Podcasts about MacDougal Street

Hoy vamos a hablar de poesía. De poesía revolucionaria. De poesía innovadora. De poesía que cambió el mundo. Vamos a continuar con la apasionante historia de la Generación golpeada, de la Generación beatífica; hoy, centrándonos en sus maravillosos poetas, aunque, en definitiva, toda esta generación, era una generación de poetas, ya que todos sus miembros escribieron poesía de forma excelsa. Y es que una revolución social, intelectual y espiritual siempre va a empezar con la poesía, por eso Platón, que conocía perfectamente a los poetas, pidió a gritos que fueran expulsados de la Polis, lo más lejos posible, y más lejos aún de las jóvenes griegas, para que no fueran corrompidas con sus patrañas. Seguramente fue lo mismo que pensaron el presidente Truman y más tarde el presidente Eisenhower cuando las ciudades norteamericanas comenzaron a llenarse de beatniks y hípsters con ideas que no casaban con la idea del sueño americano, que tras la Segunda Guerra Mundial se encontraba en su momento de máximo apogeo. Uno de esos poetas, uno de esos ángeles en llamas que surcaba las calles del Village y de Times Square, va a ser el personaje central que nos ocupe hoy en Nadie al Volante. Un escritor que se convirtió a la postre en uno de los mayores poetas del siglo XX y uno de los personajes más conocidos de la cultura popular porque asumió sin tapujos el papel de ser uno de los líderes espirituales de toda una generación de jóvenes norteamericanos que estaban empeñados en cambiar el mundo. En 1956, este autor sorprendió a propios y extraños con uno de los poemarios más controvertido, innovador y revolucionario del siglo pasado; el poemario Aullido, una de las cumbres del poeta y de la poesía del siglo XX. Y no solo se convirtió en una figura pública de primer orden, si no que también asumió el papel de sacar a la luz a toda una generación de escritores que se escondían por las calles de Nueva York y San Francisco, tratando de publicar en una industria muy conservadora unos libros más que controvertidos; entre esos jóvenes se encontraba un ex presidiario al que había conocido en un pequeño bar del Village, y que se iba a transformar en una de las voces más genuinas y rompedoras que emergieron en el convulso periodo de posguerra y que logró mostrarnos la belleza más sublime a través de la jerga más intoxicada de la calle y de los tugurios más infectos de la ciudad, y que fue considerado por su generación como el mejor poeta de los Estados Unidos en ese momento. Así que hoy abrimos las puertas de Poetical Resistance junto con nuestro ángel poético Rafael Peñas Cruz para aullar a una Luna enfurecida, para transmutarnos en seres de fuego que surcan las azoteas junto con músicos iluminados y para darle la mano a William Blake en MacDougal Street y que a través de sus ojos místicos podamos reconocer todos los misterios de la Tierra. Hablamos de los poetas Allen Ginsberg y Gregory Corso.

Matt De Nicola, whose photos will be featured in the upcoming Cracks in PoMo zine, joins me to eat fries at Pommes Frites on MacDougal Street in the West Village to discuss photography, NYC wildlife, and other random stuff. Follow him @mattiopattio, and look out for a copy of the zine $upport CracksInPomo by clicking on this link. And follow CracksInPomo on Substack, Instagram, and Twitter. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/stephen-adubato/support

Matt De Nicola, whose photos will be featured in the upcoming Cracks in PoMo zine, joins me to eat fries at Pommes Frites on MacDougal Street in the West Village to discuss photography, NYC wildlife, and other random stuff. Follow him @mattiopattio, and look out for a copy of the zine $upport CracksInPomo by clicking on this link. And follow CracksInPomo on Substack, Instagram, and Twitter. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/stephen-adubato/support

It's the end of the road for an Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning comedy series. “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” is back for its fifth and final season, with episodes dropping weekly starting April 14 on Amazon Prime Video.  For this episode of Streamed & Screened, hosts Bruce Miller and Terry Lipshetz, provide a (mostly) spoiler-free analysis of the the program, which is a favorite of both. Also hear from the stars, including clips from Rachel Brosnahan (Miriam "Midge" Maisel), Alex Borstein (Susie Myerson), Tony Shalhoub (Abraham "Abe" Weissman) and Kevin Pollak (Moishe Maisel) who reflect on the characters, the series and whether we might see them all reprise their roles in the future as part of a feature-length movie. Bruce also has an interview with Michael Zegen, who plays Midge's ex-husband Joel Maisel, who offers thoughts of his own on the program. Whether you're a longtime fan of the show or looking for an introduction before you binge the whole thing over a long weekend, you'll want to give this episode a listen. About the show Read more: REVIEW: 'Mrs. Maisel' ends with marvelous update Where to watch: Amazon Prime Video Cast: Rachel Brosnahan as Miriam "Midge" Maisel Alex Borstein as Susie Myerson Michael Zegen as Joel Maisel Marin Hinkle as Rose Weissman Tony Shalhoub as Abraham "Abe" Weissman Kevin Pollak as Moishe Maisel Caroline Aaron as Shirley Maisel Luke Kirby as Lenny Bruce Jane Lynch as Sophie Lennon Created by: Amy Sherman-Palladino Executive producers: Amy Sherman-Palladino, Daniel Palladino Producers: Dhana Gilbert, Matthew Shapiro, Salvatore Carino, Sheila Lawrence About the show Streamed & Screened is a podcast about movies and TV hosted by Bruce Miller, a longtime entertainment reporter who is now the editor of the Sioux City Journal in Iowa and Terry Lipshetz, a senior producer for Lee Enterprises based in Madison, Wisconsin. Episode transcript Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically: A lot of young women trying standup comedy for the first time, which is so awesome and long overdue. It's been incredible to hear how his legacy has already affected people, and I'm really excited to see how she lives on. That voice you just heard was Rachel Brosnahan, who stars as Miriam ‘Midge' Maisel in ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel' I'm Terry Lipshetz, a senior producer at Lee Enterprises and a co-host of Streamed and Screened, an entertainment podcast about movies and TV. Joining me, as always, is the incomparable Bruce Miller, editor of the Sioux City Journal and a longtime entertainment reporter. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is back for its fifth and final season with episodes dropping weekly starting April 14th on Amazon Prime Video. Bruce It will be an end of an era for one of the most popular shows on that platform. Certainly big shoes to fill. First of all, why was it not the marvelous Bruce Miller? This is now this is how this should be. This is how he introduced me. Right. It's interesting because this is a show that I think people lost track of because of the big gaps between seasons. Was it over? Is it over? And when they see this fifth season and I've seen the whole thing, they will go, Oh my God, there's so much in that fifth season because they do a lot of time jumps. So you're not going to just see one season, one year play out. It goes into the future and you find out things about her children. You find out things about her husband, her ex-husband, her friends, Susie. All of those people come into play at some point. And so it flashes back and forth and it's I think it pays. It rewards the people who have been loyal. And you get to see a lot of fun. So there is and I you know, I'm really I should say nothing. But there is one kind of cute thing where they're showing, you know, did she have a lot of dresses? And they show the racks of her clothes all. My God, what is this? She did have it because I don't think she ever wore anything twice. No, I don't remember it. And you also, I think, see growth in Mrs. Maysles comedy career, how she's able to tell, you know, I always thought, is she making this crap up on the fly? And every night, is she not writing this down so that she can, you know, retell it at another place? It seemed like every every routine she did was just of the moment. And you see how she does all that. And there is a scene in the last episode that is on Be Livable, and that's as much as I can tell you on the spoiler end of things. But okay, no spoilers. You know, when you first watched it, what surprised you most about it? For me personally, I was sucked in because I'm a native of New York City, okay? And for me, my wife is from just outside of Green Bay, Wisconsin. And it's been an interesting ride because she's she's Catholic. I was raised Catholic, but my dad was Jewish. But for me, it's kind of seeing that cultural the cultural phenomenon of New York, the Jewish culture, even though I'm I didn't grow up in the fifties or sixties, I was born in the mid seventies, but for me I could relate to it. And I thought that they kept this show like it's fiction, but it's also really easy. And I think it was that reality that kind of kept bringing me back. So a couple of things, if you don't mind me throwing these out, because we're going to be talking a lot about I mean, we're basically going to just talk about the show with Mrs. Basil. Yes, this is the Mrs. Maisel episode. So first off, the beauty of streaming is if you have not watched this show yet, just go back and watch it. You know, go get Amazon Prime if you don't have it already and start cranking through them. My wife and I didn't start this until the 2020 lockdown. There was already in between season three and seven season for that really long gap they were talking about. But we had nothing to watch during it. So we're kind of crushing through Netflix and Hulu and anything we could find. And we hopped into Mrs. Maisel and for some reason I didn't know much about it at the time. I was saying, What is this like some superhero thing? Because it kind of played with some of those Marvel titles that you hear. But it's a it's a comedy. It takes place, I guess, you know, like late 1950s, early 1960s. Rachael Brosnahan plays Miriam Midge Maisel. She's a housewife with very strong Jewish personalities in her life. Between her her husband and her parents and her in-laws. Alex Borstein plays Susie Myerson. She manages The Gaslight Cafe. Becomes a manager. She wants to be a manager. She's there. Michael Zegen is Joel Maseil while her husband and there's a Tony Shalhoub is in it as her father. There's a lot of actors you will know. Kevin Pollak is her father in law. It was a Jane. Lynch turned up as. Jane Lynch. Yeah. So it's it's an awesome ensemble cast. So and it's also a lot of reality. So Luke Kirby plays Lenny. Bruce. Right? So he's a real person, very controversial comic of the time, but becomes Midge's friend over time and helps guide her career. Midge Maisel, a fictional character, but she's based on Joan Rivers, who had a relationship with Lenny Bruce and started at the Gaslight Cafe, which was a real location. It's where, if you've ever heard of a musician named Bob Dylan, you've heard of Bob Dylan before.Bruce Never heard of him. Never heard of him. So he was a young man. Robert Zimmerman out of Hibbing, Minnesota. Probably did. Well, is he did. He did well. So he came to New York City and was kind of brought under the wing of a folk singer named Dave Van Ronk, who is who is the mayor of MacDougal Street down in the village of New York City. They performed at the Gaslight. This is a real location. So it's the beauty of this show is, you know, you're getting a little bit of a history lesson of the time and it but it's still a fictional comedy. It's hilarious. I love it. It's very you know, some of it is kind of on the surface kind of comedy and you pick it up really quick. But some of it's very deep, too, and it kind of gets into, you know, the place of women at the time in the 1950s and, you know, kind of being you're the housewife. Take care of the kids. Joel wants to be the comic. He's the one that's going to be the comedian. And of course, the tables get turned. But yeah, you're right. I mean, with the dresses, even as the show progresses and, you know, she's short on cash, sometimes it's like, how can you afford this apartment? Where are all these dresses coming from? It's ridiculous. The clothing budget does not suffer. She will always have a great outfit. What I find fascinating was each year it got bigger. You know, you start out and it's kind of like, Oh, this is doing a period show is expensive. And they didn't. They just threw it out there. They went to a summer camp, you know, and that can't be easy to recreate, particularly of that era. Then they go to a USO show, which is huge in an airplane hangar. They go to Paris, for God's sakes. This season, you're going to see them in New York and you're going to see a lot of landmarks in New York, particularly Rockefeller Center, which they use like a drum. They are around that building all the time. So that's that's fascinating to see. And the cast, there are so many people over those four seasons that get a return visit in the fifth. So it's it's kind of like a reunion. And you go, Oh my God, That was from remember when they did that? And she was in that. And then there's also a bit of, Oh, how can I how can I say this without saying this? It reminds you of if you saw my favorite year, if you saw laughter on the 23rd floor, if you saw any of those kind of looks at what Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner and Howard Morris did during the early days of television. With your show of shows, there are references to those kinds of things, so you get a real sense of the time. I think you really get to see what the fifties and sixties were like. There's a sort of Johnny Carson character. They mentioned Jack Paar in the course of the the series. What I love are these time jumps where you find out exactly what happened to Mrs. Maisel. What did she fizzle out and become? Nothing. Did she come a big star? Was she like Joan Rivers? You know, that is an easy comparison. But there were other female comics of the time, Tony Fields, if you remember that name. I don't know if it moms Mabley, these were all ones who were working that Phyllis Diller. And they kind of had to be aggressive in their approach to comedy because otherwise they were going to just be bulldozed over. And I think that's what you get out of out of Midge, is that she is not going to take no, but she is going to get knocked down. I can't wait to dive into this. It's exciting. I always love those just the characters. They even if they're playing such a really small role, it feels like they're playing a much larger role than it actually turns out to be. There are little in this one, you know. I don't know if you ever remember those kind of industrial shows that used to be big in New York, where it would be like, Oh, soap or whatever. And they do a huge thing for all of their their corporate people around the country. They'd come in for a day or whatever a weekend, and they do an industrial show, which we are. A lot of Broadway people would get on stage and sing the praises of, you know, Lox or whatever it might have been, or a new car. And they did these elaborate stage shows and fact there's a documentary out about them that is just fascinating because it's a world we don't know. We weren't in that industry. We weren't in that that thing. But people made a lot of money off that writing those shows. And you get a sense of that as well. There's a big convention of sorts that that Midge happens to be involved in. So you get another you know, it's this history lesson that you're getting a lot of stuff, even though it's not a real person. You know, if she were real, I think you'd look at it differently. You would say, Oh, well, you've got to have this moment. You've got to have that, and you really don't know what could happen. And Joel does not get shortchanged either. You know, I thought that maybe he would kind of just disappear as the years go by. And he has a very, very strong presence in the final season. That's great. I always loved his character. I always was afraid that as the ex-husband, estranged husband, he might just kind of slowly walk out of the show. And in the fact that not only has he remained at the forefront and kind of done his own thing, too, he's found his place and kind of escaped the shadow of his very overbearing parents. But the fact that he's still in it and that his parents are still in it just really makes the whole program him. And they do interweave those things, too, you know, that he was building a club. He was trying to get a club off the ground. And you'll see more of that in the next season. And his parents are big players with Mrs. Maysles parents. Interestingly, I don't think you see enough of Tony Shalhoub. I think he has a very secondary presence in in this year's show, and that's surprising because he won an Emmy for it, and I would have thought they would have leaned in a little more, maybe he just wasn't available to do a lot more. That's interesting. I also wonder, too, if it's is it part of character development, too, where they they want to highlight certain characters each season kind of give them because he did seem to have a very prominent role last year. When he was doing The Village Voice and he's a critic. And now he's getting the reaction to what life is like as a critic, which is I think, just fascinating. That's your favorite part, isn't it? Yeah, that's the cool part. Yeah. I lean into the critic aspect. I don't do I care about the comic? I don't know if I do, but I do care about the critic. You know, you talk a little bit about the characters and the reality and whatnot. One of my favorite things from the series and this is because, you know, and we've talked about this my my fan of of I'm such a huge fan of music. I have a very large record collection and just I feel like I have a pretty solid knowledge and I'm watching I think it was season it was season three when Midge was out on tour, was Shy Baldwin. Right. So she was doing comedy to open up for his big band performance. So he was performing. He had that ensemble band behind him. There was the one character who kind of became her friend of sorts. Carol Keane, who is a fictional musician. However, she was based on a real person. She played. Carol Kaye, if you at all familiar with her, is a legendary bassist, and she's part of what's known as The Wrecking Crew. The Wrecking Crew in the 1960s was this group of musicians that would come in and they were studio musicians. So you would have performers who weren't necessarily the best bands. They would go out live. But when it came to actually recording the albums, the producers were like, Let's you guys are in quite good enough. And it was even the Beach Boys, like the Beach Boys, didn't perform their own instruments in the studio. In a lot of cases. It was a lot of times it was The Wrecking Crew. So Carol Kaye, the real person was the basis to put down the bass line. That famous bass line in In These Boots by Nancy Sinatra. The bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. So that was Carol Kaye and the fictional character in Mrs. May's All, who is also the bassist in the band and a befriended Midge and that season. So that was for me, another piece that I just really love about this. That's where rewards you for being astute in other areas, correct? If you if you know things like if you you know, if you don't if you don't know these things, that's that's totally fine. You're just going to be entertained for for an hour or however long the episode is. But if you if you're familiar with pop culture in any way, you don't need to just know the real people like Lenny Bruce. But it's knowing little things like The Gaslight Cafe. Carol Kaye, These types of people, you know, they are based on actual folks, even if it's just very loosely. Yeah, it's fun to see who they might be. You know, Sophie Lennon, Who is she referring to? Who is she trying to be that you would know as a fellow comedian? You know, is she somebody that or is she just whole cloth, a fresh character? And that's I think that's kind of picking the brain of Amy Sherman Palladino, the creator of this show. If you know her from Gilmore Girls, you know that she loves dance scripts, she loves the idea that there's there are more words there than really you need to do a half hour or 45 minutes of a show, but she packs it and I would assume it would be very difficult to to learn all those lines, particularly when she wants that kind of rapid fire way of talking. And that's how she is. She's just like that. She usually wears a hat, too. She loves wearing hats. She's short. She's not unlike Susie. I would assume that a lot of Susie's personality comes from Amy, and her husband. Daniel is also a producer on the show, and he writes as well. So they're they're kind of in sync with what this mindset is all about. And I'm sure she had a grand plan as to where she was going to take this whole thing. Now, you can easily see that they might have gone seven or eight years with this, but I think the idea of cutting it off now opens up other opportunities like a movie. And I think for them, let's let's try and make the fifth season as packed as we can and then we can go on and do those other things and not have to worry about time limitations or we've got to meet a deadline to get this on the air by a certain time because it's it's expensive. It is hugely expensive. Bruce, I don't think you know this, but you have just set up the perfect segue way into, oh, wow, some audio here. So we already heard from Rachel. Now we're going to hear from Tony Shalhoub, who plays Midge's father. He talks about how they didn't know how long this series was going to go, but felt that both Amy Sherman-Palladino and Dan Palladino were able to wrap up the story perfectly the way it was supposed to be. So let's let's cut ahead to that clip. From what I understand, even though we didn't know how many seasons it may go or may not go, Amy and Dan always had, they always had the final scene in their heads. They always they didn't know exactly how we were going to get there, but they knew where we were going to land and then I think we all by osmosis, we all felt that cool. All right, so that was Tony Shalhoub. Bruce, does that sound accurate, like what he's talking about? Does it feel like the series wraps up perfectly? I think it does for me it did anyway. And I thought, like I say, the last episode is one you can't miss because it's and I, I cheated, all right? Because I was afraid I was doing an interview and I thought I better see the end just in case this character is dead. I don't want to end up asking, Well, like, you know, what about those later years are, well, I'm dead, so I won't be in those later years. But that wasn't the case. There wasn't anything. But I did watch the last episode before I finished off the other ones before it, and the last episode is a great example of standalone television. You could take that episode out, not see any of the rest of the series, and you would still get a really good sense of a story. It's like a little mini movie in itself, and it's interesting how they all are able to get friends in. There is a roast at one point that has a lot of comedians that you know, are friends of a lot of the actors that are in the shows. And there are ties. I think Rachel's husband is a character in the show. There are people that are all people who've been on Gilmore Girls, people who've been on Bunheads, people who have been, if you will, loyal over the years. And they repay that loyalty by giving them a shot in this last season. I mean, it's remarkable. If I sat and made a list of all the people that I saw, I, you know, a character that they introduced last season played by Gideon Glick, he's this magician and kind of an offbeat magician. And you go, What is this? I love that character. And he returns this season and he has a lot of really goofy things. He's afraid of flying. So that's a fear factor. And there there is a picture that you'll see out there somewhere that is JFK, the the airport. So you'll be able to see what that looks like inside. And it's just fascinating to see these characters. The last time I saw it was Catch Me if you can, and just to look at that and now there's a hotel there that you can stay at there. It's very commercial where you could go and actually do tourism things there. But it is featured in this season. Again, huge, huge landmarks that they're using in New York. I think it's fascinating to to realize that somebody didn't say no. Nobody was saying them, No, you can't do that. We can't afford to do that. It's like I'm sure she dreamed it. And very much like Susie, where she's not going to let somebody else tell her no, she's just going to keep going ahead and doing it. And I think that's in a nutshell. Amy. Amy Palladino I can't remember the timing of this. Was the JFK airport at the time, or was it still Idlewild? Yeah, it was, Yeah, it was, but as I know it is. I know I always wondered because it transitioned. It was not named. No, it was not named JFK because, you know, and interestingly, I don't remember that they've even mentioned that Kennedy has died at that point. But you'll see the eighties, you'll see the nineties, you'll see the seventies, you'll see various different time frames over the course of the of the of the episodes. Wow. So another character that was mentioned and we talked briefly about her was that of Alex Borstein. She plays Susie Myerson. You know, you had mentioned the connection with her to Amy Sherman-Palladino and whether it's the connection there. But we have a we have a clip of her also. Now, if you're familiar with her, she's also the voice of Lois on Family Guy. She's a comedian. She's been around for a really long time. But I think this is kind of like probably her biggest breakthrough screen role that I can think of on screen role. So we have a short clip of her talking about her relationship with Midge. So let's go to that. For a bit. Like Mutton, Jeff, It makes no sense. And yet there's just this chemistry. There's something that draws these women together and they've got each other's backs and it's not about finding a mate. It's about achieving something in their lives that they want. It's about filling a hole within and they complete each other. All right, Bruce So that was Alex Borstein talking about the relationship that Susie and Midge have. Is that connection? Because that was always one of my favorite things was the interactions between Midge and Susie and kind of the weird polar opposites that they are, but they have this great presence on screen together. Do we get more of that in this first season? We do. And you also get fighting. And that's as much as I can say about that. You know how they it's like on a soap opera where they love to put people together and then they like to tear them apart. And I think this falls into that. You know, there's there's a reason for them to be at each other's throats and maybe they both don't pay attention enough to what the needs are of the other person. But you see how how Susie is just giving her life for this person that maybe she might be a little too protected. You know, Mitch can Mitch has the ability to go and do this because she has her parents to fall back on if she really needs them. Her husband, her ex-husband is still there in the picture for her. She doesn't have that kind of if I don't do this, I don't know what will happen to my life. There is a safety net for her, and we've seen that over the years where she's taken jobs at other places and done other things and she gets a new job this year. And that's a safety net of sorts, too. But there's always this comedy where Susie has nothing. Susie is like she's all in and she will do whatever she needs to do to further the career of her client. Hopefully there will be more clients, but you know, you look at it and you say, Oh my God, she's just doing all this for one person. Is that friendship? Is that is that, you know, just survival? Is it? She's enamored with her. What is the what is the deal for her and why is she doing this? And you get answers to all of that stuff. It's just it's really fascinating. I remember when they went to the to the Catskills and they were staying there and I think she had a hammer or something. And she was like trying to do things with the hammer. And you go, Oh my God, this is unreal. And she's always treated like dirt by everybody. Everybody sees her as like their batboy for anything that goes wrong. Susie, we're going to go to you. Yeah, She said that season at the Catskills was just incredible. I mean, they basically took it was pretty much the entire season was more or less on location up there. And you still had to work her in somehow. And she obviously she doesn't dress like somebody that belongs there. So she just walked around with that hammer and like, I think a plunger, too, just looking like a maintenance worker and nobody would question it because that's what she did. But that relationship, you know, even though we're we're avoiding spoilers for season five, we had that adversarial give and take relationship between them throughout all the seasons. Because you're right, she didn't have anybody. Susie doesn't have anybody to fall back on, so she has to make a living, which meant at times taking on other clients. You know, she didn't want to be Sophie Lemon's manager, but she needed the money and then kind of had to deal with that abuse as well as the abuse of of Midge, who couldn't believe that she would support Sophie Lennon, who is her her nemesis. Right. Yeah. So, you know, that that to me has been just a great, you know, relationship. But it always comes back to when they meet in the diner, which is such an iconic New York thing. Like, I just love I miss diners so much. Bruce Living in Wisconsin, there's no diners out here. People who think there's diners out here, there is no diners out here that is. Have a drive thru with it, too, right? But it's such a it's just such a new York, New Jersey, East Coast cultural thing where you go to a diner and you get that triple decker club sandwich or the pastrami or whatever it is and a pile of food. You come all the other way, it's on you. Who knows everybody's order. Yeah. You know, you get that big pickle spear which probably sits on every plate, and they just move it from plate to plate so I don't touch it. The end. They do. Go back to the diner. You'll be seeing that and you'll be seeing various and sundry combinations of people talking. So it's a it's a key place. And like I say, these sets that they build the apartments, the business places they go to, it's unbelievable. I don't know how I would love to see what the budget was for this because it had to be huge because it looks good. And I there's a thing and there's this coming season where they mention something as a giveaway, okay? And I thought, oh no, that it's it's wrong. It's not the same time. And I had to look it up to make sure that that was within that time span. It was exactly in that time span. You know how you would say I like a yo I don't want to see what it is because again, this is one of those things. But if it was a yo yo and you say, well, yo, yo, what year was a Rubik's cube? That would be one a Rubik's Cube. Why are they giving away Rubik's cubes? They weren't available in 62 or 61 were they. I don't I think they didn't come until the seventies, but that's not yet. But there is another thing like that. And damn, if they didn't nail it. And I looked it up and it was exactly right, it it fit with the time frame. You'll see stuff like that that it just you want to play gotcha with them and they, they already know they're much better than we are at vetting these kinds of things. Yeah, they, they're really good. It's just nailing history. It is a history. Even though it is fiction, it is a history lesson throughout pop culture, history lesson. Were there characters that you really like that maybe aren't around or have, you know, dropped in for an episode or two? Well, you know, the Carol K one was one that I really liked. The magician that was in there in season four when Midge was working at that theater. And, you know, it's kind of the adult content. It's not quite a strip club, but it's that kind of like a doll that the manager of that club was. It's just a lot of those little characters like that. I really love the characters that I really felt a personal connection to, and we'll kind of kind of move this forward too, with some some clips that we have coming up. So we have Michael Zegen, who plays Joel Maze, all his parents. Kevin Pollack plays Moisi Maisel, his father, and then Caroline Aaron plays Shirley Mays or his mother. So I had mentioned earlier that that my mom was Catholic, my dad is Jewish. His parents, um, his mother died. My, my paternal grandmother died. I was probably about 15 years old when she passed away. She wasn't a very devout Jewish person. My grandfather was he was it could be. Yes, it was. That was probably about it. My grandfather was always a little bit more religious. And then after my grandmother died, he got remarried a year or two later is very quick. And the woman that he married, her name was Mildred. We all called her Millie and they became very devout again. He would go to temple. They kept kosher, but but Millie had a very unique personality. So when the show started and I started watching it, and when Joel's parents were finally introduced and Shirley Hazel comes on screen, I turned to my wife immediately and I'm like, Oh my goodness, that is Millie. That's Bella. Is Millie. Looks like Millie. Sounds like Millie. Acts like Millie. This is not like you can think that that there's there's acting here and we're over the top and there's no way people could be like this in real life. Surely Basil is Millie or Millie was Shirley. Mabel, whichever reality. So it to me there was just that personal connection that that strong, very strong personality with her. And in the father, I would I don't think my grandfather was any way like my she they had certain crossovers but you know Shirley and Millie were two peas in a pod. Shirley is a big fan of pop culture, and she knows all the names that Midge might throw out there. She has like she could give you an encyclopedia about the person, and she's so excited about everything. And of course, when Midge invites them to come to various and sundry things, oh, she's right there. She's ready to come. Whereas her own mother is like, well, this interrupt with what I'm doing. I don't know if I want to come and see you perform in front row is always Shirley. Shirley is there. She's all, This is wonderful. You're doing a great job. I love you, you're great. And you'll see they do a lot with them during this next year, so you'll enjoy that. I'm looking forward to that because that interaction with them and in some ways to my my maternal grandparents who were Catholic, they never interacted that often with each other. But there is always a very strange relationship between like my mom and her parents and my dad and his parents when they would interact. It was very I don't know if his adversarial is quite the way, but culturally very different. And I kind of get that with this show, like like Midge and her parents were very much one way, and Joel and his parents are very much another. And there is that that onscreen dynamic that I just love. And it kind of clicks with me a bit. Yeah, and they're together a lot. The four of them do a lot of things together. You'll be you'll be thrilled. You know, speaking of Moisi, Mazal, we do have one more clip of Kevin Pollak, and he's talking a little bit about the future of Mrs. Maisel. So let's go to that. Yeah, we're not going to ever say goodbye. And I predict now for you, in 4.3 years we'll be here talking about the amazing movie. There I said it. Kevin Pollak leaves a little bit of that door open. Could we see Mrs. May's old movie? I think it's the door has been cracked. Look, the way they need content these days and you know that it'd be an Amazon film in a minute. And, you know, so they put it in theaters. They could get a lot of attention for it. And then you just put it on streaming again. I think we've seen the model for all of this. And like I said, it would help pay the bills for all that expensive stuff that they're using because it looks like a Cinemascope film. It's shot. Well, it has great I mean, the scoring, they created original songs for this. Now, really for a half hour you're going to do that. And the sets, the costumes, the whole and, you know, the first season they won a lot of Emmys for those kind of below the line things. And I think this year they're going to be well rewarded for what they've done because it is so vast and so unbelievable. But, you know, it did not go unnoticed by the actors. I think they believe that they landed into a great situation. And I don't think it was by chance either that they were selected. I think these people, they knew who were the hard workers, they knew who the ones that would deliver for them. And it it it seems like it's a brutal show to do because it isn't just getting up and saying a line against somebody. You know, what's interesting is you'll see a little a clip of a TV show that stars Hank Azaria and Sutton Foster within the show. It looks it has a bit of Dick Van Dike to the quality of it. And Sutton Foster kind of seems like a mary Tyler Moore. And you think the idea that they would write this script for a show within a show that really isn't seen that much, you get a couple of lines out of it. And, you know, they did you know, they probably wrote the whole script or this sitcom that they were trying to reference in some way. And it's done in black and white. And you get all of that that kind of little homage. But clearly they are fans of the medium. They are ones who want to make sure that it comes across and you do get that sense of what the time was like. You know, it was not easy being a female comedian in New York, Hollywood, wherever. And I don't I think now it just seems too easy because we see comedians all over the place, you know, doing a one hour special on Netflix. But the idea that somebody would have had that or got that an unreal, unreal. And if I was able to interview Joan Rivers Times and she net, you know, as much as she was kind of oh what's the term I want to use not boisterous but she was you know, she seemed like a very like she would just tell it like it is and not worry about the consequences. That was not Joan. It was a character that she was portraying. She was the most loving, wonderful person who would would take you under her arms and just treat you like a friend. And that's the I think that's the same kind of disconnect you get here with Mrs. Maisel. She is two different people, but I can see easily that she is the the Joan Rivers is the template for Mrs. Maisel, even though their lives are much different. They don't they don't wind up the same way. They don't have the same dynamics. There aren't the same, you know, cards being played. But there is that kind of idea that I'm alone. I really am alone in this venture and I've got to do what I want to. Another series that it kind of seems similar to is Hacks, because you see Jean Smart showing what a comedian's like after the big days are over and how does she keep that going? And there's a glimpse of that with this fascinating because I think I think Joan Rivers is the mothership for all these kinds of things because of what she did do and the idea that look at Joan went to QVC and sold crap just to make money, you know, and what she had to do, she alienated Johnny Carson at one point and then she had her own show. But the one thing that she valued most was The Tonight Show. And there was no way they were going to let her back on with that because she had, you know, went as she had. She'd gone against the master and she wasn't sorry enough for Johnny to make this really work. And I think that was a big failing in Joan's life, is that she felt that somehow that relationship was not really repaired and she never got The Tonight Show. She didn't get things she wanted, but in the end, she did get a lot. And she is viewed as somebody they all look up to. You know, they say, well, I wouldn't be here if it weren't for Joan Rivers. And I think that's the path that you're looking at with Mrs. Maisel as well. So with Mrs. May's all leaving Prime Well, not really leaving. It's going to be there, but but this is a big tentpole production for them. What's left for Prime. They do have a lot of shows, but I also don't find myself going to Prime very often for original programing. It feels like a weird, weird platform to me compared some of the others in some ways, maybe a little bit like Apple Tv+, which has several big productions. But when there's nothing there, you know, when you run out of something like Ted Lasso, it feels like there's a long gap until something else comes. What what's your thinking on on Prime right now? I think, though, they're doing movies and a lot of those movies will draw the attention. And so I think that's where they'll get whatever. And they also have a lot of limited series that are ten and down or eight and done. And I think that for them is a better model then a series that who knows if you know the the the suits the executives who are in power may not like that series. And there it's just like network TV. As soon as one regime is out, there's do we have support? You know, unless you're the number one show on television they'll be looking to dump. Yeah. So we've been sprinkling clips throughout this episode, which has been fun because we don't always have audio from so many different people. But we do have one more and it's a little bit more than just a 1015 second clip. We have an interview. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I got to talk to it to Michael Zegen, who plays Mr. Maisel. And it's fascinating because I was always under the impression that his job could be gone at any minute. I really thought that Joel is not necessary to this show. He was important in the first year, but would you stick around? And so we got to talk about that and what this last season was like and what, you know, what what comes next. He is working on the Penguin, which is the new I think his HBO Max series with Colin Farrell, and he's a mobster in that. And so that's an excellent he'll be doing it Fascinating. And he feels very blessed, very blessed that he was a part of this because he knows it's magic in a bottle and you don't get that many times. Michael, how is it to say goodbye to this? I would think that would be very, very difficult. It is You're you're correct in you're you're sentiments. Yeah it's it's it's definitely difficult but it's some I don't know it doesn't feel like it's ended just yet especially you know we we still have all this and we're going to France together and I you know we still have this group text chain. So it's I don't think it'll ever quite feel over over. But I, I, you know, I know the reality of it. And we're not going to be filming anymore, which is devastating. Well, the last season is so stuffed with information. I mean, there's a lot there to unpack. What was it like when you were doing it? Did you say, Oh, my God, I can't believe this happened? And that happened. And, you know, there's a lot. There is, but there's always a lot. I feel like, yeah. And, you know, there's a lot of dialog. I actually think this year the scripts, they're always long, you know and I guess in our show is is supposed to be like, you know, 55 to 60 pages, our scripts are like 90 pages to 100 pages. So they're always long. I do feel like this this season, though, they were longer than most. And the locations, I mean, you're everywhere, you're doing the years, the whole all of it. That's why I thought it seemed like an awful lot. But maybe it's let's get it done and then move on to something else. Well, the show is big. It's been big from the beginning. You know, we went to Paris in the in the second season and the Catskills and Miami. So it's it's it's always been very big. And yeah, I mean, there's a lot of stuff, but somehow it just it still flows just as nicely as ever. And it's, you know, it's still. Mazal. When it started, did you feel, oh, they're going to get rid of my character at some point. I, I was just saying this in a in a previous interview. Yeah. In the first episode when I read it, I thought that was it for Joel and I thought it was going to be a guest star. I didn't even I, I looked at the you know, I was auditioning for it. They send you the cast breakdown and it said that he was a series regular. So I was like, Oh, even better. I had no idea. I really honestly thought this is it for him. And later. But but, you know, luckily that wasn't the case. And they were able to to create this this whole journey for and this evolution for this character. And there have been so many subplots of his that he just kind of owns. That must be a real cool feeling to have them kind of right for you, if you will. Yeah, we all get our subplots. But yeah, I mean, I think Joel's is is probably, I guess the most separate from from everybody else is they all kind of I mean, look, he's still in Midge's orbit, obviously, but but I think, you know, he's probably the he's like Pluto as opposed to, you know. Tony's not Venus. Right. What were you miss about this show? Because you had such a huge cast and of really great people? Well, that's what I mean. That's in that's it in a nutshell is the cast I, I, I, I'll miss everyone terribly isn't. And really, it's not just the cast, it's the crew. It's it's you know, our writers, Amy and Dan, obviously, I I'll miss everything about this show. Literally everything. This has been the greatest experience of my life so far, you know, work wise. I don't I was just talking to Tony and Kevin Pollak and they were saying, you know, by the way, no way, you're going to top this. So, like, they felt bad for me because they they were saying they're like, you have like years and years left. We only have like three and, you know, and I'm on it. It's over for me, basically. But I mean, I don't believe that, but I do I do believe that it's going to be very hard to top something like this. Do you think it's because of the writing that made it such an iconic show or was it something else? Is it spending a lot of money and doing a lot of things, making it bigger than normal? I think that the money is certainly helps. You know, luckily we had Amazon behind us and anything really Amy and Dan wanted they got because I think, you know, Amazon loved the show just as much as we did. But what was the first part of the question? Well, did did you think that it was going to be this this big, this kind of whatever, or was it the writing that really kind of sold all of this thing? It's really everything. It's the writing. It's like I said before, the crew, I mean, we had, you know, people at the top of their game in every, you know, whether it's lighting or set design or acting. I mean, it was just the whole the whole project was just lightning in a bottle. And and I think that's that's really just what made it so special. But yeah, did I have any idea I, I didn't know that it was going to be this big. I knew people were going to like it. I liked it. So, you know, I, I think I've got pretty good taste. And, you know, my if you look at my resume like I've done really good shows before and I've done shows that people watch. But but this was this took it to a new level. And, you know, right out of the gate, we we got nominated for all these awards and we won and we won the Golden Globe, you know, And that that was like, okay, yeah, we were right. Like, this is something special. And and now, you know, then we had to top that. And you got the Emmy. So there you go. Yes, We did. Talk about, though, Amy, as a as a force. I have my views of what she'd be like. I always see her in a hat and I always think she's like, she's marshaling troops. But is it like that or what is she like on on set? She's honestly just the best. You know, you talked about the writing. It doesn't get better than that. And and honestly, like, I'm a little sore about the fact that for, you know, the past couple of years at the Emmys, she's not even nominated for writing. I mean, this is the best written show on TV, you know. Yes. There's succession. There's all these other shows. But like in terms of comedy, it doesn't get better than this. And, you know, it's so rare for me to read something, especially when I'm home alone and I laugh out loud. That doesn't happen. And that's been happening on this show from day one. The minute I read the pilot, I was I was laughing. And and so, yeah, she's she's just, you know, there's there's a level of trust involved with her that that is unparalleled that I haven't I haven't experienced with anybody else. She shows up to set. I mean she's a former dancer, you know, and she thinks like a dancer. So, so even even our background actors, a lot of them are dancers. I don't know if you know that, but it's true. A lot of them are dancers and it's it's always a dance when we're rehearsing a scene because we don't have rehearsals, like prior to showing up to set and doing the scene. We, we, we get there on the day like, you know, 530 in the morning, whatever it is, and then we start blocking it out. And sometimes they're huge scenes. But I mean, you know, she's she's obviously in charge and there's this level of trust that I'll just do anything she wants because, you know, she knows what she wants. And to have a director who knows what they want is sometimes I mean, honestly, in my experience, it's rare. So what is it like watching Rachel do stand up? I mean, Rachel can do anything. You know, she's she always talks about how nervous she is. Like, I don't buy it. Like she's she's a she can do anything. She she's that type of actor where again, it's that level of trust. Like, I mean, any time I got to work with her was a joy and all of our I think you know all of our scenes that we got to do together were always my favorite. And yeah, I mean, you know, she talks about how nervous she is, how the audiences keep growing and growing for her character. And honestly, like, that stuff doesn't faze her. She was born to perform. And, you know, I don't I don't know if she would be a standup comedian, but but I'm sure she can handle that as well if she wanted to. Hey, and you can, too. So that might be even the next step. So. Hey, thank you so much, Michael. I appreciate it. And I thank you for all those years of really great television. Oh, thanks so much. I appreciate it. Thanks, Bruce, for that interview with Michael Zegen. What do we have on tap? Well, I'll tell you, I do. And tell me if you don't agree when you start watching this, this series by, because I think it's going to be in for a lot of Emmys, you know how they come and go. And they kind of had a down year. Never. They weren't getting nominated. And the things I think this year they're coming back with a vengeance. And I don't know how you could deny Rachel Brosnahan, the Emmy for best actress. Really? There are there is a moment there that you will go, Oh, my God, I'm glad I watch this series because it builds to this moment and it's unbelievable. And you'll, as you heard from Michael, you know, watching her was just unbelievable. But next week, we're going to talk about dead ringers. Here's another opportunity. And you wondered, where is Amazon going? Well, this is another series they've got, but it's a limited series. It's based off a movie. If you remember the movie by David Cronenberg, starring Jeremy Irons, he played brothers, twin brothers who were odd, to say the least, and they were involved in obstetrics and making all kinds of weird tools and instruments and whatnot. And they had freaky obsessions. They I mean, watch the movie. You'll see what I mean. It was one of those movies. Take me out for the longest time. Well, they've redone the movie and it's now a limited series, and it features two women as twins. Beverly and Elliot Mantle are now played by Rachel Weisz and Rachel really digs into it. She's and she has lots of fun. And you'll see a different Beverly and a different Elliot. And then it's at one point they play each other to try and dupe their friends. So it's a fascinating look at characters, but I do think they made a horrible land. I just kind of have that feeling knowing how the movie went. But that's next. We were talking to people who were involved in Dead Ringers, and that'll be coming as a limited series later this month. All right, Bruce, thanks again, as always. And tune in again next week for another episode of Streaming & Screened.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Such a great time talking to our friend Nathan about Dave Van Ronk's book The Mayor of MacDougal Street.

