouse Show we meet former Rough Trade keyboardist and “High School Confidential” co-writer Kevan Staples on the occasion of the song being inducted into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame, Then, Ace Frehley, former guitarist for KISS swings by to talk KISS Koffins and the release of his new solo album "Origins Vol. 2." Finally, we talk to Steve Earle, a Grammy award winning singer-songwriter, a record producer, author and actor whose song Copperhead Road is still a jukebox favorite thirty-three years after it made him a superstar. Earle Zooms in from his home in Tennessee to talk about how his new album “Ghosts of West Virginia” might bridge the political gap.
On this edition of the Richard Crouse Show Podcast we meet Gloria Kim, writer/director of a new family drama called "Queen of the Morning Calm." In this interview we about the eleven years she spent working to get this story to the screen, How her background in journalism (former Maclean’s reporter) informed the writing of this story, how she guided her eleven year old co-star Eponine Lee through the film’s difficult material and much more. Then, former CTV Toronto crime reporter Tamara Cherry joins the show to talk about her new book, "All the Bumpy Pebbles," a novel based on her reporting of human trafficking cases. Finally, Kevan Staples, former keyboardist for Rough Trade and co-writer of the classic hit "High School Confidential," stops by to talk about the history of the controversial tune.
Ridge and Maria welcome in Ridge's high school friends Jared, Drew, and Addison to discuss some of the most embarrassing, outrageous, and flat out crude stories from their boarding school days. Follow Us On Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat: @GotIssuesPod Editor: Jared Kane Producer: Jared Kane Producer: Ridge Newcomb --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app
Episode ninety-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I’ve Just Fallen For Someone” by Adam Faith, and is our final look at the pre-Beatles British pop scene. 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 “San Francisco Bay Blues” by Jesse Fuller. 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 double-CD set contains all Adam Faith’s early recordings. And Big Time: The Life of Adam Faith by David and Caroline Stafford is a delightfully-written, extremely quotable, and by all accounts accurate biography of Faith. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Errata I repeatedly mispronounce Faith’s birth surname as “Nelham”. It was “Nelhams”, with an “s”. I also say that “Milk From the Coconut” by Johnny Gentle made the top thirty. It didn’t — I got this from an unreliable source. Transcript Today we’re going to take our last look at the pre-Beatles British pop world, and we’re going to look at a record that’s far more important in retrospect than it seemed at the time. We’re going to look at Adam Faith, and a track he recorded called “I’ve Just Fallen For Someone”: [Excerpt: Adam Faith, “I’ve Just Fallen For Someone”] As is normal for British rock and roll stars of the fifties, Adam Faith was a pseudonym, in this case for someone whose birth name is the subject of some debate — the registrar seems to have got a bit confused — but who was known as Terry Nelhams, a five-foot-five singer with high cheekbones, a strong chin, and a weak voice. The crucial change in Nelhams’ life had come at the cinema, when he had watched a film called Rebel Without A Cause, starring James Dean. Amazingly, I think we managed to get through the whole 1950s without mentioning Dean, but he was a massive figure in youth pop culture of the fifties, and his presence still resonated for decades afterwards. Dean only starred in three films, and only one, East of Eden, was released in his lifetime — he died in a car crash while the other two were in post-production — but his performance in the posthumously-released Rebel Without A Cause seemed to many teenagers of the time to encapsulate everything that they wanted to be. And Terry Nelhams decided he wanted to be James Dean — why not? He bore a slight resemblance to him. Terry was going to go into showbiz. There was a problem, though — in the Britain of the fifties, acting was something that was largely the purview of the middle classes, and Terry was firmly working class. He lived on a council estate and went to a secondary modern — the schools which, in the fifties UK education system, were designed for people who were considered unlikely to succeed academically. There was no way he was going to end up studying at RADA or any of the other ways one got into acting. So he decided that rather than become a film star, he would become a director. That was much easier to get into than acting was, in the British film industry of the fifties — you got a job as a tea boy at a film studio, worked your way up into the editing suite, became an editor, and then became a director. There was a steady career path, and you had job security at every stage — and Terry Nelhams was someone who always looked after his money. So that’s what he did — he got a job at the Rank organisation as a messenger, then moved across to a company that made commercials for the new commercial TV network ITV, where he was an assistant editor. But while he was working at Rank, Nelhams had joined a skiffle group, the Worried Men — named after the skiffle standard — who had been formed by some of the younger employees. They became the resident band at the 2is when the Vipers Skiffle Group went out on tour. Despite all the stories about other people who had been discovered at the 2is on their first gig, the Worried Men ended up performing there for months before any kind of success. But then they did get a certain amount of fame, when Six-Five Special did its single most famous episode — a live outside broadcast from the 2is itself. As the house band, the Worried Men got to perform a few songs on that show, and they also got a couple of tracks on two Decca compilations, “Rockin’ at the 2is” and “Stars of the Six-Five Special”: [Excerpt: The Worried Men, “This Little Light”] But neither album sold particularly well, and the Worried Men slowly drifted apart — one member joined the Vipers, and Nelhams left before the group got in a couple of people we’ve already seen a few times in our story — both Tony Meehan, who would go on to join the Shadows, and Brian Bennett, who ended up replacing him, passed through the group. But while Nelhams had quit the Worried Men — as much as anything else because holding down a day job while he also played for four hours at the 2is every night was starting to affect his health — Jack Good remembered him from that one Six-Five Special appearance, and thought that his looks, if not his singing ability, gave him the potential to be a star. Good changed Nelhams’ name to Adam Faith, and gave him a solo spot on Six-Five Special, as well as getting him a contract with HMV, one of several record labels owned by the large conglomerate EMI. His first single on HMV was “(Got A) Heartsick Feeling”, backed by Geoff Love and his Orchestra: [Excerpt: Adam Faith, “(Got A) Heartsick Feeling”] That record was, of course, publicised on Six-Five Special, but the extent to which Faith’s star potential was based on his looks rather than his singing ability can probably be seen from the fact that after his first appearance on the show he mimed rather than sing live, unlike all the other performers. The record was not a success, and nor was his second single, a cover of Jerry Lee Lewis’ “High School Confidential”: [Excerpt: Adam Faith, “High School Confidential”] Faith was unpopular, but he was able to give up his day job in the editing room to go on tour with a package based on Six-Five Special, at the bottom of the bill. And on that tour he became friendly with one of the other acts, John Barry, the trumpet playing leader of a group called the John Barry Seven. Barry had wanted to be an arranger for big bands, but when he realised that was no longer a viable career path, he’d formed his small group, who at the time were making records like “Zip Zip”, which were fairly awful early British rock and roll efforts, but with slightly more interesting instrumental arrangements than the bulk of the work being put out in the UK at that point: [Excerpt: The John Barry Seven, “Zip Zip”] When Jack Good moved over to ITV to do Oh Boy!, he took Faith with him, but Faith’s career was stagnating, and he quit performing altogether, and got another job as an assistant editor at Elstree studios, working on ATV shows like William Tell and The Invisible Man. But then Faith got a call from John Barry. The BBC were putting together a new show, Drumbeat, to compete with Oh Boy!, and they wanted their own star to compete with Cliff Richard and Marty Wilde. Would Adam be interested? He would — though he was cautious enough after last time that he kept his day job. He’d bunk off work on Thursday and Friday afternoons to rehearse and record the show, and make the time up on Sundays. His workmates covered for him when he bunked off, and that worked until his boss’ daughter mentioned to the boss that she’d seen Terry on the telly. He was told he had to choose between his pop career and a secure job, and he decided to make his pop career into a secure job, by getting a guaranteed six-month contract on Drumbeat before quitting Elstree. Drumbeat did little to make Faith’s records sell any more, but it did lead to acting appearances — as a biker in the police show No Hiding Place, and as a musician in a cheap exploitation film that was originally titled “Striptease Girl”, before the censors made the film producers cut the nudity out (except for foreign markets) at which point it was retitled Beat Girl in the UK, and Wild For Kicks in the US. It was hardly Rebel Without a Cause, but it was definitely a step in the right direction. The music for that film was done by Adam’s friend John Barry — the very first film score Barry ever did: [Excerpt: The John Barry Seven, “Beat Girl”] But Adam Faith was still a pop star without a hit, and that was a situation that couldn’t last. He was also temporarily without a record contract, but his new manager Eve Taylor managed to get him one with Parlophone, another EMI-owned label. And then his Drumbeat contacts came through in a big way. One of the other acts who regularly appeared on the show was a group called the Raindrops, who featured a singer who had been born Yannis Skoradalides, but whose name had soon been anglicised to John Worsley. He’d then taken on the stage name Johnny Worth, which was the name he performed under, but he was also starting to write songs — and because he was under contract as a recording artist, he took on yet another name as a songwriter to avoid any legal complications, so he was writing as Les Vandyke. It was under that name that he wrote a song called “What Do You Want?”, which he played to Faith and Barry, his two colleagues on Drumbeat. They saw potential in it — a lot of potential. And John Barry had an idea for an instrumental gimmick. We’re now into 1959, and Buddy Holly’s “It Doesn’t Matter Any More” had just been a big posthumous hit for him: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “It Doesn’t Matter Any More”] The pizzicato strings, in particular, had caught the ear of a lot of people, and Barry had already used them in the arrangement he’d written for “Be Mine”, a record by the minor British pop star Lance Fortune: [Excerpt: Lance Fortune, “Be Mine”] That hadn’t been released yet – it went top five when it eventually was – and Barry thought that it was worth repeating the trick, and so he came up with a pizzicato arrangement for the song Vandyke had written. And for a final touch, Faith received some vocal coaching from another Drumbeat performer, Roy Young, who taught him how to mangle his vowels so that he could sing in what was, to British ears, almost a convincing imitation of Buddy Holly’s hiccupping vocal, particularly on the word “baby”. The result was a huge hit, becoming the first number one single ever on the Parlophone label: [Excerpt: Adam Faith, “What Do You Want?”] Faith was now a real pop star at last. “What Do You Want?” was also one of the very rare British records to actually get an American cover version — Bobby Vee, the Buddy Holly soundalike, picked up on the record and issued his own version of it: [Excerpt: Bobby Vee, “What Do You Want?”] That wasn’t a success, but as Vee became a star he would occasionally record versions of other songs Faith recorded. Faith’s second Parlophone single was another number one, and another song written by Les Vandyke and arranged by John Barry. It was very much “What Do You Want?” part two, but there was an interesting musical figure Barry came up with in the intro: [Excerpt: Adam Faith, “Poor Me”] In the 1990s, Barry used that as evidence in a court case over his claim to authorship of the piece of music with which he is most associated, a piece arranged and performed by Barry, but whose credited writer is Monty Norman. Compare and contrast “Poor Me”: [Excerpt: Adam Faith, “Poor Me”] And the James Bond theme: [Excerpt: John Barry, “James Bond Theme”] For the next couple of years, Faith had a string of hits, mostly written by Vandyke and arranged by Barry, though no more number ones. By most metrics — in hits, record sales, and fan appeal — he was the second-biggest British pop star of the early sixties, after Cliff Richard. He also became well known as a media personality, thanks in large part to his appearance on the interview show Face to Face. This was a TV programme that ran from 1959 through 1962 — almost the precise same length as Faith’s pop career — and which had interviewer John Freeman sat with his back to the camera, while the studio was largely in darkness other than the face of the person he was interviewing. Freeman’s questions seem in the modern media landscape to be remarkably gentle, but in the early sixties he was regarded as the most incisive and probing interviewer in the British media. He reduced at least one subject, Gilbert Harding, to tears, and his questioning of Tony Hancock is popularly supposed to have started Hancock into the spiral of questioning, self-doubt, and depression that led first to his career crashing and burning and eventually to his suicide. Most of the guests that Freeman had on the show were serious, important, highbrow people. The thirty-five episodes of the show included interviews with Bertrand Russell, Carl Jung, Adlai Stevenson, Henry Moore, Martin Luther King and Jomo Kenyatta. But occasionally there would be someone invited on from the world of sport or entertainment, and Faith was invited on to the show as a representative of youth culture and pop music. The questions asked on the show were clearly designed