Podcasts about Monterey Pop

Episode 5 of our Grape Expectations Series is the podcast to hear if you ever wondered what it felt like to be hunted down by a psychedelically deranged band member wielding a fire axe.  Welcome to Part 2 of my conversation with Don Stevenson, in which we cover the most harrowing period of his life, not to mention the band's career (1967-1969). Don says this will be the very last time he'll be talking about his time in Moby Grape, so you absolutely will not want to miss this. Here's just a few of the many things that Don discusses with Discograffiti in this podcast:How Moby Grape wound up blowing it at Monterey Pop;The point at which their manager Matthew Katz went to war with the band;The experience of touring the country at the same time as The Fake Grape;And a track-by-track discussion of both Wow/Grape Jam and Moby Grape '69.Listen: linktr.ee/discograffitiI support a wife and a six-year-old son with Discograffiti as my sole source of income. If you're a Moby Grape & Skip Spence superfan like me, The Director's Cut of this episode is ad-free and features 25 additional minutes of essential material. Purchase The Director's Cut as a one-off at Patreon.com/Discograffiti.Purchase the full Grape Expectations Collection: www.patreon.com/collection/1467935Subscribe to Discograffiti's Patreon at the Major Tier and receive a ceaseless barrage (4 shows a week) of must-hear binge-listening: Patreon.com/DiscograffitiCONNECTJoin our Soldiers of Sound Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1839109176272153Patreon: www.Patreon.com/DiscograffitiPodfollow: ⁠⁠https://podfollow.com/1592182331⁠⁠YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClyaQCdvDelj5EiKj6IRLhwInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/discograffitipod/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Discograffiti/Twitter: https://twitter.com/DiscograffitiOrder the Digital version of the METAL MACHINE MUZAK 2xLP (feat. Lou Barlow, Cory Hanson, Mark Robinson, & W. Cullen Hart): www.patreon.com/discograffiti/shop/197404Order the $11 Digital version of the MMM 2xLP on Bandcamp: https://discograffiti.bandcamp.com/album/metal-machine-muzakOrder the METAL MACHINE MUZAK Double Vinyl + Digital package: www.patreon.com/discograffiti/shop/169954Merch Shop: https://discograffitipod.myspreadshop.com/allVenmo Dave A Tip: @David-GebroeWeb site: http://discograffiti.com/CONTACT DAVEEmail: dave@discograffiti.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/hooligandaveInstagram:  https://www.instagram.com/davidgebroe/Twitter: https://twitter.com/DaveGebroeThere is no other Patreon in existence where you get more for your money. 4 shows a week is what it takes these days to successfully blot out our unacceptable reality…so do yourself a favor and give it a shot for at least one month to see what I'm talking about.  If you're already a member, please comment below about your experience.  www.Patreon.com/discograffiti#mobygrape #sanfrancisco #sixties #billgraham #fillmorewest #gordonstevens #doobiebrothers #weirdherald #billydeanandrus #donstevenson #peterlewis #bobmosley #jerrymiller #robertplant #skipspence #avalonballroom #grapeexpectations #thebyrds #jeffersonairplane #matthewkatz #camcobb #bellevue #jormakaukonen #discograffiti #metalmachinemuzak #soldiersofsound #grapeexpectations #thematrix #martybalin #omarspence 

In this first of a two part episode of LEGENDS: Podcast by All Day Vinyl, host Scott Dudelson sits down with Don Stevenson, the vocalist, songwriter, drummer and co-founder of the iconic Moby Grape — one of the most dynamic, underrated bands to emerge from the 1960s San Francisco rock scene. From smoky late-night clubs in the Pacific Northwest to the chaos of Monterey Pop, Don takes us on a deeply personal journey through rock history. He opens up about first meeting Jerry Miller (his Moby Grape co-founder), backing up Etta James in after-hours joints, and the wild ride that led to forming Moby Grape alongside Skip Spence, Bob Mosley, and Peter Lewis. You'll hear the story of their audition, the creative fire that birthed classics like Hey Grandma, 805, and Murder in My Heart for the Judge — and what it was like recording their genre-defining debut album in just seven days. ** Don shares behind-the-scenes stories about: The infamous middle finger album cover that became a collector's grail How poor management cost the band a place in the Monterey Pop Festival documentary What it felt like to be touted as “the next Beatles”… and how it all unraveled Recording new solo work with Jerry Miller and Omar Spence, son of Skip Spence

Send us a message, so we know what you're thinking!Why do you like the music you do?  Is it as simple as “It's what I heard on the radio”? Or something deeper? People with elder siblings may be exposed to music earlier than first children.   Jeff had an older brother, so was exposed earlier to cool music - Beatles, Janis, Hendrix, and so on.  Mick was the eldest in his family and had to find his own taste. (No surprise considering what he listens to!) Were you bullied as a child?  Influence!  Did you share music with your friends?  Influence!  Did you have access to a good radio station?  Or print media?  Influence!! We talk about our early influences – musical & otherwise – and look at how they played a role in what we listen to today.    In Rock News, Ringo has released a country album, and Toto is touring.  Oh well, shouldn't take them long to play their 3 hits. You know Jeff's obsessed with AI, so he asked three AI brands to nominate the greatest albums of 1971.  Not much variation, really.  One day, we may ask them to understand quality, rather than sales figures, and see what they give us.    Our Album You Must Listen to Before you Die is “Blue” by Joni Mitchell - an top grade album that deserves to be here.  Mick references Atlantic Records' sampler called “Very Together” which featured “Carey” from this album, and pointed out a link between Joni Mitchell and Scottish hard rock band, Nazareth. How did YOUR tastes develop?  Drop us a line & let us know. Enjoy! References:  RAM Magazine, Rock Australia Magazine, Countdown, Molly Meldrum, 2DoubleJay, The Magus/Holger Brockman, Chris Winter, Mac Cocker, “Never Mind the Bollocks”, The Sex Pistols, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, David Bowie, “Five Years”, “Room to Move”, Chris Winter, “Starman”, “Rock'n'roll Suicide”, Birdland, Weather Report, Joe Zawinul, Brian Eno, “Another Green World”, “Zawinul Lava”, “Rock'n'Roll Animal”, Lou Reed, Steve Hunter, “Sweet Jane”, “Heroin”, “Rock'n'Roll”, Berlin, Alice Cooper, Velvet Underground, Peter Gabriel, “Car”, “Stranded”, Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry, “Song for Europe”, “Street Life”, “Psalm”, Sisters of Mercy, XTC, Nico, REM, Television, Patti Smith, “Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band”, The Beatles, "Within You Without You”, “Tomorrow Never Knows”, Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits, Like a Rolling Stone”, Revolver, Bridge Over Troubled Water, Simon and Garfunkel, Pearl, Janis Joplin, Tapestry, Carole King, Slade Alive, Hot August Nigh”, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”, “Dark Side of the Moon”, “Led Zeppelin IV”, “Silk Degrees”, Box Scaggs, “Journey to the Centre of the Earth”, Rick Wakeman, “Woodstock”, “Monterey Pop”, “The Song Remains the Same”, “The Last Waltz”, The Guitar Spa, Redeye Records, John Foy, bootleg records, “His Master's Voice”, “Sheetkeeckers”, Australian electronica/dance music store, Hipgnosis, Pink Floyd, Peter Gabriel, Regurgitator, “I like your old stuff better than your new stuff", DeepSeek, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Blue, Joni Mitchell, Henry Lewy, “Very Together”, “This Flight Tonight”, Nazareth  Episode Playlist  The first song played by 2DoubleJay - “You Just Like Me ‘Cos I'm Good in Bed” 

This week, we are joined by actor, writer & comedian CLARE O'KANE (whose latest comedy album, Everything I Know How To Do, was released on Eugene Mirman's record label) about the classic 1968-directed film MONTEREY POP! We discuss Clare's Bay Area upbringing and being too uptight to be a hippie, our history with comedy records and what its like for Clare to make one, we share our weirdo pre-flight rituals, why the Grateful Dead didn't want to be in the finished film and other performances that were cut out of it, the shocking lack of beards in the film, the optimism in the audience compared to two years later with Gimme Shelter, watching the audience experience Jimi Hendrix, The Who and Janis Joplin for the first time, who was the only artist to get paid at this charity event, how the film came together and how Paul Simon saved the concert from going under, the time Clare opened for Jawbreaker, the weirdo factor of San Francisco bands, David Crosby's talking bout the Kennedy assisination, how can we Boogie and Choogle, how the song White Rabbit ruined the Jefferson Airplane for us and our acting turns that involved using this song, Godard's seeing Jefferson Airplane in this movie and then filming them rocking out on a rooftop for his film 1am One American Movie, crying at live shows, Otis Redding's incredible performance captured here, what would be the best band from this festival to have sex too, Chris spills the beans on an unreleased episode of RPM and much more!So let's laugh directly into the sun on this week's episode of Revolutions Per Movie!!!Clare O'Kane:https://www.clareokane.com/REVOLUTIONS PER MOVIE:Host Chris Slusarenko (Eyelids, Guided By Voices, owner of Clinton Street Video rental store) is joined by actors, musicians, comedians, writers & directors who each week pick out their favorite music documentary, musical, music-themed fiction film or music videos to discuss. Fun, weird, and insightful, Revolutions Per Movie is your deep dive into our life-long obsessions where music and film collide.The show is also a completely independent affair, so the best way to support it is through our Patreon at patreon.com/revolutionspermovie. By joining, you can get weekly bonus episodes, physical goods such as Flexidiscs, and other exclusive goods sent directly to you.Revolutions Per Movies releases new episodes every Thursday on any podcast app, and additional, exclusive bonus episodes every Sunday on our Patreon. If you like the show, please consider subscribing, rating, and reviewing it on your favorite podcast app. Thanks!SOCIALS:@revolutionspermovieBlueSky: @revpermovieTHEME by Eyelids 'My Caved In Mind'www.musicofeyelids.bandcamp.comARTWORK by Jeff T. Owenshttps://linktr.ee/mymetalhand Click here to get EXCLUSIVE BONUS WEEKLY Revolutions Per Movie content on our Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“We never ever got as famous as The Beatles. But we started as friends, and we ended as friends.” - Sylvia Saunders, drummer of the LiverbirdsFor the first time EVER on the Dolls Pod, we're featuring a group! We're telling the stories of Pam Birch, Val Gell, Mary McGlory, and Sylvia Saunders. Together, they're more than Britain's first all-female rock band…although that part is pretty cool! They're four independent, self-actualized young women breaking music's glass ceiling - and having a whole lot of fun doing it. This episode is for any girl in a band, or any girl who's ever wanted to be in a band

It's Emma's (belated) birthday! For her first episode of the season, she's showcasing her “birthday twin:” the one and only Janis Joplin. Though her career lasted just four short years, it was no less transformative; feeding the nation's appetite for blues rock and making a bookish girl from Texas into a generational icon. Everything about Janis, from her big heart to her fiery soul, embodied the spirit of the counterculture 60s. It's a story of pain, passion, and a woman's sheer power. “Janis Joplin: Piece of Her Heart” is available NOW wherever you stream your podcasts ❤️‍

Two of the finest blues bands are featured on this episode. Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Canned Heat were embraced by the new counterculture, and both played the two prestigious festivals of the time, Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Bothe bands leave a respected legacyIf you would, please make a donation of love and hope to St. Jude Children's HospitalMake an impact on the lives of St. Jude kids - St. Jude Children's Research Hospital (stjude.org)Also:Kathy Bushnell Website for Emily Muff bandHome | Kathy Bushnell | Em & MooListen to previous shows at the main webpage at:https://www.buzzsprout.com/1329053Pamela Des Barres Home page for books, autographs, clothing and online writing classes.Pamela Des Barres | The Official Website of the Legendary Groupie and Author (pameladesbarresofficial.com)Listen to more music by Laurie Larson at:Home | Shashké Music and Art (laurielarson.net)View the most amazing paintings by Marijke Koger-Dunham (Formally of the 1960's artists collective, "The Fool").Psychedelic, Visionary and Fantasy Art by Marijke Koger (marijkekogerart.com)For unique Candles have a look at Stardust Lady's Etsy shopWhere art and armor become one where gods are by TwistedByStardust (etsy.com)For your astrological chart reading, contact Astrologer Tisch Aitken at:https://www.facebook.com/AstrologerTisch/Tarot card readings by Kalinda available atThe Mythical Muse | FacebookEmma Bonner-Morgan Facebook music pageThe Music Of Emma Bonner-Morgan | FacebookFor booking Children's parties and character parties in the Los Angeles area contact Kalinda Gray at:https://www.facebook.com/wishingwellparties/I'm listed in Feedspot's "Top 10 Psychedelic Podcasts You Must Follow". https://blog.feedspot.com/psychedelic_podcasts/Please feel free to donate or Tip Jar the show at my Venmo account@jessie-DelgadoII

Another unusual podcast. Jennifer begins by talking about her meeting over at United Talent Agency where they're talking with her about doing some shows... and then spoke about her "uncorked event" in Manhattan Beach last Monday. We then spoke about a book she's been reading that on the back cover talks about someone meeting Jimi Hendrix on the flipside - someone who has shown up often in our sessions, whether in the books BACKSTAGE PASS TO THE FLIPSIDE or TUNING INTO THE AFTERLIFE. (People who report being greeted by him on the flipside included Janis Joplin (who left the stage a few months after him) by Charles Grodin who saw him as a talk show host, by John Lennon who saw him waiting for him onstage to play "Blue Suede Shoes."  Also Harry Dean Stanton said he was playing at the Monterey Pop festival, and later Fred Roos said the same about seeing Jimi on the flipside.  Everyone recognizes him. I was at a screening of a new film called "Rebel With a Cause" a documentary about the late great actor and humanitarian Charles Grodin.  It's a terrific film with interviews of Robert De Niro, Martin Short, Steve Martin and others.   Jennifer hasn't seen the film, no one has seen the film, but Charles was able to answers questions about the screening and about the content of the film.   Then a number of people stopped by to talk about the film, about how they all get to watch the film because people they know in our group of the flipside were in attendance, and by connection, so were they.  Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse (both answer questions), Heath Ledger - as well as Paul Allen, Junior Seau and Dave Duerson - who were reminding Jennifer this morning about how "oxygen therapy can help with brain trauma" - in reference to fellow football player Brett Favre announcing he has Parkinson's.  I'm sorry I didn't get to everyone.  I like to point out that people can talk to them if they take the time to ask them questions and wait for the answers.  The answer might not be verbal, they may be visual.  Another mind bending session - and it ends with a conversation with Phil Hartman - someone Jennifer didn't know, but who Charles Grodin was instrumental and helping to get an audition with his friend Lorne Michaels, who cast him in the SNL show. Phil talks about seeing Belushi on the flipside, and about his reaction to seeing Charles Grodin as well. It's all mind bending, but that doesn't stop us from sharing this information. Hope it helps. 

Skip Taylor's life and times are part of rock legend. He cut his teeth in the LA music scene in the 60s working with the who's who of rock at the time. However, Skip is best known as Canned Heat's manager and has been managing the band since the mid-60s, shortly after discovering them playing at a UCLA frat party. Also playing at that fateful frat party were The Doors, and he shares how he got both bands a record deal. Skip was in the center of it all at Woodstock and Monterey Pop, and recounts his adventures in opening Kaleidoscope, the hot nightclub in Hollywood that became a short-lived dream thanks to some greedy LA gangsters. This interview is packed with great stories from a guy who was in the middle of some of the greatest rock moments of the time, so let's get into it! For upcoming gigs and Canned Heat's discography, check out the links below: https://cannedheatmusic.com https://www.facebook.com/dontforgettoboogie And don't forget to follow My Rock Moment on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/la_woman_rocks/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Skip Taylor's life and times are part of rock legend. He cut his teeth in the LA music scene in the 60s working with the who's who of rock at the time. However, Skip is best known as Canned Heat's manager and has been managing the band since the mid-60s, shortly after discovering them playing at a UCLA frat party. Also playing at that fateful frat party were The Doors, and he shares how he got both bands a record deal. Skip was in the center of it all at Woodstock and Monterey Pop, and recounts his adventures in opening Kaleidoscope, the hot nightclub in Hollywood that became a short-lived dream thanks to some greedy LA gangsters. This interview is packed with great stories from a guy who was in the middle of some of the most memorable rock moments of the time, so let's get into it! For upcoming gigs and Canned Heat's discography, check out the links below: https://cannedheatmusic.com https://www.facebook.com/dontforgettoboogie And don't forget to follow My Rock Moment on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/la_woman_rocks/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

August 20, 2012-Scott sang a gentle song that became a hit and something of a theme song for 1967's "Summer of Love."Scott McKenzie, best known for San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair, died Saturday in Los Angeles. He was 73. According to the singer's website, he "had been very ill recently and passed away in his home after two weeks in hospital." The Associated Press says he "had battled Guillain-Barre Syndrome, a disease that affects the nervous system, and had been in and out of the hospital since 2010."San Francisco, the AP reminds us, was written by John Phillips of The Mamas and the Paps. McKenzie could write songs as well. He co-wrote The Beach Boys' 1988 hit Kokomo.

It was Jennifer's birthday week, she tells the story of how her daughter sent a message in the sand from Malta, shows it to the audience and how her son magically found the exact same birthday card for her - that she was going to give her mom before she passed.  Jennifer sends her love and thanks to everyone who sent her birthday wishes. Then a conversation with Fred Roos, Luana Anders' friend whose memorial was this week.  I went to the memorial, a number of very unusual conversations were had.  As noted in the podcast, people who know Fred will know how accurate this interview is - people who don't know him will hear references to friends of his both on and off the planet. I can verify that Jennifer doesn't know any of these people, and doesn't know who I'm referring to (except in some instances where I concur what who she is seeing or hearing from.)  If one compares the previous conversation with him prior to this one - everyone that was mentioned (first names only) in the last podcast who was at the memorial, I was able to pass along Fred's messages to them. It was uncanny that I was able to do so.  One in person, another a message for a relative. Luana Anders knew Fred for 60 years. She spoke to him on her last day on the planet, and was the person who introduced me to him 40 years ago.  Luana left in 1996, but over the years Fred and I spoke often, not only about Luana's script "Real Feelings" but also when his close friend Harry Dean Stanton passed away, and had private messages for his closest pals including Fred - which I dutifully passed along. Harry passed in 2017, and as noted in the podcast, those private, personal messages, along with Harry Dean's recollection of driving to the Monterey Pop festival with Fred and Luana (something I didn't know, never heard, but Fred confirmed when I asked him about it) allowed him to believe in the possibility of the idea that life goes on. As I point out - in the future, more people will do something like this. That is - a loved one leaves the stage, and the family gets together with some of the best mediums (anyone whose filters are askew, or are not properly in place, because it's an issue of "filters on the brain that block information not conducive to survival" (see pg 125 of Dr. Greyson's book AFTER for a science discussion of those filters) - and then - comparing the dreams, messages, conversations with their loved one - at the memorial they share them, bringing all those messages of love, of observation, or insight from the flipside.  They are not gone. They just aren't here. I have been filming people bypassing those filters for over fifteen years. it's how I met Jennifer 8 years ago, and why we have been meeting up like this weekly to talk to people offstage. Anyone can do it.  It helps if you have someone like Jennifer who works with law enforcement agencies nationwide. (Flipside, Talking to Bill Paxton, Hacking the Afterlife films have examples.) In this podcast, I did edit out some of the more personal commentary, and have passed those details along to his loved ones.  That doesn't mean people I pass messages along to are suddenly "going to believe" their loved ones still exist... as I've noted before, we spoke directly to someone offstage, passed a transcript to the family members which we were asked to pass along, the message came back; "I wish every day that I could speak to my relative, but I don't believe you guys are." That's fine. That's logical.  But the reason we do this work is to show people the process, the way to access them on their own. One doesn't need a medium - it helps - but one does need to allow for the possibility.  We've been at this weekly for 8 years. One method we got from hypnotherapist Michael Newton on the flipside - he came to tell us (it's in on camera in the film HACKING THE AFTERLIFE on Amazon or Gaia) "1. Say their name. 2. Ask them questions (you don't know the answers to).  Don't judge the replies. 3. When they answer a question before you've been able to ask it (often visually) you'll know you've made a connection." Anyone can.  We all experience grief, loss, sadness - but we can add to that mix nostalgia, and realize that they aren't suffering, they're home. They know where they are, and will do their best to help us on our path.  It helps that I get to work with Jennifer Shaffer, who spends a third of her day helping law enforcement agencies nationwide, who does that work pro bono - who graciously allows me to ask her any question and she answers it without knowing who I'm speaking with.  As is evidenced in this podcast. "Why am I hearing "Russo" or "Rooster?"  Clearly wasn't aware we'd interviewed him a few weeks earlier.  She's like an Etch a Sketch - once the session is over, all the information evaporates. That's why it's so cool I get to film and record this information. Love love. Oh, and Robin Williams has the last word. (He did 2 films with Fred.)

