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A (relatively) in-depth analysis of English singer-songwriter Lloyd Cole in under thirty minutes.Cole was the lead vocalist of Lloyd Cole and the Commotions from 1984 to 1989. Since then he has enjoyed a prolific solo career with his first album 'Lloyd Cole' being released in 1990.'Downtown' from his first album was featured in the 1990 film Bad Influence. 'Pay for It' from Cole's 1991 album 'Don't Get Weird on Me Babe' was also featured on the soundtrack of When the Party's Over. In 2023, Cole released his twelfth album 'On Pain', featuring songs recorded in his attic (which brings to mind the first line of the 1982 Adrian Gurvitz hit 'Classic). Four of the songs on the 'On Pain' album were co-written by founding Commotions members Blair Cowan and Neil Clark.Cole is now based in Easthampton, Massachusetts.In this episode I am in discussion with Dr. Andrew Webber.Mathew Woodallhttps://buymeacoffee.com/lownoiseWhy buy me a coffee?Low Noise is proudly ad-free. If you would like to to say thank you for any of the content you have enjoyed (and help support the continuation of creating more), the above link provides a way to make a small donation of your choice (I also function on coffee!).Feel free to leave a note with your donation to let me know what you enjoy about the podcast or any topics you would like me to discuss in the future.

RockerMike and Rob Presents: Charles F. Rosenay and Mark ArnoldNot Just Happy Together: The Turtles From AM Radio to Zappa by Charles F. Rosenay and Mark Arnold is a detailed chronicle of the 1960s pop rock band The Turtles. The 466-page book covers the band's entire history, from their origins as The Crossfires through their mainstream success, including the hit “Happy Together,” and later collaborations with Frank Zappa. The book explores the band's hits like “It Ain't Me Babe,” “She'd Rather Be with Me,” and “Elenore,” as well as their less-known ventures like performing with T. Rex and Bruce Springsteen. It also touches on the legal and business issues they faced with their record label, White Whale.The authors bring a wealth of experience in music history, having written about iconic bands like The Monkees and The Beatles. Through interviews with band members and associates, the book provides fresh insights and behind-the-scenes stories that appeal to both casual listeners and hardcore fans of the band.t's time to get “Happy Together” again!Discover the songs and the history of oneof the most successful pop rock bands ever,The Turtles, who had many, many Top 40 hitsincluding “It Ain't Me Babe,” “Let Me Be,” “YouBaby,” “She'd Rather Be with Me,” “You KnowWhat I Mean,” “She's My Girl,” “Elenore,” “YouShowed Me” and of course, the iconic “HappyTogether!” All of their Golden Hits!Authors Mark Arnold (Long Title: Looking forthe Good Times; Examining The Monkees Songs,One by One and Headquartered: A Timelineof The Monkees Solo Years) and Charles F.Rosenay!!! (The Book of Top 10 Beatles Lists andThe Book of Top 10 Horror Lists) have joinedforces to cover the entire careers of The Turtlesfrom their early days as The Crossfi res, throughtheir hit-fi lled years, into their break-up that ledto most of The Turtles' members joining forceswith Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention, toMark Volman and Howard Kaylan's years as soloartists under the guise of Flo & Eddie, and eventheir forays into children's records.Arnold and Rosenay!!! have reviewed every song and album, and interviewed many of The Turtles'friends and associates along with most of The Turtles themselves, who have given startling newrevelations that will surprise even the most hardcore fan.Open the doors to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and to your library to add this book. This defi nitiveTurtles compendium is as unique as The Turtles themselves.www.NotJustHappyTogether.comGenius Music BooksAn Imprint of Genius Book PublishingPO Box 250380Milwaukee Wisconsin 53225 USAGeniusMusicBooks.comGeniusBookPublishing.comLiverpool Productions LLC & International Tours and Eventso: 203.795.4737 c: 203.641.6505www.LiverpoolTours.com   www.LiverpoolProductions.com Professional & Fun Music Entertainment since 1978  Enjoy our promo video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=40a6bryXtc8 Books Now Available from/by Charles: New! Just Released in Hardcover:Not Just HAPPY TOGETHER: THE TURTLES A-Z (AM Radio to Zappa) www.NotJustHappyTogether.com"Celebrities Actors Athletes Mods & Rockers: THE BOOK OF TOP 10 BEATLES LISTS"Get a signed copy for you or a friend!  www.BookOfTop10BeatlesLists.comAlso available on AMAZON"Monsters Celebrities Actors Athletes & Rock Stars: THE BOOK OF TOP 10 HORROR LISTS"Get a signed copy for you or a friend! www.BookOfTop10HorrorLists.comAlso available on AMAZON"TRUE GHOST STORIES OF CONNECTICUT"Get a signed copy for you or a friend! www.ParanormalConnecticut.comAlso available on AMAZON

Hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot speak with David Browne, author of the new book Talkin' Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America's Bohemian Music Capital.Join our Facebook Group: https://bit.ly/3sivr9TBecome a member on Patreon: https://bit.ly/3slWZvcSign up for our newsletter: https://bit.ly/3eEvRnGMake a donation via PayPal: https://bit.ly/3dmt9lUSend us a Voice Memo: Desktop: bit.ly/2RyD5Ah Mobile: sayhi.chat/soundops Featured Songs:Phil Ochs, "Here's to the State of Mississippi," I Ain't Marching Anymore, Elektra, 1965The Beatles, "With A Little Help From My Friends," Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Parlophone, 1967Sonny Rollins, "Softly As In A Morning Sunrise (Live At The Village Vanguard, 1957 / Evening Take)," The Complete Night At The Village Vanguard, Blue Note, 2013Miles Davis, "Stablemates," Miles: The New Miles Davis Quintet, Prestige, 1956Joan Baez, "Wildwood Flower," Joan Baez, Vanguard, 1960John Coltrane, "Greensleeves," Evenings at the Village Gate: John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy, Impulse!, 2023Paul Butterfield, "Everything Gonna Be Alright," Live New York 1970, RockBeat, 2015Phil Ochs, "Talking Vietnam Blues," All the News That's Fit to Sing, Elektra, 1964Dave Van Ronk, "He Was a Friend of Mine," Folksinger, Prestige, 1962Dave Van Ronk, "Dink's Song," Dave Van Ronk Sings, Folkways, 1961Bob Dylan, "House of the Risin' Sun," Bob Dylan, Columbia, 1962Dave Van Ronk, "House of the Rising Sun," Just Dave Van Ronk, Mercury, 1964The Blues Project, "Catch the Wind," Live at the Cafe Au Go Go, Verve Folkways, 1966Bob Dylan, "It Ain't Me Babe," Another Side of Bob Dylan, Columbia, 1964Bob Dylan, "Hurricane (Live at Memorial Auditorium, Worcester, MA, November 1975)," The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings, Columbia, 2019Len Chandler, "Bellevue," To Be a Man, Columbia, 1966Peter, Paul and Mary, "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," Peter, Paul and Mary, Warner Bros., 1962Sonny Rollins, "I Can't Get Started (Live At The Village Vanguard, 1957 / Evening Take)," The Complete Night At The Village Vanguard, Blue Note, 2013The Roches, "Speak," Speak, MCA, 1989Buffy Sainte-Marie, "It's My Way," It's My Way!, Vanguard, 1964Odetta, "I Never Will Marry," Odetta Sings Folk Songs, RCA Victor, 1963Drive-By Truckers, "Ronnie and Neil," Southern Rock Opera, Soul Dump, 2001See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Richard Wolinsky, Trina Robbins, Richard A. Lupoff, 1996 in the KPFA studios, 1996. Trina Robbins (1938-2024) who died following a stroke on April 10, 2024, in conversation with host Richard Wolinsky, recorded at her home in San Francisco on February 6, 2018. Trina Robbins was a legend in comic book circles, an artist at a time when hardly any women drew comics. In this interview, she discusses her 2017 memoir, “Last Girl Standing,” which deals with her life as an artist, author, and clothing designer. She was the first woman to edit a comic book created by women, “It Ain't Me Babe,” the first woman to draw “Wonder Woman,” and the single most influential historian chronicling the women who created comics and cartoons. In this interview, she also talks about her other recent books including a history of women drawing comics during World War II, a graphic novel version of a short story collection originally written by her father in Yiddish, and a graphic novel based on a work by British author Sax Rohmer. Trina Robbins was clothing designer for Los Angeles rock and roll bands in the 1960s and for the Warhol factory in New York. She also was a regular contributor to “Wimmens Comix,” a series of comic books created by women from the 1970s through 1990s. Photo: Richard Wolinsky. The post Trina Robbins (1936-2024), “Last Girl Standing,” 2019 appeared first on KPFA.

​Bookwaves/Artwaves is produced and hosted by Richard Wolinsky. Links to assorted local theater & book venues    Trina Robbins (1938-2024) who died following a stroke on April 10, 2024, in conversation with host Richard Wolinsky, recorded at her home in San Francisco on February 6, 2018. Trina Robbins was a legend in comic book circles, an artist at a time when hardly any women drew comics. In this interview, she discusses her 2017 memoir, “Last Girl Standing,” which deals with her life as an artist, author, and clothing designer. She was the first woman to edit a comic book created by women, “It Ain't Me Babe,” the first woman to draw “Wonder Woman,” and the single most influential historian chronicling the women who created comics and cartoons. In this interview, she also talks about her other recent books including a history of women drawing comics during World War II, a graphic novel version of a short story collection originally written by her father in Yiddish, and a graphic novel based on a work by British author Sax Rohmer. Trina Robbins was clothing designer for Los Angeles rock and roll bands in the 1960s and for the Warhol factory in New York. She also was a regular contributor to “Wimmens Comix,” a series of comic books created by women from the 1970s through 1990s. Photo: Richard Wolinsky. Complete Interview.   Robert MacNeil (1931-2024), who died at the age of 93 on April 12, 2003, in conversation with Richard Wolinsky, recorded in the KPFA studios while on tour for the memoir, Looking for My Country. Robert MacNeil spent several years as a correspondent and news anchor for NBC, the BBC, and PBS before becoming the co-host of the PBS evening news show, originally the Robert MacNeil Report, and later the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour from 1975 to 1995. Since that time, he wrote novels and plays as well as continuing to work in television. In this interview he talks about his feelings about the United States from the vantage point of being born in Canada as well as his views on meeting various American presidents. Robert MacNeil Wikipedia page.   Book Interview/Events and Theatre Links Note: Shows may unexpectedly close early or be postponed due to actors' positive COVID tests. Check the venue for closures, ticket refunds, and vaccination and mask requirements before arrival. Dates are in-theater performances unless otherwise noted. Some venues operate Tuesday – Sunday; others Wednesday or Thursday through Sunday. All times Pacific Time. Closing dates are sometimes extended. Book Stores Bay Area Book Festival  Family Day, May 4th, events around Berkeley. 2025 Festival: June 1-2, guests include Joan Baez, Naomi Klein, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Jonathan Lethem. Book Passage.  Monthly Calendar. Mix of on-line and in-store events. Books Inc.  Mix of on-line and in-store events. The Booksmith.  Monthly Event Calendar. Center for Literary Arts, San Jose. See website for Book Club guests in upcoming months. Green Apple Books. Events calendar. Kepler's Books  On-line Refresh the Page program listings. Live Theater Companies Actor's Reading Collective (ARC).  The Last Days of Judas Iscariot by Steven Adly Guirgis, May 4, 7 pm, Marin Shakespeare Company, San Rafael. African American Art & Culture Complex. See website for calendar. Alter Theatre. See website for upcoming productions. American Conservatory Theatre  Kristina Wong Sweatshop Overlord, March 30 – May 5, 2024, Strand Theater. A Strange Loop, April 18 – May 12, Toni Rembe Theater. Aurora Theatre  Blue Door by Tanya Barfield, April 19 – May 19. Streaming:  March 14-19. Awesome Theatre Company. Awesome High: A Sketch Comedy Play, directed by Nikki Menez,  April 12-27, Eclectic Box, 446 Valencia, SF. Berkeley Rep Galileo, World Premiere Musical, book by Danny Strong, with Raul Esparza, May 5 – June 10, Roda Theatre. Berkeley Shakespeare Company. See website for upcoming schedule. Boxcar Theatre. See website for upcoming shows. Brava Theatre Center: See calendar for current and upcoming productions. BroadwaySF: Funny Girl, April 30 – May 26, Orpheum. See website for special events at the Orpheum, Curran and Golden Gate. Broadway San Jose:  Peter Pan, June 25-30. California Shakespeare Theatre (Cal Shakes). Terrapin Roadshow, June 1-2; As You Like it, September 12 – 29. Center Rep: Cabaret, May 26 – June 23, Lesher Center for the Arts. Central Works  Accused by Patricia Milton, July 13 – August 11. Cinnabar Theatre. Shipwrecked! April 12 – 28. Club Fugazi. Dear San Francisco ongoing. Contra Costa Civic Theatre In Repertory: Hamlet and Rosencranz and Gildenstern Are Dead, September 7 – 22. Curran Theater: See website for upcoming one-night only live events, including the Unscripted series with various celebrities. Custom Made Theatre. In hibernation. Cutting Ball Theatre. See website for upcoming productions. 42nd Street Moon. Forever Plaid, April 18 – May 5, 2024. Golden Thread  Returning to Haifa by Ghassan Kanafani, April 12 – May 4, Potrero Stage. Hillbarn Theatre: Something Rotten, April 25 – May 12. Lorraine Hansberry Theatre. (NO MORE) adjustments: A Black Queer Woman Evolves in Real Time, written and performed by Champagne Hughes, May 1-5, 2024. Fort Mason. Magic Theatre. Riding the Currents of the Wilding Wind by Martha Gonzalez and Virginia Grise, April 18-21. Garuda's Wing by Naomi Iizuka, June 5-23. Marin Theatre Company Torch Song by Harvey Fierstein, May 9 – June 2, 2024. Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts Upcoming Events Page. New Conservatory Theatre Center (NCTC) The Tutor by Torange Yeghiazarian, April 5 – May 12. The Giver, adapted by Eric Coble from the Newbery Award-winning book by Lois Lowry, April 26 – May 5. Oakland Theater Project.  Red, Red, Red by Amilio Garcia, conceived by Lisa Ramirez, World Premiere, April 26 – May 19. Odd Salon: Upcoming events in San Francisco & New York, and streaming. Pear Theater. In Repertory: The Chinese Lady by Lloyd Suh; Love Letters by A.R. Gurney. April 19 – May 20. Presidio Theatre. See website for complete schedule of events and performances. Ray of Light: Everybody's Talking About Jamie, June 1 – 23, 2024. See website for Spotlight Cabaret Series at Feinstein's at the Nikko. San Francisco Playhouse. The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, May 2 – June 15. SFBATCO See website for upcoming streaming and in- theater shows. San Jose Stage Company: Hangmen by Martin McDonagh. Regional premiere. April 3 – 28. Shotgun Players.  A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare. March 15 – April 27. Website also lists one night only events at the Ashby Stage. South Bay Musical Theatre: Mary Poppins, the Broadway Musical, May 18 – June 8. Saratoga Civic Theater. Stagebridge: Shady Manor, a musical play by Prescott Cole. June 14-16. 2501 Harrison St., Oakland. The Breath Project. Streaming archive. The Marsh: Calendar listings for Berkeley, San Francisco and Marshstream. Theatre Rhino  Streaming: Essential Services Project, conceived and performed by John Fisher, all weekly performances now available on demand. TheatreWorks Silicon Valley. Tiger Style by Mike Lew, April 6-28, Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts.. Word for Word.  See website for upcoming productions. Misc. Listings: BAM/PFA: On View calendar for BAM/PFA. Berkeley Symphony: See website for listings. Chamber Music San Francisco: Calendar, 2023 Season. Dance Mission Theatre. On stage events calendar. Oregon Shakespeare Festival: Calendar listings and upcoming shows. San Francisco Opera. Calendar listings. San Francisco Symphony. Calendar listings. Filmed Live Musicals: Searchable database of all filmed live musicals, podcast, blog. If you'd like to add your bookstore or theater venue to this list, please write Richard@kpfa.org The post Bookwaves/Artwaves – April 25, 2024: Trina Robbins – Robert MacNeil appeared first on KPFA.

Mark Arnold and Charles F. Rosenay are the authors of the brand new book Not Just Happy Together: The Turtles from A-Z (AM Radio to Zappa).Discover the songs and the history of one of the most successful pop rock bands ever, The Turtles, who had countless Top 40 hits including “It Ain't Me Babe,” “Let Me Be,” “You Baby,” “She'd Rather Be with Me,” “You Know What I Mean,” “She's My Girl,” “Elenore,” “You Showed Me” and of course, the iconic “Happy Together!” Authors Mark Arnold (Long Title: Looking for the Good Times; Examining The Monkees Songs, One by One and Headquartered: A Timeline of The Monkees Solo Years) and Charles F. Rosenay!!! (The Book of Top 10 Beatles Lists and The Book of Top 10 Horror Lists) have joined forces to cover the entire careers of The Turtles from their early days as The Crossfires, through their hit-filled years, into their break-up that led to most of The Turtles' members joining forces with Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention, to Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan's years as solo artists under the guise of Flo & Eddie, and even their forays into children's records. I'm so happy Mark and Charles are together with me today to talk all about this excellent new book!Purchase a copy of Not Just Happy Together: The Turtles from A-Z (AM Radio to Zappa) Episode PlaylistListen To Flo & Eddie's "We Are All Gumby"Visit The Not Just Happy Together Official Website ---------- BookedOnRock.com The Booked On Rock YouTube Channel Follow The Booked On Rock with Eric Senich:FACEBOOKINSTAGRAMTIKTOKX Find Your Nearest Independent Bookstore Contact The Booked On Rock Podcast: thebookedonrockpodcast@gmail.com The Booked On Rock Music: “Whoosh” by Crowander / “Last Train North” & “No Mercy” by TrackTribe

