Podcasts about Mitch Mitchell

Send us a textGuitarist Barrie Cadogan (Little Barrie, Primal Scream, The The) joins Al for this episode to dig into The Jimi Hendrix Experience's 1968 album Electric Ladyland. Barrie talks about getting introduced to the album by his father and getting much of his guitar education from listening to it (and Hendrix's other albums). He also goes in depth in discussing some of his favorite tracks from the album. Barrie also talks about working with Matt Johnson on The The's Ensoulment, and on the making of the second Little Barrie & Malcolm Catto album, Electric War.Barrie mentioned that he recorded an early version of his riff for The The's “Cognitive Dissident' on his Instagram account. Check it out here! https://www.instagram.com/tv/CaAXLbTAmRM/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==Speaking of Instagram, you can find Barrie and Little Barrie there at @littlebarrie. He and the band are also on Facebook at @littlebarrie. You can also find Little Barrie's music on YouTube at @littlebarrieofficial and on their website, littlebarrie.com.Al is on Bluesky at @almelchior. This show has an account on Instagram at @youmealbum. You can support the show on Buzzsprout at https://www.buzzsprout.com/1542814/episodes or at the link at the bottom of these show notes.IMPORTANT UPDATE! You, Me and An Album will soon have additional offerings on Patreon. More information will be coming soon. To sign up, go to patreon.com/youmealbum.1:34 Barrie joins the show1:57 Barrie describes the nature of his connection to Jimi Hendrix's music5:12 Barrie's love of Hendrix's music was handed down from his father7:48 Listening to Hendrix's albums were an important part of Barrie's guitar education9:03 Al contrasts his childhood experience of hearing Hendrix to Barrie's10:22 Barrie talks about seeking out older music in the pre-internet age11:50 Barrie recalls how Little Barrie wound up supporting one of his teen-years musical heroes12:54 Barrie talks about the differences and similarities between Electric Ladyland and the band's previous albums18:05 Barrie and Al discuss the impact Chas Chandler's departure as producer had on Electric Ladyland21:45 Barrie singles out some of his favorite tracks from the album28:36 Barrie talks about the challenges inherent in learning from playing along with Hendrix29:29 Barrie discusses the many musicians that Hendrix collaborated with34:28 Barrie talks about the jazzy feel that Mitch Mitchell brought to the songs37:25 Barrie explains why Electric Ladyland is his favorite Hendrix album41:06 Barrie makes note of Electric Ladyland's staying power and younger listeners discovering ‘60s rock44:59 Barrie theorizes why Electric Ladyland was recorded in both London and New York46:22 Barrie talks about how Little Barrie's collaborations with Malcolm Catto came about50:39 Barrie notes how Electric War sounds different from previous Little Barrie albums53:52 Barrie talks about Electric War coming in the midst of a busy schedule55:05 Barrie explains how one of his riffs became the basis for The The's “Cognitive Dissident”58:45 Barrie recounts his first meeting with Matt Johnson1:03:51 Barrie talks about his upcoming tour plans with Little Barrie, The The and the Black KeysOutro music is from “My Now” by Little Barrie & Malcolm Catto.Support the show

Le guitariste Thomas Naïm est le seul guitariste au monde à proposer un album solo sur Hendrix. La #SessionLive reçoit Thomas Naïm pour la sortie de l'album May This Be Love et le spécialiste français de Jimi Hendrix : Yazid Manou !C'est après un stage d'été au Berklee College of Music de Boston et des cours à l'American School of Modern Music à Paris, que Thomas Naïm fonde avec la chanteuse Joyce Hozé le duo Tom & Joyce. Influencé par la MPB, la bossa nova des 60's et le jazz, le groupe enregistre deux albums : Tom & Joyce sorti en 2002 (Yellow Productions/East West) et Antigua en 2005 (Yellow Productions/Tommy Boy) sur lequel participe le légendaire batteur Tony Allen et dont certains morceaux seront remixés par des producteurs de dance music parmi les plus reconnus (Masters At Work, François Kevorkian ou Bob Sinclar).Par la suite, Thomas Naïm sera sollicité pour accompagner sur scène ou en studio de nombreux artistes venant d'horizons parfois très différents parmi lesquels Youn Sun Nah, Hugh Coltman, Hindi Zahra, Sébastien Tellier, Ala.ni, Mayra Andrade, Tiken Jah Fakoly, Blick Bassy, Idrissa Diop, Bob Sinclar, Salomé de Bahia, Brisa Roché, Bernard Lavilliers, Albin de la Simone, Michel Fugain, Claire Diterzi, Renan Luce…Il mène en parallèle depuis plusieurs années une carrière solo à la tête d'un trio avec le bassiste Marcello Giuliani et le batteur Raphaël Chassin avec lesquels il enregistre en 2018 l'album Desert Highway.En 2020, Thomas Naïm va confronter son trio aux compositions du maître Jimi Hendrix et enregistrer l'album Sounds of Jimi. L'idée de départ n'est pas de reprendre les titres d'Hendrix tel quel mais de trouver pour chaque morceau une esthétique plus personnelle, et à l'exception de trois titres chantés par Hugh Coltman et Célia Kameni, de privilégier l'approche instrumentale. L'album accueillera également en invités Erik Truffaz à la trompette et Camille Bazbaz à l'orgue.En 2022, il retourne en studio avec son trio augmenté de l'organiste/pianiste de Marc Benham pour enregistrer, sous la houlette du réalisateur grand angle Daniel Yvinec, On the Far Side, un album consacré à ses propres compositions dont la sortie est prévue pour février 2023. Thomas Naïm y retrouve ses premières amours, le Jazz, qu'il mêle à ses influences de toujours la pop, le rock psychédélique, les bandes originales de films et mille autres choses. Laurent Bardainne (saxophone) souffle sur trois titres un vent créatif qui donne à cet album unique une force et une couleur presque mystique.Avec May This Be Love, Thomas Naïm devient le 1er guitariste au monde, à reprendre Hendrix en guitare solo.Titres interprétés au grand studio- Hey Joe Live RFI- The Wind Cries Mary, extrait de l'album- Purple Haze Live RFILine Up : Thomas Naïm, guitare.Son : Benoît Le Tirant, Camille Roch, Mathias Taylor.Album May This Be Love (Rootless Blues 2025).Site -  YouTube - Bandcamp. Yazid Manou est journaliste, relations presse et spécialiste de Jimi Hendrix en France. en 1990, il organise un concert à l'Olympia pour les 20 ans de la disparition du guitariste américain. Il est le héros du roman « Blues pour Jimi Hendrix » écrit par Stéphane Koechlin. Yazid Manou est le gardien d'un mort comme Anubis dans la mythologie égyptienne, Jimi Hendrix. Il porte des fleurs sur sa tombe, soigne sa postérité, veille à sa gloire... En 1990, vingt ans après la mort de Jimi le 18 septembre 1970, il a organisé le festival « Jimi's Back » à Paris pendant une semaine dont une soirée à l'Olympia qui a bouleversé sa vie. Il y a invité de nombreux artistes pour reprendre les thèmes du bluesman. Il a convié bien sûr en premier lieu l'ex-bassiste de Jimi, Noel Redding, personnage douloureux et attachant, frappé quelques mois plus tôt par un deuil terrible, la mort de sa fiancée Carol Appleby dans un accident de voiture. Depuis, la vie de Yazid - devenu par la suite attaché de presse indépendant - est rythmée par les nouvelles de la « famille Hendrix », disputes avec la soeur adoptive Janie, rencontre avec ceux qui l'ont connu (B. B. King, Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney, Johnny Hallyday, Miles Davis, Taj Mahal), sorties d'albums (Jimi a davantage publié de disques une fois mort que vivant), disparition des témoins, Noel, Buddy Miles, Monika Dannemann (dernière compagne), Al Hendrix (son père) puis Mitch Mitchell. Il a construit sa vie autour d'un mort, de la mort en général. Yazid est un infatigable marcheur africain arpentant le pavé parisien en compagnie de son fantôme.Playlist Jimi Hendrix par Yazid Manou51st Anniversary, Wait Until Tomorrow, Red House & All Along the Watchtower.Concert du 20 mars @ Le 360 Paris.Réalisation : Hadrien Touraud.

Le guitariste Thomas Naïm est le seul guitariste au monde à proposer un album solo sur Hendrix. La #SessionLive reçoit Thomas Naïm pour la sortie de l'album May This Be Love et le spécialiste français de Jimi Hendrix : Yazid Manou !C'est après un stage d'été au Berklee College of Music de Boston et des cours à l'American School of Modern Music à Paris, que Thomas Naïm fonde avec la chanteuse Joyce Hozé le duo Tom & Joyce. Influencé par la MPB, la bossa nova des 60's et le jazz, le groupe enregistre deux albums : Tom & Joyce sorti en 2002 (Yellow Productions/East West) et Antigua en 2005 (Yellow Productions/Tommy Boy) sur lequel participe le légendaire batteur Tony Allen et dont certains morceaux seront remixés par des producteurs de dance music parmi les plus reconnus (Masters At Work, François Kevorkian ou Bob Sinclar).Par la suite, Thomas Naïm sera sollicité pour accompagner sur scène ou en studio de nombreux artistes venant d'horizons parfois très différents parmi lesquels Youn Sun Nah, Hugh Coltman, Hindi Zahra, Sébastien Tellier, Ala.ni, Mayra Andrade, Tiken Jah Fakoly, Blick Bassy, Idrissa Diop, Bob Sinclar, Salomé de Bahia, Brisa Roché, Bernard Lavilliers, Albin de la Simone, Michel Fugain, Claire Diterzi, Renan Luce…Il mène en parallèle depuis plusieurs années une carrière solo à la tête d'un trio avec le bassiste Marcello Giuliani et le batteur Raphaël Chassin avec lesquels il enregistre en 2018 l'album Desert Highway.En 2020, Thomas Naïm va confronter son trio aux compositions du maître Jimi Hendrix et enregistrer l'album Sounds of Jimi. L'idée de départ n'est pas de reprendre les titres d'Hendrix tel quel mais de trouver pour chaque morceau une esthétique plus personnelle, et à l'exception de trois titres chantés par Hugh Coltman et Célia Kameni, de privilégier l'approche instrumentale. L'album accueillera également en invités Erik Truffaz à la trompette et Camille Bazbaz à l'orgue.En 2022, il retourne en studio avec son trio augmenté de l'organiste/pianiste de Marc Benham pour enregistrer, sous la houlette du réalisateur grand angle Daniel Yvinec, On the Far Side, un album consacré à ses propres compositions dont la sortie est prévue pour février 2023. Thomas Naïm y retrouve ses premières amours, le Jazz, qu'il mêle à ses influences de toujours la pop, le rock psychédélique, les bandes originales de films et mille autres choses. Laurent Bardainne (saxophone) souffle sur trois titres un vent créatif qui donne à cet album unique une force et une couleur presque mystique.Avec May This Be Love, Thomas Naïm devient le 1er guitariste au monde, à reprendre Hendrix en guitare solo.Titres interprétés au grand studio- Hey Joe Live RFI- The Wind Cries Mary, extrait de l'album- Purple Haze Live RFILine Up : Thomas Naïm, guitare.Son : Benoît Le Tirant, Camille Roch, Mathias Taylor.Album May This Be Love (Rootless Blues 2025).Site -  YouTube - Bandcamp. Yazid Manou est journaliste, relations presse et spécialiste de Jimi Hendrix en France. en 1990, il organise un concert à l'Olympia pour les 20 ans de la disparition du guitariste américain. Il est le héros du roman « Blues pour Jimi Hendrix » écrit par Stéphane Koechlin. Yazid Manou est le gardien d'un mort comme Anubis dans la mythologie égyptienne, Jimi Hendrix. Il porte des fleurs sur sa tombe, soigne sa postérité, veille à sa gloire... En 1990, vingt ans après la mort de Jimi le 18 septembre 1970, il a organisé le festival « Jimi's Back » à Paris pendant une semaine dont une soirée à l'Olympia qui a bouleversé sa vie. Il y a invité de nombreux artistes pour reprendre les thèmes du bluesman. Il a convié bien sûr en premier lieu l'ex-bassiste de Jimi, Noel Redding, personnage douloureux et attachant, frappé quelques mois plus tôt par un deuil terrible, la mort de sa fiancée Carol Appleby dans un accident de voiture. Depuis, la vie de Yazid - devenu par la suite attaché de presse indépendant - est rythmée par les nouvelles de la « famille Hendrix », disputes avec la soeur adoptive Janie, rencontre avec ceux qui l'ont connu (B. B. King, Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney, Johnny Hallyday, Miles Davis, Taj Mahal), sorties d'albums (Jimi a davantage publié de disques une fois mort que vivant), disparition des témoins, Noel, Buddy Miles, Monika Dannemann (dernière compagne), Al Hendrix (son père) puis Mitch Mitchell. Il a construit sa vie autour d'un mort, de la mort en général. Yazid est un infatigable marcheur africain arpentant le pavé parisien en compagnie de son fantôme.Playlist Jimi Hendrix par Yazid Manou51st Anniversary, Wait Until Tomorrow, Red House & All Along the Watchtower.Concert du 20 mars @ Le 360 Paris.Réalisation : Hadrien Touraud.

On this episode of Lipps Service, Scott sits down with the iconic drummer, Stewart Copeland, of the legendary '80s rock band The Police. The two get into Stewart's early days in music, his father being in the CIA, and influences like Ginger Baker. Stewart talks about his proudest moment, which songs he would redo, and meeting the famed producer George Martin. He discusses his relationship and some experiences with frontman Sting, reuniting with the band, and his composing work. To close, Stewart lists his top 5 drummers of all time, his perfect album, and the lineup of his ideal supergroup. Tune in for a legendary conversation with the Hall-of-Famer drummer! CREDITS (Instagram handles)Host @ScottLippsEdited by @toastycakesMusic by @Robby_hoffProduced by @whitakermarisaRecorded at Melrose Podcasts LA Sonos makes it so easy to fill your home with incredible sound! Check out the new Sonos Ace headphones, which are Bluetooth-enabled and have three buttons. The content key allows you to play, pause, accept calls, and control the volume. Plus, they feature noise cancellation and voice assist!These headphones are exceptionally well done and sound incredible, whether listening to your favorite playlist, chatting on a call, watching a movie, or even recording a podcast like this one. They sound particularly fantastic when listening to Lipps Service!Sonos has great gifts for everyone on your list. Visit sonos.com/Lipps to save 20% on select products. 0:02:00 - Grammys0:05:30 - Rock & Roll Hall of Fame0:08:26 - Growing up0:14:50 - Ginger Baker0:15:00 - First bands0:19:44 - Meeting The Police0:29:00 - Clark Kent0:31:25 - Proudest moment0:35:25 - Any songs Stewart would redo?0:39:00 - Coming to America0:45:00 - “Every Breath You Take”0:46:00 - The time Sting yelled0:49:00 - Did the band end too soon?0:50:00 - George Martin story0:53:00 - The band's dynamic during the reunion0:54:50 - How much money would it take to reunite?0:56:00 - The Doors0:57:00 - Composing0:58:00 - Top 5 drummers1:03:00 - Perfect album1:07:00 - Supergroup1:08:00 - New projects

(S4-Ep 9) The Jimi Hendrix Experience- Are You Experienced (Polydor in the U.K. and Reprise in the U.S.)  Released May 12, 1967 Recorded October 23, 1966, to April 4, 1967  Are You Experienced, released on May 12, 1967, is regarded as one of rock history's most influential debut albums. With Jimi Hendrix at the forefront, the album blends blues, psychedelia, and experimental rock, introducing his signature guitar techniques that would reshape music. Songs like "Purple Haze," "Hey Joe," and "The Wind Cries Mary" are not just iconic tracks but also showcase Hendrix's revolutionary use of distortion, feedback, and other effects. The album's US and UK releases featured different tracklists.  The Jimi Hendrix Experience—composed of Hendrix, Mitch Mitchell, and Noel Redding—provided a groundbreaking sound driven by Mitchell's jazz-infused drumming and Redding's bass playing. Produced by former Animals bassist Chas Chandler and engineered by Eddie Kramer, the album's innovative studio techniques set new standards in rock production. Are You Experienced became a commercial success and remains a cornerstone of rock music, establishing Hendrix as a true musical genius. Signature Tracks "Purple Haze,"  "Hey Joe,"  "Wind Cries Mary" Playlist YouTube Playlist  Spotify Playlist  Full Albums Full Album YouTube  Full Album on Spotify

John McDermott is a writer, producer and, for nearly three decades, the Catalog Director for the Jimi Hendrix family company Experience Hendrix, L.L.C.. Together with Jimi Hendrix's sister, Janie Hendrix and legendary engineer Eddie Kramer, McDermott has co-produced every Jimi Hendrix CD and DVD release, including 1999's Grammy Award-winning Band Of Gypsys, 2014's Emmy Award-winning Hear My Train A Comin' and the recent Grammy nominated Music, Money, Madness: Jimi Hendrix In Maui. John & Maggie discuss his latest project is Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision the new feature-length documentary film chronicling the creation of Electric Lady Studios (directed by John) Rising from the rubble of a bankrupt, Greenwich Village nightclub to the state of the art recording facility inspired by Jimi Hendrix's vision and becoming the first ever, artist owned commercial recording studio. Contained on the five vinyl LPs or three CDs in the Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision box set are 39 tracks recorded by Jimi and his band—consisting of bassist Billy Cox and drummer Mitch Mitchell—at the studio within the last four months of the guitarist's life. Hendrix was hard at work creating First Rays Of The New Rising Sun, the ambitious double album that would follow his 1968 masterwork Electric Ladyland. Inspired by the possibilities of the new studio, the Experience built classic fare such as “Night Bird Flying,” “Freedom,” and “Dolly Dagger” from the ground up. The set offers a comprehensive look at the work Hendrix undertook during that fruitful summer of 1970Source: https://ajimihendrixvision.com/Source: https://www.sonymusic.com/legacy/documentary-box-set-electric-lady-studios-a-jimi-hendrix-vision/Source: https://www.jimihendrix.com/music/electric-lady-studios-a-jimi-hendrix-vision/Host Maggie LePique, a radio veteran since the 1980's at NPR in Kansas City Mo. She began her radio career in Los Angeles in the early 1990's and has worked for Pacifica station KPFK Radio in Los Angeles since 1994.Send us a textSupport the show@profileswithmaggielepique@maggielepique

We're releasing this episode (our Season 1 finale) on a Sunday rather than the regular Tuesday, for a very good reason indeed: 1st December 2024 is the 57th anniversary of the amazing Jimi Hendrix performing in the Central Theatre, Chatham, another milestone in the long, rich history of Medway's music scene.The Hendrix Experience were headlining a package tour of seven bands - the kind of tour that was very popular in the US in the 1950s, but quite unusual in the UK by the late 60s. Second on the bill were Pink Floyd, who'd only just released their first album. So we went to talk to Nick Mason, the Floyd drummer, about his memories of being on the tour with Jimi. In his wry, understated way, he gives us a real insight to what it meant to him musically and personally.We also talk to John Campbell, the lead guitarist and singer in Europe's best Hendrix tribute band, Are You Experienced?, about channelling Hendrix for audiences in the 2020s. And illustrator and typographer Will Hill tells us about going - aged 12 - to his first-ever gig: Jimi Hendrix in Washington DC in August 1967, only a few months before he came to Chatham…Finally, Phil chats to Rob about the times he got to play piano with both the then surviving members of the Hendrix Experience - bassist Noel Redding in County Cork, and drummer Mitch Mitchell in the Hard Rock Café on Piccadilly.And we've added a Christmas bonus: a teaser for Series 2 with Lucinda Dickens Hawksley, the great-great-great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens.Thanks for listening - and a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all!!With thanks to John Campbell from Are You Experienced? Instagram: @‌JimiJon4Facebook: Are You Experienced?To purchase a copy of Victorian Christmas by Lucinda Dickens Hawksley visit the Charles Dickens Museum shop or Store 104, RochesterWe Did It Medway is supported by the Medway Council Shared Prosperity Fund from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, and The City of Rochester Society. Find out more about their work at city-of-rochester.org.ukWe Did it Medway is presented by Philip Dodd and Rob Flood. It is produced and edited by Suze Cooper at Big Tent Media, with assistance from Emily Crosby Media.The We Did It Medway music is written and performed by Chris Weller (Staggered Ray), Rob Shepherd (Singing Loins) and Vicky Price (Ashen Keys) with lyrics by Philip Dodd. Additional sound design elements for this episode were sourced from Freesound.org: Sleigh bells courtesy of GowlerMusic and soundstack. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Staci's guest is music industry legend Dave Robinson. As the co-founder of Stiff Records, Dave was at the forefront of the punk and new wave movements, working with iconic artists like Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, and The Damned. His career spans decades, including time as tour manager for Jimi Hendrix (Dave's own “rock and roll nightmare” involves Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell). He's currently managing the up-and-coming British band Hardwicke Circus, which he discusses, as well as his vision of the future of rock music through albums and performances.

It turns out it's not all about the bass when talking with my hero, iconic legend, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Inductee, Jack Casady, of Jefferson Airplane and Hot Tuna. We did a deep dive into Jack's family history, which is documented back to 1600s America on one side. There's Irish, there's Jewish, smoked whitefish on Sunday mornings whilst being raised Protestant. There are stories aplenty of Jack's father with whom he shared a passion for music and a complicated relationship. Jack found a banjo and a guitar in their attic, where his musical journey began. Jack shares the details, suffice it to say, his solid work ethic, intelligence, talent, and perhaps his penchant for alcohol took root here. Unlike his father, Jack got to live his passion, and got sober 34 years ago. Bravo, sir! He tells a most poignant tale with a prop of losing his father thisclose to a lovely milestone. One of many very moving moments shared today. Jack took us through his early musical influences and experiences, and a couple of non-musical ones like his paper route… he spoke of Danny Gatton, meeting Jorma, how he went from guitar to bass, the invitation to join Jefferson Airplane, in my top 5 bands of all time, what that was for him creatively - those days, San Francisco, those people, Signe, Marty, Paul, then Grace, Skip, Spencer… and the lifestyle, going club to club, playing and supporting each other, The Dead, Big Brother, Jimi, and recording Voodoo Chile, and the impact Mitch Mitchell had on the music, Jimi, and on Jack. We talked The Filmore, West, and East, the special pull of New York, Woodstock, how that went down for Jack & Jorma, and the aftermath… Hot Tuna, how and why… he and Jorma and why it still works almost 60 years later… SVT, The Starship, KBC… teaching at Fur Peace Ranch, and now virtually - you too can study with Jack! He played Somebody to Love on his signature Diana and almost made me cry, and, at my request, his iconic White Rabbit riff, in my top 5 songs of all time and the reason I picked up a bass 40 years ago. Speaking of Diana, Jack spoke of their life together and their fight to keep his wife alive after her cancer diagnosis. He was visibly overcome and still for a few moments when speaking of her passing over a decade ago. The bright side, he announced he's betrothed to Debra Evans, who was part of Diana's care team. Lots of full-circle moments, Jack shares a birthday with my son, Harry. We're all connected, aren't we? This was a dream come true for this Airplane, Hot Tuna, loving, bass-playing wanna-be. One for the books. If someone had told me when I was a girl in Queens playing the grooves off Surrealistic Pillow that I would one day sit down with Jack (and Jorma), I would've wanted what they were having. I was probably already having it. And look at us now, all three, clean and sober. This old girl is grateful beyond words for this wondrous day with Jack. Jack Casady Live on Game Changers With Vicki Abelson Wednesday, 11/13/24, Noon PT, 3 pm ET Streamed Live on my Facebook Replay here: https://bit.ly/4hOGeUs

This episode covers affordable estate planning for LGBTQ+ individuals and couples with Mitch Mitchell, Associate Counsel of Estate Planning at Trust & Will. Our money system in this country is outdated and antiquated and, by far, does not meet the needs of LGBTQ+ individuals and families. When it comes to estate planning and making sure that your assets get passed to who you want, things can get even more complicated if you're in the LGBTQ+ community. Different states have different laws, and figuring it all out is hard. You'll Learn: What makes estate planning for LGBTQ+ individuals so challenging What are the essential estate planning documents you need How much estate planning costs (and how to make it more affordable) How do you handle estate planning if you have kids, are adopting, or using a surrogate  Why the home-buying process can be tricky for LGBTQ+ couples and individuals  Links Trust & Will How to Find an Estate Planning Attorney article CONNECT WITH SHANNAH Ask Shannah questions - submit your question here https://etmpod.link/askshannah  Freebie: 10 Money Questions to Ask Yourself Money Guide https://etmpod.link/10moneyq  Follow me on Instagram  Leave a 5-star Review here https://ratethispodcast.com/etm.  Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@EveryonesTalkinMoney SPONSORS Thanks to ASPCA for sponsoring the show. To explore coverage, visit ASPCApetinsurance.com/ETM. Thanks to Mint Mobile for sponsoring the show. To get your new 3-month premium wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month, go to http://www.mintmobile.com/ETM . Thanks to Notion for sponsoring the show. Notion is my go-to tool for managing notes, to-do lists, and action items. You can try Notion for free at Notion.com/ETM. Thanks to OneSkin for sponsoring the show. Get 15% off OneSkin with the code ETM at https://www.oneskin.co/  Thanks to Quince for sponsoring the show. Go to http://www.quince.com/etm for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.  Thanks to NerdWallet for sponsoring the show. Don't wait to make smart financial decisions. Compare and find smarter credit cards, savings accounts, and more today at www.nerdwallet.com. Thanks to Monarch for sponsoring the show. ​​After trying out Monarch for myself, I understand why it's the top-rated personal finance app. Listeners of this show will get an extended thirty-day free trial when you go to www.monarchmoney.com/ETM.  Thanks to EarnIn for sponsoring the show. Just download the EarnIn app in Google Play of the Apple App store and use code Talkin Money under Podcast. Thanks to Noom for sponsoring the show. Start taking control of your weight management and join the millions who have lost weight with Noom. Sign up for your TRIAL today at www.noom.com.   Thanks to ButcherBox for sponsoring the show. Sign up today at www.butcherbox.com/etm and use code ETM to get $20 off your first order. Thanks to DelelteMe for sponsoring the show. Today get 20% off your DeleteMe plan when you go to www.JoinDeleteMe.com/ETM and use promo code ETM at checkout.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ian "Fritz" Frakes commenced his working career in the Music world. He was born in Harold Hill to parents who had moved out of the East End of London. Rather than taking the 11 Plus he took the morning off to avoid the exam.At 15 1/2yrs he joined the junior leaders. However, after 3 months it was discovered that the military was not for him and ended up returning home. On the way home he picked up the Evening Standard and saw a job advertised for F & R Walsh in Tottenham Court Road where he was employed as a runner. He moved to Carling Music as a counter assistant and went on to meet the great and the good of the British music scene.He worked in the building where Hendrix, Fielding and Mitch Mitchell had their 1st Jam session. His interactions with David Essex were extremely memorable and included the discussion over David's after shave. In 2019 Fritz wrote to David Essex and explained that they had previously been in each other's company, David Essex responded … Sorry mate I don't remember you. Fritz witnessed the historic performance by the Beatles on the roof of 3 Saville row in January 1969.In 1979 Fritz joined Essex Police he worked on the elite Force Support Unit, Marine Unit and at Stanstead Airport. He was present during the Colchester Poll Tax riotsHe now resides in Northumbria.#deccarecords #beatles #davidessex #podcast #police #policeofficer @TheBeatles @DavidEssexVEVO Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, we dive into the finer nuances of back office operations and why its important to invest in those operations. Our guest, Mitch Mitchell, CEO of Tai Software gets into the return on investment that comes with efficient back office operations. For more information subscribe to Check Call the newsletter or the podcast. Follow the Check Call Podcast Other FreightWaves Shows Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Good morning and happy Tuesday! Welcome to your FreightWaves NOW Community Spotlight. Today, we are thrilled to be joined by Mary O'Connell, the host and writer of "Check Call." In this episode, Mary dives into the often overlooked but crucial aspect of freight brokerage – back office operations. She discusses her recent conversation with Mitch Mitchell from Tie Software about the importance of investing in back office functions like accounting, operations support, and accounts receivable. Discover why these departments are essential for the smooth running and financial health of any brokerage, and how they can foster better relationships and efficiency between different teams. Mary and Mitch also touch on the common tension between freight brokers and back office staff, emphasizing the need for collaboration and understanding that each team's success is interconnected. Learn how adopting advanced technology, like TMS systems, can streamline processes, enhance visibility, and ultimately contribute to the overall success of a business. Make sure to catch the full episode at 12:30 PM Eastern today on FreightWaves' YouTube channel. Don't miss out on other great content by subscribing and hitting the notification bell. For more updates, subscribe to the "Check Call" newsletter on freightwaves.com/check-call. And if you're thinking about attending F3 in November, subscribing to the newsletter might just come with a surprise! Timestamps: 00:00:14 - Introduction and Welcome 00:00:33 - Conversation with Mitch Mitchell from Tie Software 00:00:54 - Importance of Back Office Operations 00:02:23 - Different Priorities and Tensions between Teams 00:04:32 - Role of Technology in Back Office Efficiency 00:06:04 - Visibility and Payment Processes 00:08:29 - Conclusion and Show Details Subscribe to FreightWaves NOW for more insightful discussions and industry updates! #FreightWavesNOW #FreightBrokerage #BackOfficeOperations #CheckCall #TMS #Logistics #SupplyChain #Technology #FreightWaves #CommunitySpotlight #Finance #Accounting #OperationsSupport #Visibility #PaymentProcessing #F3 Subscribe to the Check Call newsletter: freightwaves.com/check-call

In this episode, we dive into the finer nuances of back office operations and why its important to invest in those operations. Our guest, Mitch Mitchell, CEO of Tai Software gets into the return on investment that comes with efficient back office operations. For more information subscribe to Check Call the newsletter or the podcast. Follow the Check Call Podcast Other FreightWaves Shows Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Frenette's love of music started at the age of 5 while playing the bongos and listening to records with his parents. Artists like Perez Perado, Tito Puente, Herb Albert, Johnny Cash and Tom Jones were constantly spinning on the record player. By the age of 10, Matt was learning his rudiments in a marching and concert band. Some of Matt's early influences include Mitch Mitchell, Ginger Baker, Keith Moon, Michael Shrieve, Danny Seraphine,Billy Cobham, and later influences include Manu Katche, Steve Gadd, and Richard Bailey. Frenette is a founding member of Streetheart and his legacy as the other half of one of rock's greatest rhythm sections is still a part of Canadian rock legend. Matt's fierce approach to every song and powerful grooves he created were a big part of the musical foundation that Streetheart built their unmistakable sound on in the early days. In 1979 Matthew left Streetheart to join Paul Dean's new band Loverboy. Originally, Matt Frenette played drums for a side-project band, Headpins while Bernie Aubin played drums for a fellow Vancouver band, the soon to be renamed Loverboy. But within months, Aubin and Frenette swapped bands, where each continues to play to the present Alongside fellow Loverboy founding members Mike Reno, Paul Dean, Doug Johnson, with Ken "Spider" Sinnaeve, Matt Frenette has been "Working for the Weekend" since forming in Calgary, Alberta over 36 years ago. Loverboy has sold more than 10 million albums, earning four multi-platinum plaques, including the four-million-selling "Get Lucky." In 1982, as a member of Loverboy, Frenette went on to win a "still-record" six Juno awards. Matt's solid groove, versatile musicality and his visually exciting performance has created a demand for his appearance in many different artists' recordings, videos and tours, such as: Tom Cochrane, Bryan Adams, Kim Mitchell, Colin James and many other talented musicians.   Some Things That Came Up:  -1:30 Rich saw Matt with Loverboy at The El Paso Coliseum, 1985!  -3:00 Matt broke through the bass drum head! Very memorable -5:00 Matt has had many drum techs over the years -5:40 “Turn Me Loose” was a breakout hit!  -13:00 Evolution of a band  -14:20 The year that was 2020  -17:00 Practicing at 2112 drum shop  -23:00 Started drumming at 5 and never had any other job!  -24:30 First kit was secured on trade from a retired jazz drummer  -26:00 Community center marching band grade 8-10 -30:00 The band STREETHEART from Regina -32:50 The sweetest audition that Dad set up!  -40:36 Mike Reno on vocals!  -44:15 The beauty of the drums on “Turn Me Loose”  -44:50 Recorded live to tape with no click; everyone live on the floor -45:30 Bruce Fairbairn produced and a young Bob Rock engineered  -48:30 Gaffed headphones to his head.  -50:20 Guttural grounding sounds  -57:50 A mutual friend in Lee Kelley  -1:05:00 Played everyday to “Tom Jones:LIVE” record  -1:05:50 The two drunks at the Buddy Rich Big Band show. Buddy lit the fire under young Matt -1:14:50 Dad wanted Matt to go on the road and NOT finish grade 12! He believed!  -1:16:00 Historical-=6 Juno Awards+ many others  -1:18:00 21 years with Yamaha and 42 years with Zildjian    Follow:  www.loverboyband.com IG: @loverboyband FB: @loverboyband   The Rich Redmond Show is about all things music, motivation and success. Candid conversations with musicians, actors, comedians, authors and thought leaders about their lives and the stories that shaped them. Rich Redmond is the longtime drummer with Jason Aldean and many other veteran musicians and artists. Rich is also an actor, speaker, author, producer and educator. Rich has been heard on thousands of songs, over 25 of which have been #1 hits! Check out Rich's books on Amazon!    Follow Rich: @richredmond www.richredmond.com   Jim McCarthy is the quintessential Blue Collar Voice Guy. Honing his craft since 1996 with radio stations in Illinois, South Carolina, Connecticut, New York, Las Vegas and Nashville, Jim has voiced well over 10,000 pieces since and garnered an ear for audio production which he now uses for various podcasts, commercials and promos. Jim is also an accomplished video producer, content creator, writer and overall entrepreneur.   Follow Jim:   @jimmccarthy www.jimmccarthyvoiceovers.com

Good morning and Happy Tuesday! Welcome to today's FreightWaves NOW Community Spotlight. Kaylee is joined by Mary O'Connell to discuss everything about TMS (Transportation Management Systems). Sponsored by Tai Software, this episode features an insightful conversation with Mitch Mitchell, the CEO of Tai Software. Tune in to learn about: The signs indicating it's time to switch your TMS Evaluating the benefits versus challenges of switching TMS software Key considerations for choosing the right TMS provider Tips for managing the transition process smoothly Don't miss out on this valuable information, especially if you're considering a TMS upgrade. Make sure to subscribe and click the notification bell to stay updated with all our latest episodes. Resources: Tai Software: tai-software.com FreightWaves: freightwaves.com Connect with Us: Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more episodes and updates. Follow us on social media for the latest news and insights. Hashtags: #FreightWavesNOW #TMS #TransportationManagement #Logistics #FreightTech #SoftwareSolutions #SupplyChain #TieSoftware Stay tuned and join us for more insightful discussions on the latest trends and innovations in the freight and logistics industry!

