Podcasts about in paradise

Last week's episode, The Key to Gnostic Cosmology, was well-timed to greet the slew of new subscribers who joined The Gnostic Reformation as a result of the wonderful review by The New Unhinged that appeared on Mariah's Substack website on November 28, 2025. It's titled: Roast for Relief #17: The Gnostic Who Broke My Brain in the Best Way If you haven't seen the piece yet, please hightail it over there and take a look. It's funny and reverentially irreverent at the same time. I feel honored by Mariah's appreciation and the hours she spent on the review. Today, I'm going to run through the Gnostic Cosmology again, this time pairing the explanations with illustrations from my kid's book, Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth. My brother Bill thinks the kid's book will be the version that survives into the far future as a new Gnostic Gospel in some distant version of the Nag Hammadi codices. Personally, I’m not so sure there will be a far future here on this material plane, but we'll see… In any event, I'm doing my best to get the hard cover edition into libraries and bookstores in the here and now. Meanwhile, we need more reader reviews to help the book rise up in amazon. So, please, buy the paperback or download the kindle version for free or almost free and then leave your review. You will be supporting gnosis and love. ALL of the following illustrations are from Children of the Fullness. For the purposes of this episode, I have removed the text from the pages and am only presenting the images as I narrate a grown-up version of the pictured events. Believe me, the kiddie book is written as a young child's bedtime story. And because of that, the Gnostic characters are personified into recognizable forms. The Father looks like a father. The Son looks like a son. The Aeons are personified as Angels, although in truth, not all Aeons are angels. But kids can relate to angels, so I gave the Aeons wings and halos. I’m putting the illustrations into the transcript so that if you are listening to this as an audio podcast, you can go to GnosticInsights.com or to my Substack location, the Gnostic Reformation, under the name of Cyd Ropp, so that you can see the illustrations. The gnosis is simple. It has to be, because all living creatures know and embody it. So, if my dog can't understand the gnosis, it ain't gnosis, it's just knowledge or good or bad information. And if you can grasp today's illustrated gnosis, then you will have enough to go onward and upward. Sure, more explanations are nice, but they are not essential. All we really need to know is that we come from Above, and we will return to Above. That's it in a nutshell. The rest is a lifetime of practicing love and embodying virtue. So let’s get started. The Father’s mind is the initial, illimitable consciousness. Consciousness is the ground state that predates everything. Consciousness is part of the existence of God, and it is the very first thing before anything that follows. There is no gender associated with this Father. Obviously the Father is not a man with a beard and long robes, rather “he possesses this constitution without having a face or form, things which are understood through perception.” The Tripartite Tractate describes the Father this way: Whence also comes the title, the incomprehensible. If he is incomprehensible, then it follows that he is unknowable, that he is the one who is inconceivable by any thought, invisible by anything, ineffable by any word, untouchable by any hand. He alone is the one who knows himself as he is, along with his form and his greatness and his magnitude. Step number two is the emergence of the Son. It is the emergence of consciousness from the illimitable, infinite consciousness of the Father into a singularity—into a monad, as it’s called. It’s like the bucket dipped into the sea. It contains all of the characteristics and quality of the Father, but it’s contained as an individual. The Son doesn’t separate from the Father. It stays plugged into the Father. This first illustration shows the Father holding his baby Son and showing Him the contents of His imagination. The facing page shows the mature Son releasing Aeons into the vision. The Tripartite Tractate says that as soon as the Son was formed, what are called the Totalities of the ALL were formed. The Totalities of the ALL are all of the variabilities that make up the Son, all broken out and enumerated. The Totalities of the ALL do not recognize themselves as individuals. It is only through their giving of glory to the Father and Son that each of the Totalities comes to self-awareness. In the children's book, we skip the step where the Son divides itself into all of its discreet variables and jump right to the self-aware Aeons populating the hierarchy of the Fullness of God. Now, back to the children's book. The next page shows the Aeons giving glory to the Father and Son by singing their songs of praise. The facing page shows the Aeons reproducing and making new Aeons through their combined singing. Each of the Aeons of the hierarchy of the Fullness has a position, a place, a duty, and a name—in the Gnostic Gospel as I describe it, I say that this is the emergence of ego, for every Aeon is a self-identified individual. And basically what they do is sing songs of glory upstream to the Father and the Son, just like the Totalities did. And all together, they dream of Paradise. We turn the page of the children's book to see a young Aeon building a model of Paradise as the other Aeons look on with admiration. This final Aeon was produced through a combination of all of the Aeons of the Fullness of God giving glory to the Father and the Son at the same time. “This aeon was last to have brought forth by mutual assistance, and he was small in magnitude,” referring, I think, to the fractal nature of his pleroma. This youngest Aeon carried within itself all of the traits of every other Aeon, perfect and complete. This was a very talented Aeon resembling the Son of God Himself, who also carried all of the traits of the Aeons within its singular Self. This final Aeon was named Logos, because he was also endowed with the ability to reason thoughtfully and to figure things out in a step-by-step manner. The word Logos in Greek means reason and logic. The Tripartite Tractate puts it this way: “This aeon was among those to whom was given wisdom, so that he could become pre-existent in each one's thought. By that which he wills, will they be produced. Therefore, he received a wise nature in order to examine the hidden basis, since he is a wise fruit…” This is a curious statement, because it seems to indicate that Logos was equipped to bring others into existence without the cooperation of his fellow Aeons. If the Father had not wanted an individual Aeon to be able to procreate without the agreement of the Fullness, why would the Father have equipped Logos to do so? All of the Aeons have free will, because the Father has free will and everything that emanates from the Father carries the attributes of the Father. The Tripartite Tractate says, “for, the free will which was begotten with the Totalities was a cause for this one such as to make him do what he desired, with no one to restrain him.” Logos was loaded with free will, as are all of the Aeons. The Father foresees our behavior before we do, which seems to contradict the idea of free will. We can resolve this classic theological conundrum by realizing that the Father anticipates every possible outcome of our free will. At the universal level, the infinity of the Fullness of God is represented by the potentiality of all possible choices a person could make as their life passes from one decision to the next. The fullness of all possible futures are within our reach as we pass through this universe; our own free will is driving our consciousness through those possibilities. The Father anticipates all possibilities in his infinite wisdom, and all possible courses of action are anticipated. This choice that Logos made was anticipated though not predetermined. We turn the page in the children's book to see Logos happily carrying his model of Paradise upward to the Father's mountain top. The Father is not there to receive the gift. The middle panel shows Logos falling down from the heights. The panel on the far right shows Logos crashed down into a dark space with his broken model of Paradise scattered about him. He wears an expression of pain and clutches his head. An eerie, shadowy copy of Logos emerges from him. Logos didn’t have the power or greatness of the original Son, but he had the blueprint—he had the model. He thought he was complete and could build a perfect Paradise on his own because he contained the Fullness of God in a smaller fractal iteration. He left his position and place in the hierarchy of the Fullness and headed upward to “the realm of perfect glory.” But he was mistaken and he crashed out of the ethereal plane, broke apart, and his pleroma lost its hierarchical arrangement. It became random and chaotic. Logos tried his best to bring it all back in order, tried to put his pleroma back together into a proper hierarchy, but it would not cooperate. Quote: “The Logos himself caused it to happen, being complete and unitary, for the glory of the Father, whom he desired, and (he did so) being content with it, but those whom he wished to take hold of firmly he begot in shadows and copies and likenesses. For, he was not able to bear the sight of the light, but he looked into the depth and he doubted. Out of this there was a division – he became deeply troubled – and a turning away because of his self-doubt and division, forgetfulness and ignorance of himself and which is.” “He became increasingly desperate. He was dumbfounded. Instead of perfection he saw deficiency; instead of unity he saw division; instead of stability he saw disturbance; instead of rest, upheaval. He was unable to bring their love of disturbance to an end, nor could he destroy it; he had become utterly powerless when his wholeness and his perfection had abandoned him.” Turning to the next page we see sad Logos flying back up to the Fullness, looking over his shoulder at the mess below and his shadow rising from the gloom. And on the facing page we see the shadow of Logos, whom we call the Demiurge in Gnosticism, dark, no halo, a mean look on his face, staring at the pieces of the broken model of Paradise scattered about. When Logos falls and abandons his ego down below, his ego is separated from the direct flow of consciousness, life, and love of the Father, Son, and Fullness. So this is the beginning of ego running amok. Ego found itself in this weird, dark, chaotic space, and thought it was all that existed because it didn’t remember what came before. It had all of the blueprints for Paradise because they were in the mind of Logos when he fell. It also had the ambitious overreaching that Logos was engaged in when he fell. The next two pages show the Demiurge building our material creation, with Logos looking down from above. The Demiurge builds rocks and mud, but he can't make his muddy models come to life because he doesn’t contain the consciousness and life of the Fullness and the Father. On the next double-page spread we see the Angels sending living creatures down from the Fullness to the Earth. The Tripartite Tractate says that the Earth was populated by the fruit of the Aeons, “from the smallest to the largest.” In Gnosticism the fruit of the Aeons are known as the Second Order of Powers, and they/we contain all of the attributes of the Fullness—the life, consciousness, free will, and love of the Father flowing down from the Fullness of God. Everything that’s alive, from the bacteria and the cells and the organs that make up our bodies and all of the critters and birds and fish, all of the insects and mammals, all living creatures, the grasses and the trees, the moss and the slime molds—everything that’s alive is a fruit of the Fullness of God, pre-designed in the Fullness. And we come down with a mission. We Second Order  Powers were supposed to come down here to remind the Demiurge of the Father above; to remind the Demiurge of Logos, his better half; to remind the Demiurge of love and consciousness and that he is not God and he needs to return home. We are supposed to be calling to the Demiurge to return home to the Fullness of God. So the next page of the children's book shows a loving Earth. Hearts and flowers; everybody happy and loving. We Second Order Powers operate according to the same Aeonic principle I call the Simple Golden Rule of reaching out to others with love to help build things that we can’t do on our own. We make families and work together. We make villages and work together. We make small communities and build things that we can all enjoy together. Sadly, this state didn't last long, because the Second Order of Powers became caught up in a “never-ending war” with the material world. Gnostics speak of a division between the material world and our eternal spirits. Gnostics say that our eternal spirits are “trapped” in the material. We forgot about bringing love and remembrance to the Demiurge because of the never-ending war of spirit against material, the never-ending war of right and left, the never-ending war between us and the archons. It’s a constant battle here between life and death, with the Aeons promoting life and love and the archons promoting death and division. I portray this division on the next two pages as the once-happy people and animals fight tooth and claw against one another. Because of their isolation and strife, the Second Order Powers lost their purpose and joy. The people let their egos take control. Because the ego of Logos had been reaching for the heights, the egos of the Second Order Powers also reached for power and control, each thinking they were more worthy than the next. They forgot about the Simple Golden Rule and couldn't work together in cooperation without favoring themselves. Narcissism ruled. The next two pages of the children's book shows people filling their spiritual poverty with lots of materials riches and tasty treats as the Aeons watch and pray from Above. We Gnostics would say that you can't patch over a spiritual void with material prosperity, no matter how much stuff you accumulate. And so the Fullnesses realized that that plan wasn’t working. The Aeons prayed to the Father, the Son, and the Totalities for true salvation to come and rescue the Second Order Powers, just like we were supposed to rescue the Demiurge. Now it takes a superpower, the most super Power, to come into our cosmos, rescue all of the Second Order Powers by reminding us of God’s love and what our true mission is of sharing love. Christ has the most power of any entity ever, more than enough power to bring remembrance, love, salvation, peace, comfort, joy to all of us down here who have forgotten. That’s the job of the Christ. On the next page, we see the Savior standing with his hands on the shoulders of a pretty girl. The facing page shows many of the kids we saw in the previous unhappy page now feeling love and salvation as the Savior radiates love to them all. Once the Christ succeeds in bringing remembrance to everyone, then the Demiurge will remember Logos above. Logos and his ego reunited. All is joy. All is gnosis. The material cosmos dissolves like snow and all souls are released to return to their home in the Fullness. This ushers in the age known as the Third Economy. Paradise at last. To quote from my book, The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated, Redemption means returning to the Father's abode—that Paradise dreamed by the Fullness, where there is no death, no disease, no disappointment, and no deficiency. That Paradise where Christ is King and peace reigns supreme, and there is only cooperation, fellowship, and true love. In Paradise there is naught but life; so all the grass is green, and flowers blossom endlessly, and every soul that has ever lived, lives happily with their friends and families. That’s the end of this Gnostic Cosmology, as illustrated in my kid's book, “Children of the Fullness: A Gnostic Myth.” It’s not all that complicated, is it? Last week I said we'd get into the applications of gnosis, and I released an extra episode this week for that purpose. It's called “Remembering the Mission,” and it's an update of an earlier episode from 2021 called “Why Not Be Sinful?”. Meanwhile, if you have any questions or comments, please don’t be shy. Make some comments. I look forward to reading them. God bless us all and onward and upward. The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated presents gnosis as simply as possible for your enlightenment.

In 2019 I posted an article to my new Gnostic Gospel blog called, If All Are Redeemed, Why Not Be Sinful? And I'd like to share that with you today. One of the big heresies of Gnosticism is that all Second Order Powers are redeemed by Christ and all will someday return to the Paradise of the Fullness. Yay! Everyone's going to Heaven! No one is going to hell, not even the Fallen angels. What joy! This seems to fly in the face of Christian orthodoxy that promotes the idea that only those humans who confess a belief in Jesus as the Christ will make it into Heaven, and those who don't believe in Jesus will go to an eternal damnation of suffering in hell. Conventional Christianity states that Jesus came to save humanity, but only those who acknowledge Jesus as the only Son of God and invite Him into their hearts will be saved. This is the basis for all evangelism and all churches that follow the Nicene Creed, which is to say, all Christian churches, whether Catholic or Protestant. This is why Christians are so keen on saving souls. They don't want you to suffer for eternity in hell. The Gnostic Church begs to differ with that common interpretation of Christ's mission. According to the books of the Nag Hammadi library, all of creation will be redeemed and returned to the Fullness and the Father's home in Heaven. All of creation, everyone and everything, will be made clean and pure and holy by the end. As they say, it'll all be good in the end, and if it's not good yet, then it's not yet the end. Gnosis refers to the ability to use reason and logic to arrive at spiritual truth. So, let's think together about this idea of Christ and redemption and who does or does not go to Heaven. First, if Christ's redemption were a matter of your belief, then Christ's mission of salvation would be limited to what you believe. In other words, you would be the one holding the power of salvation, not Christ. Does that make any sense to you? Are you the one who redeems or is Christ? Can you see how making your belief central to redemption actually limits the power of Christ? Can you see how that makes sinful humans more powerful than the mission of Christ's redemption? Limiting Christ to your belief, it seems to me, is the greater heresy than simply trusting Christ to accomplish the mission. It is Christ's job to redeem humanity, not yours. Second, according to Gnostic texts, all creatures great and small will be redeemed. This means that all creatures are going to Heaven. My dog has never professed a belief in Jesus as the Christ, yet my dog is going to Heaven. The fishes in the water, the birds in the air, the insects, the forest animals, all Second Order Powers are redeemed by Christ. It is the job of the Christ to redeem creation, irrespective of creation's ability to confess that fact. Do you think that only good dogs go to Heaven? Or nice fishes? Maybe only herbivores? Perhaps only parrots who can say, Jesus saves! Once we concede that it is only the Christ that can redeem, then what is the point of leading a virtuous life? Why not sin up until the end, have all kinds of fun, and then waltz into Heaven without repentance? Repentance, by the way, means to feel sorrow and regret. Are we allowed to sin willy-nilly with no negative consequences? An even more profound question is, why were we created in the first place? According to the Tripartite Tractate, the Second Order Powers were created in order to rescue the Fallen Aeon known as Logos. The most perfect and complete of the individual Aeons, Logos crowned the top of the aeonic hierarchy. This single Aeon consisted of all the attributes of the good and perfect Fullness rolled up into one individual. And as you know by now from listening to the first eight episodes of Gnostic Insights, Logos had fallen from the Fullness and smashed to smithereens in a lower dimension. The broken bits of Logos scattered into space, forming our material universe along with a host of powers and personalities, including demons, evil djinn, and archons. Logos imagined he could build the Paradise dreamt by the Fullness because he understood all of the plans and possessed all of the necessary talents. However, without the willing support of the Fullness, Logos was unable to give proper glory to the Father. As he reached for the Father, Logos stumbled and fell, shattering himself to bits. Because the isolated glory of Logos was inadequate to the task, everything he produced as a result of that effort fell disastrously short. Where there had been unity with the Son and with his brethren in the Fullness, now there was a division and a turning away. The undiluted will expressed by the Fullness was splintered because Logos, “could not bear to look at the light but looked at the depths, and he faltered.” That's verse 77 of the Tripartite Tractate. Going on to verse 78: “What issued from his presumptuous thought and his arrogance—[by the way, that's another word for ego]—what issued from his ego had existed from something that was itself deficient. And because of that, what was perfect in him left him and went upward to its own in the Fullness, leaving the sicknesses behind in the darkness.” The material space of our universe is known as the deficiency and the imitation in Gnosticism, and it was initially populated by nothing but the lost and fallen shadows of the pleroma of Logos. The part of Logos that stayed behind in the deficiency was his ego, which came to be known as the Demiurge. The fallen ego of Logos was not hated by the Father or the Aeons of the Fullness. The fallen was mourned as lost, as a prodigal son or daughter is mourned by the parents who still love them. The Fullness loves the Fallen and only wants the ego of Logos to be restored to the Fullness. The Second Order Powers were sent into this dimension for the purpose of engaging the Fallen Demiurge and helping it to return home. However, as the Second Order Powers entered this earthly dimension, they were immediately plunged into a never-ending battle with the Fallen. Due to the law of mutual combat, we temporarily forgot our Father in Heaven and our mission of engagement and rescue. We were all infected with a host of fallen influences and fell into lifetimes of fear, regret, lust, and rage. As the Tripartite Tractate puts it in verse 84, “The two orders fought against each other, struggling for command with such a result that they were engulfed by forces and material substances in accordance with the law of mutual combat. And they too acquired lust for domination and all the other passions of this sort. And, consequently, empty vain glory pulls them all toward the desire of lust for domination, and not one of them remembers what is superior or confesses it.” We humans are Second Order Powers infected with many, many fallen influences that blind us to our true natures and our mission. These negative influences prefer the deficiency to the Fullness. These negative powers of the Fall represent the opposite of the All and of all that makes us truly happy and fulfilled. The survival reflex of the imitation requires the Second Order Powers to be miserable and lost, because misery loves company. They influence people to fight against each other rather than fight and resist the evil fallen. Our lives become an endless and fruitless quest to find happiness through selfish pursuits. All you have to do is pop into Facebook or Twitter to find evidence all over the place of these fruitless pursuits that appear to cause happiness, but actually cause misery. At this point in the Gnostic story, the Father and the Aeons of the produced a superior new entity, a Third Order Power called the Christ. It became the mission of the Christ to help the Second Order Powers remember and love the Fallen so that the Fallen could be redeemed. Love is the only power that can redeem the Fallen. Why, then, was a Third Order Power needed to accomplish the task that the Second Order Powers were sent to accomplish? Why populate creation with well-meaning but ignorant and confused Second Order Powers? Why not just send in the Christ to accomplish the redemption of fallen Logos in the first place? What is our function and purpose other than bumbling around in never-ending war with the Fallen? Because the Fallen Logos must be loved and redeemed one fallen piece at a time. Imagine if the original body of Logos resembled a human form, like we might picture an angel in Heaven looking something like us. Now, imagine that the heavenly body of Logos in the Fullness was comprised of the blueprint for every single potential body that would ever come to life in the imitation down here after the Fall. Imagine the body of Logos falling from an immaterial dimension, that being the Fullness or Heaven, and crashing and breaking apart into a lower, slower, thicker dimension, our material universe, and spilling out the blueprints for the material universe. Moreover, our personal stories, the drama that each human life enacts, are also stories of the Fall, stories that need redemption. Every life tells stories of falls and redemption, temptation and overcoming, despair and triumph, and every time an archonic influence is defeated and stripped from your personal life, part of Logos is redeemed. When we live a virtuous life, we are following the principles of the Father and the Fullness in Heaven, and we are participants with Christ in redeeming the Fall of Logos. When we live a sinful life, we are succumbing to the demons of the Fall and contributing to the chaos and despair of the deficiency. And I made up a chart with the values of the imitation or the deficiency on the left, and they are called on the left, and the values of the Father and of the Fullness on the right. And the left is the material, downward pull of the deficiency, and the right is the upward, psychical and spiritual pull of the values of the Father and the Fullness. This chart appears in this particular post, and I know I've said this chart to you before in prior episodes of the Gnostic Insights, so let me just briefly hit a few of them. If you're living on the left, if you're, quote, enjoying a sinful life, and it's not actually enjoyment, because joy does not come from the left side. Joy only comes from the right. The most that you can hope for, if you're living on the deficiency side, is a imitation of joy, which we generally call happiness. But as I believe you know by now, happiness is a never-ending pursuit, and we are often reaching for happiness—oh, let's go here, let's go there, let's buy this, let's buy that, let's eat this, ooh, let's have that, ooh, hey, let's do this drug. You see, everything promises this joy. Sometimes it brings you temporary happiness, but it never fulfills, it never brings satisfaction, never brings satisfaction. Pursuit of material gain always brings more and more desire for more and more material gain. So the values on the left that the sinful are pursuing, these are called vices, and they are such things as impatience, lust, greed, selfishness, cruelty, ruthlessness, anger, resentfulness, rude, obstructionist. (And what I mean by obstructionist is this. Have you ever known someone who, no matter what someone else proposes to do, they go, nah, that'll never work. So an obstructionist, they're like a naysayer, that's what that means. They're wet blankets, they're always pulling down good suggestions. That's what obstructionist means.) Despair, depression, sloth or laziness, chaos, disorder, thoughtless action, greed, envy, arrogance, fear, confusion, gluttony. These are values or vices on the material side of the ledger, and these are the things that generally are promoted in social media, strangely enough. The values on the right actually are virtues that are part of our aeonic inheritance from the Fullness of God, and they are such virtues. Well, you know they say that God is love, right? So love is the number one virtue. Patience, generosity, graciousness, mercy, forgiveness, welcoming, obedience, respect, cooperation as opposed to obstructionism, free choice, hopefulness, joyfulness, truthfulness, industriousness, order, prudence. Prudence, by the way, means knowing what to do at the right time. Logic, charity, kindness, empathy, humility, loyalty, justice, courage, remembrance. These are values on the right side, and you can hear as I read down these values of the right side that these are the types of things that lead to true loving connections between human beings. They are not the kind of thing we generally see on social media, by the way, and we kind of rarely see them in actual walking-around life as well. But this is the goal, is to live on the right side of the ledger, to enact those principles rather than to chase after the emptiness of the vices on the left side. The values of the Demiurge lead to isolation and despair. The values of the Fullness lead to peace and joy. Now, back to my article. Because we are in actuality children of the Fullness, we can only be truly happy when we act out of love, that is, out of virtue. When we forget our place in the Fullness of God, we operate out of ignorance and are subject to the evil influences of the Fall. The Fall can only produce misery, fear, rage, and lust. Never love, never happiness. No good ever comes from rage. No good ever comes from fear. Here is the reason we strive to lead a virtuous life, because only virtue can make you happy. All else leads to despair and depression, because, as they say, the wages of sin is death. And that's what that means. The imitation does not bring happiness. Despite a world full of false promises, vice can only bring ignorance and suffering, isolation and despair. When you dwell in vice rather than virtue, your life is part of the problem and not part of the solution. The Christ brings redemption and remembrance of the Father and the Fullness, one bit, one piece of the Fall at a time. Every time you resist evil and turn a bad habit into a good habit, you have redeemed a piece of the Fall. When you redeem all of your bits and pieces, you will be fully redeemed and regain your home in the Fullness. When all Second Order Powers have accepted the remembrance and the redemption of Christ, then Logos will be fully redeemed and this material universe can pass away. At that point, Paradise, with all of the love, peace and happiness that is implied, will be fully restored. The end goal of redemption is return to the Father's abode, that Paradise dreamed by the Fullness, where there is no death, no disease, no disappointment and no deficiencies, that Paradise where Christ is King and peace reigns supreme, and there is only cooperation, fellowship and true love. In Paradise there is nothing but life, so all the grass is green and flowers blossom endlessly and every soul that has ever lived lives happily forever after with their friends and their families. The Christ will leave no one behind to condemnation and hell. What kind of unholy savior would that be? From a previous article, I wrote, “Thus the called will condemn evil and will turn away from the rage that has consumed them, and they will be healed as they acknowledge that they have an origin of their existence, and they desire to know what that is that exists before them.” The Tripartate says in verse 132, “And even those who were brought forth from the desire of lust for domination, having inside them the seed that is lust for domination, will receive the recompense of good things if they have worked together with those who are predisposed toward good things, and provide they decide to do so deliberately, and are willing to abandon their vain love of temporary glory so as to do the command of the Lord of glory, and instead of that small temporary honor they will inherit the eternal kingdom.” So what this is saying is that you have to step away from ego, you have to take your pleasure-seeking ignorant side off the throne of your personality, and allow the indwelling of the Fullness to reside on the throne of your personality. You can turn your vices into virtues whenever you run across them. Awareness is always the first step, and then you put it into action. Okay, I'll confess something to you. I have a short temper myself, and I often lose my temper even with strangers on the street. It's a kind of a bizarre phenomenon. So I'll be walking along, and I'll see something that makes me angry. Like, for example, someone smoking a cigarette, and they don't put it out, and they just flick it thoughtlessly out into the bushes. I walk up to that person, I go, Who do you think you are? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Who's going to pick that up? What if you burn down the place? Are we supposed to look at your cigarette butts? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I get angry at total strangers. Okay, this doesn't do any good. I realize this is not a good thing. This is actually a vice and not a virtue. This righteous indignation is the thing that captures the do-gooders of the Second Order Powers into that endless rage, and the war that never ends. We can't win the battle through anger or through na-na-na-na-na. It doesn't work. We have to love these people. I'm trying to figure out how I might approach a person who flings a cigarette butt down in the street with love and kindness and compassion, but I can't figure out yet how to do that, and so I'm just going to stop getting in fights with strangers on the street. And that's been my mission for about the last two years, is to stop having random encounters of righteous indignation, step back, breathe, give praise to God, and go on. I think at some point I will have the wisdom to know how to engage people that would otherwise enrage me, but at the moment I don't quite have that. So that was my confession. Perhaps you are struggling with some other kind of thing. So remember, you have to just drop the thing when you notice it's bad. Drop it. Stop it. These are called vicious cycles in psychology. Just stop doing it. Just stop it. Don't worry about the consequences. The consequences are worse when you do engage in that vicious thing. So just stop it. Whatever it takes, just don't do it. And the more you stop yourself from the bad behavior, the easier it is to embrace the other side of the ledger. You will shift over to the other side once you stop doing that thing on the left side. You cannot grab onto that virtue as long as you embrace the vice. On to verse 133 of Tripartite. “As for those of the imitation who embrace the darkness and deny the light, even they will obtain direct vision so that they will no longer have to believe only on account of a small word produced by a voice that this is how things are. For the restoration back to that which was is a single restoration, even if some are exalted because of this economy, having been set up as a cause for things that happen, unfolding numerous physical forces, and taking pleasure in them, they, angels as well as humans, will obtain the kingdom, the confirmation, and the salvation. [Verse 136 promises,] these too will be provided with dwelling places where they will dwell eternally after they have renounced the downward attraction of deficiency and the power of the Fullness has pulled them upward on account of the great generosity and the sweetness of the preexistent Aeon.” And that is the end of the article from 2019 and the original podcast from May of 2021. Over the past several years I have turned my mind from outrage and righteous indignation as best I can, even as our society has plunged into more and more division and outrage. It is easier to see now than ever before the uselessness of operating out of anger and rejection. Anger cannot produce good results because anger is a vice, not a virtue. Only love can turn hearts around. Onward and upward! And God bless us all. If you are finding these Gnostic Insights helpful to your understanding of Gnosticism, please contribute to the cause. This will be helpful to bringing the word to more people. Thank you! Please Donate

