Podcast appearances and mentions of John Wesley Harding

In the 1960's Bob Dylan changed the world. How? And in what ways are we still dealing with the monumental changes that the future Noble prize winner kicked off? Sean Egan has written a new book about Dylan called "Decade of Dissent- How 1960's Bob Dylan Changed the World." It's a fascinating look at the creation and evolution of one of the world's most important artists. The book is available for pre-order, it comes out May 20th.

Send us a textOn this weeks episode, we discuss an LP by John Wesley Harding (né Wesley Stace), 1996's John Wesley Harding's New Deal. After releasing two EPs and three full length albums with a full band for Sire Records, Harding decided to strip down his sound for his debut on his new label Forward Records (an imprint of Rhino Records). Harding much preferred the intimacy of  acoustic live performances and created an album that embraced that aesthetic whole heatedly.  Described by Harding as “gangsta folk,”  John Wesley Harding's New Deal  is a beautiful record and a fan favorite. It was the first time Harding had the freedom to make the record he always wanted to make. The song arrangements are simple and direct, putting the focus of the lyrics., which are both sly and whimsical, and full of British charm. And as an added bonus, the album even includes a fantastic sequel of sorts to the Kink's “Waterloo Sunset.”Visit us at www.tappingvinyl.com.

After the double album Blonde on Blonde became one of the biggest selling and most lauded of his career, Bob Dylan decided, either for health or other reasons, to pull back on his exhaustive touring schedule. After abortive sessions with The Band, he went to Nashville and, with a small group, recorded an album of country and folk inspired songs that almost harkened back to his acoustic roots. 

The Kinks was one of the most influential bands to come out of England in the 60s, with a career that lasted up through the late 90s. Their style and sound changed numerous times over the decades and they amassed a legion of dedicated fans. We talk with author / editor Chris Kocher about his new book, Thank You For The Days: Fans Of The Kinks Share 60 Years Of Stories, which celebrates the band's legacy and fans' special connection to it. Among the contributors are Ron Sexsmith, Glen Burtnick, John Wesley Harding, Crouch End Festival Chorus musical director David Temple, plus touring musicians, fan club leaders, and "average Joe" fans with extraordinary stories.  Thank You For The Days is currently available in the UK and will be released in the US in March 2025. Order your copies HERE. After that, we spend a few minutes remember Marianne Faithful, who passed away just a couple of days before we reccorded this episode.  Are you a Kinks fan? Do you have a cool Kinks story that you'd like to share with us? LET US KNOW! Drop us a line at modernmusicology1@gmail.com or leave us a comment on our socials.  Find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ModernMusicology  Check us out on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/modernmusicologypodcast/  Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ModrnMusicology  Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk-MlcGy5u3fK1j4bVty1Kw  Modern Musicology is part of the ESO Podcast Network. https://esonetwork.com/  Find more about us: Rob Levy: https://kdhx.org/shows/show/juxtaposition  Stephanie Seymour: www.therearebirds.com   R. Alan Siler: www.kozmiccreative.com   Anthony Williams: https://watchers4d.podbean.com/

It was without question a natural progression. All of the attributes that country inherited from gospel, blues, and jazz resulted in what amounted to competition in the charts (and in some mid-century cultural clashes). Although The Beatles had suggested a kinship with mid-sixties tributes to Buck Owens and Chet Atkins, the only comfortable way to make the marriage work was to have it come from other directions…specifically from cultural prods of Nudie suits, coupled with folk and country nudges, and the inevitable respect for the music. Gram Parsons' influence on the late sixties rise of something they called ‘country rock' is easy to find but Dylan's John Wesley Harding album from 1968, The Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and Leon Russell's alter-ego Hank Wilson opened the doors to a sound that swept the charts. We'll hear some originals, covers, and a whole lot more in this week's Deeper Roots. Hope y'all can join us.

In 1982, the Los Angeles punk rock band X put out its album Under the Big Black Sun. Over 40 years later, it's still great! Hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot talk with X vocalist and bassist John Doe all about the album and the band's impact. They'll also chat with him about his recent solo album and his work in television and film.Join our Facebook Group: https://bit.ly/3sivr9TBecome a member on Patreon: https://bit.ly/3slWZvcSign up for our newsletter: https://bit.ly/3eEvRnGMake a donation via PayPal: https://bit.ly/3dmt9lUSend us a Voice Memo: Desktop: bit.ly/2RyD5Ah Mobile: sayhi.chat/soundops Featured Songs:X, "The Have Nots," Under the Big Black Sun, Elektra, 1982The Beatles, "With A Little Help From My Friends," Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Parlophone, 1967X, "The Hungry Wolf," Under the Big Black Sun, Elektra, 1982Bob Dylan, "As I Went Out One Morning," John Wesley Harding, Columbia, 1967John Doe, "Never Coming Back," Fables in a Foreign Land, Fat Possum, 2022X, "Riding with Mary," Under the Big Black Sun, Elektra, 1982X, "Motel Room in My Bed," Under the Big Black Sun, Elektra, 1982Germs, "Lexicon Devil," (GI), Slash, 1979The Screamers, "122 Hours Of Fear (Live at the Target)," Live in San Francisco: Sept 2nd 1978, Target Video, 2004The Dils, "I Hate the Rich," I Hate the Rich (Single), What?, 1977Circle Jerks, "Stars and Stripes," Wild in the Streets, Step-Forward, 1982X, "Los Angeles," Los Angeles, Slash, 1980X, "We're Desperate," Wild Gift, Slash, 1981X, "Under the Big Black Sun," Under the Big Black Sun, Elektra, 1982X, "Adult Books," Wild Gift, Slash, 1981X, "Dancing with Tears in My Eyes," Under the Big Black Sun, Elektra, 1982X, "Because I Do," Under the Big Black Sun, Elektra, 1982X, "Blue Spark," Under the Big Black Sun, Elektra, 1982X, "Come Back to Me," Under the Big Black Sun, Elektra, 1982X, "Real Child of Hell," Under the Big Black Sun, Elektra, 1982The Gun Club, "She's Like Heroin to Me," Fire of Love, Ruby, 1981Los Lobos, "Will the Wolf Survive?," How Will the Wolf Survive?, Slash/Warner Bros., 1984The Del Fuegos, "Don't Run Wild," Boston, Mass., Slash, 1985Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, "Henry Lee (feat. PJ Harvey) ," Murder Ballads, Mute, 1996Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan, "Revolver," Ballad of the Broken Seas, Cooking Vinyl Limited, 2006Artificial Go, "Pay Phone," Hopscotch Fever, Feel It, 2024See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Among the walnut shells, wrapping paper, dried tangerine peel and broken toys beneath the Christmas Tree Of News we found a few unopened presents, among them … … Marine Homicide Unit solving murders in Scottish waters or former rock star dumping toxic waste? A crime drama Stackwaddy special. … Roy Bittan, Duke Ellington: how musical “professors” date back to ragtime. …'Suzanne' and the other three songs Leonard Cohen gave away. … Mary Martin, unsung connector and catalyst of folk-rock. … how the spare, monochrome simplicity of John Wesley Harding flew against the prevailing wind of Disraeli Gears, Forever Changes and Magical Mystery Tour. … “I'd rather be dead than wet my bed”. … the invention of the “blockbuster album”. … she's only human: what Judy Collins thought when she met Leonard Cohen. … Crowded House, John Fogerty, Ry Cooder, Ian Broudie, Patti Smith … when did having your kids in your band become almost compulsory? … producer Richard Perry's journey from Beefheart to the “surrealistic vaudeville” of Tiny Tim to the pure genius of ‘You're So Vain'. Plus a rare moment - something David Hepworth doesn't know! - and birthday guest Sandra Austin.Tickets for Word In Your Ear live here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/bowie-in-london-and-hollywood-tickets-1118845138929?aff=oddtdtcreator Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Among the walnut shells, wrapping paper, dried tangerine peel and broken toys beneath the Christmas Tree Of News we found a few unopened presents, among them … … Marine Homicide Unit solving murders in Scottish waters or former rock star dumping toxic waste? A crime drama Stackwaddy special. … Roy Bittan, Duke Ellington: how musical “professors” date back to ragtime. …'Suzanne' and the other three songs Leonard Cohen gave away. … Mary Martin, unsung connector and catalyst of folk-rock. … how the spare, monochrome simplicity of John Wesley Harding flew against the prevailing wind of Disraeli Gears, Forever Changes and Magical Mystery Tour. … “I'd rather be dead than wet my bed”. … the invention of the “blockbuster album”. … she's only human: what Judy Collins thought when she met Leonard Cohen. … Crowded House, John Fogerty, Ry Cooder, Ian Broudie, Patti Smith … when did having your kids in your band become almost compulsory? … producer Richard Perry's journey from Beefheart to the “surrealistic vaudeville” of Tiny Tim to the pure genius of ‘You're So Vain'. Plus a rare moment - something David Hepworth doesn't know! - and birthday guest Sandra Austin.Tickets for Word In Your Ear live here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/bowie-in-london-and-hollywood-tickets-1118845138929?aff=oddtdtcreator Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Among the walnut shells, wrapping paper, dried tangerine peel and broken toys beneath the Christmas Tree Of News we found a few unopened presents, among them … … Marine Homicide Unit solving murders in Scottish waters or former rock star dumping toxic waste? A crime drama Stackwaddy special. … Roy Bittan, Duke Ellington: how musical “professors” date back to ragtime. …'Suzanne' and the other three songs Leonard Cohen gave away. … Mary Martin, unsung connector and catalyst of folk-rock. … how the spare, monochrome simplicity of John Wesley Harding flew against the prevailing wind of Disraeli Gears, Forever Changes and Magical Mystery Tour. … “I'd rather be dead than wet my bed”. … the invention of the “blockbuster album”. … she's only human: what Judy Collins thought when she met Leonard Cohen. … Crowded House, John Fogerty, Ry Cooder, Ian Broudie, Patti Smith … when did having your kids in your band become almost compulsory? … producer Richard Perry's journey from Beefheart to the “surrealistic vaudeville” of Tiny Tim to the pure genius of ‘You're So Vain'. Plus a rare moment - something David Hepworth doesn't know! - and birthday guest Sandra Austin.Tickets for Word In Your Ear live here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/bowie-in-london-and-hollywood-tickets-1118845138929?aff=oddtdtcreator Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Send us a textThis week the Portland-based duo, Wonderly stopped by to discuss their latest album Wolves/ We also talked about the Low Bar Chorale, A new German Opera, and so much more.********Wolves is the culmination of a creative partnership that dates back to 2016. Brunberg and Landsverk debuted Wonderly with a self-titled 2017 collection; the unit continued with the post-pandemic release Story We Tell in 2022 and the covers collection Appropriate 'til Death in 2023. Their film scores have been featured on the soundtracks for the independent films Last Ferry, At the Video Store and other independent features, while their music has been heard as the aforementioned theme song of the New York Times' podcast The Daily and writer Cheryl Strayed's Dear Sugar, as well as on Brunberg's award-winning podcast Roam Schooled.Jim Brunberg was a touring song and dance man for 12 years with the hugely successful rock/harmony/acoustic duo (and sometimes quintet) Box Set, touring with acts ranging from Dave Matthews to Huey Lewis, through the 90s. In 2000, Jim opened a recording studio, turning to the recording and composing world to satisfy his constant hunger for music. He produced and engineered dozens of records for many artists (Storm Large, Kristin Hersh, John Wesley Harding, and countless Portland-based bands) and released a few solo albums before converting the studios into a world-class music venue (Mississippi Studios). This spawned a few larger venues (Revolution Hall and Polaris Hall) where Jim personally built the stages, much of the seating and decor of a family of venues he still co-owns with his business partner Kevin Cradock. Currently, Jim is writing and recording/producing a tragic/comic German Opera, working with some of the classical musicians he has met over the past several years (mostly Oregon Symphony players). The work, "Das Blut" is a satirical, full-fledged production, entirely in German, that takes aim at the rise of a tyrant. It is a nuanced, but completely insurgent take on empathy, power, where our demons come from, and what they eat for dinner. He plans to debut this work, along with a new batch of songs, in 2025.Ben Landsverk is an American composer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist, based in Portland, OR, whose work focuses on social change through music. Hailed as a “prominent Portland composer” (Bloomberg Magazine) and “a unique musical talent” (Willamette Week), he is best known for his work as one half of the duo Wonderly, with musical partner Jim Brunberg. An active session musician, Landsverk has worked with such musical luminaries as Father John Misty, Pink Martini, Smokey Robinson, Van Dyke Parks, Storm Large, and Ruby Friedman Orchestra. From 2003-2015, he was a collaborator and music director with avant-garde performance artist Holcombe Waller and performed at such festivals as Under The Radar (NYC), Festival de Teatro de Curitiba (Brazil), Queer Zagreb (Croatia), Brooklyn Academy of Music (NYC), and Centre Pompidou (Metz and Paris, France).  Landsverk is the founder and director of Portland's Low Bar Chorale and of Voices Unlimited, Portland's flagship choir for people with neurodiversity. He spent over 20 years as a professional choral director and singer, specializing in medieval, renaissance, and baroque music. Landsverk is currently working on his first solo album, scheduled for release in early 2025. *******If you would like to contact the show about being a guest please email us at Dauna@bettertopodcast.comFollow us on SocSupport the show

