British actress and singer
POPULARITY
Truth behind the Crime: Wendy Savino Special guest Frank and Maria DeGennaroWendy Savino is a remarkable woman whose life encompasses both a harrowing encounter with a notorious serial killer and a rich history in the performing arts. ⸻
durée : 00:05:25 - C'est une chanson - par : Frédéric Pommier - Jusqu'au 25 juin, elle joue son spectacle "La Nuit je mens" à la Comédie de Paris, spectacle qu'elle donnera cet automne en tournée. Au micro de Frédéric Pommier, l'humoriste Morgane Cadignan témoigne de son affection pour un titre sorti en France en 1963 : "La nuit n'en finit plus" de Petula Clark.
Petula Clark knows a place (which might include a cellarful of noise), while the Yardbirds ask for your Love (although Eric doesn't want it, so runs away, the Ian Campbell folk group ask us if the times are actually changing, while we meet a new singer in a cloth cap that plays acoustic guitar and harmonica (and nom he's not Bob Dylan). Support this podcast at the $6/month level on patreon to get extra content! Create your podcast today! #madeonzencastr . If you are looking for Beatles summer fun, join our friends at the Magical Mystery Camp!
NEW EPISODE! Alan and Dave have no problem with Petula Clark...but this cover version of Clark's signature song is enough to make one quit listening to music for good.
This week's show, after a 1977 Avengers assertion: brand new Roach Squad, Bob Mould, New Model Army, Jesse Welles, Close Lobsters, John Davis, Peter Baldrachi, and Springhouse reissue; plus The Beatles, Petula Clark, Bert Jansch, Big Youth, James Brown...
Extrait : « … ses parents l'inscrivent à un programme de la BBC dans lequel des enfants de tous âges viennent enregistrer des chansons destinées aux soldats engagés contre l'Allemagne. Le jour de l'enregistrement, l'émission est retardée à cause d'un raid aérien, et pendant les bombardements, la mini Petula se porte volontaire pour distraire les autres gamins effrayés, en livrant une performance improvisée qui marque les esprits des producteurs de l'émission. Elle est engagée et enchaîne alors près de 500 apparitions à la radio, destinées à divertir et à remonter le moral des troupes, puis elle parcourt l'Angleterre avec une autre enfant chanteuse, Julie Andrews, future Mary Poppins … »Pour commenter les épisodes, tu peux le faire sur ton appli de podcasts habituelle, c'est toujours bon pour l'audience. Mais également sur le site web dédié, il y a une section Le Bar, ouverte 24/24, pour causer du podcast ou de musique en général, je t'y attends avec impatience. Enfin, si tu souhaites me soumettre une chanson, c'est aussi sur le site web que ça se passe. Pour soutenir Good Morning Music et Gros Naze :1. Abonne-toi2. Laisse-moi un avis et 5 étoiles sur Apple Podcasts, ou Spotify et Podcast Addict3. Partage ton épisode préféré à 3 personnes autour de toi. Ou 3.000 si tu connais plein de monde.Good Morning Music Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.
One FM presenter Josh Revens and Steve Dowers present 'Whatever Happened To?' This week's topic is the singer Petula Clark. This program originally aired on Monday the 10th of March, 2025. Contact the station on admin@fm985.com.au or (+613) 58313131 The ONE FM 98.5 Community Radio podcast page operates under the license of Goulburn Valley Community Radio Inc. (ONE FM) Number 1385226/1. PRA AMCOS (Australasian Performing Right Association Limited and Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners Society) that covers Simulcasting and Online content including podcasts with musical content, that we pay every year. This licence number is 1385226/1.
durée : 00:12:09 - " Curiosity, Genius, and the search for Petula Clark " : Stravinsky / Kelly-Marie Murphy - Toronto Symphony Orchestra - Cette pièce a été commandée par l'Orchestre symphonique de Toronto. Il s'agit d'une œuvre en un seul mouvement pour orchestre écrite pour célébrer le 85e anniversaire de Glenn Gould et le 70e anniversaire de sa première prestation avec le Toronto Symphony Orchestra. (Harmonia Mundi 2025)
durée : 00:12:09 - " Curiosity, Genius, and the search for Petula Clark " : Stravinsky / Kelly-Marie Murphy - Toronto Symphony Orchestra - Cette pièce a été commandée par l'Orchestre symphonique de Toronto. Il s'agit d'une œuvre en un seul mouvement pour orchestre écrite pour célébrer le 85e anniversaire de Glenn Gould et le 70e anniversaire de sa première prestation avec le Toronto Symphony Orchestra. (Harmonia Mundi 2025)
durée : 00:12:09 - " Curiosity, Genius, and the search for Petula Clark " : Stravinsky / Kelly-Marie Murphy - Toronto Symphony Orchestra - Cette pièce a été commandée par l'Orchestre symphonique de Toronto. Il s'agit d'une œuvre en un seul mouvement pour orchestre écrite pour célébrer le 85e anniversaire de Glenn Gould et le 70e anniversaire de sa première prestation avec le Toronto Symphony Orchestra. (Harmonia Mundi 2025)
PENDENTE: Rubrica su Cinema, letteratura, fumetto ed esperienze culturali
Benvenuti in un lungo, estenuante e sorprendente cinema realizzato da un artista sognatore e spesso segnato dalla sfortuna ma che non si è mai arreso. Stavolta è il turno di Francis Ford Coppola. Dopo aver girato già due film, Coppola si ritrova dietro la macchina da presa per dirigere un musical con protagonisti Fred Astaire e Petula Clark! Senza alcun tipo di pressione (sono sarcastico ovviamente), Coppola dirige "Sulle ali dell'arcobaleno" e il resto è storia.
Marissa Spencer delivers the latest entertainment news on: - The birth of Skai Jackson's first born - Bill Murray's interview at Sundance Film Festival - Downtown singer, Petula Clark teases a London show
The Beatles, Elton John, Andrews Sisters, the Chordettes, Petula Clark, Doobie Brothers, Imperio Argentina, Juanito Segarra, Mochi, Karina, Mocedades, Pérez Prado, los Sirex, Triana y Lole y Manuel.
Aitana, este viernes en 'Anda Ya'. 'Betty Black', el teórico cierre de la trilogía musical de Beyoncé. Las novedades de Mad Cool y el cartel de Concert Music Festival 2025. En LOS40 Classic: Un inglés en Nueva York regaló a Petula Clark su mayor éxito, 'Downtown'.
Send us a textReflecting on a January 1980 incident that sent shockwaves through the music world, we unravel how Paul McCartney's legal troubles in Japan influenced the dissolution of Wings and the cancelling of planned touring. We explore the inspiring tale of Norman Harris, whose serendipitous path from struggling musician to successful guitar dealer exemplifies the unpredictable nature of the music industry. The heartbeat of soul music briefly faltered with the passing of Sam Moore in January 2025, but his legacy with Sam and Dave resounds louder than ever. We celebrate the duo's timeless hits like "Hold On, I'm Coming" and "Soul Man." We take a closer look at Petula Clark's infectious anthem "Downtown." From humorous escapades in a 'Seinfeld' episode, to the introduction of a character on 'Lost,' to the profound impact of the 2020 Nashville bombing, we touch on diverse stories that highlight music's evolving landscape. We dive into the groundbreaking fusion of rock and rap by Run DMC with "King of Rock," and look deeper into songs that guitarist Eddie Martinez played on. This episode offers a nostalgic yet fresh look at how pivotal moments and pioneering sounds have forever shaped the music world.
Hello everyone and welcome to today's episode of Bob Barry's Unearthed Interviews. It's more music and memories with singer and actress Petula Clark. And I emphasize actress because I saw Petula star, in London, as Norma Desmond in a performance of “Sunset Boulevard.” She was magnificent. You all know her from her timeless hits, most written by British composer Tony Hatch. Her first number one song was inspired by the energy and excitement on the streets of New York. “My Love” was another song written by Hatch for Clark. It relates a deep, personal expression of love and promising devotion and shows an emotional side to the singer. “I Know a Place” was recorded in London, where most of her hits were made. Hatch used a catchy piano riff and brass section which made it lively and upbeat. Her music conveyed a carefree feeling and a celebration of life. Petula Clark's career spanned generations. She is an artist from the golden age of pop to Broadway, television, and beyond, making her a beloved figure in entertainment. It was early in the morning in Las Vegas and I was as surprised as she was when she answered the phone.
