Podcast appearances and mentions of malcolm cecil

The Original New Timbral Orchestra (TONTO) is the first and largest multitimbral polyphonic analog synthesizer, capable of producing many tone colours with different voices simultaneously. Beginning with a single Moog Series III Modular in 1968, creators Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff continued to expand TONTO with modules from different manufacturers, along with custom additions designed by Cecil. It marked the first attempt at creating a universal language for different synthesizers to communicate with each other, which was revolutionary. Under the name Tonto's Expanding Head Band, Cecil and Margouleff released the highly influential album Zero Time. The album demonstrated the rich, layered sounds of the massive synth, attracting significant attention and major collaborations. TONTO can be heard on many Stevie Wonder classics, including “Superstition," “Living for the City” and “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” as well as hits by the Isley Brothers, Minnie Riperton, Joan Baez, the Doobie Brothers, Quincy Jones, Randy Newman and others. Jason Tawkin leads us through the incredible story of how this massive instrument came to be donated to the National Music Centre in Calgary, Canada, and its renovation, enabling TONTO's full capabilities to be used by musicians from around the world once again… If you can, please support the Electronically Yours podcast via my Patron: patron.com/ellectronicallyours

As part of AKG's Stories Behind the Sessions' Series, legendary radio and television presenter, producer, and journalist Nic Harcourt interviews producer Robert Margouleff about his work with Devo, Stevie Wonder, Malcolm Cecil, and the invention of the TONTO synth. 

On this Jeff Rona interview: Jeff gets in-depth and personal, sharing his journey to the top, and it definitely wasn't easy. Getting turned on to soundtracks and the career and musical doors this opened… how he got session work and ultimately ghostwriting for movies. Starting and growing his Music Library, Liquid Cinema… Types of music that get licensed most… when you're most “qualified” to do pretty much anything… Cool stories about working with Hans Zimmer, Barry Levinson, Maurice White, Don Ellis (very cool!), Jon Hassell, Brian Eno, and others… How he markets his production company, KEY things you need to know about working with and forming healthy and productive relationships with producers, directors, and music supervisors… Questions to ask that help you determine how to write your scores. A terrible tragedy his parents dealt with, low points in his life and how he dealt with them. AWESOME convo, super sincere, tons of insight into the licensing business! Discover Where the Money's Hiding in Today's Music Business: https://www.MusicReboot.com JEFF RONA owns one of the biggest music production companies (music libraries) in America, Liquid Cinema. He's also an an award-winning music composer for film, TV, and video games, as well as a recording artist and producer. He was initially an in-demand studio musician, arranger, sound designer, synthesist, and music programmer working in Los Angeles and New York. After working with legendary record producers such as Maurice White, David Foster, Albhy Galuten, Malcolm Cecil and others, he collaborated on film music with Philip Glass, Mark Isham, Lisa Gerrard & Basil Poledouris. He's had longstanding relationships with composers Hans Zimmer & Cliff Martinez. Subscribe & Website:  https://www.MusicLicensingProfits.com/subscribe Jeff's scored dozens of film and TV projects with filmmakers including Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg, Wong Kar-wai, Robert Altman, Steven Soderbergh, Mark Pellington, Stephen Hopkins, Jonathan Demme, Frank Darabont, and many others. Movie soundtracks Jeff's scored or contributed to, include Black Hawk Down, Mission Impossible 2, Generation Iron 1 & 2, Traffic, The Lion King, The Thin Red Line, Prince of Egypt, The Net (Sandra Bullock), Sea of Life (Documentary), Shelter Island, Toys (Robin Williams), The Fan and literally dozens of other major motion pictures Jeff's written music for video games: God of War 3, Far Cry 4, Marvel vs Capcom Infinite, Transformers, Resident Evil 2, Crossfire, Devil May Cry 5 & Bright Memory: Infinite He's toured with Brian Eno, Lisa Gerrard (solo) and Dead Can Dance, and composed music for the 2008 Beijing Olympic games. His music appears in numerous Oscar, Peabody, BAFTA and Emmy award-winning projects, as well as countless film festival honors. He is a three-time recipient of the ASCAP Film and Television Music Award  

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Vor 50 Jahren erschien das mehrfach Grammy ausgezeichnete Album "Innervisions" von Stevie Wonder, das auch seine persönliche Entwicklung widerspiegelt. Ein Meisterwerk seines kreativen Schaffens — er hat jedes Instrument selbst eingespielt Wonder war bis dahin vor allem bekannt für romantische Balladen, entwickelte sich nun zu einem reiferen, bewussten und anerkannten Künstler. Ein Meilenstein der Musikgeschichte, von dem man sagt, dass es großen Einfluss ausgeübt hat auf die Entwicklung des Soul und der Black Music, voller politischer und auch sehr sensibler spiritueller Strahlkraft. Das künstlerische Schaffen des "Wunderkindes" Stevie Wonder, mit bürgerlichem Namen Stevland Hardaway Judkins Morris, ist zum Zeitpunkt des Erscheinens von "Innervisions" wahnsinnig jung — Anfang 20 — und er hat bis zu diesem Album schon 15 Studio-Alben rausgebracht – das ist kaum zu glauben! Sein erstes Album bringt er schon mit zwölf Jahren heraus. Er wird als Wunderkind bezeichnet, "Little Stevie Wonder" genannt. Mit 18 Jahren hatte er bereits die erste Best-of-Platte. Damals ist er bei "Motown" unter Vertrag, unter dem Sublabel "Tamla", was ihm ungewöhnlich viele künstlerische Freiheiten einräumte — ganz im Gegensatz zu anderen Künstlern. Daher war es ihm möglich alle Instrumente auf "Innervisions" selbst einzuspielen. "Man hört ihm das ganze Herzblut an, dass er jedes Instrument einzeln einspielt. Die Arbeit, die dahinter gesteckt hat, die wir uns überhaupt nicht vorstellen können. (…) Es macht einfach Spaß zuzuhören." - Adrian Beric Er war mit seinen 23 Jahren bereits ein weltweiter Superstar, hatte Erfolg mit seinen Alben und gewann vielmals den Grammy für das Album des Jahres. Er wurde immer erwachsener, seine Themen wurden poltischer. Wonder sprudelte nur so vor Kreativität, als er in den New Yorker Record Plant Studios an seinem 16. Studioalbum "Innervisions" arbeitete. "Wie kann ein Mensch, der nie gesehen hat, in seinen "Innervisions" doch so grandiose oder so gute Bilder sehen?" - Bernd Rosinus TONTO — The Original New Timbral Orchestra TONTO ist 1973 der erste und schon rein von den Ausmaßen her der größte Synthesizer der Welt. Er wurde von Malcolm Cecil und Bob Margouleff 1968 in New York gebaut. Es ist das wohl innovativste Instrument auf "Innervisions", Wonder benutzt diesen TONTO oft, aber dezent auf mehreren Alben. Vor allem für die Eröffnung einer seiner berühmtesten Songs des Albums "Talking Book" "Superstition" ist er bekannt. Die beiden sind unter anderem auch als Produzenten an dem Album beteiligt, sie unterstützen ihn mit dem TONTO. Es gibt Archivaufnahmen, auf denen die beiden hinter Stevie Wonder sitzen und aus dem Staunen nicht mehr rauskommen. Es ist die Art und Weise wie er ihr Gerät bedient — und das auch noch blind — beeindruckend. Einige Jahre später haben sie nach einem Streit die gemeinsame Arbeit beendet. "Wir waren wie Meteoriten, die sich einmal getroffen haben, dann groß gestrahlt haben und dann wieder auseinander mussten." - Malcolm Cecil "Higher Ground" Wie Stevie Wonder selbst angibt, hat er den Song "Higher Ground" innerhalb eines einzigen Tages komplett komponiert, getextet und produziert. YouTube-Video von Stevie Wonder - Topic: "Higher Ground" Drei Tage nach der Veröffentlichung von "Innervisions", am 6. August 1973, erleidet Stevie Wonder einen schweren Autounfall. Während er tagelang im Koma lag soll ihm der Legende nach sein damaliger Roadmanager "Higher Ground" ins Ohr gesungen haben… Was das für Stevie Wonders zukünftiges Leben bedeutete? Darüber sprechen wir unter anderem im Podcast. __________ Über diese Songs vom Album "Innervisions" wird im Podcast gesprochen 11:26 Mins — "Too High" 02:10 Mins — "Higher Ground" 02:35 Mins — "Living for the City" 21:51 Mins — "Living for the City" 36:12 Mins — "Higher Ground" 46:46 Mins — "Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing" 50:56 Mins — "Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing" 55:10 Mins — "Mister Known It All" __________ Über diese Songs wird außerdem im Podcast gesprochen 32:38 Mins – "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" von Public Enemy 42:04 Mins – "Higher Ground" von den Red Hot Chilli Peppers 52:14 Mins – "Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing" von Incognito __________ Shownotes: Der TONTO Synthesizer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2G1C0eOS5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flaystdObkQ Stevie Wonder bei Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevieWonder Lady Gaga mit ihrem Stevie Wonder Tribute beim Grammy 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuBnwiBCLCo Stevie Wonder live zu Gast im Musikladen 1974 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_RgaYueeh4 Stevie Wonders YouTube Kanal https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGD7CfG3JgZF52QpIRivV1Q Innervisions bei Allmusic https://www.allmusic.com/album/innervisions-mw0000192406 __________ Ihr wollt mehr Podcasts wie diesen? Abonniert die SWR1 Meilensteine! Fragen, Kritik, Anregungen? Schreibt uns an: meilensteine@swr.de

Continued discussion about working with Malcolm Cecil, Jim Keltner and the challenges facing young accompanists today.

Twitter: @podgaverockInsta: @podgaverockSpecial Guest Host: Jeff GrossStevie Wonder “I Believe (When I Fall In Love It Will Be Forever)” from the 1972 album "Talking Book" released onTamla. Written by Stevie Wonder and Yvonne Wright and produced by Stevie Wonder and Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff.Personel:Stevie Wonder – lead vocal, background vocal, piano, Hohner Clavinet, drums, Moog bassCover:Performed by Josh BondIntro Music:"Shithouse" 2010 release from "A Collection of Songs for the Kings". Written by Josh Bond. Produced by Frank Charlton.Other Artists Mentioned:The Beatles "Help"Father John MistyMichael McDonald

Twitter: @podgaverockInsta: @podgaverockSpecial Guest Host: Jeff GrossStevie Wonder “I Believe (When I Fall In Love It Will Be Forever)” from the 1972 album "Talking Book" released onTamla. Written by Stevie Wonder and Yvonne Wright and produced by Stevie Wonder and Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff.Personel:Stevie Wonder – lead vocal, background vocal, piano, Hohner Clavinet, drums, Moog bassCover:Performed by Josh BondIntro Music:"Shithouse" 2010 release from "A Collection of Songs for the Kings". Written by Josh Bond. Produced by Frank Charlton.Other Artists Mentioned:Motley CrueDef Leppard “Pour Some Sugar On Me”Def Leppard “Love Hurts”Def Leppard “Photograph”Green Day “American Idiot”Green Day “Jesus of Suberbia”AerosmithSteven TylerJoe PerryThe BeatlesBob DylanThe Grateful DeadPhish “Wading in the Velvet Sea”Paul SimonIron and WineThe Avett BrothersOutkastKendrick LamarMariah CareyAdeleIan AndersonRadiohead “Kid A”Radiohead “Amnesiac”Radiohead “In Rainbows”HamiltonHigh FidelityStevie Wonder “Blame It On the Sun”Stevie Wonder “Superstition”Stevie Wonder “Maybe Your Baby”Father John MistyBob MoogThe Jazz CourtiersStevie Wonder “You Are the Sunshine of My Life”Dolly PartonELOBoys 2 MenGeorge MichaelRichard MarxBilly PrestonMarvin GayeShuggie Otis “Strawberry Letter 23”Stevie Wonder “Innervisions”Stevie Wonder “Fulfilling His First Finale”Paul Simon “Still Crazy After All These Years”Stevie Wonder “Songs in the Key of Life”Stevie Wonder “I Just Called to Say I Love You”Art GarfunkelFasther John MistyJosh GrobanGeorge MichaelPeter FramptonMichael McDonaldJohn LegendMacy GrayD'Vine JoyStephen Reed Williams 

