Podcasts about Les Baxter

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Les Baxter

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Best podcasts about Les Baxter

Latest podcast episodes about Les Baxter

Essential Tremors
Ikue Mori (Big Ears Festival performer)

Essential Tremors

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 27, 2025 30:43


Japanese musician and composer Ikue Mori is widely known for her innovative work in experimental electronic music. Having initially gained recognition as a drummer for the avant-garde rock band DNA with Arto Lindsay in the late 1970s, she helped define the band's distinct sound. As her career evolved, Mori transitioned to using electronics and computers, exploring sound manipulation and producing intricate soundscapes that blend noise, rhythm, and melody. Her solo projects and collaborations with artists across genres have earned her a reputation as a pioneering force in the world of experimental music. In this episode, she discusses how songs by Ennio Morricone, Les Baxter, and Masuru Sato formed her sensibilities. Mori will perform at this year’s Big Ears Festival in Knoxville in March in her project with Zeena Parkins, Phantom Orchard.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Lounge Cinematica Radio
Lounge Cinematica Radio Episode 5x04 | Alessandroni, George Theodosiadis, Antonio Latorre, Les Baxter, Nora Orlandi...

Lounge Cinematica Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 21, 2024 42:29


LOUNGE CINEMATICA RADIO SEASON 5 Episode 5x04 Released on 21.10.24 Directed by... Javier Di Granti *** Alessandro Alessandroni - Life City George Theodosiadis - Air Hostess Carlo Savina - Eden Antonio Latorre y su Orquesta - Para Ceuta Me Voy Les Baxter - Bella's Dance Mario De Martino e la sua orchestra - Equation Red-Key And His International Sound - Morning Nora Orlandi ‎– Il Soldatino / Ginnastica / Il Deserto from 'Pentagramma' LP Billy Strange - Nocturnal Permission/ Wine, Women and Jam from 'De Sade' OST Bruno Nicolai - Eyeball (Javier Di Granti Trailer) Tracks included on this episode in no particulary order.

Song of the Day – KUTX
Kolumbo: “Spin the Bottle”

Song of the Day – KUTX

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 23, 2024


For a lot of people with contemporary tastes, exotica only equates to easy listening. Understandably so, since in the modern era it may strike first time listeners as muzak, elevator vapidity…jazz sans soul. But when you strip those biases and revisit the movement that began with the likes of Martin Denny and Les Baxter, you […] The post Kolumbo: “Spin the Bottle” appeared first on KUT & KUTX Studios -- Podcasts.

Castle of Horror Podcast
The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) - Podcast/Discussion

Castle of Horror Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 28, 2024 66:56


This week we have a look at the 1961 horror film The Pit and the Pendulum.  This is Episode #441! The Pit and the Pendulum is a 1961 horror film directed by Roger Corman, starring Vincent Price, Barbara Steele, John Kerr, and Luana Anders. The screenplay by Richard Matheson was loosely inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's 1842 short story of the same name. Set in sixteenth-century Spain, the story is about a young Englishman who visits a foreboding castle to investigate his sister's mysterious death. After a series of horrific revelations, apparently ghostly appearances and violent deaths, the young man becomes strapped to the titular torture device by his lunatic brother-in-law during the film's climactic sequence.The film was the second title in the popular series of Poe adaptations released by American International Pictures, the first having been Corman's House of Usher released the previous year. Like House, the film features widescreen cinematography by Floyd Crosby, sets designed by art director Daniel Haller, and a film score composed by Les Baxter. A critical and box-office hit, Pit's success convinced AIP and Corman to continue adapting Poe stories for another six films, five of them starring Price. The series ended in 1964 with the release of The Tomb of Ligeia.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/castle-of-horror-podcast--4268760/support.

the memory palace
Episode 220: The Zipper

the memory palace

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 15, 2024 13:34


The Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. Radiotopia is a collective of independently owned and operated podcasts that's a part of PRX, a not-for-profit public media company. If you'd like to directly support this show and independent media, you can make a donation at Radiotopia.fm/donate. I have recently launched a newsletter. You can subscribe to it at thememorypalacepodcast.substack.com. Music Swiming by Explosions in the Sky Walking Song by Kevin Volans and the Netherlands Wind Ensemble I Walk on Guilded Splinters by Johnny Jenkins Seduction by the Balanescu Quartet Lunette by Les Baxter and Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman Running Around by Buddy Ross September by Giles Lamb NotesThis episode was pieced together from a ton of little fragments but I wanted to steer folks to a couple of resources in particular: this excellent article from a few years back in the Toronto Star by Katie Daubs, and this documentary from filmmaker, Amy Nicholson, that primarily uses the Zipper as a way to talk about changes at Coney Island but has some great details from Harold Chance and his sons. 

Elevator Club
EC An Evening With Les Baxter

Elevator Club

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 11, 2024 118:17


Frank Mills Heart of the City Les Baxter AHO Quiet Village Les Baxter AHO Unchained Melody Les Baxter AHO Wake The Town & Tell The People Les Baxter AHO Ruby Les Baxter AHO Blue Tango Les Baxter AHO Lonely Wine Les Baxter AHO Monika Les Baxter AHO Yellow Sun Les Baxter AHO Because of You Les Baxter AHO The Poor People of Paris Les Baxter AHO Some Enchanted Evening Les Baxter AHO Green Eyes Les Baxter AHO Boca Chica Les Baxter AHO Canta De Ossanha Les Baxter AHO April In Portugal Les Baxter AHO Afternoon Affair Les Baxter AHO Bali Ha'i Les Baxter AHO Early Morning Blues Les Baxter AHO Invitation Les Baxter AHO Felicia My Love Les Baxter AHO Hot Summer Night Les Baxter AHO Younger Than Springtime Les Baxter AHO I'll Be Seeing Les Baxter Jean Les Baxter AHO La Vie En Rose Les Baxter AHO Heartstring Melody Les Baxter AHO Laia Ladaia Les Baxter AHO Moonlight Stroll Les Baxter AHO Out of This World Les Baxter AHO Miss You Les Baxter AHO Magenta Mountain Les Baxter AHO Our Kind of Love Les Baxter AHO My Love and The Sea Les Baxter AHO Thinking of You Les Baxter AHO Mutiny on the Bounty Les Baxter AHO Purple Islands Les Baxter AHO Morning On The Meadow Les Baxter AHO Poinciana (Song of the Tree) Les Baxter AHO Vereda Tropical (Havana For A Night) Les Baxter AHO Willing and Eager Frank Mills Heart of the City

Sateli 3
Sateli 3 - Music From Planet Earth 3/Jim Jam Gems 3/Trashcan 6 - 04/07/24

Sateli 3

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 4, 2024 59:51


Sintonía: "Destination Mars" - Frosty & The Diamonds"Signals From Saturn" - Rose DuBats; "Blue Moon Baby" - Dave Diddley Day; "In First Orbit" - Jean-Jacques Perrey; "The Other Side Of The Moon" - Les Baxter; "Man From Mars" - Butch Paulson y "Spaceship To Mars" de Gene Vincent, extraídas de la recopilación (1x10") "Music From Planet Earth Volume 3" (Stag-O-Lee, 2017)"Rinky Dink" - Cootie Williams; "Walk Right In" - Bonita with The Bill Harvey Orchestra; "Let´s Party" - Jesse Allen; "Rub A Dub" - Sonny Boy Williamson I; "Pete´s Mixture" - Pete Johnson; "Let It Roll Again" - Big John Greer with Lucky Millinders Orchestra y "Weed" de Bea Foote, extraídas de la recopilación (1x10") "Jim Jam Gems Volume 3" (Stag-O-Lee, 2014)"Midnight In Montevideo" - Biscaynes W. Co-Encidentals; "Nature Boy" - Don Reid featuring The Voice Of Love y "Summertime" de Lynn Hope, extraídas de la recopilación "Trashcan -The Natives Are Restless Volume 6" (Stag-O-Lee, 2020)Escuchar audio

WEFUNK Radio
WEFUNK Show 1210

WEFUNK Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 22, 2024


DJ Dmoe indulges in a healthy dose of 45 magic with beat tape business from Mihara and hypnotic Latin grooves by La Pambelé, Afrosound, Los Silvertones and Orquesta Edmundo Arias. Plus a brand new heatrock from Pete Rock & Common, Suckaside's supercharged "Ante Up" remix and a pool of greasy funk from the Interpretations and Les Baxter. View the full playlist for this show at https://www.wefunkradio.com/show/1210 Enjoying WEFUNK? Listen to all of our mixes at https://www.wefunkradio.com/shows/

Golden Gems
Les Baxter

Golden Gems

Play Episode Listen Later May 17, 2024 25:41


Leslie Thompson Baxter was an American musician, composer and conductor.

Dread Media
Episode 868 - The Dunwich Horror

Dread Media

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 15, 2024 51:36


This week, Desmond and Duane take in the parade of character actors that is 1970's The Dunwich Horror. Then Desmond goes solo and finally checks out the related-in-title-only Beyond the Dunwich Horror from 2008. Songs included: "Goin' Down to Dunwich" by The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, "Devil's Witchcraft" by Les Baxter, "Escape from Dunwich Valley" by Witchery, and "Gardens in the Dark" by inter Arma. Send feedback to: dreadmediapodcast@gmail.com. Follow @DevilDinosaurJr and @dreadmedia on Twitter! Join the Facebook group! Support the show at www.patreon.com/dreadmedia. Visit www.desmondreddick.com, www.stayscary.wordpress.com, www.dreadmedia.bandcamp.com, www.kccinephile.com, and www.dejasdomicileofdread.blogspot.com.

Earth-2.net Presents...
Dread Media - Episode 868

Earth-2.net Presents...

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 15, 2024 51:36


This week, Desmond and Duane take in the parade of character actors that is 1970's The Dunwich Horror. Then Desmond goes solo and finally checks out the related-in-title-only Beyond the Dunwich Horror from 2008. Songs included: "Goin' Down to Dunwich" by The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, "Devil's Witchcraft" by Les Baxter, "Escape from Dunwich Valley" by Witchery, and "Gardens in the Dark" by inter Arma. Send feedback to: dreadmediapodcast@gmail.com. Follow @DevilDinosaurJr and @dreadmedia on Twitter! Join the Facebook group! Support the show at www.patreon.com/dreadmedia. Visit www.desmondreddick.com, www.stayscary.wordpress.com, www.dreadmedia.bandcamp.com, www.kccinephile.com, and www.dejasdomicileofdread.blogspot.com.

21 Jump Scare
The Dunwich Horror (1970) with John DeVore

21 Jump Scare

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 27, 2023 84:26


Wilbur Whateley wants the Necronomicon, and although the library's closing, local coed Nancy is so entranced by Whateley that she's inclined to let him read it.  Her professor, Dr. Armitage, isn't thrilled with the idea of someone borrowing the book – even for five minutes – until he realizes who the reader is.  Eager to find out more about Wilbur, and his family history of seeking out transdimensional creatures, he invites Wilbur and Nancy to dinner.  But Wilbur's not interested in becoming one of Armitage's biographical sketches – he wants Nancy to come back to his home, drink some tea, and… stay there forever.  That's when his grandfather, Old Man Whateley arrives, causing Nancy to raise an eyebrow.  Why is he so determined to keep her away from the house?  What on the upper floors is making all those wind and ocean sounds?  And why is Wilbur so desperate to introduce Nancy to the Devil's Hopyard, a stone altar where, it is rumored, his ancestors once performed sacred rituals to call forth a race of creatures that would bring about the end of life as we know it?  Intro, Math Club, Debate Society, Hot for Teacher (spoiler-free): 00:00-27:20Honor Roll and Detention (spoiler-heavy): 27:21-1:07:56Superlatives (spoiler-heavier): 1:07:57-1:24:26 Director Daniel HallerScreenplay Curtis Hanson, Henry Rosenbaum, and Ronald Silkosky, based on the novella by H.P. LovecraftFeaturing Donna Baccala, Ed Begley, Lloyd Bochner, Sandra Dee, Beach Dickinson, Sam Jaffe, Barboura Morris, Jack Pierce, Talia Shire, Dean Stockwell John DeVore is a two-time James Beard award-winning essayist and editor. He's written about pop culture for Decider, Esquire, and Premiere (RIP), among many others. John's first memoir, 'Theatre Kids,' will hit bookstores in 2024 Our theme music is by Sir Cubworth, with embellishments by Edward Elgar.  Music from The Dunwich Horror by Les Baxter. For more information on this film (including why the Professor chose it, on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Our Blog⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠), the pod, essays from your hosts, and other assorted bric-a-brac, visit our website, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠scareupod.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Please subscribe to this podcast via Apple or Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave us a 5-star rating. Join our ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ group. Follow us on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

Trinity Radio
Ep 08: Zombie Cocktail

Trinity Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 23, 2023 59:46


Explore the fantasia of tiki culture and its crossover with goth ☠️

Banda Sonora Podcast
Rock en el Cine. Episodio 14. Inherent Vice

Banda Sonora Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 6, 2023 4:03


El soundtrack de Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014) incluye música original de Jonny Greenwood más una versión de “Spooks” (de Radiohead), interpretada por Greenwood y Supergras, además de rolas de Neil Young, Can, The Marketts, Les Baxter, Minnie Riperton, Chuck Jackson y KYU Sakamoto. 

deepredradio
The Dunwich Horror

deepredradio

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 23, 2023 21:31


Wilbur Whateley will an der Miskatonic-Universität eine Ausgabe des Necronomicons ausleihen, aber Dr. Armitage verwehrt es ihm. Daraufhin überredet Wilbur dessen Studentin Nancy, mit ihm nach Dunwich zu kommen. Dort sabotiert er ihr Auto und verabreicht ihr einen Drogencocktail, um sie gefügig zu halten. Etwas Seltsames lauert in Dunwich Manor, und als Dr. Armitage und Nancys Freundin Elisabeth sich auf die Suche nach ihr machen, geraten auch sie immer tiefer in „Das Grauen von Dunwich“ …

deepredradio
The Dunwich Horror

deepredradio

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 23, 2023 21:31


Wilbur Whateley will an der Miskatonic-Universität eine Ausgabe des Necronomicons ausleihen, aber Dr. Armitage verwehrt es ihm. Daraufhin überredet Wilbur dessen Studentin Nancy, mit ihm nach Dunwich zu kommen. Dort sabotiert er ihr Auto und verabreicht ihr einen Drogencocktail, um sie gefügig zu halten. Etwas Seltsames lauert in Dunwich Manor, und als Dr. Armitage und Nancys Freundin Elisabeth sich auf die Suche nach ihr machen, geraten auch sie immer tiefer in „Das Grauen von Dunwich“ …

Strong Songs
"Sinnerman" by Nina Simone [Recast]

Strong Songs

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 24, 2023 58:11


It's time for Strong Songs' first-ever analysis of a live recording, as Kirk digs in to legendary pianist/vocalist Nina Simone's 1965 interpretation of the traditional spiritual song "Sinnerman." It's time for some syncopated piano, popless grooves, band crash-landings, hand-clap breakdowns, hip hop samples, and one spectacular vocal cadenza.Artist: Nina SimoneAlbum: Pastel Blues (1965)Written by: Traditional, arr. Nina SimoneListen/Buy: Apple Music | Amazon | Spotify------ALSO FEATURED:"I Put a Spell On You" and "Feeling Good" as performed by Nina Simone on I Put a Spell On You, 1965"Strange Fruit" as performed by Simone on Pastel Blues, 1965"Sinner Man" arranged by Les Baxter for his orchestra"Oh, Timbaland" by Timbaland from Shock Value, 2007"Get By" by Talib Kweli from Quality, 2002Audio from John McTiernan's underrated 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown AffairAudio from Liz Garbus' excellent 2015 documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?OUTRO SOLOIST: Rob ReichThis episode's outro soloist is the wonderful bay area pianist/accordionist Rob Reich. Rob performs all over the place with a bunch of different groups, and is a total pleasure to see play. He's got a bunch of albums you can check out and contributes to an array of interesting projects (Live silent-film scores! Circus music!) and experiments. Find more at his website, http://www.robreich.com/.-----LINKS-----SUPPORT STRONG SONGSPaypal | Patreon.com/StrongsongsMERCH STOREstore.strongsongspodcast.comSOCIAL MEDIA@StrongSongs | @Kirkhamilton | IG: @Kirk_HamiltonNEWSLETTERhttps://kirkhamilton.substack.com/subscribeJOIN THE DISCORDhttps://discord.gg/GCvKqAM8SmOUTRO SOLO PLAY-A-LONG:https://soundcloud.com/kirkhamilton/strong-songs-outro-music-no-soloSTRONG SONGS PLAYLISTSSpotify | Apple Music | YouTube Music---------------FEBRUARY 2023 WHOLE-NOTE PATRONSDamon WhiteKaya WoodallDan AustinThomas DarstEd RankinTimothy morsheadJay SwartzEllen NalvenMiriam JoyGareth FlynnRonjanKasPatrickSEAN D WINNIERushDaniel Hannon-BarryRRPrince M. Levy-BenitezKathie HullfishPaul McElliot RosenAshley HoagKelsairAndrew BakerRob BosworthJosh PearsonKyle CookeLiam KeoghMelissa OsborneKathleen Reuscynthia hochswenderPer Morten BarstadChristopher MillerTim ByrneJamie WhiteGeorge H AronsonJohanna L. BransonAngus McKimmChristopher McConnellDavid MascettiJeffrey JueNikoJoe LaskaLaurie AcremanKen HirshJezMelanie AndrichJenness GardnerSimon CammellJill Smith-MooreRachel RakovNarelle HornMickey ClarkNathaniel BauernfeindRob SBill RosingerAnne BrittPhil GriffinDavid ZahmKyle StarrErinAidan CoughlanSteve PhilpotJeanneret Manning Family FourMatt ButlerDoug PatonR WatsonViki DunDave SharpeSami SamhuriCraig J CovellAccessViolationRyan TorvikFraserandrew waltersJared NorrisElliot Jay O'NeillGlennCALEB ROTACHAndre BremerMark SchechterDave FloreyDan ApczynskiSara WalshFEBRUARY 2023 HALF-NOTE PATRONSRandal VegterGo Birds!Jeff SpeckSamuel MillettAbraham BenrubiWhit SidenerEmlia AlfordChance McClainRobert Granatdave malloyTim RosenwongJason MorrisseyNick Gallowayjohn halpinJennifer KennerPeter HardingDavidJaredAnthony MahramusRoss ShainMeghan O'LearyJeffrey PuzzoJohn BaumanDax and Dane HuddlestonMartín SalíasTim HowesSteve MartinoDr Arthur A GrayCarolinaGary PierceMatt BaxterGiantPredatoryMolluskCasey FaubionLuigi BocciaRob AlbrightE Margaret WartonDaniel MosierCharles McGeeCatherine ClauseEthan BaumanOwain HuntRenee DowningDrewRohan LatimerKenIsWearingAHatTonyJordan BlockAaron WadeMichael FlahertyPhotog19610Travis PollardJeff UlmJeff NewmanJamieDeebsPortland Eye CareAdam RayAnupama RaghavanDemetri DetsaridisCarrie SchneiderAlenka GrealishAnne GerryRichard SneddonDavid JudsonJulian RoleffMelissa GallardoJanice BerryDoreen CarlsonmtwolfDavid McDarbyAbigail DuffieldWendy GilchristLisa TurnerPaul WayperMiles FormanDennis M EdwardsJeffrey FerrisBruno GaetaKenneth Jungbenkurt wendelkenAdam StofskyZak RemerRishi SahayJason ReitmanAndy PainterKaren LiuGreg BurgessAilie FraserSimon PrietoVonPaul McGrealKaren ArnoldNATALIE MISTILISJosh SingerPhino DeLeonSchloss Edward J. MDRhyanon MurrayAmy Lynn ThornsenAdam WKelli BrockingtonStephen RawlingsBen MachtaVictoria YuKevin RiversGray DyerBrad ClarkChristopherMichael J. CunninghamKari KirkMark Boggsmino caposselaSteve PaquinMary SchoenmakerSarahDavid JoskeÅshild Margrete Østtveit OdéenEmma SklarSpencer StanfordBernard KhooDavid BlackmanAndrew ShpallRobert HeuerMatthew GoldenBrian MeldrumDavid NoahGeraldine ButlerRichard CambierMadeleine MaderAndy SmithTimothy DoughertyJason PrattStewart OakCaroline MillerAbbie BergSam NortonNicole SchleicherShelly UnderhillDoug BelewDermot CrowleyAchint SrivastavaRyan RairighMichael Bermanstephen matthewsBridget LyonsOlivia BishopJeremy SchwartzJohn GisselquistElaine MartinLinda DuffyThomas KönigBonnie PrinsenSharon TreeBelinda Mcgrath-steerLiz SegerEoin de BurcaKevin PotterM Shane BordersPete SimmSusan PleinShawn McCarthyDallas HockleyJana JTerronJason GerryRich RoskopfMelissa GalloJoel StevensonNathan GouwensWill Dwyer Alethea LeeLauren ReayEric PrestemonErika L AustinCookies250Spencer ShirleyDamian BradyAngela LivingstoneJeffyThanadrosDavid FriedmanPhillip DaltonMark EdwardsRandall BrowningSarah SulanDiane HughesMatt BeamsKenneth TiongJo SutherlandMichael CasnerBarb CourtneyDerek & Laura BenderFranco FamularoDon HutchisonLowell MeyerEtele IllesJeff AlmondStephen TsoneffLorenz SchwarzBecca SamplemiaWenJack SjogrenAparajit RaghavanBenedict PenningtonGeoff GoldenRobyn FraserAlexander GeddesPascal RuegerRandy SouzaJCLatifah MakuyiBrendan JubbClare HolbertonJake TinsleyGeorgia LivesayDavid ZuckerDiane TurnerTom ColemanSUELLEN MOOREBrendon Oliver-EwenKendra ReidJudy ChappleTijs SoeteStuart TerryMark PerryMaloryDhu WikMelEric HelmJake RobertsBriony LeoJonathan DanielsSteven MaronMichael FlahertyJarrod SchindlerStephenGerry NelsonDave KingAlbukittyCaro FieldWayne MarshJudith StansfieldJenifer Carrmichael bochnerDuncanbrant brantphillipNaomi WatsonLeigh SalesMarkus KoesterDavid CushmanAlexanderToni IsaacsonJeremy DawsonRobbie FerreroJake DyeChris KGavin DoigMark SteenSam FennTanner MortonMollyAJ SchusterJennifer BushDavid StroudAmanda FurlottiAndrew BakerSPBrooke WilfordAlex SingerCyrus N. WhiteShaun WieseMiriam JuskowiczMark HaberlenDominik SchmittJuan Carlos Montemayor ElosuaKate AlburyMatt GaskellJules BaileyEero WahlstedtAndrew FairDarryl StewartL.B. MorseBill ThorntonTim EvansBrian AmoebasBrett DouvilleRavy VajraveluNick ClementsJeffrey OlsonMatt BetzelMuellerNate from KalamazooMelanie StiversRichard TollerAlexander PolsonJeff DixonJohn and Sharon StengleinTom LauerjouForrest ChangEarl LozadaJon O'KeefeMax SchechterJustin McElroyArjun SharmaSupermanTDJesusJames JohnsonAndrew LeeKevin MorrellTom ClewerKevin PennyfeatherFlSHBONESColin Hodohazy shacterKyle SimonsEmily Williams

