Podcasts about Junior Walker

Listen to the latest installment in our ongoing series, “40 Indiana guitar pioneers every Hoosier should know.” The series explores the music and history of Indiana guitarists who made lasting contributions to American music — some world famous, others lesser known.  This time, we focus on South Bend guitarist Willie Woods, best known for his work with Jr. Walker & the All Stars. When their 1965 hit “Shotgun” climbed the charts, listeners heard the blazing saxophone of Junior Walker. But beneath that horn was Woods' tight, percussive guitar. Born in Louisiana in 1936, Woods moved to South Bend as a child, where he became active in the city's R&B scene during the 1950s. Initially known as a singer, he joined a band formed by his longtime friend, drummer Billy “Stix” Nicks, and saxophonist Junior Walker. Determined to contribute more fully to the group's sound, Woods taught himself guitar and soon became the band's permanent guitarist. The group, then known as the Jumping Jacks, performed throughout northern Indiana and southern Michigan before relocating to Battle Creek, Michigan. The band attracted the attention of singer, songwriter, and label executive Harvey Fuqua. In 1962, they made their first recordings and adopted the name Jr. Walker & the All Stars. Soon after, they signed with Motown Records, achieving international success with “Shotgun.” Woods appeared on the group's first two Motown albums, Shotgun and Soul Session. By the late 1960s, Woods left the All Stars and returned to the Midwest. In the early 1970s, he performed with the Battle Creek funk band The Apaches, writing their cult-classic 1972 single “Trying to Make Ends Meet.” Willie Woods died of lung cancer in 1997 at age 60, two years after Junior Walker's passing. Though he was rarely in the spotlight, Woods helped define the early sound of Jr. Walker & the All Stars. His rhythm guitar provided the foundation that allowed Walker's saxophone to soar.

In celebration of the deluxe edition of Foreigner's fourth album, 4, we take a detailed look at how it was made. After Mick Jones broke into the music industry as a session musician while playing in multiple bands, including Spooky Tooth, he envisioned starting a new project for the songs he was writing. He recruited musicians Ian McDonald, Dennis Elliott, Al Greenwood and Ed Gagliardi before turning his attention to finding the right lead singer for the band. After recalling meeting Lou Gramm when he was the singer of the Rochester, New York band Black Sheep, Jones asked Gramm to audition in New York City. Gramm was immediately hired and the lineup was complete. They signed a deal with Atlantic Records and released their self-titled debut album in 1977, which became a big success. Their second album, Double Vision, was released in 1978 and continued their run of hit singles. For their third album, Head Games, they clashed with producer Roy Thomas Baker and the album was not as successful as the first two. Rick Wills had taken over on bass at this point and after Head Games, they decided to let go of Ian McDonald and Al Greenwood to become a four-piece. They hired producer Mutt Lange and began recording at Electric Lady Studios. Foreigner 4 was eventually released in 1981.  In this episode, Lou Gramm shares stories of growing up in Rochester, getting to see artists like Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones, which went on to inspire his lyrics for “Jukebox Hero.” He describes this turning point moment for the band when they wanted to update their sound and image for the 1980s. By paring down to a four-piece and bringing in outside musicians like Thomas Dolby on synthesizers, they forged a new path forward for the band. With the help of producer Mutt Lange, they were able to focus on crafting a tight set of rock songs while exploring new sonic territory with songs like “Waiting for a Girl Like You” and “Urgent.” From long hours and late nights in the studio, to Mutt Lange's perfectionist tendencies, to Thomas Dolby's art rock approach, to Mick Jones falling in love with synthesizers, to spontaneously recruiting Junior Walker for a saxophone solo, to a mysterious muse in the studio while recording “Waiting for a Girl Like You,” to both Foreigner and Mutt Lange at the height of their powers, we'll hear the stories of how the album came together.

This week's show, from the LAX departure lounge(!): brand new Salt Collective, Sloan, Flying Vipers, I Was a King, The Saints '73-'78, Satch Kerans Band, Jason Maksymilian, and Blue Tone Stompers, plus Manfred Mann, Junior Walker & the Allstars, Ringo ...

JOHNNY BRISTOL - HANG ON IN THERE BABY.JOHNNY BRISTOL - SHE CAME INTO MY LIFE.JOHNNY BRISTOL - IT DON'T HURT NO MORE.DAVID RUFFIN - MY WHOLE WORLD ENDED (THE MOMENT YOU LEFT ME).BUDDY MILES - IT'S JUST A KISS AWAY.DIANA ROSS & THE SUPREMES - SOMEDAY WE'LL ALL BE TOGETHER.EDWIN STARR - 25 MILES.JOHNNY BRISTOL - STRANGERS IN THE DARK CORNERS.JUNIOR WALKER & THE ALL STARS - WHAT DOES IT TAKE (TO WIN YOUR LOVE).BO KIRKLAND & RUTH DAVIS - YOU'RE GONNA GET NEXT TO ME.JOHNNY BRISTOL - I WOULDN'T CHANGE A THING.

Ivy Pochoda est l'autrice de «L'Autre Côté des docks» (2013, Liana Levi ; prix Page America) et «Route 62» (2018, Liana Levi). Elle est traduite dans le monde entier. Son dernier roman, «Ces femmes-là» (Globe, 2023 ; Satellites, février 2025), a été classé parmi les meilleurs thrillers de 2020 par le New York Times. Traduit de l'anglais (États-Unis) par Adélaïde Pralon"Florence « Florida » Baum se fait discrète dans la prison pour femmes d'Arizona où elle purge sa peine. Elle a beau se considérer comme victime des circonstances, Dios, son ex-codétenue, ne l'entend pas de cette oreille. Elle sait que Florida se cache derrière des excuses pour nier la violence qui l'habite. Lorsque les deux femmes sont libérées de manière anticipée, Florida n'a qu'une idée en tête : récupérer sa Jaguar à Los Angeles pour s'oublier sur les routes. Mais l'obsession de Dios pour Florida se dresse sur son chemin. La poursuivant telle une ombre funeste, Dios la pousse à embrasser sa colère et ses plus sombres pulsions, tandis que Lobos, une lieutenante hantée par ses propres démons, se lance sur la piste sanglante des deux femmes.Dans une prose coup de poing, Ivy Pochoda met en scène la rencontre fracassante entre deux femmes issues de milieux que tout oppose, et pourtant liées par une colère profonde, une violence que la société leur refuse." (Présentation des éditions Globe).Un roman sur la violence aujourd'hui aux États-Unis.Programmation musicale :Shotgun, de Junior Walker.

We're celebrating our 10th anniversary all year by digging in the vaults to re-present classic episodes with fresh commentary. Today, we're revisiting our milestone 100th episode with the legendary Lamont Dozier! ABOUT LAMONT DOZIERLamont Dozier, along with brothers Eddie and Brian Holland, wrote and produced more than 20 consecutive singles recorded by the Supremes, including ten #1 pop hits: “Where Did Our Love Go,” “Baby Love,” “Come See About Me,” “Stop! In the Name of Love,” “Back in My Arms Again,” “I Hear a Symphony,” “You Can't Hurry Love,” “You Keep Me Hangin' On,” “Love is Here and Now You're Gone,” and “The Happening.” Other Top 5 singles they wrote for the Supremes include “My World is Empty Without You” and “Reflections.” In addition to their hits with the Supremes, Holland, Dozier, and Holland helped further define the Motown sound by writing major pop and R&B hits such as “Heat Wave,” “Nowhere to Run,” and “Jimmy Mack” for Martha and the Vandellas, “Mickey's Monkey” for the Miracles, “Can I Get a Witness” and “You're a Wonderful One” for Marvin Gaye, and “(I'm A) Road Runner” for Junior Walker and the All Stars. The trio found particular success with The Four Tops, who scored hits with their songs “Baby I Need Your Loving,” “I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch),” “It's the Same Old Song,” “Reach Out I'll Be There,” “Standing in the Shadows of Love,” and “Bernadette.” Additional hits include “Crumbs Off the Table” for Glass House, “Give Me Just a Little More Time” for Chairmen of the Board, “Band of Gold” for Freda Payne, and Dozier's own recording of “Why Can't We Be Lovers.” Hit cover versions of his songs by rock artists include “Don't Do It” by the Band, “Take Me in Your Arms (Rock Me a Little While)” by the Doobie Brothers, “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)” by James Taylor, and “This Old Heart of Mine” by Rod Stewart. With hits spanning multiple decades, Dozier also co-wrote “Two Hearts” with Phil Collins, earning a #1 pop hit, a Grammy award, a Golden Globe, and an Oscar nomination. Dozier is in the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He is the recipient of the prestigious Johnny Mercer Award for songwriting, as well as the BMI Icon award. Lamont Dozier was additionally named among Rolling Stone magazine's 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time.

Can you believe it's our second anniversary episode? And our fiftieth? We're celebrating both, and we have a very special guest who makes an appearance. We're discussing our namesake movie, TapeHeads, a fairly obscure 1988 cult classic film starring John Cusack and Tim Robbins as two guys who want to get into the business of making rock music videos. It also stars Sam Moore and Junior Walker as their musical idols the Swanky Modes. The soundtrack is fantastic (Todd owns it on vinyl, CD, and cassette), and the score is by Fishbone, who appear in a scene as a country band. Comparatively few people have seen this underdog of a movie, and we're thrilled to be able to share it with you. Am I crying? Well, it wouldn't surprise me if I was. Let's get into trouble, baby! (TapeHeads fact checker here: Bird is the movie about Charlie Park, obviously. The Dexter Gordon movie is 'Round Midnight.) Connect with us a tapeheadspod.com RELATED LINKS: TapeHeads, at IMDB The excellent TapeHeads soundtrack, on YouTube

Turntables and Tea returns with its dive into Foreigner and their 4th studio album. Hear about the involvement of Thomas Dolby and Junior Walker as Charlie and Cory explain why the songs on "4" make a case for Foreigner's recent Rock Hall induction. Make listening to this urgent! Follow us on social media: Twitter-⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/turntablestea⁠⁠⁠ Facebook-⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/turntablesandteapodcast⁠⁠⁠ Instagram-⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/turntablesandteapodcast/⁠⁠ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/turntablesandtea/support

If you are exploring the rise of prog rock, it doesn't take long until you encounter the power trio of Emerson, Lake & Palmer.  This progressive rock band is actually a supergroup.  Keyboardist Keith Emerson came from The Nice, vocalist and guitarist Greg Lake was in King Crimson, and percussionist Carl Palmer was from Atomic Rooster.  Emerson, Lake & Palmer formed in 1970 and would make their mark as a prog rock band which adapted classic and symphonic music into the rock genre, with elements of jazz, acoustic, and art rock coming into play.  Most ELP songs are long and complicated, not making any attempt to stay within the confines of the “hit single” pop track.Trilogy is the trio's third studio album, following their eponymously named debut, their second studio album entitled “Tarkus,” and their live album, Pictures at an Exhibition.  Trilogy continues a tradition of combining original material with adaptations of classical music.  It was also a challenging album for the group to make, utilizing more overdubs than previous albums.  The upside is a great sounding, polished album.  The downside is that the music was difficult to duplicate live, causing a number of the songs from Trilogy to be minimally used in set lists.The album was considered both a critical and commercial success, reaching number 2 on the UK albums chart, and number 5 on the US Billboard 200 chart.ELP would continue as a force in the 70's, breaking up in 1979.  Both partial and full reunions would continue through the 1980's and 1990's, with their final performance being held in 2010.  Both Keith Emerson and Greg Lake died in 2016.Wayne takes us through this prog rock masterpiece for this week's podcast. FugueWe open with an instrumental featuring Keith Emerson on keyboards.  A fugue is a style of music involving counterpoint, popular in the Baroque musical era of the 1600's.  You will get exposure to a lot of serious musical compositions and style listening to this group.From the BeginningThis is the "hit" from the album, if you think of Emerson, Lake & Palmer in terms of popularity.  It went to number 29 on the US charts, and is the highest charting US single.  Greg Lake wrote the music and lyrics, and plays the acoustic guitar for this ballad.  The lyrics take on a philosophical sone, emphasizing the importance of the present moment, while not missing past mistakes and missed opportunities.  The SheriffKeith Emerson wrote the music and Greg Lake wrote the lyrics to this western-themed track.  It tells the story of an innocent man fleeing the law, encountering the law in the form of the Sheriff, then taking the Sheriff's place after shooting him.  It ends with a great honkytonk piano solo.HoedownImmediately following “The Sheriff” on the album, the group creates an adaptation of Aaron Copeland's iconic “Hoe-Down,” written for his classic ballet entitled “Rodeo” in 1942.  This tune became well known after being used in advertisements by America's Beef Producers.   ENTERTAINMENT TRACK:Main theme from the motion picture “Super Fly”Curtis Mayfield created this song for the black-oriented crime drama film of the same name. STAFF PICKS:Best Thing by StyxBruce leads off the staff picks with the first single from Styx's first album.  Dennis DeYoung and James Young wrote the song and trade off on lead vocals.  It peaked at number 82 on the Billboard Hot 100.  This is a great tune to hear and grasp what the early days of Styx sounded like.  Rock and Roll, part 2 by Gary GlitterRob brings us a glam rock anthem made famous today by its use in sports stadiums nation wide.  This single off “Glitter,” the debut album by Gary Glitter, is the only one of his singles to crack the U.S. top 10.  Both “Rock and Roll” part 1 and part 2 peaked at number 2 on the UK singles chart.Brandy (You're A Fine Girl) by Looking GlassIt is a mystery how Lynch was able to pick up this well-known classic of yacht rock this late in the podcasts.  This track tells the story of a waitress who gives her love to a sailor, knowing that he would never be on shore for long.  Will It Go Round in Circles by Billy PrestonWayne's staff pick is a funky tune from the man often known as the fifth Beatle.  Preston played with a number of musicians, including Ray Charles, Little Richard, Sam Cook, Eric Clapton, Aretha Franklin, Joe Cocker, and of course the Beatles.  This soulful tune sold over a million copies and topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart. INSTRUMENTAL TRACK:Walk In the Night by Junior Walker & the All StarsThis jazz-infused (largely) instrumental track closes out the podcast for the week.  Thanks for listening to “What the Riff?!?” NOTE: To adjust the loudness of the music or voices, you may adjust the balance on your device. VOICES are stronger in the LEFT channel, and MUSIC is stronger on the RIGHT channel.Please follow us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/whattheriffpodcast/, and message or email us with what you'd like to hear, what you think of the show, and any rock-worthy memes we can share.Of course we'd love for you to rate the show in your podcast platform!**NOTE: What the Riff?!? does not own the rights to any of these songs and we neither sell, nor profit from them. We share them so you can learn about them and purchase them for your own collections.

THE 60s. August's Podcast Special. In this podcast Jerome delves into the rock, rhythm and blues music of the 60s. He takes a retrospective look at the 60s year by year and presents some of the big hits and influential albums. Playlist: Artist - Track. 1 The Who - My Generation 2 The Rolling Stones - Statisfaction. 3 The Electric Prunes - I had too much to dream last night. 4 Wilson Pickett - Land of 1000 dances. 5 The Beatles - Eleanor Rigby. 6 The Beach Boys - Wouldn't It Be Nice. 7The Beatles - Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. 8 Iron Butterfly - Slayer in A Gadda da Vida. 9 The Who - Tommy. 10 The Doors - Light My Fire. 11 Fats Domino - Walking To New Orleans. 12 Buster Brown - Fannie Mae. 13 Bobby Lewis – Tossin' and Turnin'. 14 Ernie K Doe - Mother in Law. 15 Ray Charles - Hit the road Jack. 16 Acker Bilk - Stranger On The Shore. 17 King Curtis and The Noble Knights - Soul Twist. 18 Gene Chandler - Duke of Earl. 19 Little Johnny Taylor - Part Time Love. 20 Martha and the Vandellas - Heat Wave. 21 The Beatles - I Want To Hold Your Hand 22 Rufus Thomas - Jump Back. 23 Etta James - Loving You More Every Day. 24 Junior Walker & The All Stars – Shotgun. 25 Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs - Wooly Bully. 26 Bob Dylan - Like A Rolling Stone. 27 Bob Dylan - Rainy Day Woman. 28 Jimi Hendrix Experience - Burning of The Midnight Lamp. 29 Cream - White Room. 30 Johnny Winter - Hustled down in Texas. 31 Slim Harpo - Baby Scratch My Back. 32 Sam & Dave - Hold On. I'm A Comin'. 33 The Lovin' Spoonful - Summer in the City. 34 Jackie Wilson - Your Love keeps lifting me Higher and Higher. 35 Spencer Davis Group - Gimme Some Lovin'. 36 Otis Redding - The Dock Of The Bay. 37 Richie Havens - Freedom. 38 The Rolling Stones - Gimme Shelter. Size: 243 MB (255,653,912 bytes) Duration: 1:46:29

In this episode, I explore the history of the musical talent that emerged from those that performed at the El Grotto Lounge in Battle Creek, Michigan. The establishment was owned and operated by Robert 'Snap' Montgomery and Helen Evans Montgomery, and it was opened in 1949. Over its 40+ years of existence, some of the performers who started their early days at the El Grotto went onto achieve great success in the record business. Names like Al Green, Wade Flemons, Johnny & Jackey, The Velvelettes and Junior Walker & the All-Stars were some of the most notable ones. For tickets to the Music Legacy event, visit: https://events.humanitix.com/musiclegacy For tickets to the Del Shannon Concert, click here: https://events.humanitix.com/delshannonshow For more information on Del Shannon Weekend, visit: https://bcrhm.org To connect with Michael Delaware, visit: https://michaeldelaware.com --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/talesofsouthwestmipast/message

This week, Pete hits hard with new music coming from The Stance Brothers, Joe Tatton Trio, Thee Marloes & one from Bobby Oroza. There are classic funky, soulful vibes from Gwen McCrae, Charles Earland, The Jazz Apostles and Lonnie Liston Smith. With the Euros kicking off tonight, we have Germany vs Scotland repped by The Poets Of Rhythm and the Average White Band. There are also birthday celebrations for Linda Clifford and for Junior Walker.For more info and tracklisting, visit: https://thefaceradio.com/superfly-funk-and-soul-show/Tune into new broadcasts of the Superfly Funk & Soul Show, LIVE, Fridays from 10 AM - 12 PM EST / 3 - 5 PM GMT.//Dig this show? Please consider supporting The Face Radio: http://support.thefaceradio.com Support The Face Radio with PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/thefaceradio. Join the family at https://plus.acast.com/s/thefaceradio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This podcast focuses on the Golden Age of Rhythm & Blues with its roots in jazz, blues, swing, boogie woogie, jump blues and Doo Wop. Jerome delves into the Rhythm and Blues Billboard charts from the 40s through to the 60s and presents some of the big hits. Playlist: Artist - Track. 1 Louis Jordan & his Tympany Five - Caldonia Boogie. 1944 2 Eddie 'Cleanhead' Vinson - Old Maid Boogie. 1946 3 Wynonie Harris - Good Rockin' Tonight 1948 4 T Bone Walker - T Bone Shuffle 1949. 5 Little Walter - My Babe. 1951 6 Lloyd Price - Lawdy Miss Clawdy. 1952 7 Clyde McPhatter & The Drifters - Money Honey 1953 8 Little Willie John - Fever. 1956 9 Danny & The Juniors - At the Hop. 1957 10 The Silhouettes - Get a Job. 1958 11 Hank Ballard & The Midnighters - Let's Go, Let's Go, Let's Go 1960 12 Buster Brown - Fannie Mae. 1960. 13 Bobby Lewis - Tossin' and Turnin' 1961 14 Freddy King - I'm Tore Down 1961 15 Garnet Mimms & The Enchanters - Cry Baby. 1963 16 Junior Walker & The All Stars - Shotgun. 1965 17 Slim Harpo - Baby Scratch My Back. 1966 18 Koko Taylor - Wang Dang Doodle 1966 19 Sam, Dave - Soul Man. 1967 18 King Curtis & The Noble Knights - Soul Twist. 1962 Size: 145 MB (152,274,162 bytes) Duration: 1:03:24

1965 est directement sous l'influence de l'intersection de trois mouvements musicaux différents, chacun d'entre eux étant important - l'influence des Beatles et, dans une moindre mesure, des autres groupes de Merseybeat, l'influence de Bob Dylan et du mouvement folk et protestataire, et les groupes de guitares R&B britanniques qui commence à ramener aux États-Unis leur interprétation du son de Chess Records qu'on appellera le british blues boom. Mais bien sûr, alors que ces groupes à guitares influençaient tout le monde, ils étaient également influencés par l'essor de la soul, et en particulier par la Motown, et les groupes de la Motown ont été parmi les rares groupes américains qui ont réussi à continuer à avoir des succès pendant la British Invasion. En effet, 1965 a été un pic créatif et commercial pour le label, tout comme pour les groupes à guitare blancs. Aujourd'hui, nous allons donc nous pencher sur les Supremes, sur la carrière du seul groupe noir à avoir sérieusement défié les Beatles pour dominer les hit-parades dans les années 60 et sur le début des rivalités entre groupes qui ont fini par les faire tomber. Nous allons examiner "I Hear a Symphony" des Supremes The Supremes, “I Hear a Symphony” Nella Dodds, “Come See About Me” The Supremes, “Stop! In the Name of Love” The Supremes, “Stop! In the Name of Love” Dusty Springfield et Martha Reeves, "Wishin' and Hopin'" The Supremes, "Nothing But Heartaches" The Toys, "A Lover's Concerto" The Supremes, "Stop ! In the Name of Love !" Junior Walker and the All-Stars, "(I'm a) Road Runner" The Supremes, "I Hear a Symphony" The Beach Boys, "Don't Hurt My Little Sister" The Supremes, "Things Are Changing For The Better" The Supremes, "Rock-A-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody" The Supremes, "You're Nobody 'Til Somebody Loves You"

Dar and Jim share some weird holiday stories and their favorite holiday traditions on this edition of You Won't Believe What Happened To Me! We'll be back with more episodes in 2024! Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! LINKS TO STORIES https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2023/12/12/Christmas-lights-irk-neighbors-Union-Vale-New-York/9991702417613/ https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2023/12/13/Christmas-tree-owl-Lexington-Kentucky/1291702492573/ https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2023/12/06/giant-Santa-Hollytree-Tyler-Texas/8071701883416/ https://metro.co.uk/2023/12/13/catalonias-wonderfully-weird-fixation-poo-christmas-19908320/ https://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2023/12/04/Boston-Public-Library-overdue-vinyl-record-Junior-Walker/7251701727190/

On this week's episode, special guest co-host Claudia Shambaugh, Nathan, and Mahler the Fake News Dog talk about the word of the year, chinstrap penguin microsleeping, better coffee, methane digesters, net metering 3.0, rescuing the Marshall Islands, Cop28, nuclear energy, hydrogen from plastic waste, the LA to Vegas bullet train, old organs, anthrobots, wine fraud, 23and Me, Junior Walker and The All Stars, and so on.