Episode 66 Those We Have Lost—Electronic Musicians Who Passed in 2021   Playlist In this episode, we pay tribute to electronic composers and musicians who passed in 2021. I've put together what I hope will be a satisfying playlist of these diverse artists and their works. Alvin Lucier, “Vespers” from Electric Sound (1972 Mainstream). This work was performed by Lucier and other members of the Sonic Arts union, David Behrman, Robert Ashley, and Gordon Mumma. The musical instrument was a device not intended for making electronic music. It was the Sondol, a hand-held pulse oscillator designed for “boat owners, acoustic engineers, and the blind.” Lucier bought a few of these devices and worked out a piece for echolocation. Each performer was equipped with a Sondol and asked to move blindfolded inside a defined performing space. This resulted in a work comprised of four independent streams of percussive pulses that sound as if they have their own relationship to one another as each musician moves about in the space. VESPERS is written as a prose score in which Lucier invites the performer to explore the world beyond human limits: “Dive with whales, fly with certain nocturnal birds or bats (particularly the common bat of Europe and North America of the family Vespertilionidae), or seek the help of other experts in the art of echolocation.” Richard H. Kirk, with Cabaret Voltaire, “Let it Come Down” from International Language (1993 Plastex). This album was released during a period of transformation for CV. Founding member Chris Watson had left to pursue other sound interests, while Mallinder and Kirk remained and headed into the instrumental direction embodied by dance music. The liner notes for this album state, “Abandon thinking. Everything you will hear in the next seventy-four minutes is true. This music is dedicated to the Merry Pranksters past present & future.” Not sure what that means, but hey. This group was fantastic. Richard H. Kirk, solo, "Information Therapy" from Disposable Half-Truths (1980 Industrial Records). This was from Kirk's first solo cassette release while he maintained his parallel work with Cabaret Voltaire. Joel Chadabe, “Rendevous” from Rhythms for Computer and Percussion (1981 Lovely Music). Joel had such a long list of accomplishments in electronic music, a pioneer of analog systems as well as computer music. On this album, his collaboration with percussionist Jan Williams was startlingly fresh. Electronics, computer synthesizer system (Synclavier), Joel Chadabe; percussion, wood block, vibraphone, marimba, slit drum, log drum, temple block, cowbell, singing bowls, Jan Williams. "The equipment used in RHYTHMS is a portable minicomputer/digital synthesizer system designed and manufactured by New England Digital Corporation in Norwich, Vermont, expressly for making music." Jon Hassell, “Abu Gil” Last Night The Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes In The Street (2009 ECM). Trumpet, keyboard, composed by Jon Hassell; bass, Peter Freeman; Live sampling, Jan Bang; guitar, Rick Cox; drums, Helge Norbakken; violin, Kheir-Eddine M'Kachinche. Jon Hassell, “Wing Melodies” from Power Spot (1981 ECM). Trumpet, composed by Jon Hassell; guitar, electronic treatments, Michael Brook; electric bass, Brian Eno; electronic keyboards (bass, percussion, string sounds), Jean-Phillippe Rykiel; percussion, acoustic and electronic, alto flute, J. A. Deane; produced by Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. Sophie, Eeehhh” from Nothing More to Say (2012 Huntleys & Palmers). Electronics, vocals, composed and performed by Sophie Xeon. I chose a couple of earlier tracks that were largely instrumental experiments. Sophie, “Elle” from Bipp/Elle (2013 Numbers). Electronics, vocals, composed and performed by Sophie Xeon. Sophie was primarily known for electronica dance music. Malcolm Cecil, “Gamerlonia Dawn” from Radiance (1981 Unity Records). Composed By, Performer, Producer, Engineer, Malcolm Cecil. English bassist and inventor of the unique TONTO synthesizer ("The Original New Timbral Orchestra"), a massive integrated synthesizer system that was used on many analog electronic albums in the early 1970s. Episode 36 was devoted to Cecil's work so you might want to catch-up with that to get more detail about this amazing musician and producer. This track uses TONTO and also features the “golden flute” of Paul Horn. Peter Zinovieff, “M Piriform” from Electronic Calendar—The EMS Tapes (2015 Space Age Recordings). Computer music from 1981 by the founder of EMS, Peter Zinovieff, with composer/conductor Justin Connolly. Collaborating with classical composer Connolly, Zinovieff created the electronic music in his Putney studio, using computer-controlled audio generators, and combined it with instrumental parts written by Connolly for soprano, flute, and violin. This performance of the work was staged in 1969 and featured Jane Manning (soprano), Judith Pearce (flute) and Pauline Scott (violin), who all played along with a tape recording of the electronic part. Murray Schafer, “Threnody” from Threnody (Youth Music by R. Murray Schafer) (1970 Melbourne). This Canadian release features an instrumental work with electronic sound by Schafer, who is perhaps more familiar to us as a creator of soundscapes and ambient audio experiments. But he also worked in traditional instrumental music and featured electronics in some of these. There are not many recordings such as this example from 52 years ago. Background music: Opening and closing sequences voiced by Anne Benkovitz. Additional opening, closing, and other incidental music by Thom Holmes. For additional notes, please see my blog, Noise and Notations.  

Were The Moody Blues "prog"? I don't think so. They weren't virtuosos in any sense, although they were all very competent (or somewhat competent - Graeme Edge wasn't asked to do much, really) but they WERE unique and extremely popular. And every album has a treat or two. At least the ones before 1983. All you had to do was light a marijuana joint with the pot leaves and let the gentle mellotron patina take you to a new land. I guess the key to The Moody Blues' success was that they never asked too much of the listener (like Yes or King Crimson), but never insulted them (like Chicago would, eventually.)  In 1975 they all recorded solo albums, and they were also pretty good.  Justin Hayward - Forever Autumn (1978)  Ray Thomas - Hey Mama Life (1975) Graeme Edge Band - Somethin' We'd Like To Say (1975) Trivia! Barry St. John sang backup on this album. She appeared on "Dark Side of the Moon" and of course, she was in Les Humphries Singers.  Graeme Edge Band - Be My Eyes (1977) John Lodge - Into to Children of Rock 'n' Roll (1977)  John Lodge - Children of Rock 'n' Roll (1977) Featuring Kenny Jones on drums. He was in The Small Faces, then The Faces with Rod Stewart, and then released a single in 1974 ("Ready or Not") and then this. He also played in Paul McCartney's supergroup Rockestra around this time. Maybe this is where he met Pete Townshend.  Mike Pinder - The Promise (1976) My favorite Moody released the blandest solo record of the lot. Maybe he found religion and not just mysticism. Whatever the case, I was disappointed by this. "Solar heaven?"   Mike Pinder - Free As A Dove (1976) This was co-produced by Robert Margouleff, one of the main forces behind Stevie Wonder's golden era. He and his partner Malcolm Cecil brought (and tamed) synthesizers from their unwieldy beginnings into unlikely mainstream dominance. He worked with Billy Preston, The Isley Brothers, Devo, Syreeta Wright, and Stevie. Also, a curious album was released in 1980 by a group that was ubiquitous at the time, The Bus Boys. Remember? Their hit was "(The Boys Are) Back In Town." They recorded a song with Eddie Murphy in 1988 called "Never Giving Up." I wonder what happened to them to stop their momentum. Does either of you know offhand?  John Lodge - Natural Avenue (1977) The Graeme Edge Band - Paradise Ballroom (1977) The Graeme Edge Band - We Like To Do It (1974) The Moody Blues - The Word/Om (1968)  Ray Thomas - Adam and I (1975) The Moody Blues - The Balance (1970) This song was co-written by Edge and Thomas. Most Moody Blues songs were written by one member.  The Moody Blues - In The Beginning/Lovely To See You (1969) This record came with a booklet that included all the lyrics and credits, ornately written. To wit:  The Moody Blues - The Dream/Have You Heard (1969) 

