Podcasts about Mountain High

Send us a textTrailblazing in the Middle East: Julie Lewis' Expat Journey and AdventuresIn this episode of the Truly Expat Podcast, hosts Paula and Rachel welcome Julie Lewis, a professional speaker, seasoned explorer, bestselling author, and founder of Mountain High, the first female-led expedition company in the Middle East. Julie shares her inspiring journey from Sheffield, UK, to becoming an established expat in the UAE for over two decades. She talks about her numerous adventures, including her unexpected move to Kuwait, her passion for the Middle East, and the founding of her business Mountain High. Julie discusses the cultural and lifestyle adjustments in the UAE and offers valuable advice for those considering a move to the region. Additionally, she emphasises the importance of community and connection for personal growth and resilience as an expat. Julie also reveals her upcoming plans, including new expeditions and writing projects that aim to inspire and empower women and young girls.00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome01:16 Julie's Journey to the Middle East02:49 Life in Kuwait and Transition to UAE05:18 Founding Mountain High09:29 Living and Thriving in UAE10:48 Navigating Visas and Residency22:37 Housing and Lifestyle in UAE26:11 Finding Your Tribe as an Expat26:50 Living Arrangements and Co-Living Experiences28:33 Cost of Living and Food Choices32:04 Weekend Activities and Exploring the UAE34:21 Misconceptions About Living in the Middle East40:46 Advice for Moving to the Middle East42:54 The Importance of Community and Connection46:58 Future Plans and ProjectsGet in touch with Julie:Website /Books: https://julie-lewis.com/back-to-nature/, https://julie-lewis.com/uncharted-waters/Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julielewis4/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/julie.lewis.98892/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/juliemileslewis/ Remember, the conversation doesn't end here. Join us on our social media platforms to share your thoughts and continue the dialogue:Email: podcast@trulyexpat.comFacebook Page: Truly Expat PodcastInstagram: @trulyexpatpodcastTikTok: @trulyexpatpodcastLinkedin: Truly Expat PodcastWebsite: www.trulyexpatlifestyle.comPodcast: https://podcast.trulyexpatlifestyle.comDisclaimer:While we strive to provide accurate and up-to-date information, the nature of expat experiences can evolve. We encourage listeners to verify details independently. For inquiries or guidance, reach out to us at podcast@trulyexpat.com. Your questions are essential, and we're here to help you navigate expat life effectively.Thanks for tuning in to our latest episode. Subscribe for more valuable insights and information for expats in Singapore and beyond.

In this Episode of The Thermal, we find out from the man behind Mountain High oxygen systems…why canula is most often better than a mask.   And a group of UK pilots who've come up with their own Canopy Flasher. We find out why they didn't just buy off the shelf.   It's the time of year when glider pilots are polishing gliders. Either to bring them out of hibernation or put them away for the winter. We find out the tips and tricks to keeping your polyurethane coated glider looking glamorous. Hint…the trick is ceramic.   That's all on Episode #61 of The Thermal.

We are going from Lowriders to Highrisers in this episode. Auk discusses his recent trip to the Petersen Automotive Museum to check out the Lowrider exhibit while Tani discovers Auk's affinity for having high rise bars. The fellas also Transition into talking about the new Regulator that just came in and tease the Norco Sight VLTS that are coming soon!   #mountainbiking #mtb #mtblife #transitionbikes #norco #santacruz #vala #ocmtba #lovethebikeyouride #thepathbikeshop

Welcome to the Hockey Mountain High Podcast! We've partnered with Mile High Sports for the launch of HockeyMountainHigh.com, so we've got a home. So what's going to change about the show? Not much. We're still going to be the same show with the same two hosts, doing what we love every episode! Just a new look and a new place where you can find us! Follow the site here: HockeyMountainHigh.com Follow Griffin on Twitter: @GRYoungs Follow Christian on Twitter: @Christian_Bolle Send questions to the mailbag here: https://forms.gle/7ytuJfsiTr1x3VDt6

This week, Auntie Su defies brain fog with some sharp takes on a hot movie and brings big game changers to the pod. Auntie Ku takes parenting to an organized art form and hopes for the best as Eme’s first snow day approaches. Plus a very surprising and disturbing discovery Auntie Su makes about her husband, leads to some of the best investigative journalism of her career. Please note, Add To Cart contains mature themes and may not be appropriate for all listeners. To see all products mentioned in this episode, head to @addtocartpod on Instagram. To purchase any of the products, see below. Ku takes her family to Mountain High for Yeti’s Snow Play Ku’s snow trip stay at Grand Pines Cabin Eme’s snow outfit: boots, gloves, & snowsuit Su’s game changing curler Su’s game changing activism for introvertsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pastor Jeff Smith preaches on Luke 9:18-36, Mountain High to Valley Low. https://www.youtube.com/live/mVf3Jrn82XY?si=X1BMdTSlxpcN6cAy&t=1933

Erwin R. en Erwin V. hebben een bijzondere bucketlist: voor hun 50e willen de heren de 50 cols uit het boek Mountain High van Daniel Friebe hebben afgevinkt. Een uur lang bucketlistpraat, uiteraard met Herman en Frank. Shownotes: https://bit.ly/4f9ewz0

In this Episode of The Thermal, a feature interview with Patrick McLaughlin – the man behind the Mountain High Oxygen system. He has won the 2024 OSTIV award for his contribution to gliding safety. And combining passions. We talk to Tobias Barth about his new book called Framing the Sky and how he combines his love of gliding and photography. That's all on Episode   #56 of The Thermal.

How was our holiday this year?

Jesus and three of the disciples have just had an amazing experience on a mountain. Now they come down to the bottom of the mountain and are faced with the sad reality of Satan at war with humanity, faithlessness of not only a father, but also Jesus's disciples. We will see that even though our faith can often be imperfect, our perfect Lord and Savior is compassionate to help us in our weakness. Not only that, but we are reminded that prayer builds up our faith.

Subscriber-only episodeThis week we take a slight brake from murder, kidnapping and gang wars to focus on the heavy subject of... carnival crimes. Not sure if this would technically be classified as a bottle episode, but Daddy Mars sure thinks so. This health teacher desperately needs a vacation but should probably actually be fired immediately. And it was probably obvious already, but Bryan reveals he's not a sports guy.Subscribe to our Patreon to access the video version, our Discord community, plus all of our other bonus content.Send us a text

durée : 00:05:47 - C'est une chanson - par : Frédéric Pommier - Son nouveau film "La prisonnière de Bordeaux" sort ce mercredi dans les salles. L'histoire d'une amitié entre deux épouses de détenus, incarnées par Isabelle Huppert et Hafsia Herzi. Au micro de Frédéric Pommier, la réalisatrice Patricia Mazuy évoque "River Deep, Mountain High" d'Ike et Tina Turner.

Subscribe to Receive Venkat's Weekly Newsletter Every year the Coca Cola Scholars Foundation awards a select set of High School Seniors the Coca Cola Scholarship. Chase is a 2024 Coke Scholar.  In this Podcast, Elizabeth talks about her spectrum of passions from STEM to the Arts, Music and Leadership, Performing at Carnegie Hall, Winning the Coca-Cola Scholarship, her College search process, and her advice to high schoolers. #CokeScholars Check Out: The College Application Workbooks for Juniors and Seniors In particular, we discuss the following with her:  Who is Elizabeth Djajalie? Passion for STEM, Music and Arts Winning the Coke Scholarship College Process Advice for High Schoolers Topics discussed in this episode: Introducing Elizabeth Djajalie, Coke Scholar [] Hi Fives - Podcast Highlights [] Who is Elizabeth Djajalie? [] High School Interests [] Founder STEM Fair Student Board [] Future Women STEM Podcast [] Interest in Science [] E-DNA Research [] Performing at Carnegie Hall [] Alaska State Tennis Champ [] Why Coke Scholarship? [] The Application Process [] The Interview [] What the Coke Scholarship Means? [] Other Scholarships [] The College Process [] The Decision! [] College Readiness [] Advice for High Schoolers [] Our Guest: Elizabeth Djajalie is a 2024 Coke Scholar, and a recent graduate of Thunder Mountain High School, Juneau Alaska. Elizabeth will be a Freshman at Harvard University in Fall 2024. Memorable Quote: “ I went to a public school for middle school through high school, and I really think that experience of growing up in this small town overall has really taught me to be resourceful and create new opportunities, not just for myself, but for other people around me.” Elizabeth Djajalie. Episode Transcript: Please visit Episode's Transcript. Similar Episodes: College Experiences Calls-to-action: Follow us on Instagram. To Ask the Guest a question, or to comment on this episode, email podcast@almamatters.io. Subscribe or Follow our podcasts at any of these locations: Apple Podcasts, Spotify.

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MDJ Script/ Top Stories for April 18th             Publish Date:  April 18th              Commercial: From the Ingles Studio, Welcome to the Marietta Daily Journal Podcast.    Today is Thursday, April 18th and Happy 47th Birthday to Melissa Joan Hart. ***04.18.24 – BIRTHDAY – MELISSA JOAN HART*** I'm Dan Radcliffe and here are the stories Cobb is talking about, presented by Credit Union of Georgia.  Man Arrested After Bringing Gun to Kennesaw Mountain High School Man Wanted for Selling Heroin That Killed 17-Year-Old Georgia Justices Grill Lawyers in Cobb Map Case   Plus, Bruce Jenkins sits down with Leah McGrath from Ingles Markets to discuss celiacs disease.   All of this and more is coming up on the Marietta Daily Journal Podcast, and if you are looking for community news, we encourage you to listen and subscribe!    BREAK: CU of GA  STORY 1: Man Arrested After Bringing Gun to Kennesaw Mountain High School An 18-year-old Kennesaw man, Theodore Davidson, was arrested at Kennesaw Mountain High School for bringing a loaded, sawed-off rifle to an event hosted there. He was apprehended on school grounds during the event, Kennesaw Mountainfest. Davidson claimed the rifle belonged to his father, who instructed him to take possession of it. Cobb Board of Education Chairman Randy Scamihorn stated Davidson was not a district-enrolled student and suggested Davidson may have had an altercation with his girlfriend. The event was not officially sanctioned by the school or district, but Scamihorn emphasized the paramount importance of safety on school campuses. Davidson faces charges including possessing a weapon on school property and is held in Cobb jail without bond. STORY 2: Cobb DA: Man Wanted for Selling Heroin That Killed 17-Year-Old The Cobb District Attorney's Office issued an arrest warrant for Austin Joseph Love, accusing him of selling heroin to a 17-year-old who fatally overdosed on the drug. The incident occurred at a Waffle House on Sept. 30, 2023. Surveillance footage, Love's provided phone number, and car registration led to his identification as the suspect. The GBI confirmed the substance as heroin and Love has not been arrested. The DA's Opioid Fatality Project aims to combat the opioid epidemic. Challenges include investigating overdose cases and law enforcement unfamiliarity. Love faces a felony charge of selling heroin. STORY 3: Georgia Justices Grill Lawyers in Cobb Map Case The Supreme Court of Georgia held a hearing on the legal battle over Cobb Board of Commissioners' electoral maps. Justices questioned both sides but didn't reveal their stance. The dispute arose when the county replaced state-drawn maps, affecting Commissioner Jerica Richardson's district. The challenge focused on the plaintiffs' standing to sue. The Attorney General's Office argued against the county's invocation of home rule powers. The court's decision is expected before mid-November, but it's unclear if it'll impact the upcoming primary election. The hearing highlighted uncertainty over standing and the separation of powers between county and state. We have opportunities for sponsors to get great engagement on these shows. Call 770.799.6810 for more info.    We'll be right back  Break: DRAKE STORY 4: Teacher Raises Included in Marietta's Proposed Budget Marietta Schools Superintendent Grant Rivera presented the proposed 2025 budget, featuring a 5.3% average salary increase for teachers without raising the millage rate. The state's approved $2,500 raises for teaching staff contribute to this salary boost. The proposed budget, outlined by CFO Erin Franklin, entails an $11 million increase, largely attributed to rising employee benefits. Board member Angela Orange expressed satisfaction with the budget, emphasizing the importance of keeping up with the cost of living. Key allocations in the budget include funding for Science of Reading professional learning, additional staff for academic programs, and covering increased insurance premiums. The board unanimously approved various hires and budget expansions, setting the stage for tentative adoption in May. STORY 5: University System of Georgia raising tuition by 2.5% The University System of Georgia's Board of Trustees approved a 2.5% tuition increase for in-state undergraduates, citing inflationary pressures. Out-of-state students face a 5% hike, while a new tier will be introduced for out-of-country students. Kennesaw State University, for example, will see in-state tuition rise by $69 per semester, and out-of-state by $490. Students expressed disappointment, particularly those without financial aid. Despite the increase, Georgia maintains one of the lowest tuition averages among SREB states. The board also implemented new mandatory fees for online learning and extended the waiver of test score requirements for admission to most institutions for the 2025-26 academic year. We'll be back in a moment    Break: INGLES 9   STORY 6: LEAH MCGRATH And now here is Bruce Jenkins' conversation with Leah McGrath from Ingles Markets to discuss celiacs disease.   Break: TEDS   Signoff-   Thanks again for hanging out with us on today's Marietta Daily Journal podcast. If you enjoy these shows, we encourage you to check out our other offerings, like the Cherokee Tribune Ledger Podcast, the Gwinnett Daily Post, the Community Podcast for Rockdale Newton and Morgan Counties, or the Paulding County News Podcast. Read more about all our stories and get other great content at MDJonline.com.     Did you know over 50% of Americans listen to podcasts weekly? Giving you important news about our community and telling great stories are what we do. Make sure you join us for our next episode and be sure to share this podcast on social media with your friends and family. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or your Google Home Briefing and be sure to like, follow, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.   Produced by the BG Podcast Network   Show Sponsors: ingles-markets.com cuofga.org drakerealty.com tedsmontanagrill.com   #NewsPodcast #CurrentEvents #TopHeadlines #BreakingNews #PodcastDiscussion #PodcastNews #InDepthAnalysis #NewsAnalysis #PodcastTrending #WorldNews #LocalNews #GlobalNews #PodcastInsights #NewsBrief #PodcastUpdate #NewsRoundup #WeeklyNews #DailyNews #PodcastInterviews #HotTopics #PodcastOpinions #InvestigativeJournalism #BehindTheHeadlines #PodcastMedia #NewsStories #PodcastReports #JournalismMatters #PodcastPerspectives #NewsCommentary #PodcastListeners #NewsPodcastCommunity #NewsSource #PodcastCuration #WorldAffairs #PodcastUpdates #AudioNews #PodcastJournalism #EmergingStories #NewsFlash #PodcastConversationsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Get ready for a spectacular hour with the Eurovision Showcase on Forest FM!   Join your host, Ciaran Urry-Tuttiett, for an unforgettable hour of music, starting at 5pm GMT (6pm CET) TODAY! Tune in locally on 92.3 or 98.9 FM across East Dorset, West Hampshire, and The New Forest, UK. Or, be part of our global audience by listening online from anywhere in the world! Just say, "Play Forest FM" to your smart speaker and you're in!   Today's lineup is nothing short of spectacular, featuring the brand new single "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" by Cascada, Germany's electrifying entrant from 2013. We'll also take you back to 1986 with the classic "L'amour De Ma Vie" by Sherisse Laurence, representing Luxembourg.   And, get ready for some national finals flair with entries from Iceland's Söngvakeppnin, Sigga Ózk, and Croatia's Dora, the group Pavel. It's a musical journey you won't want to miss!   For more details about the show, visit us at www.escshowcase.com.   Don't forget to mark your calendars and set your alarms. This is your gateway to the heart of Eurovision, brought to you by Forest FM. See you there!   #EurovisionShowcase #ForestFM #Eurovision #MusicLovers #RadioShow #CiaranUrryTuttiett #Cascada #EurovisionClassics #NationalFinals #TuneIn

David Fahl "Road Song" - Graduation Day www.davidfahl.com Runaway Grooms "This Road" - This Road www.therunawaygrooms.com Dan Tyminski "Never Comin' Home" - God Fearing Heathen www.dantyminski.com Aztec Two Step 2.0 "Apocalypse (Now!)" - Apocalypse (Now!) www.aztectwostep.com Professor Louie & The Crowmatix "Love Bound" - Miles Of Blues www.professorlouie.com Frenchy & The Punk "Gear Geist" - Zen Ghost www.frenchyandthepunk.com Explode The TV "After The Stars Fall Out" - www.explodethetv.com *********************** ALBUM FOCUS Tropical Party www.putumayo.com The Putumayo Discovery digital series continues with the digital album, Tropical Party by Putumayo, a collection of 10 upbeat and festive songs by rising musical stars from Brazil, Cameroon, Cuba, Angola, Haiti and more. Putumayo Discovery is a digital series that highlights exceptional songs by contemporary artists from around the world. Moa vive (Brazil) "Presemte de Oxum" Manou Gallo (Ivory Coast) - "Aliso" Badegna Foli feat. Koko Dembélé (Mali / France) - "Danse" Cuba Quartet (Cuba) - "Guajira Linda" Vieux Thiers (Cameroon) - "Caroline" ************************** Shannon Clark & The Sugar "Never Grow Old" - This Old World www.shannonclarksugar.com The Davisson Brothers Band "Mountain High" - Home Is Where The Heart Is www.davissonbrothersband.com Pete Mancici "Hear The Wind" - Silent Troubadour: The Songs Of Gene Clark www.petemancini.com Ian Roland "Gold In The Dust" - The Wood Wide Web www.ianroland.com Golden Shoals "New Friend" - s/t www.goldenshoals.com Shelley King "The Power" - Madam Mystic www.shelleyking.com ******************************* The Goddamsels "Better Than" - www.thegoddamsels.com Joy Zimmerman "Nobel Prize" - Where The Light Lives www.joyzimmermanmusic.com Vance Gilbert "Simple Things" - The Mother Of Trouble www.vancegilbert.com Kris Delmhorst "Wind's Gonna Find A Way" - Long Day In The Milky Way www.krisdelmhorst.com Michelle Held "The World Moves On" www.michelleheld.com Mike Agranoff "Ballad Of The White Seal Maid" - ...Or Would You Rather Get A Job?- www.mikeagranoff.com Closing music: MFSB "My Mood" Running time: 4 hours, 48 minutes --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/radiocblue/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/radiocblue/support

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

Mark Tauscher joins he program as he does everyday and we talk a tough loss for the Packers against the Broncos. We could take solace in the fact that maybe the Packers are improving? But, they aren

