Podcast appearances and mentions of John Payne

Francis Franklin, father of Eliza, was born on December 9, 1772 in Mursley, Buckinghamshire. He was the youngest of seven children; his parents being William and Mary Franklin. Just before he turned 15 he moved to Oxford to apprentice as a cabinet and chair maker to his cousin, John Payne. He regularly attended the parish church, as he had been raised, but found the Baptist ministry of James Hinton to be more useful. He also took up the habit of reading, especially George Whitefield's sermons. For more information, visit CBTSeminary.org

Francis Franklin, father of Eliza, was born on December 9, 1772 in Mursley, Buckinghamshire. He was the youngest of seven children; his parents being William and Mary Franklin. Just before he turned 15 he moved to Oxford to apprentice as a cabinet and chair maker to his cousin, John Payne. He regularly attended the parish church, as he had been raised, but found the Baptist ministry of James Hinton to be more useful. He also took up the habit of reading, especially George Whitefield's sermons. For more information, visit CBTSeminary.org

Scripture dives deep into what it means to be the family of God. We're not just called to gather—we're called to love, honor, forgive, and build one another up. True fellowship flows from our relationship with the Father and reflects in how we treat our brothers and sisters in Christ. Let's paint a picture of unity and grace today with Pastor John—one brushstroke at a time.1 John 1:1-3 John 13:34 John 15:12 Romans 12:10 1 Thessalonians 5:11 Romans 14:19 Hebrews 10:24 Ephesians 4:32 Colossians 3:13 James 5:16 Hebrews 10:25 Proverbs 27:17 Acts 2:44-45 James 2:15-16 Galatians 6:2 Romans 15:1 1 John 1:7

“The Tragic Life of Classic Cinema Star Gail Russell” (082) - 4/07/2025 Hollywood legend has it that ethereal beauty GAIL RUSSELL was discovered after a Paramount Studios talent manager picked up two hitchhiking Santa Monica high school boys who told him all about the "Hedy Lamarr of Santa Monica High School." Allegedly, he then tracked down Russell at school and arranged for a screen test. The rest, as they say, is Hollywood history. If only it had been that easy. Russell, who was painfully shy and had no interest in a career as an actress was pushed in front of the camera by her ambitious mother and the executives at Paramount who saw dollar signs in her startling blue eyes. This week, we explore the life and career of one of Hollywood's most tragic beauties, GAIL RUSSELL.  SHOW NOTES:  Sources: Fallen Star: A Biography of Gail Russell (2016), by Steven Glenn Ochoa; John Wayne: The Life and Legend (2015), by Scott Erman; It's the Pictures That Got Smaller: Charles Brackett on Billy Wilder (2104), edited by Anthony Slide; “Paramount Official Biography of Gail Russell,” March 1940, Paramount Pictures; “Gail Russell,” May 1971, by Jim Meyer, Film Fan Monthly; “Stars Attend Funeral of Gail Russell,” August 30, 1961, Los Angeles Times; “Private Rites Scheduled Today for Gail Russell,” August 29, 1961, Los Angeles Times; “Gail Russell Found Dead At Home,” May 28, 1961, Los Angeles Times; “Gail Russell Threatens to Sue on Wayne Case Charge,” October 21, 1953, The Los Angeles Evening Herald & Express; “Gail Russell Held On Drunk Driving Charges,” November 25, 1953, Los Angeles Times; “Film Star Gail Russell Jailed As Drunk Driver,” November 25, 1953, LA Daily News; “Gail Russell Fights Drunk Driving Charge; Trial Set,” November 27, 1953, The Los Angeles Evening Herald & Express; “Gail Russell Charges $150 Drunk Charge,” January 18, 1954, The Los Angeles Evening Herald & Express; Wikipedia.com; TCM.com; IMDBPro.com; Movies Mentioned:  Henry Aldrich Gets Glamour (1943), starring James Lydon & Diana Lynn; Lady In The Dark (1944), starring Ginger Rogers & Ray Milland; The Uninvited (1944), starring Ray Milland, Ruth Hussey, & Gail Russell; Our Hearts Were Young And Gay (1944), starring Gail Russell & Diana Lynn; Salty O'Rourke (1945), starring Alan Ladd & Gail Russell; The Unseen (1945), starring Joel McCrea & Gail Russell; Our Hearts Were Growing Up (1946), starring Gail Russell & Diana Lynn; Calcutta (1947), starring Alan Ladd & Gail Russell; Angel And The Badman (1947), starring John Wayne & Gail Russell; Night Has A Thousand Eyes (1948), starring Edward G. Robinson, Gail Russell, & JohnLund; Moonrise (1948), starring Dane Clark & Gail Russell; Wake of the Red Witch (1948), starring John Wayne & Gail Russell; Song of India (1949), starring Turban Bey & Gail Russell; El Paso (1949), starring John Wayne, Sterling Hayden, & Gail Russell; The Great Dan Patch (1949), starring Dennis O'Keefe; Captain China (1950), starring John Payne & Gail Russell; 7 Men From Now (1956), starring Randolph Scott & Gail Russell; The Tattered Dress (1957), starring Jeff Chandler & Jeanne Crain; The Silent Call (1961), starring Gail Russell & Roger Mobley --------------------------------- http://www.airwavemedia.com Please contact sales@advertisecast.com if you would like to advertise on our podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Comedy and Westerns on a ThursdayFirst a look at this day in History.Then The Screen Directors Playhouse, originally broadcast April 3, 1949, 76 years ago, Ghost Breakers starring Bob Hope. Based on the 1940 American mystery/horror comedy film directed by George Marshall and starring Bob Hope.  A radio broadcaster, his quaking manservant and an heiress investigate the mystery of a haunted castle in Cuba.Followed by The Joan Davis Show, originally broadcast April 3, 1948,  77 years ago, Is Joan Married to John Payne?  Joan has bragged to her old friend that she's married to John Payne...and now she's got to deliver!Then Gunsmoke starring William Conrad, originally broadcast April 3, 1954, 71 years ago, Mr. and Mrs. Amber.  After Neil Amber is caught stealing seeds from the General Store, Pete Fletcher, a wealthy rancher, accuses Amber's wife of stealing one of his calves.Followed by Have Gun Will Travel starring John Dehner, originally broadcast April 3, 1960, 65 years ago, Shanghai is a Verb.  Hey Boy has disappeared from the Barbary Coast. Bubonic plague and a shanghai ensue. Finally Lum and Abner, originally broadcast April 3, 1942, 83 years ago, RKO Studios Premiere.   Here's a suggestion for what to do with the $10,000: everyone in Pine Ridge (including Clark Gable and Grover Cleveland!) wants a new pinball machine! The new Lum and Abner movie ("The Bashful Bachelor") is about to premiere. Find the movie on YouTube here…  https://youtu.be/ANsf_axGe6g?si=m_W__6fkvwjv4jwaThanks to Sean for supporting our podcast by using the Buy Me a Coffee function at http://classicradio.streamFind the Family Fallout Shelter Booklet Here: https://www.survivorlibrary.com/library/the_family_fallout_shelter_1959.pdfhttps://wardomatic.blogspot.com/2006/11/fallout-shelter-handbook-1962.htmlAnd more about the Survive-all Fallout Sheltershttps://conelrad.blogspot.com/2010/09/mad-men-meet-mad-survive-all-shelter.html

"STRANGE CHARACTERS: WHAT IS FILM NOIR? (PART II)" (079) Welcome to the second episode of our special 3-part series on Film Noir. In this episode, we'll explore the iconic character types that define the genre—characters who live in the grey areas of morality, driven by desire, deceit, and danger. From the hard-boiled detective to the femme fatale, we'll unpack the timeless archetypes that give film noir its signature edge. So, grab your trench coat, dim the lights, and join us as we explore the complex, shadowy figures who walk the fine line between good and evil in the world of noir cinema. SHOW NOTES:  Sources: Film Noir (2017), by Alian Silver & James Ursini; Into the Darkness: The Hidden World of Film Noir 1941-1959 (2016), by Mark A. Viera; More than Night: film Noir in Its Contexts (2008), by James Naremore; Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir (1998), by Eddie Muller; Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir (1989), by J.P. Telotte; Film Noir: An Encyclopedia Reference to the American Style (1979), edited by Alain Silver & Elizabeth Ward; Wikipedia.com; TCM.com; IMDBPro.com; Movies Mentioned:  Born To Kill (1947), starring Lawrence Tierney & Claire Trevor; Murder My Sweet (1944), starring Dick Powell & Claire Trevor; They Drive By Night (1940), starring George Raft & Ann Sheridan; Thieves Highway (1949), starring Richard Conte & Valentina Cortese; Body and Soul (1947), starring John Garfield & Lilli Palmer; The Killers (1946), starring Burt Lancaster & Ava Gardner; The Set-Up (1949), starring Robert Ryan & Audrey Totter;  Act of Violence (1948), starring Van Heflin, Robert Mitchum, Janet Leigh & Mary Astor; In a Lonely Place (1950), starring Humphrey Bogart & Gloria Grahame; Nightmare Alley (1947(, starring Tyrone Power & Coleen Gray; Leave Her To Heaven (1944), starring Gene Tierney, Cornel Wilde & Jeanne Crain; The Lady From Shanghai (1947), starring Orson Welles & Rita Hayworth; Out of the Past (1947), starring Robert Mitchum & Jane Greer; Scarlet Street (1947), starring Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett & Dan Duryea; Detour (1945), starring Tom Neal & Ann Savage;  Dead Reckoning (1947), starring Humphrey Bogart & Lizabeth Scott; Criss Cross (1949), starring Burt Lancaster & Yvonne DeCarlo; Gun Crazy (1950), starring John Dall & Peggy Cummins; The Killing (1956), starring Sterling Hayden & Coleen Gray; Impact (1949), starring Brian Donlevy & Ella Raines; Kiss of Death (1947), starring Victor Mature, Richard Widmark & Coleen Gray; Kansas City Confidential (1952), starring John Payne & Coleen Gray; Raw Deal (1948), starring Dennis O'Keefe, Claire Trevor & Marsha Hunt; Phantom Lady (1944), starring Ella Raines & Alan Curtis; They Live By Night (1948), starring Farley Granger & Cathy O'Donnell; Fallen Angel (1945), starring Dana Andrews, Alice Faye & Linda Darnell; White Heat (1949), starring James Cagney, Virginia Mayo & Margaret Wycherly; Night In The City (1950), starring Richard Widmark & Gene Tierney; The Big Combo (1955), starring Cornell Wilde, Jean Wallace, Richard Conte & Helen Walker; Pick Up On South Street (1953), starring Richard Widmark, Jean Peters, & Thelma Ritter; Too Late For Tears (1949), starring Lizabeth Scott & Dan Duryea: The Woman In The Window (1944), starring Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, & Dan Duryea; Manhandled (1949), starring Sterling Hayden, Dorothy Lamour & Dan Duryea; Desert Fury (1947), starring Burt Lancaster & Lizabeth Scott; The Letter (1940), starring Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall, & Gale Sondergaard; --------------------------------- http://www.airwavemedia.com Please contact sales@advertisecast.com if you would like to advertise on our podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Get your brandy and bread roll (or ice cream) and join us as we chat about Forgotten Lady starring Janet Leigh, Peter Falk, John Payne, Maurice Evans, Sam Jaffe and more.  We discuss Tony Curtis's autobiography, 1970s fashion, Pasadena filming locations, bloopers and much, much more.  Some of the films and books we discuss: -Crime and Misdemeanors -Tony Curtis's autobiography -Good Fellas -The Party, starring Alma the maid -The Last Show Girl, starring Janet Leigh -There really was a Hollywood, Janet Leigh's autobiography and more! Our most recent podcast episode is available wherever you listen!  Or click the link in our bio!   And for our Patreon listeners, our full uncut video podcast is available now on Patreon! Check out photos from the show on our Instagram - @trenchcoatcigar .   We have EXCLUSIVE content available on Patreon!  Get video recordings of the podcast & monthly updates & behind the scenes. Head to https://patreon.com/trenchcoatcigar to join today!   If you'd like to add to our conversation, you can email us at trenchcoatcigar@gmail.com.   Get podcast merch on RedBubble: https://www.redbubble.com/people/trenchcoatcigar/shop?asc=u  

Assistant Chief John Payne of Bremerton Fire Department discusses individual leadership growth and becoming the leader you are supposed to be, not the leader that someone else is. Lead "your way" and understand that there are leadership lessons everywhere around you. Find them, extract them, and use what works for you! Leaders should "Provide Vision and Allow Action!"

