Podcast appearances and mentions of Mary Martin

My guest is author Ron Fassler, whose latest book is titled The Show Goes On — Broadway Hirings, Firings, and Replacements, a fascinating collection of insider theater stories that range from as far back as the 1930s and go right up to today. The performers and creatives referenced in this episode include Andrea McArdle, Ann Miller, Anne Bancroft, Barbra Streisand, Cameron MacIntosh, Carol Burnett, David Merrick, Dorothy Louden, Hal Lindon, Harold Prince, Helen Gallagher, Jerry Zaks, John Cullum, Lauren Bacall, Lea Michelle, Louis Jordan, Mary Martin, Michelle Lee, Mimi Hines, Pearl Bailey, Shirley Maclaine, Sutton Foster and more! Ron Fassler is a historian, theater critic, and former actor whose previous book was Up in the Cheap Seats — A Theatrical Memoir of Broadway. Become A PATRON of Broadway Nation! This episode is made possible in part through the generous support of our Patron Club Members, such as Alan Teasley. If you are a fan of Broadway Nation, I invite you to become a PATRON! For as little as $7.00 a month, you can receive exclusive access to never-before-heard, unedited versions of many of the discussions that I have with my guests — in fact, I often record nearly twice as much conversation as ends up in the edited versions. And you will also have access to additional in-depth conversations with my frequent co-host Albert Evans that have not been featured on the podcast. And all patrons receive special “on-air” shout-outs and acknowledgement of your vital support of this podcast. And If you are very enthusiastic about Broadway Nation there are additional PATRON levels that come with even more benefits. If you would like to support the work of Broadway Nation and receive these exclusive member benefits, please just click on this link: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://broadwaynationpodcast.supercast.tech/⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thank you in advance for your support! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Songs include: Moonlight Serenade by Glenn Miller, My Heart Belongs to Daddy by Mary Martin, Body and Soul by Coleman Hawkins, Deep Purple by Larry Clinton and God Bless America by Kate Smith. 

HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH | Text by John Cameron Mitchell | Music & Lyrics by Stephen Trask Works Consulted & Reference :Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Original Libretto) by John Cameron Mitchell & Stephen TraskHedwig and the Angry Inch (Broadway Libretto) by John Cameron Mitchell & Stephen Trask, Directed by Michael Mayer"John Cameron Mitchell reflects on 'Hedwig and the Angry Inch' - Q with Tom Power" Podcast InterviewNew York TimesTalks Interview of Neil Patrick Harris, John Cameron Mitchell, & Stephen Trask" 'Midnight Radio' with John Cameron Mitchell | Queer the Music with Jake Shears Ep. 14" Podcast InterviewMusic Credits:"Overture" from Dear World (Original Broadway Cast Recording)  | Music by Jerry Herman | Performed by Dear World Orchestra & Donald Pippin"The Speed Test" from Thoroughly Modern Millie  (Original Broadway Cast Recording) | Music by Jeanine Tesori, Lyrics by Dick Scanlan | Performed by Marc Kudisch, Sutton Foster, Anne L. Nathan & Ensemble"Why God Why" from Miss Saigon: The Definitive Live Recording  (Original Cast Recording  / Deluxe)  | Music by Claude-Michel Schönberg, Lyrics by Alain Boublil & Richard Maltby Jr.  | Performed by Alistair Brammer"Back to Before" from Ragtime: The Musical (Original Broadway Cast Recording)  | Music by Stephen Flaherty, Lyrics by Lynn Ahrens | Performed by Marin Mazzie"Chromolume #7 / Putting It Together" from Sunday in the Park with George (Original Broadway Cast Recording)  | Music & Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim | Performed by Mandy Patinkin, Bernadette Peters, Judith Moore, Cris Groenendaal, Charles Kimbrough, William Parry, Nancy Opel, Robert Westenberg, Dana Ivey, Kurt Knudson, Barbara Bryne"What's Inside" from Waitress (Original Broadway Cast Recording)  | Music & Lyrics by Sara Bareilles | Performed by Jessie Mueller & Ensemble"Wicked Little Town" from Hedwig and the Angry Inch (Original  Cast Recording)  | Music & Lyrics by Stephen Schwartz | Performed by John Cameron Mitchell "Maria" from The Sound of Music (Original Soundtrack Recording)  | Music by Richard Rodgers, Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II | Performed by Evadne Baker, Anna Lee, Portia Nelson, Marni Nixon"My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music (Original Soundtrack Recording) | Music by Richard Rodgers, Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II | Performed by Julie Andrews"Corner of the Sky" from Pippin (New Broadway Cast Recording) | Music & Lyrics by Stephen Schwartz | Performed by Matthew James Thomas“What Comes Next?” from Hamilton (Original Broadway Cast Recording) | Music & Lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda | Performed by Jonathan Groff

Happy Easter! Mark finishes this sermon series, Monk Habits for the Rest of Us, with a message from John 20:11-18. As we consider how the Resurrected Jesus met with Mary, we find a story of healing and commission. thevineaustin.org DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: 1. As we conclude the series on prayer, what practice has made the most impact in your life? What is one lesson you continue to carry? 2. Reflect on the imagery of a tidal island. How does the symbolism speak to rhythms in the Christian life and the dual calling of prayer/mission? 3. Read John 20:11-18. What questions emerge when you consider this story? Why do you think Mary went to the tomb that day? 4. What has stayed with you from the sermon- either as encouraging, curious, or confusing? 5. What are the similarities between Mary's tomb experience and MLK's table moment? 6. If in fact Easter is both a time of personal healing and sending, where do you feel Christ is sending you this week?

This week, I invited my four siblings--Cassie Gadd, Brad Singley, Brett Singley, and Hayley Kirkland--into the studio to talk about our top family movies. We intended to each share 5 favorite movies from our childhood and then in our own families, but we definitely got carried away. I'm going to list our childhood movies and then our current favorite family movies by the person who recommended them. I'll omit the ones that we mentioned but do not recommend. (Sorry, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) We also talk about how we make family movie nights happen and what they look like for each of us.  Of course, check ratings and Commonsensemedia.org to decide if these movie are appropriate for your families.  Movies from Our Childhood (80s and 90s) Musicals: Sound of Music, Singing in the Rain, Music Man, Fiddler on the Roof, Newsies, Meet Me In St Louis, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (proceed with caution), Peter Pan (with Mary Martin. Definitely niche), Alice in Wonderland (made for TV movie), Into the Woods All ages:  Three Amigos, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Nacho Libre, Princess Bride (Teen? Those ROUSes are pretty scary), Hook, Sandlot, Three Ninjas, Swiss Family Robinson, That Darn Cat, Flight of the Navigator, Sister Act Teens: Happy Gilmore, Goonies, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, So I Married An Axe Murderer, Life Is Beautiful Suspense: Rear Window Top Movies for our Own Families Whitney: Dan in Real Life, Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Hitch, Hunt for the Wilderpeople (language), The Truman Show, Castaway Cassie: Jurassic Park, Blackbeard's Ghost, Remember the Titans, Princess Bride, Night at the Museum, National Treasure Brad: Safety Last, School of Rock (language), Fantastic Mr. Fox, Hunt for the Wilderpeople (language), The Red Balloon, What About Bob, Raising Arizona Brett: My Neighbor Totoro, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Surf's Up, Three Ninjas, All Lego Movies Hayley: School of Rock (language), Princess Bride, Hook, Singing in the Rain, Music Man, Newsies, Paddington 2, Napoleon Dynamite, Monty Python and the Holy Grail   Weekly Open Lab: Wednesdays at 10 am MT (through April 30 2025, then resuming in September)  Join Whitney in her virtual studio to share ideas, solve problems, craft experiments, chat about past and future episodes, discuss this quarter's book, or just drop in to say hi!  https://riverside.fm/studio/listener-ideas?t=880793c622433a15fcce

It's fifty years today, January 27th 2025, since the death of Mother Mary Martin, foundress of the Medical Missionaries of Mary, a dynamo of a woman, who achieved so much in her lifetime and whose legacy endures here in Ireland and around the world. To mark this special anniversary, Mother Mary is once more honoured with the unveiling of her new statue at Boyle O'Reilly in Drogheda, adjacent to the wonderful hospital she founded all those years ago. And to mark the occasion, we republish a documentary, written and produced by Gerry Kelly and first aired a decade ago in 2015, about the life of one of Ireland's truly great daughters. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week Ken welcomes actor, writer, and all around great human Amy Stoch to the show.   Ken and Amy discuss fabled central time, growing up in Ohio, Love Boat, having a 9pm bedtime, the Clevland Browns, the artistic nature of Clevland, Clevland Playhouse, PhD studies, Mary Martin in Peter Pan, Rock N Roll Hall of Fame, coming into the acting business as a model, Star Search, catalog work, having a sense of humor, how to stand out from the pack, A&P, Rosie O'Donnel, Sinbad, Rebecca Bush, the acting competition on Star Search, the power of a live audience, being discovered, moving to LA for the first time, going out on audictions, the good old days of Hollywood, seeing behind the scenes, walking Hollywood Blvd, The Hollywood Hills, Chicago, how the pros always fly into Burbank, how commercial work has changed, the power of unions, being paid for your work, Chicago productions, taking the time to look back and recognize all the cool things you've gotten to do, working with Andy Griffith, Gunsmoke, how amazing James Arness is, being able to give back to your parents through your work, having a comedic apetitude, Summer School, working with Carl Reiner, the Bill &Ted series, Soul Man, Steve Miner, seeing Barbara Streisand, when they film in Boston, being killed off on Days of Our Lives, being allowed to improv, the new smart dumb genre ushered in in the late 80s, doing or not doing nudity on film, being credited as "girl in bed", keeping momentos from your work, getting your script signed by everyone you worked with, the difference between movie and TV acting, having women behind the scenes on your side as advocates, and how different the entertainment world is today. 

Among the walnut shells, wrapping paper, dried tangerine peel and broken toys beneath the Christmas Tree Of News we found a few unopened presents, among them … … Marine Homicide Unit solving murders in Scottish waters or former rock star dumping toxic waste? A crime drama Stackwaddy special. … Roy Bittan, Duke Ellington: how musical “professors” date back to ragtime. …'Suzanne' and the other three songs Leonard Cohen gave away. … Mary Martin, unsung connector and catalyst of folk-rock. … how the spare, monochrome simplicity of John Wesley Harding flew against the prevailing wind of Disraeli Gears, Forever Changes and Magical Mystery Tour. … “I'd rather be dead than wet my bed”. … the invention of the “blockbuster album”. … she's only human: what Judy Collins thought when she met Leonard Cohen. … Crowded House, John Fogerty, Ry Cooder, Ian Broudie, Patti Smith … when did having your kids in your band become almost compulsory? … producer Richard Perry's journey from Beefheart to the “surrealistic vaudeville” of Tiny Tim to the pure genius of ‘You're So Vain'. Plus a rare moment - something David Hepworth doesn't know! - and birthday guest Sandra Austin.Tickets for Word In Your Ear live here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/bowie-in-london-and-hollywood-tickets-1118845138929?aff=oddtdtcreator Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Among the walnut shells, wrapping paper, dried tangerine peel and broken toys beneath the Christmas Tree Of News we found a few unopened presents, among them … … Marine Homicide Unit solving murders in Scottish waters or former rock star dumping toxic waste? A crime drama Stackwaddy special. … Roy Bittan, Duke Ellington: how musical “professors” date back to ragtime. …'Suzanne' and the other three songs Leonard Cohen gave away. … Mary Martin, unsung connector and catalyst of folk-rock. … how the spare, monochrome simplicity of John Wesley Harding flew against the prevailing wind of Disraeli Gears, Forever Changes and Magical Mystery Tour. … “I'd rather be dead than wet my bed”. … the invention of the “blockbuster album”. … she's only human: what Judy Collins thought when she met Leonard Cohen. … Crowded House, John Fogerty, Ry Cooder, Ian Broudie, Patti Smith … when did having your kids in your band become almost compulsory? … producer Richard Perry's journey from Beefheart to the “surrealistic vaudeville” of Tiny Tim to the pure genius of ‘You're So Vain'. Plus a rare moment - something David Hepworth doesn't know! - and birthday guest Sandra Austin.Tickets for Word In Your Ear live here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/bowie-in-london-and-hollywood-tickets-1118845138929?aff=oddtdtcreator Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Among the walnut shells, wrapping paper, dried tangerine peel and broken toys beneath the Christmas Tree Of News we found a few unopened presents, among them … … Marine Homicide Unit solving murders in Scottish waters or former rock star dumping toxic waste? A crime drama Stackwaddy special. … Roy Bittan, Duke Ellington: how musical “professors” date back to ragtime. …'Suzanne' and the other three songs Leonard Cohen gave away. … Mary Martin, unsung connector and catalyst of folk-rock. … how the spare, monochrome simplicity of John Wesley Harding flew against the prevailing wind of Disraeli Gears, Forever Changes and Magical Mystery Tour. … “I'd rather be dead than wet my bed”. … the invention of the “blockbuster album”. … she's only human: what Judy Collins thought when she met Leonard Cohen. … Crowded House, John Fogerty, Ry Cooder, Ian Broudie, Patti Smith … when did having your kids in your band become almost compulsory? … producer Richard Perry's journey from Beefheart to the “surrealistic vaudeville” of Tiny Tim to the pure genius of ‘You're So Vain'. Plus a rare moment - something David Hepworth doesn't know! - and birthday guest Sandra Austin.Tickets for Word In Your Ear live here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/bowie-in-london-and-hollywood-tickets-1118845138929?aff=oddtdtcreator Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Liz Ansah, the National Director for the Flame of Love of the Immaculate heart of Mary Movement UK, and Mary Martin, the English Spokesperson, speak of the graces for the dying, for souls in Purgatory and for us, that are available through the Flame of Love. If you would like to know more about the Flame of Love Movement, please visit their website, www.flameoflove.uk

David Henesy visits the podcast in this special yuletide episode of Terror at Collinwood! Celebrated and beloved by Dark Shadows fans for his portrayals of David Collins, Daniel Collins, Jamison Collins, Parallel Time Daniel Collins, and Tad Collins, David Henesy is the CEO of Panama Botanicals and the owner of La Factoria imported specialty foods, where sustainability is key! In the first half of the episode, David talks about the ethos behind his successful, and environmentally conscious, endeavors in the restaurant and food production businesses. Along the way, he elaborates on his origins in the restaurant business. In the second half of the episode, David dives into his time in show business. Topics of discussion include: working on Broadway with Mary Martin, being in the touring company of Oliver!, and of course, plenty of fun talk about his memorable years on Dark Shadows! You do not want to miss this episode! Terror at Collinwood and Shilling Shockers shirts and merch at TeePublic: https://www.teepublic.com/user/pennydreadfulxiii Help support the podcast by donating at Buy Me a Coffin: https://buymeacoffee.com/terroratcollinwood La Factoria website: https://lafapa.com/?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAabdbJ05ZL52TCLzpoUn5p1OxBoQe8i-X2tSFAiWkoonXZNLJicCZwPsAm4_aem_-ibPjehI1bHKednUJU1NrQ Surfing the Shadows surf rock cover of Bob Cobert's Dark Shadows theme by Johnny D & The Moonlighters: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61552762765082 TaC logos by Eric Marshall

IMPORTANT NOTE - I changed the dates in the titles to shorten things up. Thanksgiving Comedy on the Thursday before ThanksgivingFirst a look at the events of the dayThen Maxwell House Coffee Time hosted by Dick Powell, originally broadcast November 21, 1940, 84 years ago.  Mary Martin sings "Falling Star" for the first time, from the film, "The Great Dictator."  Daddy tells Baby Snooks about Thanksgiving. Jack Benny visits o discuss the premiere of the picture Love Thy Neighbor with co-star Mary Martin.Followed by Lum and Abner, originally broadcast November 21, 1948, 76 years ago, Ezra Seestrunk's Cousin Rowena Has Thanksgiving Dinner With Lum.  Lum tries to impress Miss Rowena on Thanksgiving, with a mansion and servants. We follow that with Jack Benny, originally broadcast November 21, 1943, 81 years ago, The Awful Turkey Dream. Jack buys a live turkey for Thanksgiving, then dreams that he's a turkey!Then The Great Gildersleeve starring Willard Waterman, originally broadcast November 21, 1951, 73 years ago, Inviting Thanksgiving Guests.  Who should be invited for dinner at Thanksgiving?Finally, Superman, originally broadcast November 21, 1941, 83 years ago, The Pan-American Highway.   The civilization of the Incas still exists! While flying to South America, Clark Kent and Lieutenant Elliott discover that someone is hiding aboard their airplane!Thanks to Honeywell for supporting our podcast by using the Buy Me a Coffee function at http://classicradio.streamIf you like what we do here, visit our friend Jay at http://radio.macinmind.com for great old time radio shows 24 hours a day

EPISODE 56 - “MARJORIE REYNOLDS: CLASSIC CINEMA STAR OF THE MONTH” - 10/07/2024 Most film fanatics agree that after the Paramount Picture's holiday classic “Holiday Inn” (1942), actress MARJORIE REYNOLDS, who gave a star-turn as struggling actress Linda Mason who gets a break singing and dancing in the seasonal nightclub run by BING CROSBY, should have been a big star. However, for reasons not quite clear, she didn't rise into the stratosphere. While she had a very respectable and long career, she just didn't soar to the top, as expected. As our Star of the Month, we will take a look into Marjorie Reynolds' life and career and explore our theories on why “Holiday Inn” did not make her a major star.  SHOW NOTES:  Sources: Christmas In the Movies (2023), by Jeremy Arnold; Whatever Became of…10th Series (1986), by Richard Lamparski; My Heart Belongs (1976), by Mary Martin; Scarlet Fever (1977), by William Pratt (including the collection of Herb Bridges); The Film Lovers Companion (1997), by David Quinlan; Biography of Marjorie Reynolds, July 25, 1942, Paramount Pictures;  “Super Cinderella,” November 1942, by William Lynch value, Silver Screen magazine; “Marjorie's Horse Comes In,” November 7, 1942, by Kyle Crichton, Collier's Magazine; Versatility Pays Off for Marjorie Reynolds,” March 10, 1944, by Hedda Hopper, Los Angeles, Times; “Divorce Plans Discussed by Miss Reynolds,” July 23, 1951, by Hedda Hopper, Los Angeles, Times; “Marjorie Reynolds to Be Wed to Film Editor,” May 16, 1952, Los Angeles, Times; “Marjorie Reynolds Weds Film Editor,” May 18, 1953, The Sedalia Democrat (Missouri); “Marjorie Reynolds: Sixty Years in the Film Business,” April 1984, by Colin Briggs, Hollywood Studio Magazine; “Marjorie Reynolds, 79, Actress, In Classic Films and on Television,” February 16, 1997, The New York Times; TCM.com; IMDBPro.com; IBDB.com; Wikipedia.com; Movies Mentioned:  Holiday Inn (1942), starring Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, Marjorie Reynolds, & Virginia Dale; Wine, Women, and Song (1933), starring Lilyan Tashman; Murder In Greenwich Village (1937), starring Richard Arlen & Fay Wray; Tex Rides With The Boy Scouts (1937), starring Tex Ritter; The Overland Express (1938), starring Buck Jones; Western Trails (1938), starring Bob Baker; Six Shootin' Sheriff (1938), starring Ken Maynard; Star Spangled Rhythm (1942), starring Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Dorothy Lamour, Veronica Lake, & Alan Ladd; Dixie (1943), starring Bing Crosby & Dorothy Lamour; Up In Mabel's Room (1944), starring Dennis O'Keefe & Gail Patrick; Ministry of Fear (1944), starring Ray Milland; Three Is A Family (1944), starring Charles Ruggles & Fay Bainter; Bring On The Girls (1945), starring Veronica Lake & Eddie Bracken; Monsieur Beaucaire (1946), starring Bob Hope & Joan Caulfield; The Time Of Their Lives (1946), starring Bud Abbott & Lou Costello; Meet Me On Broadway (1946), starring Fred Brady & Spring Byington; Heaven Only Knows (1947), Bob Cummings & Brian Donlevy; Badmen of Tombstone (1949), starring Barry Sullivan & Broderick Crawford; That Midnight Kiss (1949), starring Mario Lanza & Kathryn Grayson; The Great Jewel Robber (1950), starring David Brian; Home Town Story (1951), starring Jeffry Lynn, Alan Hale Jr, & Marilyn Monroe; Models, Inc (1952), starring Howard Duff & Coleen Gray; His Kind of Woman (1951), starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, & Vincent Price; The Silent Witness (1962), starring Tristram Coffin & George Kennedy; Pearl (1978), starring Angie Dickinson, Dennis Weaver, & Robert Wagner; --------------------------------- http://www.airwavemedia.com Please contact sales@advertisecast.com if you would like to advertise on our podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on Too Opinionated, we talk with Jane Dorian about the illustrious career of her godfather, Jerry Herman (Hello Dolly!, Mame, La Cage Au Faux, Mack & Mable, Dear World, Milk & Honey, etc) and the women that would become known as Jerry's Girls (Carol Channing, Angela Lansbury, Bernadette Peters, Pearl Bailey, Liza Minnelli, Leslie Uggams, Karen Morrow, Rita Moreno, Ethel Merman, Mary Martin, and many more).   The Doyle Auction House is currently scheduled to offer items of historic significance on November 14th, while his crypt (Adjacent to Marilyn Monroe and Hugh Hefner will be auctioned on October 25th.   JERRY HERMAN (Composer/Lyricist) There is never an evening when, somewhere in the world, the music and lyrics of Jerry Herman are not being sung by a lady in a red headdress, or a lady with a bugle, or a middle-aged man in a wig and a boa.  Hello, Dolly!, Mame, and La Cage are home to some of the most popular, most-often performed and most successful musical heroines of all time, and have given Jerry the distinction of being the only composer-lyricist in history to have had three musicals that ran more than 1,500 consecutive performances on Broadway.  His first Broadway show was Milk and Honey (1961), followed by Hello, Dolly! (1964) Mame (1966) Dear World (1969), Mack & Mabel (1974) The Grand Tour (1979), La Cage (1983), Jerry's Girls (1985) and "Mrs. Santa Claus" (1966), a CBS TV special starring Angela Lansbury.  Showtune, a revue of his life's work, is performing in regional theatres around the country.  His string of awards and honors includes, Tonys, Grammys, Drama Desk Awards, the Johnny Mercer Award, the Richard Rodgers Award, the Oscar Hammerstein Award, the Frederick Lowe Award, the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Theatre Hall of Fame.     Want to watch: YouTube Meisterkhan Pod (Please Subscribe)

