American musician and songwriter
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55 episodes with Laura Nyro
10 episodes with Laura Nyro
10 episodes with Laura Nyro
6 episodes with Laura Nyro
4 episodes with Laura Nyro
8 episodes with Laura Nyro
4 episodes with Laura Nyro
4 episodes with Laura Nyro
2 episodes with Laura Nyro
"Just a perfect dayDrink sangria in the parkAnd then later, when it gets darkWe go homeOh, it's such a perfect dayI'm glad I spent it with you" Please make our day perfect and spend 2 hours of your Sunday with me on this week's Super Sounds Of the 70's. I've invited Nick Drake, Laura Nyro, Dire Straits, Bob Dylan, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Chicago Transit Authority, Minnie Riperton, Love, Judy Collins, Allman Brothers, Orleans, George Harrison, Led Zeppelin, Ambrosia, Pink Floyd, Yes, Humble Pie, Traffic, Jethro Tull and Lou Reed...
"It was raining hard in 'FriscoI needed one more fare to make my nightA lady up ahead waved to flag me downShe got in at the light"No fare required, just 2 hours of your time. Please join me in my Yellow Cab as we explore this wondrous thing called music, but without a road map. Joining us are Simon & Garfunkel, Talking Heads, Billy Joel, Stevie Wonder, The Kinks, Rascals, Laura Nyro, Van Morrison, Billy Cobham, Pearl Jam, Led Zeppelin, Steely Dan, The Troggs, Paul Revere & The Raiders, Cream, Foo Fighters, War, The Cyrkle, Richard Harris, Earth Wind & Fire, Love, The Guess Who, Coldplay, Counting Crows and Harry Chapin...
Episode 94 — Frank Pagano: From Glen Rock to the Broadway PitIn this must-hear episode of the Broadway Drumming 101 Podcast, I sit down with legendary drummer and percussionist Frank Pagano — a true veteran of both the concert stage and the Broadway scene.Frank's career reads like a who's who of the music industry. He's played with icons like Bruce Springsteen, Bette Midler, Al Green, and Phoebe Snow. On Broadway, his credits span from Leader of the Pack and The Who's Tommy to Smokey Joe's Cafe, Cry-Baby, The Pirate Queen, Good Vibrations, Fosse, Big River, Saturday Night Fever, and more. What you'll hear in this episode:* How a 4th-grade music demo sparked Frank's lifelong love of drums.* Growing up and gigging with the Vivino brothers (yes — that Jimmy Vivino).* What it was like studying percussion at Manhattan School of Music and later with Joe Morello and Justin DiCioccio.* His unusual path to Broadway — having a chair before ever subbing.* The real reason he pivoted to Broadway full-time: marriage, fatherhood, and health insurance.* Wisdom on subbing: play their show, not yours.* Lessons from playing percussion alongside killer drummers like Brian Brake.* Touring vs. pit life — the physical grind of the road versus the stability of Broadway.* How working with artists like Laura Nyro and Bruce Springsteen shaped his perspective on artistry and professionalism.* Advice for drummers who want to make it in New York: “Play with everyone. Play everything. Be early. Be likable. Be ready.”Frank's reflections on time, groove, and what it really means to be musical are some of the best insights I've heard on this show. This episode is for any drummer who wants to play on Broadway — and stay there.Watch more episodes on YouTubeListen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcastsLearn more about Frank Pagano: https://www.frankpagano.com/bioClayton Craddock founded Broadway Drumming 101, an in-depth online platform offering specialized mentorship and a carefully curated collection of resources tailored for aspiring and professional musicians.Clayton's Broadway and Off-Broadway credits include tick, tick…BOOM!, Altar Boyz, Memphis The Musical, Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill, Ain't Too Proud – The Life and Times of The Temptations, Cats: The Jellicle Ball, and The Hippest Trip: The Soul Train Musical. As a skilled sub, he's contributed his talents to Motown, Evita, Cats, Avenue Q, The Color Purple, Rent, SpongeBob SquarePants: The Musical, Hadestown (tour), and many more. He has also appeared on major shows, including The View, Good Morning America, Jimmy Fallon, The Today Show, and the TONY Awards, and performed with legends like The Stylistics, The Delfonics, Mario Cantone, Laura Benanti, Kristin Chenoweth, Kerry Butler, Christian Borle, Norm Lewis, Deniece Williams, Chuck Berry, and Ben E. King.Clayton proudly endorses Ahead Drum Cases, Paiste Cymbals, Innovative Percussion drumsticks, and Empire Ears.Learn more about Clayton Craddock here: www.claytoncraddock.com Get full access to Broadway Drumming 101 at broadwaydrumming101.substack.com/subscribe
El pianista y compositor californiano de jazz Billy Childs quedó fascinado por Laura Nyro al descubrir los discos de ella que tenía su hermana mayor. Y en 2014, organizó 'Map to the treasure: Reimagining Laura Nyro', disco con el que quiso rendir homenaje a la cantautora neoyorquina fallecida en 1997 con solo 49 años: 'New York tendaberry' -con Renée Fleming & Yo-Yo Ma-, 'The confession' -con Becca Stevens-, 'Map to the treasure' -con Lisa Fischer-, 'Upstairs by a chinese lamp' -con Esperanza Spalding & Wayne Shorter-, 'Been on a train' -con Rickie Lee Jones & Chris Potter-, 'Stoned soul picnic' -con Ledisi-, 'Gibsom street' -con Susan Tedeschi & Steve Wilson-, 'Save the country' -con Shawn Colvin & Chris Botti- y 'To a child' -con Dianne Reeves-. Escuchar audio
Een podcast over een artiest – overleden in 1997 - die meer waardering verdient. En haar collega's waren het wel eens over haar kwaliteiten. Elton John, Jackson Browne, Todd Rundgren, Janis Ian, Suzanne Vega, allemaal zijn ze fan van haar. Elton droeg op zijn nieuwe album met Brandi Carlile het majestueueze openingsnummer aan haar op. En artiesten als Barbra Streisand, Three Dog Night en Blood, Sweat & Tears scoorden hits met haar liedjes. Maar haar eigen platen liepen lang niet zo hard. Dit is het verhaal van Laura Nyro.
The remarkable Brandi Carlile joins Simon and Brian for an in-depth conversation about writing with Elton John on their new album, Who Believes In Angels? The Grammy and Emmy-winning singer-songwriter discusses the profound connection she feels with both Elton and Bernie Taupin, and the challenges and triumphs of bringing her childhood dream to life.
We welcome back IWOL 3 timer Alaina Moore to discuss everything from the state of the music business to her love of Laura Nyro. Nobody has lived the impossible way of life more than Alaina and her episodes are always a delight.
"Seem like every time you stop and turn aroundSomething else just hit the groundBroken cutters, broken saws, broken buckles, broken lawsBroken bodies broken bones, broken voices on broken phonesTake a deep breath feel like you're chokin'Everything is broken."Well, not quite everything, please join me for 2 hours of fixing, joining us are Pat Metheny, Laura Nyro, The Doors, Rascals, Beatles, Chambers Brothers, Joe Farrell Quartet, War, Traffic, Dr. John, King Crimson, Love, John Lennon, J. Geils Band, Tim Buckley, Leon Russell, Ian Hunter & Bob Dylan.
Programa de homenaje al Día de la Mujer !!! ♀️
"Well gonna write a little letter gonna mail it to my local D.J.It's a rocking little record I want my jockey to playRoll over Beethoven gotta hear it again today"Well Boys & Girls, you don't have to write a letter just tune in and join me this afternoon for Super Sounds Of The Seventies. Joining us are Laura Nyro, Van Morrison, Dire Straits, Steely Dan, Al Stewart, Fleetwood Mac, Alice Cooper, Blues Image, Joe Walsh, The Moody Blues, Hollies, Doobie Brothers, Kinks, Friends Of Distinction, War, Three Dog Night, Crosby Stills & Nash, The Rascals, Monkees, Thunderclap Newman, Aerosmith, Kansas and Electric Light Orchestra.
Diane grew up immersed in the musical soul of New York City. Garisto sang on her first recording at the age of eight, and went on to record with artist like Billy Joel, Nile Rodgers, George Benson, Carly Simon, Laurie Anderson and Malcolm McLaren. She provided background vocals for Paul Simon on his Grammy-winning Graceland and toured internationally as a member of Steely Dan, but her career peak came in the mid ‘90s when she became a member of Laura Nyro's celebrated Harmony Group. As one of Nyro's famed backing trio, Diane toured the world with Laura and sang on the albums Live: The Loom's Desire and Live In Japan. “Performing these songs today with a band of Manhattan's top musicians and singers is my way of keeping Laura's spirit vibrant and alive,” Garisto says. “For us and for her fans, Stoned Soul Picnic is a celebration of the art and soul of Laura Nyro.”
durée : 00:53:24 - Very Good Trip - par : Michka Assayas - Ce soir, c'est une exploration de quelques rééditions de l'année qui vient de s'écouler. Pas de grands noms, mais beaucoup d'oubliés et même parfois de carrément obscurs. - réalisé par : Stéphane Ronxin
Jimmy Vivino Live on Game Changers With Vicki Abelson It had been six long, 4 1/2 COVID years since last I sat down with my old friend, multi-instrumentalist, producer, composer, and long-time musical director for Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Vivino. It was like coming home. Almost the same age, we have many shared (unbeknownst to us at the time) memories of concerts at The Filmore East, Watkins Glen, the glory daze of the NY club scene, and a bounty of mutual friends. Talk about being in one's comfort zone. Jimmy talked growing up in New Jersey, his carpenter trumpet-playing father, his talented brothers, Jerry and Floyd, and how they began and evolved - he talked Conan, Laura Nyro, Phoebe Snow, Donald Fagen, John Sebastian, Al Kooper, Levon Helm, The Allman Brothers, Albert King, Tom Petty, Prince, Bruno Mars, Michael McDonald, Johnny Johnson, Hubert Sumlin, Stevie Wonder, Muddy Waters, Pinetop Perkins, John Sebastian, The Dead, The Band, Harry Shearer, Paul Shaffer, whom he credits as his mentor, Leader of the Pack, Broadway, Ronnie Spector, Felix Cavaliere, The Rascals, Frankie Valli, Slash, Sly Stone, The J. Geils Band, Elvis Costello, and the James Brown and Friends Set Fire To The Soul with Aretha, Robert Palmer, and Joe Cocker, that he orchestrated. Incredible stories all around, and this special is available on YouTube… wow - Snuff and I just watched it. Spectacular. We talked about COVID and Jimmy joining Canned Heat, currently touring with them, and Bill Murray, as well as still doing shows with Will Lee and The Fab Faux. His first all-original album, Gonna Be 2 of Those Days, is due to drop in February, signed copies are available for pre-sale at jimmyvmusic.com He treated us to a track to close the show. Life is busy, busy. busy… just the way Jimmy likes it. And so do we who follow and adore him. I so enjoyed every second of this. Jimmy needs to write a book and get all these stories down. He knows and has played with everyone. Such fun! Jimmy Vivino Live on Game Changers With Vicki Abelson Wednesday, 12/11/24, 5 PM PT, 8 PM ET Streamed Live on my Facebook Replay here: https://bit.ly/49vuRwT
"I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his handWalking through the streets of Soho in the rainHe was looking for the place called Lee Ho Fook'sGoing to get a big dish of beef chow meinWerewolves of London"No leftovers here, just tasty tunes and a Werewolf or two. Joining us are Meat Loaf, Joe Walsh, Tom Petty, Badfinger, Art Garfunkel, Neil Young, Van Halen, Al Green, Harry Chapin, Alice Cooper, Santana, Rolling Stones, Dobie Gray, Bob Welch, Aretha Franklin, Emitt Rhodes, Jethro Tull, Manfred Mann's Earth Band, Elton John, Randy Newman, Laura Nyro, Simon & Garfunkel, Chicago, Harry Chapin and Warren Zevon.
In this episode we pay a brief tribute to High School of Music and Art grad Laura Nyro, and do a deep dive on the career of her brother Jan Nigro, M & A class of 1968, who created and nurtured a project called Vitamin L with his wife Janis for more than three decades.