to make Faith — a twenty-year-old pop singer who went to a secondary modern and still lived on a council estate even now he’d hit the big time — seem a laughing stock, and to poke holes in his image. Everyone involved seems to have been surprised when he came across as a well-read, cultured, if rather mercenary, young man who could string three words together: [Excerpt: Adam Faith, “Face to Face”, interview questions about classical music and literature] As a result of that appearance, Faith was increasingly asked on to TV shows to be “the voice of the youth”, particularly as he was the first pop star to admit to things like having sex before marriage. He debated with the Archbishop of York about religion on national TV, in a debate chaired by Ludovic Kennedy, and Faith was largely viewed as having come out better than the bishop. He also took at least one brave political stand in 1964. He had been booked to tour in South Africa, and agreed to do so only under the condition that he would perform only to integrated audiences. But when he got on stage for one show, he saw the police dragging two young girls out of an otherwise all-white audience, because they weren’t white. He walked off stage, and refused to do the rest of the tour. The promoter demanded compensation, and Faith refused, saying he’d made clear that he was only going to play to integrated audiences. He tried to leave the country, booking plane tickets under his birth name to escape suspicion, but was dragged off the plane at gunpoint by South African police. Eventually the intervention of the chairman of EMI, the British Foreign Secretary, the general secretary of Equity, the actor’s union, and several brave journalists who said that if Faith was imprisoned they would go to prison with him, meant that Faith was allowed to leave the country, though EMI paid the promoter’s compensation and took it out of Faith’s future royalties. Not that there were many royalties by that point. In early 1963, John Barry had stopped working with Faith to concentrate on his film music — he’d just started working on the Bond films that would make his name — and the hits dried up then, especially when musical styles suddenly changed in the middle of that year. But Faith had managed to parlay his looks into an acting career by that point, and over the next decade he appeared in several films, starred in the TV series Budgie, and toured in repertory theatre. He also became a manager and producer, managing Leo Sayer and producing Roger Daltrey’s solo recordings. He would occasionally make the odd record himself, up to the nineties, with his final single being a duet with Daltrey on a cover version of “Stuck in the Middle With You”: [Excerpt: Adam Faith and Roger Daltrey, “Stuck in the Middle With You”] But as someone who looked after his money, Faith had been far more canny than most of his fellow pop stars, and for much of his life he was a very wealthy man. While he continued performing, his main role in the eighties and nineties was as a financial journalist and investment advisor, writing columns on finance for the Daily Mail. He presented the BBC business show Working Lunch, the Channel 4 money show Dosh, and eventually started his own TV channel devoted to business, The Money Channel. Unfortunately for him, the Money Channel went down in the stock market crashes of the early 2000s, and Faith went bankrupt in 2002. He died in 2003, aged sixty-two. But you’ll notice we haven’t yet mentioned the song that this episode is about. That’s because that song, “I’ve Just Fallen For Someone”, was completely unimportant in Adam Faith’s life. It was just a bit of album filler on his second album. But though Faith didn’t know it, it was an important song in rock music history: [Excerpt: Adam Faith, “I’ve Just Fallen For Someone”] Like Faith’s hits, that was written by another performer, one who like Les Vandyke had a variety of different names. John Askew was one of Larry Parnes’ stable of acts, and far from the most successful of them. He performed under the name Johnny Gentle, and didn’t have a great deal of success. Askew’s first single, “Wendy”, was unsuccessful, but it was unusual among British singles of the period in that it was written by Askew himself: [Excerpt: Johnny Gentle, “Wendy”] His second, though, made the top thirty: [Excerpt: Johnny Gentle, “Milk From the Coconut”] That would be the most success Johnny Gentle ever had, and his live shows were made up entirely of cover versions of other people’s records — when he toured Scotland in 1960, for example, his setlist consisted of two Buddy Holly songs, and one each by Elvis, Ricky Nelson, Clarence “Frogman” Henry, Eddie Cochran, and Jim Reeves. But he was still writing songs on that tour, and he was working on one in a hotel in Inverness – one that clearly referenced “What Do You Want?” with its girl who doesn’t want ermine and pearls – when he got stuck for a middle eight for the song, and mentioned it to the rhythm guitarist in his backing band. The guitarist came up with a new middle eight — referencing a line from a favourite song of his, “Money” by Barrett Strong. Askew took that new middle eight, though didn’t give the guitarist any songwriting credit — Askew was an established songwriter, after all. He gave the song to Faith, who recorded it in late 1961, and released it in 1962: [Excerpt: Adam Faith, “I’ve Just Fallen for Someone”] That was on his second album, Adam Faith (his first album had been called Adam), and on an EP taken from the album. But Askew thought it had more potential, and he recorded his own version, as Darren Young — by this point he’d decided that his old stage name was bringing him bad luck: [Excerpt: Darren Young, “I’ve Just Fallen for Someone”] That version wasn’t successful either, and the song remained completely obscure until the mid-1990s. It was at that point that Askew started telling the story of how the song had been written. And suddenly the song was of a lot more interest, at least to some people, because that rhythm guitarist who wrote that middle eight was John Lennon, and Gentle’s backing band on that tour was the Beatles. We’ve just heard the story of the first ever commercial recording of a John Lennon song. And we’ll pick up on that next week…
In its adaptation of a true story of malfeasance and misappropriation in a Long Island high school, Cory Finley’s new HBO film BAD EDUCATION sets up a clash between shady educator and meddlesome student that put us in mind of Alexander Payne’s 1999 political satire ELECTION. In this half of our pairing, we debate the level of sympathy we’re able to extend to Hugh Jackman’s corrupt superintendent in BAD EDUCATION, before putting the two films in conversation to see what they have to say about the fraught interplay between student and faculty, precocious young women, and the corruptibility of adulthood. Plus, Your Next Picture Show, where we share recent filmgoing experiences in hopes of putting something new on your cinematic radar. Please share your comments, thoughts, and questions about ELECTION, BAD EDUCATION, or anything else in the world of film, by sending an email to comments@nextpictureshow.net, or leaving a short voicemail at (773) 234-9730. Your Next Picture Show: • Tasha: Richard Kwietniowski’s OWNING MAHOWNY and Seven Soderbergh’s THE INFORMANT! • Keith: Eugene Mirman’s IT STARTED AS A JOKE • Scott: Yorgos Lanthimos’ THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER Outro music: The Who, “Did You Steal My Money?” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Cory Finley’s new BAD EDUCATION is based on a real-life incident, whereas Alexander Payne’s 1999 high school satire ELECTION is based on a Tom Perrotta novel (itself inspired by the 1992 presidential election), but they both use their high school settings to make their way toward similar conclusions about the corruptibility of adulthood. In this half of our pairing looking at morality, ethics, and the educators who unwittingly illustrate the difference to their students, we dig into ELECTION’s satirical aims and accomplishments, debate the merits of Tracy Flick’s campaign for student body president, and consider what, if any, conclusions the film draws about elections and democracy. Plus, some feedback on recent episodes inspires a brief convening of the Next Picture Show Book Club. Please share your comments, thoughts, and questions about ELECTION, BAD EDUCATION, or anything else in the world of film, by sending an email to comments@nextpictureshow.net, or leaving a short voicemail at (773) 234-9730. Show Notes Works Cited: • “Election: That’s Why It’s Destiny,” by Dana Stevens (criterion.com) Outro Music: Ennio Morricone, “Navajo Joe” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this special episode of Radio Free Skaro, we present our contribution to the recent Who For Schools initiative with our commentary for the 2006 Doctor Who episode “School Reunion”! But there’s a twist! Listener Drew Walko helped to support the campaign and so gave each of the Three Who Rule a secret phrase to try to insert into the podcast. Can you guess what each phrase is? Can we? Listen and find out, and thank you for your support for Who For Schools! Links: Support Radio Free Skaro on Patreon! Doctor Who S02E03 “School Reunion” Who For Schools
In this, our first episode, my neighbor Jerry and I will discuss songs from the respective years we each graduated high school. Songs we maybe didn't appreciate back then, but have come to really enjoy these days. As usual...nothing happens until we get that third drink in front of us. Hope you enjoy it.Tune in to our curated Spotify playlist for this episode and hear the songs that were in the running:https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5fo0EutVnIGVvtJYqeGt18?si=6b8fe25a8ab84884
This Week on Home Improvement… After Randy receives detention, his teacher informs Tim and Jill that he believes Randy is not being engaged enough with the current curriculum, and wants to enroll him in advanced placement courses. This, of course, means that he will be in high school with Brad. This week on Grunt Work: […]
Episode sixty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Great Balls of Fire” by Jerry Lee Lewis. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. This one comes with a bit of a content warning, as while it has nothing explicit, it deals with his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Rumble” by Link Wray. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode (with one exception, which I mention in the podcast). The Spark That Survived by Myra Lewis Williams is Myra’s autobiography, and tells her side of the story, which has tended to be ignored in favour of her famous husband’s side. I’m relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. Books on Jerry Lee Lewis tend to be very flawed, as the authors all tend to think they’re Faulkner rather than giving the facts. This one by Rick Bragg is better than most. There are many budget CDs containing Lewis’ pre-1962 work. This set seems as good an option as any. And this ten-CD box set contains ninety Sun singles in chronological order, starting with “Whole Lotta Shakin'” and covering the Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins records discussed here. There are few better ways to get an idea of Lewis’ work in context. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum: I say “Glad All Over” was written by Aaron Schroeder. In fact it was co-written by Schroeder, Roy Bennett, and Sid Tepper. Transcript We’ve looked before at the rise of Jerry Lee Lewis, but in this episode we’re going to talk about his fall. And for that reason I have to put a content warning at the beginning here. While I’m not going to say anything explicit at all, this episode has to deal with events that I, and most of my listeners, would refer to as child sexual abuse, though the child in question still, more than sixty years later, doesn’t see them that way, and I don’t want to say anything that imposes my framing over hers. If you might find this subject distressing, I suggest reading the transcript before listening, or just skipping this episode. It also deals, towards the end, with domestic violence. Indeed, if you’re affected by these issues, I would also suggest skipping the next episode, on “Johnny B. Goode”, and coming back on February the second for “Yakety Yak” by the Coasters. We’re hitting a point in the history of rock and roll where, for the first time, rock and roll begins its decline in popularity. We’ll see from this point on that every few years there’s a change in musical fashions, and a new set of artists take over from the most popular artists of the previous period. And in the case of the first rock and roll era, that takeover was largely traumatic. There were a number of deaths, some prosecutions — and in the case of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, scandals. In general, I try not to make these podcast episodes be about the horrific acts that some of the men involved have committed. This is a podcast about music, not about horrible men doing horrible things. But in the case of Jerry Lee Lewis, he was one of the very small number of men to have actually faced consequences for his actions, and so it has to be discussed. I promise I will try to do so as sensitively as possible. Although sensitivity is not the word that comes to mind when one thinks of Jerry Lee Lewis, generally… [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] When we left Jerry Lee Lewis, he had just had his first really major success, with “Whole Lotta Shakin'”. He was on top of the world, and the most promising artist in rock and roll music. With Elvis about to be drafted into the army, the role of biggest rock and roll star was wide open, and Lewis intended to take over Elvis’ mantle. There was going to be a new king of rock and roll. It didn’t quite work out that way. “Whole Lotta Shakin'” was such a massive hit that on the basis of that one record, Jerry Lee was invited to perform his next single in a film called Jamboree. This was one of the many exploitation films that were being put out starring popular DJs — this one starred Dick Clark, rather than Alan Freed, who’d appeared in most of them. They were the kind of thing that made Elvis’ films look like masterpieces of the cinema, and tended to involve a bunch of kids who wanted to put a dance on at their local school, or similar interchangeable plots. The reason people went to see them wasn’t the plot, but the performances by rock and roll musicians. Fats Domino was in most of these, and he was in this one, singing his minor single “Wait and See”. There were also a few performances by musicians who weren’t strictly rock and roll, and were from an older generation, but who were close enough that the kids would