Podcasts about Joe South

This week on RITY... Our mini theme is The "I'ds" Of March... Plus, a hit song that was the end result of a Neil Young Impersonation... Who was Jimmie Nicol and how he inspired a popular Beatles song?... You've heard of Green Eggs and Ham, but would consider putting Vaseline on Toast?... Music from Joe South, Tommy Bolin, John Prine, Billy Strings, Phish, The Outsiders, and much more! For more info on the show, visit reelinwithryan.com

Today on another encore edition of the Rarified Heir Podcast, we are talking to Lisa Sutton, daughter of singer Lynn Anderson & music producer Glenn Sutton. Lisa grew up in Nashville, home to her parents and their ‘Countrypolitan sound'  they helped make famous. What's countrypolitan you ask? Good question. It's definitely country music but typically with lush string arrangements, an orchestra and a more stylized sound than what country music is known for prior. It's a sound her Nashville Songwriter Hall of Fame father and her mother Lynn made famous with the massive Joe South penned hit  “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.” We also talk to Lisa about her perhaps lesser known but perhaps more influential grandparents Casey Anderson and Liz Anderson whose roots in country music as songwriters, performers and connectors led them to a fortuitus meeting with the poet of the common man, Merle Haggard. He gave them their start. Of course we talk roses – it's a theme in Lisa's life that connects back to her mom's massive hit, horses, the National Enquirer and how her father's songs were recorded by everyone from The Louvin Brothers to Etta James. Fans of country music rejoice, we have a winner on this episode of the Rarified Heir Podcast with Lisa Sutten. Take a listen.

This week we look at the world through the mirror of the four horsemen of the apocalypse (Revelation 6) - 1) War - Israel, Lebanon and Gaza; Russia and Ukraine - 2) Famine, the Economy - Keir Starmer and Blackrock; the Great Reset; Climate Change; Blockading Newcastle; Ice cover and Oceans rising; Paying for COP29; Blackouts in Australia; -  3) Death - Euthanasia;  The London Tube; The World's Oldest Man;  4) The Anti-Christ  - Jordan Peterson; German Judges; The Scottish Government and What is a Woman, court case; Norway churches rebel against state indoctrination; a banana taped to a wall gets $6.2 million; Jacinda Ardern and free speech; Free speech in Australia; Tariq Ali fulfills the prediction of Christopher Hitchens;  and Feedback with music from Joe South, Bob Dylan, Louis Armstrong, Tool, The Bee Gees, Iron Maiden and the Psalms Project

Justin and Bec wrap their discussion on the recorded and filmed rehearsals undertaken for the Las Vegas engagement documented in the feature film "That's The Way It Is". The duo continues through July and August 1970's rehearsal dates, right up to August 10, the day Elvis would take the stage in front of paying customers, and reflect on the insights into Elvis and his band's creative processes along the way. Then Gurdip taps in for Song of the Week, selecting the rowdy gospel number "If the Lord Wasn't Walking By My Side", which Elvis cut for his "How Great Thou Art" album. Justin's Song of the Week is Elvis's 1970 version of Joe South's plea for empathy and understanding, "Walk A Mile in My Shoes." Our primary resource for this episode was the content contained within the Follow That Dream release "That's The Way It Is: 50th Anniversary Collectors Edition" including the book by David English and Pal Granlund.  Don't forget that the Netflix documentary "Return of the King: The Fall and Rise of Elvis Presley" releases today, November 13, 2024 on Netflix. We intend to have a full-group discussion soon! If you enjoy TCBCast, please consider supporting us with a donation at Patreon.com/TCBCast. Your support allows us to continue to provide thoughtful, provocative, challenging and well-researched perspectives on Elvis's career, his peers and influences, and his cultural impact and legacy.

1. Lucinda Williams 2. Waxahatchee 3. Sinead O'Connor 4. Thea Gilmore 5. Willie Nelson 6. Joe South 7. The Mavericks 8. Alvvays 9. Michael Head And The Red Elastic Band 10. Son Volt 11. Superette 12. Delaney Davidson & Barry Saunders 13. Dr Feelgood 14. Joni Mitchell 15. Marianne Faithfull

Label: Capitol 2592Year: 1969Condition: MPrice: $11.00Credited to 'Joe South and The Believers' This is one of my all-time favorites, from a songwriter and singer who amazingly straddled the line between soul and country throughout the 1960's. A description of yearning that I think everyone can relate to, even now, 45 years later. The flip is a terrific power pop number. Note: This beautiful copy comes in a vintage Capitol Records factory sleeve. It has Mint labels and very nearly Mint-looking vinyl. The amazing Stereo audio sounds pristine!

Pallbearer [00:34] "An Offering of Grief" Sorrow and Extinction 20 Buck Spin SPIN048 2012 Full-length debut from this heavy doomy band from Little Rock AR. Easily one of the best records of 2012. Ray Charles & Milt Jackson [09:06] "Soul Meeting" Soul Meeting Atlantic SD 1360 1962 Two great tastes that vibe great together. Featuring Ray on piano, Milt on vibes, Kenny Burrell on guitar, Percy Heath on bass, and Art Taylor on drums. This one was written by Jackson, with illuminating parts from both Milt Jackson and Kenny Burrell. Curtis Harding [16:08] "Freedom" Soul Power Burger Records BRGR600 2014 Debut outing from this Atlanta musician. Describing his sound as "slop 'n soul", this one track has a definite Arthur Lee feel. Lou Rawls [18:49] "A Whole Lotta Woman" Soulin' Capitol Records T 2566 1966 Not a whole lotta love, not a whole lotta Rosie, but a whole lotta woman. John Coltrane with Red Garland [21:27] "Theme for Ernie" Soultrane Prestige 7142 1958 One of Coltrane's showcases for his distinctive sheets of sound style. Joined here by Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and again Art Taylor on drums. Les and Larry Elgart and their Orchestra [26:24] "You're My Thrill" Sound Ideas Columbia CL 1123 1958 Hailing from Pompton, New Jersey, these brothers developed their "Elgart Sound" in 1952 and released over half a dozen albums before parting after this album to pursue their musical interests. Mary Martin et al [30:02] "The Lonely Goatherd" The Sound of Music (Original Broadway Cast) Columbia Masterworks KOL 5450 1959 Now that's what I call yodeling! Pre-Julie Andrews obviously. Mary Martin was perhaps best known as playing the title role in the Broadway production of Peter Pan. Not sure how I knew this, but maybe it was due to living in New York for 20 years naking Broadway trivia inescapable. The Sinceros [33:23] "Take Me to Your Leader" The Sound of Sunbathing Epic EPC 83632 1979 The sticker on the cover says that this track is their featured single, so that's what I'm going with. Power pop-y new wave-y. Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass [37:10] "Casino Royale" Sounds Like... Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass A&M LP124 1967 You know I love a good shaggy dog of a film, and Casino Royale is definitely that. Well, the Daniel Craig version is too, but I'm talking about the 1967 comedy version with David Niven as Sir James Bond. Ravi Shankar [39:47] "An Introduction to Indian Music" The Sounds of India Columbia CS 9296 1968 (originally released in 1958) Re-released to tap into the growing interest thanks to the Beatles' interest in Indian music (specifically George Harrison). Relax! Simon & Garfunkel [43:56] "We've Got a Groovey Thing Goin'" The Sounds of Silence Columbia CS 9269 1966 Helped out here by The Wrecking Crew, including Glen Campbell and Joe South on guitar, Hal Blaine on drums, and Larry Knechtel on the Ray Charles-esque electric piano. Scott Walker + Sunn O))) [47:22] "Brando (Dweller on the Bluff)" Soused 4AD CAD 3428 2014 On the surface, it's an odd pairing, but as the music that fills this album suggests, it's a perfect pairing. Sunn O)))'s Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley had originally reached out to Walker about contributing to their 2009 album Monoliths and Dimensions but were unable to coordinate. Walker subsequently contacted about contributing drones to fill in the silence between his lyrics while working on his epic 2012 release Bish Bosch. Evidently, Sunn O))) brought their full stage equipment to Walker's studio for recording. If you are unfamiliar, it's a wall of Ampeg, Marshall, and HiWatt speakers with Ampeg SVT and Sunn Model T heads. Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass [56:06] "The Girl from Ipanema" South of the Border A&M SP-108 1964 South of the border, down Rio de Janiero way. Music behind the DJ: "If I Fell" by Perry Botkin Jr and his Orchestra

Joe South is a testament to resilience, unconventional decisions, and finding success in unexpected places. If you've ever felt stuck in a rut or on the verge of giving up, Joe's experience might be the jolt you need to keep pushing forward. Joe, Principal Security Engineer and host of the “Security Unfiltered” podcast, shares his journey into cybersecurity and battling depression after being rejected more than 300 times when applying for security roles. Joe shares advice on breaking into cybersecurity, dealing with rejection, the importance of mentorship, and staying persistent.   00:00 Introduction 01:00 Joe South, Principal Security Engineer and Host of the Security Unfiltered podcast 02:34 Early Career Struggles and Breakthrough 03:59 The Turning Point: From Help Desk to Cybersecurity 06:44 Rejection and Finding Success 11:17 Advice for Aspiring Cybersecurity Professionals 16:19 The Importance of Continuous Learning in Cybersecurity 18:10 Join the Hacker Valley Creative Mastermind! 19:10 Securing AI Models: Challenges and Strategies 20:10 The Importance of Communication in Security 21:22 Experience and Career Advancement 21:52 Rethinking Success: The Value of Being Number Two 23:57 Pressure and Rewards of Being a CISO 26:16 The Benefits of Podcasting and Content Creation 32:28 Balancing Personal and Public Information 35:27 Overcoming Adversity and Putting Yourself Out There 38:01 Final Thoughts and Advice for Aspiring Content Creators Links: Connect with our guest, Joe South: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joseph-south/ Check out the Security Unfiltered podcast here: https://securityunfiltered.com   Check out our upcoming events: https://www.hackervalley.com/livestreams Join our creative mastermind and stand out as a cybersecurity professional: https://www.patreon.com/hackervalleystudio Love Hacker Valley Studio? Pick up some swag: https://store.hackervalley.com Continue the conversation by joining our Discord: https://hackervalley.com/discord Become a sponsor of the show to amplify your brand: https://hackervalley.com/work-with-us/  

Musician and music historian James Porter returns to the podcast to highlight country-soul pioneer Joe South. We listen to South's debut album and discuss his career as a songwriter, session player, and his brief time in the spotlight.   If you like us, please support us at patreon.com/idbuythatpodcast to get exclusive content, or tell a friend about us. Broke and have no friends? Leave us a review, it helps more people find us. Thanks!

To Support the Channel:Patreon  https://www.patreon.com/AskZacTip jar:  https://paypal.me/AskZacVenmo @AskZac  Or check out my store for merch  - https://my-store-be0243.creator-spring.com/Today we look at forgotten R&B guitar greats Chips Moman, Tommy Cogbill, Booker T. Jones & Joe South. They each played on huge hits, yet are rarely hailed, and worse yet, many times their parts are credited to other players. We right this wrong by looking at Chip's part on "Respect," Tommy's on Seesaw," Booker's on "I Forgot To Be Your Lover," and Joe's work on "Chain Of Fools." CORRECTION Estelle, not Mae Axton founded STAX.Playlist Chips Moman, Tommy Cogbill, Booker T. Jones & Joe Southhttps://open.spotify.com/playlist/6m3jIsJDPv2YsxJaMDfZ23?si=b85ionyPTBekDoX20wYf0w&pi=u-fPRZ8oNKTjCz1967 Fender Telecaster - stock except for compensated saddles. Refret by Nick at Glaser InstrumentsMore on the 1967 Maplecap Telehttps://youtu.be/K62c9ycOTlUAmp:2023 Headstrong Lil' King with 12" Eminence GA-SC64 speakerhttps://headstrongamps.com/lil-king-ampStrings: D'Addario NYXL 95-44https://amzn.to/41rnl0V#askzac #r&bguitar #telecasterSupport the Show.

On this episode of Expanded Perspectives, the guys kick things off by discussing Kyle's new water drink, the warming weather, and his thriving garden. Then, they delve into a strange sighting in Merrill, Michigan, where a person's uncle and friend encountered a bizarre creature resembling an insect-eyed kangaroo-monkey hybrid. What could this mysterious being be? Next, they explore an eerie phenomenon in Ameca, Jalisco, Mexico, where numerous people went missing or drowned mysteriously between 2004 and 2007. Locals discovered that an upright-walking lizard man was allegedly responsible for these disappearances. After the break, Cam highlights some intriguing encounters between rock musicians and UFOs. Philip Taylor Kramer, the former bassist for Iron Butterfly, vanished on February 12, 1995. His remains were found in 1999 in a Malibu ravine, with authorities ruling his death a "probable suicide." However, Kramer's family disputed this, pointing to his claims of being threatened over his revolutionary technology. Sammy Hagar, former Van Halen lead singer, shares his extraterrestrial experiences in his book "Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock." Hagar describes aliens tapping into his mind via a wireless connection long before such technology existed, even recalling a childhood encounter with a UFO. Jim Sullivan, a talented singer-songwriter, released his debut album U.F.O. in 1969 but mysteriously disappeared in the Southwest desert in 1975 while en route to Nashville. Despite comparisons to folk-rockers like Gene Clark and Joe South, his promising career never took off, leaving his disappearance an enduring mystery. All of this and more on this installment of Expanded Perspectives! Show Notes: Insect-Eyed, Kangaroo/Monkey Hybrid Creature Seen in Merrill, Michigan Area "El Chavarin" Encounters: Deadly Lizard Man of Ameca, Jalisco, Mexico Join us in beautiful Nashville, Tennessee, for our 2024 Live event, Squatchella. We will be joined by friends and fellow podcasts, Blurry Creatures, The Confessionals, and Ninjas Are Butterflies. Get your tickets now, and join us and the other shows in this amazing Live Show! If you want more Expanded Perspectives and to help out the show, then join Expanded Perspectives Elite on Patreon. Want to Share Your Story? Email: expandedperspectives@yahoo.com Hotline: 888-393-2783

For those who haven't heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a two-episode look at the song “All Along the Watchtower”. Part one was on the original version by Bob Dylan, while this part is on Jimi Hendrix's cover version. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode, on “Games People Play” by Joe South. 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…)