Today's guest is a songwriting legend who helped shape the sound of American pop music. Originally setting out to be a recording star, this guest became one of the most respected pop songwriters within the Brill Building complex of the '60s. A struggling New Yorker, this writer's fortunes changed considerably when he met his future wife and songwriting partner, Ellie Greenwich, at a party in 1962. Within a short time of teaming up, the duo had an appointment at Don Kirshner's songwriting factory, New York City's famous Brill Building. Ushered into the business by Leiber & Stoller, this duo began writing and arranging for the groups signed to Phil Spector's Philles label. The smash hits “Da Do Ron Ron” and “Be My Baby” resulted from the time spent with Spector and, by 1964, the duo were an integral part of the staff at Leiber and Stoller's newly formed Redbird Records. Largely regarded by pop aficionados as the mecca for the “girl group” sound, the staff at Redbird, produced tightly crafted, musically sophisticated songs. The duo also penned “Leader of the Pack,” which became a number one hit. They continued to write hit records throughout the '60s, such as the seminal “River Deep, Mountain High” and the Beach Boys' 1969 hit “I Can Hear Music,” their songs changing with the times, but still retaining the essence of their earlier Brill Building days. After the marriage broke up, their creative partnership did as well and while Greenwich went on to become a session vocalist, our guest became a staff producer at A&M Records. Throughout the '70s, he worked with Neil Diamond, the Monkees, and Van Morrison, among other. Overall, this guest's credits—as a writer, co-writer, producer, or a combination—extend to a mix of different genres. His song "Out of Hand" by Gary Stewart was the longest-charted country record of its year. He also wrote many other country tunes, including "If It Ain't Love by Now," sung by Jim Ed Brown and Helen Cornelius, who later won the Country Music Association's Best Country Duo award. One of this writer's most successful songs of all was Olivia Newton-John's 1974 worldwide smash hit "I Honestly Love You," which won "Song of the Year" at the American Music Awards, and, for Newton-John, GRAMMY Awards for Record of the Year and Best Female Pop Performance. While mainly influential to the pop world, this writer's impact spans throughout all genres and all corners of the music industry. #AndTheWriterIs... Jeff Barry !!Watercolor by: @artofmrw Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on August 7. It dropped for free subscribers on August 10. To receive future pods as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe for free below:WhoDanielle and Laszlo Vajtay, Owners of Plattekill Mountain, New YorkRecorded onJuly 14, 2023About Plattekill MountainClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Danielle and Laszlo VajtayLocated in: Roxbury, New YorkYear founded: 1958Pass affiliations: NoneReciprocal partners:* 3 days each at Snow Ridge, Swain, Mont du Lac, Ski Cooper* 2 days at HomewoodClosest neighboring ski areas: Belleayre (28 minutes), Windham (41 minutes), Hunter (46 minutes)Base elevation: 2,400 feetSummit elevation: 3,500 feetVertical drop: 1,100 feetSkiable Acres: 75 acresAverage annual snowfall: 175 inchesTrail count: 40 (20% expert, 20% most difficult, 40% more difficult, 20% easiest)Lift count: 3 (1 triple, 1 double, 1 carpet)Why I interviewed themThink about every ski area in the country that almost everyone knows. Almost every one of them has a smaller, less-well-known, slightly badass neighbor lurking nearby. In LA, it's Baldy, forgotten in the shadow of Big Bear and Mountain High. In Tahoe, it's Homewood, lost in the Palisades Tahoe circus. We can just keep going: Hoodoo/Bachelor; White Pass/Crystal; Mt. Spokane/Schweitzer; Soldier/Sun Valley; Snow King/Jackson; Sunlight/Aspen; Red River/Taos.In New York, we have a few versions of this: West and (currently closed) Hickory, adjacent to Gore Mountain; Titus, intercepted by Whiteface as cars wind north. But the most dramatic contrast lies in the Catskills. There, you find four ski areas: Hunter, recently expanded, owned by Vail Resorts and flying two six-packs; Windham, two new investors on its masthead, an Ikon Pass partner that runs three high-speed lifts out of its base; Belleayre, owned by the state and run by the Olympic Regional Development Authority, or ORDA, with a shimmering gondola that no other ski area of its size could afford; and Plattekill.Plattekill is owned by Laszlo and Danielle Vajtay, former ski instructors who purchased the bump in 1993. They have added snowmaking to one of their 40 trails each year that they could afford to. Their lift fleet is a 1974 Hall triple and a 1977 Hall double, moved from Belleayre in 1999. It took the Vajtays three years to install the lift. The parking lots cling layer-cake-style to the mountainside. Plattekill is open Friday through Sunday, plus Christmas and Presidents' Weeks and MLK Day. Access is down poorly marked backroads, half an hour past Belleayre, which sits directly off state route 28.It's fair to ask how such a place endures. New York is filled with family-owned ski areas running vintage lifts. But only Plattekill must compete directly with so many monsters. How?There is no one answer. There's the scrap and hustle, the constant scouring of the countryside for the new-to-Platty machines to rebuild to glory. There's the deliberate, no-debt, steady-steady better-better philosophy that keeps the banks away. There's the 1,100 feet of pure fall-line skiing. The vast kingdom of glades. The special geography that seems to squeeze just a bit extra out of every storm. There's the lodge, rustic but clean, cozy, and spacious. And there's the liftlines, or miraculous lack of them, for such a ski area just three hours from the nation's largest city. And there are the midweek private-mountain rentals – Platty's secret weapon, a $8,500 guarantee on even the feistiest weather days.That algorithm, or some version of it, has equaled survival for Plattekill. When the Vajtays bought “Ski Plattekill” in 1993, the Catskills were crowded. But Bobcat, Scotch Valley, Cortina, Highmount, and Sawkill all vanished over the decades. Plattekill could have died too. Instead, it is beloved. Enough so that it can charge more for its season pass - $779 early-bird, $799 right now – than Vail charges for the Epic Local Pass ($676 early-bird, $689 today), which includes unlimited access to Hunter and most of the company's 40 other resorts. When a harder-to-reach, smaller mountain running 50-year-old lifts can charge more for a single-mountain season pass than its larger, more up-to-date, easier-to-access neighbor whose season pass also gets skiers in the front door at Whistler and Breckenridge, it's doing something mighty right.What we talked aboutPlattekill's “surprisingly good” 2022-23 ski season; building a snowmaking system gun-by-gun; 2023 offseason improvements; how the Vajtays have grown Plattekill without taking on traditional debt; what killed independent skiing in the Catskills; private mid-week mountain rentals; a growing wedding business; why Plattekill was an early adopter of lift-served mountain-biking, why the mountain abandoned the project, and whether they would ever bring it back; assessing Platty's newest trail; potential terrain expansion within the existing footprint; plans to moderate the steep section at the end of the Overlook trail; the potential lift and terrain expansion that could make Plattekill “a big, big player in the world of ski areas”; considering outside investment to turbocharge growth - “the possibilities for the mountain are that it could be a lot more”; “I don't have an interest in selling Plattekill”; Snow Operating; assessing Plattekill's Hall chairlifts; “anybody taking out a lift, please don't cut it up and throw it in the Dumpster before contacting” small ski areas; the lightning strike that changed Plattekill's summer; helping save Holiday Mountain; competing against the Epic and Ikon passes; competing against state-owned and taxpayer-funded ski areas; how New York State could help independent ski areas compete against its owned ski areas; Liftopia's collapse; the Ski Cooper season pass; and reconsidering the Indy Pass.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewThe Vajtays have appeared on The Storm Skiing Podcast before, in episode two, which I released on Oct. 25, 2019. They'd agreed to do the interview without knowing who I was, and before I'd published a single episode. I will always be grateful to them (and the other seven folks* who recorded an episode when The Storm was still gathering in my brain), for that. The conversation turned out great, I thought, and fused the podcast to the world of scrappy independents from its earliest days.But in the intervening years, I've gotten to know the Vajtays much better. Laz and I, especially, communicate a lot. Mostly via text, but occasionally email, or when I'm up there skiing. In May, he joined a panel I hosted at the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA) convention in Savannah, Georgia. Alongside the general managers of Mt. Rose, Mt. Baker, and Cascade, Wisconsin, Laz articulated why the Vajtays had so far elected to keep Plattekill off of any multi-mountain pass.The NSAA's convention rules forbade me from recording that panel, but the conversation so closely aligned with my daily pass-world coverage that I knew I had to bring some version of it to you. This is installment one. Cascade GM Matt Vohs is scheduled to join me on the pod in October, followed by Mt. Rose GM Greg Gavrilets in November (you can always view the upcoming podcast schedule here). I've yet to schedule Mt. Baker CEO Gwyn Howat, but I'm hopeful that we can lock in a future date.So that is part of it: why has Plattekill held firm against the pass craze as all of its better-capitalized competitors have joined one coalition or the other? But that is only part of the larger Platty story. Vail was supposed to ruin everything. Then Alterra was supposed to ruin it more. Family-owned ski areas would be crushed beneath these nukes launched from a Colorado silo. But this narrative has been disproven across the country. Because of a lot of things – the Covid-driven outdoor boom, the indie cool factor, the big boys overselling their passes – small ski areas are having a moment. No one, arguably, has a tougher hill to defend than Platty, and no one's proven themselves more.*Those six people were: New England Lost Ski Areas Project founder Jeremy Davis, Lift Blog founder Peter Landsman, Boyne Resorts CEO Stephen Kircher, Magic Mountain President Geoff Hatheway, Killington President Mike Solimano, and Burke GM Kevin Mack.What I got wrongI said that The New York Times profile on Plattekill's private-rentals business ran in 2018. It actually ran Jan. 4, 2019.Why you should ski PlattekillI can endorse all four large Catskills ski areas. Hunter holds a crazy, possessed energy. Impenetrable on weekends, you can roll 1,600-vertical-foot fastlaps off the sixer on spring weekdays. Belleayre throws past-era vibes with its funky-weird trail network while delivering rides on a top-to-bottom gondola that is the nicest lift in New York State. Windham's high-speed lift fleet hides a narrow and fantastically interesting trail network that, when wide open with new snow in the woods, feels enormous.So Plattekill is not, for me, a family-diner-versus-McDonald's kind of fight. I probably ski all four of those mountains about the same amount. But I will make an appeal here to those New York-based Epic and Ikon passholders who are scanning their mountain menus and deciding where to ski this winter: take one day and go to Plattekill. Make it a day that you know will be miserable at Hunter or Windham. A day when the lift queues can be seen from space. A holiday, a Saturday, a powder day. I know you already invested in your pass. But suck up one more lift ticket, and check out Plattekill.Here's what you will find: no liftlines, ever. The parking lots simply aren't large enough to accommodate enough skiers to form them. A double chair with this view:At the top, three choices: loop green-circle Overlook all the way around, thread your way down through the tight and narrow blues, or ride one of four double-blacks all the way back to the valley. I prefer the blues because they lead to the glades, unmarked but maintained, funky, interesting, tap-shoes required.The triple side is more traditional, more wide runs, especially Upper Face. Powder Puff is fabulous for kids. The snow doesn't stick to the triple side like it does to the double side, but when it's deep enough, wild lines through the trees lie everywhere.Plattekill is littered with curiosities. A rock quarry. An old T-bar terminal. An overgrown halfpipe in the trees. Abandoned MTB trails still signed and useable for skiing. More than any ski area in New York, Plattekill rewards exploration and creativity, enables and encourages it with a permissive Patrol and line-less lifts. Twenty or 25 runs are possible here, even on a big day. Just keep ripping.In some ways, Plattekill is a time machine, a snapshot of a Catskills otherwise lost. In others, it is exactly of this moment, stripped of the pretense and the crowds that can seem like skiing's inevitable trajectory. The bozos who can't stand a fixed-grip lift ride longer than three minutes don't come here. They would rather stand in a long line for a fast lift. But you don't have to. You can come to Plattekill.Podcast NotesOn Platty's singular atmosphereNo one has written more on Plattekill than Harvey Road, founder of the fantastic New York Ski Blog. I asked him to share links to his five favorite Platty write-ups:Return to Plattekill Mountain – Jan. 8, 2013“Those intangible forces pull me inexorably to Plattekill. Don't get me wrong, Plattekill has some solid tangibles too: lake effect powder and steeps and trees and beautiful views are important to people who love to ski.  But there's also something more. A simplicity of purpose that fills my soul with an exuberance I have a hard time capturing in my nine-to-five life.”Plattekill: The Life of Riley – March 5, 2018“Later in the morning the snow and the wind really picked up. It must have snowed two or three inches an hour well into the afternoon. By noon all traces of the bottom were gone and Plattekill was 100% open for business. Twist and Ridge were deserted and any tracks you left on that side of the mountain were gone by the time you returned.”I'm Done Skiing Alone – March 20, 2018“When I was a little kid living on a farm, I'd play by myself in a big tractor tire that served as a sandbox. I developed a reputation for playing alone. ‘Harvey doesn't need playmates, he's happy all by himself!' It wasn't true, down inside I didn't like it, but I didn't know myself well enough to push back.”Chasing Plake – Feb. 4, 2019“Around 10:00 am we headed into the lodge to give our legs a break, hydrate and warm up a little (it was maybe -1 F at this point). As we got to the door, we saw the man himself. ‘I was wondering when you'd show up.'“'Hi, my name is Glen!' he said, offering his hand. I introduced myself and my son and asked if he'd been skiing yet.“'No, we kind of take our time on Saturdays. I love to watch a mountain wake up and come alive.'  We chatted about Tahoe and the weather for a couple minutes. I asked if we could take some pics. Of course we could.”Plattekill: Five Days Later – March 11, 2019“We skied down to the double and Sam the Smiling Liftie let us step around the rope and head up early with Patrol. At the top, a new character was introduced. Maybe he'd seen my custom skis, as he said ‘Road? I'm Soule. Jeff Soule.'“I use the word character in it's broadest sense. Gregarious and engaging, with homemade poles he'd carved from tree branches, Jeff had switched to tele this season and was absolutely ripping, hucking everything in sight.”On the lost ski areas of the CatskillsWhen the Vajtays purchased Plattekill in 1993, the mountain was one of six family-owned ski areas in the Catskills. One by one, the other five failed. Here's an overview of each:Highmount, circa 1985Bobcat circa 1996Cortina, circa 1995Scotch Valley, circa 2004I don't think a trailmap exists of Sawkill, which was basically one or two runs and a ropetow on 70 vertical feet.On that ominous New York Times article from the ‘90sLaszlo referred to a New York Times article covering the Vajtays' disastrous second season as owners – that article ran on Jan. 21, 1995. An excerpt:A sign posted at the Ski Plattekill resort here warns against packing the cozy, wood-paneled cafeteria beyond its capacity of 242 people. That has hardly been a problem this winter.With a third of the ski season already over, this resort in the central Catskills has yet to open a single one of its 27 trails. The reason is plain: it has barely snowed this winter, and whatever snow has fallen has been washed away by driving rains and unseasonably warm temperatures. When Laszlo Vajtay, the owner of Ski Plattekill, looks out at his mountain, all he sees is brown grass."It is depressing," he said, as he trudged through the mud blanketing his steepest trail, Blockbuster, on this 52-degree afternoon. "Look at how warm it is. It's like summer. Winter's just not here yet."Mr. Vajtay's experience is the starkest example of what has been a disastrous season for skiers and ski areas across the Northeast. Of the 50 ski areas in New York State, all but nine closed down late this week, hoping to preserve their remaining snow cover for the weekend, according to Ski Areas of New York, a trade group. Things were not much better in New England, where nearly 60 percent of ski resorts reported being closed.On The New York Times article on private mountain rentalsPlattekill has offered private mountain rentals for 15 years. That part of the business really took off, however, after The New York Times profiled the ski area in 2019:Plattekill, in turn, has branded itself as an intimate, old-fashioned resort for expert skiers and families alike. Most important, however, it has been able to guarantee income on the slower weekdays, by becoming a private mountain of sorts. Four days a week, it puts itself up for rent. Any group can have exclusive access to it for just a few thousand dollars a day.In their early years as owners, the Vajtays were obsessed with two things that were not always compatible: making snow and avoiding debt. In the summer, they opened up the mountain for camping, music festivals and mountain biking. They took what they earned and invested it into snow-making equipment.Eventually, a new business idea came from Plattekill's regular skiers, who visited the mountain every time it snowed, even when it wasn't open. (The mountain was and is only open to the public Fridays through Sundays.) This became so common that the Vajtays decided to open the mountain, regardless of the day, following a major snowfall. Typically, about 500 paying customers would show up for the event, called Powderdaize.Powderdaize led to another idea: renting out the entire mountain to groups. Some Plattekill regulars so enjoyed the quiet setting of the last-minute weekday openings that they intimated to Ms. Vajtay how great it would be to have a “power day” to themselves, she recalled. The couple knew of a few members-only mountains in the United States but these were fancy, expensive resorts like the Yellowstone Club in Montana and the Hermitage Club in Vermont. Why not rent out their humble little mountain?In 2008, they started to do just that, charging $2,500 a day for exclusive use of Plattekill Monday through Thursday. (The price has since increased to $4,500.) Clients have ranged from corporations, like Citigroup, to religious organizations. Every year since 2010, Jehovah's Witnesses congregations from New Jersey and New York have met there once a year.On being “The Alta of The Catskills”Laz referred to an old Powder article that glossed Plattekill “the Alta of the Catskills.” The author, Porter Fox, also visited Hunter and Belleayre, but here's the Platty section:Two lifts rose 1,100 vertical feet from the base of Plattekill Ski Resort to the 3,500-foot summit. Between them were a few lift enclosures—designed to mimic gambrel barn roofs in the valley—an oversized base lodge, dirt parking lots, a dirt driveway, and about 200 skiers lapping trails as fast as they could.Plattekill is the Alta of the Catskills. The Little Ski Area That Could has fewer trails but gets more snow than most resorts in the range, averaging 150 inches annually. It is easy to forget that New York State borders two Great Lakes (Ontario and Erie), and that lake-effect storms often carry all the way to the Catskills. Sitting on the northwestern fringe of the range, Plattekill rings out most of the moisture before storms warm up and dry out.The mountain's 38 trails are only open Friday through Sunday. (You can rent the whole place for $3,500/day midweek.) If it snows 12 inches or more, the staff will get the chairs spinning midweek as well. Last year, “Platty” opened on a Monday after receiving four feet of snow in one dump. It wasn't a fluke, resort owner Laszlo Vajtay told me as he pulled up National Weather Service radar images of the storm. Precipitation spanned all the way from Manhattan to Albany in the image. The red dot in the center of the maelstrom was positioned precisely over his mountain.Vajtay, 56, started skiing at Plattekill when he was 7 and never left. He taught skiing, met his wife, Danielle (also an instructor), proposed and got married there. In 1993, he bought the place. The Vajtays didn't have deep pockets, so when their ancient DMC 3700 groomer broke down, they hired a nearby mechanic, named “Macker,” who learned how to fix it. He fixed all of the groomers on the hill, then refurbished an older model that Vajtay bought for a song. In 2014, Plattekill became the only authorized Bombardier service center in New York and Pennsylvania.Meanwhile, one of their snowcat clients asked them to work on their snow guns as well. There was no snowmaking at Plattekill when Vajtay bought it; the Platty crew cobbled one together from used guns and pumps they salvaged from old fire trucks. They took the job on and now part of Plattekill's business is also repairing snow-making equipment and lifts throughout the Northeast. “We run this place like they run farms in the valley—no debt,” Vajtay said. “The one time we had to borrow, we asked our skiers to chip in for a new lift. We paid them back on time, with interest.”Vajtay's standard look is one of excitement, or shock. His clear blue eyes are penetrating, and his gray hair is usually messed up by a ski hat or helmet. The “shock” part is real. He is genuinely amazed at how well he and his crew have done with a small ski area in an era when many others have gone belly up. Sixty-five resorts in New York have closed in the last 40 years, according to the New England Lost Ski Areas Project.In the new world of mega resorts, Plattekill is a time capsule of the way things used to be—steep runs, wild-eyed locals, friendly staff, boot cubbies, $2 frozen pizza slices, and an oversized base lodge bar, where auburn alpenglow settles on the last skiers of the day cruising down. The hand-hewn rafters, deer antler chandeliers, stained pine paneling, antique snowshoes and skis hanging on the wall reel the clock back to the 1980s, '70s, '60s —when televisions received three channels, every car had 300 horsepower under the hood, politicians were accountable for their actions, and all anyone in the Northeast wanted to do in the winter was sleep and ski.Laszlo Vajtay is not just the owner of Plattekill, he grew up skiing there. He and his wife, Danielle, run the ski area like a farm--debt free. They also run it as a family. Above,It's easy to fall into that world at Platty. The day we arrived was the Friday before the annual “Beach Party.” The ticket-seller-bartender-receptionist-office-manager-landscaper gal took a break from blowing up balloons and unfolding last year's tiki decorations to give us tickets before Vajtay took us on a tour of the grounds. Here was the PR-mountain-ops-ticket-sales-manager's office; there were the ski lockers; there was the cafe and the cabinet-sized ski shop run by George Quinn—who wrote two books about ski history in the Catskills and knows the range better than anyone since Rip Van Winkle. Lastly, Vajtay showed us the main eating hall, where a circular fireplace flickered in the middle of the room, itself an actual invention of the 1960s that now absolutely vibes the place with a '60s aura.Out the double picture windows at the northern end of the Blockbuster Lounge was a quiver of double-diamond runs Platty is known for: Blockbuster, Freefall, Plunge, Northface, all of which are pitched straight down. At the top, a long, wooded ridge hems in the resort.Vajtay had rounded up a scrappy crew of locals who were anxious to go, including Scott Ketchum, a longtime local who moved to Phoenicia the same week that Jimmy Hendrix played at Woodstock a few miles away and grew up skiing Simpson's rope tow. After a quick introduction, Ketchum offered to show Reddick some leftover powder in the trees while Vajtay and I talked.Turned out that, at Platty, “leftover powder in the trees” was code for: traverse 45 minutes east across the ridge; find a foot of fresh a week after the last storm; plenty steep and plenty of vertical; bad route-finding at the top; a thicket of trees so dense it became impossible to simply get down; multiple over-the-handlebar moments; broken pole; run-in with an ornery neighbor who had fired a shotgun over someone's head the week before; a few laughs; and, finally, a smelly pig-pile ride in a pickup truck back to the resort.On Snow OperatingLaszlo referenced a podcast episode that I recorded with Snow Operating CEO Joe Hession. Listen here.Laz also talks about Hugh Reynolds, who joined me on a different podcast episode. Listen here. On the Olympic Regional Development AuthorityWe talked extensively about the Olympic Regional Development Authority (ORDA), which manages three ski areas owned by New York State: Belleayre (which is right down the road from Plattekill), Gore, and Whiteface. Recent NPR reports detailed the stunning level of taxpayer funding channeled into ORDA's coffers over the past six years:Standing in the boardroom of New York's state-run Olympic Regional Development Authority in Lake Placid, CEO Mike Pratt spread out photographs of Olympic sports venues in Beijing, Berlin and Sarajevo that lie abandoned and in ruins.His message was plain: This almost happened here.Pratt convinced New York state to bet on a different future, investing huge amounts of taxpayer cash rebuilding and modernizing the sports authority's venues, most dating back to the 1980 Winter Olympics."The last six years, the total capital investment in the Olympic authority was $552 million," Pratt said. "These are unprecedented investments in our facilities, no question about it. But the return on investment is immediate."NPR found New York state has actually pumped far more dollars into the organization since Pratt took the helm, with government documents showing the total outlay closer to $620 million.You can read more here. It's an incredible story.On Ski Cooper's controversial season passI asked Laz and Danielle about Plattekill's longtime reciprocal partnership with Ski Cooper and where they stand on the controversy around it. I've covered that extensively here, here, and here.On Mount Bohemia's $99 season passI've covered this extensively in the past, but my podcast with Boho owner Lonie Glieberman goes into the whole backstory and strategy behind the mega-bargain pass at this ungroomed glade kingdom in Michigan's remote Upper Peninsula. This year's season pass sale is set for Nov. 22 to Dec. 2. The $99 pass no longer includes Saturdays – skiers have to level up to the $109 version for that. Bohemia also sells a $172 two-year pass and a $1,299 lifetime pass.The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 67/100 in 2023, and number 453 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

It's a new week, so time for another "New Release Monday" episode. This episode we spotlight new and upcoming releases from July and August 2023 in doom metal, including stoner, death doom and sludge, of course. We're all doomed! (0:00) "Mountain High" MARIJUANA JOHNSON - Reffer Chamber Reefer Chamber | Marijuana Johnson (bandcamp.com) (4:53) "Summoned From Moribound Delusions" ETERNAL ROT - Moribound Moribound | Eternal Rot | ETERNAL ROT (bandcamp.com) (11:29) "Divinity" HIGH PRIEST - Invocation Invocation | High Priest (bandcamp.com) (16:46) "Fear Awakens" COUCH WIZARD - Fear Fear - EP | COUCH WIZARD (bandcamp.com) (23:04) "Monolith" THUNDER HORSE - After the Fall After the Fall | Thunder Horse | Ripple Music (bandcamp.com) (28:34) "Riding In Hell" GRIMORIA - Lost In Shadows LOST IN SHADOWS | Grimoria (bandcamp.com) (33:01) "Walpurgis Night" BLACK SPELL - Walpurgis Night The Purple Skull | Black Spell | Regain Records (bandcamp.com)

The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and to support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.WhoTim Cohee, President and General Manager of China Peak, California and President of California Mountain Resort CompanyRecorded onJune 19, 2023About China PeakClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: California Mountain Resort CompanyLocated in: Lakeshore, CaliforniaYear founded: 1958Pass affiliations:* Cali Pass – Unlimited access* Indy Base Pass – 2 days, potential blackouts TBD* Indy+ Pass – 2 days, no blackouts* Powder Alliance – 2 days, potential blackouts TBDReciprocal partners: None (Cali Pass includes Powder Alliance + unlimited access to Mountain High and Dodge Ridge)Closest neighboring ski areas: Badger Pass (2 hours, 45 minutes), Dodge Ridge (4 hours, 1 minute)Base elevation: 7,030 feetSummit elevation: 8,709 feetVertical drop: 1,679 feetSkiable Acres: 1,200Average annual snowfall: 300 inchesTrail count: 54 Lift count: 11 lifts (2 quads, 4 triples, 1 T-bar, 4 carpets) - Total includes Chair 6 upgrade from a double to a fixed-grip quad this summer; China Peak also plans to replace the Firebowl T-bar with a used quad from Taos in 2024 - view Lift Blog's inventory of China Peak's lift fleetWhy I interviewed himThe Storm Skiing Podcast is not yet four years old, but it is established enough to have hosted several repeat guests: Indy Pass founder Doug Fish (four appearances), Boyne Resorts CEO Stephen Kircher (three), Alterra chair Rusty Gregory (three), and snowsports columnist Shaun Sutner (two, with a third scheduled for November). Magic Mountain, Vermont President Geoff Hatheway and Berkshire East/Catamount owner Jon Schaefer have also appeared twice.What makes a good repeat guest? Many things. Fish, Kircher, and Gregory oversee rapidly changing and expansive portfolios whose evolutions shape the lift-served ski landscape as a whole. Hatheway and Schaefer guide small operations, but they are among the most original thinkers in skiing. Sutner brings deep experience and perspective to the layered New England ski scene.Tim Cohee fits into the Hatheway/Schaefer camp. Anyone who listened to my first podcast interview with him, in 2021, knows this. He brings a West Coast moxie and brashness to the rough-and-ruthless Sierras, tempered by the humbling realities of operating mountains in the fickle range over four-plus decades.The Storm, in general, is more interested in place over person. I don't seek out whacky characters or eccentrics. They may be captivating in an oddball way, but I need to find the individuals who actually make things happen, who, through will or persistence or luck or planning help shape our collective lift-served ski experience.Sometimes, however, you get both charisma and decision-making. Would I be running my second podcast focused on a mid-sized California ski area if it were owned and operated by someone else? Maybe. But probably not. At least not so soon. This is a hyper-regional mountain, isolated and hard to reach for anyone who doesn't live in or near Fresno. It's 65 miles and an hour and a half off the expressway – time that most SoCal drivers are going to use to keep moving north to Mammoth or Tahoe.But here we are, back in the parking lot at the end of highway 168, for the second time in two years. You'll understand why once you click “play.”    What we talked aboutChina Peak's record-smashing snowfall this past season; when big snow equals big problems; how running Kirkwood prepared Cohee for a huge 2022-23 at China Peak; weathering nine droughts in 11 seasons; selling the ski area to California Mountain Resorts Company; Karl Kapuscinski, “mountain guy”; the Cali Pass; “I wish I was partners with Karl 10 years ago”; doing your best work in your ‘60s; “there's no better investment company in the country in the ski business than Invision Capital”; the long-term potential for California Mountain Resort Company (CMRC) to by more ski areas; potential for Powder Alliance to morph into a revenue-generating pass; Doug Fish and the Indy Pass; whether Powder Alliance could expand outside of the West in North America; how Epic and Ikon have lifted small ski areas; how China Peak works together with Dodge Ridge and Mountain High as a collective; how Covid supercharged China Peak's business; why Ross Blackburn bailed out China Peak; the “smartest guy ever in the American ski industry”; why China Peak finally invested in a real snowmaking system and what happened when it did; this summer's Canyon lift upgrade; where a detachable lift could fit at China Peak and what sort of lift that could be; “Karl and I are passionate about mirroring as much of what the big resorts do as we can”; a Firebowl lift upgrade; another lift upgrade for Dodge Ridge; thinking through Lift 1 upgrades; why China Peak removed the Dynamite/old Buckhorn lift; why the mountain changed the name of the Exhibition lift to “Buckhorn”; “China Peak would probably be the fifth or sixth best ski area in Lake Tahoe if it was up there”; reaching for 200,000 skier visits; the problem with an East Bowl lift; why China Peak terrain expansion is unlikely; “you can put 5,500 people at China Peak and it will gobble them up”; the ski area that CMRC is trying to buy next; and why Cohee changed the name back to “China Peak” in 2010.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewChina Peak is making all kinds of moves lately:* After staggering along on a primitive snowmaking system for decades, China Peak finally installed a modern network in 2021. Following nine droughts in 11 seasons, this seemed like the only route to survival. Only, it hasn't stopped snowing since. China Peak obliterated its all-time snowfall record during the 2022-23 ski season, piling up 701 inches from November to May.* In December, Cohee sold China Peak to Invision Capital and Karl Kapuscinski, an enterprise that has now reformulated as “California Mountain Resort Company” (CMRC). It was an unexpected move that continued the rollup of North America's ski industry into conglomerates large and small, lumping China Peak in with new sister resorts Mountain High and Dodge Ridge.* In February, CMRC introduced the “Cali Pass” for the 2023-24 ski season. Renewing passholders could lock in unlimited access to Mountain High, Dodge Ridge, and China Peak for $599 ($649 for new customers). The pass, which currently runs $699, also includes Powder Alliance benefits: three days each at 19 other ski areas, including Sierra-at-Tahoe. All three ski areas continue to sell single-mountain passes, which debuted at $499/$449 renewal at China Peak (now $549), and $549/$499 renewal at Mountain High and Dodge Ridge (now $599). The Cali Pass is one of a growing number of regional ski passes that deliver multi-mountain access outside of the Epkon ecosystem.* One of the 62 lift installations rising across North America this summer is at China Peak, where Jackson Hole's old Thunder fixed-grip quad is replacing a Riblet double on the Canyon line. Cohee discusses a second lift upgrade for next summer, for the long-defunct Firebowl T-bar.* China Peak still relies entirely on a fixed-grip lift fleet. This could change as CMRC looks to retool its portfolio for skiing's high-speed age. That could mean big changes for Lift 1, Summit, which is currently a fixed-grip triple. Cohee thinks an upgrade to a high-speed six on that line could be among the most consequential lift replacements in the history of California skiing.What I got wrongI didn't get this wrong, necessarily, but I wanted to make a note about Ski Cooper and the Powder Alliance. Cohee and I spoke on June 19 – Ski Cooper announced that it had joined the Powder Alliance on June 30. Otherwise, I certainly would have asked him about it during our Powder Alliance discussion.Cohee and I talked through the coming lift upgrade at Dodge Ridge on the fly. We settled on a likely upgrade to Lift 5, but the resort is in fact upgrading Lift 6, from a Riblet double to a quad, for the 2024-25 ski season:Why you should ski China PeakIt's hard to contemplate how a ski area can be both at the ass-end of the road and in the most populous state in the nation. But that's China Peak: an hour and a half dead east of Fresno, at the terminus of a road that just can't quite contemplate going any deeper into the mountains. Mammoth, 28 miles away as the bird flies, is a six-and-a-half-hour drive.You should go anyway. “We don't even have a line on a triple chair,” Cohee tells me of China Peak's Summit Lift, the mountain's only top-to-bottom chair. “There's no way you can stand in line 10 minutes. It's not possible. Most of the time it's two or three minutes on a fixed triple chair.” So, no one's there, and you get a big mountain. Cohee explains: “People that have come there, that have never been there, are like, ‘how can there be a 1,700-vertical-foot mountain, fall-line skiing, steeps, long runs, fall-line runs, fantastic grooming, and all the frills, and I've never heard of it?' And I said, ‘because it's not in your market.'”Find me something more appealing than a 1,700-vertical-foot mountain with no liftlines. Sure, you're riding a fixed-grip lift to the top, but I'll take no line on a slow lift over a long line on a fast lift any day. And once they drop that sixer in there? Dang.Podcast NotesOn Karl Kapuscinski and California Mountain Resorts CompanyCohee and I talk extensively about Karl Kapuscinski, the CEO of CMRC and longtime owner of Mountain High. Kapuscinski joined me on the podcast last June (prior to the China Peak purchase), and we went deep on long-term plans at Mountain High and Dodge Ridge.On putting a lift on hike-to terrain in Telluride and TaosCohee referenced the contentious history of stringing chairlifts into what had traditionally been hike-to terrain. His examples were Taos and Telluride. Taos ran a 1,095-vertical-foot triple chair up Kachina Peak in 2014, delivering easy mass access to what had been revered hike-to terrain since the resort's earliest days. Note the lift-less Kachina Peak far looker's left on this 2012 trailmap:And here's Taos today (the mountain is replacing Lift 4, a fixed-grip quad, with a high-speed detach quad this summer - that lift is being split between China Peak and Dodge Ridge for the 2024 upgrade noted above; Taos will also upgrade Pioneer from a used Yan triple to a new Leitner-Poma triple this summer):The Telluride access issue was more complex, and was only tangentially related to the Revelation lift, which the resort installed on the backside in 2008. That lift made it slightly easier to access the Bear Creek terrain, which Powder characterized in 2014 as “a sprawling, steep, chute-choked drainage” and “some of the best lift-accessed backcountry in the country.” More:In 2000, skiers convinced the Forest Service to put in access points on Palmyra Peak at the top of the Gold Hill Chutes. The backcountry gates were also part of a terrain expansion in the resort. Local skiers thought the problem was solved, but the debate didn't end there. Ten years later, in December 2010, they closed the gates again due to complaints from a Bear Creek landowner. There are private inholdings in the Forest Service land in the canyon, and those landowners didn't want skiers cutting through their property.Read the rest to see how the problem sorted out. And here's the Telluride trailmap for reference:On Janek KunczynskiCohee referenced a conversation he'd had with “Yan Kunczynski,” saying that, “obviously he had his issues.” If it's not obvious to the listener, here's what he was talking about: Kuncyznski founded Yan chairlifts in 1965. They were sound lifts, and the company built hundreds, many of which are still in operation today. However. Yan's high-speed lifts turned out to be death traps. Two people died in a 1985 accident at Keystone. A 9-year-old died in a 1993 accident at Sierra-at-Tahoe (then known as Sierra Ski Ranch). Two more died at Whistler in 1995. This is why all three detachable quads at Sierra-at-Tahoe date to 1996 – the mountain ripped out all three Yan machines following the accident, even though the oldest dated only to 1989.Several Yan high-speed detachables still run, but they have been heavily modified and retrofit. Superstar Express at Killington, for example, was “retrofitted with new Poma grips and sheaves as well as terminal modifications in 1994,” according to Lift Blog. In total, 15 ski areas, including Sun Valley, Schweitzer, Mount Snow, Mammoth, and Palisades Tahoe spent millions upgrading or replacing Yan detachable quads. The company ceased operations in 2001.The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 57/100 in 2023, and number 443 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