**It's The Relax With Rendell Show Replay On Trax FM & Rendell Radio. Rendell Featured Soul & Easy Listening With Cuts From Sam Cooke, Temptations, Supremes, Stylistics, Spinners, Peaches & Herb, The O'Jays, Marvin Gaye, Junior Walker, Johnny Johnson, Jimmy Ruffin, Happenings, Fuzz, Four Tops, Foundations, Everley Brothers, Eddie Holman, Dells, Clarence Carter, Capitols & More. Catch Rendell Every Saturday From 8PM UK Time The Stations: Trax FM & Rendell Radio #traxfm #rendellradio #soul #funk #70ssoul #80ssoul #60s #boogie #disco #raregrooves #soulclassics #reggae #nusoul #relaxwithrendell Listen Live Here Via The Trax FM Player: chat.traxfm.org/player/index.html Mixcloud LIVE :mixcloud.com/live/traxfm Free Trax FM Android App: play.google.com/store/apps/det...mradio.ba.a6bcb The Trax FM Facebook Page : https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100092342916738 Trax FM Live On Hear This: hearthis.at/k8bdngt4/live Tunerr: tunerr.co/radio/Trax-FM Radio Garden: Trax FM Link: http://radio.garden/listen/trax-fm/IEnsCj55 OnLine Radio Box: onlineradiobox.com/uk/trax/?cs...cs=uk.traxRadio Radio Deck: radiodeck.com/radio/5a09e2de87...7e3370db06d44dc Radio.Net: traxfmlondon.radio.net Stream Radio : streema.com/radios/Trax_FM..The_Originals Live Online Radio: liveonlineradio.net/english/tr...ax-fm-103-3.htm**

In this episode I explore the legacy of Autry DeWalt Mixon, better known as Junior Walker, and his band the All-Stars. The group began their early career in South Bend, Indiana and also in Southwest Michigan. They first sang their legendary 'Shotgun' which went on to become a #1 R&B Hit at the El Grotto Lounge in Battle Creek, Michigan in 1965. The material in this episode comes from the book 'Here I Stand' written by Sonya and Sean Hollins. To get a copy of this book, visit: https://amzn.to/450AEHA For more books by Sonya & Sean Hollins, visit Season Press Inc. For more information on Michael Delaware, visit: https://michaeldelaware.com

Welcome to the Instant Trivia podcast episode 873, where we ask the best trivia on the Internet. Round 1. Category: zebras 1: Only continent to which zebras are native. Africa. 2: TV sitcom on which the main character called his racially mixed daughter-in-law a zebra. The Jeffersons. 3: In England, a deer crossing is for deer, but a zebra crossing is for these. pedestrians. 4: Professional sport in which 7 "zebras" officiate. football. 5: In Simon and Garfunkel's 1967 song, "At the Zoo", zebras are said to have these political views. reactionary. Round 2. Category: baywatch beach safety 1: (Hi, I'm David Hasselhoff.) For L.A. beaches, this list includes dogs, fireworks and tents. things that are prohibited. 2: (Hi, I'm Mitzi Kapture.) For your safety, always swim near one of these that's manned and open. a lifeguard station. 3: (Hi, I'm Michael Bergin.) To protect your head, neck and spine, don't do this into unfamiliar waters. dive. 4: (Hi, I'm Brooke Burns.) The Red Cross recommends everyone learn this; L.A. lifeguards have been using it since 1957. CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation). 5: (Hi, I'm Michael Newman.) If you can't swim well, or at all, don't rely on these; you may lose them in the water. life preservers (or floatation devices). Round 3. Category: named for 1: The company formerly called "Alonzo Richmond, Agents for Onondaga Salt" now bears his name. Morton. 2: While Asa Gray was known for his books on botany, Henry Gray was known for his books on this science. anatomy. 3: While John Bartlett put his name on a book of quotes, Enoch Bartlett put his name on this. a pear. 4: Textile manufacturer whose big donation got the N.Y. Institute of Musical Art named for him. Augustus Juilliard. 5: Captain Cook gave this name to a Pacific island group in honor of Earl John Montagu. the Sandwich Islands. Round 4. Category: world "p"s 1: The "4 questions" asked on this occasion include wondering why we have to eat unleavened bread. Passover. 2: Malay or Sinai. peninsula. 3: Gunmen after this South American dictator in 1986 used rockets, bazookas, rifles and grenades--and missed!. Pinochet. 4: World Heritage sites in this nation include the Nasca Lines. Peru. 5: Named for an adviser to Catherine the Great, this type of "village" looks deceptively impressive. a Potemkin village. Round 5. Category: "junior" collage 1: Student athletes know it's abbreviated JV. junior varsity. 2: James Welch named this popular movie theater candy in 1949. Junior Mints. 3: The All Stars backed up this rockin' frontman. Junior Walker. 4: It was founded in 1901 in New York City by a debutante wanting to help the less fortunate. the Junior League. 5: It was started in 1919 as a collection of small, after-school business clubs in Massachusetts. Junior Achievement. Thanks for listening! Come back tomorrow for more exciting trivia! Special thanks to https://blog.feedspot.com/trivia_podcasts/

The Cable Guy, Flag Day, and Junior Walker are all candidates in the Today Game for June 14, 2023

Welcome to the Instant Trivia podcast episode 854, where we ask the best trivia on the Internet. Round 1. Category: chicken 〠la king shopping list 1: You may want chicken described with these 2 words, meaning the bird lived relatively unconfined. free range. 2: This fortified wine you'll cook with is in a separate section from other Spanish wines. sherry. 3: Weighty name for a standard ingredient in the sauce. heavy cream. 4: For the mushrooms, try this type named for something found on a shirt. button mushrooms. 5: To catch the eyes of guests, use these peppers that can be spelled with 1 or 2 I's. pimentos or pimientos. Round 2. Category: world skyline tours 1: This city has been a port since the Roman period. London. 2: This city has one of the world's largest single-span bridges across its harbor. Sydney, Australia. 3: This city was nearly destroyed twice in the 20th century by an earthquake and then by bombing. Tokyo. 4: The first mayor of this city led a rebellion against the Canadian governor after being unseated in Parliament. Toronto. 5: This South American city's name comes from early explorers who thought the bay was a river. Rio de Janeiro. Round 3. Category: "junior" collage 1: Student athletes know it's abbreviated JV. junior varsity. 2: James Welch named this popular movie theater candy in 1949. Junior Mints. 3: The All Stars backed up this rockin' frontman. Junior Walker. 4: It was founded in 1901 in New York City by a debutante wanting to help the less fortunate. the Junior League. 5: It was started in 1919 as a collection of small, after-school business clubs in Massachusetts. Junior Achievement. Round 4. Category: here's "johnny" 1: This former nightclub singer is the announcer on "Jeopardy!". Johnny Gilbert. 2: One who is on hand and ready to perform a service or respond to an emergency. "Johnny-On-The-Spot". 3: Jane Wyman won her only Oscar playing a young deaf-mute girl in this film. Johnny Belinda. 4: Because of its rapid rate of growth, the European pansy is also known by this name. Johnny Jump-Up. 5: In the '50s he set a high jump record in college and had his 3rd Top 10 hit with the following:"You asked how much I love you...". Johnny Mathis. Round 5. Category: freedom fighters 1: Benito Juarez established land reforms and fought against French rule in this country. Mexico. 2: Mario Savio set off the free speech movement when political activities were banned on this U.C. campus in 1964. U.C. Berkeley. 3: In 1998 Fred Korematsu was given this highest civilian award for his resistance to being interned during WWII. Medal of Freedom. 4: Many consider Justin Dart Jr., who contracted polio as a child, to be the father of this 1990 federal law. Americans with Disabilities Act. 5: This NAACP lawyer won a landmark decision in 1946 overturning segregation in interstate transportation. (Thurgood) Marshall. Thanks for listening! Come back tomorrow for more exciting trivia! Special thanks to https://blog.feedspot.com/trivia_podcasts/

In this interview Mac McCullough from the Willard Library returns to the show with Author Sonya Bernard Hollins, who wrote the book 'Here I Stand' which covered the history of the El Grotto Lounge. The El Grotto Lounge was founded in 1949 by Robert & Helen Montgomery, and became an iconic landmark where many black musicians launched their careers. Names like Junior Walker & the All-Stars, Al Greene, Jackey Beavers, Johnny Bristol, Wade Flemons, Bobby Holley and even comedian Jimmie Lynch performed there. We also talk about an upcoming event call 'The Sound of Freedom' which is coming up on June 15th, at the Battle Creek Regional History Museum. For details on the Sound of Freedom Event, visit: https://willardlibrary.org To get copies of Sonya Bernard Hollins book 'Here I Stand' visit: https://seasonpressinc.com You can also acquire a copy of her book here. For more information on Michael Delaware, visit: https://michaeldelaware.com

He has the Sax Sound of the Sixties. Juniors in music, there was no one with the sound of Junior Walker.

Doc discusses the juniors in sports, arts and medicine. Doc looks at Ken Griffey Jr. from baseball and Junior Walker's unique sax sound in art. Doc shares his story from LA iconic restaurant The Pantry. The Weekend Warrior clinic is open, Keith has a ruptured disc and is thinking of replacement.