Acknowledgement of Country//Headlines//News updates from SudanAustralian government announces new restrictions on weapons exports to IsraelProtesters arrested at Indo Pacific defence expo in SydneyNews updates from GazaConcerns about mass Centrelink suspension noticesHerald Sun misreports crime statistics about young people// Announcements//Eimable Manirakiza coronial inquest: The family and loved ones of Melbourne musician Eimable Manirakiza, who passed away in 2021 after going missing during an acute mental health crisis, are calling for community members to support them at the upcoming directions hearing on Monday the 10th of November. Supporters are asked to attend the Coroners Court at 65 Kavanagh Street, Southbank from 9:30AM on Monday morning, with the directions hearing scheduled to start at 10AM. For updates on the inquest, follow @justiceforeimable on Instagram, and donate to the fundraiser to support Eimable's family to attend the inquest here.//Mona Zahed's school initiative: Gazan chef and mother Mona Zahed has been raising funds through the sale of her cook book Tabkha: Recipes from Under the Rubble to support her family and community during the genocide. She has now launched a new initiative, a school called ‘Basmat Amal' or ‘signs of hope', to support children in her community to continue learning despite their experiences of displacement and catastrophe. Donate to Mona's fundraiser here, and purchase a copy (or copies!) of Tabkha here.// Treaty Talk on Blak'n'DeadlyWe listened to a discussion about the Victorian treaty process between Uncle Robbie Thorpe and Senator Lidia Thorpe originally broadcast on last Friday's Blak 'n' Deadly. You can listen to the full conversation here, and remember to tune in to Black 'n' Deadly every Friday at 11AM on 3CR.// Save cohealth RallyShaday, a GP trainee at a community health clinic, joined us to discuss organising for the Save Cohealth Rally this Saturday 8th November outside Sarah Witty's office. The rally is calling on federal or state emergency funding to save the clinics that service over 12,500 people and prevent a statewide health catastrophe. Some symbolic motions in parliament have been moved but it is mass mobilisations like the Town Hall in Fitzroy last week and the rally that will win this campaign. Join the rally on Saturday the 8th of November from 2PM outside Labor MP Sarah Witty's Office, 142 Johnston St, Fitzroy.// Reflections From a Gazan DoctorDr Ezzideen Shehab, a Palestinian physician in northern Gaza, shared his reflections on practicing medicine during Israel's ongoing genocide. Dr Shehab has collaborated with Readers and Writers Against the Genocide to publish Diary of a Young Doctor a remarkable collection of diary entries that he has kept to document eyewitness accounts of the genocide. Order your copy of Diary of a Young Doctor here, and follow Dr Shehab on Instagram at @ezzideenshehab. Readers and Writers Against the Genocide are staging a read in at the State Library of Victoria today from 5PM, and encourage attendees to bring along their copies of Diary of a Young Doctor to participate.// Touch Sensitive on ‘In Paradise'Touch Sensitive (aka Michael Di Francesco) is one of Australia's most beloved electronic artists, bassists, and producers, known for his Italo-disco flair, piano house grooves, and undeniable presence on the dancefloor. Since breaking through with cult classic 'Pizza Guy' (2013), he's become a staple of Australian music, from releasing his acclaimed debut album 'Visions' (2017), sold out national tours, and countless collaborations, he is an artists' artist that brings nothing but groove and euphoria to the dancefloor. Catch his long-awaited second album 'In Paradise' being performed with a stacked live band, this Saturday 08 Nov, 8pm at the Nightcat in Fitzroy.// Mutual Aid for SudanFilmmaker, photographer and organiser Bakri Mahmoud spoke with us about ongoing mutual aid efforts for Sudan. Bakri also discussed the importance of disrupting narratives of 'civil war' being used to brand the catastrophic conflict between the RSF and SAF, the responsibilities and failures of so-called Australia in taking action on this crisis, and the importance of continued efforts to support Sudanese liberation. Mutual aid donation details are available in Bakri's Instagram bio.// SongIn Paradise is the Title Track of long awaited second studio album from Touch Sensitive. A vibrant groovy dance number that is not only beautifully produced, but a light, dynamic, feel-good story between told by Michael and his live band. Buy In Paradise on Bandcamp.//

When three hitmakers—Jess Cates, Ethan Hulse, and Jordan Mohilowski of In Paradise—sit down with Ginny Yurich, the conversation turns into an ode to real life. From shy kids who found their voice through a $10 garage-sale guitar to a baseball injury that rerouted a future toward award-winning songwriting, they trace how music, community, and countless “reps” forged craft the long way—no shortcuts, no prompts. They talk bluegrass circles and church choirs, co-writes that build community, and why boredom is a feature in raising creators. The heartbeat of it all: “ain't nothing on a screen is ever gonna beat this view.” This episode debuts In Paradise's brand-new single “Beautiful World,” featuring a special family cameo—Ginny's daughters: Brooklyn on background vocals and Vivian on guitar. It's a clean, catchy anthem for parents and kids alike—sun on your skin, grass under your feet, knees a little scuffed—and a timely reminder that shared songs and shared sunsets build the strongest memories. Stay to the end for the premiere, then take the cue the chorus gives you: get outside, take it in, and make today part of your beautiful world. Learn more about In Paradise and all they have to offer here Check out Two Better Friends here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New dancehall, latin, afrobeats along with some new soca from Barbados & Vincy.Mxssivh, Najeerii - Ravin (Radio)450 - Demon Gyal (Edit)Malie Donn - SUSPECT (SF Radio Edit)MALIE DONN - BODY TEA (Clean)Masicka - Mute (Clean)Masicka - WHITES (CLEAN)Shenseea - V.I.P (Clean)Jada Kingdom - G.A.D (Clean)Yung Bredda - Vitamin D (Clean)Jus Jay King x Grateful Co - Livin' Fast (In the Moment)Jus Jay - Magnet Mstr Main 1.0PROBLEM CHILD & PATRICE ROBERT - GIMME MORESHAL MARSHALL & TEDDYSON JOHN - GOD GOT MEPatrice Roberts - Ungrateful (Clean)DJ Snake ~ BehMelody.IN - Paradise (with Bipolar Sunshine)Burna Boy Ft. Ed Sheeran - For My Hand (Deejay Massive Hype Intro) (Clean) 104Tyla Ft. Sean Paul - Push 2 Start [Remix] (MMP Intro Edit) (Clean)Ayra Starr & Wizkid - Gimme Dat (Da Phonk Club Edit)Feid - Luna (DJ Mhark ReDrum)[CLEAN]Rauw Alejandro Ft. Bad Bunny - Que Pasaria (MMP Intro Edit) (Dirty)KAROL G - LATINA FOREVAKlassik Frescobar - DANSAMachel Montano - Nice Time - Muv EditMical Teja, Coutain - Riddim (Main)merchant, damon deGraff, GBM Nutron - Down Di RoadDavido feat. Omah Lay - With You (Main)Patrice Roberts - Fling It - Muv 130 - 160Bpm Transition1T1 - Bouwey (Feat Théomaa)Angie Maya - Curry (Soca 2025)Machel Montano - PARDY - Dadamanufakture's Bouyon MixSkinny Fabulous - NobodyVghn X Nailah Blackman X Travis World

Civil war... in Heaven? When a country tears itself apart, we gather that something has gone horribly wrong. "Brother against brother" is a phrase that still echoes from our "War Between the States," a century-and-a-half ago. But civil war in Heaven? In Paradise? How could such a thing happen? Well, our instincts are correct: Something (rather, someone) went horribly wrong. We're studying angels! And one in particular, today. Listen to Right Start Radio every Monday through Friday on WCVX 1160AM (Cincinnati, OH) at 9:30am, WHKC 91.5FM (Columbus, OH) at 5:00pm, WRFD 880AM (Columbus, OH) at 9:00am. Right Start can also be heard on One Christian Radio 107.7FM & 87.6FM in New Plymouth, New Zealand. You can purchase a copy of this message, unsegmented for broadcasting and in its entirety, for $7 on a single CD by calling +1 (800) 984-2313, and of course you can always listen online or download the message for free. RS03182025_0.mp3Scripture References: Job 1; Genesis 1; Isaiah 14:12-17

In Paradise we will ponder the glory of God. “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of...

This week we speak with Scott Chaskey, a farmer, poet, author, and pioneer of the CSA movement. His latest book, Soil and Spirit, explores our connection and kinship with nature through farming and storytelling. In this wide ranging conversation we explore the history of community supported agriculture (CSA) in North America, the spread of CSA's around the world, land trusts and the concepts of “ownership” and “the commons”, and the many ways in which we are deeply connected with all living things.  Soil And Spirit by Scott Chaskey http://milkweed.org/book/soil-and-spirit  PLEASE make sure to subscribe to the podcast, download our episodes, and rate them! Your support means the world to us. Thank you! Timestamps [3:21] Shi-Yan and CSA movement in China [10:38] Origins of CSA in the US Quail Hill Farm [13:13] Land Trust and CSA relationship [18:45] NOT owning the farm concept of “the commons” in Europe [27:40] Learning to garden in England [36:26] The Quail Hill Farm CSA, one of the first in the US [54:15] Scott's book Soil And Spirit Kinship with nature  [1:04:48] Hand tools BCS history Tractors [1:15:09] Current state of the CSA movement [1:26:39] The word “peasant” [1:33:39] Rivers and mountains poetry tradition / Gary Snyder poet [1:37:13] The Tree by John Fowles [1:39:10] Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard The Overstory by Richard Powers [1:46:54] Navajo word Hózhǫ́ [1:49:05] Community questions [1:53:32] In Paradise by Peter Matthiessen Sponsors Tessier https://info.serres-guytessier.com/en/tessier-mgi10 Use promocode MGI10 for 10% off and free shipping on your first purchase for the Eastern North American regions (Ontario, the Maritimes, and the states of Vermont, Maine, New York, and New Hampshire).  New Society Publishing Use code market25 for 25% off all books https://newsociety.com/?utm_source=The%20Market%20Gardener%20Podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=Sponsorship  Market Gardener Institute www.themarketgardener.com/introduction  Limited time offer of $99 USD on our online course Introduction To Organic Farming. Links/Resources Market Gardener Institute:  https://themarketgardener.com/  Masterclass:  https://themarketgardener.com/courses/the-market-gardener-masterclass/  Newsletter:  https://themarketgardener.com/newsletter Blog:  https://themarketgardener.com/blog  Books: https://themarketgardener.com/books Growers & Co: https://growers.co/ Heirloom: https://heirloom.ag/ The Old Mill: https://www.espaceoldmill.com/en/ Follow Us Website: http://themarketgardener.com  Facebook: http://facebook.com/marketgardenerinstitute  Instagram: http://instagram.com/themarketgardeners  Guest Social Media Links Scott Chaskey: Website: https://www.scottchaskey.com/  IG: https://www.instagram.com/scottchaskey JM: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jeanmartinfortier Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jeanmartinfortier 

There's a brand new expansion announced Peril's In Paradise! But don't worry... we don't really talk about it much. Well we do... But not until around the 30 minute mark. There's a lot of news and we actually cover... most of it? It's pretty wild! (Yes I know its Standard)   Logo Created By: Nate Wolfe Theme Song By: Se7enist. https://open.spotify.com/artist/5kmsQa4jBfiUwWLqOp64GX? You can buy merch here: https://blizzlet.myspreadshop.com/all

“In Paradise, what the fire didn't take was the sense of community that exists there. Our mission was, ‘look how far we've come, and it's a vision to the future.”

PART 7 OF 8: 25. Paradise And Hell 26. Everything Is Positive In Paradise, And Everything Is Negative In Hell 27. The Aim Is To Attain The Good Pleasure Of Allah 28. Sin And Repentance 25. Paradise And Hell Allah offers believers the chance to experience eternal life in Paradise. The Companions of Paradise will be the victors, set apart from the Companions of the Fire, who will be punished for disobeying Allah's commands. Allah has made it possible to appreciate the beauty of Paradise by allowing us to first experience the world, where good and evil exist simultaneously. On the Day of Judgment, Allah will save the believers from the Fire and will offer them an eternity in Paradise with its rivers, couches, and delights. Allah promises Paradise to His believers as a reward for their righteous deeds. Paradise is a place of bliss and beauty, with eternal youth, flowing springs, bountiful fruits, dark-eyed maidens, and thornless lote-trees. For the companions of the right, there are maidens of like age, devoted and passionate. On the other hand, Allah warns unbelievers that they will be sent to Hell, where they will suffer punishment, including eating the tree of Zaqqum and drinking scalding water. 26. Everything Is Positive In Paradise, And Everything Is Negative In Hell But in Paradise it will be so sweet that you will not need to add sugar. Everything is perfect. In Paradise, Allah has created an environment of positivity and beauty in which all of one's desires are fulfilled. Human souls burn with love of Allah, and there are conversations with Prophets, spouses manifested in beautiful forms, and houris. In contrast, Hell is a place of vile smells, filth, darkness, and disgusting food. In Paradise, Allah has made everything perfect and free from flaws. Everything is of the highest quality, and it is only through His grace that we can enjoy it. 27. The Aim Is To Attain The Good Pleasure Of Allah The ultimate goal in life should be to seek Allah's good pleasure. Allah's infinite might should not be forgotten, and instead we should strive to make our religion sincerely His. The reward for achieving this good pleasure is eternal life in Paradise, while the punishment for being ungrateful and seeking the pleasure of others is eternal hellfire. The Qur'an expresses that people should conduct themselves correctly and self-sacrifice for the sole purpose of attaining Allah's good pleasure. The greatest honor and gratification man can ever attain is Allah's good pleasure, while Allah rewards believers with eternal happiness in Heaven. Ultimately, our entire life should be oriented towards one single aim - Allah's good pleasure. 28. Sin And Repentance Allah's mercy is infinite and He always gives people the opportunity to repent and be forgiven for their sins. Repentance means asking for forgiveness and being committed to never committing the same sin again. Although a person may fall back into sinning after repenting, Allah will forgive him if he is sincere. He will not accept an insincere repentance and warns those who think they can repent later.

