Podcasts about Our Gang

We get to discuss in-depth the film history of The Little Rascals (A.K.A. Our Gang).   Topics Include: *how this group still finds an audience despite some stereotypes & outdated tropes *we dive into some less talked about trivia & how so many comedians reference the music theme *and other collabs with comedians like Groucho Marx!               MAIN LINKS:  LinkTree: ⁠https://linktr.ee/JURSPodcast⁠ Facebook Page: ⁠https://www.facebook.com/JackedUpReviewShow/⁠ Facebook Group: ⁠https://www.facebook.com/groups/2452329545040913⁠ Twitter:⁠ https://twitter.com/JackedUpReview ⁠ Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/jacked_up_podcast/ ⁠       SHOW LINKS: YouTube: ⁠https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCIyMawFPgvOpOUhKcQo4eQQ⁠   iHeartRadio: ⁠https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-the-jacked-up-review-show-59422651/⁠   Podbean: ⁠https://jackedupreviewshow.podbean.com⁠   Spotify: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/7Eg8w0DNympD6SQXSj1X3M⁠   Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-jacked-up-review-show-podcast/id1494236218⁠   RadioPublic: ⁠https://radiopublic.com/the-jacked-up-review-show-We4VjE⁠   Overcast: ⁠https://overcast.fm/itunes1494236218/the-jacked-up-review-show-podcast⁠   Google Podcasts: ⁠https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy9hNDYyOTdjL3BvZGNhc3QvcnNz⁠   Anchor:  ⁠https://anchor.fm/s/a46297c/podcast/rss⁠   PocketCasts: ⁠https://pca.st/0ncd5qp4⁠   CastBox:  ⁠https://castbox.fm/channel/The-Jacked-Up-Review-Show-Podcast-id2591222⁠   Discord:  ⁠https://discord.com/channels/796154005914779678/796154006358851586⁠         #MovieReview #FilmTwitter #PodFamily #PodcastersOfInstagram #Movies #Film #Cinema #Music #Reviews #Retrospect #Podcasts #MutantFam #MutantFamily #actionmystery #bmovies #scifihorror #truecrime #historydramas #warmovies #podcastcollabs #hottakes #edgy #cultmovies #nsfw #HorrorFam #badass 

"Well, she's walking through the cloudsWith a circus mind that's running wildButterflies and zebras and moonbeamsAnd her fairy talesThat's all she ever thinks aboutRiding with the wind"Please join us this afternoon on this week's Super Sounds Of The 70's . Traveling with us are David Bowie, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Paul Simon,  Gorge Harrison, Mamas & Papas, Toto, Supertramp,, Genesis, Golden Earring, Orpheus, The Kinks, Pat Metheny, The Beatles, Van Morrison, Yes, ZZ Top, Grand Funk Railroad, Spanky & Our Gang, Sonny & Cher, Three Dog Night, Todd Rundgren and Derek & The Dominos.

"Bright before me the signs implore meTo help the needy and show them the wayHuman kindness is overflowingAnd I think it's going to rain today" It's certainly been a difficult start to 2025 but we can get through this together with some basic human kindness. Join me along with  Warren Zevon, Patti Smith, Sam Cooke, The Knack, Louis Armstrong, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Allman Brothers Band, Spanky & Our Gang, Traffic, Judy Collins, Richie Havens, Three Dog Night, The Cars, Beach Boys, Impressions, Van Morrison, Peter Paul & Mary, Iron Butterfly, George Harrison, The Kinks, Dion and Randy Newman...We'll also have a tribute to Martin Luther King.

Let us examine the truths and falsehoods surrounding the most recent bonus episode of Lightnin' Licks Radio… FACT: It is typical for the Lickers to lag a bit behind the “Year's Best” list-making frenzy which consumes the majority of the sonic commentary mediasphere. FICTION: LLR is the only EOY list that matters. FACT: It's still worth the flippin' wait. Check back the first week of January, baby! FICTION: This month's super-special-secret-friend is two-time Saturn award-nominated* actor Crispin Hellion Glover. FACT: Our super-special-secret-friend is an interesting and kind soul with great taste in music. FICTION: LLR podcast bonus episode #24 is one to miss. Sonic (non-mix) contributors to the 24th bonus episode of Lightnin' Licks Radio podcast include: Townes Van Zandt, Prince Paul, De La Soul, Get Down Services, Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff, Tom Bell, Radio Ranch, The Replacements, Fredro, Grandmaster Caz, Grand Pupa, Sadat X, Big Daddy Kane, Kool G Rap, David Bowie, Spike Lee, Michael Jordan, DJ Premier, Ashford & Simpson, The Renaissance, The Beatles, Dion DiMucci, The Doors, Simon and Garfunkel, Spanky and Our Gang, Jimmy Webb, The Meters, Liquid Mike, Starship, Freeman's Narrative, Modest Mouse, Morrissey, Peter Gabrel, Beastie Boys, Donald Trump, Run the Jewels, Dr. Katz Professional Therapist's theme song, Ol' Burger Beats, Tapes and Tapes, Pimp My Ride's theme song, Daft Punk, Slowdive, Pursuit of Happiness, Danzig, Iggy Pop, Blue Oyster Cult, Mastodon, Nebula, Dave Grohl, Abraham Jefferson, The Price is Right sounds, Nirvana, Ugly Casanova, Tom Werman, Michael Moorcock, Ty Karim, Kent Harris, India Arie Simpson, Jim Morrison, DJ Fredwreck, Jack Antonoff, Sounwave, Crispin Glover, Kendrick Lamar, Heath Ledger, Eyag Nivram, and Jack Van Impe. Featured artists include: From Jay: Tears for Fears, Kelly Willis, John Tartaglia, and Blue Oyster Cult. From Deon: The Intruders, Saigon featuring Pete Rock, Mandy, and Tawana & the Total Destruction. Courtesy of our super-special-secret-friend Michael Paulus: Lola Young, Mojave 3, Ghost, and Stephen Wilson Jr. Bonus # 24 mixtape: [A1] Saigon featuring Pete Rock – Get Loose [A2] John Andrews Tartaglia – Wichita Lineman [A3} Ghost – Spillways [A4} Tawana & the Total Destruction – Wear Your Natural, Baby [A5] Tears for Fears – Astronaut [A6] Lola Young – Messy [B1] Blue Oyster Cult – You're Not the One (I Was Looking For) [B2] Mojave 3 – Prayer for the Paranoid (electric version) [B3] Mandy – Ms. Appear [B4] The Intruders – Turn the Hands of Time [B5] Kelly Willis – Fading Fast [B6] Stephen Wilson Jr. - Billy *Back to the Future, Willard. Jay's expressed opinions of Dave Grohl and Michael's conspiratorial beliefs about Courtney Love are not necessarily endorsed by this podcast. We drink Blue Chair Bay rums. We shop for music at Electric Kitsch. We perform said activities on our own accord. "We built this titty on cock and hole." - Michael Moorcock

I so want to connect with my hearers when I preach or speak. Yes, one has a Message -- the One-Way Love of God embodied in the Compassionate Christ. But if it doesn't really connect with the listener -- with the sufferer! -- it is not able to do its job. J.B. Priestley (d. 1984), who had basically lost whatever faith he had been exposed to as a child, spent a lot of years looking for... something. He would gladly have capitalized "something" (i.e., Something). In 1960 Priestley wrote specifically about the decline of Christianity in the West. He wrote that the only way the "Church" could 'come back' -- which he would have welcomed given the cultural despair and nihilism he observed everywhere around him -- was to get through to the unconscious. Christianity's original, great and contagious strength had been to reach individuals in their depth/s. I agree with JBP. For many years Mary and I have listened to sermons that are sincere, sound theologically, and well prepared exegetically. Yet we often leave the service untouched, un-addressed, un-healed. As Herr Kaesemann said once, after listening to a sermon during a conference at Yale Divinity School: "Es gibt keine Anrede!" In other words, the Word has to address me in the deeps. The preacher's "deeps" need to be calling out to mine (Psalm 42:7). This cast draws on Priestley's "Presence of the Absence"; a John Wyndham paperback from 1953; and -- wait for it -- Spanky & Our Gang. The last track, from 1969, is IMO pure perfection. Oh, and "Out of the Deeps" is dedicated to Mary Zahl, whose recent talk to the Women of the Advent in Birmingham, entitled "The Things That Remain" (https://talkingbird.fireside.fm/400) is as fine as anything I have ever heard her present. LUV U.

She came from Providence one in Rhode Island    She heard about a place people were smilin'They spoke about the red man's way how they loved the landAnd they came from everywhere To the Great DivideSeeking a place to stand Or a place to hide"Please join all the people that are smilin' on this week's Whole 'Nuther Thing musical Journey. Joining us are Blodwyn Pig, XTC, Pat Metheny, Bob Dylan, Frank Sinatra, The Bee Gees, America, Mamas & Papas, King Crimson, The Allman Brothers Band, Judy Collins, Blind Faith, The Guess Who, Tom Rush, Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66 The Beatles, Association, Spanky & Our Gang, Elton John, The Kinks and The Eagles...

"She would never say where she came fromYesterday don't matter if it's goneWhile the sun is brightOr in the darkest nightNo one knows, she comes and goesGoodbye, Ruby Tuesday"But say hello to Opal Saturday on Whole 'Nuther Thing on KXFM 104.7. Joining us are Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen, The B52's, Oasis, Del Shannon, Dada, Paul Weller, Joe Walsh, Peter Paul & Mary, Grand Funk Railroad, Spencer Davis Group, Jackson Browne, Steppenwolf, Jefferson, Starship, Billy Stewart, The Beach Boys, Ray LaMontagne, The Mamas & The Papas, Buckinghams, Spanky & Our Gang, Billy Joel, Bob Dylan and John Batdorf w James Lee Stanley

Welcome to Corrupt, the podcast about The Shield. In this episode, we discuss episode two of season one: Our Gang. Twitter: @RTOPodcasts, @ThatCoolBlkNerd, @Scarfinger, @RatchetBookClub Become a Patron at http://www.Patreon.com/singlesimulcast Donate to the show at http://www.buymeacoffee.com/sscast

Welcome to Corrupt, the podcast about The Shield. In this episode, we discuss episode two of season one: Our Gang. Twitter: @RTOPodcasts, @ThatCoolBlkNerd, @Scarfinger, @RatchetBookClub Become a Patron at http://www.Patreon.com/singlesimulcast Donate to the show at http://www.buymeacoffee.com/sscast

Spanky and Our Gang's hits included "Sunday Will Never Be The Same, Lazy Day," and "Like To Get To Know You."  They were known for great harmonies and a quirky look.  Here, Elaine "Spanky" McFarlane recalls the band's formation-to-first-gig-in-4-days origin, and the name.

"We had no home front, we had no soft soapThey sent us Playboy, they gave us Bob HopeWe dug in deep and shot on sightAnd prayed to Jesus Christ with all of our mightWe had no cameras to shoot the landscapeWe passed the hash pipe and played our Doors tapesAnd it was dark, so dark at nightAnd we held on to each other, like brother to brotherWe promised our mothers we'd write...Join me this afternoon, I'll be paying tribute to those that serve and served to protect our freedoms in ou r 4PM hour. Joining us are Earth Opera. Tim Buckley, Richie Havens, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Simon & Garfunkel, Beatles, Doors, Procol Harum, Peter Paul & Mary, Grass Roots, The McCoys, Shangri-Las, Johnny Rivers, Mamas & Papas, Rolling Stones, John Mellencamp, Tom Paxton, Orpheus, Spanky & Our Gang, The Monkees, Tommy James, Aaron Lewis, Barry McGuire and Billy Joel.

"Before you slip into unconsciousness, I'd like to have another kissAnother flashing chance at bliss, another kiss, another kissThe crystal ship is being filled a thousand girls, a thousand thrillsA million ways to spend your timeWhen we get back, I'll drop a line"Please get you boarding pass ready for this weeks Red Eye Journey on the Crystal Ship. Joining us are Return To Forever, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Tom Waits, Spanky & Our Gang, Orpheus, James Taylor, Maria Muldaur, Shuggie Otis, Traffic, Frank Sinatra, The Beatles, Moody Blues, Arthur Lee & Love w Johnny Echols, The Left Banle, Association, Critters, John Lee Hooker, J. Geils Band, Kenny Burrell, Glen Campbell, Jeff beck, Jimi Hendrix Experience, Bee Gees and The Doors...

"Look out of any windowAny morning, any evening, any day maybe the sun is shiningBirds are winging or rain is falling from a heavy skyJust a box of rain, wind, and waterBelieve it if you need it, if you don't, just pass it onSun and shower, wind and rainIn and out the window like a moth before a flame"Yet another Box Of Rain here in SoCal today, let's shelter together on Planetary Jam at Morning Breeze.Org. Joining us are Laurence Juber, Nick Drake, Velvet Underground w Nico, Mike & The Mechanics, Joe Satriani, The Electric Flag, Spanky & Our Gang, Kris Kristofferson, Poco, Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, Simon & Garfunkel, Smashing Pumpkins, Jimi Hendrix, Alan Parsons Project, Chicago, Supertramp, Porcupine Tree, The , Neil Young, Radiohead, Jefferson Airplane & The Grateful Dead...