Send us a Text Message.My guest is my old friend and legendary drummer, the great Adam Nussbaum! We played the Michael Brecker track "Suspone." Adam talks about his early influences like Mitch Mitchell, who led him to Elvin Jones, his relationship with Mel Lewis, going on the road with John Scofield, the importance of listening, his brush technique and much more! So come along for the ride, and please subscribe! Adam is also the co-host of the podcast Drummer Nation - check it out! @DrummerNationNow  Live From My Drum Room T-shirts are available now! Made of soft 60%cotton/40% polyester. Available in sizes XS-3XL$25 including shipping in the contiguous US! Payment with Venmo: @John-DeChristopher-2For orders outside the US or questions email me for more info: livefrommydrumroom@gmail.comLive From My Drum Room With John DeChristopher! is a series of conversations with legendary drummers and Music Industry icons, hosted by drummer and music industry veteran, John DeChristopher, drawing from his five decades in the Music Industry. Created in 2020, and ranked BEST Drum Podcast, "Live From My Drum Room With John DeChristopher" gives the audience an insider's view that only John can offer. And no drummers are harmed during any shows! Please subscribe!https://linktr.ee/live_from_my_drum_roomwww.youtube.com/c/JohnDeChristopherLiveFromMyDrumRoom

Send us a Text Message.On this episode, we tackle a BIG album, the 1967 debut LP by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Are You Experienced. Heralded by many as the greatest rock guitarist of all time, to many Jimi Hendrix, along with his band the Jimi Hendrix Experience (bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell) seemingly came out of nowhere. However, in reality, Hendrix more than paid his dues, playing in relative obscurity backing a myriad of musicians on the "Chitlin' Circuit," including the Isely Bothers and Little Richard.  Endlessly restless, his stints with these bands was often short lived because he would eventually tire of being in the background and get fired for upstaging the star he was hired to support.  He was finally "discovered" in New York by Chas Chandler (bassist of the Animals) who convinced him to go to England where he finally found the success that had alluded him in his own country. But Are You Experienced  proves Hendrix was more than just an amazing guitarist. It showcases what a gifted singer (if a shy and underappreciated one) and  songwriter he was. It underscores his imagination and creativity in how he used the studio in his quest to find new sounds from his guitar. After its release, Hendrix became a star and would eventually become the highest paid rock musician of the era.  While he would continue to stretch the boundaries of what both the guitar and  the studio could do over his next two LPs, Are You Experienced  is where it all began, and the the music within sounds as innovative and imaginative as it did in the over the five-plus decades since its release. Visit us at www.tappingvinyl.com.

Arriving at a rebounded freight market has been the recurring dream for many freight transportation professionals all of 2023. The Transportation & Logistics Clubhouse welcomes Walter Mitchell, CEO of Tai Software, to discuss the tools necessary to win and administer freight business in a rebounded 2024. Powered by ⁠Atlanta Dispatch LLC⁠ Dispatching Services: www.atlantadispatch.org Podcast Website: transportationandlogistics.club Physical Book Copy: transportationandlogistics.club/amazon eBook: https://books2read.com/u/4jqlzX Stay updated with our happenings: https://linktr.ee/transportationandlogistics?utm_source=linktree_profile_share Hashtags: ⁠#transportationandlogisticsclubhouse⁠ ⁠#freightbroker⁠ ⁠#hotshot⁠ ⁠#flatbed⁠ ⁠#dispatcher⁠ ⁠#boxtruck⁠ ⁠#logistics⁠ ⁠#opendeck⁠ ⁠#broker⁠ ⁠#freight⁠ ⁠#freightforwarding⁠ ⁠#carrier⁠ ⁠#trucking⁠ ⁠#supplychain⁠ ⁠#warehousing⁠ ⁠#storageyard⁠ ⁠#freightmanagement⁠ ⁠#Reefer⁠ ⁠#drayage⁠ ⁠#refrigeratedfreight⁠ ⁠#trucking⁠ ⁠#dedicatedfreight⁠ ⁠#dat⁠ ⁠#containers⁠ ⁠#chassis⁠ ⁠#networking⁠ Intro/Outro Music Shoutout: Positive Hip-Hop by MaxKoMusic | https://maxkomusic.com/ Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/ Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

 Experience Hendrix & Legacy Recordings released Jimi Hendrix Experience: Hollywood Bowl August 18, 1967.  This live concert performance was captured just five days before the US release of Are You Experienced, their album debut.  Amazingly, not a single second of this two-track live recording has ever been released before in any capacity, either via official channels or otherwise.During their set, The Jimi Hendrix Experience (Jimi Hendrix, Mitch Mitchell, Noel Redding) blazed through originals such as “Purple Haze,” “The Wind Cries Mary,” and yet-to-be-released classics “Foxey Lady” and “Fire,” as well as their own re-imagining of favorites Bob Dylan (“Like a Rolling Stone”), The Troggs (“Wild Thing”) and Muddy Waters (“Catfish Blues”). Having already conquered the band's UK base as well as Continental Europe over the previous ten months, the vast majority of the 17,000 plus Los Angeles concert goers were there to see headliners The Mamas & The Papas and were caught off guard by Jimi Hendrix's electrifying musicality and showmanship.John McDermott is the director, writer and producer who has long been associated with the legacy of Jimi Hendrix.  He has served as the Catalog Director for the Jimi Hendrix family company Experience Hendrix, L.L.C. for nearly three decades.  Together with Janie Hendrix and Eddie Kramer, McDermott has co-produced every Jimi Hendrix CD and DVD release, including 1999's Grammy Award-winning Band Of Gypsys, 2014's Emmy Award-winning Hear My Train A Comin' and the recent Grammy nominated Music, Money, Madness: Jimi Hendrix In Maui.   His most recent project is Jimi Hendrix Experience: Hollywood Bowl August 18, 1967. Source: https://www.jimihendrix.com/music/hollywood-bowl-august-18-1967/Host Maggie LePique, a radio veteran since the 1980's at NPR in Kansas City Mo. She began her radio career in Los Angeles in the early 1990's and has worked for Pacifica station KPFK Radio in Los Angeles since 1994.Support the show

In this episode, we discuss the Jimi Hendrix Experience's third and final studio album, 'Electric Ladyland,' in celebration of the 55th anniversary of its October 16, 1968 release.Support the showSubscribe to Rock Talk with Dr. Cropper +Instagram & TikTok — @rocktalk.dr.cropperTwitter — @RockTalkDrCroppFacebook, LinkedIn & YouTube — Rock Talk with Dr. CropperEmail — rocktalk.dr.cropper@gmail.com

Kenny Beats is a highly acclaimed music producer and songwriter known for his unique sound and creative approach to music production. With an impressive discography that includes collaborations with some of the biggest names in Hip Hop, Kenny has established himself as a force to be reckoned with in the industry. His distinctive style, blending trap and electronic music elements, has earned him a loyal fanbase and critical acclaim. From producing chart-topping hits to hosting his own popular web series, Kenny Beats has become one of his generation's most sought-after and influential producers. Kenny previously performed as half of the electronic music project Loudpvck before returning to his Hip Hop roots. Kenny recently returned to DJ'ing live and released his first album under his production moniker, Kenny Beats, called Louie. *Note: KB refers to Jimi Hendrix's drummer as Mitch McConnell while talking to Rick. He, of course, meant Mitch Mitchell. ------- Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Ancestral Supplements https://ancestralsupplements.com Use code TETRA ------- LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra ------- House of Macadamias https://www.houseofmacadamias.com/tetra ------- Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra 

October is National Estate Planning month, which may be more important than you think. It's a time when individuals and families are reminded of the importance of creating or maintaining a trust or will. One myth is that you have to be wealthy or have a substantial real estate portfolio in order to have a will or trust. But nothing could be further from the truth. For instance, if you have minor children then a trust or will is extremely important. On this episode, Mitch Mitchell joins us on the On Your Side Podcast. He's a lawyer for a company called Trust & Will. He explains everything you need to know about estate planning, pitfalls to avoid and how much it will cost.

Jimi Hendrix- "Electric Church/ Red House"An unreleased Jam session featuring  Noel Redding, Mitch Mitchell, Lee Michaels  and the great Buddy MilesThis track was originally intended for release on an album titled "Best Of The Bootlegs". This album was scheduled for release by Warner Brothers in 1994 but was shelved by producer Alan Douglas. All tracks were early demos and studio jam recordings.JIMI HENDRIX ON THE BIG SCREEN:Jimi Hendrix: Electric Church presents the legendary guitarist in full flight at the 1970 Atlanta Pop Festival before the largest US audience of his career. This critically acclaimed film combines color, 16mm multi-camera footage of Hendrix's unforgettable July 4, 1970 concert in its original performance sequence together with a new documentary that traces his journey to the festival amidst the dark shadow of civil rights unrest, the unrelenting toll of the Vietnam War and a burgeoning festival culture that drew together young people across the country who were inspired by the Woodstock festival.

Tina and Mitch Mitchell talk to Dr. Kent Smith about the new book Relational Revolution - https://www.amazon.com/Relational-Revolution-Rediscovering-Heart-Heart/dp/1734684046/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1691851685&sr=8-2-spons This is another book in the series. The first was Joy Fueled - https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Fueled-Catalyzing-Revolution-Communities/dp/1734684011/ref=sr_1_1?crid=ZIEM3H02K4WO&keywords=joy+fueled+book&qid=1691851909&sprefix=joy+fueled%2Caps%2C112&sr=8-1 Check out the LK10 ministry at https://lk10.com/ CGU creates spaces for Christians to gather so that we might recognize Jesus in one another. If you are blessed by this ministry please consider tax-deductible monthly donation. Please donate at https://www.commongroundsunity.org/donate. Please check out commongroundsunity.org to learn more about CGU, how to subscribe to the newsletter, join the Facebook group, or find the YouTube Channel. Check out the gatherings page, where you can connect with other unity-minded Christians in your area. If you cannot find a gathering in your area, we can help you start one. It's not difficult or time-consuming, and we will help you out along the way. It really does, simply, start with a cup of coffee. If you want to volunteer or ask questions, please email John at john@commongroundsunity.org. Until next time, God bless, and remember, “Unity Starts With A Cup of Coffee.” The Common Grounds Unity theme music for our intro and exit for Season 3 is Cody Martin's "Forever with You." Download and permission to use from Sound Stripe.

It can be assumed that Hendrix wrote the music for "Angel" as early as 1967, as it first appeared in the form of a demo with the title "Little Wing".The song became "Angel" not long after this, when the first recording under the name "Sweet Angel" took place just one month later.The lyrics for "Angel" were written early in 1968,  being completed on January 14. They were somewhat different from those used on the final version, though similar to the "Sweet Angel" recording of 1967. The title written by Hendrix for the lyrics was "My Angel Catherina (Return of Little Wing)", suggesting that the metaphorical female subject of "Little Wing" is the same as that of "Angel".The next version of "Angel" was recorded by Hendrix alone, on guitar and vocals, in a hotel room in early February, 1968. After apparently leaving the song for over two years, Hendrix, Mitch Mitchell and Billy Cox recorded the final version of "Angel" on July 23, 1970.[A few days after the session, Hendrix recited the song as a piece of poetry to friend Freddie Mae Gautier during a conversation about his mother Lucille. In an interview for Electric Gypsy.Jimi imparted the inspiration behind the song to Mae by detailing a dream he had about Lucille:"My mother was bein' carried away on this camel. And there was a big caravan, she's sayin', 'Well, I'm gonna see you now,' and she's goin' under these trees, you could see the shade, you know, the leaf patterns across her face when she was goin' under ... She's sayin', 'Well, I won't be seein' you too much anymore, you know. I'll see you.' And then about two years after that she dies, you know. And I said, 'Yeah, but where are you goin'?' and all that, you know. I remember that. I will always remember that. I never did forget ... there are some dreams you never forget."Mae described "Angel" as "very deep.  "It was what was in him" she stated."Angel" was mixed for Hendrix's First Rays of the New Rising Sun project over August 20 and 21, 1970  which included the overdubbing of a second guitar part. When Hendrix passed away, Mae took it upon herself to read the poem — as well as Hendrix's liner notes to the Buddy Miles Express album Expressway to Your Skull — at the musician's funeral on October 1, 1970.

Troy started playing drums at 10 years old and was influenced by Mitch Mitchell of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. He has a wide variety of musical tastes and loves Creedence Clearwater Revival, Neil Diamond, Led Zeppelin, and Latin style percussion. His other drumming influences include John Bonham, Ian Paice, Jeff Porcaro, David Garibaldi, and Steve Gadd. Troy grew up in the east San Francisco bay area playing in bands such as Whisper, Benny and the Jets, 415, and the Eric Martin Band before joining Tesla in 1985.In 2010, Troy participated in a tribute album titled Mister Bolin's Late Night Revival, a compilation of 17 previously unreleased tracks written by guitar legend Tommy Bolin prior to his death in 1976. The CD includes other artists such as HiFi Superstar, Doogie White, Eric Martin, Jeff Pilson, Randy Jackson, Rachel Barton, Rex Carroll, Derek St. Holmes, Kimberley Dahme, and The 77's. A percentage of the proceeds from this project will benefit the Jackson Recovery Centers.[2]Troy also produces other artists and has played drums on recording sessions in the studio with artists like Ronnie Montrose, Marc Bonilla, Eric Westphal, and others. He operated a recording studio, TML Productions, in Hayward, California.[3]Troy is endorsed by Tama Drums, Zildjian cymbals, and Promark drumsticks.

In this episode of Everyone's Talkin' Money podcast, we're covering affordable estate planning for LGBTQ+ individuals and couples with Mitch Mitchell, Associate Counsel of Estate Planning at Trust and Will. Our money system in this country is outdated and antiquated and, by far, does not meet the needs of LGBTQ+ individuals and families. When it comes to estate planning and making sure that your assets get passed to who you want, things can get even more complicated if you're in the LGBTQ+ community. Different states have different laws, and figuring it all out is hard. You'll Learn: What makes estate planning for LGBTQ+ individuals so challenging What are the essential estate planning documents you need How much estate planning costs (and how to make it more affordable) How do you handle estate planning if you have kids, are adopting, or using a surrogate  Why the home-buying process can be tricky for LGBTQ+ couples and individuals  Links Trust & Will How to Find an Estate Planning Attorney article How To Connect with Shannah: Join the Everyone's Talkin' Money Newsletter, where you get insider tips, exclusive content, and takeaways from each episode https://tinyurl.com/etmnewsletter  Ask Shannah a question on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/shannahgame/ or TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@shannahgame  Submit a money question for Shannah to answer in an upcoming episode https://tinyurl.com/askshannahq  Leave a 5-star Review here https://ratethispodcast.com/etm  Be a Featured Guest on an episode https://everyonestalkinmoney.com/contact/ Time stamps [00:01:05] Estate planning faces unique challenges. Mitch Mitchell discusses essential documents, costs, and issues for LGBTQ+ individuals. The episode covers adoption, surrogacy, and home buying. LGBTQ+ estate planning necessitates caution and creativity. Further progress is needed in achieving equality. [00:03:31] LGBTQ+ families face legal challenges in parenting [00:08:07] Challenges passing legislation in a politically charged environment [00:11:01] Choose your own plan, especially LGBTQ+ [00:14:57] Importance of having a will and trust [00:17:19] Choosing executor, setting up a trust [00:24:20] "In Texas, trusts can help avoid probate" [00:25:47] Marriage, property, and legal agreements for LGBTQ+ [00:28:51] Prepare in advance for LGBTQ+ parental rights [00:34:16] Traditional attorney route can be expensive. Trust and Will offer affordable options [00:38:24] Important to understand property ownership and inheritance [00:42:59] Estate planning advice, LGBTQ+ individuals, TrustandWill.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tina Bruner and Mitch Mitchell continue their talk with Steve Cuss about his incredible book "Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs." This conversation is incredibly important! Find it on Amazon or other booksellers. Contact John Teal at john@commongroundsunity.org if you would like to become an assistant audio/video editor. Please subscribe to the CGU Patreon Channel at www.patreon.com/commongroundsunity Thank you to our sponsors, Mission Alive www.missionalive.org and Central Christian College of the Bible www.cccb.edu. CGU creates spaces, communities, and resources to help people experience "the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace" (Eph. 4:3), advancing the prayer of Jesus (Jn. 17:21-23). We have big ideas for unity, but we can't do it alone. Our support comes from people like you who give a tax-deductible monthly donation or a one-time gift. Please donate at https://www.commongroundsunity.org/donate. Please check out commongroundsunity.org to learn more about CGU, how to subscribe to the newsletter, join the Facebook group, or find the YouTube Channel. Check out the gatherings page, where you can connect with other unity-minded Christians in your area. If you cannot find a gathering in your area, we can help you start one. It's not difficult or time-consuming, and we will help you out along the way. It really does, simply, start with a cup of coffee. If you want to volunteer or ask questions, please email John at john@commongroundsunity.org. Until next time, God bless, and remember, “Unity Starts With A Cup of Coffee.” The Common Grounds Unity theme music for our intro and exit for Season 3 is Cody Martin's "Forever with You." Download and permission to use from Sound Stripe.

Tina Bruner and Mitch Mitchell talk with Steve Cuss about his incredible book "Managing Leadership Anxiety: Yours and Theirs." This conversation is incredibly important! Find it on Amazon or other booksellers. Contact John Teal at john@commongroundsunity.org if you would like to become an assistant audio/video editor. Please subscribe to the CGU Patreon Channel at www.patreon.com/commongroundsunity Thank you to our sponsors, Mission Alive www.missionalive.org and Central Christian College of the Bible www.cccb.edu. CGU creates spaces, communities, and resources to help people experience "the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace" (Eph. 4:3), advancing the prayer of Jesus (Jn. 17:21-23). We have big ideas for unity, but we can't do it alone. Our support comes from people like you who give a tax-deductible monthly donation or a one-time gift. Please donate at https://www.commongroundsunity.org/donate. Please check out commongroundsunity.org to learn more about CGU, how to subscribe to the newsletter, join the Facebook group, or find the YouTube Channel. Check out the gatherings page, where you can connect with other unity-minded Christians in your area. If you cannot find a gathering in your area, we can help you start one. It's not difficult or time-consuming, and we will help you out along the way. It really does, simply, start with a cup of coffee. If you want to volunteer or ask questions, please email John at john@commongroundsunity.org. Until next time, God bless, and remember, “Unity Starts With A Cup of Coffee.” The Common Grounds Unity theme music for our intro and exit for Season 3 is Cody Martin's "Forever with You." Download and permission to use from Sound Stripe.

Kick ass drummer  Vinny Appice drops by The City's Backyard to chat about his new band SABBATH KNIGHTS with lead singer Jim Crean! Sabbath Knights is going on tour this summer and playing the greatest hits of Black Sabbath and Dio! We get the scoop from Vinny himself on what to expect...plus we chat about his days in Sabbath and Dio and have some fun talking about rock n roll! Vinny's unique, powerful drumming is marked not by his performances with a single group, but by his flawless musical contributions to an extensive list of rock and roll icons like Black Sabbath, Ronnie James Dio, Heaven & Hell, Rick Derringer, John lennon and more!A consummate performer and drummer, Vinny also is a brilliant clinician, performing clinics and master classes all across the globe as well as making appearances in films and television.Vinny Appice, has anchored the rhythm and power live and in the studio for the music of DIO, BLACK SABBATH, HEAVEN AND HELL, WWIII, AXIS, RICK DERRINGER, JOHN LENNON and more. He has recorded and co-written songs on over 25 albums and CDs including many multi-platinum records. Touring the world for over 2 decades resulted in selling millions of records!Vinny's drumming can also be heard on numerous movie soundtracks including Wayne's World 2, Heavy Metal, Iron Eagle and Bedazzled. Vinny, the author of drum instruction book "Rock Steady" and DVD "Hard Rock Drumming Techniques" has performed incredible powerhouse drum clinics around the globe also. Numerous books have been written about Black Sabbath and Dio with the authors always mentioning Vinny's unique powerful drumming style!"I would like to mention some of the boys that got my drumming blood flowing......John Bonham, Buddy Rich, Billy Cobham, Mitch Mitchell......Thanks!" https://www.facebook.com/OfficialVinnyAppicehttps://www.jimcrean.net/sabbath-knights.php

Join us on a journey through the world of artificial intelligence language models with Chat GPT, a powerful tool developed by OpenAI. In this podcast, we explore the fascinating capabilities of Chat GPT, from its ability to translate and process multilingual text to its sophisticated natural language processing algorithms. We'll speak with expert Mitch Mitchell, CEO of Tai Software, in the field of AI and machine learning to learn about the latest advances in language modeling, and how Chat GPT is changing the way we interact with technology. For more information subscribe to Check Call the newsletter or the podcast. Follow the Check Call Podcast Other FreightWaves Shows

Join us on a journey through the world of artificial intelligence language models with Chat GPT, a powerful tool developed by OpenAI. In this podcast, we explore the fascinating capabilities of Chat GPT, from its ability to translate and process multilingual text to its sophisticated natural language processing algorithms. We'll speak with expert Mitch Mitchell, CEO of Tai Software, in the field of AI and machine learning to learn about the latest advances in language modeling, and how Chat GPT is changing the way we interact with technology. For more information subscribe to Check Call the newsletter or the podcast. Follow the Check Call Podcast Other FreightWaves Shows Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, we dive deep into the world of freight fraud and double brokering, bringing you expert insights, from Mitch Mitchell, CEO of Tai.  We'll explore the impact of fraud on the supply chain, the latest technologies and best practices for preventing fraud, and what you can do if you suspect that you've been a victim of fraudulent activities. For more information subscribe to Check Call the newsletter or the podcast.Follow the Check Call PodcastOther FreightWaves Shows

Hey, whatcha got going on this weekend? How about a free, fun, and friendly-friendly 5k event where you can run, walk, jog, volunteer or spectate – it's up to you! It literally happens EVERY Saturday morning at 9 o'clock along the Little Sugar Creek Greenway here in Charlotte. No, it's not a “flash mob” or happy … Continue reading Sarah Kline and Mitch Mitchell – Little Sugar Creek Greenway Run →

Maggie LePique's longtime producer and music journalist Jerry Ough celebrates Jimi Hendrix's 80th Birthday with Jimi's sister, Janie Hendrix and longtime producer and Archivist John McDermott. Jerry, Janie and John discussThe Jimi Hendrix Experience – Los Angeles Forum: April 26, 1969, legendary 1969 performance includes “Purple Haze” and an incendiary 17-minute medley of “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” and Cream's “Sunshine Of Your Love.” The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Los Angeles Forum: April 26, 1969, released on 2LP vinyl, CD and all digital platforms, was recorded in the spring of 1969 before a raucous, sold-out audience. This captivating performance of the original lineup (singer/guitarist Jimi Hendrix, drummer Mitch Mitchell, bassist Noel Redding) has never before been released in its entirety.Jerry, Janie and John also discuss the new book, JIMI, the ultimate tribute to the greatest guitar player in rock and roll history, celebrating what would have been Jimi Hendrix's 80th birthday on November 8, 2022. This comprehensive visual celebration is an official collaboration with Jimi's sister, Janie Hendrix, and John McDermott of Experience Hendrix L.L.C. JIMI significantly expands on the authors' previously published titles, including An Illustrated Experience, and features a new introduction by Janie, extensive biographical texts, and a trove of lesser known and never-before-published photographs, personal memorabilia, lyrics, and more. Additionally, JIMI includes quotations by legendary musicians, such as Paul McCartney, Ron Wood, Jeff Beck, Lenny Kravitz, Eric Clapton, Drake, Dave Grohl, and others who have spoken about Hendrix's lasting influence.Janie L. Hendrix is the president and CEO of Seattle-based Experience Hendrix L.L.C. and Authentic Hendrix L.L.C., the family companies of Jimi Hendrix, which were founded by James "Al" Hendrix in 1995, as a means of keeping Hendrix's legacy alive. Janie ushered the companies into the 21st century with the dream of her father and brother in mind.John McDermott is the director, writer, and producer who has long been associated with the legacy of Jimi Hendrix. He has served as the catalog director for Experience Hendrix L.L.C. for nearly three decades. Together with Janie Hendrix and Eddie Kramer, McDermott has coproduced every Jimi Hendrix CD and DVD release, including 1999's Grammy Award–winning Band of Gypsys, 2014's Emmy Award–winning Hear My Train A Comin', and the recent Grammy-nominated Music, Money, Madness: Jimi Hendrix In Maui.Source: https://www.jimihendrix.com/music/los-angeles-forum-april-26-1969/Source: https://www.authentichendrix.com/product/Y3AMJI122Source: https://www.chroniclebooks.com/products/jimiThis episode is from an archive from the KPFK program Profiles adapted for podcast.Host Maggie LePique, a radio veteran since the 1980's at NPR in Kansas City Mo. She began her radio career in Los Angeles in the early 1990's and has worked for Pacifica station KPFK Radio in Los Angeles since 1994.Support the show

 Andy Aledort is widely known for his transcriptions, instructional columns and DVDs and has also toured throughout the last two decades with Dickey Betts and the Jimi Hendrix Tribute. He is also co-author of the New York Times Best Selling biography, Texas Flood: The Inside Story of Stevie Ray Vaughan. Andy visited with The Trout about his career from playing with Mitch Mitchell and Billy Cox of the Jimi Hendrix Band, to jamming with Johnny Winter, sharing licks with Stevie Ray Vaughn, touring with Dickie Betts and his tenure as Associate Editor for Guitar World. His stories are amusing, fascinating and a look inside rock music history. http://andyaledort.com/ https://www.thetroutshow.com/ Thanks for listening for more information or to listen to other podcasts or watch YouTube videos click on this link >https://thetroutshow.com/