Send us a textProducer, arranger, and composer Charles Calello discusses his work with one of the 20th Century's most revered and influential artists, Laura Nyro, upon the release of the late singer-songwriter's comprehensive box set, Hear My Song: The Collection 1966-1995.The Artistry of Laura Nyro with Charles Calello Playlist
"There must be some kind of way out of hereSaid the joker to the thiefThere's too much confusionI can't get no relief"Actually, relief is on the way. Please join me this afternoon at 3PM PDT, 6PM Eastern, as we decompress together with the magic of music. Assisting us are Laura Nyro, Bill Evans, Jim Hall, Counting Crows, Buffalo Springfield, Sinead O' Connor, Blood Sweat & Tears, The Doors, Eagles, Grateful Dead, Van Morrison, The Guess Who, Billy Joel, Cat Stevens, Jefferson Airplane, Supertramp, Randy Newman, The Rolling Stones, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Simply Red, Jimi Hendrix Experience, Elton John and Bob Dylan.
"Your daddy he's an outlaw and a wanderer by tradeHe'll teach you how to pick and choose and how to throw the bladeHe oversees his kingdom so no stranger does intrudeHis voice it trembles as he calls out for another plate of food.One more cup of coffee for the roadOne more cup of coffee 'fore I go. To the valley below."Yes, the arrival of Standard Time calls for another cup of Coffee so please enjoy it with me as I welcome Ellen McIlwaine, Leo Kotke, Laura Nyro, Roxy Music, Paul Butterfield's Better Days, Bob Welch, Queen, Styx, Nilsson, Joe Walsh, Frijid Pink, Dexy's Midnight Runners, J.J. Cale, Rod Stewart, Three Dog Night, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Fleetwood Mac, Eric Clapton, Bruce Springsteen, Grateful Dead, Lou Reed, Loggins & Messina, Steve Miller Band and Bob Dylan...
This episode: all THREE versions of "I Met Him on a Sunday" by The Shirelles: the 1958 snap 'n' clap original (when they were in high school!!), the '64 re-do, and the '66 Wall of Sound version (with FUZZ!)! But that's not all - 3 boffo renditions by The Orlons (1962), Reparata & the Delrons (1970), and Laura Nyro & Labelle (1971). The only thing we don't talk about is what happened to Lew Conetta!!!!!
Broadcaster and music writer Ann Powers lives in Nashville and grew up listening to Kate Bush and Blondie. The siren call of Blue sparked a life-long and deep-rooted devotion and her new book Travelling: On The Path Of Joni Mitchell takes a different tack from the standard biographies, mapping the context of the songs, the forces that drove her, the steel will it took to succeed and the love affairs that shaped her and her music. All discussed here. As is this ... … the scale of your ambition when your heroes are Nietzsche, Beethoven and Picasso. … how she got her revenge for not being allowed to go to Woodstock. … “she had to learn to walk three times”. … the psychological impact of her “dynamic father and homemaker mother”.… the love affairs with Leonard Cohen, David Crosby and Graham Nash. … her capacity to turn disaster into triumph. … the influence of Laurel Canyon neighbour Derek Taylor and the Beatles. … the many reasons she declared the music business “a corrupt cesspool”. … the tone of Rolling Stone's ‘70s coverage and the letters she wrote to Mo Austin about the way she was marketed. … David Crosby's regret about not involving her in Crosby Stills & Nash. … her reaction to the continued success of Tom Petty, Peter Gabriel and Don Henley in a world where mid-career women are “put out to pasture”. … why the current renaissance seems “all legend, no bite”. … and Laura Nyro, Tom Rush, Judy Collins, Patti Smith, Aretha Franklin, Maggie Roach, Stevie Wonder, Thomas Dolby. Order Travelling: On the Path Of Joni Mitchell here:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Travelling-Path-Mitchell-Ann-Powers/dp/0008332967Find out more about how to help us keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Broadcaster and music writer Ann Powers lives in Nashville and grew up listening to Kate Bush and Blondie. The siren call of Blue sparked a life-long and deep-rooted devotion and her new book Travelling: On The Path Of Joni Mitchell takes a different tack from the standard biographies, mapping the context of the songs, the forces that drove her, the steel will it took to succeed and the love affairs that shaped her and her music. All discussed here. As is this ... … the scale of your ambition when your heroes are Nietzsche, Beethoven and Picasso. … how she got her revenge for not being allowed to go to Woodstock. … “she had to learn to walk three times”. … the psychological impact of her “dynamic father and homemaker mother”.… the love affairs with Leonard Cohen, David Crosby and Graham Nash. … her capacity to turn disaster into triumph. … the influence of Laurel Canyon neighbour Derek Taylor and the Beatles. … the many reasons she declared the music business “a corrupt cesspool”. … the tone of Rolling Stone's ‘70s coverage and the letters she wrote to Mo Austin about the way she was marketed. … David Crosby's regret about not involving her in Crosby Stills & Nash. … her reaction to the continued success of Tom Petty, Peter Gabriel and Don Henley in a world where mid-career women are “put out to pasture”. … why the current renaissance seems “all legend, no bite”. … and Laura Nyro, Tom Rush, Judy Collins, Patti Smith, Aretha Franklin, Maggie Roach, Stevie Wonder, Thomas Dolby. Order Travelling: On the Path Of Joni Mitchell here:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Travelling-Path-Mitchell-Ann-Powers/dp/0008332967Find out more about how to help us keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Broadcaster and music writer Ann Powers lives in Nashville and grew up listening to Kate Bush and Blondie. The siren call of Blue sparked a life-long and deep-rooted devotion and her new book Travelling: On The Path Of Joni Mitchell takes a different tack from the standard biographies, mapping the context of the songs, the forces that drove her, the steel will it took to succeed and the love affairs that shaped her and her music. All discussed here. As is this ... … the scale of your ambition when your heroes are Nietzsche, Beethoven and Picasso. … how she got her revenge for not being allowed to go to Woodstock. … “she had to learn to walk three times”. … the psychological impact of her “dynamic father and homemaker mother”.… the love affairs with Leonard Cohen, David Crosby and Graham Nash. … her capacity to turn disaster into triumph. … the influence of Laurel Canyon neighbour Derek Taylor and the Beatles. … the many reasons she declared the music business “a corrupt cesspool”. … the tone of Rolling Stone's ‘70s coverage and the letters she wrote to Mo Austin about the way she was marketed. … David Crosby's regret about not involving her in Crosby Stills & Nash. … her reaction to the continued success of Tom Petty, Peter Gabriel and Don Henley in a world where mid-career women are “put out to pasture”. … why the current renaissance seems “all legend, no bite”. … and Laura Nyro, Tom Rush, Judy Collins, Patti Smith, Aretha Franklin, Maggie Roach, Stevie Wonder, Thomas Dolby. Order Travelling: On the Path Of Joni Mitchell here:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Travelling-Path-Mitchell-Ann-Powers/dp/0008332967Find out more about how to help us keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
"Out on the road today, I saw a DEADHEAD sticker on a CadillacA little voice inside my head said, "Don't look back. You can never look back"I thought I knew what love was what did I know?Those days are gone forever I should just let them go but-I can see you-your brown skin shinin' in the sunYou got that hair slicked back and those Wayfarers on, babyI can tell you my love for you will still be strongAfter the boys of summer have gone"Please join me and The Boys Of Summer for 2 hours of Music without boundaries on this 4th Of July holiday weekend. Joining us are David Bowie, Counting Crows, Laura Nyro, Leon Russell, Paul Simon, Mott The Hoople, Bad Company, Fletwood Mac, Billy Joel, The Beatles, The Nice, Yes, The Doors, Eric Clapton, Judy Collins, Jay & The Americans, Lou Reed, Simon & Garfunkel, Tim Buckley, Rolling Stones, T. Rex, Donald Byrd, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John and Don Henley...
Charlie Calello is called the “Hit Man” for good reason. He has arranged or produced over 100 Billboard Hits for dozens of major artists. His hits include “Sweet Caroline” (Neil Diamond), “My Heart Belongs To Me” (Barbra Streisand), “After The Lovin” (Englebert Humperdinck) and many hits for Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons including “Big Girls Don't Cry”, “Walk Like A Man”, “Let's Hang On” and “Grease”. And he's produced albums for Frank Sinatra, Bruce Springsteen, Barry Manilow, Al Kooper and Kenny Rogers among others.My featured song is “Saturday Morning”. Spotify link.---------------------------------------------The Follow Your Dream Podcast:Top 1% of all podcasts with Listeners in 200 countries!For more information and other episodes of the podcast click here. To subscribe to the podcast click here.To subscribe to our weekly Follow Your Dream Podcast email click here.To Rate and Review the podcast click here.“Dream With Robert”. Click here.—----------------------------------------“LOU'S BLUES” is Robert's new single. Called “Fantastic! Great playing and production!” (Mark Egan - Pat Metheny Group/Elements) and “Digging it!” (Peter Erskine - Weather Report)!Click HERE for all links.—----------------------------------------“THE RICH ONES”. Robert's recent single. With guest artist Randy Brecker (Blood Sweat & Tears) on flugelhorn. Click HERE for all links.—---------------------------------------“MILES BEHIND”, Robert's debut album, recorded in 1994, was “lost” for the last 30 years. It's now been released for streaming. Featuring Randy Brecker (Blood Sweat & Tears), Anton Fig (The David Letterman Show), Al Foster (Miles Davis), Tim Ries (The Rolling Stones), Jon Lucien and many more. Called “Hip, Tight and Edgy!” Click here for all links.—--------------------------------------“IT'S ALIVE!” is Robert's latest Project Grand Slam album. Featuring 13 of the band's Greatest Hits performed “live” at festivals in Pennsylvania and Serbia.Reviews:"An instant classic!" (Melody Maker)"Amazing record...Another win for the one and only Robert Miller!" (Hollywood Digest)"Close to perfect!" (Pop Icon)"A Masterpiece!" (Big Celebrity Buzz)"Sterling effort!" (Indie Pulse)"Another fusion wonder for Project Grand Slam!" (MobYorkCity)Click here for all links.Click here for song videos—-----------------------------------------Intro/Outro Voiceovers courtesy of:Jodi Krangle - Professional Voiceover Artisthttps://voiceoversandvocals.com Audio production:Jimmy RavenscroftKymera Films Connect with Charlie:www.charlesmcalello.com Connect with the Follow Your Dream Podcast:Website - www.followyourdreampodcast.comEmail Robert - robert@followyourdreampodcast.com Follow Robert's band, Project Grand Slam, and his music:Website - www.projectgrandslam.comYouTubeSpotify MusicApple MusicEmail - pgs@projectgrandslam.com
Peter Buck rocks up to talk about R.E.M., Laura Nyro, pandemic life and his new collaboration with Luke Haines. Tracklisting:1. The British Army on LSD, from the album, All the Kids are Super Bummed Out, by Luke Haines and Peter Buck, released by Cherry Red Records2. Eli's Coming, by Laura Nero, (eternally beguiling and cryptic 1968 LP), Eli And The Thirteenth Confession, released by Columbia
Playlist: June 9, 2024 (part two)www.Facebook.com/PSBlues20. Dolly Parton / Southern Accents 21. Lucinda Williams / Wildflowers 22. Marcus King Band / Delilah 23. Laura Nyro w/ Duane Allman / Beads of Sweat 24. Blackberry Smoke / Hammer and the Nail 25. The Black Crowes / Follow the Moon 26. Canned Heat / One Last Boogie 27. Kris Lager Band / That's Why I Play 28. Booker T & the MGs / Green Onions29. Issac Hayes / Never Can Say Goodbye30. Walter Wolfman Washington / What's It Gonna Take 31. Sugaray & the Blue Tones / I Got a Right to Sing the Blues32. Johnny Burgin / Ramblin from Coast to Coast33. Curtis Salgado / The Only Way Out 34. Sue Foley / In My Girlish Days 35. Sarah King / Not Worth the Whiskey
"Well I think it's fine, building Jumbo planesOr taking a ride on a cosmic trainSwitch on summer from a slot machineGet what you want to if you want, 'cause you can get anythingI know we've come a long wayWe're changing day to dayBut tell me, where do the children play?"I'm not sure where the children play, but I'll be right here playing 2 hours of "Music Without Boundaries" for your enjoyment. Please join me and Laura Nyro, arole King, Beach Boys, Elton John, Bob James, Traffic, Doors, Michael Hedges, Miles Davis, Jef Beck Group, Ben Sidran, Elvis Costello, George Benson, Bloodd Sweat & Tears, Earth Wind & Fire, Neil Young, Full Moon, Tower Of Power, Christopher Cross, Love, Buffalo Springfield, Beatles, Nick Drake, Van Morrison and Cat Stevens...