Dans l'épisode d'aujourd'hui nous allons parler de "The Loco-Motion" par Little Eva, et sur la façon dont une démo réalisée par la baby-sitter de Carole King est devenue l'un des plus grands succès des années soixante. Les plus chagrins d'entre vous trouveront surement qu'on est plus du côté de la pop que du rock ou de la soul….. c'est un peu vrai… Mais quelles compositions ! Et puis restez quand même parce qu'on parlera aussi de sado-masochisme mais…. Enfin…. Vous verrez. Little Eva, "The Loco-Motion" The Cookies, "In Paradise" The Cookies, "Passing Time" Big Joe Turner, "Lipstick, Powder and Paint" Chuck Willis, "It's Too Late" Ray Charles, "Lonely Avenue" Ray Charles, "The Right Time" Tony Orlando, "Halfway to Paradise" Neil Sedaka, "Breaking Up is Hard to Do" Dorothy Jones, "Taking That Long Walk Home" Nat Kendrick and the Swans, "(Do the) Mashed Potatoes" Dee Dee Sharp, "Mashed Potato Time" Bobby "Boris" Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers, "The Monster Mash" Little Eva, "The Loco-Motion" The Locomotions, "Little Eva" Big Dee Irwin, "Everybody's Got a Dance But Me" Carole King, "It Might as Well Rain Until September" The Everly Brothers, "Chains" The Cookies, "Chains" Little Eva, "Please Hurt Me" The Chiffons, "One Fine Day" Little Eva, "Keep Your Hands Off My Baby" The Cookies, "Don't Say Nothing Bad About My Baby" Idalia Boyd, "Hula Hoppin'" Big Dee Irwin, "Swinging on a Star" Earl-Jean, "I'm Into Something Good" Little Eva "Makin' With the Magilla" Grand Funk Railroad, "The Loco-Motion"

In "Paradise" bushfires are burning in Northeastern Siberia in the summer of 2021, and the villagers of remote Shologon are left withouth government support one-on-one with the fire. "Paradise" will be screened at Sydney Film Festival in June 2023. - В документальном фильме «Рай» режиссер Александр Абатуров рассказывает о лесных пожарах на северо-востоке Сибири летом 2021 года. В фильме жители далекого поселка в Якутии сражаются с огнем в надежде спасти свои дома. В июне 2023 года «Рай» будет показан в рамках Сиднейского международного кинофестиваля.

Allah has promised that believers will enjoy the company of beautiful spouses. Allah says:"In them are fair ones, good and beautiful." and"Spouses of equal age" who are "Immortal youths" and "wide-eyed houris." Allah has created everything believers need in order to enjoy the highest level of physical and spiritual pleasure. In Paradise, Allah promises believers eternal bliss and freedom from the defects and shortcomings of life in this world. Believers will be surrounded by natural beauties such as a perfect climate, unceasing water, and lush gardens. They will live in high-ceilinged halls, wear beautiful clothing, and be served by handsome servants. They will also be accompanied by beautiful spouses who are immortal and ever-youthful. All of these blessings are granted to believers by Allah, who has promised that those who follow His guidance will be rewarded with eternal happiness in Paradise. Believers who have earned Allah's approval will be rewarded with the ultimate luxury and joy in Paradise. They will be clothed in silk and satin, adorned with gold and pearls, and blessed with spouses of unblemished beauty. Allah will also provide them with an abundance of all that they need and desire, and they will be surrounded by other pure believers free from any negative characteristics. Through this, believers will receive the greatest comfort and peace, experiencing eternal happiness in gratitude for Allah's mercy. Believers strive throughout their lives to gain Allah's approval and Paradise. As a result, they experience true happiness in this world, derived from their faith, and will be rewarded with joy and salvation in the eternal Paradise. Disbelievers, on the other hand, will never know the peace and happiness of faith, and will experience unhappiness and regret in this world and the Day of Judgment.

Host Meg Wolitzer presents two gripping stories about people in flight. In Rebecca Makkai's “The Briefcase,” performed by Victor Garber, an escaped prisoner assumes another man's identity. In “Paradise,” by Yxta Maya Murray, a young widow and mother runs from a fire, but can't escape the challenges of her family life. Tanis Parenteau is the reader.

Hey, there! Welcome to September's Q&A. Check out the following time stamps for the specific topics discussed. 04:25 = Which dead celebrity I would have dinner with 07:52 = My top 5 brands 14:36 = Apps to organize time and chores 18:18 = My favorite song right now 21:19 = What I currently feel most grateful for 24:17 = How I started the podcast 27:16 = Recurring thoughts I don't like to admit 30:50 = My top expectation for France 34:30 = How to make tough decisions FOLLOW THE PODCAST'S INSTAGRAM: https://instagram.com/theasteapodcast?igshid=r04b2760fkdl CONTACT ME THROUGH: theasteapodcast@gmail.com (for business inquiries, sponsorships or to tell me what you think about this podcast!) SEND ME A VOICE MESSAGE: https://anchor.fm/th351a-beaury/message CHECK OUT THE DESIGNERS OF MY COVER ART: https://instagram.com/sofiarrublacreative?igshid=1xtsd1w69zkkl https://instagram.com/cuerpobaldio?igshid=1jq5cb59nm2z Listen to my other podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/3RhYyCBLVwBuNimne4zVCO?si=AG_LzDsuQdqBYedSmFOkfQ START YOUR PODCAST NOW BY HEADING TO anchor.fm CHECK OUT THE THINGS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE (IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE): Listen to Startalk Radio's episode with Ann Druyan (on Spotify): https://open.spotify.com/episode/5lDbzqYHjpUckDChCiBr4S?si=df50e3618bbe4226 Economía en colores by Xavier Sala-i-Martin Dove: https://www.dove.com/es/home.html Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/ Sephora: https://www.sephora.com/ IKEA: https://www.ikea.com/ Biónica: https://bionica.co/ MARINA: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6CwfuxIqcltXDGjfZsMd9A?si=do8PNh5GSGWCB3JNUxUN4g Últimos días by Zoé (on Spotify): https://open.spotify.com/track/6S2UlwxfsDpR5yqKaVASMv?si=03a1bd2bed5d46a3 Moments We Live For by In Paradise (on Spotify): https://open.spotify.com/track/7LsA36A2bVTrfGLWBvH1Cm?si=d0d7a457c79c43c6 Villano Antillano: Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 51 (on Spotify): https://open.spotify.com/track/4hceSKjrkDTO0nMKFcb3sj?si=672fa9643d134d29 Listen to Remy's podcast Pen to Page (on Spotify): https://open.spotify.com/show/4QuhsuluedQTpFn04CsVSQ?si=177a0527f7af4dc5 Listen to the back to school mental health q&a (on Spotify): https://open.spotify.com/episode/6BJ9bLpwblJMaqWsS2klx8?si=9eb1cd9a4b9548ce Listen to my first episode (on Spotify): https://open.spotify.com/episode/0SfPjD31qPrH2hBlQMVusJ?si=dbf7752707fe45a6 Check out the Word of Mouth blog: https://fr.blog.anchor.fm/ Listen to my episode on romanticizing life (on Spotify): https://open.spotify.com/episode/4SzNgCnW36iV1xDAe4U0Um?si=53505aa77f7943a3 Listen to my interview with Melanie Benítez: Listen to my episode on the biggest decision I've ever had to make (on Spotify): https://open.spotify.com/episode/7o8ESARKOL3b8knajyFloF?si=aab1a3a85570441e HERE ARE SOME QUOTES I LIKED FROM THIS WEEK'S EPISODE: “In my last moments in Medellín with my loved ones, I was aware that they would become core memories” “We can't control what we think, but we can control what comes right after” “I can implement these new habits I want in my new life” “You can't assign numerical values to abstract things” “Don't burn yourself out when trying to make a decision, let it sit in your mind” Thanks for tuning in, have a beautiful week!

In Paradise, Ben Sisko's convictions go head to head with a religious zealot! Who will win? Tune in for the breakdown and discussion! What to expect from episode 36: Paradise? Briefing A Paradise of a planet. What makes a place paradise? Sisko and O̵…

In Episode 25 of The Hottest Party On TV podcast, Jennifer Castiello-Verrino stops by to talk about her lengthy career in entertainment, starting with her time as a Club MTV dancer. Joining MTV's dance show in 1987, Jennifer had a front-row seat to see the hottest up-and-coming stars in dance & R&B music develop before her eyes which set the stage for her to make her own foray into music as part of the freestyle girl group Laissez Faire. With a huge dance hit under their belt with the song "In Paradise" and getting to open for Marky Mark & the Funky Bunch, Laissez Faire's career started taking off just as Jennifer felt she was starting to come into her own as a Club MTV dancer. As the 90s rolled on, Jennifer went on to dance on shows like The Grind, Global Groove, Singled Out, Soul Train, and even the Super Bowl. Currently, Jennifer is working to make the world a better place as a Guiding Eyes puppy socializer. Episode produced by Esteban Vargas. Stay tuned for new episodes dropping every Throwback Thursday. Follow Jennifer: Instagram Follow Laissez Faire: Instagram - Facebook Check out the Club MTV Fanpage Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/ClubMTVFanPage/ Follow The Hottest Party On TV: Instagram

SELECTED SHORTS host Meg Wolitzer presents two gripping stories about people in flight.  In Rebecca Makkai's “The Suitcase,” performed by Victor Garber, an escaped prisoner assumes another man's identity.  In “Paradise,” by Yxta Maya Murray, a young widow and mother runs from a fire, but can't escape the challenges of her family life. Tanis Parenteau is the reader.   Join and give!: https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/symphonyspacenyc?code=Splashpage See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast presents an interview with Lizzie Johnson, a staff writer for the Washington Post. Previously, Johnson worked at the San Francisco Chronicle, where she reported on fifteen of the deadliest, largest, and most destructive blazes in modern California history, and covered over thirty communities impacted by wildfires. Recently she released a book entitled Paradise: One Town's Struggle To Survive An American Wildfire — the focus of this episode — which serves as the definitive first hand account of California's Camp Fire, the nation's deadliest wildfire in a century. Paradise is a riveting examination of what went wrong and how to avert future tragedies as the Climate Crisis unfolds.On November 8, 2018, the people of Paradise, California, awoke to a mottled gray sky and gusty winds. Soon the Camp Fire, the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California's history was upon them, consuming an acre a second. Less than two hours after the fire ignited, the town was engulfed in flames, the terrified residents trapped in their homes and cars. By the next morning, eighty-five people were dead. As a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, Lizzie Johnson was there as the town of Paradise burned. She saw the smoldering rubble of a historic covered bridge and the beloved Black Bear Diner and she stayed long afterward, visiting shelters, hotels, and makeshift camps. Drawing upon her years of on-the-ground reporting, and reams of public records, including 911 calls and testimony from a grand jury investigation, Johnson provides a minute-by-minute account of the Camp Fire, following residents and first responders as they fight to save themselves and their town. We see a young mother fleeing with her newborn; a school bus full of children in search of an escape route; and a group of paramedics, patients, and nurses trapped in a cul-de-sac, fending off the fire with rakes and hoses. In Paradise, Johnson documents this unfolding tragedy with empathy and nuance. But she also investigates the root causes, from runaway climate change to a deeply flawed alert system to Pacific Gas and Electric's decades-long neglect of critical infrastructure. A cautionary tale for a new era of megafires, Paradise is the gripping story of a town wiped off the map and the determination of its people to rise again. In this episode, host Michael Shields and Lizzie Johnson explore how Climate Change has increased the intensity and size of wildfires throughout the world, how economic factors have increasingly swelled the population in the wildland-urban-interface, the challenges of evacuating the entirety of a town, forest management suppression miscalculations and the need for “controlled” burns, the emotional toll of reporting on tragedies, and much, much more.This episode concludes with a deeply affecting song by John-Michael Sun, a Camp Fire survivor. Listen to the entirety of the song here. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I have spent much of my journalism career bearing witness to the human cost of climate change, writes Lizzie Johnson in her new book, "Paradise: One Towns Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire." Nearly three years after the Camp Fire decimated the town of Paradise, taking 85 lives and razing 90 percent of its homes, Johnson weaves together its human impact, building from her San Francisco Chronicle reporting and an estimated 500 interviews. In Paradise, she writes of an ambulance holding a premature newborn and his IV-attached mother, a school bus driver maneuvering to save his passengers and other narratives of attempting survival against a blaze engulfing distances greater than a football field each second. Johnson joins us to share Paradises stories and what they foretell in the face of climate inaction.

Sitting #19 - From the descriptions of Paradise (may Allah make us from its inhabitants). In Paradise there is what no eye has ever seen, nor what any ear has ever heard, nor what has ever crossed the mind of any person. Paradise as described from selected ayaat of the Quran. Paradise as described from selected ahadith of the Prophet ﷺ. Date: 04/05/2021

Our epilogue to Hulk Hogan’s Thunder in Paradise pilot (or first two episodes of the series).  We cover some shocking revelations from episode 3 (the first episode after the pilot), give some closing thoughts on the series, and say goodbye to Thunder in Paradise for now.  It’s a bittersweet farewell, and you just might see a tear fall from our horrifically jet ski-damaged eyes.  But don’t worry, dear listeners, just like a heat-seeking missile that may appear in every episode of this series, we’ve just got this feeling…this feeling that Thunder in Paradise is hot on our tail, a missile headed straight for our hearts.  And soon enough, it’ll explode with a whole new crop of action, romance, humor, and brotherhood…an explosion whose gentle heat will warm our joyful hearts, and whose soulful noise will grace your very ears, dear listener, grace them with the soothing rumble of distant thunder.  In Paradise?!?      Follow us on Twitter @WGDPod Like us on Facebook: facebook.com/WGDPod Email us at WGDPod@gmail.com Check out our draft drawing video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc-nYmghcYQ Check out our recommendations list: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TVswqyZHn-FOOmDAKNFp9dr6sTw4rcrb4Igcs1hB0uQ/edit?usp=sharing Check out our Instagram page at instagram.com/WGDPod Theme music:  “Find My Way” by Magnolia Brown “Old Bidness” music provided by Polyester Robot.  Like and follow Polyester Robot on Facebook:  Polyester Robot (Facebook) Recommendations music provided by Len Binning.  Check out Len’s YouTube show “Len and Jim Take Over” (link) Follow Magnolia Brown on Facebook (facebook.com/MagnoliaBrownJams) and Reverb Nation (ReverbNation.com/MagnoliaBrownJams)

The source and scope of your sin.--1. In Paradise God created you good and as his image.-2. In Paradise your nature became corrupted.-3. In Paradise your natures are completely corrupted.

COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths across the United States are rising. As cold weather moves in, people spend more time indoors, and the holidays approach, take steps to slow the spread of COVID-19. Wear a mask, stay at least 6 feet apart, avoid crowds, and wash your hands often. The more steps you take, the more you are protected against COVID-19 The city of Santa Rosa has a dozen affordable housing complexes in varying stages of development that are in need of funding and could probably take advantage of the relief dollars, said David Gouin, the city’s director of housing and community services. If they’re all built, the projects would add more than 950 new apartments for low-income families. In Paradise, the town's largest low-income housing complex burned down during the Camp fire. Its developer, Community Housing Improvement Program, is in the process of rebuilding and would be eligible for disaster relief funding. But the project is getting squeezed by Internal Revenue Service regulations that call for affordable housing projects to be reoccupied within two years after they’re destroyed. Financing for the project remains precarious, said Seana O’Shaughnessy, the developer’s president and chief executive.

