Podcasts about Neal Cassady

Hoy vamos a hablar de literatura. De literatura disruptiva. De literatura de los ángeles que deambulan por nuestras calles. De literatura de los eternamente marginados. De literatura de experiencia y confesión. De literatura que busca una verdad. Vamos a seguir tratando el legado de una de las generaciones literarias más importantes del siglo XX, que sigue tan banalmente interpretada como interesa a los poderes establecidos que lo esté, para continuar restando importancia a cualquier forma de arte que se enfrente con esta inmensa zona de confort en la que vivimos que se encuentra continuamente repitiendo la misma historia, una y otra vez, decidida a no aprender absolutamente nada del pasado. Hoy en Radio Nadie al Volante vamos a hablar del novelista más importante de la Generación Beat. La Generación golpeada. La Generación beatífica. Un novelista absolutamente brillante e irrepetible. Un profeta que bajo desde una montaña de Lowell al centro del mundo literario para trazar un nuevo destino en la escritura que estaba por venir, cuya influencia podemos encontrar en prácticamente todos los escritores de la actualidad, aunque ni si quiera lo hayan leído o le hayan prestado la más mínima atención. Ya que su búsqueda de la verdad, la insondable alma que se reflejaba en sus palabras, además de la introducción de la jerga de los arrabales más marginados con una poética subyugante, se convirtieron en la base de un nuevo camino literario que se ha venido desarrollando desde entonces y que conecta directamente con los tiempos que nos han tocado vivir, que reflejan esta lucha entre nuestro espíritu frente a un mundo tecnológico y deshumanizado. Hoy en la sección Poetical Resistance vamos a subirnos a un Hudson recién comprado junto con Rafael Peñas Cruz y surcar las autopistas de todo Estados Unidos a ciento cincuenta kilómetros por hora buscando a Neal Cassady en Denver, a Allen Ginsberg en San Francisco, a William Burroughs en Nueva Orleans y en México. Vamos a observar la realidad desde la cima del Pico Desolación para regresar con la humildad y la beatitud necesarias para contar una historia que todavía está por contar. La historia del camino de nuestra alma. Hablamos del escritor Jack Kerouac.

Few novels have had the cultural impact of Jack Kerouac's speed-fueled mad dash across the continent in search of kicks as On the Road. One doubts the 1960s ever would have happened had Kerouac's Beat Generation coterie not inspired a mass embrace (and mockery) of bohemian jazz culture rebelling against the conformity of Eisenhower-era conservatism and Atomic Age anxieties. This episodes explores the background of Kerouac's famous experiment in spontaneous prose, noting its affinities with both the picaresque and the roman a clef. We talk such pivotal influences as Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady and the steep price of fame the increasingly embittered Kerouac paid as he became the guru to the hipsters and hippies. And we do it all while snapping our fingers, Daddio. 

Jim talks with Lorraine Besser about the ideas in her book The Art of the Interesting: What We Miss in the Pursuit of the Good Life and How to Cultivate It. They discuss the turning point in Lorraine's life that inspired the book, the meaning of the good life, pleasure vs eudaimonia, Stoicism & Epicureanism, unstructured cognitive engagement, the interesting, Seinfeld's relationship to happiness, problems with the pursuit of pleasure & meaning, the arrival fallacy, saints vs human beings, psychological richness, pursuit mode, Neal Cassady of the Beats, high dimensionality, the show Somebody Somewhere, tips for developing an interesting mindset, how much to go into the danger zone, the value of friendship, interesting vs moral, and much more. The Art of the Interesting: What We Miss in the Pursuit of the Good Life and How to Cultivate It, by Lorraine Besser JRS EP 130 - Ken Stanley on Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned Visions of Cody, by Jack Kerouac The First Third, by Neal Cassady JRS EP 269 - Alex Ebert on the War on Genius The Eudaimonic Ethics: The Philosophy and Psychology of Living Well, by Lorraine Besser Lorraine Besser, PhD, is a professor of philosophy at Middlebury College, who specializes in the philosophy and psychology of the good life and teaches popular courses for undergraduates on happiness, well-being, and ethics. An internationally recognized scholar, she was a founding investigator on the research team studying psychological richness.  She is the author of two academic books (The Philosophy of Happiness: An Interdisciplinary Introduction and Eudaimonic Ethics: The Philosophy and Psychology of Living Well) and dozens of professional journal articles on moral psychology.

The Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady of podcasting take to the conversational highway in this week's episode of Good Times, learning a little bit about Michelle Pfeiffer and a lot about life. Guy is curious about his own lack of curiosity towards the world. Tim pitches a Worst Idea season surrounding the 1982 film Grease 2: More Grease. Appropriately, a new guest arrives to impart some homespun wisdom on the boys as they roam around looking for wisdom or enlightenment or something (we're not actually sure, Tim could only listen to the audiobook sample)Our intro music, “Los Angeles,” courtesy of Eyeliner.Get episodes early and in video on our Substack! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Matías Rivas, Arturo Fontaine y Sofia García-Huidobro recomendaron "La carta de Joan Anderson", de Neal Cassady y el Mubi Fest Santiago 2024

Matías Rivas, Arturo Fontaine y Sofia García-Huidobro recomendaron "La carta de Joan Anderson", de Neal Cassady y el Mubi Fest Santiago 2024

Exploring the Grateful Dead's LegacyIn this episode of the Deadhead Cannabis Show, Larry Mishkin takes listeners on a nostalgic journey through the Grateful Dead's music, focusing on a concert from September 30, 1993, at the Boston Garden. He discusses various songs, including 'Here Comes Sunshine' and 'Spoonful,' while also touching on the band's history and the contributions of key figures like Vince Wellnick and Candace Brightman. The episode also delves into current music news, including a review of Lake Street Dive's performance and updates on marijuana legislation in Ukraine and the U.S.Chapters00:00 Welcome to the Deadhead Cannabis Show03:39 Here Comes Sunshine: A Grateful Dead Classic09:47 Spoonful: The Blues Influence14:00 Music News: Rich Girl and Lake Street Dive24:09 Candace Brightman: The Unsung Hero of Lighting38:01 Broken Arrow: Phil Lesh's Moment to Shine42:19 Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds: A Beatles Classic48:26 Marijuana News: Ukraine's Medical Cannabis Legislation54:32 Bipartisan Support for Clean Slate Act01:00:11 Pennsylvania's Push for Marijuana Legalization01:04:25 CBD as a Natural Insecticide01:10:26 Wave to the Wind: A Phil Lesh Tune01:13:18 The Other One: A Grateful Dead Epic Boston GardenSeptember 30, 1993  (31 years ago)Grateful Dead Live at Boston Garden on 1993-09-30 : Free Borrow & Streaming : Internet ArchiveINTRO:                                 Here Comes Sunshine                                                Track #1                                                0:08 – 1:48 Released on Wake of the Flood, October 15, 1973, the first album on the band's own “Grateful Dead Records” label. The song was first performed by the Grateful Dead in February 1973. It was played about 30 times through to February 1974 and then dropped from the repertoire. The song returned to the repertoire in December 1992, at the instigation of Vince Welnick, and was then played a few times each year until 1995. Played:  66 timesFirst:  February 9, 1973 at Maples Pavilion, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USALast:  July 2, 1995 at Deer Creek Music Center, Noblesville, IN, USA But here's the thing:                         Played 32 times in 1973                        Played 1 time in 1974                        Not played again until December 6, 1992 at Compton Terrace in Chandler, AZ  - 18 years                        Then played a “few” more times in 1993, 94 and 95, never more than 11 times in any one year. I finally caught one in 1993 at the Rosemont Horizon in Chicago with good buddies Marc and Alex. My favorite version is Feb. 15, 1973 at the Dane County Coliseum in Madison, WI SHOW No. 1:                     Spoonful                                                Track #2                                                :50 – 2:35 "Spoonful" is a blues song written by Willie Dixon and first recorded in 1960 by Howlin' Wolf. Released in June, 1960 by Chess Records in Chicago.  Called "a stark and haunting work",[1] it is one of Dixon's best known and most interpreted songs.[2]Etta James and Harvey Fuqua had a pop and R&B record chart hit with their duet cover of "Spoonful" in 1961, and it was popularized in the late 1960s by the British rock group Cream. Dixon's "Spoonful" is loosely based on "A Spoonful Blues", a song recorded in 1929 by Charley Patton.[3] Earlier related songs include "All I Want Is a Spoonful" by Papa Charlie Jackson (1925) and "Cocaine Blues" by Luke Jordan (1927).The lyrics relate men's sometimes violent search to satisfy their cravings, with "a spoonful" used mostly as a metaphor for pleasures, which have been interpreted as sex, love, and drugs. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame listed Howlin' Wolf's "Spoonful" as one of the "500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll".[9] It is ranked number 154 on Rolling Stone magazine's 2021 list of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time",[10] up from number 221 on its 2004 list. In 2010, the song was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame "Classics of Blues Recordings" category.[12] In a statement by the foundation, it was noted that "Otis Rush has stated that Dixon presented 'Spoonful' to him, but the song didn't suit Rush's tastes and so it ended up with Wolf, and soon thereafter with Etta James".[12] James' recording with Harvey Fuqua as "Etta & Harvey" reached number 12 on Billboard magazine's Hot R&B Sides chart and number 78 on its Hot 100 singles chart.[13] However, Wolf's original "was the one that inspired so many blues and rock bands in the years to come". The British rock group Cream recorded "Spoonful" for their 1966 UK debut album, Fresh Cream. They were part of a trend in the mid-1960s by rock artists to record a Willie Dixon song for their debut albums. Sung by Bob Weir, normally followed Truckin' in the second set.  This version is rare because it is the second song of the show and does not have a lead in.  Ended Here Comes Sunshine, stopped, and then went into this.  When it follows Truckin', just flows right into Spoonful. Played:  52 timesFirst:  October 15, 1981 at Melkweg, Amsterdam, NetherlandsLast:  December 8, 1994 at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena, Oakland, CA, USA  MUSIC NEWS:                              Lead In Music                                                Rich Girl                                                Lake Street Dive                                                Lake Street Dive: Rich Girl [4K] 2018-05-09 - College Street Music Hall; New Haven, CT (youtube.com)                                                0:00 – 1:13 "Rich Girl" is a song by Daryl Hall & John Oates. It debuted on the Billboard Top 40 on February 5, 1977, at number 38 and on March 26, 1977, it became their first of six number-one singles on the BillboardHot 100. The single originally appeared on the 1976 album Bigger Than Both of Us. At the end of 1977, Billboard ranked it as the 23rd biggest hit of the year. The song was rumored to be about the then-scandalous newspaper heiress Patty Hearst. In fact, the title character in the song is based on a spoiled heir to a fast-food chain who was an ex-boyfriend of Daryl Hall's girlfriend, Sara Allen. "But you can't write, 'You're a rich boy' in a song, so I changed it to a girl," Hall told Rolling Stone. Hall elaborated on the song in an interview with American Songwriter: "Rich Girl" was written about an old boyfriend of Sara [Allen]'s from college that she was still friends with at the time. His name is Victor Walker. He came to our apartment, and he was acting sort of strange. His father was quite rich. I think he was involved with some kind of a fast-food chain. I said, "This guy is out of his mind, but he doesn't have to worry about it because his father's gonna bail him out of any problems he gets in." So I sat down and wrote that chorus. [Sings] "He can rely on the old man's money/he can rely on the old man's money/he's a rich guy." I thought that didn't sound right, so I changed it to "Rich Girl". He knows the song was written about him.  Lake Street Dive at Salt Shed Lake Street Dive is an American multi-genre band that was formed in 2004 at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.[1] The band's founding members are Rachael Price, Mike "McDuck" Olson, Bridget Kearney, and Mike Calabrese. Keyboardist Akie Bermiss joined the band on tour in 2017 and was first credited on their 2018 album Free Yourself Up; guitarist James Cornelison joined in 2021 after Olson left the band. The band is based in Brooklyn and frequently tours in North America, Australia, and Europe. The group was formed in 2004 as a "free country band"; they intended to play country music in an improvised, avant-garde style.[3] This concept was abandoned in favor of something that "actually sounded good", according to Mike Olson.[4] The band's name was inspired by the Bryant Lake Bowl, a frequent hang out in the band's early years, located on Lake Street in Minneapolis. Great show last Thursday night my wife and I went with good friends JT and Marni and Rick and Ben. Sitting in the back near the top of the bleachers with a killer view of the Chicago Sky line looking west to southeast and right along the north branch of the Chicago River.  Beautiful weather and a great night overall.  My first time seeing the band although good buddies Alex, Andy and Mike had seen the at Redrocks in July and all spoke very highly of the band which is a good enough endorsement for me. I don't know any of their songs, but they were very good and one of their encores was Rich Girl which made me smile because that too is a song from my high school and college days, that's basically 40+ years ago.  Combined with Goose's cover of the 1970's hit “Hollywood Nights” by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band it was a trip down memory lane. I would recommend seeing this band to any fan of fun music.  They were all clearly having a great time. Katie Pruitt opened and came out to sing a song with LSD. In 2017, Pruitt was awarded the Buddy Holly Prize from the Songwriters Hall of Fame[4] and signed with Round Hill Records.[5] Her EP, OurVinyl Live Session EP was released in March 2018.[6] She was named by Rolling Stone as one of 10 new country artists you need to know[7] and by NPR as one of the 20 artists to watch, highlighting Pruitt as someone who "possesses a soaring, nuanced and expressive voice, and writes with devastating honesty".[8] On September 13, 2019, Pruitt released "Expectations", the title track from her full-length debut. Additional singles from this project were subsequently released: "Loving Her" on October 21, 2019,[9] and "Out of the Blue" on November 15, 2019.[10] On February 21, 2020, Pruitt's debut album, Expectations, was released by Rounder Records.[11][12] She earned a nomination for Emerging Act of the Year at the 2020 Americana Music Honors & Awards.[13] In the same year, she duetted with Canadian singer-songwriter Donovan Woods on "She Waits for Me to Come Back Down", a track from his album Without People.[14] In 2021 the artist was inter alia part of the Newport Folk Festival in July. Recommend her as well.  2.     Move Me Brightly: Grateful Dead Lighting Director Candace Brightman Candace Brightman (born 1944)[1] is an American lighting engineer, known for her longtime association with the Grateful Dead. She is the sister of author Carol Brightman. Brightman grew up in Illinois and studied set design at St John's College, Annapolis, Maryland.[1] She began working as a lighting technician in the Anderson Theater, New York City, and was recruited by Bill Graham to operate lighting at the Fillmore East.[3] In 1970, she operated the house lights at the Chicago Coliseum with Norol Tretiv.[4] She has also worked for Janis Joplin, Joe Cocker and Van Morrison. After serving as house lighting engineer for several Grateful Dead shows, including their 1971 residency at the Capitol Theatre, Port Chester, she was recruited by the band's Jerry Garcia to work for them full-time.[1] She started working regularly for the Dead on their 1972 tour of Europe (which was recorded and released as Europe 72), and remained their in-house lighting engineer for the remainder of their career.[1] One particular challenge that Brightman faced was having to alter lighting setups immediately in response to the Dead's improvisational style. By the band's final tours in the mid-1990s, she was operating a computer-controlled lighting system and managing a team of technicians.[5] Her work inspired Phish's resident lighting engineer Chris Kuroda, who regularly studied techniques in order to keep up with her standards. Brightman continued working in related spin-off projects until 2005.[1][7] She returned to direct the lighting for the Fare Thee Well concerts in 2015, where she used over 500 fixtures. Now facing significant financial and health related issues. 3.    Neil Young and New Band, The Chrome Hearts, Deliver 13-Minute “Down By The River” on Night One at The Capitol Theatre My buddies and I still can't believe Neil with Crazy Horse did not play their Chicago show back in May this year.  Thank god he's ok and still playing but we are bummed out at missing the shared experience opportunity that only comes along when seeing a rock legend like Neil and there aren't many.   SHOW No. 2:                     Broken Arrow                                                Track #5                                                1:10 – 3:00 Written by Robbie Robertson and released on his album Robbie Robertson released on October 27, 1987.  It reached number 29 on the RPM CanCon charts in 1988.[23]Rod Stewart recorded a version of "Broken Arrow" in 1991 for his album Vagabond Heart.[24] Stewart's version of the song was released as a single on August 26, 1991,[25] with an accompanying music video, reaching number 20 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart and number two in Canada. This ballad is not to be confused either with Chuck Berry's 1959 single or Buffalo Springfield's 1967 song of the same name, written by Neil Young. "Broken Arrow" was also performed live by the Grateful Dead from 1993 to 1995 with Phil Lesh on vocals.[28] Grateful Dead spinoff groups The Dead, Phil Lesh and Friends, and The Other Ones have also performed the song, each time with Lesh on vocals.[29] Played:  35 timesFirst:  February 23, 1993 at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena, Oakland, CA, USALast:  July 2, 1995 at Deer Creek Music Center, Noblesville, IN, USA  SHOW No. 3:         Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds                                    Track #9                                    2:46 – 4:13 "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles from their May, 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was written primarily by John Lennon with assistance from Paul McCartney, and credited to the Lennon–McCartneysongwriting partnership.[2] Lennon's son Julian inspired the song with a nursery school drawing that he called "Lucy – in the sky with diamonds". Shortly before the album's release, speculation arose that the first letter of each of the nouns in the title intentionally spelled "LSD", the initialism commonly used for the hallucinogenic drug lysergic acid diethylamide.[3] Lennon repeatedly denied that he had intended it as a drug song,[3][4] and attributed the song's fantastical imagery to his reading of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland books.[3] The Beatles recorded "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" in March 1967. Adding to the song's ethereal qualities, the musical arrangement includes a Lowrey organ part heavily treated with studio effects, and a drone provided by an Indian tambura. The song has been recognised as a key work in the psychedelic genre. Among its many cover versions, a 1974 recording by Elton John – with a guest appearance by Lennon – was a number 1 hit in the US and Canada. John Lennon said that his inspiration for the song came when his three-year-old son Julian showed him a nursery school drawing that he called "Lucy – in the Sky with Diamonds",[4] depicting his classmate Lucy O'Donnell.[5] Julian later recalled: "I don't know why I called it that or why it stood out from all my other drawings, but I obviously had an affection for Lucy at that age. I used to show Dad everything I'd built or painted at school, and this one sparked off the idea."[5][6][7]Ringo Starr witnessed the moment and said that Julian first uttered the song's title on returning home from nursery school.[4][8][9] Lennon later said, "I thought that's beautiful. I immediately wrote a song about it." According to Lennon, the lyrics were largely derived from the literary style of Lewis Carroll's novel Alice in Wonderland.[3][10] Lennon had read and admired Carroll's works, and the title of Julian's drawing reminded him of the "Which Dreamed It?" chapter of Through the Looking Glass, in which Alice floats in a "boat beneath a sunny sky".[11] Lennon recalled in a 1980 interview: It was Alice in the boat. She is buying an egg and it turns into Humpty-Dumpty. The woman serving in the shop turns into a sheep and the next minute they are rowing in a rowing boat somewhere and I was visualizing that.[3] Paul McCartney remembered of the song's composition, "We did the whole thing like an Alice in Wonderland idea, being in a boat on the river ... Every so often it broke off and you saw Lucy in the sky with diamonds all over the sky. This Lucy was God, the Big Figure, the White Rabbit."[10] He later recalled helping Lennon finish the song at Lennon's Kenwood home, specifically claiming he contributed the "newspaper taxis" and "cellophane flowers" lyrics.[8][12] Lennon's 1968 interview with Rolling Stone magazine confirmed McCartney's contribution.[13] Lucy O'Donnell Vodden, who lived in Surbiton, Surrey, died 28 September 2009 of complications of lupus at the age of 46. Julian had been informed of her illness and renewed their friendship before her death. Rumours of the connection between the title of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and the initialism "LSD" began circulating shortly after the release of the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band LP in June 1967.[24][25] McCartney gave two interviews in June admitting to having taken the drug.[26][27] Lennon later said he was surprised at the idea the title was a hidden reference to LSD,[3] countering that the song "wasn't about that at all,"[4] and it "was purely unconscious that it came out to be LSD. Until someone pointed it out, I never even thought of it. I mean, who would ever bother to look at initials of a title? ... It's not an acid song."[3] McCartney confirmed Lennon's claim on several occasions.[8][12] In 1968 he said: When you write a song and you mean it one way, and someone comes up and says something about it that you didn't think of – you can't deny it. Like "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," people came up and said, cunningly, "Right, I get it. L-S-D," and it was when [news]papers were talking about LSD, but we never thought about it.[10] In a 2004 interview with Uncut magazine, McCartney confirmed it was "pretty obvious" drugs did influence some of the group's compositions at that time, including "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", though he tempered this statement by adding, "[I]t's easy to overestimate the influence of drugs on the Beatles' music." In 2009 Julian with James Scott Cook and Todd Meagher released "Lucy", a song that is a quasi-follow-up to the Beatles song. The cover of the EP showed four-year-old Julian's original drawing, that now is owned by David Gilmour from Pink Floyd.[59] Lennon's original handwritten lyrics sold at auction in 2011 for $230,000. A lot of fun to see this tune live.  Love that Jerry does the singing even though his voice is very rough and he stumble through some of the lyrics.  It is a Beatles tune, a legendary rock tune, and Jerry sings it like he wrote it at his kitchen table. Phil and Friends with the Quintent cover the tune as well and I believe Warren Haynes does the primary singing on that version.  Warren, Jimmy Herring and Phil really rock that tune like the rock veterans they are. The version is fun because it opens the second set, a place of real prominence even after having played it for six months by this point.  Gotta keep the Deadheads guessing. Played:  19 timesFirst:  March 17, 1993 at Capital Centre, Landover, MD, USALast: June 28, 1995 at The Palace of Auburn Hills, Auburn Hills, MI, USA  MJ NEWS: Ukrainian Officials Approve List Of Medical Marijuana Qualifying Conditions Under Country's New Legalization Law2.      Federal Marijuana And Drug Convictions Would Be Automatically Sealed Under New Bipartisan Senate Bill3.      Pennsylvania Police Arrest An Average Of 32 People For Marijuana Possession Every Day, New Data Shows As Lawmakers Weigh Legalization4.      CBD-Rich Hemp Extract Is An Effective Natural Insecticide Against Mosquitoes, New Research Shows   SHOW No. 4:         Wave To The Wind                                    Track #10                                    5:00 – 6:40 Hunter/Lesh tune that was never released.  In fact, the Dead archives say that there is no studio recording of the song.  Not a great song.  I have no real memory of it other than it shows up in song lists for a couple of shows I attended.  Even this version of the tune is really kind of flat and uninspiring but there are not a lot of Phil tunes to feature and you can only discuss Box of Rain so many times.  Just something different to talk about. Played:  21 timesFirst:  February 22, 1992 at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena, Oakland, CA, USALast:  December 9, 1993 at Los Angeles Sports Arena, Los Angeles, CA, USA  OUTRO:                   The Other One                                    Track #16                                    2:30 – 4:22 "That's It for the Other One" is a song by American band the Grateful Dead. Released on the band's second studio album Anthem of the Sun (released on July 18, 1968) it is made up of four sections—"Cryptical Envelopment", "Quadlibet for Tenderfeet", "The Faster We Go, the Rounder We Get", and "We Leave the Castle". Like other tracks on the album, is a combination of studio and live performances mixed together to create the final product. While the "We Leave the Castle" portion of the song was never performed live by the band, the first three sections were all featured in concert to differing extents. "Cryptical Envelopment", written and sung by Jerry Garcia, was performed from 1967 to 1971, when it was then dropped aside from a select few performances in 1985. "The Faster We Go, the Rounder We Get", written by Bill Kreutzmann and Bob Weir and sung by Weir, became one of the band's most frequently performed songs in concert (usually denoted as simply "The Other One"). One of the few Grateful Dead songs to have lyrics written by Weir, "The Faster We Go, the Rounder We Get" became one of the Dead's most-played songs (being performed a known 586 times[2]) and most popular vehicles for improvisation, with some performances reaching 30+ minutes in length. The song's lyrics reference the influence of the Merry Pranksters and in particular Neal Cassady.[2] Additionally, the line "the heat came 'round and busted me for smilin' on a cloudy day"  - one of my favorite Grateful Dead lyrics  - refers to a time Weir was arrested for throwing a water balloon at a cop from the upstairs of 710 Ashbury, the Dead's communal home during the ‘60's and early ‘70's before the band moved its headquarters, and the band members moved, to Marin County just past the Golden Gate Bridge when driving out of the City. In my experience, almost always a second set tune.  Back in the late ‘60's and early ‘70's either a full That's It For The Other One suite or just The Other One, would be jammed out as long as Dark Star and sometimes longer.  During the Europe '72 tour, Dark Star and the full Other One Suite traded off every show as the second set psychedelic rock long jam piece.  Often preceded by a Phil bass bomb to bring the independent noodling into a full and tight jam with an energy all of its own. The Other One got its name because it was being written at the same time as Alligator, one of the Dead's very first tunes.  When discussing the tunes, there was Alligator and this other one. I always loved the Other One and was lucky enough to see the full That's It For The Other One suite twice in 1985 during its too brief comeback to celebrate the Dead's 20th anniversary. Played:  550 timesFirst:  October 31, 1967 at Winterland Arena, San Francisco, CA, USALast:  July 8, 1995 at Soldier Field in Chicago Birthday shout out: Nephew, Jacob Mishkin, star collegiate baseball player, turns 21and all I can say is “no effing way!”  Happy birthday dude! And a Happy and healthy New Year to those celebrating Rosh Hashanah which begins this week. .Produced by PodConx Deadhead Cannabis Show - https://podconx.com/podcasts/deadhead-cannabis-showLarry Mishkin - https://podconx.com/guests/larry-mishkinRob Hunt - https://podconx.com/guests/rob-huntJay Blakesberg - https://podconx.com/guests/jay-blakesbergSound Designed by Jamie Humiston - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-humiston-91718b1b3/Recorded on Squadcast