New York has long been a city where people go to reinvent themselves. And since the dawn of the twentieth century, New York City's Greenwich Village has been at the center of that alchemy of reinvention. Its side streets, squares and coffeehouses have nurtured generations of artists, writers, and musicians, among them Bob Dylan. Dylan first set foot in the Village in 1961, and even as he continues to make music, you can argue that his Greenwich Village years in the 1960s were a formative period in his life and work. Dick Weissman's new book, Bob Dylan's New York: A Historic Guide (SUNY Press, 2022) helps fans and students of Dylan walk the streets where his career took off. Weissman-- musician, author, veteran of the folk scene, and associate professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Denver—emphasizes the Village but also takes in the midtown Manhattan offices that ran the music industry in Dylan's early days and the backroads of Woodstock, NY where Dylan found refuge from the big city. The result is a book that situates Dylan's New York years in a rich context. Bob Dylan's New York is organized as a series of mapped walking tours--covering Bleecker Street, MacDougal Street, Washington Square and more—that convey the people and institutions that nurtured Dylan's early career. Individual stops on the tour—such as Dylan's apartment building at 161 West Fourth Street and the sites of Izzy Young's Folklore Center on MacDougal Street and Sixth Avenue—are covered in well-researched entries. The book also lists the homes and addresses of other famous Village inhabitants such as the journalist John Reed, the artist Jackson Pollock, the singer Barbra Streisand, and the political activist Eleanor Roosevelt, suggesting the cultural and political ferment of the Village in the twentieth century. Bob Dylan's New York is generously illustrated with photographs, many of them from folklore collections at the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, that capture famous and not-so-famous inhabitants of the Village folk scene in the 1960s. The gentrification that has transformed the Village in recent decades has shoved aside much of the grass-roots folk music scene that made the neighborhood so interesting. Nevertheless, many of the cafes and clubs where Dylan and his contemporaries honed their craft are still there, hidden in plain sight. This folkie, former Village resident and long-time Dylan fan went out for a two-hour walk with Bob Dylan's New York in hand. I made many discoveries on streets that I thought I knew, and I barely scratched the surface of what the book has to offer. Robert W. Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers University. Email: rwsnyder@rutgers.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

New York has long been a city where people go to reinvent themselves. And since the dawn of the twentieth century, New York City's Greenwich Village has been at the center of that alchemy of reinvention. Its side streets, squares and coffeehouses have nurtured generations of artists, writers, and musicians, among them Bob Dylan. Dylan first set foot in the Village in 1961, and even as he continues to make music, you can argue that his Greenwich Village years in the 1960s were a formative period in his life and work. Dick Weissman's new book, Bob Dylan's New York: A Historic Guide (SUNY Press, 2022) helps fans and students of Dylan walk the streets where his career took off. Weissman-- musician, author, veteran of the folk scene, and associate professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Denver—emphasizes the Village but also takes in the midtown Manhattan offices that ran the music industry in Dylan's early days and the backroads of Woodstock, NY where Dylan found refuge from the big city. The result is a book that situates Dylan's New York years in a rich context. Bob Dylan's New York is organized as a series of mapped walking tours--covering Bleecker Street, MacDougal Street, Washington Square and more—that convey the people and institutions that nurtured Dylan's early career. Individual stops on the tour—such as Dylan's apartment building at 161 West Fourth Street and the sites of Izzy Young's Folklore Center on MacDougal Street and Sixth Avenue—are covered in well-researched entries. The book also lists the homes and addresses of other famous Village inhabitants such as the journalist John Reed, the artist Jackson Pollock, the singer Barbra Streisand, and the political activist Eleanor Roosevelt, suggesting the cultural and political ferment of the Village in the twentieth century. Bob Dylan's New York is generously illustrated with photographs, many of them from folklore collections at the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, that capture famous and not-so-famous inhabitants of the Village folk scene in the 1960s. The gentrification that has transformed the Village in recent decades has shoved aside much of the grass-roots folk music scene that made the neighborhood so interesting. Nevertheless, many of the cafes and clubs where Dylan and his contemporaries honed their craft are still there, hidden in plain sight. This folkie, former Village resident and long-time Dylan fan went out for a two-hour walk with Bob Dylan's New York in hand. I made many discoveries on streets that I thought I knew, and I barely scratched the surface of what the book has to offer. Robert W. Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers University. Email: rwsnyder@rutgers.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

New York has long been a city where people go to reinvent themselves. And since the dawn of the twentieth century, New York City's Greenwich Village has been at the center of that alchemy of reinvention. Its side streets, squares and coffeehouses have nurtured generations of artists, writers, and musicians, among them Bob Dylan. Dylan first set foot in the Village in 1961, and even as he continues to make music, you can argue that his Greenwich Village years in the 1960s were a formative period in his life and work. Dick Weissman's new book, Bob Dylan's New York: A Historic Guide (SUNY Press, 2022) helps fans and students of Dylan walk the streets where his career took off. Weissman-- musician, author, veteran of the folk scene, and associate professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Denver—emphasizes the Village but also takes in the midtown Manhattan offices that ran the music industry in Dylan's early days and the backroads of Woodstock, NY where Dylan found refuge from the big city. The result is a book that situates Dylan's New York years in a rich context. Bob Dylan's New York is organized as a series of mapped walking tours--covering Bleecker Street, MacDougal Street, Washington Square and more—that convey the people and institutions that nurtured Dylan's early career. Individual stops on the tour—such as Dylan's apartment building at 161 West Fourth Street and the sites of Izzy Young's Folklore Center on MacDougal Street and Sixth Avenue—are covered in well-researched entries. The book also lists the homes and addresses of other famous Village inhabitants such as the journalist John Reed, the artist Jackson Pollock, the singer Barbra Streisand, and the political activist Eleanor Roosevelt, suggesting the cultural and political ferment of the Village in the twentieth century. Bob Dylan's New York is generously illustrated with photographs, many of them from folklore collections at the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, that capture famous and not-so-famous inhabitants of the Village folk scene in the 1960s. The gentrification that has transformed the Village in recent decades has shoved aside much of the grass-roots folk music scene that made the neighborhood so interesting. Nevertheless, many of the cafes and clubs where Dylan and his contemporaries honed their craft are still there, hidden in plain sight. This folkie, former Village resident and long-time Dylan fan went out for a two-hour walk with Bob Dylan's New York in hand. I made many discoveries on streets that I thought I knew, and I barely scratched the surface of what the book has to offer. Robert W. Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers University. Email: rwsnyder@rutgers.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

New York has long been a city where people go to reinvent themselves. And since the dawn of the twentieth century, New York City's Greenwich Village has been at the center of that alchemy of reinvention. Its side streets, squares and coffeehouses have nurtured generations of artists, writers, and musicians, among them Bob Dylan. Dylan first set foot in the Village in 1961, and even as he continues to make music, you can argue that his Greenwich Village years in the 1960s were a formative period in his life and work. Dick Weissman's new book, Bob Dylan's New York: A Historic Guide (SUNY Press, 2022) helps fans and students of Dylan walk the streets where his career took off. Weissman-- musician, author, veteran of the folk scene, and associate professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Denver—emphasizes the Village but also takes in the midtown Manhattan offices that ran the music industry in Dylan's early days and the backroads of Woodstock, NY where Dylan found refuge from the big city. The result is a book that situates Dylan's New York years in a rich context. Bob Dylan's New York is organized as a series of mapped walking tours--covering Bleecker Street, MacDougal Street, Washington Square and more—that convey the people and institutions that nurtured Dylan's early career. Individual stops on the tour—such as Dylan's apartment building at 161 West Fourth Street and the sites of Izzy Young's Folklore Center on MacDougal Street and Sixth Avenue—are covered in well-researched entries. The book also lists the homes and addresses of other famous Village inhabitants such as the journalist John Reed, the artist Jackson Pollock, the singer Barbra Streisand, and the political activist Eleanor Roosevelt, suggesting the cultural and political ferment of the Village in the twentieth century. Bob Dylan's New York is generously illustrated with photographs, many of them from folklore collections at the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, that capture famous and not-so-famous inhabitants of the Village folk scene in the 1960s. The gentrification that has transformed the Village in recent decades has shoved aside much of the grass-roots folk music scene that made the neighborhood so interesting. Nevertheless, many of the cafes and clubs where Dylan and his contemporaries honed their craft are still there, hidden in plain sight. This folkie, former Village resident and long-time Dylan fan went out for a two-hour walk with Bob Dylan's New York in hand. I made many discoveries on streets that I thought I knew, and I barely scratched the surface of what the book has to offer. Robert W. Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers University. Email: rwsnyder@rutgers.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

New York has long been a city where people go to reinvent themselves. And since the dawn of the twentieth century, New York City's Greenwich Village has been at the center of that alchemy of reinvention. Its side streets, squares and coffeehouses have nurtured generations of artists, writers, and musicians, among them Bob Dylan. Dylan first set foot in the Village in 1961, and even as he continues to make music, you can argue that his Greenwich Village years in the 1960s were a formative period in his life and work. Dick Weissman's new book, Bob Dylan's New York: A Historic Guide (SUNY Press, 2022) helps fans and students of Dylan walk the streets where his career took off. Weissman-- musician, author, veteran of the folk scene, and associate professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Denver—emphasizes the Village but also takes in the midtown Manhattan offices that ran the music industry in Dylan's early days and the backroads of Woodstock, NY where Dylan found refuge from the big city. The result is a book that situates Dylan's New York years in a rich context. Bob Dylan's New York is organized as a series of mapped walking tours--covering Bleecker Street, MacDougal Street, Washington Square and more—that convey the people and institutions that nurtured Dylan's early career. Individual stops on the tour—such as Dylan's apartment building at 161 West Fourth Street and the sites of Izzy Young's Folklore Center on MacDougal Street and Sixth Avenue—are covered in well-researched entries. The book also lists the homes and addresses of other famous Village inhabitants such as the journalist John Reed, the artist Jackson Pollock, the singer Barbra Streisand, and the political activist Eleanor Roosevelt, suggesting the cultural and political ferment of the Village in the twentieth century. Bob Dylan's New York is generously illustrated with photographs, many of them from folklore collections at the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, that capture famous and not-so-famous inhabitants of the Village folk scene in the 1960s. The gentrification that has transformed the Village in recent decades has shoved aside much of the grass-roots folk music scene that made the neighborhood so interesting. Nevertheless, many of the cafes and clubs where Dylan and his contemporaries honed their craft are still there, hidden in plain sight. This folkie, former Village resident and long-time Dylan fan went out for a two-hour walk with Bob Dylan's New York in hand. I made many discoveries on streets that I thought I knew, and I barely scratched the surface of what the book has to offer. Robert W. Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers University. Email: rwsnyder@rutgers.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

New York has long been a city where people go to reinvent themselves. And since the dawn of the twentieth century, New York City's Greenwich Village has been at the center of that alchemy of reinvention. Its side streets, squares and coffeehouses have nurtured generations of artists, writers, and musicians, among them Bob Dylan. Dylan first set foot in the Village in 1961, and even as he continues to make music, you can argue that his Greenwich Village years in the 1960s were a formative period in his life and work. Dick Weissman's new book, Bob Dylan's New York: A Historic Guide (SUNY Press, 2022) helps fans and students of Dylan walk the streets where his career took off. Weissman-- musician, author, veteran of the folk scene, and associate professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Denver—emphasizes the Village but also takes in the midtown Manhattan offices that ran the music industry in Dylan's early days and the backroads of Woodstock, NY where Dylan found refuge from the big city. The result is a book that situates Dylan's New York years in a rich context. Bob Dylan's New York is organized as a series of mapped walking tours--covering Bleecker Street, MacDougal Street, Washington Square and more—that convey the people and institutions that nurtured Dylan's early career. Individual stops on the tour—such as Dylan's apartment building at 161 West Fourth Street and the sites of Izzy Young's Folklore Center on MacDougal Street and Sixth Avenue—are covered in well-researched entries. The book also lists the homes and addresses of other famous Village inhabitants such as the journalist John Reed, the artist Jackson Pollock, the singer Barbra Streisand, and the political activist Eleanor Roosevelt, suggesting the cultural and political ferment of the Village in the twentieth century. Bob Dylan's New York is generously illustrated with photographs, many of them from folklore collections at the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, that capture famous and not-so-famous inhabitants of the Village folk scene in the 1960s. The gentrification that has transformed the Village in recent decades has shoved aside much of the grass-roots folk music scene that made the neighborhood so interesting. Nevertheless, many of the cafes and clubs where Dylan and his contemporaries honed their craft are still there, hidden in plain sight. This folkie, former Village resident and long-time Dylan fan went out for a two-hour walk with Bob Dylan's New York in hand. I made many discoveries on streets that I thought I knew, and I barely scratched the surface of what the book has to offer. Robert W. Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers University. Email: rwsnyder@rutgers.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/music

New York has long been a city where people go to reinvent themselves. And since the dawn of the twentieth century, New York City's Greenwich Village has been at the center of that alchemy of reinvention. Its side streets, squares and coffeehouses have nurtured generations of artists, writers, and musicians, among them Bob Dylan. Dylan first set foot in the Village in 1961, and even as he continues to make music, you can argue that his Greenwich Village years in the 1960s were a formative period in his life and work. Dick Weissman's new book, Bob Dylan's New York: A Historic Guide (SUNY Press, 2022) helps fans and students of Dylan walk the streets where his career took off. Weissman-- musician, author, veteran of the folk scene, and associate professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Denver—emphasizes the Village but also takes in the midtown Manhattan offices that ran the music industry in Dylan's early days and the backroads of Woodstock, NY where Dylan found refuge from the big city. The result is a book that situates Dylan's New York years in a rich context. Bob Dylan's New York is organized as a series of mapped walking tours--covering Bleecker Street, MacDougal Street, Washington Square and more—that convey the people and institutions that nurtured Dylan's early career. Individual stops on the tour—such as Dylan's apartment building at 161 West Fourth Street and the sites of Izzy Young's Folklore Center on MacDougal Street and Sixth Avenue—are covered in well-researched entries. The book also lists the homes and addresses of other famous Village inhabitants such as the journalist John Reed, the artist Jackson Pollock, the singer Barbra Streisand, and the political activist Eleanor Roosevelt, suggesting the cultural and political ferment of the Village in the twentieth century. Bob Dylan's New York is generously illustrated with photographs, many of them from folklore collections at the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, that capture famous and not-so-famous inhabitants of the Village folk scene in the 1960s. The gentrification that has transformed the Village in recent decades has shoved aside much of the grass-roots folk music scene that made the neighborhood so interesting. Nevertheless, many of the cafes and clubs where Dylan and his contemporaries honed their craft are still there, hidden in plain sight. This folkie, former Village resident and long-time Dylan fan went out for a two-hour walk with Bob Dylan's New York in hand. I made many discoveries on streets that I thought I knew, and I barely scratched the surface of what the book has to offer. Robert W. Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers University. Email: rwsnyder@rutgers.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New York has long been a city where people go to reinvent themselves. And since the dawn of the twentieth century, New York City's Greenwich Village has been at the center of that alchemy of reinvention. Its side streets, squares and coffeehouses have nurtured generations of artists, writers, and musicians, among them Bob Dylan. Dylan first set foot in the Village in 1961, and even as he continues to make music, you can argue that his Greenwich Village years in the 1960s were a formative period in his life and work. Dick Weissman's new book, Bob Dylan's New York: A Historic Guide (SUNY Press, 2022) helps fans and students of Dylan walk the streets where his career took off. Weissman-- musician, author, veteran of the folk scene, and associate professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Denver—emphasizes the Village but also takes in the midtown Manhattan offices that ran the music industry in Dylan's early days and the backroads of Woodstock, NY where Dylan found refuge from the big city. The result is a book that situates Dylan's New York years in a rich context. Bob Dylan's New York is organized as a series of mapped walking tours--covering Bleecker Street, MacDougal Street, Washington Square and more—that convey the people and institutions that nurtured Dylan's early career. Individual stops on the tour—such as Dylan's apartment building at 161 West Fourth Street and the sites of Izzy Young's Folklore Center on MacDougal Street and Sixth Avenue—are covered in well-researched entries. The book also lists the homes and addresses of other famous Village inhabitants such as the journalist John Reed, the artist Jackson Pollock, the singer Barbra Streisand, and the political activist Eleanor Roosevelt, suggesting the cultural and political ferment of the Village in the twentieth century. Bob Dylan's New York is generously illustrated with photographs, many of them from folklore collections at the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, that capture famous and not-so-famous inhabitants of the Village folk scene in the 1960s. The gentrification that has transformed the Village in recent decades has shoved aside much of the grass-roots folk music scene that made the neighborhood so interesting. Nevertheless, many of the cafes and clubs where Dylan and his contemporaries honed their craft are still there, hidden in plain sight. This folkie, former Village resident and long-time Dylan fan went out for a two-hour walk with Bob Dylan's New York in hand. I made many discoveries on streets that I thought I knew, and I barely scratched the surface of what the book has to offer. Robert W. Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers University. Email: rwsnyder@rutgers.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

New York has long been a city where people go to reinvent themselves. And since the dawn of the twentieth century, New York City's Greenwich Village has been at the center of that alchemy of reinvention. Its side streets, squares and coffeehouses have nurtured generations of artists, writers, and musicians, among them Bob Dylan. Dylan first set foot in the Village in 1961, and even as he continues to make music, you can argue that his Greenwich Village years in the 1960s were a formative period in his life and work. Dick Weissman's new book, Bob Dylan's New York: A Historic Guide (SUNY Press, 2022) helps fans and students of Dylan walk the streets where his career took off. Weissman-- musician, author, veteran of the folk scene, and associate professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Denver—emphasizes the Village but also takes in the midtown Manhattan offices that ran the music industry in Dylan's early days and the backroads of Woodstock, NY where Dylan found refuge from the big city. The result is a book that situates Dylan's New York years in a rich context. Bob Dylan's New York is organized as a series of mapped walking tours--covering Bleecker Street, MacDougal Street, Washington Square and more—that convey the people and institutions that nurtured Dylan's early career. Individual stops on the tour—such as Dylan's apartment building at 161 West Fourth Street and the sites of Izzy Young's Folklore Center on MacDougal Street and Sixth Avenue—are covered in well-researched entries. The book also lists the homes and addresses of other famous Village inhabitants such as the journalist John Reed, the artist Jackson Pollock, the singer Barbra Streisand, and the political activist Eleanor Roosevelt, suggesting the cultural and political ferment of the Village in the twentieth century. Bob Dylan's New York is generously illustrated with photographs, many of them from folklore collections at the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, that capture famous and not-so-famous inhabitants of the Village folk scene in the 1960s. The gentrification that has transformed the Village in recent decades has shoved aside much of the grass-roots folk music scene that made the neighborhood so interesting. Nevertheless, many of the cafes and clubs where Dylan and his contemporaries honed their craft are still there, hidden in plain sight. This folkie, former Village resident and long-time Dylan fan went out for a two-hour walk with Bob Dylan's New York in hand. I made many discoveries on streets that I thought I knew, and I barely scratched the surface of what the book has to offer. Robert W. Snyder, Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers University. Email: rwsnyder@rutgers.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

More than a hundred years ago, musicologist John Lomax recorded an African American woman named "Dink" singing a song as she washed her man's clothes in a Texas work camp on the banks of the Brazos River near Houston.Lomax and his son, Alan, were the first to publish it, including it in American Ballads and Folk Songs, which Macmillan brought out in 1934.A decade later, the great Josh White put the song on his first album. Since then, it has been recorded by scores of performers — Pete Seeger and Cisco Houston, Bob Dylan and Fred Neil — sometimes as "Fare Thee Well," but most often simply as "Dink's Song."Now flash forward three quarters of a century and a highlight of Joel and Ethan Coen's extraordinary 2013 film “Inside Llewyn Davis,” set in one winter's week in 1961 Greenwich Village, is Oscar Isaac, in the title role, performing a moody rendition of the same tune.That moment especially resonates with all us folk music lovers, because most of us learned the song from a 1960s recording by the late folk genius Dave Van Ronk, whose work seems to have inspired the Coens' film in the first place. Dear Dave. They didn't call him “the mayor of MacDougal Street” for nothing.Our Take on the TuneHave you ever notice the magic in folk melodies, that they are both ancient and stunningly contemporary at the same time?And the magic doesn't end there. Besides their wonderful timelessness, these well-worn melodies also are almost universal in their emotional appeal.This song has floated around the Floodisphere for many years, but it didn't really take flight until Vanessa came along to blend it with a soulful Old World aire, and then Randy stepped up to take the lead on the vocals. Here, with pensive soloing by Dan and Sam, is our merging of the thoroughly American “Dink's Song” and the lovely Scottish “Loch Lomond.” This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

Another banner episode as Xavier and I welcome two guests for the first time, Jamie Graham and Amy Larimer, AKA, The Raving Jaynes (@ravingjaynes)! These two ladies are dancers, actors, clowns, and are one of the best improv duos in the city, bar none. We really have a deep, kind, thoughtful, silly chat about not hiding in improv, being a lone wolf versus a pack animal, we meditate on the nature of endings, withstanding awkward starts to conversation, and more. And we get some epic epic improv scenes in with sentient houses, and group samosas. Really loved this episode, give it a listen fast! And check out The Raving Jaynes Lilith Fair show Saturdays: September 10th/October 15th/November 12th and December 17th / 9:30pm @ The Players Theatre: 115 MacDougal Street, New York, NY 10012! https://ravingjaynes.com/

On a snowy winter morning in 1961, Robert Zimmerman left Minnesota for New York City with a suitcase, guitar, harmonica and a few bucks in his pocket. Wasting no time upon arrival, he performed at the Cafe Wha? in his first day in the city, under the name Bob Dylan. Over the next decade the cultural milieu of Greenwich Village would foster the emergence of one of the greatest songwriters of all time. From the coffeehouses of MacDougal Street to Andy Warhol's Factory, Dylan honed his craft by drifting in and out of New York's thriving arts scenes of the 1960s and early 70s. In Bob Dylan's New York, author June Skinner Sawyers captures the thrill of how a city shaped an American icon and the people and places that were the touchstones of a legendary journey. Originally recorded in 2011. Hosted by Dr. Bob Hieronimus. Produced by Hieronimus & Co. for 21st Century Radio®.  Edited version provided to Nightlight Radio with permission.