Matthew 17 - Mountain High, Valley Low by Calvary Chapel Irmo

NEW FOR JUNE 1, 2023 A snap of a finger away from great music . . . Earned It - The Best Radio You Have Never Heard Vol. 461 1. Rocket Man (early) - Elton John 2. Low Spark Of High-Heeled Boys (live) - Rickie Lee Jones 3. Dear God - Sarah McLachlan 4. A Boat Lies Waiting (live) - David Gilmour 5. Back On The Chain Gang (live) - Morrissey 6. You Just Haven't Earned It Yet Baby - The Smiths 7. Birthday Carol - Todd Rundgren 8. River Deep, Mountain High (live) - Tina Turner 9. Come Together (live) - Ike & Tina Turner Revue 10. Sun King Medley (Keith Droz Remix) - The Beatles 11. Stand Up - Graham Nash 12. (The Angels Wanna wear My) Red Shoes (solo unplugged) - Elvis Costello 13. Release (live) - Pearl Jam 14. Tropic Morning News - The National 15. It Doesn't Have To Be Like That - Sparks 16. Starship Trooper (live) - Yes 17. Berlin (live) - Marillion 18. Your Gold Teeth - Steely Dan 19. I Wanna Be Your Dog (live) - Doyle Bramhall II / Tedeschi Trucks Band 20. Lazarus - David Bowie The Best Radio You Have Never Heard. 10,000 hours. Accept No Substitute. Click to join the conversation on the Facebook page.

In the episode, Amanda Seales discusses the topic of nepotism and how it affects black people. Seales argues that nepotism is a major problem in the Black community and that it prevents many talented black people from getting ahead. Seales also discusses the ways in which nepotism can be harmful to black people, and how it can lead to a sense of entitlement and a lack of accountability. Get ready to listen, laugh, and learn with the Amanda Seales show FOLLOW ALONG AS WE COVER: (04:17) BLACKURATE NEWS: 9 People Shot, Near Beach In Hollywood, Florida (08:33) Beyoncé Honors Tina Turner With Performance Of ‘River Deep, Mountain High' In London (13:44) Plus The Group Chat…Black People And Nepotism (18:44) 60 Sec Headlines STORY 1: MIAMI HEAT ADVANCE TO NBA FINALS AFTER CRUSHING THE BOSTON CELTICS' DREAM OF A HISTORIC COMEBACK  STORY 2: ARI LENNOX PENS ADDITIONAL APOLOGY MESSAGE TO OPRAH & GAYLE KING AFTER PREVIOUSLY CALLING THEM “COONS” & “SELF HATING PIECES OF SH*T: ‘YA'LL LEGENDS DIDN'T DESERVE THAT WRETCHED LIVE' STORY 3: THAT'S OUR ARIEL! ‘THE LITTLE MERMAID' SETS OFF SOCIAL MEDIA SWOONAMI, SPLASHES TO #1 AT BOX OFFICE STORY 4: PASTOR SARAH JAKES ROBERTS SNATCHES WIG OFF MID-SERMON AT HER FATHER'S TD JAKES CHURCH   (20:35) BLACKURATE NEWS: A Deal Is Reach To Avoid A Potential First-Ever Government Default   (30:34) Timbaland Says We Should Separate R.Kelly From His Music (35:34) The Big Up/Let Down BIG UP -  To All The Students Who Danced After Graduating LET DOWN - A Police Officer Was In Active Service At A Graduation Apprehending Black Kids Who Didn't Commit A Crime.   (38:40) Our Phone Lines Are Open To You 24/7…At 855-AMANDA-8 THAT'S 855-262-6328! (40:54) BLACKURATE NEWS: SC Juneteenth Event Banner Depicting White Couple Gets Backlash (48:57) Juneteenth Is Just For Black People (54:19) Jeremiah's Moving Mis-Adventures (58:55) Amanda's Memorial Day Meltdown (63:43) Happy Birthday To … Rapper Azealia Banks (1991) Waka Flocka Flame (986) CLINT EASTWOOD (1930) BROOKS SHIELDS (1965) COLIN FARRELL (1976) Rapper DMC Darryl McDaniels of Run-DMC (1964) (67:26) Politicians Say The Darndest Things  FOLLOW THE SHOW ON ALL SOCIALS: @sealessaidit @amandaseales @jeremiahlikethebible If you have a comment leave Amanda a message at 1 855-AMANDA-8 that's 1-855-262-6328See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Foo Fighters comparten 'The Theacher', último adelanto del disco que publican este viernes, 2 de junio, diez minutazos de canción en los que Dave Grohl rinde homenaje a su madre, que fue profesora. Escuchamos a Claud con 'Wet', uno de los dos sencillos que acaba de sacar, a Miya Folick con su nuevo álbum y a Jornada con una versión acústica y preciosa de 'Sparks', de Coldplay. Aparte, felicitamos a Luz Casal porque acaba de ser nombrada comendadora de las Artes y las Letras de Francia y hablamos de los últimos tres conciertos de Second, en el Teatro Circo de Murcia, los días 28, 29 y 30 de diciembre.   LUZ CASAL – Antes Que Tú LOS ZIGARROS - River Deep, Mountain High (ft. Aurora García) ÁNGEL STANICH – Mátame Camión LOVEJOY - Portrait of a Blank Slate JORDANA - Sparks CLAUD – Wet MIYA FOLICK - Get Out of My House CAROLINA DURANTE – Marta, Sebas, Guille y los Demás BUM MOTION CLUB - Casi Un buen día LOLA YOUNG - Don't Hate Me BABY KEEM & KENDRICK LAMAR - The Hillbillies FOO FIGHTERS – The Teacher  ROYAL BLOOD - Mountains At Midnight SECOND – Estado de Alegre TristezaEscuchar audio

Brian and Murdock celebrate the "Queen of Rock N Roll" - Tina Turner - by examining the giant impact she just might have made on the way rock n roll has looked onstage for the last 60 years. This episode brought to you in part by Louder Than Life Music Festival. Louder Than Life America's Biggest Rock Festival Louisville, KY September 21-24, 2023 Highland Festival Grounds At Kentucky Exposition Center Foo Fighters, Green Day, Tool, Avenged Sevenfold, Godsmack, Pantera, Queens Of The Stone Age, Weezer, Limp Bizkit, Megadeth, Rancid, Turnstile & More General Admission And VIP Passes On Sale Now Starting At $10 Down Win Louder Than Life tickets by entering HERE!   Support the show on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/rocknrollbedtimestories SHOW NOTES Songs used in this episode: “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston & His Delta Cats; “A Fool in Love” by Ike & Tina Turner; “River Deep, Mountain High” by Ike & Tina Turner ` https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/01/tina-turner-proud-mary/617843/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proud_Mary https://www.biography.com/musicians/tina-turner-proud-mary-origins https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/rolling-stones-mick-jagger-learn-to-dance/ https://www.npr.org/2023/05/25/1178270147/the-genre-bending-influence-and-legacy-of-tina-turner https://nz.news.yahoo.com/tina-turner-taught-mick-jagger-150109041.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kings_of_Rhythm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chitlin%27_Circuit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Krasnow Ike and Tina on The Big TNT Show: https://youtu.be/RrLl1o1shos https://americansongwriter.com/various-artists-t-m-showthe-big-t-n-t-show-collectors-edition/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Deep_%E2%80%93_Mountain_High https://www.lamag.com/article/listen-tina-turners-marathon-recording-of-river-deep-mountain-high/ River Deep recording session outtakes: https://tinaturnerblog.com/2011/05/28/ike-tina-river-deep-mountain-high-outtake/  https://www.the-world-of-tina.com/rolling-stones---concert.html 1971 Rolling Stone piece: https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/tales-of-ike-and-tina-turner-237489/ Tina and Mick at Live Aid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wyuwJP-u9Q http://rockandrollgarage.com/where-mick-jagger-got-the-inspiration-for-his-dance-moves/ https://www.towleroad.com/2023/05/tina-turner-was-prepared-for-sir-mick-jagger-ripping-her-skirt-off-at-live-aid/ https://etcanada.com/news/994825/mick-jagger-shares-rare-footage-of-himself-and-tina-turner-in-1969/ The Pony dance tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-I0HEbcrVo Another Pony dance tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qhrx5IcPUIw

We dive into the Garys' 6th straight victory, our jersey swaps, and cards of the week. Upcoming squad rotation? The boys debate this and give you a preview of upcoming matches. Podcast opening Review of the game(s) Jersey Swap of the week Trivia of the week Card of the week Upcoming week player to look for Upcoming fixtures (opponent analysis) Trivia answer and closing --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/the-flyin-lion-podcast/support

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on May 23. It dropped for free subscribers on May 26. To receive future pods as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe for free below:WhoRobby Ellingson, General Manager of Mt. Baldy, CaliforniaRecorded onMay 8, 2023About Mt. BaldyClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Mt. Baldy Ski Lifts, which is majority owned by Ron EllingsonLocated in: Mt. Baldy, CaliforniaYear founded: 1952Pass affiliations: NoneClosest neighboring ski areas: Mountain High (1 hour, 12 minutes), Snow Valley (1 hour, 19 minutes), Snow Summit (1 hour, 52 minutes), Bear Mountain (1 hour, 56 minutes) – travel times vary considerably pending time of day and weather conditionsBase elevation: 6,500 feetSummit elevation: 8,600 feetVertical drop: 2,100 feetSkiable Acres: 800-plusAverage annual snowfall: 170 inchesTrail count: 26 (54% advanced/expert, 31% intermediate, 15% beginner)Lift count: 4 double chairs – view Lift Blog's inventory of Mt. Baldy's lift fleetWhy I interviewed himIf you have children under the age of 15 or so, you have likely seen Zootopia. If not, imagine this: anthropomorphic animals (it's Disney), traumatized by eons of predator-eat-prey brutalism, build a city in which they can all coexist after the lions and wolves are given the equivalent of cartoon Beyond burgers or something. This city is divided into realms: desert, jungle, arctic, water, etc. Which is about as believable as thousands of species of walking, talking animals living in non-murderous harmony until you realize, oh yeah, that's basically Los Angeles.The monster, pulsing city, its various terras stacked skyward like realms in Tolkein: ocean then beach then jungle then mountain then desert beyond. Most American cities sprawl outward in concentric rings of Wal-Marts and Applebee's and Autozones. LA gives you whole different worlds every five freeway exits.It's still incongruous, to drive up into the sky and find Mt. Baldy. Not just to find a ski area, because there are plenty of those perched along the city walls, but to find this ski area, pinched in a deep ravine at the end of a narrow highway switchbacking up from the flats. Foot-loading the lattice-towered double chair is like boarding a slow-motion time machine into the sky. And indeed you may think you have. At the top, cellphone service blinks out. The chairlifts are museum pieces from the pre-digital era of industrial design. The trailmap un-scrolled across the baselodge wall teases the Stockton Flats expansion, which will be new… in 1991 (it's still not there).Los Angeles, with its vast wealth and enormous population, could support almost any kind of ski area. Knit the entirety of the mountains above the city together with high-speed lifts, and you would have no issue filling them with skiers. And yet, the closest ski area to Fancy Town is this throwback. Soaring, glorious, gorgeous, but a relic, as though someone turned the lights on in 1952 and forgot about it. There's some grooming but not a lot. Some snowmaking but not a lot. Some services but just enough. A few other skiers but basically none. Meaning not enough for liftlines, at least once you get up Lift 1. It's just you and endless inventive lines through the trees.If I found Baldy staked out in the remote Sierras, a token of another time, I'd be awestruck and amazed. If I found it tucked off some pass in Idaho or Wyoming, I'd understand its end-of-civilization vibe. But so positioned, directly and conspicuously over America's West Coast glitter, the place is puzzling and fascinating. I had to know more.What we talked aboutThat amazing 2022-23 California ski season; why it's almost impossible to get accurate snow measurements at Baldy; why Baldy isn't reliant on CalTrans like the other SoCal ski areas; avy mitigation in SoCal; why Baldy pushes the season so deep into spring; embracing social media; growing up in the mountains above LA; the Ellingson family legacy on the mountain; why bombing the mountain as a kid doesn't prepare you to run it as an adult; loving the mountain and the rush of it all; who owns Mt. Baldy Ski Lifts; building Baldy above Los Angeles starting in 1952; thoughts on the consolidation of Southern California skiing; competing with the Ikon Pass; what happened when Baldy introduced a $49 season pass, and why that product eventually went away; whether Vail has ever driven up from the 210 with an open checkbook; why Baldy never became the “Disneyland of the mountains”; Baldy's Holy Grail expansion and whether it will ever happen; Baldy's throwback vibe; updating the masterplan (from 1993!); priorities for new lifts, including one that could change the texture of the entire resort; the incredible journey of the used lift that will replace Chair 2; upgrades happening to Chair 3 this summer; Baldy's unique follow-the-sun lift operations; how Mt. Baldy's snowmaking system exists in an area facing chronic water shortages; snowmaking priorities; Club Baldy; whether Baldy could ever join the Indy Pass; and Baldy's parking restrictions and whether they could ever build more parking spots.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewI've been aware of Mt. Baldy for decades, in the way that I've been aware of every mid-sized-for-its-region ski area, but I never thought much about the place until April 2020.As we all remember, the entire North American ski industry had shut down over the course of a week that March. As most of us have forgotten, a handful re-opened starting in late April. The first of those was Mt. Baldy. On April 22, operating under a tee-time social-distancing structure that permitted small groups of skiers up the mountain in intervals, Baldy turned the lifts back on for the first time in weeks. I lobbed an email into the ether and, much to my surprise, connected with Ellingson for a short podcast conversation.The clever operating scheme that Ellingson patched together told a far larger story than one ski area hacking the Covid shutdowns. It was that, of course, but it also distilled the rowdy spirit of independent ski areas into one tangible act: a simple, creative, rapidly conceived and executed set of operating procedures that flexed to both the complexities of a global pandemic and the nuances of a single ski area. Vail and Alterra can do a lot of things, but that sort of nimble adaptation is harder for them (though Crystal, Washington was one of the half-dozen or so ski areas to re-open that spring). Baldy's scheme was brash without being reckless - Ellingson did not ask the local or state authorities' permission to re-open the bump, but he did so with 10 percent capacity restrictions that seem conservative in hindsight. The plan showcased the vitality of independent ski areas, and also their necessity. Remember that, in those first weeks after the Covid shutdowns, there was some doubt as to whether the 2020-21 ski season would happen at all (and, indeed, in many European nations, it basically didn't), but Baldy showed, early and decisively, that some version of skiing could co-exist with Covid, and the industry's focus quickly swiveled from “if” to “how.”That sense of quirky, raw independence animates everything about Mt. Baldy. There is nothing else like it in America. And not in the way that there's nothing else like Alta or Vail Mountain or Killington or Whiteface, which each have unique terrain and snowfall patterns and cultures, but similar ways of being. Baldy just feels like a different way of being a ski area, like when you go to Europe and all of the cars and buildings look different and you're like, OK, this is a different way of being a civilization. Or I guess like skiing in Europe, which really feels nothing at all like America.It's hard to understand without experiencing it for yourself. In March, I finally stopped in and skied the place. And I had to ask what in the world I'd just experienced.What I got wrongFor some reason, I'd thought that the Mueller lift company had gone the way of the Riblet (meaning, out of business). I said so during our interview, when Ellingson noted that he had ordered new chairs for Chair 3, a 1978 Mueller double. He pointed out that the company is still in business, in Canada.Why you should ski Mt. BaldyIn the podcast, I ask Ellingson if Vail Resorts has ever brought its big fat checkbook up the access road. He said they haven't, which is both surprising and not surprising. Surprising because Vail has purchased a ski area within the orbit of pretty much every cold-weather or mountain-adjacent city in the United States, with the exception of Los Angeles. Not surprising because Vail tends to buy renovated houses, rather than repair jobs. Not that there's anything broken about Baldy, but four double chairlifts is not exactly Vail's brand.I asked about Vail's interest for this reason: as a fully permitted ski area with secure water rights standing above the nation's second-most-populous city, Baldy is an irreplaceable asset. There are only a handful of ski areas in the National Forests above Los Angeles. Alterra owns three of them: Bear Mountain, Snow Summit, and Snow Valley. Mountain High is itself in acquisition mode, purchasing Dodge Ridge in 2021 and China Peak last year. Mt. Waterman has no snowmaking and has not turned the lifts on for public skiing in more than three years. A few other Forest Service permits remain active, though the ski areas have long closed: Cedar Pass, Green Valley, Kratka Ridge. That makes Baldy the only viable LA-area independent ski area that would make sense as a megapass acquisition.It's unlikely, but not impossible. It would cost tens of millions to upgrade the resort's lift and snowmaking infrastructure to handle Epic Pass volumes. Eventually, however, Vail may conclude that their only way to compete with Alterra for LA is to buy their way in. And, as Ellingson says in the podcast, “everything is for sale” - for the right price.My point here is this: if you want to experience the funky, idiosyncratic Mt. Baldy that I'm describing here, don't wait to do it. This is not Mad River Glen, shielded from over-development by co-op bylaws. This is a locally owned and operated ski area that has done what they could with what they've had for decades. That it's quaint and wild is a function of circumstance rather than destiny. Someone could buy this. Someone could change this. Someone could make this Big Bear 2. I'm not going to tell you whether that would be a good thing or a bad thing, but I will tell you that it would be a different thing. And that different thing could happen tomorrow or it could happen 30 years from now or it could happen never. Don't bet against it. Go ski Baldy the next chance you get.Podcast NotesOn SoCal summit elevationsWe briefly discussed the top altitude of the various SoCal ski areas. Bear Mountain checks in with the highest, topping out at 8,805 feet at the top of Bear Peak. Baldy is right behind, at 8,600 at the tops of both lifts 3 and 4. Baldy is the king of SoCal vert, however – when you can ski all the way to the bottom of Lift 1. Some seasons, this doesn't happen at all, but this year, Ellingson said one of his employees skied to the base more than 50 days.Just for fun, here's an inventory of all California ski areas' headline stats, with SoCal ski areas highlighted in blue:On reading recommendations                          Ellingson mentions a book by Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard: Let My People Surf. Here's a link if you want to check it out.On the bells clanging in the backgroundYou may notice bells clanging in the background during a good portion of the podcast. While you may conclude that I recorded this episode in a Christmas village, this was just our family's eight-week-old kittens batting their cat toys around in the background. Eventually I called in reinforcements to shut this illicit operation down, but in the meantime, chaos reigned.On Mt. Waterman not being a real ski areaMt. Waterman is, technically, still a functioning ski area. Their Forest Service permit is active. Someone regularly updates their Facebook page and website. However. The lifts haven't actually spun for the public since early 2020, pre-Covid shutdowns. There is always some excuse: not enough workers, no power, no snow, the road is closed. The place has no snowmaking, which, in Southern California in 2023, is as absurd as it sounds. But they failed to open even after this year's massive storm, which brought as much as 10 feet to the other ski areas in the region.It's fair to suspect something shady is going on here. I'm not making any accusations, but the Forest Service ought to investigate (if they're even equipped to do that) why the ski area so infrequently opens. I am usually allergic to online mob violence, but the ruthless shaming by disappointed would-be Waterman skiers to the ski area's every Facebook post is consistent, disgusted, and hilarious:The whole “you're just running the lifts for your friends and family” accusation is fairly common. I have no idea if it's true. If so, this place needs to be liberated for the people.On Stockton FlatsSki straight off Chair 4 and angle slightly right, sidestep a few feet up, and you'll see a vast kingdom stretching off into the wilderness. Straight down, marvelous untracked pow. This is Stockton Flats, the long-teased but never actualized expansion off Baldy's backside. This circa 2006 trailmap shows up to six lifts spread over 2,200 vertical feet on the expansion:The potential expansion is so built into Baldy's lore that the large trailmap stretched across the baselodge still teases it:So, why hasn't the expansion happened? Will it ever? We discuss that extensively in the podcast.On the Ski Area Recreational Opportunity Enhancement ActEllingson refers to the “Summertime Enhancement Act” that Congress passed several years ago. This was a 2010 law that allowed ski areas operating on Forest Service land to expand operations into the summer. Thus: all the mountain coasters, ziplines, disc golf, mountain biking, and other stuff you see happening around ski areas in the offseason. In other words, this law allowed ski areas to evolve into year-round businesses, as their non-Forest Service counterparts had been doing for decades. It was, by all accounts, a huge boost to the viability of the nation's ski industry.On our last Mt. Baldy podcastEllingson and I recorded a podcast episode previously, on April 22, 2020. Heads up: the energy here is way different than what you're accustomed to from The Storm. In summary, when Covid hit, no one cared about anything else but Covid for like three months. So I halted my regular podcast series (which at the time consisted of just 14 episodes), and pivoted to a “Covid-19 & Skiing” series. These were short – generally about 30 minutes – and explored the impact of Covid on skiing in the most sober possible terms. There is no music and no sponsors, and barely an introduction. Plus I hope I've gotten better at this. Anyway just setting expectations here.On “Disneyland of the Mountains”I referenced this 1987 Los Angeles Times article that envisioned a future Mt. Baldy that looked a lot like, well, Big Bear. That never happened, obviously, and Ellingson and I discuss why not at length. But it's fascinating to put yourself back in the late ‘80s and see a whole different world than the one that actually happened.On InstapostEllingson talked a bit about his experience as reluctant owner of the Mt. Baldy Instagram account. Frankly I think he does an awesome job. The feed is interesting, raw, quirky, and fun. Give them a follow.On the Mt. Baldy ski experienceIn my recent article recapping the highlights of my 2022-23 ski season, I laid out a day at Mt. Baldy in detail:There is a basic acceptance and understanding among New York City-based skiers that any hill within a three-hour orbit of Manhattan will be maximally oversold and intolerable at all peak times. Unless you go to Plattekill – a family-owned 1,100-footer tucked deep into the Catskills, with a double and a triple and ferocious double-blacks stacked along the frontside. Maybe because it lacks high-speed lifts, maybe because it sits down a tangle of poorly marked backroads, maybe because people just go where the buses go, maybe because parking is limited and that controls liftlines – but the place is never overwhelmed, even during peak season with peak snow.LA's version of Plattekill is Mt. Baldy. The crowds swarm Big Bear and Mountain High. But not Baldy, even though it's right. Freaking. There. Fourteen miles and half an hour off the 210 freeway. An hour from downtown LA. And what a surreal, unbelievable, indescribable experience this place is.The arrival likely puts the masses off. You foot-load a double chair that looks as though it was assembled from repurposed Noah's Ark scrap and ride 20 minutes to where the ski area, essentially, begins (though in deep years you can ski all the way back to the parking lot – this was a deep year).…Here, more double chairs. Your choices, in the morning, are Chair 2 – for beginners, or southeast-facing Chair 4, looker's left. This is all marked as blue terrain, but if the trees are live, it is a mad bazaar of gladed lines, nicely pitched for fast, wild turns through the widely spaced SoCal forest. There are no lift lines, even on a bluebird Saturday.At around 1 or 1:30 – whenever the sun softens the northwest-facing terrain, or whenever they feel like it – Baldy Patrol shuts down Chair 4 and opens Chair 3. Here, vastly more vert, vastly more terrain, and vastly steeper pitch. This is big-mountain stuff, steep, wild, exposed, scary. Again, there are no liftlines. Fastlaps on this caliber of terrain – especially in California – are rare. But here you go. Feast.And at the end of the day, venture onto The Face, the enormous steeps leading back to the bottom of Chair 1.The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 45/100 in 2023, and number 431 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