"Bon, on va tous sortir mater le fleuve et les gens et puis sentir l'odeur du monde", déclare, dans Sur la route, Neal Cassady à la petite bande qui traverse avec lui l'Amérique tandis que la voiture et ses passagers viennent d'embarquer sur un ferry qui, de la Nouvelle Orléans, va les transporter en face, à Algiers, sur l'autre rive du Mississippi. Cet article Sur la route (de Jack Kerouac) est apparu en premier sur Aldor (le blog).

En este especial de Cartagrafías, Laura Piñero nos habla de casos de cartas reales que han inspirado libros y películas como "La postal", "Cartas indiscretas" o "La carta de Joan Anderson. El santo grial de la generación beat" que acaba de publicar Anagrama. la carta que Neal Cassady envía a Kerouac el 17 de diciembre de 1950 y que marcará el estilo de toda una generación, por su rápida prosa, estilo desenfadado y atrevido; incluye además la cronología de Neal Cassady, el facsímil original de la carta y una nota del editor inglés. Una joya de la historia Beat que estuvo desaparecida durante casi sesenta años y fue descubierta en un ático en Oakland (EE.UU) en el 2014. Siguieron maquinaciones legales sobre su propiedad y ahora se publica por primera vez en español.

"Changing Beats: Goose's Drummer Departure and New Musical Ventures"Larry Mishkin dives into a live performance of the Grateful Dead's Mardi Gras Show from 1986. The discussion highlights the additional set by The Nevels, a brief comparison of songs played, and the significance of the venue, Kaiser Convention Center. The conversation transitions to Goose, a contemporary jam band, announcing a change in drummers and their new album release. Larry also touches on the Grateful Dead's record-breaking achievement of having the most Top 40 albums on the Billboard 200. Lastly, it explores the origins and themes of the Grateful Dead's song "Cassidy," drawing connections to individuals associated with the band and the Beat Generation. Throughout, there's a mix of musical analysis, historical context, and personal anecdotes, offering a comprehensive exploration of the music and culture surrounding these iconic bands plus the latest cannabis news. Grateful DeadFebruary 12, 1986 (38 years ago)Henry J. Kaiser Convention CenterOakland, CAGrateful Dead Live at Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center on 1986-02-12 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive Show Title:  Dead and the Neville Brothers Rock Oakland Celebrating Mardi Gras A short Dead show by Nevilles played a set after turning it into a marathon evening of great music  INTRO:              Sugaree                           Track #3                           Start – 1:35                            Jerry comes out smoking on this crowd favorite to get things rocking (second song after Hell in a Bucket).  Released on the Jerry's first solo album, Garcia, in January, 1972.                            Played 362 times                           1st at on July 31, 1971 at the Yale Bowl in New Haven, CN six months before its release                           Last played on July 8, 1995 at Soldier Field in Chicago Kaiser Convention Center is a historic, publicly owned multi-purpose building located in Oakland, California. The facility includes a 5,492-seat arena, a large theater, and a large ballroom.[2] The building is #27 on the list of Oakland Historic Landmarks.,[3] and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2021.[4]The building is located at 10 10th Street, in the Civic Center district of the city. It is next to the Oakland Museum, Laney College, Lake Merritt, and near the Lake MerrittBARTstation.he Beaux-Arts style landmark was built in 1914; the architect was John J. Donovan.[3] The structural engineer was Maurice Couchot.[5] Originally known as the Oakland Civic Auditorium, it was renamed in honor of Henry J. Kaiser after a 1984 renovation.The city closed the facility in 2006 and its future was uncertain for a decade.[1] In 2006, Oakland voters defeated a ballot proposition advocating a library space in the building.The facility was owned by the City of Oakland until 2011, when it was sold to the local redevelopment agency for $28 million.[6] However, the redevelopment agency was dissolved by the State of California in 2012,[7] so ownership reverted to the city of Oakland.In 2015 the city chose a local developer, Orton Development, Inc. to renovate the facility. The plans are to turn it into a commercial space, with the Calvin Simmons Theater being renovated as a performing arts venue. The building is also supposed to be registered as a national historic landmark.In the 1950s and 1960s the Roller Derby played there hundreds of times. Elvis Presley performed at the convention center on June 3, 1956, and again on October 27, 1957. On December 28, 1962, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to an audience of 7,000 at the auditorium to mark the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.[13]Ike & Tina Turner performed at the Oakland Auditorium on January 13, 1967.From 1967 through 1989, the Grateful Dead, an American rock band, performed at the convention center 57 times. Their first 23 concerts at the convention center were billed at "Oakland Auditorium", and later, starting in 1985, the venue changed to "Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center". In the 80's the band started performing "runs" of shows over the course of three to seven days.[                    SHOW No. 1:    Tons of Steel                           Track # 4                           1:07 – 2:40               A “new” Brent song, released on In The Dark in 1987.  Love the harmonizing with Phil – “She wasn't built to travel at the speed a rumor flies, these wheels are bound to jump the tracks, before they burn the ties.”  Crowd loves it too – any excuse to hear Phil sing – this is just about a month before the Hampton show where Phil broke out Box of Rain, Deadheads couldn't get enough of him. David Dodd:Brent wrote the words and music for “Tons of Steel.” It was first performed on December 28, 1984, at the Civic Auditorium in San Francisco (now Bill Graham Civic). The other first in the show was "Day Tripper." I was there! It sounded like a hit to me. But then, I was completely disconnected from whatever it was that passed for hit-making in the 1980s.It was performed fairly regularly throughout 1985 through September 1987, making its last appearance on September 23 at The Spectrum in Philadelphia. That seems odd to me, because it was dropped from rotation just a little more than two months after it was released on In the Dark, in July. Any thoughts?So, it's a song about a train. One of the prime motifs in Grateful Dead lyrics. Quick—name five Grateful Dead songs with trains! No peeking!What do trains evoke in Dead lyrics? Everything from danger (“Caution,” “Casey Jones”) to adventure (“Jack Straw”) to love (“They Love Each Other”) to farewell (“He's Gone”) to whatever that thing is that we feel when Garcia sings about wishing he was a headlight... (and take a look at the back cover of Reflections sometime).                           Played 29 times                           First played December 28, 1984 S.F. Civic Auditorium (NYE run)                           Last played September 23, 1987 at the Spectrum, Philly  SHOW No. 2:    Cassidy                           Track #6                           2:20 – 4:09 "Cassidy" is a song written by John Barlow and Bob Weir[1] and performed by the Grateful Dead, Ratdog, and Phil Lesh & Friends.[2] The song appeared on Bob Weir's Ace, and the Grateful Dead's Reckoning and Without a Net albums.[3]The song was named after Cassidy Law, who was born in 1970 and was the daughter of Grateful Dead crew member Rex Jackson and Weir's former housemate Eileen Law.[1] The lyrics also allude to Neal Cassady, who was associated with the Beats in the 1950s[4] and the Acid Test scene that spawned the Grateful Dead in the 1960s. Some of the lyrics in the song were also inspired by the death of Barlow's father.[5]The song was quoted in the admiring and admirable obituary of Barlow in The Economist.One of my favorite songs, a great sing a long.I really like this version because it gets nice and trippy.  Always good for a helping define the mood of the show, usually about mid to late first set.  A very fun tune.                           Played 339 times                           1st:  March 23, 1974 at the Cow Palace in Daley City, just outside S.F.                           Last:  July 6, 1995 Riverport Amphitheatre, Maryland Heights, MO outside of St. Louis   SHOW No. 3:    Willie and the Hand Jive                           Track # 14                           1:23 – 3;05 Played with the Neville Bros. but without Phil who left the stage for this one song. Willie and the Hand Jive" is a song written by Johnny Otis and originally released as a single in 1958 by Otis, reaching #9 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and #5 on the Billboard R&B chart.[1][2] The song has a Bo Diddley beat and was partly inspired by the music sung by a chain gang Otis heard while he was touring. The lyrics are about a man who became famous for doing a dance with his hands, but the song has been accused of glorifying masturbation,[2]though Otis always denied it.[3] It has since been covered by numerous artists, including The Crickets, The Strangeloves, Eric Clapton, Cliff Richard, Kim Carnes, George Thorogood, The Bunch, and in live performances by The Grateful Dead.[4][5] Clapton's 1974 version was released as a single and reached the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at No. 26. Thorogood's 1985 version reached No. 25 on the BillboardRock Tracks chart. The lyrics tell of a man named Willie who became famous for doing a hand jive dance.[1][2] In a sense, the story is similar to that of Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode", which tells of someone who became famous for playing the guitar and was released two months before "Willie and the Hand Jive".[1] The origin of the song came when one of Otis' managers, Hal Ziegler, found out that rock'n'roll concert venues in England did not permit the teenagers to stand up and dance in the aisles, so they instead danced with their hands while remaining in their seats.[2][5] At Otis' concerts, performers would demonstrate Willie's "hand jive" dance to the audience, so the audience could dance along.[2] The dance consisted of clapping two fists together one on top of the other, followed by rolling the arms around each other.[2] Otis' label, Capitol Records, also provided diagrams showing how to do the hand jive dance. Eric Clapton recorded "Willie and the Hand Jive" for his 1974 album 461 Ocean Boulevard. Clapton slowed down the tempo for his version.[12] Author Chris Welch believes that the song benefits from this "slow burn".[12]Billboard described it as a "monster powerful cut" that retains elements from Clapton's previous single "I Shot the Sheriff."[13]Record World said that "Clapton slowly boogies [the song] into laid-back magnificence. George Thorogood recorded a version of "Willie and the Hand Jive" for his 1985 album with the Destroyers Maverick.[27] His single version charted on the Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, peaking at #25, and reached #63 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.[1][28]Allmusic critic James Christopher Monger called the song one of Thorogood's "high points. Other artists who covered the song include: Johnny Rivers, New Riders of the Purple Sage, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Sandy Nelson, The Tremeloes, Amos Garrett, Ducks Deluxe and Levon Helm.[4]Lee Michaels released a version of the song on his 1971 album, 5th                            To my surprise, played 6 times by the band, all in '86 and once in ‘87                           This is the fist time they ever played it                           Last:  April 4, 1987 at the Centrum in Worcester, MA                SHOW No. 4:   In the Midnight Hour                           Track # 16                           2:20 – 4:01                            Played with the Nevilles, Phil back on stage                           Again, Jerry's playing really stands out.  "In the Midnight Hour" is a song originally performed by Wilson Pickett in 1965 and released on his 1965 album of the same name, also appearing on the 1966 album The Exciting Wilson Pickett. The song was composed by Pickett and Steve Cropper at the historic Lorraine Motel in Memphis, later (April 1968) the site of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Pickett's first hit on Atlantic Records,[1] it reached number one on the R&B charts and peaked at number 21 on the pop charts. Wilson Pickett recorded "In the Midnight Hour" at Stax Studios, Memphis, May 12, 1965. The song's co-writer Steve Cropper recalls: "[Atlantic Records president] Jerry Wexler said he was going to bring down this great singer Wilson Pickett" to record at Stax Studio where Cropper was a session guitarist" and I didn't know what groups he'd been in or whatever. But I used to work in [a] record shop, and I found some gospel songs that Wilson Pickett had sung on. On a couple [at] the end, he goes: 'I'll see my Jesus in the midnight hour! Oh, in the midnight hour. I'll see my Jesus in the midnight hour.'" and Cropper got the idea of using the phrase "in the midnight hour" as the basis for an R&B song.[3] More likely, Cropper was remembering The Falcons' 1962 song "I Found a Love," on which Pickett sings lead and says "And sometimes I call in the midnight hour!" The only gospel record Pickett had appeared on before this was the Violinaires' "Sign of the Judgement," which includes no such phrase.[4]Besides Cropper, the band on "In the Midnight Hour" featured Stax session regulars Al Jackson (drums) and Donald "Duck" Dunn (bass). According to Cropper, "Wexler was responsible for the track's innovative delayed backbeat", as Cropper revamped his planned groove for "In the Midnight Hour" based on a dance step called the Jerk, which Wexler demonstrated in the studio. According to Cropper, "this was the way the kids were dancing; they were putting the accent on two. Basically, we'd been one-beat-accenters with an afterbeat; it was like 'boom dah,' but here was a thing that went 'um-chaw,' just the reverse as far as the accent goes."[5]Pickett re-recorded the song for his 1987 album American Soul Man."In the Midnight Hour" t has become an iconic R&B track,[citation needed] placing at number 134 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time,[citation needed] Wilson Pickett's first of two entries on the list (the other being "Mustang Sally" at number 434).[citation needed] It is also one of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll,[citation needed] Pickett's only such entry. In 2017, the song was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or artistically significant."[7] In 1999, "In the Midnight Hour" recorded in 1965 on Atlantic Records by Wilson Pickett was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Covers:·        The Grateful Dead regularly performed the song in concert from 1967 onwards, most notably with extended improv vocals by frontman Ron "Pigpen" McKernan.  It was occasionally the Dead's “midnight song” at their NYE shows – I saw them do it in 1985 at midnight on the 31st. Fun way to start the new year although I was always partial to Sugar Mag at NYE midnight.                            57 times played                           1st: December 10, 1965 at the Fillmore in S. F.                           Last:  October 17, 1994 at MSG, NYC OUTRO:            Johnny B. Goode                           Track #17                          Start – 1:40               We just featured this song from a different show, but this version demands recognition.  Played with the Nevilles – great mash up of musicians, singers, the whole thing is just great. Interestingly, not the encore, but the last song of the second set (US. Blues was the encore, a ripping version, but no Neville Bros so I went with JBG instead to hear them one more time). Chuck Berry tune                                                                            Dead played it 283 times                        First played: September 7, 1969 at The Family Dog at the Great Highway, S.F.                        Last played:  April 5, 1995 at the Birmingham-Jefferson Civic Center Coliseum, Birmingham, AL .Produced by PodConx Deadhead Cannabis Show - https://podconx.com/podcasts/deadhead-cannabis-showLarry Mishkin - https://podconx.com/guests/larry-mishkinRob Hunt - https://podconx.com/guests/rob-huntJay Blakesberg - https://podconx.com/guests/jay-blakesbergSound Designed by Jamie Humiston - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-humiston-91718b1b3/Recorded on Squadcast