Welcome back to episode four of the South London Press Football Pod.We have an emergency special after we revealed this morning that Joe Edwards was set to be appointed as the new head coach of Millwall.Richard Cawley and Edmund Brack discuss the imminent appointment at The Den and outline why the Lions have decided the 37-year-old is the best replacement for Gary Rowett. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 168 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Say a Little Prayer”, and the interaction of the sacred, political, and secular in Aretha Franklin's life and work. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "Abraham, Martin, and John" by Dion. 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/ Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Aretha Franklin. Even splitting it into multiple parts would have required six or seven mixes. My main biographical source for Aretha Franklin is Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin by David Ritz, and this is where most of the quotes from musicians come from. Information on C.L. Franklin came from Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America by Nick Salvatore. Country Soul by Charles L Hughes is a great overview of the soul music made in Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville in the sixties. Peter Guralnick's Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream Of Freedom is possibly less essential, but still definitely worth reading. Information about Martin Luther King came from Martin Luther King: A Religious Life by Paul Harvey. I also referred to Burt Bacharach's autobiography Anyone Who Had a Heart, Carole King's autobiography A Natural Woman, and Soul Serenade: King Curtis and his Immortal Saxophone by Timothy R. Hoover. For information about Amazing Grace I also used Aaron Cohen's 33 1/3 book on the album. The film of the concerts is also definitely worth watching. And the Aretha Now album is available in this five-album box set for a ludicrously cheap price. But it's actually worth getting this nineteen-CD set with her first sixteen Atlantic albums and a couple of bonus discs of demos and outtakes. There's barely a duff track in the whole nineteen discs. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick warning before I begin. This episode contains some moderate references to domestic abuse, death by cancer, racial violence, police violence, and political assassination. Anyone who might be upset by those subjects might want to check the transcript rather than listening to the episode. Also, as with the previous episode on Aretha Franklin, this episode presents something of a problem. Like many people in this narrative, Franklin's career was affected by personal troubles, which shaped many of her decisions. But where most of the subjects of the podcast have chosen to live their lives in public and share intimate details of every aspect of their personal lives, Franklin was an extremely private person, who chose to share only carefully sanitised versions of her life, and tried as far as possible to keep things to herself. This of course presents a dilemma for anyone who wants to tell her story -- because even though the information is out there in biographies, and even though she's dead, it's not right to disrespect someone's wish for a private life. I have therefore tried, wherever possible, to stay away from talk of her personal life except where it *absolutely* affects the work, or where other people involved have publicly shared their own stories, and even there I've tried to keep it to a minimum. This will occasionally lead to me saying less about some topics than other people might, even though the information is easily findable, because I don't think we have an absolute right to invade someone else's privacy for entertainment. When we left Aretha Franklin, she had just finally broken through into the mainstream after a decade of performing, with a version of Otis Redding's song "Respect" on which she had been backed by her sisters, Erma and Carolyn. "Respect", in Franklin's interpretation, had been turned from a rather chauvinist song about a man demanding respect from his woman into an anthem of feminism, of Black power, and of a new political awakening. For white people of a certain generation, the summer of 1967 was "the summer of love". For many Black people, it was rather different. There's a quote that goes around (I've seen it credited in reliable sources to both Ebony and Jet magazine, but not ever seen an issue cited, so I can't say for sure where it came from) saying that the summer of 67 was the summer of "'retha, Rap, and revolt", referring to the trifecta of Aretha Franklin, the Black power leader Jamil Abdullah al-Amin (who was at the time known as H. Rap Brown, a name he later disclaimed) and the rioting that broke out in several major cities, particularly in Detroit: [Excerpt: John Lee Hooker, "The Motor City is Burning"] The mid sixties were, in many ways, the high point not of Black rights in the US -- for the most part there has been a lot of progress in civil rights in the intervening decades, though not without inevitable setbacks and attacks from the far right, and as movements like the Black Lives Matter movement have shown there is still a long way to go -- but of *hope* for Black rights. The moral force of the arguments made by the civil rights movement were starting to cause real change to happen for Black people in the US for the first time since the Reconstruction nearly a century before. But those changes weren't happening fast enough, and as we heard in the episode on "I Was Made to Love Her", there was not only a growing unrest among Black people, but a recognition that it was actually possible for things to change. A combination of hope and frustration can be a powerful catalyst, and whether Franklin wanted it or not, she was at the centre of things, both because of her newfound prominence as a star with a hit single that couldn't be interpreted as anything other than a political statement and because of her intimate family connections to the struggle. Even the most racist of white people these days pays lip service to the memory of Dr Martin Luther King, and when they do they quote just a handful of sentences from one speech King made in 1963, as if that sums up the full theological and political philosophy of that most complex of men. And as we discussed the last time we looked at Aretha Franklin, King gave versions of that speech, the "I Have a Dream" speech, twice. The most famous version was at the March on Washington, but the first time was a few weeks earlier, at what was at the time the largest civil rights demonstration in American history, in Detroit. Aretha's family connection to that event is made clear by the very opening of King's speech: [Excerpt: Martin Luther King, "Original 'I Have a Dream' Speech"] So as summer 1967 got into swing, and white rock music was going to San Francisco to wear flowers in its hair, Aretha Franklin was at the centre of a very different kind of youth revolution. Franklin's second Atlantic album, Aretha Arrives, brought in some new personnel to the team that had recorded Aretha's first album for Atlantic. Along with the core Muscle Shoals players Jimmy Johnson, Spooner Oldham, Tommy Cogbill and Roger Hawkins, and a horn section led by King Curtis, Wexler and Dowd also brought in guitarist Joe South. South was a white session player from Georgia, who had had a few minor hits himself in the fifties -- he'd got his start recording a cover version of "The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor", the Big Bopper's B-side to "Chantilly Lace": [Excerpt: Joe South, "The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor"] He'd also written a few songs that had been recorded by people like Gene Vincent, but he'd mostly become a session player. He'd become a favourite musician of Bob Johnston's, and so he'd played guitar on Simon and Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence and Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme albums: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "I am a Rock"] and bass on Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, with Al Kooper particularly praising his playing on "Visions of Johanna": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Visions of Johanna"] South would be the principal guitarist on this and Franklin's next album, before his own career took off in 1968 with "Games People Play": [Excerpt: Joe South, "Games People Play"] At this point, he had already written the other song he's best known for, "Hush", which later became a hit for Deep Purple: [Excerpt: Deep Purple, "Hush"] But he wasn't very well known, and was surprised to get the call for the Aretha Franklin session, especially because, as he put it "I was white and I was about to play behind the blackest genius since Ray Charles" But Jerry Wexler had told him that Franklin didn't care about the race of the musicians she played with, and South settled in as soon as Franklin smiled at him when he played a good guitar lick on her version of the blues standard "Going Down Slow": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Going Down Slow"] That was one of the few times Franklin smiled in those sessions though. Becoming an overnight success after years of trying and failing to make a name for herself had been a disorienting experience, and on top of that things weren't going well in her personal life. Her marriage to her manager Ted White was falling apart, and she was performing erratically thanks to the stress. In particular, at a gig in Georgia she had fallen off the stage and broken her arm. She soon returned to performing, but it meant she had problems with her right arm during the recording of the album, and didn't play as much piano as she would have previously -- on some of the faster songs she played only with her left hand. But the recording sessions had to go on, whether or not Aretha was physically capable of playing piano. As we discussed in the episode on Otis Redding, the owners of Atlantic Records were busily negotiating its sale to Warner Brothers in mid-1967. As Wexler said later “Everything in me said, Keep rolling, keep recording, keep the hits coming. She was red hot and I had no reason to believe that the streak wouldn't continue. I knew that it would be foolish—and even irresponsible—not to strike when the iron was hot. I also had personal motivation. A Wall Street financier had agreed to see what we could get for Atlantic Records. While Ahmet and Neshui had not agreed on a selling price, they had gone along with my plan to let the financier test our worth on the open market. I was always eager to pump out hits, but at this moment I was on overdrive. In this instance, I had a good partner in Ted White, who felt the same. He wanted as much product out there as possible." In truth, you can tell from Aretha Arrives that it's a record that was being thought of as "product" rather than one being made out of any kind of artistic impulse. It's a fine album -- in her ten-album run from I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You through Amazing Grace there's not a bad album and barely a bad track -- but there's a lack of focus. There are only two originals on the album, neither of them written by Franklin herself, and the rest is an incoherent set of songs that show the tension between Franklin and her producers at Atlantic. Several songs are the kind of standards that Franklin had recorded for her old label Columbia, things like "You Are My Sunshine", or her version of "That's Life", which had been a hit for Frank Sinatra the previous year: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "That's Life"] But mixed in with that are songs that are clearly the choice of Wexler. As we've discussed previously in episodes on Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett, at this point Atlantic had the idea that it was possible for soul artists to cross over into the white market by doing cover versions of white rock hits -- and indeed they'd had some success with that tactic. So while Franklin was suggesting Sinatra covers, Atlantic's hand is visible in the choices of songs like "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and "96 Tears": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "96 Tears'] Of the two originals on the album, one, the hit single "Baby I Love You" was written by Ronnie Shannon, the Detroit songwriter who had previously written "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Baby I Love You"] As with the previous album, and several other songs on this one, that had backing vocals by Aretha's sisters, Erma and Carolyn. But the other original on the album, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)", didn't, even though it was written by Carolyn: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)"] To explain why, let's take a little detour and look at the co-writer of the song this episode is about, though we're not going to get to that for a little while yet. We've not talked much about Burt Bacharach in this series so far, but he's one of those figures who has come up a few times in the periphery and will come up again, so here is as good a time as any to discuss him, and bring everyone up to speed about his career up to 1967. Bacharach was one of the more privileged figures in the sixties pop music field. His father, Bert Bacharach (pronounced the same as his son, but spelled with an e rather than a u) had been a famous newspaper columnist, and his parents had bought him a Steinway grand piano to practice on -- they pushed him to learn the piano even though as a kid he wasn't interested in finger exercises and Debussy. What he was interested in, though, was jazz, and as a teenager he would often go into Manhattan and use a fake ID to see people like Dizzy Gillespie, who he idolised, and in his autobiography he talks rapturously of seeing Gillespie playing his bent trumpet -- he once saw Gillespie standing on a street corner with a pet monkey on his shoulder, and went home and tried to persuade his parents to buy him a monkey too. In particular, he talks about seeing the Count Basie band with Sonny Payne on drums as a teenager: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Kid From Red Bank"] He saw them at Birdland, the club owned by Morris Levy where they would regularly play, and said of the performance "they were just so incredibly exciting that all of a sudden, I got into music in a way I never had before. What I heard in those clubs really turned my head around— it was like a big breath of fresh air when somebody throws open a window. That was when I knew for the first time how much I loved music and wanted to be connected to it in some way." Of course, there's a rather major problem with this story, as there is so often with narratives that musicians tell about their early career. In this case, Birdland didn't open until 1949, when Bacharach was twenty-one and stationed in Germany for his military service, while Sonny Payne didn't join Basie's band until 1954, when Bacharach had been a professional musician for many years. Also Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet bell only got bent on January 6, 1953. But presumably while Bacharach was conflating several memories, he did have some experience in some New York jazz club that led him to want to become a musician. Certainly there were enough great jazz musicians playing the clubs in those days. He went to McGill University to study music for two years, then went to study with Darius Milhaud, a hugely respected modernist composer. Milhaud was also one of the most important music teachers of the time -- among others he'd taught Stockhausen and Xenakkis, and would go on to teach Philip Glass and Steve Reich. This suited Bacharach, who by this point was a big fan of Schoenberg and Webern, and was trying to write atonal, difficult music. But Milhaud had also taught Dave Brubeck, and when Bacharach rather shamefacedly presented him with a composition which had an actual tune, he told Bacharach "Never be ashamed of writing a tune you can whistle". He dropped out of university and, like most men of his generation, had to serve in the armed forces. When he got out of the army, he continued his musical studies, still trying to learn to be an avant-garde composer, this time with Bohuslav Martinů and later with Henry Cowell, the experimental composer we've heard about quite a bit in previous episodes: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] He was still listening to a lot of avant garde music, and would continue doing so throughout the fifties, going to see people like John Cage. But he spent much of that time working in music that was very different from the avant-garde. He got a job as the band leader for the crooner Vic Damone: [Excerpt: Vic Damone. "Ebb Tide"] He also played for the vocal group the Ames Brothers. He decided while he was working with the Ames Brothers that he could write better material than they were getting from their publishers, and that it would be better to have a job where he didn't have to travel, so he got himself a job as a staff songwriter in the Brill Building. He wrote a string of flops and nearly hits, starting with "Keep Me In Mind" for Patti Page: [Excerpt: Patti Page, "Keep Me In Mind"] From early in his career he worked with the lyricist Hal David, and the two of them together wrote two big hits, "Magic Moments" for Perry Como: [Excerpt: Perry Como, "Magic Moments"] and "The Story of My Life" for Marty Robbins: [Excerpt: "The Story of My Life"] But at that point Bacharach was still also writing with other writers, notably Hal David's brother Mack, with whom he wrote the theme tune to the film The Blob, as performed by The Five Blobs: [Excerpt: The Five Blobs, "The Blob"] But Bacharach's songwriting career wasn't taking off, and he got himself a job as musical director for Marlene Dietrich -- a job he kept even after it did start to take off.  Part of the problem was that he intuitively wrote music that didn't quite fit into standard structures -- there would be odd bars of unusual time signatures thrown in, unusual harmonies, and structural irregularities -- but then he'd take feedback from publishers and producers who would tell him the song could only be recorded if he straightened it out. He said later "The truth is that I ruined a lot of songs by not believing in myself enough to tell these guys they were wrong." He started writing songs for Scepter Records, usually with Hal David, but also with Bob Hilliard and Mack David, and started having R&B hits. One song he wrote with Mack David, "I'll Cherish You", had the lyrics rewritten by Luther Dixon to make them more harsh-sounding for a Shirelles single -- but the single was otherwise just Bacharach's demo with the vocals replaced, and you can even hear his voice briefly at the beginning: [Excerpt: The Shirelles, "Baby, It's You"] But he'd also started becoming interested in the production side of records more generally. He'd iced that some producers, when recording his songs, would change the sound for the worse -- he thought Gene McDaniels' version of "Tower of Strength", for example, was too fast. But on the other hand, other producers got a better sound than he'd heard in his head. He and Hilliard had written a song called "Please Stay", which they'd given to Leiber and Stoller to record with the Drifters, and he thought that their arrangement of the song was much better than the one he'd originally thought up: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Please Stay"] He asked Leiber and Stoller if he could attend all their New York sessions and learn about record production from them. He started doing so, and eventually they started asking him to assist them on records. He and Hilliard wrote a song called "Mexican Divorce" for the Drifters, which Leiber and Stoller were going to produce, and as he put it "they were so busy running Redbird Records that they asked me to rehearse the background singers for them in my office." [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Mexican Divorce"] The backing singers who had been brought in to augment the Drifters on that record were a group of vocalists who had started out as members of a gospel group called the Drinkard singers: [Excerpt: The Drinkard Singers, "Singing in My Soul"] The Drinkard Singers had originally been a family group, whose members included Cissy Drinkard, who joined the group aged five (and who on her marriage would become known as Cissy Houston -- her daughter Whitney would later join the family business), her aunt Lee Warrick, and Warrick's adopted daughter Judy Clay. That group were discovered by the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, and spent much of the fifties performing with gospel greats including Jackson herself, Clara Ward, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. But Houston was also the musical director of a group at her church, the Gospelaires, which featured Lee Warrick's two daughters Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick (for those who don't know, the Warwick sisters' birth name was Warrick, spelled with two rs. A printing error led to it being misspelled the same way as the British city on a record label, and from that point on Dionne at least pronounced the w in her misspelled name). And slowly, the Gospelaires rather than the Drinkard Singers became the focus, with a lineup of Houston, the Warwick sisters, the Warwick sisters' cousin Doris Troy, and Clay's sister Sylvia Shemwell. The real change in the group's fortunes came when, as we talked about a while back in the episode on "The Loco-Motion", the original lineup of the Cookies largely stopped working as session singers to become Ray Charles' Raelettes. As we discussed in that episode, a new lineup of Cookies formed in 1961, but it took a while for them to get started, and in the meantime the producers who had been relying on them for backing vocals were looking elsewhere, and they looked to the Gospelaires. "Mexican Divorce" was the first record to feature the group as backing vocalists -- though reports vary as to how many of them are on the record, with some saying it's only Troy and the Warwicks, others saying Houston was there, and yet others saying it was all five of them. Some of these discrepancies were because these singers were so good that many of them left to become solo singers in fairly short order. Troy was the first to do so, with her hit "Just One Look", on which the other Gospelaires sang backing vocals: [Excerpt: Doris Troy, "Just One Look"] But the next one to go solo was Dionne Warwick, and that was because she'd started working with Bacharach and Hal David as their principal demo singer. She started singing lead on their demos, and hoping that she'd get to release them on her own. One early one was "Make it Easy On Yourself", which was recorded by Jerry Butler, formerly of the Impressions. That record was produced by Bacharach, one of the first records he produced without outside supervision: [Excerpt: Jerry Butler, "Make it Easy On Yourself"] Warwick was very jealous that a song she'd sung the demo of had become a massive hit for someone else, and blamed Bacharach and David. The way she tells the story -- Bacharach always claimed this never happened, but as we've already seen he was himself not always the most reliable of narrators of his own life -- she got so angry she complained to them, and said "Don't make me over, man!" And so Bacharach and David wrote her this: [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Don't Make Me Over"] Incidentally, in the UK, the hit version of that was a cover by the Swinging Blue Jeans: [Excerpt: The Swinging Blue Jeans, "Don't Make Me Over"] who also had a huge hit with "You're No Good": [Excerpt: The Swinging Blue Jeans, "You're No Good"] And *that* was originally recorded by *Dee Dee* Warwick: [Excerpt: Dee Dee Warwick, "You're No Good"] Dee Dee also had a successful solo career, but Dionne's was the real success, making the names of herself, and of Bacharach and David. The team had more than twenty top forty hits together, before Bacharach and David had a falling out in 1971 and stopped working together, and Warwick sued both of them for breach of contract as a result. But prior to that they had hit after hit, with classic records like "Anyone Who Had a Heart": [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Anyone Who Had a Heart"] And "Walk On By": [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "Walk On By"] With Doris, Dionne, and Dee Dee all going solo, the group's membership was naturally in flux -- though the departed members would occasionally join their former bandmates for sessions, and the remaining members would sing backing vocals on their ex-members' records. By 1965 the group consisted of Cissy Houston, Sylvia Shemwell, the Warwick sisters' cousin Myrna Smith, and Estelle Brown. The group became *the* go-to singers for soul and R&B records made in New York. They were regularly hired by Leiber and Stoller to sing on their records, and they were also the particular favourites of Bert Berns. They sang backing vocals on almost every record he produced. It's them doing the gospel wails on "Cry Baby" by Garnet Mimms: [Excerpt: Garnet Mimms, "Cry Baby"] And they sang backing vocals on both versions of "If You Need Me" -- Wilson Pickett's original and Solomon Burke's more successful cover version, produced by Berns: [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "If You Need Me"] They're on such Berns records as "Show Me Your Monkey", by Kenny Hamber: [Excerpt: Kenny Hamber, "Show Me Your Monkey"] And it was a Berns production that ended up getting them to be Aretha Franklin's backing group. The group were becoming such an important part of the records that Atlantic and BANG Records, in particular, were putting out, that Jerry Wexler said "it was only a matter of common decency to put them under contract as a featured group". He signed them to Atlantic and renamed them from the Gospelaires to The Sweet Inspirations.  Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham wrote a song for the group which became their only hit under their own name: [Excerpt: The Sweet Inspirations, "Sweet Inspiration"] But to start with, they released a cover of Pops Staples' civil rights song "Why (Am I treated So Bad)": [Excerpt: The Sweet Inspirations, "Why (Am I Treated So Bad?)"] That hadn't charted, and meanwhile, they'd all kept doing session work. Cissy had joined Erma and Carolyn Franklin on the backing vocals for Aretha's "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You"] Shortly after that, the whole group recorded backing vocals for Erma's single "Piece of My Heart", co-written and produced by Berns: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] That became a top ten record on the R&B charts, but that caused problems. Aretha Franklin had a few character flaws, and one of these was an extreme level of jealousy for any other female singer who had any level of success and came up in the business after her. She could be incredibly graceful towards anyone who had been successful before her -- she once gave one of her Grammies away to Esther Phillips, who had been up for the same award and had lost to her -- but she was terribly insecure, and saw any contemporary as a threat. She'd spent her time at Columbia Records fuming (with some justification) that Barbra Streisand was being given a much bigger marketing budget than her, and she saw Diana Ross, Gladys Knight, and Dionne Warwick as rivals rather than friends. And that went doubly for her sisters, who she was convinced should be supporting her because of family loyalty. She had been infuriated at John Hammond when Columbia had signed Erma, thinking he'd gone behind her back to create competition for her. And now Erma was recording with Bert Berns. Bert Berns who had for years been a colleague of Jerry Wexler and the Ertegun brothers at Atlantic. Aretha was convinced that Wexler had put Berns up to signing Erma as some kind of power play. There was only one problem with this -- it simply wasn't true. As Wexler later explained “Bert and I had suffered a bad falling-out, even though I had enormous respect for him. After all, he was the guy who brought over guitarist Jimmy Page from England to play on our sessions. Bert, Ahmet, Nesuhi, and I had started a label together—Bang!—where Bert produced Van Morrison's first album. But Bert also had a penchant for trouble. He courted the wise guys. He wanted total control over every last aspect of our business dealings. Finally it was too much, and the Erteguns and I let him go. He sued us for breach of contract and suddenly we were enemies. I felt that he signed Erma, an excellent singer, not merely for her talent but as a way to get back at me. If I could make a hit with Aretha, he'd show me up by making an even bigger hit on Erma. Because there was always an undercurrent of rivalry between the sisters, this only added to the tension.” There were two things that resulted from this paranoia on Aretha's part. The first was that she and Wexler, who had been on first-name terms up to that point, temporarily went back to being "Mr. Wexler" and "Miss Franklin" to each other. And the second was that Aretha no longer wanted Carolyn and Erma to be her main backing vocalists, though they would continue to appear on her future records on occasion. From this point on, the Sweet Inspirations would be the main backing vocalists for Aretha in the studio throughout her golden era [xxcut line (and when the Sweet Inspirations themselves weren't on the record, often it would be former members of the group taking their place)]: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Ain't Nobody (Gonna Turn Me Around)"] The last day of sessions for Aretha Arrives was July the twenty-third, 1967. And as we heard in the episode on "I Was Made to Love Her", that was the day that the Detroit riots started. To recap briefly, that was four days of rioting started because of a history of racist policing, made worse by those same racist police overreacting to the initial protests. By the end of those four days, the National Guard, 82nd Airborne Division, and the 101st Airborne from Clarksville were all called in to deal with the violence, which left forty-three dead (of whom thirty-three were Black and only one was a police officer), 1,189 people were injured, and over 7,200 arrested, almost all of them Black. Those days in July would be a turning point for almost every musician based in Detroit. In particular, the police had murdered three members of the soul group the Dramatics, in a massacre of which the author John Hersey, who had been asked by President Johnson to be part of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders but had decided that would compromise his impartiality and did an independent journalistic investigation, said "The episode contained all the mythic themes of racial strife in the United States: the arm of the law taking the law into its own hands; interracial sex; the subtle poison of racist thinking by “decent” men who deny they are racists; the societal limbo into which, ever since slavery, so many young black men have been driven by our country; ambiguous justice in the courts; and the devastation in both black and white human lives that follows in the wake of violence as surely as ruinous and indiscriminate flood after torrents" But these were also the events that radicalised the MC5 -- the group had been playing a gig as Tim Buckley's support act when the rioting started, and guitarist Wayne Kramer decided afterwards to get stoned and watch the fires burning down the city through a telescope -- which police mistook for a rifle, leading to the National Guard knocking down Kramer's door. The MC5 would later cover "The Motor City is Burning", John Lee Hooker's song about the events: [Excerpt: The MC5, "The Motor City is Burning"] It would also be a turning point for Motown, too, in ways we'll talk about in a few future episodes.  And it was a political turning point too -- Michigan Governor George Romney, a liberal Republican (at a time when such people existed) had been the favourite for the Republican Presidential candidacy when he'd entered the race in December 1966, but as racial tensions ramped up in Detroit during the early months of 1967 he'd started trailing Richard Nixon, a man who was consciously stoking racists' fears. President Johnson, the incumbent Democrat, who was at that point still considering standing for re-election, made sure to make it clear to everyone during the riots that the decision to call in the National Guard had been made at the State level, by Romney, rather than at the Federal level.  That wasn't the only thing that removed the possibility of a Romney presidency, but it was a big part of the collapse of his campaign, and the, as it turned out, irrevocable turn towards right-authoritarianism that the party took with Nixon's Southern Strategy. Of course, Aretha Franklin had little way of knowing what was to come and how the riots would change the city and the country over the following decades. What she was primarily concerned about was the safety of her father, and to a lesser extent that of her sister-in-law Earline who was staying with him. Aretha, Carolyn, and Erma all tried to keep in constant touch with their father while they were out of town, and Aretha even talked about hiring private detectives to travel to Detroit, find her father, and get him out of the city to safety. But as her brother Cecil pointed out, he was probably the single most loved man among Black people in Detroit, and was unlikely to be harmed by the rioters, while he was too famous for the police to kill with impunity. Reverend Franklin had been having a stressful time anyway -- he had recently been fined for tax evasion, an action he was convinced the IRS had taken because of his friendship with Dr King and his role in the civil rights movement -- and according to Cecil "Aretha begged Daddy to move out of the city entirely. She wanted him to find another congregation in California, where he was especially popular—or at least move out to the suburbs. But he wouldn't budge. He said that, more than ever, he was needed to point out the root causes of the riots—the economic inequality, the pervasive racism in civic institutions, the woefully inadequate schools in inner-city Detroit, and the wholesale destruction of our neighborhoods by urban renewal. Some ministers fled the city, but not our father. The horror of what happened only recommitted him. He would not abandon his political agenda." To make things worse, Aretha was worried about her father in other ways -- as her marriage to Ted White was starting to disintegrate, she was looking to her father for guidance, and actually wanted him to take over her management. Eventually, Ruth Bowen, her booking agent, persuaded her brother Cecil that this was a job he could do, and that she would teach him everything he needed to know about the music business. She started training him up while Aretha was still married to White, in the expectation that that marriage couldn't last. Jerry Wexler, who only a few months earlier had been seeing Ted White as an ally in getting "product" from Franklin, had now changed his tune -- partly because the sale of Atlantic had gone through in the meantime. He later said “Sometimes she'd call me at night, and, in that barely audible little-girl voice of hers, she'd tell me that she wasn't sure she could go on. She always spoke in generalities. She never mentioned her husband, never gave me specifics of who was doing what to whom. And of course I knew better than to ask. She just said that she was tired of dealing with so much. My heart went out to her. She was a woman who suffered silently. She held so much in. I'd tell her to take as much time off as she needed. We had a lot of songs in the can that we could release without new material. ‘Oh, no, Jerry,' she'd say. ‘I can't stop recording. I've written some new songs, Carolyn's written some new songs. We gotta get in there and cut 'em.' ‘Are you sure?' I'd ask. ‘Positive,' she'd say. I'd set up the dates and typically she wouldn't show up for the first or second sessions. Carolyn or Erma would call me to say, ‘Ree's under the weather.' That was tough because we'd have asked people like Joe South and Bobby Womack to play on the sessions. Then I'd reschedule in the hopes she'd show." That third album she recorded in 1967, Lady Soul, was possibly her greatest achievement. The opening track, and second single, "Chain of Fools", released in November, was written by Don Covay -- or at least it's credited as having been written by Covay. There's a gospel record that came out around the same time on a very small label based in Houston -- "Pains of Life" by Rev. E. Fair And The Sensational Gladys Davis Trio: [Excerpt: Rev. E. Fair And The Sensational Gladys Davis Trio, "Pains of Life"] I've seen various claims online that that record came out shortly *before* "Chain of Fools", but I can't find any definitive evidence one way or the other -- it was on such a small label that release dates aren't available anywhere. Given that the B-side, which I haven't been able to track down online, is called "Wait Until the Midnight Hour", my guess is that rather than this being a case of Don Covay stealing the melody from an obscure gospel record he'd have had little chance to hear, it's the gospel record rewriting a then-current hit to be about religion, but I thought it worth mentioning. The song was actually written by Covay after Jerry Wexler asked him to come up with some songs for Otis Redding, but Wexler, after hearing it, decided it was better suited to Franklin, who gave an astonishing performance: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Chain of Fools"] Arif Mardin, the arranger of the album, said of that track “I was listed as the arranger of ‘Chain of Fools,' but I can't take credit. Aretha walked into the studio with the chart fully formed inside her head. The arrangement is based around the harmony vocals provided by Carolyn and Erma. To add heft, the Sweet Inspirations joined in. The vision of the song is entirely Aretha's.” According to Wexler, that's not *quite* true -- according to him, Joe South came up with the guitar part that makes up the intro, and he also said that when he played what he thought was the finished track to Ellie Greenwich, she came up with another vocal line for the backing vocals, which she overdubbed. But the core of the record's sound is definitely pure Aretha -- and Carolyn Franklin said that there was a reason for that. As she said later “Aretha didn't write ‘Chain,' but she might as well have. It was her story. When we were in the studio putting on the backgrounds with Ree doing lead, I knew she was singing about Ted. Listen to the lyrics talking about how for five long years she thought he was her man. Then she found out she was nothing but a link in the chain. Then she sings that her father told her to come on home. Well, he did. She sings about how her doctor said to take it easy. Well, he did too. She was drinking so much we thought she was on the verge of a breakdown. The line that slew me, though, was the one that said how one of these mornings the chain is gonna break but until then she'll take all she can take. That summed it up. Ree knew damn well that this man had been doggin' her since Jump Street. But somehow she held on and pushed it to the breaking point." [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Chain of Fools"] That made number one on the R&B charts, and number two on the hot one hundred, kept from the top by "Judy In Disguise (With Glasses)" by John Fred and his Playboy Band -- a record that very few people would say has stood the test of time as well. The other most memorable track on the album was the one chosen as the first single, released in September. As Carole King told the story, she and Gerry Goffin were feeling like their career was in a slump. While they had had a huge run of hits in the early sixties through 1965, they had only had two new hits in 1966 -- "Goin' Back" for Dusty Springfield and "Don't Bring Me Down" for the Animals, and neither of those were anything like as massive as their previous hits. And up to that point in 1967, they'd only had one -- "Pleasant Valley Sunday" for the Monkees. They had managed to place several songs on Monkees albums and the TV show as well, so they weren't going to starve, but the rise of self-contained bands that were starting to dominate the charts, and Phil Spector's temporary retirement, meant there simply wasn't the opportunity for them to place material that there had been. They were also getting sick of travelling to the West Coast all the time, because as their children were growing slightly older they didn't want to disrupt their lives in New York, and were thinking of approaching some of the New York based labels and seeing if they needed songs. They were particularly considering Atlantic, because soul was more open to outside songwriters than other genres. As it happened, though, they didn't have to approach Atlantic, because Atlantic approached them. They were walking down Broadway when a limousine pulled up, and Jerry Wexler stuck his head out of the window. He'd come up with a good title that he wanted to use for a song for Aretha, would they be interested in writing a song called "Natural Woman"? They said of course they would, and Wexler drove off. They wrote the song that night, and King recorded a demo the next morning: [Excerpt: Carole King, "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman (demo)"] They gave Wexler a co-writing credit because he had suggested the title.  King later wrote in her autobiography "Hearing Aretha's performance of “Natural Woman” for the first time, I experienced a rare speechless moment. To this day I can't convey how I felt in mere words. Anyone who had written a song in 1967 hoping it would be performed by a singer who could take it to the highest level of excellence, emotional connection, and public exposure would surely have wanted that singer to be Aretha Franklin." She went on to say "But a recording that moves people is never just about the artist and the songwriters. It's about people like Jerry and Ahmet, who matched the songwriters with a great title and a gifted artist; Arif Mardin, whose magnificent orchestral arrangement deserves the place it will forever occupy in popular music history; Tom Dowd, whose engineering skills captured the magic of this memorable musical moment for posterity; and the musicians in the rhythm section, the orchestral players, and the vocal contributions of the background singers—among them the unforgettable “Ah-oo!” after the first line of the verse. And the promotion and marketing people helped this song reach more people than it might have without them." And that's correct -- unlike "Chain of Fools", this time Franklin did let Arif Mardin do most of the arrangement work -- though she came up with the piano part that Spooner Oldham plays on the record. Mardin said that because of the song's hymn-like feel they wanted to go for a more traditional written arrangement. He said "She loved the song to the point where she said she wanted to concentrate on the vocal and vocal alone. I had written a string chart and horn chart to augment the chorus and hired Ralph Burns to conduct. After just a couple of takes, we had it. That's when Ralph turned to me with wonder in his eyes. Ralph was one of the most celebrated arrangers of the modern era. He had done ‘Early Autumn' for Woody Herman and Stan Getz, and ‘Georgia on My Mind' for Ray Charles. He'd worked with everyone. ‘This woman comes from another planet' was all Ralph said. ‘She's just here visiting.'” [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman"] By this point there was a well-functioning team making Franklin's records -- while the production credits would vary over the years, they were all essentially co-productions by the team of Franklin, Wexler, Mardin and Dowd, all collaborating and working together with a more-or-less unified purpose, and the backing was always by the same handful of session musicians and some combination of the Sweet Inspirations and Aretha's sisters. That didn't mean that occasional guests couldn't get involved -- as we discussed in the Cream episode, Eric Clapton played guitar on "Good to Me as I am to You": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Good to Me as I am to You"] Though that was one of the rare occasions on one of these records where something was overdubbed. Clapton apparently messed up the guitar part when playing behind Franklin, because he was too intimidated by playing with her, and came back the next day to redo his part without her in the studio. At this point, Aretha was at the height of her fame. Just before the final batch of album sessions began she appeared in the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, and she was making regular TV appearances, like one on the Mike Douglas Show where she duetted with Frankie Valli on "That's Life": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin and Frankie Valli, "That's Life"] But also, as Wexler said “Her career was kicking into high gear. Contending and resolving both the professional and personal challenges were too much. She didn't think she could do both, and I didn't blame her. Few people could. So she let the personal slide and concentrated on the professional. " Her concert promoter Ruth Bowen said of this time "Her father and Dr. King were putting pressure on her to sing everywhere, and she felt obligated. The record company was also screaming for more product. And I had a mountain of offers on my desk that kept getting higher with every passing hour. They wanted her in Europe. They wanted her in Latin America. They wanted her in every major venue in the U.S. TV was calling. She was being asked to do guest appearances on every show from Carol Burnett to Andy Williams to the Hollywood Palace. She wanted to do them all and she wanted to do none of them. She wanted to do them all because she's an entertainer who burns with ambition. She wanted to do none of them because she was emotionally drained. She needed to go away and renew her strength. I told her that at least a dozen times. She said she would, but she didn't listen to me." The pressures from her father and Dr King are a recurring motif in interviews with people about this period. Franklin was always a very political person, and would throughout her life volunteer time and money to liberal political causes and to the Democratic Party, but this was the height of her activism -- the Civil Rights movement was trying to capitalise on the gains it had made in the previous couple of years, and celebrity fundraisers and performances at rallies were an important way to do that. And at this point there were few bigger celebrities in America than Aretha Franklin. At a concert in her home town of Detroit on February the sixteenth, 1968, the Mayor declared the day Aretha Franklin Day. At the same show, Billboard, Record World *and* Cash Box magazines all presented her with plaques for being Female Vocalist of the Year. And Dr. King travelled up to be at the show and congratulate her publicly for all her work with his organisation, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Backstage at that show, Dr. King talked to Aretha's father, Reverend Franklin, about what he believed would be the next big battle -- a strike in Memphis: [Excerpt, Martin Luther King, "Mountaintop Speech" -- "And so, as a result of this, we are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy—what is the other bread?—Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven't been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying, they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right."] The strike in question was the Memphis Sanitation Workers' strike which had started a few days before.  The struggle for Black labour rights was an integral part of the civil rights movement, and while it's not told that way in the sanitised version of the story that's made it into popular culture, the movement led by King was as much about economic justice as social justice -- King was a democratic socialist, and believed that economic oppression was both an effect of and cause of other forms of racial oppression, and that the rights of Black workers needed to be fought for. In 1967 he had set up a new organisation, the Poor People's Campaign, which was set to march on Washington to demand a program that included full employment, a guaranteed income -- King was strongly influenced in his later years by the ideas of Henry George, the proponent of a universal basic income based on land value tax -- the annual building of half a million affordable homes, and an end to the war in Vietnam. This was King's main focus in early 1968, and he saw the sanitation workers' strike as a major part of this campaign. Memphis was one of the most oppressive cities in the country, and its largely Black workforce of sanitation workers had been trying for most of the 1960s to unionise, and strike-breakers had been called in to stop them, and many of them had been fired by their white supervisors with no notice. They were working in unsafe conditions, for utterly inadequate wages, and the city government were ardent segregationists. After two workers had died on the first of February from using unsafe equipment, the union demanded changes -- safer working conditions, better wages, and recognition of the union. The city council refused, and almost all the sanitation workers stayed home and stopped work. After a few days, the council relented and agreed to their terms, but the Mayor, Henry Loeb, an ardent white supremacist who had stood on a platform of opposing desegregation, and who had previously been the Public Works Commissioner who had put these unsafe conditions in place, refused to listen. As far as he was concerned, he was the only one who could recognise the union, and he wouldn't. The workers continued their strike, marching holding signs that simply read "I am a Man": [Excerpt: Stevie Wonder, "Blowing in the Wind"] The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the NAACP had been involved in organising support for the strikes from an early stage, and King visited Memphis many times. Much of the time he spent visiting there was spent negotiating with a group of more militant activists, who called themselves The Invaders and weren't completely convinced by King's nonviolent approach -- they believed that violence and rioting got more attention than non-violent protests. King explained to them that while he had been persuaded by Gandhi's writings of the moral case for nonviolent protest, he was also persuaded that it was pragmatically necessary -- asking the young men "how many guns do we have and how many guns do they have?", and pointing out as he often did that when it comes to violence a minority can't win against an armed majority. Rev Franklin went down to Memphis on the twenty-eighth of March to speak at a rally Dr. King was holding, but as it turned out the rally was cancelled -- the pre-rally march had got out of hand, with some people smashing windows, and Memphis police had, like the police in Detroit the previous year, violently overreacted, clubbing and gassing protestors and shooting and killing one unarmed teenage boy, Larry Payne. The day after Payne's funeral, Dr King was back in Memphis, though this time Rev Franklin was not with him. On April the third, he gave a speech which became known as the "Mountaintop Speech", in which he talked about the threats that had been made to his life: [Excerpt: Martin Luther King, "Mountaintop Speech": “And then I got to Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."] The next day, Martin Luther King was shot dead. James Earl Ray, a white supremacist, pled guilty to the murder, and the evidence against him seems overwhelming from what I've read, but the King family have always claimed that the murder was part of a larger conspiracy and that Ray was not the gunman. Aretha was obviously distraught, and she attended the funeral, as did almost every other prominent Black public figure. James Baldwin wrote of the funeral: "In the pew directly before me sat Marlon Brando, Sammy Davis, Eartha Kitt—covered in black, looking like a lost, ten-year-old girl—and Sidney Poitier, in the same pew, or nearby. Marlon saw me, and nodded. The atmosphere was black, with a tension indescribable—as though something, perhaps the heavens, perhaps the earth, might crack. Everyone sat very still. The actual service sort of washed over me, in waves. It wasn't that it seemed unreal; it was the most real church service I've ever sat through in my life, or ever hope to sit through; but I have a childhood hangover thing about not weeping in public, and I was concentrating on holding myself together. I did not want to weep for Martin, tears seemed futile. But I may also have been afraid, and I could not have been the only one, that if I began to weep I would not be able to stop. There was more than enough to weep for, if one was to weep—so many of us, cut down, so soon. Medgar, Malcolm, Martin: and their widows, and their children. Reverend Ralph David Abernathy asked a certain sister to sing a song which Martin had loved—“Once more,” said Ralph David, “for Martin and for me,” and he sat down." Many articles and books on Aretha Franklin say that she sang at King's funeral. In fact she didn't, but there's a simple reason for the confusion. King's favourite song was the Thomas Dorsey gospel song "Take My Hand, Precious Lord", and indeed almost his last words were to ask a trumpet player, Ben Branch, if he would play the song at the rally he was going to be speaking at on the day of his death. At his request, Mahalia Jackson, his old friend, sang the song at his private funeral, which was not filmed, unlike the public part of the funeral that Baldwin described. Four months later, though, there was another public memorial for King, and Franklin did sing "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" at that service, in front of King's weeping widow and children, and that performance *was* filmed, and gets conflated in people's memories with Jackson's unfilmed earlier performance: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord (at Martin Luther King Memorial)"] Four years later, she would sing that at Mahalia Jackson's funeral. Through all this, Franklin had been working on her next album, Aretha Now, the sessions for which started more or less as soon as the sessions for Lady Soul had finished. The album was, in fact, bookended by deaths that affected Aretha. Just as King died at the end of the sessions, the beginning came around the time of the death of Otis Redding -- the sessions were cancelled for a day while Wexler travelled to Georgia for Redding's funeral, which Franklin was too devastated to attend, and Wexler would later say that the extra emotion in her performances on the album came from her emotional pain at Redding's death. The lead single on the album, "Think", was written by Franklin and -- according to the credits anyway -- her husband Ted White, and is very much in the same style as "Respect", and became another of her most-loved hits: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Think"] But probably the song on Aretha Now that now resonates the most is one that Jerry Wexler tried to persuade her not to record, and was only released as a B-side. Indeed, "I Say a Little Prayer" was a song that had already once been a hit after being a reject.  Hal David, unlike Burt Bacharach, was a fairly political person and inspired by the protest song movement, and had been starting to incorporate his concerns about the political situation and the Vietnam War into his lyrics -- though as with many such writers, he did it in much less specific ways than a Phil Ochs or a Bob Dylan. This had started with "What the World Needs Now is Love", a song Bacharach and David had written for Jackie DeShannon in 1965: [Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, "What the "World Needs Now is Love"] But he'd become much more overtly political for "The Windows of the World", a song they wrote for Dionne Warwick. Warwick has often said it's her favourite of her singles, but it wasn't a big hit -- Bacharach blamed himself for that, saying "Dionne recorded it as a single and I really blew it. I wrote a bad arrangement and the tempo was too fast, and I really regret making it the way I did because it's a good song." [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "The Windows of the World"] For that album, Bacharach and David had written another track, "I Say a Little Prayer", which was not as explicitly political, but was intended by David to have an implicit anti-war message, much like other songs of the period like "Last Train to Clarksville". David had sons who were the right age to be drafted, and while it's never stated, "I Say a Little Prayer" was written from the perspective of a woman whose partner is away fighting in the war, but is still in her thoughts: [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "I Say a Little Prayer"] The recording of Dionne Warwick's version was marked by stress. Bacharach had a particular way of writing music to tell the musicians the kind of feel he wanted for the part -- he'd write nonsense words above the stave, and tell the musicians to play the parts as if they were singing those words. The trumpet player hired for the session, Ernie Royal, got into a row with Bacharach about this unorthodox way of communicating musical feeling, and the track ended up taking ten takes (as opposed to the normal three for a Bacharach session), with Royal being replaced half-way through the session. Bacharach was never happy with the track even after all the work it had taken, and he fought to keep it from being released at all, saying the track was taken at too fast a tempo. It eventually came out as an album track nearly eighteen months after it was recorded -- an eternity in 1960s musical timescales -- and DJs started playing it almost as soon as it came out. Scepter records rushed out a single, over Bacharach's objections, but as he later said "One thing I love about the record business is how wrong I was. Disc jockeys all across the country started playing the track, and the song went to number four on the charts and then became the biggest hit Hal and I had ever written for Dionne." [Excerpt: Dionne Warwick, "I Say a Little Prayer"] Oddly, the B-side for Warwick's single, "Theme From the Valley of the Dolls" did even better, reaching number two. Almost as soon as the song was released as a single, Franklin started playing around with the song backstage, and in April 1968, right around the time of Dr. King's death, she recorded a version. Much as Burt Bacharach had been against releasing Dionne Warwick's version, Jerry Wexler was against Aretha even recording the song, saying later “I advised Aretha not to record it. I opposed it for two reasons. First, to cover a song only twelve weeks after the original reached the top of the charts was not smart business. You revisit such a hit eight months to a year later. That's standard practice. But more than that, Bacharach's melody, though lovely, was peculiarly suited to a lithe instrument like Dionne Warwick's—a light voice without the dark corners or emotional depths that define Aretha. Also, Hal David's lyric was also somewhat girlish and lacked the gravitas that Aretha required. “Aretha usually listened to me in the studio, but not this time. She had written a vocal arrangement for the Sweet Inspirations that was undoubtedly strong. Cissy Houston, Dionne's cousin, told me that Aretha was on the right track—she was seeing this song in a new way and had come up with a new groove. Cissy was on Aretha's side. Tommy Dowd and Arif were on Aretha's side. So I had no choice but to cave." It's quite possible that Wexler's objections made Franklin more, rather than less, determined to record the song. She regarded Warwick as a hated rival, as she did almost every prominent female singer of her generation and younger ones, and would undoubtedly have taken the implication that there was something that Warwick was simply better at than her to heart. [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer"] Wexler realised as soon as he heard it in the studio that Franklin's version was great, and Bacharach agreed, telling Franklin's biographer David Ritz “As much as I like the original recording by Dionne, there's no doubt that Aretha's is a better record. She imbued the song with heavy soul and took it to a far deeper place. Hers is the definitive version.” -- which is surprising because Franklin's version simplifies some of Bacharach's more unusual chord voicings, something he often found extremely upsetting. Wexler still though thought there was no way the song would be a hit, and it's understandable that he thought that way. Not only had it only just been on the charts a few months earlier, but it was the kind of song that wouldn't normally be a hit at all, and certainly not in the kind of rhythmic soul music for which Franklin was known. Almost everything she ever recorded is in simple time signatures -- 4/4, waltz time, or 6/8 -- but this is a Bacharach song so it's staggeringly metrically irregular. Normally even with semi-complex things I'm usually good at figuring out how to break it down into bars, but here I actually had to purchase a copy of the sheet music in order to be sure I was right about what's going on. I'm going to count beats along with the record here so you can see what I mean. The verse has three bars of 4/4, one bar of 2/4, and three more bars of 4/4, all repeated: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer" with me counting bars over verse] While the chorus has a bar of 4/4, a bar of 3/4 but with a chord change half way through so it sounds like it's in two if you're paying attention to the harmonic changes, two bars of 4/4, another waltz-time bar sounding like it's in two, two bars of four, another bar of three sounding in two, a bar of four, then three more bars of four but the first of those is *written* as four but played as if it's in six-eight time (but you can keep the four/four pulse going if you're counting): [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer" with me counting bars over verse] I don't expect you to have necessarily followed that in great detail, but the point should be clear -- this was not some straightforward dance song. Incidentally, that bar played as if it's six/eight was something Aretha introduced to make the song even more irregular than how Bacharach wrote it. And on top of *that* of course the lyrics mixed the secular and the sacred, something that was still taboo in popular music at that time -- this is only a couple of years after Capitol records had been genuinely unsure about putting out the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows", and Franklin's gospel-inflected vocals made the religious connection even more obvious. But Franklin was insistent that the record go out as a single, and eventually it was released as the B-side to the far less impressive "The House That Jack Built". It became a double-sided hit, with the A-side making number two on the R&B chart and number seven on the Hot One Hundred, while "I Say a Little Prayer" made number three on the R&B chart and number ten overall. In the UK, "I Say a Little Prayer" made number four and became her biggest ever solo UK hit. It's now one of her most-remembered songs, while the A-side is largely forgotten: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Say a Little Prayer"] For much of the