1968 är året då allting händer i USA. Samtidigt letar sig Bob Dylan fram ur sitt två år lång ide och lanserar en helt ny version av sig själv med albumet John Wesley Harding. Idag talar vi om kaosåret som förändrade ett land i grunden, till tonerna av All Along the Watchtower.Musikpodden finns även på:Instagram: Musik_poddenSpotify: Musikpodden med Arvid BranderApple podcast: Musikpodden med Arvid BranderKontakt: podcastarvid@gmail.comKällor:Martin Luther King (Godfrey, Hodgson 2010)1968: The Year That Rocked the World (Kurlansky, Mark 2003)Down the highway : the life of Bob Dylan (Sounes, Howard 2001)Images of the Tet offensive Hit Home (Oberdorfer, Don 2004)I See the Promised Land: Martin Luther King Jr.s Final Speech (Martin Luther King Jr. 1968)Robert F. Kennedy is Assassinated (Time, 2004)The Rest Is History - avsnitt 508, 509 och 510 (Podcast, Goalhanger, 2024)Dylan Has Returned With ‘John Wesley Harding' (Rolling stone, 1968) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Labor Day Vibes: Grateful Dead, George Thorogood, and MoreA special Labor Day edition featuring a recap of significant events in the music world, particularly focusing on the Grateful Dead's September 2, 1988, concert at the Capitol Center in Landover, Maryland. Larry Mishkin reminisces about the band's history, including the song "Hell in a Bucket," its significance, and its evolution in the Grateful Dead's lineup. There's a detailed discussion about the song "Dire Wolf," including its origins, inspirations, and its role in the band's performances.The episode also features a tribute to Steve Silverman, a renowned science writer and Grateful Dead enthusiast who recently passed away. Silverman was celebrated for his contributions to the understanding of autism and his deep connection to the Grateful Dead community. The tribute highlights his life, his work, and his impact on both the music and science communities.Larry shares reviews of the recent George Thorogood and Journeyman Tribute the Eric Clapton  https://www.georgethorogood.com/https://vilarpac.org/https://journeymantribute.com/ Grateful DeadSeptember 2, 1988 (36 years ago)Capital CenterLandover, MDGrateful Dead Live at Capital Centre on 1988-09-02 : Free Borrow & Streaming : Internet Archive I hope everyone is having a great Labor Day weekend. Night one of a four night run at the Cap Center to kick off 1988 East Coast Fall Tour (played Friday and Saturday, 2 and 3 and Monday and Tuesday 5 and 6).  Took a night off for my wedding on Sunday 4th.  Saturday night show was my rehearsal dinner and they played second encore, final electric Ripple and final Grateful Dead Ripple.  Memorable weekend for all (except for my east coast deadhead buddies at the wedding who were bummed to have missed the Ripple. INTRO:                                 Hell in a Bucket                                                Track #2                                                0:00 – 1:34 David Dodd:  The Bob Weir / John Barlow / Brent Mydland song “Hell in a Bucket” directly references the biker scene, and I'm sure that somehow Barlow just wanted to put that element into the band's repertoire somehow. After all, there are plenty of outlaw elements sprinkled through the band's songs. In the case of this song, though, the singer/narrator seems to be wishing a sorry fate on his erstwhile main squeeze, with the argument being that once she has a biker charging up and down her halls on his chopper, she'll realize that the narrator was really pretty good, at least by contrast. “Hell in a Bucket” appeared on In the Dark, released in July 1987.  The song frequently featured as the show opener over the course of the next two-plus decades, although it wasn't used in that role until about a year after its first performance.  Played:  217 timesFirst:  May 13, 1983 at William Randolph Hearst Greek Theatre, Berkeley, CA, USALast:  June 30, 1995 at Three Rivers Stadium, Pittsburgh, PA   SHOW No. 1:                    Dire Wolf                                                Track #5                                                2:00 – 3:24 "Dire Wolf" is a ballad by the Grateful Dead, released as the third track on their 1970 album Workingman's Dead. The lyrics were written by Robert Hunter after watching a film adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles. The music, containing elements of country and folk music, was composed by Jerry Garcia on the same day. The song tells the story of a man who plays cards with a "dire wolf" on a cold winter's night in "Fennario"; the lyrics have been variously interpreted. The piece became a staple of the Grateful Dead's performances, and was played more than two hundred times between 1969 and 1995. A few months before the release of their album Aoxomoxoa in 1969, Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter and his then-partner Christie Bourne began sharing a house with the band's guitarist Jerry Garcia, his wife, and his step-daughter. Living in close proximity gave an impetus to their collaborative song-writing: Hunter and Garcia wrote every song on Aoxomoxoa.[2] Some time later, Hunter and Carolyn Garcia spent an evening watching a film adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles. According to Grateful Dead historian Dennis McNally, Carolyn later remarked that the hound was a "dire wolf".[3] However, according to Hunter himself, as quoted in the Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics, he and Garcia were speculating about the identity of the hound in the story, and came up with the idea that it may have been a dire wolf.[4] Hunter wrote the lyrics the next morning, based on images that the phrase conjured for him, and Garcia wrote the music to them later that day.[3][4] The location named "Fennario" appears in the folk song "The Bonnie Lass o' Fyvie", including in the Grateful Dead's version of that song. It refers to a fictional location; a friend of the band members commented in an interview that it was the perfect name for a generic place, because it was evocative, and had four syllables.[4] In contrast, music writer Buzz Poole speculated that the name may be derived from Fenrir, a mythical Nordic wolf who was chained up by the gods.[6] The phrase "don't murder me", repeated in the chorus, was a reference by Garcia to his experiences driving around the San Francisco Bay Area at the time that the Zodiac Killer was active.[4] The song became a staple of the Grateful Dead's live performances; the electric version of the song was typically featured on the band's first set.[4][7] According to The Grateful Dead's 100 Essential Songs, "Dire Wolf" was played 226 times between 1969 and 1995, and was played every year, except for 1975. Sixty-three of these performances were in the first two years after the song was written. In later years, the acoustic version of the piece became more common.[7] The structure and pace of the song did not change much over the years. It was sung most often by Garcia, although an early version featured Bob Weir on vocals, with Garcia playing the pedal steel guitar instead.[7] An AllMusic review of this version praised Garcia's "sweet" guitar playing as a "great feature" of the song.[5] Its lyrics have led to it being described as an essential Grateful Dead song by commentators.[7] Played:  229 timesFirst:  June 7, 1969 at Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA, USALast:  June 7, 1969 at Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA, USA  MUSIC NEWS: Steve Silberman passesPhish – Dick'sNeil Young explanation for canceled showsMiracle in MundeleinMiracle in Mundelein 2024 is an unprecedented cannabis and outdoor concert experience taking place at RISE Recreational Dispensary in Mundelein, IL on September 7-8, 202412. Presented by RYTHM Premium Cannabis, RISE Dispensaries, Dayglo, and Deep Cut, this second annual outdoor festival allows legal on-site cannabis consumption2.    SHOW No. 2:                    Althea                                                Track #7                                                3:10 – 4:53 When the Grateful Dead released “Althea” on their 1980 album Go to Heaven, it quickly became a favorite among fans. Robert Hunter, the Dead's legendary lyricist, was known for embedding multiple layers of meaning in his lyrics. “Althea” is no exception. Jerry Garcia's soulful voice brings Hunter's words to life, but it's the lyrics that leave listeners pondering. The name “Althea” itself is rooted in Greek mythology. Althea was the Queen of Calydon, whose actions led to her son's death, reflecting themes of fate and consequence. While the song doesn't explicitly connect to this myth, the allusion to “your fire” might be a subtle nod to Althea's tragic tale. “Althea” was performed live by the Grateful Dead 273 times, making it a staple in their repertoire. Despite McNally's belief that the band overplayed it in the early '80s, fans cherished its live renditions. The song's adaptability and depth allowed it to grow with the listeners, much like a trusted pair of pants with a sturdy elastic waistband. Played:  273 timesFirst:  August 4, 1979 at Oakland Civic Auditorium, Oakland, CA, USALast:  July 8, 1995 at Soldier Field, Chicago  SHOW No. 3:                    Scarlet Begonias                                                Track #10                                                0:00 – 2:02 Garcia/HunterFrom The Mars Hotel (July 24, 1974) The group first performed the song live on March 23, 1974, at the Cow Palace in Daly City, California.[1] When "Fire on the Mountain" was incorporated into the band's repertoire in 1977, "Scarlet Begonias" would often be paired with it when played live, resulting in what would be nicknamed "Scarlet > Fire" with the first iteration of this iconic pairing on Friday, March 18th, 1977 at Winterland in S.F.   Interestingly, they played the combo to close the first set.  Almost always a second set opener, once saw them open a show with it. Had to play this because the opening is so special – sends a message to the Deadheads that good things lay ahead, best second set opener in their arsenal.  Nothing like the reaction when you hear the first few notes.  “Scarlet, into Fire, a great 25 minutes of grooving music and wonderful for “mind exercises” you may be experiencing at that time. Played:  317  (Fire played 254 times)First:  March 23, 1974 at Cow Palace, Daly City, CA, USALast: June 2, 1995 at Deer Creek, Noblesville, IN MJ NEWS: Trump Supports Florida adult use measure on fall ballot, but no public smokingDeSantis says “NO” adult use in Florida, opposes TrumpState ballots this fall for MMJ in Nebraska and ArkansasIllinois awards $35 million from MJ taxes to support community reinvestmentCalifornia allows sales of MJ at Farmer's Markets SHOW No. 4:                    All Along The Watchtower                                                Track #17                                                1:50 – 3:53 Bob DylanJohn Wesley Harding "All Along the Watchtower" is a song by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan from his eighth studio album, John Wesley Harding (1967). The song was written by Dylan and produced by Bob Johnston. The song's lyrics, which in its original version contain twelve lines, feature a conversation between a joker and a thief. The song has been subject to various interpretations; some reviewers have noted that it echoes lines in the Book of Isaiah, Chapter 21, verses 5–9. Dylan has released several different live performances, and versions of the song are included on some of his subsequent greatest hits compilations. Covered by numerous artists, "All Along the Watchtower" is strongly identified with the interpretation Jimi Hendrix recorded with the Jimi Hendrix Experience for their third studio album, Electric Ladyland (1968). The Hendrix version, released six months after Dylan's original recording, became a Top 20 single in 1968, received a Grammy Hall of Fame award in 2001, and was ranked 48th in Rolling Stone magazine's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time in 2004 (40th in the 2021 version). Dylan first played the song live in concert on the Bob Dylan and the Band 1974 Tour, his first tour since 1966. His live performances have been influenced by Hendrix's cover, to the extent that they have been called covers of a cover. Dylan has performed the song live more than any of his other ones, with over 2,250 recitals. Hendrix was a known Dylan fan. He even once cleared a dance floor by demanding that "Blowin in the Wind" be played in a New York club. In a 1967 interview, Hendrix described Dylan's influence on his own songwriting. "I could never write the kind of words he does," Hendrix said. "But he's helped me out in trying to write two or three words 'cause I've got a thousand songs that will never be finished. I just lie around and write about two or three words, but now I have a little more confidence in trying to finish one."Hendrix acquired a copy of John Wesley Harding before the album's official release and instantly knew he had to cover one of the tracks. Initially, he was planning to record "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine," but after further consideration he chose "All Along the Watchtower." Hendrix claimed he had a natural gravitation toward the track. "The songs Dylan usually gave me are so close to me that I feel like I wrote them myself," he added. "With 'Along the Watchtower' I had that feeling." Less than two months after Dylan recorded the original, Hendrix was in the studio laying down his version. John Wesley Harding was Dylan's return to his acoustic roots after his motorcycle accident. But rather than bring back the topical lyrics about civil rights and the Vietnam War, he continued the evocative, surreal images that made his previous three records -- Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde -- so groundbreaking, adding biblical imagery that foreshadowed his born-again phase more than a decade later. Dead started playing it while touring with Dylan in the summer of 1987.  Not necessarily their greatest tour, and Dylan was not sharp on a night by night basis, but when they got to this tune, the crowd really responded.  So after the tour ended, the Dead just kept it in their repertoire and played it until their end. Played:  118First:  June 20, 1987 at William Randolph Hearst Greek Theatre, Berkeley, CA, USALast:  June 22, 1995 at Knickerbocker Arena, Albany, NY, USA  OUTRO:                               Black Muddy River                                                Track #20                                                4:15 – 6:34 Garcia/HunterFrom:  In The Dark (1987) Black Muddy River was a song that was a pretty decent “new” song for a while.  Almost always played as an encore, it was a fan favorite in the Twin Cities, St. Louis, Memphis and New Orleans, all situated on or near the Mississippi River.  Sometimes they would play it in those cities and sometimes they would wait to play it until they were in the middle of nowhere with no river around for miles and miles.  Towards the end, Jerry seemed to lose his enthusiasm for it so, for example, when he rose to the occasion at the last show on July 9, 1995 and belted out a So Many Roads for the ages, his Black Muddy River encore left a lot to be desired.  So much so that, as the story goes, Phil decided they could not end the summer tour on such a low note so he pushed in a Box of Rain making that song the last one ever played in concert by the band and a much nicer farewell than that not very good Black Muddy River would have been. This one is “young” and strong, Jerry's voice rings true and you can hear the energy build up inside him as he belts out the final lines of the song.  A song that sent all those at the Cap Center out into the night longing for more without even knowing what awaited them the very next night.  Some were there, some weren't.  That's the story of the Dead and touring (like Phish waiting to Dick's to play Fee!). Played:  66 timesFirst:  December 15, 1986 at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena, Oakland, CA, USALast:  July 9, 1995 at Soldier Field, Chicago, IL, USA Shout outs:                         Wed – my anniversary, and H and Robbin                        Thurs. – JW's anniversary with the lovely Allie                        Bella – birthday on Monday                        Jackie G. in St. Louis on Sunday                        .Produced by PodConx Deadhead Cannabis Show - https://podconx.com/podcasts/deadhead-cannabis-showLarry Mishkin - https://podconx.com/guests/larry-mishkinRob Hunt - https://podconx.com/guests/rob-huntJay Blakesberg - https://podconx.com/guests/jay-blakesbergSound Designed by Jamie Humiston - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-humiston-91718b1b3/Recorded on Squadcast

