Podcasts about I Shall Be Released

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I Shall Be Released

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Best podcasts about I Shall Be Released

Latest podcast episodes about I Shall Be Released

Arroe Collins
The Winner Of NBC's The Voice Season 27 Adam David Ready To Conquer The World

Arroe Collins

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 3, 2025 10:59


Rock and Blues Artist with Dynamic Vocals Shines After Single-Chair Turn and Instant Save Second ChanceCoach Michael Bublé Goes Undefeated and Takes "Voice" Crown in Back-to-Back SeasonsAdam David, a soulful 35-year-old singer, songwriter and guitarist from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., was named champion of "The Voice" Season 27.Guided by coach Michael Bublé, David faced off against a chorus of formidable competitors in the finale, including fellow Team Bublé artist Jadyn Cree, Team Legend's RENZO, Team Adam's Lucia Flores-Wiseman and Team Kelsea's Jaelen Johnston.In his Blind Audition, David, who shared his inspirational story of battling addiction, earned the attention of Bublé with his bluesy rendition of Peter Frampton's "Baby, I Love Your Way." During the Battle Rounds, he and teammate Ricardo Moreno performed a duet of their coach's own hit song "Home."Sailing through the Knockout Round, David transformed Allen Stone's "Unaware" with his signature smoky voice. During the playoffs, his earnest and soulful take on Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released" won his coach over and advanced him to the live semi-finals.In the first live show, he performed "Bring It on Home to Me" by Sam Cooke, accompanied by his electric guitar. During the live results show, he didn't immediately advance to the next round and gave his all in a last-chance performance of "Lose Control" by Teddy Swims in the Instant Save. He earned America's vote for the single remaining spot in the finale and made a lasting impression that ultimately took him all the way to victory.On Monday night's telecast, David continued to impress coaches and viewers with an up-tempo live performance of "Hard Fought Hallelujah" by Brandon Lake & Jelly Roll as well as a stirring down-tempo performance of "You Are So Beautiful" by Joe Cocker.Before being crowned the winner during tonight's finale, David was joined on stage by coach Michael Bublé for a duet of classic "The Weight" by the Band.David's presence on the show's social media platforms this season garnered immense popularity. His performances accumulated 7.3 million views across "The Voice" pages on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube.David's musical journey began early with the guitar, later discovering his voice at a performing arts camp, leading him to write songs. His career has taken him from local venues to international corporate events. Along the way, David struggled with addiction but eventually sought help and ultimately found recovery. Now five years clean, he credits music as a steady anchor in his life, helping him process emotions and maintain stability. David is deeply committed to performing at rehabilitation centers each week, using his own experiences and music to inspire others in their recovery. This work has become a cornerstone of his healing, providing purpose and a way to support others through their struggles.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/arroe-collins-unplugged-totally-uncut--994165/support.

Arroe Collins Like It's Live
The Winner Of NBC's The Voice Season 27 Adam David Ready To Conquer The World

Arroe Collins Like It's Live

Play Episode Listen Later May 31, 2025 10:58


Rock and Blues Artist with Dynamic Vocals Shines After Single-Chair Turn and Instant Save Second ChanceCoach Michael Bublé Goes Undefeated and Takes "Voice" Crown in Back-to-Back SeasonsAdam David, a soulful 35-year-old singer, songwriter and guitarist from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., was named champion of "The Voice" Season 27.Guided by coach Michael Bublé, David faced off against a chorus of formidable competitors in the finale, including fellow Team Bublé artist Jadyn Cree, Team Legend's RENZO, Team Adam's Lucia Flores-Wiseman and Team Kelsea's Jaelen Johnston.In his Blind Audition, David, who shared his inspirational story of battling addiction, earned the attention of Bublé with his bluesy rendition of Peter Frampton's "Baby, I Love Your Way." During the Battle Rounds, he and teammate Ricardo Moreno performed a duet of their coach's own hit song "Home."Sailing through the Knockout Round, David transformed Allen Stone's "Unaware" with his signature smoky voice. During the playoffs, his earnest and soulful take on Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released" won his coach over and advanced him to the live semi-finals.In the first live show, he performed "Bring It on Home to Me" by Sam Cooke, accompanied by his electric guitar. During the live results show, he didn't immediately advance to the next round and gave his all in a last-chance performance of "Lose Control" by Teddy Swims in the Instant Save. He earned America's vote for the single remaining spot in the finale and made a lasting impression that ultimately took him all the way to victory.On Monday night's telecast, David continued to impress coaches and viewers with an up-tempo live performance of "Hard Fought Hallelujah" by Brandon Lake & Jelly Roll as well as a stirring down-tempo performance of "You Are So Beautiful" by Joe Cocker.Before being crowned the winner during tonight's finale, David was joined on stage by coach Michael Bublé for a duet of classic "The Weight" by the Band.David's presence on the show's social media platforms this season garnered immense popularity. His performances accumulated 7.3 million views across "The Voice" pages on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube.David's musical journey began early with the guitar, later discovering his voice at a performing arts camp, leading him to write songs. His career has taken him from local venues to international corporate events. Along the way, David struggled with addiction but eventually sought help and ultimately found recovery. Now five years clean, he credits music as a steady anchor in his life, helping him process emotions and maintain stability. David is deeply committed to performing at rehabilitation centers each week, using his own experiences and music to inspire others in their recovery. This work has become a cornerstone of his healing, providing purpose and a way to support others through their struggles.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/arroe-collins-like-it-s-live--4113802/support.

I Am Refocused Podcast Show
Adam David, Winner of The Voice Season 27

I Am Refocused Podcast Show

Play Episode Listen Later May 30, 2025 9:55


Rock and Blues Artist with Dynamic Vocals Shines After Single-Chair Turn and Instant Save Second Chance Coach Michael Bublé Goes Undefeated and Takes "Voice" Crown in Back-to-Back SeasonsAdam David, a soulful 35-year-old singer, songwriter and guitarist from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., was named champion of "The Voice" Season 27.Guided by coach Michael Bublé, David faced off against a chorus of formidable competitors in the finale, including fellow Team Bublé artist Jadyn Cree, Team Legend's RENZO, Team Adam's Lucia Flores-Wiseman and Team Kelsea's Jaelen Johnston.In his Blind Audition, David, who shared his inspirational story of battling addiction, earned the attention of Bublé with his bluesy rendition of Peter Frampton's "Baby, I Love Your Way." During the Battle Rounds, he and teammate Ricardo Moreno performed a duet of their coach's own hit song "Home."Sailing through the Knockout Round, David transformed Allen Stone's "Unaware" with his signature smoky voice. During the playoffs, his earnest and soulful take on Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released" won his coach over and advanced him to the live semi-finals.In the first live show, he performed "Bring It on Home to Me" by Sam Cooke, accompanied by his electric guitar. During the live results show, he didn't immediately advance to the next round and gave his all in a last-chance performance of "Lose Control" by Teddy Swims in the Instant Save. He earned America's vote for the single remaining spot in the finale and made a lasting impression that ultimately took him all the way to victory.On Monday night's telecast, David continued to impress coaches and viewers with an up-tempo live performance of "Hard Fought Hallelujah" by Brandon Lake & Jelly Roll as well as a stirring down-tempo performance of "You Are So Beautiful" by Joe Cocker.Before being crowned the winner during tonight's finale, David was joined on stage by coach Michael Bublé for a duet of classic "The Weight" by the Band.David's presence on the show's social media platforms this season garnered immense popularity. His performances accumulated 7.3 million views across "The Voice" pages on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube.David's musical journey began early with the guitar, later discovering his voice at a performing arts camp, leading him to write songs. His career has taken him from local venues to international corporate events. Along the way, David struggled with addiction but eventually sought help and ultimately found recovery. Now five years clean, he credits music as a steady anchor in his life, helping him process emotions and maintain stability. David is deeply committed to performing at rehabilitation centers each week, using his own experiences and music to inspire others in their recovery. This work has become a cornerstone of his healing, providing purpose and a way to support others through their struggles."The Voice" is the #1 most-watched alternative series for the sixth consecutive broadcast season. The recent fall and midseason cycles have reached 46 million viewers across platforms."The Voice" Season 28 premieres in September 2025. Michael Bublé will return alongside Reba McEntire, Niall Horan and Snoop Dogg. "The Voice" is a presentation of MGM Television, Warner Bros. Unscripted Television in association with Warner Horizon, and ITV Studios The Voice USA, Inc. The series was created by John de Mol, who serves as an executive producer along with Mark Burnett, Audrey Morrissey, Amanda Zucker, Kyra Thompson, Adam H. Sher and Barry Poznick. For embeddable clips and more, please visit NBC.com's official show site: https://www.nbc.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/i-am-refocused-radio--2671113/support.

Ecos del Vinilo Radio
The Band / The Weight | Programa 558 - Ecos del Vinilo Radio

Ecos del Vinilo Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 2, 2025 22:11


Vamos con la banda de bandas: The Band. Dedicaremos esta emisión a la historia de su canción-emblema The Weight; la escucharemos en varias versiones, además de su cara B como single, I Shall Be Released y un magnífico cover de Bruce Springsteen. Presenta Ricardo Portman. Recuerden que nuestros programas los pueden escuchar también en: Nuestra web https://ecosdelvinilo.com/ La Música del Arcón - FM 96.9 (Buenos Aires, Argentina) miércoles 18:00 (hora Arg.) Radio M7 (Córdoba) lunes 18:00 y sábados 17:00. Distancia Radio (Córdoba) jueves y sábados 19:00 Radio Free Rock (Cartagena) viernes 18:00. Radio Hierbabuena (Lima, Perú) jueves 20:00 (hora Perú)

Recomendados de la semana en iVoox.com Semana del 5 al 11 de julio del 2021

Esta semana hemos querido reunir en el porche de RADIO CON BOTAS una docena de canciones de Americana que se han publicado hace pocos meses, escasas semanas o, incluso, no han visto la luz en el mercado. Pero todas tienen un nexo común: son versiones de temas atemporales desde las más diversas y eclácticas formas de la música popular. De esta forma, escuchamos a Ward Hayden cantando a Springsteen, Town Moauntain saboreando los sonidos de Dire Straits, Jaelee Roberts llevando al bluegrass a Stealers Wheel o Della Mae dejándose seducir por Blind Melon. Además, Bella White se entrega a Lucind Williams, The Cartlellows lo hace a Emmylou Harris y Kelsey Waldon lo hace a Hazel Dickens y Alice Gerrard con la ayuda de S.G. Goodman. Rising Apalachia se sumerge en uno de los grande clásicos de Dylan, mientras Margo Price junto a Mike Campbell o Steve Earle rinden homenaje a Tom Petty. La nueva gira de Hootie & The Blowfish nos permite resucitar a Buffalo Springfield y hasta Flatland Cavalry se han inclinado ante la categoría de Fleetwood Mac. Por favor, subscríbete y déjanos un comentario. Queremos saber de ti. PLAYLIST 01-WARD HAYDEN & THE OUTLIERS “Brilliant Disguise” (Springsteen) Faster Horses 02-TOWN MOUNTAIN “So Far Away” (Knopfler) New West 03-JAELEE ROBERTS “Stuck In The Middle With You” (Rafferty/Egan) Mountain Home 04-DELLA MAE “No Rain” (Smith) Della Mae 05-BELLA WHITE “Concrete And Barbed Wire” (Williams) Rounder 06-THE CASTELLOWS “Red Dirt Girl (Acoustic Sessions)” (Harris) Henry-Dixon Line/Warner Nashville 07-KELSEY WALDON feat S.G. GOODMAN “Hello Stranger” (Carter/Riddle) Oh Boy! 08-RISING APPALACHIA “I Shall Be Released” (Dylan) Rising Appalachia 09-MARGO PRICE feat MIKE CAMPBELL “Ways To Be Wicked” (Petty/Campbell) Legacy/Big Machine 10-STEVE EARLE “Yer So Bad” (Petty) Petty Legacy/Big Machine 11-HOOTIE & THE BLOWFISH “For What It's Worth” (Stills) UMG 12-FLATLAND CAVALRY “Landslide” (Nicks) Interscope

Office Hours Live with Tim Heidecker
297. Jokermen, Jonny Kosmo as Rolling Thunder Bob Dylan

Office Hours Live with Tim Heidecker

Play Episode Listen Later May 16, 2024 66:49


Slap on your favorite Pendleton shirt and grab a cold one (of root beer!) because podcast deep divers the Jokermen (aka Ian Grant and Evan Laffer) are here talking Beach Boys. Then Rolling Thunder Revue era Bob Dylan (aka Jonny Kosmo) sang the Beach Boys classic "Little Honda" with a little help from Bambina, Gracie Horse and our own Vic Berger. This week's halftime features the debut of Doug's extended mix of the "Jummies Growling Gummies" jingle with an animated video by Nico Daunt featuring Lela Roy. You got all that?! Now sit back, relax and enjoy! Watch another hour of the show with more of the Jokermen, a beautiful rendition of "I Shall Be Released" from Jonny, Bambina, & Gracie, and get tons of other stuff when you subscribe to OFFICE HOURS+. Get a FREE seven-day trial at patreon.com/officehourslive. Go see DJ Douggpound and Major Entertainer in London on 20 May! Get tickets here! Find everything Office Hours including the merch store at officialofficehours.com. Deep dive into The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, and more with the Jokermen podcast by subscribing to their Patreon at patreon.com/jokermen. Support the Scribble mental health center at scribblecommunity.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shout! Black Gospel Music Moments
SHOUT! Black Gospel Music Moments - The Violinaires

Shout! Black Gospel Music Moments

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 21, 2024 2:00


You've never heard Bob Dylan's masterful “I Shall Be Released” until you've heard it sung by Robert Blair and the Violinaires of Chicago.

Voices of Esalen
Big Sur Folk Festival 1969: Part One

Voices of Esalen

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 8, 2024 37:16


Feast your ears on this little gem from our archives - a partial recording of the Big Sur Folk Festival of 1969, which was also captured in a documentary film called "Celebration at Big Sur," directed by Baird Bryant and Johanna Demetrakas, from which this recording was culled. The Big Sur Folk Festival occurred September 13th and 14th of '69, about a month after Woodstock, and it featured some of the same performers, including Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and John Sebastian, who had left the Lovin' Spoonful the year earlier. The lineup, while not quite at the Woodstock level was still quite impressive, including Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Mimi Fariña , the Flying Burrito Brothers, and Dorothy Combs Morrison, a gospel singer whose song “All God's Children Got Soul,” reached number 95 on the Billboard top 100 in October of 1969. Joan Baez, of course, has a long history with the Big Sur area and with Esalen - before Esalen was even Esalen, when it was still Big Sur Hot Springs or Slate's Hot Springs, she lived in Carmel and often came to the Hot Springs, where she could be heard playing her guitar and singing; she also had a friendship with the former Esalen gate guard Hunter S. Thompson. Baez taught her first workshop at Esalen in 1964, entitled “The New Folk Music,” which became the basis for the first Big Sur Folk Festival. The festival would reoccur each year thereafter until 1971. a couple of albums came out of the various festivals, including Celebration, From the 1970 festival, One Hand Clapping, from the 1971 festival. and Live at the Big Sur Folk Festival, featuring Kris Kristofferson's performance from 1971. This episode will comprise part one of the 1969 festival, and in our next episode we'll get part two. The setlist for this episode goes like this: Joan Baez singing “I Shall Be Released” , then “Mobile Line” by John Sebastian with Stephen Stills, followed by “Song for David” by Baez, and then “All God's Children Got Soul” by Dorothy Combs Morrison and the Combs sisters. Then we have a nice "Sea of Madness" by Crosby Stills Nash and Young, followed by an interesting scene where a heckler interrupts the performance taking place down at the Esalen pool and ultimately gets into a fistfight with Stephen Stills. This scene is pretty wild and you might want to refer to the actual movie for this one; it's available to watch on YouTube. Really a fun watch, especially if you've been to Esalen before and you want to see the property and how it looked in the late 60's overrun by 10,000 friendly young people. Then we get Stills doing "4 and 20," followed by a very young Joni Mitchell accompanying Crosby Stills and Nash with John Sebastian on "Get Together." At this time Joni was dating Graham Nash. You'll also hear her talking about spotting some whales off the coast. Then we'll end with Dorothy Combs Morrison kinda stealing the show with her cover of Put a Little Love in your Heart. I really hope you enjoy this dip into Esalen history and a glimpse back to the days when a rock festival cost four dollars to attend. Yes indeed. It's true.

Rob Tobias: TRAIN OF THOUGHT
TRAIN OF THOUGHT - DYLAN / THE BAND / BEFORE THE FLOOD

Rob Tobias: TRAIN OF THOUGHT

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 7, 2024 28:01


TRAIN OF THOUGHT is a podcast hosted by Rob Tobias focusing on culture, music, interviews and society. This show includes commentary and songs from the Bob Dylan and The Band album Before The Flood in honor of the 50th anniversary of the tour it came from (that Rob Tobias attended). Songs include: MOST LIKELY YOU GO YOUR WAY I GO MINE, KNOCKIN' ON HEAVENS DOOR, ENDLESS HIGHWAY, I SHALL BE RELEASED, IT'S ALRIGHT MA, I'M ONLY BLEEDING, & ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER. COMMENTS AND QUESTIONS send email to rob@robtobias.com HOME PAGE: www.robtobias.com TRAIN OF THOUGHT podcast: soundcloud.com/robtobias/sets/train-of-thought-podcast-by ROB TOBIAS VIDEOS: www.youtube.com/robtobiasvideos BANDCAMP: www.robtobias.bandcamp.com/

ArTEEtude. West Cork´s first Art, Fashion & Design Podcast by Detlef Schlich.
#Arteetude 194 Echoes of Empathy Part II: Kitchen Rhythms for Global Peace dives with Detlef Schlich and other musician into an immersive, improvised session where melodies and rhythms intertwine to create a harmonious symphony.

ArTEEtude. West Cork´s first Art, Fashion & Design Podcast by Detlef Schlich.