Luther Heggs was a DJ on Cleveland's #1-Oldies station - MAJIC 105.7 WMJI in Cleveland from 1991-1999.  This episode is the first in a series to give you a taste of Luther on the air at MAJIC. A composite recording of his many shows at WMJI.  In Pt.1, find out what rock god before becoming famous, played for one night in Sonny & Cher's backup band...The surprising item worn by a legendary singer of soul at Monterey Pop and was  unseen by the audience ...What #1 Billboard hit song in 1961 was found in a trash can ? .... What famous bass player takes credit for inventing the term: groupie ? ...Also, find out what really scares Cher about old age...What rock singer got hit in the head with a pipe and that was their ticket to fame ....The voice that John Lennon wanted to spend eternity with ...A call from Keith Richard telling why he still loves the road gigs at his age ... And, did you ever wonder what a Pip is ? ( as in Gladys Knight)....Or, what Beatle was the shortest and biggest Beatle all in one ?... Luther tells all live on the radio in this episode. ....Even where Lurch's earthly remains ended up ...Listen and learn....Thanks

From time to time, I will populate the main feed with a Patreon episode that's at least a year old so casual listeners might get a taste of all the extra scholarship that does occur, but lands nowhere near a published episode:  Original description for this episode:  Shaboom! Two hours of hotness for you today in the wake of my recent 3-parter on The Crow via the main feed. This was a nice slice of all-over-the-place pie, as the whole Patreon endeavor will surely continue to be.  So Today we gots: A quick look at a (post)90s rock book A Spin Reader's Poll Go Head in the Rain  Sun Records stories - Roscoe Jordan on Ike Turner, Then Nick Tosches on Jackie Brentston, Two onstage deaths in Rock Gilbert on where the love grows The history of Altamont continued, featuring Monterey Pop and Bill Graham + the establishment of both Fillmores East and West  Monthly exclusive Rock History bonus feed here https://www.patreon.com/rockfilmrock Choose your preferred method of supporting the show for no money or maybe some money: PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/whatsamatta Shirt designs with defeatist messaging delivered via bright colors and childish graphics: https://www.bonfire.com/store/justtheworstshirtsever/ Subscribe to me on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCV4Up7xGgjioEC07bjwu4mQ Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/justtheworstever/ Send me an email with show suggestions: Justtheworstever@gmail.com Suicide Prevention, Text/Call: 988 https://afsp.org/ National Sexual Assault Hotline 1-800-656-4673 https://www.rainn.org/resources  

Jennifer and I have been doing this form of accessing the flipside for 8 years.  Every week for the past 8 years we've been getting together to see who we can speak with or talk to on the flipside. In terms of the process; Jennifer works with law enforcement agencies daily; she senses, sees, hears information and does her best to interpret what she is seeing, hearing.  When someone shows up that I knew, or she knew, it's easier to interpret what they're talking about.  In my case I try to ask them the same relative questions; "Who greeted you when you crossed over?" "Who are you hanging out with?" "Who were you surprised to see?" "What was the journey like?" "What would you like to tell your loved ones?" Sometimes the people who are on our podcast show up because of their connection to our moderator on the flipside, Luana Anders, my friend who passed away in my arms in 1996.  She began to visit me after that event, then members of my family; at some point I had to acknowledge that she still existed.  My journey into the FLIPSIDE (book and film) was to figure out how that was physically possible. After about 7 years of filming people using hypnotherapy or guided meditation to access the same hallmarks, Jennifer showed up to demonstrate how talking to someone who was onstage is like having a cellphone to those who are offstage. And here we are 8 years later. Occasionally people show up that I knew well, or worked with, or someone like this week's guest who I knew for 40 years.  I heard from his family prior to the podcast about his passing, and they asked me to let them know if I heard anything from him on the flipside. So in that vein we offer this interview with someone who stepped offstage, who is not gone, just not here.  He talks about things only I know about - in many instances referring to people Jennifer doesn't know, but I do. To those who have lost a dear friend, a dear family member, someone close to their hearts, it can be difficult to listen to something like this - grief can be overwhelming. The desire to dismiss something like this is strong - and of course this kind of investigation isn't for everyone. But after doing this for eight years, I can think of no other podcast we've done that is so spot on in terms of what we learn from someone I loved dearly who is no longer on the planet, but has gone back "home" to be with friends and family. In the books BACKSTAGE PASS TO THE FLIPSIDE, (1-3) and TUNING INTO THE AFTERLIFE; there are the transcripts of the sessions with the late actor, great skeptic Harry Dean Stanton who was a dear friend of Fred Roos and Luana Anders. In those sessions, I asked Harry "at what point did you realize there was an afterlife?" and he told us that at first he thought he was dreaming - had "entered a happy memory" of his trip with Fred Roos and Luana Anders to the Monterey Pop festival in 1967 (where they arrived to see Jimi Hendrix.)  I know this is accurate, because in Harry's account from the flipside, I confirmed everything he said with Fred Roos, who was in the car with Luana and Harry Dean - something I wasn't aware of, but he was. And then, Fred described the same "soft landing" they had constructed for him. The memory of those fairgrounds, of being young and seeing one's pals offstage. This is about as mind bending a session as we've ever done.  As noted, Jennifer and I will be at the Contact in the Desert conference this coming week; I appear on Friday the 31st at 10:30, then Jennifer and I appear together on Saturday June 1st at 10:30 am in the Independence Room, and then I will be speaking solo about "filters on the brain" on Sunday at 2:30 at the event. Hope some can make it - or tune in via their website at ContactIntheDesert.com Again, I'm sorry to have a close friend of mine leave the planet after a fantastic 90 year run - and for some listening in the names of the people I ask him to talk about are easy to discern for those who might have known the great, Oscar winning producer Fred Roos. For those who don't know the references, that's okay as well, because the important part is to realize they aren't gone; they just aren't here. I ask for a message for his life long pal Francis: "Tell Francis that there's nothing to be afraid of; if I can make it to heaven anyone can." (Fred's dry sense of humor.)  I ask about his life long pal Jack:  Laughing, he says "He's not going to heaven." Then "He needs to make that film about his life with his daughter Lorraine." For his pal the writer Robert; "Tell him I'm still talking to him, that I loved our conversations recently - they talked about their friend (Nick Coster)   They talked about life after death." For his friend Sofia, he says, "I can't wait to see everything that she's doing. We're celebrating her dad over here.” (Meaning they're celebrating her father's recent successes on the flipside.) To his friend Harrison; “He's not going anywhere. He needs to stop being such a hypochondriac. He gets anxiety and he should relax."  Any comment about his friend   George? He says, "Lucky. Lucky son of a gun. " (Jennifer asks "Did he get married again?" Fred says, "It couldn't have happened to a better guy, finding love again." To his friend Mike Figgis: "Thank you. Whatever went sideways he'd figure it out – so appreciative of all the work that he did." Those are verbatim messages from a loved one offstage to his friends back onstage. Those who know Fred will know who he's referring to. But it serves to remind everyone; Fred is asked about advice he'd give someone on the planet; he says to not take any day for granted.  I'm sharing this because I know it will help some people, it's helped me to realize that our loved ones are not gone; they're just not here.  These past two podcasts, with friends Roger Corman, Fred Roos and their mutual friend Eleanor represent a comprehensive chat with people that I personally knew who are offstage and confirm what these past fifteen years of filming people offstage demonstrate. Anyone can do this. Anyone can access their loved ones offstage.  We can do so with mediumship, guided meditation or hypnotherapy.  It's healing and helpful to know about the process in some small detail - but that everyone leaves the stage and returns home. Hope this helps. 

This week Jonathan sits down with Henry Diltz, the legendary photographer who brought us photos from Woodstock, Monterey Pop, and many other festivals, and shots for over 200 album covers. Henry and Jonathan talk about his life in Laurel Canyon and his work with The Doors and many other artists. Please subscribe and give us a review wherever you get your podcasts.  The Jam is hosted and produced by Jonathan Shank. Produced by Matt Dwyer and RJ Bee of Osiris Media. Audio Production by Matt Dwyer. Recorded at Sony in Los Angeles. Music by Amar Sastry. Thanks for listening, and see you next time.

Janis Joplin was an iconic rock and blues singer whose raw talent and unapologetic spirit left an indelible mark on the music world. From her humble beginnings in Port Arthur, Texas, to her rise to fame as the queen of psychedelic rock in the 1960s, Janis Joplin's journey is one of resilience, passion, and ultimately tragedy.  You'll discover the struggles Janis faced as a woman in a male-dominated industry, her battles with addiction, and the profound impact of her music on a generation hungry for authenticity and rebellion. We'll also examine the legacy she left behind, from her unforgettable performances at Woodstock and Monterey Pop to her tragic death at the age of 27. Follow us on IG: @homance_chronicles Connect with us: linktr.ee/homance Send us a Hoe of History request: homancepodcast@gmail.com

Sam Paddor and David Bennett Cohen discuss David's work with Country Joe and the Fish as well as his experience in the Bay Area music scene in the 1960s.My Back Pages Website:mybackpages.orgDavid Bennett Cohen's Website:davidbennettcohen.com