Duas odisseias rurais. No primeiro ato: história de inquilino ruim é o que não falta. Mas não como essa. Por Vitor Hugo Brandalise. No segundo ato: uma americana que atravessou o Brasil, semeando sonhos – e alguns pesadelos. Por Flora Thomson-DeVeaux. Garanta sua plaquete do Rádio Novelo Apresenta: https://radionovelo.com.br/plaquetes Siga o perfil da Rádio Novelo no Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/radionovelo/ Siga o canal da Rádio Novelo no WhatsApp: https://radionovelo.com.br/whatsapp Inscreva-se na nossa newsletter e receba o link para o episódio, dicas culturais da nossa equipe e mais direto na sua caixa de e-mail https://bit.ly/newsletterna Existem muitas formas de esbarrar com uma boa história. E a gente quer saber: como você conheceu os podcasts da Rádio Novelo? É só clicar no link pra responder: https://radionovelo.com.br/responda Palavras-chave: perrengue com inquilinos, tráfico de drogas, Hollywood goiano, Janet Gaynor, Mary Martin, Larry Hagman, Dallas, Ronald Reagan, Cary Grant, Matheus Pestana, Ercolano, Jairo Leite Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pallbearer [00:34] "An Offering of Grief" Sorrow and Extinction 20 Buck Spin SPIN048 2012 Full-length debut from this heavy doomy band from Little Rock AR. Easily one of the best records of 2012. Ray Charles & Milt Jackson [09:06] "Soul Meeting" Soul Meeting Atlantic SD 1360 1962 Two great tastes that vibe great together. Featuring Ray on piano, Milt on vibes, Kenny Burrell on guitar, Percy Heath on bass, and Art Taylor on drums. This one was written by Jackson, with illuminating parts from both Milt Jackson and Kenny Burrell. Curtis Harding [16:08] "Freedom" Soul Power Burger Records BRGR600 2014 Debut outing from this Atlanta musician. Describing his sound as "slop 'n soul", this one track has a definite Arthur Lee feel. Lou Rawls [18:49] "A Whole Lotta Woman" Soulin' Capitol Records T 2566 1966 Not a whole lotta love, not a whole lotta Rosie, but a whole lotta woman. John Coltrane with Red Garland [21:27] "Theme for Ernie" Soultrane Prestige 7142 1958 One of Coltrane's showcases for his distinctive sheets of sound style. Joined here by Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and again Art Taylor on drums. Les and Larry Elgart and their Orchestra [26:24] "You're My Thrill" Sound Ideas Columbia CL 1123 1958 Hailing from Pompton, New Jersey, these brothers developed their "Elgart Sound" in 1952 and released over half a dozen albums before parting after this album to pursue their musical interests. Mary Martin et al [30:02] "The Lonely Goatherd" The Sound of Music (Original Broadway Cast) Columbia Masterworks KOL 5450 1959 Now that's what I call yodeling! Pre-Julie Andrews obviously. Mary Martin was perhaps best known as playing the title role in the Broadway production of Peter Pan. Not sure how I knew this, but maybe it was due to living in New York for 20 years naking Broadway trivia inescapable. The Sinceros [33:23] "Take Me to Your Leader" The Sound of Sunbathing Epic EPC 83632 1979 The sticker on the cover says that this track is their featured single, so that's what I'm going with. Power pop-y new wave-y. Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass [37:10] "Casino Royale" Sounds Like... Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass A&M LP124 1967 You know I love a good shaggy dog of a film, and Casino Royale is definitely that. Well, the Daniel Craig version is too, but I'm talking about the 1967 comedy version with David Niven as Sir James Bond. Ravi Shankar [39:47] "An Introduction to Indian Music" The Sounds of India Columbia CS 9296 1968 (originally released in 1958) Re-released to tap into the growing interest thanks to the Beatles' interest in Indian music (specifically George Harrison). Relax! Simon & Garfunkel [43:56] "We've Got a Groovey Thing Goin'" The Sounds of Silence Columbia CS 9269 1966 Helped out here by The Wrecking Crew, including Glen Campbell and Joe South on guitar, Hal Blaine on drums, and Larry Knechtel on the Ray Charles-esque electric piano. Scott Walker + Sunn O))) [47:22] "Brando (Dweller on the Bluff)" Soused 4AD CAD 3428 2014 On the surface, it's an odd pairing, but as the music that fills this album suggests, it's a perfect pairing. Sunn O)))'s Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley had originally reached out to Walker about contributing to their 2009 album Monoliths and Dimensions but were unable to coordinate. Walker subsequently contacted about contributing drones to fill in the silence between his lyrics while working on his epic 2012 release Bish Bosch. Evidently, Sunn O))) brought their full stage equipment to Walker's studio for recording. If you are unfamiliar, it's a wall of Ampeg, Marshall, and HiWatt speakers with Ampeg SVT and Sunn Model T heads. Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass [56:06] "The Girl from Ipanema" South of the Border A&M SP-108 1964 South of the border, down Rio de Janiero way. Music behind the DJ: "If I Fell" by Perry Botkin Jr and his Orchestra

Headliners from the Newfoundland Labrador Folkfestival – Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle “Live”, including a tribute to Canadian music industry professional Mary Martin. https://www.facebook.com/ron.moores.18

On episode 235, Emily Kircher-Morris talks with somatic-centered psychotherapist Mary Martin about the benefits of somatic therapy for neurodivergent people. They discuss how this body-based approach complements traditional talk therapy by focusing on the body-brain connection, and about the importance of interoception and co-regulation. They describe strategies like body awareness, movement, and breathwork to help clients regulate their nervous systems and process emotions. With school starting soon, we have an opportunity for educators to learn more about 2e students by taking our course, Strategies for Supporting Twice-Exceptional Students. It's great for CE credits for educators, and the course will be enlightening to anyone curious about helping 2e students thrive in the classroom. Mary Martin is a somatic-centered psychotherapist who uses trauma-informed and strengths-based approaches in her therapy with both children and adults. She obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in Dance Performance and Psychology from Oklahoma City University, which would later help her discover her purpose and passion for somatic-centered therapy. This led her to her Master's Degree in Somatic Counseling Psychology from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado with a concentration in Dance and Movement Therapy. Mary's experience includes working in early childhood education with autistic and developmentally delayed children, children who have experienced trauma and neglect, and private practice settings. BACKGROUND READING Facebook

Painting... but knitted!? We chat all things painting with winner of the John Moores Painting Prize Lady Grantchester Award 2023, Emma Roche. We chatted about stereotypes, trying to fit into other people's expectations of your career path, alternative education, worklife balance, being an artist and a parent - this episode is absolutely stacked with goodness!! So, search BANG ON in your streaming app to listen, like, follow, and subscribe. Don't forget to leave us a review! It really helps the show (and gives us a fuzzy feeling, too) About the show: BANG ON is a knowledge sharing podcast, breaking down some of the steps we've picked up along the way as an organisation and as artists in building a successful arts career. It's for emerging artists, packaging tips and tricks on some of the topics we've often been asked about over the years. In Season 1 we took you through all the steps of putting an exhibition together. In Season 2, we take you through the broader arts cultural landscape, plotting the uncharted waters of opportunities, education, artist-led activity, identity, rejection, mental health and MORE! Yep, you might say this podcast is BANG ON - let's get stuck in!!! About the hosts: Short Supply is an artist-led organisation established in 2019 by Mollie Balshaw and Rebekah Beasley, with a goal to support emerging artists. Follow us on all social media ⁠⁠@shortsupplymcr⁠⁠ For all requests email shortsupplymcr@outlook.com Check our website at ⁠⁠www.shortsupply.org⁠⁠ About Emma Roche: https://www.rocheemma.ie/ About John Moores Painting Prize: The John Moores Painting Prize is a biennial award to the best contemporary painting, submission is open to the public. The prize is named for Sir John Moores, noted philanthropist, who established the award in 1957. It is the most prestigious painting prize in the UK, and one of the longest running calls for art in the world. Past prize winners include David Hockney (1967), Mary Martin (1969), Lisa Milroy (1989), Peter Doig (1993), Keith Coventry (2010), Rose Wylie (2014), Michael Simpson (2016), Jacqui Hallum (2018) and most recently Kathryn Maple (2020).

Greg celebrates the life of 60's French star Françoise Hardy, who died in June at the age of 80. The French singer-songwriter and actress was a leading figure in the 1960s yéyé movement and went on to become a cultural icon in France and worldwide.Songs:Françoise Hardy - “Tous les Garcons et les Filles”Françoise Hardy - “Comment Te Dire Adieu”Françoise Hardy - “Le Temps De L'amour”Jay brings us the breakup story of the Everly Brothers and everything that led up to it. The infamous 1973 concert, where they publicly broke up the group on stage, was the culmination of a decade of decline by the duo. They still rock though.Songs:King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - “Le Risque”Everly Brothers - “All I Have To Do Is Dream”Finally, it's another News with Nick. American Filmmaker Gary Hustwit's has created 52 quintillion documentaries about musician and composer Brian Eno. We celebrate the life and incredible career of the Grammy-winning talent scout Mary Martin, who passed at 85. Finally, the Zappa Family Trust is set to release an Apostrophe box set this September.Song: Cornelius - “Mind Train”

Today we're starting a three part miniseries looking at a bunch of different musical versions of Peter Pan, starting with Stanford's favorite, the 1960 Mary Martin musical! Follow Stanford online! Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/StanfordClark⁠⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/moviespap⁠⁠⁠⁠ Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://moviespastandpresent.com⁠⁠⁠⁠ I Heart Movies - Episode ⁠224 Every Version Ever - Episode 140 For bonus episodes, extended episodes, and more, sign up for my Patreon! ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/jonjnorth⁠⁠⁠⁠ For links to my latest episodes & videos, social media, and more, check out my Link Tree! ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://linktr.ee/jonjnorth --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/iheartpodcast/message

Menopause Whist Black Season SIX FINALE Episode 8 is now up! For this special FINALE episode we took my favourite conversation clips from each guest and sandwiched them between my own thoughts and feelings to bring you a delicious and nourishing offering - all the food groups represented! A new slant that we hope you love as much as we do, this last episode in the season is available to watch on YouTube and listen on iTunes, Spotify, Amazon and beyond. If these words strike a chord, don't forget to share with someone else who may benefit. Pop to my Linktree to listen now. Goodness me what a ride the past two months have been! Thank you ALL for rocking with us! Big thanks as always to Team MWB @yaastudios and @beyongolia and meeeeee without whom the show would never go on. Loved this season? Love this podcast? Leave us a positive review on the following platforms (least reviews are listed first): > Facebook > Audible > YouTube > Spotify > Apple podcast As always the BEST advertising is the word of mouth so keep talking and keep sharing! Stay tuned for Season 7 - July 2024.   NOTES Le'Nise's Brothers' Book: You Can Have a Better Period Dr Jocelynne's Perimenopause and Menopause for Black women ebook* *Available for a small cost. Dr Yansie, Co-editor of the book: Black and Menopausal Intimate Stories of Navigating the Change. Derek Bardowell book How To Do Good Better. Professor Joyce  Paper: How do women feel cold water swimming affects their menstrual and perimenopausal symptoms? Mary Martin wins Power of a Woman Award, March 2024. Dr Itunu Johnson - DrShoCares.com   CONNECT Menopause Whilst Black on Instagram  Karen Arthur on Instagram MWBPod website These episodes are conversations between humans discussing their own menopause experiences. They are not a substitute for advice and consultation with a qualified health professional. No two menopause experiences are the same so do remember to do your own research. If you are a brand or business whose values align with Menopause Whilst Black consider sponsoring a season or an epsiode of this podcast. Get in touch for rates: juanita@tgrg.co.uk  Jiggle your bits to our Spotify Playlist Email the show: thekarenarthur@mail.com Like, subscribe, follow and rate Menopause whilst Black on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. Karen Arthur is a menopause activist and campaigner and host of this podcast plus a new bi-weekly weekend radio show on Golddust radio 'Can We Talk'. Listen to the latest episode on Soundcloud We recognise that inclusive language is important in ensuring that ALL who experience menopause are seen and heard. The term ‘women' is used whilst mindful of this. Join our mailing list.  Team MWB: Producer and Editor: Beyongolia Productions Digital design and communications: Yaa Studio Space  

Today we're starting a three part miniseries looking at a bunch of different musical versions of Peter Pan, starting with Stanford's favorite, the 1960 Mary Martin musical! Follow Stanford online! Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/StanfordClark⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/moviespap⁠⁠⁠ Website: ⁠⁠⁠https://moviespastandpresent.com⁠⁠⁠ Every Version Ever - Episode 140 For bonus episodes, extended episodes, and more, sign up for my Patreon! ⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/jonjnorth⁠⁠⁠ For links to my latest episodes & videos, social media, and more, check out my Link Tree! ⁠⁠⁠https://linktr.ee/jonjnorth --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/everyversionever/support

Menopause Whist Black Season SIX Episode 2! This weeks guest is Mary Martin, founder of fashion house Mary Martin London. Mary is an award-winning self taught fashion designer based in South London. Originally from Wales, Mary's story literally reads like a 'rags to riches' novel - this determined woman has never had any intention of being stuck with the cards she was dealt. Her strong Christian faith is a common thread throughout her life. Mary shares her menopause story and how she cares for herself 'naturally'. (I am aware of some contention around this word, but listen in and you'll get it)  We talk about:  Early years as a teenager new to London from Wales. Her unwaivering faith in God Discovering her fashion creativity and purpose. The rage that accompanied her menopause onset. The joys of regular exercise. and so much more. There's no getting round the fact that Mary is and continues to be an inspiration to many, and we're sure you'll find a part of her journey that resonates. This episode is available to watch on YouTube and listen on iTunes, Spotify, Amazon and beyond. If Mary's story hits home do share this episode with others who may benefit from our conversation. Don't forget to leave a comment or positive review on your chosen platform!   NOTES: Power of a Woman Awards founded by Frederick (Freddie) NWAKA. For UK wide lessons visit Learn to Swim. Or visit Swim Dem Crew or Black Tri Tribe our Black UK community  CONNECT Mary Martin London website. Mary Martin on Instagram. Menopause Whilst Black on Instagram Karen Arthur  on Instagram  MWBPod website If you are a brand or business whose values align with Menopause Whilst Black consider sponsoring a season or an epsiode of this podcast. Get in touch for rates: juanita@tgrg.co.uk  Jiggle your bits to our Spotify Playlist Email the show: thekarenarthur@mail.com Like, subscribe, follow and rate Menopause whilst Black on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. Karen Arthur is a menopause activist and campaigner and host of this podcast plus a new bi-weekly weekend radio show on Golddust radio 'Can We Talk'. Listen to the latest episode on Soundcloud *We recognise that inclusive language is important in ensuring that ALL who experience menopause are seen and heard. The term ‘women' is used whilst mindful of this. Join our mailing list.  Team MWB: Producer and Editor: Beyongolia Productions Digital design and communications: Yaa Studio Space

Author Stephen Cole talks about his fictional, time-traveling novel, MARY & ETHEL…and Mikey Who?, which has taken the real-life friendship with Ethel Merman and Mary Martin, tossed them into a blender and come up with a fantasy about a nerdy super-fan.

EPISODE 27 - “Dona Drake: What Price Fame” - 03/18/2024 Latina star DONA DRAKE, who signed a contract with Paramount Pictures in 1941, was many things — singer, dancer, actress, bandleader, musician — but one thing she wasn't, as it turned out, was Latin! While Paramount promoted their new discovery as a spitfire Latina born in Mexico City, Drake was, in fact, an African-American woman from Florida who pretended to be Latin, going so far as to learn Spanish fluently, in order to have a better chance at a Hollywood career. Listen to this fascinating story of one woman who went undercover just so she wouldn't have to play the maid.  SHOW NOTES:  Sources: Biography of Dona Drake (Paramount Contact Player), September 1942, Paramount Studios; “Dona Drake Tells Marriage,” September 9, 1944, by Hedda Hopper, The Los Angeles Times; “Daughter Born to Dona Drake,” August 8, 1951, The Hollywood Citizen-News; www.swingcityradio,com; www.glamourgirlsofthesilverscreen.com; IMDBPro.com; Wikipedia.com; Movies Mentioned:  Strike Me Pink (1936), starring Eddie Cantor, Ethel Merman, Sally Eilers, and William Frawley; Aloma Of The South Seas (1941), starring Dorothy Lamour, Jon Hall; Louisiana Purchase (1941), starring Bob Hope, Vera Zorina, and Victor Moore; Road to Morocco (1942), starring Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour; Star Spangled Rhythm (1942), starring Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Dorothy Lamour, Fred MacMurray, Paulette Goddard, Dick Powell, Eddie Bracken, Alan Ladd, Mary Martin, Betty Hutton, Marjorie Reynolds, and Veronica Lake; Salute For Three (1943), starring Macdonald Carey and Betty Jane Rhodes; Let's Face It (1943), staring Bob Hope, Betty Hutton, and Eve Arden;  Hot Rhythm (1944), starring Robert Lowery, Tim Ryan, and Irene Ryan; Without Reservations (1946), starring John Wayne, Claudette Colbert, and Don DeFoe; Dangerous Millions (1946), starring Kent Taylor; Another Part of The Forest (1948), starring Fredric March, Dan Duryea, Edmond O'Brien, Ann Blyth, Florence Eldridge, John Dall, and Betsy Blair; So This Is New York (1948), starring Henry Morgan, Rudy Vallee, and Virginia Grey; Beyond The Forest (1949), starring Bette Davis, Joseph Cotten, David Brian, Ruth Roman; The Girl From Jones Beach (1949), starring Virginia Mayo, Ronald Reagan, and Eddie Bracken; Kansas City Confidential (1952), starring John Payne, Colleen Gray, and Preston Foster; The Bandits of Corsica (1953), starring Richard Greene, Paula Raymond, Raymond Burr; Son Of Belle Star (1953), starring Keith Larsen, Peggie Castle, and Regis Toomey; Down Laredo Way (1953) starring Rex Allen and Slim Pickens; Princess of the Nile (1954), starring Debra Paget, Jeffrey Hunter, and Michael Rennie; --------------------------------- http://www.airwavemedia.com Please contact sales@advertisecast.com if you would like to advertise on our podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stephen Cole is an award-winning musical theatre writer whose shows have been recorded, published, and produced from New York City to London to the Middle East and Australia and Edinburgh, Scotland. His shows include: After the Fair, Night of the Hunter, Saturday Night at Grossinger's, Aspire, Time After Time, Merman's Apprentice and The Road To Qatar! to name just a few. As a producer, Stephen presented Liza Minnelli, Barbara Cook, David Hyde Pierce, and many others in an 80th Birthday Tribute to John Kander. Stephen has also released a series of CD's entitled MERMANIA on Harbinger Records. These include never before released selections sung by his favorite star and friend, Ethel Merman. Besides writing the CD booklets for these and his original cast CDs, Stephen has written the DVD booklets for the box set of THAT GIRL: SEASON ONE and ANYTHING GOES. Mary, Ethel and Mikey Who? takes Stephen's real-life friendships with Ethel Merman and Mary Martin, the two undisputed queens of Broadway, tossed them into a blender and come up with a fantasy about a nerdy super-fan in the early 1980s who, while visiting his dying idol Ethel Merman, stumbles into a time portal in her closet and exits on the other side in Sophie Tucker's star dressing room at the Imperial Theatre in 1939. Mikey Marvin Minkus gets to know his idols in their prime as he time travels through the decades with them, influencing their lives and careers, while helping to foster their legendary rivalry. Only visiting times when Merman and Martin's fates crossed, Mikey becomes a vital part of their lives, all the while interacting with such celebrated theatrical figures as Cole Porter, Jerome Robbins, Josh Logan, Dorothy Fields, Larry Hagman, Irving Berlin, Sophie Tucker, Leland Hayward, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and a newcomer named Jane Fonda.