In this very special bonus episode, Patrick welcomes Craig Raguse to the show. Craig is the grandson of the man who was given the responsibility of converting the Hal Roach Studios into a studio fit for producing talking pictures, Elmer Raguse. Craig discusses Elmer's early life and background, his move from the Victor Company in New Jersey to Roach's studio in Culver City, and talks about some of the stand-out achievements in his grandfather's career. This fascinating and entertaining episode pays tribute to a key figure in the history of Laurel and Hardy, Charley Chase, Our Gang and many more. To gain access to more exclusive content and benefits from The Laurel & Hardy Podcast, sign up to show your support and become a Patron of the Podcast by clicking the link here: ⁠⁠⁠https://patreon.com/user?u=88010194⁠⁠⁠ To subscribe to the all-new Laurel & Hardy Magazine, and for all the back episodes of the Podcast and Patrick's forthcoming series of books starting with Laurel & Hardy: Silents, visit the website at ⁠⁠⁠www.laurelandhardyfilms.com⁠⁠⁠ To contact Patrick, email ⁠⁠⁠theboys@laurelandhardyfilms.com⁠⁠⁠ If you'd like to leave feedback about the podcast, make a point, ask a question, or generally join in the discussions about the podcast and all other things Laurel and Hardy related, why not become an official Blog-Head by joining the Blog-Heads Facebook Group here: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/groups/2920310948018755⁠⁠⁠ To purchase CDs of the Beau Hunks Orchestra's music contained in these podcasts, click here: ⁠⁠⁠https://amzn.to/2CgeCbK⁠⁠⁠ To find the best Laurel and Hardy books and DVDs and Blu-Rays, visit The Laurel & Hardy Podcast's Amazon storefront, click here: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/laurelandhardyblog⁠⁠⁠