Episode 165 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Dark Stat” and the career of the Grateful Dead. This is a long one, even longer than the previous episode, but don't worry, that won't be the norm. There's a reason these two were much longer than average. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "Codine" by the Charlatans. Errata I mispronounce Brent Mydland's name as Myland a couple of times, and in the introduction I say "Touch of Grey" came out in 1988 -- I later, correctly, say 1987. (I seem to have had a real problem with dates in the intro -- I also originally talked about "Blue Suede Shoes" being in 1954 before fixing it in the edit to be 1956) Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Grateful Dead, and Grayfolded runs to two hours. I referred to a lot of books for this episode, partly because almost everything about the Grateful Dead is written from a fannish perspective that already assumes background knowledge, rather than to provide that background knowledge. Of the various books I used, Dennis McNally's biography of the band and This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead by Blair Jackson and David Gans are probably most useful for the casually interested. Other books on the Dead I used included McNally's Jerry on Jerry, a collection of interviews with Garcia; Deal, Bill Kreutzmann's autobiography; The Grateful Dead FAQ by Tony Sclafani; So Many Roads by David Browne; Deadology by Howard F. Weiner; Fare Thee Well by Joel Selvin and Pamela Turley; and Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads by David Shenk and Steve Silberman. Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is the classic account of the Pranksters, though not always reliable. I reference Slaughterhouse Five a lot. As well as the novel itself, which everyone should read, I also read this rather excellent graphic novel adaptation, and The Writer's Crusade, a book about the writing of the novel. I also reference Ted Sturgeon's More Than Human. For background on the scene around Astounding Science Fiction which included Sturgeon, John W. Campbell, L. Ron Hubbard, and many other science fiction writers, I recommend Alec Nevala-Lee's Astounding. 1,000 True Fans can be read online, as can the essay on the Californian ideology, and John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace". The best collection of Grateful Dead material is the box set The Golden Road, which contains all the albums released in Pigpen's lifetime along with a lot of bonus material, but which appears currently out of print. Live/Dead contains both the live version of "Dark Star" which made it well known and, as a CD bonus track, the original single version. And archive.org has more live recordings of the group than you can possibly ever listen to. Grayfolded can be bought from John Oswald's Bandcamp Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [Excerpt: Tuning from "Grayfolded", under the warnings Before we begin -- as we're tuning up, as it were, I should mention that this episode contains discussions of alcoholism, drug addiction, racism, nonconsensual drugging of other people, and deaths from drug abuse, suicide, and car accidents. As always, I try to deal with these subjects as carefully as possible, but if you find any of those things upsetting you may wish to read the transcript rather than listen to this episode, or skip it altogether. Also, I should note that the members of the Grateful Dead were much freer with their use of swearing in interviews than any other band we've covered so far, and that makes using quotes from them rather more difficult than with other bands, given the limitations of the rules imposed to stop the podcast being marked as adult. If I quote anything with a word I can't use here, I'll give a brief pause in the audio, and in the transcript I'll have the word in square brackets. [tuning ends] All this happened, more or less. In 1910, T. S. Eliot started work on "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", which at the time was deemed barely poetry, with one reviewer imagining Eliot saying "I'll just put down the first thing that comes into my head, and call it 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.'" It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature. In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut wrote "Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death", a book in which the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, comes unstuck in time, and starts living a nonlinear life, hopping around between times reliving his experiences in the Second World War, and future experiences up to 1976 after being kidnapped by beings from the planet Tralfamadore. Or perhaps he has flashbacks and hallucinations after having a breakdown from PTSD. It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature or of science fiction, depending on how you look at it. In 1953, Theodore Sturgeon wrote More Than Human. It is now considered one of the great classics of science fiction. In 1950, L. Ron Hubbard wrote Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. It is now considered either a bad piece of science fiction or one of the great revelatory works of religious history, depending on how you look at it. In 1994, 1995, and 1996 the composer John Oswald released, first as two individual CDs and then as a double-CD, an album called Grayfolded, which the composer says in the liner notes he thinks of as existing in Tralfamadorian time. The Tralfamadorians in Vonnegut's novels don't see time as a linear thing with a beginning and end, but as a continuum that they can move between at will. When someone dies, they just think that at this particular point in time they're not doing so good, but at other points in time they're fine, so why focus on the bad time? In the book, when told of someone dying, the Tralfamadorians just say "so it goes". In between the first CD's release and the release of the double-CD version, Jerry Garcia died. From August 1942 through August 1995, Jerry Garcia was alive. So it goes. Shall we go, you and I? [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dark Star (Omni 3/30/94)"] "One principle has become clear. Since motives are so frequently found in combination, it is essential that the complex types be analyzed and arranged, with an eye kept single nevertheless to the master-theme under discussion. Collectors, both primary and subsidiary, have done such valiant service that the treasures at our command are amply sufficient for such studies, so extensive, indeed, that the task of going through them thoroughly has become too great for the unassisted student. It cannot be too strongly urged that a single theme in its various types and compounds must be made predominant in any useful comparative study. This is true when the sources and analogues of any literary work are treated; it is even truer when the bare motive is discussed. The Grateful Dead furnishes an apt illustration of the necessity of such handling. It appears in a variety of different combinations, almost never alone. Indeed, it is so widespread a tale, and its combinations are so various, that there is the utmost difficulty in determining just what may properly be regarded the original kernel of it, the simple theme to which other motives were joined. Various opinions, as we shall see, have been held with reference to this matter, most of them justified perhaps by the materials in the hands of the scholars holding them, but none quite adequate in view of later evidence." That's a quote from The Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk Story, by Gordon Hall Gerould, published in 1908. Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five opens with a chapter about the process of writing the novel itself, and how difficult it was. He says "I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time. When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big." This is an episode several of my listeners have been looking forward to, but it's one I've been dreading writing, because this is an episode -- I think the only one in the series -- where the format of the podcast simply *will not* work. Were the Grateful Dead not such an important band, I would skip this episode altogether, but they're a band that simply can't be ignored, and that's a real problem here. Because my intent, always, with this podcast, is to present the recordings of the artists in question, put them in context, and explain why they were important, what their music meant to its listeners. To put, as far as is possible, the positive case for why the music mattered *in the context of its time*. Not why it matters now, or why it matters to me, but why it matters *in its historical context*. Whether I like the music or not isn't the point. Whether it stands up now isn't the point. I play the music, explain what it was they were doing, why they were doing it, what people saw in it. If I do my job well, you come away listening to "Blue Suede Shoes" the way people heard it in 1956, or "Good Vibrations" the way people heard it in 1966, and understanding why people were so impressed by those records. That is simply *not possible* for the Grateful Dead. I can present a case for them as musicians, and hope to do so. I can explain the appeal as best I understand it, and talk about things I like in their music, and things I've noticed. But what I can't do is present their recordings the way they were received in the sixties and explain why they were popular. Because every other act I have covered or will cover in this podcast has been a *recording* act, and their success was based on records. They may also have been exceptional live performers, but James Brown or Ike and Tina Turner are remembered for great *records*, like "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" or "River Deep, Mountain High". Their great moments were captured on vinyl, to be listened back to, and susceptible of analysis. That is not the case for the Grateful Dead, and what is worse *they explicitly said, publicly, on multiple occasions* that it is not possible for me to understand their art, and thus that it is not possible for me to explain it. The Grateful Dead did make studio records, some of them very good. But they always said, consistently, over a thirty year period, that their records didn't capture what they did, and that the only way -- the *only* way, they were very clear about this -- that one could actually understand and appreciate their music, was to see them live, and furthermore to see them live while on psychedelic drugs. [Excerpt: Grateful Dead crowd noise] I never saw the Grateful Dead live -- their last UK performance was a couple of years before I went to my first ever gig -- and I have never taken a psychedelic substance. So by the Grateful Dead's own criteria, it is literally impossible for me to understand or explain their music the way that it should be understood or explained. In a way I'm in a similar position to the one I was in with La Monte Young in the last episode, whose music it's mostly impossible to experience without being in his presence. This is one reason of several why I placed these two episodes back to back. Of course, there is a difference between Young and the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead allowed -- even encouraged -- the recording of their live performances. There are literally thousands of concert recordings in circulation, many of them of professional quality. I have listened to many of those, and I can hear what they were doing. I can tell you what *I* think is interesting about their music, and about their musicianship. And I think I can build up a good case for why they were important, and why they're interesting, and why those recordings are worth listening to. And I can certainly explain the cultural phenomenon that was the Grateful Dead. But just know that while I may have found *a* point, *an* explanation for why the Grateful Dead were important, by the band's own lights and those of their fans, no matter how good a job I do in this episode, I *cannot* get it right. And that is, in itself, enough of a reason for this episode to exist, and for me to try, even harder than I normally do, to get it right *anyway*. Because no matter how well I do my job this episode will stand as an example of why this series is called "*A* History", not *the* history. Because parts of the past are ephemeral. There are things about which it's true to say "You had to be there". I cannot know what it was like to have been an American the day Kennedy was shot, I cannot know what it was like to be alive when a man walked on the Moon. Those are things nobody my age or younger can ever experience. And since August the ninth, 1995, the experience of hearing the Grateful Dead's music the way they wanted it heard has been in that category. And that is by design. Jerry Garcia once said "if you work really hard as an artist, you may be able to build something they can't tear down, you know, after you're gone... What I want to do is I want it here. I want it now, in this lifetime. I want what I enjoy to last as long as I do and not last any longer. You know, I don't want something that ends up being as much a nuisance as it is a work of art, you know?" And there's another difficulty. There are only two points in time where it makes sense to do a podcast episode on the Grateful Dead -- late 1967 and early 1968, when the San Francisco scene they were part of was at its most culturally relevant, and 1988 when they had their only top ten hit and gained their largest audience. I can't realistically leave them out of the story until 1988, so it has to be 1968. But the songs they are most remembered for are those they wrote between 1970 and 1972, and those songs are influenced by artists and events we haven't yet covered in the podcast, who will be getting their own episodes in the future. I can't explain those things in this episode, because they need whole episodes of their own. I can't not explain them without leaving out important context for the Grateful Dead. So the best I can do is treat the story I'm telling as if it were in Tralfamadorian time. All of it's happening all at once, and some of it is happening in different episodes that haven't been recorded yet. The podcast as a whole travels linearly from 1938 through to 1999, but this episode is happening in 1968 and 1972 and 1988 and 1995 and other times, all at once. Sometimes I'll talk about things as if you're already familiar with them, but they haven't happened yet in the story. Feel free to come unstuck in time and revisit this time after episode 167, and 172, and 176, and 192, and experience it again. So this has to be an experimental episode. It may well be an experiment that you think fails. If so, the next episode is likely to be far more to your taste, and much shorter than this or the last episode, two episodes that between them have to create a scaffolding on which will hang much of the rest of this podcast's narrative. I've finished my Grateful Dead script now. The next one I write is going to be fun: [Excerpt: Grateful Dead, "Dark Star"] Infrastructure means everything. How we get from place to place, how we transport goods, information, and ourselves, makes a big difference in how society is structured, and in the music we hear. For many centuries, the prime means of long-distance transport was by water -- sailing ships on the ocean, canal boats and steamboats for inland navigation -- and so folk songs talked about the ship as both means of escape, means of making a living, and in some senses as a trap. You'd go out to sea for adventure, or to escape your problems, but you'd find that the sea itself brought its own problems. Because of this we have a long, long tradition of sea shanties which are known throughout the world: [Excerpt: A. L. Lloyd, "Off to Sea Once More"] But in the nineteenth century, the railway was invented and, at least as far as travel within a landmass goes, it replaced the steamboat in the popular imaginary. Now the railway was how you got from place to place, and how you moved freight from one place to another. The railway brought freedom, and was an opportunity for outlaws, whether train robbers or a romanticised version of the hobo hopping onto a freight train and making his way to new lands and new opportunity. It was the train that brought soldiers home from wars, and the train that allowed the Great Migration of Black people from the South to the industrial North. There would still be songs about the riverboats, about how ol' man river keeps rolling along and about the big river Johnny Cash sang about, but increasingly they would be songs of the past, not the present. The train quickly replaced the steamboat in the iconography of what we now think of as roots music -- blues, country, folk, and early jazz music. Sometimes this was very literal. Furry Lewis' "Kassie Jones" -- about a legendary train driver who would break the rules to make sure his train made the station on time, but who ended up sacrificing his own life to save his passengers in a train crash -- is based on "Alabamy Bound", which as we heard in the episode on "Stagger Lee", was about steamboats: [Excerpt: Furry Lewis, "Kassie Jones"] In the early episodes of this podcast we heard many, many, songs about the railway. Louis Jordan saying "take me right back to the track, Jack", Rosetta Tharpe singing about how "this train don't carry no gamblers", the trickster freight train driver driving on the "Rock Island Line", the mystery train sixteen coaches long, the train that kept-a-rollin' all night long, the Midnight Special which the prisoners wished would shine its ever-loving light on them, and the train coming past Folsom Prison whose whistle makes Johnny Cash hang his head and cry. But by the 1960s, that kind of song had started to dry up. It would happen on occasion -- "People Get Ready" by the Impressions is the most obvious example of the train metaphor in an important sixties record -- but by the late sixties the train was no longer a symbol of freedom but of the past. In 1969 Harry Nilsson sang about how "Nobody Cares About the Railroads Any More", and in 1968 the Kinks sang about "The Last of the Steam-Powered Trains". When in 1968 Merle Haggard sang about a freight train, it was as a memory, of a child with hopes that ended up thwarted by reality and his own nature: [Excerpt: Merle Haggard, "Mama Tried"] And the reason for this was that there had been another shift, a shift that had started in the forties and accelerated in the late fifties but had taken a little time to ripple through the culture. Now the train had been replaced in the popular imaginary by motorised transport. Instead of hopping on a train without paying, if you had no money in your pocket you'd have to hitch-hike all the way. Freedom now meant individuality. The ultimate in freedom was the biker -- the Hell's Angels who could go anywhere, unburdened by anything -- and instead of goods being moved by freight train, increasingly they were being moved by truck drivers. By the mid-seventies, truck drivers took a central place in American life, and the most romantic way to live life was to live it on the road. On The Road was also the title of a 1957 novel by Jack Kerouac, which was one of the first major signs of this cultural shift in America. Kerouac was writing about events in the late forties and early fifties, but his book was also a precursor of the sixties counterculture. He wrote the book on one continuous sheet of paper, as a stream of consciousness. Kerouac died in 1969 of an internal haemmorage brought on by too much alcohol consumption. So it goes. But the big key to this cultural shift was caused by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, a massive infrastructure spending bill that led to the construction of the modern American Interstate Highway system. This accelerated a program that had already started, of building much bigger, safer, faster roads. It also, as anyone who has read Robert Caro's The Power Broker knows, reinforced segregation and white flight. It did this both by making commuting into major cities from the suburbs easier -- thus allowing white people with more money to move further away from the cities and still work there -- and by bulldozing community spaces where Black people lived. More than a million people lost their homes and were forcibly moved, and orders of magnitude more lost their communities' parks and green spaces. And both as a result of deliberate actions and unconscious bigotry, the bulk of those affected were Black people -- who often found themselves, if they weren't forced to move, on one side of a ten-lane highway where the park used to be, with white people on the other side of the highway. The Federal-Aid Highway Act gave even more power to the unaccountable central planners like Robert Moses, the urban planner in New York who managed to become arguably the most powerful man in the city without ever getting elected, partly by slowly compromising away his early progressive ideals in the service of gaining more power. Of course, not every new highway was built through areas where poor Black people lived. Some were planned to go through richer areas for white people, just because you can't completely do away with geographical realities. For example one was planned to be built through part of San Francisco, a rich, white part. But the people who owned properties in that area had enough political power and clout to fight the development, and after nearly a decade of fighting it, the development was called off in late 1966. But over that time, many of the owners of the impressive buildings in the area had moved out, and they had no incentive to improve or maintain their properties while they were under threat of demolition, so many of them were rented out very cheaply. And when the beat community that Kerouac wrote about, many of whom had settled in San Francisco, grew too large and notorious for the area of the city they were in, North Beach, many of them moved to these cheap homes in a previously-exclusive area. The area known as Haight-Ashbury. [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Grayfolded"] Stories all have their starts, even stories told in Tralfamadorian time, although sometimes those starts are shrouded in legend. For example, the story of Scientology's start has been told many times, with different people claiming to have heard L. Ron Hubbard talk about how writing was a mug's game, and if you wanted to make real money, you needed to get followers, start a religion. Either he said this over and over and over again, to many different science fiction writers, or most science fiction writers of his generation were liars. Of course, the definition of a writer is someone who tells lies for money, so who knows? One of the more plausible accounts of him saying that is given by Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon's account is more believable than most, because Sturgeon went on to be a supporter of Dianetics, the "new science" that Hubbard turned into his religion, for decades, even while telling the story. The story of the Grateful Dead probably starts as it ends, with Jerry Garcia. There are three things that everyone writing about the Dead says about Garcia's childhood, so we might as well say them here too. The first is that he was named by a music-loving father after Jerome Kern, the songwriter responsible for songs like "Ol' Man River" (though as Oscar Hammerstein's widow liked to point out, "Jerome Kern wrote dum-dum-dum-dum, *my husband* wrote 'Ol' Man River'" -- an important distinction we need to bear in mind when talking about songwriters who write music but not lyrics). The second is that when he was five years old that music-loving father drowned -- and Garcia would always say he had seen his father dying, though some sources claim this was a false memory. So it goes. And the third fact, which for some reason is always told after the second even though it comes before it chronologically, is that when he was four he lost two joints from his right middle finger. Garcia grew up a troubled teen, and in turn caused trouble for other people, but he also developed a few interests that would follow him through his life. He loved the fantastical, especially the fantastical macabre, and became an avid fan of horror and science fiction -- and through his love of old monster films he became enamoured with cinema more generally. Indeed, in 1983 he bought the film rights to Kurt Vonnegut's science fiction novel The Sirens of Titan, the first story in which the Tralfamadorians appear, and wrote a script based on it. He wanted to produce the film himself, with Francis Ford Coppola directing and Bill Murray starring, but most importantly for him he wanted to prevent anyone who didn't care about it from doing it badly. And in that he succeeded. As of 2023 there is no film of The Sirens of Titan. He loved to paint, and would continue that for the rest of his life, with one of his favourite subjects being Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster. And when he was eleven or twelve, he heard for the first time a record that was hugely influential to a whole generation of Californian musicians, even though it was a New York record -- "Gee" by the Crows: [Excerpt: The Crows, "Gee"] Garcia would say later "That was an important song. That was the first kind of, like where the voices had that kind of not-trained-singer voices, but tough-guy-on-the-street voice." That record introduced him to R&B, and soon he was listening to Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, to Ray Charles, and to a record we've not talked about in the podcast but which was one of the great early doo-wop records, "WPLJ" by the Four Deuces: [Excerpt: The Four Deuces, "WPLJ"] Garcia said of that record "That was one of my anthem songs when I was in junior high school and high school and around there. That was one of those songs everybody knew. And that everybody sang. Everybody sang that street-corner favorite." Garcia moved around a lot as a child, and didn't have much time for school by his own account, but one of the few teachers he did respect was an art teacher when he was in North Beach, Walter Hedrick. Hedrick was also one of the earliest of the conceptual artists, and one of the most important figures in the San Francisco arts scene that would become known as the Beat Generation (or the Beatniks, which was originally a disparaging term). Hedrick was a painter and sculptor, but also organised happenings, and he had also been one of the prime movers in starting a series of poetry readings in San Francisco, the first one of which had involved Allen Ginsberg giving the first ever reading of "Howl" -- one of a small number of poems, along with Eliot's "Prufrock" and "The Waste Land" and possibly Pound's Cantos, which can be said to have changed twentieth-century literature. Garcia was fifteen when he got to know Hedrick, in 1957, and by then the Beat scene had already become almost a parody of itself, having become known to the public because of the publication of works like On the Road, and the major artists in the scene were already rejecting the label. By this point tourists were flocking to North Beach to see these beatniks they'd heard about on TV, and Hedrick was actually employed by one cafe to sit in the window wearing a beret, turtleneck, sandals, and beard, and draw and paint, to attract the tourists who flocked by the busload because they could see that there was a "genuine beatnik" in the cafe. Hedrick was, as well as a visual artist, a guitarist and banjo player who played in traditional jazz bands, and he would bring records in to class for his students to listen to, and Garcia particularly remembered him bringing in records by Big Bill Broonzy: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "When Things Go Wrong (It Hurts Me Too)"] Garcia was already an avid fan of rock and roll music, but it was being inspired by Hedrick that led him to get his first guitar. Like his contemporary Paul McCartney around the same time, he was initially given the wrong instrument as a birthday present -- in Garcia's case his mother gave him an accordion -- but he soon persuaded her to swap it for an electric guitar he saw in a pawn shop. And like his other contemporary, John Lennon, Garcia initially tuned his instrument incorrectly. He said later "When I started playing the guitar, believe me, I didn't know anybody that played. I mean, I didn't know anybody that played the guitar. Nobody. They weren't around. There were no guitar teachers. You couldn't take lessons. There was nothing like that, you know? When I was a kid and I had my first electric guitar, I had it tuned wrong and learned how to play on it with it tuned wrong for about a year. And I was getting somewhere on it, you know… Finally, I met a guy that knew how to tune it right and showed me three chords, and it was like a revelation. You know what I mean? It was like somebody gave me the key to heaven." He joined a band, the Chords, which mostly played big band music, and his friend Gary Foster taught him some of the rudiments of playing the guitar -- things like how to use a capo to change keys. But he was always a rebellious kid, and soon found himself faced with a choice between joining the military or going to prison. He chose the former, and it was during his time in the Army that a friend, Ron Stevenson, introduced him to the music of Merle Travis, and to Travis-style guitar picking: [Excerpt: Merle Travis, "Nine-Pound Hammer"] Garcia had never encountered playing like that before, but he instantly recognised that Travis, and Chet Atkins who Stevenson also played for him, had been an influence on Scotty Moore. He started to realise that the music he'd listened to as a teenager was influenced by music that went further back. But Stevenson, as well as teaching Garcia some of the rudiments of Travis-picking, also indirectly led to Garcia getting discharged from the Army. Stevenson was not a well man, and became suicidal. Garcia decided it was more important to keep his friend company and make sure he didn't kill himself than it was to turn up for roll call, and as a result he got discharged himself on psychiatric grounds -- according to Garcia he told the Army psychiatrist "I was involved in stuff that was more important to me in the moment than the army was and that was the reason I was late" and the psychiatrist thought it was neurotic of Garcia to have his own set of values separate from that of the Army. After discharge, Garcia did various jobs, including working as a transcriptionist for Lenny Bruce, the comedian who was a huge influence on the counterculture. In one of the various attacks over the years by authoritarians on language, Bruce was repeatedly arrested for obscenity, and in 1961 he was arrested at a jazz club in North Beach. Sixty years ago, the parts of speech that were being criminalised weren't pronouns, but prepositions and verbs: [Excerpt: Lenny Bruce, "To is a Preposition, Come is a Verb"] That piece, indeed, was so controversial that when Frank Zappa quoted part of it in a song in 1968, the record label insisted on the relevant passage being played backwards so people couldn't hear such disgusting filth: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Harry You're a Beast"] (Anyone familiar with that song will understand that the censored portion is possibly the least offensive part of the whole thing). Bruce was facing trial, and he needed transcripts of what he had said in his recordings to present in court. Incidentally, there seems to be some confusion over exactly which of Bruce's many obscenity trials Garcia became a transcriptionist for. Dennis McNally says in his biography of the band, published in 2002, that it was the most famous of them, in autumn 1964, but in a later book, Jerry on Jerry, a book of interviews of Garcia edited by McNally, McNally talks about it being when Garcia was nineteen, which would mean it was Bruce's first trial, in 1961. We can put this down to the fact that many of the people involved, not least Garcia, lived in Tralfamadorian time, and were rather hazy on dates, but I'm placing the story here rather than in 1964 because it seems to make more sense that Garcia would be involved in a trial based on an incident in San Francisco than one in New York. Garcia got the job, even though he couldn't type, because by this point he'd spent so long listening to recordings of old folk and country music that he was used to transcribing indecipherable accents, and often, as Garcia would tell it, Bruce would mumble very fast and condense multiple syllables into one. Garcia was particularly impressed by Bruce's ability to improvise but talk in entire paragraphs, and he compared his use of language to bebop. Another thing that was starting to impress Garcia, and which he also compared to bebop, was bluegrass: [Excerpt: Bill Monroe, "Fire on the Mountain"] Bluegrass is a music that is often considered very traditional, because it's based on traditional songs and uses acoustic instruments, but in fact it was a terribly *modern* music, and largely a postwar creation of a single band -- Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys. And Garcia was right when he said it was "white bebop" -- though he did say "The only thing it doesn't have is the harmonic richness of bebop. You know what I mean? That's what it's missing, but it has everything else." Both bebop and bluegrass evolved after the second world war, though they were informed by music from before it, and both prized the ability to improvise, and technical excellence. Both are musics that involved playing *fast*, in an ensemble, and being able to respond quickly to the other musicians. Both musics were also intensely rhythmic, a response to a faster paced, more stressful world. They were both part of the general change in the arts towards immediacy that we looked at in the last episode with the creation first of expressionism and then of pop art. Bluegrass didn't go into the harmonic explorations that modern jazz did, but it was absolutely as modern as anything Charlie Parker was doing, and came from the same impulses. It was tradition and innovation, the past and the future simultaneously. Bill Monroe, Jackson Pollock, Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac, and Lenny Bruce were all in their own ways responding to the same cultural moment, and it was that which Garcia was responding to. But he didn't become able to play bluegrass until after a tragedy which shaped his life even more than his father's death had. Garcia had been to a party and was in a car with his friends Lee Adams, Paul Speegle, and Alan Trist. Adams was driving at ninety miles an hour when they hit a tight curve and crashed. Garcia, Adams, and Trist were all severely injured but survived. Speegle died. So it goes. This tragedy changed Garcia's attitudes totally. Of all his friends, Speegle was the one who was most serious about his art, and who treated it as something to work on. Garcia had always been someone who fundamentally didn't want to work or take any responsibility for anything. And he remained that way -- except for his music. Speegle's death changed Garcia's attitude to that, totally. If his friend wasn't going to be able to practice his own art any more, Garcia would practice his, in tribute to him. He resolved to become a virtuoso on guitar and banjo. His girlfriend of the time later said “I don't know if you've spent time with someone rehearsing ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown' on a banjo for eight hours, but Jerry practiced endlessly. He really wanted to excel and be the best. He had tremendous personal ambition in the musical arena, and he wanted to master whatever he set out to explore. Then he would set another sight for himself. And practice another eight hours a day of new licks.” But of course, you can't make ensemble music on your own: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia and Bob Hunter, "Oh Mary Don't You Weep" (including end)] "Evelyn said, “What is it called when a person needs a … person … when you want to be touched and the … two are like one thing and there isn't anything else at all anywhere?” Alicia, who had read books, thought about it. “Love,” she said at length." That's from More Than Human, by Theodore Sturgeon, a book I'll be quoting a few more times as the story goes on. Robert Hunter, like Garcia, was just out of the military -- in his case, the National Guard -- and he came into Garcia's life just after Paul Speegle had left it. Garcia and Alan Trist met Hunter ten days after the accident, and the three men started hanging out together, Trist and Hunter writing while Garcia played music. Garcia and Hunter both bonded over their shared love for the beats, and for traditional music, and the two formed a duo, Bob and Jerry, which performed together a handful of times. They started playing together, in fact, after Hunter picked up a guitar and started playing a song and halfway through Garcia took it off him and finished the song himself. The two of them learned songs from the Harry Smith Anthology -- Garcia was completely apolitical, and only once voted in his life, for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to keep Goldwater out, and regretted even doing that, and so he didn't learn any of the more political material people like Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and Bob Dylan were doing at the time -- but their duo only lasted a short time because Hunter wasn't an especially good guitarist. Hunter would, though, continue to jam with Garcia and other friends, sometimes playing mandolin, while Garcia played solo gigs and with other musicians as well, playing and moving round the Bay Area and performing with whoever he could: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia, "Railroad Bill"] "Bleshing, that was Janie's word. She said Baby told it to her. She said it meant everyone all together being something, even if they all did different things. Two arms, two legs, one body, one head, all working together, although a head can't walk and arms can't think. Lone said maybe it was a mixture of “blending” and “meshing,” but I don't think he believed that himself. It was a lot more than that." That's from More Than Human In 1961, Garcia and Hunter met another young musician, but one who was interested in a very different type of music. Phil Lesh was a serious student of modern classical music, a classically-trained violinist and trumpeter whose interest was solidly in the experimental and whose attitude can be summed up by a story that's always told about him meeting his close friend Tom Constanten for the first time. Lesh had been talking with someone about serialism, and Constanten had interrupted, saying "Music stopped being created in 1750 but it started again in 1950". Lesh just stuck out his hand, recognising a kindred spirit. Lesh and Constanten were both students of Luciano Berio, the experimental composer who created compositions for magnetic tape: [Excerpt: Luciano Berio, "Momenti"] Berio had been one of the founders of the Studio di fonologia musicale di Radio Milano, a studio for producing contemporary electronic music where John Cage had worked for a time, and he had also worked with the electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Lesh would later remember being very impressed when Berio brought a tape into the classroom -- the actual multitrack tape for Stockhausen's revolutionary piece Gesang Der Juenglinge: [Excerpt: Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Gesang Der Juenglinge"] Lesh at first had been distrustful of Garcia -- Garcia was charismatic and had followers, and Lesh never liked people like that. But he was impressed by Garcia's playing, and soon realised that the two men, despite their very different musical interests, had a lot in common. Lesh was interested in the technology of music as well as in performing and composing it, and so when he wasn't studying he helped out by engineering at the university's radio station. Lesh was impressed by Garcia's playing, and suggested to the presenter of the station's folk show, the Midnight Special, that Garcia be a guest. Garcia was so good that he ended up getting an entire solo show to himself, where normally the show would feature multiple acts. Lesh and Constanten soon moved away from the Bay Area to Las Vegas, but both would be back -- in Constanten's case he would form an experimental group in San Francisco with their fellow student Steve Reich, and that group (though not with Constanten performing) would later premiere Terry Riley's In C, a piece influenced by La Monte Young and often considered one of the great masterpieces of minimalist music. By early 1962 Garcia and Hunter had formed a bluegrass band, with Garcia on guitar and banjo and Hunter on mandolin, and a rotating cast of other musicians including Ken Frankel, who played banjo and fiddle. They performed under different names, including the Tub Thumpers, the Hart Valley Drifters, and the Sleepy Valley Hog Stompers, and played a mixture of bluegrass and old-time music -- and were very careful about the distinction: [Excerpt: The Hart Valley Drifters, "Cripple Creek"] In 1993, the Republican political activist John Perry Barlow was invited to talk to the CIA about the possibilities open to them with what was then called the Information Superhighway. He later wrote, in part "They told me they'd brought Steve Jobs in a few weeks before to indoctrinate them in modern information management. And they were delighted when I returned later, bringing with me a platoon of Internet gurus, including Esther Dyson, Mitch Kapor, Tony Rutkowski, and Vint Cerf. They sealed us into an electronically impenetrable room to discuss the radical possibility that a good first step in lifting their blackout would be for the CIA to put up a Web site... We told them that information exchange was a barter system, and that to receive, one must also be willing to share. This was an alien notion to them. They weren't even willing to share information among themselves, much less the world." 1962 brought a new experience for Robert Hunter. Hunter had been recruited into taking part in psychological tests at Stanford University, which in the sixties and seventies was one of the preeminent universities for psychological experiments. As part of this, Hunter was given $140 to attend the VA hospital (where a janitor named Ken Kesey, who had himself taken part in a similar set of experiments a couple of years earlier, worked a day job while he was working on his first novel) for four weeks on the run, and take different psychedelic drugs each time, starting with LSD, so his reactions could be observed. (It was later revealed that these experiments were part of a CIA project called MKUltra, designed to investigate the possibility of using psychedelic drugs for mind control, blackmail, and torture. Hunter was quite lucky in that he was told what was going to happen to him and paid for his time. Other subjects included the unlucky customers of brothels the CIA set up as fronts -- they dosed the customers' drinks and observed them through two-way mirrors. Some of their experimental subjects died by suicide as a result of their experiences. So it goes. ) Hunter was interested in taking LSD after reading Aldous Huxley's writings about psychedelic substances, and he brought his typewriter along to the experiment. During the first test, he wrote a six-page text, a short excerpt from which is now widely quoted, reading in part "Sit back picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall unto the sea of morning creep-very-softly mist ... and then sort of cascade tinkley-bell-like (must I take you by the hand, ever so slowly type) and then conglomerate suddenly into a peal of silver vibrant uncomprehendingly, blood singingly, joyously resounding bells" Hunter's experience led to everyone in their social circle wanting to try LSD, and soon they'd all come to the same conclusion -- this was something special. But Garcia needed money -- he'd got his girlfriend pregnant, and they'd married (this would be the first of several marriages in Garcia's life, and I won't be covering them all -- at Garcia's funeral, his second wife, Carolyn, said Garcia always called her the love of his life, and his first wife and his early-sixties girlfriend who he proposed to again in the nineties both simultaneously said "He said that to me!"). So he started teaching guitar at a music shop in Palo Alto. Hunter had no time for Garcia's incipient domesticity and thought that his wife was trying to make him live a conventional life, and the two drifted apart somewhat, though they'd still play together occasionally. Through working at the music store, Garcia got to know the manager, Troy Weidenheimer, who had a rock and roll band called the Zodiacs. Garcia joined the band on bass, despite that not being his instrument. He later said "Troy was a lot of fun, but I wasn't good enough a musician then to have been able to deal with it. I was out of my idiom, really, 'cause when I played with Troy I was playing electric bass, you know. I never was a good bass player. Sometimes I was playing in the wrong key and didn't even [fuckin'] know it. I couldn't hear that low, after playing banjo, you know, and going to electric...But Troy taught me the principle of, hey, you know, just stomp your foot and get on it. He was great. A great one for the instant arrangement, you know. And he was also fearless for that thing of get your friends to do it." Garcia's tenure in the Zodiacs didn't last long, nor did this experiment with rock and roll, but two other members of the Zodiacs will be notable later in the story -- the harmonica player, an old friend of Garcia's named Ron McKernan, who would soon gain the nickname Pig Pen after the Peanuts character, and the drummer, Bill Kreutzmann: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Drums/Space (Skull & Bones version)"] Kreutzmann said of the Zodiacs "Jerry was the hired bass player and I was the hired drummer. I only remember playing that one gig with them, but I was in way over my head. I always did that. I always played things that were really hard and it didn't matter. I just went for it." Garcia and Kreutzmann didn't really get to know each other then, but Garcia did get to know someone else who would soon be very important in his life. Bob Weir was from a very different background than Garcia, though both had the shared experience of long bouts of chronic illness as children. He had grown up in a very wealthy family, and had always been well-liked, but he was what we would now call neurodivergent -- reading books about the band he talks about being dyslexic but clearly has other undiagnosed neurodivergences, which often go along with dyslexia -- and as a result he was deemed to have behavioural problems which led to him getting expelled from pre-school and kicked out of the cub scouts. He was never academically gifted, thanks to his dyslexia, but he was always enthusiastic about music -- to a fault. He learned to play boogie piano but played so loudly and so often his parents sold the piano. He had a trumpet, but the neighbours complained about him playing it outside. Finally he switched to the guitar, an instrument with which it is of course impossible to make too loud a noise. The first song he learned was the Kingston Trio's version of an old sea shanty, "The Wreck of the John B": [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "The Wreck of the John B"] He was sent off to a private school in Colorado for teenagers with behavioural issues, and there he met the boy who would become his lifelong friend, John Perry Barlow. Unfortunately the two troublemakers got on with each other *so* well that after their first year they were told that it was too disruptive having both of them at the school, and only one could stay there the next year. Barlow stayed and Weir moved back to the Bay Area. By this point, Weir was getting more interested in folk music that went beyond the commercial folk of the Kingston Trio. As he said later "There was something in there that was ringing my bells. What I had grown up thinking of as hillbilly music, it started to have some depth for me, and I could start to hear the music in it. Suddenly, it wasn't just a bunch of ignorant hillbillies playing what they could. There was some depth and expertise and stuff like that to aspire to.” He moved from school to school but one thing that stayed with him was his love of playing guitar, and he started taking lessons from Troy Weidenheimer, but he got most of his education going to folk clubs and hootenannies. He regularly went to the Tangent, a club where Garcia played, but Garcia's bluegrass banjo playing was far too rigorous for a free spirit like Weir to emulate, and instead he started trying to copy one of the guitarists who was a regular there, Jorma Kaukonnen. On New Year's Eve 1963 Weir was out walking with his friends Bob Matthews and Rich Macauley, and they passed the music shop where Garcia was a teacher, and heard him playing his banjo. They knocked and asked if they could come in -- they all knew Garcia a little, and Bob Matthews was one of his students, having become interested in playing banjo after hearing the theme tune to the Beverly Hillbillies, played by the bluegrass greats Flatt and Scruggs: [Excerpt: Flatt and Scruggs, "The Beverly Hillbillies"] Garcia at first told these kids, several years younger than him, that they couldn't come in -- he was waiting for his students to show up. But Weir said “Jerry, listen, it's seven-thirty on New Year's Eve, and I don't think you're going to be seeing your students tonight.” Garcia realised the wisdom of this, and invited the teenagers in to jam with him. At the time, there was a bit of a renaissance in jug bands, as we talked about back in the episode on the Lovin' Spoonful. This was a form of music that had grown up in the 1920s, and was similar and related to skiffle and coffee-pot bands -- jug bands would tend to have a mixture of portable string instruments like guitars and banjos, harmonicas, and people using improvised instruments, particularly blowing into a jug. The most popular of these bands had been Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, led by banjo player Gus Cannon and with harmonica player Noah Lewis: [Excerpt: Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, "Viola Lee Blues"] With the folk revival, Cannon's work had become well-known again. The Rooftop Singers, a Kingston Trio style folk group, had had a hit with his song "Walk Right In" in 1963, and as a result of that success Cannon had even signed a record contract with Stax -- Stax's first album ever, a month before Booker T and the MGs' first album, was in fact the eighty-year-old Cannon playing his banjo and singing his old songs. The rediscovery of Cannon had started a craze for jug bands, and the most popular of the new jug bands was Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, which did a mixture of old songs like "You're a Viper" and more recent material redone in the old style. Weir, Matthews, and Macauley had been to see the Kweskin band the night before, and had been very impressed, especially by their singer Maria D'Amato -- who would later marry her bandmate Geoff Muldaur and take his name -- and her performance of Leiber and Stoller's "I'm a Woman": [Excerpt: Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, "I'm a Woman"] Matthews suggested that they form their own jug band, and Garcia eagerly agreed -- though Matthews found himself rapidly moving from banjo to washboard to kazoo to second kazoo before realising he was surplus to requirements. Robert Hunter was similarly an early member but claimed he "didn't have the embouchure" to play the jug, and was soon also out. He moved to LA and started studying Scientology -- later claiming that he wanted science-fictional magic powers, which L. Ron Hubbard's new religion certainly offered. The group took the name Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions -- apparently they varied the spelling every time they played -- and had a rotating membership that at one time or another included about twenty different people, but tended always to have Garcia on banjo, Weir on jug and later guitar, and Garcia's friend Pig Pen on harmonica: [Excerpt: Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions, "On the Road Again"] The group played quite regularly in early 1964, but Garcia's first love was still bluegrass, and he was trying to build an audience with his bluegrass band, The Black Mountain Boys. But bluegrass was very unpopular in the Bay Area, where it was simultaneously thought of as unsophisticated -- as "hillbilly music" -- and as elitist, because it required actual instrumental ability, which wasn't in any great supply in the amateur folk scene. But instrumental ability was something Garcia definitely had, as at this point he was still practising eight hours a day, every day, and it shows on the recordings of the Black Mountain Boys: [Excerpt: The Black Mountain Boys, "Rosa Lee McFall"] By the summer, Bob Weir was also working at the music shop, and so Garcia let Weir take over his students while he and the Black Mountain Boys' guitarist Sandy Rothman went on a road trip to see as many bluegrass musicians as they could and to audition for Bill Monroe himself. As it happened, Garcia found himself too shy to audition for Monroe, but Rothman later ended up playing with Monroe's Blue Grass Boys. On his return to the Bay Area, Garcia resumed playing with the Uptown Jug Champions, but Pig Pen started pestering him to do something different. While both men had overlapping tastes in music and a love for the blues, Garcia's tastes had always been towards the country end of the spectrum while Pig Pen's were towards R&B. And while the Uptown Jug Champions were all a bit disdainful of the Beatles at first -- apart from Bob Weir, the youngest of the group, who thought they were interesting -- Pig Pen had become enamoured of another British band who were just starting to make it big: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Not Fade Away"] 29) Garcia liked the first Rolling Stones album too, and he eventually took Pig Pen's point -- the stuff that the Rolling Stones were doing, covers of Slim Harpo and Buddy Holly, was not a million miles away from the material they were doing as Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions. Pig Pen could play a little electric organ, Bob had been fooling around with the electric guitars in the music shop. Why not give it a go? The stuff bands like the Rolling Stones were doing wasn't that different from the electric blues that Pig Pen liked, and they'd all seen A Hard Day's Night -- they could carry on playing with banjos, jugs, and kazoos and have the respect of a handful of folkies, or they could get electric instruments and potentially have screaming girls and millions of dollars, while playing the same songs. This was a convincing argument, especially when Dana Morgan Jr, the son of the owner of the music shop, told them they could have free electric instruments if they let him join on bass. Morgan wasn't that great on bass, but what the hell, free instruments. Pig Pen had the best voice and stage presence, so he became the frontman of the new group, singing most of the leads, though Jerry and Bob would both sing a few songs, and playing harmonica and organ. Weir was on rhythm guitar, and Garcia was the lead guitarist and obvious leader of the group. They just needed a drummer, and handily Bill Kreutzmann, who had played with Garcia and Pig Pen in the Zodiacs, was also now teaching music at the music shop. Not only that, but about three weeks before they decided to go electric, Kreutzmann had seen the Uptown Jug Champions performing and been astonished by Garcia's musicianship and charisma, and said to himself "Man, I'm gonna follow that guy forever!" The new group named themselves the Warlocks, and started rehearsing in earnest. Around this time, Garcia also finally managed to get some of the LSD that his friend Robert Hunter had been so enthusiastic about three years earlier, and it was a life-changing experience for him. In particular, he credited LSD with making him comfortable being a less disciplined player -- as a bluegrass player he'd had to be frighteningly precise, but now he was playing rock and needed to loosen up. A few days after taking LSD for the first time, Garcia also heard some of Bob Dylan's new material, and realised that the folk singer he'd had little time for with his preachy politics was now making electric music that owed a lot more to the Beat culture Garcia considered himself part of: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"] Another person who was hugely affected by hearing that was Phil Lesh, who later said "I couldn't believe that was Bob Dylan on AM radio, with an electric band. It changed my whole consciousness: if something like that could happen, the sky was the limit." Up to that point, Lesh had been focused entirely on his avant-garde music, working with friends like Steve Reich to push music forward, inspired by people like John Cage and La Monte Young, but now he realised there was music of value in the rock world. He'd quickly started going to rock gigs, seeing the Rolling Stones and the Byrds, and then he took acid and went to see his friend Garcia's new electric band play their third ever gig. He was blown away, and very quickly it was decided that Lesh would be the group's new bass player -- though everyone involved tells a different story as to who made the decision and how it came about, and accounts also vary as to whether Dana Morgan took his sacking gracefully and let his erstwhile bandmates keep their instruments, or whether they had to scrounge up some new ones. Lesh had never played bass before, but he was a talented multi-instrumentalist with a deep understanding of music and an ability to compose and improvise, and the repertoire the Warlocks were playing in the early days was mostly three-chord material that doesn't take much rehearsal -- though it was apparently beyond the abilities of poor Dana Morgan, who apparently had to be told note-by-note what to play by Garcia, and learn it by rote. Garcia told Lesh what notes the strings of a bass were tuned to, told him to borrow a guitar and practice, and within two weeks he was on stage with the Warlocks: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, “Grayfolded"] In September 1995, just weeks after Jerry Garcia's death, an article was published in Mute magazine identifying a cultural trend that had shaped the nineties, and would as it turned out shape at least the next thirty years. It's titled "The Californian Ideology", though it may be better titled "The Bay Area Ideology", and it identifies a worldview that had grown up in Silicon Valley, based around the ideas of the hippie movement, of right-wing libertarianism, of science fiction authors, and of Marshall McLuhan. It starts "There is an emerging global orthodoxy concerning the relation between society, technology and politics. We have called this orthodoxy `the Californian Ideology' in honour of the state where it originated. By naturalising and giving a technological proof to a libertarian political philosophy, and therefore foreclosing on alternative futures, the Californian Ideologues are able to assert that social and political debates about the future have now become meaningless. The California Ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism and is promulgated by magazines such as WIRED and MONDO 2000 and preached in the books of Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and others. The new faith has been embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, 30-something capitalists, hip academics, futurist bureaucrats and even the President of the USA himself. As usual, Europeans have not been slow to copy the latest fashion from America. While a recent EU report recommended adopting the Californian free enterprise model to build the 'infobahn', cutting-edge artists and academics have been championing the 'post-human' philosophy developed by the West Coast's Extropian cult. With no obvious opponents, the global dominance of the Californian ideology appears to be complete." [Excerpt: Grayfolded] The Warlocks' first gig with Phil Lesh on bass was on June the 18th 1965, at a club called Frenchy's with a teenage clientele. Lesh thought his playing had been wooden and it wasn't a good gig, and apparently the management of Frenchy's agreed -- they were meant to play a second night there, but turned up to be told they'd been replaced by a band with an accordion and clarinet. But by September the group had managed to get themselves a residency at a small bar named the In Room, and playing there every night made them cohere. They were at this point playing the kind of sets that bar bands everywhere play to this day, though at the time the songs they were playing, like "Gloria" by Them and "In the Midnight Hour", were the most contemporary of hits. Another song that they introduced into their repertoire was "Do You Believe in Magic" by the Lovin' Spoonful, another band which had grown up out of former jug band musicians. As well as playing their own sets, they were also the house band at The In Room and as such had to back various touring artists who were the headline acts. The first act they had to back up was Cornell Gunter's version of the Coasters. Gunter had brought his own guitarist along as musical director, and for the first show Weir sat in the audience watching the show and learning the parts, staring intently at this musical director's playing. After seeing that, Weir's playing was changed, because he also picked up how the guitarist was guiding the band while playing, the small cues that a musical director will use to steer the musicians in the right direction. Weir started doing these things himself when he was singing lead -- Pig Pen was the frontman but everyone except Bill sang sometimes -- and the group soon found that rather than Garcia being the sole leader, now whoever was the lead singer for the song was the de facto conductor as well. By this point, the Bay Area was getting almost overrun with people forming electric guitar bands, as every major urban area in America was. Some of the bands were even having hits already -- We Five had had a number three hit with "You Were On My Mind", a song which had originally been performed by the folk duo Ian and Sylvia: [Excerpt: We Five, "You Were On My Mind"] Although the band that was most highly regarded on the scene, the Charlatans, was having problems with the various record companies they tried to get signed to, and didn't end up making a record until 1969. If tracks like "Number One" had been released in 1965 when they were recorded, the history of the San Francisco music scene may have taken a very different turn: [Excerpt: The Charlatans, "Number One"] Bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Great Society, and Big Brother and the Holding Company were also forming, and Autumn Records was having a run of success with records by the Beau Brummels, whose records were produced by Autumn's in-house A&R man, Sly Stone: [Excerpt: The Beau Brummels, "Laugh Laugh"] The Warlocks were somewhat cut off from this, playing in a dive bar whose clientele was mostly depressed alcoholics. But the fact that they were playing every night for an audience that didn't care much gave them freedom, and they used that freedom to improvise. Both Lesh and Garcia were big fans of John Coltrane, and they started to take lessons from his style of playing. When the group played "Gloria" or "Midnight Hour" or whatever, they started to extend the songs and give themselves long instrumental passages for soloing. Garcia's playing wasn't influenced *harmonically* by Coltrane -- in fact Garcia was always a rather harmonically simple player. He'd tend to play lead lines either in Mixolydian mode, which is one of the most standard modes in rock, pop, blues, and jazz, or he'd play the notes of the chord that was being played, so if the band were playing a G chord his lead would emphasise the notes G, B, and D. But what he was influenced by was Coltrane's tendency to improvise in long, complex, phrases that made up a single thought -- Coltrane was thinking musically in paragraphs, rather than sentences, and Garcia started to try the same kind of th