For those who haven't heard the announcement I just posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first part of a multi-episode look at the Byrds in 1966-69 and the birth of country rock. 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 on "My World Fell Down" by Sagittarius. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud at this time as there are too many Byrds songs in this chunk, but I will try to put together a multi-part Mixcloud when all the episodes for this song are up. My main source for the Byrds is Timeless Flight Revisited by Johnny Rogan, I also used Chris Hillman's autobiography, the 331/3 books on The Notorious Byrd Brothers and The Gilded Palace of Sin, For future parts of this multi-episode story I used Barney Hoskyns' Hotel California and John Einarson's Desperadoes as general background on Californian country-rock, Calling Me Hone, Gram Parsons and the Roots of Country Rock by Bob Kealing for information on Parsons, and Requiem For The Timeless Vol 2 by Johnny Rogan for information about the post-Byrds careers of many members. Information on Gary Usher comes from The California Sound by Stephen McParland. And this three-CD set is a reasonable way of getting most of the Byrds' important recordings. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript When we left the Byrds at the end of the episode on "Eight Miles High", they had just released that single, which combined folk-rock with their new influences from John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar, and which was a group composition but mostly written by the group's lead singer, Gene Clark. And also, as we mentioned right at the end of the episode, Clark had left the group. There had been many, many factors leading to Clark's departure. Clark was writing *far* more material than the other band members, of whom only Roger McGuinn had been a writer when the group started, and as a result was making far more money than them, especially with songs like "She Don't Care About Time", which had been the B-side to their number one single "Turn! Turn! Turn!" [Excerpt: The Byrds, "She Don't Care About Time"] Clark's extra income was making the rest of the group jealous, and they also didn't think his songs were particularly good, though many of his songs on the early Byrds albums are now considered classics. Jim Dickson, the group's co-manager, said "Gene would write fifteen to twenty songs a week and you had to find a good one whenever it came along because there were lots of them that you couldn't make head or tail of.  They didn't mean anything. We all knew that. Gene would write a good one at a rate of just about one per girlfriend." Chris Hillman meanwhile later said more simply "Gene didn't really add that much." That is, frankly, hard to square with the facts. There are ten original songs on the group's first two albums, plus one original non-album B-side. Of those eleven songs, Clark wrote seven on his own and co-wrote two with McGuinn. But as the other band members were starting to realise that they had the possibility of extra royalties -- and at least to some extent were starting to get artistic ambitions as far as writing goes -- they were starting to disparage Clark's work as a result, calling it immature. Clark had, of course, been the principal writer for "Eight Miles High", the group's most experimental record to date: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Eight Miles High"] But there he'd shared co-writing credit with David Crosby and Roger McGuinn, in part because that was the only way he could be sure they would agree to release it as a single. There were also internal rivalries within the band unrelated to songwriting -- as we've touched on, Crosby had already essentially bullied Clark off the guitar and into just playing tambourine (and McGuinn would be dismissive even of Clark's tambourine abilities). Crosby's inability to get on with any other member of any band he was in would later become legendary, but at this point Clark was the major victim of his bullying. According to Dickson "David understood when Gene left that ninety-five percent of why Gene left could be brought back to him." The other five percent, though, came from Clark's fear of flying. Clark had apparently witnessed a plane crash in his youth and been traumatised by it, and he had a general terror of flying and planes -- something McGuinn would mock him for a little, as McGuinn was an aviation buff. Eventually, Clark had a near-breakdown boarding a plane from California to New York for a promotional appearance with Murray the K, and ended up getting off the plane. McGuinn and Michael Clarke almost did the same, but in the end they decided to stay on, and the other four Byrds did the press conference without Gene. When asked where Gene was, they said he'd "broken a wing". He was also increasingly having mental health and substance abuse problems, which were exacerbated by his fear, and in the end he decided he just couldn't be a Byrd any more. Oddly, of all the band members, it was David Crosby who was most concerned about Clark's departure, and who did the most to try to persuade him to stay, but he still didn't do much, and the group decided to carry on as a four-piece and not even make a proper announcement of Clark's departure -- they just started putting out photos with four people instead of five. The main change as far as the group were concerned was that Hillman was now covering Clark's old vocal parts, and so Crosby moved to Clark's old centre mic while Hillman moved from his position at the back of the stage with Michael Clarke to take over Crosby's mic. The group now had three singer-instrumentalists in front, two of whom, Crosby and McGuinn, now thought of themselves as songwriters. So despite the loss of their singer/songwriter/frontman, they moved on to their new single, the guaranteed hit follow-up to "Eight Miles High": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "5D (Fifth Dimension)"] "5D" was written by McGuinn, inspired by a book of cartoons called 1-2-3-4 More More More More by Don Landis, which I haven't been able to track down a copy of, but which seems to have been an attempt to explain the mathematical concept of higher dimensions in cartoon form. McGuinn was inspired by this and by Einstein's theory of relativity -- or at least by his understanding of relativity, which does not seem to have been the most informed take on the topic. McGuinn has said in the past that the single should really have come with a copy of Landis' booklet, so people could understand it. Sadly, without the benefit of the booklet we only have the lyrics plus McGuinn's interviews to go on to try to figure out what he means. As far as I'm able to understand, McGuinn believed -- completely erroneously -- that Einstein had proved that along with the four dimensions of spacetime there is also a fifth dimension which McGuinn refers to as a "mesh", and that "the reason for the speed of light being what it is is because of that mesh." McGuinn then went on to identify this mesh with his own conception of God, influenced by his belief in Subud, and with a Bergsonian idea of a life force. He would talk about how most people are stuck in a materialist scientific paradigm which only admits to  the existence of three dimensions, and how there are people out there advocating for a five-dimensional view of the world. To go along with this mystic view of the universe, McGuinn wanted some music inspired by the greatest composer of sacred music, and he asked Van Dyke Parks, who was brought in to add keyboards on the session, to play something influenced by Bach -- and Parks obliged, having been thinking along the same lines himself: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "5D (Fifth Dimension)"] Unfortunately for the group, McGuinn's lyrical intention wasn't clear enough and the song was assumed to be about drugs, and was banned by many radio stations. That plus the track's basically uncommercial nature meant that it reached no higher than number forty-four in the charts. Jim Dickson, the group's co-manager, pointed to a simpler factor in the record's failure, saying that if the organ outro to the track had instead been the intro, to set a mood for the track rather than starting with a cold vocal open, it would have had more success. The single was followed by an album, called Fifth Dimension, which was not particularly successful. Of the album's eleven songs, two were traditional folk songs, one was an instrumental -- a jam called "Captain Soul" which was a version of Lee Dorsey's "Get Out My Life Woman" credited to the four remaining Byrds, though Gene Clark is very audible on it playing harmonica -- and one more was a jam whose only lyrics were "gonna ride a Lear jet, baby", repeated over and over. There was also "Eight Miles High" and the group's inept and slightly-too-late take on "Hey Joe". It also included a third single, a country track titled "Mr. Spaceman": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mr. Spaceman"] McGuinn and, particularly, Hillman, had some country music background, and both were starting to think about incorporating country sounds into the group's style, as after Clark's departure from the group they were moving away from the style that had characterised their first two albums. But the interest in "Mr. Spaceman" was less about the musical style than about the lyrics. McGuinn had written the song in the hopes of contacting extraterrestrial life -- sending them a message in his lyrics so that any aliens listening to Earth radio would come and visit, though he was later disappointed to realise that the inverse-square law means that the signals would be too faint to make out after a relatively short distance: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mr. Spaceman"] "Mr. Spaceman" did better on the charts than its predecessor, scraping the lower reaches of the top forty, but it hardly set the world alight, and neither did the album -- a typical review was the one by Jon Landau, which said in part "This album then cannot be considered up to the standards set by the Byrds' first two and basically demonstrates that they should be thinking in terms of replacing Gene Clark, instead of just carrying on without him." Fifth Dimension would be the only album that Allen Stanton would produce for the Byrds, and his replacement had actually just produced an album that was a Byrds record by any other name: [Excerpt: Gene Clark, "So You Say You've Lost Your Baby"] We've looked at Gary Usher before, but not for some time, and not in much detail. Usher was one of several people who were involved in the scene loosely centred on the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean, though he never had much time for Jan Berry and he had got his own start in the music business slightly before the Beach Boys. As a songwriter, his first big successes had come with his collaborations with Brian Wilson -- he had co-written "409" for the Beach Boys, and had also collaborated with Wilson on some of his earliest more introspective songs, like "The Lonely Sea" and "In My Room", for which Usher had written the lyrics: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "In My Room"] Usher had built a career as a producer and writer for hire, often in collaboration with Roger Christian, who also wrote with Brian Wilson and Jan Berry. Usher, usually with Christian, and very occasionally Wilson wrote the songs for several of American International Pictures' Beach Party films: [Excerpt: Donna Loren, "Muscle Bustle"] And Usher and Christian had also had bit parts in some of the films, like Bikini Beach, and Usher had produced records for Annette Funicello, the star of the films, often with the Honeys (a group consisting of Brian Wilson's future wife Marilyn plus her sister and cousin) on backing vocals. He had also produced records for the Surfaris, as well as a whole host of studio-only groups like the Four Speeds, the Super Stocks, and Mr. Gasser and the Weirdoes, most of whom were Usher and the same small group of vocalist friends along with various selections of Wrecking Crew musicians making quick themed albums. One of these studio groups, the Hondells, went on to be a real group of sorts, after Usher and the Beach Boys worked together on a film, The Girls on the Beach. Usher liked a song that Wilson and Mike Love had written for the Beach Boys to perform in the film, "Little Honda", and after discovering that the Beach Boys weren't going to release their version as a single, he put together a group to record a soundalike version: [Excerpt: The Hondells, "Little Honda"] "Little Honda" made the top ten, and Usher produced two albums for the Hondells, who had one other minor hit with a cover version of the Lovin' Spoonful's "Younger Girl". Oddly, Usher's friend Terry Melcher, who would shortly produce the Byrds' first few hits, had also latched on to "Little Honda", and produced his own version of the track, sung by Pat Boone of all people, with future Beach Boy Bruce Johnston on backing vocals: [Excerpt: Pat Boone, "Little Honda"] But when Usher had got his version out first, Boone's was relegated to a B-side. When the Byrds had hit, and folk-rock had started to take over from surf rock, Usher had gone with the flow and produced records like the Surfaris' album It Ain't Me Babe, with Usher and his usual gang of backing vocalists augmenting the Surfaris as they covered hits by Dylan, the Turtles, the Beach Boys and the Byrds: [Excerpt: The Surfaris, "All I Really Want to Do"] Usher was also responsible for the Surfaris being the first group to release a version of "Hey Joe" on a major label, as we heard in the episode on that song: [Excerpt: The Surfaris, "Hey Joe"] After moving between Capitol, Mercury, and Decca Records, Usher had left Decca after a round of corporate restructuring and been recommended for a job at Columbia by his friend Melcher, who at that point was producing Paul Revere and the Raiders and the Rip Chords and had just finished his time as the Byrds' producer. Usher's first work at Columbia was actually to prepare new stereo mixes of some Byrds tracks that had up to that point only been issued in mono, but his first interaction with the Byrds themselves came via Gene Clark: [Excerpt: Gene Clark, "So You Say You've Lost Your Baby"] On leaving the Byrds, Clark had briefly tried to make a success of himself as a songwriter-for-hire in much the same mould as Usher, attempting to write and produce a single for two Byrds fans using the group name The Cookie Fairies, while spending much of his time romancing Michelle Phillips, as we talked about in the episode on "San Francisco". When the Cookie Fairies single didn't get picked up by a label, Clark had put together a group with Bill Rinehart from the Leaves, Chip Douglas of the Modern Folk Quartet, and Joel Larson of the Grass Roots. Just called Gene Clark & The Group, they'd played around the clubs in LA and cut about half an album's worth of demos produced by Jim Dickson and Ed Tickner, the Byrds' management team, before Clark had fired first Douglas and then the rest of the group. Clark's association with Douglas did go on to benefit him though -- Douglas went on, as we've seen in other episodes, to produce hits for the Turtles and the Monkees, and he later remembered an old song by Clark and McGuinn that the Byrds had demoed but never released, "You Showed Me", and produced a top ten hit version of it for the Turtles: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "You Showed Me"] Clark had instead started working with two country singers, Vern and Rex Gosdin, who had previously been with Chris Hillman in the country band The Hillmen. When that band had split up, the Gosdin Brothers had started to perform together as a duo, and in 1967 they would have a major country hit with "Hangin' On": [Excerpt: The Gosdin Brothers, "Hangin' On"] At this point though, they were just Gene Clark's backing vocalists, on an album that had been started with producer Larry Marks, who left Columbia half way through the sessions, at which point Usher took over. The album, titled Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers, featured a mix of musicians from different backgrounds. There were Larson and Rinehart from Gene Clark and the Group, there were country musicians -- a guitarist named Clarence White and the banjo player Doug Dillard. Hillman and Michael Clarke, the Byrds' rhythm section, played on much of the album as a way of keeping a united front, Glen Campbell, Jerry Cole, Leon Russell and Jim Gordon of the Wrecking Crew contributed, and Van Dyke Parks played most of the keyboards. The lead-off single for Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers, "Echoes", is one of the tracks produced by Marks, but in truth the real producer of that track is Leon Russell, who wrote the orchestral arrangement that turned Clark's rough demo into a baroque pop masterpiece: [Excerpt: Gene Clark, "Echoes"] Despite Clark having quit the band, relations between him and the rest were still good enough that in September 1966 he temporarily rejoined the band after Crosby lost his voice, though he was gone again as soon as Crosby was well. But that didn't stop the next Byrds album, which Usher went on to produce straight after finishing work on Clark's record, coming out almost simultaneously with Clark's and, according to Clark, killing its commercial potential. Upon starting to work with the group, Usher quickly came to the conclusion that Chris Hillman was in many ways the most important member of the band. According to Usher "There was also quite a divisive element within the band at that stage which often prevented them working well together. Sometimes everything would go smoothly, but other times it was a hard road. McGuinn and Hillman were often more together on musical ideas. This left Crosby to fend for himself, which I might add he did very well." Usher also said "I quickly came to understand that Hillman was a good stabilising force within the Byrds (when he wanted to be). It was around the time that I began working with them that Chris also became more involved in the songwriting. I think part of that was the fact that he realised how much more money was involved if you actually wrote the songs yourself. And he was a good songwriter." The first single to be released from the new sessions was one that was largely Hillman's work. Hillman and Crosby had been invited by the great South African jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela to play on some demos for another South African jazzer, singer Letta Mbulu. Details are sparse, but one presumes this was for what became her 1967 album Letta Mbulu Sings, produced by David Axelrod: [Excerpt: Letta Mbulu, "Zola (MRA)"] According to Hillman, that session was an epiphany for him, and he went home and started writing his own songs for the first time. He took one of the riffs he came up with to McGuinn, who came up with a bridge inspired by a song by yet another South African musician, Miriam Makeba, who at the time was married to Masekela, and the two wrote a lyric inspired by what they saw as the cynical manipulation of the music industry in creating manufactured bands like the Monkees -- though they have both been very eager to say that they were criticising the industry, not the Monkees themselves, with whom they were friendly. As Hillman says in his autobiography, "Some people interpreted it as a jab at The Monkees. In reality, we had immense respect for all of them as singers and musicians. We weren't skewering the members of the Monkees, but we were taking a shot at the cynical nature of the entertainment business that will try to manufacture a group like The Monkees as a marketing strategy. For us, it was all about the music, and we were commenting on the pitfalls of the industry rather than on any of our fellow musicians." [Excerpt: The Byrds, "So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star?"] The track continued the experimentation with sound effects that they had started with the Lear jet song on the previous album. That had featured recordings of a Lear jet, and "So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star?" featured recordings of audience screams. Those screams were, according to most sources, recorded by Derek Taylor at a Byrds gig in Bournemouth in 1965, but given reports of the tepid response the group got on that tour, that doesn't seem to make sense. Other sources say they're recordings of a *Beatles* audience in Bournemouth in *1963*, the shows that had been shown in the first US broadcast of Beatles footage, and the author of a book on links between the Beatles and Bournemouth says on his blog "In the course of researching Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Beatles & Bournemouth I spoke to two people who saw The Byrds at the Gaumont that August and neither recalled any screaming at all, let alone the wall of noise that can be heard on So You Want To Be A Rock 'n' Roll Star." So it seems likely that screaming isn't for the Byrds, but of course Taylor had also worked for the Beatles. According to Usher "The crowd sound effects were from a live concert that Derek Taylor had taped with a little tape recorder in London. It was some outrageous crowd, something like 20,000 to 30,000 people. He brought the tape in, ran it off onto a big tape, re- EQ'd it, echoed it, cleaned it up and looped it." So my guess is that the audience screams in the Byrds song about the Monkees are for the Beatles, but we'll probably never know for sure: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star?"] The track also featured an appearance by Hugh Masekela, the jazz trumpeter whose invitation to take part in a session had inspired the song: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star?"] While Hillman was starting to lean more towards folk and country music -- he had always been the member of the band least interested in rock music -- and McGuinn was most interested in exploring electronic sounds, Crosby was still pushing the band more in the direction of the jazz experimentation they'd tried on "Eight Miles High", and one of the tracks they started working on soon after "So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star?" was inspired by another jazz trumpet great. Miles Davis had been partly responsible for getting the Byrds signed to Columbia, as we talked about in the episode on "Mr. Tambourine Man", and so the group wanted to pay him tribute, and they started working on a version of his classic instrumental "Milestones": [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "Milestones"] Sadly, while the group worked on their version for several days -- spurred on primarily by Crosby -- they eventually chose to drop the track, and it has never seen release or even been bootlegged, though there is a tiny clip of it that was used in a contemporaneous documentary, with a commentator talking over it: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Milestones (TV)"] It was apparently Crosby who decided to stop work on the track, just as working on it was also apparently his idea. Indeed, while the biggest change on the album that would become Younger Than Yesterday was that for the first time Chris Hillman was writing songs and taking lead vocals, Crosby was also writing more than before. Hillman wrote four of the songs on the album, plus his co-write with McGuinn on "So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star?", but Crosby also supplied two new solo compositions, plus a cowrite with McGuinn, and Crosby and McGuinn's "Why?", the B-side to "Eight Miles High", was also dug up and rerecorded for the album. Indeed, Gary Usher would later say "The album was probably 60% Crosby. McGuinn was not that involved, nor was Chris; at least as far as performing was concerned." McGuinn's only composition on the album other than the co-writes with Crosby and Hillman was another song about contacting aliens, "CTA-102", a song about a quasar which at the time some people were speculating might have been evidence of alien life. That song sounds to my ears like it's had some influence from Joe Meek's similar records, though I've never seen McGuinn mention Meek as an influence: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "CTA-102"] Crosby's growing dominance in the studio was starting to rankle with the other members. In particular two tracks were the cause of conflict. One was Crosby's song "Mind Gardens", an example of his increasing experimentation, a freeform song that ignores conventional song structure, and which he insisted on including on the album despite the rest of the group's objections: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mind Gardens"] The other was the track that directly followed "Mind Gardens" on the album. "My Back Pages" was a song from Dylan's album Another Side of Bob Dylan, a song many have seen as Dylan announcing his break with the folk-song and protest movements he'd been associated with up to that point, and his intention to move on in a new direction: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "My Back Pages"] Jim Dickson, the Byrds' co-manager, was no longer on speaking terms with the band and wasn't involved in their day-to-day recording as he had been, but he'd encountered McGuinn on the street and rolled down his car window and suggested that the group do the song. Crosby was aghast. They'd already recorded several songs from Another Side of Bob Dylan, and Fifth Dimension had been their first album not to include any Dylan covers. Doing a jangly cover of a Dylan song with a McGuinn lead vocal was something they'd moved on from, and he didn't want to go back to 1964 at the end of 1966. He was overruled, and the group recorded their version, a track that signified something very different for the Byrds than the original had for Dylan: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "My Back Pages"] It was released as the second single from the album, and made number thirty. It was the last Byrds single to make the top forty. While he was working with the Byrds, Usher continued his work in the pop field, though as chart pop moved on so did Usher, who was now making records in a psychedelic sunshine pop style with acts like the Peanut Butter Conspiracy: [Excerpt: The Peanut Butter Conspiracy, "It's a Happening Thing"] and he produced Chad and Jeremy's massive concept album Of Cabbages and Kings, which included a five-song "Progress Suite" illustrating history from the start of creation until the end of the world: [Excerpt: Chad and Jeremy, "Editorial"] But one of the oddest projects he was involved in was indirectly inspired by Roger McGuinn. According to Usher "McGuinn and I had a lot in common. Roger would always say that he was "out of his head," which he thought was good, because he felt you had to go out of your head before you could really find your head! That sums up McGuinn perfectly! He was also one of the first people to introduce me to metaphysics, and from that point on I started reading everything I could get my hands on. His viewpoints on metaphysics were interesting, and, at the time, useful. He was also into Marshall McLuhan; very much into the effects of electronics and the electronic transformation. He was into certain metaphysical concepts before I was, but I was able to turn him onto some abstract concepts as well" These metaphysical discussions led to Usher producing an album titled The Astrology Album, with discussions of the meaning of different star signs over musical backing: [Excerpt: Gary Usher, "Leo"] And with interviews with various of the artists he was working with talking about astrology. He apparently interviewed Art Garfunkel -- Usher was doing some uncredited production work on Simon and Garfunkel's Bookends album at the time -- but Garfunkel declined permission for the interview to be used. But he did get both Chad and Jeremy to talk, along with John Merrill of the Peanut Butter Conspiracy -- and David Crosby: [Excerpt: Gary Usher, "Leo"] One of the tracks from that album, "Libra", became the B-side of a single by a group of studio musicians Usher put together, with Glen Campbell on lead vocals and featuring Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys prominently on backing vocals. "My World Fell Down" was credited to Sagittarius, again a sign of Usher's current interest in astrology, and featured some experimental sound effects that are very similar to the things that McGuinn had been doing on recent Byrds albums: [Excerpt: Sagittarius, "My World Fell Down"] While Usher was continuing with his studio experimentation, the Byrds were back playing live -- and they were not going down well at all. They did a UK tour where they refused to play most of their old hits and went down as poorly as on their previous tour, and they were no longer the kings of LA. In large part this was down to David Crosby, whose ego was by this point known to *everybody*, and who was becoming hugely unpopular on the LA scene even as he was starting to dominate the band. Crosby was now the de facto lead vocalist on stage, with McGuinn being relegated to one or two songs per set, and he was the one who would insist that they not play their older hit singles live. He was dominating the stage, leading to sarcastic comments from the normally placid Hillman like "Ladies and gentlemen, the David Crosby show!", and he was known to do things like start playing a song then stop part way through a verse to spend five minutes tuning up before restarting. After a residency at the Whisky A-Go-Go where the group were blown off the stage by their support act, the Doors, their publicist Derek Taylor quit, and he was soon followed by the group's co-managers Jim Dickson and Eddie Tickner, who were replaced by Crosby's friend Larry Spector, who had no experience in rock management but did represent Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, two young film stars Crosby was hanging round with. The group were particularly annoyed by Crosby when they played the Monterey Pop Festival. Crosby took most lead vocals in that set, and the group didn't go down well, though instrumentally the worst performer was Michael Clarke, who unlike the rest of the band had never become particularly proficient on his instrument: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "So You Want to be a Rock 'n' Roll Star (live at Monterey)"] But Crosby also insisted on making announcements from the stage advocating LSD use and describing conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination: [Excerpt: David Crosby on the Warren Commission, from the end of "Hey Joe" Monterey] But even though Crosby was trying to be the Byrds' leader on stage, he was also starting to think that they maybe didn't deserve to have him as their leader. He'd recently been spending a lot of time hanging out with Stephen Stills of the Buffalo Springfield, and McGuinn talks about one occasion where Crosby and Stills were jamming together, Stills played a blues lick and said to McGuinn "Can you play that?" and when McGuinn, who was not a blues musician, said he couldn't, Stills looked at him with contempt. McGuinn was sure that Stills was trying to poach Crosby, and Crosby apparently wanted to be poached. The group had rehearsed intensely for Monterey, aware that they'd been performing poorly and not wanting to show themselves up in front of the new San Francisco bands, but Crosby had told them during rehearsals that they weren't good enough to play with him. McGuinn's suspicions about Stills wanting to poach Crosby seemed to be confirmed during Monterey when Crosby joined Buffalo Springfield on stage, filling in for Neil Young during the period when Young had temporarily quit the group, and performing a song he'd helped Stills write about Grace Slick: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Rock 'n' Roll Woman (live at Monterey)"] Crosby was getting tired not only of the Byrds but of the LA scene in general. He saw the new San Francisco bands as being infinitely cooler than the Hollywood plastic scene that was LA -- even though Crosby was possibly the single most Hollywood person on that scene, being the son of an Oscar-winning cinematographer and someone who hung out with film stars. At Monterey, the group had debuted their next single, the first one with an A-side written by Crosby, "Lady Friend": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Lady Friend"] Crosby had thought of that as a masterpiece, but when it was released as a single, it flopped badly, and the rest of the group weren't even keen on the track being included on the next album. To add insult to injury as far as Crosby was concerned, at the same time as the single was released, a new album came out -- the Byrds' Greatest Hits, full of all those singles he was refusing to play live, and it made the top ten, becoming far and away the group's most successful album. But despite all this, the biggest conflict between band members when they came to start sessions for their next album wasn't over Crosby, but over Michael Clarke. Clarke had never been a particularly good drummer, and while that had been OK at the start of the Byrds' career, when none of them had been very proficient on their instruments, he was barely any better at a time when both McGuinn and Hillman were being regarded as unique stylists, while Crosby was writing metrically and harmonically interesting material. Many Byrds fans appreciate Clarke's drumming nonetheless, saying he was an inventive and distinctive player in much the same way as the similarly unskilled Micky Dolenz, but on any measure of technical ability he was far behind his bandmates. Clarke didn't like the new material and wasn't capable of playing it the way his bandmates wanted. He was popular with the rest of the band as a person, but simply wasn't playing well, and it led to a massive row in the first session: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Universal Mind Decoder (alternate backing track)"] At one point they joke that they'll bring in Hal Blaine instead -- a reference to the recording of "Mr. Tambourine Man", when Clarke and Hillman had been replaced by Blaine and Larry Knechtel -- and Clarke says "Do it. I don't mind, I really don't." And so that ended up happening. Clarke was still a member of the band -- and he would end up playing on half the album's tracks -- but for the next few sessions the group brought in session drummers Hal Blaine and Jim Gordon to play the parts they actually wanted. But that wasn't going to stop the bigger problem in the group, and that problem was David Crosby's relationship with the rest of the band. Crosby was still at this point thinking of himself as having a future in the group, even as he was increasingly convinced that the group themselves were bad, and embarrassed by their live sound. He even, in a show of unity, decided to ask McGuinn and Hillman to collaborate on a couple of songs with him so they would share the royalties equally. But there were two flash-points in the studio. The first was Crosby's song "Triad", a song about what we would now call polyamory, partly inspired by Robert Heinlein's counterculture science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. The song was meant to portray a progressive, utopian, view of free love, but has dated very badly -- the idea that the *only* reason a woman might be unhappy with her partner sleeping with another woman is because of her mother's disapproval possibly reveals more about the mindset of hippie idealists than was intended. The group recorded Crosby's song, but refused to allow it to be released, and Crosby instead gave it to his friends Jefferson Airplane, whose version, by having Grace Slick sing it, at least reverses the dynamics of the relationship: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "Triad"] The other was a song that Gary Usher had brought to the group and suggested they record, a Goffin and King song released the previous year by Dusty Springfield: [Excerpt: Dusty Springfield, "Goin' Back"] Crosby was incandescent. The group wanted to do this Brill Building pap?! Hell, Gary Usher had originally thought that *Chad and Jeremy* should do it, before deciding to get the Byrds to do it instead. Did they really want to be doing Chad and Jeremy cast-offs when they could be doing his brilliant science-fiction inspired songs about alternative relationship structures? *Really*? They did, and after a first session, where Crosby reluctantly joined in, when they came to recut the track Crosby flat-out refused to take part, leading to a furious row with McGuinn. Since they were already replacing Michael Clarke with session drummers, that meant the only Byrds on "Goin' Back", the group's next single, were McGuinn and Hillman: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Goin' Back"] That came out in late October 1967, and shortly before it came out, McGuinn and Hillman had driven to Crosby's home. They told him they'd had enough. He was out of the band. They were buying him out of his contract. Despite everything, Crosby was astonished. They were a *group*. They fought, but only the way brothers fight. But McGuinn and Hillman were adamant. Crosby ended up begging them, saying "We could make great music together." Their response was just "And we can make great music without you." We'll find out whether they could or not in two weeks' time.

A (relatively) in-depth analysis of English singer, songwriter and musician Lloyd Cole. Cole was the lead vocalist of Lloyd Cole and the Commotions from 1984 to 1989 and has since worked as a solo artist. Cole was born in the spa town of Buxton, Derbyshire and studied Philosophy and English at the University of Glasgow. Having always nurtured a passion for American literature and Americana, Cole now lives in Easthampton, Massachusetts with his American wife, Elizabeth Lewis.The song 'Rattlesnakes' was covered by Tori Amos in 2001 and Sandie Shaw released a version of '(Are You) Ready to Be Heartbroken?' in 1986.'Downtown' (from the 1990 album Lloyd Cole) was featured in the film Bad Influence and 'Pay for It' (from the 1991 album Don't Get Weird on Me Babe) was featured in the film When the Party's Over.In this episode I am in conversation with Dr. Andrew Webber.I hope you enjoy the podcast and do leave feedback if you like what you you have heard.Mathew Woodall

0:00 SEG 1 Legendary comic artist and writer, Trina Robbins, talks about The San Francisco Standard's article about her (https://sfstandard.com/arts-culture/the-first-woman-to-draw-wonder-woman-wants-you-to-know-shes-alive-and-well-in-sf/ ), the underground comic scene, head shops, the lack of women in mainstream comics, working with Colleen Duran, loving comics growing up, when Wonder Woman lost her powers, working on a Wonder Woman omnibus, designing Vampirella's costume, advice for aspiring young women in comics, women at Comic Con, the feminist newspaper ‘It Ain't Me Babe', being involved with the 60's rock scene and making clothes for Mama Cass, attending conventions, putting together a pro-choice comic anthology that will benefit Planned Parenthood Crowdfunding project https://zoop.gg/c/wontbackdown  Amazon author page https://amzn.to/40rYHgl 36:05 SEG 2 Deborah Hayes, the CEO of Big River Comic Con, talks about the pet costume contest, how long the con has been going on, how it keeps growing every year, and having night time activities after Con hours https://bigrivercomiccon.com/  44:00 SEG 3 Deborah Hayes, the CEO of Big River Comic Con, talks about the different types of vendors that will be in attendance, donating some of the proceeds to charity, plans for 2024's con, outgrowing the current facility, and keeping the con affordable for families Thanks to our sponsors Historic St. Charles, Missouri (https://www.discoverstcharles.com/), Bug's Comics and Games (https://bugscomicsandgames.com/), Steve's Hotdogs (https://www.steveshotdogsstl.com/), Kokomo Toys (https://www.kokomotoys.com/), and Marcus Theatres (https://www.marcustheatres.com/) Amazon Affiliate Link -   http://bit.ly/geektome  Buy Me a Coffee - https://www.buymeacoffee.com/3Y0D2iaZl Patreon -   https://www.patreon.com/GeekToMeRadio Website -   http://geektomeradio.com/  Podcast -   https://anchor.fm/jamesenstall Facebook -   https://www.facebook.com/GeekToMeRadio/  Twitter -   https://twitter.com/geektomeradio  Instagram -   https://www.instagram.com/geektomeradio/ Producer - Joseph Vosevich https://twitter.com/Joey_Vee --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/jamesenstall/support