On a snowy winter morning in 1961, Robert Zimmerman left Minnesota for New York City with a suitcase, guitar, harmonica and a few bucks in his pocket. Wasting no time upon arrival, he performed at the Cafe Wha? in his first day in the city, under the name Bob Dylan. Over the next decade the cultural milieu of Greenwich Village would foster the emergence of one of the greatest songwriters of all time. From the coffeehouses of MacDougal Street to Andy Warhol's Factory, Dylan honed his craft by drifting in and out of New York's thriving arts scenes of the 1960s and early 70s. In Bob Dylan's New York, author June Skinner Sawyers captures the thrill of how a city shaped an American icon and the people and places that were the touchstones of a legendary journey. Originally recorded in 2011. Hosted by Dr. Bob Hieronimus. Produced by Hieronimus & Co. for 21st Century Radio®.  Edited version provided to Nightlight Radio with permission.

On a snowy winter morning in 1961, Robert Zimmerman left Minnesota for New York City with a suitcase, guitar, harmonica and a few bucks in his pocket. Wasting no time upon arrival, he performed at the Cafe Wha? in his first day in the city, under the name Bob Dylan. Over the next decade the cultural milieu of Greenwich Village would foster the emergence of one of the greatest songwriters of all time. From the coffeehouses of MacDougal Street to Andy Warhol's Factory, Dylan honed his craft by drifting in and out of New York's thriving arts scenes of the 1960s and early 70s. In Bob Dylan's New York, author June Skinner Sawyers captures the thrill of how a city shaped an American icon and the people and places that were the touchstones of a legendary journey. Originally recorded in 2011.Hosted by Dr. Bob Hieronimus. Produced by Hieronimus & Co. for 21st Century Radio®.  Edited version provided to Nightlight Radio with permission.

I met Ben Schafer in the process of working on Mark Lanegan's book with him. I have a lot of resistance to meeting publishing/ music industry/ entertainment industry folks because it always feels so ingenuine, like "I will pretend to be your friend until it no longer serves my business interests, at which point I'll pretend you never existed." From our first meeting, I recognized that Ben was, like me, just an earnest fan of Lanegan's work. We talked about how great Lanegan's voice and writing was, how excited we were for the book, sobriety, then finally just life in general. I guess what I'm trying to say is that, despite my best efforts to the contrary, Ben and I became friends very quickly and have stayed in close touch for the last couple of years. Yes, of course, we talked about the loss of Lanegan, but I tried to ask him some hard questions about publishing and his role as editor.    Ben specializes in music, popular culture, biography, memoir, and popular science, with a particular soft spot for American counterculture. He has acquired several New York Times bestsellers, including Unrequited Infatuations by Stevie Van Zandt, The Portable Atheist edited by Christopher Hitchens, Trouble Boys by Bob Mehr, and I Am Brian Wilson by Brian Wilson. Based in Los Angeles, Ben published the definitive two-volume history of L.A. punk Under the Big Black Sun and More Fun in the New World by John Doe (of X) and music publishing veteran Tom DeSavia. He is also the editor of the international bestseller Why Does E=mc2 by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, and an all-time classic memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk with Elijah Wald, the inspiration for the Coen Brothers movie Inside Llewyn Davis. Prior to joining Hachette Books, Ben was Executive Editor at Da Capo Press for 17 years and held editorial positions at William Morrow and HarperCollins.

John and Alex interview Siobhan at The Grisly Pear on MacDougal Street in SoHo, Manhattan. Find out what time shots o'clock is, what to do when a bar fight breaks out on Cinco de Mayo, and what happens when one of The Buy Back hosts drinks a little too much during the interview. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/thebuyback/support

All I can say is NEXT.  This weeks theme took an awesome turn going down the rabbit hole of next, we discover an amazing trio of covers for one song and its deep lyrics, we an original from the Mayor of MacDougal Street written by none other than Bertolt Brecht! Good tunes all the way around, good times and I can't wait until the NEXT.   Playlist: Die Antwoord - Beat Boy Deer Tick - The Bump Frank Sinatra/Dean Martin/Sammy Davis Jr. - We Open In Venice Jacques Brel - Au Suivant* The Undertones - I Gotta Getta Basement Jaxx Feat. Slarta John - Jump N Shout Dave VanRonk - Alabama Song 1966 (Written by Bertolt Brecht and covered by The Doors in 1967) The Moments - Gotta Find A Way Mudhoney - I Have To Laugh Los Umbrellos - No Tengo DiNero  Dead Boys - Ain't Nothin To Do Brand Nubian - Slow Down Scott Walker - Next* Deichkind Feat. Siriusmo - Cliffhanger  Sumo - Next Week Jo Stafford w/Paul Weston Orchestra - Better Luck Next Time  The Hard Times - Fortune Teller Was (Not Was) - Wheel Me Out Lali Puna - B-Movie The Go-Betweens - People Know Beta Band - She's The One The Sensational Alex Harvey Band - Next* The Kinks - Who'll Be The Next In Line The Bar-Kays - Too Hot To Stop De La Soul Feat. Usher - Greyhounds   *Same song in order of creation    

Episode one hundred and fifteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "House of the Rising Sun" by the Animals, at the way the US and UK music scenes were influencing each other in 1964, and at the fraught question of attribution when reworking older songs. 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 "Memphis" by Johnny Rivers. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Erratum A couple of times I mispronounce Hoagy Lands' surname as Land. Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Information on the Animals comes largely from Animal Tracks  by Sean Egan. The two-CD set The Complete Animals isn't actually their complete recordings -- for that you'd also need to buy the Decca recordings -- but it is everything they recorded with Mickie Most, including all the big hits discussed in this episode. For the information on Dylan's first album, I used The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk and Elijah Wald, the fascinating and funny autobiography of Dylan's mentor in his Greenwich Village period. I also referred to Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan, a partial, highly inaccurate, but thoroughly readable autobiography; Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon; and Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Transcript Today we're going to look at a song that, more than any other song we've looked at so far, shows how the influence between British and American music was working in the early 1960s. A song about New Orleans that may have its roots in English folk music, that became an Appalachian country song, performed by a blues band from the North of England, who learned it from a Minnesotan folk singer based in New York. We're going to look at "House of the Rising Sun", and the career of the Animals: [Excerpt: The Animals, "House of the Rising Sun"] The story of the Animals, like so many of the British bands of this time period, starts at art school, when two teenagers named Eric Burdon and John Steel met each other. The school they met each other at was in Newcastle, and this is important for how the band came together. If you're not familiar with the geography of Great Britain, Newcastle is one of the largest cities, but it's a very isolated city. Britain has a number of large cities. The biggest, of course, is London, which is about as big as the next five added together. Now, there's a saying that one of the big differences between Britain and America is that in America a hundred years is a long time, and in Britain a hundred miles is a long way, so take that into account when I talk about everything else here. Most of the area around London is empty of other big cities, and the nearest other big city to it is Birmingham, a hundred miles north-west of it. About seventy miles north of that, give or take, you hit Manchester, and Manchester is in the middle of a chain of large cities -- Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield, and the slightly smaller Bradford, are more or less in a row, and the furthest distance between two adjacent cities is about thirty-five miles. But then Newcastle is another hundred miles north of Leeds, the closest of those cities to it. And then it's another hundred miles or so further north before you hit the major Scottish cities, which cluster together like the ones near Manchester do. This means Newcastle is, for a major city, incredibly isolated. Britain's culture is extraordinarily London-centric, but if you're in Liverpool or Manchester there are a number of other nearby cities. A band from Manchester can play a gig in Liverpool and make the last train home, and vice versa. This allows for the creation of regional scenes, centred on one city but with cross-fertilisation from others. Now, again, I am talking about a major city here, not some remote village, but it means that Newcastle in the sixties was in something of the same position as Seattle was, as we talked about in the episode on "Louie, Louie" -- a place where bands would play in their own immediate area and not travel outside it. A journey to Leeds, particularly in the time we're talking about when the motorway system was only just starting, would be a major trip, let alone travelling further afield. Local bands would play in Newcastle, and in large nearby towns like Gateshead, Sunderland, and Middlesborough, but not visit other cities. This meant that there was also a limited pool of good musicians to perform with, and so if you wanted to be in a band, you couldn't be that picky about who you got on with, so long as they could play. Steel and Burdon, when they met at art school, were both jazz fanatics, and they quickly formed a trad jazz band. The band initially featured them on trumpet and trombone, but when rock and roll and skiffle hit the band changed its lineup to one based around guitars. Steel shifted to drums, while Burdon stopped playing an instrument and became the lead singer. Burdon's tastes at the time were oriented towards the jazzier side of R&B, people like Ray Charles, and he also particularly loved blues shouters like Jimmy Witherspoon and Big Joe Turner. He tried hard to emulate Turner, and one of the songs that's often mentioned as being in the repertoire of these early groups is "Roll 'Em Pete", the Big Joe Turner song we talked about back in episode two: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, "Roll 'em Pete"] The jazz group that Burdon and Steel formed was called the Pagan Jazz Men, and when they switched instruments they became instead The Pagans R&B Band. The group was rounded out by Blackie Sanderson and Jimmy Crawford, but soon got a fifth member when a member from another band on an early bill asked if he could sit in with them for a couple of numbers. Alan Price was the rhythm guitarist in that band, but joined in on piano, and instantly gelled with the group, playing Jerry Lee Lewis style piano. The other members would always later say that they didn't like Price either as a person or for his taste in music -- both Burdon and Steel regarded Price's tastes as rather pedestrian when compared to their own, hipper, tastes, saying he always regarded himself as something of a lounge player, while Burdon was an R&B and blues person and Steel liked blues and jazz. But they all played well together, and in Newcastle there wasn't that much choice about which musicians you could play with, and so they stayed together for a while, as the Pagans evolved into the Kansas City Five or the Kansas City Seven, depending on the occasional presence of two brass players. The Kansas City group played mostly jump blues, which was the area of music where Burdon and Steel's tastes intersected -- musicians they've cited as ones they covered were Ray Charles, Louis Jordan, and Big Joe Turner. But then the group collapsed, as Price didn't turn up to a gig -- he'd been poached by a pop covers band, the Kon-Tors, whose bass player, Chas Chandler, had been impressed with him when Chandler had sat in at a couple of Kansas City Five rehearsals. Steel got a gig playing lounge music, just to keep paying the bills, and Burdon would occasionally sit in with various other musicians. But a few members of the Kon-Tors got a side gig, performing as the Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo as the resident band at a local venue called the Club A Go-Go, which was the venue where visiting London jazzmen and touring American blues players would perform when they came to Newcastle. Burdon started sitting in with them, and then they invited Steel to replace their drummer, and in September 1963 the Alan Price Rhythm And Blues Combo settled on a lineup of Burdon on vocals, Price on piano, Steel on drums, Chandler on bass, and new member Hilton Valentine, who joined at the same time as Steel, on guitar. Valentine was notably more experienced than the other members, and had previously performed in a rock and roll group called the Wildcats -- not the same band who backed Marty Wilde -- and had even recorded an album with them, though I've been unable to track down any copies of the album. At this point all the group members now had different sensibilities -- Valentine was a rocker and skiffle fan, while Chandler was into more mainstream pop music, though the other members emphasised in interviews that he liked *good* pop music like the Beatles, not the lesser pop music. The new lineup was so good that a mere eight days after they first performed together, they went into a recording studio to record an EP, which they put out themselves and sold at their gigs. Apparently five hundred copies of the EP were sold. As well as playing piano on the tracks, Price also played melodica, which he used in the same way that blues musicians would normally use the harmonica: [Excerpt: The Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo, "Pretty Thing"] This kind of instrumental experimentation would soon further emphasise the split between Price and Burdon, as Price would get a Vox organ rather than cart a piano between gigs, while Burdon disliked the sound of the organ, even though it became one of the defining sounds of the group. That sound can be heard on a live recording of them a couple of months later, backing the great American blues musician Sonny Boy Williamson II at the Club A Go Go: [Excerpt: Sonny Boy Williamson II and the Animals, “Fattening Frogs For Snakes”] One person who definitely *didn't* dislike the sound of the electric organ was Graham Bond, the Hammond organ player with Alexis Korner's band who we mentioned briefly back in the episode on the Rolling Stones. Bond and a few other members of the Korner group had quit, and formed their own group, the Graham Bond Organisation, which had originally featured a guitarist named John McLaughlin, but by this point consisted of Bond, saxophone player Dick Heckstall-Smith, and the rhythm section Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. They wouldn't make an album until 1965, but live recordings of them from around this time exist, though in relatively poor quality: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Wade in the Water"] The Graham Bond Organisation played at the Club A Go Go, and soon Bond was raving back in London about this group from Newcastle he'd heard. Arrangements were quickly made for them to play in London. By this time, the Rolling Stones had outgrown the small club venues they'd been playing, and a new band called the Yardbirds were playing all the Stones' old venues. A trade was agreed -- the Yardbirds would play all the Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo's normal gigs for a couple of weeks, and the Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo would play the Yardbirds'. Or rather, the Animals would. None of the members of the group could ever agree on how they got their new name, and not all of them liked it, but when they played those gigs in London in December 1963, just three months after getting together, that was how they were billed. And it was as the Animals that they were signed by Mickie Most. Mickie Most was one of the new breed of independent producers that were cropping up in London, following in Joe Meek's footsteps, like Andrew Oldham. Most had started out as a singer in a duo called The Most Brothers, which is where he got his stage name. The Most Brothers had only released one single: [Excerpt: The Most Brothers, "Whole Lotta Woman"] But then Most had moved to South Africa, where he'd had eleven number one hits with cover versions of American rock singles, backed by a band called the Playboys: [Excerpt: Mickie Most and the Playboys, "Johnny B Goode"] He'd returned to the UK in 1963, and been less successful here as a performer, and so he decided to move into production, and the Animals were his first signing. He signed them up and started licensing their records to EMI, and in January 1964 the Animals moved down to London. There has been a lot of suggestion over the years that the Animals resented Mickie Most pushing them in a more pop direction, but their first single was an inspired compromise between the group's blues purism and Most's pop instincts. The song they recorded dates back at least to 1935, when the State Street Boys, a group that featured Big Bill Broonzy, recorded "Don't Tear My Clothes": [Excerpt: The State Street Boys, "Don't Tear My Clothes"] That song got picked up and adapted by a lot of other blues singers, like Blind Boy Fuller, who recorded it as "Mama Let Me Lay It On You" in 1938: [Excerpt: Blind Boy Fuller, "Mama Let Me Lay it On You"] That had in turn been picked up by the Reverend Gary Davis, who came up with his own arrangement of the song: [Excerpt: Rev. Gary Davis, "Baby, Let Me Lay It On You"] Eric von Schmidt, a folk singer in Massachusetts, had learned that song from Davis, and Bob Dylan had in turn learned it from von Schmidt, and included it on his first album as "Baby Let Me Follow You Down": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Baby Let Me Follow You Down"] The Animals knew the song from that version, which they loved, but Most had come across it in a different way. He'd heard a version which had been inspired by Dylan, but had been radically reworked. Bert Berns had produced a single on Atlantic for a soul singer called Hoagy Lands, and on the B-side had been a new arrangement of the song, retitled "Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand" and adapted by Berns and Wes Farrell, a songwriter who had written for the Shirelles. Land's version had started with an intro in which Lands is clearly imitating Sam Cooke: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, "Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand"] But after that intro, which seems to be totally original to Berns and Farrell, Lands' track goes into a very upbeat Twist-flavoured song, with a unique guitar riff and Latin feel, both of them very much in the style of Berns' other songs, but clearly an adaptation of Dylan's version of the old song: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, "Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand"] Most had picked up that record on a trip to America, and decided that the Animals should record a version of the song based on that record. Hilton Valentine would later claim that this record, whose title and artist he could never remember (and it's quite possible that Most never even told the band who the record was by) was not very similar at all to the Animals' version, and that they'd just kicked around the song and come up with their own version, but listening to it, it is *very* obviously modelled on Lands' version. They cut out Lands' intro, and restored a lot of Dylan's lyric, but musically it's Lands all the way. The track starts like this: [Excerpt: The Animals, "Baby Let Me Take You Home"] Both have a breakdown section with spoken lyrics over a staccato backing, though the two sets of lyrics are different -- compare the Animals: [Excerpt: The Animals, "Baby Let Me Take You Home"] and Lands: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, "Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand"] And both have the typical Bert Berns call and response ending -- Lands: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, "Baby Let me Hold Your Hand"] And the Animals: [Excerpt: The Animals, "Baby Let Me Take You Home"] So whatever Valentine's later claims, the track very much was modelled on the earlier record, but it's still one of the strongest remodellings of an American R&B record by a British group in this time period, and an astonishingly accomplished record, which made number twenty-one. The Animals' second single was another song that had been recorded on Dylan's first album. "House of the Rising Sun" has been argued by some, though I think it's a tenuous argument, to originally date to the seventeenth century English folk song "Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard": [Excerpt: Martin Carthy, "Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard"] What we do know is that the song was circulating in Appalachia in the early years of the twentieth century, and it's that version that was first recorded in 1933, under the name "Rising Sun Blues", by Clarence Ashley and Gwen Foster: [Excerpt: Clarence Ashley and Gwen Foster, "Rising Sun Blues"] The song has been described as about several things -- about alcoholism, about sex work, about gambling -- depending on the precise version. It's often thought, for example, that the song was always sung by women and was about a brothel, but there are lots of variants of it, sung by both men and women, before it reached its most famous form. Dave van Ronk, who put the song into the form by which it became best known, believed at first that it was a song about a brothel, but he later decided that it was probably about the New Orleans Women's Prison, which in his accounting used to have a carving of a rising sun over the doorway. Van Ronk's version traces back originally to a field recording Alan Lomax had made in 1938 of a woman named Georgia Turner, from Kentucky: [Excerpt: Georgia Turner, "Rising Sun Blues"] Van Ronk had learned the song from a record by Hally Wood, a friend of the Lomaxes, who had recorded a version based on Turner's in 1953: [Excerpt: Hally Wood, "House of the Rising Sun"] Van Ronk took Wood's version of Turner's version of the song, and rearranged it, changing the chords around, adding something that changed the whole song. He introduced a descending bassline, mostly in semitones, which as van Ronk put it is "a common enough progression in jazz, but unusual among folksingers". It's actually something you'd get a fair bit in baroque music as well, and van Ronk introducing this into the song is probably what eventually led to things like Procul Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale" ripping off Bach doing essentially the same thing. What van Ronk did was a simple trick. You play a descending scale, mostly in semitones, while holding the same chord shape which creates a lot of interesting chords. The bass line he played is basically this: [demonstrates] And he held an A minor shape over that bassline, giving a chord sequence Am, Am over G, Am over F#, F. [demonstrates] This is a trick that's used in hundreds and hundreds of songs later in the sixties and onward -- everything from "Sunny Afternoon" by the Kinks to "Go Now" by the Moody Blues to "Forever" by the Beach Boys -- but it was something that at this point belonged in the realms of art music and jazz more than in folk, blues, or rock and roll. Of course, it sounds rather better when he did it: [Excerpt, Dave van Ronk, "House of the Rising Sun"] "House of the Rising Sun" soon became the highlight of van Ronk's live act, and his most requested song. Dylan took van Ronk's arrangement, but he wasn't as sophisticated a musician as van Ronk, so he simplified the chords. Rather than the dissonant chords van Ronk had, he played standard rock chords that fit van Ronk's bassline, so instead of Am over G he played C with a G in the bass, and instead of Am over F# he played D with an F# in the bass. So van Ronk had: [demonstrates] While Dylan had: [demonstrates] The movement of the chords now follows the movement of the bassline. It's simpler, but it's all from van Ronk's arrangement idea. Dylan recorded his version of van Ronk's version for his first album: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "House of the Rising Sun"] As van Ronk later told the story (though I'm going to edit out one expletive here for the sake of getting past the adult content rating on Apple): "One evening in 1962, I was sitting at my usual table in the back of the Kettle of Fish, and Dylan came slouching in. He had been up at the Columbia studios with John Hammond, doing his first album. He was being very mysterioso about the whole thing, and nobody I knew had been to any of the sessions except Suze, his lady. I pumped him for information, but he was vague. Everything was going fine and, “Hey, would it be okay for me to record your arrangement of ‘House of the Rising Sun?’” [expletive]. “Jeez, Bobby, I’m going into the studio to do that myself in a few weeks. Can’t it wait until your next album?” A long pause. “Uh-oh.” I did not like the sound of that. “What exactly do you mean, ‘Uh-oh’?” “Well,” he said sheepishly, “I’ve already recorded it.” “You did what?!” I flew into a Donald Duck rage, and I fear I may have said something unkind that could be heard over in Chelsea." van Ronk and Dylan fell out for a couple of weeks, though they later reconciled, and van Ronk said of Dylan's performance "it was essentially my arrangement, but Bobby’s reading had all the nuance and subtlety of a Neanderthal with a stone hand ax, and I took comfort thereby." van Ronk did record his version, as we heard, but he soon stopped playing the song live because he got sick of people telling him to "play that Dylan song". The Animals learned the song from the Dylan record, and decided to introduce it to their set on their first national tour, supporting Chuck Berry. All the other acts were only doing rock and roll and R&B, and they thought a folk song might be a way to make them stand out -- and it instantly became the highlight of their act.  The way all the members except Alan Price tell the story, the main instigators of the arrangement were Eric Burdon, the only member of the group who had been familiar with the song before hearing the Dylan album, and Hilton Valentine, who came up with the arpeggiated guitar part. Their arrangement followed Dylan's rearrangement of van Ronk's rearrangement, except they dropped the scalar bassline altogether, so for example instead of a D with an F# in the bass they just play a plain open D chord -- the F# that van Ronk introduced is still in there, as the third, but the descending line is now just implied by the chords, not explicitly stated in the bass, where Chas Chandler just played root notes. In the middle of the tour, the group were called back into the studio to record their follow-up single, and they had what seemed like it might be a great opportunity. The TV show Ready Steady Go! wanted the Animals to record a version of the old Ray Charles song "Talking 'Bout You", to use as their theme. The group travelled down from Liverpool after playing a show there, and went into the studio in London at three o'clock in the morning, before heading to Southampton for the next night's show. But they needed to record a B-side first, of course, and so before getting round to the main business of the session they knocked off a quick one-take performance of their new live showstopper: [Excerpt: The Animals, "House of the Rising Sun"] On hearing the playback, everyone was suddenly convinced that that, not "Talking 'Bout You", should be the A-side. But there was a problem. The record was four minutes and twenty seconds long, and you just didn't ever release a record that long. The rule was generally that songs didn't last longer than three minutes, because radio stations wouldn't play them, but Most was eventually persuaded by Chas Chandler that the track needed to go out as it was, with no edits. It did, but when it went out, it had only one name on as the arranger -- which when you're recording a public domain song makes you effectively the songwriter. According to all the members other than Price, the group's manager, Mike Jeffrey, who was close to Price, had "explained" to them that you needed to just put one name down on the credits, but not to worry, as they would all get a share of the songwriting money. According to Price, meanwhile, he was the sole arranger. Whatever the truth, Price was the only one who ever got any songwriting royalties for their version of the song, which went to number one in the UK and the US. although the version released as a single in the US was cut down to three minutes with some brutal edits, particularly to the organ solo: [Excerpt: The Animals, "House of the Rising Sun (US edit)"] None of the group liked what was done to the US single edit, and the proper version was soon released as an album track everywhere The Animals' version was a big enough hit that it inspired Dylan's new producer Tom Wilson to do an experiment. In late 1964 he hired session musicians to overdub a new electric backing onto an outtake version of "House of the Rising Sun" from the sessions from Dylan's first album, to see what it would sound like: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "House of the Rising Sun (1964 electric version)"] That wasn't released at the time, it was just an experiment Wilson tried, but it would have ramifications we'll be seeing throughout the rest of the podcast. Incidentally, Dave van Ronk had the last laugh at Dylan, who had to drop the song from his own sets because people kept asking him if he'd stolen it from the Animals. The Animals' next single, "I'm Crying", was their first and only self-written A-side, written by Price and Burdon. It was a decent record and made the top ten in the UK and the top twenty in the US, but Price and Burdon were never going to become another Lennon and McCartney or Jagger and Richards -- they just didn't like each other by this point. The record after that, "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood", was written by the jazz songwriters Benny Benjamin and Horace Ott, and had originally been recorded by Nina Simone in an orchestral version that owed quite a bit to Burt Bacharach: [Excerpt: Nina Simone, "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood"] The Animals' version really suffers in comparison to that. I was going to say something about how their reinterpretation is as valid in its own way as Simone's original and stands up against it, but actually listening to them back to back as I was writing this, rather than separately as I always previously had, I changed my mind because I really don't think it does. It's a great record, and it's deservedly considered a classic single, but compared to Simone's version, it's lightweight, rushed, and callow: [Excerpt: The Animals, "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood"] Simone was apparently furious at the Animals' recording, which they didn't understand given that she hadn't written the original, and according to John Steel she and Burdon later had a huge screaming row about the record. In Steel's version, Simone eventually grudgingly admitted that they weren't "so bad for a bunch of white boys", but that doesn't sound to me like the attitude Simone would take. But Steel was there and I wasn't... "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" was followed by a more minor single, a cover of Sam Cooke's "Bring it on Home to Me", which would be the last single by the group to feature Alan Price. On the twenty-eighth of April 1965, the group were about to leave on a European tour. Chas Chandler, who shared a flat with Price, woke Price up and then got in the shower. When he got out of the shower, Price wasn't in the flat, and Chandler wouldn't see Price again for eighteen months. Chandler believed until his death that while he was in the shower, Price's first royalty cheque for arranging "House of the Rising Sun" had arrived, and Price had decided then and there that he wasn't going to share the money as agreed. The group quickly rushed to find a fill-in keyboard player for the tour, and nineteen-year-old Mick Gallagher was with them for a couple of weeks before being permanently replaced by Dave Rowberry. Gallagher would later go on to be the keyboard player with Ian Dury and the Blockheads, as well as playing on several tracks by the Clash. Price, meanwhile, went on to have a number of solo hits over the next few years, starting with a version of "I Put A Spell On You", in an arrangement which the other Animals later claimed had originally been worked up as an Animals track: [Excerpt: The Alan Price Set, "I Put A Spell On You"] Price would go on to make many great solo records, introducing the songs of Randy Newman to a wider audience, and performing in a jazz-influenced R&B style very similar to Mose Allison. The Animals' first record with their new keyboard player was their greatest single. "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place" had been written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, and had originally been intended for the Righteous Brothers, but they'd decided to have Mann record it himself: [Excerpt: Barry Mann, "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place"] But before that version was released, the Animals had heard Mann's piano demo of the song and cut their own version, and Mann's was left on the shelf. What the Animals did to the song horrified Cynthia Weill, who considered it the worst record of one of her songs ever -- though one suspects that's partly because it sabotaged the chances for her husband's single -- but to my mind they vastly improved on the song. They tightened the melody up a lot, getting rid of a lot of interjections. They reworked big chunks of the lyric, for example changing "Oh girl, now you're young and oh so pretty, staying here would be a crime, because you'll just grow old before your time" to "Now my girl, you're so young and pretty, and one thing I know is true, you'll be dead before your time is due", and making subtler changes like changing "if it's the last thing that we do" to "if it's the last thing we ever do", improving the scansion. They kept the general sense of the lyrics, but changed more of the actual words than they kept -- and to my ears, at least, every change they made was an improvement. And most importantly, they excised the overlong bridge altogether. I can see what Mann and Weill were trying to do with the bridge -- Righteous Brothers songs would often have a call and response section, building to a climax, where Bill Medley's low voice and Bobby Hatfield's high one would alternate and then come together. But that would normally come in the middle, building towards the last chorus. Here it comes between every verse and chorus, and completely destroys the song's momentum -- it just sounds like noodling: [Excerpt: Barry Mann, "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place"] The Animals' version, by contrast, is a masterpiece of dynamics, of slow builds and climaxes and dropping back down again. It's one of the few times I've wished I could just drop the entire record in, rather than excerpting a section, because it depends so much for its effect on the way the whole structure of the track works together: [Excerpt: The Animals, "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place"] From a creators' rights perspective, I entirely agree with Cynthia Weill that the group shouldn't have messed with her song. But from a listener's point of view, I have to say that they turned a decent song into a great one, and one of the greatest singles of all time "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place" was followed by another lesser but listenable single, "It's My Life", which seemed to reinforce a pattern of a great Animals single being followed by a merely OK one. But that was the point at which the Animals and Most would part company -- the group were getting sick of Most's attempts to make them more poppy. They signed to a new label, Decca, and got a new producer, Tom Wilson, the man who we heard earlier experimenting with Dylan's sound, but the group started to fall apart. After their next single, "Inside -- Looking Out", a prison work song collected by the Lomaxes, and the album Animalisms, John Steel left the group, tired of not getting any money, and went to work in a shop. The album after Animalisms, confusingly titled Animalism, was also mostly produced by Wilson, and didn't even feature the musicians in the band on two of the tracks, which Wilson farmed out to a protege of his, Frank Zappa, to produce. Those two tracks featured Zappa on guitar and members of the Wrecking Crew, with only Burdon from the actual group: [Excerpt: The Animals, "All Night Long"] Soon the group would split up, and would discover that their management had thoroughly ripped them off -- there had been a scheme to bank their money in the Bahamas for tax reasons, in a bank which mysteriously disappeared off the face of the Earth. Burdon would form a new group, known first as the New Animals and later as Eric Burdon and the Animals, who would have some success but not on the same level. There were a handful of reunions of the original lineup of the group between 1968 and the early eighties, but they last played together in 1983. Burdon continues to tour the US as Eric Burdon and the Animals. Alan Price continues to perform successfully as a solo artist. We'll be picking up with Chas Chandler later, when he moves from bass playing into management, so you'll hear more about him in future episodes. John Steel, Dave Rowberry, and Hilton Valentine reformed a version of the Animals in the 1990s, originally with Jim Rodford, formerly of the Kinks and Argent, on bass. Valentine left that group in 2001, and Rowberry died in 2003. Steel now tours the UK as "The Animals and Friends", with Mick Gallagher, who had replaced Price briefly in 1965, on keyboards. I've seen them live twice and they put on an excellent show -- though the second time, one woman behind me did indignantly say, as the singer started, "That's not Eric Clapton!", before starting to sing along happily... And Hilton Valentine moved to the US and played briefly with Burdon's Animals after quitting Steel's, before returning to his first love, skiffle. He died exactly four weeks ago today, and will be missed.