M

Guest is veteran predator and hog hunting guide Junior Walker with tips and techniques. 

hey guys! so sorry for the delay with this week's episode of my podcast. this external hard drive situation has been giving me a lot of anxiety but the good news is it's all taken care of now and life is good with me. I will have all of my data back soon. also, my next single Possibility comes out March 15th, so I hope you guys will enjoy that one. that one is a very personal song for me and it's honestly about an experience that I had with somebody else. will see if that person finds out if the song is about them, but that's another story. but anyways, I hope you guys will also stream my new song I Don't Look The Same Anymore that's out now on all of the streaming platforms. but also, coming up this month is my next podcast interview with Tony Powers, songwriter from the Brill Building. I hope you guys enjoy that one. also, here's part two on my latest episode where I cover Junior Walker & The All Stars. hope you guys enjoy hearing the history behind this artist & the group from me. here's the link to last week's song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pLaO-DFRto don't forget to also follow me & reach out to me on Instagram & Tik Tok right here: https://www.instagram.com/iheartoldies/ https://www.tiktok.com/@iheartoldies please do also sign up for the premium version of my podcast. here you'll be able to find all of my current really cool time machine style podcast interviews with musicians from the 60's. I hope you enjoy them. but I also hope college professors will use them for their Rock & Roll History classes: https://themillennialthrowbackmachine.supercast.com/new_landing? here's the link to my latest song: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/samlwilliams/i-dont-look-the-same-anymore here are two interviews I did two years ago with Honk Magazine and ShoutoutLA. I hope you enjoy these interviews that I did, and I just did one with a radio station out of Morro Bay called 97.3 The Rock. I haven't gotten a copy of that interview yet but I will let you know when I do and when I will be posting it. until then, please do enjoy these two interviews: https://honkmagazine.com/sam-l-williams-talks-about-his-career-path-influence-and-new-music/ https://shoutoutla.com/meet-sam-l-williams-musician-songwriter-podcast-host/ also please do check out the two playlists I have for this podcast. the Spotify and Youtube one. these playlists are updated pretty much every time I cover a new song on this show. if you have any suggestions for songs I should talk about next on my podcast that I haven't yet, please send those ideas to me at samltwilli@icloud.com, you can also follow me & reach out to me on Instagram & Tik Tok @iheartoldies: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/21f3uBS6kU4hUF6QAC5JMj?si=bf38ef403ed6465a https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS1sYR7xky8&list=PL66sgq_GAmRcXy8yKZJfVmAD14HUYj7Nf also do check out the official Redbubble Merch store for this podcast. here you'll be able to find all of these cool merch items for this podcast. if you like what you see definitely email me at samltwilli@icloud.com: https://www.redbubble.com/people/60ssam95/works/36806158-keep-things-groovy?asc=u&ref=recent-owner if you found out some cool info from this week's artist and you didn't know anything about them and your a millennial/Gen Z. definitely email me at samltwilli@icloud.com. I hope you guys enjoy this week's episode, I will be able to focus all of my attention and energy on this now that my stressful external hard drive situation is finally resolved. feeling pretty good right now and I will talk to you guys more soon.