Friends and guests of Finding Favorites are back to tell us about their favorite things from 2022. This is a clip show with SO many great recomendations, most of which are in the show notes below. This includes clips from How Did This Get Made (Leah asking a question at the Stone Cold live show in LA) and Doughboys (Burger King 6 with Jon Gabrus and Adam Pally) Leah Intro 1 - best movies of 2022 Steroid Saturdays Everything, Everywhere, All at once RRR 4DX theaters   Liz Nord Pennyworth on HBO Max  Steve Higgins Everything, Everywhere, All at Once Strange Loop (Broadway) Eight Billion Genies (Comic book)   Mark Smithivas Only Murders in the Building, Hulu Wakanda Forever Leah intro 2: The return of Live Shows with Friends Boston for a cancelled Doughboys show How Did This Get Made in LA with Esther and Susan Return to Boston for Doughboys and introducing Ronnie to the Doughboys in Milwaukee How Did This Get Made in  Chicago with Jocelyn over halloween LetterKenny live with Amy Guth and Kevin Alves Hadestown with Rob Going to Weird Al with Shai Korman's family in DC Esther Kustanowitz, The Bagel Report The Ringer-Verse Podcast  Shai Korman, The Friday Night Movie Podcast Weird Al at the Kennedy Center Pam Rose Stranger Things, Hulu Severance, Apple TV  Tehran, Apple TV Pachinko, Apple TV Kelsea Ballerini Tate McRae Mimi Webb Taylor Swift Love after Lockup, TV Rob Schulte Dark Web Comic Books His dog Elvis Bug Con (Bugmane event) Doin' it with Mike Sacks (Podcast) How Did This Get Made clip: Leah is the person in the audience. Episode is Stone Cold, recorded live at Largo Leah Intro 3: Cancer Stuff Finishing chemo, radiation and immunotherapy Celebrated with my trip to Boston after chemo and a trip to LA after Radiation Got a sparkly caftan for my radiation gong Three trips to the Mayo clinic Returning to Israel COVID Bivalent Booster, Flu Shot and the Pneumonia vaccine Cameron MacKenzie Premier League Football Jason Mathes Inside Job on Netflix Gravity Falls on Disney Caroline Berkowitz Uno Go Fish Taco Cat Go Cheese Pizza Scrabble Slam SET Sleeping Queens SkipBo Monopoly Deal Yahtzee Yam Slam Trouble Phase 10 Monica Reida Pentament (Xbox, PC video game) Crimes of the Future (movie) Leah Intro 4 101 Places to Party Before You Die Jackass Forever Mike Nichols, A Life by Mark Harris Art by Phineas Jones aka Octophant Lyndsey Little Doughscord Stories to Dismember Podcast Love on Netflix Doughboys Podcast Doughboys clip from Burger King 6 with guests Adam Pally and Jon Gabrus. Leah created the drop that Mitch plays towards the end of the clip. Robert Persinger Boston Milwaukee Great people Keidra Chaney Southside on HBO Max Bunny instagram Red Door Shelter Jocelyn Geboy Candy Chat Chicago 101 Places to Party Before You Die Avett Brothers The Diffs Firepits How Did This Get Made Jo Wash your hands, wear your mask, get your booster and keep enjoying your favorite things.   Transcript 1:12:55   Zoom Bomb  00:00 Hello, hello. Hello. Hi. What's good? [Switches to German]   Announcer  00:08 Welcome to the Finding Favorites Podcast where we explore your favorite things without using an algorithm. Here's your host, Leah Jones.   Leah Jones  00:20 Hello, and welcome to Finding Favorites. It's that time of year, which is the last day of the year. And that means the Call-In Show, the best of 2022 is back. This is the second time I'm doing it. So that might mean it's a tradition. Check back in 12 months and see if that's true. Right now I've got clips about 10 clips. As I'm recording this intro, I might have more by the time I finish recording. But I'm going to break my favorite things of the year into three chunks. It'll be me a few clips me a few clips.   Without further ado, I wanted to kick off my best of ‘22 with my top movie theater experiences of the year. The year started, and I was finishing chemo, which meant that Ronnie and I were still celebrating what we lovingly called Steroid Saturdays, which is when I would get chemo, I would get steroids along with my chemo infusion. And then I would be wired on steroids. And the amount of time that I had energy from the steroids got smaller and smaller over the course of the three months of chemo. But what we did was every almost every Saturday morning, after I would get chemo on Fridays, we would go and see a matinee. And so I saw a lot of movies in the theater over the winter of 21 and 22. But my top three movie going experiences were not on Steroid Saturdays. it was seeing Everything Everywhere, All At Once, in a packed movie theater. This was the first time I had been in a packed movie theater part of going of the Steroid Saturdays, The MO was we went to matinees of things that have been open for more than one or two weeks. So generally, we went to private, we created private screenings for ourselves.   Everything, Everywhere, All At Once was at the theater on Diversey and Surf. So it was an it was a sold out theater. It was jam packed. There were not assigned seats. But seeing that movie, in a theater full of people was outstanding. It was such a great experience. And only topped by at the end of the year going to a sold out show at the music box. In a theater that holds 700 people to see the Indian movie, RRR. RRR was a movie I'd heard about on podcasts, where people were just like, don't know anything, go in blind and watch it. I watched it at home alone really enjoyed it. But getting to go with three of my friends to see our RRR in a movie theater where people cheered, booed, clapped along, plus the director was there in from Tollywood to answer questions. And that was very, very cool. Seeing an Indian movie in a packed house of people cheering for these historical revolutionaries set into magical realism. It was amazing.  And finally, I have to give a shout out to 4DX. Like I said, on previous episodes, I saw Wakanda Forever 3D 4DX. It's the fourth dimension. The chair is essentially a roller coaster through the whole movie. I'm still talking about it. It's been a month later. Don't see a movie in 40x If you want to experience emotions, other than the hysteria that comes from being on a roller coaster. So you're going to hear some people talk about Wakanda Forever because it was an outstanding movie. I did not connect to it emotionally because my chair kept making me laugh. That's all I can say.   Coming up in this first block. We've got a filmmaker Liz Nord is back. You just met her last week. So Liz Nord is back. Steve Higgins who has been on the podcast twice is back with his favorite movie Broadway show and comic book of the year. And then Mark Smithivas, who I've known on since the earliest days on Twitter and who has been the person… Probably the person I know into audio the longest of anyone I've known. He joins with a TV show and a movie recommendation. Without further ado, here are Liz, Steve and Mark   Liz Nord  05:32 Hi, I'm Liz Nord. I was just on the last episode of the show talking about my love for documentary films. But I watch a lot of other stuff too. And my guilty pleasures are the comic book sci fi supernatural TV series, usually aimed at young adults. My favorite discovery from this past year is probably Pennyworth. on HBO max is the origin story of Batman's infamous butler Alfred Pennyworth. In 1960s, London, we also meet a young Thomas Wayne and Martha Kane, the future parents of Bruce Wayne, aka Batman. No one has any superpowers in this show. They're just regular people in extraordinary circumstances. And that is part of what makes it so fun. It's funny and stylish and cheeky. And over the top. There are three seasons so far. The first one is probably the best because it doesn't try to be anything it's not. The show is a total romp. But note to parents, it's definitely not kid friendly. Enjoy and Happy New Year. Hello,   Steve  06:29 I am Steve Higgins. And I am here to talk about three of my favorite things of 2022. First, I want to talk about my favorite movie of 2022. I actually got to the theater quite a bit more this year than in the past two years, obviously, because of the pandemic. And one of the movies that I saw in theaters this year that absolutely blew me away. It made it shot to the top of my list. The second that I saw it, and it never left even though it was pretty early in the year and never left that top spot. And that is Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. I remember first seeing trailers for the movie and hearing the premise that it was kind of about alternate realities. And just how visually stunning the trailers were. And I was pretty interested. But then I heard that the directors of the film The Daniels, Daniel Kwan, Daniel shiner. Were also the directors of Swiss Army Man, that was a movie that I saw in theaters back in 2016. And I absolutely loved I thought it was brilliant. And so to find out that they had done this film as well, I was sold, I absolutely had to see it as soon as I could. You know, the the premise of it is very sci fi but I like to tell people it's sci fi like Slaughterhouse Five is sci fi it's it uses a science fiction premise, in order to explor human themes. You know, it's really about our hopes and dreams and desires in life and who we want to be who we wish we had been the regrets of choices that we made. The great what if what if I had done my life differently? So it's very much the road not taken. I think the premise then getting at the heart of it is yes. To story about, you can jump from one alternate reality to another and you can grab the skills of a different version of yourself from a different reality. But really, it's about people and connections and relationships. And how would you feel if somebody came to you and said to you, alternate realities are real there's a multiverse and in all the different versions of you that exist out there, you the version you are right here right now are the worst. You're the worst version of yourself that you could be and how, how hard that is. It's a movie that has a lot of heart. A lot of soul searching, the acting is fantastic. Michel Yao, Ki Quan, and Stephanie Chu is kind of the core family of Evelyn Waymond and joy are amazing. You feel like their family dynamic is real. And it's it's a really powerful film because of that dynamic. It's It's hilarious. It's got great action sequences. It's visually stunning. It's high concept. And it's, it's moving. It's incredibly, incredibly moving. And I think this film is not only my number one movie of this year, but might be, you know, the best movie that I've seen in In the past five or 10 years, probably barn on an amazing, amazing film.   Steve  10:07  I also got to go to the theater a little bit this year to see some live theater, took a trip to New York in June and saw some Broadway plays. And so my favorite experience with the live theater this year was seeing A Strange Loop. I saw it about three days before it ended up winning the Tony for Best Musical. And it was an amazing experience. I it's it's been a, it's been a work that I have had trouble recommending to people, because I feel like the soundtrack doesn't quite do it justice. The songs are good and powerful but it doesn't have the same gravitas to it as when you see it live. And you can see the the actors performing on stage and you can see the sets and you can you can be there. Unfortunately, it is wrapping up its Broadway production on January 15. I'm very hopeful that that means they're going to move it to another city. I'm really hopeful that that city in Chicago because I will absolutely drive up to Chicago to see it again. It was it was an amazing work. Now it being wards and all kind of portrait of a black gay man in New York City.   Steve  11:39 In the modern era, it is not a film. Sorry, it's not a play, that I would recommend to anybody. We actually had a friend of ours, who was going to New York with their teenage son and asked him he really wants to see this. Should we let him go see it? No, you absolutely shouldn't. It is. It is not appropriate for young audiences. There's a lot of very frank discussion of the realities of relationships and gay sex and things that you probably don't want your teenage son to hear.   Steve  12:30 But if that sounds like a thing that you might be interested in, you know, seeing a creative person floundering, not feeling like they're able to live up to their full potential, and not just creatively but also romantically also just in life. And see them kind of come to terms with that seems to be a bit of a theme between my film in my and my play that I chose, but I would recommend at least giving the soundtrack a listen. And if you think after you hear the soundtrack that interested me, then if you can get a chance to see it live, it will take it to the next level.   And then finally, I want to recommend a comic I'm a big comic fan comic reader read a lot of great comics this year, but one that really blew me away the most is a eight issue miniseries from Image Comics, written by Charles Soule, illustrated by Ryan Brown, it's called 8 Billion Genies. And the basic premise of this comic is that, at the same instant, every single person in the world is given a genie. And given one wish that they can make and how those wishes change the world for the worse unfolds over the course of the eight issues. The first issue is the first eight seconds. Second issue is the first eight minutes third issue is the first eight hours, and so on. Up to now only the first six issues have come out. Issue seven and eight are coming in January and February respectively. And that's the first eight decades and the first eight centuries to show how this world gets changed by the introduction of everyone suddenly getting one wish that they could make anything come true. How would that play out and people being people? It doesn't play out well, but the basic premise is the the our main characters are in a bar. And there's only a handful of people in the bar and the second that this happens, the bartender slash owner of this bar makes his wish that all of the effects of everybody else's will issues in the world will not affect what happens in the walls of this bar. So this bar becomes a safe haven, from all the craziness and chaos that goes on outside. It's beautifully drawn by Ryan Brown, who makes the characters seem real. And the fantasy elements are jarring, obviously, with the reality of the world, but in a way that it's cohesive, if that makes any kind of sense. It's a cohesive narrative, I should say. And again, the high concept from Charles Sol is just just brilliant. It's an absolutely great comic. If you only read one comic, check out 8 billion genies by Image Comics. So those are my three favorite things of 2022. The film, everything everywhere all at once. The play musical, a strange loop, and the comic, 8 billion genies. Hope you check them out. Hope you dig them. Thanks for having me back on the show.   Mark Smithivas  16:09 Hi, Leah, this is Mike Smithivas. I hope you're having a great end to the Year. Happy New Year. And my favorites that I wanted to let you know about is the Hulu series Only Murders in the Building. I really loved this series with Steve Martin. It just had a level of sharpness to its writing, and the cast was top notch. And I like to say that it's a great achievement when you have a series that tries to parody something, in this case, True Crime podcasts while managing to also be what it's parodying. Meaning that I was kept guessing until the very end of who the murderer was. So I would highly recommend binge watching it. There's two seasons to it. Both seasons are really good in my opinion. And if you love that kind of New York, character actor, type of vibe, there are there are many veteran actors who are in that series. What else I just watched with my family, Black Panther to Wakanda Forever. And I was truly surprised that a movie could a Marvel movie could be something more than just your standard superhero movie. I know it had big shoes to fill, trying to be the sequel to an amazing breakthrough movie like Black Panther. But in this one, I think they managed to be poetic, while also celebrating or memorializing the death of Chadwick Boseman. And also highlighting a lot of strong black female characters. So I think it set the bar pretty high for what a Marvel superhero movie could be. And I'm hoping to see more of that in the in the future with other Marvel franchises. I think I'll stop there. I hope you have a happy new year again, and we'll catch up to you and 2023.   Leah Jones  19:00 All right, thank you, Liz, Steve, and Mark for your recommendations. All right, so in 2022, we were vaccinated. And for me, that meant the return of live shows and seeing live shows with friends. Again, a lot of my year was overshadowed by my treatment for breast cancer and a long slow recovery. That in part because I had an undiagnosed chronic illness on top of the cancer. A lot of my live shows were on my calendar as the emotional carrot to get through a part of cancer treatment. The first thing I looked forward to all through chemotherapy was going to Boston to see the Doughboys it was a doubleheader in January of 2022. And it got canceled because COVID was too high. I think that was the Omicron. It might have been Delta, like I don't even remember anymore. But their winter tour got cancelled. But I could not give up emotionally kind of could not give up the trip. So I went to Boston, I met a few people who also kept their trips. And so we hung out. And the week before the Boston trip, there was a Chicago show that got canceled. But people still came into into Chicago. So two weeks in a row, I got to hang out with my friend Geno, and then see other Doughmies in Chicago and Boston. And then other friends who aren't into the Doughboys but do live in Boston. So it was sort of like come hell or high water. I am marking the end of chemotherapy with Boston. And so I went to Boston in January, it was very cold. I slept a lot. I was very weak. But it was such a good trip.   A week, like a week after I finished radiation. I got on a plane again. I went to LA and that time it was for How Did This Get Made live show. It was right after my birthday. I stayed with my friend Esther. But this time I took… Esther and I have a mutual friend Susan, who is as into How Did This Get Made? Like we're both huge fans of it. And we have both gone to shows at the Largo and taken Esther and Esther is always a very willing guest. But this time Susan and I went together. And then when we got done with the show, Esther surprised me with a birthday charcuterie… a chocolate… a plate of chocolate for my birthday. And that was a fantastic trip.   Then Doughboys got rescheduled. So I went back to Boston again. And they had so I went to Boston and shot saw two shows in Boston. absolute blast. And then I got to take Ronnie up to Milwaukee to see the Doughboys live in Milwaukee, which I was just like, “your opinion of me might change a lot when you see the experience the live show of one of my favorite podcasts.” Introducing him to Doughboys at a live show was great seeing some Doughmies and Milwaukee. Having it was just a really fun trip.   And then Halloween I got to introduce Jocelyn, my co-host of Candy Chat Chicago to How Did This Get Made at the Chicago Theater. Again, this was one that had been in the summer got rescheduled pushed to October. I have talked about this show ad nauseam, especially on my interview with Kevin Alvis. So needless to say, this is the show. It was Morbius it's coming out next week finally, and this was the one where I realized that Jason Mantzoukas now knows who I am, which is mortifying and, but was wonderful. I got to see Letterkenny live this year with Amy Guth. That's also how I met Kevin Alves. My friend Rob and I, we went to see a ton… I would get Broadway in Chicago season tickets and Rob was my standing plus-one for a few years. Broadway in Chicago was back a highlight this year was seeing Hadestown. And finally, I went to Washington DC to meet up with Shai Korman and his family. Shai is from Friday Night Movie Podcast. And I got to go with his family to see Weird Al at the Kennedy Center, which was just the coolest venue and such a great group of people. So in this section, these are people that I have been to live events with or know through podcasts community. So we've got Esther Kustanowitz from the bagel report. Shai Korman from Friday Night Movie podcast. Pam Rose, who I know through How Did This Get Made? And Rob Schulte who I know through the Doughboys community.   Esther Kustanowitz  24:31 Hi, this is Esther Kustanowitz from The Bagel Report Podcast among other places. Leah Jones has been so instrumental in my own online development from blogging to Twitter to podcasting and I'm just thrilled to be able to continue in this tech meets pop culture dialogue that we have going on. So I have loved all of the pop culture this year except for Kanye obviously, not cool, but there was so much especially Within my chosen primary category of Jewish TV that I could talk about, but since I've already done an episode of finding favorites about that, I figured I'd focus on one of the other pod things that I loved the most this year, which was continuing to make the river ringer verse podcast part of my week.  I love a lot of other Ringer network podcasts with special shout outs to The Rewatchables, The Big Picuture as well as a lot of their other pop culture podcasts. But the Ringer-verse! they're my people. There are like two main teams and they're so dynamic and passionate about fandom. They're absolutely unapologetic about how nerdy they get about popular culture, sci fi, fantasy, etc. They totally like an every second of their recordings, they revel in how nerdy it is, and how intertextual it is, and how they know the comic books did this. And the previous movies did that. And I love the individual personalities that that are involved in recording this show and how they interrelate. And even when they disagree, and they sometimes really, really disagree, they all come back to the love they have for each other and for the primary cultural product. So I love that they can have a three hour discussion about a two hour movie, and they bring in experts to explain the lore, which helps me put things in a greater context. So being a regular listener has changed how I react to the pop culture that I consume. Because more often than not, I'll hear a phrase or a see a scene that I'll file away in my memory bank know just know somewhere in my like cells that the ringer verse team is probably going to talk about and love and criticize and contextualize and obsess over it. And I really just loved being able to partake in their conversational experience, even though it's really one sided, because I'm pretty sure they don't listen to the bagel report podcast, although, obviously they should. And I just had a guest spot on Jews on film podcast, where we talked about the fable mins for two hours so I'm honing my skills should they ever require an expert on Jewish content, I'm hoping that the reverse will give me a buzz. So if you are a fan of Star Wars or DC or Marvel properties or the Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones or anything else that kind of hits the the pop culture with a little bit of a sci fi fantasy heroes comic book infused element, the wringer versus a must listen. Thanks and have a great 2023 everyone.   Shai Korman  27:52 Hey there, Leah. This is Shai calling from the Friday Night Movie Podcast and my favorite of the year that I want to talk about is getting to go see the great Weird Al Yankovic at the Kennedy Center with none other than Leah Jones, host of Finding Favorites and Candy Chat Chicago because getting to see Weird Al with Leah Jones is one of the all time favorites that any person could experience. And I hope we get to do it again soon. And I love finding favorites and keep making this amazing show.   Pam Rose  28:35 Hi, this is Pam Rose. You may remember me from a previous episode talking about my love of one Jason Mantzoukas and How Did This Get Made. But right now I'm here to talk about things that I loved in 2022   Well, some of them at least in Number One on The List: Vechna from Stranger Things. Stranger Things came back with a vengeance this season. Epic epic episodes and at the center was the big bad vechna He was mean he was evil. He had the cutest bomb in the world and I want to be his best friend. So yeah, Batman. And speaking of TV and awesome TV, Apple TV continues to crush with its original programming. My number one favorite show of the year severance. Severance is so good if you haven't seen Severance please watch Severance. I was in California and vacation the night of the finale and my brother and I both put our headphones in and our beds. We watched the finale because I could not wait. I didn't want to get spoiled. But people talk about severance. We know how good it is.   But what about other shows on Apple TV? How about Tehran? Have you seen this show? Because it's awesome. If you'd like homeland, which is one of the all time greatest shows of all time, you might like Tehran it's got the same feel. Season two was stellar. Glenn Close was on season two she started speaking Farsi at one point what was happening, so 10 Iran I recommend it. Also, I'm not a girl who's into epic things, but let me tell you, Pachinko. Oh my god. So good apparently is based on a book. I don't have time for that. But I do have time for the TV adaptation of it and Pachinko is so good. It's multigenerational story about a family in Japan, Korea. I learned all kinds of things about history, but also so engrossing loved it so Pachinko check those things on an Apple TV if you have Apple TV if you don't get a trial of it, and you can watch these things. You could thank me later. On the music side. Kelsea Ballerini came out with a new album this year and it's her best one yet highly recommend it. We all know Taylor Swift killed it with her new album. Lavender haze midnight Rain Come on. Take McRae's debut album was awesome every track a banger and Mimi Webb continues to put out song after song. Never skip on any other things and I get to see her live twice this year. I was the oldest person there by about 20 years but that girl can sing her ass off. So watch out for that little 21 year old British girl because she's coming for you. She's putting out her first full length album next year. And don't sleep on it because she's great. And then if you need something trashy to get you through 2023 may recommend love after lockup. And I wish I was kidding. But really, it's so addictive. It's so trashy. We get love during lockup now. We get life after lockup. But love after lockup, we TV, you can catch the episodes once you watch one you're gonna get hooked. You're gonna say why am I watching this? What is happening? But then you'll keep watching, but it is that good. So anyway, those are some of the things that I loved. Yeah, here's to a great 2023 with awesome TV, music and movies. Let's do it. And also fellas, if you're single, I'm on Instagram hamster. Pam, come find me. Have a great 2023 guys.   Rob Schulte  32:09 Hey, Finding Favorites listeners. This is Rob Schulte. And I want to list off some of my favorite things of 2022. The Dark Web series of comic books. That's been fun. My dog Elvis, he's at the top of the list almost every single year. Bug Con, that was great. And let's see here is working on new episodes of Doing It with Mike Sacks. That has been a lot of fun. I think he was on his podcast as well. Great episode. Well, here's to you, 2022. And looking forward to 2023.   Clip from HDTGM: Stone Cold   Paul Scheer  32:52 Let me go to the audience here for a second. If you have any questions. You're in a beautiful shirt. It's like a baseball shirt. HDTGM shirt. I love this. Not one that we sell, but it's a great looking shirt. Okay, yes.   Leah Jones  33:10 So you mentioned before William Forsythe was also in Raising Arizona?   Jason Mantzoukas  33:13 Yes.   Leah Jones  33:14 So was Sam McMurry who played Lance the FBI agent.   Jason Mantzoukas  33:16 Yes.   Leah Jones  33:17 So my question is, who would you like Red Rover called over from Raising Arizona?   Jason Mantzoukas  33:22 Nicolas Cage.   Paul Scheer  33:23 Well, let me let me repeat the let me repeat these so I can make sure. So two of the actors in this film, the FBI agent and of course our second baddie, William Forsythe, were in Raising Arizona.  would there be anybody that we would call over from Raising Arizona?   June Diane  33:41 Imagine Holly Hunter as Nancy it's and it would be different and interesting. And they'd have to do something different   Jason Mantzoukas  33:50 Nicolas Cage as part of Boz.   Paul Scheer  33:54 Really? John Goodman as Ice   Jason Mantzoukas  34:04 I also think you could have John Goodman as the whip. [audience reaction] Guys. Cool. Cool. Okay. I know it's been a while but everybody be cool.   Paul Scheer  34:19 Great question. Great question. Great shirt.   Jason Mantzoukas  34:22 Great. Oh, so much overlap. Raising Arizona also because of the supermarket scene. I was thinking about Raising Arizona a lot during this movie. And I'm like, Oh, I gotta rewatch Ray's It's a great movie   Leah Jones  34:47 Awesome, thank you. Now you have got a lot of music to listen to and TV to watch podcasts to listen to. Here's my third chunk of things that my favorite things this year, which have to do with cancer, even though my treatments ended in March-ish, that's not true. Radiation finished in March. I was getting immunotherapy until October. But I had a really hard recovery from chemotherapy. And to get to the bottom of it, I wound up going to the Mayo Clinic this summer I drove up to the Mayo Clinic three different times. Each of those was a very fun road trip with a different friend and found out that there's a lot of good food in Rochester, Minnesota. There's a lot of good bartenders in Rochester, Minnesota and the Mayo Clinic for me was an outstanding experience. But finishing chemo in January and hitting the gong in March of '22. was incredible. And then finally getting a sarcoidosis diagnosis. And at the very end of the year starting treatment for sarcoidosis, starting my hormone therapy to gobble up all the estrogen in my body. I am finally walking without a cane. Breathing without coughing and feeling pretty good. I'm gonna put into this block.   In September I went to Israel went back to Israel hadn't been since 2019, which is a long gap for me. And with this incoming government, I'm not sure when I'll go back on that trip. I my goals were simple. At that point, I was still using a cane. Although it was getting stronger, I was still using a cane. So my goals were to have a hotel breakfast buffet every day and see a friend every day, which I did. There were some things that were really physically challenging about the trip emotionally challenging about the trip. But ultimately, I went to a beautiful breakfast buffet every morning. So at least one friend a day had ice cream had a few really amazing dinners laughed a lot, gotten the ocean. And it was a wonderful trip. So it was good to have to return to Israel, even if I don't know how to change a flight without accidentally getting charged $3,000. And finally I am going to give it up to science for the COVID boat bivalent booster, the flu shot and 15-20 years early I also have the pneumonia vaccine. So in this next block of people, we have Cameron MacKenzie, my friend Jason Mathes, my friend Caroline, get your pencils ready because she is recommending a dozen card games to play with your family. And Monica Reida is back with her favorite video game and movie of the year. Thank you to everyone who joined me on this clip show. And I'm sure I'll be back one more time for the last-minute clips that I have been asking people for.   Cameron MacKenzie  38:25 Hello, my name is Cameron MacKenzie. I had a book come out this year called River Weather from Alternating Current Press. And I wanted to talk about my favorite thing of 2020 to 2022 I think was really the year that I got into Premier League football. I'm gonna call it soccer for the sake of this conversation. Because the reason I got into Premier League football was that I got burnt out on American football, I grew up playing football. When I quit playing football, I started to watch it. But over the years, I just got ground down by the narrative of whatever Tom Brady is doing or the desire to buy Ford trucks or drink Budweiser beer. It's just sort of a constant loop and I couldn't take it anymore. My oldest boy is eight years old and he started playing soccer. And I realized I knew nothing about soccer. So I couldn't tell him what was good, what was bad what to do how to do it. So I started watching Premier League and I was blown a way the games are beautiful and exciting. The players are absolutely incandescent, the teams themselves. There's so much history to these teams and the fan bases are rabid. You if you're born in these places, you can't really choose what team you're going to watch. It's sort of handed down to you like a heritage or lineage. So if you're going to start watching Premier League, you got to choose a team and you got to stick with that team through the ups and through the downs through the good and Through the bad, the only thing I would compare it to in America maybe is college football, that sort of level of passion. But if you find yourself getting bored of the US sports landscape, give Premier League a try, you will not be disappointed. Just be sure that you choose team before you start. No arsenal.   Caroline  40:23 So I saw this tweet that said, a great alternative to screen time is playing cards as a family, so many learning opportunities. I taught my kids that there's no such thing as family while playing uno, and then I'll play I'll put a draw for down on a kindergartener and cackle like a swamp which, because I did not come to lose.   My name is Carolyn Musin Berkowitz, and I love playing cards with my family. So in my family, we play tons of card games, usually one or two per night. We started with uno, which is why I particularly like that tweet, but we've moved on a bit. Here are some of our favorites. We really like playing Go Fish. We even have a set of cards with fish on them. It's a nice easy one. It's how my little one learn to read. Sort of, we like Taco Pet goat Cheese Pizza, which is really funny to say and it's a quick game. And also, you might get your knuckles smashed. So buyer beware. Scrabble Slam is a super game that I found at Walgreens, by the way amazing games that you can find in the toy area at Walgreens. And it is a game where you make a four letter word, not one of those but whatever. And then you put other cards on top to make new words. Great way to teach your children spelling also, we have set my game of SET is probably from when I was a kid when I was a teen, and it is a math and patterns game. Super fun. There's also a junior version. But trust me, your early elementary child can handle the regular game.   Leaping Queens is a super fun game, where you have you want to collect as many queens as possible. But beware because your opponents are going to try to use knights to steal them or sleeping potions to put them to sleep. Skip It was a great counting game. And again to try to read your read yourself with all your cards before your opponents do super fun, lasts more than five minutes. Maybe it's 10 minutes. So it's good when you want something that will take a little longer. We also have been Monopoly Deal. If you've ever played Monopoly. With young kids, you know that it can last forever and it's not so pleasant. I recommend Monopoly Deal. It the game was over in 10 to 15 minutes. And I gotta tell you, my six-year-old was the first one figure out the strategy in this game. Super fun.   We also like Yahtzee not really a card game, but a pretty good game. Regardless. Yahtzee slam is a different version of Yahtzee a different iteration with poker chips. And it is super fun as with these. Now, this is not a card game, but I do have to mention trouble. It is a super game that requires zero skills, and a lot of trash talk when you send your opponents back to their home base. And finally a Chicago is about to have a terrible blizzard. And we're all going to be stuck inside for a few days. Let me introduce you to Phase 10, which is kind of like Rummy, you have to get certain arrangements of cards before your opponents do. You have to get through 10 rounds and it might take you more than 10 rounds to get there. So if you're going to be home for like a long Blizzard, make your hot cocoa sit down with phase 10 and enjoy a happy new year. I'm Caroline, and playing card games is one of my favorite things.   Jason Mathes  44:00 Hi, Leah Jones. This is past podcast guests, Jason Mathes checking in from Connecticut to tell folks about something that's probably popped up on the recommendations on Netflix and to tell them that it's worth the time. It's a cartoon, a very adult cartoon called Inside Job. And it features a lot of the comedians that I know both of us enjoy their work. Nominally it's the story of a young woman named Reagan who is a genius scientist whose father created the corporation that controls the world. So all the conspiracy theories that we've been told about the Illuminati, about the wizard people about those types of things are true. And this is the corporation that has to do all the grunt work to ensure that they dominate and control the lives of everyday citizens. It's a workplace calm empathy. It's also a father daughter divorce story. But it is highly intelligent. It's from at least executive produced from the gentleman who brought us. Gravity Falls, which is very popular in a lot of communities for being a, what I call the opposite of loss, the TV show, and so much that he weighed the show out. So there are easter eggs contain throughout and riddles and puzzles and Gravity Falls that we do to the answers. So if people have not checked out Gravity Falls, that's a completely kid appropriate. It was on Disney. And it's genius. It's smart. It's funny, it's very endearing. But inside job is all of those things, but it's for a PG 13 Plus audience, just just so folks know. And it's really great. It's a smart, funny comedy that people will enjoy. And it's something to binge watch over the holidays, and just enjoy the heck out of it, and laugh about it. And enjoy Happy Holidays to everyone and especially to the Jones family. Talk to you soon hopefully. Hello,   Monica Reida  46:22 my name is Monica Reida. And in 2022. I loved Pentamento and Crimes of the Future. Pentimento is a video game for Xbox and PC, where the premise is you are a young artisan who is in Bavaria in the 1500s. And you are currently working at a Abbey as working on illuminated manuscripts. And one day a baron comes to visit and the next day and there's a lot of you know, tension as to the Barrett and a lot of people in the village seem a little unhappy, he's there. And then the next day the Baron is found murdered in the Abbey. And so it's up to you, you are a scholar, you are a dropout from college like the best of us. And you have to try to figure out who killed the Baron to try to clear an elderly monk from being executed. The art style for the game, it looks like you're walking through an illuminated manuscript from the Middle Ages. It's one of the most beautiful video games I think I've ever played. And it requires a lot of critical thinking. It's kind of the opposite of a lot of games I tend to play where it's like, Oh, I'm just going to try to make the best moves and you know, score enough shots on goals in NHL 22. Or I'm just going to kill a bunch of guys to save the day in Yakuza. So it's kind of the opposite of that where you have to critically think about the choices you're making. And I'm not even close to being done with this game. But I already can't wait to play it again. And see how different choices affect the story how it affects the characters. So Pentiment on Xbox and PC.   One of the things I love this year, I also loved the new David Cronenberg film, Crimes of the Future. It takes place in a future where there are a lot of body mutilations and people enjoy getting surgery, including putting on performances to show off the mutilated bodies to show off the surgery. It is I would say kind of a form of sicko cinema that I think I associate with Cronenberg, and also John Waters. I mean, it's a film where people actually say surgery is the new sex. It is also I think, one of the funniest movies I have watched this year. I think benediction from Terence Davies is probably the only film that I saw this year that I think was funnier than crumbs of the future. But Cronenberg's dialogue and his most of which is delivered by Alyssa do. And I am just blanking on everybody else in the cast, Viggo Mortensen, Don McKellar, one of my boys and Kristen Stewart. It's delivered in just a brilliant, natural way that also lets the humor shine and put as a very dark and morbid film. But even just the visual cues and the cuts and the Justice positions of it the visual style. It's it's a very funny, very morbid film that has stayed with me since I saw it in theaters wearing a sickos shirt because yes, I do think that if you love Cronenberg, you might be a sicko, and the best way. So those were the two things I loved in 2022. I hope you and anybody else listening you know if you've got a fuzzy little friend or furry friend, curl up with them and enjoy some movies, enjoy some TV show, listen to some Quebec while pop and have a nice 2023   Leah Jones  50:41 and I'm back with my final block of favorite things from this year. Followed by a few more clips that have come in. So a favorite TV show of mine is 101 Places to Party Before You Die. It was on Tru TV. It is now available on HBO Max, so it's much easier to find than it was when it first came out. It is Jon Gabrus and Adam Pally. Adam, you might know from the TV show Happy Endings or from from The Mindy Project, John Gabriel was on a show called Guy Code that I never watched. I know John from podcasts. I originally saw him in a live episode of Nicole Byers podcast that was taped in Chicago many years ago. And then I started listening to High and Mighty, I started listening to Doughboys. His podcast is High and Mighty. He's a regular guest on Doughboys. I've seen him at two of the three Doughboy shows I've been to. And they have been best friends for 20 years. They came up together at UCB. And they got to shoot six episodes traveling the states. Going to bars going to restaurants, museums, and Jocelyn and I have watched it on my own at least twice. Jocelyn and I have watched it. There are times when we'll finish recording an episode of Candy Chat Chicago, and we'll just go back to the Denver episode because that is the episode that makes us cry from laughing so hard. What I love about it, honestly, it's the same things I loved about Jackass, which should have made the list (how did I not talk about Jackass Forever?), we are starting to get more positive representation of male friendship. And I think this show it was recorded both John and Adam have lost parents young. And this was recorded at a time when we had been vaccinated and the world was starting to open up again. And so they're they're traveling the country after a year of quarantine. really aware of what it means not to be with your friends and your family. And there's so much heart in between the laughter and so much realness that this little show. I hope someone picks it up for a second season. Let's keep talking about it. Let's keep watching about watching it and do watch the Denver episode all the way through the credits. Because you will be crying crying at the you'll just just watch it.   A book I read that then I bought for two people for Christmas and Hanukkah gift. So now I can talk about it is the biography of Mike Nichols called Mike Nichols a life by Mark Harris. Again, this was something that people were talking about on podcasts. And I had some audible credits and I picked it up and just lived in Mike Nichols world for like three weekends. just listened to it playing match three games on my phone and nonstop listening to Mike Nichols story. He is at some level, the for the real life Forrest Gump of pop culture and New York culture from like 1950 Odd. He is everywhere. He's friends with everyone. He's foes with everyone at certain times, but it is a compelling biography to understand pop culture, from truly from like the 1950s on, charted through his life. And then tonight, I ran out and picked up a painting by local artists Phineas Jones, other than my own dad's art, Phineas is the person is the next person that I have the most art in my house from. He was selling some original paintings and so I got an original little painting of some Chicago hot dogs. So with that, rounding out the podcast the best of 2022 Are. We've got clips from Lindsay Liddell, who I know from the Doughboys community, Robert Persinger, also known as drop King, who I know from the Doughboys community, Keidra Cheney, who is one of my very longtime Twitter pals. And Jocelyn Geboy, my co host on andy Chat Chicago Rounding things out. I do expect to wake up to two more clips. And so there will either be clips from Jaqui and Taylor when I wake up and they will be added to this, or you know that you will hear from him this year when I finally get to sit down and interview them. So with that, wash your hands, wear your mask, get your booster and keep enjoying your favorite things.   Doughboys Excerpt: Burger King 6 with Adam Pally and Jon Gabrus   Mike Mitchell  55:59 Wiges, how are you?   Nick Wiger  56:00 I'm doing well.   Mike Mitchell  56:01 Look, we have we have one guest it's way overdue. And then and then another   Jon Gabrus  56:07 who's the exact opposite of overdue.   Nick Wiger  56:11 Our most frequent guest, this is this is the duo. This is the odd couple that we have with us today. And, Mitch, we want to we want to get to them because they've been doing media all day. I'm sure they're their little bushwhacked. But before we do that, you got your you got to drop.   Mike Mitchell  56:25 I'm looking for it. All right, just   Nick Wiger  56:29 I can't believeyou're not ready with this. I said.   Mike Mitchell  56:33 We usually talk for five to 10 minutes. Well, you could have read time.   Nick Wiger  56:38 Yeah, but our guests were like, Hey, we we've been we're fucking wiped.   Mike Mitchell  56:42 I know. But that's if you get into Rush mode, it's going to be a bad episode. So don't go into Rush mode.   Nick Wiger  56:49 Well, I'm not going to rush mode. It's going to be good episode because our guests are great. I guess.   Adam Pally  56:53 Is this the Podcast?  This is what it is. Yeah. Yeah.   Jon Gabrus  56:57 Honestly, dude, I'm the most frequent guest and more or less, this is what it   emma  57:02 Mitch, do you want me to play it?   Mike Mitchell  57:03 No, I got it. I got it. I found it.   Nick Wiger  57:05 Gabrus was was air drumming some Neil Peart, I should say at the mention of Rush, which was Rush mode. That was a lot of fun for me. I saw that was the first concert I went to at the Anaheim pond   Adam Pally  57:16 Really? The first concert you went to is rush?   Nick Wiger  57:18 Yes,   Jon Gabrus  57:18 Mine was Soul Asylum at Jones Beach.   Nick Wiger  57:21 Wow.   Adam Pally  57:22 New Kids on the Block Rush  on the continental arrowheads. Oh, yeah. That's awesome.   Mike Mitchell  57:27 Mine was WBCN River Rave I believe is the first concert I went to. I saw the boss the Mighty Mighty Bosstones less than Jake. Yeah. Let's just   Jon Gabrus  57:38 lead with artists so that people know what you're talking about. Yeah, I don't quite remember the name of the tour. I want you otters jug band Christmas that my first concert was jingle ball 1992. Sponsored by Cadillac. Play the drums bass Hall.   Mike Mitchell  58:02 I went to I went to Roger Waters concert. My friend my friend's mom, Mrs. Tufo. She gave us a ride. My friend Martin he gave me what he said was acid. I bought it from him. And I took it and I was in the van with Mrs. Too far. She drove us to the concert. And then when we got out, he was like, that was vitamin C. It wasn't acid at all. But I think they expected me to like flip out and act like be like, This is crazy, but I never did it. You know what I mean? I never felt for the I passed the test. You know what I mean? Right? And, but then I did take two tabs of mescaline at that concert. It was really crazy.   Jon Gabrus  58:36 For how could you tell what was the mescaline in Hi-C? Right   Mike Mitchell  58:42 Alright, here's the drop Hold on. I'm gonna I got it. I got it loaded up.   Jon Gabrus  58:48 And you're gonna leave all this in right?   Mike Mitchell  58:51 I just think the crowd was changing   emma  58:54 not editing this at all. We haven't even announced our names to happen yet. Yes. All this shit has to happen first.   Mike Mitchell  59:06 I was watching prehistoric planet alright, I'll save that for later alright, here we go. Here we go. Wiges, Here is a little drop. Here we go plastic fork city. The city is also weird That's it. Perfect fucking length. It was nice and short. It was nice and short when   Jon Gabrus  59:52 he sat literally that's the only clip I've ever heard that's both not too short and not too long.   Mike Mitchell  59:58 I was kind of perfect. Yeah, great length. Hey, while you Norman in Boston, Mitch asked us to get back to the simple life drops with one or two clips from the show. To that end. Here's my Ode to Guns and Roses. Hope to see in Chicago in 2022. Oh, that was cancelled because of COVID xoxo Leah, aka Chicago Leah and the Doughscord  Hey, thanks for Chicago Leah. Thanks, Chicago Leah. Thanks.   Lyndsey Little  1:00:29 I'm Lindsay Liddell. And this is a strange list, but three of my favorite things are monsters, food and podcasts. This year was very unusual for me in the sense that it became such a culmination of significant moments for me, all relating to three of my favorite things. The stranger still was how my favorite things all intermingled together in some way, it felt like synchronicity. It began when as an avid listener of the Doughboys podcast, I joined the fan community Doughscord. I quickly felt at home there and made many friendships with others who loved the hosts, Nick and Mitch, and we all shared a mutual love of fast food of course, separate from this and after some time had passed, I along with two others began hosting our own horror movie recap podcast called Stories to Dismember. Even though the three of us had met through Reddit we surprisingly and quickly formed friendships and almost a familial bond. It's been a really fun and fulfilling project. And it just really gives me a love for podcasts in a whole other way now, in fact, it was our pleasure to have Doughboys host Mitch on as our guest for Halloween. For some added complexity and confusion to the layers of my favorite things. Long before I was a Doughboys listener and Mitch starred in my favorite show love on Netflix, so for me personally, it was a dream come true for him to speak with us. As an aside, Nick, if you are serious about guesting with the stories to dismember team we would still love to have you. You know where to find me flitting around on Discord. So anyone listening to this if you love podcasts, I presume this is one of your favorite ones, but also check out Doughboys if you love fast food, and if you love horror movies or monsters, then check out stories to dismember. And if your favorite thing is just Mitch Mitchell, then check out our episode where he guested with stories to dismember. Thank you so much for letting me share some of my favorite things Leah and I hope you have a wonderful new year.   Robert Persinger  1:02:34 Hello, my name is Robert per singer. And my favorite things from this year were traveling to new cities. I visited Milwaukee in Boston for some live shows and had an amazing time seeing the sights and meeting some great people. In Boston, I wanted to shout out the TAM. Jam curlies, the Trillium beer garden, Regina pizzeria, Legal Seafood, tasty burger emack and folios Mangia Mangia, Mike's pastry and the union Oyster House. In Milwaukee, I wanted to shout out to Feroz while skis, Thurman 15. Up down the Milwaukee Public Museum, Boone and Crockett, the Milwaukee pedal tavern, 's ads foundation Culvers lakefront brewing, lost whale, burn hearts, straight shots. Ian's else's Bryant's and landmark lanes, so happy to have met so many awesome people in these cities. And I wanted to include them too. So shout out to Kevin, Chelsea, Phish greeing, Aaron, Gino, Zayn. Kev, Nick. smo, Shawn, demo, Jess ,Taylor, shifty, Lou. And of course, Leah. If I forgot anyone, I apologize. It was a very fun time after all, here's to a great 2023   Keidra Cheney  1:04:11 So this is Keidra. So I wanted to share a couple of things to be alive trying to figure out what to share for the best of 2022 because 2022 didn't seem terribly eventful. And when it was eventful, it wasn't so great. Um, but there were things that were really good about the year. And one of the best things for me this year in pop culture, which is my usual obsession is a show that I constantly talk about called south side, which is on HBO Max. It's a comedy very Chicago. It's done by a group of actors and producers who are from the south side of Chicago and So the humor is very, very Southside and very Chicago specific, really funny, very weird at times, like a lot of funny, weird sci fi and geek culture-oriented humor, but also just random humor. So if you like to think of what it might be close, I compared it to, It's Always Sunny in that the characters are not supposed to be characters that are like, moral in any way, or like people that you should look up to. They're just, you know, weirdos doing, doing their thing in the world, working at a rent to own center, and basically taking people's stuff back once they can't afford it anymore. I'm probably not explaining it very well. But it is really hilarious. It's really not meant to have like, any broader message outside of making you laugh. And it's made me laugh more than any show that I've seen in the past decade, except for maybe the first season of Arrested Development. And that is like, like, the gold standard for me in terms of making you laugh. So yeah, Southside on HBO Max, three seasons, just perfection to me, every season has gotten better. And I just laugh at it nonstop. And I'm probably going to turn this off and watch the third season over again, as soon as I'm done with this. The other thing that has been really great for me, for 2022 That was my personal best, is starting to follow a lot of rabbit accounts on Instagram and Twitter. I love rabbits. I hope next year I will finally have a rabbit of my own. I just think they're cute and funny and weird and just adorable. And interesting little guys, and I just love seeing them eat and jump and zoom around. And just be lovely, lovely fellas and ladies, I follow Red Bull shelter on Instagram and there is an account that I follow on Twitter every morning and every evening they basically show this rabbit eating a meal alongside of his person. So this person is like eating super avocado toast or whatever in the rabbit is just they're eating their pellets or hay or greens every morning and evening. And I love to start and end my day with watching that burn habits delicious meal. So those are my favorite things of 2022 the things that really made me smile and made my life better. And I am wishing you and everyone listening a very happy new year and here's to a much better 2023 Then this past year   Jocelyn  1:07:54 fix Harry it's Jocelyn did this last year kind of off the cuff this time I made notes. I am dears best friends with Leah and co host of our joint podcast. Candy Chat Chicago, come to the candy state with the chat. So that has been a joy that has continued to be a joy. This year has really been something Hmm. I've had I had the joy and the honor and the privilege of being able to be with Leah while she navigated and figured out did cancer. And I was glad to be a part of that journey. Even better to have her be on the other side of it. Um, lots of things happened not to me, but I've seen I saw friends get married. I saw friends have babies. I saw friends get engaged. I saw one dear friend get a new job. She was really excited. So I've kind of been watching and letting things swirl around me. Lee is going to talk about I'm sure but she turned me on to the show called 101 Places to Party Before You Die. It's Adam Pally and Jon Gabrus. Oh my god, it's I want to tell you all the funny parts but like, it's kind of like you literally had to be there so like just go watch it and maybe you maybe think it's funny. Maybe you will I just fucking couldn't stop laughing. Um, I got the opportunity to see the Avett brothers again in 2022 for three night run at the Chicago theater March 31 first through April 2 It's been a really long time since I'd seen them so that was really nice and it was really nice to see and catch up with old friends and make new friends as well. firepit is still fucking rock and life we know that it's it's it's it's always been good and it continued to be good to us this year as well. I this new band I really loved called The Diff. They're kind of back on tour from their from the 80s from out east I don't know Massachusetts or something And they came back together and did a reunion show. I don't know earlier this fall, and it was really great. And I was really excited to see them. So that was a fun part of this year. Um, How Did This Get Made podcasts championed by Leah for many, many years, and I have problems listening to words like talk radio and stuff. So despite the fact that I have a podcast, it's been sort of hard for me to listen to one, but this is Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, and Jason Mantzoukas and these cats are off the chain so I went to a live courtesy of Leah to a live taping of a show. the premise they don't like you know, how did this movie Get me and Chicago show was Morbius Jared Leto vampires Matt Smith weirdness and so it was really fun to it was really fun to listen to you and to go to go to you to make part of and Leah got some really fun interactions with Mantzoukas and Paul and all of them actually. So it was really it was really great. That was fun. And other than that, I wrote all my notes. I'm just putting out there for the year. I have a lot of attentions, always right. I always want to write that book. I always want to do the one woman show. But ultimately, like I really had an epiphany Today I had a little mini meltham panic attack over really nothing really if in the scheme of things that were told you the story you'd be like, okay, but I really my intention for the years to let go of that which does not serve me immediately. possessions, attitudes mindsets. I don't think it's gonna be easy to do but I think one of the mindsets that dogs me is this all or nothing thing black or white? I do it or I don't. And so I think this will be a fun way to kind of exercise that is to like, let go stick stuff like that. Right? Like even if I'm not letting go of stuff like you realize, like, it's not all or nothing like I get every day and I can I can you know do it again over and over again. And meeting my friend Jo was a huge part of this year. Mutual actually of Leah, so that's always fun when that shit works out. But um, yeah, I really glad to be around again, the sun one more time. Sure. It's crazy, but she's great too. And I wish you all a very happy new year and a great 2023   Announcer  1:12:30 Thank you for listening to finding favorites with Leah Jones. Please make sure to subscribe and drop us a five star review on iTunes. Now go out and enjoy your favorite things.   Steve  1:12:46 Now how do I stop this? That's a great question. Stop. I guess I'll just leave