"Marijuana Dispensaries and Predictive Football: A Quirky Comparison"Larry is excited about Michigan's win over Alabama and in tribute to their upcoming January 8th  college football championship game against Washington he features a Grateful Dead concert from January 8th, 1978. He detail the song "Jack Straw" and its history, especially focusing on the singer distribution due to Jerry Garcia's laryngitis during the San Diego show.The conversation veers into the significance of the songs "Lazy Lightning" and "Supplication" within the Grateful Dead's repertoire, reminiscing about experiencing these songs live. It briefly touches on personal events, birthdays, and music preferences.The host humorously correlates the predicted football game winner to the number of Grateful Dead performances and marijuana dispensaries in Michigan and Washington. They discuss cannabis-related legislation and the market dynamics in these states, concluding with light-hearted references to personal travels and cannabis availability across regions.Produced by PodConx Grateful DeadJanuary 8, 1978Golden Hall Community ConcourseSan Diego, CAGrateful Dead Live at Golden Hall, Community Concourse on 1978-01-08 : Free Borrow & Streaming : Internet Archive Jerry has laryngitis so he did not singDonna filled in for him  INTRO:                  Jack Straw                                Track #2                                0:07 – 1:38                 Not on any studio album.  Featured on Europe ‘72                First time played:  October 19, 1971, Minneapolis  (Keith Godchaux's first show)                Last played:  July 8, 1995, Soldier Field, Chicago                Total times played =  476 (No. 11 on list of all time songs played)  SHOW No. 1:      Lazy Lightning>Supplication                                Track #8:  3:00 – end and then straight intoTrack #9:  0:00 – 1:15                 DAVID DODD:    The pair of songs was recorded on the Kingfish album, with Bob Weir as a member of the band. Barlow notes that he wrote the song in Mill Valley in October 1975. The two tracks opened the album, which was released in March 1976.             The Grateful Dead first played the pair in concert on June 3, 1976, at the Paramount Theater in Portland, Oregon. That show also included the first performances of “Might As Well,” “Samson and Delilah,” and “The Wheel.” “Lazy Lightning” was always followed in concert by “Supplication,” and the final performance of the two songs took place on Halloween, 1984, at the Berkeley Community Theater.                                “Supplication” was played by itself, according to DeadBase X, on one occasion subsequently, although it was also played as an instrumental jam more frequently over the years. The final “Supplication” was played 597 shows after the last “Lazy Lightning>Supplication,” on May 22, 1993 at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California. Interestingly, “Supplication” was played one other time separately from “Lazy Lightning,” on September 24, 1976, when it was sandwiched in the middle of a “Playing in the Band.”             a very strong case could be made that “Supplication” is no more a separate song from “Lazy Lightning” than “Sunshine Daydream” is from “Sugar Magnolia.” It's a coda, carrying forward the same themes—only the form of the verse has changed. Lazy Lightning – 111 total times playedSupplication – 123 total times played                  SHOW No. 2:      Estimated Prophet                                Track #14                                2:35 – 4:15                 Weir/BarlowReleased on Terrapin Station released on July 27, 1977 (first studio album released by the band after it returned to live touring after its 1975 hiatus.                               DAVID DODD:  “Estimated Prophet” was first performed by the Grateful Dead on February 26, 1977, at the Swing Auditorium in San Bernardino, California. The Dead also premiered “Terrapin Station” at that show. They played it 390 times in the years that followed, with the longest time between performances being 15 shows—mostly it stayed at the every third or fourth show rank. Its final performance was on June 28, 1995, at The Palace in Auburn Hills, Michigan. It appeared on Terrapin Station, released July 27, 1977.                Blair Jackson quotes Weir, discussing the song, in his biography of the band: “According to Weir, he and Barlow wrote the song from the perspective of a crazy, messianic zealot, a type which one invariably encounters in Deadhead crowds now and again. As Weir explains: ‘The basis of it is this guy I see at nearly every backstage door. There's always some guy who's taken a lot of dope and he's really bug-eyed, and he's having some kind of vision. He's got a rave he's got to deliver.' “                 This is one of those songs, and there are quite a number of them in the Dead's repertoire, in which a not-entirely-sympathetic character is brought to life, and, in the course of being brought to life, is made more sympathetic. I've always thought this was a big strong suit of theire songs, whether in “Wharf Rat” or in “Jack Straw”; whether in “Candyman” or “Friend of the Devil.” Not only is it a recurring trope in the lyrics, but I think it is key to understanding the whole body of the songs, and perhaps literature generally.    SHOW No. 3:      The Other One                                Track # 16                                13:30 – 15:07                 The imagery conjured up by Bob Weir, in his portion of the suite, “That's It for the Other One,” on Anthem of the Sun, is clearly and intentionally a psychedelic ode to the Pranksters and all that entailed. Whether the singer was “escapin' through the lily fields,” or “tripping through the lily fields,” or “skipping through the lily fields” (all versions of the line sung by Weir at various points, according to several extremely careful listeners), the fact is that it was akin to Alice's rabbit hole, because of where it led.     “The bus came by and I got on...that's when it all began.”That line captures so much, in so many different ways, in so few words, that it is a model of what poetry can do—over time, and in a wide variety of circumstances, the line takes on a wide spectrum of association and meaning.                The Dead, of course, were quite literally on THE bus, along with Cowboy Neal (see earlier blog entry on “Cassidy”) and Ken Kesey and Ken Babbs and Mountain Girl and many others whose names are legend among our tribe. What must that have been like? Surely, worthy of a song or two. And Weir came up with a couple of winners, between “The Other One” and “Cassidy.”                 There is something wonderfully cartoonish about the scenes described in the lyrics. A “Spanish lady” hands the singer a rose, which then starts swirling around and explodes—kind of like Yosemite Sam left holding a lit firecracker, leaving a smoking crater of his mind. The police arrest him for having a smile on his face despite the bad weather—clearly, this kid is doing something illegal. Weir's interview with David Gans (along with Phil Lesh) cited in The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics refers to a particular incident:Gans: Now, I remember a version from a little bit earlier, maybe late in '67, you had a different set of lyrics; the first verse is “the heat come ‘round and busted me”...and then there was a second verse that was about “the heat in the jail weren't very smart,” or somethin' like that...Weir: Yeah, that was after my little...Lesh: Water balloon episode?Weir: I got him good. I was on the third floor of our place in the Haight-Ashbury. And there was this cop who was illegally searching a car belonging to a friend of ours, down on the street—the cops used to harass us every chance they got. They didn't care for the hippies back then. And so I had a water balloon, and what was I gonna do with this water balloon? Come on.Lesh: Just happened to have a water balloon, in his hand... Ladies and gentlemen...Weir: And so I got him right square on the head, and...Lesh: A prettier shot you never saw.Weir: ...and he couldn't tell where it was comin' from, but then I had to go and go downstairs and walk across the street and just grin at him...and sorta rub it in a little bit.Gans: Smilin' on a cloudy day. I understand now.Weir: And at that point, he decided to hell with due process of law, this kid's goin' to jail.                So, as to the debut. If we take Weir and Lesh at their word, that the first performance of the song as it now stands coincided with the night Neal Cassady died, in the early morning hours of February 4, 1968. And sure enough, there is a performance of “The Other One” on February 3, 1968, whose verses correspond to the verses as we all know them, for the first time, at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland, Oregon. The song was a fixture in the repertoire from then on, performed at least 586 times that we know of. The only year in which it was not listed as being performed was 1975, the hiatus year.             Part of the suite of songs, That's It For The Other One from Anthem of the Sun.  Made up of four sections:  "Cryptical Envelopment", "Quadlibet for Tenderfeet", "The Faster We Go, the Rounder We Get" (the part everyone knows as “the other one”), and "We Leave the Castle". Like other tracks on the album, is a combination of studio and live performances mixed together to create the final product.            appears that way on Anthem of the Sun, bracketed by Garcia's “Cryptical Envelopment.” But it stands alone most of the time in performance—“Cryptical” was dropped completely from 1973 through 1984, reappeared for five performances in 1985 (the 20th anniversary period—it was broken out following a lapse of 791 shows at the June 16, 1985 Greek Theater show (I WAS THERE!!) in Berkeley), then disappeared again for the remainder of the band's careerI. "Cryptical Envelopment" (Garcia)[edit]"Cryptical Envelopment" is one of the few Grateful Dead songs with lyrics written by Garcia. It was performed from 1967 to 1971 (when it was then dropped), and brought back for a few performances in 1985. Post-Grateful Dead bands such as Dead & Company have returned to performing the song, sometimes as a standalone track separate from the rest of the suite.II. "Quadlibet for Tenderfeet" (Garcia, Kreutzmann, Lesh, McKernan, Weir)[edit]"Quadlibet for Tenderfeet" is a short jam section linking "Cryptical Envelopment" and "The Faster We Go, the Rounder We Get". Transitions between studio and live performances are very audible during this section.III. "The Faster We Go, the Rounder We Get" (Kreutzmann, Weir)[edit]One of the few Grateful Dead songs to have lyrics written by Weir, "The Faster We Go, the Rounder We Get" became one of the Dead's most-played songs (being performed a known 586 times[2]) and most popular vehicles for improvisation, with some performances reaching 30+ minutes in length. The song's lyrics reference the influence of the Merry Pranksters and in particular Neal Cassady.[2] Additionally, the line "the heat came 'round and busted me for smilin' on a cloudy day" refers to a time Weir was arrested for throwing a water balloon at a cop.[2] This section ends with a reprise of "Cryptical Envelopment".IV. "We Leave the Castle" (Constanten)[edit]The only Grateful Dead composition written by Tom Constanten, "We Leave the Castle" is an avant-garde piece featuring prepared piano and other studio trickery.[While the "We Leave the Castle" portion of the song was never performed live by the band, the first three sections were all featured in concert to differing extents. "Cryptical Envelopment", written and sung by Jerry Garcia, was performed from 1967 to 1971, when it was then dropped aside from a select few performances in 1985. "The Faster We Go, the Rounder We Get", written by Bill Kreutzmann and Bob Weir and sung by Weir, became one of the band's most frequently performed songs in concert (usually denoted as simply "The Other One").            The Other one– performed 549 times            First played:  Oct. 31, 1967 at Winterland, S.F.            Last played:  July 8, 1995, Soldier Field, Chicago             That's It For The Other One – performed 79 times            First played:  October 22, 1967 at Winterland, S.F.            Last played:             Cryptical Envelopment – performed 73 times            First played:     Oct. 21, 1967 at Winterland, S.F.            Last played:     Sept. 3, 1985 – Starlight Theater, K.C.              SHOW No. 4:      Truckin'                                Track # 17                                4:22 – 6:03                 The lyrics were written under pressure, in the studio, during the recording of American Beauty (Nov. 1970) (released as a single backed by Ripple in Jan. 1971), with Hunter running back and forth with hastily-written verses that somehow, despite the fact that were purpose-written on the spot, seem to have some pretty good staying power. There are rumors that he originally wrote “Garlands of neon and flashing marquees out on Main Street” as an intentionally hard-to-sing line, just to enjoy watching Weir try to wrap his mouth around them, eventually relenting and substituting “arrows of neon,” just to make it possible to sing.The music credit is shared by Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and Phil Lesh. Hunter gets the credit for the lyrics. And Hunter took the bare bones outline of some of the band's adventures and misadventures and fleshed them out with memorable features, highlighting their trips around the country with specific references to places and occurrences. In the process, he came up with a chorus consisting of a couple of phrases that are now, eternally, in the cultural psyche: “Sometimes the light's all shining on me / Other times I can barely see. Lately it occurs to me / What a long strange trip it's been.”At some point, Hunter was accused of using a cliché in that final phrase of the chorus. When something you make up becomes such a commonly-used turn of phrase that your own invention of it is accused of being cliché, that's some measure of wordsmithing success, I would say.                Truckin'” was first performed on August 18, 1970, at the Fillmore West. The show opened with an acoustic set, and “Truckin'” was the first song. Other firsts that night included “Ripple,” “Brokedown Palace,” and “Operator.” The song was performed 532 times, placing it at number 8 in the list of most-played songs, with the final performance on July 6, 1995, at Riverport Amphitheatre in Maryland Heights, Missouri.  OUTRO:                Johnny B. Goode                                Track #19                                1:10 – 2:51                 Johnny B. Goode" is a song by American musician Chuck Berry, written and sung by Berry in 1958. Released as a single in 1958, it peaked at number two on the Hot R&B Sides chart and number eight on its pre-Hot 100 chart.[1] The song remains a staple of early and later rock music."Johnny B. Goode" is considered one of the most recognizable songs in the history of popular music. Credited as "the first rock & roll hit about rock & roll stardom",[2] it has been covered by various other artists and has received several honors and accolades. These include being ranked 33rd on Rolling Stones's 2021 version[3] and 7th on the 2004 version of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time"[2][4] and included as one of the 27 songs on the Voyager Golden Record, a collection of music, images, and sounds designed to serve as a record of humanity.Written by Berry in 1955, the song is about a semi-literate "country boy" from the New Orleans area, who plays a guitar "just like ringing a bell", and who might one day have his "name in lights".[5] Berry acknowledged that the song is partly autobiographical and that the original lyrics referred to Johnny as a "colored boy", but he changed it to "country boy" to ensure radio play.[6] As well as suggesting that the guitar player is good, the title hints at autobiographic elements, because Berry was born at 2520 Goode Avenue, in St. Louis.[5]The song was initially inspired by Johnnie Johnson, the regular piano player in Berry's band,[7] but developed into a song mainly about Berry himself. Johnson played on many recordings by Berry, but for the Chess recording session Lafayette Leake played the piano, along with Willie Dixon on bass and Fred Below on drums.[5][8] The session was produced by Leonard and Phil Chess.[8] The guitarist Keith Richards later suggested that the song's chords are more typical of compositions written for piano than for guitar.[9]The opening guitar riff of "Johnny B. Goode" borrows from the opening single-note solo on Louis Jordan's "Ain't That Just Like a Woman" (1946), played by guitarist Carl HoganA cover version is featured in the film Back to the Future (1985), when the lead character Marty McFly, played by actor Michael J. Fox, performs it at a high school dance.Played 283 times, almost always as an encore or show closer (back in the days where there were no encores)First played on Sept. 7, 1969 at Family Dog on the Great Highway, S.F.Last played on April 5, 1995 at Birmingham-Jefferson Civic Center Coliseum in Birmingham, AL .Produced by PodConx Deadhead Cannabis Show - https://podconx.com/podcasts/deadhead-cannabis-showLarry Mishkin - https://podconx.com/guests/larry-mishkinRob Hunt - https://podconx.com/guests/rob-huntJay Blakesberg - https://podconx.com/guests/jay-blakesbergSound Designed by Jamie Humiston - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-humiston-91718b1b3/Recorded on Squadcast

