Podcasts about laboe

Jetzt gut einen Monat her (Stand: Anfang Mai 2025), da ist der Chef des Lachmöwen-Theaters, Jan Steffen, in Kiel mit dem Bundesverdienstkreuz ausgezeichnet worden. Die Lachmöwen in Laboe - eine sehr erfolgreiche plattdeutsche Bühne an der Kieler Förde mit rund 12.000 Besuchern im Jahr und einer guten Portion Enthusiasmus. Der Kollege Jan Graf im Gespräch mit Lachmöwen-Chef Jan Steffen. Ab sofort im SH Schnack in voller Länge auf NDR.de und in der ARD Audiothek.

-

Lokale Krimis aus der Nachbarschaft liegen voll im Trend. Eine Entwicklung, die Jan Graf sehr gern auf die Schippe nimmt. Hier gibt es mehr Plattdeutsch: Podcast: Die plattdeutsche Morgenplauderei "Hör mal 'n beten to" als kostenloses Audio-Abo für Ihren PC: https://www.ndr.de/wellenord/podcast3096.html Die Welt snackt Platt: Alles rund um das Thema Plattdeutsch: https://www.ndr.de/plattdeutsch

The Legendary Art Laboe Connection by Dj Guero

On ( Apple Podcast ) & (SoundCloud) & (Amazon Podcast) Completely free...Don't Forget To Subscribe,Follow,Like,Share & Tell a Friend and.....Click on your Notification for the NEW Uploads have a Great Day. New Music Every Friday

“Legend” is a word that is often too lightly doled out, but today we proudly present an interview with a bonafide LEGEND. Art Laboe is a broadcasting icon who was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2012. This honor was rightly bestowed as he was the first DJ to play Rock and Roll on the west coast airwaves, smashed color lines by presenting mixed race concerts and playlists, coined the term “Oldies but Goodies,” invented the concept of the compilation album and continues to bring joy to generations of radio listeners. At 87 years young, Art is a sprightly figure, holding one of the top rated slots in Southern California radio, one of the world's most important markets. He graces the airwaves six nights a week with his Art Laboe Connection program. The show's format is an exception amongst commercial radio, emphasizing a direct connection with the community. Throughout each show he takes dedications from listeners and sends their songs and kisses over the airwaves to loved ones, many of whom are incarcerated. His radio show is a pipeline through which the emotions and wishes of listeners are transmitted. The songs heard on the Art Laboe Connection are a refreshing and heartfelt break from the glossy buzz flooding much of the dial. While Art plays tried and trued favorites every show his playlist varies widely night to night based on to listener requests and his mood. On any given episode you're likely to hear rare doo-wop, R&B or sweet soul cuts played nowhere else. We were honored that Art Laboe opened up his studio and schedule to graciously allow us this interview. Scholar and dublab board member Josh Kun sat down with Art at his Original Sound Studio on Sunset Boulevard to revisit the history of his illustrious career and explore the dynamic of his nightly connection with listeners cruising the California streets or listening close for the voice of a loved one. On Saturday, August 5th, 2023, we pay tribute to Art Laboe at Grand Performances. More details here: https://www.dublab.com/events/111367/a-tribute-to-art-laboe --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/dublab-inconversation/support

As en Teltplatz schall dat Dack vun de Kark in Laboe utsehn. Annere meent as en Anker, hett Andrea Ring höört.

In dieser Episode spreche ich über die Bücher, die ich im Lesemonat Mai 2023 gelesen habe: „It happened one summer“ von Tessa Bailey* „Gameshow - Der Preis der Gier“ von Franzi Kopka* „City of Ghosts - Der Bote aus der Dunkelheit“ von V. E. Schwab „Beschütze sie“ von Laura Dave* „Verliebt in deine schönsten Seiten“ von Emily Henry* „Lore Olympus 2“ von Rachel Smythe „Die Stunde, in der ich zu glauben begann“ von Wally Lamb „Die Toten von Laboe“ von Arnd Rüskamp* „I‘m glad my mom died“ von Jennette McCurdy* „Nach dem Sommer“ und „Ruht das Licht“ von Maggie Stiefvater „Am Ende sterben wir sowieso“ von Adam Silvera „Stolen Time - Zwischen den Zeiten“ von Danielle Rollins „Ein fast perfekter Liebesroman“ von Lyssa Kay Adams Insgesamt: 5.667 Seiten/Minuten 14 (6 Bücher, 8 Hörbücher, 0 eBooks) Lesevorhaben: * 2 Titel aus „12 für 2023“ * 3 Reihen (weiter)gelesen * 0 Bücher Projekt AutorInnen * 1 Buch SuB-Senioren Aktuelle SuB-Höhe: Bücher: 121 Hörbücher: 91 eBooks: 97 Was habt ihr im Lesemonat Mai gelesen und gehört? Eure Ilana *Das Buch wurde mir als Rezensionsexemplar vom Verlag oder dem Autor/der Autorin zur Verfügung gestellt. Ich benutze Affiliate Links von Amazon.de, d.h. ich erhalte eine Provision, wenn ihr sie klickt und Produkte bestellt. Näheres siehe “Impressum und Rechtliches“.

In de lütte Kark vun Laboe hangt en smuck Votivschipp. Man worüm hebbt de egentli Kanonen, fraagt Andrea Ring.

Dieses Mal spreche ich über die Neuzugänge, die seit April 2022 auf meinem Stapel ungelesener Bücher eingezogen sind - und über weitere Neuzugänge, die als Buch oder Hörbuch im weiteren Verlauf von 2023 zu mir stoßen werden. Dabei erwähne ich: „A curse of Dusk and Dawn“ von Anna-Sophie Caspar „A magic steeped in poison“ von Judy I. Lin „Air Awoken“ von Elise Kova „Alma Obscura - The Secret Society of Styx“ von Bonnie Eldritch „Am Ende sterben wir sowieso“ von Adam Silvera „American Crown 2“ von Katharine McGee „An ocean full of secrets“ und „An ocean full of lies“ von Hanna Frost „Atlas - Die Geschichte von Pa Salt“ von Lucinda Riley/Harry Whittaker* „Aurora“ und „Laurelin“ von Caroline Brinkmann „Beschütze sie“ von Laura Dave* „Böses Licht“ von Ursula Poznanski* „Bullet Train“ von Kotaro Isaka „Camp“ von LC Rosen „Cinderella ist tot“ von Kalynn Bayron „City of Ghost“-Trilogie von Victoria Schwab „Claim the Stars“ -Trilogie von Brandon Sanderson „Cold Case Academy - Ein mörderisches Spiel“ von Jennifer Lynn Barnes „Dark and Shallow Lies“ von Ginny Myers Sain „Das Reich der Asche„ und „Das Reich der Klingen“ von Victoria Aveyard „Dead Romantics“ von Ashley Poston* „Der dunkelste aller Zauber“ von Margaret Rogerson „Der dunkle Schwarm“ und „Der dunkle Schwarm - Der stille Planet“von Marie Graßhoff „Der Hexenzirkel Ihrer Majestät - Das begabte Kind“ sowie „Der Hexenzirkel Ihrer Majestät - Die falsche Schwester“ von Juno Dawson „Der mexikanische Fluch“ von Silvia Moreno-Garcia „Die Letzte macht das Licht aus“ von Bethany Clift „Die Saphirkrone“ und „Dornenthron“ von Jennifer Estep „Die schlafenden Geister des Lake Superior“ von Ben Aaronovitch* „Die theoretische Unwahrscheinlichkeit der Liebe„ und „Das irrationale Vorkommnis von Liebe“ von Ali Hazelwood „Die Tochter des Doktor Moreau“ von Silvia Morena Garcia „Die Toten von Laboe“ von Arnd Rüskamp* „Doppelt geliebt hält besser“ und „Auf dich war ich nicht vorbereitet“ von Anna Bell „Ein Schloss aus Silber und Scherben“ von Arianne L. Silbers „Emerald Witches - Ahnenmond“ und „Emerald Witches - Seidenblume“ von Laura Labas „Emily Seymour - Totenbeschwörung für Anfänger“ von Jennifer Alice Jager „Everlove - Über das Ende der Welt hinaus“ von Tanya Byrne „Ex Hex“ von Erin Sterling „Falling in love was not the plan“ von Michelle Quach „Gallant“ von Victoria Schwab „Gameshow – Der Preis der Gier“ von Franzi Kopka* „Haie in Zeiten von Erlösern“ von Kawai Strong Washburn* „Hard Liquor“ und „Spicy Noodles“ von Marie Graßhoff „Heiress of Thunder and Lightning“ und „Descendant of Heat and Blaze“ von Johanna Danninger „Ich, Eleanor Oliphant“ von Gail Honeyman „If we were a movie“ von Kelly Oram „I'm Glad My Mom Died“ von Jennette McCurdy* „Interspace One“ von Andreas Suchanek „It happened one summer“ von Tessa Bailey* „Kingdom of the wicked - Der Fürst des Zorns“ und „Kingdom of the wicked - Die Königin der Hölle“ sowie „Kingdom of the wicked - Die Göttin der Rache“ von Kerri Maniscalco „Knights“-Reihe von Lena Kiefer „Lady of the Wicked 1 & 2“ von Laura Labas „Let me glow“, „Let me prove“, „Let me stay“, „Let me change“ von Francis Eden „Let‘s be wild“ von Anabelle Stehl und Nicole Böhm „Lightlark“ von Alex Aster „Lore“ von Alexandra Bracken „Lupus Noctis“ von Melissa C Hill „Marta schläft“ und „Liebes Kind“ von Romy Hausmann „Payback's a Witch“ von Lana Harper „Ravenhall - Verborgene Magie“ von Julia Kuhn „Red Rising“-Reihe von Pierce Brown „Rise of the Witch Queen - Beraubte Magie“ von Verena Bachmann „Schattenthron 2 - Bringerin des Lichts“ von Beril Kehribar „Schere, Stein, Papier“ von Alice Feeney* „Seasons of the Storm - Gaias Gefangene“ von Elle Cosimano „Sense of Danger“ von Jennifer Estep „Shadow Land“ von Rainer Wekwerth „Silver & Poison - Das Elixier der Lügen“ von Anne Lück „Sisters of the Sword - Wie zwei Schneiden einer Klinge“ und „Sisters of the Sword - Die Magie unserer Herzen“ von Tricia Levenseller „Spring Storm“-Reihe von Marie Graßhoff „Stolen Time - Zwischen den Welten“ von Danielle Rollins „The American Roommate Experiment“ und „Spanish Love Deception“ von Elena Armas „The Arc“ von Ben Oliver „The Atlas Six“ und „The Atlas Paradox“* von Olivie Blake „The darkest gold“ von Raven Kennedy „The Inheritance Games - Eine unbekannte Erbin“, „The Inheritance Games - Das Spiel geht weiter“ und „The Inheritance Games 3 - Der letzte Schachzug“ von Jennifer Lynn Barnes „The Lost Crown - Wer die Nacht malt“ und „The Lost Crown - Wer das Schicksal zeichnet“ von Jennifer Benkau* „The Other Side of the Sky“ von Amie Kaufman und Meagan Spooner „The Secret Book Club“-Reihe von Lyssa Kay Adams „The Stories We Write“, „The Secrets we Share“ und „The Love we Feel“ von Olivia Dade „The things we left unsaid“ von Simona Ahrnstedt „The Witches of the Silent Creek - Unendliche Macht“ und „The Witches of the Silent Creek - Zweites Herz“ von Ayla Dade „Tokyo Ever After“ und „Tokyo Dreaming“ von Emiko Jean „Treason of Thorns“ von Laura E. Weymouth „Unearthed“ und „Undying“ von Amie Kaufman und Meagan Spooner „Urlaubs-Lesebuch“ von Karoline Adler „Verliebt in deine schönsten Seiten“ von Emily Henry* „Wayfarer“-Reihe von Becky Chambers „Wer die Hölle kennt“ von Leigh Bardugo* „Wie der Falke fliegt“ von Maggie Stiefvater „Wir sind die Ewigkeit“ und „Ich bin dein Schicksal“ von Kira Licht „Zimt - Für immer von Magie berührt“ von Dagmar Bach* Welche Neuzugänge sind eure Favoriten, und welche sind auch bei euch eingezogen? Eure Ilana *Das Buch wurde mir als Rezensionsexemplar vom Verlag oder dem Autor/der Autorin zur Verfügung gestellt. Ich benutze Affiliate Links von Amazon.de, d.h. ich erhalte eine Provision, wenn ihr sie klickt und Produkte bestellt. Näheres siehe “Impressum und Rechtliches“.

Willkommen bei einer ganz besonderen Episode von bücherreich, einem Podcast größtenteils über Bücher! Ich blicke zurück auf mein Lesejahr 2022 mit Tops und Flops, Statistiken, meinen Lesevorsätzen für 2023 und einer Auswahl an Versprechern des Jahres ganz zum Schluss der Episode. Viel Spaß! Statistiken: Die beliebteste Episode dieses Jahr war „Mein Lesejahr 2021“ mit 465 Downloads, gefolgt von „Mein Lesemonat Dezember 2021“ (367 Downloads) und „Mein Lesemonat Februar 2022“ (359). Insgesamt wurden meine Folgen 75.590 Mal angehört (2021: 61.195; also sind 14.395 Downloads (1.200/Monat) 2022 hinzugekommen). Das umfasst auch alle „alten“ Episoden und ist echt der Hammer für mich. Danke für's fleißige (nachträgliche) Hören! 101 Bücher mit insgesamt 44.818 Seiten habe ich im Lesejahr 2022 gelesen. Im Schnitt sind das 444 (!) Seiten pro Buch, 8,4 Bücher pro Monat und 123 Seiten pro Tag. Ich konnte mich im Vergleich zum Vorjahr sowohl von der Gesamtzahl der gelesenen Bücher steigern, als auch an deren Seitenzahl - ich habe nämlich viele sehr lange Bücher in Angriff genommen. Im Vergleich zu 2021 sind es 3 Bücher und 4.368 Seiten mehr und ist damit auf dem Niveau von 2020, was ein super gutes Lesejahr für mich war. Bin also happy! Noch ein paar mehr Details: Die Bücher teilen sich auf auf 47 Hörbücher (46,5 %; Vorjahr: 40 / 40,8 %), 11 E-Books (10,9 %; Vorjahr: 3 / 3,1 %) und 43 „klassische“ Bücher (42,6 %; Vorjahr: 55/ 56,1 %). 38 Bücher/Hörbücher (37,6 %; Vorjahr: 44/ 45 %) im Jahr 2022 waren Rezensionsexemplare, und sage und schreibe 34 Bücher/Hörbücher (33,7 %) habe ich in Leserunden gelesen. Fremdsprachig waren leider nur 6 der gelesenen Bücher/Hörbücher, was 6 % ausmacht. 54 % meiner gelesenen Titel waren von Autorinnen, 41 % von Autoren und 5 % gemischt. 43 % waren frisch 2022 erschienen, 9 % aus dem Jahr 2021 und 7 % aus dem Jahr 2012. Die lesereichsten Monate nach Anzahl waren mit je 11 gelesenen Titeln der März und der Mai 2022, mit 6 beendeten Büchern war der April der am wenigsten lesereichste Monat. Von der gelesenen Seitenzahl her waren der Juli (4.472), der März (4.328) und der Mai (4.274) Vorreiter. Erreichen meiner Lese-Ziele 2022: Meine SuB-Abbau-Ziele habe ich nicht nur nicht erreicht, sondern auch draufgelegt. Meine Ziele lauteten: Von 103 auf 85 ungehörte Hörbücher runterkommen. Max. fünf ungelesene Bücher auf dem SuB haben. Meine SuB-Höhen lagen am 31.12.2021 bei 20 Büchern, 103 Hörbüchern und 105 eBooks (insg.: 228). Am 31.12.2022 liegen sie bei 102 Büchern, 100 Hörbüchern und 97 eBooks (299). Das lag daran, dass ich Licht am Ende des Bücher-SuB-Tunnels gesehen habe und hemmungslos Farbschnitt-Ausgaben gekauft habe. Außerdem habe ich mich wie geplant bei den Bücherhallen (Bibliothek in Hamburg) angemeldet und daraufhin meinen Hörbuch-SuB ebenfalls sträflich vernachlässigt.  Somit habe ich 82 (!) Bücher hinzubekommen, nur 3 Hörbücher abgebaut und bei den eBooks ebenfalls abgebaut, und zwar 8.  Von den „12 Büchern für 2022“ habe ich alle gelesen oder gehört. Beim Projekt „Autor(innen) lesen“ habe ich zwei von drei geplanten AutorInnen geschafft: Sowohl bei Jay Kristoff als auch bei Fredrik Backman bin ich nun völlig up to date, was ihre (deutschen) Veröffentlichungen anbelangt. Und das hat richtig Spaß gemacht! Von den Reihen, die ich 2022 beenden/weiterlesen möchte, habe ich mir den Großteil auf Wiedervorlage für 2023 gesetzt. Bis auf Cassandra Clares „City of...“-Reihe bin ich nirgendwo großartig vorangekommen. Das wiederum lag sicher großteils an der Leserunde dazu, die sich auch auf weitere Buchreihen innerhalb dieses Schattenjäger-Universums ausgeweitet hat. Die Bücher selbst fand ich leider nicht so toll, auch wenn mich der Humor positiv überrascht hat.  Die Leserunden haben alle sehr gut geklappt - so gut, dass sie mir mittlerweile in Fleisch und Blut übergegangen sind und ich sie mir nicht als explizites Lesevorhaben für 2023 setzen werde. Meine Lesevorsätze 2023: Folgende Ziele setze ich mir für 2023: SuB-Abbau: Mit dem hohen Bücher-SuB komme ich nicht gut zurecht (und habe auch nicht genug Platz im Regal!). Leider sind auch schon wieder etliche Titel vorbestellt, und auch ein monatliches Farbschnitt-Abo ist aktuell aktiv. Da hilft nur: Ganz viel weglesen und darüber hinaus nicht viel Neues kaufen. Bei den Büchern möchte ich bis Ende des Jahres auf max. 75 ungelesene Bücher kommen. Für die Hörbücher bleibe ich bei meinem letztjährigen Ziel, auf 85 ungehörte Hörbücher zu reduzieren. SuB-Senioren: Ich habe fünf haptische Bücher auf dem SuB, die ich seit (gefühlt) zehn Jahren mit mir herumschleppe. Diese Bücher möchte ich 2023 lesen - oder aussortieren. Am liebsten schon im ersten Halbjahr 2023, aber man muss ja nicht über-ambitioniert sein... Das sind: „The lies of Locke Lamora“ von Scott Lynch „Operation Red Sparrow“ von Jason Matthews „Die Monster von Templeton“ von Lauren Groff „Die Stunde, in der ich zu glauben begann“ von Wally Lamb „Die Zwillinge“ von Tessa deLoo Fortführung Projekt „Autor(innen) lesen“:  Das Projekt hat mir super viel Spaß gemacht! Dieses Jahr möchte ich die Autorin, die 2022 leider hinten über gefallen ist, nun wirklich lesen: Anne Freytag. Da dieses Projekt ein wenig dem SuB-Abbau entgegenwirkt (ich besitze nur ihr neuestes Buch), werde ich es für 2023 bei einer Autorin belassen, und dann 2024 neu schauen, ob ich mich mal an z.B. Brandon Sanderson, Riley Sager oder Anabelle Stehl heranwage. Reihen, die ich 2023 beenden/weiterlesen möchte:  „Die sieben Schwestern“ von Lucinda Riley, letzter Band „Outlander“ von Diana Gabaldon, ab Band 8 „Harry Hole“ von Jo Nesbo, ab Band 1 (Band 3 bereits gelesen) „The Diviners“ von Libba Bray, ab Band 2 „David Hunter“ von Simon Beckett, ab Band 2 „The secret book club“ von Lyssa Kay Adams, ab Band 1 „The Inheritance Games“ von Jennifer Lynn Barnes, ab Band 1 „Zeitenzauber“ von Eva Völler, ab Band 1 „The Loop“ von Ben Oliver, ab Band 1 „Wayfarers“ von Becky Chambers, ab Band 1 „Red Rising“ von Pierce Brown, ab Band 1 „The Wolves of Mercy Falls“ von Maggie Stiefvater, ab Band 1 Bei den privaten SuB-Abbau-Challenges, die ich im Lesegarten mitbetreue, werde ich 2023 bei der Jahreschallenge mitmachen (die betrifft dieses Jahr Länder/Regionen; für mich als Fantasyleserin schon schwierig genug). Bei den Monatschallenges werde ich eher aussetzen, um neben Leserunden, Jahreschallenge, Reziexemplaren und meinen Lesezielen 2023 flexibel genug zu bleiben, auch ein Stück weit nach Lust und Laune zu lesen. Es macht mir weiterhin wahnsinnig Spaß, zusammen in Teams zu lesen und sich auszutauschen - wer also Lust hat, sich dem Forum anzuschließen, ist herzlich willkommen! „12 für 2023“: Vorletztes Jahr habe ich euch zum ersten Mal auswählen lassen, welche Bücher von meinen SuBs (=Stapel ungelesener Bücher/Hörbücher/eBooks)  ich lesen soll. Für 2021 hatte ich euch 21 Titel auswählen lassen, und davon leider 8 doch nicht geschafft zu lesen. 2022 wollte ich nicht mehr so viele Titel auf der Liste haben und hatte mir 12 Titel auswählen lassen. Diese habe ich alle geschafft zu lesen, und daher sind dies nun die 12 Titel, die ihr mir für 2023 ausgesucht habt: „Ein fast perfekter Liebesroman“ von Lyssa Kay Adams „Die magische Gondel“ von Eva Völler „Achtsam morden am Rande der Welt“ von Karsten Dusse „Liebes Kind“ von Romy Hausmann „Red Rising“ von Pierce Brown „Das Dschungelbuch“ von Rudyard Kipling „The Loop“ von Ben Oliver „Der lange Weg zu einem kleinen zornigen Planeten“ von Becky Chambers „The Inheritance Games“ von Jennifer Lynn Barnes „Das Hexenmädchen (Kommissar Nils Trojan, #4)“ von Max Bentow „American Gods“ von Neil Gaiman „Nach dem Sommer (The Wolves of Mercy Falls, #1)“ von Maggie Stiefvater Flops 2022: „Die hellen Tage“ von Zsuzsa Bánk „Rabbits“ von Terry Miles* Die „Maze Runner“-Reihe von James Dashner „Die vielen Leben des Harry August“ von Claire North „#LondonWhisper - Als Zofe ist man selten online“ von Aniela Ley* „Vier Frauen und ein See“ von Viola Shipman* „Glaube mir“ von Alice Feeney* Tops 2022: Alles von Jay Kristoff, z.B. „Das Reich der Vampire“, die „Aurora“-Trilogie, die „Der Lotuskrieg“- oder die „Das Babel-Projekt“-Reihe „Malibu Rising“ von Taylor Jenkins Reid „The Witch Queen - Entfesselte Magie“ von Verena Bachmann „Kein Sommer ohne dich“ von Emily Henry* „Früher wird alles besser“ von Vanessa Mansini „Home - Haus der bösen Schatten“ von Riley Sager* „Der Anschlag“ von Stephen King „Der Report der Magd“ von Margaret Atwood „Der Gesang der Flusskrebse“ von Delia Owens Sehnlichst erwartete Neuerscheinungen 2023: Auf diese Bücher freue ich mich besonders im Lesejahr 2023, sodass sie jetzt schon auf meiner Rezi-Liste gelandet sind. Ich hoffe, ich erhalte diese Bücher als Rezi-Exemplare! (Reihenfolge folgt grob dem Erscheinungsdatum): „Mind Gap“ von Anne Freytag* „Night - Nacht der Angst“ von Riley Sager* „Stolen Time“ von Danielle Rollins „Let me prove“ und „Let me stay“ von Francis Eden „Ex Hex“ von Erin Sterling „The American Roommate Experiment – Die große Liebe findet Platz in der kleinsten Wohnung“ von Elena Armas „Wer die Hölle kennt“ von Leigh Bardugo* „Ein Schloss aus Silber und Scherben“ von Arianne L. Silbers „The Love we feel“ von Olivia Dade „Schere, Stein, Papier“ von Alice Feeney* „A magic steeped in poison“ von Judy I. Lin „Jetzt ist Sense“ von Hans Rath* „Das kleine Bücherdorf 2: Frühlingsfunkeln“ von Katharina Herzog* „Wir sind die Ewigkeit“ von Kira Licht „The Witches of Silent Creek 2“ von Ayla Dade „Spring Storm 2“ von Marie Graßhoff „Laurelin - Das Flüstern des Lichts“ von Caroline Brinkmann „Der Lotuskrieg: Last Stormdancer“ von Jay Kristoff „Dead Romantics“ von Ashley Poston* „Gameshow – Der Preis der Gier“ von Franzi Kopka* „Böses Licht“ von Ursula Poznanski* „Dornenthron“ von Jennifer Estep „It happened one summer“ von Tessa Bailey* „Tokyo Dreaming“ von Emiko Jean „The Atlas Paradox“ von Olivie Blake* „Atlas - Die Geschichte von Pa Salt“ von Lucinda Riley/Harry Whittaker* „Die Toten von Laboe“ von Arnd Rüskamp* „I'm Glad My Mom Died“ von Jennette McCurdy* „Zimt - Für immer von Magie berührt“ von Dagmar Bach* „The Lost Crown - Wer das Schicksal zeichnet“ von Jennifer Benkau* Wenn euch diese Episode gefallen hat, könnt ihr auf meiner Website www.buecherreich.net in die Vorjahres-Rückblicke von 2013-2021 reinhören. Wie war euer Lesejahr 2022? Besucht mich auf meiner FACEBOOK-Seite http://www.facebook.de/Podcastbuecherreich und erzählt mal oder hinterlasst mir hier einen Kommentar. Ich würde mich wahnsinnig freuen. :) Eure Ilana *Das Buch wurde mir als Rezensionsexemplar vom Verlag oder dem Autor/der Autorin zur Verfügung gestellt. Ich benutze Affiliate Links von Amazon.de, d.h. ich erhalte eine Provision, wenn ihr sie klickt und Produkte bestellt. Näheres siehe “Impressum und Rechtliches“.

In recognition of Art Laboe, includes Richie Valens, Earth Wind & Fire, Queen Latifah, War, Luther Vandross, Cannibal & The HeadHunters, Stephen Sanchez, Malo, Linda Ronstadt, El Chicano, Daryl Hall & John Oates, Average White Band, Tierra and Tower of Power.

We're in Kiel, Germany, with Tim Grossmann, the founder of the Explo App. We talk about the Laboe Naval Memorial, a U-boat submarine from World War II, and Kiel Week, the largest sailing event in Europe. Show notes are at https://WeTravelThere.com/kiel Acorns invests your spare change automatically on every purchase. Plus, you can earn Found Money by shopping at participating retailers. It's a great way to build up your travel fund. For a limited time, sign up at wetravelthere.com/acorns & we'll both earn $5.

In this episode special guest Marquis Williams the creator of quickies cookies joins Leo Gutierrez, Rodrigo Torres and Martin Rizo. #ArtLaboe #Chicano #ChicanoPodcast #LatinoPodcast #MexicanPodcast #Cholos #Vatos #LosAngeles

Reporter Jessica Kariisa is Ugandan American, and she's spent years listening to and writing about African pop music. When she moved to the Bay Area, she wasn't sure what she'd find in terms of an African music scene. Gentrification and the rising cost of living have pushed many Black communities out of cities in the Bay Area and beyond. But, after doing some digging, Jessica discovered an African music scene that's thriving.  And we pay tribute to the first DJ to play rock and roll on the West Coast. Art Laboe cultivated a devoted fan base over his nearly 80 years on the air. He trademarked the term “oldies but goodies,” and claimed to have invented the on-air dedication, where lovers send songs to each other over the airwaves. Laboe died earlier this month at age 97. We reprise host Sasha Khokha's interview with him from 2019.

In radio news, Salem is on a buying spree Audacy syndicates two of its radio shows. We let you know what is happening on the street, and conclude our look at the Nielsen Personal People Meter Ratings. This will be followed up by your calls and feedback, and those call letter and format changes. Next up we have a feature on Craig Way Texas sports announcer. Our classic aircheck remembers the late Art Laboe, and we travel to hear variety hits from WFKL FM from Rochester New York.