Episode 159 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Itchycoo Park” by the Small Faces, and their transition from Mod to psychedelia. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "The First Cut is the Deepest" by P.P. Arnold. 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 so many of the episodes recently have had no Mixcloud due to the number of songs by one artist, I've decided to start splitting the mixes of the recordings excerpted in the podcasts into two parts. Here's part one and part two. I've used quite a few books in this episode. The Small Faces & Other Stories by Uli Twelker and Roland Schmit is definitely a fan-work with all that that implies, but has some useful quotes. Two books claim to be the authorised biography of Steve Marriott, and I've referred to both -- All Too Beautiful by Paolo Hewitt and John Hellier, and All Or Nothing by Simon Spence. Spence also wrote an excellent book on Immediate Records, which I referred to. Kenney Jones and Ian McLagan both wrote very readable autobiographies. I've also used Andrew Loog Oldham's autobiography Stoned, co-written by Spence, though be warned that it casually uses slurs. P.P. Arnold's autobiography is a sometimes distressing read covering her whole life, including her time at Immediate. There are many, many, collections of the Small Faces' work, ranging from cheap budget CDs full of outtakes to hundred-pound-plus box sets, also full of outtakes. This three-CD budget collection contains all the essential tracks, and is endorsed by Kenney Jones, the band's one surviving member. And if you're intrigued by the section on Immediate Records, this two-CD set contains a good selection of their releases. ERRATUM-ISH: I say Jimmy Winston was “a couple” of years older than the rest of the band. This does not mean exactly two, but is used in the vague vernacular sense equivalent to “a few”. Different sources I've seen put Winston as either two or four years older than his bandmates, though two seems to be the most commonly cited figure. Transcript For once there is little to warn about in this episode, but it does contain some mild discussions of organised crime, arson, and mental illness, and a quoted joke about capital punishment in questionable taste which may upset some. One name that came up time and again when we looked at the very early years of British rock and roll was Lionel Bart. If you don't remember the name, he was a left-wing Bohemian songwriter who lived in a communal house-share which at various times was also inhabited by people like Shirley Eaton, the woman who is painted gold at the beginning of Goldfinger, Mike Pratt, the star of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), and Davey Graham, the most influential and innovative British guitarist of the fifties and early sixties. Bart and Pratt had co-written most of the hits of Britain's first real rock and roll star, Tommy Steele: [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, "Rock with the Caveman"] and then Bart had gone solo as a writer, and written hits like "Living Doll" for Britain's *biggest* rock and roll star, Cliff Richard: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard, "Living Doll"] But Bart's biggest contribution to rock music turned out not to be the songs he wrote for rock and roll stars, and not even his talent-spotting -- it was Bart who got Steele signed by Larry Parnes, and he also pointed Parnes in the direction of another of his biggest stars, Marty Wilde -- but the opportunity he gave to a lot of child stars in a very non-rock context. Bart's musical Oliver!, inspired by the novel Oliver Twist, was the biggest sensation on the West End stage in the early 1960s, breaking records for the longest-running musical, and also transferred to Broadway and later became an extremely successful film. As it happened, while Oliver! was extraordinarily lucrative, Bart didn't see much of the money from it -- he sold the rights to it, and his other musicals, to the comedian Max Bygraves in the mid-sixties for a tiny sum in order to finance a couple of other musicals, which then flopped horribly and bankrupted him. But by that time Oliver! had already been the first big break for three people who went on to major careers in music -- all of them playing the same role. Because many of the major roles in Oliver! were for young boys, the cast had to change frequently -- child labour laws meant that multiple kids had to play the same role in different performances, and people quickly grew out of the roles as teenagerhood hit. We've already heard about the career of one of the people who played the Artful Dodger in the original West End production -- Davy Jones, who transferred in the role to Broadway in 1963, and who we'll be seeing again in a few episodes' time -- and it's very likely that another of the people who played the Artful Dodger in that production, a young lad called Philip Collins, will be coming into the story in a few years' time. But the first of the artists to use the Artful Dodger as a springboard to a music career was the one who appeared in the role on the original cast album of 1960, though there's very little in that recording to suggest the sound of his later records: [Excerpt: Steve Marriott, "Consider Yourself"] Steve Marriott is the second little Stevie we've looked at in recent episodes to have been born prematurely. In his case, he was born a month premature, and jaundiced, and had to spend the first month of his life in hospital, the first few days of which were spent unsure if he was going to survive. Thankfully he did, but he was a bit of a sickly child as a result, and remained stick-thin and short into adulthood -- he never grew to be taller than five foot five. Young Steve loved music, and especially the music of Buddy Holly. He also loved skiffle, and managed to find out where Lonnie Donegan lived. He went round and knocked on Donegan's door, but was very disappointed to discover that his idol was just a normal man, with his hair uncombed and a shirt stained with egg yolk. He started playing the ukulele when he was ten, and graduated to guitar when he was twelve, forming a band which performed under a variety of different names. When on stage with them, he would go by the stage name Buddy Marriott, and would wear a pair of horn-rimmed glasses to look more like Buddy Holly. When he was twelve, his mother took him to an audition for Oliver! The show had been running for three months at the time, and was likely to run longer, and child labour laws meant that they had to have replacements for some of the cast -- every three months, any performing child had to have at least ten days off. At his audition, Steve played his guitar and sang "Who's Sorry Now?", the recent Connie Francis hit: [Excerpt: Connie Francis, "Who's Sorry Now?"] And then, ignoring the rule that performers could only do one song, immediately launched into Buddy Holly's "Oh Boy!" [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "Oh Boy!"] His musical ability and attitude impressed the show's producers, and he was given a job which suited him perfectly -- rather than being cast in a single role, he would be swapped around, playing different small parts, in the chorus, and occasionally taking the larger role of the Artful Dodger. Steve Marriott was never able to do the same thing over and over, and got bored very quickly, but because he was moving between roles, he was able to keep interested in his performances for almost a year, and he was good enough that it was him chosen to sing the Dodger's role on the cast album when that was recorded: [Excerpt: Steve Marriott and Joyce Blair, "I'd Do Anything"] And he enjoyed performance enough that his parents pushed him to become an actor -- though there were other reasons for that, too. He was never the best-behaved child in the world, nor the most attentive student, and things came to a head when, shortly after leaving the Oliver! cast, he got so bored of his art classes he devised a plan to get out of them forever. Every art class, for several weeks, he'd sit in a different desk at the back of the classroom and stuff torn-up bits of paper under the floorboards. After a couple of months of this he then dropped a lit match in, which set fire to the paper and ended up burning down half the school. His schoolfriend Ken Hawes talked about it many decades later, saying "I suppose in a way I was impressed about how he had meticulously planned the whole thing months in advance, the sheer dogged determination to see it through. He could quite easily have been caught and would have had to face the consequences. There was no danger in anybody getting hurt because we were at the back of the room. We had to be at the back otherwise somebody would have noticed what he was doing. There was no malice against other pupils, he just wanted to burn the damn school down." Nobody could prove it was him who had done it, though his parents at least had a pretty good idea who it was, but it was clear that even when the school was rebuilt it wasn't a good idea to send him back there, so they sent him to the Italia Conti Drama School; the same school that Anthony Newley and Petula Clark, among many others, had attended. Marriott's parents couldn't afford the school's fees, but Marriott was so talented that the school waived the fees -- they said they'd get him work, and take a cut of his wages in lieu of the fees. And over the next few years they did get him a lot of work. Much of that work was for TV shows, which like almost all TV of the time no longer exist -- he was in an episode of the Sid James sitcom Citizen James, an episode of Mr. Pastry's Progress, an episode of the police drama Dixon of Dock Green, and an episode of a series based on the Just William books, none of which survive. He also did a voiceover for a carpet cleaner ad, appeared on the radio soap opera Mrs Dale's Diary playing a pop star, and had a regular spot reading listeners' letters out for the agony aunt Marje Proops on her radio show. Almost all of this early acting work wa s utterly ephemeral, but there are a handful of his performances that do survive, mostly in films. He has a small role in the comedy film Heavens Above!, a mistaken-identity comedy in which a radical left-wing priest played by Peter Sellers is given a parish intended for a more conservative priest of the same name, and upsets the well-off people of the parish by taking in a large family of travellers and appointing a Black man as his churchwarden. The film has some dated attitudes, in the way that things that were trying to be progressive and antiracist sixty years ago invariably do, but has a sparkling cast, with Sellers, Eric Sykes, William Hartnell, Brock Peters, Roy Kinnear, Irene Handl, and many more extremely recognisable faces from the period: [Excerpt: Heavens Above!] Marriott apparently enjoyed working on the film immensely, as he was a fan of the Goon Show, which Sellers had starred in and which Sykes had co-written several episodes of. There are reports of Marriott and Sellers jamming together on banjos during breaks in filming, though these are probably *slightly* inaccurate -- Sellers played the banjolele, a banjo-style instrument which is played like a ukulele. As Marriott had started on ukulele before switching to guitar, it was probably these they were playing, rather than banjoes. He also appeared in a more substantial role in a film called Live It Up!, a pop exploitation film starring David Hemmings in which he appears as a member of a pop group. Oddly, Marriott plays a drummer, even though he wasn't a drummer, while two people who *would* find fame as drummers, Mitch Mitchell and Dave Clark, appear in smaller, non-drumming, roles. He doesn't perform on the soundtrack, which is produced by Joe Meek and features Sounds Incorporated, The Outlaws, and Gene Vincent, but he does mime playing behind Heinz Burt, the former bass player of the Tornadoes who was then trying for solo stardom at Meek's instigation: [Excerpt: Heinz Burt, "Don't You Understand"] That film was successful enough that two years later, in 1965 Marriott came back for a sequel, Be My Guest, with The Niteshades, the Nashville Teens, and Jerry Lee Lewis, this time with music produced by Shel Talmy rather than Meek. But that was something of a one-off. After making Live It Up!, Marriott had largely retired from acting, because he was trying to become a pop star. The break finally came when he got an audition at the National Theatre, for a job touring with Laurence Olivier for a year. He came home and told his parents he hadn't got the job, but then a week later they were bemused by a phone call asking why Steve hadn't turned up for rehearsals. He *had* got the job, but he'd decided he couldn't face a year of doing the same thing over and over, and had pretended he hadn't. By this time he'd already released his first record. The work on Oliver! had got him a contract with Decca Records, and he'd recorded a Buddy Holly knock-off, "Give Her My Regards", written for him by Kenny Lynch, the actor, pop star, and all-round entertainer: [Excerpt: Steve Marriott, "Give Her My Regards"] That record wasn't a hit, but Marriott wasn't put off. He formed a band who were at first called the Moonlights, and then the Frantiks, and they got a management deal with Tony Calder, Andrew Oldham's junior partner in his management company. Calder got former Shadow Tony Meehan to produce a demo for the group, a version of Cliff Richard's hit "Move It", which was shopped round the record labels with no success (and which sadly appears no longer to survive). The group also did some recordings with Joe Meek, which also don't circulate, but which may exist in the famous "Teachest Tapes" which are slowly being prepared for archival releases. The group changed their name to the Moments, and added in the guitarist John Weider, who was one of those people who seem to have been in every band ever either just before or just after they became famous -- at various times he was in Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Family, Eric Burdon and the Animals, and the band that became Crabby Appleton, but never in their most successful lineups. They continued recording unsuccessful demos, of which a small number have turned up: [Excerpt: Steve Marriott and the Moments, "Good Morning Blues"] One of their demo sessions was produced by Andrew Oldham, and while that session didn't lead to a release, it did lead to Oldham booking Marriott as a session harmonica player for one of his "Andrew Oldham Orchestra" sessions, to play on a track titled "365 Rolling Stones (One For Every Day of the Year)": [Excerpt: The Andrew Oldham Orchestra, "365 Rolling Stones (One For Every Day of the Year)"] Oldham also produced a session for what was meant to be Marriott's second solo single on Decca, a cover version of the Rolling Stones' "Tell Me", which was actually scheduled for release but pulled at the last minute. Like many of Marriott's recordings from this period, if it exists, it doesn't seem to circulate publicly. But despite their lack of recording success, the Moments did manage to have a surprising level of success on the live circuit. Because they were signed to Calder and Oldham's management company, they got a contract with the Arthur Howes booking agency, which got them support slots on package tours with Billy J Kramer, Freddie and the Dreamers, the Kinks, and other major acts, and the band members were earning about thirty pounds a week each -- a very, very good living for the time. They even had a fanzine devoted to them, written by a fan named Stuart Tuck. But as they weren't making records, the band's lineup started changing, with members coming and going. They did manage to get one record released -- a soundalike version of the Kinks' "You Really Got Me", recorded for a budget label who rushed it out, hoping to get it picked up in the US and for it to be the hit version there: [Excerpt: The Moments, "You Really Got Me"] But the month after that was released, Marriott was sacked from the band, apparently in part because the band were starting to get billed as Steve Marriott and the Moments rather than just The Moments, and the rest of them didn't want to be anyone's backing band. He got a job at a music shop while looking around for other bands to perform with. At one point around this time he was going to form a duo with a friend of his, Davy Jones -- not the one who had also appeared in Oliver!, but another singer of the same name. This one sang with a blues band called the Mannish Boys, and both men were well known on the Mod scene in London. Marriott's idea was that they call themselves David and Goliath, with Jones being David, and Marriott being Goliath because he was only five foot five. That could have been a great band, but it never got past the idea stage. Marriott had become friendly with another part-time musician and shop worker called Ronnie Lane, who was in a band called the Outcasts who played the same circuit as the Moments: [Excerpt: The Outcasts, "Before You Accuse Me"] Lane worked in a sound equipment shop and Marriott in a musical instrument shop, and both were customers of the other as well as friends -- at least until Marriott came into the shop where Lane worked and tried to persuade him to let Marriott have a free PA system. Lane pretended to go along with it as a joke, and got sacked. Lane had then gone to the shop where Marriott worked in the hope that Marriott would give him a good deal on a guitar because he'd been sacked because of Marriott. Instead, Marriott persuaded him that he should switch to bass, on the grounds that everyone was playing guitar since the Beatles had come along, but a bass player would always be able to find work. Lane bought the bass. Shortly after that, Marriott came to an Outcasts gig in a pub, and was asked to sit in. He enjoyed playing with Lane and the group's drummer Kenney Jones, but got so drunk he smashed up the pub's piano while playing a Jerry Lee Lewis song. The resulting fallout led to the group being barred from the pub and splitting up, so Marriott, Lane, and Jones decided to form their own group. They got in another guitarist Marriott knew, a man named Jimmy Winston who was a couple of years older than them, and who had two advantages -- he was a known Face on the mod scene, with a higher status than any of the other three, and his brother owned a van and would drive the group and their equipment for ten percent of their earnings. There was a slight problem in that Winston was also as good on guitar as Marriott and looked like he might want to be the star, but Marriott neutralised that threat -- he moved Winston over to keyboards. The fact that Winston couldn't play keyboards didn't matter -- he could be taught a couple of riffs and licks, and he was sure to pick up the rest. And this way the group had the same lineup as one of Marriott's current favourites, Booker T and the MGs. While he was still a Buddy Holly fan, he was now, like the rest of the Mods, an R&B obsessive. Marriott wasn't entirely sure that this new group would be the one that would make him a star though, and was still looking for other alternatives in case it didn't play out. He auditioned for another band, the Lower Third, which counted Stuart Tuck, the writer of the Moments fanzine, among its members. But he was unsuccessful in the audition -- instead his friend Davy Jones, the one who he'd been thinking of forming a duo with, got the job: [Excerpt: Davy Jones and the Lower Third, "You've Got a Habit of Leaving"] A few months after that, Davy Jones and the Lower Third changed their name to David Bowie and the Lower Third, and we'll be picking up that story in a little over a year from now... Marriott, Lane, Jones, and Winston kept rehearsing and pulled together a five-song set, which was just about long enough to play a few shows, if they extended the songs with long jamming instrumental sections. The opening song for these early sets was one which, when they recorded it, would be credited to Marriott and Lane -- the two had struck up a writing partnership and agreed to a Lennon/McCartney style credit split, though in these early days Marriott was doing far more of the writing than Lane was. But "You Need Loving" was... heavily inspired... by "You Need Love", a song Willie Dixon had written for Muddy Waters: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "You Need Love"] It's not precisely the same song, but you can definitely hear the influence in the Marriott/Lane song: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "You Need Loving"] They did make some changes though, notably to the end of the song: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "You Need Loving"] You will be unsurprised to learn that Robert Plant was a fan of Steve Marriott. The new group were initially without a name, until after one of their first gigs, Winston's girlfriend, who hadn't met the other three before, said "You've all got such small faces!" The name stuck, because it had a double meaning -- as we've seen in the episode on "My Generation", "Face" was Mod slang for someone who was cool and respected on the Mod scene, but also, with the exception of Winston, who was average size, the other three members of the group were very short -- the tallest of the three was Ronnie Lane, who was five foot six. One thing I should note about the group's name, by the way -- on all the labels of their records in the UK while they were together, they were credited as "Small Faces", with no "The" in front, but all the band members referred to the group in interviews as "The Small Faces", and they've been credited that way on some reissues and foreign-market records. The group's official website is thesmallfaces.com but all the posts on the website refer to them as "Small Faces" with no "the". The use  of the word "the" or not at the start of a group's name at this time was something of a shibboleth -- for example both The Buffalo Springfield and The Pink Floyd dropped theirs after their early records -- and its status in this case is a strange one. I'll be referring to the group throughout as "The Small Faces" rather than "Small Faces" because the former is easier to say, but both seem accurate. After a few pub gigs in London, they got some bookings in the North of England, where they got a mixed reception -- they went down well at Peter Stringfellow's Mojo Club in Sheffield, where Joe Cocker was a regular performer, less well at a working-man's club, and reports differ about their performance at the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, though one thing everyone is agreed on is that while they were performing, some Mancunians borrowed their van and used it to rob a clothing warehouse, and gave the band members some very nice leather coats as a reward for their loan of the van. It was only on the group's return to London that they really started to gel as a unit. In particular, Kenney Jones had up to that point been a very stiff, precise, drummer, but he suddenly loosened up and, in Steve Marriott's tasteless phrase, "Every number swung like Hanratty" (James Hanratty was one of the last people in Britain to be executed by hanging). Shortly after that, Don Arden's secretary -- whose name I haven't been able to find in any of the sources I've used for this episode, sadly, came into the club where they were rehearsing, the Starlight Rooms, to pass a message from Arden to an associate of his who owned the club. The secretary had seen Marriott perform before -- he would occasionally get up on stage at the Starlight Rooms to duet with Elkie Brooks, who was a regular performer there, and she'd seen him do that -- but was newly impressed by his group, and passed word on to her boss that this was a group he should investigate. Arden is someone who we'll be looking at a lot in future episodes, but the important thing to note right now is that he was a failed entertainer who had moved into management and promotion, first with American acts like Gene Vincent, and then with British acts like the Nashville Teens, who had had hits with tracks like "Tobacco Road": [Excerpt: The Nashville Teens, "Tobacco Road"] Arden was also something of a gangster -- as many people in the music industry were at the time, but he was worse than most of his contemporaries, and delighted in his nickname "the Al Capone of pop". The group had a few managers looking to sign them, but Arden convinced them with his offer. They would get a percentage of their earnings -- though they never actually received that percentage -- twenty pounds a week in wages, and, the most tempting part of it all, they would get expense accounts at all the Carnaby St boutiques and could go there whenever they wanted and get whatever they wanted. They signed with Arden, which all of them except Marriott would later regret, because Arden's financial exploitation meant that it would be decades before they saw any money from their hits, and indeed both Marriott and Lane would be dead before they started getting royalties from their old records. Marriott, on the other hand, had enough experience of the industry to credit Arden with the group getting anywhere at all, and said later "Look, you go into it with your eyes open and as far as I was concerned it was better than living on brown sauce rolls. At least we had twenty quid a week guaranteed." Arden got the group signed to Decca, with Dick Rowe signing them to the same kind of production deal that Andrew Oldham had pioneered with the Stones, so that Arden would own the rights to their recordings. At this point the group still only knew a handful of songs, but Rowe was signing almost everyone with a guitar at this point, putting out a record or two and letting them sink or swim. He had already been firmly labelled as "the man who turned down the Beatles", and was now of the opinion that it was better to give everyone a chance than to make that kind of expensive mistake again. By this point Marriott and Lane were starting to write songs together -- though at this point it was still mostly Marriott writing, and people would ask him why he was giving Lane half the credit, and he'd reply "Without Ronnie's help keeping me awake and being there I wouldn't do half of it. He keeps me going." -- but for their first single Arden was unsure that they were up to the task of writing a hit. The group had been performing a version of Solomon Burke's "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love", a song which Burke always claimed to have written alone, but which is credited to him, Jerry Wexler, and Bert Berns (and has Bern's fingerprints, at least, on it to my ears): [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love"] Arden got some professional writers to write new lyrics and vocal melody to their arrangement of the song -- the people he hired were Brian Potter, who would later go on to co-write "Rhinestone Cowboy", and Ian Samwell, the former member of Cliff Richard's Drifters who had written many of Richard's early hits, including "Move It", and was now working for Arden. The group went into the studio and recorded the song, titled "Whatcha Gonna Do About It?": [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Whatcha Gonna Do About It?"] That version, though was deemed too raucous, and they had to go back into the studio to cut a new version, which came out as their first single: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Whatcha Gonna Do About It?"] At first the single didn't do much on the charts, but then Arden got to work with teams of people buying copies from chart return shops, bribing DJs on pirate radio stations to play it, and bribing the person who compiled the charts for the NME. Eventually it made number fourteen, at which point it became a genuinely popular hit. But with that popularity came problems. In particular, Steve Marriott was starting to get seriously annoyed by Jimmy Winston. As the group started to get TV appearances, Winston started to act like he should be the centre of attention. Every time Marriott took a solo in front of TV cameras, Winston would start making stupid gestures, pulling faces, anything to make sure the cameras focussed on him rather than on Marriott. Which wouldn't have been too bad had Winston been a great musician, but he was still not very good on the keyboards, and unlike the others didn't seem particularly interested in trying. He seemed to want to be a star, rather than a musician. The group's next planned single was a Marriott and Lane song, "I've Got Mine". To promote it, the group mimed to it in a film, Dateline Diamonds, a combination pop film and crime caper not a million miles away from the ones that Marriott had appeared in a few years earlier. They also contributed three other songs to the film's soundtrack. Unfortunately, the film's release was delayed, and the film had been the big promotional push that Arden had planned for the single, and without that it didn't chart at all. By the time the single came out, though, Winston was no longer in the group. There are many, many different stories as to why he was kicked out. Depending on who you ask, it was because he was trying to take the spotlight away from Marriott, because he wasn't a good enough keyboard player, because he was taller than the others and looked out of place, or because he asked Don Arden where the money was. It was probably a combination of all of these, but fundamentally what it came to was that Winston just didn't fit into the group. Winston would, in later years, say that him confronting Arden was the only reason for his dismissal, saying that Arden had manipulated the others to get him out of the way, but that seems unlikely on the face of it. When Arden sacked him, he kept Winston on as a client and built another band around him, Jimmy Winston and the Reflections, and got them signed to Decca too, releasing a Kenny Lynch song, "Sorry She's Mine", to no success: [Excerpt: Jimmy Winston and the Reflections, "Sorry She's Mine"] Another version of that song would later be included on the first Small Faces album. Winston would then form another band, Winston's Fumbs, who would also release one single, before he went into acting instead. His most notable credit was as a rebel in the 1972 Doctor Who story Day of the Daleks, and he later retired from showbusiness to run a business renting out sound equipment, and died in 2020. The group hired his replacement without ever having met him or heard him play. Ian McLagan had started out as the rhythm guitarist in a Shadows soundalike band called the Cherokees, but the group had become R&B fans and renamed themselves the Muleskinners, and then after hearing "Green Onions", McLagan had switched to playing Hammond organ. The Muleskinners had played the same R&B circuit as dozens of other bands we've looked at, and had similar experiences, including backing visiting blues stars like Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, and Howlin' Wolf. Their one single had been a cover version of "Back Door Man", a song Willie Dixon had written for Wolf: [Excerpt: The Muleskinners, "Back Door Man"] The Muleskinners had split up as most of the group had day jobs, and McLagan had gone on to join a group called Boz and the Boz People, who were becoming popular on the live circuit, and who also toured backing Kenny Lynch while McLagan was in the band. Boz and the Boz People would release several singles in 1966, like their version of the theme for the film "Carry on Screaming", released just as by "Boz": [Excerpt: Boz, "Carry on Screaming"] By that time, McLagan had left the group -- Boz Burrell later went on to join King Crimson and Bad Company. McLagan left the Boz People in something of a strop, and was complaining to a friend the night he left the group that he didn't have any work lined up. The friend joked that he should join the Small Faces, because he looked like them, and McLagan got annoyed that his friend wasn't taking him seriously -- he'd love to be in the Small Faces, but they *had* a keyboard player. The next day he got a phone call from Don Arden asking him to come to his office. He was being hired to join a hit pop group who needed a new keyboard player. McLagan at first wasn't allowed to tell anyone what band he was joining -- in part because Arden's secretary was dating Winston, and Winston hadn't yet been informed he was fired, and Arden didn't want word leaking out until it had been sorted. But he'd been chosen purely on the basis of an article in a music magazine which had praised his playing with the Boz People, and without the band knowing him or his playing. As soon as they met, though, he immediately fit in in a way Winston never had. He looked the part, right down to his height -- he said later "Ronnie Lane and I were the giants in the band at 5 ft 6 ins, and Kenney Jones and Steve Marriott were the really teeny tiny chaps at 5 ft 5 1/2 ins" -- and he was a great player, and shared a sense of humour with them. McLagan had told Arden he'd been earning twenty pounds a week with the Boz People -- he'd actually been on five -- and so Arden agreed to give him thirty pounds a week during his probationary month, which was more than the twenty the rest of the band were getting. As soon as his probationary period was over, McLagan insisted on getting a pay cut so he'd be on the same wages as the rest of the group. Soon Marriott, Lane, and McLagan were all living in a house rented for them by Arden -- Jones decided to stay living with his parents -- and were in the studio recording their next single. Arden was convinced that the mistake with "I've Got Mine" had been allowing the group to record an original, and again called in a team of professional songwriters. Arden brought in Mort Shuman, who had recently ended his writing partnership with Doc Pomus and struck out on his own, after co-writing songs like "Save the Last Dance for Me", "Sweets For My Sweet", and "Viva Las Vegas" together, and Kenny Lynch, and the two of them wrote "Sha-La-La-La-Lee", and Lynch added backing vocals to the record: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Sha-La-La-La-Lee"] None of the group were happy with the record, but it became a big hit, reaching number three in the charts. Suddenly the group had a huge fanbase of screaming teenage girls, which embarrassed them terribly, as they thought of themselves as serious heavy R&B musicians, and the rest of their career would largely be spent vacillating between trying to appeal to their teenybopper fanbase and trying to escape from it to fit their own self-image. They followed "Sha-La-La-La-Lee" with "Hey Girl", a Marriott/Lane song, but one written to order -- they were under strict instructions from Arden that if they wanted to have the A-side of a single, they had to write something as commercial as "Sha-La-La-La-Lee" had been, and they managed to come up with a second top-ten hit. Two hit singles in a row was enough to make an album viable, and the group went into the studio and quickly cut an album, which had their first two hits on it -- "Hey Girl" wasn't included, and nor was the flop "I've Got Mine" -- plus a bunch of semi-originals like "You Need Loving", a couple of Kenny Lynch songs, and a cover version of Sam Cooke's "Shake". The album went to number three on the album charts, with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the number one and two spots, and it was at this point that Arden's rivals really started taking interest. But that interest was quelled for the moment when, after Robert Stigwood enquired about managing the band, Arden went round to Stigwood's office with four goons and held him upside down over a balcony, threatening to drop him off if he ever messed with any of Arden's acts again. But the group were still being influenced by other managers. In particular, Brian Epstein came round to the group's shared house, with Graeme Edge of the Moody Blues, and brought them some slices of orange -- which they discovered, after eating them, had been dosed with LSD. By all accounts, Marriott's first trip was a bad one, but the group soon became regular consumers of the drug, and it influenced the heavier direction they took on their next single, "All or Nothing". "All or Nothing" was inspired both by Marriott's breakup with his girlfriend of the time, and his delight at the fact that Jenny Rylance, a woman he was attracted to, had split up with her then-boyfriend Rod Stewart. Rylance and Stewart later reconciled, but would break up again and Rylance would become Marriott's first wife in 1968: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "All or Nothing"] "All or Nothing" became the group's first and only number one record -- and according to the version of the charts used on Top of the Pops, it was a joint number one with the Beatles' double A-side of "Yellow Submarine" and "Eleanor Rigby", both selling exactly as well as each other. But this success caused the group's parents to start to wonder why their kids -- none of whom were yet twenty-one, the legal age of majority at the time -- were not rich. While the group were on tour, their parents came as a group to visit Arden and ask him where the money was, and why their kids were only getting paid twenty pounds a week when their group was getting a thousand pounds a night. Arden tried to convince the parents that he had been paying the group properly, but that they had spent their money on heroin -- which was very far from the truth, the band were only using soft drugs at the time. This put a huge strain on the group's relationship with Arden, and it wasn't the only thing Arden did that upset them. They had been spending a lot of time in the studio working on new material, and Arden was convinced that they were spending too much time recording, and that they were just faffing around and not producing anything of substance. They dropped off a tape to show him that they had been working -- and the next thing they knew, Arden had put out one of the tracks from that tape, "My Mind's Eye", which had only been intended as a demo, as a single: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "My Mind's Eye"] That it went to number four on the charts didn't make up for the fact that the first the band heard of the record coming out at all was when they heard it on the radio. They needed rid of Arden. Luckily for them, Arden wasn't keen on continuing to work with them either. They were unreliable and flakey, and he also needed cash quick to fund his other ventures, and he agreed to sell on their management and recording contracts. Depending on which version of the story you believe, he may have sold them on to an agent called Harold Davison, who then sold them on to Andrew Oldham and Tony Calder, but according to Oldham what happened is that in December 1966 Arden demanded the highest advance in British history -- twenty-five thousand pounds -- directly from Oldham. In cash. In a brown paper bag. The reason Oldham and Calder were interested was that in July 1965 they'd started up their own record label, Immediate Records, which had been announced by Oldham in his column in Disc and Music Echo, in which he'd said "On many occasions I have run down the large record companies over issues such as pirate stations, their promotion, and their tastes. And many readers have written in and said that if I was so disturbed by the state of the existing record companies why didn't I do something about it.  I have! On the twentieth of this month the first of three records released by my own company, Immediate Records, is to be launched." That first batch of three records contained one big hit, "Hang on Sloopy" by the McCoys, which Immediate licensed from Bert Berns' new record label BANG in the US: [Excerpt: The McCoys, "Hang on Sloopy"] The two other initial singles featured the talents of Immediate's new in-house producer, a session player who had previously been known as "Little Jimmy" to distinguish him from "Big" Jim Sullivan, the other most in-demand session guitarist, but who was now just known as Jimmy Page. The first was a version of Pete Seeger's "The Bells of Rhymney", which Page produced and played guitar on, for a group called The Fifth Avenue: [Excerpt: The Fifth Avenue, "The Bells of Rhymney"] And the second was a Gordon Lightfoot song performed by a girlfriend of Brian Jones', Nico. The details as to who was involved in the track have varied -- at different times the production has been credited to Jones, Page, and Oldham -- but it seems to be the case that both Jones and Page play on the track, as did session bass player John Paul Jones: [Excerpt: Nico, "I'm Not Sayin'"] While "Hang on Sloopy" was a big hit, the other two singles were flops, and The Fifth Avenue split up, while Nico used the publicity she'd got as an entree into Andy Warhol's Factory, and we'll be hearing more about how that went in a future episode. Oldham and Calder were trying to follow the model of the Brill Building, of Phil Spector, and of big US independents like Motown and Stax. They wanted to be a one-stop shop where they'd produce the records, manage the artists, and own the publishing -- and they also licensed the publishing for the Beach Boys' songs for a couple of years, and started publicising their records over here in a big way, to exploit the publishing royalties, and that was a major factor in turning the Beach Boys from minor novelties to major stars in the UK. Most of Immediate's records were produced by Jimmy Page, but other people got to have a go as well. Giorgio Gomelsky and Shel Talmy both produced tracks for the label, as did a teenage singer then known as Paul Raven, who would later become notorious under his later stage-name Gary Glitter. But while many of these records were excellent -- and Immediate deserves to be talked about in the same terms as Motown or Stax when it comes to the quality of the singles it released, though not in terms of commercial success -- the only ones to do well on the charts in the first few months of the label's existence were "Hang on Sloopy" and an EP by Chris Farlowe. It was Farlowe who provided Immediate Records with its first home-grown number one, a version of the Rolling Stones' "Out of Time" produced by Mick Jagger, though according to Arthur Greenslade, the arranger on that and many other Immediate tracks, Jagger had given up on getting a decent performance out of Farlowe and Oldham ended up producing the vocals. Greenslade later said "Andrew must have worked hard in there, Chris Farlowe couldn't sing his way out of a paper bag. I'm sure Andrew must have done it, where you get an artist singing and you can do a sentence at a time, stitching it all together. He must have done it in pieces." But however hard it was to make, "Out of Time" was a success: [Excerpt: Chris Farlowe, "Out of Time"] Or at least, it was a success in the UK. It did also make the top forty in the US for a week, but then it hit a snag -- it had charted without having been released in the US at all, or even being sent as a promo to DJs. Oldham's new business manager Allen Klein had been asked to work his magic on the US charts, but the people he'd bribed to hype the record into the charts had got the release date wrong and done it too early. When the record *did* come out over there, no radio station would play it in case it looked like they were complicit in the scam. But still, a UK number one wasn't too shabby, and so Immediate Records was back on track, and Oldham wanted to shore things up by bringing in some more proven hit-makers. Immediate signed the Small Faces, and even started paying them royalties -- though that wouldn't last long, as Immediate went bankrupt in 1970 and its successors in interest stopped paying out. The first work the group did for the label was actually for a Chris Farlowe single. Lane and Marriott gave him their song "My Way of Giving", and played on the session along with Farlowe's backing band the Thunderbirds. Mick Jagger is the credited producer, but by all accounts Marriott and Lane did most of the work: [Excerpt: Chris Farlowe, "My Way of Giving"] Sadly, that didn't make the top forty. After working on that, they started on their first single recorded at Immediate. But because of contractual entanglements, "I Can't Make It" was recorded at Immediate but released by Decca. Because the band weren't particularly keen on promoting something on their old label, and the record was briefly banned by the BBC for being too sexual, it only made number twenty-six on the charts. Around this time, Marriott had become friendly with another band, who had named themselves The Little People in homage to the Small Faces, and particularly with their drummer Jerry Shirley. Marriott got them signed to Immediate, and produced and played on their first single, a version of his song "(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me?": [Excerpt: The Apostolic Intervention, "(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me?"] When they signed to Immediate, The Little People had to change their name, and Marriott suggested they call themselves The Nice, a phrase he liked. Oldham thought that was a stupid name, and gave the group the much more sensible name The Apostolic Intervention. And then a few weeks later he signed another group and changed *their* name to The Nice. "The Nice" was also a phrase used in the Small Faces' first single for Immediate proper. "Here Come the Nice" was inspired by a routine by the hipster comedian Lord Buckley, "The Nazz", which also gave a name to Todd Rundgren's band and inspired a line in David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust": [Excerpt: Lord Buckley, "The Nazz"] "Here Come the Nice" was very blatantly about a drug dealer, and somehow managed to reach number twelve despite that: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Here Come the Nice"] It also had another obstacle that stopped it doing as well as it might. A week before it came out, Decca released a single, "Patterns", from material they had in the vault. And in June 1967, two Small Faces albums came out. One of them was a collection from Decca of outtakes and demos, plus their non-album hit singles, titled From The Beginning, while the other was their first album on Immediate, which was titled Small Faces -- just like their first Decca album had been. To make matters worse, From The Beginning contained the group's demos of "My Way of Giving" and "(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me?", while the group's first Immediate album contained a new recording of  "(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me?", and a version of "My Way of Giving" with the same backing track but a different vocal take from the one on the Decca collection. From this point on, the group's catalogue would be a complete mess, with an endless stream of compilations coming out, both from Decca and, after the group split, from Immediate, mixing tracks intended for release with demos and jam sessions with no regard for either their artistic intent or for what fans might want. Both albums charted, with Small Faces reaching number twelve and From The Beginning reaching number sixteen, neither doing as well as their first album had, despite the Immediate album, especially, being a much better record. This was partly because the Marriott/Lane partnership was becoming far more equal. Kenney Jones later said "During the Decca period most of the self-penned stuff was 99% Steve. It wasn't until Immediate that Ronnie became more involved. The first Immediate album is made up of 50% Steve's songs and 50% of Ronnie's. They didn't collaborate as much as people thought. In fact, when they did, they often ended up arguing and fighting." It's hard to know who did what on each song credited to the pair, but if we assume that each song's principal writer also sang lead -- we know that's not always the case, but it's a reasonable working assumption -- then Jones' fifty-fifty estimate seems about right. Of the fourteen songs on the album, McLagan sings one, which is also his own composition, "Up the Wooden Hills to Bedfordshire". There's one instrumental, six with Marriott on solo lead vocals, four with Lane on solo lead vocals, and two duets, one with Lane as the main vocalist and one with Marriott. The fact that there was now a second songwriter taking an equal role in the band meant that they could now do an entire album of originals. It also meant that their next Marriott/Lane single was mostly a Lane song. "Itchycoo Park" started with a verse lyric from Lane -- "Over bridge of sighs/To rest my eyes in shades of green/Under dreaming spires/To Itchycoo Park, that's where I've been". The inspiration apparently came from Lane reading about the dreaming spires of Oxford, and contrasting it with the places he used to play as a child, full of stinging nettles. For a verse melody, they repeated a trick they'd used before -- the melody of "My Mind's Eye" had been borrowed in part from the Christmas carol "Gloria in Excelsis Deo", and here they took inspiration from the old hymn "God Be in My Head": [Excerpt: The Choir of King's College Cambridge, "God Be in My Head"] As Marriott told the story: "We were in Ireland and speeding our brains out writing this song. Ronnie had the first verse already written down but he had no melody line, so what we did was stick the verse to the melody line of 'God Be In My Head' with a few chord variations. We were going towards Dublin airport and I thought of the middle eight... We wrote the second verse collectively, and the chorus speaks for itself." [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Itchycoo Park"] Marriott took the lead vocal, even though it was mostly Lane's song, but Marriott did contribute to the writing, coming up with the middle eight. Lane didn't seem hugely impressed with Marriott's contribution, and later said "It wasn't me that came up with 'I feel inclined to blow my mind, get hung up, feed the ducks with a bun/They all come out to groove about, be nice and have fun in the sun'. That wasn't me, but the more poetic stuff was." But that part became the most memorable part of the record, not so much because of the writing or performance but because of the production. It was one of the first singles released using a phasing effect, developed by George Chkiantz (and I apologise if I'm pronouncing that name wrong), who was the assistant engineer for Glyn Johns on the album. I say it was one of the first, because at the time there was not a clear distinction between the techniques now known as phasing, flanging, and artificial double tracking, all of which have now diverged, but all of which initially came from the idea of shifting two copies of a recording slightly out of synch with each other. The phasing on "Itchycoo Park" , though, was far more extreme and used to far different effect than that on, say, Revolver: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Itchycoo Park"] It was effective enough that Jimi Hendrix, who was at the time working on Axis: Bold as Love, requested that Chkiantz come in and show his engineer how to get the same effect, which was then used on huge chunks of Hendrix's album. The BBC banned the record, because even the organisation which had missed that the Nice who "is always there when I need some speed" was a drug dealer was a little suspicious about whether "we'll get high" and "we'll touch the sky" might be drug references. The band claimed to be horrified at the thought, and explained that they were talking about swings. It's a song about a park, so if you play on the swings, you go high. What else could it mean? [Excerpt: The Small Faces, “Itchycoo Park”] No drug references there, I'm sure you'll agree. The song made number three, but the group ran into more difficulties with the BBC after an appearance on Top of the Pops. Marriott disliked the show's producer, and the way that he would go up to every act and pretend to think they had done a very good job, no matter what he actually thought, which Marriott thought of as hypocrisy rather than as politeness and professionalism. Marriott discovered that the producer was leaving the show, and so in the bar afterwards told him exactly what he thought of him, calling him a "two-faced", and then a four-letter word beginning with c which is generally considered the most offensive swear word there is. Unfortunately for Marriott, he'd been misinformed, the producer wasn't leaving the show, and the group were barred from it for a while. "Itchycoo Park" also made the top twenty in the US, thanks to a new distribution deal Immediate had, and plans were made for the group to tour America, but those plans had to be scrapped when Ian McLagan was arrested for possession of hashish, and instead the group toured France, with support from a group called the Herd: [Excerpt: The Herd, "From the Underworld"] Marriott became very friendly with the Herd's guitarist, Peter Frampton, and sympathised with Frampton's predicament when in the next year he was voted "face of '68" and developed a similar teenage following to the one the Small Faces had. The group's last single of 1967 was one of their best. "Tin Soldier" was inspired by the Hans Andersen story “The Steadfast Tin Soldier”, and was originally written for the singer P.P. Arnold, who Marriott was briefly dating around this time. But Arnold was *so* impressed with the song that Marriott decided to keep it for his own group, and Arnold was left just doing backing vocals on the track: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Tin Soldier"] It's hard to show the appeal of "Tin Soldier" in a short clip like those I use on this show, because so much of it is based on the use of dynamics, and the way the track rises and falls, but it's an extremely powerful track, and made the top ten. But it was after that that the band started falling apart, and also after that that they made the work generally considered their greatest album. As "Itchycoo Park" had made number one in Australia, the group were sent over there on tour to promote it, as support act for the Who. But the group hadn't been playing live much recently, and found it difficult to replicate their records on stage, as they were now so reliant on studio effects like phasing. The Australian audiences were uniformly hostile, and the contrast with the Who, who were at their peak as a live act at this point, couldn't have been greater. Marriott decided he had a solution. The band needed to get better live, so why not get Peter Frampton in as a fifth member? He was great on guitar and had stage presence, obviously that would fix their problems. But the other band members absolutely refused to get Frampton in. Marriott's confidence as a stage performer took a knock from which it never really recovered, and increasingly the band became a studio-only one. But the tour also put strain on the most important partnership in the band. Marriott and Lane had been the closest of friends and collaborators, but on the tour, both found a very different member of the Who to pal around with. Marriott became close to Keith Moon, and the two would get drunk and trash hotel rooms together. Lane, meanwhile, became very friendly with Pete Townshend, who introduced him to the work of the guru Meher Baba, who Townshend followed. Lane, too, became a follower, and the two would talk about religion and spirituality while their bandmates were destroying things. An attempt was made to heal the growing rifts though. Marriott, Lane, and McLagan all moved in together again like old times, but this time in a cottage -- something that became so common for bands around this time that the phrase "getting our heads together in the country" became a cliche in the music press. They started working on material for their new album. One of the tracks that they were working on was written by Marriott, and was inspired by how, before moving in to the country cottage, his neighbours had constantly complained about the volume of his music -- he'd been particularly annoyed that the pop singer Cilla Black, who lived in the same building and who he'd assumed would understand the pop star lifestyle, had complained more than anyone. It had started as as fairly serious blues song, but then Marriott had been confronted by the members of the group The Hollies, who wanted to know why Marriott always sang in a pseudo-American accent. Wasn't his own accent good enough? Was there something wrong with being from the East End of London? Well, no, Marriott decided, there wasn't, and so he decided to sing it in a Cockney accent. And so the song started to change, going from being an R&B song to being the kind of thing Cockneys could sing round a piano in a pub: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Lazy Sunday"] Marriott intended the song just as an album track for the album they were working on, but Andrew Oldham insisted on releasing it as a single, much to the band's disgust, and it went to number two on the charts, and along with "Itchycoo Park" meant that the group were now typecast as making playful, light-hearted music. The album they were working on, Ogden's Nut-Gone Flake, was eventually as known for its marketing as its music. In the Small Faces' long tradition of twisted religious references, like their songs based on hymns and their song "Here Come the Nice", which had taken inspiration from a routine about Jesus and made it about a drug dealer, the print ads for the album read: Small Faces Which were in the studios Hallowed be thy name Thy music come Thy songs be sung On this album as they came from your heads We give you this day our daily bread Give us thy album in a round cover as we give thee 37/9d Lead us into the record stores And deliver us Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake For nice is the music The sleeve and the story For ever and ever, Immediate The reason the ad mentioned a round cover is that the original pressings of the album were released in a circular cover, made to look like a tobacco tin, with the name of the brand of tobacco changed from Ogden's Nut-Brown Flake to Ogden's Nut-Gone Flake, a reference to how after smoking enough dope your nut, or head, would be gone. This made more sense to British listeners than to Americans, because not only was the slang on the label British, and not only was it a reference to a British tobacco brand, but American and British dope-smoking habits are very different. In America a joint is generally made by taking the dried leaves and flowers of the cannabis plant -- or "weed" -- and rolling them in a cigarette paper and smoking them. In the UK and much of Europe, though, the preferred form of cannabis is the resin, hashish, which is crumbled onto tobacco in a cigarette paper and smoked that way, so having rolling or pipe tobacco was a necessity for dope smokers in the UK in a way it wasn't in the US. Side one of Ogden's was made up of normal songs, but the second side mixed songs and narrative. Originally the group wanted to get Spike Milligan to do the narration, but when Milligan backed out they chose Professor Stanley Unwin, a comedian who was known for speaking in his own almost-English language, Unwinese: [Excerpt: Stanley Unwin, "The Populode of the Musicolly"] They gave Unwin a script, telling the story that linked side two of the album, in which Happiness Stan is shocked to discover that half the moon has disappeared and goes on a quest to find the missing half, aided by a giant fly who lets him sit on his back after Stan shares his shepherd's pie with the hungry fly. After a long quest they end up at the cave of Mad John the Hermit, who points out to them that nobody had stolen half the moon at all -- they'd been travelling so long that it was a full moon again, and everything was OK. Unwin took that script, and reworked it into Unwinese, and also added in a lot of the slang he heard the group use, like "cool it" and "what's been your hang-up?": [Excerpt: The Small Faces and Professor Stanley Unwin, "Mad John"] The album went to number one, and the group were justifiably proud, but it only exacerbated the problems with their live show. Other than an appearance on the TV show Colour Me Pop, where they were joined by Stanley Unwin to perform the whole of side two of the album with live vocals but miming to instrumental backing tracks, they only performed two songs from the album live, "Rollin' Over" and "Song of a Baker", otherwise sticking to the same live show Marriott was already embarrassed by. Marriott later said "We had spent an entire year in the studios, which was why our stage presentation had not been improved since the previous year. Meanwhile our recording experience had developed in leaps and bounds. We were all keenly interested in the technical possibilities, in the art of recording. We let down a lot of people who wanted to hear Ogden's played live. We were still sort of rough and ready, and in the end the audience became uninterested as far as our stage show was concerned. It was our own fault, because we would have sussed it all out if we had only used our brains. We could have taken Stanley Unwin on tour with us, maybe a string section as well, and it would have been okay. But we didn't do it, we stuck to the concept that had been successful for a long time, which is always the kiss of death." The group's next single would be the last released while they were together. Marriott regarded "The Universal" as possibly the best thing he'd written, and recorded it quickly when inspiration struck. The finished single is actually a home recording of Marriott in his garden, including the sounds of a dog barking and his wife coming home with the shopping, onto which the band later overdubbed percussion, horns, and electric guitars: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "The Universal"] Incidentally, it seems that the dog barking on that track may also be the dog barking on “Seamus” by Pink Floyd. "The Universal" confused listeners, and only made number sixteen on the charts, crushing Marriott, who thought it was the best thing he'd done. But the band were starting to splinter. McLagan isn't on "The Universal", having quit the band before it was recorded after a falling-out with Marriott. He rejoined, but discovered that in the meantime Marriott had brought in session player Nicky Hopkins to work on some tracks, which devastated him. Marriott became increasingly unconfident in his own writing, and the writing dried up. The group did start work on some new material, some of which, like "The Autumn Stone", is genuinely lovely: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "The Autumn Stone"] But by the time that was released, the group had already split up. The last recording they did together was as a backing group for Johnny Hallyday, the French rock star. A year earlier Hallyday had recorded a version of "My Way of Giving", under the title "Je N'Ai Jamais Rien Demandé": [Excerpt: Johnny Hallyday, "Je N'Ai Jamais Rien Demandé"] Now he got in touch with Glyn Johns to see if the Small Faces had any other material for him, and if they'd maybe back him on a few tracks on a new album. Johns and the Small Faces flew to France... as did Peter Frampton, who Marriott was still pushing to get into the band. They recorded three tracks for the album, with Frampton on extra guitar: [Excerpt: Johnny Hallyday, "Reclamation"] These tracks left Marriott more certain than ever that Frampton should be in the band, and the other three members even more certain that he shouldn't. Frampton joined the band on stage at a few shows on their next few gigs, but he was putting together his own band with Jerry Shirley from Apostolic Intervention. On New Year's Eve 1968, Marriott finally had enough. He stormed off stage mid-set, and quit the group. He phoned up Peter Frampton, who was hanging out with Glyn Johns listening to an album Johns had just produced by some of the session players who'd worked for Immediate. Side one had just finished when Marriott phoned. Could he join Frampton's new band? Frampton said of course he could, then put the phone down and listened to side two of Led Zeppelin's first record. The band Marriott and Frampton formed was called Humble Pie, and they were soon releasing stuff on Immediate. According to Oldham, "Tony Calder said to me one day 'Pick a straw'. Then he explained we had a choice. We could either go with the three Faces -- Kenney, Ronnie, and Mac -- wherever they were going to go with their lives, or we could follow Stevie. I didn't regard it as a choice. Neither did Tony. Marriott was our man". Marriott certainly seemed to agree that he was the real talent in the group. He and Lane had fairly recently bought some property together -- two houses on the same piece of land -- and with the group splitting up, Lane moved away and wanted to sell his share in the property to Marriott. Marriott wrote to him saying "You'll get nothing. This was bought with money from hits that I wrote, not that we wrote," and enclosing a PRS statement showing how much each Marriott/Lane