probably accept them. Slim Whitman appeared, as did Count Basie, with Joe Williams as lead vocalist:… [Excerpt: Joe Williams, “I Don’t Like You No More”] The film also featured the only known footage of Lewis Lymon and the Teenchords, who we talked about briefly last week. More pertinently to this story, it featured Carl Perkins: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Glad All Over”] That song was one of the few that Perkins recorded which wasn’t written by him. Instead, it was written by Aaron Schroeder, who had co-written the non-Leiber-and-Stoller songs for Jailhouse Rock, and who also appeared in this film in a cameo role as himself. The song was provided to Sam Phillips by Hill and Range, who were Phillips’ publishing partners as well as being Elvis’. It was to be Carl Perkins’ last record for Sun — Perkins had finally had enough of Sam Phillips being more interested in Jerry Lee Lewis. Even little things were getting to him — Jerry Lee’s records were credited to “Jerry Lee Lewis and his Pumping Piano”. Why did Carl’s records never say anything about Carl’s guitar? Sam promised him that the records would start to credit Carl Perkins as “the rocking guitar man”, but it was too late — Perkins and Johnny Cash both made an agreement with Columbia Records on November the first 1957 that when their current contracts with Sun expired, they’d start recording for the new label. Cash was in a similar situation to Perkins — Jack Clement had now taken over production of Cash’s records, and while Cash was writing some of his best material, songs like “Big River” that remain classics, Clement was making him record songs Clement had written himself, like “Ballad of a Teenage Queen”: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, “Ballad of a Teenage Queen”] It’s quite easy to see from that, which he recorded in mid-November, why Cash left Sun. While Cash would go on to have greater success at Columbia, Perkins wouldn’t. And ironically it was possible that he had had one more opportunity to have a hit follow-up to “Blue Suede Shoes” at Sun, and he’d passed on it. According to Perkins, he was given a choice of two songs to perform in Jamboree, both of them published by Hill and Range, but “I thought both of them was junk!” and he’d chosen the one that was slightly less awful — that’s not how other people involved remember it, but he would always claim that he had been offered the song that Jerry Lee Lewis performed, and turned down “Great Balls of Fire”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] That song was one that both Lewis and Phillips were immediately convinced would be a hit as soon as they heard the demo. Sam Phillips’ main worry was how they were going to improve on the demo by the song’s writer, Otis Blackwell, which he thought was pretty much perfect as it was. We’ve met Otis Blackwell briefly before — he was a New York-based songwriter, one of a relatively small number of black people who managed to get work as a professional songwriter for one of the big publishing companies. Blackwell had written “Fever” for Little Willie John, “You’re the Apple of My Eye” for Frankie Valli, and two massive hits for Elvis — “Don’t Be Cruel” and “All Shook Up”. We don’t have access to his demo of “Great Balls of Fire”, but in the seventies he recorded an album called “These are My Songs”, featuring many of the hits he’d written for other people, and it’s possible that the version of “Great Balls of Fire” on that album gives some idea of what the demo that so impressed Phillips sounded like: [Excerpt: Otis Blackwell, “Great Balls of Fire”] “Great Balls of Fire” seems to be the first thing to have been tailored specifically for the persona that Lewis had created with his previous hit. It’s a refinement of the “Whole Lotta Shakin'” formula, but it has a few differences that give the song far more impact. Most notably, where “Whole Lotta Shakin'” starts off with a gently rolling piano intro and only later picks up steam: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin'”] “Great Balls of Fire” has a much more dynamic opening — one that sets the tone for the whole record with its stop-start exclamations: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] Although that stop-start intro is one of the few signs in the record that point to the song having been possibly offered to Perkins — it’s very reminiscent of the intro to “Blue Suede Shoes”: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Blue Suede Shoes”] I could imagine Perkins recording the song in the “Blue Suede Shoes” manner and having a hit with it, though not as big a hit as Lewis eventually had. On the other hand I can’t imagine Lewis turning “Glad All Over”, fun as it is, into anything even remotely worthy of following up “Whole Lotta Shakin'”. Almost straight away they managed to cut a version of “Great Balls of Fire” that was suitable for the film, but it wasn’t right for a hit record. They needed something that was absolutely perfect. After having sent the film version off, they spent several days working on getting the perfect version cut — paying particular attention to that stop-start intro, which the musicians had to time perfectly for it not to come out as a sloppy mess. Oddly, the musicians on the track weren’t the normal Sun session players, and nor were they the musicians who normally played in Lewis’ band. Instead, Lewis was backed by Sidney Stokes on bass and Larry Linn on drums — according to Lewis, he never met those two people again after they finished recording. But as the work proceeded, Jerry Lee became concerned. “Great Balls of Fire”? Didn’t that sound a bit… Satanic? And people did say that rock and roll was the Devil’s music. He ended up getting into an angry, rambling, theological discussion with Sam Phillips, which was recorded and which gives an insight into how difficult Lewis must have been to work with, but also how tortured he was — he truly believed in the existence of a physical Hell, and that he was destined to go there because of his music: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Phillips, Bible discussion] Sam Phillips, who appears to have had the patience of a saint, eventually talked Lewis down and persuaded him to get back to making music. When “Great Balls of Fire” came out, with a cover of Hank Williams’ ballad “You Win Again” on the B-side, it was an immediate success. It sold over a million copies in the first ten days it was out, and it became a classic that has been covered by everyone from Dolly Parton to Aerosmith. It’s one of the records that defines 1950s rock and roll music, and it firmly established Jerry Lee Lewis as one of the greatest stars of rock and roll, if not the greatest. Jack and Sam kept recording everything they could from Lewis, getting a backlog of recordings that would be released for decades to come — everything from Hank Williams covers to the old blues number “Big Legged Woman”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Big Legged Woman”] But they decided that they didn’t want to mess with a winning formula, and so the next record that they put out was another Otis Blackwell song, “Breathless”. This time, the band was the normal Sun studio drummer Jimmy Van Eaton, Billy Lee Riley on guitar — Riley was also furious with Sam Phillips for the way he was concentrating on Lewis’ career at the expense of everyone else’s, but he was still working on sessions for Phillips — and Jerry Lee’s cousin J.W. Brown on bass. J.W. was his full name — it didn’t stand for anything — and he was the regular touring bass player in Lewis’ band. “Breathless” was very much in the same style as “Great Balls of Fire”, if perhaps not *quite* so good: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Breathless”] To promote the record, Jud Phillips, Sam’s brother, came up with a great promotional scheme. Dick Clark, the presenter of American Bandstand, had another show, the Dick Clark Show, which was also called Dick Clark’s Saturday Night Beechnut Show because it was sponsored by Beechnut chewing gum. Clark had already had Jerry Lee on his show once, and he’d been a hit — Clark could bring him back on the show, and they could announce that if you sent Sun Records five Beechnut wrappers and fifty cents for postage and packing, you could get a signed copy of the new record. The fifty cents would be more than the postage and packing would cost, of course, and Sun would split the profits with Dick Clark. Sun bought an autograph stamp to stamp copies of the record with, hired a few extra temporary staff members to help them get the records posted, and made the arrangements with Dick Clark and his sponsors. The result was extraordinary — in some parts of the country, stores ran out of Beechnut gum altogether. More than thirty-eight thousand copies of the single were sent out to eager gum-chewers. It was around this time that Jerry Lee went on the Alan Freed tour that we mentioned last week, with Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Larry Williams, the Chantels, and eleven other acts. The tour later became legendary not so much for the music — though that was great — but for the personal disputes between Lewis and Berry. There were two separate issues at stake. The first was Elmo Lewis, Jerry’s father. Elmo had a habit of using racial slurs, and of threatening to fight anyone, especially black people, who he thought was disrespecting him. At one show on the tour, a dispute about parking spaces between Berry and Lewis led to the elder Lewis chasing Berry three blocks, waving a knife, and shouting “You know what we do with cats like you down in Ferriday? We chop the heads off them and throw it in a lake.” Apparently, by the next day, Elmo and Chuck were sat with each other at breakfast, the best of friends. The other issue was Berry’s belief that he, rather than Lewis, should be headlining the shows. He managed to persuade the promoters of this, and this led Lewis to try more and more outrageous stunts on stage to try to upstage Berry. The legend has it that at one show he went so far as to set his piano on fire at the climax of “Great Balls of Fire”, and then walk off stage challenging Berry to follow that. Some versions of the story have him using a racial slur there, too, but the story in whatever form seems to be apocryphal. It does, though, sum up the atmosphere between the two. That said, while Lewis and Berry fought incessantly, Berry was one of the few people to whom Lewis has ever shown any respect at all. Partly that’s because of Lewis’ admiration for Berry’s songwriting — he’s called Berry “the Hank Williams of rock and roll” before now, and for someone who admires Williams as much as Lewis does that’s about the highest imaginable praise. But also, Lewis and his father were both always very careful not to do anything that would lead to word of the feud getting back to his mother, because his mother had repeatedly told him that Chuck Berry was the greatest rock and roller in the world — Elvis was good, she said, and obviously so was her son, but neither of them were a patch on Chuck. She would have been furious with him, and would definitely have taken Chuck’s side. After the tour, Jerry Lee recorded another song for a film he was going to appear in. This time, it was the title song for a terribly shlocky attempt at drama, called High School Confidential — a film that dealt with the very serious and weighty issue of marijuana use among teenagers, and is widely regarded as one of the worst films ever made. The theme music, though, was pretty good: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “High School Confidential”] That came out on the nineteenth of May, 1958, and immediately started rising up the charts. Two days later, Jerry Lee headed out on what was meant to be a triumphal tour of the UK, solidifying him as the biggest, most important, rock and roll star in the world. And that is when everything came crashing down. Because it was when he and his entourage landed in the UK, and the press saw the thirteen-year-old girl with him, and asked who she was, that it became public knowledge he had married his thirteen-year-old cousin Myra. And here we get to something I’ve been dreading talking about since I decided on this project. There is simply no way to talk about Jerry Lee Lewis’ marriage to Myra Gale Brown which doesn’t erase Brown’s experience, doesn’t excuse Lewis’ behaviour, explains the cultural context in which it happened, and doesn’t minimise child abuse — which, and let’s be clear about this right now, this was. If you take from *anything* that I say after this that I think there is any possible excuse, any justification, for a man in his twenties having sex with a thirteen-year-old girl — let alone a thirteen-year-old girl in his own family, to whom he was an authority figure — then I have *badly* failed to get my meaning across. What Lewis did was, simply, wrong. It’s important to say that, because something that applies both to this episode and to the downfall of Chuck Berry, which we’ll be looking at in the next episode, is the way that both have been framed by all the traditional histories of rock and roll. If you read almost anything about rock and roll history, what you see when it gets to 1958 is “and here rock and roll nearly died, because of the prurient attitudes of a few prudes, who were out to destroy the careers of these new exciting rock and rollers because they hated the threat they posed to their traditional way of life”. That is simply not the case. Yes, there was a great deal of establishment opposition to rock and roll music, but what happened to Jerry Lee Lewis wasn’t some conspiracy of blue-nosed prudes. It was people getting angry, for entirely understandable reasons, about a man doing something that was absolutely, unquestionably, just *wrong*. And the fact that this has been minimised by rock and roll histories says a lot about the culture around rock journalism, none of it good. Now, that said, something that needs to be understood here is that Lewis and most of the people round him didn’t see him as doing anything particularly wrong. In the culture of the Southern US at the time, it was normal for very young girls to be married, often to older men. By his own lights, he was doing nothing wrong. His first marriage was when he was sixteen — Myra was his third wife, and he was still legally married to his second when he married her — and his own younger sister had recently got married, aged twelve. Likewise, marrying one’s cousin was the norm within Jerry Lee’s extended family, where pretty much everyone whose surname was Lewis, Swaggart, or Gilley was married to someone else whose surname was Lewis, Swaggart, or Gilley. But I don’t believe we have to judge people by their own standards, or at least not wholly so. There were many other horrific