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 10, 2023 18:11


"Arteetude 194: Harmonies from the Heart of the Kitchen" dives into the second part of an intimate jam session, where the kitchen transforms into a stage for peace and musical expression. With Dirk Schlömer leading on guitar and vocals, and a talented ensemble including Thomas Wiegandt, Ailin Becker, Jens Diamond, Detlef Schlich and Corina Thornton, the episode is a melodic journey through classics like "I Shall Be Released" and "Hotel California". Gathered with a shared vision of sending positive vibrations worldwide, this episode is a testament to the power of music in uniting hearts and minds.Apple Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/arteetude-west-cork-s-first-art-fashion-design-podcast/id1527081647Spotify Podcasthttps://open.spotify.com/show/3eBv4E5qgW8Vot0oojAr1tArTEEtude is a podcast created and produced by Detlef Schlich that explores the intersection of art, digital culture, and true stories in West Cork. Schlich, a multi-disciplinary artist, operates his podcast with a cross-sectoral approach, believing that a visual artist should think beyond being just an antagonist and instead strive to be a protagonist. Through this podcast, he dives into the unknown depths of the creative mind to uncover new perspectives and ideas.Detlef Schlich is a podcaster, visual artist, filmmaker, ritual designer, and media archaeologist based in West Cork. He is recognized for his seminal work, including a scholarly examination of the intersections between shamanism, art, and digital culture, as well as his acclaimed video installation, Transodin's Tragedy. He primarily works in performance, photography, painting, sound, installations, and film. In his work, he reflects on the human condition and uses the digital shaman's methodology as an alter ego to create artwork. His media archaeology is a conceptual and practical exercise in uncovering the unique aesthetic, cultural and political aspects of media in culture.WEBSITE LINKS Detlef SchlichInstagramDetlef Schlich ArTEEtude I love West Cork Artists FacebookDetlef Schlich I love West Cork Artists Group ArTEEtudeYouTube Channelsvisual PodcastArTEEtudeCute Alien TV official WebsiteArTEEtude Detlef Schlich Det Design Tribal Loop Download here for free Detlef Schlich´s Essay about the Cause and Effect of Shamanism, Art and Digital Culturehttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/303749640_Shamanism_Art_and_Digital_Culture_Cause_and_EffectSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/arteetude-a-podcast-with-artists-by-detlef-schlich/donations

A History Of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs
Episode 167: “The Weight” by The Band