Episode ninety-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "The Loco-Motion" by Little Eva, and how a demo by Carole King's babysitter became one of the biggest hits of the sixties. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Duke of Earl" by Gene Chandler. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are no biographies of Little Eva, so I've used a variety of sources, including the articles on Little Eva and The Cookies at This Is My Story. The following books were also of some use: A Natural Woman is Carole King's autobiography. Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era by Ken Emerson is a good overview of the whole scene. Girl Groups by John Clemente contains potted biographies of many groups of the era, including articles on both Little Eva and The Cookies. There are no decent CDs of Eva's material readily available, but I can recommend two overlapping compilations. This compilation contains Little Eva's only sixties album in full, along with some tracks by Carole King, the Cookies, and the Ronettes, while Dimension Dolls is a compilation from 1963 that overlaps substantially with that album but contains several tracks not on it.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before this begins -- there is some mention of domestic violence in this episode. If that's something that might upset you, please check the transcript of the episode at 500songs.com if reading it might be easier than listening. A couple of months back, we talked about Goffin and King, and the early days of the Brill Building sound. Today we're going to take another look at them, and at a singer who recorded some of their best material, both solo and in a group, but who would always be overshadowed by the first single they wrote for her, when she was still working as their childminder. Today, we're going to look at Little Eva and "The Loco-Motion", and the short history of Dimension Records: [Excerpt: Little Eva, "The Loco-Motion"] The story of Little Eva is intertwined with the story of the Cookies, one of the earliest of the girl groups, and so we should probably start with them. We've mentioned the Cookies earlier, in the episode on "What'd I Say", but we didn't look at them in any great detail. The group started out in the mid-fifties, as a group of schoolgirls singing together in New York -- Dorothy Jones, her cousin Beulah Robertson, and a friend, Darlene McRae, who had all been in the choir at their local Baptist Church. They formed a group and made their first appearance at the famous Harlem Apollo talent contests, where they came third, to Joe Tex and a vocal group called the Flairs (not, I think, any of the Flairs groups we've looked at). They were seen at that contest by Jesse Stone, who gave them the name "The Cookies". He signed them to Aladdin Records, and produced and co-wrote their first single, "All-Night Mambo". That wasn't commercially successful, but Stone liked them enough that he then got them signed to Atlantic, where he again wrote their first single for the label. That first single was relatively unsuccessful, but their second single on Atlantic, "In Paradise", did chart, making number nine on the R&B chart: [Excerpt: The Cookies, "In Paradise"] But the B-side to that record would end up being more important to their career in the long run. "Passing Time" was the very first song by Neil Sedaka and Howie Greenfield to get recorded, even before Sedaka's recordings with the Tokens or his own successful solo records: [Excerpt: The Cookies, "Passing Time"] But then two things happened. Firstly, one of the girls, Beulah Robertson, fell out with Jesse Stone, who sacked her from the group. Stone got in a new vocalist, Margie Hendrix, to replace her, and after one more single the group stopped making singles for Atlantic. But they continued recording for smaller labels, and they also had regular gigs as backing vocalists for Atlantic, on records like "Lipstick, Powder, and Paint" by Big Joe Turner: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, "Lipstick, Powder and Paint"] "It's Too Late" by Chuck Willis: [Excerpt: Chuck Willis, "It's Too Late"] And "Lonely Avenue" by Ray Charles: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "Lonely Avenue"] It was working with Ray Charles that led to the breakup of the original lineup of the Cookies -- Charles was putting together his own group, and wanted the Cookies as his backing vocalists, but Dorothy was pregnant, and decided she'd rather stay behind and continue working as a session singer than go out on the road. Darlene and Margie went off to become the core of Charles' new backing group, the Raelettes, and they would play a major part in the sound of Charles' records for the next few years. It's Margie, for example, who can be heard duetting with Charles on "The Right Time": [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "The Right Time"] Dorothy stayed behind and put together a new lineup of Cookies. To make sure the group sounded the same, she got Darlene's sister Earl-Jean into the group -- Darlene and Earl-Jean looked and sounded so similar that many histories of the group say they're the same person -- and got another of her cousins, Margaret Ross, to take over the spot that had previously been Beulah's before Margie had taken her place.  This new version of the Cookies didn't really start doing much for a couple of years, while Dorothy was raising her newborn and Earl-Jean and Margaret were finishing high school. But in 1961 they started again in earnest, when Neil Sedaka remembered the Cookies and called Dorothy up, saying he knew someone who needed a vocal group. Gerry Goffin and Carole King had become hot songwriters, and they'd also become increasingly interested in record production after Carole had been involved in the making of "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" Carole was recording her own demos of the songs she and Goffin were writing, and was increasingly making them fully-produced recordings in their own right. The first record the new Cookies sang on was one that seems to have started out as one of these demos. "Halfway to Paradise" by Tony Orlando sounds exactly like a Drifters record, and Orlando was, at the time, a sixteen-year-old demo singer. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that this was a demo intended for the Drifters, that it was turned down, and so the demo was released as a record itself: [Excerpt: Tony Orlando, "Halfway to Paradise"] That made the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred, while a British cover version by Billy Fury made number three in the UK. From this point on, the new lineup of the Cookies were once again the premier session singers. They added extra backing vocals to a lot of the Drifters' records at this time, and would provide backing vocals for most of Atlantic's artists, as the earlier lineup had. They were also effectively the in-house backing singers for Aldon Music -- as well as singing on every Goffin and King demo, they were also singing with Neil Sedaka: [Excerpt: Neil Sedaka, "Breaking Up is Hard to Do"] But it was Goffin and King who spent the most time working with the Cookies, and who pushed them as recording artists in their own right. They started with a solo record for Dorothy, "Taking That Long Walk Home", a song that was very much "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" part two: [Excerpt: Dorothy Jones, "Taking That Long Walk Home"] The Cookies were doing huge amounts of session work, working twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Dorothy Jones described being in the studio working on a King Curtis session until literally fifteen minutes before giving birth.  They weren't the only ones working hard, though. Goffin and King were writing from their Aldon offices every single day, writing songs for the Drifters, the Shirelles, Bobby Rydell, Bobby Vee, Gene Pitney, the Crickets, the Everly Brothers, and more. And on top of that they had a child and Carole King was pregnant with a second one.  And, this being the very early 1960s, it never occurred to either Goffin or King that just because Carole King was working the exact same number of hours as Goffin, that might mean she shouldn't also be doing the housework and looking after the children with no help from Goffin. There was only one way they could continue their level of productivity, and that was to get someone in to help out Carole. She mentioned to the Cookies that she was looking for someone to help her with the children, and Earl-Jean mentioned that a nineteen-year-old acquaintance -- her friend's husband's sister -- had just moved to New York from North Carolina to try to become a singer and was looking for any work she could get while she was trying to make it. Eva Narcissus Boyd, Earl-Jean's acquaintance, moved in with Goffin and King and became their live-in childminder for $35 a week plus room and board. Goffin and King had known that Eva was a singer before they hired her, and they discovered that her voice was rather good. Not only that, but she blended well with the Cookies, and was friends with them. She became an unofficial "fourth Cookie", and was soon in the studio on a regular basis too -- and when she was, that meant that Eva's sister was looking after the kids, as a subcontracted babysitter. During this time, Don Kirshner's attitude was still that he was determined to get the next hit for every artist that had a hit. But that wasn't always possible.  Cameo-Parkway had, after the success they'd had with "The Twist", fully jumped on the dance-craze bandwagon, and they'd hit on another dance that might be the next Twist. The Mashed Potato was a dance that James Brown had been doing on stage for a few years, and in the wake of "The Twist", Brown had had a hit with a song about it "(Do the) Mashed Potatoes", which was credited to Nat Kendrick & the Swans rather than to Brown for contractual reasons: [Excerpt: Nat Kendrick and the Swans, "(Do the) Mashed Potatoes"] Cameo-Parkway had picked up on that dance, and had done just what Kirshner always did and created a soundalike of a recent hit -- and in fact they'd mashed up, if you'll pardon the expression, two recent hits. In this case, they'd taken the sound of "Please Mr. Postman", slightly reworked the lyrics to be about Brown's dance, and given it to session singer Dee Dee Sharp: [Excerpt: Dee Dee Sharp, "Mashed Potato Time"] That had gone to number two on the pop charts and number one on the R&B charts, and even inspired its own rip-offs, like "The Monster Mash" by Bobby "Boris" Pickett: [Excerpt: Bobby "Boris" Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers, "The Monster Mash"] So Kirshner just assumed that Sharp would be looking for another dance hit, one that sounded just like "Mashed Potato Time", and got Goffin and King to write one to submit to her.  Unfortunately for him, he'd assumed wrong. Cameo-Parkway was owned by a group of successful songwriters, and they didn't need outside writers bringing them hits when they could write their own. Dee Dee Sharp wasn't going to be recording Goffin and King's song.  When he listened to the demo, Don Kirshner was astonished that they hadn't taken the song. It had "hit" written all over it. He decided that he was going to start his own record label, Dimension Records, and he was just going to release that demo as the single. The Cookies went into the studio to overdub another layer of backing vocals, but otherwise the record that was released was the demo Eva -- now renamed "Little Eva" -- had sung: [Excerpt: Little Eva, "The Loco-Motion"] The record went to number one, and made Little Eva a star. It also made Gerry Goffin a successful producer, because even though Goffin and King had coproduced it, Goffin got sole production credit on this, and on other records the two produced together. According to King, Goffin was the one in the control room for their productions, while she would be on the studio floor, and she didn't really question whether what she was doing counted as production too until much later -- and anyway, getting the sole credit was apparently important to Gerry. "The Loco-Motion" was such a big hit that it inspired its own knockoffs, including one song cheekily called "Little Eva" by a group called "The Locomotions"  -- so the record label would say "Little Eva, The Locomotions", and people might buy it by mistake. You'll be shocked to learn that that one was on a Morris Levy label: [Excerpt: The Locomotions, "Little Eva"] That group featured Leon Huff, who would later go on to make a lot of much better records. Meanwhile, as Little Eva was now a star, Carole King once again had to look for a childminder. This time she insisted that anyone she hired be unable to sing, so she wouldn't keep having to do this. Dimension Records was soon churning out singles, all of them involving the Cookies, and Eva, and Goffin and King. They put out "Everybody's Got a Dance But Me" by Big Dee Irwin, a song that excerpted "The Loco-Motion", "Wah Watusi", "Hully Gully" and "Twist and Shout" among many others, with the Cookies on backing vocals, and with Goffin as the credited producer: [Excerpt: Big Dee Irwin, "Everybody's Got a Dance But Me"] That wasn't a hit, but Dimension soon released two more big hits. One was a solo single by Carole King, "It Might as Well Rain Until September", which went to number twenty even though its only national exposure was a disastrous appearance by King on American Bandstand which left her feeling humiliated: [Excerpt: Carole King, "It Might as Well Rain Until September"] Her solo performing career wouldn't properly take off for a few more years, but that was a step towards it. The Cookies also had a hit on Dimension around this point. Goffin and King had written a song called "Chains" for the Everly Brothers, who had recorded it but not released it: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Chains"] So they gave the song to the Cookies instead, with Little Eva on additional vocals, and it made the pop top twenty, and the R&B top ten: [Excerpt: The Cookies, "Chains"] Several people have pointed out that that lyric can be read as having an element of BDSM to it, and it's not the only Goffin and King song from this period that does -- there's a 1964 B-side they wrote for Eva called "Please Hurt Me", which is fairly blatant: [Excerpt: Little Eva, "Please Hurt Me"] But the BDSM comparison has also been made -- wrongly, in my opinion -- about one of the most utterly misguided songs that Goffin and King ever wrote -- a song inspired by Little Eva telling them that her boyfriend beat her up. They'd asked her why she put up with it, and she said that he only hit her because he loved her. They were inspired by that to write "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)", an utterly grotesque song which, in a version produced by Phil Spector for the Crystals, was issued as a single but soon withdrawn due to general horror. I won't be excerpting that one here, though it's easy enough to find if you want to. (Having said that, I should also say that while people have said that Goffin & King's material at this point flirts with BDSM, my understanding of BDSM, as it has been explained to me by friends who indulge in such activities, is that consent is paramount, so I don't think that "He Hit Me" should be talked about in those terms. I don't want anything I've said here to contribute to the blurring of distinctions between consensual kink and abuse, which are too often conflated). Originally, Eva's follow-up to "The Loco-Motion" was going to be "One Fine Day", another Goffin and King song, but no matter how much Goffin and King worked on the track, they couldn't come up with an arrangement, and eventually they passed the song over to the Tokens, who solved the arrangement problems (though they kept King's piano part) and produced a version of it for the Chiffons, for whom it became a hit: [Excerpt: The Chiffons, "One Fine Day"] Instead, Goffin and King gave Eva "Keep Your Hands Off My Baby". This is, in my opinion, the best thing that Eva ever did, and it made the top twenty, though it wasn't as big a hit as "The Loco-Motion": [Excerpt: Little Eva, "Keep Your Hands Off My Baby"] And Eva also appeared on another Cookies record, "Don't Say Nothing Bad About My Baby", which made the top ten: [Excerpt: The Cookies, "Don't Say Nothing Bad About My Baby"] The Cookies, Eva, and Goffin and King were such a package deal that Dimension released an album called Dimension Dolls featuring the first few hits of each act and padded out with demos they'd made for other artists.  This hit-making machine was so successful for a brief period in 1962 and 63 that even Eva's sister Idalia got in on the act, releasing a song by Goffin, King, and Jack Keller, "Hula Hoppin'": [Excerpt: Idalia Boyd, "Hula Hoppin'"] For Eva's third single, Gerry Goffin and Jack Keller wrote a song called "Let's Turkey Trot", which also made the top twenty. But that would be the last time that Eva would have a hit of her own. At first, the fact that she had a couple of flop singles wasn't a problem -- no artists at this time were consistent hit-makers, and it was normal for someone to have a few top ten hits, then a couple at number 120 or something, before going back to the top. And she was touring with Dick Clark's Caravan of Stars, and still in high demand as a live performer. She also, in 1963, recorded a version of "Swinging on a Star" with Big Dee Irwin, though she wasn't credited on the label, and that made the top forty (and made number seven in the UK): [Excerpt: Big Dee Irwin, "Swinging on a Star"] But everything changed for Little Eva, and for the whole world of Brill Building pop, in 1964. In part, this was because the Beatles became successful and changed the pop landscape, but by itself that shouldn't have destroyed the careers of Eva or the Cookies, who the Beatles admired -- they recorded a cover of "Chains", and they used to play "Keep Your Hands Off My Baby" in their live sets. But Don Kirshner decided to sell Aldon Music and Dimension Records to Columbia Pictures, and to start concentrating on the West Coast rather than New York. The idea was that they could come up with songs that would be used in films and TV, and make more money that way, and that worked out for many people, including Kirshner himself. But even when artists like Eva and the Cookies got hit material, the British Invasion made it hard for them to get a footing. For example, Goffin and King wrote a song for Earl-Jean from the Cookies to record as a solo track just after Dimension was taken over by Columbia. That record did make the top forty: [Excerpt: Earl-Jean, "I'm Into Something Good"] But then Herman's Hermits released their version, which became a much bigger hit. That sort of thing kept happening. The Cookies ended up splitting up by 1967. Little Eva did end up doing some TV work -- most famously, she sang a dance song in an episode of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon Magilla Gorilla: [Excerpt: Little Eva "Makin' With the Magilla"] But Dimension Records was not a priority for anyone -- Columbia already owned their own labels, and didn't need another one -- and the label was being wound down. And then Al Nevins, Don Kirshner's partner in Aldon, died. He'd always been friendly with Eva, and without him to advocate for her, the label sold her contract off to Bell Records. From that point on, she could no longer rely on Goffin and King, and she hopped between a number of different labels, none of them with any great success. After spending seven years going from label to label, and having split up with her husband, she quit the music business in 1971 and moved back to North Carolina. She was sick of the music industry, and particularly sick of the lack of money -- she had signed a lot of bad contracts, and was making no royalties from sales of her records. She worked menial day jobs, survived on welfare for a while, became active in her local church, and depending on which reports you read either ran a soul-food restaurant or merely worked there as a waitress. Meanwhile, "The Loco-Motion" was a perennial hit. Her version re-charted in the UK in the early seventies, and Todd Rundgren produced a version for the heavy metal band Grand Funk Railroad which went to number one in the US in 1974: [Excerpt: Grand Funk Railroad, "The Loco-Motion"] And then in 1988 an Australian soap star, Kylie Minogue, recorded her own version, which went top five worldwide and started Minogue's own successful pop career: [Excerpt: Kylie Minogue, "The Loco-Motion"] That record becoming a hit got a series of "where are they now?" articles written about Eva, and she was persuaded to come out of retirement and start performing again -- though having been so badly hurt by the industry, she was very dubious at first, and she also had scruples because of her strong religious faith. She later said that she'd left the contracts on her table for eight months before signing them -- but when she finally did, she found that her audience was still there for her. For the rest of her life, she was a popular performer on the oldies circuit, performing on package tours with people like Bobby Vee and Brian Hyland, playing state fairs and touring Europe. She continued performing until shortly before her death, even after she was diagnosed with the cancer that eventually killed her, as she once again connected with the audiences who had loved her music back when she was still a teenager. She died, aged fifty-nine, in 2003.

