Podcasts about Little Queenie

Send us a textIntro song: If Everyone Cared by Nickelback (#50)Album 10: Chaos and Creation in the Backyard by Paul McCartney (2005)Song 1: English TeaSong 2: Promise To You GirlSong 3: AnywayAlbum 9: The Great Twenty-Eight by Chuck Berry (1955-1965)Song 1: Too Much Monkey BusinessSong 2: Sweet Little Rock & RollerSong 3: Little Queenie

Hey Cher, the Indians are coming, no worry Big Chief, we just family road trippin' down to New Orleans and this show is dedicated to some of the best soul and funk ever made, and that is still being made and played today. Every day is a Party down in the big easy, it's not just Mardis Gras. And the music always plays. The folklorist traditions in Crescent City live large. Enjoy. Music Louis Armstrong, Dr. John, The Wild Tchoupitoulas, Yes Ma'am, 79rs Gang, The Dixie Cups, The Wild Magnolias, Big Chief Monk Boudreaux & The Golden Eagles, Big Chief Monk Boudreaux & The Golden Eagles, Little Queenie & The Percolators and loads more. Tune into new broadcasts of Worldy with Matt and Dom, LIVE, Monday from 10 AM - 12 Noon EST / 3- 5 PM GMT.For more info visit: https://thefaceradio.com/worldy///Dig this show? Please consider supporting The Face Radio: http://support.thefaceradio.com Support The Face Radio with PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/thefaceradio. Join the family at https://plus.acast.com/s/thefaceradio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

"Tunes of the Season: Phish, Grateful Dead, and Merry Jams"Larry Mishkin   discusses Christmas-themed songs performed by various artists, including The Who and Grateful Dead. Larry delves into The Who's rock opera "Tommy," particularly focusing on the song "Christmas" and its critical reception. He transitions to discussing Grateful Dead's rendition of Chuck Berry's "Run, Rudolph, Run" performed at the Felt Forum in 1971 and analyzes its significance in the band's repertoire.Larry further explores the potential residency of bands like Dead & Company at the Sphere in Las Vegas, following U2's shows there. He touches on Phish's upcoming performances at the same venue and discusses the difficulty in acquiring tickets for these highly anticipated shows.Later, Larry reminisces about New Year's Eve shows by various bands, specifically mentioning Grateful Dead's memorable performances during the countdown. He also features unconventional Christmas renditions by Phish and Jerry Garcia with David Grisman..Produced by PodConx   Theme – Rock n Roll ChristmasIf you were in the Mishkin household earlier this morning, you might have heard this blasting out of the speakers:INTRO:               ChristmasThe WhoFebruary 14, 1970University of Leeds, Leeds, England  aka  “Live At Leeds”The Who - Christmas - Live At Leeds (with Footage) (youtube.com)2:00 – 3:17 "Christmas" is a song written by Pete Townshend and is the seventh song on The Who's rock opera Tommy. On the original LP, it opens the second side of the album.  Tommy is the fourth studio album by the English rock band the Who, first released on 19 May 1969.[2] Primarily written by guitarist Pete Townshend, Tommy is a double album and an early rock opera that tells the story of Tommy Walker and his experiences through life. The song tells how on Christmas morning, Tommy's father is worried about Tommy's future, and soul. His future is jeopardized due to being deaf, dumb, and blind.[2] The lyrics contrast religious themes such as Christmas and Jesus Christ with Tommy's ignorance of such matters. The rhetorical question, "How can he be saved from the eternal grave?" is asked about Tommy's condition and adds speculation as to the nature of original sin and eternal salvation. In the middle of the song, "Tommy can you hear me?" is repeated, with Tommy responding, "See me, feel me, touch me, heal me." "Christmas" was praised by critics. Richie Unterberger of AllMusic called it an "excellent song."[5]Rolling Stone's Mac Randall said it was one of several "prime Pete Townshend songs" on the album.[6] A review in Life by Albert Goldman considered it beautiful and highlighted the song's "croaking chorus".[7] James Perone said it was "perhaps one of the best sleeper tracks of the collection." Townshend came up with the concept of Tommy after being introduced to the work of Meher Baba, and he attempted to translate Baba's teachings into music. Recording on the album began in September 1968, but took six months to complete as material needed to be arranged and re-recorded in the studio. Tommy was acclaimed upon its release by critics, who hailed it as the Who's breakthrough. Its critical standing diminished slightly in later years; nonetheless, several writers view it as an important and influential album in the history of rock music. The Who promoted the album's release with an extensive tour, including a live version of Tommy, which lasted throughout 1969 and 1970. Key gigs from the tour included appearances at Woodstock, the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival, the University of Leeds, the Metropolitan Opera House, and the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival. The live performances of Tommy drew critical praise and revitalised the band's career. Live at Leeds is the first live album by English rock band the Who. It was recorded at the University of Leeds Refectory on 14 February 1970, and is their only live album that was released while the group were still actively recording and performing with their best-known line-up of Roger Daltrey, Pete Townshend, John Entwistle and Keith Moon. The album was released on 11 May 1970 by Decca and MCA in the United States,[2] and by Track and Polydor in the United Kingdom. It has been reissued on several occasions and in several different formats. Since its release, Live at Leeds has been ranked by several music critics as the best live rock recording of all time SHOW No. 1:                   Run Rudolph RunGrateful DeadFelt Forum at MSG, NYCDecember 7, 1971Track No. 10Grateful Dead Live at Felt Forum, Madison Square Garden on 1971-12-07 : Free Borrow & Streaming : Internet Archive0:11 – 1:54 Run Rudolph Run"[2][3][4] is a Christmas song written by Chuck Berry but credited to Johnny Marks and M. Brodie due to Marks' trademark on the character of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.[5][note 1] It was published by St. Nicholas Music (ASCAP) and was first recorded by Berry in 1958, released as a single on Chess Records.It has since been covered by numerous other artists, sometimes with the title "Run Run Rudolph".[16] The song is a 12-bar blues, musically similar to Berry's popular and recognizable song "Johnny B. Goode", and melodically similar to his song "Little Queenie", the latter of which was released shortly after, in 1959.During its initial chart run, Berry's 1958 recording peaked at number 69 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in December 1958.[22] Sixty years later, the single re-entered the Hot 100 chart at number 45 (on the week ending January 5, 2019), reaching an overall peak position of number 10 on the week ending January 2, 2021, following its third chart re-entry, becoming Berry's third top-ten hit and his first since 1972's "My Ding-a-Ling". In doing so, it broke the record for the longest climb to the top 10 since its first entry in December 1958, at 62 years and two weeks.This Ciip:Out of Brokedown Palace and into You Win AgainPlayed a total of 7 times.This was the first timeLast:  December 15, 1971 Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor, MI  SHOW No. 2:     Little Drummer BoyPhishJuly 3, 1999Coca Cola Lakewood Amphitheatre, Atlanta, GAPhish - The Little Drummer Boy - 7/3/1999 - Atlanta, GA (youtube.com)Start to 1:30 Out of Contact to close the second set.  Played it again as the first encore (into, Won't You Come Home Bill Bailery starring Page's dad, Jack, on vocals and kazoo. "The Little Drummer Boy" (originally known as "Carol of the Drum") is a Czechoslovakian popular Christmas song written by American composer Katherine Kennicott Davis in 1941.[1] First recorded in 1951 by the Austrian Trapp Family, the song was further popularized by a 1958 recording by the Harry Simeone Chorale; the Simeone version was re-released successfully for several years, and the song has been recorded many times since.[2] In the lyrics, the singer relates how, as a poor young boy, he was summoned by the Magi to the Nativity of Jesus. Without a gift for the Infant, the little drummer boy played his drum with approval from Jesus' mother, Mary, recalling, "I played my best for him" and "He smiled at me". Phish has only performed the song three times during the month of December – the debut performance segueing out of “Mike's Song” and into “Whipping Post,” a tease during the 12/28/94 “Weekapaug Groove,” and jammed out of the “YEM” vocal jam (12/2/99) (which melted down until Jon was left singing it to close the set). But the song was jammed out of season during “My Friend, My Friend” (3/18/93) and “Stash” (7/15/93), and teased during “Weekapaug Groove” and “Big Ball Jam” (4/9/94), “Wilson” (8/13/97), “Silent in the Morning” (7/4/99), and "Wilson" (4/16/04). This version is generally considered to be Fishman's most memorable version.  SHOW No. 3:     God Rest Ye Merry GentlemenJerry Garcia and David GrismanNovember 9, 1991Warfield Theater, S.F.God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen - Jerry Garcia - Bing videoStart – 1:37Out of The Two Sisters to close second set "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen" is an English traditional Christmas carol. It is in the Roxburghe Collection (iii. 452), and is listed as no. 394 in the Roud Folk Song Index. It is also known as "Tidings of Comfort and Joy", and by other variant incipits. An early version of this carol is found in an anonymous manuscript, dating from the 1650s it appeared in a parody published in 1820 by William Hone.               Story here is the way Jerry and David play so tight, trading off leads and filling in gaps.  A great sound for a traditional tune.  There are many sides of Jerry and we don't get to see all of them.  Nice to take a break from the traditional Dead stuff and take a look in at what else Garcia was doing during that creative period of his life. SHOW No. 4:                   Stagger LeeGrateful DeadDecember 30, 1985Track No. 6Grateful Dead Live at Oakland Coliseum on 1985-12-30 : Free Borrow & Streaming : Internet ArchiveStart – 1:32 As is made clear by the opening lyrics, this is a tale about events that unfolded and played out on Christmas: “1940 Xmas Eve with a full moon over town”.  On some occasions, Jerry was  known to substitute in “Christmas” Eve. "Stagger Lee", also known as "Stagolee" and other variants, is a popular American folk song about the murder of Billy Lyons by "Stag" Lee Shelton, in St. Louis, Missouri, at Christmas 1895. The song was first published in 1911 and first recorded in 1923, by Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians, titled "Stack O' Lee Blues". A version by Lloyd Price reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1959. The historical Stagger Lee was Lee Shelton, an African-American pimp living in St. Louis, Missouri, in the late 19th century. He was nicknamed Stag Lee or Stack Lee, with a variety of explanations being given: he was given the nickname because he "went stag" (went to social events unaccompanied by a person of the opposite sex); he took the nickname from a well-known riverboat captain called Stack Lee; or, according to John and Alan Lomax, he took the name from a riverboat owned by the Lee family of Memphis called the Stack Lee, which was known for its on-board prostitution.[2] Shelton was well known locally as one of the Macks, a group of pimps who demanded attention through their flashy clothing and appearance.[3] In addition to those activities, he was the captain of a black Four Hundred Club, a social club with a dubious reputation. On Christmas night in 1895, Shelton and his acquaintance William "Billy" Lyons were drinking in the Bill Curtis Saloon. Lyons was also a member of St. Louis' underworld, and may have been a political and business rival to Shelton. Eventually, the two men got into a dispute, during which Lyons took Shelton's Stetson hat.[5]Subsequently, Shelton shot Lyons, recovered his hat, and left.[6] Lyons died of his injuries, and Shelton was charged, tried, and convicted of the murder in 1897. He was paroled in 1909, but returned to prison in 1911 for assault and robbery. He died in incarceration in 1912. The Grateful Dead frequently played and eventually recorded a version of the tale which focuses on the fictionalized hours after the death of "Billy DeLyon", when Billy's wife Delia tracks down Stagger Lee in a local saloon and "she shot him in the balls" in revenge for Billy's death. Based on the traditional song "Stagger Lee", "Stagolee" or "Stack O'Lee." Robert Hunter wrote a version that he performed solo, and Jerry Garcia subsequently re-ordered the lyrics and rewrote the music for the Grateful Dead's version. More recently Bob Weir has also been performing some of the older traditional versions with Ratdog. Dead released it on Shakedown Street, Nov. 8, 1978 Played 146 times by the Dead1st:  August 30, 1978Last:  June 18, 1995 Giants Stadium  OUTRO:              Santa Clause Is Coming To TownBruce Springsteen and the E Street BandCW Post University, Greenvale, NYDecember, 19756Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town (Live at C.W. Post College, Greenvale, NY - December 1975) - Bing video2:15 - 4:00               Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town" is a Christmas song featuring Santa Claus, written by J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie and first recorded by Harry Reser and His Band.[1] When it was covered by Eddie Cantor on his radio show in November 1934 it became a hit; within 24 hours, 500,000 copies of sheet music and more than 30,000 records were sold.[2][3] The version for Bluebird Records by George Hall and His Orchestra (vocal by Sonny Schuyler) was very popular in 1934 and reached the various charts of the day.[4] The song has been recorded by over 200 artists including Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, the Crystals, Neil Diamond, Fred Astaire, Bruce Springsteen, Frank Sinatra, Bill Evans, Chris Isaak, the Temptations, The Pointer Sisters, the Carpenters, Michael Bublé, Luis Miguel, and the Jackson 5 A rock version by Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band was recorded on December 12, 1975, at C. W. Post College in Brookville, New York, by Record Plant engineers Jimmy Iovine and Thom Panunzio.[14][15] This version borrows the chorus refrain from the 1963 recording by the Crystals.[16] It was first released as a track on the 1981 Sesame Street compilation album, In Harmony 2, as well as on a 1981 promotional, radio-only, 7-inch single (Columbia AE7 1332).[17][18] Four years later, it was released as the B-side to "My Hometown," a single off the Born in the U.S.A. album.[19] Springsteen's rendition of the song has received radio airplay perennially at Christmastime for years; it appeared on Billboard magazine's Hot Singles Recurrents chart each year from 2002 to 2009 due to seasonal air play. Live performances of the song often saw the band encouraging the audience to sing some of the lyrics with—or in place of—the band's vocalists (usually the line "you'd better be good for goodness sake", and occasionally the key line "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town" as well). Sometimes, concert crowds would sing along with the entire song, and the band, who were known to encourage this behavior for the song, would do nothing to dissuade those audiences from doing so, instead welcoming the crowds' enthusiasm. This version remains a Springsteen concert favorite during the months of November and December (often concluding the show), and the band is among the few that keep it in their roster of songs during the holidays. Dead & Co at the Sphere?Phish – sold out fast Merry ChristmasHappy Holidays .Produced by PodConx Deadhead Cannabis Show - https://podconx.com/podcasts/deadhead-cannabis-showLarry Mishkin - https://podconx.com/guests/larry-mishkinRob Hunt - https://podconx.com/guests/rob-huntJay Blakesberg - https://podconx.com/guests/jay-blakesbergSound Designed by Jamie Humiston - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-humiston-91718b1b3/Recorded on Squadcast

Musicians are gathering in New Orleans this week for what is fast becoming an annual tribute to a queen. Leigh “Little Queenie” Harris, of Lil Queenie and the Percolators, lost her battle with cancer in 2019, and for three of the past four years, her birthday, July 27, has been honored with a tribute concert.  Alex MacDonald, Little Queenie's son, joins us for more on his mother's legacy and the upcoming concert on what has now been officially declared ‘Little Queenie Day.' Tulane's Summer Lyric Theatre is wrapping up its season with a production of Lionel Bart's Oliver! The musical is based on the novel Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens and stars rising 7th grader Liam Askew in the lead role. He joins us, along with director Sean Patterson, for more.  But first, Next Generation Radio is a five-day multimedia project highlighting the experiences of people in the Gulf States. The project was produced in May 2023 in partnership with the Gulf States Newsroom, where young reporters explored the question: What does it mean to be home? Today we hear from Lora Ann Chaisson, the Principal Chief of the United Houma Nation in southeast Louisiana. Residing in Pointe-aux-Chênes, the Indigenous tribe of nearly 19,000 embodies her feelings of home – which is defined by family, food and the bayou. This story was produced by Owen Racer, a freelance journalist in New Orleans.  Today's episode of Louisiana Considered was hosted by Diane Mack. Our managing producer is Alana Schreiber and our digital editor is Katelyn Umholtz. Our engineers are Garrett Pittman and Aubry Procell. You can listen to Louisiana Considered Monday through Friday at 12:00 and 7:30 pm. It's available on Spotify, Google Play, and wherever you get your podcasts.  Louisiana Considered wants to hear from you! Please fill out our pitch line to let us know what kinds of story ideas you have for our show. And while you're at it, fill out our listener survey! We want to keep bringing you the kinds of conversations you'd like to listen to. Louisiana Considered is made possible with support from our listeners. Thank you!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Singles Going Around- Waiting For The SunT Rex- "Telegram Sam"Beastie Boys- "Son of Neckbone"Bo Diddley- "You Can't Judge A Book By It's Cover"The Beach Boys- "Salt Lake City"Roger Miller- "My Uncle Used To Love Me, But She Died"The Doors- "Love Me Two Times"The Fury's- "Little Queenie"The Rolling Stones- "Everybody Needs Somebody To Love"Creedence Clearwater Revival- "My Baby Left Me"Bob Dylan- "When I Paint My Masterpiece"Booker T & The MG's- "Get Ready"Neil Young- "Don't Cry No Tears"The Satisfactions- "Girl Don't Tell Me"The Beach Boys- "Lttle Pad"The Beatles- "Yer Blues"The Doors- "Spanish Caravan"John Fahey- "Night Train of Valhalla"*All selections taken from the original lp's.