A History Of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 14, 2023


Episode one hundred and sixty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Weight" by the Band, the Basement Tapes, and the continuing controversy over Dylan going electric. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode available, on "S.F. Sorrow is Born" by the Pretty Things. 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/ Also, a one-time request here -- Shawn Taylor, who runs the Facebook group for the podcast and is an old and dear friend of mine, has stage-three lung cancer. I will be hugely grateful to anyone who donates to the GoFundMe for her treatment. Errata At one point I say "when Robertson and Helm travelled to the Brill Building". I meant "when Hawkins and Helm". This is fixed in the transcript but not the recording. Resources There are three Mixcloud mixes this time. As there are so many songs by Bob Dylan and the Band excerpted, and Mixcloud won't allow more than four songs by the same artist in any mix, I've had to post the songs not in quite the same order in which they appear in the podcast. But the mixes are here — one, two, three. I've used these books for all the episodes involving Dylan: Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties by Elijah Wald, which is recommended, as all Wald's books are. Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades. I've also used Robert Shelton's No Direction Home, which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan. Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan is a partial, highly inaccurate, but thoroughly readable autobiography. Information on Tiny Tim comes from Eternal Troubadour: The Improbable Life of Tiny Tim by Justin Martell. Information on John Cage comes from The Roaring Silence by David Revill Information on Woodstock comes from Small Town Talk by Barney Hoskyns. For material on the Basement Tapes, I've used Million Dollar Bash by Sid Griffin. And for the Band, I've used This Wheel's on Fire by Levon Helm with Stephen Davis, Testimony by Robbie Robertson, The Band by Craig Harris and Levon by Sandra B Tooze. I've also referred to the documentaries No Direction Home and Once Were Brothers. The complete Basement Tapes can be found on this multi-disc box set, while this double-CD version has the best material from the sessions. All the surviving live recordings by Dylan and the Hawks from 1966 are on this box set. There are various deluxe versions of Music From Big Pink, but still the best way to get the original album is in this twofer CD with the Band's second album. Transcript Just a brief note before I start – literally while I was in the middle of recording this episode, it was announced that Robbie Robertson had died today, aged eighty. Obviously I've not had time to alter the rest of the episode – half of which had already been edited – with that in mind, though I don't believe I say anything disrespectful to his memory. My condolences to those who loved him – he was a huge talent and will be missed. There are people in the world who question the function of criticism. Those people argue that criticism is in many ways parasitic. If critics knew what they were talking about, so the argument goes, they would create themselves, rather than talk about other people's creation. It's a variant of the "those who can't, teach" cliche. And to an extent it's true. Certainly in the world of rock music, which we're talking about in this podcast, most critics are quite staggeringly ignorant of the things they're talking about. Most criticism is ephemeral, published in newspapers, magazines, blogs and podcasts, and forgotten as soon as it has been consumed -- and consumed is the word . But sometimes, just sometimes, a critic will have an effect on the world that is at least as important as that of any of the artists they criticise. One such critic was John Ruskin. Ruskin was one of the preeminent critics of visual art in the Victorian era, particularly specialising in painting and architecture, and he passionately advocated for a form of art that would be truthful, plain, and honest. To Ruskin's mind, many artists of the past, and of his time, drew and painted, not what they saw with their own eyes, but what other people expected them to paint. They replaced true observation of nature with the regurgitation of ever-more-mannered and formalised cliches. His attacks on many great artists were, in essence, the same critiques that are currently brought against AI art apps -- they're just recycling and plagiarising what other people had already done, not seeing with their own eyes and creating from their own vision. Ruskin was an artist himself, but never received much acclaim for his own work. Rather, he advocated for the works of others, like Turner and the pre-Raphaelite school -- the latter of whom were influenced by Ruskin, even as he admired them for seeing with their own vision rather than just repeating influences from others. But those weren't the only people Ruskin influenced. Because any critical project, properly understood, becomes about more than just the art -- as if art is just anything. Ruskin, for example, studied geology, because if you're going to talk about how people should paint landscapes and what those landscapes look like, you need to understand what landscapes really do look like, which means understanding their formation. He understood that art of the kind he wanted could only be produced by certain types of people, and so society had to be organised in a way to produce such people. Some types of societal organisation lead to some kinds of thinking and creation, and to properly, honestly, understand one branch of human thought means at least to attempt to understand all of them. Opinions about art have moral consequences, and morality has political and economic consequences. The inevitable endpoint of any theory of art is, ultimately, a theory of society. And Ruskin had a theory of society, and social organisation. Ruskin's views are too complex to summarise here, but they were a kind of anarcho-primitivist collectivism. He believed that wealth was evil, and that the classical liberal economics of people like Mill was fundamentally anti-human, that the division of labour alienated people from their work. In Ruskin's ideal world, people would gather in communities no bigger than villages, and work as craftspeople, working with nature rather than trying to bend nature to their will. They would be collectives, with none richer or poorer than any other, and working the land without modern technology. in the first half of the twentieth century, in particular, Ruskin's influence was *everywhere*. His writings on art inspired the Impressionist movement, but his political and economic ideas were the most influential, right across the political spectrum. Ruskin's ideas were closest to Christian socialism, and he did indeed inspire many socialist parties -- most of the founders of Britain's Labour Party were admirers of Ruskin and influenced by his ideas, particularly his opposition to the free market. But he inspired many other people -- Gandhi talked about the profound influence that Ruskin had on him, saying in his autobiography that he got three lessons from Ruskin's Unto This Last: "That 1) the good of the individual is contained in the good of all. 2) a lawyer's work has the same value as the barber's in as much as all have the same right of earning their livelihood from their work. 3) a life of labour, i.e., the life of the tiller of the soil and the handicraftsman is the life worth living. The first of these I knew. The second I had dimly realized. The third had never occurred to me. Unto This Last made it clear as daylight for me that the second and third were contained in the first. I arose with the dawn, ready to reduce these principles to practice" Gandhi translated and paraphrased Unto this Last into Gujurati and called the resulting book Sarvodaya (meaning "uplifting all" or "the welfare of all") which he later took as the name of his own political philosophy. But Ruskin also had a more pernicious influence -- it was said in 1930s Germany that he and his friend Thomas Carlyle were "the first National Socialists" -- there's no evidence I know of that Hitler ever read Ruskin, but a *lot* of Nazi rhetoric is implicit in Ruskin's writing, particularly in his opposition to progress (he even opposed the bicycle as being too much inhuman interference with nature), just as much as more admirable philosophies, and he was so widely read in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that there's barely a political movement anywhere that didn't bear his fingerprints. But of course, our focus here is on music. And Ruskin had an influence on that, too. We've talked in several episodes, most recently the one on the Velvet Underground, about John Cage's piece 4'33. What I didn't mention in any of the discussions of that piece -- because I was saving it for here -- is that that piece was premiered at a small concert hall in upstate New York. The hall, the Maverick Concert Hall, was owned and run by the Maverick arts and crafts collective -- a collective that were so called because they were the *second* Ruskinite arts colony in the area, having split off from the Byrdcliffe colony after a dispute between its three founders, all of whom were disciples of Ruskin, and all of whom disagreed violently about how to implement Ruskin's ideas of pacifist all-for-one and one-for-all community. These arts colonies, and others that grew up around them like the Arts Students League were the thriving centre of a Bohemian community -- close enough to New York that you could get there if you needed to, far enough away that you could live out your pastoral fantasies, and artists of all types flocked there -- Pete Seeger met his wife there, and his father-in-law had been one of the stonemasons who helped build the Maverick concert hall. Dozens of artists in all sorts of areas, from Aaron Copland to Edward G Robinson, spent time in these communities, as did Cage. Of course, while these arts and crafts communities had a reputation for Bohemianism and artistic extremism, even radical utopian artists have their limits, and legend has it that the premiere of 4'33 was met with horror and derision, and eventually led to one artist in the audience standing up and calling on the residents of the town around which these artistic colonies had agglomerated: “Good people of Woodstock, let's drive these people out of town.” [Excerpt: The Band, "The Weight"] Ronnie Hawkins was almost born to make music. We heard back in the episode on "Suzie Q" in 2019 about his family and their ties to music. Ronnie's uncle Del was, according to most of the sources on the family, a member of the Sons of the Pioneers -- though as I point out in that episode, his name isn't on any of the official lists of group members, but he might well have performed with them at some point in the early years of the group. And he was definitely a country music bass player, even if he *wasn't* in the most popular country and western group of the thirties and forties. And Del had had two sons, Jerry, who made some minor rockabilly records: [Excerpt: Jerry Hawkins, "Swing, Daddy, Swing"] And Del junior, who as we heard in the "Susie Q" episode became known as Dale Hawkins and made one of the most important rock records of the fifties: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Susie Q"] Ronnie Hawkins was around the same age as his cousins, and was in awe of his country-music star uncle. Hawkins later remembered that after his uncle moved to Califormia to become a star “He'd come home for a week or two, driving a brand new Cadillac and wearing brand new clothes and I knew that's what I wanted to be." Though he also remembered “He spent every penny he made on whiskey, and he was divorced because he was running around with all sorts of women. His wife left Arkansas and went to Louisiana.” Hawkins knew that he wanted to be a music star like his uncle, and he started performing at local fairs and other events from the age of eleven, including one performance where he substituted for Hank Williams -- Williams was so drunk that day he couldn't perform, and so his backing band asked volunteers from the audience to get up and sing with them, and Hawkins sang Burl Ives and minstrel-show songs with the band. He said later “Even back then I knew that every important white cat—Al Jolson, Stephen Foster—they all did it by copying blacks. Even Hank Williams learned all the stuff he had from those black cats in Alabama. Elvis Presley copied black music; that's all that Elvis did.” As well as being a performer from an early age, though, Hawkins was also an entrepreneur with an eye for how to make money. From the age of fourteen he started running liquor -- not moonshine, he would always point out, but something far safer. He lived only a few miles from the border between Missouri and Arkansas, and alcohol and tobacco were about half the price in Missouri that they were in Arkansas, so he'd drive across the border, load up on whisky and cigarettes, and drive back and sell them at a profit, which he then used to buy shares in several nightclubs, which he and his bands would perform in in later years. Like every man of his generation, Hawkins had to do six months in the Army, and it was there that he joined his first ever full-time band, the Blackhawks -- so called because his name was Hawkins, and the rest of the group were Black, though Hawkins was white. They got together when the other four members were performing at a club in the area where Hawkins was stationed, and he was so impressed with their music that he jumped on stage and started singing with them. He said later “It sounded like something between the blues and rockabilly. It sort of leaned in both directions at the same time, me being a hayseed and those guys playing a lot funkier." As he put it "I wanted to sound like Bobby ‘Blue' Bland but it came out sounding like Ernest Tubb.” Word got around about the Blackhawks, both that they were a great-sounding rock and roll band and that they were an integrated band at a time when that was extremely unpopular in the southern states, and when Hawkins was discharged from the Army he got a call from Sam Phillips at Sun Records. According to Hawkins a group of the regular Sun session musicians were planning on forming a band, and he was asked to front the band for a hundred dollars a week, but by the time he got there the band had fallen apart. This doesn't precisely line up with anything else I know about Sun, though it perhaps makes sense if Hawkins was being asked to front the band who had variously backed Billy Lee Riley and Jerry Lee Lewis after one of Riley's occasional threats to leave the label. More likely though, he told everyone he knew that he had a deal with Sun but Phillips was unimpressed with the demos he cut there, and Hawkins made up the story to stop himself losing face. One of the session players for Sun, though, Luke Paulman, who played in Conway Twitty's band among others, *was* impressed with Hawkins though, and suggested that they form a band together with Paulman's bass player brother George and piano-playing cousin Pop Jones. The Paulman brothers and Jones also came from Arkansas, but they specifically came from Helena, Arkansas, the town from which King Biscuit Time was broadcast. King Biscuit Time was the most important blues radio show in the US at that time -- a short lunchtime programme which featured live performances from a house band which varied over the years, but which in the 1940s had been led by Sonny Boy Williamson II, and featured Robert Jr. Lockwood, Robert Johnson's stepson, on guiitar: [Excerpt: Sonny Boy Williamson II "Eyesight to the Blind (King Biscuit Time)"] The band also included a drummer, "Peck" Curtis, and that drummer was the biggest inspiration for a young white man from the town named Levon Helm. Helm had first been inspired to make music after seeing Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys play live when Helm was eight, and he had soon taken up first the harmonica, then the guitar, then the drums, becoming excellent at all of them. Even as a child he knew that he didn't want to be a farmer like his family, and that music was, as he put it, "the only way to get off that stinking tractor  and out of that one hundred and five degree heat.” Sonny Boy Williamson and the King Biscuit Boys would perform in the open air in Marvell, Arkansas, where Helm was growing up, on Saturdays, and Helm watched them regularly as a small child, and became particularly interested in the drumming. “As good as the band sounded,” he said later “it seemed that [Peck] was definitely having the most fun. I locked into the drums at that point. Later, I heard Jack Nance, Conway Twitty's drummer, and all the great drummers in Memphis—Jimmy Van Eaton, Al Jackson, and Willie Hall—the Chicago boys (Fred Belew and Clifton James) and the people at Sun Records and Vee-Jay, but most of my style was based on Peck and Sonny Boy—the Delta blues style with the shuffle. Through the years, I've quickened the pace to a more rock-and-roll meter and time frame, but it still bases itself back to Peck, Sonny Boy Williamson, and the King Biscuit Boys.” Helm had played with another band that George Paulman had played in, and he was invited to join the fledgling band Hawkins was putting together, called for the moment the Sun Records Quartet. The group played some of the clubs Hawkins had business connections in, but they had other plans -- Conway Twitty had recently played Toronto, and had told Luke Paulman about how desperate the Canadians were for American rock and roll music. Twitty's agent Harold Kudlets booked the group in to a Toronto club, Le Coq D'Or, and soon the group were alternating between residencies in clubs in the Deep South, where they were just another rockabilly band, albeit one of the better ones, and in Canada, where they became the most popular band in Ontario, and became the nucleus of an entire musical scene -- the same scene from which, a few years later, people like Neil Young would emerge. George Paulman didn't remain long in the group -- he was apparently getting drunk, and also he was a double-bass player, at a time when the electric bass was becoming the in thing. And this is the best place to mention this, but there are several discrepancies in the various accounts of which band members were in Hawkins' band at which times, and who played on what session. They all *broadly* follow the same lines, but none of them are fully reconcilable with each other, and nobody was paying enough attention to lineup shifts in a bar band between 1957 and 1964 to be absolutely certain who was right. I've tried to reconcile the various accounts as far as possible and make a coherent narrative, but some of the details of what follows may be wrong, though the broad strokes are correct. For much of their first period in Ontario, the group had no bass player at all, relying on Jones' piano to fill in the bass parts, and on their first recording, a version of "Bo Diddley", they actually got the club's manager to play bass with them: [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins, "Hey Bo Diddley"] That is claimed to be the first rock and roll record made in Canada, though as everyone who has listened to this podcast knows, there's no first anything. It wasn't released as by the Sun Records Quartet though -- the band had presumably realised that that name would make them much less attractive to other labels, and so by this point the Sun Records Quartet had become Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks. "Hey Bo Diddley" was released on a small Canadian label and didn't have any success, but the group carried on performing live, travelling back down to Arkansas for a while and getting a new bass player, Lefty Evans, who had been playing in the same pool of musicians as them, having been another Sun session player who had been in Conway Twitty's band, and had written Twitty's "Why Can't I Get Through to You": [Excerpt: Conway Twitty, "Why Can't I Get Through to You"] The band were now popular enough in Canada that they were starting to get heard of in America, and through Kudlets they got a contract with Joe Glaser, a Mafia-connected booking agent who booked them into gigs on the Jersey Shore. As Helm said “Ronnie Hawkins had molded us into the wildest, fiercest, speed-driven bar band in America," and the group were apparently getting larger audiences in New Jersey than Sammy Davis Jr was, even though they hadn't released any records in the US. Or at least, they hadn't released any records in their own name in the US. There's a record on End Records by Rockin' Ronald and the Rebels which is very strongly rumoured to have been the Hawks under another name, though Hawkins always denied that. Have a listen for yourself and see what you think: [Excerpt: Rockin' Ronald and the Rebels, "Kansas City"] End Records, the label that was on, was one of the many record labels set up by George Goldner and distributed by Morris Levy, and when the group did release a record in their home country under their own name, it was on Levy's Roulette Records. An audition for Levy had been set up by Glaser's booking company, and Levy decided that given that Elvis was in the Army, there was a vacancy to be filled and Ronnie Hawkins might just fit the bill. Hawkins signed a contract with Levy, and it doesn't sound like he had much choice in the matter. Helm asked him “How long did you have to sign for?” and Hawkins replied "Life with an option" That said, unlike almost every other artist who interacted with Levy, Hawkins never had a bad word to say about him, at least in public, saying later “I don't care what Morris was supposed to have done, he looked after me and he believed in me. I even lived with him in his million-dollar apartment on the Upper East Side." The first single the group recorded for Roulette, a remake of Chuck Berry's "Thirty Days" retitled "Forty Days", didn't chart, but the follow-up, a version of Young Jessie's "Mary Lou", made number twenty-six on the charts: [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, "Mary Lou"] While that was a cover of a Young Jessie record, the songwriting credits read Hawkins and Magill -- Magill was a pseudonym used by Morris Levy. Levy hoped to make Ronnie Hawkins into a really big star, but hit a snag. This was just the point where the payola scandal had hit and record companies were under criminal investigation for bribing DJs to play their records. This was the main method of promotion that Levy used, and this was so well known that Levy was, for a time, under more scrutiny than anyone. He couldn't risk paying anyone off, and so Hawkins' records didn't get the expected airplay. The group went through some lineup changes, too, bringing in guitarist Fred Carter (with Luke Paulman moving to rhythm and soon leaving altogether)  from Hawkins' cousin Dale's band, and bass player Jimmy Evans. Some sources say that Jones quit around this time, too, though others say he was in the band for  a while longer, and they had two keyboards (the other keyboard being supplied by Stan Szelest. As well as recording Ronnie Hawkins singles, the new lineup of the group also recorded one single with Carter on lead vocals, "My Heart Cries": [Excerpt: Fred Carter, "My Heart Cries"] While the group were now playing more shows in the USA, they were still playing regularly in Canada, and they had developed a huge fanbase there. One of these was a teenage guitarist called Robbie Robertson, who had become fascinated with the band after playing a support slot for them, and had started hanging round, trying to ingratiate himself with the band in the hope of being allowed to join. As he was a teenager, Hawkins thought he might have his finger on the pulse of the youth market, and when Hawkins and Helm travelled to the Brill Building to hear new songs for consideration for their next album, they brought Robertson along to listen to them and give his opinion. Robertson himself ended up contributing two songs to the album, titled Mr. Dynamo. According to Hawkins "we had a little time after the session, so I thought, Well, I'm just gonna put 'em down and see what happens. And they were released. Robbie was the songwriter for words, and Levon was good for arranging, making things fit in and all that stuff. He knew what to do, but he didn't write anything." The two songs in question were "Someone Like You" and "Hey Boba Lou": [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, "Hey Boba Lou"] While Robertson was the sole writer of the songs, they were credited to Robertson, Hawkins, and Magill -- Morris Levy. As Robertson told the story later, “It's funny, when those songs came out and I got a copy of the album, it had another name on there besides my name for some writer like Morris Levy. So, I said to Ronnie, “There was nobody there writing these songs when I wrote these songs. Who is Morris Levy?” Ronnie just kinda tapped me on the head and said, “There are certain things about this business that you just let go and you don't question.” That was one of my early music industry lessons right there" Robertson desperately wanted to join the Hawks, but initially it was Robertson's bandmate Scott Cushnie who became the first Canadian to join the Hawks. But then when they were in Arkansas, Jimmy Evans decided he wasn't going to go back to Canada. So Hawkins called Robbie Robertson up and made him an offer. Robertson had to come down to Arkansas and get a couple of quick bass lessons from Helm (who could play pretty much every instrument to an acceptable standard, and so was by this point acting as the group's musical director, working out arrangements and leading them in rehearsals). Then Hawkins and Helm had to be elsewhere for a few weeks. If, when they got back, Robertson was good enough on bass, he had the job. If not, he didn't. Robertson accepted, but he nearly didn't get the gig after all. The place Hawkins and Helm had to be was Britain, where they were going to be promoting their latest single on Boy Meets Girls, the Jack Good TV series with Marty Wilde, which featured guitarist Joe Brown in the backing band: [Excerpt: Joe Brown, “Savage”] This was the same series that Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent were regularly appearing on, and while they didn't appear on the episodes that Hawkins and Helm appeared on, they did appear on the episodes immediately before Hawkins and Helm's two appearances, and again a couple of weeks after, and were friendly with the musicians who did play with Hawkins and Helm, and apparently they all jammed together a few times. Hawkins was impressed enough with Joe Brown -- who at the time was considered the best guitarist on the British scene -- that he invited Brown to become a Hawk. Presumably if Brown had taken him up on the offer, he would have taken the spot that ended up being Robertson's, but Brown turned him down -- a decision he apparently later regretted. Robbie Robertson was now a Hawk, and he and Helm formed an immediate bond. As Helm much later put it, "It was me and Robbie against the world. Our mission, as we saw it, was to put together the best band in history". As rockabilly was by this point passe, Levy tried converting Hawkins into a folk artist, to see if he could get some of the Kingston Trio's audience. He recorded a protest song, "The Ballad of Caryl Chessman", protesting the then-forthcoming execution of Chessman (one of only a handful of people to be executed in the US in recent decades for non-lethal offences), and he made an album of folk tunes, The Folk Ballads of Ronnie Hawkins, which largely consisted of solo acoustic recordings, plus a handful of left-over Hawks recordings from a year or so earlier. That wasn't a success, but they also tried a follow-up, having Hawkins go country and do an album of Hank Williams songs, recorded in Nashville at Owen Bradley's Quonset hut. While many of the musicians on the album were Nashville A-Team players, Hawkins also insisted on having his own band members perform, much to the disgust of the producer, and so it's likely (not certain, because there seem to be various disagreements about what was recorded when) that that album features the first studio recordings with Levon Helm and Robbie Robertson playing together: [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, "Your Cheatin' Heart"] Other sources claim that the only Hawk allowed to play on the album sessions was Helm, and that the rest of the musicians on the album were Harold Bradley and Hank Garland on guitar, Owen Bradley and Floyd Cramer on piano, Bob Moore on bass, and the Anita Kerr singers. I tend to trust Helm's recollection that the Hawks played at least some of the instruments though, because the source claiming that also seems to confuse the Hank Williams and Folk Ballads albums, and because I don't hear two pianos on the album. On the other hand, that *does* sound like Floyd Cramer on piano, and the tik-tok bass sound you'd get from having Harold Bradley play a baritone guitar while Bob Moore played a bass. So my best guess is that these sessions were like the Elvis sessions around the same time and with several of the same musicians, where Elvis' own backing musicians played rhythm parts but left the prominent instruments to the A-team players. Helm was singularly unimpressed with the experience of recording in Nashville. His strongest memory of the sessions was of another session going on in the same studio complex at the time -- Bobby "Blue" Bland was recording his classic single "Turn On Your Love Light", with the great drummer Jabo Starks on drums, and Helm was more interested in listening to that than he was in the music they were playing: [Excerpt: Bobby "Blue" Bland, "Turn On Your Love Light"] Incidentally, Helm talks about that recording being made "downstairs" from where the Hawks were recording, but also says that they were recording in Bradley's Quonset hut.  Now, my understanding here *could* be very wrong -- I've been unable to find a plan or schematic anywhere -- but my understanding is that the Quonset hut was a single-level structure, not a multi-level structure. BUT the original recording facilities run by the Bradley brothers were in Owen Bradley's basement, before they moved into the larger Quonset hut facility in the back, so it's possible that Bland was recording that in the old basement studio. If so, that won't be the last recording made in a basement we hear this episode... Fred Carter decided during the Nashville sessions that he was going to leave the Hawks. As his son told the story: "Dad had discovered the session musicians there. He had no idea that you could play and make a living playing in studios and sleep in your own bed every night. By that point in his life, he'd already been gone from home and constantly on the road and in the service playing music for ten years so that appealed to him greatly. And Levon asked him, he said, “If you're gonna leave, Fred, I'd like you to get young Robbie over here up to speed on guitar”…[Robbie] got kind of aggravated with him—and Dad didn't say this with any malice—but by the end of that week, or whatever it was, Robbie made some kind of comment about “One day I'm gonna cut you.” And Dad said, “Well, if that's how you think about it, the lessons are over.” " (For those who don't know, a musician "cutting" another one is playing better than them, so much better that the worse musician has to concede defeat. For the remainder of Carter's notice in the Hawks, he played with his back to Robertson, refusing to look at him. Carter leaving the group caused some more shuffling of roles. For a while, Levon Helm -- who Hawkins always said was the best lead guitar player he ever worked with as well as the best drummer -- tried playing lead guitar while Robertson played rhythm and another member, Rebel Payne, played bass, but they couldn't find a drummer to replace Helm, who moved back onto the drums. Then they brought in Roy Buchanan, another guitarist who had been playing with Dale Hawkins, having started out playing with Johnny Otis' band. But Buchanan didn't fit with Hawkins' personality, and he quit after a few months, going off to record his own first solo record: [Excerpt: Roy Buchanan, "Mule Train Stomp"] Eventually they solved the lineup problem by having Robertson -- by this point an accomplished lead player --- move to lead guitar and bringing in a new rhythm player, another Canadian teenager named Rick Danko, who had originally been a lead player (and who also played mandolin and fiddle). Danko wasn't expected to stay on rhythm long though -- Rebel Payne was drinking a lot and missing being at home when he was out on the road, so Danko was brought in on the understanding that he was to learn Payne's bass parts and switch to bass when Payne quit. Helm and Robertson were unsure about Danko, and Robertson expressed that doubt, saying "He only knows four chords," to which Hawkins replied, "That's all right son. You can teach him four more the way we had to teach you." He proved himself by sheer hard work. As Hawkins put it “He practiced so much that his arms swoll up. He was hurting.” By the time Danko switched to bass, the group also had a baritone sax player, Jerry Penfound, which allowed the group to play more of the soul and R&B material that Helm and Robertson favoured, though Hawkins wasn't keen. This new lineup of the group (which also had Stan Szelest on piano) recorded Hawkins' next album. This one was produced by Henry Glover, the great record producer, songwriter, and trumpet player who had played with Lucky Millinder, produced Wynonie Harris, Hank Ballard, and Moon Mullican, and wrote "Drowning in My Own Tears", "The Peppermint Twist", and "California Sun". Glover was massively impressed with the band, especially Helm (with whom he would remain friends for the rest of his life) and set aside some studio time for them to cut some tracks without Hawkins, to be used as album filler, including a version of the Bobby "Blue" Bland song "Farther On Up the Road" with Helm on lead vocals: [Excerpt: Levon Helm and the Hawks, "Farther On Up the Road"] There were more changes on the way though. Stan Szelest was about to leave the band, and Jones had already left, so the group had no keyboard player. Hawkins had just the replacement for Szelest -- yet another Canadian teenager. This one was Richard Manuel, who played piano and sang in a band called The Rockin' Revols. Manuel was not the greatest piano player around -- he was an adequate player for simple rockabilly and R&B stuff, but hardly a virtuoso -- but he was an incredible singer, able to do a version of "Georgia on My Mind" which rivalled Ray Charles, and Hawkins had booked the Revols into his own small circuit of clubs around Arkanasas after being impressed with them on the same bill as the Hawks a couple of times. Hawkins wanted someone with a good voice because he was increasingly taking a back seat in performances. Hawkins was the bandleader and frontman, but he'd often given Helm a song or two to sing in the show, and as they were often playing for several hours a night, the more singers the band had the better. Soon, with Helm, Danko, and Manuel all in the group and able to take lead vocals, Hawkins would start missing entire shows, though he still got more money than any of his backing group. Hawkins was also a hard taskmaster, and wanted to have the best band around. He already had great musicians, but he wanted them to be *the best*. And all the musicians in his band were now much younger than him, with tons of natural talent, but untrained. What he needed was someone with proper training, someone who knew theory and technique. He'd been trying for a long time to get someone like that, but Garth Hudson had kept turning him down. Hudson was older than any of the Hawks, though younger than Hawkins, and he was a multi-instrumentalist who was far better than any other musician on the circuit, having trained in a conservatory and learned how to play Bach and Chopin before switching to rock and roll. He thought the Hawks were too loud sounding and played too hard for him, but Helm kept on at Hawkins to meet any demands Hudson had, and Hawkins eventually agreed to give Hudson a higher wage than any of the other band members, buy him a new Lowry organ, and give him an extra ten dollars a week to give the rest of the band music lessons. Hudson agreed, and the Hawks now had a lineup of Helm on drums, Robertson on guitar, Manuel on piano, Danko on bass, Hudson on organ and alto sax, and Penfound on baritone sax. But these new young musicians were beginning to wonder why they actually needed a frontman who didn't turn up to many of the gigs, kept most of the money, and fined them whenever they broke one of his increasingly stringent set of rules. Indeed, they wondered why they needed a frontman at all. They already had three singers -- and sometimes a fourth, a singer called Bruce Bruno who would sometimes sit in with them when Penfound was unable to make a gig. They went to see Harold Kudlets, who Hawkins had recently sacked as his manager, and asked him if he could get them gigs for the same amount of money as they'd been getting with Hawkins. Kudlets was astonished to find how little Hawkins had been paying them, and told them that would be no problem at all. They had no frontman any more -- and made it a rule in all their contracts that the word "sideman" would never be used -- but Helm had been the leader for contractual purposes, as the musical director and longest-serving member (Hawkins, as a non-playing singer, had never joined the Musicians' Union so couldn't be the leader on contracts). So the band that had been Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks became the Levon Helm Sextet briefly -- but Penfound soon quit, and they became Levon and the Hawks. The Hawks really started to find their identity as their own band in 1964. They were already far more interested in playing soul than Hawkins had been, but they were also starting to get into playing soul *jazz*, especially after seeing the Cannonball Adderley Sextet play live: [Excerpt: Cannonball Adderley, "This Here"] What the group admired about the Adderley group more than anything else was a sense of restraint. Helm was particularly impressed with their drummer, Louie Hayes, and said of him "I got to see some great musicians over the years, and you see somebody like that play and you can tell, y' know, that the thing not to do is to just get it down on the floor and stomp the hell out of it!" The other influence they had, and one which would shape their sound even more, was a negative one. The two biggest bands on the charts at the time were the Beatles and the Beach Boys, and as Helm described it in his autobiography, the Hawks thought both bands' harmonies were "a blend of pale, homogenised, voices". He said "We felt we were better than the Beatles and the Beach Boys. We considered them our rivals, even though they'd never heard of us", and they decided to make their own harmonies sound as different as possible as a result. Where those groups emphasised a vocal blend, the Hawks were going to emphasise the *difference* in their voices in their own harmonies. The group were playing prestigious venues like the Peppermint Lounge, and while playing there they met up with John Hammond Jr, who they'd met previously in Canada. As you might remember from the first episode on Bob Dylan, Hammond Jr was the son of the John Hammond who we've talked about in many episodes, and was a blues musician in his own right. He invited Helm, Robertson, and Hudson to join the musicians, including Michael Bloomfield, who were playing on his new album, So Many Roads: [Excerpt: John P. Hammond, "Who Do You Love?"] That album was one of the inspirations that led Bob Dylan to start making electric rock music and to hire Bloomfield as his guitarist, decisions that would have profound implications for the Hawks. The first single the Hawks recorded for themselves after leaving Hawkins was produced by Henry Glover, and both sides were written by Robbie Robertson. "uh Uh Uh" shows the influence of the R&B bands they were listening to. What it reminds me most of is the material Ike and Tina Turner were playing at the time, but at points I think I can also hear the influence of Curtis Mayfield and Steve Cropper, who were rapidly becoming Robertson's favourite songwriters: [Excerpt: The Canadian Squires, "Uh Uh Uh"] None of the band were happy with that record, though. They'd played in the studio the same way they played live, trying to get a strong bass presence, but it just sounded bottom-heavy to them when they heard the record on a jukebox. That record was released as by The Canadian Squires -- according to Robertson, that was a name that the label imposed on them for the record, while according to Helm it was an alternative name they used so they could get bookings in places they'd only recently played, which didn't want the same band to play too often. One wonders if there was any confusion with the band Neil Young played in a year or so before that single... Around this time, the group also met up with Helm's old musical inspiration Sonny Boy Williamson II, who was impressed enough with them that there was some talk of them being his backing band (and it was in this meeting that Williamson apparently told Robertson "those English boys want to play the blues so bad, and they play the blues *so bad*", speaking of the bands who'd backed him in the UK, like the Yardbirds and the Animals). But sadly, Williamson died in May 1965 before any of these plans had time to come to fruition. Every opportunity for the group seemed to be closing up, even as they knew they were as good as any band around them. They had an offer from Aaron Schroeder, who ran Musicor Records but was more importantly a songwriter and publisher who  had written for Elvis Presley and published Gene Pitney. Schroeder wanted to sign the Hawks as a band and Robertson as a songwriter, but Henry Glover looked over the contracts for them, and told them "If you sign this you'd better be able to pay each other, because nobody else is going to be paying you". What happened next is the subject of some controversy, because as these things tend to go, several people became aware of the Hawks at the same time, but it's generally considered that nothing would have happened the same way were it not for Mary Martin. Martin is a pivotal figure in music business history -- among other things she discovered Leonard Cohen and Gordon Lightfoot, managed Van Morrison, and signed Emmylou Harris to Warner Brothers records -- but a somewhat unknown one who doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. Martin was from Toronto, but had moved to New York, where she was working in Albert Grossman's office, but she still had many connections to Canadian musicians and kept an eye out for them. The group had sent demo tapes to Grossman's offices, and Grossman had had no interest in them, but Martin was a fan and kept pushing the group on Grossman and his associates. One of those associates, of course, was Grossman's client Bob Dylan. As we heard in the episode on "Like a Rolling Stone", Dylan had started making records with electric backing, with musicians who included Mike Bloomfield, who had played with several of the Hawks on the Hammond album, and Al Kooper, who was a friend of the band. Martin gave Richard Manuel a copy of Dylan's new electric album Highway 61 Revisited, and he enjoyed it, though the rest of the group were less impressed: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Highway 61 Revisited"] Dylan had played the Newport Folk Festival with some of the same musicians as played on his records, but Bloomfield in particular was more interested in continuing to play with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band than continuing with Dylan long-term. Mary Martin kept telling Dylan about this Canadian band she knew who would be perfect for him, and various people associated with the Grossman organisation, including Hammond, have claimed to have been sent down to New Jersey where the Hawks were playing to check them out in their live setting. The group have also mentioned that someone who looked a lot like Dylan was seen at some of their shows. Eventually, Dylan phoned Helm up and made an offer. He didn't need a full band at the moment -- he had Harvey Brooks on bass and Al Kooper on keyboards -- but he did need a lead guitar player and drummer for a couple of gigs he'd already booked, one in Forest Hills, New York, and a bigger gig at the Hollywood Bowl. Helm, unfamiliar with Dylan's work, actually asked Howard Kudlets if Dylan was capable of filling the Hollywood Bowl. The musicians rehearsed together and got a set together for the shows. Robertson and Helm thought the band sounded terrible, but Dylan liked the sound they were getting a lot. The audience in Forest Hills agreed with the Hawks, rather than Dylan, or so it would appear. As we heard in the "Like a Rolling Stone" episode, Dylan's turn towards rock music was *hated* by the folk purists who saw him as some sort of traitor to the movement, a movement whose figurehead he had become without wanting to. There were fifteen thousand people in the audience, and they listened politely enough to the first set, which Dylan played acoustically, But before the second set -- his first ever full electric set, rather than the very abridged one at Newport -- he told the musicians “I don't know what it will be like out there It's going to be some kind of  carnival and I want you to all know that up front. So go out there and keep playing no matter how weird it gets!” There's a terrible-quality audience recording of that show in circulation, and you can hear the crowd's reaction to the band and to the new material: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Ballad of a Thin Man" (live Forest Hills 1965, audience noise only)] The audience also threw things  at the musicians, knocking Al Kooper off his organ stool at one point. While Robertson remembered the Hollywood Bowl show as being an equally bad reaction, Helm remembered the audience there as being much more friendly, and the better-quality recording of that show seems to side with Helm: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Maggie's Farm (live at the Hollywood Bowl 1965)"] After those two shows, Helm and Robertson went back to their regular gig. and in September they made another record. This one, again produced by Glover, was for Atlantic's Atco subsidiary, and was released as by Levon and the Hawks. Manuel took lead, and again both songs were written by Robertson: [Excerpt: Levon and the Hawks, "He Don't Love You (And He'll Break Your Heart)"] But again that record did nothing. Dylan was about to start his first full electric tour, and while Helm and Robertson had not thought the shows they'd played sounded particularly good, Dylan had, and he wanted the two of them to continue with him. But Robertson and, especially, Helm, were not interested in being someone's sidemen. They explained to Dylan that they already had a band -- Levon and the Hawks -- and he would take all of them or he would take none of them. Helm in particular had not been impressed with Dylan's music -- Helm was fundamentally an R&B fan, while Dylan's music was rooted in genres he had little time for -- but he was OK with doing it, so long as the entire band got to. As Mary Martin put it “I think that the wonderful and the splendid heart of the band, if you will, was Levon, and I think he really sort of said, ‘If it's just myself as drummer and Robbie…we're out. We don't want that. It's either us, the band, or nothing.' And you know what? Good for him.” Rather amazingly, Dylan agreed. When the band's residency in New Jersey finished, they headed back to Toronto to play some shows there, and Dylan flew up and rehearsed with them after each show. When the tour started, the billing was "Bob Dylan with Levon and the Hawks". That billing wasn't to last long. Dylan had been booked in for nine months of touring, and was also starting work on what would become widely considered the first double album in rock music history, Blonde on Blonde, and the original plan was that Levon and the Hawks would play with him throughout that time.  The initial recording sessions for the album produced nothing suitable for release -- the closest was "I Wanna Be Your Lover", a semi-parody of the Beatles' "I Want to be Your Man": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan with Levon and the Hawks, "I Wanna Be Your Lover"] But shortly into the tour, Helm quit. The booing had continued, and had even got worse, and Helm simply wasn't in the business to be booed at every night. Also, his whole conception of music was that you dance to it, and nobody was dancing to any of this. Helm quit the band, only telling Robertson of his plans, and first went off to LA, where he met up with some musicians from Oklahoma who had enjoyed seeing the Hawks when they'd played that state and had since moved out West -- people like Leon Russell, J.J. Cale (not John Cale of the Velvet Underground, but the one who wrote "Cocaine" which Eric Clapton later had a hit with), and John Ware (who would later go on to join the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band). They started loosely jamming with each other, sometimes also involving a young singer named Linda Ronstadt, but Helm eventually decided to give up music and go and work on an oil rig in New Orleans. Levon and the Hawks were now just the Hawks. The rest of the group soldiered on, replacing Helm with session drummer Bobby Gregg (who had played on Dylan's previous couple of albums, and had previously played with Sun Ra), and played on the initial sessions for Blonde on Blonde. But of those sessions, Dylan said a few weeks later "Oh, I was really down. I mean, in ten recording sessions, man, we didn't get one song ... It was the band. But you see, I didn't know that. I didn't want to think that" One track from the sessions did get released -- the non-album single "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?"] There's some debate as to exactly who's playing drums on that -- Helm says in his autobiography that it's him, while the credits in the official CD releases tend to say it's Gregg. Either way, the track was an unexpected flop, not making the top forty in the US, though it made the top twenty in the UK. But the rest of the recordings with the now Helmless Hawks were less successful. Dylan was trying to get his new songs across, but this was a band who were used to playing raucous music for dancing, and so the attempts at more subtle songs didn't come off the way he wanted: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Hawks, "Visions of Johanna (take 5, 11-30-1965)"] Only one track from those initial New York sessions made the album -- "One Of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)" -- but even that only featured Robertson and Danko of the Hawks, with the rest of the instruments being played by session players: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan (One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)"] The Hawks were a great live band, but great live bands are not necessarily the same thing as a great studio band. And that's especially the case with someone like Dylan. Dylan was someone who was used to recording entirely on his own, and to making records *quickly*. In total, for his fifteen studio albums up to 1974's Blood on the Tracks, Dylan spent a total of eighty-six days in the studio -- by comparison, the Beatles spent over a hundred days in the studio just on the Sgt Pepper album. It's not that the Hawks weren't a good band -- very far from it -- but that studio recording requires a different type of discipline, and that's doubly the case when you're playing with an idiosyncratic player like Dylan. The Hawks would remain Dylan's live backing band, but he wouldn't put out a studio recording with them backing him until 1974. Instead, Bob Johnston, the producer Dylan was working with, suggested a different plan. On his previous album, the Nashville session player Charlie McCoy had guested on "Desolation Row" and Dylan had found him easy to work with. Johnston lived in Nashville, and suggested that they could get the album completed more quickly and to Dylan's liking by using Nashville A-Team musicians. Dylan agreed to try it, and for the rest of the album he had Robertson on lead guitar and Al Kooper on keyboards, but every other musician was a Nashville session player, and they managed to get Dylan's songs recorded quickly and the way he heard them in his head: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine"] Though Dylan being Dylan he did try to introduce an element of randomness to the recordings by having the Nashville musicians swap their instruments around and play each other's parts on "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35", though the Nashville players were still competent enough that they managed to get a usable, if shambolic, track recorded that way in a single take: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35"] Dylan said later of the album "The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album. It's that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up." The album was released in late June 1966, a week before Freak Out! by the Mothers of Invention, another double album, produced by Dylan's old producer Tom Wilson, and a few weeks after Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. Dylan was at the forefront of a new progressive movement in rock music, a movement that was tying thoughtful, intelligent lyrics to studio experimentation and yet somehow managing to have commercial success. And a month after Blonde on Blonde came out, he stepped away from that position, and would never fully return to it. The first half of 1966 was taken up with near-constant touring, with Dylan backed by the Hawks and a succession of fill-in drummers -- first Bobby Gregg, then Sandy Konikoff, then Mickey Jones. This tour started in the US and Canada, with breaks for recording the album, and then moved on to Australia and Europe. The shows always followed the same pattern. First Dylan would perform an acoustic set, solo, with just an acoustic guitar and harmonica, which would generally go down well with the audience -- though sometimes they would get restless, prompting a certain amount of resistance from the performer: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Just Like a Woman (live Paris 1966)"] But the second half of each show was electric, and that was where the problems would arise. The Hawks were playing at the top of their game -- some truly stunning performances: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Hawks, "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues (live in Liverpool 1966)"] But while the majority of the audience was happy to hear the music, there was a vocal portion that were utterly furious at the change in Dylan's musical style. Most notoriously, there was the performance at Manchester Free Trade Hall where this happened: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone (live Manchester 1966)"] That kind of aggression from the audience had the effect of pushing the band on to greater heights a lot of the time -- and a bootleg of that show, mislabelled as the Royal Albert Hall, became one of the most legendary bootlegs in rock music history. Jimmy Page would apparently buy a copy of the bootleg every time he saw one, thinking it was the best album ever made. But while Dylan and the Hawks played defiantly, that kind of audience reaction gets wearing. As Dylan later said, “Judas, the most hated name in human history, and for what—for playing an electric guitar. As if that is in some kind of way equitable to betraying our Lord, and delivering him up to be crucified; all those evil mothers can rot in hell.” And this wasn't the only stress Dylan, in particular, was under. D.A. Pennebaker was making a documentary of the tour -- a follow-up to his documentary of the 1965 tour, which had not yet come out. Dylan talked about the 1965 documentary, Don't Look Back, as being Pennebaker's film of Dylan, but this was going to be Dylan's film, with him directing the director. That footage shows Dylan as nervy and anxious, and covering for the anxiety with a veneer of flippancy. Some of Dylan's behaviour on both tours is unpleasant in ways that can't easily be justified (and which he has later publicly regretted), but there's also a seeming cruelty to some of his interactions with the press and public that actually reads more as frustration. Over and over again he's asked questions -- about being the voice of a generation or the leader of a protest movement -- which are simply based on incorrect premises. When someone asks you a question like this, there are only a few options you can take, none of them good. You can dissect the question, revealing the incorrect premises, and then answer a different question that isn't what they asked, which isn't really an option at all given the kind of rapid-fire situation Dylan was in. You can answer the question as asked, which ends up being dishonest. Or you can be flip and dismissive, which is the tactic Dylan chose. Dylan wasn't the only one -- this is basically what the Beatles did at press conferences. But where the Beatles were a gang and so came off as being fun, Dylan doing the same thing came off as arrogant and aggressive. One of the most famous artifacts of the whole tour is a long piece of footage recorded for the documentary, with Dylan and John Lennon riding in the back of a taxi, both clearly deeply uncomfortable, trying to be funny and impress the other, but neither actually wanting to be there: [Excerpt Dylan and Lennon conversation] 33) Part of the reason Dylan wanted to go home was that he had a whole new lifestyle. Up until 1964 he had been very much a city person, but as he had grown more famous, he'd found New York stifling. Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary had a cabin in Woodstock, where he'd grown up, and after Dylan had spent a month there in summer 1964, he'd fallen in love with the area. Albert Grossman had also bought a home there, on Yarrow's advice, and had given Dylan free run of the place, and Dylan had decided he wanted to move there permanently and bought his own home there. He had also married, to Sara Lowndes (whose name is, as far as I can tell, pronounced "Sarah" even though it's spelled "Sara"), and she had given birth to his first child (and he had adopted her child from her previous marriage). Very little is actually known about Sara, who unlike many other partners of rock stars at this point seemed positively to detest the limelight, and whose privacy Dylan has continued to respect even after the end of their marriage in the late seventies, but it's apparent that the two were very much in love, and that Dylan wanted to be back with his wife and kids, in the country, not going from one strange city to another being asked insipid questions and having abuse screamed at him. He was also tired of the pressure to produce work constantly. He'd signed a contract for a novel, called Tarantula, which he'd written a draft of but was unhappy with, and he'd put out two single albums and a double-album in a little over a year -- all of them considered among the greatest albums ever made. He could only keep up this rate of production and performance with a large intake of speed, and he was sometimes staying up for four days straight to do so. After the European leg of the tour, Dylan was meant to take some time to finish overdubs on Blonde on Blonde, edit the film of the tour for a TV special, with his friend Howard Alk, and proof the galleys for Tarantula, before going on a second world tour in the autumn. That world tour never happened. Dylan was in a motorcycle accident near his home, and had to take time out to recover. There has been a lot of discussion as to how serious the accident actually was, because Dylan's manager Albert Grossman was known to threaten to break contracts by claiming his performers were sick, and because Dylan essentially disappeared from public view for the next eighteen months. Every possible interpretation of the events has been put about by someone, from Dylan having been close to death, to the entire story being put up as a fake. As Dylan is someone who is far more protective of his privacy than most rock stars, it's doubtful we'll ever know the precise truth, but putting together the various accounts Dylan's injuries were bad but not life-threatening, but they acted as a wake-up call -- if he carried on living like he had been, how much longer could he continue? in his sort-of autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan described this period, saying "I had been in a motorcycle accident and I'd been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses." All his forthcoming studio and tour dates were cancelled, and Dylan took the time out to recover, and to work on his film, Eat the Document. But it's clear that nobody was sure at first exactly how long Dylan's hiatus from touring was going to last. As it turned out, he wouldn't do another tour until the mid-seventies, and would barely even play any one-off gigs in the intervening time. But nobody knew that at the time, and so to be on the safe side the Hawks were being kept on a retainer. They'd always intended to work on their own music anyway -- they didn't just want to be anyone's backing band -- so they took this time to kick a few ideas around, but they were hamstrung by the fact that it was difficult to find rehearsal space in New York City, and they didn't have any gigs. Their main musical work in the few months between summer 1966 and spring 1967 was some recordings for the soundtrack of a film Peter Yarrow was making. You Are What You Eat is a bizarre hippie collage of a film, documenting the counterculture between 1966 when Yarrow started making it and 1968 when it came out. Carl Franzoni, one of the leaders of the LA freak movement that we've talked about in episodes on the Byrds, Love, and the Mothers of Invention, said of the film “If you ever see this movie you'll understand what ‘freaks' are. It'll let you see the L.A. freaks, the San Francisco freaks, and the New York freaks. It was like a documentary and it was about the makings of what freaks were about. And it had a philosophy, a very definite philosophy: that you are free-spirited, artistic." It's now most known for introducing the song "My Name is Jack" by John Simon, the film's music supervisor: [Excerpt: John Simon, "My Name is Jack"] That song would go on to be a top ten hit in the UK for Manfred Mann: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "My Name is Jack"] The Hawks contributed backing music for several songs for the film, in which they acted as backing band for another old Greenwich Village folkie who had been friends with Yarrow and Dylan but who was not yet the star he would soon become, Tiny Tim: [Excerpt: Tiny Tim, "Sonny Boy"] This was their first time playing together properly since the end of the European tour, and Sid Griffin has noted that these Tiny Tim sessions are the first time you can really hear the sound that the group would develop over the next year, and which would characterise them for their whole career. Robertson, Danko, and Manuel also did a session, not for the film with another of Grossman's discoveries, Carly Simon, playing a version of "Baby Let Me Follow You Down", a song they'd played a lot with Dylan on the tour that spring. That recording has never been released, and I've only managed to track down a brief clip of it from a BBC documentary, with Simon and an interviewer talking over most of the clip (so this won't be in the Mixcloud I put together of songs): [Excerpt: Carly Simon, "Baby Let Me Follow You Down"] That recording is notable though because as well as Robertson, Danko, and Manuel, and Dylan's regular studio keyboard players Al Kooper and Paul Griffin, it also features Levon Helm on drums, even though Helm had still not rejoined the band and was at the time mostly working in New Orleans. But his name's on the session log, so he must have m