Episode one hundred and fifteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals, at the way the US and UK music scenes were influencing each other in 1964, and at the fraught question of attribution when reworking older songs. 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 “Memphis” by Johnny Rivers. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Erratum A couple of times I mispronounce Hoagy Lands’ surname as Land. Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. Information on the Animals comes largely from Animal Tracks  by Sean Egan. The two-CD set The Complete Animals isn’t actually their complete recordings — for that you’d also need to buy the Decca recordings — but it is everything they recorded with Mickie Most, including all the big hits discussed in this episode. For the information on Dylan’s first album, I used The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk and Elijah Wald, the fascinating and funny autobiography of Dylan’s mentor in his Greenwich Village period. I also referred to Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan, a partial, highly inaccurate, but thoroughly readable autobiography; Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon; and Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Transcript Today we’re going to look at a song that, more than any other song we’ve looked at so far, shows how the influence between British and American music was working in the early 1960s. A song about New Orleans that may have its roots in English folk music, that became an Appalachian country song, performed by a blues band from the North of England, who learned it from a Minnesotan folk singer based in New York. We’re going to look at “House of the Rising Sun”, and the career of the Animals: [Excerpt: The Animals, “House of the Rising Sun”] The story of the Animals, like so many of the British bands of this time period, starts at art school, when two teenagers named Eric Burdon and John Steel met each other. The school they met each other at was in Newcastle, and this is important for how the band came together. If you’re not familiar with the geography of Great Britain, Newcastle is one of the largest cities, but it’s a very isolated city. Britain has a number of large cities. The biggest, of course, is London, which is about as big as the next five added together. Now, there’s a saying that one of the big differences between Britain and America is that in America a hundred years is a long time, and in Britain a hundred miles is a long way, so take that into account when I talk about everything else here. Most of the area around London is empty of other big cities, and the nearest other big city to it is Birmingham, a hundred miles north-west of it. About seventy miles north of that, give or take, you hit Manchester, and Manchester is in the middle of a chain of large cities — Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield, and the slightly smaller Bradford, are more or less in a row, and the furthest distance between two adjacent cities is about thirty-five miles. But then Newcastle is another hundred miles north of Leeds, the closest of those cities to it. And then it’s another hundred miles or so further north before you hit the major Scottish cities, which cluster together like the ones near Manchester do. This means Newcastle is, for a major city, incredibly isolated. Britain’s culture is extraordinarily London-centric, but if you’re in Liverpool or Manchester there are a number of other nearby cities. A band from Manchester can play a gig in Liverpool and make the last train home, and vice versa. This allows for the creation of regional scenes, centred on one city but with cross-fertilisation from others. Now, again, I am talking about a major city here, not some remote village, but it means that Newcastle in the sixties was in something of the same position as Seattle was, as we talked about in the episode on “Louie, Louie” — a place where bands would play in their own immediate area and not travel outside it. A journey to Leeds, particularly in the time we’re talking about when the motorway system was only just starting, would be a major trip, let alone travelling further afield. Local bands would play in Newcastle, and in large nearby towns like Gateshead, Sunderland, and Middlesborough, but not visit other cities. This meant that there was also a limited pool of good musicians to perform with, and so if you wanted to be in a band, you couldn’t be that picky about who you got on with, so long as they could play. Steel and Burdon, when they met at art school, were both jazz fanatics, and they quickly formed a trad jazz band. The band initially featured them on trumpet and trombone, but when rock and roll and skiffle hit the band changed its lineup to one based around guitars. Steel shifted to drums, while Burdon stopped playing an instrument and became the lead singer. Burdon’s tastes at the time were oriented towards the jazzier side of R&B, people like Ray Charles, and he also particularly loved blues shouters like Jimmy Witherspoon and Big Joe Turner. He tried hard to emulate Turner, and one of the songs that’s often mentioned as being in the repertoire of these early groups is “Roll ‘Em Pete”, the Big Joe Turner song we talked about back in episode two: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, “Roll ’em Pete”] The jazz group that Burdon and Steel formed was called the Pagan Jazz Men, and when they switched instruments they became instead The Pagans R&B Band. The group was rounded out by Blackie Sanderson and Jimmy Crawford, but soon got a fifth member when a member from another band on an early bill asked if he could sit in with them for a couple of numbers. Alan Price was the rhythm guitarist in that band, but joined in on piano, and instantly gelled with the group, playing Jerry Lee Lewis style piano. The other members would always later say that they didn’t like Price either as a person or for his taste in music — both Burdon and Steel regarded Price’s tastes as rather pedestrian when compared to their own, hipper, tastes, saying he always regarded himself as something of a lounge player, while Burdon was an R&B and blues person and Steel liked blues and jazz. But they all played well together, and in Newcastle there wasn’t that much choice about which musicians you could play with, and so they stayed together for a while, as the Pagans evolved into the Kansas City Five or the Kansas City Seven, depending on the occasional presence of two brass players. The Kansas City group played mostly jump blues, which was the area of music where Burdon and Steel’s tastes intersected — musicians they’ve cited as ones they covered were Ray Charles, Louis Jordan, and Big Joe Turner. But then the group collapsed, as Price didn’t turn up to a gig — he’d been poached by a pop covers band, the Kon-Tors, whose bass player, Chas Chandler, had been impressed with him when Chandler had sat in at a couple of Kansas City Five rehearsals. Steel got a gig playing lounge music, just to keep paying the bills, and Burdon would occasionally sit in with various other musicians. But a few members of the Kon-Tors got a side gig, performing as the Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo as the resident band at a local venue called the Club A Go-Go, which was the venue where visiting London jazzmen and touring American blues players would perform when they came to Newcastle. Burdon started sitting in with them, and then they invited Steel to replace their drummer, and in September 1963 the Alan Price Rhythm And Blues Combo settled on a lineup of Burdon on vocals, Price on piano, Steel on drums, Chandler on bass, and new member Hilton Valentine, who joined at the same time as Steel, on guitar. Valentine was notably more experienced than the other members, and had previously performed in a rock and roll group called the Wildcats — not the same band who backed Marty Wilde — and had even recorded an album with them, though I’ve been unable to track down any copies of the album. At this point all the group members now had different sensibilities — Valentine was a rocker and skiffle fan, while Chandler was into more mainstream pop music, though the other members emphasised in interviews that he liked *good* pop music like the Beatles, not the lesser pop music. The new lineup was so good that a mere eight days after they first performed together, they went into a recording studio to record an EP, which they put out themselves and sold at their gigs. Apparently five hundred copies of the EP were sold. As well as playing piano on the tracks, Price also played melodica, which he used in the same way that blues musicians would normally use the harmonica: [Excerpt: The Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo, “Pretty Thing”] This kind of instrumental experimentation would soon further emphasise the split between Price and Burdon, as Price would get a Vox organ rather than cart a piano between gigs, while Burdon disliked the sound of the organ, even though it became one of the defining sounds of the group. That sound can be heard on a live recording of them a couple of months later, backing the great American blues musician Sonny Boy Williamson II at the Club A Go Go: [Excerpt: Sonny Boy Williamson II and the Animals, “Fattening Frogs For Snakes”] One person who definitely *didn’t* dislike the sound of the electric organ was Graham Bond, the Hammond organ player with Alexis Korner’s band who we mentioned briefly back in the episode on the Rolling Stones. Bond and a few other members of the Korner group had quit, and formed their own group, the Graham Bond Organisation, which had originally featured a guitarist named John McLaughlin, but by this point consisted of Bond, saxophone player Dick Heckstall-Smith, and the rhythm section Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. They wouldn’t make an album until 1965, but live recordings of them from around this time exist, though in relatively poor quality: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, “Wade in the Water”] The Graham Bond Organisation played at the Club A Go Go, and soon Bond was raving back in London about this group from Newcastle he’d heard. Arrangements were quickly made for them to play in London. By this time, the Rolling Stones had outgrown the small club venues they’d been playing, and a new band called the Yardbirds were playing all the Stones’ old venues. A trade was agreed — the Yardbirds would play all the Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo’s normal gigs for a couple of weeks, and the Alan Price Rhythm & Blues Combo would play the Yardbirds’. Or rather, the Animals would. None of the members of the group could ever agree on how they got their new name, and not all of them liked it, but when they played those gigs in London in December 1963, just three months after getting together, that was how they were billed. And it was as the Animals that they were signed by Mickie Most. Mickie Most was one of the new breed of independent producers that were cropping up in London, following in Joe Meek’s footsteps, like Andrew Oldham. Most had started out as a singer in a duo called The Most Brothers, which is where he got his stage name. The Most Brothers had only released one single: [Excerpt: The Most Brothers, “Whole Lotta Woman”] But then Most had moved to South Africa, where he’d had eleven number one hits with cover versions of American rock singles, backed by a band called the Playboys: [Excerpt: Mickie Most and the Playboys, “Johnny B Goode”] He’d returned to the UK in 1963, and been less successful here as a performer, and so he decided to move into production, and the Animals were his first signing. He signed them up and started licensing their records to EMI, and in January 1964 the Animals moved down to London. There has been a lot of suggestion over the years that the Animals resented Mickie Most pushing them in a more pop direction, but their first single was an inspired compromise between the group’s blues purism and Most’s pop instincts. The song they recorded dates back at least to 1935, when the State Street Boys, a group that featured Big Bill Broonzy, recorded “Don’t Tear My Clothes”: [Excerpt: The State Street Boys, “Don’t Tear My Clothes”] That song got picked up and adapted by a lot of other blues singers, like Blind Boy Fuller, who recorded it as “Mama Let Me Lay It On You” in 1938: [Excerpt: Blind Boy Fuller, “Mama Let Me Lay it On You”] That had in turn been picked up by the Reverend Gary Davis, who came up with his own arrangement of the song: [Excerpt: Rev. Gary Davis, “Baby, Let Me Lay It On You”] Eric von Schmidt, a folk singer in Massachusetts, had learned that song from Davis, and Bob Dylan had in turn learned it from von Schmidt, and included it on his first album as “Baby Let Me Follow You Down”: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “Baby Let Me Follow You Down”] The Animals knew the song from that version, which they loved, but Most had come across it in a different way. He’d heard a version which had been inspired by Dylan, but had been radically reworked. Bert Berns had produced a single on Atlantic for a soul singer called Hoagy Lands, and on the B-side had been a new arrangement of the song, retitled “Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand” and adapted by Berns and Wes Farrell, a songwriter who had written for the Shirelles. Land’s version had started with an intro in which Lands is clearly imitating Sam Cooke: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, “Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand”] But after that intro, which seems to be totally original to Berns and Farrell, Lands’ track goes into a very upbeat Twist-flavoured song, with a unique guitar riff and Latin feel, both of them very much in the style of Berns’ other songs, but clearly an adaptation of Dylan’s version of the old song: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, “Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand”] Most had picked up that record on a trip to America, and decided that the Animals should record a version of the song based on that record. Hilton Valentine would later claim that this record, whose title and artist he could never remember (and it’s quite possible that Most never even told the band who the record was by) was not very similar at all to the Animals’ version, and that they’d just kicked around the song and come up with their own version, but listening to it, it is *very* obviously modelled on Lands’ version. They cut out Lands’ intro, and restored a lot of Dylan’s lyric, but musically it’s Lands all the way. The track starts like this: [Excerpt: The Animals, “Baby Let Me Take You Home”] Both have a breakdown section with spoken lyrics over a staccato backing, though the two sets of lyrics are different — compare the Animals: [Excerpt: The Animals, “Baby Let Me Take You Home”] and Lands: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, “Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand”] And both have the typical Bert Berns call and response ending — Lands: [Excerpt: Hoagy Lands, “Baby Let me Hold Your Hand”] And the Animals: [Excerpt: The Animals, “Baby Let Me Take You Home”] So whatever Valentine’s later claims, the track very much was modelled on the earlier record, but it’s still one of the strongest remodellings of an American R&B record by a British group in this time period, and an astonishingly accomplished record, which made number twenty-one. The Animals’ second single was another song that had been recorded on Dylan’s first album. “House of the Rising Sun” has been argued by some, though I think it’s a tenuous argument, to originally date to the seventeenth century English folk song “Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard”: [Excerpt: Martin Carthy, “Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard”] What we do know is that the song was circulating in Appalachia in the early years of the twentieth century, and it’s that version that was first recorded in 1933, under the name “Rising Sun Blues”, by Clarence Ashley and Gwen Foster: [Excerpt: Clarence Ashley and Gwen Foster, “Rising Sun Blues”] The song has been described as about several things — about alcoholism, about sex work, about gambling — depending on the precise version. It’s often thought, for example, that the song was always sung by women and was about a brothel, but there are lots of variants of it, sung by both men and women, before it reached its most famous form. Dave van Ronk, who put the song into the form by which it became best known, believed at first that it was a song about a brothel, but he later decided that it was probably about the New Orleans Women’s Prison, which in his accounting used to have a carving of a rising sun over the doorway. Van Ronk’s version traces back originally to a field recording Alan Lomax had made in 1938 of a woman named Georgia Turner, from Kentucky: [Excerpt: Georgia Turner, “Rising Sun Blues”] Van Ronk had learned the song from a record by Hally Wood, a friend of the Lomaxes, who had recorded a version based on Turner’s in 1953: [Excerpt: Hally Wood, “House of the Rising Sun”] Van Ronk took Wood’s version of Turner’s version of the song, and rearranged it, changing the chords around, adding something that changed the whole song. He introduced a descending bassline, mostly in semitones, which as van Ronk put it is “a common enough progression in jazz, but unusual among folksingers”. It’s actually something you’d get a fair bit in baroque music as well, and van Ronk introducing this into the song is probably what eventually led to things like Procul Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” ripping off Bach doing essentially the same thing. What van Ronk did was a simple trick. You play a descending scale, mostly in semitones, while holding the same chord shape which creates a lot of interesting chords. The bass line he played is basically this: [demonstrates] And he held an A minor shape over that bassline, giving a chord sequence Am, Am over G, Am over F#, F. [demonstrates] This is a trick that’s used in hundreds and hundreds of songs later in the sixties and onward — everything from “Sunny Afternoon” by the Kinks to “Go Now” by the Moody Blues to “Forever” by the Beach Boys — but it was something that at this point belonged in the realms of art music and jazz more than in folk, blues, or rock and roll. Of course, it sounds rather better when he did it: [Excerpt, Dave van Ronk, “House of the Rising Sun”] “House of the Rising Sun” soon became the highlight of van Ronk’s live act, and his most requested song. Dylan took van Ronk’s arrangement, but he wasn’t as sophisticated a musician as van Ronk, so he simplified the chords. Rather than the dissonant chords van Ronk had, he played standard rock chords that fit van Ronk’s bassline, so instead of Am over G he played C with a G in the bass, and instead of Am over F# he played D with an F# in the bass. So van Ronk had: [demonstrates] While Dylan had: [demonstrates] The movement of the chords now follows the movement of the bassline. It’s simpler, but it’s all from van Ronk’s arrangement idea. Dylan recorded his version of van Ronk’s version for his first album: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “House of the Rising Sun”] As van Ronk later told the story (though I’m going to edit out one expletive here for the sake of getting past the adult content rating on Apple): “One evening in 1962, I was sitting at my usual table in the back of the Kettle of Fish, and Dylan came slouching in. He had been up at the Columbia studios with John Hammond, doing his first album. He was being very mysterioso about the whole thing, and nobody I knew had been to any of the sessions except Suze, his lady. I pumped him for information, but he was vague. Everything was going fine and, “Hey, would it be okay for me to record your arrangement of ‘House of the Rising Sun?’” [expletive]. “Jeez, Bobby, I’m going into the studio to do that myself in a few weeks. Can’t it wait until your next album?” A long pause. “Uh-oh.” I did not like the sound of that. “What exactly do you mean, ‘Uh-oh’?” “Well,” he said sheepishly, “I’ve already recorded it.” “You did what?!” I flew into a Donald Duck rage, and I fear I may have said something unkind that could be heard over in Chelsea.” van Ronk and Dylan fell out for a couple of weeks, though they later reconciled, and van Ronk said of Dylan’s performance “it was essentially my arrangement, but Bobby’s reading had all the nuance and subtlety of a Neanderthal with a stone hand ax, and I took comfort thereby.” van Ronk did record his version, as we heard, but he soon stopped playing the song live because he got sick of people telling him to “play that Dylan song”. The Animals learned the song from the Dylan record, and decided to introduce it to their set on their first national tour, supporting Chuck Berry. All the other acts were only doing rock and roll and R&B, and they thought a folk song might be a way to make them stand out — and it instantly became the highlight of their act.  The way all the members except Alan Price tell the story, the main instigators of the arrangement were Eric Burdon, the only member of the group who had been familiar with the song before hearing the Dylan album, and Hilton Valentine, who came up with the arpeggiated guitar part. Their arrangement followed Dylan’s rearrangement of van Ronk’s rearrangement, except they dropped the scalar bassline altogether, so for example instead of a D with an F# in the bass they just play a plain open D chord — the F# that van Ronk introduced is still in there, as the third, but the descending line is now just implied by the chords, not explicitly stated in the bass, where Chas Chandler just played root notes. In the middle of the tour, the group were called back into the studio to record their follow-up single, and they had what seemed like it might be a great opportunity. The TV show Ready Steady Go! wanted the Animals to record a version of the old Ray Charles song “Talking ‘Bout You”, to use as their theme. The group travelled down from Liverpool after playing a show there, and went into the studio in London at three o’clock in the morning, before heading to Southampton for the next night’s show. But they needed to record a B-side first, of course, and so before getting round to the main business of the session they knocked off a quick one-take performance of their new live showstopper: [Excerpt: The Animals, “House of the Rising Sun”] On hearing the playback, everyone was suddenly convinced that that, not “Talking ‘Bout You”, should be the A-side. But there was a problem. The record was four minutes and twenty seconds long, and you just didn’t ever release a record that long. The rule was generally that songs didn’t last longer than three minutes, because radio stations wouldn’t play them, but Most was eventually persuaded by Chas Chandler that the track needed to go out as it was, with no edits. It did, but when it went out, it had only one name on as the arranger — which when you’re recording a public domain song makes you effectively the songwriter. According to all the members other than Price, the group’s manager, Mike Jeffrey, who was close to Price, had “explained” to them that you needed to just put one name down on the credits, but not to worry, as they would all get a share of the songwriting money. According to Price, meanwhile, he was the sole arranger. Whatever the truth, Price was the only one who ever got any songwriting royalties for their version of the song, which went to number one in the UK and the US. although the version released as a single in the US was cut down to three minutes with some brutal edits, particularly to the organ solo: [Excerpt: The Animals, “House of the Rising Sun (US edit)”] None of the group liked what was done to the US single edit, and the proper version was soon released as an album track everywhere The Animals’ version was a big enough hit that it inspired Dylan’s new producer Tom Wilson to do an experiment. In late 1964 he hired session musicians to overdub a new electric backing onto an outtake version of “House of the Rising Sun” from the sessions from Dylan’s first album, to see what it would sound like: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “House of the Rising Sun (1964 electric version)”] That wasn’t released at the time, it was just an experiment Wilson tried, but it would have ramifications we’ll be seeing throughout the rest of the podcast. Incidentally, Dave van Ronk had the last laugh at Dylan, who had to drop the song from his own sets because people kept asking him if he’d stolen it from the Animals. The Animals’ next single, “I’m Crying”, was their first and only self-written A-side, written by Price and Burdon. It was a decent record and made the top ten in the UK and the top twenty in the US, but Price and Burdon were never going to become another Lennon and McCartney or Jagger and Richards — they just didn’t like each other by this point. The record after that, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”, was written by the jazz songwriters Benny Benjamin and Horace Ott, and had originally been recorded by Nina Simone in an orchestral version that owed quite a bit to Burt Bacharach: [Excerpt: Nina Simone, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”] The Animals’ version really suffers in comparison to that. I was going to say something about how their reinterpretation is as valid in its own way as Simone’s original and stands up against it, but actually listening to them back to back as I was writing this, rather than separately as I always previously had, I changed my mind because I really don’t think it does. It’s a great record, and it’s deservedly considered a classic single, but compared to Simone’s version, it’s lightweight, rushed, and callow: [Excerpt: The Animals, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”] Simone was apparently furious at the Animals’ recording, which they didn’t understand given that she hadn’t written the original, and according to John Steel she and Burdon later had a huge screaming row about the record. In Steel’s version, Simone eventually grudgingly admitted that they weren’t “so bad for a bunch of white boys”, but that doesn’t sound to me like the attitude Simone would take. But Steel was there and I wasn’t… “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” was followed by a more minor single, a cover of Sam Cooke’s “Bring it on Home to Me”, which would be the last single by the group to feature Alan Price. On the twenty-eighth of April 1965, the group were about to leave on a European tour. Chas Chandler, who shared a flat with Price, woke Price up and then got in the shower. When he got out of the shower, Price wasn’t in the flat, and Chandler wouldn’t see Price again for eighteen months. Chandler believed until his death that while he was in the shower, Price’s first royalty cheque for arranging “House of the Rising Sun” had arrived, and Price had decided then and there that he wasn’t going to share the money as agreed. The group quickly rushed to find a fill-in keyboard player for the tour, and nineteen-year-old Mick Gallagher was with them for a couple of weeks before being permanently replaced by Dave Rowberry. Gallagher would later go on to be the keyboard player with Ian Dury and the Blockheads, as well as playing on several tracks by the Clash. Price, meanwhile, went on to have a number of solo hits over the next few years, starting with a version of “I Put A Spell On You”, in an arrangement which the other Animals later claimed had originally been worked up as an Animals track: [Excerpt: The Alan Price Set, “I Put A Spell On You”] Price would go on to make many great solo records, introducing the songs of Randy Newman to a wider audience, and performing in a jazz-influenced R&B style very similar to Mose Allison. The Animals’ first record with their new keyboard player was their greatest single. “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place” had been written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, and had originally been intended for the Righteous Brothers, but they’d decided to have Mann record it himself: [Excerpt: Barry Mann, “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place”] But before that version was released, the Animals had heard Mann’s piano demo of the song and cut their own version, and Mann’s was left on the shelf. What the Animals did to the song horrified Cynthia Weill, who considered it the worst record of one of her songs ever — though one suspects that’s partly because it sabotaged the chances for her husband’s single — but to my mind they vastly improved on the song. They tightened the melody up a lot, getting rid of a lot of interjections. They reworked big chunks of the lyric, for example changing “Oh girl, now you’re young and oh so pretty, staying here would be a crime, because you’ll just grow old before your time” to “Now my girl, you’re so young and pretty, and one thing I know is true, you’ll be dead before your time is due”, and making subtler changes like changing “if it’s the last thing that we do” to “if it’s the last thing we ever do”, improving the scansion. They kept the general sense of the lyrics, but changed more of the actual words than they kept — and to my ears, at least, every change they made was an improvement. And most importantly, they excised the overlong bridge altogether. I can see what Mann and Weill were trying to do with the bridge — Righteous Brothers songs would often have a call and response section, building to a climax, where Bill Medley’s low voice and Bobby Hatfield’s high one would alternate and then come together. But that would normally come in the middle, building towards the last chorus. Here it comes between every verse and chorus, and completely destroys the song’s momentum — it just sounds like noodling: [Excerpt: Barry Mann, “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place”] The Animals’ version, by contrast, is a masterpiece of dynamics, of slow builds and climaxes and dropping back down again. It’s one of the few times I’ve wished I could just drop the entire record in, rather than excerpting a section, because it depends so much for its effect on the way the whole structure of the track works together: [Excerpt: The Animals, “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place”] From a creators’ rights perspective, I entirely agree with Cynthia Weill that the group shouldn’t have messed with her song. But from a listener’s point of view, I have to say that they turned a decent song into a great one, and one of the greatest singles of all time “We Gotta Get Out Of This Place” was followed by another lesser but listenable single, “It’s My Life”, which seemed to reinforce a pattern of a great Animals single being followed by a merely OK one. But that was the point at which the Animals and Most would part company — the group were getting sick of Most’s attempts to make them more poppy. They signed to a new label, Decca, and got a new producer, Tom Wilson, the man who we heard earlier experimenting with Dylan’s sound, but the group started to fall apart. After their next single, “Inside — Looking Out”, a prison work song collected by the Lomaxes, and the album Animalisms, John Steel left the group, tired of not getting any money, and went to work in a shop. The album after Animalisms, confusingly titled Animalism, was also mostly produced by Wilson, and didn’t even feature the musicians in the band on two of the tracks, which Wilson farmed out to a protege of his, Frank Zappa, to produce. Those two tracks featured Zappa on guitar and members of the Wrecking Crew, with only Burdon from the actual group: [Excerpt: The Animals, “All Night Long”] Soon the group would split up, and would discover that their management had thoroughly ripped them off — there had been a scheme to bank their money in the Bahamas for tax reasons, in a bank which mysteriously disappeared off the face of the Earth. Burdon would form a new group, known first as the New Animals and later as Eric Burdon and the Animals, who would have some success but not on the same level. There were a handful of reunions of the original lineup of the group between 1968 and the early eighties, but they last played together in 1983. Burdon continues to tour the US as Eric Burdon and the Animals. Alan Price continues to perform successfully as a solo artist. We’ll be picking up with Chas Chandler later, when he moves from bass playing into management, so you’ll hear more about him in future episodes. John Steel, Dave Rowberry, and Hilton Valentine reformed a version of the Animals in the 1990s, originally with Jim Rodford, formerly of the Kinks and Argent, on bass. Valentine left that group in 2001, and Rowberry died in 2003. Steel now tours the UK as “The Animals and Friends”, with Mick Gallagher, who had replaced Price briefly in 1965, on keyboards. I’ve seen them live twice and they put on an excellent show — though the second time, one woman behind me did indignantly say, as the singer started, “That’s not Eric Clapton!”, before starting to sing along happily… And Hilton Valentine moved to the US and played briefly with Burdon’s Animals after quitting Steel’s, before returning to his first love, skiffle. He died exactly four weeks ago today, and will be missed.