Episode one hundred and fifty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is the last of our four-part mini-series on LA sunshine pop and folk-rock in summer 1967. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Baby, Now That I've Found You" by the Foundations. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources There is no Mixcloud this week, because there were too many Turtles songs in the episode. There's relatively little information available about the Turtles compared to other bands of their era, and so apart from the sources on the general LA scene referenced in all these podcasts, the information here comes from a small number of sources. This DVD is a decent short documentary on the band's career. Howard Kaylan's autobiography, Shell Shocked: My Life with the Turtles, Flo and Eddie, and Frank Zappa, Etc.,  is a fun read, if inevitably biased towards his own viewpoint. Jim Pons' Hard Core Love: Sex, Football, and Rock and Roll in the Kingdom of God is much less fun, being as it is largely organised around how his life led up to his latter-day religious beliefs, but is the only other book I'm aware of with a substantial amount of coverage of the Turtles. There are many compilations of the Turtles' material available, of which All The Singles is by far and away the best. The box set of all their albums with bonus tracks is now out of print on CD, but can still be bought as MP3s. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We've spent a lot of time recently in the LA of summer 1967, at the point where the sunshine pop sound that was created when the surf harmonies of the Beach Boys collided with folk rock was at its apex, right before fashions changed and tight sunny pop songs with harmonies from LA became yesterday's news, and extended blues-rock improvisations from San Francisco became the latest in thing. This episode is the last part of this four-episode sequence, and is going to be shorter than those others. In many ways this one is a bridge between this sequence and next episode, where we travel back to London, because we're saying goodbye for a while to the LA scene, and when we do return to LA it will be, for the most part, to look at music that's a lot less sunshine and a lot more shadow. So this is a brief fade-out while we sing ba-ba-ba, a three-minute pop-song of an episode, a last bit of sunshine pop before we return to longer, more complicated, stories  in two weeks' time, at which point the sun will firmly set. Like many musicians associated with LA, Howard Kaylan was born elsewhere and migrated there as a child, and he seems to have regarded his move from upstate New York to LA as essentially a move to Disneyland itself. That impression can only have been made stronger by the fact that soon after his family moved there he got his first childhood girlfriend -- who happened to be a Mouseketeer on the TV. And TV was how young Howard filtered most of his perceptions -- particularly TV comedy. By the age of fourteen he was the president of the Soupy Sales Fan Club, and he was also obsessed with the works of Ernie Kovacs, Sid Caesar, and the great satirist and parodist Stan Freberg: [Excerpt: Stan Freberg, "St. George and the Dragonet"] Second only to his love of comedy, though, was his love of music, and it was on the trip from New York to LA that he saw a show that would eventually change his life. Along the way, his family had gone to Las Vegas, and while there they had seen Louis Prima and Keeley Smith do their nightclub act. Prima is someone I would have liked to do a full podcast episode on when I was covering the fifties, and who I did do a Patreon bonus episode on. He's now probably best known for doing the voice of King Louis in the Jungle Book: [Excerpt: Louis Prima, "I Wanna Be Like You (the Monkey Song)"] But he was also a jump blues musician who made some very good records in a similar style to Louis Jordan, like "Jump, Jive, an' Wail" [Excerpt: Louis Prima, "Jump, Jive, an' Wail"] But like Jordan, Prima dealt at least as much in comedy as in music -- usually comedy involving stereotypes about his Italian-American ethnic origins. At the time young Howard Kaylan saw him, he was working a double act with his then-wife Keeley Smith. The act would consist of Smith trying to sing a song straight, while Prima would clown around, interject, and act like a fool, as Smith grew more and more exasperated, and would eventually start contemptuously mocking Prima. [Excerpt: Louis Prima and Keeley Smith, "Embraceable You/I've Got It Bad and That Ain't Good"] This is of course a fairly standard double-act format, as anyone who has suffered through an episode of The Little and Large Show will be all too painfully aware, but Prima and Smith did it better than most, and to young Howard Kaylan, this was the greatest entertainment imaginable. But while comedy was the closest thing to Kaylan's heart, music was a close second. He was a regular listener to Art Laboe's radio show, and in a brief period as a teenage shoplifter he obtained records like Ray Charles' album Genius + Soul = Jazz: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "One Mint Julep"] and the single "Tossin' and Turnin'" by Bobby Lewis: [Excerpt: Bobby Lewis, "Tossin' and Turnin'"] "Tossin' and Turnin'" made a deep impression on Kaylan, because of the saxophone solo, which was actually a saxophone duet. On the record, baritone sax player Frank Henry played a solo, and it was doubled by the great tenor sax player King Curtis, who was just playing a mouthpiece rather than a full instrument, making a high-pitched squeaking sound: [Excerpt: Bobby Lewis, "Tossin' and Turnin'"] Curtis was of course also responsible for another great saxophone part a couple of years earlier, on a record that Kaylan loved because it combined comedy and rock and roll, "Yakety Yak": [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Yakety Yak"] Those two saxophone parts inspired Kaylan to become a rock and roller. He was already learning the clarinet and playing part time in an amateur Dixieland band, and it was easy enough to switch to saxophone, which has the same fingering. Within a matter of weeks of starting to play sax, he was invited to join a band called the Nightriders, who consisted of Chuck Portz on bass, Al Nichol on guitar, and Glen Wilson on drums. The Nightriders became locally popular, and would perform sets largely made up of Johnny and the Hurricanes and Ventures material. While he was becoming a budding King Curtis, Kaylan was still a schoolkid, and one of the classes he found most enjoyable was choir class. There was another kid in choir who Kaylan got on with, and one day that kid, Mark Volman came up to him, and had a conversation that Kaylan would recollect decades later in his autobiography: “So I hear you're in a rock 'n' roll band.” “Yep.” “Um, do you think I could join it?” “Well, what do you do?” “Nothing.” “Nothing?” “Nope.” “Sounds good to me. I'll ask Al.” Volman initially became the group's roadie and occasional tambourine player, and would also get on stage to sing a bit during their very occasional vocal numbers, but was mostly "in the band" in name only at first -- he didn't get a share of the group's money, but he was allowed to say he was in the group because that meant that his friends would come to the Nightriders' shows, and he was popular among the surfing crowd. Eventually, Volman's father started to complain that his son wasn't getting any money from being in the band, while the rest of the group were, and they explained to him that Volman was just carrying the instruments while they were all playing them. Volman's father said "if Mark plays an instrument, will you give him equal shares?" and they said that that was fair, so Volman got an alto sax to play along with Kaylan's tenor. Volman had also been taking clarinet lessons, and the two soon became a tight horn section for the group, which went through a few lineup changes and soon settled on a lineup of Volman and Kaylan on saxes, Nichol on lead guitar, Jim Tucker on rhythm guitar, Portz on bass, and Don Murray on drums. That new lineup became known as the Crossfires, presumably after the Johnny and the Hurricanes song of the same name: [Excerpt: Johnny and the Hurricanes, "Crossfire"] Volman and Kaylan worked out choreographed dance steps to do while playing their saxes, and the group even developed a group of obsessive fans who called themselves the Chunky Club, named after one of the group's originals: [Excerpt: The Crossfires, "Chunky"] At this point the group were pretty much only playing instrumentals, though they would do occasional vocals on R&B songs like "Money" or their version of Don and Dewey's "Justine", songs which required more enthusiasm than vocal ability. But their first single, released on a tiny label, was another surf instrumental, a song called "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde": [Excerpt: The Crossfires, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde"] The group became popular enough locally that they became the house band at the Revelaire Club in Redondo Beach. There as well as playing their own sets, they would also be the backing band for any touring acts that came through without their own band, quickly gaining the kind of performing ability that comes from having to learn a new artist's entire repertoire in a few days and be able to perform it with them live with little or no rehearsal. They backed artists like the Coasters, the Drifters, Bobby Vee, the Rivingtons, and dozens of other major acts, and as part of that Volman and Kaylan would, on songs that required backing vocals, sing harmonies rather than playing saxophone. And that harmony-singing ability became important when the British Invasion happened, and suddenly people didn't want to hear surf instrumentals, but vocals along the lines of the new British groups. The Crossfires' next attempt at a single was another original, this one an attempt at sounding like one of their favourite new British groups, the Kinks: [Excerpt: The Crossfires, "One Potato, Two Potato"] This change to vocals necessitated a change in the group dynamic. Volman and Kaylan ditched the saxophones, and discovered that between them they made one great frontman. The two have never been excessively close on a personal level, but both have always known that the other has qualities they needed. Frank Zappa would later rather dismissively say "I regard Howard as a fine singer, and Mark as a great tambourine player and fat person", and it's definitely true that Kaylan is one of the truly great vocalists to come out of the LA scene in this period, while Volman is merely a good harmony singer, not anything particularly special -- though he *is* a good harmony singer -- but it undersells Volman's contribution. There's a reason the two men performed together for nearly sixty years. Kaylan is a great singer, but also by nature rather reserved, and he always looked uncomfortable on stage, as well as, frankly, not exactly looking like a rock star (Kaylan describes himself not inaccurately as looking like a potato several times in his autobiography). Volman, on the other hand, is a merely good singer, but he has a naturally outgoing personality, and while he's also not the most conventionally good-looking of people he has a *memorable* appearance in a way that Kaylan doesn't. Volman could do all the normal frontman stuff, the stuff that makes a show an actual show -- the jokes, the dancing, the between-song patter, the getting the crowd going, while Kaylan could concentrate on the singing. They started doing a variation on the routine that had so enthralled Howard Kaylan when he'd seen Louis Prima and Keeley Smith do it as a child. Kaylan would stand more or less stock still, looking rather awkward, but singing like an angel, while Volman would dance around, clown, act the fool, and generally do everything he could to disrupt the performance -- short of actually disrupting it in reality. It worked, and Volman became one of that small but illustrious group of people -- the band member who makes the least contribution to the sound of the music but the biggest contribution to the feel of the band itself, and without whom they wouldn't be the same. After "One Potato, Two Potato" was a flop, the Crossfires were signed to their third label. This label, White Whale, was just starting out, and the Crossfires were to become their only real hit act. Or rather, the Turtles were. The owners of White Whale knew that they didn't have much promotional budget and that their label was not a known quantity -- it was a tiny label with no track record. But they thought of a way they could turn that to their advantage. Everyone knew that the Beatles, before Capitol had picked up their contracts, had had their records released on a bunch of obscure labels like Swan and Tollie. People *might* look for records on tiny independent labels if they thought it might be another British act who were unknown in the US but could be as good as the Beatles. So they chose a name for the group that they thought sounded as English as possible -- an animal name that started with "the", and ended in "les", just like the Beatles. The group, all teenagers at the time, were desperate enough that they agreed to change their name, and from that point on they became the Turtles. In order to try and jump on as many bandwagons as possible, the label wanted to position them as a folk-rock band, so their first single under the Turtles name was a cover of a Bob Dylan song, from Another Side of Bob Dylan: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "It Ain't Me Babe"] That song's hit potential had already been seen by Johnny Cash, who'd had a country hit with it a few months before. But the Turtles took the song in a different direction, inspired by Kaylan's *other* great influence, along with Prima and Smith. Kaylan was a big fan of the Zombies, one of the more interesting of the British Invasion groups, and particularly of their singer Colin Blunstone. Kaylan imitated Blunstone on the group's hit single, "She's Not There", on which Blunstone sang in a breathy, hushed, voice on the verses: [Excerpt: The Zombies, "She's Not There"] before the song went into a more stomping chorus on which Blunstone sang in a fuller voice: [Excerpt: The Zombies, "She's Not There"] Kaylan did this on the Turtles' version of "It Ain't Me Babe", starting off with a quiet verse: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "It Ain't Me Babe"] Before, like the Zombies, going into a foursquare, more uptempo, louder chorus: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "It Ain't Me Babe"] The single became a national top ten hit, and even sort of got the approval of Bob Dylan. On the group's first national tour, Dylan was at one club show, which they ended with "It Ain't Me Babe", and after the show the group were introduced to the great songwriter, who was somewhat the worse for wear. Dylan said “Hey, that was a great song you just played, man. That should be your single", and then passed out into his food. With the group's first single becoming a top ten hit, Volman and Kaylan got themselves a house in Laurel Canyon, which was not yet the rock star Mecca it was soon to become, but which was starting to get a few interesting residents. They would soon count Henry Diltz of the Modern Folk Quartet, Danny Hutton, and Frank Zappa among their neighbours. Soon Richie Furay would move in with them, and the house would be used by the future members of the Buffalo Springfield as their rehearsal space. The Turtles were rapidly becoming part of the in crowd. But they needed a follow-up single, and so Bones Howe, who was producing their records, brought in P.F. Sloan to play them a few of his new songs. They liked "Eve of Destruction" enough to earmark it as a possible album track, but they didn't think they would do it justice, and so it was passed on to Barry McGuire. But Sloan did have something for them -- a pseudo-protest song called "Let Me Be" that was very clearly patterned after their version of "It Ain't Me Babe", and which was just rebellious enough to make them seem a little bit daring, but which was far more teenage angst than political manifesto: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Let Me Be"] That did relatively well, making the top thirty -- well enough for the group to rush out an album which was padded out with some sloppy cover versions of other Dylan songs, a version of "Eve of Destruction", and a few originals written by Kaylan. But the group weren't happy with the idea of being protest singers. They were a bunch of young men who were more motivated by having a good time than by politics, and they didn't think that it made sense for them to be posing as angry politicised rebels. Not only that, but there was a significant drop-off between "It Ain't Me Babe" and "Let Me Be". They needed to do better. They got the clue for their new direction while they were in New York. There they saw their friends in the Mothers of Invention playing their legendary residency at the Garrick Theatre, but they also saw a new band, the Lovin' Spoonful, who were playing music that was clearly related to the music the Turtles were doing -- full of harmonies and melody, and inspired by folk music -- but with no sense of rebelliousness at all. They called it "Good Time Music": [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Good Time Music"] As soon as they got back to LA, they told Bones Howe and the executives at White Whale that they weren't going to be a folk-rock group any more, they were going to be "good time music", just like the Lovin' Spoonful. They were expecting some resistance, but they were told that that was fine, and that PF Sloan had some good time music songs too. "You Baby" made the top twenty: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "You Baby"] The Turtles were important enough in the hierarchy of LA stars that Kaylan and Tucker were even invited by David Crosby to meet the Beatles at Derek Taylor's house when they were in LA on their last tour -- this may be the same day that the Beatles met Brian and Carl Wilson, as I talked about in the episode on "All You Need is Love", though Howard Kaylan describes this as being a party and that sounded like more of an intimate gathering. If it was that day, there was nearly a third Beach Boy there. The Turtles knew David Marks, the Beach Boys' former rhythm guitarist, because they'd played a lot in Inglewood where he'd grown up, and Marks asked if he could tag along with Kaylan and Tucker to meet the Beatles. They agreed, and drove up to the house, and actually saw George Harrison through the window, but that was as close as they got to the Beatles that day. There was a heavy police presence around the house because it was known that the Beatles were there, and one of the police officers asked them to drive back and park somewhere else and walk up, because there had been complaints from neighbours about the number of cars around. They were about to do just that, when Marks started yelling obscenities and making pig noises at the police, so they were all arrested, and the police claimed to find a single cannabis seed in the car. Charges were dropped, but now Kaylan was on the police's radar, and so he moved out of the Laurel Canyon home to avoid bringing police attention to Buffalo Springfield, so that Neil Young and Bruce Palmer wouldn't get deported. But generally the group were doing well. But there was a problem. And that problem was their record label. They rushed out another album to cash in on the success of "You Baby", one that was done so quickly that it had "Let Me Be" on it again, just as the previous album had, and which included a version of the old standard "All My Trials", with the songwriting credited to the two owners of White Whale records. And they pumped out a lot of singles. A LOT of singles, ranging from a song written for them by new songwriter Warren Zevon, to cover versions of Frank Sinatra's "It Was a Very Good Year" and the old standard "We'll Meet Again". Of the five singles after "You Baby", the one that charted highest was a song actually written by a couple of the band members. But for some reason a song with verses in 5/4 time and choruses in 6/4 with lyrics like "killing the living and living to kill, the grim reaper of love thrives on pain" didn't appeal to the group's good-time music pop audience and only reached number eighty-one: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Grim Reaper of Love"] The group started falling apart. Don Murray became convinced that  the rest of the band were conspiring against him and wanted him out, so he walked out of the group in the middle of a rehearsal for a TV show. They got Joel Larson of the Grass Roots -- the group who had a number of hits with Sloan and Barri songs -- to sub for a few gigs before getting in a permanent replacement, Johnny Barbata, who came to them on the recommendation of Gene Clark, and who was one of the best drummers on the scene -- someone who was not only a great drummer but a great showman, who would twirl his drumsticks between his fingers with every beat, and who would regularly engage in drum battles with Buddy Rich. By the time they hit their fifth flop single in a row, they lost their bass player as well -- Chuck Portz decided he was going to quit music and become a fisherman instead. They replaced him with Chip Douglas of the Modern Folk Quartet. Then they very nearly lost their singers. Volman and Kaylan both got their draft notices at the same time, and it seemed likely they would end up having to go and fight in the Vietnam war. Kaylan was distraught, but his mother told him "Speak to your cousin Herb". Cousin Herb was Herb Cohen, the manager of the Mothers of Invention and numerous other LA acts, including the Modern Folk Quartet, and Kaylan only vaguely knew him at this time, but he agreed to meet up with them, and told them “Stop worrying! I got Zappa out, I got Tim Buckley out, and I'll get you out.” Cohen told Volman and Kaylan to not wash for a week before their induction, to take every drug of every different kind they could find right before going in, to deliberately disobey every order, to fail the logic tests, and to sexually proposition the male officers dealing with the induction. They followed his orders to the letter, and got marked as 4-F, unfit for service. They still needed a hit though, and eventually they found something by going back to their good-time music idea. It was a song from the Koppelman-Rubin publishing company -- the same company that did the Lovin Spoonful's management and production. The song in question was by Alan Gordon and Gary Bonner, two former members of a group called the Magicians, who had had a minor success with a single called "An Invitation to Cry": [Excerpt: The Magicians, "An Invitation to Cry"] The Magicians had split up, and Bonner and Gordon were trying to make a go of things as professional songwriters, but had had little success to this point. The song on the demo had been passed over by everyone, and the demo was not at all impressive, just a scratchy acetate with Bonner singing off-key and playing acoustic rhythm guitar and Gordon slapping his knees to provide rhythm, but the group heard something in it. They played the song live for months, refining the arrangement, before taking it into the studio. There are arguments to this day as to who deserves the credit for the sound on "Happy Together" -- Chip Douglas apparently did the bulk of the arrangement work while they were on tour, but the group's new producer, Joe Wissert, a former staff engineer for Cameo-Parkway, also claimed credit for much of it. Either way, "Happy Together" is a small masterpiece of dynamics. The song is structured much like the songs that had made the Turtles' name, with the old Zombies idea of the soft verse and much louder chorus: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Happy Together"] But the track is really made by the tiny details of the arrangement, the way instruments and vocal parts come in and out as the track builds up, dies down, and builds again. If you listen to the isolated tracks, there are fantastic touches like the juxtaposition of the bassoon and oboe (which I think is played on a mellotron): [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Happy Together", isolated tracks] And a similar level of care and attention was put into the vocal arrangement by Douglas, with some parts just Kaylan singing solo, other parts having Volman double him, and of course the famous "bah bah bah" massed vocals: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Happy Together", isolated vocals] At the end of the track, thinking he was probably going to do another take, Kaylan decided to fool around and sing "How is the weather?", which Bonner and Gordon had jokingly done on the demo. But the group loved it, and insisted that was the take they were going to use: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Happy Together"] "Happy Together" knocked "Penny Lane" by the Beatles off the number one spot in the US, but by that point the group had already had another lineup change. The Monkees had decided they wanted to make records without the hit factory that had been overseeing them, and had asked Chip Douglas if he wanted to produce their first recordings as a self-contained band. Given that the Monkees were the biggest thing in the American music industry at the time, Douglas had agreed, and so the group needed their third bass player in a year. The one they went for was Jim Pons. Pons had seen the Beatles play at the Hollywood Bowl in 1964, and decided he wanted to become a pop star. The next day he'd been in a car crash, which had paid out enough insurance money that he was able to buy two guitars, a bass, drums, and amps, and use them to start his own band. That band was originally called The Rockwells, but quickly changed their name to the Leaves, and became a regular fixture at Ciro's on Sunset Strip, first as customers, then after beating Love in the auditions, as the new resident band when the Byrds left. For a while the Leaves had occasionally had guest vocals from a singer called Richard Marin, but Pons eventually decided to get rid of him, because, as he put it "I wanted us to look like The Beatles. There were no Mexicans in The Beatles". He is at pains in his autobiography to assure us that he's not a bigot, and that Marin understood. I'm sure he did. Marin went on to be better known as Cheech Marin of Cheech and Chong. The Leaves were signed by Pat Boone to his production company, and through that company they got signed to Mira Records. Their first single, produced by Nik Venet, had been a version of "Love Minus Zero (No Limit)", a song by Bob Dylan: [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Love Minus Zero (No Limit)"] That had become a local hit, though not a national one, and the Leaves had become one of the biggest bands on the Sunset Strip scene, hanging out with all the other bands. They had become friendly with the Doors before the Doors got a record deal, and Pat Boone had even asked for an introduction, as he was thinking of signing them, but unfortunately when he met Jim Morrison, Morrison had drunk a lot of vodka, and given that Morrison was an obnoxious drunk Boone had second thoughts, and so the world missed out on the chance of a collaboration between the Doors and Pat Boone. Their second single was "Hey Joe" -- as was their third and fourth, as we discussed in that episode: [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe"] Their third version of "Hey Joe" had become a top forty hit, but they didn't have a follow-up, and their second album, All The Good That's Happening, while it's a good album, sold poorly. Various band members quit or fell out, and when Johnny Barbata knocked on Jim Pons' door it was an easy decision to quit and join a band that had a current number one hit. When Pons joined, the group had already recorded the Happy Together album. That album included the follow-up to "Happy Together", another Bonner and Gordon song, "She'd Rather Be With Me": [Excerpt: The Turtles, "She'd Rather Be With Me"] None of the group were tremendously impressed with that song, but it did very well, becoming the group's second-biggest hit in the US, reaching number three, and actually becoming a bigger hit than "Happy Together" in parts of Europe. Before "Happy Together" the group hadn't really made much impact outside the US. In the UK, their early singles had been released by Pye, the smallish label that had the Kinks and Donovan, but which didn't have much promotional budget, and they'd sunk without trace. For "You Baby" they'd switched to Immediate, the indie label that Andrew Oldham had set up, and it had done a little better but still not charted. But from "Happy Together" they were on Decca, a much bigger label, and "Happy Together" had made number twelve in the charts in the UK, and "She'd Rather Be With Me" reached number four. So the new lineup of the group went on a UK tour. As soon as they got to the hotel, they found they had a message from Graham Nash of the Hollies, saying he would like to meet up with them. They all went round to Nash's house, and found Donovan was also there, and Nash played them a tape he'd just been given of Sgt Pepper, which wouldn't come out for a few more days. At this point they were living every dream a bunch of Anglophile American musicians could possibly have. Jim Tucker mentioned that he would love to meet the Beatles, and Nash suggested they do just that. On their way out the door, Donovan said to them, "beware of Lennon". It was when they got to the Speakeasy club that the first faux-pas of the evening happened. Nash introduced them to Justin Hayward and John Lodge of the Moody Blues, and Volman said how much he loved their record "Go Now": [Excerpt: The Moody Blues, "Go Now"] The problem was that Hayward and Lodge had joined the group after that record had come out, to replace its lead singer Denny Laine. Oh well, they were still going to meet the Beatles, right? They got to the table where John, Paul, and Ringo were sat, at a tense moment -- Paul was having a row with Jane Asher, who stormed out just as the Turtles were getting there. But at first, everything seemed to go well. The Beatles all expressed their admiration for "Happy Together" and sang the "ba ba ba" parts at them, and Paul and Kaylan bonded over their shared love for "Justine" by Don and Dewey, a song which the Crossfires had performed in their club sets, and started singing it together: [Excerpt: Don and Dewey, "Justine"] But John Lennon was often a mean drunk, and he noticed that Jim Tucker seemed to be the weak link in the group, and soon started bullying him, mocking his clothes, his name, and everything he said. This devastated Tucker, who had idolised Lennon up to that point, and blurted out "I'm sorry I ever met you", to which Lennon just responded "You never did, son, you never did". The group walked out, hurt and confused -- and according to Kaylan in his autobiography, Tucker was so demoralised by Lennon's abuse that he quit music forever shortly afterwards, though Tucker says that this wasn't the reason he quit. From their return to LA on, the Turtles would be down to just a five-piece band. After leaving the club, the group went off in different directions, but then Kaylan (and this is according to Kaylan's autobiography, there are no other sources for this) was approached by Brian Jones, asking for his autograph because he loved the Turtles so much. Jones introduced Kaylan to the friend he was with, Jimi Hendrix, and they went out for dinner, but Jones soon disappeared with a girl he'd met. and left Kaylan and Hendrix alone. They were drinking a lot -- more than Kaylan was used to -- and he was tired, and the omelette that Hendrix had ordered for Kaylan was creamier than he was expecting... and Kaylan capped what had been a night full of unimaginable highs and lows by vomiting all over Jimi Hendrix's expensive red velvet suit. Rather amazingly after all this, the Moody Blues, the Beatles, and Hendrix, all showed up to the Turtles' London gig and apparently enjoyed it. After "She'd Rather Be With Me", the next single to be released wasn't really a proper single, it was a theme song they'd been asked to record for a dire sex comedy titled "Guide for the Married Man", and is mostly notable for being composed by John Williams, the man who would later go on to compose the music for Star Wars. That didn't chart, but the group followed it with two more top twenty hits written by Bonner and Gordon, "You Know What I Mean" and "She's My Girl". But then the group decided that Bonner and Gordon weren't giving them their best material, and started turning down their submissions, like a song called "Celebrity Ball" which they thought had no commercial potential, at least until the song was picked up by their friends Three Dog Night, retitled "Celebrate", and made the top twenty: [Excerpt: Three Dog Night, "Celebrate"] Instead, the group decided to start recording more of their own material. They were worried that in the fast-changing rock world bands that did other songwriters' material were losing credibility. But "Sound Asleep", their first effort in this new plan, only made number forty-seven on the charts. Clearly they needed a different plan. They called in their old bass player Chip Douglas, who was now an experienced hitmaker as a producer. He called in *his* friend Harry Nilsson, who wrote "The Story of Rock & Roll" for the group, but that didn't do much better, only making number forty-eight. But the group persevered, starting work on a new album produced by Douglas, The Turtles Present The Battle of the Bands, the conceit of which was that every track would be presented as being by a different band. So there were tracks by  Chief Kamanawanalea and his Royal Macadamia Nuts,  Fats Mallard and the Bluegrass Fireball, The Atomic Enchilada, and so on, all done in the styles suggested by those band names. There was even a track by "The Cross Fires": [Excerpt: The Cross Fires, "Surfer Dan"] It was the first time the group had conceived of an album as a piece, and nine of the twelve tracks were originals by the band -- there was a track written by their friend Bill Martin, and the opening track, by "The US Teens Featuring Raoul", was co-written by Chip Douglas and Harry Nilsson. But for the most part the songs were written by the band members themselves, and jointly credited to all of them. This was the democratic decision, but one that Howard Kaylan would later regret, because of the song for which the band name was just "Howie, Mark, Johnny, Jim & Al". Where all the other songs were parodies of other types of music, that one was, as the name suggests, a parody of the Turtles themselves. It was written by Kaylan in disgust at the record label, who kept pestering the group to "give us another 'Happy Together'". Kaylan got more and more angry at this badgering, and eventually thought "OK, you want another 'Happy Together'? I'll give you another 'Happy Together'" and in a few minutes wrote a song that was intended as an utterly vicious parody of that kind of song, with lyrics that nobody could possibly take seriously, and with music that was just mocking the whole structure of "Happy Together" specifically. He played it to the rest of the group, expecting them to fall about laughing, but instead they all insisted it was the group's next single. "Elenore" went to number six on the charts, becoming their biggest hit since "She'd Rather Be With Me": [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Elenore"] And because everything was credited to the group, Kaylan's songwriting royalties were split five ways. For the follow-up, they chose the one actual cover version on the album. "You Showed Me" is a song that Roger McGuinn and Gene Clark had written together in the very early days of the Byrds, and they'd recorded it as a jangly folk-rock tune in 1964: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "You Showed Me"] They'd never released that track, but Gene Clark had performed it solo after leaving the Byrds, and Douglas had been in Clark's band at the time, and liked the song. He played it for the Turtles, but when he played it for them the only instrument he had to hand was a pump organ with one of its bellows broken. Because of this, he had to play it slowly, and while he kept insisting that the song needed to be faster, the group were equally insistent that what he was playing them was the big ballad hit they wanted, and they recorded it at that tempo. "You Showed Me" became the Turtles' final top ten hit: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "You Showed Me"] But once again there were problems in the group. Johnny Barbata was the greatest drummer any of them had ever played with, but he didn't fit as a personality -- he didn't like hanging round with the rest of them when not on stage, and while there were no hard feelings, it was clear he could get a gig with pretty much anyone and didn't need to play with a group he wasn't entirely happy in. By mutual agreement, he left to go and play with Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, and was replaced by John Seiter from Spanky and Our Gang -- a good drummer, but not the best of the best like Barbata had been. On top of this, there were a whole host of legal problems to deal with. The Turtles were the only big act on White Whale records, though White Whale did put out some other records. For example, they'd released the single "Desdemona" by John's Children in the US: [Excerpt: John's Children, "Desdemona"] The group, being the Anglophiles they were, had loved that record, and were also among the very small number of Americans to like the music made by John's Children's guitarist's new folk duo, Tyrannosaurus Rex: [Excerpt: Tyrannosaurus Rex, "Debora"] When Tyrannosaurus Rex supported the Turtles, indeed, Volman and Kaylan became very close to Marc Bolan, and told him that the next time they were in England they'd have to get together, maybe even record together. That would happen not that many years later, with results we'll be getting to in... episode 201, by my current calculations. But John's Children hadn't had a hit, and indeed nobody on White Whale other than the Turtles had. So White Whale desperately wanted to stop the Turtles having any independence, and to make sure they continued to be their hit factory. They worked with the group's roadie, Dave Krambeck, to undermine the group's faith in their manager, Bill Utley, who supported the group in their desire for independence. Soon, Krambeck and White Whale had ousted Utley, and Krambeck had paid Utley fifty thousand dollars for their management contract, with the promise of another two hundred thousand later. That fifty thousand dollars had been taken by Krambeck as an advance against the Turtles' royalties, so they were really buying themselves out. Except that Krambeck then sold the management contract on to a New York management firm, without telling the group. He then embezzled as much of the group's ready cash as he could and ran off to Mexico, without paying Utley his two hundred thousand dollars. The Turtles were out of money, and they were being sued by Utley because he hadn't had the money he should have had, and by the big New York firm, because  since the Turtles hadn't known they were now legally their managers they were in breach of contract. They needed money quickly, and so they signed with another big management company, this one co-owned by Bill Cosby, in the belief that Cosby's star power might be able to get them some better bookings. It did -- one of the group's first gigs after signing with the new company was at the White House. It turned out they were Tricia Nixon's favourite group, and so they and the Temptations were booked at her request for a White House party. The group at first refused to play for a President they rightly thought of as a monster, but their managers insisted. That destroyed their reputation among the cool antiestablishment youth, of course, but it did start getting them well-paid corporate gigs. Right up until the point where Kaylan became sick at his own hypocrisy at playing these events, drank too much of the complimentary champagne at an event for the president of US Steel, went into a drunken rant about how sick the audience made him, and then about how his bandmates were a bunch of sellouts, threw his mic into a swimming pool, and quit while still on stage. He was out of the band for two months, during which time they worked on new material without him, before they made up and decided to work on a new album. This new album, though, was going to be more democratic. As well as being all original material, they weren't having any of this nonsense about the lead singer singing lead. This time, whoever wrote the song was going to sing lead, so Kaylan only ended up singing lead on six of the twelve songs on what turned out to be their final album, Turtle Soup. They wanted a truly great producer for the new album, and they all made lists of who they might call. The lists included a few big names like George Martin and Phil Spector, but one name kept turning up -- Ray Davies. As we'll hear in the next episode, the Kinks had been making some astonishing music since "You Really Got Me", but most of it had not been heard in the US. But the Turtles all loved the Kinks' 1968 album The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, which they considered the best album ever made: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Animal Farm"] They got in touch with Davies, and he agreed to produce the album -- the first time he did any serious outside production work -- and eventually they were able to persuade White Whale, who had no idea who he was, to allow him to produce it. The resulting album is by far the group's strongest album-length work, though there were problems -- Davies' original mix of the album was dominated by the orchestral parts written by Wrecking Crew musician Ray Pohlman, while the group thought that their own instruments should be more audible, since they were trying to prove that they were a proper band. They remixed it themselves, annoying Davies, though reissues since the eighties have reverted to a mix closer to Davies' intentions. Some of the music, like Pons' "Dance This Dance With Me", perhaps has the group trying a little *too* hard to sound like the Kinks: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Dance This Dance With Me"] But on the other hand, Kaylan's "You Don't Have to Walk in the Rain" is the group's last great pop single, and has one of the best lines of any single from the sixties -- "I look at your face, I love you anyway": [Excerpt: The Turtles, "You Don't Have to Walk in the Rain"] But the album produced no hits, and the group were getting more and more problems from their label. White Whale tried to get Volman and Kaylan to go to Memphis without the other band members to record with Chips Moman, but they refused -- the Turtles were a band, and they were proud of not having session players play their parts on the records. Instead, they started work with Jerry Yester producing on a new album, to be called Shell Shock. They did, though bow to pressure and record a terrible country track called "Who Would Ever Think That I Would Marry Margaret" backed by session players, at White Whale's insistence, but managed to persuade the label not to release it. They audited White Whale and discovered that in the first six months of 1969 alone -- a period where they hadn't sold that many records -- they'd been underpaid by a staggering six hundred and fifty thousand dollars. They sued the label for several million, and in retaliation, the label locked them out of the recording studio, locking their equipment in there. They basically begged White Whale to let them record one last great single, one last throw of the dice. Jim Pons had, for years, known a keyboard player named Bob Harris, and had recently got to know Harris' wife, Judee Sill. Sill had a troubled life -- she was a heroin addict, and had at times turned to streetwalking to earn money, and had spent time in prison for armed robbery -- but she was also an astonishing songwriter, whose music was as inspired by Bach as by any pop or folk composer. Sill had been signed to Blimp, the Turtles' new production and publishing company, and Pons was co-producing some tracks on her first album, with Graham Nash producing others. Pons thought one song from that album, "Lady-O", would be perfect for the Turtles: [Excerpt: Judee Sill, "Lady-O"] (music continues under) The Turtles stuck closely to Sill's vision of the song. So closely that you haven't noticed that before I started talking, we'd already switched from Sill's record to the Turtles' version. [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Lady-O"] That track, with Sill on guitar backing Kaylan, Volman, and Nichol's vocals, was the last Turtles single to be released while the band were together. Despite “Lady O” being as gorgeous a melody as has ever been produced in the rock world, it sank without trace, as did a single from the Shell Shock sessions released under a pseudonym, The Dedications. White Whale followed that up, to the group's disgust, with "Who Would Ever Think That I Would Marry Margaret?", and then started putting out whatever they had in the vaults, trying to get the last few pennies, even releasing their 1965 album track version of "Eve of Destruction" as if it were a new single. The band were even more disgusted when they discovered that, thanks to the flurry of suits and countersuits, they not only could no longer perform as the Turtles, but White Whale were laying legal claim to their own names. They couldn't perform under those names -- Howard Kaylan, Mark Volman, and the rest were the intellectual property of White Whale, according to the lawyers. The group split up, and Kaylan and Volman did some session work, including singing on a demo for a couple of new songwriters: [Excerpt: Steely Dan, "Everyone's Gone to the Movies"] When that demo got the songwriters a contract, one of them actually phoned up to see if Kaylan wanted a permanent job in their new band, but they didn't want Volman as well, so Kaylan refused, and Steely Dan had to do without him. Volman and Kaylan were despondent, washed-up, has-been ex-rock stars. But when they went to see a gig by their old friend Frank Zappa, it turned out that he was looking for exactly that. Of course, they couldn't use their own names, but the story of the Phlorescent Leech and Eddie is a story for another time...

