Podcast appearances and mentions of james campion

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 1, 2025 96:30

This week Tom & Zeus welcome back Author James Campion the author of "Shout It Out Loud: The Story Of KISS's Destroyer And The Making Of An American Icon", for a Destroyer retrospective. James Campion penned THE book on the KISS album Destroyer. The guys welcome James and dissect and breakdown all things Destroyer for a fascinating conversation about KISS' most popular studio album. A great SIOL discussion with THE Destroyer expert, James Campion! Get Your Magic Mind Offer NOW!!! You have a limited offer you can use now, that gets you up to 48% off your first subscription or 20% off one time purchases with code SOL20 at checkout You can claim it at: https://magicmind.com/SOL20 To Purchase Shout It Out Loudcast's KISS Book “Raise Your Glasses: A Celebration Of 50 Years of KISS Songs By Celebrities, Musicians & Fans Please Click Below: Raise Your Glasses Book For all things Shout It Out Loudcast check out our amazing website by clicking below: www.ShoutItOutLoudcast.com Interested in more Shout It Out Loudcast content? Care to help us out? Come join us on Patreon by clicking below: SIOL Patreon Get all your Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise by clicking below: Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise at AMAZON Shop At Our Amazon Store by clicking below: Shout It Out Loudcast Amazon Store Please Email us comments or suggestions by clicking below: ShoutItOutLoudcast@Gmail.com Please subscribe to us and give us a 5 Star (Child) review on the following places below: iTunes Podchaser Stitcher iHeart Radio Spotify Please follow us and like our social media pages clicking below: Twitter Facebook Page Facebook Group Page Shout It Out Loudcasters Instagram YouTube Proud Member of the Pantheon Podcast click below to see the website: Pantheon Podcast Network Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Ep. 87 - She Loves Brew (feat. James Campion)

Blotto Beatles

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 20, 2025 104:12

The Beatles changed the world with three simple words: Yeah, Yeah, Yeah—and we're here to overthink (and over-drink) every last one of them. This week, we take a deep dive into She Loves You with James Campion, author of Take a Sad Song: The Emotional Currency of Hey Jude. We discuss everything from Paul's dad's questionable lyrical edits to the harmonic genius behind this early Beatles barnburner. Plus, we take a few detours into dramatic readings, home decor philosophies, and the eternal question—does this song still slap after five pints?Where does this iconic track land on our ever-expanding, ever-argued-over Big Ol' List of Beatles Songs? Tune in, pour one out, and find out. Out now—dig it!Where does this absolute ripper land on our big ol' list of Beatles tunes? Stick around, pour another round, and find out.Give James a follow on Instagram (@jamescampion) and please check out Take a Sad Song: The Emotional Currency of “Hey Jude”, wherever you buy books. As always, you can find Team Blotto Beatles on Instagram (@blottobeatles) and Twitter / X (@blottobeatles), by emailing us (blottobeatles@gmail.com), or on the web (blottobeatles.com). We want to hear from you!Please also take the time to rate and review us on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.We have a shop! Grab some merch. You can always drunk dial us at 1.857.233.9793 to share your thoughts, feedback, confessions, and concerns to be featured in an upcoming episode. Enjoying the show? Buy us a beer via the tip jar (don't forget to include a message telling us what we should drink with the money).You know we're making a list of it, see the canonical, argument-ending list of Beatles songs we are assembling here: http://www.blottobeatles.com & listen to it on Spotify here.Please remember to always enjoy Blotto Beatles responsibly.Peace and Love.Hosts: Becker and TommyGuest: James CampionExecutive Producer: Scotty C.Musical Supervisor: RB (@ryanobrooks)Associate Musical Supervision: Tim Clark (@nodisassemble)In-House Artist: Colin Driscoll (@theroyal.we)

Episode 315 "Destroyer Retrospective with author James Campion"

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Play Episode Listen Later Feb 15, 2025 96:15

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#81 Hey Jude with James Campion (author, "Sing A Sad Song: The Emotional Currency of Hey Jude")

Ranking The Beatles

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 29, 2024 87:11

Note: PLS LISTEN BEFORE LIGHTING YOUR TORCHES AND GATHERING YOUR PITCHFORKS! Written as a way to show sympathy and encouragement to young Julian Lennon in the face of his parents' divorce, "Hey Jude" is obviously one of the high water marks of modern popular music. It's a brilliantly composed song with a powerhouse vocal from Paul, showcasing his ability to go from the sweetest, most emotive and sensitive places to an absolute beast, shredding his voice and screaming from the pits of his you know whats. The rest of the lads turn in a perfect accompaniment, all serving the song as it builds to a chorus that is the prototype for the lighters-aloft stadium anthem, designed to unite masses of people. I've experienced what I think may be the closest thing to nirvana singing along to this with Paul and 70,000 strangers, and it's amazing. But once you've done that, and you've heard the record a million times, that record doesn't really compare to that moment. In fact, I find myself not really connecting to the record in that way at all anymore, and more often than not, rarely choose to listen to it. It's a victim of overexposure in a way, but maybe that's just a me problem? To help me sort this out, we've called on our old friend James Campion, who literally wrote the book on the subject, Sing A Sad Song: The Emotional Currency of Hey Jude. James joins us to chat about subjective preference vs objective quality, Paul's ultimate flex, Ted Lasso parallels, and his upcoming book on Price. Follow along with all things JC at ⁠jamescampion.com⁠, and ⁠order a copy of his book⁠ while you're at it! What do you think about "Hey Jude" at 81? Too high? Too low? Have I totally lost the plot? Let us know in the comments on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠find us now on Bluesky!⁠⁠ Be sure to check out ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.rankingthebeatles.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and grab a Rank Your Own Beatles poster, some of our new Revolver-themed merch, a shirt, a jumper, whatever you like! And if you're digging what we do, don't forget to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Buy Us A Coffee⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/rankingthebeatles/support

#242: James Campion: The Truth About TRT & Modern Training Methods

LIVE PERFORM COMPETE

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 30, 2024 100:57

Today, we speak with personal trainer and competitive bodybuilder James Campion! James shares his journey in fitness, revealing his daily routine, challenges in expanding his business in Hong Kong, and a mindset shift towards prioritizing action over perfection. We also tackle the often-taboo topic of performance-enhancing drugs, discussing athlete health and longevity. Whether you're a fitness enthusiast or just curious about training and supplementation, this episode is filled with motivation and inspiration! THIS PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY TODAY WELL SPENT todaywellspent.com Save 10% on your purchase with offer code THEPROCESS CONNECT WITH JAMES Follow James on Instagram: instagram.com/james_hitpt Reach out to James and his studio: hit-pt.comTHIS PODCAST IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE PROCESS PROGRAMMING Website: theprocessprogramming.com Instagram: instagram.com/theprocessprogramming Education: theprocessprogramming.com/coaching-education

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290: “Hey Jude” Reconstructed

Something About the Beatles

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 24, 2024 82:05

In 2023, I hosted writer James Campion with Jeff Martin for a discussion of The Beatles' 1968 mega-hit and Apple Records debut. This time, we're drilling down deep for an analysis of the song's composition (as well as possible sources of inspiration) with the musicologists of RPM School: Walter Everett (author of volumes one and … 290: “Hey Jude” Reconstructed Read More »

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Shout It Out Loudcast: Album Review Crew "Foot Loose & Fancy Free"

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 11, 2024 159:53

On the 56th Episode of the Album Review Crew of Shout It Out Loudcast, Tom, Zeus & special guest, author James Campion, review the 1977 legendary album by Rod Stewart, "Foot Loose & Fancy Free." "Foot Loose & Fancy Free" was Rod Stewart's eighth studio album. It continued Rod's 70's solo artist success. Rod's legendary vocals were in prime condition and he had tremendous band behind him. He had three guitarists, Gary Grainger, Jim Cregan and Billy Peek. His bassist was renowned session player Phil Chen. The keyboard player was Jon Barlow Jarvis and on the drums was the legendary Carmine Appice. This band could match up with any other band in the 1970's. The album featured three huge hits that have been in rotation on rock radio since the album was released, including "Hot Legs," "You're In My Heart (The Final Acclaim)" and "I Was Only Joking." Those three songs even had videos which were starting to become fashionable. The album also includes typical Rod Stewart ballads, some funk, some psychedelic rock, prog rock and more. The album made it to Number 2 on the US Billboard charts and has now gone 3X platinum. The album was produced by legendary Tom Dowd and was considered the last of his rocking 70's albums. As usual the boys breakdown and dissect the tracks and rank the songs. They then rank the album and the album cover against the previous albums reviewed on the Album Review Crew. This was Zeus' pick. So tune in to the documentary type of breakdown of the "Hot Legs" video and to see if the guys man crush on Rod is stronger than theirs on Michael Hutchence of INXS! To Purchase Rod Stewart's “Foot Loose And Fance Free” On Amazon Click Below: Rod Stewart's "Foot Loose And Fancy Free" To Purchase Shout It Out Loudcast's KISS Book “Raise Your Glasses: A Celebration Of 50 Years of KISS Songs By Celebrities, Musicians & Fans Please Click Below: Raise Your Glasses Book For all things Shout It Out Loudcast check out our amazing website by clicking below: www.ShoutItOutLoudcast.com Interested in more Shout It Out Loudcast content? Care to help us out? Come join us on Patreon by clicking below: SIOL Patreon Get all your Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise by clicking below: Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise at AMAZON Shop At Our Amazon Store by clicking below: Shout It Out Loudcast Amazon Store Please Email us comments or suggestions by clicking below: ShoutItOutLoudcast@Gmail.com Please subscribe to us and give us a 5 Star (Child) review on the following places below: iTunes Podchaser Stitcher iHeart Radio Spotify Please follow us and like our social media pages clicking below: Twitter Facebook Page Facebook Group Page Shout It Out Loudcasters Instagram YouTube Proud Member of the Pantheon Podcast click below to see the website: Pantheon Podcast Network Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Album Review Crew Episode 56 "Foot Loose & Fancy Free"

Sullivan Street : A Counting Crows Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 28, 2024 159:38

E23: James Campion Interview

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 15, 2024 84:32

Music Journalist James Campion joins the show!Crows fans probably know James best from co-hosting "The Underwater Sunshine Podcast" with Adam. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/underwater-sunshine/id1342102809He also helps organize the Underwater Sunshine festival in NYC every year (held this year October 18/19). https://underwatersunshinefest.com/Join us, as he talks about all things Underwater, what makes the Crows special compared to other rock and roll bands, his history in journalism, and...yes....even gives us an update on "the (legendary) Crows book". https://www.jamescampion.com/https://twitter.com/FearNoArt

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Episode 171: “Hey Jude” by the Beatles