Episode 169 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Piece of My Heart" and the short, tragic life of Janis Joplin. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode available, on "Spinning Wheel" by Blood, Sweat & Tears. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources There are two Mixcloud mixes this time. As there are so many songs by Big Brother and the Holding Company and Janis Joplin excerpted, and Mixcloud won't allow more than four songs by the same artist in any mix, I've had to post the songs not in quite the same order in which they appear in the podcast. But the mixes are here — one, two . For information on Janis Joplin I used three biographies -- Scars of Sweet Paradise by Alice Echols, Janis: Her Life and Music by Holly George-Warren, and Buried Alive by Myra Friedman. I also referred to the chapter '“Being Good Isn't Always Easy": Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, Dusty Springfield, and the Color of Soul' in Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination by Jack Hamilton. Some information on Bessie Smith came from Bessie Smith by Jackie Kay, a book I can't really recommend given the lack of fact-checking, and Bessie by Chris Albertson. I also referred to Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday by Angela Y. Davis And the best place to start with Joplin's music is this five-CD box, which contains both Big Brother and the Holding Company albums she was involved in, plus her two studio albums and bonus tracks. 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 contains discussion of drug addiction and overdose, alcoholism, mental illness, domestic abuse, child abandonment, and racism. If those subjects are likely to cause you upset, you may want to check the transcript or skip this one rather than listen. Also, a subject I should probably say a little more about in this intro because I know I have inadvertently caused upset to at least one listener with this in the past. When it comes to Janis Joplin, it is *impossible* to talk about her without discussing her issues with her weight and self-image. The way I write often involves me paraphrasing the opinions of the people I'm writing about, in a mode known as close third person, and sometimes that means it can look like I am stating those opinions as my own, and sometimes things I say in that mode which *I* think are obviously meant in context to be critiques of those attitudes can appear to others to be replicating them. At least once, I have seriously upset a fat listener when talking about issues related to weight in this manner. I'm going to try to be more careful here, but just in case, I'm going to say before I begin that I think fatphobia is a pernicious form of bigotry, as bad as any other form of bigotry. I'm fat myself and well aware of how systemic discrimination affects fat people. I also think more generally that the pressure put on women to look a particular way is pernicious and disgusting in ways I can't even begin to verbalise, and causes untold harm. If *ANYTHING* I say in this episode comes across as sounding otherwise, that's because I haven't expressed myself clearly enough. Like all people, Janis Joplin had negative characteristics, and at times I'm going to say things that are critical of those. But when it comes to anything to do with her weight or her appearance, if *anything* I say sounds critical of her, rather than of a society that makes women feel awful for their appearance, it isn't meant to. Anyway, on with the show. On January the nineteenth, 1943, Seth Joplin typed up a letter to his wife Dorothy, which read “I wish to tender my congratulations on the anniversary of your successful completion of your production quota for the nine months ending January 19, 1943. I realize that you passed through a period of inflation such as you had never before known—yet, in spite of this, you met your goal by your supreme effort during the early hours of January 19, a good three weeks ahead of schedule.” As you can probably tell from that message, the Joplin family were a strange mixture of ultraconformism and eccentricity, and those two opposing forces would dominate the personality of their firstborn daughter for the whole of her life.  Seth Joplin was a respected engineer at Texaco, where he worked for forty years, but he had actually dropped out of engineering school before completing his degree. His favourite pastime when he wasn't at work was to read -- he was a voracious reader -- and to listen to classical music, which would often move him to tears, but he had also taught himself to make bathtub gin during prohibition, and smoked cannabis. Dorothy, meanwhile, had had the possibility of a singing career before deciding to settle down and become a housewife, and was known for having a particularly beautiful soprano voice. Both were, by all accounts, fiercely intelligent people, but they were also as committed as anyone to the ideals of the middle-class family even as they chafed against its restrictions. Like her mother, young Janis had a beautiful soprano voice, and she became a soloist in her church choir, but after the age of six, she was not encouraged to sing much. Dorothy had had a thyroid operation which destroyed her singing voice, and the family got rid of their piano soon after (different sources say that this was either because Dorothy found her daughter's singing painful now that she couldn't sing herself, or because Seth was upset that his wife could no longer sing. Either seems plausible.) Janis was pushed to be a high-achiever -- she was given a library card as soon as she could write her name, and encouraged to use it, and she was soon advanced in school, skipping a couple of grades. She was also by all accounts a fiercely talented painter, and her parents paid for art lessons. From everything one reads about her pre-teen years, she was a child prodigy who was loved by everyone and who was clearly going to be a success of some kind. Things started to change when she reached her teenage years. Partly, this was just her getting into rock and roll music, which her father thought a fad -- though even there, she differed from her peers. She loved Elvis, but when she heard "Hound Dog", she loved it so much that she tracked down a copy of Big Mama Thornton's original, and told her friends she preferred that: [Excerpt: Big Mama Thornton, "Hound Dog"] Despite this, she was still also an exemplary student and overachiever. But by the time she turned fourteen, things started to go very wrong for her. Partly this was just down to her relationship with her father changing -- she adored him, but he became more distant from his daughters as they grew into women. But also, puberty had an almost wholly negative effect on her, at least by the standards of that time and place. She put on weight (which, again, I do not think is a negative thing, but she did, and so did everyone around her), she got a bad case of acne which didn't ever really go away, and she also didn't develop breasts particularly quickly -- which, given that she was a couple of years younger than the other people in the same classes at school, meant she stood out even more. In the mid-sixties, a doctor apparently diagnosed her as having a "hormone imbalance" -- something that got to her as a possible explanation for why she was, to quote from a letter she wrote then, "not really a woman or enough of one or something." She wondered if "maybe something as simple as a pill could have helped out or even changed that part of me I call ME and has been so messed up.” I'm not a doctor and even if I were, diagnosing historical figures is an unethical thing to do, but certainly the acne, weight gain, and mental health problems she had are all consistent with PCOS, the most common endocrine disorder among women, and it seems likely given what the doctor told her that this was the cause. But at the time all she knew was that she was different, and that in the eyes of her fellow students she had gone from being pretty to being ugly. She seems to have been a very trusting, naive, person who was often the brunt of jokes but who desperately needed to be accepted, and it became clear that her appearance wasn't going to let her fit into the conformist society she was being brought up in, while her high intelligence, low impulse control, and curiosity meant she couldn't even fade into the background. This left her one other option, and she decided that she would deliberately try to look and act as different from everyone else as possible. That way, it would be a conscious choice on her part to reject the standards of her fellow pupils, rather than her being rejected by them. She started to admire rebels. She became a big fan of Jerry Lee Lewis, whose music combined the country music she'd grown up hearing in Texas, the R&B she liked now, and the rebellious nature she was trying to cultivate: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On"] When Lewis' career was derailed by his marriage to his teenage cousin, Joplin wrote an angry letter to Time magazine complaining that they had mistreated him in their coverage. But as with so many people of her generation, her love of rock and roll music led her first to the blues and then to folk, and she soon found herself listening to Odetta: [Excerpt: Odetta, "Muleskinner Blues"] One of her first experiences of realising she could gain acceptance from her peers by singing was when she was hanging out with the small group of Bohemian teenagers she was friendly with, and sang an Odetta song, mimicking her voice exactly. But young Janis Joplin was listening to an eclectic range of folk music, and could mimic more than just Odetta. For all that her later vocal style was hugely influenced by Odetta and by other Black singers like Big Mama Thornton and Etta James, her friends in her late teens and early twenties remember her as a vocal chameleon with an achingly pure soprano, who would more often than Odetta be imitating the great Appalachian traditional folk singer Jean Ritchie: [Excerpt: Jean Ritchie, "Lord Randall"] She was, in short, trying her best to become a Beatnik, despite not having any experience of that subculture other than what she read in books -- though she *did* read about them in books, devouring things like Kerouac's On The Road. She came into conflict with her mother, who didn't understand what was happening to her daughter, and who tried to get family counselling to understand what was going on. Her father, who seemed to relate more to Janis, but who was more quietly eccentric, put an end to that, but Janis would still for the rest of her life talk about how her mother had taken her to doctors who thought she was going to end up "either in jail or an insane asylum" to use her words. From this point on, and for the rest of her life, she was torn between a need for approval from her family and her peers, and a knowledge that no matter what she did she couldn't fit in with normal societal expectations. In high school she was a member of the Future Nurses of America, the Future Teachers of America, the Art Club, and Slide Rule Club, but she also had a reputation as a wild girl, and as sexually active (even though by all accounts at this point she was far less so than most of the so-called "good girls" – but her later activity was in part because she felt that if she was going to have that reputation anyway she might as well earn it). She also was known to express radical opinions, like that segregation was wrong, an opinion that the other students in her segregated Texan school didn't even think was wrong, but possibly some sort of sign of mental illness. Her final High School yearbook didn't contain a single other student's signature. And her initial choice of university, Lamar State College of Technology, was not much better. In the next town over, and attended by many of the same students, it had much the same attitudes as the school she'd left. Almost the only long-term effect her initial attendance at university had on her was a negative one -- she found there was another student at the college who was better at painting. Deciding that if she wasn't going to be the best at something she didn't want to do it at all, she more or less gave up on painting at that point. But there was one positive. One of the lecturers at Lamar was Francis Edward "Ab" Abernethy, who would in the early seventies go on to become the Secretary and Editor of the Texas Folklore Society, and was also a passionate folk musician, playing double bass in string bands. Abernethy had a great collection of blues 78s. and it was through this collection that Janis first discovered classic blues, and in particular Bessie Smith: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Black Mountain Blues"] A couple of episodes ago, we had a long look at the history of the music that now gets called "the blues" -- the music that's based around guitars, and generally involves a solo male vocalist, usually Black during its classic period. At the time that music was being made though it wouldn't have been thought of as "the blues" with no modifiers by most people who were aware of it. At the start, even the songs they were playing weren't thought of as blues by the male vocalist/guitarists who played them -- they called the songs they played "reels". The music released by people like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Son House, Robert Johnson, Kokomo Arnold and so on was thought of as blues music, and people would understand and agree with a phrase like "Lonnie Johnson is a blues singer", but it wasn't the first thing people thought of when they talked about "the blues". Until relatively late -- probably some time in the 1960s -- if you wanted to talk about blues music made by Black men with guitars and only that music, you talked about "country blues". If you thought about "the blues", with no qualifiers, you thought about a rather different style of music, one that white record collectors started later to refer to as "classic blues" to differentiate it from what they were now calling "the blues". Nowadays of course if you say "classic blues", most people will think you mean Muddy Waters or John Lee Hooker, people who were contemporary at the time those white record collectors were coming up with their labels, and so that style of music gets referred to as "vaudeville blues", or as "classic female blues": [Excerpt: Mamie Smith, "Crazy Blues"] What we just heard was the first big blues hit performed by a Black person, from 1920, and as we discussed in the episode on "Crossroads" that revolutionised the whole record industry when it came out. The song was performed by Mamie Smith, a vaudeville performer, and was originally titled "Harlem Blues" by its writer, Perry Bradford, before he changed the title to "Crazy Blues" to get it to a wider audience. Bradford was an important figure in the vaudeville scene, though other than being the credited writer of "Keep A-Knockin'" he's little known these days. He was a Black musician and grew up playing in minstrel shows (the history of minstrelsy is a topic for another day, but it's more complicated than the simple image of blackface that we are aware of today -- though as with many "more complicated than that" things it is, also the simple image of blackface we're aware of). He was the person who persuaded OKeh records that there would be a market for music made by Black people that sounded Black (though as we're going to see in this episode, what "sounding Black" means is a rather loaded question). "Crazy Blues" was the result, and it was a massive hit, even though it was marketed specifically towards Black listeners: [Excerpt: Mamie Smith, "Crazy Blues"] The big stars of the early years of recorded blues were all making records in the shadow of "Crazy Blues", and in the case of its very biggest stars, they were working very much in the same mould. The two most important blues stars of the twenties both got their start in vaudeville, and were both women. Ma Rainey, like Mamie Smith, first performed in minstrel shows, but where Mamie Smith's early records had her largely backed by white musicians, Rainey was largely backed by Black musicians, including on several tracks Louis Armstrong: [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, "See See Rider"] Rainey's band was initially led by Thomas Dorsey, one of the most important men in American music, who we've talked about before in several episodes, including the last one. He was possibly the single most important figure in two different genres -- hokum music, when he, under the name "Georgia Tom" recorded "It's Tight Like That" with Tampa Red: [Excerpt: Tampa Red and Georgia Tom, "It's Tight Like That"] And of course gospel music, which to all intents and purposes he invented, and much of whose repertoire he wrote: [Excerpt: Mahalia Jackson, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord"] When Dorsey left Rainey's band, as we discussed right back in episode five, he was replaced by a female pianist, Lil Henderson. The blues was a woman's genre. And Ma Rainey was, by preference, a woman's woman, though she was married to a man: [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, "Prove it on Me"] So was the biggest star of the classic blues era, who was originally mentored by Rainey. Bessie Smith, like Rainey, was a queer woman who had relationships with men but was far more interested in other women.  There were stories that Bessie Smith actually got her start in the business by being kidnapped by Ma Rainey, and forced into performing on the same bills as her in the vaudeville show she was touring in, and that Rainey taught Smith to sing blues in the process. In truth, Rainey mentored Smith more in stagecraft and the ways of the road than in singing, and neither woman was only a blues singer, though both had huge success with their blues records.  Indeed, since Rainey was already in the show, Smith was initially hired as a dancer rather than a singer, and she also worked as a male impersonator. But Smith soon branched out on her own -- from the beginning she was obviously a star. The great jazz clarinettist Sidney Bechet later said of her "She had this trouble in her, this thing that would not let her rest sometimes, a meanness that came and took her over. But what she had was alive … Bessie, she just wouldn't let herself be; it seemed she couldn't let herself be." Bessie Smith was signed by Columbia Records in 1923, as part of the rush to find and record as many Black women blues singers as possible. Her first recording session produced "Downhearted Blues", which became, depending on which sources you read, either the biggest-selling blues record since "Crazy Blues" or the biggest-selling blues record ever, full stop, selling three quarters of a million copies in the six months after its release: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Downhearted Blues"] Smith didn't make royalties off record sales, only making a flat fee, but she became the most popular Black performer of the 1920s. Columbia signed her to an exclusive contract, and she became so rich that she would literally travel between gigs on her own private train. She lived an extravagant life in every way, giving lavishly to her friends and family, but also drinking extraordinary amounts of liquor, having regular affairs, and also often physically or verbally attacking those around her. By all accounts she was not a comfortable person to be around, and she seemed to be trying to fit an entire lifetime into every moment. From 1923 through 1929 she had a string of massive hits. She recorded material in a variety of styles, including the dirty blues: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Empty Bed Blues] And with accompanists like Louis Armstrong: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith with Louis Armstrong, "Cold in Hand Blues"] But the music for which she became best known, and which sold the best, was when she sang about being mistreated by men, as on one of her biggest hits, "'Tain't Nobody's Biz-Ness if I Do" -- and a warning here, I'm going to play a clip of the song, which treats domestic violence in a way that may be upsetting: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "'Tain't Nobody's Biz-Ness if I Do"] That kind of material can often seem horrifying to today's listeners -- and quite correctly so, as domestic violence is a horrifying thing -- and it sounds entirely too excusing of the man beating her up for anyone to find it comfortable listening. But the Black feminist scholar Angela Davis has made a convincing case that while these records, and others by Smith's contemporaries, can't reasonably be considered to be feminist, they *are* at the very least more progressive than they now seem, in that they were, even if excusing it, pointing to a real problem which was otherwise left unspoken. And that kind of domestic violence and abuse *was* a real problem, including in Smith's own life. By all accounts she was terrified of her husband, Jack Gee, who would frequently attack her because of her affairs with other people, mostly women. But she was still devastated when he left her for a younger woman, not only because he had left her, but also because he kidnapped their adopted son and had him put into a care home, falsely claiming she had abused him. Not only that, but before Jack left her closest friend had been Jack's niece Ruby and after the split she never saw Ruby again -- though after her death Ruby tried to have a blues career as "Ruby Smith", taking her aunt's surname and recording a few tracks with Sammy Price, the piano player who worked with Sister Rosetta Tharpe: [Excerpt: Ruby Smith with Sammy Price, "Make Me Love You"] The same month, May 1929, that Gee left her, Smith recorded what was to become her last big hit, and most well-known song, "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out": [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out"] And that could have been the theme for the rest of her life. A few months after that record came out, the Depression hit, pretty much killing the market for blues records. She carried on recording until 1931, but the records weren't selling any more. And at the same time, the talkies came in in the film industry, which along with the Depression ended up devastating the vaudeville audience. Her earnings were still higher than most, but only a quarter of what they had been a year or two earlier. She had one last recording session in 1933, produced by John Hammond for OKeh Records, where she showed that her style had developed over the years -- it was now incorporating the newer swing style, and featured future swing stars Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden in the backing band: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Gimme a Pigfoot"] Hammond was not hugely impressed with the recordings, preferring her earlier records, and they would be the last she would ever make. She continued as a successful, though no longer record-breaking, live act until 1937, when she and her common-law husband, Lionel Hampton's uncle Richard Morgan, were in a car crash. Morgan escaped, but Smith died of her injuries and was buried on October the fourth 1937. Ten thousand people came to her funeral, but she was buried in an unmarked grave -- she was still legally married to Gee, even though they'd been separated for eight years, and while he supposedly later became rich from songwriting royalties from some of her songs (most of her songs were written by other people, but she wrote a few herself) he refused to pay for a headstone for her. Indeed on more than one occasion he embezzled money that had been raised by other people to provide a headstone. Bessie Smith soon became Joplin's favourite singer of all time, and she started trying to copy her vocals. But other than discovering Smith's music, Joplin seems to have had as terrible a time at university as at school, and soon dropped out and moved back in with her parents. She went to business school for a short while, where she learned some secretarial skills, and then she moved west, going to LA where two of her aunts lived, to see if she could thrive better in a big West Coast city than she did in small-town Texas. Soon she moved from LA to Venice Beach, and from there had a brief sojourn in San Francisco, where she tried to live out her beatnik fantasies at a time when the beatnik culture was starting to fall apart. She did, while she was there, start smoking cannabis, though she never got a taste for that drug, and took Benzedrine and started drinking much more heavily than she had before. She soon lost her job, moved back to Texas, and re-enrolled at the same college she'd been at before. But now she'd had a taste of real Bohemian life -- she'd been singing at coffee houses, and having affairs with both men and women -- and soon she decided to transfer to the University of Texas at Austin. At this point, Austin was very far from the cultural centre it has become in recent decades, and it was still a straitlaced Texan town, but it was far less so than Port Arthur, and she soon found herself in a folk group, the Waller Creek Boys. Janis would play autoharp and sing, sometimes Bessie Smith covers, but also the more commercial country and folk music that was popular at the time, like "Silver Threads and Golden Needles", a song that had originally been recorded by Wanda Jackson but at that time was a big hit for Dusty Springfield's group The Springfields: [Excerpt: The Waller Creek Boys, "Silver Threads and Golden Needles"] But even there, Joplin didn't fit in comfortably. The venue where the folk jams were taking place was a segregated venue, as everywhere around Austin was. And she was enough of a misfit that the campus newspaper did an article on her headlined "She Dares to Be Different!", which read in part "She goes barefooted when she feels like it, wears Levi's to class because they're more comfortable, and carries her Autoharp with her everywhere she goes so that in case she gets the urge to break out into song it will be handy." There was a small group of wannabe-Beatniks, including Chet Helms, who we've mentioned previously in the Grateful Dead episode, Gilbert Shelton, who went on to be a pioneer of alternative comics and create the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, and Shelton's partner in Rip-Off Press, Dave Moriarty, but for the most part the atmosphere in Austin was only slightly better for Janis than it had been in Port Arthur. The final straw for her came when in an annual charity fundraiser joke competition to find the ugliest man on campus, someone nominated her for the "award". She'd had enough of Texas. She wanted to go back to California. She and Chet Helms, who had dropped out of the university earlier and who, like her, had already spent some time on the West Coast, decided to hitch-hike together to San Francisco. Before leaving, she made a recording for her ex-girlfriend Julie Paul, a country and western musician, of a song she'd written herself. It's recorded in what many say was Janis' natural voice -- a voice she deliberately altered in performance in later years because, she would tell people, she didn't think there was room for her singing like that in an industry that already had Joan Baez and Judy Collins. In her early years she would alternate between singing like this and doing her imitations of Black women, but the character of Janis Joplin who would become famous never sang like this. It may well be the most honest thing that she ever recorded, and the most revealing of who she really was: [Excerpt: Janis Joplin, "So Sad to Be Alone"] Joplin and Helms made it to San Francisco, and she started performing at open-mic nights and folk clubs around the Bay Area, singing in her Bessie Smith and Odetta imitation voice, and sometimes making a great deal of money by sounding different from the wispier-voiced women who were the norm at those venues. The two friends parted ways, and she started performing with two other folk musicians, Larry Hanks and Roger Perkins, and she insisted that they would play at least one Bessie Smith song at every performance: [Excerpt: Janis Joplin, Larry Hanks, and Roger Perkins, "Black Mountain Blues (live in San Francisco)"] Often the trio would be joined by Billy Roberts, who at that time had just started performing the song that would make his name, "Hey Joe", and Joplin was soon part of the folk scene in the Bay Area, and admired by Dino Valenti, David Crosby, and Jerry Garcia among others. She also sang a lot with Jorma Kaukonnen, and recordings of the two of them together have circulated for years: [Excerpt: Janis Joplin and Jorma Kaukonnen, "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out"] Through 1963, 1964, and early 1965 Joplin ping-ponged from coast to coast, spending time in the Bay Area, then Greenwich Village, dropping in on her parents then back to the Bay Area, and she started taking vast quantities of methamphetamine. Even before moving to San Francisco she had been an occasional user of amphetamines – at the time they were regularly prescribed to students as study aids during exam periods, and she had also been taking them to try to lose some of the weight she always hated. But while she was living in San Francisco she became dependent on the drug. At one point her father was worried enough about her health to visit her in San Francisco, where she managed to fool him that she was more or less OK. But she looked to him for reassurance that things would get better for her, and he couldn't give it to her. He told her about a concept that he called the "Saturday night swindle", the idea that you work all week so you can go out and have fun on Saturday in the hope that that will make up for everything else, but that it never does. She had occasional misses with what would have been lucky breaks -- at one point she was in a motorcycle accident just as record labels were interested in signing her, and by the time she got out of the hospital the chance had gone. She became engaged to another speed freak, one who claimed to be an engineer and from a well-off background, but she was becoming severely ill from what was by now a dangerous amphetamine habit, and in May 1965 she decided to move back in with her parents, get clean, and have a normal life. Her new fiance was going to do the same, and they were going to have the conformist life her parents had always wanted, and which she had always wanted to want. Surely with a husband who loved her she could find a way to fit in and just be normal. She kicked the addiction, and wrote her fiance long letters describing everything about her family and the new normal life they were going to have together, and they show her painfully trying to be optimistic about the future, like one where she described her family to him: "My mother—Dorothy—worries so and loves her children dearly. Republican and Methodist, very sincere, speaks in clichés which she really means and is very good to people. (She thinks you have a lovely voice and is terribly prepared to like you.) My father—richer than when I knew him and kind of embarrassed about it—very well read—history his passion—quiet and very excited to have me home because I'm bright and we can talk (about antimatter yet—that impressed him)! I keep telling him how smart you are and how proud I am of you.…" She went back to Lamar, her mother started sewing her a wedding dress, and for much of the year she believed her fiance was going to be her knight in shining armour. But as it happened, the fiance in question was described by everyone else who knew him as a compulsive liar and con man, who persuaded her father to give him money for supposed medical tests before the wedding, but in reality was apparently married to someone else and having a baby with a third woman. After the engagement was broken off, she started performing again around the coffeehouses in Austin and Houston, and she started to realise the possibilities of rock music for her kind of performance. The missing clue came from a group from Austin who she became very friendly with, the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, and the way their lead singer Roky Erickson would wail and yell: [Excerpt: The 13th Floor Elevators, "You're Gonna Miss Me (live)"] If, as now seemed inevitable, Janis was going to make a living as a performer, maybe she should start singing rock music, because it seemed like there was money in it. There was even some talk of her singing with the Elevators. But then an old friend came to Austin from San Francisco with word from Chet Helms. A blues band had formed, and were looking for a singer, and they remembered her from the coffee houses. Would she like to go back to San Francisco and sing with them? In the time she'd been away, Helms had become hugely prominent in the San Francisco music scene, which had changed radically. A band from the area called the Charlatans had been playing a fake-Victorian saloon called the Red Dog in nearby Nevada, and had become massive with the people who a few years earlier had been beatniks: [Excerpt: The Charlatans, "32-20"] When their residency at the Red Dog had finished, several of the crowd who had been regulars there had become a collective of sorts called the Family Dog, and Helms had become their unofficial leader. And there's actually a lot packed into that choice of name. As we'll see in a few future episodes, a lot of West Coast hippies eventually started calling their collectives and communes families. This started as a way to get round bureaucracy -- if a helpful welfare officer put down that the unrelated people living in a house together were a family, suddenly they could get food stamps. As with many things, of course, the label then affected how people thought about themselves, and one thing that's very notable about the San Francisco scene hippies in particular is that they are some of the first people to make a big deal about what we now  call "found family" or "family of choice". But it's also notable how often the hippie found families took their model from the only families these largely middle-class dropouts had ever known, and structured themselves around men going out and doing the work -- selling dope or panhandling or being rock musicians or shoplifting -- with the women staying at home doing the housework. The Family Dog started promoting shows, with the intention of turning San Francisco into "the American Liverpool", and soon Helms was rivalled only by Bill Graham as the major promoter of rock shows in the Bay Area. And now he wanted Janis to come back and join this new band. But Janis was worried. She was clean now. She drank far too much, but she wasn't doing any other drugs. She couldn't go back to San Francisco and risk getting back on methamphetamine. She needn't worry about that, she was told, nobody in San Francisco did speed any more, they were all on LSD -- a drug she hated and so wasn't in any danger from. Reassured, she made the trip back to San Francisco, to join Big Brother and the Holding Company. Big Brother and the Holding Company were the epitome of San Francisco acid rock at the time. They were the house band at the Avalon Ballroom, which Helms ran, and their first ever gig had been at the Trips Festival, which we talked about briefly in the Grateful Dead episode. They were known for being more imaginative than competent -- lead guitarist James Gurley was often described as playing parts that were influenced by John Cage, but was equally often, and equally accurately, described as not actually being able to keep his guitar in tune because he was too stoned. But they were drawing massive crowds with their instrumental freak-out rock music. Helms thought they needed a singer, and he had remembered Joplin, who a few of the group had seen playing the coffee houses. He decided she would be perfect for them, though Joplin wasn't so sure. She thought it was worth a shot, but as she wrote to her parents before meeting the group "Supposed to rehearse w/ the band this afternoon, after that I guess I'll know whether I want to stay & do that for awhile. Right now my position is ambivalent—I'm glad I came, nice to see the city, a few friends, but I'm not at all sold on the idea of becoming the poor man's Cher.” In that letter she also wrote "I'm awfully sorry to be such a disappointment to you. I understand your fears at my coming here & must admit I share them, but I really do think there's an awfully good chance I won't blow it this time." The band she met up with consisted of lead guitarist James Gurley, bass player Peter Albin, rhythm player Sam Andrew, and drummer David Getz.  To start with, Peter Albin sang lead on most songs, with Joplin adding yelps and screams modelled on those of Roky Erickson, but in her first gig with the band she bowled everyone over with her lead vocal on the traditional spiritual "Down on Me", which would remain a staple of their live act, as in this live recording from 1968: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Down on Me (Live 1968)"] After that first gig in June 1966, it was obvious that Joplin was going to be a star, and was going to be the group's main lead vocalist. She had developed a whole new stage persona a million miles away from her folk performances. As Chet Helms said “Suddenly this person who would stand upright with her fists clenched was all over the stage. Roky Erickson had modeled himself after the screaming style of Little Richard, and Janis's initial stage presence came from Roky, and ultimately Little Richard. It was a very different Janis.” Joplin would always claim to journalists that her stage persona was just her being herself and natural, but she worked hard on every aspect of her performance, and far from the untrained emotional outpouring she always suggested, her vocal performances were carefully calculated pastiches of her influences -- mostly Bessie Smith, but also Big Mama Thornton, Odetta, Etta James, Tina Turner, and Otis Redding. That's not to say that those performances weren't an authentic expression of part of herself -- they absolutely were. But the ethos that dominated San Francisco in the mid-sixties prized self-expression over technical craft, and so Joplin had to portray herself as a freak of nature who just had to let all her emotions out, a wild woman, rather than someone who carefully worked out every nuance of her performances. Joplin actually got the chance to meet one of her idols when she discovered that Willie Mae Thornton was now living and regularly performing in the Bay Area. She and some of her bandmates saw Big Mama play a small jazz club, where she performed a song she wouldn't release on a record for another two years: [Excerpt: Big Mama Thornton, "Ball 'n' Chain"] Janis loved the song and scribbled down the lyrics, then went backstage to ask Big Mama if Big Brother could cover the song. She gave them her blessing, but told them "don't" -- and here she used a word I can't use with a clean rating -- "it up". The group all moved in together, communally, with their partners -- those who had them. Janis was currently single, having dumped her most recent boyfriend after discovering him shooting speed, as she was still determined to stay clean. But she was rapidly discovering that the claim that San Franciscans no longer used much speed had perhaps not been entirely true, as for example Sam Andrew's girlfriend went by the nickname Speedfreak Rita. For now, Janis was still largely clean, but she did start drinking more. Partly this was because of a brief fling with Pigpen from the Grateful Dead, who lived nearby. Janis liked Pigpen as someone else on the scene who didn't much like psychedelics or cannabis -- she didn't like drugs that made her think more, but only drugs that made her able to *stop* thinking (her love of amphetamines doesn't seem to fit this pattern, but a small percentage of people have a different reaction to amphetamine-type stimulants, perhaps she was one of those). Pigpen was a big drinker of Southern Comfort -- so much so that it would kill him within a few years -- and Janis started joining him. Her relationship with Pigpen didn't last long, but the two would remain close, and she would often join the Grateful Dead on stage over the years to duet with him on "Turn On Your Lovelight": [Excerpt: Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead, "Turn on Your Lovelight"] But within two months of joining the band, Janis nearly left. Paul Rothchild of Elektra Records came to see the group live, and was impressed by their singer, but not by the rest of the band. This was something that would happen again and again over the group's career. The group were all imaginative and creative -- they worked together on their arrangements and their long instrumental jams and often brought in very good ideas -- but they were not the most disciplined or technically skilled of musicians, even when you factored in their heavy drug use, and often lacked the skill to pull off their better ideas. They were hugely popular among the crowds at the Avalon Ballroom, who were on the group's chemical wavelength, but Rothchild was not impressed -- as he was, in general, unimpressed with psychedelic freakouts. He was already of the belief in summer 1966 that the fashion for extended experimental freak-outs would soon come to an end and that there would be a pendulum swing back towards more structured and melodic music. As we saw in the episode on The Band, he would be proved right in a little over a year, but being ahead of the curve he wanted to put together a supergroup that would be able to ride that coming wave, a group that would play old-fashioned blues. He'd got together Stefan Grossman, Steve Mann, and Taj Mahal, and he wanted Joplin to be the female vocalist for the group, dueting with Mahal. She attended one rehearsal, and the new group sounded great. Elektra Records offered to sign them, pay their rent while they rehearsed, and have a major promotional campaign for their first release. Joplin was very, very, tempted, and brought the subject up to her bandmates in Big Brother. They were devastated. They were a family! You don't leave your family! She was meant to be with them forever! They eventually got her to agree to put off the decision at least until after a residency they'd been booked for in Chicago, and she decided to give them the chance, writing to her parents "I decided to stay w/the group but still like to think about the other thing. Trying to figure out which is musically more marketable because my being good isn't enough, I've got to be in a good vehicle.” The trip to Chicago was a disaster. They found that the people of Chicago weren't hugely interested in seeing a bunch of white Californians play the blues, and that the Midwest didn't have the same Bohemian crowds that the coastal cities they were used to had, and so their freak-outs didn't go down well either. After two weeks of their four-week residency, the club owner stopped paying them because they were so unpopular, and they had no money to get home. And then they were approached by Bob Shad. (For those who know the film Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, the Bob Shad in that film is named after this one -- Judd Apatow, the film's director, is Shad's grandson) This Shad was a record producer, who had worked with people like Big Bill Broonzy, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, and Billy Eckstine over an eighteen-year career, and had recently set up a new label, Mainstream Records. He wanted to sign Big Brother and the Holding Company. They needed money and... well, it was a record contract! It was a contract that took half their publishing, paid them a five percent royalty on sales, and gave them no advance, but it was still a contract, and they'd get union scale for the first session. In that first session in Chicago, they recorded four songs, and strangely only one, "Down on Me", had a solo Janis vocal. Of the other three songs, Sam Andrew and Janis dueted on Sam's song "Call on Me", Albin sang lead on the group composition "Blindman", and Gurley and Janis sang a cover of "All Is Loneliness", a song originally by the avant-garde street musician Moondog: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "All is Loneliness"] The group weren't happy with the four songs they recorded -- they had to keep the songs to the length of a single, and the engineers made sure that the needles never went into the red, so their guitars sounded far more polite and less distorted than they were used to. Janis was fascinated by the overdubbing process, though, especially double-tracking, which she'd never tried before but which she turned out to be remarkably good at. And they were now signed to a contract, which meant that Janis wouldn't be leaving the group to go solo any time soon. The family were going to stay together. But on the group's return to San Francisco, Janis started doing speed again, encouraged by the people around the group, particularly Gurley's wife. By the time the group's first single, "Blindman" backed with "All is Loneliness", came out, she was an addict again. That initial single did nothing, but the group were fast becoming one of the most popular in the Bay Area, and almost entirely down to Janis' vocals and on-stage persona. Bob Shad had already decided in the initial session that while various band members had taken lead, Janis was the one who should be focused on as the star, and when they drove to LA for their second recording session it was songs with Janis leads that they focused on. At that second session, in which they recorded ten tracks in two days, the group recorded a mix of material including one of Janis' own songs, the blues track "Women is Losers", and a version of the old folk song "the Cuckoo Bird" rearranged by Albin. Again they had to keep the arrangements to two and a half minutes a track, with no extended soloing and a pop arrangement style, and the results sound a lot more like the other San Francisco bands, notably Jefferson Airplane, than like the version of the band that shows itself in their live performances: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Coo Coo"] After returning to San Francisco after the sessions, Janis went to see Otis Redding at the Fillmore, turning up several hours before the show started on all three nights to make sure she could be right at the front. One of the other audience members later recalled “It was more fascinating for me, almost, to watch Janis watching Otis, because you could tell that she wasn't just listening to him, she was studying something. There was some kind of educational thing going on there. I was jumping around like the little hippie girl I was, thinking This is so great! and it just stopped me in my tracks—because all of a sudden Janis drew you very deeply into what the performance was all about. Watching her watch Otis Redding was an education in itself.” Joplin would, for the rest of her life, always say that Otis Redding was her all-time favourite singer, and would say “I started singing rhythmically, and now I'm learning from Otis Redding to push a song instead of just sliding over it.” [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "I Can't Turn You Loose (live)"] At the start of 1967, the group moved out of the rural house they'd been sharing and into separate apartments around Haight-Ashbury, and they brought the new year in by playing a free show organised by the Hell's Angels, the violent motorcycle gang who at the time were very close with the proto-hippies in the Bay Area. Janis in particular always got on well with the Angels, whose drugs of choice, like hers, were speed and alcohol more than cannabis and psychedelics. Janis also started what would be the longest on-again off-again relationship she would ever have, with a woman named Peggy Caserta. Caserta had a primary partner, but that if anything added to her appeal for Joplin -- Caserta's partner Kimmie had previously been in a relationship with Joan Baez, and Joplin, who had an intense insecurity that made her jealous of any other female singer who had any success, saw this as in some way a validation both of her sexuality and, transitively, of her talent. If she was dating Baez's ex's lover, that in some way put her on a par with Baez, and when she told friends about Peggy, Janis would always slip that fact in. Joplin and Caserta would see each other off and on for the rest of Joplin's life, but they were never in a monogamous relationship, and Joplin had many other lovers over the years. The next of these was Country Joe McDonald of Country Joe and the Fish, who were just in the process of recording their first album Electric Music for the Mind and Body, when McDonald and Joplin first got together: [Excerpt: Country Joe and the Fish, "Grace"] McDonald would later reminisce about lying with Joplin, listening to one of the first underground FM radio stations, KMPX, and them playing a Fish track and a Big Brother track back to back. Big Brother's second single, the other two songs recorded in the Chicago session, had been released in early 1967, and the B-side, "Down on Me", was getting a bit of airplay in San Francisco and made the local charts, though it did nothing outside the Bay Area: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Down on Me"] Janis was unhappy with the record, though, writing to her parents and saying, “Our new record is out. We seem to be pretty dissatisfied w/it. I think we're going to try & get out of the record contract if we can. We don't feel that they know how to promote or engineer a record & every time we recorded for them, they get all our songs, which means we can't do them for another record company. But then if our new record does something, we'd change our mind. But somehow, I don't think it's going to." The band apparently saw a lawyer to see if they could get out of the contract with Mainstream, but they were told it was airtight. They were tied to Bob Shad no matter what for the next five years. Janis and McDonald didn't stay together for long -- they clashed about his politics and her greater fame -- but after they split, she asked him to write a song for her before they became too distant, and he obliged and recorded it on the Fish's next album: [Excerpt: Country Joe and the Fish, "Janis"] The group were becoming so popular by late spring 1967 that when Richard Lester, the director of the Beatles' films among many other classics, came to San Francisco to film Petulia, his follow-up to How I Won The War, he chose them, along with the Grateful Dead, to appear in performance segments in the film. But it would be another filmmaker that would change the course of the group's career irrevocably: [Excerpt: Scott McKenzie, "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)"] When Big Brother and the Holding Company played the Monterey Pop Festival, nobody had any great expectations. They were second on the bill on the Saturday, the day that had been put aside for the San Francisco acts, and they were playing in the early afternoon, after a largely unimpressive night before. They had a reputation among the San Francisco crowd, of course, but they weren't even as big as the Grateful Dead, Moby Grape or Country Joe and the Fish, let alone Jefferson Airplane. Monterey launched four careers to new heights, but three of the superstars it made -- Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, and the Who -- already had successful careers. Hendrix and the Who had had hits in the UK but not yet broken the US market, while Redding was massively popular with Black people but hadn't yet crossed over to a white audience. Big Brother and the Holding Company, on the other hand, were so unimportant that D.A. Pennebaker didn't even film their set -- their manager at the time had not wanted to sign over the rights to film their performance, something that several of the other acts had also refused -- and nobody had been bothered enough to make an issue of it. Pennebaker just took some crowd shots and didn't bother filming the band. The main thing he caught was Cass Elliot's open-mouthed astonishment at Big Brother's performance -- or rather at Janis Joplin's performance. The members of the group would later complain, not entirely inaccurately, that in the reviews of their performance at Monterey, Joplin's left nipple (the outline of which was apparently visible through her shirt, at least to the male reviewers who took an inordinate interest in such things) got more attention than her four bandmates combined. As Pennebaker later said “She came out and sang, and my hair stood on end. We were told we weren't allowed to shoot it, but I knew if we didn't have Janis in the film, the film would be a wash. Afterward, I said to Albert Grossman, ‘Talk to her manager or break his leg or whatever you have to do, because we've got to have her in this film. I can't imagine this film without this woman who I just saw perform.” Grossman had a talk with the organisers of the festival, Lou Adler and John Phillips, and they offered Big Brother a second spot, the next day, if they would allow their performance to be used in the film. The group agreed, after much discussion between Janis and Grossman, and against the wishes of their manager: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Ball and Chain (live at Monterey)"] They were now on Albert Grossman's radar. Or at least, Janis Joplin was. Joplin had always been more of a careerist than the other members of the group. They were in music to have a good time and to avoid working a straight job, and while some of them were more accomplished musicians than their later reputations would suggest -- Sam Andrew, in particular, was a skilled player and serious student of music -- they were fundamentally content with playing the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore and making five hundred dollars or so a week between them. Very good money for 1967, but nothing else. Joplin, on the other hand, was someone who absolutely craved success. She wanted to prove to her family that she wasn't a failure and that her eccentricity shouldn't stop them being proud of her; she was always, even at the depths of her addictions, fiscally prudent and concerned about her finances; and she had a deep craving for love. Everyone who talks about her talks about how she had an aching need at all times for approval, connection, and validation, which she got on stage more than she got anywhere else. The bigger the audience, the more they must love her. She'd made all her decisions thus far based on how to balance making music that she loved with commercial success, and this would continue to be the pattern for her in future. And so when journalists started to want to talk to her, even though up to that point Albin, who did most of the on-stage announcements, and Gurley, the lead guitarist, had considered themselves joint leaders of the band, she was eager. And she was also eager to get rid of their manager, who continued the awkward streak that had prevented their first performance at the Monterey Pop Festival from being filmed. The group had the chance to play the Hollywood Bowl -- Bill Graham was putting on a "San Francisco Sound" showcase there, featuring Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, and got their verbal agreement to play, but after Graham had the posters printed up, their manager refused to sign the contracts unless they were given more time on stage. The next day after that, they played Monterey again -- this time the Monterey Jazz Festival. A very different crowd to the Pop Festival still fell for Janis' performance -- and once again, the film being made of the event didn't include Big Brother's set because of their manager. While all this was going on, the group's recordings from the previous year were rushed out by Mainstream Records as an album, to poor reviews which complained it was nothing like the group's set at Monterey: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Bye Bye Baby"] They were going to need to get out of that contract and sign with somewhere better -- Clive Davis at Columbia Records was already encouraging them to sign with him -- but to do that, they needed a better manager. They needed Albert Grossman. Grossman was one of the best negotiators in the business at that point, but he was also someone who had a genuine love for the music his clients made.  And he had good taste -- he managed Odetta, who Janis idolised as a singer, and Bob Dylan, who she'd been a fan of since his first album came out. He was going to be the perfect manager for the group. But he had one condition though. His first wife had been a heroin addict, and he'd just been dealing with Mike Bloomfield's heroin habit. He had one absolutely ironclad rule, a dealbreaker that would stop him signing them -- they didn't use heroin, did they? Both Gurley and Joplin had used heroin on occasion -- Joplin had only just started, introduced to the drug by Gurley -- but they were only dabblers. They could give it up any time they wanted, right? Of course they could. They told him, in perfect sincerity, that the band didn't use heroin and it wouldn't be a problem. But other than that, Grossman was extremely flexible. He explained to the group at their first meeting that he took a higher percentage than other managers, but that he would also make them more money than other managers -- if money was what they wanted. He told them that they needed to figure out where they wanted their career to be, and what they were willing to do to get there -- would they be happy just playing the same kind of venues they were now, maybe for a little more money, or did they want to be as big as Dylan or Peter, Paul, and Mary? He could get them to whatever level they wanted, and he was happy with working with clients at every level, what did they actually want? The group were agreed -- they wanted to be rich. They decided to test him. They were making twenty-five thousand dollars a year between them at that time, so they got ridiculously ambitious. They told him they wanted to make a *lot* of money. Indeed, they wanted a clause in their contract saying the contract would be void if in the first year they didn't make... thinking of a ridiculous amount, they came up with seventy-five thousand dollars. Grossman's response was to shrug and say "Make it a hundred thousand." The group were now famous and mixing with superstars -- Peter Tork of the Monkees had become a close friend of Janis', and when they played a residency in LA they were invited to John and Michelle Phillips' house to see a rough cut of Monterey Pop. But the group, other than Janis, were horrified -- the film barely showed the other band members at all, just Janis. Dave Getz said later "We assumed we'd appear in the movie as a band, but seeing it was a shock. It was all Janis. They saw her as a superstar in the making. I realized that though we were finally going to be making money and go to another level, it also meant our little family was being separated—there was Janis, and there was the band.” [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Bye Bye Baby"] If the group were going to make that hundred thousand dollars a year, they couldn't remain on Mainstream Records, but Bob Shad was not about to give up his rights to what could potentially be the biggest group in America without a fight. But luckily for the group, Clive Davis at Columbia had seen their Monterey performance, and he was also trying to pivot the label towards the new rock music. He was basically willing to do anything to get them. Eventually Columbia agreed to pay Shad two hundred thousand dollars for the group's contract -- Davis and Grossman negotiated so half that was an advance on the group's future earnings, but the other half was just an expense for the label. On top of that the group got an advance payment of fifty thousand dollars for their first album for Columbia, making a total investment by Columbia of a quarter of a million dollars -- in return for which they got to sign the band, and got the rights to the material they'd recorded for Mainstream, though Shad would get a two percent royalty on their first two albums for Columbia. Janis was intimidated by signing for Columbia, because that had been Aretha Franklin's label before she signed to Atlantic, and she regarded Franklin as the greatest performer in music at that time.  Which may have had something to do with the choice of a new song the group added to their setlist in early 1968 -- one which was a current hit for Aretha's sister Erma: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] We talked a little in the last episode about the song "Piece of My Heart" itself, though mostly from the perspective of its performer, Erma Franklin. But the song was, as we mentioned, co-written by Bert Berns. He's someone we've talked about a little bit in previous episodes, notably the ones on "Here Comes the Night" and "Twist and Shout", but those were a couple of years ago, and he's about to become a major figure in the next episode, so we might as well take a moment here to remind listeners (or tell those who haven't heard those episodes) of the basics and explain where "Piece of My Heart" comes in Berns' work as a whole. Bert Berns was a latecomer to the music industry, not getting properly started until he was thirty-one, after trying a variety of other occupations. But when he did get started, he wasted no time making his mark -- he knew he had no time to waste. He had a weak heart and knew the likelihood was he was going to die young. He started an association with Wand records as a songwriter and performer, writing songs for some of Phil Spector's pre-fame recordings, and he also started producing records for Atlantic, where for a long while he was almost the equal of Jerry Wexler or Leiber and Stoller in terms of number of massive hits created. His records with Solomon Burke were the records that first got the R&B genre renamed soul (previously the word "soul" mostly referred to a kind of R&Bish jazz, rather than a kind of gospel-ish R&B). He'd also been one of the few American music industry professionals to work with British bands before the Beatles made it big in the USA, after he became alerted to the Beatles' success with his song "Twist and Shout", which he'd co-written with Phil Medley, and which had been a hit in a version Berns produced for the Isley Brothers: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Twist and Shout"] That song shows the two elements that existed in nearly every single Bert Berns song or production. The first is the Afro-Caribbean rhythm, a feel he picked up during a stint in Cuba in his twenties. Other people in the Atlantic records team were also partial to those rhythms -- Leiber and Stoller loved what they called the baion rhythm -- but Berns more than anyone else made it his signature. He also very specifically loved the song "La Bamba", especially Ritchie Valens' version of it: [Excerpt: Ritchie Valens, "La Bamba"] He basically seemed to think that was the greatest record ever made, and he certainly loved that three-chord trick I-IV-V-IV chord sequence -- almost but not quite the same as the "Louie Louie" one.  He used it in nearly every song he wrote from that point on -- usually using a bassline that went something like this: [plays I-IV-V-IV bassline] He used it in "Twist and Shout" of course: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Twist and Shout"] He used it in "Hang on Sloopy": [Excerpt: The McCoys, "Hang on Sloopy"] He *could* get more harmonically sophisticated on occasion, but the vast majority of Berns' songs show the power of simplicity. They're usually based around three chords, and often they're actually only two chords, like "I Want Candy": [Excerpt: The Strangeloves, "I Want Candy"] Or the chorus to "Here Comes the Night" by Them, which is two chords for most of it and only introduces a third right at the end: [Excerpt: Them, "Here Comes the Night"] And even in that song you can hear the "Twist and Shout"/"La Bamba" feel, even if it's not exactly the same chords. Berns' whole career was essentially a way of wringing *every last possible drop* out of all the implications of Ritchie Valens' record. And so even when he did a more harmonically complex song, like "Piece of My Heart", which actually has some minor chords in the bridge, the "La Bamba" chord sequence is used in both the verse: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] And the chorus: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] Berns co-wrote “Piece of My Heart” with Jerry Ragavoy. Berns and Ragavoy had also written "Cry Baby" for Garnet Mimms, which was another Joplin favourite: [Excerpt: Garnet Mimms, "Cry Baby"] And Ragavoy, with other collaborators