Art Laboe's voice filled Southern California airwaves for more than 70 years. But beyond being a beloved disc jockey whose show was eventually broadcast across the nation, Laboe spread a radical message of racial unity way before such messages became mainstream.The prolific “Oldies but Goodies” radio legend died Oct. 7 of pneumonia. His death comes at a time when we need his message of tolerance more than ever. So today, a tribute to Art Laboe. Read the full transcript here.Host: Gustavo ArellanoGuests: TimesOC feature writer Gabriel San RománMore reading:L.A.'s radio community pays tribute to Art Laboe, a legend and mentor: ‘End of an era'Column: I'm playing an Art Laboe album to counteract the noxious vibe from L.A. City HallArt Laboe dies; his ‘Oldies but Goodies' show ruled the L.A. airwaves

Previously unreleased interview with late great Los Angeles radio legend, Art Laboe who passed away on October 7, 2022. Stories and recollections from his life during the golden age of rock n' roll, helping end segregation in Los Angeles through his live shows in the city and much more. In Memoriam 1925-2022. Recorded in 2013. Thank You for supporting Bakotunes podcast! Please subscribe at all podcast outlets and follow Bakotunes socials!Instagram / Twitter / More LinksContact: mattomunoz@gmail.com

Hometown Radio 10/11/22 3:30p: Don Barrett shares the radio career of Art Laboe

This week we recap on the KushStock event that took place over the weekend in Adelanto. Both Guicho's 3D Creations & MJC were there promoting/vending. It was such a long day and it gave us so much to reflect on after we came home. We discuss our 2nd year wedding anniversary and I (Mary) almost forgot

Former Producer of The Bill Handel Show Lisa Erspamer joins the show to share information about her upcoming documentary about Gabby Giffords called "Gabby Giffords Won't Back Down" that will be released on CNN on November 13th. Legendary DJ Art Laboe has passed away at the age of 97 - we remember him. And edible cities are growing throughout the U.S., but what are they?

Live Tuesday October 11, 2022 @ 8:30 AM Podcast broadcasting live with G, Shima, J, and Lynden. Every Tuesday @ 8:30 AM PT Merchandise https://abe-merch-2.creator-spring.com/listing/ABEMERCH Copyright, Liability Waiver and Disclaimers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act, without the prior express written consent of Art Beauty Equilibrium, LLC. While we and all other persons associated directly or indirectly with this site and video use their best efforts in preparing the content for this site, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the content of the videos, including any content, links or resources shared, including those by third parties. Furthermore, all parties specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. No legal advice is being given herein. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. No liability or damages shall take place because of this content. Furthermore, your use of this site and watching these videos confirms your agreement that California law applies to all disputes relating to this site and videos and, venue for all claims and disputes relating to this site and videos shall be in Los Angeles County, California. #ABEPODCAST​​​​​​​​ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/artbeautyequilibrium/support

Laboe, Garth and an Apple FailTrending Topics at 5 o'clock. Radio legend, Art Laboe, has died. Disappointed Garth fans want refunds. Rollercoasters are setting off a new Apple crash detection feature. Vlogging kit for kids. See you at the fair!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We are sending our love, today, to the family of beloved SoCal radio host Art Laboe. Art passed away at the age of 97, after catching pneumonia. Laboe is credited with helping end segregation in Southern California by organizing live shows at drive-ins that attracted crowds of all races. He coined the term, “Oldies but goodies” and taught many of us in LA that “Sunday's are for oldies.” This dedication goes out to Art Laboe from your LA radio fans, thank you for the memories.

Omar y Argelia le rinden tributo a la legendaria voz de la radio en los angeles el gran,Art Laboe. Escucha mas con Omar y Argelia 7am en Mega 96.3 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Omar y Argelia celebrando la herencia musical y cultural de Art Laboe. Escucha mas con Omar Y Argelia 8am en Mega 96.3 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Laboe, Garth and an Apple FailTrending Topics at 5 o'clock. Radio legend, Art Laboe, has died. Disappointed Garth fans want refunds. Rollercoasters are setting off a new Apple crash detection feature. Vlogging kit for kids. See you at the fair!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Toby hat schonwieder eine neue Kamera und war in Amsterdam und Paris – Holgi fährt erst noch nach Paris, war aber in Dänemark – Trockentrenntoilette – Odonien – Elektroauto-Entladung – Die neue Grundsteuer – Tee (Gesucht: Tazo Wild Sweet Orange) – Toby hat auch Bilder gemacht (Toby bei Insta, Holgi auch) – The Hunt for Artemis […]

Toby hat schonwieder eine neue Kamera und war in Amsterdam und Paris – Holgi fährt erst noch nach Paris, war aber in Dänemark – Trockentrenntoilette – Odonien – Elektroauto-Entladung – Die neue Grundsteuer – Tee (Gesucht: Tazo Wild Sweet Orange) – Toby hat auch Bilder gemacht (Toby bei Insta, Holgi auch) – The Hunt for Artemis […]

Whats up my boiii!! Its Monday night and you already know how it goes down at the GPS studio, shit got weird quick! The homie Heart Laboe cruised it over after his crazy block party last night to party with us! He talks about how he started HEY LOVE RECORDS and all about there Block party events that be thrown in Downtown LA. Yall missing out just know you catching the GPS wolf pack at the next one.....#takeashower

Die Herzdame ist da, um ihr Hundebettenversprechen bei Twitter einzulösen. Wir besprechen also ausführlich die Anschaffung, die Benutzung und mehrere weitere Aspekte des neuen Hundebetts. Danach nehmen wir noch einen Schlenker über unseren Kurzurlaub in Laboe und den Golfplatz, bevor wir das Portal Podchaser besprechen. Was das genau ist, erkläre ich in dieser Episode.

Episode one hundred and forty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “God Only Knows" by the Beach Boys, and the creation of the Pet Sounds album. 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 "Sunny" by Bobby Hebb. 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 There is no Mixcloud this week, because there were too many Beach Boys songs in the episode. I used many resources for this episode, most of which will be used in future Beach Boys episodes too. It's difficult to enumerate everything here, because I have been an active member of the Beach Boys fan community for twenty-four years, and have at times just used my accumulated knowledge for this. But the resources I list here are ones I've checked for specific things. Stephen McParland has published many, many books on the California surf and hot-rod music scenes, including several on both the Beach Boys and Gary Usher.  His books can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks Andrew Doe's Bellagio 10452 site is an invaluable resource. Jon Stebbins' The Beach Boys FAQ is a good balance between accuracy and readability. And Philip Lambert's Inside the Music of Brian Wilson is an excellent, though sadly out of print, musicological analysis of Wilson's music from 1962 through 67. I have also referred to Brian Wilson's autobiography, I Am Brian Wilson, and to Mike Love's, Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy. For material specific to Pet Sounds I have used Kingsley Abbot's The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds: The Greatest Album of the Twentieth Century and Charles L Granata's I Just Wasn't Made For These Times: Brian Wilson and the Making of Pet Sounds.  I also used the 126-page book The Making of Pet Sounds by David Leaf, which came as part of the The Pet Sounds Sessions box set, which also included the many alternate versions of songs from the album used here. Sadly both that box set and the 2016 updated reissue of it appear currently to be out of print, but either is well worth obtaining for anyone who is interested in how great records are made. Of the versions of Pet Sounds that are still in print, this double-CD version is the one I'd recommend. It has the original mono mix of the album, the more recent stereo remix, the instrumental backing tracks, and live versions of several songs. As a good starting point for the Beach Boys' music in general, I would recommend this budget-priced three-CD set, which has a surprisingly good selection of their material on it. The YouTube drum tutorial I excerpted a few seconds of to show a shuffle beat is here. Transcript We're still in the run of episodes that deal with the LA pop music scene -- though next week we're going to move away from LA, while still dealing with a lot of the people who would play a part in that scene. But today we're hitting something that requires a bit of explanation. Most artists covered in this podcast get one or at the most two episodes. Some get slightly more -- the major artists who are present for many revolutions in music, or who have particularly important careers, like Fats Domino or the Supremes. And then there are a few very major artists who get a lot more. The Beatles, for example, are going to get eight in total, plus there will be episodes on some of their solo careers. Elvis has had six, and will get one more wrap-up episode. This is the third Beach Boys episode, and there are going to be three more after this, because the Beach Boys were one of the most important acts of the decade. But normally, I limit major acts to one episode per calendar year of their career. This means that they will average at most one episode every ten episodes, so while for example the episodes on "Mystery Train" and "Heartbreak Hotel" came close together, there was then a reasonable gap before another Elvis episode. This is not possible for the Beach Boys, because this episode and the next two Beach Boys ones all take place over an incredibly compressed timeline. In May 1966, they released an album that has consistently been voted the best album ever in polls of critics, and which is certainly one of the most influential even if one does not believe there is such a thing as a "best album ever". In October 1966 they released one of the most important singles ever -- a record that is again often considered the single best pop single of all time, and which again was massively influential. And then in July 1967 they released the single that was intended to be the lead-off single from their album Smile, an album that didn't get released until decades later, and which became a legend of rock music that was arguably more influential by *not* being released than most records that are released manage to be. And these are all very different stories, stories that need to be told separately. This means that episode one hundred and forty-two, episode one hundred and forty-six, and episode one hundred and fifty-three are all going to be about the Beach Boys. There will be one final later episode about them, too, but the next few months are going to be very dominated by them, so I apologise in advance for that if that's not something you're interested in. Though it also means that with luck some of these episodes will be closer to the shorter length of podcast I prefer rather than the ninety-minute mammoths we've had recently. Though I'm afraid this is another long one. When we left the Beach Boys, we'd just heard that Glen Campbell had temporarily replaced Brian Wilson on the road, after Wilson's mental health had finally been unable to take the strain of touring while also being the group's record producer, principal songwriter, and leader. To thank Campbell, who at this point was not at all well known in his own right, though he was a respected session guitarist and had released a few singles, Brian had co-written and produced "Guess I'm Dumb" for him, a track which prefigured the musical style that Wilson was going to use for the next year or so: [Excerpt: Glen Campbell, "Guess I'm Dumb"] It's worth looking at "Guess I'm Dumb" in a little detail, as it points the way forward to a lot of Wilson's songwriting over the next year. Firstly, of course, there are the lyrical themes of insecurity and of what might even be descriptions of mental illness in the first verse -- "the way I act don't seem like me, I'm not on top like I used to be". The lyrics are by Russ Titelman, but it's reasonable to assume that as with many of his collaborations, Brian brought in the initial idea. There's also a noticeable change in the melodic style compared to Wilson's earlier melodies. Up to this point, Wilson has mostly been writing what get called "horizontal" melody lines -- ones with very little movement, and small movements, often centred on a single note or two. There are exceptions of course, and plenty of them, but a typical Brian Wilson melody up to this point is the kind of thing where even I can hit the notes more or less OK -- [sings] "Well, she got her daddy's car and she cruised through the hamburger stand now". It's not quite a monotone, but it's within a tight range, and you don't have to move far from one note to another. But "Guess I'm Dumb" is incorporating the influence of Roy Orbison, and more obviously of Burt Bacharach, and it's *ludicrously* vertical, with gigantic leaps all over the place, in places that are not obvious. It requires the kind of precision that only a singer like Campbell can attain, to make it sound at all natural: [Excerpt: Glen Campbell, "Guess I'm Dumb"] Bacharach's influence is also noticeable in the way that the chord changes are very different from those that Wilson was using before. Up to this point, when Wilson wrote unusual chord changes, it was mostly patterns like "The Warmth of the Sun", which is wildly inventive, but mostly uses very simple triads and sevenths. Now he was starting to do things like the line "I guess I'm dumb but I don't care", which is sort of a tumbling set of inversions of the same chord that goes from a triad with the fifth in the bass, to a major sixth, to a minor eleventh, to a minor seventh. Part of the reason that Brian could start using these more complex voicings was that he was also moving away from using just the standard guitar/bass/drums lineup, sometimes with keyboards and saxophone, which had been used on almost every Beach Boys track to this point. Instead, as well as the influence of Bacharach, Wilson was also being influenced by Jack Nitzsche's arrangements for Phil Spector's records, and in particular by the way Nitzsche would double instruments, and have, say, a harpsichord and a piano play the same line, to create a timbre that was different from either individual instrument. But where Nitzsche and Spector used the technique along with a lot of reverb and overdubbing to create a wall of sound which was oppressive and overwhelming, and which obliterated the sounds of the individual instruments, Wilson used the same instrumentalists, the Wrecking Crew, to create something far more delicate: [Excerpt: Glen Campbell, "Guess I'm Dumb (instrumental and backing vocals)"] Campbell does such a good job on "Guess I'm Dumb" that one has to wonder what would  have happened if he'd remained with the Beach Boys. But Campbell had of course not been able to join the group permanently -- he had his own career to attend to, and that would soon take off in a big way, though he would keep playing on the Beach Boys' records for a while yet as a member of the Wrecking Crew. But Brian Wilson was still not well enough to tour. In fact, as he explained to the rest of the group, he never intended to tour again -- and he wouldn't be a regular live performer for another twelve years. At first the group were terrified -- they thought he was talking about quitting the group, or the group splitting up altogether. But Brian had a different plan. From that point on, there were two subtly different lineups of the group. In the studio, Brian would sing his parts as always, but the group would get a permanent replacement for him on tour -- someone who could replace him on stage. While the group was on tour, Brian would use the time to write songs and to record backing tracks. He'd already started using the Wrecking Crew to add a bit of additional musical colour to some of the group's records, but from this point on, he'd use them to record the whole track, maybe getting Carl to add a bit of guitar as well if he happened to be around, but otherwise just using the group to provide vocals. It's important to note that this *was* a big change. A lot of general music history sources will say things like "the Beach Boys never played on their own records", and this is taken as fact by people who haven't investigated further. In fact, the basic tracks for all their early hits were performed by the group themselves -- "Surfin'", "Surfin' Safari", "409", "Surfer Girl", "Little Deuce Coupe", "Don't Worry Baby" and many more were entirely performed by the Beach Boys, while others like "I Get Around" featured the group with a couple of additional musicians augmenting them. The idea that the group never played on their records comes entirely from their recordings from 1965 and 66, and even there often Carl would overdub a guitar part. And at this point, the Beach Boys were still playing on the majority of their recordings, even on sophisticated-sounding records like "She Knows Me Too Well", which is entirely a group performance other than Brian's friend, Russ Titelman, the co-writer of "Guess I'm Dumb", adding some percussion by hitting a microphone stand with a screwdriver: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "She Knows Me Too Well"] So the plan to replace the group's instrumental performances in the studio was actually a bigger change than it might seem. But an even bigger change was the live performances, which of course required the group bringing in a permanent live replacement for Brian. They'd already tried this once before, when he'd quit the road for a while and they'd brought Al Jardine back in, but David Marks quitting had forced him back on stage. Now they needed someone to take his place for good. They phoned up their friend Bruce Johnston to see if he knew anyone, and after suggesting a couple of names that didn't work out, he volunteered his own services, and as of this recording he's spent more than fifty years in the band (he quit for a few years in the mid-seventies, but came back). We've seen Johnston turn up several times already, most notably in the episode on "LSD-25", where he was one of the musicians on the track we looked at, but for those of you who don't remember those episodes, he was pretty much *everywhere* in California music in the late fifties and early sixties. He had been in a band at school with Phil Spector and Sandy Nelson, and another band with Jan and Dean, and he'd played on Nelson's "Teen Beat", produced by Art Laboe: [Excerpt: Sandy Nelson, "Teen Beat"] He'd been in the house band at those shows Laboe put on at El Monte stadium we talked about a couple of episodes back, he'd been a witness to John Dolphin's murder, he'd been a record producer for Bob Keane, where he'd written and produced songs for Ron Holden, the man who had introduced "Louie Louie" to Seattle: [Excerpt: Ron Holden, "Gee But I'm Lonesome"] He'd written "The Tender Touch" for Richard Berry's backing group The Pharaos, with Berry singing backing vocals on this one: [Excerpt: The Pharaos, "The Tender Touch"] He'd helped Bob Keane compile Ritchie Valens' first posthumous album, he'd played on "LSD-25" and "Moon Dawg" by the Gamblers: [Excerpt: The Gamblers, "Moon Dawg"] He'd arranged and produced the top ten hit “Those Oldies but Goodies (Remind Me of You)” for Little Caesar and the Romans: [Excerpt Little Caesar and the Romans, "Those Oldies but Goodies (Remind Me of You)"] Basically, wherever you looked in the LA music scene in the early sixties, there was Bruce Johnston somewhere in the background. But in particular, he was suitable for the Beach Boys because he had a lot of experience in making music that sounded more than a little like theirs. He'd made cheap surf records as the Bruce Johnston Surfing Band: [Excerpt: Bruce Johnston, "The Hamptons"] And with his long-time friend and creative partner Terry Melcher he had, as well as working on several Paul Revere and the Raiders records, also recorded hit Beach Boys soundalikes both as their own duo, Bruce and Terry: [Excerpt: Bruce and Terry, "Summer Means Fun"] and under the name of a real group that Melcher had signed, but who don't seem to have sung much on their own big hit, the Rip Chords: [Excerpt: The Rip Chords, "Hey Little Cobra"] Johnston fit in well with the band, though he wasn't a bass player before joining, and had to be taught the parts by Carl and Al. But he's probably the technically strongest musician in the band, and while he would later switch to playing keyboards on stage, he was quickly able to get up to speed on the bass well enough to play the parts that were needed. He also wasn't quite as strong a falsetto singer as Brian Wilson, as can be heard by listening to this live recording of the group singing "I Get Around" in 1966: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Get Around (live 1966)"] Johnston is actually an excellent singer -- and can still hit the high notes today. He sings the extremely high falsetto part on "Fun Fun Fun" at the end of every Beach Boys show. But his falsetto was thinner than Wilson's, and he also has a distinctive voice which can be picked out from the blend in a way that none of the other Beach Boys' voices could -- the Wilson brothers and Mike Love all have a strong family resemblance, and Al Jardine always sounded spookily close to them. This meant that increasingly, the band would rearrange the vocal parts on stage, with Carl or Al taking the part that Brian had taken in the studio. Which meant that if, say, Al sang Brian's high part, Carl would have to move up to sing the part that Al had been singing, and then Bruce would slot in singing the part Carl had sung in the studio. This is a bigger difference than it sounds, and it meant that there was now a need for someone to work out live arrangements that were different from the arrangements on the records -- someone had to reassign the vocal parts, and also work out how to play songs that had been performed by maybe eighteen session musicians playing French horns and accordions and vibraphones with a standard rock-band lineup without it sounding too different from the record. Carl Wilson, still only eighteen when Brian retired from the road, stepped into that role, and would become the de facto musical director of the Beach Boys on stage for most of the next thirty years, to the point that many of the group's contracts for live performances at this point specified that the promoter was getting "Carl Wilson and four other musicians". This was a major change to the group's dynamics. Up to this point, they had been a group with a leader -- Brian -- and a frontman -- Mike, and three other members. Now they were a more democratic group on stage, and more of a dictatorship in the studio. This was, as you can imagine, not a stable situation, and was one that would not last long. But at first, this plan seemed to go very, very well. The first album to come out of this new hybrid way of working, The Beach Boys Today!, was started before Brian retired from touring, and some of the songs on it were still mostly or solely performed by the group, but as we heard with "She Knows Me Too Well" earlier, the music was still more sophisticated than on previous records, and this can be heard on songs like "When I Grow Up to Be a Man", where the only session musician is the harmonica player, with everything else played by the group: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "When I Grow Up to Be a Man"] But the newer sophistication really shows up on songs like "Kiss Me Baby", where most of the instrumentation is provided by the Wrecking Crew -- though Carl and Brian both play on the track -- and so there are saxophones, vibraphones, French horn, cor anglais, and multiple layers of twelve-string guitar: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Kiss Me Baby"] Today had several hit singles on it -- "Dance, Dance, Dance", "When I Grow Up to be a Man", and their cover version of Bobby Freeman's "Do You Wanna Dance?" all charted -- but the big hit song on the album actually didn't become a hit in that version. "Help Me Ronda" was a piece of album filler with a harmonica part played by Billy Lee Riley, and was one of Al Jardine's first lead vocals on a Beach Boys record -- he'd only previously sung lead on the song "Christmas Day" on their Christmas album: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Help Me Ronda"] While the song was only intended as album filler, other people saw the commercial potential in the song. Bruce Johnston was at this time still signed to Columbia records as an artist, and wasn't yet singing on Beach Boys records, and he recorded a version of the song with Terry Melcher as a potential single: [Excerpt: Bruce and Terry, "Help Me Rhonda"] But on seeing the reaction to the song, Brian decided to rerecord it as a single. Unfortunately, Murry Wilson turned up to the session. Murry had been fired as the group's manager by his sons the previous year, though he still owned the publishing company that published their songs. In the meantime, he'd decided to show his family who the real talent behind the group was by taking on another group of teenagers and managing and producing them. The Sunrays had a couple of minor hits, like "I Live for the Sun": [Excerpt: The Sunrays, "I Live for the Sun"] But nothing made the US top forty, and by this point it was clear, though not in the way that Murry hoped, who the real talent behind the group *actually* was. But he turned up to the recording session, with his wife in tow, and started trying to produce it: [Excerpt: Beach Boys and Murry Wilson "Help Me Rhonda" sessions] It ended up with Brian physically trying to move his drunk father away from the control panel in the studio, and having a heartbreaking conversation with him, where the twenty-two-year-old who is recovering from a nervous breakdown only a few months earlier sounds calmer, healthier, and more mature than his forty-seven-year-old father: [Excerpt: Beach Boys and Murry Wilson, "Help Me Rhonda" sessions] Knowing that this was the family dynamic helps make the comedy filler track on the next album, "I'm Bugged at My Old Man", seem rather less of a joke than it otherwise would: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I'm Bugged at My Old Man"] But with Murry out of the way, the group did eventually complete recording "Help Me Rhonda" (and for those of you reading this as a blog post rather than listening to the podcast, yes they did spell it two different ways for the two different versions), and it became the group's second number one hit: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Help Me, Rhonda"] As well as Murry Wilson, though, another figure was in the control room then -- Loren Daro (who at the time went by his birth surname, but I'm going to refer to him throughout by the name he chose).  