"MARY BETH HUGHES - CLASSIC CINEMA STAR OF THE MONTH" - 3/03/2025 For those of you who don't know the charms of MARY BETH HUGHES, when she was under contract at MGM, she was dubbed "the poor man's LANA TURNER." It was a rather unfair assessment since MGM gave Lana all the plum roles, and Mary Beth got her hand-me-downs. But still, Mary Beth had great comic chops, and no one played bitchy, hard-boiled blondes as well as she. Despite her beauty and talent, she never managed to get out of B-pictures. She did have small parts in great films like The Women (1939) and The Ox-Bow Incident (1942). She played the good girl as often as she played the bad girl, but when she played bad....you were in for a treat. Her pouty lips, snappy dialogue, and petulant attitude lit up many a lackluster production. This week, we celebrate her as our Star of the Month. SHOW NOTES:  Sources: The Official Mary Beth Hughes Website; “Mary Beth Hughes, Born in Alton, Benign Groomed for Stardom in Movies,” January 4, 1939, Alton Evening Telegraph; “Mary Beth Hughes,” October 1971, by T.P. Turton, Films in Review; “Mary Beth Hughes Stars In A New Shampoo,” December 20, 1976, People Magazine; Mary Beth Hughes: She Never Gave Up,” December 2015, by Dave White, Classic Images; “The Look of Mary Beth Hughes,” June 6, 2019, www.grandoldmovies.com; http://www.briansdriveintheater.com/marybethhughes.html Wikipedia.com; TCM.com; IMDBPro.com; Movies Mentioned:  The Women (1939), starring Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, & Rosalind Russell; The Ox-Bow Incident (1942), starring Henry Fonda, Harry Morgan, Dana Andrews, MBH, & Anthony Quinn; Broadway Serenade (1939), starring Jeanette MacDonald & Lew Ayres; Dancing Co-Ed (1939), starring Lana Turner & Richard Carlson;  These Glamour Girls (1939), starring Lana Turner & Lew Ayres: Fast and Furious (1939), starring Franchot Tone & Ann Sothern; Free, Blonde & 21 (1940), starring Lynn Bari, MBH, & Joan Davis; Star Dust (1940), starring Linda Darnell & John Payne; Four Sons (1940), starring Don Ameche, Alan Curtis, Eugenia Leontivich, & MBH; Lucky Cisco Kid (1940), starring Cesar Romero, Dana Andrews, & MBH; The Great Profile (1940), staring John Barrymore & MBH; Sleepers West (1941), starring Lloyd Nolan & MBH:  Ride on Vaquero (1941), starring Cesar Romero & MBHs; Charlie Chan In Rio (191410, starring Sidney Toler & MBH; Dressed To Kill (1941), starring Lloyd Nolan & MBH; Design For Scandal (1941), starring Rosalind Russell & Walter Pidgeon; The Cowboy and The Blonde (1941), starring MBH & George Montgomery; Blue, White, and Perfect, (1942), starring Lloyd Nolan & MBH; The Night Before The Divorce (1942), starring Lynn Bari, Joseph Allen, & MBH; Orchestra Wives (1942), starring Ann Rutherford & George Montgomery: Over My Dead Body (1942), starring Milton Berle & MBH; Timber Queen (1944), starring Richard Arlen & MBH; Men On Her Mind (1944), starring MBH; I Accuse My Parents, (1944), starring MBH & Robert Lowell; The Lady Confesses (1945), starring MBH & Hugh Beaumont; The Great Flamarion (1945), starring Erich von Stroheim, MBH, & Dan Duryea; Holiday Rhythm (1950), starring MBH & David Street; Young Man With A Horn (1950), starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, & Doris Day; Highway Dragnet (1954), starring Richard Conte & Joan Bennett; Loophole (1955), starring Barry Sullivan, Charles MacGraw, & Dorothy Malone; Gun Battle At Monterey (1957), starring Sterling Hayden & MBH; How's Your Love Life? (1971), starring John Agar, Leslie Brooks, Grant Willians, & MBH; The Working Girls (1974), starring Sarah Kennedy, Laurie Rose, & Cassandra Peterson; --------------------------------- http://www.airwavemedia.com Please contact sales@advertisecast.com if you would like to advertise on our podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"THE NICHOLAS BROTHERS: CLASSIC CINEMA STARS OF THE MONTH" The Nicholas Brothers, FAYARD and HAROLD, are arguably two of the greatest dancer to ever hit Hollywood. Born to musician parents, they learned their craft working the vaudeville scene and appearing at the famous Cotten Club during the Harlem Renaissance before landing in Hollywood. In Tinseltown, they made movie magic dancing in some of Hollywood's biggest musicals. The brothers mixed tap-dancing with acrobatics to perfect thrilling routines that we're still win awe of today. They also had to endure the limits put upon them by the racism of the day. Join us this week, as we celebrate these icons of dance who are our Stars of the Month.  SHOW NOTES:  Sources: Brotherhood in Rhythm: The Tap Dancing of the Nicholas Brothers (2002), by Constance Valis Hill; Dorothy Dandridge: An Intimate Biography (1970), by Earl Mills; “The Nicholas Brothers, Fayard and Harold: Tap Dance Legends,” February 17, 2024, Dance Mogul magazine; “The Incredible Nicholas Brothers: A Classic Hollywood Black Dance Duo Everyone Should Be Obsessed With,” October 30, 2022, by Maureen Lee Lenker, Entertainment Weekly; “The Nicholas Brothers: Every Generations Dance Heroes,” February 17, 2020, by Najja Parker, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution; “Celebrating The Nicholas Brothers,” September 16, 2011, by Daniel Eagan, Smithsonian magazine; www.nicholasbrothers.com TCM.com; IMDBPro.com; IBDB.com; Wikipedia.com; AcademyMuseum.com Movies Mentioned:  Pie Pie Blackbird  (1932) - starring Nina Mae McKinney & The Nicholas Brothers; Stoopnocracy (1933), starring Budd Hulick & Harold Nicholas; The Emperor Jones (1933), starring Paul Robeson & Harold Nicholas; Kid Millions (1934), starring Eddie Cantor, Ann Sothern, & Ethel Merman; Jealousy (1934), starring Nancy Kelly & George Murphy; The Big Broadcast of 1936 (1935), starring Jack Oakie, George Burns, Gracie Allen, Bing Crosby, & Ethel Merman; Coronado (1935), starring Johnny Downs; My American Wife (1936), starring Francis Lederer & Ann Sothern; Don't Gamble with Love (1936) starring Ann Sothern; Babes in Arms (1937), starring Mickey Rooney & Judy Garland; Down Argentine Way (1940), starring Betty Grable, Don Ameche, Carmen Miranda, & Charlotte, Greenwood; Tin Pan Alley (1940), starring Betty Grable, Alice Faye, Jack Oakie, & John Payne; The Great American Broadcast (1941), starring Alice Faye & John Payne; Sun Valley Serenade (1941), starring Sonja Henie & John Payne; Orchestra Wives (1942), starring George Montgomery & Ann Rutherford; Stormy Weather (1943), starring Lena Horne; Reckless Age (1944), starring Gloria Jean & Harold Nicholas; Carolina Blues (1944), starring Kay Kyser & Ann Miller; The Pirate (1948), starring Judy Garland & Gene Kelly; Botta e Riposta (1950); El Mensaje le la Muerte (1953); Musik I'm Blut (1955); L'Empire de la Nuit (1964); The Liberation of L.B. Jones (1970), starring Lee J. Cobb, Roscoe Lee Brown, & Fayard Nicholas; Uptown Saturday Night (1974), starring Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, Flip Wilson, Harry Belafonte, & Harold Nicholas That's Entertainment! (1974); That's Dancing (1985); Tap (1989); --------------------------------- http://www.airwavemedia.com Please contact sales@advertisecast.com if you would like to advertise on our podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Posture matters. When we humble ourselves before God, we open the door for His breakthrough and blessings in our lives. Just as the people of Nineveh turned from their ways with fasting, repentance, and humility—even their king laid aside his titles to honor God—we too must take a posture that can receive. Let's humble ourselves, lead our homes in honoring God, and watch Him respond with transformation and fire. “If My people who are called by My name humble themselves and pray…” (2 Chron 7:14)

ELLEN DREW: CLASSIC CINEMA STAR OF THE MONTH (069) Whether playing the sweet girl next door or the world-weary casino boss's moll, ELLEN DREW was an incredibly versatile leading lady who was a major star in the 1940s and 50s. She made a career of playing a wide range of roles in various genres — from Westerns to comedies to dramas to horror movies. She was nicknamed “The Candy Store Cinderella” because she was discovered scooping ice cream in a candy store on Hollywood Boulevard. And who do you think discovered her? You'll be quite surprised to find out. In this week's episode, we discuss our Star of the Month, ELLEN DREW.  SHOW NOTES:  Sources: Character Actors in Horror and Science Fiction Films, 1930-1960, (2014), by Laurence Raw; "Ellen Drew — The Private Life of Ellen Drew,” glamourgirlsofthesilverscreen.com; “Hollywood's Forgotten Daughters,” January 1986, by Anthony Cassa, Hollywood Studio Magazine; “Ellen Drew - Cinderellen,” January 2002, by Jeff Gordon, Classic Images magazine; “Ellen Drew, 89, Film and TV Actress Rose Through Ranks in Hollywood,” December 6, 2003, Los Angeles Times; TCM.com; IMDBPro.com; IBDB.com; Wikipedia.com; RogerEbert.com; Movies Mentioned:  Christmas in July  (1940), starring Dick Powell & Ellen Drew; Johnny O'Clock (1947), starring Dick Powell, Evelyn Keyes, Thomas Gomez, & Ellen Drew; Hollywood Boulevard (1936), starring Marsha Hunt & Robert Cummings; The Big Broadcast of 1937 (1936), starring Jack Benny, George Burns, & Gracie Allen; Make Way For Tomorrow (1937), staring Victor Moore & Beulah Bondi; Gone With The Wind (1939), starring Vivien Leigh & Clark Gable; Sing, You Sinners (1938), starring Bing Crosby, Fred MacMurray, & Ellen Drew; If I Were King (1938), starring Ronald Colman, Basil Rathbone, Frances Dee, & Ellen Drew; The Lady's From Kentucky (1939), staring George Raft & Ellen Drew; Geronimo (1939), starring Preston Foster; The Gracie Allen Murder Case (1939), starring Gracie Allen; French Without Tears (1940), starring Ray Milland & Ellen Drew; Buck Benny Rides Again (1940), starring Jack Benny; The Mad Doctor (1941), starring Basil Rathbone; The Monster and the Girl (1941), starring Paul Lukas & Philip Terry; Isle of the Dead (1945), starring Boris Karloff; Our Wife (1941), starring Melvyn Douglas, Ruth Hussey, & Ellen Drew; The Night of January 16th (1941), starring Preston Foster; Reaching For The Sun (1941), starring Joel McCrea & Ellen Drew; The Remarkable Andrew (1942), starring William Holden, Brian Donlevy, & Ellen Drew; My Favorite Spy (1942), starring Kay Kyser & Jane Wyman; Night Plane to Chungking (1942), starring Preston Foster & Ellen Drew; And The Angels Sing (1944), starring Dorothy Lamour, Fred MacMurray, & Betty Hutton; Strange Confession (1944), starring Jean Gabin; That's My Baby (1944), starring Richard Arlen & Ellen Drew; Dark Mountain (1944), starring Robert Lowery & Ellen Drew; China Sky (1945), starring Randolph Scott; The Swordsmen (1948), starring Larry Parks & Ellen Drew; The Man from Colorado (1949), starring William Holden & Glenn Ford; The Crocked Way (1949), starring John Payne, Sonny Tufts, & Ellen Drew; Stars In My Crown (1950), staring Joel McCrea & Ellen Drew; Cargo to Capetown (1950), starring Broderick Crawford & John Ireland; The Great Missouri Raid (1950), starring Wendell Corey; Man In The Saddle (1951), staring Randolph Scott & Joan Leslie; --------------------------------- http://www.airwavemedia.com Please contact sales@advertisecast.com if you would like to advertise on our podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our first round of Studios Year by Year comes to an end with these Universal 1948 movies: A Woman's Vengeance (directed by Zoltan Korda with a screenplay by Aldous Huxley, based on his short story "The Gioconda Smile") and Larceny (directed by George Sherman). Huxley's philosophical concerns add unexpected dimensions to familiar Gothic tropes and gives great material to Charles Boyer and Ann Blyth, while Cedric Hardwicke deals with Jessica Tandy. In the second half of our double bill, John Payne's con man tries his best to deal with Shelley Winters in honey badger mode (he's the honey and the bees).  Time Codes: 0h 00m 25s:      A WOMAN'S VENGEANCE [dir. Zoltan Korda] 0h 29m 24s:      LARCENY [dir. George Sherman]     Studio Film Capsules provided by The Universal Story by Clive Hirschhorn Additional studio information from: The Hollywood Story by Joel W. Finler               +++ * Marvel at our meticulously ridiculous Complete Viewing Schedule for the next two decades * Intro Song: “Sunday” by Jean Goldkette Orchestra with the Keller Sisters (courtesy of The Internet Archive) * Read Elise's latest film piece on Preston Sturges, Unfaithfully Yours, and the Narrative role of comedic scapegoating. * Check out Dave's new Robert Benchley blog – an attempt to annotate and reflect upon as many of the master humorist's 2000+ pieces as he can locate – Benchley Data: A Wayward Annotation Project!  Follow us on Twitter at @therebuggy Write to us at therebuggy@gmail.com   We now have a Discord server - just drop us a line if you'd like to join!   

Lux Radio Theater - 1948-12-20  Miracle on 34th Street Maureen OHara John Payne Edmund Gwenn

Best known as the kindly attorney who takes on Kris Kringle's case in Miracle on 34th Street, John Payne starred in crime dramas, westerns, and adventures on the big screen and as a TV gunslinger in The Restless Gun. We'll hear him as a small town police chief with a big-time mystery on his hands in Dashiell Hammett's "Two Sharp Knives" (originally aired on CBS on June 7, 1945). Plus, he recreates his celebrated movie role as the Lux Radio Theatre presents "Miracle on 34th Street," also featuring Maureen O'Hara and Edmund Gwenn (originally aired on CBS on December 20, 1948).