Emerging in the conformist 1950s, the Beat subculture pushed back against corporatism and consumerism in favor of a contemplatively nonconformist lifestyle focused on art, poetry, jazz and “kicks.” The small circle of young writers at the core of this lit-erary movement—Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Neal Cassady—were all heavily influenced by the improvisation, illumination. and imagination they found in cannabis.  Among their most acclaimed and lasting works are Kerouac's generation-defining novel On the Road and Ginsberg's epic poem Howl. On this episode, Martin Torloff—author of Bop Apocalypse: Jazz, Race, the Beats and Drugs—explains just how central cannabis was as a creative tool for the Beats as they sought to bust through the conventions of both literature and society. And how along the way, they founded LeMar, America's first cannabis legalization organization. EPISODE ARCHIVE Visit our podcast feed for 90+ episodes of our classic Great Moments in Weed History format, and subscribe now to get a new weekly podcast every Weednesday. PATREON Please support Great Moments in Weed HIstory on Patreon. Supporters get exclusive access to video versions of this podcast and private seshes, plus cool rewards like a signed book. And it truly helps us make the best show possible 

Sam Paddor and Ken Babbs discuss Ken's experiences with Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady and the rest of the Merry Band of Pranksters. Ken also talks about Woodstock, the bus Furthur and his run-in with Jack Kerouac.My Back Pages Website:mybackpages.org

Greg received a very special Christmas present this past year, two tickets to King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. This was his first time seeing the Gizz & they did not disappointed. The actual show garnered some press as they played a 3 hour set and, by all accounts (Greg's included) crushed it. They are quite an impressive group of musicians!Songs:King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - “Magenta Mountain”King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - “Gila”King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - “Shanghai”Reported in a fascinating story by SF Gate, it turns out the CIA tested LSD on unsuspecting Johns at a San Francisco brothel (also owned and run by the CIA) in the 1950s. Named Operation Midnight Climax, the operation meant to test how LSD could be used in obtaining information from Soviet spies…they were basically checking to see if it was a truth serum. Every element of the story spoke to Jay, so he had to cover it. That being said, there's an interesting connection back to music. In the late 1950's, Ken Kesey participated in government studies of hallucinogenic drugs to supplement his income. When, in the early 1960s, he & Neal Cassady formed the Merry Pranksters and hosted Acid Tests in their La Honda house, they mentored a young band called the Grateful Dead, which served as the house band for the parties. Song: Beck & Phoenix - “Odyssey”Earlier this year, a podcast called Trax by Avenged Sevenfold released an episode that contained audio of the band's singer M. Shadows saying they wouldn't be playing two at shows at festivals later this summer. When the episode aired, the singer took to Twitter to deny the information, claiming the podcast had been hacked and that A.I. was used to create the audio of his voice. Flash forward, turns out it was just a hoax by M. Shadows himself. While he claims it was meant to ‘make a point,' Nick's decided the only point it made is that he's an idiot.Song: Squid - “Green Light”

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

1957 - . En medio de la euforia, Kerouac se convence de que el único capaz de interpretar al alter ego de Neal Cassady, representado por Moriarty, era quien había encarnado a Stanley Kowalski en “Un tranvía llamado deseo”, Marlon Brando, y le escribe una carta. En la voz, Bárbara Espejo.

Stati Uniti, seconda metà degli anni '40. Adattamento del romanzo di Jack Kerouac, in cui racconta gli anni che trascorse viaggiando attraverso gli Stati Uniti con il suo amico Neal Cassady e altri personaggi che sarebbero diventate figure di spicco della Beat Generation, tra cui William S. Burroughs e Allen Ginsberg. Un viaggio dentro e fuori se stessi, sullo sfondo di una ribellione generazionale.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Un día como hoy, 8 de febrero. Acontecimientos: 1915, se estrena en Los Ángeles El nacimiento de una Nación, de D. W. Griffith. Nace: 1828: Julio Verne, novelista francés de ciencia ficción. 1880: Franz Marc, pintor alemán. 1926: Neal Cassady, escritor estadounidense. Conducido por Joel Almaguer. Una producción de Sala Prisma Podcast. 2023

Un día como hoy, 4 de febrero. Acontecimientos: 1939: en los Estados Unidos se estrena la película de Una noche en la ópera, de los hermanos Marx. Nace: 1688: Pierre de Marivaux, dramaturgo y novelista francés. 1912: Erich Leinsdorf, director de orquesta y músico austriaco. Fallece: 1590: Gioseffo Zarlino, compositor italiano. 1968: Neal Cassady, escritor estadounidense. 1995: Patricia Highsmith, novelista estadounidense . 2001: Iannis Xenakis, compositor y arquitecto francés de origen rumano. Conducido por Joel Almaguer Una producción de Sala Prisma Podcast. 2023

In this episode of Rock is Lit, Richard Fulco, author of the new novel ‘We Are All Together', is here to take us on a rockin' jaunt through the late 1960s, where we'll encounter several iconic players on the music and literature scene from that era. If you're a fan of the Summer of Love and all the trimmings that go with it, you'll love his novel and this episode. Later, Elliott Landy drops by to talk even more about the 1960s music scene, a period he should know a lot about since he's been photographing rock stars since the mid-60s. Best known for his classic rock photographs, Elliott Landy was one of the first music photographers to be recognized as an “artist.” His celebrated works include album cover photographs for Bob Dylan's ‘Nashville Skyline', The Band's ‘Music From Big Pink' and ‘The Band' album, and Van Morrison's ‘Moondance'. He's also taken portraits of such rock icons as Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, etc. He was the official photographer of the 1969 Woodstock Festival. And . . . Elliott has a new book out, entitled ‘Photographs of Janis Joplin On the Road & On Stage', featuring 129 photos, including 100 unpublished, accompanied by Janis's own words from recorded interviews by David Dalton of ‘Rolling Stone' magazine. HIGHLIGHTS:Richard Fulco and I talk about Syd Barrett's descent into mental illness and his exit from Pink Floyd1967: The Summer of Love—music, culture, vibe—but for African Americans, 1967 was known as The Long Hot SummerRichard's music career when he was in his twentiesThe story and characters in ‘We Are All Together'—Syd Barrett as inspiration behind the character DylanThe Beatles' performance on the ‘Ed Sullivan Show' in 1964The quest for fame and having “IT”The American Dream and racism and toxic ChristianityCharles MansonThe Merry PrankstersThe significance of the title of the novel and its connection to The BeatlesAndy Warhol, The Factory, The Velvet Underground with Nico, Lou Reed and their role in the novelThe depiction of the Monterey Pop Festival in the story, especially the performance of Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding CompanySome of the other icons who make cameos in the novel: Pete Townshend, Eric Burdon, Jann Wenner, Neal Cassady, William S. BurroughsWhat the Jack Kerouac classic novel ‘On the Road' means to Richard and meThe Monkees as a gateway drug to The BeatlesElliott Landy and I talk about How Elliott's concern about the Vietnam War brought him from a job as a photographer on a Danish film set back to America in the mid- to late 1960s to photograph peace demonstrationsHow a Country Joe and the Fish light show at The Anderson Theater in NYC's East Village started Elliott on a new career path photographing musiciansSeeing Janis Joplin, Tim Buckley, and Albert King perform the very first show at the Fillmore East on March 8, 1968Hanging out with Janis Joplin after a NYC gigElliott's style as a “fly on the wall” photographerShooting the album covers of The Band's ‘Music From Big Pink' and ‘The Band', Bob Dylan's ‘Nashville Skyline', and hanging out with guys in the town WoodstockHis experience as the official photographer at Woodstock in 1969 and the spirit of Woodstock and the 1960s MUSIC AND MEDIA IN THE EPISODE IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE:(Royalty Free Music) “Summer of Love” by Roy Edwin Williams“The King is Half-Undressed” by Jellyfish“Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding“See Emily Play” by Pink FloydRoger Waters talks about Syd Barrett on the Joe Rogan Experience“Four” by Sonny RollinsClip of Muhammad Ali explaining his anti-draft, anti-Vietnam War stance“I Am the Walrus” by The Beatles“Ball and Chain” performed by Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company at Monterey Pop Festival“Heroin” by The Velvet Underground with Nico‘The Monkees' Theme Song“Itchykoo Park” by The Small Faces“I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag” by Country Joe and the Fish“Morning Glory” by Tim BuckleyCountry Joe and the Fish chant at Woodstock 1969“To Be Alone With You” by Bob DylanWavy Gravy at Woodstock“Woodstock” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young“Down on Me” Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company LINKS: Richard's website, www.richardfulco.comRichard on Twitter and Instagram, @RichardFulco Link to clip of Roger Waters talking about Syd Barrett on the Joe Rogan Experience, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BcKrk5tFnE&t=66s Elliott's website, www.elliottlandycomElliott on Instagram, @elliott_landy_photography Christy Alexander Hallberg's website: https://www.christyalexanderhallberg.com/Christy Alexander Hallberg Twitter, @ChristyHallbergChristy Alexander Hallberg Instagram, @christyhallbergChristy Alexander Hallberg YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfSnRmlL5moSQYi6EjSvqagLink to Christy Alexander Hallberg's short story on Janis Joplin, “Third Party,” published by ‘Eclectica', https://www.eclectica.org/v20n4/hallberg.html

In this episode of Rock is Lit, Richard Fulco, author of the new novel ‘We Are All Together', is here to take us on a rockin' jaunt through the late 1960s, where we'll encounter several iconic players on the music and literature scene from that era. If you're a fan of the Summer of Love and all the trimmings that go with it, you'll love his novel and this episode. Later, Elliott Landy drops by to talk even more about the 1960s music scene, a period he should know a lot about since he's been photographing rock stars since the mid-60s.   HIGHLIGHTS: Richard Fulco and I talk about  Syd Barrett's descent into mental illness and his exit from Pink Floyd 1967: The Summer of Love—music, culture, vibe—but for African Americans, 1967 was known as The Long Hot Summer The story and characters in ‘We Are All Together'—Syd Barrett as inspiration behind the character Dylan The American Dream and racism and toxic Christianity Charles Manson The Merry Pranksters The significance of the title of the novel and its connection to The Beatles Andy Warhol, The Factory, The Velvet Underground with Nico, Lou Reed and their role in the novel The depiction of the Monterey Pop Festival in the story, especially the performance of Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company Some of the other icons who make cameos in the novel: Pete Townshend, Eric Burdon, Jann Wenner, Neal Cassady, William S. Burroughs What the Jack Kerouac classic novel ‘On the Road' means to Richard and me Elliott Landy and I talk about  How a Country Joe and the Fish light show at The Anderson Theater in NYC's East Village started Elliott on a new career path photographing musicians Seeing Janis Joplin, Tim Buckley, and Albert King perform the very first show at the Fillmore East on March 8, 1968 Hanging out with Janis Joplin after a NYC gig Elliott's style as a “fly on the wall” photographer Shooting the album covers of The Band's ‘Music From Big Pink' and ‘The Band', Bob Dylan's ‘Nashville Skyline', and hanging out with guys in the town Woodstock His experience as the official photographer at Woodstock in 1969 and the spirit of Woodstock and the 1960s   MUSIC AND MEDIA IN THE EPISODE IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE: (Royalty Free Music) “Summer of Love” by Roy Edwin Williams “The King is Half-Undressed” by Jellyfish “Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding “See Emily Play” by Pink Floyd Roger Waters talks about Syd Barrett on the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon “Four” by Sonny Rollins Clip of Muhammad Ali explaining his anti-draft, anti-Vietnam War stance “I Am the Walrus” by The Beatles “Ball and Chain” performed by Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company at Monterey Pop Festival “Heroin” by The Velvet Underground with Nico ‘The Monkees' Theme Song “Itchykoo Park” by The Small Faces “I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag” by Country Joe and the Fish “Morning Glory” by Tim Buckley Country Joe and the Fish chant at Woodstock 1969 “To Be Alone With You” by Bob Dylan Wavy Gravy at Woodstock “Woodstock” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young “Down on Me” Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company   LINKS:  Richard's website, www.richardfulco.com Richard on Twitter and Instagram, @RichardFulco   Link to clip of Roger Waters talking about Syd Barrett on the Tonight Show, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXSHZQ0AEqE   Elliott's website, www.elliottlandycom Elliott on Instagram, @elliott_landy_photography   Christy Alexander Hallberg's website: https://www.christyalexanderhallberg.com/ Christy Alexander Hallberg Twitter, @ChristyHallberg Christy Alexander Hallberg Instagram, @christyhallberg Christy Alexander Hallberg YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfSnRmlL5moSQYi6EjSvqag Link to Christy Alexander Hallberg's short story on Janis Joplin, “Third Party,” published by ‘Eclectica', https://www.eclectica.org/v20n4/hallberg.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