Jimmy Vivino is an All-Star Guitarist, Keyboard Player and Bandleader. He was the bandleader of Conan O'Brien's various television show bands; a member of the Fab Faux, the world's greatest Beatles tribute band, and currently a member of Canned Heat blues band. He talks about playing Tevye in “Fiddler On The Roof” in High School, his 15 year affiliation with Al Kooper of Blood Sweat and Tears and SuperSession fame, meeting and recording with Laura Nyro, and much more!My featured song is “I Wanna Be Your Girl” from the album East Side Sessions by my band, Project Grand Slam. Spotify link.---------------------------------------------The Follow Your Dream Podcast:Top 1% of all podcasts with Listeners in 200 countries!For more information and other episodes of the podcast click here. To subscribe to the podcast click here.To subscribe to our weekly Follow Your Dream Podcast email click here.To Rate and Review the podcast click here.“Dream With Robert”. Click here.—----------------------------------------“LOU'S BLUES” is Robert's new single. Called “Fantastic! Great playing and production!” (Mark Egan - Pat Metheny Group/Elements) and “Digging it!” (Peter Erskine - Weather Report)!Click HERE for all links.—----------------------------------------“THE RICH ONES”. Robert's recent single. With guest artist Randy Brecker (Blood Sweat & Tears) on flugelhorn. Click HERE for all links.—---------------------------------------“MILES BEHIND”, Robert's debut album, recorded in 1994, was “lost” for the last 30 years. It's now been released for streaming. Featuring Randy Brecker (Blood Sweat & Tears), Anton Fig (The David Letterman Show), Al Foster (Miles Davis), Tim Ries (The Rolling Stones), Jon Lucien and many more. Called “Hip, Tight and Edgy!” Click here for all links.—--------------------------------------“IT'S ALIVE!” is Robert's latest Project Grand Slam album. Featuring 13 of the band's Greatest Hits performed “live” at festivals in Pennsylvania and Serbia.Reviews:"An instant classic!" (Melody Maker)"Amazing record...Another win for the one and only Robert Miller!" (Hollywood Digest)"Close to perfect!" (Pop Icon)"A Masterpiece!" (Big Celebrity Buzz)"Sterling effort!" (Indie Pulse)"Another fusion wonder for Project Grand Slam!" (MobYorkCity)Click here for all links.Click here for song videos—-----------------------------------------Intro/Outro Voiceovers courtesy of:Jodi Krangle - Professional Voiceover Artisthttps://voiceoversandvocals.com Audio production:Jimmy RavenscroftKymera Films Connect with Jimmy at:www.cannedheatmusic.comwww.facebook.com/JimmyVivino Connect with the Follow Your Dream Podcast:Website - www.followyourdreampodcast.comEmail Robert - robert@followyourdreampodcast.com Follow Robert's band, Project Grand Slam, and his music:Website - www.projectgrandslam.comYouTubeSpotify MusicApple MusicEmail - pgs@projectgrandslam.com
EPISODE 114: Grammy-award winning Will Lee has done it all in the music business. Perhaps best known as bassist for over three decades on The Late Show with David Letterman, he holds the world's record for longest-running bassist on late night television. Will has also lent his considerable talents to well over 2500 Pop, Jazz, Rock, Reggae and Gospel albums including those by Gato Barbieri, The Bee Gees, George Benson, Michael Bolton, David Bowie, The Brecker Brothers, James Brown, Mariah Carey, Cher, Natalie Cole, Christopher Cross, D'Angelo, Ray Davies, Gloria Estefan & the Miami Sound Machine, Roberta Flack, Aretha Franklin, Michael Franks, Al Green, Go Hiromi, Bob James, Billy Joel, Alicia Keyes, Chaka Khan, Cyndi Lauper, Chuck Loeb, Barry Manilow, Ricky Martin, Pat Metheny, Bette Midler, Laura Nyro, Diana Ross, David Sanborn, Ryuchi Sakamoto, Carly Simon, Frank Sinatra, SMAP, Spyro Gyra, Ringo Starr, Steely Dan, Cat Stevens, Barbra Streisand, Frankie Valli, Luther Vandross, Dionne Warwick, Sadao Watanabe, Weather Report, Nancy Wilson, Akiko Yano and more. He has sung and played on an equal number of TV and radio commercials (he was the voice of Teddy Grahams, Stroh's Beer, The US Army “Be All That You Can Be”) as well as many movie soundtracks. willlee.com Contact us: makingsoundpodcast.comFollow on Instagram: @makingsoundpodcastFollow on Threads: @jannkloseJoin our Facebook GroupPlease support the show with a donation, thank you for listening!
Our Spotlight Show on The Allman Brothers Band ABB)A spotlight show plays the music of the bands that influenced The ABB, the bands influenced by The ABB, those they covered, and those who covered them. With Duane's prolific studio work and jams, we look at that as well as the bands that spun of The ABB including Gov't Mule, Sea Level, Derek Trucks, Royal Southern Brotherhood, Honey Tribe, and, of course, the Tedeschi Trucks Band. We probably could have included the Marcus King Band but simply ran out of time. Good listening. If you enjoy the show, please share the link. Other Spotlight Shows include Stevie Ray Vaughan, Buddy Guy, Johnny Winter, BB King, Johnny Cash, Willie Dixon, Bob Dylan, Robert Johnson, John Hiatt, Etta James, The Everly Brothers, Muddy Waters, Ronnie Woods' Rollin' Stones, Jimi Hendrix, The RnB Roots of The Who, The Blues & Folk Roots of Led Zeppelin, Hank Williams, The 29 Club, Neil Young, The Roots of Black and White Gospel, Bob Segar...20. Jackson Browne / These Days21. John Haitt & Warren Haynes / Memphis in the Mean Time22. Jimmy Hall (Wet Willie) / Rendezvous with the Blues 23. Royal Southern Brotherhood / The Big Greasy24. Gov't Mule / Presence of the Lord (Blind Faith) 25. Tedeschi Trucks Band / Little Wing (Derek & the Dominoes)26. Alison Krause / Come and Go Blues27. Keb Mo / Just Another Rider28. The Nighthawks featuring Jimmy Thackery with Gregg Allman / You Don't Love Me 29. Larkin Poe / Ramblin' Man 30. Jeff Healey / Whipping Post 31. Little Steve & the Disciples of Soul / Not My Cross to Bear32. Ronnie Earl, Leon Russell, Reese Wynans / I'm Not AngelPodcast Only Bonus Tracks @ https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/KWRblues33. Roy Rogers, Jim Eshelman, John Wesley / Jessica34. The Black Crowes / Dreams35. Eric Gales / In Memory of Elizabeth Reed36. Laura Nyro & Duane Allman / Beads of Sweat37. Robben Ford / One Way Out 35. The Grateful Dead (feat Duane Allman) / Sugar Magnolia38. Pat Travers / Midnight RiderContact at Pacific Street Blues & Americana Facebook page
Guitarist Elliott Randall joins the podcast to talk all about his experiences with Steely Dan over the years, from playing shows and recording with Donald and Walter in 1960's New York, to later joining them in L.A. to lay down guitar solos on songs like "Reelin' in the Years" and "Green Earrings." Elliott also looks back on friendships with several beloved musicians including Jimi Hendrix, Laura Nyro, and others. A member of The FM Podcasts Network.
Los Angeles-based folk troubadour Jessica Pratt's intimate, moody, carefully-crafted songs have helped her reach an ever-growing audience over the course of her four studio albums, the most recent of which is Here in the Pitch, which was released in May of 2024. In this episode, she talks about how songs by The Slits, Laura Nyro and Sly and the Family Stone helped her forge her musical path. Essential Tremors is produced by Matt Byars and Lee Gardner and distributed by Your Public Studios.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
"Long may you run. Long may you run.Although these changes have comeWith your chrome heart shining in the sunLong may you run.Maybe The Beach Boys have got you nowWith those waves singing "Caroline No"Rollin' down that empty ocean roadGettin' to the surf on time, Long may you run"Lets'keep running together, starting withthis week's Red Eye Edition of Whole 'Nuther Thing beginning at Midnight. Joining us are Laura Nyro, Savoy Brown, XTC, Talking Heads, Porcupine Tree, Traffic, Van Morrison, Eagles, Bruce Hornsby, Michael Murphy, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Pat Metheny w Lyle Mays, Ben E. King, Patti Smith, Brian Auger w Julie Driscoll, The Doors, Band, Grateful Dead, Flying Burrito Brothers, Steely Dan, Supertramp and Neil Young...
"Watching and waitingFor a friend to play withWhy have I been alone so longMole he is burrowing his way to the sunlightHe knows there's someone there so strong"Let's watch & wait together on the "Red Eye" edition of Whole 'Nuther Thing, joining us are Nick Drake, Lou Reed, Laura Nyro, ELO, Beatles, Santana, Robin Trower, Roxy Music, Robin Thicke, Traffic, Dionne Warwick, Blood Sweat & Tears, Jimi Hendrix, Leon Russell, Big Brother & The Holding Company, Steve Miller Band, John Klemmer, Dire Straits, Phil Collins, Billy Stewart and Moody Blues...
Musician Michelle Coltrane, daughter of Alice, step-daughter of John, offers backstory on Alice's time growing up in Detroit through Michelle's own growing up time between California, New York, and visits to Detroit. Michelle has proclaimed, 'The Year of Alice Coltrane' here in 2024 (with a centennial celebration of John coming soon as well!). This Alice Coltrane year was bench-marked by a recent release from her archives, The Carnegie Hall Concert, from 1971. Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda was at a creative peak when recording this Carnegie show. Backed by two drummers, two bassists, two saxophone/woodwind musicians and two other percussion/utility musicians. Alice helped put this show together as a benefit/tribute to Swami Satchidananda, an Indian guru she first encountered in 1969 while in the depth of grief, after losing her husband, John Coltrane. This show was on the heels of an album where she also honored him, Journey In Satchidananda--released the week before this concert. Alice shared the billing with Laura Nyro and The Rascals--the draw of the evening, whose Felix Cavaliere was a devote follower, as was Nyro. Saxophonist Pharoah Sanders got second billing next to Alice's name, as he was a rising star in the jazz world, sprouting from John Coltrane's stable along side of Alice herself. An R&B musician herself, Michelle takes us on a journey of her lifetime through her own lens, of times in Detroit, following her mother to concerts, spending time with Swami Satchidananda, dealing with her own career, and how her and step-brothers Ravi and Oran (John Jr. passed in '82) continue to grow and sprout the legacy of both Alice and John Coltrane. This
Mark, Lou. and Perry listen to and discuss Laura Nyro songs also Joni Mitchell and music trivia, random relish,newsfeed topics, and much more.. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/perry--dedovitch/message
"Turn off your mind, relax and float down streamIt is not dying, it is not dyingLay down all thoughts, surrender to the voidIt is shining, it is shiningYet you may see the meaning of withinIt is being, it is being"Please turn off your mind and come on a 2 Hour musical journey unlike any other...Joining us are The Collectors, Brian Auger, Miles Davis,, Laura Nyro, The Doors, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Cat Stevens, Procol Harum, Traffic, Grass Roots, Sweet, Rolling Stones, Rascals, The Buckinghams, Renaissance, Blood Sweat & Tears, Buffalo Springfield, Chicago, Crosby Stills & Nash, The Mark Almond Band & The Beatles...