Laguna Tropical Surf
Lively Ones & Exotica Feb 5 2023

Laguna Tropical Surf

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 6, 2023 112:54


Tonight's "Laguna Tropical Surf" features Exotica and Surf Tunes from the early 50's and 60's for your Tikis to dance to! The Lively Ones from the 1960's and Les Baxter 1950's Exotica "Ritual of the Savages". Henton Update with Michelle Haynes and Surf Report with Mark Freeman! Happy full moon!

The Holmes Archive of Electronic Music
The Theremin Part 1: From the Beginning to 1970

The Holmes Archive of Electronic Music

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 14, 2023 129:48


Episode 88 The Theremin Part 1: From the Beginning to 1970 Playlist Leon Theremin, “Deep Night” (1930 Les Actualités françaises). Soundtrack from a short, early sound film of Leon Theremin playing an RCA production model Theremin. Zinaida Hanenfeldt, Nathaniel Shilkret, Victor Salon Orchestra, “Love (Your Spell is Everywhere)” (1930 Victor). RCA theremin, Zinaida Hanenfeldt; Victor Salon Orchestra conducted by Nathaniel Shilkret. The earliest records made with the Theremin were recorded in 1930 to highlight the release of the RCA Theremin. This was one of the first. This recording session dates from January 17, 1930 and was made in New York at the 28 West 44th St. studio. Billed as a recording of “Orchestra, with theremin soloist,” this was most likely made as a demonstration of the newly introduced RCA Theremin. Seven months later, Lennington Shewell (see next listing) took up making several demonstration records produced by his father, RCA VP G. Dunbar Shewell in the Camden, NJ recording studios. Lennington H. Shewell, “Dancing with Tears in My Eyes” (1930 Victor). Recorced on July 21, 1930, in Camden, NJ Studio 1. Theremin solo, Lennington H. Shewell; piano accompaniment, Edward C. Harsch. Noted as "R.C.A. theremin: Instructions and exercises for playing" and "G. Dunbar Shewell, present." Lennington H. Shewell, “In a Monastery Garden” from “Love Sends A Gift Of Roses” / “In A Monastery Garden” (1935 Victor). Shewell was an American pianist songwriter and Thereminist. He recorded several discs for RCA . Shewell was employed by RCA to travel around the USA demonstrating the Theremin as part of its marketing campaign. His father was George Dunbar Shewell, who was a vice-president of RCA for a time. Clara Rockmore, “The Swan” from Theremin (1977 Delos). Piano, Nadia Reisenberg; Produced by Robert Moog, Shirleigh Moog; Theremin, Clara Rockmore. Rockmore, of course, was the key master of the Theremin back in the 1930s and 40s, having originally learned from Leon Theremin himself. These recordings were later produced by the Moogs in the 1970s and feature some dazzling, virtuoso performances by Rockmore as she interprets many of her favorite classical works. “The Swan” was composed in by Camille Saint-Saëns (1983-1921) that was usually a showcase for a cellist and, with Rockmore's brilliant interpretation, became a much-loved work by Thereminists. Even Samuel Hoffman made a recording of it. Clara Rockmore, “Berceuse” from Theremin (1977 Delos). Piano, Nadia Reisenberg; Produced by Robert Moog, Shirleigh Moog; Theremin, Clara Rockmore. Here Rockmore interprets a piece by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893). Lucie Bigelow Rosen, “Concerto in F” b Mortimer Browning (1940, privately recorded practice session). Ms. Rosen recorded this rehearsal in preparation for a live performance. Of great interest is that you can hear her speaking at the beginning and end of the session, and her playing is quite sophisticated. Lucie Bigelow Rosen, “The Old Refrain” by Fritz Kreisler (circa 1940 privately recorded session). Another privately recorded session by Ms. Rosen. Miklós Rózsa, Suite from The Lost Weekend (excerpt) from The Lost Weekend (The Classic Film Score) (1945 privately issued). Conducted, composed by Miklós Rózsa; Theremin, Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman. “This is a limited-edition recording, produced for the promotional purposes of the composer and is not licensed for public sale. The music was transferred to tape from the original acetate masters.” This was not a score released on a conventional soundtrack. This recording comes from a privately issued disc commissioned by the composer and I date it to around 1970. I wanted to include it because it a notably obscure soundtrack recording Theremin playing by Hoffman from the same era as the more famous and widely distributed Spellbound soundtrack. Harry Revel and Leslie Baxter with Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman, “Lunar Rhapsody” from Music Out Of The Moon: Music Unusual Featuring The Theremin (1947 Capitol). Hoffman, a foot doctor by profession, was one of the best-known Theremin players of his time. Not as persnickety as Rockmore about playing “spooky sounds,” he basically filled a gap in Theremin playing in popular music that Clara Rockmore refused to fill. He played one of the RCA production model Theremins from 1930. His most famous contributions included collaborations with Les Baxter, Miklos Rozsa, Harry Revel, and Bernard Herrmann, and his momentous movie music for Spellbound (1945) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). He was initially a classically trained violinist, and at age 14 he began playing the violin professionally in New York City. By 1936, he had taken up the Theremin and begun featuring it in publicity for his engagements. He quickly gained notoriety using the electronic instrument and he became one of the world's most famous Theremin players. Harry Revel and Leslie Baxter with Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman, “Radar Blues” from Music Out Of The Moon: Music Unusual Featuring The Theremin (1947 Capitol). Harry Revel, Leslie Baxter & Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman, “Fame” from Perfume Set to Music (1948 RCA Victor). Composed by Harry Revel; Orchestra Chorus conducted by Leslie Baxter; Theremin, Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman. "As interpreted by the British-born composer, Harry Revel, in a musical suite describing six exotic Corday fragrances." Harry Revel, Leslie Baxter & Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman, “Obsession” from Perfume Set to Music (1948 RCA Victor). Composed by Harry Revel; Orchestra Chorus conducted by Leslie Baxter; Theremin, Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman. "As interpreted by the British-born composer, Harry Revel, in a musical suite describing six exotic Corday fragrances." Elliot Lawrence and His Orchestra, featuring Lucie Bigelow Rosen, “Gigolette” (1949 Columbia). An attempt to bring the Theremin into popular music, this recording by Elliot Lawrence and his Orchestra made at the Columbia 30th Street Studio in Midtown Manhattan features Lucie Bigelow Rosen. Ms. Rosen and her husband Walter were instrumental in providing offices for Leon Theremin to work in New York during the 1930s. The inventor personally made two instruments for her. She was a practiced enthusiast and did much concertizing with the Theremin from about 1935 to 1940. Samuel J. Hoffman, “Remembering Your Lips” from Music for Peace of Mind (1950 Capitol). Orchestra conducted by Billy May; composed by Harry Revel; Theremin, Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman. “Music for PEACE OF MIND featuring the THEREMIN with orchestra.” Samuel J. Hoffman, “This Room Is My Castle of Quiet” from Music for Peace of Mind (1950 Capitol). Orchestra conducted by Billy May; composed by Harry Revel; Theremin, Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman. “Music for PEACE OF MIND featuring the THEREMIN with orchestra.” Bernard Herrmann, Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman, “Gort,” “The Visor,” “The Telescope” from The Day the Earth Stood Still (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (1951 20th Century Fox). Soundtrack recorded at the Twentieth Century Fox Scoring Stage August 1951, reissued in 1993. Composed by Bernard Herrmann; Conducted by Alfred Newman, Bernard Herrmann, Lionel Newman; Theremin by Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman. Hoffmnan played one of the RCA production model Theremins from 1930 but by this time around 1950 had modified it to include an external speaker connection for improved recording of the instrument during studio sessions. Samuel J. Hoffman, “Moonlight Sonata” (Theremin Solo with Piano Accompaniment) (1951 Capitol). Eddie Layton, “Laura”, from Organ Moods in Hi-Fi (1955 Mercury). This song is noted as including the “Ethereal sound of the theremin.” Layton was a popular Hammond organ player, later on in his career he played the organ at old Yankee Stadium for nearly 40 years, earning him membership in the New York Sports Hall of Fame. This is his first album, one many, and is notable for using some early organ electronics. “It must be stated that all of the sounds in this album were created by Eddie Layton solely on the Hammond Organ including the rhythm sounds of the bass and guitar, by means of special imported electronic recording devices and microphones.” With the exception of the Theremin, I would add. An unknown Theremin model, most likely vacuum-tube driven, possibly an original RCA model. Monty Kelly And His Orchestra with Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman, “Blue Mirage” from “Blue Mirage”/ “That Sweetheart of Mine” (1955 Essex). Single release from this Orchestra led by Monty Kelly and featuring Hoffman on Theremin. Unknown Artist, “The Fiend Who Walked the West” lobby recording (1958). Theremin or musical saw? This is from an LP recording I have that was used in movie lobbies to entice people to come and see the horror film, The Fiend Who Walked the West (1958). Could this be a Theremin, or a musical saw? I think the latter. I have no information on who played the instrument, but it makes for some curious listening from days gone by while acknowledging one of the key sources of confusion for those who collect Theremin recordings. Sonny Moon And His Orchestra, “Countdown” from “Rememb'ring”/ “Countdown” (1958 Warner Brothers). A 45-RPM single from this short-lived group od the late 1950s. Includes an uncredited Theremin performance. Milton Grayson and Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman Theremin and Orchestra, “I Paid the Penalty” (1960 Royalty Recording Co.). A 45-RPM single about capital punishment. On one side of the record a San Francisco Attorney speaks about capital punishment. On the other side is this vocal by Grayson that dramatizes the subject. This appears to be some sort of public service announcement, but the disc itself bears no clues. This is the only release on this label. The vocal by Grayson is part sermon, part monolog, part song, with the threatening aura of the Theremin provided by Dr. Hoffman. It is undated, so I'm guessing around 1960 when Grayson was most active. Lew Davies And His Orchestra, “Riders in the Sky” from Strange Interlude (1961 Command). From the early sixties comes this wonderful amalgamation of exotica and space-age instruments. The Theremin is played by none other than Walter Sear, later the manager of the Sear Sound Studio in New York and an influential programmer (and sometimes player) of the Moog Modular Synthesizer. Several members of this band also became associated with the Moog Modular, including Bobby Byrne, Sy Mann, and producer Enoch Light. Bass, Bob Haggart, Jack Lesberg; Cimbalom, Michael Szittai; Drums, George Devens, Phil Kraus; Executive Producer, Enoch Light; French Horn, Paul Faulise, Tony Miranda; Guitar, Tony Mottola; Reeds, Al Klink, Ezelle Watson, Phil Bodner, Stanley Webb; Ondioline, Sy Mann; Theremin, Paul Lippman, Walter Sear; Trombone, Bobby Byrne, Dick Hixon, Urbie Green. Yusef Lateef, “Sound Wave,” from A Flat, G Flat And C (1966 Impulse!). An innovative first from Mr. Lateef who foresaw the possibilities of the Theremin for new jazz. Lateef was known for his multi-instrumental talent on Tenor Saxophone, Alto Saxophone, Flute, Oboe and a variety of wooden flutes. Using the Theremin on this one track—I've never heard anything else he recorded with the Theremin—shows how a skilled jazz improviser can use the Theremin for self-expression. I would guess that this Theremin was made by Moog. Theremin, Yusef Lateef; Bass, Reggie Workman; Drums, Roy Brooks; Piano, Hugh Lawson; Produced by Bob Thiele. Captain Beefheart And His Magic Band, “Electricity” from Safe as Milk (1967 Buddah). The Theremin in this case was played by none other than Samuel J. Hoffman using his souped-up RCA Theremin model Theremin. It was perhaps the last appearance on record by Hoffman, who died later in 1967. Apparently, the record company hated the track so much that it led to their being dropped from the label, at which point Frank Zappa came to the rescue. Fifty Foot Hose, “War is Over” (1967) from Ingredients (1997 compilation Del Val). Psychedelic rock group from San Francisco, formed in 1967, disbanded in 1970 and re-formed in 1995. Drums, Gary Duos; Guitar, David Blossom; Theremin, Electronics, Audio Generator, Siren, Cork Marcheschi. Recorded in 1966 in San Francisco. Dorothy Ashby, “Soul Vibrations” from Afro-Harping (1968 Cadet Concept). Unknown Theremin player, although the producers at Cadet/Chess were known to add the instrument to a session, such as those by Rotary Connection. Recorded at Ter Mar Studios, Chicago, February 1968. The song was written by producer Richard Evans, then the go-to producer and de facto label head for Chess Records' jazz imprint Cadet. Perhaps he also played the Theremin, which was probably a Moog Troubadour. The First Theremin Era, “The Barnabas Theme from Dark Shadows" / “Sunset In Siberia” (1969 Epic). "Dark Shadows" was super-popular daytime drama about a vampire on ABC-TV. This record was not an official release of the television show, but an interpretation of the theme that is seldom heard. I thought it's exotic funky treatment was especially worth hearing. The soundtrack for the TV show also included Theremin, possibly played by composer Robert Cobert, but in its more traditional spooky role. This record was produced and arranged by Charlie Calello, a well-known producer who had worked with the Four Seasons (singing group) and later would produce such super stars as Frank Sinatra, Neil Diamond, Bruce Springsteen, Laura Nyro, and Barbra Streisand. Mutantes, “Banho De Lua (Tintarella Di Luna)” from Mutantes (1969 Polydor). Brazilian folk-rock-psychedelic group that featured the Theremin blended with many other instruments, both acoustic and electronic. Arranged by, Mutantes; Drums, Sir Ronaldo I. Du Rancharia; Theremin, electronic Instruments, Claudio Régulus. This innovative pop trio from Brazil also collaborated with other artists such as Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil and were threatened by the military government of Brazil. What Theremin did they use? Several Moog models would have been available, but they also may have built their own. One photo I've seen suggested that they built their own. Lothar and the Hand People, “It Comes on Anyhow” from Machines: Amherst 1969 (2020 Modern Harmonic). Live recording from 1969 featuring the Moog Modular Synthesizer played by Paul Conly and the Moog Theremin played by vocalist John Emelin. On this track, the synthesizer and Theremin sounds are intermingled, making it a fun challenge to distinguish between the two of them. Bass, Rusty Ford; Drums, Tom Flye; Guitar, Kim King; Keyboards, Moog Modular Synthesizer, Paul Conly; Vocals, Moog Troubadour Theremin (“Lothar”), John Emelin. Lothar and the Hand People, “Today Is Only Yesterday's Tomorrow” from Machines: Amherst 1969 (2020 Modern Harmonic). This track was recorded live in 1969. John Emelin starts by introducing the Moog Theremin, called “Lothar.” Bass, Rusty Ford; Drums, Tom Flye; Guitar, Kim King; Keyboards, Moog Modular Synthesizer, Paul Conly; Vocals, Moog Troubadour Theremin (“Lothar”), John Emelin. Opening background tracks: Bernard Herrmann, Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman, “Prelude, Outer Space” (excerpt), from The Day the Earth Stood Still (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (1951 20th Century Fox). Soundtrack recorded at the Twentieth Century Fox Scoring Stage August 1951, reissued in 1993. Composed by Bernard Herrmann; Conducted by Alfred Newman, Bernard Herrmann, Lionel Newman; Theremin by Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman. Zinaida Hanenfeldt, Nathaniel Shilkret, Victor Salon Orchestra, “(I'm a dreamer) Aren't we all?” (1930 Victor). “Orchestra, with theremin soloist.” Theremin, Zinaida Hanenfeldt. Recorded January 17, 1930 in New York at the 28 West 44th St. studio. Samuel J. Hoffman, “The Swan”( Saint-Saens) from “Moonlight Sonata” / “The Swan” (1951 Capitol). Arranged and performed on the Theremin by “Dr. Hoffman.” Orchestra and Chorus Under the Direction Of Leslie Baxter, Dr. Samuel Hoffman, “Struttin' with Clayton” from “Jet” / “Struttin' With Clayton” (1950 RCA Victor). Theremin, Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman. Miklós Rózsa, “Dementia” from The Lost Weekend (The Classic Film Score) (1945 privately issued). Conducted, composed by Miklós Rózsa; Theremin, Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman. This podcast is not intended as a thorough history of the Theremin itself. There are many excellent resources that provide that, including my own book on the history of electronic music, the Bob Moog Foundation website, Albert Glinsky's wonderful book about Leon Theremin, and the entire Theremin World website that is devoted to everything Theremin. I urgently suggest that you consult those resources for more detail on the actual history of the instrument and the people behind it. Opening and closing sequences voiced by Anne Benkovitz. Additional opening, closing, and other incidental music by Thom Holmes. See my companion blog that I write for the Bob Moog Foundation: For additional notes, please see my blog, Noise and Notations.