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The 80s Movies Podcast
Miramax Films - Part One

The 80s Movies Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 22, 2023 21:43


On this episode, we're going to start a miniseries that I've been dreading doing, not because of the films this company produced and/or released during the 1980s, but because it means shining any kind of light on a serial sexual assaulter and his enabling brother. But one cannot do a show like this, talking about the movies of the 1980s, and completely ignore Miramax Films. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT   From Los Angeles, California. The Entertainment Capital of the World. It's the 80s Movie Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens/ Thank you for listening today.   On this episode, we're going to start a miniseries that I've been dreading doing, not because of the films this company produced and/or released during the 1980s, but because it means shining any kind of light on a serial sexual assaulter and his enabling brother. But one cannot do a show like this, talking about the movies of the 1980s, and completely ignore Miramax Films.   But I am not here to defend Harvey Weinstein. I am not here to make him look good. My focus for this series, however many they end up being, will focus on the films and the filmmakers. Because it's important to note that the Weinsteins did not have a hand in the production of any of the movies Miramax released in the 1980s, and the two that they did have a hand in making, one a horror film, the other a comedy that would be the only film the Weinsteins would ever direct themselves, were distributed by companies other than Miramax.   But before I do begin, I want to disclose my own personal history with the Weinsteins. As you may know, I was a movie theatre manager for Landmark Theatres in the mid 1990s, running their NuWilshire Theatre in Santa Monica. The theatre was acquired by Landmark from Mann Theatres in 1992, and quickly became a hot destination for arthouse films for those who didn't want to deal with the hassle of trying to get to the Laemmle Monica 4 about a mile away, situated in a very busy area right off the beach, full of tourists who don't know how to park properly and making a general nuisance of themselves to the locals. One of the first movies to play at the NuWilshire after Landmark acquired it was Quentin Tarantino's debut film, Reservoir Dogs, which was released by Miramax in the fall of 1992. The NuWilshire quickly became a sort of lucky charm to Harvey Weinstein, which I would learn when I left the Cineplex Beverly Center in June 1993 to take over the NuWilshire from my friend Will, the great-grandson of William Fox, the founder of Fox Films, who was being promoted to district manager and personally recommended me to replace him.   During my two plus years at the NuWilshire, I fielded a number of calls from Harvey Weinstein. Not his secretary. Not his marketing people.    Harvey himself.   Harvey took a great interest in the theatre, and regularly wanted feedback about how his films were performing at my theatre. I don't know if he had heard the stories about Stanley Kubrick doing the same thing years before, but I probably spoke to him at least once a month. I never met the man, and I didn't really enjoy speaking with him, because a phone call from him meant I wasn't doing the work I actually needed to do, but keeping Harvey would mean keeping to get his best films for my theatre, so I indulged him a bit more than I probably should have.   And that indulgence did occasionally have its perks. Although I was not the manager of the NuWilshire when Reservoir Dogs played there, Quentin Tarantino personally hand-delivered one of the first teaser posters for his second movie, Pulp Fiction, to me, asking me if I would put it up in our poster frame, even though we both knew we were never going to play the film with the cast he assembled and the reviews coming out of Cannes. He, like Harvey Weinstein, considered the theatre his lucky charm. I put the poster up, even though we never did play the film, and you probably know how well the film did. Maybe we were his lucky charm.   I also got to meet Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier weeks before their first film, Clerks, opened. We hosted a special screening sponsored by the Independent Feature Project, now known as Film Independent, whose work to help promote independent film goes far deeper than just handing out the Spirit Awards each year. Smith and Mosier were cool cats, and I was able to gift Smith something the following year when he screened Mallrats a few weeks before it opened.   And, thanks to Miramax, I was gifted something that ended up being one of the best nights of my life. An invitation to the Spirit Awards and after-party in 1995, the year Quentin Tarantino and Lawrence Bender won a number of awards for Pulp Fiction. At the after-party, my then-girlfriend and I ended up drinking tequila with Toni Collette, who was just making her mark on American movie screens that very weekend, thanks to Miramax's release of Muriel's Wedding, and then playing pool against Collette and Tarantino, while his Spirit Awards sat on a nearby table.   Twenty feet from stardom, indeed.   I left that job at the end of the summer in 1995, and I would not be involved with the Weinstein Brothers for a number of years, until after I had moved to New York City, started FilmJerk, and had become an established film critic. As a critic, I had been invited to an advance screening of Bad Santa at the AMC Empire 25, and on the way out, Bob Weinstein randomly stopped me in the lobby to ask me a few questions about my reaction to the film. Which was the one and only time I ever interacted with either brother face to face, and would be the last time I ever interacted with either of them in any capacity.   As a journalist, I felt it was necessary to disclose these things, although I don't believe these things have clouded my judgment about them. They were smart enough to acquire some good films early in their careers, built a successful distribution company with some very smart people who most likely knew about their boss's disgusting proclivities and neither said nor did anything about it, and would eventually succumb to the reckoning that was always going to come to them, one way or another. I'm saddened that so many women were hurt by these men, physically and emotionally, and I will not be satisfied that they got what was coming to them until they've answered for everything they did.   Okay, enough with the proselytizing.    I will only briefly go into the history of the Weinstein Brothers, and how they came to found Miramax, and I'm going to get that out of the way right now.   Harvey Weinstein and his younger brother Bob, were born in Queens, New York, and after Harvey went to college in Buffalo, the brothers would start up a rock concert promotion company in the area. After several successful years in the concert business, they would take their profits and start up an independent film distribution company which they named Miramax, after their parents, Miriam and Max. They would symbolically start the company up on December 31st, 1979.   Like the old joke goes, they may have been concert promoters, but they really wanted to be filmmakers. But they would need to build up the company first, and they would use their connections in the music industry to pick up the American distribution rights to Rockshow, the first concert movie featuring Paul McCartney and his post-Beatles band Wings, which had been filmed during their 1976 Wings Over the World tour. And even from the start, Harvey Weinstein would earn the derisive nickname many people would give him over the years, Harvey Scissorhands, as he would cut down what was originally a 125min movie down to 102mins.   Miramax would open Rockshow on nine screens in the New York City area on Wednesday, November 26th, 1980, including the prestigious Ziegfeld Theatre, for what was billed as a one-week only run. But the film would end up exceeding their wildest expectations, grossing $113k from those nine screens, including nearly $46k just from the Ziegfeld. The film would get its run extended a second week, the absolute final week, threatened the ads, but the film would continue to play, at least at the Ziegfeld, until Saturday December 13th, when the theatre was closed for five days to prepare for what the theatre expected to be their big hit of the Christmas season, Neil Diamond's first movie, The Jazz Singer. It would be a sad coincidence that Rockstar's run at the Ziegfeld had been extended, and was still playing the night McCartney's friend and former bandmate John Lennon was assassinated barely a mile away from the theatre.   But, strangely, instead of exploiting the death of Lennon and capitalize on the sudden, unexpected, tragic reemergence of Beatlemania, Miramax seems to have let the picture go. I cannot find any playdates for the film in any other city outside of The Big Apple after December 1980, and the film would be unseen in any form outside a brief home video release in 1982 until June 2013, when the restored 125min cut was released on DVD and Blu-Ray, after a one-night theatrical showing in cinemas worldwide.   As the Brothers Weinstein were in the process of gearing up Miramax, they would try their hand at writing and producing a movie themselves. Seeing that movies like Halloween and Friday the 13th were becoming hits, Harvey would write up a five-page treatment for a horror movie, based on an upstate New York boogeyman called Cropsey, which Harvey had first heard about during his school days at camp. Bob Weinstein would write the script for The Burning with steampunk author Peter Lawrence in six weeks, hire a British music documentary filmmaker, Tony Maylam, the brothers knew through their concert promoting days, and they would have the film in production in Buffalo, New York, in the summer of 1980, with makeup effects by Tom Savini.   Once the film was complete, they accepted a purchase deal from Filmways Pictures, covering most of the cost of the $1.5m production, which they would funnel right back into their fledgling distribution company. But when The Burning opened in and around the Florida area on May 15th, 1981, the market was already overloaded with horror films, from Oliver Stone's The Hand and Edward Bianchi's The Fan, to Lewis Teague's Alligator and J. Lee Thompson's Happy Birthday to Me, to Joe Dante's The Howling and the second installment of the Friday the 13th series. Outside of Buffalo, where the movie was shot, the film did not perform well, no matter how many times Filmways tried to sell it. After several months, The Burning would only gross about $300k, which would help drive Filmways into bankruptcy. As we talked about a couple years ago on our series about Orion Pictures, Orion would buy all the assets from Filmways, including The Burning, which they would re-release into theatres with new artwork, into the New York City metropolitan region on November 5th, 1982, to help promote the upcoming home video release of the film. In just seven days in 78 theatres, the film would gross $401k, more than it had earned over its entire run during the previous year. But the film would be gone from theatres the following week, as many exhibitors do not like playing movies that were also playing on cable and/or available on videotape. It is estimated the film's final gross was about $750k in the US, but the film would become a minor success on home video and repeated cable screenings.   Now, some sources on the inter webs will tell you the first movie Miramax released was Goodbye, Emmanuelle, based in part on a profile of the brothers and their company in a March 2000 issue of Fortune Magazine, in which writer Tim Carvell makes this claim. Whether this info nugget came from bad research, or a bad memory on the part of one or both of the brothers, it simply is not true. Goodbye, Emmanuelle, as released by Miramax in an edited and dubbed version, would be released more than a year after Rockshow, on December 5th, 1981. It would gross a cool $241k in 50 theatres in New York City, but lose 80% of its screens in its second week, mostly for Miramax's next film, a low budget, British-made sci-fi sex comedy called Spaced Out.   Or, at least, that's what the brothers thought would be a better title for a movie called Outer Touch in the UK.   Which I can't necessarily argue. Outer Touch is a pretty dumb title for a movie. Even the film's director, Normal Warren, agreed. But that's all he would agree with the brothers on. He hated everything else they did to his film to prepare it for American release. Harvey would edit the film down to just 77mins in length, had a new dub created to de-emphasize the British accents of the original actors, and changed the music score and the ending. And for his efforts, Weinstein would see some success when the film was released into 41 theatres in New York on December 11th, 1981. But whether or not it was because of the film itself, which was very poorly reviewed, or because it was paired with the first re-issue of The Groove Tube since Chevy Chase, one of the actors in that film, became a star, remains to be seen.   Miramax would only release one movie for all of 1982, but it would end up being their first relative hit film.   Between 1976 and 1981, there were four live shows of music and comedy in the United Kingdom for the benefit of Amnesty International. Inspired by former Monty Python star John Cleese, these shows would raise millions for the international non-governmental organization focused on human rights issues around the world. The third show, in 1979, was called The Secret Policeman's Ball, and would not only feature Cleese, who also directed the live show, performing with his fellow Pythons Terry Jones and Michael Palin, but would also be a major launching pad for two of the most iconic comedians of the 1980s, English comedian Rowan Atkinson and Scottish comedian Billy Connelly. But unlike the first two Amnesty benefit shows, Cleese decided to add some musical acts to the bill, including Pete Townshend of The Who.   The shows would be a big success in the United Kingdom, and the Weinsteins, once again using their connections in the music scene, would buy the American film rights to the show before they actually incorporated Miramax Films. That purchase would be the impetus for creating the company.   One slight problem, though.   The show was, naturally, very British. One bit from the show, featuring the legendary British comedian and actor Peter Cook, was a nine-minute bit summing up a recent bit of British history, the leader of the British Labour Party being tried on charges of conspiracy and incitement to murder his ex-boyfriend, would not make any sense to anyone who wasn't following the trial. All in all, even with the musical segments featuring Townshend, the Weinsteins felt there was only about forty minutes worth of material that could be used for a movie.   It also didn't help that the show was shot with 16mm film, which would be extremely grainy when blown up to 35mm.   But while they hemmed and hawed through trying to shape the film. Cleese and his show partners at Amnesty decided to do another set of benefit shows in 1981, this time called The Secret Policeman's Other Ball. Knowing that there might be interest in a film version of this show, the team would decide to shoot this show in 35mm. Cleese would co-direct the live show, while music video director Julien Temple would be in charge of filming. And judging from the success of an EP released in 1980 featuring Townshend's performance at the previous show, Cleese would arrange for more musical artists to perform, including Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Phil Collins, Donovan, Bob Geldof, Sting, and Midge Ure of Ultraviolet. In fact, it would be because of their participation in these shows that would lead Geldof and Ure to form Band Aid in 1984, which would raise $24m for famine relief in Ethiopia in just three months, and the subsequent Live Aid shows in July 1985 would raise another $126m worldwide.   The 1981 Amnesty benefit shows were a success, especially the one-time-only performance of a supergroup called The Secret Police, comprising of Beck, Clapton, Geldof and Sting performing Bob Dylan's I Shall Be Released at the show's closing, and the Weinsteins would make another deal to buy the American movie rights to these shows. While Temple's version of the 1981 shows would show as intended for UK audiences in 1982, the co-creator of the series, British producer Martin Lewis, would spend three months in New York City with Harvey Weinstein at the end of 1981 and start of 1982, working to turn the 1979 and 1981 shows into one cohesive movie geared towards American audiences. After premiering at the Los Angeles International Film Exposition in March 1982, The Secret Policeman's Other Ball would open on nine screens in the greater New York City metropolitan area on May 21st, but only on one screen in all of Manhattan. And in its first three days, the movie would gross an amazing $116k, including $36,750 at the Sutton theatre in the Midtown East part of New York City. Even more astounding is that, in its second weekend at the same nine theaters, the film would actually increase its gross to $121k, when most movies in their second week were seeing their grosses drop 30-50% because of the opening of Rocky III. And after just four weeks in just New York City, on just nine or ten screens each week, The Secret Policeman's Other Ball would gross more than $400k. The film would already be profitable for Miramax.   But the Weinsteins were still cautious. It wouldn't be until July 16th when they'd start to send the film out to other markets like Los Angeles, where they could only get five theatres to show the film, including the brand new Cineplex Beverly Center, itself opening the same day, which, as the first Cineplex in America, was as desperate to show any movie it could as Miramax was to show the movie at any theatre it could.   When all was said and done, The Secret Policeman's Other Ball would gross nearly $4m in American theatres.   So, you'd think now they had a hit film under their belts, Miramax would gear up and start acquiring more films and establishing themselves as a true up and coming independent distributor.   Right?   You'd think.   Now, I already said The Secret Policeman's Other Ball was their only release in 1982.   So, naturally, you'd think their first of like ten or twelve releases for 1983 would come in January.   Right?   You'd think.   In fact, Miramax's next theatrical release, the first theatrical release of D.A. Pennebaker's Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars concert film from the legendary final Ziggy show at the Hammersmith Odeon in London on July 3, 1973, would not come until December 23rd, 1983. And, for the third time in three years, it would be their music connections that would help the Weinsteins acquire a film.   Although the Ziggy Stardust movie had been kicking around for years, mostly one-night-only 16mm screenings on college campuses and a heavily edited 44min version that aired once on American television network ABC in October 1974, this would be the first time a full-length 90min version of the movie would be seen. And the timing for it couldn't have come at a better time. 1983 had been a banner year for the musician and occasional actor. His album Let's Dance had sold more than five million copies worldwide and spawned three hit singles. His Serious Moonlight tour, his first concert tour in five years, was the biggest tour of the year. And he won critical praise for his role as  a British prisoner of war in Nagisa Ōshima's powerful Japanese World War II film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.   The Weinsteins would enlist the help of 20th Century Fox to get the film into theatres during a very competitive Christmas moviegoing season. But despite their best efforts, Fox and Miramax could only nab one theatre in all of New York City, the 8th Street Playhouse in lower Manhattan, and five in Los Angeles, including two screens at the Cineplex Beverly Center. And for the weekend, its $58,500 gross would be quite decent, with a per screen average above such films as Scarface, Sudden Impact and Yentl. But in its second weekend, the all-important Christmas week, the gross would fall nearly 50% when the vast majority of movies improve their grosses with kids out of school and wage earners getting time off for the holidays. Fox and Miramax would stay committed to the film through the early part of 1984, but they'd keep costs down by rotating the six prints made for New York and Los Angeles to other cities as those playdates wound down, and only buying eighth-page display ads in local newspapers' entertainment section when it arrived in a new city. The final gross would fall short of half a million dollars, but the film would find its audience on home video later in the year. And while the Weinsteins are no longer involved with the handling of the film, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars will be getting a theatrical release across the planet the first week of July 2023, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the concert.   So, here were are, four years into the formation of Miramax Films, and they only released five films into theatres, plus wrote and produced another released by Filmways. One minor hit, four disappointments, and we're still four years away from them becoming the distributor they'd become. But we're going to stop here today because I like to keep these episodes short.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again next week, when we continue with story of Miramax Films, from 1984 to 1987.   Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode.   The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.   Thank you again.   Good night.