"If you smile at me you know I will understandCause that is something everybody everywhere doesIn the same languageI can see by your coat my friend that you're from the other sideThere's just one thing I got to knowCan you tell me please who wonYou must try some of my purple berriesI been eating them for six or seven weeks nowHaven't got sick onceProbably keep us both alive"Please join us on this week's Red Eye edition of Whole 'Nuther Thing. Joining us are Dar Williams, Bob Seger, Bonnie Raitt, Lyle Mays, Lou Reed, Counting Crows, The Cars, Beatles, Elvis Costello, Bill Evans, Laura Nyro, Jackson Browne, Leon Russell, Gerry Rafferty, Bob Dylan, Wings, Elton John, Fred Neil, Dire Straits, John Prine, Crosby Stills & Nash and Jefferson Airplane.
durée : 00:59:43 - Banzzaï du lundi 26 février 2024 - par : Nathalie Piolé -
"Spring was never waiting for us, girlIt ran one step aheadAs we followed in the danceBetween the parted pages and were pressedIn love's hot, fevered ironLike a striped pair of pants"A terrific day for an Afternoon of Music in a Park. I've brought along a large Blanket and some tasty morsel so please join me and Laurence Juber, Genesis, Jorma Kaukenon, Yes, Nina Simone, Spirit, Jefferson Airplane, Laura Nyro, Supertramp, Miles Davis, Renaissance, Tracy Chapman, Dion, Pat Metheny, XTC, Tim Buckley, Traffic, Isaac Hayes, Moody Blues, Simon & Garfunkel, Moby Grape, Doobie Brothers, Dire Straits and Richard Harris.
"Spring was never waiting for us, girlIt ran one step aheadAs we followed in the danceBetween the parted pages and were pressedIn love's hot, fevered ironLike a striped pair of pants"A terrific day for an Afternoon of Music in a Park. I've brought along a large Blanket and some tasty morsel so please join me and Laurence Juber, Genesis, Jorma Kaukenon, Yes, Nina Simone, Spirit, Jefferson Airplane, Laura Nyro, Supertramp, Miles Davis, Renaissance, Tracy Chapman, Dion, Pat Metheny, XTC, Tim Buckley, Traffic, Isaac Hayes, Moody Blues, Simon & Garfunkel, Moby Grape, Doobie Brothers, Dire Straits and Richard Harris.
"How many special people change,How many lives are living strangeWhere were you while we were getting high?Slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannon ballWhere were you while we were getting high?Some day you will find me caught beneath the landslideIn a champagne supernova in the sky, some day you will find me"Let's find that Champagne Supernova together on the Sunday Edition of Whole "Nuther Thing on Planetary Jam at The Morning Breeze.org. Joining us are Nick Drake, Tracy Chapman, Neil Young, Phil Collins, Laura Nyro, Peter Gabriel, The Moody Blues, Cars, Genesis, David Arkenstone, Jefferson Starship, Rush, Spin Doctors, Paul & Linda McCartney, George Winston, John Lennon, Steely Dan, The Dandy Warhols, Jayhawks, Roxy Music and Oasis.
A get in get out kind of thing, like minded people from elsewhere, and being somewhat of an elder statesman. Johnny Payne "Do you remember rock and roll radio? The harmonies, the hooks, the choruses? Johnny Payne does. Or more specifically, he remembers that beautifully fucked up arc of let's say '70 to '76, that time when the impossibly bright lights of an entire generation's youthful idealism gave way to the muted amber glow of adult burn-out. You might know Johnny Payne as co-frontman of shaggy-pop auteurs The Shilohs. You might even know their three largely unheard albums of impeccably rendered pop rock. But this is something else. Where The Shilohs are a working rock band in the classic sense (remember when there were working rock bands?) Payne has ditched the band to strike out on his own as a bona fide solo singer-songwriter and the result is the almost self-titled EP Johnny. Craving an escape from the endless parade of yoga mats and craft beer culture that defines his native Vancouver, Payne accepted the invitation of Pat Riley and Alaina Moore (of indie heavyweights Tennis) to record in their home studio in Denver, Colorado. Working closely with Riley and Moore, trading instruments and ideas, and with Beach House drummer James Barone in tow, Payne came out the other side with the solo EP Johnny. These five songs find Payne pushing his craft into full on adult-contemporary mode, channeling the visionary spirit of Harry Nilsson, Laura Nyro, even Carole King. Remember a time when even a weirdo like Todd Rundgren could score a soft rock top hit? Johnny Payne does. On Johnny the vibe is all chipped champagne glasses and smeared bathroom mirrors, all the busted stuff that collects in the wake of one's life. Standing alone at the microphone, Payne shows himself for who he is on these songs – a grown man having to let go of the past. There are tears of regret, tears of joy. There are red roses, blue oceans, and slow golden mornings spent staring out the window as the world drifts by. So light a smoke, have another sip, and enjoy the good times while they last – here comes Johnny." Excerpt from https://lightorganrecords.com/artist/johnny-payne/ Johnny Payne: Instagram: @mrjohnnypayne Website: https://johnnypayne.ca Vinyl: https://lightorganrecords.com/artist/johnny-payne/ Impossible Way Of Life Podcast: Instagram: @impossiblewayoflife Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/animpossiblewayoflife Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/ Apple Podcasts: https://www.google.com/url? The Vineyard: Instagram: @thevineyardpodcast Website: https://www.thevineyardpodcast.com Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Ndle3K... Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...
Queer Cheer: The First Gays of Christmix (2018) Follow the playlist HERE: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5mBouqijWmJk1CthNbHKEE?si=eb7fd37e056a4cb5 1. Trans-Siberian Orchestra -Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24 2. Fifth Harmony - Can You See 3. Tamar Braxton - Sleigh Ride 4. Darren Hayes - Last Christmas 5. Marvin Gaye - Purple Snowflakes 6. The Supremes - Twinkle Twinkle Little Me 7. Lenka - All My Bells Are Ringing 8. Spyro Gyro - Christmas Time Is Here 9. Michele McLaughlin - Midwinter Memories 10. Mariah Carey -Oh Santa! (Jump Smokers Edit) 11. TLC - Sleigh Ride 12. Carnie and Wendy Wilson - Hey Santa! 13. Madonna - Santa Baby 14. Oliver Spalding - Lonely This Christmas 15. Bright Eyes - Little Drummer Boy 16. Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings - Just Another Christmas Song 17. Tori Amos - Pink and Glitter 18. Charo and The Salsoul Orchestra - Mamacita ¿Dónde Está Santa Claus? 19. The Weather Girls - Dear Santa (Bring Me A Man This Christmas), Pt. 1 20. Jimmy Eat World - 12.23.95 21. Laura Nyro & Carroll Gustamachio - Let It Be Me / The Christmas Song 22. Pentatonic & Kelly Clarkson - Grown Up Christmas List 23. Joni Mitchell - River 24. Jamie Cullum - All I Want For Christmas Is You 25. Olivia Newton-John - Greensleeves 26. Tori Amos - Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas
We are now into our fourth illustrious season and round two of March Sadness is back!Eight albums, four matchups, and eliminations abound!Round OneThe Clash - (self-titled from 1977)vsThe Who - Who's NextRound TwoEric B and Rakim - Paid in FullvsCat Stevens - Tea for the TillermanRound ThreePortishead - DummyvsA Tribe Called Quest - The Low End TheoryRound FourMobb Deep - The InfamousvsLaura Nyro - Eli and the 13th ConfessionOur middle discussion is if today's music can stand the test of time. Thank you, Rick Beato for this inspired talk. See his video hereSupport the showCheck out our homepage website here!Follow us on Instagram!Support your favorite uncaffeinated podcasters - buy us a coffee... please???
Episode 170 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Astral Weeks", the early solo career of Van Morrison, and the death of Bert Berns. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-minute bonus episode available, on "Stoned Soul Picnic" by Laura Nyro. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata At one point I, ridiculously, misspeak the name of Charles Mingus' classic album. Black Saint and the Sinner Lady is not about dinner ladies. Also, I say Warren Smith Jr is on "Slim Slow Slider" when I meant to say Richard Davis (Smith is credited in some sources, but I only hear acoustic guitar, bass, and soprano sax on the finished track). Resources As usual, I've created Mixcloud playlists, with full versions of all the songs excerpted in this episode. As there are so many Van Morrison songs in this episode, the Mixcloud is split into three parts, one, two, and three. The information about Bert Berns comes from Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues by Joel Selvin. I've used several biographies of Van Morrison. Van Morrison: Into the Music by Ritchie Yorke is so sycophantic towards Morrison that the word “hagiography” would be, if anything, an understatement. Van Morrison: No Surrender by Johnny Rogan, on the other hand, is the kind of book that talks in the introduction about how the author has had to avoid discussing certain topics because of legal threats from the subject. Howard deWitt's Van Morrison: Astral Weeks to Stardom is over-thorough in the way some self-published books are, while Clinton Heylin's Can You Feel the Silence? is probably the best single volume on the artist. Information on Woodstock comes from Small Town Talk by Barney Hoskyns. Ryan Walsh's Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 is about more than Astral Weeks, but does cover Morrison's period in and around Boston in more detail than anything else. The album Astral Weeks is worth hearing in its entirety. Not all of the music on The Authorized Bang Collection is as listenable, but it's the most complete collection available of everything Morrison recorded for Bang. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we start, a quick warning -- this episode contains discussion of organised crime activity, and of sudden death. It also contains excerpts of songs which hint at attraction to underage girls and discuss terminal illness. If those subjects might upset you, you might want to read the transcript rather than listen to the episode. Anyway, on with the show. Van Morrison could have been the co-writer of "Piece of My Heart". Bert Berns was one of the great collaborators in the music business, and almost every hit he ever had was co-written, and he was always on the lookout for new collaborators, and in 1967 he was once again working with Van Morrison, who he'd worked with a couple of years earlier when Morrison was still the lead singer of Them. Towards the beginning of 1967 he had come up with a chorus, but no verse. He had the hook, "Take another little piece of my heart" -- Berns was writing a lot of songs with "heart" in the title at the time -- and wanted Morrison to come up with a verse to go with it. Van Morrison declined. He wasn't interested in writing pop songs, or in collaborating with other writers, and so Berns turned to one of his regular collaborators, Jerry Ragavoy, and it was Ragavoy who added the verses to one of the biggest successes of Berns' career: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] The story of how Van Morrison came to make the album that's often considered his masterpiece is intimately tied up with the story we've been telling in the background for several episodes now, the story of Atlantic Records' sale to Warners, and the story of Bert Berns' departure from Atlantic. For that reason, some parts of the story I'm about to tell will be familiar to those of you who've been paying close attention to the earlier episodes, but as always I'm going to take you from there to somewhere we've never been before. In 1962, Bert Berns was a moderately successful songwriter, who had written or co-written songs for many artists, especially for artists on Atlantic Records. He'd written songs for Atlantic artists like LaVern Baker, and when Atlantic's top pop producers Leiber and Stoller started to distance themselves from the label in the early sixties, he had moved into production as well, writing and producing Solomon Burke's big hit "Cry to Me": [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Cry to Me"] He was the producer and writer or co-writer of most of Burke's hits from that point forward, but at first he was still a freelance producer, and also produced records for Scepter Records, like the Isley Brothers' version of "Twist and Shout", another song he'd co-written, that one with Phil Medley. And as a jobbing songwriter, of course his songs were picked up by other producers, so Leiber and Stoller produced a version of his song "Tell Him" for the Exciters on United Artists: [Excerpt: The Exciters, "Tell Him"] Berns did freelance work for Leiber and Stoller as well as the other people he was working for. For example, when their former protege Phil Spector released his hit version of "Zip-a-Dee-Do-Dah", they got Berns to come up with a knockoff arrangement of "How Much is that Doggie in the Window?", released as by Baby Jane and the Rockabyes, with a production credit "Produced by Leiber and Stoller, directed by Bert Berns": [Excerpt: Baby Jane and the Rockabyes, "How Much is that Doggie in the Window?"] And when Leiber and Stoller stopped producing work for United Artists, Berns took over some of the artists they'd been producing for the label, like Marv Johnson, as well as producing his own new artists, like Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters, who had been discovered by Berns' friend Jerry Ragovoy, with whom he co-wrote their "Cry Baby": [Excerpt: Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters, "Cry Baby"] Berns was an inveterate collaborator. He was one of the few people to get co-writing credits with Leiber and Stoller, and he would collaborate seemingly with everyone who spoke to him for five minutes. He would also routinely reuse material, cutting the same songs time and again with different artists, knowing that a song must be a hit for *someone*. One of his closest collaborators was Jerry Wexler, who also became one of his best friends, even though one of their earliest interactions had been when Wexler had supervised Phil Spector's production of Berns' "Twist and Shout" for the Top Notes, a record that Berns had thought had butchered the song. Berns was, in his deepest bones, a record man. Listening to the records that Berns made, there's a strong continuity in everything he does. There's a love there of simplicity -- almost none of his records have more than three chords. He loved Latin sounds and rhythms -- a love he shared with other people working in Brill Building R&B at the time, like Leiber and Stoller and Spector -- and great voices in emotional distress. There's a reason that the records he produced for Solomon Burke were the first R&B records to be labelled "soul". Berns was one of those people for whom feel and commercial success are inextricable. He was an artist -- the records he made were powerfully expressive -- but he was an artist for whom the biggest validation was *getting a hit*. Only a small proportion of the records he made