Podcast appearances and mentions of joe lubin

Joe Lubin returns to Bankless to break down his latest bold move—launching SBET, a publicly traded vehicle designed to accumulate and deploy Ether as a strategic treasury asset. We unpack whether Lubin is stepping into the Michael Saylor role for Ethereum, how SBET might outperform Bitcoin-backed models, and why ETH is poised for a monetary renaissance. From regulatory wins to Ethereum's evolving narrative on Wall Street, this episode explores how ETH can become a multi-trillion-dollar asset and a dominant store of value in the next economic supercycle. ------

A daily update on what's happening in the Rocket Pool community on Discord, Twitter, Reddit, and the DAO forum. #RocketPool #rpl #Ethereum #eth #crypto #cryptocurrency #staking #news Podcast RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/cd29a3d8/podcast/rss Anchor.fm: https://anchor.fm/rocket-fuel Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0Mvta9d2MsKq2u62w8RSoo Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rocket-fuel/id1655014529 0:00 - Welcome Rocket Pool news0:37 - Rocket Pool twitter account bangers https://x.com/rocket_pool Ethereum news 4:25 - Joe Lubin on Bankless https://x.com/BanklessHQ/status/1932045013179146283 5:50 - Virtuals on Ethereum L1 https://x.com/virtuals_io/status/1932087678578921644 https://x.com/ethermage/status/1932096728293134831 https://x.com/everythingempt0/status/1932100057089921381 https://app.virtuals.io/geneses/3838 12:55 - ETH ETFs booming https://x.com/NateGeraci/status/1931488195645980728 https://farside.co.uk/eth/ In other news 15:22 - Amazing SEC DeFi comments (impacting Ethereum!) https://x.com/secgov/status/1932137708068970924?s https://x.com/econoar/status/1932184752540508375

A daily update on what's happening in the Rocket Pool community on Discord, Twitter, Reddit, and the DAO forum. #RocketPool #rpl #Ethereum #eth #crypto #cryptocurrency #staking #news Podcast RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/cd29a3d8/podcast/rss Anchor.fm: https://anchor.fm/rocket-fuel Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0Mvta9d2MsKq2u62w8RSoo Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rocket-fuel/id1655014529 0:00 - Welcome 0:44 - Rocket Pool newsSEC on staking https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/speeches-statements/statement-certain-protocol-staking-activities-052925 https://x.com/drjasper_eth/status/1928462829306196474 https://x.com/drjasper_eth/status/1928466266735435780 New Smart Node https://discordapp.com/channels/405159462932971535/918351974406172723/1377299061341687888 https://discordapp.com/channels/405159462932971535/468923220607762485/1377302081651740753 https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/1377299563483893790 https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/918351974406172723/1378069669805817936 Ronin use rETH https://x.com/Ronin_Network/status/1925921718905807029 https://x.com/chainlink/status/1926005300806468086 Big deposits clear the queue https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/894377118828486666/1372913174847819807 https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/894377118828486666/1375623907419099221 https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/894377118828486666/1375628495069380669 https://dune.com/rp_community/saturnqueues Forced exits for liquidity https://dao.rocketpool.net/t/rpip-71-reth-withdrawal-liquidity-via-eip-7002-i-e-forced-exits rETH in DeFi https://aerodrome.finance/liquidity?query=reth https://x.com/StakeRocketPool/status/1925932568005808151 https://x.com/Contango_xyz/status/1930282159803117622 Treasury report https://dao.rocketpool.net/t/pdao-2025-05-08-2025-06-05-treasury-report/3641 GMC R24 results https://dao.rocketpool.net/t/round-24-apr-7-may-7-grants-bounties-retrospective-awards-results/3632 Halooo saves node operator https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/468923220607762485/1374361271700291606 https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/468923220607762485/1380257699828334728 A thread for RPL holders https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/1376176509101932554/1376178088374702090 19:58 - Staking news Client releases https://github.com/NethermindEth/nethermind/releases/tag/1.32.0-rc NodeSet thriving Staking Nerd Talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LgLU8XZOmo 25:56 - Ethereum news EF protocol https://x.com/timbeiko/status/1929620145984753843 Joe Lubin's massive move https://x.com/ethereumJoseph/status/1927835694149554430 https://x.com/sassal0x/status/1927341934290337831 Etherealize doing amazing stuff https://x.com/etherealize_io/status/1928105280656576710?s=46&t=fw7aoxDh361C5QFfbMUkZw https://x.com/ryanberckmans/status/1928616332402008513 Gas to 60m! https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/all-core-devs-testing-acdt-39-june-2-2025/24376/2 ETH ETFs coming to life https://x.com/vivekventures/status/1927939812524228648 Slot time discussion https://x.com/dankrad/status/1925282551280599221 TradFi on Ethereum https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/05/20/socgen-s-crypto-arm-to-launch-dollar-denominated-stablecoin-on-ethereum-reports-say Liquity V2 live https://x.com/liquityprotocol/status/1924465010925056106 https://x.com/Rocket_Pool/status/1930691077645779006 39:54 - In other news BTC ATH - others lagging https://www.thestreet.com/crypto/markets/bitcoin-hits-new-all-time-high GENIUS ACT likely to pass https://x.com/jchervinsky/status/1924642228070182969 6000 songs https://x.com/songadaymann/status/1930642287085674901 Raffle for May https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/1008896635734069349/1381175733719928882 https://harpocryptes.github.io/raffle.html

Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin has revealed that a conversation with Michael Saylor sparked his decision to launch a new investment firm focused on ETH accumulation. Meanwhile, JP Morgan is making questionable analysis about Ethereum while covertly building on top of it.~This Episode is Sponsored By Coinbase~ Buy $50 & Get $50 for getting started on Coinbase➜ https://bit.ly/CBARRON00:00 intro00:14 Sponsor: Coinbase00:35 GENIUS Act This Week01:06 Event Timeline01:41 Credit Card Act vs Banks03:29 M2 Money Supply03:46 Stablecoin Growth04:15 Stablecoin DeFi Yields04:39 Ethereum & Uniswap Hearing05:18 Circle IPO: Stay Away?05:50 JP Morgan Analyst FAIL06:59 Don't Listen to JP Morgan07:24 Jamie Dimon bullish on blockchain08:11 Onyx x Axelar x Avalanche08:54 Fusaka Upgrade Incoming09:23 Fusaka revenue effects10:26 7 Months For Upgrades To Take Effect10:59 Supply Shock?11:16 Consumer Survey11:29 Tether Gold11:48 Peter Schiff: Tokenized Gold vs Bitcoin13:00 Bitcoin Early?13:56 Strategic BET on Ethereum14:18 Sharplink Gaming $SBET Stock15:17 Shorts Increasing?15:53 $SBET Chart16:27 Tokenized Stocks on Ethereum Soon17:28 outro#ethereum #Crypto #bitcoin~Ethereum Strategy

Trump Media, GameStop, Joe Lubin, and a growing list of others are embracing the Michael Saylor playbook—raising massive capital to load up on Bitcoin. Today on The Breakdown, NLW unpacks the explosion of MicroStrategy-style public vehicles, the reflexive loop driving investor FOMO, and whether this leverage injection is a new frontier for Bitcoin-based finance—or a looming gray swan. Enjoying this content? SUBSCRIBE to the Podcast: https://pod.link/1438693620 Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheBreakdownBW Subscribe to the newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://blockworks.co/newsletter/thebreakdown⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join the discussion: https://discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8 Follow on Twitter: NLW: https://twitter.com/nlw Breakdown: https://twitter.com/BreakdownBW

The Daily Gwei Refuel gives you a recap every week day on everything that happened in the Ethereum and crypto ecosystems over the previous 24 hours - hosted by Anthony Sassano. Timestamps and links to topics discussed: https://daily-gwei-links.vercel.app/recent 00:00 Introductory song 00:10 EF leadership changes coming https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1880635379771904423 11:09 Stani reminds us of Ethereum's value prop https://x.com/StaniKulechov/status/1880995606220448122 17:11 Being more aggressive with Ethereum improvements https://x.com/sassal0x/status/1881159814228893857 20:20 How to deliver the world computer https://x.com/barnabemonnot/status/1880828105792868647 21:22 We will make Ethereum awesome https://x.com/sassal0x/status/1880781971217133920 24:24 Ethereum is credibly neutral https://x.com/sassal0x/status/1880794351334457420 26:11 Joe Lubin becoming Ethereum's Saylor? https://x.com/sassal0x/status/1880771664998477892 29:08 New Ethereum lobbying efforts https://x.com/econoar/status/1880646220299067660 30:50 EIP-7702 overview video https://x.com/letsgetonchain/status/1879877957017362537 31:36 Vitalik summarizing rollup/layer 2 terminology https://x.com/VitalikButerin/status/1880310747290386780 32:20 Uma Roy on native rollups https://x.com/pumatheuma/status/1880286929956270261 This episode is also available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/3xog9PDcoXA Subscribe to the newsletter: https://thedailygwei.substack.com/ Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvCp6vKY5jDr87htKH6hgDA/ Follow Anthony on Twitter: https://twitter.com/sassal0x Follow The Daily Gwei on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thedailygwei Join the Discord Channel: https://discord.gg/4pfUJsENcg DISCLAIMER: All information presented across all of The Daily Gwei's communication channels is strictly for educational purposes and should not be taken as investment advice.

Joe Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and Consensys, explores the evolution of blockchain technology and the expanding role of the Ethereum ecosystem in this episode. He discusses Consensys' pivotal work in building foundational infrastructure, such as MetaMask and Infura, while outlining the strategic direction for future applications and decentralized technologies. Joe delves into Layer 2 solutions, regulatory challenges with the SEC, and the broader implications for the industry. He offers a forward-looking perspective on the maturation of Ethereum, emphasizing scalability, decentralization, and the development of Web3. 0:00 - Evolution of Consensys 3:00 - Growth of Ethereum Infrastructure 6:30 - Scaling Ethereum & Layer 2 Solutions 9:00 - Joe Lubin's Beliefs 11:00 - Regulatory Challenges & SEC Lawsuit 14:30 - Future of Ethereum & Regulation 18:00 - Decentralizing Consensys and Network States 21:30 - Ethereum's Layer 1 & Layer 2 Architecture 28:00 - Impact of Layer 2 on Ethereum Mainnet 36:00 - Transitioning Products to On-chain Governance 39:00 - Network States and Decentralization 43:00 - Preparing for the Next Wave of Applications This episode was sponsored by: NEAR: https://redactedbangkok.ai/?utm_source=thedefiant&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=defiant&utm_content=newsletter Stellar: https://stellar.org/soroban?utm_source=defiant&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=defiant_podcast ✨ Check out our new website ✨ https://thedefiant.io/

04th July: Crypto & Coffee at 8

A daily update on what's happening in the Rocket Pool community on Discord, Twitter, Reddit, and the DAO forum. 0:00 - Welcome Rocket Pool news 0:37 - Houston article released https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/405163979141545995/1249543809893662730 https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/405163713063288832/1249545932714803230 6:52 - Smart Node 1.13.3 released - and problem https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/918351974406172723/1249568880549167204 9:07 - Inflation changes for the final time https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/894377758489210930/1249579141393813564 10:36 - IMC vote finishes https://vote.rocketpool.net/#/proposal/0x129eaa1779916b96fa1a34c7f9e24f87abad820c8fbe8ea2663f170891295e2e https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/405163713063288832/1248692394480894034 12:52 - New “RPIT” from Reddit https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/405163713063288832/1248998458698760283 15:14 - Vrun open to testinghttps://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/405163713063288832/1248678092239667260 17:26 - GMC Round 14 open https://dao.rocketpool.net/tag/gmc_round_14 https://dao.rocketpool.net/t/round-13-gmc-community-discussion-of-submitted-applications/2968 19:02 - Joe Lubin follows Jasper on Twitterhttps://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/405163713063288832/1249211313595355250 Staking news 20:18 - Ethereum staking wars podcast episode https://twitter.com/epicenterbtc/status/1799053474275143984 Ethereum news 22:15 - Nocturne shutting down https://x.com/AminCad/status/1799534506468356476 24:45 - zkSync airdrop news https://blog.zknation.io/introducing-zk-nation/ 27:31 - Layer 2s growth https://x.com/growthepie_eth/status/1800156397998596320 28:29 - Cow Swap TWAP https://x.com/cowswap/status/1799446283662536789 In other news 30:06 - Coingecko email list leaked https://cointelegraph.com/news/coingecko-confirms-email-provider-data-breach 30:56 - Thanks Val https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/405163713063288832/1249014653095514202

This episode of Decentralize with Cointelegraph features an in-depth conversation with Ethereum co-founder and Consensys CEO Joe Lubin. Lubin delves into the SEC's attempts to classify Ether as a security and the broader legal battle in which Consensus is involved.Lubin weighs up the damage of regularity uncertainty in the U.S., its impact on Ethereum ecosystem participants and the costs the wider cryptocurrency industry has incurred.The Ethereum co-founder also discussed Ethereum's ongoing roadmap, the importance of modularization, and the layering approach for scalability. Staking, the return on investment for validators, and the inherent risks are also unpacked at length.EigenLayer is another topic of discussion. Lubin explains how innovations like retaking and elastic security resources will transform startup operations in the blockchain space.The Consensys CEO also discusses the Solana ecosystem and how Bitcoin shaped his journey into the world of cryptocurrencies and blockchain. Lastly, he recaps Vitalik Buterin's ongoing influence on the Ethereum ecosystem.Guest's Twitter: @ethereumJoseph @ethereum @ConsensysHost's Twitter: @gazza_jenks Cointelegraph's Twitter: @CointelegraphCointelegraph's website: cointelegraph.com Timestamps:(00:00) - Introduction and initial thoughts on the SEC(00:50) - Clash of civilizations and technology benefits(03:37) - Gary Gensler and the SEC's strategy(04:57) - Legal contingencies and relocation(07:03) - Costs and burdens of regulatory uncertainty(11:47) - Political landscape and potential changes(14:30) - Decentralization and institutional involvement(19:02) - Ethereum's ecosystem and modularization(21:16) - Future scalability and ecosystem interoperability(26:00) - Staking Ether and risk assessments(27:25) - Innovations by EigenLayer and Liquid Staking(30:46) - Solana's performance and place in the blockchain ecosystem(35:00) - Joseph Lubin's first encounter with Bitcoin(35:49) - Bitcoin's role and evolution(38:07) - Vitalik Buterin's influence and organizing transformation(39:37) - Consensys's global operations, commitment to the U.S. marketThe views, thoughts and opinions expressed in this podcast are its participants' alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph. This podcast (and any related content) is for entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial advice, nor should it be taken as such. Everyone must do their own research and make their own decisions. The podcast's participants may or may not own any of the assets mentioned.

In this episode, Ben sits down with Min Teo, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Ethereal Ventures. Together with Joe Lubin, Min leads one of the industry's most well-respected early-stage venture firms. With an impressive track record that includes seed stage bets in EigenLayer and Aztec Protocol, Min has a knack for uncovering blue ocean categories and companies before they become consensus. Lets get into it. Connect with the guest Ethereal https://www.etherealventures.com/ Follow Ethereal on Twitter/X https://x.com/etherealvc Follow Min on Twitter/X https://x.com/_MinTeo Disclaimer  Ben Jacobs is a partner at Scenius Capital Management. All views expressed by Ben and the guests of this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Scenius Capital Management. Guests and the host may maintain positions in the assets or funds discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

A daily update on what's happening in the Rocket Pool community on Discord, Twitter, Reddit, and the DAO forum. Today's episode covers: Smart Node 1.13.1 released, treegen v10 issues, and EigenLayer change their airdrop. 0:00 - Welcome Rocket Pool 0:38 - SN 1.13.1 https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/918351974406172723/1235749273224741024 2:17 - Community call summary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9yPQr0lVOg 4:10 - Sentiment poll on RPIP 53 (rewards tree v10)https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/405163713063288832/1235618711604433018 https://dao.rocketpool.net/t/rewards-tree-spec-v10/2937/11 https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/405163713063288832/1235627883410751554 9:58 - Phiz becomes a NodeSet NO https://www.reddit.com/r/ethfinance/comments/1cj0i2a/daily_general_discussion_may_3_2024/l2drgcp/ 12:55 - Moist Owl has a Ronin update https://discord.com/channels/405159462932971535/405163713063288832/1235655299893825646 https://docs.google.com/document/d/15hT-RC4pt_O5Q3QRyo-fkK16rar4_7QKpocUxar3cJI/edit?usp=sharing 14:19 - rETH DeFi opportunities updated https://twitter.com/StakeRocketPool/status/1786177920337166364 15:28 - GMC raffle https://twitter.com/shf_ryn/status/1786055531813056549 Staking news 16:18 - Hildobby stats for staking https://x.com/hildobby_/status/1786029978750251140?s=46 https://x.com/hildobby_/status/1786029998064980196?s=46 Ethereum news 17:39 - EigenLayer change their airdrop https://x.com/eigenfoundation/status/1786152862688690589?s=46 https://blog.eigenfoundation.org/eigen-community-update/ 21:00 - Bankless with Joe Lubin https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ/status/1785779842736124212 22:19 - Hong Kong flows bigger than expected https://twitter.com/EricBalchunas/status/1786035915040674061? 24:27 - Buidl taking over https://x.com/jacqmelinek/status/1785684140043427991 25:16 - Ethereum DA https://x.com/IAmNickDodson/status/1786064771143340342 27:12 - Base onboarding https://x.com/TheCryptoLark/status/1786010275843305601 29:18 - 1000 days of EIP-1559 https://x.com/ultrasoundmoney/status/1786285283610112208 30:53 - Make ICOs great again https://x.com/sassal0x/status/1786332796493115625 In other news 33:19 - Contributors raffle https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18T5w_w9uf6eOy5tt3GDNLFjNp7pr__1Z9IaW4RBCAQY/ https://harpocryptes.github.io/raffle.html

“The U.S. is trying to disconnect from Ethereum," that's what Joe Lubin the CEO of Consensys said in today's conversation. He was talking about those in power trying to unplug Ethereum from the citizens. The SEC is going after Kraken, Coinbase, Uniswap and Metamask. They're trying to turn every non-custodial wallet into a broker-dealer. We brought on Joe Lubin, a crypto OG and CEO of Consensys the company behind a number of massive crypto projects including the popular Metamask wallet, and Matt Corva, the General Counsel at Consensys, leading the charge against the SEC  Joe and Matt are producing evidence that the SEC is coming after Ethereum itself. Sending discovery requests to Ethereum core developers, threatening their employers - pushing a coordinated effort to claim Ether is a security so they can control it. So Consensys is taking them to court to settle the issue. If they're successful it'll be the first time we get a clear court ruling that Ether is a commodity and not a security. ------

Steven Nerayoff is the creator of the utility token, ICO, security token, VC, and Cofounder of Ethereum. We discuss:- His role in Ethereum's ICO - Was Ethereum a security at ICO and is it one today - ETH ICO participants - SEC Gary Gensler's plan to coverup Bill Hinman's conflicts around Ethereum with Prometheum- Will an Ethereum ETF be approved - Joe Lubin, Vitalk Buterin, Charles Hoskinson, and Gavin Wood stories - Did JPMorgan participate in the ETH ico? - His Metaverse project 

Jason Brett X -   / regulatoryjason   Join this channel to get access to perks:    / @discovercrypto_   ➡️Trade like a crypto pro on Apex - https://pro.apex.exchange/trade/BTC-U...