Episode 164 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "White Light/White Heat" and the career of the Velvet Underground. This is a long one, lasting three hours and twenty minutes. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on "Why Don't You Smile Now?" by the Downliners Sect. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I say the Velvet Underground didn't play New York for the rest of the sixties after 1966. They played at least one gig there in 1967, but did generally avoid the city. Also, I refer to Cale and Conrad as the other surviving members of the Theater of Eternal Music. Sadly Conrad died in 2016. Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Velvet Underground, and some of the avant-garde pieces excerpted run to six hours or more. I used a lot of resources for this one. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story by Victor Bockris and Gerard Malanga is the best book on the group as a group. I also used Joe Harvard's 33 1/3 book on The Velvet Underground and Nico. Bockris also wrote one of the two biographies of Reed I referred to, Transformer. The other was Lou Reed by Anthony DeCurtis. Information on Cale mostly came from Sedition and Alchemy by Tim Mitchell. Information on Nico came from Nico: The Life and Lies of an Icon by Richard Witts. I used Draw a Straight Line and Follow it by Jeremy Grimshaw as my main source for La Monte Young, The Roaring Silence by David Revill for John Cage, and Warhol: A Life as Art by Blake Gopnik for Warhol. I also referred to the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of the 2021 documentary The Velvet Underground.  The definitive collection of the Velvet Underground's music is the sadly out-of-print box set Peel Slowly and See, which contains the four albums the group made with Reed in full, plus demos, outtakes, and live recordings. Note that the digital version of the album as sold by Amazon for some reason doesn't include the last disc -- if you want the full box set you have to buy a physical copy. All four studio albums have also been released and rereleased many times over in different configurations with different numbers of CDs at different price points -- I have used the "45th Anniversary Super-Deluxe" versions for this episode, but for most people the standard CD versions will be fine. Sadly there are no good shorter compilation overviews of the group -- they tend to emphasise either the group's "pop" mode or its "avant-garde" mode to the exclusion of the other. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I begin this episode, there are a few things to say. This introductory section is going to be longer than normal because, as you will hear, this episode is also going to be longer than normal. Firstly, I try to warn people about potentially upsetting material in these episodes. But this is the first episode for 1968, and as you will see there is a *profound* increase in the amount of upsetting and disturbing material covered as we go through 1968 and 1969. The story is going to be in a much darker place for the next twenty or thirty episodes. And this episode is no exception. As always, I try to deal with everything as sensitively as possible, but you should be aware that the list of warnings for this one is so long I am very likely to have missed some. Among the topics touched on in this episode are mental illness, drug addiction, gun violence, racism, societal and medical homophobia, medical mistreatment of mental illness, domestic abuse, rape, and more. If you find discussion of any of those subjects upsetting, you might want to read the transcript. Also, I use the term "queer" freely in this episode. In the past I have received some pushback for this, because of a belief among some that "queer" is a slur. The following explanation will seem redundant to many of my listeners, but as with many of the things I discuss in the podcast I am dealing with multiple different audiences with different levels of awareness and understanding of issues, so I'd like to beg those people's indulgence a moment. The term "queer" has certainly been used as a slur in the past, but so have terms like "lesbian", "gay", "homosexual" and others. In all those cases, the term has gone from a term used as a self-identifier, to a slur, to a reclaimed slur, and back again many times. The reason for using that word, specifically, here is because the vast majority of people in this story have sexualities or genders that don't match the societal norms of their times, but used labels for themselves that have shifted in meaning over the years. There are at least two men in the story, for example, who are now dead and referred to themselves as "homosexual", but were in multiple long-term sexually-active relationships with women. Would those men now refer to themselves as "bisexual" or "pansexual" -- terms not in widespread use at the time -- or would they, in the relatively more tolerant society we live in now, only have been in same-gender relationships? We can't know. But in our current context using the word "homosexual" for those men would lead to incorrect assumptions about their behaviour. The labels people use change over time, and the definitions of them blur and shift. I have discussed this issue with many, many, friends who fall under the queer umbrella, and while not all of them are comfortable with "queer" as a personal label because of how it's been used against them in the past, there is near-unanimity from them that it's the correct word to use in this situation. Anyway, now that that rather lengthy set of disclaimers is over, let's get into the story proper, as we look at "White Light, White Heat" by the Velvet Underground: [Excerpt: The Velvet Underground, "White Light, White Heat"] And that look will start with... a disclaimer about length. This episode is going to be a long one. Not as long as episode one hundred and fifty, but almost certainly the longest episode I'll do this year, by some way. And there's a reason for that. One of the questions I've been asked repeatedly over the years about the podcast is why almost all the acts I've covered have been extremely commercially successful ones. "Where are the underground bands? The alternative bands? The little niche acts?" The answer to that is simple. Until the mid-sixties, the idea of an underground or alternative band made no sense at all in rock, pop, rock and roll, R&B, or soul. The idea would have been completely counterintuitive to the vast majority of the people we've discussed in the podcast. Those musics were commercial musics, made by people who wanted to make money and to  get the largest audiences possible. That doesn't mean that they had no artistic merit, or that there was no artistic intent behind them, but the artists making that music were *commercial* artists. They knew if they wanted to make another record, they had to sell enough copies of the last record for the record company to make another, and that if they wanted to keep eating, they had to draw enough of an audience to their gigs for promoters to keep booking them. There was no space in this worldview for what we might think of as cult success. If your record only sold a thousand copies, then you had failed in your goal, even if the thousand people who bought your record really loved it. Even less commercially successful artists we've covered to this point, like the Mothers of Invention or Love, were *trying* for commercial success, even if they made the decision not to compromise as much as others do. This started to change a tiny bit in the mid-sixties as the influence of jazz and folk in the US, and the British blues scene, started to be felt in rock music. But this influence, at first, was a one-way thing -- people who had been in the folk and jazz worlds deciding to modify their music to be more commercial. And that was followed by already massively commercial musicians, like the Beatles, taking on some of those influences and bringing their audience with them. But that started to change around the time that "rock" started to differentiate itself from "rock and roll" and "pop", in mid 1967. So in this episode and the next, we're going to look at two bands who in different ways provided a model for how to be an alternative band. Both of them still *wanted* commercial success, but neither achieved it, at least not at first and not in the conventional way. And both, when they started out, went by the name The Warlocks. But we have to take a rather circuitous route to get to this week's band, because we're now properly introducing a strand of music that has been there in the background for a while -- avant-garde art music. So before we go any further, let's have a listen to a thirty-second clip of the most famous piece of avant-garde music ever, and I'll be performing it myself: [Excerpt, Andrew Hickey "4'33 (Cage)"] Obviously that won't give the full effect, you have to listen to the whole piece to get that. That is of course a section of "4'33" by John Cage, a piece of music that is often incorrectly described as being four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. As I've mentioned before, though, in the episode on "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", it isn't that at all. The whole point of the piece is that there is no such thing as silence, and it's intended to make the listener appreciate all the normal ambient sounds as music, every bit as much as any piece by Bach or Beethoven. John Cage, the composer of "4'33", is possibly the single most influential avant-garde artist of the mid twentieth century, so as we're properly introducing the ideas of avant-garde music into the story here, we need to talk about him a little. Cage was, from an early age, torn between three great vocations, all of which in some fashion would shape his work for decades to come. One of these was architecture, and for a time he intended to become an architect. Another was the religious ministry, and he very seriously considered becoming a minister as a young man, and religion -- though not the religious faith of his youth -- was to be a massive factor in his work as he grew older. He started studying music from an early age, though he never had any facility as a performer -- though he did, when he discovered the work of Grieg, think that might change. He later said “For a while I played nothing else. I even imagined devoting my life to the performance of his works alone, for they did not seem to me to be too difficult, and I loved them.” [Excerpt: Grieg piano concerto in A minor] But he soon realised that he didn't have some of the basic skills that would be required to be a performer -- he never actually thought of himself as very musical -- and so he decided to move into composition, and he later talked about putting his musical limits to good use in being more inventive. From his very first pieces, Cage was trying to expand the definition of what a performance of a piece of music actually was. One of his friends, Harry Hay, who took part in the first documented performance of a piece by Cage, described how Cage's father, an inventor, had "devised a fluorescent light source over which Sample" -- Don Sample, Cage's boyfriend at the time -- "laid a piece of vellum painted with designs in oils. The blankets I was wearing were white, and a sort of lampshade shone coloured patterns onto me. It looked very good. The thing got so hot the designs began to run, but that only made it better.” Apparently the audience for this light show -- one that predated the light shows used by rock bands by a good thirty years -- were not impressed, though that may be more because the Santa Monica Women's Club in the early 1930s was not the vanguard of the avant-garde. Or maybe it was. Certainly the housewives of Santa Monica seemed more willing than one might expect to sign up for another of Cage's ideas. In 1933 he went door to door asking women if they would be interested in signing up to a lecture course from him on modern art and music. He told them that if they signed up for $2.50, he would give them ten lectures, and somewhere between twenty and forty of them signed up, even though, as he said later, “I explained to the housewives that I didn't know anything about either subject but that I was enthusiastic about both of them. I promised to learn faithfully enough about each subject so as to be able to give a talk an hour long each week.” And he did just that, going to the library every day and spending all week preparing an hour-long talk for them. History does not relate whether he ended these lectures by telling the housewives to tell just one friend about them. He said later “I came out of these lectures, with a devotion to the painting of Mondrian, on the one hand, and the music of Schoenberg on the other.” [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte"] Schoenberg was one of the two most widely-respected composers in the world at that point, the other being Stravinsky, but the two had very different attitudes to composition. Schoenberg's great innovation was the creation and popularisation of the twelve-tone technique, and I should probably explain that a little before I go any further. Most Western music is based on an eight-note scale -- do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do -- with the eighth note being an octave up from the first. So in the key of C major that would be C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C: [demonstrates] And when you hear notes from that scale, if your ears are accustomed to basically any Western music written before about 1920, or any Western popular music written since then, you expect the melody to lead back to C, and you know to expect that because it only uses those notes -- there are differing intervals between them, some having a tone between them and some having a semitone, and you recognise the pattern. But of course there are other notes between the notes of that scale. There are actually an infinite number of these, but in conventional Western music we only look at a few more -- C# (or D flat), D# (or E flat), F# (or G flat), G# (or A flat) and A# (or B flat). If you add in all those notes you get this: [demonstrates] There's no clear beginning or end, no do for it to come back to. And Schoenberg's great innovation, which he was only starting to promote widely around this time, was to insist that all twelve notes should be equal -- his melodies would use all twelve of the notes the exact same number of times, and so if he used say a B flat, he would have to use all eleven other notes before he used B flat again in the piece. This was a radical new idea, but Schoenberg had only started advancing it after first winning great acclaim for earlier pieces, like his "Three Pieces for Piano", a work which wasn't properly twelve-tone, but did try to do without the idea of having any one note be more important than any other: [Excerpt: Schoenberg, "Three Pieces for Piano"] At this point, that work had only been performed in the US by one performer, Richard Buhlig, and hadn't been released as a recording yet. Cage was so eager to hear it that he'd found Buhlig's phone number and called him, asking him to play the piece, but Buhlig put the phone down on him. Now he was doing these lectures, though, he had to do one on Schoenberg, and he wasn't a competent enough pianist to play Schoenberg's pieces himself, and there were still no recordings of them. Cage hitch-hiked from Santa Monica to LA, where Buhlig lived, to try to get him to come and visit his class and play some of Schoenberg's pieces for them. Buhlig wasn't in, and Cage hung around in his garden hoping for him to come back -- he pulled the leaves off a bough from one of Buhlig's trees, going "He'll come back, he won't come back, he'll come back..." and the leaves said he'd be back. Buhlig arrived back at midnight, and quite understandably told the strange twenty-one-year-old who'd spent twelve hours in his garden pulling the leaves off his trees that no, he would not come to Santa Monica and give a free performance. But he did agree that if Cage brought some of his own compositions he'd give them a look over. Buhlig started giving Cage some proper lessons in composition, although he stressed that he was a performer, not a composer. Around this time Cage wrote his Sonata for Clarinet: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Sonata For Clarinet"] Buhlig suggested that Cage send that to Henry Cowell, the composer we heard about in the episode on "Good Vibrations" who was friends with Lev Termen and who created music by playing the strings inside a piano: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] Cowell offered to take Cage on as an assistant, in return for which Cowell would teach him for a semester, as would Adolph Weiss, a pupil of Schoenberg's. But the goal, which Cowell suggested, was always to have Cage study with Schoenberg himself. Schoenberg at first refused, saying that Cage couldn't afford his price, but eventually took Cage on as a student having been assured that he would devote his entire life to music -- a promise Cage kept. Cage started writing pieces for percussion, something that had been very rare up to that point -- only a handful of composers, most notably Edgard Varese, had written pieces for percussion alone, but Cage was: [Excerpt: John Cage, "Trio"] This is often portrayed as a break from the ideals of his teacher Schoenberg, but in fact there's a clear continuity there, once you see what Cage was taking from Schoenberg. Schoenberg's work is, in some senses, about equality, about all notes being equal. Or to put it another way, it's about fairness. About erasing arbitrary distinctions. What Cage was doing was erasing the arbitrary distinction between the more and less prominent instruments. Why should there be pieces for solo violin or string quartet, but not for multiple percussion players? That said, Schoenberg was not exactly the most encouraging of teachers. When Cage invited Schoenberg to go to a concert of Cage's percussion work, Schoenberg told him he was busy that night. When Cage offered to arrange another concert for a date Schoenberg wasn't busy, the reply came "No, I will not be free at any time". Despite this, Cage later said “Schoenberg was a magnificent teacher, who always gave the impression that he was putting us in touch with musical principles,” and said "I literally worshipped him" -- a strong statement from someone who took religious matters as seriously as Cage. Cage was so devoted to Schoenberg's music that when a concert of music by Stravinsky was promoted as "music of the world's greatest living composer", Cage stormed into the promoter's office angrily, confronting the promoter and making it very clear that such things should not be said in the city where Schoenberg lived. Schoenberg clearly didn't think much of Cage's attempts at composition, thinking -- correctly -- that Cage had no ear for harmony. And his reportedly aggressive and confrontational teaching style didn't sit well with Cage -- though it seems very similar to a lot of the teaching techniques of the Zen masters he would later go on to respect. The two eventually parted ways, although Cage always spoke highly of Schoenberg. Schoenberg later gave Cage a compliment of sorts, when asked if any of his students had gone on to do anything interesting. At first he replied that none had, but then he mentioned Cage and said “Of course he's not a composer, but an inventor—of genius.” Cage was at this point very worried if there was any point to being a composer at all. He said later “I'd read Cowell's New Musical Resources and . . . The Theory of Rhythm. I had also read Chavez's Towards a New Music. Both works gave me the feeling that everything that was possible in music had already happened. So I thought I could never compose socially important music. Only if I could invent something new, then would I be useful to society. But that seemed unlikely then.” [Excerpt: John Cage, "Totem Ancestor"] Part of the solution came when he was asked to compose music for an abstract animation by the filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, and also to work as Fischinger's assistant when making the film. He was fascinated by the stop-motion process, and by the results of the film, which he described as "a beautiful film in which these squares, triangles and circles and other things moved and changed colour.” But more than that he was overwhelmed by a comment by Fischinger, who told him “Everything in the world has its own spirit, and this spirit becomes audible by setting it into vibration.” Cage later said “That set me on fire. He started me on a path of exploration of the world around me which has never stopped—of hitting and stretching and scraping and rubbing everything.” Cage now took his ideas further. His compositions for percussion had been about, if you like, giving the underdog a chance -- percussion was always in the background, why should it not be in the spotlight? Now he realised that there were other things getting excluded in conventional music -- the sounds that we characterise as noise. Why should composers work to exclude those sounds, but work to *include* other sounds? Surely that was... well, a little unfair? Eventually this would lead to pieces like his 1952 piece "Water Music", later expanded and retitled "Water Walk", which can be heard here in his 1959 appearance on the TV show "I've Got a Secret".  It's a piece for, amongst other things, a flowerpot full of flowers, a bathtub, a watering can, a pipe, a duck call, a blender full of ice cubes, and five unplugged radios: [Excerpt: John Cage "Water Walk"] As he was now avoiding pitch and harmony as organising principles for his music, he turned to time. But note -- not to rhythm. He said “There's none of this boom, boom, boom, business in my music . . . a measure is taken as a strict measure of time—not a one two three four—which I fill with various sounds.” He came up with a system he referred to as “micro-macrocosmic rhythmic structure,” what we would now call fractals, though that word hadn't yet been invented, where the structure of the whole piece was reflected in the smallest part of it. For a time he started moving away from the term music, preferring to refer to the "art of noise" or to "organised sound" -- though he later received a telegram from Edgard Varese, one of his musical heroes and one of the few other people writing works purely for percussion, asking him not to use that phrase, which Varese used for his own work. After meeting with Varese and his wife, he later became convinced that it was Varese's wife who had initiated the telegram, as she explained to Cage's wife "we didn't want your husband's work confused with my husband's work, any more than you'd want some . . . any artist's work confused with that of a cartoonist.” While there is a humour to Cage's work, I don't really hear much qualitative difference between a Cage piece like the one we just heard and a Varese piece like Ionisation: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] But it was in 1952, the year of "Water Music" that John Cage made his two biggest impacts on the cultural world, though the full force of those impacts wasn't felt for some years. To understand Cage's 1952 work, you first have to understand that he had become heavily influenced by Zen, which at that time was very little known in the Western world. Indeed he had studied with Daisetsu Suzuki, who is credited with introducing Zen to the West, and said later “I didn't study music with just anybody; I studied with Schoenberg, I didn't study Zen with just anybody; I studied with Suzuki. I've always gone, insofar as I could, to the president of the company.” Cage's whole worldview was profoundly affected by Zen, but he was also naturally sympathetic to it, and his work after learning about Zen is mostly a continuation of trends we can already see. In particular, he became convinced that the point of music isn't to communicate anything between two people, rather its point is merely to be experienced. I'm far from an expert on Buddhism, but one way of thinking about its central lessons is that one should experience things as they are, experiencing the thing itself rather than one's thoughts or preconceptions about it. And so at Black Mountain college came Theatre Piece Number 1: [Excerpt: Edith Piaf, "La Vie En Rose" ] In this piece, Cage had set the audience on all sides, so they'd be facing each other. He stood on a stepladder, as colleagues danced in and around the audience, another colleague played the piano, two more took turns to stand on another stepladder to recite poetry, different films and slides were projected, seemingly at random, onto the walls, and the painter Robert Rauschenberg played scratchy Edith Piaf records on a wind-up gramophone. The audience were included in the performance, and it was meant to be experienced as a gestalt, as a whole, to be what we would now call an immersive experience. One of Cage's students around this time was the artist Allan Kaprow, and he would be inspired by Theatre Piece Number 1 to put on several similar events in the late fifties. Those events he called "happenings", because the point of them was that you were meant to experience an event as it was happening rather than bring preconceptions of form and structure to them. Those happenings were the inspiration for events like The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, and the term "happening" became such an integral part of the counterculture that by 1967 there were comedy films being released about them, including one just called The Happening with a title track by the Supremes that made number one: [Excerpt: The Supremes, "The Happening"] Theatre Piece Number 1 was retrospectively considered the first happening, and as such its influence is incalculable. But one part I didn't mention about Theatre Piece Number 1 is that as well as Rauschenberg playing Edith Piaf's records, he also displayed some of his paintings. These paintings were totally white -- at a glance, they looked like blank canvases, but as one inspected them more clearly, it became apparent that Rauschenberg had painted them with white paint, with visible brushstrokes. These paintings, along with a visit to an anechoic chamber in which Cage discovered that even in total silence one can still hear one's own blood and nervous system, so will never experience total silence, were the final key to something Cage had been working towards -- if music had minimised percussion, and excluded noise, how much more had it excluded silence? As Cage said in 1958 “Curiously enough, the twelve-tone system has no zero in it.” And so came 4'33, the piece that we heard an excerpt of near the start of this episode. That piece was the something new he'd been looking for that could be useful to society. It took the sounds the audience could already hear, and without changing them even slightly gave them a new context and made the audience hear them as they were. Simply by saying "this is music", it caused the ambient noise to be perceived as music. This idea, of recontextualising existing material, was one that had already been done in the art world -- Marcel Duchamp, in 1917, had exhibited a urinal as a sculpture titled "Fountain" -- but even Duchamp had talked about his work as "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice". The artist was *raising* the object to art. What Cage was saying was "the object is already art". This was all massively influential to a young painter who had seen Cage give lectures many times, and while at art school had with friends prepared a piano in the same way Cage did for his own experimental compositions, dampening the strings with different objects. [Excerpt: Dana Gillespie, "Andy Warhol (live)"] Duchamp and Rauschenberg were both big influences on Andy Warhol, but he would say in the early sixties "John Cage is really so responsible for so much that's going on," and would for the rest of his life cite Cage as one of the two or three prime influences of his career. Warhol is a difficult figure to discuss, because his work is very intellectual but he was not very articulate -- which is one reason I've led up to him by discussing Cage in such detail, because Cage was always eager to talk at great length about the theoretical basis of his work, while Warhol would say very few words about anything at all. Probably the person who knew him best was his business partner and collaborator Paul Morrissey, and Morrissey's descriptions of Warhol have shaped my own view of his life, but it's very worth noting that Morrissey is an extremely right-wing moralist who wishes to see a Catholic theocracy imposed to do away with the scourges of sexual immorality, drug use, hedonism, and liberalism, so his view of Warhol, a queer drug using progressive whose worldview seems to have been totally opposed to Morrissey's in every way, might be a little distorted. Warhol came from an impoverished background, and so, as many people who grew up poor do, he was, throughout his life, very eager to make money. He studied art at university, and got decent but not exceptional grades -- he was a competent draughtsman, but not a great one, and most importantly as far as success in the art world goes he didn't have what is known as his own "line" -- with most successful artists, you can look at a handful of lines they've drawn and see something of their own personality in it. You couldn't with Warhol. His drawings looked like mediocre imitations of other people's work. Perfectly competent, but nothing that stood out. So Warhol came up with a technique to make his drawings stand out -- blotting. He would do a normal drawing, then go over it with a lot of wet ink. He'd lower a piece of paper on to the wet drawing, and the new paper would soak up the ink, and that second piece of paper would become the finished work. The lines would be fractured and smeared, broken in places where the ink didn't get picked up, and thick in others where it had pooled. With this mechanical process, Warhol had managed to create an individual style, and he became an extremely successful commercial artist. In the early 1950s photography was still seen as a somewhat low-class way of advertising things. If you wanted to sell to a rich audience, you needed to use drawings or paintings. By 1955 Warhol was making about twelve thousand dollars a year -- somewhere close to a hundred and thirty thousand a year in today's money -- drawing shoes for advertisements. He also had a sideline in doing record covers for people like Count Basie: [Excerpt: Count Basie, "Seventh Avenue Express"] For most of the 1950s he also tried to put on shows of his more serious artistic work -- often with homoerotic themes -- but to little success. The dominant art style of the time was the abstract expressionism of people like Jackson Pollock, whose art was visceral, emotional, and macho. The term "action paintings" which was coined for the work of people like Pollock, sums it up. This was manly art for manly men having manly emotions and expressing them loudly. It was very male and very straight, and even the gay artists who were prominent at the time tended to be very conformist and look down on anything they considered flamboyant or effeminate. Warhol was a rather effeminate, very reserved man, who strongly disliked showing his emotions, and whose tastes ran firmly to the camp. Camp as an aesthetic of finding joy in the flamboyant or trashy, as opposed to merely a descriptive term for men who behaved in a way considered effeminate, was only just starting to be codified at this time -- it wouldn't really become a fully-formed recognisable thing until Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on Camp" in 1964 -- but of course just because something hasn't been recognised doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and Warhol's aesthetic was always very camp, and in the 1950s in the US that was frowned upon even in gay culture, where the mainstream opinion was that the best way to acceptance was through assimilation. Abstract expressionism was all about expressing the self, and that was something Warhol never wanted to do -- in fact he made some pronouncements at times which suggested he didn't think of himself as *having* a self in the conventional