Content warning for discussion of sexual assault in mythology and romance novels at times: 1:00:58 -1:11:36This is a long one, you sparkly romance nerds. Buckle in! We're diving into Cinderella, Beauty & the Beast, Pride & Prejudice, and Hades & Persephone! If you haven't listened to part one, go click #37 for some information on the different categories of retellings. Questions/Comments/Concerns? Don't forget to email us at ragingromantics@nopl.org!Terms:Folktale - a fictional story passed down by generations, generally starting as an oral tradition, and with the purpose of relating a moral or life lesson to the listener.Tale Type - a self-sufficient narrativeMotif - the smallest descriptive unit within the narrative. These motifs combined together create the building blocks that lead us up to a narrativeMyth - a legendary story that usually explains some historical or religious phenomenonLiterature - in this episode, this refers to fictional writings that serve no larger purpose than just to tell a storyTrope - a narrative within the larger literary narrative; a path built of motifs that leads to an understood outcomeThe Aarne-Thompson-Uther classification of folktales - abbreviated to ATU, this is a classification system of tale types and motifs. The ATU groups together multiple tales that represent an independent type which has been documented amongst at least three ethnic groups or over a long time period.Cinderella linksATU Tale Types 510: Persecuted Heroine storiesTale of RhodopsisTale of Ye XianPentamarone by Giambattista Basile "Cenerentola" (1634)Histoires ou contes du temps passé by Charles Perrault "Cendrillon; ou la petite pantoufle du verre" (1697)Aschenputtel by the Brothers Grimm (1812)"The History of Cinderella" (Abilene Public Library)Cinderella Across cultures (ed. by de la Rochère, 2016)"A Girl, A Shoe, A Prince: The Endlessly Evolving Cinderella"(Holmes for NPR, 2015)RetellingsA Kiss at Midnight by Eloisa JamesIf the Shoe Fits by Julia MurphyA Princess in Theory by Alyssa ColeMidnight in the Garden of the Prince by Catherine KeatonRogue Princess by BR MeyersThe Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen WangIf the Boot Fits by Rebekah Weatherspoon Any Duchess Will Do by Tessa DareOne Night with You by Sophie JordanBeauty and the Beast linksATU tale type 425 A-C: The Search for the Enchanted Lost Husband"The Woman Who Married the Snake" from the Panchatantra (1199 CE, possibly as early as 200BCE)"Cupid and Psyche" as written by Lucius Apuleius in The Golden Ass (1st and 2nd c. CE)La Jeune Americaine et les Contes Marins by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot, Dame de Villeneuve in her work (1740)Magasin des enfants by Jean-Marie le Prince de Beaumont (1756)“Beauty and the Beast; visions and revisions of an old tale” by Betsy Hearne (1991)"Beauty and the Beast, Old And New" (Windling, 2007)"Beauty and the Beast" (Pook Press, 2018a)"7 Variants of Beauty and the Beast Fairy Tales – A Tale as Old as Time" (Pook Press, 2018b)RetellingsA Curse so Dark and Lonely by Brigid KemmererThe Duchess Deal by Tessa Dare Romancing the Duke ALSO by Tessa DareEntreat Me by Grace DravenThe Beast by Katee RobertPride & Prejudice links'"Pride and Prejudice" Jane Austen Society of America""Pride and Prejudice" Remains Timeless and Delightful, More than 200 Years Later" (Rogerson, 2020)"Why are we still so passionate about 'Pride & Prejudice'?" (Donahue, 2013)RetellingsThe Soulmate Equation by Christina LaurenAyesha at Last by Uzma JalaluddinPride, Prejudice and Other Flavors by Sonali DevPride and Premeditation by Tirzah PricePride by Ibi ZoboiUnmarriageable by Soniah KamalThe Bennet Women by Eden Appiah-KubiHades & Persephone linksHomeric Hymn to Demeter"The Story of Hades and Persephone: Rape and Romance" (Warner, 2020)"Hades and Persephone story" (Athens Beyond, 2021)"Persephone: Queen of the Underworld" (Greekmythology.com, 2021)"Homer" (Britannica)"Homerids" (Britannica)"Homerics Hymns 1-3" (Classical Texts Library)"Persephone" (wikipedia)Makowski, John F. “Persephone, Psyche, and the Mother-Maiden Archetype.” The Classical Outlook, vol. 62, no. 3, American Classical League, 1985, pp. 73–78 (jstor)Mylonas, George E. “The Hymn to Demeter.” The Classical Weekly, vol. 38, no. 23, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1945, pp. 180–82 (jstor)Parker, Robert. “The ‘Hymn to Demeter' and the ‘Homeric Hymns.'” Greece & Rome, vol. 38, no. 1, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 1–17 (jstor)RetellingsNeon Gods by Katee RobertTouch of Darkness by Scarlett St. ClairLore Olympus (vol.1) by Rachel SmytheA Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J Maas Promises and Pomegranates by Sav r. MillerKore by Ambrosia R. HarrisPestilence by Lauren ThelassaThe Power of Hades by Eliza RaineIt Ain't Me Babe by Tillie COleDeal with the Elf King by Elisa KovaFrom Blood and Ash series and book by Jennifer Lynn Armentrout Punderworld by Linda SejicCirce by Madeleine MillerOther links:"The uses and limitations of the Folklorist's toolkit for fiction" (Lemberg, 2015)"The Evolution of the Disney Princess Franchise: Catching Up and Moving Forward" (Maier, 2016)"Why Romance Will Never Stop Retelling Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast" (Popp, 2021)"Legendary Literary Couples Live on in Countless Retellings" (Cybil, 2019)da Silva, Sara Graça, and Jamshid J Tehrani. “Comparative phylogenetic analyses uncover the ancient roots of Indo-European folktales.” Royal Society open science vol. 3,1 150645. 20 Jan. 2016,Other retellings:Omegaverse retellings Bleeding Red and Sullied Cinders by DE ChapmanThe Plated Prisoner series by Raven Kennedy (King Midas, but Midas isn't endgame)Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan (myth of Chang E)A Spindle Splintered by Alix Harrow (Sleeping Beauty)Anything by Madeleine Miller, Pat Barker, or Jennifer L Saint!#sasquatchexists