You can hear, on the recording, Brian Wilson asking Daro if he could "turn him on" -- slang that was at that point not widespread enough for Wilson's parents to understand the meaning. Daro was an agent working for the William Morris Agency, and he was part of a circle of young, hip, people who were taking drugs, investigating mysticism, and exploring new spiritual ideas. His circle included the Byrds -- Daro, like Roger McGuinn, later became a follower of Subud and changed his name as a result -- as well as people like the songwriter and keyboard player Van Dyke Parks, who will become a big part of this story in subsequent episodes, and Stephen Stills, who will also be turning up again. Daro had introduced Brian to cannabis, in 1964, and in early 1965 he gave Brian acid for the first time -- one hundred and twenty-five micrograms of pure Owsley LSD-25. Now, we're going to be looking at acid culture quite a lot in the next few months, as we get through 1966 and 1967, and I'll have a lot more to say about it, but what I will say is that even the biggest proponents of psychedelic drug use tend not to suggest that it is a good idea to give large doses of LSD in an uncontrolled setting to young men recovering from a nervous breakdown. Daro later described Wilson's experience as "ego death" -- a topic we will come to in a future episode, and not considered entirely negative -- and "a beautiful thing". But he has also talked about how Wilson was so terrified by his hallucinations that he ran into the bedroom, locked the door, and hid his head under a pillow for two hours, which doesn't sound so beautiful to me. Apparently after those two hours, he came out of the bedroom, said "Well, that's enough of that", and was back to normal. After that first trip, Wilson wrote a piece of music inspired by his psychedelic experience. A piece which starts like this, with an orchestral introduction very different from anything else the group had released as a single: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "California Girls"] Of course, when Mike Love added the lyrics to the song, it became about far more earthly and sensual concerns: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "California Girls"] But leaving the lyrics aside for a second, it's interesting to look at "California Girls" musically to see what Wilson's idea of psychedelic music -- by which I mean specifically music inspired by the use of psychedelic drugs, since at this point there was no codified genre known as psychedelic music or psychedelia -- actually was. So, first, Wilson has said repeatedly that the song was specifically inspired by "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" by Bach: [Excerpt: Bach, "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring"] And it's odd, because I see no real structural or musical resemblance between the two pieces that I can put my finger on, but at the same time I can totally see what he means. Normally at this point I'd say "this change here in this song relates to this change there in that song", but there's not much of that kind of thing here -- but I still. as soon as I read Wilson saying that for the first time, more than twenty years ago, thought "OK, that makes sense". There are a few similarities, though. Bach's piece is based around triplets, and they made Wilson think of a shuffle beat. If you remember *way* back in the second episode of the podcast, I talked about how one of the standard shuffle beats is to play triplets in four-four time. I'm going to excerpt a bit of recording from a YouTube drum tutorial (which I'll link in the liner notes) showing that kind of shuffle: [Excerpt: "3 Sweet Triplet Fills For Halftime Shuffles & Swung Grooves- Drum Lesson" , from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CwlSaQZLkY ] Now, while Bach's piece is in waltz time, I hope you can hear how the DA-da-da DA-da-da in Bach's piece may have made Wilson think of that kind of shuffle rhythm. Bach's piece also has a lot of emphasis of the first, fifth, and sixth notes of the scale -- which is fairly common, and not something particularly distinctive about the piece -- and those are the notes that make up the bass riff that Wilson introduces early in the song: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "California Girls (track)"] That bass riff, of course, is a famous one. Those of you who were listening to the very earliest episodes of the podcast might remember it from the intros to many, many, Ink Spots records: [Excerpt: The Ink Spots, "We Three (My Echo, My Shadow, and Me)"] But the association of that bassline to most people's ears would be Western music, particularly the kind of music that was in Western films in the thirties and forties. You hear something similar in "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine", as performed by Laurel and Hardy in their 1937 film Way Out West: [Excerpt: Laurel and Hardy, "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine"] But it's most associated with the song "Tumbling Tumbleweeds", first recorded in 1934 by the Western group Sons of the Pioneers, but more famous in their 1946 rerecording, made after the Ink Spots' success, where the part becomes more prominent: [Excerpt: The Sons of the Pioneers, "Tumbling Tumbleweeds"] That song was a standard of the Western genre, and by 1965 had been covered by everyone from Gene Autry to the Supremes, Bob Wills to Johnnie Ray, and it would also end up covered by several musicians in the LA pop music scene over the next few years, including Michael Nesmith and Curt Boettcher, both people part of the same general scene as the Beach Boys. The other notable thing about "California Girls" is that it's one of the first times that Wilson was able to use multi-tracking to its full effect. The vocal parts were recorded on an eight-track machine, meaning that Wilson could triple-track both Mike Love's lead vocal and the group's backing vocals. With Johnston now in the group -- "California Girls" was his first recording session with them -- that meant that on the record there were eighteen voices singing, leading to some truly staggering harmonies: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "California Girls (Stack-O-Vocals)"] So, that's what the psychedelic experience meant to Brian Wilson, at least -- Bach, orchestral influences, using the recording studio to create thicker vocal harmony parts, and the old West. Keep that in the back of your mind for the present, but it'll be something to remember in eleven episodes' time. "California Girls" was, of course, another massive hit, reaching number three on the charts. And while some Beach Boys fans see the album it was included on, Summer Days... And Summer Nights!, as something of a step backward from the sophistication of Today!, this is a relative thing. It's very much of a part with the music on the earlier album, and has many wonderful moments, with songs like "Let Him Run Wild" among the group's very best. But it was their next studio album that would cement the group's artistic reputation, and which would regularly be acclaimed by polls of critics as the greatest album of all time -- a somewhat meaningless claim; even more than there is no "first" anything in music, there's no "best" anything. The impulse to make what became Pet Sounds came, as Wilson has always told the story, from hearing the Beatles album Rubber Soul. Now, we've not yet covered Rubber Soul -- we're going to look at that, and at the album that came after it, in three episodes' time -- but it is often regarded as a major artistic leap forward for the Beatles. The record Wilson heard, though, wasn't the same record that most people nowadays think of when they think of Rubber Soul. Since the mid-eighties, the CD versions of the Beatles albums have (with one exception, Magical Mystery Tour) followed the tracklistings of the original British albums, as the Beatles and George Martin intended. But in the sixties, Capitol Records were eager to make as much money out of the Beatles as they could. The Beatles' albums generally had fourteen songs on, and often didn't include their singles. Capitol thought that ten or twelve songs per album was plenty, and didn't have any aversion to putting singles on albums. They took the three British albums Help!, Rubber Soul, and Revolver, plus the non-album "Day Tripper"/"We Can Work It Out" single and Ken Thorne's orchestral score for the Help! film, and turned that into four American albums -- Help!, Rubber Soul, Yesterday and Today, and Revolver. In the case of Rubber Soul, that meant that they removed four tracks from the British album -- "Drive My Car", "Nowhere Man", "What Goes On" and "If I Needed Someone" -- and added two songs from the British version of Help!, "I've Just Seen a Face" and "It's Only Love". Now, I've seen some people claim that this made the American Rubber Soul more of a folk-rock album -- I may even have said that myself in the past -- but that's not really true. Indeed, "Nowhere Man" and "If I Needed Someone" are two of the Beatles' most overtly folk-rock tracks, and both clearly show the influence of the Byrds. But what it did do was remove several of the more electric songs from the album, and replace them with acoustic ones: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I've Just Seen a Face"] This, completely inadvertently, gave the American Rubber Soul lineup a greater sense of cohesion than the British one. Wilson later said "I listened to Rubber Soul, and I said, 'How could they possibly make an album where the songs all sound like they come from the same place?'" At other times he's described his shock at hearing "a whole album of only good songs" and similar phrases. Because up to this point, Wilson had always included filler tracks on albums, as pretty much everyone did in the early sixties. In the American pop music market, up to the mid sixties, albums were compilations of singles plus whatever random tracks happened to be lying around. And so for example in late 1963 the Beach Boys had released two albums less than a month apart -- Surfer Girl and Little Deuce Coupe. Given that Brian Wilson wrote or co-wrote all the group's original material, it wasn't all that surprising that Little Deuce Coupe had to include four songs that had been released on previous albums, including two that were on Surfer Girl from the previous month. It was the only way the group could keep up with the demand for new product from a company that had no concept of popular music as art. Other Beach Boys albums had included padding such as generic surf instrumentals, comedy sketches like "Cassius" Love vs. "Sonny" Wilson, and in the case of The Beach Boys Today!, a track titled "Bull Session With the Big Daddy", consisting of two minutes of random chatter with the photographer Earl Leaf while they all ate burgers: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys and Earl Leaf, "Bull Session With the Big Daddy"] This is not to attack the Beach Boys. This was a simple response to the commercial pressures of the marketplace. Between October 1962 and November 1965, they released eleven albums. That's about an album every three months, as well as a few non-album singles. And on top of that Brian had also been writing songs during that time for Jan & Dean, the Honeys, the Survivors and others, and had collaborated with Gary Usher and Roger Christian on songs for Muscle Beach Party, one of American International Pictures' series of Beach Party films. It's unsurprising that not everything produced on this industrial scale was a masterpiece. Indeed, the album the Beach Boys released directly before Pet Sounds could be argued to be an entire filler album. Many biographies say that Beach Boys Party! was recorded to buy Brian time to make Pet Sounds, but the timelines don't really match up on closer investigation. Beach Boys Party! was released in November 1965, before Brian ever heard Rubber Soul, which came out later, and before he started writing the material that became Pet Sounds. Beach Boys Party! was a solution to a simple problem -- the group were meant to deliver three albums that year, and they didn't have three albums worth of material. Some shows had been recorded for a possible live album, but they'd released a live album in 1964 and hadn't really changed their setlist very much in the interim. So instead, they made a live-in-the-studio album, with the conceit that it was recorded at a party the group were holding. Rather than the lush Wrecking Crew instrumentation they'd been using in recent months, everything was played on acoustic guitars, plus some bongos provided by Wrecking Crew drummer Hal Blaine and some harmonica from Billy Hinsche of the boy band Dino, Desi, and Billy, whose sister Carl Wilson was shortly to marry. The album included jokes and false starts, and was overlaid with crowd noise, to give the impression that you were listening to an actual party where a few people were sitting round with guitars and having fun. The album consisted of songs that the group liked and could play without rehearsal -- novelty hits from a few years earlier like "Alley Oop" and "Hully Gully", a few Beatles songs, and old favourites like the Everly Brothers hit "Devoted to You" -- in a rather lovely version with two-part harmony by Mike and Brian, which sounds much better in a remixed version released later without the party-noise overdubs: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Devoted to You (remix)"] But the song that defined the album, which became a massive hit, and which became an albatross around the band's neck about which some of them would complain for a long time to come, didn't even have one of the Beach Boys singing lead. As we discussed back in the episode on "Surf City", by this point Jan and Dean were recording their album "Folk 'n' Roll", their attempt at jumping on the folk-rock bandwagon, which included the truly awful "The Universal Coward", a right-wing answer song  to "The Universal Soldier" released as a Jan Berry solo single: [Excerpt: Jan Berry, "The Universal Coward"] Dean Torrence was by this point getting sick of working with Berry, and was also deeply unimpressed with the album they were making, so he popped out of the studio for a while to go and visit his friends in the Beach Boys, who were recording nearby. He came in during the Party sessions, and everyone was suggesting songs to perform, and asked Dean to suggest something. He remembered an old doo-wop song that Jan and Dean had recorded a cover version of, and suggested that. The group had Dean sing lead, and ran through a sloppy version of it, where none of them could remember the words properly: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Barbara Ann"] And rather incredibly, that became one of the biggest hits the group ever had, making number two on the Billboard chart (and number one on other industry charts like Cashbox), number three in the UK, and becoming a song that the group had to perform at almost every live show they ever did, together or separately, for at least the next fifty-seven years. But meanwhile, Brian had been working on other material. He had not yet had his idea for an album made up entirely of good songs, but he had been experimenting in the studio. He'd worked on a handful of tracks which had pointed in new directions. One was a single, "The Little Girl I Once Knew": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "The Little Girl I Once Knew"] John Lennon gave that record a very favourable review, saying "This is the greatest! Turn it up, turn it right up. It's GOT to be a hit. It's the greatest record I've heard for weeks. It's fantastic." But the record only made number twenty -- a perfectly respectable chart placing, but nowhere near as good as the group's recent run of hits -- in part because its stop-start nature meant that the record had "dead air" -- moments of silence -- which made DJs avoid playing it, because they believed that dead air, even only a second of it here and there, would make people tune to another station. Another track that Brian had been working on was an old folk song suggested by Alan Jardine. Jardine had always been something of a folkie, of the Kingston Trio variety, and he had suggested that the group might record the old song "The Wreck of the John B", which the Kingston Trio had recorded. The Trio's version in turn had been inspired by the Weavers' version of the song from 1950: [Excerpt: The Weavers, "The Wreck of the John B"] Brian had at first not been impressed, but Jardine had fiddled with the chord sequence slightly, adding in a minor chord to make the song slightly more interesting, and Brian had agreed to record the track, though he left the instrumental without vocals for several months: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Sloop John B (instrumental)"] The track was eventually finished and released as a single, and unlike "The Little Girl I Once Knew" it was a big enough hit that it was included on the next album, though several people have said it doesn't fit. Lyrically, it definitely doesn't, but musically, it's very much of a piece with the other songs on what became Pet Sounds: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Sloop John B"] But while Wilson was able to create music by himself, he wasn't confident about his ability as a lyricist. Now, he's not a bad lyricist by any means -- he's written several extremely good lyrics by himself -- but Brian Wilson is not a particularly articulate or verbal person, and he wanted someone who could write lyrics as crafted as his music, but which would express the ideas he was trying to convey. He didn't think he could do it himself, and for whatever reason he didn't want to work with Mike Love, who had co-written the majority of his recent songs, or with any of his other collaborators. He did write one song with Terry Sachen, the Beach Boys' road manager at the time, which dealt obliquely with those acid-induced concepts of "ego death": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Hang on to Your Ego"] But while the group recorded that song, Mike Love objected vociferously to the lyrics. While Love did try cannabis a few times in the late sixties and early seventies, he's always been generally opposed to the use of illegal drugs, and certainly didn't want the group to be making records that promoted their use -- though I would personally argue that "Hang on to Your Ego" is at best deeply ambiguous about the prospect of ego death.  Love rewrote some of the lyrics, changing the title to "I Know There's an Answer", though as with all such bowdlerisation efforts he inadvertently left in some of the drug references: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Know There's an Answer"] But Wilson wasn't going to rely on Sachen for all the lyrics. Instead he turned to Tony Asher. Asher was an advertising executive, who Wilson probably met through Loren Daro -- there is some confusion over the timeline of their meeting, with some sources saying they'd first met in 1963 and that Asher had introduced Wilson to Daro, but others saying that the introductions went the other way, and that Daro introduced Asher to Wilson in 1965. But Asher and Daro had been friends for a long time, and so Wilson and Asher were definitely orbiting in the same circles. The most common version of the story seems to be that Asher was working in Western Studios, where he was recording a jingle - the advertising agency had him writing jingles because he was an amateur songwriter, and as he later put it nobody else at the agency knew the difference between E flat and A flat. Wilson was also working in the studio complex, and Wilson dragged Asher in to listen to some of the demos he was recording -- at that time Wilson was in the habit of inviting anyone who was around to listen to his works in progress. Asher chatted with him for a while, and thought nothing of it, until he got a phone call at work a few weeks later from Brian Wilson, suggesting the two write together. Wilson was impressed with Asher, who he thought of as very verbal and very intelligent, but Asher was less impressed with Wilson. He has softened his statements in recent decades, but in the early seventies he would describe Wilson as "a genius musician but an amateur human being", and sharply criticise his taste in films and literature, and his relationship with his wife. This attitude seems at least in part to have been shared by a lot of the people that Wilson was meeting and becoming influenced by. One of the things that is very noticeable about Wilson is that he has no filters at all, and that makes his music some of the most honest music ever recorded. But that same honesty also meant that he could never be cool or hip. He was -- and remains -- enthusiastic about the things he likes, and he likes things that speak to the person he is, not things that fit some idea of what the in crowd like. And the person Brian Wilson is is a man born in 1942, brought up in a middle-class suburban white family in California, and his tastes are the tastes one would expect from that background. And those tastes were not the tastes of the hipsters and scenesters who were starting to become part of his circle at the time. And so there's a thinly-veiled contempt in the way a lot of those people talked about Wilson, particularly in the late sixties and early seventies. Wilson, meanwhile, was desperate for their approval, and trying hard to fit in, but not quite managing it. Again, Asher has softened his statements more recently, and I don't want to sound too harsh about Asher -- both men were in their twenties, and still  trying to find their place in the world, and I wouldn't want to hold anyone's opinions from their twenties against them decades later. But that was the dynamic that existed between them. Asher saw himself as something of a sophisticate, and Wilson as something of a hick in contrast, but a hick who unlike him had created a string of massive hit records. And Asher did, always, respect Wilson's musical abilities. And Wilson in turn looked up to Asher, even while remaining the dominant partner, because he respected Asher's verbal facility. Asher took a two-week sabbatical from his job at the advertising agency, and during those two weeks, he and Wilson collaborated on eight songs that would make up the backbone of the album that would become Pet Sounds. The first song the two worked on was a track that had originally been titled "In My Childhood". Wilson had already recorded the backing track for this, including the sounds of bicycle horns and bells to evoke the feel of being a child: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "You Still Believe in Me (instrumental track)"] The two men wrote a new lyric for the song, based around a theme that appears in many of Wilson's songs -- the inadequate man who is loved by a woman who is infinitely superior to him, who doesn't understand why he's loved, but is astonished by it. The song became "You Still Believe in Me": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "You Still Believe in Me"] That song also featured an instrumental contribution of sorts by Asher. Even though the main backing track had been recorded before the two started working together, Wilson came up with an idea for an intro for the song, which would require a particular piano sound. To get that sound, Wilson held down the keys on a piano, while Asher leaned into the piano and plucked the strings manually. The result, with Wilson singing over the top, sounds utterly lovely: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "You Still Believe in Me"] Note that I said that Wilson and Asher came up with new lyrics together. There has been some slight dispute about the way songwriting credits were apportioned to the songs. Generally the credits said that Wilson wrote all the music, while Asher and Wilson wrote the lyrics together, so Asher got twenty-five percent of the songwriting royalties and Wilson seventy-five percent. Asher, though, has said that there are some songs for which he wrote the whole lyric by himself, and that he also made some contributions to the music on some songs -- though he has always said that the majority of the musical contribution was Wilson's, and that most of the time the general theme of the lyric, at least, was suggested by Wilson. For the most part, Asher hasn't had a problem with that credit split, but he has often seemed aggrieved -- and to my mind justifiably -- about the song "Wouldn't it Be Nice". Asher wrote the whole lyric for the song, though inspired by conversations with Wilson, but accepted his customary fifty percent of the lyrical credit. The result became one of the big hits from the album: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Wouldn't It Be Nice?"] But -- at least according to Mike Love, in the studio he added a single line to the song: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Wouldn't it Be Nice?"] When Love sued Brian Wilson in 1994, over the credits to thirty-five songs, he included "Wouldn't it Be Nice" in the list because of that contribution. Love now gets a third of the songwriting royalties, taken proportionally from the other two writers. Which means that he gets a third of Wilson's share and a third of Asher's share. So Brian Wilson gets half the money, for writing all the music, Mike Love gets a third of the money, for writing "Good night baby, sleep tight baby", and Tony Asher gets a sixth of the money -- half as much as Love -- for writing all the rest of the lyric. Again, this is not any one individual doing anything wrong – most of the songs in the lawsuit were ones where Love wrote the entire lyric, or a substantial chunk of it, and because the lawsuit covered a lot of songs the same formula was applied to borderline cases like “Wouldn't it Be Nice” as it was to clearcut ones like “California Girls”, where nobody disputes Love's authorship of the whole lyric. It's just the result of a series of reasonable decisions, each one of which makes sense in isolation, but which has left Asher earning significantly less from one of the most successful songs he ever wrote in his career than he should have earned. The songs that Asher co-wrote with Wilson were all very much of a piece, both musically and lyrically. Pet Sounds really works as a whole album better than it does individual tracks, and while some of the claims made about it -- that it's a concept album, for example -- are clearly false, it does have a unity to it, with ideas coming back in different forms. For example, musically, almost every new song on the album contains a key change down a minor third at some point -- not the kind of thing where the listener consciously notices that an idea has been repeated, but definitely the kind of thing that makes a whole album hold together. It also differs from earlier Beach Boys albums in that the majority of the lead vocals are by Brian Wilson. Previously, Mike Love had been the dominant voice on Beach Boys records, with Brian as second lead and the other members taking few or none. Now Love only took two main lead vocals, and was the secondary lead on three more. Brian, on the other hand, took six primary lead vocals and two partial leads. The later claims by some people that this was a Brian Wilson solo album in all but name are exaggerations -- the group members did perform on almost all of the tracks -- but it is definitely much more of a personal, individual statement than the earlier albums had been. The epitome of this was "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times", which Asher wrote the lyrics for but which was definitely Brian's idea, rather than Asher's. [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times"] That track also featured the first use on a Beach Boys record of the electro-theremin, an electronic instrument invented by session musician Paul Tanner, a former trombone player with the Glenn Miller band, who had created it to approximate the sound of a Theremin while being easier to play: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times"] That sound would turn up on future Beach Boys records... But the song that became the most lasting result of the Wilson/Asher collaboration was actually one that is nowhere near as personal as many of the other songs on the record, that didn't contain a lot of the musical hallmarks that unify the album, and that didn't have Brian Wilson singing lead. Of all the songs on the album, "God Only Knows" is the one that has the most of Tony Asher's fingerprints on it. Asher has spoken in the past about how when he and Wilson were writing, Asher's touchstones were old standards like "Stella By Starlight" and "How Deep is the Ocean?", and "God Only Knows" easily fits into that category. It's a crafted song rather than a deep personal expression, but the kind of craft that one would find in writers like the Gershwins, every note and syllable perfectly chosen: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows"] One of the things that is often wrongly said about the song is that it's the first pop song to have the word "God" in the title. It isn't, and indeed it isn't even the first pop song to be called "God Only Knows", as there was a song of that name recorded by the doo-wop group the Capris in 1954: [Excerpt: The Capris, "God Only Knows"] But what's definitely true is that Wilson, even though he was interested in creating spiritual music, and was holding prayer sessions with his brother Carl before vocal takes, was reluctant to include the word in the song at first, fearing it would harm radio play. He was probably justified in his fears -- a couple of years earlier he'd produced a record called "Pray for Surf" by the Honeys, a girl-group featuring his wife: [Excerpt: The Honeys, "Pray For Surf"] That record hadn't been played on the radio, in part because it was considered to be trivialising religion. But Asher eventually persuaded Wilson that it would be OK, saying "What do you think we should do instead? Say 'heck only knows'?" Asher's lyric was far more ambiguous than it may seem -- while it's on one level a straightforward love song, Asher has always pointed out that the protagonist never says that he loves the object of the song, just that he'll make her *believe* that he loves her. Coupled with the second verse, which could easily be read as a threat of suicide if the object leaves the singer, it would be very, very, easy to make the song into something that sounds like it was from the point of view of a narcissistic, manipulative, abuser. That ambiguity is also there in the music, which never settles in a strong sense of key. The song starts out with an A chord, which you'd expect to lead to the song being in A, but when the horn comes in, you get a D# note, which isn't in that key, and then when the verse starts, it starts on an inversion of a D chord, before giving you enough clues that by the end of the verse you're fairly sure you're in the key of E, but it never really confirms that: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows (instrumental)"] So this is an unsettling, ambiguous, song in many ways. But that's not how it sounds, nor how Brian at least intended it to sound. So why doesn't it sound that way? In large part it's down to the choice of lead vocalist. If Mike Love had sung this song, it might have sounded almost aggressive. Brian *did* sing it in early attempts at the track, and he doesn't sound quite right either -- his vocal attitude is just... not right: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows (Brian Wilson vocal)"] But eventually Brian hit on getting his younger brother Carl to sing lead. At this point Carl had sung very few leads on record -- there has been some dispute about who sang what, exactly,  because of the family resemblance which meant all the core band members could sound a little like each other, but it's generally considered that he had sung full leads on two album tracks -- "Pom Pom Play Girl" and "Girl Don't Tell Me" -- and partial leads on two other tracks, covers of "Louie Louie" and "Summertime Blues". At this point he wasn't really thought of as anything other than a backing vocalist, but his soft, gentle, performance on "God Only Knows" is one of the great performances: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows (vocals)"] The track was actually one of those that required a great deal of work in the studio to create the form which now seems inevitable. Early attempts at the recording included a quite awful saxophone solo: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys "God Only Knows (early version)"] And there were a lot of problems with the middle until session keyboard player Don Randi suggested the staccato break that would eventually be used: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows"] And similarly, the tag of the record was originally intended as a mass of harmony including all the Beach Boys, the Honeys, and Terry Melcher: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows (alternate version with a capella tag)"] Before Brian decided to strip it right back, and to have only three voices on the tag -- himself on the top and the bottom, and Bruce Johnston singing in the middle: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows"] When Pet Sounds came out, it was less successful in the US than hoped -- it became the first of the group's albums not to go gold on its release, and it only made number ten on the album charts. By any objective standards, this is still a success, but it was less successful than the record label had hoped, and was taken as a worrying sign. In the UK, though, it was a different matter. Up to this point, the Beach Boys had not had much commercial success in the UK, but recently Andrew Loog Oldham had become a fan, and had become the UK publisher of their original songs, and was interested in giving them the same kind of promotion that he'd given Phil Spector's records. Keith Moon of the Who was also a massive fan, and the Beach Boys had recently taken on Derek Taylor, with his strong British connections, as their publicist. Not only that, but Bruce Johnston's old friend Kim Fowley was now based in London and making waves there. So in May, in advance of a planned UK tour set for November that year, Bruce Johnston and Derek Taylor flew over to the UK to press the flesh and schmooze. Of all the group members, Johnston was the perfect choice to do this -- he's by far the most polished of them in terms of social interaction, and he was also the one who, other than Brian, had the least ambiguous feelings about the group's new direction, being wholeheartedly in favour of it. Johnston and Taylor met up with Keith Moon, Lennon and McCartney, and other pop luminaries, and played them the record. McCartney in particular was so impressed by Pet Sounds and especially "God Only Knows", that he wrote this, inspired by the song, and recorded it even before Pet Sounds' UK release at the end of June: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Here, There, and Everywhere"] As a result of Johnston and Taylor's efforts, and the promotional work by Oldham and others, Pet Sounds reached number two on the UK album charts, and "God Only Knows" made number two on the singles charts. (In the US, it was the B-side to "Wouldn't it Be Nice", although it made the top forty on its own merits too). The Beach Boys displaced the Beatles in the readers' choice polls for best band in the NME in 1966, largely as a result of the album, and Melody Maker voted it joint best album of the year along with the Beatles' Revolver. The Beach Boys' commercial fortunes were slightly on the wane in the US, but they were becoming bigger than ever in the UK. But a big part of this was creating expectations around Brian Wilson in particular. Derek Taylor had picked up on a phrase that had been bandied around -- enough that Murry Wilson had used it to mock Brian in the awful "Help Me, Rhonda" sessions -- and was promoting it widely as a truism. Everyone was now agreed that Brian Wilson was a genius. And we'll see how that expectation plays out over the next few weeks.. [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Caroline, No"]