A History Of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 17, 2023

Episode 171 looks at "Hey Jude", the White Album, and the career of the Beatles from August 1967 through November 1968. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifty-seven-minute bonus episode available, on "I Love You" by People!. 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/ Errata Not really an error, but at one point I refer to Ornette Coleman as a saxophonist. While he was, he plays trumpet on the track that is excerpted after that. Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of songs by the Beatles. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them. All my Beatles episodes refer to: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For this episode, I also referred to Last Interview by David Sheff, a longform interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from shortly before Lennon's death; Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, an authorised biography of Paul McCartney; and Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey. This time I also used Steve Turner's The Beatles: The Stories Behind the Songs 1967-1970. I referred to Philip Norman's biographies of John Lennon, George Harrison, and Paul McCartney, to Graeme Thomson's biography of George Harrison, Take a Sad Song by James Campion, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life by Donald Brackett, Those Were the Days 2.0 by Stephan Granados, and Sound Pictures by Kenneth Womack. Sadly the only way to get the single mix of “Hey Jude” is on this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but a remixed stereo mix is easily available on the new reissue of the 1967-70 compilation. The original mixes of the White Album are also, shockingly, out of print, but this 2018 remix is available for the moment. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, a quick note -- this episode deals, among other topics, with child abandonment, spousal neglect, suicide attempts, miscarriage, rape accusations, and heroin addiction. If any of those topics are likely to upset you, you might want to check the transcript rather than listening to this episode. It also, for once, contains a short excerpt of an expletive, but given that that expletive in that context has been regularly played on daytime radio without complaint for over fifty years, I suspect it can be excused. The use of mantra meditation is something that exists across religions, and which appears to have been independently invented multiple times, in multiple cultures. In the Western culture to which most of my listeners belong, it is now best known as an aspect of what is known as "mindfulness", a secularised version of Buddhism which aims to provide adherents with the benefits of the teachings of the Buddha but without the cosmology to which they are attached. But it turns up in almost every religious tradition I know of in one form or another. The idea of mantra meditation is a very simple one, and one that even has some basis in science. There is a mathematical principle in neurology and information science called the free energy principle which says our brains are wired to try to minimise how surprised we are -- our brain is constantly making predictions about the world, and then looking at the results from our senses to see if they match. If they do, that's great, and the brain will happily move on to its next prediction. If they don't, the brain has to update its model of the world to match the new information, make new predictions, and see if those new predictions are a better match. Every person has a different mental model of the world, and none of them match reality, but every brain tries to get as close as possible. This updating of the model to match the new information is called "thinking", and it uses up energy, and our bodies and brains have evolved to conserve energy as much as possible. This means that for many people, most of the time, thinking is unpleasant, and indeed much of the time that people have spent thinking, they've been thinking about how to stop themselves having to do it at all, and when they have managed to stop thinking, however briefly, they've experienced great bliss. Many more or less effective technologies have been created to bring about a more minimal-energy state, including alcohol, heroin, and barbituates, but many of these have unwanted side-effects, such as death, which people also tend to want to avoid, and so people have often turned to another technology. It turns out that for many people, they can avoid thinking by simply thinking about something that is utterly predictable. If they minimise the amount of sensory input, and concentrate on something that they can predict exactly, eventually they can turn off their mind, relax, and float downstream, without dying. One easy way to do this is to close your eyes, so you can't see anything, make your breath as regular as possible, and then concentrate on a sound that repeats over and over. If you repeat a single phrase or word a few hundred times, that regular repetition eventually causes your mind to stop having to keep track of the world, and experience a peace that is, by all accounts, unlike any other experience. What word or phrase that is can depend very much on the tradition. In Transcendental Meditation, each person has their own individual phrase. In the Catholicism in which George Harrison and Paul McCartney were raised, popular phrases for this are "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner" or "Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you; blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen." In some branches of Buddhism, a popular mantra is "_NAMU MYŌHŌ RENGE KYŌ_". In the Hinduism to which George Harrison later converted, you can use "Hare Krishna Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna Hare Hare, Hare Rama Hare Rama, Rama Rama Hare Hare", "Om Namo Bhagavate Vāsudevāya" or "Om Gam Ganapataye Namaha". Those last two start with the syllable "Om", and indeed some people prefer to just use that syllable, repeating a single syllable over and over again until they reach a state of transcendence. [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Jude" ("na na na na na na na")] We don't know much about how the Beatles first discovered Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, except that it was thanks to Pattie Boyd, George Harrison's then-wife. Unfortunately, her memory of how she first became involved in the Maharishi's Spiritual Regeneration Movement, as described in her autobiography, doesn't fully line up with other known facts. She talks about reading about the Maharishi in the paper with her friend Marie-Lise while George was away on tour, but she also places the date that this happened in February 1967, several months after the Beatles had stopped touring forever. We'll be seeing a lot more of these timing discrepancies as this story progresses, and people's memories increasingly don't match the events that happened to them. Either way, it's clear that Pattie became involved in the Spiritual Regeneration Movement a good length of time before her husband did. She got him to go along with her to one of the Maharishi's lectures, after she had already been converted to the practice of Transcendental Meditation, and they brought along John, Paul, and their partners (Ringo's wife Maureen had just given birth, so they didn't come). As we heard back in episode one hundred and fifty, that lecture was impressive enough that the group, plus their wives and girlfriends (with the exception of Maureen Starkey) and Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, all went on a meditation retreat with the Maharishi at a holiday camp in Bangor, and it was there that they learned that Brian Epstein had been found dead. The death of the man who had guided the group's career could not have come at a worse time for the band's stability. The group had only recorded one song in the preceding two months -- Paul's "Your Mother Should Know" -- and had basically been running on fumes since completing recording of Sgt Pepper many months earlier. John's drug intake had increased to the point that he was barely functional -- although with the enthusiasm of the newly converted he had decided to swear off LSD at the Maharishi's urging -- and his marriage was falling apart. Similarly, Paul McCartney's relationship with Jane Asher was in a bad state, though both men were trying to repair their damaged relationships, while both George and Ringo were having doubts about the band that had made them famous. In George's case, he was feeling marginalised by John and Paul, his songs ignored or paid cursory attention, and there was less for him to do on the records as the group moved away from making guitar-based rock and roll music into the stranger areas of psychedelia. And Ringo, whose main memory of the recording of Sgt Pepper was of learning to play chess while the others went through the extensive overdubs that characterised that album, was starting to feel like his playing was deteriorating, and that as the only non-writer in the band he was on the outside to an extent. On top of that, the group were in the middle of a major plan to restructure their business. As part of their contract renegotiations with EMI at the beginning of 1967, it had been agreed that they would receive two million pounds -- roughly fifteen million pounds in today's money -- in unpaid royalties as a lump sum. If that had been paid to them as individuals, or through the company they owned, the Beatles Ltd, they would have had to pay the full top rate of tax on it, which as George had complained the previous year was over ninety-five percent. (In fact, he'd been slightly exaggerating the generosity of the UK tax system to the rich, as at that point the top rate of income tax was somewhere around ninety-seven and a half percent). But happily for them, a couple of years earlier the UK had restructured its tax laws and introduced a corporation tax, which meant that the profits of corporations were no longer taxed at the same high rate as income. So a new company had been set up, The Beatles & Co, and all the group's non-songwriting income was paid into the company. Each Beatle owned five percent of the company, and the other eighty percent was owned by a new partnership, a corporation that was soon renamed Apple Corps -- a name inspired by a painting that McCartney had liked by the artist Rene Magritte. In the early stages of Apple, it was very entangled with Nems, the company that was owned by Brian and Clive Epstein, and which was in the process of being sold to Robert Stigwood, though that sale fell through after Brian's death. The first part of Apple, Apple Publishing, had been set up in the summer of 1967, and was run by Terry Doran, a friend of Epstein's who ran a motor dealership -- most of the Apple divisions would be run by friends of the group rather than by people with experience in the industries in question. As Apple was set up during the point that Stigwood was getting involved with NEMS, Apple Publishing's initial offices were in the same building with, and shared staff with, two publishing companies that Stigwood owned, Dratleaf Music, who published Cream's songs, and Abigail Music, the Bee Gees' publishers. And indeed the first two songs published by Apple were copyrights that were gifted to the company by Stigwood -- "Listen to the Sky", a B-side by an obscure band called Sands: [Excerpt: Sands, "Listen to the Sky"] And "Outside Woman Blues", an arrangement by Eric Clapton of an old blues song by Blind Joe Reynolds, which Cream had copyrighted separately and released on Disraeli Gears: [Excerpt: Cream, "Outside Woman Blues"] But Apple soon started signing outside songwriters -- once Mike Berry, a member of Apple Publishing's staff, had sat McCartney down and explained to him what music publishing actually was, something he had never actually understood even though he'd been a songwriter for five years. Those songwriters, given that this was 1967, were often also performers, and as Apple Records had not yet been set up, Apple would try to arrange recording contracts for them with other labels. They started with a group called Focal Point, who got signed by badgering Paul McCartney to listen to their songs until he gave them Doran's phone number to shut them up: [Excerpt: Focal Point, "Sycamore Sid"] But the big early hope for Apple Publishing was a songwriter called George Alexander. Alexander's birth name had been Alexander Young, and he was the brother of George Young, who was a member of the Australian beat group The Easybeats, who'd had a hit with "Friday on My Mind": [Excerpt: The Easybeats, "Friday on My Mind"] His younger brothers Malcolm and Angus would go on to have a few hits themselves, but AC/DC wouldn't be formed for another five years. Terry Doran thought that Alexander should be a member of a band, because bands were more popular than solo artists at the time, and so he was placed with three former members of Tony Rivers and the Castaways, a Beach Boys soundalike group that had had some minor success. John Lennon suggested that the group be named Grapefruit, after a book he was reading by a conceptual artist of his acquaintance named Yoko Ono, and as Doran was making arrangements with Terry Melcher for a reciprocal publishing deal by which Melcher's American company would publish Apple songs in the US while Apple published songs from Melcher's company in the UK, it made sense for Melcher to also produce Grapefruit's first single, "Dear Delilah": [Excerpt: Grapefruit, "Dear Delilah"] That made number twenty-one in the UK when it came out in early 1968, on the back of publicity about Grapefruit's connection with the Beatles, but future singles by the band were much less successful, and like several other acts involved with Apple, they found that they were more hampered by the Beatles connection than helped. A few other people were signed to Apple Publishing early on, of whom the most notable was Jackie Lomax. Lomax had been a member of a minor Merseybeat group, the Undertakers, and after they had split up, he'd been signed by Brian Epstein with a new group, the Lomax Alliance, who had released one single, "Try as You May": [Excerpt: The Lomax Alliance, "Try As You May"] After Epstein's death, Lomax had plans to join another band, being formed by another Merseybeat musician, Chris Curtis, the former drummer of the Searchers. But after going to the Beatles to talk with them about them helping the new group financially, Lomax was persuaded by John Lennon to go solo instead. He may later have regretted that decision, as by early 1968 the people that Curtis had recruited for his new band had ditched him and were making a name for themselves as Deep Purple. Lomax recorded one solo single with funding from Stigwood, a cover version of a song by an obscure singer-songwriter, Jake Holmes, "Genuine Imitation Life": [Excerpt: Jackie Lomax, "Genuine Imitation Life"] But he was also signed to Apple Publishing as a songwriter. The Beatles had only just started laying out plans for Apple when Epstein died, and other than the publishing company one of the few things they'd agreed on was that they were going to have a film company, which was to be run by Denis O'Dell, who had been an associate producer on A Hard Day's Night and on How I Won The War, the Richard Lester film Lennon had recently starred in. A few days after Epstein's death, they had a meeting, in which they agreed that the band needed to move forward quickly if they were going to recover from Epstein's death. They had originally been planning on going to India with the Maharishi to study meditation, but they decided to put that off until the new year, and to press forward with a film project Paul had been talking about, to be titled Magical Mystery Tour. And so, on the fifth of September 1967, they went back into the recording studio and started work on a song of John's that was earmarked for the film, "I am the Walrus": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] Magical Mystery Tour, the film, has a mixed reputation which we will talk about shortly, but one defence that Paul McCartney has always made of it is that it's the only place where you can see the Beatles performing "I am the Walrus". While the song was eventually relegated to a B-side, it's possibly the finest B-side of the Beatles' career, and one of the best tracks the group ever made. As with many of Lennon's songs from this period, the song was a collage of many different elements pulled from his environment and surroundings, and turned into something that was rather more than the sum of its parts. For its musical inspiration, Lennon pulled from, of all things, a police siren going past his house. (For those who are unfamiliar with what old British police sirens sounded like, as opposed to the ones in use for most of my lifetime or in other countries, here's a recording of one): [Excerpt: British police siren ca 1968] That inspired Lennon to write a snatch of lyric to go with the sound of the siren, starting "Mister city policeman sitting pretty". He had two other song fragments, one about sitting in the garden, and one about sitting on a cornflake, and he told Hunter Davies, who was doing interviews for his authorised biography of the group, “I don't know how it will all end up. Perhaps they'll turn out to be different parts of the same song.” But the final element that made these three disparate sections into a song was a letter that came from Stephen Bayley, a pupil at Lennon's old school Quarry Bank, who told him that the teachers at the school -- who Lennon always thought of as having suppressed his creativity -- were now analysing Beatles lyrics in their lessons. Lennon decided to come up with some nonsense that they couldn't analyse -- though as nonsensical as the finished song is, there's an underlying anger to a lot of it that possibly comes from Lennon thinking of his school experiences. And so Lennon asked his old schoolfriend Pete Shotton to remind him of a disgusting playground chant that kids used to sing in schools in the North West of England (and which they still sang with very minor variations at my own school decades later -- childhood folklore has a remarkably long life). That rhyme went: Yellow matter custard, green snot pie All mixed up with a dead dog's eye Slap it on a butty, nice and thick, And drink it down with a cup of cold sick Lennon combined some parts of this with half-remembered fragments of Lewis Carrol's The Walrus and the Carpenter, and with some punning references to things that were going on in his own life and those of his friends -- though it's difficult to know exactly which of the stories attached to some of the more incomprehensible bits of the lyrics are accurate. The story that the line "I am the eggman" is about a sexual proclivity of Eric Burdon of the Animals seems plausible, while the contention by some that the phrase "semolina pilchard" is a reference to Sgt Pilcher, the corrupt policeman who had arrested three of the Rolling Stones, and would later arrest Lennon, on drugs charges, seems less likely. The track is a masterpiece of production, but the release of the basic take on Anthology 2 in 1996 showed that the underlying performance, before George Martin worked his magic with the overdubs, is still a remarkable piece of work: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus (Anthology 2 version)"] But Martin's arrangement and production turned the track from a merely very good track into a masterpiece. The string arrangement, very much in the same mould as that for "Strawberry Fields Forever" but giving a very different effect with its harsh cello glissandi, is the kind of thing one expects from Martin, but there's also the chanting of the Mike Sammes Singers, who were more normally booked for sessions like Englebert Humperdinck's "The Last Waltz": [Excerpt: Engelbert Humperdinck, "The Last Waltz"] But here were instead asked to imitate the sound of the strings, make grunting noises, and generally go very far out of their normal comfort zone: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] But the most fascinating piece of production in the entire track is an idea that seems to have been inspired by people like John Cage -- a live feed of a radio being tuned was played into the mono mix from about the halfway point, and whatever was on the radio at the time was captured: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] This is also why for many decades it was impossible to have a true stereo mix of the track -- the radio part was mixed directly into the mono mix, and it wasn't until the 1990s that someone thought to track down a copy of the original radio broadcasts and recreate the process. In one of those bits of synchronicity that happen more often than you would think when you're creating aleatory art, and which are why that kind of process can be so appealing, one bit of dialogue from the broadcast of King Lear that was on the radio as the mixing was happening was *perfectly* timed: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I am the Walrus"] After completing work on the basic track for "I am the Walrus", the group worked on two more songs for the film, George's "Blue Jay Way" and a group-composed twelve-bar blues instrumental called "Flying", before starting production. Magical Mystery Tour, as an idea, was inspired in equal parts by Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, the collective of people we talked about in the episode on the Grateful Dead who travelled across the US extolling the virtues of psychedelic drugs, and by mystery tours, a British working-class tradition that has rather fallen out of fashion in the intervening decades. A mystery tour would generally be put on by a coach-hire company, and would be a day trip to an unannounced location -- though the location would in fact be very predictable, and would be a seaside town within a couple of hours' drive of its starting point. In the case of the ones the Beatles remembered from their own childhoods, this would be to a coastal town in Lancashire or Wales, like Blackpool, Rhyl, or Prestatyn. A coachload of people would pay to be driven to this random location, get very drunk and have a singsong on the bus, and spend a day wherever they were taken. McCartney's plan was simple -- they would gather a group of passengers and replicate this experience over the course of several days, and film whatever went on, but intersperse that with more planned out sketches and musical numbers. For this reason, along with the Beatles and their associates, the cast included some actors found through Spotlight and some of the group's favourite performers, like the comedian Nat Jackley (whose comedy sequence directed by John was cut from the final film) and the surrealist poet/singer/comedian Ivor Cutler: [Excerpt: Ivor Cutler, "I'm Going in a Field"] The film also featured an appearance by a new band who would go on to have great success over the next year, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. They had recorded their first single in Abbey Road at the same time as the Beatles were recording Revolver, but rather than being progressive psychedelic rock, it had been a remake of a 1920s novelty song: [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, "My Brother Makes the Noises For the Talkies"] Their performance in Magical Mystery Tour was very different though -- they played a fifties rock pastiche written by band leaders Vivian Stanshall and Neil Innes while a stripper took off her clothes. While several other musical sequences were recorded for the film, including one by the band Traffic and one by Cutler, other than the Beatles tracks only the Bonzos' song made it into the finished film: [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, "Death Cab for Cutie"] That song, thirty years later, would give its name to a prominent American alternative rock band. Incidentally the same night that Magical Mystery Tour was first broadcast was also the night that the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band first appeared on a TV show, Do Not Adjust Your Set, which featured three future members of the Monty Python troupe -- Eric Idle, Michael Palin, and Terry Jones. Over the years the careers of the Bonzos, the Pythons, and the Beatles would become increasingly intertwined, with George Harrison in particular striking up strong friendships and working relationships with Bonzos Neil Innes and "Legs" Larry Smith. The filming of Magical Mystery Tour went about as well as one might expect from a film made by four directors, none of whom had any previous filmmaking experience, and none of whom had any business knowledge. The Beatles were used to just turning up and having things magically done for them by other people, and had no real idea of the infrastructure challenges that making a film, even a low-budget one, actually presents, and ended up causing a great deal of stress to almost everyone involved. The completed film was shown on TV on Boxing Day 1967 to general confusion and bemusement. It didn't help that it was originally broadcast in black and white, and so for example the scene showing shifting landscapes (outtake footage from Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, tinted various psychedelic colours) over the "Flying" music, just looked like grey fuzz. But also, it just wasn't what people were expecting from a Beatles film. This was a ramshackle, plotless, thing more inspired by Andy Warhol's underground films than by the kind of thing the group had previously appeared in, and it was being presented as Christmas entertainment for all the family. And to be honest, it's not even a particularly good example of underground filmmaking -- though it looks like a masterpiece when placed next to something like the Bee Gees' similar effort, Cucumber Castle. But there are enough interesting sequences in there for the project not to be a complete failure -- and the deleted scenes on the DVD release, including the performances by Cutler and Traffic, and the fact that the film was edited down from ten hours to fifty-two minutes, makes one wonder if there's a better film that could be constructed from the original footage. Either way, the reaction to the film was so bad that McCartney actually appeared on David Frost's TV show the next day to defend it and, essentially, apologise. While they were editing the film, the group were also continuing to work in the studio, including on two new McCartney songs, "The Fool on the Hill", which was included in Magical Mystery Tour, and "Hello Goodbye", which wasn't included on the film's soundtrack but was released as the next single, with "I Am the Walrus" as the B-side: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hello Goodbye"] Incidentally, in the UK the soundtrack to Magical Mystery Tour was released as a double-EP rather than as an album (in the US, the group's recent singles and B-sides were added to turn it into a full-length album, which is how it's now generally available). "I Am the Walrus" was on the double-EP as well as being on the single's B-side, and the double-EP got to number two on the singles charts, meaning "I am the Walrus" was on the records at number one and number two at the same time. Before it became obvious that the film, if not the soundtrack, was a disaster, the group held a launch party on the twenty-first of December, 1967. The band members went along in fancy dress, as did many of the cast and crew -- the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band performed at the party. Mike Love and Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys also turned up at the party, and apparently at one point jammed with the Bonzos, and according to some, but not all, reports, a couple of the Beatles joined in as well. Love and Johnston had both just met the Maharishi for the first time a couple of days earlier, and Love had been as impressed as the Beatles were, and it may have been at this party that the group mentioned to Love that they would soon be going on a retreat in India with the guru -- a retreat that was normally meant for training TM instructors, but this time seemed to be more about getting celebrities involved. Love would also end up going with them. That party was also the first time that Cynthia Lennon had an inkling that John might not be as faithful to her as she previously supposed. John had always "joked" about being attracted to George Harrison's wife, Patti, but this time he got a little more blatant about his attraction than he ever had previously, to the point that he made Cynthia cry, and Cynthia's friend, the pop star Lulu, decided to give Lennon a very public dressing-down for his cruelty to his wife, a dressing-down that must have been a sight to behold, as Lennon was dressed as a Teddy boy while Lulu was in a Shirley Temple costume. It's a sign of how bad the Lennons' marriage was at this point that this was the second time in a two-month period where Cynthia had ended up crying because of John at a film launch party and been comforted by a female pop star. In October, Cilla Black had held a party to celebrate the belated release of John's film How I Won the War, and during the party Georgie Fame had come up to Black and said, confused, "Cynthia Lennon is hiding in your wardrobe". Black went and had a look, and Cynthia explained to her “I'm waiting to see how long it is before John misses me and comes looking for me.” Black's response had been “You'd better face it, kid—he's never gonna come.” Also at the Magical Mystery Tour party was Lennon's father, now known as Freddie Lennon, and his new nineteen-year-old fiancee. While Hunter Davis had been researching the Beatles' biography, he'd come across some evidence that the version of Freddie's attitude towards John that his mother's side of the family had always told him -- that Freddie had been a cruel and uncaring husband who had not actually wanted to be around his son -- might not be the whole of the truth, and that the mother who he had thought of as saintly might also have had some part to play in their marriage breaking down and Freddie not seeing his son for twenty years. The two had made some tentative attempts at reconciliation, and indeed Freddie would even come and live with John for a while, though within a couple of years the younger Lennon's heart would fully harden against his father again. Of course, the things that John always resented his father for were pretty much exactly the kind of things that Lennon himself was about to do. It was around this time as well that Derek Taylor gave the Beatles copies of the debut album by a young singer/songwriter named Harry Nilsson. Nilsson will be getting his own episode down the line, but not for a couple of years at my current rates, so it's worth bringing that up here, because that album became a favourite of all the Beatles, and would have a huge influence on their songwriting for the next couple of years, and because one song on the album, "1941", must have resonated particularly deeply with Lennon right at this moment -- an autobiographical song by Nilsson about how his father had left him and his mother when he was a small boy, and about his own fear that, as his first marriage broke down, he was repeating the pattern with his stepson Scott: [Excerpt: Nilsson, "1941"] The other major event of December 1967, rather overshadowed by the Magical Mystery Tour disaster the next day, was that on Christmas Day Paul McCartney and Jane Asher announced their engagement. A few days later, George Harrison flew to India. After John and Paul had had their outside film projects -- John starring in How I Won The War and Paul doing the soundtrack for The Family Way -- the other two Beatles more or less simultaneously did their own side project films, and again one acted while the other did a soundtrack. Both of these projects were in the rather odd subgenre of psychedelic shambolic comedy film that sprang up in the mid sixties, a subgenre that produced a lot of fascinating films, though rather fewer good ones. Indeed, both of them were in the subsubgenre of shambolic psychedelic *sex* comedies. In Ringo's case, he had a small role in the film Candy, which was based on the novel we mentioned in the last episode, co-written by Terry Southern, which was in itself a loose modern rewriting of Voltaire's Candide. Unfortunately, like such other classics of this subgenre as Anthony Newley's Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?, Candy has dated *extremely* badly, and unless you find repeated scenes of sexual assault and rape, ethnic stereotypes, and jokes about deformity and disfigurement to be an absolute laugh riot, it's not a film that's worth seeking out, and Starr's part in it is not a major one. Harrison's film was of the same basic genre -- a film called Wonderwall about a mad scientist who discovers a way to see through the walls of his apartment, and gets to see a photographer taking sexy photographs of a young woman named Penny Lane, played by Jane Birkin: [Excerpt: Some Wonderwall film dialogue ripped from the Blu-Ray] Wonderwall would, of course, later inspire the title of a song by Oasis, and that's what the film is now best known for, but it's a less-unwatchable film than Candy, and while still problematic it's less so. Which is something. Harrison had been the Beatle with least involvement in Magical Mystery Tour -- McCartney had been the de facto director, Starr had been the lead character and the only one with much in the way of any acting to do, and Lennon had written the film's standout scene and its best song, and had done a little voiceover narration. Harrison, by contrast, barely has anything to do in the film apart from the one song he contributed, "Blue Jay Way", and he said of the project “I had no idea what was happening and maybe I didn't pay enough attention because my problem, basically, was that I was in another world, I didn't really belong; I was just an appendage.” He'd expressed his discomfort to his friend Joe Massot, who was about to make his first feature film. Massot had got to know Harrison during the making of his previous film, Reflections on Love, a mostly-silent short which had starred Harrison's sister-in-law Jenny Boyd, and which had been photographed by Robert Freeman, who had been the photographer for the Beatles' album covers from With the Beatles through Rubber Soul, and who had taken most of the photos that Klaus Voorman incorporated into the cover of Revolver (and whose professional association with the Beatles seemed to come to an end around the same time he discovered that Lennon had been having an affair with his wife). Massot asked Harrison to write the music for the film, and told Harrison he would have complete free rein to make whatever music he wanted, so long as it fit the timing of the film, and so Harrison decided to create a mixture of Western rock music and the Indian music he loved. Harrison started recording the music at the tail end of 1967, with sessions with several London-based Indian musicians and John Barham, an orchestrator who had worked with Ravi Shankar on Shankar's collaborations with Western musicians, including the Alice in Wonderland soundtrack we talked about in the "All You Need is Love" episode. For the Western music, he used the Remo Four, a Merseybeat group who had been on the scene even before the Beatles, and which contained a couple of classmates of Paul McCartney, but who had mostly acted as backing musicians for other artists. They'd backed Johnny Sandon, the former singer with the Searchers, on a couple of singles, before becoming the backing band for Tommy Quickly, a NEMS artist who was unsuccessful despite starting his career with a Lennon/McCartney song, "Tip of My Tongue": [Excerpt: Tommy Quickly, "Tip of My Tongue"] The Remo Four would later, after a lineup change, become Ashton, Gardner and Dyke, who would become one-hit wonders in the seventies, and during the Wonderwall sessions they recorded a song that went unreleased at the time, and which would later go on to be rerecorded by Ashton, Gardner, and Dyke. "In the First Place" also features Harrison on backing vocals and possibly guitar, and was not submitted for the film because Harrison didn't believe that Massot wanted any vocal tracks, but the recording was later discovered and used in a revised director's cut of the film in the nineties: [Excerpt: The Remo Four, "In the First Place"] But for the most part the Remo Four were performing instrumentals written by Harrison. They weren't the only Western musicians performing on the sessions though -- Peter Tork of the Monkees dropped by these sessions and recorded several short banjo solos, which were used in the film soundtrack but not in the soundtrack album (presumably because Tork was contracted to another label): [Excerpt: Peter Tork, "Wonderwall banjo solo"] Another musician who was under contract to another label was Eric Clapton, who at the time was playing with The Cream, and who vaguely knew Harrison and so joined in for the track "Ski-ing", playing lead guitar under the cunning, impenetrable, pseudonym "Eddie Clayton", with Harrison on sitar, Starr on drums, and session guitarist Big Jim Sullivan on bass: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "Ski-ing"] But the bulk of the album was recorded in EMI's studios in the city that is now known as Mumbai but at the time was called Bombay. The studio facilities in India had up to that point only had a mono tape recorder, and Bhaskar Menon, one of the top executives at EMI's Indian division and later the head of EMI music worldwide, personally brought the first stereo tape recorder to the studio to aid in Harrison's recording. The music was all composed by Harrison and performed by the Indian musicians, and while Harrison was composing in an Indian mode, the musicians were apparently fascinated by how Western it sounded to them: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "Microbes"] While he was there, Harrison also got the instrumentalists to record another instrumental track, which wasn't to be used for the film: [Excerpt: George Harrison, "The Inner Light (instrumental)"] That track would, instead, become part of what was to be Harrison's first composition to make a side of a Beatles single. After John and George had appeared on the David Frost show talking about the Maharishi, in September 1967, George had met a lecturer in Sanskrit named Juan Mascaró, who wrote to Harrison enclosing a book he'd compiled of translations of religious texts, telling him he'd admired "Within You Without You" and thought it would be interesting if Harrison set something from the Tao Te Ching to music. He suggested a text that, in his translation, read: "Without going out of my door I can know all things on Earth Without looking out of my window I can know the ways of heaven For the farther one travels, the less one knows The sage, therefore Arrives without travelling Sees all without looking Does all without doing" Harrison took that text almost verbatim, though he created a second verse by repeating the first few lines with "you" replacing "I" -- concerned that listeners might think he was just talking about himself, and wouldn't realise it was a more general statement -- and he removed the "the sage, therefore" and turned the last few lines into imperative commands rather than declarative statements: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "The Inner Light"] The song has come in for some criticism over the years as being a little Orientalist, because in critics' eyes it combines Chinese philosophy with Indian music, as if all these things are equally "Eastern" and so all the same really. On the other hand there's a good argument that an English songwriter taking a piece of writing written in Chinese and translated into English by a Spanish man and setting it to music inspired by Indian musical modes is a wonderful example of cultural cross-pollination. As someone who's neither Chinese nor Indian I wouldn't want to take a stance on it, but clearly the other Beatles were impressed by it -- they put it out as the B-side to their next single, even though the only Beatles on it are Harrison and McCartney, with the latter adding a small amount of harmony vocal: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "The Inner Light"] And it wasn't because the group were out of material. They were planning on going to Rishikesh to study with the Maharishi, and wanted to get a single out for release while they were away, and so in one week they completed the vocal overdubs on "The Inner Light" and recorded three other songs, two by John and one by Paul. All three of the group's songwriters brought in songs that were among their best. John's first contribution was a song whose lyrics he later described as possibly the best he ever wrote, "Across the Universe". He said the lyrics were “purely inspirational and were given to me as boom! I don't own it, you know; it came through like that … Such an extraordinary meter and I can never repeat it! It's not a matter of craftsmanship, it wrote itself. It drove me out of bed. I didn't want to write it … It's like being possessed, like a psychic or a medium.” But while Lennon liked the song, he was never happy with the recording of it. They tried all sorts of things to get the sound he heard in his head, including bringing in some fans who were hanging around outside to sing backing vocals. He said of the track "I was singing out of tune and instead of getting a decent choir, we got fans from outside, Apple Scruffs or whatever you call them. They came in and were singing all off-key. Nobody was interested in doing the tune originally.” [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Across the Universe"] The "jai guru deva" chorus there is the first reference to the teachings of the Maharishi in one of the Beatles' records -- Guru Dev was the Maharishi's teacher, and the phrase "Jai guru dev" is a Sanskrit one which I've seen variously translated as "victory to the great teacher", and "hail to the greatness within you". Lennon would say shortly before his death “The Beatles didn't make a good record out of it. I think subconsciously sometimes we – I say ‘we' though I think Paul did it more than the rest of us – Paul would sort of subconsciously try and destroy a great song … Usually we'd spend hours doing little detailed cleaning-ups of Paul's songs, when it came to mine, especially if it was a great song like ‘Strawberry Fields' or ‘Across The Universe', somehow this atmosphere of looseness and casualness and experimentation would creep in … It was a _lousy_ track of a great song and I was so disappointed by it …The guitars are out of tune and I'm singing out of tune because I'm psychologically destroyed and nobody's supporting me or helping me with it, and the song was never done