We caught up with Barry Melton, best known as The Fish in Country Joe & The Fish, about how he a Joe McDonald got their start, Vanguard records, Monterey Pop, and how folk became Psychedelic music   more: https://www.barrythefishmelton.com/ Ep 256 #ATJPod @allthatjampod on IG, FB, and Twitter - www.allthatjampod.com - Subscribe - leave a review - tell a friend. Merch: https://t.co/QgtAisVtbV All That Jam is brought to you by Executive Producers Amanda Cadran and Kevin Hogan. Produced and edited by Amanda Cadran and Kevin Hogan. Mixed and Mastered by Kevin Hogan. Original Music by Aaron Gaul. Art by Amanda Cadran.

Discograffiti host Dave Gebroe conducted a 13-hour interview with the two founders of legendary 1960s soft pop act The Association, Terry Kirkman and Jules Alexander, in which they rated the entirety of their own discography.   It's impossible to adequately put into words how surreal this series is.  Trust me, it's unquestionably a ride worth taking no matter how you feel about the genre. Welcome aboard the most lunatic series in Discograffiti history.    In Part 2, our longest episode yet at 2 FULL HOURS, Terry & Jules reveal: What it felt like to be the first band of the first rock festival of the modern era, Monterey Pop!; How their sophomore LP Renaissance, recorded five months after their debut, nearly killed the band; And how many ⭐️'s outta five Terry & Jules give Renaissance (1966) and Insight Out (1967)! Also, prepare yourself for the introduction of A TOP-SECRET SURPRISE 3RD GUEST! NEXT WEEK: THE ASSOCIATION PART 3 2-3 podcasts / week: Patreon.com/Discograffiti  Currently, there are close to 100 PATREON EPISODES! That's an entire universe of incredible content available to you for the price of a cup of coffee a week—plus, this is the sole means by which I'm feeding my family, so please don't let us starve to death due to your abhorrent greed. Thanks! Please Pledge/Share: Gofund.me/d316c87c CONNECT Join our Soldiers of Sound Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1839109176272153 Patreon: www.Patreon.com/Discograffiti Podfollow: ⁠⁠https://podfollow.com/1592182331⁠⁠ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/discograffitipod/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Discograffiti/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Discograffiti YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClyaQCdvDelj5EiKj6IRLhw Web site: http://discograffiti.com/ CONTACT DAVE Email: dave@discograffiti.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hooligandave Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/davidgebroe/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DaveGebroe #theassociation #theassociationband #theassociationwindy #terrykirkman #julesalexander #ruthannfriedman #softpop #sunshinepop #curtboettcher #alongcomesmary #windy #nevermylove #cherish #russgiguere #tedbluechel #briancole #jimyester #jerryyester #donrandi #thewreckingcrew #larryramos #hiredandfired #oldies #oldiesbutgoodies #wtfjusthappened #montereypop #montereypopfestival #sixmanband #folkrock #thetroubadour  --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/discograffiti/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/discograffiti/support

Sam Paddor and Roy Blumenfeld discuss Roy's experience playing at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, The Blues Project and the music scene in Greenwich Village, New York. The Blues Project Website:bluesproject.netMy Back Pages Website:mybackpages.org 

Once again ATTT is honored and delighted to be joined by the great Fuzzbee Morse and our new best friend Owen Goldman as we finish up our conversation about the most titanically Epic Live Tracks we've ever heard. Or seen. That's right, Fuzzbee and Owen were there for some of these incredible and iconic moments, and they have the scars to prove it. Picks 5-1 bring home the most epic of playlists in Part 2.Part 1 is also required listening, and can be checked out here:https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/alltimetopten/episodes/2023-07-03T04_00_00-07_00Bumper tracks included, here is the ultimate Epic Live Tracks Spotify playlist. With nearly 3 hours of face melting live music, you'll never get a better value for your time:https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2giKAsxmMUQzm03Cw0F4ku?si=8072621e589e4544Fuzzbee and Owen are always up to cool shit in the LA music scene. Keep up with them on Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/fuzzbee1/https://www.instagram.com/owenbg/One last thing, Fuzzbee's incredible studio album Dreams And Other Living Things is out now officially on Rabadash Records! Get it at his Bandcamp:https://fuzzbee.bandcamp.com/album/dreams-and-other-living-things