SAN ONOFRE-Same time next year, lil ole yarnspinner you, John?! Hey Big O, What a definition of perilous dire straits this week has been. A fog! Sunday night I was hit with some sort of bug. I wasn’t sure if it was TB, polio, or leprosy. I was fit for an iron lung. I spent from Monday til Wednesday sliding into dream visions. And, my brother, they weren’t enlightening or visually stunning. No! These things were dull and uncomfortable. I dreamt my niece and her family were like the Joads from “The Grapes Of Wrath”. I had to push their jalopy up the San Bernardino Mountains. Nothing but broken inner tubes, metal wash basins, and feral chickens. The next dream was more depressing and went on for days. I was in a truly square conference room stuck at a cafeteria style folding table. The room was packed to the gills with evangelicals. All in polyester suits. Donald Trump was at a dias. He was bragging about himself. Then he started lecturing about his past lives through the eons. Dating back to ancient Egypt. I was feeling uncomfortable. I looked at my arm and noticed I was wearing an ugly brown suit. I finally pulled myself out of the sick bed to take care of business. I was walking like the undead and had an I.Q. of even less. I passed a large hillbilly woman that was smoking a cigarette who gave me the stink eye. She was wearing a t-shirt that read “If you’re going to be salty then bring the tequila “. If I had my 110% I would have talked about it when we talked; now follow me along here… Vincennes. It’s the center of the universe. The whole burg believes if a nuclear war was to happen it would be the first place to be bombed. Iggy Pop peeing in a drink and trying to serve it to a guy I used to work for. That is only the tip of the iceberg. Joe South and his importance to me right now and the writing of this latest TH album. Plus all of his songs are self help odes. And I know nothing about that! No album title yet. That’s how that one goes. Playing Deep Blues Festival in Clarksdale, Mississippi this fall and hitting Memphis and elsewhere way down in the south. And that’s all the news from this week. Joe Patt, the TH drummer, are headed to Madison, Wisconsin tomorrow to play a party for an Illuminati inspired beer brewery. Until then! JVF Prósimo chou del onofrimmo: 22 septiembre Alpha Strategy (Cz)

When people think of Joe South, they generally think first of Games People Play, one of the most successful protest-related songs of the late 1960s, with its distinctive electric sitar accompaniment, played by the singer and composer himself, and a bitingly prescient lyric directed at pseudo-hippy types who "while away the hours / In their ivory towers / Till they're covered up with flowers / In the back of a black limousine."South, who has died aged 72 of heart failure, won a Grammy for that million-seller and went on to write many other fine songs, including Walk a Mile in My Shoes, Down in the Boondocks, Hush and (I Never Promised You a) Rose Garden.A member, like Eddie Hinton, Dan Penn and Troy Seals, of a generation of US southern white boys who grew up listening to rhythm and blues, South was a fine guitarist who became a popular session man, performing on a series of important records, starting with Sheila, a hit in 1962 for Tommy Roe, a fellow native of Atlanta, Georgia. In 1966 he played bass guitar on much of Bob Dylan's album Blonde on Blonde, and the following year he created the shivering, menacing bottom-string guitar licks that opened and underpinned Aretha Franklin's classic Chain of Fools.It is South's playing that gives a clue to the spontaneity of the Blonde on Blonde sessions, which often lasted late into the night. The musicians were obliged to follow Dylan wherever his songs led, resulting in the occasional mistakes and missed changes – as when South fails to spot Dylan's chord shift in the second verse of Visions of Johanna, taking half a bar to adjust under the line about the nightwatchman clicking his flashlight.South was born Joseph Souter and was given a guitar by his father at the age of 11. He built a small radio station on which he played his own songs and had modified his name when, still in his teens, he had his first minor hit in 1958 with The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor, co-written with the Big Bopper (JP Richardson) to capitalise on current novelty hits. The following year Gene Vincent recorded two of his songs, I Might Have Known and Gone Gone Gone.He had made a successful career as a session musician in Muscle Shoals and Nashville when Games People Play brought him to international attention. Its title borrowed from a successful book on transactional analysis by the psychiatrist Eric Berne, the song took an unusual approach to the social tensions of the day, more oblique and unpredictable than other Dylan-influenced protest songs which topped the charts. But when it won a Grammy for best song of 1969, his problems began."The Grammy is a little like a crown," he told Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times. "After you win it, you feel like you have to defend it. In a sense, I froze. I found it hard to go back into the recording studio because I was afraid the next song wouldn't be perfect."None of South's subsequent records made the top 20, but Walk a Mile in My Shoes was recorded by Elvis Presley (and later by Bryan Ferry and Coldcut), Hush took the British progressive rock band Deep Purple into the top 5 in the US and Canada in 1968, and the lilting Rose Garden gave the country singer Lynn Anderson a worldwide hit in 1971. He also produced records by the singer Sandy Posey and the folk-rock duo Friend and Lover.

Singles Going Around- Rollin' and Tumblin'The Yardbirds- "Baby What's Wrong"Larry Williams- "Bony Moronie"The Clash- "Wrong Em Boyo"The Beatles- "Wait"Joe South- "Down In The Boondocks"Howlin Wolf- "You'll Be Mine"The Velvet Underground- "White Light/White Heat"The Rolling Stones- "Ain't Too Proud To Beg"The Ventures- "Pipeline"Huey "Piano" Smith- "Don't You Just Know It"Donovan- "Sunshine Superman"Pink Floyd- "San Tropez"Creedence Clearwater Revival- "I Put A Spell On You"The Stooges- "I Wanna Be Your Dog"Eric Clapton- When Things Go Wrong, It Hurts Me Too"*All selections from Lp's. 

Aquesta setmana el Males Vibracions és Missió Impossible II o també «El soul es una droga». Rubén et portarà temes majoritàriament dels seixanta, versions i no versions. Amb molt de sol, molt de soul, garage-rock prehistòric, psicodèlia del Perú i per concloure ens quedarem a la glòria. Tanquem paradeta fins passat l’estiu, encara que pot ser farem especial amb paelló i piscina.... Tot pot ser! Llistat: Chuck Berry – I Wanna Be Your Driver; Johnny Tedesco – Eres el demonio disfrazado; Bruno Lomas – Vendrás conmigo; Miguel Ríos – Antimusical; Los Kifers – El sol es una droga; Los Hitters – Delincuente; Los Tamara – Soy un juerguista de medianoche; Los Sirex – El tren de la costa; Los Monstruos – Hey Monstruo; Los Monjes – Problemas en la mente; Joe South – Hush; Los Rockin Devils – Halo que tal; Smog – Wicked Man; Els 5 Xics – Raising Your Hand; Los Buenos – Looking Back; The Brisks – Stone Free; Los Bohemios – Que chica tan formal; Los Impala – Dime (Show Me); Los Gatos Negros – Hey Hey Bunny; Los Rockin Devils – Gloria.

Singles Going Around- Mimosa Tree BluesThe Byrds- "It's No Use"Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs- "Little Red Riding Hood"Tony Joe White- "Whompt Out On You"The Monkees- "Daily Nightly"Joe South- "Hush"Elvis- "The Power of My Love"Simon & Garfunkel- "Fakin' It"Percy Sledge- "Take The Time To Know Her"Tommy McClain- "Before I Grow Too Old"The Animals- "Talking About You"Sonny & Cher- "I Look For You"Booker T & The MG's- "Sunny"The Beatles- "We Can Work It Out"Elmore James- "It Hurts Me Too"Bobby Charles- "Goodnight Irene"Lazy Lester- "Strange Things Happen"Neil Diamond- "Brother Love's Traveling Salvtion Show"Vanilla Fudge- "You Keep Me Hangin' On" (QT Edit)*All songs taken from the original Lp's and 45 rpm records.

A lot of people don't like to put themselves out there. However, in today's day in age creating content, being a guest on a podcast, and social networking is one of the best ways to be seen and get hired.Become a supporter and let out your inner Cyber Warrior with upcoming engagements and merch! Any support goes directly back into the production of the podcast and to provide our fellow warriors with meaningful connections and discussions.Bio Links:https://cyberwarriorstudios.bio.linkConnect with our guest(s):Joe SouthLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joseph-south/Twitter: https://twitter.com/SecUnfPodcastInstagram: https://instagram.com/secunfpodcastSupport the showMerch: https://cyberwarriorstudios.com/storeYoutube: https://youtube.cyberwarriorstudios.comTwitch: https://twitch.tv/CyberWarriorStudiosTwitter: @CyberWarriorSt1Discord: https://discord.gg/eCSRzM6mJf

OTR " Free and Easy " live radio rock show March the 16th 2023 , here's playlist épisode 143 , by Patryck Albert : ...intro .... Raging Teens , Nomads , Tony Valentino & the Standells , Joe South , Jittery Jack & Amy Griffin , Dominique Walter , Martin Savage & the Jiggers , Jackets , Greg Prevost , Clapham South Escalators , Mark Three , Shoutless , spot , Sinners , Members , Penetrators , Two Saints , MFC Chicken , Cynics , Grindhouse , Meatbeaters , Stooges , Subsonics , Tempo .... let's get high & down !

topics are " bad albums by good artists "....also Joe South....one hit wonders...trivia....Mark's album reveal....and more with Mark...Lou....& Perry --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/perry--dedovitch/message

"Rueben's Rondo" Oliver Nelson "Spaceman" Harry Nilsson "Down in the boondocks" Joe South "I was just a stupid dog to them" Nina Simone "Uptown babies don't cry" Max Romeo & The Upsetters "Wu Tang Clan ain't nuthing ta f' wit" El Michels Affair "California soul" Marlena Shaw "Tengu - a long-nosed goblin" Osamu Kitajima "Alfana" Attarazat Addahabia & Faradjallah "Louisiana man (demo)" Bobbie Gentry "Walk like a man" The Four Seasons "O homem da gravata florida" Jorge Ben "Jews caboose" Traffic Sound "El quinto de Beethoven" Frankie Dante Cerda & Markolino Dimond "Vivaldi" Curved Air "Jump into love" Etta James "September" Earth, Wind & Fire

De Amerikaanse singer-songwriter Joe South is Dood maar niet vergeten. Hij overleed op 5 september in 2012 aan een hartaanval. Joe South was 72 jaar oud. Joe South zag als Joseph Alfred Souter op 28…Continue Reading "Joe South (IM)"

Hey Joe, South Carolina needs a new name for its mascot. And does Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys know what he's doing and saying? And Rand sings about Chet Holmgren to Lizzo.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dad rock is back on the menu! We talk about the Billy Joe Royal song written by Joe South and made a hit by Deep Purple and others, "Hush".   Covers by: Deep Purple, Merrily Rush, Santo & Johnny, Milli Vanilli, Kula Shaker, Captain Jack, Bjorn Berge   Spotify playlist here

Label: Capitol 2248Year: 1969Condition: MPrice: $15.00From a warehouse find, this is a new, unplayed stock copy, in its original Capitol Records factory sleeve. On the B side of this classic hit is another reason why Joe South is so admired... here's a complex pop song that's part country, part soul, part psychedelic rock. Numerous tricky, interesting time changes and melodies make it a great find hidden on a B side. Note: This beautiful copy has no notable flaws, grading Mint across the board (Labels, Vinyl, Audio).