aspects to the culture of the Southern states at the time, and just because, for example, the people who defended segregation believed they were doing nothing wrong and were behaving according to their own culture, doesn’t mean we can’t judge them harshly. And it’s not as if everyone in Jerry Lee’s own culture was completely accepting of this. They’d married in secret, and when Myra’s father — Jerry Lee’s cousin and bass player, J.W. Brown — found out about it, he grabbed his shotgun and went out with every intention of murdering Jerry Lee, and it was only Sam Phillips who persuaded him that maybe that would be a bad idea. The British tour, which was meant to last six weeks, ended up lasting only three days. Jerry Lee and his band and family cancelled the tour and returned home, where they expected everyone to accept them again, and for things to carry on as normal. They didn’t. The record company tried to capitalise on the controversy, and also to defuse the anger towards Lewis. At the time, there was a craze for novelty records which interpolated bits of spoken word dialogue with excerpts of rock and roll hits, sparked off by a record called “The Flying Saucer”: [Excerpt: Buchanan and Goodman, “The Flying Saucer”] Jack Clement put together a similar thing, as a joke for the Sun Records staff, called “The Return of Jerry Lee”, having an interviewer, the DJ George Klein, ask Jerry Lee questions about the recent controversy, and having Jerry Lee “answer” them in clips from his records. Sam Phillips loved it, and insisted on releasing it as a single. [Excerpt: George and Louis, “The Return of Jerry Lee”] Unsurprisingly, that did not have the effect that was hoped, and did not defuse the situation one iota — especially since some of the jokes in the record were leering ones about Myra’s physical attractiveness — the attractiveness, remember, of a child. For that reason, I will *not* be putting the full version of that particular track in the Mixcloud mix of songs I excerpted in this episode. This is where we say goodbye to Sam Phillips. With Jerry Lee Lewis’ career destroyed, and with all his other major acts having left him, Phillips’ brief reign as the most important record producer and company owner in the USA was over. He carried on running Sun records for a few years, and eventually sold it to Shelby Singleton. Singleton is a complicated figure, but one thing he definitely did right was exploiting Sun’s back catalogue — in their four-year rockabilly heyday Sam Phillips and Jack Clement had recorded literally thousands of unreleased songs by Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, Conway Twitty, Charlie Rich, Billy Lee Riley, and many more. Those tracks sat in Sun’s vaults for more than a decade, but once Singleton took over the company pretty much every scrap of material from Sun’s vaults saw release, especially once a British reissue label called Charly employed Martin Hawkins and Colin Escott, two young music obsessives, to put out systematic releases of Sun’s rockabilly and blues archives. The more of that material came out, the more obvious it became that Sam Phillips had tapped into something very, very special at Sun Records, and that throughout the fifties one small studio in Memphis had produced staggering recordings on a daily basis. By the time Sam Phillips died, in 2003, aged eighty, he was widely regarded as one of the most important people in the history of music. Jerry Lee Lewis, meanwhile, spent several years trying and failing to have a hit, but slowly rebuilding his live audiences, playing small venues and winning back his audience one crowd at a time. By the late 1960s he was in a position to have a comeback, and “Another Place, Another Time” went to number four on the country charts, and started a run of country hits that lasted for the best part of a decade: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Another Place, Another Time”] Myra divorced Jerry Lee around that time, citing physical and emotional abuse. She is now known as Myra Williams, has been happily married for thirty-six years, and works as a real-estate agent. Jerry Lee has, so far, married four more times. His fourth and fifth wives died in mysterious circumstances — his fourth drowned shortly before the divorce went through, and the fifth died in circumstances that are still unclear, and several have raised suspicions that Jerry Lee killed her. It’s not impossible. The man known as the Killer did once shoot his bass player in the chest in the late seventies — he insists that was an accident — and was arrested outside Graceland, drunk and with a gun, yelling for Elvis Presley to come out and settle who was the real king. Jerry Lee Lewis is still alive, married to his seventh wife, who is Myra’s brother’s ex-wife. Last year, he and his wife sued his daughter, though the lawsuit was thrown out of court. He’s eighty-four years old, still performs, and according to recent interviews, worries if he is going to go to Heaven or to Hell when he dies. I imagine I would worry too, in his place.
Episode sixty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Great Balls of Fire” by Jerry Lee Lewis. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. This one comes with a bit of a content warning, as while it has nothing explicit, it deals with his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Rumble” by Link Wray. —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode (with one exception, which I mention in the podcast). The Spark That Survived by Myra Lewis Williams is Myra’s autobiography, and tells her side of the story, which has tended to be ignored in favour of her famous husband’s side. I’m relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. Books on Jerry Lee Lewis tend to be very flawed, as the authors all tend to think they’re Faulkner rather than giving the facts. This one by Rick Bragg is better than most. There are many budget CDs containing Lewis’ pre-1962 work. This set seems as good an option as any. And this ten-CD box set contains ninety Sun singles in chronological order, starting with “Whole Lotta Shakin'” and covering the Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins records discussed here. There are few better ways to get an idea of Lewis’ work in context. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum: I say “Glad All Over” was written by Aaron Schroeder. In fact it was co-written by Schroeder, Roy Bennett, and Sid Tepper. Transcript We’ve looked before at the rise of Jerry Lee Lewis, but in this episode we’re going to talk about his fall. And for that reason I have to put a content warning at the beginning here. While I’m not going to say anything explicit at all, this episode has to deal with events that I, and most of my listeners, would refer to as child sexual abuse, though the child in question still, more than sixty years later, doesn’t see them that way, and I don’t want to say anything that imposes my framing over hers. If you might find this subject distressing, I suggest reading the transcript before listening, or just skipping this episode. It also deals, towards the end, with domestic violence. Indeed, if you’re affected by these issues, I would also suggest skipping the next episode, on “Johnny B. Goode”, and coming back on February the second for “Yakety Yak” by the Coasters. We’re hitting a point in the history of rock and roll where, for the first time, rock and roll begins its decline in popularity. We’ll see from this point on that every few years there’s a change in musical fashions, and a new set of artists take over from the most popular artists of the previous period. And in the case of the first rock and roll era, that takeover was largely traumatic. There were a number of deaths, some prosecutions — and in the case of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, scandals. In general, I try not to make these podcast episodes be about the horrific acts that some of the men involved have committed. This is a podcast about music, not about horrible men doing horrible things. But in the case of Jerry Lee Lewis, he was one of the very small number of men to have actually faced consequences for his actions, and so it has to be discussed. I promise I will try to do so as sensitively as possible. Although sensitivity is not the word that comes to mind when one thinks of Jerry Lee Lewis, generally… [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] When we left Jerry Lee Lewis, he had just had his first really major success, with “Whole Lotta Shakin'”. He was on top of the world, and the most promising artist in rock and roll music. With Elvis about to be drafted into the army, the role of biggest rock and roll star was wide open, and Lewis intended to take over Elvis’ mantle. There was going to be a new king of rock and roll. It didn’t quite work out that way. “Whole Lotta Shakin'” was such a massive hit that on the basis of that one record, Jerry Lee was invited to perform his next single in a film called Jamboree. This was one of the many exploitation films that were being put out starring popular DJs — this one starred Dick Clark, rather than Alan Freed, who’d appeared in most of them. They were the kind of thing that made Elvis’ films look like masterpieces of the cinema, and tended to involve a bunch of kids who wanted to put a dance on at their local school, or similar interchangeable plots. The reason people went to see them wasn’t the plot, but the performances by rock and roll musicians. Fats Domino was in most of these, and he was in this one, singing his minor single “Wait and See”. There were also a few performances by musicians who weren’t strictly rock and roll, and were from an older generation, but who were close enough that the kids would probably accept them. Slim Whitman appeared, as did Count Basie, with Joe Williams as lead vocalist:… [Excerpt: Joe Williams, “I Don’t Like You No More”] The film also featured the only known footage of Lewis Lymon and the Teenchords, who we talked about briefly last week. More pertinently to this story, it featured Carl Perkins: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Glad All Over”] That song was one of the few that Perkins recorded which wasn’t written by him. Instead, it was written by Aaron Schroeder, who had co-written the non-Leiber-and-Stoller songs for Jailhouse Rock, and who also appeared in this film in a cameo role as himself. The song was provided to Sam Phillips by Hill and Range, who were Phillips’ publishing partners as well as being Elvis’. It was to be Carl Perkins’ last record for Sun — Perkins had finally had enough of Sam Phillips being more interested in Jerry Lee Lewis. Even little things were getting to him — Jerry Lee’s records were credited to “Jerry Lee Lewis and his Pumping Piano”. Why did Carl’s records never say anything about Carl’s guitar? Sam promised him that the records would start to credit Carl Perkins as “the rocking guitar man”, but it was too late — Perkins and Johnny Cash both made an agreement with Columbia Records on November the first 1957 that when their current contracts with Sun expired, they’d start recording for the new label. Cash was in a similar situation to Perkins — Jack Clement had now taken over production of Cash’s records, and while Cash was writing some of his best material, songs like “Big River” that remain classics, Clement was making him record songs Clement had written himself, like “Ballad of a Teenage Queen”: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, “Ballad of a Teenage Queen”] It’s quite easy to see from that, which he recorded in mid-November, why Cash left Sun. While Cash would go on to have greater success at Columbia, Perkins wouldn’t. And ironically it was possible that he had had one more opportunity to have a hit follow-up to “Blue Suede Shoes” at Sun, and he’d passed on it. According to Perkins, he was given a choice of two songs to perform in Jamboree, both of them published by Hill and Range, but “I thought both of them was junk!” and he’d chosen the one that was slightly less awful — that’s not how other people involved remember it, but he would always claim that he had been offered the song that Jerry Lee Lewis performed, and turned down “Great Balls of Fire”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] That song was one that both Lewis and Phillips were immediately convinced would be a hit as soon as they heard the demo. Sam Phillips’ main worry was how they were going to improve on the demo by the song’s writer, Otis Blackwell, which he thought was pretty much perfect as it was. We’ve met Otis Blackwell briefly before — he was a New York-based songwriter, one of a relatively small number of black people who managed to get work as a professional songwriter for one of the big publishing companies. Blackwell had written “Fever” for Little Willie John, “You’re the Apple of My Eye” for Frankie Valli, and two massive hits for Elvis — “Don’t Be Cruel” and “All Shook Up”. We don’t have access to his demo of “Great Balls of Fire”, but in the seventies he recorded an album called “These are My Songs”, featuring many of the hits he’d written for other people, and it’s possible that the version of “Great Balls of Fire” on that album gives some idea of what the demo that so impressed Phillips sounded like: [Excerpt: Otis Blackwell, “Great Balls of Fire”] “Great Balls of Fire” seems to be the first thing to have been tailored specifically for the persona that Lewis had created with his previous hit. It’s a refinement of the “Whole Lotta Shakin'” formula, but it has a few differences that give the song far more impact. Most notably, where “Whole Lotta Shakin'” starts off with a gently rolling piano intro and only later picks up steam: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Whole Lotta Shakin'”] “Great Balls of Fire” has a much more dynamic opening — one that sets the tone for the whole record with its stop-start exclamations: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] Although that stop-start intro is one of the few signs in the record that point to the song having been possibly offered to Perkins — it’s very reminiscent of the intro to “Blue Suede Shoes”: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, “Blue Suede Shoes”] I could imagine Perkins recording the song in the “Blue Suede Shoes” manner and having a hit with it, though not as big a hit as Lewis eventually had. On the other hand I can’t imagine Lewis turning “Glad All Over”, fun as it is, into anything even remotely worthy of following up “Whole Lotta Shakin'”. Almost straight away they managed to cut a version of “Great Balls of Fire” that was suitable for the film, but it wasn’t right for a hit record. They needed something that was absolutely perfect. After having sent the film version off, they spent several days working