"Deadhead Adventures: From Minneapolis to Alpine Valley"Larry Mishkin delves into a nostalgic recount of a Grateful Dead concert he attended on June 17, 1988, in Minneapolis, part of their Midwest Summer Tour. He reminisces about attending the show with friends Mikey and JT, detailing their travel adventures and the concert's setlist, which included memorable performances of "Hell in a Bucket" and "Far From Me."Larry also shares personal anecdotes about his experiences following the Grateful Dead, including the challenges of balancing concert trips with his professional life and the thrill of attending multiple shows in a short span. He transitions into discussing the significance of the song "Hell in a Bucket," its debut, and its frequent performance as a show opener. He explains the concept of "Mondegreens," humorous misheard lyrics, using an example from a Grateful Dead song review.The show revisits a story about a Phish fan who was initially banned from all Madison Square Garden Entertainment venues for smoking a bong at the Sphere. MSG later rescinded the ban, citing an internal error. Larry expresses surprise and amusement at the quick reversal and discusses the implications for fans.Finally, Larry discusses the resale of Dead & Company tickets for their Las Vegas Sphere shows, noting that many are being sold at face value or below on cashertrade.org. He expresses mixed feelings about fans having to sell tickets at a loss but appreciates the platform's role in preventing scalping.  Grateful DeadJune 17, 2024 (36 years ago)Met CenterMinneapolis, MNGrateful Dead Live at Metropolitan Sports Center on 1988-06-17 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet ArchiveAudience Tape First show of the 1988 Midwest Summer TourWith my good buddies Mikey and JT – weekend in Minny, Friday night show but had to stay until Sunday to fly home because if you stayed over a Saturday night, round trip airfare was much less expensive.  Got home on Sunday and headed straight for Alpine Valley for the first of four shows S, M, W, Th.  Each night headed home, slept for 4 hours, got up for work, left work at 3 p.m., ride the El to the middle of the Kennedy Expressway at Addison, hop in a car and drive straight up.  Fight the crazy post show traffic in that horridlbe parking lot (unless you have one-armed Lary as your driver).  Hardcore.  My law firm didn't know what to make of it.  I got in four shows at home with no vacation days taken! INTRO:                                 Hell In A Bucket                                                Track #2                                                0:00 – 1:34                [From David Dowd]:  The Bob Weir / John Barlow / Brent Mydland song “Hell in a Bucket” directly references the biker scene, and I'm sure that somehow Barlow just wanted to put that element into the band's repertoire somehow. After all, there are plenty of outlaw elements sprinkled through the band's songs.           “Bucket” debuted on May 13, 1983, at the Greek Theater in Berkeley. Alice Kahn wrote a review of the show, in which she promulgated one of the best-ever Mondegreens, referring to the song as “Police on a Joy Ride.” The song frequently featured as the show opener over the course of the next two-plus decades, although it wasn't used in that role until about a year after its first performance. It was performed by the Dead for the final time on June 30, 1995, at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.“Hell in a Bucket” appeared on In the Dark, released in July 1987 (aka Touch of Grey album).Played:  217 timesFirst:  May 13, 1983 at William Randolph Hearst Greek Theatre, Berkeley, CA, USALast:    June 30, 1995, at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh, PennsylvaniaSHOW No. 1:                    Far From Me                                                Track #6                                                3:18 – 4:45Brent MydlandGo To Heaven (April 28, 1980)Strong Brent tune.  I saw them open the second set with it a my second show ever (also with my buddy Mikey) in the Carrier Dome on September 24, 1982, the night I got on the bus forever.Played: 74 timesFirst:  March 30, 1980 at Capitol Theatre, Passaic, NJ, USALast:  July 22, 1990 at World Music Theatre, Tinley Park, IL, USA (the night before Brent's last show).  It died with him.MUSIC NEWS:MSG ENERTRAINMENT REDACTS INDEFINITE VENUE RESTRICTION FOLLOWING PHISH FAN BONG/SPHERE CONTROVERSY 2.     Dead & Company Sphere Tickets Listed for Face Value or Below on CashorTrade! Dead & Company announced 24 dates at the Las Vegas Sphere, and many fans eagerly bought tickets. Now, some can't attend and are selling their tickets at face value or less on CashorTrade.org. Built by fellow Deadheads in 2009 to protect fans from scalped tickets, 3.     Roger Daltrey Shares Thoughts on Sharing Setlists Online and More, Ahead of The Voice of The Who Tour - Touching on his feeling toward revealing the contents of a performance online, Daltrey asserted, “I'm not gonna talk about songs.” Providing reasoning, he added, “Too many people reveal songs. There's no surprises left with concerts these days, 'cause everybody wants to see the setlist. I'm f–king sick of it. The Internet's ruined the live shows for me. Who wants to know what's coming next? People forget about surprises. I can't stand it.  Here's an idea for Roger – don't play the exact same show every night!  Mix up your songs and then set lists can only give you probabilities of what might get played.  See the Grateful Dead, Phish and every other jam band ever. 4.     As promised last week, here are the deets on Trey playing with Billy Joel in MSG last week:  Madison Square Garden residencies have long been a career-defining staple of the New York City live entertainment location, with names like Billy Joel and Phish dominating multi-night show cycles, making the venue a known place to catch a memorable Big Apple performance. However, last night's performance was a truly unique event, a planned convergence for the two title-holders, Joel and Phish's Trey Anastasio. They teamed up on select songs, including “Sleeping With the Television On,” a cover of Derek and the Dominos' “Layla” and night closing “You Might Be Right,” featuring a Led Zeppelin “Rock and Roll” insert, sung by Mike DelGuidice.                                                 SHOW No. 2:                    Victim Or The Crime    (First time played)                                                Track #9                                                0:00 – 2:13 (long clip but it's the first time played so I had to run with it)                 Written by Bob Weir and Gerrit Graham                               Garcia – “It's one of Weir's stunningly odd compositions, but it's also very adventurous. It's uncompromising; it's what it is, and the challenge of coming up with stuff to play that sounds intelligent in the context has been incredible, but also appropriately gnarly. I really wanted that part of it to work.I think we did a nice job on the record with it. It works. Whatever it is, it works. I'm real happy with it because it was one of those things that was like, "What are we going to do with this?" It's like having a monster brother that you lock in the attic. It's like a relative that you -- "God, I hope nobody comes over when he's eating...." But that's one of the things that makes the Grateful Dead fun.”             “The text of it -- I don't believe I've ever actually listened to all the words to it. Ever. I have the gist of it; by now I probably could recite it if I really had to, but the text of it is more of the same in a way, it doesn't have a whole lot of light in it. It's very dense, and it's angst-ridden to boot.”             Played 96 times, “Victim” debuted on June 17, 1988, at the Metropolitan Sports Center in Bloomington, Minnesota THIS SHOW. It remained in the rotation thereafter, and was played for the final time on July 2, 1995 at Deer Creek Music Center in Noblesville, Indiana.    SHOW No. 3:                    All Along The Watchtower                                                Track #19                                                1:22 – 3:22  (another long one but could not break up the jam)                 "All Along the Watchtower" is a song by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan from his eighth studio album, John Wesley Harding (1967). The song was written by Dylan and produced by Bob Johnston.             Covered by numerous artists, "All Along the Watchtower" is strongly identified with the interpretation Jimi Hendrix recorded with the Jimi Hendrix Experience for their third studio album, Electric Ladyland (1968). The Hendrix version, released six months after Dylan's original recording, became a Top 20 single in 1968, received a Grammy Hall of Fame award in 2001, and was ranked 48th in Rolling Stone magazine's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time in 2004 (40th in the 2021 version). Dylan first played the song live in concert on the Bob Dylan and the Band 1974 Tour, his first tour since 1966. His live performances have been influenced by Hendrix's cover, to the extent that they have been called covers of a cover. The singer has performed the song live more than any of his other ones, with over 2,250 recitals.             I always loved the Dead's cover of this tune.  As you heard in the clip, it is a rocking tune and Jerry would really jam hard on it.  Great snappy second set tune that would always get the crowd moving in the next gear.  Played:  118 timesFirst:  June 20, 1987 at William Randolph Hearst Greek Theatre, Berkeley, CA, USALast:  June 22, 1995 at Knickerbocker Arena, Albany, NY, USA  MJ NEWS 1.        Biden Admin Is ‘Mischaracterizing' Marijuana Rescheduling Impact As Big Pharma Is ‘Waiting In The Wings,' Former Massachusetts Regulator Says (Marijuana Moment) 2.       GOP Congressman Says ‘Millions Of Marijuana Users' Own Guns And Shouldn't Face Prosecution Like Hunter Biden Did 3.    Marijuana Rolling Paper Company Will Pay $4.20 To Volunteers To ‘Smoke Joints For Science'  SHOW No. 4:                    Black Peter                                                Track #20                                                1:36 – 3:11                 Garcia/Hunter tune released on Workingman's Dead in 1970.                  Robert Hunter was not afraid of death; he experienced it a thousand times over. The American musician composed the lyrics to many of The Grateful Dead's most successful songs and played an essential role in curating the band's mythos, one that saw the psychedelic rock outfit earn hordes of dedicated fans, or ‘deadheads'. One such song was ‘Black Peter' – written for the band's 1970 album Workingman's Dead.          By 1969, The Dead were practically synonymous with the liberal drug culture of the hippie era. In the June of that year, Robert Hunter and the gang were given a glass of apple juice laced with “probably a full gram of crystal LSD … worth perhaps $50,000.” The intense trip that followed would completely reinvigorate Hunter's understanding of death and influence his subsequent lyrics for ‘Black Peter'. Bassist Phil Lesh would later recall tasting the LSD in the juice after a single sip: “I wish you could be where I am right now—it's so beautiful,” he told drummer Mickey Hart, “but I couldn't possibly play music now. I don't even know what music is.” Still, there was a job to do, so the band played anyway. In the ‘80's and ‘90's, one of Jerry's rotating post-drums second set ballads along with Morning Dew, Wharf Rat and Stella Blue. This version was one of the highlights of this show.  Jerry's voice is strong if not a bit “ragged” around the edges just the way Deadheads liked it, with just enough emotion to really convey the song's meaning and its statement about the end of life. Played: 351 timesFirst: December 4, 1969 at Fillmore West, San Francisco, CA, USALast:  June 22, 1995 at Knickerbocker Arena in Albany, NY  OUTRO:                               Black Muddy River                                                Track #23                                                4:09 – 5:55  Played:  66 timesFirst:  December 15, 1986 at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena, Oakland, CA, USALast:  July 9, 1995 at Soldier Field, Chicago, Il – looked like it was going to the last song of the show (encore) and the last song of the difficult summer tour.  Turns out, it could have been the last song ever played in concert by the Dead, until Phil stepped in to leave everyone with a smile on their face and no bad taste in their mouths with a great second encore Box of Rain which then became the last song ever played by the Dead in concert. By contrast, this version is outstanding with strong playing and singing by Jerry.  And, with the show practically on the banks of the Mississippi, it was a geographically appropriate song for the venue. Mikey, JT and I rolled off into the night, a crazy weekend in Minny, and then the next four shows on the tour at Alpine.  Ah, to have the kind of energy again, even if just for a night.  Thank you psychedelics!! Enjoy the Summer Solstice and the beginning of summer. .Produced by PodConx Deadhead Cannabis Show - https://podconx.com/podcasts/deadhead-cannabis-showLarry Mishkin - https://podconx.com/guests/larry-mishkinRob Hunt - https://podconx.com/guests/rob-huntJay Blakesberg - https://podconx.com/guests/jay-blakesbergSound Designed by Jamie Humiston - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-humiston-91718b1b3/Recorded on Squadcast

In radio news, we know who are the top ten performing radio groups.  Spanish broadcasting system provides us with their fourth quarter results for 2023.  Finally there is lots of news on the street.  Next those important call letter and format changes.  Our classic aircheck remembers the late John Harding from WIBG AM in Philadelphia from 1972.  Finally our featured station is the Time Machine Classic Hits an Internet station replicating the sound of the WNBC AM Time Machine from the 1980s.

Wonderful article from Charles P. Pierce   Esquire Magazine May 25 Let's get the whole gang together: Davey Moore, Hattie Carroll, Hollis Brown, Einstein disguised as Robin Hood, the motorcycle black Madonna two-wheeled gypsy queen, Ma Rainey, and Beethoven, John the Baptist, the Commander In Chief, Louis The King, Napoleon in rags, Lucille, Johanna, Sweet Marie, John Wesley Harding, St. Augustine, the joker, the thief, Big Jim, Lily, Rosemary, and most of all, the Jack of Hearts, Rubin Carter, Isis, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Blackjack Davey, Charlie Patton. All of them. Play me a song, Mr. Wolfman Jack, because if you want to remember, you better write down the names. Bob Dylan turned 83 on Friday. All of him did. All of them did. All the personae, the entire kaleidoscope of masks, the false fronts and head fakes, and, finally, the last, and in many ways, best of them all. The travelling storyteller, the seanchai as the people in the old country would call him. Out on the endless tour, up the endless highway. I think of him and I think of Turlough O'Carolan, the legendary blind Irish harper who would travel the countryside, composing his songs on the spot for whomever would give him food and drink. Go back further. Go back to Homer. Sing to him, O muse. When Dylan dropped "Murder Most Foul," virtually out of a clear blue sky, blessing us with it as consolation for the years when America had gone so terribly wrong, it was Homer of whom I thought, poet and historian both, protector of the shadowland between myth and reality, chronicler of what Greil Marcus called "the old, weird America," a phrase I wish I'd written. He'll be around all summer, travelling with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp and a whole clutch of other artists in something called the Outlaw Music Festival Tour. It's a high-priced extravaganza but, in a very real way, he's just on the road, heading for another joint. Move along, brother Bob. The highway, as you taught us, is for gamblers, and we take what we have gathered from coincidence. Here's a collection of comments and reflections from Dylan's artistic partners and others just sharing the same spaces with Bob. Interviews I've done over the years to be added to when Dylan turns 85. Interviews with David Bowie Robbie Robertson Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks The Avett Brothers Barney Bentall and Steve Dawson Greg Keelor (Blue Rodeo) And Colin Linden (Blackie and the Rodeo Kings)   Wine and Dine – Tofino June i/2. The second story takes place next weekend June 1 and 2 in one of Earth's most beautiful places -  Tofino,  British Columbia. The western edge of Canada on Vancouver island. The community includes surfing, golfing, fishing, underwater adventures and an unusual gathering of chefs. It is where they come to learn how to create seafood dishes and cook with what the forest and oceans give them – and surf their minds out.   It's the second annual Wine and Dine gathering on the front lawns of Best Western Plus Tin Wis Resort. All of the details can be found at  www.tofinowinedine.com  Our guests are the organizers and founders  of Tofino Wine & dine Ronnie Lee and Ryan Orr.

Our listeners may be more familiar with Wesley Stace as John Wesley Harding. That guy who has been responsible for several great Bruce covers and some guest appearances with The Boss. Wesley can be often seen curating his own live show with a mixture of performing artists. One day - he hopes he can persuade Bruce to make another surprise appearance. Tune in and listen to some brilliant tales about him and Bruce hanging out whilst we share some of his great music. For more information please visit www.wesleystace.com --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/jeff-matthews4/message

Let's learn about the grueling and exhilarating world of the Endeavor Team Challenge with race director, Denis Dumas. Scheduled for August 24th and 25th, this unique 30+ hour competition covers over 40 miles of California's scenic Bear Valley, pushing competitors through diverse challenges like the Crucible Road March, Competitor Field, Night Orienteering, and the climactic Final Run. You can also visit them at the Big Bear Spartan Race, they'll have a booth set up. Then we talk with Ian Hosek, Vice Chair of USAOCR. We learn all about the brand new 2024 USA OCR Championship they are holding in October in North Georgia in conjunction with Phoenix Races. Today's show is sponsored by Frontline OCR. Join us in Illinois for one of the best OCR's in the midwest on May 25th in Byron, Illinois. Follow today's guests: Endeavor Team Challenge and USA OCR. Use code ORM-2024 for all Tough Mudder and Spartan Races for 20 percent off. Support Us On Patreon for LOTS MORE behind the scenes. All other Obstacle Racing Media Links. Intro  Music – Paul B. Outro Music – Brian Revels and John Wesley Harding.

First up we talk to Matt from VJ along with Alex from Mudgear to talk all about the all new SpeedRuck. Then, we dive into an exclusive interview with Phillipe Levy from the Belgian Obstacle Racing Federation (BOCRA), as he candidly shares his experiences. Despite promises of support in resources and funding, he reveals how BOCRA felt abandoned by its parent organization, World Obstacle, led by Ian Adamson. In this revealing discussion, Phillipe unpacks the challenges faced before, during, and after last year's World Obstacle Championship held in Genk. Today's show is sponsored by Frontline OCR. Join us in Illinois for one of the best OCR's in the midwest on May 25th in Byron, Illinois. Today's show is also sponsored by: Endeavor Team Challenge Register now and get 20% OFF for this year's event hosted in Bear Valley, California, in the Stanislaus National Forest. Enter ORM20 at checkout between now and April 15th, 2024. Use code ORM-2024 for all Tough Mudder and Spartan Races for 20 percent off. Support Us On Patreon for LOTS MORE behind the scenes. All other Obstacle Racing Media Links. Intro  Music – Paul B. Outro Music – Brian Revels and John Wesley Harding.

Wesley Stace delves into the lyrical landscapes of his songs, transition from John Wesley Harding and collaborations with The post Wesley Stace appeared first on The Strange Brew .

Giles Chater, COO of Spartan/Tough Mudder comes on to talk about the return of team money to World's Toughest Mudder, plus a true relay style and other changes. Follow this week's guests: Giles Chater Use code ORM for all Tough Mudder and Spartan Races for 20 percent off. Support Us On Patreon for LOTS MORE behind the scenes. All other Obstacle Racing Media Links. Intro  Music – Paul B. Outro Music – Brian Revels and John Wesley Harding.

Veejay is back to talk about his Alula performance, GOV Games, an update on Spartan payments, potential OCR retirement, and more. Today's show is sponsored by: Endeavor Team Challenge The event takes place in areas selected for their beautiful and challenging terrain. Competitors enjoy scenic panoramas as they move up mountains, rappel down cliffs, and paddle across beautiful alpine reservoirs. Teams work together to accomplish more than they thought possible, and they do it in a safe, professional, and friendly competitive environment. Register now and get 20% OFF for this year's event hosted in Bear Valley, California, in the Stanislaus National Forest. Enter ORM20 at checkout between now and April 15th, 2024. Follow this week's guests: Veejay Jones Support Us On Patreon for LOTS MORE behind the scenes. All other Obstacle Racing Media Links. Intro  Music – Paul B. Outro Music – Brian Revels and John Wesley Harding.

We sat down at or near the ORM tent this past Sunday in Conyers, Georgia for the annual Spartan Race weekend. Listen and enjoy: Scott The Fayne, Lee Ann, Cassidy Nichols Cassandra Gill, Sarah Tucker, Brad Heilwagen, Michael, Wendy and Addie Green, Shell. Use code ORM20 to save 20 percent on any Tough Mudder or Spartan Race. Follow this week's guests: (links above). Support Us On Patreon for LOTS MORE behind the scenes. All other Obstacle Racing Media Links. Intro  Music – Paul B. Outro Music – Brian Revels and John Wesley Harding.

Phil joins us to explore his journey through 36 seasons (and counting) of The Amazing Race, the dramatic shifts in television viewing habits over two decades, and being left off from "Paramountain". He also let us know what he's doing while contestants tackle challenges. Last, we'll dive into his new show that seeks to recruit elite athletes. Terrapin Events sponsor today's episode. We are excited to promote Dirty Leprechaun on March 16th. Awesome local race plus a pancake breakfast! Also, use Code ORM20 to save 20 percent on any Tough Mudder or Spartan Race Follow Phil Keoghan. Support Us On Patreon for LOTS MORE behind the scenes. All other Obstacle Racing Media Links. Intro  Music – Paul B. Outro Music – Brian Revels and John Wesley Harding.

Mark Batres, Nicole Mericle, and Kris Rugloski journeyed to the Saudi Arabian desert aiming to secure the top prize of $80,000. Although victory eluded them, they collectively earned $50,000 as Nicole finished 2nd, Mark finished 3rd, and Kris finished 7th. Tune in as we conclude our coverage of the 2024 Tough Mudder Infinity Alua event. Terrapin Events sponsor today's episode. We are excited to promote Dirty Leprechaun on March 16th. Awesome local race plus a pancake breakfast! Also use Code ORM20 to save 20 percent on any Tough Mudder or Spartan race. Follow Nicole, Mark, Natalie, and Kris. Support Us On Patreon for LOTS MORE behind the scenes. All other Obstacle Racing Media Links. Intro  Music – Paul B. Outro Music – Brian Revels and John Wesley Harding.

Ian K is back to discuss news from the last week in OCR including Matt's lack of luggage in AlUla, Ian did a DEKA STRONG, Rugged Maniac closing its doors, and more. Terrapin Events sponsor today's episode. We are excited to promote Dirty Leprechaun on March 16th. Awesome local race plus a pancake breakfast! Follow Ian K at UKOCR. Support Us On Patreon for LOTS MORE behind the scenes. All other Obstacle Racing Media Links. Intro  Music – Paul B. Outro Music – Brian Revels and John Wesley Harding.