became hits, but enough did that in the early sixties he was a name that could be spoken of in the same breath as Leiber and Stoller, Spector, and Bacharach and David. And Atlantic needed a record man. The only people producing hits for the label at this point were Leiber and Stoller, and they were in the process of stopping doing freelance work and setting up their own label, Red Bird, as we talked about in the episode on the Shangri-Las. And anyway, they wanted more money than they were getting, and Jerry Wexler was never very keen on producers wanting money that could have gone to the record label. Wexler decided to sign Bert Berns up as a staff producer for Atlantic towards the end of 1963, and by May 1964 it was paying off. Atlantic hadn't been having hits, and now Berns had four tracks he wrote and produced for Atlantic on the Hot One Hundred, of which the highest charting was "My Girl Sloopy" by the Vibrations: [Excerpt: The Vibrations, "My Girl Sloopy"] Even higher on the charts though was the Beatles' version of "Twist and Shout". That record, indeed, had been successful enough in the UK that Berns had already made exploratory trips to the UK and produced records for Dick Rowe at Decca, a partnership we heard about in the episode on "Here Comes the Night". Berns had made partnerships there which would have vast repercussions for the music industry in both countries, and one of them was with the arranger Mike Leander, who was the uncredited arranger for the Drifters session for "Under the Boardwalk", a song written by Artie Resnick and Kenny Young and produced by Berns, recorded the day after the group's lead singer Rudy Lewis died of an overdose: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Under the Boardwalk"] Berns was making hits on a regular basis by mid-1964, and the income from the label's new success allowed Jerry Wexler and the Ertegun brothers to buy out their other partners -- Ahmet Ertegun's old dentist, who had put up some of the initial money, and Miriam Bienstock, the ex-wife of their initial partner Herb Abramson, who'd got Abramson's share in the company after the divorce, and who was now married to Freddie Bienstock of Hill and Range publishing. Wexler and the Erteguns now owned the whole label. Berns also made regular trips to the UK to keep up his work with British musicians, and in one of those trips, as we heard in the episode on "Here Comes the Night", he produced several tracks for the group Them, including that track, written by Berns: [Excerpt: Them, "Here Comes the Night"] And a song written by the group's lead singer Van Morrison, "Gloria": [Excerpt: Them, "Gloria"] But Berns hadn't done much other work with them, because he had a new project. Part of the reason that Wexler and the Erteguns had gained total control of Atlantic was because, in a move pushed primarily by Wexler, they were looking at selling it. They'd already tried to merge with Leiber and Stoller's Red Bird Records, but lost the opportunity after a disastrous meeting, but they were in negotiations with several other labels, negotiations which would take another couple of years to bear fruit. But they weren't planning on getting out of the record business altogether. Whatever deal they made, they'd remain with Atlantic, but they were also planning on starting another label. Bert Berns had seen how successful Leiber and Stoller were with Red Bird, and wanted something similar. Wexler and the Erteguns didn't want to lose their one hit-maker, so they came up with an offer that would benefit all of them. Berns' publishing contract had just ended, so they would set up a new publishing company, WEB IV, named after the initials Wexler, Ertegun, and Berns, and the fact that there were four of them. Berns would own fifty percent of that, and the other three would own the other half. And they were going to start up a new label, with seventeen thousand dollars of the Atlantic partners' money. That label would be called Bang -- for Bert, Ahmet, Neshui, and Gerald -- and would be a separate company from Atlantic, so not affected by any sale. Berns would continue as a staff producer for Atlantic for now, but he'd have "his own" label, which he'd have a proper share in, and whether he was making hits for Atlantic or Bang, his partners would have a share of the profits. The first two records on Bang were "Shake and Jerk" by Billy Lamont, a track that they licensed from elsewhere and which didn't do much, and a more interesting track co-written by Berns. Bob Feldman, Richard Gottehrer, and Jerry Goldstein were Brill Building songwriters who had become known for writing "My Boyfriend's Back", a hit for the Angels, a couple of years earlier: [Excerpt: The Angels, "My Boyfriend's Back"] With the British invasion, the three of them had decided to create their own foreign beat group. As they couldn't do British accents, they pretended to be Australian, and as the Strangeloves -- named after the Stanley Kubrick film Dr Strangelove -- they released one flop single. They cut another single, a version of "Bo Diddley", but the label they released their initial record through didn't want it. They then took the record to Atlantic, where Jerry Wexler said that they weren't interested in releasing some white men singing "Bo Diddley". But Ahmet Ertegun suggested they bring the track to Bert Berns to see what he thought. Berns pointed out that if they changed the lyrics and melody, but kept the same backing track, they could claim the copyright in the resulting song themselves. He worked with them on a new lyric, inspired by the novel Candy, a satirical pornographic novel co-written by Terry Southern, who had also co-written the screenplay to Dr Strangelove. Berns supervised some guitar overdubs, and the result went to number eleven: [Excerpt: The Strangeloves, "I Want Candy"] Berns had two other songs on the hot one hundred when that charted, too -- Them's version of "Here Comes the Night", and the version of Van McCoy's song "Baby I'm Yours" he'd produced for Barbara Lewis. Three records on the charts on three different labels. But despite the sheer number of charting records he'd had, he'd never had a number one, until the Strangeloves went on tour. Before the tour they'd cut a version of "My Girl Sloopy" for their album -- Berns always liked to reuse material -- and they started performing the song on the tour. The Dave Clark Five, who they were supporting, told them it sounded like a hit and they were going to do their own version when they got home. Feldman, Gottehrer, and Goldstein decided *they* might as well have the hit with it as anyone else. Rather than put it out as a Strangeloves record -- their own record was still rising up the charts, and there's no reason to be your own competition -- they decided to get a group of teenage musicians who supported them on the last date of the tour to sing new vocals to the backing track from the Strangeloves album. The group had been called Rick and the Raiders, but they argued so much that the Strangeloves nicknamed them the Hatfields and the McCoys, and when their version of "My Girl Sloopy", retitled "Hang on Sloopy", came out, it was under the band name The McCoys: [Excerpt: The McCoys, "Hang on Sloopy"] Berns was becoming a major success, and with major success in the New York music industry in the 1960s came Mafia involvement. We've talked a fair bit about Morris Levy's connection with the mob in many previous episodes, but mob influence was utterly pervasive throughout the New York part of the industry, and so for example Richard Gottehrer of the Strangeloves used to call Sonny Franzese of the Colombo crime family "Uncle John", they were so close. Franzese was big in the record business too, even after his conviction for bank robbery. Berns, unlike many of the other people in the industry, had no scruples at all about hanging out with Mafiosi. indeed his best friend in the mid sixties was Tommy Eboli, a member of the Genovese crime family who had been in the mob since the twenties, starting out working for "Lucky" Luciano. Berns was not himself a violent man, as far as anyone can tell, but he liked the glamour of hanging out with organised crime figures, and they liked hanging out with someone who was making so many hit records. And so while Leiber and Stoller, for example, ended up selling Red Bird Records to George Goldner for a single dollar in order to get away from the Mafiosi who were slowly muscling in on the label, Berns had no problems at all in keeping his own label going. Indeed, he would soon be doing so without the involvement of Atlantic Records. Berns' final work for Atlantic was in June 1966, when he cut a song he had co-written with Jeff Barry for the Drifters, inspired by the woman who would soon become Atlantic's biggest star: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Aretha"] The way Berns told the story in public, there was no real bad blood between him, Wexler, and the Erteguns -- he'd just decided to go his own way, and he said “I will always be grateful to them for the help they've given me in getting Bang started,” The way Berns' wife would later tell the story, Jerry Wexler had suggested that rather than Berns owning fifty percent of Web IV, they should start to split everything four ways, and she had been horrified by this suggestion, kicked up a stink about it, and Wexler had then said that either Berns needed to buy the other three out, or quit and give them everything, and demanded Berns pay them three hundred thousand dollars. According to other people, Berns decided he wanted one hundred percent control of Web IV, and raised a breach of contract lawsuit against Atlantic, over the usual royalty non-payments that were endemic in the industry at that point. When Atlantic decided to fight the lawsuit rather than settle, Berns' mob friends got involved and threatened to break the legs of Wexler's fourteen-year-old daughter, and the mob ended up with full control of Bang records, while Berns had full control of his publishing company. Given later events, and in particular given the way Wexler talked about Berns until the day he died, with a vitriol that he never used about any of the other people he had business disputes with, it seems likely to me that the latter story is closer to the truth than the former. But most people involved weren't talking about the details of what went on, and so Berns still retained his relationships with many of the people in the business, not least of them Jeff Barry, so when Barry and Ellie Greenwich had a new potential star, it was Berns they thought to bring him to, even though the artist was white and Berns had recently given an interview saying that he wanted to work with more Black artists, because white artists simply didn't have soul. Barry and Greenwich's marriage was breaking up at the time, but they were still working together professionally, as we discussed in the episode on "River Deep, Mountain High", and they had been the main production team at Red Bird. But with Red Bird in terminal decline, they turned elsewhere when they found a potential major star after Greenwich was asked to sing backing vocals on one of his songwriting demos. They'd signed the new songwriter, Neil Diamond, to Leiber and Stoller's company Trio Music at first, but they soon started up their own company, Tallyrand Music, and signed Diamond to that, giving Diamond fifty percent of the company and keeping twenty-five percent each for themselves, and placed one of his songs with Jay and the Americans in 1965: [Excerpt: Jay and the Americans, "Sunday and Me"] That record made the top twenty, and had established Diamond as a songwriter, but he was still not a major performer -- he'd released one flop single on Columbia Records before meeting Barry and Greenwich. But they thought he had something, and Bert Berns agreed. Diamond was signed to Bang records, and Berns had a series of pre-production meetings with Barry and Greenwich before they took Diamond into the studio -- Barry and Greenwich were going to produce Diamond for Bang, as they had previously produced tracks for Red Bird, but they were going to shape the records according to Berns' aesthetic. The first single released from Diamond's first session, "Solitary Man", only made number fifty-five, but it was the first thing Diamond had recorded to make the Hot One Hundred at all: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Solitary Man"] The second single, though, was much more Bert Berns' sort of thing -- a three-chord song that sounded like it could have been written by Berns himself, especially after Barry and Greenwich had added the Latin-style horns that Berns loved so much. Indeed according to some sources, Berns did make a songwriting suggestion -- Diamond's song had apparently been called "Money Money", and Berns had thought that was a ridiculous title, and suggested calling it "Cherry Cherry" instead: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Cherry Cherry"] That became Diamond's first top ten hit. While Greenwich had been the one who had discovered Diamond, and Barry and Greenwich were the credited producers on all Diamond's records as a result, Diamond soon found himself collaborating far more with Barry than with Greenwich, so for example the first number one he wrote, for the Monkees rather than himself, ended up having its production just credited to Barry. That record used a backing track recorded in New York by the same set of musicians used on most Bang records, like Al Gorgoni on lead guitar and Russ Savakus on bass: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "I'm a Believer"] Neil Diamond was becoming a solid hit-maker, but he started rubbing up badly against Berns. Berns wanted hits and only hits, and Diamond thought of himself as a serious artist. The crisis came when two songs were under contention for Diamond's next single in late 1967, after he'd had a whole run of hits for the label. The song Diamond wanted to release, "Shilo", was deeply personal to him: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Shilo"] But Bert Berns had other ideas. "Shilo" didn't sound like a hit, and he knew a hit when he heard one. No, the clear next single, the only choice, was "Kentucky Woman": [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Kentucky Woman"] But Berns tried to compromise as best he could. Diamond's contract was up for renewal, and you don't want to lose someone who has had, as Diamond had at that point, five top twenty hits in a row, and who was also writing songs like "I'm a Believer" and "Red Red Wine". He told Diamond that he'd let "Shilo" come out as a single if Diamond signed an extension to his contract. Diamond said that not only was he not going to do that, he'd taken legal advice and discovered that there were problems with his contract which let him record for other labels -- the word "exclusive" had been missed out of the text, among other things. He wasn't going to be recording for Bang at all any more. The lawsuits over this would stretch out for a decade, and Diamond would eventually win, but