Viajamos 60 años atrás en el tiempo en busca de singles que alcanzaron su puesto más alto en el Billboard Hot 100 en enero de 1965.(Foto del podcast por R. McPhedran; Petula Clark con el disco de oro por “Downtown”, 1965)Playlist;(sintonía) LEE MORGAN “The sidewinder part 1” (top 81)PETULA CLARK “Downtown” (top 1)SHIRLEY ELLIS “The name game” (top 3)MARTHA and THE VANDELLAS “Wild one” (top 3)THE MARVELETTES “Too many fish in the sea” (top 25)MARVIN GAYE “How sweet it is to be loved by you” (top 6)MARY WELLS “Use your head” (top 34)THE LARKS “The jerk” (top 7)THE CONTOURS “Can you jerk like me” (top 47)JAMES BROWN and THE FAMOUS FLAMES “Have mercy baby” (top 92)BROOK BENTON “Do it right” (top 67)JOE TEX “Hold what you got” (top 5)THE IMPRESSIONS “Amen” (top 7)RAY CHARLES “Makin’ whoope” (top 46)WILLIE MITCHELL “Percolatin’” (top 85)CANDY and THE KISSES “The 81” (top 51)THE EXCITERS “I want you to be my boy” (top 98)CHAD and JEREMY “Willow weep for me” (top 15)Escuchar audio
We are here with actor, singer, and entertainer Roslyn Kind. You Might Know Her From: The Look of Love/The Island, 3 From Brooklyn, The Nanny, I'm Going to Be Famous, Ladies of the House, Gimme a Break, and her over 50-year illustrious recording career. We talked to Roslyn about signing to RCA Records as just a 17-year-old girl, lampooning her famous sister Barbra Streisand in an iconic episode of The Nanny, and her latest projects that retells two of her signature songs into a short film. Roslyn also gave us the goods on blood harmony with her mother and Babs, her British invasion influences, the challenge of making “People” hers in her Broadway debut, and set the record on her theatrical credits because you know You Might Know Her is always going to dig some old shet up. This was just a beautiful Roslyn Kind-shaped bow to close out 2024, our year of Barbra, after reading her 900-page magnum opus. Rozzie, we love you. Patreon: www.patreon.com/youmightknowherfrom Follow us on social media: @youmightknowherfrom || @damianbellino || @rodemanne Slide moment in “So Long Dearie” with “Don't try to stop me, Horace. PLEASE” The Look of Love/The Island Tracie Thoms is a mutual friend with Sargon Yoseph Signed to RCA at 17 and first album is Give Me You Roslyn loved Motown and the English Invasion (Shirley Bassey, Cilla Black, Petula Clark, Marianne Faithful) “Fool on the Hill” guested on 1969 Charles Azenvour special with Dusty Springfield Played the same stage as Louis Prima “Meadowlark” from The Baker's Wife “Mamaloshen” by Mandy Patinkin Joel Grey's father, Mickey Katz Blood Harmony is when siblings/relatives blend together seamlessly 3 From Brooklyn Review in Times Ferguson the Tailor at the Beverly Hills Playhouse Was NOT in the Bill Finnn Elegies, she sang the song “I Don't Know How to Help You” from Elegies for Punks Angels and Raging Queens Played Ellie Greenwich Leader of the Pack in Calgary, CA at Stage West with Andrew Stevens Episode of “The Nanny” s4, ep10 Musical special, “Ladies of the Nightclub” never got released Brooks Arthur was in studio doing Happily Ever After and You'll Never Know Was Elliot Gould's guest on his 1975 episode of SNL Peter Chase helped Roslyn pick her SNL dress Tamara de Lempicka painting in her Zoom background was Barbra's and Bette describing as working with Shelley Long as “pretty rough” Roslyn was too ethnic to play the Shelley Long role in the pilot, “Ghost of a Chance” of so she got the best girlfriend role instead Ladies of the House with Donna Mills, Pam Grier and Florence Henderson NYC dance class with Luigi had Richard Chamberlain, Bernadette Peters, Loni Ackerman Interviewed by Skip E. Lowe, who was famously lampooned by Martin Short as Jiminy Glick 5 episodes of Gimme a Break: (s3 ep8, 22; s5 ep 12, 22; s6 ep 9) Jennifer Hudson maybe sang every time she went on set for Respect Tyne Daly's “Rose's Turn” On Broadway (almost replaced with Michele Lee or Lainie Kazan) Anne: Judy Garland's “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” but also “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” Damian: Ronnette's “Sleigh Ride” Phil Spector Christmas Album Lempicka was filmed for Lincoln Center archive but Tammy Faye did not Here's Love is the musical based on Miracle on 34th Street
More of the British charts for November 1964. Our first month in the history of the show without a Beatles song in either the British or American charts. It will be all the way to *next month* for us to Feel Fine again. Still some quality music as Petula Clark takes us Downtown, the Stones tell us about their Little Red Rooster and the Yardbirds talk about their little schoolgirl. Support this podcast at the $6/month level on patreon to get extra content! Create your podcast today! #madeonzencastr
British rock and pop in the 1960s became a force to be reckoned with. There were famous bands like the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks and artists like Lulu and Petula Clark. Why did this explosion of new pop music happen in Britain in that decade? Skidmore College Professor Emeritus Gordon Ross Thompson has written on just that subject!
National clean your fridge day. Entertainment from 2012. Zeb Pike 1st sees Pikes Peak, 1st Catholic college, 1st Wendy's resteraunt, Most expensive painting in history. Todays birthdays - William Herschel, Ed Asner, Joseph Wapner, Clyde McPhatter, Petula Clark, Sam Waterston, Anni-Frid Lyngstad, Beverly D'Angelo, Chad Kroeger. Roy Clark died.Intro - Pour some sugar on me - Def Leppard http://defleppard.com/COTF (cleaning out the fridge) - Dickie AlanOne more night - Maroon 5We are never ever getiing bach together - Taylor SwiftBirthdays - In da club - 50 Cent http://50cent.com/People Court TV themeMoney Honey - Clyde McPhatter & the DriftersDowntown - Petula ClarkDancing Queen - ABBAHow you remind me - NickelbackHoneymoon feelin' - Roy ClarkExut - It's not love - Dokken http://dokken.net/Follow Jeff Stampka on facebook, linkedin and cooolmedia.com
Disney Chorus and Orchestra [00:20] "Little April Shower" Walter Disney's Story of Bambi Disneyland ST 3903 1960 Plip plop plip. You may recall from the last episode we heard a track from Stay Awake. On that album, "Little April Shower" is performed by Natalie Merchant, Michael Stipe, and the Roches (https://youtu.be/7ObPekx0h0M?si=BWAulm8X4hnsji14). Thelonius Monk [03:35] "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" Straight No Chaser Columbia CS 2651 1967 Monk takes a fine run at this standard originally recorded by Cab Calloway. Helped out here by Charlie Rouse on tenor sax, Larry Gales on bass, and Ben Riley on drums. Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein [11:14] "The Upside Down" Stranger Things - Volume One (A Netflix Series) Lakeshore Records 2016 Ah, the first season (https://youtu.be/b9EkMc79ZSU?si=8SqvgKenleN2NEJ0) was pretty near perfect. Had to go with the iconic title track. Frank Sinatra with the Nelson Riddle Orchestra [12:21] "Call Me" Strangers in the Night Reprise Records FS 1017 1966 Oddly enough, Frank has not one but two (2!) Petula Clark covers on this album including this one. I much prefer the brassy sassy production of Petula's version (https://youtu.be/M_mkSWxN2xk?si=gya-HwLlYCWK093i). Less Art [16:22] "Diana the Huntress" Strangled Light Gilead Media RELIC88 2017 Featuring members of Kowloon Walled City and Thrice. Igor Stravinsky and the Columbia Symphony Orchestra [19:34] "Firebird Ballet Suite (1945): Introduction - Prelude and Dance of the Firebird - Variations" Stravinsky Conducts Firebird Suite/Petrushka Suite Columbia Masterworks MS 7011 1967 This is the 1945 arrangement of The Firebird Suite. Roxy Music [22:44] "Over You" Street Life - 20 Great Hits EG EGTV 1 1986 A single orignally from Roxy Music's Flesh and Blood (https://youtu.be/3TL-Bc1giO8?si=FaZvmtDfdg2K-5uF). Evidently recorded as a way to tes tout Phil Manzanera's recently constructed studio. Made it as high as number 80 on the Hot 100. Death Valley Girls [26:07] "Electric High" Street Venom Suicide Squeeze SSQ181 2021 (originally recorded and released in 2014) Closing track to Death Valley Girl's debut studio album. Psych rock excellence (https://youtu.be/AO8z3AwIIaw?si=JCyzx7zyGK17UD5K). Salem 66 [31:08] "Seven Steps Down" 1984 Great Plains [mm:ss] "When Do You Say Hello" 1983 Strum and Thrum: The American Jangle Underground 1983-1987 Captured Tracks CT-302 2020 If you love jangle, you'll love Strum and Thrum. 28 tracks of jingle jangle goodness. An exceptional compilation that includes a 80 page booklet that dives into the scene. Yo La Tengo [36:39] "My Heart's Not In It" Stuff Like That There Matador OLE-1079-1 2015 It's hard to choose just once song from this album, but the opening track does a great job getting the listener in the mood for the album. It's a lovely rendition of the Gerry Goffin/Russ Titelman single recorded by Darlene McCrea (https://youtu.be/CuetP9wAHnY?si=o9YtuELwMU3C6S0v). New Order [39:25] "Sub-Culture" Sub-Culture Factory fac 133 1985 A remix by John Robie of the band's third single from Low-life (https://youtu.be/Uetuplhan_U?si=Or8I0F30teDUWLOh). The flip side is, of course, Dub-Culture. Ahmed Ben Ali [47:53] "Subhana" Subhana Habibi Funk HABIBI022 2023 That's right... reggae by way of Libya. Evidently reggae arrived right around peak Bob Marley and the Wailers and it took off from there. Barren Harvest [52:46] "Claw and Feather" Subtle Cruelties Handmade Birds HB-071 2014 Some dark and lovely ambient folk metal from Portland featuring Jessica Way of Worm Ourobouros. Nancy Sinatra [58:33] "Sugar Town" Sugar Reprise Records RS-6239 1967 A Lee Hazlewood number (naturally) that he says is an allusion to LSD sugar cubes. Featuring Wrecking Crew members including the great Carol Kaye, Glen Campbell, and Hal Blaine. Music behind the DJ: "These Boots Were Made for Walking" by Les Brown and his Orchestra
A (relatively) in-depth analysis of American lyricist, singer, songwriter and painter Carole Bayer Sager in just under thirty minutes.Bayer Sager's first recording as a singer in her own right was the 1977 album Carole Bayer Sager. It included the hit single 'You're Moving Out Today', a song which she co-wrote with Bette Midler and Bruce Roberts. The single reached number 6 in the UK Singles Chart. She was born in New York City and graduated from New York University, where she majored in English, dramatic arts, and speech. She had already written her first pop hit, 'A Groovy Kind of Love', while still a student at New York City's High School of Music and Art. It was recorded by The Mindbenders, whose version was a worldwide hit. The song was later recorded by Sonny & Cher, Petula Clark, and Phil Collins, whose rendition for the film Buster reached number one on both the UK Singles Chart in 1988.In October 2016, Bayer Sager published her memoir, They're Playing Our Song: A Memoir. She also narrated the audiobook version.In this episode I am in conversation with Dr. Andrew Webber.I hope you enjoy the podcast and do leave feedback if you like what you have heard.Mathew Woodall
Daniel Popp présente l'intégrale en 13 CD de son père André Popp et le duo toulousain Tropic Hotel se rêve en pop love tropicale à Rio. André Popp (1924-2014) serait le chaînon manquant entre Olivier Messiaen et la variété, c'est ce que nous explique son fils Daniel Popp, à l'occasion de la sortie de l'intégrale instrumentale de son père, soit 293 titres, 13 CD, entre 1955 et 1976. Note d'intention Daniel Popp (son fils)Réunir pour la première fois dans une intégrale, tous les albums d'André Popp de 1955 à 1976, jamais ou si peu publiés en CD, permet de voir à quel point la musique instrumentale est un élément essentiel de son œuvre de compositeur, arrangeur, chef d'orchestre. Un volant peu connu tant les arrangements qu'il a écrits pour les plus grands, ses chansons à succès qui ont fait le tour du monde, couvrant plusieurs générations, jusqu'à aujourd'hui, ou la série des « Piccolo, Saxo et Cie » ont voilé quelque peu son travail en tant que chef d'orchestre. Car outre le côté avant-gardiste des explorations sonores d'« Elsa Popping et sa Musique Sidérante » qui lui auront collé une image d'« amuseur », ou les musiques qui ont alimenté nombre de génériques de séries d'animation (Colargol, Babar...), et d'une myriade d'émissions de radio ou de télévision (« Les Maîtres du Mystère », « La Tête et les Jambes » entre autres…) et de bandes originales (« Tintin »…), André Popp, album après album, n'aura cessé de creuser un sillon musical qui n'appartient qu'à lui. Souvent nourri d'œuvres composées pour la radio qui fut son conservatoire, dont le bonus inédit, exceptionnel, du CD 13, offre un concert radiophonique dirigé par Popp, lui-même, revisité dans un esprit jazz coloré de joyeuses dissonances. Cette publication en révèle enfin la mesure, l'incroyable variété : une véritable malle aux trésors prenant figure d'œuvre regorgeant d'audace, de malice, de folle créativité musicale, entrecoupée de périodes plus sages, mais toujours élégantes et inventives, dont il est passionnant de constater l'évolution sur une vingtaine d'années. Biographie André PoppLa passion absolue de la musique résume la vie et la carrière d'André Popp. Parfait autodidacte ou presque, génial créateur, il est resté dans l'ombre malgré une œuvre très riche, jalonnée par des tubes internationaux sur fond d'explorations musicales en tous genres. Dès cinq ans, en 1929, il apprend le piano en Vendée, là où réside sa famille. Mais la musique se révèle vraiment à lui, pendant la guerre, quand il remplace l'abbé mobilisé qui tenait l'harmonium dans la chapelle de son pensionnat. Le jeune André joue de l'instrument à tous les offices avec un grand bonheur. Déjà, plutôt que les grands classiques, il préfère écouter Stravinsky ou Messiaen. À la même période, sa première rencontre importante fut Jean Broussolle, futur ‘Compagnon de la chanson' avec lequel il écrit ses premières chansons. C'est encore avec Broussolle, qu'il ose « monter » à Paris à la Libération en 1944, venant de sa Vendée natale. Là, il travaillera comme pianiste dans divers cabarets ou encore au célèbre Théâtre des Trois Baudets à partir de 1949. Sur tous les fronts en 1953, il devient le musicien/producteur de la grande émission du samedi soir sur Paris Inter : « La bride sur le cou ». Véritable laboratoire et conservatoire pour André Popp qui affirmait y avoir fait ses classes d'orchestration, de composition, de direction d'orchestre ! En 1956, Jacques Canetti engage André Popp chez Philips et sa filiale Fontana comme chef d'orchestre et arrangeur. Chez Fontana, sous la direction artistique de Boris Vian, André Popp enregistre en 1956 son premier album instrumental Musiques en tous genres, suivi un an plus tard de Elsa Popping, un album 30 cm réunissant des classiques connus : polkas, java et autres, avec des arrangements avant-gardistes et de nombreux trucages jamais réalisés en studio. Parmi les accompagnements d'artistes chez Philips/Fontana, on