Episode one hundred and thirty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is a special long episode, running almost ninety minutes, looking at "My Generation" by the Who. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on "The Name Game" by Shirley Ellis. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I mispronounce the Herman's Hermits track "Can't You Hear My Heartbeat" as "Can You Hear My Heartbeat". I say "Rebel Without a Cause" when I mean "The Wild One". Brando was not in "Rebel Without a Cause". Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud playlist of the music excerpted here. This mix does not include the Dixon of Dock Green theme, as I was unable to find a full version of that theme anywhere (though a version with Jack Warner singing, titled "An Ordinary Copper" is often labelled as it) and what you hear in this episode is the only fragment I could get a clean copy of. The best compilation of the Who's music is Maximum A's & B's, a three-disc set containing the A and B sides of every single they released. The super-deluxe five-CD version of the My Generation album appears to be out of print as a CD, but can be purchased digitally. I referred to a lot of books for this episode, including: Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 by William Strauss and Neil Howe, which I don't necessarily recommend reading, but which is certainly an influential book. Revolt Into Style: The Pop Arts by George Melly which I *do* recommend reading if you have any interest at all in British pop culture of the fifties and sixties. Jim Marshall: The Father of Loud by Rich Maloof gave me all the biographical details about Marshall. The Who Before the Who by Doug Sandom, a rather thin book of reminiscences by the group's first drummer. The Ox by Paul Rees, an authorised biography of John Entwistle based on notes for his never-completed autobiography. Who I Am, the autobiography of Pete Townshend, is one of the better rock autobiographies. A Band With Built-In Hate by Peter Stanfield is an examination of the group in the context of pop-art and Mod. And Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere by Andy Neill and Matt Kent is a day-by-day listing of the group's activities up to 1978. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript In 1991, William Strauss and Neil Howe wrote a book called Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069. That book was predicated on a simple idea -- that there are patterns in American history, and that those patterns can be predicted in their rough outline. Not in the fine details, but broadly -- those of you currently watching the TV series Foundation, or familiar with Isaac Asimov's original novels, will have the idea already, because Strauss and Howe claimed to have invented a formula which worked as well as Asimov's fictional Psychohistory. Their claim was that, broadly speaking, generations can be thought to have a dominant personality type, influenced by the events that took place while they were growing up, which in turn are influenced by the personality types of the older generations. Because of this, Strauss and Howe claimed, American society had settled into a semi-stable pattern, where events repeat on a roughly eighty-eight-year cycle, driven by the behaviours of different personality types at different stages of their lives. You have four types of generation, which cycle -- the Adaptive, Idealist, Reactive, and Civic types. At any given time, one of these will be the elder statespeople, one will be the middle-aged people in positions of power, one will be the young rising people doing most of the work, and one will be the kids still growing up. You can predict what will happen, in broad outline, by how each of those generation types will react to challenges, and what position they will be in when those challenges arise. The idea is that major events change your personality, and also how you react to future events, and that how, say, Pearl Harbor affected someone will have been different for a kid hearing about the attack on the radio, an adult at the age to be drafted, and an adult who was too old to fight. The thesis of this book has, rather oddly, entered mainstream thought so completely that its ideas are taken as basic assumptions now by much of the popular discourse, even though on reading it the authors are so vague that pretty much anything can be taken as confirmation of their hypotheses, in much the same way that newspaper horoscopes always seem like they could apply to almost everyone's life. And sometimes, of course, they're just way off. For example they make the prediction that in 2020 there would be a massive crisis that would last several years, which would lead to a massive sense of community, in which "America will be implacably resolved to do what needs doing and fix what needs fixing", and in which the main task of those aged forty to sixty at that point would be to restrain those in leadership positions in the sixty-to-eighty age group from making irrational, impetuous, decisions which might lead to apocalypse. The crisis would likely end in triumph, but there was also a chance it might end in "moral fatigue, vast human tragedy, and a weak and vengeful sense of victory". I'm sure that none of my listeners can think of any events in 2020 that match this particular pattern. Despite its lack of rigour, Strauss and Howe's basic idea is now part of most people's intellectual toolkit, even if we don't necessarily think of them as the source for it. Indeed, even though they only talk about America in their book, their generational concept gets applied willy-nilly to much of the Western world. And likewise, for the most part we tend to think of the generations, whether American or otherwise, using the names they used. For the generations who were alive at the time they were writing, they used five main names, three of which we still use. Those born between 1901 and 1924 they term the "GI Generation", though those are now usually termed the "Greatest Generation". Those born between 1924 and 1942 were the "Silent Generation", those born 1943 through 1960 were the Boomers, and those born between 1982 and 2003 they labelled Millennials. Those born between 1961 and 1981 they labelled "thirteeners", because they were the unlucky thirteenth generation to be born in America since the declaration of independence. But that name didn't catch on. Instead, the name that people use to describe that generation is "Generation X", named after a late-seventies punk band led by Billy Idol: [Excerpt: Generation X, "Your Generation"] That band were short-lived, but they were in constant dialogue with the pop culture of ten to fifteen years earlier, Idol's own childhood. As well as that song, "Your Generation", which is obviously referring to the song this week's episode is about, they also recorded versions of John Lennon's "Gimme Some Truth", of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates' "Shakin' All Over", and an original song called "Ready Steady Go", about being in love with Cathy McGowan, the presenter of that show. And even their name was a reference, because Generation X were named after a book published in 1964, about not the generation we call Generation X, but about the Baby Boomers, and specifically about a series of fights on beaches across the South Coast of England between what at that point amounted to two gangs. These were fights between the old guard, the Rockers -- people who represented the recent past who wouldn't go away, what Americans would call "greasers", people who modelled themselves on Marlon Brando in Rebel Without A Cause, and who thought music had peaked with Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran -- and a newer, younger, hipper, group of people, who represented the new, the modern -- the Mods: [Excerpt: The Who, "My Generation"] Jim Marshall, if he'd been American, would have been considered one of the Greatest Generation, but his upbringing was not typical of that, or of any, generation. When he was five, he was diagnosed as having skeletal tuberculosis, which had made his bones weak and easily broken. To protect them, he spent the next seven years of his life, from age five until twelve, in hospital in a full-body cast. The only opportunity he got to move during those years was for a few minutes every three months, when the cast would be cut off and reapplied to account for his growth during that time. Unsurprisingly, once he was finally out of the cast, he discovered he loved moving -- a lot. He dropped out of school aged thirteen -- most people at the time left school at aged fourteen anyway, and since he'd missed all his schooling to that point it didn't seem worth his while carrying on -- and took on multiple jobs, working sixty hours a week or more. But the job he made most money at was as an entertainer. He started out as a tap-dancer, taking advantage of his new mobility, but then his song-and-dance man routine became steadily more song and less dance, as people started to notice his vocal resemblance to Bing Crosby. He was working six nights a week as a singer, but when World War II broke out, the drummer in the seven-piece band he was working with was drafted -- Marshall wouldn't ever be drafted because of his history of illness. The other members of the band knew that as a dancer he had a good sense of rhythm, and so they made a suggestion -- if Jim took over the drums, they could split the money six ways rather than seven. Marshall agreed, but he discovered there was a problem. The drum kit was always positioned at the back of the stage, behind the PA, and he couldn't hear the other musicians clearly. This is actually OK for a drummer -- you're keeping time, and the rest of the band are following you, so as long as you can *sort of* hear them everyone can stay together. But a singer needs to be able to hear everything clearly, in order to stay on key. And this was in the days before monitor speakers, so the only option available was to just have a louder PA system. And since one wasn't available, Marshall just had to build one himself. And that's how Jim Marshall started building amplifiers. Marshall eventually gave up playing the drums, and retired to run a music shop. There's a story about Marshall's last gig as a drummer, which isn't in the biography of Marshall I read for this episode, but is told in other places by the son of the bandleader at that gig. Apparently Marshall had a very fraught relationship with his father, who was among other things a semi-professional boxer, and at that gig Marshall senior turned up and started heckling his son from the audience. Eventually the younger Marshall jumped off the stage and started hitting his dad, winning the fight, but he decided he wasn't going to perform in public any more. The band leader for that show was Clifford Townshend, a clarinet player and saxophonist whose main gig was as part of the Squadronaires, a band that had originally been formed during World War II by RAF servicemen to entertain other troops. Townshend, who had been a member of Oswald Moseley's fascist Blackshirts in the thirties but later had a change of heart, was a second-generation woodwind player -- his father had been a semi-professional flute player. As well as working with the Squadronaires, Townshend also put out one record under his own name in 1956, a version of "Unchained Melody" credited to "Cliff Townsend and his singing saxophone": [Excerpt: Cliff Townshend and his Singing Saxophone, "Unchained Melody"] Cliff's wife often performed with him -- she was a professional singer who had  actually lied about her age in order to join up with the Air Force and sing with the group -- but they had a tempestuous marriage, and split up multiple times. As a result of this, and the travelling lifestyle of musicians, there were periods where their son Peter was sent to live with his grandmother, who was seriously abusive, traumatising the young boy in ways that would affect him for the rest of his life. When Pete Townshend was growing up, he wasn't particularly influenced by music, in part because it was his dad's job rather than a hobby, and his parents had very few records in the house. He did, though, take up the harmonica and learn to play the theme tune to Dixon of Dock Green: [Excerpt: Tommy Reilly, "Dixon of Dock Green Theme"] His first exposure to rock and roll wasn't through Elvis or Little Richard, but rather through Ray Ellington. Ellington was a British jazz singer and drummer, heavily influenced by Louis Jordan, who provided regular musical performances on the Goon Show throughout the fifties, and on one episode had performed "That Rock 'n' Rollin' Man": [Excerpt: Ray Ellington, "That Rock 'N' Rollin' Man"] Young Pete's assessment of that, as he remembered it later, was "I thought it some kind of hybrid jazz: swing music with stupid lyrics. But it felt youthful and rebellious, like The Goon Show itself." But he got hooked on rock and roll when his father took him and a friend to see a film: [Excerpt: Bill Haley and the Comets, "Rock Around the Clock"] According to Townshend's autobiography, "I asked Dad what he thought of the music. He said he thought it had some swing, and anything that had swing was OK. For me it was more than just OK. After seeing Rock Around the Clock with Bill Haley, nothing would ever be quite the same." Young Pete would soon go and see Bill Haley live – his first rock and roll gig. But the older Townshend would soon revise his opinion of rock and roll, because it soon marked the end of the kind of music that had allowed him to earn his living -- though he still managed to get regular work, playing a clarinet was suddenly far less lucrative than it had been. Pete decided that he wanted to play the saxophone, like his dad, but soon he switched first to guitar and then to banjo. His first guitar was bought for him by his abusive grandmother, and three of the strings snapped almost immediately, so he carried on playing with just three strings for a while. He got very little encouragement from his parents, and didn't really improve for a couple of years. But then the trad jazz boom happened, and Townshend teamed up with a friend of his who played the trumpet and French horn. He had initially bonded with John Entwistle over their shared sense of humour -- both kids loved Mad magazine and would make tape recordings together of themselves doing comedy routines inspired by the Goon show and Hancock's Half Hour -- but Entwistle was also a very accomplished musician, who could play multiple instruments. Entwistle had formed a trad band called the Confederates, and Townshend joined them on banjo and guitar, but they didn't stay together for long. Both boys, though, would join a variety of other bands, both together and separately. As the trad boom faded and rock and roll regained its dominance among British youth, there was little place for Entwistle's trumpet in the music that was popular among teenagers, and at first Entwistle decided to try making his trumpet sound more like a saxophone, using a helmet as a mute to try to get it to sound like the sax on "Ramrod" by Duane Eddy: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, "Ramrod"] Eddy soon became Entwistle's hero. We've talked about him before a couple of times, briefly, but not in depth, but Duane Eddy had a style that was totally different from most guitar heroes. Instead of playing mostly on the treble strings of the guitar, playing high twiddly parts, Eddy played low notes on the bass strings of his guitar, giving him the style that he summed up in album titles like "The Twang's the Thang" and "Have Twangy Guitar Will Travel". After a couple of years of having hits with this sound, produced by Lee Hazelwood and Lester Sill, Eddy also started playing another instrument, the instrument variously known as the six-string bass, the baritone guitar, or the Danelectro bass (after the company that manufactured the most popular model).  The baritone guitar has six strings, like a normal guitar, but it's tuned lower than a standard guitar -- usually a fourth lower, though different players have different preferences. The Danelectro became very popular in recording studios in the early sixties, because it helped solve a big problem in recording bass tones. You can hear more about this in the episodes of Cocaine and Rhinestones I recommended last week, but basically double basses were very, very difficult to record in the 1950s, and you'd often end up just getting a thudding, muddy, sound from them, which is one reason why when you listen to a lot of early rockabilly the bass is doing nothing very interesting, just playing root notes -- you couldn't easily get much clarity on the instrument at all. Conversely, with electric basses, with the primitive amps of the time, you didn't get anything like the full sound that you'd get from a double bass, but you *did* get a clear sound that would cut through on a cheap radio in a way that the sound of a double bass wouldn't. So the solution was obvious -- you have an electric instrument *and* a double bass play the same part. Use the double bass for the big dull throbbing sound, but use the electric one to give the sound some shape and cut-through. If you're doing that, you mostly want the trebly part of the electric instrument's tone, so you play it with a pick rather than fingers, and it makes sense to use a Danelectro rather than a standard bass guitar, as the Danelectro is more trebly than a normal bass. This combination, of Danelectro and double bass, appears to have been invented by Owen Bradley, and you can hear it for example on this record by Patsy Cline, with Bob Moore on double bass and Harold Bradley on baritone guitar: [Excerpt: Patsy Cline, "Crazy"] This sound, known as "tic-tac bass", was soon picked up by a lot of producers, and it became the standard way of getting a bass sound in both Nashville and LA. It's all over the Beach Boys' best records, and many of Jack Nitzsche's arrangements, and many of the other records the Wrecking Crew played on, and it's on most of the stuff the Nashville A-Team played on from the late fifties through mid-sixties, records by people like Elvis, Roy Orbison, Arthur Alexander, and the Everly Brothers. Lee Hazelwood was one of the first producers to pick up on this sound -- indeed, Duane Eddy has said several times that Hazelwood invented the sound before Owen Bradley did, though I think Bradley did it first -- and many of Eddy's records featured that bass sound, and eventually Eddy started playing a baritone guitar himself, as a lead instrument, playing it on records like "Because They're Young": [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, "Because They're Young"] Duane Eddy was John Entwistle's idol, and Entwistle learned Eddy's whole repertoire on trumpet, playing the saxophone parts. But then, realising that the guitar was always louder than the trumpet in the bands he was in, he realised that if he wanted to be heard, he should probably switch to guitar himself. And it made sense that a bass would be easier to play than a regular guitar -- if you only have four strings, there's more space between them, so playing is easier. So he started playing the bass, trying to sound as much like Eddy as he could. He had no problem picking up the instrument -- he was already a multi-instrumentalist -- but he did have a problem actually getting hold of one, as all the electric bass guitars available in the UK at the time were prohibitively expensive. Eventually he made one himself, with the help of someone in a local music shop, and that served for a time, though he would soon trade up to more professional instruments, eventually amassing the biggest collection of basses in the world. One day, Entwistle was approached on the street by an acquaintance, Roger Daltrey, who said to him "I hear you play bass" -- Entwistle was, at the time, carrying his bass. Daltrey was at this time a guitarist -- like Entwistle, he'd built his own instrument -- and he was the leader of a band called Del Angelo and his Detours. Daltrey wasn't Del Angelo, the lead singer -- that was a man called Colin Dawson who by all accounts sounded a little like Cliff Richard -- but he was the bandleader, hired and fired the members, and was in charge of their setlists. Daltrey lured Entwistle away from the band he was in with Townshend by telling him that the Detours were getting proper paid gigs, though they weren't getting many at the time. Unfortunately, one of the group's other guitarists, the member who owned the best amp, died in an accident not long after Entwistle joined the band. However, the amp was left in the group's possession, and Entwistle used it to lure Pete Townshend into the group by telling him he could use it -- and not telling him that he'd be sharing the amp with Daltrey. Townshend would later talk about his audition for the Detours -- as he was walking up the street towards Daltrey's house, he saw a stunningly beautiful woman walking away from the house crying. She saw his guitar case and said "Are you going to Roger's?" "Yes." "Well you can tell him, it's that bloody guitar or me". Townshend relayed the message, and Daltrey responded "Sod her. Come in." The audition was a formality, with the main questions being whether Townshend could play two parts of the regular repertoire for a working band at that time -- "Hava Nagila", and the Shadows' "Man of Mystery": [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Man of Mystery"] Townshend could play both of those, and so he was in. The group would mostly play chart hits by groups like the Shadows, but as trad jazz hadn't completely died out yet they would also do breakout sessions playing trad jazz, with Townshend on banjo, Entwistle on trumpet and Daltrey on trombone. From the start, there was a temperamental mismatch between the group's two guitarists. Daltrey was thoroughly working-class, culturally conservative,  had dropped out of school to go to work at a sheet metal factory, and saw himself as a no-nonsense plain-speaking man. Townshend was from a relatively well-off upper-middle-class family, was for a brief time a member of the Communist Party, and was by this point studying at art school, where he was hugely impressed by a lecture from Gustav Metzger titled “Auto-Destructive Art, Auto-Creative Art: The Struggle For The Machine Arts Of The Future”, about Metzger's creation of artworks which destroyed themselves. Townshend was at art school during a period when the whole idea of what an art school was for was in flux, something that's typified by a story Townshend tells about two of his early lectures. At the first, the lecturer came in and told the class to all draw a straight line. They all did, and then the lecturer told off anyone who had drawn anything that was anything other than six inches long, perfectly straight, without a ruler, going north-south, with a 3B pencil, saying that anything else at all was self-indulgence of the kind that needed to be drummed out of them if they wanted to get work as commercial artists. Then in another lecture, a different lecturer came in and asked them all to draw a straight line. They all drew perfectly straight, six-inch, north-south lines in 3B pencil, as the first lecturer had taught them. The new lecturer started yelling at them, then brought in someone else to yell at them as well, and then cut his hand open with a knife and dragged it across a piece of paper, smearing a rough line with his own blood, and screamed "THAT'S a line!" Townshend's sympathies lay very much with the second lecturer. Another big influence on Townshend at this point was a jazz double-bass player, Malcolm Cecil. Cecil would later go on to become a pioneer in electronic music as half of TONTO's Expanding Head Band, and we'll be looking at his work in more detail in a future episode, but at this point he was a fixture on the UK jazz scene. He'd been a member of Blues Incorporated, and had also played with modern jazz players like Dick Morrissey: [Excerpt: Dick Morrissey, "Jellyroll"] But Townshend was particularly impressed with a performance in which Cecil demonstrated unorthodox ways to play the double-bass, including playing so hard he broke the strings, and using a saw as a bow, sawing through the strings and damaging the body of the instrument. But these influences, for the moment, didn't affect the Detours, who were still doing the Cliff and the Shadows routine. Eventually Colin Dawson quit the group, and Daltrey took over the lead vocal role for the Detours, who settled into a lineup of Daltrey, Townshend, Entwistle, and drummer Doug Sandom, who was much older than the rest of the group -- he was born in 1930, while Daltrey and Entwistle were born in 1944 and Townshend in 1945. For a while, Daltrey continued playing guitar as well as singing, but his hands were often damaged by his work at the sheet-metal factory, making guitar painful for him. Then the group got a support slot with Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, who at this point were a four-piece band, with Kidd singing backed by bass, drums, and Mick Green playing one guitar on which he played both rhythm and lead parts: [Excerpt: Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, "Doctor Feel Good"] Green was at the time considered possibly the best guitarist in Britain, and the sound the Pirates were able to get with only one guitar convinced the Detours that they would be OK if Daltrey switched to just singing, so the group changed to what is now known as a "power trio" format. Townshend was a huge admirer of Steve Cropper, another guitarist who played both rhythm and lead, and started trying to adopt parts of Cropper's style, playing mostly chords, while Entwistle went for a much more fluid bass style than most, essentially turning the bass into another lead instrument, patterning his playing after Duane Eddy's work. By this time, Townshend was starting to push against Daltrey's leadership a little, especially when it came to repertoire. Townshend had a couple of American friends at art school who had been deported after being caught smoking dope, and had left their records with Townshend for safe-keeping. As a result, Townshend had become a devotee of blues and R&B music, especially the jazzier stuff like Ray Charles, Mose Allison, and Booker T and the MGs. He also admired guitar-based blues records like those by Howlin' Wolf or Jimmy Reed. Townshend kept pushing for this music to be incorporated into the group's sets, but Daltrey would push back, insisting as the leader that they should play the chart hits that everyone else played, rather than what he saw as Townshend's art-school nonsense. Townshend insisted, and eventually won -- within a short while the group had become a pure R&B group, and Daltrey was soon a convert, and became the biggest advocate of that style in the band. But there was a problem with only having one guitar, and that was volume. In particular, Townshend didn't want to be able to hear hecklers. There were gangsters in some of the audiences who would shout requests for particular songs, and you had to play them or else, even if they were completely unsuitable for the rest of the audience's tastes. But if you were playing so loud you couldn't hear the shouting, you had an excuse. Both Entwistle and Townshend had started buying amplifiers from Jim Marshall, who had opened up a music shop after quitting drums -- Townshend actually bought his first one from a shop assistant in Marshall's shop, John McLaughlin, who would later himself become a well-known guitarist. Entwistle, wanting to be heard over Townshend, had bought a cabinet with four twelve-inch speakers in it. Townshend, wanting to be heard over Entwistle, had bought *two* of these cabinets, and stacked them, one on top of the other, against Marshall's protestations -- Marshall said that they would vibrate so much that the top one might fall over and injure someone. Townshend didn't listen, and the Marshall stack was born. This ultra-amplification also led Townshend to change his guitar style further. He was increasingly reliant on distortion and feedback, rather than on traditional instrumental skills. Now, there are basically two kinds of chords that are used in most Western music. There are major chords, which consist of the first, third, and fifth note of the scale, and these are the basic chords that everyone starts with. So you can strum between G major and F major: [demonstrates G and F chords] There's also minor chords, where you flatten the third note, which sound a little sadder than major chords, so playing G minor and F minor: [demonstrates Gm and Fm chords] There are of course other kinds of chord -- basically any collection of notes counts as a chord, and can work musically in some context. But major and minor chords are the basic harmonic building blocks of most pop music. But when you're using a lot of distortion and feedback, you create a lot of extra harmonics -- extra notes that your instrument makes along with the ones you're playing. And for mathematical reasons I won't go into here because this is already a very long episode, the harmonics generated by playing the first and fifth notes sound fine together, but the harmonics from a third or minor third don't go along with them at all. The solution to this problem is to play what are known as "power chords", which are just the root and fifth notes, with no third at all, and which sound ambiguous as to whether they're major or minor. Townshend started to build his technique around these chords, playing for the most part on the bottom three strings of his guitar, which sounds like this: [demonstrates G5 and F5 chords] Townshend wasn't the first person to use power chords -- they're used on a lot of the Howlin' Wolf records he liked, and before Townshend would become famous the Kinks had used them on "You Really Got Me" -- but he was one of the first British guitarists to make them a major part of his personal style. Around this time, the Detours were starting to become seriously popular, and Townshend was starting to get exhausted by the constant demands on his time from being in the band and going to art school. He talked about this with one of his lecturers, who asked how much Townshend was earning from the band. When Townshend told him he was making thirty pounds a week, the lecturer was shocked, and said that was more than *he* was earning. Townshend should probably just quit art school, because it wasn't like he was going to make more money from anything he could learn there. Around this time, two things changed the group's image. The first was that they played a support slot for the Rolling Stones in December 1963. Townshend saw Keith Richards swinging his arm over his head and then bringing it down on the guitar, to loosen up his muscles, and he thought that looked fantastic, and started copying it -- from very early on, Townshend wanted to have a physical presence on stage that would be all about his body, to distract from his face, as he was embarrassed about the size of his nose. They played a second support slot for the Stones a few weeks later, and not wanting to look like he was copying Richards, Townshend didn't do that move, but then he noticed that Richards didn't do it either. He asked about it after the gig, and Richards didn't know what he was talking about -- "Swing me what?" -- so Townshend took that as a green light to make that move, which became known as the windmill, his own. The second thing was when in February 1964 a group appeared on Thank Your Lucky Stars: [Excerpt: Johnny Devlin and the Detours, "Sometimes"] Johnny Devlin and the Detours had had national media exposure, which meant that Daltrey, Townshend, Entwistle, and Sandom had to change the name of their group. They eventually settled on "The Who", It was around this time that the group got their first serious management, a man named Helmut Gorden, who owned a doorknob factory. Gorden had no management experience, but he did offer the group a regular salary, and pay for new equipment for them. However, when he tried to sign the group to a proper contract, as most of them were still under twenty-one he needed their parents to countersign for them. Townshend's parents, being experienced in the music industry, refused to sign, and so the group continued under Gorden's management without a contract. Gorden, not having