the first few months were very, very difficult for Diamond. When he played the Bitter End, a club in New York, stink bombs were thrown into the audience. The Bitter End's manager was assaulted and severely beaten. Diamond moved his wife and child out of Manhattan, borrowed a gun, and after his last business meeting with Berns was heard talking about how he needed to contact the District Attorney and hire a bodyguard. Of the many threats that were issued against Diamond, though, the least disturbing was probably the threat Berns made to Diamond's career. Berns pointed out to Diamond in no uncertain terms that he didn't need Diamond anyway -- he already had someone he could replace Diamond with, another white male solo singer with a guitar who could churn out guaranteed hits. He had Van Morrison: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl"] When we left Van Morrison, Them had just split up due to the problems they had been having with their management team. Indeed, the problems Morrison was having with his managers seem curiously similar to the issues that Diamond was having with Bert Berns -- something that could possibly have been a warning sign to everyone involved, if any of them had known the full details of everyone else's situation. Sadly for all of them, none of them did. Them had had some early singles success, notably with the tracks Berns had produced for them, but Morrison's opinion of their second album, Them Again, was less than complimentary, and in general that album is mostly only remembered for the version of Bob Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue", which is one of those cover versions that inspires subsequent covers more than the original ever did: [Excerpt: Them, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue"] Them had toured the US around the time of the release of that album, but that tour had been a disaster. The group had gained a reputation for incredible live shows, including performances at the Whisky A-Go-Go with the Doors and Captain Beefheart as their support acts, but during the tour Van Morrison had decided that Phil Solomon, the group's manager, was getting too much money -- Morrison had agreed to do the tour on a salary, rather than a percentage, but the tour had been more successful than he'd expected, and Solomon was making a great deal of money off the tour, money that Morrison believed rightfully belonged to him. The group started collecting the money directly from promoters, and got into legal trouble with Solomon as a result. The tour ended with the group having ten thousand dollars that Solomon believed -- quite possibly correctly -- that he was owed. Various gangsters whose acquaintance the group had made offered to have the problem taken care of, but they decided instead to come to a legal agreement -- they would keep the money, and in return Solomon, whose production company the group were signed to, would get to keep all future royalties from the Them tracks. This probably seemed a good idea at the time, when the idea of records earning royalties for sixty or more years into the future seemed ridiculous, but Morrison in particular came to regret the decision bitterly. The group played one final gig when they got back to Belfast, but then split up, though a version of the group led by the bass player Alan Henderson continued performing for a few years to no success. Morrison put together a band that played a handful of gigs under the name Them Again, with little success, but he already had his eyes set on a return to the US. In Morrison's eyes, Bert Berns had been the only person in the music industry who had really understood him, and the two worked well together. He had also fallen in love with an American woman, Janet Planet, and wanted to find some way to be with her. As Morrison said later “I had a couple of other offers but I thought this was the best one, seeing as I wanted to come to America anyway. I can't remember the exact details of the deal. It wasn't really that spectacular, money-wise, I don't think. But it was pretty hard to refuse from the point of view that I really respected Bert as a producer. I'd rather have worked with Bert than some other guy with a bigger record company. From that angle, it was spectacular because Bert was somebody that I wanted to work with.” There's little evidence that Morrison did have other offers -- he was already getting a reputation as someone who it was difficult to work with -- but he and Berns had a mutual respect, and on January the ninth, 1967, he signed a contract with Bang records. That contract has come in for a lot of criticism over the years, but it was actually, *by the standards in operation in the music business in 1967*, a reasonably fair one. The contract provided that, for a $2,500 a year advance, Bang would record twelve sides in the first year, with an option for up to fifty more that year, and options for up to four more years on the same terms. Bang had the full ownership of the masters and the right to do what they wanted with them. According to at least one biographer, Morrison added clauses requiring Bang to actually record the twelve sides a year, and to put out at least three singles and one album per year while the contract was in operation. He also added one other clause which seems telling -- "Company agrees that Company will not make any reference to the name THEM on phonograph records, or in advertising copy in connection with the recording of Artist." Morrison was, at first, extremely happy with Berns. The problems started with their first session: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl (takes 1-6)"] When Morrison had played the songs he was working on for Berns, Berns had remarked that they sounded great with just Morrison and his guitar, so Morrison was surprised when he got into the studio to find the whole standard New York session crew there -- the same group of session players who were playing for everyone from the Monkees to Laura Nyro, from Neil Diamond to the Shangri-Las -- along with the Sweet Inspirations to provide backing vocals. As he described it later "This fellow Bert, he made it the way he wanted to, and I accepted that he was producing it... I'd write a song and bring it into the group and we'd sit there and bash it around and that's all it was -- they weren't playing the songs, they were just playing whatever it was. They'd say 'OK, we got drums so let's put drums on it,' and they weren't thinking about the song, all they were thinking about was putting drums on it... But it was my song, and I had to watch it go down." The first song they cut was "Brown-Eyed Girl", a song which Morrison has said was originally a calypso, and was originally titled "Brown-skinned Girl", though he's differed in interviews as to whether Berns changed the lyric or if he just decided to sing it differently without thinking about it in the session. Berns turned "Brown-Eyed Girl" into a hit single, because that was what he tended to do with songs, and the result sounds a lot like the kind of record that Bang were releasing for Neil Diamond: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl"] Morrison has, in later years, expressed his distaste for what was done to the song, and in particular he's said that the backing vocal part by the Sweet Inspirations was added by Berns and he disliked it: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl"] Morrison has been very dismissive of "Brown-Eyed Girl" over the years, but he seems not to have disliked it at the time, and the song itself is one that has stood the test of time, and is often pointed to by other songwriters as a great example of the writer's craft. I remember reading one interview with Randy Newman -- sadly, while I thought it was in Paul Zollo's "Songwriters on Songwriting" I just checked that and it's not, so I can't quote it precisely -- in which he says that he often points to the line "behind the stadium with you" as a perfect piece of writing, because it's such a strangely specific detail that it convinces you that it actually happened, and that means you implicitly believe the rest of the song. Though it should be made very clear here that Morrison has always said, over and over again, that nothing in his songs is based directly on his own experiences, and that they're all products of his imagination and composites of people he's known. This is very important to note before we go any further, because "Brown-Eyed Girl" is one of many songs from this period in Morrison's career which imply that their narrator has an attraction to underage girls -- in this case he remembers "making love in the green grass" in the distant past, while he also says "saw you just the other day, my how you have grown", and that particular combination is not perhaps one that should be dwelt on too closely. But there is of course a very big difference between a songwriter treating a subject as something that is worth thinking about in the course of a song and writing about their own lives, and that can be seen on one of the other songs that Morrison recorded in these sessions, "T.B. Sheets": [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "T.B. Sheets"] It seems very unlikely indeed that Van Morrison actually had a lover die of tuberculosis, as the lover in the song does, and while a lot of people seem convinced that it's autobiographical, simply because of the intensity of the performance (Morrison apparently broke down in tears after recording it), nobody has ever found anyone in Morrison's life who fits the story in the song, and he's always ridiculed such suggestions. What is true though is that "T.B. Sheets" is evidence against another claim that Morrison has made in the past - that on these initial sessions the eight songs recorded were meant to be the A and B sides of four singles and there was no plan of making an album. It is simply not plausible at all to suggest that "T.B. Sheets" -- a slow blues about terminal illness, that lasts nearly ten minutes -- was ever intended as a single. It wouldn't have even come close to fitting on one side of a forty-five. It was also presumably at this time that Berns brought up the topic of "Piece of My Heart". When Berns signed Erma Franklin, it was as a way of getting at Jerry Wexler, who had gone from being his closest friend to someone he wasn't on speaking terms with, by signing the sister of his new signing Aretha. Morrison, of course, didn't co-write it -- he'd already decided that he didn't play well with others -- but it's tempting to think about how the song might have been different had Morrison written it. The song in some ways seems a message to Wexler -- haven't you had enough from me already? -- but it's also notable how many songs Berns was writing with the word "heart" in the chorus, given that Berns knew he was on borrowed time from his own heart condition. As an example, around the same time he and Jerry Ragavoy co-wrote "Piece of My Heart", they also co-wrote another song, "Heart Be Still", a flagrant lift from "Peace Be Still" by Aretha Franklin's old mentor Rev. James Cleveland, which they cut with Lorraine Ellison: [Excerpt: Lorraine Ellison, "Heart Be Still"] Berns' heart condition had got much worse as a result of the stress from splitting with Atlantic, and he had started talking about maybe getting open-heart surgery, though that was still very new and experimental. One wonders how he must have felt listening to Morrison singing about watching someone slowly dying. Morrison has since had nothing but negative things to say about the sessions in March 1967, but at the time he seemed happy. He returned to Belfast almost straight away after the sessions, on the understanding that he'd be back in the US if "Brown-Eyed Girl" was a success. He wrote to Janet Planet in San Francisco telling her to listen to the radio -- she'd know if she heard "Brown-Eyed Girl" that he would be back on his way to see her. She soon did hear the song, and he was soon back in the US: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl"] By August, "Brown-Eyed Girl" had become a substantial hit, making the top ten, and Morrison was back in the States. He was starting to get less happy with Berns though. Bang had put out the eight tracks he'd recorded in March as an album, titled Blowin' Your Mind, and Morrison thought that the crass pseudo-psychedelia of the title, liner notes, and cover was very inappropriate -- Morrison has never been a heavy user of any drugs other than alcohol, and didn't particularly want to be associated with them. He also seems to have not realised that every track he recorded in those initial sessions would be on the album, which many people have called one of the great one-sided albums of all time -- side A, with "Brown-Eyed Girl", "He Ain't Give You None" and the extended "T.B. Sheets" tends to get far more love than side B, with five much lesser songs on it. Berns held a party for Morrison on a cruise around Manhattan, but it didn't go well -- when the performer Tiny Tim tried to get on board, Carmine "Wassel" DeNoia, a mobster friend of Berns' who was Berns' partner in a studio they'd managed to get from Atlantic as part of the settlement when Berns left, was so offended by Tim's long hair and effeminate voice and mannerisms that he threw him overboard into the harbour. DeNoia was meant to be Morrison's manager in the US, working with Berns, but he and Morrison didn't get on at all -- at one point DeNoia smashed Morrison's acoustic guitar over his head, and only later regretted the damage he'd done to a nice guitar. And Morrison and Berns weren't getting on either. Morrison went back into the studio to record four more songs for a follow-up to "Brown-Eyed Girl", but there was again a misunderstanding. Morrison thought he'd been promised that this time he could do his songs the way he wanted, but Berns was just frustrated that he wasn't coming up with another "Brown-Eyed Girl", but was instead coming up with slow songs about trans women. Berns overdubbed party noises and soul backing vocals onto "Madame George", possibly in an attempt to copy the Beach Boys' Party! album with its similar feel, but it was never going to be a "Barbara Ann": [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Madame George (Bang version)"] In the end, Berns released one of the filler tracks from Blowin' Your Mind, "Ro Ro Rosey", as the next single, and it flopped. On December the twenty-ninth, Berns had a meeting with Neil Diamond, the meeting after which Diamond decided he needed to get a bodyguard. After that, he had a screaming row over the phone with Van Morrison, which made Berns ill with stress. The next day, he died of a heart attack. Berns' widow Ilene, who had only just given birth to a baby a couple of weeks earlier, would always blame Morrison for pushing her husband over the edge. Neither Van Morrison nor Jerry Wexler went to the funeral, but Neil Diamond did -- he went to try to persuade Ilene to let him out of his contract now Berns was dead. According to Janet Planet later, "We were at the hotel when we learned