The word "icon" is thrown around a lot these days, but Tina Turner was the epitome of that and more. The legendary pop star died today at the age of 83, leaving behind an indelible legacy that spanned decades across the music world, the stage, and the screen. We talk about her life and career, including her hits "River Deep, Mountain High," "Proud Mary," and "What's Love Got To Do With It."Subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour Plus at plus.npr.org/happyhour

Episode 165 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Dark Stat” and the career of the Grateful Dead. This is a long one, even longer than the previous episode, but don't worry, that won't be the norm. There's a reason these two were much longer than average. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "Codine" by the Charlatans. Errata I mispronounce Brent Mydland's name as Myland a couple of times, and in the introduction I say "Touch of Grey" came out in 1988 -- I later, correctly, say 1987. (I seem to have had a real problem with dates in the intro -- I also originally talked about "Blue Suede Shoes" being in 1954 before fixing it in the edit to be 1956) Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by the Grateful Dead, and Grayfolded runs to two hours. I referred to a lot of books for this episode, partly because almost everything about the Grateful Dead is written from a fannish perspective that already assumes background knowledge, rather than to provide that background knowledge. Of the various books I used, Dennis McNally's biography of the band and This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead by Blair Jackson and David Gans are probably most useful for the casually interested. Other books on the Dead I used included McNally's Jerry on Jerry, a collection of interviews with Garcia; Deal, Bill Kreutzmann's autobiography; The Grateful Dead FAQ by Tony Sclafani; So Many Roads by David Browne; Deadology by Howard F. Weiner; Fare Thee Well by Joel Selvin and Pamela Turley; and Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads by David Shenk and Steve Silberman. Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is the classic account of the Pranksters, though not always reliable. I reference Slaughterhouse Five a lot. As well as the novel itself, which everyone should read, I also read this rather excellent graphic novel adaptation, and The Writer's Crusade, a book about the writing of the novel. I also reference Ted Sturgeon's More Than Human. For background on the scene around Astounding Science Fiction which included Sturgeon, John W. Campbell, L. Ron Hubbard, and many other science fiction writers, I recommend Alec Nevala-Lee's Astounding. 1,000 True Fans can be read online, as can the essay on the Californian ideology, and John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace". The best collection of Grateful Dead material is the box set The Golden Road, which contains all the albums released in Pigpen's lifetime along with a lot of bonus material, but which appears currently out of print. Live/Dead contains both the live version of "Dark Star" which made it well known and, as a CD bonus track, the original single version. And archive.org has more live recordings of the group than you can possibly ever listen to. Grayfolded can be bought from John Oswald's Bandcamp Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript [Excerpt: Tuning from "Grayfolded", under the warnings Before we begin -- as we're tuning up, as it were, I should mention that this episode contains discussions of alcoholism, drug addiction, racism, nonconsensual drugging of other people, and deaths from drug abuse, suicide, and car accidents. As always, I try to deal with these subjects as carefully as possible, but if you find any of those things upsetting you may wish to read the transcript rather than listen to this episode, or skip it altogether. Also, I should note that the members of the Grateful Dead were much freer with their use of swearing in interviews than any other band we've covered so far, and that makes using quotes from them rather more difficult than with other bands, given the limitations of the rules imposed to stop the podcast being marked as adult. If I quote anything with a word I can't use here, I'll give a brief pause in the audio, and in the transcript I'll have the word in square brackets. [tuning ends] All this happened, more or less. In 1910, T. S. Eliot started work on "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", which at the time was deemed barely poetry, with one reviewer imagining Eliot saying "I'll just put down the first thing that comes into my head, and call it 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.'" It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature. In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut wrote "Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death", a book in which the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, comes unstuck in time, and starts living a nonlinear life, hopping around between times reliving his experiences in the Second World War, and future experiences up to 1976 after being kidnapped by beings from the planet Tralfamadore. Or perhaps he has flashbacks and hallucinations after having a breakdown from PTSD. It is now considered one of the great classics of modernist literature or of science fiction, depending on how you look at it. In 1953, Theodore Sturgeon wrote More Than Human. It is now considered one of the great classics of science fiction. In 1950, L. Ron Hubbard wrote Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. It is now considered either a bad piece of science fiction or one of the great revelatory works of religious history, depending on how you look at it. In 1994, 1995, and 1996 the composer John Oswald released, first as two individual CDs and then as a double-CD, an album called Grayfolded, which the composer says in the liner notes he thinks of as existing in Tralfamadorian time. The Tralfamadorians in Vonnegut's novels don't see time as a linear thing with a beginning and end, but as a continuum that they can move between at will. When someone dies, they just think that at this particular point in time they're not doing so good, but at other points in time they're fine, so why focus on the bad time? In the book, when told of someone dying, the Tralfamadorians just say "so it goes". In between the first CD's release and the release of the double-CD version, Jerry Garcia died. From August 1942 through August 1995, Jerry Garcia was alive. So it goes. Shall we go, you and I? [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Dark Star (Omni 3/30/94)"] "One principle has become clear. Since motives are so frequently found in combination, it is essential that the complex types be analyzed and arranged, with an eye kept single nevertheless to the master-theme under discussion. Collectors, both primary and subsidiary, have done such valiant service that the treasures at our command are amply sufficient for such studies, so extensive, indeed, that the task of going through them thoroughly has become too great for the unassisted student. It cannot be too strongly urged that a single theme in its various types and compounds must be made predominant in any useful comparative study. This is true when the sources and analogues of any literary work are treated; it is even truer when the bare motive is discussed. The Grateful Dead furnishes an apt illustration of the necessity of such handling. It appears in a variety of different combinations, almost never alone. Indeed, it is so widespread a tale, and its combinations are so various, that there is the utmost difficulty in determining just what may properly be regarded the original kernel of it, the simple theme to which other motives were joined. Various opinions, as we shall see, have been held with reference to this matter, most of them justified perhaps by the materials in the hands of the scholars holding them, but none quite adequate in view of later evidence." That's a quote from The Grateful Dead: The History of a Folk Story, by Gordon Hall Gerould, published in 1908. Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five opens with a chapter about the process of writing the novel itself, and how difficult it was. He says "I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time. When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big." This is an episode several of my listeners have been looking forward to, but it's one I've been dreading writing, because this is an episode -- I think the only one in the series -- where the format of the podcast simply *will not* work. Were the Grateful Dead not such an important band, I would skip this episode altogether, but they're a band that simply can't be ignored, and that's a real problem here. Because my intent, always, with this podcast, is to present the recordings of the artists in question, put them in context, and explain why they were important, what their music meant to its listeners. To put, as far as is possible, the positive case for why the music mattered *in the context of its time*. Not why it matters now, or why it matters to me, but why it matters *in its historical context*. Whether I like the music or not isn't the point. Whether it stands up now isn't the point. I play the music, explain what it was they were doing, why they were doing it, what people saw in it. If I do my job well, you come away listening to "Blue Suede Shoes" the way people heard it in 1956, or "Good Vibrations" the way people heard it in 1966, and understanding why people were so impressed by those records. That is simply *not possible* for the Grateful Dead. I can present a case for them as musicians, and hope to do so. I can explain the appeal as best I understand it, and talk about things I like in their music, and things I've noticed. But what I can't do is present their recordings the way they were received in the sixties and explain why they were popular. Because every other act I have covered or will cover in this podcast has been a *recording* act, and their success was based on records. They may also have been exceptional live performers, but James Brown or Ike and Tina Turner are remembered for great *records*, like "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" or "River Deep, Mountain High". Their great moments were captured on vinyl, to be listened back to, and susceptible of analysis. That is not the case for the Grateful Dead, and what is worse *they explicitly said, publicly, on multiple occasions* that it is not possible for me to understand their art, and thus that it is not possible for me to explain it. The Grateful Dead did make studio records, some of them very good. But they always said, consistently, over a thirty year period, that their records didn't capture what they did, and that the only way -- the *only* way, they were very clear about this -- that one could actually understand and appreciate their music, was to see them live, and furthermore to see them live while on psychedelic drugs. [Excerpt: Grateful Dead crowd noise] I never saw the Grateful Dead live -- their last UK performance was a couple of years before I went to my first ever gig -- and I have never taken a psychedelic substance. So by the Grateful Dead's own criteria, it is literally impossible for me to understand or explain their music the way that it should be understood or explained. In a way I'm in a similar position to the one I was in with La Monte Young in the last episode, whose music it's mostly impossible to experience without being in his presence. This is one reason of several why I placed these two episodes back to back. Of course, there is a difference between Young and the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead allowed -- even encouraged -- the recording of their live performances. There are literally thousands of concert recordings in circulation, many of them of professional quality. I have listened to many of those, and I can hear what they were doing. I can tell you what *I* think is interesting about their music, and about their musicianship. And I think I can build up a good case for why they were important, and why they're interesting, and why those recordings are worth listening to. And I can certainly explain the cultural phenomenon that was the Grateful Dead. But just know that while I may have found *a* point, *an* explanation for why the Grateful Dead were important, by the band's own lights and those of their fans, no matter how good a job I do in this episode, I *cannot* get it right. And that is, in itself, enough of a reason for this episode to exist, and for me to try, even harder than I normally do, to get it right *anyway*. Because no matter how well I do my job this episode will stand as an example of why this series is called "*A* History", not *the* history. Because parts of the past are ephemeral. There are things about which it's true to say "You had to be there". I cannot know what it was like to have been an American the day Kennedy was shot, I cannot know what it was like to be alive when a man walked on the Moon. Those are things nobody my age or younger can ever experience. And since August the ninth, 1995, the experience of hearing the Grateful Dead's music the way they wanted it heard has been in that category. And that is by design. Jerry Garcia once said "if you work really hard as an artist, you may be able to build something they can't tear down, you know, after you're gone... What I want to do is I want it here. I want it now, in this lifetime. I want what I enjoy to last as long as I do and not last any longer. You know, I don't want something that ends up being as much a nuisance as it is a work of art, you know?" And there's another difficulty. There are only two points in time where it makes sense to do a podcast episode on the Grateful Dead -- late 1967 and early 1968, when the San Francisco scene they were part of was at its most culturally relevant, and 1988 when they had their only top ten hit and gained their largest audience. I can't realistically leave them out of the story until 1988, so it has to be 1968. But the songs they are most remembered for are those they wrote between 1970 and 1972, and those songs are influenced by artists and events we haven't yet covered in the podcast, who will be getting their own episodes in the future. I can't explain those things in this episode, because they need whole episodes of their own. I can't not explain them without leaving out important context for the Grateful Dead. So the best I can do is treat the story I'm telling as if it were in Tralfamadorian time. All of it's happening all at once, and some of it is happening in different episodes that haven't been recorded yet. The podcast as a whole travels linearly from 1938 through to 1999, but this episode is happening in 1968 and 1972 and 1988 and 1995 and other times, all at once. Sometimes I'll talk about things as if you're already familiar with them, but they haven't happened yet in the story. Feel free to come unstuck in time and revisit this time after episode 167, and 172, and 176, and 192, and experience it again. So this has to be an experimental episode. It may well be an experiment that you think fails. If so, the next episode is likely to be far more to your taste, and much shorter than this or the last episode, two episodes that between them have to create a scaffolding on which will hang much of the rest of this podcast's narrative. I've finished my Grateful Dead script now. The next one I write is going to be fun: [Excerpt: Grateful Dead, "Dark Star"] Infrastructure means everything. How we get from place to place, how we transport goods, information, and ourselves, makes a big difference in how society is structured, and in the music we hear. For many centuries, the prime means of long-distance transport was by water -- sailing ships on the ocean, canal boats and steamboats for inland navigation -- and so folk songs talked about the ship as both means of escape, means of making a living, and in some senses as a trap. You'd go out to sea for adventure, or to escape your problems, but you'd find that the sea itself brought its own problems. Because of this we have a long, long tradition of sea shanties which are known throughout the world: [Excerpt: A. L. Lloyd, "Off to Sea Once More"] But in the nineteenth century, the railway was invented and, at least as far as travel within a landmass goes, it replaced the steamboat in the popular imaginary. Now the railway was how you got from place to place, and how you moved freight from one place to another. The railway brought freedom, and was an opportunity for outlaws, whether train robbers or a romanticised version of the hobo hopping onto a freight train and making his way to new lands and new opportunity. It was the train that brought soldiers home from wars, and the train that allowed the Great Migration of Black people from the South to the industrial North. There would still be songs about the riverboats, about how ol' man river keeps rolling along and about the big river Johnny Cash sang about, but increasingly they would be songs of the past, not the present. The train quickly replaced the steamboat in the iconography of what we now think of as roots music -- blues, country, folk, and early jazz music. Sometimes this was very literal. Furry Lewis' "Kassie Jones" -- about a legendary train driver who would break the rules to make sure his train made the station on time, but who ended up sacrificing his own life to save his passengers in a train crash -- is based on "Alabamy Bound", which as we heard in the episode on "Stagger Lee", was about steamboats: [Excerpt: Furry Lewis, "Kassie Jones"] In the early episodes of this podcast we heard many, many, songs about the railway. Louis Jordan saying "take me right back to the track, Jack", Rosetta Tharpe singing about how "this train don't carry no gamblers", the trickster freight train driver driving on the "Rock Island Line", the mystery train sixteen coaches long, the train that kept-a-rollin' all night long, the Midnight Special which the prisoners wished would shine its ever-loving light on them, and the train coming past Folsom Prison whose whistle makes Johnny Cash hang his head and cry. But by the 1960s, that kind of song had started to dry up. It would happen on occasion -- "People Get Ready" by the Impressions is the most obvious example of the train metaphor in an important sixties record -- but by the late sixties the train was no longer a symbol of freedom but of the past. In 1969 Harry Nilsson sang about how "Nobody Cares About the Railroads Any More", and in 1968 the Kinks sang about "The Last of the Steam-Powered Trains". When in 1968 Merle Haggard sang about a freight train, it was as a memory, of a child with hopes that ended up thwarted by reality and his own nature: [Excerpt: Merle Haggard, "Mama Tried"] And the reason for this was that there had been another shift, a shift that had started in the forties and accelerated in the late fifties but had taken a little time to ripple through the culture. Now the train had been replaced in the popular imaginary by motorised transport. Instead of hopping on a train without paying, if you had no money in your pocket you'd have to hitch-hike all the way. Freedom now meant individuality. The ultimate in freedom was the biker -- the Hell's Angels who could go anywhere, unburdened by anything -- and instead of goods being moved by freight train, increasingly they were being moved by truck drivers. By the mid-seventies, truck drivers took a central place in American life, and the most romantic way to live life was to live it on the road. On The Road was also the title of a 1957 novel by Jack Kerouac, which was one of the first major signs of this cultural shift in America. Kerouac was writing about events in the late forties and early fifties, but his book was also a precursor of the sixties counterculture. He wrote the book on one continuous sheet of paper, as a stream of consciousness. Kerouac died in 1969 of an internal haemmorage brought on by too much alcohol consumption. So it goes. But the big key to this cultural shift was caused by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, a massive infrastructure spending bill that led to the construction of the modern American Interstate Highway system. This accelerated a program that had already started, of building much bigger, safer, faster roads. It also, as anyone who has read Robert Caro's The Power Broker knows, reinforced segregation and white flight. It did this both by making commuting into major cities from the suburbs easier -- thus allowing white people with more money to move further away from the cities and still work there -- and by bulldozing community spaces where Black people lived. More than a million people lost their homes and were forcibly moved, and orders of magnitude more lost their communities' parks and green spaces. And both as a result of deliberate actions and unconscious bigotry, the bulk of those affected were Black people -- who often found themselves, if they weren't forced to move, on one side of a ten-lane highway where the park used to be, with white people on the other side of the highway. The Federal-Aid Highway Act gave even more power to the unaccountable central planners like Robert Moses, the urban planner in New York who managed to become arguably the most powerful man in the city without ever getting elected, partly by slowly compromising away his early progressive ideals in the service of gaining more power. Of course, not every new highway was built through areas where poor Black people lived. Some were planned to go through richer areas for white people, just because you can't completely do away with geographical realities. For example one was planned to be built through part of San Francisco, a rich, white part. But the people who owned properties in that area had enough political power and clout to fight the development, and after nearly a decade of fighting it, the development was called off in late 1966. But over that time, many of the owners of the impressive buildings in the area had moved out, and they had no incentive to improve or maintain their properties while they were under threat of demolition, so many of them were rented out very cheaply. And when the beat community that Kerouac wrote about, many of whom had settled in San Francisco, grew too large and notorious for the area of the city they were in, North Beach, many of them moved to these cheap homes in a previously-exclusive area. The area known as Haight-Ashbury. [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Grayfolded"] Stories all have their starts, even stories told in Tralfamadorian time, although sometimes those starts are shrouded in legend. For example, the story of Scientology's start has been told many times, with different people claiming to have heard L. Ron Hubbard talk about how writing was a mug's game, and if you wanted to make real money, you needed to get followers, start a religion. Either he said this over and over and over again, to many different science fiction writers, or most science fiction writers of his generation were liars. Of course, the definition of a writer is someone who tells lies for money, so who knows? One of the more plausible accounts of him saying that is given by Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon's account is more believable than most, because Sturgeon went on to be a supporter of Dianetics, the "new science" that Hubbard turned into his religion, for decades, even while telling the story. The story of the Grateful Dead probably starts as it ends, with Jerry Garcia. There are three things that everyone writing about the Dead says about Garcia's childhood, so we might as well say them here too. The first is that he was named by a music-loving father after Jerome Kern, the songwriter responsible for songs like "Ol' Man River" (though as Oscar Hammerstein's widow liked to point out, "Jerome Kern wrote dum-dum-dum-dum, *my husband* wrote 'Ol' Man River'" -- an important distinction we need to bear in mind when talking about songwriters who write music but not lyrics). The second is that when he was five years old that music-loving father drowned -- and Garcia would always say he had seen his father dying, though some sources claim this was a false memory. So it goes. And the third fact, which for some reason is always told after the second even though it comes before it chronologically, is that when he was four he lost two joints from his right middle finger. Garcia grew up a troubled teen, and in turn caused trouble for other people, but he also developed a few interests that would follow him through his life. He loved the fantastical, especially the fantastical macabre, and became an avid fan of horror and science fiction -- and through his love of old monster films he became enamoured with cinema more generally. Indeed, in 1983 he bought the film rights to Kurt Vonnegut's science fiction novel The Sirens of Titan, the first story in which the Tralfamadorians appear, and wrote a script based on it. He wanted to produce the film himself, with Francis Ford Coppola directing and Bill Murray starring, but most importantly for him he wanted to prevent anyone who didn't care about it from doing it badly. And in that he succeeded. As of 2023 there is no film of The Sirens of Titan. He loved to paint, and would continue that for the rest of his life, with one of his favourite subjects being Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster. And when he was eleven or twelve, he heard for the first time a record that was hugely influential to a whole generation of Californian musicians, even though it was a New York record -- "Gee" by the Crows: [Excerpt: The Crows, "Gee"] Garcia would say later "That was an important song. That was the first kind of, like where the voices had that kind of not-trained-singer voices, but tough-guy-on-the-street voice." That record introduced him to R&B, and soon he was listening to Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, to Ray Charles, and to a record we've not talked about in the podcast but which was one of the great early doo-wop records, "WPLJ" by the Four Deuces: [Excerpt: The Four Deuces, "WPLJ"] Garcia said of that record "That was one of my anthem songs when I was in junior high school and high school and around there. That was one of those songs everybody knew. And that everybody sang. Everybody sang that street-corner favorite." Garcia moved around a lot as a child, and didn't have much time for school by his own account, but one of the few teachers he did respect was an art teacher when he was in North Beach, Walter Hedrick. Hedrick was also one of the earliest of the conceptual artists, and one of the most important figures in the San Francisco arts scene that would become known as the Beat Generation (or the Beatniks, which was originally a disparaging term). Hedrick was a painter and sculptor, but also organised happenings, and he had also been one of the prime movers in starting a series of poetry readings in San Francisco, the first one of which had involved Allen Ginsberg giving the first ever reading of "Howl" -- one of a small number of poems, along with Eliot's "Prufrock" and "The Waste Land" and possibly Pound's Cantos, which can be said to have changed twentieth-century literature. Garcia was fifteen when he got to know Hedrick, in 1957, and by then the Beat scene had already become almost a parody of itself, having become known to the public because of the publication of works like On the Road, and the major artists in the scene were already rejecting the label. By this point tourists were flocking to North Beach to see these beatniks they'd heard about on TV, and Hedrick was actually employed by one cafe to sit in the window wearing a beret, turtleneck, sandals, and beard, and draw and paint, to attract the tourists who flocked by the busload because they could see that there was a "genuine beatnik" in the cafe. Hedrick was, as well as a visual artist, a guitarist and banjo player who played in traditional jazz bands, and he would bring records in to class for his students to listen to, and Garcia particularly remembered him bringing in records by Big Bill Broonzy: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "When Things Go Wrong (It Hurts Me Too)"] Garcia was already an avid fan of rock and roll music, but it was being inspired by Hedrick that led him to get his first guitar. Like his contemporary Paul McCartney around the same time, he was initially given the wrong instrument as a birthday present -- in Garcia's case his mother gave him an accordion -- but he soon persuaded her to swap it for an electric guitar he saw in a pawn shop. And like his other contemporary, John Lennon, Garcia initially tuned his instrument incorrectly. He said later "When I started playing the guitar, believe me, I didn't know anybody that played. I mean, I didn't know anybody that played the guitar. Nobody. They weren't around. There were no guitar teachers. You couldn't take lessons. There was nothing like that, you know? When I was a kid and I had my first electric guitar, I had it tuned wrong and learned how to play on it with it tuned wrong for about a year. And I was getting somewhere on it, you know… Finally, I met a guy that knew how to tune it right and showed me three chords, and it was like a revelation. You know what I mean? It was like somebody gave me the key to heaven." He joined a band, the Chords, which mostly played big band music, and his friend Gary Foster taught him some of the rudiments of playing the guitar -- things like how to use a capo to change keys. But he was always a rebellious kid, and soon found himself faced with a choice between joining the military or going to prison. He chose the former, and it was during his time in the Army that a friend, Ron Stevenson, introduced him to the music of Merle Travis, and to Travis-style guitar picking: [Excerpt: Merle Travis, "Nine-Pound Hammer"] Garcia had never encountered playing like that before, but he instantly recognised that Travis, and Chet Atkins who Stevenson also played for him, had been an influence on Scotty Moore. He started to realise that the music he'd listened to as a teenager was influenced by music that went further back. But Stevenson, as well as teaching Garcia some of the rudiments of Travis-picking, also indirectly led to Garcia getting discharged from the Army. Stevenson was not a well man, and became suicidal. Garcia decided it was more important to keep his friend company and make sure he didn't kill himself than it was to turn up for roll call, and as a result he got discharged himself on psychiatric grounds -- according to Garcia he told the Army psychiatrist "I was involved in stuff that was more important to me in the moment than the army was and that was the reason I was late" and the psychiatrist thought it was neurotic of Garcia to have his own set of values separate from that of the Army. After discharge, Garcia did various jobs, including working as a transcriptionist for Lenny Bruce, the comedian who was a huge influence on the counterculture. In one of the various attacks over the years by authoritarians on language, Bruce was repeatedly arrested for obscenity, and in 1961 he was arrested at a jazz club in North Beach. Sixty years ago, the parts of speech that were being criminalised weren't pronouns, but prepositions and verbs: [Excerpt: Lenny Bruce, "To is a Preposition, Come is a Verb"] That piece, indeed, was so controversial that when Frank Zappa quoted part of it in a song in 1968, the record label insisted on the relevant passage being played backwards so people couldn't hear such disgusting filth: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Harry You're a Beast"] (Anyone familiar with that song will understand that the censored portion is possibly the least offensive part of the whole thing). Bruce was facing trial, and he needed transcripts of what he had said in his recordings to present in court. Incidentally, there seems to be some confusion over exactly which of Bruce's many obscenity trials Garcia became a transcriptionist for. Dennis McNally says in his biography of the band, published in 2002, that it was the most famous of them, in autumn 1964, but in a later book, Jerry on Jerry, a book of interviews of Garcia edited by McNally, McNally talks about