It finally happened. All the hype is over and the event is on. Listen as athletes settle in for Friday dinner, then we hear from tons of athletes from the finish line of this epic race. Full race results here - https://www.obstacleracingmedia.com/featured/alula-tough-mudder-infinity-results/ Support Us On Patreon for LOTS MORE behind the scenes. All other Obstacle Racing Media Links. Intro  Music – Paul B. Outro Music – Brian Revels and John Wesley Harding.

Ian joins the show to talk Spartan firings, HYROX rowers, Superbowl commercials, and so much more. Terrapin Events sponsor today's episode. We are excited to promote Dirty Leprechaun on March 16th. Awesome local race plus a pancake breakfast! Also Rugged Maniac - The ultimate and muddiest obstacle course and 5K mud run—takes over the US with 25 live events in 2024! With over 3 miles overtaken with 25+ obstacles, the Rugged Maniac course has the most obstacles per mile of any race on the planet. Save 15 percent with code ORM15. Follow Ian K on Instagram. Support Us On Patreon for LOTS MORE behind the scenes. All other Obstacle Racing Media Links. Intro  Music – Paul B. Outro Music – Brian Revels and John Wesley Harding.

Veejay Jones and Natalie Miano join forces with host Matt B. Davis to share their insights on the upcoming $480,000 Tough Mudder Infinity event set for the 24th. As part of a four-person team, Veejay will be in the thick of the competition in AlUla, with Natalie on the sidelines cheering for her husband and WTM record holder, Mark Batres. The trio will offer their expert analysis on key contenders across the men's, women's, and team divisions. The full list of athletes heading to AlUla for the event can be accessed here: https://www.obstacleracingmedia.com/featured/tough-mudder-alula-infinity-participant-update/ Follow Veejay on Instagram. Follow Natalie on Instagram. Support Us On Patreon for LOTS MORE behind the scenes. All other Obstacle Racing Media Links. Intro  Music – Paul B. Outro Music – Brian Revels and John Wesley Harding.

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

Intro song: All Along the Watchtower by The Jimi Hendrix ExperienceAlbum 9: John Wesley Harding (1967)Song 1: The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas PriestSong 2: I Pity the Poor ImmigrantSong 3: Drifter's EscapeAlbum 10: Nashville Skyline (1969)Song 1: Peggy DaySong 2: Country PieSong 3: One More NightBonus song: Lay, Lady, LayOutro song: Lay Lady Lay by Buddy Guy

Rob welcomes fellow Bobcat Brian McCaskill to discuss "Dear Landlord", from 1967's JOHN WESLEY HARDING. Have a question or comment? Contact: https://fmpods.com/podcasts/poddylan Follow us on Twitter: @Pod_Dylan POD DYLAN "Jukebox" T-Shirt now available: https://www.etsy.com/shop/RobKellyCreative Complete list of all songs covered so far: Pod Dylan Songs This podcast is part of the FM Podcast Network. Thanks for listening!

"Leisureland" Although he was born Eric Goulden in East Sussex, my guest today on the program is perhaps best known in the music industry as Wreckless Eric. Under that moniker he first garnered attention with his song The Whole Wide World, a shambolic blast of joyful punk that landed him a deal with Stiff Records. At the time, Stiff was just getting going and they had Ian Dury Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe on their roster. Not too shabby. The art school graduate was more than just one killer song--since the '70s he's cranked out almost ten perfect solo albums of scruffy pop magic that demonstrate Wreckless Eric is a singular and very special talent. His new album Leisureland is the perfect album to play while you're saying goodbye to summer. Wistful, nostalgic and equal parts ferocious and elegant, Leisureland is filled with ragtag pop, garage stomp, and percussive muscle augmented by beats and loops. And it's fabulous. Over the years he's played with The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, The Damned, John Wesley Harding, The Proclaimers, and his wife Amy Rigby. His work has been covered by everyone from Cage the Elephant, to Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong. He's also been in a lot of bands like The Len Bright Combo, The Hitsville House Band, and The Donovan of Trash and the fact is, everything he does is wonderful and brilliant and infectious. The guy is the real deal. www.wrecklesseric.com www.bombshellradio.com www.embersarts.com STEREO EMBERS THE PODCAST Twittter: @emberseditor IG: @emberspodcast EMAIL: editor@stereoembersmagazine.com

Rob welcomes back fellow BobCat Erin Callahan to discuss "The Wicked Messenger" from 1967's JOHN WESLEY HARDING. Have a question or comment? Contact: https://fmpods.com/podcasts/poddylan Follow us on Twitter: @Pod_Dylan POD DYLAN "Jukebox" T-Shirt now available: https://www.etsy.com/shop/RobKellyCreative Complete list of all songs covered so far: Pod Dylan Songs Buy this song on Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/by/album/john-wesley-harding/181457097 This podcast is part of the FM Podcast Network. Thanks for listening!

Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan, July 10, 1987, JFK Stadium, Philadelphia, PAhttps://archive.org/details/gd87-07-10.senn.lai.3859.sbeok.shnf/gd87-07-10d1t108.shnDead played first set.Dylan backed by Dead played second setJFK big old concrete stadium in Philly.  Opened on April 15, 1926.  Hosted the Army Navy football game for many years.  Last live performance of any kind was Dead on July 7, 1989 with Bruce Hornsby and the Range opening.  Stadium was literally falling apart with dangerous chemicals exposed as well as electrical wiring.  Only reason they allowed the show to be played was because by the time the city inspector realized what was going on, stadium was already full of Deadheads.  Supposedly, there was a very strict no smoking policy enforced because of the hazards.  I'm guessing Deadhead's found a way to catch their buzz during the who.  Final tune:  Knocking on Heaven's Door.  Very appropriate.  On September 23, 1992 the stadium was finally demolished.I was only there once, in September 1981 for the opening show of the Rolling Stones Start Me Up tour.  Went with good buddies H, Mills and Lieby thanks to Uncle Dave.  George Thorogood and the Delaware Destroyers opened (One Bourbon, One Shot and One Beer), then Journey for maybe 45 minutes.  Fans got bored and started booing.  Finally the Stones – opened with Under My Thumb, they released balloons and well into the show H was convinced he could still see one or two of them.  Could have just been the shrooms we (most of us) were trying out for the first time.  Still almost a year before my first Dead show.  But psychedelics seemed very appropriate for a Stones shows made this one very memorable.INTRO:                             I Need a Miracle                                         Track No. 13                                         1:45-2:50                                         Mostly featuring the stuff with Dylan but wanted to get one Dead song in and this is an exceptionally great version of this song.  “Go right through the book and break each and every law” – another great Barlow lyric.  Was released as part of Shakedown Street (Nov. 15, 1978).  Always a high energy tune and maybe the highlight of the Dead's lone set.Dylan – set II with Dead backingSHOW #1:                        Tangled Up In Blue                                         Track No. 17                                         :20 – 1:36                                         From:  Blood on the Tracks                                         Released:  January 20, 1975                           This may be everyone's favorite Dylan tune.  Jerry loved it, a staple of the JGB, usually played as a set closer.  I love it here as the opener of the Dead's set with Dylan, a well known tune, Jerry jamming hard, and Dylan feeling the energy, love those excited vocals.  Sounds like he's have a great time.  Ok, Dylan's voice is not great BUT, it is much better than it is now AND it's the DEAD backing him (it was one thing to hear Jerry play it, but not often that the Dead played the tune!  Took a minute or two to adapt to that set up.  Start off strong, get everyone comfortable and fire up the crowd.  Mixed feelings in the crowd because folks realized Dead were only playing one set, but Dead were backing Dylan, and Dylan's voice may suck, but with the Dead the songs sound fresh and lively in a manner not normally seen at your standard Dylan show (except when he had Larry Campbell playing with him – he rocked too).SHOW #2:                        I'll  Be Your Baby Tonight                                         Track No. 18                                         0:00 – 1:14                                         From: John Wesley Harding                                         December 27, 1967                           Not necessarily my favorite Dylan tune, but anytime Jerry plays pedal steel it's worth noting and listening to.  The crowed realizes it and goes crazy.  I never got to see Jerry play that instrument and understand I missed something special.  So go back and listen to this tune again and focus on the pedal steel.  Well worth it. SHOW #3:                        Joey                                         Track No. 27                                         :38 – 1:52                                         From:  Desire                                         Released:  January 5, 1976                           "Joey" is an epic story-song from Bob Dylan's 1976 album Desire. It was written by Dylan and Jacques Levy, who collaborated with Dylan on most of the songs on the album. Like another long song on the album, "Hurricane", "Joey" is biographical. It tells the story of the life and death of mobster Joey Gallo, who was killed on his birthday at Umberto's Clam House in Little Italy, on April 7, 1972.                         The song's legacy remains mixed: a USA Today article ranking "all of Bob Dylan's songs" called it "forgettable" and lamented that it had replaced "Abandoned Love" on Desire's final track list[10] but in a readers' poll conducted by Mojo, "Joey" was rated the 74th most popular Bob Dylan song of all time.[11]Jerry Garcia, who was responsible for getting Dylan to start performing it live in 1987, considered it a "great song"[12] and Dylan himself characterized it as "Homeric" when discussing his Nobel Prize in Literature win with Edna Gundersen in 2016.[13] Critic Paul Zollo, writing in American Songwriter magazine, called it a "beautifully detailed and cinematic" song and a "masterpiece" in 2021.[14]                                    I started listening to it when they released the Dylan And The Dead album released February 6, 1989 featuring songs from this July, 1987 tour.                                                                                         :::SHOW #4:                        Watchtower                                         Track No. 28                                         1:56 – 3:26                                         From:  John Wesley Harding                                         December 27, 1967                           A great tune that the Dead rocked to.  We've talked about this song before, but Bobby really took off with it once they started playing it (first performance was a month before this tour, June 10, 1987 at the Greek.  Then played up until June 22, 1995 at the Knickerbocker Arena in Albany.  Great to hear the Dead rock it hard for Dylan. Interestingly, the show's encore was Touch of Grey which had not yet been officially released but was on In The Dark on July 6, 1987.  So four days before this show.  The Deadheads already knew it well – Dead started playing it in concert towards the very end of 1982.  I first heard it in April 1983 in Morgantown WV.  Not yet well known to the general public so no crazy crowd problems but they were just around the corner.All in all, a fun show.  Some good Dead.  Lots of good Dylan.  And a fun collaboration for the Deadheads.OUTRO:                           U. S. Blues                                         Goose                                         July 4, 2023                                         Stone Pony Summer Stage                                         Asbury Park, N.J. (The Boss's “home”)                                         Goose - US Blues 7/4/23 Stone Pony - Asbury Park, NJ - YouTube                                         O:00 – 1:10                            First time played by Goose.  Solid performance, but a little too close to the vest for me  But with time, I have no doubt they can make it their own.  And credit for covering the Dead.  Not many bands will do that, ahem, “calling Phish?”  So this is two weeks in a row ending with this tune, but this is the one Goose covered (on the 4th after all) so this is what we get.  All in all, not a bad deal.                                                                                          NEWS:On July 10, 1986, Jerry slipped into Diabetic Coma.  As a result, the Dead had to cancel two shows scheduled for the Fox Theater in St. Louis later in the month.  I was devasted to hear the news about Jerry, we all wondered if this was it.  And I was bummed to miss the Fox Theater shows.  As we have discussed, in the late ‘60's and early ‘70's it was one of the Dead's favorite theaters to play, but they had not played there since 1972.  Folks out of town for the weekend, lots of friends and Deadheads all coming to St. Louis for the shows.  I had never seen the Dead in St. Louis and ultimately, did not until July, 1995 at the very end. And I had second row, orchestra, center – best seats I ever received from mail order. Then Jerry got sick and that was that.  Ultimately, Jerry survived, relearned the guitar and all the Dead songs and by December 15th he was back.  Very amazing. July 3, 2023Dead & Co at Folsom Field.  Dave Matthews joins at the end of the second set for Watchtower/Not Fade/Knocking on Heaven's Door/The Weight.  Great drones creating cool visuals like the Steal Your Face logo.  Got good reports from Alex and Andy – she is EVERYWHERE these days!  Dead & Co. down to the Gorge (just played this last weekend)  and then July 14, 15 and 16 at Oracle Park in S. F. (Giants' home stadium).  Then, ??????????????? July 2, 2023 – my first Les Claypool and Frog Brigade show at the Salt Shed in Chicago.  Went with good buddy Rob.  Very impressed with the band  - when the show opens with a cover of King Crimson's Thela Hun Ginjeet – you know it's going to be a good night.  Their songs after that were solid and everyone was very much enjoying the scene and that was before they blew us away with their cover of the Pink Floyd album, Animals (Jan. 21, 1977).  Entire album start to finish.  Then some more Frog Brigade and a fun night for all.  I will be back to see Frog Brigade and Primus (and Oysterhead – we should all be so lucky) MJ news to follow

When you hear about the music of a guitar virtuoso with a doctorate in philosophy, who cut his musical teeth performing and collaborating with singer-songwriter Al Stewart (“Year of the Cat”), you know you will be getting something wonderfully unique. In a career that has spanned a dozen albums and thousands of shows ranging from living room concerts to the Royal Albert Hall in London, Dave Nachmanoff has built a broad and loyal fan base and a unique niche as a performer and songwriter.Touring, accompanying, and recording with his songwriting hero, Al Stewart, for over 15 years gave Dave the chance to get his own music out in front of tens of thousands of people and gained him international exposure and recognition. Over the years, he has shared the stage with a long list of legends of the folk and rock music worlds, including the likes of Alison Krauss, Steve Forbert, Firefall, John Wesley Harding, and blues legend Libba “Freight Train” Cotten (when he was ten years old). Dave continues to record and tour, playing well over a hundred shows a year in listening rooms, private house concerts, and at other events. He is focused on using his music to make a difference in the world and benefit concerts are an important part of that.Dave's album,  “Cerulean Sky”, was recorded with Grammy-nominated producer-engineer Bill Smith, who has worked with Frank Sinatra, Paul Simon, and Yes, among others. The Cerulean Sky studio band included Michael Jerome and Taras Prodaniuk (Richard Thompson's rhythm section), and Carl Byron on keyboards (Jackson Browne, Hot Club of LA). Dave's writing has strengthened over the decades and many fans are calling the songs on “Cerulean Sky,” his best yet.When not on tour, Dave is busy producing for other artists, teaching master classes around the US and working in his unique niche of writing and recording custom songs.More information about Dave and friends mentioned in this episode is just a click away...Dave Nachmanoff WebsiteDave Nachmanoff Facebook https://www.bandsintown.com/a/205935"Must Love Dogs" Music Videohttps://twitter.com/davenachSome of Dave's friends and music colleagues:Al StewartMichael McNevinElizabeth CottonLate for the Train - Dave Pascoe and Laura BensonPete HamiltonTim RenwickPeter White

John Doe is best known as a co-founder and singer/bassist of the LA punk rock band X. He is an accomplished musician, actor, and poet. Simply put, he is an amazingly talented artist. Join the club in our final episode of the season as we discuss Fables in a Foreign Land, the LA punk rock scene, and Bob Dylan's John Wesley Harding.

Rob welcomes fellow Bobcat Wayne Walker to discuss "Drifter's Escape" from 1967's JOHN WESLEY HARDING. Have a question or comment? E-MAIL: firewaterpodcast@comcast.net Follow POD DYLAN on Twitter: @Pod_Dylan POD DYLAN "Jukebox" T-Shirt now available: https://www.etsy.com/shop/RobKellyCreative You can find POD DYLAN on these platforms: Apple Podcasts: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/pod-dylan/id1095013228 Amazon Music Spotify Stitcher Complete list of all songs covered so far: http://fireandwaterpodcast.com/podcast/pod-dylan-the-songs Buy this song on Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/album/john-wesley-harding/181457097 This podcast is a proud member of the FIRE AND WATER PODCAST NETWORK: Visit the Fire & Water WEBSITE: http://fireandwaterpodcast.com Follow Fire & Water on TWITTER – https://twitter.com/FWPodcasts Like our Fire & Water FACEBOOK page – https://www.facebook.com/FWPodcastNetwork Support The Fire & Water Podcast Network on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/fwpodcasts Use our HASHTAG online: #FWPodcasts Thanks for listening!