Episode ninety-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Loco-Motion” by Little Eva, and how a demo by Carole King’s babysitter became one of the biggest hits of the sixties. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Duke of Earl” by Gene Chandler. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. There are no biographies of Little Eva, so I’ve used a variety of sources, including the articles on Little Eva and The Cookies at This Is My Story. The following books were also of some use: A Natural Woman is Carole King’s autobiography. Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era by Ken Emerson is a good overview of the whole scene. Girl Groups by John Clemente contains potted biographies of many groups of the era, including articles on both Little Eva and The Cookies. There are no decent CDs of Eva’s material readily available, but I can recommend two overlapping compilations. This compilation contains Little Eva’s only sixties album in full, along with some tracks by Carole King, the Cookies, and the Ronettes, while Dimension Dolls is a compilation from 1963 that overlaps substantially with that album but contains several tracks not on it.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before this begins — there is some mention of domestic violence in this episode. If that’s something that might upset you, please check the transcript of the episode at 500songs.com if reading it might be easier than listening. A couple of months back, we talked about Goffin and King, and the early days of the Brill Building sound. Today we’re going to take another look at them, and at a singer who recorded some of their best material, both solo and in a group, but who would always be overshadowed by the first single they wrote for her, when she was still working as their childminder. Today, we’re going to look at Little Eva and “The Loco-Motion”, and the short history of Dimension Records: [Excerpt: Little Eva, “The Loco-Motion”] The story of Little Eva is intertwined with the story of the Cookies, one of the earliest of the girl groups, and so we should probably start with them. We’ve mentioned the Cookies earlier, in the episode on “What’d I Say”, but we didn’t look at them in any great detail. The group started out in the mid-fifties, as a group of schoolgirls singing together in New York — Dorothy Jones, her cousin Beulah Robertson, and a friend, Darlene McRae, who had all been in the choir at their local Baptist Church. They formed a group and made their first appearance at the famous Harlem Apollo talent contests, where they came third, to Joe Tex and a vocal group called the Flairs (not, I think, any of the Flairs groups we’ve looked at). They were seen at that contest by Jesse Stone, who gave them the name “The Cookies”. He signed them to Aladdin Records, and produced and co-wrote their first single, “All-Night Mambo”. That wasn’t commercially successful, but Stone liked them enough that he then got them signed to Atlantic, where he again wrote their first single for the label. That first single was relatively unsuccessful, but their second single on Atlantic, “In Paradise”, did chart, making number nine on the R&B chart: [Excerpt: The Cookies, “In Paradise”] But the B-side to that record would end up being more important to their career in the long run. “Passing Time” was the very first song by Neil Sedaka and Howie Greenfield to get recorded, even before Sedaka’s recordings with the Tokens or his own successful solo records: [Excerpt: The Cookies, “Passing Time”] But then two things happened. Firstly, one of the girls, Beulah Robertson, fell out with Jesse Stone, who sacked her from the group. Stone got in a new vocalist, Margie Hendrix, to replace her, and after one more single the group stopped making singles for Atlantic. But they continued recording for smaller labels, and they also had regular gigs as backing vocalists for Atlantic, on records like “Lipstick, Powder, and Paint” by Big Joe Turner: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, “Lipstick, Powder and Paint”] “It’s Too Late” by Chuck Willis: [Excerpt: Chuck Willis, “It’s Too Late”] And “Lonely Avenue” by Ray Charles: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “Lonely Avenue”] It was working with Ray Charles that led to the breakup of the original lineup of the Cookies — Charles was putting together his own group, and wanted the Cookies as his backing vocalists, but Dorothy was pregnant, and decided she’d rather stay behind and continue working as a session singer than go out on the road. Darlene and Margie went off to become the core of Charles’ new backing group, the Raelettes, and they would play a major part in the sound of Charles’ records for the next few years. It’s Margie, for example, who can be heard duetting with Charles on “The Right Time”: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “The Right Time”] Dorothy stayed behind and put together a new lineup of Cookies. To make sure the group sounded the same, she got Darlene’s sister Earl-Jean into the group — Darlene and Earl-Jean looked and sounded so similar that many histories of the group say they’re the same person — and got another of her cousins, Margaret Ross, to take over the spot that had previously been Beulah’s before Margie had taken her place.  This new version of the Cookies didn’t really start doing much for a couple of years, while Dorothy was raising her newborn and Earl-Jean and Margaret were finishing high school. But in 1961 they started again in earnest, when Neil Sedaka remembered the Cookies and called Dorothy up, saying he knew someone who needed a vocal group. Gerry Goffin and Carole King had become hot songwriters, and they’d also become increasingly interested in record production after Carole had been involved in the making of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” Carole was recording her own demos of the songs she and Goffin were writing, and was increasingly making them fully-produced recordings in their own right. The first record the new Cookies sang on was one that seems to have started out as one of these demos. “Halfway to Paradise” by Tony Orlando sounds exactly like a Drifters record, and Orlando was, at the time, a sixteen-year-old demo singer. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that this was a demo intended for the Drifters, that it was turned down, and so the demo was released as a record itself: [Excerpt: Tony Orlando, “Halfway to Paradise”] That made the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred, while a British cover version by Billy Fury made number three in the UK. From this point on, the new lineup of the Cookies were once again the premier session singers. They added extra backing vocals to a lot of the Drifters’ records at this time, and would provide backing vocals for most of Atlantic’s artists, as the earlier lineup had. They were also effectively the in-house backing singers for Aldon Music — as well as singing on every Goffin and King demo, they were also singing with Neil Sedaka: [Excerpt: Neil Sedaka, “Breaking Up is Hard to Do”] But it was Goffin and King who spent the most time working with the Cookies, and who pushed them as recording artists in their own right. They started with a solo record for Dorothy, “Taking That Long Walk Home”, a song that was very much “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” part two: [Excerpt: Dorothy Jones, “Taking That Long Walk Home”] The Cookies were doing huge amounts of session work, working twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Dorothy Jones described being in the studio working on a King Curtis session until literally fifteen minutes before giving birth.  They weren’t the only ones working hard, though. Goffin and King were writing from their Aldon offices every single day, writing songs for the Drifters, the Shirelles, Bobby Rydell, Bobby Vee, Gene Pitney, the Crickets, the Everly Brothers, and more. And on top of that they had a child and Carole King was pregnant with a second one.  And, this being the very early 1960s, it never occurred to either Goffin or King that just because Carole King was working the exact same number of hours as Goffin, that might mean she shouldn’t also be doing the housework and looking after the children with no help from Goffin. There was only one way they could continue their level of productivity, and that was to get someone in to help out Carole. She mentioned to the Cookies that she was looking for someone to help her with the children, and Earl-Jean mentioned that a nineteen-year-old acquaintance — her friend’s husband’s sister — had just moved to New York from North Carolina to try to become a singer and was looking for any work she could get while she was trying to make it. Eva Narcissus Boyd, Earl-Jean’s acquaintance, moved in with Goffin and King and became their live-in childminder for $35 a week plus room and board. Goffin and King had known that Eva was a singer before they hired her, and they discovered that her voice was rather good. Not only that, but she blended well with the Cookies, and was friends with them. She became an unofficial “fourth Cookie”, and was soon in the studio on a regular basis too — and when she was, that meant that Eva’s sister was looking after the kids, as a subcontracted babysitter. During this time, Don Kirshner’s attitude was still that he was determined to get the next hit for every artist that had a hit. But that wasn’t always possible.  Cameo-Parkway had, after the success they’d had with “The Twist”, fully jumped on the dance-craze bandwagon, and they’d hit on another dance that might be the next Twist. The Mashed Potato was a dance that James Brown had been doing on stage for a few years, and in the wake of “The Twist”, Brown had had a hit with a song about it “(Do the) Mashed Potatoes”, which was credited to Nat Kendrick & the Swans rather than to Brown for contractual reasons: [Excerpt: Nat Kendrick and the Swans, “(Do the) Mashed Potatoes”] Cameo-Parkway had picked up on that dance, and had done just what Kirshner always did and created a soundalike of a recent hit — and in fact they’d mashed up, if you’ll pardon the expression, two recent hits. In this case, they’d taken the sound of “Please Mr. Postman”, slightly reworked the lyrics to be about Brown’s dance, and given it to session singer Dee Dee Sharp: [Excerpt: Dee Dee Sharp, “Mashed Potato Time”] That had gone to number two on the pop charts and number one on the R&B charts, and even inspired its own rip-offs, like “The Monster Mash” by Bobby “Boris” Pickett: [Excerpt: Bobby “Boris” Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers, “The Monster Mash”] So Kirshner just assumed that Sharp would be looking for another dance hit, one that sounded just like “Mashed Potato Time”, and got Goffin and King to write one to submit to her.  Unfortunately for him, he’d assumed wrong. Cameo-Parkway was owned by a group of successful songwriters, and they didn’t need outside writers bringing them hits when they could write their own. Dee Dee Sharp wasn’t going to be recording Goffin and King’s song.  When he listened to the demo, Don Kirshner was astonished that they hadn’t taken the song. It had “hit” written all over it. He decided that he was going to start his own record label, Dimension Records, and he was just going to release that demo as the single. The Cookies went into the studio to overdub another layer of backing vocals, but otherwise the record that was released was the demo Eva — now renamed “Little Eva” — had sung: [Excerpt: Little Eva, “The Loco-Motion”] The record went to number one, and made Little Eva a star. It also made Gerry Goffin a successful producer, because even though Goffin and King had coproduced it, Goffin got sole production credit on this, and on other records the two produced together. According to King, Goffin was the one in the control room for their productions, while she would be on the studio floor, and she didn’t really question whether what she was doing counted as production too until much later — and anyway, getting the sole credit was apparently important to Gerry. “The Loco-Motion” was such a big hit that it inspired its own knockoffs, including one song cheekily called “Little Eva” by a group called “The Locomotions”  — so the record label would say “Little Eva, The Locomotions”, and people might buy it by mistake. You’ll be shocked to learn that that one was on a Morris Levy label: [Excerpt: The Locomotions, “Little Eva”] That group featured Leon Huff, who would later go on to make a lot of much better records. Meanwhile, as Little Eva was now a star, Carole King once again had to look for a childminder. This time she insisted that anyone she hired be unable to sing, so she wouldn’t keep having to do this. Dimension Records was soon churning out singles, all of them involving the Cookies, and Eva, and Goffin and King. They put out “Everybody’s Got a Dance But Me” by Big Dee Irwin, a song that excerpted “The Loco-Motion”, “Wah Watusi”, “Hully Gully” and “Twist and Shout” among many others, with the Cookies on backing vocals, and with Goffin as the credited producer: [Excerpt: Big Dee Irwin, “Everybody’s Got a Dance But Me”] That wasn’t a hit, but Dimension soon released two more big hits. One was a solo single by Carole King, “It Might as Well Rain Until September”, which went to number twenty even though its only national exposure was a disastrous appearance by King on American Bandstand which left her feeling humiliated: [Excerpt: Carole King, “It Might as Well Rain Until September”] Her solo performing career wouldn’t properly take off for a few more years, but that was a step towards it. The Cookies also had a hit on Dimension around this point. Goffin and King had written a song called “Chains” for the Everly Brothers, who had recorded it but not released it: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, “Chains”] So they gave the song to the Cookies instead, with Little Eva on additional vocals, and it made the pop top twenty, and the R&B top ten: [Excerpt: The Cookies, “Chains”] Several people have pointed out that that lyric can be read as having an element of BDSM to it, and it’s not the only Goffin and King song from this period that does — there’s a 1964 B-side they wrote for Eva called “Please Hurt Me”, which is fairly blatant: [Excerpt: Little Eva, “Please Hurt Me”] But the BDSM comparison has also been made — wrongly, in my opinion — about one of the most utterly misguided songs that Goffin and King ever wrote — a song inspired by Little Eva telling them that her boyfriend beat her up. They’d asked her why she put up with it, and she said that he only hit her because he loved her. They were inspired by that to write “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)”, an utterly grotesque song which, in a version produced by Phil Spector for the Crystals, was issued as a single but soon withdrawn due to general horror. I won’t be excerpting that one here, though it’s easy enough to find if you want to. (Having said that, I should also say that while people have said that Goffin & King’s material at this point flirts with BDSM, my understanding of BDSM, as it has been explained to me by friends who indulge in such activities, is that consent is paramount, so I don’t think that “He Hit Me” should be talked about in those terms. I don’t want anything I’ve said here to contribute to the blurring of distinctions between consensual kink and abuse, which are too often conflated). Originally, Eva’s follow-up to “The Loco-Motion” was going to be “One Fine Day”, another Goffin and King song, but no matter how much Goffin and King worked on the track, they couldn’t come up with an arrangement, and eventually they passed the song over to the Tokens, who solved the arrangement problems (though they kept King’s piano part) and produced a version of it for the Chiffons, for whom it became a hit: [Excerpt: The Chiffons, “One Fine Day”] Instead, Goffin and King gave Eva “Keep Your Hands Off My Baby”. This is, in my opinion, the best thing that Eva ever did, and it made the top twenty, though it wasn’t as big a hit as “The Loco-Motion”: [Excerpt: Little Eva, “Keep Your Hands Off My Baby”] And Eva also appeared on another Cookies record, “Don’t Say Nothing Bad About My Baby”, which made the top ten: [Excerpt: The Cookies, “Don’t Say Nothing Bad About My Baby”] The Cookies, Eva, and Goffin and King were such a package deal that Dimension released an album called Dimension Dolls featuring the first few hits of each act and padded out with demos they’d made for other artists.  This hit-making machine was so successful for a brief period in 1962 and 63 that even Eva’s sister Idalia got in on the act, releasing a song by Goffin, King, and Jack Keller, “Hula Hoppin'”: [Excerpt: Idalia Boyd, “Hula Hoppin'”] For Eva’s third single, Gerry Goffin and Jack Keller wrote a song called “Let’s Turkey Trot”, which also made the top twenty. But that would be the last time that Eva would have a hit of her own. At first, the fact that she had a couple of flop singles wasn’t a problem — no artists at this time were consistent hit-makers, and it was normal for someone to have a few top ten hits, then a couple at number 120 or something, before going back to the top. And she was touring with Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars, and still in high demand as a live performer. She also, in 1963, recorded a version of “Swinging on a Star” with Big Dee Irwin, though she wasn’t credited on the label, and that made the top forty (and made number seven in the UK): [Excerpt: Big Dee Irwin, “Swinging on a Star”] But everything changed for Little Eva, and for the whole world of Brill Building pop, in 1964. In part, this was because the Beatles became successful and changed the pop landscape, but by itself that shouldn’t have destroyed the careers of Eva or the Cookies, who the Beatles admired — they recorded a cover of “Chains”, and they used to play “Keep Your Hands Off My Baby” in their live sets. But Don Kirshner decided to sell Aldon Music and Dimension Records to Columbia Pictures, and to start concentrating on the West Coast rather than New York. The idea was that they could come up with songs that would be used in films and TV, and make more money that way, and that worked out for many people, including Kirshner himself. But even when artists like Eva and the Cookies got hit material, the British Invasion made it hard for them to get a footing. For example, Goffin and King wrote a song for Earl-Jean from the Cookies to record as a solo track just after Dimension was taken over by Columbia. That record did make the top forty: [Excerpt: Earl-Jean, “I’m Into Something Good”] But then Herman’s Hermits released their version, which became a much bigger hit. That sort of thing kept happening. The Cookies ended up splitting up by 1967. Little Eva did end up doing some TV work — most famously, she sang a dance song in an episode of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon Magilla Gorilla: [Excerpt: Little Eva “Makin’ With the Magilla”] But Dimension Records was not a priority for anyone — Columbia already owned their own labels, and didn’t need another one — and the label was being wound down. And then Al Nevins, Don Kirshner’s partner in Aldon, died. He’d always been friendly with Eva, and without him to advocate for her, the label sold her contract off to Bell Records. From that point on, she could no longer rely on Goffin and King, and she hopped between a number of different labels, none of them with any great success. After spending seven years going from label to label, and having split up with her husband, she quit the music business in 1971 and moved back to North Carolina. She was sick of the music industry, and particularly sick of the lack of money — she had signed a lot of bad contracts, and was making no royalties from sales of her records. She worked menial day jobs, survived on welfare for a while, became active in her local church, and depending on which reports you read either ran a soul-food restaurant or merely worked there as a waitress. Meanwhile, “The Loco-Motion” was a perennial hit. Her version re-charted in the UK in the early seventies, and Todd Rundgren produced a version for the heavy metal band Grand Funk Railroad which went to number one in the US in 1974: [Excerpt: Grand Funk Railroad, “The Loco-Motion”] And then in 1988 an Australian soap star, Kylie Minogue, recorded her own version, which went top five worldwide and started Minogue’s own successful pop career: [Excerpt: Kylie Minogue, “The Loco-Motion”] That record becoming a hit got a series of “where are they now?” articles written about Eva, and she was persuaded to come out of retirement and start performing again — though having been so badly hurt by the industry, she was very dubious at first, and she also had scruples because of her strong religious faith. She later said that she’d left the contracts on her table for eight months before signing them — but when she finally did, she found that her audience was still there for her. For the rest of her life, she was a popular performer on the oldies circuit, performing on package tours with people like Bobby Vee and Brian Hyland, playing state fairs and touring Europe. She continued performing until shortly before her death, even after she was diagnosed with the cancer that eventually killed her, as she once again connected with the audiences who had loved her music back when she was still a teenager. She died, aged fifty-nine, in 2003.

The Virtue of Humility https://selectinternationaltours.com/catholicmanshow/ () This show is sponsored by https://selectinternationaltours.com/catholicmanshow/ (Select International Tours). If you are looking to take a pilgrimage anytime soon, don't risk going with a company that hasn't been in business very long. https://selectinternationaltours.com/catholicmanshow/ (Select International Tours) has been doing this for over 30 years – they know what they are doing. They know how to make your bucket list destinations become a reality. We are looking for a few men who are taking their faith seriously. If you enjoyed this episode with our wives then join us on Patreon: Extra content, great thank you gifts, exclusive access to Adam and David, private FB page, and much more. https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=15843387 (Become a Patron!) Adam goes off the deep end in the topic so we had to extend the episode. The book we discussed is only $5.65 currently on https://www.amazon.com/Humility-Heart-Cajetan-Mary-Bergamo/dp/1477613544/ref=pd_sbs_14_t_1/146-5148333-2735762?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1477613544&pd_rd_r=9bdab4ab-d5b2-492e-9b22-baee3fa8b2b3&pd_rd_w=yWfXS&pd_rd_wg=XSd3b&pf_rd_p=5cfcfe89-300f-47d2-b1ad-a4e27203a02a&pf_rd_r=PBGNE115P8NBZRPKWB0K&psc=1&refRID=PBGNE115P8NBZRPKWB0K (Amazon). "https://www.amazon.com/Humility-Heart-Cajetan-Mary-Bergamo/dp/1477613544/ref=pd_sbs_14_t_1/146-5148333-2735762?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1477613544&pd_rd_r=9bdab4ab-d5b2-492e-9b22-baee3fa8b2b3&pd_rd_w=yWfXS&pd_rd_wg=XSd3b&pf_rd_p=5cfcfe89-300f-47d2-b1ad-a4e27203a02a&pf_rd_r=PBGNE115P8NBZRPKWB0K&psc=1&refRID=PBGNE115P8NBZRPKWB0K (Humility of Heart)" by Fr. Cajetan Mary da Bergamo "In Paradise, there are many Saints who never gave alms on earth: their poverty justified them. There are many Saints who never mortified their bodies by fasting, or wearing hair shirts: their bodily infirmities excused them. There are many Saints too who were not virgins: their vocation was otherwise. But in Paradise, there is no Saint who was not humble." - Fr. Cajetan Mary da Bergamo Twelve  Steps  of  Humility Step 1. A first step is taken when one consciously obeys all of God's commandments, never ignoring them but always holding within himself a fear of God in his heart. Step 2. The second step is achieved when one thinks not about pleasing himself but instead follow the injunction of the Lord. Step 3. The third step is reached when out of love of God, one obediently submits to a superior in imitation of the Lord. Step 4. The fourth step is achieved when one, under obedience, patiently and quietly endures all thing that are inflicted on him.  It should make no difference whether the trials are painful, unjust or even completely beyond his understanding; he should neither tire nor give up. Step 5. The fifth step is reached when one humbly discloses to his superior all the evil thoughts in his heart, as well as those faults and evil acts he has actually committed. Step 6. To achieve the sixth step one must without qualms accept all that is crude and harsh; at all times he considers himself a poor and worthless workman. Step 7. The seventh step is attained when one not only confesses that he is an inferior and common wretch, but believes it to his very core.  He must be willing to humble himself. Step 8. One reaches the eighth step of humility when he does only that which is demanded by the common rule of his seniors. Step 9. The ninth step can be achieved when one, practicing silence, only speaks when asked a question. Step 10. The tenth step is climbed when one restrains himself from undue laughter and frivolity. Step 11. To reach the eleventh step one must speak gently, without jests, but simply, seriously, tersely, rationally and softly. Step 12. The final step is attained only when one can at all times show humility not only in his appearance... Support this podcast