Phil Wilson's Vinyl Revival - Britain's Number 1 Vinyl Radio Show - Putting The Needle On The Records From the 60s, 70s, 80s
Episode 282: Welcome To Phil Wilson's Vinyl Revival Radio Show 19th December 2022 (Full Radio Show), the Album Of The Week this week comes from Cliff Richard - Private Collection, enjoy the show!

Phil Wilson's Vinyl Revival - Britain's Number 1 Vinyl Radio Show - Putting The Needle On The Records From the 60s, 70s, 80s

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 19, 2022 110:01


On this weeks glittering edition of Britain's Number One Syndicated Vinyl Radio Show listen out for the Album Of The Week - Cliff Richard - Private Collection 1979 - 1988 EMI CRTV 301As a gift to all listeners of the show please enjoy one free audio review copy of my childrens book The Christmas Cupboard Under The Stairs: A Christmas tale that will warm your heart, now available on Audible. Redeem the one-time use code below at https://www.audible.co.uk/acx-promo4K2W7ULSB57XYNumber 1 of The Week comes from 1981 and spent 5 weeks at the top of the UK Official Top 40 Chart.The Oddity Of The Week, the clue is: Could one of the Forecasters in this song predict a white Christmas?Music this week from:Queen,Chris DeBurgh,Elvis Presley,The Jingle Bells,Elton John,Paul McCartney,Les Baxter,Alexander O'Neal,Mud,Johnny Mathisand many more...If you would like a shout out or a request please feel free to drop me a message here: https://www.vinylrevivalradio.com https://www.facebook.com/vinylrevivalradioshow    Official website: https://www.vinylrevivalradio.com    Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/phils45s #putheneedleontherecord    Also on TikTok search for philwilsonsvinylrevival    ​You can now ask Alexa on Amazon devices: "Alexa play Phil Wilson's Vinyl Revival"    Add the skill at: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Phil-Wilsons-Vinyl-Revival/dp/B08HY3GG8X    ​    Please check out the books I have written at: https://www.amazon.com/author/philwilson​Tell your friends and tell them to tell their friends.​I hope you enjoy the show Cheers Phil 'P-P-P-Pop' Wilson (Celebrating nearly 30 years of broadcasting in 2023)

The Sounds in My Head
S19,E13: 08/01/22 (CLASSIC EXOTICA! Combustible Edison, Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman, Les Baxter, Haruomi Hosono and Miharu Koshi, Juan García Esquivel)

The Sounds in My Head

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 1, 2022 44:31


SPECIAL "CLASSIC EXOTICA MUSIC" EPISODE! Vertigogo (Opening Theme) - Combustible Edison Misirlou - Martin Denny Coronation - Martin Denny La Pampa Y La Puna - Martin Denny Poinciana - Arthur Lyman Anna - Arthur Lyman Quiet Village - Les Baxter Jungalero - Les Baxter Disappeared (2021 Mix) - Haruomi Hosono and Miharu Koshi Miniskirt - Combustible Edison feat. Juan García Esquivel 20th Century - Combustible Edison Carnival of Souls - Combustible Edison This episode features a clip of Coleman Hughes from his podcast Conversations with Coleman where in his discussion with Jonathan Haidt he discusses the pros and cons of the social fragmentation allowed by the internet. Seems like most people I know focus only on the benefits or the downsides, but to me it seems worth observing both.

Tasmania Talks with Brian Carlton
Dr Les Baxter, Acting CEO of Vinnies

Tasmania Talks with Brian Carlton

Play Episode Listen Later May 30, 2022 6:30


Dr Les Baxter, Acting CEO of Vinnies 

CiTR -- Bepi Crespan Presents
MOHI BAHAUDDIN DAGAR, CODE, PIG, LES BAXTER.

CiTR -- Bepi Crespan Presents

Play Episode Listen Later May 21, 2022 180:43


CiTR's 24 Hours of Radio Art in a snack sized format. Dark Ambient. Drone. Field Recordings. Noise. Sound Art. Or something. This morning's broadcast features music from MOHI BAHAUDDIN DAGAR, CODE, PIG, and LES BAXTER.

Today's Top Tune
Les Baxter Orchestra: ‘Mai Tai'

Today's Top Tune

Play Episode Listen Later May 17, 2022 2:17


Thanks to the folks at Real Gone Music, the classic 1963 exotica LP “The Soul of The Drums,” from the inventor of the genre Lex Baxter and his orchestra, is back! Take a sonic space-age journey with the alluring gem that is “Mai Tai.” 

Then Is Now Podcast
Then Is Now Episode 94 - The Retro Cocktail Hour with Darrell Brogdon

Then Is Now Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 9, 2022 118:12


For 25 years, Kansas Public Radio's amazing show, The Retro Cocktail Hour, has been the home of Space Age Pop and incredibly strange music! And if you haven't heard, or think you haven't heard this great music, otherwise known as Lounge Music, then you're in for a treat! RCH host, Darrell Brogdon joins us direct from the underground martini bunker to discuss his career, and his passion for this incredible music that also includes Exotica, Swing Jazz, Organ music and so much more!! We take a deep dive into the artists and songs that are still popular today and influencing today's musical artists. If you're not listening to this addictive show, then you're missing out on all the music that's shaken, not stirred. And don't forget, The Retro Cocktail Hour's 25th anniversary celebration is happening soon, so check out this amazing interview to learn the details! Also, check out the images on our web page that correspond with some of the things we talked about! Darrell and the Retro Cocktail Hour can be found at: http://www.retrococktail.org Chris Can be found at: http://www.storiesmotion.com Haven Podcasts: Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ThenIsNowPodcast TeePublic: http://www.teepublic.com/stores/havenpodcasts Feedback: thenisnow42@gmail.com Join the conversation at our Facebook Group Twitter: @HavenPodcasts Website: havenpodcasts.com where you'll find our sister show, The East Meets the West, in which we discuss Shaw Brothers films and Spaghetti Western movies! Please SUBSCRIBE to our YouTube page, also! Don't forget to go to wherever you download your podcasts from and leave us a great review so more listeners can find us! You can find us on all the podcasting apps, especially the big 3: iTunes, Spotify, and Stitcher! Enjoy, Re-Gor

The MidModcast
Girls and Guitars, They're Wonderful! MMC00054b

The MidModcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 8, 2022 59:11


Girls and Guitars, They're Wonderful!… Girls and Guitars MMC00054 Back in the day, it wasn't that common to see ladies whaling on guitar or to hear them rock until you drop, but they were there, sometimes fronting an act, but usually somewhere in the background. Things have changed, but those girls and their guitars were and are amazing. Find out about Mary Ford with Les Baxter, Wanda Jackson, the Queen of Rock-A-Billy, and Carol Kaye who is and was one of the most prolific bassists in history. Join the Midmodcasters, Craig, Paula, and Dave as they take us on a journey into the past to when girls playing guitars wasn't so common, but very special. Shoot us an email or drop us a call and share your thoughts about great mid-century Halloween-worthy TV and Movies. Email us: midmodcast@gmail.comFind us on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere. NOW AVAILABLE ON AMAZON PODCASTS! https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/search/The%20MidmodcastFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/Midmodcast Twitter: @midmodcast https://twitter.com/MidModcastOur Website: https://www.midmodcast.com CALL The Mid Modcast Message Line: 216-309-2204 We would love to hear from you, and we are always interested in new show ideas. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast and give us a great review. Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-midmodcast/id1521672835 Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8yODQ4NDk1MC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/56KRzqjxzI1NTksjICLTsxOvercast: https://overcast.fm/itunes1521672835/the-midmodcast Anchor: https://anchor.fm/the-mid-modcast Thanks for being our friend. - You're Swell! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/the-mid-modcast/support Special thanks to "The Voice of The Mid-Modcast," Allen Marsh If you're looking for a Mid Century Modern home in Florida, contact our friend, Carrie here: https://www.metropolisrealestatesolutions.com/#/carrie-jones

Bahnhofskino - Genrefilme von A bis Sleaze
#415: Voodoo Child AKA The Dunwich Horror (1970) & Quäle nie ein Kind zum Scherz (1972)

Bahnhofskino - Genrefilme von A bis Sleaze

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 1, 2022 86:30


Man/frau sollte sich nicht vom Titel-Wirrwarr in dieser Woche verunsichern lassen, denn Daniel und Patrick offerieren zwei ganz besonders delikate Exemplare abgründigen 70er-Jahre-Kinos auf ihrem Menüplan. Der Lovecraft-inspirierte Okkulthorror Voodoo Child (The Dunwich Horror, 1970) glänzt mit einem herzallerliebsten Ensemble, größtmöglicher Merkwürdigkeit und einem Ohrwurm-Score von Les Baxter. Und in Lucio Fulcis meisterhaftem Abgesang auf das Landleben Quäle nie ein Kind zum Scherz (Non si sevizia un paperino AKA Don't Torture a Duckling, 1972) blicken die Bahnhofskino-Lieblinge Barbara Bouchet und Tomás Milián dem Grauen des Katholizismus ins Gesicht.

A History Of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs
Episode 146: “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys

A History Of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 25, 2022


Episode one hundred and forty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys, and the history of the theremin. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "You're Gonna Miss Me" by the Thirteenth Floor Elevators. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources There is no Mixcloud this week, because there were too many Beach Boys songs in the episode. I used many resources for this episode, most of which will be used in future Beach Boys episodes too. It's difficult to enumerate everything here, because I have been an active member of the Beach Boys fan community for twenty-four years, and have at times just used my accumulated knowledge for this. But the resources I list here are ones I've checked for specific things. Stephen McParland has published many, many books on the California surf and hot-rod music scenes, including several on both the Beach Boys and Gary Usher.  His books can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks Andrew Doe's Bellagio 10452 site is an invaluable resource. Jon Stebbins' The Beach Boys FAQ is a good balance between accuracy and readability. And Philip Lambert's Inside the Music of Brian Wilson is an excellent, though sadly out of print, musicological analysis of Wilson's music from 1962 through 67. I have also referred to Brian Wilson's autobiography, I Am Brian Wilson, and to Mike Love's, Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy. As a good starting point for the Beach Boys' music in general, I would recommend this budget-priced three-CD set, which has a surprisingly good selection of their material on it, including the single version of "Good Vibrations". Oddly, the single version of "Good Vibrations" is not on the The Smile Sessions box set. But an entire CD of outtakes of the track is, and that was the source for the session excerpts here. Information on Lev Termen comes from Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage by Albert Glinsky Transcript In ancient Greece, the god Hermes was a god of many things, as all the Greek gods were. Among those things, he was the god of diplomacy, he was a trickster god, a god of thieves, and he was a messenger god, who conveyed messages between realms. He was also a god of secret knowledge. In short, he was the kind of god who would have made a perfect spy. But he was also an inventor. In particular he was credited in Greek myth as having invented the lyre, an instrument somewhat similar to a guitar, harp, or zither, and as having used it to create beautiful sounds. But while Hermes the trickster god invented the lyre, in Greek myth it was a mortal man, Orpheus, who raised the instrument to perfection. Orpheus was a legendary figure, the greatest poet and musician of pre-Homeric Greece, and all sorts of things were attributed to him, some of which might even have been things that a real man of that name once did. He is credited with the "Orphic tripod" -- the classification of the elements into earth, water, and fire -- and with a collection of poems called the Rhapsodiae. The word Rhapsodiae comes from the Greek words rhaptein, meaning to stitch or sew, and ōidē, meaning song -- the word from which we get our word "ode", and  originally a rhapsōdos was someone who "stitched songs together" -- a reciter of long epic poems composed of several shorter pieces that the rhapsōdos would weave into one continuous piece. It's from that that we get the English word "rhapsody", which in the sixteenth century, when it was introduced into the language, meant a literary work that was a disjointed collection of patchwork bits, stitched together without much thought as to structure, but which now means a piece of music in one movement, but which has several distinct sections. Those sections may seem unrelated, and the piece may have an improvisatory feel, but a closer look will usually reveal relationships between the sections, and the piece as a whole will have a sense of unity. When Orpheus' love, Eurydice, died, he went down into Hades, the underworld where the souls of the dead lived, and played music so beautiful, so profound and moving, that the gods agreed that Orpheus could bring the soul of his love back to the land of the living. But there was one condition -- all he had to do was keep looking forward until they were both back on Earth. If he turned around before both of them were back in the mortal realm, she would disappear forever, never to be recovered. But of course, as you all surely know, and would almost certainly have guessed even if you didn't know because you know how stories work, once Orpheus made it back to our world he turned around and looked, because he lost his nerve and didn't believe he had really achieved his goal. And Eurydice, just a few steps away from her freedom, vanished back into the underworld, this time forever. [Excerpt: Blake Jones and the Trike Shop: "Mr. Theremin's Miserlou"] Lev Sergeyevich Termen was born in St. Petersburg, in what was then the Russian Empire, on the fifteenth of August 1896, by the calendar in use in Russia at that time -- the Russian Empire was still using the Julian calendar, rather than the Gregorian calendar used in most of the rest of the world, and in the Western world the same day was the twenty-seventh of August. Young Lev was fascinated both by science and the arts. He was trained as a cellist from an early age, but while he loved music, he found the process of playing the music cumbersome -- or so he would say later. He was always irritated by the fact that the instrument is a barrier between the idea in the musician's head and the sound -- that it requires training to play. As he would say later "I realised there was a gap between music itself and its mechanical production, and I wanted to unite both of them." Music was one of his big loves, but he was also very interested in physics, and was inspired by a lecture he saw from the physicist Abram Ioffe, who for the first time showed him that physics was about real, practical, things, about the movements of atoms and fields that really existed, not just about abstractions and ideals. When Termen went to university, he studied physics -- but he specifically wanted to be an experimental physicist, not a theoretician. He wanted to do stuff involving the real world. Of course, as someone who had the misfortune to be born in the late 1890s, Termen was the right age to be drafted when World War I started, but luckily for him the Russian Army desperately needed people with experience in the new invention that was radio, which was vital for wartime communications, and he spent the war in the Army radio engineering department, erecting radio transmitters and teaching other people how to erect them, rather than on the front lines, and he managed not only to get his degree in physics but also a diploma in music. But he was also becoming more and more of a Marxist sympathiser, even though he came from a relatively affluent background, and after the Russian Revolution he stayed in what was now the Red Army, at least for a time. Once Termen's Army service was over, he started working under Ioffe, working with him on practical applications of the audion, the first amplifying vacuum tube. The first one he found was that the natural capacitance of a human body when standing near a circuit can change the capacity of the circuit. He used that to create an invisible burglar alarm -- there was an antenna sending out radio waves, and if someone came within the transmitting field of the antenna, that would cause a switch to flip and a noise to be sounded. He was then asked to create a device for measuring the density of gases, outputting a different frequency for different densities. Because gas density can have lots of minor fluctuations because of air currents and so forth, he built a circuit that would cut out all the many harmonics from the audions he was using and give just the main frequency as a single pure tone, which he could listen to with headphones. That way,  slight changes in density would show up as a slight change in the tone he heard. But he noticed that again when he moved near the circuit, that changed the capacitance of the circuit and changed the tone he was hearing. He started moving his hand around near the circuit and getting different tones. The closer his hand got to the capacitor, the higher the note sounded. And if he shook his hand a little, he could get a vibrato, just like when he shook his hand while playing the cello. He got Ioffe to come and listen to him, and Ioffe said "That's an electronic Orpheus' lament!" [Excerpt: Blake Jones and the Trike Shop, "Mr. Theremin's Miserlou"] Termen figured out how to play Massenet's "Elegy" and Saint-Saens' "The Swan" using this system. Soon the students were all fascinated, telling each other "Termen plays Gluck on a voltmeter!" He soon figured out various refinements -- by combining two circuits, using the heterodyne principle, he could allow for far finer control. He added a second antenna, for volume control, to be used by the left hand -- the right hand would choose the notes, while the left hand would change the volume, meaning the instrument could be played without touching it at all. He called the instrument the "etherphone",  but other people started calling it the termenvox -- "Termen's voice". Termen's instrument was an immediate sensation, as was his automatic burglar alarm, and he was invited to demonstrate both of them to Lenin. Lenin was very impressed by Termen -- he wrote to Trotsky later talking about Termen's inventions, and how the automatic burglar alarm might reduce the number of guards needed to guard a perimeter. But he was also impressed by Termen's musical invention. Termen held his hands to play through the first half of a melody, before leaving the Russian leader to play the second half by himself -- apparently he made quite a good job of it. Because of Lenin's advocacy for his work, Termen was sent around the Soviet Union on a propaganda tour -- what was known as an "agitprop tour", in the familiar Soviet way of creating portmanteau words. In 1923 the first piece of music written specially for the instrument was performed by Termen himself with the Leningrad Philharmonic, Andrey Paschenko's Symphonic Mystery for Termenvox and Orchestra. The score for that was later lost, but has been reconstructed, and the piece was given a "second premiere" in 2020 [Excerpt: Andrey Paschenko, "Symphonic Mystery for Termenvox and Orchestra" ] But the musical instrument wasn't the only scientific innovation that Termen was working on. He thought he could reverse death itself, and bring the dead back to life.  He was inspired in this by the way that dead organisms could be perfectly preserved in the Siberian permafrost. He thought that if he could only freeze a dead person in the permafrost, he could then revive them later -- basically the same idea as the later idea of cryogenics, although Termen seems to have thought from the accounts I've read that all it would take would be to freeze and then thaw them, and not to have considered the other things that would be necessary to bring them back to life. Termen made two attempts to actually do this, or at least made preliminary moves in that direction. The first came when his assistant, a twenty-year-old woman, died of pneumonia. Termen was heartbroken at the death of someone so young, who he'd liked a great deal, and was convinced that if he could just freeze her body for a while he could soon revive her. He talked with Ioffe about this -- Ioffe was friends with the girl's family -- and Ioffe told him that he thought that he was probably right and probably could revive her. But he also thought that it would be cruel to distress the girl's parents further by discussing it with them, and so Termen didn't get his chance to experiment. He was even keener on trying his technique shortly afterwards, when Lenin died. Termen was a fervent supporter of the Revolution, and thought Lenin was a great man whose leadership was still needed -- and he had contacts within the top echelons of the Kremlin. He got in touch with them as soon as he heard of Lenin's death, in an attempt to get the opportunity to cryopreserve his corpse and revive him. Sadly, by this time it was too late. Lenin's brain had been pickled, and so the opportunity to resurrect him as a zombie Lenin was denied forever. Termen was desperately interested in the idea of bringing people back from the dead, and he wanted to pursue it further with his lab, but he was also being pushed to give demonstrations of his music, as well as doing security work -- Ioffe, it turned out, was also working as a secret agent, making various research trips to Germany that were also intended to foment Communist revolution. For now, Termen was doing more normal security work -- his burglar alarms were being used to guard bank vaults and the like, but this was at the order of the security state. But while Termen was working on his burglar alarms and musical instruments and attempts to revive dead dictators, his main project was his doctoral work, which was on the TV. We've said before in this podcast that there's no first anything, and that goes just as much for inventions as it does for music. Most inventions build on work done by others, which builds on work done by others, and so there were a lot of people building prototype TVs at this point. In Britain we tend to say "the inventor of the TV" was John Logie Baird, but Baird was working at the same time as people like the American Charles Francis Jenkins and the Japanese inventor Kenjiro Takayanagi, all of them building on earlier work by people like Archibald Low. Termen's prototype TV, the first one in Russia, came slightly later than any of those people, but was created more or less independently, and was more advanced in several ways, with a bigger screen and better resolution. Shortly after Lenin's death, Termen was invited to demonstrate his invention to Stalin, who professed himself amazed at the "magic mirror". [Excerpt: Blake Jones and the Trike Shop, "Astronauts in Trouble"] Termen was sent off to tour Europe giving demonstrations of his inventions, particularly his musical instrument. It was on this trip that he started using the Romanisation "Leon Theremin", and this is how Western media invariably referred to him. Rather than transliterate the Cyrillic spelling of his birth name, he used the French spelling his Huguenot ancestors had used before they emigrated to Russia, and called himself Leo or Leon rather than Lev. He was known throughout his life by both names, but said to a journalist in 1928 "First of all, I am not Tair-uh-MEEN. I wrote my name with French letters for French pronunciation. I am Lev Sergeyevich Tair-MEN.". We will continue to call him Termen, partly because he expressed that mild preference (though again, he definitely went by both names through choice) but also to distinguish him from the instrument, because while his invention remained known in Russia as the termenvox, in the rest of the world it became known as the theremin. He performed at the Paris Opera, and the New York Times printed a review saying "Some musicians were extremely pessimistic about the possibilities of the device, because at times M. Theremin played lamentably out of tune. But the finest Stradivarius, in the hands of a tyro, can give forth frightful sounds. The fact that the inventor was able to perform certain pieces with absolute precision proves that there remains to be solved only questions of practice and technique." Termen also came to the UK, where he performed in front of an audience including George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett, Henry Wood and others. Arnold Bennett was astonished, but Bernard Shaw, who had very strong opinions about music, as anyone who has read his criticism will be aware, compared the sound unfavourably to that of a comb and paper. After performing in Europe, Termen made his way to the US, to continue his work of performance, propagandising for the Soviet Revolution, and trying to license the patents for his inventions, to bring money both to him and to the Soviet state. He entered the US on a six-month visitor's visa, but stayed there for eleven years, renewing the visa every six months. His initial tour was a success, though at least one open-air concert had to be cancelled because, as the Communist newspaper the Daily Worker put it, "the weather on Saturday took such a counter-revolutionary turn". Nicolas Slonimsky, the musicologist we've encountered several times before, and who would become part of Termen's circle in the US, reviewed one of the performances, and described the peculiar audiences that Termen was getting -- "a considerable crop of ladies and gentlemen engaged in earnest exploration of the Great Beyond...the mental processes peculiar to believers in cosmic vibrations imparted a beatific look to some of the listeners. Boston is a seat of scientific religion; before he knows it Professor Theremin may be proclaimed Krishnamurti and sanctified as a new deity". Termen licensed his patents on the invention to RCA, who in 1929 started mass-producing the first ever theremins for general use. Termen also started working with the conductor Leopold Stokowski, including developing a new kind of theremin for Stokowski's orchestra to use, one with a fingerboard played like a cello. Stokowski said "I believe we shall have orchestras of these electric instruments. Thus will begin a new era in music history, just as modern materials and methods of construction have produced a new era of architecture." Possibly of more interest to the wider public, Lennington Sherwell, the son of an RCA salesman, took up the theremin professionally, and joined the band of Rudy Vallee, one of the most popular singers of the period. Vallee was someone who constantly experimented with new sounds, and has for example been named as the first band leader to use an electric banjo, and Vallee liked the sound of the theremin so much he ordered a custom-built left-handed one for himself. Sherwell stayed in Vallee's band for quite a while, and performed with him on the radio and in recording sessions, but it's very difficult to hear him in any of the recordings -- the recording equipment in use in 1930 was very primitive, and Vallee had a very big band with a lot of string and horn players, and his arrangements tended to have lots of instruments playing in unison rather than playing individual lines that are easy to differentiate. On top of that, the fashion at the time when playing the instrument was to try and have it sound as much like other instruments as possible -- to duplicate the sound of a cello or violin or clarinet, rather than to lean in to the instrument's own idiosyncracies. I *think* though that I can hear Sherwell's playing in the instrumental break of Vallee's big hit "You're Driving Me Crazy" -- certainly it was recorded at the time that Sherwell was in the band, and there's an instrument in there with a very pure tone, but quite a lot of vibrato, in the mid range, that seems only to be playing in the break and not the rest of the song. I'm not saying this is *definitely* a theremin solo on one of the biggest hits of 1930, but I'm not saying it's not, either: [Excerpt: Rudy Vallee, "You're Driving Me Crazy" ] Termen also invented a light show to go along with his instrument -- the illumovox, which had a light shining through a strip of gelatin of different colours, which would be rotated depending on the pitch of the theremin, so that lower notes would cause the light to shine a deep red, while the highest notes would make it shine a light blue, with different shades in between. By 1930, though, Termen's fortunes had started to turn slightly. Stokowski kept using theremins in the orchestra for a while, especially the fingerboard models to reinforce the bass, but they caused problems. As Slonimsky said "The infrasonic vibrations were so powerful...that they hit the stomach physically, causing near-nausea in the double-bass section of the orchestra". Fairly soon, the Theremin was overtaken by other instruments, like the ondes martenot, an instrument very similar to the theremin but with more precise control, and with a wider range of available timbres. And in 1931, RCA was sued by another company for patent infringement with regard to the Theremin -- the De Forest Radio Company had patents around the use of vacuum tubes in music, and they claimed damages of six thousand dollars, plus RCA had to stop making theremins. Since at the time, RCA had only made an initial batch of five hundred instruments total, and had sold 485 of them, many of them as promotional loss-leaders for future batches, they had actually made a loss of three hundred dollars even before the six thousand dollar damages, and decided not to renew their option on Termen's patents. But Termen was still working on his musical ideas. Slonimsky also introduced Termen to the avant-garde composer and theosophist Henry Cowell, who was interested in experimental sounds, and used to do things like play the strings inside the piano to get a different tone: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] Cowell was part of a circle of composers and musicologists that included Edgard Varese, Charles Ives, and Charles Seeger and Ruth Crawford, who Cowell would introduce to each other. Crawford would later marry Seeger, and they would have several children together, including the folk singer Peggy Seeger, and Crawford would also adopt Seeger's son Pete. Cowell and Termen would together invent the rhythmicon, the first ever drum machine, though the rhythmicon could play notes as well as rhythms. Only two rhythmicons were made while Termen was in the US. The first was owned by Cowell. The second, improved, model was bought by Charles Ives, but bought as a gift for Cowell and Slonimsky to use in their compositions. Sadly, both rhythmicons eventually broke down, and no recording of either is known to exist. Termen started to get further and further into debt, especially as the Great Depression started to hit, and he also had a personal loss -- he'd been training a student and had fallen in love with her, although he was married. But when she married herself, he cut off all ties with her, though Clara Rockmore would become one of the few people to use the instrument seriously and become a real virtuoso on it. He moved into other fields, all loosely based around the same basic ideas of detecting someone's distance from an object. He built electronic gun detectors for Alcatraz and Sing-Sing prisons, and he came up with an altimeter for aeroplanes. There was also a "magic mirror" -- glass that appeared like a mirror until it was backlit, at which point it became transparent. This was put into shop windows along with a proximity detector -- every time someone stepped close to look at their reflection, the reflection would disappear and be replaced with the objects behind the mirror. He was also by this point having to spy for the USSR on a more regular basis. Every week he would meet up in a cafe with two diplomats from the Russian embassy, who would order him to drink several shots of vodka -- the idea was that they would loosen his inhibitions enough that he would not be able to hide things from them -- before he related various bits of industrial espionage he'd done for them. Having inventions of his own meant he was able to talk with engineers in the aerospace industry and get all sorts of bits of information that would otherwise not have been available, and he fed this back to Moscow. He eventually divorced his first wife, and remarried -- a Black American dancer many years his junior named Lavinia Williams, who would be the great love of his life. This caused some scandal in his social circle, more because of her race than the age gap. But by 1938 he had to leave the US. He'd been there on a six-month visa, which had been renewed every six months for more than a decade, and he'd also not been paying income tax and was massively in debt. He smuggled himself back to the USSR, but his wife was, at the last minute, not allowed on to the ship with him. He'd had to make the arrangements in secret, and hadn't even told her of the plans, so the first she knew was when he disappeared. He would later claim that the Soviets had told him she would be sent for two weeks later, but she had no knowledge of any of this. For decades, Lavinia would not even know if her husband was dead or alive. [Excerpt: Blake Jones and the Trike Shop, "Astronauts in Trouble"] When Termen got back to the USSR, he found it had changed beyond recognition. Stalin's reign of terror was now well underway, and not only could he not find a job, most of the people who he'd been in contact with at the top of the Kremlin had been purged. Termen was himself arrested and tortured into signing a false confession to counter-revolutionary activities and membership of fascist organisations. He was sentenced to eight years in a forced labour camp, which in reality was a death sentence -- it was expected that workers there would work themselves to death on starvation rations long before their sentences were up -- but relatively quickly he was transferred to a special prison where people with experience of aeronautical design were working. He was still a prisoner, but in conditions not too far removed from normal civilian life, and allowed to do scientific and technical work with some of the greatest experts in the field -- almost all of whom had also been arrested in one purge or another. One of the pieces of work Termen did was at the direct order of Laventy Beria, Stalin's right-hand man and the architect of most of the terrors of the Stalinist regime. In Spring 1945, while the USA and USSR were still supposed to be allies in World War II, Beria wanted to bug the residence of the US ambassador, and got Termen to design a bug that would get past all the normal screenings. The bug that Termen designed was entirely passive and unpowered -- it did nothing unless a microwave beam of a precise frequency was beamed at it, and only then did it start transmitting. It was placed in a wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States, presented to the ambassador by a troupe of scouts as a gesture of friendship between the two countries. The wood in the eagle's beak was thin enough to let the sound through. It remained there for seven years, through the tenures of four ambassadors, only being unmasked when a British radio operator accidentally tuned to the frequency it was transmitting on and was horrified to hear secret diplomatic conversations. Upon its discovery, the US couldn't figure out how it worked, and eventually shared the information with MI5, who took eighteen months to reverse-engineer Termen's bug and come up with their own, which remained the standard bug in use for about a decade. The CIA's own attempts to reverse-engineer it failed altogether. It was also Termen who came up with that well-known bit of spycraft -- focussing an infra-red beam on a window pane, to use it to pick up the sound of conversations happening in the room behind it. Beria was so pleased with Termen's inventions that he got Termen to start bugging Stalin himself, so Beria would be able to keep track of Stalin's whims. Termen performed such great services for Beria that Beria actually allowed him to go free not long after his sentence was served. Not only that, but Beria nominated Termen for the Stalin Award, Class II, for his espionage work -- and Stalin, not realising that Termen had been bugging *him* as well as foreign powers, actually upgraded that to a Class I, the highest honour the Soviet state gave. While Termen was free, he found himself at a loose end, and ended up volunteering to work for the organisation he had been working for -- which went by many names but became known as the KGB from the 1950s onwards. He tried to persuade the government to let Lavinia, who he hadn't seen in eight years, come over and join him, but they wouldn't even allow him to contact her, and he eventually remarried. Meanwhile, after Stalin's death, Beria was arrested for his crimes, and charged under the same law that he had had Termen convicted under. Beria wasn't as lucky as Termen, though, and was executed. By 1964, Termen had had enough of the KGB, because they wanted him to investigate obvious pseudoscience -- they wanted him to look into aliens, UFOs, ESP... and telepathy. [Excerpt, The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations (early version)" "She's already working on my brain"] He quit and went back to civilian life.  