The most valuable crypto stories for Wednesday, May 31, 2023.This episode is sponsored by Ciphertrace."The Hash" hosts take a deep dive into today's top stories moving the crypto markets, including Binance saying it needs to "focus on talent density across its organization," as it responded Wednesday morning to a report of job cuts. Separately, a new blockchain token standard is allowing traders to convert their Ethereum-based non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to NFTs on the Bitcoin network. And, "The Hash" unpacks the results of a wager made at Consensus 2018 that hinged on how far Ethereum adoption would get by now.See also:Binance Says 'Reevaluating' Roles After Report of LayoffsBitcoin Trades at a 20% Discount on Binance Australia Following Banking Issues in the Country BRC-721E Token Standard Converts Ethereum NFTs to Bitcoin NFTsFind Satoshi Labs Rolls Out AI Tool That Turns Selfies Into NFTs-Ciphertrace, a Mastercard company, helps banks, governments, regulators, exchanges and VASPs to trace the movement and risk of crypto funds, uncover illicit activity, and help comply with global regulations. Get in touch today to find out more at Ciphertrace.com.-This episode has been edited by senior producer Michele Musso and the executive producer is Jared Schwartz. Our theme song is “Neon Beach.”See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The most valuable crypto stories for Wednesday, May 31, 2023.This episode is sponsored by Ciphertrace."The Hash" hosts take a deep dive into today's top stories moving the crypto markets, including Binance saying it needs to "focus on talent density across its organization," as it responded Wednesday morning to a report of job cuts. Separately, a new blockchain token standard is allowing traders to convert their Ethereum-based non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to NFTs on the Bitcoin network. And, "The Hash" unpacks the results of a wager made at Consensus 2018 that hinged on how far Ethereum adoption would get by now.See also:Binance Says 'Reevaluating' Roles After Report of LayoffsBitcoin Trades at a 20% Discount on Binance Australia Following Banking Issues in the Country BRC-721E Token Standard Converts Ethereum NFTs to Bitcoin NFTsFind Satoshi Labs Rolls Out AI Tool That Turns Selfies Into NFTs-Ciphertrace, a Mastercard company, helps banks, governments, regulators, exchanges and VASPs to trace the movement and risk of crypto funds, uncover illicit activity, and help comply with global regulations. Get in touch today to find out more at Ciphertrace.com.-This episode has been edited by senior producer Michele Musso and the executive producer is Jared Schwartz. Our theme song is “Neon Beach.”See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Listen to Bloomberg Crypto on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts or  Spotify. Last year, just before the crypto winter had hit in earnest, Princeton University opened up “The Center for the Decentralization of Power Through Blockchain Technology”. The Center was funded in part by a $20 million gift from prominent Princeton alumni including Mike Novogratz, CEO of Galaxy Investment Partners, and Joe Lubin, co-founder of the Ethereum crypto platform. The university says the Center focuses on the software engineering that makes blockchain technology work, finds innovative uses for decentralized systems and considers how it might affect our collective future. One year on, as the crypto winter persists, what's the Center up to these days?  Bloomberg reporter Francesca Maglione joins this episode to discuss the role universities are playing in studying blockchain. Subscribe to the Bloomberg Crypto Newsletter at https://bloom.bg/cryptonewsletter See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In crypto news today 715 Million in investment threatened by ConsenSys shareholder win. SEC is investigating VCs who invested in FTX. HashKey Capital has raised half a billion dollars for the cryptoasset manager's latest vehicle.

Lex Sokolin is the head economist at ConsenSys, the Ethereum developer studio created by Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin. Sokolin came to the U.S. from Russia when he was 10 years old and has long been drawn to innovations that push financial technology. He was at Lehman Brothers when it failed at the height of the financial crisis in 2008, which taught him deep lessons about the ephemerality of institutions. While it took him some time to grasp crypto, he's all in now and is leading efforts at ConsenSys that focus on token economics, DAO strategy and treasury management. Follow Lex on Twitter Lex on LinkedIn Lex's fintech newsletter on Substack

Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin joins us to talk about the historic Merge update to the blockchain where it's switching from proof-of-work to proof -of-stake.

Heya cryptozens Tonight's Stories: USDN Depegs UK Gov't Moves Toward Stablecoins Gensler Says You Need To Be Protected It's 10 PM Pacific time and the date is April 4th, 2022. And welcome back to the Crypto Overnighter. I am your host, Nick. The cover model for this podcast is Tex and together we take a nightly look at the crypto, nft and metaverse space and the industry that surrounds it. We bring you new stories on familiar topics. And keep in mind, nothing in this show should ever be considered financial advice.  Metamask Token. DId you hear about that? It seems Consensys, the owner of MetaMask, hit a valuation at the $7 billion mark. That's after they raised $450 million in their latest funding round. They're really making their mark as a major player in Web3. In a recent statement, ConsenSys talked about how MetaMask is used by many people for more than just hodling crypto. They collect NFTs, Join DAOs, maybe stake or lend or borrow from a DeFi protocol. They said the US, the Philippines, Brazil, Germany and Nigeria are some of the most active markets for MetaMask. Joe Lubin is the CEO of ConsenSys and co-founder of Ethereum. According to him, MetaMask is pushing quote “pregressive decentralization” and focusing on security and improving the kinda clunky interface. I mean really. “Expand view”? How does that have anything to do with the actual function? Anyway, they're also working on a DAO. Lubin said quote; There is a DAO that is being formed right now in the context of MetaMask. It will not own MetaMask, but it will enable the creation of new parts of MetaMask that can be funded. No further details were given, but it shows that MetaMask is planning on coming out with their own token. Those rumors may finally come true. Email: crypto.overnighter@gmail.com Salem Friends of Felines: https://sfof.org/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/CryptoCorvus1 Torum: https://www.torum.com/u/corvusforge

Amanda Cassatt has been active within the Ethereum ecosystem almost from the very beginning as she led marketing for ConsenSys, the Ethereum application development studio built by Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin. She has since gone on to co-found Serotonin, a web3 professional services firm and Mojito, an NFT infrastructure firm. Amanda is a former special projects editor for the Huffington Post and interned at the New Yorker magazine, and co-founded Slant in 2015, so we naturally dove deep into media revenue models and how web2 didn't quite get it right. Amanda is one of the most-connected people you'll find in crypto and is helping bring to life Crypto: The Musical which plans to utilize a decentralized autonomous organization to raise money to produce the first Broadway musical about well, crypto. There is also a bonus mention of the best football club the world has ever known, Liverpool FC. Follow developments in Crypto: The Musical Learn more about Serotonin and Mojito Follow Amanda on Twitter

🔥 Bit2Me prepara el lanzamiento de su propio Token, que se llamará B2M Token, y abre su whitelist para que los clientes puedan participar: https://bit2me.com/es/token - La ida del token B2M es potenciar el Suite de productos y servicios que ofrece actualmente Bit2me - B2M forma parte de la estrategia de Bit2Me para continuar su camino hacia la innovación y el desarrollo - ERC20 en Ethereum - El primer paso para este lanzamiento es la apertura de su lista blanca (whitelist) para el registro de inversores estratégicos y de todos los que quieran participar en la oferta - Las personas que se registren en la whitelist para venta pública de tokens B2M, recibirán una notificación un tiempo antes de iniciarse la venta pública así como información más detallada sobre el proyecto - La idea es que esta lista garantice una distribución justa y equitativa de los tokens entre los que quieran participar - Los poseedores del token B2M podrán: 1. Ahorrar en las comisiones de Bit2me 2. Utilizar el token en las diferentes aplicaciones y ganar recompensas 3. Obtener rendimientos por hacer staking 4. Utilizarlo directamente con la tarjeta B Mastercard de la compañía que estará lista muy pronto. https://news.bit2me.com/bit2me-prepar... ⛏️Se está presentando un cambio importante a nivel mundial con respecto a la ubicación de los mineros - Marathon Patent Group invierte $120 millones en mineros Bitcoin que instalará en Norteamérica - La compañía informó que está comprando 30.000 equipos de minería de bitcoin Antminer S19j Pro al fabricante Bitmain https://news.bit2me.com/marathon-pate... 🖼️ De acuerdo con Joe Lubin, co-fundador de Ethereum y CEO de ConsenSys, los NFTs permitirán reinventar varios modelos de negocio - Los NFTs o tokens no fungibles, son activos que a diferencia de Bitcoin, Ether o las criptomonedas tradicionales, cada uno es distintos de los demás - Además de invitar a nuevas personas al ecosistema de las criptomonedas, los NFTs también están llamando la atención de grandes empresas. https://news.bit2me.com/?p=11579&prev... 🏦 Bank of America considera “progresista” la adopción de Bitcoin por parte de El Salvador - Según un informe publicado por el banco estadounidense, Bitcoin podría beneficiar a la población salvadoreña excluida del sistema financiero tradicional 🍱 Asia contra las criptomonedas - La Comisión de Servicios Financieros (FSC) de Corea del Sur cerrará varias plataformas de intercambio de criptomonedas - Un medio local informó que la FSC anunció que cerrará al meno 11 exchanges y plataformas de intercambio cripto por sospechas de actividades ilícitas Mientras tanto, el gobierno de China comienza a manifestar su preocupación por las finanzas descentralizadas (DeFi) - El ex gobernador del Banco de la Gente de China y quien dirige actualmente la unidad de investigación blockchain de la Asociación China de Finanzas de Internet, recomienda al banco central estar atento al rápido crecimiento y desarrollo de las DeFi https://news.bit2me.com/?p=11583&prev... 🚀 Suscríbete a nuestro Canal: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBiA... 00:00 Promo Bit2Me Trade 0:15 Sumario 0:38 Los minero de Bitcoin se mudan 1:20 NFTs nuevos modelos de negocio 2:03 Bank of America sobre El Salvador 2:46 Asia contra las criptomonedas 3:22 China y las DeFi 4:13 Noticia Bomba: Bit2Me lanza su propio Token "B2M" 5:21 ¿Te has apuntado ya en la whitelist de B2M Token? 5:31 Cierre #B2MToken #Bit2MeToken #AsiaCriptomonedas #Bitcoin #Blockchain #Criptomonedas 🎁 *¡Has descubierto un regalo!* Si estás aquí, aprendiendo, te mereces nuestro regalo especial: Regístrate en Bit2Me con este enlace y en tu primera compra de 100€ o más te regalaremos 5€: https://bit2me.com/?r=75N-GP4-G0S *¡La revolución la creamos entre todos!* 📲¡Descárgate la APP de Bit2Me! https://app.adjust.com/dv1tfcp Nuestra web: https://bit2me.com 👉 Síguenos en las redes sociales: ⭕️ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bit2me ⭕️ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bit2me ⭕️ Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/bit2me ⭕️ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/9243641 ⭕️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/bit2me ⭕️ Telegram: https://t.me/Bit2Me_ES ⭕️ Lbry (Odysee): https://odysee.com/@bit2me:c ⭕️ Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1Tj4kyX... ⭕️ iVoox: https://www.ivoox.com/podcast-bit2me-... y por supuesto, dale a la campanita para activar las notificaciones 👈 ✍🏻 ¡Apunta! Conoce todos nuestros servicios: ⭕️ Wallet: https://bit2me.com/wallet ⭕️ Tikebit (compra criptomonedas en tiendas físicas): https://www.tikebit.com/inicio&lang=es ⭕️ Academy: https://academy.bit2me.com ⭕️ Crypto TV: https://tv.bit2me.com ⭕️ Crypto Converter: https://converter.bit2me.com ⭕️ Agenda de crypto eventos: https://agenda.bit2me.com ...y muchos más en nuestra web! MOSTRAR MENOS

With the S&P and Nasdaq at all-time highs, we look at the three most important charts in the markets and what they say about where stocks are going. Plus we're live from the Aspen Ideas Festival with Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin to talk about the state of the crypto space.

Guests Joseph Lubin, founder of ConsenSys and cofounder of Ethereum, and Erik Voorhees, CEO and founder of ShapeShift, join host Ash Bennington for a conversation that explores how the crypto space is growing and where Bitcoin and Ethereum fit into the landscape. They talk about use cases, discuss how each technology complements the other, explain why the either/or narrative is misguided, and consider the potential each holds to reshape the current financial system.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In our first episode of Signal, join Lex Sokolin in an interview with Ethereum Co-founder and ConsenSys CEO Joe Lubin about the beginnings of the crypto ecosystem, his experience with AI at Princeton, what he learned at Goldman Sachs, and how all these adventures shaped his vision today. Why are financial systems broken? What was it like to launch Ethereum? What is the relationship between collectivism and open-source? How can the banking world mesh with the next generation of financial infrastructure? We'll cover all these and more in our inaugural episode of Signal.

Hi Fintech Futurists, In this exciting conversation, we talk with none other than Joe Lubin of ConsenSys and Ethereum, about his journey from being exposed to advances in artificial intelligence at Princeton to becoming the household name in programmable blockchain. Additionally, we get an insider look into his founding of Ethereum and ConsenSys, and how the technology and individuals behind these two companies are transforming the very fabric of financial institutions that exist today and how new products/services are started for the betterment of humanity.

In this week’s episode we speak with Mike Novogratz, the CEO of Galaxy Digital. He started his career at Goldman Sachs and then led a macro hedge fund at Fortress, which was shuttered in 2015. He then went all-in on crypto, in part thanks to convincing from his college roommate Joe Lubin, and founded Galaxy Digital, an investment bank for digital assets. After grinding through the 2018 and 2019 bear market, Mike says he can finally breathe. He is convinced that Bitcoin is finally derisked. While Bitcoin is firmly established as digital gold, to him, Ethereum is a venture bet because it’s not totally finished yet. It's getting there, and so the bet is it's going to happen, not that it's happened. Novo is wildly bullish DeFi. He says the threat to the banking system and payments is DeFi, not Bitcoin. But that also means the big guys are going to fight back with lobbying and regulation because protocols like Uniswap and Aave are going after their business. About the hype and rally in the crypto market, Novo says this time it’s different. Unlike in 2017, he doesn’t believe we’re in a bubble. He says we’re in a movement. Big thanks to our sponsors: Zerion, a simple interface to access and use decentralized finance Balancer, one of the leading DeFi automated market makers (AMM) for multiple tokens. Dive into their pools at https://balancer.finance/! Casper, an enterprise-focused blockchain which aims to introduce unprecedented security, speed and scale for businesses Kraken, consistently rated the best and most secure cryptocurrency exchange, which can get you from fiat to DeFi

My guest today is Joe Lubin, Co-Founder of Ethereum and CEO and Founder of ConsenSys. On this episode of Empire, we discuss where Bitcoin falls short, Joe leaving Wall Street for Crypto, founding Ethereum and ConsenSys, why forks can be good for progress, and Joe's real motivators. ––– Empire is brought to you by Blockworks, a financial media brand delivering breaking news and premium insights about digital assets to millions of investors. For more content like Empire, visit http://blockworks.co/podcasts. Follow me on Twitter @JasonYanowitz and let me know what you thought of the show!

Hi Fintech Futurists,Thinking about how to connect these worlds and different available journeys? Or the timeless risks developing in tranched DeFi that look like mortgage-backed securities? We even touch on hegelian dialectics! Check out our great conversation.For premium subscribers, a full transcript is provided along with the recording.Hope you enjoy, and do not hesitate to reach out here!ExcerptLex Sokolin:And then, when we look at DeFi, and what we see is, globally, lots and lots of hackers from scratch, building capital markets machinery, which is like the Linux of capital markets machinery. You can make any exposure you want and package it however you want. I feel like people just have to take a much more forgiving lens here. Ajit Tripathi:Lex, this is a fascinating topic because I come from the other side, so everything, capital markets, from pricing and risking, to some of the most exotic derivatives the world has ever seen in Tokyo. I come from the other side and for me, it was really frustrating that everyone in fintech were either doing payments or doing some kind of mobile app, not really changing much, if you ask me and I know you'll disagree with this, but it has always been very frustrating for me that the core capital markets infrastructure has remained unimpacted, more or less, by this whole fintech revolution and nobody has tried in the traditional, and I'm already saying traditional because it has been 10 years, nobody has even tried to revive the backend infrastructure. People are building it, yeah people are building apps, people haven't really tried to see how capital is distributed? How is wealth created?How do we allocate capital to applications far more efficiently? How do we make capital more efficient? How do we take the assets for the real world, whether gaming or art or whatever and how do we capture this? Finance doesn't exist in isolation. Capital markets make value, enable value to be monetized, distributed at scale and directed to relatively more efficient uses, and I think Joe Lubin saw this coming along ahead of most of us. Back in 2016, he was saying things like, Ethereum will help capital be directed to much more efficient uses, analog capital and so on. I didn't see that coming and for me, what DeFi really does is it starts to compliment fintech, it starts to build this whole backend infrastructure, the back office, the financial instrument creation, the lending, the market makers, the risk taking through derivative exchanges.