Dominic and Billy explore Journeys inspired by The Beatles, Joe South and Marcelle. They discuss the impact on small business owners in Victoria following the world's most draconian Covid lockdowns. If you're in financial difficulty seek help with an Independent Advisor.

Drawing back the curtain for a suitably Beltane Bazaar with Buffalo Springfield as our featured artist for tracks and associated acts plus a spotlight on Judy Henske, Beatniks and Blues! So tracks from Tubby Hayes, The Mynah Birds, Joe South, Tony Joe White, Little Walter, Terry Reid, Earl Bostic, Link Ray plus added Hylda Baker, a flying visit & some choice tracks from Station Master Al and a very happy birthday to Mr Potato Head! All good thing start with a B! Hope you enjoy PLAYLIST Come Josephine In My Flying Machine - 1920's Wurlitzer Carousel Orchestra Beltane Walk - T-Rex Four Birds - Galley Beggar Sit Down I Think I Love You - Buffalo Springfield It's My Time - The Mynah Birds Ohio / Machine Gun - The Isley Brothers John Finn's Wide (Live) - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Paint, It Black - The Animals For What It's Worth - The Staple Singers High Flying Birds - Judy Henske Less Of Me - Bobbie Gentry & Glen Campbell Snowblind - Judy Henske & Jerry Yester Go And Say Goodbye - Buffalo Springfield You Better Run - The N'Betweens Loving Time - Terry Reid Beatnik Boy - Tallulah Gosh Makin' Love - Hylda Baker Wide Awake - Parquet Courts In The Pines - Link Ray  Hold On - Sharon Tandy Elements & Things - Tony Joe White I'm Gonna Make Her Love Me - Jim Ford She Said - John Spencer Blues Explosion Juke - Little Walter Flying On the Ground Is Wrong - Buffalo Springfield Voodoo - Tubby Hayes Prodigal Son - The Rolling Stones Flamingo - Earl Bostic  Come Josephine In My Flying Machine (Reprise) - 1920's Wurlitzer Carousel Orchestra  

Ella Morgulis practices empathy and patience as a life coach and practitioner of “PQ - Positive Intelligence and Mental Fitness.” She recounts her path from her early childhood in Odesa Ukraine, followed by her moves to Russia and Moldova, and the religious, cultural and educational “bumps in the road” she navigated along the way. She emigrated to San Francisco with her young daughter in the mid 1990's to escape the bleak economy of that region. Ella's perspective: there are many ways to consciously increase the positivity in our lives, empathy and patience enables a deeper connection with others, and asking for help from mentors gives us acceleration. The 70's pop hit Walk a mile in my shoes by Joe South never rang truer. About Ella Morgulis www.linkedin.com/in/ellamorgulis https://www.lifeenlightened.net/ Resources mentioned: https://www.positiveintelligence.com/ Walk a mile in my shoes by Joe South https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=In4UDYxxqVU

Music & Memories (Mar 69) Radio Northsea International (online Sat 7pm UK time) music from: Elvis Presley, Bee Gees, Cilla Black, Marvin Gaye, Love Affair, Sam & Dave, Joe South, Peter Sarstedt, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich, Cliff Richard, Temptations and more......

Uur 1 1.         A change of scenery – Ethel Ennis 2.         Vijf uur – Ramses Shaffy 3.         Vesoul – Pomplamoose 4.         Haven't got time for the pain – Carly Simon 5.         Garden of remembrance – Fish 6.         Wie sjoen us Limburg is – Benny Neyman 7.         Solidao – Amalia Rodrigues 8.         Prodigal daughter – Aoife O'Donovan 9.         The secret life of plants – Stevie Wonder 10.       Happier than the morning sun – Venice 11.       Zundag – Normaal 12.       Ich hab' noch einen Koffer in Berlin – Hildegard Knef 13.       Your heart is as black as night – Melody Gardot 14.       What is success – Bonnie Raitt   Uur 2 1.         Oh very young – Cat Stevens 2.         De vogels – Jules de Corte 3.         Boire un coup – Baptiste W. Hamon 4.         Calling you – Jevetta Steele 5.         Angst is maar voor even – Kommil Foo 6.         I bought myself a politician – MonaLisa Twins 7.         Stop this train – John Mayer 8.         Pra falar bem a verdade – Lilian Vieira 9.         Making love – Roberta Flack 10.       Marriage French style – Burt Bacharach 11.       Feel the love – Sue Moreno 12.       On verra ca – Orchestra Baobab 13.       Walk a mile in my shoes – Joe South

Buscamos la versión original de Rose Garden, en grabaciones anteriores a la de Lynn Anderson.A mediados de los 80, tres chavales ensayan en un piso de san Sebastián, en casa del padre de uno de ellos. Mientras el trío practica, el padre acostumbra a escuchar frecuentemente un disco de Lynn Anderson, de manera constante. Tanto es así, que los jóvenes músicos se rinden a una de las canciones que escuchaban en aquella casa. Se trata de Rose Garden, compuesta por Joe South. Se ponen manos a la obra y finalmente llegan a la canción llamada "Jardín de Rosas", que lleva la misma melodía, aunque la letra es completamente distinta. Ese tema se incluye en un álbum llamado "Canciones", publicado en 1986 que se convierte en uno de los pilares del éxito del grupo. Esos tres jóvenes son, Mikel Erentxun, Diego Vasallo y Juanra Viles, DUNCAN DHU.Pero esta canción, además de la versión de los donostiarras en 1986 y la de Lynn Anderson en 1970, que es la más popular a nivel internacional, ha tenido muchas más versiones, incluso anteriores. Unos pocos meses antes de la publicación de Lynn Anderson, el grupo vocal femenino de Philadelphia, The Three Degrees había lanzado su versión. Un año antes, lo hizo la banda de rock The Brotherhood. Antes...

Buscamos la versión original de Rose Garden, en grabaciones anteriores a la de Lynn Anderson.A mediados de los 80, tres chavales ensayan en un piso de san Sebastián, en casa del padre de uno de ellos. Mientras el trío practica, el padre acostumbra a escuchar frecuentemente un disco de Lynn Anderson, de manera constante. Tanto es así, que los jóvenes músicos se rinden a una de las canciones que escuchaban en aquella casa. Se trata de Rose Garden, compuesta por Joe South. Se ponen manos a la obra y finalmente llegan a la canción llamada "Jardín de Rosas", que lleva la misma melodía, aunque la letra es completamente distinta. Ese tema se incluye en un álbum llamado "Canciones", publicado en 1986 que se convierte en uno de los pilares del éxito del grupo. Esos tres jóvenes son, Mikel Erentxun, Diego Vasallo y Juanra Viles, DUNCAN DHU.Pero esta canción, además de la versión de los donostiarras en 1986 y la de Lynn Anderson en 1970, que es la más popular a nivel internacional, ha tenido muchas más versiones, incluso anteriores. Unos pocos meses antes de la publicación de Lynn Anderson, el grupo vocal femenino de Philadelphia, The Three Degrees había lanzado su versión. Un año antes, lo hizo la banda de rock The Brotherhood. Antes...

Here's a question for you. Will the person who you think is your fan, actually like your music. Are they willing to put the time and effort into becoming a fan of your career? How devoted and passionate of a fan are they? How do you go about getting them engaged in your career? How do you go about creating new fans, who will also become devoted followers. Just as you nurture prospects in the real world, you also have to nurture those prospects in the online world. You're in the fan building business. You have to get them from fan, to occasional fan, to good fan, to super fan. Mike Stewart, who is the President and Found of Stewart Internet Solutions, chats with us regarding what it takes to reach those people, and turn them from suspects, into Super Fans. I takes marketing. Marketing is not evil. Marketing is necessary. You need to use such devices as Kindle, Amazon, and YouTube in the proper way, and learn how to leverage these platforms to your benefit. Part of this is understanding that platforms such as YouTube are a traffic generation process. It's not an income producing process. It markets whatever you're selling. Mike is president and founder of Stewart Internet Solutions Inc., a internet consulting agency and services company located in the Nashville, TN, USA. Mike has composed countless radio jingles, television scores, and produced or performed on music heard all over the world. He has worked with world famous musicians such as Tommy Roe, Joe South, William Bell (Georgia Hall of Fame Recipient and 2017 Grammy Winner), Buckner Garcia, Atlanta Rhythm Section, Billy Joe Royal, Alicia Bridges, Isaac Hayes, Eddie Floyd, Bertie Higgins, Doug Johnson, and Bill Anderson.  He has gold record for playing keys on 80's hit, Pac Man Fever as a band member of Buckner and Garcia and recorded the theme to Disney's Oscar nominated movie, “Wreck It Ralph” in 2012 The list goes on and on of national performers who's who. He owned and operated a recording studio for over twenty years working in all facets of digital audio and video. In 1996, Mike became passionate about the future of the Internet and how small businesses could benefit from the web if they just understood how to make it work for their company. He saw how the broadcast of audio and video information on a website was no different than the television/radio industry he had been a part of all his life. Since that time, he has become very successful consulting with small business owners on how to set up their worldwide TV stations and broadcast their unique marketing message to the world. Stewart Internet Solutions focused on Internet technologies that allowed audio and video to be streamed over the Internet. We developed distance training web sites, e-commerce projects, and audio/video intensive web projects utilizing HTML 5 responsive web programming. He didn't stop there, but was constantly striving to be on the cutting edge of technology always searching for better more efficient ways of achieving his goals. After listening to a set of audiotapes in 2000, he attended his first Internet Marketing Seminar. Initially Mike was a student himself. Soon he was hired to record seminars, events and webinars. Through techniques he learned from the seminar speakers and promoters he was able to create his own software products that made the process easier. While he had spoken to many groups, associations, and business organizations throughout the years, his first Internet Marketing Seminar speaking engagement was in 2003. Since then he has attended and spoken at many events worldwide. Mike teaches attendees the benefits of owning the right equipment and utilizing it to record themselves to make quality multi-media audio and video information products that can be marketed for high profits. He is always on the look out for new innovative ideas, products, hardware and software to benefit his clients. His hands-on customer service approach outshines most and he creates in-depth audio and video tutorials to enhance the products he sells. These tutorials are now available in over 20 subscription websites linked from this site. More training sites are being created and update on an ongoing basis. Mike and his wife,  Susan who works and travels with him on his speaking engagements, now enjoying working with the music industry professionals in Nashville and back to his passion of song writing and music production. They have 3 children involved in several aspects of the business. www.musicbizinternet.com www.tubemusicpromotions.com www.mikestewartlive.com www.boxtops.com The Business Side of Music ™ Lotta Dogs Productions LLC   Co-Produced and Hosted (by the guy who has a face for podcasting):  Bob Bender Co-Producer, Creator, and Technical Advisor (the man behind the curtain):  Tom Sabella Director of Video and Continuity (the brains of the entire operation): Deborah Halle Audio/Video Editor Mark Sabella Midnight Express Studio  Olian, NY Marketing and Social Media: Kaitlin Fritts Executive Assistant to Bob and Tom (the one who keeps us on track and our schedules straight) Tammy Kowalski All Around Problem Solver: Connie Ribas Recorded at: The Bunker in Franklin, TN (except during the Covid 19 pandemic, then it's pretty much done VIA Skype or over the phone, with the exception for those fearless enough to come to Bob Bender's living room… and there are a few). Mixed and Mastered at Music Dog Studios in Nashville, TN Production Sound Design: Keith Stark Voice Over and Promo: Lisa Fuson Special Thanks to Tom Sabella and Traci Snow for producing and hosting over 100 episodes of the original “Business Side of Music” podcast, and trusting us to carry on their legacy.   Website: Sponsorship information  Interview submission    