SynopsisOn today's date in 1965, the now-classic and mega-iconic musical film The Sound of Music officially debuted at the Rivoli Theater at Broadway and 49th Street in New York City.Since we at Composers Datebook are notorious for mentioning “little known facts,” let us state, for the record, that the first test audiences to see the film did so in flyover country — first in Minneapolis and subsequently in Tulsa, Oklahoma, about a month before the film's New York debut.The Midwestern audiences were ecstatic, and director Robert Wise knew he'd have a hit on his hands when his film, starring Julie Andrews, opened on Broadway, not far from where the stage version, starring Mary Martin, had originally debuted back in 1959.The 1965 New York Times film review was a little snarky — well, what else is new? It began by referring to “the perceptible weakness of its quaintly old-fashioned book,” while grudgingly admiring, “the generally melodic felicity of the Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein score,” and ended by opining, “Business-wise, Mr. Wise is no fool.”No fool, indeed. Wise's film won five Oscars and displaced Gone With the Wind as the highest-grossing film of all-time.Music Played in Today's ProgramRichard Rodgers (1902-1979): ‘My Favorite Things,' from ‘The Sound of Music' (arr. Hough); Stephen Hough, p. MusicMasters 60135 and/or Virgin 59509 and 61498

LESTER YOUNG – JONES, SMITH INC Chicago, November 9, 1936Lady Be Good, Shoe Shine Boy, Evenin' (JR-vcl), Boogie Woogie (JR-vcl)Carl “Tatti” Smith (tp), Lester Young (ts), Count Basie (p), Walter Page (b), Jo Jones (d), Jimmy Rushing (vcl). WOODY HERMAN – 1937-1938 (CHRONOLOGICAL) The Band That Plays The Blues – New York, October 25 & November 23, 1937I double dare you, My fine feathered friend, I wanna be in Winchell's column, Loch Lomond Clarence Willard, Kermit Simmons (tp) Neal Reid (tb) Joe Bishop (fhr,arr) Woody Herman (cl,as,vcl) Jack Ferrier, Ray Hopfner (as) Maynard “Saxie” Mansfield, Pete Johns (ts) Tommy Linehan (p) Oliver Mathewson (g) Walter Yoder (b) Frank Carlson (d) And His Orchestra – New York, June 8, 1938Laughing boy blues, Lullaby in rhythm Clarence Willard, Malcolm Crain (tp) Neal Reid (tb) Joe Bishop (fhr,arr) Woody Herman (cl,as,vcl) Jack Ferrier, Deane Kincaide (as) Maynard “Saxie” Mansfield, Bruce Wilkins (ts) Tommy Linehan (p) Oliver Mathewson (g) Walter Yoder (b) Frank Carlson (d) Woody Herman Sonny Skylar (vcl) And His Orchestra – New York, December 22, 1938Indian boogie woogieIrving Goodman, Clarence Willard, Jerry Neary (tp) Neal Reid (tb) Joe Bishop (fhr,arr) Woody Herman (cl,as,vcl) Joe Estren, Ray Hopfner (as) Maynard “Saxie” Mansfield, Pete Johns (ts) Tommy Linehan (p) Hy White (g) Walter Yoder (b) Frank Carlson (d) Mary Martin (vcl) ILLINOIS JACQUET – COLUMBIA SMALL GROUP SWING SESSIONS 1953-62 New York, February 5, 1962 & March 28, 1962Satin doll, Ydeen, Banned in Boston, Indiana, Reverie (ij vcl;re,cd out)Ernie Royal, Roy Eldridge (tp) Matthew Gee (tb) Illinois Jacquet (as,ts,vcl) Charles Davis o Leo Parker (bar) Sir Charles Thompson (p) Barry Galbraith o Kenny Burrell (g) Jimmy Rowser (b) Jimmy Crawford o Jo Jones (d) Jimmy Mundy, Ernie Wilkins (arr) Continue reading Puro Jazz 12 febrero 2024 at PuroJazz.

My guest today is the prolific and award-winning book writer and lyricist Stephen Cole who joins me today to talk about his new novel: Mary & Ethel…and Mikey Who? I found it to be a terrific book, both wildly funny and very moving. And as you will hear, at times it feels like Stephen wrote this novel especially for me, and for the fans of this podcast. Stephen Cole is an award-winning musical theatre writer whose shows have been produced from New York City to London to the Middle East and Australia. His off-Broadway musical with Matthew Ward, AFTER THE FAIR, was nominated for the Outer Critic's Circle Award for Best Musical and was subsequently produced in London to great acclaim.THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER won the prestigious Edward Kleban Award and was produced in New York City, Dallas, and San Francisco, where it was nominated for several Bay Area Theatre Awards. The award-winning 1998 concept CD features Ron Raines, Sally Mayes, and Dorothy Loudon. SATURDAY NIGHT AT GROSSINGER'S has had successful runs in Texas (starring Gavin MacLeod), Los Angeles, and Florida. Broadway legend Chita Rivera toured in CASPER, and Hal Linden and Dee Hoty starred in the world premiere of his musical adaptation of DODSWORTH.In 2005, Stephen was commissioned to write ASPIRE, the first American musical to premiere in the Middle East. This experience resulted in another musical about the creation of that show entitled THE ROAD TO QATAR!, produced to rave reviews and awards Off-Broadway, in London, and at the Edinburgh Festival, garnering a Best Musical nomination. Among his other produced shows are ROCK ODYSSEY, which played to hundreds of thousands of kids for ten seasons of productions at the Adrienne Arscht Center in Miami, and MERMAN'S APPRENTICE, presented in concert at Birdland in New York City, followed by an all-star cast album on Jay Records, and an acclaimed premiere production in Sonoma, CA in 2019. Stephen's latest critically acclaimed musical is GOIN' HOLLYWOOD.Stephen's published books include That Book About That Girl and I Could Have Sung All Night, the Marni Nixon story, currently in development as a feature film from Amazon. Stephen has also written several published stories and his real-life friendships with Ethel Merman and Mary Martin resulted in this, his first novel. Visit www.stephencolewriter.org. Become a PATRON of Broadway Nation! I want to thank our Broadway Nation Patron Club members, such as Geoffrey Block and Larry Spinelli, whose generous support helps to make it possible for me to bring this podcast to you each week. If you would like to support the creation of Broadway Nation, here is the information about how you too can become a patron. For just $7.00 a month, you will receive exclusive access to never-before-heard, unedited versions of many of the discussions that I have with my guests — in fact I often record nearly twice as much conversation as ends up in the edited versions. You will also have access to additional in-depth conversations with my frequent co-host Albert Evans that have not been featured on the podcast.  All patrons receive special “on-air” shout-outs and acknowledgment of your vital support of this podcast. And if you are very enthusiastic about Broadway Nation there are additional PATRON levels that come with even more benefits. If you would like to support the work of Broadway Nation and receive these exclusive member benefits, please just click on this link: https://broadwaynationpodcast.supercast.tech/ Thank you in advance for your support! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Host Jeremy C. Park talks with Mary Martin, Development Director for Hands On Nashville, who highlights the Middle Tennessee-based nonprofit that serves as a volunteer resource center and hub that partners with 160+ nonprofits, school and civic organizations and connects volunteers with their service opportunities. Each month, Hands On Nashville's website offers 300-500 volunteer projects for volunteers to explore and sign up to help make a difference.During the interview, Mary shares about the importance and power of volunteerism, how it is needed more than ever and how in January 2024, Hands On Nashville and United Way of Greater Nashville will be one organization, building on a longstanding partnership. The strengthened partnership will allow Hands On Nashville to offer stronger support to local nonprofit partners, as well as bring more volunteer services to Middle Tennessee.Mary talks about what the partnership means for their ability to expand their reach and service area, and how they are making it easy for companies to get their teams involved, as well. She also spotlights the upcoming 38th Annual Strobel Volunteer Awards, which celebrate the most impactful volunteers over the past year.Visit www.hon.org to learn more and get involved.https://www.facebook.com/HONashvillehttps://www.linkedin.com/company/hands-on-nashville/Donate: https://www.hon.org/donateVolunteer: https://www.hon.org/HON_WaysToVolunteer

This is a special memorial edition of this program and recognizes the 50th anniversary of the Rome airport attack. We are  joined by two survivors that were on a Pan Am plane that was firebombed at the Rome airport on December 17, 1973: Pan Am Flight Engineer Ken Pfrang and Pan Am passenger B.J. Geisler.B.J. is the author of the recently published book, Terror on Pan Am Flight 110. This episode is a follow up to "Episode 6: Hijackings and the Dawn of Global Terrorism." If you haven't heard this episode, we encourage you to do so after listening to this installment. In order to understand the gravity of global terrorism throughout the 1970s and 1980s, it is important to examine the 1967 six day war between Israel and neighboring Arab countries, the September 1970 hijacking of four airplanes all bound for United States, as a direct result of those hijacking…the subsequent Jordanian civil war also known as Black September(Sep. 1970- Jul. 1971), and the Munich Olympic attacks in 1972. These topics are discussed in Episode 6. In the early afternoon of Monday, December 17, 1973 at Rome's Leonardo Da Vinci Airport, a Pan Am Boeing 707, registration number N407PA, named Clipper Celestial was getting ready for departure with 53 passengers onboard and nine crew members. At around 12:51 local time, five members of a radical Palestinian terrorist group pulled out weapons from their luggage in the airport terminal lounge and opened fire killing two people. They then ran out of the terminal on the tarmac and then attacked the Pan Am jet by running up the boarding stairs of the front and rear doors and threw three hand grenades inside the plane. A total of 29 persons, including 4 senior Moroccan officials and 17 ARAMCO employees and family members were killed on the aircraft. Passenger Bonnie Presnell died later at the hospital with severe burns bringing the total killed from the attack on the Pan Am plane to 30. We remember them…The Pan Am Employees and Family:Diana Perez, Purser; Lambert Tununga, Pan Am Catering; Bonnie Erbeck, wife of Captain Andrew ErbeckMembers of the Moroccan government:Inani Abdelatif, Moroccan state secretary for economic planning; Mounlr Doukkali, Moroccan undersecretary of state for youth and sports; Mohammad Lazrak, general secretary at the Moroccan Ministry of Commerce and Industry; Mekki Zailacpii, attaché to the Moroccan Premier's OfficeARAMCO Employees and FamilyMuriel Berka, Henrietta Echmenn, Robert Ghormley, Charles Walker Heywood, Clarence Hildebrand, Thelma Hildebrand, Pamela Julavitis, Emily Kempf, Jane Kirby, Mary Martin, Bonnie Presnell, Edith Roundtree, Russell Turner, Mary Wamp, Margaret Wilson, Miss Wouters of BelgiumAdditional PassengersGiuliano DeAngelis, an employee of Alitalia, his wife Emma, and 9-year-old daughter Monica; Miss Filipe of Portugal; Raffaele Narcisco, an Italian mining expert; Miss Rodrigues of Portugal; A. Zietteman of South AfricaSupport the show