Episode 144 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Last Train to Clarksville" and the beginnings of the career of the Monkees, along with a short primer on the origins of the Vietnam War.  Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a seventeen-minute bonus episode available, on "These Boots Are Made For Walking" by Nancy Sinatra, which I mispronounce at the end of this episode as "These Boots Were Made For Walking", so no need to correct me here. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, all the songs excerpted in the podcast can be heard in full at Mixcloud. The best versions of the Monkees albums are the triple-CD super-deluxe versions that used to be available from monkees.com , and I've used Andrew Sandoval's liner notes for them extensively in this episode. Sadly, though, the only one of those that is still in print is More of the Monkees. For those just getting into the group, my advice is to start with this five-CD set, which contains their first five albums along with bonus tracks. The single biggest source of information I used in this episode is the first edition of Andrew Sandoval's The Monkees; The Day-By-Day Story. Sadly that is now out of print and goes for hundreds of pounds. Sandoval released a second edition of the book last year, which I was unfortunately unable to obtain, but that too is now out of print. If you can find a copy of either, do get one. Other sources used were Monkee Business by Eric Lefcowitz, and the autobiographies of three of the band members and one of the songwriters -- Infinite Tuesday by Michael Nesmith, They Made a Monkee Out of Me by Davy Jones, I'm a Believer by Micky Dolenz, and Psychedelic Bubble-Gum by Bobby Hart. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We've obviously talked in this podcast about several of the biggest hits of 1966 already, but we haven't mentioned the biggest hit of the year, one of the strangest records ever to make number one in the US -- "The Ballad of the Green Berets" by Sgt Barry Sadler: [Excerpt: Barry Sadler, "The Ballad of the Green Berets"] Barry Sadler was an altogether odd man, and just as a brief warning his story, which will last a minute or so, involves gun violence. At the time he wrote and recorded that song, he was on active duty in the military -- he was a combat medic who'd been fighting in the Vietnam War when he'd got a wound that had meant he had to be shipped back to the USA, and while at Fort Bragg he decided to write and record a song about his experiences, with the help of Robin Moore, a right-wing author of military books, both fiction and nonfiction, who wrote the books on which the films The Green Berets and The French Connection were based. Sadler's record became one of those massive fluke hits, selling over nine million copies and getting him appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show, but other than one top thirty hit, he never had another hit single. Instead, he tried and failed to have a TV career, then became a writer of pulp fiction himself, writing a series of twenty-one novels about the centurion who thrust his spear into Jesus' side when Jesus was being crucified, and is thus cursed to be a soldier until the second coming. He moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where he lived until he shot Lee Emerson, a country songwriter who had written songs for Marty Robbins, in the head, killing him, in an argument over a woman. He was sentenced to thirty days in jail for this misdemeanour, of which he served twenty-eight. Later he moved to Guatemala City, where he was himself shot in the head. The nearest Army base to Nashville, where Sadler lived after his discharge, is Fort Campbell, in Clarksville: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Last Train to Clarksville"] The Vietnam War was a long and complicated war, one which affected nearly everything we're going to see in the next year or so of this podcast, and we're going to talk about it a lot, so it's worth giving a little bit of background here. In doing so, I'm going to use quite a flippant tone, but I want to make it clear that I'm not mocking the very real horrors that people suffered in the wars I'm talking about -- it's just that to sum up multiple decades of unimaginable horrors in a few sentences requires glossing over so much that you have to either laugh or cry. The origin of the Vietnam War, as in so many things in twentieth century history, can be found in European colonialism. France had invaded much of Southeast Asia in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, and created a territory known as French Indo-China, which became part of the French colonial Empire. But in 1940 France was taken over by Germany, and Japan was at war with China. Germany and Japan were allies, and the Japanese were worried that French Indo-China would be used to import fuel and arms to China -- plus, they quite fancied the idea of having a Japanese empire. So Vichy France let Japan take control of French Indo-China. But of course the *reason* that France had been taken over by Germany was that pretty much the whole world was at war in 1940, and obviously the countries that were fighting Germany and Japan -- the bloc led by Britain, soon to be joined by America and Russia -- weren't very keen on the idea of Japan getting more territory. But they were also busy with the whole "fighting a world war" thing, so they did what governments in this situation always do -- they funded local guerilla insurgent fighters on the basis that "my enemy's enemy is my friend", something that has luckily never had any negative consequences whatsoever, except for occasionally. Those local guerilla fighters were an anti-imperialist popular front, the Việt Minh, led by Hồ Chí Minh, a revolutionary Communist. They were dedicated to overthrowing foreign imperialist occupiers and gaining independence for Vietnam, and Hồ Chí Minh further wanted to establish a Soviet-style Communist government in the newly-independent country. The Allies funded the Việt Minh in their fight against the Japanese occupiers until the end of the Second World War, at which point France was liberated from German occupation, Vietnam was liberated from Japanese occupation, and the French basically said "Hooray! We get our Empire back!", to which Hồ Chí Minh's response was, more or less, "what part of anti-imperialist Marxist dedicated to overthrowing foreign occupation of Vietnam did you not understand, exactly?" Obviously, the French weren't best pleased with this, and so began what was the first of a series of wars in the region. The First Indochina War lasted for years and ended in a negotiated peace of a sort. Of course, this led to the favoured tactic of the time, partition -- splitting a formerly-occupied country into two, at an arbitrary dividing line, a tactic which was notably successful in securing peace everywhere it was tried. Apart from Ireland, India, Korea, and a few other places, but surely it wouldn't be a problem in Vietnam, right? North Vietnam was controlled by the Communists, led by Hồ Chí Minh, and recognised by China and the USSR but not by the Western states. South Vietnam was nominally independent but led by the former puppet emperor who owed his position to France, soon replaced by a right-wing dictatorship. And both the right-wing dictatorship and the left-wing dictatorship were soon busily oppressing their own citizens and funding military opposition groups in the other country. This soon escalated into full-blown war, with the North backed by China and Russia and the South backed by America. This was one of a whole series of wars in small countries which were really proxy wars between the two major powers, the USA and the USSR, both of which were vying for control, but which couldn't confront each other directly because either country had enough nuclear weapons to destroy the whole world multiple times over. But the Vietnam War quickly became more than a small proxy war. The US started sending its own troops over, and more and more of them. The US had never ended the draft after World War II, and by the mid sixties significant numbers of young men were being called up and sent over to fight in a war that had by that point lasted a decade (depending on exactly when you count the war as starting from) between two countries they didn't care about, over things few of them understood, and at an exorbitant cost in lives. As you might imagine, this started to become unpopular among those likely to be drafted, and as the people most affected (other, of course, than the Vietnamese people, whose opinions on being bombed and shot at by foreigners supporting one of other of the dictators vying to rule over them nobody else was much interested in) were also of the generation who were the main audience for popular music, slowly this started to seep into the lyrics of songs -- a seepage which had already been prompted by the appearance in the folk and soul worlds of many songs against other horrors, like segregation. This started to hit the pop charts with songs like "The Universal Soldier" by Buffy Saint-Marie, which made the UK top five in a version by Donovan: [Excerpt: Donovan, "The Universal Soldier"] That charted in the lower regions of the US charts, and a cover version by Glen Campbell did slightly better: [Excerpt: Glen Campbell, "The Universal Soldier"] That was even though Campbell himself was a supporter of the war in Vietnam, and rather pro-military. Meanwhile, as we've seen a couple of times, Jan Berry of Jan and Dean recorded a pro-war answer song to that, "The Universal Coward": [Excerpt: Jan Berry, "The Universal Coward"] This, of course, was even though Berry was himself avoiding the draft. And I've not been able to find the credits for that track, but Glen Campbell regularly played guitar on Berry's sessions, so it's entirely possible that he played guitar on that record made by a coward, attacking his own record, which he disagreed with, for its cowardice. This is, of course, what happens when popular culture tries to engage with social and political issues -- pop culture is motivated by money, not ideological consistency, and so if there's money to be made from anti-war songs or from pro-war songs, someone will take that money. And so on October the ninth 1965, Billboard magazine ran a report: "Colpix Enters Protest Field HOLLYWOOD -Colpix has secured its first protest lyric disk, "The Willing Conscript,"as General Manager Bud Katzel initiates relationships with independent producers. The single features Lauren St. Davis. Katzel says the song was written during the Civil War, rewritten during World War I and most recently updated by Bob Krasnow and Sam Ashe. Screen Gems Music, the company's publishing wing, is tracing the song's history, Katzel said. Katzel's second single is "(You Got the Gamma Goochee" by an artist with that unusual stage name. The record is a Screen Gems production and was in the house when Katzel arrived one month ago. The executive said he was expressly looking for material for two contract artists, David Jones and Hoyt Axton. The company is also working on getting Axton a role in a television series, "Camp Runamuck." " To unpack this a little, Colpix was a record label, owned by Columbia Pictures, and we talked about that a little bit in the episode on "The Loco-Motion" -- the film and TV companies were getting into music, and Columbia had recently bought up Don Kirshner's Aldon publishing and Dimension Records as part of their strategy of tying in music with their TV shows. This is a company trying desperately to jump on a bandwagon -- Colpix at this time was not exactly having huge amounts of success with its records. Hoyt Axton, meanwhile, was a successful country singer and songwriter. We met his mother many episodes back -- Mae Axton was the writer of "Heartbreak Hotel". Axton himself is now best known as the dad in the 80s film Gremlins. David Jones will be coming up shortly. Bob Krasnow and Sam Ashe were record executives then at Kama Sutra records, but soon to move on -- we'll be hearing about Krasnow more in future episodes. Neither of them were songwriters, and while I have no real reason to disbelieve the claim that "The Willing Conscript" dates back to the Civil War, the earliest version *I* have been able to track down was its publication in issue 28 of Broadside Magazine in June 1963 -- nearly a hundred years after the American Civil War -- with the credit "by Tom Paxton" -- Paxton was a popular singer-songwriter of the time, and it certainly sounds like his writing. The first recording of it I know of was by Pete Seeger: [Excerpt: Pete Seeger, "The Willing Conscript"] But the odd thing is that by the time this was printed, the single had already been released the previous month, and it was not released under the name Lauren St Davis, or under the title "The Willing Conscript" -- there are precisely two differences between the song copyrighted as by Krasnow and Ashe and the one copyrighted two years earlier as by Paxton. One is that verses three and four are swapped round, the other is that it's now titled "The New Recruit". And presumably because they realised that the pseudonym "Lauren St. Davis" was trying just a bit too hard to sound cool and drug culture, they reverted to another stage name the performer had been using, Michael Blessing: [Excerpt: Michael Blessing, "The New Recruit"] Blessing's name was actually Michael Nesmith, and before we go any further, yes his mother, Bette Nesmith Graham, did invent the product that later became marketed in the US as Liquid Paper. At this time, though, that company wasn't anywhere near as successful as it later became, and was still a tiny company. I only mention it to forestall the ten thousand comments and tweets I would otherwise get asking why I didn't mention it. In Nesmith's autobiography, while he talks a lot about his mother, he barely mentions her business and says he was uninterested in it -- he talks far more about the love of art she instilled in him, as well as her interest in the deep questions of philosophy and religion, to which in her case and his they found answers in Christian Science, but both were interested in conversations about ideas, in a way that few other people in Nesmith's early environment were. Nesmith's mother was also responsible for his music career. He had spent two years in the Air Force in his late teens, and the year he got out, his mother and stepfather bought him a guitar for Christmas, after he was inspired by seeing Hoyt Axton performing live and thinking he could do that himself: [Excerpt: Hoyt Axton, "Greenback Dollar"] As he put it in his autobiography, "What did it matter that I couldn't play the guitar, couldn't sing very well, and didn't know any folk songs? I would be going to college and hanging out at the student union with pretty girls and singing folk songs. They would like me. I might even figure out a way to get a cool car." This is, of course, the thought process that pretty much every young man to pick up a guitar goes through, but Nesmith was more dedicated than most. He gave his first performance as a folk singer ten days after he first got a guitar, after practising the few chords in most folk songs for twelve hours a day every day in that time. He soon started performing as a folk singer, performing around Dallas both on his own and with his friend John London, performing the standard folk repertoire of Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly songs, things like "Pick a Bale of Cotton": [Excerpt: Michael Nesmith, "Pick a Bale of Cotton"] He also started writing his own songs, and put out a vanity record of one of them in 1963: [Excerpt: Mike Nesmith, "Wanderin'"] London moved to California, and Nesmith soon followed, with his first wife Phyllis and their son Christian. There Nesmith and London had the good fortune to be neighbours with someone who was a business associate of Frankie Laine, and they were signed to Laine's management company as a folk duo. However, Nesmith's real love was rock and roll, especially the heavier R&B end of the genre -- he was particularly inspired by Bo Diddley, and would always credit seeing Diddley live as a teenager as being his biggest musical influence. Soon Nesmith and London had formed a folk-rock trio with their friend Bill Sleeper. As Mike & John & Bill, they put out a single, "How Can You Kiss Me?", written by Nesmith: [Excerpt: Mike & John & Bill, "How Can You Kiss Me?"] They also recorded more of Nesmith's songs, like "All the King's Horses": [Excerpt: Mike & John & Bill, "All the King's Horses"] But that was left unreleased, as Bill was drafted, and Nesmith and London soon found themselves in The Survivors, one of several big folk groups run by Randy Sparks, the founder of the New Christie Minstrels. Nesmith was also writing songs throughout 1964 and 1965, and a few of those songs would be recorded by other people in 1966, like "Different Drum", which was recorded by the bluegrass band The Greenbriar Boys: [Excerpt: The Greenbriar Boys, "Different Drum"] That would more successfully be recorded by the Stone Poneys later of course. And Nesmith's "Mary Mary" was also picked up by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band: [Excerpt: The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, "Mary Mary"] But while Nesmith had written these songs by late 1965, he wasn't able to record them himself. He was signed by Bob Krasnow, who insisted he change his name to Michael Blessing, and recorded two singles for Colpix -- "The New Recruit", which we heard earlier, and a version of Buffy Saint-Marie's "Until It's Time For You To Go", sung in a high tenor range very far from Nesmith's normal singing voice: [Excerpt: Michael Blessing, "Until It's Time For You To Go"] But to my mind by far the best thing Nesmith recorded in this period is the unissued third Michael Blessing single, where Nesmith seems to have been given a chance to make the record he really wanted to make. The B-side, a version of Allen Toussaint's swamp-rocker "Get Out of My Life, Woman", is merely a quite good version of the song, but the A-side, a version of his idol Bo Diddley's classic "Who Do You Love?" is utterly extraordinary, and it's astonishing that it was never released at the time: [Excerpt: Michael Blessing, "Who Do You Love?"] But the Michael Blessing records did no better than anything else Colpix were putting out. Indeed, the only record they got onto the hot one hundred at all in a three and a half year period was a single by one David Jones, which reached the heady heights of number ninety-eight: [Excerpt: David Jones, "What Are We Going to Do?"] Jones had been brought up in extreme poverty in Openshaw in Manchester, but had been encouraged by his mother, who died when he was fourteen, to go into acting. He'd had a few parts on local radio, and had appeared as a child actor on TV shows made in Manchester, like appearing in the long-running soap opera Coronation Street (still on today) as Ena Sharples' grandson Colin: [Excerpt: Coronation St https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FDEvOs1imc , 13:30] He also had small roles in Z-Cars and Bill Naughton's TV play "June Evening", and a larger role in Keith Waterhouse's radio play "There is a Happy Land". But when he left school, he decided he was going to become a jockey rather than an actor -- he was always athletic, he loved horses, and he was short -- I've seen his height variously cited as five foot three and five foot four. But it turned out that the owner of the stables in which he was training had showbusiness connections, and got him the audition that changed his life, for the part of the Artful Dodger in Lionel Bart's West End musical Oliver! We've encountered Lionel Bart before a couple of times, but if you don't remember him, he was the songwriter who co-wrote Tommy Steele's hits, and who wrote "Living Doll" for Cliff Richard. He also discovered both Steele and Marty Wilde, and was one of the major figures in early British rock and roll. But after the Tommy Steele records, he'd turned his attention to stage musicals, writing book, music, and lyrics for a string of hits, and more-or-less singlehandedly inventing the modern British stage musical form -- something Andrew Lloyd Webber, for example, always credits him with. Oliver!, based on Oliver Twist, was his biggest success, and they were looking for a new Artful Dodger. This was *the* best role for a teenage boy in the UK at the time -- later performers to take the role on the London stage include Steve Marriott and Phil Collins, both of whom we'll no doubt encounter in future episodes -- and Jones got the job, although they were a bit worried at first about his Manchester vowels. He assured them though that he could learn to do a Cockney accent, and they took him on. Jones not having a natural Cockney accent ended up doing him the biggest favour of his career. While he could put on a relatively convincing one, he articulated quite carefully because it wasn't his natural accent. And so when the North American version found  in previews that their real Cockney Dodger wasn't being understood perfectly, the fake Cockney Jones was brought over to join the show on Broadway, and was there from opening night on. On February the ninth, 1964, Jones found himself, as part of the Broadway cast of Oliver!, on the Ed Sullivan Show: [Excerpt: Davy Jones and Georgia Brown, "I'd Do Anything"] That same night, there were some other British people, who got a little bit more attention than Jones did: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Want to Hold Your Hand (live on Ed Sullivan)"] Davy Jones wasn't a particular fan of pop music at that point, but he knew he liked what he saw, and he wanted some of the same reaction. Shortly after this, Jones was picked up for management by Ward Sylvester, of Columbia Pictures, who was going to groom Jones for stardom. Jones continued in Oliver! for a while, and also had a brief run in a touring version of Pickwick, another musical based on a Dickens novel, this time starring Harry Secombe, the British comedian and singer who had made his name with the Goon Show. Jones' first single, "Dream Girl", came out in early 1965: [Excerpt: Davy Jones, "Dream Girl"] It was unsuccessful, as was his one album, David Jones, which seemed to be aiming at the teen idol market, but failing miserably. The second single, "What Are  We Going to Do?" did make the very lowest regions of the Hot One Hundred, but the rest of the album was mostly attempts to sound a bit like Herman's Hermits -- a band whose lead singer, coincidentally, also came from Manchester, had appeared in Coronation Street, and was performing with a fake Cockney accent. Herman's Hermits had had a massive US hit with the old music hall song "I'm Henry VIII I Am": [Excerpt: Herman's Hermits, "I'm Henry VIII I Am"] So of course Davy had his own old music-hall song, "Any Old Iron": [Excerpt: Davy Jones, "Any Old Iron"] Also, the Turtles had recently had a hit with a folk-rock version of Dylan's "It Ain't Me Babe", and Davy cut his own version of their arrangement, in the one concession to rock music on the album: [Excerpt: Davy Jones, "It Ain't Me Babe"] The album was, unsurprisingly, completely unsuccessful, but Ward Sylvester was not disheartened. He had the perfect job for a young British teen idol who could sing and act. The Monkees was the brainchild of two young TV producers, Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, who had come up with the idea of doing a TV show very loosely based on the Beatles' film A Hard Day's Night (though Rafelson would later claim that he'd had the idea many years before A Hard Day's Night and was inspired by his youth touring with folk bands -- Schneider always admitted the true inspiration though). This was not a particularly original idea -- there were a whole bunch of people trying to make TV shows based in some way around bands. Jan and Dean were working on a possible TV series, there was talk of a TV series starring The Who, there was a Beatles cartoon series, Hanna-Barbera were working on a cartoon series about a band called The Bats, and there was even another show proposed to Screen Gems, Columbia's TV department, titled Liverpool USA, which was meant to star Davy Jones, another British performer, and two American musicians, and to have songs provided by Don Kirshner's songwriters. That The Monkees, rather than these other series, was the one that made it to the TV (though obviously the Beatles cartoon series did too) is largely because Rafelson and Schneider's independent production company, Raybert, which they had started after leaving Screen Gems, was given two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars to develop the series by their former colleague, Screen Gems' vice president in charge of programme development, the former child star Jackie Cooper. Of course, as well as being their former colleague, Cooper may have had some more incentive to give Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider that money in that the head of Columbia Pictures, and thus Cooper's boss' boss, was one Abe Schneider. The original idea for the show was to use the Lovin' Spoonful, but as we heard last week they weren't too keen, and it was quickly decided instead that the production team would put together a group of performers. Davy Jones was immediately attached to the project, although Rafelson was uncomfortable with Jones, thinking he wasn't as rock and roll as Rafelson was hoping for -- he later conceded, though, that Jones was absolutely right for the group. As for everyone else, to start with Rafelson and Schneider placed an ad in a couple of the trade papers which read "Madness!! Auditions Folk and Roll Musicians-Singers for acting roles in new TV series. Running parts for 4 insane boys ages 17-21. Want spirited Ben Frank's types. Have courage to work. Must come down for interview" There were a couple of dogwhistles in there, to appeal to the hip crowd -- Ben Frank's was a twenty-four-hour restaurant on the Sunset Strip, where people including Frank Zappa and Jim Morrison used to hang out, and which was very much associated with the freak scene we've looked at in episodes on Zappa and the Byrds. Meanwhile "Must come down for interview" was meant to emphasise that you couldn't actually be high when you turned up -- but you were expected to be the kind of person who would at least at some points have been high. A lot of people answered that ad -- including Paul Williams, Harry Nilsson, Van Dyke Parks, and many more we'll be seeing along the way. But oddly, the only person actually signed up for the show because of that ad was Michael Nesmith -- who was already signed to Colpix Records anyway. According to Davy Jones, who was sitting in at the auditions, Schneider and Rafelson were deliberately trying to disorient the auditioners with provocative behaviour like just ignoring them, to see how they'd react. Nesmith was completely unfazed by this, and apparently walked in wearing a  green wool hat and carrying a bag of laundry, saying that he needed to get this over with quickly so he could go and do his washing. John London, who came along to the audition as well, talked later about seeing Nesmith fill in a questionnaire that everyone had to fill in -- in a space asking about previous experience Nesmith just wrote "Life" and drew a big diagonal line across the rest of the page. That attitude certainly comes across in Nesmith's screen test: [Excerpt: Michael Nesmith screen test] Meanwhile, Rafelson and Schneider were also scouring the clubs for performers who might be useful, and put together a shortlist of people including Jerry Yester and Chip Douglas of the Modern Folk Quartet, Bill Chadwick, who was in the Survivors with Nesmith and London, and one Micky Braddock, whose agent they got in touch with and who was soon signed up. Braddock was the stage name of Micky Dolenz, who soon reverted to his birth surname, and it's the name by which he went in his first bout of fame. Dolenz was the son of two moderately successful Hollywood actors, George Dolenz and Janelle Johnson, and their connections had led to Dolenz, as Braddock, getting the lead role in the 1958 TV series Circus Boy, about a child named Corky who works in a circus looking after an elephant after his parents, the Flying Falcons, were killed in a trapeze accident. [Excerpt: Circus Boy, "I can't play a drum"] Oddly, one of the other people who had been considered for that role was Paul Williams, who was also considered for the Monkees but ultimately turned down, and would later write one of the Monkees' last singles. Dolenz had had a few minor TV appearances after that series had ended, including a recurring role on Peyton Place, but he had also started to get interested in music. He'd performed a bit as a folk duo with his sister Coco, and had also been the lead singer of a band called Micky and the One-Nighters, who later changed their name to the Missing Links, who'd played mostly covers of Little Richard and Chuck Berry songs and later British Invasion hits. He'd also recorded two tracks with Wrecking Crew backing, although neither track got released until after his later fame -- "Don't Do It": [Excerpt: Micky Dolenz, "Don't Do It"] and "Huff Puff": [Excerpt: Micky Dolenz, "Huff Puff"] Dolenz had a great singing voice, an irrepressible personality, and plenty of TV experience. He was obviously in. Rafelson and Schneider took quite a while whittling down the shortlist to the final four, and they *were* still considering people who'd applied through the ads. One they actually offered the role to was Stephen Stills, but he decided not to take the role. When he turned the role down, they asked if he knew anyone else who had a similar appearance to him, and as it happened he did. Steve Stills and Peter Tork had known of each other before they actually met on the streets of Greenwich Village -- the way they both told the story, on their first meeting they'd each approached the other and said "You must be the guy everyone says looks like me!" The two had become fast friends, and had played around the Greenwich Village folk scene together for a while, before going their separate ways -- Stills moving to California while Tork joined another of those big folk ensembles of the New Christie Minstrels type, this one called the Phoenix Singers. Tork had later moved to California himself, and reconnected with his old friend, and they had performed together for a while in a trio called the Buffalo Fish, with Tork playing various instruments, singing, and doing comedy bits. Oddly, while Tork was the member of the Monkees with the most experience as a musician, he was the only one who hadn't made a record when the TV show was put together. But he was by far the most skilled instrumentalist of the group -- as distinct from best musician, a distinction Tork was always scrupulous about making -- and could play guitar, bass, and keyboards, all to a high standard -- and I've also seen him in more recent years play French horn live. His great love, though, was the banjo, and you can hear how he must have sounded on the Greenwich Village folk scene in his solo spots on Monkees shows, where he would show off his banjo skills: [Excerpt: Peter Tork, "Cripple Creek"] Tork wouldn't get to use his instrumental skills much at first though, as most of the backing tracks for the group's records were going to be performed by other people. More impressive for the TV series producers was his gift for comedy, especially physical comedy -- having seen Tork perform live a few times, the only comparison I can make to his physical presence is to Harpo Marx, which is about as high a compliment as one can give. Indeed, Micky Dolenz has often pointed out that while there were intentional parallels to the Beatles in the casting of the group, the Marx Brothers are a far better parallel, and it's certainly easy to see Tork as Harpo, Dolenz as Chico, Nesmith as Groucho, and Jones as Zeppo. (This sounds like an insult to Jones, unless you're aware of how much the Marx Brothers films actually depended on Zeppo as the connective tissue between the more outrageous brothers and the more normal environment they were operating in, and how much the later films suffered for the lack of Zeppo). The new cast worked well together, even though there were obvious disagreements between them right from the start. Dolenz, at least at this point, seems to have been the gel that held the four together -- he had the experience of being a child star in common with Jones, he was a habitue of the Sunset Strip clubs where Nesmith and Tork had been hanging out, and he had personality traits in common with all of them. Notably, in later years, Dolenz would do duo tours with each of his three bandmates without the participation of the others. The others, though, didn't get on so well with each other. Jones and Tork seem to have got on OK, but they were very different people -- Jones was a showbiz entertainer, whose primary concern was that none of the other stars of the show be better looking than him, while Tork was later self-diagnosed as neurodivergent, a folkie proto-hippie who wanted to drift from town to town playing his banjo. Tork and Nesmith had similar backgrounds and attitudes in some respects -- and were united in their desire to have more musical input into the show than was originally intended -- but they were such different personalities in every aspect of their lives from their religious views to their politics to their taste in music they came into conflict. Nesmith would later say of Tork "I never liked Peter, he never liked me. So we had an uneasy truce between the two of us. As clear as I could tell, among his peers he was very well liked. But we rarely had a civil word to say to each other". Nesmith also didn't get on well with Jones, both of them seeming to view themselves as the natural leader of the group, with all the clashes that entails. The four Monkees were assigned instruments for their characters based not on instrumental skill, but on what suited their roles better. Jones was the teen idol character, so he was made the maraca-playing frontman who could dance without having to play an instrument, though Dolenz took far more of the lead vocals. Nesmith was made the guitarist, while Tork was put on bass, though Tork was by far the better guitarist of the two. And Dolenz was put on drums, even though he didn't play the drums -- Tork would always say later that if the roles had been allocated by actual playing ability, Jones would have been the drummer. Dolenz did, though, become a good drummer, if a rather idiosyncratic one. Tork would later say "Micky played the drums but Mike kept time, on that one record we all made, Headquarters. Mike was the timekeeper. I don't know that Micky relied on him but Mike had a much stronger sense of time. And Davy too, Davy has a much stronger sense of time. Micky played the drums like they were a musical instrument, as a colour. He played the drum colour.... as a band, there was a drummer and there was a timekeeper and they were different people." But at first, while the group were practising their instruments so they could mime convincingly on the TV and make personal appearances, they didn't need to play on their records. Indeed, on the initial pilot, they didn't even sing -- the recordings had been made before the cast had been finalised: [Excerpt: Boyce & Hart, "Monkees Theme (pilot version)"] The music was instead performed by two songwriters, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, who would become hugely important in the Monkees project. Boyce and Hart were not the first choice for the project. Don Kirshner, the head of Screen Gems Music, had initially suggested Roger Atkins, a Brill Building songwriter working for his company, as the main songwriter for The Monkees. Atkins is best known for writing "It's My Life", a hit for the Animals: [Excerpt: The Animals, "It's My Life"] But Atkins didn't work out, though he would collaborate later on one song with Nesmith, and reading between the lines, it seems that there was some corporate infighting going on, though I've not seen it stated in so many words. There seems to have been a turf war between Don Kirshner, the head of Screen Gems' music publishing, who was based in the Brill Building, and Lester Sill, the West Coast executive we've seen so many times before, the mentor to Leiber and Stoller, Duane Eddy, and Phil Spector, who was now the head of Screen Gems music on the West Coast. It also seems to be the case that none of the top Brill Building songwriters were all that keen on being involved at this point -- writing songs for an unsold TV pilot wasn't exactly a plum gig. Sill ended up working closely with the TV people, and it seems to have been him who put forward Boyce and Hart, a songwriting team he was mentoring. Boyce and Hart had been working in the music industry for years, both together and separately, and had had some success, though they weren't one of the top-tier songwriting teams like Goffin and King. They'd both started as performers -- Boyce's first single, "Betty Jean", had come out in 1958: [Excerpt: Tommy Boyce, "Betty Jean"] And Hart's, "Love Whatcha Doin' to Me", under his birth name Robert Harshman, a year later: [Excerpt: Robert Harshman, "Love Whatcha Doin' to Me"] Boyce had been the first one to have real songwriting success, writing Fats Domino's top ten hit "Be My Guest" in 1959: [Excerpt: Fats Domino, "Be My Guest"] and cowriting two songs with singer Curtis Lee, both of which became singles produced by Phil Spector -- "Under the Moon of Love" and the top ten hit "Pretty Little Angel Eyes": [Excerpt: Curtis Lee, "Pretty Little Angel Eyes"] Boyce and Hart together, along with Wes Farrell, who had co-written "Twist and Shout" with Bert Berns, wrote "Lazy Elsie Molly" for Chubby Checker, and the number three hit "Come a Little Bit Closer" for Jay and the Americans: [Excerpt: Jay and the Americans, "Come a Little Bit Closer"] At this point they were both working in the Brill Building, but then Boyce moved to the West Coast, where he was paired with Steve Venet, the brother of Nik Venet, and they co-wrote and produced "Peaches and Cream" for the Ikettes: [Excerpt: The Ikettes, "Peaches and Cream"] Hart, meanwhile, was playing in the band of Teddy Randazzo, the accordion-playing singer who had appeared in The Girl Can't Help It, and with Randazzo and Bobby Weinstein he wrote "Hurts So Bad", which became a big hit for Little Anthony and the Imperials: [Excerpt: Little Anthony and the Imperials, "Hurts So Bad"] But Hart soon moved over to the West Coast, where he joined his old partner Boyce, who had been busy writing TV themes with Venet for shows like "Where the Action Is". Hart soon replaced Venet in the team, and the two soon wrote what would become undoubtedly their most famous piece of music ever, a theme tune that generations of TV viewers would grow to remember: [Excerpt: "Theme from Days of Our Lives"] Well, what did you *think* I meant? Yes, just as Davy Jones had starred in an early episode of Britain's longest-running soap opera, one that's still running today, so Boyce and Hart wrote the theme music for *America's* longest-running soap opera, which has been running every weekday since 1965, and has so far aired well in excess of fourteen thousand episodes. Meanwhile, Hart had started performing in a band called the Candy Store Prophets, with Larry Taylor  -- who we last saw with the Gamblers, playing on "LSD-25" and "Moon Dawg" -- on bass, Gerry McGee on guitar, and Billy Lewis on drums. It was this band that Boyce and Hart used -- augmented by session guitarists Wayne Erwin and Louie Shelton and Wrecking Crew percussionist Gene Estes on tambourine, plus Boyce and session singer Ron Hicklin on backing vocals, to record first the demos and then the actual tracks that would become the Monkees hits. They had a couple of songs already that would be suitable for the pilot episode, but they needed something that would be usable as a theme song for the TV show. Boyce and Hart's usual working method was to write off another hit -- they'd try to replicate the hook or the feel or the basic sound of something that was already popular. In this case, they took inspiration from the song "Catch Us If You Can", the theme from the film that was the Dave Clark Five's attempt at their own A Hard Day's Night: [Excerpt: The Dave Clark Five, "Catch Us If You Can"] Boyce and Hart turned that idea into what would become the Monkees theme. We heard their performance of it earlier of course, but when the TV show finally came out, it was rerecorded with Dolenz singing: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Monkees Theme"] For a while, Boyce and Hart hoped that they would get to perform all the music for the TV show, and there was even apparently some vague talk of them being cast in it, but it was quickly decided that they would just be songwriters. Originally, the intent was that they wouldn't even produce the records, that instead the production would be done by a name producer. Micky Most, the Animals' producer, was sounded out for the role but wasn't interested. Snuff Garrett was brought in, but quickly discovered he didn't get on with the group at all -- in particular, they were all annoyed at the idea that Davy would be the sole lead vocalist, and the tracks Garrett cut with Davy on lead and the Wrecking Crew backing were scrapped. Instead, it was decided that Boyce and Hart would produce most of the tracks, initially with the help of the more experienced Jack Keller, and that they would only work with one Monkee at a time to minimise disruption -- usually Micky and sometimes Davy. These records would be made the same way as the demos had been, by the same set of musicians, just with one of the Monkees taking the lead. Meanwhile, as Nesmith was seriously interested in writing and production, and Rafelson and Schneider wanted to encourage the cast members, he was also assigned to write and produce songs for the show. Unlike Boyce and Hart, Nesmith wanted to use his bandmates' talents -- partly as a way of winning them over, as it was already becoming clear that the show would involve several competing factions. Nesmith's songs were mostly country-rock tracks that weren't considered suitable as singles, but they would be used on the TV show and as album tracks, and on Nesmith's songs Dolenz and Tork would sing backing vocals, and Tork would join the Wrecking Crew as an extra guitarist -- though he was well aware that his part on records like "Sweet Young Thing" wasn't strictly necessary when Glen Campbell, James Burton, Al Casey and Mike Deasy were also playing guitar: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Sweet Young Thing"] That track was written by Nesmith with Goffin and King, and there seems to have been some effort to pair Nesmith, early on, with more commercial songwriters, though this soon fell by the wayside and Nesmith was allowed to keep making his own idiosyncratic records off to the side while Boyce and Hart got on with making the more commercial records. This was not, incidentally, something that most of the stars of the show objected to or even thought was a problem at the time. Tork was rather upset that he wasn't getting to have much involvement with the direction of the music, as he'd thought he was being employed as a musician, but Dolenz and Jones were actors first and foremost, while Nesmith was happily making his own tracks. They'd all known going in that most of the music for the show would be created by other people -- there were going to be two songs every episode, and there was no way that four people could write and record that much material themselves while also performing in a half-hour comedy show every week. Assuming, of course, that the show even aired. Initial audience response to the pilot was tepid at best, and it looked for a while like the show wasn't going to be green-lit. But Rafelson and Schneider -- and director James Frawley who played a crucial role in developing the show -- recut the pilot, cutting out one character altogether -- a manager who acted as an adult supervisor -- and adding in excerpts of the audition tapes, showing the real characters of some of the actors. As three of the four were playing characters loosely based on themselves -- Peter's "dummy" character wasn't anything like he was in real life, but was like the comedy character he'd developed in his folk-club performances -- this helped draw the audience in. It also, though, contributed to some line-blurring that became a problem. The re-edited pilot was a success, and the series sold. Indeed, the new format for the series was a unique one that had never been done on TV before -- it was a sitcom about four young men living together, without any older adult supervision, getting into improbable adventures, and with one or two semi-improvised "romps", inspired by silent slapstick, over which played original songs. This became strangely influential in British sitcom when the series came out over here  -- two of the most important sitcoms of the next couple of decades, The Goodies and The Young Ones, are very clearly influenced by the Monkees. And before the broadcast of the first episode, they were going to release a single to promote it. The song chosen as the first single was one Boyce and Hart had written, inspired by the Beatles. Specifically inspired by this: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] Hart heard that tag on the radio, and thought that the Beatles were singing "take the last train". When he heard the song again the next day and realised that the song had nothing to do with trains, he and Boyce sat down and wrote their own song inspired by his mishearing. "Last Train to Clarksville" is structured very, very, similarly to "Paperback Writer" -- both of them stay on one chord, a G7, for an eight-bar verse before changing to C7 for a chorus line -- the word "writer" for the Beatles, the "no no no" (inspired by the Beatles "yeah yeah yeah") for the Monkees. To show how close the parallels are, I've sped up the vocals from the Beatles track slightly to match the tempo with a karaoke backing track version of "Last Train to Clarksville" I found, and put the two together: [Excerpt: "Paperback Clarksville"] Lyrically, there was one inspiration I will talk about in a minute, but I think I've identified another inspiration that nobody has ever mentioned. The classic country song "Night Train to Memphis", co-written by Owen Bradley, and made famous by Roy Acuff, has some slight melodic similarity to "Last Train to Clarksville", and parallels the lyrics fairly closely -- "take the night train to Memphis" against "take the last train to Clarksville", both towns in Tennessee, and "when you arrive at the station, I'll be right there to meet you I'll be right there to greet you, So don't turn down my invitation" is clearly close to "and I'll meet you at the station, you can be here by 4:30 'cos I've made your reservation": [Excerpt: Roy Acuff, "Night Train to Memphis"] Interestingly, in May 1966, the same month that "Paperback Writer" was released, and so presumably the time that Hart heard the song on the radio for the first time, Rick Nelson, the teen idol formerly known as Ricky Nelson, who had started his own career as a performer in a sitcom, had released an album called Bright Lights and Country Music. He'd had a bit of a career downslump and was changing musical direction, and recording country songs. The last track on that album was a version of "Night Train to Memphis": [Excerpt: Rick Nelson, "Night Train to Memphis"] Now, I've never seen either Boyce or Hart ever mention even hearing that song, it's pure speculation on my part that there's any connection there at all, but I thought the similarity worth mentioning. The idea of the lyric, though, was to make a very mild statement about the Vietnam War. Clarksville was, as mentioned earlier, the site of Fort Campbell, a military training base, and they crafted a story about a young soldier being shipped off to war, calling his girlfriend to come and see him for one last night. This is left more-or-less ambiguous -- this was a song being written for a TV show intended for children, after all -- but it's still very clear on the line "and I don't know if I'm ever coming home". Now, Boyce and Hart were songwriters first and foremost, and as producers they were quite hands-off and would let the musicians shape the arrangements. They knew they wanted a guitar riff in the style of the Beatles' recent singles, and Louie Shelton came up with one based around the G7 chord that forms the basis of the song, starting with an octave leap: Shelton's riff became the hook that drove the record, and engineer Dave Hassinger added the final touch, manually raising the volume on the hi-hat mic for a fraction of a second every bar, creating a drum sound like a hissing steam brake: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Last Train to Clarksville"] Now all that was needed was to get the lead vocals down. But Micky Dolenz was tired, and hungry, and overworked -- both Dolenz and Jones in their separate autobiographies talk about how it was normal for them to only get three hours' sleep a night between working twelve hour days filming the series, three-hour recording sessions, and publicity commitments. He got the verses down fine, but he just couldn't sing the middle eight. Boyce and Hart had written a complicated, multisyllabic, patter bridge, and he just couldn't get his tongue around that many syllables when he was that tired. He eventually asked if he could just sing "do do do" instead of the words, and the producers agreed. Surprisingly, it worked: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Last Train to Clarksville"] "Last Train to Clarksville" was released in advance of the TV series, on a new label, Colgems, set up especially for the Monkees to replace Colpix, with a better distribution deal, and it went to number one. The TV show started out with mediocre ratings, but soon that too became a hit. And so did the first album released from the TV series. And that album was where some of the problems really started. The album itself was fine -- ten tracks produced by Boyce and Hart with the Candy Store Prophets playing and either Micky or Davy singing, mostly songs Boyce and Hart wrote, with a couple of numbers by Goffin and King and other Kirshner staff songwriters, plus two songs produced by Nesmith with the Wrecking Crew, and with token participation from Tork and Dolenz. The problem was the back cover, which gave little potted descriptions of each of them, with their height, eye colour, and so on. And under three of them it said "plays guitar and sings", while under Dolenz it said "plays drums and sings". Now this was technically accurate -- they all did play those instruments. They just didn't play them on the record, which was clearly the impression the cover was intended to give. Nesmith in particular was incandescent. He believed that people watching the TV show understood that the group weren't really performing that music, any more than Adam West was really fighting crime or William Shatner travelling through space. But crediting them on the record was, he felt, crossing a line into something close to con artistry. To make matters worse, success was bringing more people trying to have a say. Where before, the Monkees had been an irrelevance, left to a couple of B-list producer-songwriters on the West Coast, now they were a guaranteed hit factory, and every songwriter working for Kirshner wanted to write and produce for them -- which made sense because of the sheer quantity of material they needed for the TV show, but it made for a bigger, less democratic, organisation -- one in which Kirshner was suddenly in far more control. Suddenly as well as Boyce and Hart with the Candy Store Prophets and Nesmith with the Wrecking Crew, both of whom had been operating without much oversight from Kirshner, there were a bunch of tracks being cut on the East Coast by songwriting and production teams like Goffin and King, and Neil Sedaka and Carole Bayer. On the second Monkees album, released only a few months after the first, there were nine producers credited -- as well as Boyce, Hart, Jack Keller, and Nesmith, there were now also Goffin, King, Sedaka, Bayer, and Jeff Barry, who as well as cutting tracks on the east coast was also flying over to the West Coast, cutting more tracks with the Wrecking Crew, and producing vocal sessions while there. As well as producing songs he'd written himself, Barry was also supervising songs written by other people. One of those was a new songwriter he'd recently discovered and been co-producing for Bang Records, Neil Diamond, who had just had a big hit of his own with "Cherry Cherry": [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "Cherry Cherry"] Diamond was signed with Screen Gems, and had written a song which Barry thought would be perfect for the Monkees, an uptempo song called "I'm a Believer", which he'd demoed with the regular Bang musicians -- top East Coast session players like Al Gorgoni, the guitarist who'd played on "The Sound of Silence": [Excerpt: Neil Diamond, "I'm a Believer"] Barry had cut a backing track for the Monkees using those same musicians, including Diamond on acoustic guitar, and brought it over to LA. And that track would indirectly lead to the first big crisis for the group. Barry, unlike Boyce and Hart, was interested in working with the whole group, and played all of them the backing track. Nesmith's reaction was a blunt "I'm a producer too, and that ain't no hit". He liked the song -- he wanted to have a go at producing a track on it himself, as it happened -- but he didn't think the backing track worked. Barry, trying to lighten the mood, joked that it wasn't finished and you needed to imagine it with strings and horns. Unfortunately, Nesmith didn't get that he was joking, and started talking about how that might indeed make a difference -- at which point everyone laughed and Nesmith took it badly -- his relationship with Barry quickly soured. Nesmith was getting increasingly dissatisfied with the way his songs and his productions were being sidelined, and was generally getting unhappy, and Tork was wanting more musical input too. They'd been talking with Rafelson and Schneider, who'd agreed that the group were now good enough on their instruments that they could start recording some tracks by themselves, an idea which Kirshner loathed. But for now they were recording Neil Diamond's song to Jeff Barry's backing track. Given that Nesmith liked the song, and given that he had some slight vocal resemblance to Diamond, the group suggested that Nesmith be given the lead vocal, and Kirshner and Barry agreed, although Kirshner at least apparently always intended for Dolenz to sing lead, and was just trying to pacify Nesmith. In the studio, Kirshner kept criticising Nesmith's vocal, and telling him he was doing it wrong, until eventually he stormed out, and Kirshner got what he wanted -- another Monkees hit with Micky Dolenz on lead, though this time it did at least have Jones and Tork on backing vocals: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "I'm a Believer"] That was released on November 23rd, 1966, as their second single, and became their second number one. And in January 1967, the group's second album, More of the Monkees, was released. That too went to number one. There was only one problem. The group weren't even told about the album coming out beforehand -- they had to buy their own copies from a record shop to even see what tracks were on it. Nesmith had his two tracks, but even Boyce and Hart were only given two, with the rest of the album being made up of tracks from the Brill Building songwriters Kirshner preferred. Lots of great Nesmith and Boyce and Hart tracks were left off the album in favour of some astonishingly weak material, including the two worst tracks the group ever recorded, "The Day We Fall in Love" and "Laugh", and a novelty song they found embarrassing, "Your Auntie Grizelda", included to give Tork a vocal spot. Nesmith called it "probably the worst album in the history of the world", though in truth seven of the twelve tracks are really very strong, though some of the other material is pretty poor. The group were also annoyed by the packaging. The liner notes were by Don Kirshner, and read to the group at least like a celebration of Kirshner himself as the one person responsible for everything on the record. Even the photo was an embarrassment -- the group had taken a series of photos in clothes from the department store J. C. Penney as part of an advertising campaign, and the group thought the clothes were ridiculous, but one of those photos was the one chosen for the cover. Nesmith and Tork made a decision, which the other two agreed to with varying degrees of willingness. They'd been fine miming to other people's records when it was clearly just for a TV show. But if they were being promoted as a real band, and having to go on tour promoting albums credited to them, they were going to *be* a real band, and take some responsibility for the music that was being put out in their name.  With the support of Rafelson and Schneider, they started making preparations to do just that. But Don Kirshner had other ideas, and told them so in no uncertain terms. As far as he was concerned, they were a bunch of ungrateful, spoiled, kids who were very happy cashing the ridiculously large cheques they were getting, but now wanted to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. They were going to keep doing what they were told. Things came to a head in a business meeting in January 1967, when Nesmith gave an ultimatum. Either the group got to start playing on their own records, or he was quitting. Herb Moelis, Kirshner's lawyer, told Nesmith that he should read his contract more carefully, at which point Nesmith got up, punched a hole in the wall of the hotel suite they were in, and told Moelis "That could have been your face". So as 1967 began, the group were at a turning point. Would they be able to cut the puppet strings, or would they have to keep living a lie? We'll find out in a few weeks' time...