As the first and only American-born Chef to be awarded multiple three-star Michelin ratings for his restaurants, The French Laundry and Per Se, Chef Thomas Keller brings his expertise to discuss Bones in this very special episode of Ingredient Insiders.Recorded in Yountville, California, and joined by his business partner Chef Mitch Mitchell, these friends and colleagues divulge us in the backstory of their culinary upbringings, how they formed their new venture, Proper Stock and Sauce Company, and the precise nature of how they select and prepare bones.FIND OUT MOREIngredient Insiders: https://www.instagram.com/ingredientinsiders/Thomas Keller: https://www.thomaskeller.com/Mitch Mitchell: https://truefoodsltd.com/This podcast is in partnership with The Chefs' Warehouse, purveyors and curators of the world's finest specialty foods and ingredients in North America. Visit our website to learn more: https://www.chefswarehouse.com/Produced by Gotham Production Studios, https://www.gothamproductionstudios.com/.

Elizabeth Sullivan was struggling. She'd married her military husband following a whirlwind romance a few years earlier. Shortly after they married, the Navy relocated the couple to San Diego. So, Elizabeth found herself far from friends and family, often alone, with two young children. She and her husband, Matthew, argued. He got violent with her. Elizabeth told her friends she'd had enough. She was going to leave Matthew. They never heard from her again.  Then Kristin tells us about a series of rapes that gripped Texas Tech in 1984 and 1985. Young women were being raped late at night, often while they were parking their cars. Police sketches of the attacker all looked different enough that many young Black men were afraid to go on campus late at night, for fear that they'd be mistaken for the Tech Rapist. Eventually, female police officers began posing as students in an attempt to bait the rapist. About a week into the undercover operation, police were certain they'd caught the right guy — Tim Cole. They were wrong. And now for a note about our process. For each episode, Kristin reads a bunch of articles, then spits them back out in her very limited vocabulary. Brandi copies and pastes from the best sources on the web. And sometimes Wikipedia. (No shade, Wikipedia. We love you.) We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the real experts who covered these cases. In this episode, Kristin pulled from: “Tim Cole” episodes of Vindicated “Timothy Cole” InnocenceTexas.org “Cole case,” by Jena Williams for Texas Monthly  “The Innocent Man: Timothy Cole,” by Matt Sell for Everything Lubbock “Judge clears dead Texas man of rape conviction,” Associated Press, NBC News “A push to award a degree to a symbol of injustice,” by Reeve Hamilton for The Texas Tribune “Statue of Tim Cole to be unveiled soon,” by Anna Tinsley for The Star-Telegram “Innocence now on display,” by Mitch Mitchell for The Star-Telegram “Victim aims to clear name of dead man convicted of attack,” by Max B. Baker for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram “Innocence lost in attack, but courage was found,” by Bob Ray Sanders for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram “‘You are a victim, just like my son was,'” by Max B. Baker for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram “A day of vindication for innocent man, family,” by Max B. Baker for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram “DNA in 1985 rape exonerates man who died behind bars,” Associated Press, Los Angeles Times “The Cole Truth,” by Fred McKinley for the Texas Observer In this episode, Brandi pulled from: “Secrets by the Bay” episode Dateline “Elizabeth Sullivan” chillingcrimes.com “Timeline: The Disappearance of Elizabeth Sullivan” by Monica Garske, San Diego 7 News “Ex-Navy Man Who ‘Brutally Murdered' Wife in San Diego in 2014 Sentenced” by Monica Garske and Christina Bravo, San Diego 7 News “Ex-Navy Sailor Murdered Wife with Children in Other Room, Then Froze Body and Claimed She'd Left” by Steve Helling, people.com “Husband gets 16 years to life for killing wife, dumping body in bay two years later” by Teri Figueroa, The San Diego Union-Tribune YOU'RE STILL READING? My, my, my, you skeezy scunch! You must be hungry for more! We'd offer you some sausage brunch, but that gets messy. So how about you head over to our Patreon instead? (patreon.com/lgtcpodcast). At the $5 level, you'll get 40+ full length bonus episodes, plus access to our 90's style chat room!  