Nancy Dussault opens up about her work with Stephen Sondheim and other legends across a career that straddles several eras from following Mary Martin in the original Sound of Music to following Bernadette Peters in Into The Woods. Join host Ben Rimalower for this candid conversation exploring how Sondheim and Lapine went Into the Woods. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode 170 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Astral Weeks", the early solo career of Van Morrison, and the death of Bert Berns.  Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-minute bonus episode available, on "Stoned Soul Picnic" by Laura Nyro. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata At one point I, ridiculously, misspeak the name of Charles Mingus' classic album. Black Saint and the Sinner Lady is not about dinner ladies. Also, I say Warren Smith Jr is on "Slim Slow Slider" when I meant to say Richard Davis (Smith is credited in some sources, but I only hear acoustic guitar, bass, and soprano sax on the finished track). Resources As usual, I've created Mixcloud playlists, with full versions of all the songs excerpted in this episode. As there are so many Van Morrison songs in this episode, the Mixcloud is split into three parts, one, two, and three. The information about Bert Berns comes from Here Comes the Night: The Dark Soul of Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues by Joel Selvin. I've used several biographies of Van Morrison. Van Morrison: Into the Music by Ritchie Yorke is so sycophantic towards Morrison that the word “hagiography” would be, if anything, an understatement. Van Morrison: No Surrender by Johnny Rogan, on the other hand, is the kind of book that talks in the introduction about how the author has had to avoid discussing certain topics because of legal threats from the subject. Howard deWitt's Van Morrison: Astral Weeks to Stardom is over-thorough in the way some self-published books are, while Clinton Heylin's Can You Feel the Silence? is probably the best single volume on the artist. Information on Woodstock comes from Small Town Talk by Barney Hoskyns. Ryan Walsh's Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 is about more than Astral Weeks, but does cover Morrison's period in and around Boston in more detail than anything else. The album Astral Weeks is worth hearing in its entirety. Not all of the music on The Authorized Bang Collection is as listenable, but it's the most complete collection available of everything Morrison recorded for Bang. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we start, a quick warning -- this episode contains discussion of organised crime activity, and of sudden death. It also contains excerpts of songs which hint at attraction to underage girls and discuss terminal illness. If those subjects might upset you, you might want to read the transcript rather than listen to the episode. Anyway, on with the show. Van Morrison could have been the co-writer of "Piece of My Heart". Bert Berns was one of the great collaborators in the music business, and almost every hit he ever had was co-written, and he was always on the lookout for new collaborators, and in 1967 he was once again working with Van Morrison, who he'd worked with a couple of years earlier when Morrison was still the lead singer of Them. Towards the beginning of 1967 he had come up with a chorus, but no verse. He had the hook, "Take another little piece of my heart" -- Berns was writing a lot of songs with "heart" in the title at the time -- and wanted Morrison to come up with a verse to go with it. Van Morrison declined. He wasn't interested in writing pop songs, or in collaborating with other writers, and so Berns turned to one of his regular collaborators, Jerry Ragavoy, and it was Ragavoy who added the verses to one of the biggest successes of Berns' career: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] The story of how Van Morrison came to make the album that's often considered his masterpiece is intimately tied up with the story we've been telling in the background for several episodes now, the story of Atlantic Records' sale to Warners, and the story of Bert Berns' departure from Atlantic. For that reason, some parts of the story I'm about to tell will be familiar to those of you who've been paying close attention to the earlier episodes, but as always I'm going to take you from there to somewhere we've never been before. In 1962, Bert Berns was a moderately successful songwriter, who had written or co-written songs for many artists, especially for artists on Atlantic Records. He'd written songs for Atlantic artists like LaVern Baker, and when Atlantic's top pop producers Leiber and Stoller started to distance themselves from the label in the early sixties, he had moved into production as well, writing and producing Solomon Burke's big hit "Cry to Me": [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Cry to Me"] He was the producer and writer or co-writer of most of Burke's hits from that point forward, but at first he was still a freelance producer, and also produced records for Scepter Records, like the Isley Brothers' version of "Twist and Shout", another song he'd co-written, that one with Phil Medley. And as a jobbing songwriter, of course his songs were picked up by other producers, so Leiber and Stoller produced a version of his song "Tell Him" for the Exciters on United Artists: [Excerpt: The Exciters, "Tell Him"] Berns did freelance work for Leiber and Stoller as well as the other people he was working for. For example, when their former protege Phil Spector released his hit version of "Zip-a-Dee-Do-Dah", they got Berns to come up with a knockoff arrangement of "How Much is that Doggie in the Window?", released as by Baby Jane and the Rockabyes, with a production credit "Produced by Leiber and Stoller, directed by Bert Berns": [Excerpt: Baby Jane and the Rockabyes, "How Much is that Doggie in the Window?"] And when Leiber and Stoller stopped producing work for United Artists, Berns took over some of the artists they'd been producing for the label, like Marv Johnson, as well as producing his own new artists, like Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters, who had been discovered by Berns' friend Jerry Ragovoy, with whom he co-wrote their "Cry Baby": [Excerpt: Garnet Mimms and the Enchanters, "Cry Baby"] Berns was an inveterate collaborator. He was one of the few people to get co-writing credits with Leiber and Stoller, and he would collaborate seemingly with everyone who spoke to him for five minutes. He would also routinely reuse material, cutting the same songs time and again with different artists, knowing that a song must be a hit for *someone*. One of his closest collaborators was Jerry Wexler, who also became one of his best friends, even though one of their earliest interactions had been when Wexler had supervised Phil Spector's production of Berns' "Twist and Shout" for the Top Notes, a record that Berns had thought had butchered the song. Berns was, in his deepest bones, a record man. Listening to the records that Berns made, there's a strong continuity in everything he does. There's a love there of simplicity -- almost none of his records have more than three chords. He loved Latin sounds and rhythms -- a love he shared with other people working in Brill Building R&B at the time, like Leiber and Stoller and Spector -- and great voices in emotional distress. There's a reason that the records he produced for Solomon Burke were the first R&B records to be labelled "soul". Berns was one of those people for whom feel and commercial success are inextricable. He was an artist -- the records he made were powerfully expressive -- but he was an artist for whom the biggest validation was *getting a hit*. Only a small proportion of the records he made became hits, but enough did that in the early sixties he was a name that could be spoken of in the same breath as Leiber and Stoller, Spector, and Bacharach and David. And Atlantic needed a record man. The only people producing hits for the label at this point were Leiber and Stoller, and they were in the process of stopping doing freelance work and setting up their own label, Red Bird, as we talked about in the episode on the Shangri-Las. And anyway, they wanted more money than they were getting, and Jerry Wexler was never very keen on producers wanting money that could have gone to the record label. Wexler decided to sign Bert Berns up as a staff producer for Atlantic towards the end of 1963, and by May 1964 it was paying off. Atlantic hadn't been having hits, and now Berns had four tracks he wrote and produced for Atlantic on the Hot One Hundred, of which the highest charting was "My Girl Sloopy" by the Vibrations: [Excerpt: The Vibrations, "My Girl Sloopy"] Even higher on the charts though was the Beatles' version of "Twist and Shout". That record, indeed, had been successful enough in the UK that Berns had already made exploratory trips to the UK and produced records for Dick Rowe at Decca, a partnership we heard about in the episode on "Here Comes the Night". Berns had made partnerships there which would have vast repercussions for the music industry in both countries, and one of them was with the arranger Mike Leander, who was the uncredited arranger for the Drifters session for "Under the Boardwalk", a song written by Artie Resnick and Kenny Young and produced by Berns, recorded the day after the group's lead singer Rudy Lewis died of an overdose: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Under the Boardwalk"] Berns was making hits on a regular basis by mid-1964, and the income from the label's new success allowed Jerry Wexler and the Ertegun brothers to buy out their other partners -- Ahmet Ertegun's old dentist, who had put up some of the initial money, and Miriam Bienstock, the ex-wife of their initial partner Herb Abramson, who'd got Abramson's share in the company after the divorce, and who was now married to Freddie Bienstock of Hill and Range publishing. Wexler and the Erteguns now owned the whole label. Berns also made regular trips to the UK to keep up his work with British musicians, and in one of those trips, as we heard in the episode on "Here Comes the Night", he produced several tracks for the group Them, including that track, written by Berns: [Excerpt: Them, "Here Comes the Night"] And a song written by the group's lead singer Van Morrison, "Gloria": [Excerpt: Them, "Gloria"] But Berns hadn't done much other work with them, because he had a new project. Part of the reason that Wexler and the Erteguns had gained total control of Atlantic was because, in a move pushed primarily by Wexler, they were looking at selling it. They'd already tried to merge with Leiber and Stoller's Red Bird Records, but lost the opportunity after a disastrous meeting, but they were in negotiations with several other labels, negotiations which would take another couple of years to bear fruit. But they weren't planning on getting out of the record business altogether. Whatever deal they made, they'd remain with Atlantic, but they were also planning on starting another label. Bert Berns had seen how successful Leiber and Stoller were with Red Bird, and wanted something similar. Wexler and the Erteguns didn't want to lose their one hit-maker, so they came up with an offer that would benefit all of them. Berns' publishing contract had just ended, so they would set up a new publishing company, WEB IV, named after the initials Wexler, Ertegun, and Berns, and the fact that there were four of them. Berns would own fifty percent of that, and the other three would own the other half. And they were going to start up a new label, with seventeen thousand dollars of the Atlantic partners' money. That label would be called Bang -- for Bert, Ahmet, Neshui, and Gerald -- and would be a separate company from Atlantic, so not affected by any sale. Berns would continue as a staff producer for Atlantic for now, but he'd have "his own" label, which he'd have a proper share in, and whether he was making hits for Atlantic or Bang, his partners would have a share of the profits. The first two records on Bang were "Shake and Jerk" by Billy Lamont, a track that they licensed from elsewhere and which didn't do much, and a more interesting track co-written by Berns. Bob Feldman, Richard Gottehrer, and Jerry Goldstein were Brill Building songwriters who had become known for writing "My Boyfriend's Back", a hit for the Angels, a couple of years earlier: [Excerpt: The Angels, "My Boyfriend's Back"] With the British invasion, the three of them had decided to create their own foreign beat group. As they couldn't do British accents, they pretended to be Australian, and as the Strangeloves -- named after the Stanley Kubrick film Dr  Strangelove -- they released one flop single. They cut another single, a version of "Bo Diddley", but the label they released their initial record through didn't want it. They then took the record to Atlantic, where Jerry Wexler said that they weren't interested in releasing some white men singing "Bo Diddley". But Ahmet Ertegun suggested they bring the track to Bert Berns to see what he thought. Berns pointed out that if they changed the lyrics and melody, but kept the same backing track, they could claim the copyright in the resulting song themselves. He worked with them on a new lyric, inspired by the novel Candy, a satirical pornographic novel co-written by Terry Southern, who had also co-written the screenplay to Dr Strangelove. Berns supervised some guitar overdubs, and the result went to number eleven: [Excerpt: The Strangeloves, "I Want Candy"] Berns had two other songs on the hot one hundred when that charted, too -- Them's version of "Here Comes the Night", and the version of Van McCoy's song "Baby I'm Yours" he'd produced for Barbara Lewis. Three records on the charts on three different labels. But despite the sheer number of charting records he'd had, he'd never had a number one, until the Strangeloves went on tour. Before the tour they'd cut a version of "My Girl Sloopy" for their album -- Berns always liked to reuse material -- and they started performing the song on the tour. The Dave Clark Five, who they were supporting, told them it sounded like a hit and they were going to do their own version when they got home. Feldman, Gottehrer, and Goldstein decided *they* might as well have the hit with it as anyone else. Rather than put it out as a Strangeloves record -- their own record was still rising up the charts, and there's no reason to be your own competition -- they decided to get a group of teenage musicians who supported them on the last date of the tour to sing new vocals to the backing track from the Strangeloves album. The group had been called Rick and the Raiders, but they argued so much that the Strangeloves nicknamed them the Hatfields and the McCoys, and when their version of "My Girl Sloopy", retitled "Hang on Sloopy", came out, it was under the band name The McCoys: [Excerpt: The McCoys, "Hang on Sloopy"] Berns was becoming a major success, and with major success in the New York music industry in the 1960s came Mafia involvement. We've talked a fair bit about Morris Levy's connection with the mob in many previous episodes, but mob influence was utterly pervasive throughout the New York part of the industry, and so for example Richard Gottehrer of the Strangeloves used to call Sonny Franzese of the Colombo crime family "Uncle John", they were so close. Franzese was big in the record business too, even after his conviction for bank robbery. Berns, unlike many of the other people in the industry, had no scruples at all about hanging out with Mafiosi. indeed his best friend in the mid sixties was Tommy Eboli, a member of the Genovese crime family who had been in the mob since the twenties, starting out working for "Lucky" Luciano. Berns was not himself a violent man, as far as anyone can tell, but he liked the glamour of hanging out with organised crime figures, and they liked hanging out with someone who was making so many hit records. And so while Leiber and Stoller, for example, ended up selling Red Bird Records to George Goldner for a single dollar in order to get away from the Mafiosi who were slowly muscling in on the label, Berns had no problems at all in keeping his own label going. Indeed, he would soon be doing so without the involvement of Atlantic Records. Berns' final work for Atlantic was in June 1966, when he cut a song he had co-written with Jeff Barry for the Drifters, inspired by the woman who would soon become Atlantic's biggest star: [Excerpt: The Drifters, "Aretha"] The way Berns told the story in public, there was no real bad blood between him, Wexler, and the Erteguns -- he'd just decided to go his own way, and he said “I will always be grateful to them for the help they've given me in getting Bang started,” The way Berns' wife would later tell the story, Jerry Wexler had suggested that rather than Berns owning fifty percent of Web IV, they should start to split everything four ways, and she had been horrified by this suggestion, kicked up a stink about it, and Wexler had then said that either Berns needed to buy the other three out, or quit and give them everything, and demanded Berns pay them three hundred thousand dollars. According to other people, Berns decided he wanted one hundred percent control of Web IV, and raised a breach of contract lawsuit against Atlantic, over the usual royalty non-payments that were endemic in the industry at that point. When Atlantic decided to fight the lawsuit rather than settle, Berns' mob friends got involved and threatened to break the legs of Wexler's fourteen-year-old daughter, and the mob ended up with full control of Bang records, while Berns had full control of his publishing company. Given later events, and in particular given the way Wexler talked about Berns until the day he died, with a vitriol that he never used about any of the other people he had business disputes with, it seems likely to me that the latter story is closer to the truth than the former. But most people involved weren't talking about the details of what went on, and so Berns still retained his relationships with many of the people in the business, not least of them Jeff Barry, so when Barry and Ellie Greenwich had a new potential star, it was Berns they thought to bring him to, even though the artist was white and Berns had recently given an interview saying that he wanted to work with more Black artists, because white artists simply didn't have soul. Barry and Greenwich's marriage was breaking up at the time, but they were still working together professionally, as we discussed in the episode on "River Deep, Mountain High", and they had been the main production team at Red Bird. But with Red Bird in terminal decline, they turned elsewhere when they found a potential major star after Greenwich was asked to sing backing vocals on one of his songwriting demos. They'd signed the new songwriter, Neil Diamond, to Leiber and Stoller's company Trio Music at first, but they soon started up their own company, Tallyrand Music, and signed Diamond to that, giving Diamond fifty percent of the company and keeping twenty-five percent each for themselves, and placed one of his songs with Jay and the Americans in 1965: [Excerpt: Jay and the Americans, "Sunday and Me"] That record made the top twenty, and had established Diamond as a songwriter, but he was still not a major performer -- he'd released one flop single on Columbia Records before meeting Barry and Greenwich. But they thought he had something, and Bert Berns agreed. Diamond was signed to Bang records, and Berns had a series of pre-production meetings with Barry and Greenwich before they took Diamond into the studio -- Barry and Greenwich were going to produce Diamond for Bang, as they had previously produced tracks for Red Bird, but they were going to shape the records according to Berns' aesthetic. The first single released from Diamond's first session, "Solitary Man", only made number fifty-five, but it was the first thing Diamond had recorded to make the Hot One Hundred at all: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Solitary Man"] The second single, though, was much more Bert Berns' sort of thing -- a three-chord song that sounded like it could have been written by Berns himself, especially after Barry and Greenwich had added the Latin-style horns that Berns loved so much. Indeed according to some sources, Berns did make a songwriting suggestion -- Diamond's song had apparently been called "Money Money", and Berns had thought that was a ridiculous title, and suggested calling it "Cherry Cherry" instead: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Cherry Cherry"] That became Diamond's first top ten hit. While Greenwich had been the one who had discovered Diamond, and Barry and Greenwich were the credited producers on all Diamond's records  as a result, Diamond soon found himself collaborating far more with Barry than with Greenwich, so for example the first number one he wrote, for the Monkees rather than himself, ended up having its production just credited to Barry. That record used a backing track recorded in New York by the same set of musicians used on most Bang records, like Al Gorgoni on lead guitar and Russ Savakus on bass: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "I'm a Believer"] Neil Diamond was becoming a solid hit-maker, but he started rubbing up badly against Berns. Berns wanted hits and only hits, and Diamond thought of himself as a serious artist. The crisis came when two songs were under contention for Diamond's next single in late 1967, after he'd had a whole run of hits for the label. The song Diamond wanted to release, "Shilo", was deeply personal to him: [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Shilo"] But Bert Berns had other ideas. "Shilo" didn't sound like a hit, and he knew a hit when he heard one. No, the clear next single, the only choice, was "Kentucky Woman": [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Kentucky Woman"] But Berns tried to compromise as best he could. Diamond's contract was up for renewal, and you don't want to lose someone who has had, as Diamond had at that point, five top twenty hits in a row, and who was also writing songs like "I'm a Believer" and "Red Red Wine". He told Diamond that he'd let "Shilo" come out as a single if Diamond signed an extension to his contract. Diamond said that not only was he not going to do that, he'd taken legal advice and discovered that there were problems with his contract which let him record for other labels -- the word "exclusive" had been missed out of the text, among other things. He wasn't going to be recording for Bang at all any more. The lawsuits over this would stretch out for a decade, and Diamond would eventually win, but the first few months were very, very difficult for Diamond. When he played the Bitter End, a club in New York, stink bombs were thrown into the audience. The Bitter End's manager was assaulted and severely beaten. Diamond moved his wife and child out of Manhattan, borrowed a gun, and after his last business meeting with Berns was heard talking about how he needed to contact the District Attorney and hire a bodyguard. Of the many threats that were issued against Diamond, though, the least disturbing was probably the threat Berns made to Diamond's career. Berns pointed out to Diamond in no uncertain terms that he didn't need Diamond anyway -- he already had someone he could replace Diamond with, another white male solo singer with a guitar who could churn out guaranteed hits. He had Van Morrison: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl"] When we left Van Morrison, Them had just split up due to the problems they had been having with their management team. Indeed, the problems Morrison was having with his managers seem curiously similar to the issues that Diamond was having with Bert Berns -- something that could possibly have been a warning sign to everyone involved, if any of them had known the full details of everyone else's situation. Sadly for all of them, none of them did. Them had had some early singles success, notably with the tracks Berns had produced for them, but Morrison's opinion of their second album, Them Again, was less than complimentary, and in general that album is mostly only remembered for the version of Bob Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue", which is one of those cover versions that inspires subsequent covers more than the original ever did: [Excerpt: Them, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue"] Them had toured the US around the time of the release of that album, but that tour had been a disaster. The group had gained a reputation for incredible live shows, including performances at the Whisky A-Go-Go with the Doors and Captain Beefheart as their support acts, but during the tour Van Morrison had decided that Phil Solomon, the group's manager, was getting too much money -- Morrison had agreed to do the tour on a salary, rather than a percentage, but the tour had been more successful than he'd expected, and Solomon was making a great deal of money off the tour, money that Morrison believed rightfully belonged to him. The group started collecting the money directly from promoters, and got into legal trouble with Solomon as a result. The tour ended with the group having ten thousand dollars that Solomon believed -- quite possibly correctly -- that he was owed. Various gangsters whose acquaintance the group had made offered to have the problem taken care of, but they decided instead to come to a legal agreement -- they would keep the money, and in return Solomon, whose production company the group were signed to, would get to keep all future royalties from the Them tracks. This probably seemed a good idea at the time, when the idea of records earning royalties for sixty or more years into the future seemed ridiculous, but Morrison in particular came to regret the decision bitterly. The group played one final gig when they got back to Belfast, but then split up, though a version of the group led by the bass player Alan Henderson continued performing for a few years to no success. Morrison put together a band that played a handful of gigs under the name Them Again, with little success, but he already had his eyes set on a return to the US. In Morrison's eyes, Bert Berns had been the only person in the music industry who had really understood him, and the two worked well together. He had also fallen in love with an American woman, Janet Planet, and wanted to find some way to be with her. As Morrison said later “I had a couple of other offers but I thought this was the best one, seeing as I wanted to come to America anyway. I can't remember the exact details of the deal. It wasn't really that spectacular, money-wise, I don't think. But it was pretty hard to refuse from the point of view that I really respected Bert as a producer. I'd rather have worked with Bert than some other guy with a bigger record company. From that angle, it was spectacular because Bert was somebody that I wanted to work with.” There's little evidence that Morrison did have other offers -- he was already getting a reputation as someone who it was difficult to work with -- but he and Berns had a mutual respect, and on January the ninth, 1967, he signed a contract with Bang records. That contract has come in for a lot of criticism over the years, but it was actually, *by the standards in operation in the music business in 1967*, a reasonably fair one. The contract provided that, for a $2,500 a year advance, Bang would record twelve sides in the first year, with an option for up to fifty more that year, and options for up to four more years on the same terms. Bang had the full ownership of the masters and the right to do what they wanted with them. According to at least one biographer, Morrison added clauses requiring Bang to actually record the twelve sides a year, and to put out at least three singles and one album per year while the contract was in operation. He also added one other clause which seems telling -- "Company agrees that Company will not make any reference to the name THEM on phonograph records, or in advertising copy in connection with the recording of Artist." Morrison was, at first, extremely happy with Berns. The problems started with their first session: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl (takes 1-6)"] When Morrison had played the songs he was working on for Berns, Berns had remarked that they sounded great with just Morrison and his guitar, so Morrison was surprised when he got into the studio to find the whole standard New York session crew there -- the same group of session players who were playing for everyone from the Monkees to Laura Nyro, from Neil Diamond to the Shangri-Las -- along with the Sweet Inspirations to provide backing vocals. As he described it later "This fellow Bert, he made it the way he wanted to, and I accepted that he was producing it... I'd write a song and bring it into the group and we'd sit there and bash it around and that's all it was -- they weren't playing the songs, they were just playing whatever it was. They'd say 'OK, we got drums so let's put drums on it,' and they weren't thinking about the song, all they were thinking about was putting drums on it... But it was my song, and I had to watch it go down." The first song they cut was "Brown-Eyed Girl", a song which Morrison has said was originally a calypso, and was originally titled "Brown-skinned Girl", though he's differed in interviews as to whether Berns changed the lyric or if he just decided to sing it differently without thinking about it in the session. Berns turned "Brown-Eyed Girl" into a hit single, because that was what he tended to do with songs, and the result sounds a lot like the kind of record that Bang were releasing for Neil Diamond: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl"] Morrison has, in later years, expressed his distaste for what was done to the song, and in particular he's said that the backing vocal part by the Sweet Inspirations was added by Berns and he disliked it: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl"] Morrison has been very dismissive of "Brown-Eyed Girl" over the years, but he seems not to have disliked it at the time, and the song itself is one that has stood the test of time, and is often pointed to by other songwriters as a great example of the writer's craft. I remember reading one interview with Randy Newman -- sadly, while I thought it was in Paul Zollo's "Songwriters on Songwriting" I just checked that and it's not, so I can't quote it precisely -- in which he says that he often points to the line "behind the stadium with you" as a perfect piece of writing, because it's such a strangely specific detail that it convinces you that it actually happened, and that means you implicitly believe the rest of the song. Though it should be made very clear here that Morrison has always said, over and over again, that nothing in his songs is based directly on his own experiences, and that they're all products of his imagination and composites of people he's known. This is very important to note before we go any further, because "Brown-Eyed Girl" is one of many songs from this period in Morrison's career which imply that their narrator has an attraction to underage girls -- in this case he remembers "making love in the green grass" in the distant past, while he also says "saw you just the other day, my how you have grown", and that particular combination is not perhaps one that should be dwelt on too closely. But there is of course a very big difference between a songwriter treating a subject as something that is worth thinking about in the course of a song and writing about their own lives, and that can be seen on one of the other songs that Morrison recorded in these sessions, "T.B. Sheets": [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "T.B. Sheets"] It seems very unlikely indeed that Van Morrison actually had a lover die of tuberculosis, as the lover in the song does, and while a lot of people seem convinced that it's autobiographical, simply because of the intensity of the performance (Morrison apparently broke down in tears after recording it), nobody has ever found anyone in Morrison's life who fits the story in the song, and he's always ridiculed such suggestions. What is true though is that "T.B. Sheets" is evidence against another claim that Morrison has made in the past - that on these initial sessions the eight songs recorded were meant to be the A and B sides of four singles and there was no plan of making an album. It is simply not plausible at all to suggest that "T.B. Sheets" -- a slow blues about terminal illness, that lasts nearly ten minutes -- was ever intended as a single. It wouldn't have even come close to fitting on one side of a forty-five. It was also presumably at this time that Berns brought up the topic of "Piece of My Heart". When Berns signed Erma Franklin, it was as a way of getting at Jerry Wexler, who had gone from being his closest friend to someone he wasn't on speaking terms with, by signing the sister of his new signing Aretha. Morrison, of course, didn't co-write it -- he'd already decided that he didn't play well with others -- but it's tempting to think about how the song might have been different had Morrison written it. The song in some ways seems a message to Wexler -- haven't you had enough from me already? -- but it's also notable how many songs Berns was writing with the word "heart" in the chorus, given that Berns knew he was on borrowed time from his own heart condition. As an example, around the same time he and Jerry Ragavoy co-wrote "Piece of My Heart", they also co-wrote another song, "Heart Be Still", a flagrant lift from "Peace Be Still" by Aretha Franklin's old mentor Rev. James Cleveland, which they cut with Lorraine Ellison: [Excerpt: Lorraine Ellison, "Heart Be Still"] Berns' heart condition had got much worse as a result of the stress from splitting with Atlantic, and he had started talking about maybe getting open-heart surgery, though that was still very new and experimental. One wonders how he must have felt listening to Morrison singing about watching someone slowly dying. Morrison has since had nothing but negative things to say about the sessions in March 1967, but at the time he seemed happy. He returned to Belfast almost straight away after the sessions, on the understanding that he'd be back in the US if "Brown-Eyed Girl" was a success. He wrote to Janet Planet in San Francisco telling her to listen to the radio -- she'd know if she heard "Brown-Eyed Girl" that he would be back on his way to see her. She soon did hear the song, and he was soon back in the US: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Brown-Eyed Girl"] By August, "Brown-Eyed Girl" had become a substantial hit, making the top ten, and Morrison was back in the States. He was starting to get less happy with Berns though. Bang had put out the eight tracks he'd recorded in March as an album, titled Blowin' Your Mind, and Morrison thought that the crass pseudo-psychedelia of the title, liner notes, and cover was very inappropriate -- Morrison has never been a heavy user of any drugs other than alcohol, and didn't particularly want to be associated with them. He also seems to have not realised that every track he recorded in those initial sessions would be on the album, which many people have called one of the great one-sided albums of all time -- side A, with "Brown-Eyed Girl", "He Ain't Give You None" and the extended "T.B. Sheets" tends to get far more love than side B, with five much lesser songs on it. Berns held a party for Morrison on a cruise around Manhattan, but it didn't go well -- when the performer Tiny Tim tried to get on board, Carmine "Wassel" DeNoia, a mobster friend of Berns' who was Berns' partner in a studio they'd managed to get from Atlantic as part of the settlement when Berns left, was so offended by Tim's long hair and effeminate voice and mannerisms that he threw him overboard into the harbour. DeNoia was meant to be Morrison's manager in the US, working with Berns, but he and Morrison didn't get on at all -- at one point DeNoia smashed Morrison's acoustic guitar over his head, and only later regretted the damage he'd done to a nice guitar. And Morrison and Berns weren't getting on either. Morrison went back into the studio to record four more songs for a follow-up to "Brown-Eyed Girl", but there was again a misunderstanding. Morrison thought he'd been promised that this time he could do his songs the way he wanted, but Berns was just frustrated that he wasn't coming up with another "Brown-Eyed Girl", but was instead coming up with slow songs about trans women. Berns overdubbed party noises and soul backing vocals onto "Madame George", possibly in an attempt to copy the Beach Boys' Party! album with its similar feel, but it was never going to be a "Barbara Ann": [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Madame George (Bang version)"] In the end, Berns released one of the filler tracks from Blowin' Your Mind, "Ro Ro Rosey", as the next single, and it flopped. On December the twenty-ninth, Berns had a meeting with Neil Diamond, the meeting after which Diamond decided he needed to get a bodyguard. After that, he had a screaming row over the phone with Van Morrison, which made Berns ill with stress. The next day, he died of a heart attack. Berns' widow Ilene, who had only just given birth to a baby a couple of weeks earlier, would always blame Morrison for pushing her husband over the edge. Neither Van Morrison nor Jerry Wexler went to the funeral, but Neil Diamond did -- he went to try to persuade Ilene to let him out of his contract now Berns was dead. According to Janet Planet later, "We were at the hotel when we learned that Bert had died. We were just mortified, because things had been going really badly, and Van felt really bad, because I guess they'd parted having had some big fight or something... Even though he did love Bert, it was a strange relationship that lived and died in the studio... I remember we didn't go to the funeral, which probably was a mistake... I think [Van] had a really bad feeling about what was going to happen." But Morrison has later mostly talked about the more practical concerns that came up, which were largely the same as the ones Neil Diamond had, saying in 1997 "I'd signed a contract with Bert Berns for management, production, agency and record company,  publishing, the whole lot -- which was professional suicide as any lawyer will tell you now... Then the whole thing blew up. Bert Berns died and I was left broke." This was the same mistake, essentially, that he'd made with Phil Solomon, and in order to get out of it, it turned out he was going to have to do much the same for a third time.  But it was the experience with Berns specifically that traumatised Morrison enough that twenty-five years later he would still be writing songs about it, like "Big Time Operators": [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Big Time Operators"] The option to renew Morrison's contracts with Berns' companies came on the ninth of January 1968, less than two weeks after Berns' death. After his death, Berns' share of ownership in his companies had passed to his widow, who was in a quandary. She had two young children, one of whom was only a few weeks old, and she needed an income after their father had died. She was also not well disposed at all towards Morrison, who she blamed for causing her husband's death. By all accounts the amazing thing is that Berns lived as long as he did given his heart condition and the state of medical science at the time, but it's easy to understand her thinking. She wanted nothing to do with Morrison, and wanted to punish him. On the other hand, her late husband's silent partners didn't want to let their cash cow go. And so Morrison came under a huge amount of pressure in very different directions. From one side, Carmine DiNoia was determined to make more money off Morrison, and Morrison has since talked about signing further contracts at this point with a gun literally to his head, and his hotel room being shot up. But on the other side, Ilene Berns wanted to destroy Morrison's career altogether. She found out that Bert Berns hadn't got Morrison the proper work permits and reported him to the immigration authorities. Morrison came very close to being deported, but in the end he managed to escape deportation by marrying Janet Planet. The newly-married couple moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to get away from New York and the mobsters, and to try to figure out the next steps in Morrison's career. Morrison started putting together a band, which he called The Van Morrison Controversy, and working on new songs. One of his earliest connections in Massachusetts was the lead singer of a band called the Hallucinations, who he met in a bar where he was trying to get a gig: [Excerpt: The Hallucinations, "Messin' With the Kid"] The Hallucinations' lead singer was called Peter Wolf, and would much later go on to become well-known as the singer with the J. Geils Band. He and Morrison became acquaintances, and later became closer friends when they realised they had another connection -- Wolf had a late-night radio show under the name Woofa Goofa, and he'd been receiving anonymous requests for obscure blues records from a fan of the show. Morrison had been the one sending in the requests, not realising his acquaintance was the DJ. Before he got his own band together, Morrison actually guested with the Hallucinations at one show they did in May 1968, supporting John Lee Hooker. The Hallucinations had been performing "Gloria" since Them's single had come out, and they invited Morrison to join them to perform it on stage. According to Wolf, Morrison was very drunk and ranted in cod-Japanese for thirty-five minutes, and tried to sing a different song while the band played "Gloria". The audience were apparently unimpressed, even though Wolf shouted at them “Don't you know who this man is? He wrote the song!” But in truth, Morrison was sick of "Gloria" and his earlier work, and was trying to push his music in a new direction. He would later talk about having had an epiphany after hearing one particular track on the radio: [Excerpt: The Band, "I Shall Be Released"] Like almost every musician in 1968, Morrison was hit like a lightning bolt by Music From Big Pink, and he decided that he needed to turn his music in the same direction. He started writing the song "Brand New Day", which would later appear on his album Moondance, inspired by the music on the album. The Van Morrison Controversy started out as a fairly straightforward rock band, with guitarist John Sheldon, bass player Tom Kielbania, and drummer Joey Bebo. Sheldon was a novice, though his first guitar teacher was the singer James Taylor, but the other two were students at Berklee, and very serious musicians. Morrison seems to have had various managers involved in rapid succession in 1968, including one who was himself a mobster, and another who was only known as Frank, but one of these managers advanced enough money that the musicians got paid every gig. These musicians were all interested in kinds of music other than just straight rock music, and as well as rehearsing up Morrison's hits and his new songs, they would also jam with him on songs from all sorts of other genres, particularly jazz and blues. The band worked up the song that would become "Domino" based on Sheldon jamming on a Bo Diddley riff, and another time the group were rehearsing a Grant Green jazz piece, "Lazy Afternoon": [Excerpt: Grant Green, "Lazy Afternoon"] Morrison started messing with the melody, and that became his classic song "Moondance": [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Moondance"] No recordings of this electric lineup of the group are known to exist, though the backing musicians remember going to a recording studio called Ace recordings at one point and cutting some demos, which don't seem to circulate. Ace was a small studio which, according to all the published sources I've read, was best known for creating song poems, though it was a minor studio even in the song-poem world. For those who don't know, song poems were essentially a con aimed at wannabe songwriters who knew nothing about the business -- companies would advertise you too could become a successful, rich, songwriter if you sent in your "song poems", because anyone who knew the term "lyric" could be presumed to know too much about the music business to be useful. When people sent in their lyrics, they'd then be charged a fee to have them put out on their very own record -- with tracks made more or less on a conveyor belt with quick head arrangements, sung by session singers who were just handed a lyric sheet and told to get on with it. And thus were created such classics prized by collectors as "I Like Yellow Things", "Jimmy Carter Says 'Yes'", and "Listen Mister Hat". Obviously, for the most part these song poems did not lead to the customers becoming the next Ira Gershwin, but oddly even though Ace recordings is not one of the better-known song poem studios, it seems to have produced an actual hit song poem -- one that I don't think has ever before been identified as such until I made a connection, hence me going on this little tangent. Because in researching this episode I noticed something about its co-owner, Milton Yakus', main claim to fame. He co-wrote the song "Old Cape Cod", and to quote that song's Wikipedia page "The nucleus of the song was a poem written by Boston-area housewife Claire Rothrock, for whom Cape Cod was a favorite vacation spot. "Old Cape Cod" and its derivatives would be Rothrock's sole evident songwriting credit. She brought her poem to Ace Studios, a Boston recording studio owned by Milton Yakus, who adapted the poem into the song's lyrics." And while Yakus had written other songs, including songs for Patti Page who had the hit with "Old Cape Cod", apparently Page recorded that song after Rothrock brought her the demo after a gig, rather than getting it through any formal channels. It sounds to me like the massive hit and classic of the American songbook "Old Cape Cod" started life as a song-poem -- and if you're familiar with the form, it fits the genre perfectly: [Excerpt: Patti Page, "Old Cape Cod"] The studio was not the classiest of places, even if you discount the song-poems. Its main source of income was from cutting private records with mobsters' wives and mistresses singing (and dealing with the problems that came along when those records weren't successful) and it also had a sideline in bugging people's cars to see if their spouses were cheating, though Milton Yakus' son Shelly, who got his start at his dad's studio, later became one of the most respected recording engineers in the industry -- and indeed had already worked as assistant engineer on Music From Big Pink. And there was actually another distant connection to Morrison's new favourite band on these sessions. For some reason -- reports differ -- Bebo wasn't considered suitable for the session, and in his place was the one-handed drummer Victor "Moulty" Moulton, who had played with the Barbarians, who'd had a minor hit with "Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?" a couple of years earlier: [Excerpt: The Barbarians, "Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl?"] A later Barbarians single, in early 1966, had featured Moulty telling his life story, punctuated by the kind of three-chord chorus that would have been at home on a Bert Berns single: [Excerpt: The Barbarians, "Moulty"] But while that record was credited to the Barbarians, Moulton was the only Barbarian on the track, with the instruments and backing vocals instead being provided by Levon and the Hawks. Shortly after the Ace sessions, the Van Morrison Controversy fell apart, though nobody seems to know why. Depending on which musician's story you listen to, either Morrison had a dream that he should get rid of all electric instruments and only use acoustic players, or there was talk of a record deal but the musicians weren't good enough, or the money from the mysterious manager (who may or may not have been the one who was a mobster) ran out. Bebo went back to university, and Sheldon left soon after, though Sheldon would remain in the music business in one form or another. His most prominent credit has been writing a couple of songs for his old friend James Taylor, including the song "Bittersweet" on Taylor's platinum-selling best-of, on which Sheldon also played guitar: [Excerpt: James Taylor, "Bittersweet"] Morrison and Kielbania continued for a while as a duo, with Morrison on acoustic guitar and Kielbania on double bass, but they were making very different music. Morrison's biggest influence at this point, other than The Band, was King Pleasure, a jazz singer who sang in the vocalese style we've talked about before -- the style where singers would sing lyrics to melodies that had previously been improvised by jazz musicians: [Excerpt: King Pleasure, "Moody's Mood for Love"] Morrison and Kielbania soon decided that to make the more improvisatory music they were interested in playing, they wanted another musician who could play solos. They ended up with John Payne, a jazz flute and saxophone player whose biggest inspiration was Charles Lloyd. This new lineup of the Van Morrison Controversy -- acoustic guitar, double bass, and jazz flute -- kept gigging around Boston, though the sound they were creating was hardly what the audiences coming to see the man who'd had that "Brown-Eyed Girl" hit the year before would have expected -- even when they did "Brown-Eyed Girl", as the one live recording of that line-up, made by Peter Wolf, shows: [Excerpt: The Van Morrison Controversy, "Brown-Eyed Girl (live in Boston 1968)"] That new style, with melodic bass underpinning freely extemporising jazz flute and soulful vocals, would become the basis of the album that to this day is usually considered Morrison's best. But before that could happen, there was the matter of the contracts to be sorted out. Warner-Reprise Records were definitely interested. Warners had spent the last few years buying up smaller companies like Atlantic, Autumn Records, and Reprise, and the label was building a reputation as the major label that would give artists the space and funding they needed to make the music they wanted to make. Idiosyncratic artists with difficult reputations (deserved or otherwise), like Neil Young, Randy Newman, Van Dyke Parks, the Grateful Dead, and Joni Mitchell, had all found homes on the label, which was soon also to start distributing Frank Zappa, the Beach Boys, and Captain Beefheart. A surly artist who wants to make mystical acoustic songs with jazz flute accompaniment was nothing unusual for them, and once Joe Smith, the man who had signed the Grateful Dead, was pointed in Morrison's direction by Andy Wickham, an A&R man working for the label, everyone knew that Morrison would be a perfect fit. But Morrison was still under contract to Bang records and Web IV, and those contracts said, among other things, that any other label that negotiated with Morrison would be held liable for breach of contract. Warners didn't want to show their interest in Morrison, because a major label wanting to sign him would cause Bang to raise the price of buying him out of his contract. Instead they got an independent production company to sign him, with a nod-and-wink understanding that they would then license the records to Warners. The company they chose was Inherit Productions, the production arm of Schwaid-Merenstein, a management company set up by Bob Schwaid, who had previously worked in Warners' publishing department, and record producer Lewis Merenstein. Merenstein came to another demo session at Ace Recordings, where he fell in love with the new music that Morrison was playing, and determined he would do everything in his power to make the record into the masterpiece it deserved to be. He and Morrison were, at least at this point, on exactly the same page, and bonded over their mutual love of King Pleasure. Morrison signed to Schwaid-Merenstein, just as he had with Bert Berns and before him Phil Solomon, for management, record production, and publishing. Schwaid-Merenstein were funded by Warners, and would license any recordings they made to Warners, once the contractual situation had been sorted out. The first thing to do was to negotiate the release from Web IV, the publishing company owned by Ilene Berns. Schwaid negotiated that, and Morrison got released on four conditions -- he had to make a substantial payment to Web IV, if he released a single within a year he had to give Web IV the publishing, any album he released in the next year had to contain at least two songs published by Web IV, and he had to give Web IV at least thirty-six new songs to publish within the next year. The first two conditions were no problem at all -- Warners had the money to buy the contract out, and Merenstein's plans for the first album didn't involve a single anyway. It wouldn't be too much of a hardship to include a couple of Web IV-published tracks on the album -- Morrison had written two songs, "Beside You" and "Madame George", that had already been published and that he was regularly including in his live sets. As for the thirty-six new songs... well, that all depended on what you called a song, didn't it? [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Ring Worm"] Morrison went into a recording studio and recorded thirty-one ostensible songs, most of them lasting one minute to within a few seconds either way, in which he strummed one or two chords and spoke-sang whatever words came into his head -- for example one song, "Here Comes Dumb George", just consists of the words "Here Comes Dumb George" repeated over and over. Some of the 'songs', like "Twist and Shake" and "Hang on Groovy", are parodying Bert Berns' songwriting style; others, like "Waiting for My Royalty Check", "Blowin' Your Nose", and "Nose in Your Blow", are attacks on Bang's business practices. Several of the songs, like "Hold on George", "Here Comes Dumb George", "Dum Dum George", and "Goodbye George" are about a man called George who seems to have come to Boston to try and fail to make a record with Morrison. And “Want a Danish” is about wanting a Danish pastry. But in truth, this description is still making these "songs" sound more coherent than they are. The whole recording is of no musical merit whatsoever, and has absolutely nothing in it which could be considered to have any commercial potential at all. Which is of course the point -- just to show utter contempt to Ilene Berns and her company. The other problem that needed to be solved was Bang Records itself, which was now largely under the control of the mob. That was solved by Joe Smith. As Smith told the story "A friend of mine who knew some people said I could buy the contract for $20,000. I had to meet somebody in a warehouse on the third floor on Ninth Avenue in New York. I walked up there with twenty thousand-dollar bills -- and I was terrified. I was terrified I was going to give them the money, get a belt on the head and still not wind up with the contract. And there were two guys in the room. They looked out of central casting -- a big wide guy and  a tall, thin guy. They were wearing suits and hats and stuff. I said 'I'm here with the money. You got the contract?' I remember I took that contract and ran out the door and jumped from the third floor to the second floor, and almost broke my leg to get on the street, where I could get a cab and put the contract in a safe place back at Warner Brothers." But the problem was solved, and Lewis Merenstein could get to work translating the music he'd heard Morrison playing into a record. He decided that Kielbania and Payne were not suitable for the kind of recording he wanted -- though they were welcome to attend the sessions in case the musicians had any questions about the songs, and thus they would get session pay. Kielbania was, at first, upset by this, but he soon changed his mind when he realised who Merenstein was bringing in to replace him on bass for the session. Richard Davis, the bass player -- who sadly died two months ago as I write this -- would later go on to play on many classic rock records by people like Bruce Springsteen and Laura Nyro, largely as a result of his work for Morrison, but at the time he was known as one of the great jazz bass players, most notably having played on Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch: [Excerpt: Eric Dolphy, "Hat and Beard"] Kielbania could see the wisdom of getting in one of the truly great players for the album, and he was happy to show Davis the parts he'd been playing on the songs live, which Davis could then embellish -- Davis later always denied this, but it's obvious when listening to the live recordings that Kielbania played on before these sessions that Davis is playing very similar lines. Warren Smith Jr, the vibraphone player, had played with great jazz musicians like Charles Mingus and Herbie Mann, as well as backing Lloyd Price, Aretha Franklin, and Janis Joplin. Connie Kay, the drummer, was the drummer for the Modern Jazz Quartet and had also played sessions with everyone from Ruth Brown to Miles Davis. And Jay Berliner, the guitarist, had played on records like Charles Mingus' classic The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady: [Excerpt: Charles Mingus: "Mode D - Trio and Group Dancers, Mode F - Single Solos & Group Dance"] There was also a flute player whose name nobody now remembers. Although all of these musicians were jobbing session musicians -- Berliner came to the first session for the album that became Astral Weeks straight from a session recording a jingle for Pringles potato chips -- they were all very capable of taking a simple song and using it as an opportunity for jazz improvisation. And that was what Merenstein asked them to do. The songs that Morrison was writing were lyrically oblique, but structurally they were very simple -- surprisingly so when one is used to listening to the finished album. Most of the songs were, harmonically, variants of the standard blues and R&B changes that Morrison was used to playing. "Cyprus Avenue" and "The Way Young Lovers Do", for example, are both basically twelve-bar blueses -- neither is *exactly* a standard twelve-bar blues, but both are close enough that they can be considered to fit the form. Other than what Kielbania and Payne showed the musicians, they received no guidance from Morrison, who came in, ran through the songs once for them, and then headed to the vocal booth. None of the musicians had much memory of Morrison at all -- Jay Berliner said “This little guy walks in, past everybody, disappears into the vocal booth, and almost never comes out, even on the playbacks, he stayed in there." While Richard Davis later said “Well, I was with three of my favorite fellas to play with, so that's what made it beautiful. We were not concerned with Van at all, he never spoke to us.” The sound of the basic tracks on Astral Weeks is not the sound of a single auteur, as one might expect given its reputation, it's the sound of extremely good jazz musicians improvising based on the instructions given by Lewis Merenstein, who was trying to capture the feeling he'd got from listening to Morrison's live performances and demos. And because these were extremely good musicians, the album was recorded extremely quickly. In the first session, they cut four songs. Two of those were songs that Morrison was contractually obliged to record because of his agreement with Web IV -- "Beside You" and "Madame George", two songs that Bert Berns had produced, now in radically different versions: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Madame George"] The third song, "Cyprus Avenue", is the song that has caused most controversy over the years, as it's another of the songs that Morrison wrote around this time that relate to a sexual or romantic interest in underage girls. In this case, the reasoning might have been as simple as that the song is a blues, and Morrison may have been thinking about a tradition of lyrics like this in blues songs like "Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl". Whatever the cause though, the lyrics have, to put it mildly, not aged well at all: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Cyprus Avenue"] That song would be his standard set-closer for live performances for much of the seventies. For the fourth and final song, though, they chose to record what would become the title track for the album, "Astral Weeks", a song that was a lot more elliptical, and which seems in part to be about Morrison's longing for Janet Planet from afar, but also about memories of childhood, and also one of the first songs to bring in Morrison's fascination with the occult and spirituality,  something that would be a recurring theme throughout his work, as the song was partly inspired by paintings by a friend of Morrison's which suggested to him the concept of astral travel: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Astral Weeks"] Morrison had a fascination with the idea of astral travel, as he had apparently had several out-of-body experiences as a child, and wanted to find some kind of explanation for them. Most of the songs on the album came, by Morrison's own account, as a kind of automatic writing, coming through him rather than being consciously written, and there's a fascination throughout with, to use the phrase from "Madame George", "childhood visions". The song is also one of the first songs in Morrison's repertoire to deliberately namecheck one of his idols, something else he would do often in future, when he talks about "talking to Huddie Leadbelly". "Astral Weeks" was a song that Morrison had been performing live for some time, and Payne had always enjoyed doing it. Unlike Kielbania he had no compunction about insisting that he was good enough to play on the record, and he eventually persuaded the session flute player to let him borrow his instrument, and Payne was allowed to play on the track: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Astral Weeks"] Or at least that's how the story is usually told -- Payne is usually credited for playing on "Madame George" too, even though everyone agrees that "Astral Weeks" was the last song of the night, but people's memories can fade over time. Either way, Payne's interplay with Jay Berliner on the guitar became such a strong point of the track that there was no question of bringing the unknown session player back -- Payne was going to be the woodwind player for the rest of the album: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Astral Weeks"] There was then a six-day break between sessions, during which time Payne and Kielbania went to get initiated into Scientology -- a religion with which Morrison himself would experiment a little over a decade later -- though they soon decided that it wasn't worth the cost of the courses they'd have to take, and gave up on the idea the same week. The next session didn't go so well. Jay Berliner was unavailable, and so Barry Kornfeld, a folkie who played with people like Dave Van Ronk, was brought in to replace him. Kornfeld was perfectly decent in the role, but they'd also brought in a string section, with the idea of recording some of the songs which needed string parts live. But the string players they brought in were incapable of improvising, coming from a classical rather than jazz tradition, and the only track that got used on the finished album was "The Way Young Lovers Do", by far the most conventional song on the album, a three-minute soul ballad structured as a waltz twelve-bar blues, where the strings are essentially playing the same parts that a horn section would play on a record by someone like Solomon Burke: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "The Way Young Lovers Do"] It was decided that any string or horn parts on the rest of the album would just be done as overdubs. It was two weeks before the next and final session for the album, and that featured the return of Jay Berliner on guitar. The session started with "Sweet Thing" and "Ballerina", two songs that Morrison had been playing live for some time, and which were cut in relatively quick order.  They then made attempts at two more songs that didn't get very far, "Royalty", and "Going Around With Jesse James", before Morrison, stuck for something to record, pulled out a new lyric he'd never performed live, "Slim Slow Slider". The whole band ran through the song once, but then Merenstein decided to pare the arrangement down to just Morrison, Payne (on soprano sax rather than on flute), and Warren Smith Jr: [Excerpt: Van Morrison, "Slim Slow Slider"] That track was the only one where, after the recording, Merenstein didn't compliment the performance, remaining silent instead – Payne said “Maybe everyone was just tired, or maybe they were moved by it.” It seems likely it was the latter. The track eventually got chosen as the final track of the album, because Merenstein felt that it didn't fit conceptually with anything else -- and it's definitely a more negative track than the oth