Rob welcomes fellow Bobcat Wayne Walker to discuss "Drifter's Escape" from 1967's JOHN WESLEY HARDING.Have a question or comment? E-MAIL: firewaterpodcast@comcast.net Follow POD DYLAN on Twitter: @Pod_Dylan POD DYLAN "Jukebox" T-Shirt now available: https://www.etsy.com/shop/RobKellyCreativeYou can find POD DYLAN on these platforms: Apple Podcasts: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/pod-dylan/id1095013228 Amazon Music Spotify StitcherComplete list of all songs covered so far: http://fireandwaterpodcast.com/podcast/pod-dylan-the-songsBuy this song on Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/album/john-wesley-harding/181457097This podcast is a proud member of the FIRE AND WATER PODCAST NETWORK:Visit the Fire & Water WEBSITE: http://fireandwaterpodcast.comFollow Fire & Water on TWITTER – https://twitter.com/FWPodcastsLike our Fire & Water FACEBOOK page – https://www.facebook.com/FWPodcastNetworkSupport The Fire & Water Podcast Network on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/fwpodcastsUse our HASHTAG online: #FWPodcastsThanks for listening!

Rob welcomes fellow Bobcat Wayne Walker to discuss "Drifter's Escape" from 1967's JOHN WESLEY HARDING. Have a question or comment? E-MAIL: firewaterpodcast@comcast.net Follow POD DYLAN on Twitter: @Pod_Dylan POD DYLAN "Jukebox" T-Shirt now available: https://www.etsy.com/shop/RobKellyCreative You can find POD DYLAN on these platforms: Apple Podcasts: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/pod-dylan/id1095013228 Amazon Music Spotify Stitcher Complete list of all songs covered so far: http://fireandwaterpodcast.com/podcast/pod-dylan-the-songs Buy this song on Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/album/john-wesley-harding/181457097 This podcast is a proud member of the FIRE AND WATER PODCAST NETWORK: Visit the Fire & Water WEBSITE: http://fireandwaterpodcast.com Follow Fire & Water on TWITTER – https://twitter.com/FWPodcasts Like our Fire & Water FACEBOOK page – https://www.facebook.com/FWPodcastNetwork Support The Fire & Water Podcast Network on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/fwpodcasts Use our HASHTAG online: #FWPodcasts Thanks for listening!

The Jokermen are joined by journalist and broadcaster extraordinaire Jenny Eliscu for a look back at the John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline, and Johnny Cash sessions that make up the 15th volume of the Bootleg Series. LISTEN TO JENNY'S PODCAST + FOLLOW HER ON TWITTER NEW MERCH NOW AVAILABLE ON JOKERMEN.NET JOKERMEN x MOUNTAIN BREWS // LIVE @ GOLD-DIGGERS // 11/18 LISTEN TO OUR BEST OF JOHN + BEST OF LOU 70s PLAYLISTS FOLLOW JOKERMEN ON TWITTER, INSTAGRAM, AND YOUTUBE

Author Grady Hendrix dropped in on The Record Player for what became one of our favorite chats to date. Where the Pyramid Meets the Eye: A Tribute to Roky Erickson is the album that Grady brought along to discuss with Jeff and Matt.Released in 1990, Where the Pyramid Meets the Eye features an all-star cast including R.E.M., the Jesus and Mary Chain, Poi Dog Pondering, John Wesley Harding, Julian Cope, ZZ Top, Bongwater, Butthole Surfers and many others. They all pooled their musical talents in support of Austin singer-songwriter Roky Erickson (13th Floor Elevators) who was dealing with hard times. The album helped to spark a renaissance for his career, with Erickson eventually making his return to recording and playing live. Producer Bill Bentley revisited his experiences of working on Where the Pyramid Meets the Eye in a 2017 article celebrating a vinyl release of the compilation. He went on to mount a second tribute to Erickson which was released on Light in the Attic in 2021.About Grady:Grady Hendrix used to be a journalist, which means that he was completely irrelevant and could be killed and turned into food at any time. He is one of the founders of the New York Asian Film Festival, but he is not responsible for the bad parts of it. For years he was a regular film critic for the New York Sun but then it went out of business. He has written for Playboy Magazine, Slate, The Village Voice, the New York Post, Film Comment, and Variety. He has a hard time making up his mind.He is very, very beautiful, but if you ever meet him, please do not let this make you uncomfortable. He does not judge.The New Yorker once ran a short profile of him, and this means that when the time comes and they are lining people up for the Space Arks he will be guaranteed a seat ahead of you.Okay, so you can read everything in full at Grady's website. He's a funny guy. A number of his books have been optioned for movies and television, including My Best Friend's Exorcism, which you can now watch on Amazon Prime and he's got a new book coming in early 2023, which we discuss briefly in our conversation.The Record Player:Please rate and review our podcast wherever you might be listening. It all helps and we appreciate your ears and thoughts!If you're enjoying these episodes, please consider joining our Patreon. Become a member of the Record Club to receive early access to our conversations, plus bonus interviews and additional materials related to the program. Thanks so much for your support!

Comedian Nimesh Patel unravels the inner mysteries of mythic singer-songwriter Bod Dylan's 1967 album John Wesley Harding. Follow Nimesh on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/findingnimesh/ Follow Nimesh on Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/findingnimesh Check out Nimesh's website: https://findingnimesh.com/ Follow Josh on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joshadammeyers/ Follow Josh on Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoshAdamMeyers Follow Josh on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/joshameyers Follow The 500 on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the500podcast/ Follow The 500 on Twitter: https://twitter.com/the500podcast Follow The 500 on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/The500PodcastWithJAM/ Email the show: 500podcast@gmail.com Check the show website: http://the500podcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1982, the Los Angeles punk rock band X put out its album Under the Big Black Sun. 40 years later, it's still great! Hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot talk with X vocalist and bassist John Doe all about the album and the band's impact. They'll also chat with him about his new solo album and his work in television and film.  Join our Facebook Group: https://bit.ly/3sivr9TBecome a member on Patreon: https://bit.ly/3slWZvcSign up for our newsletter: https://bit.ly/3eEvRnGMake a donation via PayPal: https://bit.ly/3dmt9lUSend us a Voice Memo: Desktop: bit.ly/2RyD5Ah  Mobile: sayhi.chat/soundops Featured Songs:X, "The Have Nots," Under the Big Black Sun, Elektra, 1982X, "The Hungry Wolf," Under the Big Black Sun, Elektra, 1982Bob Dylan, "As I Went Out One Morning," John Wesley Harding, Columbia, 1967John Doe, "Never Coming Back," Fables in a Foreign Land, Fat Possum, 2022X, "Riding with Mary," Under the Big Black Sun, Elektra, 1982X, "Motel Room in My Bed," Under the Big Black Sun, Elektra, 1982Germs, "Lexicon Devil," (GI), Slash, 1979The Screamers, "122 Hours Of Fear (Live at the Target)," Live in San Francisco: Sept 2nd 1978, Target Video, 2004The Dils, "I Hate the Rich," I Hate the Rich (Single), What?, 1977Circle Jerks, "Stars and Stripes," Wild in the Streets, Step-Forward, 1982X, "Los Angeles," Los Angeles, Slash, 1980X, "We're Desperate," Wild Gift, Slash, 1981X, "Under the Big Black Sun," Under the Big Black Sun, Elektra, 1982X, "Adult Books," Wild Gift, Slash, 1981X, "Dancing with Tears in My Eyes," Under the Big Black Sun, Elektra, 1982X, "Because I Do," Under the Big Black Sun, Elektra, 1982X, "Blue Spark," Under the Big Black Sun, Elektra, 1982X, "Come Back to Me," Under the Big Black Sun, Elektra, 1982X, "Real Child of Hell," Under the Big Black Sun, Elektra, 1982The Gun Club, "She's Like Heroin to Me," Fire of Love, Ruby, 1981Los Lobos, "Will the Wolf Survive?," How Will the Wolf Survive?, Slash/Warner Bros., 1984The Del Fuegos, "Don't Run Wild," Boston, Mass., Slash, 1985Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, "Henry Lee (feat. PJ Harvey) ," Murder Ballads, Mute, 1996Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan, "Revolver," Ballad of the Broken Seas, Cooking Vinyl Limited, 2006Yola, "Stand For Myself," Stand For Myself, Easy Eye and Concord, 2021

Singer/Songwriter/Actor John Doe tells terrific tales: hanging with Dennis Quaid and Winona Ryder in Memphis, gigging with Nick Lowe in London and hearing his voice come out of Christian Bale's mouth in Todd Haynes's Dylan biopic I'm Not There.Did John's appearance with LA punk band X on the Letterman Show in 1983 inspire Dylan's wild 1984 set with The Plugz? What did he say when he suddenly found himself face-to-face with Bruce Springsteen at that Grammy thing? Did Jerry Lee Lewis actually call him a "fucking asshole" the first time they met? John raves about Tulsa's new Bob Dylan Center and answers all the above questions, as he presses on…John Doe and his bandmates in X made 6 studio recordings from 1978-1993. He has recorded 9 solo records, collaborating with Patty Griffin, Dan Auerbach, Aimee Mann, Don Was, Kathleen Edwards, Dave Alvin and Greg Liesz. Doe has acted in over 50 films and television productions including Road House, Great Balls of Fire, Pure Country and Roswell. His musical side projects include work with The Knitters and The Sadies. Doe co-wrote the definitive book about the LA punk rock scene, Under The Big Black Sun. His new album, Fables In A Foreign Land, was inspired by John Wesley Harding. John currently lives in Austin, Texas.WebsiteTwitterTrailerEpisode playlist on AppleEpisode playlist on SpotifyListeners: please subscribe and/or leave a review and a rating.Twitter @isitrollingpodRecorded 13th May 2022This show is part of Pantheon Podcasts  

Singer/Songwriter/Actor John Doe tells terrific tales: hanging with Dennis Quaid and Winona Ryder in Memphis, gigging with Nick Lowe in London and hearing his voice come out of Christian Bale's mouth in Todd Haynes's Dylan biopic I'm Not There.Did John's appearance with LA punk band X on the Letterman Show in 1983 inspire Dylan's wild 1984 set with The Plugz? What did he say when he suddenly found himself face-to-face with Bruce Springsteen at that Grammy thing? Did Jerry Lee Lewis actually call him a "fucking asshole" the first time they met? John raves about Tulsa's new Bob Dylan Center and answers all the above questions, as he presses on…John Doe and his bandmates in X made 6 studio recordings from 1978-1993. He has recorded 9 solo records, collaborating with Patty Griffin, Dan Auerbach, Aimee Mann, Don Was, Kathleen Edwards, Dave Alvin and Greg Liesz. Doe has acted in over 50 films and television productions including Road House, Great Balls of Fire, Pure Country and Roswell. His musical side projects include work with The Knitters and The Sadies. Doe co-wrote the definitive book about the LA punk rock scene, Under The Big Black Sun. His new album, Fables In A Foreign Land, was inspired by John Wesley Harding. John currently lives in Austin, Texas.WebsiteTwitterTrailerEpisode playlist on AppleEpisode playlist on SpotifyListeners: please subscribe and/or leave a review and a rating.Twitter @isitrollingpodRecorded 13th May 2022This show is part of Pantheon Podcasts  

Bob Dylan wrote “All Along The Watchtower” for his 1967 album, John Wesley Harding, after realizing he was getting swindled by his own management and record label. Jimi Hendrix immediately covered the song for his final album, Electric Ladyland, and did such a mind-blowing job of interpreting it musically and lyrically that Bob Dylan has long admitted it to be the better version. Find out the history this classic in the new episode of the Behind The Song podcast. Watch the video episode and subscribe to the Behind The Song Youtube channel: https://bit.ly/2DBF4wJ