on getting the perfect version cut — paying particular attention to that stop-start intro, which the musicians had to time perfectly for it not to come out as a sloppy mess. Oddly, the musicians on the track weren’t the normal Sun session players, and nor were they the musicians who normally played in Lewis’ band. Instead, Lewis was backed by Sidney Stokes on bass and Larry Linn on drums — according to Lewis, he never met those two people again after they finished recording. But as the work proceeded, Jerry Lee became concerned. “Great Balls of Fire”? Didn’t that sound a bit… Satanic? And people did say that rock and roll was the Devil’s music. He ended up getting into an angry, rambling, theological discussion with Sam Phillips, which was recorded and which gives an insight into how difficult Lewis must have been to work with, but also how tortured he was — he truly believed in the existence of a physical Hell, and that he was destined to go there because of his music: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Phillips, Bible discussion] Sam Phillips, who appears to have had the patience of a saint, eventually talked Lewis down and persuaded him to get back to making music. When “Great Balls of Fire” came out, with a cover of Hank Williams’ ballad “You Win Again” on the B-side, it was an immediate success. It sold over a million copies in the first ten days it was out, and it became a classic that has been covered by everyone from Dolly Parton to Aerosmith. It’s one of the records that defines 1950s rock and roll music, and it firmly established Jerry Lee Lewis as one of the greatest stars of rock and roll, if not the greatest. Jack and Sam kept recording everything they could from Lewis, getting a backlog of recordings that would be released for decades to come — everything from Hank Williams covers to the old blues number “Big Legged Woman”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Big Legged Woman”] But they decided that they didn’t want to mess with a winning formula, and so the next record that they put out was another Otis Blackwell song, “Breathless”. This time, the band was the normal Sun studio drummer Jimmy Van Eaton, Billy Lee Riley on guitar — Riley was also furious with Sam Phillips for the way he was concentrating on Lewis’ career at the expense of everyone else’s, but he was still working on sessions for Phillips — and Jerry Lee’s cousin J.W. Brown on bass. J.W. was his full name — it didn’t stand for anything — and he was the regular touring bass player in Lewis’ band. “Breathless” was very much in the same style as “Great Balls of Fire”, if perhaps not *quite* so good: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Breathless”] To promote the record, Jud Phillips, Sam’s brother, came up with a great promotional scheme. Dick Clark, the presenter of American Bandstand, had another show, the Dick Clark Show, which was also called Dick Clark’s Saturday Night Beechnut Show because it was sponsored by Beechnut chewing gum. Clark had already had Jerry Lee on his show once, and he’d been a hit — Clark could bring him back on the show, and they could announce that if you sent Sun Records five Beechnut wrappers and fifty cents for postage and packing, you could get a signed copy of the new record. The fifty cents would be more than the postage and packing would cost, of course, and Sun would split the profits with Dick Clark. Sun bought an autograph stamp to stamp copies of the record with, hired a few extra temporary staff members to help them get the records posted, and made the arrangements with Dick Clark and his sponsors. The result was extraordinary — in some parts of the country, stores ran out of Beechnut gum altogether. More than thirty-eight thousand copies of the single were sent out to eager gum-chewers. It was around this time that Jerry Lee went on the Alan Freed tour that we mentioned last week, with Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Larry Williams, the Chantels, and eleven other acts. The tour later became legendary not so much for the music — though that was great — but for the personal disputes between Lewis and Berry. There were two separate issues at stake. The first was Elmo Lewis, Jerry’s father. Elmo had a habit of using racial slurs, and of threatening to fight anyone, especially black people, who he thought was disrespecting him. At one show on the tour, a dispute about parking spaces between Berry and Lewis led to the elder Lewis chasing Berry three blocks, waving a knife, and shouting “You know what we do with cats like you down in Ferriday? We chop the heads off them and throw it in a lake.” Apparently, by the next day, Elmo and Chuck were sat with each other at breakfast, the best of friends. The other issue was Berry’s belief that he, rather than Lewis, should be headlining the shows. He managed to persuade the promoters of this, and this led Lewis to try more and more outrageous stunts on stage to try to upstage Berry. The legend has it that at one show he went so far as to set his piano on fire at the climax of “Great Balls of Fire”, and then walk off stage challenging Berry to follow that. Some versions of the story have him using a racial slur there, too, but the story in whatever form seems to be apocryphal. It does, though, sum up the atmosphere between the two. That said, while Lewis and Berry fought incessantly, Berry was one of the few people to whom Lewis has ever shown any respect at all. Partly that’s because of Lewis’ admiration for Berry’s songwriting — he’s called Berry “the Hank Williams of rock and roll” before now, and for someone who admires Williams as much as Lewis does that’s about the highest imaginable praise. But also, Lewis and his father were both always very careful not to do anything that would lead to word of the feud getting back to his mother, because his mother had repeatedly told him that Chuck Berry was the greatest rock and roller in the world — Elvis was good, she said, and obviously so was her son, but neither of them were a patch on Chuck. She would have been furious with him, and would definitely have taken Chuck’s side. After the tour, Jerry Lee recorded another song for a film he was going to appear in. This time, it was the title song for a terribly shlocky attempt at drama, called High School Confidential — a film that dealt with the very serious and weighty issue of marijuana use among teenagers, and is widely regarded as one of the worst films ever made. The theme music, though, was pretty good: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “High School Confidential”] That came out on the nineteenth of May, 1958, and immediately started rising up the charts. Two days later, Jerry Lee headed out on what was meant to be a triumphal tour of the UK, solidifying him as the biggest, most important, rock and roll star in the world. And that is when everything came crashing down. Because it was when he and his entourage landed in the UK, and the press saw the thirteen-year-old girl with him, and asked who she was, that it became public knowledge he had married his thirteen-year-old cousin Myra. And here we get to something I’ve been dreading talking about since I decided on this project. There is simply no way to talk about Jerry Lee Lewis’ marriage to Myra Gale Brown which doesn’t erase Brown’s experience, doesn’t excuse Lewis’ behaviour, explains the cultural context in which it happened, and doesn’t minimise child abuse — which, and let’s be clear about this right now, this was. If you take from *anything* that I say after this that I think there is any possible excuse, any justification, for a man in his twenties having sex with a thirteen-year-old girl — let alone a thirteen-year-old girl in his own family, to whom he was an authority figure — then I have *badly* failed to get my meaning across. What Lewis did was, simply, wrong. It’s important to say that, because something that applies both to this episode and to the downfall of Chuck Berry, which we’ll be looking at in the next episode, is the way that both have been framed by all the traditional histories of rock and roll. If you read almost anything about rock and roll history, what you see when it gets to 1958 is “and here rock and roll nearly died, because of the prurient attitudes of a few prudes, who were out to destroy the careers of these new exciting rock and rollers because they hated the threat they posed to their traditional way of life”. That is simply not the case. Yes, there was a great deal of establishment opposition to rock and roll music, but what happened to Jerry Lee Lewis wasn’t some conspiracy of blue-nosed prudes. It was people getting angry, for entirely understandable reasons, about a man doing something that was absolutely, unquestionably, just *wrong*. And the fact that this has been minimised by rock and roll histories says a lot about the culture around rock journalism, none of it good. Now, that said, something that needs to be understood here is that Lewis and most of the people round him didn’t see him as doing anything particularly wrong. In the culture of the Southern US at the time, it was normal for very young girls to be married, often to older men. By his own lights, he was doing nothing wrong. His first marriage was when he was sixteen — Myra was his third wife, and he was still legally married to his second when he married her — and his own younger sister had recently got married, aged twelve. Likewise, marrying one’s cousin was the norm within Jerry Lee’s extended family, where pretty much everyone whose surname was Lewis, Swaggart, or Gilley was married to someone else whose surname was Lewis, Swaggart, or Gilley. But I don’t believe we have to judge people by their own standards, or at least not wholly so. There were many other horrific aspects to the culture of the Southern states at the time, and just because, for example, the people who defended segregation believed they were doing nothing wrong and were behaving according to their own culture, doesn’t mean we can’t judge them harshly. And it’s not as if everyone in Jerry Lee’s own culture was completely accepting of this. They’d married in secret, and when Myra’s father — Jerry Lee’s cousin and bass player, J.W. Brown — found out about it, he grabbed his shotgun and went out with every intention of murdering Jerry Lee, and it was only Sam Phillips who persuaded him that maybe that would be a bad idea. The British tour, which was meant to last six weeks, ended up lasting only three days. Jerry Lee and his band and family cancelled the tour and returned home, where they expected everyone to accept them again, and for things to carry on as normal. They didn’t. The record company tried to capitalise on the controversy, and also to defuse the anger towards Lewis. At the time, there was a craze for novelty records which interpolated bits of spoken word dialogue with excerpts of rock and roll hits, sparked off by a record called “The Flying Saucer”: [Excerpt: Buchanan and Goodman, “The Flying Saucer”] Jack Clement put together a similar thing, as a joke for the Sun Records staff, called “The Return of Jerry Lee”, having an interviewer, the DJ George Klein, ask Jerry Lee questions about the recent controversy, and having Jerry Lee “answer” them in clips from his records. Sam Phillips loved it, and insisted on releasing it as a single. [Excerpt: George and Louis, “The Return of Jerry Lee”] Unsurprisingly, that did not have the effect that was hoped, and did not defuse the situation one iota — especially since some of the jokes in the record were leering ones about Myra’s physical attractiveness — the attractiveness, remember, of a child. For that reason, I will *not* be putting the full version of that particular track in the Mixcloud mix of songs I excerpted in this episode. This is where we say goodbye to Sam Phillips. With Jerry Lee Lewis’ career destroyed, and with all his other major acts having left him, Phillips’ brief reign as the most important record producer and company owner in the USA was over. He carried on running Sun records for a few years, and eventually sold it to Shelby Singleton. Singleton is a complicated figure, but one thing he definitely did right was exploiting Sun’s back catalogue — in their four-year rockabilly heyday Sam Phillips and Jack Clement had recorded literally thousands of unreleased songs by Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, Conway Twitty, Charlie Rich, Billy Lee Riley, and many more. Those tracks sat in Sun’s vaults for more than a decade, but once Singleton took over the company pretty much every scrap of material from Sun’s vaults saw release, especially once a British reissue label called Charly employed Martin Hawkins and Colin Escott, two young music obsessives, to put out systematic releases of Sun’s rockabilly and blues archives. The more of that material came out, the more obvious it became that Sam Phillips had tapped into something very, very special at Sun Records, and that throughout the fifties one small studio in Memphis had produced staggering recordings on a daily basis. By the time Sam Phillips died, in 2003, aged eighty, he was widely regarded as one of the most important people in the history of music. Jerry Lee Lewis, meanwhile, spent several years trying and failing to have a hit, but slowly rebuilding his live audiences, playing small venues and winning back his audience one crowd at a time. By the late 1960s he was in a position to have a comeback, and “Another Place, Another Time” went to number four on the country charts, and started a run of country hits that lasted for the best part of a decade: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Another Place, Another Time”] Myra divorced Jerry Lee around that time, citing physical and emotional abuse. She is now known as Myra Williams, has been happily married for thirty-six years, and works as a real-estate agent. Jerry Lee has, so far, married four more times. His fourth and fifth wives died in mysterious circumstances — his fourth drowned shortly before the divorce went through, and the fifth died in circumstances that are still unclear, and several have raised suspicions that Jerry Lee killed her. It’s not impossible. The man known as the Killer did once shoot his bass player in the chest in the late seventies — he insists that was an accident — and was arrested outside Graceland, drunk and with a gun, yelling for Elvis Presley to come out and settle who was the real king. Jerry Lee Lewis is still alive, married to his seventh wife, who is Myra’s brother’s ex-wife. Last year, he and his wife sued his daughter, though the lawsuit was thrown out of court. He’s eighty-four years old, still performs, and according to recent interviews, worries if he is going to go to Heaven or to Hell when he dies. I imagine I would worry too, in his place.