Hello Broadway Nation listeners! This week for the first time in more than 126 episodes some unforeseen technical complications have reared their ugly heads and those, on top of the tech rehearsals for the upcoming production of White Christmas that I am co-directing at Seattle's 5th Avenue Theatre, and some important deadlines for my upcoming book, have all come together and kept me from posting a new episode of this podcast as planned. This is especially frustrating to me because we are in the middle of what I think is a fantastic series of episodes about Oliver Soden's new biography of Noel Coward which I promise we will get back to as soon as possible! In the meantime, here is another of my favorite episodes Gypsy vs The Sound Of Music in The Golden Age Of Broadway which I thought would be appropriate since the The Sound Of Music opened on November 16, 1959, 63 years ago this week. Enjoy! The 1950s were crowned by four legendary musicals that went head to head for the “Best Musical” prize at the TONY Awards. In the last episode we looked at the 1958 contest of West Side Story vs. The Music Man,. In this episode I focus on the 1959–1960 which brought us Gypsy vs. The Sound Of Music. And you could subtitle this episode Ethel Merman vs. Mary Martin! Spoiler alert: There was a tie for the Best Musical Tony Award that season, but if you don't already know the story, it probably didn't end up the way you think it would have. As with the previous pair, there are still Broadway mavens that remain outraged over which show won, and which musical was in their view unjustly denied its rightful award! And in addition to Merman and Martin, the giants of Broadway that are figure significantly in this episode include: David Merrick, Leland Hayward,, July Styne, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, Jerome Robbins, Joe Layton and, of course, Rodgers & Hammerstein, WARNING:: There are a few historically correct curse words used in this episode. You know how theater people are! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The cast of the 1960 televised "Peter Pan" starring Mary Martin join Tammy on The Tammy Tuckey Show to celebrate the musical's T.V. production!   Guests include:   Benedict Herrman - Lost Boy, First Twin Edmund Gaynes - Lost Boy, Slightly George Zima - Kangaroo   Follow me on:   Facebook - www.facebook.com/singertammytuckey Twitter & Instagram - @TammyTuckey www.tammytuckey.com

We think we have free will and control over our lives, but we have much less control than we think. No I'm not talking about the government. I'm talking about the operating systems that control us. Habit formation, cognitive bias, emotions, prediction engines, misinformation and more.  This is a great episode if you want to change your life. Join us this week as we discuss how to change your investing with Mary Martin. For more information, visit the show notes at https://moneytreepodcast.com/controls-your-investing-mary-martin Today's Panelists: Kirk Chisholm | Innovative Wealth Tim Baker | Metric Financial   Follow on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/moneytreepodcast Follow LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/money-tree-investing-podcast Follow on X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/MTIPodcast  

Devotion on Missions, Isaiah 6:8. 2 pages. And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then I said, “Here am I! Send me” (Isaiah 6:8). Unlike Isaiah's eager response, my initial reaction when asked to join a Haiti mission team was “Who, me? I'm a hot-headed, socially clumsy, middle-aged, adult convert from the backwoods. What credentials do I have to offer a team of experienced mission trippers?” I thought. God, You Want Me? Written by Mary Martin, Sterling, Kansas Published by Lutheran Women's Missionary League, 2019 Download the printable PDF of this devotion God, You Want Me?