Couch And Coffee Table present Lux Radio Theatre's adaptation of Miracle On 34th Street with Edmond Gwinn and Maureen O'Hara and John Payne reprising their roles from the 20th Century Fox film of the same name. This episode aired on December 20, 1948. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michael-perry6/support

This Sunday on Vintage Classic Radio's “Sunday Night Playhouse,” we are delighted to bring you a special presentation of the “Lux Radio Theatre” radio show with the beloved holiday classic, “Miracle on 34th Street,” which originally aired on December 20, 1948. Set in New York City during the festive Christmas season, this heartwarming tale follows the story of Kris Kringle, a kind elderly man who claims to be the real Santa Claus. During the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, Kris steps in for an indisposed Santa and soon becomes a sensation with the shoppers and staff of the store. However, his claim to be Santa leads to a court case where both his sanity and the very spirit of Christmas are at stake. The episode stars Edmund Gwenn reprising his Academy Award-winning film role as Kris Kringle, along with Maureen O'Hara as Doris Walker, a no-nonsense Macy's executive, and John Payne as Fred Gailey, the lawyer and neighbor who defends Kris. Natalie Wood also stars as Susan Walker, Doris's little girl, who learns to believe in the magic of Christmas. Join us for an evening of magic and belief that will surely put you in the Yuletide spirit.

EPISODE 63 - “NOT EVEN NOMINATED: A DISCUSSION ABOUT CLASSIC CINEMA WITH AUTHOR JOHN DILEO” - 11/25/2024 Author JOHN DILEO, film historian and author, has just published his eighth book, Not Even Nominated: 40 Overlooked Costars of Oscar-Winning Performances. This week, John joins Steve and Nan to discuss his book, as well as his origin story on how he got hooked on classic cinema. Join us for the fun, lively discussion about old Hollywood. And make sure you check out John's book.  SHOW NOTES:  Sources: 100 Great Film Performances You Should Remember — But Probably Don't (2002), by John DiLeo: Not Even Nominated: 40 Overlooked Costars of Oscar-Winning Performances (2024), by John DiLeo; TCM.com; Wikipedia.com; IMDBPro.com; Movies Mentioned:  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931); Fredric March & Miriam Hopkins; Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), starring Gary Cooper & Jean Arthur; The More the Merrier (1943), starring Jean Arthur , Joel McCrea, and Charles Coburn; The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), starring Dana Andrews, Fredric March, Myrna Loy, Teresa Wright, Harold Russell, Cathy O'Donnell, Virginia Mayo, and Steve Cochran; Miracle On 34th Street (1947), starring Maureen O'Hara, John Payne, Edmund Gwynn, and Natalie Wood; The Treasure of The Sierra Madre (1948), starring Humphrey Bogart & Walter Huston; All About Eve (1950), starring Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Gary Merrill, Celeste Holm, George Sanders, Thelma Ritter, and Marilyn Monroe; Ace In the Hole (1951), Starring Kirk Douglas & Jan Sterling; Strangers on a Train (1951), starring Farley Granger, Robert Walker, Ruth Roman, & Pat Hitchcock; Mr. Blanding Builds His Dream House (1948), starring Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, & Melvyn Douglas; Rope (1948), starring James Stewart, Farley Granger & John Dahl; They Live By Night (1948), starring Farley Granger & Cathy O'Donnell; From Here To Eternity (1953), starring Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr, Montgomery Clift, Donna Reed, & Frank Sinatra; The Bandwagon (1953), Fred Astaire & Cyd Charisse; Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), starring Howard Keel, Jane Powell, & Russ Tamblyn; Elmer Gantry (1960), starring Burt Lancaster, Jean Simmons, & Shirley Jones; Judgement at Nuremberg (1961), starring Spencer Tracy, Maximilian Schell, Burt Lancaster, Marlene Dietrich, Montgomery Clift, Richard Widmark, & Jusy Garland; To Kill A Mockingbird (1962), starring Gregory Peck, Mary Badham, Philip Allford, Brock Peters; Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1963);, starring Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, & Victor Bueno; Mary Poppins (1964), starring Julie Andrews, Dick Van Dyke & David Tomlinson; The Trouble With Angels (1966); starring Rosalind Russell, Hayley Mills, Mary Wickes & Binnie Barnes; The Graduate (1967), starring Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, and Katharine Ross; Wiat Until Dark (1968), starring Audrey Hepburn, Alan Arkin, Richard Crenna, Efram Zimberlist, Jr. & Jack Weston; That's Entertainment (1974); The Devil's Rain (1975), starring Ida Lupino, William Shatner, Ernest Borgnine, Tom Skerritt, Eddie Albert, Keenan Wynn, Joan Prather & John Travolta; That's Entertainment II (1976); Ordinary People (1980), starring Donald Sutherland, Mary Tyler Moore, Timothy Hutton, Judd Hirsh, & Elizabeth McGovern; --------------------------------- http://www.airwavemedia.com Please contact sales@advertisecast.com if you would like to advertise on our podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

EPISODE 60 - "THELMA RITTER: CLASSIC CINEMA STAR OF THE MONTH" - 11/04/2024 There's a scene in the classic 1950 film All About Eve where Eve Harrington (ANNE BAXTER), a star-struck fan who has infiltrated the life of Broadway star Margo Channing (BETTE DAVIS), is telling the tragic story of her past to Margo and her friends. While Margo and company are drawn into the sad circumstances of Eve's life, Margo's acerbic dresser Birdie, played to perfection by the great THELMA RITTER, is not buying her sob story. After Eve finishes, Birdie mutters, "What a story! Everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end." This is probably the moment I fell in love with Ritter. With her heavy New York accent, diminutive size, working-class charm, and sarcastic zingers, she made a career of stealing scenes from big stars and making the most of her time on screen. She played characters wiser than most, and her characters certainly didn't suffer fools gladly. She is a cinematic treasure, and we celebrate her as our Star of the Month. SHOW NOTES:  Sources: All About Eve: The Complete Behind-The-Scenes Story of the Bitchiest Film Ever Made (2001), by Sam Staggs; All About Thelma and Eve: Sidekicks and Third Wheels (2002), by Judith Roof; Actresses of a Certain Character (2007) by Axel Nissen; “Thelma Ritter, Versatile Actress with Raspy Voice Dies at 63,” February 5, 1969, New York Times; “Ten Women that Changed the Face of Film Forever,” March 8, 2019, by Harry Fletcher, The Standard; TCM.com; IMDBPro.com; IBDB.com; Wikipedia.com; Movies Mentioned:  Miracle on 34th Street (1947), starring Maureen O'Hara, Edmund Gwenn, John Payne, and Natalie Wood; Call Northside 777 (1948), starring James Stewart, Richard Conte, and Helen Walker; A Letter To Three Wives (1949), starring Jeanne Crain, Linda Darnell, Ann Sothern, Kirk Douglas, Paul Douglas, Jeffrey Lynn, Connie Gilchrist, and Barbara Lawrence; Father Was a Fullback (1949), starring Fred MacMurray and Maureen O'Hara; All About Eve (1950), starring Bette Davis, Ann Baxter, Gary Merrill, Celeste Holm, Hugh Marlowe, George Sanders, Marilyn Monroe, Gregory Ratoff, and Barbara Bates; The Mating Season (1951), starring John Lund and Gene Tierney; The Model and the Marriage Broker (1951), starring Jean Peters and Scott Brady; With a Song in My Heart (1952), starring Susan Hayward, Rory Calhoun, David Wayne, Robert Wagner, and Helen Westcott; Titanic (1953), starring Barbara Stanwyck, Clifton Webb, Robert Wagner, and Brian Aherne; Pick Up On South Street (1953), starring Richard Widmark, Jean Peters, and Richard Kiley; As Young As You Feel (1951), starring Monty Woolley, David Wayne, Jean Peters, Constance Bennett, Marilyn Monroe, Allen Joslyn, and Albert Dekker; Rear Window (1954), starring James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Wendel Corey, and Raymond Burr; Daddy Long Legs (1955), starring Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron; The Proud and Profane (1956), starring William Holden and Deborah Kerr; A Hole In The Head (1959), starring Frank Sinatra, Edward G. Robinson, and Eleanor Parker; Pillow Talk (1959), starring Doris Day and Rock Hudson The Misfits (1961), starring Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, and Eli Wallach; Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), starring Burt Lancaster, Karl Malden, Neville Brand, Betty Field, Telly Savalas, Edmond O'Brien, and Hugh Marlowe; How The West Was Won (1962), starring James Stewart, Gregory Peck, John Wayne, Debbie Reynolds, Henry Fonda, Carroll Baker, Lee J. Cobb, Karl Malden, and Richard Widmark; Move Over Darling (1963), starring Doris Day, James Garner, and Polly Bergen; Boeing, Boeing (1965), starring Tony Curtis and Jerry Lewis; What's So Bad About Feeling Good? (1968), starring George Peppard and Mary Tyler Moore; --------------------------------- http://www.airwavemedia.com Please contact sales@advertisecast.com if you would like to advertise on our podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Time Travelin' Top 40 E161 Brandon Vogt talks with Jeff Kollman Guitarist for Asia f/ John Payne and the Alan Parsons Live Project on the new album "2023 A.D." and the band Bombastic Meatbats with Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili PeppersSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

John Payne arrived at Campbell in 1987 from Dublin, Ireland by way of Henderson, N.C.  Four years later, he not only graduated with a degree from the Lundy-Fetterman School of Business, but left a legacy that included four all-conference honors, a Big South player of the year award and victories over the likes of North Carolina, Duke and Penn State.   He went on to play professional soccer in Wilmington, where he ultimately settled, was married and raised a family.   Along the way, he and his wife Tracy raised a family of five – including the 2022 North Carolina high school soccer player of the year – and become grandparents.   Most recently, "Seany" was inducted into both the Big South Conference and Campbell University athletics halls of fame.   In the next installment of Tales from the Creek, John talks with Stan Cole about growing up in Ireland, his family's decision to send him to the U.S. to finish high school, how he arrived at Campbell, meeting his wife, raising a family while playing pro soccer part time, and more.

This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/BENEATH and get on your way to being your best self. EPISODE 47 - “Laird Cregar (Star of the Month) ” - 08/05/2024 With his sad, dark eyes, hulking frame, and aristocratic speech, actor LAIRD CREGAR often played the complex villain tortured by a sinister past or an unrequited love that turns into an obsession. No one played characters with suppressed anguish, a tortured soul, or darkness lingering beneath the surface better than he did. While he only made 16 films in a period of five years, he is unforgettable. His desire to be thin was his achilles heel that turned tragic. This week join us as we take a deep dive into the short life and career of this amazing actor.  SHOW NOTES:  Sources: Laird Cregar: A Hollywood Tragedy (2017), by Gregory William Mank; “Atlas With A Grin,” by Fredda Dudley, December 1941, Screenland magazine; “Setbacks To Fame,” by Dorothy B.Haas, June 1942, Silver Screen magazine; “Bold, Bad, (Bluffing) Cregar,” by Barbara Berch, January 1945, Screenland magazine; “Ripping Tales: Laird Cregar: The Forgotten Ripper,” by Kevin G. Shimick, Fall 1991, Scarlett Street; “Queers In History: Laird Cregar,” December 9, 2012, by Elisa Rolle, livejournal.com; “Heavy: The Life and Films of Laird Cregar,” October 7, 2013, by Jennifer Garland, Virtual Virago; IMDBPro.com; Wikipedia.com; Movies Mentioned:  I Wake Up Screaming (1941), starring Betty Grable, Victor Mature, Carole Landis, and Laird Cregar; The Lodger (1944), starring Merle Oberon and Laird Cregar; Charley's Aunt (1941), starring Jack Benny, Kay Francis, James Ellison, and Laird Cregar; Rings On Her Fingers (1942), starring Gene Tierney, Henry Fonda, Laird Cregar, and Spring Byington; Hudson Bay (1940), starring Gene Tierney, Paul Muni, Vincent Price, and Laird Cregar; Blood and Sand (1940), starring Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, and Laird Cregar; This Gun For Hire (1942), starring Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, Robert Preston, and Laird Cregar; Ten Gentlemen From West Point (1942), starring George Montgomery, Maureen O'Hara, and Laird Cregar; The Black Swan (1942), starring Tyrone Power, Maureen O'Hara, and Laird Cregar; Heaven Can Wait (1943), starring Gene Tierney, Don Ameche, Charles Coburn, Marjorie Main Spring Byington, and Laird Cregar; Hello Frisco, Hello (1943), starring Alice Faye, John Payne, Lynn Bari, and Laird Cregar; Hangover Square (1945), starring Laird Cregar, Linda Darnell, and George Sanders; --------------------------------- http://www.airwavemedia.com Please contact sales@advertisecast.com if you would like to advertise on our podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this new episode of Robin's Nest, American Humane president and CEO Dr. Robin Ganzert is coming to us straight from South Africa.   In this exciting episode, Robin speaks with the 2023 and 2024 Global Humanitarian Award Recipients Adrian Gardiner and John Payne, respectively. Adrian delves into his leadership journey in conservation and his efforts with the Nyosi Wildlife Reserve, while John highlights the significant impact of American Humane's Pups4Patriots program and underscores the importance of community connection.Both men are leaders in the humanitarian space, and we hope you enjoy getting to know a little more about each of their inspiring work.

Talking all things coaching with JP, the US Coach for the Paris Paralympics and Associate Head Coach of TAC Titans.