On episode 22 I do a little check in with my first ever guest… Jenn from The Book Refuge!The Book Refuge Merch Shop… my-store-b94533.creator-spring.comJenn's Amazon Storefront… www.amazon.com/shop/thebookrefugeJenn on YouTube… https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxV4h6pmpKH53gkj4-iERtAJenn on Instagram… https://www.instagram.com/jennmarsh18/Jenn on GoodReads… https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/14949982-jenn-the-book-refugeJenn's Channel Memberships… https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxV4...Jenn's Discord… https://discord.gg/Np52QF8DVaJenn's LinkTree… https://linktr.ee/TheBookRefugeJenn's Literary Enchantments Discount Code… Jenn10Books Mentioned:Never Seduce a Scot… https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13360101-never-seduce-a-scot?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=Q96n8KEGLm&rank=1Annie's Song… https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/659600.Annie_s_Song?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=BqfJfjLTWX&rank=1Secrets of a Summer Night… https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/114162.Secrets_of_a_Summer_Night?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=qeEtce6aLS&rank=1Carnal Urges… https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57101782-carnal-urges?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=40rxiY5X1E&rank=1Morning Glory… https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/987577.Morning_Glory?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=R36t9WLXvq&rank=1Psycho… https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58470435-psychoUntouchable… https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40660802-untouchable?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=XOn5BN0u7n&rank=1First In… https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53267419-first-in?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=jgAbd54YSY&rank=1It Ain't Me Babe… https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22020052-it-ain-t-me-babe?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=J6lTqqThBe&rank=1Deliver… https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20931902-deliver

Tidligere i år og 2020 udkom der fire nye album, Johnny Cash, Forever Words Expanded med ny musik til gamle digte og tekster af Johnny Cash. POVs musikredaktør Jan Eriksen blev så begejstret for disse album, at han kontaktede en af Danmarks største Johnny Cash-entusiaster. Dennis Greis Lydom, der holder foredrag og optræder med Cash-musik. Resultatet af denne podcast, hvor de tager på vandring ned gennem de seks American Recordings album, der udkom i den sene del af Cash's karriere.  De to sidste udkom efter Johnny Cash's død i 2003. Efter musikpodcasten Mediano Music er blevet en del af POV hedder det fremover Mediano Music POVcast. I 1969 udgav Johnny Cash albummet At San Quentin, der blev det mest solgte album det år - i hele verden. 20 år senere var Johnny Cash på mange måder rangeret ud på et sidespor i sin karriere og til dels også menneskeligt. Godt nok havde han fundet sin gud og var kommet clean ud af sin misbrugsbehandling i 1983, men det kneb indimellem med at holde sig på stien. Efter sin anden fyring, denne gang fra selskabet Mercury, sang Cash Bob Dylans "It Ain't Me Babe" under en hyldestkoncert til den gamle ven, som Cash bl.a. havde indspillet sammen med på Dylans Nashville Skyline. Da pladeselskabsmanden Rick Rubin overværede koncerten, opstod der en drøm i ham. En drøm om at give Johnny Cash den respekt og de sange, han som en af de tidlige rockpionerer havde fortjent. Den var Cash helt med på, faktisk havde han en liste med 100 sange, som han godt kunne tænke sig at indspille. Så de mødtes og begyndte at indspille i Rubins stue. Resten er musikhistorie. Nu også fortalt i denne POVcast: På grund af en fejl i en ellers helt nyindkøbt mikser er lyden lidt ulden, men kan sagtens høres. Det beklager vi. Og så skal det tilføjes at The Class of '55, 'de fire vise mænd', som Jan Eriksen nævner i podcasten, er Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison og Johnny Cash. Nogle gange kan de ske, at det løber af med nørder, når de får talt sig varme. American Recordings American II: Unchained American III: Solitary Man American IV: The Man Comes Around American V: A Hundred Highways American VI: Ain't No Grave