“Local Matters with Mel McMahon” brings you the stories of Indiana Owned business owners and community members making a positive impact in Indiana. On this episode, Indiana Owned and Indiana Gifts co-founder Mel McMahon chats with Blair and Mary Martin of Martin's Market. They talk about coming back home to Indiana and how Martin's Market came to be, the surprises of running your own business, and how Martin's Market is more than just a store to the residents of Mitchell, Indiana. It's all about the mission—creating healthier, stronger communities and more jobs in Indiana through the support of local. Thanks for listening!Subscribe on Google Podcasts and wherever you listen to podcasts! #SupportLocalThank you for listening to “Local Matters with Mel McMahon” made possible by Indiana Owned, Indiana Gifts, and Jiffy Lube of Indiana. Learn more about why local matters, find local now, and become a member at IndianaOwned.com. Celebrate local talent, support local creatives, and send local gifts at ShopIndianaGifts.com. It is an honor to bring you incredible stories about Indiana Owned businesses and community members helping achieve our mission to create healthier, stronger communities and more jobs in Indiana. Listen to more episodes at indianaowned.com/podcasts.

THE FANTASTICKS, with book and lyrics by Tom Jones and music by Harvey Schmidt, opened Off-Broadway in May of 1960 and closed forty-two years later, becoming the longest-running production in the history of the American stage and one of the most frequently produced musicals in the world. Their first Broadway musical, 110 IN THE SHADE, was nominated for a Tony Award and was successfully revived by the New York City Opera starring Karen Ziemba, and later produced on Broadway by the Roundabout Theatre Company starring Audra McDonald and John Cullum. I DO! I DO!, their two character musical with Mary Martin and Robert Preston, ran for a year on Broadway and a year on the road and is frequently done around the country and the world. (One production, in Minneapolis, played for twenty-two continuous years with the same two actors in the leading roles.) Tom in recording studio.JPG For several years Jones and Schmidt worked privately at their theatre workshop, concentrating on small musicals in new and often untried forms. The most notable of these efforts were CELEBRATION, which moved to Broadway, and PHILEMON, which won the Outer Critics Circle Award and was filmed for television. They contributed incidental music and lyrics to the Off-Broadway play COLETTE starring Zoe Caldwell and Milddred Dunnock, then later did a full-scale musical version under the title COLETTE COLLAGE. In addition to an Obie Award and the 1992 Special Tony for THE FANTASTICKS, in 1999 Jones and Schmidt were inducted into the Broadway Hall of Fame at the Gershwin Theatre, in 2012 they were inducted into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame, and in December of 2017 they received the Oscar Hammerstein Award. 