it being when Garcia was nineteen, which would mean it was Bruce's first trial, in 1961. We can put this down to the fact that many of the people involved, not least Garcia, lived in Tralfamadorian time, and were rather hazy on dates, but I'm placing the story here rather than in 1964 because it seems to make more sense that Garcia would be involved in a trial based on an incident in San Francisco than one in New York. Garcia got the job, even though he couldn't type, because by this point he'd spent so long listening to recordings of old folk and country music that he was used to transcribing indecipherable accents, and often, as Garcia would tell it, Bruce would mumble very fast and condense multiple syllables into one. Garcia was particularly impressed by Bruce's ability to improvise but talk in entire paragraphs, and he compared his use of language to bebop. Another thing that was starting to impress Garcia, and which he also compared to bebop, was bluegrass: [Excerpt: Bill Monroe, "Fire on the Mountain"] Bluegrass is a music that is often considered very traditional, because it's based on traditional songs and uses acoustic instruments, but in fact it was a terribly *modern* music, and largely a postwar creation of a single band -- Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys. And Garcia was right when he said it was "white bebop" -- though he did say "The only thing it doesn't have is the harmonic richness of bebop. You know what I mean? That's what it's missing, but it has everything else." Both bebop and bluegrass evolved after the second world war, though they were informed by music from before it, and both prized the ability to improvise, and technical excellence. Both are musics that involved playing *fast*, in an ensemble, and being able to respond quickly to the other musicians. Both musics were also intensely rhythmic, a response to a faster paced, more stressful world. They were both part of the general change in the arts towards immediacy that we looked at in the last episode with the creation first of expressionism and then of pop art. Bluegrass didn't go into the harmonic explorations that modern jazz did, but it was absolutely as modern as anything Charlie Parker was doing, and came from the same impulses. It was tradition and innovation, the past and the future simultaneously. Bill Monroe, Jackson Pollock, Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac, and Lenny Bruce were all in their own ways responding to the same cultural moment, and it was that which Garcia was responding to. But he didn't become able to play bluegrass until after a tragedy which shaped his life even more than his father's death had. Garcia had been to a party and was in a car with his friends Lee Adams, Paul Speegle, and Alan Trist. Adams was driving at ninety miles an hour when they hit a tight curve and crashed. Garcia, Adams, and Trist were all severely injured but survived. Speegle died. So it goes. This tragedy changed Garcia's attitudes totally. Of all his friends, Speegle was the one who was most serious about his art, and who treated it as something to work on. Garcia had always been someone who fundamentally didn't want to work or take any responsibility for anything. And he remained that way -- except for his music. Speegle's death changed Garcia's attitude to that, totally. If his friend wasn't going to be able to practice his own art any more, Garcia would practice his, in tribute to him. He resolved to become a virtuoso on guitar and banjo. His girlfriend of the time later said “I don't know if you've spent time with someone rehearsing ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown' on a banjo for eight hours, but Jerry practiced endlessly. He really wanted to excel and be the best. He had tremendous personal ambition in the musical arena, and he wanted to master whatever he set out to explore. Then he would set another sight for himself. And practice another eight hours a day of new licks.” But of course, you can't make ensemble music on your own: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia and Bob Hunter, "Oh Mary Don't You Weep" (including end)] "Evelyn said, “What is it called when a person needs a … person … when you want to be touched and the … two are like one thing and there isn't anything else at all anywhere?” Alicia, who had read books, thought about it. “Love,” she said at length." That's from More Than Human, by Theodore Sturgeon, a book I'll be quoting a few more times as the story goes on. Robert Hunter, like Garcia, was just out of the military -- in his case, the National Guard -- and he came into Garcia's life just after Paul Speegle had left it. Garcia and Alan Trist met Hunter ten days after the accident, and the three men started hanging out together, Trist and Hunter writing while Garcia played music. Garcia and Hunter both bonded over their shared love for the beats, and for traditional music, and the two formed a duo, Bob and Jerry, which performed together a handful of times. They started playing together, in fact, after Hunter picked up a guitar and started playing a song and halfway through Garcia took it off him and finished the song himself. The two of them learned songs from the Harry Smith Anthology -- Garcia was completely apolitical, and only once voted in his life, for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to keep Goldwater out, and regretted even doing that, and so he didn't learn any of the more political material people like Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, and Bob Dylan were doing at the time -- but their duo only lasted a short time because Hunter wasn't an especially good guitarist. Hunter would, though, continue to jam with Garcia and other friends, sometimes playing mandolin, while Garcia played solo gigs and with other musicians as well, playing and moving round the Bay Area and performing with whoever he could: [Excerpt: Jerry Garcia, "Railroad Bill"] "Bleshing, that was Janie's word. She said Baby told it to her. She said it meant everyone all together being something, even if they all did different things. Two arms, two legs, one body, one head, all working together, although a head can't walk and arms can't think. Lone said maybe it was a mixture of “blending” and “meshing,” but I don't think he believed that himself. It was a lot more than that." That's from More Than Human In 1961, Garcia and Hunter met another young musician, but one who was interested in a very different type of music. Phil Lesh was a serious student of modern classical music, a classically-trained violinist and trumpeter whose interest was solidly in the experimental and whose attitude can be summed up by a story that's always told about him meeting his close friend Tom Constanten for the first time. Lesh had been talking with someone about serialism, and Constanten had interrupted, saying "Music stopped being created in 1750 but it started again in 1950". Lesh just stuck out his hand, recognising a kindred spirit. Lesh and Constanten were both students of Luciano Berio, the experimental composer who created compositions for magnetic tape: [Excerpt: Luciano Berio, "Momenti"] Berio had been one of the founders of the Studio di fonologia musicale di Radio Milano, a studio for producing contemporary electronic music where John Cage had worked for a time, and he had also worked with the electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Lesh would later remember being very impressed when Berio brought a tape into the classroom -- the actual multitrack tape for Stockhausen's revolutionary piece Gesang Der Juenglinge: [Excerpt: Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Gesang Der Juenglinge"] Lesh at first had been distrustful of Garcia -- Garcia was charismatic and had followers, and Lesh never liked people like that. But he was impressed by Garcia's playing, and soon realised that the two men, despite their very different musical interests, had a lot in common. Lesh was interested in the technology of music as well as in performing and composing it, and so when he wasn't studying he helped out by engineering at the university's radio station. Lesh was impressed by Garcia's playing, and suggested to the presenter of the station's folk show, the Midnight Special, that Garcia be a guest. Garcia was so good that he ended up getting an entire solo show to himself, where normally the show would feature multiple acts. Lesh and Constanten soon moved away from the Bay Area to Las Vegas, but both would be back -- in Constanten's case he would form an experimental group in San Francisco with their fellow student Steve Reich, and that group (though not with Constanten performing) would later premiere Terry Riley's In C, a piece influenced by La Monte Young and often considered one of the great masterpieces of minimalist music. By early 1962 Garcia and Hunter had formed a bluegrass band, with Garcia on guitar and banjo and Hunter on mandolin, and a rotating cast of other musicians including Ken Frankel, who played banjo and fiddle. They performed under different names, including the Tub Thumpers, the Hart Valley Drifters, and the Sleepy Valley Hog Stompers, and played a mixture of bluegrass and old-time music -- and were very careful about the distinction: [Excerpt: The Hart Valley Drifters, "Cripple Creek"] In 1993, the Republican political activist John Perry Barlow was invited to talk to the CIA about the possibilities open to them with what was then called the Information Superhighway. He later wrote, in part "They told me they'd brought Steve Jobs in a few weeks before to indoctrinate them in modern information management. And they were delighted when I returned later, bringing with me a platoon of Internet gurus, including Esther Dyson, Mitch Kapor, Tony Rutkowski, and Vint Cerf. They sealed us into an electronically impenetrable room to discuss the radical possibility that a good first step in lifting their blackout would be for the CIA to put up a Web site... We told them that information exchange was a barter system, and that to receive, one must also be willing to share. This was an alien notion to them. They weren't even willing to share information among themselves, much less the world." 1962 brought a new experience for Robert Hunter. Hunter had been recruited into taking part in psychological tests at Stanford University, which in the sixties and seventies was one of the preeminent universities for psychological experiments. As part of this, Hunter was given $140 to attend the VA hospital (where a janitor named Ken Kesey, who had himself taken part in a similar set of experiments a couple of years earlier, worked a day job while he was working on his first novel) for four weeks on the run, and take different psychedelic drugs each time, starting with LSD, so his reactions could be observed. (It was later revealed that these experiments were part of a CIA project called MKUltra, designed to investigate the possibility of using psychedelic drugs for mind control, blackmail, and torture. Hunter was quite lucky in that he was told what was going to happen to him and paid for his time. Other subjects included the unlucky customers of brothels the CIA set up as fronts -- they dosed the customers' drinks and observed them through two-way mirrors. Some of their experimental subjects died by suicide as a result of their experiences. So it goes. ) Hunter was interested in taking LSD after reading Aldous Huxley's writings about psychedelic substances, and he brought his typewriter along to the experiment. During the first test, he wrote a six-page text, a short excerpt from which is now widely quoted, reading in part "Sit back picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall unto the sea of morning creep-very-softly mist ... and then sort of cascade tinkley-bell-like (must I take you by the hand, ever so slowly type) and then conglomerate suddenly into a peal of silver vibrant uncomprehendingly, blood singingly, joyously resounding bells" Hunter's experience led to everyone in their social circle wanting to try LSD, and soon they'd all come to the same conclusion -- this was something special. But Garcia needed money -- he'd got his girlfriend pregnant, and they'd married (this would be the first of several marriages in Garcia's life, and I won't be covering them all -- at Garcia's funeral, his second wife, Carolyn, said Garcia always called her the love of his life, and his first wife and his early-sixties girlfriend who he proposed to again in the nineties both simultaneously said "He said that to me!"). So he started teaching guitar at a music shop in Palo Alto. Hunter had no time for Garcia's incipient domesticity and thought that his wife was trying to make him live a conventional life, and the two drifted apart somewhat, though they'd still play together occasionally. Through working at the music store, Garcia got to know the manager, Troy Weidenheimer, who had a rock and roll band called the Zodiacs. Garcia joined the band on bass, despite that not being his instrument. He later said "Troy was a lot of fun, but I wasn't good enough a musician then to have been able to deal with it. I was out of my idiom, really, 'cause when I played with Troy I was playing electric bass, you know. I never was a good bass player. Sometimes I was playing in the wrong key and didn't even [fuckin'] know it. I couldn't hear that low, after playing banjo, you know, and going to electric...But Troy taught me the principle of, hey, you know, just stomp your foot and get on it. He was great. A great one for the instant arrangement, you know. And he was also fearless for that thing of get your friends to do it." Garcia's tenure in the Zodiacs didn't last long, nor did this experiment with rock and roll, but two other members of the Zodiacs will be notable later in the story -- the harmonica player, an old friend of Garcia's named Ron McKernan, who would soon gain the nickname Pig Pen after the Peanuts character, and the drummer, Bill Kreutzmann: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, "Drums/Space (Skull & Bones version)"] Kreutzmann said of the Zodiacs "Jerry was the hired bass player and I was the hired drummer. I only remember playing that one gig with them, but I was in way over my head. I always did that. I always played things that were really hard and it didn't matter. I just went for it." Garcia and Kreutzmann didn't really get to know each other then, but Garcia did get to know someone else who would soon be very important in his life. Bob Weir was from a very different background than Garcia, though both had the shared experience of long bouts of chronic illness as children. He had grown up in a very wealthy family, and had always been well-liked, but he was what we would now call neurodivergent -- reading books about the band he talks about being dyslexic but clearly has other undiagnosed neurodivergences, which often go along with dyslexia -- and as a result he was deemed to have behavioural problems which led to him getting expelled from pre-school and kicked out of the cub scouts. He was never academically gifted, thanks to his dyslexia, but he was always enthusiastic about music -- to a fault. He learned to play boogie piano but played so loudly and so often his parents sold the piano. He had a trumpet, but the neighbours complained about him playing it outside. Finally he switched to the guitar, an instrument with which it is of course impossible to make too loud a noise. The first song he learned was the Kingston Trio's version of an old sea shanty, "The Wreck of the John B": [Excerpt: The Kingston Trio, "The Wreck of the John B"] He was sent off to a private school in Colorado for teenagers with behavioural issues, and there he met the boy who would become his lifelong friend, John Perry Barlow. Unfortunately the two troublemakers got on with each other *so* well that after their first year they were told that it was too disruptive having both of them at the school, and only one could stay there the next year. Barlow stayed and Weir moved back to the Bay Area. By this point, Weir was getting more interested in folk music that went beyond the commercial folk of the Kingston Trio. As he said later "There was something in there that was ringing my bells. What I had grown up thinking of as hillbilly music, it started to have some depth for me, and I could start to hear the music in it. Suddenly, it wasn't just a bunch of ignorant hillbillies playing what they could. There was some depth and expertise and stuff like that to aspire to.” He moved from school to school but one thing that stayed with him was his love of playing guitar, and he started taking lessons from Troy Weidenheimer, but he got most of his education going to folk clubs and hootenannies. He regularly went to the Tangent, a club where Garcia played, but Garcia's bluegrass banjo playing was far too rigorous for a free spirit like Weir to emulate, and instead he started trying to copy one of the guitarists who was a regular there, Jorma Kaukonnen. On New Year's Eve 1963 Weir was out walking with his friends Bob Matthews and Rich Macauley, and they passed the music shop where Garcia was a teacher, and heard him playing his banjo. They knocked and asked if they could come in -- they all knew Garcia a little, and Bob Matthews was one of his students, having become interested in playing banjo after hearing the theme tune to the Beverly Hillbillies, played by the bluegrass greats Flatt and Scruggs: [Excerpt: Flatt and Scruggs, "The Beverly Hillbillies"] Garcia at first told these kids, several years younger than him, that they couldn't come in -- he was waiting for his students to show up. But Weir said “Jerry, listen, it's seven-thirty on New Year's Eve, and I don't think you're going to be seeing your students tonight.” Garcia realised the wisdom of this, and invited the teenagers in to jam with him. At the time, there was a bit of a renaissance in jug bands, as we talked about back in the episode on the Lovin' Spoonful. This was a form of music that had grown up in the 1920s, and was similar and related to skiffle and coffee-pot bands -- jug bands would tend to have a mixture of portable string instruments like guitars and banjos, harmonicas, and people using improvised instruments, particularly blowing into a jug. The most popular of these bands had been Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, led by banjo player Gus Cannon and with harmonica player Noah Lewis: [Excerpt: Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, "Viola Lee Blues"] With the folk revival, Cannon's work had become well-known again. The Rooftop Singers, a Kingston Trio style folk group, had had a hit with his song "Walk Right In" in 1963, and as a result of that success Cannon had even signed a record contract with Stax -- Stax's first album ever, a month before Booker T and the MGs' first album, was in fact the eighty-year-old Cannon playing his banjo and singing his old songs. The rediscovery of Cannon had started a craze for jug bands, and the most popular of the new jug bands was Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, which did a mixture of old songs like "You're a Viper" and more recent material redone in the old style. Weir, Matthews, and Macauley had been to see the Kweskin band the night before, and had been very impressed, especially by their singer Maria D'Amato -- who would later marry her bandmate Geoff Muldaur and take his name -- and her performance of Leiber and Stoller's "I'm a Woman": [Excerpt: Jim Kweskin's Jug Band, "I'm a Woman"] Matthews suggested that they form their own jug band, and Garcia eagerly agreed -- though Matthews found himself rapidly moving from banjo to washboard to kazoo to second kazoo before realising he was surplus to requirements. Robert Hunter was similarly an early member but claimed he "didn't have the embouchure" to play the jug, and was soon also out. He moved to LA and started studying Scientology -- later claiming that he wanted science-fictional magic powers, which L. Ron Hubbard's new religion certainly offered. The group took the name Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions -- apparently they varied the spelling every time they played -- and had a rotating membership that at one time or another included about twenty different people, but tended always to have Garcia on banjo, Weir on jug and later guitar, and Garcia's friend Pig Pen on harmonica: [Excerpt: Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions, "On the Road Again"] The group played quite regularly in early 1964, but Garcia's first love was still bluegrass, and he was trying to build an audience with his bluegrass band, The Black Mountain Boys. But bluegrass was very unpopular in the Bay Area, where it was simultaneously thought of as unsophisticated -- as "hillbilly music" -- and as elitist, because it required actual instrumental ability, which wasn't in any great supply in the amateur folk scene. But instrumental ability was something Garcia definitely had, as at this point he was still practising eight hours a day, every day, and it shows on the recordings of the Black Mountain Boys: [Excerpt: The Black Mountain Boys, "Rosa Lee McFall"] By the summer, Bob Weir was also working at the music shop, and so Garcia let Weir take over his students while he and the Black Mountain Boys' guitarist Sandy Rothman went on a road trip to see as many bluegrass musicians as they could and to audition for Bill Monroe himself. As it happened, Garcia found himself too shy to audition for Monroe, but Rothman later ended up playing with Monroe's Blue Grass Boys. On his return to the Bay Area, Garcia resumed playing with the Uptown Jug Champions, but Pig Pen started pestering him to do something different. While both men had overlapping tastes in music and a love for the blues, Garcia's tastes had always been towards the country end of the spectrum while Pig Pen's were towards R&B. And while the Uptown Jug Champions were all a bit disdainful of the Beatles at first -- apart from Bob Weir, the youngest of the group, who thought they were interesting -- Pig Pen had become enamoured of another British band who were just starting to make it big: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Not Fade Away"] 29) Garcia liked the first Rolling Stones album too, and he eventually took Pig Pen's point -- the stuff that the Rolling Stones were doing, covers of Slim Harpo and Buddy Holly, was not a million miles away from the material they were doing as Mother McRee's Uptown Jug Champions. Pig Pen could play a little electric organ, Bob had been fooling around with the electric guitars in the music shop. Why not give it a go? The stuff bands like the Rolling Stones were doing wasn't that different from the electric blues that Pig Pen liked, and they'd all seen A Hard Day's Night -- they could carry on playing with banjos, jugs, and kazoos and have the respect of a handful of folkies, or they could get electric instruments and potentially have screaming girls and millions of dollars, while playing the same songs. This was a convincing argument, especially when Dana Morgan Jr, the son of the owner of the music shop, told them they could have free electric instruments if they let him join on bass. Morgan wasn't that great on bass, but what the hell, free instruments. Pig Pen had the best voice and stage presence, so he became the frontman of the new group, singing most of the leads, though Jerry and Bob would both sing a few songs, and playing harmonica and organ. Weir was on rhythm guitar, and Garcia was the lead guitarist and obvious leader of the group. They just needed a drummer, and handily Bill Kreutzmann, who had played with Garcia and Pig Pen in the Zodiacs, was also now teaching music at the music shop. Not only that, but about three weeks before they decided to go electric, Kreutzmann had seen the Uptown Jug Champions performing and been astonished by Garcia's musicianship and charisma, and said to himself "Man, I'm gonna follow that guy forever!" The new group named themselves the Warlocks, and started rehearsing in earnest. Around this time, Garcia also finally managed to get some of the LSD that his friend Robert Hunter had been so enthusiastic about three years earlier, and it was a life-changing experience for him. In particular, he credited LSD with making him comfortable being a less disciplined player -- as a bluegrass player he'd had to be frighteningly precise, but now he was playing rock and needed to loosen up. A few days after taking LSD for the first time, Garcia also heard some of Bob Dylan's new material, and realised that the folk singer he'd had little time for with his preachy politics was now making electric music that owed a lot more to the Beat culture Garcia considered himself part of: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"] Another person who was hugely affected by hearing that was Phil Lesh, who later said "I couldn't believe that was Bob Dylan on AM radio, with an electric band. It changed my whole consciousness: if something like that could happen, the sky was the limit." Up to that point, Lesh had been focused entirely on his avant-garde music, working with friends like Steve Reich to push music forward, inspired by people like John Cage and La Monte Young, but now he realised there was music of value in the rock world. He'd quickly started going to rock gigs, seeing the Rolling Stones and the Byrds, and then he took acid and went to see his friend Garcia's new electric band play their third ever gig. He was blown away, and very quickly it was decided that Lesh would be the group's new bass player -- though everyone involved tells a different story as to who made the decision and how it came about, and accounts also vary as to whether Dana Morgan took his sacking gracefully and let his erstwhile bandmates keep their instruments, or whether they had to scrounge up some new ones. Lesh had never played bass before, but he was a talented multi-instrumentalist with a deep understanding of music and an ability to compose and improvise, and the repertoire the Warlocks were playing in the early days was mostly three-chord material that doesn't take much rehearsal -- though it was apparently beyond the abilities of poor Dana Morgan, who apparently had to be told note-by-note what to play by Garcia, and learn it by rote. Garcia told Lesh what notes the strings of a bass were tuned to, told him to borrow a guitar and practice, and within two weeks he was on stage with the Warlocks: [Excerpt: The Grateful Dead, “Grayfolded"] In September 1995, just weeks after Jerry Garcia's death, an article was published in Mute magazine identifying a cultural trend that had shaped the nineties, and would as it turned out shape at least the next thirty years. It's titled "The Californian Ideology", though it may be better titled "The Bay Area Ideology", and it identifies a worldview that had grown up in Silicon Valley, based around the ideas of the hippie movement, of right-wing libertarianism, of science fiction authors, and of Marshall McLuhan. It starts "There is an emerging global orthodoxy concerning the relation between society, technology and politics. We have called this orthodoxy `the Californian Ideology' in honour of the state where it originated. By naturalising and giving a technological proof to a libertarian political philosophy, and therefore foreclosing on alternative futures, the Californian Ideologues are able to assert that social and political debates about the future have now become meaningless. The California Ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism and is promulgated by magazines such as WIRED and MONDO 2000 and preached in the books of Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and others. The new faith has been embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, 30-something capitalists, hip academics, futurist bureaucrats and even the President of the USA himself. As usual, Europeans have not been slow to copy the latest fashion from America. While a recent EU report recommended adopting the Californian free enterprise model to build the 'infobahn', cutting-edge artists and academics have been championing the 'post-human' philosophy developed by the West Coast's Extropian cult. With no obvious opponents, the global dominance of the Californian ideology appears to be complete." [Excerpt: Grayfolded] The Warlocks' first gig with Phil Lesh on bass was on June the 18th 1965, at a club called Frenchy's with a teenage clientele. Lesh thought his playing had been wooden and it wasn't a good gig, and apparently the management of Frenchy's agreed -- they were meant to play a second night there, but turned up to be told they'd been replaced by a band with an accordion and clarinet. But by September the group had managed to get themselves a residency at a small bar named the In Room, and playing there every night made them cohere. They were at this point playing the kind of sets that bar bands everywhere play to this day, though at the time the songs they were playing, like "Gloria" by Them and "In the Midnight Hour", were the most contemporary of hits. Another song that they introduced into their repertoire was "Do You Believe in Magic" by the Lovin' Spoonful, another band which had grown up out of former jug band musicians. As well as playing their own sets, they were also the house band at The In Room and as such had to back various touring artists who were the headline acts. The first act they had to back up was Cornell Gunter's version of the Coasters. Gunter had brought his own guitarist along as musical director, and for the first show Weir sat in the audience watching the show and learning the parts, staring intently at this musical director's playing. After seeing that, Weir's playing was changed, because he also picked up how the guitarist was guiding the band while playing, the small cues that a musical director will use to steer the musicians in the right direction. Weir started doing these things himself when he was singing lead -- Pig Pen was the frontman but everyone except Bill sang sometimes -- and the group soon found that rather than Garcia being the sole leader, now whoever was the lead singer for the song was the de facto conductor as well. By this point, the Bay Area was getting almost overrun with people forming electric guitar bands, as every major urban area in America was. Some of the bands were even having hits already -- We Five had had a number three hit with "You Were On My Mind", a song which had originally been performed by the folk duo Ian and Sylvia: [Excerpt: We Five, "You Were On My Mind"] Although the band that was most highly regarded on the scene, the Charlatans, was having problems with the various record companies they tried to get signed to, and didn't end up making a record until 1969. If tracks like "Number One" had been released in 1965 when they were recorded, the history of the San Francisco music scene may have taken a very different turn: [Excerpt: The Charlatans, "Number One"] Bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Great Society, and Big Brother and the Holding Company were also forming, and Autumn Records was having a run of success with records by the Beau Brummels, whose records were produced by Autumn's in-house A&R man, Sly Stone: [Excerpt: The Beau Brummels, "Laugh Laugh"] The Warlocks were somewhat cut off from this, playing in a dive bar whose clientele was mostly depressed alcoholics. But the fact that they were playing every night for an audience that didn't care much gave them freedom, and they used that freedom to improvise. Both Lesh and Garcia were big fans of John Coltrane, and they started to take lessons from his style of playing. When the group played "Gloria" or "Midnight Hour" or whatever, they started to extend the songs and give themselves long instrumental passages for soloing. Garcia's playing wasn't influenced *harmonically* by Coltrane -- in fact Garcia was always a rather harmonically simple player. He'd tend to play lead lines either in Mixolydian mode, which is one of the most standard modes in rock, pop, blues, and jazz, or he'd play the notes of the chord that was being played, so if the band were playing a G chord his lead would emphasise the notes G, B, and D. But what he was influenced by was Coltrane's tendency to improvise in long, complex, phrases that made up a single thought -- Coltrane was thinking musically in paragraphs, rather than sentences, and Garcia started to try the same kind of th