sense. The combination of not wanting to express himself and of wanting to work more efficiently as a commercial artist led to some interesting results. For example, he was commissioned in 1957 to do a cover for an album by Moondog, the blind street musician whose name Alan Freed had once stolen: [Excerpt: Moondog, "Gloving It"] For that cover, Warhol got his mother, Julia Warhola, to just write out the liner notes for the album in her rather ornamental cursive script, and that became the front cover, leading to an award for graphic design going that year to "Andy Warhol's mother". (Incidentally, my copy of the current CD issue of that album, complete with Julia Warhola's cover, is put out by Pickwick Records...) But towards the end of the fifties, the work for commercial artists started to dry up. If you wanted to advertise shoes, now, you just took a photo of the shoes rather than get Andy Warhol to draw a picture of them. The money started to disappear, and Warhol started to panic. If there was no room for him in graphic design any more, he had to make his living in the fine arts, which he'd been totally unsuccessful in. But luckily for Warhol, there was a new movement that was starting to form -- Pop Art. Pop Art started in England, and had originally been intended, at least in part, as a critique of American consumerist capitalism. Pieces like "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" by Richard Hamilton (who went on to design the Beatles' White Album cover) are collages of found images, almost all from American sources, recontextualised and juxtaposed in interesting ways, so a bodybuilder poses in a room that's taken from an advert in Ladies' Home Journal, while on the wall, instead of a painting, hangs a blown-up cover of a Jack Kirby romance comic. Pop Art changed slightly when it got taken up in America, and there it became something rather different, something closer to Duchamp, taking those found images and displaying them as art with no juxtaposition. Where Richard Hamilton created collage art which *showed* a comic cover by Jack Kirby as a painting in the background, Roy Lichtenstein would take a panel of comic art by Kirby, or Russ Heath or Irv Novick or a dozen other comic artists, and redraw it at the size of a normal painting. So Warhol took Cage's idea that the object is already art, and brought that into painting, starting by doing paintings of Campbell's soup cans, in which he tried as far as possible to make the cans look exactly like actual soup cans. The paintings were controversial, inciting fury in some and laughter in others and causing almost everyone to question whether they were art. Warhol would embrace an aesthetic in which things considered unimportant or trash or pop culture detritus were the greatest art of all. For example pretty much every profile of him written in the mid sixties talks about him obsessively playing "Sally Go Round the Roses", a girl-group single by the one-hit wonders the Jaynettes: [Excerpt: The Jaynettes, "Sally Go Round the Roses"] After his paintings of Campbell's soup cans, and some rather controversial but less commercially successful paintings of photographs of horrors and catastrophes taken from newspapers, Warhol abandoned painting in the conventional sense altogether, instead creating brightly coloured screen prints -- a form of stencilling -- based on photographs of celebrities like Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor and, most famously, Marilyn Monroe. That way he could produce images which could be mass-produced, without his active involvement, and which supposedly had none of his personality in them, though of course his personality pervades the work anyway. He put on exhibitions of wooden boxes, silk-screen printed to look exactly like shipping cartons of Brillo pads. Images we see everywhere -- in newspapers, in supermarkets -- were art. And Warhol even briefly formed a band. The Druds were a garage band formed to play at a show at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, the opening night of an exhibition that featured a silkscreen by Warhol of 210 identical bottles of Coca-Cola, as well as paintings by Rauschenberg and others. That opening night featured a happening by Claes Oldenburg, and a performance by Cage -- Cage gave a live lecture while three recordings of his own voice also played. The Druds were also meant to perform, but they fell apart after only a few rehearsals. Some recordings apparently exist, but they don't seem to circulate, but they'd be fascinating to hear as almost the entire band were non-musician artists like Warhol, Jasper Johns, and the sculptor Walter de Maria. Warhol said of the group “It didn't go too well, but if we had just stayed on it it would have been great.” On the other hand, the one actual musician in the group said “It was kind of ridiculous, so I quit after the second rehearsal". That musician was La Monte Young: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] That's an excerpt from what is generally considered Young's masterwork, "The Well-Tuned Piano". It's six and a half hours long. If Warhol is a difficult figure to write about, Young is almost impossible. He's a musician with a career stretching sixty years, who is arguably the most influential musician from the classical tradition in that time period. He's generally considered the father of minimalism, and he's also been called by Brian Eno "the daddy of us all" -- without Young you simply *do not* get art rock at all. Without Young there is no Velvet Underground, no David Bowie, no Eno, no New York punk scene, no Yoko Ono. Anywhere that the fine arts or conceptual art have intersected with popular music in the last fifty or more years has been influenced in one way or another by Young's work. BUT... he only rarely publishes his scores. He very, very rarely allows recordings of his work to be released -- there are four recordings on his bandcamp, plus a handful of recordings of his older, published, pieces, and very little else. He doesn't allow his music to be performed live without his supervision. There *are* bootleg recordings of his music, but even those are not easily obtainable -- Young is vigorous in enforcing his copyrights and issues takedown notices against anywhere that hosts them. So other than that handful of legitimately available recordings -- plus a recording by Young's Theater of Eternal Music, the legality of which is still disputed, and an off-air recording of a 1971 radio programme I've managed to track down, the only way to experience Young's music unless you're willing to travel to one of his rare live performances or installations is second-hand, by reading about it. Except that the one book that deals solely with Young and his music is not only a dense and difficult book to read, it's also one that Young vehemently disagreed with and considered extremely inaccurate, to the point he refused to allow permissions to quote his work in the book. Young did apparently prepare a list of corrections for the book, but he wouldn't tell the author what they were without payment. So please assume that anything I say about Young is wrong, but also accept that the short section of this episode about Young has required more work to *try* to get it right than pretty much anything else this year. Young's musical career actually started out in a relatively straightforward manner. He didn't grow up in the most loving of homes -- he's talked about his father beating him as a child because he had been told that young La Monte was clever -- but his father did buy him a saxophone and teach him the rudiments of the instrument, and as a child he was most influenced by the music of the big band saxophone player Jimmy Dorsey: [Excerpt: Jimmy Dorsey, “It's the Dreamer in Me”] The family, who were Mormon farmers, relocated several times in Young's childhood, from Idaho first to California and then to Utah, but everywhere they went La Monte seemed to find musical inspiration, whether from an uncle who had been part of the Kansas City jazz scene, a classmate who was a musical prodigy who had played with Perez Prado in his early teens, or a teacher who took the class to see a performance of Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra: [Excerpt: Bartok, "Concerto for Orchestra"] After leaving high school, Young went to Los Angeles City College to study music under Leonard Stein, who had been Schoenberg's assistant when Schoenberg had taught at UCLA, and there he became part of the thriving jazz scene based around Central Avenue, studying and performing with musicians like Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and Eric Dolphy -- Young once beat Dolphy in an audition for a place in the City College dance band, and the two would apparently substitute for each other on their regular gigs when one couldn't make it. During this time, Young's musical tastes became much more adventurous. He was a particular fan of the work of John Coltrane, and also got inspired by City of Glass, an album by Stan Kenton that attempted to combine jazz and modern classical music: [Excerpt: Stan Kenton's Innovations Orchestra, "City of Glass: The Structures"] His other major musical discovery in the mid-fifties was one we've talked about on several previous occasions -- the album Music of India, Morning and Evening Ragas by Ali Akhbar Khan: [Excerpt: Ali Akhbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] Young's music at this point was becoming increasingly modal, and equally influenced by the blues and Indian music. But he was also becoming interested in serialism. Serialism is an extension and generalisation of twelve-tone music, inspired by mathematical set theory. In serialism, you choose a set of musical elements -- in twelve-tone music that's the twelve notes in the twelve-tone scale, but it can also be a set of tonal relations, a chord, or any other set of elements. You then define all the possible ways you can permute those elements, a defined set of operations you can perform on them -- so you could play a scale forwards, play it backwards, play all the notes in the scale simultaneously, and so on. You then go through all the possible permutations, exactly once, and that's your piece of music. Young was particularly influenced by the works of Anton Webern, one of the earliest serialists: [Excerpt: Anton Webern, "Cantata number 1 for Soprano, Mixed Chorus, and Orchestra"] That piece we just heard, Webern's "Cantata number 1", was the subject of some of the earliest theoretical discussion of serialism, and in particular led to some discussion of the next step on from serialism. If serialism was all about going through every single permutation of a set, what if you *didn't* permute every element? There was a lot of discussion in the late fifties in music-theoretical circles about the idea of invariance. Normally in music, the interesting thing is what gets changed. To use a very simple example, you might change a melody from a major key to a minor one to make it sound sadder. What theorists at this point were starting to discuss is what happens if you leave something the same, but change the surrounding context, so the thing you *don't* vary sounds different because of the changed context. And going further, what if you don't change the context at all, and merely *imply* a changed context? These ideas were some of those which inspired Young's first major work, his Trio For Strings from 1958, a complex, palindromic, serial piece which is now credited as the first work of minimalism, because the notes in it change so infrequently: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Trio for Strings"] Though I should point out that Young never considers his works truly finished, and constantly rewrites them, and what we just heard is an excerpt from the only recording of the trio ever officially released, which is of the 2015 version. So I can't state for certain how close what we just heard is to the piece he wrote in 1958, except that it sounds very like the written descriptions of it I've read. After writing the Trio For Strings, Young moved to Germany to study with the modernist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. While studying with Stockhausen, he became interested in the work of John Cage, and started up a correspondence with Cage. On his return to New York he studied with Cage and started writing pieces inspired by Cage, of which the most musical is probably Composition 1960 #7: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "Composition 1960 #7"] The score for that piece is a stave on which is drawn a treble clef, the notes B and F#, and the words "To be held for a long Time". Other of his compositions from 1960 -- which are among the few of his compositions which have been published -- include composition 1960 #10 ("To Bob Morris"), the score for which is just the instruction "Draw a straight line and follow it.", and Piano Piece for David  Tudor #1, the score for which reads "Bring a bale of hay and a bucket of water onto the stage for the piano to eat and drink. The performer may then feed the piano or leave it to eat by itself. If the former, the piece is over after the piano has been fed. If the latter, it is over after the piano eats or decides not to". Most of these compositions were performed as part of a loose New York art collective called Fluxus, all of whom were influenced by Cage and the Dadaists. This collective, led by George Maciunas, sometimes involved Cage himself, but also involved people like Henry Flynt, the inventor of conceptual art, who later became a campaigner against art itself, and who also much to Young's bemusement abandoned abstract music in the mid-sixties to form a garage band with Walter de Maria (who had played drums with the Druds): [Excerpt: Henry Flynt and the Insurrections, "I Don't Wanna"] Much of Young's work was performed at Fluxus concerts given in a New York loft belonging to another member of the collective, Yoko Ono, who co-curated the concerts with Young. One of Ono's mid-sixties pieces, her "Four Pieces for Orchestra" is dedicated to Young, and consists of such instructions as "Count all the stars of that night by heart. The piece ends when all the orchestra members finish counting the stars, or when it dawns. This can be done with windows instead of stars." But while these conceptual ideas remained a huge part of Young's thinking, he soon became interested in two other ideas. The first was the idea of just intonation -- tuning instruments and voices to perfect harmonics, rather than using the subtly-off tuning that is used in Western music. I'm sure I've explained that before in a previous episode, but to put it simply when you're tuning an instrument with fixed pitches like a piano, you have a choice -- you can either tune it so that the notes in one key are perfectly in tune with each other, but then when you change key things go very out of tune, or you can choose to make *everything* a tiny bit, almost unnoticeably, out of tune, but equally so. For the last several hundred years, musicians as a community have chosen the latter course, which was among other things promoted by Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, a collection of compositions which shows how the different keys work together: [Excerpt: Bach (Glenn Gould), "The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II: Fugue in F-sharp minor, BWV 883"] Young, by contrast, has his own esoteric tuning system, which he uses in his own work The Well-Tuned Piano: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Well-Tuned Piano"] The other idea that Young took on was from Indian music, the idea of the drone. One of the four recordings of Young's music that is available from his Bandcamp, a 1982 recording titled The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath, consists of one hour, thirteen minutes, and fifty-eight seconds of this: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Tamburas of Pandit Pran Nath"] Yes, I have listened to the whole piece. No, nothing else happens. The minimalist composer Terry Riley describes the recording as "a singularly rare contribution that far outshines any other attempts to capture this instrument in recorded media". In 1962, Young started writing pieces based on what he called the "dream chord", a chord consisting of a root, fourth, sharpened fourth, and fifth: [dream chord] That chord had already appeared in his Trio for Strings, but now it would become the focus of much of his work, in pieces like his 1962 piece The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, heard here in a 1982 revision: [Excerpt: La Monte Young, "The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer"] That was part of a series of works titled The Four Dreams of China, and Young began to plan an installation work titled Dream House, which would eventually be created, and which currently exists in Tribeca, New York, where it's been in continuous "performance" for thirty years -- and which consists of thirty-two different pure sine wave tones all played continuously, plus purple lighting by Young's wife Marian Zazeela. But as an initial step towards creating this, Young formed a collective called Theatre of Eternal Music, which some of the members -- though never Young himself -- always claim also went by the alternative name The Dream Syndicate. According to John Cale, a member of the group, that name came about because the group tuned their instruments to the 60hz hum of the fridge in Young's apartment, which Cale called "the key of Western civilisation". According to Cale, that meant the fundamental of the chords they played was 10hz, the frequency of alpha waves when dreaming -- hence the name. The group initially consisted of Young, Zazeela, the photographer Billy Name, and percussionist Angus MacLise, but by this recording in 1964 the lineup was Young, Zazeela, MacLise, Tony Conrad and John Cale: [Excerpt: "Cale, Conrad, Maclise, Young, Zazeela - The Dream Syndicate 2 IV 64-4"] That recording, like any others that have leaked by the 1960s version of the Theatre of Eternal Music or Dream Syndicate, is of disputed legality, because Young and Zazeela claim to this day that what the group performed were La Monte Young's compositions, while the other two surviving members, Cale and Conrad, claim that their performances were improvisational collaborations and should be equally credited to all the members, and so there have been lawsuits and countersuits any time anyone has released the recordings. John Cale, the youngest member of the group, was also the only one who wasn't American. He'd been born in Wales in 1942, and had had the kind of childhood that, in retrospect, seems guaranteed to lead to eccentricity. He was the product of a mixed-language marriage -- his father, William, was an English speaker while his mother, Margaret, spoke Welsh, but the couple had moved in on their marriage with Margaret's mother, who insisted that only Welsh could be spoken in her house. William didn't speak Welsh, and while he eventually picked up the basics from spending all his life surrounded by Welsh-speakers, he refused on principle to capitulate to his mother-in-law, and so remained silent in the house. John, meanwhile, grew up a monolingual Welsh speaker, and didn't start to learn English until he went to school when he was seven, and so couldn't speak to his father until then even though they lived together. Young John was extremely unwell for most of his childhood, both physically -- he had bronchial problems for which he had to take a cough mixture that was largely opium to help him sleep at night -- and mentally. He was hospitalised when he was sixteen with what was at first thought to be meningitis, but turned out to be a psychosomatic condition, the result of what he has described as a nervous breakdown. That breakdown is probably connected to the fact that during his teenage years he was sexually assaulted by two adults in positions of authority -- a vicar and a music teacher -- and felt unable to talk to anyone about this. He was, though, a child prodigy and was playing viola with the National Youth Orchestra of Wales from the age of thirteen, and listening to music by Schoenberg, Webern, and Stravinsky. He was so talented a multi-instrumentalist that at school he was the only person other than one of the music teachers and the headmaster who was allowed to use the piano -- which led to a prank on his very last day at school. The headmaster would, on the last day, hit a low G on the piano to cue the assembly to stand up, and Cale had placed a comb on the string, muting it and stopping the note from sounding -- in much the same way that his near-namesake John Cage was "preparing" pianos for his own compositions in the USA. Cale went on to Goldsmith's College to study music and composition, under Humphrey Searle, one of Britain's greatest proponents of serialism who had himself studied under Webern. Cale's main instrument was the viola, but he insisted on also playing pieces written for the violin, because they required more technical skill. For his final exam he chose to play Hindemith's notoriously difficult Viola Sonata: [Excerpt: Hindemith Viola Sonata] While at Goldsmith's, Cale became friendly with Cornelius Cardew, a composer and cellist who had studied with Stockhausen and at the time was a great admirer of and advocate for the works of Cage and Young (though by the mid-seventies Cardew rejected their work as counter-revolutionary bourgeois imperialism). Through Cardew, Cale started to correspond with Cage, and with George Maciunas and other members of Fluxus. In July 1963, just after he'd finished his studies at Goldsmith's, Cale presented a festival there consisting of an afternoon and an evening show. These shows included the first British performances of several works including Cardew's Autumn '60 for Orchestra -- a piece in which the musicians were given blank staves on which to write whatever part they wanted to play, but a separate set of instructions in *how* to play the parts they'd written. Another piece Cale presented in its British premiere at that show was Cage's "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra": [Excerpt: John Cage, "Concerto for Piano and Orchestra"] In the evening show, they performed Two Pieces For String Quartet by George Brecht (in which the musicians polish their instruments with dusters, making scraping sounds as they clean them),  and two new pieces by Cale, one of which involved a plant being put on the stage, and then the performer, Robin Page, screaming from the balcony at the plant that it would die, then running down, through the audience, and onto the stage, screaming abuse and threats at the plant. The final piece in the show was a performance by Cale (the first one in Britain) of La Monte Young's "X For Henry Flynt". For this piece, Cale put his hands together and then smashed both his arms onto the keyboard as hard as he could, over and over. After five minutes some of the audience stormed the stage and tried to drag the piano away from him. Cale followed the piano on his knees, continuing to bang the keys, and eventually the audience gave up in defeat and Cale the performer won. After this Cale moved to the USA, to further study composition, this time with Iannis Xenakis, the modernist composer who had also taught Mickey Baker orchestration after Baker left Mickey and Sylvia, and who composed such works as "Orient Occident": [Excerpt: Iannis Xenakis, "Orient Occident"] Cale had been recommended to Xenakis as a student by Aaron Copland, who thought the young man was probably a genius. But Cale's musical ambitions were rather too great for Tanglewood, Massachusetts -- he discovered that the institute had eighty-eight pianos, the same number as there are keys on a piano keyboard, and thought it would be great if for a piece he could take all eighty-eight pianos, put them all on different boats, sail the boats out onto a lake, and have eighty-eight different musicians each play one note on each piano, while the boats sank with the pianos on board. For some reason, Cale wasn't allowed to perform this composition, and instead had to make do with one where he pulled an axe out of a single piano and slammed it down on a table. Hardly the same, I'm sure you'll agree. From Tanglewood, Cale moved on to New York, where he soon became part of the artistic circles surrounding John Cage and La Monte Young. It was at this time that he joined Young's Theatre of Eternal Music, and also took part in a performance with Cage that would get Cale his first television exposure: [Excerpt: John Cale playing Erik Satie's "Vexations" on "I've Got a Secret"] That's Cale playing through "Vexations", a piece by Erik Satie that wasn't published until after Satie's death, and that remained in obscurity until Cage popularised -- if that's the word -- the piece. The piece, which Cage had found while studying Satie's notes, seems to be written as an exercise and has the inscription (in French) "In order to play the motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." Cage interpreted that, possibly correctly, as an instruction that the piece should be played eight hundred and forty times straight through, and so he put together a performance of the piece, the first one ever, by a group he called the Pocket Theatre Piano Relay Team, which included Cage himself, Cale, Joshua Rifkin, and several other notable musical figures, who took it in turns playing the piece. For that performance, which ended up lasting eighteen hours, there was an entry fee of five dollars, and there was a time-clock in the lobby. Audience members punched in and punched out, and got a refund of five cents for every twenty minutes they'd spent listening to the music. Supposedly, at the end, one audience member yelled "Encore!" A week later, Cale appeared on "I've Got a Secret", a popular game-show in which celebrities tried to guess people's secrets (and which is where that performance of Cage's "Water Walk" we heard earlier comes from): [Excerpt: John Cale on I've Got a Secret] For a while, Cale lived with a friend of La Monte Young's, Terry Jennings, before moving in to a flat with Tony Conrad, one of the other members of the Theatre of Eternal Music. Angus MacLise lived in another flat in the same building. As there was not much money to be made in avant-garde music, Cale also worked in a bookshop -- a job Cage had found him -- and had a sideline in dealing drugs. But rents were so cheap at this time that Cale and Conrad only had to work part-time, and could spend much of their time working on the music they were making with Young. Both were string players -- Conrad violin, Cale viola -- and they soon modified their instruments. Conrad merely attached pickups to his so it could be amplified, but Cale went much further. He filed down the viola's bridge so he could play three strings at once, and he replaced the normal viola strings with thicker, heavier, guitar and mandolin strings. This created a sound so loud that it sounded like a distorted electric guitar -- though in late 1963 and early 1964 there were very few people who even knew what a distorted guitar sounded like. Cale and Conrad were also starting to become interested in rock and roll music, to which neither of them had previously paid much attention, because John Cage's music had taught them to listen for music in sounds they previously dismissed. In particular, Cale became fascinated with the harmonies of the Everly Brothers, hearing in them the same just intonation that Young advocated for: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "All I Have to Do is Dream"] And it was with this newfound interest in rock and roll that Cale and Conrad suddenly found themselves members of a manufactured pop band. The two men had been invited to a party on the Lower East Side, and there they'd been introduced to Terry Phillips of Pickwick Records. Phillips had seen their long hair and asked if they were musicians, so they'd answered "yes". He asked if they were in a band, and they said yes. He asked if that band had a drummer, and again they said yes. By this point they realised that he had assumed they were rock guitarists, rather than experimental avant-garde string players, but they decided to play along and see where this was going. Phillips told them that if they brought along their drummer to Pickwick's studios the next day, he had a job for them. The two of them went along with Walter de Maria, who did play the drums a little in between his conceptual art work, and there they were played a record: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] It was explained to them that Pickwick made knock-off records -- soundalikes of big hits, and their own records in the style of those hits, all played by a bunch of session musicians and put out under different band names. This one, by "the Primitives", they thought had a shot at being an actual hit, even though it was a dance-craze song about a dance where one partner lays on the floor and the other stamps on their head. But if it was going to be a hit, they needed an actual band to go out and perform it, backing the singer. How would Cale, Conrad, and de Maria like to be three quarters of the Primitives? It sounded fun, but of course they weren't actually guitarists. But as it turned out, that wasn't going to be a problem. They were told that the guitars on the track had all been tuned to one note -- not even to an open chord, like we talked about Steve Cropper doing last episode, but all the strings to one note. Cale and Conrad were astonished -- that was exactly the kind of thing they'd been doing in their drone experiments with La Monte Young. Who was this person who was independently inventing the most advanced ideas in experimental music but applying them to pop songs? And that was how they met Lou Reed: [Excerpt: The Primitives, "The Ostrich"] Where Cale and Conrad were avant-gardeists who had only just started paying attention to rock and roll music, rock and roll was in Lou Reed's blood, but there were a few striking similarities between him and Cale, even though at a glance their backgrounds could not have seemed more different. Reed had been brought up in a comfortably middle-class home in Long Island, but despised the suburban conformity that surrounded him from a very early age, and by his teens was starting to rebel against it very strongly. According to one classmate “Lou was always more advanced than the rest of us. The drinking age was eighteen back then, so we all started drinking at around sixteen. We were drinking quarts of beer, but Lou was smoking joints. He didn't do that in front of many people, but I knew he was doing it. While we were looking at girls in Playboy, Lou was reading Story of O. He was reading the Marquis de Sade, stuff that I wouldn't even have thought about or known how to find.” But one way in which Reed was a typical teenager of the period was his love for rock and roll, especially doo-wop. He'd got himself a guitar, but only had one lesson -- according to the story he would tell on numerous occasions, he turned up with a copy of "Blue Suede Shoes" and told the teacher he only wanted to know how to play the chords for that, and he'd work out the rest himself. Reed and two schoolfriends, Alan Walters and Phil Harris, put together a doo-wop trio they called The Shades, because they wore sunglasses, and a neighbour introduced them to Bob Shad, who had been an A&R man for Mercury Records and was starting his own new label. He renamed them the Jades and took them into the studio with some of the best New York session players, and at fourteen years old Lou Reed was writing songs and singing them backed by Mickey Baker and King Curtis: [Excerpt: The Jades, "Leave Her For Me"] Sadly the Jades' single was a flop -- the closest it came to success was being played on Murray the K's radio show, but on a day when Murray the K was off ill and someone else was filling in for him, much to Reed's disappointment. Phil Harris, the lead singer of the group, got to record some solo sessions after that, but the Jades split up and it would be several years before Reed made any more records. Partly this was because of Reed's mental health, and here's where things get disputed and rather messy. What we know is that in his late teens, just after he'd gone off to New