Episode one hundred and forty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Trouble Every Day" by the Mothers of Invention, and the early career of Frank Zappa. 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 "Christmas Time is Here Again" by the Beatles. 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 I'm away from home as I upload this and haven't been able to do a Mixcloud, but will hopefully edit a link in in a week or so if I remember. The main biography I consulted for this was Electric Don Quixote by Neil Slaven. Zappa's autobiography, The Real Frank Zappa Book, is essential reading if you're a fan of his work. Information about Jimmy Carl Black's early life came from Black's autobiography, For Mother's Sake. Zappa's letter to Varese is from this blog, which also contains a lot of other useful information on Zappa. For information on the Watts uprising, I recommend Johnny Otis' Listen to the Lambs. And the original mix of Freak Out is currently available not on the CD issue of Freak Out itself, which is an eighties remix, but on this "documentary" set. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Just a quick note before I begin -- there are a couple of passing references in this episode to rape and child abuse. I don't believe there's anything that should upset anyone, but if you're worried, you might want to read the transcript on the podcast website before or instead of listening. But also, this episode contains explicit, detailed, descriptions of racial violence carried out by the police against Black people, including against children. Some of it is so distressing that even reading the transcript might be a bit much for some people. Sometimes, in this podcast, we have to go back to another story we've already told. In most cases, that story is recent enough that I can just say, "remember last episode, when I said...", but to tell the story of the Mothers of Invention, I have to start with a story that I told sixty-nine episodes ago, in episode seventy-one, which came out nearly two years ago. In that episode, on "Willie and the Hand Jive", I briefly told the story of Little Julian Herrera at the start. I'm going to tell a slightly longer version of the story now. Some of the information at the start of this episode will be familiar from that and other episodes, but I'm not going to expect people to remember something from that long ago, given all that's happened since. The DJ Art Laboe is one of the few figures from the dawn of rock and roll who is still working. At ninety-six years old, he still promotes concerts, and hosts a syndicated radio show on which he plays "Oldies but Goodies", a phrase which could describe him as well as the music. It's a phrase he coined -- and trademarked -- back in the 1950s, when people in his audience would ask him to play records made a whole three or four years earlier, records they had listened to in their youth. Laboe pretty much single-handedly invented the rock and roll nostalgia market -- as well as being a DJ, he owned a record label, Original Sound, which put out a series of compilation albums, Oldies But Goodies, starting in 1959, which started to cement the first draft of the doo-wop canon. These were the first albums to compile together a set of older rock and roll hits and market them for nostalgia, and they were very much based on the tastes of his West Coast teenage listenership, featuring songs like "Earth Angel" by the Penguins: [Excerpt: The Penguins, "Earth Angel"] But also records that had a more limited geographic appeal, like "Heaven and Paradise" by Don Julian and the Meadowlarks: [Excerpt: Don Julian and the Meadowlarks, "Heaven and Paradise"] As well as being a DJ and record company owner, Laboe was the promoter and MC for regular teenage dances at El Monte Legion Stadium, at which Kip and the Flips, the band that featured Sandy Nelson and Bruce Johnston, would back local performers like the Penguins, Don and Dewey, or Ritchie Valens, as well as visiting headliners like Jerry Lee Lewis. El Monte stadium was originally chosen because it was outside the LA city limits -- at the time there were anti-rock-and-roll ordinances that meant that any teenage dance had to be approved by the LA Board of Education, but those didn't apply to that stadium -- but it also led to Laboe's audience becoming more racially diverse. The stadium was in East LA, which had a large Mexican-American population, and while Laboe's listenership had initially been very white, soon there were substantial numbers of Mexican-American and Black audience members. And it was at one of the El Monte shows that Johnny Otis discovered the person who everyone thought was going to become the first Chicano rock star, before even Ritchie Valens, in 1957, performing as one of the filler acts on Laboe's bill. He signed Little Julian Herrera, a performer who was considered a sensation in East LA at the time, though nobody really knew where he lived, or knew much about him other than that he was handsome, Chicano, and would often have a pint of whisky in his back pocket, even though he was under the legal drinking age. Otis signed Herrera to his label, Dig Records, and produced several records for him, including the record by which he's now best remembered, "Those Lonely Lonely Nights": [Excerpt: Little Julian Herrera, "Those Lonely, Lonely, Nights"] After those didn't take off the way they were expected to, Herrera and his vocal group the Tigers moved to another label, one owned by Laboe, where they recorded "I Remember Linda": [Excerpt: Little Julian Herrera and the Tigers, "I Remember Linda"]  And then one day Johnny Otis got a knock on his door from the police. They were looking for Ron Gregory. Otis had never heard of Ron Gregory, and told them so. The police then showed him a picture. It turned out that Julian Herrera wasn't Mexican-American, and wasn't from East LA, but was from Massachusetts. He had run away from home a few years back, hitch-hiked across the country, and been taken in by a Mexican-American family, whose name he had adopted. And now he was wanted for rape. Herrera went to prison, and when he got out, he tried to make a comeback, but ended up sleeping rough in the basement of the stadium where he had once been discovered. He had to skip town because of some other legal problems, and headed to Tijuana, where he was last seen playing R&B gigs in 1963. Nobody knows what happened to him after that -- some say he was murdered, others that he's still alive, working in a petrol station under yet another name, but nobody has had a confirmed sighting of him since then. When he went to prison, the Tigers tried to continue for a while, but without their lead singer, they soon broke up. Ray Collins, who we heard singing the falsetto part in "I Remember Linda", went on to join many other doo-wop and R&B groups over the next few years, with little success. Then in summer 1963, he walked into a bar in Ponoma, and saw a bar band who were playing the old Hank Ballard and the Midnighters song "Work With Me Annie". As Collins later put it, “I figured that any band that played ‘Work With Me Annie' was all right,” and he asked if he could join them for a few songs. They agreed, and afterwards, Collins struck up a conversation with the guitarist, and told him about an idea he'd had for a song based on one of Steve Allen's catchphrases. The guitarist happened to be spending a lot of his time recording at an independent recording studio, and suggested that the two of them record the song together: [Excerpt: Baby Ray and the Ferns, "How's Your Bird?"] The guitarist in question was named Frank Zappa. Zappa was originally from Maryland, but had moved to California as a child with his conservative Italian-American family when his father, a defence contractor, had got a job in Monterey. The family had moved around California with his father's work, mostly living in various small towns in the Mojave desert seventy miles or so north of Los Angeles. Young Frank had an interest in science, especially chemistry, and especially things that exploded, but while he managed to figure out the ingredients for gunpowder, his family couldn't afford to buy him a chemistry set in his formative years -- they were so poor that his father regularly took part in medical experiments to get a bit of extra money to feed his kids -- and so the young man's interest was diverted away from science towards music. His first musical interest, and one that would show up in his music throughout his life, was the comedy music of Spike Jones, whose band combined virtuosic instrumental performances with sound effects: [Excerpt: Spike Jones and his City Slickers, "Cocktails for Two"] and parodies of popular classical music [Excerpt: Spike Jones and his City Slickers, "William Tell Overture"] Jones was a huge inspiration for almost every eccentric or bohemian of the 1940s and 50s -- Spike Milligan, for example, took the name Spike in tribute to him. And young Zappa wrote his first ever fan letter to Jones when he was five or six. As a child Zappa was also fascinated by the visual aesthetics of music -- he liked to draw musical notes on staves and see what they looked like. But his musical interests developed in two other ways once he entered his teens. The first was fairly typical for the musicians of his generation from LA we've looked at and will continue to look at, which is that he heard "Gee" by the Crows on the radio: [Excerpt: The Crows, "Gee"] He became an R&B obsessive at that moment, and would spend every moment he could listening to the Black radio stations, despite his parents' disapproval. He particularly enjoyed Huggy Boy's radio show broadcast from Dolphins of Hollywood, and also would religiously listen to Johnny Otis, and soon became a connoisseur of the kind of R&B and blues that Otis championed as a musician and DJ: [Excerpt: Zappa on the Late Show, “I hadn't been raised in an environment where there was a lot of music in the house. This couple that owned the chilli place, Opal and Chester, agreed to ask the man who serviced the jukebox to put in some of the song titles that I liked, because I promised that I would dutifully keep pumping quarters into this thing so that I could listen to them, and so I had the ability to eat good chilli and listen to 'Three Hours Past Midnight' by Johnny 'Guitar' Watson for most of my junior and senior year"] Johnny “Guitar” Watson, along with Guitar Slim, would become a formative influence on Zappa's guitar playing, and his playing on "Three Hours Past Midnight" is so similar to Zappa's later style that you could easily believe it *was* him: [Excerpt: Johnny "Guitar" Watson, "Three Hours Past Midnight"] But Zappa wasn't only listening to R&B. The way Zappa would always tell the story, he discovered the music that would set him apart from his contemporaries originally by reading an article in Look magazine. Now, because Zappa has obsessive fans who check every detail, people have done the research and found that there was no such article in that magazine, but he was telling the story close enough to the time period in which it happened that its broad strokes, at least, must be correct even if the details are wrong. What Zappa said was that the article was on Sam Goody, the record salesman, and talked about how Goody was so good at his job that he had even been able to sell a record of Ionisation by Edgard Varese, which just consisted of the worst and most horrible noises anyone had ever heard, just loud drumming noises and screeching sounds. He determined then that he needed to hear that album, but he had no idea how he would get hold of a copy. I'll now read an excerpt from Zappa's autobiography, because Zappa's phrasing makes the story much better: "Some time later, I was staying overnight with Dave Franken, a friend who lived in La Mesa, and we wound up going to the hi-fi place -- they were having a sale on R&B singles. After shuffling through the rack and finding a couple of Joe Huston records, I made my way toward the cash register and happened to glance at the LP bin. I noticed a strange-looking black-and-white album cover with a guy on it who had frizzy gray hair and looked like a mad scientist. I thought it was great that a mad scientist had finally made a record, so I picked it up -- and there it was, the record with "Ionisation" on it. The author of the Look article had gotten it slightly wrong -- the correct title was The Complete Works of Edgard Varèse, Volume I, including "Ionisation," among other pieces, on an obscure label called EMS (Elaine Music Store). The record number was 401.I returned the Joe Huston records and checked my pockets to see how much money I had -- I think it came to about $3.75. I'd never bought an album before, but I knew they must be expensive because mostly old people bought them. I asked the man at the cash register how much EMS 401 cost. "That gray one in the box?" he said. "$5.95." I'd been searching for that record for over a year and I wasn't about to give up. I told him I had $3.75. He thought about it for a minute, and said, "We've been using that record to demonstrate hi-fi's with -- but nobody ever buys one when we use it. I guess if you want it that bad you can have it for $3.75."" Zappa took the record home, and put it on on his mother's record player in the living room, the only one that could play LPs: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] His mother told him he could never play that record in the living room again, so he took the record player into his bedroom, and it became his record player from that point on. Varese was a French composer who had, in his early career, been very influenced by Debussy. Debussy is now, of course, part of the classical canon, but in the early twentieth century he was regarded as radical, almost revolutionary, for his complete rewriting of the rules of conventional classical music tonality into a new conception based on chordal melodies, pedal points, and use of non-diatonic scales. Almost all of Varese's early work was destroyed in a fire, so we don't have evidence of the transition from Debussy's romantic-influenced impressionism to Varese's later style, but after he had moved to the US in 1915 he had become wildly more experimental. "Ionisation" is often claimed to be the first piece of Western classical music written only for percussion instruments. Varese was part of a wider movement of modernist composers -- for example he was the best man at Nicolas Slonimsky's wedding -- and had also set up the International Composers' Guild, whose manifesto influenced Zappa, though his libertarian politics led him to adapt it to a more individualistic rather than collective framing. The original manifesto read in part "Dying is the privilege of the weary. The present day composers refuse to die. They have realized the necessity of banding together and fighting for the right of each individual to secure a fair and free presentation of his work" In the twenties and thirties, Varese had written a large number of highly experimental pieces, including Ecuatorial, which was written for bass vocal, percussion, woodwind, and two Theremin cellos. These are not the same as the more familiar Theremin, created by the same inventor, and were, as their name suggests, Theremins that were played like a cello, with a fingerboard and bow. Only ten of these were ever made, specifically for performances of Varese's work, and he later rewrote the work to use ondes martenot instead of Theremin cellos, which is how the work is normally heard now: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ecuatorial"] But Varese had spent much of the thirties, forties, and early fifties working on two pieces that were never finished, based on science fiction ideas -- L'Astronome, which was meant to be about communication with people from the star Sirius, and Espace, which was originally intended to be performed simultaneously by choirs in Beijing, Moscow, Paris, and New York. Neither of these ideas came to fruition, and so Varese had not released any new work, other than one small piece, Étude pour espace, an excerpt from the  larger work, in Zappa's lifetime. Zappa followed up his interest in Varese's music with his music teacher, one of the few people in the young man's life who encouraged him in his unusual interests. That teacher, Mr Kavelman, introduced Zappa to the work of other composers, like Webern, but would also let him know why he liked particular R&B records. For example, Zappa played Mr. Kavelman "Angel in My Life" by the Jewels, and asked what it was that made him particularly like it: [Excerpt: The Jewels, "Angel in My Life"] The teacher's answer was that it was the parallel fourths that made the record particularly appealing. Young Frank was such a big fan of Varese that for his fifteenth birthday, he actually asked if he could make a long-distance phone call to speak to Varese. He didn't know where Varese lived, but figured that it must be in Greenwich Village because that was where composers lived, and he turned out to be right. He didn't get through on his birthday -- he got Varese's wife, who told him the composer was in Europe -- but he did eventually get to speak to him, and was incredibly excited when Varese told him that not only had he just written a new piece for the first time in years, but that it was called Deserts, and was about deserts -- just like the Mojave Desert where Zappa lived: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Deserts"] As he later wrote, “When you're 15 and living in the Mojave Desert, and you find out that the World's Greatest Composer (who also looks like a mad scientist) is working in a secret Greenwich Village laboratory on a song about your hometown (so to speak), you can get pretty excited.” A year later, Zappa actually wrote to Varese, a long letter which included him telling the story about how he'd found his work in the first place, hoping to meet up with him when Zappa travelled to the East Coast to see family. I'll read out a few extracts, but the whole thing is fascinating for what it says about Zappa the precocious adolescent, and I'll link to a blog post with it in the show notes. "Dear Sir: Perhaps you might remember me from my stupid phone call last January, if not, my name again is Frank Zappa Jr. I am 16 years old… that might explain partly my disturbing you last winter. After I had struggled through Mr. Finklestein's notes on the back cover (I really did struggle too, for at the time I had had no training in music other than practice at drum rudiments) I became more and more interested in you and your music. I began to go to the library and take out books on modern composers and modern music, to learn all I could about Edgard Varese. It got to be my best subject (your life) and I began writing my reports and term papers on you at school. At one time when my history teacher asked us to write on an American that has really done something for the U.S.A. I wrote on you and the Pan American Composers League and the New Symphony. I failed. The teacher had never heard of you and said I made the whole thing up. Silly but true. That was my Sophomore year in high school. Throughout my life all the talents and abilities that God has left me with have been self developed, and when the time came for Frank to learn how to read and write music, Frank taught himself that too. I picked it all up from the library. I have been composing for two years now, utilizing a strict twelve-tone technique, producing effects that are reminiscent of Anton Webern. During those two years I have written two short woodwind quartets and a short symphony for winds, brass and percussion. I plan to go on and be a composer after college and I could really use the counsel of a veteran such as you. If you would allow me to visit with you for even a few hours it would be greatly appreciated. It may sound strange but I think I have something to offer you in the way of new ideas. One is an elaboration on the principle of Ruth Seeger's contrapuntal dynamics and the other is an extension of the twelve-tone technique which I call the inversion square. It enables one to compose harmonically constructed pantonal music in logical patterns and progressions while still abandoning tonality. Varese sent a brief reply, saying that he was going to be away for a few months, but would like to meet Zappa on his return. The two never met, but Zappa kept the letter from Varese framed on his wall for the rest of his life. Zappa soon bought a couple more albums, a version of "The Rite of Spring" by Stravinsky: [Excerpt: Igor Stravinsky, "The Rite of Spring"] And a record of pieces by Webern, including his Symphony opus 21: [Excerpt: Anton Webern, "Symphony op. 21"] (Incidentally, with the classical music here, I'm not seeking out the precise performances Zappa was listening to, just using whichever recordings I happen to have copies of). Zappa was also reading Slonimsky's works of musicology, like the Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns. As well as this "serious music" though, Zappa was also developing as an R&B musician.  He later said of the Webern album, "I loved that record, but it was about as different from Stravinsky and Varèse as you could get. I didn't know anything about twelve-tone music then, but I liked the way it sounded. Since I didn't have any kind of formal training, it didn't make any difference to me if I was listening to Lightnin' Slim, or a vocal group called the Jewels (who had a song out then called "Angel in My Life"), or Webern, or Varèse, or Stravinsky. To me it was all good music." He had started as a drummer with a group called the Blackouts, an integrated group with white, Latino, and Black members, who played R&B tracks like "Directly From My Heart to You", the song Johnny Otis had produced for Little Richard: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Directly From My Heart to You"] But after eighteen months or so, he quit the group and stopped playing drums. Instead, he switched to guitar, with a style influenced by Johnny "Guitar" Watson and Guitar Slim. His first guitar had action so bad that he didn't learn to play chords, and moved straight on to playing lead lines with his younger brother Bobby playing rhythm. He also started hanging around with two other teenage bohemians -- Euclid Sherwood, who was nicknamed Motorhead, and Don Vliet, who called himself Don Van Vliet. Vliet was a truly strange character, even more so than Zappa, but they shared a love for the blues, and Vliet was becoming a fairly good blues singer, though he hadn't yet perfected the Howlin' Wolf imitation that would become his stock-in-trade in later years. But the surviving recording of Vliet singing with the Zappa brothers on guitar, singing a silly parody blues about being flushed down the toilet of the kind that many teenage boys would write, shows the promise that the two men had: [Excerpt: Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, "Lost in a Whirlpool"] Zappa was also getting the chance to hear his more serious music performed. He'd had the high school band play a couple of his pieces, but he also got the chance to write film music -- his English teacher, Don Cerveris, had decided to go off and seek his fortune as a film scriptwriter, and got Zappa hired to write the music for a cheap Western he'd written, Run Home Slow. The film was beset with problems -- it started filming in 1959 but didn't get finished and released until 1965 -- but the music Zappa wrote for it did eventually get recorded and used on the soundtrack: [Excerpt: Frank Zappa, "Run Home Slow Theme"] In 1962, he got to write the music for another film, The World's Greatest Sinner, and he also wrote a theme song for that, which got released as the B-side of "How's Your Bird?", the record he made with Ray Collins: [Excerpt: Baby Ray and the Ferns, "The World's Greatest Sinner"] Zappa was able to make these records because by the early sixties, as well as playing guitar in bar bands, he was working as an assistant for a man named Paul Buff. Paul Buff had worked as an engineer for a guided missile manufacturer, but had decided that he didn't want to do that any more, and instead had opened up the first independent multi-track recording studio on the West Coast, PAL Studios, using equipment he'd designed and built himself, including a five-track tape recorder. Buff engineered a huge number of surf instrumentals there, including "Wipe Out" by the Surfaris: [Excerpt: The Surfaris, "Wipe Out"] Zappa had first got to know Buff when he had come to Buff's studio with some session musicians in 1961, to record some jazz pieces he'd written, including this piece which at the time was in the style of Dave Brubeck but would later become a staple of Zappa's repertoire reorchestrated in a  rock style. [Excerpt: The PAL Studio Band, "Never on Sunday"] Buff really just wanted to make records entirely by himself, so he'd taught himself to play the rudiments of guitar, bass, drums, piano, and alto saxophone, so he could create records alone. He would listen to every big hit record, figure out what the hooks were on the record, and write his own knock-off of those. An example is "Tijuana Surf" by the Hollywood Persuaders, which is actually Buff on all instruments, and which according to Zappa went to number one in Mexico (though I've not found an independent source to confirm that chart placing, so perhaps take it with a pinch of salt): [Excerpt: The Hollywood Persuaders, "Tijuana Surf"] The B-side to that, "Grunion Run", was written by Zappa, who also plays guitar on that side: [Excerpt: The Hollywood Persuaders, "Grunion Run"] Zappa, Buff, Ray Collins, and a couple of associates would record all sorts of material at PAL -- comedy material like "Hey Nelda", under the name "Ned and Nelda" -- a parody of "Hey Paula" by Paul and Paula: [Excerpt: Ned and Nelda, "Hey Nelda"] Doo-wop parodies like "Masked Grandma": [Excerpt: The PAL Studio Band, "Masked Grandma"] R&B: [Excerpt: The PAL Studio Band, "Why Don't You Do Me Right?"] and more. Then Buff or Zappa would visit one of the local independent label owners and try to sell them the master -- Art Laboe at Original Sound released several of the singles, as did Bob Keane at Donna Records and Del-Fi. The "How's Your Bird" single also got Zappa his first national media exposure, as he went on the Steve Allen show, where he demonstrated to Allen how to make music using a bicycle and a prerecorded electronic tape, in an appearance that Zappa would parody five years later on the Monkees' TV show: [Excerpt: Steve Allen and Frank Zappa, "Cyclophony"] But possibly the record that made the most impact at the time was "Memories of El Monte", a song that Zappa and Collins wrote together about Art Laboe's dances at El Monte Stadium, incorporating excerpts of several of the songs that would be played there, and named after a compilation Laboe had put out, which had included “I Remember Linda” by Little Julian and the Tigers. They got Cleve Duncan of the Penguins to sing lead, and the record came out as by the Penguins, on Original Sound: [Excerpt: The Penguins, "Memories of El Monte"] By this point, though, Pal studios was losing money, and Buff took up the offer of a job working for Laboe full time, as an engineer at Original Sound. He would later become best known for inventing the kepex, an early noise gate which engineer Alan Parsons used on a bass drum to create the "heartbeat" that opens Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon: [Excerpt: Pink Floyd, "Speak to Me"] That invention would possibly be Buff's most lasting contribution to music, as by the early eighties, the drum sound on every single pop record was recorded using a noise gate. Buff sold the studio to Zappa, who renamed it Studio Z and moved in -- he was going through a divorce and had nowhere else to live. The studio had no shower, and Zappa had to just use a sink to wash, and he was surviving mostly off food scrounged by his resourceful friend Motorhead Sherwood. By this point, Zappa had also joined a band called the Soots, consisting of Don Van Vliet, Alex St. Clair and Vic Mortenson, and they recorded several tracks at Studio Z, which they tried to get released on Dot Records, including a cover version of Little Richard's “Slippin' and Slidin'”, and a song called “Tiger Roach” whose lyrics were mostly random phrases culled from a Green Lantern comic: [Excerpt: The Soots, "Tiger Roach"] Zappa also started writing what was intended as the first ever rock opera, "I Was a Teenage Maltshop", and attempts were made to record parts of it with Vliet, Mortenson, and Motorhead Sherwood: [Excerpt: Frank Zappa, "I Was a Teenage Maltshop"] Zappa was also planning to turn Studio Z into a film studio. He obtained some used film equipment, and started planning a science fiction film to feature Vliet, titled "Captain Beefheart Meets the Grunt People". The title was inspired by an uncle of Vliet's, who lived with Vliet and his girlfriend, and used to urinate with the door open so he could expose himself to Vliet's girlfriend, saying as he did so "Look at that! Looks just like a big beef heart!" Unfortunately, the film would not get very far. Zappa was approached by a used-car salesman who said that he and his friends were having a stag party. As Zappa owned a film studio, could he make them a pornographic film to show at the party? Zappa told him that a film wouldn't be possible, but as he needed the money, would an audio tape be acceptable? The used-car salesman said that it would, and gave him a list of sex acts he and his friends would like to hear. Zappa and a friend, Lorraine Belcher, went into the studio and made a few grunting noises and sound effects. The used-car salesman turned out actually to be an undercover policeman, who was better known in the area for his entrapment of gay men, but had decided to branch out. Zappa and Belcher were arrested -- Zappa's father bailed him out, and Zappa got an advance from Art Laboe to pay Belcher's bail. Luckily "Grunion Run" and "Memories of El Monte" were doing well enough that Laboe could give Zappa a $1500 advance. When the case finally came to trial, the judge laughed at the tape and wanted to throw the whole case out, but the prosecutor insisted on fighting, and Zappa got ten days in prison, and most of his tapes were impounded, never to be returned. He fell behind with his rent, and Studio Z was demolished. And then Ray Collins called him, asking if he wanted to join a bar band: [Excerpt: The Mothers, "Hitch-Hike"] The Soul Giants were formed by a bass player named Roy Estrada. Now, Estrada is unfortunately someone who will come up in the story a fair bit over the next year or so, as he played on several of the most important records to come out of LA in the sixties and early seventies. He is also someone about whom there's fairly little biographical information -- he's not been interviewed much, compared to pretty much everyone else, and it's easy to understand why when you realise that he's currently half-way through a twenty-five year sentence for child molestation -- his third such conviction. He won't get out of prison until he's ninety-three. He's one of the most despicable people who will turn up in this podcast, and frankly I'm quite glad I don't know more about him as a person. He was, though, a good bass player and falsetto singer, and he had released a single on King Records, an instrumental titled "Jungle Dreams": [Excerpt, Roy Estrada and the Rocketeers, "Jungle Dreams"] The other member of the rhythm section, Jimmy Carl Black, was an American Indian (that's the term he always used about himself until his death, and so that's the term I'll use about him too) from Texas. Black had grown up in El Paso as a fan of Western Swing music, especially Bob Wills, but had become an R&B fan after discovering Wolfman Jack's radio show and hearing the music of Howlin' Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson. Like every young man from El Paso, he would travel to Juarez as a teenager to get drunk, see sex shows, and raise hell. It was also there that he saw his first live blues music, watching Long John Hunter, the same man who inspired the Bobby Fuller Four, and he would always claim Hunter as the man whose shows taught him how to play the blues. Black had decided he wanted to become a musician when he'd seen Elvis perform live. In Black's memory, this was a gig where Elvis was an unknown support act for Faron Young and Wanda Jackson, but he was almost certainly slightly misremembering -- it's most likely that what he saw was Elvis' show in El Paso on the eleventh of April 1956, where Young and Jackson were also on the bill, but supporting Elvis who was headlining. Either way, Black had decided that he wanted to make girls react to him the same way they reacted to Elvis, and he started playing in various country and R&B bands. His first record was with a group called the Keys, and unfortunately I haven't been able to track down a copy (it was reissued on a CD in the nineties, but the CD itself is now out of print and sells for sixty pounds) but he did rerecord the song with a later group he led, the Mannish Boys: [Excerpt: Jimmy Carl Black and the Mannish Boys, "Stretch Pants"] He spent a couple of years in the Air Force, but continued playing music during that time, including in a band called The Exceptions which featured Peter Cetera later of the band Chicago, on bass. After a brief time working as lineman in Wichita, he moved his family to California, where he got a job teaching drums at a music shop in Anaheim, where the bass teacher was Jim Fielder, who would later play bass in Blood, Sweat, and Tears. One of Fielder's friends, Tim Buckley, used to hang around in the shop as well, and Black was at first irritated by him coming in and playing the guitars and not buying anything, but eventually became impressed by his music. Black would later introduce Buckley to Herb Cohen, who would become Buckley's manager, starting his professional career. When Roy Estrada came into the shop, he and Black struck up a friendship, and Estrada asked Black to join his band The Soul Giants, whose lineup became Estrada, Black, a sax player named Davey Coronado, a guitarist called Larry and a singer called Dave. The group got a residency at the Broadside club in Ponoma, playing "Woolly Bully" and "Louie Louie" and other garage-band staples. But then Larry and Dave got drafted, and the group got in two men called Ray -- Ray Collins on vocals, and Ray Hunt on guitar. This worked for a little while, but Ray Hunt was, by all accounts, not a great guitar player -- he would play wrong chords, and also he was fundamentally a surf player while the Soul Giants were an R&B group. Eventually, Collins and Hunt got into a fistfight, and Collins suggested that they get in his friend Frank instead. For a while, the Soul Giants continued playing "Midnight Hour" and "Louie Louie", but then Zappa suggested that they start playing some of his original material as well. Davy Coronado refused to play original material, because he thought, correctly, that it would lose the band gigs, but the rest of the band sided with the man who had quickly become their new leader. Coronado moved back to Texas, and on Mother's Day 1965 the Soul Giants changed their name to the Mothers. They got in Henry Vestine on second guitar, and started playing Zappa's originals, as well as changing the lyrics to some of the hits they were playing: [Excerpt: The Mothers, "Plastic People"] Zappa had started associating with the freak crowd in Hollywood centred around Vito and Franzoni, after being introduced by Don Cerveris, his old teacher turned screenwriter, to an artist called Mark Cheka, who Zappa invited to manage the group. Cheka in turn brought in his friend Herb Cohen, who managed several folk acts including the Modern Folk Quartet and Judy Henske, and who like Zappa had once been arrested on obscenity charges, in Cohen's case for promoting gigs by the comedian Lenny Bruce. Cohen first saw the Mothers when they were recording their appearance in an exploitation film called Mondo Hollywood. They were playing in a party scene, using equipment borrowed from Jim Guercio, a session musician who would briefly join the Mothers, but who is now best known for having been Chicago's manager and producing hit records for them and Blood, Sweat, and Tears. In the crowd were Vito and Franzoni, Bryan Maclean, Ram Dass, the Harvard psychologist who had collaborated with Timothy Leary in controversial LSD experiments that had led to both losing their jobs, and other stalwarts of the Sunset Strip scene. Cohen got the group bookings at the Whisky A-Go-Go and The Trip, two of the premier LA nightclubs, and Zappa would also sit in with other bands playing at those venues, like the Grass Roots, a band featuring Bryan Maclean and Arthur Lee which would soon change its name to Love. At this time Zappa and Henry Vestine lived together, next door to a singer named Victoria Winston, who at the time was in a duo called Summer's Children with Curt Boettcher: [Excerpt: Summer's Children, "Milk and Honey"] Winston, like Zappa, was a fan of Edgard Varese, and actually asked Zappa to write songs for Summer's Children, but one of the partners involved in their production company disliked Zappa's material and the collaboration went no further. Zappa at this point was trying to incorporate more ideas from modal jazz into his music. He was particularly impressed by Eric Dolphy's 1964 album "Out to Lunch": [Excerpt: Eric Dolphy, "Hat and Beard"] But he was also writing more about social issues, and in particular he had written a song called "The Watts Riots Song", which would later be renamed "Trouble Every Day": [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Trouble Every Day"] Now, the Watts Uprising was one of the most important events in Black American history, and it feels quite wrong that I'm covering it in an episode about a band made up of white, Latino, and American Indian people rather than a record made by Black people, but I couldn't find any way to fit it in anywhere else. As you will remember me saying in the episode on "I Fought the Law", the LA police under Chief William Parker were essentially a criminal gang by any other name -- they were incompetent, violent, and institutionally racist, and terrorised Black people. The Black people of LA were also feeling particularly aggrieved in the summer of 1965, as a law banning segregation in housing had been overturned by a ballot proposition in November 1964, sponsored by the real estate industry and passed by an overwhelming majority of white voters in what Martin Luther King called "one of the most shameful developments in our nation's history", and which Edmund Brown, the Democratic governor said was like "another hate binge which began more than 30 years ago in a Munich beer hall". Then on Wednesday, August 11, 1965, the police pulled over a Black man, Marquette Frye, for drunk driving. He had been driving his mother's car, and she lived nearby, and she came out to shout at him about drinking and driving. The mother, Rena Price, was hit by one of the policemen; Frye then physically attacked one of the police for hitting his mother, one of the police pulled out a gun, a crowd gathered, the police became violent against the crowd, a rumour spread that they had kicked a pregnant woman, and the resulting protests were exacerbated by the police carrying out what Chief Parker described as a "paramiltary" response. The National Guard were called in, huge swathes of south central LA were cordoned off by the police with signs saying things like "turn left or get shot". Black residents started setting fire to and looting local white-owned businesses that had been exploiting Black workers and customers, though this looting was very much confined to individuals who were known to have made the situation worse. Eventually it took six days for the uprising to be put down, at a cost of thirty-four deaths, 1032 injuries, and 3438 arrests. Of the deaths, twenty-three were Black civilians murdered by the police, and zero were police murdered by Black civilians (two police were killed by other police, in accidental shootings). The civil rights activist Bayard Rustin said of the uprising, "The whole point of the outbreak in Watts was that it marked the first major rebellion of Negroes against their own masochism and was carried on with the express purpose of asserting that they would no longer quietly submit to the deprivation of slum life." Frank Zappa's musical hero Johnny Otis would later publish the book Listen to the Lambs about the Watts rebellion, and in it he devotes more than thirty pages to eyewitness accounts from Black people. It's an absolutely invaluable resource. One of the people Otis interviews is Lily Ford, who is described by my copy of the book as being the "lead singer of the famous Roulettes". This is presumably an error made by the publishers, rather than Otis, because Ford was actually a singer with the Raelettes, as in Ray Charles' vocal group. She also recorded with Otis under the name "Lily of the Valley": [Excerpt: Lily of the Valley, "I Had a Sweet Dream"] Now, Ford's account deserves a large excerpt, but be warned, this is very, very difficult to hear. I gave a content warning at the beginning, but I'm going to give another one here. "A lot of our people were in the street, seeing if they could get free food and clothes and furniture, and some of them taking liquor too. But the white man was out for blood. Then three boys came down the street, laughing and talking. They were teenagers, about fifteen or sixteen years old. As they got right at the store they seemed to debate whether they would go inside. One boy started a couple of times to go. Finally he did. Now a cop car finally stops to investigate. Police got out of the car. Meanwhile, the other two boys had seen them coming and they ran. My brother-in-law and I were screaming and yelling for the boy to get out. He didn't hear us, or was too scared to move. He never had a chance. This young cop walked up to the broken window and looked in as the other one went round the back and fired some shots and I just knew he'd killed the other two boys, but I guess he missed. He came around front again. By now other police cars had come. The cop at the window aimed his gun. He stopped and looked back at a policeman sitting in a car. He aimed again. No shot. I tried to scream, but I was so horrified that nothing would come out of my throat. The third time he aimed he yelled, "Halt", and fired before the word was out of his mouth. Then he turned around and made a bull's-eye sign with his fingers to his partner. Just as though he had shot a tin can off a fence, not a human being. The cops stood around for ten or fifteen minutes without going inside to see if the kid was alive or dead. When the ambulance came, then they went in. They dragged him out like he was a sack of potatoes. Cops were everywhere now. So many cops for just one murder." [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Trouble Every Day"] There's a lot more of this sort of account in Otis' book, and it's all worth reading -- indeed, I would argue that it is *necessary* reading. And Otis keeps making a point which I quoted back in the episode on "Willie and the Hand Jive" but which I will quote again here -- “A newborn Negro baby has less chance of survival than a white. A Negro baby will have its life ended seven years sooner. This is not some biological phenomenon linked to skin colour, like sickle-cell anaemia; this is a national crime, linked to a white-supremacist way of life and compounded by indifference”. (Just a reminder, the word “Negro” which Otis uses there was, in the mid-sixties, the term of choice used by Black people.) And it's this which inspired "The Watts Riot Song", which the Mothers were playing when Tom Wilson was brought into The Trip by Herb Cohen: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Trouble Every Day"] Wilson had just moved from Columbia, where he'd been producing Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel, to Verve, a subsidiary of MGM which was known for jazz records but was moving into rock and roll. Wilson was looking for a white blues band, and thought he'd found one. He signed the group without hearing any other songs. Henry Vestine quit the group between the signing and the first recording, to go and join an *actual* white blues band, Canned Heat, and over the next year the group's lineup would fluctuate quite a bit around the core of Zappa, Collins, Estrada, and Black, with members like Steve Mann, Jim Guercio, Jim Fielder, and Van Dyke Parks coming and going, often without any recordings being made of their performances. The lineup on what became the group's first album, Freak Out! was Zappa, Collins, Estrada, Black, and Elliot Ingber, the former guitarist with the Gamblers, who had joined the group shortly before the session and would leave within a few months. The first track the group recorded, "Any Way the Wind Blows", was straightforward enough: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Any Way the Wind Blows"] The second song, a "Satisfaction" knock-off called "Hungry Freaks Daddy", was also fine. But it was when the group performed their third song of the session, "Who Are The Brain Police?", that Tom Wilson realised that he didn't have a standard band on his hands: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Who Are the Brain Police?"] Luckily for everyone concerned, Tom Wilson was probably the single best producer in America to have discovered the Mothers. While he was at the time primarily known for his folk-rock productions, he had built his early career on Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra records, some of the freakiest jazz of the fifties and early sixties. He knew what needed to be done -- he needed a bigger budget. Far from being annoyed that he didn't have the white blues band he wanted, Wilson actively encouraged the group to go much, much further. He brought in Wrecking Crew members to augment the band (though one of them. Mac Rebennack, found the music so irritating he pretended he needed to go to the toilet, walked out, and never came back). He got orchestral musicians to play Zappa's scores, and allowed the group to rent hundreds of dollars of percussion instruments for the side-long track "Return of the Son of Monster Magnet", which features many Hollywood scenesters of the time, including Van Dyke Parks, Kim Fowley, future Manson family member Bobby Beausoleil, record executive David Anderle, songwriter P.F. Sloan, and cartoonist Terry Gilliam, all recording percussion parts and vocal noises: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Return of the Son of Monster Magnet"] Such was Wilson's belief in the group that Freak Out! became only the second rock double album ever released -- exactly a week after the first, Blonde on Blonde, by Wilson's former associate Bob Dylan. The inner sleeve included a huge list of people who had influenced the record in one way or another, including people Zappa knew like Don Cerveris, Don Vliet, Paul Buff, Bob Keane, Nik Venet, and Art Laboe,  musicians who had influenced the group like Don & Dewey, Johnny Otis, Otis' sax players Preston Love and Big Jay McNeely, Eric Dolphy, Edgard Varese, Richard Berry, Johnny Guitar Watson, and Ravi Shankar, eccentric performers like Tiny Tim, DJs like Hunter Hancock and Huggy Boy, science fiction writers like Cordwainer Smith and Robert Sheckley, and scenesters like David Crosby, Vito, and Franzoni. The list of 179 people would provide a sort of guide for many listeners, who would seek out those names and find their ways into the realms of non-mainstream music, writing, and art over the next few decades. Zappa would always remain grateful to Wilson for taking his side in the record's production, saying "Wilson was sticking his neck out. He laid his job on the line by producing the album. MGM felt that they had spent too much money on the album". The one thing Wilson couldn't do, though, was persuade the label that the group's name could stay as it was. "The Mothers" was a euphemism, for a word I can't say if I want this podcast to keep its clean rating, a word that is often replaced in TV clean edits of films with "melon farmers", and MGM were convinced that the radio would never play any music by a band with that name -- not realising that that wouldn't be the reason this music wouldn't get played on the radio. The group needed to change their name. And so, out of necessity, they became the Mothers of Invention.