*In the summer of 1964, a very strange vehicle was seen making its way across America. it was a school bus covered in psychedelic colours, driven by NEAL CASSADY, a beat generation character made famous in JACK KEROUAC'S beat generation classic On the Road and piloted by KEN KESEY, the best selling author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.   *The bus contained a raggle-taggle crew of crazy psychonauts calling themselves The Merry pranksters allegedly dispensing LSD in orange kool aid to all and sundry in attempt to turn on America.   *In this episode, we leave Soho to travel to the far west of the USA, to a farm in Oregon to meet KEN BABBS the last of The Merry Pranksters.   *We talk of all sorts of things - Ken Kesey, the Magic Trip and the Acid Tests of course, plus Kerouac, Ginsberg, Viet Nam, Timothy Leary, spontaneity, the good life and dreams. *And at the end we hear some very positive news about a question that I suspect is troubling many of us   *For The Bureau of Lost Culture https://www.bureauoflostculture.com    #bureauoflostculture #kenkesey #kenbabbs #tarot #themerrypranksters #kerouac #ginsberg #themagicbus #lsd  #acid #tomwolfe #counterculture #psychedelic #thegratefuldead #acidtests #nealcassady #beatgeneration     

Slug murder - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOAWrmj9WE4Malabar Spinach - https://shorturl.at/GIU68Absinthe - https://shorturl.at/btvHKCuban Oregano - https://shorturl.at/npqT4What is it - https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x22mkaaSalty slugs - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv4IvyG3J6UStandard Wedding photo - https://shorturl.at/DELM5Family Dog Experience - https://moaonline.org/the-family-dog-experience/Barry Fey - https://303magazine.com/2016/10/red-rocks-famous-barry-fey/Rainbow Music Hall - https://www.facebook.com/groups/51278222808/Motorhead at Rainbow - https://shorturl.at/bortxNig Heist arrest - https://shorturl.at/BDFITPT's Strip Club - https://www.yelp.com/biz/pts-showclub-denver-denver-2Bill Graham - https://shorturl.at/LP129Chet Helms - https://shorturl.at/clmLSTommy Bolin - https://shorturl.at/kMTZ4Regis College - https://shorturl.at/dGTUVGate 10 - https://shorturl.at/gHIJ9Tale of the Dog - https://www.thetaleofthedog.com/Museum of Outdoor Arts - https://moaonline.org/Lothar and the Hand People - https://pleasekillme.com/lothar-hand-people/Zephyr - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1KZAOIUX90Bob Ferbrache Ebbetts Field Photos - https://colomusic.org/photo/ebbets-field-1973-1977/Neal Cassady - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXitvt24Q6wDenver Years - https://shorturl.at/bwAEMMore - https://shorturl.at/biWXYMerry Pranksters  - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uh2kK5IfS-8How Cassady drove - https://shorturl.at/DIQUYSmiley's laundromat - https://shorturl.at/fLQW1Smiley himself - https://shorturl.at/ABPST

Live from Dexter, OR with an original Merry Prankster

•Künstler-Biografie• Eigentlich wollte Carolyn ein ganz normales Familienleben. Mit Mann, Kindern, Haus und Garten. Doch sie hatte Neal Cassady geheiratet, einen Beatnik und Frauenheld aus der exzessiven Kunstszene Kaliforniens der 50er Jahre. // Von Carolyn Cassady / Übersetzung aus dem Amerikanischen: Werner Waldhoff / Bearbeitung: Heike Tauch / Komposition: LAF Überland / Regie: Heike Tauch / WDR 2006 // www.wdr.de/k/hoerspiel-newsletter Von Carolyn Cassidy.

durée : 00:27:00 - Les Nuits de France Culture - De quoi est faite l'écriture de Kerouac ? Comment recevoir, comprendre, des lignes, des mots, des kilomètres de signes écrits comme on meurt ou comme on joue le jazz ? Comment traduire le rythme, la fougue et la tension de ce qui se voulait être une transcription sans fard et à chaud de la réalité ? C'est en 2014 qu'a été redécouverte la lettre qui a sans doute été à l'origine de l'écriture de Sur la route de Jack Kerouac. Une lettre de dix-huit pages, envoyée à Kerouac en 1950 par son ami Neal Cassady, qui dans le roman apparaît sous les traits de Dean Moriarty. "Le plus extraordinaire morceau d'écriture que j'aie jamais lu", disait de ces pages Jack Kerouac.  Ce courrier de seize mille mots, dans lequel Cassady décrivait à Kerouac un voyage vers Denver jalonné de sexe, d'alcool et de drogues, était passé dans les mains de Ginsberg, avant d'échouer chez un petit producteur de musique, dont la fille hérita du précieux document. Ce document d'une valeur inestimable, qui aussitôt retrouvé fut vendu aux enchères, aurait, dit-on, établi les codes de la Beat Generation.  * Mais au-delà des ventes aux enchères et de la légende de la Beat Generation, de quoi est faite l'écriture de Jack Kerouac ? Comment recevoir, comprendre, des lignes, des mots, des kilomètres de signes, écrits comme on meurt ou comme on joue le jazz ? Comment traduire le rythme, la fougue et la tension de ce qui se voulait être une transcription sans fard et à chaud de la réalité ? Autant de questions qu'abordait en 1988 le quatrième volet d'une série intitulée Sur la piste de Kerouac, dans lequel Gilles Farcet s'entretenait avec deux grands spécialistes de la Beat Generation et de l'ouvre de Kerouac, Yves Le Pellec et Bertrand Agostini. Bertrand Agostini évoque une écriture obstinée, de très longues phrases de plusieurs pages, particulièrement dans Visions de Cody. Il raconte que Jack Kerouac était très souvent dans un état d'excitation extrême quand il écrivait, et dans un état de fatigue physique extraordinaire : Il ne dormait plus, il utilisait tous les procédés possibles pour se maintenir éveillé, pour que son inspiration ne se tarisse pas. Et il écrivait dans une sorte de frénésie glorieuse. Kerouac voulait qu'on le considère comme un poète de jazz qui joue des blues à une 'jam session' le dimanche après-midi : _Il se comparait à un joueur de jazz, il disait je veux être considéré comme un saxophoniste qui pousse son chorus dans un après-midi chaud d'été. _ Il y a dans son écriture un caractère qui est éphémère. On a l'impression qu'il a consigné sur la page des choses qui ne faisaient que passer. Mais pour autant il ne corrigeait pas, il ne revenait pas en arrière, gardant le bon le mauvais, l'anecdote et le significatif. Il y a donc à la fois ce désir de saisir le réel, et en même temps dans son texte la crainte de le figer sous une forme qui serait trop définitive. Son texte apparaît toujours comme un "work in progress", un texte en gestation, en développement, en pleine métamorphose. Les chemins de la connaissance - Sur la piste de Kerouac - Le flot spontané de l'écriture quatrième épisode d'une série de cinq, diffusé la première fois le 2 juin 1988 sur France Culture, avec la voix de Jack Kerouac lisant notamment un extrait de Doctor Sax__. Avec Yves Le Pellec (poète, essayiste, spécialiste de la Beat Generation) et Bertrand Agostini (universitaire, spécialiste de la Beat Generation) - Avec la voix de Jack Kerouac lisant un extrait de son roman "Doctor Sax" - Lectures Philippe Bories . Par Gilles Farcet Réalisation Marie-France Nussbaum Les chemins de la connaissance - Sur la piste de Kerouac : 4ème partie, Le flot spontané de l'écriture 1ère diffusion : 02/06/1988

C.M. pays tribute to Jack Kerouac with a poem about Dean Moriarty, the famed character from Kerouac's "On the Road", based on the real-life Neal Cassady, another major figure of the 1950's Beat Generation. This poem first appeared in Rosebud Magazine in 2013, and also appears in C.M.'s poetry collection "How To Carry Soup" (Homebound Publications). --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/cm-rivers/support

There aren't very many original Beatniks left on planet earth and as of this writing, Wavy Gravy is one of the last original Beatnik poets standing. But Wavy isn't just an original Beatnik poet - he's also a improv comedy trailblazer and international comedic activist who's antics included running a pig for president. This series travels from Wavy's childhood to the Gaslight Café Beatnik years to San Francisco where the convergence of psychedelic and comedy history collided, steering Wavy to Hollywood where his comedy career soared, propelling him to the famed Acid Tests and the birth of his Hog Farm commune, bringing Wavy to the Woodstock Peace and Music Festival's stage enshrining him as a global symbol for peace, love and Rock'n'Roll. Wavy's historic and hilarious adventures include his involvement in countless cultural watershed moments in American history… like the fabrication of snapping for applause, the introduction of granola to hippies and in fact, the actual creation of the ethos of the hippie. American Prankster is a chronological deep dive with Wavy, unfolding never-before-heard stories about his life that even he had forgotten until interviews with Rainbow Valentine from Disorganized Crime: Smuggler's Daughter, retrieved them. Stories about Wavy's psychedelic shenanigans with countless icons like: Lenny Bruce, Groucho Marx, BB King, Janis Joplin, Tiny Tim, Del Close, Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, Margo St. James, Thelonius Monk, Bob Dylan, Ram Dass, Albert Einstein, Peter, Paul & Mary, Marlene Dietrich, Severin Darden, Joan Baez, Martha Graham, Alice Cooper, David Crosby, Jackson Brown, Abbie Hoffman, Bob Weir, Mama Cass, John Coltrane, Grace Slick, Jerry Garcia, Paul Krassner, Bill Graham, Tim Harden, Robin Williams, Viola Spolin, Pink Floyd and many more. Guests on this series include members of the Hog Farm, the Merry Pranksters, Grateful Dead Family, KMPX, The Committee, the Family Dog, the Medicine Ball Caravan, the Yippies and other counter culture institutions. Produced by Rainbow Valentine Studios, American Prankster is a proud part of Pantheon Podcasts www.rainbowvalentine.com  

Cronies, A Burlesque: Adventures with Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, the Merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead

Tales From the Lot Ep7 - The Genesis of the Face MeltGeoffrey V. Carter is my guest to discuss the Grateful Dead 7/18/1990 & 7/19/1990 at Deer Creek, Neal Cassady's legacy, and much more.Season 2 Story Request

Inner Journey welcomes Normal Bean and George Walker. Normal bean has shared the Stage with members of (Grateful Dead), Country joe & the Fish) Big brother holding, Quicksilver messenger, Jefferson starship, Three dog Night, CCR revisited Earth, Wind & Fire, Kid Rock, Collective soul, Head East, Black Oak Arkansas, Buddy Rich, Maynard Ferguson, and many others.George Walker's circle consisted of an extraordinary crew of cultural pioneers that included journalist Hunter S. Thompson, Hells Angel Terry the Tramp musician David Crosby, counter-culture hero Neal Cassady and novelist Ken Kesey.

Part of the legendary Kesey tribe talks about his relationship with Neal Cassady and going Furthur.

A Beat to Everything ​by George Walker ​I've been doing Neal Cassady reading performances this year [2017], and the reason I'm able to do that is I know the rhythm. Neal listened to jazz from the time he was a teenager, so he had those rhythms in his head. His speech had those rhythms. He'd be talking and there'd be this syncopation, there'd be a beat to everything he was saying. He wouldn't just be talking, talking, talking. It would be this and then this, and you'd get this sense of a rhythmic flow. He'd be moving to it, too. It was kinetic, and he was driving a car, and it was all rhythmic. There was a jazz beat behind all this stuff, because that was in his head. ​The reason I'm able to do this now is because I know those rhythms. I listened to that music. And listening to Neal and being around him so much, I could see that rhythm in what he was doing: that's what made it effective.

Are you on the bus or off it, man? The book commies, dear listener, are decidedly off it. Or rather, we’re punching, clawing, screaming, and fighting our way out of this goddamn thing, past balls-trippin’ Ken Kesey, speed-addled Neal Cassady, the rest of the Merry Pranksters, and the 400+ freaking pages Tom Wolfe decided to write about them. It’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) this week, and we’re wrapping up our convo on the New Journalism and talking the counterculture’s reactionary side, how saying “f*ck it” actually isn’t a politic, man, and the psychology of going through one’s professional life wearing an all-white three-piece suit. We read the Picador USA edition. Wolfe thought he basically invented New Journalism, and he did coin the term in the 1973 anthology called The New Journalism. You can check that out for more from Wolfe and our old pals Didion, Capote, McGinniss, and other people we might get around to talking about on the show someday. If you don’t want to read Acid Test, or at least want a skimming aid, just watch Magic Trip, the 2011 (heavily edited) release of the film from the Pranksters’ 1964 escapades. Cassady is very high. Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.

1957- Debuta en las librerías la historia del viaje sin retorno de Dean Moriarty, Sal Paradise y los demás personajes, seudónimos todos para habitantes reales de la galaxia beat. La novela aparece ante los lectores como un grito urgente y no demoran las ofertas para adaptarla al cine. En medio de la euforia, Kerouac se convence de que el único capaz de interpretar al alter ego de Neal Cassady, representado por Moriarty, era quien había encarnado a Stanley Kowalski en "Un tranvía llamado deseo", Marlon Brando y le escribe una carta. En la voz, Bárbara Espejo.

In this documentary, director Chuck Workman examines the lasting cultural significance of the Beats, focusing mainly on Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Neal Cassady. Along the way, these freethinking men became friends and associates, and their writing influenced numerous generations of questioning individuals. Workman combines interviews, TV clips and archival footage in his film, in addition to dramatic readings by notable actors such as Johnny Depp. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/drzeusfilmpodcast/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/drzeusfilmpodcast/support

Un día como hoy, 8 de febrero. Acontecimientos: 1915, se estrena en Los Ángeles El nacimiento de una Nación, de D. W. Griffith. Nace: 1828: Julio Verne, novelista francés de ciencia ficción. 1880: Franz Marc, pintor alemán. 1926: Neal Cassady, escritor estadounidense. Una producción de Sala Prisma Podcast. 2021

Un día como hoy, 4 de febrero. Acontecimientos: 1939: en los Estados Unidos se estrena la película de Una noche en la ópera, de los hermanos Marx. Nace: 1688: Pierre de Marivaux, dramaturgo y novelista francés. 1912: Erich Leinsdorf, director de orquesta y músico austriaco. Fallece: 1590: Gioseffo Zarlino, compositor italiano. 1968: Neal Cassady, escritor estadounidense. 1995: Patricia Highsmith, novelista estadounidense . 2001: Iannis Xenakis, compositor y arquitecto francés de origen rumano. Una producción de Sala Prisma Podcast. 2021

BEATNICKÁ GENERACE = beatnici, zbitá generace, generace na cestě - 2. polovina 50. Let - Hipster (esej Normana Mailora the White Negro) x Hipster - Gingsberg - "zasvěcený", "ten, který ví", odpor vůči mainstreamové, zkomercionalizované společnosti - znaky beatniků: prostředí psychiatrických léčeben, sexuální nevázanost, hledají vnitřní svobodu, jazz, alkohol, drogy - halucinogenní látky = zdroj inspirace, odkaz k východním náboženstvím: zen-buddhismus a hinduismus, forma: bopová prozodie, volný verš, metoda proudu vědomí, metoda spontánního psaní, autoři: William Seward Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, později Herbert Gold, Ken Kesey - Vyhoďme ho z kola ven (film Přelet nad kukaččím hnízdem - Miloš Forman - 5 Oskarů) - pohled náčelníka Bromdena, Randle McMurphy x Velká sestra WILLIAM SEWARD BURROUGHS - FEŤÁK - románové vyznání narkomana TEPLOUŠ - ztráta ženy NAHÝ OBĚD - kritika americké společnosti, snové, surrealistické scény ALLEN GINSBERG - KVÍLENÍ A JINÉ BÁSNĚ - 3 části - 1) kontrast schopnosti autorů nové generace a jejich vyřazení ze společnosti 2) zaklíná Molocha 3) Carl Solomon v Rocklandu (znalec francouzské literatury), KADIŠ A JINÉ BÁSNĚ - ztráta matky Naomi - firma litanie JACK KEROUAC -do 6 let mluví francouzsky (francouzsko-kanadský původ) POEZIE - ROZPRÁŠENÉ BÁSNĚ, PRÓZA: MĚSTEČKO A VELKOMĚSTO - román, tragédie vlastní rodiny - otec -alkoholismus + krach rodinné firmy, cca 12 ne zcela úspěšných románů, NA CESTĚ - generační román, Sol Paradise x Dean Moriarty, psal na 75 metrů dlouhou roli, 30 m dlouhý odstavec, putování napříč USA, psal 3 týdny - alkohol, drogy, pouze 1 odstavec (30 m dlouhý) - rozchod se svou druhou ženou Joan Havertyovou Další díla: DHARMOVÍ TULÁCI - meditativní próza, dharma = cesta pravdy , PODZEMNÍCI - román o autorech generace na cestě JEROME DAVID SALINGER - neřadí se přímo k autorům beatnické generace, psal povídky do časopisů, autor jedné knihy KDO CHYTÁ V ŽITĚ - pikareskní román, třídenní cesta Holdena Coufielda přes New York - alkoholismus, sex s prostitutkou, homosexualita - zakázáno v amerických školách, navázal na tradici dětského hrdiny (Huckleberry Finn)