management experience, didn't have any contacts in the music industry. But his barber did. Gorden enthused about his group to Jack Marks, the barber, and Marks in turn told some of his other clients about this group he'd been hearing about. Tony Hatch wasn't interested, as he already had a guitar group with the Searchers, but Chris Parmenter at Fontana Records was, and an audition was arranged. At the audition, among other numbers, they played Bo Diddley's "Here 'Tis": [Excerpt: Bo Diddley, "Here 'Tis"] Unfortunately for Doug, he didn't play well on that song, and Townshend started berating him. Doug also knew that Parmenter had reservations about him, because he was so much older than the rest of the band -- he was thirty-four at the time, while the rest of the group were only just turning twenty -- and he was also the least keen of the group on the R&B material they were playing. He'd been warned by Entwistle, his closest friend in the group, that Daltrey and Townshend were thinking of dropping him, and so he decided to jump before he was pushed, walking out of the audition. He agreed to come back for a handful more gigs that were already booked in, but that was the end of his time in the band, and of his time in the music industry -- though oddly not of his friendship with the group. Unlike other famous examples of an early member not fitting in and being forced out before a band becomes big, Sandom remained friends with the other members, and Townshend wrote the foreword to his autobiography, calling him a mentor figure, while Daltrey apparently insisted that Sandom phone him for a chat every Sunday, at the same time every week, until Sandom's death in 2019 at the age of eighty-nine. The group tried a few other drummers, including someone who Jim Marshall had been giving drum lessons to, Mitch Mitchell, before settling on the drummer for another group that played the same circuit, the Beachcombers, who played mostly Shadows material, plus the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean songs that their drummer, Keith Moon, loved. Moon and Entwistle soon became a formidable rhythm section, and despite having been turned down by Fontana, they were clearly going places. But they needed an image -- and one was provided for them by Pete Meaden. Meaden was another person who got his hair cut by Jack Marks, and he had had  little bit of music business experience, having worked for Andrew Oldham, the Rolling Stones' manager, for a while before going on to manage a group called the Moments, whose career highlight was recording a soundalike cover version of "You Really Got Me" for an American budget label: [Excerpt: The Moments, "You Really Got Me"] The Moments never had any big success, but Meaden's nose for talent was not wrong, as their teenage lead singer, Steve Marriott, later went on to much better things. Pete Meaden was taken on as Helmut Gorden's assistant, but from this point on the group decided to regard him as their de facto manager, and as more than just a manager. To Townshend in particular he was a guru figure, and he shaped the group to appeal to the Mods. Now, we've not talked much about the Mods previously, and what little has been said has been a bit contradictory. That's because the Mods were a tiny subculture at this point -- or to be more precise, they were three subcultures. The original mods had come along in the late 1950s, at a time when there was a division among jazz fans between fans of traditional New Orleans jazz -- "trad" -- and modern jazz. The mods were modernists, hence the name, but for the most part they weren't as interested in music as in clothes. They were a small group of young working-class men, almost all gay, who dressed flamboyantly and dandyishly, and who saw themselves, their clothing, and their bodies as works of art. In the late fifties, Britain was going through something of an economic boom, and this was the first time that working-class men *could* buy nice clothes. These working-class dandies would have to visit tailors to get specially modified clothes made, but they could just about afford to do so. The mod image was at first something that belonged to a very, very, small clique of people. But then John Stephens opened his first shop. This was the first era when short runs of factory-produced clothing became possible, and Stephens, a stylish young man, opened a shop on Carnaby Street, then a relatively cheap place to open a shop. He painted the outside yellow, played loud pop music, and attracted a young crowd. Stephens was selling factory-made clothes that still looked unique -- short runs of odd-coloured jeans, three-button jackets, and other men's fashion. Soon Carnaby Street became the hub for men's fashion in London, thanks largely to Stephens. At one point Stephens owned fifteen different shops, nine of them on Carnaby Street itself, and Stephens' shops appealed to the kind of people that the Kinks would satirise in their early 1966 hit single "Dedicated Follower of Fashion": [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Dedicated Follower of Fashion"] Many of those who visited Stephens' shops were the larger, second, generation of mods. I'm going to quote here from George Melly's Revolt Into Style, the first book to properly analyse British pop culture of the fifties and sixties, by someone who was there: "As the ‘mod' thing spread it lost its purity. For the next generation of Mods, those who picked up the ‘mod' thing around 1963, clothes, while still their central preoccupation, weren't enough. They needed music (Rhythm and Blues), transport (scooters) and drugs (pep pills). What's more they needed fashion ready-made. They hadn't the time or the fanaticism to invent their own styles, and this is where Carnaby Street came in." Melly goes on to talk about how these new Mods were viewed with distaste by the older Mods, who left the scene. The choice of music for these new Mods was as much due to geographic proximity as anything else. Carnaby Street is just round the corner from Wardour Street, and Wardour Street is where the two clubs that between them were the twin poles of the London R&B scenes, the Marquee and the Flamingo, were both located. So it made sense that the young people frequenting John Stephens' boutiques on Carnaby Street were the same people who made up the audiences -- and the bands -- at those clubs. But by 1964, even these second-generation Mods were in a minority compared to a new, third generation, and here I'm going to quote Melly again: "But the Carnaby Street Mods were not the final stage in the history of this particular movement. The word was taken over finally by a new and more violent sector, the urban working class at the gang-forming age, and this became quite sinister. The gang stage rejected the wilder flights of Carnaby Street in favour of extreme sartorial neatness. Everything about them was neat, pretty and creepy: dark glasses, Nero hair-cuts, Chelsea boots, polo-necked sweaters worn under skinny V-necked pullovers, gleaming scooters and transistors. Even their offensive weapons were pretty—tiny hammers and screwdrivers. En masse they looked like a pack of weasels." I would urge anyone who's interested in British social history to read Melly's book in full -- it's well worth it. These third-stage Mods soon made up the bulk of the movement, and they were the ones who, in summer 1964, got into the gang fights that were breathlessly reported in all the tabloid newspapers. Pete Meaden was a Mod, and as far as I can tell he was a leading-edge second-stage Mod, though as with all these things who was in what generation of Mods is a bit blurry. Meaden had a whole idea of Mod-as-lifestyle and Mod-as-philosophy, which worked well with the group's R&B leanings, and with Townshend's art-school-inspired fascination with the aesthetics of Pop Art. Meaden got the group a residency at the Railway Hotel, a favourite Mod hangout, and he also changed their name -- The Who didn't sound Mod enough. In Mod circles at the time there was a hierarchy, with the coolest people, the Faces, at the top, below them a slightly larger group of people known as Numbers, and below them the mass of generic people known as Tickets. Meaden saw himself as the band's Svengali, so he was obviously the Face, so the group had to be Numbers -- so they became The High Numbers. Meaden got the group a one-off single deal, to record two songs he had allegedly written, both of which had lyrics geared specifically for the Mods. The A-side was "Zoot Suit": [Excerpt: The High Numbers, "Zoot Suit"] This had a melody that was stolen wholesale from "Misery" by the Dynamics: [Excerpt: The Dynamics, "Misery"] The B-side, meanwhile, was titled "I'm the Face": [Excerpt: The High Numbers, "I'm the Face"] Which anyone with any interest at all in blues music will recognise immediately as being "Got Love if You Want It" by Slim Harpo: [Excerpt: Slim Harpo, "Got Love if You Want it"] Unfortunately for the High Numbers, that single didn't have much success. Mod was a local phenomenon, which never took off outside London and its suburbs, and so the songs didn't have much appeal in the rest of the country -- while within London, Mod fashions were moving so quickly that by the time the record came out, all its up-to-the-minute references were desperately outdated. But while the record didn't have much success, the group were getting a big live following among the Mods, and their awareness of rapidly shifting trends in that subculture paid off for them in terms of stagecraft. To quote Townshend: "What the Mods taught us was how to lead by following. I mean, you'd look at the dance floor and see some bloke stop during the dance of the week and for some reason feel like doing some silly sort of step. And you'd notice some of the blokes around him looking out of the corners of their eyes and thinking 'is this the latest?' And on their own, without acknowledging the first fellow, a few of 'em would start dancing that way. And we'd be watching. By the time they looked up on the stage again, we'd be doing that dance and they'd think the original guy had been imitating us. And next week they'd come back and look to us for dances". And then Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp came into the Railway Hotel. Kit Lambert was the son of Constant Lambert, the founding music director of the Royal Ballet, who the economist John Maynard Keynes described as the most brilliant man he'd ever met. Constant Lambert was possibly Britain's foremost composer of the pre-war era, and one of the first people from the serious music establishment to recognise the potential of jazz and blues music. His most famous composition, "The Rio Grande", written in 1927 about a fictitious South American river, is often compared with Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue: [Excerpt: Constant Lambert, "The Rio Grande"] Kit Lambert was thus brought up in an atmosphere of great privilege, both financially and intellectually, with his godfather being the composer Sir William Walton while his godmother was the prima ballerina Dame Margot Fonteyn, with whom his father was having an affair. As a result of the problems between his parents, Lambert spent much of his childhood living with his grandmother. After studying history at Oxford and doing his national service, Lambert had spent a few months studying film at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques in Paris, where he went because Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Renais taught there -- or at least so he would later say, though there's no evidence I can find that Godard actually taught there, so either he went there under a mistaken impression or he lied about it later to make himself sound more interesting. However, he'd got bored with his studies after only a few months, and decided that he knew enough to just make a film himself, and he planned his first documentary. In early 1961, despite having little film experience, he joined two friends from university, Richard Mason and John Hemming, in an attempt to make a documentary film tracing the source of the Iriri, a river in South America that was at that point the longest unnavigated river in the world. Unfortunately, the expedition was as disastrous as it's possible for such an expedition to be. In May 1961 they landed in the Amazon basin and headed off on their expedition to find the source of the Iriri, with the help of five local porters and three people sent along by the Brazillian government to map the new areas they were to discover. Unfortunately, by September, not only had they not found the source of the Iriri, they'd actually not managed to find the Iriri itself, four and a half months apparently not being a long enough time to find an eight-hundred-and-ten-mile-long river. And then Mason made his way into history in the worst possible way, by becoming the last, to date, British person to be murdered by an uncontacted indigenous tribe, the Panará, who shot him with eight poison arrows and then bludgeoned his skull. A little over a decade later the Panará made contact with the wider world after nearly being wiped out by disease. They remembered killing Mason and said that they'd been scared by the swishing noise his jeans had made, as they'd never encountered anyone who wore clothes before. Before they made contact, the Panará were also known as the Kreen-Akrore, a name given them by the Kayapó people, meaning "round-cut head", a reference to the way they styled their hair, brushed forward and trimmed over the forehead in a way that was remarkably similar to some of the Mod styles. Before they made contact, Paul McCartney would in 1970 record an instrumental, "Kreen Akrore", after being inspired by a documentary called The Tribe That Hides From Man. McCartney's instrumental includes sound effects, including McCartney firing a bow and arrow, though apparently the bow-string snapped during the recording: [Excerpt: Paul McCartney, "Kreen Akrore"] For a while, Lambert was under suspicion for the murder, though the Daily Express, which had sponsored the expedition, persuaded Brazillian police to drop the charges. While he was in Rio waiting for the legal case to be sorted, Lambert developed what one book on the Who describes as "a serious anal infection". Astonishingly, this experience did not put Lambert off from the film industry, though he wouldn't try to make another film of his own for a couple of years. Instead, he went to work at Shepperton Studios, where he was an uncredited second AD on many films, including From Russia With Love and The L-Shaped Room. Another second AD working on many of the same films was Chris Stamp, the brother of the actor Terence Stamp, who was just starting out in his own career. Stamp and Lambert became close friends, despite -- or because of -- their differences. Lambert was bisexual, and preferred men to women, Stamp was straight. Lambert was the godson of a knight and a dame, Stamp was a working-class East End Cockney. Lambert was a film-school dropout full of ideas and grand ambitions, but unsure how best to put those ideas into practice, Stamp was a practical, hands-on, man. The two complemented each other perfectly, and became flatmates and collaborators. After seeing A Hard Day's Night, they decided that they were going to make their own pop film -- a documentary, inspired by the French nouvelle vague school of cinema, which would chart a pop band from playing lowly clubs to being massive pop stars. Now all they needed was to find a band that were playing lowly clubs but could become massive stars. And they found that band at the Railway Hotel, when they saw the High Numbers. Stamp and Lambert started making their film, and completed part of it, which can be found on YouTube: [Excerpt: The High Numbers, "Oo Poo Pa Doo"] The surviving part of the film is actually very, very, well done for people who'd never directed a film before, and I have no doubt that if they'd completed the film, to be titled High Numbers, it would be regarded as one of the classic depictions of early-sixties London club life, to be classed along with The Small World of Sammy Lee and Expresso Bongo. What's even more astonishing, though, is how *modern* the group look. Most footage of guitar bands of this period looks very dated, not just in the fashions, but in everything -- the attitude of the performers, their body language, the way they hold their instruments. The best performances are still thrilling, but you can tell when they were filmed. On the other hand, the High Numbers look ungainly and awkward, like the lads of no more than twenty that they are -- but in a way that was actually shocking to me when I first saw this footage. Because they look *exactly* like every guitar band I played on the same bill as during my own attempts at being in bands between 2000 and about 2005. If it weren't for the fact that they have such recognisable faces, if you'd told me this was footage of some band I played on the same bill with at the Star and Garter or Night and Day Cafe in 2003, I'd believe it unquestioningly. But while Lambert and Stamp started out making a film, they soon pivoted and decided that they could go into management. Of course, the High Numbers did already have management -- Pete Meaden and Helmut Gorden -- but after consulting with the Beatles' lawyer, David Jacobs, Lambert and Stamp found out that Gorden's contract with the band was invalid, and so when Gorden got back from a holiday, he found himself usurped. Meaden was a bit more difficult to get rid of, even though he had less claim on the group than Gorden -- he was officially their publicist, not their manager, and his only deal was with Gorden, even though the group considered him their manager. While Meaden didn't have a contractual claim though, he did have one argument in his favour, which is that he had a large friend named Phil the Greek, who had a big knife. When this claim was put to Lambert and Stamp, they agreed that this was a very good point indeed, one that they hadn't considered, and agreed to pay Meaden off with two hundred and fifty pounds. This would not be the last big expense that Stamp and Lambert would have as the managers of the Who, as the group were now renamed. Their agreement with the group had the two managers taking forty percent of the group's earnings, while the four band members would split the other sixty percent between themselves -- an arrangement which should theoretically have had the managers coming out ahead. But they also agreed to pay the group's expenses. And that was to prove very costly indeed. Shortly after they started managing the group, at a gig at the Railway Hotel, which had low ceilings, Townshend lifted his guitar up a bit higher than he'd intended, and broke the headstock. Townshend had a spare guitar with him, so this was OK, and he also remembered Gustav Metzger and his ideas of auto-destructive art, and Malcolm Cecil sawing through his bass strings and damaging his bass, and decided that it was better for him to look like he'd meant to do that than to look like an idiot who'd accidentally broken his guitar, so he repeated the motion, smashing his guitar to bits, before carrying on the show with his spare. The next week, the crowd were excited, expecting the same thing again, but Townshend hadn't brought a spare guitar with him. So as not to disappoint them, Keith Moon destroyed his drum kit instead. This destruction was annoying to Entwistle, who saw musical instruments as something close to sacred, and it also annoyed the group's managers at first, because musical instruments are expensive. But they soon saw the value this brought to the band's shows, and reluctantly agreed to keep buying them new instruments. So for the first couple of years, Lambert and Stamp lost money on the group. They funded this partly through Lambert's savings, partly through Stamp continuing to do film work, and partly from investors in their company, one of whom was Russ Conway, the easy-listening piano player who'd had hits like "Side Saddle": [Excerpt: Russ Conway, "Side Saddle"] Conway's connections actually got the group another audition for a record label, Decca (although Conway himself recorded for EMI), but the group were turned down. The managers were told that they would have been signed, but they didn't have any original material. So Pete Townshend was given the task of writing some original material. By this time Townshend's musical world was expanding far beyond the R&B that the group were performing on stage, and he talks in his autobiography about the music he was listening to while he was trying to write his early songs. There was "Green Onions", which he'd been listening to for years in his attempt to emulate Steve Cropper's guitar style, but there was also The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, and two tracks he names in particular, "Devil's Jump" by John Lee Hooker: [Excerpt: John Lee Hooker, "Devil's Jump"] And "Better Get Hit in Your Soul" by Charles Mingus: [Excerpt: Charles Mingus, "Better Get Hit In Your Soul"] He was also listening to what he described as "a record that changed my life as a composer", a recording of baroque music that included sections of Purcell's Gordian Knot Untied: [Excerpt: Purcell, Chaconne from Gordian Knot Untied] Townshend had a notebook in which he listed the records he wanted to obtain, and he reproduces that list in his autobiography -- "‘Marvin Gaye, 1-2-3, Mingus Revisited, Stevie Wonder, Jimmy Smith Organ Grinder's Swing, In Crowd, Nina in Concert [Nina Simone], Charlie Christian, Billie Holiday, Ella, Ray Charles, Thelonious Monk Around Midnight and Brilliant Corners.'" He was also listening to a lot of Stockhausen and Charlie Parker, and to the Everly Brothers -- who by this point were almost the only artist that all four members of the Who agreed were any good, because Daltrey was now fully committed to the R&B music he'd originally dismissed, and disliked what he thought was the pretentiousness of the music Townshend was listening to, while Keith Moon was primarily a fan of the Beach Boys. But everyone could agree that the Everlys, with their sensitive interpretations, exquisite harmonies, and Bo Diddley-inflected guitars, were great, and so the group added several songs from the Everlys' 1965 albums Rock N Soul and Beat N Soul to their set, like "Man With Money": [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Man With Money"] Despite Daltrey's objections to diluting the purity of the group's R&B sound, Townshend brought all these influences into his songwriting. The first song he wrote to see release was not actually recorded by the Who, but a song he co-wrote for a minor beat group called the Naturals, who released it as a B-side: [Excerpt: The Naturals, "It Was You"] But shortly after this, the group got their first big break, thanks to Lambert's personal assistant, Anya Butler. Butler was friends with Shel Talmy's wife, and got Talmy to listen to the group. Townshend in particular was eager to work with Talmy, as he was a big fan of the Kinks, who were just becoming big, and who Talmy produced. Talmy signed the group to a production deal, and then signed a deal to license their records to Decca in America -- which Lambert and Stamp didn't realise wasn't the same label as British Decca. Decca in turn sublicensed the group's recordings to their British subsidiary Brunswick, which meant that the group got a minuscule royalty for sales in Britain, as their recordings were being sold through three corporate layers all taking their cut. This didn't matter to them at first, though, and they went into the studio excited to cut their first record as The Who. As was typical at the time, Talmy brought in a few session players to help out. Clem Cattini turned out not to be needed, and left quickly, but Jimmy Page stuck around -- not to play on the A-side, which Townshend said was "so simple even I could play it", but the B-side, a version of the old blues standard "Bald-Headed Woman", which Talmy had copyrighted in his own name and had already had the Kinks record: [Excerpt: The Who, "Bald-Headed Woman"] Apparently the only reason that Page played on that is that Page wouldn't let Townshend use his fuzzbox. As well as Page and Cattini, Talmy also brought in some backing vocalists. These were the Ivy League, a writing and production collective consisting at this point of John Carter and Ken Lewis, both of whom had previously been in a band with Page, and Perry Ford. The Ivy League were huge hit-makers in the mid-sixties, though most people don't recognise their name. Carter and Lewis had just written "Can You Hear My Heartbeat" for Herman's Hermits: [Excerpt: Herman's Hermits, "Can You Hear My Heartbeat?"] And, along with a couple of other singers who joined the group, the Ivy League would go on to sing backing vocals on hits by Sandie Shaw, Tom Jones and others. Together and separately the members of the Ivy League were also responsible for writing, producing, and singing on "Let's Go to San Francisco" by the Flowerpot Men, "Winchester Cathedral" by the New Vaudeville Band, "Beach Baby" by First Class, and more, as well as their big hit under their own name, "Tossing and Turning": [Excerpt: The Ivy League, "Tossing and Turning"] Though my favourite of their tracks is their baroque pop masterpiece "My World Fell Down": [Excerpt: The Ivy League, "My World Fell Down"] As you can tell, the Ivy League were masters of the Beach Boys sound that Moon, and to a lesser extent Townshend, loved. That backing vocal sound was combined with a hard-driving riff inspired by the Kinks' early hits like "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night", and with lyrics that explored inarticulacy, a major theme of Townshend's lyrics: [Excerpt: The Who, "I Can't Explain"] "I Can't Explain" made the top ten, thanks in part to a publicity stunt that Lambert came up with. The group had been booked on to Ready, Steady, Go!, and the floor manager of the show mentioned to Lambert that they were having difficulty getting an audience for that week's show -- they were short about a hundred and fifty people, and they needed young, energetic, dancers. Lambert suggested that the best place to find young, energetic, dancers, was at the Marquee on a Tuesday night -- which just happened to be the night of the Who's regular residency at the club. Come the day of filming, the Ready, Steady, Go! audience was full of the Who's most hardcore fans, all of whom had been told by Lambert to throw scarves at the band when they started playing. It was one of the most memorable performances on the show. But even though the record was a big hit, Daltrey was unhappy. The man who'd started out as guitarist in a Shadows cover band and who'd strenuously objected to the group's inclusion of R&B material now had the zeal of a convert. He didn't want to be doing this "soft commercial pop", or Townshend's art-school nonsense. He wanted to be an R&B singer, playing hard music for working-class men like him. Two decisions were taken to mollify the lead singer. The first was that when they went into the studio to record their first album, it was all soul and R&B apart from one original. The album was going to consist of three James Brown covers, three Motown covers, Bo Diddley's "I'm a Man", and a cover of Paul Revere and the Raiders' "Louie Louie" sequel "Louie Come Home", retitled "Lubie". All of this was material that Daltrey was very comfortable with. Also, Daltrey was given some input into the second single, which would be the only song credited to Daltrey and Townshend, and Daltrey's only songwriting contribution to a Who A-side. Townshend had come up with the title "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere" while listening to Charlie Parker, and had written the song based on that title, but Daltrey was allowed to rewrite the lyrics and make suggestions as to the arrangement. That record also made the top ten: [Excerpt: The Who, "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere"] But Daltrey would soon become even more disillusioned. The album they'd recorded was shelved, though some tracks were later used for what became the My Generation album, and Kit Lambert told the Melody Maker “The Who are having serious doubts about the state of R&B. Now the LP material will consist of hard pop. They've finished with ‘Smokestack Lightning'!” That wasn't the only thing they were finished with -- Townshend and Moon were tired of their band's leader, and also just didn't think he was a particularly good singer -- and weren't shy about saying so, even to the press. Entwistle, a natural peacemaker, didn't feel as strongly, but there was a definite split forming in the band. Things came to a head on a European tour. Daltrey was sick of this pop nonsense, he was sick of the arty ideas of Townshend, and he was also sick of the other members' drug use. Daltrey didn't indulge himself, but the other band members had been using drugs long before they became successful, and they were all using uppers, which offended Daltrey greatly. He flushed Keith Moon's pill stash down the toilet, and screamed at his band mates that they were a bunch of junkies, then physically attacked Moon. All three of the other band members agreed -- Daltrey was out of the band. They were going to continue as a trio. But after a couple of days, Daltrey was back in the group. This was mostly because Daltrey had come crawling back to them, apologising -- he was in a very bad place at the time, having left his wife and kid, and was actually living in the back of the group's tour van. But it was also because Lambert and Stamp persuaded the group they needed Daltrey, at least for the moment, because he'd sung lead on their latest single, and that single was starting to rise up the charts. "My Generation" had had a long and torturous journey from conception to realisation. Musically it originally had been inspired by Mose Allison's "Young Man's Blues": [Excerpt: Mose Allison, "Young Man's Blues"] Townshend had taken that musical mood and tied it to a lyric that was inspired by a trilogy of TV plays, The Generations, by the socialist playwright David Mercer, whose plays were mostly about family disagreements that involved politics and class, as in the case of the first of those plays, where two upwardly-mobile young brothers of very different political views go back to visit their working-class family when their mother is on her deathbed, and are confronted by the differences they have with each other, and with the uneducated father who sacrificed to give them a better life than he had: [Excerpt: Where the Difference Begins] Townshend's original demo for the song was very much in the style of Mose Allison, as the excerpt of it that's been made available on various deluxe reissues of the album shows: [Excerpt: Pete Townshend, "My Generation (demo)"] But Lambert had not been hugely impressed by that demo. Stamp had suggested that Townshend try a heavier guitar riff, which he did, and then Lambert had added the further suggestion that the music would be improved by a few key changes -- Townshend was at first unsure about this, because he already thought he was a bit too influenced by the Kinks, and he regarded Ray Davies as, in his words, "the master of modulation", but eventually he agreed, and decided that the key changes did improve the song. Stamp made one final suggestion after hearing the next demo version of the song. A while earlier, the Who had been one of the many British groups, like the Yardbirds and the Animals, who had backed Sonny Boy Williamson II on his UK tour. Williamson had occasionally done a little bit of a stutter in some of his performances, and Daltrey had picked up on that and started doing it. Townshend had in turn imitated Daltrey's mannerism a couple of times on the demo, and Stamp thought that was something that could be accentuated. Townshend agreed, and reworked the song, inspired by John Lee Hooker's "Stuttering Blues": [Excerpt: John Lee Hooker, "Stuttering Blues"] The stuttering made all the difference, and it worked on three levels. It reinforced the themes of inarticulacy that run throughout the Who's early work -- their first single, after all, had been called "I Can't Explain", and Townshend talks movingly in his autobiography about talking to teenage fans who felt that "I Can't Explain" had said for them the things they couldn't say th