Episode sixty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Great Balls of Fire" by Jerry Lee Lewis. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. This one comes with a bit of a content warning, as while it has nothing explicit, it deals with his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Rumble" by Link Wray. ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode (with one exception, which I mention in the podcast). The Spark That Survived by Myra Lewis Williams is Myra's autobiography, and tells her side of the story, which has tended to be ignored in favour of her famous husband's side. I'm relying heavily on Sam Phillips: the Man Who Invented Rock and Roll by Peter Guralnick for all the episodes dealing with Phillips and Sun Records. Books on Jerry Lee Lewis tend to be very flawed, as the authors all tend to think they're Faulkner rather than giving the facts. This one by Rick Bragg is better than most. There are many budget CDs containing Lewis' pre-1962 work. This set seems as good an option as any. And this ten-CD box set contains ninety Sun singles in chronological order, starting with "Whole Lotta Shakin'" and covering the Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins records discussed here. There are few better ways to get an idea of Lewis' work in context. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Erratum: I say “Glad All Over” was written by Aaron Schroeder. In fact it was co-written by Schroeder, Roy Bennett, and Sid Tepper. Transcript We've looked before at the rise of Jerry Lee Lewis, but in this episode we're going to talk about his fall. And for that reason I have to put a content warning at the beginning here. While I'm not going to say anything explicit at all, this episode has to deal with events that I, and most of my listeners, would refer to as child sexual abuse, though the child in question still, more than sixty years later, doesn't see them that way, and I don't want to say anything that imposes my framing over hers. If you might find this subject distressing, I suggest reading the transcript before listening, or just skipping this episode. It also deals, towards the end, with domestic violence. Indeed, if you're affected by these issues, I would also suggest skipping the next episode, on "Johnny B. Goode", and coming back on February the second for "Yakety Yak" by the Coasters. We're hitting a point in the history of rock and roll where, for the first time, rock and roll begins its decline in popularity. We'll see from this point on that every few years there's a change in musical fashions, and a new set of artists take over from the most popular artists of the previous period. And in the case of the first rock and roll era, that takeover was largely traumatic. There were a number of deaths, some prosecutions -- and in the case of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, scandals. In general, I try not to make these podcast episodes be about the horrific acts that some of the men involved have committed. This is a podcast about music, not about horrible men doing horrible things. But in the case of Jerry Lee Lewis, he was one of the very small number of men to have actually faced consequences for his actions, and so it has to be discussed. I promise I will try to do so as sensitively as possible. Although sensitivity is not the word that comes to mind when one thinks of Jerry Lee Lewis, generally... [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Great Balls of Fire"] When we left Jerry Lee Lewis, he had just had his first really major success, with "Whole Lotta Shakin'". He was on top of the world, and the most promising artist in rock and roll music. With Elvis about to be drafted into the army, the role of biggest rock and roll star was wide open, and Lewis intended to take over Elvis' mantle. There was going to be a new king of rock and roll. It didn't quite work out that way. "Whole Lotta Shakin'" was such a massive hit that on the basis of that one record, Jerry Lee was invited to perform his next single in a film called Jamboree. This was one of the many exploitation films that were being put out starring popular DJs -- this one starred Dick Clark, rather than Alan Freed, who'd appeared in most of them. They were the kind of thing that made Elvis' films look like masterpieces of the cinema, and tended to involve a bunch of kids who wanted to put a dance on at their local school, or similar interchangeable plots. The reason people went to see them wasn't the plot, but the performances by rock and roll musicians. Fats Domino was in most of these, and he was in this one, singing his minor single "Wait and See". There were also a few performances by musicians who weren't strictly rock and roll, and were from an older generation, but who were close enough that the kids would probably accept them. Slim Whitman appeared, as did Count Basie, with Joe Williams as lead vocalist:… [Excerpt: Joe Williams, "I Don't Like You No More"] The film also featured the only known footage of Lewis Lymon and the Teenchords, who we talked about briefly last week. More pertinently to this story, it featured Carl Perkins: [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, "Glad All Over"] That song was one of the few that Perkins recorded which wasn't written by him. Instead, it was written by Aaron Schroeder, who had co-written the non-Leiber-and-Stoller songs for Jailhouse Rock, and who also appeared in this film in a cameo role as himself. The song was provided to Sam Phillips by Hill and Range, who were Phillips' publishing partners as well as being Elvis'. It was to be Carl Perkins' last record for Sun -- Perkins had finally had enough of Sam Phillips being more interested in Jerry Lee Lewis. Even little things were getting to him -- Jerry Lee's records were credited to "Jerry Lee Lewis and his Pumping Piano". Why did Carl's records never say anything about Carl's guitar? Sam promised him that the records would start to credit Carl Perkins as "the rocking guitar man", but it was too late -- Perkins and Johnny Cash both made an agreement with Columbia Records on November the first 1957 that when their current contracts with Sun expired, they'd start recording for the new label. Cash was in a similar situation to Perkins -- Jack Clement had now taken over production of Cash's records, and while Cash was writing some of his best material, songs like "Big River" that remain classics, Clement was making him record songs Clement had written himself, like "Ballad of a Teenage Queen": [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "Ballad of a Teenage Queen"] It's quite easy to see from that, which he recorded in mid-November, why Cash left Sun. While Cash would go on to have greater success at Columbia, Perkins wouldn't. And ironically it was possible that he had had one more opportunity to have a hit follow-up to "Blue Suede Shoes" at Sun, and he'd passed on it. According to Perkins, he was given a choice of two songs to perform in Jamboree, both of them published by Hill and Range, but "I thought both of them was junk!" and he'd chosen the one that was slightly less awful -- that's not how other people involved remember it, but he would always claim that he had been offered the song that Jerry Lee Lewis performed, and turned down "Great Balls of Fire": [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Great Balls of Fire"] That song was one that both Lewis and Phillips were immediately convinced would be a hit as soon as they heard the demo. Sam Phillips' main worry was how they were going to improve on the demo by the song's writer, Otis Blackwell, which he thought was pretty much perfect as it was. We've met Otis Blackwell briefly before -- he was a New York-based songwriter, one of a relatively small number of black people who managed to get work as a professional songwriter for one of the big publishing companies. Blackwell had written "Fever" for Little Willie John, "You're the Apple of My Eye" for Frankie Valli, and two massive hits for Elvis -- "Don't Be Cruel" and "All Shook Up". We don't have access to his demo of "Great Balls of Fire", but in the seventies he recorded an album called "These are My Songs", featuring many of the hits he'd written for other people, and it's possible that the version of "Great Balls of Fire" on that album gives some idea of what the demo that so impressed Phillips sounded like: [Excerpt: Otis Blackwell, "Great Balls of Fire"] "Great Balls of Fire" seems to be the first thing to have been tailored specifically for the persona that Lewis had created with his previous hit. It's a refinement of the "Whole Lotta Shakin'" formula, but it has a few differences that give the song far more impact. Most notably, where "Whole Lotta Shakin'" starts off with a gently rolling piano intro and only later picks up steam: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Whole Lotta Shakin'"] "Great Balls of Fire" has a much more dynamic opening -- one that sets the tone for the whole record with its stop-start exclamations: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Great Balls of Fire"] Although that stop-start intro is one of the few signs in the record that point to the song having been possibly offered to Perkins -- it's very reminiscent of the intro to "Blue Suede Shoes": [Excerpt: Carl Perkins, "Blue Suede Shoes"] I could imagine Perkins recording the song in the "Blue Suede Shoes" manner and having a hit with it, though not as big a hit as Lewis eventually had. On the other hand I can't imagine Lewis turning "Glad All Over", fun as it is, into anything even remotely worthy of following up "Whole Lotta Shakin'". Almost straight away they managed to cut a version of "Great Balls of Fire" that was suitable for the film, but it wasn't right for a hit record. They needed something that was absolutely perfect. After having sent the film version off, they spent several days working on getting the perfect version cut -- paying particular attention to that stop-start intro, which the musicians had to time perfectly for it not to come out as a sloppy mess. Oddly, the musicians on the track weren't the normal Sun session players, and nor were they the musicians who normally played in Lewis' band. Instead, Lewis was backed by Sidney Stokes on bass and Larry Linn on drums -- according to Lewis, he never met those two people again after they finished recording. But as the work proceeded, Jerry Lee became concerned. "Great Balls of Fire"? Didn't that sound a bit... Satanic? And people did say that rock and roll was the Devil's music. He ended up getting into an angry, rambling, theological discussion with Sam Phillips, which was recorded and which gives an insight into how difficult Lewis must have been to work with, but also how tortured he was -- he truly believed in the existence of a physical Hell, and that he was destined to go there because of his music: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Phillips, Bible discussion] Sam Phillips, who appears to have had the patience of a saint, eventually talked Lewis down and persuaded him to get back to making music. When "Great Balls of Fire" came out, with a cover of Hank Williams' ballad "You Win Again" on the B-side, it was an immediate success. It sold over a million copies in the first ten days it was out, and it became a classic that has been covered by everyone from Dolly Parton to Aerosmith. It's one of the records that defines 1950s rock and roll music, and it firmly established Jerry Lee Lewis as one of the greatest stars of rock and roll, if not the greatest. Jack and Sam kept recording everything they could from Lewis, getting a backlog of recordings that would be released for decades to come -- everything from Hank Williams covers to the old blues number "Big Legged Woman": [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Big Legged Woman"] But they decided that they didn't want to mess with a winning formula, and so the next record that they put out was another Otis Blackwell song, "Breathless". This time, the band was the normal Sun studio drummer Jimmy Van Eaton, Billy Lee Riley on guitar -- Riley was also furious with Sam Phillips for the way he was concentrating on Lewis' career at the expense of everyone else's, but he was still working on sessions for Phillips -- and Jerry Lee's cousin J.W. Brown on bass. J.W. was his full name -- it didn't stand