Kultura: architektura - německý Bauhaus (posledním ředitelem Ludwig van der Rohe - vila Tugendhat), výškové budovy (sídlo OSN), malířství - centrum New Yorku - abstraktní expresionismus - Jackson Pollock, pop-art - Andy Warhol (např. Plechovky s fazolovou polévku Cambelli, portréty Marilyn Monroe), hudba - skladatelé - Martinů, Stravinskij, černošská hudba - jazz - Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Leonard Bernstein - Westside story, bebop (bop) - zrychlená, improvizovaná verze jazzu (=> bebopová prozodie u Beatniků), Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson LITERATURA - vliv války - realismus (někdy až naturalismus), moderní kompoziční postupy - střih, prolínání rovin BEATNICKÁ GENERACE (beatnici, zbitá generace, blažená generace, generace na cestě) - od 50. Let 20. Stol., bohémská čtvrť North Beach v San Franciscu, zpočátku program veskrze negativní - odmítání masové, zkomercionalizované společnosti, příklon k východním náboženstvím, hinduismus a zejména zen buddhismus, holdují alkoholu, drogám, sexuální promiskuita, homosexualita, psychiatrické prostředí, policejní represe - autoři: Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, William Seward Burroughs DRAMA - bez předešlé tradice - malé scény - psychologické drama Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Arthur Miller (proti) válečná literatura - Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnengut, Joseph Heller, William Styron NORMAN MAILER - z židovské rodiny, ctižádostivý student, vystudoval letecké inženýrství na Harvardu, od 1942 v armádě, 1944 - 1946 seržant americké armády, studium na Sorbonně - Nazí a mrtví, 2x Pulitzerova cena, od 60. Let beletrizované reportáže, prezident amerického PEN klubu, 3x kandidoval na newyorského starostu (heslo:"Žádný další kecy") - 5% hlasů, 6x ženatý (1. žena Beatrice "Bea"), 8 dětí, zakladatel tzv. Nového žurnalismu - subjektivní pohled (všechna média někým vlastněná) DÍLO NAZÍ A MRTVÍ - protiválečný román, debut, americká kritika: "nejlepší americký román o 2. světové válce" - do té doby, než vychází Hlava XXII), nazí - přežili válku, zcela bez iluzí a snů, mrtví - padli na bojišti kolektivní hrdina - jednotka seržanta Crofta (na ostrově Anapopei) - kolektivní , psychologie, 4 části: Vlna, Hlína a tvar, Rostlina a přízrak, Brázda, zachycuje myšlenkové proudy doby (pragmatismus) - život jedince podřízen vojenským cílům - jednotka poručíka Hearna AMERICKÝ SEN - román, bouřlivá polemika, politik: 2 možnosti - sebevražda nebo vražda manželky - vražda manželky - nikdy není odhalen - autobiografické prvky - sám svou ženu pobodal nožem, ARMÁDY NOCI - reportážní protiválečný román, pochod na Pentagon - největší demonstrace x válce ve Vietnamu, 2 části: 1) popis stávky - ich-forma + následné zatknutí/věznění 2. Část er-forma, vypravěč, popisuje přípravu + realizaci (samotná osoba Mailora okem vypravěče) - Pulitzerova cena KATOVA PÍSEŇ (The Executioner's song) román, Pulitzerova cena, data o skutečném dvojnásobném vrahovi Gary Gilmorovi, biografie MARILYN - o Marilyn Monroe KURT VONNENGUT - rodina německých přistěhovalců, zajat, byl u bombardování Drážďan - 2 možnosti: zešílet nebo uchýlit see do světa fantazie - píše sci-fi, až do r. 2007 přispívá do měsíčníku In These Times, částečné alter-ego Kilgore Trout (1907 - 1981) - spisovatel brakových sci-fi románů JATKA Č. 5 (Slaughterhause Five) - sci-fi román, cituje díla Kilgora Trouta, hlavní hrdina Billy Pilgrim - díky válečnému traumatu schopný neovladatelně cestovat časem, nejednotný děj (epizodické příběhy sjednocuje Billy Pilgrim) SNÍDANĚ ŠAMPIÓNŮ - demytizace amerických dějin, americké hymny, kritika hodnot americké společnosti Závěr: oznámení, že Kilgora Trouta vytvořil sám autor (srov. Epické divadlo Bertolta Brechta) MECHANICKÉ PIANO - antiutopický román, ovládnutí roboty (srov. RUR) JOSEPH HELLER - BŮH VÍ, NĚCO SE STALO, HLAVA XXII - groteska, kapitán amerického letectva John Yossarian - cykličnost - Snowdenovy smrti WILLIAM STYRON - psychologické romány, z Virginie DOZNÁNÍ NATA TURNERA, ULEHNI V TEMNOTÁCH,SOPHIINA VOLBA

Anyone who has followed my show understands the spiritual and multi dimensional aspects of the JFS. All music's are covered, coming directly from the musician's themselves. Black dirt lives again today on my program because of Brent Mydland. He was the multi dimensional keyboardist who expanded The Grateful Dead's sound. He quickly dropped the bar lines and was chasing Phil Lesh down one rabbit hole while Billy Kreutzmann was dancing on a pin. My guest today is someone who knew Brent better than most. One of the most prolific lyricists in the Western World, he and Brent worked together because it was real as thunder, real as the sun shining. It's so very undefined, the last time I spoke with my guest he was in Mobile Bay, AL. We talked about how Ram Dass was a snake oil salesman early in his career, the April experiment, Bob Weir's angular chords, hanging with Neal Cassady and melting into a cube of LSD while watching Raga concerts at Wesleyan. We didn't talk about his collaborator in chief Brent Mydland. By the time "Built To Last" came along Brent had the most published songs on the album. His felt success real fast and it shot him up and brought him back, and eventually underground. His spirit remains with me as it was in the late nineties when I was at Boston University. I had a chance to talk with my guest while he was giving a seminar on the internet at Harvard. We talked about Brent for 10 or 15 minutes but over the years I misplaced it. Lash the mast..... John Perry Barlow welcome back to the Jake Feinberg Show --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jake-feinberg/support

The classic novel,"On The Road" was published on this day in 1957. Jack Kerouac based his novel on road trips with his friend Neal Cassady.

His Shoes and a Note ​Fourteen of us got busted at Ken Kesey’s house for pot. We went to court, and our lawyer made a deal where we all got off except Ken. The reason was that Neal Cassady had already been busted twice for felonies. In California if he went down for another felony, he’d be in jail for another ten or fifteen years. So they made the deal that Ken would take the rap and the rest of us would go free. ​When it came time for Kesey to show up in court and get his conviction, he didn’t show up. He “committed suicide.” He left his shoes and a note on the beach in California and disappeared. What really happened was a buddy of his drove him down to Mexico in an old truck. We knew about it, but the rest of us were still doing the Acid Tests in LA. We had the bus down there, we had a place to stay, and we were doing these shows every Saturday night. The Hog Farm had joined up for that. ​LSD was going to become illegal the next day in California. So after the Acid Tests, we jumped on the bus and headed down to Mexico. We went way down in Mexico, on the ocean. We stayed there six months till our visas expired and we came back along with Kesey. During that time my first wife came down with my kids to visit. My second wife was down there and gave birth to our daughter Casa. Mountain Girl birthed Sunshine Kesey in Mexico. They’re about a month apart in age. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jake-feinberg/support

Never Eat When You’re Angry ​When we met at Stanford, right from the get-go, Kesey and I were making tapes together. We’d sit there in the dark, get high, and rap with microphones into a reel-to-reel tape recorder, doing these off-the-wall, off-the-cuff stories, plots, and situations. We were both good at making stuff up on the spot. Kesey was an absolute genius at it; I would fill in a lot. Actual novels, making up the characters and the dialogue. We’d pull out the tape recorder and we never knew how good it was when we were doing it. We first started doing it in relation to writing. Can this stuff be transposed into a book? Can it be sold; is it worth anything? So later we’d listen to it and see if we thought we had any ability in this direction. It actually was pretty good, but it was really raw. There were no cheerleaders singing “rah, rah, rah.” ​We realized we had a talent, but we were really not brought up to speed in that respect until we had Neal Cassady with us. He was the absolute master at talking. He didn’t always make stuff up, but he was able to talk about everything that had happened in his life and weave it into long convoluted stories that always had a moral to them. “Never eat when you’re angry; no one was ever happy angry.” Luckily on the bus trip in 1964 with Neal driving, we all had microphones set up and speakers going, so you would hear us all talking and rapping at the same time --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jake-feinberg/support

Daughter of Neal Cassady talks candidly about her dad, what is what like to live with him and how he always wanted to please mom. A true Merry Prankster --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/jake-feinberg/support

Hey Dude, I check-in from my new pad, where I'm hunkered down for who knows how long. I also riff on my plan to gather and share my family's trippy stories.PEOPLE: Joan Anderson, Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, Zane Grey PLACES: California, Burbank, Mt. Olympus, Sunset Boulevard, Laurel Canyon, Warner Bros.THINGS: The Handmaid's Tale, Pulitzer, Peabody Award, S-Town, podcast novel, Beat, FBI, artsy-fartsy SOUNDS: birds, airplanes, wind, palm treesGENRE: storytelling, personal narrative, personal journalPHOTO: "Twin Palms" shot on my "new" iPhone6 RECORDED: March 21, 2020 under the flight path of the Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, California GEAR: Marantz Solid State Recorder PMD670, Sennheiser MD 46 microphoneDISCLAIMER/WARNING: Proudly presented rough, raw and ragged. Seasoned with salty language and ideas. Not for most people's taste. Please be advised.HYPE/SWIPE: "Don't call me dude." - John Lurie

Hey Dude, I check-in from my new pad, where I'm hunkered down for who knows how long. I also riff on my plan to gather and share my family's trippy stories. PEOPLE: Joan Anderson, Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, Zane Grey  PLACES: California, Burbank, Mt. Olympus, Sunset Boulevard, Laurel Canyon, Warner Bros. THINGS: The Handmaid's Tale, Pulitzer, Peabody Award, S-Town, podcast novel, Beat, FBI, artsy-fartsy  SOUNDS: birds, airplanes, wind, palm trees GENRE: storytelling, personal narrative, personal journal PHOTO: "Twin Palms" shot on my "new" iPhone6  RECORDED: March 21, 2020 under the flight path of the Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, California  GEAR: Marantz Solid State Recorder PMD670, Sennheiser MD 46 microphone DISCLAIMER/WARNING: Proudly presented rough, raw and ragged. Seasoned with salty language and ideas. Not for most people's taste. Please be advised. HYPE/SWIPE: "Don't call me dude." - John Lurie          

"The Last Time I Committed Suicide" (1997) by Stephen Kay. This one's about Neal Cassady (played by Thomas Jane), muse of the beat writers, amphetamine popping driver of The Merry Pranksters, during maybe the most boring part of his life, rendered duller still by being treated so reverently. A young Neal is listless and dissatisfied in small-town Colorado, working at a tire factory and trying to suss out life's mysteries. These mainly consist of what type of girl is better to have sex with: The suicidal brunette Joan (Claire Forlani) or bubbly blond nympho Mary (Gretchen Mol), ultimately choosing neither. Adrian Brody appears as Neal's friend and Allen Ginsberg analog Ben. Our dude Keanu (who put on weight for the role!) is the believably sleazy barfly Harry. The whole movie is based on a letter between Cassady and Kerouac, and that feels about right since this is meagre fare. Almost like something written by someone on speed in their twenties and translated to a feature film.

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Today we're going to look at the impact Stewart Brand had on computing. Brand was one of the greatest muses of the interactive computing and then the internet revolutions. This isn't to take anything away from his capacity to create, but the inspiration he provided gave him far more reach than nearly anyone in computing. There's a decent chance you might not know who he his. There's even a chance that you've never heard of any of his creations. But you live and breath some of his ideas on a daily basis. So who was this guy and what did he do? Well, Stewart Brand was born in 1938, in Rockford, Illinois. He would go on to study biology at Stanford, enter the military and then study design and photography at other schools in the San Francisco area. This was a special time in San Francisco. Revolution was in the air. And one of the earliest scientific studies had him legitimately dosing on LSD. One of my all-time favorite books was The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe. In the book, Wolfe follows Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters along a journey of LSD and Benzedrine riddled hippy goodness, riding a converted school bus across the country and delivering a new kind of culture straight out of Haight-Ashbury and to the heart of middle America. All while steering clear of the shoes FBI agents of the day wore. Here he would have met members of the Grateful Dead, Neal Cassady, members of the Hells Angels, Wavy Gravy, Paul Krassner, and maybe even Kerouac and Ginsberg. This was a transition from the Beat Generation to the Hippies of the 60s. Then he started the Whole Earth Catalog. Here, he showed the first satallite imagery of the planet Earth, which he'd begun campaigning NASA to release two years earlier. In the 5 years he made the magazine, he spread ideals like ecology, a do it yourself mentality, self-sufficiency, and what the next wave of progress would look like. People like Craig Newmark of Craig's List would see the magazine and it would help to form a new world view. In fact, the Whole Earth Catalog was a direct influence on Craig's List. Steve Jobs compared the Whole Earth Catalog to a 60s era Google. It inspired Wired Magazine. Earth Day would be created two years later. Brand would loan equipment and inspire spinoffs of dozens of magazines and books. And even an inspiration for many early websites. The catalog put him in touch with so, so many influential people. One of the first was Doug Engelbart and The Mother Of All Demos involves him in the invention of the mouse and the first video conferencing. In fact, Brand helped produce the Mother Of All Demos! As we moved into the 70s he chronicled the oncoming hacker culture, and the connection to the 60s-era counterculture. He inspired and worked with Larry Brilliant, Lee Felsenstein, and Ted Nelson. He basically invented being a “futurist” founding CoEvolution Quarterly and spreading the word of digital utopianism. The Whole Earth Software Review would come along with the advent of personal computers. The end of the 70s would also see him become a special advisor to former California governor Jerry Brown. In the 70s and 80s, he saw the Internet form and went on to found one of the earliest Internet communities, called The WELL, or Whole Earth Lectronic Link. Collaborations in the WELL gave us Barlow's The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a safe haunt for Kevin Mitnick while on the run, Grateful Dead tape trading, and many other Digerati. There would be other virtual communities and innovations to the concept like social networks, eventually giving us online forums, 4chan, Yelp, Facebook, LinkedIn, and corporate virtual communities. But it started with The Well. He would go on to become a visiting scientist in the MIT Media Lab, organize conferences, found the Global Business Network with Peter Schwarts, Jay Ogilvy and other great thinkers to help with promoting values and various planning like scenario planning, a corporate strategy that involves thinking from the outside in. This is now a practice inside Deloitte. The decades proceeded on and Brand inspired whole new generations to leverage humor to push the buttons of authority. Much as the pranksters inspired him on the bus. But it wasn't just anti-authority. It was a new and innovative approach in an upcoming era of maximizing short-term profits at the expense of the future. Brand founded The Long Now Foundation with an outlook that looked 10,000 years in the future. They started a clock on Jeff Bezos' land in Texas, they started archiving languages approaching extinction, Brian Eno led seminars about long-term thinking, and inspired Anathem, a novel from one of my favorite authors, Neal Stephenson. Peter Norton, Pierre Omidyar, Bruce Sterling, Chris Anderson of the Economist and many others are also involved. But Brand inspired other counter-cultures as well. In the era of e-zines, he inspired Jesse Dresden, who Brand knew as Jefferson Airplane Spencer Drydens kid. The kid turned out to be dFx, who would found HoHo Con an inspiration for DefCon. Stewart Brand wrote 5 books in addition to the countless hours he spent editing books, magazines, web sites, and papers. Today, you'll find him pimping blockchain and cryptocurrency, in an attempt to continue decentralization and innovation. He inherited a playful counter-culture. He watched the rise and fall and has since both watched and inspired the innovative iterations of countless technologies, extending of course into bio-hacking. He's hobnobbed with the hippies, the minicomputer timeshares, the PC hackers, the founders of the internet, the tycoons of the web, and then helped set strategy for industry, NGOs, and governments. He left something with each. Urania was the muse of astronomy, some of the top science in ancient Greece. And he would probably giggle if anyone compared him to the muse. Both on the bus in the 60s, and in his 80s today. He's one of the greats and we're lucky he graced us with his presence on this rock - that he helped us see from above for the first time. Just as I'm lucky you elected to listen to this episode. So next time you're arguing about silly little things at work, think about what really matters and listen to one of his Ted Talks. Context. 10,000 years. Have a great week and thanks for listening to this episode of the History of Computing Podcast.

In the last episode we took a look at Neal Cassady, the living embodiment of 'it' in the eyes of Jack Kerouac. Today, we'll move beyond the passion and the frenzy exuded by Cassady in On The Road to explore the path to transcendence that Kerouac found elsewhere. We'll find out how Kerouac progressed from a hunger for pleasure and kicks to meditation, solitude, and an inner tranquillity.Like us on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/searchingforitpodcastFollow us on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/searchingforitpodcastSupport the show here: https://www.patreon.com/searchingforitFind out more at http://www.searchingforit.org

In the Beatnik classic On The Road, Jack Kerouac wrote explicitly about the "it" that his buddy Neal Cassady seemed to have found and embody. In this episode, we're going to explore whether Kerouac was really on to something here, and whether there are any lessons that we can take from his adventures with Cassady.Like us on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/searchingforitpodcast Follow us on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/searchingforitpodcast Support the show here: https://www.patreon.com/searchingforitFind out more at http://www.searchingforit.org

Carolyn Cassady was an artist, costume designer, writer, and critical influence on the members of the Beat Generation. Her marriage to Neal Cassady and her friendships with Jack Kerouac and other prominent members of the Beats have long overshadowed her own life and accomplishments, but with the recent publication of new manuscripts discovered after her death that is finally beginning to change. An astonishingly talented and prolific creative force, Carolyn Cassady’s legacy of determination, strength, … The post THE MUSE Carolyn Cassady appeared first on What'shername.