He started working in the acoustics lab in Moscow Conservatory, although he had to start at the bottom because everything he'd been doing for more than a quarter of a century was classified. He also wrote a short book on electronic music. In the late sixties an article on him was published in the US -- the first sign any of his old friends had that he'd not  died nearly thirty years earlier. They started corresponding with him, and he became a minor celebrity again, but this was disapproved of by the Soviet government -- electronic music was still considered bourgeois decadence and not suitable for the Soviet Union, and all his instruments were smashed and he was sacked from the conservatory. He continued working in various technical jobs until the 1980s, and still continued inventing refinements of the theremin, although he never had any official support for his work. In the eighties, a writer tried to get him some sort of official recognition -- the Stalin Prize was secret -- and the university at which he was working sent a reply saying, in part, "L.S. Termen took part in research conducted by the department as an ordinary worker and he did not show enough creative activity, nor does he have any achievements on the basis of which he could be recommended for a Government decoration." By this time he was living in shared accommodation with a bunch of other people, one room to himself and using a shared bathroom, kitchen, and so on. After Glasnost he did some interviews and was asked about this, and said "I never wanted to make demands and don't want to now. I phoned the housing department about three months ago and inquired about my turn to have a new flat. The woman told me that my turn would come in five or six years. Not a very reassuring answer if one is ninety-two years old." In 1989 he was finally allowed out of the USSR again, for the first time in fifty-one years, to attend a UNESCO sponsored symposium on electronic music. Among other things, he was given, forty-eight years late, a letter that his old colleague Edgard Varese had sent about his composition Ecuatorial, which had originally been written for theremin. Varese had wanted to revise the work, and had wanted to get modified theremins that could do what he wanted, and had asked the inventor for help, but the letter had been suppressed by the Soviet government. When he got no reply, Varese had switched to using ondes martenot instead. [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ecuatorial"] In the 1970s, after the death of his third wife, Termen had started an occasional correspondence with his second wife, Lavinia, the one who had not been able to come with him to the USSR and hadn't known if he was alive for so many decades. She was now a prominent activist in Haiti, having established dance schools in many Caribbean countries, and Termen still held out hope that they could be reunited, even writing her a letter in 1988 proposing remarriage. But sadly, less than a month after Termen's first trip outside the USSR, she died -- officially of a heart attack or food poisoning, but there's a strong suspicion that she was murdered by the military dictatorship for her closeness to Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the pro-democracy activist who later became President of Haiti. Termen was finally allowed to join the Communist Party in the spring of 1991, just before the USSR finally dissolved -- he'd been forbidden up to that point because of his conviction for counter-revolutionary crimes. He was asked by a Western friend why he'd done that when everyone else was trying to *leave* the Communist Party, and he explained that he'd made a promise to Lenin. In his final years he was researching immortality, going back to the work he had done in his youth, working with biologists, trying to find a way to restore elderly bodies to youthful vigour. But sadly he died in 1993, aged ninety-seven, before he achieved his goal. On one of his last trips outside the USSR, in 1991, he visited the US, and in California he finally got to hear the song that most people associate with his invention, even though it didn't actually feature a theremin: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations"] Back in the 1930s, when he was working with Slonimsky and Varese and Ives and the rest, Termen had set up the Theremin Studio, a sort of experimental arts lab, and in 1931 he had invited the musicologist, composer, and theoretician Joseph Schillinger to become a lecturer there. Schillinger had been one of the first composers to be really interested in the theremin, and had composed a very early piece written specifically for the instrument, the First Airphonic Suite: [Excerpt: Joseph Schillinger, "First Airphonic Suite"] But he was most influential as a theoretician. Schillinger believed that all of the arts were susceptible to rigorous mathematical analysis, and that you could use that analysis to generate new art according to mathematical principles, art that would be perfect. Schillinger planned to work with Termen to try to invent a machine that could compose, perform, and transmit music. The idea was that someone would be able to tune in a radio and listen to a piece of music in real time as it was being algorithmically composed and transmitted. The two men never achieved this, but Schillinger became very, very, respected as someone with a rigorous theory of musical structure -- though reading his magnum opus, the Schillinger System of Musical Composition, is frankly like wading through treacle. I'll read a short excerpt just to give an idea of his thinking: "On the receiving end, phasic stimuli produced by instruments encounter a metamorphic auditory integrator. This integrator represents the auditory apparatus as a whole and is a complex interdependent system. It consists of two receivers (ears), transmitters, auditory nerves, and a transformer, the auditory braincenter.  The response to a stimulus is integrated both quantitatively and selectively. The neuronic energy of response becomes the psychonic energy of auditory image. The response to stimuli and the process of integration are functional operations and, as such, can be described in mathematical terms , i.e., as  synchronization, addition, subtraction, multiplication, etc. But these integrative processes alone do not constitute the material of orchestration either.  The auditory image, whether resulting from phasic stimuli of an excitor or from selfstimulation of the auditory brain-center, can be described only in Psychological terms, of loudness, pitch, quality, etc. This leads us to the conclusion that the material of orchestration can be defined only as a group of conditions under which an integrated image results from a sonic stimulus subjected to an auditory response.  This constitutes an interdependent tripartite system, in which the existence of one component necessitates the existence of two others. The composer can imagine an integrated sonic form, yet he cannot transmit it to the auditor (unless telepathicaliy) without sonic stimulus and hearing apparatus." That's Schillinger's way of saying that if a composer wants someone to hear the music they've written, the composer needs a musical instrument and the listener needs ears and a brain. This kind of revolutionary insight made Schillinger immensely sought after in the early 1930s, and among his pupils were the swing bandleaders Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey, and the songwriter George Gershwin, who turned to Schillinger for advice when he was writing his opera Porgy and Bess: [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, "Here Come De Honey Man"] Another of his pupils was the trombonist and arranger Glenn Miller, who at that time was a session player working in pickup studio bands for people like Red Nichols. Miller spent some time studying with him in the early thirties, and applied those lessons when given the job of putting together arrangements for Ray Noble, his first prominent job. In 1938 Glenn Miller walked into a strip joint to see a nineteen-year-old he'd been told to take a look at. This was another trombonist, Paul Tanner, who was at the time working as a backing musician for the strippers. Miller had recently broken up his first big band, after a complete lack of success, and was looking to put together a new big band, to play arrangements in the style he had worked out while working for Noble. As Tanner later put it "he said, `Well, how soon can you come with me?' I said, `I can come right now.' I told him I was all packed, I had my toothbrush in my pocket and everything. And so I went with him that night, and I stayed with him until he broke the band up in September 1942." The new band spent a few months playing the kind of gigs that an unknown band can get, but they soon had a massive success with a song Miller had originally written as an arranging exercise set for him by Schillinger, a song that started out under the title "Miller's Tune", but soon became known worldwide as "Moonlight Serenade": [Excerpt: Glenn Miller, "Moonlight Serenade"] The Miller band had a lot of lineup changes in the four and a bit years it was together, but other than Miller himself there were only four members who were with that group throughout its career, from the early dates opening for  Freddie Fisher and His Schnickelfritzers right through to its end as the most popular band in America. They were piano player Chummy MacGregor, clarinet player Wilbur Schwartz, tenor sax player Tex Beneke, and Tanner. They played on all of Miller's big hits, like "In the Mood" and "Chattanooga Choo-Choo": [Excerpt: Glenn Miller, "Chattanooga Choo-Choo"] But in September 1942, the band broke up as the members entered the armed forces, and Tanner found himself in the Army while Miller was in the Air Force, so while both played in military bands, they weren't playing together, and Miller disappeared over the Channel, presumed dead, in 1944. Tanner became a session trombonist, based in LA, and in 1958 he found himself on a session for a film soundtrack with Dr. Samuel Hoffman. I haven't been able to discover for sure which film this was for, but the only film on which Hoffman has an IMDB credit for that year is that American International Pictures classic, Earth Vs The Spider: [Excerpt: Earth Vs The Spider trailer] Hoffman was a chiropodist, and that was how he made most of his living, but as a teenager in the 1930s he had been a professional violin player under the name Hal Hope. One of the bands he played in was led by a man named Jolly Coburn, who had seen Rudy Vallee's band with their theremin and decided to take it up himself. Hoffman had then also got a theremin, and started his own all-electronic trio, with a Hammond organ player, and with a cello-style fingerboard theremin played by William Schuman, the future Pulitzer Prize winning composer. By the 1940s, Hoffman was a full-time doctor, but he'd retained his Musicians' Union card just in case the odd gig came along, and then in 1945 he received a call from Miklos Rozsa, who was working on the soundtrack for Alfred Hitchcock's new film, Spellbound. Rozsa had tried to get Clara Rockmore, the one true virtuoso on the theremin playing at the time, to play on the soundtrack, but she'd refused -- she didn't do film soundtrack work, because in her experience they only wanted her to play on films about ghosts or aliens, and she thought it damaged the dignity of the instrument. Rozsa turned to the American Federation of Musicians, who as it turned out had precisely one theremin player who could read music and wasn't called Clara Rockmore on their books. So Dr. Samuel Hoffman, chiropodist, suddenly found himself playing on one of the most highly regarded soundtracks of one of the most successful films of the forties: [Excerpt: Miklos Rozsa, "Spellbound"] Rozsa soon asked Hoffman to play on another soundtrack, for the Billy Wilder film The Lost Weekend, another of the great classics of late forties cinema. Both films' soundtracks were nominated for the Oscar, and Spellbound's won, and Hoffman soon found himself in demand as a session player. Hoffman didn't have any of Rockmore's qualms about playing on science fiction and horror films, and anyone with any love of the genre will have heard his playing on genre classics like The Five Thousand Fingers of Dr T, The Thing From Another World, It Came From Outer Space, and of course Bernard Hermann's score for The Day The Earth Stood Still: [Excerpt: The Day The Earth Stood Still score] As well as on such less-than-classics as The Devil's Weed, Voodoo Island, The Mad Magician, and of course Billy The Kid Vs Dracula. Hoffman became something of a celebrity, and also recorded several albums of lounge music with a band led by Les Baxter, like the massive hit Music Out Of The Moon, featuring tracks like “Lunar Rhapsody”: [Excerpt: Samuel Hoffman, "Lunar Rhapsody”] [Excerpt: Neil Armstrong] That voice you heard there was Neil Armstrong, on Apollo 11 on its way back from the moon. He took a tape of Hoffman's album with him. But while Hoffman was something of a celebrity in the fifties, the work dried up almost overnight in 1958 when he worked at that session with Paul Tanner. The theremin is a very difficult instrument to play, and while Hoffman was a good player, he wasn't a great one -- he was getting the work because he was the best in a very small pool of players, not because he was objectively the best there could be. Tanner noticed that Hoffman was having quite some difficulty getting the pitching right in the session, and realised that the theremin must be a very difficult instrument to play because it had no markings at all. So he decided to build an instrument that had the same sound, but that was more sensibly controlled than just waving your hands near it. He built his own invention, the electrotheremin, in less than a week, despite never before having had any experience in electrical engineering. He built it using an oscillator, a length of piano wire and a contact switch that could be slid up and down the wire, changing the pitch. Two days after he finished building it, he was in the studio, cutting his own equivalent of Hoffman's forties albums, Music For Heavenly Bodies, including a new exotica version of "Moonlight Serenade", the song that Glenn Miller had written decades earlier as an exercise for Schillinger: [Excerpt: Paul Tanner, "Moonlight Serenade"] Not only could the electrotheremin let the player control the pitch more accurately, but it could also do staccato notes easily -- something that's almost impossible with an actual theremin. And, on top of that, Tanner was cheaper than Hoffman. An instrumentalist hired to play two instruments is paid extra, but not as much extra as paying for another musician to come to the session, and since Tanner was a first-call trombone player who was likely to be at the session *anyway*, you might as well hire him if you want a theremin sound, rather than paying for Hoffman. Tanner was an excellent musician -- he was a professor of music at UCLA as well as being a session player, and he authored one of the standard textbooks on jazz -- and soon he had cornered the market, leaving Hoffman with only the occasional gig. We will actually be seeing Hoffman again, playing on a session for an artist we're going to look at in a couple of months, but in LA in the early sixties, if you wanted a theremin sound, you didn't hire a theremin player, you hired Paul Tanner to play his electrotheremin -- though the instrument was so obscure that many people didn't realise he wasn't actually playing a theremin. Certainly Brian Wilson seems to have thought he was when he hired him for "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times"] We talked briefly about that track back in the episode on "God Only Knows",   but three days after recording that, Tanner was called back into the studio for another session on which Brian Wilson wanted a theremin sound. This was a song titled "Good, Good, Good Vibrations", and it was inspired by a conversation he'd had with his mother as a child. He'd asked her why dogs bark at some people and not at others, and she'd said that dogs could sense vibrations that people sent out, and some people had bad vibrations and some had good ones. It's possible that this came back to mind as he was planning the Pet Sounds album, which of course ends with the sound of his own dogs barking. It's also possible that he was thinking more generally about ideas like telepathy -- he had been starting to experiment with acid by this point, and was hanging around with a crowd of people who were proto-hippies, and reading up on a lot of the mystical ideas that were shared by those people. As we saw in the last episode, there was a huge crossover between people who were being influenced by drugs, people who were interested in Eastern religion, and people who were interested in what we now might think of as pseudo-science but at the time seemed to have a reasonable amount of validity, things like telepathy and remote viewing. Wilson had also had exposure from an early age to people claiming psychic powers. Jo Ann Marks, the Wilson family's neighbour and the mother of former Beach Boy David Marks, later had something of a minor career as a psychic to the stars (at least according to obituaries posted by her son) and she would often talk about being able to sense "vibrations". The record Wilson started out making in February 1966 with the Wrecking Crew was intended as an R&B single, and was also intended to sound *strange*: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations: Gold Star 1966-02-18"] At this stage, the song he was working on was a very straightforward verse-chorus structure, and it was going to be an altogether conventional pop song. The verses -- which actually ended up used in the final single, are dominated by organ and Ray Pohlman's bass: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations: Gold Star 1966-02-18"] These bear a strong resemblance to the verses of "Here Today", on the Pet Sounds album which the Beach Boys were still in the middle of making: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Here Today (instrumental)"] But the chorus had far more of an R&B feel than anything the Beach Boys had done before: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations: Gold Star 1966-02-18"] It did, though, have precedent. The origins of the chorus feel come from "Can I Get a Witness?", a Holland-Dozier-Holland song that had been a hit for Marvin Gaye in 1963: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, "Can I Get a Witness?"] The Beach Boys had picked up on that, and also on its similarity to the feel of Lonnie Mack's instrumental cover version of Chuck Berry's "Memphis, Tennessee", which, retitled "Memphis", had also been a hit in 1963, and in 1964 they recorded an instrumental which they called "Memphis Beach" while they were recording it but later retitled "Carl's Big Chance", which was credited to Brian and Carl Wilson, but was basically just playing the "Can I Get a Witness" riff over twelve-bar blues changes, with Carl doing some surf guitar over the top: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Carl's Big Chance"] The "Can I Get a Witness" feel had quickly become a standard piece of the musical toolkit – you might notice the resemblance between that riff and the “talking 'bout my generation” backing vocals on “My Generation” by the Who, for example. It was also used on "The Boy From New York City", a hit on Red Bird Records by the Ad-Libs: [Excerpt: The Ad-Libs, "The Boy From New York City"] The Beach Boys had definitely been aware of that record -- on their 1965 album Summer Days... And Summer Nights! they recorded an answer song to it, "The Girl From New York City": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "The Girl From New York City"] And you can see how influenced Brian was by the Ad-Libs record by laying the early instrumental takes of the "Good Vibrations" chorus from this February session under the vocal intro of "The Boy From New York City". It's not a perfect match, but you can definitely hear that there's an influence there: [Excerpt: "The Boy From New York City"/"Good Vibrations"] A few days later, Brian had Carl Wilson overdub some extra bass, got a musician in to do a jaw harp overdub, and they also did a guide vocal, which I've sometimes seen credited to Brian and sometimes Carl, and can hear as both of them depending on what I'm listening for. This guide vocal used a set of placeholder lyrics written by Brian's collaborator Tony Asher, which weren't intended to be a final lyric: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations (first version)"] Brian then put the track away for a month, while he continued work on the Pet Sounds album. At this point, as best we can gather, he was thinking of it as something of a failed experiment. In the first of the two autobiographies credited to Brian (one whose authenticity is dubious, as it was largely put together by a ghostwriter and Brian later said he'd never even read it) he talks about how he was actually planning to give the song to Wilson Pickett rather than keep it for the Beach Boys, and one can definitely imagine a Wilson Pickett version of the song as it was at this point. But Brian's friend Danny Hutton, at that time still a minor session singer who had not yet gone on to form the group that would become Three Dog Night, asked Brian if *he* could have the song if Brian wasn't going to use it. And this seems to have spurred Brian into rethinking the whole song. And in doing so he was inspired by his very first ever musical memory. Brian has talked a lot about how the first record he remembers hearing was when he was two years old, at his maternal grandmother's house, where he heard the Glenn Miller version of "Rhapsody in Blue", a three-minute cut-down version of Gershwin's masterpiece, on which Paul Tanner had of course coincidentally played: [Excerpt: The Glenn Miller Orchestra, "Rhapsody in Blue"] Hearing that music, which Brian's mother also played for him a lot as a child, was one of the most profoundly moving experiences of Brian's young life, and "Rhapsody in Blue" has become one of those touchstone pieces that he returns to again and again. He has recorded studio versions of it twice, in the mid-nineties with Van Dyke Parks: [Excerpt: Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks, "Rhapsody in Blue"] and in 2010 with his solo band, as the intro and outro of an album of Gershwin covers: [Excerpt: Brian Wilson, "Rhapsody in Blue"] You'll also often see clips of him playing "Rhapsody in Blue" when sat at the piano -- it's one of his go-to songs. So he decided he was going to come up with a song that was structured like "Rhapsody in Blue" -- what publicist Derek Taylor would later describe as a "pocket symphony", but "pocket rhapsody" would possibly be a better term for it. It was going to be one continuous song, but in different sections that would have different instrumentation and different feelings to them -- he'd even record them in different studios to get different sounds for them, though he would still often have the musicians run through the whole song in each studio. He would mix and match the sections in the edit. His second attempt to record the whole track, at the start of April, gave a sign of what he was attempting, though he would not end up using any of the material from this session: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations: Gold Star 1966-04-09" around 02:34] Nearly a month later, on the fourth of May, he was back in the studio -- this time in Western Studios rather than Gold Star where the previous sessions had been held, with yet another selection of musicians from the Wrecking Crew, plus Tanner, to record another version. This time, part of the session was used for the bridge for the eventual single: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys: "Good Vibrations: Western 1966-05-04 Second Chorus and Fade"] On the twenty-fourth of May the Wrecking Crew, with Carl Wilson on Fender bass (while Lyle Ritz continued to play string bass, and Carol Kaye, who didn't end up on the finished record at all, but who was on many of the unused sessions, played Danelectro), had another attempt at the track, this time in Sunset Studios: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys: "Good Vibrations: Sunset Sound 1966-05-24 (Parts 2&3)"] Three days later, another group of musicians, with Carl now switched to rhythm guitar, were back in Western Studios recording this: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys: "Good Vibrations: Western 1966-05-27 Part C" from 2:52] The fade from that session was used in the final track. A few days later they were in the studio again, a smaller group of people with Carl on guitar and Brian on piano, along with Don Randi on electric harpsichord, Bill Pitman on electric bass, Lyle Ritz on string bass and Hal Blaine on drums. This time there seems to have been another inspiration, though I've never heard it mentioned as an influence. In March, a band called The Association, who were friends with the Beach Boys, had released their single "Along Comes Mary", and by June it had become a big hit: [Excerpt: The Association, "Along Comes Mary"] Now the fuzz bass part they were using on the session on the second of June sounds to my ears very, very, like that intro: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations (Inspiration) Western 1966-06-02" from 01:47] That session produced the basic track that was used for the choruses on the final single, onto which the electrotheremin was later overdubbed as Tanner wasn't at that session. Some time around this point, someone suggested to Brian that they should use a cello along with the electrotheremin in the choruses, playing triplets on the low notes. Brian has usually said that this was Carl's idea, while Brian's friend Van Dyke Parks has always said that he gave Brian the idea. Both seem quite certain of this, and neither has any reason to lie, so I suspect what might have happened is that Parks gave Brian the initial idea to have a cello on the track, while Carl in the studio suggested having it specifically play triplets. Either way, a cello part by Jesse Erlich was added to those choruses. There were more sessions in June, but everything from those sessions was scrapped. At some point around this time, Mike Love came up with a bass vocal lyric, which he sang along with the bass in the choruses in a group vocal session. On August the twenty-fourth, two months after what one would think at this point was the final instrumental session, a rough edit of the track was pulled together. By this point the chorus had altered quite a bit. It had originally just been eight bars of G-flat, four bars of B-flat, then four more bars of G-flat. But now Brian had decided to rework an idea he had used in "California Girls". In that song, each repetition of the line "I wish they all could be California" starts a tone lower than the one before. Here, after the bass hook line is repeated, everything moves up a step, repeats the line, and then moves up another step: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations: [Alternate Edit] 1966-08-24"] But Brian was dissatisfied with this version of the track. The lyrics obviously still needed rewriting, but more than that, there was a section he thought needed totally rerecording -- this bit: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations: [Alternate Edit] 1966-08-24"] So on the first of September, six and a half months after the first instrumental session for the song, the final one took place. This had Dennis Wilson on organ, Tommy Morgan on harmonicas, Lyle Ritz on string bass, and Hal Blaine and Carl Wilson on percussion, and replaced that with a new, gentler, version: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys: "Good Vibrations (Western 1966-09-01) [New Bridge]"] Well, that was almost the final instrumental session -- they called Paul Tanner in to a vocal overdub session to redo some of the electrotheremin parts, but that was basically it. Now all they had to do was do the final vocals. Oh, and they needed some proper lyrics. By this point Brian was no longer working with Tony Asher. He'd started working with Van Dyke Parks on some songs, but Parks wasn't interested in stepping into a track that had already been worked on so long, so Brian eventually turned to Mike Love, who'd already come up with the bass vocal hook, to write the lyrics. Love wrote them in the car, on the way to the studio, dictating them to his wife as he drove, and they're actually some of his best work. The first verse grounds everything in the sensory, in the earthy. He makes a song originally about *extra* -sensory perception into one about sensory perception -- the first verse covers sight, sound, and smell: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations"] Carl Wilson was chosen to sing the lead vocal, but you'll notice a slight change in timbre on the line "I hear the sound of a" -- that's Brian stepping into double him on the high notes. Listen again: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations"] For the second verse, Love's lyric moves from the sensory grounding of the first verse to the extrasensory perception that the song has always been about, with the protagonist knowing things about the woman who's the object of the song without directly perceiving them. The record is one of those where I wish I was able to play the whole thing for you, because it's a masterpiece of structure, and of editing, and of dynamics. It's also a record that even now is impossible to replicate properly on stage, though both its writers in their live performances come very close. But while someone in the audience for either the current touring Beach Boys led by Mike Love or for Brian Wilson's solo shows might come away thinking "that sounded just like the record", both have radically different interpretations of it even while sticking close to the original arrangement. The touring Beach Boys' version is all throbbing strangeness, almost garage-rock, emphasising the psychedelia of the track: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations (live 2014)"] While Brian Wilson's live version is more meditative, emphasising the gentle aspects: [Excerpt Brian Wilson, "Good Vibrations (live at the Roxy)"] But back in 1966, there was definitely no way to reproduce it live with a five-person band. According to Tanner, they actually asked him if he would tour with them, but he refused -- his touring days were over, and also he felt he would look ridiculous, a middle-aged man on stage with a bunch of young rock and roll stars, though apparently they offered to buy him a wig so he wouldn't look so out of place. When he wouldn't tour with them, they asked him where they could get a theremin, and he pointed them in the direction of Robert Moog. Moog -- whose name is spelled M-o-o-g and often mispronounced "moog", had been a teenager in 1949, when he'd seen a schematic for a theremin in an electronic hobbyist magazine, after Samuel Hoffman had brought the instrument back into the limelight. He'd built his own, and started building others to sell to other hobbyists, and had also started branching out into other electronic instruments by the mid-sixties. His small company was the only one still manufacturing actual theremins, but when the Beach Boys came to him and asked him for one, they found it very difficult to control, and asked him if he could do anything simpler. He came up with a ribbon-controlled oscillator, on the same principle as Tanner's electro-theremin, but even simpler to operate, and the Beach Boys bought it and gave it to Mike Love to play on stage. All he had to do was run his finger up and down a metallic ribbon, with the positions of the notes marked on it, and it would come up with a good approximation of the electro-theremin sound. Love played this "woo-woo machine" as he referred to it, on stage for several years: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations (live in Hawaii 8/26/67)"] Moog was at the time starting to build his first synthesisers, and having developed that ribbon-control mechanism he decided to include it in the early models as one of several different methods of controlling the Moog synthesiser, the instrument that became synonymous with the synthesiser in the late sixties and early seventies: [Excerpt: Gershon Kingsley and Leonid Hambro, "Rhapsody in Blue" from Switched-On Gershwin] "Good Vibrations" became the Beach Boys' biggest ever hit -- their third US number one, and their first to make number one in the UK. Brian Wilson had managed, with the help of his collaborators, to make something that combined avant-garde psychedelic music and catchy pop hooks, a truly experimental record that was also a genuine pop classic. To this day, it's often cited as the greatest single of all time. But Brian knew he could do better. He could be even more progressive. He could make an entire album using the same techniques as "Good Vibrations", one where themes could recur, where sections could be edited together and songs could be constructed in the edit. Instead of a pocket symphony, he could make a full-blown teenage symphony to God. All he had to do was to keep looking forward, believe he could achieve his goal, and whatever happened, not lose his nerve and turn back. [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Smile Promo" ]