EPISODE 44 - "THERESA HARRIS: HOW OLD HOLLYWOOD STOPPED HER STAR FROM RISING" - 07/15/2024 ** This episode is sponsored brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/BENEATH and get on your way to being your best self.” ** When THERESA HARRIS appears on screen, you cannot take your eyes off of her. Beautiful, talented, and a skilled singer and dancer, she lights up any scene she's in. Despite appearing in over 100 films, she rarely received screen credit and most often played a maid, waitress, or other types of domestic servant. Her parts were small, but her charisma and presence on screen were enormous! As a black woman in the early days of Hollywood, she was limited in the roles she could perform by the restrictive Hayes Code of 1934 and the horrible Jim Crow laws of the South. Still, she is a welcome presence in so many classic films. This week, we look at the extraordinary life and career of the talented THERESA HARRIS.  SHOW NOTES:  Sources: “Theresa Harris, Credited and Uncredited in Over 100 Films,” March 28, 2024, by Herb Boyd, New York Amsterdam News; “Just a Maid in Movies, But Not Forgotten,” April 21, 2011, by Manohla Dargis, The New York Times; “The Underrated Charms of Theresa Harris,” July 11, 2020, by Constance Cherise, TCM.com; “Theresa Harris: Television and Film Actress of the 1930s,” August 18, 2023, by Jae Jones, BackThen.com; “Actress Theresa Harris Hollywood Vixen Turned Servant,”September 2, 2011, by Veronica Wells, Madamenoire; IMDBPro.com; Wikipedia.com; Movies Mentioned:  Thunderbolt (1929), starring Fay Wray and George Brent; Hold Your Man (1932), starring Jean Harlow and Clark Gable; Baby Face (1933), starring Barbara Stanwyck and George Brent; Professional Sweetheart (1933), starring Ginger Rogers, Norman Foster, and Zasu Pitts; Horse Feathers (1932), starring The Marx Brothers and Thelma Todd; Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), starring Joan Blondell, Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler, and Ginger Rogers; Morning Glory (1933), starring Katharine Hepburn and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr; Flying Down to Rio (1933), starring Delores Del Rio, Gene Raymond, Ginger Rogers, and Fred Astaire; Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935), starring Jack Benny and Eleanor Powell; Banjo On My Knee (1936), starring Barbara Stanwyck and Joel McCrea; Bargain With Bullets (aka The Gangster's On The Loose) (1937), starring Ralph Cooper and Theresa Harris; Jezebel (1938), starring Bette Davis, Henry Fonda, and George Brent; Tell No Tales (1939), starring Melvyn Douglas and Louise Platt; Buck Benny Rides Again (1940), starring Jack Benny, Ellen Drew, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, and Theresa Harris; What's Buzzin' Cousin? (1943), starring Jack Benny and Ann Miller; Blossoms In The Dust (1941), starring Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, and Marsha Hunt; Our Wife (1941), starring Melvyn Douglas, Ruth Hussey, and Ellen Drew; Cat People (1942), starring Kent Smith, Simone Simon, Jane Randolph, and Tom Conway; I Walked With A Zombie (1943), starring Frances Dee, Tom Conway, Darby Jones, and Christine Gordon; The Dolly Sisters (1945), starring Betty Grable, John Payne, and June Haver; Three Little Girls In Blue (1946), starring George Montgomery, Vera-Ellen, and June Haver; Miracle on 34th Street (1947), starring Maureen O'Hara, Edmund Gwenn, John Payne, and Natalie Wood; Out of the Past (1947), staring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, and Kirk Douglas; Angel Face (1952), starring Robert Mitchum and Jean Simmons; --------------------------------- http://www.airwavemedia.com Please contact sales@advertisecast.com if you would like to advertise on our podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Steven reviews a few concerts he watched online and in-person. On July 13, he watched the Total Mass Retain concert streamed by ProgStock via Stageit from the Williams Center in Rutherford, New Jersey. Afterward, he went to the Forever '80s concert at Pershing Square in Los Angeles, managing to catch When in Rome UK and Asia Featuring John Payne. And just this morning, with today being Trevor Horn's birthday, The Buggles concert from Las Vegas last year available for a limited time on Horn's YouTube channel! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/yesshift/support

Friday's WASDE report brought many questions for the market trade moving forward. On this week's Nebraska Soybean Board Weekly Market Roundup, we hear from John Payne of Advance Trading and Darren Frye of Water Street Solutions as they break down the report. They discuss how, at one point, the U.S. will have the cheapest grains in the world, along with were USDA & CONAB are on crop numbers coming out of South America. Additionally, they address feed revisions and what these changes mean for the future of grains and livestock markets.

7/1/24  '25 acres  Second half of the year what are seasonals  How low or high could we go  Cattle market struggles  Overall feed costs

Asaph found himself being distracted by the things of this world and even wavered in his faith with envy in his heart. But, God didn't show Asaph the whole picture to freedom until he did something specific - tune in to make sure this is something you aren't missing in your life!!   #perspective #oceansunitechurch #alexpappas #church #sermon2024  #thisisyourchurch #word #truth #oceansunite #verobeach #florida #usapray #united    Stay Connected:    Visit our Linktree

Inside Agriculture Segment 2

We review the latest WASDE report with John Payne of Advance Trading plus we hear perspective from Todd Horwitz of bubbatrading.com on Fed Chairman Powell's remarks today. And U.S. Senator Roger Marshall, MD of Kansas joins us to contrast the GOP Senate Farm Bill framework with the version put forth by Senate Ag Committee Chairwoman Stabenow.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Over the years, Choiceology has offered a lot of advice for making better decisions. In this special episode of Choiceology with Katy Milkman, we bring you the story of a video game that is surprisingly effective at reducing decision errors, and you'll hear about a practical checklist for improving choices in many different contexts.Solving fictitious mysteries might sound like fun and games, but the video game MISSING: The Pursuit of Terry Hughes was designed with a serious purpose in mind: to help intelligence analysts avoid decision-making traps. In 2015, James Korris and Carey Morewedge worked together to design a video game for the intelligence agency IARPA, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, and measured the biases exhibited before and after playing the series of 90-minute games. The results were remarkable and extremely durable.James Korris is president and CEO of Creative Technologies Inc. in Los Angeles, and is a pioneer in immersive game-based simulation for military learning. You can see a preview of the game James designed titled MISSING: The Pursuit of Terry Hughes.Next, Katy speaks with Carey Morewedge about the game and about his research on effective decision-debiasing techniques. You can learn more in the paper Carey co-authored with James titled "Debiasing Decisions: Improved Decision Making With a Single Training Intervention."Carey Morewedge is a professor of marketing at Boston University Questrom School of Business who studies psychological biases and how to reduce them. Finally, Katy speaks with Jack Soll to hear his checklist of four simple ways to debias yourself before making decisions, big or small. You can read more in the article Jack and Katy co-authored with John Payne titled "Outsmart Your Own Biases." Jack Soll is the Gregory Mario & Jeremy Mario Distinguished Professor of Management and Organizations at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. Choiceology is an original podcast from Charles Schwab. For more on the show, visit schwab.com/Choiceology.If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating or review on Apple Podcasts.Important DisclosuresThe comments, views, and opinions expressed in the presentation are those of the speakers and do not necessarily represent the views of Charles Schwab.Data contained herein from third party providers is obtained from what are considered reliable source. However, its accuracy, completeness or reliability cannot be guaranteed and Charles Schwab & Co. expressly disclaims any liability, including incidental or consequential damages, arising from errors or omissions in this publication. All corporate names and market data shown above are for illustrative purposes only and are not a recommendation, offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security. Supporting documentation for any claims or statistical information is available upon request. Investing involves risk including loss of principal.The book How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. (CS&Co.). Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. (CS&Co.) has not reviewed the book and makes no representations about its content.Apple, the Apple logo, iPad, iPhone, and Apple Podcasts are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. App Store is a service mark of Apple Inc.Spotify and the Spotify logo are registered trademarks of Spotify AB.(0524-2GW1)

Should we support Israel?

EPISODE 29 - “Jan Sterling: Old Hollywood Star of the Month” - 04/01/2024 Our “Star of the Month” is the fabulous JAN STERLING, who was married to our March “Star of the Month,” PAUL DOUGLAS. Blonde, beautiful, and often deadly on screen, Sterling started in theatre, but made a name for herself portraying tough dames, femme fatales, and sexy seductresses in films such as “Caged,” “Ace In the Hole” and “The High and the Mighty.” However, her upbringing was quite different from these wayward women she played so convincingly; she was actually from a very wealthy and prominent family. She had a stellar career, but many heartbreaks off camera. This week, we discuss the life and career of this most memorable lady.  SHOW NOTES:  Sources: Jan Sterling: Everything You Need To Know (2014), by Billy Vasquez; The Encyclopedia of Film Actors (2003), by Barry Monush; The Illustrated Who's Who of the Cinema (1983), by Ann Lloyd and Graham Fuller; Quinlan's Illustrated Registry of Film Stars (1986), by David Quinlan; “Jan Sterling, 82, Blonde Actress Who Made Film Noir A Specialty” Obituary, March 29, 2004, The New York Times; IMDBPro.com; Wikipedia.com; Movies Mentioned:  Tycoon (1947), starring John Wayne, Laaine Day, and Anthony Quinn; Johnny Belinda (1948), starring Jane Wyman, Lew Ayres, and Agnes Moorhead; Caged (1950), starring Eleanor Parker, Agnes Moorhead, and Faye Emerson; Appointment With Danger (1950), starring Robert Walker and Joan Leslie; The Mating Season (1950), starring Gene Tierney, John Lund, and Thelma Ritter; Ace In The Hole (1951), starring Kirk Douglas; Rhubarb (1951), starring Ray Miland; Flesh and Fury (1952), starring Tony Curtis; Sky Full of Moon (1952), starring  Split Second (1953), starring Stephen McNally; Pony Express (1953), starring Charlton Heston and Rhonda Fleming; The Vanquished (1953), starring John Payne and Coleen Gray; Alaska Seas (1954), starring Robert Ryan; The High and the Mighty (19543), starring John Wayne, Robert Stack, Claire Trevor, and Laraine Day; Woman's Prison (1955), starring Ida Lupino, Pyllis Thaxter, Audrey Totter, and Howard Duff; Female on the Beach (1955), starring Joan Crawford and Jeff Chandler; The Harder They Fall (1956), starring Humphrey Bogart and Rod Steiger; 1984 (1956), starring Edmond O'Brien and Michael Redgrave; The Female Animal (1958), starring Hedy Lamar, Jane Powell, and George Nader; Kathy O (1958), starring Dan Duryea and Patty McCormick; High School Confidential (1958), starring Russ Tamblyn and Mamie Van Doren; Love In A Goldfish Bowl (1961), staring Fabian, Tommy Sands, and Majel Barrett; The Incident (1967), Starring Martin Sheen, Beau Bridges, and Tony Musante;  The Minx (1969), starring Robert Roden and Shirley Parker; First Monday in October (1981), Starring Walter Matthau and Jill Clayburgh; --------------------------------- http://www.airwavemedia.com Please contact sales@advertisecast.com if you would like to advertise on our podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pastor John Payne shares from Psalm 139, about how God truly does know us; He knows where we go and everything we do, and He knows our words even before we speak them. We have no need to try to be someone we're not in the presence of God, because He already knows everything about us.

EPISODE 27 - “Dona Drake: What Price Fame” - 03/18/2024 Latina star DONA DRAKE, who signed a contract with Paramount Pictures in 1941, was many things — singer, dancer, actress, bandleader, musician — but one thing she wasn't, as it turned out, was Latin! While Paramount promoted their new discovery as a spitfire Latina born in Mexico City, Drake was, in fact, an African-American woman from Florida who pretended to be Latin, going so far as to learn Spanish fluently, in order to have a better chance at a Hollywood career. Listen to this fascinating story of one woman who went undercover just so she wouldn't have to play the maid.  SHOW NOTES:  Sources: Biography of Dona Drake (Paramount Contact Player), September 1942, Paramount Studios; “Dona Drake Tells Marriage,” September 9, 1944, by Hedda Hopper, The Los Angeles Times; “Daughter Born to Dona Drake,” August 8, 1951, The Hollywood Citizen-News; www.swingcityradio,com; www.glamourgirlsofthesilverscreen.com; IMDBPro.com; Wikipedia.com; Movies Mentioned:  Strike Me Pink (1936), starring Eddie Cantor, Ethel Merman, Sally Eilers, and William Frawley; Aloma Of The South Seas (1941), starring Dorothy Lamour, Jon Hall; Louisiana Purchase (1941), starring Bob Hope, Vera Zorina, and Victor Moore; Road to Morocco (1942), starring Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour; Star Spangled Rhythm (1942), starring Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Dorothy Lamour, Fred MacMurray, Paulette Goddard, Dick Powell, Eddie Bracken, Alan Ladd, Mary Martin, Betty Hutton, Marjorie Reynolds, and Veronica Lake; Salute For Three (1943), starring Macdonald Carey and Betty Jane Rhodes; Let's Face It (1943), staring Bob Hope, Betty Hutton, and Eve Arden;  Hot Rhythm (1944), starring Robert Lowery, Tim Ryan, and Irene Ryan; Without Reservations (1946), starring John Wayne, Claudette Colbert, and Don DeFoe; Dangerous Millions (1946), starring Kent Taylor; Another Part of The Forest (1948), starring Fredric March, Dan Duryea, Edmond O'Brien, Ann Blyth, Florence Eldridge, John Dall, and Betsy Blair; So This Is New York (1948), starring Henry Morgan, Rudy Vallee, and Virginia Grey; Beyond The Forest (1949), starring Bette Davis, Joseph Cotten, David Brian, Ruth Roman; The Girl From Jones Beach (1949), starring Virginia Mayo, Ronald Reagan, and Eddie Bracken; Kansas City Confidential (1952), starring John Payne, Colleen Gray, and Preston Foster; The Bandits of Corsica (1953), starring Richard Greene, Paula Raymond, Raymond Burr; Son Of Belle Star (1953), starring Keith Larsen, Peggie Castle, and Regis Toomey; Down Laredo Way (1953) starring Rex Allen and Slim Pickens; Princess of the Nile (1954), starring Debra Paget, Jeffrey Hunter, and Michael Rennie; --------------------------------- http://www.airwavemedia.com Please contact sales@advertisecast.com if you would like to advertise on our podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Market Roundup | Brought to you by the Nebraska Soybean Board: The week's market trade was all over the place with exports to unknown countries & cancellations globally from China. On this week's Nebraska Soybean Board Weekly Market Roundup we hear from Alan Brugler, with Brugler Marketing and Management and John Payne, with Hedgepoint Global Markets on the corn export window, watching the bean oil and the cattle movement.