The introduction of the synthesizer brought with it a many new types of sounds and a new way of thinking when it came to creating instruments. This week on The Music History Project, hear from some of the legendary synth pioneers that creatively and scientifically invented some of the most iconic sounds in recent popular music including Don Buchla, John Chowning, Suzanne Ciani, Bob Moog and Malcolm Cecil.

On this episode of Audio Judo, Matthew and Kyle discuss Stevie Wonder's 1972 masterpiece "Talking Book."If you like what you hear and want to support the podcast, you can become a Patreon supporter (starting at just $3/month):https://www.patreon.com/audiojudoYou can also buy some swag with our logo on it:https://www.teepublic.com/user/audio-judo-podcastAs always, let us know what you think by emailing info(at)audiojudo.com.Website: https://www.audiojudo.comGet in touch on social media:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/audiojudoTwitter: @audiojudoInstagram: @audio_judoWe are proud members of the Pantheon Podcast Network. If you like our show check out other music related podcasts at https://www.pantheonpodcasts.comNotes:Mathieu Bitton's Bio and Website: http://www.mathieubitton.fr/biography/Sadly, Malcolm Cecil, the creator of TONTO died just a few days before this episode will post. Here is a lovely article written about him, with a wonderful picture of TONTO for those curious to see what it looks like: https://happymag.tv/malcolm-cecil-creator-of-tonto-dies-age-84/A clip from the Sesame Street performance of "Superstition" by Stevie Wonder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ul7X5js1vE"Mixing Stevie Wonder's 'Superstition'" by Joe Shambro: https://www.liveabout.com/mixing-stevie-wonders-superstition-1817747