Oldies with Some Goodies is all about our Rock N Roll past, includes Frank Ballard, Elvis Presley, Lesley Gore, Jackie Wilson, Ray Charles, Frankie Valli, Billy Stewart, The Champs, Bobby Darin, Junior Walker & The Allstars, Brian Setzer & The Brian Setzer Orchestra, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Simon & Garfunkel, Little Anthony & The Imperials, Martha & The Vandellas and Gary U.S. Bonds with Jeff Beck. (and if you like this go down and look for Oldies with Some Goodies 2022 - Rock N Roll)

The Chat Reel is proud to bring to our show on Monday evening, January 2, 2023 at 8:00 p.m. humanitarian and community activist Bobby Holley. Bobby has Holley been a key negotiator in successfully ending gang violence and drug trafficking in some of the toughest and roughest neighborhoods throughout the Chicago and Detroit area, campaigned and conducted multiple charities and one man marches to aide in ending domestic violence, child abuse, and raise money for the homeless. For his selfless endeavors to aide those in need in multiple areas, that our own communities and government bodies have fallen short on fulfilling. Mr. Holley has been honored and even received proclamations weby governors and even presidents over the years. When Bobby is not doing dilligence for those less fortunate worldwide, he has also traveled the world as a musical performer with Junior Walker and the Allstars, Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, and numerous other Motown artists, as well as himself being a former Staxx Recording Artist himself. So mark your calendar and set your alarms, because this is one guest you surely do not want to miss out on hearing his exclusive and very up close and personal interview with Billy Tappin and friends on The Chat Reel!   Please support  The Black Jewish Queen Live Chat or the Chat Reel with Billy and Friends you can send your monetary donations through: paypal.me/psychotherapycheckout To support the shoe donations. Contact givebackjamaica@gmail.com or go to webpage www.givebackjamaica.org

The Chat Reel is proud to bring to our show on Monday evening, December 12th, 2022 at 8:00 p.m. humanitarian and community activist Bobby Holley. Bobby Holley been a key negotiator in successfully ending gang violence and drug trafficking in some of the toughest and roughest neighborhoods throughout the Chicago and Detroit area, campaigned and conducted multiple charities and one man marches to aide in ending domestic violence, child abuse, and raise money for the homeless. For his selfless endeavors to aide those in need in multiple areas that our own communities and government bodies have fell short on fulfilling, Mr. Holley has been honored and even received proclamation  by governors and even presidents over the years. When Bobby is not doing dilligence for those less fortunate worldwide, he has also traveled the world as a musical performer with Junior Walker and the Allstars, Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, and numerous other Motown artists, as well as himself being a former Staxx Recording Artist himself. So mark your calendar and set your alarms, because this is one guest you surely do not want to miss out on hearing his exclusive and very up close and personal interview with Billy Tappin and friends on The Chat Reel!   Please support  The Black Jewish Queen Live Chat or the Chat Reel with Billy and Friends you can send your monetary donations through: paypal.me/psychotherapycheckou To support the shoe donations. Contact givebackjamaica@gmail.com or go to webpage www.givebackjamaica.org

So much has changed since David Uosikkinen & Kenny Aaronson were guests on the podcast, separately back in 2019! Their musical friendship has grown, even during the pandemic. We talk about each of their own activities (The Hooters for David, and The Yardbirds for Kenny), and, no spoilers, but Ken uncorks a fun surprise, amidst his stories.We get an update on In The Pocket, Dave's Philly-centric collective,  with the latest news on that project. Plus, they both discuss their involvement in the Lest We Forget recorded tribute organization, and their part in honoring Charlie Watts!But the episode starts with, and centers around, the recent passing of Robert Gordon, and what he meant to both of them. If you're a fan, it can help serve as a bit of grieving. Just remember, they knew him well...So, get set for a fun, high-paced listen with 4 friends "in the quad!"Episode Links:"Lest We Forget""In The Pocket"Tickets link for New Year's Eve in Lititz, PA with the guys and Annabella from Bow Wow Wow!!! We love our sponsors!!! Please visit their web sites, and support them because they make this crazy show go:Boldfoot Socks   https://boldfoot.comCrooked Eye Brewery   https://crookedeyebrewery.com/Don't forget that you can find all of our episodes, on-demand, for free right here on our web site: https://imbalancedhistory.com/   

I was on a roll with the oldies but goldies but when I got to shotgun Junior Walker and All Stars it's shut down my system shut down it won't play anything sorry folks I was on a roll maybe I can pick it up later all right have a good day good Friday yay --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/j-w54/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/j-w54/support

Two Cow Garage "The Heart and the Crown"Richard Swift "Broken Finger Blues"JD McPherson "Just Around The Corner"Kitty Wells "Guilty Street"Adia Victoria "Devil Is A Lie"Blue Mountain "Bloody 98"Fats Domino "When I Was Young"Memphis Slim "We're Gonna Rock"Wilco "Falling Apart (Right Now)"Elvis Costello & the Roots "Sugar Won't Work"Eilen Jewell "Back to Dallas"Rick Danko "What A Town"Eddie Hinton "Brand New Man"Hot Water Music "Trusty Chords"Joan Shelley "Over and Even"Superchunk "Endless Summer"Joseph "Come On Up To The House"LaVern Baker "Bumble Bee"Little Brother Montgomery "Michigan Water Blues"Bob Dylan "Precious Angel"Labi Siffre "I Got The..."Kendrick Lamar "Auntie Diaries"Hank Crawford "Sister Sadie"Arthur Gunter "Baby Let´s Play House"The 40 Acre Mule "16 Days"Old 97's "Rollerskate Skinny"Nina Simone "Do I Move You?"Koko Taylor "I'd Rather Go Blind"Jack White "If I Die Tomorrow"Drive-By Truckers "Forged In Hell And Heaven Sent"R.E.M. "Swan Swan H"Cory Branan "Imogene"Sister O.M. Terrell "Life Is a Problem"Jkutchma & the Five Fifths "Sundown, Usa"Carl Perkins "Poor Boy Blues"Blue Lu Barker "I'll Give You Some Tomorrow"John Prine "Sweet Revenge"Buddy Guy "Outskirst of Town"Junior Walker & The All Stars "Way Back Home"Wynonie Harris "Mr Blues Is Coming To Town"Billie Holiday Orchestra "Summertime"Lucero "That Much Further West"

1. Marvin Gaye - How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)2. Aretha Franklin - Respect3. Lyn Collins - Think About It4. Chi-Lites - Are You My Woman5. Wilson Pickett - Soul Man6. Jackson 5 - Stop The Love You Save7. The Bar-Kays - Soul Finger8. Marvin Gaye - I Heard It Thru The Grapevine9. Aretha Franklin - Chain Of Fools10. The Four Tops - Baby I Need Your Loving11. Booker T & The MG's - Melting Pot12. The Temptations - Papa Was A Rolling Stone13. The Temptations - Ain't Too Proud To Beg14. The Marvelettes - Playboy15. The Temptations -  The Way You Do The Things You Do16. Martha & The Vandellas - Rescue Me17. Junior Walker & The All Stars - Shotgun18. James Brown - Super Bad19. The Family Fortune - Work20. Raphael Saadiq - Love That Girl21. Stevie Wonder - If You Really Love Me22. Marha & The Vandellas - Dancing In The Streets23. Smokey Robinson - The Tears Of A Clown 24. Marvin Gaye - Let's Get It On (Da Producers MPG Remix)25. Dennis Edwards - Don't Look Any Further (Samba Remix)26. Bill Whithers - Lovely Day (Studio Rio Version)27. Charles Wright & The 103rd Street Band - Express Yourself (Mocean Worker Remix)28. Jackson 5 - I Want You Back (Z-Trip Remix)29. Stevie Wonder - Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours (DJ Smash Remix)30. Tower Of Power - What Is Hip? (T.O.P Remix)31. Jackson 5 - ABC (Salaam Remi Remix)32. The Temptations - My Girl (Remix)33. Mystikal Ft James Brown - Shake Ya Azz (Jim Sharp Remix)34. All Green - Love & Happiness (4AM Remix)35. The Temptations - Sugar Pie Honey Bunch36. Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell - Ain't No Mountain High Enough37. Barrett Strong - Money That's What I Want38. The Supremes - Where Did Our Love Go?39. Solange - I Decided40. King Floyd - Groove Me41. Jackson 5 - I Wanna Be Where You Are42. The Temptations - My Girl43. Spinners - I'll Be Around44. Marvin Gaye - Too Busy Thinking About My Baby45. Archie Bell & The Drells - Tighten Up

Request Episode #14Intro/Outro: Shake and Fingerpop by Junior Walker and His All-Stars (requested by Lauren)1. Burn Rubber On Me (Why You Want to Hurt Me) by The Gap Band (requested by Jeanette)2. For What It's Worth by Liam Gallagher (requested by Paul)3. Right Said Fred by Bernard Cribbins (requested by Jimmy)4. The Nights by Avicii (requested by David)5. Found/Tonight by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Ben Platt (requested by Brad)Vote on Week 17 Round 2 Album Art (Episodes 381-385)Championship Round (so far)

Just one more ... that's the title for RADIOWILDERLIVE.COM #199 because we have just one more show to hit the Big 200 next week. Wow, hard to believe!  We've got a good one leading up to #200 and it'll #rockyourweekend.Our Sticky is Junior Walker and the All Stars sharing our Deuces are Wilder covers segment with The Supremes!Kid Rock (for Denise) takes us back to the summer of his youth with All Summer Long.The Grip Weeds pay tribute to The Beach Boys, Foreigner, Foo Fighters, Ry Cooder and the greatest male voice in Rock n' Roll, Roy O gives us All I can do is Dream You.From San Francisco for Baja Bob, Moby Grape does All My Life.New from Cheap Trick, Another World and mighty Hound Dog Taylor rips his guitar in Wild About you Bay. Kings of Leon, The Fleetwood's from Harry's Homesick collection and much more.Baby Ruth found some termites in her new studio but she fixed their butts and says the show will be on the air @3:15 Eastern as usual.Shout out to Storelocal for landing the largest single RV and Boat Storage in America, Storage Solutions and the excitement is building for the big Toy Storage Nation Executive Workshop and the AZ Self Storage Association Annual Conference both here in Phoenix in February. We will represent so be sure to come and hang out with us! Harry and the Wilder Crew!