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  Episode sixty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Maybe" by the Chantels, and covers child stardom, hymns in Latin, and how to get discovered twice in one day. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Don't You Just Know It" by Huey "Piano" Smith and the Clowns.  ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The only book actually about the Chantels is barely a book -- Maybe, Renee Minus White's self-published memoir, is more of a pamphlet, and it only manages even to get to that length with a ton of padding -- things like her fruit cake recipe. Don't expect much insight from this one. A big chunk of the outline of the story comes from Girl Groups; Fabulous Females Who Rocked the World by John Clemente, which has  a chapter on the Chantels.  This article on Richie Barrett's career filled in much of the detail.  My opinions of George Goldner come mostly from reading two books -- Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz, which talks about Leiber and Stoller's attempts to go into business with Goldner, and Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy by Richard Carlin. There are innumerable collections of the small number of recordings the Chantels released -- this one is as good as any. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? ERRATUM: I refer to “Summer Love” rather than “Summer's Love”   Transcript We've already seen one girl group, when we looked at “Mr Lee” by the Bobbettes, but already within a few months of the Bobbettes' breakout hit, other groups were making waves with the public. The Chantels were one such group, and one of the best. They were pretty much exact contemporaries of the Bobbettes – so much so that when the Bobbettes were forming, they decided against calling themselves the Chanels, because it would be too similar. The Chantels, too, changed their name early on. They were formed by a group of girls at a Catholic school – St Anthony of Padua school in the Bronx – and were originally named “the Crystals”, but they found that another group in the area had already named themselves that, and so they changed it. (This other group was not the same one as the famous Crystals, who didn't form until 1961). They decided to name themselves after St Francis de Chantal after their school won a basketball game against St. Francis de Chantal school – when they discovered that the Chantal in the saint's name was from the same root as the French word for singing, it seemed to be too perfect for them. Originally there were around a dozen members of the group, but they slowly whittled themselves down to five girls, between the ages of fourteen and seventeen – Arlene Smith, Lois Harris, Sonia Goring, Jackie Landry, and Renee Minus. According to Renee (who now goes by her married name Renee Minus White) the group's name came from a brainstorming session between her, Lois, Jackie, and Sonia, with Arlene agreeing to it later – this may, though, have more to do with ongoing disputes between Arlene and the other group members than with what actually happened. They were drawn together by their mutual love of R&B vocal groups – a particular favourite record of theirs was “In Paradise” by the Cookies, a New York-based girl group who had started recording a few years earlier, and whose records were produced by Jesse Stone, but who wouldn't have any major chart successes for several years yet: [Excerpt: The Cookies, "In Paradise"] So they were R&B singers, but the fact that these were Catholic schoolgirls, specifically, points to something about the way their music developed, and about early rock and roll more generally. We've talked about the influence of religious music on rock and roll before, but the type of religious music that had influenced it up until this point had generally come from two sources – either the black gospel music that was created by and for worshippers in African-American Pentecostal denominations, or the euphemistically-named “Southern Gospel” that is usually made by white Pentecostals, and by Southern Baptists. These denominations, in 2020, have a certain amount of institutional power – especially the Southern Baptists, who are now one of the most important power blocs within the Republican Party. But in the 1950s, those were the churches of the poorest, most despised, people. By geography, class, and race, the people who attended those churches were overwhelmingly those who would be looked down on by the people who had actual power in the USA. The churches that people with power overwhelmingly went to at the time were those which had been established in Western Europe – the so-called mainline Protestant churches – and, to a lesser extent, the Catholic Church. The music of those churches had very little influence on rock and roll. It makes sense that this would be the case – obviously underprivileged people's music would be influenced by the churches that underprivileged people went to, rather than the ones that privileged people attended, and rock and roll was, at this point, still a music made almost solely by people who were underprivileged on one or more axis – but it's still worth pointing out, because for the first time we're going to look at a group who – while they were also underprivileged, being black – were influenced by Catholic liturgical music, rather than gospel or spiritual music. Because there's always been a geographical variation, as well as one based on class and race, in what religions dominate in the US. While evangelical churches predominate in the southern states, in the North-East there were, especially at the time we're talking about, far more mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Jewish people. The Chantels were a New York group, and it's notable that New York groups were far more likely to have been influenced by Catholic or Episcopalian liturgical music, and choral music in general, than vocal groups from other areas. This may go some way towards explaining Johnny Otis' observation that all the LA vocal groups he knew had pitching problems, while the New York groups could sing in tune – choir practice may have made the New York groups more technically adept (though to my own ears, the New York groups tend to make much less interesting music than the LA groups). Certainly when it comes to the Chantels, the girls had all sung in the choir, and had been taught to read music and play the piano, although a couple of them had eventually been kicked out of the choir for singing “that skip and jump music”, as the nuns referred to rock and roll. Indeed, at their very first appearance at the Apollo, after getting a record contract, one of the two songs they performed was a Catholic hymn, in Latin - “Terra Tremuit”. That piece remains in the group's repertoire to this day, and while they've never formally recorded it, there are videos on YouTube of them performing it: [Excerpt: The Chantels, "Terra Tremuit", soundcheck recording] The story of how the Chantels were discovered, as it's usually told, is one that leaves one asking more questions than it answers. The group were walking down the street, when they passed a rehearsal room. A young man spotted them on the street and asked them if they were singers, since they were dressed identically. When they said “yes”, he took them up to a rehearsal studio to hear them. The rehearsal studio happened to be in the Brill Building. We've not mentioned the Brill Building so far, because we're only just getting to the point where it started to have an impact on rock and roll music, but it was a building on Broadway – 1619 Broadway to be exact – which was the home of dozens, even hundreds at times, of music publishers, record labels, and talent agencies. There were a few other nearby buildings, most notably 1650 Broadway, which became the home of Aldon Music, which often get lumped in with the Brill Building when most people talk about it, and when I refer to the Brill Building in future episodes I'll be referring to the whole ecosystem of music industries that sprang up on Broadway in the fifties and early sixties. But in this case, they were invited into the main Brill Building itself. They weren't just being invited into some random room, but into the heart of the music industry on the East Coast of America. This was the kind of thing that normally only happens in films – and relatively unrealistic films at that. So far, so cliched, though it's hard to believe that that kind of thing ever really happened. But then something happened that isn't in any of the cliches – the girls noticed, through the window, that three members of the Valentines, one of their favourite groups, were walking past. We've mentioned the Valentines a few months ago, when talking about Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, and we talked about how Richie Barrett, as well as being a singer and songwriter in the group, was also a talent scout for George Goldner's record labels. The Valentines had released several records, but none of them had had anything but local success, though records like “The Woo Woo Train” have since become cult favourites among lovers of 1950s vocal group music: [Excerpt: The Valentines, "The Woo Woo Train"] The girls loved the Valentines, and they also knew that Barrett was important in the industry. They decided to run out of the rehearsal room and accost the group members. They told Richie Barrett that they were a singing group, and when he didn't believe them, they burst into song, singing what would later become the B-side of their first record, “The Plea”: [Excerpt: The Chantels, "The Plea"] That song was one they'd written themselves, sort of. It was actually based on a song that a group of boys they knew, who sang in a street-corner group, had made up. That song had been called “Baby”, but the Chantels had taken it and reworked it into their own song. The version that they finally recorded, which we just heard, was further revamped by Barrett. Barrett was impressed, and said he'd be in touch. But then he never bothered to get in contact with them again, until Jackie Landry managed to obtain his home address and get in touch with him. She got the address through a friend of hers, a member of the Teenchords, a vocal group fronted by Frankie Lymon's brother Lewis, who recorded for one of George Goldner's labels, releasing tracks like “Your Last Chance”: [Excerpt: Lewis Lymon and the Teenchords, "Your Last Chance"] They tracked down Barrett, and he agreed to try to get them signed to a record deal. That story has many, many, problems, and frankly doesn't make any kind of sense, but it's the accepted history you'll find in books that deal with the group. According to Renee Minus White's autobiography, though, each of the girls has a different recollection of how they first met Barrett – in her version, they simply waited at the stage door to get autographs, and told him they were a singing group. My guess is that the accepted story is an attempt to reconcile a bunch of irreconcilable versions of the story. Whatever the true facts as to how they started to work with Richie Barrett, the important thing is that they did end up working with him. Barrett was impressed by their ability not just to sing the “oohs” and “aahs”, but the complex polyphonic parts that they sang in choir. For the most part, doo-wop groups either sang simple block chords behind a lead singer, or they all sang their own moving parts that worked more or less in isolation – the bass singer would sing his part, the falsetto singer his, and so on. I say “his” because pretty much all doo-wop groups at this point were male. They were all singing the same song, but doing their own thing. The Chantels were different – they were singing block harmonies, but they weren't singing simple chords, but interlocking moving lines. What they were doing ended up being closer to the so-called "modern harmony" of jazz vocal groups like the Four Freshmen: [Excerpt: The Four Freshmen, "It's a Blue World"] But where other groups singing in that style had no R&B background, the Chantels were able to sing a rhythm and blues song with the best of them. Barrett signed the group to End Records, one of George Goldner's stable of record labels. But before recording them, he spent weeks rehearsing them, and teaching them how to perform on stage. The first record they made, when they finally went into the studio, was a song primarily written by Arlene Smith, who also sang lead, though the composition is credited to the girls as a group. And listening to it, you have in this record for the first time the crystallisation of the girl-group sound, the sound that would later become a hallmark of people like Phil Spector. [Excerpt: The Chantels, "He's Gone"] It's a song about adolescent anguish, written by and for adolescents, and it has a drama and angst to it that none of the other records by girl groups had had before – it's obviously inspired by groups like the Penguins and the Platters, but there's a near-hysteria to the performance that hadn't really been heard before. That strained longing is something that would appear in almost every girl-group record of the early sixties, and you can hear very clear echoes of the Chantels in records by people like the Ronettes, the Crystals, and the Shangri-Las. It's a far cry from “Mr. Lee”. Most of the time, when people talk about the Chantels' vocals, they – rightly – draw attention to Arlene Smith's leads, which are astonishing. But listen to the a capella intro, which is repeated as the outro, and you can hear those choir-trained voices – this was a vocal group, not just a singer and some cooing background vocalists: [Excerpt: the Chantels, "He's Gone"] As well as being pioneers in the girl-group sound, the Chantels were also one of the first self-contained vocal groups to play their own instruments on stage. This was not something that they did at first, but something that Barrett encouraged them to do. Some of them had instrumental training already, and those who didn't were taught how to play by Barrett. Sonia and Jackie played guitar, Arlene bass, Lois piano, and Renee the drums. They even, according to Renee's autobiography, recorded an instrumental by themselves, called “The Chantels' Rock”. Almost immediately, the girls were pulled out of Catholic school and instead sent to Quintano’s School for Young Professionals, the same school that the Teenagers went to, which was set up to accommodate children who had to go on tour. But there was one exception. Lois' mother would not let her transfer schools, or go on tour with the group. She could sing with them in the studio, and when they were performing in New York, but until she graduated high school that was all. In many ways her mother was right to be worried, or at least Richie Barrett believed she had good reason to be. They started touring as soon as “He's Gone” came out, but the girls, at the time, resented Barrett, who came along on tour with them, because he would lock them in the dressing rooms and only let them out for the show itself, not allowing them to socialise with the other acts. In retrospect, given that they were girls in their teens, and they were touring with large numbers of male musicians, many of them with reputations as sexual predators, Barrett's protectiveness (and his apparent threats to several of these men) was probably justified. For example, in early 1958, the girls were sent out on a tour that became legendary – and given its lineup it's easy to see why. As well as the Chantels, the tour had Frankie Lymon, Danny & the Juniors, the Diamonds, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Larry Williams, Buddy Holly, and as alternating headliners Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry. We'll talk more about that tour in the next couple of episodes, but aside from the undoubted musical quality of the performers, that was simply not a group of people who young women were going to be safe around (though several of the individuals there were harmless enough). One could, of course, argue that young girls shouldn't be put in that situation at all, but that never seems to have occurred to anyone involved. By the time of that tour, they'd recorded what would become by far their biggest hit, their second single, “Maybe”: [Excerpt: The Chantels, "Maybe"] “Maybe” was a song that was originally co-credited to George Goldner and an unknown “Casey”, but for which Richie Barrett later sued and won co-writing credit. Barrett was presumably the sole writer, though some have claimed that Arlene Smith was an uncredited co-writer – something the other Chantels deny. It was very much in the mould of “He's Gone”, and concentrated even more on Smith's lead vocal, and that lead vocal took an immense amount of work to obtain. In total they recorded fifty-two takes of the song before they got one that sounded right, and Smith was crying in frustration when she recorded the last take. “Maybe” reached number fifteen on the pop charts, and number two on the R&B charts, and it became a classic that has been covered by everyone from Janis Joplin to the Three Degrees. The group's next two records, “Every Night (I Pray)” and “I Love You So”, both charted as well, though neither of them was a massive hit in the way that “Maybe” was. But after this point, the hits dried up – something that wasn't helped by the fact that George Goldner went through a phase of having his artists perform old standards, which didn't really suit the Chantels' voices. But they'd had four hit records in a row, which was enough for them to get an album released. The album, which just featured the A- and B-sides of their first six singles, was originally released with a photo of the group on the front. That version was quickly withdrawn and replaced with a stock image of two white teenagers at a jukebox, just in case you've forgotten how appallingly racist the music industry was at this point. They continued releasing singles, but they were also increasingly being used as backing vocalists for other artists produced by Barrett. He had them backing Jimmy Pemberton on “Rags to Riches”: [Excerpt: Jimmy Pemberton, “Rags to Riches”] And they also backed Barrett himself on "Summer Love", which got to the lower reaches of the top one hundred in pop, and made the top thirty in the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Richie Barrett and the Chantels, “Summer Love”] There had also been some attempts to give Arlene a separate career outside the Chantels, as she duetted with Willie Wilson on “I've Lied”: [Excerpt: Willie Wilson and the Tunemasters, "I've Lied"] Unfortunately, after a year of success followed by another year of comparative failure, the group discovered that their career was at an end, thanks to George Goldner. We've talked about Goldner before, most significantly in the episode on “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?”, but he had an almost unique combination of strong points and flaws as a record executive. His strongest point was his musical taste. Nobody who knew him respected his taste, but everyone respected his ability to pick a hit, and both of these things sprang from the same basic reason – he had exactly the same musical tastes as a typical teenage girl from the period. Now, it's an unfortunate fact that the tastes of teenage girls are looked down upon by almost anyone with any power in the music industry, because of the almost universal misogyny in the industry, but the fact remains that teenage girls were becoming a powerful demographic as customers, and anyone who could accurately predict the music that they were going to buy would have a tremendous advantage when it came to making money in the music industry. And Goldner definitely made himself enough money over the years, because he engaged in all the usual practices of ripping off his artists – who were, very often, teenagers themselves. He would credit himself as the writer of their songs, he would engage in shady accounting practices, and all the rest. But Goldner's real problem was his gambling addiction, and so there's a pattern that happens over and again throughout the fifties and sixties. Goldner starts up a new record label, discovers some teenage and/or black act, and makes them into overnight stars. Goldner then starts getting vast amounts of money, because he's ripping off his new discoveries. Goldner starts gambling with that money, loses badly, gets into debt with the mob, and goes to Morris Levy for a loan in order to keep his business going. Levy and his Mafia friends end up taking over the whole company, in exchange for writing off the debts. Levy replaces Goldner's writing credits on the hits with his own name, stops paying the artists anything at all, and collects all the money from the hits for the rest of his life, while Goldner is left with nothing and goes off to find another bunch of teenagers. And so End Records met the same fate as all of Goldner's other labels. It went bankrupt, and closed down, owing the Chantels a great deal of money. After End records closed, the Chantels wanted to carry on – but Arlene Smith decided she wanted to go solo instead. She recorded a couple of singles with a new producer, Phil Spector: [Excerpt: Arlene Smith, "Love, Love, Love"] And she also recorded another single with Richie Barrett as producer: [Excerpt: Arlene Smith, "Everything"] At first, that looked like it would be the end of the Chantels, but then a year or so later Richie Barrett got back in touch with the girls. He had some ideas for records that would use the Chantels sound. By this point, Lois had decided that she was going to retire from the music business, but Jackie, Renee, and Sonia agreed to restart their career. There was a problem, though – they weren't sure what to do without their lead singer. Barrett told them he would sort it out for them. Barrett had been working with another girl group, the Veneers, for a couple of years. They'd released a few singles on Goldner-owned labels, like “Believe Me (My Angel)”: [Excerpt: The Veneers, "Believe Me (My Angel)"] And they'd also been the regular backing group Barrett used for sessions for male vocalists like Titus Turner: [Excerpt: Titus Turner, "The Return of Stagolee"] But they'd never had a huge amount of success. So Barrett got their lead singer, Annette Swinson, to replace Arlene. To make it up to the Veneers, he got the rest of them a job as Jackie Wilson's backing vocalists. He changed Annette's name to Annette Smith, and the new lineup of the group had a few more hits, with “Look in My Eyes”, which went to number six on the R&B charts and number fourteen on the pop charts: [Excerpt: The Chantels, "Look in My Eyes"] They also backed Richie Barrett on an answer record to Ray Charles' “Hit the Road Jack”, titled “Well I Told You”, which made the top thirty on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Richie Barrett and the Chantels, "Well I Told You"] This second phase of the Chantels' career was successful enough that Goldner, who no longer had the girls under contract, got one of his record labels to put out a new Chantels album, featuring a few tracks he owned by them that hadn't been on their first album. To fill out the album, and make it sound more like the current group, he also took a few of the Veneers' singles and stuck them on it under the Chantels' name. Annette would stay with the group for a while, but the sixties saw several lineup changes, as the group stopped having chart successes, and members temporarily dropped out to have children or pursue careers. However, Sonia and Renee remained in place throughout, as the two constant members of the group (though Sonia also moonlit for a while in the sixties with another group Richie Barrett was looking after at the time, the Three Degrees). By the mid-nineties, they had reformed with all of the original members except Arlene, who was replaced by Ami Ortiz, who can do a very creditable imitation of Arlene's lead vocals. Sadly Jackie Landry died in 1997, but the other four continued to tour, though only intermittently in between holding down day jobs. Almost uniquely, the Chantels are still touring with the majority of their original members. Sonia Goring Wilson, Renee Minus White, and Lois Harris Powell still tour with the group, and they have several tour dates booked in for 2020, mostly on the east coast of the US. Arlene Smith spent many years touring solo and performing with her own rival “Chantels” group. She has very occasionally reunited with the rest of the Chantels for one-off performances, but there appears to be bad blood between them. She kept performing into the middle of the last decade, and as of 2018, her Facebook page said she was planning a comeback, but no further details have emerged. The Chantels never received either the money or the acclaim that they deserved, given their run of chart successes and the way that they pioneered the girl group sound. But more than sixty years on from their biggest hits, four of the five of them are still alive, and apparently healthy, happy, and performing when the opportunity arises, and three of them are still good friends. Given the careers of most other stars of the era, especially the other child stars, that's as close to a happy ending as a group gets.

  Episode sixty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Maybe” by the Chantels, and covers child stardom, hymns in Latin, and how to get discovered twice in one day. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Don’t You Just Know It” by Huey “Piano” Smith and the Clowns.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The only book actually about the Chantels is barely a book — Maybe, Renee Minus White’s self-published memoir, is more of a pamphlet, and it only manages even to get to that length with a ton of padding — things like her fruit cake recipe. Don’t expect much insight from this one. A big chunk of the outline of the story comes from Girl Groups; Fabulous Females Who Rocked the World by John Clemente, which has  a chapter on the Chantels.  This article on Richie Barrett’s career filled in much of the detail.  My opinions of George Goldner come mostly from reading two books — Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz, which talks about Leiber and Stoller’s attempts to go into business with Goldner, and Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy by Richard Carlin. There are innumerable collections of the small number of recordings the Chantels released — this one is as good as any. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? ERRATUM: I refer to “Summer Love” rather than “Summer’s Love”   Transcript We’ve already seen one girl group, when we looked at “Mr Lee” by the Bobbettes, but already within a few months of the Bobbettes’ breakout hit, other groups were making waves with the public. The Chantels were one such group, and one of the best. They were pretty much exact contemporaries of the Bobbettes – so much so that when the Bobbettes were forming, they decided against calling themselves the Chanels, because it would be too similar. The Chantels, too, changed their name early on. They were formed by a group of girls at a Catholic school – St Anthony of Padua school in the Bronx – and were originally named “the Crystals”, but they found that another group in the area had already named themselves that, and so they changed it. (This other group was not the same one as the famous Crystals, who didn’t form until 1961). They decided to name themselves after St Francis de Chantal after their school won a basketball game against St. Francis de Chantal school – when they discovered that the Chantal in the saint’s name was from the same root as the French word for singing, it seemed to be too perfect for them. Originally there were around a dozen members of the group, but they slowly whittled themselves down to five girls, between the ages of fourteen and seventeen – Arlene Smith, Lois Harris, Sonia Goring, Jackie Landry, and Renee Minus. According to Renee (who now goes by her married name Renee Minus White) the group’s name came from a brainstorming session between her, Lois, Jackie, and Sonia, with Arlene agreeing to it later – this may, though, have more to do with ongoing disputes between Arlene and the other group members than with what actually happened. They were drawn together by their mutual love of R&B vocal groups – a particular favourite record of theirs was “In Paradise” by the Cookies, a New York-based girl group who had started recording a few years earlier, and whose records were produced by Jesse Stone, but who wouldn’t have any major chart successes for several years yet: [Excerpt: The Cookies, “In Paradise”] So they were R&B singers, but the fact that these were Catholic schoolgirls, specifically, points to something about the way their music developed, and about early rock and roll more generally. We’ve talked about the influence of religious music on rock and roll before, but the type of religious music that had influenced it up until this point had generally come from two sources – either the black gospel music that was created by and for worshippers in African-American Pentecostal denominations, or the euphemistically-named “Southern Gospel” that is usually made by white Pentecostals, and by Southern Baptists. These denominations, in 2020, have a certain amount of institutional power – especially the Southern Baptists, who are now one of the most important power blocs within the Republican Party. But in the 1950s, those were the churches of the poorest, most despised, people. By geography, class, and race, the people who attended those churches were overwhelmingly those who would be looked down on by the people who had actual power in the USA. The churches that people with power overwhelmingly went to at the time were those which had been established in Western Europe – the so-called mainline Protestant churches – and, to a lesser extent, the Catholic Church. The music of those churches had very little influence on rock and roll. It makes sense that this would be the case – obviously underprivileged people’s music would be influenced by the churches that underprivileged people went to, rather than the ones that privileged people attended, and rock and roll was, at this point, still a music made almost solely by people who were underprivileged on one or more axis – but it’s still worth pointing out, because for the first time we’re going to look at a group who – while they were also underprivileged, being black – were influenced by Catholic liturgical music, rather than gospel or spiritual music. Because there’s always been a geographical variation, as well as one based on class and race, in what religions dominate in the US. While evangelical churches predominate in the southern states, in the North-East there were, especially at the time we’re talking about, far more mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Jewish people. The Chantels were a New York group, and it’s notable that New York groups were far more likely to have been influenced by Catholic or Episcopalian liturgical music, and choral music in general, than vocal groups from other areas. This may go some way towards explaining Johnny Otis’ observation that all the LA vocal groups he knew had pitching problems, while the New York groups could sing in tune – choir practice may have made the New York groups more technically adept (though to my own ears, the New York groups tend to make much less interesting music than the LA groups). Certainly when it comes to the Chantels, the girls had all sung in the choir, and had been taught to read music and play the piano, although a couple of them had eventually been kicked out of the choir for singing “that skip and jump music”, as the nuns referred to rock and roll. Indeed, at their very first appearance at the Apollo, after getting a record contract, one of the two songs they performed was a Catholic hymn, in Latin – “Terra Tremuit”. That piece remains in the group’s repertoire to this day, and while they’ve never formally recorded it, there are videos on YouTube of them performing it: [Excerpt: The Chantels, “Terra Tremuit”, soundcheck recording] The story of how the Chantels were discovered, as it’s usually told, is one that leaves one asking more questions than it answers. The group were walking down the street, when they passed a rehearsal room. A young man spotted them on the street and asked them if they were singers, since they were dressed identically. When they said “yes”, he took them up to a rehearsal studio to hear them. The rehearsal studio happened to be in the Brill Building. We’ve not mentioned the Brill Building so far, because we’re only just getting to the point where it started to have an impact on rock and roll music, but it was a building on Broadway – 1619 Broadway to be exact – which was the home of dozens, even hundreds at times, of music publishers, record labels, and talent agencies. There were a few other nearby buildings, most notably 1650 Broadway, which became the home of Aldon Music, which often get lumped in with the Brill Building when most people talk about it, and when I refer to the Brill Building in future episodes I’ll be referring to the whole ecosystem of music industries that sprang up on Broadway in the fifties and early sixties. But in this case, they were invited into the main Brill Building itself. They weren’t just being invited into some random room, but into the heart of the music industry on the East Coast of America. This was the kind of thing that normally only happens in films – and relatively unrealistic films at that. So far, so cliched, though it’s hard to believe that that kind of thing ever really happened. But then something happened that isn’t in any of the cliches – the girls noticed, through the window, that three members of the Valentines, one of their favourite groups, were walking past. We’ve mentioned the Valentines a few months ago, when talking about Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, and we talked about how Richie Barrett, as well as being a singer and songwriter in the group, was also a talent scout for George Goldner’s record labels. The Valentines had released several records, but none of them had had anything but local success, though records like “The Woo Woo Train” have since become cult favourites among lovers of 1950s vocal group music: [Excerpt: The Valentines, “The Woo Woo Train”] The girls loved the Valentines, and they also knew that Barrett was important in the industry. They decided to run out of the rehearsal room and accost the group members. They told Richie Barrett that they were a singing group, and when he didn’t believe them, they burst into song, singing what would later become the B-side of their first record, “The Plea”: [Excerpt: The Chantels, “The Plea”] That song was one they’d written themselves, sort of. It was actually based on a song that a group of boys they knew, who sang in a street-corner group, had made up. That song had been called “Baby”, but the Chantels had taken it and reworked it into their own song. The version that they finally recorded, which we just heard, was further revamped by Barrett. Barrett was impressed, and said he’d be in touch. But then he never bothered to get in contact with them again, until Jackie Landry managed to obtain his home address and get in touch with him. She got the address through a friend of hers, a member of the Teenchords, a vocal group fronted by Frankie Lymon’s brother Lewis, who recorded for one of George Goldner’s labels, releasing tracks like “Your Last Chance”: [Excerpt: Lewis Lymon and the Teenchords, “Your Last Chance”] They tracked down Barrett, and he agreed to try to get them signed to a record deal. That story has many, many, problems, and frankly doesn’t make any kind of sense, but it’s the accepted history you’ll find in books that deal with the group. According to Renee Minus White’s autobiography, though, each of the girls has a different recollection of how they first met Barrett – in her version, they simply waited at the stage door to get autographs, and told him they were a singing group. My guess is that the accepted story is an attempt to reconcile a bunch of irreconcilable versions of the story. Whatever the true facts as to how they started to work with Richie Barrett, the important thing is that they did end up working with him. Barrett was impressed by their ability not just to sing the “oohs” and “aahs”, but the complex polyphonic parts that they sang in choir. For the most part, doo-wop groups either sang simple block chords behind a lead singer, or they all sang their own moving parts that worked more or less in isolation – the bass singer would sing his part, the falsetto singer his, and so on. I say “his” because pretty much all doo-wop groups at this point were male. They were all singing the same song, but doing their own thing. The Chantels were different – they were singing block harmonies, but they weren’t singing simple chords, but interlocking moving lines. What they were doing ended up being closer to the so-called “modern harmony” of jazz vocal groups like the Four Freshmen: [Excerpt: The Four Freshmen, “It’s a Blue World”] But where other groups singing in that style had no R&B background, the Chantels were able to sing a rhythm and blues song with the best of them. Barrett signed the group to End Records, one of George Goldner’s stable of record labels. But before recording them, he spent weeks rehearsing them, and teaching them how to perform on stage. The first record they made, when they finally went into the studio, was a song primarily written by Arlene Smith, who also sang lead, though the composition is credited to the girls as a group. And listening to it, you have in this record for the first time the crystallisation of the girl-group sound, the sound that would later become a hallmark of people like Phil Spector. [Excerpt: The Chantels, “He’s Gone”] It’s a song about adolescent anguish, written by and for adolescents, and it has a drama and angst to it that none of the other records by girl groups had had before – it’s obviously inspired by groups like the Penguins and the Platters, but there’s a near-hysteria to the performance that hadn’t really been heard before. That strained longing is something that would appear in almost every girl-group record of the early sixties, and you can hear very clear echoes of the Chantels in records by people like the Ronettes, the Crystals, and the Shangri-Las. It’s a far cry from “Mr. Lee”. Most of the time, when people talk about the Chantels’ vocals, they – rightly – draw attention to Arlene Smith’s leads, which are astonishing. But listen to the a capella intro, which is repeated as the outro, and you can hear those choir-trained voices – this was a vocal group, not just a singer and some cooing background vocalists: [Excerpt: the Chantels, “He’s Gone”] As well as being pioneers in the girl-group sound, the Chantels were also one of the first self-contained vocal groups to play their own instruments on stage. This was not something that they did at first, but something that Barrett encouraged them to do. Some of them had instrumental training already, and those who didn’t were taught how to play by Barrett. Sonia and Jackie played guitar, Arlene bass, Lois piano, and Renee the drums. They even, according to Renee’s autobiography, recorded an instrumental by themselves, called “The Chantels’ Rock”. Almost immediately, the girls were pulled out of Catholic school and instead sent to Quintano’s School for Young Professionals, the same school that the Teenagers went to, which was set up to accommodate children who had to go on tour. But there was one exception. Lois’ mother would not let her transfer schools, or go on tour with the group. She could sing with them in the studio, and when they were performing in New York, but until she graduated high school that was all. In many ways her mother was right to be worried, or at least Richie Barrett believed she had good reason to be. They started touring as soon as “He’s Gone” came out, but the girls, at the time, resented Barrett, who came along on tour with them, because he would lock them in the dressing rooms and only let them out for the show itself, not allowing them to socialise with the other acts. In retrospect, given that they were girls in their teens, and they were touring with large numbers of male musicians, many of them with reputations as sexual predators, Barrett’s protectiveness (and his apparent threats to several of these men) was probably justified. For example, in early 1958, the girls were sent out on a tour that became legendary – and given its lineup it’s easy to see why. As well as the Chantels, the tour had Frankie Lymon, Danny & the Juniors, the Diamonds, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Larry Williams, Buddy Holly, and as alternating headliners Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry. We’ll talk more about that tour in the next couple of episodes, but aside from the undoubted musical quality of the performers, that was simply not a group of people who young women were going to be safe around (though several of the individuals there were harmless enough). One could, of course, argue that young girls shouldn’t be put in that situation at all, but that never seems to have occurred to anyone involved. By the time of that tour, they’d recorded what would become by far their biggest hit, their second single, “Maybe”: [Excerpt: The Chantels, “Maybe”] “Maybe” was a song that was originally co-credited to George Goldner and an unknown “Casey”, but for which Richie Barrett later sued and won co-writing credit. Barrett was presumably the sole writer, though some have claimed that Arlene Smith was an uncredited co-writer – something the other Chantels deny. It was very much in the mould of “He’s Gone”, and concentrated even more on Smith’s lead vocal, and that lead vocal took an immense amount of work to obtain. In total they recorded fifty-two takes of the song before they got one that sounded right, and Smith was crying in frustration when she recorded the last take. “Maybe” reached number fifteen on the pop charts, and number two on the R&B charts, and it became a classic that has been covered by everyone from Janis Joplin to the Three Degrees. The group’s next two records, “Every Night (I Pray)” and “I Love You So”, both charted as well, though neither of them was a massive hit in the way that “Maybe” was. But after this point, the hits dried up – something that wasn’t helped by the fact that George Goldner went through a phase of having his artists perform old standards, which didn’t really suit the Chantels’ voices. But they’d had four hit records in a row, which was enough for them to get an album released. The album, which just featured the A- and B-sides of their first six singles, was originally released with a photo of the group on the front. That version was quickly withdrawn and replaced with a stock image of two white teenagers at a jukebox, just in case you’ve forgotten how appallingly racist the music industry was at this point. They continued releasing singles, but they were also increasingly being used as backing vocalists for other artists produced by Barrett. He had them backing Jimmy Pemberton on “Rags to Riches”: [Excerpt: Jimmy Pemberton, “Rags to Riches”] And they also backed Barrett himself on “Summer Love”, which got to the lower reaches of the top one hundred in pop, and made the top thirty in the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Richie Barrett and the Chantels, “Summer Love”] There had also been some attempts to give Arlene a separate career outside the Chantels, as she duetted with Willie Wilson on “I’ve Lied”: [Excerpt: Willie Wilson and the Tunemasters, “I’ve Lied”] Unfortunately, after a year of success followed by another year of comparative failure, the group discovered that their career was at an end, thanks to George Goldner. We’ve talked about Goldner before, most significantly in the episode on “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?”, but he had an almost unique combination of strong points and flaws as a record executive. His strongest point was his musical taste. Nobody who knew him respected his taste, but everyone respected his ability to pick a hit, and both of these things sprang from the same basic reason – he had exactly the same musical tastes as a typical teenage girl from the period. Now, it’s an unfortunate fact that the tastes of teenage girls are looked down upon by almost anyone with any power in the music industry, because of the almost universal misogyny in the industry, but the fact remains that teenage girls were becoming a powerful demographic as customers, and anyone who could accurately predict the music that they were going to buy would have a tremendous advantage when it came to making money in the music industry. And Goldner definitely made himself enough money over the years, because he engaged in all the usual practices of ripping off his artists – who were, very often, teenagers themselves. He would credit himself as the writer of their songs, he would engage in shady accounting practices, and all the rest. But Goldner’s real problem was his gambling addiction, and so there’s a pattern that happens over and again throughout the fifties and sixties. Goldner starts up a new record label, discovers some teenage and/or black act, and makes them into overnight stars. Goldner then starts getting vast amounts of money, because he’s ripping off his new discoveries. Goldner starts gambling with that money, loses badly, gets into debt with the mob, and goes to Morris Levy for a loan in order to keep his business going. Levy and his Mafia friends end up taking over the whole company, in exchange for writing off the debts. Levy replaces Goldner’s writing credits on the hits with his own name, stops paying the artists anything at all, and collects all the money from the hits for the rest of his life, while Goldner is left with nothing and goes off to find another bunch of teenagers. And so End Records met the same fate as all of Goldner’s other labels. It went bankrupt, and closed down, owing the Chantels a great deal of money. After End records closed, the Chantels wanted to carry on – but Arlene Smith decided she wanted to go solo instead. She recorded a couple of singles with a new producer, Phil Spector: [Excerpt: Arlene Smith, “Love, Love, Love”] And she also recorded another single with Richie Barrett as producer: [Excerpt: Arlene Smith, “Everything”] At first, that looked like it would be the end of the Chantels, but then a year or so later Richie Barrett got back in touch with the girls. He had some ideas for records that would use the Chantels sound. By this point, Lois had decided that she was going to retire from the music business, but Jackie, Renee, and Sonia agreed to restart their career. There was a problem, though – they weren’t sure what to do without their lead singer. Barrett told them he would sort it out for them. Barrett had been working with another girl group, the Veneers, for a couple of years. They’d released a few singles on Goldner-owned labels, like “Believe Me (My Angel)”: [Excerpt: The Veneers, “Believe Me (My Angel)”] And they’d also been the regular backing group Barrett used for sessions for male vocalists like Titus Turner: [Excerpt: Titus Turner, “The Return of Stagolee”] But they’d never had a huge amount of success. So Barrett got their lead singer, Annette Swinson, to replace Arlene. To make it up to the Veneers, he got the rest of them a job as Jackie Wilson’s backing vocalists. He changed Annette’s name to Annette Smith, and the new lineup of the group had a few more hits, with “Look in My Eyes”, which went to number six on the R&B charts and number fourteen on the pop charts: [Excerpt: The Chantels, “Look in My Eyes”] They also backed Richie Barrett on an answer record to Ray Charles’ “Hit the Road Jack”, titled “Well I Told You”, which made the top thirty on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Richie Barrett and the Chantels, “Well I Told You”] This second phase of the Chantels’ career was successful enough that Goldner, who no longer had the girls under contract, got one of his record labels to put out a new Chantels album, featuring a few tracks he owned by them that hadn’t been on their first album. To fill out the album, and make it sound more like the current group, he also took a few of the Veneers’ singles and stuck them on it under the Chantels’ name. Annette would stay with the group for a while, but the sixties saw several lineup changes, as the group stopped having chart successes, and members temporarily dropped out to have children or pursue careers. However, Sonia and Renee remained in place throughout, as the two constant members of the group (though Sonia also moonlit for a while in the sixties with another group Richie Barrett was looking after at the time, the Three Degrees). By the mid-nineties, they had reformed with all of the original members except Arlene, who was replaced by Ami Ortiz, who can do a very creditable imitation of Arlene’s lead vocals. Sadly Jackie Landry died in 1997, but the other four continued to tour, though only intermittently in between holding down day jobs. Almost uniquely, the Chantels are still touring with the majority of their original members. Sonia Goring Wilson, Renee Minus White, and Lois Harris Powell still tour with the group, and they have several tour dates booked in for 2020, mostly on the east coast of the US. Arlene Smith spent many years touring solo and performing with her own rival “Chantels” group. She has very occasionally reunited with the rest of the Chantels for one-off performances, but there appears to be bad blood between them. She kept performing into the middle of the last decade, and as of 2018, her Facebook page said she was planning a comeback, but no further details have emerged. The Chantels never received either the money or the acclaim that they deserved, given their run of chart successes and the way that they pioneered the girl group sound. But more than sixty years on from their biggest hits, four of the five of them are still alive, and apparently healthy, happy, and performing when the opportunity arises, and three of them are still good friends. Given the careers of most other stars of the era, especially the other child stars, that’s as close to a happy ending as a group gets.