In this episode we feature April releases only, such was the Australian artist output, although there were only two that reached the Top 10 nationally. We'll hear the first release from The Changing Times; the name itself an apt description for the month. There's a noticeable shift to ‘tuff' R&B, aligning with The Rolling Stones ascendancy; The Spinning Wheels with Got My Mojo Working, Ray Hoff & The Offbeats with Little Queenie & the afore-mentioned Changing Times with Mary Lou. Jay Justin and Little Pattie continue to chart whilst we hear debut 45s from The Henchmen, Peter Doyle and, The Easybeats. Ray Brown & The Whispers' Pride reaches the highest chart mark at 3. Enjoy the changin' times!

¡Vienen los Stones a Madrid! y para ir calentado motores queremos llevarles a su disco en vivo más emblemático, el enorme Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! The Rolling Stones in Concert publicado en septiembre de 1970 y que documenta su gira americana de 1969. Ricardo Portmán nos cuenta su historia. Escucharemos Jumping Jack Flash, Carol, Stray Cat Blues, Love In Vain, Midnight Rambler, Sympathy for the Devil, Live with Me, Little Queenie, Honky Tonk Women y Street Fighting Man + Bonus tracks. Recuerden que nuestros programas los pueden escuchar también en nuestra web https://ecosdelvinilo.com, en https://distanciaradio.com (Córdoba) los miércoles a las 18:00 y domingos a las 23:00 y en https://radiofreerock.com (Cartagena) los viernes a las 18:00.

Mit dem Album "Electric Warrior" erfand Marc Bolan zusammen mit seiner Band T. Rex und dem Produzenten Toni Visconti 1971 eine vollkommen neue Musikrichtung, den "Glamrock". Damit sticht Marc Bolan aus der Masse heraus und wird weltberühmt. Und das in einem Jahr, in dem die Musikwelt ohnehin schon voll war mit großartigen Alben wie: "Aqualung" von Jethro Tull, „L.A. Woman“ von den Doors, "What's Going On" von Marvin Gaye, "Sticky Fingers" der Rolling Stones und "Fireball" von Deep Purple – und das sind noch längst nicht alle. Für die Erfindung des Glamrock wäre wohl kaum jemand besser geeignet gewesen als Marc Bolan. Vor seiner explosionsartigen Musikerkarriere war er schließlich Model, Theaterschauspieler und bekennender Modefan. Seine ersten früheren musikalischen Schritte waren dabei allerdings wenig glamourös. Vor T. Rex machte Marc Bolan noch eher Folksongs mit "Herr der Ringe"-Touch. __________ Über diese Songs vom Album "Electric Warrior" wird im Podcast gesprochen: 09:32 Mins - Mambo Sun 17:35 Mins - Cosmic Dancer 20:30 Mins - Jeepster 26:50 Mins - Girl 29:45 Mins - Get It On __________ Weitere Songbeispiele aus dem Podcast: 10:15 Mins - "Hot Love" von T.Rex 22:57 Mins - "You'll Be Mine" von Howlin‘ Wolf 30:39 Mins - "Little Queenie" von Chuck Berry 38:30 Mins - "Ballroom Blitz" von The Sweet 38:50 Mins - "Make Me Smile" von Steve Harley und Cockney Rebel 39:03 Mins - "Tiger Feet" von Mud 39:25 Mins - "Cum On Feel The Noize" von Slade 39:40 Mins - "Starman" von David Bowie __________ Links zum Podcast: Uschi Nerke moderiert im Beat-Club Folge 72/1971 T. Rex an: https://youtu.be/FApi-kFFqUI David Bowie und Marc Bolan in der letzten Folge der TV Show "Marc": https://youtu.be/kDxUAWIkiOg Born To Boogie, der T.Rex Film von Ringo Starr: https://youtu.be/oLcjA28R0ss __________ Ihr wollt mehr Podcasts wie diesen? Abonniert die SWR1 Meilensteine! Fragen, Kritik, Anregungen? Schreibt uns an: meilensteine@swr.de

Happy Tuesday! This week's guest is Misha of LA's own SadGirl. We talk about seizing the means of production, taking your career into your own hands, and share some tour stories! This is an educational episode from two, now, longtimers in the game. Enjoy the ride and hold on! Dante Elephante is also back on TOUR! Tickets on sale now: www.danteelephante.com/tour Fri. July 30th at The Empty Bottle in Chicago opening for Hinds's Lollapalooza aftershow Sat. July 31st Merchant St. MusicFest in Kankakee, IL Fri. August 27th at Big B's in Colorado Sat. August 28th at UMS in Denver, CO Sun. August 29th at Fort Collins Museum Thurs. October 14th at Cornerstone in Berkeley Fri. October 15th at The Atrium in Santa Cruz Sat. October 16th at The Starlet Room in Sacramento Tues. October 26th at Valley Bar in Phoenix Thurs. October 28th at Casbah in San Diego Thanks for listening to the Dante Elephante Podcast. If you want to support the band go to www.danteelephante.com for merch and tour dates. Visit our Patreon and become a member to get exclusive podcast content, an all vinyl monthly DJ mix and more!Find Dante Elephante: www.danteelephante.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DanteElephante/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Dante_ElephanteInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/danteelephante Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3RdlkFPALHduIIZSinXgJZ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danteelephante

Alison Aucoin isn't usually given to making profane gestures. But after her mother, Lynn Evans, contracted Covid and died last April in New Orleans, Alison -- livid with anger -- posted a photograph to Facebook that quickly went viral. Alison's post, a raw rant straight from the heart, was directed at Donald Trump and his egregeious mishandling of the pandemic that killed her mother.Katie interviews Alison about her mother's life, their mutual devotion, and the terrible circumstances around Lynn's illness and death.Alison's original Facebook post can be found here.Don't forget to visit us at ourmothersourselves.com. And while you're there, please contribute your word to the mother word cloud.Music composed and performed by Andrea Perry.Artwork by Paula Mangin. (@PaulaBallah)Producer: Alice HudsonIntern: Rosie Manock (@RosieManock)Extra special thanks this week to Kevin Clark and the Dukes of Dixieland for permission to play a couple of songs. Kevin is on trumpet, and on Stardust Tom McDermott is on piano and the late Leigh "Little Queenie" Harris is the vocalist.

Sometimes called "the American Beatle," Harry Nilsson was cited by the Beatles as their favorite American group during a 1968 press conference.  Nilsson Schmilsson was Harry Nilsson's (known professionally as Nilsson) seventh and most commercially successful album.Nilsson grew up without a father and was poor.  He began working early in life, and worked on computers in a bank by night, pursuing songwriting by day.  Nilsson would come to work for Phil Spector and would write for a number of artists including the Monkees and Little Richard before going out on his own.  He established a solid reputation as a songwriter through hits such as "Everybody's Talkin'" from the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack, and through pieces such as "Best Friend," the theme from the television show "The Courtship of Eddie's Father."  Nilsson was one of the few major artists of the era to achieve commercial success without ever touring.Nilsson also established a different type of reputation, indulging in excessive drinking and drug use, and instigating with famous people to do the same.  One of the more infamous occasions was Harry Nilsson's involvement with John Lennon's "lost weekend" in the 1970's.  Nilsson was connected to virtually everyone in the music industry and his funeral was attended by some of the biggest names.  If you haven't been acquainted with Harry Nilsson before, you may be surprised by how familiar his songs are to you. Jump Into the FireThis song has a more hard rock style than is typical of Nilsson's other work.  It gained further recognition following its inclusion as the soundtrack to a pivotal scene in Martin Scorsese's 1990 film "Goodfellas." Without YouThis slower track was written by Badfinger and shows off Nilsson's 3-1/2 octave singing range.  Nilsson's cover went to number 1.  Mariah Carey also took a cover of this song to number 1.Gotta Get UpThe transition from a carefree youth to adult responsibility can be a difficult one, and this song discusses that dread of facing responsibility.  You may recognize this as the "reset" song in the Netflix series "Russian Doll."  CoconutThis calypso number was a novelty song featuring four characters (the narrarator, the brother, the sister, and the doctor) al sung in different voices by Nilsson.  The entire song is played using one chord, C7.  Nilsson wrote the word "coconut" on a matchbook during a vacation in Hawaii, thinking it would make a great lyric for a song.  He wrote the song in his car after finding the matchbook while driving in Los Angeles. ENTERTAINMENT TRACK:Finale from the motion picture "Fiddler On the Roof"This musical comedy film was based on the Broadway musical of the same name about life in a Jewish community in pre-revolutionary Russia. STAFF PICKS:“Sunshine” by Jonathan EdwardsRob brings us a country-folk song off Jonathan Edwards debut album.  Originally, this song was not going to be on the album, but the engineer accidentally erased the master of another song and put this one on the album instead.  It was fortuitous, because it would go to number 4 on the charts.“Imagine” by John LennonBrian's staff pick is perhaps the most iconic John Lennon song.  Inspired by Yoko Ono, the song asks the listener to imagine the absence of all the things that divide us.  .“Where Did Our Love Go” by Donnie ElbertBruce features this cover of a Supremes hit from 1964.  Elbert took the song to number 15 in 1971.  Donnie Elbert was a soul singer and songwriter who grew up in Buffalo.  This was one of his biggest songs.  You may also be familiar with a cover by Soft Cell, done as an outro to "Tainted Love."“Get It On” by T. RexWayne's staff pick is from the glam rock group T. Rex.  This was their only hit in the United States.  Front man Marc Bolan claimed to have written this song out of a desire to record Chuck Berry's "Little Queenie," and said that the riff was taken from that tune. COMEDY TRACK:“Shanty” by Jonathan EdwardsIf you grew up in Atlanta in the 80's you will recognize this song from the 96 Rock "5 O'clock Whistle."

The slide guitar master spent his teenage years studying and playing Delta blues with the great Son House, one of the foundational practitioners who was an early influence on the legendary Robert Johnson. John's got a hellhound on his trail—just be careful not to look the beast in the eyes. Topics include a new semester, political drama, haircare tips, police contact, a mentor, a Rochester relocation, vintage underwear, a hitchhiking nightmare, a narrow escape, a New Orleans relocation, meeting Fess, Uganda Roberts, and Earl King, James Booker at the Maple Leaf, a series of bass players, Little Queenie and the Percolators, Bluesiana, Voodoo, Sally Glassman, Rev. Goat Carson, past lives, the spirit world, Carlo Nuccio, immunity, a trickster, Terry Jones, passwords, the Glass House, Peggy Lipton, Quincy Jones, mechanical genius, a universal principle, the Holy Ghost, and much more. Subscribe, review, and rate on Apple Podcasts or most podcast outlets. Follow on social media, share with friends, and spread the Troubled Word. Intro music: Styler/Coman

The slide guitar master spent his teenage years studying and playing Delta blues with the great Son House, one of the foundational practitioners who was an early influence on the legendary Robert Johnson. John’s got a hellhound on his trail—just be careful not to look the beast in the eyes. Topics include a new semester, political drama, haircare tips, police contact, a mentor, a Rochester relocation, vintage underwear, a hitchhiking nightmare, a narrow escape, a New Orleans relocation, meeting Fess, Uganda Roberts, and Earl King, James Booker at the Maple Leaf, a series of bass players, Little Queenie and the Percolators, Bluesiana, Voodoo, Sally Glassman, Rev. Goat Carson, past lives, the spirit world, Carlo Nuccio, immunity, a trickster, Terry Jones, passwords, the Glass House, Peggy Lipton, Quincy Jones, mechanical genius, a universal principle, the Holy Ghost, and much more. Subscribe, review, and rate on Apple Podcasts or most podcast outlets. Follow on social media, share with friends, and spread the Troubled Word. Intro music: Styler/Coman

  Episode sixty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry, and the decline and fall of both Berry and Alan Freed. 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 “Splish Splash” by Bobby Darin.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created Mixcloud streaming playlists with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Because of the limit on the number of songs by one artist, I have posted them as two playlists — part one, part two. I used foue main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn’t shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry’s Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry’s career up to 2001. I also used a Chuck Berry website, http://www.crlf.de/ChuckBerry/ , which contains updates on Rothwell’s research. The information on the precursors to the “Johnny B. Goode” intro comes from Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum.  And for information about Freed, I used  Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll by John A. Jackson. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I’d recommend if you don’t have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without much of the filler.    Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A brief content warning for this episode – like last week’s, this discusses, though not in any great detail, a few crimes of a sexual nature. If that’s likely to upset you, please either check the transcript to make sure you’ll be OK, or come back next week. Today we’re going to talk about the definitive fifties rock and roll song. “Johnny B. Goode” is so much the epitome of American post-war culture that when NASA sent a record into space, on the Voyager probes in the seventies, it was the only rock and roll song included in the selection of audio, which also included pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Stravinsky, and performances by Louis Armstrong and Blind Willie Johnson, along with folk songs, spoken greetings from world leaders, and so on. At the time the golden record was put together, it was criticised for containing any rock and roll at all. Now, that record is further away from Earth than any other object created by a human being. On Saturday Night Live, the week the probe was launched, Steve Martin joked that there’d been a message from aliens – “Send more Chuck Berry”. That’s what an important record “Johnny B. Goode” is. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode”] When we last looked at Chuck Berry, he’d just released “School Day”, which had been his breakout hit into the broader white teenage market that had started to listen to rock and roll. Berry’s career didn’t go on a completely upward curve after that point. His next single, “Oh Baby Doll”, was a comparative flop — it reached number twelve in the R&B charts, but only number fifty-seven on the pop charts. But the record after that was the start of a three-single run that would consolidate Berry as rock and roll’s premier mythologiser. Where in May 1956 Berry had sung about “these rhythm and blues”, this time he was going to use the music’s new name, and he was singing “just let me hear some of that rock and roll music”: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Rock and Roll Music”] That put him back in the top ten, and everything seemed to be going wonderfully for him. He was so popular now as a rock and roll star that on one of the late 1957 tours he did, when Buddy Holly and the Crickets were lower down the bill, the Crickets would do “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” as part of their set. Berry had written enough classics by now that other acts on the bill could do the ones he didn’t have time for. When he next went back into the studio, it was to cut seven songs. One of them, “Reelin’ and Rockin'”, was a slight reworking of the old Wynonie Harris song, “Round the Clock Blues”. Harris’ song, which had also been recorded by Big Joe Turner with Johnny Otis’ band, was an inspiration for “Rock Around the Clock” among other records: [Excerpt: Wynonie Harris, “Round the Clock Blues”] Berry’s version got rid of some of the more sexual lyrical content — though that would later come back in live performances of the song — and played up the song’s similarity to “Rock Around the Clock”, but it’s still basically the exact same song that Wynonie Harris had performed. Of course, the copyright is in Chuck Berry’s name — for all that he and his publishers would be very eager to sue anyone who might come too close to one of Berry’s songs, he had no compunction about taking all the credit for a song someone else had written. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Reelin’ and Rockin’”] You might notice that the piano style on that track is very different from some of Berry’s earlier recordings. Now, there are two possible explanations for this, because I’ve seen two different pianists credited for these sessions. Some sources credit Lafayette Leake with playing the piano here, and that might be enough to explain the difference in style, but I’m going with the other sources, which credit Johnnie Johnson, Berry’s regular player, as playing on the session. If it is, though, he’s playing in a different style. This is because of the popularity of Jerry Lee Lewis, who had risen to fame since Berry’s last session. Lewis used to use a simple technique called “ripping” when playing the piano, in which you just slide your fingers across the keys as fast as possible. He does it pretty much constantly in his solos, as you can hear in this: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”, piano solo] Leonard Chess had heard that sound, and become convinced that that was the main reason that Lewis’ records were so successful, so he insisted on Johnnie Johnson doing that on Berry’s new records. Johnson didn’t like the sound, which he considered “all flash and no technique”, but Chess insisted — to the extent that when they were rehearsing the tracks, Chess would walk over and rip his hand down the keys himself, to show Johnson what he wanted. Johnson eventually went along with it, though he said he “’bout tore my thumbnail off” getting it done. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Reelin’ and Rockin’”] He later acknowledged that Chess had a point, though — simple as it was, it did make the records more exciting, and it was something that the kids clearly liked. And something else that the kids liked was another song recorded at the same session — this time about the kids themselves: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Sweet Little Sixteen”] “Sweet Little Sixteen” was one of the first songs about the experience of being a rock and roll fan. There had been earlier records about just dancing to rock and roll music, of course — things like “Drugstore Rock & Roll” or “Rip it Up” — but this was about fandom, and about the experience of following musicians. It’s not completely about that, sadly — it’s the teen girl fan filtered through the male gaze, and so it’s also about how “everybody wants to dance with” this sixteen-year-old girl, and about her “tight dresses and lipstick” — but where the song gains its power is in the verse sections where the girl becomes the viewpoint character, and we hear about how excited she is to go to the show, and about her collections of autographs and photos. However flawed it is, it’s one of the best evocations of the experience of fandom as a hobby — not just liking the music, but having the experience of fandom be a major part of your life. One of the most notable things about “Sweet Little Sixteen” is the way that Berry uses the song to namecheck American Bandstand, which was fast becoming the most important rock and roll TV show around. While in the first chorus he sings about how they’ll be rocking in Boston and Pittsburgh, PA, in the subsequent choruses he changes that to “on Bandstand” and “in Philadelphia PA”, which is where American Bandstand was broadcast from. It’s a sign that Dick Clark was becoming more important than Berry’s mentor, Alan Freed. A week after the session for “Reelin’ and Rockin'” and “Sweet Little Sixteen”, came another session for what would become Berry’s most well-known song, and one that remains in the repertoire of almost every bar band in the world. It’s instantly recognisable right from the start. The introduction to “Johnny B. Goode” is one of the most well-known guitar parts in history: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode”] But that guitar part has a long history — it’s original to Chuck Berry, but at the same time it’s based on a lot of earlier examples. Berry took the basic idea for that line from Carl Hogan, Louis Jordan’s guitarist, who played this as the intro to Jordan’s “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman”: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman”] But Hogan was only the latest in a long line of people who had played essentially that identical line. The first recording we have of that riff dates back to 1918, and a recording by Wilbur Sweatman’s Jazz Orchestra. Sweatman was a friend and colleague of Scott Joplin, and his band was one of the very first black jazz groups to record at all. And on their song “Bluin’ the Blues”, you hear this: [Excerpt: Wilbur Sweatman’s Jazz Orchestra, “Bluin’ the Blues”] We hear it in Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Got the Blues”, in 1926: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, “Got the Blues”] In Blind Blake’s “Too Tight”, also from 1926: [Excerpt: Blind Blake, “Too Tight”] then in records by Cow Cow Davenport, Andy Kirk, and Count Basie, before it turns up in the Louis Jordan record. But there is a crucial difference between what Carl Hogan played and what Chuck Berry played. Listen again to Hogan’s playing: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman”] and now to Berry: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode”] The crucial change Berry makes there is that most of the time he’s playing the solo line on two strings instead of one, creating a thicker sound, with parallel harmonies, rather than just the simple melody line. This was something that Berry learned from the great blues guitarist T-Bone Walker: [Excerpt: T-Bone Walker, “Shufflin’ the Blues”] Berry took Walker’s playing style, and combined it with Hogan’s note choices, and that simple change makes all the difference. It transmutes the part that Hogan had played from just a standard riff you find in dozens of old jazz records, a standard part of any musician’s toolkit, into a specific intro to a specific song. When, six years later, Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys played this as the intro to “Fun, Fun, Fun”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Fun Fun Fun”] Absolutely no-one listening thought “Oh, he’s riffing off ‘Texas Shout’ by Cow Cow Davenport” — everyone instantly thought “Oh, that’s the intro to ‘Johnny B. Goode'”. Berry had taken a standard piece of every musician’s toolkit, and by putting a very slight twist on it had made everyone listening hear it differently, so now it was identified solely with him. The lyric to Johnny B. Goode is more original than the music, but even there we can trace its origins. Berry always talked about how the original idea for the lyric was as a message to Johnnie Johnson, saying “Johnnie, be good”, stop drinking so much — a wake-up call to his friend and colleague. But that quickly changed, and the song became more about Berry himself, or an idealised version of Berry, perhaps how he would want people to see him — something that was even more explicit in the original version of the lyric, where rather than sing “a country boy”, he sang “a coloured boy”. But there’s another sign that Berry was talking about himself, and that’s in the very title itself. Goode is spelled “G-o-o-d-e”, with an “e” on the end — and Berry’s childhood home was at 2520 Goode avenue, with an E. There’s another possible origin as well — the poet Langston Hughes had written a very widely circulated series of newspaper columns, which Berry would have encountered in his teenage years and early twenties, about a character named Jesse B. Simple. (And in an interesting note, in 1934 Hughes wrote a story about racial injustice called “Berry”, about a boy named Berry who would, among other things, tell children stories and sing them songs, and Hughes signed the dedication in the book that story was in “Berry” rather than with his own name.) You can point to every element of “Johnny B. Goode” and say “well, this came from there, and this came from there”, but still you’re no closer to identifying why Johnny B. Goode works as well as it does. it’s the combination of all these elements in a way that they’d never been put together before that is Berry’s genius, and is why Berry is pretty much universally regarded as an innovator, not just as an imitator. “Johnny B. Goode” was also the title song for what turned out to be Alan Freed’s final film — a film called Go, Johnny, Go! which also featured Eddie Cochran, the Moonglows, and Ritchie Valens. [Excerpt: Berry and Freed dialogue from Go, Johnny, Go!] That film came out in 1959, and had Berry as Freed’s co-star, appearing with Freed as himself in almost every scene. It was the last gasp of rock and roll cultural relevance for almost everyone involved. By the time the film had come out, Valens was already dead, and within a little over eighteen months after its release, Cochran was also dead, Freed was disgraced, and Berry was in prison. In the last couple of episodes, I’ve mentioned a tour that Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis headlined in 1958, just after “Johnny B. Goode” came out, with Alan Freed as the MC. What I didn’t mention until now is that as well as the tension between Chuck and Jerry Lee, that tour ended up spelling the end of Freed’s career. Freed was already on the downturn in his career — rock and roll was moving from being a music made largely by black musicians to one dominated by white people, and to make matters worse the major labels had finally got a handle on it and started churning out dozens of prepackaged teen idols, most of them called Bobby. Freed didn’t have the connections with the major labels, or the understanding of the new manufactured pop, that he did with the R&B records from labels like Chess. But it was the show in Boston on this tour that led to Freed’s downfall. The early show, which had been headlined by Lewis, had had the audience dancing, and the police were not at all impressed with this. They’d forced Alan Freed to make the audience sit down, and Lewis had had to play his set to an audience who were seated and squirming, unable to get up and dance to his recent big hits like “Great Balls of Fire”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] Then came the late show, which Berry was headlining. The same thing started to happen — the kids in the audience got up to dance, and the police made Alan Freed make them sit down. But then, when the audience had quietened down, while Berry was standing there on stage, the police refused to dim the house lights and let the musicians carry on playing. So Freed got back on stage and said “It looks like the Boston police don’t want you to have a good time.” The show continued with the lights on, but the audience got annoyed — so much so that Chuck Berry finished the show from behind the drummer, in case the audience attacked. But the police got more annoyed. They got so annoyed, in fact, that they decided to simply claim that every single crime reported to them that night had been inspired by the show. Nobody now thinks that the New York Times reports which said there were multiple stabbings, fifteen people hospitalised, and multiple rapes, are actually accurate reports of anything caused by the show. But at the time, everyone believed it. Boston decided to ban rock and roll concerts altogether, as a result of the show, and while the tour continued through a couple more dates, most of the remaining tour dates got cancelled. Oddly, going through this adversity seems to have brought Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis together. While they’d been fighting each other for almost the entire tour, after this point they became quite close friends, and would speak warmly about each other. Things didn’t end so happily for Alan Freed. Freed had been having some problems with his radio station for a little while. He was difficult to work with, and they particularly disliked that he had started doing his broadcasts from home, rather than from the studio. When he’d been hired, the station was losing money, and he’d been a gamble. Now, they were in profit, and they didn’t need to take risks, and they’d been considering not renewing his contract when it came up in six months. Now that this had happened, they took the opportunity to use the morals clause in Freed’s contract to fire him, although he was allowed to present it as a resignation instead of a firing. Freed would manage to get another radio job, but not one with anything like the same prominence. He would, within a couple of years, become the designated industry fall guy for the practice of payola. This is something that we’ve talked about before — record labels would pay DJs to play their records. Sometimes it was in the form of adding their name to the writing credits, as was the case for Freed with records like “Maybellene” and “Sincerely” – and you can tell how much Freed contributed to those songs by hearing his own attempts at making records: [Excerpt: Alan Freed and his Rock and Roll Band, “Rock and Roll Boogie”, Rock Rock Rock version] Sometimes a promoter would just slip a DJ fifty dollars when handing over a promotional copy of the record. Sometimes, the DJ would be hired to announce a show by the act whose record was to be promoted. There were a lot of different methods, some of them more blatant than others, but it was a common practice. Every DJ and TV presenter took part in this, pretty much — Dick Clark certainly did — and while no-one other than the DJs liked the practice, the small labels that built rock and roll, labels like Sun or Chess or Atlantic, all saw it as a way that they could equalise things a little bit. The major labels all had an inbuilt advantage, and would get their records played on the radio no matter what — this was a way that the smaller labels could be heard. But precisely because it levelled the playing field somewhat, the larger record labels didn’t like it, and by this point the major labels were becoming more interested in rock and roll. And to protect that interest, they promoted a campaign against payola. Freed, as the most prominent DJ in the country, and someone who did his fair share of taking bribes, was essentially chosen as the scapegoat for this, once he lost his job at WINS. By the end of 1959 he lost his job with the station he moved to, WABC, once the payola scandal became headline news, and he spent the next few years moving from smaller stations to yet smaller ones, not staying anywhere very long. He died in 1965, of illnesses caused by his alcoholism. He was only forty-three. [Excerpt: Alan Freed sign-off, “This is not goodbye, it’s just goodnight”] And here we get to the downfall of Chuck Berry himself. It’s an unfortunate fact of chronology that I have to deal with this the week after dealing with Jerry Lee Lewis’ own underage sex scandal — well, a fact of both chronology and a terrible society that sees the bodies of young girls as something to which powerful men are entitled, anyway. Chuck Berry had been on a tour of the Southwest, when in Texas he had met up with a fourteen-year-old sex worker, who had accompanied him on the rest of the tour. He’d promised her a job working at his nightclub in St. Louis, and when he fired her shortly after she started there, she went to the police. Like Lewis, Berry has been more or less forgiven by the consensus narrative of rock history. There is slightly more justification for doing so in Berry’s case than in Lewis’, because the Mann Act, the law under which he was charged and convicted, was a law that was created specifically to punish black men — indeed, its official title was The White Slave Traffic Act. Given the way that other rock and roll artists seem to have had carte blanche to abuse young girls, the fact that a black man was about the only one, certainly for many decades, to spend time in prison for this, is more than a little unjust. But the fact remains, a man in his thirties had had sexual relations with a fourteen-year-old girl. And it’s not like this was an isolated incident — he would later famously settle a class-action suit brought against him by a large number of women he had videotaped on the toilet without their permission. So while Berry had an entirely fair complaint that the prosecution was motivated by race — and his prison sentence was reduced in large part because the judge made some extremely racist remarks — it’s still a fact that what he did was wrong. Now, I’m not going to spend much more time on this with Berry — not as much as I did with Jerry Lee Lewis last week — and that’s because as I said in the beginning of the series, this is not a podcast about the horrible crimes men have committed against women. So why bring it up at all? Well, there’s a myth that Berry’s career was completely wrecked by his arrest. This simply isn’t true. It’s true that “Johnny B. Goode” was Berry’s last top ten hit for quite a few years, and he only had one more top twenty hit in the fifties. But the thing is, his singles had had a very inconsistent chart history before that. He’d released eleven singles up to that point, and only five of them had made the top ten on the pop charts. Classics like “Thirty Days”, “Too Much Monkey Business”, “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” and “You Can’t Catch Me” had totally failed to hit the pop charts at all. Berry was arrested in December 1959, and between trials and appeals, he didn’t end up going to jail until 1961. “Johnny B. Goode” came out in March 1958. That means that for almost two years *before* the arrest, Berry was, at best, charting in the lower reaches of the charts. The fact is, there’s a simple reason why Berry didn’t chart very much in the late fifties and early sixties. Well, there are two reasons. The first is that public taste had moved on, as it does every few years. There are very few singles artists — and all artists in the fifties were singles artists — who can survive a major change in the public’s taste. The other reason, as he would later admit himself, is that the material he recorded in the few years after “Johnny B. Goode” wasn’t his best. There were some good songs — things like “Carol”, “Little Queenie”, and “I’ve Got to Find My Baby” — but even those weren’t Berry at his absolute peak. And the majority of the material he put out during that time was stuff like “Anthony Boy” and “Too Pooped to Pop”, which very few of even Berry’s most ardent fans will tell you are worth listening to. There was one exception — during that time, he put out what may be the best song he ever wrote, “Memphis, Tennessee”: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Memphis, Tennessee”] While it’s a travesty that that record didn’t chart, in retrospect it’s easy to see why it didn’t. Berry’s audience were, for the most part, teenagers. No matter how good a song it was, “Memphis Tennessee” was about a man wanting to regain contact with his six-year-old daughter after he’s split up with her mother. That’s something that would have far more relevance to people of Berry’s own age group than to the people who had been, a year or so earlier, wanting to dance with sweet little sixteen, and wanting to hear some of that rock and roll music. As odd as it is to say, Berry’s eighteen months in jail may have done him some good as a commercial prospect. The first three singles he released in 1964, right after getting out of prison, were all bigger hits than he’d had since summer 1958 — “Nadine” made number 23, “You Never Can Tell” made number fourteen, and “No Particular Place to Go”, a rewrite of “School Day”, with new, funnier, lyrics about sexual frustration, went to number ten: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “No Particular Place to Go”] Those songs were better than anything he’d released for several years previously, and it seemed that Berry might be on his way back to the top, but it was a false dawn. Berry’s studio work slid back into mediocrity with occasional flashes of his old brilliance, and his only hit after this point was in the seventies, when he had his only number one with a novelty song by Dave Bartholomew, “My Ding-a-Ling”, which if you’ve not heard it is about as juvenile as it sounds. In the late seventies, Berry essentially retired from making new music, choosing instead to spend the best part of forty years touring the world with just his guitar, playing with whatever local pickup band the promoter could scrape together, and often not even letting them know in advance what the next song was going to be — he assumed that everyone knew all of his songs, and he was, by and large, correct in that assumption. He was, by all accounts, an extremely bitter man. He did, though, work on one final album, just called “Chuck”, which was announced as part of the celebrations for his ninetieth birthday, but wasn’t released until shortly after his death. He died, aged ninety, in 2017, and the obituaries concentrated on his music rather than his crimes against women. John Lennon once said “if you tried to give rock and roll another name, it would be Chuck Berry”, and for both better and worse, that’s probably true.