In this Keen on Yoga Podcast Adam talks to Sri Dharma Mittra. A yoga master who has dedicated his life to the karma yoga or selfless service of sharing the accumulated wisdom gained through constant practice and teaching over a half-century at his school in New York and around the world. Sri Dharma Mittra has dedicated most of his life in service to humanity teaching yoga, the ancient knowledge of how to attain radiant health and develop spiritually. Since 1967, he has been teaching classical yoga: advanced postures, Yama and Niyama, and how to lead a content, simple and happy life. Sri Dharma was born in 1939 in the small, remote village of Pirapora, Brazil and was raised Catholic in a poor family of 5 children. In his early teens, he became involved in esoteric teachings and yoga through books his younger brother was studying. From 1958 through 1964, Sri Dharma served in the Brazilian National Air Force and practiced bodybuilding, wrestling and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. In 1962, he took top honors in a national bodybuilding contest, achieved second place in powerlifting and was awarded the title “Mister Minas Gerais” (the state in Brazil he is from). As above, Sri Dharma had only practiced yoga through books in his late teens when his younger brother Sattya went to New York City to meet and commence studies with their future Guru (teacher; spiritual preceptor) in 1962. Sattya wrote to Sri Dharma about Sri Swami Kailashananda a.k.a. Yogi Gupta, and extended an invitation for him to come to New York City, stay with him and meet the man they had both been hoping to meet. Sri Dharma took leave of his mother, left the Air Force, sold the bodybuilding gym he owned and managed, and he gathered together just enough money for the flight to the United States. On September 14, 1964, he and his brother met on MacDougal Street near Sattya’s Leroy Street apartment in the heart of Greenwich Village, filled with the colors of the 1960s. The very next day, Sri Dharma had a private consultation with the Guru with his brother serving as translator. After meeting his Guru, Sri Dharma immersed himself in intense study and practice of the classical Eight Limbs of Yoga and dedicated ten years of his life to the full-time practice of Karma Yoga. After three-and-a-half years, Sri Dharma was initiated as a Sannyasi (one who renounces the world in order to realize God). During his years as a renunciate, he had the esteemed honor of being the personal assistant to the Guru, attending to all his needs. In 1967, Sri Dharma was asked to teach intermediate and advanced classes in Asana (postures) and Pranayama (breathing exercises) at the Yogi Gupta New York Center both for his fellow disciples and the general public. He was also involved with preparing food, manning the juice bar and was the main handyman. Sri Dharma demonstrated Yoga Asana at the lectures the Guru offered to the public in the ’60s and ’70s in hotel ballrooms all around New York City. With Yogi Gupta’s blessings, Sri Dharma left the ashram in 1974 to found the Yoga Asana Center in 1975, known of now as the Dharma Yoga Center. Sri Dharma left the ashram to live his destiny — a life dedicated to sharing and spreading the truth, knowledge and light of God through yoga in the most humble and quiet of ways. Over the years, the Dharma Yoga Center was located at many locations throughout Manhattan. It is currently located on the 6th Floor of 61 West 23rd Street. For many years, Sri Dharma was the only yoga teacher in New York City teaching advanced yoga postures. Teachers from other schools and ashrams have always come to him to learn, practice, and then teach elsewhere. Sri Dharma is truly a sweet, gentle master who sets the greatest example of yoga by living what he teaches and asking nothing in return. He continues to be that same selfless, shining example today.

Episode one hundred and nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Blowin’ in the Wind”, Peter, Paul and Mary, Bob Dylan, the UK folk scene and the civil rights movement. Those of you who get angry at me whenever I say anything that acknowledges the existence of racism may want to skip this one. 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 “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” by the Crystals. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   This compilation contains all Peter, Paul and Mary’s hits. I have used *many* books for this episode, most of which I will also be using for future episodes on Dylan: The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk and Elijah Wald is the fascinating and funny autobiography of Dylan’s mentor in his Greenwich Village period, including his interactions with Albert Grossman. Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan is a partial, highly inaccurate, but thoroughly readable autobiography. Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades. I’ve also used Robert Shelton’s No Direction Home, which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan. Only one book exists on Peter, Paul, and Mary themselves, and it is a hideously overpriced coffee table book consisting mostly of photos, so I wouldn’t bother with it.  Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World by Billy Bragg has some great information on the British folk scene of the fifties and sixties. And Singing From the Floor is an oral history of British folk clubs, including a chapter on Dylan’s 1962 visit to London.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   Today we’re going to look at the first manufactured pop band we will see in this story, but not the last — a group cynically put together by a manager to try and cash in on a fad, but one who were important enough that in a small way they helped to change history. We’re going to look at the March on Washington and the civil rights movement, at Bob Dylan blossoming into a songwriter and the English folk revival, and at “Blowin’ in the Wind” by Peter, Paul, and Mary: [Excerpt: Peter, Paul and Mary, “Blowin’ in the Wind”] Albert Grossman was an unusual figure in the world of folk music. The folk revival had started out as an idealistic movement, mostly centred on Pete Seeger, and outside a few ultra-commercial acts like the Kingston Trio, most of the people involved were either doing it for the love of the music, or as a means of advancing their political goals. No doubt many of the performers on the burgeoning folk circuit were also quite keen to make money — there are very few musicians who don’t like being able to eat and have a home to live in — but very few of the people involved were primarily motivated by increasing their income. Grossman was a different matter. He was a businessman, and he was interested in money more than anything else — and for that he was despised by many of the people in the Greenwich Village folk scene. But he was, nonetheless, someone who was interested in making money *from folk music* specifically. And in the late fifties and early sixties this was less of a strange idea than it might have seemed. We talked back in the episode on “Drugstore Rock and Roll” about how rock and roll music was starting to be seen as the music of the teenager, and how “teenager” was, for the first time, becoming a marketing category into which people could be segmented. But the thing about music that’s aimed at a particular age group is that once you’re out of that age group you are no longer the target audience for that music. Someone who was sixteen in 1956 was twenty in 1960, and people in their twenties don’t necessarily want to be listening to music aimed at teenagers. But at the same time, those people didn’t want to listen to the music that their parents were listening to.  There’s no switch that gets flipped on your twentieth birthday that means that you suddenly no longer like Little Richard but instead like Rosemary Clooney. So there was a gap in the market, for music that was more adult than rock and roll was perceived as being, but which still set itself apart from the pop music that was listened to by people in their thirties and forties. And in the late fifties and early sixties, that gap seemed to be filled by a commercialised version of the folk revival.  In particular, Harry Belafonte had a huge run of massive hit albums with collections of folk, calypso, and blues songs, presented in a way that was acceptable to an older, more settled audience while still preserving some of the rawness of the originals, like his version of Lead Belly’s “Midnight Special”, recorded in 1962 with a young Bob Dylan on harmonica: [Excerpt: Harry Belafonte, “Midnight Special”] Meanwhile, the Kingston Trio had been having huge hits with cleaned-up versions of old folk ballads like “Tom Dooley”: [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, “Tom Dooley”] So Grossman believed that there was a real market out there for something that was as clean and bright and friendly as the Kingston Trio, but with just a tiny hint of the bohemian Greenwich Village atmosphere to go with it. Something that wouldn’t scare TV people and DJs, but which might seem just the tiniest bit more radical than the Kingston Trio did. Something mass-produced, but which seemed more authentic. So Grossman decided to put together what we would now call a manufactured pop group. It would be a bit like the Kingston Trio, but ever so slightly more political, and rather than being three men, it would be two men and a woman. Grossman had very particular ideas about what he wanted — he wanted a waifish, beautiful woman at the centre of the group, he wanted a man who brought a sense of folk authenticity, and he wanted someone who could add a comedy element to the performances, to lighten them.  For the woman, he chose Mary Travers, who had been around the folk scene for several years at this point, starting out with a group called the Song Swappers, who had recorded an album of union songs with Pete Seeger back in 1955: [Excerpt: Pete Seeger and the Song Swappers, “Solidarity Forever”] Travers was chosen in part because of her relative shyness — she had never wanted to be a professional singer, and her introverted nature made her perfect for the image Grossman wanted — an image that was carefully cultivated, to the point that when the group were rehearsing in Florida, Grossman insisted Travers stay inside so she wouldn’t get a tan and spoil her image. As the authentic male folk singer, Grossman chose Peter Yarrow, who was the highest profile of the three, as he had performed as a solo artist for a number of years and had appeared on TV and at the Newport Folk Festival, though he had not yet recorded. And for the comedy element, he chose Noel Stookey, who regularly performed as a comedian around Greenwich Village — in the group’s very slim autobiography, Stookey compares himself to two other comedians on that circuit, Bill Cosby and Woody Allen, comparisons that were a much better look in 2009 when the book was published than they are today. Grossman had originally wanted Dave Van Ronk to be the low harmony singer, rather than Stookey, but Van Ronk turned him down flat, wanting no part of a Greenwich Village Kingston Trio, though he later said he sometimes looked at his bank account rather wistfully. The group’s name was, apparently, inspired by a line in the old folk song “I Was Born About 10,000 Years Ago”, which was recorded by many people, but most famously by Elvis Presley in the 1970s: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “I Was Born About 10,000 Years Ago”] The “Peter, Paul, and Moses” from that song became Peter, Paul and Mary — Stookey started going by his middle name, Paul, on stage, in order to fit the group name, though he still uses Noel in his daily life. While Peter, Paul, and Mary were the front people of the group, there were several other people who were involved in the creative process — the group used a regular bass player, Bill Lee, the father of the filmmaker Spike Lee, who played on all their recordings, as well as many other recordings from Greenwich Village folk musicians. They also had, as their musical director, a man named Milt Okun who came up with their arrangements and helped them choose and shape the material. Grossman shaped this team into a formidable commercial force. Almost everyone who talks about Grossman compares him to Colonel Tom Parker, and the comparison is a reasonable one. Grossman was extremely good at making money for his acts, so long as a big chunk of the money came to him. There’s a story about him signing Odetta, one of the great folk artists of the period, and telling her “you can stay with your current manager, and make a hundred thousand dollars this year, and he’ll take twenty percent, or you can come with me, and make a quarter of a million dollars, but I’ll take fifty percent”. That was the attitude that Grossman took to everyone. He cut himself in to every contract, salami-slicing his artists’ royalties at each stage. But it can’t be denied that his commercial instincts were sound. Peter, Paul, and Mary’s first album was a huge success. The second single from the album, their version of the old Weavers song “If I Had a Hammer”, written by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays, went to number ten on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Peter, Paul and Mary, “If I Had a Hammer”] And the album itself went to number one and eventually went double-platinum — a remarkable feat for a collection of songs that, however prettily arranged, contained a fairly uncompromising selection of music from the folk scene, with songs by Seeger, Dave van Ronk, and Rev. Gary Davis mixing with traditional songs like “This Train” and originals by Stookey and Yarrow. Their second album was less successful at first, with its first two singles flopping. But the third, a pretty children’s song by Yarrow and his friend Leonard Lipton, went to number two on the pop charts and number one on the Adult Contemporary charts: [Excerpt: Peter, Paul, and Mary, “Puff the Magic Dragon”] Incidentally, Leonard Lipton, who wrote that lyric, became independently wealthy from the royalties from the song, and used the leisure that gave him to pursue his passion of inventing 3D projection systems, which eventually made him an even wealthier man — if you’ve seen a 3D film in the cinema in the last couple of decades, it’s almost certainly been using the systems Lipton invented. So Peter, Paul, and Mary were big stars, and having big hits. And Albert Grossman was constantly on the lookout for more material for them. And eventually he found it, and the song that was to make both him, his group, and its writer, very, very rich, in the pages of Broadside magazine. When we left Bob Dylan, he was still primarily a performer, and not really known for his songwriting, but he had already written a handful of songs, and he was being drawn into the more political side of the folk scene. In large part this was because of his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, with whom Dylan was very deeply in love, and who was a very political person indeed. Dylan had political views, but wasn’t particularly driven by them — Rotolo very much was, and encouraged him to write songs about politics. For much of early 1962, Dylan was being pulled in two directions at once — he was writing songs inspired by Robert Johnson, and trying to adapt Johnson’s style to fit himself, but at the same time he was writing songs like “The Death of Emmett Till”, about the 1955 murder of a Black teenager which had galvanised the civil rights movement, and “The Ballad of Donald White”, about a Black man on death row. Dylan would later be very dismissive of these attempts at topicality, saying “I realize now that my reasons and motives behind it were phony, I didn’t have to write it; I was bothered by many other things that I pretended I wasn’t bothered by, in order to write this song about Emmett Till, a person I never even knew”. But at the time they got him a great deal of attention in the small US folk-music scene, when they were published in magazines like Broadside and Sing Out, which collected political songs. Most of these early songs are juvenilia, with a couple of exceptions like the rather marvellous anti-bomb song “Let Me Die in My Footsteps”, but the song that changed everything for Dylan was a different matter.  “Blowin’ in the Wind” was inspired by the melody of the old nineteenth century song “No More Auction Block”, a song that is often described as a “spiritual”, though in fact it’s a purely secular song about slavery: [Excerpt: Odetta, “No More Auction Block”] That song had seen something of a revival in folk circles in the late fifties, especially because part of its melody had been incorporated into another song, “We Shall Overcome”, which had become an anthem of the civil rights movement when it was revived and adapted by Pete Seeger: [Excerpt: Pete Seeger, “We Shall Overcome”] Dylan took this melody, with its associations with the fight for the rights of Black people, and came up with new lyrics, starting with the line “How many roads must a man walk down, before you call him a man?” He wrote two verses of the song — the first and last verses — in a short burst of inspiration, and a few weeks later came back to it and added another verse, the second, which incorporated allusions to the Biblical prophet Ezekiel, and which is notably less inspired than those earlier verses. In later decades, many people have looked at the lyrics to the song and seen it as the first of what would become a whole subgenre of non-protest protest songs — they’ve seen the abstraction of “How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?” as being nice-sounding rhetoric that doesn’t actually mean anything, in much the same way as something like, say, “Another Day in Paradise” or “Eve of Destruction”, songs that make nonspecific complaints about nonspecific bad things. But while “Blowin’ in the Wind” is a song that has multiple meanings and can be applied to multiple situations, as most good songs can, that line was, at the time in which it was written, a very concrete question. The civil rights movement was asking for many things — for the right to vote, for an end to segregation, for an end to police brutality, but also for basic respect and acknowledgment of Black people’s shared humanity. We’ve already heard in a couple of past episodes Big Bill Broonzy singing “When Do I Get to Be Called a Man?”: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, “When Do I Get to Be Called a Man?”] Because at the time, it was normal for white people to refer to Black men as “boy”. As Dr. Martin Luther King said in his “Letter From Birmingham Jail”, one of the greatest pieces of writing of the twentieth century, a letter in large part about how white moderates were holding Black people back with demands to be “reasonable” and let things take their time: “when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society… when your first name becomes“ and here Dr. King uses a racial slur which I, as a white man, will not say, “and your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodyness”—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair.” King’s great letter was written in 1963, less than a year after Dylan was writing his song but before it became widely known. In the context of 1962, the demand to call a man a man was a very real political issue, not an aphorism that could go in a Hallmark card. Dylan recorded the song in June 1962, during the sessions for his second album, which at the time was going under the working title “Bob Dylan’s Blues”: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “Blowin’ in the Wind”] By the time he recorded it, two major changes had happened to him. The first was that Suze Rotolo had travelled to Spain for several months, leaving him bereft — for the next few months, his songwriting took a turn towards songs about either longing for the return of a lost love, like “Tomorrow is a Long Time”, one of his most romantic songs, or about how the protagonist doesn’t even need his girlfriend anyway and she can leave if she likes, see if he cares, like “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright”. The other change was that Albert Grossman had become his manager, largely on the strength of “Blowin’ in the Wind”, which Grossman thought had huge potential. Grossman signed Dylan up, taking twenty percent of all his earnings — including on the contract with Columbia Records Dylan already had — and got him signed to a new publisher, Witmark Publishing, where the aptly-named Artie Mogull thought that “Blowin’ in the Wind” could be marketed. Grossman took his twenty percent of Dylan’s share of the songwriting money as his commission from Dylan — and fifty percent of Witmark’s share of the money as his commission from Witmark, meaning that Dylan was getting forty percent of the money for writing the songs, while Grossman was getting thirty-five percent. Grossman immediately got involved in the recording of Dylan’s second album, and started having personality clashes with John Hammond. It was apparently Grossman who suggested that Dylan “go electric” for the first time, with the late-1962 single “Mixed-Up Confusion”: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “Mixed-Up Confusion”] Neither Hammond nor Dylan liked that record, and it seemed clear for the moment that the way forward for Dylan was to continue in an acoustic folk vein. Dylan was also starting to get inspired more by English folk music, and incorporate borrowings from English music into his songwriting. That’s most apparent in “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”, written in September 1962. Dylan took the structure of that song from the old English ballad, “Lord Randall”: [Excerpt: Ewan MacColl, “Lord Randall”] He reworked that structure into a song of apocalypse, again full of the Biblical imagery he’d tried in the second verse of  “Blowin’ in the Wind”, but this time more successfully incorporating it: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”] His interest in English folk music was to become more important in his songwriting in the following months, as Dylan was about to travel to the UK and encounter the British folk music scene. A TV director called Philip Saville had seen Dylan performing in New York, and had decided he would be perfect for the role of a poet in a TV play he was putting on, Madhouse in Castle Street, and got Dylan flown over to perform in it. Unfortunately, no-one seems to have told Dylan what would be involved in this, and he proved incapable of learning his lines or acting, so the show was rethought — the role of the poet was given to David Warner, later to become one of Britain’s most famous screen actors, and Dylan was cast in a new role as a singer called “Bobby”, who had few or no lines but did get to sing a few songs, including “Blowin’ in the Wind”, which was the first time the song was heard by anyone outside of the New York folk scene. Dylan was in London for about a month, and while he was there he immersed himself in the British folk scene. This scene was in some ways modelled on the American scene, and had some of the same people involved, but it was very different. The initial spark for the British folk revival had come in the late 1940s, when A.L. Lloyd, a member of the Communist Party, had published a book of folk songs he’d collected, along with some Marxist analysis of how folk songs evolved. In the early fifties, Alan Lomax, then in the UK to escape McCarthyism, put Lloyd in touch with Ewan MacColl, a songwriter and performer from Manchester, who we heard earlier singing “Lord Randall”. MacColl, like Lloyd, was a Communist, but the two also shared a passion for older folk songs, and they began recording and performing together, recording traditional songs like “The Handsome Cabin Boy”: [Excerpt: Ewan MacColl and A.L. Lloyd, “The Handsome Cabin Boy”] MacColl and Lloyd latched on to the skiffle movement, and MacColl started his own club night, Ballads and Blues, which tried to push the skifflers in the direction of performing more music based in English traditional music. This had already been happening to an extent with things like the Vipers performing “Maggie May”, a song about a sex worker in Liverpool: [Excerpt: The Vipers Skiffle Group, “Maggie May”] But this started to happen a lot more with MacColl’s encouragement. At one point in 1956, there was even a TV show hosted by Lomax and featuring a band that included Lomax, MacColl, Jim Bray, the bass player from Chris Barber’s band, Shirley Collins — a folk singer who was also Lomax’s partner — and Peggy Seeger, who was Pete Seeger’s sister and who had also entered into a romantic relationship with MacColl, whose most famous song, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”, was written both about and for her: [Excerpt: Peggy Seeger, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”] It was Seeger who instigated what became the most notable feature at the Ballads and Blues club and its successor the Singer’s Club. She’d burst out laughing when she saw Long John Baldry sing “Rock Island Line”, because he was attempting to sing in an American accent. As someone who had actually known Lead Belly, she found British imitations of his singing ludicrous, and soon there was a policy at the clubs that people would only sing songs that were originally sung with their normal vowel sounds. So Seeger could only sing songs from the East Coast of the US, because she didn’t have the Western vowels of a Woody Guthrie, while MacColl could sing English and Scottish songs, but nothing from Wales or Ireland. As the skiffle craze died down, it splintered into several linked scenes. We’ve already seen how in Liverpool and London it spawned guitar groups like the Shadows and the Beatles, while in London it also led to the electric blues scene. It also led to a folk scene that was very linked to the blues scene at first, but was separate from it, and which was far more political, centred around MacColl. That scene, like the US one, combined topical songs about political events from a far-left viewpoint with performances of traditional songs, but in the case of the British one these were mostly old sea shanties and sailors’ songs, and the ancient Child Ballads, rather than Appalachian country music — though a lot of the songs have similar roots.  And unlike the blues scene, the folk scene spread all over the country. There were clubs in Manchester, in Liverpool (run by the group the Spinners), in Bradford, in Hull (run by the Waterson family) and most other major British cities. The musicians who played these venues were often inspired by MacColl and Lloyd, but the younger generation of musicians often looked askance at what they saw as MacColl’s dogmatic approach, preferring to just make good music rather than submit it to what they saw as MacColl’s ideological purity test, even as they admired his musicianship and largely agreed with his politics. And one of these younger musicians was a guitarist named Martin Carthy, who was playing a club called the King and Queen on Goodge Street when he saw Bob Dylan walk in. He recognised Dylan from the cover of Sing Out! magazine, and invited him to get up on stage and do a few numbers. For the next few weeks, Carthy showed Dylan round the folk scene — Dylan went down great at the venues where Carthy normally played, and at the Roundhouse, but flopped around the venues that were dominated by MacColl, as the people there seemed to think of Dylan as a sort of cut-rate Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, as Elliot had been such a big part of the skiffle and folk scenes. Carthy also taught Dylan a number of English folk songs, including “Lord Franklin”: [Excerpt: Martin Carthy, “Lord Franklin”] and “Scarborough Fair”: [Excerpt: Martin Carthy, “Scarborough Fair”] Dylan immediately incorporated the music he’d learned from Carthy into his songwriting, basing “Bob Dylan’s Dream” on “Lord Franklin”, and even more closely basing “GIrl From the North Country” on “Scarborough Fair”: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “Girl From The North Country”] After his trip to London, Dylan went over to Europe to see if he could catch up with Suze, but she had already gone back to New York — their letters to each other crossed in the post. On his return, they reunited at least for a while, and she posed with him for the photo for the cover of what was to be his second album.  Dylan had thought that album completed when he left for England, but he soon discovered that there were problems with the album — the record label didn’t want to release the comedy talking blues “Talking John Birch Society Paranoid Blues”, because they thought it might upset the fascists in the John Birch Society. The same thing would later make sure that Dylan never played the Ed Sullivan Show, because when he was booked onto the show he insisted on playing that song, and so they cancelled the booking. In this case, though, it gave him an excuse to remove what he saw as the weaker songs on the album, including “Tomorrow is a Long Time”, and replace them with four new songs, three of them inspired by traditional English folk songs — “Bob Dylan’s Dream”,  “Girl From the North Country”, and “Masters of War” which took its melody from the old folk song “Nottamun Town” popularised on the British folk circuit by an American singer, Jean Ritchie: [Excerpt: Jean Ritchie, “Nottamun Town”] These new recordings weren’t produced by John Hammond, as the rest of the album was. Albert Grossman had been trying from the start to get total control over Dylan, and didn’t want Hammond, who had been around before Grossman, involved in Dylan’s career. Instead, a new producer named Tom Wilson was in charge. Wilson was a remarkable man, but seemed an odd fit for a left-wing folk album. He was one of the few Black producers working for a major label, though he’d started out as an indie producer. He was a Harvard economics graduate, and had been president of the Young Republicans during his time there — he remained a conservative all his life — but he was far from conservative in his musical tastes. When he’d left university, he’d borrowed nine hundred dollars and started his own record label, Transition, which had put out some of the best experimental jazz of the fifties, produced by Wilson, including the debut albums by Sun Ra: [Excerpt: Sun Ra, “Brainville”] and Cecil Taylor: [Excerpt: Cecil Taylor, “Bemsha Swing”] Wilson later described his first impressions of Dylan: “I didn’t even particularly like folk music. I’d been recording Sun Ra and Coltrane … I thought folk music was for the dumb guys. This guy played like the dumb guys, but then these words came out. I was flabbergasted.” Wilson would soon play a big part in Dylan’s career, but for now his job was just to get those last few tracks for the album recorded. In the end, the final recording session for Dylan’s second album was more than a year after the first one, and it came out into a very different context from when he’d started recording it. Because while Dylan was putting the finishing touches on his second album, Peter Paul and Mary were working on their third, and they were encouraged by Grossman to record three Bob Dylan songs, since that way Grossman would make more money from them. Their version of “Blowin’ in the Wind” came out as a single a few weeks after The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan came out, and sold 300,000 copies in the first week: [Excerpt: Peter, Paul, and Mary, “Blowin’ in the Wind”] The record went to number two on the charts, and their followup, “Don’t Think Twice it’s Alright”, another Dylan song, went top ten as well.  “Blowin’ in the Wind” became an instant standard, and was especially picked up by Black performers, as it became a civil rights anthem. Mavis Staples of the Staple Singers said later that she was astonished that a white man could write a line like “How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?”, saying “That’s what my father experienced” — and the Staple Singers recorded it, of course: [Excerpt: The Staple Singers, “Blowin’ in the Wind”] as did Sam Cooke: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, “Blowin’ in the Wind”] And Stevie Wonder: [Excerpt: Stevie Wonder, “Blowin’ in the Wind”] But the song’s most important performance came from Peter, Paul and Mary, performing it on a bill with Dylan, Odetta, Joan Baez, and Mahalia Jackson in August 1963, just as the song had started to descend the charts. Because those artists were the entertainment for the March on Washington, in which more than a quarter of a million people descended on Washington both to support President Kennedy’s civil rights bill and to speak out and say that it wasn’t going far enough. That was one of the great moments in American political history, full of incendiary speeches like the one by John Lewis: [Excerpt: John Lewis, March on Washington speech] But the most memorable moment at that march  came when Dr. King was giving his speech. Mahalia Jackson shouted out “Tell them about the dream, Martin”, and King departed from his prepared words and instead improvised based on themes he’d used in other speeches previously, coming out with some of the most famous words ever spoken: [Excerpt: Martin Luther King, “I Have a Dream”] The civil rights movement was more than one moment, however inspiring, and white people like myself have a tendency to reduce it just to Dr. King, and to reduce Dr. King just to those words — which is one reason why I quoted from Letter From Birmingham Jail earlier, as that is a much less safe and canonised piece of writing. But it’s still true to say that if there is a single most important moment in the history of the post-war struggle for Black rights, it was that moment, and because of “Blowin’ in the Wind”, both Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary were minor parts of that event. After 1963, Peter, Paul and Mary quickly became passe with the British Invasion, only having two more top ten hits, one with a novelty song in 1967 and one with “Leaving on a Jet Plane” in 1969. They split up in 1970, and around that time Yarrow was arrested and convicted for a sexual offence involving a fourteen-year-old girl, though he was later pardoned by President Carter. The group reformed in 1978 and toured the nostalgia circuit until Mary’s death in 2009. The other two still occasionally perform together, as Peter and Noel Paul. Bob Dylan, of course, went on to bigger things after “Blowin’ in the Wind” suddenly made him into the voice of a generation — a position he didn’t ask for and didn’t seem to want. We’ll be hearing much more from him. And we’ll also be hearing more about the struggle for Black civil rights, as that’s a story, much like Dylan’s, that continues to this day.