Am Anleger Reventlou steigt Klimaforscher Dr. Tobias Bayr an Bord. Er hatte uns für die verabredete Fördefahrt sommerlich warmes Herbstwetter vorhergesagt. Genau das traf ein. Gemeinsam fuhren wir am 7. Oktober mit der Fähre nach Laboe und zurück. Im Gespräch war der Klimawandel als Chance.

We sat down with Jay LaBoe to talk about how he got his start in real estate. Check it out...

Als einer der ersten deutschen Podcaster ging Henry Krasemann im Juni 2007 mit dem Kiel.Pod und unter seinem Pseudonym "Caulius" online. Der Jurist und bekannte Datenschützer sendete anfangs täglich. Dann kam Video hinzu und das Produzieren wurde aufwendiger. Das Gespräch mit Henry ist unser Sonderbeitrag zur Digitalen Woche Kiel 2021. Es bildet einen Meilenstein: Nach anderthalb Jahren geht es zum Recording endlich wieder an Bord einer Förde-Fähre!

Sommer, Sonne, Breitensport Mixed. Noch nicht ganz, bevor es nämlich los geht, gehen wir alle nochmal in den Urlaub. Teneriffa, Dänemark, Grömitz oder Laboe. Die Akkus werden aufgeladen um dann in der Woche des Jahres alles zu geben!  Weltexklusiv bekommt ihr die News auf die alle gewartet haben! Das Breitensport Mixed Turnier wird zum allerersten mal um einen Tag verlängert und beginnt nun schon am Sonntag. Außerdem reden wir über das Herren Punktspiel in Findorf, unsere Pokalrunden und das allererste Wingfield Match, welches nur Zafer gegen René heißen konnte. Freut euch auf die neue Episode, genießt den Urlaub und dann sehen wir uns beim mit 144 Teilnehmern komplett ausgebuchten Breitensport Turnier. #ESGIBTPOMMES #WIRHABENBOCK

Wenn Alex mit seinem Kumpel Jorge von Laboe aus segeln geht, schweift sein Blick immer rüber zur BERLIN, einem Seenotrettungskreuzer der DGzRS: der Deutschen Gesellschaft zur Rettung Schiffbrüchiger. Und sollte sie mal nicht dort liegen, fragt er sich, was für einen Einsatz die Seenotretter wohl gerade fahren. Natürlich kennen wir alle die kleinen Sammelschiffchen in der Nähe der Kassen. Und wer schon mal die Nord- oder Ostseeküste besucht hat, konnte die Rettungseinheiten der DGzRS auch erblicken oder vielleicht sogar im Rahmen eines Hafenfestes begehen. Die leuchtrot-weiß-grünen Spezialschiffe mit der Aufschrift „SAR“ am Bug. SEARCH AND RESCUE, Suche und Rettung. Da wir euch möglichst viele Akteur*innen aus dem Bereich „Rettung“ vorstellen möchten, dürfen die Seenotretter erst recht nicht fehlen. Denn Rettung findet nicht nur an Land statt, sondern eben auch häufig auf See. Wir wollten ganz viel erfahren und haben mit Pressesprecher Christian Stipeldey sprechen dürfen. Wie ist die DGzRS entstanden? Wie finanziert sie sich? Welche Voraussetzungen muss jemand erfüllen, der / die für die Seenotretter tätig werden will? Was macht die Schiffe der Seenotretter so besonders? VIEL SPASS mit der neuen Folge. Folge direkt herunterladen

Autor: Kulms, Johannes Sendung: Information und Musik Hören bis: 19.01.2038 04:14

Seit gut zwei Wochen darf die Gastronomie in Schleswig-Holstein ihre Außenbereiche wieder öffnen. Wie das Zwischenfazit des Gaststättenverbandes ausfällt, hören Sie im Schwerpunkt des shz Audio Snacks.

Der Sommer war bunt Die hessische Sommerferien sind nun vorbei, Dänemark ist leider wieder weit weg und die Kinder "dürfen" bei schönstem Sommerwetter wieder in die Schule gehen. [caption id="attachment_868" align="alignleft" width="300"] Diese Szene war glücklicherweise die Einzige, die wir aus Titanic nachgespielt haben.[/caption] Auch unser beiden Jungs sind nun wieder im Alltag bestens aufgehoben. Vielleicht denken sie noch ein bisschen an unsere Urlaubserinnerungen, wenn es mal wieder total öde ist in der Schule. Wie im letzten Newsletter berichtet, waren wir ja eine Woche mit einem Charterschiff auf der Ostsee um Dänemark unterwegs. Das Wetter war leider nicht wirklich sommerlich und so waren lange Hosen und Jacken eine Woche angesagt. Aber wir hatten guten Segelwind und das war ja eigentlich die Hauptmotivation für den Urlaub: wir wollten segeln! Aber von Anfang an. Wir konnten die Hanse 400 schon am Freitag Abend kapern und so konnten wir dann am Samstag morgen pünktlich nach der Übergabe durch den Vercharterer schon bald ablegen. Ab nach Dänemark Unser erster Schlag ging nach Bagenkop auf Langeland. Babsi stand an der Reling und meinte auf einmal: "Was schwimmt denn da vorne?". Alle Köpfe fuhren herum in die Richtung, in die Babsi deutete. Eine dunkle Rückenfinne tauchte in einiger Entfernung neben unserem Boot auf. Ein Schweinswal begrüßte uns in Dänemark! Die komplette Flaute zwang uns schon bald, die testweise hochgezogenen Segel wieder einzuholen und den Jockel anzuwerfen. Bagenkop In Bagenkop angekommen, stellten wir fest: Hier ist es voll. Aber wir konnten uns doch am Ende des Stegs ins Päckchen zu einer dänischen Yacht legen und bemerkten dann auch gleich den Grund für die vielen Yachten: Auf Bagenkop war Sommerfest das sogenannte: Bagenkop By- & Havnefest Das mussten wir uns natürlich ansehen, aber erstmal brav die Hafengebühr zahlen. Gehört hatten wir schön öfter von den Bezahlautomaten, erlebt noch nicht. Aber es ist alles sehr verständlich erklärt und so konnten wir kurz darauf unser Bändchen am Boot befestigen. [caption id="attachment_867" align="alignright" width="300"] Skipper Eric[/caption] Dann schnell stadtfein gemacht und ab aufs Fest. Also die Dänen können feiern. Wir haben selten so viele lustige und ausgelassene Menschen gesehen, wie auf diesem Fest. Wir haben uns dann von einem sehr netten Dänen eine Spezialität empfehlen lassen: Roggenbrot mit Backfisch, Remoulade, Gurken und Röstzwiebel! LEGGER! In der Nacht haben wir sehr gut geschlafen und am nächsten Morgen wollten wir nach unserer Törnplanung nach Lyø. Kurz bevor wir Lyø erreichten, liessen Wind und Regen nach und wir sahen die schöne kleine Insel in der Sonne liegen. Lyø Der Hafen war noch nicht so voll und wir konnten gut in eine Box rückwärts anlegen. Endlich konnten wir die Manöver aus dem Skippertraining im letzten Jahr in der Praxis erproben: Eindampfen in eine Achterspring lässt einen auch mit Wind auf die Nase gut und kontrolliert rückwärts in die Box fahren. Unser Stegnachbar hat uns sehr sicher und ruhig bestätigt und war ein sehr positiver Ausgleich zu den üblichen Verdächtigen, die als vermeintliche Profis am Steg standen und meinten, gute Ratschläge in Form von unsachlichen Zurufen geben zu müssen! [caption id="attachment_870" align="alignright" width="300"] Die Glockensteine von Lyø[/caption] Thorsten und Christine lagen also mit ihrer Friendship Rose neben uns und wir hatten gleich ziemlich viel Gesprächsstoff, da auch die Beiden in der nächsten Zeit zu ihrer Weltumseglung aufbrechen werden. Kurz darauf legte dann backbords noch Skipperlehrer Axel mit seiner Crew an und zusammen mit dieser netten Gesellschaft schmeckte das Anlegebier nochmal so gut! Am nächsten Morgen wollten wir die Insel ein wenig erkunden. Lyø ist eine sehr schnuckelige kleine Insel. Auf Lyø gibt es nur einen zentral gelegenen Ort, der Lyø By heißt. Er ist mit seinen fünf Dorfteichen eines der schönsten Dörfer Dänemarks, in dem mundgeblasene Fensterscheiben und Holzschlösser in den Türen zu sehen sind. Ausserdem wollten wir uns die berühmten Klokkestenen von Lyø ansehen. Kevin hatte seine Drohne dabei und machten einige sehr schöne Aufnahmen von der Insel. Wir beschlossen den Tag noch auf der Insel zu verbringen und erst am nächsten Morgen weiter zu fahren. Im Laufe des Nachmittags Abends wurde der Hafen voller und voller und es waren einige sehr gewagte Hafenmanöver zu beobachten. Wir waren froh, dass wir unseren Boxenplatz hatten, denn nun lagen die Schiffe im Dreierpäckchen. So schnell sich der Hafen am Abend gefüllt hatte, so schnell leerte er sich auch schon wieder am nächsten Morgen. Auch wir legten nach einem leckeren Frühstück ab und fuhren wie geplant in Richtung Sonderborg. Wir legten einen kleinen Zwischenstopp im Stadthafen ein, den wir zum Einkaufen nutzen. Schnell war ein Supermarkt gefunden und die Biervorräte und das notwendige Zubehör für Fischbrötchen waren gebunkert. Vor dem Schloss von Sonderborg lag ein großes Traditionsschiff der königlichen Marine und eine Feier mit Pauken und Trompeten war im Gange, sehen konnte man nicht viel, aber die Musik war sehr feierlich. Unsere Smutja versorgte uns dann während der Weiterfahrt mit leckeren Fischbrötchen und wir erreichten unsere Ankerbucht. Ankern im Vemmingbund Selbst unsere Jungs fanden die Begriffe idyllisch und traumhaft in diesem Moment nicht kitschig ;-) [caption id="attachment_864" align="alignright" width="300"] Kevin und David genießen den Sonnenuntergang vor Anker in Vemmingbund[/caption] Nachdem ein Motorboot mit seinen Wasserkifahrern nach einer Stunde abfuhr, war nur noch Stille. Wir grillen mit unserm wunderbaren COBB GRILL und beobachten im Schein der untergehenden Sonne, wie Schweinswale um unser Schiff ziehen. Nach einem traumhaften Sonnenuntergang hatte Eric die Idee, das wir auch den Sonnenaufgang gemeinsam erleben könnten. Also schnell gegoogelt, wann dieser stattfindet und den Wecker auf fünf Uhr gestellt. Die Sonne ging blutrot über einem Ententeich auf! Kein Windhauch kräuselte das Wasser. Zufrieden krochen wir dann nochmal in unsere Kojen und holten uns noch eine Mütze Schlaf. Fünf Uhr war wirklich etwas früh, um jetzt schon auf zu bleiben. Als wir wieder wach wurden, bot sich ein anderes Bild! Der Schwell hatte merklich zugenommen und wir fuhren dann recht flott gegenan aus der Flensburger Förde und die Küste entlang Richtung Maasholm. [caption id="attachment_865" align="alignleft" width="225"] Babsi peitscht die Hanse bis auf 8 Knoten[/caption] In Maasholm sahen wir schon aus einiger Entfernung eine Amel Super Maramu am Steg liegen. Wir Eltern bekamen glänzende Augen und die Jungs sahen eine Amel das erste Mal live. Wir machten längsseits hinter ihr fest. Der Hafenmeister empfahl uns sofort den leckeren Fischstand von Petersen hier um die Ecke. Das liessen wir uns nicht zweimal sagen und schlugen uns den Bauch voll. Fischbrötchen und Backfisch. Das Leben kann so einfach sein. Und so lecker! Nachdem uns Kevin und David beim Monopoly spielen nach dem Abendessen richtig abgezockt hatten, gingen wir dann müde schlafen. Am nächsten Morgen hatten wir nur noch ein kurzes Stück zu fahren. Wir tankten in Strande und fuhren dann wieder auf unseren Liegeplatz in Laboe! Abends mussten wir zum Abschluss auf vielfachen Wunsch zweier Herren zum Bosna essen gehen! Anschließend genossen wir noch ein leckeres Eis bei einem weiteren schönen Sonnenuntergang am Strand von Laboe. [caption id="attachment_869" align="alignright" width="300"] Der Himmel brennt am letzten Abend in Laboe[/caption] Am nächsten Morgen wurde gepackt und geräumt. Während Eric die Übergabe mit dem Vercharterer machte, fuhr Babsi, David und Kevin das Leergut weg und zu einem obligatorischen Besuch bei Kaufhaus Stolz! Um zwei Uhr winkten wir das letzte Mal der Ostsee und fuhren wieder zurück ins heiße Rhein-Main-Gebiet. [caption id="attachment_866" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Die Glüxpiraten-Crew[/caption]