For one of two launch episodes for my new podcast Next with Novo, I called up my old college roommate and friend, the CEO of ConsenSys, co-founder of the Ethereum Project, and all-around crypto guru, Joe Lubin. I'm so glad to have been able to get Joe on the show to help kick off these conversations about what's new and what's next, the best & brightest minds behind the technologies powering permissionless innovation, with a focus on how cryptocurrency (Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi) is taking us into the future and rewriting our financial systems. Following his upbringing in Toronto and education at Princeton, Joe started noticing systemic issues in our political and economic structures and how equity is shared. He knew we needed a different future and decided he wanted to help build it. After reading a white paper from anonymous Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, Joe went on to found the ConsenSys project, leading to the creation of Ethereum, the first cryptocurrency on the blockchain. Check out the episode to learn more from Joe about the past, present, and future of Ethereum, the banking industry's rapid moves in crypto, the hottest DeFi projects, and how cryptocurrency is bringing us an enlightened worldwide infrastructure that will change our entire way of life. Make sure to subscribe to my YouTube and Apple Podcasts channels so you don't miss out on future episodes, and follow me: Twitter: https://twitter.com/novogratz YouTube: www.youtube.com/c/mikenovo/ Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3sdPneD Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3s74l5Y Next with Novo is the go-to resource for what's new and what's next. In this series, Mike Novogratz, influential investor, Wall Street Veteran, and CEO at Galaxy Digital, invites viewers to learn with him from the brightest minds behind disruptive businesses, prolific social movements, and technologies powering permissionless innovation. This podcast was recorded on December 9, 2020. The Next with Novo podcast is for informational purposes only. Nothing in this podcast constitutes an offer to buy or sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy or sell, any securities. The information in the podcast does not constitute investment, legal, or tax advice. The host is an affiliate of Galaxy Digital (host and Galaxy Digital together, the “Parties”), and the podcast represents the opinions of the host and/or guest and not necessarily that of Galaxy Digital. The Parties do not make any representation or warranty, express or implied, as to the accuracy or completeness of any of the information therein. Each of the Parties expressly disclaims any and all liability relating to or resulting from the use of this information. Certain information in the podcast may have been obtained from published and non-published sources and has not been independently verified. The Parties may buy, sell or hold investments in some of the companies, digital assets or protocols discussed in this podcast. Except where otherwise indicated, the information in this video is based on matters as they exist as of the date of preparation and will not be updated.

Episode 107 of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs looks at “Surf City” and the career of Jan and Dean, including a Pop Symphony, accidental conspiracy to kidnap, and a career that both started and ended with attempts to get out of being drafted. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Hey Little Cobra” by the Rip Chords. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources No Mixcloud this week, due to the number of songs by Jan and Dean. Stephen McParland has published many, many books on the California surf and hot-rod music scenes. The Grand High Potentates of California Rock: Jan and Dean “In Perspective” 1958-1968 is the one I used most here, but I referred to several. His books can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks I also used Dead Man’s Curve and Back: The Jan and Dean Story by Mark Thomas Passmore, and Dean Torrence’s autobiography Surf City.  The original mono versions of the Liberty singles are only available on an out-of-print CD that goes for over £400, and many compilations have later rerecordings (often by Dean without Jan) but this has the proper recordings, albeit in stereo mixes. This compilation contains their pre-Liberty singles, including the Jan & Arnie material.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript A warning about this episode — it features some discussion of a car crash and resulting disability and recovery, which may be upsetting to some people. Today we’re going to look at one of the most successful duos in rock and roll history, but one who have been relegated to a footnote because of their collaboration with a far more successful band, who had a similar sound to them. We’re going to look at Jan and Dean, and at “Surf City”: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, “Surf City”] The story of Jan and Dean begins with Jan and Arnie, and with the Barons. We discussed the Barons briefly in the episode on “LSD-25”, a few months ago, but only in passing, so to recap — the Barons were a singing group that formed at University High School in LA in the late fifties, centred around Jan Berry. Various people involved in the group’s formation went on to be important parts of the LA music scene in the sixties, but by 1958 they were down to Berry and his friends Arnie Ginsburg — not the DJ we talked about last episode, Dean Torrence, and Don Altfeld. The group members all had a love for R&B, and hung around with various of the Black groups of the time — Don Altfeld has talked about him and Berry being present, but not participating, for Richard Berry’s recording of “Louie Louie”, though his memories of the time seem confused in the interviews I’ve read. And Jan Berry in particular was a real music obsessive, and had what may have been the biggest R&B and rock and roll record collection in LA — which he obtained by scamming record companies, which seems to be very in character for him. He got a letterhead made up for a fake radio station, KJAN, and wrote to every record company he could find asking for promo copies. He ended up getting six copies of every new release “to play on the radio”, and would give some of the extra copies to his friends — and others he would use as frisbees. According to Torrence, Berry would often receive two hundred new records a day, all free. Berry had a reel-to-reel tape recorder belonging to his father — his father, William Berry, was important in the Howard Hughes organisation, and had been in charge of the Spruce Goose project, even flying in the famous plane with Hughes, and Hughes had given him the tape recorder, which unlike almost all recording equipment available in the fifties had a primitive reverb function built in. With that and a microphone stolen from the school auditorium, Berry started recording himself and his friends, and he’d wanted to play one of the tapes he’d made at a party, so he’d taken it to a studio to be cut as an acetate, where it had been heard by Joe Lubin of Arwin Records, who took the tape and got session musicians to overdub it: [Excerpt: Jan and Arnie, “Jennie Lee”] That record was released as by Jan and Arnie, rather than the Barons — Dean Torrence was off doing six months in the army, to get out of being conscripted later. Torrence has always said that he could hear himself on the recording, and that it was one the Barons had done together, but everyone else involved has claimed that while the Barons did record a version of that song, the finished version only features Jan and Arnie’s vocals. Don Altfeld didn’t sing on it, because he was never allowed to sing in the Barons — he was forced to just mouth along, which given that both Jan and Dean were known for regularly singing flat must say something about just how bad a singer he is — though he did apparently hit a metal chair leg as percussion on the record. “Jennie Lee” went to number three on the Cashbox chart — number eight on Billboard — and was a big enough hit that it set a precedent for how all the records Jan Berry would be involved in for the next few years would be made — he would record vocals and piano in his garage, with a ton of reverb, and then the backing track would be recorded to that, usually by the same group of musicians that played on records by people like Sam Cooke, Ritchie Valens, and other late-fifties LA singers — a group centred around Ernie Freeman on piano and organ, Rene Hall on guitar, and Earl Palmer on drums. This was a completely backwards way of recording — normally you’d have the musicians play the backing track first and then overdub the vocals on it — but it was how they would carry on doing things for several years. Jan and Arnie’s follow-up, “Gas Money”, written by Berry, Ginsburg, and Altfeld, did less well, only making number eighty-one in the charts: [Excerpt: Jan and Arnie, “Gas Money”] And their third single didn’t chart at all. By this point, Arnie Ginsburg was getting thoroughly sick of working with Jan Berry — pretty much without exception everyone who knew Berry in the fifties and early sixties says two things about him — that he was the single most intelligent person they ever met, and that he was a domineering egomaniac who used anyone he could remorselessly. Jan and Arnie split up, and Arwin Records seems to have decided to stick with Arnie, rather than Jan — though this might have been because Arnie seemed *less* likely to have hits, as Dean Torrence has later claimed that Arwin was a tax dodge — it was owned by Marty Melcher, Doris Day’s husband, and seems to have been used as much to get out of paying as much tax on the family’s vast wealth as it was a real record label. Whatever the reason, though, Arnie made one more single, as The Rituals, backed by many of the people who had played with The Barons — Bruce Johnston, Sandy Nelson, and Dave Shostac, plus their regular collaborators Mike Deasy, Richie Polodor and Harper Cosby. It didn’t chart: [Excerpt: The Rituals, “Girl in Zanzibar”] Dean Torrence, who had by now left the Army, saw his chance, and soon Jan and Arnie had become Jan and Dean — after a brief phase in which it looked like they might persuade Dean to change his name in order to avoid losing the group name. They hooked up with a new management and production team, Lou Adler and Herb Alpert, who had both been working at Keen Records with Sam Cooke. Kim Fowley later said that it was him who persuaded Adler to sign the duo, but Kim Fowley said a lot of things, very few of them true. Adler and Alpert got the new duo signed to Doré Records, a small label based in LA, and their first release on the label was a cover version of a record originally by a group called the Laurels: [Excerpt: The Laurels, “Baby Talk”] Herb Alpert brought that song to the duo, and their version became a top ten hit, with Jan singing the low parts and Dean singing the lead: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, “Baby Talk”] The hit was big enough that budget labels released soundalike cover versions of it, one of which was by a duo called Tom and Jerry, who had been one hit wonders a year earlier: [Excerpt: Tom and Jerry, “Baby Talk”] That cover version was unsuccessful, something Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel were probably very grateful for when they reinvented themselves as sensitive folkies a couple of years later. Around this time, Jan got his girlfriend pregnant. In order not to spoil their son’s promising career — as well as being a singer, he was also at university and planned to become a doctor — Jan’s parents adopted his son and raised the boy as their own son. The duo went on a tour with Little Willie John, Bobby Day, and Little Richard’s old backing band The Upsetters, playing to mainly Black audiences — a tour they were booked on because almost all West Coast doo-wop at that time was from Black singers. Once the mistake was realised, a decision was made to promote the new duo’s image more — lots of photos of the very blonde, very white, duo started to be released, as a way to reassure the white audience. The duo’s film-star good looks assured them of regular coverage in the teen magazines, but they didn’t have any more hits on Doré — of the seven singles they released in the two years after “Baby Talk”, none of them got to better than number fifty-three on the charts.  Eventually the duo left Doré, and Jan released one solo single, “Tomorrow’s Teardrops”: [Excerpt: Jan Berry, “Tomorrow’s Teardrops”] That was actually released as by Jan Barry, rather than Jan Berry, at a point when the duo had actually split up — Dean was getting tired of not having any further hit records, and wanted to concentrate on his college work, while Berry was one of those people who needs to be doing several things simultaneously. Berry’s new girlfriend Jill Gibson added backing vocals — by this time he’d dumped the one he’d got pregnant — and the song was written by Berry and Altfeld. Jan actually started his own label, Ripple Records — named after the brand of cheap wine — to release it, and Dean created the logo for him — the first of many he would create over the years. However, the duo soon reunited, and came up with a plan which would have them only touring during the summer break, and doing local performances in the LA area on those weekends when neither had any homework. Now they needed to get signed to a major label. The one they wanted was Liberty, the label that Eddie Cochran had been on, and whose owner, Si Waronker, was actually the cousin of the owners of Doré. And they had recorded a track that they were sure would get them signed to Liberty. The Marcels had recently had a hit with their doo-wop revival of the old standard “Blue Moon”: [Excerpt: The Marcels, “Blue Moon”] Jan had decided to make a soundalike arrangement of another song from the same period, using the same chord changes — the old Hoagy Carmichael song “Heart and Soul”: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, “Heart and Soul”] They were sure that would be a hit. But Herb Alpert wasn’t — he thought it was a dreadful record, He hated it so much, in fact, that he broke up his partnership with Lou Adler. The division of the partnership’s assets was straightforward — they owned Jan and Dean’s contract, and they owned a tape recorder. Alpert got the tape recorder, and Adler got Jan and Dean. Alpert went on to have a string of hit records as a trumpet player, starting with “The Lonely Bull” in 1962: [Excerpt: Herb Alpert, “The Lonely Bull”] He later formed his own record label, A&M, and never seems to have regretted losing Jan & Dean. Jan and Dean took their tape of “Heart and Soul” to Liberty Records, who said that they did want to sign Jan and Dean, but they didn’t want to release a record like that — they told them to take it somewhere else, and then when the single was a flop, they could come back to Liberty and make some proper records. So the duo got a two-record deal with the small label Challenge Records, on the understanding that after those two singles they would move on to Liberty. And “Heart and Soul” turned out to be a big hit, making number twenty-five on the charts: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, “Heart and Soul”] Their second single on Challenge only made number one hundred and four, but by this time they knew the drill — they’d release their first single on a new label, it would be a big hit, then everything after that would be a flop. But they were going to a new label anyway, and they were sure their first single on Liberty Records would be a huge hit, just like every time they changed labels. The first record they put out on Liberty was a cover of another oldie, “A Sunday Kind of Love”, suggested by Si Waronker’s son Lenny, who we’ll be hearing a lot more about in future episodes. By this point Lou Adler was working for Aldon Music as their West Coast representative, and so the track was credited as “produced by Lou Adler for Nevins-Kirshner”, but Jan was given a separate arrangement credit on the record. But despite their predictions that the single would be a hit because it was a new label, it only made number ninety-four on the charts. The follow-up, “Tennessee”, was a song which had been more or less forced on them — it was originally one of the recordings that Phil Spector produced during his short-lived contract with Liberty, for a group called the Ducanes, but when the Ducanes had made a hash of it, Liberty forced the song on Jan & Dean instead: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, “Tennessee”] By this time, while Ernie Freeman was still the studio leader of the session musicians, Jan was requesting a rather larger group of musicians, and they’d started recording the backing tracks first. The musicians on “Tennessee” included Tommy Allsup and Jerry Allison of the Crickets, Earl Palmer on drums, and Glen Campbell on guitar, but even these proven hit-makers couldn’t bring the song to more than number sixty-nine on the charts. And even that was better than their next two singles, neither of which even made the Hot One Hundred — though the fact that by this point they were reduced to recording versions of “Frosty The Snowman”, and attempting to recapture their first hit with a sequel called “She’s Still Talking Baby Talk” shows how desperately they were casting around for something, anything that could be a hit. Eventually they found something that worked. A group called the Regents had recently had a hit with “Barbara Ann”: [Excerpt: The Regents, “Barbara Ann”] The duo had cut a cover version of that for their most recent album, and they thought it had worked well, and so they wanted something else that would allow Dean to sing a falsetto lead, over a bass vocal by Jan, with a girl’s name in the title. They eventually hit on an old standard from the 1940s, originally written as a favour for the songwriter’s lawyer, Lee Eastman, about his then one-year-old daughter Linda (who we’ll be hearing more about later in this series). Their version of “Linda” finally gave them another hit after five flops in a row, reaching number twenty-eight in the charts: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, “Linda”] Their career was on an upswing again, and then everything changed for them when they played a gig with support from a local band who had just started having hits, the Beach Boys. The story goes that the Beach Boys were booked to do their own support slot and then to back Jan and Dean on their set. The show went down well with the audience, and they wanted an encore, but Jan and Dean had run out of rehearsed songs. So they suggested that the Beach Boys play their own two singles again, and Jan and Dean would sing with them. The group were flattered that two big stars like Jan and Dean would want to perform their songs, and eagerly joined in. Suddenly, Jan and Dean had an idea — their next album was going to be called Jan & Dean Take Linda Surfin’, but as yet they hadn’t recorded any surf songs. They invited the Beach Boys to come into the studio and record new versions of their two singles for Jan & Dean’s album, with Jan and Dean singing the leads: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys, “Surfin'”] The Beach Boys weren’t credited for that session, as they were signed to another label, but it started a long collaboration between the two groups. In particular, the Beach Boys’ leader Brian Wilson became a close collaborator with Berry. And at that same session, Wilson gave Jan and Dean what would become their biggest hit. After the recording, Jan and Dean asked Wilson if he had any new songs they might be able to do. The first one he played them, “Surfin’ USA”, he told them they couldn’t do anything with as he wanted that for the Beach Boys themselves. But then he played them two others. The one that Jan and Dean saw most potential in was a song he’d completed, “Gonna Hustle You”: [Excerpt: Brian Wilson, “Gonna Hustle You”] The duo wanted that as their next single, but Liberty Records flat out refused to put out something that sounded so dirty as “Gonna Hustle You”. They tried rewriting it as “Get a Chance With You”, but even that was too much. They put the song aside, though they’d return to it later as “The New Girl In School”, which would become a minor hit for them. Instead, they worked on a half-completed song that Wilson had started, very much in the same mould as the first two Beach Boys singles, with the provisional title “Goodie Connie Won’t You Please Come Home”. This song would become the first of many Jan and Dean songs for which the songwriting credit is disputed. No-one argues with the fact that the basic idea of the song was Brian Wilson’s, but Jan Berry’s process was to get a lot of people to throw ideas in, sometimes working in a group, sometimes working separately and not even knowing that other people had been involved. The song is officially credited to Wilson and Berry, but Don Altfeld has also claimed he contributed to it, Dean Torrence says that he wrote about a quarter of the lyrics, and it’s also been suggested that Roger Christian wrote the lyrics to the first verse. Christian was an LA-area DJ who was obsessed with cars, and had come to Wilson’s attention after he’d said on the air that the Beach Boys’ “409” was a great song about a bad car. He’d started writing songs with Wilson, and he would also collaborate with both Jan Berry and Wilson’s friend Gary Usher (who was a big part of this scene but hardly ever worked with Jan and Dean because he hated Jan). Almost every car song from this period, by the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, or any number of studio groups, was co-written by Christian, and we’ll be hearing more about him in a future episode. This group of people — Jan and Dean, Brian Wilson, Roger Christian, and Don Altfeld — would write together in various combinations, and write a lot of hits, but a lot of the credits were assigned more or less randomly — though Jan Berry was almost always credited, and Dean Torrence almost never was. The completed song, titled “Surf City”, was recorded with members of the Wrecking Crew — the studio musicians who usually worked with Phil Spector — performing the backing track. In this case, these were Hal Blaine, Glen Campbell, Earl Palmer, Bill Pitman, Ray Pohlman and Billy Strange — there were two drummers because Berry liked a big drum sound. Brian Wilson was at the session, and soon after this he started using some of those musicians himself. While it was released as a Jan and Dean record, Dean doesn’t sing on it at all — the vocals featured Jan, three singers from another Liberty Records group called the Gents, and Brian Wilson, with Wilson and Tony Minichello of the Gents singing the falsetto parts that Dean would sing live: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, “Surf City”] That went to number one, becoming Jan and Dean’s only number one, and Brian Wilson’s first — much to the fury of Wilson’s father Murry, who thought that Wilson’s hits should only be going to the Beach Boys. Murry Wilson may well have been more bothered by the fact that the publishing for the song went to Columbia/Screen Gems, to whom Jan was signed, rather than to Sea of Tunes, the company that published Wilson’s other songs, and which was owned by Murry himself. Murry started calling Jan a “pirate”, which prompted Berry to turn up to a Beach Boys session wearing a full pirate costume to taunt Murry. From “Linda” on, Jan and Dean had ten top forty hits with ten singles — one of the B-sides also charted, but they did miss with “Here They Come From All Over The World”, the theme tune for the TAMI Show, a classic rock concert film on which Jan and Dean appeared both as singers and as the hosts. That was by far their weakest single from this period, being as it is just a list of the musicians in the show, some of them described incorrectly — the song talks about “The Rolling Stones from Liverpool” and James Brown being “the King of the Blues”. All of these hits were made by the same team. The Wrecking Crew would play the instruments, the Gents — now renamed the Matadors, and sometimes the Blossoms would provide backing vocals on the earlier singles. The later ones would feature the Fantastic Baggies instead of the Matadors — two young songwriters, Steve Barri and P.F. Sloan, who were also making their own surf records. The lead would be sung by Jan, the falsetto by some combination of Brian Wilson, Dean Torrence, Tony Minichello and P.F. Sloan — often Dean wouldn’t appear at all. The singles would be written by some combination of Wilson, Berry, Altfeld and Christian, and the songs would be about the same subjects as the Beach Boys’ records — surf, cars, girls, or some combination of the three. Sometimes the records would be just repetitions of the formula, like “Drag City”, which was an attempt at a second “Surf City”: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, “Drag City”] But often there would be a self-parodic element that wasn’t present in the Beach Boys’ singles, as in “The Little Old Lady From Pasadena”, a car song written by Berry, Christian, and Altfeld, based on a series of Dodge commercials featuring a car-racing old lady: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, “The Little Old Lady From Pasadena”] And the grotesque “Dead Man’s Curve”, equal parts a serious attempt at a teen tragedy song and a parody of the genre, which took on a new meaning a few years after it was a hit: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, “Dead Man’s Curve”] But while 1963 and 64 saw the duo rack up an incredible run of hits, they were making enemies. Jan was so unpleasant to people by this point that even the teen mags would call him out, with Teen Scene in March 1964 running an article which read, in part, “Blast of the month goes to half of a certain group whose initials are J&D. Reason for the blast: his personality, which makes enemies faster than Carter makes pills… (It’s the Jan Half)… Acting like Mr. Big Britches gets you nowhere, and your poor partner, who is one of the nicest guys on earth, shouldn’t be forced to go around making apologies for your actions.” And while Torrence may have been “one of the nicest guys on Earth”, not all of his friends were. In fact, in December 1963, his closest friend, Barry Keenan, was the ringleader in the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra Jr.  Keenan told Torrence about the plan in advance, and Torrence had lent Keenan a great deal of money, which Keenan used to finance the kidnapping. Torrence was accused of being a major part of the plot, though he was let off after testifying against the people who were actually involved — he’s always claimed that he thought that his friend’s talking about his plan for the perfect crime was just talk, not a serious plan. Torrence had even offered suggestions, jokingly, which Keenan had incorporated — and Keenan had left a bag containing fifty thousand dollars at Torrence’s home, Torrence’s share of the ransom money, which Torrence refused to keep. However, Sinatra Sr was annoyed enough at Torrence that a lot of plans for Jan and Dean TV shows and film appearances suddenly dried up. The lack of TV and film appearances was a particular problem as the music industry was changing under them, and surf and hot rod records weren’t the in thing any more — and Brian Wilson seems to have been less interested in working with them as well, as the Beach Boys overtook Jan and Dean in popularity. 1965 saw them trying to figure out the new, more serious, music scene, with experiments like Pop Symphony Number 1, an album of orchestral arrangements of the duo’s hits by Berry (who minored in music at UCLA) and George Tipton: [Excerpt: The Bel-Aire Pops Orchestra, “Surf City”] The duo also tried going folk-rock, releasing an album called Folk ‘n’ Roll, which featured another variation on the “Surf City” and “Drag City” theme — this one “Folk City”: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, “Folk City”] That album didn’t do well at all, not least because the lead-off single was a pro-war protest song, released as a Jan Berry solo single. Berry had become incensed by Buffy Saint-Marie’s song “The Universal Soldier”, and had written a right-wing response, “The Universal Coward”: [Excerpt: Jan Berry, “The Universal Coward”] As you can imagine, that was not popular with the folk-rock crowd, especially coming as it did from someone who was still managing to avoid the draft by studying medicine, even as he was also a pop star. Torrence became so irritated with Berry, and with the music they were making, during the recording of that album that he ended up going down the hall to another studio, where the Beach Boys were recording their unplugged Party! album, and sitting in with them. He suggested they do a new recording of “Barbara Ann”, and he sang lead on it, uncredited: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Barbara Ann”] That went to number two on the charts, becoming the biggest hit record that Torrence ever sang on. Torrence was happier with the next project, though, an album spoofing the popular TV show Batman, with several comedy sketches, along with songs about the characters from the TV show: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, “Batman”] But by this point, in 1966, Jan and Dean’s singles were doing absolutely nothing in the charts. In March, Liberty Records dropped them. And then on April the twelfth, 1966, something happened that would end their chances of another comeback. Jan Berry had been in numerous accidents over the previous few years — he was a thrill-seeker, and would often end up crashing cars or breaking bones. On April the twelfth, he had an appointment at the draft board, at which he was given bad news — depending on which account you read, he was either told that his draft deferment was coming to an end and he was going to Vietnam straight away, or that he was going to Vietnam as soon as he graduated from medical school at the end of the school year. He was furious, and he got into his car. What happened next has been the subject of some debate. Some people say that a wheel came off his car — and some have hinted that this was the result of some of Sinatra’s friends getting revenge on Jan and Dean. Others just say he was driving carelessly, which he often did. Some have suggested that he was trying to deliberately get into a minor accident to avoid being drafted. Whatever happened, he was involved in a major accident, in which he, though luckily no-one else, was severely injured. He spent a month in a coma, and came out of it severely brain damaged. He had to relearn to read and speak, and for the rest of his life would have problems with his memory, his physical co-ordination, and his speech. Liberty kept releasing old Jan and Dean tracks, and even got them a final top twenty hit with “Popsicle”, a song from a few years earlier. Dean made a Jan and Dean album, Save For a Rainy Day, without Jan, while Jan was still recovering, as a way of trying to keep their career options open if Jan ever got better. Dean put it out on the duo’s own new label, J&D, and there were plans for Columbia to pick it up and give it a wider release, but Jan refused to sign the contracts — he was furious that Dean had made a Jan and Dean record without him, and would have nothing to do with it. Torrence tried to have a music career anyway — he put out a cover of the Beach Boys song “Vegetables” under the name The Laughing Gravy: [Excerpt: The Laughing Gravy, “Vegetables”] But he soon gave up, and became an artist, designing covers and logos for people like Harry Nilsson, Canned Heat, the Turtles, and the Beach Boys. Jan tried making his own Jan and Dean album without Dean, even though he was unable to sing again or write yet. With a lot of help from Roger Christian, he pulled together some old half-finished songs and finished them, got in some soundalike session singers and famous friends like Glen Campbell and Davy Jones of the Monkees and put together Carnival of Sound, an album that didn’t get released until 2010: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, “Girl You’re Blowing My Mind”] In the mid-seventies, Jan and Dean got back together and started touring the nostalgia circuit, spurred by a TV movie, Dead Man’s Curve, based on their lives. There seemed to be a love-hate relationship between them in later years — they would split up and get back together, and their roles had reversed, with Dean now taking most of the leads on the shows — Dean had to look after Jan a lot of the time, and some reports said that Jan had to relearn the words to the three songs he sang lead on every night. But with the aid of some excellent backing musicians, and with some love and tolerance from the audience for Jan’s ongoing problems, they managed to regularly please crowds of thousands until a few weeks before Jan’s death in 2004. Since then, Dean has mostly performed with the Surf City All-Stars, a band that sometimes also features Al Jardine and David Marks of the Beach Boys, playing a few shows a year. He released an autobiography in 2016 — it came out at the same time as the autobiographies of Brian Wilson and Mike Love of the Beach Boys, ensuring that even at this late date, he would be overshadowed by his more famous colleagues.