découvre ses arrangements ciselés sur mesure pour Jacques Brel avec ‘Quand on a que l'amour', son premier succès, Juliette Gréco et ‘Il n'y a plus d'après', Mouloudji, Zizi Jeanmaire et tellement d'autres, tant son originalité lui vaut de faire partie des arrangeurs « à la mode » ! Puis viendront une kyrielle de chansons dont il écrit les musiques gravées dans toutes les mémoires : les célébrissimes ‘Lavandières du Portugal' en 1955 avec Jacqueline François, ‘La complainte du téléphone' ou ‘De Pantin à Pékin' pour Juliette Gréco, ‘Tom Pillibi', chanté par Jacqueline Boyer, Grand prix de l'Eurovision en 1960, ‘Le chant de Mallory' avec Rachel, quatrième de cette même Eurovision en 1964, ‘Le lit de Lola', ‘Manchester et Liverpool' et ‘Mon amour, mon ami', pour Marie Laforêt. Son plus grand succès comme compositeur restera ‘Love Is Blue' (‘L'amour est bleu') dont le chef d'orchestre Paul Mauriat fera un succès mondial en 1968 et vendra trente millions de disques. ‘La solitude c'est après' pour Claude François, ‘L'amour c'est comme les bateaux' pour Sylvie Vartan ou un autre tube planétaire ‘Song for Anna' joué au départ par Herb Ohta, un guitariste Hawaïen, sont d'autres belles réalisations à l'actif d'André Popp qui a aussi offert des chansons à Petula Clark, Brigitte Bardot, France Gall, Régine, Françoise Hardy, Nana Mouskouri, Nicole Croisille ou encore à la toute jeune Céline Dion à ses débuts. Mais le chef d'œuvre d'André Popp restera à tout jamais « Piccolo, saxo et compagnie », seule œuvre symphonique éducative destinée à la jeunesse, jouée de l'Australie à la Colombie en passant par l'Allemagne, la France… Peu présent dans le monde du cinéma, André Popp composera néanmoins quelques musiques de film, dont « Tintin et le mystère de la toison d'or ». Le théâtre lui ouvrira ses portes grâce à ses orchestrations célèbres d'Irma la douce jouée encore à Broadway le jour de sa mort, ou par ses musiques composées pour nombre de pièces d'André Barsac au Théâtre de l'Atelier. Depuis une décennie, André Popp était heureux d'avoir trouvé en Fred Pallem et son orchestre de jazz « Le Sacre du Tympan », le prolongateur de son œuvre. Fred Pallem qui ne se lasse pas de répéter qu'André Popp symbolise encore aujourd'hui le chaînon manquant entre Olivier Messiaen et la musique de variété.Extrait de « Les Arrangeurs de la Chanson Française : 200 Rencontres » Par Serge ELHAÏK (2017) Éditions Textuel.Titres d'André Popp joués dans l'émission :Les Papillons, Les Lavandières du Portugal, 20 que da ?, Le chant de Mallaury par Tabuley Rochereau (extrait), Manchester & Liverpool demo par David Bowie (extrait), Love is Blue par George Benson et La Polka du Roi.► Coffret 13 CD André Popp L'intégrale instrumentale (1955-1976) (Universal 2024).Facebook - Site - Deezer - YouTube.En 2025 ! Le 8 Mars 2025, concert exceptionnel de Fred Pallem et le Sacre du Tympan Big Band « 100 ans de Popp et de jazz » dans le cadre du centenaire du compositeur André Popp, Radio France, Studio 104. Puis nous recevons Tropic Hotel pour la sortie de l'album Tum Tum Bossa. Un travail d'adaptation en français de poésies brésiliennes issues de la bossa nova des années 60 (Tom Jobim, Chico Buarque, Caetano Veloso, Vinicius de Moraes, Carlos Lyra, Adoniran Barbosa…) au plus proche du sens et de la sonorité d'origine : Tropic Hotel, c'est un homme (Frédéric Jean, ex-Hyperclean) et une femme (Sandra Campas) qui jouent et chantent face à face le discours amoureux. Partis de la forme brute de la bossa, le Tropic Hotel n'hésite pas à s'aventurer sur les sentiers électriques de la pop exotica et nous entrainent dans un véritable « road movie musical. » Ce sont des histoires d'amour. D'abord celle de Sandra et Frédéric.En 2014, alors élève au Conservatoire de Jazz de Montauban, Sandra rencontre Frédéric. Le week-end, ils se retrouvent dans une petite cabane perdue au fond des bois pour jouer de la bossa nova nus. S'inspirant des surréalistes, ils s'essaient à des adaptations à partir de jeux littéraires. Sandra chante en brésilien et Frédéric interprète ce qu'il entend en français. Ils appellent cela des « bossas sourdes ». Fin 2016, Sandra se lance dans des adaptations, au plus proche du sens et de la sonorité d'origine. Il apparaît évident que c'est ce qui restitue le mieux la poésie crue de ces textes brésiliens des années 60. Au printemps 2017, ils décident alors de les partager sur scène. Frédéric fait quelques propositions d'arrangements plus électriques et peu à peu se dessine le répertoire, nouvel havre pour ces poèmes d'amour. On laisse la cabane pour le Tropic Hotel. Titres interprétés au grand studio- Je ne suis plus toi et moi (voce e eu) Live RFI- Viens, extrait de l'album voir le clip- Petite Valse Live RFI.Line Up : Sandra Campas, chant, Frédéric Jean, guitare.Son : Benoît Letirant.► Album Tum Tum Bossa (Velvetica Music 2024).- Site - Facebook - Instagram - Spotify.
Daniel Popp présente l'intégrale en 13 CD de son père André Popp et le duo toulousain Tropic Hotel se rêve en pop love tropicale à Rio. André Popp (1924-2014) serait le chaînon manquant entre Olivier Messiaen et la variété, c'est ce que nous explique son fils Daniel Popp, à l'occasion de la sortie de l'intégrale instrumentale de son père, soit 293 titres, 13 CD, entre 1955 et 1976. Note d'intention Daniel Popp (son fils)Réunir pour la première fois dans une intégrale, tous les albums d'André Popp de 1955 à 1976, jamais ou si peu publiés en CD, permet de voir à quel point la musique instrumentale est un élément essentiel de son œuvre de compositeur, arrangeur, chef d'orchestre. Un volant peu connu tant les arrangements qu'il a écrits pour les plus grands, ses chansons à succès qui ont fait le tour du monde, couvrant plusieurs générations, jusqu'à aujourd'hui, ou la série des « Piccolo, Saxo et Cie » ont voilé quelque peu son travail en tant que chef d'orchestre. Car outre le côté avant-gardiste des explorations sonores d'« Elsa Popping et sa Musique Sidérante » qui lui auront collé une image d'« amuseur », ou les musiques qui ont alimenté nombre de génériques de séries d'animation (Colargol, Babar...), et d'une myriade d'émissions de radio ou de télévision (« Les Maîtres du Mystère », « La Tête et les Jambes » entre autres…) et de bandes originales (« Tintin »…), André Popp, album après album, n'aura cessé de creuser un sillon musical qui n'appartient qu'à lui. Souvent nourri d'œuvres composées pour la radio qui fut son conservatoire, dont le bonus inédit, exceptionnel, du CD 13, offre un concert radiophonique dirigé par Popp, lui-même, revisité dans un esprit jazz coloré de joyeuses dissonances. Cette publication en révèle enfin la mesure, l'incroyable variété : une véritable malle aux trésors prenant figure d'œuvre regorgeant d'audace, de malice, de folle créativité musicale, entrecoupée de périodes plus sages, mais toujours élégantes et inventives, dont il est passionnant de constater l'évolution sur une vingtaine d'années. Biographie André PoppLa passion absolue de la musique résume la vie et la carrière d'André Popp. Parfait autodidacte ou presque, génial créateur, il est resté dans l'ombre malgré une œuvre très riche, jalonnée par des tubes internationaux sur fond d'explorations musicales en tous genres. Dès cinq ans, en 1929, il apprend le piano en Vendée, là où réside sa famille. Mais la musique se révèle vraiment à lui, pendant la guerre, quand il remplace l'abbé mobilisé qui tenait l'harmonium dans la chapelle de son pensionnat. Le jeune André joue de