Analysts explain what Coloradans need to know from President Donald Trump's 2019 State of the Union last night. Then, there have only been 16 mountain lion attacks in Colorado in 30 years, including this guest. Next, a new program battles teen suicide through texting. Finally, ahead of his birthday bash, we revisit our interview about Neal Cassady.

Throughout the ‘90s, Keanu Reeves was making interesting and unexpected choices, many paid off while others were disasters. The subject of the latest episode of this all Keanu podcast is somewhere in the middle. A somewhat-biography of poet Neal Cassady, The Last Time I Committed Suicide is occasionally interesting but largely unfocused. Sam (@samshotfirst) is joined by Marcus Irving (@marcusirving317) to discuss the film that co-stars Thomas Jane, Claire Forlani, and Adrien Brody.

In this Alta Podcast, Cathy Cassady and journalist David Ulin discuss the famous letter Cathy's dad, Neal Cassady, wrote author Jack Kerouac, its impact on American literature, Neal Cassady’s major role in the Beat Generation and the little-known but vital work of author Carolyn Cassady.

It was on this day in 1957 that Jack Kerouac published On the Road, which told the story of Kerouac's & his friend Neal Cassady's hitchhiking adventures from 10 years before.

References and allusions include but are not limited to: Body shame, Basketball, Canada, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Dr. James Naismith, the YMCA, Esperanto, Television, hula-hoops, the Internet, Scarlett Rubella, Tuberculosis, Jim Croce, Chicago, kangaroo boxing, The Harlem Globetrotters, New York City, Louis "Red" Klotz, The Philadelphia Sphas, Ken Doll, Judaism, Philadelphia, Rucker Park, South Dakota, Dynarex Cleansing Disposable Enemas, Karkov Vodka, Ralph Nader, Sisyphus, the gender spectrum, Sports Illustrated, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, The Chelsea Hotel, The Borscht Belt, Shecky Greene, Soupy Sales, crows, Mother Russia, the Mayflower, psilocyben, Williston, North Dakota, Arby's, Whapeton, World War II, Betty Boop, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Greatest Generation, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 1960s, Baby Boomers, Richard Nixon, Three Dog Night's "Joy to the World", The Osmonds, The Manson Family, Stanley Kubrik's "A Clockwork Orange", Jim Morrison, D.B. Cooper, Sean Astin, Brian Dunkleman, Ryan Seacrest, Meadowlark Lemon, Yiddish, Tootsie Pops, Super 8 Motel, Kool and the Gang's "Live at the Sex Machine", and black licorice jelly beans.

A weeks-long, boozed soaked, Benzedrine crazed, smoked-filled literary journey across the United States, (no, we're not describing a typical Tuesday for Brian), Jack Kerouac's seminal Beat Generation novel, On the Road, was published on September 5, 1957 and changed the way people wrote and lived...and may have helped usher in the Hippie Movement of the 60's. Jack Kerouac wrote in a new, exciting way he called spontaneous prose (some say our podcast uses a similar haphazard style, but with lesser results), and detailed his travels across late 1940's American landscape with his friend and muse, Neal Cassady (known as Dean Moriarty in the novel). The novel has been hailed as the harbinger of the Beat Generation, and dismissed by many as naïve, and in the words of Truman Capote, typing not writing. Listen as Brian and Rodrigo debate the merits of this novel, and try not to gratuitously swear (we're cleaning it up, folks!). Was On the Road the Hippie handbook? Was it writing or typing? Listen and decide!

October 21, 2015 After a week off while we ramped up for the new site, we’re back at World Cup Coffee and Tea at Northwest 18th and Glisan in Portand for another OMN Coffeeshop Conversation. With me is bassist/composer Jaime Leopold. You may know him from his current group Short Stories. If you’re real good, you know him from the legendary Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks. Jaime was on the scene in San Francisco for all those hippie hijinks…he knew Neal Cassady, Kesey, and nearly all of the other luminaries. It was Cassady who once said, "“We are actually fourth dimensional beings in a third dimensional body inhabiting a second dimensional world!” Jaime even spent a little time in the pokey back then for helping distribute what we in Oregon can now buy in stores. He quit music for a long time, but is back on the scene. Stories? He’s got them.

  “Each day I lacerated myself thinking on her, but I didn’t go back.” ― Neal Cassady, The First Third Ribbon Drive, by Avery Mcdaldno is a game built around mixtapes and road-trips. This story takes place over the course of two mixtapes. In this episode John gives a prompt at about 9 minutes to begin playing the mixtape in sync with the show, but it doesn’t need to sync up perfectly. Mixtape 1: Black and White and Red all Over   Last Kiss – Wayne Cochrane Chili Town – The Hinds Friday I’m in Love – Yo La Tengo Transfusion – Nervous Norvus Why Would You Wanna Live – Wilco Good Feeling – Violent Femmes You Rascal You – Cab Calloway Ingrid Bergman – Mermaid Avenue A Whiter Shade of Pale – Procol Harum The Wind – Cat Stevens B+A – The Beta Band Iron Man – The Cardigans Montreal -40C – Malajube Wave of Mutilation (UK Surf) – Pixies There is a Light The Never Goes Out – The Smiths Paranoid Android – Sia Push – The Cure Before Cologne – Ben Folds Last Kiss – Coeur De Pirate Farewell, Farewell – Fairport Convention   The characters for this game: Kyle (Ken Breese) – Surfer now living on the west coast.   Trent Smith (Brian Jones) – Longshoreman now living in Maine   Chris Robles (John Holt) – Does something with Wall Street in New York   Ribbon Drive’s creator Avery Mcdaldno is an amazing designer who’s work and dedication to story is one of the inspirations for us in starting this show.  Please explore her work on Buried Without Ceremony. Find Ken on twitter @BerlingsBeard Find John on twitter @LordJoho Find Brian on twitter @alowroar Follow us on twitter @boredghostworld Our Bored Ghost theme song is by the amazing Pat Cupples, see his band websiteHotels and Highways. Bored Ghosts we hope you found some distraction from your eternity in the void this week!

Coloradan David Klaus was a launch commander for NASA when the space shuttle Challenger exploded 30 years ago. He's now a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, and he talks about his memories of that day. Then, a new exhibit that one artist hopes inspires the state's art community. Also, they're called "sharrows" and they're meant to prevent collisions between bicyclists and cars, but do they work? Then, a look back at Beat writer Neal Cassady's time in Denver.

Orian Williams was born in Jackson, Mississippi and raised in Houston, Texas. A graduate of Baylor University, Orian moved to Los Angeles in the early 1990’s . After a few years as a successful producer of commercials, Orian formed a fortuitous alliance with the director E. Elias Merhige, whose work Orian was an early champion of after seeing his acclaimed University thesis feature film BEGOTTEN. Williams first film was to set up SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE the Academy Award nominated film starring Willem Dafoe and John Malkovich at Saturn Films, Nicolas Cage’s production company directed by Merhige. In 2004 Orian secured the rights to the book “Touching from a Distance,” a biography based on the life of Ian Curtis, lead singer of the band Joy Division, written by Ian’s widow, Deborah Curtis. Ian committed suicide in 1980 just 2 days before the bands first American tour and reformed under the name New Order. The highly regarded photographer/video director Anton Corbijn, directed and was his first feature film. CONTROL stars Sam Riley as Ian Curtis, Samantha Morton and Alexandra Maria Lara. CONTROL had its world premiere in Cannes 2007 opening the Director’s Fortnight and came away with 3 awards including Best European Film and 4 BAFTA nominations including one win for writer and 10 BIFA nominations with 5 wins including Best Picture. Orian then set his eyes on Jack Kerouac, producing two films about his life, a documentary about the book ‘Big Sur’ then the feature film BIG SUR Written and Directed by Michael Polish, BIG SUR stars, Jean Marc Barr as Kerouac and Josh Lucas as Neal Cassady, Kate Bosworth, Radha Mitchell and Henry Thomas also star. Currently Orian is producing WONDERLAND AVENUE with David Fincher, which focuses on Danny Sugerman and his young life in Los Angeles in the 1960’s, Fred Durst will direct, set up at New Regency. 

Everybody knows football is a tough, violent sport. But the long-term consequences of playing — particularly as they relate to concussions — have only recently started to emerge. The game has gotten safer, but it still poses big risks for the young men who play it. Football forever changed the life of Jack Kerouac, who played for the Columbia Lions in the early 1940s. It brought him to New York, where he met the likes of Allen Ginsburg and Neal Cassady and established himself as an early pioneer of the Beat movement. But, according to a New Yorker story by journalist Ian Scheffler, "Football and the Fall of Jack Kerouac," it also left him scarred — physically and perhaps even mentally. Subscribe to The Season on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes will be released every Thursday. Jack Kerouac played football for Columbia in the early 1940s. (Courtesy Columbia University Archives.)   Wooden crutches that belonged to Jack Kerouac, who used them after breaking his leg while a football player at Columbia, are part of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. (Ilya Marritz)    Players leave the field after Columbia's win over Yale — the team's first Ivy League win since 2012. (Matt Collette)   Defensive lineman Hunter Little with his mom, Julie Meisler, after the Yale game. (Ilya Marritz)  