00:00 - 36:14 - 24 Hour Party People 36:15 - 55:00 - Malcolm in the Middle The Extended Clip Month of Music has arrived. for the inaugural episode of the miniseries, we're joined by Charis Huling ( @gothloglady ) aka DJ Kerosene to talk about 24 Hour Party People. Michael Winterbottom's 2002 music biopic about Tony Wilson and Factory Records subverts tropes just like it's subject matter did, and Steve Coogan's performance is an all-timer. we get into the music, the history, the muddy mini-dv cinematography by Robby Muller, and so much more. then, we finally have our boy Malcolm back for a juicy edition of Malcolm in the Middle (36:15). he regales us of tales from his parents' house, revisiting teenage inspirations such as Donnie Darko and Heathers. JT digs into FearDotCom, Charis goes to Freshman Year Film Bro mode, and Eddie keeps the music alive with two from D.A. Pennebaker — Don't Look Back and Monterey Pop. join us next week, for another long raga by Ravi Shankar. art by Charis + listen to her all-vinyl mixes: https://soundcloud.com/charis-huling

Screenwriter Stuart Wright talks to Cultural Sociologist Dr Phil Miles about the his book MIDLIFE CREATIVITY & IDENTITY: LIFE INTO ART, the study of creative processes and "3 Films That Have Impacted Everything In Your Adult Life"ORLANDO (1992)GREGORY'S GIRL (1981)MONTEREY POP (1968)MIDLIFE CREATIVITY & IDENTITY: LIFE INTO ART is out now https://www.amazon.co.uk/Midlife-Creativity-Identity-Life-into/dp/178754334XMore about Dr Phil Miles and his field of study https://www.beds.ac.uk/howtoapply/departments/appliedsocialsciences/staff/philip-miles/"3 FILMS THAT HAVE IMPACTED EVERYTHING IN YOUR ADULT LIFE" is a podcast by screenwriter Stuart Wright that explores the transformative power of cinema. From emotional masterpieces to thought-provoking classics, each episode delves into the films that have had a profound impact on our personal growth and perspective. Through engaging storytelling, critical analysis, and cultural commentary, Stuart aims to uncover the lasting influence that movies have had on his guests. Please join him on an emotional journey through the world of film and discover how just three movies can change the direction of a life, cement memories you will never forget or sometimes change how you see the world."3 FILMS THAT IMPACTED EVERYTHING IN YOUR ADULT LIFE is about those films that made you fall in love with film. The guest selects their trio of movies and we talk for 5 minutes, against the clock. When the ALARM goes off for five minutes we move onto the next film.Please consider leaving a five-star review wherever you get your podcasts if you enjoyed this. It really helps the Britflicks Podcast grow and others to discover it.CreditsIntro/Outro music is Rocking The Stew by Tokyo Dragons (www.instagram.com/slomaxster/Podcast for www.britflicks.com. Written, produced and hosted by Stuart WrightSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/britflicks-com-podcast/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The late D.A. Pennebaker made documentaries about rock and roll, politics and (often) the intersection of the two through the late 20th century. Many of them are roundly considered some of the most influential cinéma vérité movies of all time. Nico and Adam discuss five of them: Bob Dylan: Dont Look Back (4:10), Monterey Pop (21:06), Original Cast Album: Company (32:29), Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (47:11) and The War Room (58:18). Chat with the TMT Community on Discord! For More TMT Shenanigans: toomanythoughtsmedia.com Twitter: @NicoDeGregorio, @someadamhall, @TMT_Media E-mail: toomanythoughtsmedia@gmail.com Subscribe and Rate on Apple Podcasts!

Sure, it's a music commentary podcast—but when you're friends with John Landis, you invite John Landis on the show. Not to mention the man is one of the foremost music directors who ever was—simply for The Blues Brothers and Michael Jackson's Thriller Video alone. For the next 6 months, there will be one Landis episode a month, as we dissect his entire career, Discograffiti-style. We'll learn about the torrent of classic European films on which John worked in every possible capacity in the 1960s, his experiences attending both the TAMI Show and Monterey Pop, and finally the real story behind the making of his first feature film, Schlock, and the unexpected support from a truly massive celebrity that wound up kick-starting his career. Next Week: Part 1 of a soul-baring Interview With SERGIO DIAS From OS MUTANTES! More John Landis ruminations on his early career: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctPZQo7YSo8 John Landis on Trailers From Hell talking about the T.A.M.I. Show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugoAwajp5Yc John Landis's Debut Feature Film Schlock (in full): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abc0-iF31-4 CONNECT Join our Soldiers of Sound Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1839109176272153 Patreon: www.Patreon.com/Discograffiti Podfollow: https://podfollow.com/1592182331 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/discograffitipod/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Discograffiti/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Discograffiti YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClyaQCdvDelj5EiKj6IRLhw Web site: http://discograffiti.com/ CONTACT DAVE Email: dave@discograffiti.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hooligandave Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidgebroe/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DaveGebroe CONTACT TODD ZIMMER: GRAPHIC DESIGN Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ToddZimmer and https://www.facebook.com/punknjunkradio Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_real_todd_zimmer/ and https://www.instagram.com/punknjunkradioshow/ #johnlandis #rockcousteau #patreon #wildcardepisode #discograffiti #musicpatreon #podcast #musicpodcast #musicreview #musicreviews #musiccommentary #indie #deepdive #musicobsessed #Paulmajor #GenX #privatepress #pavement #rickbaker #comingtoamerica #kentuckyfriedmovie #threeamigos #spieslikeus #thebluesbrothers #bluesbrothers #animalhouse #director #filmdirector #schlock --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/discograffiti/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/discograffiti/support