Gustav Ejstes is the singer, multi-instrumentalist and founding member of Dungen. After a six year break, Dungen has released En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog (One is Too Much and a Thousand is Never Enough) on Mexican Summer. In this episode Gustav explains  the process of working with producer/collaborator Mattias Glavå, and the role Mitch Mitchell, Public Enemy and Jungle play on the album. He shares his touring plans and we hear a couple tunes. http://www.dungen-music.com/https://www.mexicansummer.com/artist/dungen/Use coupon code FRET10 to claim 10% off your iZotope plug-in purchase or try Music Production Suite Pro free for 30 days.Go to www.izotope.com/en/lp/ruinous

Episode one hundred and fifty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Waterloo Sunset” by the Kinks, and the self-inflicted damage the group did to their career between 1965 and 1967. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a nineteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Excerpt From a Teenage Opera" by Keith West. 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 this week, as there are too many Kinks songs. I've used several resources for this and future episodes on the Kinks, most notably Ray Davies: A Complicated Life by Johnny Rogan and You Really Got Me by Nick Hasted. X-Ray by Ray Davies is a remarkable autobiography with a framing story set in a dystopian science-fiction future, while Kink by Dave Davies is more revealing but less well-written. The Anthology 1964-1971 is a great box set that covers the Kinks' Pye years, which overlap almost exactly with their period of greatest creativity. For those who don't want a full box set, this two-CD set covers all the big hits. And this is the interview with Rasa I discuss in the episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, this episode has some mentions of racism and homophobia, several discussions of physical violence, one mention of domestic violence, and some discussion of mental illness. I've tried to discuss these things with a reasonable amount of sensitivity, but there's a tabloid element to some of my sources which inevitably percolates through, so be warned if you find those things upsetting. One of the promises I made right at the start of this project was that I would not be doing the thing that almost all podcasts do of making huge chunks of the episodes be about myself -- if I've had to update people about something in my life that affects the podcast, I've done it in separate admin episodes, so the episodes themselves will not be taken up with stuff about me. The podcast is not about me. I am making a very slight exception in this episode, for reasons that will become clear -- there's no way for me to tell this particular story the way I need to without bringing myself into it at least a little. So I wanted to state upfront that this is a one-off thing. The podcast is not suddenly going to change. But one question that I get asked a lot -- far more than I'd expect -- is "do the people you talk about in the podcast ever get in touch with you about what you've said?" Now that has actually happened twice, both times involving people leaving comments on relatively early episodes. The first time is probably the single thing I'm proudest of achieving with this series, and it was a comment left on the episode on "Goodnight My Love" a couple of years back: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, "Goodnight My Love"] That comment was from Debra Frazier and read “Jesse Belvin is my Beloved Uncle, my mother's brother. I've been waiting all my life for him to be recognized in this manner. I must say the content in this podcast is 100% correct!Joann and Jesse practically raised me. Can't express how grateful I am. Just so glad someone got it right. I still miss them dearly to this day. My world was forever changed Feb. 6th 1960. I can remember him writing most of those songs right there in my grandmother's living room. I think I'm his last living closest relative, that knows everything in this podcast is true." That comment by itself would have justified me doing this whole podcast. The other such comment actually came a couple of weeks ago, and was on the episode on "Only You": [Excerpt: The Platters, "Only You"] That was a longer comment, from Gayle Schrieber, an associate of Buck Ram, and started "Well, you got some of it right. Your smart-assed sarcasm and know-it-all attitude is irritating since I Do know it all from the business side but what the heck. You did better than most people – with the exception of Marv Goldberg." Given that Marv Goldberg is the single biggest expert on 1950s vocal groups in the world, I'll take that as at least a backhanded compliment. So those are the only two people who I've talked about in the podcast who've commented, but before the podcast I had a blog, and at various times people whose work I wrote about would comment -- John Cowsill of the Cowsills still remembers a blog post where I said nice things about him fourteen years ago, for example. And there was one comment on a blog post I made four or five years ago which confirmed something I'd suspected for a while… When we left the Kinks, at the end of 1964, they had just recorded their first album. That album was not very good, but did go to number three in the UK album charts, which is a much better result than it sounds. Freddie "Boom Boom" Cannon got to number one in 1960, but otherwise the only rock acts to make number one on the album charts from the start of the sixties through the end of 1967 were Elvis, Cliff Richard, the Shadows, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and the Monkees. In the first few years of the sixties they were interspersed with the 101 Strings, trad jazz, the soundtrack to West Side Story, and a blackface minstrel group, The George Mitchell Singers. From mid-1963 through to the end of 1967, though, literally the only things to get to number one on the album charts were the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Monkees, and the soundtrack to The Sound of Music. That tiny cabal was eventually broken at the end of 1967 by Val Doonican Rocks… But Gently, and from 1968 on the top of the album charts becomes something like what we would expect today, with a whole variety of different acts, I make this point to point out two things The first is that number three on the album charts is an extremely good position for the Kinks to be in -- when they reached that point the Rolling Stones' second album had just entered at number one, and Beatles For Sale had dropped to number two after eight weeks at the top -- and the second is that for most rock artists and record labels, the album market was simply not big enough or competitive enough until 1968 for it to really matter. What did matter was the singles chart. And "You Really Got Me" had been a genuinely revolutionary hit record. According to Ray Davies it had caused particular consternation to both the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds, both of whom had thought they would be the first to get to number one with a dirty, distorted, R&B-influenced guitar-riff song. And so three weeks after the release of the album came the group's second single. Originally, the plan had been to release a track Ray had been working on called "Tired of Waiting", but that was a slower track, and it was decided that the best thing to do would be to try to replicate the sound of their first hit. So instead, they released "All Day And All Of The Night": [Excerpt: The Kinks, "All Day And All Of The Night"] That track was recorded by the same team as had recorded "You Really Got Me", except with Perry Ford replacing Arthur Greenslade on piano. Once again, Bobby Graham was on drums rather than Mick Avory, and when Ray Davies suggested that he might want to play a different drum pattern, Graham just asked him witheringly "Who do you think you are?" "All Day and All of the Night" went to number two -- a very impressive result for a soundalike follow-up -- and was kept off the number one spot first by "Baby Love" by the Supremes and then by "Little Red Rooster" by the Rolling Stones. The group quickly followed it up with an EP, Kinksize Session, consisting of three mediocre originals plus the group's version of "Louie Louie". By February 1965 that had hit number one on the EP charts, knocking the Rolling Stones off. Things were going as well as possible for the group. Ray and his girlfriend Rasa got married towards the end of 1964 -- they had to, as Rasa was pregnant and from a very religious Catholic family. By contrast, Dave was leading the kind of life that can only really be led by a seventeen-year-old pop star -- he moved out of the family home and in with Mick Avory after his mother caught him in bed with five women, and once out of her watchful gaze he also started having affairs with men, which was still illegal in 1964. (And which indeed would still be illegal for seventeen-year-olds until 2001). In January, they released their third hit single, "Tired of Waiting for You". The track was a ballad rather than a rocker, but still essentially another variant on the theme of "You Really Got Me" -- a song based around a few repeated phrases of lyric, and with a chorus with two major chords a tone apart. "You Really Got Me"'s chorus has the change going up: [Plays "You Really Got Me" chorus chords] While "Tired Of Waiting For You"'s chorus has the change going down: [Plays "Tired of Waiting For You" chorus chords] But it's trivially easy to switch between the two if you play them in the same key: [Demonstrates] Ray has talked about how "Tired of Waiting for You" was partly inspired by how he felt tired of waiting for the fame that the Kinks deserved, and the music was written even before "You Really Got Me". But when they went into the studio to record it, the only lyrics he had were the chorus. Once they'd recorded the backing track, he worked on the lyrics at home, before coming back into the studio to record his vocals, with Rasa adding backing vocals on the softer middle eight: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Tired of Waiting For You"] After that track was recorded, the group went on a tour of Australia, New Zealand, and Hong Kong. The flight out to Australia was thirty-four hours, and also required a number of stops. One stop to refuel in Moscow saw the group forced back onto the plane at gunpoint after Pete Quaife unwisely made a joke about the recently-deposed Russian Premier Nikita Khruschev. They also had a stop of a couple of days in Mumbai, where Ray was woken up by the sounds of fishermen chanting at the riverside, and enchanted by both the sound and the image. In Adelaide, Ray and Dave met up for the first time in years with their sister Rose and her husband Arthur. Ray was impressed by their comparative wealth, but disliked the slick modernity of their new suburban home. Dave became so emotional about seeing his big sister again that he talked about not leaving her house, not going to the show that night, and just staying in Australia so they could all be a family again. Rose sadly told him that he knew he couldn't do that, and he eventually agreed. But the tour wasn't all touching family reunions. They also got into a friendly rivalry with Manfred Mann, who were also on the tour and were competing with the Kinks to be the third-biggest group in the UK behind the Beatles and the Stones, and at one point both bands ended up on the same floor of the same hotel as the Stones, who were on their own Australian tour. The hotel manager came up in the night after a complaint about the noise, saw the damage that the combined partying of the three groups had caused, and barricaded them into that floor, locking the doors and the lift shafts, so that the damage could be contained to one floor. "Tired of Waiting" hit number one in the UK while the group were on tour, and it also became their biggest hit in the US, reaching number six, so on the way home they stopped off in the US for a quick promotional appearance on Hullabaloo. According to Ray's accounts, they were asked to do a dance like Freddie and the Dreamers, he and Mick decided to waltz together instead, and the cameras cut away horrified at the implied homosexuality. In fact, examining the footage shows the cameras staying on the group as Mick approaches Ray, arms extended, apparently offering to waltz, while Ray backs off nervous and confused, unsure what's going on. Meanwhile Dave and Pete on the other side of the stage are being gloriously camp with their arms around each other's shoulders. When they finally got back to the UK, they were shocked to hear this on the radio: [Excerpt: The Who, "I Can't Explain"] Ray was horrified that someone had apparently stolen the group's sound, especially when he found out it was the Who, who as the High Numbers had had a bit of a rivalry with the group. He said later "Dave thought it was us! It was produced by Shel Talmy, like we were. They used the same session singers as us, and Perry Ford played piano, like he did on ‘All Day And All Of The Night'. I felt a bit appalled by that. I think that was worse than stealing a song – they were actually stealing our whole style!” Pete Townshend later admitted as much, saying that he had deliberately demoed "I Can't Explain" to sound as much like the Kinks as possible so that Talmy would see its potential. But the Kinks were still, for the moment, doing far better than the Who. In March, shortly after returning from their foreign tour, they released their second album, Kinda Kinks. Like their first album, it was a very patchy effort, but it made number two on the charts, behind the Rolling Stones. But Ray Davies was starting to get unhappy. He was dissatisfied with everything about his life. He would talk later about looking at his wife lying in bed sleeping and thinking "What's she doing here?", and he was increasingly wondering if the celebrity pop star life was right for him, simultaneously resenting and craving the limelight, and doing things like phoning the music papers to deny rumours that he was leaving the Kinks -- rumours which didn't exist until he made those phone calls. As he thought the Who had stolen the Kinks' style, Ray decided to go in a different direction for the next Kinks single, and recorded "Everybody's Gonna Be Happy", which was apparently intended to sound like Motown, though to my ears it bears no resemblance: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Everybody's Gonna Be Happy"] That only went to number nineteen -- still a hit, but a worry for a band who had had three massive hits in a row. Several of the band started to worry seriously that they were going to end up with no career at all. It didn't help that on the tour after recording that, Ray came down with pneumonia. Then Dave came down with bronchitis. Then Pete Quaife hit his head and had to be hospitalised with severe bleeding and concussion. According to Quaife, he fainted in a public toilet and hit his head on the bowl on the way down, but other band members have suggested that Quaife -- who had a reputation for telling tall stories, even in a band whose members are all known for rewriting history -- was ashamed after getting into a fight. In April they played the NME Poll-Winners' Party, on the same bill as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Moody Blues, the Searchers, Freddie And The Dreamers, Herman's Hermits, Wayne Fontana & The Mindbenders, the Rockin' Berries, the Seekers, the Ivy League, Them, the Bachelors, Georgie Fame & The Blue Flames, Cilla Black, Dusty Springfield, Twinkle, Tom Jones, Donovan, and Sounds Incorporated. Because they got there late they ended up headlining, going on after the Beatles, even though they hadn't won an award, only come second in best new group, coming far behind the Stones but just ahead of Manfred Mann and the Animals. The next single, "Set Me Free", was a conscious attempt to correct course after "Everybody's Gonna Be Happy" had been less successful: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Set Me Free"] The song is once again repetitive, and once again based on a riff, structured similarly to "Tired of Waiting" but faster and more upbeat, and with a Beatles-style falsetto in the chorus. It worked -- it returned the group to the top ten -- but Ray wasn't happy at writing to order. He said in August of that year “I'm ashamed of that song. I can stand to hear and even sing most of the songs I've written, but not that one. It's built around pure idiot harmonies that have been used in a thousand songs.” More recently he's talked about how the lyric was an expression of him wanting to be set free from the constraint of having to write a hit song in the style he felt he was outgrowing. By the time the single was released, though, it looked like the group might not even be together any longer. There had always been tensions in the band. Ray and Dave had a relationship that made the Everly Brothers look like the model of family amity, and while Pete Quaife stayed out of the arguments for the most part, Mick Avory couldn't. The core of the group had always been the Davies brothers, and Quaife had known them for years, but Avory was a relative newcomer and hadn't grown up with them, and they also regarded him as a bit less intelligent than the rest of the group. He became the butt of jokes on a fairly constant basis. That would have been OK, except that Avory was also an essentially passive person, who didn't want to take sides in conflicts, while Dave Davies thought that as he and Avory were flatmates they should be on the same side, and resented when Avory didn't take his side in arguments with Ray. As Dave remembered it, the trigger came when he wanted to change the setlist and Mick didn't support him against Ray. In others' recollection, it came when the rest of the band tried to get Dave away from a party and he got violent with them. Both may be true. Either way, Dave got drunk and threw a suitcase at the back of a departing Mick, who was normally a fairly placid person but had had enough, and so he turned round, furious, grabbed Dave, got him in a headlock and just started punching, blackening both his eyes. According to some reports, Avory was so infuriated with Dave that he knocked him out, and Dave was so drunk and angry that when he came to he went for Avory again, and got knocked out again. The next day, the group were driven to their show in separate cars -- the Davies brothers in one, the rhythm section in the other -- they had separate dressing rooms, and made their entrance from separate directions. They got through the first song OK, and then Dave Davies insulted Avory's drumming, spat at him, and kicked his drums so they scattered all over the stage. At this point, a lot of the audience were still thinking this was part of the act, but Avory saw red again and picked up his hi-hat cymbal and smashed it down edge-first onto Dave's head. Everyone involved says that if his aim had been very slightly different he would have actually killed Dave. As it is, Dave collapsed, unconscious, bleeding everywhere. Ray screamed "My brother! He's killed my little brother!" and Mick, convinced he was a murderer, ran out of the theatre, still wearing his stage outfit of a hunting jacket and frilly shirt. He was running away for his life -- and that was literal, as Britain still technically had the death penalty at this point; while the last executions in Britain took place in 1964, capital punishment for murder wasn't abolished until late 1965 -- but at the same time a gang of screaming girls outside who didn't know what was going on were chasing him because he was a pop star. He managed to get back to London, where he found that the police had been looking for him but that Dave was alive and didn't want to press charges. However, he obviously couldn't go back to their shared home, and they had to cancel gigs because Dave had been hospitalised. It looked like the group were finished for good. Four days after that, Ray and Rasa's daughter Louisa was born, and shortly after that Ray was in the studio again, recording demos: [Excerpt: Ray Davies, "I Go to Sleep (demo)"] That song was part of a project that Larry Page, the group's co-manager, and Eddie Kassner, their publisher, had of making Ray's songwriting a bigger income source, and getting his songs recorded by other artists. Ray had been asked to write it for Peggy Lee, who soon recorded her own version: [Excerpt: Peggy Lee, "I Go to Sleep"] Several of the other tracks on that demo session featured Mitch Mitchell on drums. At the time, Mitchell was playing with another band that Page managed, and there seems to have been some thought of him possibly replacing Avory in the group. But instead, Larry Page cut the Gordian knot. He invited each band member to a meeting, just the two of them -- and didn't tell them that he'd scheduled all these meetings at the same time. When they got there, they found that they'd been tricked into having a full band meeting, at which point Page just talked to them about arrangements for their forthcoming American tour, and didn't let them get a word in until he'd finished. At the end he asked if they had any questions, and Mick Avory said he'd need some new cymbals because he'd broken his old ones on Dave's head. Before going on tour, the group recorded a song that Ray had written inspired by that droning chanting he'd heard in Mumbai. The song was variously titled "See My Friend" and "See My Friends" -- it has been released under both titles, and Ray seems to sing both words at different times -- and Ray told Maureen Cleave "The song is about homosexuality… It's like a football team and the way they're always kissing each other.” (We will be talking about Ray Davies' attitudes towards sexuality and gender in a future episode, but suffice to say that like much of Davies' worldview, he has a weird mixture of very progressive and very reactionary views, and he is also prone to observe behaviours in other people's private lives and make them part of his own public persona). The guitar part was recorded on a bad twelve-string guitar that fed back in the studio, creating a drone sound, which Shel Talmy picked up on and heavily compressed, creating a sound that bore more than a little resemblance to a sitar: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "See My Friend"] If that had been released at the time, it would have made the Kinks into trend-setters. Instead it was left in the can for nearly three months, and in the meantime the Yardbirds released the similar-sounding "Heart Full of Soul", making the Kinks look like bandwagon-jumpers when their own record came out, and reinforcing a paranoid belief that Ray had started to develop that his competitors were stealing his ideas. The track taking so long to come out was down to repercussions from the group's American tour, which changed the course of their whole career in ways they could not possibly have predicted. This was still the era when the musicians' unions of the US and UK had a restrictive one-in, one-out policy for musicians, and you couldn't get a visa to play in the US without the musicians' union's agreement -- and the AFM were not very keen on the British invasion, which they saw as taking jobs away from their members. There are countless stories from this period of bands like the Moody Blues getting to the US only to find that the arrangements have fallen through and they can't perform. Around this time, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders were told they weren't notable enough to get permission to play more than one gig, even though they were at number one on the charts in the US at the time. So it took a great deal of effort to get the Kinks' first US tour arranged, and they had to make a good impression. Unfortunately, while the Beatles and Stones knew how to play the game and give irreverent, cheeky answers that still left the interviewers amused and satisfied, the Kinks were just flat-out confusing and rude: [Excerpt: The Kinks Interview with Clay Cole] The whole tour went badly. They were booked into unsuitable venues, and there were a series of events like the group being booked on the same bill as the Dave Clark Five, and both groups having in their contract that they would be the headliner. Promoters started to complain about them to their management and the unions, and Ray was behaving worse and worse. By the time the tour hit LA, Ray was being truly obnoxious. According to Larry Page he refused to play one TV show because there was a Black drummer on the same show. Page said that it was not about personal prejudice -- though it's hard to see how it could not be, at least in part -- but just picking something arbitrary to complain about to show he had the power to mess things up. While shooting a spot for the show Where The Action Is, Ray got into a physical fight with one of the other cast members over nothing. What Ray didn't realise was that the person in question was a representative for AFTRA, the screen performers' union, and was already unhappy because Dave had earlier refused to join the union. Their behaviour got reported up the chain. The day after the fight was supposed to be the highlight of the tour, but Ray was missing his wife. In the mid-sixties, the Beach Boys would put on a big Summer Spectacular at the Hollywood Bowl every year, and the Kinks were due to play it, on a bill which as well as the Beach Boys also featured the Byrds, the Righteous Brothers, Dino, Desi & Billy, and Sonny and Cher. But Ray said he wasn't going on unless Rasa was there. And he didn't tell Larry Page, who was there, that. Instead, he told a journalist at the Daily Mirror in London, and the first Page heard about it was when the journalist phoned him to confirm that Ray wouldn't be playing. Now, they had already been working to try to get Rasa there for the show, because Ray had been complaining for a while. But Rasa didn't have a passport. Not only that, but she was an immigrant and her family were from Lithuania, and the US State Department weren't exactly keen on people from the Eastern Bloc flying to the US. And it was a long flight. I don't know exactly how long a flight from London to LA took then, but it takes eleven and a half hours now, and it will have been around that length. Somehow, working a miracle, Larry Page co-ordinated with his co-managers Robert Wace and Grenville Collins back in London -- difficult in itself as Wace and Collins and Page and his business partner Eddie Kassner were by now in two different factions, because Ray had been manipulating them and playing them off against each other for months. But the three of them worked together and somehow got Rasa to LA in time for Ray to go on stage. Page waited around long enough to see that Ray had got on stage at the Hollywood Bowl, then flew back to London. He had had enough of Ray's nonsense, and didn't really see any need to be there anyway, because they had a road manager, their publisher, their agent, and plenty of support staff. He felt that he was only there to be someone for Ray Davies to annoy and take his frustrations out on. And indeed, once Page flew back to the UK, Ray calmed down, though how much of that was the presence of Rasa it's hard to say. Their road manager at the time though said "If Larry wasn't there, Ray couldn't make problems because there was nobody there to make them to. He couldn't make problems for me because I just ignored them. For example, in Hawaii, the shirts got stolen. Ray said, ‘No way am I going onstage without my shirt.' So I turned around and said to him, ‘Great, don't go on!' Of course, they went on.” They did miss the gig the next night in San Francisco, with more or less the same lineup as the Hollywood Bowl show -- they'd had problems with the promoter of that show at an earlier gig in Reno, and so Ray said they weren't going to play unless they got paid in cash upfront. When the promoter refused, the group just walked on stage, waved, and walked off. But other than that, the rest of the tour went OK. What they didn't realise until later was that they had made so many enemies on that tour that it would be impossible for them to return to the US for another four years. They weren't blacklisted, as such, they just didn't get the special treatment that was necessary to make it possible for them to visit there. From that point on they would still have a few hits in the US, but nothing like the sustained massive success they had in the UK in the same period. Ray felt abandoned by Page, and started to side more and more with Wace and Collins. Page though was still trying to promote Ray's songwriting. Some of this, like the album "Kinky Music" by the Larry Page Orchestra, released during the tour, was possibly not the kind of promotion that anyone wanted, though some of it has a certain kitsch charm: [Excerpt: The Larry Page Orchestra, "All Day And All Of The Night"] Incidentally, the guitarist on that album was Jimmy Page, who had previously played rhythm guitar on a few Kinks album tracks. But other stuff that Larry Page was doing would be genuinely helpful. For example, on the tour he had become friendly with Stone and Greene, the managers who we heard about in the Buffalo Springfield episode. At this point they were managing Sonny and Cher, and when they came over to the UK, Page took the opportunity to get Cher into the studio to cut a version of Ray's "I Go to Sleep": [Excerpt: Cher, "I Go to Sleep"] Most songwriters, when told that the biggest new star of the year was cutting a cover version of one of their tracks for her next album, would be delighted. Ray Davies, on the other hand, went to the session and confronted Page, screaming about how Page was stealing his ideas. And it was Page being marginalised that caused "See My Friend" to be delayed, because while they were in the US, Page had produced the group in Gold Star Studios, recording a version of Ray's song "Ring the Bells", and Page wanted that as the next single, but the group had a contract with Shel Talmy which said he would be their producer. They couldn't release anything Talmy hadn't produced, but Page, who had control over the group's publishing with his business partner Kassner, wouldn't let them release "See My Friend". Eventually, Talmy won out, and "See My Friend" became the group's next single. It made the top ten on the Record Retailer chart, the one that's now the official UK chart cited in most sources, but only number fifteen on the NME chart which more people paid attention to at the time, and only spent a few weeks on the charts. Ray spent the summer complaining in the music papers about how the track -- "the only one I've really liked", as he said at the time -- wasn't selling as much as it deserved, and also insulting Larry Page and boasting about his own abilities, saying he was a better singer than Andy Williams and Tony Bennett. The group sacked Larry Page as their co-manager, and legal battles between Page and Kassner on one side and Collins and Wace on the other would continue for years, tying up much of the group's money. Page went on to produce a new band he was managing, making records that sounded very like the Kinks' early hits: [Excerpt: The Troggs, "Wild Thing"] The Kinks, meanwhile, decided to go in a different direction for their new EP, Kwyet Kinks, an EP of mostly softer, folk- and country-inspired songs. The most interesting thing on Kwyet Kinks was "Well-Respected Man", which saw Ray's songwriting go in a completely different direction as he started to write gentle social satires with more complex lyrics, rather than the repetitive riff-based songs he'd been doing before. That track was released as a single in the US, which didn't have much of an EP market, and made the top twenty there, despite its use of a word that in England at the time had a double meaning -- either a cigarette or a younger boy at a public school who has to be the servant of an older boy -- but in America was only used as a slur for gay people: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Well Respected Man"] The group's next album, The Kink Kontroversy, was mostly written in a single week, and is another quickie knockoff album. It had the hit single "Til the End of the Day", another attempt at getting back to their old style of riffy rockers, and one which made the top ten. It also had a rerecorded version of "Ring the Bells", the song Larry Page had wanted to release as a single: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Ring the Bells"] I'm sure that when Ray Davies heard "Ruby Tuesday" a little over a year later he didn't feel any better about the possibility that people were stealing his ideas. The Kink Kontroversy was a transitional album for the group in many ways. It was the first album to prominently feature Nicky Hopkins, who would be an integral part of the band's sound for the next three years, and the last one to feature a session drummer (Clem Cattini, rather than Avory, played on most of the tracks). From this point on there would essentially be a six-person group of studio Kinks who would make the records -- the four Kinks themselves, Rasa Davies on backing vocals, and Nicky Hopkins on piano. At the end of 1965 the group were flailing, mired in lawsuits, and had gone from being the third biggest group in the country at the start of the year to maybe the tenth or twentieth by the end of it. Something had to change. And it did with the group's next single, which in both its sound and its satirical subject matter was very much a return to the style of "Well Respected Man". "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" was inspired by anger. Ray was never a particularly sociable person, and he was not the kind to do the rounds of all the fashionable clubs like the other pop stars, including his brother, would. But he did feel a need to make some kind of effort and would occasionally host parties at his home for members of the fashionable set. But Davies didn't keep up with fashion the way they did, and some of them would mock him for the way he dressed. At one such party he got into a fistfight with someone who was making fun of his slightly flared trousers, kicked all the guests out, and then went to a typewriter and banged out a lyric mocking the guest and everyone like him: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Dedicated Follower of Fashion"] The song wasn't popular with Ray's bandmates -- Dave thought it was too soft and wimpy, while Quaife got annoyed at the time Ray spent in the studio trying to make the opening guitar part sound a bit like a ukulele. But they couldn't argue with the results -- it went to number five on the charts, their biggest success since "Tired of Waiting for You" more than a year earlier, and more importantly in some ways it became part of the culture in a way their more recent singles hadn't. "Til The End of the Day" had made the top ten, but it wasn't a record that stuck in people's minds. But "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" was so popular that Ray soon got sick of people coming up to him in the street and singing "Oh yes he is!" at him. But then, Ray was getting sick of everything. In early 1966 he had a full-scale breakdown, brought on by the flu but really just down to pure exhaustion. Friends from this time say that Ray was an introverted control freak, always neurotic and trying to get control and success, but sabotaging it as soon as he attained it so that he didn't have to deal with the public. Just before a tour of Belgium, Rasa gave him an ultimatum -- either he sought medical help or she would leave him. He picked up their phone and slammed it into her face, blacking her eye -- the only time he was ever physically violent to her, she would later emphasise -- at which point it became imperative to get medical help for his mental condition. Ray stayed at home while the rest of the band went to Belgium -- they got in a substitute rhythm player, and Dave took the lead vocals -- though the tour didn't make them any new friends. Their co-manager Grenville Collins went along and with the tact and diplomacy for which the British upper classes are renowned the world over, would say things like “I understand every bloody word you're saying but I won't speak your filthy language. De Gaulle won't speak English, why should I speak French?” At home, Ray was doing worse and worse. When some pre-recorded footage of the Kinks singing "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" came on the TV, he unplugged it and stuck it in the oven. He said later "I was completely out of my mind. I went to sleep and I woke up a week later with a beard. I don't know what happened to me. I'd run into the West End with my money stuffed in my socks, I'd tried to punch my press agent, I was chased down Denmark Street by the police, hustled into a taxi by a psychiatrist and driven off somewhere. And I didn't know. I woke up and I said, ‘What's happening? When do we leave for Belgium?' And they said, ‘Ray it's all right. You had a collapse. Don't worry. You'll get better.'” He did get better, though for a long time he found himself unable to listen to any contemporary rock music other than Bob Dylan -- electric guitars made him think of the pop world that had made him ill -- and so he spent his time listening to classical and jazz records. He didn't want to be a pop star any more, and convinced himself he could quit the band if he went out on top by writing a number one single. And so he did: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Sunny Afternoon"] Or at least, I say it's a single he wrote, but it's here that I finally get to a point I've been dancing round since the beginning of the episode. The chorus line, "In the summertime", was Rasa's suggestion, and in one of the only two interviews I've ever come across with her, for Johnny Rogan's biography of Ray, she calls the song "the only one where I wrote some words". But there's evidence, including another interview with her I'll talk about in a bit, that suggests that's not quite the case. For years, I thought it was an interesting coincidence that Ray Davies' songwriting ability follows a curve that almost precisely matches that of his relationship with Rasa. At the start, he's clearly talented -- "You Really Got Me" is a great track -- but he's an unformed writer and most of his work is pretty poor stuff. Then he marries Rasa, and his writing starts to become more interesting. Rasa starts to regularly contribute in the studio, and he becomes one of the great songwriters of his generation. For a five-year period in the mid-to-late-sixties, the period when their marriage is at its strongest, Ray writes a string of classic songs that are the equal of any catalogue in popular music. Then around 1970 Rasa stops coming to the studio, and their marriage is under strain. The records become patchier -- still plenty of classic tracks, but a lot more misses. And then in 1973, she left him, and his songwriting fell off a cliff. If you look at a typical Ray Davies concert setlist from 2017, the last time he toured, he did twenty songs, of which two were from his new album, one was the Kinks' one-off hit "Come Dancing" from 1983, and every other song was from the period when he and Rasa were married. Now, for a long time I just thought that was interesting, but likely a coincidence. After all, most rock songwriters do their most important work in their twenties, divorces have a way of messing people's mental health up, musical fashions change… there are a myriad reasons why these things could be like that. But… the circumstantial evidence just kept piling up. Ray's paranoia about people stealing his ideas meant that he became a lot more paranoid and secretive in his songwriting process, and would often not tell his bandmates the titles of the songs, the lyrics, or the vocal melody, until after they'd recorded the backing tracks -- they would record the tracks knowing the chord changes and tempo, but not what the actual song was. Increasingly he would be dictating parts to Quaife and Nicky Hopkins in the studio from the piano, telling them exactly what to play. But while Pete Quaife thought that Ray was being dictatorial in the studio and resented it, he resented something else more. As late as 1999 he was complaining about, in his words, "the silly little bint from Bradford virtually running the damn studio", telling him what to do, and feeling unable to argue back even though he regarded her as "a jumped-up groupie". Dave, on the other hand, valued Rasa's musical intuition and felt that Ray was the same. And she was apparently actually more up-to-date with the music in the charts than any of the band -- while they were out on the road, she would stay at home and listen to the radio and make note of what was charting and why. All this started to seem like a lot of circumstantial evidence that Rasa was possibly far more involved in the creation of the music than she gets credit for -- and given that she was never credited for her vocal parts on any Kinks records, was it too unbelievable that she might have contributed to the songwriting without credit? But then I found the other interview with Rasa I'm aware of, a short sidebar piece I'll link in the liner notes, and I'm going to quote that here: "Rasa, however, would sometimes take a very active role during the writing of the songs, many of which were written in the family home, even on occasion adding to the lyrics. She suggested the words “In the summertime” to ‘Sunny Afternoon', it is claimed. She now says, “I would make suggestions for a backing melody, sing along while Ray was playing the song(s) on the piano; at times I would add a lyric line or word(s). It was rewarding for me and was a major part of our life.” That was enough for me to become convinced that Rasa was a proper collaborator with Ray. I laid all this out in a blog post, being very careful how I phrased what I thought -- that while Ray Davies was probably the principal author of the songs credited to him (and to be clear, that is definitely what I think -- there's a stylistic continuity throughout his work that makes it very clear that the same man did the bulk of the work on all of it), the songs were the work of a writing partnership. As I said in that post "But even if Rasa only contributed ten percent, that seems likely to me to have been the ten percent that pulled those songs up to greatness. Even if all she did was pull Ray back from his more excessive instincts, perhaps cause him to show a little more compassion in his more satirical works (and the thing that's most notable about his post-Rasa songwriting is how much less compassionate it is), suggest a melodic line should go up instead of down at the end of a verse, that kind of thing… the cumulative effect of those sorts of suggestions can be enormous." I was just laying out my opinion, not stating anything as a certainty, though I was morally sure that Rasa deserved at least that much credit. And then Rasa commented on the post, saying "Dear Andrew. Your article was so informative and certainly not mischaracterised. Thank you for the 'history' of my input working with Ray. As I said previously, that time was magical and joyous." I think that's as close a statement as we're likely to get that the Kinks' biggest hits were actually the result of the songwriting team of Davies and Davies, and not of Ray alone, since nobody seems interested at all in a woman who sang on -- and likely co-wrote -- some of the biggest hit records of the sixties. Rasa gets mentioned in two sentences in the band's Wikipedia page, and as far as I can tell has only been interviewed twice -- an extensive interview by Johnny Rogan for his biography of Ray, in which he sadly doesn't seem to have pressed her on her songwriting contributions, and the sidebar above. I will probably continue to refer to Ray writing songs in this and the next episode on the Kinks, because I don't know for sure who wrote what, and he is the one who is legally credited as the sole writer. But… just bear that in mind. And bear it in mind whenever I or anyone else talk about the wives and girlfriends of other rock stars, because I'm sure she's not the only one. "Sunny Afternoon" knocked "Paperback Writer" off the number one spot, but by the time it did, Pete Quaife was out of the band. He'd fallen out with the Davies brothers so badly that he'd insisted on travelling separately from them, and he'd been in a car crash that had hospitalised him for six weeks. They'd quickly hired a temporary replacement, John Dalton, who had previously played with The Mark Four, the group that had evolved into The Creation. They needed him to mime for a TV appearance pretty much straight away, so they asked him "can you play a descending D minor scale?" and when he said yes he was hired -- because the opening of "Sunny Afternoon" used a trick Ray was very fond of, of holding a chord in the guitars while the bass descends in a scale, only changing chord when the notes would clash too badly, and then changing to the closest possible chord: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Sunny Afternoon"] Around this time, the group also successfully renegotiated their contract with Pye Records, with the help of a new lawyer they had been advised to get in touch with -- Allen Klein. As well as helping renegotiate their contracts, Klein also passed on a demo of one of Ray's new songs to Herman's Hermits. “Dandy” was going to be on the Kinks' next album, but the Hermits released it as a single in the US and took it into the top ten: [Excerpt: Herman's Hermits, “Dandy”] In September, Pete Quaife formally quit the band -- he hadn't played with them in months after his accident -- and the next month the album Face To Face, recorded while Quaife was still in the group, was released. Face to Face was the group's first really solid album, and much of the album was in the same vein as "Sunny Afternoon" -- satirical songs that turned on the songwriter as much as on the people they were ostensibly about. It didn't do as well as the previous albums, but did still make the top twenty on the album chart. The group continued work, recording a new single, "Dead End Street", a song which is musically very similar to "Sunny Afternoon", but is lyrically astonishingly bleak, dealing with poverty and depression rather than more normal topics for a pop song. The group produced a promotional film for it, but the film was banned by the BBC as being in bad taste, as it showed the group as undertakers. But the single happened to be released two days after the broadcast of "Cathy Come Home", the seminal drama about homelessness, which suddenly brought homelessness onto the political agenda. While "Dead End Street" wasn't technically about homelessness, it was close enough that when the TV programme Panorama did a piece on the subject, they used "Dead End Street" to soundtrack it. The song made the top five, an astonishing achievement for something so dark: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Dead End Street"] But the track also showed the next possible breach in the Kinks' hitmaking team -- when it was originally recorded, Shel Talmy had produced it, and had a French horn playing, but after he left the session, the band brought in a trombone player to replace the French horn, and rerecorded it without him. They would continue working with him for a little while, recording some of the tracks for their next album, but by the time the next single came out, Talmy would be out of the picture for good. But Pete Quaife, on the other hand, was nowhere near as out of the group as he had seemed. While he'd quit the band in September, Ray persuaded him to rejoin the band four days before "Dead End Street" came out, and John Dalton was back to working in his day job as a builder, though we'll be hearing more from him. The group put out a single in Europe, "Mr. Pleasant", a return to the style of "Well Respected Man" and "Dedicated Follower of Fashion": [Excerpt: The Kinks, “Mr. Pleasant”] That was a big hit in the Netherlands, but it wasn't released in the UK. They were working on something rather different. Ray had had the idea of writing a song called "Liverpool Sunset", about Liverpool, and about the decline of the Merseybeat bands who had been at the top of the profession when the Kinks had been starting out. But then the Beatles had released "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane", and Ray hadn't wanted to release anything about Liverpool's geography and look like he had stolen from them, given his attitudes to plagiarism. He said later "I sensed that the Beatles weren't going to be around long. When they moved to London, and ended up in Knightsbridge or wherever, I was still in Muswell Hill. I was loyal to my origins. Maybe I felt when they left it was all over for Merseybeat.” So instead, he -- or he and Rasa -- came up with a song about London, and about loneliness, and about a couple, Terry and Julie -- Terry was named after his nephew Terry who lived in Australia, while Julie's name came from Julie Christie, as she was then starring in a film with a Terry, Terrence Stamp: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Waterloo Sunset"] It's interesting to look at the musical inspirations for the song. Many people at the time pointed out the song's similarity to "Winchester Cathedral" by the New Vaudeville Band, which had come out six months earlier with a similar melody and was also named after a place: [Excerpt: The New Vaudeville Band, "Winchester Cathedral"] And indeed Spike Milligan had parodied that song and replaced the lyrics with something more London-centric: [Excerpt: Spike Milligan, "Tower Bridge"] But it seems likely that Ray had taken inspiration from an older piece of music. We've talked before about Ferd Grofe in several episodes -- he was the one who orchestrated the original version of "Rhapsody in Blue", who wrote the piece of music that inspired Don Everly to write "Cathy's Clown", and who wrote the first music for the Novachord, the prototype synthesiser from the 1930s. As we saw earlier, Ray was listening to a lot of classical and jazz music rather than rock at this point, and one has to wonder if, at some point during his illness the previous year, he had come across Metropolis: A Blue Fantasy, which Grofe had written for Paul Whiteman's band in 1928, very much in the style of "Rhapsody in Blue", and this section, eight and a half minutes in, in particular: [Excerpt: Paul Whiteman, "Metropolis: A Blue Fantasy" ] "Waterloo Sunset" took three weeks to record. They started out, as usual, with a backing track recorded without the rest of the group knowing anything about the song they were recording -- though the group members did contribute some ideas to the arrangement, which was unusual by this point. Pete Quaife contributed to the bass part, while Dave Davies suggested the slapback echo on the guitar: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Waterloo Sunset, Instrumental Take 2"] Only weeks later did they add the vocals. Ray had an ear infection, so rather than use headphones he sang to a playback through a speaker, which meant he had to sing more gently, giving the vocal a different tone from his normal singing style: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Waterloo Sunset"] And in one of the few contributions Rasa made that has been generally acknowledged, she came up with the "Sha la la" vocals in the middle eight: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Waterloo Sunset"] And the idea of having the track fade out on cascading, round-like vocals: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Waterloo Sunset"] Once again the Kinks were at a turning point. A few weeks after "Waterloo Sunset" came out, the Monterey Pop Festival finally broke the Who in America -- a festival the Kinks were invited to play, but had to turn down because of their visa problems. It felt like the group were being passed by -- Ray has talked about how "Waterloo Sunset" would have been another good point for him to quit the group as he kept threatening to, or at least to stay home and just make the records, like Brian Wilson, while letting the band tour with Dave on lead vocals. He decided against it, though, as he would for decades to come. That attitude, of simultaneously wanting to be part of something and be a distanced, dispassionate observer of it, is what made "Waterloo Sunset" so special. As Ray has said, in words that seem almost to invoke the story of Moses: "it's a culmination of all my desires and hopes – it's a song about people going to a better world, but somehow I stayed where I was and became the observer in the song rather than the person who is proactive . . . I did not cross the river. They did and had a good life apparently." Ray stayed with the group, and we'll be picking up on what he and they did next in about a year's time. "Waterloo Sunset" went to number two on the charts, and has since become the most beloved song in the Kinks' whole catalogue. It's been called "the most beautiful song in the English language", and "the most beautiful song of the rock 'n' roll era", though Ray Davies, ever self-critical when he's not being self-aggrandising, thinks it could be improved upon. But most of the rest of us disagree. As the song itself says, "Waterloo Sunset's fine".