Episode one hundred and thirty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Papa's Got a Brand New Bag” by James Brown, and at how Brown went from a minor doo-wop artist to the pioneer of funk. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "I'm a Fool" by Dino, Desi, and Billy. 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/ NB an early version of this was uploaded, in which I said "episode 136" rather than 137 and "flattened ninth" at one point rather than "ninth". I've fixed that in a new upload, which is otherwise unchanged. Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I relied mostly on fur books for this episode. James Brown: The Godfather of Soul, by James Brown with Bruce Tucker, is a celebrity autobiography with all that that entails, but a more interesting read than many. Kill ‘Em and Leave: Searching for the Real James Brown, by James McBride is a more discursive, gonzo journalism piece, and well worth a read. Black and Proud: The Life of James Brown by Geoff Brown is a more traditional objective biography. And Douglas Wolk's 33 1/3 book on Live at the Apollo is a fascinating, detailed, look at that album. This box set is the best collection of Brown's work there is, but is out of print. This two-CD set has all the essential hits. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [Introduction, the opening of Live at the Apollo. "So now, ladies and gentlemen, it is star time. Are you ready for star time? [Audience cheers, and gives out another cheer with each musical sting sting] Thank you, and thank you very kindly. It is indeed a great pleasure to present to you in this particular time, national and international known as the hardest working man in showbusiness, Man that sing "I'll Go Crazy"! [sting] "Try Me" [sting] "You've Got the Power" [sting] "Think" [sting], "If You Want Me" [sting] "I Don't Mind" [sting] "Bewildered" [sting] million-dollar seller "Lost Someone" [sting], the very latest release, "Night Train" [sting] Let's everybody "Shout and Shimmy" [sting] Mr. Dynamite, the amazing Mr. Please Please himself, the star of the show, James Brown and the Famous Flames"] In 1951, the composer John Cage entered an anechoic chamber at Harvard University. An anechoic chamber is a room that's been completely soundproofed, so no sound can get in from the outside world, and in which the walls, floor, and ceiling are designed to absorb any sounds that are made. It's as close as a human being can get to experiencing total silence. When Cage entered it, he expected that to be what he heard -- just total silence. Instead, he heard two noises, a high-pitched one and a low one. Cage was confused by this -- why hadn't he heard the silence? The engineer in charge of the chamber explained to him that what he was hearing was himself -- the high-pitched noise was Cage's nervous system, and the low-pitched one was his circulatory system. Cage later said about this, "Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music." The experience inspired him to write his most famous piece, 4'33, in which a performer attempts not to make any sound for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The piece is usually described as being four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence, but it actually isn't -- the whole point is that there is no silence, and that the audience is meant to listen to the ambient noise and appreciate that noise as music. Here is where I would normally excerpt the piece, but of course for 4'33 to have its full effect, one has to listen to the whole thing. But I can excerpt another piece Cage wrote. Because on October the twenty-fourth 1962 he wrote a sequel to 4'33, a piece he titled 0'00, but which is sometimes credited as "4'33 no. 2". He later reworked the piece, but the original score, which is dedicated to two avant-garde Japanese composers, Toshi Ichiyanagi and his estranged wife Yoko Ono, reads as follows: "In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action." Now, as it happens, we have a recording of someone else performing Cage's piece, as written, on the day it was written, though neither performer nor composer were aware that that was what was happening. But I'm sure everyone can agree that this recording from October the 24th, 1962, is a disciplined action performed with maximum amplification and no feedback: [Excerpt: James Brown, "Night Train" (Live at the Apollo version)] When we left James Brown, almost a hundred episodes ago, he had just had his first R&B number one, with "Try Me", and had performed for the first time at the venue with which he would become most associated, the Harlem Apollo, and had reconnected with the mother he hadn't seen since he was a small child. But at that point, in 1958, he was still just the lead singer of a doo-wop group, one of many, and there was nothing in his shows or his records to indicate that he was going to become anything more than that, nothing to distinguish him from King Records labelmates like Hank Ballard, who made great records, put on a great live show, and are still remembered more than sixty years later, but mostly as a footnote. Today we're going to look at the process that led James Brown from being a peer of Ballard or Little Willie John to being arguably the single most influential musician of the second half of the twentieth century. Much of that influence is outside rock music, narrowly defined, but the records we're going to look at this time and in the next episode on Brown are records without which the entire sonic landscape of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries would be unimaginably different. And that process started in 1958, shortly after the release of "Try Me" in October that year, with two big changes to Brown's organisation. The first was that this was -- at least according to Brown -- when he first started working with Universal Attractions, a booking agency run by a man named Ben Bart, who before starting his own company had spent much of the 1940s working for Moe Gale, the owner of the Savoy Ballroom and manager of the Ink Spots, Louis Jordan, and many of the other acts we looked at in the very first episodes of this podcast. Bart had started his own agency in 1945, and had taken the Ink Spots with him, though they'd returned to Gale a few years later, and he'd been responsible for managing the career of the Ravens, one of the first bird groups: [Excerpt: The Ravens, "Rock Me All Night Long"] In the fifties, Bart had become closely associated with King Records, the label to which Brown and the Famous Flames were signed. A quick aside here -- Brown's early records were released on Federal Records, and later they switched to being released on King, but Federal was a subsidiary label for King, and in the same way that I don't distinguish between Checker and Chess, Tamla and Motown, or Phillips and Sun, I'll just refer to King throughout. Bart and Universal Attractions handled bookings for almost every big R&B act signed by King, including Tiny Bradshaw, Little Willie John, the "5" Royales, and Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. According to some sources, the Famous Flames signed with Universal Attractions at the same time they signed with King Records, and Bart's family even say it was Bart who discovered them and got them signed to King in the first place. Other sources say they didn't sign with Universal until after they'd proved themselves on the charts. But everyone seems agreed that 1958 was when Bart started making Brown a priority and taking an active interest in his career. Within a few years, Bart would have left Universal, handing the company over to his son and a business partner, to devote himself full-time to managing Brown, with whom he developed an almost father-son relationship. With Bart behind them, the Famous Flames started getting better gigs, and a much higher profile on the chitlin circuit. But around this time there was another change that would have an even more profound effect. Up to this point, the Famous Flames had been like almost every other vocal group playing the chitlin' circuit, in that they hadn't had their own backing musicians. There were exceptions, but in general vocal groups would perform with the same backing band as every other act on a bill -- either a single backing band playing for a whole package tour, or a house band at the venue they were playing at who would perform with every act that played that venue. There would often be a single instrumentalist with the group, usually a guitarist or piano player, who would act as musical director to make sure that the random assortment of musicians they were going to perform with knew the material. This was, for the most part, how the Famous Flames had always performed, though they had on occasion also performed their own backing in the early days. But now they got their own backing band, centred on J.C. Davis as sax player and bandleader, Bobby Roach on guitar, Nat Kendrick on drums, and Bernard Odum on bass. Musicians would come and go, but this was the core original lineup of what became the James Brown Band. Other musicians who played with them in the late fifties were horn players Alfred Corley and Roscoe Patrick, guitarist Les Buie, and bass player Hubert Perry, while keyboard duties would be taken on by Fats Gonder, although James Brown and Bobby Byrd would both sometimes play keyboards on stage. At this point, as well, the lineup of the Famous Flames became more or less stable. As we discussed in the previous episode on Brown, the original lineup of the Famous Flames had left en masse when it became clear that they were going to be promoted as James Brown and the Famous Flames, with Brown getting more money, rather than as a group. Brown had taken on another vocal group, who had previously been Little Richard's backing vocalists, but shortly after "Try Me" had come out, but before they'd seen any money from it, that group had got into an argument with Brown over money he owed them. He dropped them, and they went off to record unsuccessfully as the Fabulous Flames on a tiny label, though the records they made, like "Do You Remember", are quite good examples of their type: [Excerpt: The Fabulous Flames, "Do You Remember?"] Brown pulled together a new lineup of Famous Flames, featuring two of the originals. Johnny Terry had already returned to the group earlier, and stayed when Brown sacked the rest of the second lineup of Flames, and they added Lloyd Bennett and Bobby Stallworth. And making his second return to the group was Bobby Byrd, who had left with the other original members, joined again briefly, and then left again. Oddly, the first commercial success that Brown had after these lineup changes was not with the Famous Flames, or even under his own name. Rather, it was under the name of his drummer, Nat Kendrick. Brown had always seen himself, not primarily as a singer, but as a band leader and arranger. He was always a jazz fan first and foremost, and he'd grown up in the era of the big bands, and musicians he'd admired growing up like Lionel Hampton and Louis Jordan had always recorded instrumentals as well as vocal selections, and Brown saw himself very much in that tradition. Even though he couldn't read music, he could play several instruments, and he could communicate his arrangement ideas, and he wanted to show off the fact that he was one of the few R&B musicians with his own tight band. The story goes that Syd Nathan, the owner of King Records, didn't like the idea, because he thought that the R&B audience at this point only wanted vocal tracks, and also because Brown's band had previously released an instrumental which hadn't sold. Now, this is a definite pattern in the story of James Brown -- it seems that at every point in Brown's career for the first decade, Brown would come up with an idea that would have immense commercial value, Nathan would say it was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard, Brown would do it anyway, and Nathan would later admit that he was wrong. This is such a pattern -- it apparently happened with "Please Please Please", Brown's first hit, *and* "Try Me", Brown's first R&B number one, and we'll see it happen again later in this episode -- that one tends to suspect that maybe these stories were sometimes made up after the fact, especially since Syd Nathan somehow managed to run a successful record label for over twenty years, putting out some of the best R&B and country records from everyone from Moon Mullican to Wynonie Harris, the Stanley Brothers to Little Willie John, while if these stories are to be believed he was consistently making the most boneheaded, egregious, uncommercial decisions imaginable. But in this case, it seems to be at least mostly true, as rather than being released on King Records as by James Brown, "(Do the) Mashed Potatoes" was released on Dade Records as by Nat Kendrick and the Swans, with the DJ Carlton Coleman shouting vocals over Brown's so it wouldn't be obvious Brown was breaking his contract: [Excerpt: Nat Kendrick and the Swans, "(Do the)" Mashed Potatoes"] That made the R&B top ten,  and I've seen reports that Brown and his band even toured briefly as Nat Kendrick and the Swans, before Syd Nathan realised his mistake, and started allowing instrumentals to be released under the name "James Brown presents HIS BAND", starting with a cover of Bill Doggett's "Hold It": [Excerpt: James Brown Presents HIS BAND, "Hold It"] After the Nat Kendrick record gave Brown's band an instrumental success, the Famous Flames also came back from another mini dry spell for hits, with the first top twenty R&B hit for the new lineup, "I'll Go Crazy", which was followed shortly afterwards by their first pop top forty hit, "Think!": [Excerpt: James Brown and the Famous Flames, "Think!"] The success of "Think!" is at least in part down to Bobby Byrd, who would from this point on be Brown's major collaborator and (often uncredited) co-writer and co-producer until the mid-seventies. After leaving the Flames, and before rejoining them, Byrd had toured for a while with his own group, but had then gone to work for King Records at the request of Brown. King Records' pressing plant had equipment that sometimes produced less-than-ideal pressings of records, and Brown had asked Byrd to take a job there performing quality control, making sure that Brown's records didn't skip. While working there, Byrd also worked as a song doctor. His job was to take songs that had been sent in as demos, and rework them in the style of some of the label's popular artists, to make them more suitable, changing a song so it might fit the style of the "5" Royales or Little Willie John or whoever, and Byrd had done this for "Think", which had originally been recorded by the "5" Royales, whose leader, Lowman Pauling, had written it: [Excerpt: The "5" Royales, "Think"] Byrd had reworked the song to fit Brown's style and persona. It's notable for example that the Royales sing "How much of all your happiness have I really claimed?/How many tears have you cried for which I was to blame?/Darlin', I can't remember which was my fault/I tried so hard to please you—at least that's what I thought.” But in Brown's version this becomes “How much of your happiness can I really claim?/How many tears have you shed for which you was to blame?/Darlin', I can't remember just what is wrong/I tried so hard to please you—at least that's what I thought.” [Excerpt: James Brown and the Famous Flames, "Think"] In Brown's version, nothing is his fault, he's trying to persuade an unreasonable woman who has some problem he doesn't even understand, but she needs to think about it and she'll see that he's right, while in the Royales' version they're acknowledging that they're at fault, that they've done wrong, but they didn't *only* do wrong and maybe she should think about that too. It's only a couple of words' difference, but it changes the whole tenor of the song. "Think" would become the Famous Flames' first top forty hit on the pop charts, reaching number thirty-three. It went top ten on the R&B charts, and between 1959 and 1963 Brown and the Flames would have fifteen top-thirty R&B hits, going from being a minor doo-wop group that had had a few big hits to being consistent hit-makers, who were not yet household names, but who had a consistent sound that could be guaranteed to make the R&B charts, and who put on what was regarded as the best live show of any R&B band in the world. This was partly down to the type of discipline that Brown imposed on his band. Many band-leaders in the R&B world would impose fines on their band members, and Johnny Terry suggested that Brown do the same thing. As Bobby Byrd put it, "Many band leaders do it but it was Johnny's idea to start it with us and we were all for it ‘cos we didn't want to miss nothing. We wanted to be immaculate, clothes-wise, routine-wise and everything. Originally, the fines was only between James and us, The Famous Flames, but then James carried it over into the whole troupe. It was still a good idea because anybody joining The James Brown Revue had to know that they couldn't be messing up, and anyway, all the fines went into a pot for the parties we had." But Brown went much further with these fines than any other band leader, and would also impose them arbitrarily, and it became part of his reputation that he was the strictest disciplinarian in rhythm and blues music. One thing that became legendary among musicians was the way that he would impose fines while on stage. If a band member missed a note, or a dance step, or missed a cue, or had improperly polished shoes, Brown would, while looking at them, briefly make a flashing gesture with his hand, spreading his fingers out for a fraction of a second. To the audience, it looked like just part of Brown's dance routine, but the musician knew he had just been fined five dollars. Multiple flashes meant multiples of five dollars fined. Brown also developed a whole series of other signals to the band, which they had to learn, To quote Bobby Byrd again: "James didn't want anybody else to know what we was doing, so he had numbers and certain screams and spins. There was a certain spin he'd do and if he didn't do the complete spin you'd know it was time to go over here. Certain screams would instigate chord changes, but mostly it was numbers. James would call out football numbers, that's where we got that from. Thirty-nine — Sixteen —Fourteen — Two — Five — Three — Ninety-eight, that kind of thing. Number thirty-nine was always the change into ‘Please, Please, Please'. Sixteen is into a scream and an immediate change, not bam-bam but straight into something else. If he spins around and calls thirty-six, that means we're going back to the top again. And the forty-two, OK, we're going to do this verse and then bow out, we're leaving now. It was amazing." This, or something like this, is a fairly standard technique among more autocratic band leaders, a way of allowing the band as a whole to become a live compositional or improvisational tool for their leader, and Frank Zappa, for example, had a similar system. It requires the players to subordinate themselves utterly to the whim of the band leader, but also requires a band leader who knows the precise strengths and weaknesses of every band member and how they are likely to respond to a cue. When it works well, it can be devastatingly effective, and it was for Brown's live show. The Famous Flames shows soon became a full-on revue, with other artists joining the bill and performing with Brown's band. From the late 1950s on, Brown would always include a female singer. The first of these was Sugar Pie DeSanto, a blues singer who had been discovered (and given her stage name) by Johnny Otis, but DeSanto soon left Brown's band and went on to solo success on Chess records, with hits like "Soulful Dress": [Excerpt: Sugar Pie DeSanto, "Soulful Dress"] After DeSanto left, she was replaced by  Bea Ford, the former wife of the soul singer Joe Tex, with whom Brown had an aggressive rivalry and mutual loathing. Ford and Brown recorded together, cutting tracks like "You Got the Power": [Excerpt: James Brown and Bea Ford, "You Got the Power"] However, Brown and Ford soon fell out, and Brown actually wrote to Tex asking if he wanted his wife back. Tex's response was to record this: [Excerpt: Joe Tex, "You Keep Her"] Ford's replacement was Yvonne Fair, who had briefly replaced Jackie Landry in the Chantels for touring purposes when Landry had quit touring to have a baby. Fair would stay with Brown for a couple of years, and would release a number of singles written and produced for her by Brown, including one which Brown would later rerecord himself with some success: [Excerpt: Yvonne Fair, "I Found You"] Fair would eventually leave the band after getting pregnant with a child by Brown, who tended to sleep with the female singers in his band. The last shows she played with him were the shows that would catapult Brown into the next level of stardom. Brown had been convinced for a long time that his live shows had an energy that his records didn't, and that people would buy a record of one of them. Syd Nathan, as usual, disagreed. In his view the market for R&B albums was small, and only consisted of people who wanted collections of hit singles they could play in one place. Nobody would buy a James Brown live album. So Brown decided to take matters into his own hands. He decided to book a run of shows at the Apollo Theatre, and record them, paying for the recordings with his own money. This was a week-long engagement, with shows running all day every day -- Brown and his band would play five shows a day, and Brown would wear a different suit for every show. This was in October 1962, the month that we've already established as the month the sixties started -- the month the Beatles released their first single, the Beach Boys released their first record outside the US, and the first Bond film came out, all on the same day at the beginning of the month. By the end of October, when Brown appeared at the Apollo, the Cuban Missile Crisis was at its height, and there were several points during the run where it looked like the world itself might not last until November 62. Douglas Wolk has written an entire book on the live album that resulted, which claims to be a recording of the midnight performance from October the twenty-fourth, though it seems like it was actually compiled from multiple performances. The album only records the headline performance, but Wolk describes what a full show by the James Brown Revue at the Apollo was like in October 1962, and the following description is indebted to his book, which I'll link in the show notes. The show would start with the "James Brown Orchestra" -- the backing band. They would play a set of instrumentals, and a group of dancers called the Brownies would join them: [Excerpt: James Brown Presents His Band, "Night Flying"] At various points during the set, Brown himself would join the band for a song or two, playing keyboards or drums. After the band's instrumental set, the Valentinos would take the stage for a few songs. This was before they'd been taken on by Sam Cooke, who would take them under his wing very soon after these shows, but the Valentinos were already recording artists in their own right, and had recently released "Lookin' For a Love": [Excerpt: The Valentinos, "Lookin' For a Love"] Next up would be Yvonne Fair, now visibly pregnant with her boss' child, to sing her few numbers: [Excerpt: Yvonne Fair, "You Can Make it if You Try"] Freddie King was on next, another artist for the King family of labels who'd had a run of R&B hits the previous year, promoting his new single "I'm On My Way to Atlanta": [Excerpt: Freddie King, "I'm on My Way to Atlanta"] After King came Solomon Burke, who had been signed to Atlantic earlier that year and just started having hits, and was the new hot thing on the scene, but not yet the massive star he became: [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Cry to Me"] After Burke came a change of pace -- the vaudeville comedian Pigmeat Markham would take the stage and perform a couple of comedy sketches. We actually know exactly how these went, as Brown wasn't the only one recording a live album there that week, and Markham's album "The World's Greatest Clown" was a result of these shows and released on Chess Records: [Excerpt: Pigmeat Markham, "Go Ahead and Sing"] And after Markham would come the main event. Fats Gonder, the band's organist, would give the introduction we heard at the beginning of the episode -- and backstage, Danny Ray, who had been taken on as James Brown's valet that very week (according to Wolk -- I've seen other sources saying he'd joined Brown's organisation in 1960), was listening closely. He would soon go on to take over the role of MC, and would introduce Brown in much the same way as Gonder had at every show until Brown's death forty-four years later. The live album is an astonishing tour de force, showing Brown and his band generating a level of excitement that few bands then or now could hope to equal. It's even more astonishing when you realise two things. The first is that this was *before* any of the hits that most people now associate with the name James Brown -- before "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" or "Sex Machine", or "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" or "Say it Loud I'm Black and I'm Proud" or "Funky Drummer" or "Get Up Offa That Thing". It's still an *unformed* James Brown, only six years into a fifty-year career, and still without most of what made him famous. The other thing is, as Wolk notes, if you listen to any live bootleg recordings from this time, the microphone distorts all the time, because Brown is singing so loud. Here, the vocal tone is clean, because Brown knew he was being recorded. This is the sound of James Brown restraining himself: [Excerpt: James Brown and the Famous Flames, "Night Train" (Live at the Apollo version)] The album was released a few months later, and proved Syd Nathan's judgement utterly, utterly, wrong. It became the thirty-second biggest selling album of 1963 -- an amazing achievement given that it was released on a small independent label that dealt almost exclusively in singles, and which had no real presence in the pop market. The album spent sixty-six weeks on the album charts, making number two on the charts -- the pop album charts, not R&B charts. There wasn't an R&B albums chart until 1965, and Live at the Apollo basically forced Billboard to create one, and more or less single-handedly created the R&B albums market. It was such a popular album in 1963 that DJs took to playing the whole album -- breaking for commercials as they turned the side over, but otherwise not interrupting it. It turned Brown from merely a relatively big R&B star into a megastar. But oddly, given this astonishing level of success, Brown's singles in 1963 were slightly less successful than they had been in the previous few years -- possibly partly because he decided to record a few versions of old standards, changing direction as he had for much of his career. Johnny Terry quit the Famous Flames, to join the Drifters, becoming part of the lineup that recorded "Under the Boardwalk" and "Saturday Night at the Movies". Brown also recorded a second live album, Pure Dynamite!, which is generally considered a little lacklustre in comparison to the Apollo album. There were other changes to the lineup as well as Terry leaving. Brown wanted to hire a new drummer, Melvin Parker, who agreed to join the band, but only if Brown took on his sax-playing brother, Maceo, along with him. Maceo soon became one of the most prominent musicians in Brown's band, and his distinctive saxophone playing is all over many of Brown's biggest hits. The first big hit that the Parkers played on was released as by James Brown and his Orchestra, rather than James Brown and the Famous Flames, and was a landmark in Brown's evolution as a musician: [Excerpt: James Brown and his Orchestra, "Out of Sight"] The Famous Flames did sing on the B-side of that, a song called "Maybe the Last Time", which was ripped off from the same Pops Staples song that the Rolling Stones later ripped off for their own hit single. But that would be the last time Brown would use them in the studio -- from that point on, the Famous Flames were purely a live act, although Bobby Byrd, but not the other members, would continue to sing on the records. The reason it was credited to James Brown, rather than to James Brown and the Famous Flames, is that "Out of Sight" was released on Smash Records, to which Brown -- but not the Flames -- had signed a little while earlier. Brown had become sick of what he saw as King Records' incompetence, and had found what he and his advisors thought was a loophole in his contract. Brown had been signed to King Records under a personal services contract as a singer, not under a musician contract as a musician, and so they believed that he could sign to Smash, a subsidiary of Mercury, as a musician. He did, and he made what he thought of as a fresh start on his new label by recording "Caldonia", a cover of a song by his idol Louis Jordan: [Excerpt: James Brown and his Orchestra, "Caldonia"] Understandably, King Records sued on the reasonable grounds that Brown was signed to them as a singer, and they got an injunction to stop him recording for Smash -- but by the time the injunction came through, Brown had already released two albums and three singles for the label. The injunction prevented Brown from recording any new material for the rest of 1964, though both labels continued to release stockpiled material during that time. While he was unable to record new material, October 1964 saw Brown's biggest opportunity to cross over to a white audience -- the TAMI Show: [Excerpt: James Brown, "Out of Sight (TAMI show live)"] We've mentioned the TAMI show a couple of times in previous episodes, but didn't go into it in much detail. It was a filmed concert which featured Jan and Dean, the Barbarians, Lesley Gore, Chuck Berry, the Beach Boys, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J Kramer and the Dakotas, Marvin Gaye, the Miracles, the Supremes, and, as the two top acts, James Brown and the Rolling Stones. Rather oddly, the point of the TAMI Show wasn't the music as such. Rather it was intended as a demonstration of a technical process. Before videotape became cheap and a standard, it was difficult to record TV shows for later broadcast, for distribution to other countries, or for archive. The way they used to be recorded was a process known as telerecording in the UK and kinescoping in the US, and that was about as crude as it's possible to get -- you'd get a film camera, point it at a TV showing the programme you wanted to record, and film the TV screen. There was specialist equipment to do this, but that was all it actually did. Almost all surviving TV from the fifties and sixties -- and even some from the seventies -- was preserved by this method rather than by videotape. Even after videotape started being used to make the programmes, there were differing standards and tapes were expensive, so if you were making a programme in the UK and wanted a copy for US broadcast, or vice versa, you'd make a telerecording. But what if you wanted to make a TV show that you could also show on cinema screens? If you're filming a TV screen, and then you project that film onto a big screen, you get a blurry, low-resolution, mess -- or at least you did with the 525-line TV screens that were used in the US at the time. So a company named Electronovision came into the picture, for those rare times when you wanted to do something using video cameras that would be shown at the cinema. Rather than shoot in 525-line resolution, their cameras shot in 819-line resolution -- super high definition for the time, but capable of being recorded onto standard videotape with appropriate modifications for the equipment. But that meant that when you kinescoped the production, it was nearly twice the resolution that a standard US TV broadcast would be, and so it didn't look terrible when shown in a cinema. The owner of the Electronovision process had had a hit with a cinema release of a performance by Richard Burton as Hamlet, and he needed a follow-up, and decided that another filmed live performance would be the best way to make use of his process -- TV cameras were much more useful for capturing live performances than film cameras, for a variety of dull technical reasons, and so this was one of the few areas where Electronovision might actually be useful. And so Bill Roden, one of the heads of Electronovision, turned to a TV director named Steve Binder, who was working at the time on the Steve Allen show, one of the big variety shows, second only to Ed Sullivan, and who would soon go on to direct Hullaballoo. Roden asked Binder to make a concert film, shot on video, which would be released on the big screen by American International Pictures (the same organisation with which David Crosby's father worked so often). Binder had contacts with West Coast record labels, and particularly with Lou Adler's organisation, which managed Jan and Dean. He also had been in touch with a promoter who was putting on a package tour of British musicians. So they decided that their next demonstration of the capabilities of the equipment would be a show featuring performers from "all over the world", as the theme song put it -- by which they meant all over the continental United States plus two major British cities. For those acts who didn't have their own bands -- or whose bands needed augmenting -- there was an orchestra, centred around members of the Wrecking Crew, conducted by Jack Nitzsche, and the Blossoms were on hand to provide backing vocals where required. Jan and Dean would host the show and sing the theme song. James Brown had had less pop success than any of the other artists on the show except for the Barbarians, who are now best-known for their appearances on the Nuggets collection of relatively obscure garage rock singles, and whose biggest hit, "Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?" only went to number fifty-five on the charts: [Excerpt: The Barbarians, "Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?"] The Barbarians were being touted as the American equivalent of the Rolling Stones, but the general cultural moment of the time can be summed up by that line "You're either a girl or you come from Liverpool" -- which was where the Rolling Stones came from. Or at least, it was where Americans seemed to think they came from given both that song, and the theme song of the TAMI show, written by P.F. Sloan and Steve Barri, which sang about “the Rolling Stones from Liverpool”, and also referred to Brown as "the king of the blues": [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Here They Come From All Over The World"] But other than the Barbarians, the TAMI show was one of the few places in which all the major pop music movements of the late fifties and early sixties could be found in one place -- there was the Merseybeat of Gerry and the Pacemakers and the Dakotas, already past their commercial peak but not yet realising it, the fifties rock of Chuck Berry, who actually ended up performing one song with Gerry and the Pacemakers: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry and Gerry and the Pacemakers: "Maybellene"] And there was the Brill Building pop of Lesley Gore, the British R&B of the Rolling Stones right at the point of their breakthrough, the vocal surf music of the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean, and three of the most important Motown acts, with Brown the other representative of soul on the bill. But the billing was a sore point. James Brown's manager insisted that he should be the headliner of the show, and indeed by some accounts the Rolling Stones also thought that they should probably not try to follow him -- though other accounts say that the Stones were equally insistent that they *must* be the headliners. It was a difficult decision, because Brown was much less well known, but it was eventually decided that the Rolling Stones would go on last. Most people talking about the event, including most of those involved with the production, have since stated that this was a mistake, because nobody could follow James Brown, though in interviews Mick Jagger has always insisted that the Stones didn't have to follow Brown, as there was a recording break between acts and they weren't even playing to the same audience -- though others have disputed that quite vigorously. But what absolutely everyone has agreed is that Brown gave the performance of a lifetime, and that it was miraculously captured by the cameras. I say its capture was miraculous because every other act had done a full rehearsal for the TV cameras, and had had a full shot-by-shot plan worked out by Binder beforehand. But according to Steve Binder -- though all the accounts of the show are contradictory -- Brown refused to do a rehearsal -- so even though he had by far the most complex and choreographed performance of the event, Binder and his camera crew had to make decisions by pure instinct, rather than by having an actual plan they'd worked out in advance of what shots to use. This is one of the rare times when I wish this was a video series rather than a podcast, because the visuals are a huge part of this performance -- Brown is a whirlwind of activity, moving all over the stage in a similar way to Jackie Wilson, one of his big influences, and doing an astonishing gliding dance step in which he stands on one leg and moves sideways almost as if on wheels. The full performance is easily findable online, and is well worth seeking out. But still, just hearing the music and the audience's reaction can give some insight: [Excerpt: James Brown, "Out of Sight" (TAMI Show)] The Rolling Stones apparently watched the show in horror, unable to imagine following that -- though when they did, the audience response was fine: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Around and Around"] Incidentally, Chuck Berry must have been quite pleased with his payday from the TAMI Show, given that as well as his own performance the Stones did one of his songs, as did Gerry and the Pacemakers, as we heard earlier, and the Beach Boys did "Surfin' USA" for which he had won sole songwriting credit. After the TAMI Show, Mick Jagger would completely change his attitude to performing, and would spend the rest of his career trying to imitate Brown's performing style. He was unsuccessful in this, but still came close enough that he's still regarded as one of the great frontmen, nearly sixty years later. Brown kept performing, and his labels kept releasing material, but he was still not allowed to record, until in early 1965 a court reached a ruling -- yes, Brown wasn't signed as a musician to King Records, so he was perfectly within his rights to record with Smash Records. As an instrumentalist. But Brown *was* signed to King Records as a singer, so he was obliged to record vocal tracks for them, and only for them. So until his contract with Smash lapsed, he had to record twice as much material -- he had to keep recording instrumentals, playing piano or organ, for Smash, while recording vocal tracks for King Records. His first new record, released as by "James Brown" rather than the earlier billings of "James Brown and his Orchestra" or "James Brown and the Famous Flames", was for King, and was almost a remake of "Out of Sight", his hit for Smash Records. But even so, "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" was a major step forward, and is often cited as the first true funk record. This is largely because of the presence of a new guitarist in Brown's band. Jimmy Nolen had started out as a violin player, but like many musicians in the 1950s he had been massively influenced by T-Bone Walker, and had switched to playing guitar. He was discovered as a guitarist by the bluesman Jimmy Wilson, who had had a minor hit with "Tin Pan Alley": [Excerpt: Jimmy Wilson, "Tin Pan Alley"] Wilson had brought Nolen to LA, where he'd soon parted from Wilson and started working with a whole variety of bandleaders. His first recording came with Monte Easter on Aladdin Records: [Excerpt: Monte Easter, "Blues in the Evening"] After working with Easter, he started recording with Chuck Higgins, and also started recording by himself. At this point, Nolen was just one of many West Coast blues guitarists with a similar style, influenced by T-Bone Walker -- he was competing with Pete "Guitar" Lewis, Johnny "Guitar" Watson, and Guitar Slim, and wasn't yet quite as good as any of them. But he was still making some influential records. His version of "After Hours", for example, released under his own name on Federal Records, was a big influence on Roy Buchanan, who would record several versions of the standard based on Nolen's arrangement: [Excerpt: Jimmy Nolen, "After Hours"] Nolen had released records on many labels, but his most important early association came from records he made but didn't release. In the mid-fifties, Johnny Otis produced a couple of tracks by Nolen, for Otis' Dig Records label, but they weren't released until decades later: [Excerpt: Jimmy Nolen, "Jimmy's Jive"] But when Otis had a falling out with his longtime guitar player Pete "Guitar" Lewis, who was one of the best players in LA but who was increasingly becoming unreliable due to his alcoholism, Otis hired Nolen to replace him. It's Nolen who's playing on most of the best-known recordings Otis made in the late fifties, like "Casting My Spell": [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, "Casting My Spell"] And of course Otis' biggest hit "Willie and the Hand Jive": [Excerpt: Johnny Otis, "Willie and the Hand Jive"] Nolen left Otis after a few years, and spent the early sixties mostly playing in scratch bands backing blues singers, and not recording. It was during this time that Nolen developed the style that would revolutionise music. The style he developed was unique in several different ways. The first was in Nolen's choice of chords. We talked last week about how Pete Townshend's guitar playing became based on simplifying chords and only playing power chords. Nolen went the other way -- while his voicings often only included two or three notes, he was also often using very complex chords with *more* notes than a standard chord. As we discussed last week, in most popular music, the chords are based around either major or minor triads -- the first, third, and fifth notes of a scale, so you have an E major chord, which is the notes E, G sharp, and B: [Excerpt: E major chord] It's also fairly common to have what are called seventh chords, which are actually a triad with an added flattened seventh, so an E7 chord would be the notes E, G sharp, B, and D: [Excerpt: E7 chord] But Nolen built his style around dominant ninth chords, often just called ninth chords. Dominant ninth chords are mostly thought of as jazz chords because they're mildly dissonant. They consist of the first, third, fifth, flattened seventh, *and* ninth of a scale, so an E9 would be the notes E, G sharp, B, D, and F sharp: [Excerpt: E9 chord] Another way of looking at that is that you're playing both a major chord *and* at the same time a minor chord that starts on the fifth note, so an E major and B minor chord at the same time: [Demonstrates Emajor, B minor, E9] It's not completely unknown for pop songs to use ninth chords, but it's very rare. Probably the most prominent example came from a couple of years after the period we're talking about, when in mid-1967 Bobby Gentry basically built the whole song "Ode to Billie Joe" around a D9 chord, barely ever moving off it: [Excerpt: Bobby Gentry, "Ode to Billie Joe"] That shows the kind of thing that ninth chords are useful for -- because they have so many notes in them, you can just keep hammering on the same chord for a long time, and the melody can go wherever it wants and will fit over it. The record we're looking at, "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", actually has three chords in it -- it's basically a twelve-bar blues, like "Out of Sight" was, just with these ninth chords sometimes used instead of more conventional chords -- but as Brown's style got more experimental in future years, he would often build songs with no chord changes at all, just with Nolen playing a single ninth chord throughout. There's a possibly-apocryphal story, told in a few different ways, but the gist of which is that when auditioning Nolen's replacement many years later, Brown asked "Can you play an E ninth chord?" "Yes, of course" came the reply. "But can you play an E ninth chord *all night*?" The reason Brown asked this, if he did, is that playing like Nolen is *extremely* physically demanding. Because the other thing about Nolen's style is that he was an extremely percussive player. In his years backing blues musicians, he'd had to play with many different drummers, and knew they weren't always reliable timekeepers. So he'd started playing like a drummer himself, developing a technique called chicken-scratching, based on the Bo Diddley style he'd played with Otis, where he'd often play rapid, consistent, semiquaver chords, keeping the time himself so the drummer didn't have to. Other times he'd just play single, jagged-sounding, chords to accentuate the beat. He used guitars with single-coil pickups and turned the treble up and got rid of all the midrange, so the sound would cut through no matter what. As well as playing full-voiced chords, he'd also sometimes mute all the strings while he strummed, giving a percussive scratching sound rather than letting the strings ring. In short, the sound he got was this: [Excerpt: James Brown, "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag"] And that is the sound that became funk guitar. If you listen to Jimmy Nolen's playing on "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", that guitar sound -- chicken scratched ninth chords -- is what every funk guitarist after him based their style on. It's not Nolen's guitar playing in its actual final form -- that wouldn't come until he started using wah wah pedals, which weren't mass produced until early 1967 -- but it's very clear when listening to the track that this is the birth of funk. The original studio recording of "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" actually sounds odd if you listen to it now -- it's slower than the single, and lasts almost seven minutes: [Excerpt: James Brown "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag (parts 1, 2, and 3)"] But for release as a single, it was sped up a semitone, a ton of reverb was added, and it was edited down to just a few seconds over two minutes. The result was an obvious hit single: [Excerpt: James Brown, "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag"] Or at least, it was an obvious hit single to everyone except Syd Nathan, who as you'll have already predicted by now didn't like the song. Indeed according to Brown, he was so disgusted with the record that he threw his acetate copy of it onto the floor. But Brown got his way, and the single came out, and it became the biggest hit of Brown's career up to that point, not only giving him his first R&B number one since "Try Me" seven years earlier, but also crossing over to the pop charts in a way he hadn't before. He'd had the odd top thirty or even top twenty pop single in the past, but now he was in the top ten, and getting noticed by the music business establishment in a way he hadn't earlier. Brown's audience went from being medium-sized crowds of almost exclusively Black people with the occasional white face, to a much larger, more integrated, audience. Indeed, at the Grammys the next year, while the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Phil Spector and the whole Motown stable were overlooked in favour of the big winners for that year Roger Miller, Herb Alpert, and the Anita Kerr Singers, even an organisation with its finger so notoriously off the pulse of the music industry as the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, which presents the Grammys, couldn't fail to find the pulse of "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", and gave Brown the Grammy for Best Rhythm and Blues record, beating out the other nominees "In the Midnight Hour", "My Girl", "Shotgun" by Junior Walker, and "Shake" by Sam Cooke. From this point on, Syd Nathan would no longer argue with James Brown as to which of his records would be released. After nine years of being the hardest working man in showbusiness, James Brown had now become the Godfather of Soul, and his real career had just begun.