In episode no. 147 of the Rock's Backpages podcast, we welcome pioneering '60s rock writer Ellen Sander and invite her to discuss her classic 1973 book Trips: Rock Life in the Sixties, reissued in an "augmented" edition in 2019. Ellen recalls her New York upbringing and initiation into the folk scene in Greenwich Village, then explains how Danny Fields (episode 28) steered her towards writing for Sing Out! and Hullabaloo. With references to David Crosby, David Geffen, Abbie Hoffman and the Monterey Pop festival, she talks about the inextricable relationship between '60s music and the decade's political upheavals. We also hear about her 1968 article on groupies; her troubling experiences on the road with Led Zeppelin; and her relationship with Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman (father of her son Marin), all of which led to the writing of Trips. Attention then turns to two clips from the week's new audio interview, in which suave Yorkshire-born rock'n'soul man Robert Palmer talks about his love of bossa nova and the fun he had on the sessions for 1974's Sneakin' Sally through the Alley with Little Feat's Lowell George. After Mark quotes from new library interviews with the Beatles (1963), B.B. King (1968), and Simpsons creator Matt Groening (1993), Barney cites an early Steely Dan piece from 1973 and Jasper recommends articles about emo stars Paramore (2010), Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor (2014) and – from 2016 – jazz hybridiser Jacob Collier. Many thanks to special guest Ellen Sander. Trips: Rock Life in the Sixties is published by Dover and available now. Pieces discussed: Crosby, Stills & Nash, Robert Palmer audio, Roxy Music, For Your Pleasure, Roxy in retrospect, Chuck Jackson, Chuck Jacksoner, Chuck Jacksonest, The Strokes, B.B. King, The Beatles, Beach Boys, Matt Groening, Steely Dan, Paramore, Trent Reznor and Jacob Collier. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode 163 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay", Stax Records, and the short, tragic, life of Otis Redding. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on "Soul Man" by Sam and Dave. 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 songs by Redding, even if I split into multiple parts. The main resource I used for the biographical details of Redding was Dreams to Remember: Otis Redding, Stax Records, and the Transformation of Southern Soul by Mark Ribowsky. Ribowsky is usually a very good, reliable, writer, but in this case there are a couple of lapses in editing which make it not a book I can wholeheartedly recommend, but the research on the biographical details of Redding seems to be the best. Information about Stax comes primarily from two books: Soulsville USA: The Story of Stax by Rob Bowman, and Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion by Robert Gordon. Country Soul by Charles L Hughes is a great overview of the soul music made in Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville in the sixties. There are two Original Album Series box sets which between them contain all the albums Redding released in his life plus his first few posthumous albums, for a low price. Volume 1, volume 2. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before I begin -- this episode ends with a description of a plane crash, which some people may find upsetting. There's also a mention of gun violence. In 2019 the film Summer of Soul came out. If you're unfamiliar with this film, it's a documentary of an event, the Harlem Cultural Festival, which gets called the "Black Woodstock" because it took place in the summer of 1969, overlapping the weekend that Woodstock happened. That event was a series of weekend free concerts in New York, performed by many of the greatest acts in Black music at that time -- people like Stevie Wonder, David Ruffin, Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, the Staple Singers, Sly and the Family Stone, Nina Simone, and the Fifth Dimension. One thing that that film did was to throw into sharp relief a lot of the performances we've seen over the years by legends of white rock music of the same time. If you watch the film of Woodstock, or the earlier Monterey Pop festival, it's apparent that a lot of the musicians are quite sloppy. This is easy to dismiss as being a product of the situation -- they're playing outdoor venues, with no opportunity to soundcheck, using primitive PA systems, and often without monitors. Anyone would sound a bit sloppy in that situation, right? That is until you listen to the performances on the Summer of Soul soundtrack. The performers on those shows are playing in the same kind of circumstances, and in the case of Woodstock literally at the same time, so it's a fair comparison, and there really is no comparison. Whatever you think of the quality of the *music* (and some of my very favourite artists played at Monterey and Woodstock), the *musicianship* is orders of magnitude better at the Harlem Cultural Festival [Excerpt: Gladys Knight and the Pips “I Heard it Through the Grapevine (live)”] And of course there's a reason for this. Most of the people who played at those big hippie festivals had not had the same experiences as the Black musicians. The Black players were mostly veterans of the chitlin' circuit, where you had to play multiple shows a day, in front of demanding crowds who wanted their money's worth, and who wanted you to be able to play and also put on a show at the same time. When you're playing for crowds of working people who have spent a significant proportion of their money to go to the show, and on a bill with a dozen other acts who are competing for that audience's attention, you are going to get good or stop working. The guitar bands at Woodstock and Monterey, though, hadn't had the same kind of pressure. Their audiences were much more forgiving, much more willing to go with the musicians, view themselves as part of a community with them. And they had to play far fewer shows than the chitlin' circuit veterans, so they simply didn't develop the same chops before becoming famous (the best of them did after fame, of course). And so it's no surprise that while a lot of bands became more famous as a result of the Monterey Pop Festival, only three really became breakout stars in America as a direct result of it. One of those was the Who, who were already the third or fourth biggest band in the UK by that point, either just behind or just ahead of the Kinks, and so the surprise is more that it took them that long to become big in America. But the other two were themselves veterans of the chitlin' circuit. If you buy the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of Monterey Pop, you get two extra discs along with the disc with the film of the full festival on it -- the only two performances that were thought worth turning into their own short mini-films. One of them is Jimi Hendrix's performance, and we will talk about that in a future episode. The other is titled Shake! Otis at Monterey: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Shake! (live at Monterey Pop Festival)"] Otis Redding came from Macon, Georgia, the home town of Little Richard, who became one of his biggest early influences, and like Richard he was torn in his early years between religion and secular music -- though in most other ways he was very different from Richard, and in particular he came from a much more supportive family. While his father, Otis senior, was a deacon in the church, and didn't approve much of blues, R&B, or jazz music or listen to it himself, he didn't prevent his son from listening to it, so young Otis grew up listening to records by Richard -- of whom he later said "If it hadn't been for Little Richard I would not be here... Richard has soul too. My present music has a lot of him in it" -- and another favourite, Clyde McPhatter: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, "Have Mercy Baby"] Indeed, it's unclear exactly how much Otis senior *did* disapprove of those supposedly-sinful kinds of music. The biography I used as a source for this, and which says that Otis senior wouldn't listen to blues or jazz music at all, also quotes his son as saying that when he was a child his mother and father used to play him "a calypso song out then called 'Run Joe'" That will of course be this one: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Run Joe"] I find it hard to reconcile the idea of someone who refused to listen to the blues or jazz listening to Louis Jordan, but then people are complex. Whatever Otis senior's feelings about secular music, he recognised from a very early age that his son had a special talent, and encouraged him to become a gospel singer. And at the same time he was listening to Little Richard, young Otis was also listening to gospel singers. One particular influence was a blind street singer, Reverend Pearly Brown: [Excerpt: Reverend Pearly Brown, "Ninety Nine and a Half Won't Do"] Redding was someone who cared deeply about his father's opinion, and it might well have been that he would eventually have become a gospel performer, because he started his career with a foot in both camps. What seems to have made the difference is that when he was sixteen, his father came down with tuberculosis. Even a few years earlier this would have been a terminal diagnosis, but thankfully by this point antibiotics had been invented, and the deacon eventually recovered. But it did mean that Otis junior had to become the family breadwinner while his father was sick, and so he turned decisively towards the kind of music that could make more money. He'd already started performing secular music. He'd joined a band led by Gladys Williams, who was the first female bandleader in the area. Williams sadly doesn't seem to have recorded anything -- discogs has a listing of a funk single by a Gladys Williams on a tiny label which may or may not be the same person, but in general she avoided recording studios, only wanting to play live -- but she was a very influential figure in Georgia music. According to her former trumpeter Newton Collier, who later went on to play with Redding and others, she trained both Fats Gonder and Lewis Hamlin, who went on to join the lineup of James Brown's band that made Live at the Apollo, and Collier says that Hamlin's arrangements for that album, and the way the band would segue from one track to another, were all things he'd been taught by Miss Gladys. Redding sang with Gladys Williams for a while, and she took him under her wing, trained him, and became his de facto first manager. She got him to perform at local talent shows, where he won fifteen weeks in a row, before he got banned from performing to give everyone else a chance. At all of these shows, the song he performed was one that Miss Gladys had rehearsed with him, Little Richard's "Heeby Jeebies": [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Heeby Jeebies"] At this time, Redding's repertoire was largely made up of songs by the two greats of fifties Georgia R&B -- Little Richard and James Brown -- plus some by his other idol Sam Cooke, and those singers would remain his greatest influences throughout his career. After his stint with Williams, Redding went on to join another band, Pat T Cake and the Mighty Panthers, whose guitarist Johnny Jenkins would be a major presence in his life for several years. The Mighty Panthers were soon giving Redding top billing, and advertising gigs as featuring Otis "Rockin' Robin" Redding -- presumably that was another song in his live repertoire. By this time Redding was sounding enough like Little Richard that when Richard's old backing band, The Upsetters, were looking for a new singer after Richard quit rock and roll for the ministry, they took Redding on as their vocalist for a tour. Once that tour had ended, Redding returned home to find that Johnny Jenkins had quit the Mighty Panthers and formed a new band, the Pinetoppers. Redding joined that band, who were managed by a white teenager named Phil Walden, who soon became Redding's personal manager as well. Walden and Redding developed a very strong bond, to the extent that Walden, who was studying at university, spent all his tuition money promoting Redding and almost got kicked out. When Redding found this out, he actually went round to everyone he knew and got loans from everyone until he had enough to pay for Walden's tuition -- much of it paid in coins. They had a strong enough bond that Walden would remain his manager for the rest of Redding's life, and even when Walden had to do two years in the Army in Germany, he managed Redding long-distance, with his brother looking after things at home. But of course, there wasn't much of a music industry in Georgia, and so with Walden's blessing and support, he moved to LA in 1960 to try to become a star. Just before he left, his girlfriend Zelma told him she was pregnant. He assured her that he was only going to be away for a few months, and that he would be back in time for the birth, and that he intended to come back to Georgia rich and marry her. Her response was "Sure you is". In LA, Redding met up with a local record producer, James "Jimmy Mack" McEachin, who would later go on to become an actor, appearing in several films with Clint Eastwood. McEachin produced a session for Redding at Gold Star studios, with arrangements by Rene Hall and using several of the musicians who later became the Wrecking Crew. "She's All Right", the first single that came from that session, was intended to sound as much like Jackie Wilson as possible, and was released under the name of The Shooters, the vocal group who provided the backing vocals: [Excerpt: The Shooters, "She's All Right"] "She's All Right" was released on Trans World, a small label owned by Morris Bernstein, who also owned Finer Arts records (and "She's All Right" seems to have been released on both labels). Neither of Bernstein's labels had any great success -- the biggest record they put out was a single by the Hollywood Argyles that came out after they'd stopped having hits -- and they didn't have any connection to the R&B market. Redding and McEachin couldn't find any R&B labels that wanted to pick up their recordings, and so Redding did return to Georgia and marry Zelma a few days before the birth of their son Dexter. Back in Georgia, he hooked up again with the Pinetoppers, and he and Jenkins started trying local record labels, attempting to get records put out by either of them. Redding was the first, and Otis Redding and the Pinetoppers put out a single, "Shout Bamalama", a slight reworking of a song that he'd recorded as "Gamma Lamma" for McEachin, which was obviously heavily influenced by Little Richard: [Excerpt: Otis Redding and the Pinetoppers, "Shout Bamalama"] That single was produced by a local record company owner, Bobby Smith, who signed Redding to a contract which Redding didn't read, but which turned out to be a management contract as well as a record contract. This would later be a problem, as Redding didn't have an actual contract with Phil Walden -- one thing that comes up time and again in stories about music in the Deep South at this time is people operating on handshake deals and presuming good faith on the part of each other. There was a problem with the record which nobody had foreseen though -- Redding was the first Black artist signed to Smith's label, which was called Confederate Records, and its logo was the Southern Cross. Now Smith, by all accounts, was less personally racist than most white men in Georgia at the time, and hadn't intended that as any kind of statement of white supremacy -- he'd just used a popular local symbol, without thinking through the implications. But as the phrase goes, intent isn't magic, and while Smith didn't intend it as racist, rather unsurprisingly Black DJs and record shops didn't see things in the same light. Smith was told by several DJs that they wouldn't play the record while it was on that label, and he started up a new subsidiary label, Orbit, and put the record out on that label. Redding and Smith continued collaborating, and there were plans for Redding to put out a second single on Orbit. That single was going to be "These Arms of Mine", a song Redding had originally given to another Confederate artist, a rockabilly performer called Buddy Leach (who doesn't seem to be the same Buddy Leach as the Democratic politician from Louisiana, or the saxophone player with George Thorogood and the Destroyers). Leach had recorded it as a B-side, with the slightly altered title "These Arms Are Mine". Sadly I can't provide an excerpt of that, as the record is so rare that even websites I've found by rockabilly collectors who are trying to get everything on Confederate Records haven't managed to get hold of copies. Meanwhile, Johnny Jenkins had been recording on another label, Tifco, and had put out a single called "Pinetop": [Excerpt: Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers, "Pinetop"] That record had attracted the attention of Joe Galkin. Galkin was a semi-independent record promoter, who had worked for Atlantic in New York before moving back to his home town of Macon. Galkin had proved himself as a promoter by being responsible for the massive amounts of airplay given to Solomon Burke's "Just Out of Reach (of My Two Open Arms)": [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Just Out of Reach (of My Two Open Arms)"] After that, Jerry Wexler had given Galkin fifty dollars a week and an expense account, and Galkin would drive to all the Black radio stations in the South and pitch Atlantic's records to them. But Galkin also had his own record label, Gerald Records, and when he went to those stations and heard them playing something from a smaller label, he would quickly negotiate with that smaller label, buy the master and the artist's contract, and put the record out on Gerald Records -- and then he would sell the track and the artist on to Atlantic, taking ten percent of the record's future earnings and a finder's fee. This is what happened with Johnny Jenkins' single, which was reissued on Gerald and then on Atlantic. Galkin signed Jenkins to a contract -- another of those contracts which also made him Jenkins' manager, and indeed the manager of the Pinetops. Jenkins' record ended up selling about twenty-five thousand records, but when Galkin saw the Pinetoppers performing live, he realised that Otis Redding was the real star. Since he had a contract with Jenkins, he came to an agreement with Walden, who was still Jenkins' manager as well as Redding's -- Walden would get fifty percent of Jenkins' publishing and they would be co-managers of Jenkins. But Galkin had plans for Redding, which he didn't tell anyone about, not even Redding himself. The one person he did tell was Jerry Wexler, who he phoned up and asked for two thousand dollars, explaining that he wanted to record Jenkins' follow-up single at Stax, and he also wanted to bring along a singer he'd discovered, who sang with Jenkins' band. Wexler agreed -- Atlantic had recently started distributing Stax's records on a handshake deal of much the same kind that Redding had with Walden. As far as everyone else was concerned, though, the session was just for Johnny Jenkins, the known quantity who'd already released a single for Atlantic. Otis Redding, meanwhile, was having to work a lot of odd jobs to feed his rapidly growing family, and one of those jobs was to work as Johnny Jenkins' driver, as Jenkins didn't have a driving license. So Galkin suggested that, given that Memphis was quite a long drive, Redding should drive Galkin and Jenkins to Stax, and carry the equipment for them. Bobby Smith, who still thought of himself as Redding's manager, was eager to help his friend's bandmate with his big break (and to help Galkin, in the hope that maybe Atlantic would start distributing Confederate too), and so he lent Redding the company station wagon to drive them to the session.The other Pinetoppers wouldn't be going -- Jenkins was going to be backed by Booker T and the MGs, the normal Stax backing band. Phil Walden, though, had told Redding that he should try to take the opportunity to get himself heard by Stax, and he pestered the musicians as they recorded Jenkins' "Spunky": [Excerpt: Johnny Jenkins, "Spunky"] Cropper later remembered “During the session, Al Jackson says to me, ‘The big tall guy that was driving Johnny, he's been bugging me to death, wanting me to hear him sing,' Al said, ‘Would you take some time and get this guy off of my back and listen to him?' And I said, ‘After the session I'll try to do it,' and then I just forgot about it.” What Redding didn't know, though Walden might have, is that Galkin had planned all along to get Redding to record while he was there. Galkin claimed to be Redding's manager, and told Jim Stewart, the co-owner of Stax who acted as main engineer and supervising producer on the sessions at this point, that Wexler had only funded the session on the basis that Redding would also get a shot at recording. Stewart was unimpressed -- Jenkins' session had not gone well, and it had taken them more than two hours to get two tracks down, but Galkin offered Stewart a trade -- Galkin, as Redding's manager, would take half of Stax's mechanical royalties for the records (which wouldn't be much) but in turn would give Stewart half the publishing on Redding's songs. That was enough to make Stewart interested, but by this point Booker T. Jones had already left the studio, so Steve Cropper moved to the piano for the forty minutes that was left of the session, with Jenkins remaining on guitar, and they tried to get two sides of a single cut. The first track they cut was "Hey Hey Baby", which didn't impress Stewart much -- he simply said that the world didn't need another Little Richard -- and so with time running out they cut another track, the ballad Redding had already given to Buddy Leach. He asked Cropper, who didn't play piano well, to play "church chords", by which he meant triplets, and Cropper said "he started singing ‘These Arms of Mine' and I know my hair lifted about three inches and I couldn't believe this guy's voice": [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "These Arms of Mine"] That was more impressive, though Stewart carefully feigned disinterest. Stewart and Galkin put together a contract which signed Redding to Stax -- though they put the single out on the less-important Volt subsidiary, as they did for much of Redding's subsequent output -- and gave Galkin and Stewart fifty percent each of the publishing rights to Redding's songs. Redding signed it, not even realising he was signing a proper contract rather than just one for a single record, because he was just used to signing whatever bit of paper was put in front of him at the time. This one was slightly different though, because Redding had had his twenty-first birthday since the last time he'd signed a contract, and so Galkin assumed that that meant all his other contracts were invalid -- not realising that Redding's contract with Bobby Smith had been countersigned by Redding's mother, and so was also legal. Walden also didn't realise that, but *did* realise that Galkin representing himself as Redding's manager to Stax might be a problem, so he quickly got Redding to sign a proper contract, formalising the handshake basis they'd been operating on up to that point. Walden was at this point in the middle of his Army service, but got the signature while he was home on leave. Walden then signed a deal with Galkin, giving Walden half of Galkin's fifty percent cut of Redding's publishing in return for Galkin getting a share of Walden's management proceeds. By this point everyone was on the same page -- Otis Redding was going to be a big star, and he became everyone's prime focus. Johnny Jenkins remained signed to Walden's agency -- which quickly grew to represent almost every big soul star that wasn't signed to Motown -- but he was regarded as a footnote. His record came out eventually on Volt, almost two years later, but he didn't release another record until 1968. Jenkins did, though, go on to have some influence. In 1970 he was given the opportunity to sing lead on an album backed by Duane Allman and the members of the Muscle Shoals studio band, many of whom went on to form the Allman Brothers Band. That record contained a cover of Dr. John's "I Walk on Guilded Splinters" which was later sampled by Beck for "Loser", the Wu-Tang Clan for "Gun Will Go" and Oasis for their hit "Go Let it Out": [Excerpt: Johnny Jenkins, "I Walk on Guilded Splinters"] Jenkins would play guitar on several future Otis Redding sessions, but would hold a grudge against Redding for the rest of his life for taking the stardom he thought was rightfully his, and would be one of the few people to have anything negative to say about Redding after his early death. When Bobby Smith heard about the release of "These Arms of Mine", he was furious, as his contract with Redding *was* in fact legally valid, and he'd been intending to get Redding to record the song himself. However, he realised that Stax could call on the resources of Atlantic Records, and Joe Galkin also hinted that if he played nice Atlantic might start distributing Confederate, too. Smith signed away all his rights to Redding -- again, thinking that he was only signing away the rights to a single record and song, and not reading the contract closely enough. In this case, Smith only had one working eye, and that wasn't good enough to see clearly -- he had to hold paper right up to his face to read anything on it -- and he simply couldn't read the small print on the contract, and so signed over Otis Redding's management, record contract, and publishing, for a flat seven hundred dollars. Now everything was legally -- if perhaps not ethically -- in the clear. Phil Walden was Otis Redding's manager, Stax was his record label, Joe Galkin got a cut off the top, and Walden, Galkin, and Jim Stewart all shared Redding's publishing. Although, to make it a hit, one more thing had to happen, and one more person had to get a cut of the song: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "These Arms of Mine"] That sound was becoming out of fashion among Black listeners at the time. It was considered passe, and even though the Stax musicians loved the record, Jim Stewart didn't, and put it out not because he believed in Otis Redding, but because he believed in Joe Galkin. As Stewart later said “The Black radio stations were getting out of that Black country sound, we put it out to appease and please Joe.” For the most part DJs ignored the record, despite Galkin pushing it -- it was released in October 1962, that month which we have already pinpointed as the start of the sixties, and came out at the same time as a couple of other Stax releases, and the one they were really pushing was Carla Thomas' "I'll Bring it Home to You", an answer record to Sam Cooke's "Bring it On Home to Me": [Excerpt: Carla Thomas, "I'll Bring it Home to You"] "These Arms of Mine" wasn't even released as the A-side -- that was "Hey Hey Baby" -- until John R came along. John R was a Nashville DJ, and in fact he was the reason that Bobby Smith even knew that Redding had signed to Stax. R had heard Buddy Leach's version of the song, and called Smith, who was a friend of his, to tell him that his record had been covered, and that was the first Smith had heard of the matter. But R also called Jim Stewart at Stax, and told him that he was promoting the wrong side, and that if they started promoting "These Arms of Mine", R would play the record on his radio show, which could be heard in twenty-eight states. And, as a gesture of thanks for this suggestion -- and definitely not as payola, which would be very illegal -- Stewart gave R his share of the publishing rights to the song, which eventually made the top twenty on the R&B charts, and slipped into the lower end of the Hot One Hundred. "These Arms of Mine" was actually recorded at a turning point for Stax as an organisation. By the time it was released, Booker T Jones had left Memphis to go to university in Indiana to study music, with his tuition being paid for by his share of the royalties for "Green Onions", which hit the charts around the same time as Redding's first session: [Excerpt: Booker T. and the MGs, "Green Onions"] Most of Stax's most important sessions were recorded at weekends -- Jim Stewart still had a day job as a bank manager at this point, and he supervised the records that were likely to be hits -- so Jones could often commute back to the studio for session work, and could play sessions during his holidays. The rest of the time, other people would cover the piano parts, often Cropper, who played piano on Redding's next sessions, with Jenkins once again on guitar. As "These Arms of Mine" didn't start to become a hit until March, Redding didn't go into the studio again until June, when he cut the follow-up, "That's What My Heart Needs", with the MGs, Jenkins, and the horn section of the Mar-Keys. That made number twenty-seven on the Cashbox R&B chart -- this was in the period when Billboard had stopped having one. The follow-up, "Pain in My Heart", was cut in September and did even better, making number eleven on the Cashbox R&B chart: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Pain in My Heart"] It did well enough in fact that the Rolling Stones cut a cover version of the track: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Pain in My Heart"] Though Redding didn't get the songwriting royalties -- by that point Allen Toussaint had noticed how closely it resembled a song he'd written for Irma Thomas, "Ruler of My Heart": [Excerpt: Irma Thomas, "Ruler of My Heart"] And so the writing credit was changed to be Naomi Neville, one of the pseudonyms Toussaint used. By this point Redding was getting steady work, and becoming a popular live act. He'd put together his own band, and had asked Jenkins to join, but Jenkins didn't want to play second fiddle to him, and refused, and soon stopped being invited to the recording sessions as well. Indeed, Redding was *eager* to get as many of his old friends working with him as he could. For his second and third sessions, as well as bringing Jenkins, he'd brought along a whole gang of musicians from his touring show, and persuaded Stax to put out records by them, too. At those sessions, as well as Redding's singles, they also cut records by his valet (which was the term R&B performers in those years used for what we'd now call a gofer or roadie) Oscar Mack: [Excerpt: Oscar Mack, "Don't Be Afraid of Love"] For Eddie Kirkland, the guitarist in his touring band, who had previously played with John Lee Hooker and whose single was released under the name "Eddie Kirk": [Excerpt: Eddie Kirk, "The Hawg, Part 1"] And Bobby Marchan, a singer and female impersonator from New Orleans who had had some massive hits a few years earlier both on his own and as the singer with Huey "Piano" Smith and the Clowns, but had ended up in Macon without a record deal and been taken under Redding's wing: [Excerpt: Bobby Marchan, "What Can I Do?"] Redding would continue, throughout his life, to be someone who tried to build musical careers for his friends, though none of those singles was successful. The changes in Stax continued. In late autumn 1963, Atlantic got worried by the lack of new product coming from Stax. Carla Thomas had had a couple of R&B hits, and they were expecting a new single, but every time Jerry Wexler phoned Stax asking where the new single was, he was told it would be coming soon but the equipment was broken. After a couple of weeks of this, Wexler decided something fishy was going on, and sent Tom Dowd, his genius engineer, down to Stax to investigate. Dowd found when he got there that the equipment *was* broken, and had been for weeks, and was a simple fix. When Dowd spoke to Stewart, though, he discovered that they didn't know where to source replacement parts from. Dowd phoned his assistant in New York, and told him to go to the electronics shop and get the parts he needed. Then, as there were no next-day courier services at that time, Dowd's assistant went to the airport, found a flight attendant who was flying to Memphis, and gave her the parts and twenty-five dollars, with a promise of twenty-five more if she gave them to Dowd at the other end. The next morning, Dowd had the equipment fixed, and everyone involved became convinced that Dowd was a miracle worker, especially after he showed Steve Cropper some rudimentary tape-manipulation techniques that Cropper had never encountered before. Dowd had to wait around in Memphis for his flight, so he went to play golf with the musicians for a bit, and then they thought they might as well pop back to the studio and test the equipment out. When they did, Rufus Thomas -- Carla Thomas' father, who had also had a number of hits himself on Stax and Sun -- popped his head round the door to see if the equipment was working now. They told him it was, and he said he had a song if they were up for a spot of recording. They were, and so when Dowd flew back that night, he was able to tell Wexler not only that the next Carla Thomas single would soon be on its way, but that he had the tapes of a big hit single with him right there: [Excerpt: Rufus Thomas, "Walking the Dog"] "Walking the Dog" was a sensation. Jim Stewart later said “I remember our first order out of Chicago. I was in New York in Jerry Wexler's office at the time and Paul Glass, who was our distributor in Chicago, called in an order for sixty-five thousand records. I said to Jerry, ‘Do you mean sixty-five hundred?' And he said, ‘Hell no, he wants sixty-five thousand.' That was the first order! He believed in the record so much that we ended up selling about two hundred thousand in Chicago alone.” The record made the top ten on the pop charts, but that wasn't the biggest thing that Dowd had taken away from the session. He came back raving to Wexler about the way they made records in Memphis, and how different it was from the New York way. In New York, there was a strict separation between the people in the control room and the musicians in the studio, the musicians were playing from written charts, and everyone had a job and did just that job. In Memphis, the musicians were making up the arrangements as they went, and everyone was producing or engineering all at the same time. Dowd, as someone with more technical ability than anyone at Stax, and who was also a trained musician who could make musical suggestions, was soon regularly commuting down to Memphis to be part of the production team, and Jerry Wexler was soon going down to record with other Atlantic artists there, as we heard about in the episode on "Midnight Hour". Shortly after Dowd's first visit to Memphis, another key member of the Stax team entered the picture. Right at the end of 1963, Floyd Newman recorded a track called "Frog Stomp", on which he used his own band rather than the MGs and Mar-Keys: [Excerpt: Floyd Newman, "Frog Stomp"] The piano player and co-writer on that track was a young man named Isaac Hayes, who had been trying to get work at Stax for some time. He'd started out as a singer, and had made a record, "Laura, We're On Our Last Go-Round", at American Sound, the studio run by the former Stax engineer and musician Chips Moman: [Excerpt: Isaac Hayes, "Laura, We're On Our Last Go-Round"] But that hadn't been a success, and Hayes had continued working a day job at a slaughterhouse -- and would continue doing so for much of the next few years, even after he started working at Stax (it's truly amazing how many of the people involved in Stax were making music as what we would now call a side-hustle). Hayes had become a piano player as a way of getting a little extra money -- he'd been offered a job as a fill-in when someone else had pulled out at the last minute on a gig on New Year's Eve, and took it even though he couldn't actually play piano, and spent his first show desperately vamping with two fingers, and was just lucky the audience was too drunk to care. But he had a remarkable facility for the instrument, and while unlike Booker T Jones he would never gain a great deal of technical knowledge, and was embarrassed for the rest of his life by both his playing ability and his lack of theory knowledge, he was as great as they come at soul, at playing with feel, and at inventing new harmonies on the fly. They still didn't have a musician at Stax that could replace Booker T, who was still off at university, so Isaac Hayes was taken on as a second session keyboard player, to cover for Jones when Jones was in Indiana -- though Hayes himself also had to work his own sessions around his dayjob, so didn't end up playing on "In the Midnight Hour", for example, because he was at the slaughterhouse. The first recording session that Hayes played on as a session player was an Otis Redding single, either his fourth single for Stax, "Come to Me", or his fifth, "Security": [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Security"] "Security" is usually pointed to by fans as the point at which Redding really comes into his own, and started directing the musicians more. There's a distinct difference, in particular, in the interplay between Cropper's guitar, the Mar-Keys' horns, and Redding's voice. Where previously the horns had tended to play mostly pads, just holding chords under Redding's voice, now they were starting to do answering phrases. Jim Stewart always said that the only reason Stax used a horn section at all was because he'd been unable to find a decent group of backing vocalists, and the function the horns played on most of the early Stax recordings was somewhat similar to the one that the Jordanaires had played for Elvis, or the Picks for Buddy Holly, basically doing "oooh" sounds to fatten out the sound, plus the odd sax solo or simple riff. The way Redding used the horns, though, was more like the way Ray Charles used the Raelettes, or the interplay of a doo-wop vocal group, with call and response, interjections, and asides. He also did something in "Security" that would become a hallmark of records made at Stax -- instead of a solo, the instrumental break is played by the horns as an ensemble: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Security"] According to Wayne Jackson, the Mar-Keys' trumpeter, Redding was the one who had the idea of doing these horn ensemble sections, and the musicians liked them enough that they continued doing them on all the future sessions, no matter who with. The last Stax single of 1964 took the "Security" sound and refined it, and became the template for every big Stax hit to follow. "Mr. Pitiful" was the first collaboration between Redding and Steve Cropper, and was primarily Cropper's idea. Cropper later remembered “There was a disc jockey here named Moohah. He started calling Otis ‘Mr. Pitiful' 'cause he sounded so pitiful singing his ballads. So I said, ‘Great idea for a song!' I got the idea for writing about it in the shower. I was on my way down to pick up Otis. I got down there and I was humming it in the car. I said, ‘Hey, what do you think about this?' We just wrote the song on the way to the studio, just slapping our hands on our legs. We wrote it in about ten minutes, went in, showed it to the guys, he hummed a horn line, boom—we had it. When Jim Stewart walked in we had it all worked up. Two or three cuts later, there it was.” [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Mr. Pitiful"] Cropper would often note later that Redding would never write about himself, but that Cropper would put details of Redding's life and persona into the songs, from "Mr. Pitiful" right up to their final collaboration, in which Cropper came up with lines about leaving home in Georgia. "Mr Pitiful" went to number ten on the R&B chart and peaked at number forty-one on the hot one hundred, and its B-side, "That's How Strong My Love Is", also made the R&B top twenty. Cropper and Redding soon settled into a fruitful writing partnership, to the extent that Cropper even kept a guitar permanently tuned to an open chord so that Redding could use it. Redding couldn't play the guitar, but liked to use one as a songwriting tool. When a guitar is tuned in standard tuning, you have to be able to make chord shapes to play it, because the sound of the open strings is a discord: [demonstrates] But you can tune a guitar so all the strings are the notes of a single chord, so they sound good together even when you don't make a chord shape: [demonstrates open-E tuning] With one of these open tunings, you can play chords with just a single finger barring a fret, and so they're very popular with, for example, slide guitarists who use a metal slide to play, or someone like Dolly Parton who has such long fingernails it's difficult to form chord shapes. Someone like Parton is of course an accomplished player, but open tunings also mean that someone who can't play well can just put their finger down on a fret and have it be a chord, so you can write songs just by running one finger up and down the fretboard: [demonstrates] So Redding could write, and even play acoustic rhythm guitar on some songs, which he did quite a lot in later years, without ever learning how to make chords. Now, there's a downside to this -- which is why standard tuning is still standard. If you tune to an open major chord, you can play major chords easily but minor chords become far more difficult. Handily, that wasn't a problem at Stax, because according to Isaac Hayes, Jim Stewart banned minor chords from being played at Stax. Hayes said “We'd play a chord in a session, and Jim would say, ‘I don't want to hear that chord.' Jim's ears were just tuned into one, four, and five. I mean, just simple changes. He said they were the breadwinners. He didn't like minor chords. Marvell and I always would try to put that pretty stuff in there. Jim didn't like that. We'd bump heads about that stuff. Me and Marvell fought all the time that. Booker wanted change as well. As time progressed, I was able to sneak a few in.” Of course, minor chords weren't *completely* banned from Stax, and some did sneak through, but even ballads would often have only major chords -- like Redding's next single, "I've Been Loving You Too Long". That track had its origins with Jerry Butler, the singer who had been lead vocalist of the Impressions before starting a solo career and having success with tracks like "For Your Precious Love": [Excerpt: Jerry Butler, "For Your Precious Love"] Redding liked that song, and covered it himself on his second album, and he had become friendly with Butler. Butler had half-written a song, and played it for Redding, who told him he'd like to fiddle with it, see what he could do. Butler forgot about the conversation, until he got a phone call from Redding, telling him that he'd recorded the song. Butler was confused, and also a little upset -- he'd been planning to finish the song himself, and record it. But then Redding played him the track, and Butler decided that doing so would be pointless -- it was Redding's song now: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "I've Been Loving You Too Long"] "I've Been Loving You Too Long" became Redding's first really big hit, making number two on the R&B chart and twenty-one on the Hot One Hundred. It was soon being covered by the Rolling Stones and Ike & Tina Turner, and while Redding was still not really known to the white pop market, he was quickly becoming one of the biggest stars on the R&B scene. His record sales were still not matching his live performances -- he would always make far more money from appearances than from records -- but he was by now the performer that every other soul singer wanted to copy. "I've Been Loving You Too Long" came out just after Redding's second album, The Great Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads, which happened to be the first album released on Volt Records. Before that, while Stax and Volt had released the singles, they'd licensed all the album tracks to Atlantic's Atco subsidiary, which had released the small number of albums put out by Stax artists. But times were changing and the LP market was becoming bigger. And more importantly, the *stereo* LP market was becoming bigger. Singles were still only released in mono, and would be for the next few years, but the album market had a substantial number of audiophiles, and they wanted stereo. This was a problem for Stax, because they only had a mono tape recorder, and they were scared of changing anything about their setup in case it destroyed their sound. Tom Dowd, who had been recording in eight track for years, was appalled by the technical limitations at the McLemore Ave studio, but eventually managed to get Jim Stewart, who despite -- or possibly because of -- being a white country musician was the most concerned that they keep their Black soul sound, to agree to a compromise. They would keep everything hooked up exactly the same -- the same primitive mixers, the same mono tape recorder -- and Stax would continue doing their mixes for mono, and all their singles would come directly off that mono tape. But at the same time, they would *also* have a two-track tape recorder plugged in to the mixer, with half the channels going on one track and half on the other. So while they were making the mix, they'd *also* be getting a stereo dump of that mix. The limitations of the situation meant that they might end up with drums and vocals in one channel and everything else in the other -- although as the musicians cut everything together in the studio, which had a lot of natural echo, leakage meant there was a *bit* of everything on every track -- but it would still be stereo. Redding's next album, Otis Blue, was recorded on this new equipment, with Dowd travelling down from New York to operate it. Dowd was so keen on making the album stereo that during that session, they rerecorded Redding's two most recent singles, "I've Been Loving You Too Long" and "Respect" (which hadn't yet come out but was in the process of being released) in soundalike versions so there would be stereo versions of the songs on the album -- so the stereo and mono versions of Otis Blue actually have different performances of those songs on them. It shows how intense the work rate was at Stax -- and how good they were at their jobs -- that apart from the opening track "Ole Man Trouble", which had already been recorded as a B-side, all of Otis Blue, which is often considered the greatest soul album in history, was recorded in a twenty-eight hour period, and it would have been shorter but there was a four-hour break in the middle, from 10PM to 2AM, so that the musicians on the session could play their regular local club gigs. And then after the album was finished, Otis left the session to perform a gig that evening. Tom Dowd, in particular, was astonished by the way Redding took charge in the studio, and how even though he had no technical musical knowledge, he would direct the musicians. Dowd called Redding a genius and told Phil Walden that the only two other artists he'd worked with who had as much ability in the studio were Bobby Darin and Ray Charles. Other than those singles and "Ole Man Trouble", Otis Blue was made up entirely of cover versions. There were three versions of songs by Sam Cooke, who had died just a few months earlier, and whose death had hit Redding hard -- for all that he styled himself on Little Richard vocally, he was also in awe of Cooke as a singer and stage presence. There were also covers of songs by The Temptations, William Bell, and B.B. King. And there was also an odd choice -- Steve Cropper suggested that Redding cut a cover of a song by a white band that was in the charts at the time: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] Redding had never heard the song before -- he was not paying attention to the white pop scene at the time, just to his competition on the R&B charts -- but he was interested in doing it. Cropper sat by the turntable, scribbling down what he thought the lyrics Jagger was singing were, and they cut the track. Redding starts out more or less singing the right words: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] But quickly ends up just ad-libbing random exclamations in the same way that he would in many of his live performances: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] Otis Blue made number one on the R&B album chart, and also made number six on the UK album chart -- Redding, like many soul artists, was far more popular in the UK than in the US. It only made number seventy-five on the pop album charts in the US, but it did a remarkable thing as far as Stax was concerned -- it *stayed* in the lower reaches of the charts, and on the R&B album charts, for a long time. Redding had become what is known as a "catalogue artist", something that was almost unknown in rock and soul music at this time, but which was just starting to appear. Up to 1965, the interlinked genres that we now think of as rock and roll, rock, pop, blues, R&B, and soul, had all operated on the basis that singles were where the money was, and that singles should be treated like periodicals -- they go on the shelves, stay there for a few weeks, get replaced by the new thing, and nobody's interested any more. This had contributed to the explosive rate of change in pop music between about 1954 and 1968. You'd package old singles up into albums, and stick some filler tracks on there as a way of making a tiny bit of money from tracks which weren't good enough to release as singles, but that was just squeezing the last few drops of juice out of the orange, it wasn't really where the money was. The only exceptions were those artists like Ray Charles who crossed over into the jazz and adult pop markets. But in general, your record sales in the first few weeks and months *were* your record sales. But by the mid-sixties, as album sales started to take off more, things started to change. And Otis Redding was one of the first artists to really benefit from that. He wasn't having huge hit singles, and his albums weren't making the pop top forty, but they *kept selling*. Redding wouldn't have an album make the top forty in his lifetime, but they sold consistently, and everything from Otis Blue onward sold two hundred thousand or so copies -- a massive number in the much smaller album market of the time. These sales gave Redding some leverage. His contract with Stax was coming to an end in a few months, and he was getting offers from other companies. As part of his contract renegotiation, he got Jim Stewart -- who like so many people in this story including Redding himself liked to operate on handshake deals and assumptions of good faith on the part of everyone else, and who prided himself on being totally fair and not driving hard bargains -- to rework his publishing deal. Now Redding's music was going to be published by Redwal Music -- named after Redding and Phil Walden -- which was owned as a four-way split between Redding, Walden, Stewart, and Joe Galkin. Redding also got the right as part of his contract negotiations to record other artists using Stax's facilities and musicians. He set up his own label, Jotis Records -- a portmanteau of Joe and Otis, for Joe Galkin and himself, and put out records by Arthur Conley: [Excerpt: Arthur Conley, "Who's Fooling Who?"] Loretta Williams [Excerpt: Loretta Williams, "I'm Missing You"] and Billy Young [Excerpt: Billy Young, "The Sloopy"] None of these was a success, but it was another example of how Redding was trying to use his success to boost others. There were other changes going on at Stax as well. The company was becoming more tightly integrated with Atlantic Records -- Tom Dowd had started engineering more sessions, Jerry Wexler was turning up all the time, and they were starting to make records for Atlantic, as we discussed in the episode on "In the Midnight Hour". Atlantic were also loaning Stax Sam and Dave, who were contracted to Atlantic but treated as Stax artists, and whose hits were written by the new Stax songwriting team of Isaac Hayes and David Porter: [Excerpt: Sam and Dave, "Soul Man"] Redding was not hugely impressed by Sam and Dave, once saying in an interview "When I first heard the Righteous Brothers, I thought they were colored. I think they sing better than Sam and Dave", but they were having more and bigger chart hits than him, though they didn't have the same level of album sales. Also, by now Booker T and the MGs had a new bass player. Donald "Duck" Dunn had always been the "other" bass player at Stax, ever since he'd started with the Mar-Keys, and he'd played on many of Redding's recordings, as had Lewie Steinberg, the original bass player with the MGs. But in early 1965, the Stax studio musicians had cut a record originally intending it to be a Mar-Keys record, but decided to put it out as by Booker T and the MGs, even though Booker T wasn't there at the time -- Isaac Hayes played keyboards on the track: [Excerpt: Booker T and the MGs, "Boot-Leg"] Booker T Jones would always have a place at Stax, and would soon be back full time as he finished his degree, but from that point on Duck Dunn, not Lewie Steinberg, was the bass player for the MGs. Another change in 1965 was that Stax got serious about promotion. Up to this point, they'd just relied on Atlantic to promote their records, but obviously Atlantic put more effort into promoting records on which it made all the money than ones it just distributed. But as part of the deal to make records with Sam and Dave and Wilson Pickett, Atlantic had finally put their arrangement with Stax on a contractual footing, rather than their previous handshake deal, and they'd agreed to pay half the salary of a publicity person for Stax. Stax brought in Al Bell, who made a huge impression. Bell had been a DJ in Memphis, who had gone off to work with Martin Luther King for a while, before leaving after a year because, as he put it "I was not about passive resistance. I was about economic development, economic empowerment.” He'd returned to DJing, first in Memphis, then in Washington DC, where he'd been one of the biggest boosters of Stax records in the area. While he was in Washington, he'd also started making records himself. He'd produced several singles for Grover Mitchell on Decca: [Excerpt: Grover Mitchell, "Midnight Tears"] Those records were supervised by Milt Gabler, the same Milt Gabler who produced Louis Jordan's records and "Rock Around the Clock", and Bell co-produced them with Eddie Floyd, who wrote that song, and Chester Simmons, formerly of the Moonglows, and the three of them started their own label, Safice, which had put out a few records by Floyd and others, on the same kind of deal with Atlantic that Stax had: [Excerpt: Eddie Floyd, "Make Up Your Mind"] Floyd would himself soon become a staff songwriter at Stax. As with almost every decision at Stax, the decision to hire Bell was a cause of disagreement between Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton, the "Ax" in Stax, who wasn't as involved in the day-to-day studio operations as her brother, but who was often regarded by the musicians as at least as important to the spirit of the label, and who tended to disagree with her brother on pretty much everything. Stewart didn't want to hire Bell, but according to Cropper “Estelle and I said, ‘Hey, we need somebody that can liaison between the disc jockeys and he's the man to do it. Atlantic's going into a radio station with six Atlantic records and one Stax record. We're not getting our due.' We knew that. We needed more promotion and he had all the pull with all those disc jockeys. He knew E. Rodney Jones and all the big cats, the Montagues and so on. He knew every one of them.” Many people at Stax will say that the label didn't even really start until Bell joined -- and he became so important to the label that he would eventually take it over from Stewart and Axton. Bell came in every day and immediately started phoning DJs, all day every day, starting in the morning with the drivetime East Coast DJs, and working his way across the US, ending up at midnight phoning the evening DJs in California. Booker T Jones said of him “He had energy like Otis Redding, except he wasn't a singer. He had the same type of energy. He'd come in the room, pull up his shoulders and that energy would start. He would start talking about the music business or what was going on and he energized everywhere he was. He was our Otis for promotion. It was the same type of energy charisma.” Meanwhile, of course, Redding was constantly releasing singles. Two more singles were released from Otis Blue -- his versions of "My Girl" and "Satisfaction", and he also released "I Can't Turn You Loose", which was originally the B-side to "Just One More Day" but ended up charting higher than its original A-side. It's around this time that Redding did something which seems completely out of character, but which really must be mentioned given that with very few exceptions everyone in his life talks about him as some kind of saint. One of Redding's friends was beaten up, and Redding, the friend, and another friend drove to the assailant's house and started shooting through the windows, starting a gun battle in which Redding got grazed. His friend got convicted of attempted murder, and got two years' probation, while Redding himself didn't face any criminal charges but did get sued by the victims, and settled out of court for a few hundred dollars. By this point Redding was becoming hugely rich from his concert appearances and album sales, but he still hadn't had a top twenty pop hit. He needed to break the white market. And so in April 1966, Redding went to LA, to play the Sunset Strip: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Respect (live at the Whisky A-Go-Go)"] Redding's performance at the Whisky A-Go-Go, a venue which otherwise hosted bands like the Doors, the Byrds, the Mothers of Invention, and Love, was his first real interaction with the white rock scene, part of a process that had started with his recording of "Satisfaction". The three-day residency got rave reviews, though the plans to release a live album of the shows were scuppered when Jim Stewart listened back to the tapes and decided that Redding's horn players were often out of tune. But almost everyone on the LA scene came out to see the shows, and Redding blew them away. According to one biography of Redding I used, it was seeing how Redding tuned his guitar that inspired the guitarist from the support band, the Rising Sons, to start playing in the same tuning -- though I can't believe for a moment that Ry Cooder, one of the greatest slide guitarists of his generation, didn't already know about open tunings. But Redding definitely impressed that band -- Taj Mahal, their lead singer, later said it was "one of the most amazing performances I'd ever seen". Also at the gigs was Bob Dylan, who played Redding a song he'd just recorded but not yet released: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Just Like a Woman"] Redding agreed that the song sounded perfect for him, and said he would record it. He apparently made some attempts at rehearsing it at least, but never ended up recording it. He thought the first verse and chorus were great, but had problems with the second verse: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Just Like a Woman"] Those lyrics were just too abstract for him to find a way to connect with them emotionally, and as a result he found himself completely unable to sing them. But like his recording of "Satisfaction", this was another clue to him that he should start paying more attention to what was going on in the white music industry, and that there might be things he could incorporate into his own style. As a result of the LA gigs, Bill Graham booked Redding for the Fillmore in San Francisco. Redding was at first cautious, thinking this might be a step too far, and that he wouldn't go down well with the hippie crowd, but Graham persuaded him, saying that whenever he asked any of the people who the San Francisco crowds most loved -- Jerry Garcia or Paul Butterfield or Mike Bloomfield -- who *they* most wanted to see play there, they all said Otis Redding. Redding reluctantly agreed, but before he took a trip to San Francisco, there was somewhere even further out for him to go. Redding was about to head to England but before he did there was another album to make, and this one would see even more of a push for the white market, though still trying to keep everything soulful. As well as Redding originals, including "Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)", another song in the mould of "Mr. Pitiful", there was another cover of a contemporary hit by a guitar band -- this time a version of the Beatles' "Day Tripper" -- and two covers of old standards; the country song "Tennessee Waltz", which had recently been covered by Sam Cooke, and a song made famous by Bing Crosby, "Try a Little Tenderness". That song almost certainly came to mind because it had recently been used in the film Dr. Strangelove, but it had also been covered relatively recently by two soul greats, Aretha Franklin: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Try a Little Tenderness"] And Sam Cooke: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Live Medley: I Love You For Sentimental Reasons/Try a Little Tenderness/You Send Me"] This version had horn parts arranged by Isaac Hayes, who by this point had been elevated to be considered one of the "Big Six" at Stax records -- Hayes, his songwriting partner David Porter, Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn, Booker T. Jones, and Al Jackson, were all given special status at the company, and treated as co-producers on every record -- all the records were now credited as produced by "staff", but it was the Big Six who split the royalties. Hayes came up with a horn part that was inspired by Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come", and which dominated the early part of the track: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Try a Little Tenderness"] Then the band came in, slowly at first: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Try a Little Tenderness"] But Al Jackson surprised them when they ran through the track by deciding that after the main song had been played, he'd kick the track into double-time, and give Redding a chance to stretch out and do his trademark grunts and "got-ta"s. The single version faded out shortly after that, but the version on the album kept going for an extra thirty seconds: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Try a Little Tenderness"] As Booker T. Jones said “Al came up with the idea of breaking up the rhythm, and Otis just took that and ran with it. He really got excited once he found out what Al was going to do on the drums. He realized how he could finish the song. That he could start it like a ballad and finish it full of emotion. That's how a lot of our arrangements would come together. Somebody would come up with something totally outrageous.” And it would have lasted longer but Jim Stewart pushed the faders down, realising the track was an uncommercial length even as it was. Live, the track could often stretch out to seven minutes or longer, as Redding drove the crowd into a frenzy, and it soon became one of the highlights of his live set, and a signature song for him: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Try a Little Tenderness (live in London)"] In September 1966, Redding went on his first tour outside the US. His records had all done much better in the UK than they had in America, and they were huge favourites of everyone on the Mod scene, and when he arrived in the UK he had a limo sent by Brian Epstein to meet him at the airport. The tour was an odd one, with multiple London shows, shows in a couple of big cities like Manchester and Bristol, and shows in smallish towns in Hampshire and Lincolnshire. Apparently the shows outside London weren't particularly well attended, but the London shows were all packed to overflowing. Redding also got his own episode of Ready! Steady! Go!, on which he performed solo as well as with guest stars Eric Burdon and Chris Farlowe: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, Chris Farlowe and Eric Burdon, "Shake/Land of a Thousand Dances"] After the UK tour, he went on a short tour of the Eastern US with Sam and Dave as his support act, and then headed west to the Fillmore for his three day residency there, introducing him to the San Francisco music scene. His first night at the venue was supported by the Grateful Dead, the second by Johnny Talbot and De Thangs and the third by Country Joe and the Fish, but there was no question that it was Otis Redding that everyone was coming to see. Janis Joplin turned up at the Fillmore every day at 3PM, to make sure she could be right at the front for Redding's shows that night, and Bill Graham said, decades later, "By far, Otis Redding was the single most extraordinary talent I had ever seen. There was no comparison. Then or now." However, after the Fillmore gigs, for the first time ever he started missing shows. The Sentinel, a Black newspaper in LA, reported a few days later "Otis Redding, the rock singer, failed to make many friends here the other day when he was slated to appear on the Christmas Eve show[...] Failed to draw well, and Redding reportedly would not go on." The Sentinel seem to think that Redding was just being a diva, but it's likely that this was the first sign of a problem that would change everything about his career -- he was developing vocal polyps that were making singing painful. It's notable though that the Sentinel refers to Redding as a "rock" singer, and shows again how different genres appeared in the mid-sixties to how they appear today. In that light, it's interesting to look at a quote from Redding from a few months later -- "Everybody thinks that all songs by colored people are rhythm and blues, but that's not true. Johnny Taylor, Muddy Waters, and B.B. King are blues singers. James Brown is not a blues singer. He has a rock and roll beat and he can sing slow pop songs. My own songs "Respect" and "Mr Pitiful" aren't blues songs. I'm speaking in terms of the beat and structure of the music. A blues is a song that goes twelve bars all the way through. Most of my songs are soul songs." So in Redding's eyes, neither he nor James Brown were R&B -- he was soul, which was a different thing from R&B, while Brown was rock and roll and pop, not soul, but journalists thought that Redding was rock. But while the lines between these things were far less distinct than they are today, and Redding was trying to cross over to the white audience, he knew what genre he was in, and celebrated that in a song he wrote with his friend Art