Host Bing Crosby with Mary Martin and Dinah Shore

Episode one hundred and sixty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Weight" by the Band, the Basement Tapes, and the continuing controversy over Dylan going electric. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode available, on "S.F. Sorrow is Born" by the Pretty Things. 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/ Also, a one-time request here -- Shawn Taylor, who runs the Facebook group for the podcast and is an old and dear friend of mine, has stage-three lung cancer. I will be hugely grateful to anyone who donates to the GoFundMe for her treatment. Errata At one point I say "when Robertson and Helm travelled to the Brill Building". I meant "when Hawkins and Helm". This is fixed in the transcript but not the recording. Resources There are three Mixcloud mixes this time. As there are so many songs by Bob Dylan and the Band excerpted, and Mixcloud won't allow more than four songs by the same artist in any mix, I've had to post the songs not in quite the same order in which they appear in the podcast. But the mixes are here — one, two, three. I've used these books for all the episodes involving Dylan: Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties by Elijah Wald, which is recommended, as all Wald's books are. Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades. I've also used Robert Shelton's No Direction Home, which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan. Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan is a partial, highly inaccurate, but thoroughly readable autobiography. Information on Tiny Tim comes from Eternal Troubadour: The Improbable Life of Tiny Tim by Justin Martell. Information on John Cage comes from The Roaring Silence by David Revill Information on Woodstock comes from Small Town Talk by Barney Hoskyns. For material on the Basement Tapes, I've used Million Dollar Bash by Sid Griffin. And for the Band, I've used This Wheel's on Fire by Levon Helm with Stephen Davis, Testimony by Robbie Robertson, The Band by Craig Harris and Levon by Sandra B Tooze. I've also referred to the documentaries No Direction Home and Once Were Brothers. The complete Basement Tapes can be found on this multi-disc box set, while this double-CD version has the best material from the sessions. All the surviving live recordings by Dylan and the Hawks from 1966 are on this box set. There are various deluxe versions of Music From Big Pink, but still the best way to get the original album is in this twofer CD with the Band's second album. Transcript Just a brief note before I start – literally while I was in the middle of recording this episode, it was announced that Robbie Robertson had died today, aged eighty. Obviously I've not had time to alter the rest of the episode – half of which had already been edited – with that in mind, though I don't believe I say anything disrespectful to his memory. My condolences to those who loved him – he was a huge talent and will be missed. There are people in the world who question the function of criticism. Those people argue that criticism is in many ways parasitic. If critics knew what they were talking about, so the argument goes, they would create themselves, rather than talk about other people's creation. It's a variant of the "those who can't, teach" cliche. And to an extent it's true. Certainly in the world of rock music, which we're talking about in this podcast, most critics are quite staggeringly ignorant of the things they're talking about. Most criticism is ephemeral, published in newspapers, magazines, blogs and podcasts, and forgotten as soon as it has been consumed -- and consumed is the word . But sometimes, just sometimes, a critic will have an effect on the world that is at least as important as that of any of the artists they criticise. One such critic was John Ruskin. Ruskin was one of the preeminent critics of visual art in the Victorian era, particularly specialising in painting and architecture, and he passionately advocated for a form of art that would be truthful, plain, and honest. To Ruskin's mind, many artists of the past, and of his time, drew and painted, not what they saw with their own eyes, but what other people expected them to paint. They replaced true observation of nature with the regurgitation of ever-more-mannered and formalised cliches. His attacks on many great artists were, in essence, the same critiques that are currently brought against AI art apps -- they're just recycling and plagiarising what other people had already done, not seeing with their own eyes and creating from their own vision. Ruskin was an artist himself, but never received much acclaim for his own work. Rather, he advocated for the works of others, like Turner and the pre-Raphaelite school -- the latter of whom were influenced by Ruskin, even as he admired them for seeing with their own vision rather than just repeating influences from others. But those weren't the only people Ruskin influenced. Because any critical project, properly understood, becomes about more than just the art -- as if art is just anything. Ruskin, for example, studied geology, because if you're going to talk about how people should paint landscapes and what those landscapes look like, you need to understand what landscapes really do look like, which means understanding their formation. He understood that art of the kind he wanted could only be produced by certain types of people, and so society had to be organised in a way to produce such people. Some types of societal organisation lead to some kinds of thinking and creation, and to properly, honestly, understand one branch of human thought means at least to attempt to understand all of them. Opinions about art have moral consequences, and morality has political and economic consequences. The inevitable endpoint of any theory of art is, ultimately, a theory of society. And Ruskin had a theory of society, and social organisation. Ruskin's views are too complex to summarise here, but they were a kind of anarcho-primitivist collectivism. He believed that wealth was evil, and that the classical liberal economics of people like Mill was fundamentally anti-human, that the division of labour alienated people from their work. In Ruskin's ideal world, people would gather in communities no bigger than villages, and work as craftspeople, working with nature rather than trying to bend nature to their will. They would be collectives, with none richer or poorer than any other, and working the land without modern technology. in the first half of the twentieth century, in particular, Ruskin's influence was *everywhere*. His writings on art inspired the Impressionist movement, but his political and economic ideas were the most influential, right across the political spectrum. Ruskin's ideas were closest to Christian socialism, and he did indeed inspire many socialist parties -- most of the founders of Britain's Labour Party were admirers of Ruskin and influenced by his ideas, particularly his opposition to the free market. But he inspired many other people -- Gandhi talked about the profound influence that Ruskin had on him, saying in his autobiography that he got three lessons from Ruskin's Unto This Last: "That 1) the good of the individual is contained in the good of all. 2) a lawyer's work has the same value as the barber's in as much as all have the same right of earning their livelihood from their work. 3) a life of labour, i.e., the life of the tiller of the soil and the handicraftsman is the life worth living. The first of these I knew. The second I had dimly realized. The third had never occurred to me. Unto This Last made it clear as daylight for me that the second and third were contained in the first. I arose with the dawn, ready to reduce these principles to practice" Gandhi translated and paraphrased Unto this Last into Gujurati and called the resulting book Sarvodaya (meaning "uplifting all" or "the welfare of all") which he later took as the name of his own political philosophy. But Ruskin also had a more pernicious influence -- it was said in 1930s Germany that he and his friend Thomas Carlyle were "the first National Socialists" -- there's no evidence I know of that Hitler ever read Ruskin, but a *lot* of Nazi rhetoric is implicit in Ruskin's writing, particularly in his opposition to progress (he even opposed the bicycle as being too much inhuman interference with nature), just as much as more admirable philosophies, and he was so widely read in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that there's barely a political movement anywhere that didn't bear his fingerprints. But of course, our focus here is on music. And Ruskin had an influence on that, too. We've talked in several episodes, most recently the one on the Velvet Underground, about John Cage's piece 4'33. What I didn't mention in any of the discussions of that piece -- because I was saving it for here -- is that that piece was premiered at a small concert hall in upstate New York. The hall, the Maverick Concert Hall, was owned and run by the Maverick arts and crafts collective -- a collective that were so called because they were the *second* Ruskinite arts colony in the area, having split off from the Byrdcliffe colony after a dispute between its three founders, all of whom were disciples of Ruskin, and all of whom disagreed violently about how to implement Ruskin's ideas of pacifist all-for-one and one-for-all community. These arts colonies, and others that grew up around them like the Arts Students League were the thriving centre of a Bohemian community -- close enough to New York that you could get there if you needed to, far enough away that you could live out your pastoral fantasies, and artists of all types flocked there -- Pete Seeger met his wife there, and his father-in-law had been one of the stonemasons who helped build the Maverick concert hall. Dozens of artists in all sorts of areas, from Aaron Copland to Edward G Robinson, spent time in these communities, as did Cage. Of course, while these arts and crafts communities had a reputation for Bohemianism and artistic extremism, even radical utopian artists have their limits, and legend has it that the premiere of 4'33 was met with horror and derision, and eventually led to one artist in the audience standing up and calling on the residents of the town around which these artistic colonies had agglomerated: “Good people of Woodstock, let's drive these people out of town.” [Excerpt: The Band, "The Weight"] Ronnie Hawkins was almost born to make music. We heard back in the episode on "Suzie Q" in 2019 about his family and their ties to music. Ronnie's uncle Del was, according to most of the sources on the family, a member of the Sons of the Pioneers -- though as I point out in that episode, his name isn't on any of the official lists of group members, but he might well have performed with them at some point in the early years of the group. And he was definitely a country music bass player, even if he *wasn't* in the most popular country and western group of the thirties and forties. And Del had had two sons, Jerry, who made some minor rockabilly records: [Excerpt: Jerry Hawkins, "Swing, Daddy, Swing"] And Del junior, who as we heard in the "Susie Q" episode became known as Dale Hawkins and made one of the most important rock records of the fifties: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Susie Q"] Ronnie Hawkins was around the same age as his cousins, and was in awe of his country-music star uncle. Hawkins later remembered that after his uncle moved to Califormia to become a star “He'd come home for a week or two, driving a brand new Cadillac and wearing brand new clothes and I knew that's what I wanted to be." Though he also remembered “He spent every penny he made on whiskey, and he was divorced because he was running around with all sorts of women. His wife left Arkansas and went to Louisiana.” Hawkins knew that he wanted to be a music star like his uncle, and he started performing at local fairs and other events from the age of eleven, including one performance where he substituted for Hank Williams -- Williams was so drunk that day he couldn't perform, and so his backing band asked volunteers from the audience to get up and sing with them, and Hawkins sang Burl Ives and minstrel-show songs with the band. He said later “Even back then I knew that every important white cat—Al Jolson, Stephen Foster—they all did it by copying blacks. Even Hank Williams learned all the stuff he had from those black cats in Alabama. Elvis Presley copied black music; that's all that Elvis did.” As well as being a performer from an early age, though, Hawkins was also an entrepreneur with an eye for how to make money. From the age of fourteen he started running liquor -- not moonshine, he would always point out, but something far safer. He lived only a few miles from the border between Missouri and Arkansas, and alcohol and tobacco were about half the price in Missouri that they were in Arkansas, so he'd drive across the border, load up on whisky and cigarettes, and drive back and sell them at a profit, which he then used to buy shares in several nightclubs, which he and his bands would perform in in later years. Like every man of his generation, Hawkins had to do six months in the Army, and it was there that he joined his first ever full-time band, the Blackhawks -- so called because his name was Hawkins, and the rest of the group were Black, though Hawkins was white. They got together when the other four members were performing at a club in the area where Hawkins was stationed, and he was so impressed with their music that he jumped on stage and started singing with them. He said later “It sounded like something between the blues and rockabilly. It sort of leaned in both directions at the same time, me being a hayseed and those guys playing a lot funkier." As he put it "I wanted to sound like Bobby ‘Blue' Bland but it came out sounding like Ernest Tubb.” Word got around about the Blackhawks, both that they were a great-sounding rock and roll band and that they were an integrated band at a time when that was extremely unpopular in the southern states, and when Hawkins was discharged from the Army he got a call from Sam Phillips at Sun Records. According to Hawkins a group of the regular Sun session musicians were planning on forming a band, and he was asked to front the band for a hundred dollars a week, but by the time he got there the band had fallen apart. This doesn't precisely line up with anything else I know about Sun, though it perhaps makes sense if Hawkins was being asked to front the band who had variously backed Billy Lee Riley and Jerry Lee Lewis after one of Riley's occasional threats to leave the label. More likely though, he told everyone he knew that he had a deal with Sun but Phillips was unimpressed with the demos he cut there, and Hawkins made up the story to stop himself losing face. One of the session players for Sun, though, Luke Paulman, who played in Conway Twitty's band among others, *was* impressed with Hawkins though, and suggested that they form a band together with Paulman's bass player brother George and piano-playing cousin Pop Jones. The Paulman brothers and Jones also came from Arkansas, but they specifically came from Helena, Arkansas, the town from which King Biscuit Time was broadcast. King Biscuit Time was the most important blues radio show in the US at that time -- a short lunchtime programme which featured live performances from a house band which varied over the years, but which in the 1940s had been led by Sonny Boy Williamson II, and featured Robert Jr. Lockwood, Robert Johnson's stepson, on guiitar: [Excerpt: Sonny Boy Williamson II "Eyesight to the Blind (King Biscuit Time)"] The band also included a drummer, "Peck" Curtis, and that drummer was the biggest inspiration for a young white man from the town named Levon Helm. Helm had first been inspired to make music after seeing Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys play live when Helm was eight, and he had soon taken up first the harmonica, then the guitar, then the drums, becoming excellent at all of them. Even as a child he knew that he didn't want to be a farmer like his family, and that music was, as he put it, "the only way to get off that stinking tractor  and out of that one hundred and five degree heat.” Sonny Boy Williamson and the King Biscuit Boys would perform in the open air in Marvell, Arkansas, where Helm was growing up, on Saturdays, and Helm watched them regularly as a small child, and became particularly interested in the drumming. “As good as the band sounded,” he said later “it seemed that [Peck] was definitely having the most fun. I locked into the drums at that point. Later, I heard Jack Nance, Conway Twitty's drummer, and all the great drummers in Memphis—Jimmy Van Eaton, Al Jackson, and Willie Hall—the Chicago boys (Fred Belew and Clifton James) and the people at Sun Records and Vee-Jay, but most of my style was based on Peck and Sonny Boy—the Delta blues style with the shuffle. Through the years, I've quickened the pace to a more rock-and-roll meter and time frame, but it still bases itself back to Peck, Sonny Boy Williamson, and the King Biscuit Boys.” Helm had played with another band that George Paulman had played in, and he was invited to join the fledgling band Hawkins was putting together, called for the moment the Sun Records Quartet. The group played some of the clubs Hawkins had business connections in, but they had other plans -- Conway Twitty had recently played Toronto, and had told Luke Paulman about how desperate the Canadians were for American rock and roll music. Twitty's agent Harold Kudlets booked the group in to a Toronto club, Le Coq D'Or, and soon the group were alternating between residencies in clubs in the Deep South, where they were just another rockabilly band, albeit one of the better ones, and in Canada, where they became the most popular band in Ontario, and became the nucleus of an entire musical scene -- the same scene from which, a few years later, people like Neil Young would emerge. George Paulman didn't remain long in the group -- he was apparently getting drunk, and also he was a double-bass player, at a time when the electric bass was becoming the in thing. And this is the best place to mention this, but there are several discrepancies in the various accounts of which band members were in Hawkins' band at which times, and who played on what session. They all *broadly* follow the same lines, but none of them are fully reconcilable with each other, and nobody was paying enough attention to lineup shifts in a bar band between 1957 and 1964 to be absolutely certain who was right. I've tried to reconcile the various accounts as far as possible and make a coherent narrative, but some of the details of what follows may be wrong, though the broad strokes are correct. For much of their first period in Ontario, the group had no bass player at all, relying on Jones' piano to fill in the bass parts, and on their first recording, a version of "Bo Diddley", they actually got the club's manager to play bass with them: [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins, "Hey Bo Diddley"] That is claimed to be the first rock and roll record made in Canada, though as everyone who has listened to this podcast knows, there's no first anything. It wasn't released as by the Sun Records Quartet though -- the band had presumably realised that that name would make them much less attractive to other labels, and so by this point the Sun Records Quartet had become Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks. "Hey Bo Diddley" was released on a small Canadian label and didn't have any success, but the group carried on performing live, travelling back down to Arkansas for a while and getting a new bass player, Lefty Evans, who had been playing in the same pool of musicians as them, having been another Sun session player who had been in Conway Twitty's band, and had written Twitty's "Why Can't I Get Through to You": [Excerpt: Conway Twitty, "Why Can't I Get Through to You"] The band were now popular enough in Canada that they were starting to get heard of in America, and through Kudlets they got a contract with Joe Glaser, a Mafia-connected booking agent who booked them into gigs on the Jersey Shore. As Helm said “Ronnie Hawkins had molded us into the wildest, fiercest, speed-driven bar band in America," and the group were apparently getting larger audiences in New Jersey than Sammy Davis Jr was, even though they hadn't released any records in the US. Or at least, they hadn't released any records in their own name in the US. There's a record on End Records by Rockin' Ronald and the Rebels which is very strongly rumoured to have been the Hawks under another name, though Hawkins always denied that. Have a listen for yourself and see what you think: [Excerpt: Rockin' Ronald and the Rebels, "Kansas City"] End Records, the label that was on, was one of the many record labels set up by George Goldner and distributed by Morris Levy, and when the group did release a record in their home country under their own name, it was on Levy's Roulette Records. An audition for Levy had been set up by Glaser's booking company, and Levy decided that given that Elvis was in the Army, there was a vacancy to be filled and Ronnie Hawkins might just fit the bill. Hawkins signed a contract with Levy, and it doesn't sound like he had much choice in the matter. Helm asked him “How long did you have to sign for?” and Hawkins replied "Life with an option" That said, unlike almost every other artist who interacted with Levy, Hawkins never had a bad word to say about him, at least in public, saying later “I don't care what Morris was supposed to have done, he looked after me and he believed in me. I even lived with him in his million-dollar apartment on the Upper East Side." The first single the group recorded for Roulette, a remake of Chuck Berry's "Thirty Days" retitled "Forty Days", didn't chart, but the follow-up, a version of Young Jessie's "Mary Lou", made number twenty-six on the charts: [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, "Mary Lou"] While that was a cover of a Young Jessie record, the songwriting credits read Hawkins and Magill -- Magill was a pseudonym used by Morris Levy. Levy hoped to make Ronnie Hawkins into a really big star, but hit a snag. This was just the point where the payola scandal had hit and record companies were under criminal investigation for bribing DJs to play their records. This was the main method of promotion that Levy used, and this was so well known that Levy was, for a time, under more scrutiny than anyone. He couldn't risk paying anyone off, and so Hawkins' records didn't get the expected airplay. The group went through some lineup changes, too, bringing in guitarist Fred Carter (with Luke Paulman moving to rhythm and soon leaving altogether)  from Hawkins' cousin Dale's band, and bass player Jimmy Evans. Some sources say that Jones quit around this time, too, though others say he was in the band for  a while longer, and they had two keyboards (the other keyboard being supplied by Stan Szelest. As well as recording Ronnie Hawkins singles, the new lineup of the group also recorded one single with Carter on lead vocals, "My Heart Cries": [Excerpt: Fred Carter, "My Heart Cries"] While the group were now playing more shows in the USA, they were still playing regularly in Canada, and they had developed a huge fanbase there. One of these was a teenage guitarist called Robbie Robertson, who had become fascinated with the band after playing a support slot for them, and had started hanging round, trying to ingratiate himself with the band in the hope of being allowed to join. As he was a teenager, Hawkins thought he might have his finger on the pulse of the youth market, and when Hawkins and Helm travelled to the Brill Building to hear new songs for consideration for their next album, they brought Robertson along to listen to them and give his opinion. Robertson himself ended up contributing two songs to the album, titled Mr. Dynamo. According to Hawkins "we had a little time after the session, so I thought, Well, I'm just gonna put 'em down and see what happens. And they were released. Robbie was the songwriter for words, and Levon was good for arranging, making things fit in and all that stuff. He knew what to do, but he didn't write anything." The two songs in question were "Someone Like You" and "Hey Boba Lou": [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, "Hey Boba Lou"] While Robertson was the sole writer of the songs, they were credited to Robertson, Hawkins, and Magill -- Morris Levy. As Robertson told the story later, “It's funny, when those songs came out and I got a copy of the album, it had another name on there besides my name for some writer like Morris Levy. So, I said to Ronnie, “There was nobody there writing these songs when I wrote these songs. Who is Morris Levy?” Ronnie just kinda tapped me on the head and said, “There are certain things about this business that you just let go and you don't question.” That was one of my early music industry lessons right there" Robertson desperately wanted to join the Hawks, but initially it was Robertson's bandmate Scott Cushnie who became the first Canadian to join the Hawks. But then when they were in Arkansas, Jimmy Evans decided he wasn't going to go back to Canada. So Hawkins called Robbie Robertson up and made him an offer. Robertson had to come down to Arkansas and get a couple of quick bass lessons from Helm (who could play pretty much every instrument to an acceptable standard, and so was by this point acting as the group's musical director, working out arrangements and leading them in rehearsals). Then Hawkins and Helm had to be elsewhere for a few weeks. If, when they got back, Robertson was good enough on bass, he had the job. If not, he didn't. Robertson accepted, but he nearly didn't get the gig after all. The place Hawkins and Helm had to be was Britain, where they were going to be promoting their latest single on Boy Meets Girls, the Jack Good TV series with Marty Wilde, which featured guitarist Joe Brown in the backing band: [Excerpt: Joe Brown, “Savage”] This was the same series that Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent were regularly appearing on, and while they didn't appear on the episodes that Hawkins and Helm appeared on, they did appear on the episodes immediately before Hawkins and Helm's two appearances, and again a couple of weeks after, and were friendly with the musicians who did play with Hawkins and Helm, and apparently they all jammed together a few times. Hawkins was impressed enough with Joe Brown -- who at the time was considered the best guitarist on the British scene -- that he invited Brown to become a Hawk. Presumably if Brown had taken him up on the offer, he would have taken the spot that ended up being Robertson's, but Brown turned him down -- a decision he apparently later regretted. Robbie Robertson was now a Hawk, and he and Helm formed an immediate bond. As Helm much later put it, "It was me and Robbie against the world. Our mission, as we saw it, was to put together the best band in history". As rockabilly was by this point passe, Levy tried converting Hawkins into a folk artist, to see if he could get some of the Kingston Trio's audience. He recorded a protest song, "The Ballad of Caryl Chessman", protesting the then-forthcoming execution of Chessman (one of only a handful of people to be executed in the US in recent decades for non-lethal offences), and he made an album of folk tunes, The Folk Ballads of Ronnie Hawkins, which largely consisted of solo acoustic recordings, plus a handful of left-over Hawks recordings from a year or so earlier. That wasn't a success, but they also tried a follow-up, having Hawkins go country and do an album of Hank Williams songs, recorded in Nashville at Owen Bradley's Quonset hut. While many of the musicians on the album were Nashville A-Team players, Hawkins also insisted on having his own band members perform, much to the disgust of the producer, and so it's likely (not certain, because there seem to be various disagreements about what was recorded when) that that album features the first studio recordings with Levon Helm and Robbie Robertson playing together: [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, "Your Cheatin' Heart"] Other sources claim that the only Hawk allowed to play on the album sessions was Helm, and that the rest of the musicians on the album were Harold Bradley and Hank Garland on guitar, Owen Bradley and Floyd Cramer on piano, Bob Moore on bass, and the Anita Kerr singers. I tend to trust Helm's recollection that the Hawks played at least some of the instruments though, because the source claiming that also seems to confuse the Hank Williams and Folk Ballads albums, and because I don't hear two pianos on the album. On the other hand, that *does* sound like Floyd Cramer on piano, and the tik-tok bass sound you'd get from having Harold Bradley play a baritone guitar while Bob Moore played a bass. So my best guess is that these sessions were like the Elvis sessions around the same time and with several of the same musicians, where Elvis' own backing musicians played rhythm parts but left the prominent instruments to the A-team players. Helm was singularly unimpressed with the experience of recording in Nashville. His strongest memory of the sessions was of another session going on in the same studio complex at the time -- Bobby "Blue" Bland was recording his classic single "Turn On Your Love Light", with the great drummer Jabo Starks on drums, and Helm was more interested in listening to that than he was in the music they were playing: [Excerpt: Bobby "Blue" Bland, "Turn On Your Love Light"] Incidentally, Helm talks about that recording being made "downstairs" from where the Hawks were recording, but also says that they were recording in Bradley's Quonset hut.  Now, my understanding here *could* be very wrong -- I've been unable to find a plan or schematic anywhere -- but my understanding is that the Quonset hut was a single-level structure, not a multi-level structure. BUT the original recording facilities run by the Bradley brothers were in Owen Bradley's basement, before they moved into the larger Quonset hut facility in the back, so it's possible that Bland was recording that in the old basement studio. If so, that won't be the last recording made in a basement we hear this episode... Fred Carter decided during the Nashville sessions that he was going to leave the Hawks. As his son told the story: "Dad had discovered the session musicians there. He had no idea that you could play and make a living playing in studios and sleep in your own bed every night. By that point in his life, he'd already been gone from home and constantly on the road and in the service playing music for ten years so that appealed to him greatly. And Levon asked him, he said, “If you're gonna leave, Fred, I'd like you to get young Robbie over here up to speed on guitar”…[Robbie] got kind of aggravated with him—and Dad didn't say this with any malice—but by the end of that week, or whatever it was, Robbie made some kind of comment about “One day I'm gonna cut you.” And Dad said, “Well, if that's how you think about it, the lessons are over.” " (For those who don't know, a musician "cutting" another one is playing better than them, so much better that the worse musician has to concede defeat. For the remainder of Carter's notice in the Hawks, he played with his back to Robertson, refusing to look at him. Carter leaving the group caused some more shuffling of roles. For a while, Levon Helm -- who Hawkins always said was the best lead guitar player he ever worked with as well as the best drummer -- tried playing lead guitar while Robertson played rhythm and another member, Rebel Payne, played bass, but they couldn't find a drummer to replace Helm, who moved back onto the drums. Then they brought in Roy Buchanan, another guitarist who had been playing with Dale Hawkins, having started out playing with Johnny Otis' band. But Buchanan didn't fit with Hawkins' personality, and he quit after a few months, going off to record his own first solo record: [Excerpt: Roy Buchanan, "Mule Train Stomp"] Eventually they solved the lineup problem by having Robertson -- by this point an accomplished lead player --- move to lead guitar and bringing in a new rhythm player, another Canadian teenager named Rick Danko, who had originally been a lead player (and who also played mandolin and fiddle). Danko wasn't expected to stay on rhythm long though -- Rebel Payne was drinking a lot and missing being at home when he was out on the road, so Danko was brought in on the understanding that he was to learn Payne's bass parts and switch to bass when Payne quit. Helm and Robertson were unsure about Danko, and Robertson expressed that doubt, saying "He only knows four chords," to which Hawkins replied, "That's all right son. You can teach him four more the way we had to teach you." He proved himself by sheer hard work. As Hawkins put it “He practiced so much that his arms swoll up. He was hurting.” By the time Danko switched to bass, the group also had a baritone sax player, Jerry Penfound, which allowed the group to play more of the soul and R&B material that Helm and Robertson favoured, though Hawkins wasn't keen. This new lineup of the group (which also had Stan Szelest on piano) recorded Hawkins' next album. This one was produced by Henry Glover, the great record producer, songwriter, and trumpet player who had played with Lucky Millinder, produced Wynonie Harris, Hank Ballard, and Moon Mullican, and wrote "Drowning in My Own Tears", "The Peppermint Twist", and "California Sun". Glover was massively impressed with the band, especially Helm (with whom he would remain friends for the rest of his life) and set aside some studio time for them to cut some tracks without Hawkins, to be used as album filler, including a version of the Bobby "Blue" Bland song "Farther On Up the Road" with Helm on lead vocals: [Excerpt: Levon Helm and the Hawks, "Farther On Up the Road"] There were more changes on the way though. Stan Szelest was about to leave the band, and Jones had already left, so the group had no keyboard player. Hawkins had just the replacement for Szelest -- yet another Canadian teenager. This one was Richard Manuel, who played piano and sang in a band called The Rockin' Revols. Manuel was not the greatest piano player around -- he was an adequate player for simple rockabilly and R&B stuff, but hardly a virtuoso -- but he was an incredible singer, able to do a version of "Georgia on My Mind" which rivalled Ray Charles, and Hawkins had booked the Revols into his own small circuit of clubs around Arkanasas after being impressed with them on the same bill as the Hawks a couple of times. Hawkins wanted someone with a good voice because he was increasingly taking a back seat in performances. Hawkins was the bandleader and frontman, but he'd often given Helm a song or two to sing in the show, and as they were often playing for several hours a night, the more singers the band had the better. Soon, with Helm, Danko, and Manuel all in the group and able to take lead vocals, Hawkins would start missing entire shows, though he still got more money than any of his backing group. Hawkins was also a hard taskmaster, and wanted to have the best band around. He already had great musicians, but he wanted them to be *the best*. And all the musicians in his band were now much younger than him, with tons of natural talent, but untrained. What he needed was someone with proper training, someone who knew theory and technique. He'd been trying for a long time to get someone like that, but Garth Hudson had kept turning him down. Hudson was older than any of the Hawks, though younger than Hawkins, and he was a multi-instrumentalist who was far better than any other musician on the circuit, having trained in a conservatory and learned how to play Bach and Chopin before switching to rock and roll. He thought the Hawks were too loud sounding and played too hard for him, but Helm kept on at Hawkins to meet any demands Hudson had, and Hawkins eventually agreed to give Hudson a higher wage than any of the other band members, buy him a new Lowry organ, and give him an extra ten dollars a week to give the rest of the band music lessons. Hudson agreed, and the Hawks now had a lineup of Helm on drums, Robertson on guitar, Manuel on piano, Danko on bass, Hudson on organ and alto sax, and Penfound on baritone sax. But these new young musicians were beginning to wonder why they actually needed a frontman who didn't turn up to many of the gigs, kept most of the money, and fined them whenever they broke one of his increasingly stringent set of rules. Indeed, they wondered why they needed a frontman at all. They already had three singers -- and sometimes a fourth, a singer called Bruce Bruno who would sometimes sit in with them when Penfound was unable to make a gig. They went to see Harold Kudlets, who Hawkins had recently sacked as his manager, and asked him if he could get them gigs for the same amount of money as they'd been getting with Hawkins. Kudlets was astonished to find how little Hawkins had been paying them, and told them that would be no problem at all. They had no frontman any more -- and made it a rule in all their contracts that the word "sideman" would never be used -- but Helm had been the leader for contractual purposes, as the musical director and longest-serving member (Hawkins, as a non-playing singer, had never joined the Musicians' Union so couldn't be the leader on contracts). So the band that had been Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks became the Levon Helm Sextet briefly -- but Penfound soon quit, and they became Levon and the Hawks. The Hawks really started to find their identity as their own band in 1964. They were already far more interested in playing soul than Hawkins had been, but they were also starting to get into playing soul *jazz*, especially after seeing the Cannonball Adderley Sextet play live: [Excerpt: Cannonball Adderley, "This Here"] What the group admired about the Adderley group more than anything else was a sense of restraint. Helm was particularly impressed with their drummer, Louie Hayes, and said of him "I got to see some great musicians over the years, and you see somebody like that play and you can tell, y' know, that the thing not to do is to just get it down on the floor and stomp the hell out of it!" The other influence they had, and one which would shape their sound even more, was a negative one. The two biggest bands on the charts at the time were the Beatles and the Beach Boys, and as Helm described it in his autobiography, the Hawks thought both bands' harmonies were "a blend of pale, homogenised, voices". He said "We felt we were better than the Beatles and the Beach Boys. We considered them our rivals, even though they'd never heard of us", and they decided to make their own harmonies sound as different as possible as a result. Where those groups emphasised a vocal blend, the Hawks were going to emphasise the *difference* in their voices in their own harmonies. The group were playing prestigious venues like the Peppermint Lounge, and while playing there they met up with John Hammond Jr, who they'd met previously in Canada. As you might remember from the first episode on Bob Dylan, Hammond Jr was the son of the John Hammond who we've talked about in many episodes, and was a blues musician in his own right. He invited Helm, Robertson, and Hudson to join the musicians, including Michael Bloomfield, who were playing on his new album, So Many Roads: [Excerpt: John P. Hammond, "Who Do You Love?"] That album was one of the inspirations that led Bob Dylan to start making electric rock music and to hire Bloomfield as his guitarist, decisions that would have profound implications for the Hawks. The first single the Hawks recorded for themselves after leaving Hawkins was produced by Henry Glover, and both sides were written by Robbie Robertson. "uh Uh Uh" shows the influence of the R&B bands they were listening to. What it reminds me most of is the material Ike and Tina Turner were playing at the time, but at points I think I can also hear the influence of Curtis Mayfield and Steve Cropper, who were rapidly becoming Robertson's favourite songwriters: [Excerpt: The Canadian Squires, "Uh Uh Uh"] None of the band were happy with that record, though. They'd played in the studio the same way they played live, trying to get a strong bass presence, but it just sounded bottom-heavy to them when they heard the record on a jukebox. That record was released as by The Canadian Squires -- according to Robertson, that was a name that the label imposed on them for the record, while according to Helm it was an alternative name they used so they could get bookings in places they'd only recently played, which didn't want the same band to play too often. One wonders if there was any confusion with the band Neil Young played in a year or so before that single... Around this time, the group also met up with Helm's old musical inspiration Sonny Boy Williamson II, who was impressed enough with them that there was some talk of them being his backing band (and it was in this meeting that Williamson apparently told Robertson "those English boys want to play the blues so bad, and they play the blues *so bad*", speaking of the bands who'd backed him in the UK, like the Yardbirds and the Animals). But sadly, Williamson died in May 1965 before any of these plans had time to come to fruition. Every opportunity for the group seemed to be closing up, even as they knew they were as good as any band around them. They had an offer from Aaron Schroeder, who ran Musicor Records but was more importantly a songwriter and publisher who  had written for Elvis Presley and published Gene Pitney. Schroeder wanted to sign the Hawks as a band and Robertson as a songwriter, but Henry Glover looked over the contracts for them, and told them "If you sign this you'd better be able to pay each other, because nobody else is going to be paying you". What happened next is the subject of some controversy, because as these things tend to go, several people became aware of the Hawks at the same time, but it's generally considered that nothing would have happened the same way were it not for Mary Martin. Martin is a pivotal figure in music business history -- among other things she discovered Leonard Cohen and Gordon Lightfoot, managed Van Morrison, and signed Emmylou Harris to Warner Brothers records -- but a somewhat unknown one who doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. Martin was from Toronto, but had moved to New York, where she was working in Albert Grossman's office, but she still had many connections to Canadian musicians and kept an eye out for them. The group had sent demo tapes to Grossman's offices, and Grossman had had no interest in them, but Martin was a fan and kept pushing the group on Grossman and his associates. One of those associates, of course, was Grossman's client Bob Dylan. As we heard in the episode on "Like a Rolling Stone", Dylan had started making records with electric backing, with musicians who included Mike Bloomfield, who had played with several of the Hawks on the Hammond album, and Al Kooper, who was a friend of the band. Martin gave Richard Manuel a copy of Dylan's new electric album Highway 61 Revisited, and he enjoyed it, though the rest of the group were less impressed: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Highway 61 Revisited"] Dylan had played the Newport Folk Festival with some of the same musicians as played on his records, but Bloomfield in particular was more interested in continuing to play with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band than continuing with Dylan long-term. Mary Martin kept telling Dylan about this Canadian band she knew who would be perfect for him, and various people associated with the Grossman organisation, including Hammond, have claimed to have been sent down to New Jersey where the Hawks were playing to check them out in their live setting. The group have also mentioned that someone who looked a lot like Dylan was seen at some of their shows. Eventually, Dylan phoned Helm up and made an offer. He didn't need a full band at the moment -- he had Harvey Brooks on bass and Al Kooper on keyboards -- but he did need a lead guitar player and drummer for a couple of gigs he'd already booked, one in Forest Hills, New York, and a bigger gig at the Hollywood Bowl. Helm, unfamiliar with Dylan's work, actually asked Howard Kudlets if Dylan was capable of filling the Hollywood Bowl. The musicians rehearsed together and got a set together for the shows. Robertson and Helm thought the band sounded terrible, but Dylan liked the sound they were getting a lot. The audience in Forest Hills agreed with the Hawks, rather than Dylan, or so it would appear. As we heard in the "Like a Rolling Stone" episode, Dylan's turn towards rock music was *hated* by the folk purists who saw him as some sort of traitor to the movement, a movement whose figurehead he had become without wanting to. There were fifteen thousand people in the audience, and they listened politely enough to the first set, which Dylan played acoustically, But before the second set -- his first ever full electric set, rather than the very abridged one at Newport -- he told the musicians “I don't know what it will be like out there It's going to be some kind of  carnival and I want you to all know that up front. So go out there and keep playing no matter how weird it gets!” There's a terrible-quality audience recording of that show in circulation, and you can hear the crowd's reaction to the band and to the new material: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Ballad of a Thin Man" (live Forest Hills 1965, audience noise only)] The audience also threw things  at the musicians, knocking Al Kooper off his organ stool at one point. While Robertson remembered the Hollywood Bowl show as being an equally bad reaction, Helm remembered the audience there as being much more friendly, and the better-quality recording of that show seems to side with Helm: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Maggie's Farm (live at the Hollywood Bowl 1965)"] After those two shows, Helm and Robertson went back to their regular gig. and in September they made another record. This one, again produced by Glover, was for Atlantic's Atco subsidiary, and was released as by Levon and the Hawks. Manuel took lead, and again both songs were written by Robertson: [Excerpt: Levon and the Hawks, "He Don't Love You (And He'll Break Your Heart)"] But again that record did nothing. Dylan was about to start his first full electric tour, and while Helm and Robertson had not thought the shows they'd played sounded particularly good, Dylan had, and he wanted the two of them to continue with him. But Robertson and, especially, Helm, were not interested in being someone's sidemen. They explained to Dylan that they already had a band -- Levon and the Hawks -- and he would take all of them or he would take none of them. Helm in particular had not been impressed with Dylan's music -- Helm was fundamentally an R&B fan, while Dylan's music was rooted in genres he had little time for -- but he was OK with doing it, so long as the entire band got to. As Mary Martin put it “I think that the wonderful and the splendid heart of the band, if you will, was Levon, and I think he really sort of said, ‘If it's just myself as drummer and Robbie…we're out. We don't want that. It's either us, the band, or nothing.' And you know what? Good for him.” Rather amazingly, Dylan agreed. When the band's residency in New Jersey finished, they headed back to Toronto to play some shows there, and Dylan flew up and rehearsed with them after each show. When the tour started, the billing was "Bob Dylan with Levon and the Hawks". That billing wasn't to last long. Dylan had been booked in for nine months of touring, and was also starting work on what would become widely considered the first double album in rock music history, Blonde on Blonde, and the original plan was that Levon and the Hawks would play with him throughout that time.  The initial recording sessions for the album produced nothing suitable for release -- the closest was "I Wanna Be Your Lover", a semi-parody of the Beatles' "I Want to be Your Man": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan with Levon and the Hawks, "I Wanna Be Your Lover"] But shortly into the tour, Helm quit. The booing had continued, and had even got worse, and Helm simply wasn't in the business to be booed at every night. Also, his whole conception of music was that you dance to it, and nobody was dancing to any of this. Helm quit the band, only telling Robertson of his plans, and first went off to LA, where he met up with some musicians from Oklahoma who had enjoyed seeing the Hawks when they'd played that state and had since moved out West -- people like Leon Russell, J.J. Cale (not John Cale of the Velvet Underground, but the one who wrote "Cocaine" which Eric Clapton later had a hit with), and John Ware (who would later go on to join the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band). They started loosely jamming with each other, sometimes also involving a young singer named Linda Ronstadt, but Helm eventually decided to give up music and go and work on an oil rig in New Orleans. Levon and the Hawks were now just the Hawks. The rest of the group soldiered on, replacing Helm with session drummer Bobby Gregg (who had played on Dylan's previous couple of albums, and had previously played with Sun Ra), and played on the initial sessions for Blonde on Blonde. But of those sessions, Dylan said a few weeks later "Oh, I was really down. I mean, in ten recording sessions, man, we didn't get one song ... It was the band. But you see, I didn't know that. I didn't want to think that" One track from the sessions did get released -- the non-album single "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?"] There's some debate as to exactly who's playing drums on that -- Helm says in his autobiography that it's him, while the credits in the official CD releases tend to say it's Gregg. Either way, the track was an unexpected flop, not making the top forty in the US, though it made the top twenty in the UK. But the rest of the recordings with the now Helmless Hawks were less successful. Dylan was trying to get his new songs across, but this was a band who were used to playing raucous music for dancing, and so the attempts at more subtle songs didn't come off the way he wanted: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Hawks, "Visions of Johanna (take 5, 11-30-1965)"] Only one track from those initial New York sessions made the album -- "One Of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)" -- but even that only featured Robertson and Danko of the Hawks, with the rest of the instruments being played by session players: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan (One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)"] The Hawks were a great live band, but great live bands are not necessarily the same thing as a great studio band. And that's especially the case with someone like Dylan. Dylan was someone who was used to recording entirely on his own, and to making records *quickly*. In total, for his fifteen studio albums up to 1974's Blood on the Tracks, Dylan spent a total of eighty-six days in the studio -- by comparison, the Beatles spent over a hundred days in the studio just on the Sgt Pepper album. It's not that the Hawks weren't a good band -- very far from it -- but that studio recording requires a different type of discipline, and that's doubly the case when you're playing with an idiosyncratic player like Dylan. The Hawks would remain Dylan's live backing band, but he wouldn't put out a studio recording with them backing him until 1974. Instead, Bob Johnston, the producer Dylan was working with, suggested a different plan. On his previous album, the Nashville session player Charlie McCoy had guested on "Desolation Row" and Dylan had found him easy to work with. Johnston lived in Nashville, and suggested that they could get the album completed more quickly and to Dylan's liking by using Nashville A-Team musicians. Dylan agreed to try it, and for the rest of the album he had Robertson on lead guitar and Al Kooper on keyboards, but every other musician was a Nashville session player, and they managed to get Dylan's songs recorded quickly and the way he heard them in his head: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine"] Though Dylan being Dylan he did try to introduce an element of randomness to the recordings by having the Nashville musicians swap their instruments around and play each other's parts on "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35", though the Nashville players were still competent enough that they managed to get a usable, if shambolic, track recorded that way in a single take: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35"] Dylan said later of the album "The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album. It's that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up." The album was released in late June 1966, a week before Freak Out! by the Mothers of Invention, another double album, produced by Dylan's old producer Tom Wilson, and a few weeks after Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. Dylan was at the forefront of a new progressive movement in rock music, a movement that was tying thoughtful, intelligent lyrics to studio experimentation and yet somehow managing to have commercial success. And a month after Blonde on Blonde came out, he stepped away from that position, and would never fully return to it. The first half of 1966 was taken up with near-constant touring, with Dylan backed by the Hawks and a succession of fill-in drummers -- first Bobby Gregg, then Sandy Konikoff, then Mickey Jones. This tour started in the US and Canada, with breaks for recording the album, and then moved on to Australia and Europe. The shows always followed the same pattern. First Dylan would perform an acoustic set, solo, with just an acoustic guitar and harmonica, which would generally go down well with the audience -- though sometimes they would get restless, prompting a certain amount of resistance from the performer: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Just Like a Woman (live Paris 1966)"] But the second half of each show was electric, and that was where the problems would arise. The Hawks were playing at the top of their game -- some truly stunning performances: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Hawks, "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues (live in Liverpool 1966)"] But while the majority of the audience was happy to hear the music, there was a vocal portion that were utterly furious at the change in Dylan's musical style. Most notoriously, there was the performance at Manchester Free Trade Hall where this happened: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone (live Manchester 1966)"] That kind of aggression from the audience had the effect of pushing the band on to greater heights a lot of the time -- and a bootleg of that show, mislabelled as the Royal Albert Hall, became one of the most legendary bootlegs in rock music history. Jimmy Page would apparently buy a copy of the bootleg every time he saw one, thinking it was the best album ever made. But while Dylan and the Hawks played defiantly, that kind of audience reaction gets wearing. As Dylan later said, “Judas, the most hated name in human history, and for what—for playing an electric guitar. As if that is in some kind of way equitable to betraying our Lord, and delivering him up to be crucified; all those evil mothers can rot in hell.” And this wasn't the only stress Dylan, in particular, was under. D.A. Pennebaker was making a documentary of the tour -- a follow-up to his documentary of the 1965 tour, which had not yet come out. Dylan talked about the 1965 documentary, Don't Look Back, as being Pennebaker's film of Dylan, but this was going to be Dylan's film, with him directing the director. That footage shows Dylan as nervy and anxious, and covering for the anxiety with a veneer of flippancy. Some of Dylan's behaviour on both tours is unpleasant in ways that can't easily be justified (and which he has later publicly regretted), but there's also a seeming cruelty to some of his interactions with the press and public that actually reads more as frustration. Over and over again he's asked questions -- about being the voice of a generation or the leader of a protest movement -- which are simply based on incorrect premises. When someone asks you a question like this, there are only a few options you can take, none of them good. You can dissect the question, revealing the incorrect premises, and then answer a different question that isn't what they asked, which isn't really an option at all given the kind of rapid-fire situation Dylan was in. You can answer the question as asked, which ends up being dishonest. Or you can be flip and dismissive, which is the tactic Dylan chose. Dylan wasn't the only one -- this is basically what the Beatles did at press conferences. But where the Beatles were a gang and so came off as being fun, Dylan doing the same thing came off as arrogant and aggressive. One of the most famous artifacts of the whole tour is a long piece of footage recorded for the documentary, with Dylan and John Lennon riding in the back of a taxi, both clearly deeply uncomfortable, trying to be funny and impress the other, but neither actually wanting to be there: [Excerpt Dylan and Lennon conversation] 33) Part of the reason Dylan wanted to go home was that he had a whole new lifestyle. Up until 1964 he had been very much a city person, but as he had grown more famous, he'd found New York stifling. Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary had a cabin in Woodstock, where he'd grown up, and after Dylan had spent a month there in summer 1964, he'd fallen in love with the area. Albert Grossman had also bought a home there, on Yarrow's advice, and had given Dylan free run of the place, and Dylan had decided he wanted to move there permanently and bought his own home there. He had also married, to Sara Lowndes (whose name is, as far as I can tell, pronounced "Sarah" even though it's spelled "Sara"), and she had given birth to his first child (and he had adopted her child from her previous marriage). Very little is actually known about Sara, who unlike many other partners of rock stars at this point seemed positively to detest the limelight, and whose privacy Dylan has continued to respect even after the end of their marriage in the late seventies, but it's apparent that the two were very much in love, and that Dylan wanted to be back with his wife and kids, in the country, not going from one strange city to another being asked insipid questions and having abuse screamed at him. He was also tired of the pressure to produce work constantly. He'd signed a contract for a novel, called Tarantula, which he'd written a draft of but was unhappy with, and he'd put out two single albums and a double-album in a little over a year -- all of them considered among the greatest albums ever made. He could only keep up this rate of production and performance with a large intake of speed, and he was sometimes staying up for four days straight to do so. After the European leg of the tour, Dylan was meant to take some time to finish overdubs on Blonde on Blonde, edit the film of the tour for a TV special, with his friend Howard Alk, and proof the galleys for Tarantula, before going on a second world tour in the autumn. That world tour never happened. Dylan was in a motorcycle accident near his home, and had to take time out to recover. There has been a lot of discussion as to how serious the accident actually was, because Dylan's manager Albert Grossman was known to threaten to break contracts by claiming his performers were sick, and because Dylan essentially disappeared from public view for the next eighteen months. Every possible interpretation of the events has been put about by someone, from Dylan having been close to death, to the entire story being put up as a fake. As Dylan is someone who is far more protective of his privacy than most rock stars, it's doubtful we'll ever know the precise truth, but putting together the various accounts Dylan's injuries were bad but not life-threatening, but they acted as a wake-up call -- if he carried on living like he had been, how much longer could he continue? in his sort-of autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan described this period, saying "I had been in a motorcycle accident and I'd been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses." All his forthcoming studio and tour dates were cancelled, and Dylan took the time out to recover, and to work on his film, Eat the Document. But it's clear that nobody was sure at first exactly how long Dylan's hiatus from touring was going to last. As it turned out, he wouldn't do another tour until the mid-seventies, and would barely even play any one-off gigs in the intervening time. But nobody knew that at the time, and so to be on the safe side the Hawks were being kept on a retainer. They'd always intended to work on their own music anyway -- they didn't just want to be anyone's backing band -- so they took this time to kick a few ideas around, but they were hamstrung by the fact that it was difficult to find rehearsal space in New York City, and they didn't have any gigs. Their main musical work in the few months between summer 1966 and spring 1967 was some recordings for the soundtrack of a film Peter Yarrow was making. You Are What You Eat is a bizarre hippie collage of a film, documenting the counterculture between 1966 when Yarrow started making it and 1968 when it came out. Carl Franzoni, one of the leaders of the LA freak movement that we've talked about in episodes on the Byrds, Love, and the Mothers of Invention, said of the film “If you ever see this movie you'll understand what ‘freaks' are. It'll let you see the L.A. freaks, the San Francisco freaks, and the New York freaks. It was like a documentary and it was about the makings of what freaks were about. And it had a philosophy, a very definite philosophy: that you are free-spirited, artistic." It's now most known for introducing the song "My Name is Jack" by John Simon, the film's music supervisor: [Excerpt: John Simon, "My Name is Jack"] That song would go on to be a top ten hit in the UK for Manfred Mann: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "My Name is Jack"] The Hawks contributed backing music for several songs for the film, in which they acted as backing band for another old Greenwich Village folkie who had been friends with Yarrow and Dylan but who was not yet the star he would soon become, Tiny Tim: [Excerpt: Tiny Tim, "Sonny Boy"] This was their first time playing together properly since the end of the European tour, and Sid Griffin has noted that these Tiny Tim sessions are the first time you can really hear the sound that the group would develop over the next year, and which would characterise them for their whole career. Robertson, Danko, and Manuel also did a session, not for the film with another of Grossman's discoveries, Carly Simon, playing a version of "Baby Let Me Follow You Down", a song they'd played a lot with Dylan on the tour that spring. That recording has never been released, and I've only managed to track down a brief clip of it from a BBC documentary, with Simon and an interviewer talking over most of the clip (so this won't be in the Mixcloud I put together of songs): [Excerpt: Carly Simon, "Baby Let Me Follow You Down"] That recording is notable though because as well as Robertson, Danko, and Manuel, and Dylan's regular studio keyboard players Al Kooper and Paul Griffin, it also features Levon Helm on drums, even though Helm had still not rejoined the band and was at the time mostly working in New Orleans. But his name's on the session log, so he must have m