For those who haven't heard the announcement I just posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a multi-episode look at the Byrds in 1966-69 and the birth of country rock. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode, on "With a Little Help From My Friends" by Joe Cocker. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud at this time as there are too many Byrds songs in the first chunk, but I will try to put together a multi-part Mixcloud when all the episodes for this song are up. My main source for the Byrds is Timeless Flight Revisited by Johnny Rogan, I also used Chris Hillman's autobiography, the 331/3 books on The Notorious Byrd Brothers and The Gilded Palace of Sin, I used Barney Hoskyns' Hotel California and John Einarson's Desperadoes as general background on Californian country-rock, Calling Me Hone, Gram Parsons and the Roots of Country Rock by Bob Kealing for information on Parsons, and Requiem For The Timeless Vol 2 by Johnny Rogan for information about the post-Byrds careers of many members. Information on Gary Usher comes from The California Sound by Stephen McParland. And this three-CD set is a reasonable way of getting most of the Byrds' important recordings. The International Submarine Band's only album can be bought from Bandcamp. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we begin, a brief warning – this episode contains brief mentions of suicide, alcoholism, abortion, and heroin addiction, and a brief excerpt of chanting of a Nazi slogan. If you find those subjects upsetting, you may want to read the transcript rather than listen. As we heard in the last part, in October 1967 Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman fired David Crosby from the Byrds. It was only many years later, in a conversation with the group's ex-manager Jim Dickson, that Crosby realised that they didn't actually have a legal right to fire him -- the Byrds had no partnership agreement, and according to Dickson given that the original group had been Crosby, McGuinn, and Gene Clark, it would have been possible for Crosby and McGuinn to fire Hillman, but not for McGuinn and Hillman to fire Crosby. But Crosby was unaware of this at the time, and accepted a pay-off, with which he bought a boat and sailed to Florida, where saw a Canadian singer-songwriter performing live: [Excerpt: Joni Mitchell, "Both Sides Now (live Ann Arbor, MI, 27/10/67)"] We'll find out what happened when David Crosby brought Joni Mitchell back to California in a future story... With Crosby gone, the group had a major problem. They were known for two things -- their jangly twelve-string guitar and their soaring harmonies. They still had the twelve-string, even in their new slimmed-down trio format, but they only had two of their four vocalists -- and while McGuinn had sung lead on most of their hits, the sound of the Byrds' harmony had been defined by Crosby on the high harmonies and Gene Clark's baritone. There was an obvious solution available, of course, and they took it. Gene Clark had quit the Byrds in large part because of his conflicts with David Crosby, and had remained friendly with the others. Clark's solo album had featured Chris Hillman and Michael Clarke, and had been produced by Gary Usher who was now producing the Byrds' records, and it had been a flop and he was at a loose end. After recording the Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers album, Clark had started work with Curt Boettcher, a singer-songwriter-producer who had produced hits for Tommy Roe and the Association, and who was currently working with Gary Usher. Boettcher produced two tracks for Clark, but they went unreleased: [Excerpt: Gene Clark, "Only Colombe"] That had been intended as the start of sessions for an album, but Clark had been dropped by Columbia rather than getting to record a second album. He had put together a touring band with guitarist Clarence White, bass player John York, and session drummer "Fast" Eddie Hoh, but hadn't played many gigs, and while he'd been demoing songs for a possible second solo album he didn't have a record deal to use them on. Chisa Records, a label co-owned by Larry Spector, Peter Fonda, and Hugh Masekela, had put out some promo copies of one track, "Yesterday, Am I Right", but hadn't released it properly: [Excerpt: Gene Clark, "Yesterday, Am I Right"] Clark, like the Byrds, had left Dickson and Tickner's management organisation and signed with Larry Spector, and Spector was wanting to make the most of his artists -- and things were very different for the Byrds now. Clark had had three main problems with being in the Byrds -- ego clashes with David Crosby, the stresses of being a pop star with a screaming teenage fanbase, and his fear of flying. Clark had really wanted to have the same kind of role in the Byrds that Brian Wilson had with the Beach Boys -- appear on the records, write songs, do TV appearances, maybe play local club gigs, but not go on tour playing to screaming fans. But now David Crosby was out of the group and there were no screaming fans any more -- the Byrds weren't having the kind of pop hits they'd had a few years earlier and were now playing to the hippie audience. Clark promised that with everything else being different, he could cope with the idea of flying -- if necessary he'd just take tranquilisers or get so drunk he passed out. So Gene Clark rejoined the Byrds. According to some sources he sang on their next single, "Goin' Back," though I don't hear his voice in the mix: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Goin' Back"] According to McGuinn, Clark was also an uncredited co-writer on one song on the album they were recording, "Get to You". But before sessions had gone very far, the group went on tour. They appeared on the Smothers Brothers TV show, miming their new single and "Mr. Spaceman", and Clark seemed in good spirits, but on the tour of the Midwest that followed, according to their road manager of the time, Clark was terrified, singing flat and playing badly, and his guitar and vocal mic were left out of the mix. And then it came time to get on a plane, and Clark's old fears came back, and he refused to fly from Minneapolis to New York with the rest of the group, instead getting a train back to LA. And that was the end of Clark's second stint in the Byrds. For the moment, the Byrds decided they were going to continue as a trio on stage and a duo in the studio -- though Michael Clarke did make an occasional return to the sessions as they progressed. But of course, McGuinn and Hillman couldn't record an album entirely by themselves. They did have several tracks in a semi-completed state still featuring Crosby, but they needed people to fill his vocal and instrumental roles on the remaining tracks. For the vocals, Usher brought in his friend and collaborator Curt Boettcher, with whom he was also working at the time in a band called Sagittarius: [Excerpt: Sagittarius, "Another Time"] Boettcher was a skilled harmony vocalist -- according to Usher, he was one of the few vocal arrangers that Brian Wilson looked up to, and Jerry Yester had said of the Modern Folk Quartet that “the only vocals that competed with us back then was Curt Boettcher's group” -- and he was more than capable of filling Crosby's vocal gap, but there was never any real camaraderie between him and the Byrds. He particularly disliked McGuinn, who he said "was just such a poker face. He never let you know where you stood. There was never any lightness," and he said of the sessions as a whole "I was really thrilled to be working with The Byrds, and, at the same time, I was glad when it was all over. There was just no fun, and they were such weird guys to work with. They really freaked me out!" Someone else who Usher brought in, who seems to have made a better impression, was Red Rhodes: [Excerpt: Red Rhodes, "Red's Ride"] Rhodes was a pedal steel player, and one of the few people to make a career on the instrument outside pure country music, which is the genre with which the instrument is usually identified. Rhodes was a country player, but he was the country pedal steel player of choice for musicians from the pop and folk-rock worlds. He worked with Usher and Boettcher on albums by Sagittarius and the Millennium, and played on records by Cass Elliot, Carole King, the Beach Boys, and the Carpenters, among many others -- though he would be best known for his longstanding association with Michael Nesmith of the Monkees, playing on most of Nesmith's recordings from 1968 through 1992. Someone else who was associated with the Monkees was Moog player Paul Beaver, who we talked about in the episode on "Hey Jude", and who had recently played on the Monkees' Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones, Ltd album: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Star Collector"] And the fourth person brought in to help the group out was someone who was already familiar to them. Clarence White was, like Red Rhodes, from the country world -- he'd started out in a bluegrass group called the Kentucky Colonels: [Excerpt: The Kentucky Colonels, "Clinch Mountain Backstep"] But White had gone electric and formed one of the first country-rock bands, a group named Nashville West, as well as becoming a popular session player. He had already played on a couple of tracks on Younger Than Yesterday, as well as playing with Hillman and Michael Clarke on Gene Clark's album with the Gosdin Brothers and being part of Clark's touring band with John York and "Fast" Eddie Hoh. The album that the group put together with these session players was a triumph of sequencing and production. Usher had recently been keen on the idea of crossfading tracks into each other, as the Beatles had on Sgt Pepper, and had done the same on the two Chad and Jeremy albums he produced. By clever crossfading and mixing, Usher managed to create something that had the feel of being a continuous piece, despite being the product of several very different creative minds, with Usher's pop sensibility and arrangement ideas being the glue that held everything together. McGuinn was interested in sonic experimentation. He, more than any of the others, seems to have been the one who was most pushing for them to use the Moog, and he continued his interest in science fiction, with a song, "Space Odyssey", inspired by the Arthur C. Clarke short story "The Sentinel", which was also the inspiration for the then-forthcoming film 2001: A Space Odyssey: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Space Odyssey"] Then there was Chris Hillman, who was coming up with country material like "Old John Robertson": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Old John Robertson"] And finally there was David Crosby. Even though he'd been fired from the group, both McGuinn and Hillman didn't see any problem with using the songs he had already contributed. Three of the album's eleven songs are compositions that are primarily by Crosby, though they're all co-credited to either Hillman or both Hillman and McGuinn. Two of those songs are largely unchanged from Crosby's original vision, just finished off by the rest of the group after his departure, but one song is rather different: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Draft Morning"] "Draft Morning" was a song that was important to Crosby, and was about his -- and the group's -- feelings about the draft and the ongoing Vietnam War. It was a song that had meant a lot to him, and he'd been part of the recording for the backing track. But when it came to doing the final vocals, McGuinn and Hillman had a problem -- they couldn't remember all the words to the song, and obviously there was no way they were going to get Crosby to give them the original lyrics. So they rewrote it, coming up with new lyrics where they couldn't remember the originals: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Draft Morning"] But there was one other contribution to the track that was very distinctively the work of Usher. Gary Usher had a predilection at this point for putting musique concrete sections in otherwise straightforward pop songs. He'd done it with "Fakin' It" by Simon and Garfunkel, on which he did uncredited production work, and did it so often that it became something of a signature of records on Columbia in 1967 and 68, even being copied by his friend Jim Guercio on "Susan" by the Buckinghams. Usher had done this, in particular, on the first two singles by Sagittarius, his project with Curt Boettcher. In particular, the second Sagittarius single, "Hotel Indiscreet", had had a very jarring section (and a warning here, this contains some brief chanting of a Nazi slogan): [Excerpt: Sagittarius, "Hotel Indiscreet"] That was the work of a comedy group that Usher had discovered and signed to Columbia. The Firesign Theatre were so named because, like Usher, they were all interested in astrology, and they were all "fire signs".  Usher was working on their first album, Waiting For The Electrician or Someone Like Him, at the same time as he was working on the Byrds album: [Excerpt: The Firesign Theatre, "W.C. Fields Forever"] And he decided to bring in the Firesigns to contribute to "Draft Morning": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Draft Morning"] Crosby was, understandably, apoplectic when he heard the released version of "Draft Morning". As far as Hillman and McGuinn were concerned, it was always a Byrds song, and just because Crosby had left the band didn't mean they couldn't use material he'd written for the Byrds. Crosby took a different view, saying later "It was one of the sleaziest things they ever did. I had an entire song finished. They just casually rewrote it and decided to take half the credit. How's that? Without even asking me. I had a finished song, entirely mine. I left. They did the song anyway. They rewrote it and put it in their names. And mine was better. They just took it because they didn't have enough songs." What didn't help was that the publicity around the album, titled The Notorious Byrd Brothers minimised Crosby's contributions. Crosby is on five of the eleven tracks -- as he said later, "I'm all over that album, they just didn't give me credit. I played, I sang, I wrote, I even played bass on one track, and they tried to make out that I wasn't even on it, that they could be that good without me." But the album, like earlier Byrds albums, didn't have credits saying who played what, and the cover only featured McGuinn, Hillman, and Michael Clarke in the photo -- along with a horse, which Crosby took as another insult, as representing him. Though as McGuinn said, "If we had intended to do that, we would have turned the horse around". Even though Michael Clarke was featured on the cover, and even owned the horse that took Crosby's place, by the time the album came out he too had been fired. Unlike Crosby, he went quietly and didn't even ask for any money. According to McGuinn, he was increasingly uninterested in being in the band -- suffering from depression, and missing the teenage girls who had been the group's fans a year or two earlier. He gladly stopped being a Byrd, and went off to work in a hotel instead. In his place came Hillman's cousin, Kevin Kelley, fresh out of a band called the Rising Sons: [Excerpt: The Rising Sons, "Take a Giant Step"] We've mentioned the Rising Sons briefly in some previous episodes, but they were one of the earliest LA folk-rock bands, and had been tipped to go on to greater things -- and indeed, many of them did, though not as part of the Rising Sons. Jesse Lee Kincaid, the least well-known of the band, only went on to release a couple of singles and never had much success, but his songs were picked up by other acts -- his "Baby You Come Rollin' 'Cross My Mind" was a minor hit for the Peppermint Trolley Company: [Excerpt: The Peppermint Trolley Company, "Baby You Come Rollin' 'Cross My Mind"] And Harry Nilsson recorded Kincaid's "She Sang Hymns Out of Tune": [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, "She Sang Hymns Out of Tune"] But Kincaid was the least successful of the band members, and most of the other members are going to come up in future episodes of the podcast -- bass player Gary Marker played for a while with Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, lead singer Taj Mahal is one of the most respected blues singers of the last sixty years, original drummer Ed Cassidy went on to form the progressive rock band Spirit, and lead guitarist Ry Cooder went on to become one of the most important guitarists in rock music. Kelley had been the last to join the Rising Sons, replacing Cassidy but he was in the band by the time they released their one single, a version of Rev. Gary Davis' "Candy Man" produced by Terry Melcher, with Kincaid on lead vocals: [Excerpt: The Rising Sons, "Candy Man"] That hadn't been a success, and the group's attempt at a follow-up, the Goffin and King song "Take a Giant Step", which we heard earlier, was blocked from release by Columbia as being too druggy -- though there were no complaints when the Monkees released their version as the B-side to "Last Train to Clarksville". The Rising Sons, despite being hugely popular as a live act, fell apart without ever releasing a second single. According to Marker, Mahal realised that he would be better off as a solo artist, but also Columbia didn't know how to market a white group with a Black lead vocalist (leading to Kincaid singing lead on their one released single, and producer Terry Melcher trying to get Mahal to sing more like a white singer on "Take a Giant Step"), and some in the band thought that Terry Melcher was deliberately trying to sink their career because they refused to sign to his publishing company. After the band split up, Marker and Kelley had formed a band called Fusion, which Byrds biographer Johnny Rogan describes as being a jazz-fusion band, presumably because of their name. Listening to the one album the group recorded, it is in fact more blues-rock, very like the music Marker made with the Rising Sons and Captain Beefheart. But Kelley's not on that album, because before it was recorded he was approached by his cousin Chris Hillman and asked to join the Byrds. At the time, Fusion were doing so badly that Kelley had to work a day job in a clothes shop, so he was eager to join a band with a string of hits who were just about to conclude a lucrative renegotiation of their record contract -- a renegotiation which may have played a part in McGuinn and Hillman firing Crosby and Clarke, as they were now the only members on the new contracts. The choice of Kelley made a lot of sense. He was mostly just chosen because he was someone they knew and they needed a drummer in a hurry -- they needed someone new to promote The Notorious Byrd Brothers and didn't have time to go through a laborious process of audtioning, and so just choosing Hillman's cousin made sense, but Kelley also had a very strong, high voice, and so he could fill in the harmony parts that Crosby had sung, stopping the new power-trio version of the band from being *too* thin-sounding in comparison to the five-man band they'd been not that much earlier. The Notorious Byrd Brothers was not a commercial success -- it didn't even make the top forty in the US, though it did in the UK -- to the presumed chagrin of Columbia, who'd just paid a substantial amount of money for this band who were getting less successful by the day. But it was, though, a gigantic critical success, and is generally regarded as the group's creative pinnacle. Robert Christgau, for example, talked about how LA rather than San Francisco was where the truly interesting music was coming from, and gave guarded praise to Captain Beefheart, Van Dyke Parks, and the Fifth Dimension (the vocal group, not the Byrds album) but talked about three albums as being truly great -- the Beach Boys' Wild Honey, Love's Forever Changes, and The Notorious Byrd Brothers. (He also, incidentally, talked about how the two songs that Crosby's new discovery Joni Mitchell had contributed to a Judy Collins album were much better than most folk music, and how he could hardly wait for her first album to come out). And that, more or less, was the critical consensus about The Notorious Byrd Brothers -- that it was, in Christgau's words "simply the best album the Byrds have ever recorded" and that "Gone are the weak--usually folky--tracks that have always flawed their work." McGuinn, though, thought that the album wasn't yet what he wanted. He had become particularly excited by the potentials of the Moog synthesiser -- an instrument that Gary Usher also loved -- during the recording of the album, and had spent a lot of time experimenting with it, coming up with tracks like the then-unreleased "Moog Raga": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Moog Raga"] And McGuinn had a concept for the next Byrds album -- a concept he was very excited about. It was going to be nothing less than a grand sweeping history of American popular music. It was going to be a double album -- the new contract said that they should deliver two albums a year to Columbia, so a double album made sense -- and it would start with Appalachian folk music, go through country, jazz, and R&B, through the folk-rock music the Byrds had previously been known for, and into Moog experimentation. But to do this, the Byrds needed a keyboard player. Not only would a keyboard player help them fill out their thin onstage sound, if they got a jazz keyboardist, then they could cover the jazz material in McGuinn's concept album idea as well. So they went out and looked for a jazz piano player, and happily Larry Spector was managing one. Or at least, Larry Spector was managing someone who *said* he was a jazz pianist. But Gram Parsons said he was a lot of things... [Excerpt: Gram Parsons, "Brass Buttons (1965 version)"] Gram Parsons was someone who had come from a background of unimaginable privilege. His maternal grandfather was the owner of a Florida citrus fruit and real-estate empire so big that his mansion was right in the centre of what was then Florida's biggest theme park -- built on land he owned. As a teenager, Parsons had had a whole wing of his parents' house to himself, and had had servants to look after his every need, and as an adult he had a trust fund that paid him a hundred thousand dollars a year -- which in 1968 dollars would be equivalent to a little under nine hundred thousand in today's money. Two events in his childhood had profoundly shaped the life of young Gram. The first was in February 1956, when he went to see a new singer who he'd heard on the radio, and who according to the local newspaper had just recorded a new song called "Heartburn Motel".  Parsons had tried to persuade his friends that this new singer was about to become a big star -- one of his friends had said "I'll wait til he becomes famous!" As it turned out, the day Parsons and the couple of friends he did manage to persuade to go with him saw Elvis Presley was also the day that "Heartbreak Hotel" entered the Billboard charts at number sixty-eight. But even at this point, Elvis was an obvious star and the headliner of the show. Young Gram was enthralled -- but in retrospect he was more impressed by the other acts he saw on the bill. That was an all-star line-up of country musicians, including Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters, and especially the Louvin Brothers, arguably the greatest country music vocal duo of all time: [Excerpt: The Louvin Brothers, "The Christian Life"] Young Gram remained mostly a fan of rockabilly music rather than country, and would remain so for another decade or so, but a seed had been planted. The other event, much more tragic, was the death of his father. Both Parsons' parents were functioning alcoholics, and both by all accounts were unfaithful to each other, and their marriage was starting to break down. Gram's father was also, by many accounts, dealing with what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder from his time serving in the second world war. On December the twenty-third 1958, Gram's father died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Everyone involved seems sure it was suicide, but it was officially recorded as natural causes because of the family's wealth and prominence in the local community. Gram's Christmas present from his parents that year was a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and according to some stories I've read his father had left a last message on a tape in the recorder, but by the time the authorities got to hear it, it had been erased apart from the phrase "I love you, Gram." After that Gram's mother's drinking got even worse, but in most ways his life still seemed charmed, and the descriptions of him as a teenager are about what you'd expect from someone who was troubled, with a predisposition to addiction, but who was also unbelievably wealthy, good-looking, charming, and talented. And the talent was definitely there. One thing everyone is agreed on is that from a very young age Gram Parsons took his music seriously and was determined to make a career as a musician. Keith Richards later said of him "Of the musicians I know personally (although Otis Redding, who I didn't know, fits this too), the two who had an attitude towards music that was the same as mine were Gram Parsons and John Lennon. And that was: whatever bag the business wants to put you in is immaterial; that's just a selling point, a tool that makes it easier. You're going to get chowed into this pocket or that pocket because it makes it easier for them to make charts up and figure out who's selling. But Gram and John were really pure musicians. All they liked was music, and then they got thrown into the game." That's not the impression many other people have of Parsons, who is almost uniformly described as an incessant self-promoter, and who from his teens onwards would regularly plant fake stories about himself in the local press, usually some variant of him having been signed to RCA records. Most people seem to think that image was more important to him than anything. In his teens, he started playing in a series of garage bands around Florida and Georgia, the two states in which he was brought up. One of his early bands was largely created by poaching the rhythm section who were then playing with Kent Lavoie, who later became famous as Lobo and had hits like "Me and You and a Dog Named Boo". Lavoie apparently held a grudge -- decades later he would still say that Parsons couldn't sing or play or write. Another musician on the scene with whom Parsons associated was Bobby Braddock, who would later go on to co-write songs like "D-I-V-O-R-C-E" for Tammy Wynette, and the song "He Stopped Loving Her Today", often considered the greatest country song ever written, for George Jones: [Excerpt: George Jones, "He Stopped Loving Her Today"] Jones would soon become one of Parsons' musical idols, but at this time he was still more interested in being Elvis or Little Richard. We're lucky enough to have a 1962 live recording of one of his garage bands, the Legends -- the band that featured the bass player and drummer he'd poached from Lobo. They made an appearance on a local TV show and a friend with a tape recorder recorded it off the TV and decades later posted it online. Of the four songs in that performance, two are R&B covers -- Little Richard's "Rip It Up" and Ray Charles' "What'd I Say?", and a third is the old Western Swing classic "Guitar Boogie Shuffle". But the interesting thing about the version of "Rip it Up" is that it's sung in an Everly Brothers style harmony, and the fourth song is a recording of the Everlys' "Let It Be Me". The Everlys were, of course, hugely influenced by the Louvin Brothers, who had so impressed young Gram six years earlier, and in this performance you can hear for the first time the hints of the style that Parsons would make his own a few years later: [Excerpt: Gram Parsons and the Legends, "Let it Be Me"] Incidentally, the other guitarist in the Legends, Jim Stafford, also went on to a successful musical career, having a top five hit in the seventies with "Spiders & Snakes": [Excerpt: Jim Stafford, "Spiders & Snakes"] Soon after that TV performance though, like many musicians of his generation, Parsons decided to give up on rock and roll, and instead to join a folk group. The group he joined, The Shilos, were a trio who were particularly influenced by the Journeymen, John Phillips' folk group before he formed the Mamas and the Papas, which we talked about in the episode on "San Francisco". At various times the group expanded with the addition of some female singers, trying to capture something of the sound of the New Chrisy Minstrels. In 1964, with the band members still in school, the Shilos decided to make a trip to Greenwich Village and see if they could make the big time as folk-music stars. They met up with John Phillips, and Parsons stayed with John and Michelle Phillips in their home in New York -- this was around the time the two of them were writing "California Dreamin'". Phillips got the Shilos an audition with Albert Grossman, who seemed eager to sign them until he realised they were still schoolchildren just on a break. The group were, though, impressive enough that he was interested, and we have some recordings of them from a year later which show that they were surprisingly good for a bunch of teenagers: [Excerpt: The Shilos, "The Bells of Rhymney"] Other than Phillips, the other major connection that Parsons made in New York was the folk singer Fred Neil, who we've talked about occasionally before. Neil was one of the great songwriters of the Greenwich Village scene, and many of his songs became successful for others -- his "Dolphins" was recorded by Tim Buckley, most famously his "Everybody's Talkin'" was a hit for Harry Nilsson, and he wrote "Another Side of This Life" which became something of a standard -- it was recorded by the Animals and the Lovin' Spoonful, and Jefferson Airplane, as well as recording the song, included it in their regular setlists, including at Monterey: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "The Other Side of This Life (live at Monterey)"] According to at least one biographer, though, Neil had another, more pernicious, influence on Parsons -- he may well have been the one who introduced Parsons to heroin, though several of Parsons' friends from the time said he wasn't yet using hard drugs. By spring 1965, Parsons was starting to rethink his commitment to folk music, particularly after "Mr. Tambourine Man" became a hit. He talked with the other members about their need to embrace the changes in music that Dylan and the Byrds were bringing about, but at the same time he was still interested enough in acoustic music that when he was given the job of arranging the music for his high school graduation, the group he booked were the Dillards. That graduation day was another day that would change Parsons' life -- as it was the day his mother died, of alcohol-induced liver failure. Parsons was meant to go on to Harvard, but first he went back to Greenwich Village for the summer, where he hung out with Fred Neil and Dave Van Ronk (and started using heroin regularly). He went to see the Beatles at Shea Stadium, and he was neighbours with Stephen Stills and Richie Furay -- the three of them talked about forming a band together before Stills moved West. And on a brief trip back home to Florida between Greenwich Village and Harvard, Parsons spoke with his old friend Jim Stafford, who made a suggestion to him -- instead of trying to do folk music, which was clearly falling out of fashion, why not try to do *country* music but with long hair like the Beatles? He could be a country Beatle. It would be an interesting gimmick. Parsons was only at Harvard for one semester before flunking out, but it was there that he was fully reintroduced to country music, and in particular to three artists who would influence him more than any others. He'd already been vaguely aware of Buck Owens, whose "Act Naturally" had recently been covered by the Beatles: [Excerpt: Buck Owens, "Act Naturally"] But it was at Harvard that he gained a deeper appreciation of Owens. Owens was the biggest star of what had become known as the Bakersfield Sound, a style of country music that emphasised a stripped-down electric band lineup with Telecaster guitars, a heavy drumbeat, and a clean sound. It came from the same honky-tonk and Western Swing roots as the rockabilly music that Parsons had grown up on, and it appealed to him instinctively.  In particular, Parsons was fascinated by the fact that Owens' latest album had a cover version of a Drifters song on it -- and then he got even more interested when Ray Charles put out his third album of country songs and included a version of Owens' "Together Again": [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "Together Again"] This suggested to Parsons that country music and the R&B he'd been playing previously might not quite be so far apart as he'd thought. At Harvard, Parsons was also introduced to the work of another Bakersfield musician, who like Owens was produced by Ken Nelson, who also produced the Louvin Brothers' records, and who we heard about in previous episodes as he produced Gene Vincent and Wanda Jackson. Merle Haggard had only had one big hit at the time, "(My Friends Are Gonna Be) Strangers": [Excerpt: Merle Haggard, "(My Friends are Gonna Be) Strangers"] But he was about to start a huge run of country hits that would see every single he released for the next twelve years make the country top ten, most of them making number one. Haggard would be one of the biggest stars in country music, but he was also to be arguably the country musician with the biggest influence on rock music since Johnny Cash, and his songs would soon start to be covered by everyone from the Grateful Dead to the Everly Brothers to the Beach Boys. And the third artist that Parsons was introduced to was someone who, in most popular narratives of country music, is set up in opposition to Haggard and Owens, because they were representatives of the Bakersfield Sound while he was the epitome of the Nashville Sound to which the Bakersfield Sound is placed in opposition, George Jones. But of course anyone with ears will notice huge similarities in the vocal styles of Jones, Haggard, and Owens: [Excerpt: George Jones, "The Race is On"] Owens, Haggard, and Jones are all somewhat outside the scope of this series, but are seriously important musicians in country music. I would urge anyone who's interested in them to check out Tyler Mahan Coe's podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones, season one of which has episodes on Haggard and Owens, as well as on the Louvin Brothers who I also mentioned earlier, and season two of which is entirely devoted to Jones. When he dropped out of Harvard after one semester, Parsons was still mostly under the thrall of the Greenwich Village folkies -- there's a recording of him made over Christmas 1965 that includes his version of "Another Side of This Life": [Excerpt: Gram Parsons, "Another Side of This Life"] But he was encouraged to go further in the country direction by John Nuese (and I hope that's the correct pronunciation – I haven't been able to find any recordings mentioning his name), who had introduced him to this music and who also played guitar. Parsons, Neuse, bass player Ian Dunlop and drummer Mickey Gauvin formed a band that was originally called Gram Parsons and the Like. They soon changed their name though, inspired by an Our Gang short in which the gang became a band: [Excerpt: Our Gang, "Mike Fright"] Shortening the name slightly, they became the International Submarine Band. Parsons rented them a house in New York, and they got a contract with Goldstar Records, and released a couple of singles. The first of them, "The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming" was a cover of the theme to a comedy film that came out around that time, and is not especially interesting: [Excerpt: The International Submarine Band, "The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming"] The second single is more interesting. "Sum Up Broke" is a song by Parsons and Neuse, and shows a lot of influence from the Byrds: [Excerpt: The international Submarine Band, "Sum Up Broke"] While in New York with the International Submarine Band, Parsons made another friend in the music business. Barry Tashian was the lead singer of a band called the Remains, who had put out a couple of singles: [Excerpt: The Remains, "Why Do I Cry?"] The Remains are now best known for having been on the bill on the Beatles' last ever tour, including playing as support on their last ever show at Candlestick Park, but they split up before their first album came out. After spending most of 1966 in New York, Parsons decided that he needed to move the International Submarine Band out to LA. There were two reasons for this. The first was his friend Brandon DeWilde, an actor who had been a child star in the fifties -- it's him at the end of Shane -- who was thinking of pursuing a musical career. DeWilde was still making TV appearances, but he was also a singer -- John Nuese said that DeWilde sang harmony with Parsons better than anyone except Emmylou Harris -- and he had recorded some demos with the International Submarine Band backing him, like this version of Buck Owens' "Together Again": [Excerpt: Brandon DeWilde, "Together Again"] DeWilde had told Parsons he could get the group some work in films. DeWilde made good on that promise to an extent -- he got the group a cameo in The Trip, a film we've talked about in several other episodes, which was being directed by Roger Corman, the director who worked a lot with David Crosby's father, and was coming out from American International Pictures, the company that put out the beach party films -- but while the group were filmed performing one of their own songs, in the final film their music was overdubbed by the Electric Flag. The Trip starred Peter Fonda, another member of the circle of people around David Crosby, and another son of privilege, who at this point was better known for being Henry Fonda's son than for his own film appearances. Like DeWilde, Fonda wanted to become a pop star, and he had been impressed by Parsons, and asked if he could record Parsons' song "November Nights". Parsons agreed, and the result was released on Chisa Records, the label we talked about earlier that had put out promos of Gene Clark, in a performance produced by Hugh Masekela: [Excerpt: Peter Fonda, "November Nights"] The other reason the group moved West though was that Parsons had fallen in love with David Crosby's girlfriend, Nancy Ross, who soon became pregnant with his daughter -- much to Parsons' disappointment, she refused to have an abortion. Parsons bought the International Submarine Band a house in LA to rehearse in, and moved in separately with Nancy. The group started playing all the hottest clubs around LA, supporting bands like Love and the Peanut Butter Conspiracy, but they weren't sounding great, partly because Parsons was more interested in hanging round with celebrities than rehearsing -- the rest of the band had to work for a living, and so took their live performances more seriously than he did, while he was spending time catching up with his old folk friends like John Phillips and Fred Neil, as well as getting deeper into drugs and, like seemingly every musician in 1967, Scientology, though he only dabbled in the latter. The group were also, though, starting to split along musical lines. Dunlop and Gauvin wanted to play R&B and garage rock, while Parsons and Nuese wanted to play country music. And there was a third issue -- which record label should they go with? There were two labels interested in them, neither of them particularly appealing. The offer that Dunlop in particular wanted to go with was from, of all people, Jay Ward Records: [Excerpt: A Salute to Moosylvania] Jay Ward was the producer and writer of Rocky & Bullwinkle, Peabody & Sherman, Dudley Do-Right and other cartoons, and had set up a record company, which as far as I've been able to tell had only released one record, and that five years earlier (we just heard a snippet of it). But in the mid-sixties several cartoon companies were getting into the record business -- we'll hear more about that when we get to song 186 -- and Ward's company apparently wanted to sign the International Submarine Band, and were basically offering to throw money at them. Parsons, on the other hand, wanted to go with Lee Hazlewood International. This was a new label set up by someone we've only talked about in passing, but who was very influential on the LA music scene, Lee Hazlewood. Hazlewood had got his start producing country hits like Sanford Clark's "The Fool": [Excerpt: Sanford Clark, "The Fool"] He'd then moved on to collaborating with Lester Sill, producing a series of hits for Duane Eddy, whose unique guitar sound Hazlewood helped come up with: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, "Rebel Rouser"] After splitting off from Sill, who had gone off to work with Phil Spector, who had been learning some production techniques from Hazlewood, Hazlewood had gone to work for Reprise records, where he had a career in a rather odd niche, producing hit records for the children of Rat Pack stars. He'd produced Dino, Desi, and Billy, who consisted of future Beach Boys sideman Billy Hinsche plus Desi Arnaz Jr and Dean Martin Jr: [Excerpt: Dino, Desi, and Billy, "I'm a Fool"] He'd also produced Dean Martin's daughter Deana: [Excerpt: Deana Martin, "Baby I See You"] and rather more successfully he'd written and produced a series of hits for Nancy Sinatra, starting with "These Boots are Made for Walkin'": [Excerpt: Nancy Sinatra, "These Boots are Made for Walkin'"] Hazlewood had also moved into singing himself. He'd released a few tracks on his own, but his career as a performer hadn't really kicked into gear until he'd started writing duets for Nancy Sinatra. She apparently fell in love with his demos and insisted on having him sing them with her in the studio, and so the two made a series of collaborations like the magnificently bizarre "Some Velvet Morning": [Excerpt: Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra, "Some Velvet Morning"] Hazlewood is now considered something of a cult artist, thanks largely to a string of magnificent orchestral country-pop solo albums he recorded, but at this point he was one of the hottest people in the music industry. He wasn't offering to produce the International Submarine Band himself -- that was going to be his partner, Suzi Jane Hokom -- but Parsons thought it was better to sign for less money to a label that was run by someone with a decade-long string of massive hit records than for more money to a label that had put out one record about a cartoon moose. So the group split up. Dunlop and Gauvin went off to form another band, with Barry Tashian -- and legend has it that one of the first times Gram Parsons visited the Byrds in the studio, he mentioned the name of that band, The Flying Burrito Brothers, and that was the inspiration for the Byrds titling their album The Notorious Byrd Brothers. Parsons and Nuese, on the other hand, formed a new lineup of The International Submarine Band, with bass player Chris Ethridge, drummer John Corneal, who Parsons had first played with in The Legends, and guitarist Bob Buchanan, a former member of the New Christy Minstrels who Parsons had been performing with as a duo after they'd met through Fred Neil. The International Submarine Band recorded an album, Safe At Home, which is now often called the first country-rock album -- though as we've said so often, there's no first anything. That album was a mixture of cover versions of songs by people like Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard: [Excerpt: The International Submarine Band, "I Must Be Somebody Else You've Known"] And Parsons originals, like "Do You Know How It Feels To Be Lonesome?", which he cowrote with Barry Goldberg of the Electric Flag: [Excerpt: The International Submarine Band, "Do You Know How It Feels To Be Lonesome?"] But the recording didn't go smoothly. In particular, Corneal realised he'd been hoodwinked. Parsons had told him, when persuading him to move West, that he'd be able to sing on the record and that some of his songs would be used. But while the record was credited to The International Submarine Band, everyone involved agrees that it was actually a Gram Parsons solo album by any other name -- he was in charge, he wouldn't let other members' songs on the record, and he didn't let Corneal sing as he'd promised. And then, before the album could be released, he was off. The Byrds wanted a jazz keyboard player, and Parsons could fake being one long enough to get the gig. The Byrds had got rid of one rich kid with a giant ego who wanted to take control of everything and thought his undeniable talent excused his attempts at dominating the group, and replaced him with another one -- who also happened to be signed to another record label. We'll see how well that worked out for them in two weeks' time.  

New year. New season. New Hawk. Whisp and Geoff welcome DANNY TAMBERELLI (The Adventures of Pete & Pete/All That/Jounce) to the Rock & Roll RV to talk about his new book (co-written with his wife Kate), “The First Date Prophecy!” Meet cutes! Television (the band)! The original cast of “Our Gang!” Werner Herzog! It's all in this episode! You also get a new PSA from Geoff “The Angry Man” Garlock and the latest 108.9 The Hawk Concert Calendar! Sponsored by Shetland Creameries and Tom Kiefer's Blowing Leafers! 108.9 The Hawk was created, written and performed by Jason Gore and Geoff Garlock. Listen. Subscribe. Tell your friends. Support The Hawk at https://patreon.com/1089thehawk! Bonus episodes! Hawk episodes one week early! So much more! Learn more about 108.9 The Hawk at 1089thehawk.com! Subscribe! Tell your friends about 108.9 The Hawk! GET THAT HAWK MERCH: http://tee.pub/lic/goodrockshirts   FOLLOW US ON YOUTUBE https://www.youtube.com/@1089thehawk SOCIAL SIGHTS: https://twitter.com/1089thehawk https://instagram.com/1089thehawk https://www.tiktok.com/@1089thehawk https://bsky.app/profile/1089thehawk.bsky.social https://www.threads.net/@1089thehawk The Hawk will be back next week with actor, improviser, writer - Achilles Stamatelaky!

"In the winter timeWhen all the leaves are brown, and the wind blows so chillAnd the birds have all flown for the summerI'm callin', hear me callin, hear me callin'"Yes, we're in the throes of Winter but I'll provide 2 hours of relief on the Red Eye Edition. Bundling up with us will be Maria Muldaur, Chris Isaak, The Doobie BrothersSimon & Garfunkel, Procol Harum, Spanky & Our Gang, Tom Petty, Little Feat, Renaissance, Buffalo, Stevie Ray Vaughn,  Springfield, Bob Dylan, Grateful Dead, Ace, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Rolling Stones, The Eagles, Moby Grape, Melanie, Marty Robbins, Johnny Rivers and The Steve Miller Band.

"I am just a poor boy, though my story's seldom toldI have squandered my resistance for a pocketful of mumblesSuch are promises, All lies and jestStill, a man hears what he wants to hearAnd disregards the restLie-la-lie.."Please join me for this weeks Musical Adventure on the Red Eye Edition of Whole 'Nuther Thing. Joining us are Nick Drake, JJ Cale, Jim Dawson, Tufano & Giamerese, Love, Spanky & Our Gang, Phoebe Snow, Savoy Brown, Sly & The FamilyStone, Lou Reed, Mamas & Papas, David Bowie, Jose Feliciano, Jethro Tull, Fleetwood Mac, Mott The Hoople, Johnny Rivers, Oliver Nelson, Tim Buckley, Python Lee Jackson, Tim Hardin, John Prine, Janis Ian,  Leonard Cohen, Therese Schroeder-Sheker and Simon & Garfunkel.

"So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner's piesAnd walked off  to look for America"Kathy", I said, as we boarded a Greyhound in PittsburghMichigan seems like a dream to me nowCounting the carsOn the New Jersey TurnpikeThey've all come to look for AmericaAll come to look for America, All come to look for America"What's a Holiday without the travails of traveling. Pleasejoin me for a post Thanksgiving journey without the hassle and you can leave the navigation to me. Coming aboard are Jefferson Airplane, Moody Blues, Counting Crows, Boz Scaggs, The Doors,, Rolling Stones, Warren Zevon, Beatles, Traffic, Buffalo Springfield, Coldplay, Dawes, Don Henley, Buzzy Linhart, Laura Nyro, Paul Simon, Cat Stevens, Art Garfunkel, Spanky & Our Gang, Kenny Rankin, Van Morrison, Jackson Browne, Glen Campbell, Nilsson, Harry Chapin & Simon & Garfunkel.

"Across the evening sky, all the birds are leavingBut how can they know it's time for them to go?Before the winter fire, I will still be dreaming,I have no thought of timeFor who knows where the time goes?Who knows where the time goes?"Time, our most precious commodity will be an important consideration this weeked as we transition from Daylight Savings back to Standard Time. Please join us on this weeks "Red Eye" musical journey as we explore the passing of Time. Joining us are Bob Seger, Yes, King Crimson, Simply Red, Tim Rose, Jethro Tull, The Association, Critters, Poco, Joni Mitchell, Porcupine Tree, Tim Hardin, U2, Moody Blues, Rolling Stones, Alan Parsons Project, Led Zeppelin, Mamas & Papas, Rascals, Turtles, Little Feat, Tim Buckley, Spanky & Our Gang, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Jean Luc Ponty, Counting Crows and The Strawbs...

directly available here: TOOOOOOOOOOPERSFeatures fine music by Mike Hankinson, Percy Sledge,  Spanky & Our Gang, The Eden Electric Ensemble, Phil Niblock, LL Cool J, Gerry Mulligan, Reunion, Leonard Nimoy, Butthole Surfers, Devo, composer Raymond "Def" Leppard, and more.

Live action model for Tinker Bell, Margret Kerry joins us this week. Margret pantomimed movements of the tiny pixie for the animators working on Peter Pan. She shares her story of what it was like at the Disney Studio over 70-years ago. She has a book titled, Tinker Bell Talks, Tales of a Pixie Dusted Life from CreateSpace. Disney wasn't the only place in Hollywood where Margret spent her career. She worked on Our Gang, The Lone Ranger, The Andy Griffith Show and more. Plus, The Country Bears have a new show coming but they're not looking for new talent. Somebody should've shared that information with a recent unwelcome guest who was looking to get in on the act. We'd love to hear from you! You can email or send us a recorded audio message at podcast@thehyperionhub.com. Find us on social media on Facebook, Instagram and on Twitter @HubHyperion. The Hyperion Hub is not affiliated with the Walt Disney Company or its subsidiaries.  facebook.com/The-Hyperion-Hub-103502041266061/

Some child actors seem like they're just born to be stars (we've all watched that one kid's audition video for E.T., and if you haven't, put that in the queue for the weekend). But way back before we got movies like The Goonies, producer Hal Roach had already revolutionized cinema's approach to incorporating kids in the motion pictures. Instead of just having them be set dressing, or using them as plot devices, why not just make movies in which kids … act like kids?Ray teaches Rob about the Our Gang films and the child stars who made them so iconic; the archetypes that the film series relied upon to create unforgettable characters; how Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer actually terrorized many of his castmates; the lives, and passings, of other notable “Little Rascals” after they left the film series; why getting dinner with Robert Blake might have been hazardous to your health; and whether or not the Our Gang curse is backed up by the evidence.If you like what we're doing, please support us on Patreon, or you can subscribe to our bonus content on Apple Podcasts. And we'd love to find even more listeners, so if you have time, please leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you have any other thoughts or feedback you'd like to share with us, we'd love to hear from you - feel free to email us or send us a message on social media. Thank you as always for your support, and if you have any thoughts or feedback you'd like to share with us, we'd love to hear from you - feel free to send us a message on social media! And we'd love to find even more listeners, so if you have a second, please leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts.TEAMRay HebelRobert W. SchneiderMark SchroederBilly RecceDaniel SchwartzbergGabe CrawfordNatalie DeSaviaARTICLESEPISODE CLIPSOur Gang: Inside the Clubhouse (1984) (Part 1 of 10)

Recent guest Jim Reid returns to co-host as we talk with author Craig Calman about legendary producer Hal Roach as documented in Craig's book 100 Years of Brodies With Hal Roach:  The Jaunty Journeys of a Hollywood Motion Picture and Television Pioneer.   Listen in as we discuss the likes of Harold Lloyd, Laurel & Hardy, Charley Chase and Our Gang, among others.A Bill&Debi Production

To everyone's mortification, The Old Movie Lady sings! She also brings you tales of criminal activity at the Wampas Frolic, a go-to-dog girl, a vamp with a beautiful back, a new nose, and confusion caused by the name Lola. Featuring the Our Gang kids and a host of animal stars: Rin Tin Tin, Silver Streak, Rinty, Rex the wild horse, and Numa the lion. This episode contains brief mention of mental health struggles, as well as (mild) language that may be inappropriate for some listeners. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Garrett Chaffin-Quiray and Ed Rosa mourn the decline of theatrical movie-going and celebrate sentimental entertainment.***Referenced media:“Belfast” (Kenneth Branagh, 2021)“Don't Look Up” (Adam McKay, 2021)“Drive My Car” (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2021)“Dune: Part One” (Denis Villeneuve, 2021)“King Richard” (Reinaldo Marcus Green, 2021)“Licorice Pizza” (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2021)“Nightmare Alley” (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)“Power of the Dog” (Jane Campion, 2021)“West Side Story” (Steven Spielberg, 2021)“Marty” (Delbert Mann, 1955)“Our Gang” (also known as “The Little Rascals”) (Hal Roach, 1922-1944)“Barbie” (Greta Gerwig, 2023)“Oppenheimer” (Christopher Nolan, 2023)“Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” (Christopher McQuarrie, 2023)“Top Gun: Maverick” (Joseph Kosinski, 2022)Audio quotation:“CODA” (Sian Heder, 2021)“Polybius Cypher” (written by John Williams, and performed by the San Francisco Symphony, from “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” (James Mangold, 2023))“Closer to Fine” (written by Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, and performed by Brandi Carlile and Catherine Carlile from “Barbie” (Greta Gerwig, 2023))

"Smile, an everlasting smile,A smile could bring you near to meDon't ever let me find you gone'Cause that would bring a tear to me.It's only words, and words are all I have to take your heart away, It's only words, and words are all I have to take your heart away"Please join me for Words & Music from the Soundtrack Of Our Lives on the Red Eye Edition of Whole 'Nuther Thing. Joining us are The Pozo Seco Singers, Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel, John Coltrane, Carly Simon, Paul Simon, Chad & Jeremy, Booker T & Priscilla, Cashman & West, Spanky & Our Gang, Simon & Garfunkel, Seals & Crofts, Kris Kristofferson, Sandy Denny,Beach Boys, Peter Paul & Mary, The Who, Graham Nash, Dusty Springfield, Three Dog Night, Orpheus, Judy Collins, Crosby Stills & Nash, Badfinger, The Byrds, Turtles, Leon Russell, Randy Newman, Nilsson, Righteous Brothers, Beatles, Rickie Lee Jones and The Bee Gees.

2:52:08 – The Great Cheesesteak Debate (BDTSP, Attribution NC SA), Family Life (1949 public domain film), Bear Shooters (1930 Our Gang film, public domain), Sweet Shining (Circarama, Attribution NC 3.0), Betrayal at the Knights of Columbus (Tom 7, public domain), Sleepytime (The Hamiltones, Attribution NC ND 3.0), Brightly Fancy (Kevin MacLeod, Attribution 3.0), Donovan – […]

"I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets inStops my mind from wanderingWhere it will goWhere it will go"No more rain for forseeable future and it feels really good to announce after 3 weeks I'm on the mend and just recorded 2 new shows for this weekend. Show number 1 is here. This "Red Eye" Edition is a celebration of Spring and a new Season featuring George Winston, Jack Johnson, Vivaldi, Simon & Garfunkel, Pat Metheny Group, Carpenters, Steve Miller Band, Eagles, Rascals, Lovin' Spoonful, Van Morrison, Tommy James & The Shondells, Moody Blues, Byrds, Traffic, Tim Buckley, Electric Flag, Mamas & Papas, Doors, Spanky & Our Gang, The Hollies, Serendipity Singers, Eric Burdon & The Animals, Paul Simon, The Buckinghams, Paul Revere & The Raiders, Zombies, Robert Plant & The Beatles...

Over the last year, The Nose has covered 14 of this year's Academy Award-nominated movies, encompassing 64 nominations. So on this special edition of The Nose, we look back at our discussions of nominated movies, and we look ahead to Sunday's Oscars ceremony with film and television star (and Oscars voter) Illeana Douglas. Some of the movies covered include: The Banshees of Inisherin, Elvis, Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Fabelmans, Tár, Top Gun: Maverick, Triangle of Sadness, Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb, The Whale, Women Talking, and more. Note: This special two-part Oscars season finale edition of The Nose, airing over two days on the radio, is presented here as one double-length (or so) episode. Some other stuff that happened this week, give or take: Tom Sizemore, Intense Actor With a Troubled Life, Dies at 61 He earned praise for his work in films like “Saving Private Ryan” and “Black Hawk Down.” He also served prison time for drug possession and domestic abuse. Robert Blake, ‘Baretta' Star Acquitted in Wife's Murder, Dies at 89 His film and TV career began with “Our Gang” comedies and was highlighted by his performance as a killer in “In Cold Blood.” But he led a tempestuous life. Topol, Star of ‘Fiddler on the Roof' Onscreen and Onstage, Dies at 87 Wide acclaim for his portrayal of Tevye helped make him, according to one newspaper, “Israel's most famous export since the Jaffa orange.” Ricou Browning, Who Made the Black Lagoon Scary, Dies at 93 He helped bring “Flipper” to the movies and TV but was best known for his plunge in a monster suit in “Creature From the Black Lagoon.” This is the most populist Oscars in a long time So why doesn't it feel like it? The Stunt Awards Vulture's inaugural celebration of stunt professionals is here. Because if the Oscars won't recognize them, we will. Who Are You Rooting Against at the Oscars This Year? And the Oscar Goes to…The Guy Who Inspired Big League Chew? Todd Field is the Oscar-nominated director of ‘Tár.' Major League Baseball players are more familiar with his shredded bubble gum. The Year the Movies Died (Over and Over and Over Again) Joseph Kosinski Doesn't See Top Gun: Maverick As an Action Movie Bad Projection Is Ruining the Movie Theater Experience Multiplexes are failing at their most basic function: delivering a bright, sharp image. Peak TV Is Over. Welcome to Trough TV. Streaming's golden age has been ending for a while, but it's only now become clear what's replacing it. Seth Rogen Gets Brutally Honest About Negative Reviews: Film Critics Should Know ‘How Much It Hurts….It F—ing Sucks' Twenty Years Later, ‘Irreversible' Still Shocks A look back at Gaspar Noé's brutal told-in-reverse drama, which has been rereleased in a “Straight Cut” version. GUESTS: Raquel Benedict: The most dangerous woman in speculative fiction and the host of the Rite Gudpodcast Rebecca Castellani: Co-founder of Quiet Corner Communications and a freelance writer Illeana Douglas: The Official Movie Star of The Colin McEnroe Show and a real, live Oscars voter Sam Hadelman: Works in music public relations and hosts The Sam Hadelman Show at Radio Free Brooklyn James Hanley: Co-founder of Cinestudio at Trinity College Shawn Murray: A stand-up comedian, writer, and the host of the Nobody Asked Shawn podcast Carolyn Paine: An actress, comedian, and dancer, and she is founder, director, and choreographer of CONNetic Dance Irene Papoulis: Teaches writing at Trinity College Mercy Quaye: Founder and principal consultant for The Narrative Project Gene Seymour: A “writer, professional spectator, pop-culture maven, and jazz geek” Pedro Soto: President and CEO of Hygrade Precision Technologies Bill Yousman: Professor of Media Studies at Sacred Heart University The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode! Subscribe to The Noseletter, an email compendium of merriment, secrets, and ancient wisdom brought to you by The Colin McEnroe Show. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter. Colin McEnroe, Eugene Amatruda, Cat Pastor, and Catie Talarski contributed to this show, parts of which have aired previously in different form.Support the show: http://www.wnpr.org/donateSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Desde el Basement Club te ofrecemos una sesión sin palabras ni interrupciones, con canciones seleccionadas entre las oscuras valijas de pildorazos que nos dejó la música de garage de los años 60. (Foto del podcast; The Troyes) Playlist; (sintonía) THE POOR “Skip to my Mary Lou” TROYES “Help me find myself” THE ROCK GARDEN “Super stuff” ZAKARY THAKS “Won’t come back” THE JOLLY GREEN GIANTS “Busy body” THE US FOUR “The alligator” MICKEY and THE CLEAN CUTS “Soapy” LARRY and THE BLUE NOTES “In and out” JAGGERS “Feel so good” THE TWILITERS “Move it” LITTLE PHIL and THE NIGHTSHADOWS “60 second swinger” MOURNING REIGN “Satisfaction guaranteed” SOUNDS UNLIMITED “Cool one” LARRY and THE LOAFERS “Let’s go to the beach” JACK BEDIENT and THE CHESSMEN “Double whammy” THEE MIDNIGHTERS “Jump, jive and harmonize” THE MODS “Ritual” THE TROPICS “As time’s gone” THE SHAG “Stop and listen” THE SWAMP RATS “Hey freak” THE UNTAMED “Someday baby” THE HANGMEN OF FAIRFIELD COUNTY “Stacey” OUR GANG “Careless love” THE RUN-A-ROUNDS “I couldn’t care less” ROAD RUNNERS “Goodbye” Escuchar audio

Ch-ch-ch-ch-check it out! The third matchup of the season brings in a new crop of players to test their knowledge of pop culture past, present, and future! Ok, we're not asking about any unreleased properties, but we ARE getting nerdy with Adal, Keegan, and Lucy as we quiz on pop culture representations of Dungeons & Dragons, as well as delving into the nooks and crannies of the multitude of weird ways that Fortnite has pulled in other movies and TV. All this, plus a lightning round! NOTES ⚠️ Inline notes below may be truncated due to podcast feed character limits. Full notes are always on the episode page.

The superhero movie “The Crow,” released in 1994, will forever be known for two events.  First, the tragic death of lead actor Brandon Lee, son of Bruce Lee, during production of the film would cast a pall over the movie from then on.  Second, the outstanding music of The Crow:  Original Motion Picture Soundtrack would result in a chart-topping album.  This soundtrack is a veritable who's who of alternative rock at the time, including artists like The Cure, Violent Femmes, Nine Inch Nails, and Stone Temple Pilots.The Crow is based on a comic book series of the same name, written in 1989.  The protagonist is brutally killed by a gang along with his fiancée, and is brought back to life by a crow to wreak vengeance on the murderers.This soundtrack would hit number 1 on the Billboard 200 charts in 1994.Friend of the show John Lynch leads the commentary on this album.Burn by The CureThe Cure was an inspiration for James O'Barr, the creator of the comic series, and lead man Robert Smith wrote this song specifically for the film.  Burn leads off the album.  Golgotha Tenement Blues by Machines of Loving GraceThis song was also written specifically for the film.  The name of the song takes Christian imagery and reflects it on the dark mood set by the movie.  Golgotha was the place where Jesus was crucified, and Tenement reflects the ghetto where the protagonist originated.  The song appears only on the soundtrack, not on any MOLG album.Color Me Once by Violent FemmesThis track would significantly enhance the popularity of the Violent Femmes.  The song depicts disappointment in relationships when hard realities dash hopes.  Slip Slide Melting by For Love Not LisaA rocking track from an underrated group.  KISS alum Ace Frehley wrote songs and made guest appearances with For Love Not Lisa.  Slip Slide Melting appears on their first album entitled “Melting,” which was released in 1993.  They would release one other album before disbanding in 1996. ENTERTAINMENT TRACK:Main Theme from NFL on FOX Newcomer network FOX debuts its first NFL game in August of 1994.   STAFF PICKS:New Age Girl by Deadeye DickWayne leads off the staff picks with a song from the soundtrack of “Dumb and Dumber.”  The song describes Mary Moon, a new age vegetarian.  It generated some controversy with its lyrics, “she don't eat meat, but she sure likes the bone.”  Some radio stations would edit out the word "bone."  Breathe by Collective Soul Rob features a song off Collective Soul's 1993 album “Hints, Allegations, and Things Left Unsaid.”  Hailing from Stockbridge, Georgia, Collective Soul would have a number of hits beginning in the 1990s, particularly “Shine” and “The World I Know.”Come to My Window by Melissa EtheridgeBrian brings us the second single from Etheridge's breakout fourth album “Yes I Am.”  The song remained in the Billboard Hot 100 for 44 weeks.  Etheridge would win a Grammy for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance.Don't Turn Around by Ace of BaseJohn Lynch closes out the staff picks with Swedish reggae group Ace of Base, performing a remastered song originally performed by Tina Turner in 1986.  Ace of Base would take their version to number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. INSTRUMENTAL TRACK:Theme from the motion picture “The Little Rascals”A movie version of the of the old Our Gang comedy short films from 1922 was released in this month.  

"Sailors fighting in the dance hallOh man!Look at those cavemen go, It's the freakiest showTake a look at the lawman, Beating up the wrong guyOh man!Wonder if he'll ever know, He's in the best-selling showIs there life on Mars?"Let's find out together, shall we?It's my 4th Anniversary on 885 The SoCal Sound after 18 years on our sister station, Jazz FM KSBR.Joing us are The Blues Project, Savoy Brown, Alan Parsons Project, Badfinger, Genesis, Spanky & Our Gang,  Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd, It's A Beautiful Day, Little River Band, Foghsat, Steely Dan, Sly & The Family Stone, Three Dog Night, Seatrain, Paul Winter Consort, Todd Rundgren, Bachman Turner Overdrive and David Bowie.

Dateline: The World of Pro Sports: Yankees/Mets, Division Champs, or Wild Card? A Judge throws out the record BOOK on the AL single-season home run record! Albert--the Einstein of hitting--smashes #500! A players union for MLB minor leaguers? Nothing minor about that hardball proposal! Big Blue continues to 'offend' their fans at the line of scrimmage! Gang Green can not get past Pop Warner's Our Gang to reach the end zone! The NFL refs continue to pass--or is that punt--on pass interference! New York Sports Radio broadcasts from high atop the 59th Street Bridge on Monday mornings when reporting on the local football teams! "Don't jump! It's not worth it!!" Joe butchers the name of The Steelers QB! Trocheck throws a check into The Rangers KId Line? Your hosts may have sports ESP during games? Flash Fact: Keith Tarnowski is now a baseball fan?! Join your hosts, Chris and Joe, as they navigate the above sports shenanigans in an 'iron-man' attempt to make sense of the whacky world of Pro Sports! "You know, just because you guys are upset with the Umps and the Refs, is no excuse to spill your drinks all over the sports desk! Your pay will be docked for this." The Management

Episode one hundred and fifty-four of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs is the last of our four-part mini-series on LA sunshine pop and folk-rock in summer 1967. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Baby, Now That I've Found You" by the Foundations. 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 Turtles songs in the episode. There's relatively little information available about the Turtles compared to other bands of their era, and so apart from the sources on the general LA scene referenced in all these podcasts, the information here comes from a small number of sources. This DVD is a decent short documentary on the band's career. Howard Kaylan's autobiography, Shell Shocked: My Life with the Turtles, Flo and Eddie, and Frank Zappa, Etc.,  is a fun read, if inevitably biased towards his own viewpoint. Jim Pons' Hard Core Love: Sex, Football, and Rock and Roll in the Kingdom of God is much less fun, being as it is largely organised around how his life led up to his latter-day religious beliefs, but is the only other book I'm aware of with a substantial amount of coverage of the Turtles. There are many compilations of the Turtles' material available, of which All The Singles is by far and away the best. The box set of all their albums with bonus tracks is now out of print on CD, but can still be bought as MP3s. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript We've spent a lot of time recently in the LA of summer 1967, at the point where the sunshine pop sound that was created when the surf harmonies of the Beach Boys collided with folk rock was at its apex, right before fashions changed and tight sunny pop songs with harmonies from LA became yesterday's news, and extended blues-rock improvisations from San Francisco became the latest in thing. This episode is the last part of this four-episode sequence, and is going to be shorter than those others. In many ways this one is a bridge between this sequence and next episode, where we travel back to London, because we're saying goodbye for a while to the LA scene, and when we do return to LA it will be, for the most part, to look at music that's a lot less sunshine and a lot more shadow. So this is a brief fade-out while we sing ba-ba-ba, a three-minute pop-song of an episode, a last bit of sunshine pop before we return to longer, more complicated, stories  in two weeks' time, at which point the sun will firmly set. Like many musicians associated with LA, Howard Kaylan was born elsewhere and migrated there as a child, and he seems to have regarded his move from upstate New York to LA as essentially a move to Disneyland itself. That impression can only have been made stronger by the fact that soon after his family moved there he got his first childhood girlfriend -- who happened to be a Mouseketeer on the TV. And TV was how young Howard filtered most of his perceptions -- particularly TV comedy. By the age of fourteen he was the president of the Soupy Sales Fan Club, and he was also obsessed with the works of Ernie Kovacs, Sid Caesar, and the great satirist and parodist Stan Freberg: [Excerpt: Stan Freberg, "St. George and the Dragonet"] Second only to his love of comedy, though, was his love of music, and it was on the trip from New York to LA that he saw a show that would eventually change his life. Along the way, his family had gone to Las Vegas, and while there they had seen Louis Prima and Keeley Smith do their nightclub act. Prima is someone I would have liked to do a full podcast episode on when I was covering the fifties, and who I did do a Patreon bonus episode on. He's now probably best known for doing the voice of King Louis in the Jungle Book: [Excerpt: Louis Prima, "I Wanna Be Like You (the Monkey Song)"] But he was also a jump blues musician who made some very good records in a similar style to Louis Jordan, like "Jump, Jive, an' Wail" [Excerpt: Louis Prima, "Jump, Jive, an' Wail"] But like Jordan, Prima dealt at least as much in comedy as in music -- usually comedy involving stereotypes about his Italian-American ethnic origins. At the time young Howard Kaylan saw him, he was working a double act with his then-wife Keeley Smith. The act would consist of Smith trying to sing a song straight, while Prima would clown around, interject, and act like a fool, as Smith grew more and more exasperated, and would eventually start contemptuously mocking Prima. [Excerpt: Louis Prima and Keeley Smith, "Embraceable You/I've Got It Bad and That Ain't Good"] This is of course a fairly standard double-act format, as anyone who has suffered through an episode of The Little and Large Show will be all too painfully aware, but Prima and Smith did it better than most, and to young Howard Kaylan, this was the greatest entertainment imaginable. But while comedy was the closest thing to Kaylan's heart, music was a close second. He was a regular listener to Art Laboe's radio show, and in a brief period as a teenage shoplifter he obtained records like Ray Charles' album Genius + Soul = Jazz: [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "One Mint Julep"] and the single "Tossin' and Turnin'" by Bobby Lewis: [Excerpt: Bobby Lewis, "Tossin' and Turnin'"] "Tossin' and Turnin'" made a deep impression on Kaylan, because of the saxophone solo, which was actually a saxophone duet. On the record, baritone sax player Frank Henry played a solo, and it was doubled by the great tenor sax player King Curtis, who was just playing a mouthpiece rather than a full instrument, making a high-pitched squeaking sound: [Excerpt: Bobby Lewis, "Tossin' and Turnin'"] Curtis was of course also responsible for another great saxophone part a couple of years earlier, on a record that Kaylan loved because it combined comedy and rock and roll, "Yakety Yak": [Excerpt: The Coasters, "Yakety Yak"] Those two saxophone parts inspired Kaylan to become a rock and roller. He was already learning the clarinet and playing part time in an amateur Dixieland band, and it was easy enough to switch to saxophone, which has the same fingering. Within a matter of weeks of starting to play sax, he was invited to join a band called the Nightriders, who consisted of Chuck Portz on bass, Al Nichol on guitar, and Glen Wilson on drums. The Nightriders became locally popular, and would perform sets largely made up of Johnny and the Hurricanes and Ventures material. While he was becoming a budding King Curtis, Kaylan was still a schoolkid, and one of the classes he found most enjoyable was choir class. There was another kid in choir who Kaylan got on with, and one day that kid, Mark Volman came up to him, and had a conversation that Kaylan would recollect decades later in his autobiography: “So I hear you're in a rock 'n' roll band.” “Yep.” “Um, do you think I could join it?” “Well, what do you do?” “Nothing.” “Nothing?” “Nope.” “Sounds good to me. I'll ask Al.” Volman initially became the group's roadie and occasional tambourine player, and would also get on stage to sing a bit during their very occasional vocal numbers, but was mostly "in the band" in name only at first -- he didn't get a share of the group's money, but he was allowed to say he was in the group because that meant that his friends would come to the Nightriders' shows, and he was popular among the surfing crowd. Eventually, Volman's father started to complain that his son wasn't getting any money from being in the band, while the rest of the group were, and they explained to him that Volman was just carrying the instruments while they were all playing them. Volman's father said "if Mark plays an instrument, will you give him equal shares?" and they said that that was fair, so Volman got an alto sax to play along with Kaylan's tenor. Volman had also been taking clarinet lessons, and the two soon became a tight horn section for the group, which went through a few lineup changes and soon settled on a lineup of Volman and Kaylan on saxes, Nichol on lead guitar, Jim Tucker on rhythm guitar, Portz on bass, and Don Murray on drums. That new lineup became known as the Crossfires, presumably after the Johnny and the Hurricanes song of the same name: [Excerpt: Johnny and the Hurricanes, "Crossfire"] Volman and Kaylan worked out choreographed dance steps to do while playing their saxes, and the group even developed a group of obsessive fans who called themselves the Chunky Club, named after one of the group's originals: [Excerpt: The Crossfires, "Chunky"] At this point the group were pretty much only playing instrumentals, though they would do occasional vocals on R&B songs like "Money" or their version of Don and Dewey's "Justine", songs which required more enthusiasm than vocal ability. But their first single, released on a tiny label, was another surf instrumental, a song called "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde": [Excerpt: The Crossfires, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde"] The group became popular enough locally that they became the house band at the Revelaire Club in Redondo Beach. There as well as playing their own sets, they would also be the backing band for any touring acts that came through without their own band, quickly gaining the kind of performing ability that comes from having to learn a new artist's entire repertoire in a few days and be able to perform it with them live with little or no rehearsal. They backed artists like the Coasters, the Drifters, Bobby Vee, the Rivingtons, and dozens of other major acts, and as part of that Volman and Kaylan would, on songs that required backing vocals, sing harmonies rather than playing saxophone. And that harmony-singing ability became important when the British Invasion happened, and suddenly people didn't want to hear surf instrumentals, but vocals along the lines of the new British groups. The Crossfires' next attempt at a single was another original, this one an attempt at sounding like one of their favourite new British groups, the Kinks: [Excerpt: The Crossfires, "One Potato, Two Potato"] This change to vocals necessitated a change in the group dynamic. Volman and Kaylan ditched the saxophones, and discovered that between them they made one great frontman. The two have never been excessively close on a personal level, but both have always known that the other has qualities they needed. Frank Zappa would later rather dismissively say "I regard Howard as a fine singer, and Mark as a great tambourine player and fat person", and it's definitely true that Kaylan is one of the truly great vocalists to come out of the LA scene in this period, while Volman is merely a good harmony singer, not anything particularly special -- though he *is* a good harmony singer -- but it undersells Volman's contribution. There's a reason the two men performed together for nearly sixty years. Kaylan is a great singer, but also by nature rather reserved, and he always looked uncomfortable on stage, as well as, frankly, not exactly looking like a rock star (Kaylan describes himself not inaccurately as looking like a potato several times in his autobiography). Volman, on the other hand, is a merely good singer, but he has a naturally outgoing personality, and while he's also not the most conventionally good-looking of people he has a *memorable* appearance in a way that Kaylan doesn't. Volman could do all the normal frontman stuff, the stuff that makes a show an actual show -- the jokes, the dancing, the between-song patter, the getting the crowd going, while Kaylan could concentrate on the singing. They started doing a variation on the routine that had so enthralled Howard Kaylan when he'd seen Louis Prima and Keeley Smith do it as a child. Kaylan would stand more or less stock still, looking rather awkward, but singing like an angel, while Volman would dance around, clown, act the fool, and generally do everything he could to disrupt the performance -- short of actually disrupting it in reality. It worked, and Volman became one of that small but illustrious group of people -- the band member who makes the least contribution to the sound of the music but the biggest contribution to the feel of the band itself, and without whom they wouldn't be the same. After "One Potato, Two Potato" was a flop, the Crossfires were signed to their third label. This label, White Whale, was just starting out, and the Crossfires were to become their only real hit act. Or rather, the Turtles were. The owners of White Whale knew that they didn't have much promotional budget and that their label was not a known quantity -- it was a tiny label with no track record. But they thought of a way they could turn that to their advantage. Everyone knew that the Beatles, before Capitol had picked up their contracts, had had their records released on a bunch of obscure labels like Swan and Tollie. People *might* look for records on tiny independent labels if they thought it might be another British act who were unknown in the US but could be as good as the Beatles. So they chose a name for the group that they thought sounded as English as possible -- an animal name that started with "the", and ended in "les", just like the Beatles. The group, all teenagers at the time, were desperate enough that they agreed to change their name, and from that point on they became the Turtles. In order to try and jump on as many bandwagons as possible, the label wanted to position them as a folk-rock band, so their first single under the Turtles name was a cover of a Bob Dylan song, from Another Side of Bob Dylan: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "It Ain't Me Babe"] That song's hit potential had already been seen by Johnny Cash, who'd had a country hit with it a few months before. But the Turtles took the song in a different direction, inspired by Kaylan's *other* great influence, along with Prima and Smith. Kaylan was a big fan of the Zombies, one of the more interesting of the British Invasion groups, and particularly of their singer Colin Blunstone. Kaylan imitated Blunstone on the group's hit single, "She's Not There", on which Blunstone sang in a breathy, hushed, voice on the verses: [Excerpt: The Zombies, "She's Not There"] before the song went into a more stomping chorus on which Blunstone sang in a fuller voice: [Excerpt: The Zombies, "She's Not There"] Kaylan did this on the Turtles' version of "It Ain't Me Babe", starting off with a quiet verse: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "It Ain't Me Babe"] Before, like the Zombies, going into a foursquare, more uptempo, louder chorus: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "It Ain't Me Babe"] The single became a national top ten hit, and even sort of got the approval of Bob Dylan. On the group's first national tour, Dylan was at one club show, which they ended with "It Ain't Me Babe", and after the show the group were introduced to the great songwriter, who was somewhat the worse for wear. Dylan said “Hey, that was a great song you just played, man. That should be your single", and then passed out into his food. With the group's first single becoming a top ten hit, Volman and Kaylan got themselves a house in Laurel Canyon, which was not yet the rock star Mecca it was soon to become, but which was starting to get a few interesting residents. They would soon count Henry Diltz of the Modern Folk Quartet, Danny Hutton, and Frank Zappa among their neighbours. Soon Richie Furay would move in with them, and the house would be used by the future members of the Buffalo Springfield as their rehearsal space. The Turtles were rapidly becoming part of the in crowd. But they needed a follow-up single, and so Bones Howe, who was producing their records, brought in P.F. Sloan to play them a few of his new songs. They liked "Eve of Destruction" enough to earmark it as a possible album track, but they didn't think they would do it justice, and so it was passed on to Barry McGuire. But Sloan did have something for them -- a pseudo-protest song called "Let Me Be" that was very clearly patterned after their version of "It Ain't Me Babe", and which was just rebellious enough to make them seem a little bit daring, but which was far more teenage angst than political manifesto: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Let Me Be"] That did relatively well, making the top thirty -- well enough for the group to rush out an album which was padded out with some sloppy cover versions of other Dylan songs, a version of "Eve of Destruction", and a few originals written by Kaylan. But the group weren't happy with the idea of being protest singers. They were a bunch of young men who were more motivated by having a good time than by politics, and they didn't think that it made sense for them to be posing as angry politicised rebels. Not only that, but there was a significant drop-off between "It Ain't Me Babe" and "Let Me Be". They needed to do better. They got the clue for their new direction while they were in New York. There they saw their friends in the Mothers of Invention playing their legendary residency at the Garrick Theatre, but they also saw a new band, the Lovin' Spoonful, who were playing music that was clearly related to the music the Turtles were doing -- full of harmonies and melody, and inspired by folk music -- but with no sense of rebelliousness at all. They called it "Good Time Music": [Excerpt: The Lovin' Spoonful, "Good Time Music"] As soon as they got back to LA, they told Bones Howe and the executives at White Whale that they weren't going to be a folk-rock group any more, they were going to be "good time music", just like the Lovin' Spoonful. They were expecting some resistance, but they were told that that was fine, and that PF Sloan had some good time music songs too. "You Baby" made the top twenty: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "You Baby"] The Turtles were important enough in the hierarchy of LA stars that Kaylan and Tucker were even invited by David Crosby to meet the Beatles at Derek Taylor's house when they were in LA on their last tour -- this may be the same day that the Beatles met Brian and Carl Wilson, as I talked about in the episode on "All You Need is Love", though Howard Kaylan describes this as being a party and that sounded like more of an intimate gathering. If it was that day, there was nearly a third Beach Boy there. The Turtles knew David Marks, the Beach Boys' former rhythm guitarist, because they'd played a lot in Inglewood where he'd grown up, and Marks asked if he could tag along with Kaylan and Tucker to meet the Beatles. They agreed, and drove up to the house, and actually saw George Harrison through the window, but that was as close as they got to the Beatles that day. There was a heavy police presence around the house because it was known that the Beatles were there, and one of the police officers asked them to drive back and park somewhere else and walk up, because there had been complaints from neighbours about the number of cars around. They were about to do just that, when Marks started yelling obscenities and making pig noises at the police, so they were all arrested, and the police claimed to find a single cannabis seed in the car. Charges were dropped, but now Kaylan was on the police's radar, and so he moved out of the Laurel Canyon home to avoid bringing police attention to Buffalo Springfield, so that Neil Young and Bruce Palmer wouldn't get deported. But generally the group were doing well. But there was a problem. And that problem was their record label. They rushed out another album to cash in on the success of "You Baby", one that was done so quickly that it had "Let Me Be" on it again, just as the previous album had, and which included a version of the old standard "All My Trials", with the songwriting credited to the two owners of White Whale records. And they pumped out a lot of singles. A LOT of singles, ranging from a song written for them by new songwriter Warren Zevon, to cover versions of Frank Sinatra's "It Was a Very Good Year" and the old standard "We'll Meet Again". Of the five singles after "You Baby", the one that charted highest was a song actually written by a couple of the band members. But for some reason a song with verses in 5/4 time and choruses in 6/4 with lyrics like "killing the living and living to kill, the grim reaper of love thrives on pain" didn't appeal to the group's good-time music pop audience and only reached number eighty-one: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Grim Reaper of Love"] The group started falling apart. Don Murray became convinced that  the rest of the band were conspiring against him and wanted him out, so he walked out of the group in the middle of a rehearsal for a TV show. They got Joel Larson of the Grass Roots -- the group who had a number of hits with Sloan and Barri songs -- to sub for a few gigs before getting in a permanent replacement, Johnny Barbata, who came to them on the recommendation of Gene Clark, and who was one of the best drummers on the scene -- someone who was not only a great drummer but a great showman, who would twirl his drumsticks between his fingers with every beat, and who would regularly engage in drum battles with Buddy Rich. By the time they hit their fifth flop single in a row, they lost their bass player as well -- Chuck Portz decided he was going to quit music and become a fisherman instead. They replaced him with Chip Douglas of the Modern Folk Quartet. Then they very nearly lost their singers. Volman and Kaylan both got their draft notices at the same time, and it seemed likely they would end up having to go and fight in the Vietnam war. Kaylan was distraught, but his mother told him "Speak to your cousin Herb". Cousin Herb was Herb Cohen, the manager of the Mothers of Invention and numerous other LA acts, including the Modern Folk Quartet, and Kaylan only vaguely knew him at this time, but he agreed to meet up with them, and told them “Stop worrying! I got Zappa out, I got Tim Buckley out, and I'll get you out.” Cohen told Volman and Kaylan to not wash for a week before their induction, to take every drug of every different kind they could find right before going in, to deliberately disobey every order, to fail the logic tests, and to sexually proposition the male officers dealing with the induction. They followed his orders to the letter, and got marked as 4-F, unfit for service. They still needed a hit though, and eventually they found something by going back to their good-time music idea. It was a song from the Koppelman-Rubin publishing company -- the same company that did the Lovin Spoonful's management and production. The song in question was by Alan Gordon and Gary Bonner, two former members of a group called the Magicians, who had had a minor success with a single called "An Invitation to Cry": [Excerpt: The Magicians, "An Invitation to Cry"] The Magicians had split up, and Bonner and Gordon were trying to make a go of things as professional songwriters, but had had little success to this point. The song on the demo had been passed over by everyone, and the demo was not at all impressive, just a scratchy acetate with Bonner singing off-key and playing acoustic rhythm guitar and Gordon slapping his knees to provide rhythm, but the group heard something in it. They played the song live for months, refining the arrangement, before taking it into the studio. There are arguments to this day as to who deserves the credit for the sound on "Happy Together" -- Chip Douglas apparently did the bulk of the arrangement work while they were on tour, but the group's new producer, Joe Wissert, a former staff engineer for Cameo-Parkway, also claimed credit for much of it. Either way, "Happy Together" is a small masterpiece of dynamics. The song is structured much like the songs that had made the Turtles' name, with the old Zombies idea of the soft verse and much louder chorus: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Happy Together"] But the track is really made by the tiny details of the arrangement, the way instruments and vocal parts come in and out as the track builds up, dies down, and builds again. If you listen to the isolated tracks, there are fantastic touches like the juxtaposition of the bassoon and oboe (which I think is played on a mellotron): [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Happy Together", isolated tracks] And a similar level of care and attention was put into the vocal arrangement by Douglas, with some parts just Kaylan singing solo, other parts having Volman double him, and of course the famous "bah bah bah" massed vocals: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Happy Together", isolated vocals] At the end of the track, thinking he was probably going to do another take, Kaylan decided to fool around and sing "How is the weather?", which Bonner and Gordon had jokingly done on the demo. But the group loved it, and insisted that was the take they were going to use: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Happy Together"] "Happy Together" knocked "Penny Lane" by the Beatles off the number one spot in the US, but by that point the group had already had another lineup change. The Monkees had decided they wanted to make records without the hit factory that had been overseeing them, and had asked Chip Douglas if he wanted to produce their first recordings as a self-contained band. Given that the Monkees were the biggest thing in the American music industry at the time, Douglas had agreed, and so the group needed their third bass player in a year. The one they went for was Jim Pons. Pons had seen the Beatles play at the Hollywood Bowl in 1964, and decided he wanted to become a pop star. The next day he'd been in a car crash, which had paid out enough insurance money that he was able to buy two guitars, a bass, drums, and amps, and use them to start his own band. That band was originally called The Rockwells, but quickly changed their name to the Leaves, and became a regular fixture at Ciro's on Sunset Strip, first as customers, then after beating Love in the auditions, as the new resident band when the Byrds left. For a while the Leaves had occasionally had guest vocals from a singer called Richard Marin, but Pons eventually decided to get rid of him, because, as he put it "I wanted us to look like The Beatles. There were no Mexicans in The Beatles". He is at pains in his autobiography to assure us that he's not a bigot, and that Marin understood. I'm sure he did. Marin went on to be better known as Cheech Marin of Cheech and Chong. The Leaves were signed by Pat Boone to his production company, and through that company they got signed to Mira Records. Their first single, produced by Nik Venet, had been a version of "Love Minus Zero (No Limit)", a song by Bob Dylan: [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Love Minus Zero (No Limit)"] That had become a local hit, though not a national one, and the Leaves had become one of the biggest bands on the Sunset Strip scene, hanging out with all the other bands. They had become friendly with the Doors before the Doors got a record deal, and Pat Boone had even asked for an introduction, as he was thinking of signing them, but unfortunately when he met Jim Morrison, Morrison had drunk a lot of vodka, and given that Morrison was an obnoxious drunk Boone had second thoughts, and so the world missed out on the chance of a collaboration between the Doors and Pat Boone. Their second single was "Hey Joe" -- as was their third and fourth, as we discussed in that episode: [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe"] Their third version of "Hey Joe" had become a top forty hit, but they didn't have a follow-up, and their second album, All The Good That's Happening, while it's a good album, sold poorly. Various band members quit or fell out, and when Johnny Barbata knocked on Jim Pons' door it was an easy decision to quit and join a band that had a current number one hit. When Pons joined, the group had already recorded the Happy Together album. That album included the follow-up to "Happy Together", another Bonner and Gordon song, "She'd Rather Be With Me": [Excerpt: The Turtles, "She'd Rather Be With Me"] None of the group were tremendously impressed with that song, but it did very well, becoming the group's second-biggest hit in the US, reaching number three, and actually becoming a bigger hit than "Happy Together" in parts of Europe. Before "Happy Together" the group hadn't really made much impact outside the US. In the UK, their early singles had been released by Pye, the smallish label that had the Kinks and Donovan, but which didn't have much promotional budget, and they'd sunk without trace. For "You Baby" they'd switched to Immediate, the indie label that Andrew Oldham had set up, and it had done a little better but still not charted. But from "Happy Together" they were on Decca, a much bigger label, and "Happy Together" had made number twelve in the charts in the UK, and "She'd Rather Be With Me" reached number four. So the new lineup of the group went on a UK tour. As soon as they got to the hotel, they found they had a message from Graham Nash of the Hollies, saying he would like to meet up with them. They all went round to Nash's house, and found Donovan was also there, and Nash played them a tape he'd just been given of Sgt Pepper, which wouldn't come out for a few more days. At this point they were living every dream a bunch of Anglophile American musicians could possibly have. Jim Tucker mentioned that he would love to meet the Beatles, and Nash suggested they do just that. On their way out the door, Donovan said to them, "beware of Lennon". It was when they got to the Speakeasy club that the first faux-pas of the evening happened. Nash introduced them to Justin Hayward and John Lodge of the Moody Blues, and Volman said how much he loved their record "Go Now": [Excerpt: The Moody Blues, "Go Now"] The problem was that Hayward and Lodge had joined the group after that record had come out, to replace its lead singer Denny Laine. Oh well, they were still going to meet the Beatles, right? They got to the table where John, Paul, and Ringo were sat, at a tense moment -- Paul was having a row with Jane Asher, who stormed out just as the Turtles were getting there. But at first, everything seemed to go well. The Beatles all expressed their admiration for "Happy Together" and sang the "ba ba ba" parts at them, and Paul and Kaylan bonded over their shared love for "Justine" by Don and Dewey, a song which the Crossfires had performed in their club sets, and started singing it together: [Excerpt: Don and Dewey, "Justine"] But John Lennon was often a mean drunk, and he noticed that Jim Tucker seemed to be the weak link in the group, and soon started bullying him, mocking his clothes, his name, and everything he said. This devastated Tucker, who had idolised Lennon up to that point, and blurted out "I'm sorry I ever met you", to which Lennon just responded "You never did, son, you never did". The group walked out, hurt and confused -- and according to Kaylan in his autobiography, Tucker was so demoralised by Lennon's abuse that he quit music forever shortly afterwards, though Tucker says that this wasn't the reason he quit. From their return to LA on, the Turtles would be down to just a five-piece band. After leaving the club, the group went off in different directions, but then Kaylan (and this is according to Kaylan's autobiography, there are no other sources for this) was approached by Brian Jones, asking for his autograph because he loved the Turtles so much. Jones introduced Kaylan to the friend he was with, Jimi Hendrix, and they went out for dinner, but Jones soon disappeared with a girl he'd met. and left Kaylan and Hendrix alone. They were drinking a lot -- more than Kaylan was used to -- and he was tired, and the omelette that Hendrix had ordered for Kaylan was creamier than he was expecting... and Kaylan capped what had been a night full of unimaginable highs and lows by vomiting all over Jimi Hendrix's expensive red velvet suit. Rather amazingly after all this, the Moody Blues, the Beatles, and Hendrix, all showed up to the Turtles' London gig and apparently enjoyed it. After "She'd Rather Be With Me", the next single to be released wasn't really a proper single, it was a theme song they'd been asked to record for a dire sex comedy titled "Guide for the Married Man", and is mostly notable for being composed by John Williams, the man who would later go on to compose the music for Star Wars. That didn't chart, but the group followed it with two more top twenty hits written by Bonner and Gordon, "You Know What I Mean" and "She's My Girl". But then the group decided that Bonner and Gordon weren't giving them their best material, and started turning down their submissions, like a song called "Celebrity Ball" which they thought had no commercial potential, at least until the song was picked up by their friends Three Dog Night, retitled "Celebrate", and made the top twenty: [Excerpt: Three Dog Night, "Celebrate"] Instead, the group decided to start recording more of their own material. They were worried that in the fast-changing rock world bands that did other songwriters' material were losing credibility. But "Sound Asleep", their first effort in this new plan, only made number forty-seven on the charts. Clearly they needed a different plan. They called in their old bass player Chip Douglas, who was now an experienced hitmaker as a producer. He called in *his* friend Harry Nilsson, who wrote "The Story of Rock & Roll" for the group, but that didn't do much better, only making number forty-eight. But the group persevered, starting work on a new album produced by Douglas, The Turtles Present The Battle of the Bands, the conceit of which was that every track would be presented as being by a different band. So there were tracks by  Chief Kamanawanalea and his Royal Macadamia Nuts,  Fats Mallard and the Bluegrass Fireball, The Atomic Enchilada, and so on, all done in the styles suggested by those band names. There was even a track by "The Cross Fires": [Excerpt: The Cross Fires, "Surfer Dan"] It was the first time the group had conceived of an album as a piece, and nine of the twelve tracks were originals by the band -- there was a track written by their friend Bill Martin, and the opening track, by "The US Teens Featuring Raoul", was co-written by Chip Douglas and Harry Nilsson. But for the most part the songs were written by the band members themselves, and jointly credited to all of them. This was the democratic decision, but one that Howard Kaylan would later regret, because of the song for which the band name was just "Howie, Mark, Johnny, Jim & Al". Where all the other songs were parodies of other types of music, that one was, as the name suggests, a parody of the Turtles themselves. It was written by Kaylan in disgust at the record label, who kept pestering the group to "give us another 'Happy Together'". Kaylan got more and more angry at this badgering, and eventually thought "OK, you want another 'Happy Together'? I'll give you another 'Happy Together'" and in a few minutes wrote a song that was intended as an utterly vicious parody of that kind of song, with lyrics that nobody could possibly take seriously, and with music that was just mocking the whole structure of "Happy Together" specifically. He played it to the rest of the group, expecting them to fall about laughing, but instead they all insisted it was the group's next single. "Elenore" went to number six on the charts, becoming their biggest hit since "She'd Rather Be With Me": [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Elenore"] And because everything was credited to the group, Kaylan's songwriting royalties were split five ways. For the follow-up, they chose the one actual cover version on the album. "You Showed Me" is a song that Roger McGuinn and Gene Clark had written together in the very early days of the Byrds, and they'd recorded it as a jangly folk-rock tune in 1964: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "You Showed Me"] They'd never released that track, but Gene Clark had performed it solo after leaving the Byrds, and Douglas had been in Clark's band at the time, and liked the song. He played it for the Turtles, but when he played it for them the only instrument he had to hand was a pump organ with one of its bellows broken. Because of this, he had to play it slowly, and while he kept insisting that the song needed to be faster, the group were equally insistent that what he was playing them was the big ballad hit they wanted, and they recorded it at that tempo. "You Showed Me" became the Turtles' final top ten hit: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "You Showed Me"] But once again there were problems in the group. Johnny Barbata was the greatest drummer any of them had ever played with, but he didn't fit as a personality -- he didn't like hanging round with the rest of them when not on stage, and while there were no hard feelings, it was clear he could get a gig with pretty much anyone and didn't need to play with a group he wasn't entirely happy in. By mutual agreement, he left to go and play with Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, and was replaced by John Seiter from Spanky and Our Gang -- a good drummer, but not the best of the best like Barbata had been. On top of this, there were a whole host of legal problems to deal with. The Turtles were the only big act on White Whale records, though White Whale did put out some other records. For example, they'd released the single "Desdemona" by John's Children in the US: [Excerpt: John's Children, "Desdemona"] The group, being the Anglophiles they were, had loved that record, and were also among the very small number of Americans to like the music made by John's Children's guitarist's new folk duo, Tyrannosaurus Rex: [Excerpt: Tyrannosaurus Rex, "Debora"] When Tyrannosaurus Rex supported the Turtles, indeed, Volman and Kaylan became very close to Marc Bolan, and told him that the next time they were in England they'd have to get together, maybe even record together. That would happen not that many years later, with results we'll be getting to in... episode 201, by my current calculations. But John's Children hadn't had a hit, and indeed nobody on White Whale other than the Turtles had. So White Whale desperately wanted to stop the Turtles having any independence, and to make sure they continued to be their hit factory. They worked with the group's roadie, Dave Krambeck, to undermine the group's faith in their manager, Bill Utley, who supported the group in their desire for independence. Soon, Krambeck and White Whale had ousted Utley, and Krambeck had paid Utley fifty thousand dollars for their management contract, with the promise of another two hundred thousand later. That fifty thousand dollars had been taken by Krambeck as an advance against the Turtles' royalties, so they were really buying themselves out. Except that Krambeck then sold the management contract on to a New York management firm, without telling the group. He then embezzled as much of the group's ready cash as he could and ran off to Mexico, without paying Utley his two hundred thousand dollars. The Turtles were out of money, and they were being sued by Utley because he hadn't had the money he should have had, and by the big New York firm, because  since the Turtles hadn't known they were now legally their managers they were in breach of contract. They needed money quickly, and so they signed with another big management company, this one co-owned by Bill Cosby, in the belief that Cosby's star power might be able to get them some better bookings. It did -- one of the group's first gigs after signing with the new company was at the White House. It turned out they were Tricia Nixon's favourite group, and so they and the Temptations were booked at her request for a White House party. The group at first refused to play for a President they rightly thought of as a monster, but their managers insisted. That destroyed their reputation among the cool antiestablishment youth, of course, but it did start getting them well-paid corporate gigs. Right up until the point where Kaylan became sick at his own hypocrisy at playing these events, drank too much of the complimentary champagne at an event for the president of US Steel, went into a drunken rant about how sick the audience made him, and then about how his bandmates were a bunch of sellouts, threw his mic into a swimming pool, and quit while still on stage. He was out of the band for two months, during which time they worked on new material without him, before they made up and decided to work on a new album. This new album, though, was going to be more democratic. As well as being all original material, they weren't having any of this nonsense about the lead singer singing lead. This time, whoever wrote the song was going to sing lead, so Kaylan only ended up singing lead on six of the twelve songs on what turned out to be their final album, Turtle Soup. They wanted a truly great producer for the new album, and they all made lists of who they might call. The lists included a few big names like George Martin and Phil Spector, but one name kept turning up -- Ray Davies. As we'll hear in the next episode, the Kinks had been making some astonishing music since "You Really Got Me", but most of it had not been heard in the US. But the Turtles all loved the Kinks' 1968 album The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, which they considered the best album ever made: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Animal Farm"] They got in touch with Davies, and he agreed to produce the album -- the first time he did any serious outside production work -- and eventually they were able to persuade White Whale, who had no idea who he was, to allow him to produce it. The resulting album is by far the group's strongest album-length work, though there were problems -- Davies' original mix of the album was dominated by the orchestral parts written by Wrecking Crew musician Ray Pohlman, while the group thought that their own instruments should be more audible, since they were trying to prove that they were a proper band. They remixed it themselves, annoying Davies, though reissues since the eighties have reverted to a mix closer to Davies' intentions. Some of the music, like Pons' "Dance This Dance With Me", perhaps has the group trying a little *too* hard to sound like the Kinks: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Dance This Dance With Me"] But on the other hand, Kaylan's "You Don't Have to Walk in the Rain" is the group's last great pop single, and has one of the best lines of any single from the sixties -- "I look at your face, I love you anyway": [Excerpt: The Turtles, "You Don't Have to Walk in the Rain"] But the album produced no hits, and the group were getting more and more problems from their label. White Whale tried to get Volman and Kaylan to go to Memphis without the other band members to record with Chips Moman, but they refused -- the Turtles were a band, and they were proud of not having session players play their parts on the records. Instead, they started work with Jerry Yester producing on a new album, to be called Shell Shock. They did, though bow to pressure and record a terrible country track called "Who Would Ever Think That I Would Marry Margaret" backed by session players, at White Whale's insistence, but managed to persuade the label not to release it. They audited White Whale and discovered that in the first six months of 1969 alone -- a period where they hadn't sold that many records -- they'd been underpaid by a staggering six hundred and fifty thousand dollars. They sued the label for several million, and in retaliation, the label locked them out of the recording studio, locking their equipment in there. They basically begged White Whale to let them record one last great single, one last throw of the dice. Jim Pons had, for years, known a keyboard player named Bob Harris, and had recently got to know Harris' wife, Judee Sill. Sill had a troubled life -- she was a heroin addict, and had at times turned to streetwalking to earn money, and had spent time in prison for armed robbery -- but she was also an astonishing songwriter, whose music was as inspired by Bach as by any pop or folk composer. Sill had been signed to Blimp, the Turtles' new production and publishing company, and Pons was co-producing some tracks on her first album, with Graham Nash producing others. Pons thought one song from that album, "Lady-O", would be perfect for the Turtles: [Excerpt: Judee Sill, "Lady-O"] (music continues under) The Turtles stuck closely to Sill's vision of the song. So closely that you haven't noticed that before I started talking, we'd already switched from Sill's record to the Turtles' version. [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Lady-O"] That track, with Sill on guitar backing Kaylan, Volman, and Nichol's vocals, was the last Turtles single to be released while the band were together. Despite “Lady O” being as gorgeous a melody as has ever been produced in the rock world, it sank without trace, as did a single from the Shell Shock sessions released under a pseudonym, The Dedications. White Whale followed that up, to the group's disgust, with "Who Would Ever Think That I Would Marry Margaret?", and then started putting out whatever they had in the vaults, trying to get the last few pennies, even releasing their 1965 album track version of "Eve of Destruction" as if it were a new single. The band were even more disgusted when they discovered that, thanks to the flurry of suits and countersuits, they not only could no longer perform as the Turtles, but White Whale were laying legal claim to their own names. They couldn't perform under those names -- Howard Kaylan, Mark Volman, and the rest were the intellectual property of White Whale, according to the lawyers. The group split up, and Kaylan and Volman did some session work, including singing on a demo for a couple of new songwriters: [Excerpt: Steely Dan, "Everyone's Gone to the Movies"] When that demo got the songwriters a contract, one of them actually phoned up to see if Kaylan wanted a permanent job in their new band, but they didn't want Volman as well, so Kaylan refused, and Steely Dan had to do without him. Volman and Kaylan were despondent, washed-up, has-been ex-rock stars. But when they went to see a gig by their old friend Frank Zappa, it turned out that he was looking for exactly that. Of course, they couldn't use their own names, but the story of the Phlorescent Leech and Eddie is a story for another time...