In this episode we welcome pioneering '60s rock writer Ellen Sander and invite her to discuss her classic 1973 book Trips: Rock Life in the Sixties, reissued in an "augmented" edition in 2019. Ellen recalls her New York upbringing and initiation into the folk scene in Greenwich Village, then explains how Danny Fields (episode 28) steered her towards writing for Sing Out! and Hullabaloo. With references to David Crosby, David Geffen, Abbie Hoffman and the Monterey Pop festival, she talks about the inextricable relationship between '60s music and the decade's political upheavals. We also hear about her 1968 article on groupies; her troubling experiences on the road with Led Zeppelin; and her relationship with Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman (father of her son Marin), all of which led to the writing of Trips. Attention then turns to two clips from the week's new audio interview, in which suave Yorkshire-born rock'n'soul man Robert Palmer talks about his love of bossa nova and the fun he had on the sessions for 1974's Sneakin' Sally through the Alley with Little Feat's Lowell George. After Mark quotes from new library interviews with the Beatles (1963), B.B. King (1968), and Simpsons creator Matt Groening (1993), Barney cites an early Steely Dan piece from 1973 and Jasper recommends articles about emo stars Paramore (2010), Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor (2014) and – from 2016 – jazz hybridiser Jacob Collier.

Feeding the Woodstock thousands, acid, the Summer of Love, the Haight Ashbury, Timothy Leary, anti-Vietnam war protests, the problems of free love and living in communes, the Monterey pop festival, The Diggers, Wavy Gravy, Owsley, Bob and Sarah Dylan, Peter Coyote, helping Dennis Hopper though a bad trip.. In this episode we sat down again with 80 year old photographer LISA LAW in her home in Mexico to hear more extraordinary tales from the her life on the frontiers of counterculture.   We take up the tales as Lisa arrives in San Francisco in 1967, follow her behind the scenes at the Woodstock, Texas and Monterey Pop festivals, through the ups and downs of family life and motherhood whilst always taking photographs of a society in the turmoils of radical change.   Thanks to Roger Burton for the introduction to Lisa. During the episode we hear Tim Leary at 'The Human Be In' in San Francisco and the poet Adrian Mitchell reciting his poem To Whom it May Concern (Tell Me Lies about Viet Nam). For more on Lisa, her film, book and images: www.flashingonthesixties.com/ For more on the Bureau: www.bureauoflostculture.com   Images copyright Lisa Law   #Dylan, #TheVelvetUnderground, #JanisJoplin, #TheBeatles, #OtisRedding, #PeterFonda, #DenisHopper, #TimothyLeary, #RamDass, #AllenGinsberg, KenKesey, #thehogfarm, #themerrypranksters, #wavygravy, #peterpaulandmary #haightashbury, #hippies, #psychedelicmushrooms, #lisalaw, #vietnamwar  

On January 19, 2023, musician David Crosby passed at the age of 81.  Crosby's music was hugely important to Andrew Langer, and in this bonus episode, Andrew talks about that influence--from Crosby's music to how he lived his life.  He talks about his relationships with his bandmates, a little about his love life, but ultimately gives a tribute to this musical giant.