properly.” Of course, this is only Lennon's perception, and it's one that the other participants would disagree with. George Martin, in particular, was always rather hurt by the implication that Lennon's songs had less attention paid to them, and he would always say that the problem was that Lennon in the studio would always say "yes, that's great", and only later complain that it hadn't been what he wanted. No doubt McCartney did put in more effort on his own songs than on Lennon's -- everyone has a bias towards their own work, and McCartney's only human -- but personally I suspect that a lot of the problem comes down to the two men having very different personalities. McCartney had very strong ideas about his own work and would drive the others insane with his nitpicky attention to detail. Lennon had similarly strong ideas, but didn't have the attention span to put the time and effort in to force his vision on others, and didn't have the technical knowledge to express his ideas in words they'd understand. He expected Martin and the other Beatles to work miracles, and they did -- but not the miracles he would have worked. That track was, rather than being chosen for the next single, given to Spike Milligan, who happened to be visiting the studio and was putting together an album for the environmental charity the World Wildlife Fund. The album was titled "No One's Gonna Change Our World": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Across the Universe"] That track is historic in another way -- it would be the last time that George Harrison would play sitar on a Beatles record, and it effectively marks the end of the period of psychedelia and Indian influence that had started with "Norwegian Wood" three years earlier, and which many fans consider their most creative period. Indeed, shortly after the recording, Harrison would give up the sitar altogether and stop playing it. He loved sitar music as much as he ever had, and he still thought that Indian classical music spoke to him in ways he couldn't express, and he continued to be friends with Ravi Shankar for the rest of his life, and would only become more interested in Indian religious thought. But as he spent time with Shankar he realised he would never be as good on the sitar as he hoped. He said later "I thought, 'Well, maybe I'm better off being a pop singer-guitar-player-songwriter – whatever-I'm-supposed-to-be' because I've seen a thousand sitar-players in India who are twice as better as I'll ever be. And only one of them Ravi thought was going to be a good player." We don't have a precise date for when it happened -- I suspect it was in June 1968, so a few months after the "Across the Universe" recording -- but Shankar told Harrison that rather than try to become a master of a music that he hadn't encountered until his twenties, perhaps he should be making the music that was his own background. And as Harrison put it "I realised that was riding my bike down a street in Liverpool and hearing 'Heartbreak Hotel' coming out of someone's house.": [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "Heartbreak Hotel"] In early 1968 a lot of people seemed to be thinking along the same lines, as if Christmas 1967 had been the flick of a switch and instead of whimsy and ornamentation, the thing to do was to make music that was influenced by early rock and roll. In the US the Band and Bob Dylan were making music that was consciously shorn of all studio experimentation, while in the UK there was a revival of fifties rock and roll. In April 1968 both "Peggy Sue" and "Rock Around the Clock" reentered the top forty in the UK, and the Who were regularly including "Summertime Blues" in their sets. Fifties nostalgia, which would make occasional comebacks for at least the next forty years, was in its first height, and so it's not surprising that Paul McCartney's song, "Lady Madonna", which became the A-side of the next single, has more than a little of the fifties about it. Of course, the track isn't *completely* fifties in its origins -- one of the inspirations for the track seems to have been the Rolling Stones' then-recent hit "Let's Spend The Night Together": [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Let's Spend the Night Together"] But the main source for the song's music -- and for the sound of the finished record -- seems to have been Johnny Parker's piano part on Humphrey Lyttleton's "Bad Penny Blues", a hit single engineered by Joe Meek in the fifties: [Excerpt: Humphrey Lyttleton, "Bad Penny Blues"] That song seems to have been on the group's mind for a while, as a working title for "With a Little Help From My Friends" had at one point been "Bad Finger Blues" -- a title that would later give the name to a band on Apple. McCartney took Parker's piano part as his inspiration, and as he later put it “‘Lady Madonna' was me sitting down at the piano trying to write a bluesy boogie-woogie thing. I got my left hand doing an arpeggio thing with the chord, an ascending boogie-woogie left hand, then a descending right hand. I always liked that, the juxtaposition of a line going down meeting a line going up." [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Lady Madonna"] That idea, incidentally, is an interesting reversal of what McCartney had done on "Hello, Goodbye", where the bass line goes down while the guitar moves up -- the two lines moving away from each other: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hello Goodbye"] Though that isn't to say there's no descending bass in "Lady Madonna" -- the bridge has a wonderful sequence where the bass just *keeps* *descending*: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Lady Madonna"] Lyrically, McCartney was inspired by a photo in National Geographic of a woman in Malaysia, captioned “Mountain Madonna: with one child at her breast and another laughing into her face, sees her quality of life threatened.” But as he put it “The people I was brought up amongst were often Catholic; there are lots of Catholics in Liverpool because of the Irish connection and they are often religious. When they have a baby I think they see a big connection between themselves and the Virgin Mary with her baby. So the original concept was the Virgin Mary but it quickly became symbolic of every woman; the Madonna image but as applied to ordinary working class woman. It's really a tribute to the mother figure, it's a tribute to women.” Musically though, the song was more a tribute to the fifties -- while the inspiration had been a skiffle hit by Humphrey Lyttleton, as soon as McCartney started playing it he'd thought of Fats Domino, and the lyric reflects that to an extent -- just as Domino's "Blue Monday" details the days of the week for a weary working man who only gets to enjoy himself on Saturday night, "Lady Madonna"'s lyrics similarly look at the work a mother has to do every day -- though as McCartney later noted "I was writing the words out to learn it for an American TV show and I realised I missed out Saturday ... So I figured it must have been a real night out." The vocal was very much McCartney doing a Domino impression -- something that wasn't lost on Fats, who cut his own version of the track later that year: [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "Lady Madonna"] The group were so productive at this point, right before the journey to India, that they actually cut another song *while they were making a video for "Lady Madonna"*. They were booked into Abbey Road to film themselves performing the song so it could be played on Top of the Pops while they were away, but instead they decided to use the time to cut a new song -- John had a partially-written song, "Hey Bullfrog", which was roughly the same tempo as "Lady Madonna", so they could finish that up and then re-edit the footage to match the record. The song was quickly finished and became "Hey Bulldog": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Hey Bulldog"] One of Lennon's best songs from this period, "Hey Bulldog" was oddly chosen only to go on the soundtrack of Yellow Submarine. Either the band didn't think much of it because it had come so easily, or it was just assigned to the film because they were planning on being away for several months and didn't have any other projects they were working on. The extent of the group's contribution to the film was minimal – they were not very hands-on, and the film, which was mostly done as an attempt to provide a third feature film for their United Artists contract without them having to do any work, was made by the team that had done the Beatles cartoon on American TV. There's some evidence that they had a small amount of input in the early story stages, but in general they saw the cartoon as an irrelevance to them -- the only things they contributed were the four songs "All Together Now", "It's All Too Much", "Hey Bulldog" and "Only a Northern Song", and a brief filmed appearance for the very end of the film, recorded in January: [Excerpt: Yellow Submarine film end] McCartney also took part in yet another session in early February 1968, one produced by Peter Asher, his fiancee's brother, and former singer with Peter and Gordon. Asher had given up on being a pop star and was trying to get into the business side of music, and he was starting out as a producer, producing a single by Paul Jones, the former lead singer of Manfred Mann. The A-side of the single, "And the Sun Will Shine", was written by the Bee Gees, the band that Robert Stigwood was managing: [Excerpt: Paul Jones, "And the Sun Will Shine"] While the B-side was an original by Jones, "The Dog Presides": [Excerpt: Paul Jones, "The Dog Presides"] Those tracks featured two former members of the Yardbirds, Jeff Beck and Paul Samwell-Smith, on guitar and bass, and Nicky Hopkins on piano. Asher asked McCartney to play drums on both sides of the single, saying later "I always thought he was a great, underrated drummer." McCartney was impressed by Asher's production, and asked him to get involved with the new Apple Records label that would be set up when the group returned from India. Asher eventually became head of A&R for the label. And even before "Lady Madonna" was mixed, the Beatles were off to India. Mal Evans, their roadie, went ahead with all their luggage on the fourteenth of February, so he could sort out transport for them on the other end, and then John and George followed on the fifteenth, with their wives Pattie and Cynthia and Pattie's sister Jenny (John and Cynthia's son Julian had been left with his grandmother while they went -- normally Cynthia wouldn't abandon Julian for an extended period of time, but she saw the trip as a way to repair their strained marriage). Paul and Ringo followed four days later, with Ringo's wife Maureen and Paul's fiancee Jane Asher. The retreat in Rishikesh was to become something of a celebrity affair. Along with the Beatles came their friend the singer-songwriter Donovan, and Donovan's friend and songwriting partner, whose name I'm not going to say here because it's a slur for Romani people, but will be known to any Donovan fans. Donovan at this point was also going through changes. Like the Beatles, he was largely turning away from drug use and towards meditation, and had recently written his hit single "There is a Mountain" based around a saying from Zen Buddhism: [Excerpt: Donovan, "There is a Mountain"] That was from his double-album A Gift From a Flower to a Garden, which had come out in December 1967. But also like John and Paul he was in the middle of the breakdown of a long-term relationship, and while he would remain with his then-partner until 1970, and even have another child with her, he was secretly in love with another woman. In fact he was secretly in love with two other women. One of them, Brian Jones' ex-girlfriend Linda, had moved to LA, become the partner of the singer Gram Parsons, and had appeared in the documentary You Are What You Eat with the Band and Tiny Tim. She had fallen out of touch with Donovan, though she would later become his wife. Incidentally, she had a son to Brian Jones who had been abandoned by his rock-star father -- the son's name is Julian. The other woman with whom Donovan was in love was Jenny Boyd, the sister of George Harrison's wife Pattie. Jenny at the time was in a relationship with Alexis Mardas, a TV repairman and huckster who presented himself as an electronics genius to the Beatles, who nicknamed him Magic Alex, and so she was unavailable, but Donovan had written a song about her, released as a single just before they all went to Rishikesh: [Excerpt: Donovan, "Jennifer Juniper"] Donovan considered himself and George Harrison to be on similar spiritual paths and called Harrison his "spirit-brother", though Donovan was more interested in Buddhism, which Harrison considered a corruption of the more ancient Hinduism, and Harrison encouraged Donovan to read Autobiography of a Yogi. It's perhaps worth noting that Donovan's father had a different take on the subject though, saying "You're not going to study meditation in India, son, you're following that wee lassie Jenny" Donovan and his friend weren't the only other celebrities to come to Rishikesh. The actor Mia Farrow, who had just been through a painful divorce from Frank Sinatra, and had just made Rosemary's Baby, a horror film directed by Roman Polanski with exteriors shot at the Dakota building in New York, arrived with her sister Prudence. Also on the trip was Paul Horn, a jazz saxophonist who had played with many of the greats of jazz, not least of them Duke Ellington, whose Sweet Thursday Horn had played alto sax on: [Excerpt: Duke Ellington, "Zweet Zursday"] Horn was another musician who had been inspired to investigate Indian spirituality and music simultaneously, and the previous year he had recorded an album, "In India," of adaptations of ragas, with Ravi Shankar and Alauddin Khan: [Excerpt: Paul Horn, "Raga Vibhas"] Horn would go on to become one of the pioneers of what would later be termed "New Age" music, combining jazz with music from various non-Western traditions. Horn had also worked as a session musician, and one of the tracks he'd played on was "I Know There's an Answer" from the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds album: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Know There's an Answer"] Mike Love, who co-wrote that track and is one of the lead singers on it, was also in Rishikesh. While as we'll see not all of the celebrities on the trip would remain practitioners of Transcendental Meditation, Love would be profoundly affected by the trip, and remains a vocal proponent of TM to this day. Indeed, his whole band at the time were heavily into TM. While Love was in India, the other Beach Boys were working on the Friends album without him -- Love only appears on four tracks on that album -- and one of the tracks they recorded in his absence was titled "Transcendental Meditation": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Transcendental Meditation"] But the trip would affect Love's songwriting, as it would affect all of the musicians there. One of the few songs on the Friends album on which Love appears is "Anna Lee, the Healer", a song which is lyrically inspired by the trip in the most literal sense, as it's about a masseuse Love met in Rishikesh: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Anna Lee, the Healer"] The musicians in the group all influenced and inspired each other as is likely to happen in such circumstances. Sometimes, it would be a matter of trivial joking, as when the Beatles decided to perform an off-the-cuff song about Guru Dev, and did it in the Beach Boys style: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Spiritual Regeneration"] And that turned partway through into a celebration of Love for his birthday: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Spiritual Regeneration"] Decades later, Love would return the favour, writing a song about Harrison and their time together in Rishikesh. Like Donovan, Love seems to have considered Harrison his "spiritual brother", and he titled the song "Pisces Brothers": [Excerpt: Mike Love, "Pisces Brothers"] The musicians on the trip were also often making suggestions to each other about songs that would become famous for them. The musicians had all brought acoustic guitars, apart obviously from Ringo, who got a set of tabla drums when George ordered some Indian instruments to be delivered. George got a sitar, as at this point he hadn't quite given up on the instrument, and he gave Donovan a tamboura. Donovan started playing a melody on the tamboura, which is normally a drone instrument, inspired by the Scottish folk music he had grown up with, and that became his "Hurdy-Gurdy Man": [Excerpt: Donovan, "Hurdy Gurdy Man"] Harrison actually helped him with the song, writing a final verse inspired by the Maharishi's teachings, but in the studio Donovan's producer Mickie Most told him to cut the verse because the song was overlong, which apparently annoyed Harrison. Donovan includes that verse in his live performances of the song though -- usually while doing a fairly terrible impersonation of Harrison: [Excerpt: Donovan, "Hurdy Gurdy Man (live)"] And similarly, while McCartney was working on a song pastiching Chuck Berry and the Beach Boys, but singing about the USSR rather than the USA, Love suggested to him that for a middle-eight he might want to sing about the girls in the various Soviet regions: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Back in the USSR"] As all the guitarists on the retreat only had acoustic instruments, they were very keen to improve their acoustic playing, and they turned to Donovan, who unlike the rest of them was primarily an acoustic player, and one from a folk background. Donovan taught them the rudiments of Travis picking, the guitar style we talked about way back in the episodes on the Everly Brothers, as well as some of the tunings that had been introduced to British folk music by Davey Graham, giving them a basic grounding in the principles of English folk-baroque guitar, a style that had developed over the previous few years. Donovan has said in his autobiography that Lennon picked the technique up quickly (and that Harrison had already learned Travis picking from Chet Atkins records) but that McCartney didn't have the application to learn the style, though he picked up bits. That seems very unlike anything else I've read anywhere about Lennon and McCartney -- no-one has ever accused Lennon of having a surfeit of application -- and reading Donovan's book he seems to dislike McCartney and like Lennon and Harrison, so possibly that enters into it. But also, it may just be that Lennon was more receptive to Donovan's style at the time. According to McCartney, even before going to Rishikesh Lennon had been in a vaguely folk-music and country mode, and the small number of tapes he'd brought with him to Rishikesh included Buddy Holly, Dylan, and the progressive folk band The Incredible String Band, whose music would be a big influence on both Lennon and McCartney for the next year: [Excerpt: The Incredible String Band, "First Girl I Loved"] According to McCartney Lennon also brought "a tape the singer Jake Thackray had done for him... He was one of the people we bumped into at Abbey Road. John liked his stuff, which he'd heard on television. Lots of wordplay and very suggestive, so very much up John's alley. I was fascinated by his unusual guitar style. John did ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun' as a Jake Thackray thing at one point, as I recall.” Thackray was a British chansonnier, who sang sweetly poignant but also often filthy songs about Yorkshire life, and his humour in particular will have appealed to Lennon. There's a story of Lennon meeting Thackray in Abbey Road and singing the whole of Thackray's song "The Statues", about two drunk men fighting a male statue to defend the honour of a female statue, to him: [Excerpt: Jake Thackray, "The Statues"] Given this was the music that Lennon was listening to, it's unsurprising that he was more receptive to Donovan's lessons, and the new guitar style he learned allowed him to expand his songwriting, at precisely the same time he was largely clean of drugs for the first time in several years, and he started writing some of the best songs he would ever write, often using these new styles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Julia"] That song is about Lennon's dead mother -- the first time he ever addressed her directly in a song, though it would be far from the last -- but it's also about someone else. That phrase "Ocean child" is a direct translation of the Japanese name "Yoko". We've talked about Yoko Ono a bit in recent episodes, and even briefly in a previous Beatles episode, but it's here that she really enters the story of the Beatles. Unfortunately, exactly *how* her relationship with John Lennon, which was to become one of the great legendary love stories in rock and roll history, actually started is the subject of some debate. Both of them were married when they first got together, and there have also been suggestions that Ono was more interested in McCartney than in Lennon at first -- suggestions which everyone involved has denied, and those denials have the ring of truth about them, but if that was the case it would also explain some of Lennon's more perplexing behaviour over the next year. By all accounts there was a certain amount of finessing of the story th