l'instrument à tous les offices avec un grand bonheur. Déjà, plutôt que les grands classiques, il préfère écouter Stravinsky ou Messiaen. À la même période, sa première rencontre importante fut Jean Broussolle, futur ‘Compagnon de la chanson' avec lequel il écrit ses premières chansons. C'est encore avec Broussolle, qu'il ose « monter » à Paris à la Libération en 1944, venant de sa Vendée natale. Là, il travaillera comme pianiste dans divers cabarets ou encore au célèbre Théâtre des Trois Baudets à partir de 1949. Sur tous les fronts en 1953, il devient le musicien/producteur de la grande émission du samedi soir sur Paris Inter : « La bride sur le cou ». Véritable laboratoire et conservatoire pour André Popp qui affirmait y avoir fait ses classes d'orchestration, de composition, de direction d'orchestre ! En 1956, Jacques Canetti engage André Popp chez Philips et sa filiale Fontana comme chef d'orchestre et arrangeur. Chez Fontana, sous la direction artistique de Boris Vian, André Popp enregistre en 1956 son premier album instrumental Musiques en tous genres, suivi un an plus tard de Elsa Popping, un album 30 cm réunissant des classiques connus : polkas, java et autres, avec des arrangements avant-gardistes et de nombreux trucages jamais réalisés en studio. Parmi les accompagnements d'artistes chez Philips/Fontana, on découvre ses arrangements ciselés sur mesure pour Jacques Brel avec ‘Quand on a que l'amour', son premier succès, Juliette Gréco et ‘Il n'y a plus d'après', Mouloudji, Zizi Jeanmaire et tellement d'autres, tant son originalité lui vaut de faire partie des arrangeurs « à la mode » ! Puis viendront une kyrielle de chansons dont il écrit les musiques gravées dans toutes les mémoires : les célébrissimes ‘Lavandières du Portugal' en 1955 avec Jacqueline François, ‘La complainte du téléphone' ou ‘De Pantin à Pékin' pour Juliette Gréco, ‘Tom Pillibi', chanté par Jacqueline Boyer, Grand prix de l'Eurovision en 1960, ‘Le chant de Mallory' avec Rachel, quatrième de cette même Eurovision en 1964, ‘Le lit de Lola', ‘Manchester et Liverpool' et ‘Mon amour, mon ami', pour Marie Laforêt. Son plus grand succès comme compositeur restera ‘Love Is Blue' (‘L'amour est bleu') dont le chef d'orchestre Paul Mauriat fera un succès mondial en 1968 et vendra trente millions de disques. ‘La solitude c'est après' pour Claude François, ‘L'amour c'est comme les bateaux' pour Sylvie Vartan ou un autre tube planétaire ‘Song for Anna' joué au départ par Herb Ohta, un guitariste Hawaïen, sont d'autres belles réalisations à l'actif d'André Popp qui a aussi offert des chansons à Petula Clark, Brigitte Bardot, France Gall, Régine, Françoise Hardy, Nana Mouskouri, Nicole Croisille ou encore à la toute jeune Céline Dion à ses débuts. Mais le chef d'œuvre d'André Popp restera à tout jamais « Piccolo, saxo et compagnie », seule œuvre symphonique éducative destinée à la jeunesse, jouée de l'Australie à la Colombie en passant par l'Allemagne, la France… Peu présent dans le monde du cinéma, André Popp composera néanmoins quelques musiques de film, dont « Tintin et le mystère de la toison d'or ». Le théâtre lui ouvrira ses portes grâce à ses orchestrations célèbres d'Irma la douce jouée encore à Broadway le jour de sa mort, ou par ses musiques composées pour nombre de pièces d'André Barsac au Théâtre de l'Atelier. Depuis une décennie, André Popp était heureux d'avoir trouvé en Fred Pallem et son orchestre de jazz « Le Sacre du Tympan », le prolongateur de son œuvre. Fred Pallem qui ne se lasse pas de répéter qu'André Popp symbolise encore aujourd'hui le chaînon manquant entre Olivier Messiaen et la musique de variété.Extrait de « Les Arrangeurs de la Chanson Française : 200 Rencontres » Par Serge ELHAÏK (2017) Éditions Textuel.Titres d'André Popp joués dans l'émission :Les Papillons, Les Lavandières du Portugal, 20 que da ?, Le chant de Mallaury par Tabuley Rochereau (extrait), Manchester & Liverpool demo par David Bowie (extrait), Love is Blue par George Benson et La Polka du Roi.► Coffret 13 CD André Popp L'intégrale instrumentale (1955-1976) (Universal 2024).Facebook - Site - Deezer - YouTube.En 2025 ! Le 8 Mars 2025, concert exceptionnel de Fred Pallem et le Sacre du Tympan Big Band « 100 ans de Popp et de jazz » dans le cadre du centenaire du compositeur André Popp, Radio France, Studio 104. Puis nous recevons Tropic Hotel pour la sortie de l'album Tum Tum Bossa. Un travail d'adaptation en français de poésies brésiliennes issues de la bossa nova des années 60 (Tom Jobim, Chico Buarque, Caetano Veloso, Vinicius de Moraes, Carlos Lyra, Adoniran Barbosa…) au plus proche du sens et de la sonorité d'origine : Tropic Hotel, c'est un homme (Frédéric Jean, ex-Hyperclean) et une femme (Sandra Campas) qui jouent et chantent face à face le discours amoureux. Partis de la forme brute de la bossa, le Tropic Hotel n'hésite pas à s'aventurer sur les sentiers électriques de la pop exotica et nous entrainent dans un véritable « road movie musical. » Ce sont des histoires d'amour. D'abord celle de Sandra et Frédéric.En 2014, alors élève au Conservatoire de Jazz de Montauban, Sandra rencontre Frédéric. Le week-end, ils se retrouvent dans une petite cabane perdue au fond des bois pour jouer de la bossa nova nus. S'inspirant des surréalistes, ils s'essaient à des adaptations à partir de jeux littéraires. Sandra chante en brésilien et Frédéric interprète ce qu'il entend en français. Ils appellent cela des « bossas sourdes ». Fin 2016, Sandra se lance dans des adaptations, au plus proche du sens et de la sonorité d'origine. Il apparaît évident que c'est ce qui restitue le mieux la poésie crue de ces textes brésiliens des années 60. Au printemps 2017, ils décident alors de les partager sur scène. Frédéric fait quelques propositions d'arrangements plus électriques et peu à peu se dessine le répertoire, nouvel havre pour ces poèmes d'amour. On laisse la cabane pour le Tropic Hotel. Titres interprétés au grand studio- Je ne suis plus toi et moi (voce e eu) Live RFI- Viens, extrait de l'album voir le clip- Petite Valse Live RFI.Line Up : Sandra Campas, chant, Frédéric Jean, guitare.Son : Benoît Letirant.► Album Tum Tum Bossa (Velvetica Music 2024).- Site - Facebook - Instagram - Spotify.
Our very, very special guest today is the great Kevin Harrington, who most Beatles fans will recognize as the “redhead on the roof” in the Let It Be and Get Back films. At the time, Kevin was only 18 years old(!) but had been working for the Beatles, in some capacity, for years, first as an errand boy at NEMS and then as an assistant to Brian Epstein. He worked alongside Mal Evans as the Beatles' “roadie,” as he's billed in the Let It Be credits. After the Beatles broke up, Kevin stayed closely in the fold, even living at Friar Park with George and Patti during the recording of All Things Must Pass. Then, he finally struck out on his own in the ‘70s and beyond and was a roadie with some of the biggest names in music, including Wishbone Ash, Motorhead, Petula Clark, Ted Nugent, Tina Turner and more. To learn more about Kevin's time with NEMS and the Beatles, check out his memoir, Who's The Redhead on the Roof? --------------------- Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter/X for photos, videos, and more from this episode & past episodes — we're @bcthebeatles everywhere. Follow BC the Beatles on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you're listening now. Buy us a coffee! www.ko-fi.com/bcthebeatles Contact us at bcthebeatles@gmail.com.