Welcome to Oceans Unite! We have been called to bring the fire of God to our City and Nation by teaching and demonstrating God's love and power!   #oceansunitechurch #alexpappas #church #sermon2024 #achangedlifeisagainedlife #thisisyourchurch #bringingthefireofGod #word #truth #oceansunite #verobeach #florida #usapray #united    Stay Connected:    Visit our Linktree

Market Roundup | Brought to you by the Nebraska Soybean Board: The soybean markets had a volatile trading week. On this week's Nebraska Soybean Board Weekly Market Roundup we hear from John Payne with Hedge Point Global and Kyle Bumsted with Allendale as they break apart the movement of the grains and give their reaction to the Cattle Inventory Report.

John Payne of HedgePoint Global doesn't MEAN to sound as bearish as he may come off...he's just answering questions about the supply-side anchor in corn market and Brazilian hedging in U.S. bean market. Brian Splitt of AgMarket.net shares price action perspective.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

1-26-24  Grain markets seeing money going into feeders  U.S. cannot compete for China's attention  Some good movement in the hog markets  Cattle trade pushes the positive

Who, what and indeed where is Can? Krautrock legends bring The Can Lost Tapes (Mute), due out imminently. The band's founder/chief theoretician Irmin Schmidt discusses the whys and wherefores; Can archival engineer Jono Podmore, also of analog electronic band Metamono, spins tracks from Metamono's new Parcel Post EP (Instrumentarium Records). For more from John Payne, check out bluefat.com --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/dublab-inconversation/support

Robin is joined by guest John Payne. Payne is the chairman of the board for American Humane as well as President and CEO of Compassion-First Pet Hospitals. He is a well-known leader in both the international and domestic animal wellness and welfare space.

The Lux Radio Theatre. Originally broadcast December 20, 1948, 75 years ago. . "Miracle On 34th Street" starring Maureen O'Hara, John Payne, and Edmund Gwenn as Kris Kringle. An adaptation of the award-winning 1947 film. Kris Kringle is indignant to find that the man assigned to play Santa in the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is intoxicated. When he complains to event director Doris Walker, she persuades Kris to take his place. He does so well that he is hired to play Santa at Macy's New York City store on 34th Street.

Do you love movies that feature Miracles AND 34th Street? Then Miracle on 34th Street (1947) is the Holiday film for you! Check out this beloved Oscar winning Christmas classic that puts heart ahead of commercialism. Directed by George Seaton, this festive-yet-sincere blockbuster stars Maureen O'Hara, Edmund Gwenn, John Payne, and features an adorably precocious turn from then-child-star Natalie Wood. Host Sara Greenfield and her guest Ashley Blanchet chat about all this and more on this week's season finale episode of Talk Classic To Me. Happy Holidays and we'll see you again in the New Year! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/sara-greenfield/support

12-5-23 Lower trade seen within the soybeans China markets & hog industry struggles with ASF Demand is there for U.S. wheat from China & Japan wanting food grade Russian wheat & Ukraine Feeder cattle markets Still not a lot of Saturday kills out there