One of the greatest rock stars of all time was laid to rest on this day in 1970 - Jimi Hendrix. On today's episode of This Day Rocks we hear from Pete Sears who recalls a conversation he had with his good friend, Jimi Hendrix Experience drummer, Mitch Mitchell, just days after Jimi had died.

As broadcast September 19, 2022 with plenty of new vibes for the time off.  Tonight we mark 52 years yesterday since Jimi Hendrix passed away.  An artist that rose and fell in seemingly the blink of an eye, few artists can hold the torch to his four years in the music business, and his debut is still one of the most earth-shatteringly successful that the music world has ever seen.  After that, there is a bevvy of new albums ready to drop in the coming weeks, with this Friday being a huge day of releases, but last Friday was no slouch.  New albums to feature from The Beths, Djo, Danielle Ponder, and Whitney to highlight the first hour along with black midi coming to Seoul for the first time on December 2 to close the first half.  New pop out this weekend featured some serious slaps, chief amongst them BLACKPINK's atom smasher of a new album Born Pink that made history over the weekend on Spotify.  We finished in part four with new and recent Korean indie cuts, mostly standalones, with our tune of the week being from SOLE's incredible new album imagine club, which also just dropped Friday amongst the ruckus.#feelthegravityTracklist (st:rt)Part I (00:00)Jimi Hendrix – I Don't Live TodayThe Beths – When You Know You KnowDry Cleaning – Gary AshbyJAWNY – adiosWhitney – LOST CONTROLAlex Siegel – Fairweather Friends Part II (30:33)Weyes Blood – It's Not Just Me, It's EverybodyDjo – End of BeginningNick Hakim – VertigoDEHD – EggshellsDanielle Ponder – Someone Like YouBlackmidi – Sugar/TzuBlackmidi – Dangerous Liaisons Part III (62:31)BLACKPINK – Shut DownJessie Reyez – ONLY ONEWizkid – Bad to MeFeid – ProhibidoxNoah Cyrus – I Just Want A LoverCharlie Puth – I Don't Think That I Like HerRina Sawayama – Hurricanes Part IV (92:34)Choi Yuree – ForestYU YEON WOO – diversSOSEOM – The Regret of YesterdayWitches – Whenever I Fall AsleepSOLE – ore oresucozy feat subin – EmptyLevan – You're Beautiful 

The focus here, after a classic two-part episode about Hendrix in the Fall of 2019, is the game-changing album, "Are You Experienced?" The Experience's debut set fire to all conventions except the use of instruments and electricity to create sound!!! Jimi's brilliance is underlined by the perfect sonic bed by Noel & Mitch for the exercising of the passions exhibited in those grooves!The social conditions of the times are discussed as are their impact on the final contents of both the U.S. and U.K. versions of the album.Please check out our sponsors:Boldfoot Socks   https://boldfoot.comCrooked Eye Brewery   https://crookedeyebrewery.com/Don't forget that you can find all of our episodes, on-demand, for free right here on our web site: https://imbalancedhistory.com/And check our blog about exciting premier events for Danny Garcia's new film, "Nightclubbing!"     

In this episode, John caught up with his old friend Chris Layton and talked about his early drumming influences, moving from his home town of Corpus Christi to Austin, TX at age 20. Becoming entrenched in Austin's music scene, which led to meeting legendary guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan and forming, “Double Trouble.” Chris talked about developing his style for playing his signature Texas Shuffle, his critically acclaimed group “Arc Angels” and his long association with guitar great, Kenny Wayne Shepherd. John and Chris also remembered their mutual friend, the late great Mitch Mitchell.