(Show 132) 1hr of classic Motown with Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, The Temptations, Jackson 5, The Four Tops, The Contours, Jimmy Ruffin, The Spinners, Barrett Strong, The Isley Brothers, Supremes , Martha Reeves & The Vandellas, Junior Walker & the All Stars. Tips at cash app $djbenniejamesOr support at all levels at djbenniejames.com/podcastOne-time donations to https://djbenniejames.com/supportLicensed for digital streaming & play  ASCAP 400009874 & BMI - 61044939THANKS as always to all my Supporters, Sponsors and Music Pool MembersVery Special Thanks to : Life Destiny SOULutions & the Gardner FamilySupport the show (https://djbenniejames.com/podcast)

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This week on Riffin Radio podcast. Dermot talks with Junior Walker. He talks about how he discovered the saxophone. He also talks about working with Johnny Bristol and becoming a Motown artist.

A number of groups came out of the psychedelic pop scene in Northern England and Scotland in the late 80's including Primal Scream, Teenage Fanclub, Jesus and the Mary Chain, and The Soup Dragons.  Their third album, Hotwired, was released in October 1992.The Soup Dragons got their name from a character in a 1970's UK children's television series called "Clangers," which consisted of short films about a family of mouse-like creatures that live on a small moon-like planet.  They speak only in a whistled language, and only eat green soup, which is supplied by the Soup Dragon.  The Soup Dragons lineup for this album were Sean Dickson on vocals and guitar, Jim McCullough on backing vocals and guitar, Sushil K. Dade on bass, and Paul Quinn on percussion.  They started off as an indie-rock group, but switched to a more dance-rock oriented band when they were without a drummer and started using a drum machine on their second album.The group received some club play with their first indie-dance track called "Mother Universe," but their first big hit was "I'm Free," a fast paced cover of the Rolling Stones song.  They toured the U.S. for two years, and performed on both the David Letterman and Arsenio Hall late night shows.  The Soup Dragons would produce one more studio album after Hotwired, and would disband a year later in 1995.We think you will enjoy the early 90's rock-dance groove of this most successful album of the Soup Dragon's discography.PleasureIs everybody ready?  This first track on the album made it to number 69 on the Billboard 100, and number 14 in the Modern Rock charts.  It is about living your life - "Take it to the limit, live it to the full."Divine ThingThe big hit off the album made it to number 26 on the Billboard 100, and was a staple of the burgeoning stable of alternative rock stations in the early 90's.  It is an homage to Glenn Milstead, more famously known as Divine in John Waters movies.  The music video for this song is the first to display transgender and drug culture to be placed in daytime rotation in the USA. Sweet LayaboutThis is a bit deeper of a cut.  A layabout is a lazy person who is comfortable letting others do things for them.  "Well, hallelujah.  Why don't you sit there in your chair.  'Cause you ain't nothing but the Devil's clientele."MindlessThis track is a softer song that describes the initial infatuation of an early relationship.  You get mindless over the person and can't think of anything else.  "Jesus Christ took his time when inventing you, and Mother Nature couldn't leave our dream come true."   ENTERTAINMENT TRACK:I Gotcha by Joe Tex (from the motion picture "Reservoir Dogs")Quentin Tarantino's debut features what Tarantino would become famous for - lots of violence, and great music. STAFF PICKS:Jump Around by House of PainRob's staff pick dips into the hip-hop genre.  Everlast, DJ Lethal, and Danny Boy formed the band, and the song made it to number 3 in the U.S.  A lot of debate was created around what created the “scream” sound, with some thinking it comes from "Get Off" by Prince, and other's thinking it comes from Junior Walker and the All Stars.  The University of Wisconsin plays this in the fourth quarter to hype up the crowd.Jimmy Olsen's Blues by The Spin DoctorsBruce features a song inspired by the Superman comics.  Jimmy Olsen is the junior photographer.  Chris Barron was inspired to write this when sneaking into the Brown University cafeteria and seeing a girl who reminded him of Lois Lane.  The "pocket full of kryptonite" represents what is special or unique about you.Life Is A Highway by Tom CochraneBrian hits the road with former Red Rider front man Tom Cochrane.  This song encourages folks to "seize the day," and get motivated.  Cochrane wrote it after a visit to Africa, and seeing the poverty around him.  It is interesting that such a positive song came out of a close brush with poverty.  Rascal Flatts would cover the song for the movie "Cars."   At the Hundredth Meridian by the Tragically HipWayne stays in Canada with a group much more popular in the Great White North than in the U.S.  The hundredth meridian is considered a dividing line between east and west Canada.  The Hip stayed together from 1984 until 2017 when lead singer Gord Downie died of brain cancer. INSTRUMENTAL TRACK:Forever In Love by Kenny G.You can't go wrong with a saxophone - or can you?

Prince is one of the greatest artists of all time. ‘Jump Around' is one of the greatest songs of all time. Junior Walker was a musician. What do all these have in common? Prince may be owed some paper! Listen in as Jimmy B. Fearless and Wayne discuss this years long spider web of intrigue. 

Dermot talks with Johnny Bristol about being a producer, song writer and Motown artist. He spoke about writing songs for The Supremes, Junior Walker, and producing Johnny Mathis.

Our goal with The Vietnam War: The Music is to honor the fallen and the survivors with the music that got them through “just one more day”. Our shows are broadcast around the world. They say thank you & “welcome home” to all Vietnam Vets. ***** As we close season three, the theme is centered around a military cadence call, “Jody's Got Your Cadillac”. Cadences are used by soldiers during marching or running maneuvers. They are sometimes called “jody calls” or “jodies”, after Jody, a recurring character who figures in many traditional cadences; Jody refers to the man with whom a serviceman's wife/girlfriend cheats while he is deployed. Jody stays back home, drives the soldier's car, and gets the soldier's sweetheart while the soldier is stationed elsewhere. ******  ***** In this episode you'll hear two songs, by soldiers who served there. ******** One is Saigon Warrior by Saul Broudy (lead) & Robin Thomas (back-up vocal) **** SAIGON WARRIOR is a military folksong about rear echelon personnel. It descended from a British Army World War I song entitled "The Lousy Lance-Corporal." It circulated widely in Southeast Asia in both Army and Air Force tradition. *****SAUL BROUDY served as a platoon leader, in the 96th Quartermaster Battalion, 1st Logistical Command, at Phan Rang, 1966-1967. *****The second song, GRUNT, was written & performed by in-country soldier Bill Ellis. This song is a detailed description of the "little things that mean a lot" in the daily life of the combat infantryman—mail from home, a drink of cool water, sharing what you have with your buddies. ***** BILL ELLIS was drafted out of a rock band in San Francisco in 1968. He became known as the "singing rifleman" of the First Cavalry Division. In March, 1969, he was pulled from field duty as a rifleman with A Company, 1st Battalion, Fifth Cavalry, and reassigned to Special Services. He toured the Cav area of operations, performing for grunts on the fire support bases. ***** Both are available on the CD “In Country: Folk Songs of Americans in the Vietnam War” (Rounder Records, https://store.rounder.com/) - - - - - - For a look at in-country soldier musicians, watch the video at: ***https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mLgkMqt_Bw-----Join the conversation on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008232395712    ------ or by email at dannymemorylane@gmail.com   ------ In this episode, you'll hear: -- 1)     Every Picture Tells a Story by Rod Stewart2)     Drive My Car by The Beatles3)     Welcome Home by Country Joe McDonald4)     Wanted (A Solid Gold Cadillac) by The Aquatones (w/ Lynne Nixon, vocals)5)     Who's Making Love by Johnnie Taylor6)     A Letter From Sherry by Dale Ward7)     Hoochie Coochie Man by The Allman Brothers Band8)     Wild One by BR5-499)     Saigon Warrior by Saul Broudy (lead) & Robin Thomas10) Bitch by The Rolling Stones11) Long Live Our Love by The Shangri-Las12) Kentucky Rain by Elvis Presley13) Have You Seen Her by The Chi-Lites14) When a Man Loves a Woman by Wolfman Jack15) You Can Have Her by The Righteous Brothers16) I Put A Spell On You by Creedence Clearwater Revival17) Please Mr. D.J. by Merle Haggard18) Stoned At The Jukebox by Hank Williams Jr.19) Requiem For The Masses by The Association20) The Devil Went Down To Georgia by The Charlie Daniels Band21) Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da by The Beatles22) Grunt by Bill Ellis23) Come See About Me by Junior Walker & The All Stars24) L.A. Woman by The Doors25) Talking Vietnam Blues by Phil Ochs26) A Worried Man by The Kingston Trio27) For The Good Times by Ray Price28) Folsom Prison Blues by Johnny Cash29) Little Girl Blue by Janis Joplin30) Did You Boogie (With Your Baby) by Flash Cadillac & The Continental Kids (w/ Wolfman Jack, narrating)31) Rock Bottom by Kenny Chesney32) Oh No Not My Baby by Maxine Brown33) (You're My) Soul And Inspiration by The Righteous Brothers34) One by George Jones & Tammy Wynette