for anything -- and he was the regular touring bass player in Lewis' band. "Breathless" was very much in the same style as "Great Balls of Fire", if perhaps not *quite* so good: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Breathless"] To promote the record, Jud Phillips, Sam's brother, came up with a great promotional scheme. Dick Clark, the presenter of American Bandstand, had another show, the Dick Clark Show, which was also called Dick Clark's Saturday Night Beechnut Show because it was sponsored by Beechnut chewing gum. Clark had already had Jerry Lee on his show once, and he'd been a hit -- Clark could bring him back on the show, and they could announce that if you sent Sun Records five Beechnut wrappers and fifty cents for postage and packing, you could get a signed copy of the new record. The fifty cents would be more than the postage and packing would cost, of course, and Sun would split the profits with Dick Clark. Sun bought an autograph stamp to stamp copies of the record with, hired a few extra temporary staff members to help them get the records posted, and made the arrangements with Dick Clark and his sponsors. The result was extraordinary -- in some parts of the country, stores ran out of Beechnut gum altogether. More than thirty-eight thousand copies of the single were sent out to eager gum-chewers. It was around this time that Jerry Lee went on the Alan Freed tour that we mentioned last week, with Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Larry Williams, the Chantels, and eleven other acts. The tour later became legendary not so much for the music -- though that was great -- but for the personal disputes between Lewis and Berry. There were two separate issues at stake. The first was Elmo Lewis, Jerry's father. Elmo had a habit of using racial slurs, and of threatening to fight anyone, especially black people, who he thought was disrespecting him. At one show on the tour, a dispute about parking spaces between Berry and Lewis led to the elder Lewis chasing Berry three blocks, waving a knife, and shouting "You know what we do with cats like you down in Ferriday? We chop the heads off them and throw it in a lake." Apparently, by the next day, Elmo and Chuck were sat with each other at breakfast, the best of friends. The other issue was Berry's belief that he, rather than Lewis, should be headlining the shows. He managed to persuade the promoters of this, and this led Lewis to try more and more outrageous stunts on stage to try to upstage Berry. The legend has it that at one show he went so far as to set his piano on fire at the climax of "Great Balls of Fire", and then walk off stage challenging Berry to follow that. Some versions of the story have him using a racial slur there, too, but the story in whatever form seems to be apocryphal. It does, though, sum up the atmosphere between the two. That said, while Lewis and Berry fought incessantly, Berry was one of the few people to whom Lewis has ever shown any respect at all. Partly that's because of Lewis' admiration for Berry's songwriting -- he's called Berry "the Hank Williams of rock and roll" before now, and for someone who admires Williams as much as Lewis does that's about the highest imaginable praise. But also, Lewis and his father were both always very careful not to do anything that would lead to word of the feud getting back to his mother, because his mother had repeatedly told him that Chuck Berry was the greatest rock and roller in the world -- Elvis was good, she said, and obviously so was her son, but neither of them were a patch on Chuck. She would have been furious with him, and would definitely have taken Chuck's side. After the tour, Jerry Lee recorded another song for a film he was going to appear in. This time, it was the title song for a terribly shlocky attempt at drama, called High School Confidential -- a film that dealt with the very serious and weighty issue of marijuana use among teenagers, and is widely regarded as one of the worst films ever made. The theme music, though, was pretty good: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "High School Confidential"] That came out on the nineteenth of May, 1958, and immediately started rising up the charts. Two days later, Jerry Lee headed out on what was meant to be a triumphal tour of the UK, solidifying him as the biggest, most important, rock and roll star in the world. And that is when everything came crashing down. Because it was when he and his entourage landed in the UK, and the press saw the thirteen-year-old girl with him, and asked who she was, that it became public knowledge he had married his thirteen-year-old cousin Myra. And here we get to something I've been dreading talking about since I decided on this project. There is simply no way to talk about Jerry Lee Lewis' marriage to Myra Gale Brown which doesn't erase Brown's experience, doesn't excuse Lewis' behaviour, explains the cultural context in which it happened, and doesn't minimise child abuse -- which, and let's be clear about this right now, this was. If you take from *anything* that I say after this that I think there is any possible excuse, any justification, for a man in his twenties having sex with a thirteen-year-old girl -- let alone a thirteen-year-old girl in his own family, to whom he was an authority figure -- then I have *badly* failed to get my meaning across. What Lewis did was, simply, wrong. It's important to say that, because something that applies both to this episode and to the downfall of Chuck Berry, which we'll be looking at in the next episode, is the way that both have been framed by all the traditional histories of rock and roll. If you read almost anything about rock and roll history, what you see when it gets to 1958 is "and here rock and roll nearly died, because of the prurient attitudes of a few prudes, who were out to destroy the careers of these new exciting rock and rollers because they hated the threat they posed to their traditional way of life". That is simply not the case. Yes, there was a great deal of establishment opposition to rock and roll music, but what happened to Jerry Lee Lewis wasn't some conspiracy of blue-nosed prudes. It was people getting angry, for entirely understandable reasons, about a man doing something that was absolutely, unquestionably, just *wrong*. And the fact that this has been minimised by rock and roll histories says a lot about the culture around rock journalism, none of it good. Now, that said, something that needs to be understood here is that Lewis and most of the people round him didn't see him as doing anything particularly wrong. In the culture of the Southern US at the time, it was normal for very young girls to be married, often to older men. By his own lights, he was doing nothing wrong. His first marriage was when he was sixteen -- Myra was his third wife, and he was still legally married to his second when he married her -- and his own younger sister had recently got married, aged twelve. Likewise, marrying one's cousin was the norm within Jerry Lee's extended family, where pretty much everyone whose surname was Lewis, Swaggart, or Gilley was married to someone else whose surname was Lewis, Swaggart, or Gilley. But I don't believe we have to judge people by their own standards, or at least not wholly so. There were many other horrific aspects to the culture of the Southern states at the time, and just because, for example, the people who defended segregation believed they were doing nothing wrong and were behaving according to their own culture, doesn't mean we can't judge them harshly. And it's not as if everyone in Jerry Lee's own culture was completely accepting of this. They'd married in secret, and when Myra's father -- Jerry Lee's cousin and bass player, J.W. Brown -- found out about it, he grabbed his shotgun and went out with every intention of murdering Jerry Lee, and it was only Sam Phillips who persuaded him that maybe that would be a bad idea. The British tour, which was meant to last six weeks, ended up lasting only three days. Jerry Lee and his band and family cancelled the tour and returned home, where they expected everyone to accept them again, and for things to carry on as normal. They didn't. The record company tried to capitalise on the controversy, and also to defuse the anger towards Lewis. At the time, there was a craze for novelty records which interpolated bits of spoken word dialogue with excerpts of rock and roll hits, sparked off by a record called "The Flying Saucer": [Excerpt: Buchanan and Goodman, "The Flying Saucer"] Jack Clement put together a similar thing, as a joke for the Sun Records staff, called "The Return of Jerry Lee", having an interviewer, the DJ George Klein, ask Jerry Lee questions about the recent controversy, and having Jerry Lee "answer" them in clips from his records. Sam Phillips loved it, and insisted on releasing it as a single. [Excerpt: George and Louis, "The Return of Jerry Lee"] Unsurprisingly, that did not have the effect that was hoped, and did not defuse the situation one iota -- especially since some of the jokes in the record were leering ones about Myra's physical attractiveness -- the attractiveness, remember, of a child. For that reason, I will *not* be putting the full version of that particular track in the Mixcloud mix of songs I excerpted in this episode. This is where we say goodbye to Sam Phillips. With Jerry Lee Lewis' career destroyed, and with all his other major acts having left him, Phillips' brief reign as the most important record producer and company owner in the USA was over. He carried on running Sun records for a few years, and eventually sold it to Shelby Singleton. Singleton is a complicated figure, but one thing he definitely did right was exploiting Sun's back catalogue -- in their four-year rockabilly heyday Sam Phillips and Jack Clement had recorded literally thousands of unreleased songs by Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, Conway Twitty, Charlie Rich, Billy Lee Riley, and many more. Those tracks sat in Sun's vaults for more than a decade, but once Singleton took over the company pretty much every scrap of material from Sun's vaults saw release, especially once a British reissue label called Charly employed Martin Hawkins and Colin Escott, two young music obsessives, to put out systematic releases of Sun's rockabilly and blues archives. The more of that material came out, the more obvious it became that Sam Phillips had tapped into something very, very special at Sun Records, and that throughout the fifties one small studio in Memphis had produced staggering recordings on a daily basis. By the time Sam Phillips died, in 2003, aged eighty, he was widely regarded as one of the most important people in the history of music. Jerry Lee Lewis, meanwhile, spent several years trying and failing to have a hit, but slowly rebuilding his live audiences, playing small venues and winning back his audience one crowd at a time. By the late 1960s he was in a position to have a comeback, and "Another Place, Another Time" went to number four on the country charts, and started a run of country hits that lasted for the best part of a decade: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Another Place, Another Time"] Myra divorced Jerry Lee around that time, citing physical and emotional abuse. She is now known as Myra Williams, has been happily married for thirty-six years, and works as a real-estate agent. Jerry Lee has, so far, married four more times. His fourth and fifth wives died in mysterious circumstances -- his fourth drowned shortly before the divorce went through, and the fifth died in circumstances that are still unclear, and several have raised suspicions that Jerry Lee killed her. It's not impossible. The man known as the Killer did once shoot his bass player in the chest in the late seventies -- he insists that was an accident -- and was arrested outside Graceland, drunk and with a gun, yelling for Elvis Presley to come out and settle who was the real king. Jerry Lee Lewis is still alive, married to his seventh wife, who is Myra's brother's ex-wife. Last year, he and his wife sued his daughter, though the lawsuit was thrown out of court. He's eighty-four years old, still performs, and according to recent interviews, worries if he is going to go to Heaven or to Hell when he dies. I imagine I would worry too, in his place.