  Episode sixty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Maybe” by the Chantels, and covers child stardom, hymns in Latin, and how to get discovered twice in one day. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Don’t You Just Know It” by Huey “Piano” Smith and the Clowns.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. The only book actually about the Chantels is barely a book — Maybe, Renee Minus White’s self-published memoir, is more of a pamphlet, and it only manages even to get to that length with a ton of padding — things like her fruit cake recipe. Don’t expect much insight from this one. A big chunk of the outline of the story comes from Girl Groups; Fabulous Females Who Rocked the World by John Clemente, which has  a chapter on the Chantels.  This article on Richie Barrett’s career filled in much of the detail.  My opinions of George Goldner come mostly from reading two books — Hound Dog: The Leiber and Stoller Autobiography by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and David Ritz, which talks about Leiber and Stoller’s attempts to go into business with Goldner, and Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy by Richard Carlin. There are innumerable collections of the small number of recordings the Chantels released — this one is as good as any. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? ERRATUM: I refer to “Summer Love” rather than “Summer’s Love”   Transcript We’ve already seen one girl group, when we looked at “Mr Lee” by the Bobbettes, but already within a few months of the Bobbettes’ breakout hit, other groups were making waves with the public. The Chantels were one such group, and one of the best. They were pretty much exact contemporaries of the Bobbettes – so much so that when the Bobbettes were forming, they decided against calling themselves the Chanels, because it would be too similar. The Chantels, too, changed their name early on. They were formed by a group of girls at a Catholic school – St Anthony of Padua school in the Bronx – and were originally named “the Crystals”, but they found that another group in the area had already named themselves that, and so they changed it. (This other group was not the same one as the famous Crystals, who didn’t form until 1961). They decided to name themselves after St Francis de Chantal after their school won a basketball game against St. Francis de Chantal school – when they discovered that the Chantal in the saint’s name was from the same root as the French word for singing, it seemed to be too perfect for them. Originally there were around a dozen members of the group, but they slowly whittled themselves down to five girls, between the ages of fourteen and seventeen – Arlene Smith, Lois Harris, Sonia Goring, Jackie Landry, and Renee Minus. According to Renee (who now goes by her married name Renee Minus White) the group’s name came from a brainstorming session between her, Lois, Jackie, and Sonia, with Arlene agreeing to it later – this may, though, have more to do with ongoing disputes between Arlene and the other group members than with what actually happened. They were drawn together by their mutual love of R&B vocal groups – a particular favourite record of theirs was “In Paradise” by the Cookies, a New York-based girl group who had started recording a few years earlier, and whose records were produced by Jesse Stone, but who wouldn’t have any major chart successes for several years yet: [Excerpt: The Cookies, “In Paradise”] So they were R&B singers, but the fact that these were Catholic schoolgirls, specifically, points to something about the way their music developed, and about early rock and roll more generally. We’ve talked about the influence of religious music on rock and roll before, but the type of religious music that had influenced it up until this point had generally come from two sources – either the black gospel music that was created by and for worshippers in African-American Pentecostal denominations, or the euphemistically-named “Southern Gospel” that is usually made by white Pentecostals, and by Southern Baptists. These denominations, in 2020, have a certain amount of institutional power – especially the Southern Baptists, who are now one of the most important power blocs within the Republican Party. But in the 1950s, those were the churches of the poorest, most despised, people. By geography, class, and race, the people who attended those churches were overwhelmingly those who would be looked down on by the people who had actual power in the USA. The churches that people with power overwhelmingly went to at the time were those which had been established in Western Europe – the so-called mainline Protestant churches – and, to a lesser extent, the Catholic Church. The music of those churches had very little influence on rock and roll. It makes sense that this would be the case – obviously underprivileged people’s music would be influenced by the churches that underprivileged people went to, rather than the ones that privileged people attended, and rock and roll was, at this point, still a music made almost solely by people who were underprivileged on one or more axis – but it’s still worth pointing out, because for the first time we’re going to look at a group who – while they were also underprivileged, being black – were influenced by Catholic liturgical music, rather than gospel or spiritual music. Because there’s always been a geographical variation, as well as one based on class and race, in what religions dominate in the US. While evangelical churches predominate in the southern states, in the North-East there were, especially at the time we’re talking about, far more mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Jewish people. The Chantels were a New York group, and it’s notable that New York groups were far more likely to have been influenced by Catholic or Episcopalian liturgical music, and choral music in general, than vocal groups from other areas. This may go some way towards explaining Johnny Otis’ observation that all the LA vocal groups he knew had pitching problems, while the New York groups could sing in tune – choir practice may have made the New York groups more technically adept (though to my own ears, the New York groups tend to make much less interesting music than the LA groups). Certainly when it comes to the Chantels, the girls had all sung in the choir, and had been taught to read music and play the piano, although a couple of them had eventually been kicked out of the choir for singing “that skip and jump music”, as the nuns referred to rock and roll. Indeed, at their very first appearance at the Apollo, after getting a record contract, one of the two songs they performed was a Catholic hymn, in Latin – “Terra Tremuit”. That piece remains in the group’s repertoire to this day, and while they’ve never formally recorded it, there are videos on YouTube of them performing it: [Excerpt: The Chantels, “Terra Tremuit”, soundcheck recording] The story of how the Chantels were discovered, as it’s usually told, is one that leaves one asking more questions than it answers. The group were walking down the street, when they passed a rehearsal room. A young man spotted them on the street and asked them if they were singers, since they were dressed identically. When they said “yes”, he took them up to a rehearsal studio to hear them. The rehearsal studio happened to be in the Brill Building. We’ve not mentioned the Brill Building so far, because we’re only just getting to the point where it started to have an impact on rock and roll music, but it was a building on Broadway – 1619 Broadway to be exact – which was the home of dozens, even hundreds at times, of music publishers, record labels, and talent agencies. There were a few other nearby buildings, most notably 1650 Broadway, which became the home of Aldon Music, which often get lumped in with the Brill Building when most people talk about it, and when I refer to the Brill Building in future episodes I’ll be referring to the whole ecosystem of music industries that sprang up on Broadway in the fifties and early sixties. But in this case, they were invited into the main Brill Building itself. They weren’t just being invited into some random room, but into the heart of the music industry on the East Coast of America. This was the kind of thing that normally only happens in films – and relatively unrealistic films at that. So far, so cliched, though it’s hard to believe that that kind of thing ever really happened. But then something happened that isn’t in any of the cliches – the girls noticed, through the window, that three members of the Valentines, one of their favourite groups, were walking past. We’ve mentioned the Valentines a few months ago, when talking about Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, and we talked about how Richie Barrett, as well as being a singer and songwriter in the group, was also a talent scout for George Goldner’s record labels. The Valentines had released several records, but none of them had had anything but local success, though records like “The Woo Woo Train” have since become cult favourites among lovers of 1950s vocal group music: [Excerpt: The Valentines, “The Woo Woo Train”] The girls loved the Valentines, and they also knew that Barrett was important in the industry. They decided to run out of the rehearsal room and accost the group members. They told Richie Barrett that they were a singing group, and when he didn’t believe them, they burst into song, singing what would later become the B-side of their first record, “The Plea”: [Excerpt: The Chantels, “The Plea”] That song was one they’d written themselves, sort of. It was actually based on a song that a group of boys they knew, who sang in a street-corner group, had made up. That song had been called “Baby”, but the Chantels had taken it and reworked it into their own song. The version that they finally recorded, which we just heard, was further revamped by Barrett. Barrett was impressed, and said he’d be in touch. But then he never bothered to get in contact with them again, until Jackie Landry managed to obtain his home address and get in touch with him. She got the address through a friend of hers, a member of the Teenchords, a vocal group fronted by Frankie Lymon’s brother Lewis, who recorded for one of George Goldner’s labels, releasing tracks like “Your Last Chance”: [Excerpt: Lewis Lymon and the Teenchords, “Your Last Chance”] They tracked down Barrett, and he agreed to try to get them signed to a record deal. That story has many, many, problems, and frankly doesn’t make any kind of sense, but it’s the accepted history you’ll find in books that deal with the group. According to Renee Minus White’s autobiography, though, each of the girls has a different recollection of how they first met Barrett – in her version, they simply waited at the stage door to get autographs, and told him they were a singing group. My guess is that the accepted story is an attempt to reconcile a bunch of irreconcilable versions of the story. Whatever the true facts as to how they started to work with Richie Barrett, the important thing is that they did end up working with him. Barrett was impressed by their ability not just to sing the “oohs” and “aahs”, but the complex polyphonic parts that they sang in choir. For the most part, doo-wop groups either sang simple block chords behind a lead singer, or they all sang their own moving parts that worked more or less in isolation – the bass singer would sing his part, the falsetto singer his, and so on. I say “his” because pretty much all doo-wop groups at this point were male. They were all singing the same song, but doing their own thing. The Chantels were different – they were singing block harmonies, but they weren’t singing simple chords, but interlocking moving lines. What they were doing ended up being closer to the so-called “modern harmony” of jazz vocal groups like the Four Freshmen: [Excerpt: The Four Freshmen, “It’s a Blue World”] But where other groups singing in that style had no R&B background, the Chantels were able to sing a rhythm and blues song with the best of them. Barrett signed the group to End Records, one of George Goldner’s stable of record labels. But before recording them, he spent weeks rehearsing them, and teaching them how to perform on stage. The first record they made, when they finally went into the studio, was a song primarily written by Arlene Smith, who also sang lead, though the composition is credited to the girls as a group. And listening to it, you have in this record for the first time the crystallisation of the girl-group sound, the sound that would later become a hallmark of people like Phil Spector. [Excerpt: The Chantels, “He’s Gone”] It’s a song about adolescent anguish, written by and for adolescents, and it has a drama and angst to it that none of the other records by girl groups had had before – it’s obviously inspired by groups like the Penguins and the Platters, but there’s a near-hysteria to the performance that hadn’t really been heard before. That strained longing is something that would appear in almost every girl-group record of the early sixties, and you can hear very clear echoes of the Chantels in records by people like the Ronettes, the Crystals, and the Shangri-Las. It’s a far cry from “Mr. Lee”. Most of the time, when people talk about the Chantels’ vocals, they – rightly – draw attention to Arlene Smith’s leads, which are astonishing. But listen to the a capella intro, which is repeated as the outro, and you can hear those choir-trained voices – this was a vocal group, not just a singer and some cooing background vocalists: [Excerpt: the Chantels, “He’s Gone”] As well as being pioneers in the girl-group sound, the Chantels were also one of the first self-contained vocal groups to play their own instruments on stage. This was not something that they did at first, but something that Barrett encouraged them to do. Some of them had instrumental training already, and those who didn’t were taught how to play by Barrett. Sonia and Jackie played guitar, Arlene bass, Lois piano, and Renee the drums. They even, according to Renee’s autobiography, recorded an instrumental by themselves, called “The Chantels’ Rock”. Almost immediately, the girls were pulled out of Catholic school and instead sent to Quintano’s School for Young Professionals, the same school that the Teenagers went to, which was set up to accommodate children who had to go on tour. But there was one exception. Lois’ mother would not let her transfer schools, or go on tour with the group. She could sing with them in the studio, and when they were performing in New York, but until she graduated high school that was all. In many ways her mother was right to be worried, or at least Richie Barrett believed she had good reason to be. They started touring as soon as “He’s Gone” came out, but the girls, at the time, resented Barrett, who came along on tour with them, because he would lock them in the dressing rooms and only let them out for the show itself, not allowing them to socialise with the other acts. In retrospect, given that they were girls in their teens, and they were touring with large numbers of male musicians, many of them with reputations as sexual predators, Barrett’s protectiveness (and his apparent threats to several of these men) was probably justified. For example, in early 1958, the girls were sent out on a tour that became legendary – and given its lineup it’s easy to see why. As well as the Chantels, the tour had Frankie Lymon, Danny & the Juniors, the Diamonds, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Larry Williams, Buddy Holly, and as alternating headliners Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry. We’ll talk more about that tour in the next couple of episodes, but aside from the undoubted musical quality of the performers, that was simply not a group of people who young women were going to be safe around (though several of the individuals there were harmless enough). One could, of course, argue that young girls shouldn’t be put in that situation at all, but that never seems to have occurred to anyone involved. By the time of that tour, they’d recorded what would become by far their biggest hit, their second single, “Maybe”: [Excerpt: The Chantels, “Maybe”] “Maybe” was a song that was originally co-credited to George Goldner and an unknown “Casey”, but for which Richie Barrett later sued and won co-writing credit. Barrett was presumably the sole writer, though some have claimed that Arlene Smith was an uncredited co-writer – something the other Chantels deny. It was very much in the mould of “He’s Gone”, and concentrated even more on Smith’s lead vocal, and that lead vocal took an immense amount of work to obtain. In total they recorded fifty-two takes of the song before they got one that sounded right, and Smith was crying in frustration when she recorded the last take. “Maybe” reached number fifteen on the pop charts, and number two on the R&B charts, and it became a classic that has been covered by everyone from Janis Joplin to the Three Degrees. The group’s next two records, “Every Night (I Pray)” and “I Love You So”, both charted as well, though neither of them was a massive hit in the way that “Maybe” was. But after this point, the hits dried up – something that wasn’t helped by the fact that George Goldner went through a phase of having his artists perform old standards, which didn’t really suit the Chantels’ voices. But they’d had four hit records in a row, which was enough for them to get an album released. The album, which just featured the A- and B-sides of their first six singles, was originally released with a photo of the group on the front. That version was quickly withdrawn and replaced with a stock image of two white teenagers at a jukebox, just in case you’ve forgotten how appallingly racist the music industry was at this point. They continued releasing singles, but they were also increasingly being used as backing vocalists for other artists produced by Barrett. He had them backing Jimmy Pemberton on “Rags to Riches”: [Excerpt: Jimmy Pemberton, “Rags to Riches”] And they also backed Barrett himself on “Summer Love”, which got to the lower reaches of the top one hundred in pop, and made the top thirty in the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Richie Barrett and the Chantels, “Summer Love”] There had also been some attempts to give Arlene a separate career outside the Chantels, as she duetted with Willie Wilson on “I’ve Lied”: [Excerpt: Willie Wilson and the Tunemasters, “I’ve Lied”] Unfortunately, after a year of success followed by another year of comparative failure, the group discovered that their career was at an end, thanks to George Goldner. We’ve talked about Goldner before, most significantly in the episode on “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?”, but he had an almost unique combination of strong points and flaws as a record executive. His strongest point was his musical taste. Nobody who knew him respected his taste, but everyone respected his ability to pick a hit, and both of these things sprang from the same basic reason – he had exactly the same musical tastes as a typical teenage girl from the period. Now, it’s an unfortunate fact that the tastes of teenage girls are looked down upon by almost anyone with any power in the music industry, because of the almost universal misogyny in the industry, but the fact remains that teenage girls were becoming a powerful demographic as customers, and anyone who could accurately predict the music that they were going to buy would have a tremendous advantage when it came to making money in the music industry. And Goldner definitely made himself enough money over the years, because he engaged in all the usual practices of ripping off his artists – who were, very often, teenagers themselves. He would credit himself as the writer of their songs, he would engage in shady accounting practices, and all the rest. But Goldner’s real problem was his gambling addiction, and so there’s a pattern that happens over and again throughout the fifties and sixties. Goldner starts up a new record label, discovers some teenage and/or black act, and makes them into overnight stars. Goldner then starts getting vast amounts of money, because he’s ripping off his new discoveries. Goldner starts gambling with that money, loses badly, gets into debt with the mob, and goes to Morris Levy for a loan in order to keep his business going. Levy and his Mafia friends end up taking over the whole company, in exchange for writing off the debts. Levy replaces Goldner’s writing credits on the hits with his own name, stops paying the artists anything at all, and collects all the money from the hits for the rest of his life, while Goldner is left with nothing and goes off to find another bunch of teenagers. And so End Records met the same fate as all of Goldner’s other labels. It went bankrupt, and closed down, owing the Chantels a great deal of money. After End records closed, the Chantels wanted to carry on – but Arlene Smith decided she wanted to go solo instead. She recorded a couple of singles with a new producer, Phil Spector: [Excerpt: Arlene Smith, “Love, Love, Love”] And she also recorded another single with Richie Barrett as producer: [Excerpt: Arlene Smith, “Everything”] At first, that looked like it would be the end of the Chantels, but then a year or so later Richie Barrett got back in touch with the girls. He had some ideas for records that would use the Chantels sound. By this point, Lois had decided that she was going to retire from the music business, but Jackie, Renee, and Sonia agreed to restart their career. There was a problem, though – they weren’t sure what to do without their lead singer. Barrett told them he would sort it out for them. Barrett had been working with another girl group, the Veneers, for a couple of years. They’d released a few singles on Goldner-owned labels, like “Believe Me (My Angel)”: [Excerpt: The Veneers, “Believe Me (My Angel)”] And they’d also been the regular backing group Barrett used for sessions for male vocalists like Titus Turner: [Excerpt: Titus Turner, “The Return of Stagolee”] But they’d never had a huge amount of success. So Barrett got their lead singer, Annette Swinson, to replace Arlene. To make it up to the Veneers, he got the rest of them a job as Jackie Wilson’s backing vocalists. He changed Annette’s name to Annette Smith, and the new lineup of the group had a few more hits, with “Look in My Eyes”, which went to number six on the R&B charts and number fourteen on the pop charts: [Excerpt: The Chantels, “Look in My Eyes”] They also backed Richie Barrett on an answer record to Ray Charles’ “Hit the Road Jack”, titled “Well I Told You”, which made the top thirty on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Richie Barrett and the Chantels, “Well I Told You”] This second phase of the Chantels’ career was successful enough that Goldner, who no longer had the girls under contract, got one of his record labels to put out a new Chantels album, featuring a few tracks he owned by them that hadn’t been on their first album. To fill out the album, and make it sound more like the current group, he also took a few of the Veneers’ singles and stuck them on it under the Chantels’ name. Annette would stay with the group for a while, but the sixties saw several lineup changes, as the group stopped having chart successes, and members temporarily dropped out to have children or pursue careers. However, Sonia and Renee remained in place throughout, as the two constant members of the group (though Sonia also moonlit for a while in the sixties with another group Richie Barrett was looking after at the time, the Three Degrees). By the mid-nineties, they had reformed with all of the original members except Arlene, who was replaced by Ami Ortiz, who can do a very creditable imitation of Arlene’s lead vocals. Sadly Jackie Landry died in 1997, but the other four continued to tour, though only intermittently in between holding down day jobs. Almost uniquely, the Chantels are still touring with the majority of their original members. Sonia Goring Wilson, Renee Minus White, and Lois Harris Powell still tour with the group, and they have several tour dates booked in for 2020, mostly on the east coast of the US. Arlene Smith spent many years touring solo and performing with her own rival “Chantels” group. She has very occasionally reunited with the rest of the Chantels for one-off performances, but there appears to be bad blood between them. She kept performing into the middle of the last decade, and as of 2018, her Facebook page said she was planning a comeback, but no further details have emerged. The Chantels never received either the money or the acclaim that they deserved, given their run of chart successes and the way that they pioneered the girl group sound. But more than sixty years on from their biggest hits, four of the five of them are still alive, and apparently healthy, happy, and performing when the opportunity arises, and three of them are still good friends. Given the careers of most other stars of the era, especially the other child stars, that’s as close to a happy ending as a group gets.