On this episode of Audio Judo, Matthew and Kyle discuss Stevie Wonder's 1972 masterpiece "Talking Book." If you like what you hear and want to support the podcast, you can become a Patreon supporter (starting at just $3/month): https://www.patreon.com/audiojudo You can also buy some swag with our logo on it: https://www.teepublic.com/user/audio-judo-podcast As always, let us know what you think by emailing info(at)audiojudo.com. Website: https://www.audiojudo.com Get in touch on social media: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/audiojudo Twitter: @audiojudo Instagram: @audio_judo We are proud members of the Pantheon Podcast Network. If you like our show check out other music related podcasts at https://www.pantheonpodcasts.com Notes: Mathieu Bitton's Bio and Website: http://www.mathieubitton.fr/biography/ Sadly, Malcolm Cecil, the creator of TONTO died just a few days before this episode will post. Here is a lovely article written about him, with a wonderful picture of TONTO for those curious to see what it looks like: https://happymag.tv/malcolm-cecil-creator-of-tonto-dies-age-84/ A clip from the Sesame Street performance of "Superstition" by Stevie Wonder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ul7X5js1vE "Mixing Stevie Wonder's 'Superstition'" by Joe Shambro: https://www.liveabout.com/mixing-stevie-wonders-superstition-1817747

On this episode of Audio Judo, Matthew and Kyle discuss Stevie Wonder's 1972 masterpiece "Talking Book."If you like what you hear and want to support the podcast, you can become a Patreon supporter:https://www.patreon.com/audiojudoYou can also buy some swag with our logo on it:https://www.teepublic.com/user/audio-judo-podcastAs always, let us know what you think by emailing info(at)audiojudo.com.Website: https://www.audiojudo.comGet in touch on social media:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/audiojudoTwitter: @audiojudoInstagram: @audio_judoWe are proud members of the Pantheon Podcast Network. If you like our show check out other music related podcasts at https://www.pantheonpodcasts.comNotes:Mathieu Bitton's Bio and Website: http://www.mathieubitton.fr/biography/Sadly, Malcolm Cecil, the creator of TONTO died just a few days before this episode will post. Here is a lovely article written about him, with a wonderful picture of TONTO for those curious to see what it looks like: https://happymag.tv/malcolm-cecil-creator-of-tonto-dies-age-84/A clip from the Sesame Street performance of "Superstition" by Stevie Wonder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ul7X5js1vE"Mixing Stevie Wonder's 'Superstition'" by Joe Shambro: https://www.liveabout.com/mixing-stevie-wonders-superstition-1817747

On this episode of Audio Judo, Matthew and Kyle discuss Stevie Wonder's 1972 masterpiece "Talking Book."Do you really want to see what we look like while we record? Check out select episodes on our YouTube, you weirdo:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO8oo8oZkSLUqOuiiw8hD7QIf you like what you hear (and see) and want to support the podcast, you can become a Patreon supporter for as little as $1/month:https://www.patreon.com/audiojudoYou can also buy some swag with our logo on it:https://www.teepublic.com/user/audio-judo-podcastAs always, let us know what you think by emailing info(at)audiojudo(dot)com.Website: https://www.audiojudo.comGet in touch on social media:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/audiojudoTwitter: @audiojudoInstagram: @audio_judoWe are proud members of the Pantheon Podcast Network. If you like our show check out other music related podcasts at https://www.pantheonpodcasts.comEpisode info and notes updated June 15, 2022.   Show Notes:Mathieu Bitton's Bio and Website: http://www.mathieubitton.fr/biography/Sadly, Malcolm Cecil, the creator of TONTO died just a few days before this episode will post. Here is a lovely article written about him, with a wonderful picture of TONTO for those curious to see what it looks like: https://happymag.tv/malcolm-cecil-creator-of-tonto-dies-age-84/A clip from the Sesame Street performance of "Superstition" by Stevie Wonder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ul7X5js1vE"Mixing Stevie Wonder's 'Superstition'" by Joe Shambro: https://www.liveabout.com/mixing-stevie-wonders-superstition-1817747

On this episode of Audio Judo, Matthew and Kyle discuss Stevie Wonder's 1972 masterpiece "Talking Book." If you like what you hear and want to support the podcast, you can become a Patreon supporter: https://www.patreon.com/audiojudo You can also buy some swag with our logo on it: https://www.teepublic.com/user/audio-judo-podcast As always, let us know what you think by emailing info(at)audiojudo.com. Website: https://www.audiojudo.com Get in touch on social media: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/audiojudo Twitter: @audiojudo Instagram: @audio_judo We are proud members of the Pantheon Podcast Network. If you like our show check out other music related podcasts at https://www.pantheonpodcasts.com Notes: Mathieu Bitton's Bio and Website: http://www.mathieubitton.fr/biography/ Sadly, Malcolm Cecil, the creator of TONTO died just a few days before this episode will post. Here is a lovely article written about him, with a wonderful picture of TONTO for those curious to see what it looks like: https://happymag.tv/malcolm-cecil-creator-of-tonto-dies-age-84/ A clip from the Sesame Street performance of "Superstition" by Stevie Wonder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ul7X5js1vE "Mixing Stevie Wonder's 'Superstition'" by Joe Shambro: https://www.liveabout.com/mixing-stevie-wonders-superstition-1817747 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of the RBP podcast, we welcome San Francisco Chronicle legend Joel Selvin into the virtual cupboard to talk about Hollywood Eden, his terrific new book about L.A.'s pop scene in the early '60s.After explaining how he first came to write for "the Chron" at the end of that decade, Joel recalls his early fascination with L.A. as the burgeoning "surf city" celebrated by Jan & Dean and the Beach Boys. Barney & Mark press him for stories about the scurrilous but brilliant "bottom feeder" Kim Fowley, after which we hear three audio clips from John Tobler's 1973 interview with (Jan &) Dean Torrence. (Among those namechecked along the way: Jan Berry, inevitably, and Lou Adler, Bruce Johnston, Terry Melcher & Jill Gibson...)Staying in a Southern California groove, Joel also reminisces about the troubled Jack Nitzsche, whom he interviewed for Melody Maker in 1978. We discuss Nitzsche's achievements as a producer-arranger, his big influence on the Rolling Stones, and his regrettable decline in the last years of his life. Handily, Joel also turns out to know his stuff when it comes to the role played in Stevie Wonder's synthesized '70s soul by the late Malcolm (Tonto's Expanding Head Band) Cecil, who passed away last week...Mark wraps matters up with observations on such recent RBP library additions as Maureen O'Grady's 1965 Rave interview with the visiting Byrds; Richard Goldstein's 1968 New York Times profile of the splendidly eccentric Van Dyke Parks; and — from 1980 — Glenn O'Brien's Interview interview with the Marianne Faithfull of Broken English.Many thanks to special guest Joel Selvin. Hollywood Eden is published by House of Anansi and Joel can be found online at joelselvin.com.Pieces discussed: Beach Boys, Lenny Waronker, Dean Torrence audio, Jack Nitzsche, Joel on Jack, Jack Nitzsche and the Stones, Stevie Wonder, Stubbs on Stevie, Tonto's Expanding Head Band, The Byrds, Bill Graham, Phil Spector, Phil Spector Again, The Stone Roses, Stash de Rola, Van Dyke Parks, Marianne Faithfull, Madonna, J.J. Fad, Brandy, Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz.

In this episode of the RBP podcast, we welcome San Francisco Chronicle legend Joel Selvin into the virtual cupboard to talk about Hollywood Eden, his terrific new book about L.A.'s pop scene in the early '60s. After explaining how he first came to write for "the Chron" at the end of that decade, Joel recalls his early fascination with L.A. as the burgeoning "surf city" celebrated by Jan & Dean and the Beach Boys. Barney & Mark press him for stories about the scurrilous but brilliant "bottom feeder" Kim Fowley, after which we hear three audio clips from John Tobler's 1973 interview with (Jan &) Dean Torrence. (Among those namechecked along the way: Jan Berry, inevitably, and Lou Adler, Bruce Johnston, Terry Melcher & Jill Gibson...) Staying in a Southern California groove, Joel also reminisces about the troubled Jack Nitzsche, whom he interviewed for Melody Maker in 1978. We discuss Nitzsche's achievements as a producer-arranger, his big influence on the Rolling Stones, and his regrettable decline in the last years of his life. Handily, Joel also turns out to know his stuff when it comes to the role played in Stevie Wonder's synthesized '70s soul by the late Malcolm (Tonto's Expanding Head Band) Cecil, who passed away last week... Mark wraps matters up with observations on such recent RBP library additions as Maureen O'Grady's 1965 Rave interview with the visiting Byrds; Richard Goldstein's 1968 New York Times profile of the splendidly eccentric Van Dyke Parks; and — from 1980 — Glenn O'Brien's Interview interview with the Marianne Faithfull of Broken English. Many thanks to special guest Joel Selvin. Hollywood Eden is published by House of Anansi and Joel can be found online at joelselvin.com. Pieces discussed: Beach Boys, Lenny Waronker, Dean Torrence audio, Jack Nitzsche, Joel on Jack, Jack Nitzsche and the Stones, Stevie Wonder, Stubbs on Stevie, Tonto's Expanding Head Band, The Byrds, Bill Graham, Phil Spector, Phil Spector Again, The Stone Roses, Stash de Rola, Van Dyke Parks, Marianne Faithfull, Madonna, J.J. Fad, Brandy, Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz.

In this episode of the RBP podcast, we welcome San Francisco Chronicle legend Joel Selvin into the virtual cupboard to talk about Hollywood Eden, his terrific new book about L.A.'s pop scene in the early '60s.After explaining how he first came to write for "the Chron" at the end of that decade, Joel recalls his early fascination with L.A. as the burgeoning "surf city" celebrated by Jan & Dean and the Beach Boys. Barney & Mark press him for stories about the scurrilous but brilliant "bottom feeder" Kim Fowley, after which we hear three audio clips from John Tobler's 1973 interview with (Jan &) Dean Torrence. (Among those namechecked along the way: Jan Berry, inevitably, and Lou Adler, Bruce Johnston, Terry Melcher & Jill Gibson...)Staying in a Southern California groove, Joel also reminisces about the troubled Jack Nitzsche, whom he interviewed for Melody Maker in 1978. We discuss Nitzsche's achievements as a producer-arranger, his big influence on the Rolling Stones, and his regrettable decline in the last years of his life. Handily, Joel also turns out to know his stuff when it comes to the role played in Stevie Wonder's synthesized '70s soul by the late Malcolm (Tonto's Expanding Head Band) Cecil, who passed away last week...Mark wraps matters up with observations on such recent RBP library additions as Maureen O'Grady's 1965 Rave interview with the visiting Byrds; Richard Goldstein's 1968 New York Times profile of the splendidly eccentric Van Dyke Parks; and — from 1980 — Glenn O'Brien's Interview interview with the Marianne Faithfull of Broken English.Many thanks to special guest Joel Selvin. Hollywood Eden is published by House of Anansi and Joel can be found online at joelselvin.com.Pieces discussed: Beach Boys, Lenny Waronker, Dean Torrence audio, Jack Nitzsche, Joel on Jack, Jack Nitzsche and the Stones, Stevie Wonder, Stubbs on Stevie, Tonto's Expanding Head Band, The Byrds, Bill Graham, Phil Spector, Phil Spector Again, The Stone Roses, Stash de Rola, Van Dyke Parks, Marianne Faithfull, Madonna, J.J. Fad, Brandy, Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz.