Episode one hundred and nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Blowin' in the Wind", Peter, Paul and Mary, Bob Dylan, the UK folk scene and the civil rights movement. Those of you who get angry at me whenever I say anything that acknowledges the existence of racism may want to skip this one. 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 "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" by the Crystals. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode.   This compilation contains all Peter, Paul and Mary's hits. I have used *many* books for this episode, most of which I will also be using for future episodes on Dylan: The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk and Elijah Wald is the fascinating and funny autobiography of Dylan's mentor in his Greenwich Village period, including his interactions with Albert Grossman. Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan is a partial, highly inaccurate, but thoroughly readable autobiography. Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades. I've also used Robert Shelton's No Direction Home, which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan. Only one book exists on Peter, Paul, and Mary themselves, and it is a hideously overpriced coffee table book consisting mostly of photos, so I wouldn't bother with it.  Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World by Billy Bragg has some great information on the British folk scene of the fifties and sixties. And Singing From the Floor is an oral history of British folk clubs, including a chapter on Dylan's 1962 visit to London.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   Today we're going to look at the first manufactured pop band we will see in this story, but not the last -- a group cynically put together by a manager to try and cash in on a fad, but one who were important enough that in a small way they helped to change history. We're going to look at the March on Washington and the civil rights movement, at Bob Dylan blossoming into a songwriter and the English folk revival, and at "Blowin' in the Wind" by Peter, Paul, and Mary: [Excerpt: Peter, Paul and Mary, "Blowin' in the Wind"] Albert Grossman was an unusual figure in the world of folk music. The folk revival had started out as an idealistic movement, mostly centred on Pete Seeger, and outside a few ultra-commercial acts like the Kingston Trio, most of the people involved were either doing it for the love of the music, or as a means of advancing their political goals. No doubt many of the performers on the burgeoning folk circuit were also quite keen to make money -- there are very few musicians who don't like being able to eat and have a home to live in -- but very few of the people involved were primarily motivated by increasing their income. Grossman was a different matter. He was a businessman, and he was interested in money more than anything else -- and for that he was despised by many of the people in the Greenwich Village folk scene. But he was, nonetheless, someone who was interested in making money *from folk music* specifically. And in the late fifties and early sixties this was less of a strange idea than it might have seemed. We talked back in the episode on "Drugstore Rock and Roll" about how rock and roll music was starting to be seen as the music of the teenager, and how "teenager" was, for the first time, becoming a marketing category into which people could be segmented. But the thing about music that's aimed at a particular age group is that once you're out of that age group you are no longer the target audience for that music. Someone who was sixteen in 1956 was twenty in 1960, and people in their twenties don't necessarily want to be listening to music aimed at teenagers. But at the same time, those people didn't want to listen to the music that their parents were listening to.  There's no switch that gets flipped on your twentieth birthday that means that you suddenly no longer like Little Richard but instead like Rosemary Clooney. So there was a gap in the market, for music that was more adult than rock and roll was perceived as being, but which still set itself apart from the pop music that was listened to by people in their thirties and forties. And in the late fifties and early sixties, that gap seemed to be filled by a commercialised version of the folk revival.  In particular, Harry Belafonte had a huge run of massive hit albums with collections of folk, calypso, and blues songs, presented in a way that was acceptable to an older, more settled audience while still preserving some of the rawness of the originals, like his version of Lead Belly's "Midnight Special", recorded in 1962 with a young Bob Dylan on harmonica: [Excerpt: Harry Belafonte, "Midnight Special"] Meanwhile, the Kingston Trio had been having huge hits with cleaned-up versions of old folk ballads like "Tom Dooley": [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "Tom Dooley"] So Grossman believed that there was a real market out there for something that was as clean and bright and friendly as the Kingston Trio, but with just a tiny hint of the bohemian Greenwich Village atmosphere to go with it. Something that wouldn't scare TV people and DJs, but which might seem just the tiniest bit more radical than the Kingston Trio did. Something mass-produced, but which seemed more authentic. So Grossman decided to put together what we would now call a manufactured pop group. It would be a bit like the Kingston Trio, but ever so slightly more political, and rather than being three men, it would be two men and a woman. Grossman had very particular ideas about what he wanted -- he wanted a waifish, beautiful woman at the centre of the group, he wanted a man who brought a sense of folk authenticity, and he wanted someone who could add a comedy element to the performances, to lighten them.  For the woman, he chose Mary Travers, who had been around the folk scene for several years at this point, starting out with a group called the Song Swappers, who had recorded an album of union songs with Pete Seeger back in 1955: [Excerpt: Pete Seeger and the Song Swappers, "Solidarity Forever"] Travers was chosen in part because of her relative shyness -- she had never wanted to be a professional singer, and her introverted nature made her perfect for the image Grossman wanted -- an image that was carefully cultivated, to the point that when the group were rehearsing in Florida, Grossman insisted Travers stay inside so she wouldn't get a tan and spoil her image. As the authentic male folk singer, Grossman chose Peter Yarrow, who was the highest profile of the three, as he had performed as a solo artist for a number of years and had appeared on TV and at the Newport Folk Festival, though he had not yet recorded. And for the comedy element, he chose Noel Stookey, who regularly performed as a comedian around Greenwich Village -- in the group's very slim autobiography, Stookey compares himself to two other comedians on that circuit, Bill Cosby and Woody Allen, comparisons that were a much better look in 2009 when the book was published than they are today. Grossman had originally wanted Dave Van Ronk to be the low harmony singer, rather than Stookey, but Van Ronk turned him down flat, wanting no part of a Greenwich Village Kingston Trio, though he later said he sometimes looked at his bank account rather wistfully. The group's name was, apparently, inspired by a line in the old folk song "I Was Born About 10,000 Years Ago", which was recorded by many people, but most famously by Elvis Presley in the 1970s: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, "I Was Born About 10,000 Years Ago"] The "Peter, Paul, and Moses" from that song became Peter, Paul and Mary -- Stookey started going by his middle name, Paul, on stage, in order to fit the group name, though he still uses Noel in his daily life. While Peter, Paul, and Mary were the front people of the group, there were several other people who were involved in the creative process -- the group used a regular bass player, Bill Lee, the father of the filmmaker Spike Lee, who played on all their recordings, as well as many other recordings from Greenwich Village folk musicians. They also had, as their musical director, a man named Milt Okun who came up with their arrangements and helped them choose and shape the material. Grossman shaped this team into a formidable commercial force. Almost everyone who talks about Grossman compares him to Colonel Tom Parker, and the comparison is a reasonable one. Grossman was extremely good at making money for his acts, so long as a big chunk of the money came to him. There's a story about him signing Odetta, one of the great folk artists of the period, and telling her "you can stay with your current manager, and make a hundred thousand dollars this year, and he'll take twenty percent, or you can come with me, and make a quarter of a million dollars, but I'll take fifty percent". That was the attitude that Grossman took to everyone. He cut himself in to every contract, salami-slicing his artists' royalties at each stage. But it can't be denied that his commercial instincts were sound. Peter, Paul, and Mary's first album was a huge success. The second single from the album, their version of the old Weavers song "If I Had a Hammer", written by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays, went to number ten on the pop charts: [Excerpt: Peter, Paul and Mary, "If I Had a Hammer"] And the album itself went to number one and eventually went double-platinum -- a remarkable feat for a collection of songs that, however prettily arranged, contained a fairly uncompromising selection of music from the folk scene, with songs by Seeger, Dave van Ronk, and Rev. Gary Davis mixing with traditional songs like "This Train" and originals by Stookey and Yarrow. Their second album was less successful at first, with its first two singles flopping. But the third, a pretty children's song by Yarrow and his friend Leonard Lipton, went to number two on the pop charts and number one on the Adult Contemporary charts: [Excerpt: Peter, Paul, and Mary, "Puff the Magic Dragon"] Incidentally, Leonard Lipton, who wrote that lyric, became independently wealthy from the royalties from the song, and used the leisure that gave him to pursue his passion of inventing 3D projection systems, which eventually made him an even wealthier man -- if you've seen a 3D film in the cinema in the last couple of decades, it's almost certainly been using the systems Lipton invented. So Peter, Paul, and Mary were big stars, and having big hits. And Albert Grossman was constantly on the lookout for more material for them. And eventually he found it, and the song that was to make both him, his group, and its writer, very, very rich, in the pages of Broadside magazine. When we left Bob Dylan, he was still primarily a performer, and not really known for his songwriting, but he had already written a handful of songs, and he was being drawn into the more political side of the folk scene. In large part this was because of his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, with whom Dylan was very deeply in love, and who was a very political person indeed. Dylan had political views, but wasn't particularly driven by them -- Rotolo very much was, and encouraged him to write songs about politics. For much of early 1962, Dylan was being pulled in two directions at once -- he was writing songs inspired by Robert Johnson, and trying to adapt Johnson's style to fit himself, but at the same time he was writing songs like "The Death of Emmett Till", about the 1955 murder of a Black teenager which had galvanised the civil rights movement, and "The Ballad of Donald White", about a Black man on death row. Dylan would later be very dismissive of these attempts at topicality, saying "I realize now that my reasons and motives behind it were phony, I didn’t have to write it; I was bothered by many other things that I pretended I wasn’t bothered by, in order to write this song about Emmett Till, a person I never even knew". But at the time they got him a great deal of attention in the small US folk-music scene, when they were published in magazines like Broadside and Sing Out, which collected political songs. Most of these early songs are juvenilia, with a couple of exceptions like the rather marvellous anti-bomb song "Let Me Die in My Footsteps", but the song that changed everything for Dylan was a different matter.  "Blowin' in the Wind" was inspired by the melody of the old nineteenth century song "No More Auction Block", a song that is often described as a "spiritual", though in fact it's a purely secular song about slavery: [Excerpt: Odetta, "No More Auction Block"] That song had seen something of a revival in folk circles in the late fifties, especially because part of its melody had been incorporated into another song, "We Shall Overcome", which had become an anthem of the civil rights movement when it was revived and adapted by Pete Seeger: [Excerpt: Pete Seeger, "We Shall Overcome"] Dylan took this melody, with its associations with the fight for the rights of Black people, and came up with new lyrics, starting with the line "How many roads must a man walk down, before you call him a man?" He wrote two verses of the song -- the first and last verses -- in a short burst of inspiration, and a few weeks later came back to it and added another verse, the second, which incorporated allusions to the Biblical prophet Ezekiel, and which is notably less inspired than those earlier verses. In later decades, many people have looked at the lyrics to the song and seen it as the first of what would become a whole subgenre of non-protest protest songs -- they've seen the abstraction of "How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?" as being nice-sounding rhetoric that doesn't actually mean anything, in much the same way as something like, say, "Another Day in Paradise" or "Eve of Destruction", songs that make nonspecific complaints about nonspecific bad things. But while "Blowin' in the Wind" is a song that has multiple meanings and can be applied to multiple situations, as most good songs can, that line was, at the time in which it was written, a very concrete question. The civil rights movement was asking for many things -- for the right to vote, for an end to segregation, for an end to police brutality, but also for basic respect and acknowledgment of Black people's shared humanity. We've already heard in a couple of past episodes Big Bill Broonzy singing "When Do I Get to Be Called a Man?": [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "When Do I Get to Be Called a Man?"] Because at the time, it was normal for white people to refer to Black men as "boy". As Dr. Martin Luther King said in his "Letter From Birmingham Jail", one of the greatest pieces of writing of the twentieth century, a letter in large part about how white moderates were holding Black people back with demands to be "reasonable" and let things take their time: "when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society... when your first name becomes“ and here Dr. King uses a racial slur which I, as a white man, will not say, "and your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodyness”—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair." King's great letter was written in 1963, less than a year after Dylan was writing his song but before it became widely known. In the context of 1962, the demand to call a man a man was a very real political issue, not an aphorism that could go in a Hallmark card. Dylan recorded the song in June 1962, during the sessions for his second album, which at the time was going under the working title "Bob Dylan's Blues": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Blowin' in the Wind"] By the time he recorded it, two major changes had happened to him. The first was that Suze Rotolo had travelled to Spain for several months, leaving him bereft -- for the next few months, his songwriting took a turn towards songs about either longing for the return of a lost love, like "Tomorrow is a Long Time", one of his most romantic songs, or about how the protagonist doesn't even need his girlfriend anyway and she can leave if she likes, see if he cares, like "Don't Think Twice It's Alright". The other change was that Albert Grossman had become his manager, largely on the strength of "Blowin' in the Wind", which Grossman thought had huge potential. Grossman signed Dylan up, taking twenty percent of all his earnings -- including on the contract with Columbia Records Dylan already had -- and got him signed to a new publisher, Witmark Publishing, where the aptly-named Artie Mogull thought that "Blowin' in the Wind" could be marketed. Grossman took his twenty percent of Dylan's share of the songwriting money as his commission from Dylan -- and fifty percent of Witmark's share of the money as his commission from Witmark, meaning that Dylan was getting forty percent of the money for writing the songs, while Grossman was getting thirty-five percent. Grossman immediately got involved in the recording of Dylan's second album, and started having personality clashes with John Hammond. It was apparently Grossman who suggested that Dylan "go electric" for the first time, with the late-1962 single "Mixed-Up Confusion": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Mixed-Up Confusion"] Neither Hammond nor Dylan liked that record, and it seemed clear for the moment that the way forward for Dylan was to continue in an acoustic folk vein. Dylan was also starting to get inspired more by English folk music, and incorporate borrowings from English music into his songwriting. That's most apparent in "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall", written in September 1962. Dylan took the structure of that song from the old English ballad, "Lord Randall": [Excerpt: Ewan MacColl, "Lord Randall"] He reworked that structure into a song of apocalypse, again full of the Biblical imagery he'd tried in the second verse of  "Blowin' in the Wind", but this time more successfully incorporating it: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"] His interest in English folk music was to become more important in his songwriting in the following months, as Dylan was about to travel to the UK and encounter the British folk music scene. A TV director called Philip Saville had seen Dylan performing in New York, and had decided he would be perfect for the role of a poet in a TV play he was putting on, Madhouse in Castle Street, and got Dylan flown over to perform in it. Unfortunately, no-one seems to have told Dylan what would be involved in this, and he proved incapable of learning his lines or acting, so the show was rethought -- the role of the poet was given to David Warner, later to become one of Britain's most famous screen actors, and Dylan was cast in a new role as a singer called "Bobby", who had few or no lines but did get to sing a few songs, including "Blowin' in the Wind", which was the first time the song was heard by anyone outside of the New York folk scene. Dylan was in London for about a month, and while he was there he immersed himself in the British folk scene. This scene was in some ways modelled on the American scene, and had some of the same people involved, but it was very different. The initial spark for the British folk revival had come in the late 1940s, when A.L. Lloyd, a member of the Communist Party, had published a book of folk songs he'd collected, along with some Marxist analysis of how folk songs evolved. In the early fifties, Alan Lomax, then in the UK to escape McCarthyism, put Lloyd in touch with Ewan MacColl, a songwriter and performer from Manchester, who we heard earlier singing "Lord Randall". MacColl, like Lloyd, was a Communist, but the two also shared a passion for older folk songs, and they began recording and performing together, recording traditional songs like "The Handsome Cabin Boy": [Excerpt: Ewan MacColl and A.L. Lloyd, "The Handsome Cabin Boy"] MacColl and Lloyd latched on to the skiffle movement, and MacColl started his own club night, Ballads and Blues, which tried to push the skifflers in the direction of performing more music based in English traditional music. This had already been happening to an extent with things like the Vipers performing "Maggie May", a song about a sex worker in Liverpool: [Excerpt: The Vipers Skiffle Group, "Maggie May"] But this started to happen a lot more with MacColl's encouragement. At one point in 1956, there was even a TV show hosted by Lomax and featuring a band that included Lomax, MacColl, Jim Bray, the bass player from Chris Barber's band, Shirley Collins -- a folk singer who was also Lomax's partner -- and Peggy Seeger, who was Pete Seeger's sister and who had also entered into a romantic relationship with MacColl, whose most famous song, "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face", was written both about and for her: [Excerpt: Peggy Seeger, "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face"] It was Seeger who instigated what became the most notable feature at the Ballads and Blues club and its successor the Singer's Club. She'd burst out laughing when she saw Long John Baldry sing "Rock Island Line", because he was attempting to sing in an American accent. As someone who had actually known Lead Belly, she found British imitations of his singing ludicrous, and soon there was a policy at the clubs that people would only sing songs that were originally sung with their normal vowel sounds. So Seeger could only sing songs from the East Coast of the US, because she didn't have the Western vowels of a Woody Guthrie, while MacColl could sing English and Scottish songs, but nothing from Wales or Ireland. As the skiffle craze died down, it splintered into several linked scenes. We've already seen how in Liverpool and London it spawned guitar groups like the Shadows and the Beatles, while in London it also led to the electric blues scene. It also led to a folk scene that was very linked to the blues scene at first, but was separate from it, and which was far more political, centred around MacColl. That scene, like the US one, combined topical songs about political events from a far-left viewpoint with performances of traditional songs, but in the case of the British one these were mostly old sea shanties and sailors' songs, and the ancient Child Ballads, rather than Appalachian country music -- though a lot of the songs have similar roots.  And unlike the blues scene, the folk scene spread all over the country. There were clubs in Manchester, in Liverpool (run by the group the Spinners), in Bradford, in Hull (run by the Waterson family) and most other major British cities. The musicians who played these venues were often inspired by MacColl and Lloyd, but the younger generation of musicians often looked askance at what they saw as MacColl's dogmatic approach, preferring to just make good music rather than submit it to what they saw as MacColl's ideological purity test, even as they admired his musicianship and largely agreed with his politics. And one of these younger musicians was a guitarist named Martin Carthy, who was playing a club called the King and Queen on Goodge Street when he saw Bob Dylan walk in. He recognised Dylan from the cover of Sing Out! magazine, and invited him to get up on stage and do a few numbers. For the next few weeks, Carthy showed Dylan round the folk scene -- Dylan went down great at the venues where Carthy normally played, and at the Roundhouse, but flopped around the venues that were dominated by MacColl, as the people there seemed to think of Dylan as a sort of cut-rate Ramblin' Jack Elliot, as Elliot had been such a big part of the skiffle and folk scenes. Carthy also taught Dylan a number of English folk songs, including "Lord Franklin": [Excerpt: Martin Carthy, "Lord Franklin"] and "Scarborough Fair": [Excerpt: Martin Carthy, "Scarborough Fair"] Dylan immediately incorporated the music he'd learned from Carthy into his songwriting, basing "Bob Dylan's Dream" on "Lord Franklin", and even more closely basing "GIrl From the North Country" on "Scarborough Fair": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Girl From The North Country"] After his trip to London, Dylan went over to Europe to see if he could catch up with Suze, but she had already gone back to New York -- their letters to each other crossed in the post. On his return, they reunited at least for a while, and she posed with him for the photo for the cover of what was to be his second album.  Dylan had thought that album completed when he left for England, but he soon discovered that there were problems with the album -- the record label didn't want to release the comedy talking blues "Talking John Birch Society Paranoid Blues", because they thought it might upset the fascists in the John Birch Society. The same thing would later make sure that Dylan never played the Ed Sullivan Show, because when he was booked onto the show he insisted on playing that song, and so they cancelled the booking. In this case, though, it gave him an excuse to remove what he saw as the weaker songs on the album, including "Tomorrow is a Long Time", and replace them with four new songs, three of them inspired by traditional English folk songs -- "Bob Dylan's Dream",  "Girl From the North Country", and "Masters of War" which took its melody from the old folk song "Nottamun Town" popularised on the British folk circuit by an American singer, Jean Ritchie: [Excerpt: Jean Ritchie, "Nottamun Town"] These new recordings weren't produced by John Hammond, as the rest of the album was. Albert Grossman had been trying from the start to get total control over Dylan, and didn't want Hammond, who had been around before Grossman, involved in Dylan's career. Instead, a new producer named Tom Wilson was in charge. Wilson was a remarkable man, but seemed an odd fit for a left-wing folk album. He was one of the few Black producers working for a major label, though he'd started out as an indie producer. He was a Harvard economics graduate, and had been president of the Young Republicans during his time there -- he remained a conservative all his life -- but he was far from conservative in his musical tastes. When he'd left university, he'd borrowed nine hundred dollars and started his own record label, Transition, which had put out some of the best experimental jazz of the fifties, produced by Wilson, including the debut albums by Sun Ra: [Excerpt: Sun Ra, "Brainville"] and Cecil Taylor: [Excerpt: Cecil Taylor, "Bemsha Swing"] Wilson later described his first impressions of Dylan: "I didn’t even particularly like folk music. I’d been recording Sun Ra and Coltrane … I thought folk music was for the dumb guys. This guy played like the dumb guys, but then these words came out. I was flabbergasted." Wilson would soon play a big part in Dylan's career, but for now his job was just to get those last few tracks for the album recorded. In the end, the final recording session for Dylan's second album was more than a year after the first one, and it came out into a very different context from when he'd started recording it. Because while Dylan was putting the finishing touches on his second album, Peter Paul and Mary were working on their third, and they were encouraged by Grossman to record three Bob Dylan songs, since that way Grossman would make more money from them. Their version of "Blowin' in the Wind" came out as a single a few weeks after The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan came out, and sold 300,000 copies in the first week: [Excerpt: Peter, Paul, and Mary, "Blowin' in the Wind"] The record went to number two on the charts, and their followup, "Don't Think Twice it's Alright", another Dylan song, went top ten as well.  "Blowin' in the Wind" became an instant standard, and was especially picked up by Black performers, as it became a civil rights anthem. Mavis Staples of the Staple Singers said later that she was astonished that a white man could write a line like "How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?", saying "That's what my father experienced" -- and the Staple Singers recorded it, of course: [Excerpt: The Staple Singers, "Blowin' in the Wind"] as did Sam Cooke: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Blowin' in the Wind"] And Stevie Wonder: [Excerpt: Stevie Wonder, "Blowin' in the Wind"] But the song's most important performance came from Peter, Paul and Mary, performing it on a bill with Dylan, Odetta, Joan Baez, and Mahalia Jackson in August 1963, just as the song had started to descend the charts. Because those artists were the entertainment for the March on Washington, in which more than a quarter of a million people descended on Washington both to support President Kennedy's civil rights bill and to speak out and say that it wasn't going far enough. That was one of the great moments in American political history, full of incendiary speeches like the one by John Lewis: [Excerpt: John Lewis, March on Washington speech] But the most memorable moment at that march  came when Dr. King was giving his speech. Mahalia Jackson shouted out "Tell them about the dream, Martin", and King departed from his prepared words and instead improvised based on themes he'd used in other speeches previously, coming out with some of the most famous words ever spoken: [Excerpt: Martin Luther King, "I Have a Dream"] The civil rights movement was more than one moment, however inspiring, and white people like myself have a tendency to reduce it just to Dr. King, and to reduce Dr. King just to those words -- which is one reason why I quoted from Letter From Birmingham Jail earlier, as that is a much less safe and canonised piece of writing. But it's still true to say that if there is a single most important moment in the history of the post-war struggle for Black rights, it was that moment, and because of "Blowin' in the Wind", both Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary were minor parts of that event. After 1963, Peter, Paul and Mary quickly became passe with the British Invasion, only having two more top ten hits, one with a novelty song in 1967 and one with "Leaving on a Jet Plane" in 1969. They split up in 1970, and around that time Yarrow was arrested and convicted for a sexual offence involving a fourteen-year-old girl, though he was later pardoned by President Carter. The group reformed in 1978 and toured the nostalgia circuit until Mary's death in 2009. The other two still occasionally perform together, as Peter and Noel Paul. Bob Dylan, of course, went on to bigger things after "Blowin' in the Wind" suddenly made him into the voice of a generation -- a position he didn't ask for and didn't seem to want. We'll be hearing much more from him. And we'll also be hearing more about the struggle for Black civil rights, as that's a story, much like Dylan's, that continues to this day.

For our first episode of December, we talked with artist and vintage pencil collector Ali Serra about his work, and about how — and why — he finds cool, old pencils and accessories.Show Notes & LinksErasable PatreonAli Serra on EtsyMandalorianTed LassoBlackwing Volume 6Chronicle Books NotebookField Notes Snowy EveningChristmas VacationMayor of Macdougal StreetRamsey Lewis Trio Sound of ChristmasUncle FrankPaterson (again))Make a ZineColumboPiranesiPencil of the Week/NAME Collab postcardsPilgrim Soul NotebookBullet Journal Version 2.0Pencil Revolution Zine #10-11Pencil Revolution Sticker #1Linton Rancho 444Our GuestAli SerraErnest Theodore Vintage Pencils • Art • WoodworkingYour HostsJohnny  GamberPencil Revolution@pencilutionAndy WelfleWoodclinched@awelfleTim Wasem@TimWasem