  Episode sixty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Johnny B. Goode" by Chuck Berry, and the decline and fall of both Berry and Alan Freed. 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 "Splish Splash" by Bobby Darin.  ----more---- Resources As always, I've created Mixcloud streaming playlists with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Because of the limit on the number of songs by one artist, I have posted them as two playlists -- part one, part two. I used foue main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn't shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry's Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry's career up to 2001. I also used a Chuck Berry website, http://www.crlf.de/ChuckBerry/ , which contains updates on Rothwell's research. The information on the precursors to the "Johnny B. Goode" intro comes from Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum.  And for information about Freed, I used  Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll by John A. Jackson. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I'd recommend if you don't have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without much of the filler.    Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A brief content warning for this episode – like last week's, this discusses, though not in any great detail, a few crimes of a sexual nature. If that's likely to upset you, please either check the transcript to make sure you'll be OK, or come back next week. Today we're going to talk about the definitive fifties rock and roll song. “Johnny B. Goode” is so much the epitome of American post-war culture that when NASA sent a record into space, on the Voyager probes in the seventies, it was the only rock and roll song included in the selection of audio, which also included pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Stravinsky, and performances by Louis Armstrong and Blind Willie Johnson, along with folk songs, spoken greetings from world leaders, and so on. At the time the golden record was put together, it was criticised for containing any rock and roll at all. Now, that record is further away from Earth than any other object created by a human being. On Saturday Night Live, the week the probe was launched, Steve Martin joked that there'd been a message from aliens – “Send more Chuck Berry”. That's what an important record "Johnny B. Goode" is. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode”] When we last looked at Chuck Berry, he'd just released "School Day", which had been his breakout hit into the broader white teenage market that had started to listen to rock and roll. Berry's career didn't go on a completely upward curve after that point. His next single, "Oh Baby Doll", was a comparative flop -- it reached number twelve in the R&B charts, but only number fifty-seven on the pop charts. But the record after that was the start of a three-single run that would consolidate Berry as rock and roll's premier mythologiser. Where in May 1956 Berry had sung about "these rhythm and blues", this time he was going to use the music's new name, and he was singing "just let me hear some of that rock and roll music": [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Rock and Roll Music"] That put him back in the top ten, and everything seemed to be going wonderfully for him. He was so popular now as a rock and roll star that on one of the late 1957 tours he did, when Buddy Holly and the Crickets were lower down the bill, the Crickets would do "Roll Over Beethoven" and "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" as part of their set. Berry had written enough classics by now that other acts on the bill could do the ones he didn't have time for. When he next went back into the studio, it was to cut seven songs. One of them, "Reelin' and Rockin'", was a slight reworking of the old Wynonie Harris song, "Round the Clock Blues". Harris' song, which had also been recorded by Big Joe Turner with Johnny Otis' band, was an inspiration for "Rock Around the Clock" among other records: [Excerpt: Wynonie Harris, "Round the Clock Blues"] Berry's version got rid of some of the more sexual lyrical content -- though that would later come back in live performances of the song -- and played up the song's similarity to "Rock Around the Clock", but it's still basically the exact same song that Wynonie Harris had performed. Of course, the copyright is in Chuck Berry's name -- for all that he and his publishers would be very eager to sue anyone who might come too close to one of Berry's songs, he had no compunction about taking all the credit for a song someone else had written. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Reelin' and Rockin'”] You might notice that the piano style on that track is very different from some of Berry's earlier recordings. Now, there are two possible explanations for this, because I've seen two different pianists credited for these sessions. Some sources credit Lafayette Leake with playing the piano here, and that might be enough to explain the difference in style, but I'm going with the other sources, which credit Johnnie Johnson, Berry's regular player, as playing on the session. If it is, though, he's playing in a different style. This is because of the popularity of Jerry Lee Lewis, who had risen to fame since Berry's last session. Lewis used to use a simple technique called "ripping" when playing the piano, in which you just slide your fingers across the keys as fast as possible. He does it pretty much constantly in his solos, as you can hear in this: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”, piano solo] Leonard Chess had heard that sound, and become convinced that that was the main reason that Lewis' records were so successful, so he insisted on Johnnie Johnson doing that on Berry's new records. Johnson didn't like the sound, which he considered "all flash and no technique", but Chess insisted -- to the extent that when they were rehearsing the tracks, Chess would walk over and rip his hand down the keys himself, to show Johnson what he wanted. Johnson eventually went along with it, though he said he "'bout tore my thumbnail off" getting it done. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Reelin' and Rockin'”] He later acknowledged that Chess had a point, though -- simple as it was, it did make the records more exciting, and it was something that the kids clearly liked. And something else that the kids liked was another song recorded at the same session -- this time about the kids themselves: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Sweet Little Sixteen"] "Sweet Little Sixteen" was one of the first songs about the experience of being a rock and roll fan. There had been earlier records about just dancing to rock and roll music, of course -- things like "Drugstore Rock & Roll" or "Rip it Up" -- but this was about fandom, and about the experience of following musicians. It's not completely about that, sadly -- it's the teen girl fan filtered through the male gaze, and so it's also about how "everybody wants to dance with" this sixteen-year-old girl, and about her "tight dresses and lipstick" -- but where the song gains its power is in the verse sections where the girl becomes the viewpoint character, and we hear about how excited she is to go to the show, and about her collections of autographs and photos. However flawed it is, it's one of the best evocations of the experience of fandom as a hobby -- not just liking the music, but having the experience of fandom be a major part of your life. One of the most notable things about "Sweet Little Sixteen" is the way that Berry uses the song to namecheck American Bandstand, which was fast becoming the most important rock and roll TV show around. While in the first chorus he sings about how they'll be rocking in Boston and Pittsburgh, PA, in the subsequent choruses he changes that to "on Bandstand" and "in Philadelphia PA", which is where American Bandstand was broadcast from. It's a sign that Dick Clark was becoming more important than Berry's mentor, Alan Freed. A week after the session for "Reelin' and Rockin'" and "Sweet Little Sixteen", came another session for what would become Berry's most well-known song, and one that remains in the repertoire of almost every bar band in the world. It's instantly recognisable right from the start. The introduction to "Johnny B. Goode" is one of the most well-known guitar parts in history: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Johnny B. Goode"] But that guitar part has a long history -- it's original to Chuck Berry, but at the same time it's based on a lot of earlier examples. Berry took the basic idea for that line from Carl Hogan, Louis Jordan's guitarist, who played this as the intro to Jordan's "Ain't That Just Like a Woman": [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Ain't That Just Like a Woman"] But Hogan was only the latest in a long line of people who had played essentially that identical line. The first recording we have of that riff dates back to 1918, and a recording by Wilbur Sweatman's Jazz Orchestra. Sweatman was a friend and colleague of Scott Joplin, and his band was one of the very first black jazz groups to record at all. And on their song "Bluin' the Blues", you hear this: [Excerpt: Wilbur Sweatman's Jazz Orchestra, "Bluin' the Blues"] We hear it in Blind Lemon Jefferson's "Got the Blues", in 1926: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Got the Blues"] In Blind Blake's "Too Tight", also from 1926: [Excerpt: Blind Blake, "Too Tight"] then in records by Cow Cow Davenport, Andy Kirk, and Count Basie, before it turns up in the Louis Jordan record. But there is a crucial difference between what Carl Hogan played and what Chuck Berry played. Listen again to Hogan's playing: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Ain't That Just Like a Woman"] and now to Berry: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Johnny B. Goode"] The crucial change Berry makes there is that most of the time he's playing the solo line on two strings instead of one, creating a thicker sound, with parallel harmonies, rather than just the simple melody line. This was something that Berry learned from the great blues guitarist T-Bone Walker: [Excerpt: T-Bone Walker, "Shufflin' the Blues"] Berry took Walker's playing style, and combined it with Hogan's note choices, and that simple change makes all the difference. It transmutes the part that Hogan had played from just a standard riff you find in dozens of old jazz records, a standard part of any musician's toolkit, into a specific intro to a specific song. When, six years later, Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys played this as the intro to "Fun, Fun, Fun": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Fun Fun Fun"] Absolutely no-one listening thought "Oh, he's riffing off 'Texas Shout' by Cow Cow Davenport" -- everyone instantly thought "Oh, that's the intro to 'Johnny B. Goode'". Berry had taken a standard piece of every musician's toolkit, and by putting a very slight twist on it had made everyone listening hear it differently, so now it was identified solely with him. The lyric to Johnny B. Goode is more original than the music, but even there we can trace its origins. Berry always talked about how the original idea for the lyric was as a message to Johnnie Johnson, saying "Johnnie, be good", stop drinking so much -- a wake-up call to his friend and colleague. But that quickly changed, and the song became more about Berry himself, or an idealised version of Berry, perhaps how he would want people to see him -- something that was even more explicit in the original version of the lyric, where rather than sing "a country boy", he sang "a coloured boy". But there's another sign that Berry was talking about himself, and that's in the very title itself. Goode is spelled "G-o-o-d-e", with an "e" on the end -- and Berry's childhood home was at 2520 Goode avenue, with an E. There's another possible origin as well -- the poet Langston Hughes had written a very widely circulated series of newspaper columns, which Berry would have encountered in his teenage years and early twenties, about a character named Jesse B. Simple. (And in an interesting note, in 1934 Hughes wrote a story about racial injustice called "Berry", about a boy named Berry who would, among other things, tell children stories and sing them songs, and Hughes signed the dedication in the book that story was in "Berry" rather than with his own name.) You can point to every element of "Johnny B. Goode" and say "well, this came from there, and this came from there", but still you're no closer to identifying why Johnny B. Goode works as well as it does. it's the combination of all these elements in a way that they'd never been put together before that is Berry's genius, and is why Berry is pretty much universally regarded as an innovator, not just as an imitator. "Johnny B. Goode" was also the title song for what turned out to be Alan Freed's final film -- a film called Go, Johnny, Go! which also featured Eddie Cochran, the Moonglows, and Ritchie Valens. [Excerpt: Berry and Freed dialogue from Go, Johnny, Go!] That film came out in 1959, and had Berry as Freed's co-star, appearing with Freed as himself in almost every scene. It was the last gasp of rock and roll cultural relevance for almost everyone involved. By the time the film had come out, Valens was already dead, and within a little over eighteen months after its release, Cochran was also dead, Freed was disgraced, and Berry was in prison. In the last couple of episodes, I've mentioned a tour that Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis headlined in 1958, just after “Johnny B. Goode” came out, with Alan Freed as the MC. What I didn't mention until now is that as well as the tension between Chuck and Jerry Lee, that tour ended up spelling the end of Freed's career. Freed was already on the downturn in his career -- rock and roll was moving from being a music made largely by black musicians to one dominated by white people, and to make matters worse the major labels had finally got a handle on it and started churning out dozens of prepackaged teen idols, most of them called Bobby. Freed didn't have the connections with the major labels, or the understanding of the new manufactured pop, that he did with the R&B records from labels like Chess. But it was the show in Boston on this tour that led to Freed's downfall. The early show, which had been headlined by Lewis, had had the audience dancing, and the police were not at all impressed with this. They'd forced Alan Freed to make the audience sit down, and Lewis had had to play his set to an audience who were seated and squirming, unable to get up and dance to his recent big hits like “Great Balls of Fire”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] Then came the late show, which Berry was headlining. The same thing started to happen -- the kids in the audience got up to dance, and the police made Alan Freed make them sit down. But then, when the audience had quietened down, while Berry was standing there on stage, the police refused to dim the house lights and let the musicians carry on playing. So Freed got back on stage and said "It looks like the Boston police don't want you to have a good time." The show continued with the lights on, but the audience got annoyed -- so much so that Chuck Berry finished the show from behind the drummer, in case the audience attacked. But the police got more annoyed. They got so annoyed, in fact, that they decided to simply claim that every single crime reported to them that night had been inspired by the show. Nobody now thinks that the New York Times reports which said there were multiple stabbings, fifteen people hospitalised, and multiple rapes, are actually accurate reports of anything caused by the show. But at the time, everyone believed it. Boston decided to ban rock and roll concerts altogether, as a result of the show, and while the tour continued through a couple more dates, most of the remaining tour dates got cancelled. Oddly, going through this adversity seems to have brought Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis together. While they'd been fighting each other for almost the entire tour, after this point they became quite close friends, and would speak warmly about each other. Things didn't end so happily for Alan Freed. Freed had been having some problems with his radio station for a little while. He was difficult to work with, and they particularly disliked that he had started doing his broadcasts from home, rather than from the studio. When he'd been hired, the station was losing money, and he'd been a gamble. Now, they were in profit, and they didn't need to take risks, and they'd been considering not renewing his contract when it came up in six months. Now that this had happened, they took the opportunity to use the morals clause in Freed's contract to fire him, although he was allowed to present it as a resignation instead of a firing. Freed would manage to get another radio job, but not one with anything like the same prominence. He would, within a couple of years, become the designated industry fall guy for the practice of payola. This is something that we've talked about before -- record labels would pay DJs to play their records. Sometimes it was in the form of adding their name to the writing credits, as was the case for Freed with records like "Maybellene" and "Sincerely" – and you can tell how much Freed contributed to those songs by hearing his own attempts at making records: [Excerpt: Alan Freed and his Rock and Roll Band, “Rock and Roll Boogie”, Rock Rock Rock version] Sometimes a promoter would just slip a DJ fifty dollars when handing over a promotional copy of the record. Sometimes, the DJ would be hired to announce a show by the act whose record was to be promoted. There were a lot of different methods, some of them more blatant than others, but it was a common practice. Every DJ and TV presenter took part in this, pretty much -- Dick Clark certainly did -- and while no-one other than the DJs liked the practice, the small labels that built rock and roll, labels like Sun or Chess or Atlantic, all saw it as a way that they could equalise things a little bit. The major labels all had an inbuilt advantage, and would get their records played on the radio no matter what -- this was a way that the smaller labels could be heard. But precisely because it levelled the playing field somewhat, the larger record labels didn't like it, and by this point the major labels were becoming more interested in rock and roll. And to protect that interest, they promoted a campaign against payola. Freed, as the most prominent DJ in the country, and someone who did his fair share of taking bribes, was essentially chosen as the scapegoat for this, once he lost his job at WINS. By the end of 1959 he lost his job with the station he moved to, WABC, once the payola scandal became headline news, and he spent the next few years moving from smaller stations to yet smaller ones, not staying anywhere very long. He died in 1965, of illnesses caused by his alcoholism. He was only forty-three. [Excerpt: Alan Freed sign-off, “This is not goodbye, it's just goodnight”] And here we get to the downfall of Chuck Berry himself. It's an unfortunate fact of chronology that I have to deal with this the week after dealing with Jerry Lee Lewis' own underage sex scandal -- well, a fact of both chronology and a terrible society that sees the bodies of young girls as something to which powerful men are entitled, anyway. Chuck Berry had been on a tour of the Southwest, when in Texas he had met up with a fourteen-year-old sex worker, who had accompanied him on the rest of the tour. He'd promised her a job working at his nightclub in St. Louis, and when he fired her shortly after she started there, she went to the police. Like Lewis, Berry has been more or less forgiven by the consensus narrative of rock history. There is slightly more justification for doing so in Berry's case than in Lewis', because the Mann Act, the law under which he was charged and convicted, was a law that was created specifically to punish black men -- indeed, its official title was The White Slave Traffic Act. Given the way that other rock and roll artists seem to have had carte blanche to abuse young girls, the fact that a black man was about the only one, certainly for many decades, to spend time in prison for this, is more than a little unjust. But the fact remains, a man in his thirties had had sexual relations with a fourteen-year-old girl. And it's not like this was an isolated incident -- he would later famously settle a class-action suit brought against him by a large number of women he had videotaped on the toilet without their permission. So while Berry had an entirely fair complaint that the prosecution was motivated by race -- and his prison sentence was reduced in large part because the judge made some extremely racist remarks -- it's still a fact that what he did was wrong. Now, I'm not going to spend much more time on this with Berry -- not as much as I did with Jerry Lee Lewis last week -- and that's because as I said in the beginning of the series, this is not a podcast about the horrible crimes men have committed against women. So why bring it up at all? Well, there's a myth that Berry's career was completely wrecked by his arrest. This simply isn't true. It's true that "Johnny B. Goode" was Berry's last top ten hit for quite a few years, and he only had one more top twenty hit in the fifties. But the thing is, his singles had had a very inconsistent chart history before that. He'd released eleven singles up to that point, and only five of them had made the top ten on the pop charts. Classics like "Thirty Days", "Too Much Monkey Business", "Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" and "You Can't Catch Me" had totally failed to hit the pop charts at all. Berry was arrested in December 1959, and between trials and appeals, he didn't end up going to jail until 1961. "Johnny B. Goode" came out in March 1958. That means that for almost two years *before* the arrest, Berry was, at best, charting in the lower reaches of the charts. The fact is, there's a simple reason why Berry didn't chart very much in the late fifties and early sixties. Well, there are two reasons. The first is that public taste had moved on, as it does every few years. There are very few singles artists -- and all artists in the fifties were singles artists -- who can survive a major change in the public's taste. The other reason, as he would later admit himself, is that the material he recorded in the few years after "Johnny B. Goode" wasn't his best. There were some good songs -- things like "Carol", "Little Queenie", and "I've Got to Find My Baby" -- but even those weren't Berry at his absolute peak. And the majority of the material he put out during that time was stuff like "Anthony Boy" and "Too Pooped to Pop", which very few of even Berry's most ardent fans will tell you are worth listening to. There was one exception -- during that time, he put out what may be the best song he ever wrote, "Memphis, Tennessee": [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Memphis, Tennessee"] While it's a travesty that that record didn't chart, in retrospect it's easy to see why it didn't. Berry's audience were, for the most part, teenagers. No matter how good a song it was, "Memphis Tennessee" was about a man wanting to regain contact with his six-year-old daughter after he's split up with her mother. That's something that would have far more relevance to people of Berry's own age group than to the people who had been, a year or so earlier, wanting to dance with sweet little sixteen, and wanting to hear some of that rock and roll music. As odd as it is to say, Berry's eighteen months in jail may have done him some good as a commercial prospect. The first three singles he released in 1964, right after getting out of prison, were all bigger hits than he'd had since summer 1958 -- "Nadine" made number 23, "You Never Can Tell" made number fourteen, and "No Particular Place to Go", a rewrite of "School Day", with new, funnier, lyrics about sexual frustration, went to number ten: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "No Particular Place to Go"] Those songs were better than anything he'd released for several years previously, and it seemed that Berry might be on his way back to the top, but it was a false dawn. Berry's studio work slid back into mediocrity with occasional flashes of his old brilliance, and his only hit after this point was in the seventies, when he had his only number one with a novelty song by Dave Bartholomew, "My Ding-a-Ling", which if you've not heard it is about as juvenile as it sounds. In the late seventies, Berry essentially retired from making new music, choosing instead to spend the best part of forty years touring the world with just his guitar, playing with whatever local pickup band the promoter could scrape together, and often not even letting them know in advance what the next song was going to be -- he assumed that everyone knew all of his songs, and he was, by and large, correct in that assumption. He was, by all accounts, an extremely bitter man. He did, though, work on one final album, just called "Chuck", which was announced as part of the celebrations for his ninetieth birthday, but wasn't released until shortly after his death. He died, aged ninety, in 2017, and the obituaries concentrated on his music rather than his crimes against women. John Lennon once said "if you tried to give rock and roll another name, it would be Chuck Berry", and for both better and worse, that's probably true.