Episode 107 of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs looks at "Surf City" and the career of Jan and Dean, including a Pop Symphony, accidental conspiracy to kidnap, and a career that both started and ended with attempts to get out of being drafted. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Hey Little Cobra" by the Rip Chords. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources No Mixcloud this week, due to the number of songs by Jan and Dean. Stephen McParland has published many, many books on the California surf and hot-rod music scenes. The Grand High Potentates of California Rock: Jan and Dean "In Perspective" 1958-1968 is the one I used most here, but I referred to several. His books can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks I also used Dead Man's Curve and Back: The Jan and Dean Story by Mark Thomas Passmore, and Dean Torrence's autobiography Surf City.  The original mono versions of the Liberty singles are only available on an out-of-print CD that goes for over £400, and many compilations have later rerecordings (often by Dean without Jan) but this has the proper recordings, albeit in stereo mixes. This compilation contains their pre-Liberty singles, including the Jan & Arnie material.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them?   Transcript A warning about this episode -- it features some discussion of a car crash and resulting disability and recovery, which may be upsetting to some people. Today we're going to look at one of the most successful duos in rock and roll history, but one who have been relegated to a footnote because of their collaboration with a far more successful band, who had a similar sound to them. We're going to look at Jan and Dean, and at "Surf City": [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Surf City"] The story of Jan and Dean begins with Jan and Arnie, and with the Barons. We discussed the Barons briefly in the episode on "LSD-25", a few months ago, but only in passing, so to recap -- the Barons were a singing group that formed at University High School in LA in the late fifties, centred around Jan Berry. Various people involved in the group's formation went on to be important parts of the LA music scene in the sixties, but by 1958 they were down to Berry and his friends Arnie Ginsburg -- not the DJ we talked about last episode, Dean Torrence, and Don Altfeld. The group members all had a love for R&B, and hung around with various of the Black groups of the time -- Don Altfeld has talked about him and Berry being present, but not participating, for Richard Berry's recording of "Louie Louie", though his memories of the time seem confused in the interviews I've read. And Jan Berry in particular was a real music obsessive, and had what may have been the biggest R&B and rock and roll record collection in LA -- which he obtained by scamming record companies, which seems to be very in character for him. He got a letterhead made up for a fake radio station, KJAN, and wrote to every record company he could find asking for promo copies. He ended up getting six copies of every new release "to play on the radio", and would give some of the extra copies to his friends -- and others he would use as frisbees. According to Torrence, Berry would often receive two hundred new records a day, all free. Berry had a reel-to-reel tape recorder belonging to his father -- his father, William Berry, was important in the Howard Hughes organisation, and had been in charge of the Spruce Goose project, even flying in the famous plane with Hughes, and Hughes had given him the tape recorder, which unlike almost all recording equipment available in the fifties had a primitive reverb function built in. With that and a microphone stolen from the school auditorium, Berry started recording himself and his friends, and he'd wanted to play one of the tapes he'd made at a party, so he'd taken it to a studio to be cut as an acetate, where it had been heard by Joe Lubin of Arwin Records, who took the tape and got session musicians to overdub it: [Excerpt: Jan and Arnie, "Jennie Lee"] That record was released as by Jan and Arnie, rather than the Barons -- Dean Torrence was off doing six months in the army, to get out of being conscripted later. Torrence has always said that he could hear himself on the recording, and that it was one the Barons had done together, but everyone else involved has claimed that while the Barons did record a version of that song, the finished version only features Jan and Arnie's vocals. Don Altfeld didn't sing on it, because he was never allowed to sing in the Barons -- he was forced to just mouth along, which given that both Jan and Dean were known for regularly singing flat must say something about just how bad a singer he is -- though he did apparently hit a metal chair leg as percussion on the record. "Jennie Lee" went to number three on the Cashbox chart -- number eight on Billboard -- and was a big enough hit that it set a precedent for how all the records Jan Berry would be involved in for the next few years would be made -- he would record vocals and piano in his garage, with a ton of reverb, and then the backing track would be recorded to that, usually by the same group of musicians that played on records by people like Sam Cooke, Ritchie Valens, and other late-fifties LA singers -- a group centred around Ernie Freeman on piano and organ, Rene Hall on guitar, and Earl Palmer on drums. This was a completely backwards way of recording -- normally you'd have the musicians play the backing track first and then overdub the vocals on it -- but it was how they would carry on doing things for several years. Jan and Arnie's follow-up, "Gas Money", written by Berry, Ginsburg, and Altfeld, did less well, only making number eighty-one in the charts: [Excerpt: Jan and Arnie, "Gas Money"] And their third single didn't chart at all. By this point, Arnie Ginsburg was getting thoroughly sick of working with Jan Berry -- pretty much without exception everyone who knew Berry in the fifties and early sixties says two things about him -- that he was the single most intelligent person they ever met, and that he was a domineering egomaniac who used anyone he could remorselessly. Jan and Arnie split up, and Arwin Records seems to have decided to stick with Arnie, rather than Jan -- though this might have been because Arnie seemed *less* likely to have hits, as Dean Torrence has later claimed that Arwin was a tax dodge -- it was owned by Marty Melcher, Doris Day's husband, and seems to have been used as much to get out of paying as much tax on the family's vast wealth as it was a real record label. Whatever the reason, though, Arnie made one more single, as The Rituals, backed by many of the people who had played with The Barons -- Bruce Johnston, Sandy Nelson, and Dave Shostac, plus their regular collaborators Mike Deasy, Richie Polodor and Harper Cosby. It didn't chart: [Excerpt: The Rituals, "Girl in Zanzibar"] Dean Torrence, who had by now left the Army, saw his chance, and soon Jan and Arnie had become Jan and Dean -- after a brief phase in which it looked like they might persuade Dean to change his name in order to avoid losing the group name. They hooked up with a new management and production team, Lou Adler and Herb Alpert, who had both been working at Keen Records with Sam Cooke. Kim Fowley later said that it was him who persuaded Adler to sign the duo, but Kim Fowley said a lot of things, very few of them true. Adler and Alpert got the new duo signed to Doré Records, a small label based in LA, and their first release on the label was a cover version of a record originally by a group called the Laurels: [Excerpt: The Laurels, "Baby Talk"] Herb Alpert brought that song to the duo, and their version became a top ten hit, with Jan singing the low parts and Dean singing the lead: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Baby Talk"] The hit was big enough that budget labels released soundalike cover versions of it, one of which was by a duo called Tom and Jerry, who had been one hit wonders a year earlier: [Excerpt: Tom and Jerry, "Baby Talk"] That cover version was unsuccessful, something Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel were probably very grateful for when they reinvented themselves as sensitive folkies a couple of years later. Around this time, Jan got his girlfriend pregnant. In order not to spoil their son's promising career -- as well as being a singer, he was also at university and planned to become a doctor -- Jan's parents adopted his son and raised the boy as their own son. The duo went on a tour with Little Willie John, Bobby Day, and Little Richard's old backing band The Upsetters, playing to mainly Black audiences -- a tour they were booked on because almost all West Coast doo-wop at that time was from Black singers. Once the mistake was realised, a decision was made to promote the new duo's image more -- lots of photos of the very blonde, very white, duo started to be released, as a way to reassure the white audience. The duo's film-star good looks assured them of regular coverage in the teen magazines, but they didn't have any more hits on Doré -- of the seven singles they released in the two years after "Baby Talk", none of them got to better than number fifty-three on the charts.  Eventually the duo left Doré, and Jan released one solo single, "Tomorrow's Teardrops": [Excerpt: Jan Berry, "Tomorrow's Teardrops"] That was actually released as by Jan Barry, rather than Jan Berry, at a point when the duo had actually split up -- Dean was getting tired of not having any further hit records, and wanted to concentrate on his college work, while Berry was one of those people who needs to be doing several things simultaneously. Berry's new girlfriend Jill Gibson added backing vocals -- by this time he'd dumped the one he'd got pregnant -- and the song was written by Berry and Altfeld. Jan actually started his own label, Ripple Records -- named after the brand of cheap wine -- to release it, and Dean created the logo for him -- the first of many he would create over the years. However, the duo soon reunited, and came up with a plan which would have them only touring during the summer break, and doing local performances in the LA area on those weekends when neither had any homework. Now they needed to get signed to a major label. The one they wanted was Liberty, the label that Eddie Cochran had been on, and whose owner, Si Waronker, was actually the cousin of the owners of Doré. And they had recorded a track that they were sure would get them signed to Liberty. The Marcels had recently had a hit with their doo-wop revival of the old standard "Blue Moon": [Excerpt: The Marcels, "Blue Moon"] Jan had decided to make a soundalike arrangement of another song from the same period, using the same chord changes -- the old Hoagy Carmichael song "Heart and Soul": [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Heart and Soul"] They were sure that would be a hit. But Herb Alpert wasn't -- he thought it was a dreadful record, He hated it so much, in fact, that he broke up his partnership with Lou Adler. The division of the partnership's assets was straightforward -- they owned Jan and Dean's contract, and they owned a tape recorder. Alpert got the tape recorder, and Adler got Jan and Dean. Alpert went on to have a string of hit records as a trumpet player, starting with "The Lonely Bull" in 1962: [Excerpt: Herb Alpert, "The Lonely Bull"] He later formed his own record label, A&M, and never seems to have regretted losing Jan & Dean. Jan and Dean took their tape of "Heart and Soul" to Liberty Records, who said that they did want to sign Jan and Dean, but they didn't want to release a record like that -- they told them to take it somewhere else, and then when the single was a flop, they could come back to Liberty and make some proper records. So the duo got a two-record deal with the small label Challenge Records, on the understanding that after those two singles they would move on to Liberty. And "Heart and Soul" turned out to be a big hit, making number twenty-five on the charts: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Heart and Soul"] Their second single on Challenge only made number one hundred and four, but by this time they knew the drill -- they'd release their first single on a new label, it would be a big hit, then everything after that would be a flop. But they were going to a new label anyway, and they were sure their first single on Liberty Records would be a huge hit, just like every time they changed labels. The first record they put out on Liberty was a cover of another oldie, "A Sunday Kind of Love", suggested by Si Waronker's son Lenny, who we'll be hearing a lot more about in future episodes. By this point Lou Adler was working for Aldon Music as their West Coast representative, and so the track was credited as "produced by Lou Adler for Nevins-Kirshner", but Jan was given a separate arrangement credit on the record. But despite their predictions that the single would be a hit because it was a new label, it only made number ninety-four on the charts. The follow-up, "Tennessee", was a song which had been more or less forced on them -- it was originally one of the recordings that Phil Spector produced during his short-lived contract with Liberty, for a group called the Ducanes, but when the Ducanes had made a hash of it, Liberty forced the song on Jan & Dean instead: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Tennessee"] By this time, while Ernie Freeman was still the studio leader of the session musicians, Jan was requesting a rather larger group of musicians, and they'd started recording the backing tracks first. The musicians on "Tennessee" included Tommy Allsup and Jerry Allison of the Crickets, Earl Palmer on drums, and Glen Campbell on guitar, but even these proven hit-makers couldn't bring the song to more than number sixty-nine on the charts. And even that was better than their next two singles, neither of which even made the Hot One Hundred -- though the fact that by this point they were reduced to recording versions of "Frosty The Snowman", and attempting to recapture their first hit with a sequel called "She's Still Talking Baby Talk" shows how desperately they were casting around for something, anything that could be a hit. Eventually they found something that worked. A group called the Regents had recently had a hit with "Barbara Ann": [Excerpt: The Regents, "Barbara Ann"] The duo had cut a cover version of that for their most recent album, and they thought it had worked well, and so they wanted something else that would allow Dean to sing a falsetto lead, over a bass vocal by Jan, with a girl's name in the title. They eventually hit on an old standard from the 1940s, originally written as a favour for the songwriter's lawyer, Lee Eastman, about his then one-year-old daughter Linda (who we'll be hearing more about later in this series). Their version of "Linda" finally gave them another hit after five flops in a row, reaching number twenty-eight in the charts: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Linda"] Their career was on an upswing again, and then everything changed for them when they played a gig with support from a local band who had just started having hits, the Beach Boys. The story goes that the Beach Boys were booked to do their own support slot and then to back Jan and Dean on their set. The show went down well with the audience, and they wanted an encore, but Jan and Dean had run out of rehearsed songs. So they suggested that the Beach Boys play their own two singles again, and Jan and Dean would sing with them. The group were flattered that two big stars like Jan and Dean would want to perform their songs, and eagerly joined in. Suddenly, Jan and Dean had an idea -- their next album was going to be called Jan & Dean Take Linda Surfin', but as yet they hadn't recorded any surf songs. They invited the Beach Boys to come into the studio and record new versions of their two singles for Jan & Dean's album, with Jan and Dean singing the leads: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys, "Surfin'"] The Beach Boys weren't credited for that session, as they were signed to another label, but it started a long collaboration between the two groups. In particular, the Beach Boys' leader Brian Wilson became a close collaborator with Berry. And at that same session, Wilson gave Jan and Dean what would become their biggest hit. After the recording, Jan and Dean asked Wilson if he had any new songs they might be able to do. The first one he played them, "Surfin' USA", he told them they couldn't do anything with as he wanted that for the Beach Boys themselves. But then he played them two others. The one that Jan and Dean saw most potential in was a song he'd completed, "Gonna Hustle You": [Excerpt: Brian Wilson, "Gonna Hustle You"] The duo wanted that as their next single, but Liberty Records flat out refused to put out something that sounded so dirty as "Gonna Hustle You". They tried rewriting it as "Get a Chance With You", but even that was too much. They put the song aside, though they'd return to it later as "The New Girl In School", which would become a minor hit for them. Instead, they worked on a half-completed song that Wilson had started, very much in the same mould as the first two Beach Boys singles, with the provisional title "Goodie Connie Won't You Please Come Home". This song would become the first of many Jan and Dean songs for which the songwriting credit is disputed. No-one argues with the fact that the basic idea of the song was Brian Wilson's, but Jan Berry's process was to get a lot of people to throw ideas in, sometimes working in a group, sometimes working separately and not even knowing that other people had been involved. The song is officially credited to Wilson and Berry, but Don Altfeld has also claimed he contributed to it, Dean Torrence says that he wrote about a quarter of the lyrics, and it's also been suggested that Roger Christian wrote the lyrics to the first verse. Christian was an LA-area DJ who was obsessed with cars, and had come to Wilson's attention after he'd said on the air that the Beach Boys' "409" was a great song about a bad car. He'd started writing songs with Wilson, and he would also collaborate with both Jan Berry and Wilson's friend Gary Usher (who was a big part of this scene but hardly ever worked with Jan and Dean because he hated Jan). Almost every car song from this period, by the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, or any number of studio groups, was co-written by Christian, and we'll be hearing more about him in a future episode. This group of people -- Jan and Dean, Brian Wilson, Roger Christian, and Don Altfeld -- would write together in various combinations, and write a lot of hits, but a lot of the credits were assigned more or less randomly -- though Jan Berry was almost always credited, and Dean Torrence almost never was. The completed song, titled "Surf City", was recorded with members of the Wrecking Crew -- the studio musicians who usually worked with Phil Spector -- performing the backing track. In this case, these were Hal Blaine, Glen Campbell, Earl Palmer, Bill Pitman, Ray Pohlman and Billy Strange -- there were two drummers because Berry liked a big drum sound. Brian Wilson was at the session, and soon after this he started using some of those musicians himself. While it was released as a Jan and Dean record, Dean doesn't sing on it at all -- the vocals featured Jan, three singers from another Liberty Records group called the Gents, and Brian Wilson, with Wilson and Tony Minichello of the Gents singing the falsetto parts that Dean would sing live: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Surf City"] That went to number one, becoming Jan and Dean's only number one, and Brian Wilson's first -- much to the fury of Wilson's father Murry, who thought that Wilson's hits should only be going to the Beach Boys. Murry Wilson may well have been more bothered by the fact that the publishing for the song went to Columbia/Screen Gems, to whom Jan was signed, rather than to Sea of Tunes, the company that published Wilson's other songs, and which was owned by Murry himself. Murry started calling Jan a "pirate", which prompted Berry to turn up to a Beach Boys session wearing a full pirate costume to taunt Murry. From "Linda" on, Jan and Dean had ten top forty hits with ten singles -- one of the B-sides also charted, but they did miss with "Here They Come From All Over The World", the theme tune for the TAMI Show, a classic rock concert film on which Jan and Dean appeared both as singers and as the hosts. That was by far their weakest single from this period, being as it is just a list of the musicians in the show, some of them described incorrectly -- the song talks about "The Rolling Stones from Liverpool" and James Brown being "the King of the Blues". All of these hits were made by the same team. The Wrecking Crew would play the instruments, the Gents -- now renamed the Matadors, and sometimes the Blossoms would provide backing vocals on the earlier singles. The later ones would feature the Fantastic Baggies instead of the Matadors -- two young songwriters, Steve Barri and P.F. Sloan, who were also making their own surf records. The lead would be sung by Jan, the falsetto by some combination of Brian Wilson, Dean Torrence, Tony Minichello and P.F. Sloan -- often Dean wouldn't appear at all. The singles would be written by some combination of Wilson, Berry, Altfeld and Christian, and the songs would be about the same subjects as the Beach Boys' records -- surf, cars, girls, or some combination of the three. Sometimes the records would be just repetitions of the formula, like "Drag City", which was an attempt at a second "Surf City": [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Drag City"] But often there would be a self-parodic element that wasn't present in the Beach Boys' singles, as in "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena", a car song written by Berry, Christian, and Altfeld, based on a series of Dodge commercials featuring a car-racing old lady: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "The Little Old Lady From Pasadena"] And the grotesque "Dead Man's Curve", equal parts a serious attempt at a teen tragedy song and a parody of the genre, which took on a new meaning a few years after it was a hit: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Dead Man's Curve"] But while 1963 and 64 saw the duo rack up an incredible run of hits, they were making enemies. Jan was so unpleasant to people by this point that even the teen mags would call him out, with Teen Scene in March 1964 running an article which read, in part, "Blast of the month goes to half of a certain group whose initials are J&D. Reason for the blast: his personality, which makes enemies faster than Carter makes pills... (It's the Jan Half)... Acting like Mr. Big Britches gets you nowhere, and your poor partner, who is one of the nicest guys on earth, shouldn't be forced to go around making apologies for your actions." And while Torrence may have been "one of the nicest guys on Earth", not all of his friends were. In fact, in December 1963, his closest friend, Barry Keenan, was the ringleader in the kidnapping of Frank Sinatra Jr.  Keenan told Torrence about the plan in advance, and Torrence had lent Keenan a great deal of money, which Keenan used to finance the kidnapping. Torrence was accused of being a major part of the plot, though he was let off after testifying against the people who were actually involved -- he's always claimed that he thought that his friend's talking about his plan for the perfect crime was just talk, not a serious plan. Torrence had even offered suggestions, jokingly, which Keenan had incorporated -- and Keenan had left a bag containing fifty thousand dollars at Torrence's home, Torrence's share of the ransom money, which Torrence refused to keep. However, Sinatra Sr was annoyed enough at Torrence that a lot of plans for Jan and Dean TV shows and film appearances suddenly dried up. The lack of TV and film appearances was a particular problem as the music industry was changing under them, and surf and hot rod records weren't the in thing any more -- and Brian Wilson seems to have been less interested in working with them as well, as the Beach Boys overtook Jan and Dean in popularity. 1965 saw them trying to figure out the new, more serious, music scene, with experiments like Pop Symphony Number 1, an album of orchestral arrangements of the duo's hits by Berry (who minored in music at UCLA) and George Tipton: [Excerpt: The Bel-Aire Pops Orchestra, "Surf City"] The duo also tried going folk-rock, releasing an album called Folk 'n' Roll, which featured another variation on the "Surf City" and "Drag City" theme -- this one "Folk City": [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Folk City"] That album didn't do well at all, not least because the lead-off single was a pro-war protest song, released as a Jan Berry solo single. Berry had become incensed by Buffy Saint-Marie's song "The Universal Soldier", and had written a right-wing response, "The Universal Coward": [Excerpt: Jan Berry, "The Universal Coward"] As you can imagine, that was not popular with the folk-rock crowd, especially coming as it did from someone who was still managing to avoid the draft by studying medicine, even as he was also a pop star. Torrence became so irritated with Berry, and with the music they were making, during the recording of that album that he ended up going down the hall to another studio, where the Beach Boys were recording their unplugged Party! album, and sitting in with them. He suggested they do a new recording of "Barbara Ann", and he sang lead on it, uncredited: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Barbara Ann"] That went to number two on the charts, becoming the biggest hit record that Torrence ever sang on. Torrence was happier with the next project, though, an album spoofing the popular TV show Batman, with several comedy sketches, along with songs about the characters from the TV show: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Batman"] But by this point, in 1966, Jan and Dean's singles were doing absolutely nothing in the charts. In March, Liberty Records dropped them. And then on April the twelfth, 1966, something happened that would end their chances of another comeback. Jan Berry had been in numerous accidents over the previous few years -- he was a thrill-seeker, and would often end up crashing cars or breaking bones. On April the twelfth, he had an appointment at the draft board, at which he was given bad news -- depending on which account you read, he was either told that his draft deferment was coming to an end and he was going to Vietnam straight away, or that he was going to Vietnam as soon as he graduated from medical school at the end of the school year. He was furious, and he got into his car. What happened next has been the subject of some debate. Some people say that a wheel came off his car -- and some have hinted that this was the result of some of Sinatra's friends getting revenge on Jan and Dean. Others just say he was driving carelessly, which he often did. Some have suggested that he was trying to deliberately get into a minor accident to avoid being drafted. Whatever happened, he was involved in a major accident, in which he, though luckily no-one else, was severely injured. He spent a month in a coma, and came out of it severely brain damaged. He had to relearn to read and speak, and for the rest of his life would have problems with his memory, his physical co-ordination, and his speech. Liberty kept releasing old Jan and Dean tracks, and even got them a final top twenty hit with "Popsicle", a song from a few years earlier. Dean made a Jan and Dean album, Save For a Rainy Day, without Jan, while Jan was still recovering, as a way of trying to keep their career options open if Jan ever got better. Dean put it out on the duo's own new label, J&D, and there were plans for Columbia to pick it up and give it a wider release, but Jan refused to sign the contracts -- he was furious that Dean had made a Jan and Dean record without him, and would have nothing to do with it. Torrence tried to have a music career anyway -- he put out a cover of the Beach Boys song "Vegetables" under the name The Laughing Gravy: [Excerpt: The Laughing Gravy, "Vegetables"] But he soon gave up, and became an artist, designing covers and logos for people like Harry Nilsson, Canned Heat, the Turtles, and the Beach Boys. Jan tried making his own Jan and Dean album without Dean, even though he was unable to sing again or write yet. With a lot of help from Roger Christian, he pulled together some old half-finished songs and finished them, got in some soundalike session singers and famous friends like Glen Campbell and Davy Jones of the Monkees and put together Carnival of Sound, an album that didn't get released until 2010: [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, “Girl You're Blowing My Mind"] In the mid-seventies, Jan and Dean got back together and started touring the nostalgia circuit, spurred by a TV movie, Dead Man's Curve, based on their lives. There seemed to be a love-hate relationship between them in later years -- they would split up and get back together, and their roles had reversed, with Dean now taking most of the leads on the shows -- Dean had to look after Jan a lot of the time, and some reports said that Jan had to relearn the words to the three songs he sang lead on every night. But with the aid of some excellent backing musicians, and with some love and tolerance from the audience for Jan's ongoing problems, they managed to regularly please crowds of thousands until a few weeks before Jan's death in 2004. Since then, Dean has mostly performed with the Surf City All-Stars, a band that sometimes also features Al Jardine and David Marks of the Beach Boys, playing a few shows a year. He released an autobiography in 2016 -- it came out at the same time as the autobiographies of Brian Wilson and Mike Love of the Beach Boys, ensuring that even at this late date, he would be overshadowed by his more famous colleagues.