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Asinine Radio
Beer & Vinyl November '21 Vol 3

Asinine Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 18, 2021 71:13


We start with our Fearless Beer Review. We get into some of the new vinyl we got this week, and that leads to our Songs Of The Week from Les Baxter and Aqua. We finish up with some new music and other happenings in the music world. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe on iTunes. Leave a comment on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or AsinineRadio.com. Email us at AsinineRadio@gmail.com. We're even on Spotify! iTunes: www.itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/asi…130289553?mt=2 Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/60pYwZVJoOm2NvmmQHcks7 Twitter: www.twitter.com/AsinineRadio Instagram: www.Instagram.com/asinineradio/ Facebook: www.facebook.com/asinineradio/

A History Of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs
Episode 128: “Mr. Tambourine Man” by the Byrds

A History Of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 22, 2021


Episode one hundred and twenty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Mr. Tambourine Man" by the Byrds, and the start of LA folk-rock. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "I Got You Babe" by Sonny and Cher. 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/ Erratum The version of this originally uploaded got the date of the Dylan tour filmed for Don't Look Back wrong. I edited out the half-sentence in question when this was pointed out to me very shortly after uploading. Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode (with the exception of the early Gene Clark demo snippet, which I've not been able to find a longer version of). For information on Dylan and the song, I've mostly used these books: Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades. I've also used Robert Shelton's No Direction Home, which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan. While for the Byrds, I relied mostly on Timeless Flight Revisited by Johnny Rogan, with some information from Chris Hillman's autobiography. This three-CD set is a reasonable way of getting most of the Byrds' important recordings, while this contains the pre-Byrds recordings the group members did with Jim Dickson. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we're going to take a look at one of the pivotal recordings in folk-rock music, a track which, though it was not by any means the first folk-rock record, came to define the subgenre in the minds of the listening public, and which by bringing together the disparate threads of influence from Bob Dylan, the Searchers, the Beatles, and the Beach Boys, manages to be arguably the record that defines early 1965. We're going to look at "Mr. Tambourine Man" by the Byrds: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mr. Tambourine Man"] Folk-rock as a genre was something that was bound to happen sooner rather than later. We've already seen how many of the British R&B bands that were becoming popular in the US were influenced by folk music, with records like "House of the Rising Sun" taking traditional folk songs and repurposing them for a rock idiom. And as soon as British bands started to have a big influence on American music, that would have to inspire a reassessment by American musicians of their own folk music. Because of course, while the British bands were inspired by rock and roll, they were all also coming from a skiffle tradition which saw Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Big Bill Broonzy, and the rest as being the people to emulate, and that would show up in their music. Most of the British bands came from the bluesier end of the folk tradition -- with the exception of the Liverpool bands, who pretty much all liked their Black music on the poppy side and their roots music to be more in a country vein -- but they were still all playing music which showed the clear influence of country and folk as well as blues. And that influence was particularly obvious to those American musicians who were suddenly interested in becoming rock and roll stars, but who had previously been folkies. Musicians like Gene Clark. Gene Clark was born in Missouri, and had formed a rock and roll group in his teens called Joe Meyers and the Sharks. According to many biographies, the Sharks put out a record of Clark's song "Blue Ribbons", but as far as I've been able to tell, this was Clark embellishing things a great deal -- the only evidence of this song that anyone has been able to find is a home recording from this time, of which a few seconds were used in a documentary on Clark: [Excerpt: Gene Clark, "Blue Ribbons"] After his period in the Sharks, Clark became a folk singer, starting out in a group called the Surf Riders. But in August 1963 he was spotted by the New Christy Minstrels, a fourteen-piece ultra-commercial folk group who had just released a big hit single, "Green Green", with a lead sung by one of their members, Barry McGuire: [Excerpt: The New Christy Minstrels, "Green Green"] Clark was hired to replace a departing member, and joined the group, who as well as McGuire at that time also included Larry Ramos, who would later go on to join The Association and sing joint lead on their big hit "Never My Love": [Excerpt: The Association, "Never My Love"] Clark was only in the New Christy Minstrels for a few months, but he appeared on several of their albums -- they recorded four albums during the months he was with the group, but there's some debate as to whether he appeared on all of them, as he may have missed some recording sessions when he had a cold. Clark didn't get much opportunity to sing lead on the records, but he was more prominent in live performances, and can be seen and heard in the many TV appearances the group did in late 1963: [Excerpt: The New Christy Minstrels, "Julianne"] But Clark was not a good fit for the group -- he didn't put himself forward very much, which meant he didn't get many lead vocals, which meant in turn that he seemed not to be pulling his weight. But the thing that really changed his mind came in late 1963, on tour in Canada, when he heard this: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "She Loves You"] Clark knew instantly that that was the kind of music he wanted to be making, and when "I Want to Hold Your Hand" came out in the US soon afterwards, it was the impetus that Clark needed in order to quit the group and move to California. There he visited the Troubadour club in Los Angeles, and saw another performer who had been in an ultra-commercial folk group until he had been bitten by the Beatle bug -- Roger McGuinn. One note here -- Roger McGuinn at this point used his birth name, but he changed it for religious reasons in 1967.  I've been unable to find out his views on his old name -- whether he considers it closer to a trans person's deadname which would be disrespectful to mention, or to something like Reg Dwight becoming Elton John or David Jones becoming David Bowie. As I presume everyone listening to this has access to a search engine and can find out his birth name if at all interested, I'll be using "Roger McGuinn" throughout this episode, and any other episodes that deal with him, at least until I find out for certain how he feels about the use of that name. McGuinn had grown up in Chicago, and become obsessed with the guitar after seeing Elvis on TV in 1956, but as rockabilly had waned in popularity he had moved into folk music, taking lessons from Frank Hamilton, a musician who had played in a group with Ramblin' Jack Elliot, and who would later go on to join a 1960s lineup of the Weavers. Hamilton taught McGuinn Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie songs, and taught him how to play the banjo. Hamilton also gave McGuinn an enthusiasm for the twelve-string guitar, an instrument that had been popular among folk musicians like Lead Belly, but which had largely fallen out of fashion. McGuinn became a regular in the audience at the Gate of Horn, a folk club owned by Albert Grossman, who would later become Bob Dylan's manager, and watched performers like Odetta and Josh White. He also built up his own small repertoire of songs by people like Ewan MacColl, which he would perform at coffee shops. At one of those coffee shops he was seen by a member of the Limeliters, one of the many Kingston Trio-alike groups that had come up during the folk boom. The Limeliters were after a guitarist to back them, and offered McGuinn the job. He turned it down at first, as he was still in school, but as it turned out the job was still open when he graduated, and so young McGuinn found himself straight out of school playing the Hollywood Bowl on a bill including Eartha Kitt. McGuinn only played with the Limeliters for six weeks, but in that short time he ended up playing on a top five album, as he was with them at the Ash Grove when they recorded their live album Tonight in Person: [Excerpt: The Limeliters, "Madeira, M'Dear"] After being sacked by the Limeliters, McGuinn spent a short while playing the clubs around LA, before being hired by another commercial folk group, the Chad Mitchell Trio, who like the Limeliters before them needed an accompanist. McGuinn wasn't particularly happy working with the trio, who in his telling regarded themselves as the stars and McGuinn very much as the hired help. He also didn't respect them as musicians, and thought they were little to do with folk music as he understood the term. Despite this, McGuinn stayed with the Chad Mitchell Trio for two and a half years, and played on two albums with them -- Mighty Day on Campus, and Live at the Bitter End: [Excerpt: The Chad Mitchell Trio, "The John Birch Society" ] McGuinn stuck it out with the Chad Mitchell trio until his twentieth birthday, and he was just about to accept an offer to join the New Christy Minstrels himself when he got a better one. Bobby Darin was in the audience at a Chad Mitchell Trio show, and approached McGuinn afterwards. Darin had started out in the music business as a songwriter, working with his friend Don Kirshner, but had had some success in the late fifties and early sixties as one of the interchangeable teen idol Bobbies who would appear on American Bandstand, with records like "Dream Lover" and "Splish Splash": [Excerpt: Bobby Darin, "Splish Splash"] But Darin had always been more musically adventurous than most of his contemporaries, and with his hit version of "Mack the Knife" he had successfully moved into the adult cabaret market. And like other singers breaking into that market, like Sam Cooke, he had decided to incorporate folk music into his act. He would do his big-band set, then there would be a fifteen-minute set of folk songs, backed just by guitar and stand-up bass. Darin wanted McGuinn to be his guitarist and backing vocalist for these folk sets, and offered to double what the Chad Mitchell Trio was paying him. Darin wasn't just impressed with McGuinn's musicianship -- he also liked his showmanship, which came mostly from McGuinn being bored and mildly disgusted with the music he was playing on stage. He would pull faces behind the Chad Mitchell Trio's back, the audience would laugh, and the trio would think the laughter was for them. For a while, McGuinn was happy playing with Darin, who he later talked about as being a mentor. But then Darin had some vocal problems and had to take some time off the road. However, he didn't drop McGuinn altogether -- rather, he gave him a job in the Brill Building, writing songs for Darin's publishing company. One of the songs he wrote there was "Beach Ball", co-written with Frank Gari. A knock-off of "Da Doo Ron Ron", retooled as a beach party song, the recording released as by the City Surfers apparently features McGuinn, Gari, Darin on drums and Terry Melcher on piano: [Excerpt: The City Surfers, "Beach Ball"] That wasn't a hit, but a cover version by Jimmy Hannan was a local hit in Melbourne, Australia: [Excerpt: Jimmy Hannan “Beach Ball”] That record is mostly notable for its backing vocalists, three brothers who would soon go on to become famous as the Bee Gees. Darin soon advised McGuinn that if he really wanted to become successful, he should become a rock and roll singer, and so McGuinn left Darin's employ and struck out as a solo performer, playing folk songs with a rock backbeat around Greenwich Village, before joining a Beatles tribute act playing clubs around New York. He was given further encouragement by Dion DiMucci, another late-fifties singer who like Darin was trying to make the transition to playing for adult crowds. DiMucci had been lead singer of Dion and the Belmonts, but had had more success as a solo act with records like "The Wanderer": [Excerpt: Dion, "The Wanderer"] Dion was insistent that McGuinn had something -- that he wasn't just imitating the Beatles, as he thought, but that he was doing something a little more original. Encouraged by Dion, McGuinn made his way west to LA, where he was playing the Troubadour supporting Roger Miller, when Gene Clark walked in. Clark saw McGuinn as a kindred spirit -- another folkie who'd had his musical world revolutionised by the Beatles -- and suggested that the two become a duo, performing in the style of Peter and Gordon, the British duo who'd recently had a big hit with "World Without Love", a song written for them by Paul McCartney: [Excerpt: Peter and Gordon, "World Without Love"] The duo act didn't last long though, because they were soon joined by a third singer, David Crosby. Crosby had grown up in LA -- his father, Floyd Crosby, was an award-winning cinematographer, who had won an Oscar for his work on Tabu: A Story of the South Seas, and a Golden Globe for High Noon, but is now best known for his wonderfully lurid work on a whole series of films starring Vincent Price, including The Pit and the Pendulum, House of Usher, Tales of Terror, and Comedy of Terrors. Like many children of privilege, David had been a spoiled child, and he had taken to burglary for kicks, and had impregnated a schoolfriend and then run off rather than take responsibility for the child. Travelling across the US as a way to escape the consequences of his actions, he had spent some time hanging out with musicians like Fred Neil, Paul Kantner, and Travis Edmondson, the latter of whom had recorded a version of Crosby's first song, "Cross the Plains": [Excerpt: Travis Edmondson, "Cross the Plains"] Edmondson had also introduced Crosby to cannabis, and Crosby soon took to smoking everything he could, even once smoking aspirin to see if he could get high from that. When he'd run out of money, Crosby, like Clark and McGuinn, had joined an ultra-commercial folk group. In Crosby's case it was Les Baxter's Balladeers, put together by the bandleader who was better known for his exotica recordings. While Crosby was in the Balladeers, they were recorded for an album called "Jack Linkletter Presents A Folk Festival", a compilation of live recordings hosted by the host of Hootenanny: [Excerpt: Les Baxter's Balladeers, "Ride Up"] It's possible that Crosby got the job with Baxter through his father's connections -- Baxter did the music for many films made by Roger Corman, the producer and director of those Vincent Price films. Either way, Crosby didn't last long in the Balladeers. After he left the group, he started performing solo sets, playing folk music but with a jazz tinge to it -- Crosby was already interested in pushing the boundaries of what chords and melodies could be used in folk. Crosby didn't go down particularly well with the folk-club crowds, but he did impress one man. Jim Dickson had got into the music industry more or less by accident -- he had seen the comedian Lord Buckley, a white man who did satirical routines in a hipsterish argot that owed more than a little to Black slang, and had been impressed by him. He had recorded Buckley with his own money, and had put out Buckley's first album Hipsters, Flipsters and Finger Poppin' Daddies, Knock Me Your Lobes on his own label, before selling the rights of the album to Elektra records: [Excerpt: Lord Buckley, "Friends, Romans, Countrymen"] Dickson had gone on to become a freelance producer, often getting his records put out by Elektra, making both jazz records with people like Red Mitchell: [Excerpt: Red Mitchell, "Jim's Blues"] And country, folk, and bluegrass records, with people like the Dillards, whose first few albums he produced: [Excerpt: The Dillards, "Duelling Banjos"] Dickson had also recently started up a publishing company, Tickson Music, with a partner, and the first song they had published had been written by a friend of Crosby's, Dino Valenti, with whom at one point Crosby had shared a houseboat: [Excerpt: Dino Valenti, "Get Together"] Unfortunately for Dickson, before that song became a big hit for the Youngbloods, he had had to sell the rights to it, to the Kingston Trio's managers, as Valenti had been arrested and needed bail money, and it was the only way to raise the funds required. Dickson liked Crosby's performance, and became his manager. Dickson had access to a recording studio, and started recording Crosby singing traditional songs and songs to which Dickson owned the copyright -- at this point Crosby wasn't writing much, and so Dickson got him to record material like "Get Together": [Excerpt: David Crosby, "Get Together"] Unfortunately for Crosby, Dickson's initial idea, to get him signed to Warner Brothers records as a solo artist using those recordings, didn't work out. But Gene Clark had seen Crosby perform live and thought he was impressive. He told McGuinn about him, and the three men soon hit it off -- they were able to sing three-part harmony together as soon as they met. ( This is one characteristic of Crosby that acquaintances often note -- he's a natural harmony singer, and is able to fit his voice into pre-existing groups of other singers very easily, and make it sound natural). Crosby introduced the pair to Dickson, who had a brainwave. These were folkies, but they didn't really sing like folkies -- they'd grown up on rock and roll, and they were all listening to the Beatles now. There was a gap in the market, between the Beatles and Peter, Paul, and Mary, for something with harmonies, a soft sound, and a social conscience, but a rock and roll beat. Something that was intelligent, but still fun, and which could appeal to the screaming teenage girls and to the college kids who were listening to Dylan. In Crosby, McGuinn, and Clark, Dickson thought he had found the people who could do just that. The group named themselves The Jet Set -- a name thought up by McGuinn, who loved flying and everything about the air, and which they also thought gave them a certain sophistication -- and their first demo recording, with all three of them on twelve-string guitars, shows the direction they were going in. "The Only Girl I Adore", written by McGuinn and Clark, has what I can only assume is the group trying for Liverpool accents and failing miserably, and call and response and "yeah yeah" vocals that are clearly meant to evoke the Beatles. It actually does a remarkably good job of evoking some of Paul McCartney's melodic style -- but the rhythm guitar is pure Don Everly: [Excerpt: The Jet Set, "The Only Girl I Adore"] The Jet Set jettisoned their folk instruments for good after watching A Hard Day's Night -- Roger McGuinn traded in his banjo and got an electric twelve-string Rickenbacker just like the one that George Harrison played, and they went all-in on the British Invasion sound, copying the Beatles but also the Searchers, whose jangly sound was perfect for the Rickenbacker, and who had the same kind of solid harmony sound the Jet Set were going for. Of course, if you're going to try to sound like the Beatles and the Searchers, you need a drummer, and McGuinn and Crosby were both acquainted with a young man who had been born Michael Dick, but who had understandably changed his name to Michael Clarke. He was only eighteen, and wasn't a particularly good drummer, but he did have one huge advantage, which is that he looked exactly like Brian Jones. So the Jet Set now had a full lineup -- Roger McGuinn on lead guitar, Gene Clark on rhythm guitar, David Crosby was learning bass, and Michael Clarke on drums. But that wasn't the lineup on their first recordings. Crosby was finding it difficult to learn the bass, and Michael Clarke wasn't yet very proficient on drums, so for what became their first record Dickson decided to bring in a professional rhythm section, hiring two of the Wrecking Crew, bass player Ray Pohlman and drummer Earl Palmer, to back the three singers, with McGuinn and Gene Clark on guitars: [Excerpt: The Beefeaters, "Please Let Me Love You"] That was put out on a one-single deal with Elektra Records, and Jim Dickson made the deal under the condition that it couldn't be released under the group's real name -- he wanted to test what kind of potential they had without spoiling their reputation. So instead of being put out as by the Jet Set, it was put out as by the Beefeaters -- the kind of fake British name that a lot of American bands were using at the time, to try and make themselves seem like they might be British. The record did nothing, but nobody was expecting it to do much, so they weren't particularly bothered. And anyway, there was another problem to deal with. David Crosby had been finding it difficult to play bass and sing -- this was one reason that he only sang, and didn't play, on the Beefeaters single. His bass playing was wooden and rigid, and he wasn't getting better. So it was decided that Crosby would just sing, and not play anything at all. As a result, the group needed a new bass player, and Dickson knew someone who he thought would fit the bill, despite him not being a bass player. Chris Hillman had become a professional musician in his teens, playing mandolin in a bluegrass group called the Scottsville Squirrel Barkers, who made one album of bluegrass standards for sale through supermarkets: [Excerpt: The Scottsville Squirrel Barkers, "Shady Grove"] Hillman had moved on to a group called the Golden State Boys, which featured two brothers, Vern and Rex Gosdin. The Golden State Boys had been signed to a management contract by Dickson, who had renamed the group the Hillmen after their mandolin player -- Hillman was very much in the background in the group, and Dickson believed that he would be given a little more confidence if he was pushed to the front. The Hillmen had recorded one album, which wasn't released until many years later, and which had featured Hillman singing lead on the Bob Dylan song "When the Ship Comes In": [Excerpt: The Hillmen, "When the Ship Comes In"] Hillman had gone on from there to join a bluegrass group managed by Randy Sparks, the same person who was in charge of the New Christy Minstrels, and who specialised in putting out ultra-commercialised versions of roots music for pop audiences. But Dickson knew that Hillman didn't like playing with that group, and would be interested in doing something very different, so even though Hillman didn't play bass, Dickson invited him to join the group. There was almost another lineup change at this point, as well. McGuinn and Gene Clark were getting sick of David Crosby's attitude -- Crosby was the most technically knowledgeable musician in the group, but was at this point not much of a songwriter. He was not at all shy about pointing out what he considered flaws in the songs that McGuinn and Clark were writing, but he wasn't producing anything better himself. Eventually McGuinn and Clark decided to kick Crosby out of the group altogether, but they reconsidered when Dickson told them that if Crosby went he was going too. As far as Dickson was concerned, the group needed Crosby's vocals, and that was an end of the matter. Crosby was back in the group, and all was forgotten. But there was another problem related to Crosby, as the Jet Set found out when they played their first gig, an unannounced spot at the Troubadour. The group had perfected their image, with their Beatles suits and pose of studied cool, but Crosby had never performed without an instrument before. He spent the gig prancing around the stage, trying to act like a rock star, wiggling his bottom in what he thought was a suggestive manner. It wasn't, and the audience found it hilarious. Crosby, who took himself very seriously at this point in time, felt humiliated, and decided that he needed to get an instrument to play. Obviously he couldn't go back to playing bass, so he did the only thing that seemed possible -- he started undermining Gene Clark's confidence as a player, telling him he was playing behind the beat. Clark -- who was actually a perfectly reasonable rhythm player -- was non-confrontational by nature and believed Crosby's criticisms. Soon he *was* playing behind the beat, because his confidence had been shaken. Crosby took over the rhythm guitar role, and from that point on it would be Gene Clark, not David Crosby, who would have to go on stage without an instrument. The Jet Set were still not getting very many gigs, but they were constantly in the studio, working on material. The most notable song they recorded in this period is "You Showed Me", a song written by Gene Clark and McGuinn, which would not see release at the time but which would later become a hit for both the Turtles and the Lightning Seeds: [Excerpt: The Jet Set, "You Showed Me"] Clark in particular was flourishing as a songwriter, and becoming a genuine talent. But Jim Dickson thought that the song that had the best chance of being the Jet Set's breakout hit wasn't one that they were writing themselves, but one that he'd heard Bob Dylan perform in concert, but which Dylan had not yet released himself. In 1964, Dylan was writing far more material than he could reasonably record, even given the fact that his albums at this point often took little more time to record than to listen to. One song he'd written but not yet put out on an album was "Mr. Tambourine Man". Dylan had written the song in April 1964, and started performing it live as early as May, when he was on a UK tour that would later be memorialised in D.A. Pennebaker's film Don't Look Back. That performance was later released in 2014 for copyright extension purposes on vinyl, in a limited run of a hundred copies. I *believe* this recording is from that: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Mr. Tambourine Man (live Royal Festival Hall 1964)"] Jim Dickson remembered the song after seeing Dylan perform it live, and started pushing Witmark Music, Dylan's publishers, to send him a demo of the song. Dylan had recorded several demos, and the one that Witmark sent over was a version that was recorded with Ramblin' Jack Elliot singing harmony, recorded for Dylan's album Another Side of Bob Dylan, but left off the album as Elliot had been off key at points: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and Ramblin' Jack Elliot, "Mr. Tambourine Man" (from Bootleg Series vol 7)] There have been all sorts of hypotheses about what "Mr. Tambourine Man" is really about. Robert Shelton, for example, suspects the song is inspired by Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater. de Quincey uses a term for opium, "the dark idol", which is supposedly a translation of the Latin phrase "mater tenebrarum", which actually means "mother of darkness" (or mother of death or mother of gloom). Shelton believes that Dylan probably liked the sound of "mater tenebrarum" and turned it into "Mister Tambourine Man". Others have tried to find links to the Pied Piper of Hamelin, or claimed that Mr. Tambourine Man is actually Jesus. Dylan, on the other hand, had a much more prosaic explanation -- that Mr. Tambourine Man was a friend of his named Bruce Langhorne, who was prominent in the Greenwich Village folk scene. As well as being a guitarist, Langhorne was also a percussionist, and played a large Turkish frame drum, several feet in diameter, which looked and sounded quite like a massively oversized tambourine. Dylan got that image in his head and wrote a song about it. Sometimes a tambourine is just a tambourine. (Also, in a neat little coincidence, Dylan has acknowledged that he took the phrase “jingle jangle” from a routine by Jim Dickson's old client, Lord Buckley.) Dickson was convinced that "Mr. Tambourine Man" would be a massive hit, but the group didn't like it. Gene Clark, who was at this point the group's only lead singer, didn't think it fit his voice or had anything in common with the songs he was writing. Roger McGuinn was nervous about doing a Dylan song, because he'd played at the same Greenwich Village clubs as Dylan when both were starting out -- he had felt a rivalry with Dylan then, and wasn't entirely comfortable with inviting comparisons with someone who had grown so much as an artist while McGuinn was still very much at the beginning of his career. And David Crosby simply didn't think that such a long, wordy, song had a chance of being a hit. So Dickson started to manipulate the group. First, since Clark didn't like singing the song, he gave the lead to McGuinn. The song now had one champion in the band, and McGuinn was also a good choice as he had a hypothesis that there was a space for a vocal sound that split the difference between John Lennon and Bob Dylan, and was trying to make himself sound like that -- not realising that Lennon himself was busily working on making his voice more Dylanesque at the same time. But that still wasn't enough -- even after Dickson worked with the group to cut the song down so it was only two choruses and one verse, and so came in under two minutes, rather than the five minutes that Dylan's original version lasted, Crosby in particular was still agitating that the group should just drop the song. So Dickson decided to bring in Dylan himself. Dickson was acquainted with Dylan, and told him that he was managing a Beatles-style group who were doing one of Dylan's songs, and invited him to come along to a rehearsal. Dylan came, partly out of politeness, but also because Dylan was as aware as anyone of the commercial realities of the music business. Dylan was making most of his money at this point as a songwriter, from having other people perform his songs, and he was well aware that the Beatles had changed what hit records sounded like. If the kids were listening to beat groups instead of to Peter, Paul, and Mary, then Dylan's continued commercial success relied on him getting beat groups to perform his songs. So he agreed to come and hear Jim Dickson's beat group, and see what he thought of what they were doing with his song. Of course, once the group realised that Dylan was going to be coming to listen to them, they decided that they had better actually work on their arrangement of the song. They came up with something that featured McGuinn's Searchers-style twelve-string playing, the group's trademark harmonies, and a rather incongruous-sounding marching beat: [Excerpt: The Jet Set, "Mr. Tambourine Man (early version)"] Dylan heard their performance, and was impressed, telling them "You can DANCE to it!" Dylan went on a charm offensive with the group, winning all of them round except Crosby -- but even Crosby stopped arguing the point, realising he'd lost. "Mr. Tambourine Man" was now a regular part of their repertoire. But they still didn't have a record deal, until one came from an unexpected direction. The group were playing their demos to a local promoter, Benny Shapiro, when Shapiro's teenage daughter came in to the room, excited because the music sounded so much like the Beatles. Shapiro later joked about this to the great jazz trumpet player Miles Davis, and Davis told his record label about this new group, and suddenly they were being signed to Columbia Records. "Mr. Tambourine Man" was going to be their first single, but before that they had to do something about the group's name, as Columbia pointed out that there was already a British group called the Jet Set. The group discussed this over Thanksgiving turkey, and the fact that they were eating a bird reminded Gene Clark of a song by the group's friend Dino Valenti, "Birdses": [Excerpt: Dino Valenti, "Birdses"] Clark suggested "The Birdses", but the group agreed it wasn't quite right -- though McGuinn, who was obsessed with aviation, did like the idea of a name that was associated with flight. Dickson's business partner Eddie Tickner suggested that they just call themselves "The Birds", but the group saw a problem with that, too -- "bird" being English slang for "girl", they worried that if they called themselves that people might think they were gay. So how about messing with the vowels, the same way the Beatles had changed the spelling of their name? They thought about Burds with a "u" and Berds with an "e", before McGuinn hit on Byrds with a y, which appealed to him because of Admiral Byrd, an explorer and pioneering aviator. They all agreed that the name was perfect -- it began with a "b", just like Beatles and Beach Boys, it was a pun like the Beatles, and it signified flight, which was important to McGuinn. As the group entered 1965, another major event happened in McGuinn's life -- the one that would lead to him changing his name. A while earlier, McGuinn had met a friend in Greenwich Village and had offered him a joint. The friend had refused, saying that he had something better than dope. McGuinn was intrigued to try this "something better" and went along with his friend to what turned out to be a religious meeting, of the new religious movement Subud, a group which believes, among other things, that there are seven levels of existence from gross matter to pure spirit, and which often encourages members to change their names. McGuinn was someone who was very much looking for meaning in his life -- around this time he also became a devotee of the self-help writer Norman Vincent Peale thanks to his mother sending him a copy of Peale's book on positive thinking -- and so he agreed to give the organisation a go. Subud involves a form of meditation called the laithan, and on his third attempt at doing this meditation, McGuinn had experienced what he believed was contact with God -- an intense hallucinatory experience which changed his life forever. McGuinn was initiated into Subud ten days before going into the studio to record "Mr. Tambourine Man", and according to his self-description, whatever Bob Dylan thought the song was about, he was singing to God when he sang it -- in earlier interviews he said he was singing to Allah, but now he's a born-again Christian he tends to use "God". The group had been assigned by CBS to Terry Melcher, mostly because he was the only staff producer they had on the West Coast who had any idea at all about rock and roll music, and Melcher immediately started to mould the group into his idea of what a pop group should be. For their first single, Melcher decided that he wasn't going to use the group, other than McGuinn, for anything other than vocals. Michael Clarke in particular was still a very shaky drummer (and would never be the best on his instrument) while Hillman and Crosby were adequate but not anything special on bass and guitar. Melcher knew that the group's sound depended on McGuinn's electric twelve-string sound, so he kept that, but other than that the Byrds' only contribution to the A-side was McGuinn, Crosby, and Clark on vocals. Everything else was supplied by members of the Wrecking Crew -- Jerry Cole on guitar, Larry Knechtel on bass, Leon Russell on electric piano, and Hal Blaine on drums: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mr. Tambourine Man"] Indeed, not everyone who performed at the session is even clearly audible on the recording. Both Gene Clark and Leon Russell were actually mixed out by Melcher -- both of them are audible, Clark more than Russell, but only because of leakage onto other people's microphones. The final arrangement was a mix of influences. McGuinn's twelve-string sound was clearly inspired by the Searchers, and the part he's playing is allegedly influenced by Bach, though I've never seen any noticeable resemblance to anything Bach ever wrote. The overall sound was an attempt to sound like the Beatles, while Melcher always said that the arrangement and feel of the track was inspired by "Don't Worry Baby" by the Beach Boys. This is particularly noticeable in the bass part -- compare the part on the Beach Boys record: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Don't Worry Baby (instrumental mix with backing vocals)"] to the tag on the Byrds record: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mr. Tambourine Man"] Five days before the Byrds recorded their single, Bob Dylan had finally recorded his own version of the song, with the tambourine man himself, Bruce Langhorne, playing guitar, and it was released three weeks before the Byrds' version, as an album track on Dylan's Bringing it All Back Home: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Mr. Tambourine Man"] Dylan's album would become one of the most important of his career, as we'll discuss in a couple of weeks, when we next look at Dylan. But it also provided an additional publicity boost for the Byrds, and as a result their record quickly went to number one in both the UK and America, becoming the first record of a Dylan song to go to number one on any chart. Dylan's place in the new pop order was now secured; the Byrds had shown that American artists could compete with the British Invasion on its own terms -- that the new wave of guitar bands still had a place for Americans; and folk-rock was soon identified as the next big commercial trend. And over the next few weeks we'll see how all those things played out throughout the mid sixties.