  Episode sixty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry, and the decline and fall of both Berry and Alan Freed. 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 “Splish Splash” by Bobby Darin.  —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created Mixcloud streaming playlists with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Because of the limit on the number of songs by one artist, I have posted them as two playlists — part one, part two. I used foue main books as reference here: Brown Eyed Handsome Man: The Life and Hard Times of Chuck Berry by Bruce Pegg is a good narrative biography of Berry, which doesn’t shy away from the less salubrious aspects of his personality, but is clearly written by an admirer. Long Distance Information: Chuck Berry’s Recorded Legacy by Fred Rothwell is an extraordinarily researched look at every single recording session of Berry’s career up to 2001. I also used a Chuck Berry website, http://www.crlf.de/ChuckBerry/ , which contains updates on Rothwell’s research. The information on the precursors to the “Johnny B. Goode” intro comes from Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum.  And for information about Freed, I used  Big Beat Heat: Alan Freed and the Early Years of Rock & Roll by John A. Jackson. There are a myriad Chuck Berry compilations available. The one I’d recommend if you don’t have a spare couple of hundred quid for the complete works box set is the double-CD Gold, which has every major track without much of the filler.    Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A brief content warning for this episode – like last week’s, this discusses, though not in any great detail, a few crimes of a sexual nature. If that’s likely to upset you, please either check the transcript to make sure you’ll be OK, or come back next week. Today we’re going to talk about the definitive fifties rock and roll song. “Johnny B. Goode” is so much the epitome of American post-war culture that when NASA sent a record into space, on the Voyager probes in the seventies, it was the only rock and roll song included in the selection of audio, which also included pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Stravinsky, and performances by Louis Armstrong and Blind Willie Johnson, along with folk songs, spoken greetings from world leaders, and so on. At the time the golden record was put together, it was criticised for containing any rock and roll at all. Now, that record is further away from Earth than any other object created by a human being. On Saturday Night Live, the week the probe was launched, Steve Martin joked that there’d been a message from aliens – “Send more Chuck Berry”. That’s what an important record “Johnny B. Goode” is. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode”] When we last looked at Chuck Berry, he’d just released “School Day”, which had been his breakout hit into the broader white teenage market that had started to listen to rock and roll. Berry’s career didn’t go on a completely upward curve after that point. His next single, “Oh Baby Doll”, was a comparative flop — it reached number twelve in the R&B charts, but only number fifty-seven on the pop charts. But the record after that was the start of a three-single run that would consolidate Berry as rock and roll’s premier mythologiser. Where in May 1956 Berry had sung about “these rhythm and blues”, this time he was going to use the music’s new name, and he was singing “just let me hear some of that rock and roll music”: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Rock and Roll Music”] That put him back in the top ten, and everything seemed to be going wonderfully for him. He was so popular now as a rock and roll star that on one of the late 1957 tours he did, when Buddy Holly and the Crickets were lower down the bill, the Crickets would do “Roll Over Beethoven” and “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” as part of their set. Berry had written enough classics by now that other acts on the bill could do the ones he didn’t have time for. When he next went back into the studio, it was to cut seven songs. One of them, “Reelin’ and Rockin'”, was a slight reworking of the old Wynonie Harris song, “Round the Clock Blues”. Harris’ song, which had also been recorded by Big Joe Turner with Johnny Otis’ band, was an inspiration for “Rock Around the Clock” among other records: [Excerpt: Wynonie Harris, “Round the Clock Blues”] Berry’s version got rid of some of the more sexual lyrical content — though that would later come back in live performances of the song — and played up the song’s similarity to “Rock Around the Clock”, but it’s still basically the exact same song that Wynonie Harris had performed. Of course, the copyright is in Chuck Berry’s name — for all that he and his publishers would be very eager to sue anyone who might come too close to one of Berry’s songs, he had no compunction about taking all the credit for a song someone else had written. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Reelin’ and Rockin’”] You might notice that the piano style on that track is very different from some of Berry’s earlier recordings. Now, there are two possible explanations for this, because I’ve seen two different pianists credited for these sessions. Some sources credit Lafayette Leake with playing the piano here, and that might be enough to explain the difference in style, but I’m going with the other sources, which credit Johnnie Johnson, Berry’s regular player, as playing on the session. If it is, though, he’s playing in a different style. This is because of the popularity of Jerry Lee Lewis, who had risen to fame since Berry’s last session. Lewis used to use a simple technique called “ripping” when playing the piano, in which you just slide your fingers across the keys as fast as possible. He does it pretty much constantly in his solos, as you can hear in this: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”, piano solo] Leonard Chess had heard that sound, and become convinced that that was the main reason that Lewis’ records were so successful, so he insisted on Johnnie Johnson doing that on Berry’s new records. Johnson didn’t like the sound, which he considered “all flash and no technique”, but Chess insisted — to the extent that when they were rehearsing the tracks, Chess would walk over and rip his hand down the keys himself, to show Johnson what he wanted. Johnson eventually went along with it, though he said he “’bout tore my thumbnail off” getting it done. [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Reelin’ and Rockin’”] He later acknowledged that Chess had a point, though — simple as it was, it did make the records more exciting, and it was something that the kids clearly liked. And something else that the kids liked was another song recorded at the same session — this time about the kids themselves: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Sweet Little Sixteen”] “Sweet Little Sixteen” was one of the first songs about the experience of being a rock and roll fan. There had been earlier records about just dancing to rock and roll music, of course — things like “Drugstore Rock & Roll” or “Rip it Up” — but this was about fandom, and about the experience of following musicians. It’s not completely about that, sadly — it’s the teen girl fan filtered through the male gaze, and so it’s also about how “everybody wants to dance with” this sixteen-year-old girl, and about her “tight dresses and lipstick” — but where the song gains its power is in the verse sections where the girl becomes the viewpoint character, and we hear about how excited she is to go to the show, and about her collections of autographs and photos. However flawed it is, it’s one of the best evocations of the experience of fandom as a hobby — not just liking the music, but having the experience of fandom be a major part of your life. One of the most notable things about “Sweet Little Sixteen” is the way that Berry uses the song to namecheck American Bandstand, which was fast becoming the most important rock and roll TV show around. While in the first chorus he sings about how they’ll be rocking in Boston and Pittsburgh, PA, in the subsequent choruses he changes that to “on Bandstand” and “in Philadelphia PA”, which is where American Bandstand was broadcast from. It’s a sign that Dick Clark was becoming more important than Berry’s mentor, Alan Freed. A week after the session for “Reelin’ and Rockin'” and “Sweet Little Sixteen”, came another session for what would become Berry’s most well-known song, and one that remains in the repertoire of almost every bar band in the world. It’s instantly recognisable right from the start. The introduction to “Johnny B. Goode” is one of the most well-known guitar parts in history: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode”] But that guitar part has a long history — it’s original to Chuck Berry, but at the same time it’s based on a lot of earlier examples. Berry took the basic idea for that line from Carl Hogan, Louis Jordan’s guitarist, who played this as the intro to Jordan’s “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman”: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman”] But Hogan was only the latest in a long line of people who had played essentially that identical line. The first recording we have of that riff dates back to 1918, and a recording by Wilbur Sweatman’s Jazz Orchestra. Sweatman was a friend and colleague of Scott Joplin, and his band was one of the very first black jazz groups to record at all. And on their song “Bluin’ the Blues”, you hear this: [Excerpt: Wilbur Sweatman’s Jazz Orchestra, “Bluin’ the Blues”] We hear it in Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Got the Blues”, in 1926: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, “Got the Blues”] In Blind Blake’s “Too Tight”, also from 1926: [Excerpt: Blind Blake, “Too Tight”] then in records by Cow Cow Davenport, Andy Kirk, and Count Basie, before it turns up in the Louis Jordan record. But there is a crucial difference between what Carl Hogan played and what Chuck Berry played. Listen again to Hogan’s playing: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman”] and now to Berry: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Johnny B. Goode”] The crucial change Berry makes there is that most of the time he’s playing the solo line on two strings instead of one, creating a thicker sound, with parallel harmonies, rather than just the simple melody line. This was something that Berry learned from the great blues guitarist T-Bone Walker: [Excerpt: T-Bone Walker, “Shufflin’ the Blues”] Berry took Walker’s playing style, and combined it with Hogan’s note choices, and that simple change makes all the difference. It transmutes the part that Hogan had played from just a standard riff you find in dozens of old jazz records, a standard part of any musician’s toolkit, into a specific intro to a specific song. When, six years later, Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys played this as the intro to “Fun, Fun, Fun”: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, “Fun Fun Fun”] Absolutely no-one listening thought “Oh, he’s riffing off ‘Texas Shout’ by Cow Cow Davenport” — everyone instantly thought “Oh, that’s the intro to ‘Johnny B. Goode'”. Berry had taken a standard piece of every musician’s toolkit, and by putting a very slight twist on it had made everyone listening hear it differently, so now it was identified solely with him. The lyric to Johnny B. Goode is more original than the music, but even there we can trace its origins. Berry always talked about how the original idea for the lyric was as a message to Johnnie Johnson, saying “Johnnie, be good”, stop drinking so much — a wake-up call to his friend and colleague. But that quickly changed, and the song became more about Berry himself, or an idealised version of Berry, perhaps how he would want people to see him — something that was even more explicit in the original version of the lyric, where rather than sing “a country boy”, he sang “a coloured boy”. But there’s another sign that Berry was talking about himself, and that’s in the very title itself. Goode is spelled “G-o-o-d-e”, with an “e” on the end — and Berry’s childhood home was at 2520 Goode avenue, with an E. There’s another possible origin as well — the poet Langston Hughes had written a very widely circulated series of newspaper columns, which Berry would have encountered in his teenage years and early twenties, about a character named Jesse B. Simple. (And in an interesting note, in 1934 Hughes wrote a story about racial injustice called “Berry”, about a boy named Berry who would, among other things, tell children stories and sing them songs, and Hughes signed the dedication in the book that story was in “Berry” rather than with his own name.) You can point to every element of “Johnny B. Goode” and say “well, this came from there, and this came from there”, but still you’re no closer to identifying why Johnny B. Goode works as well as it does. it’s the combination of all these elements in a way that they’d never been put together before that is Berry’s genius, and is why Berry is pretty much universally regarded as an innovator, not just as an imitator. “Johnny B. Goode” was also the title song for what turned out to be Alan Freed’s final film — a film called Go, Johnny, Go! which also featured Eddie Cochran, the Moonglows, and Ritchie Valens. [Excerpt: Berry and Freed dialogue from Go, Johnny, Go!] That film came out in 1959, and had Berry as Freed’s co-star, appearing with Freed as himself in almost every scene. It was the last gasp of rock and roll cultural relevance for almost everyone involved. By the time the film had come out, Valens was already dead, and within a little over eighteen months after its release, Cochran was also dead, Freed was disgraced, and Berry was in prison. In the last couple of episodes, I’ve mentioned a tour that Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis headlined in 1958, just after “Johnny B. Goode” came out, with Alan Freed as the MC. What I didn’t mention until now is that as well as the tension between Chuck and Jerry Lee, that tour ended up spelling the end of Freed’s career. Freed was already on the downturn in his career — rock and roll was moving from being a music made largely by black musicians to one dominated by white people, and to make matters worse the major labels had finally got a handle on it and started churning out dozens of prepackaged teen idols, most of them called Bobby. Freed didn’t have the connections with the major labels, or the understanding of the new manufactured pop, that he did with the R&B records from labels like Chess. But it was the show in Boston on this tour that led to Freed’s downfall. The early show, which had been headlined by Lewis, had had the audience dancing, and the police were not at all impressed with this. They’d forced Alan Freed to make the audience sit down, and Lewis had had to play his set to an audience who were seated and squirming, unable to get up and dance to his recent big hits like “Great Balls of Fire”: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, “Great Balls of Fire”] Then came the late show, which Berry was headlining. The same thing started to happen — the kids in the audience got up to dance, and the police made Alan Freed make them sit down. But then, when the audience had quietened down, while Berry was standing there on stage, the police refused to dim the house lights and let the musicians carry on playing. So Freed got back on stage and said “It looks like the Boston police don’t want you to have a good time.” The show continued with the lights on, but the audience got annoyed — so much so that Chuck Berry finished the show from behind the drummer, in case the audience attacked. But the police got more annoyed. They got so annoyed, in fact, that they decided to simply claim that every single crime reported to them that night had been inspired by the show. Nobody now thinks that the New York Times reports which said there were multiple stabbings, fifteen people hospitalised, and multiple rapes, are actually accurate reports of anything caused by the show. But at the time, everyone believed it. Boston decided to ban rock and roll concerts altogether, as a result of the show, and while the tour continued through a couple more dates, most of the remaining tour dates got cancelled. Oddly, going through this adversity seems to have brought Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis together. While they’d been fighting each other for almost the entire tour, after this point they became quite close friends, and would speak warmly about each other. Things didn’t end so happily for Alan Freed. Freed had been having some problems with his radio station for a little while. He was difficult to work with, and they particularly disliked that he had started doing his broadcasts from home, rather than from the studio. When he’d been hired, the station was losing money, and he’d been a gamble. Now, they were in profit, and they didn’t need to take risks, and they’d been considering not renewing his contract when it came up in six months. Now that this had happened, they took the opportunity to use the morals clause in Freed’s contract to fire him, although he was allowed to present it as a resignation instead of a firing. Freed would manage to get another radio job, but not one with anything like the same prominence. He would, within a couple of years, become the designated industry fall guy for the practice of payola. This is something that we’ve talked about before — record labels would pay DJs to play their records. Sometimes it was in the form of adding their name to the writing credits, as was the case for Freed with records like “Maybellene” and “Sincerely” – and you can tell how much Freed contributed to those songs by hearing his own attempts at making records: [Excerpt: Alan Freed and his Rock and Roll Band, “Rock and Roll Boogie”, Rock Rock Rock version] Sometimes a promoter would just slip a DJ fifty dollars when handing over a promotional copy of the record. Sometimes, the DJ would be hired to announce a show by the act whose record was to be promoted. There were a lot of different methods, some of them more blatant than others, but it was a common practice. Every DJ and TV presenter took part in this, pretty much — Dick Clark certainly did — and while no-one other than the DJs liked the practice, the small labels that built rock and roll, labels like Sun or Chess or Atlantic, all saw it as a way that they could equalise things a little bit. The major labels all had an inbuilt advantage, and would get their records played on the radio no matter what — this was a way that the smaller labels could be heard. But precisely because it levelled the playing field somewhat, the larger record labels didn’t like it, and by this point the major labels were becoming more interested in rock and roll. And to protect that interest, they promoted a campaign against payola. Freed, as the most prominent DJ in the country, and someone who did his fair share of taking bribes, was essentially chosen as the scapegoat for this, once he lost his job at WINS. By the end of 1959 he lost his job with the station he moved to, WABC, once the payola scandal became headline news, and he spent the next few years moving from smaller stations to yet smaller ones, not staying anywhere very long. He died in 1965, of illnesses caused by his alcoholism. He was only forty-three. [Excerpt: Alan Freed sign-off, “This is not goodbye, it’s just goodnight”] And here we get to the downfall of Chuck Berry himself. It’s an unfortunate fact of chronology that I have to deal with this the week after dealing with Jerry Lee Lewis’ own underage sex scandal — well, a fact of both chronology and a terrible society that sees the bodies of young girls as something to which powerful men are entitled, anyway. Chuck Berry had been on a tour of the Southwest, when in Texas he had met up with a fourteen-year-old sex worker, who had accompanied him on the rest of the tour. He’d promised her a job working at his nightclub in St. Louis, and when he fired her shortly after she started there, she went to the police. Like Lewis, Berry has been more or less forgiven by the consensus narrative of rock history. There is slightly more justification for doing so in Berry’s case than in Lewis’, because the Mann Act, the law under which he was charged and convicted, was a law that was created specifically to punish black men — indeed, its official title was The White Slave Traffic Act. Given the way that other rock and roll artists seem to have had carte blanche to abuse young girls, the fact that a black man was about the only one, certainly for many decades, to spend time in prison for this, is more than a little unjust. But the fact remains, a man in his thirties had had sexual relations with a fourteen-year-old girl. And it’s not like this was an isolated incident — he would later famously settle a class-action suit brought against him by a large number of women he had videotaped on the toilet without their permission. So while Berry had an entirely fair complaint that the prosecution was motivated by race — and his prison sentence was reduced in large part because the judge made some extremely racist remarks — it’s still a fact that what he did was wrong. Now, I’m not going to spend much more time on this with Berry — not as much as I did with Jerry Lee Lewis last week — and that’s because as I said in the beginning of the series, this is not a podcast about the horrible crimes men have committed against women. So why bring it up at all? Well, there’s a myth that Berry’s career was completely wrecked by his arrest. This simply isn’t true. It’s true that “Johnny B. Goode” was Berry’s last top ten hit for quite a few years, and he only had one more top twenty hit in the fifties. But the thing is, his singles had had a very inconsistent chart history before that. He’d released eleven singles up to that point, and only five of them had made the top ten on the pop charts. Classics like “Thirty Days”, “Too Much Monkey Business”, “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” and “You Can’t Catch Me” had totally failed to hit the pop charts at all. Berry was arrested in December 1959, and between trials and appeals, he didn’t end up going to jail until 1961. “Johnny B. Goode” came out in March 1958. That means that for almost two years *before* the arrest, Berry was, at best, charting in the lower reaches of the charts. The fact is, there’s a simple reason why Berry didn’t chart very much in the late fifties and early sixties. Well, there are two reasons. The first is that public taste had moved on, as it does every few years. There are very few singles artists — and all artists in the fifties were singles artists — who can survive a major change in the public’s taste. The other reason, as he would later admit himself, is that the material he recorded in the few years after “Johnny B. Goode” wasn’t his best. There were some good songs — things like “Carol”, “Little Queenie”, and “I’ve Got to Find My Baby” — but even those weren’t Berry at his absolute peak. And the majority of the material he put out during that time was stuff like “Anthony Boy” and “Too Pooped to Pop”, which very few of even Berry’s most ardent fans will tell you are worth listening to. There was one exception — during that time, he put out what may be the best song he ever wrote, “Memphis, Tennessee”: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “Memphis, Tennessee”] While it’s a travesty that that record didn’t chart, in retrospect it’s easy to see why it didn’t. Berry’s audience were, for the most part, teenagers. No matter how good a song it was, “Memphis Tennessee” was about a man wanting to regain contact with his six-year-old daughter after he’s split up with her mother. That’s something that would have far more relevance to people of Berry’s own age group than to the people who had been, a year or so earlier, wanting to dance with sweet little sixteen, and wanting to hear some of that rock and roll music. As odd as it is to say, Berry’s eighteen months in jail may have done him some good as a commercial prospect. The first three singles he released in 1964, right after getting out of prison, were all bigger hits than he’d had since summer 1958 — “Nadine” made number 23, “You Never Can Tell” made number fourteen, and “No Particular Place to Go”, a rewrite of “School Day”, with new, funnier, lyrics about sexual frustration, went to number ten: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, “No Particular Place to Go”] Those songs were better than anything he’d released for several years previously, and it seemed that Berry might be on his way back to the top, but it was a false dawn. Berry’s studio work slid back into mediocrity with occasional flashes of his old brilliance, and his only hit after this point was in the seventies, when he had his only number one with a novelty song by Dave Bartholomew, “My Ding-a-Ling”, which if you’ve not heard it is about as juvenile as it sounds. In the late seventies, Berry essentially retired from making new music, choosing instead to spend the best part of forty years touring the world with just his guitar, playing with whatever local pickup band the promoter could scrape together, and often not even letting them know in advance what the next song was going to be — he assumed that everyone knew all of his songs, and he was, by and large, correct in that assumption. He was, by all accounts, an extremely bitter man. He did, though, work on one final album, just called “Chuck”, which was announced as part of the celebrations for his ninetieth birthday, but wasn’t released until shortly after his death. He died, aged ninety, in 2017, and the obituaries concentrated on his music rather than his crimes against women. John Lennon once said “if you tried to give rock and roll another name, it would be Chuck Berry”, and for both better and worse, that’s probably true.