Joseph Lubin, founder of ConsenSys and cofounder of Ethereum, discusses ConsenSys's acquisition this week of JPMorgan's blockchain solution, Quorum. In this episode, he talks about: why JPMorgan sold Quorum to ConsenSys, and how that fits into ConsenSys's larger enterprise offerings who Quorum's clients are and what it is used for whether or not ConsenSys is also acquiring the Quorum team  how the acquisition fits in with the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and its standards-based approach to blockchain enterprise development how much JPMorgan invested into ConsenSys how much ConsenSys is raising  how the Quorum acquisition fits into ConsenSys's larger restructuring into two main arms focused on software development and venture activity how the pandemic has affected ConsenSys's business the recent outcry over MetaMask's changes to its licensing structure and how it may eventually monetize with a token his thoughts on Ethereum's five-year anniversary and where it is headed with Ethereum 2.0   Thank you to our sponsors!  Crypto.com: http://crypto.com Nexo: https://www.nexo.io   Episode links:  Joe Lubin: https://twitter.com/ethereumJoseph ConsenSys: https://consensys.net ConsenSys Quorum: https://consensys.net/quorum   Announcement about acquisition of Quorum: https://consensys.net/blog/news/consensys-acquires-jpm-quorum/ https://www.theblockcrypto.com/linked/75947/consensys-jpm-quorum-announcement The Block’s earlier reporting: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/daily/74687/jpmorgan-consensys-investment-deal Initial report about deal by Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-jp-morgan-blockchain-exclusive/exclusive-jpmorgan-in-talks-to-merge-blockchain-unit-quorum-with-startup-consensys-sources-idUSKBN2051AW   Interbank Information Network: https://www.jpmorgan.com/solutions/treasury-services/payments-and-cross-currency-solutions/iin   ConsenSys receives money from Payroll Protection Program: https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/70511/ledgerx-consensys-tendermint-crypto-ppp-trump   MetaMask licensing: https://decrypt.co/39514/metamask-tightens-license-in-response-to-crypto-browser-boom   Links from news recap: https://unchainedpodcast.com/fidelity-and-the-next-best-thing-to-a-bitcoin-etf/

JPMorgan's deal with ConsenSys ushers the birth of the "ConsenSys Quorum" brand that offers interoperability with ConsenSys and Ethereum. Listen to ConsenSys CEO Joe Lubin explain to Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau how ConsenSys' acquisition of JPMorgan's Quorum will affect the blockchain ecosystem, his expectations of Ethereum 2.0 and the rise of DeFi.

JPMorgan's deal with ConsenSys ushers the birth of the "ConsenSys Quorum" brand that offers interoperability with ConsenSys and Ethereum. Listen to ConsenSys CEO Joe Lubin explain to Forkast.News Editor-in-Chief Angie Lau how ConsenSys’ acquisition of JPMorgan’s Quorum will affect the blockchain ecosystem, his expectations of Ethereum 2.0 and the rise of DeFi.

Proudly sponsored by Luno. Sign up NOW at www.luno.com // ConsenSys Founder & Ethereum Co-founder JOSEPH LUBIN! // Joe Lubin is consistently ranked among crypto's most influential people, and for good reason. The work he did to bring Ethereum to the world is nothing short of astounding, and his expertise in software engineering coupled with his business acumen has positioned him to build a worldchanging company in ConsenSys. // In this interview you'll find out about Joe's earlier years in AI and robotics back at Princeton, his reasons for choosing New York as the base for ConsenSys, and the Ethereum foundation's plans to scale the platform effectively. A man with a magnificent mind, you'll want to share this interview with your friends. // Follow Joe on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ethereumJoseph // Subscribe to Global Crypto for more:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkKgXHf4nRzBCkA8jfUDMMg?sub_confirmation=1 // WATCH ON YOUTUBE: https://youtu.be/EL5-uVol5eY // - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -  // 