The 80s Movie Podcast
Miramax Films - Part One

The 80s Movie Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 22, 2023 21:43


On this episode, we're going to start a miniseries that I've been dreading doing, not because of the films this company produced and/or released during the 1980s, but because it means shining any kind of light on a serial sexual assaulter and his enabling brother. But one cannot do a show like this, talking about the movies of the 1980s, and completely ignore Miramax Films. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT   From Los Angeles, California. The Entertainment Capital of the World. It's the 80s Movie Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens/ Thank you for listening today.   On this episode, we're going to start a miniseries that I've been dreading doing, not because of the films this company produced and/or released during the 1980s, but because it means shining any kind of light on a serial sexual assaulter and his enabling brother. But one cannot do a show like this, talking about the movies of the 1980s, and completely ignore Miramax Films.   But I am not here to defend Harvey Weinstein. I am not here to make him look good. My focus for this series, however many they end up being, will focus on the films and the filmmakers. Because it's important to note that the Weinsteins did not have a hand in the production of any of the movies Miramax released in the 1980s, and the two that they did have a hand in making, one a horror film, the other a comedy that would be the only film the Weinsteins would ever direct themselves, were distributed by companies other than Miramax.   But before I do begin, I want to disclose my own personal history with the Weinsteins. As you may know, I was a movie theatre manager for Landmark Theatres in the mid 1990s, running their NuWilshire Theatre in Santa Monica. The theatre was acquired by Landmark from Mann Theatres in 1992, and quickly became a hot destination for arthouse films for those who didn't want to deal with the hassle of trying to get to the Laemmle Monica 4 about a mile away, situated in a very busy area right off the beach, full of tourists who don't know how to park properly and making a general nuisance of themselves to the locals. One of the first movies to play at the NuWilshire after Landmark acquired it was Quentin Tarantino's debut film, Reservoir Dogs, which was released by Miramax in the fall of 1992. The NuWilshire quickly became a sort of lucky charm to Harvey Weinstein, which I would learn when I left the Cineplex Beverly Center in June 1993 to take over the NuWilshire from my friend Will, the great-grandson of William Fox, the founder of Fox Films, who was being promoted to district manager and personally recommended me to replace him.   During my two plus years at the NuWilshire, I fielded a number of calls from Harvey Weinstein. Not his secretary. Not his marketing people.    Harvey himself.   Harvey took a great interest in the theatre, and regularly wanted feedback about how his films were performing at my theatre. I don't know if he had heard the stories about Stanley Kubrick doing the same thing years before, but I probably spoke to him at least once a month. I never met the man, and I didn't really enjoy speaking with him, because a phone call from him meant I wasn't doing the work I actually needed to do, but keeping Harvey would mean keeping to get his best films for my theatre, so I indulged him a bit more than I probably should have.   And that indulgence did occasionally have its perks. Although I was not the manager of the NuWilshire when Reservoir Dogs played there, Quentin Tarantino personally hand-delivered one of the first teaser posters for his second movie, Pulp Fiction, to me, asking me if I would put it up in our poster frame, even though we both knew we were never going to play the film with the cast he assembled and the reviews coming out of Cannes. He, like Harvey Weinstein, considered the theatre his lucky charm. I put the poster up, even though we never did play the film, and you probably know how well the film did. Maybe we were his lucky charm.   I also got to meet Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier weeks before their first film, Clerks, opened. We hosted a special screening sponsored by the Independent Feature Project, now known as Film Independent, whose work to help promote independent film goes far deeper than just handing out the Spirit Awards each year. Smith and Mosier were cool cats, and I was able to gift Smith something the following year when he screened Mallrats a few weeks before it opened.   And, thanks to Miramax, I was gifted something that ended up being one of the best nights of my life. An invitation to the Spirit Awards and after-party in 1995, the year Quentin Tarantino and Lawrence Bender won a number of awards for Pulp Fiction. At the after-party, my then-girlfriend and I ended up drinking tequila with Toni Collette, who was just making her mark on American movie screens that very weekend, thanks to Miramax's release of Muriel's Wedding, and then playing pool against Collette and Tarantino, while his Spirit Awards sat on a nearby table.   Twenty feet from stardom, indeed.   I left that job at the end of the summer in 1995, and I would not be involved with the Weinstein Brothers for a number of years, until after I had moved to New York City, started FilmJerk, and had become an established film critic. As a critic, I had been invited to an advance screening of Bad Santa at the AMC Empire 25, and on the way out, Bob Weinstein randomly stopped me in the lobby to ask me a few questions about my reaction to the film. Which was the one and only time I ever interacted with either brother face to face, and would be the last time I ever interacted with either of them in any capacity.   As a journalist, I felt it was necessary to disclose these things, although I don't believe these things have clouded my judgment about them. They were smart enough to acquire some good films early in their careers, built a successful distribution company with some very smart people who most likely knew about their boss's disgusting proclivities and neither said nor did anything about it, and would eventually succumb to the reckoning that was always going to come to them, one way or another. I'm saddened that so many women were hurt by these men, physically and emotionally, and I will not be satisfied that they got what was coming to them until they've answered for everything they did.   Okay, enough with the proselytizing.    I will only briefly go into the history of the Weinstein Brothers, and how they came to found Miramax, and I'm going to get that out of the way right now.   Harvey Weinstein and his younger brother Bob, were born in Queens, New York, and after Harvey went to college in Buffalo, the brothers would start up a rock concert promotion company in the area. After several successful years in the concert business, they would take their profits and start up an independent film distribution company which they named Miramax, after their parents, Miriam and Max. They would symbolically start the company up on December 31st, 1979.   Like the old joke goes, they may have been concert promoters, but they really wanted to be filmmakers. But they would need to build up the company first, and they would use their connections in the music industry to pick up the American distribution rights to Rockshow, the first concert movie featuring Paul McCartney and his post-Beatles band Wings, which had been filmed during their 1976 Wings Over the World tour. And even from the start, Harvey Weinstein would earn the derisive nickname many people would give him over the years, Harvey Scissorhands, as he would cut down what was originally a 125min movie down to 102mins.   Miramax would open Rockshow on nine screens in the New York City area on Wednesday, November 26th, 1980, including the prestigious Ziegfeld Theatre, for what was billed as a one-week only run. But the film would end up exceeding their wildest expectations, grossing $113k from those nine screens, including nearly $46k just from the Ziegfeld. The film would get its run extended a second week, the absolute final week, threatened the ads, but the film would continue to play, at least at the Ziegfeld, until Saturday December 13th, when the theatre was closed for five days to prepare for what the theatre expected to be their big hit of the Christmas season, Neil Diamond's first movie, The Jazz Singer. It would be a sad coincidence that Rockstar's run at the Ziegfeld had been extended, and was still playing the night McCartney's friend and former bandmate John Lennon was assassinated barely a mile away from the theatre.   But, strangely, instead of exploiting the death of Lennon and capitalize on the sudden, unexpected, tragic reemergence of Beatlemania, Miramax seems to have let the picture go. I cannot find any playdates for the film in any other city outside of The Big Apple after December 1980, and the film would be unseen in any form outside a brief home video release in 1982 until June 2013, when the restored 125min cut was released on DVD and Blu-Ray, after a one-night theatrical showing in cinemas worldwide.   As the Brothers Weinstein were in the process of gearing up Miramax, they would try their hand at writing and producing a movie themselves. Seeing that movies like Halloween and Friday the 13th were becoming hits, Harvey would write up a five-page treatment for a horror movie, based on an upstate New York boogeyman called Cropsey, which Harvey had first heard about during his school days at camp. Bob Weinstein would write the script for The Burning with steampunk author Peter Lawrence in six weeks, hire a British music documentary filmmaker, Tony Maylam, the brothers knew through their concert promoting days, and they would have the film in production in Buffalo, New York, in the summer of 1980, with makeup effects by Tom Savini.   Once the film was complete, they accepted a purchase deal from Filmways Pictures, covering most of the cost of the $1.5m production, which they would funnel right back into their fledgling distribution company. But when The Burning opened in and around the Florida area on May 15th, 1981, the market was already overloaded with horror films, from Oliver Stone's The Hand and Edward Bianchi's The Fan, to Lewis Teague's Alligator and J. Lee Thompson's Happy Birthday to Me, to Joe Dante's The Howling and the second installment of the Friday the 13th series. Outside of Buffalo, where the movie was shot, the film did not perform well, no matter how many times Filmways tried to sell it. After several months, The Burning would only gross about $300k, which would help drive Filmways into bankruptcy. As we talked about a couple years ago on our series about Orion Pictures, Orion would buy all the assets from Filmways, including The Burning, which they would re-release into theatres with new artwork, into the New York City metropolitan region on November 5th, 1982, to help promote the upcoming home video release of the film. In just seven days in 78 theatres, the film would gross $401k, more than it had earned over its entire run during the previous year. But the film would be gone from theatres the following week, as many exhibitors do not like playing movies that were also playing on cable and/or available on videotape. It is estimated the film's final gross was about $750k in the US, but the film would become a minor success on home video and repeated cable screenings.   Now, some sources on the inter webs will tell you the first movie Miramax released was Goodbye, Emmanuelle, based in part on a profile of the brothers and their company in a March 2000 issue of Fortune Magazine, in which writer Tim Carvell makes this claim. Whether this info nugget came from bad research, or a bad memory on the part of one or both of the brothers, it simply is not true. Goodbye, Emmanuelle, as released by Miramax in an edited and dubbed version, would be released more than a year after Rockshow, on December 5th, 1981. It would gross a cool $241k in 50 theatres in New York City, but lose 80% of its screens in its second week, mostly for Miramax's next film, a low budget, British-made sci-fi sex comedy called Spaced Out.   Or, at least, that's what the brothers thought would be a better title for a movie called Outer Touch in the UK.   Which I can't necessarily argue. Outer Touch is a pretty dumb title for a movie. Even the film's director, Normal Warren, agreed. But that's all he would agree with the brothers on. He hated everything else they did to his film to prepare it for American release. Harvey would edit the film down to just 77mins in length, had a new dub created to de-emphasize the British accents of the original actors, and changed the music score and the ending. And for his efforts, Weinstein would see some success when the film was released into 41 theatres in New York on December 11th, 1981. But whether or not it was because of the film itself, which was very poorly reviewed, or because it was paired with the first re-issue of The Groove Tube since Chevy Chase, one of the actors in that film, became a star, remains to be seen.   Miramax would only release one movie for all of 1982, but it would end up being their first relative hit film.   Between 1976 and 1981, there were four live shows of music and comedy in the United Kingdom for the benefit of Amnesty International. Inspired by former Monty Python star John Cleese, these shows would raise millions for the international non-governmental organization focused on human rights issues around the world. The third show, in 1979, was called The Secret Policeman's Ball, and would not only feature Cleese, who also directed the live show, performing with his fellow Pythons Terry Jones and Michael Palin, but would also be a major launching pad for two of the most iconic comedians of the 1980s, English comedian Rowan Atkinson and Scottish comedian Billy Connelly. But unlike the first two Amnesty benefit shows, Cleese decided to add some musical acts to the bill, including Pete Townshend of The Who.   The shows would be a big success in the United Kingdom, and the Weinsteins, once again using their connections in the music scene, would buy the American film rights to the show before they actually incorporated Miramax Films. That purchase would be the impetus for creating the company.   One slight problem, though.   The show was, naturally, very British. One bit from the show, featuring the legendary British comedian and actor Peter Cook, was a nine-minute bit summing up a recent bit of British history, the leader of the British Labour Party being tried on charges of conspiracy and incitement to murder his ex-boyfriend, would not make any sense to anyone who wasn't following the trial. All in all, even with the musical segments featuring Townshend, the Weinsteins felt there was only about forty minutes worth of material that could be used for a movie.   It also didn't help that the show was shot with 16mm film, which would be extremely grainy when blown up to 35mm.   But while they hemmed and hawed through trying to shape the film. Cleese and his show partners at Amnesty decided to do another set of benefit shows in 1981, this time called The Secret Policeman's Other Ball. Knowing that there might be interest in a film version of this show, the team would decide to shoot this show in 35mm. Cleese would co-direct the live show, while music video director Julien Temple would be in charge of filming. And judging from the success of an EP released in 1980 featuring Townshend's performance at the previous show, Cleese would arrange for more musical artists to perform, including Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Phil Collins, Donovan, Bob Geldof, Sting, and Midge Ure of Ultraviolet. In fact, it would be because of their participation in these shows that would lead Geldof and Ure to form Band Aid in 1984, which would raise $24m for famine relief in Ethiopia in just three months, and the subsequent Live Aid shows in July 1985 would raise another $126m worldwide.   The 1981 Amnesty benefit shows were a success, especially the one-time-only performance of a supergroup called The Secret Police, comprising of Beck, Clapton, Geldof and Sting performing Bob Dylan's I Shall Be Released at the show's closing, and the Weinsteins would make another deal to buy the American movie rights to these shows. While Temple's version of the 1981 shows would show as intended for UK audiences in 1982, the co-creator of the series, British producer Martin Lewis, would spend three months in New York City with Harvey Weinstein at the end of 1981 and start of 1982, working to turn the 1979 and 1981 shows into one cohesive movie geared towards American audiences. After premiering at the Los Angeles International Film Exposition in March 1982, The Secret Policeman's Other Ball would open on nine screens in the greater New York City metropolitan area on May 21st, but only on one screen in all of Manhattan. And in its first three days, the movie would gross an amazing $116k, including $36,750 at the Sutton theatre in the Midtown East part of New York City. Even more astounding is that, in its second weekend at the same nine theaters, the film would actually increase its gross to $121k, when most movies in their second week were seeing their grosses drop 30-50% because of the opening of Rocky III. And after just four weeks in just New York City, on just nine or ten screens each week, The Secret Policeman's Other Ball would gross more than $400k. The film would already be profitable for Miramax.   But the Weinsteins were still cautious. It wouldn't be until July 16th when they'd start to send the film out to other markets like Los Angeles, where they could only get five theatres to show the film, including the brand new Cineplex Beverly Center, itself opening the same day, which, as the first Cineplex in America, was as desperate to show any movie it could as Miramax was to show the movie at any theatre it could.   When all was said and done, The Secret Policeman's Other Ball would gross nearly $4m in American theatres.   So, you'd think now they had a hit film under their belts, Miramax would gear up and start acquiring more films and establishing themselves as a true up and coming independent distributor.   Right?   You'd think.   Now, I already said The Secret Policeman's Other Ball was their only release in 1982.   So, naturally, you'd think their first of like ten or twelve releases for 1983 would come in January.   Right?   You'd think.   In fact, Miramax's next theatrical release, the first theatrical release of D.A. Pennebaker's Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars concert film from the legendary final Ziggy show at the Hammersmith Odeon in London on July 3, 1973, would not come until December 23rd, 1983. And, for the third time in three years, it would be their music connections that would help the Weinsteins acquire a film.   Although the Ziggy Stardust movie had been kicking around for years, mostly one-night-only 16mm screenings on college campuses and a heavily edited 44min version that aired once on American television network ABC in October 1974, this would be the first time a full-length 90min version of the movie would be seen. And the timing for it couldn't have come at a better time. 1983 had been a banner year for the musician and occasional actor. His album Let's Dance had sold more than five million copies worldwide and spawned three hit singles. His Serious Moonlight tour, his first concert tour in five years, was the biggest tour of the year. And he won critical praise for his role as  a British prisoner of war in Nagisa Ōshima's powerful Japanese World War II film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.   The Weinsteins would enlist the help of 20th Century Fox to get the film into theatres during a very competitive Christmas moviegoing season. But despite their best efforts, Fox and Miramax could only nab one theatre in all of New York City, the 8th Street Playhouse in lower Manhattan, and five in Los Angeles, including two screens at the Cineplex Beverly Center. And for the weekend, its $58,500 gross would be quite decent, with a per screen average above such films as Scarface, Sudden Impact and Yentl. But in its second weekend, the all-important Christmas week, the gross would fall nearly 50% when the vast majority of movies improve their grosses with kids out of school and wage earners getting time off for the holidays. Fox and Miramax would stay committed to the film through the early part of 1984, but they'd keep costs down by rotating the six prints made for New York and Los Angeles to other cities as those playdates wound down, and only buying eighth-page display ads in local newspapers' entertainment section when it arrived in a new city. The final gross would fall short of half a million dollars, but the film would find its audience on home video later in the year. And while the Weinsteins are no longer involved with the handling of the film, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars will be getting a theatrical release across the planet the first week of July 2023, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the concert.   So, here were are, four years into the formation of Miramax Films, and they only released five films into theatres, plus wrote and produced another released by Filmways. One minor hit, four disappointments, and we're still four years away from them becoming the distributor they'd become. But we're going to stop here today because I like to keep these episodes short.   Thank you for joining us. We'll talk again next week, when we continue with story of Miramax Films, from 1984 to 1987.   Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode.   The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.   Thank you again.   Good night.