Kait and Clare discuss season two, episode seven of The Secret Life of the American Teenager. Talking Points: Quotes from Kait, Little Queenie, How to Break Up in 5th Grade, Fartin’ Around, Planned Jokes, Lucky Chucky, Groin Talk, Our Movie Schedule, Cait and Klare Email us at kaitandclare@gmail.com Follow us on Twitter & Instagram @PDMMWT_Podcast If you like our show, please subscribe, rate, and review!

Multi award-winning Doug Duffey and BADD are a North Louisiana-based quartet specializing in 100% original ‘Bayou Funk’, ‘Swampadelic’, Bluesiana and Delta Soul music. Influenced by old school 70’s funk and soul classics, as well as their native regional New Orleans funk, Memphis Soul, Louisiana R&B, and Louisiana Delta blues, they’ve recycled, refried, refunked, redefined and repackaged it all into their own personal post-modern slammin’ jams.Doug Duffy was Born in Monroe, Louisiana in 1950, Duffey began singing and playing piano at an early age; he was composing and performing professionally by age 14. His first single, recorded in Nashville in 1970, was chosen by Billboard, Cashbox and Record World as “Pick Hit” and broke into the top 100 charts.He moved to Hollywood In his early 20s where Backstage Management managed him. He has written songs for and/or recorded with George Clinton, Funkadelic, Rare Earth, Bootsy Collins, Bernie Worrell, Keith Richards, Herbie Hancock, David Byrne, Maceo Parker, Fred Wesley, Anders Osborne, Little Queenie, Marcia Ball, Zakiya Hooker, Jerry Beach, John Autin, and other Louisiana and international artists.

Hoy vamos a repasar la vida y milagros de uno de los mejores grupos de la historia del rock: THE QUEEN. Para ello contaremos con la colaboración de dos periodistas de prestigio: Miguel Ángel Bargueño y Carlos Marcos que hace unos días publicaron un artículo en el periódico El País en el que, a través de 12 de las mejores canciones de este grupo, recorrían la trayectoria musical de esta fantástica banda. Así que, y apoyándonos en ese trabajo, empezamos con el número 12 de esta lista: Another One Bites the Dust, de 1980 e incluida en el disco “The Game” La línea de bajo resulta tan adherente como un buen estribillo. Y es una apuesta segura para poner patas arriba una discoteca. El bajo de John Deacon, autor del tema, es el protagonista absoluto del 'single' más vendido de la historia de Queen (fue número uno de ventas en Estados Unidos y en casi todo el mundo). Como buen bajista, flipaba con el funk y la música disco, y con esos mimbres, creó esta base rítmica prodigiosa. El tema está aderezado con efectos de sonido que hoy pueden parecer obsoletos, pero que en su momento eran de lo más moderno: recuerdan al despegue de una nave espacial. Queen ponían así un pie en los ochenta, cuando se suponía que la ciencia ficción iba a dejar de ser ficción. Con todo, la banda no tenía mucha confianza en este tema, y, según ha revelado Roger Taylor, fue Michael Jackson quien, tras escucharlo, les dijo: “Chicos, estáis locos si no lo sacáis como 'single”. El batería también recordó que muchas emisoras de soul creyeron, al oírlo por primera vez, que el tema era de un grupo afroamericano. Numero once: Killer Queen, de 1974 e incluida en el disco “Sheer Heart” La estructura de Killer Queen es casi cabaretera. Pero Queen consiguen elaborar un medio tiempo rockero, con capas de voces ya marca de la casa y la guitarra afilada (y limpia) de Brian May. Era 1974 y Queen eran todavía una banda de rock duro. Killer Queen es la canción que le dio el primer éxito internacional al grupo. Se ponían los primeros cimientos del reinado de uno de los mejores grupos de la historia. Sobre esta canción, Mercury explicó: “Trata sobre una mujer de clase alta que se dedica a la prostitución. Lo que quiero transmitir en el texto es que las mujeres ricas también pueden ser putas”. Pero según parte de sus seguidores, la protagonista es un travesti… a saber. Sea como fuere, la canción salió en poco tiempo. “La escribí en una noche”, confirmó Mercury. Una anécdota: la estrella pop Katy Perry denominó a su propio perfume Killer Queen. Y lo explicó: “Freddie Mercury definió en la letra a la mujer que siempre he querido ser. Por eso he llamado así a mi perfume”. Bueno, a lo mejor alguien debería haber explicado a Perry la auténtica intención de la letra. Seguimos: número DIEZ, “Seven seas of Rhye”, de 1974 e incluida en el disco “Queen II” Resulta llamativo cómo Queen eran capaces de hacer tanto en tampoco tiempo. 'Seven seas of Rhye' dura 2,45 (como una canción punk, vamos), pero pasan mil cosas: una introducción de piano, guitarras heavies, una deslumbrante interpretación de Mercury, estribillos, solo de guitarra, parte vocal operística, una coda ruidosa con voces de fiesta… Estamos ante los Queen de su etapa dura. La canción se incluye en su segunda obra, 'Queen II'. Una reinvención del rock duro en toda regla. Es también una de las letras más misteriosas de la primera etapa del grupo. La tierra de Rhye aparece en varias letras escritas por Mercury. Para algunos es un mundo fantástico creado por él y su hermana mientras vivían con su familia en Zanzíbar. Freddie nació allí: su padre trabajaba para la británica Secretaría de las Colonias y en aquella época Zanzíbar estaba bajo protectorado inglés. La otra versión es que es una letra de contenido religioso: una crítica al lado oscuro de las religiones. Como siempre… a saber. Número NUEVE: We will rock you, de 1977 e incluida en su disco News of the world. Con esta canción nació el rock de estadio. Sorprendentemente corta (solo dos minutos: ¿a que creías que era más larga?), más básica imposible (incluso podría sobrar el solo de guitarra final) y de una eficacia automática. Si alguien sueña con componer la canción que tiene que corear todo el mundo, está perdiendo el tiempo: lleva en marcha desde 1977. La mayoría de los éxitos de Queen están compuestos por Mercury. Este no: lleva la firma del guitarrista Brian May. ¿En qué se inspiró para componer este clásico de los estadios? Pues en un estadio. Habla May: “Una noche, al final de un concierto, nos retiramos del escenario y de fondo escuché a la gente cantar el himno del Liverpool. Me fui a la cama pensando en una canción donde el público pudiera participar. Es gente que está ahí, apretujada, apenas se puede mover, pero puede aplaudir, golpear sus pies y cantar. Cuando me desperté por la mañana 'We will rock you' salió del tirón”. Vamos a por el número OCHO: Bicycle Race, de 1978 e incluida en el disco Jazz. Esta canción es originalísima, tanto por su composición como por su letra. A Mercury, que no tenía especial predilección por las bicicletas, se le encendió la bombilla cuando vio pasar el pelotón del Tour de Francia cerca del estudio donde Queen estaban grabando 'Jazz' en Montreux (Suiza). Con esa imagen desarrolló una lista de ideas contrapuestas (“Tú dices blanco, yo digo negro / Tú dices ladrar, yo digo morder”), sazonada de agudos comentarios sobre 'Star Wars', Tiburón', 'Peter Pan', 'Superman' o 'Frankenstein', con el ansia de libertad como trasfondo. También fue muy original su lanzamiento como 'single', dado que 'Fat bootmed girls', en la otra cara, era un tema siamés: en la letra de uno se mencionaba el otro y viceversa. Su vídeo causó sensación: muestra a un nutrido grupo de modelos desnudas montando en bicicleta en los alrededores del estadio de Wembley. Llegamos al número siete: Crazy Little Thing Called Love, de 1979, del disco The Game. Por qué nos gusta tanto? Porque es una maravillosa rareza dentro de la discografía de Queen. Una canción de latido acústico, con un ritmo de rock and roll de los cincuenta que podrían haber firmado unos revisionistas como Stray Cats. Pero no: es de Queen y les reportó mucho dinero, ya que fue la primera vez que el grupo llegó al número uno en EEUU. “Me salió en cinco minutos mientras me tomaba un baño”, declaró Freddie Mercury sobre 'Crazy Little Thing Called Love'. Luego llegaría la fase de pulir, pero básicamente salió de allí, de un baño relajado en una habitación de hotel del Hilton de Múnich, donde el grupo se fue a grabar el disco 'The Game'. Resulta curioso el vídeo, con todos los miembros vestidos de rockeros duros (cuero a tope) y donde Mercury, agasajado por bellas señoritas, ejerce de macho alfa como si fuera un componente de Led Zeppelin. Número SEIS: Now I’m Here, de 1975. Para el aficionado que se enganchó a Queen en los ochenta quizá este tren desbocado no lo sienta familiar. Pero sí, Queen fueron duros, muy duros. ‘Now I´m here’ es el ejemplo, una canción de rock perfecta: apabullante energía, melodía y una interpretación feroz. Hay hasta un minisolo de batería. Esta vez el que compone es Brian May, y en unas circunstancias llamativas. La escribe durante una convalecencia en el hospital, afectado por una hepatitis. “Estábamos en plena gira por Estados Unidos con Mott the Hoople y tuvimos que suspenderla por mi enfermedad. Fue una faena. Incluso llegué a temer que me sustituyeran, así que empecé a escribir canciones para el próximo disco”, ha contado May. En la letra se hace referencia a la gira con Moot the Hoople e incluso un guiño a un clásico de Chuck Berry, ‘Little Queenie’. Número cinco: Don’t stop me now, de 1978 e incluida en su LP Jazz Con su ritmo endiablado y su mensaje de “voy a comerme el mundo”, es mejor que cualquier libro de autoayuda. Aunque es un tema inequívoco de rock, no hay guitarra excepto en el solo: conseguir esa potencia solo con piano, bajo y batería es algo que no está al alcance de cualquiera. La rica discografía de Queen permite que sucedan cosas como esta: que un tema que en su momento no tuvo especial repercusión sea redescubierto con el paso de los años —gracias a la publicidad y el cine— y hoy figure entre sus títulos más emblemáticos. Mercury debió de escribir la letra en un momento de especial subidón, utilizando la astronomía como metáfora de su excitación febril: “Soy una estrella fugaz saltando por el cielo”, “viajo a la velocidad de la luz”, “soy un cohete de camino a Marte” o “soy un satélite fuera de control” son algunas de esas referencias. Aunque la frase más redonda es: “Estoy ardiendo a través del cielo a 200 grados, por eso me llaman míster Fahrenheit”. En 2014, en el Reino Unido la eligieron como la mejor canción para conducir. Vamos al número cuatro: “Under Pressure”, de 1981 e incluida en el disco “Hot Space”. Artista invitado: David Bowie. A veces, unas pequeñas notas tocadas como si nada, lo son todo. Por ejemplo: el bajo de esta canción. Bueno, pues resulta que la colaboración entre dos colosos como Freddie Mercury y David Bowie, se recuerda por ese sonido de bajo de John Deacon. Lo que no está claro es si fue idea de Deacon o si Deacon la tocó, luego se le olvidó y la recordó Bowie con alguna aportación. La canción tiene mucho más: un duelo vocal que no es tal, ya que Bowie y Mercury se van alternando en la ejecución de forma tan fluida como sorprendentemente generosa, si tenemos en cuenta el volumen de sus egos respectivos. En cualquier caso, de dos artistas colosales que no estaban ni mucho menos en su mejor momento sale una obra maestra como “Under Pressure”. Bowie venía del tibio “Scary Monsters” y Queen estaban exhaustos después de años de éxito. Se juntaron en Suiza y salió esta pieza firmada por los cinco en la que se trabajó de forma colectiva para que luego Freddie y David se pelearan en la última fase del proceso. “ La mezcla final no me pareció buena. Fue el momento en el que Freddie y David batallaran duramente por imponer sus criterios”, ha revelado Brian May. En tercera posición: Somebady to Love, de 1976 e incluida en el disco “A day at the races” Cuatro rockeros ingleses sonando como un coro góspel de cien personas. Y, al mismo tiempo, 100% Queen. Tras el éxito de 'Bohemian Rhapsody', Mercury intentó hacer algo parecido en el siguiente disco, 'A Day at The Races'. Con una variante: en vez de inspirarse en la tradición operística europea, lo hizo en el góspel estadounidense. “Es nuevo, es ligeramente diferente”, explicó Freddie a la revista 'Circus' en 1977. “Pero aún suena a los Queen de siempre”. En la misma entrevista, el batería Roger Taylor explicó que este tema “está muy influido por Aretha Franklin. Freddie está muy colgado con ella”. A diferencia de 'Bohemian rhapsody', se acerca más al formato estándar de canción de rock. Compuesta por Mercury al piano, la letra va dirigida a Dios, a quien pide explicaciones por una vida vacía de amor: “Me he pasado la vida creyendo en ti pero no encuentro alivio, Señor”. El arreglo de los coros es verdaderamente soberbio. Llegó al número dos en la lista de ventas británica. Mocedades (sí, Mocedades) grabó en 1981 una notable versión ('Amar a alguien'); parece que para conseguir el permiso de Mercury un representante de la discográfica tocó el timbre de su casa de Londres y le puso 'Eres tú', tras lo cual accedió. Y ya estamos en el número dos: I Want to Break Free de 1984 e incluida en el disco ‘The Works’ Si Queen vivieron una segunda edad dorada en los ochenta fue por temas como este. Aunque la mayor parte del repertorio de Queen nació de la pluma de Freddie Mercury, el bajista John Deacon escribió unos cuantos temas, de los que este y 'Another one bites the dust' son los más logrados y famosos. Construido con una base electrónica, cuenta con un solo de sintetizador memorable a cargo del canadiense Fred Mandel. Por el divertido vídeo, en el que los componentes del grupo aparecen vestidos de mujer realizando tareas domésticas (una parodia de la serie 'Coronation street'), algunos dieron por sentado que el tema era una declaración de la sexualidad de Mercury; pero el autor, como decimos, es Deacon, y la idea del vídeo fue del batería Roger Taylor. Si el público ya conocía el talento y la fuerza del grupo, ahora supo de su capacidad de reinvención, recuperando el aplauso masivo del público con esta y otras canciones en plena era de los teclados y las hombreras. En la actualidad, Deacon lleva una vida tranquila de sexagenario alejado de los focos. Y, por fin, el número uno: Bohemian Rhapsody, de 1975 e incluida en el disco “A night at the Opera” Con esta canción, estos cuatro tíos hicieron volar por los aires la estructura clásica de rock (estrofas y un estribillo que se repite) y se las arreglaron para insertar seis canciones en una. Tiene partes de ópera. Cascadas de voces. Una introducción a capella. Referencias a Galileo y Fígaro. La letra es misteriosa y fascinante. Y el solo de guitarra posee vida propia. No está claro qué llevó a Freddie Mercury a escribir este drama sobre un hombre que confiesa a su madre que ha cometido un asesinato y se prepara para ir al infierno. Algunos biógrafos apuntan a que se trata de una metáfora sobre la ruptura de Mercury con su pasado (hasta poco antes había estado saliendo con una chica, Mary Austin) y la aceptación de su homosexualidad. El autor nunca lo aclaró y prefirió alimentar la incógnita. Las múltiples capas de voces supusieron un reto para la tecnología de la época, que se resolvió poniendo a Mercury, May y Taylor a grabar los coros durante jornadas enteras; luego el productor Roy Thomas Baker duplicó docenas de cintas. Pese a que la discográfica no lo veía claro por su duración (casi seis minutos), se publicó como 'single' y fue un gran éxito: número uno durante nueve semanas seguidas en el Reino Unido. Aunque ya se habían rodado vídeos musicales anteriormente, el de esta canción es uno de los primeros en constituir una obra de arte en sí mismo. Queen fue la última banda realmente gigante hasta la aparición de U2, pero eso será otra historia y otro momento. Señoras y Señores, hemos terminado por hoy. Espero y deseo que vuestra vuelta al trabajo o lo que sea, os pase casi casi desapercibida.