america god tv jesus christ american new york california live history canada black friends thanksgiving chicago english uk los angeles house americans british comedy cross dance romans tales confessions missouri hamilton cbs terror birds melbourne sharks beatles gate cd columbia air liverpool latin west coast elvis rock and roll golden globes campus david bowie turtles bob dylan usher elton john musicians turkish horn john lennon knife bach paul mccartney shades travelling allah darin pit encouraged warner brothers beach boys baxter shapiro buckley miles davis shelton george harrison pendulum bee gees tilt mcguire mixcloud madeira dickson vincent price beatle vern rising sun roger corman sam cooke rock music elektra daddies greenwich village hollywood bowl pied piper terrors high noon hard days david jones david crosby byrds british invasion ramblin troubadour hillman woody guthrie brian jones columbia records searchers eartha kitt wrecking crew valenti jet set leon russell weavers hamelin leadbelly norman vincent peale gari bobby darin josh white tambourine american bandstand roger miller michael clarke hold your hand another side melcher south seas elektra records royal festival hall quincey peale pennebaker youngbloods kingston trio beachball rickenbacker roger mcguinn admiral byrd langhorne dream lover brill building dillards belmonts hal blaine gene clark big bill broonzy green green chris hillman bobbies les baxter ewan maccoll i got you babe dion dimucci paul kantner bootleg series worry baby no direction home fred neil don kirshner mcguinn blue ribbons beefeaters terry melcher albert grossman lord buckley chad mitchell british r frank hamilton larry ramos dylanesque opium eater bruce langhorne tilt araiza
A Score To Settle
ASTS 041: The Evolving Sound of Science Fiction Cinema, Part 2-The 1960's

A Score To Settle

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 18, 2021 91:24


Welcome back to the podcast! In this episode I continue on to the next chapter of a multi-part deep dive, into the evolving music of Science Fiction cinema through the decades, with my focus today being the 1960's. Thus far, we've journeyed through the 1950's scores which were brimming with electric violins, theremins, Novachords, jarring stinger chords and harsh onslaughts of brass and percussion.   Now, as we advance into the 1960's, we'll hear sumptuous symphonic scores for THE TIME MACHINE (1960) and MASTER OF THE WORLD (1961), pop and jazz influences in PANIC IN YEAR ZERO! (1962) and BARBARELLA (1968) and avant garde concert techniques expressed in the music for FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966) and PLANET OF THE APES (1968). Composers featured here include Bernard Herrmann, Jerry Goldsmith, Les Baxter, Russell Garcia, Akira Ifukube - plus vocal crooning by Frankie Avalon! I also include samples of Alex North's original, unused score for the Stanley Kubrick directed, game-changing 1968 classic 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.   Stay safe out there, take care of yourself and each other!    Small correction: I mistakenly attribute the score for 1954's 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA to Paul Sawtell and Bert Shefter, but it was composed by Paul J. Smith. Thanks to my attentive listeners!   Connect with the podcast on Facebook and Twitter: www.facebook.com/ascoretosettle https://twitter.com/score2settlepod   Email the show at ascoretosettlepodcast@gmail.com   

The Reggae Podclash
The Reggae Podclash #39 - Joey Altruda 6/23/21

The Reggae Podclash

Play Episode Play 30 sec Highlight Listen Later Jun 23, 2021 120:56


Joey Altruda is an American musician, composer, producer and bandleader from Los Angeles. Formed In 1989,  his band Jump With Joey became a keystone in the revival of traditional Jamaican Ska, Rocksteady, and Reggae. Jump With Joey filled the dance floors backing Jamaican musicians such as Roland Alphonso, Laurel Aitken, Ernest Ranglin, Rico Rodriguez, Ken Lazarus. In 2006 Altruda was awarded a lifetime achievement award for the Preservation Of Jamaican Music and Culture. In the past 35 years he has worked with a wide spectrum of artists including Seu Jorge, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, Bo Diddley, El Gran Fellove, Joe Houston, Don & Dewey, Rose Maddox, Levi Dexter, Tom Waits, Joe Strummer, Plas Johnson, Les Baxter, as well as Studio One's main man, Sir Coxsone Dodd. Tune into www.TheReggaePodclash.com Wednesday, Jun 23, 2021 at 6pm PT as we talk all things including his latest collaboration with Tom Zé!ENTER TO WIN - AUGUSTUS PABLO "RISING SUN" LP courtesy of VP Records:https://gleam.io/lrZQh/win-an-augustus-pablo-rising-sun-lp-from-the-reggae-podclashSHOP PODCLASH MERCH! Every sale helps support the show. Thank you. https://rootfire-intl.myshopify.com/collections/the-reggae-podclashListen to Past Episodes: https://podlink.to/ReggaePodclash***Man-Like-Devin and Roger Rivas talk all things reggae with original and modern artists in the scene on http://Rootfire.net/tv​.#RootfireTV #TheReggaePodclash #JoeyAltrudaSupport the show (https://rootfire.net/tv/)

TV CONFIDENTIAL: A radio talk show about television

TVC 540.1: Ed welcomes Geoffrey Littlefield, author of Nelson Riddle: Music with a Heartbeat, a cradle to grave look at the complex, but often forlorn genius who was one of the chef architects of the Great American Songbook. Known for his many collaborations with Frank Sinatra, as well as such other music greats as Dean Martin, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, and Linda Ronstadt, Riddle had a tremendous influence on American popular music and the movie and TV soundtracks of our lives. Topics this segment include Riddle’s peculiar relationship with Sinatra, as well as his early work with Doris Day, Nat King Cole, and the Les Baxter orchestra. Tuesday, June 1, 2021 marks the centennial birthday of Nelson Riddle. Want to advertise/sponsor our show? TV Confidential has partnered with AdvertiseCast to handle advertising/sponsorship requests for the podcast edition of our program. They’re great to work with and will help you advertise on our show. Please email sales@advertisecast.com or click the link below to get started: https://www.advertisecast.com/TVConfidentialAradiotalkshowabout Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Weird Studies
Episode 98: Taboo: Time and Belief in Exotica

Weird Studies

Play Episode Listen Later May 12, 2021 80:27


Exotica is a kind of music that was popular in the 1950s, when it was simply known as "mood music." Though somewhat obscure today, the sound of exotica remains immediately recognizable to contemporary ears. Its use of "tribal" beats, ethereal voices, flutes and gongs evoke a world that is no more at home in the modern West than it is anywhere else on earth. With its shameless stereotyping of non-Western cultures and its aestheticization of the other, exotica rightly deserves the criticism it has drawn over the years. But as we shall see in this episode, if you stop there, you just might miss the thing that makes exotica so difficult to expunge from Western culture, and also what makes it a prime example of how the "trash stratum" sometimes becomes the site of strange visions that transcend culture altogether. REFERENCES Phil Ford, “Taboo: Time and Belief in Exotica” (https://online.ucpress.edu/representations/article/103/1/107/81624/Taboo-Time-and-Belief-in-Exotica) Future Fossils, Episode 157 (https://shows.acast.com/futurefossils/episodes/157) Weird Studies, Episode 21: The Trash Stratum (https://www.weirdstudies.com/21) Weird Studies, Episode 79: Love, Death and the Dream Life (https://www.weirdstudies.com/79) Jack Smith, “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness Maria Montez” Yma Sumac, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yma_Sumac) Peruvian singer Les Baxter, "The Oasis of Dakhla" Steely Dan, "I Heard the News" Stravinsky, Rite of Spring Les Baxter, “Hong Kong Cable Car” Jacques Riviere, review of The Rite of Spring (http://sarma.be/docs/621) Nenao Sakaki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanao_Sakaki), Japanese poet Lew Welch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lew_Welch), American Beat poet JF Martel, “Stay with Mystery: Hiroshima Mon Amour, Melancholia, and the truth of extinction” (http://notesandqueries.ca/number-106/) Jeffrey Kripal, Mutants and Mystics (https://bookshop.org/books/mutants-and-mystics-science-fiction-superhero-comics-and-the-paranormal/9780226271484) Captain Beefheart, “Orange Claw Hammer” Martin Buber, I and Thou (https://bookshop.org/books/i-and-thou/9780684717258)