Sometimes word nerds just need a place to talk shop, and that s what we intend to do here. In this episode of the The Writer Files I ve asked award-winning journalist Adam Skolnick to join me on a guest segment we’re calling Writer Porn. Adam is an award-winning, globetrotting travel journalist, which is kind of a rare thing these days. He is the author and co author of 25 Lonely Planet guidebooks, and has written for publications as varied as the New York Times (for whom he won a big award from the Associated Press Sports Editors last year), ESPN.com, Wired, Men’s Health, Outside, BBC, and Playboy Magazine. He recently finished his first narrative non-fiction book based on his award-winning NY Times coverage of the death of the greatest American free diver of all time, titled One Breath (slated for publication in January). Adam and I talk about how a page one New York Times story became a book, the secret literary legacy of Playboy Magazine, debunking Jack Kerouac’s prolificness, and tips and tricks to staying focused when you re working on multiple projects across multiple timezones. In this 29-minute file Adam Skolnick and I discuss: How a Tragic New York Times Story Became a Book What a Globetrotting Journalist Does to Get a Story The Secret Literary Legacy of Playboy Magazine What Mr. Skolnick Has in Common with Hunter S. Thompson One Great Trick to Stay Focused on Multiple Deadlines Busting The Urban Legend of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” Why You Shouldn’t Compare Yourself to Other Writers How to Stay Organized When You Have a Ton of Research Listen to The Writer Files: Writing, Productivity, Creativity, and Neuroscience below ... Download MP3 Subscribe by RSS Subscribe in iTunes The Show Notes AdamSkolnick.com A Deep-Water Diver From Brooklyn Dies After Trying for a Record Top 10 Writers Published in Playboy ‘I Only Read It For The Interviews’ The Fact and Fiction of ‘On the Road’ Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors by Sarah Stodola Voice Recorder HD for Audio Recording, Playback, Trimming and Sharing Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Kaherine Boo Zeitoun by Dave Eggers Kelton Reid on Twitter Adam Skolnick on Twitter Writer Porn on Twitter Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By   Discover why more than 80,000 companies in 135 countries choose WP Engine for managed WordPress hosting. Start getting more from your site today! The Transcript How Award-Winning Journalist Adam Skolnick Writes Voiceover: This is Rainmaker.FM, the digital marketing podcast network. It’s built on the Rainmaker Platform, which empowers you to build your own digital marketing and sales platform. Start your free 14-day trial at RainmakerPlatform.com. Kelton Reid: These are The Writer Files, a tour of the habits, habitats, and brains of working writers, from online content creators to fictionists, journalists, entrepreneurs, and beyond. I’m your host, Kelton Reid: writer, podcaster, and mediaphile. Each week, we’ll find out how great writers keep the ink flowing, the cursor moving, and avoid writer s block. In this episode of The Writer Files, I’ve asked award-winning journalist Adam Skolnick to join me on a guest segment we call Writer Porn. Sometimes, word nerds just need a place to talk shop, and that’s what we intend to do here. We’ll talk about how a page-one New York Times story became a book, the secret literary legacy of Playboy magazine, debunking the urban legend of Jack Kerouac’s creative Mount Everest, and tips and tricks to staying focused when you’re working on multiple projects across multiple time zones. Just a quick introduction of Adam: he is an award-winning, globetrotting travel journalist, and obviously, that’s a rare thing these days. He is the author and co-author of 25 Lonely Planet guidebooks, and he’s also written for publications as varied as ESPN.com, Men’s Health, Outside, BBC, and Playboy. He’s just now finishing up his first narrative non-fiction book based on his award-winning New York Times coverage of the death of the greatest American free diver of all time. The title of that book is One Breath, and it is slated for publication in January. Congratulations on that accomplishment. That must feel pretty good. Adam Skolnick: Yeah, it feels great. It was a big, big weight off my shoulders. Kelton Reid: To say the least, I’m sure. Adam Skolnick: Yeah. You have this goal in mind, and it’s driving you. It was well over a year from the time when he died to the point of getting the book deal and researching the book and tagging along with the free divers and embedding myself with his friends and family, then writing it. You re so singly focused for all that time. Then when it’s done, you do relax deeply. Kelton Reid: You actually won a pretty big award from the AP last year, didn’t you? How a Tragic New York Times Story Became a Book Adam Skolnick: I don’t know how big it is, but in sports writing, it s fairly large. I was there to do more of a general feature on free diving for the New York Times — this was an event in November 2013 called Vertical Blue. Vertical Blue is the Wimbledon of free diving. It’s competitive free diving, so the divers compete in three different disciplines. They hold their breath, and they go as deep as possible on that one breath, either with fins or without fins, or by pulling a line down and back. That’s the event, and that’s the sport. Because it’s a growing sport, more and more people are getting into it either casually or seriously, and there are schools opening all over the world. It’s an international sport, and I was just there to do a general feature. When he died, tragically, I just happened to be there 10 feet away, so it became a different story right off the bat. That story, I wrote it that evening — the first one, the day-one story — and it went viral. I think it was the New York Times number-one story that day. Then the next day, we did a follow-up piece with a group of writers, myself and three others, and both those stories were widely disseminated. I think people were enamored with the sport, enamored with the this diver, Nicholas Mevoli. The Times submitted it. I had no idea they were submitting it until they were. All the major papers submit to the APSE Awards. It’s a newspaper award, and it’s an organization, and they honor the best newspaper sports writing each year. I was lucky enough to win. Kelton Reid: It is an amazingly tragic story. I know that you spent a lot of time on the road, because I was getting rogue transmissions from you. Were you in Russia? What a Globetrotting Journalist Does to Get a Story Adam Skolnick: Yeah. The book starts with Nick s death, and then it goes back through his life. It’s Into the Wild meets Shadow Divers. Shadow Divers was a bestseller about some wreck divers and their quest to discover this new wreck they found, what it was and to name it. There was a lot of death and destruction involved in that, and it was a really compelling book. Into The Wild, we all know, is an iconic book and Krakauer’s first book. It’s a great book. Just like Chris McCandless in Into The Wild, Nick had a story where he had an even more troubled upbringing than McCandless, and he was searching for something, and he found it free diving after many, many forays into acting, into protest. The water was his refuge. The water was where he was free. He ended up finding this sport later in terms of athletics. He found it when he was 30. His first competition, he broke the American record. He was this gifted athlete, a tremendous athlete, not just as a swimmer. He was also a tremendous athlete on the bike. He was a near-X-Games-quality BMXer and just an incredible soul. Following him is a no-brainer. You want to tell that story. It s an inspiring story. I start with his story, and I go back and forth between him and the 2014 free diving seasons. For that, I went to Roatán for the Caribbean Cup, which is — if you use a tennis metaphor — one of the Grand Slam events, then the World Championships, which is obviously the World Championships, and that was in Sardinia, Italy, and then also back to Vertical Blue a year later. In the meantime, I spent time with two of the great Russian free divers. Natalia Molchanova and her son, Alexey Molchanov, are two of the very best free divers in the world. Natalia is the very best female free diver of all time, and Alexey is the deepest diver with fins, so he’s one of the two best free divers currently in the world. I spent time with them in Russia. Kelton Reid: You’ve been a little busy. Adam Skolnick: Yeah, I’ve been busy. What bridges those two stories in the book — Nick s story and his rise from the time he’s a child to getting into the sport, and then the 2014 season — is the work of some doctors who are trying to figure out what exactly happened to Nick, because his death is something the sport of free diving the sport had never seen before. It wasn’t the type of accident that you would have normally seen in free diving, it was very unique. Kelton Reid: It sounds like a really captivating story, and I actually can’t wait to read it. Adam Skolnick: Thanks, man. Kelton Reid: I just find it fascinating, the fact that you are a guy who is always on the road. You travel many, many months out of the year. You don’t have a permanent home. And then you’re constantly working on a handful of different deadlines simultaneously. One of those has been doing some writing for Playboy. I guess my first question is, how do average citizens react when you mention that you have published with them or are working for them? Adam Skolnick: Average citizens? Kelton Reid: I don’t know. How does your mom react? Adam Skolnick: I don’t know any average citizens, Kelton. Kelton Reid: I m sorry. The Secret Literary Legacy of Playboy Magazine Adam Skolnick: No, I think it’s funny. It depends on who it is. Some people react knowing that Playboy has this rich literary history, but more often, the younger folks I talk to laugh, and they have no idea of this rich history that Playboy has. I have to explain to them that there’s articles. Of course, I just finished up a story about free diving for Playboy that’ll be out in May. Going into the free diving community and explaining to them that I’m going to write a story for Playboy about the sport, some were just mystified that that’s a thing. I don’t know why. My theory is that people go elsewhere for their naked pictures, and that has somehow dimmed Playboy’s history in people s minds, when in reality, it’s still here. It s still kicking. It s still publishing good writers. Kelton Reid: So it s a generational thing, maybe. It s not that generation who’s saying, “I only read it for the articles,” any longer. They don’t even know that it has or had articles to begin with, or that some of the most famous authors of the 20th century published there, including Arthur C. Clarke, Ian Fleming, Nabokov, Chuck Palahniuk, Murakami, Margaret Atwood. The list goes on, and on, and on. You recognize some of those names. Adam Skolnick: Yeah, Gabriel García Márquez. Kelton Reid: Joseph Heller. Adam Skolnick: It’s an honor for me. I think Playboy’s upheld an ideal, and it was always a progressive ideal. It was a pushing-America-forward ideal. That’s how it was founded. Part of that is this great literary tradition. My favorite article probably of all time out of Playboy is the interview that Alex Haley did with Malcolm X, which subsequently led to the autobiography of Malcolm X, which was one of the great works of non-fiction in American history. Playboy has this incredibly rich tradition. It’s an honor to be associated with them. They have a full bar in their lobby. I love it. What Mr. Skolnick Has in Common with Hunter S. Thompson Kelton Reid: Another one of those great interviews, I think, was with Hunter S. Thompson, who, oddly enough, also wrote for the New York Times and was a pretty accomplished journalist himself. Another strange factoid — he relocated to Hawaii to work on a book. It sounds like a familiar theme. Did you write your book in Hawaii? Adam Skolnick: No, but I had relocated to Hawaii to do a story on the GMO corn seed farms that have cropped up where the old sugar cane plantations once were. There is one community that is being heavily impacted by tainted dust that’s blown into their community and damaged property and impacted public health. I moved out there to cover that story. In Hawaii, it’s very hard to parachute in and tell a story well. There’s trust issues with outsiders, and from the surf culture on, it s a very locals-only type spot. It was helpful for me to rent a house there and live there while I burrowed into this story. The person who came and shot that story, a photographer named Lia Barrett, had just come from the Caribbean Cup in 2013 where Nick had hit his 100-meter dive, and she was pitching, “Hey, we should be covering free diving together.” That was the whole genesis of me going to Vertical Blue in the first place, and that story also led me to connect with the New York Times in the first place. That story came out in Salon, but it connected me up with the New York Times science reporter there. It was just an odd turn of events that led me to be in the Bahamas that day, and Hawaii was definitely part of it. As far as me living overseas and working on stuff, that’s something I’ve done frequently. A couple of the places I’ve covered for Lonely Planet include Indonesia and Thailand, which I’ve covered each several times. Whenever I’m there and do those jobs, I tend to stay in the country to write my manuscript. I’ve done that several times. I’ve done the same thing. When I was working on stories, reporting about Myanmar and East Burma and the humanitarian crisis there, I’ve embedded in the community for some time to tell those stories. It’s something I’ve done and something I’ll continue to do. I enjoy doing that part of it and staying longer than most reporters would. Kelton Reid: Let me turn the conversation briefly to productivity. As you’re working on different long-form and short-form pieces, especially when you’re working on a hard deadline but you’re in a beautiful place like Bali or Hawaii, how do you stay focused, first of all? Adam Skolnick: The main thing for me is that I give myself a words-per-day quota. If you’re talking about a longer piece, or even with shorter pieces I do that now, you’re talking about a manuscript that’s upwards of 50,000, 100,000 words. Most books are over 100,000 words or around 100,000 words. The Lonely Planet manuscripts can vary anywhere from 30,000 to 80,000 — I ve had 90,000 words. It’s basically the same amount of material, but it’s just a different type of material. In order to hack through material, you have to give yourself a words-per-day quota, and once you do that, you find that you can meet it. That’s, I think, the hardest thing for newer writers, or younger writers, or any writer really — the focus, the expansion of that focus. Everyone could sit down when they’re inspired and pound out something, could make it sound good. What if they’re tired or dragging or not feeling it? How do they then push on? You have to. In order to put together any big piece of work, you have to be able to push through good days and bad days. Frankly, even the bad days could turn out better work than the good days sometimes. It’s just a matter of being there, showing up, doing it. I give myself a 3,000-word-a-day quota that I try to meet, whether I’m doing a Lonely Planet guide book or I’m doing my book. If I’m doing a magazine story — a feature story where I’ll still try to turn out a lot of words — I might do 2,000 words day then, because I’m going over the words a bit more carefully at first. Whereas with books, you can put out this massive amount of work and then go back through and edit and cut afterwards. With a magazine article, maybe you do a little bit less of that. Maybe you don’t let yourself ramble for 10,000 words because that’ll make it hard to cut. Kelton Reid: On that note, I know a lot of online content creators and novelists in general are working on multiple projects simultaneously. When you say you have your 3,000-word-a-day quota, when you have a manuscript-length project, like a 100,000-word project, but then you also have smaller projects that you’re working on the side, how do you balance the two? One Great Trick to Stay Focused on Multiple Deadlines Adam Skolnick: I think there’s two things. First of all, before you’re going to sit down and write a big piece of work, unless it’s fiction, and even if it is fiction, there’s the research element. For me, I end up in a rhythm where I’m researching and then I’m writing, and then I’m researching and then I’m writing. Then, if I have overlapping deadlines, which does happen, usually it’s when I’m researching something bigger. Then I might take on write-ups or something smaller, or I might have to research for two different things at the same time. I’ve also done things where I’ve researched all day and then at night I’ve written on a different project. That’s happened. Recently, when I had to do a draft of the Playboy story and turn that in prior to the submission date of my book, I did take a few days out of that work on One Breath to dedicate to the magazine article. I’m a one-trick pony. I have a hard time multitasking, to be honest with you. I tend to give everything to what I’m doing at that moment. That’s what I do. For me, multitasking is, “Okay, tomorrow I’m going to do this in the day, and in the night I’m going to do 1,500 words because I can’t do 3,000 because I’m only going to do a night session,” or something like that. I’ll just have that marked in my head. That’s the best multitasking I can probably do. You can’t help it if you’re doing a project that’s three months long. Something else might come up in between that you have to connect to. Usually, what I’ll do is I’ll disconnect from the longer project for a period of time, a couple of days, and do the smaller one. That’s usually what I do because it’s just easier for me to do that then try to do them all at once. Kelton Reid: That single-minded focus is good. I definitely ascribe to that. Subscribe to that? Do I aspire to that? Adam Skolnick: Yes, I don’t know. You could ascribe, aspire, and subscribe to it. Kelton Reid: Just a quick pause to mention that The Writer Files is brought to you by the Rainmaker Platform, the complete website solution for content marketers and online entrepreneurs. Find out more and take a free 14-day test drive at Rainmaker.FM/Platform. Busting the Urban Legend of Jack Kerouac s On the Road Kelton Reid: Speaking of another famous author who published in Playboy: Jack Kerouac actually published in Playboy. He started his journalistic career, and I didn’t know this, as a sports reporter for the New York World Telegram — I’m sure that exists still. Adam Skolnick: Yeah, right. Kelton Reid: He s most well known for writing the 120,000-word novel On The Road in three weeks — I put three weeks in quotes — on this 120-foot long scroll of paper that he famously taped together or whatever. Adam Skolnick: Right. Didn’t Jim Irsay buy the scroll recently? Kelton Reid: I don’t know, the original or what? Adam Skolnick: The owner of the Colts — I think he bought the original scroll. Kelton Reid: That’s wild. I did get a chance to see that scroll actually here in Denver. Adam Skolnick: I bought that hardcover they released. Kelton Reid: Is that right? Adam Skolnick: Yeah, right around the auction time, they finally released it in hardcover. All the real names are in there that he doesn’t use. He uses his own name. He uses William Burroughs’ name. He uses Allen Ginsberg s name, and of course Neal Cassady s name. Kelton Reid: What I found most interesting about the fact that it’s this urban legend, or this creative Mount Everest, that he sat there for three weeks with this single-pointed attention and supposedly wrote this 120,000 word novel in those 20, 21 days on speed. It’s an urban legend that writers hold dear to their hearts. I read recently that that might not be as accurate as we thought it was, because according to Sarah Stodola s book Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors –which I highly recommend, I love it, it’s pure writer porn in my opinion — Kerouac wrote six drafts of On the Road in the three years leading up to those three weeks where he finally nailed it. When he wasn’t sitting at that typewriter, he was taking notes prolifically, much like you do, journalists do. When he was criss-crossing the country, and meeting all these crazy people, and collecting all these stories, that was part of his process. Really, he wrote that novel over three years time. Adam Skolnick: Yeah, the first draft, you mean. Kelton Reid: The first draft. It wasn’t published for another 6 years. Adam Skolnick: Yeah, I think that everyone loves the wunderkind, genius story, so that’s probably where that came from. Plus, he did sit down there for three weeks and do the scroll and do his 120,000 words. If you read the published version of that, you’ll see there’s no indentations or anything like that, so you can see his manic mind moving and working in a way that you can’t when you read the polished work. There’s something raw there. Of course the polished version is a classic. It s probably one of my favorite books of all time. Why You Shouldn t Compare Yourself to Other Writers Adam Skolnick: Yeah, it can be daunting when you start to compare yourself to other writers. I think that’s what that does. When you hear about that, you’re like, “God, I’m not capable of that. Does that mean I’m not capable of writing a book as good as On the Road. Does that mean I’m not capable of making a living as a writer?” I think those are the kinds of neurotic mind loops that we tend to go into, especially writers who are internal and in their head a lot anyway. At least I am. I think that debunking that myth is really good, because obviously you don’t get to be where he got to at such a young age without incredible work ethic. It’s not about doing speed and sitting down for three weeks, but it’s about doing it all the time. I think that’s what he did, and that’s why he was so great. Kelton Reid: Flexing that muscle — because he had really been writing from an early age. His father introduced him to writing. He had his own printing press. He started early. I think by the time he was 22, his writings amounted to something like 600,000 words. I think even William Burroughs said that when he met Jack Kerouac close to that, he probably had written closer to a million words. He was flexing that muscle, so to speak. That’s a monumental feat, but he was clearly a professional athlete in the sport. Adam Skolnick: Yeah, it’s the classic Gladwell thing now, the 10,000 hours. He had that real young. That’s what did it. Again, it’s no mystery why he was so great. He found his voice young because he was writing so much, and it became so natural for him. Yeah, there probably was something happening creatively by him doing this: “I’m going to sit down for three weeks and do it until it’s done, do it right this one last time.” We can’t completely let go of that myth because there had to be some sort of chemical reaction with the muse that made it so great that time he sat there. Otherwise he wouldn’t have continued to sit there. There’s something to that last gasp, three-week marathon that he pulled off that I think matters. Yeah, I think that’s not what makes him great. What makes him great is the work before and after. Kelton Reid: He was meticulously organized, this guy. He had files and notebooks and kept everything pretty neatly organized. I think a lot of his Beat friends who would visit his apartment would always marvel at the fact that he was just very regimented guy. I think he was also a merchant marine, if I’m not mistaken. Adam Skolnick: Yeah. Kelton Reid: When you’re travelling the world, Adam Skolnick, and you’re working on all these different mediums, you’re probably using not only notebooks, photographs, audio interviews. How to Stay Organized When You Have a Ton of Research Adam Skolnick: I’m not the most organized guy in the world. You are very organized, Kelton Reid. I’m not the most organized. When I first started, because I was a travel writer before I was doing harder core stories — and I still do a lot of travel stories, and obviously the Lonely Planet stuff is all travel-related — I would just use Moleskine notebooks or whatever notebooks I could find on the road if I ran out of notebooks. I kept it all in notebooks, kept all those notebooks on me, and when it came time to do the write-up, I would just go through the notebooks at the time. Then when Lonely Planet started to go to a shared publishing platform, I was part of the experimental phase. One of the higher-ups that came on the road with us — and we did this in Colorado, as a matter of fact — asked me to start taking notes on my phone just to see if I liked it. At first I didn’t like it at all, and I felt like I was losing something in terms of creativity with the mind and the whole idea of the hands and a brain. They’re connected, and if I’m writing something analog then my brain s working differently and somehow opening more organically, which was really probably just my own laziness, not wanting to have to adapt to using this app and using my thumbs. He said, “Just try it for a week, and then you can go back to the notebooks if you want.” Pretty soon after, I found that putting it into a phone right away, uploading it right away, actually made it easier and makes me, a less organized person, more organized. I started to use the phone, and I now use all sorts. I use the phone when I’m interviewing subjects. I’ll use the phone for notes sometimes. I’ll use my notebooks sometimes, depending on the situation, and then I’ll also use the audio recorder. Voice Recorder HD is the app I use, because you can back it up to Dropbox. I do that for some interviews. I’ll use any number of those three things. Then afterward, I’ll have to transcribe the voice interviews. I’ve done most of that myself, although I do farm it out sometimes to transcription services if I’m under the gun, and that’s just something I’ve started to experiment with lately. Then, in terms of the book, which I don’t have call to do this for anything else because if I’m doing a Lonely Planet guide book or a magazine story I could keep everything in one Notes file. I don’t need more than one Notes file, and then I can email that to myself and put it into a Word document. Now all my notes are already transcribed from the notebook, which is my phone, and it’s all right there. Then I can go through it and highlight what I need and look through it. I don’t have to do much. Although, when I’m writing a magazine story, what I’ll do is I’ll outline the story, and then I’ll go through those notes and take the chunks that I think relate to the subject or the turn in the story that I’m working. I’ll slot that into that piece in the outline so I have it all there for me. That’s how I’ll organize it right before I do the work. In terms of this book, there were literally hundreds of interviews. I couldn’t tell you right now because I haven’t counted them all out, but it’s over 100 interviews. I’m interviewing different people about different things and different places. Then I started to slot them into their own separate document. I’m just using Word documents, and I’ll just slot in those notes or that transcribed interview into the North Carolina pile, or the New York City pile, or the Russia pile, or the Sardinia pile, that kind of stuff. That’s how I did that. Then when it came down to the outline, again with the book, I did more detailed outline, and I started slotting in those big slabs of notes into those sections. So when I started working on it, it was all there for me. That’s how it worked. I probably have 1,000 Word pages of notes to work on. Kelton Reid: You’ve just got this huge raw block of clay, so to speak, that you start molding from there. You’ve got to start with something, and that’s pretty amazing. Last quick question for Adam Skolnick: can you give us a couple recommendations for favorite non-fiction reads you read recently? Adam Skolnick: I read Behind the Beautiful Forevers, which is beautiful. Katherine Boo, I believe, is the author. It s a beautiful book about the Mumbai slums. Zeitoun — a few years ago I read that. it’s one of my favorite nonfiction books of all time. That’s about a handyman who was caught in the floods in New Orleans after Katrina. It s a beautiful book by Dave Eggers, and I highly recommend that. Kelton Reid: Great one. Adam Skolnick: Then Harry Potter is my favorite non-fiction book I’ve ever read — J.K Rowling. Amazing how she embedded herself into that world. I found it magical … oh wait. Kelton Reid: I’m not familiar. Adam Skolnick: Are you not familiar with that work? Kelton Reid:Adam Skolnick: Thanks for having me. Kelton Reid: We will speak with you in another episode very soon. I appreciate your time. Remember, every great sculpture starts with a raw block of clay. Keep working, and eventually it will start to look like something. Thanks for flipping through Adam’s file with me. If you enjoyed this episode of The Writer Files, feel free to leave a comment or a question on the website at Writerfiles.FM. You can also easily subscribe to the show on iTunes and get updates on new episodes. Please leave a rating or a review on iTunes to help other writers find us. You can find me on Twitter @KeltonReid. You can find Adam @adamskolnick. You can find more Writer Porn @writerporn. Cheers. Talk to you next week.