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on May 4. It dropped for free subscribers on May 7. To receive future pods as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe for free below:WhoDee Byrne, President and Chief Operating Officer of Palisades Tahoe, CaliforniaRecorded onApril 24, 2023About Palisades TahoeClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Alterra Mountain CompanyPass affiliations: Unlimited access on the Ikon Pass; unlimited access with holiday blackouts on the Ikon Base PassLocated in: Olympic Valley, CaliforniaYear founded: * Palisades/Olympic side (as Squaw Valley): 1949* Alpine Meadows: 1961Closest neighboring ski areas: Granlibakken (14 minutes from Palisades base), Homewood (18 minutes), Northstar (23 minutes), Tahoe Donner (24 minutes), Boreal (24 minutes), Soda Springs (28 minutes), Donner Ski Ranch (28 minutes), Kingvale (29 minutes), Sugar Bowl (30 minutes), Diamond Peak (39 minutes), Mt. Rose (45 minutes), Sky Tavern (50), Heavenly (1 hour) - travel times vary dramatically given weather conditions and time of dayBase elevation | summit elevation | vertical drop:* Alpine Meadows side: 6,835 feet | 8,637 feet | 1,802 feet* Olympic Valley side: 6,200 feet | 9,050 feet | 2,850 feetSkiable Acres: 6,000* Alpine Meadows side: 2,400* Olympic Valley side: 3,600Average annual snowfall: 400 inches (713 inches for the 2023-24 ski season through May 3!)Trail count: 270-plus* Alpine Meadows side: 100-plus (25% beginner, 40% intermediate, 35% advanced)* Olympic Valley side: 170-plus (25% beginner, 45% intermediate, 30% advanced)Lift count: 42 (10-passenger tram, 28-passenger funitel, 8-passenger gondola, 8 six-packs, 5 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 10 triples, 8 doubles, 7 carpets - view Lift Blog's inventory of Palisades Tahoe's lift fleet)* Alpine Meadows: 13 (1 six-pack,  3 high-speed quads, 2 triples, 5 doubles,  2 carpets)* Palisades/Olympic: 28 (120-passenger tram, 28-passenger funitel, 7 six-packs, 2 high-speed quads, 1 quad, 8 triples, 3 doubles, 5 carpets)* Shared lifts: 1 (8-passenger Base-to-Base Gondola)Why I interviewed herImagine this: I'm a Midwest teenager who has notched exactly three days on skis, on three separate 200-vert bumps. I know vaguely that there is skiing out West, and that it is big. But I'm thinking Colorado, maybe Wyoming. California? California is Beach Boys and palm trees. Surfboards and San Diego. I have no idea that California has mountains, let alone ski resorts. Anticipating the skis, boots, and poles that I've requested as the totality of my Christmas list, I pick up the December 1994 issue of Skiing (RIP), and read the following by Kristen Ulmer:Nothing is random. You live, die, pay taxes, move to Squaw. It's the place you see in all the ski flicks, with the groovy attitudes, toasty-warm days, wild lines, and that enormous lake. It's California! Squallywood! It's the one place where every born-to-ski skier, at some point or other, wants to move to; where people will crawl a thousand miles over broken glass for the chance to ski freezer burn. The one place to make it as a “professional” skier.My friend Kent Kreitler, a phenomenal skier who doesn't live anywhere in particular, finally announced, “I think I'm move to Squaw.”“So Kent,” I said, “let me tell you what the rest of your life will be like.” And I laid it out for him. …You're curious to find out if you're as good a skier as you think. So you find a group of locals and try to keep up. On powder days the excitement builds like a pressure cooker. Move fast, because it only takes an hour for the entire mountain to get tracked up. There's oodles of cliff jumps and psycho lines. You'd better just do it, because within seconds, 10 other yahoos will have already jumped and tracked out the landing pad.If you're a truly amazing skier (anything else inspires only polite smiles and undisguised yawns), then you land clean on jumps and shred through anything with style. If not, the hyperactivity of the place will motivate you to ski the same lines anyway. Either way is fulfilling.Occasionally a random miracle occurs, and the patrol opens the famed Palisades on Squaw Peak. On those days you don't bother with a warm-up run – just hike 15 minutes from the top of Siberia Express chair and coolly launch some hospital air off Main Chute.There are other places to express your extreme nature. When everything else gets tracked, you hike up Granite Peak for its steep chutes. If the snowpack is good, you climb 10 minutes from the top of the KT-22 chair to Eagle's Nest. And jumping the Fingers off KT-22 seems particularly heroic: Not only do you need speed to clear the sloping rocks, but it's right (ahem) under the lift.At the conclusion of that ski season, teenage Stuart Winchester, a novice skier who lived in his parents' basement, announced, “I think I'm moving to Squaw.” “No D*****s,” his mom said, “you're going to college.”Which doesn't mean I ever forgot that high-energy introduction to California extreme. I re-read that article dozens of times (you can read the full bit here). Until my brain had been coded to regard the ski resort now known as Palisades Tahoe (see why?) as one of the spiritual and cultural homelands of U.S. lift-served skiing.Ulmer's realm, hyperactive as it was, looks pokey by today's standards. An accompanying essay in that same issue of Skiing, written by Eric Hanson, describes a very different resort than the one you'll encounter today:Locals seem proud that there's so little development here. The faithful will say it's because everything that matters is up on the mountain itself: bottomless steeps, vast acreage, 33 lifts and no waiting. America's answer to the wide-open ski circuses of Europe. After all these years the mountain is still uncrowded, except on weekends when people pile in from the San Francisco Bay area in droves. Squaw is unflashy, underbuilt, and seems entirely indifferent to success. The opposite of what you would expect one of America's premier resorts to be.Apparently, “flashy” included, you know, naming trails. Check out this circa 1996 trailmap, which shows lift names, but only a handful of runs:Confusion reigned, according to Hanson:Every day, we set off armed with our trail map and the printed list of the day's groomed runs in search of intermediate terrain – long steep runs groomed for cruising, unmogulled routes down from the top of the black-diamond chairs. It wasn't easy. The grooming sheet named runs which weren't marked on the trail map. The only trail named on the map is The Mountain Run, an expressway that drops 2,000 feet from Gold Coast to the village. And most of the biggest verticals were on the chairs – KT-22, Cornice II, Headwall, Silverado, Broken Arrow – marked “experts only.” We didn't relish the idea of going up an expert chair looking for a particular groomed route down, if the groomed route wasn't to be found. I began feeling nostalgic for all those totem poles of green and blue and black trail signs that clutter the landscapes of other ski resorts, but at least keep the skier oriented.I asked a patroller where I could find some of the runs on the groomed list. He wasn't sure. He told me that the grooming crew and the ski patrol didn't have the same names for many of the runs.Just amazing. While Palisades Tahoe is now a glimmering model of a modern American ski resort, that raw-and-rowdy past is still sewn into the DNA of this fascinating place.What we talked aboutTahoe's megaseason; corn harvest; skiing into July and… maybe beyond; why Alpine will be the later operator this summer; why the base-to-base gondola ceased operation on April 30; snow exhaustion; Cali spring skiing; reminiscing on Pacific Northwest ski culture; for the love of teaching and turning; skiing as adventure; from 49 Degrees North to Vail to Aspen to Tahoe; Tahoe culture shock; Palisades' vast and varied ski school; reflections on the name change a year and a half later; going deep on the base-to-base gondola; the stark differences between the cultural vibe on the Alpine Meadows and Palisades sides of the resort and whether the gondola has compromised those distinctions; why the gondola took more than a decade to build and what finally pushed it through; White Wolf, the property that hosts an unfinished chairlift between Palisades and Alpine; how the gondola took cars off the road; why the base-to-base gondola didn't overload KT-22's terrain; the Mothership; the new Red Dog sixer; why Palisades re-oriented the lift to run lower to the ground; why the lift was only loading four passengers at a time for large parts of the season; snowmaking as fire-suppression system; how Palisades and Mammoth assisted Sierra-at-Tahoe's recovery; candidates for lift upgrades at Alpine Meadows; “fixed-grip lifts are awesome”; an Alpine masterplan refresh incoming; which lift could be next in line for upgrades on the Palisades side; the “biggest experience bust on the Palisades side of the resort”; why Silverado and Granite Chief will likely never be upgraded to detachable lifts; why the Silverado terrain is so rarely open and what it takes to make it live; whether Palisades Tahoe could ever leave the unlimited-with-blackouts tier on the Ikon Base Pass; and paid parking incoming.             Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewThis was the second time I've featured Palisades Tahoe on The Storm Skiing Podcast. The first was a conversation with then-resort president Ron Cohen in September 2020, shortly after the ski area announced that it would ditch the “Squaw Valley” name. We spent the entire 49-minute conversation discussing that name change. At the time, the podcast was mostly focused on New England and New York, and a deep exploration of a distant resort would have been a little off-brand.But The Storm has evolved, and my coverage now firmly includes the State of California. Thank goodness. What an incredible ski state. So many huge resorts, so much wide-open terrain, so much snow, so much energy. The Northeast tugs skiing from the earth through technology and willpower, pasting white streaks over brown land, actualizing the improbable in a weird algorithm that only pencils out because 56 million people camp out within driving distance. California is different. California delivers skiing because it's lined top to bottom with giant mountains that summon ungodly oceans of snow from the clouds. It just happens Brah. There aren't even that many ski areas here – just 28, or 29 if you count the uber-dysfunctional Mt. Waterman – but there seems to be one everywhere you need one – LA (Big Bear, Baldy, Mountain High), Fresno (China Peak), Modesto (Dodge Ridge), Stockton (Bear Valley), Sacramento and the Bay Area (all of Tahoe). Among these are some of the largest and most-developed ski areas in America.And none is bigger than Palisades Tahoe. Well, Heavenly was until this year, as I outlined earlier this week, but the base-to-base gondola changed all that. The ski area formerly known as Squaw Valley and the ski area still-known as Alpine Meadows are now officially one interconnected ski goliath. That's a big deal.Add a new six-pack (Red Dog), a sufficient period to reflect on the name change, a historic winter, and the ongoing impacts of the Covid-driven outdoor boom and the Ikon Pass, and it was a perfect time to check in on one of Alterra's trophy properties.Why you should ski Palisades TahoeOne of the most oft-dished compliments to emphasize the big-mountain cred of a North American ski resort is that it “feels like Europe.” But there just aren't that many ski areas around these parts worthy of that description. Big Sky, with its dramatic peaks and super-duper out-of-base bubble lifts. Snowbird-Alta, with their frenzied scale and wild terrain and big-box tram (though they get way too much snow to mistake for Europe). Whistler, with its village and polyglot vibe. And then there's Palisades Tahoe:Nowhere else in America do you stand in the base area and wonder if you should hop on the tram or the gondola or the other big-gondola-thingy-that-you're-not-quite-sure-what-it-is (the funitel) or the most iconic chairlift in the country (KT-22). Or Wa She Shu. Or Exhibition or Red Dog. And go up and up and then you never need to see the base area again. Up to Headwall or Gold Coast or so help-you-God Silverado if it's open. Or up and over to Alpine and another whole ski area that used to be a giant ski resort but is now just a small part of a giant-er ski resort.It's too much to describe or even really try to. In our conversation, Byrne called Palisades a “super-regional” resort. One that most people drive to, rather than fly to. I'm telling you this one is worth the flight. From anywhere. For anyone. Just go.Podcast NotesOn the name changeThe last time I interviewed Byrne, it was for an article I wrote on the name change in 2021:The name change, promised more than a year ago, acknowledges that many Native Americans consider the word “squaw” to be a racist and sexist slur.“Anyone who spends time at these mountains can feel the passion of our dedicated skiers and riders,” said Ron Cohen, former president and COO of Palisades Tahoe, who moved into the same position at Alterra's Mammoth Mountain in June. “It's electric, exciting, reverential, and incredibly motivating. However, no matter how deep, meaningful, and positive these feelings are and no matter how much our guests don't intend to offend anyone, it is not enough to justify continuing to operate under a name that is deeply offensive to indigenous people across North America.”The former resort name was perhaps the most prominent modern use of the word “squaw” in America, skiing's equivalent to the Cleveland Indians or Washington Redskins, two professional sports teams that are also in the process of replacing their names (Cleveland will become the Guardians, while Washington will announce its new name early next year). The update broadcasts a powerful signal to an American mainstream that still largely regards the word “squaw” as an innocuous synonym for a Native American woman.“We know the founders of our resort had no intention of causing offense in choosing this name for the resort, nor have any of our patrons who have spoken this word over the last seven decades,” said Cohen. “But as our society evolves, we must acknowledge the need for change when we are confronted with harsh realities. Having our name be associated with pain and dehumanization is contrary to our goal of making the outdoors a welcoming space for all people. I feel strongly that we have been given the rare opportunity to effect lasting, positive change; to find a new name that reflects our core values, storied past and respect for all those who have enjoyed this land.”It's a long piece, and my opinion on it stands, but I'll reiterate this bit:I realize that many of us learned something different in grade school. I am one of them. Until last year, I did not know that Native Americans considered this word to be offensive. But the resort, after extensive research and consultation with the local Washoe Tribe, made a good case that the name was an anachronism.Cohen came on my podcast to further elaborate. The arguments made sense. What I had learned in grade-school was wrong. “Squaw” was not a word that belonged on the masthead of a major ski resort.The immediate reaction that this is some PC move is flimsy and hardly worth addressing, but OK: this is not a redefining of history to cast a harmless thing as nefarious. Rather, it is an example of a long-ostracized group finding its voice and saying, “Hey, this is what this actually means – can you rethink how you're using this word?”If you want to scream into the wind about this, be my guest. The name change is final. The place will still have plenty of skiers. If you don't want to be one of them, there are plenty of other places to ski, around Tahoe and elsewhere. But what this means for the ski terrain is exactly nothing at all. The resort, flush with capital from Alterra, is only getting bigger and better. Sitting out that evolution for what is a petty protest is anyone's mistake to make.“We want to be on the right side of history on this,” said Byrne. “While this may take some getting used to, our name change was an important initiative for our company and community. At the end of the day, ‘squaw' is a hurtful word, and we are not hurtful people. We have a well-earned reputation as a progressive resort at the forefront of ski culture, and progress cannot happen without change.”Apparently there are still a handful of Angry Ski Bros who occasionally track Byrne down on social media and yell about this. Presumably in all-caps. Sometimes I think about what life would be like right now had the commercial internet failed to take off and honestly it's hard to conclude that it wouldn't be a hell of a lot better than whatever version of reality we've found ourselves in.On federal place names eliminating the use of the word “squaw”Byrne mentioned that the federal government had also moved to eliminate the word “squaw” from its place names. Per a New York Times article last March:The map dots, resembling a scattergram of America, point to snow-covered pinnacles, remote islands and places in between.Each of the 660 points, shown on maps of federal lands and waterways, includes the word “squaw” in its name, a term Native Americans regard as a racist and misogynistic slur.Now the Interior Department, led by Deb Haaland, the first Native American cabinet secretary, is taking steps to strip the word from mountains, rivers, lakes and other geographic sites and has solicited input from tribes on new names for the landmarks.A task force created by the department will submit the new names for final approval from the Board on Geographic Names, the federal body that standardizes American place names. The National Park Service was ordered to take similar steps.By September, the Biden administration had completed the project. The word persists in non-federally owned place names, however. One ski area – Big Squaw in Maine – still officially carries the name, even though the state was among the first to ban the use of the word “squaw,” back in 2000. While a potential new ownership group had vowed to change the ski area's name, they ultimately backed out of the deal. As long as the broken-down, barely functional ski area remains under the ownership of professional knucklehead and bootleg timber baron James Confalone, the ski area – and the volunteer group that keeps the one remaining chairlift spinning – is stuck with the name.On White Wolf If you've ever looked off the backside of KT-22, you've no doubt noticed the line of chairlift towers standing empty on the mountain:This is White Wolf, a long-envisioned but as-yet-incomplete private resort owned by a local gent named Troy Caldwell, who purchased the land in 1989 for $400,000. Byrne and I discuss this property briefly on the podcast. The Palisades Tahoe blog posted a terrific history of Caldwell and White Wolf last year:So, they shifted to the idea of a private ski area, named White Wolf. In 2000, Placer County issued Caldwell a permit to build his own chairlift. A local homeowners' association later sued the county for issuing him that permit, but, in 2005, the lift towers and cables went in, but construction slowed on the private chairlift as Caldwell weighed his options for a future interconnect between the resorts. To date, the chairlift has yet to operate—but that may be changing if Caldwell's long-term plan comes to fruition.In 2016, Caldwell submitted plans to Placer County for a 275-acre private-resort housing project on his land that would include the construction of dozens of fire-safe custom homes, as well employee housing units, a pool, an ice-skating rink, and two private chairlifts, including the one that's already constructed.After the Palisades Tahoe resorts came under the same ownership in 2012, the plan to physically link them has now become reality. Caldwell is the missing piece enabling the long-awaited gondola to connect the two mountains over his land. Roughly half of the Base to Base Gondola and its mid-stations are on property owned by the Caldwells.“Sure, we could have sold the land for $50 million and moved to Tahiti,” Caldwell says with a laugh. “But we made the decision that this is our life, this is what we wanted to do. We wanted to finish the dream, connect the ski areas and do what we initially set out to do.”Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the general public will ever be able to ski White Wolf.On Alpine Meadows' masterplanByrne and I discuss several proposed but unbuilt lifts at Alpine Meadows, including the Rollers lift, shown here on the 2015 masterplan:And here, just for fun, is an old proposed line for the gondola, which would not have crossed the KT-22 Express:On Sierra-at-Tahoe and the Caldor FireI discussed this one in my recent article for the Heavenly pod.Parting shotThe Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 41/100 in 2023, and number 427 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com. 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This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on May 2. It dropped for free subscribers on May 5. To receive future pods as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe for free below:WhoTom Fortune, Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Heavenly and Vail's Tahoe Region (Heavenly, Northstar, and Kirkwood)Recorded onApril 25 , 2023About Heavenly and Vail's Tahoe RegionHeavenlyClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Vail ResortsLocated in: Stateline, Nevada and South Lake Tahoe, CaliforniaYear founded: 1955Pass affiliations: Unlimited access on Epic Pass; Unlimited access with holiday blackouts on Epic Local Pass, Tahoe Local Pass, Tahoe Value PassClosest neighboring ski areas: Sierra-at-Tahoe (30 minutes), Diamond Peak (45 minutes), Kirkwood (51 minutes), Mt. Rose (1 hour), Northstar (1 hour), Sky Tavern (1 hour, 5 minutes) - travel times vary dramatically given weather conditions and time of day.Base elevation: 6,565 feet at California Lodge; the Heavenly Gondola leaves from Heavenly Village at 6,255 feet – when snowpack allows, you can ski all the way to the village, though this is technically backcountry terrainSummit elevation: 10,040 feet at the top of Sky ExpressVertical drop: 3,475 feet from the summit to California Lodge; 3,785 feet from the summit to Heavenly VillageSkiable Acres: 4,800Average annual snowfall: 360 inches (570 inches for 2022-23 ski season as of May 2)Trail count: 97Lift count: 26 lifts (1 50-passenger tram, 1 eight-passenger gondola, 2 six-packs, 8 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 5 triples, 2 doubles, 2 ropetows, 4 carpets)NorthstarClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Vail ResortsLocated in: Truckee, CaliforniaYear founded: 1972Pass affiliations: Unlimited access on Epic Pass; Unlimited access with holiday blackouts on Epic Local Pass, Tahoe Local Pass; unlimited with holiday and Saturday blackouts on Tahoe Value PassClosest neighboring ski areas: Tahoe Donner (24 minutes), Boreal (25 minutes), Donner Ski Ranch (27 minutes), Palisades Tahoe (27 minutes), Diamond Peak (27 minutes), Soda Springs (29 minutes), Kingvale (32 minutes), Sugar Bowl (33 minutes), Mt. Rose (34 minutes), Homewood (35 minutes), Sky Tavern (39 minutes), Heavenly (1 hour) - travel times vary dramatically given weather conditions and time of day.Base elevation: 6,330 feetSummit elevation: 8,610 feetVertical drop: 2,280 feetSkiable Acres: 3,170Average annual snowfall: 350 inches (665 inches for 2022-23 ski season as of May 2)Trail count: 106Lift count: 19 (1 six-passenger gondola, 1 pulse gondola, 1 chondola with 6-pack chairs & 8-passenger cabins, 1 six-pack, 6 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 2 triples, 1 platter, 5 magic carpets)KirkwoodClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Vail ResortsLocated in: Kirkwood, CaliforniaYear founded: 1972Pass affiliations: Unlimited access on Epic Pass, Kirkwood Pass; Unlimited access with holiday blackouts on Epic Local Pass, Tahoe Local Pass; unlimited with holiday and Saturday blackouts on Tahoe Value PassClosest neighboring ski areas: Sierra-at-Tahoe (48 minutes), Heavenly (48 minutes) - travel times vary dramatically given weather conditions and time of day.Base elevation: 7,800 feetSummit elevation: 9,800 feetVertical drop: 2,000 feetSkiable Acres: 2,300Average annual snowfall: 354 inches (708 inches for 2022-23 ski season as of May 2)Trail count: 94Lift count: 13 (2 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 6 triples, 1 double, 1 T-bar, 2 carpets)Why I interviewed himFor decades, Heavenly was the largest ski area that touched the state of California. By a lot. Four drive-to base areas serving 4,800 acres across two states. Mammoth? Ha! Its name misleads – 3,500 acres, barely bigger than Keystone. To grasp Heavenly's scale, look again at the new North Bowl lift on the trailmap above. A blip, one red line lost among dozens. Lodged near the base like the beginner lifts we're all used to ignoring. But that little lift rises almost 1,300 vertical feet over nearly a mile. That's close to the skiable drop of Sugar Bowl (1,500 feet), itself a major Tahoe ski area. Imagine laying Sugar Bowl's 1,650 acres over the Heavenly trailmap, then add Sierra-at-Tahoe (2,000 acres) and Mt. Rose (1,200). Now you're even.Last year, Palisades Tahoe wrecked the party, stringing a gondola between Alpine Meadows and the resort formerly known as Squaw Valley. They were technically one resort before, but I'm not an adherent of the these-two-ski-areas-are-one-ski-area-because-we-say-so school of marketing. But now the two sides really are united, crafting a 6,000-acre super-resort that demotes Heavenly to second-largest in Tahoe.Does it really matter? Heavenly is one of the more impressive hunks of interconnected mountain that you'll ever ski in America. Glance northwest and the lake booms away forever into the horizon. Peer east and there, within reach as your skis touch a 20-foot snowbase, is a tumbling brown forever, the edge of the great American desert that stretches hundreds of miles through Nevada, Utah, and Colorado.When Vail Resorts raised its periscope above Colorado for the first time two decades ago, Heavenly fell in its sites. The worthy fifth man, an all-star forward to complement the Colorado quad of Vail, Beaver Creek, Keystone, and Breck. That's not an easy role to fill. It had to be a mountain that was enormous, evolved, transcendent. Someplace that could act as both a draw for variety-seeking Eagle County faithful and an ambassador for the Vail brand as benevolent caretaker. Heavenly, a sort of Vail Mountain West – with its mostly intermediate pitch, multiple faces, and collection of high-speed lifts cranking out of every gully – was perfect, the most logical extra-Colorado manifestation of big-mountain skiing made digestible for the masses.That's still what Heavenly is, mostly: a ski resort for everyone. You can get in trouble, sure, in Mott or Killebrew or by underestimating the spiral down Gunbarrel. But this is an intermediate mountain, a cruisers' mountain. Even the traverses – and there are many – are enjoyable. Those views, man. Set the cruise control and wander forever. For a skier who doesn't care to be the best skier in the world but who wants to experience some of the best skiing in the world, this is the place.What we talked aboutRecords smashing all over the floor around Tahoe; why there won't be more season extensions; Heavenly's spring-skiing footprint; managing weather-related delays and shutdowns in a social-media age; it's been a long long winter in Tahoe; growing up skiing the Pacific Northwest; Stevens Pass in the ‘70s; remember when Stevens Pass and Schweitzer had the same owner?; why leaving the thing you love most can be the best thing sometimes; overlooked Idaho; pausing at Snow King; fitting rowdy Kirkwood into the Vail Resorts puzzle; the enormous complexity of Heavenly; what it means to operate in two states; a special assignment at Stevens Pass; stabilizing a resort in chaos; why Heavenly was an early snowmaking adopter; Hugh and Bill Killebrew; on the ground during the Caldor Fire; snowmaking systems as fire-fighting sprinkler systems; fire drills; Sierra-at-Tahoe's lost season and how Heavenly and Kirkwood helped; wind holds and why they seem to be becoming more frequent; “it can be calm down in the base area and blowing 100 up top”; potential future alternatives to Sky Express as a second lift-served route back to Nevada from California; a lift-upgrade wishlist for Heavenly; how Mott Canyon lift could evolve; potential tram replacement lifts; the immediate impact of the new North Bowl express quad; how Northstar, Kirkwood, and Heavenly work together as a unit; paid parking incoming; and the Epic Pass.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewThe first half of my life was dominated by one immutable looming fact: the year 2000 would arrive. That's how we all referenced it, every time: “the year 2000.” As though it were not just another year but the president of all years. The turning of a millennium. For the first time in a thousand years. It sounded so fantastical, so improbable, so futuristic. As though aliens had set an invasion date and we all knew it but we just didn't know if they would vaporize us or gift us their live-forever beer recipe. Y2K hysteria added a layer of intrigue and mild thrill. Whatever else happened with your life, wherever you ended up, whoever you turned out to be, this was a party you absolutely could not miss.This winter in Tahoe was like that. If you had any means of getting there, you had to go. Utah too. But everything is more dramatic in Tahoe. The snows piled Smurf Village-like on rooftops. The incredible blizzards raking across the Sierras. The days-long mountain closures. It was a rare winter, a cold winter, a relentless winter, a record-smashing winter for nearly every ski area ringing the 72-mile lake.Tahoe may never see a winter like this again in our lifetimes. So how are they dealing with it? They know what to do with snow in Tahoe. But we all know what to do with water until our basement floods. Sometimes a thing you need is a thing you can get too much of.In March I flew to California, circled the lake, skied with the people running the mountains. Exhaustion, tinted with resignation, reigned. Ski season always sprawls at the top of the Sierras, but this winter – with its relentless atmospheric rivers, the snows high and low, the piles growing back each night like smashed anthills in the driveway – amplified as it went, like an action movie with no comedic breaks or diner-meal interludes. How were they doing now, as April wound down and the snows faded and corn grew on the mountainside? And at the end of what's been a long three years in Tahoe, with Covid shutdowns leading into a Covid surge leading into wildfires leading into the biggest snows anyone alive has ever seen? There's hardship in all that, but pride, too, in thriving in spite of it.What I got wrongI said that the Kehr's Riblet double was “one of the oldest lifts in the country.” That's not accurate. It was built in 1964 – very old for a machine, but not even the oldest lift at the resort. That honor goes to Seventh Heaven, a 1960 Riblet double rising to the summit. And that's not even the oldest Riblet double in the State of Washington: White Pass still runs Chair 2, built in 1958; and Vista Cruiser has been spinning at Mt. Spokane since 1956.Questions I wish I'd askedFortune briefly discussed the paid-parking plans landing at Heavenly, Northstar, and Kirkwood next winter. Limited as these are to weekend and holiday mornings, the plans will no doubt spark feral rage in a certain group of skiers who want to pretend like it's still 1987 and Tahoe has not changed in an unsustainable way. The traffic. The people. The ripple effects of all these things. I would have liked to have gotten into the motivations behind this change a bit more with Fortune, to really underscore how this very modest change is but one way to address a huge and stubborn problem that's not going anywhere.  Why you should ski Heavenly, Northstar, and KirkwoodFrom a distance, Tahoe can be hard to sort. Sixteen ski areas strung around the lake, nine of them with vertical drops of 1,500 feet or more:How to choose? One easy answer: follow your pass. If you already have an Epic Pass, you have a pre-loaded Tahoe sampler. Steep and funky Kirkwood. Big and meandering Heavenly. Gentle Northstar. The Brobots will try steering you away from Northstar (which they've glossed “Flatstar”) or Heavenly (too many traverses). Ignore them. Both are terrific ski areas, with endless glades that are about exactly pitched for the average tree skier. Kirkwood is the gnarliest, no question, but Northstar (which is also a knockout parks mountain, and heavily wind-protected for storm days), and Heavenly (which, despite the traverses, delivers some incredible stretches of sustained vertical), will still give you a better ski day than 95 percent of the ski areas in America on any given winter date.It's easy to try to do too much in Tahoe. I certainly did. Heavenly especially deserves – and rewards – multiple days of exploration. This is partly due to the size of each mountain, but also because conditions vary so wildly day-to-day. I skied in a windy near-whiteout at Kirkwood on Sunday, hit refrozen crust that exiled me to Northstar groomers on Tuesday, and lucked into a divine four-inch refresh at Heavenly on Wednesday, gifting us long meanders through the woods. Absolutely hit multiple resorts on your visit, but don't rush it too much – you can always go back.Podcast NotesOn Schweitzer and Stevens Pass' joint ownerFortune and I discuss an outfit called Harbor Resorts, which at one time owned both Stevens Pass and Schweitzer. I'd never heard of this company, so I dug a little. An Aug. 19, 1997 article in The Seattle Times indicates that the company also once owned a majority share in Mission Ridge and something called the “Arrowleaf resort development.” They sold Mission in 2003, and the company split in two in 2005. Harbor then sold Stevens to CNL Lifestyle Properties in 2011, where it operated under Karl Kapuscinski, the current owner, with Invision Capital, of Mountain High, Dodge Ridge, and China Peak. CNL then sold the resort to the Och-Ziff hedge fund in 2016, before Vail bought Stevens in 2018 (say what you'd like about Vail Resorts, but at least we have relative certainty that they are invested as a long-term owner, and the days of private-equity ping pong are over). Schweitzer remains under McCaw Investment Group, which emerged out of that 2005 split of Harbor.As for Arrowleaf, that refers to the doomed Early Winters ski area development in Washington. Aspen, before it decided to just be Aspen, tried being Vail, or what Vail ended up being. The company's adventures abroad included owning Breckenridge from 1970 to 1987 or 1988, developing Blackcomb, and the attempted building of Early Winters, which would have included up to 16 lifts serving nearly 4,000 acres in the Methow Valley. Aspen, outfoxed by a group of citizen-activists who are still shaking their pom-poms about it nearly four decades later, eventually sold the land. Subsequent developers also failed, and today the land that would have held, according to The New York Times, 200 hotel rooms, 550 condos, 440 single-family homes, shops, and restaurants is the site of exactly five single-family homes. If you want to understand why ski resort development is so hard, this 2016 article from the local Methow Valley News explains it pretty succinctly (emphasis mine):“The first realization was that we would be empowered by understanding the rules of the game.” Coon said. Soon after it was formed, MVCC “scraped together a few dollars to hire a consultant,” who showed them that Aspen Corp. would have to obtain many permits for the ski resort, but MVCC would only have to prevail on defeating one.Administrative and legal challenges delayed the project for 25 years, “ultimately paving the way to victory,” with the water rights issue as the final obstacle to resort development, Coon said.The existing Washington ski resorts, meanwhile, remain overburdened and under-built, with few places to stay anywhere near the bump. Three cheers for traffic and car-first transportation infrastructure, I guess. Here's a rough look at what Early Winters could have been:On Stevens Pass in late 2021 and early 2022Fortune spent 20 years, starting in the late 1970s, working at Stevens Pass. Last year, he returned on a special assignment. As explained by Gregory Scruggs in The Seattle Times:[Fortune] arrived on Jan. 14 when the ski area was at a low point. After a delayed start to the season, snow hammered the Cascades during the holiday week. Severely understaffed, Stevens Pass struggled to open most of its chairlifts for six weeks, including those serving the popular backside terrain.Vail Resorts, which bought Stevens Pass in 2018, had sold a record number of its season pass product, the Epic Pass, in the run-up to the 2021-22 winter, leaving thousands of Washington residents claiming that they had prepaid for a product they couldn't use. A Change.org petition titled “Hold Vail Resorts Accountable” generated over 45,000 signatures. Over 400 state residents filed complaints against Vail Resorts with the state Attorney General's office. In early January, Vail Daily reported that Vail's stock price was underperforming by 25%, with analysts attributing the drop in part to an avalanche of consumer ire about mismanagement at resorts across the country, including Stevens Pass.On Jan. 12, Vail Resorts fired then-general manager Tom Pettigrew and announced that Fortune would temporarily relocate from his role as general manager at Heavenly Ski Resort in South Lake Tahoe, California, to right the ship at Stevens Pass. Vail, which owns 40 ski areas across 15 states and three countries, has a vast pool of ski industry talent from which to draw. In elevating Fortune, whose history with the mountain goes back five decades, the company seems to have acknowledged what longtime skiers and snowboarders at Stevens Pass have been saying for several seasons: local institutional knowledge matters.Fortune is back at Heavenly, of course. Ellen Galbraith is the resort's current general manager – she is scheduled to join me on The Storm Skiing Podcast in June.On Hugh and Bill KillebrewFortune and I touched on the legacy of Hugh Killebrew and his son, Bill. This Tahoe Daily Tribune article sums up this legacy, along with the tragic circumstances that put the younger Killebrew in charge of the resort:By October of 1964, attorney Hugh Killebrew owned more than 60 percent of the resort. … Killebrew was a visionary who wanted to expand the resort into Nevada. Chair Four [Sky] allowed it to happen.In the fall of 1967, [Austin] Angell was part of a group that worked through storms and strung cable for two new lifts in Nevada. Then on New Year's Day, 1968, Boulder and Dipper chairs started running. Angell's efforts helped turn Heavenly Valley into America's largest ski area. …On Aug. 27, 1977 … Hugh Killebrew and three other resort employees were killed in a plane crash near Echo Summit.Killebrew's son, Bill Killebrew, a then-recent business school graduate of the University of California, was one of the first civilians on the scene. He saw the wreckage off Highway 50 and immediately recognized his dad's plane. …At 23, Bill Killebrew assumed control of the resort. A former youth ski racer with the Heavenly Blue Angels, he learned a lot from his dad. But the resort was experiencing two consecutive drought years and was millions of dollars in debt.Bill Killebrew began focusing on snowmaking capabilities. Tibbetts and others tinkered with different systems and, by the early 1980s, Heavenly Valley had 65 percent snowmaking coverage.With a stroke of good luck and several wet winters, Bill Killebrew had the resort out of debt in 1987, 10 years after bankruptcy was a possibility. It was now time to sell.Killebrew sold to a Japanese outfit called Kamori Kanko Company, who then sold it to American Skiing Company in 1997, who then sold it to likely forever owner Vail in 2002.When he joined me on The Storm Skiing Podcast in 2021, Tim Cohee, current GM of China Peak, called Bill Killebrew “the smartest person I've ever known” and “overall probably the smartest guy ever in the American ski industry.” Cohee called him “basically a savant, who happened to, by accident, end up in the ski business through his dad's tragic death in 1977.” You can listen to that at 26:30 here.On Sierra-at-Tahoe and the Caldor FireMost of the 16 Tahoe-area ski areas sit along or above the lake's North Shore. Only three sit south. Vail owns Heavenly and Kirkwood. The third is Sierra-at-Tahoe. You may be tempted to dismiss this as a locals' bump, but look again at the chart above – this is a serious ski area, with 2,000 acres of skiable terrain on a 2,212-foot vertical drop. It's basically the same size as Kirkwood.The 2021 Caldor Fire threatened all three resorts. Heavenly and Kirkwood escaped with superficial damage, but Sierra got crushed. A blog post from the ski area's website summarizes the damage:The 3000-degree fire ripped through our beloved trees crawling through the canopies and the forest floor affecting 1,600 of our 2,000 acres, damaging lift towers, haul ropes, disintegrating terrain park features and four brand new snowcats and practically melted the Upper Shop — a maintenance building which housed many of our crews' tools and personal belongings, some that had been passed down through generations.The resort lost the entire 2021-22 ski season and enormous swaths of trees. Here's the pre-fire trailmap:And post-fire:Ski areas all over the region helped with whatever they could. One of Vail Resorts' biggest contributions was filling in for Sierra's Straight As program, issuing Tahoe Local Epic Passes good at all three ski areas to eligible South Shore students.On wind holdsFortune discussed why wind holds are such an issue at Heavenly, and why they seem to be happening more frequently, with the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this year.On the pastI'll leave you with this 1972 Heavenly trailmap, which labels Mott and Killebrew Canyons as “closed area - dangerous steep canyons”:Or maybe I'll just leave you with more pictures of Heavenly:The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 40/100 in 2023, and number 426 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