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"Accidentally Like a Martyr: The Tortured Art of Warren Zevon"/James Campion [Episode 155]

Booked On Rock with Eric Senich

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 21, 2023 59:59

James Campion is a returning guest. He's here to talk about the life and career of the late great Warren Zevon and his 2018 book Accidentally Like a Martyr: The Tortured Art of Warren Zevon. It's hard to believe but it's been 20 years since Zevon passed away. For nearly four decades, spanning 12 studio albums and 32 singles, no artist expressed the duality of life, the light and dark, the ugliness and the beauty better than Warren Zevon. As Warren's ex-wife told James in his book: “If you're looking at the themes through his songs and what influenced them, at the heart of everything is that Warren was an artist…first.”Purchase a copy of Accidentally Like a Martyr: The Tortured Art of Warren Zevon through Amazon HERE Listen to a playlist of Warren Zevon HERE Visit James Campion's website HEREFollow James Campion:FacebookInstagramXVisit the Booked On Rock Website HERE Watch exclusive video segments from the Booked On Rock podcast HERE Follow The Booked On Rock with Eric Senich:FACEBOOKTWITTERINSTAGRAMTIKTOK Support Your Local Bookstore! Find your nearest independent bookstore HERE Contact The Booked On Rock Podcast: thebookedonrockpodcast@gmail.com The Booked On Rock Music: “Whoosh” by Crowander / “Last Train North” & “No Mercy” by TrackTribe

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Hey Jude – James Campion

My Favourite Beatles Song

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 31, 2023 45:42

James Campion, author of Take a Sad Song, the Emotional Currency of Hey Jude, talks about the communal hymn that gave the Beatles their biggest hit single in America.Website: https://www.jamescampion.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/FearNoArtFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/jc.authorInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/jamescampion/

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407. Take A Sad Song: The Emotional Currency of Hey Jude author James Campion

My Favorite Album with Jeremy Dylan

Play Episode Listen Later May 16, 2023 36:23

Today, author, music journalist and podcaster James Campion joins me to delve into one of the most iconic and enduring songs in the history of popular music as he gives a taste of his book Take A Sad Song: The Emotional Currency of Hey Jude. We talk about how McCartney took a song inspired by John Lennon's son Julian's feelings about his parents divorce and refined it into one of the most universal songs ever written, how John Lennon was the first of many people to think it was about himself, the difficulty of writing in second person, the songs unusual take on male friendship and how it acts as a sequel to She Loves You, how the recording saw the Beatles take another leap forward in the studio and the revolutionary elements of the track that now seem classic and inevitable.

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I'm In Love With That Song: The Beatles play Shea Stadium, 1965

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 1, 2023 59:20

The Beatles had many peaks in their career, but their August 15, 1965 concert at Shea Stadium may be the high point. It was certainly their ultimate live performance and the pinnacle of Beatlemania. On this episode, I'm joined by author Laurie Jacobson; her new book, "Top Of The Mountain", tells the story of that record-breaking concert. It's a behind-the-scenes look at the events leading up to the performance, including the tale of the man who made it all happen, Sid Bernstein. More on Laurie's book here: https://www.lauriejacobson.com/Beatles.php And check out our other Beatles episodes: The Beatles – “Rain” Special Edition: The Beatles “Get Back” Documentary The Beatles – “Hey Jude” (with special guest James Campion) -- This show is just one of many great Rock Podcasts on the Pantheon Podcasts network. Give them a listen! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Rock School - 02/05/23 (Interview with James Campion)

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 26, 2023 44:08

"A friend of the show, author James Campion is back to discuss his latest book, Take a Sad Song. It is an in depth discussion and view of The Beatles Hey Jude. We will talk about the song and his findings."

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Rock School - 02/05/23 (Interview with James Campion)

Misadventures in Music with Ian Prowse & Mick Ord

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 26, 2023 44:08

MIM - S02 EP02 - James Campion

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 16, 2023 56:46

Millions of words have been written about The Beatles so why would James Campion spend 2 years writing ANOTHER one? You could be excused for thinking, "Either he's jumping on the bandwagon to earn a quick buck or because he has something genuinely original and thought-provoking to say." Thankfully 'Take a Sad Song - the Emotional Currency of Hey Jude' charges headlong into the latter category. In Misadventures in Music episode #14 Ian Prowse and Mick Ord meet New York based author, journalist and broadcaster James who reveals many of the fascinating layers to Hey Jude. Yes, it was written by Paul McCartney for John Lennon's son Julian who'd just seen his parents split up after John left the family home for Yoko Ono, but the song is SO more than that, as James explains in his critically-acclaimed book. He takes us back to 1968 (the Year of Revolution, according to many social historians) when the band appeared on the David Frost show in front of the cameras to sing Hey Jude in front of a studio audience (well, THREE studio audiences actually) for the first time in 2 years, having given up touring in 1966. James takes us behind the scenes of that performance and explains why and how the song became a worldwide number one single and why, in his view, it's the best song they ever recorded. As one of the contributors to the book says, " It was 7 minutes we needed at the time' Find out more on James' website - www.jamescampion.com

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Episode 97 | KISS @ 50 with Author James Campion

Booked On Rock with Eric Senich

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 1, 2022 60:10

Fifty years ago next month - January of 1973 - Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, Peter Criss and Ace Frehley launched the band KISS. Author James Campion (Shout It Out Loud: The Story of Kiss's Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon") is on the podcast to talk about the band's rise to prominence thanks to endless determination by the original four members, an incredibly creative and just as hard-working manager (Bill Aucoin) and a genius producer (Bob Ezrin) to become the biggest band in the world by the end of the 1970s. Some say KISS is overrated, some say they're overrated. James has his opinion on that, what he says to those who say KISS doesn't write great songs and whether KISS should continue without Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons.Listen to KISS 'Destroyer' Album: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4BwDtrjZv2ZiGq7q2pOva3?si=66284eff12f04876Purchase a copy of "Shout It Out Loud: The Story of Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon" through Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Shout-Out-Loud-Destroyer-American/dp/1617136182See Ken Kelly's hand-drawn recreation of the 'Destroyer' album cover: https://www.bookedonrock.com/post/rare-hand-drawn-kiss-destroyer-album-cover-by-artist-ken-kellyVisit James Campion's website: https://www.jamescampion.com/Follow James Campion:Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/jc.authorTwitter - https://twitter.com/fearnoartInstagram - http://www.instagram.com/jamescampionListen to James Campion in episode 63 of Booked On Rock: http://www.spreaker.com/user/discoveryeric/episode-63-james-campion-take-a-sad-songThe Booked On Rock Website: https://www.bookedonrock.comFollow The Booked On Rock with Eric Senich:FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/bookedonrockpodcastTWITTER: https://twitter.com/bookedonrockINSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/bookedonrockpodcastSupport Your Local Bookstore! Find your nearest independent bookstore here: https://www.indiebound.org/indie-store-finderContact The Booked On Rock Podcast:thebookedonrockpodcast@gmail.comThe Booked On Rock Music: “Whoosh” & “Nasty” by Crowander (https://www.crowander.com)

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248: Hey Jude Deconstructed with James Campion and Jeff Martin

Something About the Beatles

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 24, 2022 121:02

An entire book dedicated to a single song may strike some as bewildering, but not if the song in question is both The Beatles' longest single (in length) as well as one of their most successful (quadruple platinum): 1968's "Hey Jude." Deceptively simple and universally appealing, the Apple Records debut marked an astonishing launch to their label while serving as an anthem of healing during a tumultuous year - in the world as well as within the band. Author James Campion (Take A Sad Song: The Emotional Currency of Hey Jude) discussed the song with returning guest Jeff Martin and I for nearly two hours. You too will discover what James did - that uncovering the magic and pull of this recording is something that will take you farther than you can imagine. This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. Go to www.betterhelp.com/satb for 10% off your first month.