Homecoming with Jessica
I Shall Be Released

Homecoming with Jessica

Play Episode Listen Later May 13, 2023 19:09


I'm restarting my podcast with heartfelt appreciation to all my listeners, new and established. This podcast celebrates the light in all its glory. As we embrace it, our hopes and dreams come to life, creating a new world. I sing "I Shall Be Released," Dylan's great anthem to freedom. With love to all, Jessica Here is the interview with Archbishop Desmond Tutu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHszI1n-CJY Here is my YouTube video of this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gPB13XVVT4 With gratitude to my sponsors: Roland Corporation Australia Haworths Shellharbour, New South Wales, Australia My dear Patreon patrons, and all supporters past and present Your support will help me bring hope and inspiration to the world: https://www.pianobeautiful.com/donatecontact.html Thank you! Website: https://www.pianobeautiful.com Audios, Videos and Podcast YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JessicaRoemischer Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/user1976839 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/7rjR3RqXhE35SMskX9Wjv2 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/homecoming-with-jessica/id1420380439 Follow me on... Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jessica.roemischer/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jessica_roemischer/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicaroemischer/ Buy audios and my Award-winning Memoir Amazon CDs: https://amzn.to/3E2bAlT Amazon Memoir: https://amzn.to/3xu5wAo

The Flower Power Hour with Ken & MJ
The Flower Power Hour with Ken & MJ Featuring Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks album

The Flower Power Hour with Ken & MJ

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 12, 2023 58:00


Dear Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, it's me, Back Door Man. I am asking for a little Shelter from the Storm. Buckets of Rain have fallen on 2nd and 3rd and positively 4th Street, too. Now The Shield has failed and I would Love You To just Shake Your Hips and then I Shall Be Released. Tomorrow Never Knows, but I am no Idiot. Wind or no wind, I, Back Door Man, am not a fan of the Gallows Pole.

Bethany UCC
2022.3.6 Sermon: I Shall Be Released. Not Too Soon

Bethany UCC

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 7, 2022 16:00


Rev. Vince Amlin kicks off our new sermon series, I Shall Be Released, while back in our sanctuary after two, long years. We're talking about joyous celebrations maybe being too soon... or are they?

Carolina Calling: A Music & History Podcast
Shelby: Local Legends Breathe New Life into Small Town

Carolina Calling: A Music & History Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 14, 2022 33:08


The image of bluegrass is mountain music played and heard at high altitudes and towns like Deep Gap and remote mountain hollers across the Appalachians. But the earliest form of the music originated at lower elevations, in textile towns across the North Carolina Piedmont. As far back as the 1920s, old-time string bands like Charlie Poole's North Carolina Ramblers were playing an early form of the music in textile towns, like Gastonia, Spray, and Shelby - in Cleveland County west of Charlotte.In this second episode of Carolina Calling, we visit the small town of Shelby: a seemingly quiet place, like most small Southern towns one might pass by in their travels. Until you see the signs for the likes of the Don Gibson Theatre and the Earl Scruggs Center, you wouldn't guess that it was the town that raised two of the most influential musicians and songwriters in bluegrass and country music: Earl Scruggs, one of the most important musicians in the birth of bluegrass, whose banjo playing was so innovative that it still bears his name, “Scruggs style,” and Don Gibson, one of the greatest songwriters in the pop & country pantheon, who wrote “I Can't Stop Loving You,” “Sweet Dreams,” and other songs you know by heart. For both Don Gibson and Earl Scruggs, Shelby is where it all began.Subscribe to Carolina Calling to follow along as we journey across the Old North State, visiting towns like Greensboro, Durham, Wilmington, Asheville, and more.Brought to you by The Bluegrass Situation and Come Hear NCMusic featured in this episode:Charlie Poole & The North Carolina Ramblers - "Take a Drink On Me"Flatt & Scruggs - "Ground Speed"Don Gibson - "I Can't Stop Loving You"Andrew Marlin - "Erie Fiddler" (Carolina Calling Theme)Hedy West - "Cotton Mill Girl"Blind Boy Fuller - "Rag Mama, Rag"Don Gibson - "Sea Of Heartbreak"Patsy Cline - "Sweet Dreams "Ray Charles - "I Can't Stop Loving You"Ronnie Milsap - "(I'd Be) A Legend In My Time"Elvis Presley - "Crying In The Chapel"Hank Snow - "Oh Lonesome Me"Don Gibson - "Sweet Dreams"Don Gibson - "Oh Lonesome Me"Chet Atkins - "Oh Lonesome Me"Johnny Cash - "Oh, Lonesome Me"The Everly Brothers - "Oh Lonesome Me"Neil Young - "Oh Lonesome Me"Flatt & Scruggs - "Foggy Mountain Breakdown"Bill Preston - "Holy, Holy, Holy"Flat & Scruggs - "We'll Meet Again Sweetheart"Snuffy Jenkins - "Careless Love"Bill Monroe - "Uncle Pen"Bill Monroe - "It's Mighty Dark to Travel"The Earl Scruggs Revue - "I Shall Be Released"The Band - "I Shall Be Released"Nitty Gritty Dirt Band - "Will The Circle Be Unbroken"The Country Gentlemen - "Fox on the Run"Sonny Terry - "Whoopin' The Blues"Sonny Terry & Brownie McGee - "Born With The Blues (Live)"Nina Simone - "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free"Cover image courtesy of the Don Gibson TheatreAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

The Heart of Markness Led Zeppelin Podcast
Bob Dylan - Brixton UK 1995 W Elvis Costello

The Heart of Markness Led Zeppelin Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 30, 2022 31:57


Bob Dylan's 1995 tour is legendary for how awesome it is. We hear Jokerman, Love Minus Zero, and I Shall Be Released (w/ Elvis Costello) from March 30, 1995 @ Brixton Academy, UK. So good.

Mick and the PhatMan Talking Music
The Sex Pistols story. "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"

Mick and the PhatMan Talking Music

Play Episode Play 30 sec Highlight Listen Later Nov 12, 2021 63:33


In mid-70's London, the Sex Pistols released their first and only album, "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols".After the controversy, the legal battles, and the arguments, we're left with one of the best rock-n-roll albums ever.  Mick and the Phatman talk about the band, where they came from, and why the album is so great.References: Uluru, Red Sands Motel, Mr Mercedes, Chrissie Hynde, "I Shall Be Released", Santana, "Blessings and Miracles", Stevie Winwood, John Lydon, Johnny Rotten, Public Image Ltd, Glen Matlock, Sid Vicious, Bill Grundy, Julien Temple, "The Filth and the Fury",  Richard Branson, Malcolm McLaren, Jamie Reid, Graham Chapman Bob Dylan 30th AnniversaryNever Mind the BollocksBlessings and MiraclesBook:  "Anger is an Energy", John LydonContact UsIf you enjoy this podcast, share it with a friend who loves music. Or leave us a review and a rating (5-star?) to help our audience grow.  What do you think of the podcast? What would you like us to talk about? Ask questions, or even let us know if we got something wrong!! Follow us on Facebook Follow us  on Instagram Email us at: mickandthephatman@gmail.com

Sing Out! Radio Magazine
Episode 2121: #21-21: Happy Birthday, Bob Dylan!, Pt.2

Sing Out! Radio Magazine

Play Episode Listen Later May 26, 2021 58:30


On this week’s show, we conclude our two-part celebration of Bob Dylan's 80th. We'll hear more of my favorite covers of Dylan's best tunes, including selections from Rhiannon Giddens, Willie Nelson, The Byrds, Martin Simpson and some from Bob as well. Celebrating the legendary icon … this week on The Sing Out! Radio Magazine. Episode #21-21: Happy Birthday, Bob Dylan!, Pt.2 Host: Tom Druckenmiller Artist/”Song”/CD/Label Pete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / SmithsonianFolkways Larry Campbell / “Ragtime Annie” / Rooftops / Treasure Brewer & Shipley / “All Along the Watchtower” / Weeds / BMG-Buddah John Renbourn & Wizz Jones / “Buckets of Rain” / Joint Control / Riverboat Brian Auger & the Trinity w/ Julie Driscoll / “This Wheels on Fire” / Open / Ghostown Bob Dylan / “The Love that Faded” / The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams / Columbia Rhiannon Giddens / “Spanish Mary” / Lost on the River / Harvest Willie Nelson / “Heartland” / Across the Borderland / Columbia Larry Campbell / “Blind Mary” / Rooftops / Treasure The Byrds / “My Back Pages” / Younger than Yesterday / Columbia Nina Simone / “I Shall Be Released” / Just Like a Woman / RCA-Legacy Happy Traum / “Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood)” / Just For the Love of It / Lark's Nest Peter, Paul & Mary / “Too Much of Nothing” / Late Again / Warner Brothers Martin Simpson / “Blind Willie McTell” / Vagrant Stanzas / Topic Bob Dylan / “Forever Young” / Planet Waves / Columbia Pete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / SmithsonianFolkways

Mediano Music
BOBCast: 80 år med Dylan - en samtale med Jakob Brønnum

Mediano Music

Play Episode Listen Later May 23, 2021 103:26


Bob Dylan fylder 80 år den 24. maj. Det fejrer vi med forfatter og teolog Jakob Brønnums gennemgang af de efter hans mening ti bedste Bob Dylan-album. Og i denne POVcast - som i dagens anledning er døbt BOBcast - uddyber Brønnum sine valg i samtale med musikredaktør Jan Eriksen. Podcasten er lang, det handler om en lang karriere. 100 minutters BOBcast. 80 års levet liv. 60 år lang karriere. 40 album. Godt og vel.  At sætte sig for at udnævne de bedste ti Dylan-album kræver beslutsomhed, stor viden og et vist mod. Alt det kendetegner Dylan-eksperten Jakob Brønnum. I denne podcast taler han og værten ikke bare om de ti album på listen, men også om afgørende træk, musikalsk og teksmæssigt, der kom til at påvirke Dylan efter det store brud med folkemusikbevægelsen i begyndelsen af 60'erne. Og de taler ikke mindst om den betydning Dylan løbende har haft på den øvrige musikscene og den omgivende verden, der omvendt har påvirket Dylans sangskrivning.  På det seneste har Brønnum og Dylan-eksperten Eyolf Østrem udsendt første udgave af det, de kalder et "in-depth newsletter about Bob Dylan's music and lyrics", med andre ord et lille månedligt tidsskrift med artikler og analyser og anmeldelser og klummer, men i den nye Substack-form, hvor det går direkte i indbakken som mail og man samtidig har arkivet på hjemmesiden.  Brønnum har bl.a. skrevet bogen "Sange ved himlens port - Bob Dylans bibelske inspirationskilder". Jan Eriksen mødte Brønnum på et hotel i København, da denne var på vej hjem til Sverige. Der er lidt rumlen fra andre hotelgæster undervejs. I løbet af samtalen taler de blandt meget andet om: Robbie Robertsons indfølte guitarspil, der nærmest er et nummer i sig selv på versionen af  "Blowing in the Wind" på Before the Flood Forholdet til den daværende kone Sara Lowdes, der påvirker flere af Bob Dylans smukkeste numre. Dylans inspiration i den jødiske Kabbala-tænkning De uendelig mange oneliners i Dylans sange Dylans Nobel-pris Den evige afsøgning af eksistentielle spørgsmål i Dylans sange Forholdet mellem og folkemusikbevægelsen, der kom til at påvirke Dylans sangskrivning i mange år senere.  Dylans påvirkning af resten af musikscenen. Hvad der skete, der Dylan for første og sidste gang arbejdede sammen med en anden tekstforfatter - på albummet Desire. BOBcastens playliste: Bob Dylan Greatest Hits vol. 2, "Positively 4. Street" Before The Flood, "I Shall Be Released" Oh Mercy, "Ring them Bells", version med Joe Cocker Blood on the Tracks, "If You See Her Say Hallo" Highway 61 Revisited, "Desolation Row" Desire, "Hurricane" Time Out of Mind, "Trying to Get to Heaven" Blonde on Blonde, "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands" Love and Theft, "Mississippi" Bring it All Back Home, "Love Minus Zero/No Limit"

Wilco Will Love You Podcast
I Have a Quiet Amplifier

Wilco Will Love You Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 14, 2021 14:57


If you haven't listened yet, here's "Quiet Amplifier."The other Wilco song that features a present joint vocal (okay, so most of it is unison, not harmony like I said. So sue me!) It's a live performance, too - with Feist. Enjoy!Strumming a snare is a thing! I couldn't find the video of Levon Helm doing it on "I Shall Be Released," by The Band but this drum forum proves that I didn't hallucinate it.That Tom Waits snare detail was also from that Fresh Air interview shared on a previous episode's show notes.All twee drum wizardry speculation aside, this account is abundant proof that Glenn Kotche can do anything.We mentioned Jeff Tweedy's book yet again.We talked about the amazing song "One Sunday Morning" from The Whole Love.Well, look at that! A hearing aid can also be a "quiet amplifier." There's probably another meaning in there somewhere."Everyone Hides" is next!And here's our humble Instagram page. Bye!

Sacred Awakenings Podcast
Music of the Spirit - vol.2

Sacred Awakenings Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 30, 2021 38:05


Welcome to the second installment of - Music from our Sunday Gatherings - vol2 - Performers:Kim BuehlerEmily MitchellLori  & John JohnsonDan O'Connor 1) Receiving Chant 2) Evening Prayer(Sleep in Peace) 3) Love is My Decision 4) What a Wonderful World 5) Speak Life 6) I Shall Be Released 7) The Healing Song 8) You Raise Me Up 9) Gratitude 10) Let There Be On Earth 11) You Are The Face Of God 12) Let It Be 13) Lean On Me 14) The Gift You Are  

Ecos del Vinilo Radio
The Band / The Weight | Programa 132 - Ecos del Vinilo Radio

Ecos del Vinilo Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 15, 2021 22:11


Vamos con la banda de bandas: The Band. Dedicaremos esta emisión a la historia de su canción-emblema The Weight; la escucharemos en varias versiones, además de su cara B como single, I Shall Be Released y un magnífico cover de Bruce Springsteen.

world is a house on fire
'I Shall Be Released' (Dylan)/'Joyful [Man]' (DiFranco) (Interrupted by Fucking Text Message Version)

world is a house on fire

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 16, 2021 3:10


'I Shall Be Released' by Bob Dylan + 'Joyful Girl [Man]' by Ani DiFranco I almost never get texts and have notifications turned off on, oh, everything, so I never need to remember to mute my phone. I had already failed to record this thing so many, many, MANY times, and it's incredibly difficult to pull off this arrangement and remember to switch the genders and the right place to come in to the second song and switching plucked strings and chord reps and then the fucking text came. The worst part? I was inducted into a text chain for no apparent reason. I'm leaving this as is, as is my habit. It was hard enough to work up the courage to do this, overcome elbow pain and cold and find a quiet space away from the other noise I have no control over. This is as good as it gets, y'all.