Roots of Rock - Rosemary Clooney Connect the Dots Before They Were Famous - Simon and Garfunkel 5 Second Quiz This Week in Music History Behind the Hits - Downtown by Petula Clark
In this episode, the gals chat all about what their walk out songs would be! From Joan Jet & Petula Clark to baked gnocchi & good bread, the gals share it all! So tune in & keep listening for updates from your favorite knitting gals :) We would LOVE to hear your thoughts for our next episode! To be part of the fun, please email your answers to Cathy at cathyfinleyknits@gmail.com. Question for Next Episode: What is YOUR third place? And don't forget...Roots Knitting Academy's Spring 2024 class calendar is open for registration on their website www.rootsknitting.com! Be sure to follow them on Facebook & Instagram for updates on all the fun they have planned! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/knittingshoplive/message
Here's a Santa's bag full of potential purchases for the show tune fan in your life (like you!). Selections from cast albums to Merrily We Roll Along, Harmony, Sweeney Todd, plus performances by Petula Clark, Julie Benko and more.
In Part 1 of this week's episode, Patrick and Tommie pay tribute to a dog loyal til his owner's end and beyond, meet the Rajapalayam, wish a Happy Birthday to Petula Clark, review three Broadway shows that opened on this day in history, take a bite out of National Bundt Day, look at the Supreme Court's new code of ethics, and discuss the fascism of Donald Trump and the cult of personality formerly known as the Republican Party. (Part 2 of this episode will be released on Wednesday, November 22.)
National clean your fridge day. Entertainment from 1970. Zeb Pike 1st sees Pikes Peak, 1st Catholic college, 1st Wendy's resteraunt, Most expensive painting in history. Todays birthdays - William Herschel, Ed Asner, Joseph Wapner, Clyde McPhatter, Petula Clark, Sam Waterston, Anni-Frid Lyngstad, Beverly D'Angelo, Chad Kroeger. Roy Clark died.Intro - Pour some sugar on me - Def Leppard http://defleppard.com/COTF (cleaning out the fridge) - Dickie AlanI'll be there - The Jackson 5Fifteen years ago - Conway TwittyBirthdays - In da club - 50 Cent http://50cent.com/People Court TV themeMoney Honey - Clyde McPhatter & the DriftersDowntown - Petula ClarkDancing Queen - ABBAHow you remind me - NickelbackHoneymoon feelin' - Roy ClarkExut - It's not love - Dokken http://dokken.net/https://coolcasts.cooolmedia.com/
Close your eyes and imagine exiting your front door. Within moments, everything necessary for your life is a few blocks away, except perhaps your job. Groceries, coffee, toiletries, your bank—if you're still a physical bank-type person—auto shop, all within walking distance. You never have to commute too far to live your life. Sounds like quite a dystopian hellscape, doesn't it? Believe it or not, that's yet another conspiracy theory that emerged earlier this year, because the ability to access things you need is apparently a Deep State plot. Derek is joined by “The War on Cars” co-host, Doug Gordon, to discuss how this conspiracy started and why smart urban planning is a boon for society. First, we discuss Jane Jacobs, the Scranton, Pennsylvania-born journalist and theorist who brought her civic activism to Toronto in 1968, with Matthew coloring in how her legacy has fared during the rise of the Ford family. Corrections: In his unbridled enthusiasm for the topic and the memories it churned up, Matthew messed up THREE things—the Escalade is a Cadillac, not a Ford, “Downtown” was sung by Petula Clark, not Peggy Lee, and Bill Davis was a Progressive Conservative Premier, not a Liberal! Apologies. Show Notes The Woman Who Saved New York City from Superhighway Hell | Vanity Fair ‘The streets belong to the people': Why a premier killed the Spadina Expressway | TVO Today Ford family is building a political dynasty Video shows Councillor Doug Ford handing out $20 bills at TCHC building Where the Spadina Expressway Didn't Stop | The Local Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This episode puts Glen and Petula together for a pair of albums that include many songs originally made famous by other singers and cover a wide range of popular music styles.
Andy sings Petula Clark's "Downtown", Taylor Swift is dating a jock, Panera Bread gets more shade, and a woman loses her mind while listening to Doja Cat's song "Demons". On Rachel's Chart Chat, Rachel from Des Moines delivers a special Andy-themed Chart Chat segment all about different artists named Andy who have hit the Hot 100 over the years. You can find a playlist for Rachel's Chart Chat here. Follow Rachel on Last.fm here.
Harvey Brownstone conducts an in-depth interview with Randy Edelman, Renowned Film Score Composer & Songwriter About Harvey's guest: Today's guest, Randy Edelman, is a renowned, multi-award winning composer, musician, producer and singer-songwriter, whose body of work is truly monumental. As a solo artist, he's recorded 16 albums and had numerous hit singles including “Uptown Up-tempo Woman”, “Concrete and Clay” and “Nobody Made Me”. But most of his classic songs became huge hits for some of the greatest music stars of all time. Everyone from Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney and Shirley Bassey, to Petula Clark, the 5th Dimension, and Kool and the Gang, have recorded his songs. Some of his biggest hits include “Weekend in New England” by Barry Manilow, “I Can't Make Music” by The Carpenters, “Isn't it a Shame” by Patti LaBelle, “Down in the Everglades” by Willy Nelson, “If Love is Real” by Olivia Newton-John, “Blue Street” by Blood, Sweat and Tears, “The Laughter and the Tears” by Dionne Warwick, and of course, “Sunny Days”, recorded by his mega-talented wife, Jackie DeShannon. And if that weren't enough, our guest is also one of the most highly acclaimed composers for movies and television, having written over 100 soundtracks for movies, including “My Cousin Vinny”, “The Mask”, “Ghostbusters 2”, “Twins”, “Kindergarten Cop”, “Six Days Seven Nights”, “Dragonheart”, “Beethoven”, “Anaconda”, “Diabolique”, “Gettysburg”, “Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story”, and “Last of the Mohicans”. Some of the TV shows and series he's scored include “MacGyver”, “Backdraft 2” for Netflix, and “Citizen X” for HBO. And believe me, I'm just scratching the surface of this man's compositions. He's received some of the most prestigious awards including an Emmy Award, 13 BMI Awards including their highest honor, the Richard Kirk Award for Outstanding Career Achievement, the Composer and Lyricist's Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Cincinnati. In addition, he received nominations for a Golden Globe Award AND a BAFTA Award for “Last of the Mohicans”, and nominations for the Saturn Science Fiction Award for “Dragonheart”, and a Gold Spirit Best Comedy Award nomination for “Leap Year”. His live show entitled “A Life in 80 Minutes” played to sold out audiences and got rave reviews. He's written a musical entitled “Short Cut” about the construction of the Panama Canal. And he has a new album coming out, entitled “Can't Be Killed By Any Conventional Means”. AND his brand new single entitled “Everything is Possible”, on which he collaborated with legendary rapper Grandmaster Melle Mel, is now available for streaming. For more interviews and podcasts go to: https://www.harveybrownstoneinterviews.com/ To see more about Randy Edelman, go to:https://www.randyedelman.com/https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQPOMaKamdeM6_yfNYIO4yghttps://open.spotify.com/artist/3shMd6Vll0mOcviQ3hrk8m?autoplay=truehttps://music.apple.com/ca/artist/randy-edelman/3297021 #RandyEdelman #harveybrownstoneinterviews
Today's episode is first and foremost a tribute to a forgotten African American trailblazer, the pop singer Henry Wright, born in 1933, who, in the late fifties, claimed Italy as his adoptive country after touring there as a vocal soloist with Lionel Hampton. With a voice as suave and seductive as any of the great crooners of the 1950s and 1960s, Henry Wright first came to international prominence as the voice on the record to which Sophia Loren performed her legendary striptease in the 1962 film Ieri, oggi, domani [Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow]. He went on to make a great impact on Italian pop music throughout the 1960s. Your fearless podcaster discovered this fascinating singer almost by accident sometime in the past year and he (that is, I) have been collecting his rare and valuable recordings which I am thrilled to share with my listening public. Many of these songs exist in earlier versions, either from the Great American Songbook, from Italian films, from early American singers of R&B, from Italian pop stars of the 1950s, even from Viennese operetta! So I had the idea of playing those original versions alongside Henry Wright's recordings. Thus you will encounter singers like Ricky Nelson, Peggy Lee, Tony Dallara, Peter Alexander, Mina, Petula Clark, Vittorio de Sica (who in his acting days was an Italian matinee idol!) and even opera legends Miguel Fleta and Richard Tauber. It's a fascinating episode (if I do say so myself!) and I am thrilled beyond words to introduce the seductive, charming, compelling Henry Wright to my listeners. The episode begins with memorial tributes to recently departed pop music greats Tony Bennett and Sinéad O'Connor. Countermelody is a podcast devoted to the glory and the power of the human voice raised in song. Singer and vocal aficionado Daniel Gundlach explores great singers of the past and present focusing in particular on those who are less well-remembered today than they should be. Daniel's lifetime in music as a professional countertenor, pianist, vocal coach, voice teacher, and journalist yields an exciting array of anecdotes, impressions, and “inside stories.” At Countermelody's core is the celebration of great singers of all stripes, their instruments, and the connection they make to the words they sing. By clicking on the following link (https://linktr.ee/CountermelodyPodcast) you can find the dedicated Countermelody website which contains additional content including artist photos and episode setlists. The link will also take you to Countermelody's Patreon page, where you can pledge your monthly support at whatever level you can afford. Bonus episodes available exclusively to Patreon supporters are currently available and further bonus content including interviews and livestreams is planned for the upcoming season.