杰克•阿诺德 Jack Arnold推荐片单:《宇宙访客》 It Came From Outer Space (1953)《玻璃情网》 The Glass Web (1953)《黑湖妖潭》 Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)《不可思议的收缩人》 The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957)《空间小孩》 The Space Children (1958)《中学机密》 High School Confidential! (1958)《鼠吼奇谈》 The Mouse That Roared (1959)
Home Impodcast: A Home Improvement TV Show, Tim Allen, and '90s Podcast
This week on Home Impodcast…we’re talking High School Confidential. Topics discussed include a few HI-related articles, siblings, and Christmas movies. The episode is available for download here. ALSO! We’re lowering the price on our Patreon tiers throughout the month. Donate a $1 per month to hear our bonus episodes. We really can’t make this any … Continue reading Episode 114 – High School Confidential
Join the Brothers as we discuss one of the original and first rock n roll bad boys!Rock and Roll may be the work of the devil, but we aren't here to talk about the devil, today we are here to talk about The Killer! One of the earliest and biggest rock and roll showmen of all time. Maybe some of these songs by him sound familiar to you....."Whole lotta shaking goin on, High School Confidential, Wild one, Great Balls of Fire!...... That's right, today are are talking about Jerry Lee Lewis! Sometimes he is considered and referred to as a Wild Man, but is he more #Wildman or more #MelHallofFame!? Thank you everyone for listening!Be good, stay safe and laugh at the dark stuff!Don't forget to share, rate and 5 *review on itunes!**Movie References**references Mr Deeds Final Destination HeavyWeights Tropic Thunder Happy Gilmore
All ukulele covers of rockabilly classics and a spotlight on rockabilly legend and ukulele virtuoso singer/songwriter Ron Hargrave who co-wrote High School Confidential with Jerry Lee Lewis. An all ukulele playlist to celebrate this integral part to the history of rock and roll.
Doug Ross and Alex Baskin are Executive Producer of Bravo’s hit franchise The Real Housewives of Orange County and the spinoffs The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and Vanderpump Rules, as well as the E! format Botched and it’s spinoff Botched by Nature. Other Evolution credits include ABC Family’s Beverly Hills Nannies, WE’s critically acclaimed High School Confidential, Disney’s hidden camera comedy, Code: 9, MTV’s comedy Yo Momma, truth’s action drama Ocean Force and TLC’s long-running Clean Sweep and 10 Years Younger. Evolution Media: http://evolutionusa.comReality Life with Kate Casey www.loveandknuckles.comFacebook: facebook.com/loveandknucklesTwitter: @katecaseyInstagram: @katecaseyca See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Team Tiger Awesome are back for another round of ridiculous conversation! Nick Mundy, Clint Gage, and Michael Truly join Y2J to reveal the most embarrassing stories about their highschool years. It’s all covered – terrible highschool haircuts, band camp, bullying, first kisses, hot teachers, worst teachers, house parties, and fights (both real and imagined). #NothingMattersButItsAllVeryImportant
Team Tiger Awesome are back for another round of ridiculous conversation! Nick Mundy, Clint Gage, and Michael Truly join Y2J to reveal the most embarrassing stories about their highschool years. It's all covered – terrible highschool haircuts, band camp, bullying, first kisses, hot teachers, worst teachers, house parties, and fights (both real and imagined). #NothingMattersButItsAllVeryImportant
[Life After Downton Episode 3] - The damsels dive into the world of teen shows with special guest Karen Draper who is a YA Author and writes about teen shows on her tumblr. We compare the shows about the rich kids with the shows about the dorks, examine the sexual politics, gush about the bad boys, and decipher the timeless-ness of the themes and why they still appeal to us as adult women. The podcast opens with 15 minutes devoted to our discussion on Julian's two latest projects: Belgravia and Dr. Thorne. Pour some cheap vodka into a Diet Coke and open a bag of Cheetos because we're going back to high-school! Links: Karen on Twitter https://twitter.com/kurenable Karen on Tumblr http://betweenthemap.tumblr.com/ Loving Bad Boys http://www.worshipthefandom.com/content/in-defense-of-rory-jess-and-the-girls-who-love-bad-boys-1
Singer, songwriter Carole Pope is known for pushing the boundaries of sexuality, sexual politics and the status quo. Pope co-wrote the hit song “High School Confidential” for her band Rough Trade in 1980. It was one of the most sexually explicit songs in pop music. We talk about her songwriting process, her most recent recording "Music for Lesbians" and her book "Anti-Diva" a no-holds-barred look at her adventures in the music scene – on the concert stage, in the recording studio, and in the bedroom.
downloadon iTunesThere were times in this podcast when th dead air stretched out before us like a highway cutting through th Canadian wilderness. Billy Ray Stupendous and I were cool w/ it as we emulated th chillness of our esteemed Canadian guests, Toronto's Phil B and Winnipeg's Michael Dwilow, who hold court on th greatness, th bashfulness, th emotional weirdness, and th relative invisibility of th land known to people in my neighbourhood as "Canadia". Listen as Billy and I indulge in a nostalgic callback to our shared coming-of-age to Allan Moyle's Pump Up th Volume (1990). (Yes, Moyle is Canadian.) Learn th fate of th Loyalists from th American Revolution. Slap yr own head in astonishment as one of th world's most beloved superheroes is outed. Picture Chester Brown's m-bation technique. Surrender to th feeling that something's off about a famous person you admire -- that's right, it's because they're from Canadia Table of contents:00:00 "Everybody Knows" performed by Leonard Cohen05:29 A pair of killer Canadians | What the fuck is going on in Ottawa!? | serious Canadian terrorism 09:24 Upsetting our thesis | size comparison: Toronto vs NOLA | surfing/Slurpee capital of th world 13:06 The feet in Vancouver | Twin Peaks/Canada crossover 16:16 What are the signifiers of Canadian culture? | long stretches of non-civilization | default: hockey 20:58 Michael gets frozen in time | burger culture 24:08 Canadian Thanksgiving vs Canadian Halloween | Canada's Mexico | northern superiority | Canadian jail 29:33 MZA's Canadian gaydar | gun control & diversity | the Memphis of Canada 35:19 Canada's treatment of its aborigines 36:55 How do you feel bout Québécois separatism? | How do you feel bout the Queen of England? 39:55 Th Canadian/American crossover | dual credibility | unassumingness/bashfulness/humility | wet split beaver 43:11 Th Canadian reputation for comedy | shoutout to Crime Wave (John Paizs 1985) | speculations on killer Canadians 46:27 Th Lowest of th Low | Barenaked Ladies 49:01 calibrating yr Canadian gaydar: Jim Jarmusch | Twin Peaks | Canadian selfhood eludes me | Jodie Foster 54:33 Famous Canadian authors 56:19 Rob Ford 57:42 MZA, what is it that you find weird bout Canada? | Coen Bros & Minnesota | th cinematic Canadian spectrum | Guy Maddin 1:04:07 Michael Dwilow's historical theory re Loyalists from th American Revolution migrating to Canada | Phil's Canadian body language | th 'Nuck/flippy crossover 1:06:55 What to do for fun in Winnipeg | invitations to our respective cities 1:08:49 America: guns & diabetes | Phil visits America | Torontonians vs Winnipeggers1:12:11 Who is yr favourite Canadian ? | David Cronenberg | little Canadian in-jokes | Chester Brown | Cronenberg again1:21:49 Canadian rebels who have gotten adopted/co-opted by official culture: Leonard Cohen & Louis Riel | how Chester Brown m-bates1:27:00 List of famous Canadians: hot or not | Superman is half-Canadian (!?) | Clifford Olson | James Randi | Pierre Trudeau | Big Bear | Michael's dad was a fish pathologist1:38:58 Billy issues an apology1:39:16 Famous Canadian actors | th shape of Pamela Anderson's pussy 1:41:55 Good-bye to our Canadians | Roger Ebert | Canadian selfhood still eludes me | Rough Trade's "High School Confidential" etc1:46:39 Bonus Track: male feminist Canadian anthem
High School Confidential, The Scientific Explanation Of Despair, Oaken Tower, Xiphiidae, Dogbox, David Lackner, Spare Death Icon, Egg Sac, Emeralds and Aaron Dilloway, Pine Smoke Lodge, and Burning Star Core
High School Confidential, The Scientific Explanation Of Despair, Oaken Tower, Xiphiidae, Dogbox, David Lackner, Spare Death Icon, Egg Sac, Emeralds and Aaron Dilloway, Pine Smoke Lodge, and Burning Star Core
We're pretty busy these days with the holidays right around the corner....but managed to craft another 58 minutes of podcast with 45's, 78's and LP cuts from the quasi-meritricious vinyl vaults located here in Boonton, NJ.....We found a copy of XTC's Dave Gregory's mega-rare 22 track-made-for-friends and relatives "Remounds" and sample 2 cuts from it...So kick off you shoes, get a "cuppa" your favorite poison and "dig the vacuum 'cause tomorrow is a drag, man, a king size drag......" if I might quote the famous for 15 seconds Philippa Fallon from "High School Confidential"......Next week: Santa's Got A Brand New Podcast
Zoe and Tyler call from the Worldfare busTaurant where they are premiering new music and promoting the "Inspire A Little Love" event presented by Inspire Magazine and To Write Love On her Arms. Tadhg Kelly and author Jeremy Iverson can be heard as well.
Kate’s High School Confidential, Partying Amish, Pride and Prejudice with ......Zombies http://www.amazon.com/Pride-Prejudice-Zombies-Classic-Ultraviolent/dp/1594743347, White Men Get Drunk, White Wine stains teeth, Dogs Look like their Owners, email: talesfromthecounter@gmail.com voicemail-207-221-2679, blog: http://www.talesfromthecounter.com myspace: http://www.myspace.com/talesfromthecounter talkshoe: http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/25128
Kids. Cable. Learning. The Official Podcast Channel of Cable in the Classroom!
Cable in the Classroom recently spoke with “Kim W.” who is one of the featured students in WE tv’s HIGH SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL, a documentary series airing Mondays at 10 pm ET through April 28. The series follows 12 girls through four years of high school capturing their daily lives, motivations, challenges, and peer and parental pressures they experienced.In this interview (MP3, 15MB), we take a look at recent Harris Poll findings on teenagers’ lives related to stress, lack of sleep, body image and interpersonal relationships. Kim W., now a student at Boston University majoring in Philosophy and Political Science, elaborates on her experiences in high school, particularly the stress she faced balancing parent expectations, academics, sports and other activities. We also hear how she is striving to achieve work-life-study balance now that she is in college. She describes what it was like to have cameras follow her throughout her high school years to major events, and what the reaction has been to the series. Check your local listings for WE tv to watch the series.Website resources: http://www.ciconline.org/we (including link to survey of girls and their parents commissioned by WE tv )http://highschool.wetv.com/http://highschool.wetv.com/girls/index.htmlhttp://highschool.wetv.com/episodes/index.htmlhttp://www.wetv.com/
The first of our "Special Summer Series" recordings of Story Salon ON THE AIR. This month it is "High School Confidential." Our Featured Performer is actress Moira Quirk. Enjoy!...Next Month's Featured Performer will be writer, musician and radio presenter Julio Martinez...Recorded Live on Friday, June 15, 2007 at The Coffee Fix in Studio City, California...1:01:36 / 56.4 MB / Rated: PG-13 (Some Adult Language and Themes)...Thanks for the Download!