Episode one hundred and forty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Hey Joe" by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and is the longest episode to date, at over two hours. Patreon backers also have a twenty-two-minute bonus episode available, on "Making Time" by The Creation. 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, I've put together a Mixcloud mix containing all the music excerpted in this episode. For information on the Byrds, I relied mostly on Timeless Flight Revisited by Johnny Rogan, with some information from Chris Hillman's autobiography. Information on Arthur Lee and Love came from Forever Changes: Arthur Lee and the Book of Love by John Einarson, and Arthur Lee: Alone Again Or by Barney Hoskyns. Information on Gary Usher's work with the Surfaris and the Sons of Adam came from The California Sound by Stephen McParland, which can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks Information on Jimi Hendrix came from Room Full of Mirrors by Charles R. Cross, Crosstown Traffic by Charles Shaar Murray, and Wild Thing by Philip Norman. Information on the history of "Hey Joe" itself came from all these sources plus Hey Joe: The Unauthorised Biography of a Rock Classic by Marc Shapiro, though note that most of that book is about post-1967 cover versions. Most of the pre-Experience session work by Jimi Hendrix I excerpt in this episode is on this box set of alternate takes and live recordings. And "Hey Joe" can be found on Are You Experienced? Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Just a quick note before we start – this episode deals with a song whose basic subject is a man murdering a woman, and that song also contains references to guns, and in some versions to cocaine use. Some versions excerpted also contain misogynistic slurs. If those things are likely to upset you, please skip this episode, as the whole episode focusses on that song. I would hope it goes without saying that I don't approve of misogyny, intimate partner violence, or murder, and my discussing a song does not mean I condone acts depicted in its lyrics, and the episode itself deals with the writing and recording of the song rather than its subject matter, but it would be impossible to talk about the record without excerpting the song. The normalisation of violence against women in rock music lyrics is a subject I will come back to, but did not have room for in what is already a very long episode. Anyway, on with the show. Let's talk about the folk process, shall we? We've talked before, like in the episodes on "Stagger Lee" and "Ida Red", about how there are some songs that aren't really individual songs in themselves, but are instead collections of related songs that might happen to share a name, or a title, or a story, or a melody, but which might be different in other ways. There are probably more songs that are like this than songs that aren't, and it doesn't just apply to folk songs, although that's where we see it most notably. You only have to look at the way a song like "Hound Dog" changed from the Willie Mae Thornton version to the version by Elvis, which only shared a handful of words with the original. Songs change, and recombine, and everyone who sings them brings something different to them, until they change in ways that nobody could have predicted, like a game of telephone. But there usually remains a core, an archetypal story or idea which remains constant no matter how much the song changes. Like Stagger Lee shooting Billy in a bar over a hat, or Frankie killing her man -- sometimes the man is Al, sometimes he's Johnny, but he always done her wrong. And one of those stories is about a man who shoots his cheating woman with a forty-four, and tries to escape -- sometimes to a town called Jericho, and sometimes to Juarez, Mexico. The first version of this song we have a recording of is by Clarence Ashley, in 1929, a recording of an older folk song that was called, in his version, "Little Sadie": [Excerpt: Clarence Ashley, "Little Sadie"] At some point, somebody seems to have noticed that that song has a slight melodic similarity to another family of songs, the family known as "Cocaine Blues" or "Take a Whiff on Me", which was popular around the same time: [Excerpt: The Memphis Jug Band, "Cocaine Habit Blues"] And so the two songs became combined, and the protagonist of "Little Sadie" now had a reason to kill his woman -- a reason other than her cheating, that is. He had taken a shot of cocaine before shooting her. The first recording of this version, under the name "Cocaine Blues" seems to have been a Western Swing version by W. A. Nichol's Western Aces: [Excerpt: W.A. Nichol's Western Aces, "Cocaine Blues"] Woody Guthrie recorded a version around the same time -- I've seen different dates and so don't know for sure if it was before or after Nichol's version -- and his version had himself credited as songwriter, and included this last verse which doesn't seem to appear on any earlier recordings of the song: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, "Cocaine Blues"] That doesn't appear on many later recordings either, but it did clearly influence yet another song -- Mose Allison's classic jazz number "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Mose Allison, "Parchman Farm"] The most famous recordings of the song, though, were by Johnny Cash, who recorded it as both "Cocaine Blues" and as "Transfusion Blues". In Cash's version of the song, the murderer gets sentenced to "ninety-nine years in the Folsom pen", so it made sense that Cash would perform that on his most famous album, the live album of his January 1968 concerts at Folsom Prison, which revitalised his career after several years of limited success: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "Cocaine Blues (live at Folsom Prison)"] While that was Cash's first live recording at a prison, though, it wasn't the first show he played at a prison -- ever since the success of his single "Folsom Prison Blues" he'd been something of a hero to prisoners, and he had been doing shows in prisons for eleven years by the time of that recording. And on one of those shows he had as his support act a man named Billy Roberts, who performed his own song which followed the same broad outlines as "Cocaine Blues" -- a man with a forty-four who goes out to shoot his woman and then escapes to Mexico. Roberts was an obscure folk singer, who never had much success, but who was good with people. He'd been part of the Greenwich Village folk scene in the 1950s, and at a gig at Gerde's Folk City he'd met a woman named Niela Miller, an aspiring songwriter, and had struck up a relationship with her. Miller only ever wrote one song that got recorded by anyone else, a song called "Mean World Blues" that was recorded by Dave Van Ronk: [Excerpt: Dave Van Ronk, "Mean World Blues"] Now, that's an original song, but it does bear a certain melodic resemblance to another old folk song, one known as "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" or "In the Pines", or sometimes "Black Girl": [Excerpt: Lead Belly, "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?"] Miller was clearly familiar with the tradition from which "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" comes -- it's a type of folk song where someone asks a question and then someone else answers it, and this repeats, building up a story. This is a very old folk song format, and you hear it for example in "Lord Randall", the song on which Bob Dylan based "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall": [Excerpt: Ewan MacColl, "Lord Randall"] I say she was clearly familiar with it, because the other song she wrote that anyone's heard was based very much around that idea. "Baby Please Don't Go To Town" is a question-and-answer song in precisely that form, but with an unusual chord progression for a folk song. You may remember back in the episode on "Eight Miles High" I talked about the circle of fifths -- a chord progression which either increases or decreases by a fifth for every chord, so it might go C-G-D-A-E [demonstrates] That's a common progression in pop and jazz, but not really so much in folk, but it's the one that Miller had used for "Baby, Please Don't Go to Town", and she'd taught Roberts that song, which she only recorded much later: [Excerpt: Niela Miller, "Baby, Please Don't Go To Town"] After Roberts and Miller broke up, Miller kept playing that melody, but he changed the lyrics. The lyrics he added had several influences. There was that question-and-answer folk-song format, there's the story of "Cocaine Blues" with its protagonist getting a forty-four to shoot his woman down before heading to Mexico, and there's also a country hit from 1953. "Hey, Joe!" was originally recorded by Carl Smith, one of the most popular country singers of the early fifties: [Excerpt: Carl Smith, "Hey Joe!"] That was written by Boudleaux Bryant, a few years before the songs he co-wrote for the Everly Brothers, and became a country number one, staying at the top for eight weeks. It didn't make the pop chart, but a pop cover version of it by Frankie Laine made the top ten in the US: [Excerpt: Frankie Laine, "Hey Joe"] Laine's record did even better in the UK, where it made number one, at a point where Laine was the biggest star in music in Britain -- at the time the UK charts only had a top twelve, and at one point four of the singles in the top twelve were by Laine, including that one. There was also an answer record by Kitty Wells which made the country top ten later that year: [Excerpt: Kitty Wells, "Hey Joe"] Oddly, despite it being a very big hit, that "Hey Joe" had almost no further cover versions for twenty years, though it did become part of the Searchers' setlist, and was included on their Live at the Star Club album in 1963, in an arrangement that owed a lot to "What'd I Say": [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Hey Joe"] But that song was clearly on Roberts' mind when, as so many American folk musicians did, he travelled to the UK in the late fifties and became briefly involved in the burgeoning UK folk movement. In particular, he spent some time with a twelve-string guitar player from Edinburgh called Len Partridge, who was also a mentor to Bert Jansch, and who was apparently an extraordinary musician, though I know of no recordings of his work. Partridge helped Roberts finish up the song, though Partridge is about the only person in this story who *didn't* claim a writing credit for it at one time or another, saying that he just helped Roberts out and that Roberts deserved all the credit. The first known recording of the completed song is from 1962, a few years after Roberts had returned to the US, though it didn't surface until decades later: [Excerpt: Billy Roberts, "Hey Joe"] Roberts was performing this song regularly on the folk circuit, and around the time of that recording he also finally got round to registering the copyright, several years after it was written. When Miller heard the song, she was furious, and she later said "Imagine my surprise when I heard Hey Joe by Billy Roberts. There was my tune, my chord progression, my question/answer format. He dropped the bridge that was in my song and changed it enough so that the copyright did not protect me from his plagiarism... I decided not to go through with all the complications of dealing with him. He never contacted me about it or gave me any credit. He knows he committed a morally reprehensible act. He never was man enough to make amends and apologize to me, or to give credit for the inspiration. Dealing with all that was also why I made the decision not to become a professional songwriter. It left a bad taste in my mouth.” Pete Seeger, a friend of Miller's, was outraged by the injustice and offered to testify on her behalf should she decide to take Roberts to court, but she never did. Some time around this point, Roberts also played on that prison bill with Johnny Cash, and what happened next is hard to pin down. I've read several different versions of the story, which change the date and which prison this was in, and none of the details in any story hang together properly -- everything introduces weird inconsistencies and things which just make no sense at all. Something like this basic outline of the story seems to have happened, but the outline itself is weird, and we'll probably never know the truth. Roberts played his set, and one of the songs he played was "Hey Joe", and at some point he got talking to one of the prisoners in the audience, Dino Valenti. We've met Valenti before, in the episode on "Mr. Tambourine Man" -- he was a singer/songwriter himself, and would later be the lead singer of Quicksilver Messenger Service, but he's probably best known for having written "Get Together": [Excerpt: Dino Valenti, "Get Together"] As we heard in the "Mr. Tambourine Man" episode, Valenti actually sold off his rights to that song to pay for his bail at one point, but he was in and out of prison several times because of drug busts. At this point, or so the story goes, he was eligible for parole, but he needed to prove he had a possible income when he got out, and one way he wanted to do that was to show that he had written a song that could be a hit he could make money off, but he didn't have such a song. He talked about his predicament with Roberts, who agreed to let him claim to have written "Hey Joe" so he could get out of prison. He did make that claim, and when he got out of prison he continued making the claim, and registered the copyright to "Hey Joe" in his own name -- even though Roberts had already registered it -- and signed a publishing deal for it with Third Story Music, a company owned by Herb Cohen, the future manager of the Mothers of Invention, and Cohen's brother Mutt. Valenti was a popular face on the folk scene, and he played "his" song to many people, but two in particular would influence the way the song would develop, both of them people we've seen relatively recently in episodes of the podcast. One of them, Vince Martin, we'll come back to later, but the other was David Crosby, and so let's talk about him and the Byrds a bit more. Crosby and Valenti had been friends long before the Byrds formed, and indeed we heard in the "Mr. Tambourine Man" episode how the group had named themselves after Valenti's song "Birdses": [Excerpt: Dino Valenti, "Birdses"] And Crosby *loved* "Hey Joe", which he believed was another of Valenti's songs. He'd perform it every chance he got, playing it solo on guitar in an arrangement that other people have compared to Mose Allison. He'd tried to get it on the first two Byrds albums, but had been turned down, mostly because of their manager and uncredited co-producer Jim Dickson, who had strong opinions about it, saying later "Some of the songs that David would bring in from the outside were perfectly valid songs for other people, but did not seem to be compatible with the Byrds' myth. And he may not have liked the Byrds' myth. He fought for 'Hey Joe' and he did it. As long as I could say 'No!' I did, and when I couldn't any more they did it. You had to give him something somewhere. I just wish it was something else... 'Hey Joe' I was bitterly opposed to. A song about a guy who murders his girlfriend in a jealous rage and is on the way to Mexico with a gun in his hand. It was not what I saw as a Byrds song." Indeed, Dickson was so opposed to the song that he would later say “One of the reasons David engineered my getting thrown out was because I would not let Hey Joe be on the Turn! Turn! Turn! album.” Dickson was, though, still working with the band when they got round to recording it. That came during the recording of their Fifth Dimension album, the album which included "Eight Miles High". That album was mostly recorded after the departure of Gene Clark, which was where we left the group at the end of the "Eight Miles High" episode, and the loss of their main songwriter meant that they were struggling for material -- doubly so since they also decided they were going to move away from Dylan covers. This meant that they had to rely on original material from the group's less commercial songwriters, and on a few folk songs, mostly learned from Pete Seeger The album ended up with only eleven songs on it, compared to the twelve that was normal for American albums at that time, and the singles on it after "Eight Miles High" weren't particularly promising as to the group's ability to come up with commercial material. The next single, "5D", a song by Roger McGuinn about the fifth dimension, was a waltz-time song that both Crosby and Chris Hillman were enthused by. It featured organ by Van Dyke Parks, and McGuinn said of the organ part "When he came into the studio I told him to think Bach. He was already thinking Bach before that anyway.": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "5D"] While the group liked it, though, that didn't make the top forty. The next single did, just about -- a song that McGuinn had written as an attempt at communicating with alien life. He hoped that it would be played on the radio, and that the radio waves would eventually reach aliens, who would hear it and respond: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mr. Spaceman"] The "Fifth Dimension" album did significantly worse, both critically and commercially, than their previous albums, and the group would soon drop Allen Stanton, the producer, in favour of Gary Usher, Brian Wilson's old songwriting partner. But the desperation for material meant that the group agreed to record the song which they still thought at that time had been written by Crosby's friend, though nobody other than Crosby was happy with it, and even Crosby later said "It was a mistake. I shouldn't have done it. Everybody makes mistakes." McGuinn said later "The reason Crosby did lead on 'Hey Joe' was because it was *his* song. He didn't write it but he was responsible for finding it. He'd wanted to do it for years but we would never let him.": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Hey Joe"] Of course, that arrangement is very far from the Mose Allison style version Crosby had been doing previously. And the reason for that can be found in the full version of that McGuinn quote, because the full version continues "He'd wanted to do it for years but we would never let him. Then both Love and The Leaves had a minor hit with it and David got so angry that we had to let him do it. His version wasn't that hot because he wasn't a strong lead vocalist." The arrangement we just heard was the arrangement that by this point almost every group on the Sunset Strip scene was playing. And the reason for that was because of another friend of Crosby's, someone who had been a roadie for the Byrds -- Bryan MacLean. MacLean and Crosby had been very close because they were both from very similar backgrounds -- they were both Hollywood brats with huge egos. MacLean later said "Crosby and I got on perfectly. I didn't understand what everybody was complaining about, because he was just like me!" MacLean was, if anything, from an even more privileged background than Crosby. His father was an architect who'd designed houses for Elizabeth Taylor and Dean Martin, his neighbour when growing up was Frederick Loewe, the composer of My Fair Lady. He learned to swim in Elizabeth Taylor's private pool, and his first girlfriend was Liza Minelli. Another early girlfriend was Jackie DeShannon, the singer-songwriter who did the original version of "Needles and Pins", who he was introduced to by Sharon Sheeley, whose name you will remember from many previous episodes. MacLean had wanted to be an artist until his late teens, when he walked into a shop in Westwood which sometimes sold his paintings, the Sandal Shop, and heard some people singing folk songs there. He decided he wanted to be a folk singer, and soon started performing at the Balladeer, a club which would later be renamed the Troubadour, playing songs like Robert Johnson's "Cross Roads Blues", which had recently become a staple of the folk repertoire after John Hammond put out the King of the Delta Blues Singers album: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Cross Roads Blues"] Reading interviews with people who knew MacLean at the time, the same phrase keeps coming up. John Kay, later the lead singer of Steppenwolf, said "There was a young kid, Bryan MacLean, kind of cocky but nonetheless a nice kid, who hung around Crosby and McGuinn" while Chris Hillman said "He was a pretty good kid but a wee bit cocky." He was a fan of the various musicians who later formed the Byrds, and was also an admirer of a young guitarist on the scene named Ryland Cooder, and of a blues singer on the scene named Taj Mahal. He apparently was briefly in a band with Taj Mahal, called Summer's Children, who as far as I can tell had no connection to the duo that Curt Boettcher later formed of the same name, before Taj Mahal and Cooder formed The Rising Sons, a multi-racial blues band who were for a while the main rivals to the Byrds on the scene. MacLean, though, firmly hitched himself to the Byrds, and particularly to Crosby. He became a roadie on their first tour, and Hillman said "He was a hard-working guy on our behalf. As I recall, he pretty much answered to Crosby and was David's assistant, to put it diplomatically – more like his gofer, in fact." But MacLean wasn't cut out for the hard work that being a roadie required, and after being the Byrds' roadie for about thirty shows, he started making mistakes, and when they went off on their UK tour they decided not to keep employing him. He was heartbroken, but got back into trying his own musical career. He auditioned for the Monkees, unsuccessfully, but shortly after that -- some sources say even the same day as the audition, though that seems a little too neat -- he went to Ben Frank's -- the LA hangout that had actually been namechecked in the open call for Monkees auditions, which said they wanted "Ben Franks types", and there he met Arthur Lee and Johnny Echols. Echols would later remember "He was this gadfly kind of character who knew everybody and was flitting from table to table. He wore striped pants and a scarf, and he had this long, strawberry hair. All the girls loved him. For whatever reason, he came and sat at our table. Of course, Arthur and I were the only two black people there at the time." Lee and Echols were both Black musicians who had been born in Memphis. Lee's birth father, Chester Taylor, had been a cornet player with Jimmie Lunceford, whose Delta Rhythm Boys had had a hit with "The Honeydripper", as we heard way back in the episode on "Rocket '88": [Excerpt: Jimmie Lunceford and the Delta Rhythm Boys, "The Honeydripper"] However, Taylor soon split from Lee's mother, a schoolteacher, and she married Clinton Lee, a stonemason, who doted on his adopted son, and they moved to California. They lived in a relatively prosperous area of LA, a neighbourhood that was almost all white, with a few Asian families, though the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson lived nearby. A year or so after Arthur and his mother moved to LA, so did the Echols family, who had known them in Memphis, and they happened to move only a couple of streets away. Eight year old Arthur Lee reconnected with seven-year-old Johnny Echols, and the two became close friends from that point on. Arthur Lee first started out playing music when his parents were talked into buying him an accordion by a salesman who would go around with a donkey, give kids free donkey rides, and give the parents a sales pitch while they were riding the donkey, He soon gave up on the accordion and persuaded his parents to buy him an organ instead -- he was a spoiled child, by all accounts, with a TV in his bedroom, which was almost unheard of in the late fifties. Johnny Echols had a similar experience which led to his parents buying him a guitar, and the two were growing up in a musical environment generally. They attended Dorsey High School at the same time as both Billy Preston and Mike Love of the Beach Boys, and Ella Fitzgerald and her then-husband, the great jazz bass player Ray Brown, lived in the same apartment building as the Echols family for a while. Ornette Coleman, the free-jazz saxophone player, lived next door to Echols, and Adolphus Jacobs, the guitarist with the Coasters, gave him guitar lessons. Arthur Lee also knew Johnny Otis, who ran a pigeon-breeding club for local children which Arthur would attend. Echols was the one who first suggested that he and Arthur should form a band, and they put together a group to play at a school talent show, performing "Last Night", the instrumental that had been a hit for the Mar-Keys on Stax records: [Excerpt: The Mar-Keys, "Last Night"] They soon became a regular group, naming themselves Arthur Lee and the LAGs -- the LA Group, in imitation of Booker T and the MGs – the Memphis Group. At some point around this time, Lee decided to switch from playing organ to playing guitar. He would say later that this was inspired by seeing Johnny "Guitar" Watson get out of a gold Cadillac, wearing a gold suit, and with gold teeth in his mouth. The LAGs started playing as support acts and backing bands for any blues and soul acts that came through LA, performing with Big Mama Thornton, Johnny Otis, the O'Jays, and more. Arthur and Johnny were both still under-age, and they would pencil in fake moustaches to play the clubs so they'd appear older. In the fifties and early sixties, there were a number of great electric guitar players playing blues on the West Coast -- Johnny "Guitar" Watson, T-Bone Walker, Guitar Slim, and others -- and they would compete with each other not only to play well, but to put on a show, and so there was a whole bag of stage tricks that West Coast R&B guitarists picked up, and Echols learned all of them -- playing his guitar behind his back, playing his guitar with his teeth, playing with his guitar between his legs. As well as playing their own shows, the LAGs also played gigs under other names -- they had a corrupt agent who would book them under the name of whatever Black group had a hit at the time, in the belief that almost nobody knew what popular groups looked like anyway, so they would go out and perform as the Drifters or the Coasters or half a dozen other bands. But Arthur Lee in particular wanted to have success in his own right. He would later say "When I was a little boy I would listen to Nat 'King' Cole and I would look at that purple Capitol Records logo. I wanted to be on Capitol, that was my goal. Later on I used to walk from Dorsey High School all the way up to the Capitol building in Hollywood -- did that many times. I was determined to get a record deal with Capitol, and I did, without the help of a fancy manager or anyone else. I talked to Adam Ross and Jack Levy at Ardmore-Beechwood. I talked to Kim Fowley, and then I talked to Capitol". The record that the LAGs released, though, was not very good, a track called "Rumble-Still-Skins": [Excerpt: The LAGs, "Rumble-Still-Skins"] Lee later said "I was young and very inexperienced and I was testing the record company. I figured if I gave them my worst stuff and they ripped me off I wouldn't get hurt. But it didn't work, and after that I started giving my best, and I've been doing that ever since." The LAGs were dropped by Capitol after one single, and for the next little while Arthur and Johnny did work for smaller labels, usually labels owned by Bob Keane, with Arthur writing and producing and Johnny playing guitar -- though Echols has said more recently that a lot of the songs that were credited to Arthur as sole writer were actually joint compositions. Most of these records were attempts at copying the style of other people. There was "I Been Trying", a Phil Spector soundalike released by Little Ray: [Excerpt: Little Ray, "I Been Trying"] And there were a few attempts at sounding like Curtis Mayfield, like "Slow Jerk" by Ronnie and the Pomona Casuals: [Excerpt: Ronnie and the Pomona Casuals, "Slow Jerk"] and "My Diary" by Rosa Lee Brooks: [Excerpt: Rosa Lee Brooks, "My Diary"] Echols was also playing with a lot of other people, and one of the musicians he was playing with, his old school friend Billy Preston, told him about a recent European tour he'd been on with Little Richard, and the band from Liverpool he'd befriended while he was there who idolised Richard, so when the Beatles hit America, Arthur and Johnny had some small amount of context for them. They soon broke up the LAGs and formed another group, the American Four, with two white musicians, bass player John Fleckenstein and drummer Don Costa. Lee had them wear wigs so they seemed like they had longer hair, and started dressing more eccentrically -- he would soon become known for wearing glasses with one blue lens and one red one, and, as he put it "wearing forty pounds of beads, two coats, three shirts, and wearing two pairs of shoes on one foot". As well as the Beatles, the American Four were inspired by the other British Invasion bands -- Arthur was in the audience for the TAMI show, and quite impressed by Mick Jagger -- and also by the Valentinos, Bobby Womack's group. They tried to get signed to SAR Records, the label owned by Sam Cooke for which the Valentinos recorded, but SAR weren't interested, and they ended up recording for Bob Keane's Del-Fi records, where they cut "Luci Baines", a "Twist and Shout" knock-off with lyrics referencing the daughter of new US President Lyndon Johnson: [Excerpt: The American Four, "Luci Baines"] But that didn't take off any more than the earlier records had. Another American Four track, "Stay Away", was recorded but went unreleased until 2006: [Excerpt: Arthur Lee and the American Four, "Stay Away"] Soon the American Four were changing their sound and name again. This time it was because of two bands who were becoming successful on the Sunset Strip. One was the Byrds, who to Lee's mind were making music like the stuff he heard in his head, and the other was their rivals the Rising Sons, the blues band we mentioned earlier with Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder. Lee was very impressed by them as an multiracial band making aggressive, loud, guitar music, though he would always make the point when talking about them that they were a blues band, not a rock band, and *he* had the first multiracial rock band. Whatever they were like live though, in their recordings, produced by the Byrds' first producer Terry Melcher, the Rising Sons often had the same garage band folk-punk sound that Lee and Echols would soon make their own: [Excerpt: The Rising Sons, "Take a Giant Step"] But while the Rising Sons recorded a full album's worth of material, only one single was released before they split up, and so the way was clear for Lee and Echols' band, now renamed once again to The Grass Roots, to become the Byrds' new challengers. Lee later said "I named the group The Grass Roots behind a trip, or an album I heard that Malcolm X did, where he said 'the grass roots of the people are out in the street doing something about their problems instead of sitting around talking about it'". After seeing the Rolling Stones and the Byrds live, Lee wanted to get up front and move like Mick Jagger, and not be hindered by playing a guitar he wasn't especially good at -- both the Stones and the Byrds had two guitarists and a frontman who just sang and played hand percussion, and these were the models that Lee was following for the group. He also thought it would be a good idea commercially to get a good-looking white boy up front. So the group got in another guitarist, a white pretty boy who Lee soon fell out with and gave the nickname "Bummer Bob" because he was unpleasant to be around. Those of you who know exactly why Bobby Beausoleil later became famous will probably agree that this was a more than reasonable nickname to give him (and those of you who don't, I'll be dealing with him when we get to 1969). So when Bryan MacLean introduced himself to Lee and Echols, and they found out that not only was he also a good-looking white guitarist, but he was also friends with the entire circle of hipsters who'd been going to Byrds gigs, people like Vito and Franzoni, and he could get a massive crowd of them to come along to gigs for any band he was in and make them the talk of the Sunset Strip scene, he was soon in the Grass Roots, and Bummer Bob was out. The Grass Roots soon had to change their name again, though. In 1965, Jan and Dean recorded their "Folk and Roll" album, which featured "The Universal Coward"... Which I am not going to excerpt again. I only put that pause in to terrify Tilt, who edits these podcasts, and has very strong opinions about that song. But P. F. Sloan and Steve Barri, the songwriters who also performed as the Fantastic Baggies, had come up with a song for that album called "Where Where You When I Needed You?": [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Where Were You When I Needed You?"] Sloan and Barri decided to cut their own version of that song under a fake band name, and then put together a group of other musicians to tour as that band. They just needed a name, and Lou Adler, the head of Dunhill Records, suggested they call themselves The Grass Roots, and so that's what they did: [Excerpt: The Grass Roots, "Where Were You When I Needed You?"] Echols would later claim that this was deliberate malice on Adler's part -- that Adler had come in to a Grass Roots show drunk, and pretended to be interested in signing them to a contract, mostly to show off to a woman he'd brought with him. Echols and MacLean had spoken to him, not known who he was, and he'd felt disrespected, and Echols claims that he suggested the name to get back at them, and also to capitalise on their local success. The new Grass Roots soon started having hits, and so the old band had to find another name, which they got as a joking reference to a day job Lee had had at one point -- he'd apparently worked in a specialist bra shop, Luv Brassieres, which the rest of the band found hilarious. The Grass Roots became Love. While Arthur Lee was the group's lead singer, Bryan MacLean would often sing harmonies, and would get a song or two to sing live himself. And very early in the group's career, when they were playing a club called Bido Lito's, he started making his big lead spot a version of "Hey Joe", which he'd learned from his old friend David Crosby, and which soon became the highlight of the group's set. Their version was sped up, and included the riff which the Searchers had popularised in their cover version of  "Needles and Pins", the song originally recorded by MacLean's old girlfriend Jackie DeShannon: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Needles and Pins"] That riff is a very simple one to play, and variants of it became very, very, common among the LA bands, most notably on the Byrds' "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better"] The riff was so ubiquitous in the LA scene that in the late eighties Frank Zappa would still cite it as one of his main memories of the scene. I'm going to quote from his autobiography, where he's talking about the differences between the LA scene he was part of and the San Francisco scene he had no time for: "The Byrds were the be-all and end-all of Los Angeles rock then. They were 'It' -- and then a group called Love was 'It.' There were a few 'psychedelic' groups that never really got to be 'It,' but they could still find work and get record deals, including the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, Sky Saxon and the Seeds, and the Leaves (noted for their cover version of "Hey, Joe"). When we first went to San Francisco, in the early days of the Family Dog, it seemed that everybody was wearing the same costume, a mixture of Barbary Coast and Old West -- guys with handlebar mustaches, girls in big bustle dresses with feathers in their hair, etc. By contrast, the L.A. costumery was more random and outlandish. Musically, the northern bands had a little more country style. In L.A., it was folk-rock to death. Everything had that" [and here Zappa uses the adjectival form of a four-letter word beginning with 'f' that the main podcast providers don't like you saying on non-adult-rated shows] "D chord down at the bottom of the neck where you wiggle your finger around -- like 'Needles and Pins.'" The reason Zappa describes it that way, and the reason it became so popular, is that if you play that riff in D, the chords are D, Dsus2, and Dsus4 which means you literally only wiggle one finger on your left hand: [demonstrates] And so you get that on just a ton of records from that period, though Love, the Byrds, and the Searchers all actually play the riff on A rather than D: [demonstrates] So that riff became the Big Thing in LA after the Byrds popularised the Searchers sound there, and Love added it to their arrangement of "Hey Joe". In January 1966, the group would record their arrangement of it for their first album, which would come out in March: [Excerpt: Love, "Hey Joe"] But that wouldn't be the first recording of the song, or of Love's arrangement of it – although other than the Byrds' version, it would be the only one to come out of LA with the original Billy Roberts lyrics. Love's performances of the song at Bido Lito's had become the talk of the Sunset Strip scene, and soon every band worth its salt was copying it, and it became one of those songs like "Louie Louie" before it that everyone would play. The first record ever made with the "Hey Joe" melody actually had totally different lyrics. Kim Fowley had the idea of writing a sequel to "Hey Joe", titled "Wanted Dead or Alive", about what happened after Joe shot his woman and went off. He produced the track for The Rogues, a group consisting of Michael Lloyd and Shaun Harris, who later went on to form the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, and Lloyd and Harris were the credited writers: [Excerpt: The Rogues, "Wanted Dead or Alive"] The next version of the song to come out was the first by anyone to be released as "Hey Joe", or at least as "Hey Joe, Where You Gonna Go?", which was how it was titled on its initial release. This was by a band called The Leaves, who were friends of Love, and had picked up on "Hey Joe", and was produced by Nik Venet. It was also the first to have the now-familiar opening line "Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand?": [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe Where You Gonna Go?"] Roberts' original lyric, as sung by both Love and the Byrds, had been "where you going with that money in your hand?", and had Joe headed off to *buy* the gun. But as Echols later said “What happened was Bob Lee from The Leaves, who were friends of ours, asked me for the words to 'Hey Joe'. I told him I would have the words the next day. I decided to write totally different lyrics. The words you hear on their record are ones I wrote as a joke. The original words to Hey Joe are ‘Hey Joe, where you going with that money in your hand? Well I'm going downtown to buy me a blue steel .44. When I catch up with that woman, she won't be running round no more.' It never says ‘Hey Joe where you goin' with that gun in your hand.' Those were the words I wrote just because I knew they were going to try and cover the song before we released it. That was kind of a dirty trick that I played on The Leaves, which turned out to be the words that everybody uses.” That first release by the Leaves also contained an extra verse -- a nod to Love's previous name: [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe Where You Gonna Go?"] That original recording credited the song as public domain -- apparently Bryan MacLean had refused to tell the Leaves who had written the song, and so they assumed it was traditional. It came out in November 1965, but only as a promo single. Even before the Leaves, though, another band had recorded "Hey Joe", but it didn't get released. The Sons of Adam had started out as a surf group called the Fender IV, who made records like "Malibu Run": [Excerpt: The Fender IV, "Malibu Run"] Kim Fowley had suggested they change their name to the Sons of Adam, and they were another group who were friends with Love -- their drummer, Michael Stuart-Ware, would later go on to join Love, and Arthur Lee wrote the song "Feathered Fish" for them: [Excerpt: Sons of Adam, "Feathered Fish"] But while they were the first to record "Hey Joe", their version has still to this day not been released. Their version was recorded for Decca, with producer Gary Usher, but before it was released, another Decca artist also recorded the song, and the label weren't sure which one to release. And then the label decided to press Usher to record a version with yet another act -- this time with the Surfaris, the surf group who had had a hit with "Wipe Out". Coincidentally, the Surfaris had just changed bass players -- their most recent bass player, Ken Forssi, had quit and joined Love, whose own bass player, John Fleckenstein, had gone off to join the Standells, who would also record a version of “Hey Joe” in 1966. Usher thought that the Sons of Adam were much better musicians than the Surfaris, who he was recording with more or less under protest, but their version, using Love's arrangement and the "gun in your hand" lyrics, became the first version to come out on a major label: [Excerpt: The Surfaris, "Hey Joe"] They believed the song was in the public domain, and so the songwriting credits on the record are split between Gary Usher, a W. Hale who nobody has been able to identify, and Tony Cost, a pseudonym for Nik Venet. Usher said later "I got writer's credit on it because I was told, or I assumed at the time, the song was Public Domain; meaning a non-copyrighted song. It had already been cut two or three times, and on each occasion the writing credit had been different. On a traditional song, whoever arranges it, takes the songwriting credit. I may have changed a few words and arranged and produced it, but I certainly did not co-write it." The public domain credit also appeared on the Leaves' second attempt to cut the song, which was actually given a general release, but flopped. But when the Leaves cut the song for a *third* time, still for the same tiny label, Mira, the track became a hit in May 1966, reaching number thirty-one: [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe"] And *that* version had what they thought was the correct songwriting credit, to Dino Valenti. Which came as news to Billy Roberts, who had registered the copyright to the song back in 1962 and had no idea that it had become a staple of LA garage rock until he heard his song in the top forty with someone else's name on the credits. He angrily confronted Third Story Music, who agreed to a compromise -- they would stop giving Valenti songwriting royalties and start giving them to Roberts instead, so long as he didn't sue them and let them keep the publishing rights. Roberts was indignant about this -- he deserved all the money, not just half of it -- but he went along with it to avoid a lawsuit he might not win. So Roberts was now the credited songwriter on the versions coming out of the LA scene. But of course, Dino Valenti had been playing "his" song to other people, too. One of those other people was Vince Martin. Martin had been a member of a folk-pop group called the Tarriers, whose members also included the future film star Alan Arkin, and who had had a hit in the 1950s with "Cindy, Oh Cindy": [Excerpt: The Tarriers, "Cindy, Oh Cindy"] But as we heard in the episode on the Lovin' Spoonful, he had become a Greenwich Village folkie, in a duo with Fred Neil, and recorded an album with him, "Tear Down the Walls": [Excerpt: Fred Neil and Vince Martin, "Morning Dew"] That song we just heard, "Morning Dew", was another question-and-answer folk song. It was written by the Canadian folk-singer Bonnie Dobson, but after Martin and Neil recorded it, it was picked up on by Martin's friend Tim Rose who stuck his own name on the credits as well, without Dobson's permission, for a version which made the song into a rock standard for which he continued to collect royalties: [Excerpt: Tim Rose, "Morning Dew"] This was something that Rose seems to have made a habit of doing, though to be fair to him it went both ways. We heard about him in the Lovin' Spoonful episode too, when he was in a band named the Big Three with Cass Elliot and her coincidentally-named future husband Jim Hendricks, who recorded this song, with Rose putting new music to the lyrics of the old public domain song "Oh! Susanna": [Excerpt: The Big Three, "The Banjo Song"] The band Shocking Blue used that melody for their 1969 number-one hit "Venus", and didn't give Rose any credit: [Excerpt: Shocking Blue, "Venus"] But another song that Rose picked up from Vince Martin was "Hey Joe". Martin had picked the song up from Valenti, but didn't know who had written it, or who was claiming to have written it, and told Rose he thought it might be an old Appalchian murder ballad or something. Rose took the song and claimed writing credit in his own name -- he would always, for the rest of his life, claim it was an old folk tune he'd heard in Florida, and that he'd rewritten it substantially himself, but no evidence of the song has ever shown up from prior to Roberts' copyright registration, and Rose's version is basically identical to Roberts' in melody and lyrics. But Rose takes his version at a much slower pace, and his version would be the model for the most successful versions going forward, though those other versions would use the lyrics Johnny Echols had rewritten, rather than the ones Rose used: [Excerpt: Tim Rose, "Hey Joe"] Rose's version got heard across the Atlantic as well. And in particular it was heard by Chas Chandler, the bass player of the Animals. Some sources seem to suggest that Chandler first heard the song performed by a group called the Creation, but in a biography I've read of that group they clearly state that they didn't start playing the song until 1967. But however he came across it, when Chandler heard Rose's recording, he knew that the song could be a big hit for someone, but he didn't know who. And then he bumped into Linda Keith, Keith Richards' girlfriend,  who took him to see someone whose guitar we've already heard in this episode: [Excerpt: Rosa Lee Brooks, "My Diary"] The Curtis Mayfield impression on guitar there was, at least according to many sources the first recording session ever played on by a guitarist then calling himself Maurice (or possibly Mo-rees) James. We'll see later in the story that it possibly wasn't his first -- there are conflicting accounts, as there are about a lot of things, and it was recorded either in very early 1964, in which case it was his first, or (as seems more likely, and as I tell the story later) a year later, in which case he'd played on maybe half a dozen tracks in the studio by that point. But it was still a very early one. And by late 1966 that guitarist had reverted to the name by which he was brought up, and was calling himself Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix and Arthur Lee had become close, and Lee would later claim that Hendrix had copied much of Lee's dress style and attitude -- though many of Hendrix's other colleagues and employers, including Little Richard, would make similar claims -- and most of them had an element of truth, as Lee's did. Hendrix was a sponge. But Lee did influence him. Indeed, one of Hendrix's *last* sessions, in March 1970, was guesting on an album by Love: [Excerpt: Love with Jimi Hendrix, "Everlasting First"] Hendrix's name at birth was Johnny Allen Hendrix, which made his father, James Allen Hendrix, known as Al, who was away at war when his son was born, worry that he'd been named after another man who might possibly be the real father, so the family just referred to the child as "Buster" to avoid the issue. When Al Hendrix came back from the war the child was renamed James Marshall Hendrix -- James after Al's first name, Marshall after Al's dead brother -- though the family continued calling him "Buster". Little James Hendrix Junior didn't have anything like a stable home life. Both his parents were alcoholics, and Al Hendrix was frequently convinced that Jimi's mother Lucille was having affairs and became abusive about it. They had six children, four of whom were born disabled, and Jimi was the only one to remain with his parents -- the rest were either fostered or adopted at birth, fostered later on because the parents weren't providing a decent home life, or in one case made a ward of state because the Hendrixes couldn't afford to pay for a life-saving operation for him. The only one that Jimi had any kind of regular contact with was the second brother, Leon, his parents' favourite, who stayed with them for several years before being fostered by a family only a few blocks away. Al and Lucille Hendrix frequently split and reconciled, and while they were ostensibly raising Jimi (and for a  few years Leon), he was shuttled between them and various family members and friends, living sometimes in Seattle where his parents lived and sometimes in Vancouver with his paternal grandmother. He was frequently malnourished, and often survived because friends' families fed him. Al Hendrix was also often physically and emotionally abusive of the son he wasn't sure was his. Jimi grew up introverted, and stuttering, and only a couple of things seemed to bring him out of his shell. One was science fiction -- he always thought that his nickname, Buster, came from Buster Crabbe, the star of the Flash Gordon serials he loved to watch, though in fact he got the nickname even before that interest developed, and he was fascinated with ideas about aliens and UFOs -- and the other was music. Growing up in Seattle in the forties and fifties, most of the music he was exposed to as a child and in his early teens was music made by and for white people -- there wasn't a very large Black community in the area at the time compared to most major American cities, and so there were no prominent R&B stations. As a kid he loved the music of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, and when he was thirteen Jimi's favourite record was Dean Martin's "Memories are Made of This": [Excerpt: Dean Martin, "Memories are Made of This"] He also, like every teenager, became a fan of rock and roll music. When Elvis played at a local stadium when Jimi was fifteen, he couldn't afford a ticket, but he went and sat on top of a nearby hill and watched the show from the distance. Jimi's first exposure to the blues also came around this time, when his father briefly took in lodgers, Cornell and Ernestine Benson, and Ernestine had a record collection that included records by Lightnin' Hopkins, Howlin' Wolf, and Muddy Waters, all of whom Jimi became a big fan of, especially Muddy Waters. The Bensons' most vivid memory of Jimi in later years was him picking up a broom and pretending to play guitar along with these records: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "Baby Please Don't Go"] Shortly after this, it would be Ernestine Benson who would get Jimi his very first guitar. By this time Jimi and Al had lost their home and moved into a boarding house, and the owner's son had an acoustic guitar with only one string that he was planning to throw out. When Jimi asked if he could have it instead of it being thrown out, the owner told him he could have it for five dollars. Al Hendrix refused to pay that much for it, but Ernestine Benson bought Jimi the guitar. She said later “He only had one string, but he could really make that string talk.” He started carrying the guitar on his back everywhere he went, in imitation of Sterling Hayden in the western Johnny Guitar, and eventually got some more strings for it and learned to play. He would play it left-handed -- until his father came in. His father had forced him to write with his right hand, and was convinced that left-handedness was the work of the devil, so Jimi would play left-handed while his father was somewhere else, but as soon as Al came in he would flip the guitar the other way up and continue playing the song he had been playing, now right-handed. Jimi's mother died when he was fifteen, after having been ill for a long time with drink-related problems, and Jimi and his brother didn't get to go to the funeral -- depending on who you believe, either Al gave Jimi the bus fare and told him to go by himself and Jimi was too embarrassed to go to the funeral alone on the bus, or Al actually forbade Jimi and Leon from going.  After this, he became even more introverted than he was before, and he also developed a fascination with the idea of angels, convinced his mother now was one. Jimi started to hang around with a friend called Pernell Alexander, who also had a guitar, and they would play along together with Elmore James records. The two also went to see Little Richard and Bill Doggett perform live, and while Jimi was hugely introverted, he did start to build more friendships in the small Seattle music scene, including with Ron Holden, the man we talked about in the episode on "Louie Louie" who introduced that song to Seattle, and who would go on to record with Bruce Johnston for Bob Keane: [Excerpt: Ron Holden, "Gee But I'm Lonesome"] Eventually Ernestine Benson persuaded Al Hendrix to buy Jimi a decent electric guitar on credit -- Al also bought himself a saxophone at the same time, thinking he might play music with his son, but sent it back once the next payment became due. As well as blues and R&B, Jimi was soaking up the guitar instrumentals and garage rock that would soon turn into surf music. The first song he learned to play was "Tall Cool One" by the Fabulous Wailers, the local group who popularised a version of "Louie Louie" based on Holden's one: [Excerpt: The Fabulous Wailers, "Tall Cool One"] As we talked about in the "Louie Louie" episode, the Fabulous Wailers used to play at a venue called the Spanish Castle, and Jimi was a regular in the audience, later writing his song "Spanish Castle Magic" about those shows: [Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "Spanish Castle Magic"] He was also a big fan of Duane Eddy, and soon learned Eddy's big hits "Forty Miles of Bad Road", "Because They're Young", and "Peter Gunn" -- a song he would return to much later in his life: [Excerpt: Jimi Hendrix, "Peter Gunn/Catastrophe"] His career as a guitarist didn't get off to a great start -- the first night he played with his first band, he was meant to play two sets, but he was fired after the first set, because he was playing in too flashy a manner and showing off too much on stage. His girlfriend suggested that he might want to tone it down a little, but he said "That's not my style".  This would be a common story for the next several years. After that false start, the first real band he was in was the Velvetones, with his friend Pernell Alexander. There were four guitarists, two piano players, horns and drums, and they dressed up with glitter stuck to their pants. They played Duane Eddy songs, old jazz numbers, and "Honky Tonk" by Bill Doggett, which became Hendrix's signature song with the band. [Excerpt: Bill Doggett, "Honky Tonk"] His father was unsupportive of his music career, and he left his guitar at Alexander's house because he was scared that his dad would smash it if he took it home. At the same time he was with the Velvetones, he was also playing with another band called the Rocking Kings, who got gigs around the Seattle area, including at the Spanish Castle. But as they left school, most of Hendrix's friends were joining the Army, in order to make a steady living, and so did he -- although not entirely by choice. He was arrested, twice, for riding in stolen cars, and he was given a choice -- either go to prison, or sign up for the Army for three years. He chose the latter. At first, the Army seemed to suit him. He was accepted into the 101st Airborne Division, the famous "Screaming Eagles", whose actions at D-Day made them legendary in the US, and he was proud to be a member of the Division. They were based out of Fort Campbell, the base near Clarksville we talked about a couple of episodes ago, and while he was there he met a bass player, Billy Cox, who he started playing with. As Cox and Hendrix were Black, and as Fort Campbell straddled the border between Kentucky and Tennessee, they had to deal with segregation and play to only Black audiences. And Hendrix quickly discovered that Black audiences in the Southern states weren't interested in "Louie Louie", Duane Eddy, and surf music, the stuff he'd been playing in Seattle. He had to instead switch to playing Albert King and Slim Harpo songs, but luckily he loved that music too. He also started singing at this point -- when Hendrix and Cox started playing together, in a trio called the Kasuals, they had no singer, and while Hendrix never liked his own voice, Cox was worse, and so Hendrix was stuck as the singer. The Kasuals started gigging around Clarksville, and occasionally further afield, places like Nashville, where Arthur Alexander would occasionally sit in with them. But Cox was about to leave the Army, and Hendrix had another two and a bit years to go, having enlisted for three years. They couldn't play any further away unless Hendrix got out of the Army, which he was increasingly unhappy in anyway, and so he did the only thing he could -- he pretended to be gay, and got discharged on medical grounds for homosexuality. In later years he would always pretend he'd broken his ankle parachuting from a plane. For the next few years, he would be a full-time guitarist, and spend the periods when he wasn't earning enough money from that leeching off women he lived with, moving from one to another as they got sick of him or ran out of money. The Kasuals expanded their lineup, adding a second guitarist, Alphonso Young, who would show off on stage by playing guitar with his teeth. Hendrix didn't like being upstaged by another guitarist, and quickly learned to do the same. One biography I've used as a source for this says that at this point, Billy Cox played on a session for King Records, for Frank Howard and the Commanders, and brought Hendrix along, but the producer thought that Hendrix's guitar was too frantic and turned his mic off. But other sources say the session Hendrix and Cox played on for the Commanders wasn't until three years later, and the record *sounds* like a 1965 record, not a 1962 one, and his guitar is very audible – and the record isn't on King. But we've not had any music to break up the narration for a little while, and it's a good track (which later became a Northern Soul favourite) so I'll play a section here, as either way it was certainly an early Hendrix session: [Excerpt: Frank Howard and the Commanders, "I'm So Glad"] This illustrates a general problem with Hendrix's life at this point -- he would flit between bands, playing with the same people at multiple points, nobody was taking detailed notes, and later, once he became famous, everyone wanted to exaggerate their own importance in his life, meaning that while the broad outlines of his life are fairly clear, any detail before late 1966 might be hopelessly wrong. But all the time, Hendrix was learning his craft. One story from around this time  sums up both Hendrix's attitude to his playing -- he saw himself almost as much as a scientist as a musician -- and his slightly formal manner of speech.  He challenged the best blues guitarist in Nashville to a guitar duel, and the audience actually laughed at Hendrix's playing, as he was totally outclassed. When asked what he was doing, he replied “I was simply trying to get that B.B. King tone down and my experiment failed.” Bookings for the King Kasuals dried up, and he went to Vancouver, where he spent a couple of months playing in a covers band, Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers, whose lead guitarist was Tommy Chong, later to find fame as one half of Cheech and Chong. But he got depressed at how white Vancouver was, and travelled back down south to join a reconfigured King Kasuals, who now had a horn section. The new lineup of King Kasuals were playing the chitlin circuit and had to put on a proper show, and so Hendrix started using all the techniques he'd seen other guitarists on the circuit use -- playing with his teeth like Alphonso Young, the other guitarist in the band, playing with his guitar behind his back like T-Bone Walker, and playing with a fifty-foot cord that allowed him to walk into the crowd and out of the venue, still playing, like Guitar Slim used to. As well as playing with the King Kasuals, he started playing the circuit as a sideman. He got short stints with many of the second-tier acts on the circuit -- people who had had one or two hits, or were crowd-pleasers, but weren't massive stars, like Carla Thomas or Jerry Butler or Slim Harpo. The first really big name he played with was Solomon Burke, who when Hendrix joined his band had just released "Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Empty Arms)": [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Empty Arms)"] But he lacked discipline. “Five dates would go beautifully,” Burke later said, “and then at the next show, he'd go into this wild stuff that wasn't part of the song. I just couldn't handle it anymore.” Burke traded him to Otis Redding, who was on the same tour, for two horn players, but then Redding fired him a week later and they left him on the side of the road. He played in the backing band for the Marvelettes, on a tour with Curtis Mayfield, who would be another of Hendrix's biggest influences, but he accidentally blew up Mayfield's amp and got sacked. On another tour, Cecil Womack threw Hendrix's guitar off the bus while he slept. In February 1964 he joined the band of the Isley Brothers, and he would watch the Beatles on Ed Sullivan with them during his first days with the group. Assuming he hadn't already played the Rosa Lee Brooks session (and I think there's good reason to believe he hadn't), then the first record Hendrix played on was their single "Testify": [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Testify"] While he was with them, he also moonlighted on Don Covay's big hit "Mercy, Mercy": [Excerpt: Don Covay and the Goodtimers, "Mercy Mercy"] After leaving the Isleys, Hendrix joined the minor soul singer Gorgeous George, and on a break from Gorgeous George's tour, in Memphis, he went to Stax studios in the hope of meeting Steve Cropper, one of his idols. When he was told that Cropper was busy in the studio, he waited around all day until Cropper finished, and introduced himself. Hendrix was amazed to discover that Cropper was white -- he'd assumed that he must be Black -- and Cropper was delighted to meet the guitarist who had played on "Mercy Mercy", one of his favourite records. The two spent hours showing each other guitar licks -- Hendrix playing Cropper's right-handed guitar, as he hadn't brought along his own. Shortly after this, he joined Little Richard's band, and once again came into conflict with the star of the show by trying to upstage him. For one show he wore a satin shirt, and after the show Richard screamed at him “I am the only Little Richard! I am the King of Rock and Roll, and I am the only one allowed to be pretty. Take that shirt off!” While he was with Richard, Hendrix played on his "I Don't Know What You've Got, But It's Got Me", which like "Mercy Mercy" was written by Don Covay, who had started out as Richard's chauffeur: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "I Don't Know What You've Got, But It's Got Me"] According to the most likely version of events I've read, it was while he was working for Richard that Hendrix met Rosa Lee Brooks, on New Year's Eve 1964. At this point he was using the name Maurice James, apparently in tribute to the blues guitarist Elmore James, and he used various names, including Jimmy James, for most of his pre-fame performances. Rosa Lee Brooks was an R&B singer who had been mentored by Johnny "Guitar" Watson, and when she met Hendrix she was singing in a girl group who were one of the support acts for Ike & Tina Turner, who Hendrix went to see on his night off. Hendrix met Brooks afterwards, and told her she looked like his mother -- a line he used on a lot of women, but which was true in her case if photos are anything to go by. The two got into a relationship, and were soon talking about becoming a duo like Ike and Tina or Mickey and Sylvia -- "Love is Strange" was one of Hendrix's favourite records. But the only recording they made together was the "My Diary" single. Brooks always claimed that she actually wrote that song, but the label credit is for Arthur Lee, and it sounds like his work to me, albeit him trying hard to write like Curtis Mayfield, just as Hendrix is trying to play like him: [Excerpt: Rosa Lee Brooks, "My Diary"] Brooks and Hendrix had a very intense relationship for a short period. Brooks would later recall Little

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