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#130 - Revolution 9 with guest James Campion (author, TAKE A SAD SONG… The Emotional Currency of “Hey Jude”)

Ranking The Beatles

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 22, 2022 98:50

Hindsight being what it is, one can only imagine the reaction listeners had when they first reached the back half of side 4 of the White Album in November 68, and the sounds of "Revolution 9" came out of their stereos for the first time. While adjectives such as "bewilderment" or "confusion" probably are safe bets, The Beatles had been sowing seeds of avant-garde & outside influence in their music since they introduced the sitar on Norwegian Wood in 1965, moving to tape loops and backwards tracks and exploratory (if not self-indulgent) recording techniques on Revolver, Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery tour, and they'd been nothing if not progressive since day 1. All of them had experimented in making their own home-studio recordings of weirdness, and while they hadn't completely committed to putting out something like this in a traditional commercial sense, once John had Yoko's encouragement to stretch out to new artistic horizons, all bets were off. He was staying true to his art and following his muse, and Beatle fans were invited to come along for the ride. Our first taste of this is "Revolution 9," an 8 minute plus journey through playful and terrifying soundscapes, spoken word, and tape loops, with roots from the original extended take of "Revolution 1." The final product is a auditory journey through John's idea of the sonics of actual revolution: chaos, explosions, backwards sounds, eerie melodies, screaming, stereo spectrum panning creating a dizzying effect. Over 40 loops pass through the tape heads at EMI's Abbey Road studios, each faded in and out of the track in real time by John, with help from Yoko and George. It's truly a one-of-a-kind performance, using the studio as an instrument, both musical and one of chaos. And while it may have caused many listeners to ask "why?," if you look beyond the obvious, there's more important questions to ask, and more joy to be discovered. Why would an artist who's work I so admire put out something I don't get? Why don't I get it? What are my expectations, and are they fair to the artist? The more time you spend with a track like this, the more you can start to see those things and begin to appreciate the track. I, for one, appreciate that this is maybe the only song that you can never hear the same way twice. It's like a choose-your-own-adventure book, but in a song. I also like that it's essentially a non-visual soundtrack. You can listen to it and picture every element of it in your head, all are total mysteries until you imagine what's passing through your eardrums. And to add to it all, they've dropped this slice of musique concrete on a pop album that ended up in like, 30 million homes. Arguably one of the boldest and bravest artistic moves ever. The Beatles could be absolutely fearless, and what sums that up more than this? Coming back to chat with us this week is James Campion, author of the book Take A Sad Song: The Emotional Currency of Hey Jude. We had such a good time talking "Revolution 1," we had to have him back for #9! We dive deep into topics like what constitutes art, being true to yourself, Stockhausen, and more. This is one of our favorite chats yet! Grab a copy of "Take A Sad Song" anywhere you get books, or order one through jamescampion.com and he'll even sign it for you! What do you think? Too high? Too low? Or just right? Let us know in the comments on Facebook, Instagram @rankingthebeatles, or Twitter @rankingbeatles! Be sure to visit rankingthebeatles.com! Wanna show your support? Buy Us A Coffee! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/rankingthebeatles/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/rankingthebeatles/support

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Episode 187: Fun Ideas Podcast #187 - James Campion

Fun Ideas Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 8, 2022 76:59

On today's show, we have a writer who is here to discuss latest book Take A Sad Song., The Emotional Currency of "Hey Jude". Here he is, James Campion. Plus, the usual news from Fun Ideas Productions.

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#134 - Revolution 1 with guest James Campion (author, TAKE A SAD SONG… The Emotional Currency of “Hey Jude”)

Ranking The Beatles

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 18, 2022 72:34 Very Popular

Following the flower power vibes of 1967, 1968 found the Beatles diving into transcendental meditation, looking inward, and grounding themselves back to the real world around them, which was getting pretty tumultuous. A back-to-basics vibe that was moving through the music scene, combined with John's growing want to speak his mind on current events (aided by the artistic awakening he was experiencing with his new girlfriend, Yoko Ono), lead to the creation of "Revolution 1," a slow bluesy shuffle explaining John's desire to see the oppressive systems around the world crumble, but also his uncertainty of what to do once they fall. His want for this to be the band's next single lead to the creation of a faster, uptempo, unnumbered version that would be released as the b-side to "Hey Jude." Elements of the over 10 minute jam that became "Revolution 1" would get repurposed for John and Yoko's avant garde tour de force, "Revolution 9." "Revolution 1," however, was John's original statement, his artistic intent. He wanted the song slow so the lyrics were upfront and easy to understand, but to me the song's opioid-induced tempo kind of undercuts the message. The track itself is really interesting. It's a crisp, acoustic rhythm guitar provided by George, grounding the back-to-basics idea, but that idea gets undercut by lead guitar and loops and sounds that run in and out of the track. It's just as much a studio concoction as it is a band performance. John isn't sure if he can be counted in or out, and neither is the band just yet, as to whether they want to return to their roots. Joining us this week is James Campion, author of the book Take A Sad Song: The Emotional Currency of Hey Jude. We look at the times and history surrounding the writing and recording of "Hey Jude" and the "Revolution" trio, and the parts they play in their creations. We also talk about the multiple layers of the band, their first entry into the realm of political sons, the quintessential mansplain, and more! Grab a copy of "Take A Sad Song" anywhere you get books, or order one through jamescampion.com and he'll even sign it for you! What do you think? Too high? Too low? Just right? Let us know in the comments on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/rankingthebeatles, Instagram @rankingthebeatles, or Twitter @rankingbeatles! Be sure to check out RTB's official website, www.rankingthebeatles.com and our brand new webstore!! RANK YOUR OWN BEATLES with our new RTB poster! Pick up a tshirt, coffee cup, tote bag, and more! Enjoying the show, and wanna show your support? Buy Us A Coffee! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/rankingthebeatles/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/rankingthebeatles/support

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Ep.036 - Take A Sad Song with James Campion

Look! It's Rock 'N' Roll Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 22, 2022 67:48

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Fans On The Run - James Campion (Ep. 76)

Fans On The Run: A Podcast Made By, For And About Beatles Fans

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 16, 2022 59:56 Very Popular

After a bit of a break, Fans On The Run is back! Joining me on today's show is the author of the new book “Take a Sad Song - The Emotional Currency of 'Hey Jude.'”, James Campion! We talk Warren Zevon, The Rolling Stones, the subconscious, McCartney, and of course the Fab Four and the song of the hour. All that and more, you're not going to want to miss this! This episode is available to stream wherever good podcasts can be heard! Keep up with James: https://www.jamescampion.com/ https://twitter.com/fearnoart https://www.instagram.com/jamescampion/ https://www.facebook.com/jc.author/ Follow us elsewhere: https://linktr.ee/fansontherun Contact fansontherunpodcast@gmail.com

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Ep. 20 - James Campion (author of ”Take a Sad Song: The Emotional Currency of 'Hey Jude'”)

Here, There, and Everywhere: A Beatles Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 29, 2022 58:20

James Campion is a columnist, music journalist, podcaster, and author of eight books - his latest is “Take a Sad Song - The Emotional Currency of 'Hey Jude.'” James joins Jack on the podcast to discuss his new book about the Beatles' song, “Hey Jude”. James tells us about what inspired him to write an entire book about one song, the importance of "Hey Jude" for both the Beatles and the world, and which Beatles album this song would land on if it wasn't a single. Check out James' new book here: https://www.amazon.com/Take-Sad-Song-Emotional-Currency/dp/1493062379 Follow James on Twitter If you like this episode, be sure to rate it and leave a review! Subscribe to get notifications for each week's podcast. Follow us on Twitter: @BeatlesEarth and check out our website, BeatlesEarth.com, for more information!

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James Campion - 'Take A Sad Song...'

Beatles Books

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 24, 2022 43:24

My guest for this episode is James Campion, who joins me to discuss his book 'Take A Sad Song...The Emotional Currency of Hey Jude'. James' book dives deeply into the song's origins, recording, visual presentation, impact, and eventual influence on the remaining pat of The Beatles career

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The Journey Into the Song

Always FreyDay

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 17, 2022 60:31

The audience will hear from an author who defines the personal and professional attainments felt by people, through the power of song.As a result of the pandemic, many SMB employers and employees had to make the best experience out of a bad situation. Society as a whole has been on a search for comfort and unity, during this time of uncertainty. In the words of Paul McCartney, people had to "take a sad song, and make it better."Our special guest this week is an author who not only has a passion for music, but whose published works dive deeply into the origins, recording, visual presentation, impact, and eventual influence, of various songs and songwriters. We are joined by James Campion, author of the new book "Take a Sad Song - The Emotional Currency of Hey Jude." Take a Sad Song is a tribute to how a song can define, inspire, and affect us in ways we do not always fully comprehend, in both our personal and professional lives. James points out the insights of academic experts and professors in the field of musicology, sociology, philosophy, psychology, and history while emphasizing the song's lasting voice in our cultural and musical landscape.Website: https://www.jamescampion.com/ Email: jc@jamescampion.comTune in for this sensible conversation at TalkRadio.nyc or watch the Facebook Livestream by Clicking Here.

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Hey Jude, Get Back with James Campion

Rock Docs

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 7, 2022 53:14

Rock Docs: A Podcast About Music Documentaries We're joined by Very Special Guest James Campion, author of Take a Sad Song: The Emotional Currency of "Hey Jude". We discuss his book about "Hey Jude" and the influence that the song had on the "Let It Be" sessions that led to Get Back. James shares his insights after talking to songwriters, musicologists, and even Michael Lindsay-Hogg himself about this era of the Beatles' career. Plus we talk about our mutual love of rock docs and James puts on the spot to reveal our favorite Beatles documentaries (other than Get Back, of course). Hosted by David Lizerbram & Andrew Keatts Twitter: @RockDocsPod Instagram: @RockDocsPod Cover Art by N.C. Winters - check him out on Instagram at @NCWintersArt

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Bonus Episode: Interview with author James Campion on his book ”Take a Sad Song”

Album Divers

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 3, 2022 69:58

On this special bonus episode, Trevor and Shane sit down with author James Campion to discuss his new book "Take a Sad Song...the Emotional Currency of Hey Jude." James is a syndicated columnist and editor for the pop culture magazine “The Aquarian Weekly." His long form essays are featured in the webzine "Dog Door Culture,” and his work has appeared in several periodicals including Huffington Post, New York Newsday, and Hackwriters just to name a few. James is also the cohost of the popular podcast, "Underwater Sunshine" with Counting Crows frontman Adam Duritz and the two also host and annual music festival of the same name. His most recent book, "Take a Sad Song: The Emotional Currency of Hey Jude" was released on June 1st of this year, 2022 by Backbeat Books, a division of Rowman and Littlefield. Signed first edition hardcover copies can be ordered through James' website here: https://www.jamescampion.com/ Shane and Trevor enjoyed discussing James' book, and the stories behind the construction of one of the greatest songs ever written. ***Dont forget to check out our featured artist for this episode, Stylus Theory! You can find their music on all major music platforms. Here is a link to their website: https://stylustheory.com/ ________________________________________________________________________________________________ HOW TO CONNECT WITH ALBUM DIVERS: *You can submit your questions or comments about this episode or anything else on your mind here via our text line at: (502) 792-8080 *Leave us an audio message here: https://www.speakpipe.com/AlbumDivers We promise to respond and may even feature your thoughts on a future episode. *Follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Album Divers *Email us at Albumdiverspodcast@gmail.com *Please subscribe and review wherever you get your podcasts!