Episode eighty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “LSD-25” by the Gamblers, the first rock song ever to namecheck acid, and a song by a band so obscure no photos exist of them. (The photo here is of the touring lineup of the Hollywood Argyles. Derry Weaver, the Gamblers’ lead guitarist, is top left). Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode, on “Papa Oom Mow Mow” by the Rivingtons. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/  —-more—- Resources   As usual, I have put together a Mixcloud mix with every song excerpted in this podcast. This episode, more than most, required tiny bits of information from dozens of sources. Among those I used were the one existing interview with Derry Weaver I have been able to find, Dean Torrence’s autobiography , a book about John Dolphin by his son, and He’s A Rebel, a biography of Phil Spector by Mark Ribkowsky.  But more than anything else, I used the self-published books by Stephen McParland,  who is the premier expert on surf music, and which you can buy in PDF form here. The ones I used the most were The Beach Boys: Inception and Conception, California Confidential, and Surf & Hot-Rod Music Chronicles: Bull Sessions With the Big Daddy. “LSD-25” is on numerous various-artists compilations of surf music, of which this two-CD set looks like the best value for the casual listener.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript On the sixteenth of April, 1943, Albert Hoffman, a research scientist in Zurich, had a curious experience after accidentally touching a tiny speck of the chemical he was experimenting with at the pharmaceutical lab in which he worked, and felt funny afterwards. Three days later, he decided to experiment on himself, and took a tiny dose of the chemical, to see if anything happened. He felt fine at first, but asked a colleague to escort him as he rode home on his bicycle. By the time he got home, he was convinced that his neighbour was a witch and that he had been poisoned. But a few hours later, he felt a little better, though still unusual. As he would later report, “Little by little I could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colors and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes. Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux”. The chemical he had taken was a derivative of ergotamine that had been discovered about five years earlier and mostly ignored up until that time, a chemical called D-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate. Sandoz, the company he worked for, were delighted with this unusual chemical and its effects. They came up with some variants of the molecule without those effects, but which still affected the brain, and marketed those as migraine treatments. The chemical itself, they decided to make available as an experimental drug for psychiatrists and psychologists who wanted to investigate unusual states of consciousness. It found some uptake, among experimenters who wished to experience psychotic symptoms in a controlled environment in order to get a better understanding of their patients, or who wanted to investigate neurochemistry, and it had some promise as a treatment for alcoholism and various other psychiatric illnesses, and throughout the 1950s it was the subject of much medical research, under the trade name Sandoz came up with for it, Delysid. But in the sixties, it became better known as LSD-25: [Excerpt: The Gamblers, “LSD-25”] There are some records that one can look back at retrospectively and see that while they seemed unimportant at the time, they signalled a huge change in the musical culture. The single “Moon Dawg”, backed by “LSD-25”, by the Gamblers, is one of those records. Unfortunately, everything about the Gamblers is shrouded in mystery. The story I am going to tell here is the one that I’ve been able to piece together from stray fragments of recollection from the main participants over the years, but it could very well be wrong. Put it this way, on the record, there are two guitarists, bass, drums, and keyboards. I have seen fifteen people credited as having been members of the group that recorded the track. Obviously, those credits can’t all be true, so I’m going to go here with the stories of the people who are most commonly credited, but with the caveat that the people I’m talking about could very easily not have been the people on the record. I have also made mistakes about this single before — there are a couple of errors in the piece on it in my book California Dreaming. Part of the problem is that almost everyone who has laid claim to being involved in the record is — or was, as many of them have died — a well-known credit thief, someone who will happily place themselves at the centre of the story, happily put their name on copyright forms for music with which they had no involvement, and then bitterly complain that they were the real unsung geniuses behind other records, but that some evil credit thief stole all their work. The other people involved — those who haven’t said that everything was them and they did everything — were for the most part jobbing musicians who, when asked about the record, would not even be sure if they’d played on it, because they played on so many records, and weren’t asked about them for decades later. Just as one example, Nik Venet, who is generally credited as the producer of this record, said for years that Derry Weaver, the credited co-composer of the song and the person who is generally considered to have played lead guitar on it, was a pseudonym for himself. Later, when confronted with evidence that Derry Weaver was a real person, he admitted that Weaver *had* been a real person, but claimed that it was still a pseudonym for himself. Venet claimed that Weaver had died in a car crash years earlier, and that as a result he had been able to use his social security number on forms to claim himself extra money he wasn’t entitled to as a staff producer. The only problem with that story is that Venet died in 1998, while the real Derry Weaver died in 2013, but Weaver only ever did one interview I’ve been able to track down, in 2001, so Venet’s lies went unchallenged, and many books still claim that Weaver never existed. So today, I’m going to tell the story of a music scene, and use a few people as a focus, with the understanding that they may not be the people on the record we’re talking about. I’m going to look at the birth of the surf and hot-rod studio scene in LA, and at Bruce Johnston, Kim Fowley, Derry Weaver, Nik Venet, Sandy Nelson, Elliot Ingber, Larry Taylor, Howard Hirsch, and Rod Schaffer, some or all of whom may or may not have been the Gamblers: [Excerpt: The Gamblers, “Moon Dawg”] Possibly the best place to start the story is at University High School, Los Angeles, in the late 1950s. University High had always had more than its fair share of star students over the years — Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor had all attended in previous years, and over the succeeding decades members of Sonic Youth, the Doors, Black Flag, the Foo Fighters and the Partridge Family would all attend the school, among many others. But during the period in the late fifties, it had a huge number of students who would go on to define the California lifestyle in the pop culture of the next few years. There was Sandra Dee, who starred in Gidget, the first Beach Party film; Anette Funicello, who starred in most of the other Beach Party films; Randy Newman, who would document another side of California life a few years later; and Nancy Sinatra, who was then just her famous father’s daughter, but who would go on to make a series of magnificent records in the sixties with Lee Hazelwood. And there was a vocal group at the school called the Barons, one of the few interracial vocal groups around at the time. They had a black lead singer, Chuck Steele, a Japanese tenor, Wally Yagi, two Jewish boys, Arnie Ginsburg and John Saligman, and two white kids, Jan Berry — who was the leader of the group, and Dean Torrence, his friend who could sing a little falsetto. As they were all singers, they were backed by three instrumentalists who also went to the school — Berry’s neighbour Bruce Johnston on piano, Torrence’s neighbour Sandy Nelson on drums, and Nelson’s friend Dave Shostac on saxophone. This group played several gigs together, but slowly split apart as people’s mothers wanted them to concentrate on school, or they got cars that they wanted to fix up. In Sandy Nelson’s case he was sacked by Berry for playing his drums so loud — as he packed up his kit for the last time, he told Berry, “You’ll see, I’m going to have a hit record that’s *only* drums”. Slowly they were whittled down to three people — Berry, Torrence, and Ginsburg, with occasional help from Berry’s friend Don Altfeld. The Barons cut a demo tape of a song about a prominent local stripper, named Jennie Lee, but then Torrence decided to sign up with the Army. He’d discovered that if he did six months’ basic training and joined the Army Reserves, he would be able to avoid being drafted a short while later. He thought that six months sounded a lot better than two years, so signed up, and he was on basic training when he heard a very familiar sounding record on the radio: [Excerpt: Jan and Arnie, “Jennie Lee”] He was surprised to hear it, and also surprised to hear it credited to “Jan and Arnie” rather than “the Barons”. He called Berry, who told him that no, it was a completely new recording — though Torrence was absolutely certain that he could hear his own voice on there as well. What had happened, according to Jan, was that there’d been a problem with the tape, and he and Arnie had decided to rerecord it. He’d then gone into a professional studio to get the tape cut into an acetate, so he could play it at parties, and someone in the next room had happened to hear it — and that someone happened to be Joe Lubin. Lubin was the Vice President of Arwin Records, a label owned by Marty Melcher, Doris Day’s husband. He told Berry that he would make Jan and Arnie bigger than the Everly Brothers, but Jan didn’t believe him, though he let him have a copy of the disc. Jan took his copy to play at a friend’s party, where it went down well. That friend was Craig Bruderlin, who later changed his name to James Brolin and became a major film star. Presumably Bruderlin’s best friend Ryan O’Neal, who also went to University High, was there as well. I told you, University High School had a lot of future stars. And Jan and Arnie became two more of those stars. Joe Lubin overdubbed extra instruments on the track and released it. He didn’t quite make them bigger than the Everly Brothers, but for a while they were almost as big — at one point, the Everly Brothers were at number one in the charts, number two was Sheb Wooley with “The Purple People Eater”, and number three was Jan and Arnie with “Jennie Lee”. And Dean Torrence was off in the Army, regretting his choices. We’ll be picking up on what happened with those three in a few months’ time… But what of the other Barons? The instrumentalists, Bruce Johnston, Dave Shostac, and Sandy Nelson, formed their own band, the Sleepwalkers, with various guitarists sitting in, often a young blues player called Henry Vestine, who had already started taking LSD at this time, though none of the other band members indulged. They would often play parties organised by another University High student, Kim Fowley. Now, Fowley is the person who spoke most about this time on the record, but he was also possibly the least honest person involved in this episode (and, if the accusations made about him since his death are true, also one of the most despicable people in this episode, which is quite a high bar…), so take this with a grain of salt. But Fowley claimed in later years that these parties were his major source of income — that he would hire sex workers to take fellow University High students who had big houses off to a motel to have sex with them. While the students were otherwise occupied, Fowley would break into their house and move all the furniture, so people could dance, he’d get the band in, and he’d invite everyone to come to the party. Then dope dealers would sell dope to the partygoers, giving Fowley a cut, and meanwhile friends of Fowley’s would be outside breaking into the partygoers’ cars and stealing their stuff. But then Fowley got arrested — according to him, for stealing wine from a liquor store owned by a girlfriend who was twice his age, and selling it to other students at the school. He was given a choice of joining the Army or going to prison, and he chose the Army, on the same deal as Dean Torrence, who he ended up going through some of his training with. Meanwhile, Johnston, Shostac, and Nelson were trying to get signed as a band. They went to see John Dolphin on February the first, 1958. We’ve talked about Dolphin before, in the episodes on Gene and Eunice and the Penguins. Dolphin owned Dolphin’s of Hollywood, the biggest black-owned record store in the LA area, and was responsible for a large part of the success of many of the records we’ve covered, through getting them played on radio shows broadcast from his station. He also owned a series of small labels which would put out one or two singles by an artist before the artist was snapped up by a bigger label. For example, he owned Cash Records, which had put out “Walkin’ Stick Boogie”, by Jerry Capehart and Eddie and Hank Cochran: [Excerpt: Jerry Capehart and the Cochran Brothers, “Walkin’ Stick Boogie”] He also owned a publishing company, which owned the publishing on “Buzz Buzz Buzz” by the Hollywood Flames: [Excerpt: The Hollywood Flames, “Buzz Buzz Buzz”] Johnston, Shostac, and Nelson hoped that maybe they could get signed to one of Dolphin’s labels, but they chose the worst possible day to do it. While they were waiting to see Dolphin, they got talking to an older man, Percy Ivy, who started to tell them that Dolphin couldn’t be trusted and that he owed Ivy a lot of money. They were used to hearing this kind of thing about people in the music business, and decided they’d go in to see Dolphin anyway. When they did, Ivy came in with them. What happened next is told differently by different people. What’s definitely the case is that Ivy and Dolphin got into a heated row. Ivy claimed that Dolphin pulled a knife on him. Witness statements seem confused on the matter, but most say that all that Dolphin had in his hand was a cigar. Ivy pulled out a gun and shot Dolphin — one shot also hit Shostac in the leg. Sandy Nelson ran out of the room to get help. Johnston comforted the dying Dolphin, but by the time Nelson got back, he was busily negotiating with Ivy, talking about how they were going to make a record together when Ivy got out of jail. One presumes he was trying to humour Ivy, to make sure nobody else got shot. Obviously, with John Dolphin having died, he wasn’t going to be running a record company any more. The shop part of his business was, from then on, managed by his assistant, a failed singer called Rudy Ray Moore who later went on to become famous playing the comedy character Dolemite. Then the Sleepwalkers got a call from another acquaintance. Kip Tyler had a band called the Flips who had had some moderate success with rockabilly records produced by Milt Gabler. And this is one of the points where the conflicting narratives become most confusing. According to every one of the few articles I can find about Tyler, before forming the Flips he was the lead singer of the Sleepwalkers, the toughest rock and roll band in the school, when he was at Union High School. According to those same articles, he was born in 1929. So either there were two bands at Union High School, a decade apart, called the Sleepwalkers, one of which was a rock and roll band before the term had been coined; or Tyler was still at high school aged twenty-eight; or someone is deeply mistaken somewhere. Kip and the Flips didn’t have much recording success, and kept moving to smaller and smaller labels, but they were considered a hot band in LA — in particular, they were the house band at Art Laboe’s regular shows at El Monte stadium — the shows which would later be immortalised by the Penguins in “Memories of El Monte”. [Excerpt: The Penguins, “Memories of El Monte”] But then the group’s piano player, Larry Knechtel, saxophone player, Steve Douglas, and drummer, Mike Bermani, all left to join Duane Eddy’s group. Kim Fowley was by this point a roadie and general hanger-on for the Flips, and he happened to know a piano player, a saxophone player, and a drummer who were looking for a gig, and so the Sleepwalkers joined Kip Tyler and guitarist Mike Deasy in the Flips, and took over that role performing at El Monte, performing themselves but also backing other musicians, like Ritchie Valens, who played at these shows. Sandy Nelson didn’t stay long in the Flips, though — he was replaced by another drummer, Jim Troxel, and it was this lineup, with extra sax from Duane Eddy’s sax player Jim Horn, that recorded “Rumble Rock”: [Excerpt: Kip Tyler, “Rumble Rock”] Nelson’s departure from the group coincided with him starting to get a great deal of session work from people who had seen him play live. One of those people was a young man named Harvey Philip Spector, who went by his middle name. Spector went to Fairfax High, a school which had a strong rivalry with University High and produced a similarly ludicrous list of famous people, and he’d got his own little clique of people around him with whom he was making music. These included his best friend Marshall Leib, and sometimes also Leib’s girlfriend’s younger brother Russ Titelman. Spector and Leib had formed a vocal group, the Teddy Bears, with a girl they knew who then went by a different name but is now called Carol Connors. Their first single was called “To Know Him Is To Love Him”, inspired by the epitaph on Spector’s father’s grave: [Excerpt: The Teddy Bears, “To Know Him is to Love Him”] Sandy Nelson played the drums on that, and the track went to number one. I’ve also seen some credits say that Bruce Johnston played the bass on it, but at the time Johnston wasn’t a bass player, so this seems unlikely. Even though Nelson’s playing on the track is absolutely rudimentary, it gave him the cachet to get other gigs, for example playing on Gene Vincent’s “Crazy Times” LP: [Excerpt: Gene Vincent, “She She Little Sheila”] Another record Nelson played on reunited him with Bruce Johnston. Kim Fowley was by this point doing some work for American International Pictures, and was asked to come up with an instrumental for a film called Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow, a film about a drag-racing club that have a Halloween party inside a deserted mansion but then discover a real monster has shown up. It’s not as fun as it sounds. A songwriter friend of Fowley’s named Nik Venet is credited with writing “Geronimo”, although Richie Polodor, the guitarist and bass player on the session says he came up with it. Polodor said “There are three guys in the business who really have no scruples whatsoever. They are Bruce Johnston, Kim Fowley and Sandy Nelson. And I was Mr. Scruples… I wrote both Geronimo and Charge, but they were taken away from me. It was all my stuff, but between Nik Venet, Kim Fowley and Bruce Johnston I had no chance. It was cut in my studio. I did all the guitars. I wrote it all and Nik Venet walked away with the credit.” Venet did the howls on the track, Johnston played piano, Nelson drums, Polodor guitar and bass, and Fowley produced: [Excerpt: The Renegades, “Geronimo”] Meanwhile, Phil Spector had become disenchanted with being in the Teddy Bears, and had put together a solo instrumental single, under the name Phil Harvey: [Excerpt: Phil Harvey, “Bumbershoot”] Spector wanted a band to play a gig to promote that single, and he put together the Phil Harvey band from the members of another band that Marshall Leib had been in before joining the Teddy Bears. The Moon Dogs had consisted of a singer called Jett Power, guitarists Derry Weaver and Elliot Ingber, and bass player Larry Taylor, along with Leib. Taylor and Ingber joined the Phil Harvey band, along with keyboard player Howard Hirsch, and drummer Rod Schaffer. The Phil Harvey band only played one gig — the band’s concept was apparently a mix of Duane Eddy style rock guitar instrumentals and complex jazz, with the group all dressed as mobsters — but Kim Fowley happened to be there and liked what he saw, and made a note of some of those musicians as people to work with. Spector, meanwhile, had decided to use his connection with Lester Sill to go and work with Leiber and Stoller, and we’ll be picking up that story in a couple of months. Meanwhile, Derry Weaver from the Moon Dogs had started to date Mary Jo Sheeley, the sister of Sharon Sheeley, and Sharon started to take an interest in her little sister’s boyfriend and his friends. She suggested that Jett Power change his name to P.J. Proby, and she would regularly have him sing on the demos of her songs in the sixties: [Excerpt: P.J. Proby, “The Other Side of Town”] And she introduced Weaver to Eddie Cochran and Jerry Capehart. Cochran taught Weaver several of the guitar licks he used, and Capehart produced a session for Weaver with Cochran on guitar, Jim Stivers on piano, Guybo Smith on bass and Gene Riggio on drums: [Excerpt: Derry Weaver, “Bad Baby Doll”] That track was not released until decades later, but several other songs by Weaver, with no Cochran involvement, were released on Capehart’s own label (under the misspelled name Darry Weaver), and Capehart was Weaver’s manager for a little while. Weaver was actually living at the Sheeley residence when they received the phone call saying that Eddie had died and Sharon was in hospital, and it haunted him deeply for the rest of his life. Another record on which Guybo Smith played at this time was one by Sandy Nelson. The Flips had split up by this point — Mike Deasy had gone on to join Eddie Cochran’s backing band, and Bruce Johnston was playing on random sessions, so he was here for what was going to be Nelson’s “single that was only drums”. It wasn’t quite only drums — as well as Nelson on drums, there was Smith on bass, Johnston on piano, and Polodor on guitar. The musicians on the record have said they all deserved songwriting credit for it, but the writing credit went to Art Laboe and Nelson: [Excerpt: Sandy Nelson, “Teen Beat”] “Teen Beat” went to number four on the charts, and Nelson had a handful of other hits under his own name, including “Let There Be Drums”. Less successful was a ballad released under the name “Bruce and Jerry”, released on Arwin records after the owner’s son, Terry Melcher, had remembered seeing the Sleepwalkers, and was desperate for some more rock and roll success on the label like Jan and Arnie, even though Melcher was a student at Beverly High and, like Fairfax, everyone at Beverly hated people at University High. “Take This Pearl” was sung by Johnston and Jerry Cooper, with backing by Johnston, Shostac, Deasy, Nelson, and bass player Harper Cosby, who would later play for Sam Cooke: [Excerpt: Bruce and Jerry, “Take This Pearl”] “Take This Pearl” by Bruce and Jerry did nothing, but Terry Melcher did think that name sounded good, except maybe it should be Terry instead of Jerry… Meanwhile, Nik Venet had got a production role at World Pacific Records, and he wanted to put together yet another studio group. And this is where some of the confusion comes in. Because this record was important, and everyone later wanted a piece of the credit. According to Nik Venet, the Gamblers were originally going to be called Nik and the Gamblers, and consisted of himself, Bruce Johnston, Sandy Nelson, Larry Taylor, and the great guitarist James Burton, with Richie Polodor engineering, and Kim Fowley involved somehow. Meanwhile, Fowley says he was not involved at all — and given that this is about the only record in the history of the world that Fowley ever said he *wasn’t* on, I tend to believe him. Elliot Ingber said that the group was Ingber, Taylor, Derry Weaver, Howard Hirsch, and Rod Schaffer. Bruce Johnston says he has no memory of the record. I don’t know if anyone’s ever asked James Burton about it, but it doesn’t sound like him playing. Given that the A-side is called “Moon Dawg”, that Weaver and Taylor were in a band called The Moondogs that used to play a song called “Moon Dog”, and that Weaver is credited as the writer, I think we can assume that the lead guitar is Derry Weaver, and that Elliot Ingber’s list of credits is mostly correct. But on the other hand, one of the voices singing the wordless harmonies sounds *very* much like Bruce Johnston to me, and he has a very distinctive voice that I know extremely well. so my guess is that the Gamblers on this occasion were Derry Weaver, Larry Taylor, Elliot Ingber, Bruce Johnston, and either Rod Schaffer or Sandy Nelson — probably Schaffer, since no-one other than Venet has credited Nelson with being there. I suspect Ingber is understandably misremembering Howard Hirsch being there because Hirsch *did* play on the second Gamblers single. The B-side of the record is credited as written by Weaver and Taylor: [Excerpt: The Gamblers, “LSD-25”] That song is called “LSD-25”, and while we have said over and over that there is no first anything in rock music, this is an exception — that is, without any doubt whatsoever, the first rock and roll record to mention LSD, and so in its way a distant ancestor of psychedelic music. Weaver and Taylor have said in later years that neither of them knew anything about the drug (and it’s very clear that Johnston, who takes a very hardline anti-drugs stance, never indulged) — they’ve said they read a magazine article about acid and liked the name. On the other hand, Henry Vestine was part of the same circle and he was apparently already taking acid by then, though details are vague (every single article I can find about it uses the same phrasing that Wikipedia does, talking of having taken it with “a close musician friend” — who might have been one of the Gamblers, but who might not). So the B-side was a milestone in rock music history, and in a different way so was the A-side, just written by Weaver: [Excerpt: The Gamblers, “Moon Dawg”] “Moon Dawg” was a local hit, but sold nothing anywhere outside Southern California, and there were a couple of follow-ups by different lineups of Gamblers, featuring some but never all of the same musicians, along with other people we’ve mentioned like Fowley. The Gamblers stopped being a thing, and Derry Weaver went off to join another group. Kim Fowley and his friend Gary Paxton had put together a novelty record, “Alley Oop”, under the name The Hollywood Argyles, which featured Gaynel Hodge on piano and Sandy Nelson banging a bin lid: [Excerpt: The Hollywood Argyles, “Alley Oop”] That became a hit, and they had to put together a band to tour as the Hollywood Argyles, and Weaver became one of them, as did Marshall Leib. After that Weaver hooked up again with Nik Venet, who started getting him regular session work, as Venet had taken a job at Capitol Records. And Venet doing that suddenly meant that “Moon Dawg” became very important indeed. Even though it had been only a minor success, because Venet owned the rights to the master tape, and also the publishing rights, he got “Moon Dawg” stuck on a various-artists compilation album put out on Capitol, Golden Gassers, which featured big acts like Sam Cooke and the Four Preps, and which exposed the song to a wider audience. Cover versions of it started to sprout up, by people like the Ventures, the Surfaris, and the Beach Boys — Larry Taylor’s brother Mel was the drummer for the Ventures, which might have helped bring the track to their attention, while Nik Venet was the Beach Boys’ producer. Indeed, some have claimed that Derry Weaver played on the Beach Boys’ version — he’s credited on the session sheets, but nobody involved with the session has ever said if it was actually him, or whether that was just Venet putting down a friend’s name to claim some extra money: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Moon Dawg”] While there had been twangy guitar instrumentals before “Moon Dawg”, and as I said, there’s never a first anything, historians of the surf music genre now generally point to it as the first surf music record ever, and it’s as good a choice as any. We won’t be seeing anything more from Derry Weaver, who fell into obscurity after a few years of session work, but Bruce Johnston, Larry Taylor, Elliot Ingber, Henry Vestine, Nik Venet, Kim Fowley, Phil Spector, Jan Berry, Terry Melcher, and Dean Torrence will be turning up throughout the sixties, and in some cases later. The records we looked at today were the start of a California music scene that would define American pop music in the sixties. As a final note, I mentioned Gaynel Hodge as the piano player on “Alley Oop”. As I was in the middle of writing this episode, I received word that Hodge had died earlier this week. As people who’ve listened to earlier episodes of this podcast will know, Gaynel Hodge was one of the most important people in the fifties LA vocal group scene, and without him there would have been no Platters, Penguins, or Jesse Belvin. He was also one of the few links between that fifties world of black R&B musicians and the white-dominated sixties LA pop music scene of surf, hot rods, folk rock, and sunshine. He’s unlikely to turn up again in more than minor roles in future episodes, but I’ve made this week’s Patreon episode be on another classic record he played on. As well as being an important musician in his own right, Hodge was someone without whom almost none of the music made in LA in the fifties or sixties would have happened. He’ll be missed.  