In this episode of the RBP podcast, we welcome San Francisco Chronicle legend Joel Selvin into the virtual cupboard to talk about Hollywood Eden, his terrific new book about L.A.'s pop scene in the early '60s. After explaining how he first came to write for "the Chron" at the end of that decade, Joel recalls his early fascination with L.A. as the burgeoning "surf city" celebrated by Jan & Dean and the Beach Boys. Barney & Mark press him for stories about the scurrilous but brilliant "bottom feeder" Kim Fowley, after which we hear three audio clips from John Tobler's 1973 interview with (Jan &) Dean Torrence. (Among those namechecked along the way: Jan Berry, inevitably, and Lou Adler, Bruce Johnston, Terry Melcher & Jill Gibson...) Staying in a Southern California groove, Joel also reminisces about the troubled Jack Nitzsche, whom he interviewed for Melody Maker in 1978. We discuss Nitzsche's achievements as a producer-arranger, his big influence on the Rolling Stones, and his regrettable decline in the last years of his life. Handily, Joel also turns out to know his stuff when it comes to the role played in Stevie Wonder's synthesized '70s soul by the late Malcolm (Tonto's Expanding Head Band) Cecil, who passed away last week... Mark wraps matters up with observations on such recent RBP library additions as Maureen O'Grady's 1965 Rave interview with the visiting Byrds; Richard Goldstein's 1968 New York Times profile of the splendidly eccentric Van Dyke Parks; and — from 1980 — Glenn O'Brien's Interview interview with the Marianne Faithfull of Broken English. Many thanks to special guest Joel Selvin. Hollywood Eden is published by House of Anansi and Joel can be found online at joelselvin.com. Pieces discussed: Beach Boys, Lenny Waronker, Dean Torrence audio, Jack Nitzsche, Joel on Jack, Jack Nitzsche and the Stones, Stevie Wonder, Stubbs on Stevie, Tonto's Expanding Head Band, The Byrds, Bill Graham, Phil Spector, Phil Spector Again, The Stone Roses, Stash de Rola, Van Dyke Parks, Marianne Faithfull, Madonna, J.J. Fad, Brandy, Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz.

Episode 36 Listening to Malcolm Cecil and T.O.N.T.O Malcolm Cecil's synthesizer setup was known as T.O.N.T.O., an acronym meaning The Original New Timbral Orchestra. Playlist Caldera, “Share With Me the Pain” from A Moog Mass (1970 Kama Sutra). Synthesizer programming and engineering by Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff; spoken vocals, Malcolm Cecil; tenor vocals, Robert White; harpsichord, John Atkins; synthetic speech effects, Robert Margouleff' cello, toby Saks. 4:31 Tonto's Expanding Head Band, “Timewhys” from Zero Time (1971 Atlantic). Written by, programmed, engineered, produced and performed by Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margoulff. Lyrics by Tama Starr. Recorded with an expanded Moog Modular III synthesizer. This was prior to expanding their system into what would become T.O.N.T.O.. 5:03 Tonto's Expanding Head Band, “Cybernaut” from Zero Time (1971 Atlantic). Written, programmed, engineered, produced and performed by Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margoulff. Recorded with an expanded Moog Modular III synthesizer. A nice demonstration of what they could accomplish with the Moog. 4:31 Stephen Stills/Manassas, “Move Around” from Manassas (1972 Atlantic). Synthesizer, electric guitar, organ, vocals, producer, Stephen Stills; keyboards, Paul Harris; drums, Dallas Taylor; guitar, Chris Hillman. Synthesizer programming, Malcolm Cecil. 4:17 Stevie Wonder, “Keep on Running” from Music Of My Mind (1972 Tamla). Synthesizers, ARP and Moog, Piano, Drums, Harmonica, Organ, Clavichord, Clavinet, Stevie Wonder. Engineering and synthesizer programming, Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff. Adds the ARP and another Moog to the T.O.N.T.O. setup. 6:38 Stevie Wonder, “Evil” from Music Of My Mind (1972 Tamla). Synthesizers, ARP and Moog, Piano, Drums, Harmonica, Organ, Clavichord, Clavinet, Stevie Wonder. Engineering and synthesizer programming, Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff. 3:31 Pat Rebillot, “The Naked Truth” from Free Fall (1974 Atlantic). Synthesizer and electric piano, Pat Rebillot. Engineering and synthesizer programming, Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff. 3:28 Tonto, “The Boatman” from It's About Time (1974 Polydor). Written, programmed, engineered, produced, and performed by Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margoulff. Features the expanded analog version of T.O.N.T.O. featuring ARP, Moog, and Oberheim equipment. Note the rain and thunder sounds created using the synthesizer. Reminds me of Beaver and Krause from this era. 5:04. Tonto, “Tonto's Travels” from It's About Time (1974 Polydor). Written, programmed, engineered, produced, and performed by Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margoulff. Features the expanded analog version of T.O.N.T.O. featuring ARP, Moog, and Oberheim equipment. I think you can hear the joystick that Cecil created. 8:25 Mandrill, “Peaceful Atmosphere” from Beast From The East (1975 United Artists Records). T.O.N.T.O. played by Claude “Coffee” Cave, Carlos Wilson; electronic music programming, Malcolm Cecil. From the liner notes: “T.O.N.T.O. The Original New-Timbrel Orchestra. This instrument consists of twelve synthesizers linked together and played simultaneously. A polyphonic touch-sensitive also plays also plays an essential role in the creation of sound when the instrument is played. We thank you Malcolm Cecil for the creation of T.O.N.T.O. 3:19 Mandrill, “Honey-Butt” from Beast From The East (1975 United Artists Records). T.O.N.T.O. played by Claude “Coffee” Cave, Carlos Wilson; electronic music programming, Malcolm Cecil. 4:58 Stairsteps, “Theme Of Angels” from 2nd Resurrection (1976 Dark Horse Records). Synthesizer, T.O.N.T.O., Billy Preston; T.O.N.T.O. programmed by Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff; produced and engineered by Robert Margouleff. Music By, Lyrics By, Lead Vocals, Lead Guitar, Bass, Kenneth Burke; Backing Vocals, Ivory Davis; Backing Vocals, Stairsteps; Drums, Alvin Taylor; Guitar, Dennis Burke; Keyboards, Billy Preston. 3:18 Stairsteps, “Salaam” from 2nd Resurrection (1976 Dark Horse Records). Synthesizer, T.O.N.T.O., Billy Preston; T.O.N.T.O. programmed by Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff; produced and engineered by Robert Margouleff. Music By, Lyrics By, Lead Vocals, Lead Guitar, Bass, Kenneth Burke; Backing Vocals, Ivory Davis; Backing Vocals, Stairsteps; Drums, Alvin Taylor; Guitar, Dennis Burke; Keyboards, Billy Preston. 4:26 Quincy Jones, “I Heard That” from I Heard That!! (1976 A&M). Synthesizer, Dave Gruisin. Synthesizer programming by Malcom Cecil, Robert Margouleff, Paul Beaver. 2:12 Quincy Jones, “Theme from ‘The Anderson Tapes” from I Heard That!! (1976 A&M). Synthesizer, Dave Gruisin. Synthesizer programming by Malcom Cecil, Robert Margouleff, Paul Beaver. Synthesizer, Ed Kalehoff. Also features a vibraphone solo by Milt Jackson, a trumpet solo by Freddie Hubbard, Toots Thielemans on harmonica, and Bobby Scott on piano. 5:05 Steve Hillage, “Octave Doctors” from Motivation Radio (1977 Virgin). Producer, Engineer, Synthesizer T.O.N.T.O., Malcolm Cecil; Synthesizer & Saucersizer, Vocals, Lyrics, Miquette Giraudy; Composed, Arranged, Lyrics, Guitar, Guitar Synthesizer, Voice, Shenai; Steve Hillage. 3:30 Steve Hillage, “Radio” from Motivation Radio (1977 Virgin). Producer, Engineer, Synthesizer T.O.N.T.O., Malcolm Cecil; Synthesizer, Vocals, Lyrics, Miquette Giraudy; Composed, Arranged, Lyrics, Guitar, Guitar Synthesizer, Voice, Shenai; Steve Hillage. 6:11 Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson, “1980” from 1980 (1980 Arista). Produced by Brian Jackson, Gil Scott-Heron, Malcolm Cecil; engineered and mixed by Malcolm Cecil; Synthesizer (T.O.N.T.O.), piano, electric piano, keyboard bass, Brian Jackson; composer, guitar, piano, vocals, Gil Scott-Heron; horns, Bill Watrous, Denis Sirias, Gordon Goodwin; drums, Harvey Mason; guitar, Marlo Henderson. 5:59 Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson, “Late Last Night” from 1980 (1980 Arista). Produced by Brian Jackson, Gil Scott-Heron, Malcolm Cecil; engineered and mixed by Malcolm Cecil; Synthesizer (T.O.N.T.O.), piano, electric piano, keyboard bass, Brian Jackson; composer, guitar, piano, vocals, Gil Scott-Heron; horns, Bill Watrous, Denis Sirias, Gordon Goodwin; drums, Harvey Mason; guitar, Marlo Henderson. 4:24 Malcolm Cecil, “Gamelonia Dawn” from Radiance (1981 Unity Records). Composed, Performed, Produced, Engineered by Malcolm Cecil. Recorded at T.O.N.T.O. studios in Santa Monica, California. From the liner notes: “The Original New Timbral Orchestra is the world's largest privately built and owned synthesizer standing some six feet high and twenty feet in diameter. It was designed and built by Malcom Cecil.” In addition to Cecil on T.O.N.T.O., this track features Paul Horn on “golden” flute. 4:35 Malcolm Cecil, “Dance of the Heart” from Radiance (1981 Unity Records). Composed, Performed, Produced, Engineered by Malcolm Cecil. Recorded at T.O.N.T.O. studios in Santa Monica, California. 3:28   Background music: Caldera, “Make Me Carry The Death Of Christ” from A Moog Mass (1970 Kama Sutra). Synthesizer programming and engineering by Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff; spoken vocals, Malcolm Cecil; tenor vocals, Robert White; harpsichord, John Atkins; synthetic speech effects, Robert Margouleff' cello, toby Saks. Tonto's Expanding Head Band, “Riversong” from Zero Time (1971 Atlantic). Written by, programmed, engineered, produced and performed by Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margoulff. Lyrics by Tama Starr. Recorded with an expanded Moog Modular III synthesizer. This was prior to expanding their system into what would become T.O.N.T.O.. 8:01 Here is the video produced with Malcolm Cecil by the National Music Centre of Canada. This short history of T.O.N.T.O. at Rolling Stone magazine is also of interest.   Introductory and background music by Thom Holmes unless otherwise indicated. Opening and closing sequences were voiced by Anne Benkovitz. For episode notes, see Noise and Notations. For more information about the history of electronic music, see Electronic and Experimental Music, sixth edition, published by Routledge.

Talking Synths is a weekly podcast where Syntaur's Sam Mims and Carlos Morales tackle your questions and chat about all manner of synthology. This episode, Sam and Carlos talk about the myriad of controller possibilities for synthesizers, and mourn the passing of Malcolm Cecil.

Hats Off Media's Youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/HatsOffProducts Twitter: https://twitter.com/HatsOffMedia 0:45 Soul Plane 25:28 Malcolm Cecil, New Sesame Street Muppets, Arthur 49:20 The Spongebob panty raid, Banned Cartoon Episodes, 01:07:55 Things we couldn't watch as kids 01:46:38 Lil Nas X

This week we’re joined by friend of the show Wayan Zoey!Nick particularly wanted to get Wayan’s take on a recent Pitchfork article regarding LiveNation’s market dominance and stock growth despite having no live music the past year. We discuss how LiveNation has come to dominate so much of the live music industry in the last decade & whether that’s a problem.Song: Black Midi - “John L”Greg shares an album released back in 2006 but that’s received an increasing amount of recognition since its initial release. J Dilla made his final album “Donuts” from his hospital bed while being treated for the rare blood disease that he succumbed to days after the albums release. The guys concur that it’s an incredibly compelling listen and discuss J Dilla’s contributions to instrumental hip-hop in particular, and music overall.Song: J Dilla - “Stop”, “Mash”Jay adds to discussion of TONTO back on #065. Malcolm Cecil, the co-designer & producer of TONTO, passed at the age of 84 last week. We discuss his role as a pioneer of the analog synthesizer & his collaboration with Stevie Wonder during his prolific 1970s run of albums.Song: Stevie Wonder - “Superstition”We hope you’re all doing well, see you next week!

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Elton John a récemment confié avoir travaillé avec Metallica. Brian May lutte contre la morosité avec un nouveau titre "The Panic Attack Song". On a appris le décès de Malcolm Cecil, musicien et producteur lié à plusieurs albums de Stevie Wonder dans les années 70. La campagne de Fightback Lager “this beer saves music venues”, portée notamment par Frank Turner et Iron Maiden, pour venir en aide au secteur de la culture. Le guitariste Adrian Smith qui a confié qu’ Iron Maiden préparait quelque chose de très excitant, et promet aux fans qu’ils "seront ravis" quand ils apprendront de quoi il s’agit. Ce samedi 27 mars avait lieu la cérémonie des Roblox’s Bloxy Awards au cours de laquelle Royal Blood a proposé un mini-concert virtuel sous forme d’avatars. --- Classic 21 vous informe des dernières actualités du rock, en Belgique et partout ailleurs. Le Journal du Rock, chaque jour à 7h30 et 18h30.