***Please show your support for these independent artists and share out this show!!! 1. "Make It Wit Chu" (QOTSA) - @virginmagneticmaterial Remix 2. "Deep Dive" - @Reno-McCarthy 3. "Heavy Hitters" - @official_nova 4. "Open Eyes" - Galaa (@user-119314571) 5. "Recovering Romantic" - @mikeevin 6. "Primitive Us" - LISA (@user-750419585) 7. "Leave Me Cold" - @freddiefuture 8. "Moving Target" - @wildriversband (@paquin-entertainment) 9. "Money Lover" - Magdalena Bay (@magbae) 10. "Take The Night" - @kriefmusic 11. "Break" - The Drew Thomson Foundation (@dine-alone-records) 12. "In Paradise" - @theworldofbirds 13. "Lupins" - @thisiszinnia 14. "Magic" (Dirty Radio) - @mok0a 15. "Let Go" - @saxsyndrum 16. "By Reason" - @boyewa 17. "Stabilize" - @jojo-worthington 18. "Long Way Down" - @nuela_charles 19. "When I Had Infinity" - @camaranomusic 20. "Daughter" - @sophiadanai 21. "The Heart and Soul" - @spc-eco 22. "Flesh & Blood" - @okbutton 23. "Eggshell" - @runnnermusic 24. "Little Star" - @iskwe

Una volta lasciato il gruppo di Herbie Mann, con cui lavorano nel '69-70, Sonny e Linda Sharrock suonano nell'area di New York con gruppi propri che portano diversi nomi. Nell'estate del '73 c'è una seduta di incisione in cui registrano musica per un breve documentario su James Baldwin del fotografo turco Sedat Pakay. Da una session della primavera del '74 per la stazione radio WCKR si può cogliere che la musica di Sonny e Linda non è più l'improvvisazione estrema dei loro due album ma si sta orientando verso una direzione più pop, verso una black music più agevole. Nell'estate del '75 Sonny e Linda registrano per la Atlantic il materiale per un nuovo disco, Paradise, album finalmente cointestato ad entrambi e con in copertina un bellissimo primo piano di Linda: una copertina seducente che può far pensare ad un Lp di disco music. In Paradise il clima, rispetto agli album precedenti, è decisamente cambiato: Sonny e Linda stanno cercando una impostazione più accattivante, ma l'album (che in ogni caso passa pressoché inosservato) riesce in realtà ad essere commerciale fino ad un certo punto, perché sia la chitarra di Sonny che la vocalità di Linda continuano ad andare in una direzione non convenzionale. Anni dopo il chitarrista si sarebbe adddirittura rammaricato che il disco fosse stato ristampato, perché (affidato al produttore turco Ilhan Mimaroglu) riteneva non offrisse una buona rappresentazione della sua musica dell'epoca: ma in effetti Paradise, con una combinazione estremamente gustosa, e anche gustosamente stravagante, della chitarra di Sonny e della vocalità di Linda con stilemi più commerciali tipici della black music di allora, è un album unico, originale e godibilissimo.

Una volta lasciato il gruppo di Herbie Mann, con cui lavorano nel '69-70, Sonny e Linda Sharrock suonano nell'area di New York con gruppi propri che portano diversi nomi. Nell'estate del '73 c'è una seduta di incisione in cui registrano musica per un breve documentario su James Baldwin del fotografo turco Sedat Pakay. Da una session della primavera del '74 per la stazione radio WCKR si può cogliere che la musica di Sonny e Linda non è più l'improvvisazione estrema dei loro due album ma si sta orientando verso una direzione più pop, verso una black music più agevole. Nell'estate del '75 Sonny e Linda registrano per la Atlantic il materiale per un nuovo disco, Paradise, album finalmente cointestato ad entrambi e con in copertina un bellissimo primo piano di Linda: una copertina seducente che può far pensare ad un Lp di disco music. In Paradise il clima, rispetto agli album precedenti, è decisamente cambiato: Sonny e Linda stanno cercando una impostazione più accattivante, ma l'album (che in ogni caso passa pressoché inosservato) riesce in realtà ad essere commerciale fino ad un certo punto, perché sia la chitarra di Sonny che la vocalità di Linda continuano ad andare in una direzione non convenzionale. Anni dopo il chitarrista si sarebbe adddirittura rammaricato che il disco fosse stato ristampato, perché (affidato al produttore turco Ilhan Mimaroglu) riteneva non offrisse una buona rappresentazione della sua musica dell'epoca: ma in effetti Paradise, con una combinazione estremamente gustosa, e anche gustosamente stravagante, della chitarra di Sonny e della vocalità di Linda con stilemi più commerciali tipici della black music di allora, è un album unico, originale e godibilissimo.

Una volta lasciato il gruppo di Herbie Mann, con cui lavorano nel '69-70, Sonny e Linda Sharrock suonano nell'area di New York con gruppi propri che portano diversi nomi. Nell'estate del '73 c'è una seduta di incisione in cui registrano musica per un breve documentario su James Baldwin del fotografo turco Sedat Pakay. Da una session della primavera del '74 per la stazione radio WCKR si può cogliere che la musica di Sonny e Linda non è più l'improvvisazione estrema dei loro due album ma si sta orientando verso una direzione più pop, verso una black music più agevole. Nell'estate del '75 Sonny e Linda registrano per la Atlantic il materiale per un nuovo disco, Paradise, album finalmente cointestato ad entrambi e con in copertina un bellissimo primo piano di Linda: una copertina seducente che può far pensare ad un Lp di disco music. In Paradise il clima, rispetto agli album precedenti, è decisamente cambiato: Sonny e Linda stanno cercando una impostazione più accattivante, ma l'album (che in ogni caso passa pressoché inosservato) riesce in realtà ad essere commerciale fino ad un certo punto, perché sia la chitarra di Sonny che la vocalità di Linda continuano ad andare in una direzione non convenzionale. Anni dopo il chitarrista si sarebbe adddirittura rammaricato che il disco fosse stato ristampato, perché (affidato al produttore turco Ilhan Mimaroglu) riteneva non offrisse una buona rappresentazione della sua musica dell'epoca: ma in effetti Paradise, con una combinazione estremamente gustosa, e anche gustosamente stravagante, della chitarra di Sonny e della vocalità di Linda con stilemi più commerciali tipici della black music di allora, è un album unico, originale e godibilissimo.

Ricky, Tamra's Gay of Honor, dropped a bomb this week claiming he has seen Eddie make out with men. He even claimed Tamra liked it. Is this true or another cancer scam? Do we like Brandi of Dallas and her botched facelift and light eyebrows? In Paradise, Deanie babies became the villain and we had to hear about Taylor taking all of Derek in...it made us feel uncomfortable. Speaking of uncomfortable, Courtney is trying out for my 600 lb life to get gastro bypass surgery. Come judge with us! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The most anticipated interview to end the summer is approaching... Andy Cohen sits down with Lu at her home in The Hamptons. Hear our predictions and wrap up why Sonja was such a C-U-Next-Tuesday to Tinsley; She isn't your slave or intern! We are snoring through the OC but appreciate Shannon and Kelly Godd making amends. Also, Shannon we get, you are FAT. In Paradise, Corinne over drank and and blamed it on "medication." Poor Demario. And we have to keep dealing with that teetotaler, Taylor. We've finally boarded the Dallas train, so hop on and COME JUDGE WITH US! (Oh yeah, and help us get to 10K by Labor Day on our Instagram, @twojudgeygirls!) See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Speaker or Performer: Pr. Mark D. Lovett Scripture Passage(s): John 2:1-11 Date of Delivery: January 18, 2015 In the name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit.Here is a hard topic: sexuality and marriage. But because the Lord has brought up the subject today He also wills that we should consider marriage and sexuality. Moreover, it is only a hard topic because we have let the world teach us about marriage and sexuality and have not stood firm on the word of God concerning it. It is also a hard topic, difficult to navigate and master because we are so perverse in our sexuality and so bad at marriage. So we always feel condemned in both, unclean and godless. Even when we are at our best we know that it is only for a short time and that soon we will be at our worst.It is also difficult because it is the one topic we cannot hide from, though we do our best. We can’t hide from it because it is everywhere and involves every living soul on earth, even the celibate and unmarried. They, too, are affected by sexuality and marriage. So what can we say about it in these few minutes that will help us navigate the ways of life and avoid the ways of death? In truth, we can really say no more about that what has been said in God’s word about it. What is perhaps more fruitful is to discover ourselves, that is to let the Lord open our eyes so that we see ourselves in relation to His word. Then we will know the good from the bad and be able choose the good and avoid the evil. Or at least we will know what to pray for.Marriage is instated by God and so belongs to Him. Therefore it is holy to the Lord. Even when an unbeliever is married their marriage remains holy to the Lord. An unbeliever can no more defile marriage than he can defile holy Baptism by his unbelief. And just as the Lord God will defend His blessed sacrament from all lies and misuse and vindicate His holy Name, and doesn’t need us to defend it, so He will defend marriage from all lies and perversion and vindicate His creation and doesn’t need us to do it. However, that does not free us from giving a right confession about marriage and sexuality. Ours is not to defend but to confess. Ours is not to wage war but to stand firm knowing that we are as sheep led to the slaughter. But that’s okay with us because we know the One in whom we hope and He will raise us from the slaughter and stand us on our own two feet.God made woman, drawing her out of the side of man, so that man would not be alone. For he is in the image of God and God is not alone but is Himself Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So man is not alone but has a helper fit for him, which is woman. And this man and woman, like God Himself in whose image they are made, create life. This is the purpose of marriage. But it might be said, so too do animals create life. Yes, but they are not in the image of God so the life they create is not the image of God but the image of beasts. Therefore the life they create is not of the same value as the life of man. The world says otherwise. The world tries to convince us that animals are just as valuable as humans, perhaps even more so. Nature is so often described as anything except humanity so that when people say “in nature” they exclusively don’t mean “in humanity”. But this is twisted. For man is the pinnacle of God’s creation, what we call nature.God brought this woman made from man to the man that they would be one flesh and be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. Notice that there is no emotion here. This is descriptive of the way it is. Although many things in creation elicit and emotional response – like sunsets and puppy dogs and majestic mountain tops – nothing is created to serve our emotions. Our emotions, one might say, serve creation. So that when we see a person in need we feel for them and have compassion. Without the emotion of compassion we would care for nothing. But nothing is created for compassion but rather compassion for all things.So with the emotion we call love, which is really better called strong desire. Love is truly a duty not an emotion but we have let the word be high jacked. Men have a strong desire for women. In Paradise this was good because the man would desire the woman God gave him. The desire for her would cause the man to cleave to his wife and become one flesh. But after the fall into sin and shame our desire became king and ruled over us so that what once would have satisfied us in having a wife no longer satisfies and we give way to lust, which is the perversion of desire and leads to sexual immorality.Sexual immorality, simply put, is the perverted desire to find satisfaction in that which God did not give for our satisfaction. The categories of straight or gay or any of the other nearly twenty categories given to sexual orientation are made up labels slapped on the core truth of sexual perversion. So that now men let desire reign and think to find satisfaction with other men or with many women or other ways not fit to be mentioned.Women, too, are perverted, but in a different way. For a woman the curse was that her desire would be for her husband, as it is read in English. But the gist is that woman will want to ruler her husband. If we don’t see this in women’s lib and feminism then we are blind, deaf, and dumb. Now of course it would be remise if it was not quickly pointed out that men and women are equally human and so equals before God. But then so to are we equal to Christ in our humanity though He is our Lord and Master. He is a man and we are men; we are equal in that respect. But we are not the same nor shall we be nor can we be. For He is also the Son of God and holds the place of King and Lord over all. So a man and a woman are equal in humanity but they are not the same nor shall they be nor can they be. For man is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the Church.It is our perverted desire that causes sexual immorality. And none of us are immune. Even those of us who have no husband or wife, which in itself is not a bad thing at all. The Scriptures, even Christ our Lord praises what He calls celibacy. And that is truly what being without a husband or wife is: celibacy. And it is the natural order of things. For before the Lord brought Eve to Adam, Adam was celibate. It was the Lord who gave Adam his wife so that celibacy was not for Adam. And it was the Lord that brought Eve to her husband so that celibacy was not for Eve. But without the Lord’s doing both would have remained celibate. Not by choice but by design. Which in Paradise would have mirrored their choice but now design is attacked by choice and choice, led by lust and the king called Desire, runs over and murders design just as Cain murdered Abel, whom he was to keep as the older brother.But all of this, as true and godly as it is, is a picture of Christ and His Church. For the Man of Heaven left His Father with His Father’s blessing to find and cleave to His Bride so that the two became one flesh in the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. For we are flesh of His flesh and bone of His bone. And being raised from the dead the Lord Jesus washes us in the cleansing bath of His blood so that we would be presented to Him as a spotless Bride, holy and undefiled. This is necessary because our desire has turned to lust and we have abandoned our Husband and sought the comfort of many false gods and idols, even the gods of emotion and desire.And, as the Church has preached for 2,000 years, the Bride of Christ begets the children of God, living beings. Not mortal but begotten by the Spirit, born again through water by the Spirit of God, having the Breath of God breathed into us we become those from whom the Spirit shall not depart but with whom the Spirit shall remain so that we would live before God in righteousness and purity forever.+ In Nomine Iesu +