Episode eighty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "LSD-25" by the Gamblers, the first rock song ever to namecheck acid, and a song by a band so obscure no photos exist of them. (The photo here is of the touring lineup of the Hollywood Argyles. Derry Weaver, the Gamblers' lead guitarist, is top left). Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode, on "Papa Oom Mow Mow" by the Rivingtons. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/  ----more---- Resources   As usual, I have put together a Mixcloud mix with every song excerpted in this podcast. This episode, more than most, required tiny bits of information from dozens of sources. Among those I used were the one existing interview with Derry Weaver I have been able to find, Dean Torrence's autobiography , a book about John Dolphin by his son, and He's A Rebel, a biography of Phil Spector by Mark Ribkowsky.  But more than anything else, I used the self-published books by Stephen McParland,  who is the premier expert on surf music, and which you can buy in PDF form here. The ones I used the most were The Beach Boys: Inception and Conception, California Confidential, and Surf & Hot-Rod Music Chronicles: Bull Sessions With the Big Daddy. "LSD-25" is on numerous various-artists compilations of surf music, of which this two-CD set looks like the best value for the casual listener.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript On the sixteenth of April, 1943, Albert Hoffman, a research scientist in Zurich, had a curious experience after accidentally touching a tiny speck of the chemical he was experimenting with at the pharmaceutical lab in which he worked, and felt funny afterwards. Three days later, he decided to experiment on himself, and took a tiny dose of the chemical, to see if anything happened. He felt fine at first, but asked a colleague to escort him as he rode home on his bicycle. By the time he got home, he was convinced that his neighbour was a witch and that he had been poisoned. But a few hours later, he felt a little better, though still unusual. As he would later report, "Little by little I could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colors and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes. Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux". The chemical he had taken was a derivative of ergotamine that had been discovered about five years earlier and mostly ignored up until that time, a chemical called D-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate. Sandoz, the company he worked for, were delighted with this unusual chemical and its effects. They came up with some variants of the molecule without those effects, but which still affected the brain, and marketed those as migraine treatments. The chemical itself, they decided to make available as an experimental drug for psychiatrists and psychologists who wanted to investigate unusual states of consciousness. It found some uptake, among experimenters who wished to experience psychotic symptoms in a controlled environment in order to get a better understanding of their patients, or who wanted to investigate neurochemistry, and it had some promise as a treatment for alcoholism and various other psychiatric illnesses, and throughout the 1950s it was the subject of much medical research, under the trade name Sandoz came up with for it, Delysid. But in the sixties, it became better known as LSD-25: [Excerpt: The Gamblers, "LSD-25"] There are some records that one can look back at retrospectively and see that while they seemed unimportant at the time, they signalled a huge change in the musical culture. The single "Moon Dawg", backed by "LSD-25", by the Gamblers, is one of those records. Unfortunately, everything about the Gamblers is shrouded in mystery. The story I am going to tell here is the one that I've been able to piece together from stray fragments of recollection from the main participants over the years, but it could very well be wrong. Put it this way, on the record, there are two guitarists, bass, drums, and keyboards. I have seen fifteen people credited as having been members of the group that recorded the track. Obviously, those credits can't all be true, so I'm going to go here with the stories of the people who are most commonly credited, but with the caveat that the people I'm talking about could very easily not have been the people on the record. I have also made mistakes about this single before -- there are a couple of errors in the piece on it in my book California Dreaming. Part of the problem is that almost everyone who has laid claim to being involved in the record is -- or was, as many of them have died -- a well-known credit thief, someone who will happily place themselves at the centre of the story, happily put their name on copyright forms for music with which they had no involvement, and then bitterly complain that they were the real unsung geniuses behind other records, but that some evil credit thief stole all their work. The other people involved -- those who haven't said that everything was them and they did everything -- were for the most part jobbing musicians who, when asked about the record, would not even be sure if they'd played on it, because they played on so many records, and weren't asked about them for decades later. Just as one example, Nik Venet, who is generally credited as the producer of this record, said for years that Derry Weaver, the credited co-composer of the song and the person who is generally considered to have played lead guitar on it, was a pseudonym for himself. Later, when confronted with evidence that Derry Weaver was a real person, he admitted that Weaver *had* been a real person, but claimed that it was still a pseudonym for himself. Venet claimed that Weaver had died in a car crash years earlier, and that as a result he had been able to use his social security number on forms to claim himself extra money he wasn't entitled to as a staff producer. The only problem with that story is that Venet died in 1998, while the real Derry Weaver died in 2013, but Weaver only ever did one interview I've been able to track down, in 2001, so Venet's lies went unchallenged, and many books still claim that Weaver never existed. So today, I'm going to tell the story of a music scene, and use a few people as a focus, with the understanding that they may not be the people on the record we're talking about. I'm going to look at the birth of the surf and hot-rod studio scene in LA, and at Bruce Johnston, Kim Fowley, Derry Weaver, Nik Venet, Sandy Nelson, Elliot Ingber, Larry Taylor, Howard Hirsch, and Rod Schaffer, some or all of whom may or may not have been the Gamblers: [Excerpt: The Gamblers, "Moon Dawg"] Possibly the best place to start the story is at University High School, Los Angeles, in the late 1950s. University High had always had more than its fair share of star students over the years -- Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor had all attended in previous years, and over the succeeding decades members of Sonic Youth, the Doors, Black Flag, the Foo Fighters and the Partridge Family would all attend the school, among many others. But during the period in the late fifties, it had a huge number of students who would go on to define the California lifestyle in the pop culture of the next few years. There was Sandra Dee, who starred in Gidget, the first Beach Party film; Anette Funicello, who starred in most of the other Beach Party films; Randy Newman, who would document another side of California life a few years later; and Nancy Sinatra, who was then just her famous father's daughter, but who would go on to make a series of magnificent records in the sixties with Lee Hazelwood. And there was a vocal group at the school called the Barons, one of the few interracial vocal groups around at the time. They had a black lead singer, Chuck Steele, a Japanese tenor, Wally Yagi, two Jewish boys, Arnie Ginsburg and John Saligman, and two white kids, Jan Berry -- who was the leader of the group, and Dean Torrence, his friend who could sing a little falsetto. As they were all singers, they were backed by three instrumentalists who also went to the school -- Berry's neighbour Bruce Johnston on piano, Torrence's neighbour Sandy Nelson on drums, and Nelson's friend Dave Shostac on saxophone. This group played several gigs together, but slowly split apart as people's mothers wanted them to concentrate on school, or they got cars that they wanted to fix up. In Sandy Nelson's case he was sacked by Berry for playing his drums so loud -- as he packed up his kit for the last time, he told Berry, "You'll see, I'm going to have a hit record that's *only* drums". Slowly they were whittled down to three people -- Berry, Torrence, and Ginsburg, with occasional help from Berry's friend Don Altfeld. The Barons cut a demo tape of a song about a prominent local stripper, named Jennie Lee, but then Torrence decided to sign up with the Army. He'd discovered that if he did six months' basic training and joined the Army Reserves, he would be able to avoid being drafted a short while later. He thought that six months sounded a lot better than two years, so signed up, and he was on basic training when he heard a very familiar sounding record on the radio: [Excerpt: Jan and Arnie, "Jennie Lee"] He was surprised to hear it, and also surprised to hear it credited to "Jan and Arnie" rather than "the Barons". He called Berry, who told him that no, it was a completely new recording -- though Torrence was absolutely certain that he could hear his own voice on there as well. What had happened, according to Jan, was that there'd been a problem with the tape, and he and Arnie had decided to rerecord it. He'd then gone into a professional studio to get the tape cut into an acetate, so he could play it at parties, and someone in the next room had happened to hear it -- and that someone happened to be Joe Lubin. Lubin was the Vice President of Arwin Records, a label owned by Marty Melcher, Doris Day's husband. He told Berry that he would make Jan and Arnie bigger than the Everly Brothers, but Jan didn't believe him, though he let him have a copy of the disc. Jan took his copy to play at a friend's party, where it went down well. That friend was Craig Bruderlin, who later changed his name to James Brolin and became a major film star. Presumably Bruderlin's best friend Ryan O'Neal, who also went to University High, was there as well. I told you, University High School had a lot of future stars. And Jan and Arnie became two more of those stars. Joe Lubin overdubbed extra instruments on the track and released it. He didn't quite make them bigger than the Everly Brothers, but for a while they were almost as big -- at one point, the Everly Brothers were at number one in the charts, number two was Sheb Wooley with "The Purple People Eater", and number three was Jan and Arnie with "Jennie Lee". And Dean Torrence was off in the Army, regretting his choices. We'll be picking up on what happened with those three in a few months' time... But what of the other Barons? The instrumentalists, Bruce Johnston, Dave Shostac, and Sandy Nelson, formed their own band, the Sleepwalkers, with various guitarists sitting in, often a young blues player called Henry Vestine, who had already started taking LSD at this time, though none of the other band members indulged. They would often play parties organised by another University High student, Kim Fowley. Now, Fowley is the person who spoke most about this time on the record, but he was also possibly the least honest person involved in this episode (and, if the accusations made about him since his death are true, also one of the most despicable people in this episode, which is quite a high bar...), so take this with a grain of salt. But Fowley claimed in later years that these parties were his major source of income -- that he would hire sex workers to take fellow University High students who had big houses off to a motel to have sex with them. While the students were otherwise occupied, Fowley would break into their house and move all the furniture, so people could dance, he'd get the band in, and he'd invite everyone to come to the party. Then dope dealers would sell dope to the partygoers, giving Fowley a cut, and meanwhile friends of Fowley's would be outside breaking into the partygoers' cars and stealing their stuff. But then Fowley got arrested -- according to him, for stealing wine from a liquor store owned by a girlfriend who was twice his age, and selling it to other students at the school. He was given a choice of joining the Army or going to prison, and he chose the Army, on the same deal as Dean Torrence, who he ended up going through some of his training with. Meanwhile, Johnston, Shostac, and Nelson were trying to get signed as a band. They went to see John Dolphin on February the first, 1958. We've talked about Dolphin before, in the episodes on Gene and Eunice and the Penguins. Dolphin owned Dolphin's of Hollywood, the biggest black-owned record store in the LA area, and was responsible for a large part of the success of many of the records we've covered, through getting them played on radio shows broadcast from his station. He also owned a series of small labels which would put out one or two singles by an artist before the artist was snapped up by a bigger label. For example, he owned Cash Records, which had put out "Walkin' Stick Boogie", by Jerry Capehart and Eddie and Hank Cochran: [Excerpt: Jerry Capehart and the Cochran Brothers, "Walkin' Stick Boogie"] He also owned a publishing company, which owned the publishing on "Buzz Buzz Buzz" by the Hollywood Flames: [Excerpt: The Hollywood Flames, "Buzz Buzz Buzz"] Johnston, Shostac, and Nelson hoped that maybe they could get signed to one of Dolphin's labels, but they chose the worst possible day to do it. While they were waiting to see Dolphin, they got talking to an older man, Percy Ivy, who started to tell them that Dolphin couldn't be trusted and that he owed Ivy a lot of money. They were used to hearing this kind of thing about people in the music business, and decided they'd go in to see Dolphin anyway. When they did, Ivy came in with them. What happened next is told differently by different people. What's definitely the case is that Ivy and Dolphin got into a heated row. Ivy claimed that Dolphin pulled a knife on him. Witness statements seem confused on the matter, but most say that all that Dolphin had in his hand was a cigar. Ivy pulled out a gun and shot Dolphin -- one shot also hit Shostac in the leg. Sandy Nelson ran out of the room to get help. Johnston comforted the dying Dolphin, but by the time Nelson got back, he was busily negotiating with Ivy, talking about how they were going to make a record together when Ivy got out of jail. One presumes he was trying to humour Ivy, to make sure nobody else got shot. Obviously, with John Dolphin having died, he wasn't going to be running a record company any more. The shop part of his business was, from then on, managed by his assistant, a failed singer called Rudy Ray Moore who later went on to become famous playing the comedy character Dolemite. Then the Sleepwalkers got a call from another acquaintance. Kip Tyler had a band called the Flips who had had some moderate success with rockabilly records produced by Milt Gabler. And this is one of the points where the conflicting narratives become most confusing. According to every one of the few articles I can find about Tyler, before forming the Flips he was the lead singer of the Sleepwalkers, the toughest rock and roll band in the school, when he was at Union High School. According to those same articles, he was born in 1929. So either there were two bands at Union High School, a decade apart, called the Sleepwalkers, one of which was a rock and roll band before the term had been coined; or Tyler was still at high school aged twenty-eight; or someone is deeply mistaken somewhere. Kip and the Flips didn't have much recording success, and kept moving to smaller and smaller labels, but they were considered a hot band in LA -- in particular, they were the house band at Art Laboe's regular shows at El Monte stadium -- the shows which would later be immortalised by the Penguins in "Memories of El Monte". [Excerpt: The Penguins, "Memories of El Monte"] But then the group's piano player, Larry Knechtel, saxophone player, Steve Douglas, and drummer, Mike Bermani, all left to join Duane Eddy's group. Kim Fowley was by this point a roadie and general hanger-on for the Flips, and he happened to know a piano player, a saxophone player, and a drummer who were looking for a gig, and so the Sleepwalkers joined Kip Tyler and guitarist Mike Deasy in the Flips, and took over that role performing at El Monte, performing themselves but also backing other musicians, like Ritchie Valens, who played at these shows. Sandy Nelson didn't stay long in the Flips, though -- he was replaced by another drummer, Jim Troxel, and it was this lineup, with extra sax from Duane Eddy's sax player Jim Horn, that recorded "Rumble Rock": [Excerpt: Kip Tyler, "Rumble Rock"] Nelson's departure from the group coincided with him starting to get a great deal of session work from people who had seen him play live. One of those people was a young man named Harvey Philip Spector, who went by his middle name. Spector went to Fairfax High, a school which had a strong rivalry with University High and produced a similarly ludicrous list of famous people, and he'd got his own little clique of people around him with whom he was making music. These included his best friend Marshall Leib, and sometimes also Leib's girlfriend's younger brother Russ Titelman. Spector and Leib had formed a vocal group, the Teddy Bears, with a girl they knew who then went by a different name but is now called Carol Connors. Their first single was called "To Know Him Is To Love Him", inspired by the epitaph on Spector's father's grave: [Excerpt: The Teddy Bears, "To Know Him is to Love Him"] Sandy Nelson played the drums on that, and the track went to number one. I've also seen some credits say that Bruce Johnston played the bass on it, but at the time Johnston wasn't a bass player, so this seems unlikely. Even though Nelson's playing on the track is absolutely rudimentary, it gave him the cachet to get other gigs, for example playing on Gene Vincent's "Crazy Times" LP: [Excerpt: Gene Vincent, "She She Little Sheila"] Another record Nelson played on reunited him with Bruce Johnston. Kim Fowley was by this point doing some work for American International Pictures, and was asked to come up with an instrumental for a film called Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow, a film about a drag-racing club that have a Halloween party inside a deserted mansion but then discover a real monster has shown up. It's not as fun as it sounds. A songwriter friend of Fowley's named Nik Venet is credited with writing "Geronimo", although Richie Polodor, the guitarist and bass player on the session says he came up with it. Polodor said "There are three guys in the business who really have no scruples whatsoever. They are Bruce Johnston, Kim Fowley and Sandy Nelson. And I was Mr. Scruples... I wrote both Geronimo and Charge, but they were taken away from me. It was all my stuff, but between Nik Venet, Kim Fowley and Bruce Johnston I had no chance. It was cut in my studio. I did all the guitars. I wrote it all and Nik Venet walked away with the credit." Venet did the howls on the track, Johnston played piano, Nelson drums, Polodor guitar and bass, and Fowley produced: [Excerpt: The Renegades, "Geronimo"] Meanwhile, Phil Spector had become disenchanted with being in the Teddy Bears, and had put together a solo instrumental single, under the name Phil Harvey: [Excerpt: Phil Harvey, "Bumbershoot"] Spector wanted a band to play a gig to promote that single, and he put together the Phil Harvey band from the members of another band that Marshall Leib had been in before joining the Teddy Bears. The Moon Dogs had consisted of a singer called Jett Power, guitarists Derry Weaver and Elliot Ingber, and bass player Larry Taylor, along with Leib. Taylor and Ingber joined the Phil Harvey band, along with keyboard player Howard Hirsch, and drummer Rod Schaffer. The Phil Harvey band only played one gig -- the band's concept was apparently a mix of Duane Eddy style rock guitar instrumentals and complex jazz, with the group all dressed as mobsters -- but Kim Fowley happened to be there and liked what he saw, and made a note of some of those musicians as people to work with. Spector, meanwhile, had decided to use his connection with Lester Sill to go and work with Leiber and Stoller, and we'll be picking up that story in a couple of months. Meanwhile, Derry Weaver from the Moon Dogs had started to date Mary Jo Sheeley, the sister of Sharon Sheeley, and Sharon started to take an interest in her little sister's boyfriend and his friends. She suggested that Jett Power change his name to P.J. Proby, and she would regularly have him sing on the demos of her songs in the sixties: [Excerpt: P.J. Proby, "The Other Side of Town"] And she introduced Weaver to Eddie Cochran and Jerry Capehart. Cochran taught Weaver several of the guitar licks he used, and Capehart produced a session for Weaver with Cochran on guitar, Jim Stivers on piano, Guybo Smith on bass and Gene Riggio on drums: [Excerpt: Derry Weaver, "Bad Baby Doll"] That track was not released until decades later, but several other songs by Weaver, with no Cochran involvement, were released on Capehart's own label (under the misspelled name Darry Weaver), and Capehart was Weaver's manager for a little while. Weaver was actually living at the Sheeley residence when they received the phone call saying that Eddie had died and Sharon was in hospital, and it haunted him deeply for the rest of his life. Another record on which Guybo Smith played at this time was one by Sandy Nelson. The Flips had split up by this point -- Mike Deasy had gone on to join Eddie Cochran's backing band, and Bruce Johnston was playing on random sessions, so he was here for what was going to be Nelson's "single that was only drums". It wasn't quite only drums -- as well as Nelson on drums, there was Smith on bass, Johnston on piano, and Polodor on guitar. The musicians on the record have said they all deserved songwriting credit for it, but the writing credit went to Art Laboe and Nelson: [Excerpt: Sandy Nelson, "Teen Beat"] "Teen Beat" went to number four on the charts, and Nelson had a handful of other hits under his own name, including "Let There Be Drums". Less successful was a ballad released under the name "Bruce and Jerry", released on Arwin records after the owner's son, Terry Melcher, had remembered seeing the Sleepwalkers, and was desperate for some more rock and roll success on the label like Jan and Arnie, even though Melcher was a student at Beverly High and, like Fairfax, everyone at Beverly hated people at University High. "Take This Pearl" was sung by Johnston and Jerry Cooper, with backing by Johnston, Shostac, Deasy, Nelson, and bass player Harper Cosby, who would later play for Sam Cooke: [Excerpt: Bruce and Jerry, "Take This Pearl"] "Take This Pearl" by Bruce and Jerry did nothing, but Terry Melcher did think that name sounded good, except maybe it should be Terry instead of Jerry... Meanwhile, Nik Venet had got a production role at World Pacific Records, and he wanted to put together yet another studio group. And this is where some of the confusion comes in. Because this record was important, and everyone later wanted a piece of the credit. According to Nik Venet, the Gamblers were originally going to be called Nik and the Gamblers, and consisted of himself, Bruce Johnston, Sandy Nelson, Larry Taylor, and the great guitarist James Burton, with Richie Polodor engineering, and Kim Fowley involved somehow. Meanwhile, Fowley says he was not involved at all -- and given that this is about the only record in the history of the world that Fowley ever said he *wasn't* on, I tend to believe him. Elliot Ingber said that the group was Ingber, Taylor, Derry Weaver, Howard Hirsch, and Rod Schaffer. Bruce Johnston says he has no memory of the record. I don't know if anyone's ever asked James Burton about it, but it doesn't sound like him playing. Given that the A-side is called "Moon Dawg", that Weaver and Taylor were in a band called The Moondogs that used to play a song called "Moon Dog", and that Weaver is credited as the writer, I think we can assume that the lead guitar is Derry Weaver, and that Elliot Ingber's list of credits is mostly correct. But on the other hand, one of the voices singing the wordless harmonies sounds *very* much like Bruce Johnston to me, and he has a very distinctive voice that I know extremely well. so my guess is that the Gamblers on this occasion were Derry Weaver, Larry Taylor, Elliot Ingber, Bruce Johnston, and either Rod Schaffer or Sandy Nelson -- probably Schaffer, since no-one other than Venet has credited Nelson with being there. I suspect Ingber is understandably misremembering Howard Hirsch being there because Hirsch *did* play on the second Gamblers single. The B-side of the record is credited as written by Weaver and Taylor: [Excerpt: The Gamblers, "LSD-25"] That song is called "LSD-25", and while we have said over and over that there is no first anything in rock music, this is an exception -- that is, without any doubt whatsoever, the first rock and roll record to mention LSD, and so in its way a distant ancestor of psychedelic music. Weaver and Taylor have said in later years that neither of them knew anything about the drug (and it's very clear that Johnston, who takes a very hardline anti-drugs stance, never indulged) -- they've said they read a magazine article about acid and liked the name. On the other hand, Henry Vestine was part of the same circle and he was apparently already taking acid by then, though details are vague (every single article I can find about it uses the same phrasing that Wikipedia does, talking of having taken it with "a close musician friend" -- who might have been one of the Gamblers, but who might not). So the B-side was a milestone in rock music history, and in a different way so was the A-side, just written by Weaver: [Excerpt: The Gamblers, "Moon Dawg"] "Moon Dawg" was a local hit, but sold nothing anywhere outside Southern California, and there were a couple of follow-ups by different lineups of Gamblers, featuring some but never all of the same musicians, along with other people we've mentioned like Fowley. The Gamblers stopped being a thing, and Derry Weaver went off to join another group. Kim Fowley and his friend Gary Paxton had put together a novelty record, "Alley Oop", under the name The Hollywood Argyles, which featured Gaynel Hodge on piano and Sandy Nelson banging a bin lid: [Excerpt: The Hollywood Argyles, "Alley Oop"] That became a hit, and they had to put together a band to tour as the Hollywood Argyles, and Weaver became one of them, as did Marshall Leib. After that Weaver hooked up again with Nik Venet, who started getting him regular session work, as Venet had taken a job at Capitol Records. And Venet doing that suddenly meant that "Moon Dawg" became very important indeed. Even though it had been only a minor success, because Venet owned the rights to the master tape, and also the publishing rights, he got "Moon Dawg" stuck on a various-artists compilation album put out on Capitol, Golden Gassers, which featured big acts like Sam Cooke and the Four Preps, and which exposed the song to a wider audience. Cover versions of it started to sprout up, by people like the Ventures, the Surfaris, and the Beach Boys -- Larry Taylor's brother Mel was the drummer for the Ventures, which might have helped bring the track to their attention, while Nik Venet was the Beach Boys' producer. Indeed, some have claimed that Derry Weaver played on the Beach Boys' version -- he's credited on the session sheets, but nobody involved with the session has ever said if it was actually him, or whether that was just Venet putting down a friend's name to claim some extra money: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Moon Dawg"] While there had been twangy guitar instrumentals before "Moon Dawg", and as I said, there's never a first anything, historians of the surf music genre now generally point to it as the first surf music record ever, and it's as good a choice as any. We won't be seeing anything more from Derry Weaver, who fell into obscurity after a few years of session work, but Bruce Johnston, Larry Taylor, Elliot Ingber, Henry Vestine, Nik Venet, Kim Fowley, Phil Spector, Jan Berry, Terry Melcher, and Dean Torrence will be turning up throughout the sixties, and in some cases later. The records we looked at today were the start of a California music scene that would define American pop music in the sixties. As a final note, I mentioned Gaynel Hodge as the piano player on "Alley Oop". As I was in the middle of writing this episode, I received word that Hodge had died earlier this week. As people who've listened to earlier episodes of this podcast will know, Gaynel Hodge was one of the most important people in the fifties LA vocal group scene, and without him there would have been no Platters, Penguins, or Jesse Belvin. He was also one of the few links between that fifties world of black R&B musicians and the white-dominated sixties LA pop music scene of surf, hot rods, folk rock, and sunshine. He's unlikely to turn up again in more than minor roles in future episodes, but I've made this week's Patreon episode be on another classic record he played on. As well as being an important musician in his own right, Hodge was someone without whom almost none of the music made in LA in the fifties or sixties would have happened. He'll be missed.  