On this episode of The World's Greatest Action Sports Podcast, Chris and Todd talk about the MEO Rip Curl Pro Portugal, Caity Simmers, Joao Chianca, Slater retiring, the looming WSL cut, Black's Beach tragedy,  the Set Skateboarding crew out of Ethiopia, Tom Schaar, Tony Hawk's femur, Chris' disdain for baby skaters, Cocona Hiraki, Mami Tezuka, Felipe Nunes, Gary Land calls in to talk about the Homesick snowboard event, NASCAR driver Chase Elliot breaks himself snowboarding, The Last Of Us is over, John Wick 4, Encinitas Magazine, the Oscars, lots of questions, and so much more.   Presented By:   Pedal Electric @pedal.electric Bachan's Japanese BBQ Sauce @trybachans BN3TH @BN3THApparel Bubs Naturals @bubsnaturals  Pannikin Coffee And Tea @pannikincoffeeandtea Nanocraft CBD @nanocraftcbd Pure Prescriptions @pureprescriptions Hansen Surfboards @hansensurfboards Die Cut Stickers @diecutstickersdotcom Mountain High @mthighsnow

The longtime Gwinnett Stripers announcer and new Voice of the Atlanta Braves, Kevin Kraus joins the show. Plus:  Swaying and shimmying to exultant tunes, hundreds of Cobb students packed the Kennesaw Mountain High School gym Tuesday morning for the district's dance for students with special needs. The annual affair brings together students from across the district, who left it all on the dance floor as they were joined by Kennesaw Mountain athletes and student volunteers. Indeed, students were welcomed to the festivities with a procession of high-fives from teachers and staff, entering to cheers through a festooned archway at the gym's door. There, they danced the morning away to such favorites as “Dancing Queen” and “Party in the U.S.A.” Kennesaw Mountain High has hosted the dance since 2001, and this year's theme was “Once Upon a Time at the Mountain.” Amory Brown, a junior, was one of the student organizers of the event and told the MDJ she was honored to help carry on a tradition that goes back more than 20 years. Students were able to show off their moves in a variety of ways. Some spun doughnuts in their wheelchairs, while others leapt up and down in joy as their favorite songs came on. Felicia Vuu, another student organizer, called the event “surreal” after working on it for months. She told the MDJ she wanted people to take away the message that students should be treated with respect. Two bills which seek to thwart the Cobb County Board of Commissioners' effort to draw its own district map have stalled in the state legislature. Senate bills 124 and 236, sponsored by state Sen. Ed Setzler of Acworth, had been slated for floor votes on Monday — Crossover Day, a crucial legislative deadline during the legislative session. Neither bill received a vote, however. Setzler told the MDJ Tuesday his legislation was close to getting a vote before the Senate adjourned. Setzler said he hoped the home rule bills might survive in some fashion, saying there are related bills under consideration at the Capitol that his language could be attached to. SB 124 would explicitly prohibit Georgia counties from drawing their own district lines, something the Democratic majority on the Cobb commission has sought to do. SB 236, meanwhile, mirrors the map signed into law by Governor Brian Kemp last year, which drew Democratic Commissioner Jerica Richardson out of her seat. The Cobb commission last fall passed a pair of resolutions amending the Kemp map, in an untested use of the county's home rule powers. The county's map, using one drawn by former state Representative Erick Allen a  Democrat from Smyrna, would keep Richardson in her seat. Setzler has until March 29, the end of the session, to try and attach his language onto another bill. In an email to parents at Lockheed Elementary School on Tuesday, Marietta City Schools Superintendent Grant Rivera said a teacher “was alleged to have attempted to inappropriately restrain a student during recess.” Rivera said this incident was reported to school administration who immediately initiated the investigation and engaged the proper authorities. Rivera also said the district is supporting the students in this particular class and is in direct communication with their families. Rivera added that parents with any concerns should feel free to reach out to Lockheed Elementary Principal Coretta Stewart or their child's teacher or counselor. When the Mount Paran Christian girls face Banks County for the Class AA state championship this afternoon, the squad that takes the floor of the Macon Coliseum will not resemble the one that won the Class A Private title a year ago. That team was dominated by seniors. This group is made up of four freshmen, seven sophomores and one junior. But while the team is young, coach Stephanie Dunn said those seniors made sure this team is up for the challenge. Mount Paran has not missed a beat. It rolled through Region 6AA play undefeated, bolstered by a non-region schedule highlighted with games against competition from higher classifications. The Eagles faced Class AAAA Hardaway, Class AAAAAA Woodward Academy and Forest Park, and Class AAAAAAA Collins Hill and Brookwood. It will take a complete team effort for Mount Paran to upend Banks County and win the program's second straight state title. The Leopards (28-3) are making their first appearance in the state championship game and present a defensive challenge for the Eagles, as they are loaded with juniors and seniors who are used to winning. A federal judge ruled Tuesday that state Representative Ginny Ehrhart, a Republican from west Cobb, must cease blocking and removing the comments of opponents on her official Facebook page. The ruling from Judge J.P. Boulee found Ehrhart violated the First Amendment in blocking Thomas Biedermann, an Atlanta man whose comments were removed from Ehrhart's page in 2019. Biedermann at the time — using a pseudonym on Facebook — had criticized Ehrhart's proposal to make it a felony for Georgia doctors to help a minor medically transition their gender. He filed suit after that comment, and several others, were removed from Ehrhart's page. Ehrhart previously told the MDJ Biedermann had harassed other Facebook users and violated her page's content standards. Biedermann, Judge Boulee noted in his order, was one of dozens whose accounts were blocked and comments were removed by Ehrhart — a contingent united under the banner of #BlockedByGinny. Judge Boulee found the First Amendment infringements outweighed any potential damage from unblocking the commenters. He ordered Ehrhart to “cease unconstitutional viewpoint-based blocking and removal of (Biedermann's) expressive activity on the official Facebook page and to rescind her ban on Plaintiff's access to the official Facebook page.” Representative Ehrhart said that her office is examining their next steps. The Marietta-based Atlanta Lyric Theatre, which put on Broadway-style musicals for 42 years, has closed its doors, it announced Tuesday. In a message posted to the Lyric's website, Monica Gwinn and Patti Schoettler, co-chairs of the theater's board, said a steep decline in attendance since the COVID-19 pandemic began has strained the group's financial resources to the point of making its continued operation unsustainable. The Lyric will also be unable to refund tickets for its 42nd season, Gwinn and Schoettler said, though the theater will write acknowledgement letters for the value of patrons' unused tickets and donations they made this year. The Atlanta Lyric Theatre most recently staged its productions at the Jennie T. Anderson Theatre at the Cobb County Civic Center. In their message announcing the end of the Lyric's run, co-chairs of the board also thanked the theater's staff, praising “their attempts to adjust to the Lyric's new reality.” They also thanked the Lyric's subscribers and donors for their support of the theater. #CobbCounty #Marietta #LocalNews -            -            -            -            The Marietta Daily Journal Podcast is local news for Marietta, Kennesaw, Smyrna, and all of Cobb County.             Subscribe today, so you don't miss an episode! MDJOnline            Register Here for your essential digital news.            https://www.chattahoocheetech.edu/  https://cuofga.org/ https://www.esogrepair.com/ https://www.drakerealty.com/           Find additional episodes of the MDJ Podcast here.             This Podcast was produced and published for the Marietta Daily Journal and MDJ Online by BG Ad Group   For more information be sure to visit https://www.bgpodcastnetwork.com              See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this episode of The World's Greatest Action Sports Podcast, Chris and Todd talk to Ben Ferguson about near-death snowboarding at Natural Selection,  “Are You Serious” Sterling Spencer doc by Dave Malcolm, Balter Beer makes millions, Seal snaps dude's leg, Orca's kill sharks in scary fashion, Tampa Pro went off, Chris is getting in to Joe Rogan's shorts, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles skate, lots of questions answered, and so much more.   Presented By: Pedal Electric @pedal.electric Bachan's Japanese BBQ Sauce @trybachans Herschel Supply Co. @herschelsupply BN3TH @BN3THApparel Bubs Naturals @bubsnaturals   Pannikin Coffee And Tea @pannikincoffeeandtea Nanocraft CBD @nanocraftcbd Pure Prescriptions @pureprescriptions Hansen Surfboards @hansensurfboards Die Cut Stickers @diecutstickersdotcom Mountain High @mthighsnow K2 Snowboarding @k2.snowboarding

To support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. The discounted annual rate is back through March 13, 2023.WhoChristian Knapp, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Pacific Group ResortsRecorded onFebruary 27, 2023About Pacific Group ResortsPacific Group Resorts (PGRI) owns and/or operates six North American ski areas:While they don't have a single unified pass like Vail Resorts or Mountain Capital Partners, PGRI's ski areas do offer reciprocity for their passholders, largely through their Mission: Affordable product. Here are the 2022-23 exchanges – the company has not yet released 2023-24 passes:Why I interviewed himThere are more than a dozen companies that own three or more ski areas in North America. The National Ski Areas Association itemizes most of them* here. Everyone knows Vail and Aspen, whether they ski or not. The next tier is a little more insider, but not much: Alterra, Boyne, Powdr. These are the ski companies with national footprints and Ikon Pass headliner resorts. If skiers haven't heard of these companies, they're familiar with Mammoth and Big Sky and Snowbird. Everything else on the list is regionally dense: Invision Capital's three California ski areas (Mountain High, Dodge Ridge, China Peak); Wisconsin Resorts six Midwestern bumps (Alpine Valley, Pine Knob, Mt. Holly, and Bittersweet in Michigan; Alpine Valley in Wisconsin; and Searchmont in Ontario); the State of New York's Belleayre, Gore, and Whiteface. Some – like Midwest Family Ski Resorts' trio of gigantors – align with Indy Pass, while others stand alone, with a pass just for their mountains, like Mountain Capital Partners' Power Pass.PGRI doesn't fit any of these templates. The company has a national footprint, with properties stretching from coastal BC to New Hampshire, but no national pass presence (at least before the company inherited Jay Peak's Indy Pass membership). Its properties' season passes sort of work together but sort of don't. It's all a little strange: a small ski area operator, based in Park City, whose nearest ski area is more than a 400-mile drive away, on the edge of Colorado's Grand Mesa. PGRI is built like a regional operator, but its ski areas are scattered across the continent, including in improbable-seeming locales such as Maryland and Virginia.Despite the constant facile reminders that American Skiing Company and SKI failed, small conglomerates such as PGRI are likely the future of skiing. Owning multiple resorts in multiple regions is the best kind of weather insurance. Scale builds appeal both for national pass coalitions and for banks, who often control the cash register. A larger company can build a talent pipeline to shift people around and advance their careers, which often improves retention, creating, in turn, a better ski experience. Or so the theories go. Independence will always have advantages, and consolidation its pitfalls, but the grouping together of ski resorts is not going away. So let's talk to one of the companies actively growing on its own terms, in its own way, and setting a new template for what corporate skiing balanced with local control can look like.*Missing from the NSAA's list is the Schmitz Brothers trio of Wisconsin ski areas: Little Switzerland, Nordic Mountain, and The Rock Snow Park; the list also includes Sun Valley and Snowbasin, which are jointly owned by the Holding Family, but excludes the other two-resort groups around the country: Berkshire East/Catamount, Labrador/Song, 49 Degrees North/Silver Mountain, Homewood/Red Lodge, Perfect North/Timberline, and Mission Ridge/Blacktail - there may be others).What we talked aboutThe bomber western winter; closing Wintergreen early; the existential importance of Eastern snowmaking; why Mid-Atlantic ski resorts are such great businesses; growing up in the ski industry; Mt. Bachelor in the ‘90s; Breck in the early Vail days; why founding the Mountain Collective was harder than you probably think; the surprising mountain that helped start but never joined the pass; how essential the existence of Mountain Collective was to Ikon Pass; why Ikon didn't kill Mountain Collective; the origins and structure of Pacific Group Resorts (PGRI); reviving the historically troubled Ragged Mountain; the two things that PGRI did differently from previous owners to finally help Ragged succeed; the Mission: Affordable pass suite; how Jay Peak turbocharged reciprocity between the company's resorts; how reciprocity for Jay Peak may shape up for 2023-24 passes; why we're unlikely to see a Mission: Affordable pass at Jay Peak; why Mount Washington Alpine hasn't had a Mission: Affordable pass; the future of Jay Peak – and, potentially the rest of PGRI's portfolio – on the Indy Pass; the fate of Ragged's Pinnacle Peak expansion; how and why PGRI started running and eventually purchased Wisp and Wintergreen; wild and isolated Mount Washington Alpine; could that Vancouver Island resort ever be a destination?; thoughts on replacing the West End double at Powderhorn; why PGRI has not prioritized lift replacements at the rate of some of its competitors; priorities for lift upgrades at Wisp; winning the bid for Jay Peak; reflecting on receivership; the chances of getting a new Bonaventure lift; and whether PGRI will buy more ski areas.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewThe lazy answer: PGRI just bought Jay Peak, and while writing the various stories leading up to and after the auction in which they acquired the joint,  I established contact with PGRI corporate HQ for the first time. My first impression was not a great one (on their side), as I managed to not only jack up the company name in the headline announcing their opening bid, but get the fundamentals of the story so wrong that I had to issue a correction with a full article re-send for the only time in Storm history. Which apparently created a huge PR pain in the ass for them. Sorry.Maybe the stupid jokes eventually disarmed them over or something, but for whatever reason Knapp agreed to do the pod. As you know I don't typically host marketing-type folks. I work with them all the time and value them immensely, but that's just not the brand. The brand is talk-to-whoever-is-in-charge-of-whatever-mountain-or-company-I'm-talking-about. But Knapp is a unique case, the former CMO of Aspen Skiing Company and the creator of the uber-relevant-to-my-readers Mountain Collective Pass. So Knapp joins the equally impressive Hugh Reynolds of Snow Partners as the only other marketing lead to ever carry his own episode.Ahem. What I was trying to get to is this: yes, this was a convenient time to drill into PGRI, because they just bought one of the most important ski resorts on the Eastern seaboard and everyone's like, “Now what, Bro?” But this is a company that has been quietly relevant for years. It cannot be overstated what an absolute shitshow Ragged Mountain was for five decades. No one could get that thing right. Now it is one of the most well-regarded ski areas in New Hampshire, with knockout grooming, a killer glade network, one of the state's best lift systems, and a customer-friendly orientation that begins with its ridiculous Mission: Affordable season pass, one of the few all-access season passes under $400 at a thousand-foot-plus mountain in New England.Which set them up perfectly to glide into the Jay marquee. Almost any other buyer would have ignited mutiny at Jay. No one I've spoken to who skis the mountain regularly wanted the place anywhere near the Ikon Pass. So no Alterra, Powdr, or Boyne. Epic? LOL no. Locals have seen enough downstate. Another rich asshat cackling with cartoon glee as he shifts hundreds of millions of dollars around like he's reorganizing suitcases in his Escalade? F**k no. Jay will be shedding the scabs of Ariel Quiros' various schemes for decades. PGRI hit that Goldilocks spot, a proven New England operator without megapass baggage that has operated scandal-free for 15 years, and is run by people who know how to make a big resort go (PGRI CEO Vern Greco is former president and GM of both Park City and Steamboat, and the former COO of Powdr Corp).PGRI is just good at running ski areas. Wisp opened Thanksgiving weekend, despite 70-degree temperatures through much of that month, despite being in Maryland. Visitation has been trending up at Powderhorn for years after steady snowmaking improvements. It's hard to find anyone with a bad opinion of Ragged.But PGRI has never been what business folk call a “consumer-facing brand.” Meaning they let the resorts speak for themselves. Meaning we don't know much about the company behind all those mountains, or what their plans are to build out their network. Or build within it, for that matter. PGRI has only stood up one new chairlift in 16 years – the Spear Mountain high-speed quad at Ragged. Powderhorn skiers are side-eyeing the 51-year-old, 1,655-vertical-foot, 7,000-foot-long West End double chair and thinking, “are you kidding me with this thing?” Five years into ownership, they want a plan. Or at least to know it's a priority. There are lesser examples all over the portfolio. It was time to see what these guys were thinking.Questions I wish I'd askedI had a few questions teed up that I didn't quite get to: why is Ragged still owned by something called RMR-Pacific LLC (and operated by PGRI)? I also wanted to understand why some PGRI ski areas use dynamic pricing but others don't. I'm still a little confused as to the exact timeline of Pacific Group purchasing Ragged and then PGRI materializing to take over the ski area. And of course I could have filled an entire hour with questions on any of the six ski areas. What I got wrongWhen I summarized Ragged's traumatic financial history, I said, “ownership defaulted on a loan.” It sounded as though I was suggesting that PGRI defaulted on the loan, when it was in fact the previous owner. You can read the full history of Ragged's many pre-PGRI financial issues on New England Ski History.I said that Midwest Family Ski Resorts had announced two new high-speed six-packs “in the past couple years.” They've actually announced two within the past year, both of which will be built this summer: a new Eagle Mountain lift at Lutsen, and a new sixer to replace three old Riblets on the Jackson Creek Summit side of Snowriver.Somehow though I got through this entire interview without calling the company “Pacific Resorts Group” and I would like credit for this please.Why you should ski PGRI's mountainsWell let's just fire through these real quick. Jay: most snow in the East. Nearly 300 inches so far even in this drab-until-the-past-two-weeks New England season. Some of the best glade skiing in the country. Just look:Ragged: Also strong on glades, though it gets maybe a third of Jay's snowfall if it's lucky. When the snow doesn't come, Ragged has some of the best grooming in New Hampshire:Wisp and Wintergreen: you know, I take my kid to Mt. Peter, a small ski area outside of New York City, every Saturday for a seasonal ski program. I'd say 80 percent of the parents arrive in street clothes, drop their kids, and sit in the lodge zombie-scrolling their phones for 90 minutes. Why? Why wouldn't a person ski every opportunity they have? This is what Wisp and Wintergreen exist for. Sure, you live in the Mid-Atlantic. No one is trying to pretend it's Colorado. But these are good little mountains. Wisp is a zinger, with terrific fall line skiing. Wintergreen sprawls, with a fun trail network and two high-speed sixers. If you live anywhere near them, there's absolutely no reason not to pick up their sub-$400 season passes (though Wintergreen's is not a true season pass, excluding Saturdays and holidays, which are reserved for club members) to supplement the Epic or Ikon Pass you use for those Western or New England vacations:Powderhorn: If you live in Grand Junction, you can fight your way east, or stop on the Mesa and go skiing:Mt. Washington Alpine: I know you'll all tell me this is for locals, that no one would bother trekking out to Vancouver Island when they can reach Whistler in a fraction of the time. But I don't know man, I've done enough wild voyages to the ass-ends of the earth to have convinced myself that it's always worth it, especially if skiing is involved:Besides, you're not going to find Whistler crowds here, and this is about enough mountain for most of us.Podcast NotesOn Wisp and Wintergreen opening and closing datesI mentioned on the podcast that Wisp opened in November. The exact date was Nov. 25 for Wisp. The resort is still open today, though on “limited terrain,” and I imagine the season is winding down quickly. Wintergreen opened on Dec. 20 and closed Feb. 26. Ugh.On the world's largest snow fortKnapp said he helped start this tradition when he worked at Keystone:On the Mountain CollectiveKnapp and I had an extensive discussion about his role founding Mountain Collective, which debuted in 2012 with two days each at Alta, Aspen-Snowmass, Jackson Hole, and Palisades Tahoe. At $349, it's underwhelming to today's ski consumer, but it's impossible to overstate how miraculous it was that the product existed at all. I won't give away the whole story, but this 2012 Powder article crystalizes the shock and stoke around the realization that these four resorts were on the same pass, Brah!On Pinnacle Peak at Ragged PGRI is probably hoping I will stop asking them about this stalled expansion at Ragged sometime this century. No luck so far, as I presented Knapp with the same set of questions that I'd asked Ragged GM Erik Barnes on the podcast last year. Here's what I was talking about: in 2007, PGRI took over Ragged. From 2014 to 2019, the mountain teased this future expansion on its trailmaps:Then, without explanation, the expansion disappeared. What happened? “The expansion does not make financial sense,” Knapp told me last year. But I wanted a more thorough explanation. Knapp delivered. This is still one of the most talked-about projects in New England, and its sudden abeyance has been a source of curiosity and confusion for Ragged skiers for a few years now. Listen up to find out what happened.The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The discounted annual rate is available until March 13, 2023.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 19/100 in 2023, and number 405 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

On this episode of The World's Greatest Action Sports Podcast, Chris and Todd talk the Superbowl, nice things we saw last week, Billabong Pro Pipeline, Hurley Sunset Pro, Larry Haynes R.I.P., Kelly Slater Birthday, jumping the distance of your age in feet, Chippa Wilson, Corbett's, Camp Shred, The Berrics, Stevie Williams, Skateboarding World Championships in Dubai, Jagger Eaton, Sky Brown, Matt Tomasello, Todd reviews more boards, animals attacjing snowboarders, Last Of Us update, Dew Tour preview, De La Sol, all your questions answered and so much more!  Presented By:  Mountain High @mthighsnow K2 Snowboarding @k2.snowboarding Pedal Electric @pedal.electric Bachan's Japanese BBQ Sauce @trybachans Herschel Supply Co. @herschelsupply BN3TH @BN3THApparel Bubs Naturals @bubsnaturals   Pannikin Coffee And Tea @pannikincoffeeandtea Nanocraft CBD @nanocraftcbd Pure Prescriptions @pureprescriptions Hansen Surfboards @hansensurfboards Die Cut Stickers @diecutstickersdotcom   CAMP SHRED is coming!  March 4 and 5 at San Elijo Campgrounds

HOUR 4: Did the Broncos give up too much for Sean Payton? Should the Bills be worried about Allen's hits? Plus, Advanced Analytics and today's Epic Fail.