NOTE: This episode went up before the allegations about Dylan, in a lawsuit filed on Friday, were made public on Monday night. Had I been aware of them, I would at least have commented at the beginning of the episode. Episode one hundred and thirty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Like a Rolling Stone" by Bob Dylan, and the 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 ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Hold What You've Got" by Joe Tex. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Erratum A couple of times I refer to “CBS”. Dylan's label in the US was Columbia Records, a subsidiary of CBS Inc, but in the rest of the world the label traded as “CBS Records”. I should probably have used “Columbia” throughout... Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Dylan. Much of the information in this episode comes from 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. I've used these books for all the episodes involving Dylan: 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. The New Yorker article by Nat Hentoff I talk about is here. And for the information about the writing of "Like a Rolling Stone", I relied on yet another book by Heylin, All the Madmen. Dylan's albums up to 1967 can all be found in their original mono mixes on this box set. And Dylan's performances at Newport from 1963 through 1965 are on this DVD. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There's a story that everyone tells about Bob Dylan in 1965, the story that has entered into legend. It's the story that you'll see in most of the biographies of him, and in all those coffee-table histories of rock music put out by glossy music magazines. Bob Dylan, in this story, was part of the square, boring, folk scene until he plugged in an electric guitar and just blew the minds of all those squares, who immediately ostracised him forever for being a Judas and betraying their traditionalist acoustic music, but he was just too cool and too much of a rebel to be bound by their rules, man. Pete Seeger even got an axe and tried to cut his way through the cables of the amplifiers, he was so offended by the desecration of the Newport Folk Festival. And like all these stories, it's an oversimplification but there's an element of truth to it too. So today, we're going to look at what actually happened when Dylan went electric. We're going to look at what led to him going electric, and at the truth behind the legend of Seeger's axe. And we're going to look at the masterpiece at the centre of it all, a record that changed rock songwriting forever. We're going to look at Bob Dylan and "Like a Rolling Stone": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"] While we've seen Dylan turn up in all sorts of episodes -- most recently the episode on "Mr. Tambourine Man", the last time we looked at him in detail was in the episode on "Blowin' in the Wind", and when we left him there he had just recorded his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, but it had not yet been released. As we'll see, Dylan was always an artist who moved on very quickly from what he'd been doing before, and that had started as early as that album. While his first album, produced by John Hammond, had been made up almost entirely of traditional songs and songs he'd learned from Dave van Ronk or Eric von Schmidt, with only two originals, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan had started out being produced by Hammond, but as Hammond and Dylan's manager Albert Grossman had come to find it difficult to work together, the last few tracks had been produced by Tom Wilson. We've mentioned Wilson briefly a couple of times already, but to reiterate, Wilson was a Black Harvard graduate and political conservative whose background was in jazz and who had no knowledge of or love for folk music. But Wilson saw two things in Dylan -- the undeniable power of his lyrics, and his vocals, which Wilson compared to Ray Charles. Wilson wanted to move Dylan towards working with a backing band, and this was something that Dylan was interested in doing, but his first experiment with that, with John Hammond, hadn't been a particular success. Dylan had recorded a single backed with a band -- "Mixed-Up Confusion", backed with "Corrina, Corrina", a version of an old song that had been recorded by both Bob Wills and Big Joe Turner, but had recently been brought back to the public mind by a version Phil Spector had produced for Ray Peterson. Dylan's version of that song had a country lope and occasional breaks into Jimmie Rodgers style keening that foreshadow his work of the late sixties: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Corrina, Corrina (single version)"] A different take of that track was included on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, an album that was made up almost entirely of originals. Those originals fell into roughly two types -- there were songs like "Masters of War", "Blowin' in the Wind", and "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" which dealt in some way with the political events of the time -- the fear of nuclear war, the ongoing conflict in Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement and more -- but did so in an elliptical, poetic way; and there were songs about distance in a relationship -- songs like "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright", which do a wonderful job at portraying a young man's conflicted feelings -- the girl has left him, and he wants her back, but he wants to pretend that he doesn't.  While it's always a bad idea to look for a direct autobiographical interpretation of Dylan's lyrics, it seems fairly safe to say that these songs were inspired by Dylan's feelings for his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, who had gone travelling in Europe and not seen him for eight months, and who he was worried he would never see again, and he does seem to have actually had several conflicting feelings about this, ranging from desperation for her to come back through to anger and resentment. The surprising thing about The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan is that it's a relatively coherent piece of work, despite being recorded with two different producers over a period of more than a year, and that recording being interrupted by Dylan's own travels to the UK, his separation from and reconciliation with Rotolo, and a change of producers. If you listened to it, you would get an impression of exactly who Dylan was -- you'd come away from it thinking that he was an angry, talented, young man who was trying to merge elements of both traditional English folk music and Robert Johnson style Delta blues with poetic lyrics related to what was going on in the young man's life. By the next album, that opinion of Dylan would have to be reworked, and it would have to be reworked with every single album that came out.  But The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan came out at the perfect time for Dylan to step into the role of "spokesman for a generation" -- a role which he didn't want, and to which he wasn't particularly suited. Because it came out in May 1963, right at the point at which folk music was both becoming hugely more mainstream, and becoming more politicised. And nothing showed both those things as well as the Hootenanny boycott: [Excerpt: The Brothers Four, “Hootenanny Saturday Night”] We've talked before about Hootenanny, the folk TV show, but what we haven't mentioned is that there was a quite substantial boycott of that show by some of the top musicians in folk music at the time. The reason for this is that Pete Seeger, the elder statesman of the folk movement, and his old band the Weavers, were both blacklisted from the show because of Seeger's Communist leanings. The Weavers were --- according to some sources -- told that they could go on if they would sign a loyalty oath, but they refused. It's hard for those of us who weren't around at the time to really comprehend both just how subversive folk music was considered, and how seriously subversion was taken in the USA of the early 1960s. To give a relevant example -- Suze Rotolo was pictured on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. Because of this, her cousin's husband, who was in the military, lost his security clearance and didn't get a promotion he was in line for. Again,  someone lost his security clearance because his wife's cousin was pictured on the cover of a Bob Dylan album. So the blacklisting of Seeger and the Weavers was considered a serious matter by the folk music community, and people reacted very strongly. Joan Baez announced that she wouldn't be going on Hootenanny until they asked Seeger on, and Dylan, the Kingston Trio, Dave van Ronk, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and Peter, Paul, and Mary, among many others, all refused to go on the show as a result. But the odd thing was, whenever anyone *actually asked* Pete Seeger what he thought they should do, he told them they should go on the TV show and use it as an opportunity to promote the music. So while the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul, and Mary, two of the biggest examples of the commercialisation of folk music that the serious purists sneered at, were refusing to go on the TV in solidarity with a Communist, that Communist's brother, Mike Seeger, happily went on Hootenanny with his band the New Lost City Ramblers, and when the Tarriers were invited on to the show but it clashed with one of their regular bookings, Pete Seeger covered their booking for them so they could appear. Dylan was on the side of the boycotters, though he was not too clear on exactly why. When he spoke about  the boycott on stage, this is what he had to say: [Excerpt: Dylan talks about the boycott. Transcript: "Now a friend of mine, a friend of all yours I'm sure, Pete Seeger's been blacklisted [applause]. He and another group called the Weavers who are around New York [applause] I turned down that television show, but I got no right [applause] but . . . I feel bad turning it down, because the Weavers and Pete Seeger can't be on it. They oughta turn it down. They aren't even asked to be on it because they are blacklisted. Uh—which is, which is a bad thing. I don't know why it's bad, but it's just bad, it's bad all around."] Hootenanny started broadcasting in April 1963, just over a month before The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan came out, and so it would have been a good opportunity for publicity for him -- but turning the show down was also good publicity. Hootenanny wouldn't be the only opportunity to appear on TV that he was offered. It would also not be the only one he turned down. In May, Dylan was given the opportunity to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show, but he agreed on one condition -- that he be allowed to sing "Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues". For those who don't know, the John Birch Society is a far-right conspiratorial organisation which had a huge influence on the development of the American right-wing in the middle of the twentieth century, and is responsible for perpetuating almost every conspiracy theory that has exerted a malign influence on the country and the world since that time. They were a popular punching bag for the left and centre, and for good reason -- we heard the Chad Mitchell Trio mocking them, for example, in the episode on "Mr. Tambourine Man" a couple of weeks ago.  So Dylan insisted that if he was going to go on the Ed Sullivan Show, it would only be to perform his song about them: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues"] Now, the Ed Sullivan Show was not interested in having Dylan sing a song that would upset a substantial proportion of its audience, on what was after all meant to be an entertainment show, and so Dylan didn't appear on the show -- and he got a big publicity boost from his principled refusal to make a TV appearance that would have given him a big publicity boost. It's interesting to note in this context that Dylan himself clearly didn't actually think very much of the song -- he never included it on any of his albums, and it remained unreleased for decades. By this point, Dylan had started dating Joan Baez, with whom he would have an on-again off-again relationship for the next couple of years, even though at this point he was also still seeing Suze Rotolo. Baez was one of the big stars of the folk movement, and like Rotolo she was extremely politically motivated. She was also a fan of Dylan's writing, and had started recording versions of his songs on her albums: [Excerpt: Joan Baez, "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right"] The relationship between the two of them became much more public when they appeared together at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963. The Newport Folk Festival had started in 1959, as a spinoff from the successful Newport Jazz Festival, which had been going for a number of years previously. As there was a large overlap between the jazz and folk music fanbases -- both musics appealed at this point to educated, middle-class, liberals who liked to think of themselves as a little bit Bohemian -- the Jazz Festival had first started putting on an afternoon of folk music during its normal jazz programme, and then spun that off into a whole separate festival, initially with the help of Albert Grossman, who advised on which acts should be booked (and of course included several of the acts he managed on the bill). Both Newport festivals had been shut down after rioting at the 1960 Jazz Festival, as three thousand more people had turned up for the show than there was capacity for, and the Marines had had to be called in to clear the streets of angry jazz fans, but the jazz  festival had returned in 1962, and in 1963 the folk festival came back as well. By this time, Albert Grossman was too busy to work for the festival, and so its organisation was taken over by a committee headed by Pete Seeger.  At that 1963 festival, even though Dylan was at this point still a relative unknown compared to some of the acts on the bill, he was made the headliner of the first night, which finished with his set, and then with him bringing Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, Pete Seeger and the Freedom Singers out to sing with him on "Blowin' in the Wind" and "We Shall Overcome".  To many people, Dylan's appearance in 1963 was what launched him from being "one of the rising stars of the folk movement" to being the most important musician in the movement -- still just one of many, but the first among equals. He was now being talked of in the same terms as Joan Baez or Pete Seeger, and was also starting to behave like someone as important as them -- like he was a star. And that was partly because Baez was promoting Dylan, having him duet with her on stage on his songs -- though few would now argue that the combination of their voices did either artist any favours, Baez's pure, trained, voice, rubbing up against Dylan's more idiosyncratic phrasing in ways that made both sound less impressive: [Excerpt: Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, "With God On Our Side (live at Newport 1963)"] At the end of 1963, Dylan recorded his third album, which came out in early 1964. The Times They Are A-Changin' seems to be Dylan's least personal album to this point, and seems to have been written as a conscious attempt to write the kind of songs that people wanted and expected from him -- there were songs about particular recent news events, like "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll",  the true story of the murder of a Black woman by a white man, and  "Only a Pawn in Their Game", about the murder of the Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers. There were fictional dramatisations of the kind of effects that real-world social problems were having on people, like "North Country Blues", in which the callous way mining towns were treated by capital leads to a woman losing her parents, brother, husband, and children, or "The Ballad of Hollis Brown", about a farmer driven to despair by poverty who ends up killing his whole family and himself. As you can imagine, it's not a very cheery album, but it's one that impressed a lot of people, especially its title track, which was very deliberately written as an anthem for the new social movements that were coming up: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "The Times They Are A-Changin'"] But it was a bleak album, with none of the humour that had characterised Dylan's first two albums. Soon after recording the album, Dylan had a final split with Rotolo, went travelling for a while, and took LSD for the first time. He also started to distance himself from Baez at this point, though the two would remain together until mid 1965. He seems to have regarded the political material he was doing as a mistake, as something he was doing for other people, rather than because that was what he wanted to do.  He toured the UK in early 1964, and then returned to the US in time to record his fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan. It can be argued that this is the point where Dylan really becomes himself, and starts making music that's the music he wants to make, rather than music that he thinks other people want him to make.  The entire album was recorded in one session, along with a few tracks that didn't make the cut -- like the early version of "Mr. Tambourine Man" with Ramblin' Jack Elliott that we heard in the episode on that song. Elliott was in attendance, as were a number of Dylan's other friends, though the album features only Dylan performing. Also there was the journalist Nat Hentoff, who wrote a full account of the recording session for the New Yorker, which I'll link in the show notes.  Dylan told Hentoff "“There aren't any finger-pointing songs in here, either. Those records I've already made, I'll stand behind them, but some of that was jumping into the scene to be heard and a lot of it was because I didn't see anybody else doing that kind of thing. Now a lot of people are doing finger-pointing songs. You know—pointing to all the things that are wrong. Me, I don't want to write for people anymore. You know—be a spokesman. Like I once wrote about Emmett Till in the first person, pretending I was him. From now on, I want to write from inside me, and to do that I'm going to have to get back to writing like I used to when I was ten—having everything come out naturally." Dylan was right to say that there were no finger-pointing songs. The songs on Another Side of Bob Dylan were entirely personal -- "Ballad in Plain D", in particular, is Dylan's take on the night he split up with Suze Rotolo, laying the blame -- unfairly, as he would later admit -- on her older sister. The songs mostly dealt with love and relationships, and as a result were ripe for cover versions. The opening track, in particular, "All I Really Want to Do", which in Dylan's version was a Jimmie Rodgers style hillbilly tune, became the subject of duelling cover versions. The Byrds' version came out as the follow-up to their version of "Mr. Tambourine Man": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "All I Really Want to Do"] But Cher also released a version -- which the Byrds claimed came about when Cher's husband Sonny Bono secretly taped a Byrds live show where they performed the song before they'd released it, and he then stole their arrangement: [Excerpt: Cher, "All I Really Want to Do"] In America, the Byrds' version only made number forty on the charts, while Cher made number fifteen. In the UK, where both artists were touring at the time to promote the single, Cher made number nine but the Byrds charted higher at number four.  Both those releases came out after the album came out in late 1964, but even before it was released, Dylan was looking for other artists to cover his new songs. He found one at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, where he met Johnny Cash for the first time. Cash had been a fan of Dylan for some time -- and indeed, he's often credited as being the main reason why CBS persisted with Dylan after his first album was unsuccessful, as Cash had lobbied for him within the company -- and he'd recently started to let that influence show. His most recent hit, "Understand Your Man", owed more than a little to Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right", and Cash had also started recording protest songs. At Newport, Cash performed his own version of "Don't Think Twice": [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right"] Cash and Dylan met up, with June Carter and Joan Baez, in Baez's hotel room, and according to later descriptions they were both so excited to meet each other they were bouncing with excitement, jumping up and down on the beds. They played music together all night, and Dylan played some of his new songs for Cash. One of them was "It Ain't Me Babe", a song that seems at least slightly inspired by "She Loves You" -- you can sing the "yeah, yeah, yeah" and "no, no, no" together -- and which was the closing track of Another Side of Bob Dylan. Cash soon released his own version of the song, which became a top five country hit: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "It Ain't Me Babe"] But it wasn't long after meeting Cash that Dylan met the group who may have inspired that song -- and his meeting with the Beatles seems to have confirmed in him his decision that he needed to move away from the folk scene and towards making pop records. This was something that Tom Wilson had been pushing for for a while -- Wilson had told Dylan's manager Albert Grossman that if they could get Dylan backed by a good band, they'd have a white Ray Charles on their hands. As an experiment, Wilson took some session musicians into the studio and had them overdub an electric backing on Dylan's acoustic version of "House of the Rising Sun", basing the new backing on the Animals' hit version. The result wasn't good enough to release, but it did show that there was a potential for combining Dylan's music with the sound of electric guitars and drums: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “House of the Rising Sun (electric version)”] Dylan was also being influenced by his friend John Hammond Jr, the blues musician son of Dylan's first producer, and a veteran of the Greenwich Village folk scene. Hammond had decided that he wanted to show the British R&B bands what proper American blues sounded like, and so he'd recruited a group of mostly-Canadian musicians to back him on an electric album. His "So Many Roads" album featured three members of a group called Levon and the Hawks -- Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, and Robbie Robertson -- who had recently quit working for the Canadian rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins -- plus harmonica player Charlie Musselwhite and Mike Bloomfield, who was normally a guitarist but who is credited on piano for the album: [Excerpt: John Hammond, Jr. "Who Do You Love?"] Dylan was inspired by Hammond's sound, and wanted to get the same sound on his next record, though he didn't consider hiring the same musicians. Instead, for his next album he brought in Bruce Langhorne, the tambourine man himself, on guitar, Bobby Gregg -- a drummer who had been the house drummer for Cameo-Parkway and played on hits by Chubby Checker, Bobby Rydell and others; the session guitarists Al Gorgoni and Kenny Rankin, piano players Frank Owens and Paul Griffin, and two bass players, Joseph Macho and William Lee, the father of the film director Spike Lee. Not all of these played on all the finished tracks -- and there were other tracks recorded during the sessions, where Dylan was accompanied by Hammond and another guitarist, John Sebastian, that weren't used at all -- but that's the lineup that played on Dylan's first electric album, Bringing it All Back Home. The first single, "Subterranean Homesick Blues" actually takes more inspiration than one might imagine from the old-school folk singers Dylan was still associating with. Its opening lines seem to be a riff on "Taking it Easy", a song that had originally been written in the forties by Woody Guthrie for the Almanac Singers, where it had been a song about air-raid sirens: [Excerpt: The Almanac Singers, "Taking it Easy"] But had then been rewritten by Pete Seeger for the Weavers, whose version had included this verse that wasn't in the original: [Excerpt: The Weavers, "Taking it Easy"] Dylan took that verse, and the basic Guthrie-esque talking blues rhythm, and connected it to Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business" with its rapid-fire joking blues lyrics: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Too Much Monkey Business"] But Dylan's lyrics were a radical departure, a freeform, stream-of-consciousness proto-psychedelic lyric inspired as much by the Beat poets as by any musician -- it's no coincidence that in the promotional film Dylan made for the song, one of the earliest examples of what would become known as the rock video, the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg makes an appearance: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"] "Subterranean Homesick Blues" made the top forty in the US -- it only made number thirty-nine, but it was Dylan's first single to chart at all in the US. And it made the top ten in the UK -- but it's notable that even over here, there was still some trepidation about Dylan's new direction. To promote his UK tour, CBS put out a single of "The Times They Are A-Changin'", and that too made the top ten, and spent longer on the charts than "Subterranean Homesick Blues". Indeed, it seems like everyone was hedging their bets. The opening side of Bringing it All Back Home is all electric, but the B-side is made up entirely of acoustic performances, though sometimes with a little added electric guitar countermelody -- it's very much in the same style as Dylan's earlier albums, and seems to be a way of pulling back after testing the waters, of reassuring people who might have been upset by the change in style on the first side that this was still the same Dylan they knew.  And the old Dylan certainly still had plenty of commercial life in him. Indeed, when Dylan went to the UK for a tour in spring of 1965, he found that British musicians were trying to copy his style -- a young man called Donovan seemed to be doing his best to *be* Dylan, with even the title of his debut hit single seeming to owe something to "Blowing in the Wind": [Excerpt: Donovan, "Catch the Wind (original single version)"] On that UK tour, Dylan performed solo as he always had -- though by this point he had taken to bringing along an entourage. Watching the classic documentary of that tour, Dont Look Back, it's quite painful to see Dylan's cruelty to Joan Baez, who had come along on the expectation that she would be duetting with him occasionally, as he had dueted with her, but who is sidelined, tormented, and ignored. It's even worse to see Bob Neuwirth,  a hanger-on who is very obviously desperate to impress Dylan by copying all his mannerisms and affectations, doing the same. It's unsurprising that this was the end of Dylan and Baez's relationship. Dylan's solo performances on that tour went down well, but some of his fans questioned him about his choice to make an electric record. But he wasn't going to stop recording with electric musicians. Indeed, Tom Wilson also came along on the tour, and while he was in England he made an attempt to record a track with the members of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers -- Mayall, Hughie Flint, Eric Clapton, and John McVie, though it was unsuccessful and only a low-fidelity fragment of it circulates: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Bluesbreakers, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] Also attending that session was a young wannabe singer from Germany who Dylan had taken up with, though their dalliance was very brief. During the session Dylan cut a demo of a song he planned to give her, but Nico didn't end up recording "I'll Keep it With Mine" until a couple of years later. But one other thing happened in England. After the UK tour, Dylan travelled over to Europe for a short tour, then returned to the UK to do a show for the BBC -- his first full televised concert. Unfortunately, that show never went ahead -- there was a party the night before, and Dylan was hospitalised after it with what was said to be food poisoning. It might even actually have been food poisoning, but take a listen to the episode I did on Vince Taylor, who was also at that party, and draw your own conclusions. Anyway, Dylan was laid up in bed for a while, and took the opportunity to write what he's variously described as being ten or twenty pages of stream of consciousness vomit, out of which he eventually took four pages of lyrics, a vicious attack on a woman who was originally the protagonist's social superior, but has since fallen. He's never spoken in any detail about what or who the subject of the song was, but given that it was written just days after his breakup with Baez, it's not hard to guess. The first attempt at recording the song was a false start. On June the fifteenth, Dylan and most of the same musicians who'd played on his previous album went into the studio to record it, along with Mike Bloomfield, who had played on that John Hammond album that had inspired Dylan and was now playing in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Bloomfield had been surprised when Dylan had told him that he didn't want the kind of string-bending electric blues that Bloomfield usually played, but he managed to come up with something Dylan approved of -- but the song was at this point in waltz time: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone (early version)"] The session ended, but Joe Macho, Al Gorgoni and Bobby Gregg stayed around after the session, when Tom Wilson called in another session guitarist to join them in doing the same trick he'd done on "House of the Rising Sun", overdubbing new instruments on a flop acoustic record he'd produced for a Greenwich Village folk duo who'd already split up. But we'll hear more about "The Sound of Silence" in a few weeks' time. The next day, the same musicians came back, along with one new one. Al Kooper had been invited by Wilson to come along and watch the session, but he was determined that he was going to play on whatever was recorded. He got to the session early, brought his guitar and amp in and got tuned up before Wilson arrived. But then Kooper heard Bloomfield play, realised that he simply couldn't play at anything remotely like the same standard, and decided he'd be best off staying in the control room after all.  But then, before they started recording "Like a Rolling Stone", which by now was in 4/4 time, Frank Owens, who had been playing organ, switched to piano and left his organ on. Kooper saw his chance -- he played a bit of keyboards, too, and the song was in C, which is the easiest key to play in. Kooper asked Wilson if he could go and play, and Wilson didn't exactly say no, so Kooper went into the studio and sat at the organ.  Kooper improvised the organ line that became the song's most notable instrumental part, but you will notice that it's mixed quite low in the track. This is because Wilson was unimpressed with Kooper's playing, which is technically pretty poor -- indeed, for much of the song, Kooper is a beat behind the rest of the band, waiting for them to change chords and then following the change on the next measure. Luckily, Kooper is also a good enough natural musician that he made this work, and it gave the song a distinctive sound: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"] The finished record came in at around six minutes -- and here I should just mention that most books on the subject say that the single was six minutes and thirteen seconds long. That's the length of the stereo mix of the song on the stereo version of the album. The mono mix on the mono album, which we just heard, is five minutes fifty-eight, as it has a shorter fade. I haven't been able to track down a copy of the single as released in 1965, but usually the single mix would be the same as the mono album mix. Whatever the exact length, it was much, much, longer than the norm for a single -- the Animals' "House of the Rising Sun" had been regarded as ridiculously long at four and a half minutes -- and Columbia originally wanted to split the song over two sides of a single. But eventually it was released as one side, in full: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"] That's Bruce Langhorne there playing that rather sloppy tambourine part, high in the mix. The record made the top five in the UK, and reached number two in the US, only being held off from the top spot by "Help!" by the Beatles.  It would, however, be the last track that Tom Wilson produced for Dylan. Nobody knows what caused their split after three and a half albums working together -- and everything suggests that on the UK tour in the Spring, the two were very friendly. But they had some sort of disagreement, about which neither of them would ever speak, other than a comment by Wilson in an interview shortly before his death in which he said that Dylan had told him he was going to get Phil Spector to produce his records. In the event, the rest of the album Dylan was working on would be produced by Bob Johnston, who would be Dylan's regular producer until the mid-seventies. So "Like a Rolling Stone" was a major break in Dylan's career, and there was another one shortly after its release, when Dylan played the Newport Folk Festival for the third time, in what has become possibly the single most discussed and analysed performance in folk or rock music. The most important thing to note here is that there was not a backlash among the folk crowd against electric instruments. The Newport Folk Festival had *always* had electric performers -- John Lee Hooker and Johnny Cash and The Staple Singers had all performed with electric guitars and nobody had cared. What there was, was a backlash against pop music. You see, up until the Beatles hit America, the commercial side of folk music had been huge. Acts like the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul, and Mary, The Chad Mitchell Trio, and so on had been massive. Most of the fans at the Newport Folk Festival actually despised many of these acts as sell-outs, doing watered-down versions of the traditional music they loved. But at the same time, those acts *were* doing watered-down versions of the traditional music they loved, and by doing so they were exposing more people to that traditional music. They were making programmes like Hootenanny possible -- and the folkies didn't like Hootenanny, but Hootenanny existing meant that the New Lost City Ramblers got an audience they would otherwise not have got. There was a recognition, then, that the commercialised folk music that many of them despised was nonetheless important in the development of a thriving scene. And it was those acts, the Kingston Trios and Peter, Paul, and Marys, who were fast losing their commercial relevance because of the renewed popularity of rock music. If Hootenanny gets cancelled and Shindig put on in its place, that's great for fans of the Righteous Brothers and Sam Cooke, but it's not so great if you want to hear "Tom Dooley" or "If I Had a Hammer". And so many of the old guard in the folk movement weren't wary of electric guitars *as instruments*, but they were wary of anything that looked like someone taking sides with the new pop music rather than the old folk music. For Dylan's first performance at the festival in 1965, he played exactly the set that people would expect of him, and there was no problem. The faultlines opened up, not with Dylan's first performance, but with the performance by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, as part of a history of the blues, presented by Alan Lomax. Lomax had no objection to rock and roll -- indeed, earlier in the festival the Chambers Brothers, a Black electric group from Mississippi, had performed a set of rock and R&B songs, and Lomax had come on stage afterwards and said “I'm very proud tonight that we finally got onto the Newport Folk Festival our modern American folk music: rock 'n' roll!” But Lomax didn't think that the Butterfield band met his criteria of "authenticity". And he had a point. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band were an integrated group -- their rhythm section were Black musicians who had played with Howlin' Wolf -- and they'd gained experience through playing Chicago blues on the South Side of Chicago, but their leader, Butterfield, was a white man, as was Mike Bloomfield, their guitarist, and so they'd quickly moved to playing clubs on the North side, where Black musicians had generally not been able to play. Butterfield and Bloomfield were both excellent musicians, but they were closer to the British blues lovers who were making up groups like the Rolling Stones, Animals, and Manfred Mann. There was a difference -- they were from Chicago, not from the Home Counties -- but they were still scholars coming at the music from the outside, rather than people who'd grown up with the music and had it as part of their culture. The Butterfield Band were being promoted as a sort of American answer to the Stones, and they had been put on Lomax's bill rather against his will -- he wanted to have some Chicago blues to illustrate that part of the music, but why not Muddy Waters or Howlin' Wolf, rather than this new group who had never really done anything? One he'd never even heard -- but who he knew that Albert Grossman was thinking about managing. So his introduction to the Butterfield Blues Band's performance was polite but hardly rapturous. He said "Us white cats always moved in, a little bit late, but tried to catch up...I understand that this present combination has not only caught up but passed the rest. That's what I hear—I'm anxious to find out whether it's true or not." He then introduced the musicians, and they started to play an old Little Walter song: [Excerpt: The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, "Juke"] But after the set, Grossman was furious at Lomax, asking him what kind of introduction that was meant to be. Lomax responded by asking if Grossman wanted a punch in the mouth, Grossman hurled a homophobic slur at Lomax, and the two men started hitting each other and rolling round in the dirt, to the amusement of pretty much everyone around. But Lomax and Grossman were both far from amused. Lomax tried to get the Festival board to kick Grossman out, and almost succeeded, until someone explained that if they did, then that would mean that all Grossman's acts, including huge names like Dylan and Peter, Paul, and Mary, would also be out.  Nobody's entirely sure whose idea it was, but it seems to have been Grossman who thought that since Bloomfield had played on Dylan's recent single, it might be an idea to get the Butterfield Blues Band to back Dylan on stage, as a snub to Lomax. But the idea seems to have cohered properly when Grossman bumped into Al Kooper, who was attending the festival just as an audience member. Grossman gave Kooper a pair of backstage passes, and told him to meet up with Dylan. And so, for Dylan's performance on the Sunday -- scheduled in the middle of the day, rather than as the headliner as most people expected, he appeared with an electric guitar, backed by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Al Kooper. He opened with his recent single "Maggie's Farm", and followed it with the new one, "Like a Rolling Stone": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone (live at Newport)"] After those two songs, the group did one more, a song called "Phantom Engineer", which they hadn't rehearsed properly and which was an utter train wreck. And then they left the stage. And there was booing. How much booing, and what the cause was, is hard to say, but everyone agrees there was some. Some people claim that the booing was just because the set had been so short, others say that the audience was mostly happy but there were just a few people booing. And others say that the booing mostly came from the front -- that there were sound problems that meant that while the performance sounded great to people further back, there was a tremendous level of distortion near the front. That's certainly what Pete Seeger said. Seeger was visibly distraught and angry at the sounds coming from the stage. He later said, and I believe him, that it wasn't annoyance at Dylan playing with an electric band, but at the distorted sound. He said he couldn't hear the words, that the guitar was too loud compared to the vocals, and in particular that his father, who was an old man using a hearing aid, was in actual physical pain at the sound. According to Joe Boyd, later a famous record producer but at this time just helping out at the festival, Seeger, the actor Theodore Bikel, and Alan Lomax, all of whom were on the festival board, told Boyd to take a message to Paul Rothchild, who was working the sound, telling him that the festival board ordered him to lower the volume. When Boyd got there, he found Rothchild there with Albert Grossman and Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary, who was also on the board. When Boyd gave his message, Yarrow responded that the board was "adequately represented at the sound controls", that the sound was where the musicians wanted it, and gave Boyd a message to take back to the other board members, consisting of a single raised middle finger. Whatever the cause of the anger, which was far from universal, Dylan was genuinely baffled and upset at the reaction -- while it's been portrayed since, including by Dylan himself at times, as a deliberate act of provocation on Dylan's part, it seems that at the time he was just going on stage with his new friends, to play his new songs in front of some of his old friends and a crowd that had always been supportive of him. Eventually Peter Yarrow, who was MCing, managed to persuade Dylan to go back on stage and do a couple more numbers, alone this time as the band hadn't rehearsed any more songs. He scrounged up an acoustic guitar, went back on, spent a couple of minutes fiddling around with the guitar, got a different guitar because something was wrong with that one, played "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue", spent another couple of minutes tuning up, and then finally played "Mr. Tambourine Man": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Mr. Tambourine Man (live at Newport)"] But that pause while Dylan was off stage scrounging an acoustic guitar from somewhere led to a rumour that has still got currency fifty-six years later. Because Peter Yarrow, trying to keep the crowd calm, said "He's gone to get his axe" -- using musicians' slang for a guitar. But many of the crowd didn't know that slang. But they had seen Pete Seeger furious, and they'd also seen, earlier in the festival, a demonstration of work-songs, sung by people who kept time by chopping wood, and according to some people Seeger had joined in with that demonstration, swinging an axe as he sang. So the audience put two and two together, and soon the rumour was going round the festival -- Pete Seeger had been so annoyed by Dylan going electric he'd tried to chop the cables with an axe, and had had to be held back from doing so. Paul Rothchild even later claimed to have seen Seeger brandishing it. The rumour became so pervasive that in later years, even as he denied doing it, Seeger tried to explain it away by saying that he might have said something like "I wish I had an axe so I could cut those cables". In fact, Seeger wasn't angry at Dylan, as much as he was concerned -- shortly afterwards he wrote a private note to himself trying to sort out his own feelings, which said in part "I like some rock and roll a great deal. Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. I confess that, like blues and like flamenco music, I can't listen to it for a long time at a stretch. I just don't feel that aggressive, personally. But I have a question. Was the sound at Newport from Bob's aggregation good rock and roll?  I once had a vision of a beast with hollow fangs. I first saw it when my mother-in-law, who I loved very much, died of cancer... Who knows, but I am one of the fangs that has sucked Bob dry. It is in the hope that I can learn that I write these words, asking questions I need help to answer, using language I never intended. Hoping that perhaps I'm wrong—but if I am right, hoping that it won't happen again." Seeger would later make his own electric albums, and he would always continue to be complimentary towards Dylan in public. He even repeatedly said that while he still wished he'd been able to hear the words and that the guitar had been mixed quieter, he knew he'd been on the wrong side, and that if he had the time over he'd have gone on stage and asked the audience to stop booing Dylan. But the end result was the same -- Dylan was now no longer part of the Newport Folk Festival crowd. He'd moved on and was now a pop star, and nothing was going to change that. He'd split with Suze, he'd split with Joan Baez, he'd split with Tom Wilson, and now he'd split with his peer group. From now on Dylan wasn't a spokesman for his generation, or the leader of a movement. He was a young man with a leather jacket and a Stratocaster, and he was going to make rock music. And we'll see the results of that in future episodes.

This exhibit is called The Vietnam War: The Music. Our mission at the Music Museum is to support all Vietnam Veterans and those who serve the United States, then and now. We thank you for your service. ----- Many of the songs in this episode will have a special meaning for you. A place, a brother, a time gone by. This program is for you, the Vietnam Vets, who will never forget. ----- In this episode you'll hear the song, “BATTLE HYMN OF THE RIVER RATS” Dick Jonas wrote this song while flying to the first "practice" stateside reunion of the Red River Valley Fighter Pilots' Association ("Red River Rats") in 1969. The Red River Rats are pilots who flew combat missions across the Red River in North Vietnam. They held "practice" reunions in Thailand and the United States until the POW's came home in 1973, when the first real reunion was held. Other units have adapted this song for themselves, notably the Ravens, who flew forward air control in the secret war in Laos. ------- Visit: http://www.fighterpilotuniversity.com/ ------ ----- DICK JONAS (guitar) Dick Jonas, the best-known song writer of the air war, flew 125 missions with the 433rd Tactical Fighter Squadron ("Satan's Angels"), 8th Tactical Fighter Wing ("Wolfpack"), Ubon Rachitani Royal Thai Air Force Base, 1967-1968. He participated in Rolling Thunder (the code name for U.S. air operations over North Vietnam at that time), took part in Steel Tiger missions, and flew in support of Khe Sahn. ----- Our goal with The Vietnam War: The Music is to honor the fallen and the survivors with the music that got them through “just one more day”. Our shows are broadcast around the world. They say thank you & “welcome home” to all Vietnam Vets. There is no opinion offered on the War. It's all about the music.---- For your service and your sacrifice, this is The Vietnam War: The Music. - ----- This episode: Vietnam War: The Music – The Order Is Rapidly FadingDon't forget to join the conversation on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008232395712   - - - - - or by email at dannymemorylane@gmail.com   - - - - -In this episode you'll hear:1)     The Times They Are A Changin' by Simon & Garfunkel2)     Song Of The Patriot by Johnny Cash & Marty Robbins3)     We Take Care Of Our Own by Bruce Springsteen4)     Soldiers & Jesus by James Otto5)     Welcome Home by Country Joe McDonald6)     Love Minus Zero/No Limit by Buck Owens7)     She Has Funny Cars by Jefferson Airplane8)     Whipping Post by The Allman Brothers Band9)     Battle Hymn of the Red River Rats by Dick Jonas10) Street Fighting Man by The Rolling Stones11) War Song by Vinnie James12) Black And White by Three Dog Night13) East Bound and Down by Dave Dudley14) Cry Baby by Janis Joplin15) Lucky Man by Emerson, Lake & Palmer16) Some Gave All by Billy Ray Cyrus17) My Generation by The Who18) Rag Mama by Jim Kweskin & The Jug Band19) John Brown by State Radio20) Tell All The People by The Doors21) Didn't I by Montgomery Gentry22) Slippin' Into Darkness by War23) Get Back by The Beatles24) The King Is Gone (So Are You) by George Jones25) Universal Soldier by Glen Campbell26) Don't Think Twice, It's All Right by Waylon Jennings27) Someday Never Comes by Creedence Clearwater Revival28) I Am A Rock by Simon & Garfunkel29) Once I Was by Judy Collins30) These Are My People by Johnny Cash31) It Ain't Me Babe by Peter, Paul And Mary32) The Green Fields of France by Dropkick Murphys33) Flowers of the Forest [aka "The Lament"] by Mike Oldfield

The Danny Lane Music Museum is for listening and remembering the great rock & roll music of the past. This museum is a global effort. We are available around the world and at any time you want. Ordinary museums have varying aims, ranging from serving researchers and specialists to serving the general public. We serve the world of Oldies But Goodies. Enjoy ******Join the conversation on Facebook at ---- https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008232395712 **** or by email at:dannymemorylane@gmail.com **** If there was a Jukebox exclusively for the soundtrack of our youth, this would be it. In this episode you'll hear:1) Juke Box Saturday Night by Nino & The Ebb Tides2) Dance, Dance, Dance by The Beach Boys3) Little Devil by Neil Sedaka4) Tammy by Debbie Reynolds5) Take Good Care of My Baby by Bobby Vee6) Hotel Happiness by Brook Benton7) Hello Stranger by Barbara Lewis8) M.T.A. by The Kingston Trio9) A-Me-Ri-Ca by Trini Lopez10) Let's Limbo Some More by Chubby Checker11) Blue Bayou by Roy Orbison12) Thou Shalt Not Steal by Dick & Dee Dee13) The Diary by Little Anthony & The Imperials14) You Can Depend On Me by Brenda Lee15) Good Timin' by Jimmy Jones16) Stay Awhile by Dusty Springfield17) You're The Reason I'm Living by Bobby Darin18) In The Midnight Hour by The Young Rascals 19) Sixteen Candles by The Crests20) Goodbye Jimmy Goodbye by Kathy Linden21) Shakin' All Over by The Guess Who22) All American Boy by Bobby Bare23) It Ain't Me Babe by The Turtles24) I'm Walkin' by Ricky Nelson25) Everybody Loves A Clown by Gary Lewis & The Playboys26) Real Wild Child by Ivan27) Honey by Bobby Goldsboro28) Understand Your Man by Johnny Cash29) Motorcycle by Tico & The Triumphs (member & lead vocal: Paul Simon, aka Jerry Landis)30) Mio Amore (My Love, 'Till The End Of Time) by The Flamingos31) Night Time by The Strangeloves32) Stupid Cupid by Wanda Jackson33) A Hard Day's Night by The Beatles34) At Last by Etta James35) Roses Are Red (My Love) by Bobby Vinton36) The One Who Really Loves You by Mary Wells (with The Love-Tones)37) A Lover's Question by Clyde McPhatter38) In His Car by Robin Ward39) The ABC's Of Love by Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers40) All I Have To Do Is Dream by The Everly Brothers41) He Was Really Sayin' Somethin' by The Velvelettes42) Girl Come Running by Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons43) Teddy by Connie Francis44) I Wonder What She's Doing Tonight by Barry & The Tamerlanes45) One Night (Of Sin) by Elvis Presley46) New York's a Lonely Town by The Trade Winds47) Agent Double-O-Soul by Edwin Starr48) Somewhere by The Tymes

To mark Bob Dylan's 80th birthday, Ian Pope played a selection of his songs plus notable cover versions. Thanks to everyone who sent in their requests! Nancy Sinatra - It Ain't Me Babe       Bob Dylan & The Band - Million Dollar Bash      Bob Dylan - One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later) - Doug Kaye Bob Dylan - Ballad of Hollis Brown  - Doug Kaye Odetta - Baby I'm In The Mood for You - Emmie Schurer Bob Dylan - Subterranean Homesick Blues       Bob Dylan - Positively 4th Street       Robyn Hitchcock - Visions of Joanna - Tom Burgess    The Abyssinians - Blowin' In The Wind - KenWillingale Tracy Chapman - The Times That Are A Changin' - Paul Bailey Eddie Vedder & Mike McCready - Masters of War - Paul Bailey Bob Dylan - The Groom's Still Waiting At The Altar     Bob Dylan - Political World        The Jimi Hendrix Experience - All Along The Watchtower - Mark Gibson Rod Stewart - Only A Hobo - Dave Crix      Nina Simone - Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues - Daryl Easlea The Byrds - My Back Pages - Doug Kaye Bob Dylan - Lay Lady Lay        Bob Dylan - Buckets of Rain - Tom Burgess      Bob Dylan - Mozambique - David Miller Bob Dylan & The Band - Apple Suckling Tree - Emmie Schurer Bob Dylan feat The Band - Forever Young       The White Stripes - One More Cup of Coffee - Ken Willingale    Old Crow Medicine Show - Rock Me Mamma (Wagon Wheel) _ RJ Learmouth Laura Marling - A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall - Emmie Schurer The William Loveday Intention - Like a Rolling Stone - Andrew Branch   Bob Dylan - Goodbye Jimmy Reed      Bob Dylan - Some Enchanted Evening    Please support our financial appeal by visiting patreon.co./sfob