This week there are two episiodes of the podcast going up, both of them longer than normal. This one, episode ninety-nine, is on “Surfin’ Safari” by the Beach Boys, and the group’s roots in LA, and is fifty minutes long. 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 “Misirlou” by Dick Dale and the Deltones. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources No Mixclouds this week, as both episodes have far too many songs by one artist. The mixclouds will be back with episode 101. I used many resources for this episode, most of which will be used in future Beach Boys episodes too. It’s difficult to enumerate everything here, because I have been an active member of the Beach Boys fan community for twenty-three years, and have at times just used my accumulated knowledge for this. But the resources I list here are ones I’ve checked for specific things. Becoming the Beach Boys by James B. Murphy is an in-depth look at the group’s early years. Stephen McParland has published many, many books on the California surf and hot-rod music scenes, including several on both the Beach Boys and Gary Usher. The Beach Boys: Inception and Creation is the one I used most here, but I referred to several. His books can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks Andrew Doe’s Bellagio 10452 site is an invaluable resource. Jon Stebbins’ The Beach Boys FAQ is a good balance between accuracy and readability. And Philip Lambert’s Inside the Music of Brian Wilson is an excellent, though sadly out of print, musicological analysis of Wilson’s music from 1962 through 67. The Beach Boys’ Morgan recordings and all the outtakes from them can be found on this 2-CD set. The Surfin’ Safari album is now in the public domain, and so can be found cheaply, but the best version to get is still the twofer CD with the Surfin’ USA album. *But*, those two albums are fairly weak, the Beach Boys in their early years were not really an album band, and you will want to investigate them further. I would recommend, rather than the two albums linked above, starting with this budget-priced three-CD set, which has a surprisingly good selection of their material on it.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, there are going to be two podcast episodes. This one, episode ninety-nine, will be a normal-length episode, or maybe slightly longer than normal, and episode one hundred, which will follow straight after it, will be a super-length one that’s at least three times the normal length of one of these podcasts. I’m releasing them together, because the two episodes really do go together. We’ve talked recently about how we’re getting into the sixties of the popular imagination, and those 1960s began, specifically, in October 1962. That was the month of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which saw the world almost end. It was the month that James Brown released Live at the Apollo — an album we’ll talk about in a few weeks’ time. And if you want one specific date that the 1960s started, it was October the fifth, 1962. On that date, a film came out that we mentioned last week — Doctor No, the first ever James Bond film. It was also the date that two records were released on EMI in Britain. One was a new release by a British band, the other a record originally released a few months earlier in the USA, by an American band. Both bands had previously released records on much smaller labels, to no success other than very locally, but this was their first to be released on a major label, and had a slightly different lineup from those earlier releases. Both bands would influence each other, and go on to be the most successful band from their respective country in the next decade. Both bands would revolutionise popular music. And the two bands would even be filed next to each other alphabetically, both starting “the Bea”. In episode one hundred, we’re going to look at “Love Me Do” by the Beatles, but right now, in episode ninety-nine, we’re going to look at “Surfin’ Safari” by the Beach Boys: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfin’ Safari”] Before I start this story properly, I just want to say something — there are a lot of different accounts of the formation of the Beach Boys, and those accounts are all different. What I’ve tried to do here is take one plausible account of how the group formed and tell it in a reasonable length of time. If you read the books I link in the show notes, you might find some disagreements about the precise order of some of these events, or some details I’ve glossed over. This episode is already running long, and I didn’t want to get into that stuff, but it’s important that I stress that this is just as accurate as I can get in the length of an episode. The Beach Boys really were boys when they made their first records. David Marks, their youngest member, was only thirteen when “Surfin’ Safari” came out, and Mike Love, the group’s oldest member, was twenty-one.  So, as you might imagine when we’re talking about children, the story really starts with the older generation. In particular, we want to start with Hite and Dorinda Morgan. The Morgans were part-time music business people in Los Angeles in the fifties. Hite Morgan owned an industrial flooring company, and that was his main source of income — putting in floors at warehouses and factories that could withstand the particular stresses that such industrial sites faced. But while that work was hard, it was well-paying and didn’t take too much time. The company would take on two or three expensive jobs a year, and for the rest of the year Hite would have the money and time to help his wife with her work as a songwriter. She’d collaborated with Spade Cooley, one of the most famous Western Swing musicians of the forties, and she’d also co-written “Don’t Put All Your Dreams in One Basket” for Ray Charles in 1948: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, “Don’t Put All Your Dreams in One Basket”] Hite and Dorinda’s son, Bruce, was also a songwriter, though I’ve seen some claims that often the songs credited to him were actually written by his mother, who gave him credits in order to encourage him. One of Bruce Morgan’s earliest songs was a piece called “Proverb Boogie”, which was actually credited under his father’s name, and which Louis Jordan retitled to “Heed My Warning” and took a co-writing credit on: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Heed My Warning”] Eventually the Morgans also started their own publishing company, and built their own small demo studio, which they used to use to record cheap demos for many other songwriters and performers. The Morgans were only very minor players in the music industry, but they were friendly with many of the big names on the LA R&B scene, and knew people like John Dolphin, Bumps Blackwell, Sam Cooke, and the Hollywood Flames. Bruce Morgan would talk in interviews about Bumps Blackwell calling round to see his father and telling him about this new song “You Send Me” he was going to record with Cooke. But although nobody could have realised it at the time, or for many years later, the Morgans’ place in music history would be cemented in 1952, when Hite Morgan, working at his day job, met a man named Murry Wilson, who ran a machine-tool company based in Hawthorne, a small town in southwestern Los Angeles County. It turned out that Wilson, like Dorinda Morgan, was an aspiring songwriter, and Hite Morgan signed him up to their publishing company, Guild Music. Wilson’s tastes in music were already becoming old-fashioned even in the very early 1950s, but given the style of music he was working in he was a moderately talented writer. His proudest moment was writing a song called “Two Step Side Step” for the Morgans, which was performed on TV by Lawrence Welk — Murry gathered the whole family round the television to watch his song being performed.  That song was a moderate success – it was never a hit for anyone, but it was recorded by several country artists, including the rockabilly singer Bonnie Lou, and most interestingly for our purposes by Johnny Lee Wills, Bob Wills’ brother: [Excerpt: Johnny Lee Wills, “Two Step Side Step”] Wilson wrote a few other songs for the Morgans, of which the most successful was “Tabarin”, which was recorded by the Tangiers — one of the several names under which the Hollywood Flames performed. Gaynel Hodge would later speak fondly of Murry Wilson, and how he was always bragging about his talented kids: [Excerpt: The Tangiers, “Tabarin”] But as the fifties progressed, the Morgans published fewer and fewer of Wilson’s songs, and none of them were hits. But the Morgans and Wilson stayed in touch, and around 1958 he heard from them about an opportunity for one of those talented kids. Dorinda Morgan had written a song called “Chapel of Love” — not the same song as the famous one by the Dixie Cups — and Art Laboe had decided that that song would be perfect as the first record for his new label, Original Sound. Laboe was putting together a new group to sing it, called the Hitmakers, which was based around Val Poliuto. Poliuto had been the tenor singer of an integrated vocal group — two Black members, one white, and one Hispanic — which had gone by the names The Shadows and The Miracles before dismissing both names as being unlikely to lead to any success and taking the name The Jaguars at the suggestion of, of all people, Stan Freberg, the comedian and voice actor. The Jaguars had never had much commercial success, but they’d recorded a version of “The Way You Look Tonight” which became a classic when Laboe included it on the massively successful “Oldies But Goodies”, the first doo-wop nostalgia album: [Excerpt: The Jaguars, “The Way You Look Tonight”] The Jaguars continued for many years, and at one point had Richard Berry guest as an extra vocalist on some of their tracks, but as with so many of the LA vocal groups we’ve looked at from the fifties, they all had their fingers in multiple pies, and so Poliuto was to be in this new group, along with Bobby Adams of the Calvanes, who had been taught to sing R&B by Cornell Gunter and who had recorded for Dootsie Williams: [Excerpt: The Calvanes, “Crazy Over You”] Those two were to be joined by two other singers, who nobody involved can remember much about except that their first names were Don and Duke, but Art Laboe also wanted a new young singer to sing the lead, and was auditioning singers. Murry Wilson suggested to the Morgans that his young son Brian might be suitable for the role, and he auditioned, but Laboe thought he was too young, and the role went to a singer called Rodney Goodens instead: [Excerpt: The Hitmakers, “Chapel of Love”] So the audition was a failure, but it was a first contact between Brian Wilson and the Morgans, and also introduced Brian to Val Poliuto, from whom he would learn a lot about music for the next few years. Brian was a very sensitive kid, the oldest of three brothers, and someone who seemed to have some difficulty dealing with other people — possibly because his father was abusive towards him and his brothers, leaving him frightened of many aspects of life. He did, though, share with his father a love of music, and he had a remarkable ear — singular, as he’s deaf in one ear. He had perfect pitch, a great recollection for melodies — play him something once and it would stay in his brain — and from a very young age he gravitated towards sweet-sounding music. He particularly loved Glenn Miller’s version of “Rhapsody in Blue” as a child: [Excerpt: The Glenn Miller Orchestra, “Rhapsody in Blue”] But his big musical love was a modern harmony group called the Four Freshmen — a group made up of two brothers, their cousin, and a college friend. Modern harmony is an outdated term, but it basically meant that they were singing chords that went beyond the normal simple triads of most pop music. While there were four, obviously, of the Four Freshmen, they often achieved an effect that would normally be five-part harmony, by having the group members sing all the parts of the chord *except* the root note — they’d leave the root note to a bass instrument. So while Brian was listening to four singers, he was learning five-part harmonies. The group would also sing their harmonies in unusual inversions — they’d take one of the notes from the middle of the chord and sing it an octave lower. There was another trick that the Four Freshmen used — they varied their vocals from equal temperament.  To explain this a little bit — musical notes are based on frequencies, and the ratio between them matters. If you double the frequency of a note, you get the same note an octave up — so if you take an A at 440hz, and double the frequency to 880, you get another A, an octave up. If you go down to 220hz, you get the A an octave below. You get all the different notes by multiplying or dividing a note, so A# is A multiplied by a tiny bit more than one, and A flat is A multiplied by a tiny bit less than one. But in the middle ages, this hit a snag — A#. which is A multiplied by one and a bit, is very very slightly different from B flat, which is B multiplied by 0.9 something. And if you double those, so you go to the A# and B flat the next octave up, the difference between A# and B flat gets bigger. And this means that if you play a melody in the key of C, but then decide you want to play it in the key of B flat, you need to retune your instrument — or have instruments with separate notes for A# and B flat — or everything will sound out of tune. It’s very very hard to retune some instruments, especially ones like the piano, and also sometimes you want to play in different keys in the same piece. If you’re playing a song in C, but it goes into C# in the last chorus to give it a bit of extra momentum, you lose that extra momentum if you stop the song to retune the piano. So a different system was invented, and popularised in the Baroque era, called “equal temperament”. In that system, every note is very very slightly out of tune, but those tiny errors cancel out rather than multiply like they do in the old system. You’re sort of taking the average of A# and B flat, and calling them the same note. And to most people’s ears that sounds good enough, and it means you can have a piano without a thousand keys.  But the Four Freshmen didn’t stick to that — because you don’t need to retune your throat to hit different notes (unless you’re as bad a singer as me, anyway). They would sing B flat slightly differently than they would sing A#, and so they would get a purer vocal blend, with stronger harmonic overtones than singers who were singing the notes as placed on a piano: [Excerpt: the Four Freshmen, “It’s a Blue World”] Please note by the way that I’m taking the fact that they used those non-equal temperaments somewhat on trust — Ross Barbour of the group said they did in interviews, and he would know, but I have relatively poor pitch so if you listened to that and thought “Hang on, they’re all singing dead-on equal tempered concert pitch, what’s he talking about?”, then that’s on him. When Brian heard them singing, he instantly fell for them, and became a major, major fan of their work, especially their falsetto singer Bob Flanigan, whose voice he decided to emulate. He decided that he was going to learn how they got that sound. Every day when he got home from school, he would go to the family’s music room, where he had a piano and a record player. He would then play just a second or so of one of their records, and figure out on the piano what notes they were singing in that one second, and duplicating them himself. Then he would learn the next second of the song. He would spend hours every day on this, learning every vocal part, until he had the Four Freshmen’s entire repertoire burned into his brain, and could sing all four vocal parts to every song. Indeed, at one point when he was about sixteen — around the same time as the Art Laboe audition — Brian decided to go and visit the Four Freshmen’s manager, to find out how to form a successful vocal group of his own, and to find out more about the group themselves. After telling the manager that he could sing every part of every one of their songs, the manager challenged him with “The Day Isn’t Long Enough”, a song that they apparently had trouble with: [Excerpt: The Four Freshmen, “The Day Isn’t Long Enough”] And Brian demonstrated every harmony part perfectly. He had a couple of tape recorders at home, and he would experiment with overdubbing his own voice — recording on one tape recorder, playing it back and singing along while recording on the other. Doing this he could do his own imitations of the Four Freshmen, and even as a teenager he could sound spookily like them: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys [Brian Wilson solo recording released on a Beach Boys CD], “Happy Birthday Four Freshmen”] While Brian shared his love for this kind of sweet music with his father, he also liked the rock and roll music that was making its way onto the radio during his teen years — though again, he would gravitate towards the sweet vocal harmonies of the Everly Brothers rather than to more raucous music. He shared his love of the Everlys with his cousin Mike Love, whose tastes otherwise went more in the direction of R&B and doo-wop. Unlike Brian and his brothers, Mike attended Dorsey High School, a predominantly Black school, and his tastes were shaped by that — other graduates of the school include Billy Preston, Eric Dolphy, and Arthur Lee, to give some idea of the kind of atmosphere that Dorsey High had. He loved the Robins, and later the Coasters, and he’s been quoted as saying he “worshipped” Johnny Otis — as did every R&B lover in LA at the time. He would listen to Otis’ show on KFOX, and to Huggy Boy on KRKD. His favourite records were things like “Smokey Joe’s Cafe” by the Robins, which combined an R&B groove with witty lyrics: [Excerpt: The Robins, “Smokey Joe’s Cafe”] He also loved the music of Chuck Berry, a passion he shared with Brian’s youngest brother Carl, who also listened to Otis’ show and got Brian listening to it. While Mike was most attracted to Berry’s witty lyrics, Carl loved the guitar part — he’d loved string instruments since he was a tiny child, and he and a neighbour, David Marks, started taking guitar lessons from another neighbour, John Maus. Maus had been friends with Ritchie Valens, and had been a pallbearer at Valens’ funeral. John was recording at the time with his sister Judy, as the imaginatively-named duo “John & Judy”: [Excerpt: John & Judy, “Why This Feeling?”] John and Judy later took on a bass player called Scott Engel, and a few years after that John and Scott changed their surnames to Walker and became two thirds of The Walker Brothers. But at this time, John was still just a local guitar player, and teaching two enthusiastic kids to play guitar. Carl and David learned how to play Chuck Berry licks, and also started to learn some of the guitar instrumentals that were becoming popular at the time. At the same time, Mike would sing with Brian to pass the time, Mike singing in a bass voice while Brian took a high tenor lead. Other times, Brian would test his vocal arranging out by teaching Carl and his mother Audree vocal parts — Carl got so he could learn parts very quickly, so his big brother wouldn’t keep him around all day and he could go out and play. And sometimes their middle brother Dennis would join in — though he was more interested in going out and having fun at the beach than he was in making music. Brian was interested in nothing *but* making music — at least once he’d quit the school football team (American football, for those of you like me who parse the word to mean what it does in Britain), after he’d got hurt for the first time. But before he did that, he had managed to hurt someone else — a much smaller teammate named Alan Jardine, whose leg Brian broke in a game. Despite that, the two became friends, and would occasionally sing together — like Brian, Alan loved to sing harmonies, and they found that they had an extraordinarily good vocal blend. While Brian mostly sang with his brothers and his cousin, all of whom had a family vocal resemblance, Jardine could sound spookily similar to that family, and especially to Brian. Jardine’s voice was a little stronger and more resonant, Brian’s a little sweeter, with a fuller falsetto, but they had the kind of vocal similarity one normally only gets in family singers. However,  they didn’t start performing together properly, because they had different tastes in music — while Brian was most interested in the modern jazz harmonies of the Four Freshman, Jardine was a fan of the new folk revival groups, especially the Kingston Trio. Alan had a group called the Tikis when he was at high school, which would play Kingston Trio style material like “The Wreck of the John B”, a song that like much of the Kingston Trio’s material had been popularised by the Weavers, but which the Trio had recorded for their first album: [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, “The Wreck of the John B”] Jardine was inspired by that to write his own song, “The Wreck of the Hesperus”, putting Longfellow’s poem to music. One of the other Tikis had a tape recorder, and they made a few stabs at recording it. They thought that they sounded pretty good, and they decided to go round to Brian Wilson’s house to see if he could help them — depending on who you ask, they either wanted him to join the band, or knew that his dad had some connection with the music business and wanted to pick his brains. When they turned up, Brian was actually out, but Audree Wilson basically had an open-door policy for local teenagers, and she told the boys about Hite and Dorinda Morgan. The Tikis took their tape to the Morgans, and the Morgans responded politely, saying that they did sound good — but they sounded like the Kingston Trio, and there were a million groups that sounded like the Kingston Trio. They needed to get an original sound. The Tikis broke up, as Alan went off to Michigan to college. But then a year later, he came back to Hawthorne and enrolled in the same community college that Brian was enrolled in. Meanwhile, the Morgans had got in touch with Gary Winfrey, Alan’s Tikis bandmate, and asked him if the Tikis would record a demo of one of Bruce Morgan’s songs. As the Tikis no longer existed, Alan and Gary formed a new group along the same lines, and invited Brian to be part of one of these sessions. That group, The Islanders made a couple of attempts at Morgan’s song, but nothing worked out. But this brought Brian back to the Morgans’ attention — at this point they’d not seen him in three years. Alan still wanted to record folk music with Brian, and at some point Brian suggested that they get his brother Carl and cousin Mike involved — and then Brian’s mother made him let his other brother Dennis join in.  The group went to see the Morgans, who once again told them that they needed some original material. Dennis piped up that the group had been fooling around with a song about surfing, and while the Morgans had never heard of the sport, they said it would be worth the group’s while finishing off the song and coming back to them. At this point, the idea of a song about surfing was something that was only in Dennis’ head, though he may have mentioned the idea to Mike at some point. Mike and the Wilsons went home and started working out the song, without Al being involved at this time — some of the rehearsal recordings we have seem to suggest that they thought Al was a little overbearing and thought of himself as a bit more professional than the others, and they didn’t want him in the group at first. While surf music was definitely already a thing, there were very few vocal surf records. Brian and Mike wrote the song together, with Mike writing most of the lyrics and coming up with his own bass vocal line, while Brian wrote the rest of the music: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfin’ (Rehearsal)”] None of the group other than Dennis surfed — though Mike would later start surfing a little — and so Dennis provided Mike with some surfing terms that they could add into the song. This led to what would be the first of many, many arguments about songwriting credit among the group, as Dennis claimed that he should get some credit for his contribution, while Mike disagreed: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfin’ (Rehearsal)”] The credit was eventually assigned to Brian Wilson and Mike Love. Eventually, they finished the song, and decided that they *would* get Al Jardine back into the group after all. When Murry and Audree Wilson went away for a long weekend and left their boys some money for emergencies, the group saw their chance. They took that money, along with some more they borrowed from Al’s mother, and rented some instruments — a drum kit and a stand-up bass. They had a party at the Wilsons’ house where they played their new song and a few others, in front of their friends, before going back to the Morgans with their new song completed. For their recording session, they used that stand-up bass, which Al played, along with Carl on an acoustic guitar, giving it that Kingston Trio sound that Al liked. Dennis was the group’s drummer, but he wasn’t yet very good and instead of drums the record has Brian thumping a dustbin lid as its percussion. As well as being the lead vocalist, Mike Love was meant to be the group’s saxophone player, but he never progressed more than honking out a couple of notes, and he doesn’t play on the session. The song they came up with was oddly structured — it had a nine-bar verse and a fourteen-bar chorus, the latter of which was based around a twelve-bar blues, but extended to allow the “surf, surf with me” hook. But other than the unusual bar counts it followed the structure that the group would set up most of their early singles. The song seems at least in part to have been inspired by the song “Bermuda Shorts” by the Delroys, which is a song the group have often cited and would play in their earliest live shows: [Excerpt: The Delroys, “Bermuda Shorts”] They messed around with the structure in various ways in rehearsal, and those can be heard on the rehearsal recordings, but by the time they came into the studio they’d settled on starting with a brief statement of the chorus hook: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfin'”] It then goes into a verse with Mike singing a tenor lead, with the rest of the group doing block harmonies and then joining him on the last line of the verse: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfin'”] And then we have Mike switching down into the bass register to sing wordless doo-wop bass during the blues-based chorus, while the rest of the group again sing in block harmony: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfin'”] That formula would be the one that the Beach Boys would stick with for several singles to follow — the major change that would be made would be that Brian would soon start singing an independent falsetto line over the top of the choruses, rather than being in the block harmonies.  The single was licensed to Candix Records, along with a B-side written by Bruce Morgan, and it became a minor hit record, reaching number seventy-five on the national charts. But what surprised the group about the record was the name on it. They’d been calling themselves the Pendletones, because there was a brand of thick woollen shirt called Pendletons which was popular among surfers, and which the group wore.  It might also have been intended as a pun on Dick Dale’s Deltones, the preeminent surf music group of the time. But Hite Morgan had thought the name didn’t work, and they needed something that was more descriptive of the music they were doing. He’d suggested The Surfers, but Russ Regan, a record promoter, had told him there was already a group called the Surfers, and suggested another name. So the first time the Wilsons realised they were now in the Beach Boys was when they saw the record label for the first time. The group started working on follow-ups — and as they were now performing live shows to promote their records, they switched to using electric guitars when they went into the studio to record some demos in February 1962. By now, Al was playing rhythm guitar, while Brian took over on bass, now playing a bass guitar rather than the double bass Al had played. For that session, as Dennis was still not that great a drummer, Brian decided to bring in a session player, and Dennis stormed out of the studio. However, the session player was apparently flashy and overplayed, and got paid off. Brian persuaded Dennis to come back and take over on drums again, and the session resumed. Val Poliuto was also at the session, in case they needed some keyboards, but he’s not audible on any of the tracks they recorded, at least to my ears. The most likely song for a follow-up was another one by Brian and Mike. This one was very much a rewrite of “Surfin'”, but this time the verses were a more normal eight bars, and the choruses were a compromise between the standard twelve-bar blues and “Surfin'”s fourteen, landing on an unusual thirteen bars. With the electric guitars the group decided to bring in a Chuck Berry influence, and you can hear a certain similarity to songs like “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” in the rhythm and phrasing: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfin’ Safari [early version]”] Around this time, Brian also wrote another song — the song he generally describes as being the first song he ever wrote. Presumably, given that he’d already co-written “Surfin'”, he means that it was the first song he wrote on his own, words and music. The song was inspired, melodically, by the song “When You Wish Upon A Star” from the Disney film Pinocchio: [Excerpt: Cliff Edwards “When You Wish Upon a Star”] The song came to Brian in the car, and he challenged himself to write the whole thing in his head without going to the piano until he’d finished it. The result was a doo-wop ballad with Four Freshmen-like block harmonies, with lyrics inspired by Brian’s then girlfriend Judy Bowles, which they recorded at the same session as that version of “Surfin’ Safari”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfer Girl [early version]”] At the same session, they also recorded two more songs — a song by Brian called Judy, and a surf instrumental written by Carl called “Karate”. However, shortly after that session, Al left the group. As the group had started playing electric instruments, they’d also started performing songs that were more suitable for those instruments, like “What’d I Say” and “The Twist”. Al wasn’t a fan of that kind of music, and he wanted to be singing “Tom Dooley” and “Wreck of the John B”, not “Come on baby, let’s do the Twist”. He was also quite keen on completing his university studies — he was planning on becoming a dentist — and didn’t want to spend time playing tons of small gigs when he could be working towards his degree. This was especially the case since Murry Wilson, who had by this point installed himself as the group’s manager, was booking them on all sorts of cheap dates to get them exposure. As far as Al could see, being a Beach Boy was never going to make anyone any real money, and it wasn’t worth disrupting his studies to keep playing music that he didn’t even particularly like. His place was taken by David Marks, Carl’s young friend who lived nearby. Marks was only thirteen when he joined, and apparently it caused raised eyebrows among some of the other musicians who knew the group, because he was so much younger and less experienced than the rest. Unlike Al, he was never much of a singer — he can hold a tune, and has a pleasant enough voice, but he wasn’t the exceptional harmony singer that Al was — but he was a competent rhythm player, and he and Carl had been jamming together since they’d both got guitars, and knew each other’s playing style. However, while Al was gone from the group, he wasn’t totally out of the picture, and he remained close enough that he was a part of the first ever Beach Boys spin-off side project a couple of months later. Dorinda Morgan had written a song inspired by the new children’s doll, Barbie, that had come out a couple of years before and which, like the Beach Boys, was from Hawthorne. She wanted to put together a studio group to record it, under the name Kenny and the Cadets, and Brian rounded up Carl, Al, Val Poliuto, and his mother Audree, to sing on the record for Mrs Morgan: [Excerpt: Kenny and the Cadets, “Barbie”] But after that, Al Jardine was out of the group for the moment — though he would be back sooner than anyone expected. Shortly after Al left, the new lineup went into a different studio, Western Studios, to record a new demo. Ostensibly produced by Murry Wilson, the session was actually produced by Brian and his new friend Gary Usher, who took charge in the studio and spent most of his time trying to stop Murry interfering. Gary Usher is someone about whom several books have been written, and who would have a huge influence on West Coast music in the sixties. But at this point he was an aspiring singer, songwriter, and record producer, who had been making records for a few months longer than Brian and was therefore a veteran. He’d put out his first single, “Driven Insane”, in March 1961: [Excerpt: Gary Usher, “Driven Insane”] Usher was still far from a success, but he was very good at networking, and had all sorts of minor connections within the music business. As one example, his girlfriend, Sandra Glanz, who performed under the name Ginger Blake, had just written “You Are My Answer” for Carol Connors, who had been the lead singer of the Teddy Bears but was now going solo: [Excerpt: Carol Connors, “You Are My Answer”] Connors, too, would soon become important in vocal surf music, while Ginger would play a significant part in Brian’s life. Brian had started writing songs with Gary, and they were in the studio to record some demos by Gary, and some demos by the Beach Boys of songs that Brian and Gary had written together, along with a new version of “Surfin’ Safari”. Of the two Wilson/Usher songs recorded in the session, one was a slow doo-wop styled ballad called “The Lonely Sea”, which would later become an album track, but the song that they were most interested in recording was one called “409”, which had been inspired by a new, larger, engine that Chevrolet had introduced for top-of-the-line vehicles. Musically, “409” was another song that followed the “Surfin’ Safari” formula, but it was regularised even more, lopping off the extra bar from “Surfin’ Safari”‘s chorus, and making the verses as well as the choruses into twelve-bar blues. But it still started with the hook, still had Mike sing his tenor lead in the verses, and still had him move to sing a boogie-ish bassline in the chorus while the rest of the group chanted in block harmonies over the top. But it introduced a new lyrical theme to the group — now, as well as singing about surfing and the beach, they could also sing about cars and car racing — Love credits this as being one of the main reasons for the group’s success in landlocked areas, because while there were many places in the US where you couldn’t surf, there was nowhere where people didn’t have cars. It’s also the earliest Beach Boys song over which there is an ongoing question of credit. For the first thirty years of the song’s existence, it was credited solely to Wilson and Usher, but in the early nineties Love won a share of the songwriting credit in a lawsuit in which he won credit on many, many songs he’d not been credited for. Love claims that he came up with the “She’s real fine, my 409” hook, and the “giddy up” bass vocal he sang. Usher always claimed that Love had nothing to do with the song, and that Love was always trying to take credit for things he didn’t do. It’s difficult to tell who was telling the truth, because both obviously had a financial stake in the credit (though Usher was dead by the time of the lawsuit). Usher was always very dismissive of all of the Beach Boys with the exception of Brian, and wouldn’t credit them for making any real contributions, Love’s name was definitely missed off the credits of a large number of songs to which he did make substantial contributions, including some where he wrote the whole lyric, and the bits of the song Love claims *do* sound like the kind of thing he contributed to other songs which have no credit disputes. On the other hand, Love also overreached in his claims of credit in that lawsuit, claiming to have co-written songs that were written when he wasn’t even in the same country as the writers. Where you stand on the question of whether Love deserves that credit usually depends on your views of Wilson, Love and Usher as people, and it’s not a question I’m going to get into, but I thought I should acknowledge that the question is there. While “409” was still following the same pattern as the other songs, it’s head and shoulders ahead of the Hite Morgan productions both in terms of performance and in terms of the sound. A great deal of that clearly owes to Usher, who was experimenting with things like sound effects, and so “409” starts with a recording that Brian and Usher made of Usher’s car driving up and down the street: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “409”] Meanwhile the new version of “Surfin’ Safari” was vastly superior to the recording from a couple of months earlier, with changed lyrics and a tighter performance: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfin’ Safari (second version)”] So at the end of the session, the group had a tape of three new songs, and Murry WIlson wanted them to take it somewhere better than Candix Records. He had a contact somewhere much better — at Capitol Records. He was going to phone Ken Nelson. Or at least, Murry *thought* he had a contact at Capitol. He phoned Ken Nelson and told him “Years ago, you did me a favour, and now I’m doing one for you. My sons have formed a group and you have the chance to sign them!” Now, setting aside the question of whether that would actually count as Murry doing Nelson a favour, there was another problem with this — Nelson had absolutely no idea who Murry Wilson was, and no recollection of ever doing him a favour. It turned out that the favour he’d done, in Murry’s eyes, was recording one of Murry’s songs — except that there’s no record of Nelson ever having been involved in a recording of a Murry Wilson song. By this time, Capitol had three A&R people, in charge of different areas. There was Voyle Gilmore, who recorded soft pop — people like Nat “King” Cole. There was Nelson, who as we’ve seen in past episodes had some rockabilly experience but was mostly country — he’d produced Gene Vincent and Wanda Jackson, but he was mostly working at this point with people like Buck Owens and the Louvin Brothers, producing some of the best country music ever recorded, but not really doing the kind of thing that the Beach Boys were doing. But the third, and youngest, A&R man was doing precisely the kind of thing the Beach Boys did. That was Nik Venet, who we met back in the episode on “LSD-25”, and who was one of the people who had been involved with the very first surf music recordings. Nelson suggested that Murry go and see Venet, and Venet was immediately impressed with the tape Murry played him — so impressed that he decided to offer the group a contract, and to release “Surfin’ Safari” backed with “409”, buying the masters from Murry rather than rerecording them. Venet also tried to get the publishing rights for the songs for Beechwood Music, a publishing company owned by Capitol’s parent company EMI (and known in the UK as Ardmore & Beechwood) but Gary Usher, who knew a bit about the business, said that he and Brian were going to set up their own publishing companies — a decision which Murry Wilson screamed at him for, but which made millions of dollars for Brian over the next few years. The single came out, and was a big hit, making number fourteen on the hot one hundred, and “409” as the B-side also scraped the lower reaches of the charts. Venet soon got the group into the studio to record an album to go with the single, with Usher adding extra backing vocals to fill out the harmonies in the absence of Al Jardine. While the Beach Boys were a self-contained group, Venet seems to have brought in his old friend Derry Weaver to add extra guitar, notably on Weaver’s song “Moon Dawg”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Moon Dawg”] It’s perhaps unsurprising that the Beach Boys recorded that, because not only was it written by Venet’s friend, but Venet owned the publishing on the song. The group also recorded “Summertime Blues”, which was co-written by Jerry Capehart, a friend of Venet and Weaver’s who also may have appeared on the album in some capacity. Both those songs fit the group, but their choice was clearly influenced by factors other than the purely musical, and very soon Brian Wilson would get sick of having his music interfered with by Venet.  The album came out on October 1, and a few days later the single was released in the UK, several months after its release in the US. And on the same day, a British group who *had* signed to have their single published by Ardmore & Beechwood put out their own single on another EMI label. And we’re going to look at that in the next episode…