Episode one hundred and thirty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Sound of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel, and the many records they made, together and apart, before their success. 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 "Blues Run the Game" by Jackson C. Frank. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I talk about a tour of Lancashire towns, but some of the towns I mention were in Cheshire at the time, and some are in Greater Manchester or Merseyside now. They're all very close together though. I say Mose Rager was Black. I was misremembering, confusing Mose Rager, a white player in the Muhlenberg style, with Arnold Schultz, a Black player who invented it. I got this right in the episode on "Bye Bye Love". Also, I couldn't track down a copy of the Paul Kane single version of “He Was My Brother” in decent quality, so I used the version on The Paul Simon Songbook instead, as they're basically identical performances. Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud playlist of the music excerpted here. This compilation collects all Simon and Garfunkel's studio albums, with bonus tracks, plus a DVD of their reunion concert. There are many collections of the pre-S&G recordings by the two, as these are now largely in the public domain. This one contains a good selection. I've referred to several books for this episode: Simon and Garfunkel: Together Alone by Spencer Leigh is a breezy, well-researched, biography of the duo. Paul Simon: The Life by Robert Hilburn is the closest thing there is to an authorised biography of Simon. And What is it All But Luminous? is Art Garfunkel's memoir. It's not particularly detailed, being more a collection of thoughts and poetry than a structured narrative, but gives a good idea of Garfunkel's attitude to people and events in his life. Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World by Billy Bragg has some great information on the British folk scene of the fifties and sixties. And Singing From the Floor is an oral history of British folk clubs, including a chapter on Dylan's 1962 visit to London. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, we're going to take a look at a hit record that almost never happened -- a record by a duo who had already split up, twice, by the time it became a hit, and who didn't know it was going to come out. We're going to look at how a duo who started off as an Everly Brothers knockoff, before becoming unsuccessful Greenwich Village folkies, were turned into one of the biggest acts of the sixties by their producer. We're going to look at Simon and Garfunkel, and at "The Sound of Silence": [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sound of Silence"] The story of Simon and Garfunkel starts with two children in a school play.  Neither Paul Simon or Art Garfunkel had many friends when they met in a school performance of Alice in Wonderland, where Simon was playing the White Rabbit and Garfunkel the Cheshire Cat. Simon was well-enough liked, by all accounts, but he'd been put on an accelerated programme for gifted students which meant he was progressing through school faster than his peers. He had a small social group, mostly based around playing baseball, but wasn't one of the popular kids. Art Garfunkel, another gifted student, had no friends at all until he got to know Simon, who he described later as his "one and only friend" in this time period. One passage in Garfunkel's autobiography seems to me to sum up everything about Garfunkel's personality as a child -- and indeed a large part of his personality as it comes across in interviews to this day. He talks about the pleasure he got from listening to the chart rundown on the radio -- "It was the numbers that got me. I kept meticulous lists—when a new singer like Tony Bennett came onto the charts with “Rags to Riches,” I watched the record jump from, say, #23 to #14 in a week. The mathematics of the jumps went to my sense of fun." Garfunkel is, to this day, a meticulous person -- on his website he has a list of every book he's read since June 1968, which is currently up to one thousand three hundred and ten books, and he has always had a habit of starting elaborate projects and ticking off every aspect of them as he goes. Both Simon and Garfunkel were outsiders at this point, other than their interests in sport, but Garfunkel was by far the more introverted of the two, and as a result he seems to have needed their friendship more than Simon did. But the two boys developed an intense, close, friendship, initially based around their shared sense of humour. Both of them were avid readers of Mad magazine, which had just started publishing when the two of them had met up, and both could make each other laugh easily. But they soon developed a new interest, when Martin Block on the middle-of-the-road radio show Make Believe Ballroom announced that he was going to play the worst record he'd ever heard. That record was "Gee" by the Crows: [Excerpt: The Crows, "Gee"] Paul Simon later said that that record was the first thing he'd ever heard on that programme that he liked, and soon he and Garfunkel had become regular listeners to Alan Freed's show on WINS, loving the new rock and roll music they were discovering. Art had already been singing in public from an early age -- his first public performance had been singing Nat "King" Cole's hit "Too Young" in a school talent contest when he was nine -- but the two started singing together. The first performance by Simon and Garfunkel was at a high school dance and, depending on which source you read, was a performance either of "Sh'Boom" or of Big Joe Turner's "Flip, Flop, and Fly": [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, "Flip, Flop, and Fly"] The duo also wrote at least one song together as early as 1955 -- or at least Garfunkel says they wrote it together. Paul Simon describes it as one he wrote. They tried to get a record deal with the song, but it was never recorded at the time -- but Simon has later performed it: [Excerpt: Paul Simon, "The Girl For Me"] Even at this point, though, while Art Garfunkel was putting all his emotional energy into the partnership with Simon, Simon was interested in performing with other people. Al Kooper was another friend of Simon's at the time, and apparently Simon and Kooper would also perform together. Once Elvis came on to Paul's radar, he also bought a guitar, but it was when the two of them first heard the Everly Brothers that they realised what it was that they could do together. Simon fell in love with the Everly Brothers as soon as he heard "Bye Bye Love": [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Bye Bye Love"] Up to this point, Paul hadn't bought many records -- he spent his money on baseball cards and comic books, and records just weren't good value. A pack of baseball cards was five cents, a comic book was ten cents, but a record was a dollar. Why buy records when you could hear music on the radio for free? But he needed that record, he couldn't just wait around to hear it on the radio. He made an hour-long two-bus journey to a record shop in Queens, bought the record, took it home, played it... and almost immediately scratched it. So he got back on the bus, travelled for another hour, bought another copy, took it home, and made sure he didn't scratch that one. Simon and Garfunkel started copying the Everlys' harmonies, and would spend hours together, singing close together watching each other's mouths and copying the way they formed words, eventually managing to achieve a vocal blend through sheer effort which would normally only come from familial closeness. Paul became so obsessed with music that he sold his baseball card collection and bought a tape recorder for two hundred dollars. They would record themselves singing, and then sing back along with it, multitracking themselves, but also critiquing the tape, refining their performances. Paul's father was a bass player -- "the family bassman", as he would later sing -- and encouraged his son in his music, even as he couldn't see the appeal in this new rock and roll music. He would critique Paul's songs, saying things like "you went from four-four to a bar of nine-eight, you can't do that" -- to which his son would say "I just did" -- but this wasn't hostile criticism, rather it was giving his son a basic grounding in song construction which would prove invaluable. But the duo's first notable original song -- and first hit -- came about more or less by accident. In early 1956, the doo-wop group the Clovers had released the hit single "Devil or Angel". Its B-side had a version of "Hey Doll Baby", a song written by the blues singer Titus Turner, and which sounds to me very inspired by Hank Williams' "Hey, Good Lookin'": [Excerpt: The Clovers, "Hey, Doll Baby"] That song was picked up by the Everly Brothers, who recorded it for their first album: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Hey Doll Baby"] Here is where the timeline gets a little confused for me, because that album wasn't released until early 1958, although the recording session for that track was in August 1957. Yet that track definitely influenced Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel to record a song that they released in November 1957. All I can imagine is that they heard the brothers perform it live, or maybe a radio station had an acetate copy. Because the way everyone has consistently told the story is that at the end of summer 1957, Simon and Garfunkel had both heard the Everly Brothers perform "Hey Doll Baby", but couldn't remember how it went. The two of them tried to remember it, and to work a version of it out together, and their hazy memories combined to reconstruct something that was completely different, and which owed at least as much to "Wake Up Little Suzie" as to "Hey Doll Baby". Their new song, "Hey Schoolgirl", was catchy enough that they thought if they recorded a demo of it, maybe the Everly Brothers themselves would record the song. At the demo studio they happened to encounter Sid Prosen, who owned a small record label named Big Records. He heard the duo perform and realised he might have his own Everly Brothers here. He signed the duo to a contract, and they went into a professional studio to rerecord "Hey Schoolgirl", this time with Paul's father on bass, and a couple of other musicians to fill out the sound: [Excerpt: Tom and Jerry, "Hey Schoolgirl"] Of course, the record couldn't be released under their real names -- there was no way anyone was going to buy a record by Simon and Garfunkel. So instead they became Tom and Jerry. Paul Simon was Jerry Landis -- a surname he chose because he had a crush on a girl named Sue Landis. Art became Tom Graff, because he liked drawing graphs. "Hey Schoolgirl" became a local hit. The two were thrilled to hear it played on Alan Freed's show (after Sid Prosen gave Freed two hundred dollars), and were even more thrilled when they got to perform on American Bandstand, on the same show as Jerry Lee Lewis. When Dick Clark asked them where they were from, Simon decided to claim he was from Macon, Georgia, where Little Richard came from, because all his favourite rock and roll singers were from the South. "Hey Schoolgirl" only made number forty-nine nationally, because the label didn't have good national distribution, but it sold over a hundred thousand copies, mostly in the New York area. And Sid Prosen seems to have been one of a very small number of independent label owners who wasn't a crook -- the two boys got about two thousand dollars each from their hit record. But while Tom and Jerry seemed like they might have a successful career, Simon and Garfunkel were soon to split up, and the reason for their split was named True Taylor. Paul had been playing some of his songs for Sid Prosen, to see what the duo's next single should be, and Prosen had noticed that while some of them were Everly Brothers soundalikes, others were Elvis soundalikes. Would Paul be interested in recording some of those, too? Obviously Art couldn't sing on those, so they'd use a different name, True Taylor. The single was released around the same time as the second Tom and Jerry record, and featured an Elvis-style ballad by Paul on one side, and a rockabilly song written by his father on the other: [Excerpt: True Taylor, "True or False"] But Paul hadn't discussed that record with Art before doing it, and the two had vastly different ideas about their relationship. Paul was Art's only friend, and Art thought they had an indissoluble bond and that they would always work together. Paul, on the other hand, thought of Art as one of his friends and someone he made music with, but he could play at being Elvis if he wanted, as well as playing at being an Everly brother. Garfunkel, in his memoir published in 2017, says "the friendship was shattered for life" -- he decided then and there that Paul Simon was a "base" person, a betrayer. But on the other hand, he still refers to Simon, over and over again, in that book as still being his friend, even as Simon has largely been disdainful of him since their last performance together in 2010. Friendships are complicated. Tom and Jerry struggled on for a couple more singles, which weren't as successful as "Hey Schoolgirl" had been, with material like "Two Teenagers", written by Rose Marie McCoy: [Excerpt: Tom and Jerry, "Two Teenagers"] But as they'd stopped being friends, and they weren't selling records, they drifted apart and didn't really speak for five years, though they would occasionally run into one another. They both went off to university, and Garfunkel basically gave up on the idea of having a career in music, though he did record a couple of singles, under the name "Artie Garr": [Excerpt: Artie Garr, "Beat Love"] But for the most part, Garfunkel concentrated on his studies, planning to become either an architect or maybe an academic. Paul Simon, on the other hand, while he was technically studying at university too, was only paying minimal attention to his studies. Instead, he was learning the music business. Every afternoon, after university had finished, he'd go around the Brill Building and its neighbouring buildings, offering his services both as a songwriter and as a demo performer. As Simon was competent on guitar, bass, and drums, could sing harmonies, and could play a bit of piano if it was in the key of C, he could use primitive multitracking to play and sing all the parts on a demo, and do it well: [Excerpt: Paul Simon, "Boys Were Made For Girls"] That's an excerpt from a demo Simon recorded for Burt Bacharach, who has said that he tried to get Simon to record as many of his demos as possible, though only a couple of them have surfaced publicly. Simon would also sometimes record demos with his friend Carole Klein, sometimes under the name The Cosines: [Excerpt: The Cosines, "Just to Be With You"] As we heard back in the episode on "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?", Carole Klein went on to change her name to Carole King, and become one of the most successful songwriters of the era -- something which spurred Paul Simon on, as he wanted to emulate her success. Simon tried to get signed up by Don Kirshner, who was publishing Goffin and King, but Kirshner turned Simon down -- an expensive mistake for Kirshner, but one that would end up benefiting Simon, who eventually figured out that he should own his own publishing. Simon was also getting occasional work as a session player, and played lead guitar on "The Shape I'm In" by Johnny Restivo, which made the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred: [Excerpt: Johnny Restivo, "The Shape I'm In"] Between 1959 and 1963 Simon recorded a whole string of unsuccessful pop singles. including as a member of the Mystics: [Excerpt: The Mystics, "All Through the Night"] He even had a couple of very minor chart hits -- he got to number 99 as Tico and the Triumphs: [Excerpt: Tico and the Triumphs, "Motorcycle"] and number ninety-seven as Jerry Landis: [Excerpt: Jerry Landis, "The Lone Teen Ranger"] But he was jumping around, hopping onto every fad as it passed, and not getting anywhere. And then he started to believe that he could do something more interesting in music. He first became aware that the boundaries of what could be done in music extended further than "ooh-bop-a-loochy-ba" when he took a class on modern music at university, which included a trip to Carnegie Hall to hear a performance of music by the avant-garde composer Edgard Varese: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] Simon got to meet Varese after the performance, and while he would take his own music in a very different, and much more commercial, direction than Varese's, he was nonetheless influenced by what Varese's music showed about the possibilities that existed in music. The other big influence on Simon at this time was when he heard The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Girl From the North Country"] Simon immediately decided to reinvent himself as a folkie, despite at this point knowing very little about folk music other than the Everly Brothers' Songs Our Daddy Taught Us album. He tried playing around Greenwich Village, but found it an uncongenial atmosphere, and inspired by the liner notes to the Dylan album, which talked about Dylan's time in England, he made what would be the first of several trips to the UK, where he was given a rapturous reception simply on the grounds of being an American and owning a better acoustic guitar -- a Martin -- than most British people owned. He had the showmanship that he'd learned from watching his father on stage and sometimes playing with him, and from his time in Tom and Jerry and working round the studios, and so he was able to impress the British folk-club audiences, who were used to rather earnest, scholarly, people, not to someone like Simon who was clearly ambitious and very showbiz. His repertoire at this point consisted mostly of songs from the first two Dylan albums, a Joan Baez record, Little Willie John's "Fever", and one song he'd written himself, an attempt at a protest song called "He Was My Brother", which he would release on his return to the US under yet another stage name, Paul Kane: [Excerpt: Paul Kane, "He Was My Brother"] Simon has always stated that that song was written about a friend of his who was murdered when he went down to Mississippi with the Freedom Riders -- but while Simon's friend was indeed murdered, it wasn't until about a year after he wrote the song, and Simon has confused the timelines in his subsequent recollections. At the time he recorded that, when he had returned to New York at the end of the summer, Simon had a job as a song plugger for a publishing company, and he gave the publishing company the rights to that song and its B-side, which led to that B-side getting promoted by the publisher, and ending up covered on one of the biggest British albums of 1964, which went to number two in the UK charts: [Excerpt: Val Doonican, "Carlos Dominguez"] Oddly, that may not end up being the only time we feature a Val Doonican track on this podcast. Simon continued his attempts to be a folkie, even teaming up again with Art Garfunkel, with whom he'd re-established contact, to perform in Greenwich Village as Kane and Garr, but they went down no better as a duo than Simon had as a solo artist. Simon went back to the UK again over Christmas 1963, and while he was there he continued work on a song that would become such a touchstone for him that of the first six albums he would be involved in, four would feature the song while a fifth would include a snippet of it. "The Sound of Silence" was apparently started in November 1963, but not finished until February 1964, by which time he was once again back in the USA, and back working as a song plugger. It was while working as a song plugger that Simon first met Tom Wilson, Bob Dylan's producer at Columbia. Simon met up with Wilson trying to persuade him to use some of the songs that the publishing company were putting out. When Wilson wasn't interested, Simon played him a couple of his own songs. Wilson took one of them, "He Was My Brother", for the Pilgrims, a group he was producing who were supposed to be the Black answer to Peter, Paul, and Mary: [Excerpt: The Pilgrims, "He Was My Brother"] Wilson was also interested in "The Sound of Silence", but Simon was more interested in getting signed as a performer than in having other acts perform his songs. Wilson was cautious, though -- he was already producing one folkie singer-songwriter, and he didn't really need a second one. But he *could* probably do with a vocal group... Simon mentioned that he had actually made a couple of records before, as part of a duo. Would Wilson be at all interested in a vocal *duo*? Wilson would be interested. Simon and Garfunkel auditioned for him, and a few days later were in the Columbia Records studio on Seventh Avenue recording their first album as a duo, which was also the first time either of them would record under their own name. Wednesday Morning, 3AM, the duo's first album, was a simple acoustic album, and the only instrumentation was Simon and Barry Kornfeld, a Greenwich Village folkie, on guitars, and Bill Lee, the double bass player who'd played with Dylan and others, on bass. Tom Wilson guided the duo in their song selection, and the eventual album contained six cover versions and six originals written by Simon. The cover versions were a mixture of hootenanny staples like "Go Tell it on the Mountain", plus Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'", included to cross-promote Dylan's new album and to try to link the duo with the more famous writer, and one unusual one, "The Sun is Burning", written by Ian Campbell, a Scottish folk singer who Simon had got to know on his trips to the UK: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sun is Burning"] But the song that everyone was keenest on was "The Sound of Silence", the first song that Simon had written that he thought would stand up in comparison with the sort of song that Dylan was writing: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sound of Silence (Wednesday Morning 3AM version)"] In between sessions for the album, Simon and Garfunkel also played a high-profile gig at Gerde's Folk City in the Village, and a couple of shows at the Gaslight Cafe. The audiences there, though, regarded them as a complete joke -- Dave Van Ronk would later relate that for weeks afterwards, all anyone had to do was sing "Hello darkness, my old friend", for everyone around to break into laughter. Bob Dylan was one of those who laughed at the performance -- though Robert Shelton later said that Dylan hadn't been laughing at them, specifically, he'd just had a fit of the giggles -- and this had led to a certain amount of anger from Simon towards Dylan. The album was recorded in March 1964, and was scheduled for release  in October. In the meantime, they both made plans to continue with their studies and their travels. Garfunkel was starting to do postgraduate work towards his doctorate in mathematics, while Simon was now enrolled in Brooklyn Law School, but was still spending most of his time travelling, and would drop out after one semester. He would spend much of the next eighteen months in the UK. While he was occasionally in the US between June 1964 and November 1965, Simon now considered himself based in England, where he made several acquaintances that would affect his life deeply. Among them were a young woman called Kathy Chitty, with whom he would fall in love and who would inspire many of his songs, and an older woman called Judith Piepe (and I apologise if I'm mispronouncing her name, which I've only ever seen written down, never heard) who many people believed had an unrequited crush on Simon. Piepe ran her London flat as something of a commune for folk musicians, and Simon lived there for months at a time while in the UK. Among the other musicians who stayed there for a time were Sandy Denny, Cat Stevens, and Al Stewart, whose bedroom was next door to Simon's. Piepe became Simon's de facto unpaid manager and publicist, and started promoting him around the British folk scene. Simon also at this point became particularly interested in improving his guitar playing. He was spending a lot of time at Les Cousins, the London club that had become the centre of British acoustic guitar. There are, roughly, three styles of acoustic folk guitar -- to be clear, I'm talking about very broad-brush categorisations here, and there are people who would disagree and say there are more, but these are the main ones. Two of these are American styles -- there's the simple style known as Carter scratching, popularised by Mother Maybelle Carter of the Carter family, and for this all you do is alternate bass notes with your thumb while scratching the chord on the treble strings with one finger, like this: [Excerpt: Carter picking] That's the style played by a lot of country and folk players who were primarily singers accompanying themselves. In the late forties and fifties, though, another style had become popularised -- Travis picking. This is named after Merle Travis, the most well-known player in the style, but he always called it Muhlenberg picking, after Muhlenberg County, where he'd learned the style from Ike Everly -- the Everly Brothers' father -- and Mose Rager, a Black guitarist. In Travis picking, the thumb alternates between two bass notes, but rather than strumming a chord, the index and middle fingers play simple patterns on the treble strings, like this: [Excerpt: Travis picking] That's, again, a style primarily used for accompaniment, but it can also be used to play instrumentals by oneself. As well as Travis and Ike Everly, it's also the style played by Donovan, Chet Atkins, James Taylor, and more. But there's a third style, British baroque folk guitar, which was largely the invention of Davey Graham. Graham, you might remember, was a folk guitarist who had lived in the same squat as Lionel Bart when Bart started working with Tommy Steele, and who had formed a blues duo with Alexis Korner. Graham is now best known for one of his simpler pieces, “Anji”, which became the song that every British guitarist tried to learn: [Excerpt: Davey Graham, "Anji"] Dozens of people, including Paul Simon, would record versions of that. Graham invented an entirely new style of guitar playing, influenced by ragtime players like Blind Blake, but also by Bach, by Moroccan oud music, and by Celtic bagpipe music. While it was fairly common for players to retune their guitar to an open major chord, allowing them to play slide guitar, Graham retuned his to a suspended fourth chord -- D-A-D-G-A-D -- which allowed him to keep a drone going on some strings while playing complex modal counterpoints on others. While I demonstrated the previous two styles myself, I'm nowhere near a good enough guitarist to demonstrate British folk baroque, so here's an excerpt of Davey Graham playing his own arrangement of the traditional ballad "She Moved Through the Fair", recast as a raga and retitled "She Moved Thru' the Bizarre": [Excerpt: Davey Graham, "She Moved Thru' the Bizarre"] Graham's style was hugely influential on an entire generation of British guitarists, people who incorporated world music and jazz influences into folk and blues styles, and that generation of guitarists was coming up at the time and playing at Les Cousins. People who started playing in this style included Jimmy Page, Bert Jansch, Roy Harper, John Renbourn, Richard Thompson, Nick Drake, and John Martyn, and it also had a substantial influence on North American players like Joni Mitchell, Tim Buckley, and of course Paul Simon. Simon was especially influenced at this time by Martin Carthy, the young British guitarist whose style was very influenced by Graham -- but while Graham applied his style to music ranging from Dave Brubeck to Lutheran hymns to Big Bill Broonzy songs, Carthy mostly concentrated on traditional English folk songs. Carthy had a habit of taking American folk singers under his wing, and he taught Simon several songs, including Carthy's own arrangement of the traditional "Scarborough Fair": [Excerpt: Martin Carthy, "Scarborough Fair"] Simon would later record that arrangement, without crediting Carthy, and this would lead to several decades of bad blood between them, though Carthy forgave him in the 1990s, and the two performed the song together at least once after that. Indeed, Simon seems to have made a distinctly negative impression on quite a few of the musicians he knew in Britain at this time, who seem to, at least in retrospect, regard him as having rather used and discarded them as soon as his career became successful. Roy Harper has talked in liner notes to CD reissues of his work from this period about how Simon used to regularly be a guest in his home, and how he has memories of Simon playing with Harper's baby son Nick (now himself one of the greats of British guitar) but how as soon as he became successful he never spoke to Harper again. Similarly, in 1965 Simon started a writing partnership with Bruce Woodley of the Seekers, an Australian folk-pop band based in the UK, best known for "Georgy Girl". The two wrote "Red Rubber Ball", which became a hit for the Cyrkle: [Excerpt: The Cyrke, "Red Rubber Ball"] and also "Cloudy", which the Seekers recorded as an album track: [Excerpt: The Seekers, "Cloudy"] When that was recorded by Simon and Garfunkel, Woodley's name was removed from the writing credits, though Woodley still apparently received royalties for it. But at this point there *was* no Simon and Garfunkel. Paul Simon was a solo artist working the folk clubs in Britain, and Simon and Garfunkel's one album had sold a minuscule number of copies. They did, when Simon briefly returned to the US in March, record two tracks for a prospective single, this time with an electric backing band. One was a rewrite of the title track of their first album, now titled "Somewhere They Can't Find Me" and with a new chorus and some guitar parts nicked from Davey Graham's "Anji"; the other a Twist-beat song that could almost be Manfred Mann or Georgie Fame -- "We Got a Groovy Thing Goin'". That was also influenced by “Anji”, though by Bert Jansch's version rather than Graham's original. Jansch rearranged the song and stuck in this phrase: [Excerpt: Bert Jansch, “Anji”] Which became the chorus to “We Got a Groovy Thing Goin'”: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "We Got a Groovy Thing Goin'"] But that single was never released, and as far as Columbia were concerned, Simon and Garfunkel were a defunct act, especially as Tom Wilson, who had signed them, was looking to move away from Columbia. Art Garfunkel did come to visit Simon in the UK a couple of times, and they'd even sing together occasionally, but it was on the basis of Paul Simon the successful club act occasionally inviting his friend on stage during the encore, rather than as a duo, and Garfunkel was still seeing music only as a sideline while Simon was now utterly committed to it. He was encouraged in this commitment by Judith Piepe, who considered him to be the greatest songwriter of his generation, and who started a letter-writing campaign to that effect, telling the BBC they needed to put him on the radio. Eventually, after a lot of pressure, they agreed -- though they weren't exactly sure what to do with him, as he didn't fit into any of the pop formats they had. He was given his own radio show -- a five-minute show in a religious programming slot. Simon would perform a song, and there would be an introduction tying the song into some religious theme or other. Two series of four episodes of this were broadcast, in a plum slot right after Housewives' Choice, which got twenty million listeners, and the BBC were amazed to find that a lot of people phoned in asking where they could get hold of the records by this Paul Simon fellow. Obviously he didn't have any out yet, and even the Simon and Garfunkel album, which had been released in the US, hadn't come out in Britain. After a little bit of negotiation, CBS, the British arm of Columbia Records, had Simon come in and record an album of his songs, titled The Paul Simon Songbook. The album, unlike the Simon and Garfunkel album, was made up entirely of Paul Simon originals. Two of them were songs that had previously been recorded for Wednesday Morning 3AM -- "He Was My Brother" and a new version of "The Sound of Silence": [Excerpt: Paul Simon, "The Sound of Silence"] The other ten songs were newly-written pieces like "April Come She Will", "Kathy's Song", a parody of Bob Dylan entitled "A Simple Desultory Philippic", and the song that was chosen as the single, "I am a Rock": [Excerpt: Paul Simon, "I am a Rock"] That song was also the one that was chosen for Simon's first TV appearance since Tom and Jerry had appeared on Bandstand eight years earlier. The appearance on Ready, Steady, Go, though, was not one that anyone was happy with. Simon had been booked to appear on  a small folk music series, Heartsong, but that series was cancelled before he could appear. Rediffusion, the company that made the series, also made Ready, Steady, Go, and since they'd already paid Simon they decided they might as well stick him on that show and get something for their money. Unfortunately, the episode in question was already running long, and it wasn't really suited for introspective singer-songwriter performances -- the show was geared to guitar bands and American soul singers. Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the director, insisted that if Simon was going to do his song, he had to cut at least one verse, while Simon was insistent that he needed to perform the whole thing because "it's a story". Lindsay-Hogg got his way, but nobody was happy with the performance. Simon's album was surprisingly unsuccessful, given the number of people who'd called the BBC asking about it -- the joke went round that the calls had all been Judith Piepe doing different voices -- and Simon continued his round of folk clubs, pubs, and birthday parties, sometimes performing with Garfunkel, when he visited for the summer, but mostly performing on his own. One time he did perform with a full band, singing “Johnny B Goode” at a birthday party, backed by a band called Joker's Wild who a couple of weeks later went into the studio to record their only privately-pressed five-song record, of them performing recent hits: [Excerpt: Joker's Wild, "Walk Like a Man"] The guitarist from Joker's Wild would later join the other band who'd played at that party, but the story of David Gilmour joining Pink Floyd is for another episode. During this time, Simon also produced his first record for someone else, when he was responsible for producing the only album by his friend Jackson C Frank, though there wasn't much production involved as like Simon's own album it was just one man and his guitar. Al Stewart and Art Garfunkel were also in the control room for the recording, but the notoriously shy Frank insisted on hiding behind a screen so they couldn't see him while he recorded: [Excerpt: Jackson C Frank, "Blues Run the Game"] It seemed like Paul Simon was on his way to becoming a respected mid-level figure on the British folk scene, releasing occasional albums and maybe having one or two minor hits, but making a steady living. Someone who would be spoken of in the same breath as Ralph McTell perhaps. Meanwhile, Art Garfunkel would be going on to be a lecturer in mathematics whose students might be surprised to know he'd had a minor rock and roll hit as a kid. But then something happened that changed everything. Wednesday Morning 3AM hadn't sold at all, and Columbia hadn't promoted it in the slightest. It was too collegiate and polite for the Greenwich Village folkies, and too intellectual for the pop audience that had been buying Peter, Paul, and Mary, and it had come out just at the point that the folk boom had imploded. But one DJ in Boston, Dick Summer, had started playing one song from it, "The Sound of Silence", and it had caught on with the college students, who loved the song. And then came spring break 1965. All those students went on holiday, and suddenly DJs in places like Cocoa Beach, Florida, were getting phone calls requesting "The Sound of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel. Some of them with contacts at Columbia got in touch with the label, and Tom Wilson had an idea. On the first day of what turned out to be his last session with Dylan, the session for "Like a Rolling Stone", Wilson asked the musicians to stay behind and work on something. He'd already experimented with overdubbing new instruments on an acoustic recording with his new version of Dylan's "House of the Rising Sun", now he was going to try it with "The Sound of Silence". He didn't bother asking the duo what they thought -- record labels messed with people's records all the time. So "The Sound of Silence" was released as an electric folk-rock single: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sound of Silence"] This is always presented as Wilson massively changing the sound of the duo without their permission or knowledge, but the fact is that they had *already* gone folk-rock, back in March, so they were already thinking that way. The track was released as a single with “We Got a Groovy Thing Going” on the B-side, and was promoted first in the Boston market, and it did very well. Roy Harper later talked about Simon's attitude at this time, saying "I can remember going into the gents in The Three Horseshoes in Hempstead during a gig, and we're having a pee together. He was very excited, and he turns round to me and and says, “Guess what, man? We're number sixteen in Boston with The Sound of Silence'”. A few days later I was doing another gig with him and he made a beeline for me. “Guess what?” I said “You're No. 15 in Boston”. He said, “No man, we're No. 1 in Boston”. I thought, “Wow. No. 1 in Boston, eh?” It was almost a joke, because I really had no idea what that sort of stuff meant at all." Simon was even more excited when the record started creeping up the national charts, though he was less enthused when his copy of the single arrived from America. He listened to it, and thought the arrangement was a Byrds rip-off, and cringed at the way the rhythm section had to slow down and speed up in order to stay in time with the acoustic recording: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sound of Silence"] I have to say that, while the tempo fluctuations are noticeable once you know to look for them, it's a remarkably tight performance given the circumstances. As the record went up the charts, Simon was called back to America, to record an album to go along with it. The Paul Simon Songbook hadn't been released in the US,  and they needed an album *now*, and Simon was a slow songwriter, so the duo took six songs from that album and rerecorded them in folk-rock versions with their new producer Bob Johnston, who was also working with Dylan now, since Tom Wilson had moved on to Verve records. They filled out the album with "The Sound of Silence", the two electric tracks from March, one new song, "Blessed", and a version of "Anji", which came straight after "Somewhere They Can't Find Me", presumably to acknowledge Simon lifting bits of it. That version of “Anji” also followed Jansch's arrangement, and so included the bit that Simon had taken for “We Got a Groovy Thing Going” as well. They also recorded their next single, which was released on the British version of the album but not the American one, a song that Simon had written during a thoroughly depressing tour of Lancashire towns (he wrote it in Widnes, but a friend of Simon's who lived in Widnes later said that while it was written in Widnes it was written *about* Birkenhead. Simon has also sometimes said it was about Warrington or Wigan, both of which are so close to Widnes and so similar in both name and atmosphere that it would be the easiest thing in the world to mix them up.) [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "Homeward Bound"] These tracks were all recorded in December 1965, and they featured the Wrecking Crew -- Bob Johnston wanted the best, and didn't rate the New York players that Wilson had used, and so they were recorded in LA with Glen Campbell, Joe South, Hal Blaine, Larry Knechtel, and Joe Osborne. I've also seen in some sources that there were sessions in Nashville with A-team players Fred Carter and Charlie McCoy. By January, "The Sound of Silence" had reached number one, knocking "We Can Work it Out" by the Beatles off the top spot for two weeks, before the Beatles record went back to the top. They'd achieved what they'd been trying for for nearly a decade, and I'll give the last word here to Paul Simon, who said of the achievement: "I had come back to New York, and I was staying in my old room at my parents' house. Artie was living at his parents' house, too. I remember Artie and I were sitting there in my car one night, parked on a street in Queens, and the announcer said, "Number one, Simon & Garfunkel." And Artie said to me, "That Simon & Garfunkel, they must be having a great time.""

Un songwriter américain accompli, engagé, excellent musicien doublé d’un mélodiste convaincant. Playlist : WALK A MILE IN MY SHOES >… The post S05E07 Joe SOUTH first appeared on Radio Campus Angers.

"Appearing after a blockbuster debut and a sophomore set that was rather disappointing (in comparison), 1968's Lady Soul proved Aretha Franklin, the pop sensation, was no fluke. Her performances were more impassioned than on her debut, and the material just as strong, an inspired blend of covers and originals from the best songwriters in soul and pop music. The opener, "Chain of Fools," became the biggest hit, driven by a chorus of cascading echoes by Franklin and her bedrock backing vocalists, the Sweet Impressions, plus the unforgettable, earthy guitar work of guest Joe South. The album's showpiece, though, was "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman," a song written expressly for her by Brill Building pop stalwarts Gerry Goffin and Carole King, based on a title coined by producer Jerry Wexler. One of the landmark performances in pop music, the song floats serenely through the verses until, swept up by Ralph Burns' stirring string arrangement again and again, Franklin opens up on the choruses with one of the most transcendent vocals of her career. And just as she'd previously transformed a soul classic (Otis Redding's "Respect") into a signature piece of her own, Franklin courageously reimagined songs by heavyweights James Brown, Ray Charles, and the Impressions. Brown's "Money Won't Change You" is smooth and kinetic, her testifying constantly reinforced by interjections from the Sweet Inspirations. Curtis Mayfield's "People Get Ready," a 1965 civil-rights anthem and a hit for the Impressions, is taken at a slower pace than the original; after a quiet verse, Franklin lets loose amidst a magisterial brass arrangement by Arif Mardin. Powered by three hit singles (each nested in the upper reaches of the pop Top Ten), Lady Soul became Aretha Franklin's second gold LP and remained on the charts for over a year." - John Bush, All MusicSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/polyphonic-press1229/donations

Urodzeni: Al Stewart, Freddie Mercury (Queen), Sal Solo (Classix Nouveaux) [FOTO], Elżbieta Adamiak. Zmarli: Peter Tetteroo (Tee Set), Joe South. Nagranie z roku 2021. 

In this episode, Barney, Mark & Jasper invite legendary A&R man David Bates to tell them about his long & distinguished career in music — particularly the years he spent working at Phonogram with the likes of Tears For Fears, Def Leppard & Robert Plant.David reminisces about hearing the Beatles on the radio in 1962, and how that took him eventually to DJ'ing & to working at Richard Branson's first Virgin megastore in the '70s. A clip from our 1990 Was (Not Was) audio interview prompts recall of the droll duo & of David Geffen, after which our guest talks about the "torturous" process of overseeing Tears For Fears' eye-wateringly expensive Seeds Of Love album. He also recalls reuniting Robert Plant with Led Zep bandmate Jimmy Page for 1994's live No Quarter album.From there we segue into the week's new audio interview, which features Julian Cope — frontman with David's first major Phonogram signing the Teardrop Explodes — talking to a roomful of French music journalists about 1991's Peggy Suicide album. Two clips from this highly entertaining press conference prompt memories of the inimitable "Saint Julian" from our guest, who also joins in with the RBP team's tribute to ZZ Top bassist Dusty Hill, God rest his beard.Mark concludes the episode with quotes from his favourite library additions over the past fortnight, including pieces about Joe South and Earth, Wind & Fire, and Barney & Jasper respond with remarks on interviews with Seth Lakeman and Christina Aguilera.Many thanks to special guest David Bates; find his playlists at dbfinestkind.com.Pieces discussed: David Bates on life as an A&R man, Was (Not Was) audio, Tears for Fears' Seeds of Love, Julian Cope, Julian Cope audio, John Sinclair, Dusty Hill, Record shops and Hammond B3s, Earth, Wind and Fire, Jerry Lee Lewis, Joe South, Television, Chuck E. Weiss, Seth Lakeman, Christina Aguilera and Arctic Monkeys.