The Show On The Road with Z. Lupetin
Blind Boys Of Alabama

The Show On The Road with Z. Lupetin

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 10, 2021 41:43


This week on the show, to help honor Black History Month, we bring you a conversation with members of the foundational gospel group The Blind Boys Of Alabama - including longtime singer Ricky McKinnie, and beloved senior member Jimmy Carter who has been with the group for four decades. Formed in the late 1930s with talent discovered at the Alabama Institute Of The Negro Blind, the troupe has superseded its limitations by bringing its own high-spirited version of jubilee gospel throughout the world. Their music was often the backdrop to the civil rights movement as Martin Luther King JR. toured the south, and Jimmy and Ricky are amazed and grateful that their message was still ringing true during the Black Lives Matter protest movement of the tumultuous last year. While the members of the band have changed through history, the group has stayed steadfast to preserving a kinetic church-based music that doesn't seek to evangelize, but can bring people of all faiths together. Indeed, watching Jimmy and the other bespectacled members walk with hands on each other's shoulders into the youthful crowds of adoring festival goers from Bonnarroo to Jazzfest is really something to behold. Their body of work continues to grow. In the last few decades they've gamely collaborated with a wide range of secular artists from Peter Gabriel to Ben Harper to Bonnie Raitt, made an album with Bon Iver (the stellar 2013 release I'll Find A Way) and shrewdly reworked the ominous Tom Waits classic “Way Down In The Hole” which became the theme for HBO's The Wire. Their newest full length Almost Home, a treatise on morality and mortality, is particularly moving. It features songs written by Marc Cohn, Valerie June, The North Mississippi All Stars and many others - and was the last record that longtime member and bandleader Clarance Fountain was a part of before he passed away. Fountain was part of the group for for nearly sixty years. As Jimmy playfully mentions throughout the conversation, they've never let being blind stand in the way of doing what they do best: putting on a show. They're entertainers at heart and it's so small feat that they've brought a nearly lost form of swinging, soulful (and expertly arranged) gospel from the small southern towns where they grew up, all the way to the White House, where they've held court for three different presidents. They've won five Grammy Awards along the way. Stick around to the end hear their rich cover of Bob Dylan's “I Shall Be Released”.

Working Class Heroes Podcast
"Can't Be A Victim to the System" - The Prakash Churaman Story Part 2

Working Class Heroes Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 2, 2020 62:22


On this week’s show of Working Class Heroes Radio, we continue our story of Prakash Churaman, a young man locked up for six years without a fair trial or a guilty verdict, who’s fighting to prove his innocence from within the Rikers Island Jail Complex. In part two, Julian talks about how Prakash has built his support group, his issues with the judge on his trial, and how six years behind bars have affected Prakash. To help Prakash Churaman: Sign his petition here: https://bit.ly/3dFenVP Donate to his fundraiser here: https://bit.ly/3o8xwEr Closing song - I Shall Be Released by Nina Simone

Hard Rain & Slow Trains: Bob Dylan & Fellow Travelers
10/15/2020: "All Those Who've Sailed With Me": Bob Dylan & His Bands pt 1

Hard Rain & Slow Trains: Bob Dylan & Fellow Travelers

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 16, 2020 59:11


This week we begin a multi-episode series featuring Dylan's bands over the decades. Tonight, it is the Paul Butterfield Blues Band – three members of which joined him on stage at the infamous Newport Folk Festival performance of July 25, 1965 – and The Band, who, truly, need no introduction...especially for you, right? Tonight on "Who Did It Better?" we ask you to go to our Twitter page @RainTrains and vote for who did "I Shall Be Released" better: Bob Dylan & The Band or...The Band?!?

Beautiful Illusions
EP 02 - Our Back Pages

Beautiful Illusions

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 26, 2020 61:56


Visit our website BeautifulIllusions.org for a complete set of show notes and links to almost everything discussed in this episodeSelected References:Bob Dylan lyrics by song titleNo Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan by Robert Shelton“I Want You” from Dylan and The Grateful Dead’s 7/4/87 show in Foxboro, MA - not the exact version on the album (in terms of Dylan’s enunciation it’s actually better), but you get the idea.“I Want You” from Bob Dylan’s 1966 masterpiece Blonde on Blonde“Hurricane” and “One More Cup Of Coffee” off the 1976 album Desire“Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” from the 1975 album Blood On The Tracks“Love Minus Zero/No Limit” from the 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home“The Man In Me” from the 1970 album New Morning, and famously used in the Coen brother’s extraordinary cult classic movie  “The Big Lebowski”Bruce Springsteen, the 1975 Rolling Stone article “New Dylan From Jersey? It Might As Well Be Springsteen”, “The Members of ‘The Next Bob Dylan’ Club” and “Who Is The Next Bob Dylan?: 10 Songwriters Once Voted Most Likely” Bob Dylan at The Palace Theatre on April 14, 1996 reviewed here in the Hartford CourantTime Out Of Mind won 3 Grammy’s at the 40th Annual Grammy Awards for Album of the Year, Best Contemporary Folk Album, and Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for the song “Cold Irons Bound” - perhaps most memorably Dylan’s performance of “Love Sick” at the show was crashed by a spastically contorting and shirtless Michael Portnoy who infamously had the words “Soy Bomb” painted across his chest - Dylan and the band kept going like the true pros that they are without missing a beat or seeming to acknowledge the intrusion in any way. Also notably “Time Out of Mind” beat out Radiohead’s masterpiece “OK Computer” for Album of the Year.Rick Danko (late, of The Band) joins Bob Dylan for “This Wheel’s On Fire” and then again during the encore for “I Shall Be Released” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” original version from the 1963 album The Freewheelin’ Bob DylanThe Gibson J-45 Sunburst acoustic guitar - Dylan played the J-45 as his primary acoustic throughout the late 90’s and early 2000’s - it can be seen and heard prominently on this video of “My Back Pages”Is Dylan the greatest songwriter? Try “Rolling Stone Readers Pick the Top 10 Songwriters of All Time” or “The 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time” (heavily biased towards rock era, but it’s Rolling Stone, so that’s somewhat expected), or try a list from Dave’s Music Database that aggregates 36 other lists, an article/poll from BBC news, an opinion piece from a philosophy professor, or maybe the fact that Dylan won a Nobel Prize in Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”Newport concert review (with setlist) from Berkshire Links website, and “Dylan at Newport, 2002” from the blog singer-songwriter/Dylanologist Peter Stone Brown (originally posted on Bobdylan.com), Dylan notably wore a wig and fake beard for the occasion (pic with wig, beard, and J-45)Dylan sang “Only A Pawn In Their Game” and “When the Ship Comes In” (with Joan Baez) as part of a musical program that included Mahalia Jackson, Marian Anderson, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, Odetta, and The Freedom Singers, before Martin Luther King gave his famous speech “Bob Dylan’s Influence On The Beatles” from The Flip Side Beatles Blog, and “How Bob Dylan Influenced The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who“ from Far Out Magazine“How Bob Dylan Changed the 60’s, and American Culture”“Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and the Rock of the Sixties” “Is this cave painting humanity’s oldest story?”“Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman, or read this excerpt in Scientific AmericanAnother Side of Bob Dylan released in 1964Bob Dylan performing “Maggie’s Farm” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, and just because it’s cool here is an awestruck Jason Isbell playing the 1964 Fender Strat that Dylan played at the Newport performance, and here is a bunch of others including Courtney Barnett with the same  guitarFor more on the “Electric Dylan Controversy” see “The Night Bob Dylan Went Electric,” “Dylan goes electric at The Newport Folk Festival,” “July 25, 1965: Dylan Goes Electric at The Newport Folk Festival,” and “Revisit Bob Dylan’s electric performance at Newport Folk Festival 50 years later” -Here’s a good example of an antagonistic interview from the famous Dylan documentary “Don’t Look Back”“How Robert Zimmerman Became Bob Dylan”“My Back Pages” album recording and lyricsThe album Bringing It All Back Home was released on March 22, 1965 a few months before the Newport Folk Festival in July of that same year“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” album recording“It Ain’t Me Babe” album recording“Simulacra and Simulations” excerpt from Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings 1965’s Highway 61 Revisited and the 1966 masterpiece Blonde on Blonde, along with Bringing It All Back Home are widely considered the peak of Dylan’s 60’s outputCheck out the classic video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues”The 2005 documentary “No Direction Home” by Martin Scorsese“Shelter from the Storm” album version This episode was recorded in February 2020The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

It's New Orleans: Happy Hour
Humidor Saves The World Again

It's New Orleans: Happy Hour

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 10, 2020 61:36


Still barred from hanging out in bars in New Orleans, in the interests of public health, we continue to revisit standout shows from years gone by. This show, in which Humidor Saves The World Again, is the first Happy Hour after the election of Donald J Trump in 2016. Even then we knew things were going to go to Hell. If only podcasting was as popular in 2016 as it is today. Maybe somebody in DC would have heard this conversation and we could, indeed have saved the world. For now though all we can do is look back and laugh, and try not cry in our beer.  Austin Alward, aka Aus-T the Franco rap star, has a plan to save the country and the world from rampant Trumpism. It involves the internet, a Cuban cigar store owner, and a bunch of New Orleans actors and musicians. It might have been just crazy enough to work. Jazz great Mitchel Forman, and singer-songwriters Sam Doores from The Deslondes and Andrew Duhon have their own plan. It involves a searing rendition of I Shall Be Released, a tribute to both Leonard Cohen and the nation. Actress Teri Wyble made it out of dance school in Lafayette to become a critically acclaimed actress, a go-go dancer at Harrah’s Casino, and an international body painting sensation. This really is one of the greatest Happy Hours in the history of the show. When we first published this show we sent an admonition with it: "If you were thinking of leaving New Orleans this will make you stay. If you are thinking of moving here, call U-Haul, this will tip you over the edge." Photos from the now defunct Wayfare are by Alison Moon. For more Best of Happy Hour, try this.

Rock N Roll Pantheon
Is It Rolling, Bob? Talking Dylan: Nish Kumar

Rock N Roll Pantheon

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 22, 2020 48:37


Comedian Nish Kumar says: “Bob Dylan is the most enduring and important creative relationship of my life. If you can't think of one Dylan song you like, then a part of your humanity may be missing”. When Bob and his band played the Hendrix arrangement of All Along The Watchtower at his first (and only) Dylan concert, it was “one of the greatest moments of my life”. In other words, he's our sort of chap.Cheerfully agreeing that “there's no bore like a Dylan bore”, Nish gives us his takes on Tangled Up In Blue (“I don't think he's ever finished it”), The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll, Bob Dylan's 115th Dream and I Shall Be Released. We get the inside story on using Bob as a role model when being booed (“bloody-minded obstinance in the face of people being dicks is very inspiring”) and for personal grooming inspiration (“my hair grows the way it grows because of the Blonde On Blonde album cover”).Nish Kumar grew up in Croydon, South London. He has a degree in History and English from Durham University. His sold-out solo shows have won awards at the Edinburgh Fringe and toured nationally and internationally to huge acclaim. Nish's TV appearances include a Netflix Special, The John Bishop Show, Have I Got News For You, Alan Davies As Yet Untitled, QI, Mock The Week, and Live At The Apollo. He has been the presenter of the topical comedy show Newsjack on Radio 4 Extra, hosts television's very popular The Mash Report on BBC Two and chairs The News Quiz on BBC Radio 4.WebsiteTrailerTwitterSpotify playlistListeners: please subscribe and/or leave a review and a rating.Twitter @isitrollingpodRecorded 24th February 2020This show is part of Pantheon Podcasts.

Is It Rolling, Bob? Talking Dylan

Comedian Nish Kumar says: “Bob Dylan is the most enduring and important creative relationship of my life. If you can't think of one Dylan song you like, then a part of your humanity may be missing”. When Bob and his band played the Hendrix arrangement of All Along The Watchtower at his first (and only) Dylan concert, it was “one of the greatest moments of my life”. In other words, he's our sort of chap.Cheerfully agreeing that “there's no bore like a Dylan bore”, Nish gives us his takes on Tangled Up In Blue (“I don't think he's ever finished it”), The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll, Bob Dylan's 115th Dream and I Shall Be Released. We get the inside story on using Bob as a role model when being booed (“bloody-minded obstinance in the face of people being dicks is very inspiring”) and for personal grooming inspiration (“my hair grows the way it grows because of the Blonde On Blonde album cover”).Nish Kumar grew up in Croydon, South London. He has a degree in History and English from Durham University. His sold-out solo shows have won awards at the Edinburgh Fringe and toured nationally and internationally to huge acclaim. Nish's TV appearances include a Netflix Special, The John Bishop Show, Have I Got News For You, Alan Davies As Yet Untitled, QI, Mock The Week, and Live At The Apollo. He has been the presenter of the topical comedy show Newsjack on Radio 4 Extra, hosts television's very popular The Mash Report on BBC Two and chairs The News Quiz on BBC Radio 4.WebsiteTrailerTwitterEpisode playlist on AppleEpisode playlist on SpotifyListeners: please subscribe and/or leave a review and a rating.Twitter @isitrollingpodRecorded 24th February 2020This show is part of Pantheon Podcasts.

Is It Rolling, Bob? Talking Dylan

Comedian Nish Kumar says: “Bob Dylan is the most enduring and important creative relationship of my life. If you can’t think of one Dylan song you like, then a part of your humanity may be missing”. When Bob and his band played the Hendrix arrangement of All Along The Watchtower at his first (and only) Dylan concert, it was “one of the greatest moments of my life”. In other words, he’s our sort of chap. Cheerfully agreeing that “there’s no bore like a Dylan bore”, Nish gives us his takes on Tangled Up In Blue (“I don’t think he’s ever finished it”), The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll, Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream and I Shall Be Released. We get the inside story on using Bob as a role model when being booed (“bloody-minded obstinance in the face of people being dicks is very inspiring”) and for personal grooming inspiration (“my hair grows the way it grows because of the Blonde On Blonde album cover”). Nish Kumar grew up in Croydon, South London. He has a degree in History and English from Durham University. His sold-out solo shows have won awards at the Edinburgh Fringe and toured nationally and internationally to huge acclaim. Nish’s TV appearances include a Netflix Special, The John Bishop Show, Have I Got News For You, Alan Davies As Yet Untitled, QI, Mock The Week, and Live At The Apollo. He has been the presenter of the topical comedy show Newsjack on Radio 4 Extra, hosts television’s very popular The Mash Report on BBC Two and chairs The News Quiz on BBC Radio 4. Website Trailer Twitter Spotify playlist Listeners: please subscribe and/or leave a review and a rating. Twitter @isitrollingpod Recorded 24th February 2020 This show is part of Pantheon Podcasts.

Rock N Roll Pantheon
Is It Rolling, Bob? Talking Dylan: Nish Kumar

Rock N Roll Pantheon

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 22, 2020 49:22


Comedian Nish Kumar says: “Bob Dylan is the most enduring and important creative relationship of my life. If you can’t think of one Dylan song you like, then a part of your humanity may be missing”. When Bob and his band played the Hendrix arrangement of All Along The Watchtower at his first (and only) Dylan concert, it was “one of the greatest moments of my life”. In other words, he’s our sort of chap. Cheerfully agreeing that “there’s no bore like a Dylan bore”, Nish gives us his takes on Tangled Up In Blue (“I don’t think he’s ever finished it”), The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll, Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream and I Shall Be Released. We get the inside story on using Bob as a role model when being booed (“bloody-minded obstinance in the face of people being dicks is very inspiring”) and for personal grooming inspiration (“my hair grows the way it grows because of the Blonde On Blonde album cover”). Nish Kumar grew up in Croydon, South London. He has a degree in History and English from Durham University. His sold-out solo shows have won awards at the Edinburgh Fringe and toured nationally and internationally to huge acclaim. Nish’s TV appearances include a Netflix Special, The John Bishop Show, Have I Got News For You, Alan Davies As Yet Untitled, QI, Mock The Week, and Live At The Apollo. He has been the presenter of the topical comedy show Newsjack on Radio 4 Extra, hosts television’s very popular The Mash Report on BBC Two and chairs The News Quiz on BBC Radio 4. Website Trailer Twitter Spotify playlist Listeners: please subscribe and/or leave a review and a rating. Twitter @isitrollingpod Recorded 24th February 2020 This show is part of Pantheon Podcasts.

Pod Dylan
Pod Dylan #117 – I Shall Be Released

Pod Dylan

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 22, 2020


POD DYLAN Episode 117 - I Shall Be Released Rob welcomes legendary author and comic book writer J.M. DeMatteis to discuss one of Bob Dylan's most anthemic songs, "I Shall Be Released", originally recorded for THE BASEMENT TAPES. Have a question or comment? E-MAIL: firewaterpodcast@comcast.net Follow POD DYLAN on Twitter: @Pod_Dylan Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/pod-dylan/id1095013228 Complete list of all songs covered so far: http://fireandwaterpodcast.com/podcast/pod-dylan-the-songs Buy this song on Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/album/the-bootleg-series-vols-1-3-rare-unreleased-1961-1991/157471642 This podcast is a proud member of the FIRE AND WATER PODCAST NETWORK: Visit the Fire & Water WEBSITE: http://fireandwaterpodcast.com Follow Fire & Water on TWITTER – https://twitter.com/FWPodcasts Like our Fire & Water FACEBOOK page – https://www.facebook.com/FWPodcastNetwork Support The Fire & Water Podcast Network on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/fwpodcasts Use our HASHTAG online: #FWPodcasts Thanks for listening!

Pod Dylan
Pod Dylan #117 - I Shall Be Released

Pod Dylan

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 22, 2020 35:39


POD DYLAN Episode 117 - I Shall Be Released Rob welcomes legendary author and comic book writer J.M. DeMatteis to discuss one of Bob Dylan's most anthemic songs, "I Shall Be Released", originally recorded for THE BASEMENT TAPES. Have a question or comment? E-MAIL: firewaterpodcast@comcast.net Follow POD DYLAN on Twitter: @Pod_Dylan Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/pod-dylan/id1095013228 Complete list of all songs covered so far: http://fireandwaterpodcast.com/podcast/pod-dylan-the-songs Buy this song on Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/album/the-bootleg-series-vols-1-3-rare-unreleased-1961-1991/157471642 This podcast is a proud member of the FIRE AND WATER PODCAST NETWORK: Visit the Fire & Water WEBSITE: http://fireandwaterpodcast.com Follow Fire & Water on TWITTER – https://twitter.com/FWPodcasts Like our Fire & Water FACEBOOK page – https://www.facebook.com/FWPodcastNetwork Support The Fire & Water Podcast Network on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/fwpodcasts Use our HASHTAG online: #FWPodcasts Thanks for listening!

Hard Rain & Slow Trains: Bob Dylan & Fellow Travelers
2/20/20: #23-16 of Top 50 Greatest Dylan Songs

Hard Rain & Slow Trains: Bob Dylan & Fellow Travelers

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 21, 2020 61:46


We are celebrating the 50th episode of Hard Rain & Slow Trains and also our one-year anniversary on the air by counting down our list of Bob Dylan's 50 greatest songs. Join us for this episode wherein we play & discuss songs #23 through #16.