Prospettive Musicali
Prospettive Musicali di dom 09/05/21

Prospettive Musicali

Play Episode Listen Later May 9, 2021 95:04


a cura di Alessandro Achilli. Musiche: Les Baxter, Billie Holiday, Nick Mason, Carla Bley, Wyatt, Frith, Gowen, Miller, Artchipel, Comicoperando, Gong, de Liège, Cameo Adele, Nym, Ziad Rahbani, Natalie Bergman, Braida, Locatelli, Sutera

EL GUATEQUE
EL GUATEQUE T07C015 Esta semana recordamos a Mari Trini, que se fue un 6 de abril (04/04/2021)

EL GUATEQUE

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 4, 2021 55:43


En El Guateque (orm.es; domingos, 22,05h) rescatamos olvidadas melodías del ayer. Esta semana recordamos a Mari Trini (María Trinidad Pérez de Miravete Mille), que se fue un 6 de abril. Tenía 61 años. Fue una de las más populares cantantes españolas en los años setenta y ochenta. En abril nació el amor, En 1974 enviaron el tema Addio amor al Festival de San Remo, aunque en esta ocasión no tuvieron tanta suerte. Addio amor se convertiría en Adiós amor para el disco Mocedades 4. Abril en Portugal es un fado escrito por Raúl Ferrao, que se tituló Coimbra, y que Les Baxter la grabó para Capitol Records en marzo de 1953 y estuvo 22 semanas en lista. Hasta el avispado Julio Iglesias hizo una versión de este tema. AMALIA RODRIGUES. La Reina del Fado, naturalmente la grabó también con ese sonido de guitarras portuguesas respetando las raíces. En abril se echa la calle a la vida. Bienaventurados, disco de 1987 contiene otra de las más bellas canciones de Serrat: Especialmente en abril; el arreglo musical unido a la letra y a la voz de Serrat nos dejan sin aliento. “Especialmente en abril la razón se indisciplina y como una serpentina se enmaraña por ahí. Van buscando los rincones sofocadas las parejas, hacen planes y se dejan llevar por las emociones, sin atender, imprudentes, el consejo de Neruda que las nieves son más crudas en abril especialmente…”. The Spotnicks eran un grupo sueco de rock instrumantal aparecido en 1961. Junto con los Shadows y los Ventures formaron el triunvirato de grandes bandas instrumentales de los 60. Impresionaban con sus indumentarias espaciales en el escenario y también por su innovador sonido de guitarras eléctricas. En 1967 el sello catalán Belter se fija en Elsa Baeza, y la ficha para grabar el que sería su primer disco, el EP, ”Dubeque Dublin", También escucharemos a la grandiosa y espectacular GIGLIOLA CINQUETTI, a los que algunos la han calificado como “EL TESORO DE ITALIA”, una forma de expresar todo el cariño que le prodigan los italianos. Las Grecas nos ofrecen una gran lectura de los Turtles, Happy together. Aunque en la vida real no fueron tan felices. Tina vivia su propia guerra interna. Nos anticipamos al Día Internacional de la Salud con Yolanda. Deliciosa su versión de “La salud”, una composición del siempre irreverente Serge Gainsbourg con un aroma de lo más francés captado por la cantante que hace una buena interpretación. La letra ofrece perlas tan saludables como estas: “Procurar la línea conservar. Por la mañana al despertar, un zumo de limón después seguir la prescripción del doctor Marañón...”. April Come She Will, Simon & Garfunkel. Este clásico de Simon & Farfunkel desgrana los diferentes meses de la primavera y el verano, hasta llegar al otoño en algo así como un camino metafórico del evolucionar de un amor de juventud y primaveral hasta que se marchita. La cantante valenciana Lolita Garrido, una gran cantante de boleros que fue censurada porque cantaba «muy provocativo». Parece una historia de Fellini, pero dicen que cantó para el Sha de Persia en uno de sus palacios. Si quieres viajar a los años 50' de forma inmediata, lo mejor que puedes hacer es cerrar los ojos y escuchar esta canción, April Love, de Sammy Fain. Se trata de un tema instrumental que fue la banda sonora original de la película de 1957 que llevaba el mismo título que el de esta canción. Con la orquesta Mantovani. Cada mes tiene su flor, y la de abril es la margarita. Margarita” ha sido cantada por miles de jóvenes universitarios que pasaron por la Milicias Universitarias. Micky y Los Tonys nos devuelven a la pista con una versión en español de la canción que popularizó el grupo de folk estadounidense The New Christy Minstrels, de Barry McGuire. “Canta con Nosotros”, compuesta por Herrero y Armenteros, fue el primer sencillo de Voces Amigas, que salió al mercado en las postrimerías del emblemático 68, subiendo en las listas como la espuma. La cancioncita de marras era un auténtico banderín de enganche, exhortando a la juventud - a cierta juventud - que “Sabe entender” y atesora “Mucha fe”, a una juventud sana, de buen corazón y nobles y propósitos, a comprometerse, a unirse a una causa que abanderaba valores como la naturaleza, el amor sincero, la paz del mundo...

Cally Raduenzel's Podcast Lunatic Fringe
Permanent Vacation/Oahu/Lounge Tiki Lifestyle...

Cally Raduenzel's Podcast Lunatic Fringe

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 28, 2021 12:03


Polynesian Village, remember that...or Don Ho? Well in this shorty episode we will cover a fun new compilation CD called Technicolor Paradise, which according to the label who put it out, Numero Group...it's all about "rum rhapsodies and other exotic delights' from the music of Les Baxter to Martin Denny. Then we will chat about Permanent Vacation my new book that hopes to make you feel as fine as a mystery solved by Hawaii 5-0. Shout out to Dusty Groove a GREAT record store you need to go crate digging in!

Sateli 3
Sateli 3 - Music Non-Stop Sessions: "Ultra-Lounge, 01: Mondo Exotica" - 23/03/21

Sateli 3

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 23, 2021 58:51


Sintonía: "Atlantis" - Les Baxter El primer volumen de la colección "Ultra-Lounge", editada por Capitol Records en 1996 "Swamp Fire" - Martin Denny; "Moon Mist" - The Out-Islanders; "Caravan" - 80 Drums Around The World; "Hypnotique" - Martin Denny; "Alika" - Webley Edwards; "Misirlou" - Martin Denny; "Lust" - Bas Sheva; "Hana Maui" - Chick Floyd & His Orchestra; "Voodoo Dreams/Voodoo" - Les Baxter; "Jungle Madness" - Martin Denny; "Babalu" - Yma Sumac; "Simba" - Les Baxter; "The Girlfriend of the Whirling Dervish" - Martin Denny; "Bali Ha i" - Tak Shindo; "Pyramid Of The Sun" - Les Baxter; "Quiet Village" - Martin Denny; "Wimoweh" - Yma Sumac Escuchar audio

Zen Tiki Lounge
445 Is That Kombucha In Your Tiki Drink?

Zen Tiki Lounge

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 23, 2021


This trip into the Zen Tiki Lounge is nothing more than a nice conversation with great drinks and exotica. Sunshine mixed up a little something tropical with kombucha, rum and fresh juice. Les Baxter is playing throughout the show.

Jouissance Vampires
Episode 19 Ishay Landa Part 1: The Apprentice's Sorcerer

Jouissance Vampires

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 18, 2021 60:32


@DanielTutt interviews Ishay Landa, author of The Apprentice's Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism, Fascism and the Masses: The Revolt Against the Last Humans, The Overman in the Marketplace: Nietzschean Heroism in Popular Culture and player of the harmonica! Part 1 of this 2 part episode focuses on Fascism and liberalism, neoliberalism vs liberalism, discourse of fascism- identity and race, contemporary crisis of liberalism, the 4 myths of fascism, individualism, origins of fascism, and fascism today. Song "Simba" by Les Baxter

Sateli 3
Sateli 3 - The Music Non-Stop Week, 01: Music for Dancefloors (KPM) - 12/01/21

Sateli 3

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 12, 2021 59:17


Sintonía: "Interlude: Witchdoctor" - Nascimbene Las "Music Green Label Sessions", de la Música de Librería del sello KPM, compiladas por Adrian Gibson y Quinton Scott para el sello Strut en el 2000: "That´s What Friends Are For (Vocal)" - Madeline Bell & Alan Parker; "Unlimited Love" - Alan Parker; "Funky Express" (re-edit) - Duncan Lamont; "Assault Course" - Johnny Pearson; "Samba Street" - Barry Morgan & Ray Cooper; "Second Cut" (re-edit) - James Clarke; "Swamp Fever" - John Cameron; "Reggae Train" - William Farley & Dennis Bovell; "Incidental Backcloth No.3" - Keith Mansfield; "Cross Talk" - Francis Coppieters; "In Advanced" (re-edit) - P. Xanten & Pierre Lavin Pop Band; "Senior Thump" - Alan Hawkshaw; "Expo in Tokyo" - Alan Moorhouse; "Jungle Baby" - H. Ehrlinger and Juan Erlando & His Latin Band; "Morning 1/Morning 2" - Klaus Weiss Sounds & Percussion; "Freeway to Rio" - Les Baxter; "Brazil Express" - G. Callert and Juan Erlando & His Latin Band; "Piano in Transit" - Francis Coppieters; "Crash Course" - Keith Mansfield. Escuchar audio

95bFM: Morning Glory
Morning Glory Holiday Spectacular with Keria: Friday, December 25, 2020

95bFM: Morning Glory

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 24, 2020


It's time for a holiday spectacular with Keria! No xmas tunes, just the hits for 3 hours straight. Featuring Ray Anthony, David Joseph, Ingram, Les Baxter, S-Tone Inc., Sugar Babe and many more. Happy holidays right in your eardrums... ~ ~ ~

95bFM
Morning Glory Holiday Spectacular with Keria: Friday, December 25, 2020

95bFM

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 24, 2020


It's time for a holiday spectacular with Keria! No xmas tunes, just the hits for 3 hours straight. Featuring Ray Anthony, David Joseph, Ingram, Les Baxter, S-Tone Inc., Sugar Babe and many more. Happy holidays right in your eardrums... ~ ~ ~

The Apple of Truth: A Lucifer Podcast
Episode 6: TAOT Lucifer S1E06

The Apple of Truth: A Lucifer Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 22, 2020 57:44


This one got us good. It's filled with fun bits and intense emotions. Dan is learning about relationships (about time) and Lucifer is learning about himself. Linda is taking advice from Ames and Trixie from Lucifer. What a rollercoaster! And let's not forget all the links that we randomly promised throughout the episode! Tom Ellis singing Sinnerman: https://youtu.be/J7yMzfplUco Final confrontation in therapy with Linda: https://youtu.be/TGgBJA7AxGo Correction on Nina Simone Sinnerman year release, it was in fact 1965, version that was recorded and released in 1956 is by Les Baxter and it is now also on the playlist, here is a youtube link just for good measure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZWlE502g_4 And last but not least the song that isn't on Spotify: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roZvgk0J4Po As always, find us on our various social media platforms: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/taotpodcast Twitter: https://twitter.com/theappleoftruth or Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/taotpodcast Listen to the playlist on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5VI3suSs77JIoV6b8BmBvx?si=83z3fg-ZRGq3bMcJF31kbQ Enjoy!

cocktailnation
Cocktail Nation Evenings At The Penthouse-Relaxing With Les

cocktailnation

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 16, 2017 61:15


  Some relaxing tunes with the great Les Baxter to unwind to at the end of the day!   www.cocktailnation.net   Les Baxter- Adios The Enchanted Sea Les Le'vres Dream Rhapsody Moon Moods Joy Quiet Village Oasis Of Dakhla Speak Low Lunar Rhapsody Ecstasy Shooting Star Bustin The Bongos City Of Veils Acapulco Coco Adios  

cocktailnation
Cocktail Nation Evening At The Penthouse-Exotica

cocktailnation

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 10, 2017 47:51


The tiki tunes are out this week as Kooper relaxes on a tropical island so he figured why not spin the exotica tracks and it's even more relaxing because James Spencer did all the work programming the show. Cheers to you Jimmy Jazz ww.cocktailnation.net   “Oasis of Dahkla” from Tamboo! (1956) Les Baxter “The Mysterious Jade Temple of Dahkla” from Exotica (2017) James Spencer “Swamp Fire” from Afro-Desia (1959) Martin Denny “Moorean Moonbeams” from Voodoo II (2007) Robert Drasnin “Stone Gods of Bimini” from Pagan Rites (2007) Ixtahuele “Voodoo Dreams” from Bahia (1959) Arthur Lyman “Return to Paradise” from Polynesian Fantasy (1961) Out-Islanders “Strange Enchantment” from Tropical Magic (1959) Korla Pandit “Taita Inty” from Voice of the Xtabay (1950) Yma Sumac “River of Dreams” from The Music of Les Baxter (1963) Don Tiare “Manila” from Adventures in Paradise (2009) Waitiki 7 “My Isle of Golden Dreams” from Sea of Dreams (1958) Nelson Riddle “Wild Orchids” from Wild Orchids 1964) Rex Kona “Quiet Village” from Exotica (2017) James Spencer

cocktailnation
Cocktail Nation Evenings At The Penthouse- Les Baxter

cocktailnation

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 30, 2016 61:15


Relax in the Penthouse with Koop as he spins an evening of Les Baxter as programmed by James Spencer who recently wrote a book about the great musician https://www.amazon.com/Baxter-James-Spencer/dp/1530961203   LES BAXTER is the first published biography to examine a detailed history of composer and musician Leslie Thompson Baxter. One of Capitol Record's most prominent artists, Les had 35 hits and 11 album hits in a career that expanded nearly fifty years. Les is one of America's most influential, innovative and unique composers of of the 20th century. He is the father of Exotica, Space-Age Bachelor Music, and his experimental and innovative film scores set the standards for the genres of horror, sci-fi, westerns, and teen-age beach movies. The biography was researched over twenty years and includes rare interviews by Skip Heller, a protege who studied and was companion to Les during the last few years of his life. James Spencer, musicologist, concert pianist and recording artist became friends with Les Baxter in 1991 and documents the last five years of Les' life until his death in January of 1996. James Spencer includes a complete discography, filmography, comparative Hits study of Les Baxter and Martin Denny. The book includes personal remembrances by Les Baxter's daughter Leslie Eaton and others that knew Les. Musicologist Jeff Chenault introduces us to Les with a thoughtful foreword to this 700 page in depth biography of the man who penned the Exotica anthem "Quiet Village." Come join our "Quiet Village" and read this fascinating biography about the musical genius... Les Baxter   www.cocktailnation.net Les Baxter- Adios The Enchanted Sea Les Le'vres Dream Rhapsody Moon Moods Joy Quiet Village Oasis Of Dakhla Speak Low Lunar Rhapsody Ecstasy

cocktailnation
Cocktail Nation Special-Les Baxter The Book- Full interview and all songs Les Baxter

cocktailnation

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 26, 2016 62:56


A Cocktail Nation midweek special this week as I have a long chat with James Spencer and play some of the big songs of Les Baxter's career as programmed by Mr Spencer himself! LES BAXTER is the first published biography to examine a detailed history of composer and musician Leslie Thompson Baxter. One of Capitol Record's most prominent artists, Les had 35 hits and 11 album hits in a career that expanded nearly fifty years. Les is one of America's most influential, innovative and unique composers of of the 20th century. He is the father of Exotica, Space-Age Bachelor Music, and his experimental and innovative film scores set the standards for the genres of horror, sci-fi, westerns, and teen-age beach movies. The biography was researched over twenty years and includes rare interviews by Skip Heller, a protege who studied and was companion to Les during the last few years of his life. James Spencer, musicologist, concert pianist and recording artist became friends with Les Baxter in 1991 and documents the last five years of Les' life until his death in January of 1996. www.cocktailnation.ne 1. “Quiet Village” [The Ritual of the Savage (1951) 2. “Oasis of Dahkla [Tamboo! (1956) 3. “The Enchanted Sea” [Jewels of the Sea (1961)  4. “Moon Moods” [Music Out of the Moon (1948)] with Harry Revel 5. “Dream Rhapsody” [Midnight On the Cliffs (1957]  6. “Nightmare Sequence” [The Fall of the House of Usher (1960)]   7. “Speak Low” [Thinking of You (1954)]   8. “Joy” [ The Passions with Bas Sheva (1954)]   9. “Les Levres” from La Femme (Franck Pourcel and his French Strings)1956 10. “Adios”  from Caribbean Moonlight 1956 

cocktailnation
Cocktail Nation 413 Les Baxter Special

cocktailnation

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 23, 2016 63:55


This week we have a chat to James Spencer about his new bio on Les Baxter, we head to the Blogoshere with a cool blog for the gals to check out and Cherry Capri has some advice on how to treat new neighbours. News on an old tv franchise that is being brought back for netflix and one that is brand new that you just have to check out! www.cocktailnation.net Louisville Sluggers- Time For Swinging Tiki Lounge Crew-Copa Del Mar Les Baxter-Quiet Village Gene Rains-Flamingo Peggy Lee-The Boy From Ipanema City Of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra-Lost In Space Martini Kings-You Only Live Twice The Acca Dacquiries-Wild Thing Chet Baker And Strings You Better Go Now Pat Longo-Rhapsody In blue Liberace-Tico Tico Mr Ho's Orchestrotica-Dancing In The Dark Julie Lyon Quartet- All or Nothing At All Kahuna Kawentizman -Kava Village Tikiyaki Orchestra-Maitais On The Moon

cocktailnation
Cocktail Nation 407 The Quiller Memorandam

cocktailnation

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 4, 2016 60:01


This week on the Cocktail nation it's another Euro spy special as we take a look at a very cool spy flick called the Quiller Memorandum , new book that you need all about Les Baxter and swinging by the studio it's, Cherry Capri with dear Cherry as she talks about handling sick people www.cocktailnation.net Codename Carter-Time Bomb Henry Mancini -Charade Matt Monro-Wednesdays Child Martini Kings-Enchanted Lovers Nancy Sinatra -You Only Live Twice Daniel Pemberton-The Vincinguerra Affair Tiki Delights-Sandy Samba Bobby Darin-After Today Martini Kings-Dance Of the Virgins Pedro Garcis Senjor Juez Anita O'day and Cal Tjader-The Partys Over Metropole Orchestra-Magic Is The Moonlight Narco Lounge Combo- Caravan Les Baxter-Bali Hai Left Arm Of Budda-A Monkeys Affair Bobby Fox-Mr Kicks Tiki Lounge Crew Summer Sunset The Third Wave-Waves Lament