Para el verano de 1962 la fiebre del Twist está completamente desatada. No solo surgen decenas de bailes paralelos, como el Pony, el Watusi o el Jerk, que intentaban clonar el éxito del Twist, sino que prácticamente todos los artistas del momento, vinculados o no al rocknroll, hacen alguna canción con referencias al baile más famoso de su tiempo.Playlist; (sintonía) THE VENTURES “The twist” (1962)FATS DOMINO “Dance with Mr Domino” (junio 1962)PROFESSOR LONGHAIR “Whole lotta twistin’” (1962)RAY ANTHONY and HIS BOOKENDS “Night train twist” (enero 1962)COUNT BASIE and HIS ORCHESTRA “The Basie twist” (1962)HENRY MANCINI and HIS ORCHESTRA “Tooty twist” (marzo 1962)PÉREZ PRADO and HIS ORCHESTRA “Venezuela Twist” (1962)FRANK SINATRA “Everybody’s twistin’” (marzo 1962)RAY BENNETT “Twistin’ to the blues” (noviembre 1962)SPEEDY WEST “Tulsa Twist” (1962)JOE HOUSTON “Crazy Twist” (1962)PETULA CLARK “Ya Ya Twist” (junio 1962)MINA “Ecclise Twist” (abril 1962)MIKE RIOS “Twist de Saint Tropez” (1962)DUO DINAMICO “Bailando Twist” (1962)SANDY NELSON “Twisted” (1962)DUANE EDDY “Twistin’ and Twangin’” (1962)STEVE DOUGLAS and THE REBEL ROUSERS “Surfer’s Twist” (1962)THE DOVELLS “Bristol Twistin’ Annie” (noviembre 1962)HANK BALLARD and THE MIDNIGHTERS “The Twist” (diciembre 1958) Escuchar audio
Petula Sally Olwen Clark is a British singer, actress and composer whose career spanned more than seven decades.
Carve about three hours for Pete to quiz Ben about English songstress Petula Clark, her relationship with other Muppet guests, and his research on her chart-topping status. Ben takes Pete to task about his dislike of apparent cue-card use and presents his own "Pet" theories about Ms Clark's lip-synched performance.
Harvey Brownstone conducts an in-depth interview with David Friedman, Composer, Musical Director, Author, “The Thought Exchange” About Harvey's guest: Today's guest, David Friedman, is a film and theatre composer, songwriter, conductor, author and teacher whose list of accomplishments is truly staggering. After spending several years conducting musicals on Broadway including “Grease”, “Joseph & The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” and “Song and Dance”, he went to Hollywood, where he was the Conductor and Vocal Arranger on many Disney classic films including “Beauty & The Beast”, “Aladdin”, “Pocahontas” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”. He wrote music and lyrics for Disney's “Aladdin and the King of Thieves”, and he spent 13 years as Music Supervisor and Vocal Arranger of “Beauty & The Beast” on Broadway. His off-Broadway hit, “Desperate Measures” won the 2018 Drama Desk, Outer Critics' Circle and Off Broadway Alliance Awards. He's also co-written many other highly acclaimed shows, including “Scandalous”, “Chasing Nicolette, which won the Barrymore Award for best score, “Nellie Bly”, and “Money Talks”, as well as his beloved Christmas Oratorio, “King Island Christmas”, which has had over 50 productions around the world, and which won a Frederick Loewe Award and Dramatists Guild Award. And his show entitled, “Listen to my Heart: The Songs of David Friedman”, has also been performed throughout America and globally. He's written numerous classic hit songs, including “Help is on the Way”, “My Simple Christmas Wish” and “Let the Music Play”, all of which have won MAC Awards for Song of the Year. His multi-platinum-selling songs have been performed by everyone from Diana Ross, Barry Manilow and Petula Clark, to Allison Krauss, Laura Branigan, Lainie Kazan – and of course, the magnificent, late, great Nancy LaMott, for whom our guest produced ALL of her albums and DVDs. For 10 years he appeared on the Today Show every month, performing his songs live with some of Broadway's brightest stars. His songs have been used to raise money for charitable organizations, for children's hospitals, Breast Cancer Awareness, and Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. He's released 2 CD's, entitled “A Different Light” and “Let Me Fly”, in which he sings his own songs. In 1997 he received a Backstage Bistro Award for Composer of the Year AND a Johnny Mercer Award for Songwriter of the Year. And in 2012 he received a Special Lifetime Achievement Award at the MAC Awards. And if ALL OF THAT weren't enough, he's become renowned for his work in metaphysics and human potential exploration, with his #1 best selling book entitled, “The Thought Exchange: Overcoming Our Resistance to Living a Sensational Life”. A new 20th anniversary edition of the book was just released. The book formed the basis for a critically acclaimed documentary film directed by Usher Morgan, called “The Thought Exchange”. Since then, our guest has written 4 more books, entitled, “The Healing Power of Negative Thoughts and Uncomfortable Sensations”, “It's all Inside”, “We Can Be Kind – Healing Our World One Kindness at a Time”, and “Help is on the Way”. And he has TWO more books on the way. For more interviews and podcasts go to: https://www.harveybrownstoneinterviews.com/ To see more about David Friedman, go to:http://thethoughtexchange.com/https://www.facebook.com/thethoughtexchangehttps://twitter.com/ThoughtExchnge#DavidFriedman #harveybrownstoneinterviews
From October 25, 2017: Iconic songstress Petula Clark was a guest on the show to talk about her new album, Living For Today, and an upcoming local show at the Arcadia Theater in St. Charles, Illinois. ABOUT PETULA CLARKPetula Clark was born in Epsom, England, but her love of music began at a very early age in her mother's land of Wales. She was already a star in the U.K. by the age of 9, singing for the troops stationed in England during World War II.Many years later, when, after marrying French PR man Claude Wolff, she moved to France. Almost without trying, she soon became a star in that country, and across Europe, also recording in French, Italian, German and Spanish, finding time to produce two delightful daughters, Barbara and Kate (and later a splendid son, Patrick).While still living in Paris, English songwriter Tony Hatch presented her with his new composition: Downtown. The recording was made in London and was destined to become a worldwide hit, leading to a string of top ten records (including I Know A Place, My Love, A Sign Of The Times, Don't Sleep In The Subway, etc.), winning her 2 Grammy awards, and taking Petula's career to international level. She has been living in Geneva, Switzerland for many years, where she met up with Charlie Chaplin who wrote one of her major hits This Is My Song.She has performed in her own TV shows in the U.K., the U.S.A. and France. She has starred in movies (including Finian's Rainbow with Fred Astaire, Goodbye Mr. Chips with Peter O'Toole), theater in London's West End and on Broadway.