  Episode ninety-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Song To Woody” by Bob Dylan, and at the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early sixties. 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 “Sherry” by the Four Seasons. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This might not be available in the US, due to the number of Woody Guthrie songs in a row. Dylan’s first album is in the public domain in Europe, so a variety of reissues of it exist. An interesting and cheap one is this, which pairs it (and a non-album single by Dylan) with two Carolyn Hester albums which give a snapshot of the Greenwich Village scene, on one of which Dylan plays harmonica. The Harry Smith Anthology is also now public domain, and can be freely downloaded from archive.org.  I have used *many* books for this episode, most of which I will also be using for future episodes on Dylan: The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk and Elijah Wald is the fascinating and funny autobiography of Dylan’s mentor in his Greenwich Village period. Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald is the definitive book on Robert Johnson. Information on Woody Guthrie comes from Ramblin’ Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie by Ed Cray. Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan is a partial, highly inaccurate, but thoroughly readable autobiography. Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades. I’ve also used Robert Shelton’s No Direction Home, which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   1962 is the year when the sixties really started, and in the next few episodes we will see the first proper appearances of several of the musicians who would go on to make the decade what it was. By two weeks from now, when we get to episode one hundred and the end of the second year of the podcast, the stage will be set for us to look at that most mythologised of decades. And so today, we’re going to take our first look at one of the most important of the sixties musicians, the only songwriter ever to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, a man who influenced every single performer and songwriter for at least the next decade, and whose work inspired a whole subgenre, albeit one he had little but contempt for. We’re going to look at his first album, and at a song he wrote to his greatest influence. And we’re also going to look at how his career intersected with someone we talked about way back in the very first episode of this podcast. Today we’re going to look at Bob Dylan, and at “Song to Woody”: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “Song to Woody”] This episode is going to be a little different from several of the other episodes we’ve had recently. At the time he made his first album, Dylan was not the accomplished artist he quickly became, but a minor performer whose first record only contained two original songs. But he was from a tradition that we’ve looked at only in passing before. We’ve barely looked at the American folk music tradition, and largely ignored the musicians who were major figures in it, because those figures only really enter into rock and roll in a real way starting with Dylan. So as part of this episode, we’re going to have very brief, capsule, looks at a number of other musicians we’ve not touched on before. I’ll only be giving enough background for these people so you can get a flavour of them — in future episodes when we look at the folk and folk-rock scenes, we’ll also fill in some more of the background of these artists. That also means this episode is going to run a little long, just because there’s a lot to get through. Bob Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in the Minnesota Iron Range, an area of the US that was just beginning a slow descent into poverty, as the country suddenly needed a lot less metal after the end of World War II. He was born in Duluth, but moved to Hibbing, a much smaller town, when he was very young. As a kid, he was fascinated with music that sounded a little odd. He was first captivated by Johnnie Ray — and incidentally, Clinton Heylin, in his biography of Dylan, thinks that this must be wrong, and “Dylan has surely mixed up his names” and must be thinking of Johnny Ace, because “Ray’s main period of chart success” was 1956-58. Heylin’s books are usually very, very well researched, but here he’s showing his parochialism. Johnnie Ray’s biggest *UK* hits were in 1956-8, but in the US his biggest hits came in 1951, and he had a string of hits in the very early fifties.  Ray’s hits, like “Cry”, were produced by Mitch Miller, and were on Columbia records: [Excerpt: Johnnie Ray, “Cry”] Shortly after his infatuation with Ray’s music, he fell for the music of Hank Williams in a big way, and became obsessed with Williams’ songwriting: [Excerpt: Hank Williams, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”] He also became a fan of another Hank, Hank Snow, the country singer who had been managed by Colonel Tom Parker, and through Snow he became aware of the songs of Jimmie Rodgers, who Snow frequently covered, and who Snow admired enough that Snow’s son was named Jimmie Rodgers Snow.  But he soon also became a big fan of rhythm and blues and rock and roll. He taught himself to play rudimentary piano in a Little Richard style, and his ambition, as quoted in his high school yearbook, was to join Little Richard’s band. He was enough of a fan of rock and roll music that he went to see Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper on the penultimate date of their ill-fated tour. He later claimed to have seen a halo over Holly’s head during the performance. His first brush with fame came indirectly as a result of that tour. A singer from Fargo, North Dakota, named Bobby Vee, was drafted in to cover for Holly at the show that Holly had been travelling to when he died. Vee sounded a little like Holly, if you didn’t listen too closely, and he had a minor local hit with a song called “Suzy Baby”: [Excerpt: Bobby Vee, “Suzy Baby”] Dylan joined Vee’s band for a short while under the stage name Elston Gunn, playing the piano, though he was apparently not very good (he could only play in C, according to some sources I’ve read), and he didn’t stay in Vee’s band very long. But while he was in Vee’s band, he would tell friends and relatives that he *was* Bobby Vee, and at least some people believed him. Vee would go on to have a career as one of the wave of Bobbies that swarmed all over American Bandstand in the late fifties and early sixties, with records like “Rubber Ball”: [Excerpt: Bobby Vee, “Rubber Ball”] While Dylan made his name with a very different kind of music, he would always argue that Vee deserved rather more respect than he usually got, and that there was some merit to his music. But it wasn’t until he went to university in Minneapolis that Robert Zimmerman became Bob Dylan, and changed everything about his life. As many people do when they go to university, he reinvented himself — he took on a new name, which has variously been quoted as having been inspired by Marshall Dillon from the TV series Gunsmoke and by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. He stopped studying, and devoted his time to music and chasing women. And he also took on a new musical style. The way he tells it, he had an epiphany in a record shop listening booth, listening to an album by the folk singer Odetta. Odetta was an astonishing singer who combined elements of folk, country, and blues with an opera-trained voice, and Dylan was probably listening to her first album, which was largely traditional folk songs, plus one song each by Lead Belly and Jimmie Rodgers: [Excerpt: Odetta, “Muleskinner Blues”] Dylan had soon sold his electric guitar and bought an acoustic, and he immediately learned all of Odetta’s repertoire and started performing her songs, and Lead Belly’s, with a friend, “Spider” John Koerner, who would later become a fairly well-known folk blues musician in his own right: [Excerpt: Ray, Koerner, and Glover, “Hangman”] And then, at a coffee-shop, he got talking with a friend of his, Flo Castner, and she invited him to come round to her brother’s apartment, which was nearby, because she thought he might be interested in some of the music her brother had. Dylan discovered two albums at Lyn Castner’s house that day that would change his life. The first, and the less important to him in the short term, is one we’ve talked about before — he heard the Spirituals to Swing album, the record of the 1938 Carnegie Hall concerts that we talked about back in the first few episodes of the podcast: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner & Pete Johnson, “It’s Alright, Baby”] That album impressed him, but it was the other record he heard that day that changed everything for him immediately. It was a collection of recordings by Woody Guthrie. Guthrie is someone we’ve only mentioned in passing so far, but he was pivotal in the development of American folk music in the 1940s, and in particular he was important in the politicisation of that music. In the 1930s, there wasn’t really a distinction made between country music and folk — that distinction is one that only really came later — and Guthrie had started out as a country singer, singing songs inspired by the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, and other 1920s greats. For most of his early twenties he’d bummed around Oklahoma and Texas doing odd jobs as a sign painter, psychic, faith healer, and whatever else he could pick up a little money for. But then in 1936 he’d travelled out to California in search of work. When there, he’d hooked up with a cousin, Jack Guthrie, who was a Western singer, performing the kind of Western Swing that would later become rockabilly. We don’t have any recordings of Jack from this early, but when you listen to him in the forties, you can hear the kind of hard-edged California Western Swing that would influence most of the white artists we looked at in the first year or so of the podcast: [Excerpt: Jack Guthrie, “Oakie Boogie”] Woody and Jack weren’t musically compatible — this was when country and western were seen as very, very different genres, rather than being lumped into one — but they worked together for a while. Jack was the lead singer and guitarist, and Woody was his comedy sidekick, backing vocalist, and harmonica player. They performed with a group called the Beverly Hillbillies and got their own radio show, The Oakie and Woody Show, but it wasn’t successful, and Jack decided to give up the show. Woody continued with a friend, Maxine Crissman, who performed as “Lefty Lou From Old Mizzou”. The Woody and Lefty act became hugely popular, but Lefty eventually also quit, due to her health failing, and while at the time she seems to have been regarded as the major talent in the duo, her leaving the act was indirectly the best thing that ever happened to Guthrie. The radio station they were performing on was owned by a fairly left-wing businessman who had connections with the radical left faction of the Democratic Party (and in California in the thirties that could be quite radical, somewhere close to today’s Democratic Socialists of America), and when Lefty quit the act, the owner of the station gave Guthrie another job — the owner also ran a left-wing newspaper, and since Guthrie was from Oklahoma, maybe he would be interested in writing some columns about the plight of the Okie migrants?  Guthrie went and spent time with those people, and his shock at the poverty they were living in and the discrimination they were suffering seems to have radicalised him. He started hanging round with members of the Communist Party, though he apparently never joined — he wasn’t all that interested in Marxist theory or the party line, he just wanted to take the side of the victims against the bullies, and he saw the Communists as doing that. He was, though, enough of a fellow traveller that when World War II started he took the initial Communist line of it being a capitalist’s fight that socialists should have no part of (a line which was held until Russia joined the war, at which point it became a crusade against the evils of fascism). His employer was a more resolute anti-fascist, and so Guthrie lost his newspaper job, and he decided to move across the country to New York, where he hooked up with a group of left-wing intellectuals and folk singers, centring on Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, and Lead Belly. It was this environment, centred in Almanac House in Greenwich Village, that spawned the Almanac Singers and later the Weavers, who we talked about a few episodes back. And Guthrie had been the most important of all of them. Guthrie was a folk performer — a big chunk of his repertoire was old songs like “Ida Red”, “Stackolee”, and “Who’s Going to Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?” – but he also wrote songs himself, taking the forms of old folk and country songs, and reworking the lyrics — and sometimes, but not always, the music — creating songs that dealt with events that were happening at the time. There were songs about famous outlaws, recast as Robin Hood type figures: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “Pretty Boy Floyd”] There were talking blues with comedy lyrics: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “Talking Fishing Blues”] There were the famous Dust Bowl Ballads, about the dust storms that had caused so much destruction and hardship in the west: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “The Great Dust Storm”] And of course, there was “This Land is Your Land”, a radical song about how private property is immoral and unnatural, which has been taken up as an anthem by people who would despise everything that Guthrie stood for: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “This Land is Your Land”] It’s not certain which records by Guthrie Dylan heard that day — he talks about it in his autobiography, but the songs he talks about weren’t ones that were on the same album, and he seems to just be naming a handful of Guthrie’s songs. What is certain is that Dylan reacted to this music in a visceral way. He decided that he had to *become* Woody Guthrie, and took on Guthrie’s playing and singing style, even his accent. However, he soon modulated that slightly, when a friend told him that he might as well give up — Ramblin’ Jack Elliot was already doing the Guthrie-imitation thing. Elliot, like Dylan, was a middle-class Jewish man who had reinvented himself as a Woody Guthrie copy — in this case, Elliot Adnopoz, the son of a surgeon, had become Ramblin’ Jack the singing cowboy, and had been an apprentice of Guthrie, living with him and learning everything from him, before going over to Britain, where his status as an actual authentic American had meant he was one of the major figures in the British folk scene and the related skiffle scene. Alan Lomax, who had moved to the UK temporarily to escape the anti-Communist witch hunts, had got Elliot a contract with Topic Records, a folk label that had started out as part of the Workers’ Music Association, which as you can probably tell from the name was affiliated with the Communist Party of Great Britain. There he’d recorded an album of Guthrie songs, which Dylan’s acquaintance played for him: [Excerpt: Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, “1913 Massacre”] Dylan was shocked that there was someone out there doing the same thing, but then he just took on aspects of Elliot’s persona as well as Guthrie’s. He was going to be the next Woody Guthrie, and that meant inhabiting his persona utterly, and giving his whole repertoire over to Guthrie songs. He was also, though, making tentative efforts at writing his own songs, too. One which we only have as a lyric was written to a girlfriend, and was set to the same tune we just heard — Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre”. The lyrics were things like “Hey, hey Bonny, I’m singing to you now/The song I’m singing is the best I know how” Incidentally, the woman that was written for is yet another person in the story who now has a different name — she became a moderately successful actor, appearing in episodes of Star Trek and Gunsmoke, and changed her name to Jahanara Romney shortly after her marriage to the hippie peace activist Wavy Gravy (which isn’t Mr. Gravy’s birth name either). Their son, whose birth name was Howdy Do-Good Gravy Tomahawk Truckstop Romney, also changed his name later on, you’ll be unsurprised to hear. Dylan by this point was feeling as constrained by the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul as he had earlier by the small town Hibbing. In January 1961, he decided he was going to go to New York, and while he was there he was going to go and meet Woody Guthrie in person. Guthrie was, by this time, severely ill — he had Huntington’s disease, a truly awful genetic disorder that had also killed his mother. Huntington’s causes dementia, spasmodic movements, a loss of control of the body, and a ton of other mental and physical symptoms. Guthrie had been in a psychiatric hospital since 1956, and was only let out every Sunday to see family at a friend’s house.  Bob Dylan quickly became friendly with Guthrie, visiting him regularly in the hospital to play Guthrie’s own songs for him, and occasionally joining him on the family visits on Sundays. He only spent a few months doing this — Dylan has always been someone who moved on quickly, and Guthrie also moved towards the end of 1961, to a new hospital closer to his family, but these visits had a profound effect on the young man. When not visiting Guthrie, Dylan was spending his time in Greenwich Village, the Bohemian centre of New York. The Village at that time was a hotbed of artists and radicals, with people like the poet Allen Ginsberg, the street musician Moondog, and Tiny Tim, a ukulele player who sang Rudy Vallee songs in falsetto, all part of the scene. It was also the centre of what was becoming the second great folk revival. That revival had been started in 1952, when the most important bootleg ever was released, Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean”] Harry Smith was a record collector, experimental filmmaker, and follower of the occultist Aleister Crowley. His greatest work seems at least in part to have been created as a magickal work, with album covers designed by himself full of esoteric symbolism. Smith had a huge collection of old 78 records — all of them things that had been issued commercially in the late 1920s and early thirties, when the record industry had been in a temporary boom before the depression. Many of these records had been very popular in the twenties, but by 1952 even the most popular acts, like Blind Lemon Jefferson or the Carter Family, were largely forgotten. So Smith and Moe Asch, the owner of Folkways Records, took advantage of the new medium, the long-playing album, and put together a six-album set of these recordings, not bothering with trivialities like copyright even though, again, most of these had been recorded for major labels only twenty or so years earlier — but at this time there was not really such a thing as a market for back catalogue, and none of the record labels involved seem to have protested. Smith’s collection was an idiosyncratic one, based around his own tastes. It ran the gamut from hard blues: [Excerpt: Joe Williams’ Washboard Blues Singers, “Baby Please Don’t Go”] To the Carter Family’s country recordings of old ballads that date back centuries: [Excerpt: The Carter Family, “Black Jack Davey”] To gospel: [Excerpt: Sister Clara Hudmon, “Stand By Me”] But put together in one place, these records suggested the existence of a uniquely American roots music tradition, one that encompassed all these genres, and Smith’s Anthology became the favourite music of the same type of people who in the UK around the same time were becoming skifflers — many of them radical leftists who had been part of the US equivalent of the trad jazz movement (who were known as “mouldy figs”) and were attracted by the idea of an authentic music of the working man. The Harry Smith Anthology became the core repertoire for every American folk musician of the fifties, the seed around which the whole movement crystallised. Every folkie knew every single song on those records. Those folkies had started playing at coffee shops in Greenwich Village, places that were known as basket houses, because they didn’t charge for entry or pay the artists, but the performers could pass a basket and split whatever the audience decided to donate.  Originally, the folk musicians were not especially popular, and in fact they were booked for that reason. The main entertainment for those coffee shops was poetry, and the audience for poetry would mostly buy a single coffee and make it last all night. The folkies were booked to come on between the poets and play a few songs to make the audience clear out to make room for a new audience to come and buy new coffees. However, some of the people got good enough that they actually started to get their own audiences, and within a short time the roles were reversed, with the poets coming on to clear out the folk audience. Dylan’s first gigs were on this circuit, playing on bills put together by Fred Neil, a musician who was at this point mostly playing blues songs but who within a few years would write some of the great classics of the sixties singer-songwriter genre: [Excerpt: Fred Neil, “Everybody’s Talkin'”] By the time Dylan hit the scene, there were quite a few very good musicians in the Village, and the folk scene had grown to the point that there were multiple factions. There were the Stalinists, who had coalesced around Pete Seeger, the elder statesman of the scene, and who played a mixture of summer-camp singalong music and topical songs about news events. There were the Zionists, who were singing things like “Hava Nagilah”. There were bluegrass players, and there were the two groups that most attracted Dylan — those who sang old folk ballads, and those who sang the blues. Those latter two groups tended to cluster together, because they were smaller than the other groups, and also because of their own political views — while all of the scene were leftists, the blues and ballad singers tended either to be vaguely apolitical, or to be anarchists and Trotskyites rather than Stalinists. But they had a deeper philosophical disagreement with the Stalinists — Seeger’s camp thought that the quality of a song was secondary to the social good it could do, while the blues and ballad singers held that the important thing was the music, and any political or social good was a nice byproduct. There was a huge amount of infighting between these small groups — the narcissism of small differences — but there was one place they would all hang out. The Folklore Centre was a record and bookshop owned by a man named Izzy Young, and it was where you would go to buy every new book, to buy and sell copies of the zines that were published, and to hang out and find out who the new musicians on the scene were.  And it was at the Folklore Centre that Dylan met Dave Van Ronk: [Excerpt: Dave Van Ronk, “Cocaine Blues”] Van Ronk was the most important musician in the blues and ballads group of folkies, and was politically an anarchist who, through his connection with the Schachtmanites (a fringe-left group who were more Trotskyite than the Trotskyites, and whose views sometimes shaded into anarchism) was becoming converted to Marxism. A physically massive man, he’d started out as a traditional jazz guitarist and banjo player, but had slowly moved on into the folk side of things through his love of blues singers like Bessie Smith and folk-blues artists like Lead Belly. Van Ronk had learned a great deal from Rev. Gary Davis, a blind gospel-blues singer whose technique Van Ronk had studied: [Excerpt: Rev. Gary Davis, “Death Don’t Have No Mercy”] Van Ronk was one of the few people on the Village scene who was a native New Yorker, though he was from Queens rather than the Village, and he was someone who had already made a few records that Dylan had heard, mostly of the standard repertoire: [Excerpt: Dave Van Ronk, “See That My Grave is Kept Clean”] Dylan consciously sought him out as the person to imitate on the scene, and he was soon regularly sleeping on Van Ronk’s couch and being managed for a brief time by Van Ronk’s wife. Once again, Dylan was learning everything he could from the people he was around — but he had a much bigger ambition than anyone else on the scene. A lot of the people on that scene have been very bitter over the years about Dylan, but Van Ronk, who did more for Dylan than anyone else on the scene, never really was — the two stopped being close once he was no more use to Dylan, as so often happened, but they remained friendly, because Van Ronk was secure enough in himself and his own abilities that he didn’t need the validation of being important to the big star. Van Ronk was an important mentor to him for a crucial period of six months or so, and Dylan always acknowledged that, just as Van Ronk always acknowledged Dylan’s talent. And that talent, at least at first, was a performing talent rather than a songwriting one. Dylan was writing songs by now, but hardly any, and when he did perform them, he was not acknowledging them. His first truly successful song, a song about nuclear war, “Let Me Die in my Footsteps”, he would introduce as a Weavers song: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “Let Me Die in my Footsteps”] For the most part, his repertoire was still only Woody Guthrie songs, but people were amazed by his personal charisma, his humour — one comparison you see time and again when people talk about his early performances is Charlie Chaplin — and his singing. There are so many jokes about Dylan’s vocals that this sounds like a joke, but among the folk crowd, his phrasing in particular — as influenced by the R&B records he grew up listening to as by Guthrie — was considered utterly astonishing. Dylan started publishing some of his song lyrics in Broadside, a magazine for new topical songs, and in other magazines like Sing Out! These were associated with the Communist side of the folk movement, and Dylan had a foot in both camps through his association with Guthrie and Guthrie’s friends. Through these people he got to know Suze Rotolo, a volunteer with the Congress of Racial Equality, who became his girlfriend, and her sister Carla, who was the assistant to Alan Lomax, who was now back from the UK, and the Rotolos played a part in Dylan’s big breakthrough.  The timeline that follows is a bit confused, but Carla Rotolo recorded some of the best Village folk singers, and wrote to John Hammond about the tape, mentioning Dylan in particular. At the same time, Hammond’s son John Hammond Jr, another musician on the circuit and a friend of Dylan’s, apparently mentioned Dylan to his father. Dylan was also working on Robert Shelton, the folk critic of the New York Times, who eventually gave Dylan a massive rave review for a support slot he’d played at Gerde’s Folk City. And the same day that review came out, eight days after Carla Rotolo’s letter, Dylan was in the recording studio with the folk singer Carolyn Hester, playing harmonica on a few of her tracks, and Hammond was the producer: [Excerpt: Carolyn Hester, “I’ll Fly Away”] Hammond had, of course, organised the Spirituals to Swing concerts which had influenced Dylan. And not only that, he’d been the person to discover Billie Holiday, and Count Basie. And Charlie Christian. He was now working for Columbia Records, where he’d just produced the first secular records for a promising new gospel singer who had decided to turn pop, named Aretha Franklin: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “Today I Sing the Blues”] So Hammond was an important figure in many ways, and he had a lot of latitude at Columbia Records. He decided to sign Dylan, and even though Mitch Miller, Columbia’s head of A&R at the time, had no clue what Hammond saw in Dylan, Hammond’s track record was good enough that he was allowed to get on with it and put out an album. Hammond also gave Dylan an album to take home and listen to, a record which hadn’t come out yet, a reissue of some old blues records called “King of the Delta Blues Singers” by Robert Johnson: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, “Crossroads Blues”] There has been a hell of a lot of mythology about Johnson over the years, so much so that it’s almost impossible to give anyone who’s heard of him at all an accurate impression of Johnson’s place in music history. One question I have been asked repeatedly since I started this podcast is “How come you didn’t start with Robert Johnson?”, and if you don’t know about him, you’ll get an idea of his general perception among music fans from the fact that I recently watched an episode of a science fiction TV series where our heroes had to go back in time to stop the villains from preventing Johnson from making his recordings, because by doing that they could stop rock and roll from ever existing. There’s a popular perception that Johnson was the most important blues musician of his generation, and that he was hugely influential on the development of blues and R&B, and it’s simply false. He *was* a truly great musician, and he *was* hugely influential — but he was influential on white musicians in the sixties, not black musicians in the thirties, forties, and fifties. In his lifetime, his best selling records sold around five thousand copies, which to put it in perspective is about the same number of people who’ve listened to some of my more popular podcast episodes. Johnson’s biographer Elijah Wald — a man who, like I do, has a huge respect for Johnson’s musicianship, has said “knowing about Johnson and Muddy Waters but not about Leroy Carr or Dinah Washington [is] like knowing about, say, the Sir Douglas Quintet but not knowing about the Beatles.” I’d agree, except that the Sir Douglas Quintet were much, much, bigger in the sixties than Robert Johnson was in the thirties. Johnson’s reputation comes entirely from that album that Hammond had handed Dylan. Hammond had been one of the tiny number of people who had actually listened to Johnson at the time he was performing. Indeed, Hammond had wanted to get Johnson to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts, only to find that Johnson had died only a short time earlier — they’d got Big Bill Broonzy to play in his place, and played a couple of Johnson’s records from the stage. That had, in fact, kickstarted Broonzy’s later second career as a folk-blues musician playing for largely white audiences, rather than as a proto-Chicago-blues performer playing for Black ones. Hammond’s friend Alan Lomax had also been a fan of Johnson — he’d gone to Mississippi later, to try to record Johnson, also without having realised that Johnson had died. But far from Johnson being the single most important blues musician of the thirties, as he is now portrayed in popular culture, if you’d asked most blues musicians or listeners about Robert Johnson in the twenty-three years between his death and the King of the Delta Blues Singers album coming out, most of them would have looked at you blankly, or maybe asked if you meant Lonnie Johnson, the much more famous musician who was a big inspiration for Robert. When King of the Delta Blues Singers came out, it changed all that, and made Robert Johnson into a totemic figure among white blues fans, and we’ll see over the next year or two a large number of very important musicians who took inspiration from him — and deservedly so. While the myth of Robert Johnson has almost no connection to the real man, his music demonstrated a remarkable musical mind — he was a versatile, skilled guitarist and arranger, and someone whose musical palette was far wider than his recorded legacy suggests — Ramblin’ Johnny Shines, who travelled with Johnson for a time, describes him as particularly enjoying playing songs like “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby” and Jimmie Rodgers songs, and polkas, calling Johnson “a polka hound, man”. And even though in his handful of recording sessions he was asked only to play blues, you can still hear elements of that: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, “They’re Red Hot”] But the music wasn’t the main thing that grabbed Dylan. Dylan played the album for Dave Van Ronk, who was unimpressed — musically, Johnson just didn’t seem very original to Van Ronk, who played Dylan records by Skip James, Leroy Carr, and others, showing Dylan where Johnson had picked up most of his musical ideas. And Dylan had to agree with him that Johnson didn’t sound particularly original in that context — but he also didn’t care, reasoning that many of the Woody Guthrie songs he loved were rewrites of old Carter Family songs, so if Johnson was rewriting Leroy Carr songs that was fair enough. What got to Dylan was Johnson’s performance style, but also his ability with words. Johnson had a very sparse, economical, lyrical style which connected with Dylan on a primordial level. Most of those who became fans of Johnson following the release of King of the Delta Blues Singers saw Johnson as an exotic and scary figure — the myth commonly told about him is that he sold his soul at a crossroads to the Devil in return for the ability to play the guitar, though that’s a myth that was originally told about a different Mississippi blues man called Tommy Johnson, and there’s no evidence that anyone thought that of him at the time — and so these later fans see his music as being haunted. Dylan instead seems to see Johnson as someone very like himself — in his autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan talks about Johnson being a bothersome kid who played harmonica, who was later taught a bit of guitar and then learned the rest of his music from records, rather than from live performers. Dylan’s version of Johnson is closer to the reality, as far as we know it, than the Johnson of legend is, and Dylan seems to have been delighted when he found out much later that the name of the musician who taught Johnson to play guitar was Ike Zimmerman. Dylan immediately tried to incorporate Johnson’s style into his own songwriting, and we’ll see the effects of that in future episodes. But that songwriting wouldn’t be seen much on his debut album. And nor would his Woody Guthrie repertoire. Instead, Dylan performed a set of traditional ballads and blues numbers, most of which he never performed live normally, and at least half of which were arrangements that Dylan copied wholesale from Dave Van Ronk. [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “See That My Grave is Kept Clean”] The album was recorded quickly, in a couple of days. Hammond found Dylan incredibly difficult to work with, saying he had appalling mic technique, and for many of the songs Dylan refused to do a second take. There were only two originals on the album. One, “Talkin’ New York”, was a comedy talking blues about his early time in New York, very much in the style of Woody Guthrie’s talking blues songs. The other, “Song To Woody”, was a rewrite of his earlier “Song For Bonny”, which was itself a rewrite of Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre”. The song is a touching one, Dylan paying tribute to his single biggest influence: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “Song to Woody”] Dylan was moving on, and he knew he was moving on, but he had to say goodbye. Dylan’s first album was not a success, and he became known within Columbia Records as “Hammond’s Folly”, but nor did it lose money, since it was recorded so quickly. It’s a record that Dylan and Hammond both later spoke poorly of, but it’s one I rather like, and one of the best things to come out of the Greenwich Village folk scene. But by the time it came out, Dylan’s artistic heart was already elsewhere, and when we come back to him in a couple of months, we’ll be seeing someone who had completely reinvented himself.  