Flori Marquez is the cofounder of BlockFi, a fintech firm that provides wealth management products to investors in cryptocurrency.   BlockFi currently offers interest-bearing crypto accounts, crypto trading, and crypto-backed loans.   In the last year, BlockFi has raised an $18.3 million Series A and a $30 million Series B from investors like Morgan Creek Digital, Fidelity, the Winklevoss twins, and Valar Ventures.   Flori has spent her career managing alternative lending products, including a $125MM portfolio for Bond Street (acquired by Goldman Sachs).    In this conversation, Flori and Aaron discuss the founding of the company, the new customers BlockFi is targeting, and why banking people across the world is challenging.   Text Me What You Think of This Episode 412-278-7680   Flori Marquez’s Challenge; Take $100 and invest in something new or different.   Connect with Flori Marquez Linkedin Twitter Website support@blockfi.com   If you liked this interview, check out our past blockchain and crypto interviews with Anthony Pompliano, Brendan Eich, and Joe Lubin. Underwritten by Piper Creative Piper Creative creates podcasts, vlogs, and videos for companies.    Our clients become better storytellers.    How? Click here and Learn more.   We work with Fortune 500s, medium-sized companies, and entrepreneurs.   Follow Piper as we grow YouTube TikTok Instagram Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | Spotify 

Host Mark Pesce interviews Joe Lubin, co-creator of Ethereum, and ‘godfather’ of the smart contract, tracing an arc from Princeton to ConsenSys.

Joe Lubin, the co-founder of Ethereum and founder of ConsenSys, is planning a big upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain. Fintech Beat sits down with him to discuss the changes--as well as what he thinks about Libra and the CFTC's stance that Ether is a commodity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

WHO is Joe Leonardo? What makes him tick? In this somewhat-special episode of Funny as Tech, David puts co-host Joe Leonardo in the host seat to ask about what his innermost feelings towards life, death, and technology. FUNNY AS TECH Our Relationship With Technology is Messy...Let's Discuss! Each week, tech ethicist David Ryan Polgar and comedian Joe Leonardo take a deep dive into a complex tech issue that is tripping up society. The show has dealt with AR, VR, AI, IoT, diversity in tech, tech addiction, media literacy, future of work, and much more. Previous guests have included CNN's Laurie Segall, Baratunde Thurston, Nir Eyal, Manoush Zomorodi, Douglas Rushkoff, Joe Lubin, Tracy Chou, Bridget Carey, Dennis Crowley, and Chuck Nice. Outside of podcast recordings, Funny as Tech holds regular live performance in NYC at the Peoples Improv Theater. Funny as Tech also performs on the road with conferences and special events. Have a question? Info@FunnyAsTech.com FUNNY AS TECH www.funnyastech.com/ Twitter: twitter.com/FunnyAsTech Instagram: www.instagram.com/FunnyAsTech/ Facebook: www.facebook.com/FunnyAsTech/ Soundcloud: @user-328735920 iTunes: apple.co/2mAxIAV Google Play: bit.ly/2C7afyg *Find Funny as Tech on Spotify & RadioPublic Signup to our monthly mailing list: https://funnyastech.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=43f37d897394e33ea3668b208&id=0d2e9ef88e

Can tech REDUCE stress? David & Joe chat with Breathing.ai's Hannes Bend about adaptive screens, calm technology, and his personal journey that led him to founding the company. FUNNY AS TECH Our Relationship With Technology is Messy...Let's Discuss! Each week, tech ethicist David Ryan Polgar and comedian Joe Leonardo take a deep dive into a complex tech issue that is tripping up society. The show has dealt with AR, VR, AI, IoT, diversity in tech, tech addiction, media literacy, future of work, and much more. Previous guests have included CNN's Laurie Segall, Baratunde Thurston, Nir Eyal, Manoush Zomorodi, Douglas Rushkoff, Joe Lubin, Tracy Chou, Bridget Carey, Dennis Crowley, and Chuck Nice. Outside of podcast recordings, Funny as Tech holds regular live performance in NYC at the Peoples Improv Theater. Funny as Tech also performs on the road with conferences and special events. Have a question? Info@FunnyAsTech.com FUNNY AS TECH www.funnyastech.com/ Twitter: twitter.com/FunnyAsTech Instagram: www.instagram.com/FunnyAsTech/ Facebook: www.facebook.com/FunnyAsTech/ Soundcloud: @user-328735920 iTunes: apple.co/2mAxIAV Google Play: bit.ly/2C7afyg *Find Funny as Tech on Spotify & RadioPublic HOSTS www.TechEthicist.com www.JoeLeonardo.com Signup to our monthly mailing list: https://funnyastech.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=43f37d897394e33ea3668b208&id=0d2e9ef88e

PART II: David & Joe chat with Mo Johnson (from Project Love and Data for Democracy) about strategies for tech change, bringing new voices into the conversation, and building a multidisciplinary community. FUNNY AS TECH Our Relationship With Technology is Messy...Let's Discuss! Each week, tech ethicist David Ryan Polgar and comedian Joe Leonardo take a deep dive into a complex tech issue that is tripping up society. The show has dealt with AR, VR, AI, IoT, diversity in tech, tech addiction, media literacy, future of work, and much more. Previous guests have included CNN's Laurie Segall, Baratunde Thurston, Nir Eyal, Manoush Zomorodi, Douglas Rushkoff, Joe Lubin, Tracy Chou, Bridget Carey, Dennis Crowley, and Chuck Nice. Outside of podcast recordings, Funny as Tech holds regular live performance in NYC at the Peoples Improv Theater. Funny as Tech also performs on the road with conferences and special events. Have a question? Info@FunnyAsTech.com FUNNY AS TECH www.funnyastech.com/ Twitter: twitter.com/FunnyAsTech Instagram: www.instagram.com/FunnyAsTech/ Facebook: www.facebook.com/FunnyAsTech/ Soundcloud: @user-328735920 iTunes: apple.co/2mAxIAV Google Play: bit.ly/2C7afyg *Find Funny as Tech on Spotify & RadioPublic Signup to our monthly mailing list: https://funnyastech.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=43f37d897394e33ea3668b208&id=0d2e9ef88e

David & Joe chat with Mo Johnson (from Project Love and Data for Democracy) about strategies for tech change, bringing new voices into the conversation, and building a multidisciplinary community. We also get into the differences between NYC and San Francisco. FUNNY AS TECH Our Relationship With Technology is Messy...Let's Discuss! Each week, tech ethicist David Ryan Polgar and comedian Joe Leonardo take a deep dive into a complex tech issue that is tripping up society. The show has dealt with AR, VR, AI, IoT, diversity in tech, tech addiction, media literacy, future of work, and much more. Previous guests have included CNN's Laurie Segall, Baratunde Thurston, Nir Eyal, Manoush Zomorodi, Douglas Rushkoff, Joe Lubin, Tracy Chou, Bridget Carey, Dennis Crowley, and Chuck Nice. Outside of podcast recordings, Funny as Tech holds regular live performance in NYC at the Peoples Improv Theater. Funny as Tech also performs on the road with conferences and special events. Have a question? Info@FunnyAsTech.com FUNNY AS TECH www.funnyastech.com/ Twitter: twitter.com/FunnyAsTech Instagram: www.instagram.com/FunnyAsTech/ Facebook: www.facebook.com/FunnyAsTech/ Soundcloud: @user-328735920 iTunes: apple.co/2mAxIAV Google Play: bit.ly/2C7afyg *Find Funny as Tech on Spotify & RadioPublic Signup to our monthly mailing list: https://funnyastech.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=43f37d897394e33ea3668b208&id=0d2e9ef88e

Joe Lubin speaks about his vision for a decentralized world and the role Ethereum and ConsenSys play in it, what most people misunderstand about Ethereum, why it is hard to imagine what blockchain technology will do for us in 2025, why silos are coming to an end, how hierarchy and decentralization go together, what the blockchain space needs to become more trustworthy, which skills are relevant in the decentralized future, and what he would be doing if Ethereum and ConsenSys didn't exist.  Joe is the co-founder of Ethereum and the founder of ConsenSys, which is "a global formation of technologists and entrepreneurs building the infrastructure, applications, and practices that enable a decentralized world."  Joe Lubin: https://twitter.com/ethereumJoseph, https://www.linkedin.com/in/joseph-lubin-48406489/ Ethereum: https://ethereum.org, https://twitter.com/ethereum ConsenSys: https://new.consensys.net/, https://twitter.com/consensys  Also mentioned in the podcast: https://ujomusic.com/, https://twitter.com/ujomusic  Shownotes and transcript: https://theblockchainandus.com/joe-lubin To stay up to date about what blockchain pioneers, innovators and entrepreneurs from all around the world think about the future of this space, just go to www.theblockchainandus.com and sign up for the newsletter.

There is perhaps no firm that has done as much to promote the adoption of Ethereum as the dominant cryptocurrency platform for actual product development as Consensys. Founded by Ethereum Foundation co-founder Joe Lubin, Consensys has emerged as an investor, accelerator, educator and product developer in its own right in little more than three years that it has been in existence.

The most entertaining panel discussion so far @Consensus2018 was between Joe Lubin, Amber Baldet, and Jimmy Song.  Song met the panel with uninhibited skepticism over the "blockchain hype." We read David Floyd's article for details on what happened as a lead into the next quick read.  Link to David Floyd's article at Coindesk:https://www.coindesk.com/lubin-song-wager-bitcoin-blockchain-consensus/?utm_content=buffer432a3&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/bitcoinaudible/message