Iconic photographer Henry Diltz has shot more than 250 album covers and thousands of publicity shots in the ‘60s and ‘70s, for bands and artists such as The Doors, the Eagles, Neil Young, Crosby Stills & Nash, Jackson Browne, America, Steppenwolf, James Taylor, Jimi Hendrix, The Monkees and David Cassidy. He was the official photographer at the Woodstock festival in August 1969. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, LIFE, People, Rolling Stone, High Times and Billboard.My Rock Moment has been lucky enough to have Henry on twice, and in this episode we delve into the 70s, covering everything from the first two Eagles album covers, to meeting Jackson Browne for the first time to shooting James Taylor's Sweet Baby James album cover. Henry also recalls shooting Mama Cass in Palm Springs, Monterey Pop and Woodstock '99, which is getting quite a bit of attention recently due to the Netflix documentary that painted a dark picture of the 3 day festival.If you would like to check out some of Henry's iconic work, sold exclusively through The Morrison Hotel Gallery, click here: https://morrisonhotelgallery.com/collections/henry-diltzAnd don't forget to follow My Rock Moment on social:Instagram: @la_woman_rocksFacebook: https://morrisonhotelgallery.com/collections/henry-diltz

We welcome Dan Sheehan, Co-Founder of a brand new festival taking place in Monterey, CA called 'Rebels & Renegades, a 2-day music festival taking place October 15-16 at the Monterey Fair & Event Center in Monterey, CA, the once home to the famous Monterey Pop Festival. The stacked lineup includes Cody Jinks, Trampled by Turtles, Orville Peck, Houndmouth, The Cadillac Three, Shane Smith and The Saints, Nikki Lane, Sierra Hull, Fruition, Charles Wesley Godwin, Kat Hasty, Myron Elkins, Shooter Jennings and more. The team behind Rebels & Renegades, Good Vibez Presents, were inspired by the rebellious spirit and storytelling culture of Americana, outlaw country, bluegrass, and folk artists of today, saluting the outlaw in all of us with this year's musical and non-musical offerings. Dan walks us through how the festival came to be, the mission and purpose behind the company, the hollowed grounds of Monterey Pop and more. For more information on Rebels & Renegades Music Festival, visit: www.rebelsandrenegadesfest.com

Part 1: Zach talks about movies he saw this week at TIFF, including: The Woman King, Chevalier, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Fabelmans.Part 2 (28:40): The group continues their concert movies series with 1968's Monterey Pop.See movies discussed in this episode here.Don't want to listen? Watch the podcast on our YouTube channel.Also follow us on:FacebookTwitterLetterboxd

Berättelsen om en av musikhistoriens första kvinnliga rocklegender. Hon som levde för scenen och sin publik men som kände sig oändligt ensam när strålkastarna slocknade. Det är högsommar i Monterey, Kalifornien 1967. I år är det premiär för festivalen Monterey Pop och på scenen står Janis Joplin.Hennes långa bruna hår ligger utsläppt över axlarna. På sig har hon en ljusgul stickad klänning och utsvängda byxor i samma gula färg. Det här är Janis och hennes band Big Brother and the Holding companys största och hittills viktigaste spelning.Mycket, nej allt står på spel. Tänk att hon, Texas-tjejen från landsbygden, som för bara ett år sen harvade runt med en akustisk gitarr på små caféer i San Francisco nu står här framför tusentals människor och i sällskap med artister som Jimi Hendrix, The Who och The Mamas and the Papas. Publiken har ingen aning om vad de har att vänta och när Janis spruckna, innerliga röst skär igenom tystnaden är det som att tiden står still.Janis Joplins karriär ska precis snurra igång och där och då gör hon något som ingen har gjort förut.Där och då skapar hon musikhistoria.  P3 Musikdokumentär om Janis Joplin är en berättelse om en av musikhistoriens första kvinnliga rocklegender. Hon med den spruckna rösten som ekar än i dag. Hon som levde för scenen och sin publik men som kände sig oändligt ensam när strålkastarna slocknade.Dokumentären är gjord av Siri Hill sommaren 2022. Producent Hanna Frelin. Exekutiv producent Anna Johannessen. Tekniker Fredrik Nilsson. Programmet görs av produktionsbolaget Tredje Statsmakten Media.Medverkande: Navid Bavey och Caroline af Ugglas.Biografin Love, Janis (2005) av Laura Joplin är en av de främsta källorna i programmet.Ljudklipp i dokumentären kommer från ABC TV, The Dick Cavett Show, KTVU, Sveriges Radio, WDR, Rock and Roll hall of fame samt dokumentärfilmerna Janis (1974), Janis: Little girl blue (2015), Monterey Pop (1968) och Woodstock (1970). 

Put on your too tight jeans, do up that hair, and get ready to rock! In your living room! The guys go back to the documentary genre for a little slice of the concert film. What separates these movies from other documentaries? Are they their own art form? Did you just take the brown acid? Oh my god! Keep calm! Take deep breaths, and listen to the guys bring you down by talking about Monterey Pop, The Last Waltz, Depeche Mode 101, Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, Stop Making Sense, Amazing Grace, and Neil Young in Berlin. Josh may have been deceptive in the editing by including audio of songs not recorded during the Berlin performance for this episode. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/brickedpit/message

In a Very Special Episode, Dave and Joe welcome filmmaker John Landis (Animal House, The Blues Brothers, Coming To America, Three Amigos!, Michael Jackson's Thriller video), who talks about seeing The Beatles as a teenager, a terrifying situation with Michael Jackson, Monterey Pop, and much more. Relevant links: - The T.A.M.I. Show - Otis Redding at Monterey Pop --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/discograffiti/message

The Harlem Cultural Festival was a music festival taking place in the same summer of 1969 as Woodstock, and its amazing line-up, and insight into how it happened, is finally presented, 52 years later. Movies about music festivals have a built-in appeal: if you like the kind of music featured, the festival film gives you a variety of different artists in that genre. The gold standard is still Monterey Pop, about the 1967 festival of that name. And of course, there's Woodstock, chronicling the famous gathering in 1969 that was seen as a kind of summing up of the rock and pop music then. Now, just last year, a film was released about a major music festival that took place the same summer when Woodstock was happening. It was the Harlem Cultural Festival, a free event that occurred at Mount Morris Park on six successive weekends from June to August of '69. This did not get very much attention. I, for one, had never heard of it. The film is called Summer of Soul, and my jaw dropped when I saw the list of performers. But first you need to know that Summer of Soul is also a record of a crucial time in the history of the Black community in America, and the production was put together by Ahmir Thompson, more popularly known as Questlove, a major author and producer, and one of the frontmen for the band The Roots, which is The Tonight Show band. Each weekend in the Harlem Cultural Festival highlighted a different type of Black American music. In the course of the film, we watch performances by B.B. King, Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, Gladys Knight and the Pips, The Chambers Brothers, and David Ruffin, the lead singer for The Temptations who had just left that group to go solo. We see The Fifth Dimension performing there as well, and two of the members of that group talk about how excited they were to play in Harlem, because their sound was sometimes dismissed as “too white,” but the film showcases their stunning vocal mastery. The jazz portions include Herbie Mann, Abbey Lincoln, and Nina Simone. And a very interesting long middle section shows the strong influence of gospel on the Black music scene, with performances by The Staple Singers, The Edwin Hawkins singers with “Oh Happy Day,” and the Queen of Gospel, Mahalia Jackson. Interspersed with all the great music are clips and interviews profiling the social and political situation in Black America at that time. Dr. King had been murdered only the previous year, and there was a new militancy in the air. Civil rights and social justice were part of the festival, and we are shown a very young Jesse Jackson speaking to the audience about the need to continue the struggle for peace and justice. Interviews with artists and people involved in putting the festival on emphasize the strong sense of togetherness experienced at these events. In such an atmosphere of joy and hope, it is somewhat difficult for us now, over five decades later, not to feel some frustration at how much racism has continued as a political force in our country. But the people being interviewed caution us against despair. The love and solidarity, expressed through music and activism, is still alive today, as we see, for instance, in the Black Lives Matter movement. So why did it take so long for this film to be released? One of the sponsors of the festival, Maxwell House Coffee, filmed all the performances. But after being minimally aired on a couple of TV specials, the footage ended up sitting in a basement for fifty years until it was discovered by an archivist in 2004 who alerted others to take on the task of restoration. Now, thanks to them and to Questlove, this brilliant event has come to life again in Summer of Soul. You owe it to yourself t

Season 2, Episode 1, AJ talks to Harvey Brooks and his wife Bonnie. Probably the most important bass player in the history of Rock N Roll. Not many musicians can claim in their resume of recording with Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Mama Cass, Janis Joplin, John Sebastian and Electric Flag … just to name a few. Hear all the first hand accounts as well as stories of being at Monterey Pop, and his current life in Jerusalem. Long live Harvey Brooks! and thanks for sharing so many amazing stories.

He was born and raised along side 30,000 marine recruits at Paris Island, South Carolina. His father was a retired Naval Officer, who'd won an Oklahoma bar in a poker game. After struggling thru middle school and high school, he gets accepted into the United States Naval Academy, but he drops out after only a year. He went on to Hampden-Sydney College, a liberal arts college for men. He dropped out after a year.He started a folk trio called the Journeymen. They were fairly well-received, thanks in part to the tv show Hootenanny. After three successful albums with the J-Men, he started a co-ed group, named after the Hell's Angels ladies auxiliary group the Mama's, they called themselves the Mamas & the Papas. they have several Bill Board Top 10 Hits; California Dreaming, Monday Monday and San Fransisco, just to name a few.Aside from performing, he helped plan, promote and play at the Monterey Pop Festival, including the accompanying film, Monterey Pop. After years of fame and hanging out with HollyWood socialites, his drug use increases. Tiring of the US, he moves to London, England for a while. He hangs out with Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones and David Bowie.After being convicted of drug trafficking, he got the Mamas & the Papas back together, wrote Kokomo , on the side, for the Beach Boys and won a Grammy for that song for the film Cocktail, he had a liver transplant and eventually died of heart failure. One of the fore-fathers of festivals, four-tracks and folk music, it's the jam of John Phillips!Leave an Anonymous SpeakPipe Voice Msg: www.crimeinmusic.comTweet Us: www.twitter.com/crimeinmusicGram: www.instagram.com/crimeinusicFaceBook: www.facebook.com/crimeinmusicProud member of the Pantheon Podcasts Network

He was born and raised along side 30,000 marine recruits at Paris Island, South Carolina. His father was a retired Naval Officer, who'd won an Oklahoma bar in a poker game. After struggling thru middle school and high school, he gets accepted into the United States Naval Academy, but he drops out after only a year. He went on to Hampden-Sydney College, a liberal arts college for men. He dropped out after a year.He started a folk trio called the Journeymen. They were fairly well-received, thanks in part to the tv show Hootenanny. After three successful albums with the J-Men, he started a co-ed group, named after the Hell's Angels ladies auxiliary group the Mama's, they called themselves the Mamas & the Papas. they have several Bill Board Top 10 Hits; California Dreaming, Monday Monday and San Fransisco, just to name a few.Aside from performing, he helped plan, promote and play at the Monterey Pop Festival, including the accompanying film, Monterey Pop. After years of fame and hanging out with HollyWood socialites, his drug use increases. Tiring of the US, he moves to London, England for a while. He hangs out with Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones and David Bowie.After being convicted of drug trafficking, he got the Mamas & the Papas back together, wrote Kokomo , on the side, for the Beach Boys and won a Grammy for that song for the film Cocktail, he had a liver transplant and eventually died of heart failure. One of the fore-fathers of festivals, four-tracks and folk music, it's the jam of John Phillips!Leave an Anonymous SpeakPipe Voice Msg: www.crimeinmusic.comTweet Us: www.twitter.com/crimeinmusicGram: www.instagram.com/crimeinusicFaceBook: www.facebook.com/crimeinmusicProud member of the Pantheon Podcasts Network

In this episode we depart from our normal format in order to celebrate the milestone that is our 100th episode. Barney, Mark & Jasper look back over highlights of the previous 99 "shows", listening to amusing clips from interviews with Jennifer Otter Bickerdike, Neil Tennant, Amy Linden, Bernard Fowler, James Fox, Stewart Lee, Caroline Boucher, Loyd Grossman and John Harris. Along the way they relive the podcast's inception and evolution — and the crucial importance of Mark Pringle's inimitable laugh.The podcast's "power trio" wish a happy 80th birthday to contributor Keith Altham, express their deep appreciation for his support over the past 20 years, and discuss three of his 450 pieces on RBP. They also talk a bit about the Black Keys, R. L Burnside & the North Mississippi hill country blues sound that inspired the Keys' new Delta Kream album. Clips from a 1991 audio interview with Donald Fagen prompt conversation about The Nightfly, the Rock & Soul Revue, and the all-round greatness of Steely Dan.Finally, Mark regales us with quotes from new library pieces about the Velvets & the Mothers live, the Bee Gees' Barry Gibb and Cameo's Larry Blackmon. Jasper talks us out with remarks on Coldplay live and Lil Jon.Many thanks to all our guests, contributors and listeners for joining us for one hundred episodes.The Rock's Backpages podcast is part of the Pantheon podcast network.Pieces and episodes discussed: Episode 1, Jennifer Otter Bickerdike, Neil Tennant, Amy Linden, Bernard Fowler, James Fox, Stewart Lee, Caroline Boucher, Barbara Charone, Loyd Grossman, John Harris, Keith Altham at 80, Monterey Pop, Marc Bolan, The Beatles, North Mississippi Hill Country Blues, R. L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough, Billy Gibbons and Dan Auerbach, Donald Fagen audio, the Velvet Underground & the Mothers of Invention, Barry Gibb, Miles Davis, Cameo, Public Enemy, Coldplay, Lil Jon, Junglepussy, Christina Aguilera and Keith Altham.

In this episode we depart from our normal format in order to celebrate the milestone that is our 100th episode. Barney, Mark & Jasper look back over highlights of the previous 99 "shows", listening to amusing clips from interviews with Jennifer Otter Bickerdike, Neil Tennant, Amy Linden, Bernard Fowler, James Fox, Stewart Lee, Caroline Boucher, Loyd Grossman and John Harris. Along the way they relive the podcast's inception and evolution — and the crucial importance of Mark Pringle's inimitable laugh.The podcast's "power trio" wish a happy 80th birthday to contributor Keith Altham, express their deep appreciation for his support over the past 20 years, and discuss three of his 450 pieces on RBP. They also talk a bit about the Black Keys, R. L Burnside & the North Mississippi hill country blues sound that inspired the Keys' new Delta Kream album. Clips from a 1991 audio interview with Donald Fagen prompt conversation about The Nightfly, the Rock & Soul Revue, and the all-round greatness of Steely Dan.Finally, Mark regales us with quotes from new library pieces about the Velvets & the Mothers live, the Bee Gees' Barry Gibb and Cameo's Larry Blackmon. Jasper talks us out with remarks on Coldplay live and Lil Jon.Many thanks to all our guests, contributors and listeners for joining us for one hundred episodes.The Rock's Backpages podcast is part of the Pantheon podcast network. Pieces and episodes discussed: Episode 1, Jennifer Otter Bickerdike, Neil Tennant, Amy Linden, Bernard Fowler, James Fox, Stewart Lee, Caroline Boucher, Barbara Charone, Loyd Grossman, John Harris, Keith Altham at 80, Monterey Pop, Marc Bolan, The Beatles, North Mississippi Hill Country Blues, R. L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough, Billy Gibbons and Dan Auerbach, Donald Fagen audio, the Velvet Underground & the Mothers of Invention, Barry Gibb, Miles Davis, Cameo, Public Enemy, Coldplay, Lil Jon, Junglepussy, Christina Aguilera and Keith Altham.

It's obviously not just the film industry that's having trouble during the pandemic; the music industry's working bands have found their main revenue stream of touring currently not an option for this last year. On this episode is Laura Colwell and Stephen Salisbury of the Austin, TX band Sun June, who, between their dreamy “regret pop” and self-directed videos, have a foot in both industries. Here we discuss:- these two Bay Area concert docs of the late '60s;- Janis Joplin and Otis Redding's iconic performances in the former;- the snuff film aspects of the latter;- the forced-mythologized bookending of both;- their cameramen directors D.A. Pennebaker and the Maysles Bros;- and other contributors such as Shelter's co-director and -editor Charlotte Zwerin.Also:- How Sun June literally started out in an editing room;- what their working band entails now with members across multiple cities;- rock critic Robert Christgau's clear-eyed essay “Anatomy of a Love Festival”;- what Albert Maysles told me when I interviewed him in 2000;- how wildly different the industry was financially between now and 1967;- and what techniques these docs can have for a modern band making their own videos and controlling their own image.Colwell, along with being lead singer and keyboard player for Sun June, works in the film industry and has edited features and docs, including Also Starring Austin, about the city's history on film. Salisbury, Sun June's guitarist, also worked in the film industry on films such as Knight of Cups, Song to Song, and the doc Becoming Leslie. He is currently in the graduate program studying microbiology at the University of North Carolina. They both also write songs for the band.Sun June's sophomore album, Somewhere, was just released via Run For Cover and Keeled Scales. You can find out more at the band's website, such as where to stream live performances and, when bands can do so again, tour dates. Checking out their videos page is also highly recommended, too.Monterey Pop and Gimme Shelter are both, respectively, streaming on HBO Max and both, respectively, physically on the Criterion Collection.

Host Nate Wilcox and Ed Ward spoke in 2018 about Ed's book Michael Bloomfield: The Rise and Fall of an American Guitar Hero. Ed tells Nate about The Electric Flag, Bloomfield's attempt to build a "supergroup" incorporating horns and drummer Buddy Miles. The band's struggles with direction and drugs. Bloomfield's part in Al Kooper's successful "SuperSession" album and Bloomfield's withdrawal from the rock music rat race and tragic passing.Let It Roll is Proud to be a part of the Pantheon Podcast Network.

Host Nate Wilcox and Ed Ward spoke in 2018 about Ed's book Michael Bloomfield: The Rise and Fall of an American Guitar Hero. Ed tells Nate about The Electric Flag, Bloomfield's attempt to build a "supergroup" incorporating horns and drummer Buddy Miles. The band's struggles with direction and drugs. Bloomfield's part in Al Kooper's successful "SuperSession" album and Bloomfield's withdrawal from the rock music rat race and tragic passing.Let It Roll is Proud to be a part of the Pantheon Podcast Network.

Today's guest is pioneering conservation photographer, Robert Glenn Ketchum. Robert's imagery and books have helped to define contemporary color photography while at the same time addressing critical national environmental issues, having made him one of the most successful artists and activists in American history. In today's episode, Robert talks about the development of his career, the many adventures his work has taken him on, and the social change these projects have kickstarted. We dive straight in hearing Robert talk about the Pebble Mine campaign he is involved in currently where he is fighting against the construction of the largest gold and cyanide leech mine in the history of the world in Southwest Alaska. From there, Robert rewinds to his days as a student at UCLA in the 60s, where he started his photography career taking snaps of the famous bands that played in his neighborhood. On the way back from the Monterey Pop Festival, Robert camped out at Limekiln Creek to break the trip up, and in a moment of contemplation next to a quiet stream he got the idea to pivot into conservation photography. Robert's career blew up after that event, and he tells one epic tale after another about the different campaigns he fell into, the huge names he rubbed shoulders with, and the incredible ripple effects his photographs had. We also get to hear Robert's thoughts on some of the most vital sides of being an artist, how to secure money, and how to increase the clout of one's projects. Wrapping up our conversation, Robert tells a few more awe-inspiring stories about how he started translating his prints into textiles after discovering the quality Chinese embroidery. Tune in for tales of adventure, discovery, and serendipity, all powered by a passion for creativity and our natural environment with Robert today.   Key Points From This Episode: The campaign Robert is working on to protest the Pebble Mine in South West Alaska. Robert's book, Southwest Alaska, which talks about overfishing in Crystal Bay. Saving San Ignacio Lagoon with Joel Reynolds from the NRDC and recruiting him for the Southwest Alaska work. The multi-tiered nature of the campaigns Robert works on; drawing on multiple channels. The funds necessary to launch these big campaigns which groups smaller than the NRDC wouldn't manage. The power of branding to spread public awareness about bad practices. Differences in quality between wild and farmed salmon and Robert's adventures with Alaskan locals. Robert's experiences shooting famous bands in LA in the 1960s. How Robert got the idea to transition into environmental photography on the way back from Monterey Pop. Moving to the East Coast to work on a project in the Hudson River Valley. Photographing destructive practices in the Hudson River Valley and getting published by Aperture. Passing the largest timber reform bill in the U.S's history during the Tongass Rainforest Project. Getting invited onto the board of the American Land Conservancy and helping save Limekiln Creek. Robert's ‘method' involving simply taking pictures and falling into one project after another. Using contrasting images of natural beauty and destruction in campaigns. How Robert realized the power of photography after photos of his caused real changes. Founding the International League of Conservation Photographers. The need for artists with great ideas to secure funding and how Robert did this. Events related to the publicity and funding of the Tongass Rainforest Project. Some of the books that Robert has published and collections he has curated. Getting invited by Robert Redford to be an artist in residence at his Sundance Institute. An expedition on William E. Simon's private yacht through the Northwest Passage. How Robert convinced Bill Simon that the Tongass logging was not ethical. The story of finding out about Suzhou embroidery prowess and getting photos translated into textiles.  How...

Music historian Harvey Kubernik comes on the Goldmine Podcast to dig deep into his latest book Docs That Rock, Music That Matters. Kubernik grew up in Los Angeles in the 1960s and absorbed all the show business that surrounded him, as the world of film and television began to mesh with the music industry. Music variety shows such as Shindig! and Dick Clark's American Bandstand and films such as Gimme Shelter, Elvis' '68 Comeback Special and D.A. Pennebaker's Monterey Pop will be expanded upon.This show is part of Pantheon Podcasts.

Today Ed Ward and host Nate Wilcox talk about 1967, the year of Monterey Pop, when the Beatles lost Brian Epstein and gained the Maharishi, Brian Wilson blew it and Otis Redding died.Visit our sponsor Adam & Eve for 50% off almost any item, get tons of free gifts AND receive free shipping. Just go to adamandeve.com and type “LIRPOD” at checkout.This show is part of Pantheon Podcasts.