  Episode ninety-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Song To Woody" by Bob Dylan, and at the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early sixties. 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 "Sherry" by the Four Seasons. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This might not be available in the US, due to the number of Woody Guthrie songs in a row. Dylan's first album is in the public domain in Europe, so a variety of reissues of it exist. An interesting and cheap one is this, which pairs it (and a non-album single by Dylan) with two Carolyn Hester albums which give a snapshot of the Greenwich Village scene, on one of which Dylan plays harmonica. The Harry Smith Anthology is also now public domain, and can be freely downloaded from archive.org.  I have used *many* books for this episode, most of which I will also be using for future episodes on Dylan: The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk and Elijah Wald is the fascinating and funny autobiography of Dylan's mentor in his Greenwich Village period. Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald is the definitive book on Robert Johnson. Information on Woody Guthrie comes from Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie by Ed Cray. Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan is a partial, highly inaccurate, but thoroughly readable autobiography. Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades. I've also used Robert Shelton's No Direction Home, which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   1962 is the year when the sixties really started, and in the next few episodes we will see the first proper appearances of several of the musicians who would go on to make the decade what it was. By two weeks from now, when we get to episode one hundred and the end of the second year of the podcast, the stage will be set for us to look at that most mythologised of decades. And so today, we're going to take our first look at one of the most important of the sixties musicians, the only songwriter ever to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, a man who influenced every single performer and songwriter for at least the next decade, and whose work inspired a whole subgenre, albeit one he had little but contempt for. We're going to look at his first album, and at a song he wrote to his greatest influence. And we're also going to look at how his career intersected with someone we talked about way back in the very first episode of this podcast. Today we're going to look at Bob Dylan, and at "Song to Woody": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Song to Woody"] This episode is going to be a little different from several of the other episodes we've had recently. At the time he made his first album, Dylan was not the accomplished artist he quickly became, but a minor performer whose first record only contained two original songs. But he was from a tradition that we've looked at only in passing before. We've barely looked at the American folk music tradition, and largely ignored the musicians who were major figures in it, because those figures only really enter into rock and roll in a real way starting with Dylan. So as part of this episode, we're going to have very brief, capsule, looks at a number of other musicians we've not touched on before. I'll only be giving enough background for these people so you can get a flavour of them -- in future episodes when we look at the folk and folk-rock scenes, we'll also fill in some more of the background of these artists. That also means this episode is going to run a little long, just because there's a lot to get through. Bob Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in the Minnesota Iron Range, an area of the US that was just beginning a slow descent into poverty, as the country suddenly needed a lot less metal after the end of World War II. He was born in Duluth, but moved to Hibbing, a much smaller town, when he was very young. As a kid, he was fascinated with music that sounded a little odd. He was first captivated by Johnnie Ray -- and incidentally, Clinton Heylin, in his biography of Dylan, thinks that this must be wrong, and "Dylan has surely mixed up his names" and must be thinking of Johnny Ace, because "Ray’s main period of chart success" was 1956-58. Heylin's books are usually very, very well researched, but here he's showing his parochialism. Johnnie Ray's biggest *UK* hits were in 1956-8, but in the US his biggest hits came in 1951, and he had a string of hits in the very early fifties.  Ray's hits, like "Cry", were produced by Mitch Miller, and were on Columbia records: [Excerpt: Johnnie Ray, "Cry"] Shortly after his infatuation with Ray's music, he fell for the music of Hank Williams in a big way, and became obsessed with Williams' songwriting: [Excerpt: Hank Williams, "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry"] He also became a fan of another Hank, Hank Snow, the country singer who had been managed by Colonel Tom Parker, and through Snow he became aware of the songs of Jimmie Rodgers, who Snow frequently covered, and who Snow admired enough that Snow's son was named Jimmie Rodgers Snow.  But he soon also became a big fan of rhythm and blues and rock and roll. He taught himself to play rudimentary piano in a Little Richard style, and his ambition, as quoted in his high school yearbook, was to join Little Richard's band. He was enough of a fan of rock and roll music that he went to see Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper on the penultimate date of their ill-fated tour. He later claimed to have seen a halo over Holly's head during the performance. His first brush with fame came indirectly as a result of that tour. A singer from Fargo, North Dakota, named Bobby Vee, was drafted in to cover for Holly at the show that Holly had been travelling to when he died. Vee sounded a little like Holly, if you didn't listen too closely, and he had a minor local hit with a song called "Suzy Baby": [Excerpt: Bobby Vee, "Suzy Baby"] Dylan joined Vee's band for a short while under the stage name Elston Gunn, playing the piano, though he was apparently not very good (he could only play in C, according to some sources I've read), and he didn't stay in Vee's band very long. But while he was in Vee's band, he would tell friends and relatives that he *was* Bobby Vee, and at least some people believed him. Vee would go on to have a career as one of the wave of Bobbies that swarmed all over American Bandstand in the late fifties and early sixties, with records like "Rubber Ball": [Excerpt: Bobby Vee, "Rubber Ball"] While Dylan made his name with a very different kind of music, he would always argue that Vee deserved rather more respect than he usually got, and that there was some merit to his music. But it wasn't until he went to university in Minneapolis that Robert Zimmerman became Bob Dylan, and changed everything about his life. As many people do when they go to university, he reinvented himself -- he took on a new name, which has variously been quoted as having been inspired by Marshall Dillon from the TV series Gunsmoke and by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. He stopped studying, and devoted his time to music and chasing women. And he also took on a new musical style. The way he tells it, he had an epiphany in a record shop listening booth, listening to an album by the folk singer Odetta. Odetta was an astonishing singer who combined elements of folk, country, and blues with an opera-trained voice, and Dylan was probably listening to her first album, which was largely traditional folk songs, plus one song each by Lead Belly and Jimmie Rodgers: [Excerpt: Odetta, "Muleskinner Blues"] Dylan had soon sold his electric guitar and bought an acoustic, and he immediately learned all of Odetta's repertoire and started performing her songs, and Lead Belly's, with a friend, "Spider" John Koerner, who would later become a fairly well-known folk blues musician in his own right: [Excerpt: Ray, Koerner, and Glover, "Hangman"] And then, at a coffee-shop, he got talking with a friend of his, Flo Castner, and she invited him to come round to her brother's apartment, which was nearby, because she thought he might be interested in some of the music her brother had. Dylan discovered two albums at Lyn Castner's house that day that would change his life. The first, and the less important to him in the short term, is one we've talked about before -- he heard the Spirituals to Swing album, the record of the 1938 Carnegie Hall concerts that we talked about back in the first few episodes of the podcast: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner & Pete Johnson, "It's Alright, Baby"] That album impressed him, but it was the other record he heard that day that changed everything for him immediately. It was a collection of recordings by Woody Guthrie. Guthrie is someone we've only mentioned in passing so far, but he was pivotal in the development of American folk music in the 1940s, and in particular he was important in the politicisation of that music. In the 1930s, there wasn't really a distinction made between country music and folk -- that distinction is one that only really came later -- and Guthrie had started out as a country singer, singing songs inspired by the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, and other 1920s greats. For most of his early twenties he'd bummed around Oklahoma and Texas doing odd jobs as a sign painter, psychic, faith healer, and whatever else he could pick up a little money for. But then in 1936 he'd travelled out to California in search of work. When there, he'd hooked up with a cousin, Jack Guthrie, who was a Western singer, performing the kind of Western Swing that would later become rockabilly. We don't have any recordings of Jack from this early, but when you listen to him in the forties, you can hear the kind of hard-edged California Western Swing that would influence most of the white artists we looked at in the first year or so of the podcast: [Excerpt: Jack Guthrie, "Oakie Boogie"] Woody and Jack weren't musically compatible -- this was when country and western were seen as very, very different genres, rather than being lumped into one -- but they worked together for a while. Jack was the lead singer and guitarist, and Woody was his comedy sidekick, backing vocalist, and harmonica player. They performed with a group called the Beverly Hillbillies and got their own radio show, The Oakie and Woody Show, but it wasn't successful, and Jack decided to give up the show. Woody continued with a friend, Maxine Crissman, who performed as "Lefty Lou From Old Mizzou". The Woody and Lefty act became hugely popular, but Lefty eventually also quit, due to her health failing, and while at the time she seems to have been regarded as the major talent in the duo, her leaving the act was indirectly the best thing that ever happened to Guthrie. The radio station they were performing on was owned by a fairly left-wing businessman who had connections with the radical left faction of the Democratic Party (and in California in the thirties that could be quite radical, somewhere close to today's Democratic Socialists of America), and when Lefty quit the act, the owner of the station gave Guthrie another job -- the owner also ran a left-wing newspaper, and since Guthrie was from Oklahoma, maybe he would be interested in writing some columns about the plight of the Okie migrants?  Guthrie went and spent time with those people, and his shock at the poverty they were living in and the discrimination they were suffering seems to have radicalised him. He started hanging round with members of the Communist Party, though he apparently never joined -- he wasn't all that interested in Marxist theory or the party line, he just wanted to take the side of the victims against the bullies, and he saw the Communists as doing that. He was, though, enough of a fellow traveller that when World War II started he took the initial Communist line of it being a capitalist's fight that socialists should have no part of (a line which was held until Russia joined the war, at which point it became a crusade against the evils of fascism). His employer was a more resolute anti-fascist, and so Guthrie lost his newspaper job, and he decided to move across the country to New York, where he hooked up with a group of left-wing intellectuals and folk singers, centring on Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, and Lead Belly. It was this environment, centred in Almanac House in Greenwich Village, that spawned the Almanac Singers and later the Weavers, who we talked about a few episodes back. And Guthrie had been the most important of all of them. Guthrie was a folk performer -- a big chunk of his repertoire was old songs like "Ida Red", "Stackolee", and "Who's Going to Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?" – but he also wrote songs himself, taking the forms of old folk and country songs, and reworking the lyrics -- and sometimes, but not always, the music -- creating songs that dealt with events that were happening at the time. There were songs about famous outlaws, recast as Robin Hood type figures: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, "Pretty Boy Floyd"] There were talking blues with comedy lyrics: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, "Talking Fishing Blues"] There were the famous Dust Bowl Ballads, about the dust storms that had caused so much destruction and hardship in the west: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, "The Great Dust Storm"] And of course, there was "This Land is Your Land", a radical song about how private property is immoral and unnatural, which has been taken up as an anthem by people who would despise everything that Guthrie stood for: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, "This Land is Your Land"] It's not certain which records by Guthrie Dylan heard that day -- he talks about it in his autobiography, but the songs he talks about weren't ones that were on the same album, and he seems to just be naming a handful of Guthrie's songs. What is certain is that Dylan reacted to this music in a visceral way. He decided that he had to *become* Woody Guthrie, and took on Guthrie's playing and singing style, even his accent. However, he soon modulated that slightly, when a friend told him that he might as well give up -- Ramblin' Jack Elliot was already doing the Guthrie-imitation thing. Elliot, like Dylan, was a middle-class Jewish man who had reinvented himself as a Woody Guthrie copy -- in this case, Elliot Adnopoz, the son of a surgeon, had become Ramblin' Jack the singing cowboy, and had been an apprentice of Guthrie, living with him and learning everything from him, before going over to Britain, where his status as an actual authentic American had meant he was one of the major figures in the British folk scene and the related skiffle scene. Alan Lomax, who had moved to the UK temporarily to escape the anti-Communist witch hunts, had got Elliot a contract with Topic Records, a folk label that had started out as part of the Workers' Music Association, which as you can probably tell from the name was affiliated with the Communist Party of Great Britain. There he'd recorded an album of Guthrie songs, which Dylan's acquaintance played for him: [Excerpt: Ramblin' Jack Elliot, "1913 Massacre"] Dylan was shocked that there was someone out there doing the same thing, but then he just took on aspects of Elliot's persona as well as Guthrie's. He was going to be the next Woody Guthrie, and that meant inhabiting his persona utterly, and giving his whole repertoire over to Guthrie songs. He was also, though, making tentative efforts at writing his own songs, too. One which we only have as a lyric was written to a girlfriend, and was set to the same tune we just heard -- Guthrie's "1913 Massacre". The lyrics were things like "Hey, hey Bonny, I’m singing to you now/The song I’m singing is the best I know how" Incidentally, the woman that was written for is yet another person in the story who now has a different name -- she became a moderately successful actor, appearing in episodes of Star Trek and Gunsmoke, and changed her name to Jahanara Romney shortly after her marriage to the hippie peace activist Wavy Gravy (which isn't Mr. Gravy's birth name either). Their son, whose birth name was Howdy Do-Good Gravy Tomahawk Truckstop Romney, also changed his name later on, you'll be unsurprised to hear. Dylan by this point was feeling as constrained by the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul as he had earlier by the small town Hibbing. In January 1961, he decided he was going to go to New York, and while he was there he was going to go and meet Woody Guthrie in person. Guthrie was, by this time, severely ill -- he had Huntington's disease, a truly awful genetic disorder that had also killed his mother. Huntington's causes dementia, spasmodic movements, a loss of control of the body, and a ton of other mental and physical symptoms. Guthrie had been in a psychiatric hospital since 1956, and was only let out every Sunday to see family at a friend's house.  Bob Dylan quickly became friendly with Guthrie, visiting him regularly in the hospital to play Guthrie's own songs for him, and occasionally joining him on the family visits on Sundays. He only spent a few months doing this -- Dylan has always been someone who moved on quickly, and Guthrie also moved towards the end of 1961, to a new hospital closer to his family, but these visits had a profound effect on the young man. When not visiting Guthrie, Dylan was spending his time in Greenwich Village, the Bohemian centre of New York. The Village at that time was a hotbed of artists and radicals, with people like the poet Allen Ginsberg, the street musician Moondog, and Tiny Tim, a ukulele player who sang Rudy Vallee songs in falsetto, all part of the scene. It was also the centre of what was becoming the second great folk revival. That revival had been started in 1952, when the most important bootleg ever was released, Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean"] Harry Smith was a record collector, experimental filmmaker, and follower of the occultist Aleister Crowley. His greatest work seems at least in part to have been created as a magickal work, with album covers designed by himself full of esoteric symbolism. Smith had a huge collection of old 78 records -- all of them things that had been issued commercially in the late 1920s and early thirties, when the record industry had been in a temporary boom before the depression. Many of these records had been very popular in the twenties, but by 1952 even the most popular acts, like Blind Lemon Jefferson or the Carter Family, were largely forgotten. So Smith and Moe Asch, the owner of Folkways Records, took advantage of the new medium, the long-playing album, and put together a six-album set of these recordings, not bothering with trivialities like copyright even though, again, most of these had been recorded for major labels only twenty or so years earlier -- but at this time there was not really such a thing as a market for back catalogue, and none of the record labels involved seem to have protested. Smith's collection was an idiosyncratic one, based around his own tastes. It ran the gamut from hard blues: [Excerpt: Joe Williams' Washboard Blues Singers, "Baby Please Don't Go"] To the Carter Family's country recordings of old ballads that date back centuries: [Excerpt: The Carter Family, "Black Jack Davey"] To gospel: [Excerpt: Sister Clara Hudmon, "Stand By Me"] But put together in one place, these records suggested the existence of a uniquely American roots music tradition, one that encompassed all these genres, and Smith's Anthology became the favourite music of the same type of people who in the UK around the same time were becoming skifflers -- many of them radical leftists who had been part of the US equivalent of the trad jazz movement (who were known as “mouldy figs”) and were attracted by the idea of an authentic music of the working man. The Harry Smith Anthology became the core repertoire for every American folk musician of the fifties, the seed around which the whole movement crystallised. Every folkie knew every single song on those records. Those folkies had started playing at coffee shops in Greenwich Village, places that were known as basket houses, because they didn't charge for entry or pay the artists, but the performers could pass a basket and split whatever the audience decided to donate.  Originally, the folk musicians were not especially popular, and in fact they were booked for that reason. The main entertainment for those coffee shops was poetry, and the audience for poetry would mostly buy a single coffee and make it last all night. The folkies were booked to come on between the poets and play a few songs to make the audience clear out to make room for a new audience to come and buy new coffees. However, some of the people got good enough that they actually started to get their own audiences, and within a short time the roles were reversed, with the poets coming on to clear out the folk audience. Dylan's first gigs were on this circuit, playing on bills put together by Fred Neil, a musician who was at this point mostly playing blues songs but who within a few years would write some of the great classics of the sixties singer-songwriter genre: [Excerpt: Fred Neil, "Everybody's Talkin'"] By the time Dylan hit the scene, there were quite a few very good musicians in the Village, and the folk scene had grown to the point that there were multiple factions. There were the Stalinists, who had coalesced around Pete Seeger, the elder statesman of the scene, and who played a mixture of summer-camp singalong music and topical songs about news events. There were the Zionists, who were singing things like "Hava Nagilah". There were bluegrass players, and there were the two groups that most attracted Dylan -- those who sang old folk ballads, and those who sang the blues. Those latter two groups tended to cluster together, because they were smaller than the other groups, and also because of their own political views -- while all of the scene were leftists, the blues and ballad singers tended either to be vaguely apolitical, or to be anarchists and Trotskyites rather than Stalinists. But they had a deeper philosophical disagreement with the Stalinists -- Seeger's camp thought that the quality of a song was secondary to the social good it could do, while the blues and ballad singers held that the important thing was the music, and any political or social good was a nice byproduct. There was a huge amount of infighting between these small groups -- the narcissism of small differences -- but there was one place they would all hang out. The Folklore Centre was a record and bookshop owned by a man named Izzy Young, and it was where you would go to buy every new book, to buy and sell copies of the zines that were published, and to hang out and find out who the new musicians on the scene were.  And it was at the Folklore Centre that Dylan met Dave Van Ronk: [Excerpt: Dave Van Ronk, "Cocaine Blues"] Van Ronk was the most important musician in the blues and ballads group of folkies, and was politically an anarchist who, through his connection with the Schachtmanites (a fringe-left group who were more Trotskyite than the Trotskyites, and whose views sometimes shaded into anarchism) was becoming converted to Marxism. A physically massive man, he'd started out as a traditional jazz guitarist and banjo player, but had slowly moved on into the folk side of things through his love of blues singers like Bessie Smith and folk-blues artists like Lead Belly. Van Ronk had learned a great deal from Rev. Gary Davis, a blind gospel-blues singer whose technique Van Ronk had studied: [Excerpt: Rev. Gary Davis, "Death Don't Have No Mercy"] Van Ronk was one of the few people on the Village scene who was a native New Yorker, though he was from Queens rather than the Village, and he was someone who had already made a few records that Dylan had heard, mostly of the standard repertoire: [Excerpt: Dave Van Ronk, "See That My Grave is Kept Clean"] Dylan consciously sought him out as the person to imitate on the scene, and he was soon regularly sleeping on Van Ronk's couch and being managed for a brief time by Van Ronk's wife. Once again, Dylan was learning everything he could from the people he was around -- but he had a much bigger ambition than anyone else on the scene. A lot of the people on that scene have been very bitter over the years about Dylan, but Van Ronk, who did more for Dylan than anyone else on the scene, never really was -- the two stopped being close once he was no more use to Dylan, as so often happened, but they remained friendly, because Van Ronk was secure enough in himself and his own abilities that he didn't need the validation of being important to the big star. Van Ronk was an important mentor to him for a crucial period of six months or so, and Dylan always acknowledged that, just as Van Ronk always acknowledged Dylan's talent. And that talent, at least at first, was a performing talent rather than a songwriting one. Dylan was writing songs by now, but hardly any, and when he did perform them, he was not acknowledging them. His first truly successful song, a song about nuclear war, "Let Me Die in my Footsteps", he would introduce as a Weavers song: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Let Me Die in my Footsteps"] For the most part, his repertoire was still only Woody Guthrie songs, but people were amazed by his personal charisma, his humour -- one comparison you see time and again when people talk about his early performances is Charlie Chaplin -- and his singing. There are so many jokes about Dylan's vocals that this sounds like a joke, but among the folk crowd, his phrasing in particular -- as influenced by the R&B records he grew up listening to as by Guthrie -- was considered utterly astonishing. Dylan started publishing some of his song lyrics in Broadside, a magazine for new topical songs, and in other magazines like Sing Out! These were associated with the Communist side of the folk movement, and Dylan had a foot in both camps through his association with Guthrie and Guthrie's friends. Through these people he got to know Suze Rotolo, a volunteer with the Congress of Racial Equality, who became his girlfriend, and her sister Carla, who was the assistant to Alan Lomax, who was now back from the UK, and the Rotolos played a part in Dylan's big breakthrough.  The timeline that follows is a bit confused, but Carla Rotolo recorded some of the best Village folk singers, and wrote to John Hammond about the tape, mentioning Dylan in particular. At the same time, Hammond's son John Hammond Jr, another musician on the circuit and a friend of Dylan's, apparently mentioned Dylan to his father. Dylan was also working on Robert Shelton, the folk critic of the New York Times, who eventually gave Dylan a massive rave review for a support slot he'd played at Gerde's Folk City. And the same day that review came out, eight days after Carla Rotolo's letter, Dylan was in the recording studio with the folk singer Carolyn Hester, playing harmonica on a few of her tracks, and Hammond was the producer: [Excerpt: Carolyn Hester, "I'll Fly Away"] Hammond had, of course, organised the Spirituals to Swing concerts which had influenced Dylan. And not only that, he'd been the person to discover Billie Holiday, and Count Basie. And Charlie Christian. He was now working for Columbia Records, where he'd just produced the first secular records for a promising new gospel singer who had decided to turn pop, named Aretha Franklin: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Today I Sing the Blues"] So Hammond was an important figure in many ways, and he had a lot of latitude at Columbia Records. He decided to sign Dylan, and even though Mitch Miller, Columbia's head of A&R at the time, had no clue what Hammond saw in Dylan, Hammond's track record was good enough that he was allowed to get on with it and put out an album. Hammond also gave Dylan an album to take home and listen to, a record which hadn't come out yet, a reissue of some old blues records called "King of the Delta Blues Singers" by Robert Johnson: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Crossroads Blues"] There has been a hell of a lot of mythology about Johnson over the years, so much so that it's almost impossible to give anyone who's heard of him at all an accurate impression of Johnson's place in music history. One question I have been asked repeatedly since I started this podcast is "How come you didn't start with Robert Johnson?", and if you don't know about him, you'll get an idea of his general perception among music fans from the fact that I recently watched an episode of a science fiction TV series where our heroes had to go back in time to stop the villains from preventing Johnson from making his recordings, because by doing that they could stop rock and roll from ever existing. There's a popular perception that Johnson was the most important blues musician of his generation, and that he was hugely influential on the development of blues and R&B, and it's simply false. He *was* a truly great musician, and he *was* hugely influential -- but he was influential on white musicians in the sixties, not black musicians in the thirties, forties, and fifties. In his lifetime, his best selling records sold around five thousand copies, which to put it in perspective is about the same number of people who've listened to some of my more popular podcast episodes. Johnson's biographer Elijah Wald -- a man who, like I do, has a huge respect for Johnson's musicianship, has said "knowing about Johnson and Muddy Waters but not about Leroy Carr or Dinah Washington [is] like knowing about, say, the Sir Douglas Quintet but not knowing about the Beatles." I'd agree, except that the Sir Douglas Quintet were much, much, bigger in the sixties than Robert Johnson was in the thirties. Johnson's reputation comes entirely from that album that Hammond had handed Dylan. Hammond had been one of the tiny number of people who had actually listened to Johnson at the time he was performing. Indeed, Hammond had wanted to get Johnson to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts, only to find that Johnson had died only a short time earlier -- they'd got Big Bill Broonzy to play in his place, and played a couple of Johnson's records from the stage. That had, in fact, kickstarted Broonzy's later second career as a folk-blues musician playing for largely white audiences, rather than as a proto-Chicago-blues performer playing for Black ones. Hammond's friend Alan Lomax had also been a fan of Johnson -- he'd gone to Mississippi later, to try to record Johnson, also without having realised that Johnson had died. But far from Johnson being the single most important blues musician of the thirties, as he is now portrayed in popular culture, if you'd asked most blues musicians or listeners about Robert Johnson in the twenty-three years between his death and the King of the Delta Blues Singers album coming out, most of them would have looked at you blankly, or maybe asked if you meant Lonnie Johnson, the much more famous musician who was a big inspiration for Robert. When King of the Delta Blues Singers came out, it changed all that, and made Robert Johnson into a totemic figure among white blues fans, and we'll see over the next year or two a large number of very important musicians who took inspiration from him -- and deservedly so. While the myth of Robert Johnson has almost no connection to the real man, his music demonstrated a remarkable musical mind -- he was a versatile, skilled guitarist and arranger, and someone whose musical palette was far wider than his recorded legacy suggests -- Ramblin' Johnny Shines, who travelled with Johnson for a time, describes him as particularly enjoying playing songs like "Yes, Sir, That's My Baby" and Jimmie Rodgers songs, and polkas, calling Johnson "a polka hound, man". And even though in his handful of recording sessions he was asked only to play blues, you can still hear elements of that: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "They're Red Hot"] But the music wasn't the main thing that grabbed Dylan. Dylan played the album for Dave Van Ronk, who was unimpressed -- musically, Johnson just didn't seem very original to Van Ronk, who played Dylan records by Skip James, Leroy Carr, and others, showing Dylan where Johnson had picked up most of his musical ideas. And Dylan had to agree with him that Johnson didn't sound particularly original in that context -- but he also didn't care, reasoning that many of the Woody Guthrie songs he loved were rewrites of old Carter Family songs, so if Johnson was rewriting Leroy Carr songs that was fair enough. What got to Dylan was Johnson's performance style, but also his ability with words. Johnson had a very sparse, economical, lyrical style which connected with Dylan on a primordial level. Most of those who became fans of Johnson following the release of King of the Delta Blues Singers saw Johnson as an exotic and scary figure -- the myth commonly told about him is that he sold his soul at a crossroads to the Devil in return for the ability to play the guitar, though that's a myth that was originally told about a different Mississippi blues man called Tommy Johnson, and there's no evidence that anyone thought that of him at the time -- and so these later fans see his music as being haunted. Dylan instead seems to see Johnson as someone very like himself -- in his autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan talks about Johnson being a bothersome kid who played harmonica, who was later taught a bit of guitar and then learned the rest of his music from records, rather than from live performers. Dylan's version of Johnson is closer to the reality, as far as we know it, than the Johnson of legend is, and Dylan seems to have been delighted when he found out much later that the name of the musician who taught Johnson to play guitar was Ike Zimmerman. Dylan immediately tried to incorporate Johnson's style into his own songwriting, and we'll see the effects of that in future episodes. But that songwriting wouldn't be seen much on his debut album. And nor would his Woody Guthrie repertoire. Instead, Dylan performed a set of traditional ballads and blues numbers, most of which he never performed live normally, and at least half of which were arrangements that Dylan copied wholesale from Dave Van Ronk. [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “See That My Grave is Kept Clean”] The album was recorded quickly, in a couple of days. Hammond found Dylan incredibly difficult to work with, saying he had appalling mic technique, and for many of the songs Dylan refused to do a second take. There were only two originals on the album. One, "Talkin' New York", was a comedy talking blues about his early time in New York, very much in the style of Woody Guthrie's talking blues songs. The other, "Song To Woody", was a rewrite of his earlier "Song For Bonny", which was itself a rewrite of Guthrie's "1913 Massacre". The song is a touching one, Dylan paying tribute to his single biggest influence: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Song to Woody"] Dylan was moving on, and he knew he was moving on, but he had to say goodbye. Dylan's first album was not a success, and he became known within Columbia Records as "Hammond's Folly", but nor did it lose money, since it was recorded so quickly. It's a record that Dylan and Hammond both later spoke poorly of, but it's one I rather like, and one of the best things to come out of the Greenwich Village folk scene. But by the time it came out, Dylan's artistic heart was already elsewhere, and when we come back to him in a couple of months, we'll be seeing someone who had completely reinvented himself.  

Pete Holmes made everyone think selling tickets on the street for comedy shows was fun and easy. This is a lie, but who knew all of the horrible hours comedians Chris Reiter, Stephen Pratt and I spent standing in the cold yelling at people on MacDougal Street in NYC would lead to such a fun podcast?!We sat down to tell some stories and reminisce about the old days where we had to miserable for comedy spots and it turns out, we all kind of miss it juuuust a little bit.Twitter, tiktok, youtube & Insta: @thestephenpratt, and listen to his podcast Recoil Now wherever you listen to this PodTwitter & Insta: christopherthecomicTwitter & Insta: coreytcomedy 

Ariel Arce is the 32 year-old New York entrepreneur, also known as the Champagne Empress of Greenwich Village and Nightlife Hitmaker, behind Tokyo Record Bar, Air’s Champagne Parlor, Niche Niche, and Special Club, all of which opened within the past two years on MacDougal Street. Ariel’s passions for wine, dinner parties and music shine throughout her spaces. Each has a distinctive identity and offers guests a singular experience yet share the common philosophy that going out in New York should be more than just picking food from a menu or getting a ticket to a show. It should inspire conviviality, human connection, discovery, and be affordable! A native New York Yorker, Ariel lives in the same apartment where she grew up in Hell’s Kitchen. Her former experiences as a professional actor and competitive gymnast greatly inspired the theatrical elements showcased throughout her venues. Ariel earned her wining and dining stripes at The Office in Chicago, a speakeasy below the renowned Aviary restaurant, and at Pops for Champagne, the "oldest family-operated Champagne bar in America," before heading back home to New York to serve as wine director for Birds & Bubbles and later Riddling Widow. She is considered a thought leader in the wine industry and a tastemaker in the New York dining and entertainment scenes. She is due to publish a book on Champagne in 2020 among other projects that will soon be announced. https://www.instagram.com/arcecool/ https://www.instagram.com/airschampagne/ https://www.instagram.com/tokyorecordbar/ https://www.instagram.com/nichenichenyc/ https://www.instagram.com/specialclubnyc/

On any given night, you can see a line that snakes down Macdougal Street of people waiting to get into the Comedy Cellar. And the man responsible for making sense of this mob of tourists and comedy fans is known as Outside Steve.  Steve Fabricant runs the door at the comedy club, managing the reservations for multiple sold out shows each night, strategically placing guests in either the front or the back of the room and occasionally popping up in sitcoms.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On any given night, you can see a line that snakes down Macdougal Street of people waiting to get into the Comedy Cellar. And the man responsible for making sense of this mob of tourists and comedy fans is known as Outside Steve.  Steve Fabricant runs the door at the comedy club, managing the reservations for multiple sold out shows each night, strategically placing guests in either the front or the back of the room and occasionally popping up in sitcoms.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mark Alan Stamaty’s great visual novel MacDoodle Street—the story of dishwashing poet Malcolm Frazzle that first appeared in the pages of the Village Voice in the late 1970s—is back in print thanks to the fine nerds of the New York Review of Books. Bill Bramhall, editorial cartoonist for the Daily News, joined Harry Siegel and Alex Brook Lynn for a conversation with Stamaty about his work, God, drugs, those hacks Artman and Andy Warhol, donuts and love, and, of course, umbilical oralism and the ultimate painting. In the spirit of his work, there are tangents within tangents — Emmylou Harris, maybe, helping a drunk Dave Van Ronk up from the sidewalk of MacDougal Street after a Kris Kristofferson show — as we stroll through the lost New York of MacDoodle Street without ever leaving Alex’s Bleaker Street apartment.

Post election vibes surely call for an Astro forecast! Thus, the ladies welcome back Ambi Kavanaugh, of Alchemy with Ambi, to shine light on the current cosmic climate. Then, it’s a floral crystal grid of roses as Elizabeth and Stephanie recap their eventful week: Steph’s birthday celebrations, some lady baby nights on the town, eye updates and podcast recommendations for your listening pleasure. PLUS, Steph and Elizabeth are headed back to New York this week for two exciting events, see below for the where’s the the when’s! New York appearances: Live Show: 11/11: 5 pm @ Union Hall, 702 Union St, Brooklyn, NY 11215 https://www.ticketfly.com/purchase/mobile/index/1770154 Meet up: 11/12: 5 pm @ Airs Champagne Parlor, 127 Macdougal Street, Greenwhich Village, NY 10012 https://tsrinnyc.splashthat.com/ This Episode was brought to you by: Fabletics: www.fabletics.com/retrograde Thrive market: www.thrivemarket.com/retrograde Shoedazzle: www.shoedazzle.com/retrograde

Chelsea in Chelsea and the Brooklyn Blonde welcome comedian and UCB improviser X Mayo, who dishes on the power of staying true to herself even when she’s the only person who looks like she does in the room. Speaking of dishing, she shares the deets on her baby, Who Made The Potato Salad, a comedy show written and performed in one day, exclusively featuring people of color. Our girls recap Guys We Fest and say the F word... a lot. And a City Secret that will tickle your funny bone is revealed. ______________________________________________ Follow all of X Mayo's adventures on Instagram at: http://instagram.com/80dollarsandasuitcase Watch her in the Facebook series, "Strangers," here: http://facebook.com/StrangersSeries And check out her comedy show, "Who Made The Potato Salad?" here: http://whomadethepotatosaladshow.com http://instagram.com/whomadethepotatosaladshow CITY SECRET: Catch some of New York's biggest names in comedy making casual appearances at The Comedy Cellar, located at 117 MacDougal Street, between W 3rd Street and Minetta Lane! Call (212) 254-3480 for reservations. http://comedycellar.com http://twitter.com/comedycellarusa http://instagram.com/comedycellarusa ______________________________________________ This episode of the Sassy and Uncalled For podcast is brought to you in part by HEYDAY... the Best Tasting Anytime Cold Brew! You can find HEYDAY in your favorite Bodegas all over New York City... or get it delivered right to your door from http://Drinkheyday.com and Amazon. Sassy cats can use promo code Anytime15 to get 15 percent off when ordering online. Make Today Your HEYDAY! This episode is also brought to you in part by Goodr... Running Sunglasses that don't slip, don't bounce and look so damn sexy it's borderline uncalled for... all at a reasonable price! Use the promo code SASSY at http://PlayGoodr.com for 10% off your order! ____________________________________ Represent the Sassy and Uncalled For podcast in style with our official tee and sweatshirt! http://represent.com/sassyanduncalledfor ____________________________________ We are super excited to announce our Patreon page. This where you can support our podcast, so we can keep giving you top notch listening entertainment! Go to Patreon.com/sassyanduncalledfor to make a donation and receive exclusive content in return and a few other perks we’re throwing in to show our appreciation for our OG Sassy Cats. ____________________________________

Eddie (@EddieIfft) is recording in New York City... unofficially the only podcast ever recorded on a pedicab. This week's c0-host, Brian McCarthy (@BrianPMcCarthy), explains the actual difference from a pedicab and a rickshaw. Eddie interviews Max, the driver, while Brian jumps ship to get beers - blow jobs are a common currency for pedicabs in Manhattan. After 2 tours of MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, Eddie and Brian finally find some people to talk to, including - Judah Friedlander (@JudahWorldChamp), famously known from 30 Rock as well as The Wrestler, Zoolander, and apparently the brand new Star Wars: A Force Awakens (that's what it says on IMDB). Judah is a long-time friend of Eddie from NYC.  Buy Judah's new bo0k, "If the Raindrops United", use the Amazon Click-Thru link on www.eddieifft.com. Shit stories ensue. Listen in for that and much more on this episode of Talkin' Shit. Don't forget - rate and review Talkin' Shit (aka "Talkins Hit") on iTunes or your favorite podcasting service! Follow the show, get merch and listen to previous episodes on www.EddieIfft.com. Judah Friedlander - @JudahWorldChamp | FacebookBrian McCarthy - @BrianPMcCarthy | FacebookEddie Ifft - @EddieIfft | FacebookJason Auer - @JasonAuerOfficial Talkin' Shit - @EddieTalkinShit | Facebook

Hablamos hoy de la especialidad Artichoke Pizza (alcachofa) que nos ofrece Basille´s Artichoke Pizza, en su local de Macdougal Street, en el Greenwich Village.Feed del podcast: http://www.spreaker.com/user/7494944/episodes/feedMétodos de contacto:email: unminutoennuevayork@gmail.comWeb: http://un-minuto-en-nueva-york.tumblr.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/unminutoennuevayorkpodcastTwitter: @unminutoenNYInstagram: @unminutoennuevayork

Hablamos hoy de la especialidad Artichoke Pizza (alcachofa) que nos ofrece Basille´s Artichoke Pizza, en su local de Macdougal Street, en el Greenwich Village. Feed del podcast: http://www.spreaker.com/user/7494944/episodes/feed Métodos de contacto: email: unminutoennuevayork@gmail.com Web: http://un-minuto-en-nueva-york.tumblr.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/unminutoennuevayorkpodcast Twitter: @unminutoenNY Instagram: @unminutoennuevayork

In the latest installment of the Red Light Podcast Redux, Gina and Ricki sit down with comedian Dustin Chafin who has appeared on Showtime's White Boyz in the Hood. We talk about his days as a boxer, a Mormon and up and coming comic! We explore the influence of alcohol and drugs in the comedy community and discuss the comedy dues, do's and dont's! Dustin also talks about booking, his support of our troops, women in comedy and the comedy cock block on MacDougal Street (it's not what you think)!

http://www.andystreasuretrove.com/andystreasuretrove.com/Media/ATTSF%20Episode%20%2312%20%28mp3%29.mp3 ()Episode 12 starts with music from the new album Honeymoon for One by Candace Roberts. Then Andy interviews Manny Roth, who ran the famous Cafe Wha? in New York City, presenting up-and-coming entertainers like Bob Dylan, Bill Cosby, Peter, Paul & Mary, Richard Pryor, Jimi Hendrix and many others. Manny tells us about his childhood in Indiana, his stint as a flyer and as a USO show coordinator in WWII, and then about his arrival in Greenwich Village and the start of his cafe and night club empire. This episode has a contest/drawing, and the prize is a brand new Apple iPod Shuffle (I know I say “Nano” in the show but it’s only a Shuffle). Andy’s listener call-in phone line — for comments, questions, contest entries and your audio contributions to the show: Call 415-508-4084 Cafe Wha? Photos by Michael Zucker Keywords and Links: http://www.candaceroberts.com/ (Candace Roberts), Honeymoon for One, Manny Roth, Bob Dylan, Peter Paul & Mary, Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, Jimi Hendrix, Kiev, Russia, Vilna, Poland, Newcastle, Indiana, Chrysler, Indiana University, University of Miami, Army Air Corps, World War Two, WWII, Snoopy, B-17 bomber, USO shows, Wiesbaden Opera House, Kate Smith, Muncie, John Wayne, army/navy goods, American Theater Wing, GI Bill, Lee Strasberg, Will Lee, Thelma Schnee, Bill Kirkland, Jason Robards, Marlon Brando, Greenwich Village, Bleecker Street, Tribeca, The Bowery, Vatican City Religious Bookshop, Cafe Theater Cock and Bull, Tom Zeigler, Le Figaro Cafe, Cafe Wha?, Macdougal Street, Lou Gossett, Godfrey Cambridge, hootenanny, Bobby Zimmerman, Woody Allen, Tiny Tim, Dino Valenti, The Quicksilver Messenger Service, Lenny Bruce, Maxwell Bodenheim, Shane O’Neill, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Valerie Solanas, Andy Warhol, Johnny Brent, Lou Reed, the Tonight Show, the Rudy Vallee Show, Johnny Carson, Jerry Seinfeld, Ray Romano, Denis Leary, Bill Hicks, David Lee Roth, Eddie Van Halen, Van Halen, Michael Zucker, Brandon Roth.