that Bert had died. We were just mortified, because things had been going really badly, and Van felt really bad, because I guess they'd parted having had some big fight or something... Even though he did love Bert, it was a strange relationship that lived and died in the studio... I remember we didn't go to the funeral, which probably was a mistake... I think [Van] had a really bad feeling about what was going to happen." But Morrison has later mostly talked about the more practical concerns that came up, which were largely the same as the ones Neil Diamond had, saying in 1997 "I'd signed a contract with Bert Berns for management, production, agency and record company, publishing, the whole lot -- which was professional suicide as any lawyer will tell you now... Then the whole thing blew up. Bert Berns died and I was left broke." This was the same mistake, essentially, that he'd made with Phil Solomon, and in order to get out of it, it turned out he was going to have to do much the same for a third time. But it was the experience with Berns specifically that traumatised Morrison enough that twenty-five years later he would still be writing songs about it, like "Big Time Operators": [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Big Time Operators"] The option to renew Morrison's contracts with Berns' companies came on the ninth of January 1968, less than two weeks after Berns' death. After his death, Berns' share of ownership in his companies had passed to his widow, who was in a quandary. She had two young children, one of whom was only a few weeks old, and she needed an income after their father had died. She was also not well disposed at all towards Morrison, who she blamed for causing her husband's death. By all accounts the amazing thing is that Berns lived as long as he did given his heart condition and the state of medical science at the time, but it's easy to understand her thinking. She wanted nothing to do with Morrison, and wanted to punish him. On the other hand, her late husband's silent partners didn't want to let their cash cow go. And so Morrison came under a huge amount of pressure in very different directions. From one side, Carmine DiNoia was determined to make more money off Morrison, and Morrison has since talked about signing further contracts at this point with a gun literally to his head, and his hotel room being shot up. But on the other side, Ilene Berns wanted to destroy Morrison's career altogether. She found out that Bert Berns hadn't got Morrison the proper work permits and reported him to the immigration authorities. Morrison came very close to being deported, but in the end he managed to escape deportation by marrying Janet Planet. The newly-married couple moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to get away from New York and the mobsters, and to try to figure out the next steps in Morrison's career. Morrison started putting together a band, which he called The Van Morrison Controversy, and working on new songs. One of his earliest connections in Massachusetts was the lead singer of a band called the Hallucinations, who he met in a bar where he was trying to get a gig: [Excerpt: The Hallucinations, "Messin' With the Kid"] The Hallucinations' lead singer was called Peter Wolf, and would much later go on to become well-known as the singer with the J. Geils Band. He and Morrison became acquaintances, and later became closer friends when they realised they had another connection -- Wolf had a late-night radio show under the name Woofa Goofa, and he'd been receiving anonymous requests for obscure blues records from a fan of the show. Morrison had been the one sending in the requests, not realising his acquaintance was the DJ. Before he got his own band together, Morrison actually guested with the Hallucinations at one show they did in May 1968, supporting John Lee Hooker. The Hallucinations had been performing "Gloria" since Them's single had come out, and they invited Morrison to join them to perform it on stage. According to Wolf, Morrison was very drunk and ranted in cod-Japanese for thirty-five minutes, and tried to sing a different song while the band played "Gloria". The audience were apparently unimpressed, even though Wolf shouted at them “Don't you know who this man is? He wrote the song!” But in truth, Morrison was sick of "Gloria" and his earlier work, and was trying to push his music in a new direction. He would later talk about having had an epiphany after hearing one particular track on the radio: [Excerpt: The Band, "I Shall Be Released"] Like almost every musician in 1968, Morrison was hit like a lightning bolt by Music From Big Pink, and he decided that he needed to turn his music in the same direction. He started writing the song "Brand New Day", which would later appear on his album Moondance, inspired by the music on the album. The Van Morrison Controversy started out as a fairly straightforward rock band, with guitarist John Sheldon, bass player Tom Kielbania, and drummer Joey Bebo. Sheldon was a novice, though his first guitar teacher was the singer James Taylor, but the other two were students at Berklee, and very serious musicians. Morrison seems to have had various managers involved in rapid succession in 1968, including one who was himself a mobster, and another who was only known as Frank, but one of these managers advanced enough money that the musicians got paid every gig. These musicians were all interested in kinds of music other than just straight rock music, and as well as rehearsing up Morrison's hits and his new songs, they would also jam with him on songs from all sorts of other genres, particularly jazz and blues. The band worked up the song that would become "Domino" based on Sheldon jamming on a Bo Diddley riff, and another time the group were rehearsing a Grant Green jazz piece, "Lazy Afternoon": [Excerpt: Grant Green, "Lazy Afternoon"] Morrison started messing with the melody, and that became his classic song "Moondance": [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Moondance"] No recordings of this electric lineup of the group are known to exist, though the backing musicians remember going to a recording studio called Ace recordings at one point and cutting some demos, which don't seem to circulate. Ace was a small studio which, according to all the published sources I've read, was best known for creating song poems, though it was a minor studio even in the song-poem world. For those who don't know, song poems were essentially a con aimed at wannabe songwriters who knew nothing about the business -- companies would advertise you too could become a successful, rich, songwriter if you sent in your "song poems", because anyone who knew the term "lyric" could be presumed to know too much about the music business to be useful. When people sent in their lyrics, they'd then be charged a fee to have them put out on their very own record -- with tracks made more or less on a conveyor belt with quick head arrangements, sung by session singers who were just handed a lyric sheet and told to get on with it. And thus were created such classics prized by collectors as "I Like Yellow Things", "Jimmy Carter Says 'Yes'", and "Listen Mister Hat". Obviously, for the most part these song poems did not lead to the customers becoming the next Ira Gershwin, but oddly even though Ace recordings is not one of the better-known song poem studios, it seems to have produced an actual hit song poem -- one that I don't think has ever before been identified as such until I made a connection, hence me going on this little tangent. Because in researching this episode I noticed something about its co-owner, Milton Yakus', main claim to fame. He co-wrote the song "Old Cape Cod", and to quote that song's Wikipedia page "The nucleus of the song was a poem written by Boston-area housewife Claire Rothrock, for whom Cape Cod was a favorite vacation spot. "Old Cape Cod" and its derivatives would be Rothrock's sole evident songwriting credit. She brought her poem to Ace Studios, a Boston recording studio owned by Milton Yakus, who adapted the poem into the song's lyrics." And while Yakus had written other songs, including songs for Patti Page who had the hit with "Old Cape Cod", apparently Page recorded that song after Rothrock brought her the demo after a gig, rather than getting it through any formal channels. It sounds to me like the massive hit and classic of the American songbook "Old Cape Cod" started life as a song-poem -- and if you're familiar with the form, it fits the genre perfectly: [Excerpt: Patti Page, "Old Cape Cod"] The studio was not the classiest of places, even if you discount the song-poems. Its main source of income was from cutting private records with mobsters' wives and mistresses singing (and dealing with the problems that came along when those records weren't successful) and it also had a sideline in bugging people's cars to see if their spouses were cheating, though Milton Yakus' son Shelly, who got his start at his dad's studio, later became one of the most respected recording engineers in the industry -- and indeed had already worked as assistant engineer on Music From Big Pink. And there was actually another distant connection to Morrison's new favourite band on these sessions. For some reason -- reports differ -- Bebo wasn't considered suitable for the session, and in his place was the one-handed drummer Victor "Moulty" Moulton, who had played with the Barbarians, who'd had a minor hit with "Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?" a couple of years earlier: [Excerpt: The Barbarians, "Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?"] A later Barbarians single, in early 1966, had featured Moulty telling his life story, punctuated by the kind of three-chord chorus that would have been at home on a Bert Berns single: [Excerpt: The Barbarians, "Moulty"] But while that record was credited to the Barbarians, Moulton was the only Barbarian on the track, with the instruments and backing vocals instead being provided by Levon and the Hawks. Shortly after the Ace sessions, the Van Morrison Controversy fell apart, though nobody seems to know why. Depending on which musician's story you listen to, either Morrison had a dream that he should get rid of all electric instruments and only use acoustic players, or there was talk of a record deal but the musicians weren't good enough, or the money from the mysterious manager (who may or may not have been the one who was a mobster) ran out. Bebo went back to university, and Sheldon left soon after, though Sheldon would remain in the music business in one form or another. His most prominent credit has been writing a couple of songs for his old friend James Taylor, including the song "Bittersweet" on Taylor's platinum-selling best-of, on which Sheldon also played guitar: [Excerpt: James Taylor, "Bittersweet"] Morrison and Kielbania continued for a while as a duo, with Morrison on acoustic guitar and Kielbania on double bass, but they were making very different music. Morrison's biggest influence at this point, other than The Band, was King Pleasure, a jazz singer who sang in the vocalese style we've talked about before -- the style where singers would sing lyrics to melodies that had previously been improvised by jazz musicians: [Excerpt: King Pleasure, "Moody's Mood for Love"] Morrison and Kielbania soon decided that to make the more improvisatory music they were interested in playing, they wanted another musician who could play solos. They ended up with John Payne, a jazz flute and saxophone player whose biggest inspiration was Charles Lloyd. This new lineup of the Van Morrison Controversy -- acoustic guitar, double bass, and jazz flute -- kept gigging around Boston, though the sound they were creating was hardly what the audiences coming to see the man who'd had that "Brown-Eyed Girl" hit the year before would have expected -- even when they did "Brown-Eyed Girl", as the one live recording of that line-up, made by Peter Wolf, shows: [Excerpt: The Van Morrison Controversy, "Brown-Eyed Girl (live in Boston 1968)"] That new style, with melodic bass underpinning freely extemporising jazz flute and soulful vocals, would become the basis of the album that to this day is usually considered Morrison's best. But before that could happen, there was the matter of the contracts to be sorted out. Warner-Reprise Records were definitely interested. Warners had spent the last few years buying up smaller companies like Atlantic, Autumn Records, and Reprise, and the label was building a reputation as the major label that would give artists the space and funding they needed to make the music they wanted to make. Idiosyncratic artists with difficult reputations (deserved or otherwise), like Neil Young, Randy Newman, Van Dyke Parks, the Grateful Dead, and Joni Mitchell, had all found homes on the label, which was soon also to start distributing Frank Zappa, the Beach Boys, and Captain Beefheart. A surly artist who wants to make mystical acoustic songs with jazz flute accompaniment was nothing unusual for them, and once Joe Smith, the man who had signed the Grateful Dead, was pointed in Morrison's direction by Andy Wickham, an A&R man working for the label, everyone knew that Morrison would be a perfect fit. But Morrison was still under contract to Bang records and Web IV, and those contracts said, among other things, that any other label that negotiated with Morrison would be held liable for breach of contract. Warners didn't want to show their interest in Morrison, because a major label wanting to sign him would cause Bang to raise the price of buying him out of his contract. Instead they got an independent production company to sign him, with a nod-and-wink understanding that they would then license the records to Warners. The company they chose was Inherit Productions, the production arm of Schwaid-Merenstein, a management company set up by Bob Schwaid, who had previously worked in Warners' publishing department, and record producer Lewis Merenstein. Merenstein came to another demo session at Ace Recordings, where he fell in love with the new music that Morrison was playing, and determined he would do everything in his power to make the record into the masterpiece it deserved to be. He and Morrison were, at least at this point, on exactly the same page, and bonded over their mutual love of King Pleasure. Morrison signed to Schwaid-Merenstein, just as he had with Bert Berns and before him Phil Solomon, for management, record production, and publishing. Schwaid-Merenstein were funded by Warners, and would license any recordings they made to Warners, once the contractual situation had been sorted out. The first thing to do was to negotiate the release from Web IV, the publishing company owned by Ilene Berns. Schwaid negotiated that, and Morrison got released on four conditions -- he had to make a substantial payment to Web IV, if he released a single within a year he had to give Web IV the publishing, any album he released in the next year had to contain at least two songs