In this episode, Barney, Mark & Jasper invite legendary A&R man David Bates to tell them about his long & distinguished career in music — particularly the years he spent working at Phonogram with the likes of Tears For Fears, Def Leppard & Robert Plant. David reminisces about hearing the Beatles on the radio in 1962, and how that took him eventually to DJ'ing & to working at Richard Branson's first Virgin megastore in the '70s. A clip from our 1990 Was (Not Was) audio interview prompts recall of the droll duo & of David Geffen, after which our guest talks about the "torturous" process of overseeing Tears For Fears' eye-wateringly expensive Seeds Of Love album. He also recalls reuniting Robert Plant with Led Zep bandmate Jimmy Page for 1994's live No Quarter album. From there we segue into the week's new audio interview, which features Julian Cope — frontman with David's first major Phonogram signing the Teardrop Explodes — talking to a roomful of French music journalists about 1991's Peggy Suicide album. Two clips from this highly entertaining press conference prompt memories of the inimitable "Saint Julian" from our guest, who also joins in with the RBP team's tribute to ZZ Top bassist Dusty Hill, God rest his beard. Mark concludes the episode with quotes from his favourite library additions over the past fortnight, including pieces about Joe South and Earth, Wind & Fire, and Barney & Jasper respond with remarks on interviews with Seth Lakeman and Christina Aguilera. Many thanks to special guest David Bates; find his playlists at dbfinestkind.com. Pieces discussed: David Bates on life as an A&R man, Was (Not Was) audio, Tears for Fears' Seeds of Love, Julian Cope, Julian Cope audio, John Sinclair, Dusty Hill, Record shops and Hammond B3s, Earth, Wind and Fire, Jerry Lee Lewis, Joe South, Television, Chuck E. Weiss, Seth Lakeman, Christina Aguilera and Arctic Monkeys. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Barney, Mark & Jasper invite legendary A&R man David Bates to tell them about his long & distinguished career in music — particularly the years he spent working at Phonogram with the likes of Tears For Fears, Def Leppard & Robert Plant.David reminisces about hearing the Beatles on the radio in 1962, and how that took him eventually to DJ'ing & to working at Richard Branson's first Virgin megastore in the '70s. A clip from our 1990 Was (Not Was) audio interview prompts recall of the droll duo & of David Geffen, after which our guest talks about the "torturous" process of overseeing Tears For Fears' eye-wateringly expensive Seeds Of Love album. He also recalls reuniting Robert Plant with Led Zep bandmate Jimmy Page for 1994's live No Quarter album.From there we segue into the week's new audio interview, which features Julian Cope — frontman with David's first major Phonogram signing the Teardrop Explodes — talking to a roomful of French music journalists about 1991's Peggy Suicide album. Two clips from this highly entertaining press conference prompt memories of the inimitable "Saint Julian" from our guest, who also joins in with the RBP team's tribute to ZZ Top bassist Dusty Hill, God rest his beard.Mark concludes the episode with quotes from his favourite library additions over the past fortnight, including pieces about Joe South and Earth, Wind & Fire, and Barney & Jasper respond with remarks on interviews with Seth Lakeman and Christina Aguilera.Many thanks to special guest David Bates; find his playlists at dbfinestkind.com.Pieces discussed: David Bates on life as an A&R man, Was (Not Was) audio, Tears for Fears' Seeds of Love, Julian Cope, Julian Cope audio, John Sinclair, Dusty Hill, Record shops and Hammond B3s, Earth, Wind and Fire, Jerry Lee Lewis, Joe South, Television, Chuck E. Weiss, Seth Lakeman, Christina Aguilera and Arctic Monkeys.

In this episode, Barney, Mark & Jasper invite legendary A&R man David Bates to tell them about his long & distinguished career in music — particularly the years he spent working at Phonogram with the likes of Tears For Fears, Def Leppard & Robert Plant. David reminisces about hearing the Beatles on the radio in 1962, and how that took him eventually to DJ'ing & to working at Richard Branson's first Virgin megastore in the '70s. A clip from our 1990 Was (Not Was) audio interview prompts recall of the droll duo & of David Geffen, after which our guest talks about the "torturous" process of overseeing Tears For Fears' eye-wateringly expensive Seeds Of Love album. He also recalls reuniting Robert Plant with Led Zep bandmate Jimmy Page for 1994's live No Quarter album. From there we segue into the week's new audio interview, which features Julian Cope — frontman with David's first major Phonogram signing the Teardrop Explodes — talking to a roomful of French music journalists about 1991's Peggy Suicide album. Two clips from this highly entertaining press conference prompt memories of the inimitable "Saint Julian" from our guest, who also joins in with the RBP team's tribute to ZZ Top bassist Dusty Hill, God rest his beard. Mark concludes the episode with quotes from his favourite library additions over the past fortnight, including pieces about Joe South and Earth, Wind & Fire, and Barney & Jasper respond with remarks on interviews with Seth Lakeman and Christina Aguilera. Many thanks to special guest David Bates; find his playlists at dbfinestkind.com. Pieces discussed: David Bates on life as an A&R man, Was (Not Was) audio, Tears for Fears' Seeds of Love, Julian Cope, Julian Cope audio, John Sinclair, Dusty Hill, Record shops and Hammond B3s, Earth, Wind and Fire, Jerry Lee Lewis, Joe South, Television, Chuck E. Weiss, Seth Lakeman, Christina Aguilera and Arctic Monkeys.

"THE OFFICIAL JOE SOUTH WEBSITE":https://www.joesouth.com/

Label: Tetragrammaton 1503Year: 1968Condition: M-Last Price: $25.00. Not currently available for sale.On Deep Purple's first U.S. chart single, an epic cover of Joe South's "Hush" (originally recorded by Billy Joe Royal) is backed with a brooding, tuneful power pop track that will quickly become a favorite! Have a listen to the mp3 snippet in our "jukebox" to hear what we mean (the snippet skips the rain sound effects that open the track). Note: This beautiful copy looks almost new and has pristine Mint sound.

We talk with fellow podcasters Joe South and Derrick Jackson from "Security Unfiltered," about what it takes to run an INFOSEC-oriented show.

Label: Tetragrammaton 1503Year: 1968Condition: MLast Price: $28.00. Not currently available for sale.This great cover of the Joe South tune (originally recorded by Billy Joe Royal) is backed with a brooding, tuneful rock track that will quickly become a favorite! Note: This beautiful copy comes in a vintage Tetragrammaton Records factory sleeve. It has no notable flaws, grading Mint across the board (Labels, Vinyl, Audio)... a real treat!

Label: Tetragrammaton 1503Year: 1968Condition: M-Last Price: $25.00. Not currently available for sale.This great cover of the Joe South tune (originally recorded by Billy Joe Royal) is backed with a brooding, tuneful rock track that will quickly become a favorite! Note: This beautiful copy comes in a vintage Tetragrammaton Records factory sleeve. It has Mint labels and very nearly Mint vinyl (styrene) and audio. The A side audio sounds pristine — no surface noise to speak of and no distortion; the B side has a touch of surface noise during the "thunder" sounds at the beginning of the track, but no distortion.

This week’s episode looks at “Needles and Pins”, and the story of the second-greatest band to come out of Liverpool in the sixties, The Searchers. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a sixteen-minute bonus episode available, on “Farmer John” by Don and Dewey. 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, as there are too many recordings by the Searchers.  My two main resources for this episode have been the autobiographies of members of the group — Frank Allen’s The Searchers and Me and Mike Pender’s The Search For Myself.  All the Searchers tracks and Tony Jackson or Chris Curtis solo recordings excerpted here, except the live excerpt of “What’d I Say”, can be found on this box set, which is out of print as a physical box, but still available digitally. For those who want a good budget alternative, though, this double-CD set contains fifty Searchers tracks, including all their hits, for under three pounds.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Last week we had a look at the biggest group ever to come out of Liverpool, and indeed the biggest group ever to play rock and roll music. But the Beatles weren’t the only influential band on the Merseybeat scene, and while we won’t have much chance to look at Merseybeat in general, we should at least briefly touch on the other bands from the scene. So today we’re going to look at a band who developed a distinctive sound that would go on to be massively influential, even though they’re rarely cited as an influence in the way some of their contemporaries are. We’re going to look at The Searchers, and “Needles and Pins”: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Needles and Pins”] The story of the early origins of the Searchers is, like everything about the Searchers, the subject of a great deal of dispute. The two surviving original members of the group, John McNally and Mike Pender, haven’t spoken to each other in thirty-six years, and didn’t get on for many years before that, and there have been several legal disputes between them over the years. As a result, literally everything about the group’s history has become a battlefield in their ongoing arguments. According to a book by Frank Allen, the group’s bass player from 1964 on and someone who took McNally’s side in the split and subsequent legal problems, McNally formed a skiffle group, which Mike Pender later joined, and was later joined first by Tony Jackson and then by a drummer then known as Chris Crummey, but who changed his name to the more euphonic Chris Curtis.  According to Pender, he never liked skiffle, never played skiffle, and “if McNally had a skiffle group, it must have been before I met him”. He is very insistent on this point — he liked country music, and later rock and roll, but never liked skiffle. According to him, he and McNally got together and formed a group that was definitely absolutely not in any way a skiffle group and wasn’t led by McNally but was formed by both of them. That group split up, and then Pender became friends with Tony Jackson — and he’s very insistent that he became friends with Jackson during  a period when he didn’t know McNally — and the group reformed around the three of them, when McNally and Pender got back in touch. The origin of the group’s name is similarly disputed. Everyone agrees that it came from the John Wayne film The Searchers — the same film which had inspired the group’s hero Buddy Holly to write “That’ll Be The Day” — but there is disagreement as to whose idea the name was. Pender claims that it was his idea, while McNally says that the name was coined by a singer named “Big Ron”, who sang with the band for a bit before disappearing into obscurity. Big Ron’s replacement was a singer named Billy Beck, who at the time he was with the Searchers used the stage name Johnny Sandon (though he later reverted to his birth name). The group performed as Johnny Sandon and The Searchers for two years, before Sandon quit the group to join the Remo Four, a group that was managed by Brian Epstein. Sandon made some records with the Remo Four in 1963, but they went nowhere, but they’ll give some idea of how Sandon sounded: [Excerpt: Johnny Sandon and the Remo Four, “Lies”] The Remo Four later moved on to back Tommy Quickly, who we heard last week singing a song the Beatles wrote for him. With Sandon out of the picture, the group had no lead singer or frontman, and were in trouble — they were known around Liverpool as Johnny Sandon’s backing group, not as a group in their own right. They started splitting the lead vocals between themselves, but with Tony Jackson taking most of them. And, in a move which made them stand out, Chris Curtis moved his drum kit to the front line, started playing standing up, and became the group’s front-man and second lead singer. Even at this point, though, there seemed to be cracks in the group. The Searchers were the most clean-living of the Liverpool bands — they were all devout Catholics who would go to Mass every Sunday without fail, and seem to have never indulged in most of the vices that pretty much every other rock star indulged in. But Curtis and Jackson were far less so than Pender and McNally — Jackson in particular was a very heavy drinker and known to get very aggressive when drunk, while Curtis was known as eccentric in other ways — he seems to have had some sort of mental illness, though no-one’s ever spoken about a diagnosis — the Beatles apparently referred to him as “Mad Henry”. Curtis and Jackson didn’t get on with each other, and while Jackson started out as a close friend of Pender’s, the two soon drifted apart, and by the time of their first recording sessions they appeared to most people to be a group of three plus one outsider, with Jackson not getting on well with any of the others. There was also a split in the band’s musical tastes, but that would be the split that would drive much of their creativity. Pender and McNally were drawn towards softer music — country and rockabilly, the Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly — while Jackson preferred harder, stomping, music. But it was Chris Curtis who took charge of the group’s repertoire, and who was the group’s unofficial leader. While the other band members had fairly mainstream musical tastes, it was Curtis who would seek out obscure R&B B-sides that he thought the group could make their own, by artists like The Clovers and Richie Barrett — while many Liverpool groups played Barrett’s “Some Other Guy”, the Searchers would also play the B-side to that, “Tricky Dicky”, a song written by Leiber and Stoller. Curtis also liked quite a bit of folk music, and would also get the group to perform songs by Joan Baez and Peter, Paul, and Mary. The result of this combination of material and performers was that the Searchers ended up with a repertoire rooted in R&B, and a heavy rhythm section, but with strong harmony vocals inspired more by the Everlys than by the soul groups that were inspiring the other groups around Liverpool. Other than the Beatles, the Searchers were the best harmony group in Liverpool, and were the only other one to have multiple strong lead vocalists. Like the Beatles, the Searchers went off to play at the Star Club in Hamburg in 1962. Recordings were made of their performances there, and their live version of Brenda Lee’s “Sweet Nothin’s” later got released as a single after they became successful: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Sweet Nothin’s”] Even as every talent scout in the country seemed to be turning up in Liverpool, and even bands from nearby Manchester were getting signed up in the hope of repeating the Beatles’ success, the Searchers were having no luck getting any attention from the London music industry. In part that was because of one bit of bad luck — the day that Brian Epstein turned up to see them, with the thought of maybe managing them, Tony Jackson was drunk and fell off the stage, and Epstein decided that he was going to give them a miss. As no talent scouts were coming to see them, they decided that they would record a demo session at the Iron Door, the club they regularly played, and send that out to A&R people. That demo session produced a full short album, which shows them at their stompiest and hardest-driving. Most of the Merseybeat bands sounded much more powerful in their earlier live performances than in the studio, and the Searchers were no exception, and it’s interesting to compare the sound of these recordings to the studio ones from only a few months later: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Let’s Stomp”] The group eventually signed to Pye Records. Pye was the third or fourth biggest record label in Britain at the time, but that was a relative matter — EMI and Decca between them had something like eighty-five percent of the market, and basically *were* the record industry in Britain at the time. Pye was chronically underfunded, and when they signed an artist who managed to have any success, they would tend to push that artist to keep producing as many singles as possible, chasing trends, rather than investing in their long-term career survival. That said, they did have some big acts, most notably Petula Clark — indeed the company had been formed from the merger of two other companies, one of which had been formed specifically to issue Clark’s records. Clark was yet to have her big breakthrough hit in the USA, but she’d had several big hits in the UK, including the number one hit “Sailor”: [Excerpt: Petula Clark, “Sailor”] The co-producer on that track had been Tony Hatch, a songwriter and producer who would go on to write and produce almost all of Clark’s hit records. Hatch had a track record of hits — we’ve heard several songs he was involved in over the course of the series. Most recently, we heard last week how “She Loves You” was inspired by “Forget Him”, which Hatch wrote and produced for Bobby Rydell: [Excerpt: Bobby Rydell, “Forget Him”] Hatch heard the group’s demo, and was impressed, and offered to sign them. The Searchers’ manager at the time agreed, on one condition — that Hatch also sign another band he managed, The Undertakers. Astonishingly, Hatch agreed, and so the Undertakers also got a record contract, and released several flop singles produced by Hatch, including this cover version of a Coasters tune: [Excerpt: The Undertakers, “What About Us?”] The biggest mark that the Undertakers would make on music would come many years later, when their lead singer Jackie Lomax would release a solo single, “Sour Milk Sea”, which George Harrison wrote for him. The Searchers, on the other hand, made their mark immediately. The group’s first single was a cover version of a song written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, which had been a top twenty hit in the US for the Drifters a couple of years earlier: [Excerpt: The Drifters, “Sweets For My Sweet”] That had become a regular fixture in the Searchers’ live set, with Tony Jackson singing lead and Chris Curtis singing the high backing vocal part in falsetto. In much the same way that the Beatles had done with “Twist and Shout”, they’d flattened out the original record’s Latin cha-cha-cha rhythm into a more straightforward thumping rocker for their live performances, as you can hear on their original demo version from the Iron Door sessions: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Sweets For My Sweet (live at the Iron Door)”] As you can hear, they’d also misheard a chunk of the lyrics, and so instead of “your tasty kiss”, Jackson sang “Your first sweet kiss”. In the studio, they slowed the song down very slightly, and brought up the harmony vocal from Pender on the choruses, which on the demo he seems to have been singing off-mic. The result was an obvious hit: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Sweets For My Sweet”] That went to number one, helped by an endorsement from John Lennon, who said it was the best record to come out of Liverpool, and launched the Searchers into the very top tier of Liverpool groups, their only real competition being the Beatles and Gerry and the Pacemakers — and though nobody could have known it at the time, the Pacemakers’ career had already peaked at this point.  Their first album, Meet The Searchers, featured “Sweets For My Sweet”, along with a selection of songs that mixed the standard repertoire of every Merseybeat band — “Money”, “Da Doo Ron Ron”, “Twist and Shout”, “Stand By Me”, and the Everly Brothers’ “Since You Broke My Heart”, with more obscure songs like “Ain’t Gonna Kiss Ya”, by the then-unknown P.J. Proby, “Farmer John” by Don and Dewey, which hadn’t yet become a garage-rock standard (and indeed seems to have become so largely because of the Searchers’ version), and a cover of “Love Potion #9”, a song that Leiber and Stoller had written for the Clovers, which was not released as a single in the UK, but later became their biggest hit in the US (and a quick content note for this one — the lyric contains a word for Romani people which many of those people regard as a slur): [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Love Potion #9”] Their second single was an attempt to repeat the “Sweets For My Sweet” formula, and was written by Tony Hatch, although the group didn’t know that at the time. Hatch, like many producers of the time, was used to getting his artists to record his own songs, written under pseudonyms so the record label didn’t necessarily realise this was what he was doing. In this case he brought the group a song that he claimed had been written by one “Fred Nightingale”, and which he thought would be perfect for them. The song in question, “Sugar and Spice”, was a blatant rip-off of “Sweets For My Sweet”, and recorded in a near-identical arrangement: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Sugar and Spice”] The group weren’t keen on the song, and got very angry later on when they realised that Tony Hatch had lied to them about its origins, but the record was almost as big a hit as the first one, peaking at number two on the charts. But it was their third single that was the group’s international breakthrough, and which both established a whole new musical style and caused the first big rift in the group. The song chosen for that third single was one they learned in Hamburg, from Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers, a London group who had recorded a few singles with Joe Meek, like “You Got What I Like”: [Excerpt: Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers, “You Got What I Like”] The Rebel Rousers had picked up on a record by Jackie DeShannon, a singer-songwriter who had started up a writing partnership with Sharon Sheeley, the writer who had been Eddie Cochran’s girlfriend and in the fatal car crash with him. The record they’d started covering live, though, was not one that DeShannon was the credited songwriter on. “Needles and Pins” was credited to two other writers, both of them associated with Phil Spector.  Sonny Bono was a young songwriter who had written songs at Specialty Records for people like Sam Cooke, Larry Williams, and Don and Dewey, and his most famous song up to this point was “She Said Yeah”, the B-side to Williams’ “Bad Boy”: [Excerpt: Larry Williams, “She Said Yeah”] After working at Specialty, he’d gone on to work as Phil Spector’s assistant, doing most of the hands-on work in the studio while Spector sat in the control room. While working with Spector he’d got to know Jack Nitzsche, who did most of the arrangements for Spector, and who had also had hits on his own like “The Lonely Surfer”: [Excerpt: Jack Nitzsche, “The Lonely Surfer”] Bono and Nitzsche are the credited writers on “Needles and Pins”, but Jackie DeShannon insists that she co-wrote the song with them, but her name was left off the credits. I tend to believe her — both Nitzsche and Bono were, like their boss, abusive misogynist egomaniacs, and it’s easy to see them leaving her name off the credits. Either way, DeShannon recorded the song in early 1963, backed by members of the Wrecking Crew, and it scraped into the lower reaches of the US Hot One Hundred, though it actually made number one in Canada: [Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, “Needles and Pins”] Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers had been covering that song, and Chris Curtis picked up on it as an obvious hit. The group reshaped the song, and fixed the main flaw with DeShannon’s original.  There’s really only about ninety seconds’ worth of actual song in “Needles and Pins”, and DeShannon’s version ends with a minute or so of vamping — it sounds like it’s still a written lyric, but it’s full of placeholders where entire lines are “whoa-oh”, the kind of thing that someone like Otis Redding could make sound great, but that didn’t really work for her record. The Searchers tightened the song up and altered its dynamics — instead of the middle eight leading to a long freeform section, they started the song with Mike Pender singing solo, and then on the middle eight they added a high harmony from Curtis, then just repeated the first verse and chorus, in the new key of C sharp, with Curtis harmonising this time: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Needles and Pins” (middle eight on)] The addition of the harmony gives the song some much-needed dynamic variation not present in DeShannon’s version, while repeating the original verse after the key change, and adding in Curtis’ high harmony, gives it an obsessive quality. The protagonist here is spiralling – he keeps thinking the same things over and over, at a higher and higher pitch, getting more and more desperate. It’s a simple change, but one that improves the song immensely. Incidentally, one thing I should note here because it’s not something I normally do — in these excerpts of the Searchers’ version of “Needles and Pins”, I’m actually modifying the recording slightly. The mix used for the original single version of the song, which is what I’m excerpting here, is marred by an incredibly squeaky bass pedal on Chris Curtis’ drumkit, which isn’t particularly audible if you’re listening to it on early sixties equipment, which had little dynamic range, but which on modern digital copies of the track overpowers everything else, to the point that the record sounds like that Monty Python sketch where someone plays a tune by hitting mice with hammers. Here’s a couple of seconds of the unmodified track, so you can see what I mean: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Needles and Pins”] Most hits compilations have a stereo mix of the song, and have EQ’d it so that the squeaky bass pedal isn’t noticeable, but I try wherever possible to use the mixes that people were actually listening to at the time, so I’ve compromised and used the mono mix but got rid of the squeaky frequencies, so you can hear the music I’m talking about rather than being distracted by the squeaks. Anyway, leaving the issue of nobody telling Chris Curtis to oil his pedals aside, the change in the structure of the song turned it from something a little baggy and aimless into a tight two-and-a-half minute pop song, but the other major change they made was emphasising the riff, and in doing so they inadvertently invented a whole new genre of music.  The riff in DeShannon’s version is there, but it’s just one element — an acoustic guitar strumming through the chords. It’s a good, simple, play-in-a-day riff — you basically hold a chord down and then move a single finger at a time and you can get that riff — and it’s the backbone of the song, but there’s also a piano, and horns, and the Blossoms singing: [Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, “Needles and Pins”] But what the Searchers did was to take the riff and play it simultaneously on two electric guitars, and then added reverb. They also played the first part of the song in A, rather than the key of C which DeShannon’s version starts in, which allowed the open strings to ring out more. The result came out sounding like an electric twelve-string, and soon both they and the Beatles would be regularly using twelve-string Rickenbackers to get the same sound: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Needles and Pins”] That record is the root of jangle-pop and folk-rock. That combination of jangling, reverb-heavy, trebly guitars and Everly Brothers inspired harmonies is one that leads directly to the Byrds, Love, Big Star, Tom Petty, REM, the Smiths, and the Bangles, among many others. While the Beatles were overall obviously the more influential group by a long way, “Needles and Pins” has a reasonable claim to be the most influential single track from the Merseybeat era. It went to number one in the UK, and became the group’s breakthrough hit in the US, reaching number sixteen. The follow-up, “Don’t Throw Your Love Away”, a cover of a B-side by the Orlons, again featuring Pender on lead vocals and Curtis on harmonies, also made number one in the UK and the US top twenty, giving them a third number one out of four singles. But the next single, “Someday We’re Gonna Love Again”, a cover of a Barbara Lewis song, only made number eleven, and caused journalists to worry if the Searchers had lost their touch. There was even some talk in the newspapers that Mike Pender might leave the group and start a solo career, which he denied. As it turned out, one of the group’s members was going to leave, but it wasn’t Mike Pender. Tony Jackson had sung lead on the first two singles, and on the majority of the tracks on the first album, and he thus regarded himself as the group’s lead singer. With Pender taking over the lead on the more recent hit singles, Jackson was being edged aside. By the third album, It’s The Searchers, which included “Needles and Pins”, Jackson was the only group member not to get a solo lead vocal — even John McNally got one, while Jackson’s only lead was an Everlys style close harmony with Mike Pender. Everything else was being sung by Pender or Curtis. Jackson was also getting involved in personality conflicts with the other band members — at one point it actually got to the point that he and Pender had a fistfight on stage. Jackson was also not entirely keen on the group’s move towards more melodic material. It’s important to remember that the Searchers had started out as an aggressive, loud, R&B band, and they still often sounded like that on stage — listen for example to their performance of “What’d I Say” at the NME poll-winners’ party in April 1964, with Chris Curtis on lead vocals clearly showing why he had a reputation for eccentricity: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “What’d I Say (live)”] The combination of these musical differences and his feelings about having his place usurped meant that Jackson was increasingly getting annoyed at the other three band members. Eventually he left the group — whether he was fired or quit depends on which version of the story you read — and was replaced by Frank Allen of Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers.  Jackson didn’t take this replacement well, and publicly went round telling people that he had been pushed out of the band so that Curtis could get his boyfriend into the band, and there are some innuendoes to this effect in Mike Pender’s autobiography — although Allen denies that he and Curtis were in a relationship, and says that he doesn’t actually know what Curtis’ sexuality was, because they never discussed that kind of thing, and presumably Allen would know better than anyone else whether he was in a relationship with Curtis.  Curtis is widely described as having been gay or bi by his contemporaries, but if he was he never came out publicly, possibly due to his strong religious views. There’s some suggestion, indeed, that one reason Jackson ended up out of the band was that he blackmailed the band, saying that he would publicly out Curtis if he didn’t get more lead vocals. Whatever the truth, Jackson left the group, and his first solo single, “Bye Bye Baby”, made number thirty-eight on the charts: [Excerpt: Tony Jackson and the Vibrations, “Bye Bye Baby”] However, his later singles had no success — he was soon rerecording “Love Potion Number Nine” in the hope that that would be a UK chart success as it had been in the US: [Excerpt: Tony Jackson and the Vibrations, “Love Potion Number Nine”] Meanwhile, Allen was fitting in well with his new group, and it appeared at first that the group’s run of hits would carry on uninterrupted without Jackson. The first single by the new lineup, “When You Walk In The Room”, was a cover of another Jackie DeShannon song, this time written by DeShannon on her own, and originally released as a B-side: [Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, “When You Walk In The Room”] The Searchers rearranged that, once again emphasising the riff from DeShannon’s original, and by this time playing it on real twelve-strings, and adding extra compression to them. Their version featured a joint lead vocal by Pender and Allen: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “When You Walk In the Room”] Do you think the Byrds might have heard that? That went to number three on the charts. The next single was less successful, only making number thirteen, but was interesting in other ways — from the start, as well as their R&B covers, Curtis had been adding folk songs to the group’s repertoire, and there’d been one or two covers of songs like “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” on their albums, but “What Have They Done to the Rain?” was the first one to become a single.  It was written by Malvina Reynolds, who was a socialist activist who only became a songwriter in her early fifties, and who also wrote “Morningtown Ride” and “Little Boxes”. “What Have They Done to The Rain?” was a song written to oppose nuclear weapons testing, and Curtis had learned it from a Joan Baez album. Even though it wasn’t as big a success as some of their other hits, given how utterly different it was from their normal style, and how controversial the subject was, getting it into the top twenty at all seems quite an achievement. [Excerpt: The Searchers, “What Have They Done To The Rain?”] Their next single, “Goodbye My Love”, was their last top ten hit, and the next few singles only made the top forty, even when the Rolling Stones gave them “Take It Or Leave It”. The other group members started to get annoyed at Curtis, who they thought had lost his touch at picking songs, and whose behaviour had become increasingly erratic. Eventually, on an Australian tour, they took his supply of uppers and downers, which he had been using as much to self-medicate as for enjoyment as far as I can tell, and flushed them down the toilet. When they got back to the UK, Curtis was out of the group. Their first single after Curtis’ departure, “Have You Ever Loved Somebody”, was given to them by the Hollies, who had originally written it as an Everly Brothers album track: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Have You Ever Loved Somebody”] Unfortunately for the Searchers, Chris Curtis had also heard the song, decided it was a likely hit, and had produced a rival version for Paul and Barry Ryan, which got rushed out to compete with it: [Excerpt: Paul and Barry Ryan, “Have You Ever Loved Somebody”] Neither single made the top forty, and the Searchers would never have a hit single again. Nor would Curtis. Curtis only released one solo single, “Aggravation”, a cover of a Joe South song: [Excerpt: Chris Curtis, “Aggravation”] The musicians on that included Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and Joe Moretti, but it didn’t chart. Curtis then tried to form a band, which he named Roundabout, based on the concept that musicians could hop on or hop off at any point, with Curtis as the only constant member. The guitarist and keyboard player quickly decided that it would be more convenient for them if Curtis was the one to hop off, and without Curtis Jon Lord and Richie Blackmore went on to form Deep Purple. The Searchers didn’t put out another album for six years after Curtis left. They kept putting out singles on various labels, but nothing came close to charting. Their one album between 1966 and 1979 was a collection of rerecordings of their old hits, in 1972. But then in 1979 Seymour Stein, the owner of Sire Records, a label which was having success with groups like the Ramones, Talking Heads, and the Pretenders, was inspired by the Ramones covering “Needles and Pins” to sign the Searchers to a two-album deal, which produced records that fit perfectly into the late seventies New Wave pop landscape, while still sounding like the Searchers: [Excerpt: The Searchers, “Hearts in Her Eyes”] Apparently during those sessions, Curtis, who had given up music and become a civil servant, would regularly phone the studio threatening to burn it down if he wasn’t involved. Unfortunately, while those albums had some critical success, they did nothing commercially, and Sire dropped them. By 1985, the Searchers were at breaking point. They hadn’t recorded any new material in several years, and Mike Pender and John McNally weren’t getting on at all — which was a particular problem as the two of them were now the only two members based in Liverpool, and so they had to travel to and from gigs together without the other band members — the group were so poor that McNally and Pender had one car between the two of them. One of them would drive them both to the gig, the other would drive back to Liverpool and keep the car until the next gig, when they would swap over again. No-one except them knows what conversations they had on those long drives, but apparently they weren’t amicable. Pender thought of himself as the star of the group, and he particularly resented that he had to split the money from the band three ways (the drummers the group got in after Curtis were always on a salary rather than full partners in the group). Pender decided that he could make more money by touring on his own but still doing essentially the same show, with hired backing musicians. Pender and the other Searchers eventually reached an agreement that he could tour as “Mike Pender’s Searchers”, so long as he made sure that all the promotional material put every word at the same size, while the other members would continue as The Searchers with a new singer. A big chunk of the autobiographies of both Pender and Allen are taken up with the ensuing litigation, as there were suits and countersuits over matters of billing which on the outside look incredibly trivial, but which of course mattered greatly to everyone involved — there were now two groups with near-identical names, playing the same sets, in the same venues, and so any tiny advantage that one had was a threat to the other, to the extent that at one point there was a serious danger of Pender going to prison over their contractual disputes. The group had been earning very little money anyway, comparatively, and there was a real danger that the two groups undercutting each other might lead to everyone going bankrupt. Thankfully, that didn’t happen. Pender still tours — or at least has tour dates booked over the course of the next year — and McNally and Allen’s band continued playing regularly until 2019, and only stopped performing because of McNally’s increasing ill health. Having seen both, Pender’s was the better show — McNally and Allen’s lineup of the group relied rather too heavily on a rather cheesy sounding synthesiser for my tastes, while Pender stuck closer to a straight guitar/bass/drums sound — but both kept audiences very happy for decades. Mike Pender was made an MBE in 2020, as a reward for his services to the music industry. Tony Jackson and Chris Curtis both died in the 2000s, and John McNally and Frank Allen are now in well-deserved retirement. While Allen and Pender exchanged pleasantries and handshakes at their former bandmates’ funerals, McNally and Pender wouldn’t even say hello to each other, and even though McNally and Allen’s band has retired, there’s still a prominent notice on their website that they own the name “The Searchers” and nobody else is allowed to use it. But every time you hear a jangly twelve-string electric guitar, you’re hearing a sound that was originally created by Mike Pender and John McNally playing in unison, a sound that proved to be greater than any of its constituent parts.