Hoy vamos a repasar la vida y milagros de uno de los mejores grupos de la historia del rock: THE QUEEN. Para ello contaremos con la colaboración de dos periodistas de prestigio: Miguel Ángel Bargueño y Carlos Marcos que hace unos días publicaron un artículo en el periódico El País en el que, a través de 12 de las mejores canciones de este grupo, recorrían la trayectoria musical de esta fantástica banda. Así que, y apoyándonos en ese trabajo, empezamos con el número 12 de esta lista: Another One Bites the Dust, de 1980 e incluida en el disco “The Game” La línea de bajo resulta tan adherente como un buen estribillo. Y es una apuesta segura para poner patas arriba una discoteca. El bajo de John Deacon, autor del tema, es el protagonista absoluto del 'single' más vendido de la historia de Queen (fue número uno de ventas en Estados Unidos y en casi todo el mundo). Como buen bajista, flipaba con el funk y la música disco, y con esos mimbres, creó esta base rítmica prodigiosa. El tema está aderezado con efectos de sonido que hoy pueden parecer obsoletos, pero que en su momento eran de lo más moderno: recuerdan al despegue de una nave espacial. Queen ponían así un pie en los ochenta, cuando se suponía que la ciencia ficción iba a dejar de ser ficción. Con todo, la banda no tenía mucha confianza en este tema, y, según ha revelado Roger Taylor, fue Michael Jackson quien, tras escucharlo, les dijo: “Chicos, estáis locos si no lo sacáis como 'single”. El batería también recordó que muchas emisoras de soul creyeron, al oírlo por primera vez, que el tema era de un grupo afroamericano. Numero once: Killer Queen, de 1974 e incluida en el disco “Sheer Heart” La estructura de Killer Queen es casi cabaretera. Pero Queen consiguen elaborar un medio tiempo rockero, con capas de voces ya marca de la casa y la guitarra afilada (y limpia) de Brian May. Era 1974 y Queen eran todavía una banda de rock duro. Killer Queen es la canción que le dio el primer éxito internacional al grupo. Se ponían los primeros cimientos del reinado de uno de los mejores grupos de la historia. Sobre esta canción, Mercury explicó: “Trata sobre una mujer de clase alta que se dedica a la prostitución. Lo que quiero transmitir en el texto es que las mujeres ricas también pueden ser putas”. Pero según parte de sus seguidores, la protagonista es un travesti… a saber. Sea como fuere, la canción salió en poco tiempo. “La escribí en una noche”, confirmó Mercury. Una anécdota: la estrella pop Katy Perry denominó a su propio perfume Killer Queen. Y lo explicó: “Freddie Mercury definió en la letra a la mujer que siempre he querido ser. Por eso he llamado así a mi perfume”. Bueno, a lo mejor alguien debería haber explicado a Perry la auténtica intención de la letra. Seguimos: número DIEZ, “Seven seas of Rhye”, de 1974 e incluida en el disco “Queen II” Resulta llamativo cómo Queen eran capaces de hacer tanto en tampoco tiempo. 'Seven seas of Rhye' dura 2,45 (como una canción punk, vamos), pero pasan mil cosas: una introducción de piano, guitarras heavies, una deslumbrante interpretación de Mercury, estribillos, solo de guitarra, parte vocal operística, una coda ruidosa con voces de fiesta… Estamos ante los Queen de su etapa dura. La canción se incluye en su segunda obra, 'Queen II'. Una reinvención del rock duro en toda regla. Es también una de las letras más misteriosas de la primera etapa del grupo. La tierra de Rhye aparece en varias letras escritas por Mercury. Para algunos es un mundo fantástico creado por él y su hermana mientras vivían con su familia en Zanzíbar. Freddie nació allí: su padre trabajaba para la británica Secretaría de las Colonias y en aquella época Zanzíbar estaba bajo protectorado inglés. La otra versión es que es una letra de contenido religioso: una crítica al lado oscuro de las religiones. Como siempre… a saber. Número NUEVE: We will rock you, de 1977 e incluida en su disco News of the world. Con esta canción nació el rock de estadio. Sorprendentemente corta (solo dos minutos: ¿a que creías que era más larga?), más básica imposible (incluso podría sobrar el solo de guitarra final) y de una eficacia automática. Si alguien sueña con componer la canción que tiene que corear todo el mundo, está perdiendo el tiempo: lleva en marcha desde 1977. La mayoría de los éxitos de Queen están compuestos por Mercury. Este no: lleva la firma del guitarrista Brian May. ¿En qué se inspiró para componer este clásico de los estadios? Pues en un estadio. Habla May: “Una noche, al final de un concierto, nos retiramos del escenario y de fondo escuché a la gente cantar el himno del Liverpool. Me fui a la cama pensando en una canción donde el público pudiera participar. Es gente que está ahí, apretujada, apenas se puede mover, pero puede aplaudir, golpear sus pies y cantar. Cuando me desperté por la mañana 'We will rock you' salió del tirón”. Vamos a por el número OCHO: Bicycle Race, de 1978 e incluida en el disco Jazz. Esta canción es originalísima, tanto por su composición como por su letra. A Mercury, que no tenía especial predilección por las bicicletas, se le encendió la bombilla cuando vio pasar el pelotón del Tour de Francia cerca del estudio donde Queen estaban grabando 'Jazz' en Montreux (Suiza). Con esa imagen desarrolló una lista de ideas contrapuestas (“Tú dices blanco, yo digo negro / Tú dices ladrar, yo digo morder”), sazonada de agudos comentarios sobre 'Star Wars', Tiburón', 'Peter Pan', 'Superman' o 'Frankenstein', con el ansia de libertad como trasfondo. También fue muy original su lanzamiento como 'single', dado que 'Fat bootmed girls', en la otra cara, era un tema siamés: en la letra de uno se mencionaba el otro y viceversa. Su vídeo causó sensación: muestra a un nutrido grupo de modelos desnudas montando en bicicleta en los alrededores del estadio de Wembley. Llegamos al número siete: Crazy Little Thing Called Love, de 1979, del disco The Game. Por qué nos gusta tanto? Porque es una maravillosa rareza dentro de la discografía de Queen. Una canción de latido acústico, con un ritmo de rock and roll de los cincuenta que podrían haber firmado unos revisionistas como Stray Cats. Pero no: es de Queen y les reportó mucho dinero, ya que fue la primera vez que el grupo llegó al número uno en EEUU. “Me salió en cinco minutos mientras me tomaba un baño”, declaró Freddie Mercury sobre 'Crazy Little Thing Called Love'. Luego llegaría la fase de pulir, pero básicamente salió de allí, de un baño relajado en una habitación de hotel del Hilton de Múnich, donde el grupo se fue a grabar el disco 'The Game'. Resulta curioso el vídeo, con todos los miembros vestidos de rockeros duros (cuero a tope) y donde Mercury, agasajado por bellas señoritas, ejerce de macho alfa como si fuera un componente de Led Zeppelin. Número SEIS: Now I’m Here, de 1975. Para el aficionado que se enganchó a Queen en los ochenta quizá este tren desbocado no lo sienta familiar. Pero sí, Queen fueron duros, muy duros. ‘Now I´m here’ es el ejemplo, una canción de rock perfecta: apabullante energía, melodía y una interpretación feroz. Hay hasta un minisolo de batería. Esta vez el que compone es Brian May, y en unas circunstancias llamativas. La escribe durante una convalecencia en el hospital, afectado por una hepatitis. “Estábamos en plena gira por Estados Unidos con Mott the Hoople y tuvimos que suspenderla por mi enfermedad. Fue una faena. Incluso llegué a temer que me sustituyeran, así que empecé a escribir canciones para el próximo disco”, ha contado May. En la letra se hace referencia a la gira con Moot the Hoople e incluso un guiño a un clásico de Chuck Berry, ‘Little Queenie’. Número cinco: Don’t stop me now, de 1978 e incluida en su LP Jazz Con su ritmo endiablado y su mensaje de “voy a comerme el mundo”, es mejor que cualquier libro de autoayuda. Aunque es un tema inequívoco de rock, no hay guitarra excepto en el solo: conseguir esa potencia solo con piano, bajo y batería es algo que no está al alcance de cualquiera. La rica discografía de Queen permite que sucedan cosas como esta: que un tema que en su momento no tuvo especial repercusión sea redescubierto con el paso de los años —gracias a la publicidad y el cine— y hoy figure entre sus títulos más emblemáticos. Mercury debió de escribir la letra en un momento de especial subidón, utilizando la astronomía como metáfora de su excitación febril: “Soy una estrella fugaz saltando por el cielo”, “viajo a la velocidad de la luz”, “soy un cohete de camino a Marte” o “soy un satélite fuera de control” son algunas de esas referencias. Aunque la frase más redonda es: “Estoy ardiendo a través del cielo a 200 grados, por eso me llaman míster Fahrenheit”. En 2014, en el Reino Unido la eligieron como la mejor canción para conducir. Vamos al número cuatro: “Under Pressure”, de 1981 e incluida en el disco “Hot Space”. Artista invitado: David Bowie. A veces, unas pequeñas notas tocadas como si nada, lo son todo. Por ejemplo: el bajo de esta canción. Bueno, pues resulta que la colaboración entre dos colosos como Freddie Mercury y David Bowie, se recuerda por ese sonido de bajo de John Deacon. Lo que no está claro es si fue idea de Deacon o si Deacon la tocó, luego se le olvidó y la recordó Bowie con alguna aportación. La canción tiene mucho más: un duelo vocal que no es tal, ya que Bowie y Mercury se van alternando en la ejecución de forma tan fluida como sorprendentemente generosa, si tenemos en cuenta el volumen de sus egos respectivos. En cualquier caso, de dos artistas colosales que no estaban ni mucho menos en su mejor momento sale una obra maestra como “Under Pressure”. Bowie venía del tibio “Scary Monsters” y Queen estaban exhaustos después de años de éxito. Se juntaron en Suiza y salió esta pieza firmada por los cinco en la que se trabajó de forma colectiva para que luego Freddie y David se pelearan en la última fase del proceso. “ La mezcla final no me pareció buena. Fue el momento en el que Freddie y David batallaran duramente por imponer sus criterios”, ha revelado Brian May. En tercera posición: Somebady to Love, de 1976 e incluida en el disco “A day at the races” Cuatro rockeros ingleses sonando como un coro góspel de cien personas. Y, al mismo tiempo, 100% Queen. Tras el éxito de 'Bohemian Rhapsody', Mercury intentó hacer algo parecido en el siguiente disco, 'A Day at The Races'. Con una variante: en vez de inspirarse en la tradición operística europea, lo hizo en el góspel estadounidense. “Es nuevo, es ligeramente diferente”, explicó Freddie a la revista 'Circus' en 1977. “Pero aún suena a los Queen de siempre”. En la misma entrevista, el batería Roger Taylor explicó que este tema “está muy influido por Aretha Franklin. Freddie está muy colgado con ella”. A diferencia de 'Bohemian rhapsody', se acerca más al formato estándar de canción de rock. Compuesta por Mercury al piano, la letra va dirigida a Dios, a quien pide explicaciones por una vida vacía de amor: “Me he pasado la vida creyendo en ti pero no encuentro alivio, Señor”. El arreglo de los coros es verdaderamente soberbio. Llegó al número dos en la lista de ventas británica. Mocedades (sí, Mocedades) grabó en 1981 una notable versión ('Amar a alguien'); parece que para conseguir el permiso de Mercury un representante de la discográfica tocó el timbre de su casa de Londres y le puso 'Eres tú', tras lo cual accedió. Y ya estamos en el número dos: I Want to Break Free de 1984 e incluida en el disco ‘The Works’ Si Queen vivieron una segunda edad dorada en los ochenta fue por temas como este. Aunque la mayor parte del repertorio de Queen nació de la pluma de Freddie Mercury, el bajista John Deacon escribió unos cuantos temas, de los que este y 'Another one bites the dust' son los más logrados y famosos. Construido con una base electrónica, cuenta con un solo de sintetizador memorable a cargo del canadiense Fred Mandel. Por el divertido vídeo, en el que los componentes del grupo aparecen vestidos de mujer realizando tareas domésticas (una parodia de la serie 'Coronation street'), algunos dieron por sentado que el tema era una declaración de la sexualidad de Mercury; pero el autor, como decimos, es Deacon, y la idea del vídeo fue del batería Roger Taylor. Si el público ya conocía el talento y la fuerza del grupo, ahora supo de su capacidad de reinvención, recuperando el aplauso masivo del público con esta y otras canciones en plena era de los teclados y las hombreras. En la actualidad, Deacon lleva una vida tranquila de sexagenario alejado de los focos. Y, por fin, el número uno: Bohemian Rhapsody, de 1975 e incluida en el disco “A night at the Opera” Con esta canción, estos cuatro tíos hicieron volar por los aires la estructura clásica de rock (estrofas y un estribillo que se repite) y se las arreglaron para insertar seis canciones en una. Tiene partes de ópera. Cascadas de voces. Una introducción a capella. Referencias a Galileo y Fígaro. La letra es misteriosa y fascinante. Y el solo de guitarra posee vida propia. No está claro qué llevó a Freddie Mercury a escribir este drama sobre un hombre que confiesa a su madre que ha cometido un asesinato y se prepara para ir al infierno. Algunos biógrafos apuntan a que se trata de una metáfora sobre la ruptura de Mercury con su pasado (hasta poco antes había estado saliendo con una chica, Mary Austin) y la aceptación de su homosexualidad. El autor nunca lo aclaró y prefirió alimentar la incógnita. Las múltiples capas de voces supusieron un reto para la tecnología de la época, que se resolvió poniendo a Mercury, May y Taylor a grabar los coros durante jornadas enteras; luego el productor Roy Thomas Baker duplicó docenas de cintas. Pese a que la discográfica no lo veía claro por su duración (casi seis minutos), se publicó como 'single' y fue un gran éxito: número uno durante nueve semanas seguidas en el Reino Unido. Aunque ya se habían rodado vídeos musicales anteriormente, el de esta canción es uno de los primeros en constituir una obra de arte en sí mismo. Queen fue la última banda realmente gigante hasta la aparición de U2, pero eso será otra historia y otro momento. Señoras y Señores, hemos terminado por hoy. Espero y deseo que vuestra vuelta al trabajo o lo que sea, os pase casi casi desapercibida.

Emily Remler (18 de septiembre de 1957 – 4 de mayo de 1990) fue una guitarrista de jazz estadounidense que saltó a la fama en los 80. Grabó siete álbumes de Hard bop, estándares del jazz y fusión. Nacida en la ciudad de Nueva York, Emily comenzó a tocar la guitarra a la edad de diez años. Inicialmente inspirada por artistas de rock como Jimi Hendrix y Johnny Winter así como de otros estilos populares de música, experimentó una epifanía musical durante sus estudios de 1974 a 1976 en el Berklee College of Music en Boston, Massachusetts. Empezó a escuchar a grandes del jazz como Herb Ellis, Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, Pat Martino, Charlie Christian, Miles Davis y John Coltrane y tomó el jazz con una feroz intensidad, practicando casi constantemente y nunca miró atrás. Después de graduarse de Berklee a los dieciocho años empezó su carrera profesional tocando por los Estados Unidos. El primer paso formativo y significativo de Emily Remler, como música profesional en ciernes, fue establecerse en Nueva Orleans donde tocó en clubes de blues y jazz trabajando con bandas como FourPlay, Little Queenie and the Percolators antes de empezar a grabar en 1981. Fue defendida por el gran guitarrista Herb Ellis, quien se refería a ella como “la nueva superestrella de la guitarra”. Ellis la introdujo al mundo en el Concord, CA Jazz Festival en 1978.

Linda's was the final episode for 2018, and what pleasure to have her as a guest. In Linda's words: "Music has been at the center of my life since I can remember. Early influences include Karla Bonoff, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell: many other female singer songwriters since then have shaped my taste in music: Lucinda Williams, Patty Griffin, Emmylou Harris, Mia Borders, Caroline Herring, Susan Cowsill, Lynn Drury, Shannon McNally, Amy Mann and Brandi Carlile. This list is actually pretty endless--I would also have to include the Beatles, the Stones, and the women of the early blues movement, such as Memphis Minnie. I write Americana music, rooted in my life experiences. Many of my songs tell stories, and they are all different; I don't want to write in just one style--I am open to a variety of music, from country to soul. In short, I am a work in progress and I hope you like what you hear. Little Queenie was released on my birthday in 2016, and No Limits, my second album, was released in October of 2017. I am currently writing and recording songs for my next record, due out in the spring of 2019. My style continues to evolve! You can hear my songs here, as well as on Seattle Wave Radio and Local Roots Music NW Radio, available for purchase on CD Baby and BandCamp." A simple but important point is made in this interview as a recurring theme throughout all; music is for everyone and although it helps, no special skills or education are required to enjoy listening to or creating your own. But as seen below, Linda is a bit of an overachiever. EDUCATION-- Writing Fellows Institute, University of Washington, Tacoma; September - June, 2009 Adjunct Faculty Institute, Tacoma Community College; January - March 2006 Summer School for Applied Aesthetics, Lahti Finland; August 18-23, 2002 The School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University; June 20 - July 26, 2001 The School of Criticism and Theory, Dartmouth College; June 17 - July 26, 1996 Ph. D. English, University of Tennessee, Knoxville; May 1989 M.A. English, University of Southern Mississippi; August 1982 Graduate Study Abroad, University of London; Summer 1981 B. M. E. Mississippi College, 1979 And, that doesn't include any of her music background! “If Chrissie Hynde had bolted Akron for Nashville instead of London, her unbuffered emotion and incisive observations might have taken shape something like those of Ms. Blair. The Washington-based singer/songwriter takes on romantic love’s frequent left turns and rude awakenings with straightforward lyrics and vocals to match. “Wild Night”, in particular, evokes the soulfulness of the afore-mentioned Ms. H. Other instantly attractive tracks include “All The While”, “Lucky Man” and “Far Away”.” — Duane Verh, Roots Music Report Linda's Website Linda's Facebook Linda via Spotify

Linda's was the final episode for 2018, and what pleasure to have her as a guest. In Linda's words: "Music has been at the center of my life since I can remember. Early influences include Karla Bonoff, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell: many other female singer songwriters since then have shaped my taste in music: Lucinda Williams, Patty Griffin, Emmylou Harris, Mia Borders, Caroline Herring, Susan Cowsill, Lynn Drury, Shannon McNally, Amy Mann and Brandi Carlile. This list is actually pretty endless--I would also have to include the Beatles, the Stones, and the women of the early blues movement, such as Memphis Minnie. I write Americana music, rooted in my life experiences. Many of my songs tell stories, and they are all different; I don't want to write in just one style--I am open to a variety of music, from country to soul. In short, I am a work in progress and I hope you like what you hear. Little Queenie was released on my birthday in 2016, and No Limits, my second album, was released in October of 2017. I am currently writing and recording songs for my next record, due out in the spring of 2019. My style continues to evolve! You can hear my songs here, as well as on Seattle Wave Radio and Local Roots Music NW Radio, available for purchase on CD Baby and BandCamp." A simple but important point is made in this interview as a recurring theme throughout all; music is for everyone and although it helps, no special skills or education are required to enjoy listening to or creating your own. But as seen below, Linda is a bit of an overachiever. EDUCATION-- Writing Fellows Institute, University of Washington, Tacoma; September - June, 2009 Adjunct Faculty Institute, Tacoma Community College; January - March 2006 Summer School for Applied Aesthetics, Lahti Finland; August 18-23, 2002 The School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University; June 20 - July 26, 2001 The School of Criticism and Theory, Dartmouth College; June 17 - July 26, 1996 Ph. D. English, University of Tennessee, Knoxville; May 1989 M.A. English, University of Southern Mississippi; August 1982 Graduate Study Abroad, University of London; Summer 1981 B. M. E. Mississippi College, 1979 And, that doesn't include any of her music background! “If Chrissie Hynde had bolted Akron for Nashville instead of London, her unbuffered emotion and incisive observations might have taken shape something like those of Ms. Blair. The Washington-based singer/songwriter takes on romantic love’s frequent left turns and rude awakenings with straightforward lyrics and vocals to match. “Wild Night”, in particular, evokes the soulfulness of the afore-mentioned Ms. H. Other instantly attractive tracks include “All The While”, “Lucky Man” and “Far Away”.” — Duane Verh, Roots Music Report Linda's Website Linda's Facebook Linda via Spotify

In today's podcast we discuss Christmas, Christmas spirit, Christmas decorations, Chuck Berry, Run Rudolph Run, Little Queenie, Jack Frost, Star Wars The Last Jedi, Vietnam vet, Jocko, motivation, incarceration, Red States, algorithms, Facebook, Twitter, RAW, The Bar, CM Punk, Elias, John Cena, Dean Ambrose, Seth Rollins, Jason Jordan, Renee Young, Asuka, Shinsuke Nakamura, Paul Heyman Guy, Brock Lesnar, American Alpha, NBA Xmas games, Cavs, Warriors, Lebron James, Kevin Durant, foul, flop, Justin Trudeau, birthday, FBI, Trump, Chappelles Show, War on Christmas, Kurt Cobain, Rusev Day, Magic Leap, spaghetto, Obama, Muslim, Flobots, logo, 3D Printer, Puerto Rico, power, delayed gratification, Also, we are on iTunes! Subscribe, download and review at https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/papa-johns-brain-droppings/id1278787736Listen to the Papa John's Brain Droppings Podcast on Stitcher at http://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=149731&refid=stprFollow us on http://www.Twitter.com/TheJohnDNewton or https://www.facebook.com/PJBDPodcast for the latest updates. Favorite us on TuneIn at https://tunein.com/radio/Papa-Johns-Brain-Droppings-Podcast-p1026907/For video of the podcasts subscribe to https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnBY8t1-2xJCr7jxYn6evfg

In today's podcast we discuss Christmas, Christmas spirit, Christmas decorations, Chuck Berry, Run Rudolph Run, Little Queenie, Jack Frost, Star Wars The Last Jedi, Vietnam vet, Jocko, motivation, incarceration, Red States, algorithms, Facebook, Twitter, RAW, The Bar, CM Punk, Elias, John Cena, Dean Ambrose, Seth Rollins, Jason Jordan, Renee Young, Asuka, Shinsuke Nakamura, Paul Heyman Guy, Brock Lesnar, American Alpha, NBA Xmas games, Cavs, Warriors, Lebron James, Kevin Durant, foul, flop, Justin Trudeau, birthday, FBI, Trump, Chappelles Show, War on Christmas, Kurt Cobain, Rusev Day, Magic Leap, spaghetto, Obama, Muslim, Flobots, logo, 3D Printer, Puerto Rico, power, delayed gratification, Also, we are on iTunes! Subscribe, download and review at https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/papa-johns-brain-droppings/id1278787736Listen to the Papa John's Brain Droppings Podcast on Stitcher at http://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=149731&refid=stprFollow us on http://www.Twitter.com/TheJohnDNewton or https://www.facebook.com/PJBDPodcast for the latest updates. Favorite us on TuneIn at https://tunein.com/radio/Papa-Johns-Brain-Droppings-Podcast-p1026907/For video of the podcasts subscribe to https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnBY8t1-2xJCr7jxYn6evfg

In which Jeff and KC welcome to the studio Tacoma-based uber-educator, author, and singer/songwriter Linda Nicole Blair; we learn the rundown about Little Queenie and her long love affair with her husband; a rock that looks like Mordor hovers above the desert; KC celebrates the eleventh season of derby in Tacoma; KC edits her first movie; Nicole's parents plied her with books and spoken poetry; Mrs Basich rocks the literature education game; we learn about a supremely awesome 60s family band; cool kids take the bus in from the Harbor; hookups gotten, questions asked; Chopin, Mansfield, and Woolf do that poetry thang; an illegal immigrants' story makes us cry; Literary Darwinism is explained; Linda plays some original music; nights are wild and seas are heavy; seas roil beneath tundra; Jeff leads the Mutual Admiration Society; and Bianca del Rio is coming!   Songs in this episode: "Indian Lake" by The Cowsills "Wild Night","Little Queenie", and "Tennessee Honey, Mississippi Shine" by Linda Nicole Blair

Zum Podcast Episode 18 - Anthony Bedard ----------- Anthony Bedard is at an overlap in the Venn diagram of music and comedy. As a musician he was in the notorious and recently reunited Icky Boyfriends as well as the Resineators, Hank IV, Little Queenie, and Leather Uppers. He's also the music booker at the Hemlock Tavern for about a decade and in addition to inaugurating the comedy series Club Chuckles, he started a comedy record label called Talent Moat which has released recordings by Bucky Sinister, Brent Weinbach, and Nick Flanagan. We also talked about the early '90s Boston and SF music scenes and the hilarious twitter he runs called Folder Rock, rife with overhyped self-promotion from bands seeking to get booked at the club. ------------ HIGH CASTLE - After God - Spirit of the West (Zum) (intro music)  ICKY BOYFRIENDS - Katerophenia - A Love Obscene (Menlo Park) BRENT WEINBACH - Women - The Night Shift (Talent Moat)

The slide guitar master spent his teenage years studying and playing Delta blues with the great Son House, one of the foundational practitioners who was an early influence on the legendary Robert Johnson. John's got a hellhound on his trail—just be careful not to look the beast in the eyes. Topics include a new semester, political drama, haircare tips, police contact, a mentor, a Rochester relocation, vintage underwear, a hitchhiking nightmare, a narrow escape, a New Orleans relocation, meeting Fess, Uganda Roberts, and Earl King, James Booker at the Maple Leaf, a series of bass players, Little Queenie and the Percolators, Bluesiana, Voodoo, Sally Glassman, Rev. Goat Carson, past lives, the spirit world, Carlo Nuccio, immunity, a trickster, Terry Jones, passwords, the Glass House, Peggy Lipton, Quincy Jones, mechanical genius, a universal principle, the Holy Ghost, and much more. Support the podcast [here](https://www.paypal.me/troubledmenpodcast). Subscribe, review, and rate on Apple or most podcast outlets. Follow on social media, share with friends, and spread the Troubled Word. Intro music: Styler/Coman Outro music: “Standing Still” by John Mooney from the album “Truth of the Matter”