Episode one hundred and thirty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Hear a Symphony” by the Supremes, and is the start of a three-episode look at Motown in 1965. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Rescue Me" by Fontella Bass. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this week, as too many of the songs were by the Supremes. For Motown-related information in this and other Motown episodes, I've used the following resources: Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound by Nelson George is an excellent popular history of the various companies that became Motown. To Be Loved by Berry Gordy is Gordy's own, understandably one-sided, but relatively well-written, autobiography. Women of Motown: An Oral History by Susan Whitall is a collection of interviews with women involved in Motown. I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover R&B by J. Andrew Flory is an academic look at Motown. The Motown Encyclopaedia by Graham Betts is an exhaustive look at the people and records involved in Motown's thirty-year history. How Sweet It Is by Lamont Dozier and Scott B. Bomar is Dozier's autobiography, while Come and Get These Memories by Brian and Eddie Holland and Dave Thompson is the Holland brothers'. And Motown Junkies is an infrequently-updated blog looking at (so far) the first 694 tracks released on Motown singles. Girl Groups by John Clemente contains potted biographies of many groups of the era. The Supremes biography I relied on most is The Supremes by Mark Ribowsky, which seems factually accurate but questionable in its judgments of people. I also used this omnibus edition of Mary Wilson's two volumes of autobiography. This box set contains everything you could want by the Supremes, but is extraordinarily expensive in physical form at the moment, though cheap as MP3s. This is a good budget substitute, though oddly doesn't contain “Stop in the Name of Love”. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Hi, this is Andrew. Between recording this episode and it going live, three great musicians, two of whom have been the subject of episodes of this podcast, sadly died. We lost Don Everly, Charlie Watts, and Tom T. Hall, and I just wanted to acknowledge them and their contributions to music before the episode starts. They'll all be missed. [theme music] Just a brief note before we start to say that this episode contains brief mentions of eating disorders, so if that might be a problem for you, check the transcript to make sure it's safe. Thanks. We've spent much of the last few months looking at the intersections of three different movements, each of which was important -- the influence of the Beatles and to a lesser extent the other Merseybeat bands, the influence of Bob Dylan and the folk and protest movement, and the British R&B guitar bands who were taking their interpretation of the sound of Chess Records back to the USA. But of course, while these guitar bands were all influencing everyone, they were also being influenced by the growth of soul, and in particular by Motown, and Motown's groups were among the few American acts who managed to keep having hits during the British Invasion. Indeed, 1965 was as much of a creative and commercial peak for the label as for the white guitar bands we've been looking at. So for the next few weeks we're going to move over to Detroit, and we're going to look at Motown. And this week and next week we're going to continue our look at the Holland-Dozier-Holland collaboration, and at the groups they were writing for. So today, we're going to look at the Supremes, at the career of the only Black act to seriously challenge the Beatles for chart dominance in the sixties and at the start of the inter-group rivalries that eventually took them down. We're going to look at "I Hear a Symphony” by the Supremes: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "I Hear a Symphony"] When we last looked at the Supremes, they had just had their second number one single. After having spent years being called "the no-hit Supremes" and recording third-rate material like "The Man With the Rock and Roll Banjo Band", they'd been taken on by Holland, Dozier, and Holland, Motown's new star songwriting team, and had recorded two songs written and produced by the team -- "Where Did Our Love Go?" and "Baby Love" -- both of which had reached number one. But there were already tensions in the group. Most notably, there was the tension between Florence Ballard and Diana Ross. Ballard had always considered herself the lead singer of the group, and almost everyone who knew the group at the time agreed that Ballard was the better singer. But Berry Gordy, the owner of Motown, thought that Ross was the member of the group who had actual star potential, and insisted that she be the lead vocalist on everything the Supremes cut. At first, this didn't matter too much -- after all, no matter who the lead singer on the records was, they were having the huge hits they'd always dreamed of -- but it inevitably led to friction within the group. But in late 1964, at least, everyone was on the same page. Berry Gordy, in particular, was delighted by the group's continued success -- they had been the *only* act other than the Beatles or Bobby Vinton to have more than one number one on the pop charts in 1964 -- and by the end of the year, they had released their third, "Come See About Me". "Come See About Me" actually got released only a month after "Baby Love", before the latter had even reached the top of the charts, and it seems like a ridiculous idea to release another single so close to that one. But it came out so early to make sure the Supremes had the hit with it. Because a soundalike had come out on Wand Records even before the Supremes' single came out. A fourteen-year-old girl called Nella Dodds had decided that she could sing quite a bit like Diana Ross, and since the Supremes were the biggest female group in the country at this point, she had a chance at being a star, too. She'd auditioned for Wand by singing along with the whole of the first Supremes album, and Wand Records had decided that she sounded enough like Ross that it was worth a shot putting out a single by her. They chose "Come See About Me", which had been released as an album track on that album, and put out this: [Excerpt: Nella Dodds, "Come See About Me"] Dodds' version of the track was cut to be a soundalike, and was so similar to the Supremes version that it's actually quite easy to cut between the two records. You can hear the joins, but they're *spookily* similar: [Excerpt: The Supremes and Nella Dodds, "Come See About Me", alternating phrases] That wasn't the only time a Holland-Dozier-Holland production would be copied wholesale -- we'll hear another, slightly less blatant, example later this episode. As Dodds' single started to rise up the charts, Berry Gordy got furious. If the record sounded good enough to be a hit single, his label was going to have the hit with it, and so the Supremes' version of "Come See About Me" was rush-released. It went to number one, and Nella Dodds vanished into obscurity. The group having three number one hits in a row focused everyone's minds, and Gordy held a meeting with Holland, Dozier, and Holland, and told them that from that point on the Supremes had to be their number one priority. They should drop everything they were doing and concentrate on making Supremes hits while the Supremes were having their moment of success. And so of course they did just that -- and in January 1965 they recorded the album which would contain the Supremes' fourth number one in a row: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "Stop! In the Name of Love"] The story of how "Stop! In the Name of Love" was conceived tells us a lot about the kind of life that the people at Motown were living, now they were all successful and making a great deal of money. The way Lamont Dozier tells the story, his marriage had fallen apart, and he was sleeping with multiple women, some of whom thought they were the only one. Dozier would regularly head to a motel near Hitsville for some of these assignations, and one day while he was there with one of his women, another one tracked him down. The woman he was with made her escape, and Dozier tried to make excuses, claiming he had just got very tired at work and booked a motel room to have a rest so he wouldn't have to go all the way home. His girlfriend didn't believe this rather transparent lie, and started throwing things at him. Dozier started yelling at her to stop it, and eventually mangled the phrase "Stop in the name of the law", shouting instead "Stop in the name of love!" Dozier immediately saw this line as the basis of a song, and his burst of inspiration amused the woman, who started laughing. It defused the situation, and led to a hit record. [Excerpt: The Supremes, "Stop! In the Name of Love"] Indeed, Dozier wasn't the only one whose experiences made up part of the lyrics for the song. All three of Holland, Dozier, and Holland were having complex love lives and going through the breakup of their first marriages. Eddie Holland has said that he used his own experiences in that regard in writing the lyrics to that song. All three men were having affairs with multiple women, but two of those affairs were important in their working lives -- Brian Holland was dating Diana Ross, while Lamont Dozier was seeing Mary Wilson. According to Eddie Holland, Florence seemed to think that this meant that the  remaining members of their respective trios should also pair up, but Holland didn't think that he should get involved, given Florence's mental fragility and his own promiscuous nature. Both Lamont and Brian later split up with their respective Supremes partners, but luckily everyone was professional enough that they were all able to continue working together. After "Stop! In the Name of Love" came "Back in Your Arms Again", making five number ones in a row for the combination of the Supremes and Holland-Dozier-Holland. On top of this, Holland-Dozier-Holland were busily making hits for the Four Tops, who we'll hear more about next week, and for the Isley Brothers, as well as writing odd songs for other artists like Marvin Gaye. To put this into perspective, at this point the *only* act ever to have had five number ones in a row on the US charts was Elvis, who had done it twice. The Beatles were about to hit their fifth, and would eventually get to six number ones in a row -- they had eleven in the UK, but many more Beatles singles were released in the US than in the UK, so there were more opportunities to break the streak. That was the company the Supremes were in. It's important to stress how big the Supremes, Motown, and Holland-Dozier-Holland were in 1965. There were twenty-seven Billboard number one singles that year, and six of them were from Motown -- compared to five from the Beatles and two from the Rolling Stones. Of those six number one Motown singles, five of them were Holland-Dozier-Holland productions, and four were by the Supremes. Of course, number one records are not the only measure of success in the music industry, but they are definitely a measure. By that measure, the Supremes were bigger than anyone except the Beatles, but this led to a certain amount of dissatisfaction among the rest of the Motown acts. They were being told that a rising tide would lift all boats, but the way they saw it, everyone who wasn't a Supreme was being ignored, unless they were named Smokey Robinson or Marvin Gaye. The Vandellas, for example, thought that records like "Dancing in the Street", which made number two in the charts, could have easily made number one had they been given the same kind of promotion as the Supremes. This was, to them, particularly evident when it came to the first British tour of the Motortown Revue, in March 1965. While the various Motown acts were on tour in the UK, the opportunity came up to do a TV special for Granada TV, presented by Dusty Springfield, who was the driving force behind the special. Springfield was particularly an admirer of Martha and the Vandellas, and got Martha to duet with her on her own hit "Wishin' and Hopin'": [Excerpt: Dusty Springfield and Martha Reeves, "Wishin' and Hopin'"] Yet while all the acts on the tour -- the Vandellas, Stevie Wonder, the Miracles, and the Temptations -- got their moments in the spotlight on the show, the Supremes did seem to dominate it, with more songs than any of the other acts. This was partly just good sense -- Motown was only just starting to have a presence in the UK, and to the extent it did the Supremes were almost the only Motown artists that had made any impression on the public consciousness at all at this point -- but it was also because Berry Gordy was becoming increasingly infatuated with Diana Ross, and they finally consummated their relationship in Paris at the end of the tour. Now, it is important to note here that this is always portrayed in every book about the group or Motown as "scheming Diana Ross used her feminine wiles to seduce hapless Berry Gordy, who was helplessly under her spell.” That's certainly one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that Berry Gordy was a thirty-five-year-old married man sleeping with an employee of his who had only just turned twenty-one, and who had been his employee for several years. I wouldn't mention any of this at all -- I despise the gossiping nature of much music writing -- except that it is impossible to read anything at all about the Supremes without getting a take on the group's career from this point on that has Ross using her sexuality to manipulate Gordy in order to fulfil her own scheming ambition. I think there's no question at all that Ross was ambitious, but I think most of the narrative about her is rooted in misogyny, and a very deep misunderstanding of the power dynamics in her relationship with Gordy. But there is absolutely no question that Gordy saw the Supremes as the most important act on Motown -- and that he saw Diana Ross as the most important part of the Supremes. And decisions made for the benefit of Ross were not always decisions that would benefit her colleagues. For example, at this point in time, the fashion was for women to be very curvy, rather than thin. Ross was extremely thin, and so the group's outfits were padded. This wasn't such a problem for Mary, who had her own issues about a lack of curves, but for Florence, who was bigger than the other two, it was humiliating, because it made her look bigger than she was, and there was no question of the padding being removed from her clothes -- the decisions were being made on the basis of what made Diana look good. Of course, fashions change, and with the rise of the supermodel Twiggy, suddenly a more emaciated look became popular, so the group were able to drop the padding -- but that still left Florence as the unfashionable-looking one. She became deeply insecure about this, though she would hide it with humour -- after Twiggy became popular, there was a scripted bit of the show where Ross would say "thin is in", and Florence ad libbed "but fat is where it's at!", and her ad lib became part of the routine. After the Supremes' run of five number one singles, it might have seemed that they were invulnerable, but in September 1965, "Nothing But Heartaches" came out, and it only made number eleven: [Excerpt: The Supremes, “Nothing But Heartaches”] For any other act, this would be a major hit, but for an act that had had five number one hits in a row, it was a failure, and it was treated as such, even though it sold over a million copies. Berry Gordy actually sent out a memo to all Motown creative staff, saying "We will release nothing less than top ten product on any artist: and because the Supremes' world-wide acceptance is greater than the other artists, on them we will only release number-one records". Of course, that was easier said than done -- every songwriter and producer wanted only to be making number one records, after all, but it's a symptom of the attitudes that were showing up at Motown by this point -- a number eleven hit for a group that two years earlier had been laughed at for being the "no hit Supremes" was now regarded as a failure to be punished, while major successes were just to be considered the norm. But it's also a tribute to how successful Holland, Dozier, and Holland were by this point that the next Supremes single was, once again, another number one hit. The inspiration for "I Hear a Symphony" came from Dozier thinking about how characters in films often had musical motifs on the soundtrack, and how ridiculous it would be if people in real life walked around with their own musical accompaniments. But it might also be that the writing trio had something else in mind. In August, just over a month before the recording of "I Hear a Symphony", a girl group called The Toys had released a single called "A Lover's Concerto": [Excerpt: The Toys, "A Lover's Concerto"] That song had been based on a piece of music usually incorrectly attributed to Bach, but actually by the Baroque composer Christian Petzold, and had been written by Sandy Linzer and Denny Randell, two writers who usually wrote for the Four Seasons, whose four-on-the-floor style was very similar to that of Holland, Dozier, and Holland. Linzer and Randell had even put in a little nod to the Supremes in the song. Compare the intro of the Toys record: [Excerpt: The Toys, "A Lover's Concerto"] With the intro from "Stop! In the Name of Love!": [Excerpt: The Supremes, "Stop! In the Name of Love!"] The section from eight through sixteen seconds on the Toys record is so close to the section from eleven through nineteen seconds on the Supremes one that you can play them almost together -- I had to do a tiny splice five seconds in here because the musicians on the Toys record don't have the perfect timing of the Funk Brothers and drifted by 0.1 seconds, but I hope you can see just how close those two sections are: [Excerpt: The Supremes and The Toys together] See what I mean? The Toys' record reached number two on the charts -- not a number one, but better than the most recent Supremes record. So it might well be that Holland, Dozier, and Holland were also thinking about the Toys' record when they came to make their new one -- especially since it had contained a little nod to their own work. And the odd thing about that section is it's not integral to the Toys record at all -- it's just there, I think, as a nod and a wink to anyone listening for it. Certainly, Holland, Dozier, and Holland were aware of the Toys record -- they had the Supremes cut a cover version of it for the I Hear a Symphony album. That album also contained the Supremes' version of the Beatles' "Yesterday" -- another hit which had, of course, referenced classical music, with its string quartet backing. One hit record referencing classical music might be a fluke, but two was a pattern, and so whatever the writers' later claims about the inspiration, it's reasonable to suspect that at the very least they were paying close attention to this pattern. The lyrics to "I Hear a Symphony" were written in a rush. The original plan had been for the group to release a song called "Mother Dear" as their next single, but then Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier came up with the track and title for "I Hear a Symphony", and knew it would be a winner. There was one problem, though -- the single needed to be out relatively quickly, and the Supremes were travelling to the UK in two days' time. When the instrumental track had been cut, Brian Holland phoned his brother, waking him up, and telling him they needed a set of lyrics for the very next day. Holland was actually already a little burned out that day -- he'd just been working on "Road Runner" by Junior Walker and the All-Stars, which was intended as the follow-up to their big hit "Shotgun": [Excerpt: Junior Walker and the All-Stars, "(I'm a) Road Runner"] At least, Holland says that was what he was working on, though it came out five months later – but Motown often delayed releases by minor acts. "Road Runner" was not normal Holland-Dozier-Holland material, it had been difficult to write, and not only that they'd discovered that Walker couldn't play the saxophone part in the same keys that he could sing the song, so they'd had to varispeed the track in order to get both parts down. Holland had had a tiring day, and had just gone to sleep when the phone had rung. Brian Holland had a copy of the backing track couriered over to Eddie in the middle of the night, and Eddie stayed up all night writing the lyrics, eventually finishing them in the studio while he was teaching Diana Ross the song: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "I Hear a Symphony"] Because it had to be recorded in such a hurry, the Supremes were in London when the mixing was finalised -- as was Berry Gordy, who normally ran Motown's quality control meetings, the meetings in which the executives and producers all checked all the work that was going out to make sure it met the company's standards. Normally, if Gordy was out of town, Brian Holland would take over the meeting, but a new Supremes single was important enough to Gordy that he made an international phone call to the meeting and listened to the record over the phone. Gordy insisted that the vocal was too high in the mix, but Brian Holland pushed back, and Gordy eventually agreed to let the record go out as it was, despite his reservations. He agreed that he had been wrong when the record went to number one. It wouldn't start another streak of number ones, but the next eight singles would all go top ten, and the group would have another six number ones, including a streak of four in late 1966 and early 1967. There were other records, as well -- Christmas singles (which don't tend to get counted as "real singles", because Christmas records got put on their own special charts), and promotional efforts, like "Things Are Changing For The Better". That was a song that Brian Wilson and Mike Love of the Beach Boys had originally written for the Ronettes, under the title "Don't Hurt My Little Sister", but while Spector had cut a backing track, the song hadn't been considered worth the Ronettes adding their vocals, and the Beach Boys had cut their own version as an album track: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Don't Hurt My Little Sister"] But a year later, the Advertising Council wanted a public information song, to promote the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the subsequent Voting Rights Act of 1965, two landmark acts that between them meant that for the first time discrimination against Black people wasn't legal. They turned to Spector to come up with something, and Spector, not wanting to waste a hit on them, came up with some new lyrics for the unused backing track, using the various slogans the Advertising Council wanted. Spector got his assistant Jerry Riopelle to finish the track off, and three versions were cut with different vocals over the same backing track. Riopelle produced a version with the Blossoms on vocals, another version was performed by the white pop group Jay and the Americans, and finally Motown put out a version with the Supremes singing over Spector's track. It's not the greatest track ever recorded or anything, but it is the only collaboration between the three biggest American hit-makers of the early sixties -- the Beach Boys, Spector, and the Supremes -- even if they didn't actually work together on it, and so "Things Are Changing For The Better" is interesting as a capsule of American pop music in 1965: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "Things Are Changing For The Better"] But Gordy had plans for the Supremes that involved them moving away from being merely pop stars, and the title of “I Hear a Symphony” worked well for Gordy's plans. Like Sam Cooke before them, he wanted them to move into the more lucrative middle-class white market, and like Sam Cooke that meant playing the Copacabana. We talked a little about the Copacabana -- or the Copa as it was universally known -- in the episode on "A Change is Gonna Come", but it's hard to get across now what an important venue it was. It was a mob-controlled nightclub in New York, and while it was only a nightclub, not a huge-capacity venue, headlining there was considered a sign that an act had made it and become part of the elite. If you could headline at the Copacabana in the early sixties, you were no longer a transitory pop act who might be gone tomorrow, you were up there with Tony Bennett and Sammy Davis Jr and Martin and Lewis. Of course, that whole showbusiness world has largely gone now, and the entertainment industry was going through massive changes in the early sixties that would soon make whether an act had headlined at the Copa as irrelevant to their future prospects as where they had gone to school, but nobody at the time knew that the changes that were happening -- thanks in large part to labels like Motown -- were going to be lasting ones, rather than just fads. So Gordy decided that his flagship group were going to headline at the Copa -- even though he had to agree to a deal which meant that for their initial three-week residency  the group members only made sixty dollars a show each before expenses. And they were going to do a "classy" show. Yes, they would include a few of the hits, but most of the songs would be things like "Somewhere" from West Side Story, the Barbra Streisand song "People" -- which would be Florence's one lead vocal in the show -- the Guy Lombardo song "Enjoy Yourself, It's Later Than You Think", and of all things "Rock-a-bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody": [Excerpt: The Supremes, "Rock-A-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody"] The rest of the repertoire was show tunes, a gender-swapped version of "The Girl From Ipanema" retitled "The Boy From Ipanema", a parody of Roger Miller's "King of the Road" titled "Queen of the House", and a medley of Sam Cooke's hits. Other than the Cooke material and the brief run-throughs of their own number ones, the setlist was tailored entirely for the Copa's clientele, which barely overlapped at all with the Motown audience. The Copa residency was a triumph, and led to the Supremes making regular appearances at the venue for seven years, but it came at a great cost to the group members. Ross was so stressed she lost a stone of her already low weight, the first sign of the anorexia which she would deal with for many years to come. Meanwhile, Florence had to miss a chunk of the rehearsals as she became seriously ill with the flu, though she got herself well enough to make the opening night. And while it was what Berry Gordy had been working towards for years, it couldn't have come at a worse time for him personally -- his elder sister Loucye died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage shortly before the residency, and her funeral was actually the morning of the opening night. The opening night went exactly as Gordy had planned, except for one ad-lib -- during the song "You're Nobody 'Til Somebody Loves You", after Ross sang the line “But gold won't bring you happiness,” Florence interjected a joking line -- "Now wait a minute, honey. I don't know about all that." The audience loved her ad-lib -- Sammy Davis Jr., who was in the audience, yelled out "All right, girl! You tell it like it is!" -- and the line got added as a regular part of the performance: [Excerpt: The Supremes, “You're Nobody 'Til Somebody Loves You”] along with a rather less fun bit where Florence would mention "little old me", and Ross would snarkily respond "Little?" But even though it worked, Gordy was furious, partly just because he was understandably in a bad mood after his sister's funeral, partly because it was a deviation from the carefully-scripted performance, and partly because it was a moment in the spotlight for someone other than Diana Ross. As retaliation, a couple of days later he had Harvey Fuqua tell the group that they were dropping "People" -- Florence's only lead vocal -- from the set because there were too many show tunes. Then, a week or so later, "People" was added back to the set, but with Ross singing lead. (Mary Wilson had also asked to have her own lead vocal in the set, but Gordy had just looked at her sadly and said "Mary, you know you can't sing".) Florence was devastated. She was already drinking too much, but that escalated after the Copa engagement. Even though the group had never been as close as many groups are, they had all genuinely attempted to create a bond with each other, even all moving on to the same street. But now, that physical closeness just became an opportunity for the women to note the comings and goings at each other's houses and pass snarky comment on it. Ballard was fast becoming considered a liability by the powers that be at Motown, and even the existence of the Supremes was starting to be seen as something that was merely a hindrance for Diana Ross' career, rather than them being seen for what they were -- a massively successful group, not just a lead singer and her backing vocalists. Florence wasn't very long for the group, and when we next look at them, we'll no longer be looking at the Supremes, but at Diana Ross and the Supremes...

One of the most recognized and sought-after saxophonists, two-time GRAMMY nominee Mindi Abair has been electrifying audiences with her dynamic live performances and sax prowess since her debut album in 1999. No one since Junior Walker has brought saxophone and vocals in one package to the forefront of modern music. In 2014, Mindi received her first GRAMMY nomination in the Best Pop Instrumental Album category, followed by a 2015 GRAMMY nomination for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album for her solo LP Wild Heart featuring the late Gregg Allman, Joe Perry, Trombone Shorty, Booker T. Jones, Keb' Mo', and Max Weinberg. You might know her as the featured saxophonist on American Idol, sitting in with Paul Shaffer on The Late Show with David Letterman and The Roots on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, or as the first solo saxophonist touring with Aerosmith since 1973. She has garnered twelve #1 radio hits in the jazz and blues world, two #1 spots on the Billboard Contemporary Jazz Album Chart and two #3 spots on the Billboard Blues Album Chart. In 2018, Mindi Abair and The Boneshakers won 8 Independent Blues Awards including Artist of the Year and Best Blues Song fan award for the Independent Music Awards for “Pretty Good For A Girl” featuring Joe Bonamassa. They won the 2019 LA Critics Award for Best Holiday Album for All I Got For Christmas Is The Blues. And in 2019, 2020 and 2021 she was nominated by the Blues Music Awards as the Best Instrumentalist: Horn In After the Encore Volume 5: Who Runs The World? We explore the music industry through 4 women-centric perspectives. 2 Grammy Nominated Veterans & 2 Up-and-Coming Future Stars. We examine how the industry has changed over the years, and what has stayed the same. Tune in to find out how these women answer the questions essential to the essence of the podcast: 1. What does music mean to you? 2. How do you quantify success? 3. And what happens after the music fades? After the Encore is a long-form, career retrospective podcast that takes you behind the music of some of your favorite artists. After the Encore is also a "2020 Music Podcast of the Year" award nominee over at PodcastAwards.com The official Spotify playlist for Volume 5 can be found here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/64DiPTFTycDK5w99bIrTGI?si=2F0mYMqOSA65O7fmqTyfGw 'After the Encore' is powered by Roberts Media Group. For more programming and advertisement opportunities, please visit www.robertsmediagroup.co --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/after-the-encore/message

Episode 115: We've heard about the longest guitar and piano solos of the 1980's, and in this episode, Joe and Kari focus on the sax! Take a deep breath and dive right in! Grover Washington and legend Junior Walker make an appearance, as well as some artists you may not expect. // Just a Bit Outside -- That segment that looks at songs that peaked outside the top 40 is back, with a couple of names that are new to the podcast. Did they deserve to go all the way? You be the judge!

He has the Sax Sound of the Sixties... and he is our artist in this week's Cardio Chronicles...

Alvin “Seeco” Patterson was the percussionist in Bob Marley and the Wailers, and one of Marley's closest confidants and friends.  He took Alvin Patterson as a stage name, and acquired the nickname “Seeco” as a bastardisation of his birth name Francisco. “Willy Pep” As a child,  As a young man, Patterson found work as a bauxite miner. In 1957, Patterson attempted to emigrate to the United States in search of better work.  Patterson first met a teenage Bob Marley, who was fifteen years Patterson's junior, and living in the same Trench Town slums. Marley took note of Patterson because of his famed cricket bowling abilities, and began to follow Patterson around, in search of both cricket skills, and likely also a fatherly figure.As the Wailers rose in prominence on the scene, Patterson was thrown from the room and lost his Jamaican shoes in the process. Patterson began to contribute percussion tracks to a number of Wailers cuts. His first known contribution was on the June, 1967 session which produced “Lyrical Satyrical I” and “This Train”, and was released on the Wailers' own Wail N Soul M label. Junia Walker born in Jamaica His infant school at Forester's Hall  doubled as a dance-hall for Jamaica's two premier sound systems Sir Coxsone's Downbeat and Duke Reid The Ruler.  Junia grew up in Carib from 4 years-old watching live shows with foreign artists from Fats Domino to Stevie Wonder and the cream of Jamaica talent including The Blues Busters, Jimmy Cliff and the Maytals. After high school he worked at Barclays Bank, Harbour St., Kingston where he started Black Equinox Disco playing at month-end bank parties and other Barclay Bank functions. This started a interaction between Junia and numerous artists, musicians and producers to secure new releases for his Disco, mainly from the Wailers Tuff Gong store