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Analog Smile - James Campion (Author - Take a Sad Song: The Emotional Currency of Hey Jude)

Analog Smile

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 3, 2022 79:52

On this episode of Analog Smile, Sherry speaks with James Campion, the author of Take a Sad Song: The Emotional Currency of Hey Jude. Music columnist and podcast host Campion shows why the Beatles' epic 1968 single "Hey Jude" transcends time, taking readers through the song's riveting personal story, its importance during the fractious days of a pop culture phenomenon, and its impact on the most turbulent year since WWII. He is a syndicated columnist and contributing editor for The Aquarian Weekly, where he's reported on and interviewed several and varied musical artists and reviewed concerts and albums for twenty-three years. His long-form music essays are featured in the webzine Dog Door Cultural. His work has also appeared in NY Newsday, North County News, Hackwriters, and other periodicals. He is also the co-host of the popular music podcast Underwater Sunshine with Counting Crows frontman, Adam Duritz. The two host an annual music festival in New York City by the same name. They chat about the new book, The Beatles, Alice Cooper, journalism, and much more! Please visit jamescampion.com for more information.

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I'm In Love With That Song: The Beatles - "Hey Jude" (with special guest James Campion)

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Play Episode Listen Later Jun 2, 2022 54:00

It's nearly impossible to pick the "best" Beatles song, but by nearly every measurement-- sales, chart success, cultural impact-- it's hard to beat "Hey Jude". Author James Campion's new book, Take A Sad Song, is an in-depth look at the history and legacy of "Hey Jude". He joins us on this episode for a deep dive into this legendary, iconic song. A true classic."Hey Jude" (John Lennon & Paul McCartney) Copyright 1968 Northern Songs - Copyright 1968 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLCIf you enjoyed this episode, please check out these other Beatles-related episodes:https://lovethatsongpodcast.com/the-beatles-rain/https://lovethatsongpodcast.com/special-edition-the-beatles-get-back-documentary/https://lovethatsongpodcast.com/george-harrison-beware-of-darkness/https://lovethatsongpodcast.com/paul-mccartney-wings-little-lamb-dragonfly/https://lovethatsongpodcast.com/john-lennon-nobody-loves-you-when-youre-down-and-out/https://lovethatsongpodcast.com/paul-mccartney-wings-daytime-nighttime-suffering/ -- This show is just one of many great Rock Podcasts on the Pantheon Podcasts network. Get 'em while they're red hot!

I'm In Love With That Song: The Beatles - "Hey Jude" (with special guest James Campion)

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Play Episode Listen Later Jun 2, 2022 55:30

It's nearly impossible to pick the "best" Beatles song, but by nearly every measurement-- sales, chart success, cultural impact-- it's hard to beat "Hey Jude". Author James Campion's new book, Take A Sad Song, is an in-depth look at the history and legacy of "Hey Jude". He joins us on this episode for a deep dive into this legendary, iconic song. A true classic. "Hey Jude" (John Lennon & Paul McCartney) Copyright 1968 Northern Songs - Copyright 1968 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC If you enjoyed this episode, please check out these other Beatles-related episodes: https://lovethatsongpodcast.com/the-beatles-rain/ https://lovethatsongpodcast.com/special-edition-the-beatles-get-back-documentary/ https://lovethatsongpodcast.com/george-harrison-beware-of-darkness/ https://lovethatsongpodcast.com/paul-mccartney-wings-little-lamb-dragonfly/ https://lovethatsongpodcast.com/john-lennon-nobody-loves-you-when-youre-down-and-out/ https://lovethatsongpodcast.com/paul-mccartney-wings-daytime-nighttime-suffering/ -- This show is just one of many great Rock Podcasts on the Pantheon Podcasts network. Get 'em while they're red hot! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Beatles - "Hey Jude" (with special guest James Campion)

I'm In Love With That Song

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 1, 2022 54:14 Very Popular

It's nearly impossible to pick the "best" Beatles song, but by virtually every measurement-- sales, chart success, cultural impact-- it's hard to beat "Hey Jude". Author James Campion's new book, Take A Sad Song, is an in-depth look at the history and legacy of "Hey Jude". He joins us on this episode for a deep dive into this legendary, iconic song. A true classic."Hey Jude" (John Lennon & Paul McCartney) Copyright 1968 Northern Songs - Copyright 1968 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC If you enjoyed this episode, please check out these other Beatles-related episodes:https://lovethatsongpodcast.com/the-beatles-rain/https://lovethatsongpodcast.com/special-edition-the-beatles-get-back-documentary/https://lovethatsongpodcast.com/george-harrison-beware-of-darkness/https://lovethatsongpodcast.com/paul-mccartney-wings-little-lamb-dragonfly/https://lovethatsongpodcast.com/john-lennon-nobody-loves-you-when-youre-down-and-out/https://lovethatsongpodcast.com/paul-mccartney-wings-daytime-nighttime-suffering/ -- This show is just one of many great Rock Podcasts on the Pantheon Podcasts network. Get 'em while they're red hot!

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The Beatles - "Hey Jude" (with special guest James Campion)

I'm In Love With That Song

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 1, 2022 58:29

It's nearly impossible to pick the "best" Beatles song, but by nearly every measurement-- sales, chart success, cultural impact-- it's hard to beat "Hey Jude". Author James Campion's new book, Take A Sad Song, is an in-depth look at the history and legacy of "Hey Jude". He joins us on this episode for a deep dive into this legendary, iconic song. A true classic. "Hey Jude" (John Lennon & Paul McCartney) Copyright 1968 Northern Songs - Copyright 1968 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC If you enjoyed this episode, please check out these other Beatles-related episodes: https://lovethatsongpodcast.com/the-beatles-rain/ https://lovethatsongpodcast.com/special-edition-the-beatles-get-back-documentary/ https://lovethatsongpodcast.com/george-harrison-beware-of-darkness/ https://lovethatsongpodcast.com/paul-mccartney-wings-little-lamb-dragonfly/ https://lovethatsongpodcast.com/john-lennon-nobody-loves-you-when-youre-down-and-out/ https://lovethatsongpodcast.com/paul-mccartney-wings-daytime-nighttime-suffering/ -- This show is just one of many great Rock Podcasts on the Pantheon Podcasts network. Get 'em while they're red hot! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Take a Sad Song: interview with James Campion - Paul or Nothing Bonus Episode #99.

'Paul Or Nothing' Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 25, 2022 115:13

Continuing with our run of authorial interviews; I am kindly joined by James Campion, the author of "Take a Sad Song: The Emotional Currency of Hey Jude". This is a book that eschews all the grand, sweeping scope of most Beatle texts and replaces it with an incredibly detailed and granular deep dive into a single Beatles tune. If you ever wanted to know ALL there is to know about Hey Jude, or are interested in how songs work in general, this book is not to be missed! Also, I do apologise for not actually stating the entire title anywhere in this episode! Please enjoy. Peace and love, Sam You can buy "Take a Sad Song: The Emotional Currency of Hey Jude" at all good book shops/websites. If you want to support the show, check out our Patreon page at www.patreon.com/mccartneypodcast To get in contact with the show, drop us an email at paulmccartneypod@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter for all Macca updates by searching @mccartneypod. Check out our YouTube page at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXcuhC1jm1wqhUTWhVS-r6A If you haven't seen the blog, check it out at www.paulmccartneypod.wordpress.com where you can see loads of episodes start out life as a random blog post, before being resculpted into the quality content you are here for today! Hosted by Sam Whiles.

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Episode 63 | James Campion ["Take A Sad Song: The Emotional Currency Of 'Hey Jude'"]

Booked On Rock with Eric Senich

Play Episode Listen Later May 19, 2022 80:47

In “Take a Sad Song: The Emotional Currency of ‘Hey Jude',” James Campion dives deeply into the song's origins, recording, visual presentation, impact, and eventual influence, while also discovering what makes "Hey Jude" a classic musical expression of personal comfort and societal unity conceived by a master songwriter, Paul McCartney. Within its melodic brilliance and lyrical touchstones of empathy and nostalgia resides McCartney's personal and professional relationship with his childhood friend and songwriting partner, John Lennon, and their simultaneous pursuit of the women who would complete them. There are also clues to the growing turmoil within the Beatles and their splintering generation scarred by war, assassination, and virulent protest.Campion's journey into the song includes the insights of experts in the fields of musicology, sociology, philosophy, psychology, and history. Campion also reveals commentary from noted Beatles authors, biographers, music historians, and journalists and, finally, a peek into the craft of songwriting from a host of talented composers across several generations.“Take a Sad Song” is a tribute to how a song can define, inspire, and affect us in ways we do not always fully comprehend, as well as a celebration of a truly amazing track in the Beatles canon that reveals one band's genius and underscores its lasting voice in our cultural and musical landscape.James Campion is a syndicated columnist and contributing editor for the pop culture magazine the Aquarian Weekly, where he's reported on and interviewed several and varied musical artists and reviewed concerts and albums for twenty-three years. His long-form music essays are featured in the webzine Dog Door Cultural. His work has also appeared in New York Newsday, North County News, Hackwriters, Huff Post, among other periodicals. He is also the co-host of the popular music podcast Underwater Sunshine with Counting Crows front man, Adam Duritz. The two host an annual music festival in New York City by the same name.Purchase a copy of “Take a Sad Song: The Emotional Currency of ‘Hey Jude'” through Backbeat Books: http://backbeatbooks.com/books/9781493062386Listen to a playlist of the music discussed in this episode: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/09OItbDfMWM6WsGC3qX4hD?si=4f8d1914f9534fb1Visit James Campion's official website: https://www.jamescampion.comVisit James Campion's Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/jc.authorFollow James Campion on Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/FearNoArtFollow James Campion on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jamescampion/?hl=enListen to the “Underwater Sunshine” podcast with Adam Duritz & James Campion: https://www.jamescampion.com/underwater-sunshine-podcastListen to the “Sunshine Spotlight” podcast with James Campion: https://underwatersunshinefest.com/sunshine-spotlightsThe Booked On Rock Website: https://www.bookedonrock.comFollow The Booked On Rock with Eric Senich:FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/bookedonrockpodcastTWITTER: https://twitter.com/bookedonrockSupport Your Local Bookstore! Find your nearest independent bookstore here: https://www.indiebound.org/indie-store-finderContact The Booked On Rock Podcast:thebookedonrockpodcast@gmail.comThe Booked On Rock Music by Crowander: “Whoosh” & “Nasty”[ https://freemusicarchive.org/music/crowander]

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Episode 166: ”Hey Jude” (Interview with Author James Campion)

2Legs: A Paul McCartney Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 14, 2022 75:57

James Campion joins us this week to discuss his new book Take A Sad Song...The Emotional Currency of 'Hey Jude' which will be published on June 1st, 2022 by Backbeat Publishing. Link for James' website and book: James' Website Amazon James discusses his career and writing and why he chose to tackle and analyse one of The Beatles most celebrated songs. Beatles historical context, Paul as a writer during this time and the legacy of 'Hey Jude' some 50+ years later and why the song has such "emotional currency." Tom and Andy definitely agree. We think you will too! Thanks to James and his agent for arranging this interview and we look forward to seeing it succeed!

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Success in the face of adversity: James Campion

The Self Made Podcast

Play Episode Play 58 sec Highlight Listen Later Apr 11, 2022 108:58

In this episode of the Self Made Podcast, it is a pleasure to welcome James Campion to the show.This episode is a little different as James is the founder and manager at HIT personal training in Hong Kong the gym that I myself take clients from in central Hong Kong. I have lost count of the number of times I have been leaving work thinking I will say hi to James then 2 hours later we are still discussing health, training, business and education. It is because of these daily great conversations I felt I had to get James on the show and share these with a wider audience but this conversation went deeper than any I have had with James in the past. The last few years for James have been far from easy. Started a brick and mortar gym business right before the first lockdown in Hong Kong and now 18 months into the business there have been 8 months that the gyms have been forced to shut. Where many more well-established gyms closed their doors for good HIT personal training not only survived but flourished adding a second location and more members of staff through tricky circumstances.In this episode, we speak about the lessons he has learned from business and bodybuilding, why he went into a physical gym business over online as well as common struggles many people face when embarking on a big goal such as imposter syndrome, gold medal syndrome and much much more!If you want to know more about James you can find him on Instagram @james_hitpt as well as his gym in Hong Kong which finally re-opens on April 21st go follow the page for a one time only coaching offer @hit_pt. As always if you want to know more about my work you can follow me @kingsleydutton and if you enjoy the episode please give us a review on your preferred podcast platform and share on social media tagging me and James.Support the show

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Shout It Out Loudcast: Shout It Out Loud The Story Of KISS's DESTROYER With Author James Campion

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 19, 2022 140:36

This week Tom & Zeus welcome Author James Campion to discuss his fantastic book, "Shout It Out Loud - The Story Of KISS's DESTROYER And The Making Of An American Icon. The book is filled with never before heard stories, interviews and behind the scenes revelations about the making of the 1976 legendary KISS album, Destroyer. Author James Campion discusses the background of his book, the process and many of the fascinating facts behind the breakout album of KISS.As usual the guys then rank the book cover and the book itself against the previous books reviewed on SIOL.A fascinating discussion with James filled with insight and passion just like his must-have book!To Purchase Shout It Out Loud The Story of KISS's Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon by James Campion please click belowJamesCampion.comInterested in more Shout It Out Loudcast content? Care to help us out? Come join us on Patreon by clicking below:SIOL Patreon Please go to Klick Tee Shop for all your Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise by clicking below:SIOL Merchandise at Klick Tee Shop Please Email us comments or suggestions by clicking below:ShoutItOutLoudcast@Gmail.com Please subscribe to us and give us a 5 Star (Child) review on the following places below:iTunesPodchaserStitcheriHeart RadioSpotify Please follow us and like our social media pages clicking below:TwitterFacebook PageFacebook Group Page Shout It Out LoudcastersInstagramYouTube Proud Member of the Pantheon Podcast click below to see the website:Pantheon Podcast Network