Episode 149 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Respect", and the journey of Aretha Franklin from teenage gospel singer to the Queen of Soul. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on "I'm Just a Mops" by the Mops. 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/ Also, people may be interested in a Facebook discussion group for the podcast, run by a friend of mine (I'm not on FB myself) which can be found at https://www.facebook.com/groups/293630102611672/ Errata I say "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby to a Dixie Melody" instead of "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody". Also I say Spooner Oldham co-wrote "Do Right Woman". I meant Chips Moman. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Aretha Franklin. My main biographical source for Aretha Franklin is Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin by David Ritz, and this is where most of the quotes from musicians come from. I also relied heavily on I Never Loved a Man the Way I Loved You by Matt Dobkin. Information on C.L. Franklin came from Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America by Nick Salvatore. Rick Hall's The Man From Muscle Shoals: My Journey from Shame to Fame contains his side of the story. Country Soul by Charles L Hughes is a great overview of the soul music made in Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville in the sixties. Peter Guralnick's Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream Of Freedom is possibly less essential, but still definitely worth reading. And the I Never Loved a Man album is available in this five-album box set for a ludicrously cheap price. But it's actually worth getting this nineteen-CD set with her first sixteen Atlantic albums and a couple of bonus discs of demos and outtakes. There's barely a duff track in the whole nineteen discs. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start this episode,  I have to say that there are some things people may want to be aware of before listening to this. This episode has to deal, at least in passing, with subjects including child sexual abuse, intimate partner abuse, racism, and misogyny. I will of course try to deal with those subjects as tactfully as possible, but those of you who may be upset by those topics may want to check the episode transcript before or instead of listening. Those of you who leave comments or send me messages saying "why can't you just talk about the music instead of all this woke virtue-signalling?" may also want to skip this episode. You can go ahead and skip all the future ones as well, I won't mind. And one more thing to say before I get into the meat of the episode -- this episode puts me in a more difficult position than most other episodes of the podcast have. When I've talked about awful things that have happened in the course of this podcast previously, I have either been talking about perpetrators -- people like Phil Spector or Jerry Lee Lewis who did truly reprehensible things -- or about victims who have talked very publicly about the abuse they've suffered, people like Ronnie Spector or Tina Turner, who said very clearly "this is what happened to me and I want it on the public record". In the case of Aretha Franklin, she has been portrayed as a victim *by others*, and there are things that have been said about her life and her relationships which suggest that she suffered in some very terrible ways. But she herself apparently never saw herself as a victim, and didn't want some aspects of her private life talking about. At the start of David Ritz's biography of her, which is one of my main sources here, he recounts a conversation he had with her: "When I mentioned the possibility of my writing an independent biography, she said, “As long as I can approve it before it's published.” “Then it wouldn't be independent,” I said. “Why should it be independent?” “So I can tell the story from my point of view.” “But it's not your story, it's mine.” “You're an important historical figure, Aretha. Others will inevitably come along to tell your story. That's the blessing and burden of being a public figure.” “More burden than blessing,” she said." Now, Aretha Franklin is sadly dead, but I think that she still deserves the basic respect of being allowed privacy. So I will talk here about public matters, things she acknowledged in her own autobiography, and things that she and the people around her did in public situations like recording studios and concert venues. But there are aspects to the story of Aretha Franklin as that story is commonly told, which may well be true, but are of mostly prurient interest, don't add much to the story of how the music came to be made, and which she herself didn't want people talking about. So there will be things people might expect me to talk about in this episode, incidents where people in her life, usually men, treated her badly, that I'm going to leave out. That information is out there if people want to look for it, but I don't see myself as under any obligation to share it. That's not me making excuses for people who did inexcusable things, that's me showing some respect to one of the towering artistic figures of the latter half of the twentieth century. Because, of course, respect is what this is all about: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Respect"] One name that's come up a few times in this podcast, but who we haven't really talked about that much, is Bobby "Blue" Bland. We mentioned him as the single biggest influence on the style of Van Morrison, but Bland was an important figure in the Memphis music scene of the early fifties, which we talked about in several early episodes. He was one of the Beale Streeters, the loose aggregation of musicians that also included B.B. King and Johnny Ace, he worked with Ike Turner, and was one of the key links between blues and soul in the fifties and early sixties, with records like "Turn on Your Love Light": [Excerpt: Bobby "Blue" Bland, "Turn on Your Love Light"] But while Bland was influenced by many musicians we've talked about, his biggest influence wasn't a singer at all. It was a preacher he saw give a sermon in the early 1940s. As he said decades later: "Wasn't his words that got me—I couldn't tell you what he talked on that day, couldn't tell you what any of it meant, but it was the way he talked. He talked like he was singing. He talked music. The thing that really got me, though, was this squall-like sound he made to emphasize a certain word. He'd catch the word in his mouth, let it roll around and squeeze it with his tongue. When it popped on out, it exploded, and the ladies started waving and shouting. I liked all that. I started popping and shouting too. That next week I asked Mama when we were going back to Memphis to church. “‘Since when you so keen on church?' Mama asked. “‘I like that preacher,' I said. “‘Reverend Franklin?' she asked. “‘Well, if he's the one who sings when he preaches, that's the one I like.'" Bland was impressed by C.L. Franklin, and so were other Memphis musicians. Long after Franklin had moved to Detroit, they remembered him, and Bland and B.B. King would go to Franklin's church to see him preach whenever they were in the city. And Bland studied Franklin's records. He said later "I liked whatever was on the radio, especially those first things Nat Cole did with his trio. Naturally I liked the blues singers like Roy Brown, the jump singers like Louis Jordan, and the ballad singers like Billy Eckstine, but, brother, the man who really shaped me was Reverend Franklin." Bland would study Franklin's records, and would take the style that Franklin used in recorded sermons like "The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest": [Excerpt: C.L. Franklin, "The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest"] And you can definitely hear that preaching style on records like Bland's "I Pity the Fool": [Excerpt: Bobby "Blue" Bland, "I Pity the Fool"] But of course, that wasn't the only influence the Reverend C.L. Franklin had on the course of soul music. C.L. Franklin had grown up poor, on a Mississippi farm, and had not even finished grade school because he was needed to work behind the mule, ploughing the farm for his stepfather. But he had a fierce intelligence and became an autodidact, travelling regularly to the nearest library, thirty miles away, on a horse-drawn wagon, and reading everything he could get his hands on. At the age of sixteen he received what he believed to be a message from God, and decided to become an itinerant preacher. He would travel between many small country churches and build up audiences there -- and he would also study everyone else preaching there, analysing their sermons, seeing if he could anticipate their line of argument and get ahead of them, figuring out the structure. But unlike many people in the conservative Black Baptist churches of the time, he never saw the spiritual and secular worlds as incompatible. He saw blues music and Black church sermons as both being part of the same thing -- a Black culture and folklore that was worthy of respect in both its spiritual and secular aspects. He soon built up a small circuit of local churches where he would preach occasionally, but wasn't the main pastor at any of them. He got married aged twenty, though that marriage didn't last, and he seems to have been ambitious for a greater respectability. When that marriage failed, in June 1936, he married Barbara Siggers, a very intelligent, cultured, young single mother who had attended Booker T Washington High School, the best Black school in Memphis, and he adopted her son Vaughn. While he was mostly still doing churches in Mississippi, he took on one in Memphis as well, in an extremely poor area, but it gave him a foot in the door to the biggest Black city in the US. Barbara would later be called "one of the really great gospel singers" by no less than Mahalia Jackson. We don't have any recordings of Barbara singing, but Mahalia Jackson certainly knew what she was talking about when it came to great gospel singers: [Excerpt: Mahalia Jackson, "Precious Lord, Take My Hand"] Rev. Franklin was hugely personally ambitious, and he also wanted to get out of rural Mississippi, where the Klan were very active at this time, especially after his daughter Erma was born in 1938. They moved to Memphis in 1939, where he got a full-time position at New Salem Baptist Church, where for the first time he was able to earn a steady living from just one church and not have to tour round multiple churches. He soon became so popular that if you wanted to get a seat for the service at noon, you had to turn up for the 8AM Sunday School or you'd be forced to stand. He also enrolled for college courses at LeMoyne College. He didn't get a degree, but spent three years as a part-time student studying theology, literature, and sociology, and soon developed a liberal theology that was very different from the conservative fundamentalism he'd grown up in, though still very much part of the Baptist church. Where he'd grown up with a literalism that said the Bible was literally true, he started to accept things like evolution, and to see much of the Bible as metaphor. Now, we talked in the last episode about how impossible it is to get an accurate picture of the lives of religious leaders, because their life stories are told by those who admire them, and that's very much the case for C.L. Franklin. Franklin was a man who had many, many, admirable qualities -- he was fiercely intelligent, well-read, a superb public speaker, a man who was by all accounts genuinely compassionate towards those in need, and he became one of the leaders of the civil rights movement and inspired tens of thousands, maybe even millions, of people, directly and indirectly, to change the world for the better. He also raised several children who loved and admired him and were protective of his memory. And as such, there is an inevitable bias in the sources on Franklin's life. And so there's a tendency to soften the very worst things he did, some of which were very, very bad. For example in Nick Salvatore's biography of him, he talks about Franklin, in 1940, fathering a daughter with someone who is described as "a teenager" and "quite young". No details of her age other than that are given, and a few paragraphs later the age of a girl who was then sixteen *is* given, talking about having known the girl in question, and so the impression is given that the girl he impregnated was also probably in her late teens. Which would still be bad, but a man in his early twenties fathering a child with a girl in her late teens is something that can perhaps be forgiven as being a different time. But while the girl in question may have been a teenager when she gave birth, she was *twelve years old* when she became pregnant, by C.L. Franklin, the pastor of her church, who was in a position of power over her in multiple ways. Twelve years old. And this is not the only awful thing that Franklin did -- he was also known to regularly beat up women he was having affairs with, in public. I mention this now because everything else I say about him in this episode is filtered through sources who saw these things as forgivable character flaws in an otherwise admirable human being, and I can't correct for those biases because I don't know the truth. So it's going to sound like he was a truly great man. But bear those facts in mind. Barbara stayed with Franklin for the present, after discovering what he had done, but their marriage was a difficult one, and they split up and reconciled a handful of times. They had three more children together -- Cecil, Aretha, and Carolyn -- and remained together as Franklin moved on first to a church in Buffalo, New York, and then to New Bethel Church, in Detroit, on Hastings Street, a street which was the centre of Black nightlife in the city, as immortalised in John Lee Hooker's "Boogie Chillun": [Excerpt: John Lee Hooker, "Boogie Chillen"] Before moving to Detroit, Franklin had already started to get more political, as his congregation in Buffalo had largely been union members, and being free from the worst excesses of segregation allowed him to talk more openly about civil rights, but that only accelerated when he moved to Detroit, which had been torn apart just a couple of years earlier by police violence against Black protestors. Franklin had started building a reputation when in Memphis using radio broadcasts, and by the time he moved to Detroit he was able to command a very high salary, and not only that, his family were given a mansion by the church, in a rich part of town far away from most of his congregation. Smokey Robinson, who was Cecil Franklin's best friend and a frequent visitor to the mansion through most of his childhood, described it later, saying "Once inside, I'm awestruck -- oil paintings, velvet tapestries, silk curtains, mahogany cabinets filled with ornate objects of silver and gold. Man, I've never seen nothing like that before!" He made a lot of money, but he also increased church attendance so much that he earned that money. He had already been broadcasting on the radio, but when he started his Sunday night broadcasts in Detroit, he came up with a trick of having his sermons run long, so the show would end before the climax. People listening decided that they would have to start turning up in person to hear the end of the sermons, and soon he became so popular that the church would be so full that crowds would have to form on the street outside to listen. Other churches rescheduled their services so they wouldn't clash with Franklin's, and most of the other Black Baptist ministers in the city would go along to watch him preach. In 1948 though, a couple of years after moving to Detroit, Barbara finally left her husband. She took Vaughn with her and moved back to Buffalo, leaving the four biological children she'd had with C.L. with their father.  But it's important to note that she didn't leave her children -- they would visit her on a regular basis, and stay with her over school holidays. Aretha later said "Despite the fact that it has been written innumerable times, it is an absolute lie that my mother abandoned us. In no way, shape, form, or fashion did our mother desert us." Barbara's place in the home was filled by many women -- C.L. Franklin's mother moved up from Mississippi to help him take care of the children, the ladies from the church would often help out, and even stars like Mahalia Jackson would turn up and cook meals for the children. There were also the women with whom Franklin carried on affairs, including Anna Gordy, Ruth Brown, and Dinah Washington, the most important female jazz and blues singer of the fifties, who had major R&B hits with records like her version of "Cold Cold Heart": [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, "Cold Cold Heart"] Although my own favourite record of hers is "Big Long Slidin' Thing", which she made with arranger Quincy Jones: [Excerpt: Dinah Washington, "Big Long Slidin' Thing"] It's about a trombone. Get your minds out of the gutter. Washington was one of the biggest vocal influences on young Aretha, but the single biggest influence was Clara Ward, another of C.L. Franklin's many girlfriends. Ward was the longest-lasting of these, and there seems to have been a lot of hope on both her part and Aretha's that she and Rev. Franklin would marry, though Franklin always made it very clear that monogamy wouldn't suit him. Ward was one of the three major female gospel singers of the middle part of the century, and possibly even more technically impressive as a vocalist than the other two, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Mahalia Jackson. Where Jackson was an austere performer, who refused to perform in secular contexts at all for most of her life, and took herself and her music very seriously, and Tharpe was a raunchier, funnier, more down-to-earth performer who was happy to play for blues audiences and even to play secular music on occasion, Ward was a *glamorous* performer, who wore sequined dresses and piled her hair high on her head. Ward had become a singer in 1931 when her mother had what she later talked about as a religious epiphany, and decided she wasn't going to be a labourer any more, she was going to devote her life to gospel music. Ward's mother had formed a vocal group with her two daughters, and Clara quickly became the star and her mother's meal ticket -- and her mother was very possessive of that ticket, to the extent that Ward, who was a bisexual woman who mostly preferred men, had more relationships with women, because her mother wouldn't let her be alone with the men she was attracted to. But Ward did manage to keep a relationship going with C.L. Franklin, and Aretha Franklin talked about the moment she decided to become a singer, when she saw Ward singing "Peace in the Valley" at a funeral: [Excerpt: Clara Ward, "Peace in the Valley"] As well as looking towards Ward as a vocal influence, Aretha was also influenced by her as a person -- she became a mother figure to Aretha, who would talk later about watching Ward eat, and noting her taking little delicate bites, and getting an idea of what it meant to be ladylike from her. After Ward's death in 1973, a notebook was found in which she had written her opinions of other singers. For Aretha she wrote “My baby Aretha, she doesn't know how good she is. Doubts self. Some day—to the moon. I love that girl.” Ward's influence became especially important to Aretha and her siblings after their mother died of a heart attack a few years after leaving her husband, when Aretha was ten, and Aretha, already a very introverted child, became even more so. Everyone who knew Aretha said that her later diva-ish reputation came out of a deep sense of insecurity and introversion -- that she was a desperately private, closed-off, person who would rarely express her emotions at all, and who would look away from you rather than make eye contact. The only time she let herself express emotions was when she performed music. And music was hugely important in the Franklin household. Most preachers in the Black church at that time were a bit dismissive of gospel music, because they thought the music took away from their prestige -- they saw it as a necessary evil, and resented it taking up space when their congregations could have been listening to them. But Rev. Franklin was himself a rather good singer, and even made a few gospel records himself in 1950, recording for Joe Von Battle, who owned a record shop on Hastings Street and also put out records by blues singers: [Excerpt: C.L. Franklin, "I Am Climbing Higher Mountains" ] The church's musical director was James Cleveland, one of the most important gospel artists of the fifties and sixties, who sang with groups like the Caravans: [Excerpt: The Caravans, "What Kind of Man is This?" ] Cleveland, who had started out in the choir run by Thomas Dorsey, the writer of “Take My Hand Precious Lord” and “Peace in the Valley”, moved in with the Franklin family for a while, and he gave the girls tips on playing the piano -- much later he would play piano on Aretha's album Amazing Grace, and she said of him “He showed me some real nice chords, and I liked his deep, deep sound”. Other than Clara Ward, he was probably the single biggest musical influence on Aretha. And all the touring gospel musicians would make appearances at New Bethel Church, not least of them Sam Cooke, who first appeared there with the Highway QCs and would continue to do so after joining the Soul Stirrers: [Excerpt: The Soul Stirrers, "Touch the Hem of his Garment"] Young Aretha and her older sister Erma both had massive crushes on Cooke, and there were rumours that he had an affair with one or both of them when they were in their teens, though both denied it. Aretha later said "When I first saw him, all I could do was sigh... Sam was love on first hearing, love at first sight." But it wasn't just gospel music that filled the house. One of the major ways that C.L. Franklin's liberalism showed was in his love of secular music, especially jazz and blues, which he regarded as just as important in Black cultural life as gospel music. We already talked about Dinah Washington being a regular visitor to the house, but every major Black entertainer would visit the Franklin residence when they were in Detroit. Both Aretha and Cecil Franklin vividly remembered visits from Art Tatum, who would sit at the piano and play for the family and their guests: [Excerpt: Art Tatum, "Tiger Rag"] Tatum was such a spectacular pianist that there's now a musicological term, the tatum, named after him, for the smallest possible discernible rhythmic interval between two notes. Young Aretha was thrilled by his technique, and by that of Oscar Peterson, who also regularly came to the Franklin home, sometimes along with Ella Fitzgerald. Nat "King" Cole was another regular visitor. The Franklin children all absorbed the music these people -- the most important musicians of the time -- were playing in their home, and young Aretha in particular became an astonishing singer and also an accomplished pianist. Smokey Robinson later said: “The other thing that knocked us out about Aretha was her piano playing. There was a grand piano in the Franklin living room, and we all liked to mess around. We'd pick out little melodies with one finger. But when Aretha sat down, even as a seven-year-old, she started playing chords—big chords. Later I'd recognize them as complex church chords, the kind used to accompany the preacher and the solo singer. At the time, though, all I could do was view Aretha as a wonder child. Mind you, this was Detroit, where musical talent ran strong and free. Everyone was singing and harmonizing; everyone was playing piano and guitar. Aretha came out of this world, but she also came out of another far-off magical world none of us really understood. She came from a distant musical planet where children are born with their gifts fully formed.” C.L. Franklin became more involved in the music business still when Joe Von Battle started releasing records of his sermons, which had become steadily more politically aware: [Excerpt: C.L. Franklin, "Dry Bones in the Valley"] Franklin was not a Marxist -- he was a liberal, but like many liberals was willing to stand with Marxists where they had shared interests, even when it was dangerous. For example in 1954, at the height of McCarthyism, he had James and Grace Lee Boggs, two Marxist revolutionaries, come to the pulpit and talk about their support for the anti-colonial revolution in Kenya, and they sold four hundred copies of their pamphlet after their talk, because he saw that the struggle of Black Africans to get out from white colonial rule was the same struggle as that of Black Americans. And Franklin's powerful sermons started getting broadcast on the radio in areas further out from Detroit, as Chess Records picked up the distribution for them and people started playing the records on other stations. People like future Congressman John Lewis and the Reverend Jesse Jackson would later talk about listening to C.L. Franklin's records on the radio and being inspired -- a whole generation of Black Civil Rights leaders took their cues from him, and as the 1950s and 60s went on he became closer and closer to Martin Luther King in particular. But C.L. Franklin was always as much an ambitious showman as an activist, and he started putting together gospel tours, consisting mostly of music but with himself giving a sermon as the headline act. And he became very, very wealthy from these tours. On one trip in the south, his car broke down, and he couldn't find a mechanic willing to work on it. A group of white men started mocking him with racist terms, trying to provoke him, as he was dressed well and driving a nice car (albeit one that had broken down). Rather than arguing with them, he walked to a car dealership, and bought a new car with the cash that he had on him. By 1956 he was getting around $4000 per appearance, roughly equivalent to $43,000 today, and he was making a *lot* of appearances. He also sold half a million records that year. Various gospel singers, including the Clara Ward Singers, would perform on the tours he organised, and one of those performers was Franklin's middle daughter Aretha. Aretha had become pregnant when she was twelve, and after giving birth to the child she dropped out of school, but her grandmother did most of the child-rearing for her, while she accompanied her father on tour. Aretha's first recordings, made when she was just fourteen, show what an astonishing talent she already was at that young age. She would grow as an artist, of course, as she aged and gained experience, but those early gospel records already show an astounding maturity and ability. It's jaw-dropping to listen to these records of a fourteen-year-old, and immediately recognise them as a fully-formed Aretha Franklin. [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "There is a Fountain Filled With Blood"] Smokey Robinson's assessment that she was born with her gifts fully formed doesn't seem like an exaggeration when you hear that. For the latter half of the fifties, Aretha toured with her father, performing on the gospel circuit and becoming known there. But the Franklin sisters were starting to get ideas about moving into secular music. This was largely because their family friend Sam Cooke had done just that, with "You Send Me": [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "You Send Me"] Aretha and Erma still worshipped Cooke, and Aretha would later talk about getting dressed up just to watch Cooke appear on the TV. Their brother Cecil later said "I remember the night Sam came to sing at the Flame Show Bar in Detroit. Erma and Ree said they weren't going because they were so heartbroken that Sam had recently married. I didn't believe them. And I knew I was right when they started getting dressed about noon for the nine o'clock show. Because they were underage, they put on a ton of makeup to look older. It didn't matter 'cause Berry Gordy's sisters, Anna and Gwen, worked the photo concession down there, taking pictures of the party people. Anna was tight with Daddy and was sure to let my sisters in. She did, and they came home with stars in their eyes.” Moving from gospel to secular music still had a stigma against it in the gospel world, but Rev. Franklin had never seen secular music as sinful, and he encouraged his daughters in their ambitions. Erma was the first to go secular, forming a girl group, the Cleo-Patrettes, at the suggestion of the Four Tops, who were family friends, and recording a single for Joe Von Battle's J-V-B label, "No Other Love": [Excerpt: The Cleo-Patrettes, "No Other Love"] But the group didn't go any further, as Rev. Franklin insisted that his eldest daughter had to finish school and go to university before she could become a professional singer. Erma missed other opportunities for different reasons, though -- Berry Gordy, at this time still a jobbing songwriter, offered her a song he'd written with his sister and Roquel Davis, but Erma thought of herself as a jazz singer and didn't want to do R&B, and so "All I Could Do Was Cry" was given to Etta James instead, who had a top forty pop hit with it: [Excerpt: Etta James, "All I Could Do Was Cry"] While Erma's move into secular music was slowed by her father wanting her to have an education, there was no such pressure on Aretha, as she had already dropped out. But Aretha had a different problem -- she was very insecure, and said that church audiences "weren't critics, but worshippers", but she was worried that nightclub audiences in particular were just the kind of people who would just be looking for flaws, rather than wanting to support the performer as church audiences did. But eventually she got up the nerve to make the move. There was the possibility of her getting signed to Motown -- her brother was still best friends with Smokey Robinson, while the Gordy family were close to her father -- but Rev. Franklin had his eye on bigger things. He wanted her to be signed to Columbia, which in 1960 was the most prestigious of all the major labels. As Aretha's brother Cecil later said "He wanted Ree on Columbia, the label that recorded Mahalia Jackson, Duke Ellington, Johnny Mathis, Tony Bennett, Percy Faith, and Doris Day. Daddy said that Columbia was the biggest and best record company in the world. Leonard Bernstein recorded for Columbia." They went out to New York to see Phil Moore, a legendary vocal coach and arranger who had helped make Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge into stars, but Moore actually refused to take her on as a client, saying "She does not require my services. Her style has already been developed. Her style is in place. It is a unique style that, in my professional opinion, requires no alteration. It simply requires the right material. Her stage presentation is not of immediate concern. All that will come later. The immediate concern is the material that will suit her best. And the reason that concern will not be easily addressed is because I can't imagine any material that will not suit her." That last would become a problem for the next few years, but the immediate issue was to get someone at Columbia to listen to her, and Moore could help with that -- he was friends with John Hammond. Hammond is a name that's come up several times in the podcast already -- we mentioned him in the very earliest episodes, and also in episode ninety-eight, where we looked at his signing of Bob Dylan. But Hammond was a legend in the music business. He had produced sessions for Bessie Smith, had discovered Count Basie and Billie Holiday, had convinced Benny Goodman to hire Charlie Christian and Lionel Hampton, had signed Pete Seeger and the Weavers to Columbia, had organised the Spirituals to Swing concerts which we talked about in the first few episodes of this podcast, and was about to put out the first album of Robert Johnson's recordings. Of all the executives at Columbia, he was the one who had the greatest eye for talent, and the greatest understanding of Black musical culture. Moore suggested that the Franklins get Major Holley to produce a demo recording that he could get Hammond to listen to. Major Holley was a family friend, and a jazz bassist who had played with Oscar Peterson and Coleman Hawkins among others, and he put together a