Welcome home. And welcome back to The Music Museum. This exhibit is called The Vietnam War: The Music. Our mission here at the Music Museum is to support all Vietnam Veterans and those who serve the United States, then and now. We thank you for your service. This project started with a story I saw on TV in 2018, a story about a soldier, a 23-year-old Army helicopter sniper, who served in the Vietnam War. Before Christmas 1970, he received a Christmas card from a sixth-grader he didn't know. It had a simple message: "Thank you." He said it helped him get through the war. Over the years, he prized the letter and wondered what happened to the little girl who wrote it. That got me thinking about a letter that I received in 1968 from a soldier serving in Vietnam. I was a disc jockey in Manchester NH playing the hits every night. In July of that year, I got a letter from the soldier requesting that I play three songs dedicated to his girlfriend who was attending college in the area. I played the songs, and that was that. But I saved that letter for 50 years and in 2018, I started to wonder what had happened to that soldier. I tried to locate him, but, so far, I haven’t made contact. The search however continues. In the meantime, a Podcast was born. It’s called Vietnam War: The Music. This episode is called “The Beat Goes On” Join the conversation on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008232395712 or by email at dannymemorylane@gmail.com In this episode you’ll hear: 1) The Beat Goes On by Sonny & Cher 2) Welcome Home by Country Joe McDonald 3) The Letter by The Box Tops 4) Ohio by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young 5) Question by The Moody Blues 6) Come Together by The Beatles 7) Black Is Black by Los Bravos 8) Tell Me by The Rolling Stones 9) And When I Die by Blood, Sweat & Tears 10) If I Were A Carpenter by The Four Tops 11) Maybe by Janis Joplin 12) Sloop John B by The Beach Boys 13) For What It's Worth by Buffalo Springfield 14) Midnight Rider by The Allman Brothers Band 15) Give Peace A Chance by Joe Cocker 16) It Ain't Me Babe by The Turtles 17) A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert McNamara'd Into Submission) by Simon & Garfunkel 18) To Susan On The West Coast Waiting by Donovan 19) Lay Down (Candles In The Rain) by Melanie 20) Distant Drums by Roy Orbison 21) White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane 22) La Bamba by Ritchie Valens 23) Act Naturally by The Beatles (Ringo, lead) 24) The Cruel War by Peter, Paul And Mary 25) Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is A Season) by The Byrds 26) Eve Of Destruction by Barry McGuire 27) Proud Mary by Creedence Clearwater Revival 28) Heard It In A Love Song by The Marshall Tucker Band 29) Shame, Shame, Shame by Jimi Hendrix 30) Pinball Wizard by The Who 31) Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynyrd 32) Can I Get A Witness by Marvin Gaye 33) The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down by The Band 34) Reflections of My Life by Marmalade 35) Amazing Grace by Judy Collins 36) God Bless America by Connie Francis

We tots thought that this book was going to have a darker romance, however, the darkness in this book was the situation and backstory of the characters, especially the Mae and the other women from the cult. One of the books that we disagreed with the most in our final ratings… probably because Shani doesn’t like the intrigue!PS _ Bridget reviews books 2 & 3 on Patreon!***Get your copy of It Ain't Me Babe here. ***Leave us a rating and review on Itunes***A lot of additional listening on Patreon!30 day free trial on Kindle  UnlimitedFree 30 day Audible Trial to read like ShaniA diverse, inclusive podcast that explores romance novels and helps our listeners pique their naughty curiosity with 100% honest reviews, spontaneous singing, life lessons, indecent anecdotes, and bawdy humor.Check out www.romanceataglance.comChat with us on Instagram at instagram.com/romanceataglanceSupport us on Patreon at patreon.com/romanceataglance** Clicking these links may result in affiliate commissions. Thank you!

Just imagine every hit record from the 1960s in one gigantic playlist. OK, now press “SHUFFLE” Here we go: 1) Dum Dum by Brenda Lee 2) Step by Step by The Crests 3) My Boyfriend's Back by The Angels 4) Save Your Heart For Me by Gary Lewis & The Playboys 5) Up On The Roof by The Drifters (with Rudy Lewis, lead) 6) The End Of The World by Skeeter Davis 7) Pictures Of Matchstick Men by Status Quo 8) Let's Twist Again by Chubby Checker 9) Piece Of My Heart by Big Brother & The Holding Company 10) The Happening by The Supremes 11) Walk Right Back by The Everly Brothers 12) Your Good Thing (Is About To End) by Lou Rawls 13) Just A Little by The Beau Brummels 14) The Wanderer by Dion 15) Love Me With All Your Heart by The Ray Charles Singers 16) I've Been Lonely Too Long by The Young Rascals 17) Where Have All The Flowers Gone by The Kingston Trio 18) Green River by Creedence Clearwater Revival 19) I Dig Rock And Roll Music by Peter, Paul And Mary 20) Do You Believe In Magic by The Lovin' Spoonful 21) Baby Don't Go by Sonny & Cher 22) It Ain't Me Babe by The Turtles 23) Little Bit O' Soul by The Music Explosion 24) Handy Man by Jimmy Jones 25) Then He Kissed Me by The Crystals 26) You've Made Me So Very Happy by Blood, Sweat & Tears 27) Color Him Father by The Winstons 28) She Cried by Jay & The Americans 29) You're The Reason I'm Living by Bobby Darin 30) Unchained Melody by The Righteous Brothers (Bobby Hatfield, solo) 31) Venus In Blue Jeans by Jimmy Clanton 32) Young Emotions by Ricky Nelson 33) Last Train To Clarksville by The Monkees 34) Here Comes My Baby by The Tremeloes 35) Coming On Strong by Brenda Lee 36) Wooly Bully by Sam The Sham & The Pharaohs 37) Blowin' In The Wind by Peter, Paul And Mary 38) Come Back When You Grow Up by Bobby Vee 39) Doggin' Around by Jackie Wilson 40) Ramblin' Gamblin' Man by Bob Seger System 41) Sandy by Larry Hall 42) Johnny Angel by Shelley Fabares 43) Cryin' Time by Ray Charles & The Raelettes 44) Sweet Inspiration by The Sweet Inspirations 45) Angel Baby by Rosie & The Originals 46) Asia Minor by Kokomo

When Berry Gordy's Motown Record Corporation began, the first group signed was The Miracles, also known as Smokey Robinson and the Miracles from 1965 to 1972.  The group was also the first of Motown's million-selling recording artists, and the first Motown act to appear on American Bandstand.  The group would have a nineteen-year run on the American music charts, with over fifty hits, sixteen within the top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100.  Smokey Robinson led the group from its start in 1955 as “The Five Chimes” until he retired from the group in 1972 to take a larger tole as Motown's vice president.  Other members included Robinson's wife Claudette, Ronald White, Marv Tarplin, Pete Moore, and Bobby Rogers.  In addition to their chart success, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles would have a profound affect on rock and roll, with many of the Miracles' hits being covered by groups like the Zombies, the Who, the Rolling Stones, the Hollies, and the Beatles.Robinson, whose first name is William, got the name “Smokey” from his uncle.  Young William Robinson loved cowboy movies, and his uncle started calling him “Smokey Joe” as a cowboy name.  Everyone called him that until he was about 12 years old, at which time he dropped the “Joe” part.Going to a Go-Go is the first Miracles album to use the name “Smokey Robinson and the Miracles.”  It is also the only studio album by the group to chart in the top 10 of Billboards 200 albums chart, peaking at number 8.  Smokey Robinson produced the album, and wrote or co-wrote all but one of the songs on it. We're sure you will enjoy this blast from the past.  Ooo, Baby BabyThe Funk Brothers provide the instrumentals for this pleading song about a man who cheated on his woman and begs forgiveness.  It was listed as number 266 on Rolling Stone Magazine's list of “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.”Tracks of My TearsThis iconic song is another of “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time,” coming in at number 50.  The song itself is about putting on a good face for others after a breakup.  “Baby take a good look at my face, you'll see my smile looks out of place.  Yeah, just look closer, it's easy to trace the tracks of my tears.”My Girl Has GoneMarv Tarplin plays a 12-string guitar on this song that tries to put a positive spin on a breakup.  “Don't you cry, hold your head up high.  Don't give up, give love one more try, ‘cause there’s a right girl for every guy.”Going to a Go-GoThe up-temp dance song was covered by the Rolling Stones on their 1982 album “Still Life.”  Miracles member and co-writer Bobby Rogers said that the song was inspired by the success of the “go-go” clubs that were popular throughout the United States in the 1960's.   ENTERTAINMENT TRACK:The theme from the television series “Combat!”This drama series started in black and white and switched to color during its run from 1962 to 1967, and focused on a World War II American squad fighting Germans in France. STAFF PICKS:Everyone's Gone to the Moon by Jonathan KingBruce's staff pick was written and sung by Jonathan King while he was an undergraduate at Cambridge.  He went on to become a record producer, songwriter, and entrepreneur.  He discovered the band Genesis in 1967 and produced their first album, “From Genesis to Revelation.” I'm A Man by The YardbirdsRob brings us a most politically incorrect tune, originally performed by Bo Diddley in 1955.  The Yardbirds covered it this year after Jeff Beck replaced Eric Clapton as guitar.May the Bird of Paradise (Fly Up Your Nose) by “Little” Jimmy DickensBrian's staff pick features 4' 11" tall Jimmy Dickens.  The reference was used frequently by Johnny Carson, and the song chronicles some events in the life of a cheapskate.It Ain't Me Babe  by The TurtlesWayne finishes up the staff picks with a cover of a Bob Dylan song.  The song is about a boy telling a girl that he is not the one who will meet her every need.  This is the biggest hit of the first album by The Turtles.  INSTRUMENTAL TRACK:Cleo's Back by Junior Walker & the All StarsWe close out this week's podcast with an instrumental from another Motown group.

Visit our website BeautifulIllusions.org for a complete set of show notes and links to almost everything discussed in this episodeSelected References:Bob Dylan lyrics by song titleNo Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan by Robert Shelton“I Want You” from Dylan and The Grateful Dead’s 7/4/87 show in Foxboro, MA - not the exact version on the album (in terms of Dylan’s enunciation it’s actually better), but you get the idea.“I Want You” from Bob Dylan’s 1966 masterpiece Blonde on Blonde“Hurricane” and “One More Cup Of Coffee” off the 1976 album Desire“Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” from the 1975 album Blood On The Tracks“Love Minus Zero/No Limit” from the 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home“The Man In Me” from the 1970 album New Morning, and famously used in the Coen brother’s extraordinary cult classic movie  “The Big Lebowski”Bruce Springsteen, the 1975 Rolling Stone article “New Dylan From Jersey? It Might As Well Be Springsteen”, “The Members of ‘The Next Bob Dylan’ Club” and “Who Is The Next Bob Dylan?: 10 Songwriters Once Voted Most Likely” Bob Dylan at The Palace Theatre on April 14, 1996 reviewed here in the Hartford CourantTime Out Of Mind won 3 Grammy’s at the 40th Annual Grammy Awards for Album of the Year, Best Contemporary Folk Album, and Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for the song “Cold Irons Bound” - perhaps most memorably Dylan’s performance of “Love Sick” at the show was crashed by a spastically contorting and shirtless Michael Portnoy who infamously had the words “Soy Bomb” painted across his chest - Dylan and the band kept going like the true pros that they are without missing a beat or seeming to acknowledge the intrusion in any way. Also notably “Time Out of Mind” beat out Radiohead’s masterpiece “OK Computer” for Album of the Year.Rick Danko (late, of The Band) joins Bob Dylan for “This Wheel’s On Fire” and then again during the encore for “I Shall Be Released” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” original version from the 1963 album The Freewheelin’ Bob DylanThe Gibson J-45 Sunburst acoustic guitar - Dylan played the J-45 as his primary acoustic throughout the late 90’s and early 2000’s - it can be seen and heard prominently on this video of “My Back Pages”Is Dylan the greatest songwriter? Try “Rolling Stone Readers Pick the Top 10 Songwriters of All Time” or “The 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time” (heavily biased towards rock era, but it’s Rolling Stone, so that’s somewhat expected), or try a list from Dave’s Music Database that aggregates 36 other lists, an article/poll from BBC news, an opinion piece from a philosophy professor, or maybe the fact that Dylan won a Nobel Prize in Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”Newport concert review (with setlist) from Berkshire Links website, and “Dylan at Newport, 2002” from the blog singer-songwriter/Dylanologist Peter Stone Brown (originally posted on Bobdylan.com), Dylan notably wore a wig and fake beard for the occasion (pic with wig, beard, and J-45)Dylan sang “Only A Pawn In Their Game” and “When the Ship Comes In” (with Joan Baez) as part of a musical program that included Mahalia Jackson, Marian Anderson, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, Odetta, and The Freedom Singers, before Martin Luther King gave his famous speech “Bob Dylan’s Influence On The Beatles” from The Flip Side Beatles Blog, and “How Bob Dylan Influenced The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who“ from Far Out Magazine“How Bob Dylan Changed the 60’s, and American Culture”“Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and the Rock of the Sixties” “Is this cave painting humanity’s oldest story?”“Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman, or read this excerpt in Scientific AmericanAnother Side of Bob Dylan released in 1964Bob Dylan performing “Maggie’s Farm” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, and just because it’s cool here is an awestruck Jason Isbell playing the 1964 Fender Strat that Dylan played at the Newport performance, and here is a bunch of others including Courtney Barnett with the same  guitarFor more on the “Electric Dylan Controversy” see “The Night Bob Dylan Went Electric,” “Dylan goes electric at The Newport Folk Festival,” “July 25, 1965: Dylan Goes Electric at The Newport Folk Festival,” and “Revisit Bob Dylan’s electric performance at Newport Folk Festival 50 years later” -Here’s a good example of an antagonistic interview from the famous Dylan documentary “Don’t Look Back”“How Robert Zimmerman Became Bob Dylan”“My Back Pages” album recording and lyricsThe album Bringing It All Back Home was released on March 22, 1965 a few months before the Newport Folk Festival in July of that same year“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” album recording“It Ain’t Me Babe” album recording“Simulacra and Simulations” excerpt from Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings 1965’s Highway 61 Revisited and the 1966 masterpiece Blonde on Blonde, along with Bringing It All Back Home are widely considered the peak of Dylan’s 60’s outputCheck out the classic video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues”The 2005 documentary “No Direction Home” by Martin Scorsese“Shelter from the Storm” album version This episode was recorded in February 2020The “Beautiful Illusions Theme” was performed by Darron Vigliotti (guitar) and Joseph Vigliotti (drums), and was written and recorded by Darron Vigliotti

Deman shares his journey with comics, visual semiotics, Orientalism, and margins of alternative comics. Along the way, Deman discusses Scott McCloud, comics in the 1990s and its seeking of legitimacy, pornography and sexuality in comics, Sam Kieth's Maxx, Aline Kominsky Crumb's It Ain't Me Babe, Chris Claremont, Harley Quinn Vol. 3, #8--as well as the Canadian Society for the Study of Comics, his blog, and his "The Claremont Run" big data research lab. "The big 3 (Maus, Persepolis, Fun Home) grows from a contextual history of insecurity in comics studies as a field."

This exhibit is called The Vietnam War: The Music. Our mission at the Music Museum is to support all Vietnam Veterans and those who serve the United States, then and now. We thank you for your service. ----- Many of the songs in this episode will have a special meaning for you. A place, a brother, a time gone by. This program is for you, the Vietnam Vets, who will never forget. ----- In this episode you’ll hear the song, “BATTLE HYMN OF THE RIVER RATS” Dick Jonas wrote this song while flying to the first "practice" stateside reunion of the Red River Valley Fighter Pilots' Association ("Red River Rats") in 1969. The Red River Rats are pilots who flew combat missions across the Red River in North Vietnam. They held "practice" reunions in Thailand and the United States until the POW's came home in 1973, when the first real reunion was held. Other units have adapted this song for themselves, notably the Ravens, who flew forward air control in the secret war in Laos. ------- Visit: http://www.fighterpilotuniversity.com/ ------ ----- DICK JONAS (guitar) Dick Jonas, the best-known song writer of the air war, flew 125 missions with the 433rd Tactical Fighter Squadron ("Satan's Angels"), 8th Tactical Fighter Wing ("Wolfpack"), Ubon Rachitani Royal Thai Air Force Base, 1967-1968. He participated in Rolling Thunder (the code name for U.S. air operations over North Vietnam at that time), took part in Steel Tiger missions, and flew in support of Khe Sahn. ----- Our goal with The Vietnam War: The Music is to honor the fallen and the survivors with the music that got them through “just one more day”. Our shows are broadcast around the world. They say thank you & “welcome home” to all Vietnam Vets. There is no opinion offered on the War. It’s all about the music. - ---- For your service and your sacrifice, this is The Vietnam War: The Music. - ----- This episode: Vietnam War: The Music - S. 2 / E. 7 – The Order Is Rapidly Fading Don’t forget to join the conversation on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100008232395712 - - - - - or by email at dannymemorylane@gmail.com - - - - - In this episode you’ll hear: 1) The Times They Are A Changin' by Simon & Garfunkel 2) Song Of The Patriot by Johnny Cash & Marty Robbins 3) We Take Care Of Our Own by Bruce Springsteen 4) Soldiers & Jesus by James Otto 5) Welcome Home by Country Joe McDonald 6) Love Minus Zero/No Limit by Buck Owens 7) She Has Funny Cars by Jefferson Airplane 8) Whipping Post by The Allman Brothers Band 9) Battle Hymn of the Red River Rats by Dick Jonas 10) Street Fighting Man by The Rolling Stones 11) War Song by Vinnie James 12) Black And White by Three Dog Night 13) East Bound and Down by Dave Dudley 14) Cry Baby by Janis Joplin 15) Lucky Man by Emerson, Lake & Palmer 16) Some Gave All by Billy Ray Cyrus 17) My Generation by The Who 18) Rag Mama by Jim Kweskin & The Jug Band 19) John Brown by State Radio 20) Tell All The People by The Doors 21) Didn't I by Montgomery Gentry 22) Slippin' Into Darkness by War 23) Get Back by The Beatles 24) The King Is Gone (So Are You) by George Jones 25) Universal Soldier by Glen Campbell 26) Don't Think Twice, It's All Right by Waylon Jennings 27) Someday Never Comes by Creedence Clearwater Revival 28) I Am A Rock by Simon & Garfunkel 29) Once I Was by Judy Collins 30) These Are My People by Johnny Cash 31) It Ain't Me Babe by Peter, Paul And Mary 32) The Green Fields of France by Dropkick Murphys 33) Flowers of the Forest [aka "The Lament"] by Mike Oldfield

This is a week of me working on many custom projects! Since all the things I’ve been working on are secret (lots of engagement and wedding rings), I’ve chosen to share a special ring I made back in July for a dear friend of mine. Opal and diamonds in 14k rose gold with 14k white gold settings.1. Neil Young - Birds (45 RPM Version) 2. Bill Stone - Here I am 3. Bill Grover And The New Country Beat - Why Must I Be A Teenager In Love 4. Kevin Ayers - Stranger In Blue Suede Shoes 5. Duane Eddy - It Ain’t Me Babe 6. Bill Wilson - Father Let Your Light Shine Down 7. Itasca - Bess’ Dance 8. The City - I Wasn’t Born To Follow

Listening better is at the core of building healthy relationships. Healthy relationships lead to better health, better stress management, and a happier life. Today we talk about how to become a better listener by focusing on the person you're with, learning to avoid distractions, and listening objectively without the filters and stories we often bring to a conversation. This is our first episode looking at how to build healthier relationships, which we thematically label, "Just You and Me Babe."

Trina Robbins, in conversation with Richard Wolinsky. A legend in comic book circles, an artist at a time when hardly any women drew comics, Trina Robbins discusses her latest book, a memoir, “Last Girl Standing,” which deals with her life as an artist, author, and clothing designer. She was the first woman to edit a comic book created by women, “It Ain't Me Babe,” the first woman to draw “Wonder Woman,” and the single most influential historian chronicling the women who created comics and cartoons. In this interview, she also talks about her other recent books including a history of women drawing comics during World War II, a graphic novel version of a short story collection originally written by her father in Yiddish, and a graphic novel based on a work by British author Sax Rohmer. Trina Robbins was clothing designer for Los Angeles rock and roll bands in the 1960s and for the Warhol factory in New York. She also was a regular contributor to “Wimmens Comix,” a series of comic books created by women from the 1970s through 1990s.              The post Trina Robbins: Last Girl Standing appeared first on KPFA.

NEW FOR NOVEMBER 15, 2014 Where passing the time seems like the perfect place for BRYHNH . . . Sent Up The River - The Best Radio You Have Never Heard Vol. 246 1. The Lost Art Of Conversation / Night Light / Allons-Y (1) / Autumn / Allons-Y (2) / Talkin' Hawkin' - Pink Floyd Buy From iTunes 2. Firth Of Fifth (live excerpt) - Steve Hackett Buy From iTunes* 3.The River (live) - Bruce Springsteen and the Seeger Session Band Buy From iTunes* 4. Down By The River (live unplugged) - Neil Young Buy From iTunes 5. Going To California (early) - Led Zeppelin Buy From iTunes 6. It Ain't Me Babe (early) - Bob Dylan and The Band Buy From iTunes 7. Mr. Tambourine Man / Eight Miles High (live) - The Byrds Buy From iTunes* 8. Overture: "Mountain Top Sunrise" / Communion With The Sun (live) - Todd Rundgren and Utopia 10. Sound Chaser (early) - Yes Buy From iTunes* 11. Frame By Frame (alt) - King Crimson 12. Beware My Love (early) - Paul McCartney and Wings w/ John Bonham Buy From iTunes 13. Say Hello To Chicago - Neil Young Buy From iTunes We have a winner ! Charles Gammill of Colorado left us a comment on our iTunes Store page and is now the proud owner of an official BRYHNH hoodie. Our thanks and congrats to him. The Best Radio You Have Never Heard. Been up many creeks without a paddle . . . Accept No Substitute Click to leave comments on the Facebook page.

  Real Love by The Beatles When I'm 64 by The Beatles and Julian Lennon  Angel by James McCartney Ringo Wants to Write a Song by College Humor If That's What it Takes by George Harrison Roll over Beethoven by The Beatles Get Back by The Beatles You and Me Babe by Ringo Starr

  * News of a new George Harrison album called "Early Takes vol 1", John and Paul's responses to Bloody Sunday in 1972, Feedback the show has recieved so far, I tell you exactly what "Aladdin", "Hunger Games" and "The Muppets" have to do with the Beatles. The songs played during this episode are, Real Love by The Beatles Give Ireland Back to the Irsh by Wings Sunday Bloody Sunday by John Lennon Luck of the Irish by John Lennon All Things Must Pass by The Beatles All Things Must Pass by George Harrison Come Together by Robin Williams and Bobby McFerrin Long Haired Lady by Percy Thrillington You and Me Babe by Ringo Starr

  In this episode we cover,  * Rumors of the "Ram" reissue. * The quest to premiere Yellow Submarine at Abbey Road on the River. * A new musical direction for the original Quarrymen.  * What is Twitter saying about Yoko Ono?  * One odd theory about the identity of "Lovely Rita". All this plus more! Here is the set-list for this episode! Real Love by The Beatles Yoko One Rock Band Sketch by College Humor Long Haired Lady by Amnion Lovely Rita by The Beatles It's All Too Much by The Beatles No. 6 by The Quarrymen featuring May Pang If You've Got Trouble by The Beatles You and Me Babe by Ringo Starr   E-mail comments to bertonebeatle@gmail.com!

Show #6 Featuring Jamie from Broken Records and Jill from Sparrow and the Workshop What they said: Wahey! Great start. Indeed. I’m currently on a train with two people who are so posh, they must be Oli’s family. I’m in my jammies, eating super noodles and feeling sorry for myself. Right, @LiveFromtheLQ is done so it’s time for another exciting adventure from the files of Police Squad! Gracias for the mention! Great show, brill tune to end on. See you at @merrimentmakers once I”ve got my record player bagged. Tracklisting: 01. Rob St. John - Sargasso Sea02. G. Love & Special Sauce - Garbage Man03. The Young Republic - When I See Your Eyes I Swear To God That Worlds Collide04. The Phantom Band - Everybody Knows It’S True05. Bob Dylan - It Ain’t Me Babe06. Crash - The Primitives07. Broken Records - A Darkness Rises Up08. Creedence Clearwater Revival - Down On The Corner09. The Beta Band - Dr. Baker Download

JOHN JACOB NILES is considered one of our nation's most influential musicians. This Kentucky native is called the "Dean of American Balladeers" and Niles's dedication to the folk music tradition lives on in generations of folk revival artists such as Bob Dylan, Jean Ritchie, Joan Baez, and Oscar Brand. At the age of sixteen Niles wrote one of his most enduring tunes, "Go 'Way from My Window," basing it on a song fragment from a black farm worker. This iconic song has been performed by folk artists ever since and may even have inspired the opening line of Bob Dylan's "It Ain't Me Babe." As a composer and balladeer, Niles drew inspiration from the deep well of traditional Appalachian and African American folk songs. The show will feature Dr. RON PEN, associate professor of music and director of the John Jacob Niles Center for American Music and the Appalachian Studies Program, who just published the first full-length biography of Niles called I Wonder as I Wander: The Life of John Jacob Niles. Other artists performing on the show include: The Reel World String Band, The Niles String Quartet, Carla Gover, Dennis Bender & vocalist Monica Dewey.