Más Allá de las Bandas Sonoras
Música Pop en el Cine de Martin Scorsese

Más Allá de las Bandas Sonoras

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 14, 2019 46:55


Gran conocedor tanto del cine clásico como de la música pop de los años 50, 60 y 70, Martin Scorsese ha utilizado canciones de grupos emblemáticos a lo largo de toda su filmografía y ha contado con Robbie Robertson (The Band) como autor de varias bandas sonoras. En sus películas conviven los Rolling Stones y The Shangri-Las, los crooners y los músicos de blues, grandes éxitos del rock con piezas menos conocidas de otros géneros. Las canciones sirven siempre para reflejar el estado de ánimo de sus personajes y potenciar los agitados movimientos de cámara, como ocurre en sus películas sobre mafiosos o en El lobo de Wall Street. Ha realizado además uno de los mejores film-concierto de la historia, El último vals, y documentales sobre Bob Dylan y George Harrison. Su última película, El irlandés, una historia crepuscular de gánsteres realizada para Netflix, es una nueva lección de cómo utilizar el pop y el rock en el cine. 1) “Sally Go Round The Roses”, The Jaynets 2) “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”, The Rolling Stones 3) “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”, Devo 4) “Chelsea Morning”, Joni Mitchell 5) “Remember (Walking in the Sand)”, The Shangri-Las 6) “Mannish Boy”, Muddy Waters 7) “Tupelo Blues”, John Lee Hocker 8) “Bang Bang”, Joe Cuba 9) “Mrs Robinson” Lemonheads 10) “C?a plane pour moi”, Plastic Bertrand 11) “Helpless”, Neil Young & The Band ‘The Last Waltz’ 12) “I Shall Be Released”, Bob Dylan, The Band & Friends ‘The Last Waltz’

Is It Rolling, Bob? Talking Dylan

Music journalist Andrew Male begins by examining “the humour that turns sour… the madness” of Bob’s 1965 “speedy, hipster world”, the “fascinating cruelty” of Dont Look Back and Eat The Document (“he couldn’t stand that close to the flame anymore”). He goes on: “if you’re interested in Dylan, you have to see it as a grand narrative, even the points that you flinch from.” This episode bounces between Elvis’s version of “I Shall Be Released”, Dylan doing his “Movie Elvis” voice on “Spanish Is The Loving Tongue” and New Morning, “Dylan’s first religious album, but the religion is Buddhism: the lyrics are like koans”. Was that Dylan on harmonica in George Harrison’s version of “If Not For You”? Was “Father Of Night” Dylan’s examination of his Jewish faith? Andrew offers more questions than answers on this one, which is how it should be. Join us. Andrew Male, former deputy editor of Mojo magazine and film lecturer at Warwick University, has been writing about music, books, film, radio & TV for the past twenty-five years. He can currently be found in the pages of Mojo, Sight & Sound, the Guardian, the Sunday Times and the Radio Times. Andrew lives in South London. Trailer Twitter: @Andr6wMale Spotify playlist Listeners: please subscribe and/or leave a review and a rating. Twitter @isitrollingpod Recorded 15th April 2019 This show is part of Pantheon Podcasts.

UNBOXING PANDORA
"Unboxing 'I Shall Be Released' (Ep. 104) w/ MARTIN BOBB-SEMPLE"

UNBOXING PANDORA

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 9, 2019 44:18


Join Executive Producer STEVE KRIOZERE, Director BRETT SIMMONS, Director of Photography MAXIMILLIAN SCHMIGE and star MARTIN BOBB-SEMPLE ("Thomas Ross") as they unpack the "zombie episode," "I Shall Be Released" and discuss the making of this action-packed mission gone awry as well as the beginning of Thomas and Atria's divisive relationship. Plus: find out why Avar Sumitov wears a baseball cap the entire episode and more candid observations from the set. Watch episodes of PANDORA on @theCW app or on iTunes. Follow PANDORA on social media at @pandoraseries and #pandoracw.

Cosmic Tortoise
GTP #36 - Alex Montyro And Caolan O Neill Forde (Bookie Baker)

Cosmic Tortoise

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 24, 2019 145:49


Alex and Caolan are indie-folk musicians based in Prague. After an afternoon of drinking Czech pilsner in the sun we chat about the boy’s experience of living in China and and being arrested on-stage; the difference between Curling and Hurling; the modern meaning crisis for young people; songwriting and music in general and a few tunes are performed.                       Connect:Bookie BakerMala RuckusSongs:”Autumn Wind” @ 01:04:12”I Shall Be Released (originally by The Band)” @ 01:32:45”Ponder ‘round The Sun” @ 02:13:42In the podcast:Laura BrennanEnglish Breakfast Recorded in Prague, Czech Republic and Cologne, Germany

Sign on the Window
Band Month – Night 1 (Music From Big Pink And Post-78)

Sign on the Window

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 1, 2018 72:36


Mixed Up Confusion is our vehicle to discuss the culture that surrounds our weekly conversation about Bob Dylan. This is the first episode of November's Band Month! Tonight, Night 1, features post-1978 tracks and 1968's masterpiece, Music From Big Pink. Before we begin, one must understand the formula for these run of nights (2:00) as well as just who is The Band (5:45). Then, we open with the post-Last Waltz material (9:00): - Jericho songs (10:00) - High on the Hog songs (12:15) - Jubilation songs (14:00) Before the main event, Music From Big Pink (26:00): - "Tears of Rage" (33:00) - "To Kingdom Come" (37:40) - "In a Station" (38:30) - "Caledonia Mission" (40:45) - "The Weight" (42:30) - "We Can Talk" (50:00) - "Long Black Veil" (52:45) - "Chest Fever" (54:10) - "Lonesome Suzie" (59:00) - "This Wheel's on Fire" (1:01:05) - "I Shall Be Released" (1:05:15) Night Two will feature the Band's final official album, Islands from 1977, and the inimitable The Band from 1969. See you then. As always, full show notes at our website. You can also follow along with our weekly real-time Spotify playlist – See That My Playlist is Kept Clean – and join the conversation on Twitter, message us on Facebook, and like on Instagram. And if you're loving us, consider our Patreon. For as little as one dollar you get early access to every episode we do as soon as they're edited (and a dedicated feed just for you) and exclusive content that'll only ever be on Patreon. Thanks!

Eldorado
Errance #112 : De The Band à Brigitte Fontaine & Areski

Eldorado

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 19, 2018 57:03


THE BAND. I SHALL BE RELEASED – 3:15Music From Big Pink, Capitol, 1968 LONNY MONTEM & G. CHARRET. BIG BIG HOUSE – 3:50Tara (EP), Marjan records, 2018 SIMON & GARFUNKEL. OLD FRIENDS + BOOKENDS THEME – 4:55Bookends, Columbia, 1968 MORGANE IMBEAUD & ELIAS DRIS. THE BOXER – 4:25The Homeward Bound Ep : Songs Of Simon […] Cet article Errance #112 : De The Band à Brigitte Fontaine & Areski est apparu en premier sur Eldorado.

Celebration Rock
Robbie Robertson On 50 Years of "Music From Big Pink"

Celebration Rock

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 13, 2018 55:14


Fifty years ago this summer, one of the greatest debut albums in rock history was released. Though when The Band put out 1968's Music From Big Pink, they weren't exactly unknown. Two years prior, they had backed Bob Dylan on his first "electric" tour, supporting the iconic singer-songwriter as he faced hostile audiences all around the world. When the tour ended and Dylan retreated to upstate New York, the members of The Band joined him, setting up camp at a large house they dubbed "Big Pink," because of the faded red siding.  What happened at that house has since become rock legend — Dylan and the Band collaborated on The Basement Tapes, a trove of home recordings that included future classics like "I Shall Be Released," "Tears Of Rage," and "This Wheel's On Fire." The Band also started working on the songs that would appear on their first record, like "The Weight," which was written by guitarist Robbie Robertson.  In order to delve deep into the album's creation, and celebrate the music that was created — which will be reissued Aug. 31 as part of a special anniversary edition — I figured the best person to speak with was Robertson, who fortunately agreed to share some of his favorite stories from that period. We discussed the brilliance of The Band's troubled piano player Richard Manuel, the identity of the real-life "Fanny" from "The Weight," how the Band evolved from a loud, bluesy bar band to a pastoral folk-rock outfit, and the way that the band members perfected their unique vocal blend, which Robertson's likens to "passing the ball around."

DefCon Jive Podcast
DefCon Jive Episode 101 - 68% Thirsty

DefCon Jive Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 23, 2018 93:36


Smooth with the American cape out... Black Business of the Week: True Laundry Detergent| https://www.thetrueproducts.com | https://www.facebook.com/thetrueproducts In this episode: - Royal Wedding - Views and Stream - Do Disses Matter? WYBLT: Boom - Nick Grant, "Dreamin' Out Loud" https://open.spotify.com/album/0Z2KGj1qspfGj87YSMpZJw Remy - Desiigner, "L.O.D." https://open.spotify.com/album/0TjZvf2v4FQlmpEKVvxeB7 - Nina Simone, "I Shall Be Released" https://open.spotify.com/track/6SCiE2JKIhg9FlZDz3XOx2 Cannon - Nick Grant, "Dreamin' Out Loud" https://open.spotify.com/album/0Z2KGj1qspfGj87YSMpZJw Email: podcast@defconjive.com | Twitter: https://twitter.com/dcjpodcast | WBB: http://webuyblack.defconjive.com

DefCon Jive Podcast
DefCon Jive Episode 101 - 68% Thirsty

DefCon Jive Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 23, 2018 93:36


Smooth with the American cape out... Black Business of the Week: True Laundry Detergent| https://www.thetrueproducts.com | https://www.facebook.com/thetrueproducts In this episode: - Royal Wedding - Views and Stream - Do Disses Matter? WYBLT: Boom - Nick Grant, "Dreamin' Out Loud" https://open.spotify.com/album/0Z2KGj1qspfGj87YSMpZJw Remy - Desiigner, "L.O.D." https://open.spotify.com/album/0TjZvf2v4FQlmpEKVvxeB7 - Nina Simone, "I Shall Be Released" https://open.spotify.com/track/6SCiE2JKIhg9FlZDz3XOx2 Cannon - Nick Grant, "Dreamin' Out Loud" https://open.spotify.com/album/0Z2KGj1qspfGj87YSMpZJw Email: podcast@defconjive.com | Twitter: https://twitter.com/dcjpodcast | WBB: http://webuyblack.defconjive.com

Daddy Unscripted Podcast
Chris Lizotte: His Music History & Is There Good Christian Music?

Daddy Unscripted Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 22, 2018 83:01


Episode 48 is the long-awaited second half of my conversation with Chris Lizotte. I'll repeat what I started Episode 47 with as my description of Chris, that he is known as and for a great many things by a great many people. He is a successful Christian music artist --Wait! Where are you going?! I say the words "Christian music" and you want to leave this episode behind already? Well, you'll be missing out. This is another great episode filled with a lot of laughter, deep conversation and we got really close to tears as well. Or, maybe that was just me.Again, I took these episodes with Chris as a direct challenge to make them extremely listenable for people of any and all faiths. Chris is an incredibly humble man who has done a lot of great things with his talents and gifts. We originally met about 25 years ago when a band I was singing in (yes... you read that correctly) opened up a couple/few times for Chris at various local spots.This episode doesn't exactly start right where the previous episode left off. Maybe more than some other 2-parters, you really will benefit from listening to the 1st part with Chris and I.We dig in a little more into some of the different backstory of Chris' path through music and becoming a fully-fledged recording artist: starting with his start shortly after high school with a band called The Spiritones. It was a few years later when I first met Chris and the band I was singing in (we were called 99) opened for and performed with him. Though Chris really urged me to, I saved you all and avoided putting any of that band's music on this episode.We touched on a lot of the different iterations of Chris' bands and held out some high praise for a lot of the grandiose musicians that have played with him over the years: Ray "Sleepy Ray" McDonald, Shawn Tubbs and, most recently, Marc Ford (yes... that Marc Ford, formerly of the Black Crowes).I teased this a little in my post of the 1st episode. This is way more on my shoulders than on Chris'... so, if anyone is going to complain, it should be to me. I dove right into the lions' den and brought up the topic of: "Why is so much Christian music just not great?!" It's something I have wondered for decades. I talked about a time long ago when I really tried to find more Christian music to listen to and how difficult and nearly completely unfruitful that search was for me. And, yes... I did in fact say during this episode that Christian music is like the brussel sprouts of music.Chris challenged me a little on my thoughts on this. We talked about how "the industry" works... and I know that can go for the music industry, in general. Heck... that can go for nearly any entertainment industry, when you really think about it.Christ brought up some of the early music that was not called "Christian music" before "the industry" came in and started taking over. Artists like Mavis Staples, Alison Krauss and even Bob Dylan. After recording this episode, Chris listed out a few more artists I should check out. Let me just tease this out right now: this entire conversation has led to me starting to work on a new podcast that delves into this. It's in its infant stages... but keep your eyes and ears open for that.A list of the music on this episode: Chris Lizotte "Change My Heart Oh God", The Black Peppercorns "Helplessly in Love", Dicky Ochoa "My Beloved", The Black Peppercorns "Please", Chris Lizotte "Sweet Mercy", Chris Lizotte "Close to Your Heart", Richfolk "Peace in the Middle of the Storm", Chris Lizotte "Glory to the King > I Shall Be Released".Chris Lizotte's music can be found pretty much anywhere you stream your music: iTunes, Apple Music, Google Play, Spotify, Pandora, etc.Daddy Unscripted can be found at:iTunes | Stitcher Radio | Google Play | Tune-In RadioTwitter: @DaddyUnscriptedFacebook: Daddy Unscriptedwww.daddyunscripted.comDaddy Unscripted is proud to be a part of the Osiris Podcast Network! You can check out the... Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/daddyunscripted. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

TV Ate My Brain - The Official TV Podcast of Core Temp Arts

For the season 2 finale of Atlanta, Allegra and Mariano are joined by Rod and Karen from The Black Guy Who Tips Podcast. They delve into a mostly stressful episode regarding Earn. With the possibility of getting fired by Al, Earn must finish an extensive to-do list. Outro - "I Shall Be Released" by Nina Simone Chime in: Facebook | Instagram | Email | Website | Twitter | Voicemail

Motherboard Cali Guys
MBCG - 008 John & Jarrod Go It Alone

Motherboard Cali Guys

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 29, 2017 39:13


DISCLAIMER: John & Jarrod go it alone... On This Episode: Wine / New Children / Friends & Seinfeld / Running With The Bulls / Jeff Buckley & I Shall Be Released

Driven to Drink
107. Penny's Podcast

Driven to Drink

Play Episode Listen Later May 27, 2017 30:43


    Aunt Penny had a super power. She honed in on the best of a person, and then she pulled it out, cultivated and resonated it. She made me a better person not because of anything she created, not because of ulterior motives or selfish agendas, but because she placed a mirror in front of my face. She read everything I wrote, listened to every minute I recorded, recognized so many beautiful and unique things underneath all of the anxiety, worry, and anger…and simply allowed me to see what she saw. And what she always saw was hopeful, beautiful, and uplifting. That was her super power. I love her. And I love me more today because she loved me, and I her. Powerful. The world is missing a significant piece of it’s soul today, or perhaps it isn’t…because so many people now walk the earth with clearer vision, with deeper self-knowledge, and with a more confident ability to resonate love. I chose two songs that communicate such depth of soul, such love, such peace. “In the Lord’s Arms,” by Ben Harper and “I Shall Be Released,” by The Band. I proudly present to you, “Penny’s Podcast.”   Aunt Penny teaching Jen how to make Berryoskas    

Driven to Drink
104. I Know More About You Than You Do About Politics (RJ Again, pt 5)

Driven to Drink

Play Episode Listen Later May 6, 2017 43:59


Trigger Warning: You will hear the actual “N Word” in this podcast, and not just once…and never as a racial epithet or indicator of hate or white supremacy. It’s conversational, and it’s included because it needed to be there. If you can’t handle the word, then you might want to either skip this altogether or be prepared for some fast forwarding. Have you ever felt afraid to vote, inadequate? Like you haven’t done your research as well as you know you should have but you feel an obligation to complete the one civic duty that is reportedly the foundation of our constitutional republic of sorts? Yeah, me too. And RJ. I’m giving you Levon Helm today. The Band. First, “I Shall Be Released.” At the end, “When I Paint My Masterpiece.” I really do wish you’d listen to this, but I understand if you choose otherwise. Love yinz! -G  

It's New Orleans: Happy Hour
Humidor Saves The World - Happy Hour - It's New Orleans

It's New Orleans: Happy Hour

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 16, 2016 59:42


Austin Alward aka Aus T the Franco rap star, has a plan to save the country and the world from rampant Trumpism. It involves the inernet, a Cuban cigar store owner, and a bunch of New Orleans actors and musicians. It might be just crazy enough to work. Jazz great Mitchel Forman, and singer songwriters Sam Doores from The Deslondes and Andrew Duhon have their own plan. It involves a searing rendition of I Shall Be Released, a tribute to both Leonard Cohen and the nation. Actress Teri Wyble made it out of dance school in Lafayette to become a critically acclaimed actress, a go go dancer at Harrah s Casino, and an international body painting sensation. This is one of the greatest Happy Hours in the history of the show. If you were thinking of leaving New Orlenas this will make you stay. If you are thinking of moving here, call U Haul, this will tip you over the edge. Photos at Wayfare by Alison Moon. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dead Fantasy - Unofficial Grateful Dead Fantasy Podcast

Episode 043 - August 2016 Set 1Shady Grove[1] (1991-12-08)I'm Just Here To Get My Baby Out Of Jail[1] > The Wind And Rain[1] (1987-12-04)Ragged But Right[1] (1987-10-21)Spike Driver Blues[1] (1986-11-14)Troubled In Mind[1] (1987-10-31)Turtle Dove[1] (1987-12-17)Diamond Joe[1] (1987)Russian Lullaby[1] (1991-08-25)Summertime[1] (1993)The Streamlined Cannonball[1] (1975)The Maker[1] (1994-02-06)Shining Star (1994-08-14)I Shall Be Released[1] (1990)So Many Roads[1] (1995-07-09)After Midnight-> Eleanor Rigby Jam-> After Midnight (1980-01-20)[1] Dead Fantasy Debut

Dead Fantasy - Unofficial Grateful Dead Fantasy Podcast

Episode 016 - August 2015 Set 1Tore Up Over YouMission In The RainTangled Up In BlueC'est la VieSimple Twist Of FateDear Prudence->When the Hunter Gets Captured by the GameThe Harder They ComeDon't Let GoPositively 4th StreetLonesome and a Long Way from HomeI Shall Be ReleasedWonderful WorldReuben and Cerise

String Cheese Incident podcasts @ deadesq.com
Podcast #14 (Cheese Does Dylan)

String Cheese Incident podcasts @ deadesq.com

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 13, 2009 75:19


(0:00) Tombstone Blues, 2/20/99, Boulder Theater, Boulder, CO (SBD) (7:14) I Shall Be Released, 5/5/99, Arcadia Theater, Dallas, TX (Taper: Larry Fox) (24:06) Tom Thumb Blues, 8/1/03, Horning's Hideout, North Plains, OR (Taper: Jason Ho) (31:05) Tangled Up In Blue, 4/7/05, Big Easy Concert House, Spokane, WA (Taper: Ryan NeRoy) (40:37) My Back Pages, 4/22/04, Zepp Tokyo (SBD) (44:33) It Takes a Lot to Laugh (It Takes a Train to Cry), 10/16/04, The Backyard, Austin, TX (Taper: Joe Billerbeck) (48:24) You Ain't Goin' Nowhere, 3/26/05, Fillmore Auditorium, Denver, CO (Taper: Phil Rollins) (54:56) Meet Me in the Morning, 11/25/06, Fabulous Fox Theatre, Atlanta, GA (Taper: Joe Billerbeck) (1:01:14) Quinn the Eskimo, 10/28/01, Landmark Theater, Syracuse, NY (Taper: Benjamin Fleahman) (1:11:40) Knockin' on Heaven's Door, 3/25/02, Fillmore Auditorium, Denver, CO (Taper: Dave Koorey)

Cross Connection
I Shall Be Released

Cross Connection

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 2, 2008 30:00


Program 17: In this program we look at the Dilan classic "I Shall Be Released".