ELLIE GREENWICH -SONGWRITER HALL OF FAME INDUCTEE- 1991Ellie Greenwich is one of the most successful songwriters of the modern pop music era. She was one of the major influences on the 60's rock and roll, a music that continues alive and well today. Her songs, which have sold in the tens of millions, have earned her 25 gold and platinum records.Born in Brooklyn, her young life was filled with singing and dancing recitals and winning first prize in a local newspaper's poetry contest. At 11, she moved to Levittown, Long Island, and her musical career became serious when she took up the accordion and by 13, was writing songs. Along with two high school friends, she formed her first "girls group," The Jivettes, and the trio performed original songs at hospitals, schools and charity benefits throughout Long Island.About this time, Greenwich's mother arranged a meeting for Ellie with Cadence Records president Archie Bleyer (of Everly Brothers and Chordettes fame). His advice to "keep writing but finish school... the music business will always be there," stuck in the young writer's head and she did just that. She attended Hofstra University, was its Spring Queen and graduated with top honors with a BA degree in English, and a listing in "Who's Who in American Colleges and Universities."During her latter years in college, she met Jeff Barry at a family gathering and the two became good friends almost immediately. "He was the first male I could actually harmonize with," she recalls. Eventually, the couple married and went on to become co-writers of some of the most memorable classic rock hits.After graduation in 1962 and following a High School English teaching career which lasted three and one half weeks, she began free-lancing and working out of the offices of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, a pair of hot songwriters in their own right, in Broadway's Brill Building, one of the music business headquarters of that time. She wrote songs with Doc Pomus and Tony Powers and enjoyed her first chart successes with "This Is It," by Jay and the Americans, and "He's Got the Power," by the Exciters. She and Barry formed The Raindrops, who skimmed the top 16 with "What a Guy" and "The Kind of Boy You Can't Forget."Teaming with Phil Spector, the two managed number one hits with "Be My Baby," "Da Doo Ron Ron," "And Then He Kissed Me," "Chapel of Love" and "River Deep, Mountain High." Greenwich and Barry also continued their successes with such number one smashes as "Hanky Panky," and co-written with Shadow Morton, the epic, "Leader of the Pack." During these years, too, Greenwich reigned as one of New York's top demo singers and session vocal arrangers/singers, working with artists ranging from Dusty Springfield and Lesley Gore to Ella Fitzgerald, Bobby Darin and Frank Sinatra. During one of the many demo sessions in which she was involved, Greenwich met and "discovered" Neil Diamond and went on to co-produce such early Diamond hits as "Cherry Cherry" and "Kentucky Woman," doing background vocals as well.During the latter part of the 60's, Greenwich found continued success in collaborations with Bob Crewe, in writing for The Hardy Boys TV series, and in singing on popular commercials for Cheerios

On this episode of The World's Greatest Action Sports Podcast, Chris and Todd talk to Josh Kerr about the SUPERSWELL California, Hawaii, and beyond. The boys also talk WSL World Jr. Championships, mega snowfall, the late great Ken Block, Backdoor Shootout, brutal surf injuries at Pipeline, Moan Jones Wong barrel of the decade, Tony Hawk karaoke tour, The Eddie, Cortez Bank goes XXL, wild weather, floods, Nathan Florence VLOG talk, Danny Way jumps walls, Todd goes on and on about The Last of Us, Chris thinks Steven Spielberg has a big future in filmmaking, we reminisce on the incredible like of Ken Block, and we answer bunch of your questions.   Presented By:   Mountain High @mthighsnow K2 Snowboarding @k2.snowboarding Pedal Electric @pedal.electric Bachan's Japanese BBQ Sauce @trybachans Herschel Supply Co. @herschelsupply BN3TH @BN3THApparel Bubs Naturals @bubsnaturals Pannikin Coffee And Tea @pannikincoffeeandtea Nanocraft CBD @nanocraftcbd Pure Prescriptions @pureprescriptions Hansen Surfboards @hansensurfboards Die Cut Stickers @diecutstickersdotcom

On this episode of The World's Greatest Action Sports Podcast, Chris and Todd talk to Balaram Stack about wining the Vans Pipe Masters, about the STAB SOTY voting, Sambazon SL Jr World Championships presented by Best Western, Hallmark surf movie, Selema and Lupita IG official, Jenkem predictions for 2023, Koston and Berra are back in 100% control of The Berrics, Anti Hero Fantastic Voyage was epic, Gershon Mosley is back, RYOGOKU rips, Mass snowboard leash law, Mountain High rail jam, Blanket Jackson and Justin Bieber shred Aspen, TONS of questions asked and answered, and so much more.   Presented By:   Mountain High @mthighsnow K2 Snowboarding @k2.snowboarding Pedal Electric @pedal.electric Bachan's Japanese BBQ Sauce @trybachans Herschel Supply Co. @herschelsupply BN3TH @BN3THApparel Bubs Naturals @bubsnaturals Pannikin Coffee And Tea @pannikincoffeeandtea Nanocraft CBD @nanocraftcbd Pure Prescriptions @pureprescriptions Hansen Surfboards @hansensurfboards Die Cut Stickers @diecutstickersdotcom

On this episode of The World's Greatest Action Sports Podcast, Chris and Todd talk to we talk to Parker Coffin about his horrible near death injury, the big “Out Cold” movie showing, scoring in Mammoth, taking a trip to Mountain High, Chris' new Billabong wetsuit, some whack ass podcasters talking crap about Chris, Todd's new snowboard, Tyshawn is SOTY, The 2022 WSL World Junior Championships, Andrew Reynolds to New Balance, Supreme vid has epic soundtrack, The Miami Leap of Faith, Mikey LeBlanc goes hard, Jaime Anderson who is happily and beautifully pregnant, Kaitlyn Farrington might be going to the moon, some nerd news, lots of questions, and so much more. Presented By: Mountain High @mthighsnow K2 Snowboarding @k2snowboarding: Pedal Electric @pedal.electric Bachan's Japanese BBQ Sauce @trybachans Herschel Supply Co. @herschelsupply BN3TH @BN3THApparel Bubs Naturals @bubsnaturals Pannikin Coffee And Tea @pannikincoffeeandtea Nanocraft CBD @nanocraftcbd Pure Prescriptions @pureprescriptions Hansen Surfboards @hansensurfboards Die Cut Stickers @diecutstickersdotcom

It's Season 6 and WE ARE BACK! It's been way too long and we are so excited to be back with our favorite people during our favorite time of the year! What a year it has been, and the end of the year affords us many privileges including preparing to celebrate the birth of our Savior, spending time with family and friends and reflecting on the highs and lows of the current year. What have been the greatest moments of your year? What have been the lowest moments? I'm a firm believer that when you look in the rearview mirror, you have to see everything in order to get a full view of what shaped you and molded you and it is only then you are able to move clearly forward into the future. Shout from your peaks, pray from your pits and from every vantage point, give God thanks! Let's get this season started! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Once you have a vision, you can never unsee it. It may lay dormant, it may get shoved into the recesses of your subconscious, but it will always exist. Les Brannen took a 20 year old vision and used it to drastically shift his life in the direction he wanted. After being laid off when the ol' scamdemic came around, he was faced with a choice to drudge along in the same industry, or create a new path. Thankful for him and those who he leads, he has spent the last 4 years building Mountain High Mulch, and creating a winning team around him. Tune in as we discuss his growth, his mission and vision, and pick up some key nuggets of wisdom that just might help you make good choices in your life as well! To learn more about Les and his company, please visit https://www.facebook.com/MountainHighMulch, https://www.facebook.com/les.brannen, https://www.instagram.com/mountainhighmulch/, https://www.instagram.com/brannenles/, and https://mountainhighmulch.com/ ENJOY!!

To support independent ski journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This podcast hit paid subscribers’ inboxes on July 27. Free subscribers got it on July 30. To receive future pods as soon as they’re live, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription.WhoBrad Wilson, General Manager of Bogus Basin, IdahoRecorded onJuly 11, 2022About Bogus BasinClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: The Bogus Basin Resort Association Inc., a group of approximately 100 people who own the ski areaPass affiliations: Powder Alliance, Freedom PassLocated in: Boise National Forest, IdahoClosest neighboring ski areas: Tamarack (2.5 hours), Soldier Mountain (2.5 hours)Base elevation: 5,790 feetSummit elevation: 7,852 feetVertical drop: 1,800 feetSkiable Acres: 2,600 Night-skiing acres: 175Average annual snowfall: 250 inchesTrail count: 88 (24% double-black, 49% black, 20% intermediate, 7% beginner)Lift count: 10 (4 high-speed quads, 3 doubles, 3 carpets, - view Lift Blog’s inventory of Bogus Basin’s lift fleet)Why I interviewed himFor many years, I lived in West Harlem. Specifically, a slice of bricks and concrete called Morningside Heights. It’s beautiful. The streets straightline up from the river with San Franciscan steepness. Walking and bike paths line the Hudson and above this looms Riverbank State Park, a neat grid of basketball courts and plazas and a full 400-meter track and west-facing benches where I would write and watch the sun set over New Jersey. I lived on the fourth floor of a rambling prewar building of four- and five-bedroom apartments, in a small corner room set with enormous river-facing windows, bracketing the Palisades and the George Washington Bridge twinkling over the swarm.Harlem is a big, busy neighborhood – a neighborhood of neighborhoods, as they say around here. It was a part of the city that still acted like the old city, vibrant with life beyond transit, kids running and inflatable pools dragged onto the sidewalk and on hot days the local fire brigade would pop open the hydrants and let the water gush. Men played Dominoes on folding tables. It was a primarily Dominican neighborhood, and the bodegas stocked heaping crates of wild exotic fruits.This was wonderful, but the place had shortcomings. It was hard to find basic items, such as a toothbrush. I once found myself in need of bug spray and had to take the 1 train down to the Upper West Side – 51 blocks – to find it. I was frequently offered drugs while walking down the street. There were no bars and few restaurants.Every New York-based newspaper and magazine would point to Harlem, with its lovely building stock and dense network of subway lines and irreplaceable Manhattan location, as the “next Brooklyn.” What that meant, of course, was gentrification. That’s a heavy subject, and one I’ll skim over here. What I wanted was to be able to restock my medicine cabinet without an excursion across the island, like some sort of uptown Laura Ingles Wilder. When a chain pharmacy finally moved into four combined storefronts in my third or fourth year in the neighborhood, I was relieved. I thought maybe a nice pub would follow.It never did. I moved back to the Upper East Side in 2014. For four years, I kept the apartment and rented out the rooms. A chichi wine bar popped up here and there, but Morningside Heights today looks much the same as it did in 2009, when I moved in: smoke shops and sex shops and bodegas and variety stores that look as though they are stocked by dumping out the contents of random shipping containers. It’s lively and raw and interesting, but Harlem was not, in fact, the next Brooklyn.And that’s kind of how I view Idaho. It’s skiing’s next big thing that never quite gets there. And why not? There is plenty of snow. Lookout Pass scores 400 inches per year. Pomerelle rocks 500. Brundage, Schweitzer, Silver, and Tamarack each claim 300. If you count Lost Trail, which straddles the Idaho-Montana border, the state has nine ski areas* with more than 1,000 acres of terrain and 12 with a vertical drop of more than 1,000 feet**. The southern part of the state is well-served by Boise airport, and the northern part by Spokane.So why, as Colorado and Utah overflow from Epkon skiers, do Idaho lifts continue to spin empty so much of the time? Most skiers not from Idaho can name one Idaho ski area: Sun Valley. And then they’re stumped. Or maybe they get Schweitzer, whose profile is rising thanks to Ikon Pass membership. Or they’ve heard about once-troubled Tamarack, launched with gusto in 2004 and soon shuttered by a rash court-appointed receiver (it’s back now, and I had a great, extended conversation with current resort president Scott Turlington about the resort’s past and future earlier this year). But, mostly, this is a prime ski state that is not at all perceived as one on the national scene.I’m not exactly sure why. Bogus Basin encapsulates this mystery better than any other Idaho ski area. The mountain is less than an hour (on good roads), from the Boise airport. It’s roughly the size of Copper Mountain and is larger than Beaver Creek, Telluride, Deer Valley, or Jackson Hole by inbounds skiable acreage. It is, in fact, larger than Sun Valley, which is far more remote (a fact somewhat obviated by a good airport). It has four high-speed quads. Coming expansions could further supersize the place.What gives? I put this question to Wilson in the podcast, and his answer is enlightening (and inspiring), for anyone wondering if all big mountains are destined to become Disney-at-Altitude.*Schweitzer (2,900 acres), Bogus Basin (2,600), Sun Valley (2,434), Brundage (1,920), Lost Trail (1,800), Silver (1,600), Soldier Mountain (1,142), Tamarack (1,100), and Pebble Creek (1,100).**Sun Valley (3,400 feet), Tamarack (2,800), Schweitzer (2,400), Silver (2,200), Pebble Creek (2,200), Brundage (1,921), Bogus Basin (1,800), Lost Trail (1,800), Soldier Mountain (1,425), Lookout Pass (1,150), Pomerelle (1,000), and Kelly Canyon (1,000).  What we talked aboutA record financial season at Bogus Basin; reopening in April after putting the mountain away for the year; learning to ski in the early ‘70s hotdog scene; Heavenly in the Killebrew days; Gunbarrel lunchbreaks; the legendary team in the Goldmine-transitioning-to-Big Bear days; what made that team disperse; stumbling upon Brian Head; Sugarbush in the American Skiing Company days; yet another testament to the virtues of Sugarbush; yeah I forgot the name of the Slide Brook Express shoot me; fixing up Mountain High; SoCal as snowboard mecca; from 180,000 skier visits to 577,000 in four years with very little capital investment, dethroning Snow Summit as king of SoCal; Alpine Meadows in the Powdr Corp days; why Wilson didn’t become the general manager at Alpine; the difference between the two sides of the resort now known as Palisades Tahoe and thoughts on the base-to-base gondola; how Wilson wound up living and working on Catalina Island, 24 miles off the California coast, for several years; becoming a ski consumer; the unique governance structure of Diamond Peak and how that makes it challenging to operate; finally a GM; how Diamond Peak is different from other Tahoe ski areas; that one season Diamond Peak had the best season of any ski area in Tahoe, and why; trying to market a ski area where the skiers don’t want any other skiers; master planning Diamond Peak; Bogus Basin’s complex ownership structure; Alf Engen’s role in founding Bogus Basin; the ski area’s evolution; the dire financial situation at Bogus Basin when Wilson arrived and how he turned it around; the legacy of Mike Shirley and the birth of the mega-bargain season pass; the incredible, exponential increase in pass sales when the first $199 sale hit; where the discount-pass strategy faltered; what happened when Wilson finally raised the price after more than two decades; Bogus Basin’s expansive reciprocal season pass lift ticket program and why the mountain began charging extra for an upgrade to that pass; what percentage of the ski area’s pass holders upgrade; why Bogus Basin hasn’t (and probably won’t) join the Indy Pass; Bogus Basin’s incredibly low walk-up lift ticket prices; the amazing number of night-skiing passes the mountain sells and the importance of night skiing to the mountain; the tremendous value of the twighlight family pass; the two trails that Bogus Basin is in the process of adding to its night-skiing footprint as soon as the 2022-23 ski season; puzzling through the elaborate equation of night skiing, grooming, avalanche mitigation, and everything else that goes along with big-mountain management; grooming in a low-snow year; coping with Boise’s explosive growth; where Bogus Basin could expand terrain next; when we could see an update of the ski area’s 2016 masterplan; where new trails could be cut within the mountain’s existing footprint; which chairlifts may get an upgrade next; where Bogus Basin may upgrade a high-speed quad to a six-pack; where the ski area may install a new lift within the existing trail footprint and what sort of lift we may see there; is Deer Point the most-used chairlift in the country?; ideas to reconfigure the Coach liftline and what sort of lift could replace the existing machine; the improved and widened beginner trail debuting off the top of Morningstar this coming winter; how Bogus Basin discovered it had water and built a snowmaking system from scratch; expanding the system in the future; and what’s keeping 2,600-acre Bogus Basin from becoming a national destination resort.Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewIt started with a comment on one of the most-popular Storm stories I’ve ever written: Rob Katz Changed Skiing. What Comes Next for Vail Resorts?, which I published last December:Let's set the record straight, Vail did not create the concept of cheap passes driving volume. That piece of history should go to Bogus Basin in Boise, Idaho. In 1998 the ski area lowered their anytime season pass rates from $450 to $199. They went from 5,500 passes sold in 1997 to 25,000 in 1998. The rest of the industry took notice and many, if not most ski areas jumped on board. Rob may have expanded on the concept, largely because he had a much larger audience, but he in no way came up with the concept. I'm sure SAM could pull up some old stories. Thanks and Happy New Year-Brad Wilson, GM Bogus Basin Mountain Recreation Area.Well that was a nice surprise. Perhaps Brad wanted to set the record straight on the podcast, rather than in the comments section alongside various Angry Ski Bros and one guy who said the article was too long for him to read “while riding in the car,” (which really should describe any bit of writing longer than the name of your radio station)?It took us a while, but we finally arranged the chat. Idaho has turned out to be fertile ground for The Storm – the Tamarack pod landed well, and the general managers of Brundage and Sun Valley are scheduled to join me in the fall. As I attempt to sort out both the mystery of Idaho’s secret radness and the market forces and historical events driving the modern U.S. American ski landscape, this sort of insight and historical perspective from the people who lived and are living these things is invaluable.But there was another interesting element to this that I didn’t realize until I began researching the resort for my interview: for a long time, Bogus Basin wasn’t a very good business. For several years, it lost money. And while it never seemed to be in danger of closing, it was in desperate need of new management. Enter Wilson, who, since 2015, has orchestrated one of the greatest big-mountain turnarounds in modern U.S. American skiing. In less than seven years, he has grown revenues from $8 million annually to $18 million. Operating surpluses have grown from negligible to $5 million per year. One hundred percent of that goes back into the mountain, which operates as a nonprofit.This is rare. Most nonprofit ski areas lose money (profitable Bridger Bowl is another exception). Many are taxpayer subsidized. Wilson, who carried four decades of ski industry experience into the corner office with him, has so far been able to navigate whatever bureaucratic and organizational hurdles hobble these other organizations and transform the mountain into an understated gem of the Upper Rockies, a place no one has heard of that everyone could try if they spent about two minutes on logistics. It’s a good mountain that is getting better, and it was a good time to talk about what that better could look like.Questions I wish I’d askedBogus Basin has now explained to me a couple of times why they aren’t interested in joining the Indy Pass, and it has come down to some version of “we don’t want our passholders to have to pay extra for the partner resort lift tickets.” Indeed, Bogus Basin has one of the most phenomenal reciprocal programs (see chart below) in the country – but they charge extra for it. A Bogus Basin-only pass is $549, while the “True Bogus” pass, which includes the reciprocal days, is $80 extra. Granted, that is far less than the $199 Indy AddOn Pass would cost passholders, but it also weakens the rationale that the reciprocal days ought to be embedded in the pass as a native benefit. Wilson explained that the True Bogus pass is a year-round pass and also includes access to all the summer stuff, including scenic lift rides and the MTB trails. He also said there’s a lot of crossover between Bogus Basin’s reciprocals and the Indy Pass - 23 Indy Pass partners are also Bogus Basin reciprocal partners. I’m still not sure that I really understand the fundamental equation here, and I would have liked to have asked a follow-up question or two. But it wouldn’t have really mattered – whatever they’re reason, the mountain is not interested in joining the Indy Pass.What I got wrongI stated in the intro and a couple times throughout the podcast that Bogus Basin was “publicly owned.” That is untrue. While the mountain is registered as a nonprofit organization, it is in fact privately owned by the Bogus Basin Resort Association Inc., which, according to Wilson, is a group of “about 100 volunteers” who own the ski area. If they were ever to sell it, Wilson said, the operation would go to the state.My understanding was that Bogus Basin was running a $1.2 million surplus prior to Wilson’s arrival, but this was, according to Wilson, an isolated figure from one standout year. Most years, the ski area lost money – enough that it totaled “millions of dollars” over the decades, according to Wilson.I stated a couple times in the interview that Bogus Basin was “almost as big as Sun Valley.” It is, in fact, larger by 166 acres. Who knew?In the middle of our conversation, I attempted to call out the name of “the long lift between the two peaks” at Sugarbush, and I blanked. Like a dumbass. Slide. Brook. Express. Maybe if I have a ski publication I ought to be able to remember the name of the longest chairlift on the planet?Why you should ski Bogus BasinBogus Basin seems to have everything a ski resort needs to transform itself into a major name in the U.S. American ski scene: good terrain, plenty of snow, fast lifts, proximity to a major(-ish) airport. It’s larger than the state’s one true legendary destination, Sun Valley, and a bit easier to get to (access road excepted). So why, I asked Wilson, isn’t Bogus Basin lobbying for Ikon membership and tying all these attributes together into a come-ski-me package?Because, he said, the mountain cares about locals and locals alone. That’s its mission: make sure the people of Treasure Valley, Idaho have access to outdoor recreation. So that’s where the mountain focuses its marketing, and that’s what guides its pricing decisions. Peak-day walk-up lift tickets were $73 last year. That’s insane. Who cares if the mountain isn’t on your ULTIMATE FLIPKICK PASS!!! – you can just walk up and ski like it’s Keystone in 2003.There’s another something cool about this local’s focus. When I swing through a locals’ bump in New England, the pace and sense of comfort and urgency is completely different than if I’m at Stratton or Okemo. There’s a sense of, “hey, no need to hurry here. We’re home.” Typically, that sort of place-building self-confidence only exists at places stripped of high-speed lifts and triple-digit trail counts. The big joints – outside of northern Vermont – can rarely retain it. But here is one of the 20 largest ski areas in America, and you’ll find almost no tourists. It’s a place by and for locals, a big ski area that acts like a little one while still skiing like a monster. And that’s pretty cool.Podcast notesWilson came up with Tim Cohee, who is now CEO and part-owner of China Peak, at Heavenly and Big Bear. Cohee joined me on the podcast last year, and there is a ton of crossover between their stories:It’s worth noting that we recorded this podcast on July 11, a week and a half before Gunstock’s senior management team resigned en masse to protest the micromanaging blockheads on the Gunstock Area Commission (GAC), which oversees the county-owned mountain. The parallels between the intransigent GAC and the way that Wilson describes the five-person board of stay-off-my-lawn locals at Diamond Peak are eerie. Certainly we would have made an explicit comparison had it been available to make. Timing.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 78/100 in 2022, and number 324 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane). You can also email skiing@substack.com. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe