Podcasts about Nowhere Man

Hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot pay tribute to the late musical genius Brian Wilson, who died at age 82. They'll discuss Wilson's transcendent music, including doing a deep dive on his masterpiece, Pet Sounds.Join our Facebook Group: https://bit.ly/3sivr9TBecome a member on Patreon: https://bit.ly/3slWZvcSign up for our newsletter: https://bit.ly/3eEvRnGMake a donation via PayPal: https://bit.ly/3dmt9lUSend us a Voice Memo: Desktop: bit.ly/2RyD5Ah Mobile: sayhi.chat/soundops Featured Songs:The Beach Boys, "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times," Pet Sounds, Capitol, 1966The Beatles, "With A Little Help From My Friends," Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Parlophone, 1967The Beach Boys, "In My Room," Surfer Girl, Capitol, 1963The Beach Boys, "Lonely Sea," Surfin' USA, Capitol, 1963The Beach Boys, "Don't Worry Baby," Shut Down Volume 2, Capitol, 1964The Beach Boys, "Surf's Up," Surf's Up, Brother/Reprise, 1971The Beach Boys, "Still I Dream of It (Original Home Demo, 1976)," Good Vibrations:Thirty Years of the Beach Boys, Capitol, 1993The Beach Boys, "Sloop John B," Pet Sounds, Capitol, 1966The Four Freshman, "I Remember You," Four Freshmen and 5 Trombones, Capitol, 1955The Gamblers, "LSD-25," Moon Dawg!/LSD-25, World Pacific, 1960The Beach Boys, "I'm Waiting for the Day," Pet Sounds, Capitol, 1966The Beach Boys, "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)," Pet Sounds, Capitol, 1966The Beach Boys, "Let's Go Away for Awhile," Pet Sounds, Capitol, 1966The Beach Boys, "Caroline No," Pet Sounds, Capitol, 1966The Beach Boys, "You Still Believe in Me," Pet Sounds, Capitol, 1966The Beach Boys, "Pet Sounds," Pet Sounds, Capitol, 1966The Beach Boys, "Hang On to Your Ego," Pet Sounds, Capitol, 1966The Beach Boys, "That's Not Me," Pet Sounds, Capitol, 1966The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows," Pet Sounds, Capitol, 1966The Beach Boys, "Little Deuce Coupe," Pet Sounds, Capitol, 1966The Beatles, "Nowhere Man," Rubber Soul, Parlophone, 1965The Beatles, "She's Leaving Home," Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Parlophone, 1967Horsegirl, "2468," Phonetics On and On, Matador, 2025See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Nowhere Man, mind control, parapolitical thrillers, 1990s, The X-Files, Larry Hertzog, The Prisoner, Bruce Greenwood, Joel Surnow, gang stalking, identity erasure, deep fakes, surveillance state, Nowhere Man as prophetic, electroshock therapy, Artichoke Treatment, psychic driving, militias, Order of Nine Angles (O9A), digital Gladio, Sovereign Order of Saint John (SOSJ), private intelligence groups, FBI, political assassinations, doubles, extreme low frequency (ELF), UFOs, MILAB (military abductions), Colonia Dignidad, false memories, the importance of memories to identityMusic by: Keith Allen Dennishttps://keithallendennis.bandcamp.com/Additional Music: Ilsahttps://ilsa.bandcamp.com/album/preyer Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's time for a minor-league Lennon "classic" this week as we stray into Nowhere, Man (cough). Does the song deserve its high reputation? Is it fair to call it entry-level Beatles? And does it have the weight that's often attributed to it?   Rankings: Track-by-track Ranking eMail: beatlesstuffology@gmail.com Twitter: @beatles_ology Instagram: beatlesstuffology JG's Blog: Judgementally Reviews… Andrew's Blog: Stuffology   Produced By: JG McQuarrie

A Gab Four spectacular!    Jon Stone, Lonnie Pena, Martin Quibell and I gathered to talk about the characters and stories in Beatles songs.     They started with covers of folks like Long Tall Sally, and this episode takes us through Rubber Soul, where the band gives us Michelle, the Nowhere Man, and asks about the possibility of exchanging golden rings in favor of getting behind the wheel to "Drive My Car!"

Richtig gelesen. Auf Michelle Zauners viertem Album «For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women)» singt doch tatsächlich Schauspieler Jeff Bridges («The Big Lebowski») mit. Tiefe Reibeisen-Stimme trifft auf zarten Indie-Pop. Passt das? +++ PLAYLIST +++ · 22:54 – TREAT MODE von AVALON EMERSON · 22:49 – HUMAN NATURE von DESIRE · 22:45 – DIGITAL LOVE von DAFT PUNK · 22:40 – TARDIS von GREENTEA PENG · 22:34 – NOWHERE MAN von GREENTEA PENG · 22:31 – FAMILY AFFAIR von SLY & THE FAMILY STONE · 22:28 – WOES OF THE WORLD von SABA & NO I.D. · 22:23 – CRASH von SABA & NO I.D. FEAT. RAPHAEL SAADIQ & KELLY ROWLAND · 22:19 – I LOVE YOU von KT GORIQUE & RIGA · 22:13 – SINGULIER von KT GORIQUE · 22:10 – MERLOT & GRIGIO von YAYA BEY FEAT. FATHER PHILIS · 21:55 – BRUISED LUNG von SUPERCHUNK FEAT. ROSALI · 21:51 – RUNNING/PLANNING von CMAT · 21:46 – DOWN ON THE FREEWAY von LAEL NEALE · 21:41 – AGE OF CONSENT von NEW ORDER · 21:37 – CLEAN HEART von PERFUME GENIUS · 21:33 – QUEEN von PERFUME GENIUS · 21:30 – REDONDO BEACH von PATTI SMITH · 21:23 – VILLAIN von ANNAHSTASIA · 21:21 – IF NOT NOW, IT'S SOON von SELF ESTEEM · 21:15 – I DO THIS ALL THE TIME von SELF ESTEEM · 21:12 – STAY von SEA LEMON · 21:08 – GHOSTS & ALIENS von CLAIRE MY FLAIR · 21:05 – APPEAR DISAPPEAR von THE YOUNG GODS · 20:56 – FLIGHT SIMULATOR von PRUNE CARMEN DIAZ · 20:53 – LEMME KNOW von MY MORNING JACKET · 20:48 – BEGINNING FROM THE ENDING von MY MORNING JACKET · 20:41 – MAHGEETAH von MY MORNING JACKET · 20:37 – COUNTRY HOUSE von BLUR · 20:33 – MEN IN BARS von JAPANESE BREAKFAST FEAT. JEFF BRIDGES · 20:30 – PICTURE WINDOW von JAPANESE BREAKFAST · 20:25 – HONEY WATER von JAPANESE BREAKFAST · 20:22 – MEGA CIRCUIT von JAPANESE BREAKFAST · 20:18 – BE SWEET von JAPANESE BREAKFAST · 20:15 – MY LOVE MINE ALL MINE von MITSKI · 20:11 – THIS BOY IS TOCOTRONIC von TOCOTRONIC · 20:07 – ELECTRIC GUITAR von TOCOTRONIC

Send us a textA group of friends become convinced they are not alone after moving into a new Rough House in the suburbs. When the original owners return, all hell breaks loose! On Episode 658 of Trick or Treat Radio we have a return engagement a long time in the making as we meet up with the Rough House Publishing boys to find out what they've been cooking up. We also discuss the film Presence from director Steven Soderbergh! There is much reminiscing, shenanigans, and plenty of uncrustables humor! So grab your camera with the 14mm lens, a medical grade vomit bag, and strap on for the world's most dangerous podcast!Stuff we talk about: BUFF, Boston Underground Film Festival, Reanimator 4K Remaster, Gabe Bartolos, Rough House Publishing, Derek Rook, Steve Van Samson, Gore Shriek Resurrectus Vol 3, Tom Skulan, Mike Wasion, Silver Scream, Mark Bloodworth, weird westerns, The Nowhere Man, Ravenous, Randy Carter Dies A Lot, FantaCo, Slaygoth, Lucio Fulci's Zombie, Scare-A-Con, Jack-o-Lantern breasts, hottest Quint ever, Corpse Monger, This Slaughterhouse Earth, Marz Attacks, Slaughtered Kingdom, Death Mask, Newbury Comics, Bull Moose, Strawberries, The Brady Bunch, That's Entertainment, Capital Toy, Turning Page, Faust, Dead World, Garbage Pail Kids, Fangoria, Satanic Panic, 18” singing Rob Zombie doll, Trollenberg, The Dead Omnibus, Redneck Zombies, Clutch of Personalities Podcast, oil painting of uncrustables, Forbidden Planet, John Carpenter, The Real Ghostbusters, Retro Ridoctopus, The Crow, Throbbos, Dead of Winter Film Fest, Slanging and Banging, O.J. Samson, MZ the booth babe, Cinema Box, Prevue Network, The 4k77 Project, Steven Soderbergh, Presence, Lucy Liu, David Cronenberg, Knock Knock, Eli Roth, House Humpers on the brain, Done and Doner, Companion, Sophie Thatcher, Jack Quaid, The Passion of the Christ, Black Dynamite, Cedric Yarbrough, Too Many Cooks, Robot Chicken, 12 Oz. Mouse, Aluminum Falcon, and A-Thrilla The Hun.Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/trickortreatradioJoin our Discord Community: discord.trickortreatradio.comSend Email/Voicemail: mailto:podcast@trickortreatradio.comVisit our website: http://trickortreatradio.comStart your own podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=386Use our Amazon link: http://amzn.to/2CTdZzKFB Group: http://www.facebook.com/groups/trickortreatradioTwitter: http://twitter.com/TrickTreatRadioFacebook: http://facebook.com/TrickOrTreatRadioYouTube: http://youtube.com/TrickOrTreatRadioInstagram: http://instagram.com/TrickorTreatRadioSupport the show

Spartacus is a figure who floats between history and allegory. Read by Helen Lloyd. Engelsberg Ideas is funded by the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit. Image: Promotional poster for the film, Spartacus. 1960. Credit: Allstar Picture Library Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

People have been saying for decades that Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was secretly replaced by a look-alike, but what really keeps the theory alive are the eerie clues hidden in Beatles songs and album covers.Darkness Syndicate members get the ad-free version. https://weirddarkness.com/syndicateInfo on the next LIVE SCREAM event. https://weirddarkness.com/LiveScreamInfo on the next WEIRDO WATCH PARTY event. https://weirddarkness.com/TVIN THIS EPISODE: It's one of the strangest conspiracy theories ever created by mortal man. Was Beatles legend Paul McCartney killed in 1966 and replaced with a look-alike? We look at the evidence for and against this bizarre rumor. SOURCES AND RESOURCES FROM THE EPISODE…Episode Page at WeirdDarkness.com: https://weirddarkness.com/NowhereMan“Nowhere Man: The Paul McCartney Death Conspiracy” posted at The UnRedacted:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/paulisdead=====(Over time links seen above may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)= = = = ="I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness." — John 12:46= = = = =WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2025, Weird Darkness.=====Originally aired: November, 2018TRANSCRIPT: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckj5j6m

Watch the video version HERE!:  https://youtu.be/C8aCNTUmLbE A Real Nowhere Man by The Better Neversis based on the original idea of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and The Beatles in their 1965 hit single Nowhere Man and embellished by the pessimist philosophy of David Benatar that takes Lennon's notion of futility a step further. Original music and lyrics John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Original arrangement The Beatles. This version's lyrics by Matti Häyry, inspired by David Benatar's seminal book Better Never to Have Been 2006, and performance by Matti Häyry. A REAL NOWHERE MAN Better never to have been This your parents didn’t see So they sent you down that road of misery Failed to grasp asymmetry Thought too much of quality Couldn’t see that all they had was fantasy Sleep is good, calm is better (No life) But the best would be never (All right) To have been brought into this sadness at all They were blind as they could be With their dreams of harmony Pollyanna be their guide to destiny Sleep is good, calm is better (No life) But the best would be never (All right) To have been brought into this badness at all Nonexistence, let me stay Can there be a brighter day? Without you and me and without anyone Sleep is good, calm is better (No life) But the best would be never (All right) To have been brought into this madness at all Better never to have been Quality, asymmetry Better never to have been at all Better never to have been at all Dedicated to Amanda Sukenick on her the-meaning-of-life-according-to-the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy better-never-to-have-been anniversary. 

In this weeks episode of The Heroes Rewatch, Cory and Tom discuss the web series Nowhere Man, and the graphic novel issues 136-144. Blog Post

In this conversation, my returning guest (see episodes 189 – 245 – 266) discusses his recent visit to Spain, where a belated Beatlemania is in full swing. He also offers his insights on the recent May Pang documentary, The Lost Weekend: A Love Story, as well as his take on David Whelan's investigation into John Lennon's … 286: Nowhere Man '24 with Robert Rosen  Read More »

The Beatles Made a Mistake - Mike Cohn It should be a comfort to each of us to know that we'll probably never make a mistake as big as the one The Beatles made during this week in 1966.Following the critical and sales success of the prior year's “Rubber Soul” album, the Beatles released a new album, “Yesterday and Today,” in June 1966. The album was released in the US and Canada and contained songs that had been withheld from North American versions of other Beatles albums.Musically, it's a solid album featuring “Drive My Car,” “Nowhere Man,” “We Can Work It Out,” “Day Tripper,” and of course “Yesterday.”Where The Beatles went wrong was in the choice of the album art. The cover photo shows all four Beatles wearing white butcher's frocks with decapitated baby dolls and pieces of raw meat in their laps.The photo is in incredibly bad taste even to the less sensitive standards of 1966.I'm sharing this because on this day in 1966, The Beatles admitted their mistake and replaced the cover.I think The Beatles' experience with this botched album cover decision holds four lessons.First, it's important to acknowledge that when a team is moving quickly, team members will make some mistakes. “Yesterday and Today” was The Beatles' twelfth album released in North America in four years.Second, when you make a mistake, be willing to admit it. The Beatles did not blame their label for picking the cover. In fact, band members insisted on the cover over the label's objection.The Beatles said the cover was meant to be a protest against the savagery of the Vietnam War. I've always been skeptical of that as it seemed like an after-the-fact justification, but I appreciate that they owned the mistake.Third, correct mistakes as quickly and cost-effectively as possible. The Beatles corrected their mistake by recalling all the albums and pasting a new cover on top of the original.A few savvy DJs and record store owners did not return all the albums. This created a lucrative collector's market in copies of “Yesterday and Today” with the original cover. I've seen some sell for nearly $40,000.Finally, after correcting the mistake, put the memory aside and move on. After the cover debacle of “Yesterday and Today,” The Beatles went on to make some of their greatest albums including “Revolver,” “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the white album, and “Abbey Road.”Mistakes happen. I make them. You make them. Your team makes them. Even The Beatles made mistakes.Let's acknowledge that mistakes will happen when moving quickly. Then, when we do make a mistake, let's own it, correct it, and move beyond it.It's quite possible, as it was for The Beatles, that your best work may follow your biggest mistake, How to connect with AgileDad: - [website] https://www.agiledad.com/ - [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/ - [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/ - [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

Singles Going Around- Back To Mono Volume 7Mono records, recorded and transferred in mono. To be played loud!Buffalo Springfield- "Sit Down I Think I Love You"The Byrds- "Artificial Energy"Otis Redding- "Hard To Handle"Nat Stuckey- "What Am I Doing In L.A.?The Monkees- "I'll Be Back Up On My Feet"The Yardbirds- "Drinking Muddy Water"Ray Charles- "I Got A Woman"Love- "Orange Skies"The Beach Boys- "Girl Don't Tell Me"The Beatles- "Nowhere Man"Bo Diddley- "Who Do You Love"The Rolling Stones- "Get Off Of My Cloud"The Mar-Keys- "Mustang Sally"The Uniques- "Treat Her Right"Dr John- "Walk On Guilded Splinters"

Rafa Panadero y Javier del Pino hablan de músicos como Chubby Checker, Alice Cooper y Elvis Presley... junto al amigo secreto descubrimos los secretos detrás de la canción "Nowhere Man".

The last episode ended on the evening of December 3, 1965 when my father suffered a massive heart attack and died instantly during a nationally televised NBA game between the 76ers and the Boston Celtics. As I have mentioned previously, this podcast series examines the enormous evolution of consciousness that began to take place in the western world during the 1960s, as well as looking at what happened to me personally during those turbulent times, which led to my life-long commitment to the greater realization of human potential.    It also seeks to present you with some fundamental ideas that you might find useful as you grow through your own inner evolutions, which is something we all do, whether we're aware of it or not. That's just the way our intelligence works.   So, even though the events surrounding my father's death were extremely traumatic, this is not an autobiographical look back at them. Rather, I am going to describe some of the realizations I experienced that began to open a pathway to my own inner growth. Looking back, I can see that without having the slightest awareness of it, I had been living my life with two basic assumptions that I had been taking for granted. As naïve as they may sound, these assumptions were simple - everything was going to stay the same and I would live forever. Of course, I knew intellectually, as we all do, that that these ideas are ridiculous. In reality, everything here ends and everybody dies. But as we all must learn sooner or later, there is a vast difference between believing a theoretical concept of something and experiencing the actual reality of it. And that's especially true when it comes to death.   For me, the aspect of sudden death was a powerful and rather rude teacher. It felt like having to learn how to swim because the luxury cruise ship you had been traveling on suddenly sank. The next thing you know, you're in a freezing cold ocean and you notice a dark fin sticking out of the water that keeps circling around you. Of course, that's just a metaphor, but that's kind of what it felt like. But the death itself was also accompanied by an additional, mysterious factor. On top of the shock and grief, I had to ponder the series of cryptic omens that had preceded it that were particularly unnerving. As you may recall, along with several less intense events, I had experienced a jarring, recurring nightmare for three consecutive nights, followed by an incredibly vivid dream that my father had died. Then in the real world, the dream came true the following night, exactly the way I had dreamt it. In metaphysical terms, this is called a pre-cognitive dream, which is more of a prophecy than a premonition. So, under the surface, there was always this other element that I had to deal with, which was the uncanny experience that I had somehow foreseen the future. It had been incredibly strange and I had to ask myself – “How could that have happened? How could you have seen something in such detail the night before it happened? And, what does that say about time and the nature of life itself?” There was another deeply troubling aspect to the experience as well.  In real life, when I began living through the events of the dream, I knew exactly what was coming next and I wanted to change the events. But to my severe shock, I found that I had no control over anything whatsoever. The incredibly odd fact was that I had absolutely no volition. Nothing that I thought, felt, or decided made any difference at all. I was awake. This was real. But it was like I was walking through a movie that had already been made. I knew that nothing could be changed because somehow, I knew that the present had already happened in the past. It was all too overwhelming to even try to understand. Some years later, I came come across a profound quote from Einstein that seemed related. “The distinction between past, present and future is nothing but a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Of course, I found the idea fascinating, but in trying to grasp it, all I could come up was that my understanding of my life in the world was incomplete, and that there was a lot more that I needed to learn, to say the least.  It's like you're living your adult life learning your lessons and something unexpectedly alters your reality. Suddenly you feel like a preschooler enrolled in a babysitting club at an advanced university.  Everything had changed so fundamentally for me that I felt like I didn't know this world anymore. As boxer Mike Tyson once put it, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.” And believe me, it was quite a heavy punch for this 16-year-old kid to take. At the foundation of it all, the basic impermanence that underlies all of life had become abundantly clear to me. My father had been an incredibly powerful person, the central figure not just in our family, but in the entire world around him as well. And in less than five seconds, he was gone for good. Vanished without a trace. So, it quickly drove home the fundamental impermanence of life. Nothing here lasts. Everything ends. Which brings up some deeper questions. Why does this creation even exist in the first place? What are we doing here? What is the real purpose of my life, if there even is one?” Suffice it to say that I eventually put all these thoughts and questions aside and got on with living the new version of life that had been presented to me. And it picked up pretty quickly. After all, I was in the middle of my junior year in high school and we are blessed with a tremendous amount of resiliency at that age. As soon as I began to return to my normal school life, a nice little coincidence happened for me. You may remember from a previous episode that my father had made me promise that I would say the Kaddish prayer for him after he died. I made that vow on a Saturday and eight days later, I said the prayer for the first time at his graveside. Amazingly, I had completely forgotten about that promise until those first words came out of my mouth that day in the cemetery.  I started attending the synagogue near our house twice a day and I had to get into the routine of getting ready to go there every morning and night. A new Beatles album had just come out and I got into the habit of listening to it as I prepared to leave. Like all their other albums, its songs took up permanent residency in my mind almost immediately upon hearing them.  The album was called “Rubber Soul” and it was quite a departure for the band. Many years later, once the Beatles had become history and were being studied from a cultural perspective, this album came to be viewed a major turning point in their career. Listening to it was giving me quite an emotional boost and one day, I heard a deejay say that the release date for Rubber Soul had been December 3, 1965, which was the exact day that my father died.  Now, all my life, I've been one of those people who are always on the lookout for “signs.” It's hard to explain exactly why, but if you happen to be one of them, you understand. Anyway, for me, this information meant that somehow, everything was in synch. As insanely disruptive as the death had been, on some level, it all made sense and in some way the universe was still in good working order. I might very well have been grasping at straws, but who cares? The fact that the dates were identical made me feel a little better. And no matter how small, I needed all the “feel better” I could get. Importantly, from the larger standpoint of the evolution of the times, the group had a distinctively new sound. Later this would be understood to be the very beginnings of psychedelic music, and the songs were mainly written and recorded while the band was under the steady influence of marijuana. If you listen to the song “Girl” you can hear someone inhaling a joint, and George Harrison once commented that the album was “the first one where we were fully-fledged potheads.”  But the songs had a new level of depth to them as well. Remember that Bob Dylan had once told the Beatles that he liked their songs, but the trouble was that they weren't about anything. John Lennon said that he took that comment in on a profound level, and when you listen to him sing “Nowhere Man,” it certainly sounds like it. “He's a real nowhere man. Sitting in his nowhere land. Making all his nowhere plans for nobody.” Those words immediately got me. At the time, it sounded like he was talking about everyone, myself included. He continued, “Doesn't have a point of view. Knows not where he's going to. Isn't he a bit like you and me. He's as blind as he can be. Just sees what he wants to see…” In the present day, the song is looked at as an absolute classic and we take it for granted, but back then, it was truly incredible to hear these kind of ideas expressed in a Beatles song. In another cut, “Norwegian Wood,” George Harrison played the sitar for the first time ever in western music, which was truly a sign of things to come. And finally, there was the song, “The Word.” It's a song about love, but it's not a standard love song because it's actually about universal love, which is a theme the Beatles would expound upon seriously over the next few years. “Say the word and you'll be free. Say the word and be like me. Say the word I'm thinking of. Have you heard the word is love? Now that I know what I feel must be right. I'm here to show everybody the light. Give the word a chance to say that the word is just the way.” So, at the end of 1965, big changes were underway. The Beatles had evolved into a new level of musical genius and don't forget, they were the leading force of cultural change in the entire word, so the larger world of popular music was changing in an enormous way as well. And as difficult as it had been for me, I had gone through the first truly major change in my life, and one of the key parts of it had been the fact that I had gone through an experience that had defied science and logic. But something even bigger was waiting for me just around the next corner. Let's take that up in the coming episode, so as always, keep your eyes, mind and heart open, and let's get together in the next one.

Singles Going Around- Loving CupGrabbed some new records for this new episode!Bo Diddley- "Road Runner" (Live)The Primitives- "The Ostrich"Lightnin' Slim- "Hoo Doo Blues"The Byrds- "Lover Of The Bayou"Huey "Piano" Smith- "Free, Single and Disengaged"The White Stripes- "Lafayette Blues"The Prime Movers- "I'm A Man"The Faces- "Too Bad"Love- "She Comes In Colors"The Rolling Stones- "She's A Rainbow"The Greatful Dead- "Box Of Rain"Muddy Waters- "Got My Mojo Workin'"The Velvet Underground- "I'm Waiting For The Man"The Beach Boys- "Breakaway" (45 Version)The Beatles- "Nowhere Man" (45 Version)The Rolling Stones- "Loving Cup"*All Selections taken from various Lp's and 45's.

It's one of the strangest conspiracy theories ever created by mortal man. Was Beatles legend Paul McCartney killed in 1966 and replaced with a look-alike? We look at the evidence for and against this bizarre rumor. SOURCES AND REFERENCES FROM THE EPISODE…“Nowhere Man: The Paul McCartney Death Conspiracy” posted at The UnRedacted:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/paulisdeadWeird Darkness theme by Alibi Music Library. = = = = =(Over time links seen above may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)= = = = ="I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness." — John 12:46= = = = =WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2024, Weird Darkness.= = = = =Originally aired: November, 2018CUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/nowhere-man-paul-mccartney-changeling-conspiracy/

Heather and I are talking about feeling average. Most people that think they are averagePeople call themselves averageWhat are the benefits or drawbacks of thinking you are average Heather and I want to hear about you support your supervisees to see how they are exceptional. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psychology-yesterday/202402/why-most-americans-believe-they-are-middle-class

Beatles, Lennon-McCartney, George Martin, and me.

Yale educator and TV writer/producer, Aaron Tracy, returns to chat with me about surviving the WGA writer's strike, finally teaching the podcast at Yale, and his latest audio thriller on Audible, Nowhere Man, starring Lee Pace and Zosia Mamet. Aaron Tracy also teaches “The Art and Craft of Television Drama” at Yale University, and his TV credits include Law & Order: SVU, Fairly Legal, The Tap, and Sequestered, a serialized thriller that ran two seasons, for which he was Creator and Executive Producer.  He is also a Creator, Director,  and Exec. Producer of scripted audio dramas for iHeartRadio, Audible, and Spotify, with various production partners including: Supreme: The Battle For Roe, his 9-part audio drama starring Eva Longoria (feat. Maya Hawke and William H. Macy); Murder in Bermuda (feat. Mary-Louise Parker); and many others. His most recent is Nowhere Man (exclusively from Audible, premieres Thursday, December 14, 2023), a noir political thriller Executive Produced by and starring Lee Pace, with co-stars Zosia Mamet, and Chazz Palminteri. “Set in the mid-1980s, Nowhere Man is a dark, paranoid thriller about temptation and obsession through the prism of a profession most people don't even know exists.” Aaron's debut audio drama, The Coldest Case, a detective thriller starring Aaron Paul, Krysten Ritter, and Alexis Bledel, premiered as the #1 download on Audible in 2021, and has since become the most downloaded show in Audible Plus history. [Discover The Writer Files Extra: Get 'The Writer Files' Podcast Delivered Straight to Your Inbox at writerfiles.fm] [If you're a fan of The Writer Files, please click FOLLOW to automatically see new interviews. And drop us a rating or a review wherever you listen] In this file Aaron Tracy and I discussed: Why he loves the ‘80s period pieces How his directing experience has shaped his writing Why he teaches the narrative podcast the same way he teaches Television Drama The two greatest innovations of the modern TV art form  What aspiring TV writers should be reading And a lot more! Show Notes: Yale University – Aaron Tracy Aaron Tracy Audible Page Amazon Author Page for William Goldman Story by Robert McKee [Amazon] Save the Cat by Blake Snyder [Amazon] Aaron Tracy on IMdB Aaron Tracy on Twitter Kelton Reid on Twitter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you in touch with the healing properties of your emotions? In this episode, the amazing Karen Lorre joins us to help us understand the intersection between emotions, healing, and meditation, how we can improve our lives through them, and awaken our minds' full potential so it can conspire with the universe in our favor. Karen is a True Mastery Coach, Writer, and actress who starred in One Life to Live, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Malcolm in the Middle, Nowhere Man, and The X-Files, to name just a few. She is also the Author of "Chronic Pleasure: Use the Law of Attraction to Transform Fatigue and Pain into Vibrant Energy," "Effortless Enchantment: A Memoir of Magic, Magnetism, and Enchantment," and "Chronic Pleasure in Relationships: Inspire the Best in Men."All her life, Karen felt this urge to understand how things work; she studied psychobiology (how the mind affects the body), the Science of Mind, and the Law of Attraction and has been meditating consistently for the last 15 years. In over a thousand hours of acting in TV shows and movies, Karen noticed her body reacted while playing different characters and even experienced physiological changes after months of "being" other people. We had a fantastic conversation about Karen's journey to becoming a True Mastery Coach, her self-healing techniques, and how, through meditation, self-improvement, and spiritual growth, she overcame mental health issues for which doctors didn't have an answer. We also talk about her books, the near-death experiences that changed her, how to use our emotions to enhance creativity, release our subconscious blocks, and much more. Tune in to episode 14 of RADitude and learn how to use the hidden power of your mind to start Liv-nRAD and Loving Contagiously. In This Episode, You Will Learn:Karen talks about her journey into becoming a True Mastery Coach (3:10)About Karen's first glance at the power of the mind (7:10)How Karen cured her narcolepsy (11:50)The Law of Attraction's transformative power (18:20)Karen talks about the power of appreciation and gratitude (28:50)Karen's guided meditation for World Peace (35:20)Connect with Karen:WebsiteLinkedInLet's connect!WebsiteContact UsLinkedInInstagramFacebookTwitter Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this exclusive series in partnership with Penguin Random House India, we will shine a spotlight on two compelling contemporary voices each month, individuals who are reshaping the landscape of Indian literature. In this special episode of Books & Beyond, Tara and Michelle converse with Aditi Kumar and Shivalik Bakshi as they take us on a tour of the Indian Army and give us an insider's view of defence families.Exploring the heartbreaking story of the forgotten men of the 1971 Indo-Pak war and the relentless search to get them back home, Shivalik Bakshi brings us the story of his own uncle, Capt Kamal Bakshi who was declared ‘Missing-Believed Killed' after the Battle of Chamb, in his book “Nowhere Man”. Aditi Kumar's novel “Operation Payback” is the story of a Veer Nari who decides to join the Indian Army to honour her husband's legacy, and delivers an audacious plan of action to deliver much-deserved payback not just for herself but for the entire nation. Tune in to hear heartfelt and never-before-heard stories about individuals who serve in the armed forces!Produced by Aishwarya Javalgekar‘Books and Beyond with Bound' is the podcast where Tara Khandelwal and Michelle D'costa uncover how their books reflect the realities of our lives and society today. Find out what drives India's finest authors: from personal experiences to jugaad research methods, insecurities to publishing journeys. Created by Bound, a storytelling company that helps you grow through stories. Follow us @boundindia on all social media platforms.

On this week's episode of Grease the Wheels, we title it after where we were last week, nowhere to be found! Sorry about that, we needed a week to get back to the grind. This brings us to the theme of today's episode, where we go deeper into some of the crazy stuff that is coming down the pike and the relative rate of advancement in the automotive industry over the last 20 years versus the previous 50. A “Nowhere Man” in this case is a technician who's skills and training cannot keep up with the rate of advancement, and are relegated to doing menial work like brakes and tires - and they're going to get paid like it. From rear wheel steering, to all of the firmware going live on Autonomous Driving V, to iMax screens in the back of the 7-Series. Whenever there is a significant skill gap, and the lower skilled technicians keep sopping up all of the gravy, this is automatically going to create tension in the shop. With the growing number of EV's this presents a new problem for “Nowhere Men”, because if you mess it up - you can die! Bottom line, the entire industry is getting more complicated by the day, so we all need to keep our training up and on top of the latest features that are breaking! Also Uncle Jimmy pitches the console Turkish Press and “Operation: EV-Training”This episode is distributed by The Wrenching Network. Whether you're a technician, a mechanic, or someone who just loves the car scene, The Wrenching Network is a place that you have to check out. They have all sorts of great content, gear, and snacks to keep you turning wrenches in whatever capacity you do it. Also if you see us over there, make sure you say hi and leave a comment with what you think about the episode! 

Singles Going Around- Operation Retrieve- Mono Beatles Volume One"Act Naturally" (T 2553)"Nowhere Man" (T 2553)We Can Work It Out" (T 2553)"Day Tripper" (T 2553)"I've Just Seen A Face" (T 2442)"It's Only Love" (T 2442)"Think For Yourself" (T 2442)"Michelle" (T 2442)"I Want To Tell You" (T 2576)"Got To Get You Into My Life" (T 2576)"Tomorrow Never Knows" (T 2576)"I'm Only Sleeping" (T 2553) *"Doctor Robert" (T 2553) *"And Your Bird Can Sing" (T 2553) *"You Won't See Me" (T 2442)"Wait" (T 2442)"Good Day Sunshine" (T 2576)"Getting Better" (MAS 2653)"When I'm Sixty Four" (MAS 2653)"Lovely Rita" (MAS 2653)"Good Morning, Good Morning" (MAS 2653)"What Goes On?" (T 2553)"Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band (Reprise) (MAS 2653)"A Day In The Life" (MAS 2653)* These mono mixes from Yesterday and Today are different from those used on the mono mixes from Revolver.

Bidenomics, Congress and the Nowhere Man. www.watchdogonwallstreet.com

In some other world, in some other life, Pinto might've prayed in the morning, prayed his šaharit, prayed to be relieved of his abhorrent passion. But the only prayer that came to his mind now was to the Lord to let him keep Osman for the rest of time, for his voice to be the last thing he would hear before slipping into la gran eskuridad. Rafael Pinto is a young Jewish apothecary in Sarajevo, Bosnia, with big dreams and a penchant for opium. One summer day in 1914 he witnesses the assassination of archduke Franz Ferdinand, and suddenly Pinto is thrust into life as a soldier in the Great War. There he meets Osman, a handsome Muslim soldier who charms Pinto with his bravery and talent for storytelling, and between them blossoms a boundless love which shall follow them through the war and to the ends of the Earth.Aleksandar Hemon's The World and All That It Holds is a grandiose historical novel that combines historical fact with a rich and fabulous prose. With events set in a multicultural Europe in great social upheaval, Hemon deploys a distinctly lyrical prose, mixing in languages and expressions from all corners and cultures, showing a broad history and a multiform world. The result is a highly original, yet archetypal story of undying love and one man's fight to save something worth living for as the world as he knows it is collapsing around him.Bosnian American Aleksander Hemon is one of the most central authors of his generation. With novels such as The Lazarus Project and Nowhere Man, alongside his many short stories, Hemon has written himself into the contemporary American canon and garnered readers all over the world. This year, he returns with The World and All That It Holds, perhaps his most ambitious project yet.In conversation with Hemon is renowned author, critic, and editor John Freeman. He has long followed Hemon's career as a writer and metHemon on stage for a conversation on love in wartime and the explosive power of literature. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The author of Nowhere Man (2000) returns for a conversation prompted by the book's recent re-publication, augmented with an array of new material and appendices. Robert will also be making a rare personal appearance in St Louis on October 4th in St. Louis – details here.  Among the subjects we talked about this time round were:  Robert's website … 266: Nowhere Man '23 with Robert Rosen Read More » The post 266: Nowhere Man '23 with Robert Rosen appeared first on .

On May 25th 2020, in Minneapolis, a black man named George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer named Derek Chauvin who put his knee on George Floyd's neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds, thus asphyxiating him. That tragic event had an immediate global impact, sparking off demonstrations and riots, not just in the US but across the world. But who was George Floyd? Where did he come from? What was he like? What was his life? These questions are all addressed in the book co-authored by my guest today, Robert Samuels, and Tolu Olorunnipa called “His Name is George Floyd: One Man's Life & Struggle for Racial Justice” which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non Fiction this year. It's a superbly researched book which provides a look at George Floyd's ancestry and how the trauma of slavery & discrimination is typically passed down in Black families in America. In today's interview, I ask Robert Samuels what the research was like given the raw emotions that must have been omnipresent. This is obviously a difficult subject, but one that must be discussed and this book certainly helps to open our eyes and instigate these important conversations.  Books mentioned in the episode: Favourite book I've never heard of: “Nowhere Man” by Aleksandar Hemon (2002) Favourite book of the last 12 months: “The Haunting of Hajji Hotak & Other Stories” by Jamil Kochai (2022) The book that he would take to a desert island: “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck The book that changed his mind: “Locking Up Our Own” by James Forman Jr. (2017) Buy Robert Samuels book: https://amzn.eu/d/jeix2UR Follow me ⁠⁠⁠@litwithcharles⁠⁠⁠ for more book reviews and recommendations!

It's The Night Before the Open Championship, and the LLG gang is ready to Get Back to it. It's been a busy couple of weeks in pro golf, and The Things We Said Today include a discussion of the return of Jay Monahan to his job as the nominal head of the PGA Tour. But the Nowhere Man has yet to be seen in Merseyside this week.Duffer, OTP Lefty, and JScore touch on the performance of The Fools on the (Capitol) Hill sent in Jay's place, Jimmy Dunne and and Ron Price. Dick Blumenthal's main line of inquiry: Tell Me Why the deal had to be with the Saudis. The obvious answer, of course, is Money (That's What They Want). Jimmy and Ron had little to say about the terms of the deal before the deal, other than We Can Work it Out later. The DOJ will certainly have its say about What Goes On, as will the Taxman when it comes to dealing with the 501(c)(6) issues.As for the Open, as usual, everybody's talking about Little Lord McIlroy, who's fresh off his win at the Scottish Open. But I've Got a Feeling you know what the gang thinks of Rory's chances of winning. Baby You're a Rich Man, but you won't be a winner at Hoylake, Not a Second Time. He and his many media fanboys will just have to Wait until next year, just like they've been doing for 8+ years now.The End. 

Our journey through the psychedelic dreamlands of Magicant continues! On the surface, this fantastic world is (mostly) sunshine and rainbows, but there's a deep, and literal, well of sorrow underneath. Meet the sad queen in her majestic palace, the friends who'll lay their lives on the line for you, and a man who doesn't exist - as Cat and Jess unpack the Jungian mysteries of this surprisingly dark chapter of Ninten's adventures. “MOTHER,” She Wrote mixes audio drama and talk podcast to chronicle the strangest, most thought-provoking, most heart-rending video games ever made: the MOTHER series, as it's called in Japan, and EarthBound as it's called everywhere else. This first season chronicles MOTHER (1989), known as EarthBound Beginnings in English-speaking countries. For links and transcriptions, head to https://mothershewrote.earth Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New York Times bestselling author and screenwriter GREGG HURWITZ joins BOOKSTORM Podcast to discuss The Last Orphan, his latest thriller in the bestselling Orphan X series! We dive deep into the character of our beloved hero, Evan Smoak. He's referred to as The Nowhere Man now ... so what's driving the changes he's making? What does it mean to become more human? We talk about Evan's guiding principles and how he determines who needs a lethal dose of justice. Do his actions line up with his beliefs? Is there such a thing as good and bad? We talk about these and other deep (but somehow also entertaining!) subjects like vengeance, facing our monsters, and resilience. Gregg even gives us a hotline telephone number to call EVAN SMOAK! This interview is a do. not. miss! Join us!

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In this episode, Rich has a conversation with Robert Rosen.Robert Rosen is a successful author, editor, and writer. He is best known for his international bestseller, "Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon," which has been translated into many languages. His latest book, "A Brooklyn Memoir," is about growing up in Flatbush in the 1950s and 60s, surrounded by Holocaust survivors and WWII veterans who fought against the Nazis. Rosen's investigative memoir, "Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography," has received critical acclaim from various publications, including Vanity Fair and academic journals. Throughout his career, Rosen has edited pornographic magazines and an underground newspaper, written speeches for the Secretary of the Air Force, and received a Hugo Boss poetry prize. His work has been published in numerous international publications, including The Village Voice, Uncut, and La Repubblica. Rosen attended Erasmus Hall High School and the City College of New York, where he studied creative writing with Joseph Heller and Francine du Plessix Gray. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, Mary Lyn Maiscott, who is also a writer, editor, and singer.Here are links for you to bookmark, save, follow, memorize, write down, and to share with others:Robert Rosen - Nowhere Man Available Everywhere Books A

Gary Rooney is a former rated fighter and has over 45 years of teaching experience. He is the founder of The Lab, a boxing gym based out of Eureka, CA. Gary is also a former actor with roles in Spyder, Death Wish 4: The Crackdown, Days of Our Lives, and Nowhere Man. For more information about The Lab, or to sign up for a class, find them on Facebook (@thelabeureka).

EPISODE 1446: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to author of THE WORLD AND ALL THAT IT HOLDS, Aleksandar Hemon, about Sarajevo, Jerusalem and the political power of "macaronic" language Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and three books of short stories: The Question of Bruno; Nowhere Man, which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Love and Obstacles. He was the recipient of a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship and a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, and the 2020 Dos Passos Prize. He lives in Chicago. Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Evan Smoak returns in The Last Orphan, the latest New York Times bestselling Orphan X thriller--when everything changes and everything is at risk.As a child, Evan Smoak was plucked out of a group home, raised and trained as an off-the-books assassin for the government as part of the Orphan program. When he broke with the program and went deep underground, he left with a lot of secrets in his head that the government would do anything to make sure never got out.When he remade himself as The Nowhere Man, dedicated to helping the most desperate in their times of trouble, Evan found himself slowly back on the government's radar. Having eliminated most of the Orphans in the program, the government will stop at nothing to eliminate the threat they see in Evan. But Orphan X has always been several steps ahead of his pursuers.Until he makes one little mistake...Now the President has him in her control and offers Evan a deal - eliminate a rich, powerful man she says is too dangerous to live and, in turn, she'll let Evan survive. But when Evan left the Program he swore to only use his skills against those who really deserve it. Now he has to decide what's more important - his principles or his life.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/houseofmysteryradio. Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/houseofmysteryradio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

New York Times and #1 internationally bestselling author, Gregg Hurwitz, spoke with me about why all writing is a process of self-discovery, how to humanize a trained assassin, and the latest Orphan X thriller, THE LAST ORPHAN. Gregg Hurwitz is an award-winning and internationally bestselling author of 23 thrillers including the ORPHAN X series. He has been published in 33 languages, and the Los Angeles Times called him “... a thriller giant."  He is also a NY Times bestselling comic book writer, having penned stories for AWA (Knighted and the critically acclaimed anthology NewThink), Marvel (Wolverine, Punisher) and DC (Batman, Penguin). His eighth Orphan X novel is The Last Orphan, the ongoing series featuring The Nowhere Man, “Evan Smoak, a man with skills, resources, and a personal mission to help those with nowhere else to turn. He's also a man with a dangerous past.” #1 NY Times bestselling author Meg Gardiner said of the book, "Just when I thought the Orphan X novels couldn't get any better, Gregg Hurwitz takes the series to an even higher level. The Last Orphan is pulse-pounding, heart-stopping, and thought-provoking.” Gregg Hurwitz has written screenplays and TV scripts for many of the major studios and networks, has published poetry, numerous academic articles on Shakespeare, and has taught fiction writing at USC. [Discover The Writer Files Extra: Get 'The Writer Files' Podcast Delivered Straight to Your Inbox at writerfiles.fm] [If you're a fan of The Writer Files, please click FOLLOW to automatically see new interviews. And drop us a rating or a review wherever you listen] In this file Gregg Hurwitz and I discussed:  The reason he never took a creative writing class Why Orphan X is the culmination of his career Plot as character in motion How every writer's voice is as distinctive as a fingerprint Writing Batman vs Bruce Wayne and villains vs antagonists Grabbing a bourbon with William Faulkner And a lot more! Show Notes: GreggHurwitz.net The Last Orphan By Gregg Hurwitz (Amazon) Gregg Hurwitz Amazon Author Page Gregg Hurwitz on Facebook Gregg Hurwitz on Instagram Gregg Hurwitz on Twitter Kelton Reid on Twitter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Escape To Earth #1 Buy here: https://reptilianmedia.bigcartel.com/ Back in the 90s, there was a hot new TV station called the UPN, and with it a wide variety of TV shows looking to take a chunk out of the competitions ratings. One of this shows was Nowwhere Man, a paranoid thriller that was a mix of The fugitive, and the Prisoner, and was gunning for The X-Files, but only lasted for 1 season. Did Nowhere Man deserve more, or should it be left in the past with Marker, Legend, and all the other UPN shows? Steve and Yahel @WrestlingWithGaming aim to answer this, and many more episodes on this episode of Obscurity Now! Every week friends Steve (creator of the Ray Can't Sleep podcast) and Yahel (creator of Wrestling with Gaming youtube channel) chat about weird, obscure, and forgotten media, and some not-so obscure media. But don't just listen! This is much more than a podcast. Obscurity Now! Streams live on Twitch and Youtube every Sunday at 6pm. Come join the chat! Streaming live: Every Sunday at 6pm Eastern, 3pm Pacific PODCAST: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/obscuritynow/episodes/Obscurity-Now--podcast-97-The-Irredeemable-Antman-1-comicbooks-marvelcomics-mcu-e212vei TWITCH: https://www.twitch.tv/stevinfinite YOUTUBE: https://youtu.be/p2mWPQsw8oQ TicToc: https://www.tiktok.com/@reptilianmedia?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc E-mail: reptilianmedia@gmail.com Twitter: @reptilianmedia Instagram: obscurity_now Hosts: Steve Honeycutt Twitter:@Stevinfinite Audiodrama: www.raycantsleep.com Podcast: www.themeparklegends.com Yahel Velazquez Twitter:@Wrestlesgaming Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/WrestlingWithGaming

This week, we chat to multi-million New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, Gregg Hurwitz. He's written many screenplays, comic books, took charge of Batman, and is known for the 'Orphan X' series. The newest one, 'The Last Orphan', sees Evan Smoak, the Nowhere Man, on one last mission after he was taken from a group home as an orphan and trained as an assassin.We discuss how he made a plan at the start of his career, in order to make writing a regular job so it could last as long as possible. Also, you can hear how he's managed to get back to a state of pure writing, without any of the distractions that surround success. We chat about how even though he's written and published many books, he still gets stuck in the baggy middle like everyone else. Gregg runs through his extensive research, which has seen him jump from planes, train with Navy SEALS, and go under cover in mind control cults.Support the show at patreon.com/writersroutine@writerspodwritersroutine.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Help spread the darkness! Vote Up This Episode at https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/mvjsnkbz – you can vote up to 3X per day! Find Weird Darkness in your favorite podcast app at https://weirddarkness.com/listen. PLEASE SHARE Weird Darkness with someone who loves paranormal stories, true crime, monsters, or unsolved mysteries like you do! Recommending Weird Darkness to others helps make it possible for me to keep doing the show!IN THIS EPISODE: It's one of the strangest conspiracy theories ever created by mortal man. Was Beatles legend Paul McCartney killed in 1966 and replaced with a look-alike? We look at the evidence for and against this bizarre rumor. SOURCES AND ESSENTIAL WEB LINKS…“Nowhere Man: The Paul McCartney Death Conspiracy” posted at The UnRedacted:https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/paulisdead= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =Weird Darkness theme by Alibi Music Library. Background music provided by Alibi Music Library, EpidemicSound and/or StoryBlocks with paid license. Music from Shadows Symphony (https://tinyurl.com/yyrv987t), Midnight Syndicate (http://amzn.to/2BYCoXZ) Kevin MacLeod (https://tinyurl.com/y2v7fgbu), Tony Longworth (https://tinyurl.com/y2nhnbt7), and Nicolas Gasparini (https://tinyurl.com/lnqpfs8) is used with permission of the artists.= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =(Over time links seen above may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = ="I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness." — John 12:46WeirdDarkness™ - is a production and trademark of Marlar House Productions. © 2023, Weird Darkness.= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =TRANSCRIPT: https://weirddarkness.com/archives/14539

Aleksander Hemon's new novel, The World and All That it Holds starts with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, and then takes us from Bosnia, to Uzbekistan, to China and elsewhere, covering a convulsive period of history in which the technological advances, the political turbulence, and the displacement of people bear striking similarities to those of our own time. At it's heart, though—not exactly beneath the grand sweep, but entwined with it—is a love story between two men, Pinto and Osman, and a novel that never loses sight of the fact that within beneath History, there are humans living, humans loving, humans losing and, crucially, humans coming to understand the scale at which the decisions they make can count.Buy The World and All That it Holds: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/5273994/hemon-aleksandar-the-world-and-all-that-it-holds*Aleksandar Hemon was born in Sarajevo and lives in Chicago. He is the author of The Question of Bruno, Nowhere Man, Love and Obstacles, and The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His work also appears regularly in the New Yorker and Granta, among other publications.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel Feeding Time here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/product/7209940/biles-adam-feeding-timeListen to Alex Freiman's Play It Gentle here: https://open.spotify.com/album/4gfkDcG32HYlXnBqI0xgQX?si=mf0Vw-kuRS-ai15aL9kLNA&dl_branch=1 Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this episode, we had a lively interview with Gregg Hurwitz, the author of The Last Orphan,#8 in the Orphan X series by Gregg Hurwitz (Minotaur Books 2/14.23Evan Smoak returns in The Last Orphan, the latest New York Times bestselling Orphan Xthriller--when everything changes and everything is at risk.As a child, Evan Smoak was plucked out of a group home, raised and trained as an off-the-books assassin for the government as part of the Orphan program. When he broke with theprogram and went deep underground, he left with a lot of secrets in his head that thegovernment would do anything to make sure never got out.When he remade himself as The Nowhere Man, dedicated to helping the most desperate intheir times of trouble, Evan found himself slowly back on the government's radar. Havingeliminated most of the Orphans in the program, the government will stop at nothing to eliminatethe threat they see in Evan. But Orphan X has always been several steps ahead of hispursuers.Until he makes one little mistake...Now the President has him in her control and offers Evan a deal - eliminate a rich, powerful manshe says is too dangerous to live and, in turn, she'll let Evan survive. But when Evan left theProgram he swore to only use his skills against those who really deserve it. Now he has todecide what's more important - his principles or his life.TRIVIALast Week's Question Was:Where did Dorothy L. Sayers get the names for her characters in “The Nine Tailors”a. graves in the cemeteryb. the neighborsc. school friendsd. the baptism role in churchShe grew up in the tiny village of Bluntisham in Huntingdonshire after her father was given theliving there as rector of Bluntisham-cum-Earith. The church graveyard next to the elegantRegency-style rectory features the surnames of several characters from her mystery The NineTailors.This week's question is:Gregg Hurwitz received the Harvard Undergraduate-Scholar Award for what?a. Chessb. Boxingc. Pole vaultd. Croquet

The Crew is back... and so is Evan Smoak! In this episode, the guys are joined by New York Times bestselling author Gregg Hurwitz to discuss his latest Orphan X thriller, THE LAST ORPHAN.  As a child, Evan Smoak was plucked out of a group home, raised and trained as an off-the-books assassin for the government as part of the Orphan Program. When he broke with the Program and went deep underground, he left with a lot of secrets in his head that the government would do anything to make sure never got out. He remade himself as The Nowhere Man, dedicated to helping the most desperate when they have nowhere else to turn, which landed him back on the government's radar. Having eliminated most of the other living Orphans, the government will stop at nothing to end the threat they see in Evan. But Orphan X has always been several steps ahead of his pursuers. Until he makes one little mistake... Now the President has him in her control and offers Evan a deal — eliminate a rich, powerful man she says is too dangerous to live and, in turn, she'll let Evan survive. But when Evan left the Program he swore to only use his skills against those who really deserve it. Now he has to decide what's more important — his principles or his life. You can learn more by going to https://gregghurwitz.net/ _____________________________ Don't forget to subscribe to The Crew Reviews, hit the "like" button, and leave a comment or a review.  And if you want to learn more about the guys from The Crew or see additional author interviews, visit us at http://www.thecrewreviews.com Follow us on social media Twitter | @CREWbookreviews Instagram | @thecrewreviews Facebook | @thecrewreviews #GreggHurwitz #TheLastOrphan #TheCrewReviews

As we're in the period between Christmas and New Year, the gap between episodes is going to be longer than normal, and the podcast proper is going to be back on January the ninth. So nobody has to wait around for another fortnight for a new episode, I thought I'd upload some old Patreon bonus episodes to fill the gap. Every year around Christmas the bonus episodes I do tend to be on Christmas songs and so this week I'm uploading three of those. These are older episodes, so don't have the same production values as more recent episodes, and are also shorter than more recent bonuses, but I hope they're still worth listening to. Hello, and welcome to this week's second Patreon bonus episode. I'm recording this on December the twenty-third, so whether you hear this before Christmas is largely down to how quickly we can get the main episode edited and uploaded. Hopefully, this is going up on Christmas Eve and you're all feeling appropriately festive. Normally for the Patreon bonuses in the last week of December I choose a particularly Christmassy record from the time period we're covering in the main podcast -- usually a perennial Christmas hit like something off the Phil Spector Christmas album or the Elvis Christmas album. However, this year we're in the mid sixties, a period when none of the big hits of US or UK Christmas music were released, because it's after the peak of US Christmas music and before the peak of UK Christmas music. There were Christmas albums by people like James Brown, but they weren't major parts of the discography. So today, we're going to have a brief run-through of the Beatles' Christmas records. These were flexi-discs -- which for those of you who are too young to remember them were records pressed on very, very, thin, cheap plastic, which used to be attached to things like kids' comics or cereal boxes as promotional gimmicks -- sent out to members of the group's fan club. In a way, these were the Beatles' very own Patreon bonuses, sent out to fans and supporters, and not essential works, but hopefully interesting and fun. They very rarely had anything like a full song, being mostly made up of sketches and recorded messages, and other than a limited-edition vinyl reissue a few years back they've never been put on general release -- though one song from the discs, "Christmas Time is Here Again", *was* released as a B-side of the CD single of "Free as A Bird" in 1995: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Christmas Time is Here Again"] Other than that, the Christmas records remain one of those parts of the Beatles catalogue which have never seen a proper widespread release. The first record was made on October the 17th 1963, at the same recording session as "I Want to Hold Your Hand", at the instigation of Tony Barrow, the group's publicist, who also came up with a script for the group to depart from: [Excerpt, the Beatles' first Christmas record] Barrow apparently edited the recording himself, using scissors and tape, and much of that was just taking out the swearing. Incidentally, I've seen some American sources talking about the word "Crimble" being a word that the Beatles made up themselves, but it's actually a fairly standard bit of Scouse slang. The second Christmas record was recorded at the end of the sessions for Beatles For Sale and was much the same kind of thing, though this time they incorporated sound effects: [Excerpt: The Beatles' Second Christmas Record] That was never sent to American fans. Instead, they got a cardboard copy of an edited version of the first record (it's possible to make records out of cardboard, but they can only be played a handful of times). They wouldn't get another Christmas record until 1968, though British fans kept receiving them. The third record sees the group parodying other people's hits, including a brief rendition of "It's the Same Old Song" interrupted by George Harrison saying they can't sing it because of copyright, and an attempt to sing Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction" and "Auld Lang Syne" at the same time: [Excerpt: The Beatles' Third Christmas Record] The fourth record, from 1966, was recorded during the early sessions for "Strawberry Fields Forever", and titled "Pantomime: Everywhere It's Christmas". For those outside the UK and its sphere of cultural influence, pantomime is a British Xmas stage tradition which is very hard to explain if you've not experienced it, involving performances that are ostensibly of fairy stories like Cinderella or Snow White, but also usually involving drag performances -- the male lead is usually played by a young woman, while there's usually an old woman character played by a man in drag -- with audience participation, songs, and old jokes of the "I do declare, the Prince's balls get bigger every year!" type. As the title suggests, then, the 1966 Christmas record is an attempt at an actual narrative of sorts, though a surreal, incoherent one. It comes across very much like the Goon show -- though like one of the later episodes where Milligan has lost all sense of narrative coherence: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Pantomime: Everywhere It's Christmas"] it's probably the best of the group's Christmas efforts, and certainly the most fully realised to this point. The 1967 Christmas record, "Christmas Time is Here Again", is even more ambitious. It's another narrative, which sees the group playing a fictitious group called the Ravellers, auditioning for the BBC: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Christmas Time is Here Again"] It also features parodies of broadcasting formats, which I've seen a few people suggest were inspired by the Bonzo Dog Band's then-recent Craig Torso Show radio performances, but which seem to me more indicative just of a general shared sense of humour: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Christmas Time is Here Again"] But that record has become most famous for having one of the closest things on any of these records to a full song, the title track "Christmas Time is Here Again": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Christmas Time is Here Again"] As well as later being issued as the B-side of a CD single, that was also remade by Ringo as a solo record: [Excerpt: Ringo Starr, "Christmas Time is Here Again"] Although my favourite use of the song is actually as an interpolation, with slightly altered lyrics, in "Xmas Again" by Stew of the Negro Problem, one of my favourite current songwriters: [Excerpt: Stew, "Xmas Again"] "Christmas Time is Here Again" would be the last Christmas record the group would make together. For their final two Christmas releases, they recorded their parts separately and got their friend, the DJ Kenny Everett, who was known at this point for his tricks with tape editing, and who shared their sense of humour (he later went on to become a successful TV comedian) to collage them together into something listenable. The highlight of the 1968 record comes from George's contribution. George, a lover of the ukulele, got Tiny Tim to record his version of "Nowhere Man" for the record: [Excerpt: Tiny Tim, "Nowhere Man"] And for the seventh and final Christmas single, recorded after the group had split up but before the split was announced, Everett once again cobbled it together from separate recordings, this time a chat between John and Yoko, Ringo improvising a song and plugging his new film, and Paul singing an original Christmas song: [Excerpt: Paul McCartney, "Merry, Merry, Year"] George's contribution was a single sentence. In 1970, the fan club members got one final record -- an actual vinyl album, compiling all the previous Christmas records in one place. All the Beatles would in future record solo Christmas singles, some of which became perennial classics, but there would never be another Beatles Christmas record [Excerpt, the end of the third Beatles Christmas record]

April of 1965 was a relatively uneventful month in western culture. If you research it, you'll see that nothing particularly critical happened during those thirty days. However, even though it never showed up on any of society's radar screens, one event did take place that was to change the entire world. John Lennon and George Harrison of the Beatles went to dinner at their dentist's home and unbeknownst to them, the dentist slipped LSD into their after-dinner coffee. They had no idea of what was going to happen, but according to George, although things were a little rocky at first, it turned out to be quite a night. As he put it, "I had such an overwhelming feeling of well-being, that there was a God, and I could see him in every blade of grass. It was like gaining hundreds of years of experience within twelve hours. It changed me, and there was no way back to what I was before." He also said that as he was coming back to normal consciousness, a thought occurred to him that had no connection to any part of his life and he had no idea where it had come from. This thought, that came to him completely out of nowhere, was simply this: “The yogis of the Himalayas.” Now LSD was relatively new and still legal at the time. An extremely powerful psychedelic drug, many famous celebrities had taken it and had profound experiences including Carey Grant, Groucho Marx and Jack Nicholson, along with renowned Harvard professors, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert. And speaking of Harvard, there are still rumors that JFK took acid several times as well, with his longtime companion Mary Meyers. Timothy Leary hints that he played a key role in those events in his autobiography, “Flashbacks.” Again, it was still legal and there were no prohibitions to it. Anyway, a few months after the incident in their dentist's home, whether or not it had anything to do with his thought of the “yogis of the Himalayas,” George introduced Indian music to pop culture when he played the sitar on the Beatles song “Norwegian Wood.”  This was the early beginnings of a revolutionary change in popular culture as the band began to introduce a new genre that would eventually become known as psychedelic music. Not only did their sound change, but their songs took on a new depth of meaning, with primary examples being “Nowhere Man,” “The Word,” “In My Life,” “Elanor Rigby,” “I'm Only Sleeping,” “Tomorrow Never Knows,” ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and “Within You, Without You.” They were all part of a remarkable string of three groundbreaking albums: “Rubber Soul,” “Revolver” and “Sgt. Peppers' Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Now, it's nearly sixty years later and all of these songs are looked at as just great classics. But back then, they were incredibly revolutionary and the Beatles themselves were even more so. Along with their radical appearance and their welcoming approach to marijuana, psychedelics and the expansion of consciousness, they were at the forefront of an astounding cultural shift that would radically alter not only England and America, but every other country throughout the entire civilized world. And it all went to the next level in February of 1968 when the Beatles travelled to India to study meditation with a guru named Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. And as usual, they weren't shy about telling the world what they were doing. The massive publicity surrounding their trip created a major sensation that rocked the whole world. Now as earthshattering as all this was, it wasn't the first time that Indian spirituality, with its reverence for the expansion of consciousness, had made a profound impact on western culture. Far from it. In one way or another it had been going on since the 1500s. Unfortunately, it came about as the result of a rather brutal societal development. Certain European nations established superior military might and mixed it with ever-increasing naval reach.  And with an appalling display of the greed-driven, incredibly destructive delusion that “might makes right,” they began to conquer and subjugate as much of the world as they could get their hands on. They would routinely invade a foreign country, enslave its people and plunder their resources. All in the name of civilization, of course. A prime example of this arrogance of power is what England did to India. Although the British had been in the land for centuries, they finally conquered it completely in 1876. Queen Victoria became the Empress of India and the exploitation of the country moved into full swing. But something unexpected happened as well and it became an example of something extremely positive resulting from something extremely negative. Along with all the horrors that came with the conquest, an inevitable interaction of Indian and English cultures got underway along with it.  And nowhere was the distinction between the two cultures more evident than in the realm of religion.   The difference was somewhat stark. Western religion was basically a societal matter, where people would gather at houses of worship, sing songs of praise to God and hear sermons from clerical leaders that promoted higher ethical, moral and religious standards. In India it was a little different. Their religion had been around for over five thousand years and was the oldest in the world. And although it did have many similarities to its Western counterpart, it had some significant differences as well. For instance, according to its teachings, not only is there a God, but rather than being far away and unapproachable, it is actually within you right now and is completely accessible to you at all times. If you wish, you can evolve your consciousness to the point where you can become enlightened and actually merge with it. So, you didn't have to die to go to heaven, you could do it while you were still alive. In fact, doing it was the actual point of being alive. And also, given the idea that it was possible to reach this higher level of consciousness, rather than having clerics who could only give speeches and sermons about the higher realms, they had beings who had supposedly attained the enlightened state and were talking about something they actually knew, rather than something they just believed. And not only that, they had the ability to show you how to get there as well. They called these teachers “Swamis,” “Yogi's” or “Gurus,” which was an interesting term word because “Gu” means darkness and “Ru” means light, and a true spiritual guru can take you from inner darkness to inner light. And this isn't supposed to be just a bunch of words and concepts, it's experiential. In other words, if you were thirsty, you weren't confined to just hearing stories about people who had gotten to drink water, you could actually drink it yourself.    Now a couple of these Gurus had made it to the United States over the years and their impact had been extremely significant. The first one was named Swami Vivekananda who travelled to Chicago in 1893 to address the First World's Parliament of Religion. The Swami created quite a stir and his talk was, in a word, a sensation. The attendees to the conference felt they had heard someone address them who was in a uniquely elevated state and seemed to be speaking about God consciousness from direct personal experience. And there was something extraordinary about being in his physical presence. It wasn't just uplifting and inspiring. It was actually elevating.  It was palpable. Indeed, one of the delegates, Professor John Henry Wright of Harvard University told him, "To ask you, Swami, for your credentials is like asking the sun about its right to shine." After his ground-breaking appearance in Chicago, Vivekananda's reputation grew rapidly and he travelled to New York and gave lectures to sold out auditoriums, where people waited for hours to buy tickets. One night, New York's most prominent actress Sarah Barnhart held a party for him and introduced him to her friends Nicola Tesla and Mark Twain. His vast influence spread from there and even though he passed away in 1902, at the age of just 39, he continues to be a renowned and deeply respected authority on inner growth. Then in 1920 another Guru from India arrived in America, this time in Boston, in the form of Parmahansa Yogananda. He was also a powerful presence whose impact quickly grew to the extent that he was able to reach millions of people, encouraging them to evolve and grow their inner consciousness. As his life work evolved, along with remaining a powerful force in India, he became a major phenomenon throughout the West and indeed the entire world.  Not only was Yogananda a magnetic speaker, he was also a brilliant and profoundly prolific writer. He went on to establish a major center for mediation in Los Angeles and many local residents of the area studied his work. The internationally esteemed author W. Summerset Maugham cited him as a primary inspiration for his 1944 masterpiece novel, “The Razor's Edge,” which is about one American man's search for enlightenment following his harrowing experiences in World War I. In 1946, it became a well-loved motion picture as well.  The next truly major interaction between India and Western culture happened when Mahatma Gandhi visited London at the end of 1931, and this was quite a phenomenon. Although Gandhi was the head statesman of his country, when he came to England, instead of wearing formal western clothing, he only wore his simple handwoven Indian cloth and sandals. He always looked like he was walking through the blistering heat of India, although he was in the freezing temperatures of England, with its shivering rains. Wherever he went, he was mobbed by massive crowds who were in awe of his presence. Not only were his words inspiring, he also had a piercing wit. As he was about to depart, a reporter asked him, “What do you think about Western Civilization. “I think it would be a good idea,” he shot back. A few years later in August of 1935 Gandhi met with Parmahansa Yogananda, who initiated him into the practice of Kriya Yoga, an advanced form of meditation. But to Gandhi, the ground breaking elevation of consciousness had applications that were societal as well as individual. And in response to the increasingly harsh British domination of India, Gandhi began to institute a process he called “Satagraha” which means “holding onto truth,” with its emphasis on non-violent civil disobedience. Although it was a slow and difficult process, it was extremely powerful and twelve years later, the British were driven out of India with relatively little violence. It was a truly incredible example of the application of evolved consciousness to resolve a cruel societal injustice.   But that wasn't the end of it. In the late forties, an African-American theology student at Morehouse College in Atlanta was introduced to these remarkable works of the Mahatma. Intrigued, the student began a serious study of Gandhi and the unique way he had been able to terminate British rule      Upon his graduation, that student was ordained to the Baptist ministry at the age of 19. And of course, that student was Martin Luther King, Jr. As his activities in the civil rights movement began to evolve and grow, he became more interested in the idea of applying Gandhi's methods to break the chains of racial oppression that were so overwhelmingly prevalent throughout the land.      It all culminated on February 3, 1959 when King and his wife Coretta, embarked on a three-month trip to India to get more familiar with Gandhi's approach. “To other countries I may go as a tourist,” he said upon his arrival. “But to India I come as a pilgrim.” During his stay, his study of Gandhi deepened considerably. As an ordained minister, he was taken with Gandhi's profound spiritual understandings and in his closing remarks he said, “In a real sense, Mahatma Gandhi embodied in his life certain universal principles that are inherent in the moral structure of the universe, and these principles are as inescapable as the law of gravitation.” Dr. King returned to the United States and anyone remotely familiar with American history knows the extraordinary story of what happened next.  So, that unlikely acid trip that ended with George Harrison's mysterious inner reflection about the Yogis of the Himalayas began yet another major chapter in the story of how the evolution of consciousness has changed the world. And changed it for the better. And even though a lot of the advances that happened came about as a result of some terrible cruelty, the truth is, the negativity had quite a silver lining.  And for me, it's always important to remember that the only reason there ever is a silver lining, is because of the powerful light that is right behind those dark clouds. Well, that's the end of this episode. As always, keep your eyes, mind and heart opened and let's get together in the next one.

Houston Radio Platinum airdate 10-16-22Today at noon on Houston Radio Platinum, the Crispy Coated Robots listen to the Beatles classic "Rubber Soul!" That's right, George W. Padgett and Jim Beazy break down all the classic tracks - "Michelle," "Drive My Car," "Nowhere Man" and more! Find out - which song won a grammy, which actress inspired multiple songs, which song started the Patti-rock era and more! Listen on-air in Houston at 850 AM KEYH, online at houstonradioplatinum.com and on your phone by downloading the FREE app! If you miss the noon show (family stuff or football) check out the replay Monday at midnight! Chris Alan Joey Kovacik THE BEATLES Rob Olive #newepisode #classicalbums

From the Buskin with The Beatles episode 'Fab Four Double Tracking'www.patreon.com/BWTB

January 20-26, 1996 This week Ken welcomes former Boston, now L.A., based comic and fellow comic book lover Jeff May to the show. Ken and Jeff discuss technology, selling your soul, Wizard of Bard, long sleeve vs. short sleeve shirts,  sweat shirts, weird bodies, Blast from the Past, comic book stores, buying TV Guides,  Burbank, That's Entertainment, Sci-Fi Issues, sports and fantasy, Shatner as Michael Meyers mask, Arizona, the weirdness of time zones, Mountain Time, space station astronauts doing Tim Allen's grunt, Galaxy Quest, Tony Robbins, Leeza Gibbons fake infomercial, Robocop, not believing in ghosts, Celebrity Horroscope, giant soda, Diet Rite Chocolate Soda, Delta Burke, Polar Seltzer, Worcester MA, SNICK, Mary Tona-Cocaine, Table Talk Pies, Frozen Pizza, The Golden Globes, Weird Science the TV series, Are You Afraid of the Dark?, hating Dean Caine, The Adventures of Lois and Clark, bootleg grandma VHS, Renaissance Man being two stars, The Babysitter's Seduction,  Collector's Plates, Dr. Crusher slapping your ass, BMG mail fraud, The Drew Carey Show, Montell Williams, Nowhere Man, It Could Happen to You, The Valley, Mario Van Peebles, hating friends, how offensive Ferengi are, Star Trek, appreciating Data, Tank Girl, pre-2000s Comic Book movies, the Punish with Dolph Lundgren bootleg, Judge Dredd, Demolition Man, Lucy Lawless vs Kevin Sorbo, terrible comics in Boston who continue to get booked, transphobia, Ken writing for Richard Roundtree, the Cheers Robots, using antennas, TBS, network TV, The Jeff Has Cool Friends Podcast, California Dreams, Thomas Dolby, cell phone ring tones, Nokia, and the mystery of Huey Lewis and The News. 

Episode one hundred and forty-two of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “God Only Knows" by the Beach Boys, and the creation of the Pet Sounds album. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Sunny" by Bobby Hebb. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources There is no Mixcloud this week, because there were too many Beach Boys songs in the episode. I used many resources for this episode, most of which will be used in future Beach Boys episodes too. It's difficult to enumerate everything here, because I have been an active member of the Beach Boys fan community for twenty-four years, and have at times just used my accumulated knowledge for this. But the resources I list here are ones I've checked for specific things. Stephen McParland has published many, many books on the California surf and hot-rod music scenes, including several on both the Beach Boys and Gary Usher.  His books can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks Andrew Doe's Bellagio 10452 site is an invaluable resource. Jon Stebbins' The Beach Boys FAQ is a good balance between accuracy and readability. And Philip Lambert's Inside the Music of Brian Wilson is an excellent, though sadly out of print, musicological analysis of Wilson's music from 1962 through 67. I have also referred to Brian Wilson's autobiography, I Am Brian Wilson, and to Mike Love's, Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy. For material specific to Pet Sounds I have used Kingsley Abbot's The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds: The Greatest Album of the Twentieth Century and Charles L Granata's I Just Wasn't Made For These Times: Brian Wilson and the Making of Pet Sounds.  I also used the 126-page book The Making of Pet Sounds by David Leaf, which came as part of the The Pet Sounds Sessions box set, which also included the many alternate versions of songs from the album used here. Sadly both that box set and the 2016 updated reissue of it appear currently to be out of print, but either is well worth obtaining for anyone who is interested in how great records are made. Of the versions of Pet Sounds that are still in print, this double-CD version is the one I'd recommend. It has the original mono mix of the album, the more recent stereo remix, the instrumental backing tracks, and live versions of several songs. As a good starting point for the Beach Boys' music in general, I would recommend this budget-priced three-CD set, which has a surprisingly good selection of their material on it. The YouTube drum tutorial I excerpted a few seconds of to show a shuffle beat is here. Transcript We're still in the run of episodes that deal with the LA pop music scene -- though next week we're going to move away from LA, while still dealing with a lot of the people who would play a part in that scene. But today we're hitting something that requires a bit of explanation. Most artists covered in this podcast get one or at the most two episodes. Some get slightly more -- the major artists who are present for many revolutions in music, or who have particularly important careers, like Fats Domino or the Supremes. And then there are a few very major artists who get a lot more. The Beatles, for example, are going to get eight in total, plus there will be episodes on some of their solo careers. Elvis has had six, and will get one more wrap-up episode. This is the third Beach Boys episode, and there are going to be three more after this, because the Beach Boys were one of the most important acts of the decade. But normally, I limit major acts to one episode per calendar year of their career. This means that they will average at most one episode every ten episodes, so while for example the episodes on "Mystery Train" and "Heartbreak Hotel" came close together, there was then a reasonable gap before another Elvis episode. This is not possible for the Beach Boys, because this episode and the next two Beach Boys ones all take place over an incredibly compressed timeline. In May 1966, they released an album that has consistently been voted the best album ever in polls of critics, and which is certainly one of the most influential even if one does not believe there is such a thing as a "best album ever". In October 1966 they released one of the most important singles ever -- a record that is again often considered the single best pop single of all time, and which again was massively influential. And then in July 1967 they released the single that was intended to be the lead-off single from their album Smile, an album that didn't get released until decades later, and which became a legend of rock music that was arguably more influential by *not* being released than most records that are released manage to be. And these are all very different stories, stories that need to be told separately. This means that episode one hundred and forty-two, episode one hundred and forty-six, and episode one hundred and fifty-three are all going to be about the Beach Boys. There will be one final later episode about them, too, but the next few months are going to be very dominated by them, so I apologise in advance for that if that's not something you're interested in. Though it also means that with luck some of these episodes will be closer to the shorter length of podcast I prefer rather than the ninety-minute mammoths we've had recently. Though I'm afraid this is another long one. When we left the Beach Boys, we'd just heard that Glen Campbell had temporarily replaced Brian Wilson on the road, after Wilson's mental health had finally been unable to take the strain of touring while also being the group's record producer, principal songwriter, and leader. To thank Campbell, who at this point was not at all well known in his own right, though he was a respected session guitarist and had released a few singles, Brian had co-written and produced "Guess I'm Dumb" for him, a track which prefigured the musical style that Wilson was going to use for the next year or so: [Excerpt: Glen Campbell, "Guess I'm Dumb"] It's worth looking at "Guess I'm Dumb" in a little detail, as it points the way forward to a lot of Wilson's songwriting over the next year. Firstly, of course, there are the lyrical themes of insecurity and of what might even be descriptions of mental illness in the first verse -- "the way I act don't seem like me, I'm not on top like I used to be". The lyrics are by Russ Titelman, but it's reasonable to assume that as with many of his collaborations, Brian brought in the initial idea. There's also a noticeable change in the melodic style compared to Wilson's earlier melodies. Up to this point, Wilson has mostly been writing what get called "horizontal" melody lines -- ones with very little movement, and small movements, often centred on a single note or two. There are exceptions of course, and plenty of them, but a typical Brian Wilson melody up to this point is the kind of thing where even I can hit the notes more or less OK -- [sings] "Well, she got her daddy's car and she cruised through the hamburger stand now". It's not quite a monotone, but it's within a tight range, and you don't have to move far from one note to another. But "Guess I'm Dumb" is incorporating the influence of Roy Orbison, and more obviously of Burt Bacharach, and it's *ludicrously* vertical, with gigantic leaps all over the place, in places that are not obvious. It requires the kind of precision that only a singer like Campbell can attain, to make it sound at all natural: [Excerpt: Glen Campbell, "Guess I'm Dumb"] Bacharach's influence is also noticeable in the way that the chord changes are very different from those that Wilson was using before. Up to this point, when Wilson wrote unusual chord changes, it was mostly patterns like "The Warmth of the Sun", which is wildly inventive, but mostly uses very simple triads and sevenths. Now he was starting to do things like the line "I guess I'm dumb but I don't care", which is sort of a tumbling set of inversions of the same chord that goes from a triad with the fifth in the bass, to a major sixth, to a minor eleventh, to a minor seventh. Part of the reason that Brian could start using these more complex voicings was that he was also moving away from using just the standard guitar/bass/drums lineup, sometimes with keyboards and saxophone, which had been used on almost every Beach Boys track to this point. Instead, as well as the influence of Bacharach, Wilson was also being influenced by Jack Nitzsche's arrangements for Phil Spector's records, and in particular by the way Nitzsche would double instruments, and have, say, a harpsichord and a piano play the same line, to create a timbre that was different from either individual instrument. But where Nitzsche and Spector used the technique along with a lot of reverb and overdubbing to create a wall of sound which was oppressive and overwhelming, and which obliterated the sounds of the individual instruments, Wilson used the same instrumentalists, the Wrecking Crew, to create something far more delicate: [Excerpt: Glen Campbell, "Guess I'm Dumb (instrumental and backing vocals)"] Campbell does such a good job on "Guess I'm Dumb" that one has to wonder what would  have happened if he'd remained with the Beach Boys. But Campbell had of course not been able to join the group permanently -- he had his own career to attend to, and that would soon take off in a big way, though he would keep playing on the Beach Boys' records for a while yet as a member of the Wrecking Crew. But Brian Wilson was still not well enough to tour. In fact, as he explained to the rest of the group, he never intended to tour again -- and he wouldn't be a regular live performer for another twelve years. At first the group were terrified -- they thought he was talking about quitting the group, or the group splitting up altogether. But Brian had a different plan. From that point on, there were two subtly different lineups of the group. In the studio, Brian would sing his parts as always, but the group would get a permanent replacement for him on tour -- someone who could replace him on stage. While the group was on tour, Brian would use the time to write songs and to record backing tracks. He'd already started using the Wrecking Crew to add a bit of additional musical colour to some of the group's records, but from this point on, he'd use them to record the whole track, maybe getting Carl to add a bit of guitar as well if he happened to be around, but otherwise just using the group to provide vocals. It's important to note that this *was* a big change. A lot of general music history sources will say things like "the Beach Boys never played on their own records", and this is taken as fact by people who haven't investigated further. In fact, the basic tracks for all their early hits were performed by the group themselves -- "Surfin'", "Surfin' Safari", "409", "Surfer Girl", "Little Deuce Coupe", "Don't Worry Baby" and many more were entirely performed by the Beach Boys, while others like "I Get Around" featured the group with a couple of additional musicians augmenting them. The idea that the group never played on their records comes entirely from their recordings from 1965 and 66, and even there often Carl would overdub a guitar part. And at this point, the Beach Boys were still playing on the majority of their recordings, even on sophisticated-sounding records like "She Knows Me Too Well", which is entirely a group performance other than Brian's friend, Russ Titelman, the co-writer of "Guess I'm Dumb", adding some percussion by hitting a microphone stand with a screwdriver: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "She Knows Me Too Well"] So the plan to replace the group's instrumental performances in the studio was actually a bigger change than it might seem. But an even bigger change was the live performances, which of course required the group bringing in a permanent live replacement for Brian. They'd already tried this once before, when he'd quit the road for a while and they'd brought Al Jardine back in, but David Marks quitting had forced him back on stage. Now they needed someone to take his place for good. They phoned up their friend Bruce Johnston to see if he knew anyone, and after suggesting a couple of names that didn't work out, he volunteered his own services, and as of this recording he's spent more than fifty years in the band (he quit for a few years in the mid-seventies, but came back). We've seen Johnston turn up several times already, most notably in the episode on "LSD-25", where he was one of the musicians on the track we looked at, but for those of you who don't remember those episodes, he was pretty much *everywhere* in California music in the late fifties and early sixties. He had been in a band at school with Phil Spector and Sandy Nelson, and another band with Jan and Dean, and he'd played on Nelson's "Teen Beat", produced by Art Laboe: [Excerpt: Sandy Nelson, "Teen Beat"] He'd been in the house band at those shows Laboe put on at El Monte stadium we talked about a couple of episodes back, he'd been a witness to John Dolphin's murder, he'd been a record producer for Bob Keane, where he'd written and produced songs for Ron Holden, the man who had introduced "Louie Louie" to Seattle: [Excerpt: Ron Holden, "Gee But I'm Lonesome"] He'd written "The Tender Touch" for Richard Berry's backing group The Pharaos, with Berry singing backing vocals on this one: [Excerpt: The Pharaos, "The Tender Touch"] He'd helped Bob Keane compile Ritchie Valens' first posthumous album, he'd played on "LSD-25" and "Moon Dawg" by the Gamblers: [Excerpt: The Gamblers, "Moon Dawg"] He'd arranged and produced the top ten hit “Those Oldies but Goodies (Remind Me of You)” for Little Caesar and the Romans: [Excerpt Little Caesar and the Romans, "Those Oldies but Goodies (Remind Me of You)"] Basically, wherever you looked in the LA music scene in the early sixties, there was Bruce Johnston somewhere in the background. But in particular, he was suitable for the Beach Boys because he had a lot of experience in making music that sounded more than a little like theirs. He'd made cheap surf records as the Bruce Johnston Surfing Band: [Excerpt: Bruce Johnston, "The Hamptons"] And with his long-time friend and creative partner Terry Melcher he had, as well as working on several Paul Revere and the Raiders records, also recorded hit Beach Boys soundalikes both as their own duo, Bruce and Terry: [Excerpt: Bruce and Terry, "Summer Means Fun"] and under the name of a real group that Melcher had signed, but who don't seem to have sung much on their own big hit, the Rip Chords: [Excerpt: The Rip Chords, "Hey Little Cobra"] Johnston fit in well with the band, though he wasn't a bass player before joining, and had to be taught the parts by Carl and Al. But he's probably the technically strongest musician in the band, and while he would later switch to playing keyboards on stage, he was quickly able to get up to speed on the bass well enough to play the parts that were needed. He also wasn't quite as strong a falsetto singer as Brian Wilson, as can be heard by listening to this live recording of the group singing "I Get Around" in 1966: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Get Around (live 1966)"] Johnston is actually an excellent singer -- and can still hit the high notes today. He sings the extremely high falsetto part on "Fun Fun Fun" at the end of every Beach Boys show. But his falsetto was thinner than Wilson's, and he also has a distinctive voice which can be picked out from the blend in a way that none of the other Beach Boys' voices could -- the Wilson brothers and Mike Love all have a strong family resemblance, and Al Jardine always sounded spookily close to them. This meant that increasingly, the band would rearrange the vocal parts on stage, with Carl or Al taking the part that Brian had taken in the studio. Which meant that if, say, Al sang Brian's high part, Carl would have to move up to sing the part that Al had been singing, and then Bruce would slot in singing the part Carl had sung in the studio. This is a bigger difference than it sounds, and it meant that there was now a need for someone to work out live arrangements that were different from the arrangements on the records -- someone had to reassign the vocal parts, and also work out how to play songs that had been performed by maybe eighteen session musicians playing French horns and accordions and vibraphones with a standard rock-band lineup without it sounding too different from the record. Carl Wilson, still only eighteen when Brian retired from the road, stepped into that role, and would become the de facto musical director of the Beach Boys on stage for most of the next thirty years, to the point that many of the group's contracts for live performances at this point specified that the promoter was getting "Carl Wilson and four other musicians". This was a major change to the group's dynamics. Up to this point, they had been a group with a leader -- Brian -- and a frontman -- Mike, and three other members. Now they were a more democratic group on stage, and more of a dictatorship in the studio. This was, as you can imagine, not a stable situation, and was one that would not last long. But at first, this plan seemed to go very, very well. The first album to come out of this new hybrid way of working, The Beach Boys Today!, was started before Brian retired from touring, and some of the songs on it were still mostly or solely performed by the group, but as we heard with "She Knows Me Too Well" earlier, the music was still more sophisticated than on previous records, and this can be heard on songs like "When I Grow Up to Be a Man", where the only session musician is the harmonica player, with everything else played by the group: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "When I Grow Up to Be a Man"] But the newer sophistication really shows up on songs like "Kiss Me Baby", where most of the instrumentation is provided by the Wrecking Crew -- though Carl and Brian both play on the track -- and so there are saxophones, vibraphones, French horn, cor anglais, and multiple layers of twelve-string guitar: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Kiss Me Baby"] Today had several hit singles on it -- "Dance, Dance, Dance", "When I Grow Up to be a Man", and their cover version of Bobby Freeman's "Do You Wanna Dance?" all charted -- but the big hit song on the album actually didn't become a hit in that version. "Help Me Ronda" was a piece of album filler with a harmonica part played by Billy Lee Riley, and was one of Al Jardine's first lead vocals on a Beach Boys record -- he'd only previously sung lead on the song "Christmas Day" on their Christmas album: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Help Me Ronda"] While the song was only intended as album filler, other people saw the commercial potential in the song. Bruce Johnston was at this time still signed to Columbia records as an artist, and wasn't yet singing on Beach Boys records, and he recorded a version of the song with Terry Melcher as a potential single: [Excerpt: Bruce and Terry, "Help Me Rhonda"] But on seeing the reaction to the song, Brian decided to rerecord it as a single. Unfortunately, Murry Wilson turned up to the session. Murry had been fired as the group's manager by his sons the previous year, though he still owned the publishing company that published their songs. In the meantime, he'd decided to show his family who the real talent behind the group was by taking on another group of teenagers and managing and producing them. The Sunrays had a couple of minor hits, like "I Live for the Sun": [Excerpt: The Sunrays, "I Live for the Sun"] But nothing made the US top forty, and by this point it was clear, though not in the way that Murry hoped, who the real talent behind the group *actually* was. But he turned up to the recording session, with his wife in tow, and started trying to produce it: [Excerpt: Beach Boys and Murry Wilson "Help Me Rhonda" sessions] It ended up with Brian physically trying to move his drunk father away from the control panel in the studio, and having a heartbreaking conversation with him, where the twenty-two-year-old who is recovering from a nervous breakdown only a few months earlier sounds calmer, healthier, and more mature than his forty-seven-year-old father: [Excerpt: Beach Boys and Murry Wilson, "Help Me Rhonda" sessions] Knowing that this was the family dynamic helps make the comedy filler track on the next album, "I'm Bugged at My Old Man", seem rather less of a joke than it otherwise would: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I'm Bugged at My Old Man"] But with Murry out of the way, the group did eventually complete recording "Help Me Rhonda" (and for those of you reading this as a blog post rather than listening to the podcast, yes they did spell it two different ways for the two different versions), and it became the group's second number one hit: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Help Me, Rhonda"] As well as Murry Wilson, though, another figure was in the control room then -- Loren Daro (who at the time went by his birth surname, but I'm going to refer to him throughout by the name he chose).  You can hear, on the recording, Brian Wilson asking Daro if he could "turn him on" -- slang that was at that point not widespread enough for Wilson's parents to understand the meaning. Daro was an agent working for the William Morris Agency, and he was part of a circle of young, hip, people who were taking drugs, investigating mysticism, and exploring new spiritual ideas. His circle included the Byrds -- Daro, like Roger McGuinn, later became a follower of Subud and changed his name as a result -- as well as people like the songwriter and keyboard player Van Dyke Parks, who will become a big part of this story in subsequent episodes, and Stephen Stills, who will also be turning up again. Daro had introduced Brian to cannabis, in 1964, and in early 1965 he gave Brian acid for the first time -- one hundred and twenty-five micrograms of pure Owsley LSD-25. Now, we're going to be looking at acid culture quite a lot in the next few months, as we get through 1966 and 1967, and I'll have a lot more to say about it, but what I will say is that even the biggest proponents of psychedelic drug use tend not to suggest that it is a good idea to give large doses of LSD in an uncontrolled setting to young men recovering from a nervous breakdown. Daro later described Wilson's experience as "ego death" -- a topic we will come to in a future episode, and not considered entirely negative -- and "a beautiful thing". But he has also talked about how Wilson was so terrified by his hallucinations that he ran into the bedroom, locked the door, and hid his head under a pillow for two hours, which doesn't sound so beautiful to me. Apparently after those two hours, he came out of the bedroom, said "Well, that's enough of that", and was back to normal. After that first trip, Wilson wrote a piece of music inspired by his psychedelic experience. A piece which starts like this, with an orchestral introduction very different from anything else the group had released as a single: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "California Girls"] Of course, when Mike Love added the lyrics to the song, it became about far more earthly and sensual concerns: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "California Girls"] But leaving the lyrics aside for a second, it's interesting to look at "California Girls" musically to see what Wilson's idea of psychedelic music -- by which I mean specifically music inspired by the use of psychedelic drugs, since at this point there was no codified genre known as psychedelic music or psychedelia -- actually was. So, first, Wilson has said repeatedly that the song was specifically inspired by "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" by Bach: [Excerpt: Bach, "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring"] And it's odd, because I see no real structural or musical resemblance between the two pieces that I can put my finger on, but at the same time I can totally see what he means. Normally at this point I'd say "this change here in this song relates to this change there in that song", but there's not much of that kind of thing here -- but I still. as soon as I read Wilson saying that for the first time, more than twenty years ago, thought "OK, that makes sense". There are a few similarities, though. Bach's piece is based around triplets, and they made Wilson think of a shuffle beat. If you remember *way* back in the second episode of the podcast, I talked about how one of the standard shuffle beats is to play triplets in four-four time. I'm going to excerpt a bit of recording from a YouTube drum tutorial (which I'll link in the liner notes) showing that kind of shuffle: [Excerpt: "3 Sweet Triplet Fills For Halftime Shuffles & Swung Grooves- Drum Lesson" , from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CwlSaQZLkY ] Now, while Bach's piece is in waltz time, I hope you can hear how the DA-da-da DA-da-da in Bach's piece may have made Wilson think of that kind of shuffle rhythm. Bach's piece also has a lot of emphasis of the first, fifth, and sixth notes of the scale -- which is fairly common, and not something particularly distinctive about the piece -- and those are the notes that make up the bass riff that Wilson introduces early in the song: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "California Girls (track)"] That bass riff, of course, is a famous one. Those of you who were listening to the very earliest episodes of the podcast might remember it from the intros to many, many, Ink Spots records: [Excerpt: The Ink Spots, "We Three (My Echo, My Shadow, and Me)"] But the association of that bassline to most people's ears would be Western music, particularly the kind of music that was in Western films in the thirties and forties. You hear something similar in "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine", as performed by Laurel and Hardy in their 1937 film Way Out West: [Excerpt: Laurel and Hardy, "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine"] But it's most associated with the song "Tumbling Tumbleweeds", first recorded in 1934 by the Western group Sons of the Pioneers, but more famous in their 1946 rerecording, made after the Ink Spots' success, where the part becomes more prominent: [Excerpt: The Sons of the Pioneers, "Tumbling Tumbleweeds"] That song was a standard of the Western genre, and by 1965 had been covered by everyone from Gene Autry to the Supremes, Bob Wills to Johnnie Ray, and it would also end up covered by several musicians in the LA pop music scene over the next few years, including Michael Nesmith and Curt Boettcher, both people part of the same general scene as the Beach Boys. The other notable thing about "California Girls" is that it's one of the first times that Wilson was able to use multi-tracking to its full effect. The vocal parts were recorded on an eight-track machine, meaning that Wilson could triple-track both Mike Love's lead vocal and the group's backing vocals. With Johnston now in the group -- "California Girls" was his first recording session with them -- that meant that on the record there were eighteen voices singing, leading to some truly staggering harmonies: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "California Girls (Stack-O-Vocals)"] So, that's what the psychedelic experience meant to Brian Wilson, at least -- Bach, orchestral influences, using the recording studio to create thicker vocal harmony parts, and the old West. Keep that in the back of your mind for the present, but it'll be something to remember in eleven episodes' time. "California Girls" was, of course, another massive hit, reaching number three on the charts. And while some Beach Boys fans see the album it was included on, Summer Days... And Summer Nights!, as something of a step backward from the sophistication of Today!, this is a relative thing. It's very much of a part with the music on the earlier album, and has many wonderful moments, with songs like "Let Him Run Wild" among the group's very best. But it was their next studio album that would cement the group's artistic reputation, and which would regularly be acclaimed by polls of critics as the greatest album of all time -- a somewhat meaningless claim; even more than there is no "first" anything in music, there's no "best" anything. The impulse to make what became Pet Sounds came, as Wilson has always told the story, from hearing the Beatles album Rubber Soul. Now, we've not yet covered Rubber Soul -- we're going to look at that, and at the album that came after it, in three episodes' time -- but it is often regarded as a major artistic leap forward for the Beatles. The record Wilson heard, though, wasn't the same record that most people nowadays think of when they think of Rubber Soul. Since the mid-eighties, the CD versions of the Beatles albums have (with one exception, Magical Mystery Tour) followed the tracklistings of the original British albums, as the Beatles and George Martin intended. But in the sixties, Capitol Records were eager to make as much money out of the Beatles as they could. The Beatles' albums generally had fourteen songs on, and often didn't include their singles. Capitol thought that ten or twelve songs per album was plenty, and didn't have any aversion to putting singles on albums. They took the three British albums Help!, Rubber Soul, and Revolver, plus the non-album "Day Tripper"/"We Can Work It Out" single and Ken Thorne's orchestral score for the Help! film, and turned that into four American albums -- Help!, Rubber Soul, Yesterday and Today, and Revolver. In the case of Rubber Soul, that meant that they removed four tracks from the British album -- "Drive My Car", "Nowhere Man", "What Goes On" and "If I Needed Someone" -- and added two songs from the British version of Help!, "I've Just Seen a Face" and "It's Only Love". Now, I've seen some people claim that this made the American Rubber Soul more of a folk-rock album -- I may even have said that myself in the past -- but that's not really true. Indeed, "Nowhere Man" and "If I Needed Someone" are two of the Beatles' most overtly folk-rock tracks, and both clearly show the influence of the Byrds. But what it did do was remove several of the more electric songs from the album, and replace them with acoustic ones: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I've Just Seen a Face"] This, completely inadvertently, gave the American Rubber Soul lineup a greater sense of cohesion than the British one. Wilson later said "I listened to Rubber Soul, and I said, 'How could they possibly make an album where the songs all sound like they come from the same place?'" At other times he's described his shock at hearing "a whole album of only good songs" and similar phrases. Because up to this point, Wilson had always included filler tracks on albums, as pretty much everyone did in the early sixties. In the American pop music market, up to the mid sixties, albums were compilations of singles plus whatever random tracks happened to be lying around. And so for example in late 1963 the Beach Boys had released two albums less than a month apart -- Surfer Girl and Little Deuce Coupe. Given that Brian Wilson wrote or co-wrote all the group's original material, it wasn't all that surprising that Little Deuce Coupe had to include four songs that had been released on previous albums, including two that were on Surfer Girl from the previous month. It was the only way the group could keep up with the demand for new product from a company that had no concept of popular music as art. Other Beach Boys albums had included padding such as generic surf instrumentals, comedy sketches like "Cassius" Love vs. "Sonny" Wilson, and in the case of The Beach Boys Today!, a track titled "Bull Session With the Big Daddy", consisting of two minutes of random chatter with the photographer Earl Leaf while they all ate burgers: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys and Earl Leaf, "Bull Session With the Big Daddy"] This is not to attack the Beach Boys. This was a simple response to the commercial pressures of the marketplace. Between October 1962 and November 1965, they released eleven albums. That's about an album every three months, as well as a few non-album singles. And on top of that Brian had also been writing songs during that time for Jan & Dean, the Honeys, the Survivors and others, and had collaborated with Gary Usher and Roger Christian on songs for Muscle Beach Party, one of American International Pictures' series of Beach Party films. It's unsurprising that not everything produced on this industrial scale was a masterpiece. Indeed, the album the Beach Boys released directly before Pet Sounds could be argued to be an entire filler album. Many biographies say that Beach Boys Party! was recorded to buy Brian time to make Pet Sounds, but the timelines don't really match up on closer investigation. Beach Boys Party! was released in November 1965, before Brian ever heard Rubber Soul, which came out later, and before he started writing the material that became Pet Sounds. Beach Boys Party! was a solution to a simple problem -- the group were meant to deliver three albums that year, and they didn't have three albums worth of material. Some shows had been recorded for a possible live album, but they'd released a live album in 1964 and hadn't really changed their setlist very much in the interim. So instead, they made a live-in-the-studio album, with the conceit that it was recorded at a party the group were holding. Rather than the lush Wrecking Crew instrumentation they'd been using in recent months, everything was played on acoustic guitars, plus some bongos provided by Wrecking Crew drummer Hal Blaine and some harmonica from Billy Hinsche of the boy band Dino, Desi, and Billy, whose sister Carl Wilson was shortly to marry. The album included jokes and false starts, and was overlaid with crowd noise, to give the impression that you were listening to an actual party where a few people were sitting round with guitars and having fun. The album consisted of songs that the group liked and could play without rehearsal -- novelty hits from a few years earlier like "Alley Oop" and "Hully Gully", a few Beatles songs, and old favourites like the Everly Brothers hit "Devoted to You" -- in a rather lovely version with two-part harmony by Mike and Brian, which sounds much better in a remixed version released later without the party-noise overdubs: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Devoted to You (remix)"] But the song that defined the album, which became a massive hit, and which became an albatross around the band's neck about which some of them would complain for a long time to come, didn't even have one of the Beach Boys singing lead. As we discussed back in the episode on "Surf City", by this point Jan and Dean were recording their album "Folk 'n' Roll", their attempt at jumping on the folk-rock bandwagon, which included the truly awful "The Universal Coward", a right-wing answer song  to "The Universal Soldier" released as a Jan Berry solo single: [Excerpt: Jan Berry, "The Universal Coward"] Dean Torrence was by this point getting sick of working with Berry, and was also deeply unimpressed with the album they were making, so he popped out of the studio for a while to go and visit his friends in the Beach Boys, who were recording nearby. He came in during the Party sessions, and everyone was suggesting songs to perform, and asked Dean to suggest something. He remembered an old doo-wop song that Jan and Dean had recorded a cover version of, and suggested that. The group had Dean sing lead, and ran through a sloppy version of it, where none of them could remember the words properly: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Barbara Ann"] And rather incredibly, that became one of the biggest hits the group ever had, making number two on the Billboard chart (and number one on other industry charts like Cashbox), number three in the UK, and becoming a song that the group had to perform at almost every live show they ever did, together or separately, for at least the next fifty-seven years. But meanwhile, Brian had been working on other material. He had not yet had his idea for an album made up entirely of good songs, but he had been experimenting in the studio. He'd worked on a handful of tracks which had pointed in new directions. One was a single, "The Little Girl I Once Knew": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "The Little Girl I Once Knew"] John Lennon gave that record a very favourable review, saying "This is the greatest! Turn it up, turn it right up. It's GOT to be a hit. It's the greatest record I've heard for weeks. It's fantastic." But the record only made number twenty -- a perfectly respectable chart placing, but nowhere near as good as the group's recent run of hits -- in part because its stop-start nature meant that the record had "dead air" -- moments of silence -- which made DJs avoid playing it, because they believed that dead air, even only a second of it here and there, would make people tune to another station. Another track that Brian had been working on was an old folk song suggested by Alan Jardine. Jardine had always been something of a folkie, of the Kingston Trio variety, and he had suggested that the group might record the old song "The Wreck of the John B", which the Kingston Trio had recorded. The Trio's version in turn had been inspired by the Weavers' version of the song from 1950: [Excerpt: The Weavers, "The Wreck of the John B"] Brian had at first not been impressed, but Jardine had fiddled with the chord sequence slightly, adding in a minor chord to make the song slightly more interesting, and Brian had agreed to record the track, though he left the instrumental without vocals for several months: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Sloop John B (instrumental)"] The track was eventually finished and released as a single, and unlike "The Little Girl I Once Knew" it was a big enough hit that it was included on the next album, though several people have said it doesn't fit. Lyrically, it definitely doesn't, but musically, it's very much of a piece with the other songs on what became Pet Sounds: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Sloop John B"] But while Wilson was able to create music by himself, he wasn't confident about his ability as a lyricist. Now, he's not a bad lyricist by any means -- he's written several extremely good lyrics by himself -- but Brian Wilson is not a particularly articulate or verbal person, and he wanted someone who could write lyrics as crafted as his music, but which would express the ideas he was trying to convey. He didn't think he could do it himself, and for whatever reason he didn't want to work with Mike Love, who had co-written the majority of his recent songs, or with any of his other collaborators. He did write one song with Terry Sachen, the Beach Boys' road manager at the time, which dealt obliquely with those acid-induced concepts of "ego death": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Hang on to Your Ego"] But while the group recorded that song, Mike Love objected vociferously to the lyrics. While Love did try cannabis a few times in the late sixties and early seventies, he's always been generally opposed to the use of illegal drugs, and certainly didn't want the group to be making records that promoted their use -- though I would personally argue that "Hang on to Your Ego" is at best deeply ambiguous about the prospect of ego death.  Love rewrote some of the lyrics, changing the title to "I Know There's an Answer", though as with all such bowdlerisation efforts he inadvertently left in some of the drug references: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Know There's an Answer"] But Wilson wasn't going to rely on Sachen for all the lyrics. Instead he turned to Tony Asher. Asher was an advertising executive, who Wilson probably met through Loren Daro -- there is some confusion over the timeline of their meeting, with some sources saying they'd first met in 1963 and that Asher had introduced Wilson to Daro, but others saying that the introductions went the other way, and that Daro introduced Asher to Wilson in 1965. But Asher and Daro had been friends for a long time, and so Wilson and Asher were definitely orbiting in the same circles. The most common version of the story seems to be that Asher was working in Western Studios, where he was recording a jingle - the advertising agency had him writing jingles because he was an amateur songwriter, and as he later put it nobody else at the agency knew the difference between E flat and A flat. Wilson was also working in the studio complex, and Wilson dragged Asher in to listen to some of the demos he was recording -- at that time Wilson was in the habit of inviting anyone who was around to listen to his works in progress. Asher chatted with him for a while, and thought nothing of it, until he got a phone call at work a few weeks later from Brian Wilson, suggesting the two write together. Wilson was impressed with Asher, who he thought of as very verbal and very intelligent, but Asher was less impressed with Wilson. He has softened his statements in recent decades, but in the early seventies he would describe Wilson as "a genius musician but an amateur human being", and sharply criticise his taste in films and literature, and his relationship with his wife. This attitude seems at least in part to have been shared by a lot of the people that Wilson was meeting and becoming influenced by. One of the things that is very noticeable about Wilson is that he has no filters at all, and that makes his music some of the most honest music ever recorded. But that same honesty also meant that he could never be cool or hip. He was -- and remains -- enthusiastic about the things he likes, and he likes things that speak to the person he is, not things that fit some idea of what the in crowd like. And the person Brian Wilson is is a man born in 1942, brought up in a middle-class suburban white family in California, and his tastes are the tastes one would expect from that background. And those tastes were not the tastes of the hipsters and scenesters who were starting to become part of his circle at the time. And so there's a thinly-veiled contempt in the way a lot of those people talked about Wilson, particularly in the late sixties and early seventies. Wilson, meanwhile, was desperate for their approval, and trying hard to fit in, but not quite managing it. Again, Asher has softened his statements more recently, and I don't want to sound too harsh about Asher -- both men were in their twenties, and still  trying to find their place in the world, and I wouldn't want to hold anyone's opinions from their twenties against them decades later. But that was the dynamic that existed between them. Asher saw himself as something of a sophisticate, and Wilson as something of a hick in contrast, but a hick who unlike him had created a string of massive hit records. And Asher did, always, respect Wilson's musical abilities. And Wilson in turn looked up to Asher, even while remaining the dominant partner, because he respected Asher's verbal facility. Asher took a two-week sabbatical from his job at the advertising agency, and during those two weeks, he and Wilson collaborated on eight songs that would make up the backbone of the album that would become Pet Sounds. The first song the two worked on was a track that had originally been titled "In My Childhood". Wilson had already recorded the backing track for this, including the sounds of bicycle horns and bells to evoke the feel of being a child: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "You Still Believe in Me (instrumental track)"] The two men wrote a new lyric for the song, based around a theme that appears in many of Wilson's songs -- the inadequate man who is loved by a woman who is infinitely superior to him, who doesn't understand why he's loved, but is astonished by it. The song became "You Still Believe in Me": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "You Still Believe in Me"] That song also featured an instrumental contribution of sorts by Asher. Even though the main backing track had been recorded before the two started working together, Wilson came up with an idea for an intro for the song, which would require a particular piano sound. To get that sound, Wilson held down the keys on a piano, while Asher leaned into the piano and plucked the strings manually. The result, with Wilson singing over the top, sounds utterly lovely: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "You Still Believe in Me"] Note that I said that Wilson and Asher came up with new lyrics together. There has been some slight dispute about the way songwriting credits were apportioned to the songs. Generally the credits said that Wilson wrote all the music, while Asher and Wilson wrote the lyrics together, so Asher got twenty-five percent of the songwriting royalties and Wilson seventy-five percent. Asher, though, has said that there are some songs for which he wrote the whole lyric by himself, and that he also made some contributions to the music on some songs -- though he has always said that the majority of the musical contribution was Wilson's, and that most of the time the general theme of the lyric, at least, was suggested by Wilson. For the most part, Asher hasn't had a problem with that credit split, but he has often seemed aggrieved -- and to my mind justifiably -- about the song "Wouldn't it Be Nice". Asher wrote the whole lyric for the song, though inspired by conversations with Wilson, but accepted his customary fifty percent of the lyrical credit. The result became one of the big hits from the album: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Wouldn't It Be Nice?"] But -- at least according to Mike Love, in the studio he added a single line to the song: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Wouldn't it Be Nice?"] When Love sued Brian Wilson in 1994, over the credits to thirty-five songs, he included "Wouldn't it Be Nice" in the list because of that contribution. Love now gets a third of the songwriting royalties, taken proportionally from the other two writers. Which means that he gets a third of Wilson's share and a third of Asher's share. So Brian Wilson gets half the money, for writing all the music, Mike Love gets a third of the money, for writing "Good night baby, sleep tight baby", and Tony Asher gets a sixth of the money -- half as much as Love -- for writing all the rest of the lyric. Again, this is not any one individual doing anything wrong – most of the songs in the lawsuit were ones where Love wrote the entire lyric, or a substantial chunk of it, and because the lawsuit covered a lot of songs the same formula was applied to borderline cases like “Wouldn't it Be Nice” as it was to clearcut ones like “California Girls”, where nobody disputes Love's authorship of the whole lyric. It's just the result of a series of reasonable decisions, each one of which makes sense in isolation, but which has left Asher earning significantly less from one of the most successful songs he ever wrote in his career than he should have earned. The songs that Asher co-wrote with Wilson were all very much of a piece, both musically and lyrically. Pet Sounds really works as a whole album better than it does individual tracks, and while some of the claims made about it -- that it's a concept album, for example -- are clearly false, it does have a unity to it, with ideas coming back in different forms. For example, musically, almost every new song on the album contains a key change down a minor third at some point -- not the kind of thing where the listener consciously notices that an idea has been repeated, but definitely the kind of thing that makes a whole album hold together. It also differs from earlier Beach Boys albums in that the majority of the lead vocals are by Brian Wilson. Previously, Mike Love had been the dominant voice on Beach Boys records, with Brian as second lead and the other members taking few or none. Now Love only took two main lead vocals, and was the secondary lead on three more. Brian, on the other hand, took six primary lead vocals and two partial leads. The later claims by some people that this was a Brian Wilson solo album in all but name are exaggerations -- the group members did perform on almost all of the tracks -- but it is definitely much more of a personal, individual statement than the earlier albums had been. The epitome of this was "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times", which Asher wrote the lyrics for but which was definitely Brian's idea, rather than Asher's. [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times"] That track also featured the first use on a Beach Boys record of the electro-theremin, an electronic instrument invented by session musician Paul Tanner, a former trombone player with the Glenn Miller band, who had created it to approximate the sound of a Theremin while being easier to play: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times"] That sound would turn up on future Beach Boys records... But the song that became the most lasting result of the Wilson/Asher collaboration was actually one that is nowhere near as personal as many of the other songs on the record, that didn't contain a lot of the musical hallmarks that unify the album, and that didn't have Brian Wilson singing lead. Of all the songs on the album, "God Only Knows" is the one that has the most of Tony Asher's fingerprints on it. Asher has spoken in the past about how when he and Wilson were writing, Asher's touchstones were old standards like "Stella By Starlight" and "How Deep is the Ocean?", and "God Only Knows" easily fits into that category. It's a crafted song rather than a deep personal expression, but the kind of craft that one would find in writers like the Gershwins, every note and syllable perfectly chosen: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows"] One of the things that is often wrongly said about the song is that it's the first pop song to have the word "God" in the title. It isn't, and indeed it isn't even the first pop song to be called "God Only Knows", as there was a song of that name recorded by the doo-wop group the Capris in 1954: [Excerpt: The Capris, "God Only Knows"] But what's definitely true is that Wilson, even though he was interested in creating spiritual music, and was holding prayer sessions with his brother Carl before vocal takes, was reluctant to include the word in the song at first, fearing it would harm radio play. He was probably justified in his fears -- a couple of years earlier he'd produced a record called "Pray for Surf" by the Honeys, a girl-group featuring his wife: [Excerpt: The Honeys, "Pray For Surf"] That record hadn't been played on the radio, in part because it was considered to be trivialising religion. But Asher eventually persuaded Wilson that it would be OK, saying "What do you think we should do instead? Say 'heck only knows'?" Asher's lyric was far more ambiguous than it may seem -- while it's on one level a straightforward love song, Asher has always pointed out that the protagonist never says that he loves the object of the song, just that he'll make her *believe* that he loves her. Coupled with the second verse, which could easily be read as a threat of suicide if the object leaves the singer, it would be very, very, easy to make the song into something that sounds like it was from the point of view of a narcissistic, manipulative, abuser. That ambiguity is also there in the music, which never settles in a strong sense of key. The song starts out with an A chord, which you'd expect to lead to the song being in A, but when the horn comes in, you get a D# note, which isn't in that key, and then when the verse starts, it starts on an inversion of a D chord, before giving you enough clues that by the end of the verse you're fairly sure you're in the key of E, but it never really confirms that: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows (instrumental)"] So this is an unsettling, ambiguous, song in many ways. But that's not how it sounds, nor how Brian at least intended it to sound. So why doesn't it sound that way? In large part it's down to the choice of lead vocalist. If Mike Love had sung this song, it might have sounded almost aggressive. Brian *did* sing it in early attempts at the track, and he doesn't sound quite right either -- his vocal attitude is just... not right: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows (Brian Wilson vocal)"] But eventually Brian hit on getting his younger brother Carl to sing lead. At this point Carl had sung very few leads on record -- there has been some dispute about who sang what, exactly,  because of the family resemblance which meant all the core band members could sound a little like each other, but it's generally considered that he had sung full leads on two album tracks -- "Pom Pom Play Girl" and "Girl Don't Tell Me" -- and partial leads on two other tracks, covers of "Louie Louie" and "Summertime Blues". At this point he wasn't really thought of as anything other than a backing vocalist, but his soft, gentle, performance on "God Only Knows" is one of the great performances: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows (vocals)"] The track was actually one of those that required a great deal of work in the studio to create the form which now seems inevitable. Early attempts at the recording included a quite awful saxophone solo: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys "God Only Knows (early version)"] And there were a lot of problems with the middle until session keyboard player Don Randi suggested the staccato break that would eventually be used: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows"] And similarly, the tag of the record was originally intended as a mass of harmony including all the Beach Boys, the Honeys, and Terry Melcher: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows (alternate version with a capella tag)"] Before Brian decided to strip it right back, and to have only three voices on the tag -- himself on the top and the bottom, and Bruce Johnston singing in the middle: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows"] When Pet Sounds came out, it was less successful in the US than hoped -- it became the first of the group's albums not to go gold on its release, and it only made number ten on the album charts. By any objective standards, this is still a success, but it was less successful than the record label had hoped, and was taken as a worrying sign. In the UK, though, it was a different matter. Up to this point, the Beach Boys had not had much commercial success in the UK, but recently Andrew Loog Oldham had become a fan, and had become the UK publisher of their original songs, and was interested in giving them the same kind of promotion that he'd given Phil Spector's records. Keith Moon of the Who was also a massive fan, and the Beach Boys had recently taken on Derek Taylor, with his strong British connections, as their publicist. Not only that, but Bruce Johnston's old friend Kim Fowley was now based in London and making waves there. So in May, in advance of a planned UK tour set for November that year, Bruce Johnston and Derek Taylor flew over to the UK to press the flesh and schmooze. Of all the group members, Johnston was the perfect choice to do this -- he's by far the most polished of them in terms of social interaction, and he was also the one who, other than Brian, had the least ambiguous feelings about the group's new direction, being wholeheartedly in favour of it. Johnston and Taylor met up with Keith Moon, Lennon and McCartney, and other pop luminaries, and played them the record. McCartney in particular was so impressed by Pet Sounds and especially "God Only Knows", that he wrote this, inspired by the song, and recorded it even before Pet Sounds' UK release at the end of June: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Here, There, and Everywhere"] As a result of Johnston and Taylor's efforts, and the promotional work by Oldham and others, Pet Sounds reached number two on the UK album charts, and "God Only Knows" made number two on the singles charts. (In the US, it was the B-side to "Wouldn't it Be Nice", although it made the top forty on its own merits too). The Beach Boys displaced the Beatles in the readers' choice polls for best band in the NME in 1966, largely as a result of the album, and Melody Maker voted it joint best album of the year along with the Beatles' Revolver. The Beach Boys' commercial fortunes were slightly on the wane in the US, but they were becoming bigger than ever in the UK. But a big part of this was creating expectations around Brian Wilson in particular. Derek Taylor had picked up on a phrase that had been bandied around -- enough that Murry Wilson had used it to mock Brian in the awful "Help Me, Rhonda" sessions -- and was promoting it widely as a truism. Everyone was now agreed that Brian Wilson was a genius. And we'll see how that expectation plays out over the next few weeks.. [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Caroline, No"]

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