Jim Pons and John Seiter share their journeys from music industry to The NFL. In 1973 Pons left the music industry to become the film and video director for the New York Jets football club; he actually designed the team's 1978–97 team logo.   Seiter may be best known for his work as a drummer for Spanky and Our Gang and The Turtles.  But he also built a solid post music career with The Jets.

Bonny Lee Bakley had nine husbands before she met former “Our Gang” and “Baretta” star Robert Blake. He would be her last. As she waited for Blake outside a Los Angeles restaurant someone approached her car and shot her in the head. Was this Bakley's checkered past catching up to her, or was the danger someone we thought we knew? This week's Court TV Podcast dives deeper into these questions with another episode of the original true crime series Someone They Knew With Tamron Hall. This week's episode titled “If You Can't Do The Time.”   To see this week's episode of Someone They Knew with Tamron Hall, click here.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

HHearing word of Ollie's brother for the first time since their descent, Our Gang goes out on a limb for a fateful meeting. Greg stews, Joe boils, and Ollie unwinds fitfully.

This week, Phoenix police on the lookout for a cat burglar in a cat costume, Japanese man arrested for driving 52 years without a license, Australian artist sells a pickle stuck to a ceiling, and Mike gives the twisted history of Our Gang.   Hosts: Kevin Harrison, Mike Wiebe, Brian Camp Producer & Music: Mark Ryan Announcer: Nancy Walker Graphic Designer: Mike Tidwell   Merch: https://www.redbubble.com/shop/ap/79908204 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/internationalnewspod

HHearing word of Ollie's brother for the first time since their descent, Our Gang goes out on a limb for a fateful meeting. Greg stews, Joe boils, and Ollie unwinds fitfully.

"I awoke last night to the sound of thunderHow far off I sat and wonderedStarted humming a song from 1962Ain't it funny how the night movesWhen you just don't seem to have as much to loseStrange how the night movesWith autumn closing in"Well, Autumn's a ways off but we can still hum some tunes together like we used to on the Sunday Edition of Whole 'Nuther Thing. Joining us this afternoon are Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Beth Hart w Joe Bonamassa, Buzzy Linhart, The Doors, Bob Dylan, Big Brother & The Holding Company, James Taylor, Ten Years After, Dion, Buffalo Springfield, The Tradewinds, Hollies, Beach Boys, Alan Parsons Project, Traffic, Tears For Fears, David Bromberg, Led Zeppelin, Velvet Underground, Jefferson Airplane, Donovan, Spanky & Our Gang, Jeff Buckley, Richard Barone and Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band.

For Video Edition, Please Click and Subscribe Here: https://youtu.be/BLsdG8P4N10 Alan K. Rode's affinity for classic cinema is part of his DNA. His mother grew up in Hollywood and was an extra in Our Gang comedy shorts and studied acting at Ben Bard Drama. His grandfather was a silent film violinist who went from bit actor to Universal Studios house composer and eventually founded Corelli-Jacobs Recording Inc. A great-uncle doubled Gary Cooper in The Virginian (1929) and fought Jack Dempsey. Yet another grandfather promoted rodeos with cowboy star Hoot Gibson at Gilmore Stadium. Before the advent of classic films on cable, video or streaming, Alan incessantly watched and catalogued movies on television. He is the author of a pair of notable cinema biographies. Charles McGraw: Film Noir Tough Guy is a critically acclaimed saga of the rough-hewn actor's life and times. Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film is the first comprehensive biography of the director of Casablanca, Mildred Pierce, Yankee Doodle Dandy and The Adventures of Robin Hood among other classic films. The Curtiz book has received enthusiastic reviews from the New York Review of Books (David Thomson), the Wall Street Journal (Scott Eyman), the Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) and Leonard Maltin. Alan has been the producer and host of the annual Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival in Palm Springs, California since 2008.  Alan is also charter director and treasurer of the Film Noir Foundation. With FNF president Eddie Muller, Alan has spearheaded the preservation and restoration of “lost” films and co-programs and co-hosts several of the annual NOIR CITY film festivals. Alan has produced, written and appeared in documentaries for many classic film releases on Blu ray physical media.  

MATURE CONTENT IN THIS EPISODE: On this episode we talk about our youth and going on vacation, things we did for fun in the summer, playing jailbreak, capture, going on really bad first dates, embarrassing medical moments, crazy oil prices, and incredible bass lines in songs, plus a whole lot more. To listen to the songs played here on Finding Subjects, please go to Spotify, open a FREE account, and you will get 30 seconds of them music to get the feel for the episode. Thank you. Music By: Spanky and Our Gang, Earth Wind and Fire, Diamond Rio, Loving Spoonful, John Sebastian, Alice Cooper, Steely Dan --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/finding-subjects-podcast/message

This week the Siblings revisit a 100-year-old classic…or at least its reboot. Wrangle up your child actors because it's time for The Little Rascals! Just, you know, ignore the chill at the back of your spine while watching it. Discussed: “Our Gang” or “The Little Rascals?” Old timey serials!Child acting at it's most cringy!No Homers!She's five years old!Boys vs. Girls!Braids!The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air!Contact us at adultsiblingsversus@gmail.comTwitter: @AdultVersusTheme Song: “Sellout” by Zombie Apocalypse NOW!https://antizombierock.bandcamp.com/

Carl Dean Switzer, better known as "Alfalfa", the freckled-face boy with the strong cowlick from "Our Gang" seemed to have a budding career; however, after an incident during a dog training, his life was taken. Millicent Entwistle, better known as "The Hollywood Sign Girl" had a slow progression to her career, and after a not so great premier, she climbed to the top of the "H" on the Hollywood sign and leapt to her death. Hear both of their tragic stories now. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/creepycases-spookyspaces/message

His Grandfather was in the original Our Gang comedies... This week, host Gray Jones interviews comedy writer and Script Anatomy instructor Aaron Vaccaro. Aaron Vaccaro bio: He grew up in the San Fernando Valley (the non-porny part) and was always enamored by the entertainment industry, inspired by his grandfather, who starred in the original "Our Gang" comedies. After graduating from UC Santa Barbara with a degree in Film Studies, Aaron set out to become a television writer. He scored several Writers' Assistant stints – on "24," "Ghost Whisperer," "The New Adventures of Old Christine," "Wilfred," and "Mike & Molly." After being chosen as one of the NBC's Writers on the Verge, Aaron has gone on to write for "Mike & Molly" and "Superior Donuts," both on CBS, "Team Kaylie" on Netflix, and most recently "Drama Club" on Nickelodeon. He has developed projects with Netflix, Disney, Universal Cable Productions, Viola Davis' production company, and once sold a feature entitled "Sasquatch vs. The Abominable Snowman," which is every bit as insane as it sounds. Aaron now has an M.F.A. in Screenwriting and has taught screenwriting courses at AFI, UCSB, CSUN, LA Valley College and now Script Anatomy. Follow Aaron on Twitter: @HairyPizzaBagel Visit primary sponsor Script Anatomy on the web: scriptanatomy.com Buying Final Draft screenwriting software? Use this link to support the podcast: tinyurl.com/BuyFinalDraft. You can help with the ongoing costs of bringing these weekly podcasts to you by becoming a patron of the podcast – for as little as 25¢ per episode! There are many reward levels. CLICK HERE to find out more. Buy Gray's book for only $4.99! Look for it on Amazon – How To Break In To TV Writing: Insider Interviews. Didn't get your questions asked? Make sure you follow Gray on Twitter (@GrayJones) so you can get the scoop on who is being interviewed and how to get your questions in. Also check out our TV Writer Twitter Database to find Twitter addresses for over 1,200 TV writers. Find previous episodes and other resources at www.tvwriterpodcast.com.

Jim Irvin's guests in this episode are world-renowned ABBA expert and chronicler, Carl Magnus Palm, and award-winning memoirist, author of Broken Greek and founder of Perturbed fanzine, Peter Paphides, back for more because the chance to discuss ABBA was in the air. The albums in this episode are: Anything You Choose b/w Without Rhyme Or reason by Spanky & Our Gang (1969), The Wishing Chair by 10,000 Maniacs (1985) and The Smoke by The Smoke (1968) Also discussed: The lure of ABBA and the gems on their final album, Voyage, plus, who would have been the members of the British version of ABBA? Also, groovy music made by squares, spoken word interludes on albums and who or what links The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, The Osmonds and Dirty Dancing? A playlist accompanying this episode, featuring all three albums and other music discussed is available here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3pcwgB4MlIhzdC7t1hT6wp?si=NcfczhNJTES-nz8_Xo4oCA Go to jimirvin.com for Jim Irvin's other show, Here's One I Made Earlier, in which musical creators discuss a key work in their repertoire. There's also a contact page there where you can email comments on either show,. Alternatively, leave a voice message here: https://anchor.fm/james-irvin5/message. Messages we like will be included in future episodes. Please like, rate or comment wherever you get your podcasts. Every interaction helps new listeners discover the show. Thank you.

[Note: Episode ending fixed] Taking a trip down memory lane, Our Gang finds their way back right where they started only to discover exactly what it is that they've lost this time. Ollie keeps her thoughts to her self for a change, Greg falls asleep on the job, and Joe fondly recalls his first time.

Our Gang gets knocked down! In the blasted techno-industrial hellscape they find themselves in will they ever find their way home? Probably not! Joe finds a family, Ollie learns to yeehaw, and Greg has a run-in with scissors.