set of songs for Aretha that would emphasise the jazz side of her abilities, pitching her as a Dinah Washington style bluesy jazz singer. The highlight of the demo was a version of "Today I Sing the Blues", a song that had originally been recorded by Helen Humes, the singer who we last heard of recording “Be Baba Leba” with Bill Doggett: [Excerpt: Helen Humes, "Today I Sing the Blues"] That original version had been produced by Hammond, but the song had also recently been covered by Aretha's idol, Sam Cooke: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Today I Sing the Blues"] Hammond was hugely impressed by the demo, and signed Aretha straight away, and got to work producing her first album. But he and Rev. Franklin had different ideas about what Aretha should do. Hammond wanted to make a fairly raw-sounding bluesy jazz album, the kind of recording he had produced with Bessie Smith or Billie Holiday, but Rev. Franklin wanted his daughter to make music that would cross over to the white pop market -- he was aiming for the same kind of audience that Nat "King" Cole or Harry Belafonte had, and he wanted her recording standards like "Over the Rainbow". This showed a lack of understanding on Rev. Franklin's part of how such crossovers actually worked at this point. As Etta James later said, "If you wanna have Black hits, you gotta understand the Black streets, you gotta work those streets and work those DJs to get airplay on Black stations... Or looking at it another way, in those days you had to get the Black audience to love the hell outta you and then hope the love would cross over to the white side. Columbia didn't know nothing 'bout crossing over.” But Hammond knew they had to make a record quickly, because Sam Cooke had been working on RCA Records, trying to get them to sign Aretha, and Rev. Franklin wanted an album out so they could start booking club dates for her, and was saying that if they didn't get one done quickly he'd take up that offer, and so they came up with a compromise set of songs which satisfied nobody, but did produce two R&B top ten hits, "Won't Be Long" and Aretha's version of "Today I Sing the Blues": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Today I Sing the Blues"] This is not to say that Aretha herself saw this as a compromise -- she later said "I have never compromised my material. Even then, I knew a good song from a bad one. And if Hammond, one of the legends of the business, didn't know how to produce a record, who does? No, the fault was with promotion." And this is something important to bear in mind as we talk about her Columbia records. Many, *many* people have presented those records as Aretha being told what to do by producers who didn't understand her art and were making her record songs that didn't fit her style. That's not what's happening with the Columbia records. Everyone actually involved said that Aretha was very involved in the choices made -- and there are some genuinely great tracks on those albums. The problem is that they're *unfocused*. Aretha was only eighteen when she signed to the label, and she loved all sorts of music -- blues, jazz, soul, standards, gospel, middle-of-the-road pop music -- and wanted to sing all those kinds of music. And she *could* sing all those kinds of music, and sing them well. But it meant the records weren't coherent. You didn't know what you were getting, and there was no artistic personality that dominated them, it was just what Aretha felt like recording. Around this time, Aretha started to think that maybe her father didn't know what he was talking about when it came to popular music success, even though she idolised him in most areas, and she turned to another figure, who would soon become both her husband and manager. Ted White. Her sister Erma, who was at that time touring with Lloyd Price, had introduced them, but in fact Aretha had first seen White years earlier, in her own house -- he had been Dinah Washington's boyfriend in the fifties, and her first sight of him had been carrying a drunk Washington out of the house after a party. In interviews with David Ritz, who wrote biographies of many major soul stars including both Aretha Franklin and Etta James, James had a lot to say about White, saying “Ted White was famous even before he got with Aretha. My boyfriend at the time, Harvey Fuqua, used to talk about him. Ted was supposed to be the slickest pimp in Detroit. When I learned that Aretha married him, I wasn't surprised. A lot of the big-time singers who we idolized as girls—like Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan—had pimps for boyfriends and managers. That was standard operating procedure. My own mother had made a living turning tricks. When we were getting started, that way of life was part of the music business. It was in our genes. Part of the lure of pimps was that they got us paid." She compared White to Ike Turner, saying "Ike made Tina, no doubt about it. He developed her talent. He showed her what it meant to be a performer. He got her famous. Of course, Ted White was not a performer, but he was savvy about the world. When Harvey Fuqua introduced me to him—this was the fifties, before he was with Aretha—I saw him as a super-hip extra-smooth cat. I liked him. He knew music. He knew songwriters who were writing hit songs. He had manners. Later, when I ran into him and Aretha—this was the sixties—I saw that she wasn't as shy as she used to be." White was a pimp, but he was also someone with music business experience -- he owned an unsuccessful publishing company, and also ran a chain of jukeboxes. He was also thirty, while Aretha was only eighteen. But White didn't like the people in Aretha's life at the time -- he didn't get on well with her father, and he also clashed with John Hammond. And Aretha was also annoyed at Hammond, because her sister Erma had signed to Epic, a Columbia subsidiary, and was releasing her own singles: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Hello Again"] Aretha was certain that Hammond had signed Erma, even though Hammond had nothing to do with Epic Records, and Erma had actually been recommended by Lloyd Price. And Aretha, while for much of her career she would support her sister, was also terrified that her sister might have a big hit before her and leave Aretha in her shadow. Hammond was still the credited producer on Aretha's second album, The Electrifying Aretha Franklin, but his lack of say in the sessions can be shown in the choice of lead-off single. "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody" was originally recorded by Al Jolson in 1918: [Excerpt: Al Jolson, "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody"] Rev. Franklin pushed for the song, as he was a fan of Jolson -- Jolson, oddly, had a large Black fanbase, despite his having been a blackface performer, because he had *also* been a strong advocate of Black musicians like Cab Calloway, and the level of racism in the media of the twenties through forties was so astonishingly high that even a blackface performer could seem comparatively OK. Aretha's performance was good, but it was hardly the kind of thing that audiences were clamouring for in 1961: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody"] That single came out the month after _Down Beat_ magazine gave Aretha the "new-star female vocalist award", and it oddly made the pop top forty, her first record to do so, and the B-side made the R&B top ten, but for the next few years both chart success and critical acclaim eluded her. None of her next nine singles would make higher than number eighty-six on the Hot One Hundred, and none would make the R&B charts at all. After that transitional second album, she was paired with producer Bob Mersey, who was precisely the kind of white pop producer that one would expect for someone who hoped for crossover success. Mersey was the producer for many of Columbia's biggest stars at the time -- people like Barbra Streisand, Andy Williams, Julie Andrews, Patti Page, and Mel Tormé -- and it was that kind of audience that Aretha wanted to go for at this point. To give an example of the kind of thing that Mersey was doing, just the month before he started work on his first collaboration with Aretha, _The Tender, the Moving, the Swinging Aretha Franklin_, his production of Andy Williams singing "Moon River" was released: [Excerpt: Andy Williams, "Moon River"] This was the kind of audience Aretha was going for when it came to record sales – the person she compared herself to most frequently at this point was Barbra Streisand – though in live performances she was playing with a small jazz group in jazz venues, and going for the same kind of jazz-soul crossover audience as Dinah Washington or Ray Charles. The strategy seems to have been to get something like the success of her idol Sam Cooke, who could play to soul audiences but also play the Copacabana, but the problem was that Cooke had built an audience before doing that -- she hadn't. But even though she hadn't built up an audience, musicians were starting to pay attention. Ted White, who was still in touch with Dinah Washington, later said “Women are very catty. They'll see a girl who's dressed very well and they'll say, Yeah, but look at those shoes, or look at that hairdo. Aretha was the only singer I've ever known that Dinah had no negative comments about. She just stood with her mouth open when she heard Aretha sing.” The great jazz vocalist Carmen McRea went to see Aretha at the Village Vanguard in New York around this time, having heard the comparisons to Dinah Washington, and met her afterwards. She later said "Given how emotionally she sang, I expected her to have a supercharged emotional personality like Dinah. Instead, she was the shyest thing I've ever met. Would hardly look me in the eye. Didn't say more than two words. I mean, this bitch gave bashful a new meaning. Anyway, I didn't give her any advice because she didn't ask for any, but I knew goddamn well that, no matter how good she was—and she was absolutely wonderful—she'd have to make up her mind whether she wanted to be Della Reese, Dinah Washington, or Sarah Vaughan. I also had a feeling she wouldn't have minded being Leslie Uggams or Diahann Carroll. I remember thinking that if she didn't figure out who she was—and quick—she was gonna get lost in the weeds of the music biz." So musicians were listening to Aretha, even if everyone else wasn't. The Tender, the Moving, the Swinging Aretha Franklin, for example, was full of old standards like "Try a Little Tenderness": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Try a Little Tenderness"] That performance inspired Otis Redding to cut his own version of that song a few years later: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Try a Little Tenderness"] And it might also have inspired Aretha's friend and idol Sam Cooke to include the song in his own lounge sets. The Tender, the Moving, the Swinging Aretha Franklin also included Aretha's first original composition, but in general it wasn't a very well-received album. In 1963, the first cracks started to develop in Aretha's relationship with Ted White. According to her siblings, part of the strain was because Aretha's increasing commitment to the civil rights movement was costing her professional opportunities. Her brother Cecil later said "Ted White had complete sway over her when it came to what engagements to accept and what songs to sing. But if Daddy called and said, ‘Ree, I want you to sing for Dr. King,' she'd drop everything and do just that. I don't think Ted had objections to her support of Dr. King's cause, and he realized it would raise her visibility. But I do remember the time that there was a conflict between a big club gig and doing a benefit for Dr. King. Ted said, ‘Take the club gig. We need the money.' But Ree said, ‘Dr. King needs me more.' She defied her husband. Maybe that was the start of their marital trouble. Their thing was always troubled because it was based on each of them using the other. Whatever the case, my sister proved to be a strong soldier in the civil rights fight. That made me proud of her and it kept her relationship with Daddy from collapsing entirely." In part her increasing activism was because of her father's own increase in activity. The benefit that Cecil is talking about there is probably one in Chicago organised by Mahalia Jackson, where Aretha headlined on a bill that also included Jackson, Eartha Kitt, and the comedian Dick Gregory. That was less than a month before her father organised the Detroit Walk to Freedom, a trial run for the more famous March on Washington a few weeks later. The Detroit Walk to Freedom was run by the Detroit Council for Human Rights, which was formed by Rev. Franklin and Rev. Albert Cleage, a much more radical Black nationalist who often differed with Franklin's more moderate integrationist stance. They both worked together to organise the Walk to Freedom, but Franklin's stance predominated, as several white liberal politicians, like the Mayor of Detroit, Jerome Cavanagh, were included in the largely-Black March. It drew crowds of 125,000 people, and Dr. King called it "one of the most wonderful things that has happened in America", and it was the largest civil rights demonstration in American history up to that point. King's speech in Detroit was recorded and released on Motown Records: [Excerpt: Martin Luther King, "Original 'I Have a Dream' Speech”] He later returned to the same ideas in his more famous speech in Washington. During that civil rights spring and summer of 1963, Aretha also recorded what many think of as the best of her Columbia albums, a collection of jazz standards  called Laughing on the Outside, which included songs like "Solitude", "Ol' Man River" and "I Wanna Be Around": [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Wanna Be Around"] The opening track, "Skylark", was Etta James' favourite ever Aretha Franklin performance, and is regarded by many as the definitive take on the song: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Skylark"] Etta James later talked about discussing the track with the great jazz singer Sarah Vaughan, one of Aretha's early influences, who had recorded her own version of the song: "Sarah said, ‘Have you heard of this Aretha Franklin girl?' I said, ‘You heard her do “Skylark,” didn't you?' Sarah said, ‘Yes, I did, and I'm never singing that song again.” But while the album got noticed by other musicians, it didn't get much attention from the wider public. Mersey decided that a change in direction was needed, and they needed to get in someone with more of a jazz background to work with Aretha. He brought in pianist and arranger Bobby Scott, who had previously worked with people like Lester Young, and Scott said of their first meeting “My first memory of Aretha is that she wouldn't look at me when I spoke. She withdrew from the encounter in a way that intrigued me. At first I thought she was just shy—and she was—but I also felt her reading me...For all her deference to my experience and her reluctance to speak up, when she did look me in the eye, she did so with a quiet intensity before saying, ‘I like all your ideas, Mr. Scott, but please remember I do want hits.'” They started recording together, but the sides they cut wouldn't be released for a few years. Instead, Aretha and Mersey went in yet another direction. Dinah Washington died suddenly in December 1963, and given that Aretha was already being compared to Washington by almost everyone, and that Washington had been a huge influence on her, as well as having been close to both her father and her husband/manager, it made sense to go into the studio and quickly cut a tribute album, with Aretha singing Washington's hits: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Cold Cold Heart"] Unfortunately, while Washington had been wildly popular, and one of the most important figures in jazz and R&B in the forties and fifties, her style was out of date. The tribute album, titled Unforgettable, came out in February 1964, the same month that Beatlemania hit the US. Dinah Washington was the past, and trying to position Aretha as "the new Dinah Washington" would doom her to obscurity. John Hammond later said "I remember thinking that if Aretha never does another album she will be remembered for this one. No, the problem was timing. Dinah had died, and, outside the black community, interest in her had waned dramatically. Popular music was in a radical and revolutionary moment, and that moment had nothing to do with Dinah Washington, great as she was and will always be.” At this point, Columbia brought in Clyde Otis, an independent producer and songwriter who had worked with artists like Washington and Sarah Vaughan, and indeed had written one of the songs on Unforgettable, but had also worked with people like Brook Benton, who had a much more R&B audience. For example, he'd written "Baby, You Got What It Takes" for Benton and Washington to do as a duet: [Excerpt: Brook Benton and Dinah Washington, "Baby, You Got What it Takes"] In 1962, when he was working at Mercury Records before going independent, Otis had produced thirty-three of the fifty-one singles the label put out that year that had charted. Columbia had decided that they were going to position Aretha firmly in the R&B market, and assigned Otis to do just that. At first, though, Otis had no more luck with getting Aretha to sing R&B than anyone else had. He later said "Aretha, though, couldn't be deterred from her determination to beat Barbra Streisand at Barbra's own game. I kept saying, ‘Ree, you can outsing Streisand any day of the week. That's not the point. The point is to find a hit.' But that summer she just wanted straight-up ballads. She insisted that she do ‘People,' Streisand's smash. Aretha sang the hell out of it, but no one's gonna beat Barbra at her own game." But after several months of this, eventually Aretha and White came round to the idea of making an R&B record. Otis produced an album of contemporary R&B, with covers of music from the more sophisticated end of the soul market, songs like "My Guy", "Every Little Bit Hurts", and "Walk on By", along with a few new originals brought in by Otis. The title track, "Runnin' Out of Fools", became her biggest hit in three years, making number fifty-seven on the pop charts and number thirty on the R&B charts: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Runnin' Out of Fools"] After that album, they recorded another album with Otis producing, a live-in-the-studio jazz album, but again nobody involved could agree on a style for her. By this time it was obvious that she was unhappy with Columbia and would be leaving the label soon, and they wanted to get as much material in the can as they could, so they could continue releasing material after she left. But her working relationship with Otis was deteriorating -- Otis and Ted White did not get on, Aretha and White were having their own problems, and Aretha had started just not showing up for some sessions, with nobody knowing where she was. Columbia passed her on to yet another producer, this time Bob Johnston, who had just had a hit with Patti Page, "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte": [Excerpt: Patti Page, "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte"] Johnston was just about to hit an incredible hot streak as a producer. At the same time as his sessions with Aretha, he was also producing Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, and just after the sessions finished he'd go on to produce Simon & Garfunkel's Sounds of Silence album. In the next few years he would produce a run of classic Dylan albums like Blonde on Blonde, John Wesley Harding, and New Morning, Simon & Garfunkel's follow up Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme, Leonard Cohen's first three albums, and Johnny Cash's comeback with the Live at Folsom Prison album and its follow up At San Quentin. He also produced records for Marty Robbins, Flatt & Scruggs, the Byrds, and Burl Ives during that time period. But you may notice that while that's as great a run of records as any producer was putting out at the time, it has little to do with the kind of music that Aretha Franklin was making then, or would become famous with. Johnston produced a string-heavy session in which Aretha once again tried to sing old standards by people like Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern. She then just didn't turn up for some more sessions, until one final session in August, when she recorded songs like "Swanee" and "You Made Me Love You". For more than a year, she didn't go into a studio. She also missed many gigs and disappeared from her family's life for periods of time. Columbia kept putting out records of things she'd already recorded, but none of them had any success at all. Many of the records she'd made for Columbia had been genuinely great -- there's a popular perception that she was being held back by a record company that forced her to sing material she didn't like, but in fact she *loved* old standards, and jazz tunes, and contemporary pop at least as much as any other kind of music. Truly great musicians tend to have extremely eclectic tastes, and Aretha Franklin was a truly great musician if anyone was. Her Columbia albums are as good as any albums in those genres put out in that time period, and she remained proud of them for the rest of her life. But that very eclecticism had meant that she hadn't established a strong identity as a performer -- everyone who heard her records knew she was a great singer, but nobody knew what "an Aretha Franklin record" really meant -- and she hadn't had a single real hit, which was the thing she wanted more than anything. All that changed when in the early hours of the morning, Jerry Wexler was at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals recording a Wilson Pickett track -- from the timeline, it was probably the session for "Mustang Sally", which coincidentally was published by Ted White's publishing company, as Sir Mack Rice, the writer, was a neighbour of White and Franklin, and to which Aretha had made an uncredited songwriting contribution: [Excerpt: Wilson Pickett, "Mustang Sally"] Whatever the session, it wasn't going well. Percy Sledge, another Atlantic artist who recorded at Muscle Shoals, had turned up and had started winding Pickett up, telling him he sounded just like James Brown. Pickett *hated* Brown -- it seems like almost every male soul singer of the sixties hated James Brown -- and went to physically attack Sledge. Wexler got between the two men to protect his investments in them -- both were the kind of men who could easily cause some serious damage to anyone they hit -- and Pickett threw him to one side and charged at Sledge. At that moment the phone went, and Wexler yelled at the two of them to calm down so he could talk on the phone. The call was telling him that Aretha Franklin was interested in recording for Atlantic. Rev. Louise Bishop, later a Democratic politician in Pennsylvania, was at this time a broadcaster, presenting a radio gospel programme, and she knew Aretha. She'd been to see her perform, and had been astonished by Aretha's performance of a recent Otis Redding single, "Respect": [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Respect"] Redding will, by the way, be getting his own episode in a few months' time, which is why I've not covered the making of that record here. Bishop thought that Aretha did the song even better than Redding -- something Bishop hadn't thought possible. When she got talking to Aretha after the show, she discovered that her contract with Columbia was up, and Aretha didn't really know what she was going to do -- maybe she'd start her own label or something. She hadn't been into the studio in more than a year, but she did have some songs she'd been working on. Bishop was good friends with Jerry Wexler, and she knew that he was a big fan of Aretha's, and had been saying for a while that when her contract was up he'd like to sign her. Bishop offered to make the connection, and then went back home and phoned Wexler's wife, waking her up -- it was one in the morning by this point, but Bishop was accustomed to phoning Wexler late at night when it was something important. Wexler's wife then phoned him in Muscle Shoals, and he phoned Bishop back and made the arrangements to meet up. Initially, Wexler wasn't thinking about producing Aretha himself -- this was still the period when he and the Ertegun brothers were thinking of selling Atlantic and getting out of the music business, and so while he signed her to the label he was originally going to hand her over to Jim Stewart at Stax to record, as he had with Sam and Dave. But in a baffling turn of events, Jim Stewart didn't actually want to record her, and so Wexler determined that he had better do it himself. And he didn't want to do it with slick New York musicians -- he wanted to bring out the gospel sound in her voice, and he thought the best way to do that was with musicians from what Charles Hughes refers to as "the country-soul triangle" of Nashville, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals. So he booked a week's worth of sessions at FAME studios, and got in FAME's regular rhythm section, plus a couple of musicians from American Recordings in Memphis -- Chips Moman and Spooner Oldham. Oldham's friend and songwriting partner Dan Penn came along as well -- he wasn't officially part of the session, but he was a fan of Aretha's and wasn't going to miss this. Penn had been the first person that Rick Hall, the owner of FAME, had called when Wexler had booked the studio, because Hall hadn't actually heard of Aretha Franklin up to that point, but didn't want to let Wexler know that. Penn had assured him that Aretha was one of the all-time great talents, and that she just needed the right production to become massive. As Hall put it in his autobiography, "Dan tended in those days to hate anything he didn't write, so I figured if he felt that strongly about her, then she was probably going to be a big star." Charlie Chalmers, a horn player who regularly played with these musicians, was tasked with putting together a horn section. The first song they recorded that day was one that the musicians weren't that impressed with at first. "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)" was written by a songwriter named Ronnie Shannon, who had driven from Georgia to Detroit hoping to sell his songs to Motown. He'd popped into a barber's shop where Ted White was having his hair cut to ask for directions to Motown, and White had signed him to his own publishing company and got him to write songs for Aretha. On hearing the demo, the musicians thought that the song was mediocre and a bit shapeless: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You) (demo)"] But everyone there was agreed that Aretha herself was spectacular. She didn't speak much to the musicians, just went to the piano and sat down and started playing, and Jerry Wexler later compared her playing to Thelonius Monk (who was indeed one of the jazz musicians who had influenced her). While Spooner Oldham had been booked to play piano, it was quickly decided to switch him to electric piano and organ, leaving the acoustic piano for Aretha to play, and she would play piano on all the sessions Wexler produced for her in future. Although while Wexler is the credited producer (and on this initial session Rick Hall at FAME is a credited co-producer), everyone involved, including Wexler, said that the musicians were taking their cues from Aretha rather than anyone else. She would outline the arrangements at the piano, and everyone else would fit in with what she was doing, coming up with head arrangements directed by her. But Wexler played a vital role in mediating between her and the musicians and engineering staff, all of whom he knew and she didn't. As Rick Hall said "After her brief introduction by Wexler, she said very little to me or anyone else in the studio other than Jerry or her husband for the rest of the day. I don't think Aretha and I ever made eye contact after our introduction, simply because we were both so totally focused on our music and consumed by what we were doing." The musicians started working on "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)", and at first found it difficult to get the groove, but then Oldham came up with an electric piano lick which everyone involved thought of as the key that unlocked the song for them: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Love You)"] After that, they took a break. Most of them were pleased with the track, though Rick Hall wasn't especially happy. But then Rick Hall wasn't especially happy about anything at that point. He'd always used mono for his recordings until then, but had been basically forced to install at least a two-track system by Tom Dowd, Atlantic's chief engineer, and was resentful of this imposition. During the break, Dan Penn went off to finish a song he and Spooner Oldham had been writing, which he hoped Aretha would record at the session: [Excerpt: Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham, "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man"] They had the basic structure of the song down, but hadn't quite finished the middle eight, and both Jerry Wexler and Aretha Franklin chipped in uncredited lyrical contributions -- Aretha's line was "as long as we're together baby, you'd better show some respect to me". Penn, Oldham, Chips Moman, Roger Hawkins, and Tommy Cogbill started cutting a backing track for the song, with Penn singing lead initially with the idea that Aretha would overdub her vocal. But while they were doing this, things had been going wrong with the other participants. All the FAME and American rhythm section players were white, as were Wexler, Hall, and Dowd, and Wexler had been very aware of this, and of the fact that they were recording in Alabama, where Aretha and her husband might not feel totally safe, so he'd specifically requested that the horn section at least contain some Black musicians. But Charlie Chalmers hadn't been able to get any of the Black musicians he would normally call when putting together a horn section, and had ended up with an all-white horn section as well, including one player, a trumpet player called Ken Laxton, who had a reputation as a good player but had never worked with any of the other musicians there -- he was an outsider in a group of people who regularly worked together and had a pre-existing relationship. As the two outsiders, Laxton and Ted White had, at first, bonded, and indeed had started drinking vodka together, passing a bottle between themselves, in a way that Rick Hall would normally not allow in a session -- at the time, the county the studio was in was still a dry county. But as Wexler said, “A redneck patronizing a Black man is a dangerous camaraderie,” and White and Laxton soon had a major falling out. Everyone involved tells a different story about what it was that caused them to start rowing, though it seems to have been to do with Laxton not showing the proper respect for Aretha, or even actually sexually assaulting her -- Dan Penn later said “I always heard he patted her on the butt or somethin', and what would have been wrong with that anyway?”, which says an awful lot about the attitudes of these white Southern men who thought of themselves as very progressive, and were -- for white Southern men in early 1967. Either way, White got very, very annoyed, and insisted that Laxton get fired from the session, which he was, but that still didn't satisfy White, and he stormed off to the motel, drunk and angry. The rest of them finished cutting a basic track for "Do Right Woman", but nobody was very happy with it. Oldham said later “She liked the song but hadn't had time to practice it or settle into it I remember there was Roger playing the drums and Cogbill playing the bass. And I'm on these little simplistic chords on organ, just holding chords so the song would be understood. And that was sort of where it was left. Dan had to sing the vocal, because she didn't know the song, in the wrong key for him. That's what they left with—Dan singing the wrong-key vocal and this little simplistic organ and a bass and a drum. We had a whole week to do everything—we had plenty of time—so there was no hurry to do anything in particular.” Penn was less optimistic, saying "But as I rem