This week there are two episiodes of the podcast going up, both of them longer than normal. This one, episode ninety-nine, is on "Surfin' Safari" by the Beach Boys, and the group's roots in LA, and is fifty minutes long. 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 "Misirlou" by Dick Dale and the Deltones. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources No Mixclouds this week, as both episodes have far too many songs by one artist. The mixclouds will be back with episode 101. I used many resources for this episode, most of which will be used in future Beach Boys episodes too. It's difficult to enumerate everything here, because I have been an active member of the Beach Boys fan community for twenty-three years, and have at times just used my accumulated knowledge for this. But the resources I list here are ones I've checked for specific things. Becoming the Beach Boys by James B. Murphy is an in-depth look at the group's early years. Stephen McParland has published many, many books on the California surf and hot-rod music scenes, including several on both the Beach Boys and Gary Usher. The Beach Boys: Inception and Creation is the one I used most here, but I referred to several. His books can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks Andrew Doe's Bellagio 10452 site is an invaluable resource. Jon Stebbins' The Beach Boys FAQ is a good balance between accuracy and readability. And Philip Lambert's Inside the Music of Brian Wilson is an excellent, though sadly out of print, musicological analysis of Wilson's music from 1962 through 67. The Beach Boys' Morgan recordings and all the outtakes from them can be found on this 2-CD set. The Surfin' Safari album is now in the public domain, and so can be found cheaply, but the best version to get is still the twofer CD with the Surfin' USA album. *But*, those two albums are fairly weak, the Beach Boys in their early years were not really an album band, and you will want to investigate them further. I would recommend, rather than the two albums linked above, starting with this budget-priced three-CD set, which has a surprisingly good selection of their material on it.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, there are going to be two podcast episodes. This one, episode ninety-nine, will be a normal-length episode, or maybe slightly longer than normal, and episode one hundred, which will follow straight after it, will be a super-length one that's at least three times the normal length of one of these podcasts. I'm releasing them together, because the two episodes really do go together. We've talked recently about how we're getting into the sixties of the popular imagination, and those 1960s began, specifically, in October 1962. That was the month of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which saw the world almost end. It was the month that James Brown released Live at the Apollo -- an album we'll talk about in a few weeks' time. And if you want one specific date that the 1960s started, it was October the fifth, 1962. On that date, a film came out that we mentioned last week -- Doctor No, the first ever James Bond film. It was also the date that two records were released on EMI in Britain. One was a new release by a British band, the other a record originally released a few months earlier in the USA, by an American band. Both bands had previously released records on much smaller labels, to no success other than very locally, but this was their first to be released on a major label, and had a slightly different lineup from those earlier releases. Both bands would influence each other, and go on to be the most successful band from their respective country in the next decade. Both bands would revolutionise popular music. And the two bands would even be filed next to each other alphabetically, both starting "the Bea". In episode one hundred, we're going to look at "Love Me Do" by the Beatles, but right now, in episode ninety-nine, we're going to look at "Surfin' Safari" by the Beach Boys: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Surfin' Safari"] Before I start this story properly, I just want to say something -- there are a lot of different accounts of the formation of the Beach Boys, and those accounts are all different. What I've tried to do here is take one plausible account of how the group formed and tell it in a reasonable length of time. If you read the books I link in the show notes, you might find some disagreements about the precise order of some of these events, or some details I've glossed over. This episode is already running long, and I didn't want to get into that stuff, but it's important that I stress that this is just as accurate as I can get in the length of an episode. The Beach Boys really were boys when they made their first records. David Marks, their youngest member, was only thirteen when "Surfin' Safari" came out, and Mike Love, the group's oldest member, was twenty-one.  So, as you might imagine when we're talking about children, the story really starts with the older generation. In particular, we want to start with Hite and Dorinda Morgan. The Morgans were part-time music business people in Los Angeles in the fifties. Hite Morgan owned an industrial flooring company, and that was his main source of income -- putting in floors at warehouses and factories that could withstand the particular stresses that such industrial sites faced. But while that work was hard, it was well-paying and didn't take too much time. The company would take on two or three expensive jobs a year, and for the rest of the year Hite would have the money and time to help his wife with her work as a songwriter. She'd collaborated with Spade Cooley, one of the most famous Western Swing musicians of the forties, and she'd also co-written "Don't Put All Your Dreams in One Basket" for Ray Charles in 1948: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "Don't Put All Your Dreams in One Basket"] Hite and Dorinda's son, Bruce, was also a songwriter, though I've seen some claims that often the songs credited to him were actually written by his mother, who gave him credits in order to encourage him. One of Bruce Morgan's earliest songs was a piece called "Proverb Boogie", which was actually credited under his father's name, and which Louis Jordan retitled to "Heed My Warning" and took a co-writing credit on: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Heed My Warning"] Eventually the Morgans also started their own publishing company, and built their own small demo studio, which they used to use to record cheap demos for many other songwriters and performers. The Morgans were only very minor players in the music industry, but they were friendly with many of the big names on the LA R&B scene, and knew people like John Dolphin, Bumps Blackwell, Sam Cooke, and the Hollywood Flames. Bruce Morgan would talk in interviews about Bumps Blackwell calling round to see his father and telling him about this new song "You Send Me" he was going to record with Cooke. But although nobody could have realised it at the time, or for many years later, the Morgans' place in music history would be cemented in 1952, when Hite Morgan, working at his day job, met a man named Murry Wilson, who ran a machine-tool company based in Hawthorne, a small town in southwestern Los Angeles County. It turned out that Wilson, like Dorinda Morgan, was an aspiring songwriter, and Hite Morgan signed him up to their publishing company, Guild Music. Wilson's tastes in music were already becoming old-fashioned even in the very early 1950s, but given the style of music he was working in he was a moderately talented writer. His proudest moment was writing a song called "Two Step Side Step" for the Morgans, which was performed on TV by Lawrence Welk -- Murry gathered the whole family round the television to watch his song being performed.  That song was a moderate success – it was never a hit for anyone, but it was recorded by several country artists, including the rockabilly singer Bonnie Lou, and most interestingly for our purposes by Johnny Lee Wills, Bob Wills' brother: [Excerpt: Johnny Lee Wills, "Two Step Side Step"] Wilson wrote a few other songs for the Morgans, of which the most successful was "Tabarin", which was recorded by the Tangiers -- one of the several names under which the Hollywood Flames performed. Gaynel Hodge would later speak fondly of Murry Wilson, and how he was always bragging about his talented kids: [Excerpt: The Tangiers, "Tabarin"] But as the fifties progressed, the Morgans published fewer and fewer of Wilson's songs, and none of them were hits. But the Morgans and Wilson stayed in touch, and around 1958 he heard from them about an opportunity for one of those talented kids. Dorinda Morgan had written a song called "Chapel of Love" -- not the same song as the famous one by the Dixie Cups -- and Art Laboe had decided that that song would be perfect as the first record for his new label, Original Sound. Laboe was putting together a new group to sing it, called the Hitmakers, which was based around Val Poliuto. Poliuto had been the tenor singer of an integrated vocal group -- two Black members, one white, and one Hispanic -- which had gone by the names The Shadows and The Miracles before dismissing both names as being unlikely to lead to any success and taking the name The Jaguars at the suggestion of, of all people, Stan Freberg, the comedian and voice actor. The Jaguars had never had much commercial success, but they'd recorded a version of "The Way You Look Tonight" which became a classic when Laboe included it on the massively successful "Oldies But Goodies", the first doo-wop nostalgia album: [Excerpt: The Jaguars, "The Way You Look Tonight"] The Jaguars continued for many years, and at one point had Richard Berry guest as an extra vocalist on some of their tracks, but as with so many of the LA vocal groups we've looked at from the fifties, they all had their fingers in multiple pies, and so Poliuto was to be in this new group, along with Bobby Adams of the Calvanes, who had been taught to sing R&B by Cornell Gunter and who had recorded for Dootsie Williams: [Excerpt: The Calvanes, "Crazy Over You"] Those two were to be joined by two other singers, who nobody involved can remember much about except that their first names were Don and Duke, but Art Laboe also wanted a new young singer to sing the lead, and was auditioning singers. Murry Wilson suggested to the Morgans that his young son Brian might be suitable for the role, and he auditioned, but Laboe thought he was too young, and the role went to a singer called Rodney Goodens instead: [Excerpt: The Hitmakers, "Chapel of Love"] So the audition was a failure, but it was a first contact between Brian Wilson and the Morgans, and also introduced Brian to Val Poliuto, from whom he would learn a lot about music for the next few years. Brian was a very sensitive kid, the oldest of three brothers, and someone who seemed to have some difficulty dealing with other people -- possibly because his father was abusive towards him and his brothers, leaving him frightened of many aspects of life. He did, though, share with his father a love of music, and he had a remarkable ear -- singular, as he's deaf in one ear. He had perfect pitch, a great recollection for melodies -- play him something once and it would stay in his brain -- and from a very young age he gravitated towards sweet-sounding music. He particularly loved Glenn Miller's version of "Rhapsody in Blue" as a child: [Excerpt: The Glenn Miller Orchestra, "Rhapsody in Blue"] But his big musical love was a modern harmony group called the Four Freshmen -- a group made up of two brothers, their cousin, and a college friend. Modern harmony is an outdated term, but it basically meant that they were singing chords that went beyond the normal simple triads of most pop music. While there were four, obviously, of the Four Freshmen, they often achieved an effect that would normally be five-part harmony, by having the group members sing all the parts of the chord *except* the root note -- they'd leave the root note to a bass instrument. So while Brian was listening to four singers, he was learning five-part harmonies. The group would also sing their harmonies in unusual inversions -- they'd take one of the notes from the middle of the chord and sing it an octave lower. There was another trick that the Four Freshmen used -- they varied their vocals from equal temperament.  To explain this a little bit -- musical notes are based on frequencies, and the ratio between them matters. If you double the frequency of a note, you get the same note an octave up -- so if you take an A at 440hz, and double the frequency to 880, you get another A, an octave up. If you go down to 220hz, you get the A an octave below. You get all the different notes by multiplying or dividing a note, so A# is A multiplied by a tiny bit more than one, and A flat is A multiplied by a tiny bit less than one. But in the middle ages, this hit a snag -- A#. which is A multiplied by one and a bit, is very very slightly different from B flat, which is B multiplied by 0.9 something. And if you double those, so you go to the A# and B flat the next octave up, the difference between A# and B flat gets bigger. And this means that if you play a melody in the key of C, but then decide you want to play it in the key of B flat, you need to retune your instrument -- or have instruments with separate notes for A# and B flat -- or everything will sound out of tune. It's very very hard to retune some instruments, especially ones like the piano, and also sometimes you want to play in different keys in the same piece. If you're playing a song in C, but it goes into C# in the last chorus to give it a bit of extra momentum, you lose that extra momentum if you stop the song to retune the piano. So a different system was invented, and popularised in the Baroque era, called "equal temperament". In that system, every note is very very slightly out of tune, but those tiny errors cancel out rather than multiply like they do in the old system. You're sort of taking the average of A# and B flat, and calling them the same note. And to most people's ears that sounds good enough, and it means you can have a piano without a thousand keys.  But the Four Freshmen didn't stick to that -- because you don't need to retune your throat to hit different notes (unless you're as bad a singer as me, anyway). They would sing B flat slightly differently than they would sing A#, and so they would get a purer vocal blend, with stronger harmonic overtones than singers who were singing the notes as placed on a piano: [Excerpt: the Four Freshmen, "It's a Blue World"] Please note by the way that I'm taking the fact that they used those non-equal temperaments somewhat on trust -- Ross Barbour of the group said they did in interviews, and he would know, but I have relatively poor pitch so if you listened to that and thought "Hang on, they're all singing dead-on equal tempered concert pitch, what's he talking about?", then that's on him. When Brian heard them singing, he instantly fell for them, and became a major, major fan of their work, especially their falsetto singer Bob Flanigan, whose voice he decided to emulate. He decided that he was going to learn how they got that sound. Every day when he got home from school, he would go to the family's music room, where he had a piano and a record player. He would then play just a second or so of one of their records, and figure out on the piano what notes they were singing in that one second, and duplicating them himself. Then he would learn the next second of the song. He would spend hours every day on this, learning every vocal part, until he had the Four Freshmen's entire repertoire burned into his brain, and could sing all four vocal parts to every song. Indeed, at one point when he was about sixteen -- around the same time as the Art Laboe audition -- Brian decided to go and visit the Four Freshmen's manager, to find out how to form a successful vocal group of his own, and to find out more about the group themselves. After telling the manager that he could sing every part of every one of their songs, the manager challenged him with "The Day Isn't Long Enough", a song that they apparently had trouble with: [Excerpt: The Four Freshmen, "The Day Isn't Long Enough"] And Brian demonstrated every harmony part perfectly. He had a couple of tape recorders at home, and he would experiment with overdubbing his own voice -- recording on one tape recorder, playing it back and singing along while recording on the other. Doing this he could do his own imitations of the Four Freshmen, and even as a teenager he could sound spookily like them: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys [Brian Wilson solo recording released on a Beach Boys CD], "Happy Birthday Four Freshmen"] While Brian shared his love for this kind of sweet music with his father, he also liked the rock and roll music that was making its way onto the radio during his teen years -- though again, he would gravitate towards the sweet vocal harmonies of the Everly Brothers rather than to more raucous music. He shared his love of the Everlys with his cousin Mike Love, whose tastes otherwise went more in the direction of R&B and doo-wop. Unlike Brian and his brothers, Mike attended Dorsey High School, a predominantly Black school, and his tastes were shaped by that -- other graduates of the school include Billy Preston, Eric Dolphy, and Arthur Lee, to give some idea of the kind of atmosphere that Dorsey High had. He loved the Robins, and later the Coasters, and he's been quoted as saying he "worshipped" Johnny Otis -- as did every R&B lover in LA at the time. He would listen to Otis' show on KFOX, and to Huggy Boy on KRKD. His favourite records were things like "Smokey Joe's Cafe" by the Robins, which combined an R&B groove with witty lyrics: [Excerpt: The Robins, "Smokey Joe's Cafe"] He also loved the music of Chuck Berry, a passion he shared with Brian's youngest brother Carl, who also listened to Otis' show and got Brian listening to it. While Mike was most attracted to Berry's witty lyrics, Carl loved the guitar part -- he'd loved string instruments since he was a tiny child, and he and a neighbour, David Marks, started taking guitar lessons from another neighbour, John Maus. Maus had been friends with Ritchie Valens, and had been a pallbearer at Valens' funeral. John was recording at the time with his sister Judy, as the imaginatively-named duo "John & Judy": [Excerpt: John & Judy, "Why This Feeling?"] John and Judy later took on a bass player called Scott Engel, and a few years after that John and Scott changed their surnames to Walker and became two thirds of The Walker Brothers. But at this time, John was still just a local guitar player, and teaching two enthusiastic kids to play guitar. Carl and David learned how to play Chuck Berry licks, and also started to learn some of the guitar instrumentals that were becoming popular at the time. At the same time, Mike would sing with Brian to pass the time, Mike singing in a bass voice while Brian took a high tenor lead. Other times, Brian would test his vocal arranging out by teaching Carl and his mother Audree vocal parts -- Carl got so he could learn parts very quickly, so his big brother wouldn't keep him around all day and he could go out and play. And sometimes their middle brother Dennis would join in -- though he was more interested in going out and having fun at the beach than he was in making music. Brian was interested in nothing *but* making music -- at least once he'd quit the school football team (American football, for those of you like me who parse the word to mean what it does in Britain), after he'd got hurt for the first time. But before he did that, he had managed to hurt someone else -- a much smaller teammate named Alan Jardine, whose leg Brian broke in a game. Despite that, the two became friends, and would occasionally sing together -- like Brian, Alan loved to sing harmonies, and they found that they had an extraordinarily good vocal blend. While Brian mostly sang with his brothers and his cousin, all of whom had a family vocal resemblance, Jardine could sound spookily similar to that family, and especially to Brian. Jardine's voice was a little stronger and more resonant, Brian's a little sweeter, with a fuller falsetto, but they had the kind of vocal similarity one normally only gets in family singers. However,  they didn't start performing together properly, because they had different tastes in music -- while Brian was most interested in the modern jazz harmonies of the Four Freshman, Jardine was a fan of the new folk revival groups, especially the Kingston Trio. Alan had a group called the Tikis when he was at high school, which would play Kingston Trio style material like "The Wreck of the John B", a song that like much of the Kingston Trio's material had been popularised by the Weavers, but which the Trio had recorded for their first album: [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "The Wreck of the John B"] Jardine was inspired by that to write his own song, "The Wreck of the Hesperus", putting Longfellow's poem to music. One of the other Tikis had a tape recorder, and they made a few stabs at recording it. They thought that they sounded pretty good, and they decided to go round to Brian Wilson's house to see if he could help them -- depending on who you ask, they either wanted him to join the band, or knew that his dad had some connection with the music business and wanted to pick his brains. When they turned up, Brian was actually out, but Audree Wilson basically had an open-door policy for local teenagers, and she told the boys about Hite and Dorinda Morgan. The Tikis took their tape to the Morgans, and the Morgans responded politely, saying that they did sound good -- but they sounded like the Kingston Trio, and there were a million groups that sounded like the Kingston Trio. They needed to get an original sound. The Tikis broke up, as Alan went off to Michigan to college. But then a year later, he came back to Hawthorne and enrolled in the same community college that Brian was enrolled in. Meanwhile, the Morgans had got in touch with Gary Winfrey, Alan's Tikis bandmate, and asked him if the Tikis would record a demo of one of Bruce Morgan's songs. As the Tikis no longer existed, Alan and Gary formed a new group along the same lines, and invited Brian to be part of one of these sessions. That group, The Islanders made a couple of attempts at Morgan's song, but nothing worked out. But this brought Brian back to the Morgans' attention -- at this point they'd not seen him in three years. Alan still wanted to record folk music with Brian, and at some point Brian suggested that they get his brother Carl and cousin Mike involved -- and then Brian's mother made him let his other brother Dennis join in.  The group went to see the Morgans, who once again told them that they needed some original material. Dennis piped up that the group had been fooling around with a song about surfing, and while the Morgans had never heard of the sport, they said it would be worth the group's while finishing off the song and coming back to them. At this point, the idea of a song about surfing was something that was only in Dennis' head, though he may have mentioned the idea to Mike at some point. Mike and the Wilsons went home and started working out the song, without Al being involved at this time -- some of the rehearsal recordings we have seem to suggest that they thought Al was a little overbearing and thought of himself as a bit more professional than the others, and they didn't want him in the group at first. While surf music was definitely already a thing, there were very few vocal surf records. Brian and Mike wrote the song together, with Mike writing most of the lyrics and coming up with his own bass vocal line, while Brian wrote the rest of the music: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Surfin' (Rehearsal)"] None of the group other than Dennis surfed -- though Mike would later start surfing a little -- and so Dennis provided Mike with some surfing terms that they could add into the song. This led to what would be the first of many, many arguments about songwriting credit among the group, as Dennis claimed that he should get some credit for his contribution, while Mike disagreed: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Surfin' (Rehearsal)”] The credit was eventually assigned to Brian Wilson and Mike Love. Eventually, they finished the song, and decided that they *would* get Al Jardine back into the group after all. When Murry and Audree Wilson went away for a long weekend and left their boys some money for emergencies, the group saw their chance. They took that money, along with some more they borrowed from Al's mother, and rented some instruments -- a drum kit and a stand-up bass. They had a party at the Wilsons' house where they played their new song and a few others, in front of their friends, before going back to the Morgans with their new song completed. For their recording session, they used that stand-up bass, which Al played, along with Carl on an acoustic guitar, giving it that Kingston Trio sound that Al liked. Dennis was the group's drummer, but he wasn't yet very good and instead of drums the record has Brian thumping a dustbin lid as its percussion. As well as being the lead vocalist, Mike Love was meant to be the group's saxophone player, but he never progressed more than honking out a couple of notes, and he doesn't play on the session. The song they came up with was oddly structured -- it had a nine-bar verse and a fourteen-bar chorus, the latter of which was based around a twelve-bar blues, but extended to allow the "surf, surf with me" hook. But other than the unusual bar counts it followed the structure that the group would set up most of their early singles. The song seems at least in part to have been inspired by the song "Bermuda Shorts" by the Delroys, which is a song the group have often cited and would play in their earliest live shows: [Excerpt: The Delroys, "Bermuda Shorts"] They messed around with the structure in various ways in rehearsal, and those can be heard on the rehearsal recordings, but by the time they came into the studio they'd settled on starting with a brief statement of the chorus hook: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Surfin'"] It then goes into a verse with Mike singing a tenor lead, with the rest of the group doing block harmonies and then joining him on the last line of the verse: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Surfin'"] And then we have Mike switching down into the bass register to sing wordless doo-wop bass during the blues-based chorus, while the rest of the group again sing in block harmony: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Surfin'"] That formula would be the one that the Beach Boys would stick with for several singles to follow -- the major change that would be made would be that Brian would soon start singing an independent falsetto line over the top of the choruses, rather than being in the block harmonies.  The single was licensed to Candix Records, along with a B-side written by Bruce Morgan, and it became a minor hit record, reaching number seventy-five on the national charts. But what surprised the group about the record was the name on it. They'd been calling themselves the Pendletones, because there was a brand of thick woollen shirt called Pendletons which was popular among surfers, and which the group wore.  It might also have been intended as a pun on Dick Dale's Deltones, the preeminent surf music group of the time. But Hite Morgan had thought the name didn't work, and they needed something that was more descriptive of the music they were doing. He'd suggested The Surfers, but Russ Regan, a record promoter, had told him there was already a group called the Surfers, and suggested another name. So the first time the Wilsons realised they were now in the Beach Boys was when they saw the record label for the first time. The group started working on follow-ups -- and as they were now performing live shows to promote their records, they switched to using electric guitars when they went into the studio to record some demos in February 1962. By now, Al was playing rhythm guitar, while Brian took over on bass, now playing a bass guitar rather than the double bass Al had played. For that session, as Dennis was still not that great a drummer, Brian decided to bring in a session player, and Dennis stormed out of the studio. However, the session player was apparently flashy and overplayed, and got paid off. Brian persuaded Dennis to come back and take over on drums again, and the session resumed. Val Poliuto was also at the session, in case they needed some keyboards, but he's not audible on any of the tracks they recorded, at least to my ears. The most likely song for a follow-up was another one by Brian and Mike. This one was very much a rewrite of "Surfin'", but this time the verses were a more normal eight bars, and the choruses were a compromise between the standard twelve-bar blues and "Surfin'"s fourteen, landing on an unusual thirteen bars. With the electric guitars the group decided to bring in a Chuck Berry influence, and you can hear a certain similarity to songs like "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" in the rhythm and phrasing: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Surfin' Safari [early version]"] Around this time, Brian also wrote another song -- the song he generally describes as being the first song he ever wrote. Presumably, given that he'd already co-written "Surfin'", he means that it was the first song he wrote on his own, words and music. The song was inspired, melodically, by the song "When You Wish Upon A Star" from the Disney film Pinocchio: [Excerpt: Cliff Edwards "When You Wish Upon a Star"] The song came to Brian in the car, and he challenged himself to write the whole thing in his head without going to the piano until he'd finished it. The result was a doo-wop ballad with Four Freshmen-like block harmonies, with lyrics inspired by Brian's then girlfriend Judy Bowles, which they recorded at the same session as that version of “Surfin' Safari”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Surfer Girl [early version]"] At the same session, they also recorded two more songs -- a song by Brian called Judy, and a surf instrumental written by Carl called "Karate". However, shortly after that session, Al left the group. As the group had started playing electric instruments, they'd also started performing songs that were more suitable for those instruments, like "What'd I Say" and "The Twist". Al wasn't a fan of that kind of music, and he wanted to be singing "Tom Dooley" and "Wreck of the John B", not "Come on baby, let's do the Twist". He was also quite keen on completing his university studies -- he was planning on becoming a dentist -- and didn't want to spend time playing tons of small gigs when he could be working towards his degree. This was especially the case since Murry Wilson, who had by this point installed himself as the group's manager, was booking them on all sorts of cheap dates to get them exposure. As far as Al could see, being a Beach Boy was never going to make anyone any real money, and it wasn't worth disrupting his studies to keep playing music that he didn't even particularly like. His place was taken by David Marks, Carl's young friend who lived nearby. Marks was only thirteen when he joined, and apparently it caused raised eyebrows among some of the other musicians who knew the group, because he was so much younger and less experienced than the rest. Unlike Al, he was never much of a singer -- he can hold a tune, and has a pleasant enough voice, but he wasn't the exceptional harmony singer that Al was -- but he was a competent rhythm player, and he and Carl had been jamming together since they'd both got guitars, and knew each other's playing style. However, while Al was gone from the group, he wasn't totally out of the picture, and he remained close enough that he was a part of the first ever Beach Boys spin-off side project a couple of months later. Dorinda Morgan had written a song inspired by the new children's doll, Barbie, that had come out a couple of years before and which, like the Beach Boys, was from Hawthorne. She wanted to put together a studio group to record it, under the name Kenny and the Cadets, and Brian rounded up Carl, Al, Val Poliuto, and his mother Audree, to sing on the record for Mrs Morgan: [Excerpt: Kenny and the Cadets, "Barbie"] But after that, Al Jardine was out of the group for the moment -- though he would be back sooner than anyone expected. Shortly after Al left, the new lineup went into a different studio, Western Studios, to record a new demo. Ostensibly produced by Murry Wilson, the session was actually produced by Brian and his new friend Gary Usher, who took charge in the studio and spent most of his time trying to stop Murry interfering. Gary Usher is someone about whom several books have been written, and who would have a huge influence on West Coast music in the sixties. But at this point he was an aspiring singer, songwriter, and record producer, who had been making records for a few months longer than Brian and was therefore a veteran. He'd put out his first single, "Driven Insane", in March 1961: [Excerpt: Gary Usher, "Driven Insane"] Usher was still far from a success, but he was very good at networking, and had all sorts of minor connections within the music business. As one example, his girlfriend, Sandra Glanz, who performed under the name Ginger Blake, had just written "You Are My Answer" for Carol Connors, who had been the lead singer of the Teddy Bears but was now going solo: [Excerpt: Carol Connors, "You Are My Answer"] Connors, too, would soon become important in vocal surf music, while Ginger would play a significant part in Brian's life. Brian had started writing songs with Gary, and they were in the studio to record some demos by Gary, and some demos by the Beach Boys of songs that Brian and Gary had written together, along with a new version of "Surfin' Safari". Of the two Wilson/Usher songs recorded in the session, one was a slow doo-wop styled ballad called "The Lonely Sea", which would later become an album track, but the song that they were most interested in recording was one called "409", which had been inspired by a new, larger, engine that Chevrolet had introduced for top-of-the-line vehicles. Musically, "409" was another song that followed the "Surfin' Safari" formula, but it was regularised even more, lopping off the extra bar from "Surfin' Safari"'s chorus, and making the verses as well as the choruses into twelve-bar blues. But it still started with the hook, still had Mike sing his tenor lead in the verses, and still had him move to sing a boogie-ish bassline in the chorus while the rest of the group chanted in block harmonies over the top. But it introduced a new lyrical theme to the group -- now, as well as singing about surfing and the beach, they could also sing about cars and car racing -- Love credits this as being one of the main reasons for the group's success in landlocked areas, because while there were many places in the US where you couldn't surf, there was nowhere where people didn't have cars. It's also the earliest Beach Boys song over which there is an ongoing question of credit. For the first thirty years of the song's existence, it was credited solely to Wilson and Usher, but in the early nineties Love won a share of the songwriting credit in a lawsuit in which he won credit on many, many songs he'd not been credited for. Love claims that he came up with the "She's real fine, my 409" hook, and the "giddy up" bass vocal he sang. Usher always claimed that Love had nothing to do with the song, and that Love was always trying to take credit for things he didn't do. It's difficult to tell who was telling the truth, because both obviously had a financial stake in the credit (though Usher was dead by the time of the lawsuit). Usher was always very dismissive of all of the Beach Boys with the exception of Brian, and wouldn't credit them for making any real contributions, Love's name was definitely missed off the credits of a large number of songs to which he did make substantial contributions, including some where he wrote the whole lyric, and the bits of the song Love claims *do* sound like the kind of thing he contributed to other songs which have no credit disputes. On the other hand, Love also overreached in his claims of credit in that lawsuit, claiming to have co-written songs that were written when he wasn't even in the same country as the writers. Where you stand on the question of whether Love deserves that credit usually depends on your views of Wilson, Love and Usher as people, and it's not a question I'm going to get into, but I thought I should acknowledge that the question is there. While "409" was still following the same pattern as the other songs, it's head and shoulders ahead of the Hite Morgan productions both in terms of performance and in terms of the sound. A great deal of that clearly owes to Usher, who was experimenting with things like sound effects, and so "409" starts with a recording that Brian and Usher made of Usher's car driving up and down the street: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "409"] Meanwhile the new version of "Surfin' Safari" was vastly superior to the recording from a couple of months earlier, with changed lyrics and a tighter performance: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Surfin' Safari (second version)"] So at the end of the session, the group had a tape of three new songs, and Murry WIlson wanted them to take it somewhere better than Candix Records. He had a contact somewhere much better -- at Capitol Records. He was going to phone Ken Nelson. Or at least, Murry *thought* he had a contact at Capitol. He phoned Ken Nelson and told him "Years ago, you did me a favour, and now I'm doing one for you. My sons have formed a group and you have the chance to sign them!" Now, setting aside the question of whether that would actually count as Murry doing Nelson a favour, there was another problem with this -- Nelson had absolutely no idea who Murry Wilson was, and no recollection of ever doing him a favour. It turned out that the favour he'd done, in Murry's eyes, was recording one of Murry's songs -- except that there's no record of Nelson ever having been involved in a recording of a Murry Wilson song. By this time, Capitol had three A&R people, in charge of different areas. There was Voyle Gilmore, who recorded soft pop -- people like Nat "King" Cole. There was Nelson, who as we've seen in past episodes had some rockabilly experience but was mostly country -- he'd produced Gene Vincent and Wanda Jackson, but he was mostly working at this point with people like Buck Owens and the Louvin Brothers, producing some of the best country music ever recorded, but not really doing the kind of thing that the Beach Boys were doing. But the third, and youngest, A&R man was doing precisely the kind of thing the Beach Boys did. That was Nik Venet, who we met back in the episode on "LSD-25", and who was one of the people who had been involved with the very first surf music recordings. Nelson suggested that Murry go and see Venet, and Venet was immediately impressed with the tape Murry played him -- so impressed that he decided to offer the group a contract, and to release "Surfin' Safari" backed with "409", buying the masters from Murry rather than rerecording them. Venet also tried to get the publishing rights for the songs for Beechwood Music, a publishing company owned by Capitol's parent company EMI (and known in the UK as Ardmore & Beechwood) but Gary Usher, who knew a bit about the business, said that he and Brian were going to set up their own publishing companies -- a decision which Murry Wilson screamed at him for, but which made millions of dollars for Brian over the next few years. The single came out, and was a big hit, making number fourteen on the hot one hundred, and "409" as the B-side also scraped the lower reaches of the charts. Venet soon got the group into the studio to record an album to go with the single, with Usher adding extra backing vocals to fill out the harmonies in the absence of Al Jardine. While the Beach Boys were a self-contained group, Venet seems to have brought in his old friend Derry Weaver to add extra guitar, notably on Weaver's song "Moon Dawg": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Moon Dawg"] It's perhaps unsurprising that the Beach Boys recorded that, because not only was it written by Venet's friend, but Venet owned the publishing on the song. The group also recorded "Summertime Blues", which was co-written by Jerry Capehart, a friend of Venet and Weaver's who also may have appeared on the album in some capacity. Both those songs fit the group, but their choice was clearly influenced by factors other than the purely musical, and very soon Brian Wilson would get sick of having his music interfered with by Venet.  The album came out on October 1, and a few days later the single was released in the UK, several months after its release in the US. And on the same day, a British group who *had* signed to have their single published by Ardmore & Beechwood put out their own single on another EMI label. And we're going to look at that in the next episode...

Happy 95th birthday to a man who not only is a Guinness World Record holder for broadcasting, he literally saved an entire era of music by people of color from being whitewashed and became an icon of Southern California Hispanic culture. #oldies #oldiesbutgoodies #lowrider #chicano #rhythmnadblues #rockandroll #doowop #crusing

In LA’s signature industry —entertainment – NewFilmmakers Los Angeles (NFMLA) is forging a path and creating community for the next generation of storytellers. With the goal of showcasing, supporting, educating and connecting diverse and emerging filmmakers, NFMLA is a non-profit 501(c) 3 organization designed to showcase innovative works by emerging filmmakers from around the world, providing the Los Angeles community of entertainment professionals and film goers with a constant surge of monthly screening events. Meet Founding Executive Director, Larry Laboe, as we discuss the work of NFMLA and its efforts to provide a forum where filmmakers can be recognized for their contributions, have open audience discussions about their projects and connect with industry professionals for insight on distribution, production, acquisition, and representation. To learn more and get involved, please visit http://www.newfilmmakersla.com  For more information, please visit www.CivitasLA.com  And, we hope you’ll rate and review our show; and stay in touch with us on Facebook (@CivitasLA), Instagram (@Civitas_LA) and Twitter (@Civitas_LA).

Zwar kommen noch immer täglich neue Corona-Fälle in Schleswig-Holstein hinzu, doch die Lage ist so überschaubar, dass das Land nun weitere Lockerungen ankündigt. Ab Montag, den 20. Juli werden die Regeln für Veranstaltungen und Schwimmbäder angepasst. Wir erklären Ihnen diese Lockerungen im Detail. Außerdem geht's um die Kultkneipe "Die Erbse", die nach Kiel zurückgekehrt ist, und um das KN+ Sommerquiz. Diese Woche verlosen wir einen Gutschein für die "Casa Tripaldi" in Laboe!

Kathryn sits down with friend Betsy to chat about how she came to become a woman of faith. Alli and Kathryn then discuss how sharing our stories of faith can help our world as we are faced with our deep brokenness. Tune in, and stay watered!

In this podcast, Bluespring Wealth Partners firm successors Anne-Marie Laboe of Bernard R. Wolfe & Associates, Brandon Hayes of oXYGen Financial, and Roger David of Rinvelt & David share their own personal experiences with business succession. 

This episode I talked a little bit about where I met Arch hanging out with him at his show Etc. We also talked to hip hop DJ Romeo who helps out with art show and is a big friend and fan about his feelings on Art and what he's up to. --- 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/liz-bridges/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/liz-bridges/support

A member of the Producers Guild of America (PGA), Larry is the President of Production at international digital production house SXM, where he has produced numerous digital properties. The first series was NBC’s ‘Ctrl’ starring Tony Hale and Steve Howey. Since, Larry has produced for top networks and brands including Disney, NBC, CBS, VEVO, Dailymotion, MTV, Break Media (now DEFY Media), Comedy Central, IKEA, Samsung, Coca-Cola and Smuckers.These series have been viewed more than 1 billion times over both traditional and new media, and have garnered multiple awards at BANFF, SXSW, NATPE, MIPTV, Cannes and The Webbys. The series have been covered by media outlets worldwide and SXM has been profiled by publications such as Fast Company, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. Larry has produced projects directed by James Franco and Joseph Gordon Levitt. Notable titles produced include Fact Checkers Unit, Easy to Assemble, Armed Response, SOS Island, Matumbo Goldberg, The Comment Show, Kitchen Jam, Diagnosis Stories, Jump Outs, In a City and Extreme Retreat among others.In addition to his work at SXM, Larry also serves as Co-Founder and Executive Director of NewFilmmakers Los Angeles (NFMLA).Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/thejhorton)

Es ist ein imposantes Schauspiel, wenn die großen Kreuzfahrtschiffe nach Kiel kommen und nahe dem Stadtzentrum anlegen. Rund 130 Luxusdampfer kommen jedes Jahr in die Landeshauptstadt von Schleswig-Holstein.Die Kreuzfahrer verlassen das Schiff und befinden sich direkt in der Innenstadt, nur fünf Minuten sind es zu Fuß bis zum Bahnhof und in die Einkaufsmeile Holstenstraße, eine der ältesten Fußgängerzonen Deutschlands. Historisches zu Seefahrt und Hafengeschichte können Besucher im Schifffahrtsmuseum entdecken. Das größte Museum der Landeshauptstadt ist die Kunsthalle. Sie beherbergt eine Sammlung zur Kunst des 19. Jahrhunderts, der klassischen Moderne und internationale Kunst seit 1945. Wer Kiel und die Kieler Förde in ihrer ganzen Vielfalt erleben will, sollte unbedingt eine Hafenrundfahrt machen. Vorbei am Marinehafen und am Yacht Club entlang der Kieler Förde bis nach Laboe. Das slawische Fischer- und Bauerndorf hat sich in über 800 Jahren zu einem beliebten Ostseebad entwickelt.

Art Laboe In Conversation with Josh Kun Broadcasting icon, Art Laboe, is our guest this week on In Conversation. Dublab board member, Josh Kun, sits down with Laboe at his Original Sound Studio on Sunset Boulevard to revisit the history of his illustrious 70 year career and explore his intimate nightly connection with listeners cruising the California streets or listening close for the voice of a loved one. We are proud to bring you an in-depth interview with this legendary radio personality! A sprightly 87 years young at the time of this interview, Laboe continues to hold one of the top rated slots in Southern California radio, one of the world’s most important markets. He graces the airwaves six nights a week with his Art Laboe Connection program. The format of the show is an exception amongst commercial radio, emphasizing a direct connection with the community. Throughout each show he takes dedications from listeners and sends their songs and kisses over the airwaves to loved ones, many of whom are incarcerated. His radio show is a pipeline through which the emotions and wishes of listeners are transmitted. The songs heard on the Art Laboe Connection are a refreshing and heartfelt break from the glossy buzz flooding much of the dial. While Art plays tried and trued favorites every show his playlist varies widely night to night based on to listener requests and his mood. On any given episode you’re likely to hear rare doo-wop, R&B or sweet soul cuts played nowhere else. In Conversation is produced by dublab. Sound editing and music are by Matteah Baim. Due to rights reasons music from the original broadcast has been removed. To hear more, please visit dublab.com.

LA Times columnist Patt Morrison speaks with radio legend Art Laboe.