This week's episode looks at "Needles and Pins", and the story of the second-greatest band to come out of Liverpool in the sixties, The Searchers. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a sixteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Farmer John" by Don and Dewey. 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, as there are too many recordings by the Searchers.  My two main resources for this episode have been the autobiographies of members of the group -- Frank Allen's The Searchers and Me and Mike Pender's The Search For Myself.  All the Searchers tracks and Tony Jackson or Chris Curtis solo recordings excerpted here, except the live excerpt of "What'd I Say", can be found on this box set, which is out of print as a physical box, but still available digitally. For those who want a good budget alternative, though, this double-CD set contains fifty Searchers tracks, including all their hits, for under three pounds.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Last week we had a look at the biggest group ever to come out of Liverpool, and indeed the biggest group ever to play rock and roll music. But the Beatles weren't the only influential band on the Merseybeat scene, and while we won't have much chance to look at Merseybeat in general, we should at least briefly touch on the other bands from the scene. So today we're going to look at a band who developed a distinctive sound that would go on to be massively influential, even though they're rarely cited as an influence in the way some of their contemporaries are. We're going to look at The Searchers, and "Needles and Pins": [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Needles and Pins"] The story of the early origins of the Searchers is, like everything about the Searchers, the subject of a great deal of dispute. The two surviving original members of the group, John McNally and Mike Pender, haven't spoken to each other in thirty-six years, and didn't get on for many years before that, and there have been several legal disputes between them over the years. As a result, literally everything about the group's history has become a battlefield in their ongoing arguments. According to a book by Frank Allen, the group's bass player from 1964 on and someone who took McNally's side in the split and subsequent legal problems, McNally formed a skiffle group, which Mike Pender later joined, and was later joined first by Tony Jackson and then by a drummer then known as Chris Crummey, but who changed his name to the more euphonic Chris Curtis.  According to Pender, he never liked skiffle, never played skiffle, and "if McNally had a skiffle group, it must have been before I met him". He is very insistent on this point -- he liked country music, and later rock and roll, but never liked skiffle. According to him, he and McNally got together and formed a group that was definitely absolutely not in any way a skiffle group and wasn't led by McNally but was formed by both of them. That group split up, and then Pender became friends with Tony Jackson -- and he's very insistent that he became friends with Jackson during  a period when he didn't know McNally -- and the group reformed around the three of them, when McNally and Pender got back in touch. The origin of the group's name is similarly disputed. Everyone agrees that it came from the John Wayne film The Searchers -- the same film which had inspired the group's hero Buddy Holly to write "That'll Be The Day" -- but there is disagreement as to whose idea the name was. Pender claims that it was his idea, while McNally says that the name was coined by a singer named "Big Ron", who sang with the band for a bit before disappearing into obscurity. Big Ron's replacement was a singer named Billy Beck, who at the time he was with the Searchers used the stage name Johnny Sandon (though he later reverted to his birth name). The group performed as Johnny Sandon and The Searchers for two years, before Sandon quit the group to join the Remo Four, a group that was managed by Brian Epstein. Sandon made some records with the Remo Four in 1963, but they went nowhere, but they'll give some idea of how Sandon sounded: [Excerpt: Johnny Sandon and the Remo Four, "Lies"] The Remo Four later moved on to back Tommy Quickly, who we heard last week singing a song the Beatles wrote for him. With Sandon out of the picture, the group had no lead singer or frontman, and were in trouble -- they were known around Liverpool as Johnny Sandon's backing group, not as a group in their own right. They started splitting the lead vocals between themselves, but with Tony Jackson taking most of them. And, in a move which made them stand out, Chris Curtis moved his drum kit to the front line, started playing standing up, and became the group's front-man and second lead singer. Even at this point, though, there seemed to be cracks in the group. The Searchers were the most clean-living of the Liverpool bands -- they were all devout Catholics who would go to Mass every Sunday without fail, and seem to have never indulged in most of the vices that pretty much every other rock star indulged in. But Curtis and Jackson were far less so than Pender and McNally -- Jackson in particular was a very heavy drinker and known to get very aggressive when drunk, while Curtis was known as eccentric in other ways -- he seems to have had some sort of mental illness, though no-one's ever spoken about a diagnosis -- the Beatles apparently referred to him as "Mad Henry". Curtis and Jackson didn't get on with each other, and while Jackson started out as a close friend of Pender's, the two soon drifted apart, and by the time of their first recording sessions they appeared to most people to be a group of three plus one outsider, with Jackson not getting on well with any of the others. There was also a split in the band's musical tastes, but that would be the split that would drive much of their creativity. Pender and McNally were drawn towards softer music -- country and rockabilly, the Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly -- while Jackson preferred harder, stomping, music. But it was Chris Curtis who took charge of the group's repertoire, and who was the group's unofficial leader. While the other band members had fairly mainstream musical tastes, it was Curtis who would seek out obscure R&B B-sides that he thought the group could make their own, by artists like The Clovers and Richie Barrett -- while many Liverpool groups played Barrett's "Some Other Guy", the Searchers would also play the B-side to that, "Tricky Dicky", a song written by Leiber and Stoller. Curtis also liked quite a bit of folk music, and would also get the group to perform songs by Joan Baez and Peter, Paul, and Mary. The result of this combination of material and performers was that the Searchers ended up with a repertoire rooted in R&B, and a heavy rhythm section, but with strong harmony vocals inspired more by the Everlys than by the soul groups that were inspiring the other groups around Liverpool. Other than the Beatles, the Searchers were the best harmony group in Liverpool, and were the only other one to have multiple strong lead vocalists. Like the Beatles, the Searchers went off to play at the Star Club in Hamburg in 1962. Recordings were made of their performances there, and their live version of Brenda Lee's "Sweet Nothin's" later got released as a single after they became successful: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Sweet Nothin's"] Even as every talent scout in the country seemed to be turning up in Liverpool, and even bands from nearby Manchester were getting signed up in the hope of repeating the Beatles' success, the Searchers were having no luck getting any attention from the London music industry. In part that was because of one bit of bad luck -- the day that Brian Epstein turned up to see them, with the thought of maybe managing them, Tony Jackson was drunk and fell off the stage, and Epstein decided that he was going to give them a miss. As no talent scouts were coming to see them, they decided that they would record a demo session at the Iron Door, the club they regularly played, and send that out to A&R people. That demo session produced a full short album, which shows them at their stompiest and hardest-driving. Most of the Merseybeat bands sounded much more powerful in their earlier live performances than in the studio, and the Searchers were no exception, and it's interesting to compare the sound of these recordings to the studio ones from only a few months later: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Let's Stomp"] The group eventually signed to Pye Records. Pye was the third or fourth biggest record label in Britain at the time, but that was a relative matter -- EMI and Decca between them had something like eighty-five percent of the market, and basically *were* the record industry in Britain at the time. Pye was chronically underfunded, and when they signed an artist who managed to have any success, they would tend to push that artist to keep producing as many singles as possible, chasing trends, rather than investing in their long-term career survival. That said, they did have some big acts, most notably Petula Clark -- indeed the company had been formed from the merger of two other companies, one of which had been formed specifically to issue Clark's records. Clark was yet to have her big breakthrough hit in the USA, but she'd had several big hits in the UK, including the number one hit "Sailor": [Excerpt: Petula Clark, "Sailor"] The co-producer on that track had been Tony Hatch, a songwriter and producer who would go on to write and produce almost all of Clark's hit records. Hatch had a track record of hits -- we've heard several songs he was involved in over the course of the series. Most recently, we heard last week how "She Loves You" was inspired by "Forget Him", which Hatch wrote and produced for Bobby Rydell: [Excerpt: Bobby Rydell, "Forget Him"] Hatch heard the group's demo, and was impressed, and offered to sign them. The Searchers' manager at the time agreed, on one condition -- that Hatch also sign another band he managed, The Undertakers. Astonishingly, Hatch agreed, and so the Undertakers also got a record contract, and released several flop singles produced by Hatch, including this cover version of a Coasters tune: [Excerpt: The Undertakers, "What About Us?"] The biggest mark that the Undertakers would make on music would come many years later, when their lead singer Jackie Lomax would release a solo single, "Sour Milk Sea", which George Harrison wrote for him. The Searchers, on the other hand, made their mark immediately. The group's first single was a cover version of a song written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, which had been a top twenty hit in the US for the Drifters a couple of years earlier: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Sweets For My Sweet"] That had become a regular fixture in the Searchers' live set, with Tony Jackson singing lead and Chris Curtis singing the high backing vocal part in falsetto. In much the same way that the Beatles had done with "Twist and Shout", they'd flattened out the original record's Latin cha-cha-cha rhythm into a more straightforward thumping rocker for their live performances, as you can hear on their original demo version from the Iron Door sessions: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Sweets For My Sweet (live at the Iron Door)"] As you can hear, they'd also misheard a chunk of the lyrics, and so instead of "your tasty kiss", Jackson sang "Your first sweet kiss". In the studio, they slowed the song down very slightly, and brought up the harmony vocal from Pender on the choruses, which on the demo he seems to have been singing off-mic. The result was an obvious hit: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Sweets For My Sweet"] That went to number one, helped by an endorsement from John Lennon, who said it was the best record to come out of Liverpool, and launched the Searchers into the very top tier of Liverpool groups, their only real competition being the Beatles and Gerry and the Pacemakers -- and though nobody could have known it at the time, the Pacemakers' career had already peaked at this point.  Their first album, Meet The Searchers, featured "Sweets For My Sweet", along with a selection of songs that mixed the standard repertoire of every Merseybeat band -- "Money", "Da Doo Ron Ron", "Twist and Shout", "Stand By Me", and the Everly Brothers' "Since You Broke My Heart", with more obscure songs like "Ain't Gonna Kiss Ya", by the then-unknown P.J. Proby, "Farmer John" by Don and Dewey, which hadn't yet become a garage-rock standard (and indeed seems to have become so largely because of the Searchers' version), and a cover of "Love Potion #9", a song that Leiber and Stoller had written for the Clovers, which was not released as a single in the UK, but later became their biggest hit in the US (and a quick content note for this one -- the lyric contains a word for Romani people which many of those people regard as a slur): [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Love Potion #9"] Their second single was an attempt to repeat the "Sweets For My Sweet" formula, and was written by Tony Hatch, although the group didn't know that at the time. Hatch, like many producers of the time, was used to getting his artists to record his own songs, written under pseudonyms so the record label didn't necessarily realise this was what he was doing. In this case he brought the group a song that he claimed had been written by one "Fred Nightingale", and which he thought would be perfect for them. The song in question, "Sugar and Spice", was a blatant rip-off of "Sweets For My Sweet", and recorded in a near-identical arrangement: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Sugar and Spice"] The group weren't keen on the song, and got very angry later on when they realised that Tony Hatch had lied to them about its origins, but the record was almost as big a hit as the first one, peaking at number two on the charts. But it was their third single that was the group's international breakthrough, and which both established a whole new musical style and caused the first big rift in the group. The song chosen for that third single was one they learned in Hamburg, from Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers, a London group who had recorded a few singles with Joe Meek, like "You Got What I Like": [Excerpt: Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers, "You Got What I Like"] The Rebel Rousers had picked up on a record by Jackie DeShannon, a singer-songwriter who had started up a writing partnership with Sharon Sheeley, the writer who had been Eddie Cochran's girlfriend and in the fatal car crash with him. The record they'd started covering live, though, was not one that DeShannon was the credited songwriter on. "Needles and Pins" was credited to two other writers, both of them associated with Phil Spector.  Sonny Bono was a young songwriter who had written songs at Specialty Records for people like Sam Cooke, Larry Williams, and Don and Dewey, and his most famous song up to this point was "She Said Yeah", the B-side to Williams' "Bad Boy": [Excerpt: Larry Williams, "She Said Yeah"] After working at Specialty, he'd gone on to work as Phil Spector's assistant, doing most of the hands-on work in the studio while Spector sat in the control room. While working with Spector he'd got to know Jack Nitzsche, who did most of the arrangements for Spector, and who had also had hits on his own like "The Lonely Surfer": [Excerpt: Jack Nitzsche, "The Lonely Surfer"] Bono and Nitzsche are the credited writers on "Needles and Pins", but Jackie DeShannon insists that she co-wrote the song with them, but her name was left off the credits. I tend to believe her -- both Nitzsche and Bono were, like their boss, abusive misogynist egomaniacs, and it's easy to see them leaving her name off the credits. Either way, DeShannon recorded the song in early 1963, backed by members of the Wrecking Crew, and it scraped into the lower reaches of the US Hot One Hundred, though it actually made number one in Canada: [Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, "Needles and Pins"] Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers had been covering that song, and Chris Curtis picked up on it as an obvious hit. The group reshaped the song, and fixed the main flaw with DeShannon's original.  There's really only about ninety seconds' worth of actual song in "Needles and Pins", and DeShannon's version ends with a minute or so of vamping -- it sounds like it's still a written lyric, but it's full of placeholders where entire lines are "whoa-oh", the kind of thing that someone like Otis Redding could make sound great, but that didn't really work for her record. The Searchers tightened the song up and altered its dynamics -- instead of the middle eight leading to a long freeform section, they started the song with Mike Pender singing solo, and then on the middle eight they added a high harmony from Curtis, then just repeated the first verse and chorus, in the new key of C sharp, with Curtis harmonising this time: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Needles and Pins" (middle eight on)] The addition of the harmony gives the song some much-needed dynamic variation not present in DeShannon's version, while repeating the original verse after the key change, and adding in Curtis' high harmony, gives it an obsessive quality. The protagonist here is spiralling – he keeps thinking the same things over and over, at a higher and higher pitch, getting more and more desperate. It's a simple change, but one that improves the song immensely. Incidentally, one thing I should note here because it's not something I normally do -- in these excerpts of the Searchers' version of "Needles and Pins", I'm actually modifying the recording slightly. The mix used for the original single version of the song, which is what I'm excerpting here, is marred by an incredibly squeaky bass pedal on Chris Curtis' drumkit, which isn't particularly audible if you're listening to it on early sixties equipment, which had little dynamic range, but which on modern digital copies of the track overpowers everything else, to the point that the record sounds like that Monty Python sketch where someone plays a tune by hitting mice with hammers. Here's a couple of seconds of the unmodified track, so you can see what I mean: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Needles and Pins"] Most hits compilations have a stereo mix of the song, and have EQ'd it so that the squeaky bass pedal isn't noticeable, but I try wherever possible to use the mixes that people were actually listening to at the time, so I've compromised and used the mono mix but got rid of the squeaky frequencies, so you can hear the music I'm talking about rather than being distracted by the squeaks. Anyway, leaving the issue of nobody telling Chris Curtis to oil his pedals aside, the change in the structure of the song turned it from something a little baggy and aimless into a tight two-and-a-half minute pop song, but the other major change they made was emphasising the riff, and in doing so they inadvertently invented a whole new genre of music.  The riff in DeShannon's version is there, but it's just one element -- an acoustic guitar strumming through the chords. It's a good, simple, play-in-a-day riff -- you basically hold a chord down and then move a single finger at a time and you can get that riff -- and it's the backbone of the song, but there's also a piano, and horns, and the Blossoms singing: [Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, "Needles and Pins"] But what the Searchers did was to take the riff and play it simultaneously on two electric guitars, and then added reverb. They also played the first part of the song in A, rather than the key of C which DeShannon's version starts in, which allowed the open strings to ring out more. The result came out sounding like an electric twelve-string, and soon both they and the Beatles would be regularly using twelve-string Rickenbackers to get the same sound: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Needles and Pins"] That record is the root of jangle-pop and folk-rock. That combination of jangling, reverb-heavy, trebly guitars and Everly Brothers inspired harmonies is one that leads directly to the Byrds, Love, Big Star, Tom Petty, REM, the Smiths, and the Bangles, among many others. While the Beatles were overall obviously the more influential group by a long way, "Needles and Pins" has a reasonable claim to be the most influential single track from the Merseybeat era. It went to number one in the UK, and became the group's breakthrough hit in the US, reaching number sixteen. The follow-up, "Don't Throw Your Love Away", a cover of a B-side by the Orlons, again featuring Pender on lead vocals and Curtis on harmonies, also made number one in the UK and the US top twenty, giving them a third number one out of four singles. But the next single, "Someday We're Gonna Love Again", a cover of a Barbara Lewis song, only made number eleven, and caused journalists to worry if the Searchers had lost their touch. There was even some talk in the newspapers that Mike Pender might leave the group and start a solo career, which he denied. As it turned out, one of the group's members was going to leave, but it wasn't Mike Pender. Tony Jackson had sung lead on the first two singles, and on the majority of the tracks on the first album, and he thus regarded himself as the group's lead singer. With Pender taking over the lead on the more recent hit singles, Jackson was being edged aside. By the third album, It's The Searchers, which included "Needles and Pins", Jackson was the only group member not to get a solo lead vocal -- even John McNally got one, while Jackson's only lead was an Everlys style close harmony with Mike Pender. Everything else was being sung by Pender or Curtis. Jackson was also getting involved in personality conflicts with the other band members -- at one point it actually got to the point that he and Pender had a fistfight on stage. Jackson was also not entirely keen on the group's move towards more melodic material. It's important to remember that the Searchers had started out as an aggressive, loud, R&B band, and they still often sounded like that on stage -- listen for example to their performance of "What'd I Say" at the NME poll-winners' party in April 1964, with Chris Curtis on lead vocals clearly showing why he had a reputation for eccentricity: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "What'd I Say (live)"] The combination of these musical differences and his feelings about having his place usurped meant that Jackson was increasingly getting annoyed at the other three band members. Eventually he left the group -- whether he was fired or quit depends on which version of the story you read -- and was replaced by Frank Allen of Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers.  Jackson didn't take this replacement well, and publicly went round telling people that he had been pushed out of the band so that Curtis could get his boyfriend into the band, and there are some innuendoes to this effect in Mike Pender's autobiography -- although Allen denies that he and Curtis were in a relationship, and says that he doesn't actually know what Curtis' sexuality was, because they never discussed that kind of thing, and presumably Allen would know better than anyone else whether he was in a relationship with Curtis.  Curtis is widely described as having been gay or bi by his contemporaries, but if he was he never came out publicly, possibly due to his strong religious views. There's some suggestion, indeed, that one reason Jackson ended up out of the band was that he blackmailed the band, saying that he would publicly out Curtis if he didn't get more lead vocals. Whatever the truth, Jackson left the group, and his first solo single, "Bye Bye Baby", made number thirty-eight on the charts: [Excerpt: Tony Jackson and the Vibrations, "Bye Bye Baby"] However, his later singles had no success -- he was soon rerecording "Love Potion Number Nine" in the hope that that would be a UK chart success as it had been in the US: [Excerpt: Tony Jackson and the Vibrations, "Love Potion Number Nine"] Meanwhile, Allen was fitting in well with his new group, and it appeared at first that the group's run of hits would carry on uninterrupted without Jackson. The first single by the new lineup, "When You Walk In The Room", was a cover of another Jackie DeShannon song, this time written by DeShannon on her own, and originally released as a B-side: [Excerpt: Jackie DeShannon, "When You Walk In The Room"] The Searchers rearranged that, once again emphasising the riff from DeShannon's original, and by this time playing it on real twelve-strings, and adding extra compression to them. Their version featured a joint lead vocal by Pender and Allen: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "When You Walk In the Room"] Do you think the Byrds might have heard that? That went to number three on the charts. The next single was less successful, only making number thirteen, but was interesting in other ways -- from the start, as well as their R&B covers, Curtis had been adding folk songs to the group's repertoire, and there'd been one or two covers of songs like "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" on their albums, but "What Have They Done to the Rain?" was the first one to become a single.  It was written by Malvina Reynolds, who was a socialist activist who only became a songwriter in her early fifties, and who also wrote "Morningtown Ride" and "Little Boxes". "What Have They Done to The Rain?" was a song written to oppose nuclear weapons testing, and Curtis had learned it from a Joan Baez album. Even though it wasn't as big a success as some of their other hits, given how utterly different it was from their normal style, and how controversial the subject was, getting it into the top twenty at all seems quite an achievement. [Excerpt: The Searchers, “What Have They Done To The Rain?”] Their next single, "Goodbye My Love", was their last top ten hit, and the next few singles only made the top forty, even when the Rolling Stones gave them "Take It Or Leave It". The other group members started to get annoyed at Curtis, who they thought had lost his touch at picking songs, and whose behaviour had become increasingly erratic. Eventually, on an Australian tour, they took his supply of uppers and downers, which he had been using as much to self-medicate as for enjoyment as far as I can tell, and flushed them down the toilet. When they got back to the UK, Curtis was out of the group. Their first single after Curtis' departure, "Have You Ever Loved Somebody", was given to them by the Hollies, who had originally written it as an Everly Brothers album track: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Have You Ever Loved Somebody"] Unfortunately for the Searchers, Chris Curtis had also heard the song, decided it was a likely hit, and had produced a rival version for Paul and Barry Ryan, which got rushed out to compete with it: [Excerpt: Paul and Barry Ryan, "Have You Ever Loved Somebody"] Neither single made the top forty, and the Searchers would never have a hit single again. Nor would Curtis. Curtis only released one solo single, "Aggravation", a cover of a Joe South song: [Excerpt: Chris Curtis, "Aggravation"] The musicians on that included Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and Joe Moretti, but it didn't chart. Curtis then tried to form a band, which he named Roundabout, based on the concept that musicians could hop on or hop off at any point, with Curtis as the only constant member. The guitarist and keyboard player quickly decided that it would be more convenient for them if Curtis was the one to hop off, and without Curtis Jon Lord and Richie Blackmore went on to form Deep Purple. The Searchers didn't put out another album for six years after Curtis left. They kept putting out singles on various labels, but nothing came close to charting. Their one album between 1966 and 1979 was a collection of rerecordings of their old hits, in 1972. But then in 1979 Seymour Stein, the owner of Sire Records, a label which was having success with groups like the Ramones, Talking Heads, and the Pretenders, was inspired by the Ramones covering "Needles and Pins" to sign the Searchers to a two-album deal, which produced records that fit perfectly into the late seventies New Wave pop landscape, while still sounding like the Searchers: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Hearts in Her Eyes"] Apparently during those sessions, Curtis, who had given up music and become a civil servant, would regularly phone the studio threatening to burn it down if he wasn't involved. Unfortunately, while those albums had some critical success, they did nothing commercially, and Sire dropped them. By 1985, the Searchers were at breaking point. They hadn't recorded any new material in several years, and Mike Pender and John McNally weren't getting on at all -- which was a particular problem as the two of them were now the only two members based in Liverpool, and so they had to travel to and from gigs together without the other band members -- the group were so poor that McNally and Pender had one car between the two of them. One of them would drive them both to the gig, the other would drive back to Liverpool and keep the car until the next gig, when they would swap over again. No-one except them knows what conversations they had on those long drives, but apparently they weren't amicable. Pender thought of himself as the star of the group, and he particularly resented that he had to split the money from the band three ways (the drummers the group got in after Curtis were always on a salary rather than full partners in the group). Pender decided that he could make more money by touring on his own but still doing essentially the same show, with hired backing musicians. Pender and the other Searchers eventually reached an agreement that he could tour as "Mike Pender's Searchers", so long as he made sure that all the promotional material put every word at the same size, while the other members would continue as The Searchers with a new singer. A big chunk of the autobiographies of both Pender and Allen are taken up with the ensuing litigation, as there were suits and countersuits over matters of billing which on the outside look incredibly trivial, but which of course mattered greatly to everyone involved -- there were now two groups with near-identical names, playing the same sets, in the same venues, and so any tiny advantage that one had was a threat to the other, to the extent that at one point there was a serious danger of Pender going to prison over their contractual disputes. The group had been earning very little money anyway, comparatively, and there was a real danger that the two groups undercutting each other might lead to everyone going bankrupt. Thankfully, that didn't happen. Pender still tours -- or at least has tour dates booked over the course of the next year -- and McNally and Allen's band continued playing regularly until 2019, and only stopped performing because of McNally's increasing ill health. Having seen both, Pender's was the better show -- McNally and Allen's lineup of the group relied rather too heavily on a rather cheesy sounding synthesiser for my tastes, while Pender stuck closer to a straight guitar/bass/drums sound -- but both kept audiences very happy for decades. Mike Pender was made an MBE in 2020, as a reward for his services to the music industry. Tony Jackson and Chris Curtis both died in the 2000s, and John McNally and Frank Allen are now in well-deserved retirement. While Allen and Pender exchanged pleasantries and handshakes at their former bandmates' funerals, McNally and Pender wouldn't even say hello to each other, and even though McNally and Allen's band has retired, there's still a prominent notice on their website that they own the name "The Searchers" and nobody else is allowed to use it. But every time you hear a jangly twelve-string electric guitar, you're hearing a sound that was originally created by Mike Pender and John McNally playing in unison, a sound that proved to be greater than any of its constituent parts.