Alan Shayne - The Star Dressing Room The Not Old Better Show, Art Of Living Interview Series Welcome to The Not Old Better Show, Art of Living Interview Series on radio and podcast.  I'm Paul Vogelzang, and today's show is brought to you by Lectric eBikes: Ride Your Lectric eBike during an Endless Summer! We have a fantastic interview today with one of Hollywood's greats, entertainment industry icon Alan Shayne. We will be joined by Alan Shayne in just a moment. But quickly, if you missed any episodes, last week was our 733d episode when I spoke with with Forbes 30 Under 30, CEO and co-Founder of Lectric eBike, Levi Conlow. Two weeks ago I spoke with Smithsonian Associate, Dr. Andrew Lam about his upcoming Smithsonian Associates presentation titled “The Only Winner in War is Medicine.”  Excellent subjects for our Not Old Better Show audience. If you missed those shows, along with any others, you can go back and check them out with my entire back catalog of shows, all free for you, there on our website, NotOld-Better.com. You can Google Not Old Better and get everything you need about us! Our guest today, Alan Shayne was the President of Warner Brothers Television for many years, shepherding hit shows such as Alice, Night Court, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, Wonder Woman, Growing Pains, etc. He began his career as an actor on Broadway and became a well-known casting director of TV and films such as All the President's Men. He produced TV specials and, after leaving Warners, received an Emmy nomination for producing the mini-series The Bourne Identity with Richard Chamberlain. We'll talk about all that, of course, but we'll also be speaking with Alan Shayne about his new book, ‘THE STAR DRESSING ROOM: Portrait of An Actor   Alan Shayne's new book, ‘The Star Dressing Room,' is an affectionate, often uproarious new memoir that takes us back to Broadway's golden age.  THE STAR DRESSING ROOM and our interview today with Alan Shayne are filled with his delightful anecdotes about show business legends of the 1940s and 1950s including Marlon Brando, Lena Horne, Charlton Heston, Maureen Stapleton, Ricardo Montalban, Burgess Meredith, Jack Palance, Greta Garbo, Mary Martin, Elaine Stritch, and Anne Bancroft, and many more.  This is an amazing story about perseverance, triumph, tough times, and a full life. Please join me in welcoming you to The Not Old Better Show Art of Living interview series on radio and podcast Alan Shayne.  My thanks to Alan Shayne and his generous time today about his new book, ‘THE STAR DRESSING ROOM: Portrait of An Actor .  My thanks to our sponsor today, Lectric Bikes.  Lectric eBikes: Ride Your Lectric eBike during an Endless Summer!  Please support our sponsors, who in turn so generously support the show.  My thanks to the Smithsonian team for their ongoing support of the show. My thanks to you, my wonderful Not Old Better Show audience on radio and podcast.  Please be well, be safe and Let's Talk About Better© The Not Old Better Show.  Thanks, everybody and we'll see you next week. 

(Timestamps below) It's a Peter Pan-athon! We review and compare 5 Peter Pan films: Disney's Peter Pan cartoon (1953), Disney's remake; Peter Pan & Wendy (2023), Peter Pan (2003), Hook (1991) and Mary Martin's made for TV musical: Peter Pan 1960, Mary Martin YoutubeJoin our Facebook group! Shall We Compare Thee? A Remake & Sequel Group Follow us on Instagram! @ShallWeCompareTheeWatch the video of this episode- patreon.com/perfectlymarvelouspodcast The following episode will be Comparing Indiana Jones Raiders of the Lost Arc to the latest Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, 2023- now in theaters!! If you have thoughts on any or all of these films or suggestions for future episodes, please send your feedback to Shallwecomparethee@gmail.com or on Facebook and Instagram. Written feedback or voice message accepted!...Here's talkin' to you, kid. Cheers!Timestamps (might be off 2-3 min due to ads):3:44 -Film trailers5:03 - JM Barrie and Jade/Paul's history with Peter Pan20:57 - Peter Pan (1953)39:14- Peter Pan (Musical - 1960)1:02:52- Peter Pan (2003)1:27:46 - Peter Pan and Wendy (2023)1:42:54 - Hook (1991)2:05:48 - Jade/Paul pick fantasy Peter Pan cast2:20:00 - Listener FeedbackFollow Jade on social media:Instagram- @Jadethenakedlady Tiktok- @Jade8greenYoutube- @JadeAndersonactor Website- Jade-anderson.comJade's other podcasts:Perfectly marvelous! -A Marvelous Mrs. Maisel PodcastMurder Magnets -A Poker Face PodcastDead to Us- A Dead to Me PodcastFollow Paul on social media:Paul's pub quiz/trivia site- quizfixInstagram- @quizfix Facebook- Quizfix Paul's trivia podcast with Monika - Stream Quizfix Podcast on SoundCloud Paul's FB- PaulJensen Paul's band on FB- The ProfitsPeter Pan News Links/References for this episode:J. M. Barrie documentary The making of Peter Pan Doc 1953Behind the scenes of Peter Pan (2003) | FULL HD | Part 1/2 Peter Pan 1924 (full silent film)Mary Martin's Peter Pan, 1955 full film Jason Isaacs Talks Peter Pan (2003) and Playing Captain Hook

Subscribe to Jade's New Podcast: Shall We Compare Thee? A Remake and Sequel PodcastJoin our Facebook group! Shall We Compare Thee? A Remake & Sequel Group Follow us on Instagram! @ShallWeCompareTheeEmail us Feedback! Shallwecomparethee@gmail.comPaul and Jade talk Psycho! Comparing/contrasting Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) to Gus Van Sant's remake; Psycho (1998)FYI: Psycho(1960) will be leaving Netflix on July 1, 2023 so get your rewatch in! If you haven't seen Psycho (1998) and don't wish to pay for it, no worries, PsychoS-1960&1998 for a video of both films spliced together so you can get a fair enough idea of what we're talking about. Enjoy!Our next episode will be on Peter Pan! We'll compare Disney's cartoon (1953) to Peter Pan & Wendy (2023) also discuss Peter Pan (2003), Hook (1991) and Mary Martin's made for TV musical: Mary Martin's Peter Pan 1960The following episode will be Comparing Little Shop of Horrors (1960) starring Jack Nicholson to the Little Shop of Horrors (1986) musical directed by Frank Oz.If you have thoughts on any or all of these films, pleave us your feedback!We'd LOVE to read and respond to your comments so send your thoughts, opinions and recommendations to https://gmail.com. Written feedback or voice message!...Here's talkin' to you, kid. Cheers!Time stamps (will be offset by 1-2 min due to ads- SORRY!)17:39 - start discussion/hotel scene30:41 - The office/driving/car lot57:44 - Marion arrives at the Bates Motel/Parlor scene1:34:25 - Shower/Clean-up Scene1:54:28 - Arbogast, Sam and Lila2:02:34 - Arbogast goes to the Bates Motel2:17:00 - Sam and Lila go to the Bates Motel2:39:13 - Psychiatrist explains it all2:43:50 - AwardsFollow Jade on social media:Instagram- https://www.instagram.com/jadethenakedlady/ Tiktok- https://www.tiktok.com/@jade8greenYoutube:https://www.youtube.com/@JadeAndersonactor Website:https://jade-anderson.com/Jade's other podcasts:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/perfectly-marvelous-a-mrs-maisel-podcast/id1683151287https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/murder-magnets-a-poker-face-podcast/id1668903252https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dead-to-us-a-dead-to-me-podcast/id1650736588Follow Paul on social media:Paul's pub quiz/trivia site- http://www.quizfix.net/Instagram- https://www.instagram.com/quizfix/Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/quizfix Trivia podcast with Monika - https://soundcloud.com/quizfix Paul's FB- https://www.facebook.com/mrmajestyk/Paul's band on FB- https://www.facebook.com/theprofitsband

Synopsis On today's date in 1948 at New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel there was a press demonstration of a new kind of phonograph record.  Edward Wallerstein of Columbia Records stood between a big stack of heavy, shellac, 78-rpm albums, the standard for recorded music in those days, and a noticeably slimmer stack of vinyl discs, a new format which Wallerstein had dubbed “LPs” – “long playing” records that spun at 33 & 1/3 revolutions per minute. Before 1948, if you wanted to buy a recording of a complete symphony or concerto, it meant the purchase of up to a dozen 78s, each playing only four minutes a side. In developing its new LP-record, Columbia's goal was to fit complete classical works onto a SINGLE disc. Columbia's first LP release was a recording of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, with Nathan Milstein the soloist and the New York Philharmonic conducted by Bruno Walter. The following year, Columbia struck pay dirt with its original cast album of a brand-new Broadway musical by Richard Rodgers. The 1949 Columbia LP of Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza singing the hit tunes from “South Pacific” became a best-seller, and by 1951 the LP-record had become the industry standard. Music Played in Today's Program Felix Mendelssohn (1809 - 1847) Violin Concerto in e Nathan Milstein, violin; New York Philharmonic; Bruno Walter, conductor. Sony 64459 Rodgers and Hammerstein South Pacific Ezio Pinza and Mary Martin; orchestra; Lehman Engel, conductor. Sony 53327

Subscribe to "Shall We Compare Thee?" feed on Apple Podcasts: CLICK HERE!Hey my Maises! Jade here! My friend Paul and I are so excited to announce our new podcast "Shall We Compare Thee?" where we will compare, classic movies to their remakes and/or sequels. We will be releasing our first episode in a few days, and we want you to be a part of it, so please send in your thoughts!On the first episode, we will be talking all things Psycho:The cast and crew, production, making-of, behind-the-scenes, trivia and of course comparing/contrasting Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho,1960 to the Gus Van Sant shot-for-shot remake; Psycho,1998.FYI: Psycho, 1960 will be leaving Netflix on July 1, 2023 so get your rewatch in! If you haven't seen Psycho, 1998 and don't wish to pay for it, no worries! CLICK HERE for a youtube video of both films spliced together so you can get a fair enough idea of what we're talking about. Enjoy! Our next episode will be on Peter Pan! We will compare and contrast The Disney cartoon-1953, Hook-1991, Mary Martin's made for TV musical (Peter Pan 1960, Mary Martin restored)and of course Disney's latest live action Peter Pan & Wendy- 2023.The following episode will be on Little shop of horrors! Comparing Little Shop of Horrors- 1960, starring Jack Nicholson to the Little Shop of Horrors-1986 musical directed by Frank Oz.If you have thoughts on any or all of these films, pleave us your feedback!We'd LOVE to read and respond to your comments on the podcast. So please join in the conversation with us! Send your thoughts, opinions and recommendations to Shallwecomparethee@gmail.comWe accept written feedback and especially love voice messages, so be brave and let your voice be heard!...Here's talkin' to you, kid. Cheers!Check out Jade's other podcasts:Perfectly marvelous! -A Marvelous Mrs. Maisel PodcastMurder Magnets -A Poker Face PodcastDead to Us- A Dead to Me PodcastFollow Jade on social media:Instagram- @Jadethenakedlady Tiktok- @Jade8greenYoutube:@JadeAndersonactor Website:Jade-anderson.com