Der Sommer war bunt Die hessische Sommerferien sind nun vorbei, Dänemark ist leider wieder weit weg und die Kinder "dürfen" bei schönstem Sommerwetter wieder in die Schule gehen. [caption id="attachment_868" align="alignleft" width="300"] Diese Szene war glücklicherweise die Einzige, die wir aus Titanic nachgespielt haben.[/caption] Auch unser beiden Jungs sind nun wieder im Alltag bestens aufgehoben. Vielleicht denken sie noch ein bisschen an unsere Urlaubserinnerungen, wenn es mal wieder total öde ist in der Schule. Wie im letzten Newsletter berichtet, waren wir ja eine Woche mit einem Charterschiff auf der Ostsee um Dänemark unterwegs. Das Wetter war leider nicht wirklich sommerlich und so waren lange Hosen und Jacken eine Woche angesagt. Aber wir hatten guten Segelwind und das war ja eigentlich die Hauptmotivation für den Urlaub: wir wollten segeln! Aber von Anfang an. Wir konnten die Hanse 400 schon am Freitag Abend kapern und so konnten wir dann am Samstag morgen pünktlich nach der Übergabe durch den Vercharterer schon bald ablegen. Ab nach Dänemark Unser erster Schlag ging nach Bagenkop auf Langeland. Babsi stand an der Reling und meinte auf einmal: "Was schwimmt denn da vorne?". Alle Köpfe fuhren herum in die Richtung, in die Babsi deutete. Eine dunkle Rückenfinne tauchte in einiger Entfernung neben unserem Boot auf. Ein Schweinswal begrüßte uns in Dänemark! Die komplette Flaute zwang uns schon bald, die testweise hochgezogenen Segel wieder einzuholen und den Jockel anzuwerfen. Bagenkop In Bagenkop angekommen, stellten wir fest: Hier ist es voll. Aber wir konnten uns doch am Ende des Stegs ins Päckchen zu einer dänischen Yacht legen und bemerkten dann auch gleich den Grund für die vielen Yachten: Auf Bagenkop war Sommerfest das sogenannte: Bagenkop By- & Havnefest Das mussten wir uns natürlich ansehen, aber erstmal brav die Hafengebühr zahlen. Gehört hatten wir schön öfter von den Bezahlautomaten, erlebt noch nicht. Aber es ist alles sehr verständlich erklärt und so konnten wir kurz darauf unser Bändchen am Boot befestigen. [caption id="attachment_867" align="alignright" width="300"] Skipper Eric[/caption] Dann schnell stadtfein gemacht und ab aufs Fest. Also die Dänen können feiern. Wir haben selten so viele lustige und ausgelassene Menschen gesehen, wie auf diesem Fest. Wir haben uns dann von einem sehr netten Dänen eine Spezialität empfehlen lassen: Roggenbrot mit Backfisch, Remoulade, Gurken und Röstzwiebel! LEGGER! In der Nacht haben wir sehr gut geschlafen und am nächsten Morgen wollten wir nach unserer Törnplanung nach Lyø.  Kurz bevor wir Lyø erreichten, liessen Wind und Regen nach und wir sahen die schöne kleine Insel in der Sonne liegen. Lyø Der Hafen war noch nicht so voll und wir konnten gut in eine Box rückwärts anlegen. Endlich konnten wir die Manöver aus dem Skippertraining im letzten Jahr in der Praxis erproben: Eindampfen in eine Achterspring lässt einen auch mit Wind auf die Nase gut und kontrolliert rückwärts in die Box fahren. Unser Stegnachbar hat uns sehr sicher und ruhig bestätigt und war ein sehr positiver Ausgleich zu den üblichen Verdächtigen, die als vermeintliche Profis am Steg standen und meinten, gute Ratschläge in Form von unsachlichen Zurufen geben zu müssen! [caption id="attachment_870" align="alignright" width="300"] Die Glockensteine von Lyø[/caption] Thorsten und Christine lagen also mit ihrer Friendship Rose neben uns und wir hatten gleich ziemlich viel Gesprächsstoff, da auch die Beiden in der nächsten Zeit zu ihrer Weltumseglung aufbrechen werden. Kurz darauf legte dann backbords noch Skipperlehrer Axel mit seiner Crew an und zusammen mit dieser netten Gesellschaft schmeckte das Anlegebier nochmal so gut! Am nächsten Morgen wollten wir die Insel ein wenig erkunden. Lyø ist eine sehr schnuckelige kleine Insel. Auf Lyø gibt es nur einen zentral gelegenen Ort, der Lyø By heißt. Er ist mit seinen fünf Dorfteichen eines der schönsten Dörfer Dänemarks, in dem mundgeblasene Fensterscheiben und Holzschlösser in den Türen zu sehen sind.  Ausserdem wollten wir uns die berühmten Klokkestenen von Lyø ansehen. Kevin hatte seine Drohne dabei und machten einige sehr schöne Aufnahmen von der Insel. Wir beschlossen den Tag noch auf der Insel zu verbringen und erst am nächsten Morgen weiter zu fahren. Im Laufe des Nachmittags Abends wurde der Hafen voller und voller und es waren einige sehr gewagte Hafenmanöver zu beobachten. Wir waren froh, dass wir unseren Boxenplatz hatten, denn nun lagen die Schiffe im Dreierpäckchen. So schnell sich der Hafen am Abend gefüllt hatte, so schnell leerte er sich auch schon wieder am nächsten Morgen. Auch wir legten nach einem leckeren Frühstück ab und fuhren wie geplant in Richtung Sonderborg. Wir legten einen kleinen Zwischenstopp im Stadthafen ein, den wir zum Einkaufen nutzen. Schnell war ein Supermarkt gefunden und die Biervorräte und das notwendige Zubehör für Fischbrötchen waren gebunkert. Vor dem Schloss von Sonderborg lag ein großes Traditionsschiff der königlichen Marine und eine Feier mit Pauken und Trompeten war im Gange, sehen konnte man nicht viel, aber die Musik war sehr feierlich. Unsere Smutja versorgte uns dann während der Weiterfahrt mit leckeren Fischbrötchen und wir erreichten unsere Ankerbucht. Ankern im Vemmingbund Selbst unsere Jungs fanden die Begriffe idyllisch und traumhaft in diesem Moment nicht kitschig ;-) [caption id="attachment_864" align="alignright" width="300"] Kevin und David genießen den Sonnenuntergang vor Anker in Vemmingbund[/caption] Nachdem ein Motorboot mit seinen Wasserkifahrern nach einer Stunde abfuhr, war nur noch Stille. Wir grillen mit unserm wunderbaren COBB GRILL und beobachten im Schein der untergehenden Sonne, wie Schweinswale um unser Schiff ziehen. Nach einem traumhaften Sonnenuntergang hatte Eric die Idee, das wir auch den Sonnenaufgang gemeinsam erleben könnten. Also schnell gegoogelt, wann dieser stattfindet und den Wecker auf fünf Uhr gestellt. Die Sonne ging blutrot über einem Ententeich auf! Kein Windhauch kräuselte das Wasser. Zufrieden krochen wir dann nochmal in unsere Kojen und holten uns noch eine Mütze Schlaf. Fünf Uhr war wirklich etwas früh, um jetzt schon auf zu bleiben. Als wir wieder wach wurden, bot sich ein anderes Bild! Der Schwell hatte merklich zugenommen und wir fuhren dann recht flott gegenan aus der Flensburger Förde und die Küste entlang Richtung Maasholm. [caption id="attachment_865" align="alignleft" width="225"] Babsi peitscht die Hanse bis auf 8 Knoten[/caption] In Maasholm sahen wir schon aus einiger Entfernung eine Amel Super Maramu am Steg liegen. Wir Eltern bekamen glänzende Augen und die Jungs sahen eine Amel das erste Mal live. Wir machten längsseits hinter ihr fest.  Der Hafenmeister empfahl uns sofort den leckeren Fischstand von Petersen hier um die Ecke. Das liessen wir uns nicht zweimal sagen und schlugen uns den Bauch voll. Fischbrötchen und Backfisch. Das Leben kann so einfach sein. Und so lecker! Nachdem uns Kevin und David beim Monopoly spielen nach dem Abendessen richtig abgezockt hatten, gingen wir dann müde schlafen. Am nächsten Morgen hatten wir nur noch ein kurzes Stück zu fahren. Wir tankten in Strande und fuhren dann wieder auf unseren Liegeplatz in Laboe! Abends mussten wir zum Abschluss auf vielfachen Wunsch zweier Herren zum Bosna essen gehen! Anschließend genossen wir noch ein leckeres Eis bei einem weiteren schönen Sonnenuntergang am Strand von Laboe. [caption id="attachment_869" align="alignright" width="300"] Der Himmel brennt am letzten Abend in Laboe[/caption] Am nächsten Morgen wurde gepackt und geräumt. Während Eric die Übergabe mit dem Vercharterer  machte, fuhr Babsi, David und Kevin das Leergut weg und zu einem obligatorischen Besuch bei Kaufhaus Stolz! Um zwei Uhr winkten wir das letzte Mal der Ostsee und fuhren wieder zurück ins heiße Rhein-Main-Gebiet. [caption id="attachment_866" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Die Glüxpiraten-Crew[/caption]

Backstage Knitting PodcastEpisode 28- She-nun-igans!www.backstageknitting.com•You can find us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Periscope.•Join our Ravelry group, introduce yourself and we’ll give you a shout out!•Ways to help victims of Hurricane Harvey. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/how-to-help-hurricane-storm-harvey_us_59a166dde4b0821444c37515•On the Needles:oAnna is working on some stripey mitts for her Etsy shop and a scrappy granny square lap blanket. •https://www.etsy.com/shop/hibougirl?ref=pr_faveshopsoBethany is working on her Disneyland sockhead hat in Malabrigo, her second LaBoe top by Cory Ellen in Cascade 220, she started the Wonder Woman wrap by Carissa Browning in Madeline Tosh, and she has also started her first square for the Welcome Blanket project.•http://www.malabrigoyarn.com/sock-28#.WahYQEv0R6k•http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/laboe•http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/wonder-woman-wrap-knit•https://www.welcomeblanket.org/patterns/•Off the Needles:oBethany finished a Shrek hat and a pair of Shrek ears for Shrek the Musical Jr. at Puyallup Children’s Theater and Music Academy. •https://www.facebook.com/PuyallupChildrensTheater/photos/a.432772810100901.99111.125587520819433/1635632399814930/?type=3&theater•Sew A Needle Pulling Thread:oAnna is starting her Geek Girl Con Cosplay. She is basing her cosplay off the main character from Dealing with Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede.•https://www.amazon.com/Dealing-Dragons-Enchanted-Forest-Chronicles-ebook/dp/B00QPHX2U2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1504205275&sr=8-1&keywords=dealing+with+dragons•Knetflix and Knit:oBethany watched a lot of Parks and Rec. She also saw The Little Hours, which was funny but not family friendly. oAnna watched Voltron, Legendary Defenders! And is all caught up on Game of Thrones. •In Rehearsal:oAnna is helping with the costuming for Outsiders Inn production of Blitzrieg. •https://www.facebook.com/Outsiders-Inn-210548302319786/•https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/theater/hard-truths-or-easy-targets-confronting-the-summer-of-trump-onstage.html•Events!oWe are extending our Leah Justine giveaway! To win her awesome debut album join our Ravelry group and tell us who is your favorite country artist or group is! •https://www.leahjustine.com•https://www.amazon.com/Leah-Justine/dp/B074JRQ8DF/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1502947450&sr=8-1&keywords=leah+justineoOur Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Along is coming to a close. Thank you to everyone who participated and shared your tips and tricks to reducing their footprint.oOregon Flock and Fiber Festival September 23 and 24 in Canby, Oregon! •http://flockandfiberfestival.comoALL KNITTER’S EVE charity event! We will be making blankets to send to Welcome Blanket for immigrants and refugees. This event will be October 29 at Puyallup Children’s Theater in Puyallup, Washington. We are looking for vendors and raffle donations. Email us at backstageknitting@gmail.com •https://www.welcomeblanket.orgoVogue Knitting Live November 3-5 in Bellevue, Washington.oMadrona and Stitches West will happen in February 2018 and we will be there! •Shownotes can be found at www.backstageknitting.com•We can be found on Facebook, Instagram, Periscope, and Twitter!•Join our Ravelry group!!

Backstage Knitting PodcastEpisode 28- She-nun-igans!www.backstageknitting.com•You can find us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Periscope.•Join our Ravelry group, introduce yourself and we’ll give you a shout out!•Ways to help victims of Hurricane Harvey. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/how-to-help-hurricane-storm-harvey_us_59a166dde4b0821444c37515•On the Needles:oAnna is working on some stripey mitts for her Etsy shop and a scrappy granny square lap blanket. •https://www.etsy.com/shop/hibougirl?ref=pr_faveshopsoBethany is working on her Disneyland sockhead hat in Malabrigo, her second LaBoe top by Cory Ellen in Cascade 220, she started the Wonder Woman wrap by Carissa Browning in Madeline Tosh, and she has also started her first square for the Welcome Blanket project.•http://www.malabrigoyarn.com/sock-28#.WahYQEv0R6k•http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/laboe•http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/wonder-woman-wrap-knit•https://www.welcomeblanket.org/patterns/•Off the Needles:oBethany finished a Shrek hat and a pair of Shrek ears for Shrek the Musical Jr. at Puyallup Children’s Theater and Music Academy. •https://www.facebook.com/PuyallupChildrensTheater/photos/a.432772810100901.99111.125587520819433/1635632399814930/?type=3&theater•Sew A Needle Pulling Thread:oAnna is starting her Geek Girl Con Cosplay. She is basing her cosplay off the main character from Dealing with Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede.•https://www.amazon.com/Dealing-Dragons-Enchanted-Forest-Chronicles-ebook/dp/B00QPHX2U2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1504205275&sr=8-1&keywords=dealing+with+dragons•Knetflix and Knit:oBethany watched a lot of Parks and Rec. She also saw The Little Hours, which was funny but not family friendly. oAnna watched Voltron, Legendary Defenders! And is all caught up on Game of Thrones. •In Rehearsal:oAnna is helping with the costuming for Outsiders Inn production of Blitzrieg. •https://www.facebook.com/Outsiders-Inn-210548302319786/•https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/16/theater/hard-truths-or-easy-targets-confronting-the-summer-of-trump-onstage.html•Events!oWe are extending our Leah Justine giveaway! To win her awesome debut album join our Ravelry group and tell us who is your favorite country artist or group is! •https://www.leahjustine.com•https://www.amazon.com/Leah-Justine/dp/B074JRQ8DF/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1502947450&sr=8-1&keywords=leah+justineoOur Reduce, Reuse, Recycle Along is coming to a close. Thank you to everyone who participated and shared your tips and tricks to reducing their footprint.oOregon Flock and Fiber Festival September 23 and 24 in Canby, Oregon! •http://flockandfiberfestival.comoALL KNITTER’S EVE charity event! We will be making blankets to send to Welcome Blanket for immigrants and refugees. This event will be October 29 at Puyallup Children’s Theater in Puyallup, Washington. We are looking for vendors and raffle donations. Email us at backstageknitting@gmail.com •https://www.welcomeblanket.orgoVogue Knitting Live November 3-5 in Bellevue, Washington.oMadrona and Stitches West will happen in February 2018 and we will be there! •Shownotes can be found at www.backstageknitting.com•We can be found on Facebook, Instagram, Periscope, and Twitter!•Join our Ravelry group!!

Episode 27- They don’t sell DPNs in Disneylandwww.backstageknitting.com•Shout out to Madelen from Sweden! Join our Ravelry group and introduce yourself. We’ll give you a shout out!•We can be found on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Periscope. •Backstage Knitting Podcast does not condone or approve of racism, bigotry, or white supremacy of any kind. •On the Needles:oAnna is working on her “Gillyweed” shawl, which is the “Light As A Feather” shawl from Cascade Yarns. •http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/light-as-a-feather-shawl-5•https://www.etsy.com/listing/511567038/handpainted-wool-yarn-handspun-yarn-bfl•http://www.mosaicmoon.com/item_672/Sherlocked-Semisolid-Birch-Sport-4-oz-skeins.htmoBethany is working on her “Disneyland” hat that she brought to knit in line while on vacation out of some Malabrigo she bought at the Black Sheep Yarn Boutique in Olympia. She is working on her vanilla sock in Plymouth Happy Feet in the “Blueberry” colorway. She is using the Fish Lips Kiss heel. She cast on her second Laboe top by Cory Ellen in a turquoise and dark gray in Cascade 220 superwash and her 13th Black Lives Matter pussyhat. •http://www.malabrigoyarn.com/home-1#.WZUkQ0v0R6k•https://www.theblacksheepyarnboutique.com•https://www.plymouthyarn.com/yarn/happy-feet-100-splash-hand-dyed-item-1555•http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/fish-lips-kiss-heel•http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/laboe•Off the Needles:oAnna finished the “Close to You” shawl by Justyn Lorkowska in the “Hecate” colorway from A Hundred Ravens Yarns. •http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/close-to-you•http://ahundredravens.com•In Time Out:oBethany has her TPCT in time out. It is being knit in Miss Babs Yowza in the “Deep Sea Jellyfish” colorway. •http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/tpct•https://www.missbabs.com/collections/yowza/products/yowza-deepseajellyfish•Sew a Needle Pulling Thread: oAnna sewed several things for Ren Faire last weekend including a pirate flag, a tent bag, and pirate tank top. oBethany has purchased goods to start sewing!•Spinning:oBethany got to spin on Jasmin Knitmore’s Schacht Matchless spinning wheel. She loves it and is now saving her money for one of her own. •http://www.knitmoregirlspodcast.com•https://schachtspindle.com/item/matchless-spinning-wheel/•Knetflix and Knit:oAnna is watching the current season of Game of Thrones and LOVED Atomic Blonde!!oBethany watched Moana, Gilmore Girls, Parks and Rec, The West Wing, One Fine Day and the Two Towers. •In Performance:oBethany is gearing up for the final weekend of Frankenstein with New Muses Theatre Co. at the Dukesbay Theater in Tacoma. •http://www.newmuses.com•Events:oOur Reduce Reuse Recycle Along is going on now through Labor Day. Post in our Ravelry thread about what you’re doing to reduce your footprint.oCONTEST!!! Win a copy of Leah Justine’s debut country album!! Join our Ravelry group and tell us in the contest thread who your favorite country artist/group is. Leah Justine’s album can now be found on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, etc. •https://www.leahjustine.com•https://www.amazon.com/Leah-Justine/dp/B074JRQ8DF/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1502947450&sr=8-1&keywords=leah+justineoWe will be at Oregon Flock and Fiber Festival in Canby, Oregon September 23-24.oPNW Yarn Crawl September 29-October 1, 2017. •http://www.pnwyarncrawl.comoVogue Knitting Live in Bellevue, Washington November 3-5, 2017•https://www.vogueknittinglive.com/seattle/54151•Join our Ravelry group!•Find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Periscope•Show notes can be found at www.backstageknitting.com

Episode 27- They don’t sell DPNs in Disneylandwww.backstageknitting.com•Shout out to Madelen from Sweden! Join our Ravelry group and introduce yourself. We’ll give you a shout out!•We can be found on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Periscope. •Backstage Knitting Podcast does not condone or approve of racism, bigotry, or white supremacy of any kind. •On the Needles:oAnna is working on her “Gillyweed” shawl, which is the “Light As A Feather” shawl from Cascade Yarns. •http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/light-as-a-feather-shawl-5•https://www.etsy.com/listing/511567038/handpainted-wool-yarn-handspun-yarn-bfl•http://www.mosaicmoon.com/item_672/Sherlocked-Semisolid-Birch-Sport-4-oz-skeins.htmoBethany is working on her “Disneyland” hat that she brought to knit in line while on vacation out of some Malabrigo she bought at the Black Sheep Yarn Boutique in Olympia. She is working on her vanilla sock in Plymouth Happy Feet in the “Blueberry” colorway. She is using the Fish Lips Kiss heel. She cast on her second Laboe top by Cory Ellen in a turquoise and dark gray in Cascade 220 superwash and her 13th Black Lives Matter pussyhat. •http://www.malabrigoyarn.com/home-1#.WZUkQ0v0R6k•https://www.theblacksheepyarnboutique.com•https://www.plymouthyarn.com/yarn/happy-feet-100-splash-hand-dyed-item-1555•http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/fish-lips-kiss-heel•http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/laboe•Off the Needles:oAnna finished the “Close to You” shawl by Justyn Lorkowska in the “Hecate” colorway from A Hundred Ravens Yarns. •http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/close-to-you•http://ahundredravens.com•In Time Out:oBethany has her TPCT in time out. It is being knit in Miss Babs Yowza in the “Deep Sea Jellyfish” colorway. •http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/tpct•https://www.missbabs.com/collections/yowza/products/yowza-deepseajellyfish•Sew a Needle Pulling Thread: oAnna sewed several things for Ren Faire last weekend including a pirate flag, a tent bag, and pirate tank top. oBethany has purchased goods to start sewing!•Spinning:oBethany got to spin on Jasmin Knitmore’s Schacht Matchless spinning wheel. She loves it and is now saving her money for one of her own. •http://www.knitmoregirlspodcast.com•https://schachtspindle.com/item/matchless-spinning-wheel/•Knetflix and Knit:oAnna is watching the current season of Game of Thrones and LOVED Atomic Blonde!!oBethany watched Moana, Gilmore Girls, Parks and Rec, The West Wing, One Fine Day and the Two Towers. •In Performance:oBethany is gearing up for the final weekend of Frankenstein with New Muses Theatre Co. at the Dukesbay Theater in Tacoma. •http://www.newmuses.com•Events:oOur Reduce Reuse Recycle Along is going on now through Labor Day. Post in our Ravelry thread about what you’re doing to reduce your footprint.oCONTEST!!! Win a copy of Leah Justine’s debut country album!! Join our Ravelry group and tell us in the contest thread who your favorite country artist/group is. Leah Justine’s album can now be found on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, etc. •https://www.leahjustine.com•https://www.amazon.com/Leah-Justine/dp/B074JRQ8DF/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1502947450&sr=8-1&keywords=leah+justineoWe will be at Oregon Flock and Fiber Festival in Canby, Oregon September 23-24.oPNW Yarn Crawl September 29-October 1, 2017. •http://www.pnwyarncrawl.comoVogue Knitting Live in Bellevue, Washington November 3-5, 2017•https://www.vogueknittinglive.com/seattle/54151•Join our Ravelry group!•Find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Periscope•Show notes can be found at www.backstageknitting.com

Backstage Knitting PodcastEpisode 25- Just Keep TinkingShow Notes can be found at www.backstageknitting.com•Shout out to: Sue from Canada, Briana from Massachusetts, and Jennifer from Seattle, Washington. •On the Needles: oAnna is working on her Sockhead Hat variation based on the pattern by Kelly McClure in “Hells Bells” by Magpie Fibers and an Entrelac blanket in Noro of Anna’s own creation. •http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/sockhead-slouch-hat•http://www.magpiefibers.com/productsdk/hell-bells•https://knittingfever.com/brand/norooBethany is seaming up her Baby wrap Sweater by Churchmouse Yarns in the “UW” colorway by Fancy Image Yarn, knitting up a vanilla sock in Plymouth Yarn Happy Feet in the “Blueberry” colorway, she is also working on the Laboe top by Cory Ellen in the “Platinum” and “Bad Juju” colorway from Amanda’s Art Yarn. •http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/baby-wrap-sweater•http://www.fancyimageyarn.com/store/p190/UW_-_Fingering_Wt._Merino.html•https://www.plymouthyarn.com/yarn/happy-feet-100-item-2555•http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/laboe•http://www.amandasartyarn.com•Off The Needles:oBethany finished a Sock head hat by Kelly McClure (see link in Anna’s section of On the Needles) in Madeline Tosh (Not Malabrigo as previously stated) •https://madelinetosh.com/rainbow/ Pretty sure it is the “Soot” colorway. •In Time Out:oBethany has had to tink back the K2P2 ribbing on her Laboe top several times this week. •Sew A Needle Pulling Thread:oAnna has been working on a Greek goddess dress for a photo shoot, the blue gingham shirt dress (which is now in sewing time out), and a couple commissioned dresses are in the works. •Spinning:oBethany is having a blast spinning for Tour de Fleece. She is spinning some BFL from Allyn Knit and Spin in pinks, purples, and reds. •Knetflix and Knit:oAnna watched Gladiator for Greek photo shoot inspiration. She is also reading “The Pirate Queen; in search of Grace O’Malley” by Barbara Sjoholm.•https://www.amazon.com/Pirate-Queen-Search-OMalley-Legendary-ebook/dp/B00THMCF3M/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1499984545&sr=8-1&keywords=the+pirate+queen+in+search+of+grace+omalleyoBethany watched How I Met Your Mother, the Season 9 finale of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Star Trek: TNG, 13 Going On 30, and Jenny’s Wedding. She also restarted the first “Outlander” book. •https://www.amazon.com/Outlander-Novel-Book-1-ebook/dp/B000FC2L1O/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1499984665&sr=8-1&keywords=outlander•http://www.frockflicks.com •Healing Hands:oAnna is almost finished with Term 2 and is heading into finals next week. •In Rehearsal:oBethany closed “A Servant of Two Masters” last weekend and is opening “Frankenstein” on August 4 with New Muses Theater Co. •http://www.newmuses.com•Events:oOur Reduce Reuse Recycle Along is on now through Labor Day! •Join our Ravelry group and post in the thread about what you are doing to reduce you environmental impact. •#RRRalongoBethany will be attending Stitch N Pitch at Safeco Field Thursday July 20, 2017oBethany will also be attending Leah Justine’s Debut Album Release party at Steel Creek in Tacoma on Saturday July 22, 2017.•https://www.leahjustine.com •Discussion:oBethany and Anna discuss how we budget for fiber events and how we value the tools of our craft such as pay for patterns and beautiful indie dyed yarns, etc. •https://vickiehowell.com/craftish/•Show Notes can be found at www.backstageknitting.com •Find us, friend us, like us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Periscope•Join our FANTASTIC Ravelry group!

Backstage Knitting PodcastEpisode 25- Just Keep TinkingShow Notes can be found at www.backstageknitting.com•Shout out to: Sue from Canada, Briana from Massachusetts, and Jennifer from Seattle, Washington. •On the Needles: oAnna is working on her Sockhead Hat variation based on the pattern by Kelly McClure in “Hells Bells” by Magpie Fibers and an Entrelac blanket in Noro of Anna’s own creation. •http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/sockhead-slouch-hat•http://www.magpiefibers.com/productsdk/hell-bells•https://knittingfever.com/brand/norooBethany is seaming up her Baby wrap Sweater by Churchmouse Yarns in the “UW” colorway by Fancy Image Yarn, knitting up a vanilla sock in Plymouth Yarn Happy Feet in the “Blueberry” colorway, she is also working on the Laboe top by Cory Ellen in the “Platinum” and “Bad Juju” colorway from Amanda’s Art Yarn. •http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/baby-wrap-sweater•http://www.fancyimageyarn.com/store/p190/UW_-_Fingering_Wt._Merino.html•https://www.plymouthyarn.com/yarn/happy-feet-100-item-2555•http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/laboe•http://www.amandasartyarn.com•Off The Needles:oBethany finished a Sock head hat by Kelly McClure (see link in Anna’s section of On the Needles) in Madeline Tosh (Not Malabrigo as previously stated) •https://madelinetosh.com/rainbow/ Pretty sure it is the “Soot” colorway. •In Time Out:oBethany has had to tink back the K2P2 ribbing on her Laboe top several times this week. •Sew A Needle Pulling Thread:oAnna has been working on a Greek goddess dress for a photo shoot, the blue gingham shirt dress (which is now in sewing time out), and a couple commissioned dresses are in the works. •Spinning:oBethany is having a blast spinning for Tour de Fleece. She is spinning some BFL from Allyn Knit and Spin in pinks, purples, and reds. •Knetflix and Knit:oAnna watched Gladiator for Greek photo shoot inspiration. She is also reading “The Pirate Queen; in search of Grace O’Malley” by Barbara Sjoholm.•https://www.amazon.com/Pirate-Queen-Search-OMalley-Legendary-ebook/dp/B00THMCF3M/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1499984545&sr=8-1&keywords=the+pirate+queen+in+search+of+grace+omalleyoBethany watched How I Met Your Mother, the Season 9 finale of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Star Trek: TNG, 13 Going On 30, and Jenny’s Wedding. She also restarted the first “Outlander” book. •https://www.amazon.com/Outlander-Novel-Book-1-ebook/dp/B000FC2L1O/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1499984665&sr=8-1&keywords=outlander•http://www.frockflicks.com •Healing Hands:oAnna is almost finished with Term 2 and is heading into finals next week. •In Rehearsal:oBethany closed “A Servant of Two Masters” last weekend and is opening “Frankenstein” on August 4 with New Muses Theater Co. •http://www.newmuses.com•Events:oOur Reduce Reuse Recycle Along is on now through Labor Day! •Join our Ravelry group and post in the thread about what you are doing to reduce you environmental impact. •#RRRalongoBethany will be attending Stitch N Pitch at Safeco Field Thursday July 20, 2017oBethany will also be attending Leah Justine’s Debut Album Release party at Steel Creek in Tacoma on Saturday July 22, 2017.•https://www.leahjustine.com •Discussion:oBethany and Anna discuss how we budget for fiber events and how we value the tools of our craft such as pay for patterns and beautiful indie dyed yarns, etc. •https://vickiehowell.com/craftish/•Show Notes can be found at www.backstageknitting.com •Find us, friend us, like us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Periscope•Join our FANTASTIC Ravelry group!

Viel los an diesem Wochenende in Kiel. Das Barcamp findet wieder statt, das Fördefestival bringt große deutsche Musik an den Strand von Laboe und der Weg zwischen Holtenau und Friedrichsort wird frei gegeben.

Bericht vom überraschend entspannten Förde Festival auf dem Strand von Laboe mit dem Top-Act Unheilig. Außerdem: Holstein Kiel ist nach dramatischen 24 Stunden nun doch Meister der Regionalliga Nord.

Die letzten Vorbereitungen für das Laboe-Festival am Strand mit Unheilig laufen - nur der Wetterbericht macht nicht mit. Außerdem: blaue Schafe auf dem Rathausplatz.

Seit Montag darf man (fast) nur noch bei den Bussen in Kiel vorne einsteigen. Außerdem: Der Fördedampfer Laboe fährt in Anleger Bellevue.

Holstein gewinnt indirekt, THW gewinnt direkt, Laboe hat einen neuen Bürgermeister und an diesem Montag ist wieder Webmontag im Kitz.

Unheilig kommt nach Laboe an den Kurstrand am 18.05.2013 und Karten soll es schon ab Freitag geben. Außerdem: Der neue Tatort wird gedreht.