Charles Barrett formed The Barrett Company publicity firm in 1991 after holding top public relations positions with NBC for more than a decade.He was in charge of media relations for shows including The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, The Today Show, Unsolved Mysteries, and Fame as well as numerous highly rated NBC specials, including The American Film Institute Awards and The American Movie Awards.While based in New York City, Charlie served as a book publicist to many major publishers from Scribner to Random House and masterminded publicity campaigns for a number of best-selling authors.He has also held executive media relations posts with 20th Century Fox Film Corporation in New York and Capitol Records in Hollywood, New York and London, where he helped launch recorded music by The Beatles, The Band, Joe South, Freda Payne, Bobbie Gentry, Glen Campbell and many other acts.Charlie began his media career as a reporter with The Associated Press in New Haven, CT and later served on the editorial staffs of both The Hollywood Reporter in Los Angeles and Billboard in New York. He has also authored numerous articles for magazines and newspapers on the performing arts and travel, as well as appearing as a contributor on major US TV and radio talk shows discussing celebrities, films, television and books.Among his honors is the “Book Publicist of the Year” award given by The Book Publicists of Southern California.http://thebarrettco.com/charles-barrett/If you have a comment about this episode or any other, please click the link below.https://ratethispodcast.com/douglascolemanshow

Charles Barrett formed The Barrett Company publicity firm in 1991 after holding top public relations positions with NBC for more than a decade.He was in charge of media relations for shows including The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, The Today Show, Unsolved Mysteries, and Fame as well as numerous highly rated NBC specials, including The American Film Institute Awards and The American Movie Awards.While based in New York City, Charlie served as a book publicist to many major publishers from Scribner to Random House and masterminded publicity campaigns for a number of best-selling authors.He has also held executive media relations posts with 20th Century Fox Film Corporation in New York and Capitol Records in Hollywood, New York and London, where he helped launch recorded music by The Beatles, The Band, Joe South, Freda Payne, Bobbie Gentry, Glen Campbell and many other acts.Charlie began his media career as a reporter with The Associated Press in New Haven, CT and later served on the editorial staffs of both The Hollywood Reporter in Los Angeles and Billboard in New York. He has also authored numerous articles for magazines and newspapers on the performing arts and travel, as well as appearing as a contributor on major US TV and radio talk shows discussing celebrities, films, television and books.Among his honors is the “Book Publicist of the Year” award given by The Book Publicists of Southern California.http://thebarrettco.com/charles-barrett/If you have a comment about this episode or any other, please click the link below.https://ratethispodcast.com/douglascolemanshow

Label: Columbia 45453Year: 1971Condition: MPrice: $9.00From a warehouse find, this is a new, unplayed stock copy, in its original factory sleeve. Extremely catchy bubblegum-style rock, written by Joe South, with an equally catchy, bubblegummy instrumental on the flip! This single was credited to just "Raiders." Note: This beautiful copy has no notable flaws, grading Mint across the board (Labels, Vinyl (styrene), Audio).

Hoy queremos volver a señalar que el tema instrumental que abre y cierre cada uno de nuestros programas fue un regalo exclusivo de un gran amigo como Tony Luz, pionero del rock ‘n’ roll en España. Él fue autor e intérprete único de la sintonía de TOMA UNO. Y Tony Luz murió hace exactamente tres años, por lo que queremos compartir con vosotros lo mucho que le echamos de menos desde entonces. El 29 de noviembre de 1975, hace exactamente 45 años, Neil Young grabó "Like a Hurricane" en el Broken Arrow Ranch in Woodside, California, aunque no saldría a la luz hasta dos años más tarde, cuando se editó en single y formó parte del álbum American Stars 'n Bars. El noveno de los 10 discos que componen el segundo volumen de sus Neil Young Archives recién publicado, se abre con aquella canción que el canadiense compuso en la parte trasera de un DeSoto Suburban, el coche de finales de los años 40 que pertenecía a su vecino Taylor Phelps en La Honda, un pequeño pueblo del condado de San Mateo, en California. Por entonces se estaba recuperando de una operación en las cuerdas vocales que le impedían cantar y toda su energía la expresaba a través de la guitarra. Cubriendo tan solo cuatro años de su carrera, de 1972 a 1976, en el segundo volumen de su entrega de archivos personales, Neil Young se fija en la que todos consideramos su etapa más prolífica, e incluye 12 canciones nunca lanzadas en ningún formato, mientras que 50 son versiones inéditas de canciones conocidas. Entre los temas no publicados hasta ahora encontramos esta grabación junto a su paisana Joni Mitchell, que el 26 de agosto de 1973, llegó al Studio Instrument Rentals de Los Ángeles, donde Neil Young estaba sacando adelante Tonight’s the Night junto a los guitarristas Ben Keith y Nils Lofgren, el batería Ralph Molina y el bajista Billy Talbot. Es decir los Santa Monica Flyers. En aquel estudio surgió una versión desconocida hasta ahora de “Raised on Robbery”, la conversación de una prostituta que intenta ligar con un hombre solitario en un hotel, sin éxito. Al año siguiente sería el single de anticipo del álbum Court and Spark de la también artista canadiense. Kindred Spirits es uno de los discos de versiones más interesantes que hemos escuchado en mucho tiempo. Larkin Poe, sus protagonistas, han utilizado la variedad de estilos elegidos para moverse por una variedad de amplios espacios sonoros que abarca desde Robert Johnson a Post Malone, pasando por Lenny Kravitz, Allman Brothers, Elvis Presley, Elton John, los Moody Blues, Derek And The Dominos y Neil Young. En este último caso, las hermanas Lovell han elegido “Rockin’ In The Free World”, una canción que partió de una frase de Frank Sampedro cuando pensaban hacer un concierto en la Unión Soviética en 1989 y que formó parte en su álbum Freedom, con dos versiones, una eléctrica y otra acústica al estilo de “Hey Hey My My” en Rust Never Sleep. Hablaba de George Bush padre, del Ayatollah Khomeini y de Jesse Jackson. Cuando Trump se presentó a las elecciones en 2016 utilizó la canción contra la voluntad del canadiense. Kelsey Waldon fue el único fichaje en vida de John Prine de su sello Oh Boy!, por deseo expreso de su dueño, el fallecido músico de Illinois a causa del COVID-19. Nativa de Monkey’s Eyebrow, en Kentucky, tiene una extraordinaria capacidad para componer canciones muy personales que abarcan las más distintas facetas de la condición humana desde su visión como sureña de un país como el suyo. Es por eso que los derechos humanos se han convertido en uno de los focos de su último EP, They’ll Never Keep Us Down, donde canta sobre la injusticia racial o las condiciones laborales de los mineros del carbón de su tierra natal. Para ello se ha acogido a siete canciones de músicos tan dispares como Nina Simone, Hazel Dickens, Bob Dylan, Neil Young o Kristofferson. Su versión de "I Wish I Knew How It would Feel to Be Free", un tema que se convirtió en himno en pro de los derechos civiles en Estados Unidos durante los años 60 y que Nina Simone hizo muy popular en el 67, ha contado con Devon Gilfillian en el apoyo vocal. El pasado jueves 12, Lucinda Williams hizo público el segundo de los seis conciertos temáticos que ha grabado con el título de Lu's Jukebox en apoyo de promotores y salas de conciertos y que irá distribuyendo hasta finales de año. Esta vez se trataba de Southern Soul From Memphis To Muscle Shoals And More, con una selección de 10 versiones e canciones de rhythm and blues y una de cierre que suponía recordar su álbum Car Wheels on a Gravel Road gracias a “Still I Long for Your Kiss”. Lucinda recordó a Brook Benton, Ann Pebbles, Etta James, Al Green, Otis Redding, Bobby Gentry o Joe South entre otros y, por supuesto, no olvidó a Barbara Lynn, cuyo “You’ll Lose a Good Thing” de 1962 también cantó Aretha Franklin e incluso fue versionada por Freddy Fender en el 1976, llevándola al No.1 de las listas de country. La canción que anticipó el último álbum de Lucinda Williams, Good Souls Better Angels, fue "Man Without A Soul", tres años después de que revisara aquel Sweet Old World de 1992. En ese registro se dedicó a abordar los problemas que les son más cercanos y, por supuesto, no ha podido obviar las cuestiones políticas, un terreno en el que, además, entró en profundidad. Hablamos de un disco con evidentes tintes de blues, elementos de rock y un poderoso protagonismo de la guitarra de Stuart Mathis. Ahora esa canción ha obtenido una nominación al premio Grammy a la mejor canción de raíz Americana, compartido con su marido, Tom Overby, que compuso el tema con ella. Desde Carolina del Sur, el guitarrista Marcus King se ha convertido en una de las grandes realidades de la música Americana con acento sureño. Ahora al lado del productor Dan Auerbach, ha conseguido precisamente la nominación al mejor álbum de Americana con El Dorado, el primero de sus álbumes como solista tras su etapa como cabeza visible de la Marcus King Band. Un disco que incluye piezas tan rotundas como “The Well”, compuesta por él, Auerbach y Ronnie Bowman, que sirvió en su momento como primera escucha del trabajo con un impactante trabajo a la guitarra. Acaba de cumplir 28 años y Billy Strings, que recibió el apodo de su tía, se ha convertido en un instrumentista con una envidiable habilidad para interpretar las distintas formas en que se manifiesta el bluegrass. Este joven músico de Lansing, en el estado de Michigan, es la gran realidad de un género muy revitalizado en este siglo XXI. Home, su último álbum, aspira a llevarse un Grammy como mejor álbum de bluegrass, un regalo sonoro impregnado de miradas al pasado que recuerdan a las jam bands, y también a los grandes del jazz o del bluegrass. Son los sonidos puros que, como en “Hollow Heart”, memorizan de dónde viene y le activan a encontrar nuevos horizontes. Si la Country Music Association se olvidó mencionar a John Prine en su última gala de entrega de premios, la Academia de la Música no lo ha hecho y ha nominado al Grammy al artista como mejor interpretación de Americana del año por “I Remember Everything”, la última canción grabada por el mítico artista que nos arrebató el Covid-19 el pasado mes de abril. Competirá también con Lucinda Williams y su marido para lograr ser la mejor canción de raíz Americana. "I Remember Everything" está compuesta por Prine y su buen amigo Pat McLaughlin, contando recuerdos del pasado que dejan una marca indeleble.  En enero de 2018, la USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative publicó un estudio sobre la industria musical, señalando que la mujer necesitaba un mínimo de seis años para situarse al mismo nivel del hombre. She Is The Music, es una organización que busca cerrar esa brecha, apoyando a las mujeres en todos los aspectos de la industria de la música, aumentando sus oportunidades y su visibilidad, procurando que la próxima generación de mujeres consiga roles de liderazgo en esa industria. The Highwomen han tomado la iniciativa junto a She Is The Music para organizar campus de composición femeninos y ayudar a financiar programas de tutoría. “Crowded Table”, una canción que Natalie Hemby y Brandi Carlile han compuesto con Lori McKenna y que se ha convertido en todo un himno desde que las escucharon estrenarlo en el Newport Folk Festival del año pasado. Ahora, sus tres compositoras aspiran a llevarse el Grammy como mejor canción country. A lo largo de su carrera, Linda Ronstadt ha cantado temas de todos los estilos musicales imaginables, desde country a ópera y comedia musical, pasando por folk, rhythm'n'blues, rock'n'roll, pop o música latina. En todos los casos, su voz ha brillado tanto que se ha convertido en una de las vocalistas femeninas de mayor prestigio. Su segundo álbum en solitario, Silk Purse, cumplió esta primavera medio siglo desde su publicación, siendo recordado por canciones como “Long Long Time”, una balada exquisita que llegó a ser nominada a los premios Grammy y en el que hablaba de haber hecho todo lo posible por retener a su pareja. Ahora, 50 años después, la legendaria artista de Arizona ve como su documental Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice está nominada para llevarse el fonógrafo dorado como mejor película musical.   Escuchar audio

Sign on the Window isn't the Bob Dylan podcast you need, but it's definitely the one that you want! Each week we select a Dylan song at random, live with the song for a week (or two) and then get together to discuss. This week we visit Dylan's first song from his first album, "You're No Good." In this episode, we explore: Context (5:30) Jesse Fuller (9:40) Song Itself(15:40) We talk about our playlist (28:00, recommendation lots of things — from Alone to Touché Amoré to Hunting of Bly Manor to Nina Simone and Joe South (34:00), before picking our final song of 2020 (46:00) As always, full show notes at our website. You can also follow along with our weekly real-time Spotify playlist – See That My Playlist is Kept Clean – or listen to our dedicated playlist for this episode – and join the conversation on the usual suspects: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. And if you're loving us, consider our Patreon. For as little as one dollar you get early access to every episode we do as soon as they're edited (and a dedicated feed just for you) and exclusive content that'll only ever be on Patreon. Thanks! Next episode: I feel a chilly breeze / In place of memories / My dreams are locked and barred

Label: Tetragrammaton 1503Year: 1968Condition: M-Last Price: $23.00. Not currently available for sale.On Deep Purple's first U.S. chart single, an epic cover of Joe South's "Hush" (originally recorded by Billy Joe Royal) is backed with a brooding, tuneful power pop track that will quickly become a favorite! Have a listen to the mp3 snippet in our "jukebox" to hear what we mean (the snippet skips the rain sound effects that open the track). Note: This beautiful copy has Mint labels and very nearly Mint-looking vinyl (styrene). The audio is pristine except for a touch of surface noise during the quiet intro to each track.

Uur 1 1. The singing hills – Bing Crosby 2. That’s the way I’ve always heard it should be – Carly Simon 3. Morna – Luz Casal & Buika 4. Treinen – Harrie Jekkers 5. Monkey business – Fats Domino 6. For all you give – Paper Kites & Lucy Rose 7. Vocalise/The end of the line – Lizz Wright 8. Fallin’ rain – Father John Misty 9. Saturne – Georges Brassens 10. Onweer – Ronnie Potsdammer 11. That’s that – Rumer 12. Wild horses – Gino Vanelli 13. Cantico delle creature – Angelo Branduardi 14. Rock-a-bye your baby with a dixie melody – Aretha Franklin Uur 2 1. Tell me why – Neil Young 2. Malaika – Miriam Makeba 3. The sweetest gift – Kris Berry 4. Man op it san – Nynke Laverman 5. Have a little faith in me – John Hiatt 6. Underwater – Sofia Dragt 7. Galupa – Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu 8. Tot de maan en terug – Paul de Leeuw & Simone Kleinsma 9. Steppin’ out with my baby – Tony Bennett 10. Supper time – Barbra Streisand 11. Mais je t’aime – Grand Corps Malade & Camille Lellouche 12. De goudvis – Senne Guns 13. Little something – Melody Gardot & Sting 14. Rose garden – Joe South

It's the Spring Pledge Drive wind-down as Dan takes another Covaid 19 solo ride that begins with an REM bike riding song, flows through a Tom Waits pair and ends up with a classic from Joe South, while Hank sits at home helplessly, ordering his new grooming kit.

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Vandaag met muziek van Dave Simontett, Sonyy Landreth, Joe South, Waco Brother, Chuck Prophet, Frankie Lee en Robert Cray Band.

This week, Larry dips into the crates for the songs of Joe South, Tony Joe White, Esquerita and New arrivals!Tune into new broadcasts of Funky 16 Corners every Monday from 8 - 9 PM EST / 1 - 2 AM GMT (Tuesday).For a complete track listing, visit: https://thefaceradio.com Instagram: @funky16cornersMixcloud: funky16cornersradioshowTwitter: @Funky16CornersEmail: funky16corners@thefaceradio.comWeb: www.funky16corners.com Support The Face Radio with Patreon See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Je hoort muziek van Drive-by Truckers, Bonzo Dog Doodah Band, Sam Baker, Sean Costello en een nooit uitgebrachte opname van Joe South.