Prior to running her own business, Fiona has overseen many careers, including her time at EMI Records, where she ran marketing campaigns for Digable Planets,  Gang Starr, Shara Nelson, The Solsonics, Eternal, and others.She co-owned Sub Verse Music and 3-2-1 Records, where she signed and marketed Blackalicious, MF Doom, C-Rayz Walz, Skeme Team, and more.At the parent company Zero Hour Records, she spearheaded the publicity department and ran campaigns for The Notwist, Varnarline, Swervedriver, Space Needle, Steve Wynn, John Wesley Harding, Threadwaxing Space, just to name a few.As talent booker for Joe's Pub, she developed the highly popular Late Night Series, then went on to run the International Department at TVT Records.She also showcased and gave NY debuts to some of the hottest indie acts on the scene including Slum Village, Saian Supa Crew, Spank Rock, TTC, Loop Troop, Eternia, Timbuktu, Zion I, Atmosphere, Aloe Blacc, Swollen Members, Dub Inc, etc.Before her record Industry work, she was a radio personality in Atlanta with a widely popular urban show on WRFG 89.3FM, a party promoter, freelance publicist, and a voice-over talent.And before that:  A Concert Pianist in England where she grew up!Learn more about Lyte.

Wesley started performing as John Wesley Harding in the late '80s (often eliciting comparisons in his early work to Elvis Costello), moved from England to the U.S. in 1991, and has 20+ releases, switching to his own name in 2013 as a result of his success as a novelist. We discuss "The Impossible She" (and end by listening to "Come Back Yesterday") from Late Style (2021), whose music was written by David Nagler; "When I Knew" from Wesley Stace (2013), and "Your Ghost (Don't Scare Me No More)" from Awake (1998). Intro: The title track from Here Comes the Groom (1990). For more see wesleystace.com. Hear more Nakedly Examined Music. Like our Facebook page. Support us on Patreon. Sponsors: Upgrade your showering at nebia.com/nem (code NEM).

Wesley started performing as John Wesley Harding in the late '80s (often eliciting comparisons in his early work to Elvis Costello), moved from England to the U.S. in 1991, and has 20+ releases, switching to his own name in 2013 as a result of his success as a novelist. We discuss "The Impossible She" (and end by listening to "Come Back Yesterday") from Late Style (2021), whose music was written by David Nagler; "When I Knew" from Wesley Stace (2013), and "Your Ghost (Don't Scare Me No More)" from Awake (1998). Intro: The title track from Here Comes the Groom (1990). For more see wesleystace.com. Hear more Nakedly Examined Music. Like our Facebook page. Support us on Patreon. Sponsors: Upgrade your showering at nebia.com/nem (code NEM).