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Shout It Out Loudcast: Shout It Out Loud The Story Of KISS's DESTROYER With Author James Campion

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 19, 2022 142:06

This week Tom & Zeus welcome Author James Campion to discuss his fantastic book, "Shout It Out Loud - The Story Of KISS's DESTROYER And The Making Of An American Icon. The book is filled with never before heard stories, interviews and behind the scenes revelations about the making of the 1976 legendary KISS album, Destroyer. Author James Campion discusses the background of his book, the process and many of the fascinating facts behind the breakout album of KISS. As usual the guys then rank the book cover and the book itself against the previous books reviewed on SIOL. A fascinating discussion with James filled with insight and passion just like his must-have book! To Purchase Shout It Out Loud The Story of KISS's Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon by James Campion please click below JamesCampion.com Interested in more Shout It Out Loudcast content? Care to help us out? Come join us on Patreon by clicking below: SIOL Patreon Please go to Klick Tee Shop for all your Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise by clicking below: SIOL Merchandise at Klick Tee Shop Please Email us comments or suggestions by clicking below: ShoutItOutLoudcast@Gmail.com Please subscribe to us and give us a 5 Star (Child) review on the following places below: iTunes Podchaser Stitcher iHeart Radio Spotify Please follow us and like our social media pages clicking below: Twitter Facebook Page Facebook Group Page Shout It Out Loudcasters Instagram YouTube Proud Member of the Pantheon Podcast click below to see the website: Pantheon Podcast Network Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Episode 158 "Shout It Out Loud The Story Of KISS's DESTROYER with Author James Campion"

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 15, 2022 140:36

This week Tom & Zeus welcome Author James Campion to discuss his fantastic book, "Shout It Out Loud - The Story Of KISS's DESTROYER And The Making Of An American Icon. The book is filled with never before heard stories, interviews and behind the scenes revelations about the making of the 1976 legendary KISS album, Destroyer. Author James Campion discusses the background of his book, the process and many of the fascinating facts behind the breakout album of KISS.As usual the guys then rank the book cover and the book itself against the previous books reviewed on SIOL.A fascinating discussion with James filled with insight and passion just like his must-have book!To Purchase Shout It Out Loud The Story of KISS's Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon by James Campion please click belowJamesCampion.comFor all things Shout It Out Loudcast check out our amazing website by clicking below:www.ShoutItOutLoudcast.comInterested in more Shout It Out Loudcast content? Care to help us out? Come join us on Patreon by clicking below:SIOL Patreon Please go to Klick Tee Shop for all your Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise by clicking below:SIOL Merchandise at Klick Tee Shop Please Email us comments or suggestions by clicking below:ShoutItOutLoudcast@Gmail.com Please subscribe to us and give us a 5 Star (Child) review on the following places below:iTunesPodchaserStitcheriHeart RadioSpotify Please follow us and like our social media pages clicking below:TwitterFacebook PageFacebook Group Page Shout It Out LoudcastersInstagramYouTube Proud Member of the Pantheon Podcast click below to see the website:Pantheon Podcast Network

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Episode 158 "Shout It Out Loud The Story Off KISS's DESTROYER with Author James Campion"

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Play Episode Listen Later Jan 15, 2022 141:36

This week Tom & Zeus welcome Author James Campion to discuss his fantastic book, "Shout It Out Loud - The Story Of KISS's DESTROYER And The Making Of An American Icon. The book is filled with never before heard stories, interviews and behind the scenes revelations about the making of the 1976 legendary KISS album, Destroyer. Author James Campion discusses the background of his book, the process and many of the fascinating facts behind the breakout album of KISS. As usual the guys then rank the book cover and the book itself against the previous books reviewed on SIOL. A fascinating discussion with James filled with insight and passion just like his must-have book! To Purchase Shout It Out Loud The Story of KISS's Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon by James Campion please click below JamesCampion.com Interested in more Shout It Out Loudcast content? Care to help us out? Come join us on Patreon by clicking below: SIOL Patreon Please go to Klick Tee Shop for all your Shout It Out Loudcast Merchandise by clicking below: SIOL Merchandise at Klick Tee Shop Please Email us comments or suggestions by clicking below: ShoutItOutLoudcast@Gmail.com Please subscribe to us and give us a 5 Star (Child) review on the following places below: iTunes Podchaser Stitcher iHeart Radio Spotify Please follow us and like our social media pages clicking below: Twitter Facebook Page Facebook Group Page Shout It Out Loudcasters Instagram YouTube Proud Member of the Pantheon Podcast click below to see the website: Pantheon Podcast Network Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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'The Power Of The Dog' reviewed

88Nine: Cinebuds

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 22, 2021 24:14

'The Power of the Dog,' is a not-so-stylized Western directed by James Campion and starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Kirsten Dunst.

Critically Acclaimed #100 | The Power of the Dog, Benedetta, The Hand of God, Torn, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Flee, Wolf

Canceled Too Soon

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 7, 2021 80:49

This week on CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED, film critics William Bibbiani and Witney Seibold review James Campion's new western THE POWER OF THE DOG, Paul Verhoeven's controversial queer nun story BENEDETTA, Paolo Sorrentino's latest THE HAND OF GOD, the mountain climbing documentary TORN, the animated kids film DIARY OF A WIMPY KID, the animated documentary FLEE, and the Irish/Polish drama WOLF! The Power of the Dog - 4:15 Benedetta - 18:48 The Hand of God - 36:54 Torn - 47:04 Diary of a Wimpy Kid - 53:50 Flee - 1:00:08 Wolf - 1:08:12 Review Round-Up - 1:13:22 Subscribe on Patreon at www.patreon.com/criticallyacclaimednetwork for exclusive content and exciting rewards, like bonus episodes, commentary tracks and much, much more! And visit our TeePublic page to buy shirts, mugs and other exciting merchandise! Email us at letters@criticallyacclaimed.net, so we can read your correspondence and answer YOUR questions in future episodes! And if you want soap, be sure to check out M. Lopes da Silva's Etsy store: SaltCatSoap! Follow us on Twitter at @CriticAcclaim, join the official Fan Club on Facebook, follow Bibbs at @WilliamBibbiani and follow Witney at @WitneySeibold, and head on over to www.criticallyacclaimed.net for all their podcasts, reviews and more! Support the show: https://www.patreon.com//criticallyacclaimednetwork See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

#29: James Campion: Body Transformations, Building Muscle, Budgeting your Calories and Progressive Overload

LIVE PERFORM COMPETE

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 7, 2020 82:10

James is a strength and conditioning coach with a particular interest in body transformations. But he isn’t your typical transformation coach. Despite his interest in getting folks competition ready, he refuses to do it at the expense of their health. An idea that jives well with the LIVE PERFORM COMPETE community. In this episode, we begin by talking about James’ story and what brought him to being where he is today. We cover a bunch of topics in this episode: The importance of the process vs the outcome; Training principles; Indivdiualisation for nutrition and training; Obsession; Prepping for competition; and our experiences with the WHOOP band as a tool for tracking recovery Sponsor: Website: The Process Programming Instagram: @theprocessprogramming

Kid Sistr’s $1000 Dinner

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 26, 2020 63:23

We had an incredible Underwater Sunshine Festival in October and the Garden Sessions were amazing. This week’s podcast features performances and interviews with two of our faves: Kid Sistr and Matt Sucich. Dig it!

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Purple Reign 4 - 1999 Pt. 2

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 19, 2020 105:16

Welp. As the nation celebrates Part 2 of our 1999 podcast, I personally celebrate Day 2 of food poisoning. Although I’m less excited about one than the other, I recognize the humanity inherent in both. To paraphrase Edward R Murrow...good night and good bleccchhhh

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#211 - Adam Duritz of Counting Crows

The Paul Leslie Hour

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 11, 2019 29:13

211 - Adam Duritz of Counting Crows The Paul Leslie Hour is honored to welcome Adam Duritz. He is a singer, songwriter, record producer and frontman for the band Counting Crows, which has sold more than 200 million records internationally. Adam Duritz is also co-host of the podcast "Underwater Sunshine," a conversation series he does with author & journalist James Campion. He is also the Executive Producer of "Underwater Sunshine Fest," a music festival. The debut album of the band Counting Crows is entitled "August and Everything After" was released in September 1993. Duritz had written a song called "August and Everything After," but it was not included on that record. 25 years later the song was released as a single. Adam Duritz stopped by The Paul Leslie Hour to talk about the song and his perspectives on his life and music as a whole. Support The Paul Leslie Hour by donating to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/the-paul-leslie-hour

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Rock School - 09/23/18 (James Campion - Warren Zevon Book)

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 27, 2018 43:45

"James Campion talks about his book and why more people should listen to Warren Zevon. "

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Rock School - 09/23/18 (James Campion - Warren Zevon Book)

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Play Episode Listen Later Sep 27, 2018 43:45

"James Campion talks about his book and why more people should listen to Warren Zevon. "

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328 - James Campion - Warren Zevon Book

Icon Fetch

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 8, 2018 30:51

Warren Zevon was the very definition of the enigmatic artist. In Accidentally Like a Martyr: The Tortured Art of Warren Zevon (Backbeat Books), author James Campion attempts to separate the man from the myth by first analyzing the lyrics in several of his songs, then by talking with the family, friends and colleagues who knew him best. Campion secured interviews with Zevon’s ex-wife, and kids, plus J.D. Souther, Jackson Browne, and many others.We chat with the life-long, self-proclaimed “Zevon-head” about doing a book on his favorite artist, plus how he tracked down all the great interviews for the book. We also discuss how Zevon felt about his one, smash hit “Werewolves of London.”

Episode 369: Detroit Rock City (1999)

The Projection Booth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 18, 2018 296:23

Detroit Rock City (1999) from director Adam Rifkin is the story of four friends and their desperate quest to get from Cleveland to Detroit to see KISS play live at Cobo Arena in 1978. They're faced with a series of challenges that threaten to keep them from seeing Gene, Paul, Ace, and Peter play the hits.Returning from the Never Too Young To Die episode are co-hosts Josh Stewart and Heather Drain join Mike on this deluxe episode of the show which features director Adam Rifkin, screenwriter Carl V. Dupré, producer Tim Sullivan, actress Lin Shaye, and James Campion author of Shout It Out Loud: The Story of Kiss's Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Episode 369: Detroit Rock City (1999)

The Projection Booth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 18, 2018 296:18

Detroit Rock City (1999) from director Adam Rifkin is the story of four friends and their desperate quest to get from Cleveland to Detroit to see KISS play live at Cobo Arena in 1978. They're faced with a series of challenges that threaten to keep them from seeing Gene, Paul, Ace, and Peter play the hits. Returning from the Never Too Young To Die episode are co-hosts Josh Stewart and Heather Drain join Mike on this deluxe episode of the show which features director Adam Rifkin, screenwriter Carl V. Dupré, producer Tim Sullivan, actress Lin Shaye, and James Campion author of Shout It Out Loud: The Story of Kiss's Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon.

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Episode 369: Detroit Rock City (1999)

The Projection Booth Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 18, 2018 296:18

Detroit Rock City (1999) from director Adam Rifkin is the story of four friends and their desperate quest to get from Cleveland to Detroit to see KISS play live at Cobo Arena in 1978. They're faced with a series of challenges that threaten to keep them from seeing Gene, Paul, Ace, and Peter play the hits. Returning from the Never Too Young To Die episode are co-hosts Josh Stewart and Heather Drain join Mike on this deluxe episode of the show which features director Adam Rifkin, screenwriter Carl V. Dupré, producer Tim Sullivan, actress Lin Shaye, and James Campion author of Shout It Out Loud: The Story of Kiss's Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon.

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Warren Peace - The Tortured Art of James Campion

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 18, 2018 114:30

In which we celebrate today’s release of Handsome James Campion's new book ACCIDENTALLY LIKE A MARTYR - THE TORTURED ART OF WARREN ZEVON. The long-awaited collection of essays arrives with great fanfare and pomp into the arms of a grateful nation. And we - here at the Underwater Sunshine Podcast - join them in a rousing "HUZZAH!

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XX-Ray Vision

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 20, 2018 88:07

In which Adam gets all excited about playing Mary Lou Lord and our heroes manage to accidentally find themselves spending an entire podcast talking endlessly about the one subject neither of them knows anything about... (sigh) ...women.

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Leaving Every Home

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Play Episode Listen Later Jan 29, 2018 74:01

A series of conversations between noted non-journalist Adam Duritz and his pal, author and music journalist James Campion, about life, music, and whatever comes into their large and incredibly handsome brains.

"This week we talk with James Campion about his book “Shout It Out Loud: The Story of Kiss's Destroyer and the Making of an American Icon."

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Rock School - 01/24/16 (KISS Destroyer - Author Interview)