published by Web IV, and he had to give Web IV at least thirty-six new songs to publish within the next year. The first two conditions were no problem at all -- Warners had the money to buy the contract out, and Merenstein's plans for the first album didn't involve a single anyway. It wouldn't be too much of a hardship to include a couple of Web IV-published tracks on the album -- Morrison had written two songs, "Beside You" and "Madame George", that had already been published and that he was regularly including in his live sets. As for the thirty-six new songs... well, that all depended on what you called a song, didn't it? [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Ring Worm"] Morrison went into a recording studio and recorded thirty-one ostensible songs, most of them lasting one minute to within a few seconds either way, in which he strummed one or two chords and spoke-sang whatever words came into his head -- for example one song, "Here Comes Dumb George", just consists of the words "Here Comes Dumb George" repeated over and over. Some of the 'songs', like "Twist and Shake" and "Hang on Groovy", are parodying Bert Berns' songwriting style; others, like "Waiting for My Royalty Check", "Blowin' Your Nose", and "Nose in Your Blow", are attacks on Bang's business practices. Several of the songs, like "Hold on George", "Here Comes Dumb George", "Dum Dum George", and "Goodbye George" are about a man called George who seems to have come to Boston to try and fail to make a record with Morrison. And “Want a Danish” is about wanting a Danish pastry. But in truth, this description is still making these "songs" sound more coherent than they are. The whole recording is of no musical merit whatsoever, and has absolutely nothing in it which could be considered to have any commercial potential at all. Which is of course the point -- just to show utter contempt to Ilene Berns and her company. The other problem that needed to be solved was Bang Records itself, which was now largely under the control of the mob. That was solved by Joe Smith. As Smith told the story "A friend of mine who knew some people said I could buy the contract for $20,000. I had to meet somebody in a warehouse on the third floor on Ninth Avenue in New York. I walked up there with twenty thousand-dollar bills -- and I was terrified. I was terrified I was going to give them the money, get a belt on the head and still not wind up with the contract. And there were two guys in the room. They looked out of central casting -- a big wide guy and a tall, thin guy. They were wearing suits and hats and stuff. I said 'I'm here with the money. You got the contract?' I remember I took that contract and ran out the door and jumped from the third floor to the second floor, and almost broke my leg to get on the street, where I could get a cab and put the contract in a safe place back at Warner Brothers." But the problem was solved, and Lewis Merenstein could get to work translating the music he'd heard Morrison playing into a record. He decided that Kielbania and Payne were not suitable for the kind of recording he wanted -- though they were welcome to attend the sessions in case the musicians had any questions about the songs, and thus they would get session pay. Kielbania was, at first, upset by this, but he soon changed his mind when he realised who Merenstein was bringing in to replace him on bass for the session. Richard Davis, the bass player -- who sadly died two months ago as I write this -- would later go on to play on many classic rock records by people like Bruce Springsteen and Laura Nyro, largely as a result of his work for Morrison, but at the time he was known as one of the great jazz bass players, most notably having played on Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch: [Excerpt: Eric Dolphy, "Hat and Beard"] Kielbania could see the wisdom of getting in one of the truly great players for the album, and he was happy to show Davis the parts he'd been playing on the songs live, which Davis could then embellish -- Davis later always denied this, but it's obvious when listening to the live recordings that Kielbania played on before these sessions that Davis is playing very similar lines. Warren Smith Jr, the vibraphone player, had played with great jazz musicians like Charles Mingus and Herbie Mann, as well as backing Lloyd Price, Aretha Franklin, and Janis Joplin. Connie Kay, the drummer, was the drummer for the Modern Jazz Quartet and had also played sessions with everyone from Ruth Brown to Miles Davis. And Jay Berliner, the guitarist, had played on records like Charles Mingus' classic The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady: [Excerpt: Charles Mingus: "Mode D - Trio and Group Dancers, Mode F - Single Solos & Group Dance"] There was also a flute player whose name nobody now remembers. Although all of these musicians were jobbing session musicians -- Berliner came to the first session for the album that became Astral Weeks straight from a session recording a jingle for Pringles potato chips -- they were all very capable of taking a simple song and using it as an opportunity for jazz improvisation. And that was what Merenstein asked them to do. The songs that Morrison was writing were lyrically oblique, but structurally they were very simple -- surprisingly so when one is used to listening to the finished album. Most of the songs were, harmonically, variants of the standard blues and R&B changes that Morrison was used to playing. "Cyprus Avenue" and "The Way Young Lovers Do", for example, are both basically twelve-bar blueses -- neither is *exactly* a standard twelve-bar blues, but both are close enough that they can be considered to fit the form. Other than what Kielbania and Payne showed the musicians, they received no guidance from Morrison, who came in, ran through the songs once for them, and then headed to the vocal booth. None of the musicians had much memory of Morrison at all -- Jay Berliner said “This little guy walks in, past everybody, disappears into the vocal booth, and almost never comes out, even on the playbacks, he stayed in there." While Richard Davis later said “Well, I was with three of my favorite fellas to play with, so that's what made it beautiful. We were not concerned with Van at all, he never spoke to us.” The sound of the basic tracks on Astral Weeks is not the sound of a single auteur, as one might expect given its reputation, it's the sound of extremely good jazz musicians improvising based on the instructions given by Lewis Merenstein, who was trying to capture the feeling he'd got from listening to Morrison's live performances and demos. And because these were extremely good musicians, the album was recorded extremely quickly. In the first session, they cut four songs. Two of those were songs that Morrison was contractually obliged to record because of his agreement with Web IV -- "Beside You" and "Madame George", two songs that Bert Berns had produced, now in radically different versions: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Madame George"] The third song, "Cyprus Avenue", is the song that has caused most controversy over the years, as it's another of the songs that Morrison wrote around this time that relate to a sexual or romantic interest in underage girls. In this case, the reasoning might have been as simple as that the song is a blues, and Morrison may have been thinking about a tradition of lyrics like this in blues songs like "Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl". Whatever the cause though, the lyrics have, to put it mildly, not aged well at all: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Cyprus Avenue"] That song would be his standard set-closer for live performances for much of the seventies. For the fourth and final song, though, they chose to record what would become the title track for the album, "Astral Weeks", a song that was a lot more elliptical, and which seems in part to be about Morrison's longing for Janet Planet from afar, but also about memories of childhood, and also one of the first songs to bring in Morrison's fascination with the occult and spirituality, something that would be a recurring theme throughout his work, as the song was partly inspired by paintings by a friend of Morrison's which suggested to him the concept of astral travel: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Astral Weeks"] Morrison had a fascination with the idea of astral travel, as he had apparently had several out-of-body experiences as a child, and wanted to find some kind of explanation for them. Most of the songs on the album came, by Morrison's own account, as a kind of automatic writing, coming through him rather than being consciously written, and there's a fascination throughout with, to use the phrase from "Madame George", "childhood visions". The song is also one of the first songs in Morrison's repertoire to deliberately namecheck one of his idols, something else he would do often in future, when he talks about "talking to Huddie Leadbelly". "Astral Weeks" was a song that Morrison had been performing live for some time, and Payne had always enjoyed doing it. Unlike Kielbania he had no compunction about insisting that he was good enough to play on the record, and he eventually persuaded the session flute player to let him borrow his instrument, and Payne was allowed to play on the track: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Astral Weeks"] Or at least that's how the story is usually told -- Payne is usually credited for playing on "Madame George" too, even though everyone agrees that "Astral Weeks" was the last song of the night, but people's memories can fade over time. Either way, Payne's interplay with Jay Berliner on the guitar became such a strong point of the track that there was no question of bringing the unknown session player back -- Payne was going to be the woodwind player for the rest of the album: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Astral Weeks"] There was then a six-day break between sessions, during which time Payne and Kielbania went to get initiated into Scientology -- a religion with which Morrison himself would experiment a little over a decade later -- though they soon decided that it wasn't worth the cost of the courses they'd have to take, and gave up on the idea the same week. The next session didn't go so well. Jay Berliner was unavailable, and so Barry Kornfeld, a folkie who played with people like Dave Van Ronk, was brought in to replace him. Kornfeld was perfectly decent in the role, but they'd also brought in a string section, with the idea of recording some of the songs which needed string parts live. But the string players they brought in were incapable of improvising, coming from a classical rather than jazz tradition, and the only track that got used on the finished album was "The Way Young Lovers Do", by far the most conventional song on the album, a three-minute soul ballad structured as a waltz twelve-bar blues, where the strings are essentially playing the same parts that a horn section would play on a record by someone like Solomon Burke: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "The Way Young Lovers Do"] It was decided that any string or horn parts on the rest of the album would just be done as overdubs. It was two weeks before the next and final session for the album, and that featured the return of Jay Berliner on guitar. The session started with "Sweet Thing" and "Ballerina", two songs that Morrison had been playing live for some time, and which were cut in relatively quick order. They then made attempts at two more songs that didn't get very far, "Royalty", and "Going Around With Jesse James", before Morrison, stuck for something to record, pulled out a new lyric he'd never performed live, "Slim Slow Slider". The whole band ran through the song once, but then Merenstein decided to pare the arrangement down to just Morrison, Payne (on soprano sax rather than on flute), and Warren Smith Jr: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Slim Slow Slider"] That track was the only one where, after the recording, Merenstein didn't compliment the performance, remaining silent instead – Payne said “Maybe everyone was just tired, or maybe they were moved by it.” It seems likely it was the latter. The track eventually got chosen as the final track of the album, because Merenstein felt that it didn't fit conceptually with anything else -- and it's definitely a more negative track than the oth
Laura Nyro wrote this song - (a tribute to torch singer Helen Merrill) - in 1966, but, it didn't do much for her at the time. Three years later, when The Fifth Dimension recorded it, it shot to number 1. The radiant lead vocalist, Marilyn McCoo, sang it to her betrothed, Billy Davis Jr., on the various television variety shows of the day, and audiences lapped it up. Nyro, the oddball composer-prodigy from the Bronx, consistently channeled her soulful declarations to many other artists of the time - (Three Dog Night, Blood Sweat and Tears, Barbara Streisand) before being identified as the singular genius behind the magic. My high school girlfriend Cindy was a 4'11'' spitfire with an identical twin. Her dad, Hank, a long-distance truck driver with a provocative (to put it generously) sense of humor, enjoyed teasing us. He called me “Keppy” (the yiddish word for Head, because my hair was thinning). Whenever this song came on the radio, trumpeting the refrain: “Marry Me, Bill!” - and it was ubiquitous - Hank, and Cindy's two older brothers, would give us shit mercilessly, - and I HATED IT. I hated the song and I hated them for pushing the uncomfortable question on us - because, despite the fact that Cindy hoped for the eventuality of matrimony, I didn't, and that was painful for her. Today this song sustains a shining memento for me - a reminder that I have enjoyed the gift of being loved by a soul who refused to give up on me. Fiercely loyal, uncompromising in her passions,- Cindy, my first love.
We kick off season five with a long-overdue episode on singer-songwriter Laura Nyro. Joined by vocal group Labelle on this record, Nyro showcases her knack for R&B and soul music through a wide range of cover songs, an interesting choice for an artist arguably best known for having other musicians perform her material. If you like us, please consider supporting us us at patreon.com/idbuythatpodcast to get exclusive bonus content, or tell a friend about us. Broke and have no friends? Leave us a review, it helps more people find us. Thank you!
An in-depth interview with virtuoso guitarist Jeff Pevar, who has played with Ray Charles, David Crosby, Laura Nyro, Joe Cocker, Bette Midler, James Taylor, Phil Lesh, Donald Fagen, and many more. He is a sought after session musician and composer for tv and movies, and has co-written many songs that have appeared on recordings of David Crosby, Graham Nash and other artists. Jeff is a great storyteller and shares exceptional musical moments and tales of collaborations.
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