Episode 170 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Astral Weeks", the early solo career of Van Morrison, and the death of Bert Berns.  Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-minute bonus episode available, on "Stoned Soul Picnic" by Laura Nyro. 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 At one point I, ridiculously, misspeak the name of Charles Mingus' classic album. Black Saint and the Sinner Lady is not about dinner ladies. Also, I say Warren Smith Jr is on "Slim Slow Slider" when I meant to say Richard Davis (Smith is credited in some sources, but I only hear acoustic guitar, bass, and soprano sax on the finished track). Resources As usual, I've created Mixcloud playlists, with full versions of all the songs excerpted in this episode. As there are so many Van Morrison songs in this episode, the Mixcloud is split into three parts, one, two, and three. The information about Bert Berns comes from Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues by Joel Selvin. I've used several biographies of Van Morrison. Van Morrison: Into the Music by Ritchie Yorke is so sycophantic towards Morrison that the word “hagiography” would be, if anything, an understatement. Van Morrison: No Surrender by Johnny Rogan, on the other hand, is the kind of book that talks in the introduction about how the author has had to avoid discussing certain topics because of legal threats from the subject. Howard deWitt's Van Morrison: Astral Weeks to Stardom is over-thorough in the way some self-published books are, while Clinton Heylin's Can You Feel the Silence? is probably the best single volume on the artist. Information on Woodstock comes from Small Town Talk by Barney Hoskyns. Ryan Walsh's Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 is about more than Astral Weeks, but does cover Morrison's period in and around Boston in more detail than anything else. The album Astral Weeks is worth hearing in its entirety. Not all of the music on The Authorized Bang Collection is as listenable, but it's the most complete collection available of everything Morrison recorded for Bang. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we start, a quick warning -- this episode contains discussion of organised crime activity, and of sudden death. It also contains excerpts of songs which hint at attraction to underage girls and discuss terminal illness. If those subjects might upset you, you might want to read the transcript rather than listen to the episode. Anyway, on with the show. Van Morrison could have been the co-writer of "Piece of My Heart". Bert Berns was one of the great collaborators in the music business, and almost every hit he ever had was co-written, and he was always on the lookout for new collaborators, and in 1967 he was once again working with Van Morrison, who he'd worked with a couple of years earlier when Morrison was still the lead singer of Them. Towards the beginning of 1967 he had come up with a chorus, but no verse. He had the hook, "Take another little piece of my heart" -- Berns was writing a lot of songs with "heart" in the title at the time -- and wanted Morrison to come up with a verse to go with it. Van Morrison declined. He wasn't interested in writing pop songs, or in collaborating with other writers, and so Berns turned to one of his regular collaborators, Jerry Ragavoy, and it was Ragavoy who added the verses to one of the biggest successes of Berns' career: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] The story of how Van Morrison came to make the album that's often considered his masterpiece is intimately tied up with the story we've been telling in the background for several episodes now, the story of Atlantic Records' sale to Warners, and the story of Bert Berns' departure from Atlantic. For that reason, some parts of the story I'm about to tell will be familiar to those of you who've been paying close attention to the earlier episodes, but as always I'm going to take you from there to somewhere we've never been before. In 1962, Bert Berns was a moderately successful songwriter, who had written or co-written songs for many artists, especially for artists on Atlantic Records. He'd written songs for Atlantic artists like LaVern Baker, and when Atlantic's top pop producers Leiber and Stoller started to distance themselves from the label in the early sixties, he had moved into production as well, writing and producing Solomon Burke's big hit "Cry to Me": [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Cry to Me"] He was the producer and writer or co-writer of most of Burke's hits from that point forward, but at first he was still a freelance producer, and also produced records for Scepter Records, like the Isley Brothers' version of "Twist and Shout", another song he'd co-written, that one with Phil Medley. And as a jobbing songwriter, of course his songs were picked up by other producers, so Leiber and Stoller produced a version of his song "Tell Him" for the Exciters on United Artists: [Excerpt: The Exciters, "Tell Him"] Berns did freelance work for Leiber and Stoller as well as the other people he was working for. For example, when their former protege Phil Spector released his hit version of "Zip-a-Dee-Do-Dah", they got Berns to come up with a knockoff arrangement of "How Much is that Doggie in the Window?", released as by Baby Jane and the Rockabyes, with a production credit "Produced by Leiber and Stoller, directed by Bert Berns": [Excerpt: Baby Jane and the Rockabyes, "How Much is that Doggie in the Window?"] And when Leiber and Stoller stopped producing work for United Artists, Berns took over some of the artists they'd been producing for the label, like Marv Johnson, as well as producing his own new artists, like Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters, who had been discovered by Berns' friend Jerry Ragovoy, with whom he co-wrote their "Cry Baby": [Excerpt: Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters, "Cry Baby"] Berns was an inveterate collaborator. He was one of the few people to get co-writing credits with Leiber and Stoller, and he would collaborate seemingly with everyone who spoke to him for five minutes. He would also routinely reuse material, cutting the same songs time and again with different artists, knowing that a song must be a hit for *someone*. One of his closest collaborators was Jerry Wexler, who also became one of his best friends, even though one of their earliest interactions had been when Wexler had supervised Phil Spector's production of Berns' "Twist and Shout" for the Top Notes, a record that Berns had thought had butchered the song. Berns was, in his deepest bones, a record man. Listening to the records that Berns made, there's a strong continuity in everything he does. There's a love there of simplicity -- almost none of his records have more than three chords. He loved Latin sounds and rhythms -- a love he shared with other people working in Brill Building R&B at the time, like Leiber and Stoller and Spector -- and great voices in emotional distress. There's a reason that the records he produced for Solomon Burke were the first R&B records to be labelled "soul". Berns was one of those people for whom feel and commercial success are inextricable. He was an artist -- the records he made were powerfully expressive -- but he was an artist for whom the biggest validation was *getting a hit*. Only a small proportion of the records he made became hits, but enough did that in the early sixties he was a name that could be spoken of in the same breath as Leiber and Stoller, Spector, and Bacharach and David. And Atlantic needed a record man. The only people producing hits for the label at this point were Leiber and Stoller, and they were in the process of stopping doing freelance work and setting up their own label, Red Bird, as we talked about in the episode on the Shangri-Las. And anyway, they wanted more money than they were getting, and Jerry Wexler was never very keen on producers wanting money that could have gone to the record label. Wexler decided to sign Bert Berns up as a staff producer for Atlantic towards the end of 1963, and by May 1964 it was paying off. Atlantic hadn't been having hits, and now Berns had four tracks he wrote and produced for Atlantic on the Hot One Hundred, of which the highest charting was "My Girl Sloopy" by the Vibrations: [Excerpt: The Vibrations, "My Girl Sloopy"] Even higher on the charts though was the Beatles' version of "Twist and Shout". That record, indeed, had been successful enough in the UK that Berns had already made exploratory trips to the UK and produced records for Dick Rowe at Decca, a partnership we heard about in the episode on "Here Comes the Night". Berns had made partnerships there which would have vast repercussions for the music industry in both countries, and one of them was with the arranger Mike Leander, who was the uncredited arranger for the Drifters session for "Under the Boardwalk", a song written by Artie Resnick and Kenny Young and produced by Berns, recorded the day after the group's lead singer Rudy Lewis died of an overdose: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Under the Boardwalk"] Berns was making hits on a regular basis by mid-1964, and the income from the label's new success allowed Jerry Wexler and the Ertegun brothers to buy out their other partners -- Ahmet Ertegun's old dentist, who had put up some of the initial money, and Miriam Bienstock, the ex-wife of their initial partner Herb Abramson, who'd got Abramson's share in the company after the divorce, and who was now married to Freddie Bienstock of Hill and Range publishing. Wexler and the Erteguns now owned the whole label. Berns also made regular trips to the UK to keep up his work with British musicians, and in one of those trips, as we heard in the episode on "Here Comes the Night", he produced several tracks for the group Them, including that track, written by Berns: [Excerpt: Them, "Here Comes the Night"] And a song written by the group's lead singer Van Morrison, "Gloria": [Excerpt: Them, "Gloria"] But Berns hadn't done much other work with them, because he had a new project. Part of the reason that Wexler and the Erteguns had gained total control of Atlantic was because, in a move pushed primarily by Wexler, they were looking at selling it. They'd already tried to merge with Leiber and Stoller's Red Bird Records, but lost the opportunity after a disastrous meeting, but they were in negotiations with several other labels, negotiations which would take another couple of years to bear fruit. But they weren't planning on getting out of the record business altogether. Whatever deal they made, they'd remain with Atlantic, but they were also planning on starting another label. Bert Berns had seen how successful Leiber and Stoller were with Red Bird, and wanted something similar. Wexler and the Erteguns didn't want to lose their one hit-maker, so they came up with an offer that would benefit all of them. Berns' publishing contract had just ended, so they would set up a new publishing company, WEB IV, named after the initials Wexler, Ertegun, and Berns, and the fact that there were four of them. Berns would own fifty percent of that, and the other three would own the other half. And they were going to start up a new label, with seventeen thousand dollars of the Atlantic partners' money. That label would be called Bang -- for Bert, Ahmet, Neshui, and Gerald -- and would be a separate company from Atlantic, so not affected by any sale. Berns would continue as a staff producer for Atlantic for now, but he'd have "his own" label, which he'd have a proper share in, and whether he was making hits for Atlantic or Bang, his partners would have a share of the profits. The first two records on Bang were "Shake and Jerk" by Billy Lamont, a track that they licensed from elsewhere and which didn't do much, and a more interesting track co-written by Berns. Bob Feldman, Richard Gottehrer, and Jerry Goldstein were Brill Building songwriters who had become known for writing "My Boyfriend's Back", a hit for the Angels, a couple of years earlier: [Excerpt: The Angels, "My Boyfriend's Back"] With the British invasion, the three of them had decided to create their own foreign beat group. As they couldn't do British accents, they pretended to be Australian, and as the Strangeloves -- named after the Stanley Kubrick film Dr  Strangelove -- they released one flop single. They cut another single, a version of "Bo Diddley", but the label they released their initial record through didn't want it. They then took the record to Atlantic, where Jerry Wexler said that they weren't interested in releasing some white men singing "Bo Diddley". But Ahmet Ertegun suggested they bring the track to Bert Berns to see what he thought. Berns pointed out that if they changed the lyrics and melody, but kept the same backing track, they could claim the copyright in the resulting song themselves. He worked with them on a new lyric, inspired by the novel Candy, a satirical pornographic novel co-written by Terry Southern, who had also co-written the screenplay to Dr Strangelove. Berns supervised some guitar overdubs, and the result went to number eleven: [Excerpt: The Strangeloves, "I Want Candy"] Berns had two other songs on the hot one hundred when that charted, too -- Them's version of "Here Comes the Night", and the version of Van McCoy's song "Baby I'm Yours" he'd produced for Barbara Lewis. Three records on the charts on three different labels. But despite the sheer number of charting records he'd had, he'd never had a number one, until the Strangeloves went on tour. Before the tour they'd cut a version of "My Girl Sloopy" for their album -- Berns always liked to reuse material -- and they started performing the song on the tour. The Dave Clark Five, who they were supporting, told them it sounded like a hit and they were going to do their own version when they got home. Feldman, Gottehrer, and Goldstein decided *they* might as well have the hit with it as anyone else. Rather than put it out as a Strangeloves record -- their own record was still rising up the charts, and there's no reason to be your own competition -- they decided to get a group of teenage musicians who supported them on the last date of the tour to sing new vocals to the backing track from the Strangeloves album. The group had been called Rick and the Raiders, but they argued so much that the Strangeloves nicknamed them the Hatfields and the McCoys, and when their version of "My Girl Sloopy", retitled "Hang on Sloopy", came out, it was under the band name The McCoys: [Excerpt: The McCoys, "Hang on Sloopy"] Berns was becoming a major success, and with major success in the New York music industry in the 1960s came Mafia involvement. We've talked a fair bit about Morris Levy's connection with the mob in many previous episodes, but mob influence was utterly pervasive throughout the New York part of the industry, and so for example Richard Gottehrer of the Strangeloves used to call Sonny Franzese of the Colombo crime family "Uncle John", they were so close. Franzese was big in the record business too, even after his conviction for bank robbery. Berns, unlike many of the other people in the industry, had no scruples at all about hanging out with Mafiosi. indeed his best friend in the mid sixties was Tommy Eboli, a member of the Genovese crime family who had been in the mob since the twenties, starting out working for "Lucky" Luciano. Berns was not himself a violent man, as far as anyone can tell, but he liked the glamour of hanging out with organised crime figures, and they liked hanging out with someone who was making so many hit records. And so while Leiber and Stoller, for example, ended up selling Red Bird Records to George Goldner for a single dollar in order to get away from the Mafiosi who were slowly muscling in on the label, Berns had no problems at all in keeping his own label going. Indeed, he would soon be doing so without the involvement of Atlantic Records. Berns' final work for Atlantic was in June 1966, when he cut a song he had co-written with Jeff Barry for the Drifters, inspired by the woman who would soon become Atlantic's biggest star: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Aretha"] The way Berns told the story in public, there was no real bad blood between him, Wexler, and the Erteguns -- he'd just decided to go his own way, and he said “I will always be grateful to them for the help they've given me in getting Bang started,” The way Berns' wife would later tell the story, Jerry Wexler had suggested that rather than Berns owning fifty percent of Web IV, they should start to split everything four ways, and she had been horrified by this suggestion, kicked up a stink about it, and Wexler had then said that either Berns needed to buy the other three out, or quit and give them everything, and demanded Berns pay them three hundred thousand dollars. According to other people, Berns decided he wanted one hundred percent control of Web IV, and raised a breach of contract lawsuit against Atlantic, over the usual royalty non-payments that were endemic in the industry at that point. When Atlantic decided to fight the lawsuit rather than settle, Berns' mob friends got involved and threatened to break the legs of Wexler's fourteen-year-old daughter, and the mob ended up with full control of Bang records, while Berns had full control of his publishing company. Given later events, and in particular given the way Wexler talked about Berns until the day he died, with a vitriol that he never used about any of the other people he had business disputes with, it seems likely to me that the latter story is closer to the truth than the former. But most people involved weren't talking about the details of what went on, and so Berns still retained his relationships with many of the people in the business, not least of them Jeff Barry, so when Barry and Ellie Greenwich had a new potential star, it was Berns they thought to bring him to, even though the artist was white and Berns had recently given an interview saying that he wanted to work with more Black artists, because white artists simply didn't have soul. Barry and Greenwich's marriage was breaking up at the time, but they were still working together professionally, as we discussed in the episode on "River Deep, Mountain High", and they had been the main production team at Red Bird. But with Red Bird in terminal decline, they turned elsewhere when they found a potential major star after Greenwich was asked to sing backing vocals on one of his songwriting demos. They'd signed the new songwriter, Neil Diamond, to Leiber and Stoller's company Trio Music at first, but they soon started up their own company, Tallyrand Music, and signed Diamond to that, giving Diamond fifty percent of the company and keeping twenty-five percent each for themselves, and placed one of his songs with Jay and the Americans in 1965: [Excerpt: Jay and the Americans, "Sunday and Me"] That record made the top twenty, and had established Diamond as a songwriter, but he was still not a major performer -- he'd released one flop single on Columbia Records before meeting Barry and Greenwich. But they thought he had something, and Bert Berns agreed. Diamond was signed to Bang records, and Berns had a series of pre-production meetings with Barry and Greenwich before they took Diamond into the studio -- Barry and Greenwich were going to produce Diamond for Bang, as they had previously produced tracks for Red Bird, but they were going to shape the records according to Berns' aesthetic. The first single released from Diamond's first session, "Solitary Man", only made number fifty-five, but it was the first thing Diamond had recorded to make the Hot One Hundred at all: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Solitary Man"] The second single, though, was much more Bert Berns' sort of thing -- a three-chord song that sounded like it could have been written by Berns himself, especially after Barry and Greenwich had added the Latin-style horns that Berns loved so much. Indeed according to some sources, Berns did make a songwriting suggestion -- Diamond's song had apparently been called "Money Money", and Berns had thought that was a ridiculous title, and suggested calling it "Cherry Cherry" instead: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Cherry Cherry"] That became Diamond's first top ten hit. While Greenwich had been the one who had discovered Diamond, and Barry and Greenwich were the credited producers on all Diamond's records  as a result, Diamond soon found himself collaborating far more with Barry than with Greenwich, so for example the first number one he wrote, for the Monkees rather than himself, ended up having its production just credited to Barry. That record used a backing track recorded in New York by the same set of musicians used on most Bang records, like Al Gorgoni on lead guitar and Russ Savakus on bass: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "I'm a Believer"] Neil Diamond was becoming a solid hit-maker, but he started rubbing up badly against Berns. Berns wanted hits and only hits, and Diamond thought of himself as a serious artist. The crisis came when two songs were under contention for Diamond's next single in late 1967, after he'd had a whole run of hits for the label. The song Diamond wanted to release, "Shilo", was deeply personal to him: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Shilo"] But Bert Berns had other ideas. "Shilo" didn't sound like a hit, and he knew a hit when he heard one. No, the clear next single, the only choice, was "Kentucky Woman": [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Kentucky Woman"] But Berns tried to compromise as best he