En Música de Contrabando, revista diaria de música en Onda Regional de Murcia, estrenamos nuevo formato con la incorporación de Terminal Pop, y aumentamos la duración a dos horas (orm.es; 00'00h). Malcolm Cecil nos dejó este domingo. Fue co-productor o productor asociado de algunas de las mayores maravillas que Stevie Wonder publicó a principios y mediados de los años 70. Love of Lesbian tocaron para 5.000 personas en Barcelona. Xoel López viene a presentar su nuevo disco: ‘Si mi rayo te alcanzara’ a El Batel. Niños Mutantes llevan su concierto inédito de presentación de su disco “Ventanas” a la gran pantalla bajo el título de “Nunca olvidaré esta noche. La película del concierto de Ventanas”. Tras varios aplazamientos, por fin el próximo 9 de abril se podrá disfrutar en los Cines Yelmo de más de cuarenta ciudades. PRENDE MADRID, el ciclo de conciertos auspiciado en la capital por AYUKEN MP, vuelve a la carga con su tercera temporada, la más ambiciosa hasta este momento. El Ayuntamiento de Gijón sigue adelante con el proyecto “ENCAJA2”, en el que apuesta por la música minoritaria y de calidad en directo (Ainara LeGard ONAinara Legardón). Vibra Madrid llega en Semana Santa con Siloé, Los Nastys, Biznaga y más. Elvis Costello lanza EP en francés con Iggy Pop, Isabelle Adjani y Tshegue. La Face de Pendule à Coucou presenta adaptaciones francesas de algunas de las canciones del álbum de Costello de 2020, Hey Clockface. Tame Impala ha sacado a la luz una majestuosa reedición de «Innerspeaker», álbum debut que los australianos editaron hace justo 10 años. Como complemento, y para celebrarlo por todo lo alto, Tame Impala ha compartido «Innerspeaker Memories», o «Memorias De Innerspeaker«, un documental de 15 minutos de duración que recupera grabaciones caseras registradas por Parker y su equipo de su ópera prima. John Grant ha anunciado la publicación de un nuevo disco titulado Boy From Michigan. Andrés Calamaro presenta nu nueva versión de 'Para no olvidar' acompañado de la voz de Manolo García y la guitarra de Vicente Amigo. CreaMurcia convoca su XXIX edición , que contará con 13 disciplinas. Abierto el plazo de inscripción (Ruto Neón). Llega la 41º edición del concurso Villa de Madrid (The Parrots). Pocos artistas pueden decir que superan los mil millones de streams, pero la colaboración por el 15º aniversario de Naïve reúne a The Kooks y Seeb, que han conseguido eso y mucho más. Para quienes no puedan presenciar uno de estos esperados shows en vivo, Muerdo ofrecerá el 18 de Abril, a través de Escenario Virtual, un concierto streaming desde Madrid para todo el mundo que será el pistoletazo de salida para esta nueva etapa sonora. Coque Mallaa estrena “El crac universal”. 'Esta Ciudad' nueva canción y videoclip de Chloral ft. Chill Chicos. Ya disponible el tercer adelanto del nuevo disco de Maika Makovskii “MKMK”, que se lanzará el próximo 28 de mayo. “Love you til I die” es toda una declaración de amor eterno en clave de rock intimista, que nos enseña una cara más de la multifacética artista. ‘La Bola de Cristal’ es el tercer adelanto del segundo LP de la artista canaria de origen sueco, Cintia Lund. Paul McCartney publica "Find My Way", el segundo adelanto del proyecto "McCartney III Imagined", y Beck se anima a reimaginar el sonido del exbeatle. Gaman nos presenta 'Tu momento' , su primer EP. Antonio Muñoz y Jesús Ortega nos desentrañan sus secretos.

Malcolm Cecil helped shape the sound of 1970s soul, funk and R&B as co-producer and engineer of the some of the most iconic albums and singles of all time. Malcolm collaborated with such luminaries as Stevie Wonder, Billy Preston, The Isley Brothers, The Doobie Brothers, and Gil Scott-Heron. He designed and constructed one of the earliest and largest analog synthesizers in the world (nicknamed TONTO), and recorded one of the first albums comprised entirely of synthesized audio. In this interview, Cecil discusses his early musical experiences in England, leading to his role as principal bassist for the BBC orchestra, opening for The Miles Davis Quintet, and recording with saxophonist Sonny Stitt. He describes meeting and working closely with Wonder, including his demand to Motown founder Berry Gordy that he let Cecil preserve the integrity of the classic album “Innervisions” during its mastering. Cecil also talks about helping boxing legend Muhammad Ali with his own recording, and discovering and restoring an unreleased live recording of the original Miles Davis Quintet with John Coltrane.

Our very special guest today is Legendary Music Producer Robert Margouleff, Interviewed by Mike Gormley. Robert Margouleff is most noted for his work with electronic music synthesizer programming for Stevie Wonder (beginning in the 1970s) for award-winning albums including Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, Fulfillingness' First Finale and Jungle Fever, all projects which featured Margouleff (with collaborator Malcolm Cecil) as associate producers, engineers and synthesizer programmers. Margouleff also worked with and produced music with Billy Preston, Devo, Jeff Beck, Robin Trower, David Sanborn, Depeche Mode, Oingo Boingo, The Doobie Brothers, Quincy Jones, Bobby Womack, The Isley Brothers, Gil Scott-Heron, Weather Report, Stephen Stills, Dave Mason, Little Feat, Joan Baez, Steve Hillage, Paul Rodgers, GWAR

In this month's episode we take a look at Stevie Wonder's life-threatening car accident and the demise of his fruitful relationship with the production team of Robert Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil.

Rita Ryan takes a break from interviewing local musicians to be interviewed by one on the Rick Z Show.  Rita's live radio show Localmotion airs Wednesdays at 4pm on 91.3 WVKR Vasser College. Her over 200 shows shines a spotlight on local talent and the venues they play as well as known musical icons from Paul Schafer and Martin Sexton to Jack Cassidy and Malcolm Cecil. 

The legendary Grammy Winner Malcolm Cecil has FIVE platinum and TWENTY ONE gold records. Has worked with countless musicians including Stevie Wonder, The Isley Brothers, Quincy Jones, Weather Report to name just a few.

Malcolm Cecil was in a series of ’50s and ’60s jazz bands, but it was the synthesizer that really excited him. With Bob Margouleff he formed T.O.N.T.O.’s Expanding Head Band. The name was an acronym of a synth designed and built by Cecil himself. A dazzled Stevie Wonder instantly recruited Cecil and Margouleff, making them co-producers on his series of classic albums from Music Of My Mind through Fulfillingness’ First Finale. Here, Cecil discusses T.O.N.T.O., Wonder, what it means to produce and mor

Excerpt from the feature film/performance POET OF SOUND AND IMAGE. Sonic Wizard Jeff Blenkinsopp introduces KiNo and the sonic world they created together for the album MAP OF THE UNIVERSE. This video Includes blips from the live performance when living legend Malcolm Cecil and The Smith's bassist Andy Rourke joined KiNo. www.music.poetofsoundandimage.com

One of the most important progenitors of rap music, Gil Scott-Heron's aggressive, no-nonsense street poetry inspired a legion of intelligent rappers while his engaging songwriting skills placed him square in the R&B charts later in his career, backed by increasingly contemporary production courtesy of Malcolm Cecil and Nile Rodgers (of Chic). Born in Chicago but transplanted to Tennessee for his early years, Scott-Heron spent most of his high-school years in the Bronx, where he learned firsthand many of the experiences that later made up his songwriting material. He had begun writing before reaching his teenage years, however, and completed his first volume of poetry at the age of 13. Though he attended college in Pennsylvania, he dropped out after one year to concentrate on his writing career and earned plaudits for his novel, The Vulture.

I've always tried to keep my personal and professional life separate, but these days it seems the lines are increasingly blurred. It's no secret that much to my amazement and delight I've become a father again which accounts for my recent sabbatical from the radio. So, whilst I was reconciled to the idea of parenthood returning to the agenda despite my (ahem) advancing years, I never anticipated..... twins!!!! A double blessing for sure, but that's easily said by those who've never actually experienced the reality of dealing with two wee ones simultaneously! It's relentless, they sleep deprivation is a form of torture but mainly I'm just delirious, doolally and drunk on the delights of nappy changing, cooing, comforting and generally easing the passage of my identical twin boys into this world. Funnily enough when we eventually arrived home with the boys there was a record shaped package amongst the piles of bills and junk mail which turned out to be my copy of Malcolm Cecil's "Radiance". I've long been fascinated by Cecil's career, as an obsessive devourer of record sleeve credits I eventually pieced together Cecil puzzle from his work alongside Robert Magaloueff with Stevie Wonder, and their pioneering electronic ambient excursions as Tonto's Expanding Head Band, to his production with Gil Scott-Heron And The Isley Brothers, but his solo album from 1981 had so far eluded me. It's very much in the classic T.O.N.T.O style, The Original New Timbral Orchestra being the vast modular synthesiser on which the album is entirely played, (apart from a contribution from Paul Horn's flute on the second track we include in the show). So "Radiance" ended up being the soundtrack to our first days at home with Quincy and Sebastian.... and you know who the former is named after! Ambient music certainly seems the most appropriate for the frayed and dazed days of new parenthood, gentle and slightly surreal, time dissolved into a continuum of caring and getting through. So maybe instead of my musings about cycling to South London my podcast will become a blog about twin parenthood? Actually I look forward to the day when I can get back to cycling and broadcasting live, and for that matter the days when I can return to my regular work-outs in the pool... of all the things I miss at the moment swimming would have to be top of the list as I tend to think it keeps me sane as much as trim! Anyway it was fairly miraculous to me that I managed to record a show here at Forge Towers, and I wouldn't pretend it's the greatest radio show I've put together, but under the circumstances I'm pleased with the outcome. There's a healthy balance of ancient and modern, with new soulful sounds from Lucas Arruda, Eric Roberson, Dele Sosimi, Kamasi Washington nestling alongside classics from Doug and Jean Carn, Charles Earland, Deodato and others. Of course Doug and Jean's rendering of Wayne Shorter's beautiful "Infant Eyes" was an obvious choice even if it was originally dedicated to a baby girl, it has all the tenderness and wonder of life inside the baby bubble. Of course for all the vagaries of sleepless nights and other sacrifices the joys of witnessing a new life are so much greater, unfathomable, therapeutic and profound. As for the music, well it was definitely therapeutic to get back to my vinyl, and the one advantage of recording the show at home is that affords the opportunity for more spontanaeity. Certainly the last half hour was completely impromptu, other than kicking it off with Nick the Record's rework of a Lincoln Olivetti Brazil boogie nugget, the rest were just pulled out off the cuff. (Which is easy as my twelves are all in the racks behind my decks, whereas the jazz is mainly on the other side of the room!). If I'd been planning a show more meticulously I'd probably thought "better" of playing Level 42's "Starchild" and Deodato's "Whistle Bump", so there you go. I also particularly enjoyed the start of the show with the Malcolm Cecil segué into an often overlooked version of "My Favourite Things" ( thank you Jean Claude Thompson). As I mentioned on the show I've been reassessing my Charles Earland collection as he is undoubtedly my favourite jazz organist, so expect more buried treasure from the king of the Hammond in weeks to come...Generally to my ears nothing screams "Acid Jazz" more than the sound of a funky organ groove, as that was the dominant sound at the birth of that "genre". So it was to my surprise that when I eventually dipped into the the third disc of the Kamasi Washington album to find that "Cherokee" was very much in that kind of rare groove style. However it must be said that the thing that stands out to me about the vocal tunes on The Epic is that they have something of a "show tune" quality, the melodies are almost archaic on "Cherokee" and "The Rhythm Changes", which is no bad thing. Of all the new music I played this week, I have to say that having vinyl copies of the Dele Sosimi and Lucas Arruda albums has increased my appreciation of those works exponentially. Of course I'm a vinyl fan, but beyond any discussion about sound quality, what makes an enormous difference to me is that I'm less likely to listen to a file on my main sound system and even though I run my laptop through a nice pair of speakers (in the kitchen), the whole sonic perspective is very different when playing off vinyl on my "semi-audiophile" set-up with my decks. So the Dele Sosimi album which benefits from being recorded in one of London's best analogue studios sounded much mightier from vinyl. As for Lucas Arruda's "Solar", it's a delightful set which owes much to classic Brazilian crossover fusion and soul, and even though it bears his influence quite obviously even Ed Motta is a fan, as indeed am I; a maturing talent for sure. More musings on fatherhood and music (definitely not) for dad dancing next week. I'm toying with the idea of some specials.... Like shows dedicated to my favourite drummers... Bernard Purdie, Harvey Mason et al, and I think a classic strictly acoustic jazz set is long overdue... Also I'm trying to think of a fitting tribute to my late great colleague Colin Faver who passed away last Saturday after I recorded the show. The man was one of the greatest DJs I've known, so much greater a talent than so many more celebrated names...no doubt he'll be rocking that party on the other side. Until then as one of my favourite comedians, Dave Allen, used to say "may your God go with you" which i think leaves plenty of room for interpretation whether your religious, agnostic or atheist...your God might well be music. 1. Malcolm Cecil - Sun Song 2. Oliver Nelson - My Favourite Things 3. Lucas Arruda - Vento Sul 4. The Foreign Exchange - Milk And Honey 5. Dele Sosimi - E Go Better 6. Kamasi Washington - Cherokee 7. Charles Wright & The Watts 103rd Street Band - What Can You Bring Me? 8. Charles Earland - Charles 3rd 9. Guilherme Vergueiro - Em Cima Da Hora 10. George Cables - Quiet Fire 11.Malcolm Cecil - Gamelonian Dawn 12. Doug & Jean Carn - Infant Eyes 13. Lucas Arruda - Uma Onda 14. Omar - Get Away 15. Eric Roberson ft. King - Just Imagine 16. Famks - Labirinto (Nick The Record rework ) 17. Carly Simon - Tranquilo (Melt My Heart) 18. Airto - The Road Is Hard ( But We're Going To Make It ) 19. Level 42 -Starchild 20. Deodato - Whistle Bump