could. Diamond's contract was up for renewal, and you don't want to lose someone who has had, as Diamond had at that point, five top twenty hits in a row, and who was also writing songs like "I'm a Believer" and "Red Red Wine". He told Diamond that he'd let "Shilo" come out as a single if Diamond signed an extension to his contract. Diamond said that not only was he not going to do that, he'd taken legal advice and discovered that there were problems with his contract which let him record for other labels -- the word "exclusive" had been missed out of the text, among other things. He wasn't going to be recording for Bang at all any more. The lawsuits over this would stretch out for a decade, and Diamond would eventually win, but the first few months were very, very difficult for Diamond. When he played the Bitter End, a club in New York, stink bombs were thrown into the audience. The Bitter End's manager was assaulted and severely beaten. Diamond moved his wife and child out of Manhattan, borrowed a gun, and after his last business meeting with Berns was heard talking about how he needed to contact the District Attorney and hire a bodyguard. Of the many threats that were issued against Diamond, though, the least disturbing was probably the threat Berns made to Diamond's career. Berns pointed out to Diamond in no uncertain terms that he didn't need Diamond anyway -- he already had someone he could replace Diamond with, another white male solo singer with a guitar who could churn out guaranteed hits. He had Van Morrison: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl"] When we left Van Morrison, Them had just split up due to the problems they had been having with their management team. Indeed, the problems Morrison was having with his managers seem curiously similar to the issues that Diamond was having with Bert Berns -- something that could possibly have been a warning sign to everyone involved, if any of them had known the full details of everyone else's situation. Sadly for all of them, none of them did. Them had had some early singles success, notably with the tracks Berns had produced for them, but Morrison's opinion of their second album, Them Again, was less than complimentary, and in general that album is mostly only remembered for the version of Bob Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue", which is one of those cover versions that inspires subsequent covers more than the original ever did: [Excerpt: Them, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue"] Them had toured the US around the time of the release of that album, but that tour had been a disaster. The group had gained a reputation for incredible live shows, including performances at the Whisky A-Go-Go with the Doors and Captain Beefheart as their support acts, but during the tour Van Morrison had decided that Phil Solomon, the group's manager, was getting too much money -- Morrison had agreed to do the tour on a salary, rather than a percentage, but the tour had been more successful than he'd expected, and Solomon was making a great deal of money off the tour, money that Morrison believed rightfully belonged to him. The group started collecting the money directly from promoters, and got into legal trouble with Solomon as a result. The tour ended with the group having ten thousand dollars that Solomon believed -- quite possibly correctly -- that he was owed. Various gangsters whose acquaintance the group had made offered to have the problem taken care of, but they decided instead to come to a legal agreement -- they would keep the money, and in return Solomon, whose production company the group were signed to, would get to keep all future royalties from the Them tracks. This probably seemed a good idea at the time, when the idea of records earning royalties for sixty or more years into the future seemed ridiculous, but Morrison in particular came to regret the decision bitterly. The group played one final gig when they got back to Belfast, but then split up, though a version of the group led by the bass player Alan Henderson continued performing for a few years to no success. Morrison put together a band that played a handful of gigs under the name Them Again, with little success, but he already had his eyes set on a return to the US. In Morrison's eyes, Bert Berns had been the only person in the music industry who had really understood him, and the two worked well together. He had also fallen in love with an American woman, Janet Planet, and wanted to find some way to be with her. As Morrison said later “I had a couple of other offers but I thought this was the best one, seeing as I wanted to come to America anyway. I can't remember the exact details of the deal. It wasn't really that spectacular, money-wise, I don't think. But it was pretty hard to refuse from the point of view that I really respected Bert as a producer. I'd rather have worked with Bert than some other guy with a bigger record company. From that angle, it was spectacular because Bert was somebody that I wanted to work with.” There's little evidence that Morrison did have other offers -- he was already getting a reputation as someone who it was difficult to work with -- but he and Berns had a mutual respect, and on January the ninth, 1967, he signed a contract with Bang records. That contract has come in for a lot of criticism over the years, but it was actually, *by the standards in operation in the music business in 1967*, a reasonably fair one. The contract provided that, for a $2,500 a year advance, Bang would record twelve sides in the first year, with an option for up to fifty more that year, and options for up to four more years on the same terms. Bang had the full ownership of the masters and the right to do what they wanted with them. According to at least one biographer, Morrison added clauses requiring Bang to actually record the twelve sides a year, and to put out at least three singles and one album per year while the contract was in operation. He also added one other clause which seems telling -- "Company agrees that Company will not make any reference to the name THEM on phonograph records, or in advertising copy in connection with the recording of Artist." Morrison was, at first, extremely happy with Berns. The problems started with their first session: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl (takes 1-6)"] When Morrison had played the songs he was working on for Berns, Berns had remarked that they sounded great with just Morrison and his guitar, so Morrison was surprised when he got into the studio to find the whole standard New York session crew there -- the same group of session players who were playing for everyone from the Monkees to Laura Nyro, from Neil Diamond to the Shangri-Las -- along with the Sweet Inspirations to provide backing vocals. As he described it later "This fellow Bert, he made it the way he wanted to, and I accepted that he was producing it... I'd write a song and bring it into the group and we'd sit there and bash it around and that's all it was -- they weren't playing the songs, they were just playing whatever it was. They'd say 'OK, we got drums so let's put drums on it,' and they weren't thinking about the song, all they were thinking about was putting drums on it... But it was my song, and I had to watch it go down." The first song they cut was "Brown-Eyed Girl", a song which Morrison has said was originally a calypso, and was originally titled "Brown-skinned Girl", though he's differed in interviews as to whether Berns changed the lyric or if he just decided to sing it differently without thinking about it in the session. Berns turned "Brown-Eyed Girl" into a hit single, because that was what he tended to do with songs, and the result sounds a lot like the kind of record that Bang were releasing for Neil Diamond: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl"] Morrison has, in later years, expressed his distaste for what was done to the song, and in particular he's said that the backing vocal part by the Sweet Inspirations was added by Berns and he disliked it: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl"] Morrison has been very dismissive of "Brown-Eyed Girl" over the years, but he seems not to have disliked it at the time, and the song itself is one that has stood the test of time, and is often pointed to by other songwriters as a great example of the writer's craft. I remember reading one interview with Randy Newman -- sadly, while I thought it was in Paul Zollo's "Songwriters on Songwriting" I just checked that and it's not, so I can't quote it precisely -- in which he says that he often points to the line "behind the stadium with you" as a perfect piece of writing, because it's such a strangely specific detail that it convinces you that it actually happened, and that means you implicitly believe the rest of the song. Though it should be made very clear here that Morrison has always said, over and over again, that nothing in his songs is based directly on his own experiences, and that they're all products of his imagination and composites of people he's known. This is very important to note before we go any further, because "Brown-Eyed Girl" is one of many songs from this period in Morrison's career which imply that their narrator has an attraction to underage girls -- in this case he remembers "making love in the green grass" in the distant past, while he also says "saw you just the other day, my how you have grown", and that particular combination is not perhaps one that should be dwelt on too closely. But there is of course a very big difference between a songwriter treating a subject as something that is worth thinking about in the course of a song and writing about their own lives, and that can be seen on one of the other songs that Morrison recorded in these sessions, "T.B. Sheets": [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "T.B. Sheets"] It seems very unlikely indeed that Van Morrison actually had a lover die of tuberculosis, as the lover in the song does, and while a lot of people seem convinced that it's autobiographical, simply because of the intensity of the performance (Morrison apparently broke down in tears after recording it), nobody has ever found anyone in Morrison's life who fits the story in the song, and he's always ridiculed such suggestions. What is true though is that "T.B. Sheets" is evidence against another claim that Morrison has made in the past - that on these initial sessions the eight songs recorded were meant to be the A and B sides of four singles and there was no plan of making an album. It is simply not plausible at all to suggest that "T.B. Sheets" -- a slow blues about terminal illness, that lasts nearly ten minutes -- was ever intended as a single. It wouldn't have even come close to fitting on one side of a forty-five. It was also presumably at this time that Berns brought up the topic of "Piece of My Heart". When Berns signed Erma Franklin, it was as a way of getting at Jerry Wexler, who had gone from being his closest friend to someone he wasn't on speaking terms with, by signing the sister of his new signing Aretha. Morrison, of course, didn't co-write it -- he'd already decided that he didn't play well with others -- but it's tempting to think about how the song might have been different had Morrison written it. The song in some ways seems a message to Wexler -- haven't you had enough from me already? -- but it's also notable how many songs Berns was writing with the word "heart" in the chorus, given that Berns knew he was on borrowed time from his own heart condition. As an example, around the same time he and Jerry Ragavoy co-wrote "Piece of My Heart", they also co-wrote another song, "Heart Be Still", a flagrant lift from "Peace Be Still" by Aretha Franklin's old mentor Rev. James Cleveland, which they cut with Lorraine Ellison: [Excerpt: Lorraine Ellison, "Heart Be Still"] Berns' heart condition had got much worse as a result of the stress from splitting with Atlantic, and he had started talking about maybe getting open-heart surgery, though that was still very new and experimental. One wonders how he must have felt listening to Morrison singing about watching someone slowly dying. Morrison has since had nothing but negative things to say about the sessions in March 1967, but at the time he seemed happy. He returned to Belfast almost straight away after the sessions, on the understanding that he'd be back in the US if "Brown-Eyed Girl" was a success. He wrote to Janet Planet in San Francisco telling her to listen to the radio -- she'd know if she heard "Brown-Eyed Girl" that he would be back on his way to see her. She soon did hear the song, and he was soon back in the US: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl"] By August, "Brown-Eyed Girl" had become a substantial hit, making the top ten, and Morrison was back in the States. He was starting to get less happy with Berns though. Bang had put out the eight tracks he'd recorded in March as an album, titled Blowin' Your Mind, and Morrison thought that the crass pseudo-psychedelia of the title, liner notes, and cover was very inappropriate -- Morrison has never been a heavy user of any drugs other than alcohol, and didn't particularly want to be associated with them. He also seems to have not realised that every track he recorded in those initial sessions would be on the album, which many people have called one of the great one-sided albums of all time -- side A, with "Brown-Eyed Girl", "He Ain't Give You None" and the extended "T.B. Sheets" tends to get far more love than side B, with five much lesser songs on it. Berns held a party for Morrison on a cruise around Manhattan, but it didn't go well -- when the performer Tiny Tim tried to get on board, Carmine "Wassel" DeNoia, a mobster friend of Berns' who was Berns' partner in a studio they'd managed to get from Atlantic as part of the settlement when Berns left, was so offended by Tim's long hair and effeminate voice and mannerisms that he threw him overboard into the harbour. DeNoia was meant to be Morrison's manager in the US, working with Berns, but he and Morrison didn't get on at all -- at one point DeNoia smashed Morrison's acoustic guitar over his head, and only later regretted the damage he'd done to a nice guitar. And Morrison and Berns weren't getting on either. Morrison went back into the studio to record four more songs for a follow-up to "Brown-Eyed Girl", but there was again a misunderstanding. Morrison thought he'd been promised that this time he could do his songs the way he wanted, but Berns was just frustrated that he wasn't coming up with another "Brown-Eyed Girl", but was instead coming up with slow songs about trans women. Berns overdubbed party noises and soul backing vocals onto "Madame George", possibly in an attempt to copy the Beach Boys' Party! album with its similar feel, but it was never going to be a "Barbara Ann": [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Madame George (Bang version)"] In the end, Berns released one of the filler tracks from Blowin' Your Mind, "Ro Ro Rosey", as the next single, and it flopped. On December the twenty-ninth, Berns had a meeting with Neil Diamond, the meeting after which Diamond decided he needed to get a bodyguard. After that, he had a screaming row over the phone with Van Morrison, which made Berns ill with stress. The next day, he died of a heart attack. Berns' widow Ilene, who had only just given birth to a baby a couple of weeks earlier, would always blame Morrison for pushing her husband over the edge. Neither Van Morrison nor Jerry Wexler went to the funeral, but Neil Diamond did -- he went to try to persuade Ilene to let him out of his contract now Berns was dead. According to Janet Planet later, "We were at the hotel when we learned that Bert had died. We were just mortified, because things had been going really badly, and Van felt really bad, because I guess they'd parted having had some big fight or something... Even though he did love Bert, it was a strange relationship that lived and died in the studio... I remember we didn't go to the funeral, which probably was a mistake... I think [Van] had a really bad feeling about what was going to happen." But Morrison has later mostly talked about the more practical concerns that came up, which were largely the same as the ones Neil Diamond had, saying in 1997 "I'd signed a contract with Bert Berns for management, production, agency and record company,  publishing, the whole lot -- which was professional suicide as any lawyer will tell you now... Then the whole thing blew up. Bert Berns died and I was left broke." This was the same mistake, essentially, that he'd made with Phil Solomon, and in order to get out of it, it turned out he was going to have to do much the same for a third time.  But it was the experience with Berns specifically that traumatised Morrison enough that twenty-five years later he would still be writing songs about it, like "Big Time Operators": [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Big Time Operators"] The option to renew Morrison's contracts with Berns' companies came on the ninth of January 1968, less than two weeks after Berns' death. After his death, Berns' share of ownership in his companies had passed to his widow, who was in a quandary. She had two young children, one of whom was only a few weeks old, and she needed an income after their father had died. She was also not well disposed at all towards Morrison, who she blamed for causing her husband's death. By all accounts the amazing thing is that Berns lived as long as he did given his heart condition and the state of medical science at the time, but it's easy to understand her thinking. She wanted nothing to do with Morrison, and wanted to punish him. On the other hand, her late husband's silent partners didn't want to let their cash cow go. And so Morrison came under a huge amount of pressure in very different directions. From one side, Carmine DiNoia was determined to make more money off Morrison, and Morrison has since talked about signing further contracts at this point with a gun literally to his head, and his hotel room being shot up. But on the other side, Ilene Berns wanted to destroy Morrison's career altogether. She found out that Bert Berns hadn't got Morrison the proper work permits and reported him to the immigration authorities. Morrison came very close to being deported, but in the end he managed to escape deportation by marrying Janet Planet. The newly-married couple moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to get away from New York and the mobsters, and to try to figure out the next steps in Morrison's career. Morrison started putting together a band, which he called The Van Morrison Controversy, and working on new songs. One of his earliest connections in Massachusetts was the lead singer of a band called the Hallucinations, who he met in a bar where he was trying to get a gig: [Excerpt: The Hallucinations, "Messin' With the Kid"] The Hallucinations' lead singer was called Peter Wolf, and would much later go on to become well-known as the singer with the J. Geils Band. He and Morrison became acquaintances, and later became closer friends when they realised they had another connection -- Wolf had a late-night radio show under the name Woofa Goofa, and he'd been receiving anonymous requests for obscure blues records from a fan of the show. Morrison had been the one sending in the requests, not realising his acquaintance was the DJ. Before he got his own band together, Morrison actually guested with the Hallucinations at one show they did in May 1968, supporting John Lee Hooker. The Hallucinations had been performing "Gloria" since Them's single had come out, and they invited Morrison to join them to perform it on stage. According to Wolf, Morrison was very drunk and ranted in cod-Japanese for thirty-five minutes, and tried to sing a different song while the band played "Gloria". The audience were apparently unimpressed, even though Wolf shouted at them “Don't you know who this man is? He wrote the song!” But in truth, Morrison was sick of "Gloria" and his earlier work, and was trying to push his music in a new direction. He would later talk about having had an epiphany after hearing one particular track on the radio: [Excerpt: The Band, "I Shall Be Released"] Like almost every musician in 1968, Morrison was hit like a lightning bolt by Music From Big Pink, and he decided that he needed to turn his music in the same direction. He started writing the song "Brand New Day", which would later appear on his album Moondance, inspired by the music on the album. The Van Morrison Controversy started out as a fairly straightforward rock band, with guitarist John Sheldon, bass player Tom Kielbania, and drummer Joey Bebo. Sheldon was a novice, though his first guitar teacher was the singer James Taylor, but the other two were students at Berklee, and very serious musicians. Morrison seems to have had various managers involved in rapid succession in 1968, including one who was himself a mobster, and another who was only known as Frank, but one of these managers advanced enough money that the musicians got paid every gig. These musicians were all interested in kinds of music other than just straight rock music, and as well as rehearsing up Morrison's hits and his new songs, they would also jam with him on songs from all sorts of other genres, particularly jazz and blues. The band worked up the song that would become "Domino" based on Sheldon jamming on a Bo Diddley riff, and another time the group were rehearsing a Grant Green jazz piece, "Lazy Afternoon": [Excerpt: Grant Green, "Lazy Afternoon"] Morrison started messing with the melody, and that became his classic song "Moondance": [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Moondance"] No recordings of this electric lineup of the group are known to exist, though the backing musicians remember going to a recording studio called Ace recordings at one point and cutting some demos, which don't seem to circulate. Ace was a small studio which, according to all the published sources I've read, was best known for creating song poems, though it was a minor studio even in the song-poem world. For those who don't know, song poems were essentially a con aimed at wannabe songwriters who knew nothing about the business -- companies would advertise you too could become a successful, rich, songwriter if you sent in your "song poems", because anyone who knew the term "lyric" could be presumed to know too much about the music business to be useful. When people sent in their lyrics, they'd then be charged a fee to have them put out on their very own record -- with tracks made more or less on a conveyor belt with quick head arrangements, sung by session singers who were just handed a lyric sheet and told to get on with it. And thus were created such classics prized by collectors as "I Like Yellow Things", "Jimmy Carter Says 'Yes'", and "Listen Mister Hat". Obviously, for the most part these song poems did not lead to the customers becoming the next Ira Gershwin, but oddly even though Ace recordings is not one of the better-known song poem studios, it seems to have produced an actual hit song poem -- one that I don't think has ever before been identified as such until I made a connection, hence me going on this little tangent. Because in researching this episode I noticed something about its co-owner, Milton Yakus', main claim to fame. He co-wrote the song "Old Cape Cod", and to quote that song's Wikipedia page "The nucleus of the song was a poem written by Boston-area housewife Claire Rothrock, for whom Cape Cod was a favorite vacation spot. "Old Cape Cod" and its derivatives would be Rothrock's sole evident songwriting credit. She brought her poem to Ace Studios, a Boston recording studio owned by Milton Yakus, who adapted the poem into the song's lyrics." And while Yakus had written other songs, including songs for Patti Page who had the hit with "Old Cape Cod", apparently Page recorded that song after Rothrock brought her the demo after a gig, rather than getting it through any formal channels. It sounds to me like the massive hit and classic of the American songbook "Old Cape Cod" started life as a song-poem -- and if you're familiar with the form, it fits the genre perfectly: [Excerpt: Patti Page, "Old Cape Cod"] The studio was not the classiest of places, even if you discount the song-poems. Its main source of income was from cutting private records with mobsters' wives and mistresses singing (and dealing with the problems that came along when those records weren't successful) and it also had a sideline in bugging people's cars to see if their spouses were cheating, though Milton Yakus' son Shelly, who got his start at his dad's studio, later became one of the most respected recording engineers in the industry -- and indeed had already worked as assistant engineer on Music From Big Pink. And there was actually another distant connection to Morrison's new favourite band on these sessions. For some reason -- reports differ -- Bebo wasn't considered suitable for the session, and in his place was the one-handed drummer Victor "Moulty" Moulton, who had played with the Barbarians, who'd had a minor hit with "Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?" a couple of years earlier: [Excerpt: The Barbarians, "Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?"] A later Barbarians single, in early 1966, had featured Moulty telling his life story, punctuated by the kind of three-chord chorus that would have been at home on a Bert Berns single: [Excerpt: The Barbarians, "Moulty"] But while that record was credited to the Barbarians, Moulton was the only Barbarian on the track, with the instruments and backing vocals instead being provided by Levon and the Hawks. Shortly after the Ace sessions, the Van Morrison Controversy fell apart, though nobody seems to know why. Depending on which musician's story you listen to, either Morrison had a dream that he should get rid of all electric instruments and only use acoustic players, or there was talk of a record deal but the musicians weren't good enough, or the money from the mysterious manager (who may or may not have been the one who was a mobster) ran out. Bebo went back to university, and Sheldon left soon after, though Sheldon would remain in the music business in one form or another. His most prominent credit has been writing a couple of songs for his old friend James Taylor, including the song "Bittersweet" on Taylor's platinum-selling best-of, on which Sheldon also played guitar: [Excerpt: James Taylor, "Bittersweet"] Morrison and Kielbania continued for a while as a duo, with Morrison on acoustic guitar and Kielbania on double bass, but they were making very different music. Morrison's biggest influence at this point, other than The Band, was King Pleasure, a jazz singer who sang in the vocalese style we've talked about before -- the style where singers would sing lyrics to melodies that had previously been improvised by jazz musicians: [Excerpt: King Pleasure, "Moody's Mood for Love"] Morrison and Kielbania soon decided that to make the more improvisatory music they were interested in playing, they wanted another musician who could play solos. They ended up with John Payne, a jazz flute and saxophone player whose biggest inspiration was Charles Lloyd. This new lineup of the Van Morrison Controversy -- acoustic guitar, double bass, and jazz flute -- kept gigging around Boston, though the sound they were creating was hardly what the audiences coming to see the man who'd had that "Brown-Eyed Girl" hit the year before would have expected -- even when they did "Brown-Eyed Girl", as the one live recording of that line-up, made by Peter Wolf, shows: [Excerpt: The Van Morrison Controversy, "Brown-Eyed Girl (live in Boston 1968)"] That new style, with melodic bass underpinning freely extemporising jazz flute and soulful vocals, would become the basis of the album that to this day is usually considered Morrison's best. But before that could happen, there was the matter of the contracts to be sorted out. Warner-Reprise Records were definitely interested. Warners had spent the last few years buying up smaller companies like Atlantic, Autumn Records, and Reprise, and the label was building a reputation as the major label that would give artists the space and funding they needed to make the music they wanted to make. Idiosyncratic artists with difficult reputations (deserved or otherwise), like Neil Young, Randy Newman, Van Dyke Parks, the Grateful Dead, and Joni Mitchell, had all found homes on the label, which was soon also to start distributing Frank Zappa, the Beach Boys, and Captain Beefheart. A surly artist who wants to make mystical acoustic songs with jazz flute accompaniment was nothing unusual for them, and once Joe Smith, the man who had signed the Grateful Dead, was pointed in Morrison's direction by Andy Wickham, an A&R man working for the label, everyone knew that Morrison would be a perfect fit. But Morrison was still under contract to Bang records and Web IV, and those contracts said, among other things, that any other label that negotiated with Morrison would be held liable for breach of contract. Warners didn't want to show their interest in Morrison, because a major label wanting to sign him would cause Bang to raise the price of buying him out of his contract. Instead they got an independent production company to sign him, with a nod-and-wink understanding that they would then license the records to Warners. The company they chose was Inherit Productions, the production arm of Schwaid-Merenstein, a management company set up by Bob Schwaid, who had previously worked in Warners' publishing department, and record producer Lewis Merenstein. Merenstein came to another demo session at Ace Recordings, where he fell in love with the new music that Morrison was playing, and determined he would do everything in his power to make the record into the masterpiece it deserved to be. He and Morrison were, at least at this point, on exactly the same page, and bonded over their mutual love of King Pleasure. Morrison signed to Schwaid-Merenstein, just as he had with Bert Berns and before him Phil Solomon, for management, record production, and publishing. Schwaid-Merenstein were funded by Warners, and would license any recordings they made to Warners, once the contractual situation had been sorted out. The first thing to do was to negotiate the release from Web IV, the publishing company owned by Ilene Berns. Schwaid negotiated that, and Morrison got released on four conditions -- he had to make a substantial payment to Web IV, if he released a single within a year he had to give Web IV the publishing, any album he released in the next year had to contain at least two songs published by Web IV, and he had to give Web IV at least thirty-six new songs to publish within the next year. The first two conditions were no problem at all -- Warners had the money to buy the contract out, and Merenstein's plans for the first album didn't involve a single anyway. It wouldn't be too much of a hardship to include a couple of Web IV-published tracks on the album -- Morrison had written two songs, "Beside You" and "Madame George", that had already been published and that he was regularly including in his live sets. As for the thirty-six new songs... well, that all depended on what you called a song, didn't it? [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Ring Worm"] Morrison went into a recording studio and recorded thirty-one ostensible songs, most of them lasting one minute to within a few seconds either way, in which he strummed one or two chords and spoke-sang whatever words came into his head -- for example one song, "Here Comes Dumb George", just consists of the words "Here Comes Dumb George" repeated over and over. Some of the 'songs', like "Twist and Shake" and "Hang on Groovy", are parodying Bert Berns' songwriting style; others, like "Waiting for My Royalty Check", "Blowin' Your Nose", and "Nose in Your Blow", are attacks on Bang's business practices. Several of the songs, like "Hold on George", "Here Comes Dumb George", "Dum Dum George", and "Goodbye George" are about a man called George who seems to have come to Boston to try and fail to make a record with Morrison. And “Want a Danish” is about wanting a Danish pastry. But in truth, this description is still making these "songs" sound more coherent than they are. The whole recording is of no musical merit whatsoever, and has absolutely nothing in it which could be considered to have any commercial potential at all. Which is of course the point -- just to show utter contempt to Ilene Berns and her company. The other problem that needed to be solved was Bang Records itself, which was now largely under the control of the mob. That was solved by Joe Smith. As Smith told the story "A friend of mine who knew some people said I could buy the contract for $20,000. I had to meet somebody in a warehouse on the third floor on Ninth Avenue in New York. I walked up there with twenty thousand-dollar bills -- and I was terrified. I was terrified I was going to give them the money, get a belt on the head and still not wind up with the contract. And there were two guys in the room. They looked out of central casting -- a big wide guy and  a tall, thin guy. They were wearing suits and hats and stuff. I said 'I'm here with the money. You got the contract?' I remember I took that contract and ran out the door and jumped from the third floor to the second floor, and almost broke my leg to get on the street, where I could get a cab and put the contract in a safe place back at Warner Brothers." But the problem was solved, and Lewis Merenstein could get to work translating the music he'd heard Morrison playing into a record. He decided that Kielbania and Payne were not suitable for the kind of recording he wanted -- though they were welcome to attend the sessions in case the musicians had any questions about the songs, and thus they would get session pay. Kielbania was, at first, upset by this, but he soon changed his mind when he realised who Merenstein was bringing in to replace him on bass for the session. Richard Davis, the bass player -- who sadly died two months ago as I write this -- would later go on to play on many classic rock records by people like Bruce Springsteen and Laura Nyro, largely as a result of his work for Morrison, but at the time he was known as one of the great jazz bass players, most notably having played on Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch: [Excerpt: Eric Dolphy, "Hat and Beard"] Kielbania could see the wisdom of getting in one of the truly great players for the album, and he was happy to show Davis the parts he'd been playing on the songs live, which Davis could then embellish -- Davis later always denied this, but it's obvious when listening to the live recordings that Kielbania played on before these sessions that Davis is playing very similar lines. Warren Smith Jr, the vibraphone player, had played with great jazz musicians like Charles Mingus and Herbie Mann, as well as backing Lloyd Price, Aretha Franklin, and Janis Joplin. Connie Kay, the drummer, was the drummer for the Modern Jazz Quartet and had also played sessions with everyone from Ruth Brown to Miles Davis. And Jay Berliner, the guitarist, had played on records like Charles Mingus' classic The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady: [Excerpt: Charles Mingus: "Mode D - Trio and Group Dancers, Mode F - Single Solos & Group Dance"] There was also a flute player whose name nobody now remembers. Although all of these musicians were jobbing session musicians -- Berliner came to the first session for the album that became Astral Weeks straight from a session recording a jingle for Pringles potato chips -- they were all very capable of taking a simple song and using it as an opportunity for jazz improvisation. And that was what Merenstein asked them to do. The songs that Morrison was writing were lyrically oblique, but structurally they were very simple -- surprisingly so when one is used to listening to the finished album. Most of the songs were, harmonically, variants of the standard blues and R&B changes that Morrison was used to playing. "Cyprus Avenue" and "The Way Young Lovers Do", for example, are both basically twelve-bar blueses -- neither is *exactly* a standard twelve-bar blues, but both are close enough that they can be considered to fit the form. Other than what Kielbania and Payne showed the musicians, they received no guidance from Morrison, who came in, ran through the songs once for them, and then headed to the vocal booth. None of the musicians had much memory of Morrison at all -- Jay Berliner said “This little guy walks in, past everybody, disappears into the vocal booth, and almost never comes out, even on the playbacks, he stayed in there." While Richard Davis later said “Well, I was with three of my favorite fellas to play with, so that's what made it beautiful. We were not concerned with Van at all, he never spoke to us.” The sound of the basic tracks on Astral Weeks is not the sound of a single auteur, as one might expect given its reputation, it's the sound of extremely good jazz musicians improvising based on the instructions given by Lewis Merenstein, who was trying to capture the feeling he'd got from listening to Morrison's live performances and demos. And because these were extremely good musicians, the album was recorded extremely quickly. In the first session, they cut four songs. Two of those were songs that Morrison was contractually obliged to record because of his agreement with Web IV -- "Beside You" and "Madame George", two songs that Bert Berns had produced, now in radically different versions: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Madame George"] The third song, "Cyprus Avenue", is the song that has caused most controversy over the years, as it's another of the songs that Morrison wrote around this time that relate to a sexual or romantic interest in underage girls. In this case, the reasoning might have been as simple as that the song is a blues, and Morrison may have been thinking about a tradition of lyrics like this in blues songs like "Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl". Whatever the cause though, the lyrics have, to put it mildly, not aged well at all: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Cyprus Avenue"] That song would be his standard set-closer for live performances for much of the seventies. For the fourth and final song, though, they chose to record what would become the title track for the album, "Astral Weeks", a song that was a lot more elliptical, and which seems in part to be about Morrison's longing for Janet Planet from afar, but also about memories of childhood, and also one of the first songs to bring in Morrison's fascination with the occult and spirituality,  something that would be a recurring theme throughout his work, as the song was partly inspired by paintings by a friend of Morrison's which suggested to him the concept of astral travel: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Astral Weeks"] Morrison had a fascination with the idea of astral travel, as he had apparently had several out-of-body experiences as a child, and wanted to find some kind of explanation for them. Most of the songs on the album came, by Morrison's own account, as a kind of automatic writing, coming through him rather than being consciously written, and there's a fascination throughout with, to use the phrase from "Madame George", "childhood visions". The song is also one of the first songs in Morrison's repertoire to deliberately namecheck one of his idols, something else he would do often in future, when he talks about "talking to Huddie Leadbelly". "Astral Weeks" was a song that Morrison had been performing live for some time, and Payne had always enjoyed doing it. Unlike Kielbania he had no compunction about insisting that he was good enough to play on the record, and he eventually persuaded the session flute player to let him borrow his instrument, and Payne was allowed to play on the track: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Astral Weeks"] Or at least that's how the story is usually told -- Payne is usually credited for playing on "Madame George" too, even though everyone agrees that "Astral Weeks" was the last song of the night, but people's memories can fade over time. Either way, Payne's interplay with Jay Berliner on the guitar became such a strong point of the track that there was no question of bringing the unknown session player back -- Payne was going to be the woodwind player for the rest of the album: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Astral Weeks"] There was then a six-day break between sessions, during which time Payne and Kielbania went to get initiated into Scientology -- a religion with which Morrison himself would experiment a little over a decade later -- though they soon decided that it wasn't worth the cost of the courses they'd have to take, and gave up on the idea the same week. The next session didn't go so well. Jay Berliner was unavailable, and so Barry Kornfeld, a folkie who played with people like Dave Van Ronk, was brought in to replace him. Kornfeld was perfectly decent in the role, but they'd also brought in a string section, with the idea of recording some of the songs which needed string parts live. But the string players they brought in were incapable of improvising, coming from a classical rather than jazz tradition, and the only track that got used on the finished album was "The Way Young Lovers Do", by far the most conventional song on the album, a three-minute soul ballad structured as a waltz twelve-bar blues, where the strings are essentially playing the same parts that a horn section would play on a record by someone like Solomon Burke: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "The Way Young Lovers Do"] It was decided that any string or horn parts on the rest of the album would just be done as overdubs. It was two weeks before the next and final session for the album, and that featured the return of Jay Berliner on guitar. The session started with "Sweet Thing" and "Ballerina", two songs that Morrison had been playing live for some time, and which were cut in relatively quick order.  They then made attempts at two more songs that didn't get very far, "Royalty", and "Going Around With Jesse James", before Morrison, stuck for something to record, pulled out a new lyric he'd never performed live, "Slim Slow Slider". The whole band ran through the song once, but then Merenstein decided to pare the arrangement down to just Morrison, Payne (on soprano sax rather than on flute), and Warren Smith Jr: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Slim Slow Slider"] That track was the only one where, after the recording, Merenstein didn't compliment the performance, remaining silent instead – Payne said “Maybe everyone was just tired, or maybe they were moved by it.” It seems likely it was the latter. The track eventually got chosen as the final track of the album, because Merenstein felt that it didn't fit conceptually with anything else -- and it's definitely a more negative track than the oth

On the milestone 150th episode of RümpChät, Rump and Hambone catch up with one of our most beloved guests; a long-time hero and friend of the Chät - the legendary 'One Arm Bandit', John Payne!!!