In their second London live recording, Jonny and Richard talk about a military plant hire company, Jay Leno's draughty car port, American model years, judging a supercar competition, turning off hotel air conditioning, and ask if any villages actually welcome careful drivers. Plus, a Simply Norfolk shop, the decor in coastal rental properties, dad-style urinal leaning, Jonny's brush with American police, active aero policy when parked, tiller steering, getting a podcast word into the dictionary, Susie Dent in a De Tomaso, killing off one car, missing Rover, pub Ubers coming true, confessions of a Scooterman, Barry Dakar, finding a famous explorer lost in a park, Top Gear field racing with a hangover, and unnecessarily brutal American driveways. Also, Richard confuses Petula Clark with Lulu.patreon.com/smithandsniff Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
TVC 610.3: From August 2016: Emmy Award winning director Steve Binder (Elvis: The 1968 Comeback Special, The T.A.M.I. Show) with the back story of "The Touch," the seminal moment of the April 1968 special Petula, starring Petula Clark and Harry Belafonte, in which Clark reached out and touched Belafonte on the arm while they performed the song "On the Path of Glory." Coming on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement, Clark's unrehearsed, impromptu gesture caused an uproar behind the scenes among network executives and the show's sponsors over whether that shot should be edited out of the special before it aired on NBC. Harry Belafonte passed away last Tuesday, Apr. 25 at the age of ninety-six. Want to advertise/sponsor our show? TV Confidential has partnered with AdvertiseCast to handle advertising/sponsorship requests for the podcast edition of our program. They're great to work with and will help you advertise on our show. Please email sales@advertisecast.com or click the link below to get started: https://www.advertisecast.com/TVConfidentialAradiotalkshowabout Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Max Pearson presents a collection of this week's Witness History episodes from the BBC World Service. We hear about Althea McNish, the Trinidadian artist who designed fabric for Queen Elizabeth II. Former Vogue editor Suzy Menkes on the success of the fashion celebration, the Met Gala. The Guatemalan Bishop, Juan Gerardi, killed in his home, after presenting the conclusions of a major investigation into abuses committed during the country's civil war. We remember Harry Belafonte, with a look back at his historic duet with Petula Clark. Plus the fight by the BBC to televise Queen Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953. Contributors: Rose Sinclair, Lecturer in textile design at Goldsmiths, University of London. Gavin Douglas, Programme Leader and Senior Lecturer in fashion design at Manchester Metropolitan University. Suzy Menkes, former Vogue International Editor. Ronalth Ochaeta, former head of the Catholic Church's human rights office in Guatemala. Steve Binder, TV producer. Lady Jane Rayne Lacey, a lady in waiting at Queen Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953. (Photo: Althea McNish Credit: Getty Images)
Episode 141, in which your psychic friend and faithful deejay, Frozen Lazuras, spins some tasty treats (of the sonic variety) from Corvair, Shin Otowa, Petula Clark, Jarboe, The Plastic Cloud, Julian Cope, and many more.Giving you what the algorithms won't since 2020.
For nearly 50 years, Jim Anderson has set the standard for acoustic audio engineering and production, capturing pristine, high definition stereo and surround sound recordings that have garnered thirteen Grammy and Latin Grammy Awards, two Peabodys, and a pair of Emmy nominations among countless other accolades. Born and raised in western Pennsylvania, Anderson attended Duquesne University on a musical performance scholarship, and it was there that his passion for sound and technology first collided in the music school's on-campus recording studio. After graduation, he took work at the local public radio station, WDUQ-FM, and one year later, he made the leap to NPR in Washington, DC, where he engineered broadcast sessions for everything from news and documentaries to performances by jazz icons, classical orchestras, folk singers, and contemporary composers. In 1980, Anderson moved to New York to launch his career as a freelance engineer and producer, and over the next several decades, he would go on to record studio albums, live concerts, and film scores across a diverse array of genres with the likes of McCoy Tyner, Christian McBride, Arturo Sandoval, Petula Clark, Patricia Barber, John Zorn, and hundreds more. In 2003, he became a professor at the prestigious Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music in the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. In 2008, he was elected President of the Audio Engineering Society. Today, Anderson and his wife/production partner Ulrike Schwarz are widely hailed as industry leaders operating at the cutting edge of the immersive audio field, and their world-class recordings are regular fixtures at the Grammy Awards and on critics' annual Best Of lists. IN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN ABOUT: Recording with limitations How to handle high stakes pressure when you're working with the best of the best Helping artists achieve their vision for their albums Adapting to new recording environments Adding reverb to your mixes Using pink noise to calibrate your reverb levels How to create and use Impulse Responses Tips for starting your day with a fresh perspective How to record piano, horns, upright bass, and jazz drums Being intentional with mic placement and selection Using mics to create depth How the impedance of your DI can drastically change the sound quality To learn more about Jim Anderson, visit: http://andersonaudiony.com/ To learn more tips on how to improve your mixes, visit https://masteryourmix.com/ Download your FREE copy of the Ultimate Mixing Blueprint: https://masteryourmix.com/blueprint/ Get your copy of the #1 Amazon bestselling book, The Mixing Mindset – The Step-By-Step Formula For Creating Professional Rock Mixes From Your Home Studio: https://masteryourmix.com/mixingmindsetbook/ Join the FREE MasterYourMix Facebook community: https://links.masteryourmix.com/community To make sure that you don't miss an episode, make sure to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or on Android. Have your questions answered on the show. Send them to questions@masteryourmix.com Thanks for listening! Please leave a rating and review on iTunes!
Petula Clark's 90th birthday serves as a perfect motivation for a look at her career devotion to the music of Broadway. Selections from Finian's Rainbow, Sunset Blyd, The Sound of Music, and many more.
Episode 159 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Itchycoo Park” by the Small Faces, and their transition from Mod to psychedelia. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "The First Cut is the Deepest" by P.P. Arnold. 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 As so many of the episodes recently have had no Mixcloud due to the number of songs by one artist, I've decided to start splitting the mixes of the recordings excerpted in the podcasts into two parts. Here's part one and part two. I've used quite a few books in this episode. The Small Faces & Other Stories by Uli Twelker and Roland Schmit is definitely a fan-work with all that that implies, but has some useful quotes. Two books claim to be the authorised biography of Steve Marriott, and I've referred to both -- All Too Beautiful by Paolo Hewitt and John Hellier, and All Or Nothing by Simon Spence. Spence also wrote an excellent book on Immediate Records, which I referred to. Kenney Jones and Ian McLagan both wrote very readable autobiographies. I've also used Andrew Loog Oldham's autobiography Stoned, co-written by Spence, though be warned that it casually uses slurs. P.P. Arnold's autobiography is a sometimes distressing read covering her whole life, including her time at Immediate. There are many, many, collections of the Small Faces' work, ranging from cheap budget CDs full of outtakes to hundred-pound-plus box sets, also full of outtakes. This three-CD budget collection contains all the essential tracks, and is endorsed by Kenney Jones, the band's one surviving member. And if you're intrigued by the section on Immediate Records, this two-CD set contains a good selection of their releases. ERRATUM-ISH: I say Jimmy Winston was “a couple” of years older than the rest of the band. This does not mean exactly two, but is used in the vague vernacular sense equivalent to “a few”. Different sources I've seen put Winston as either two or four years older than his bandmates, though two seems to be the most commonly cited figure. Transcript For once there is little to warn about in this episode, but it does contain some mild discussions of organised crime, arson, and mental illness, and a quoted joke about capital punishment in questionable taste which may upset some. One name that came up time and again when we looked at the very early years of British rock and roll was Lionel Bart. If you don't remember the name, he was a left-wing Bohemian songwriter who lived in a communal house-share which at various times was also inhabited by people like Shirley Eaton, the woman who is painted gold at the beginning of Goldfinger, Mike Pratt, the star of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), and Davey Graham, the most influential and innovative British guitarist of the fifties and early sixties. Bart and Pratt had co-written most of the hits of Britain's first real rock and roll star, Tommy Steele: [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, "Rock with the Caveman"] and then Bart had gone solo as a writer, and written hits like "Living Doll" for Britain's *biggest* rock and roll star, Cliff Richard: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard, "Living Doll"] But Bart's biggest contribution to rock music turned out not to be the songs he wrote for rock and roll stars, and not even his talent-spotting -- it was Bart who got Steele signed by Larry Parnes, and he also pointed Parnes in the direction of another of his biggest stars, Marty Wilde -- but the opportunity he gave to a lot of child stars in a very non-rock context. Bart's musical Oliver!, inspired by the novel Oliver Twist, was the biggest sensation on the West End stage in the early 1960s, breaking records for the longest-running musical, and also transferred to Broadway and later became an extremely successful film. As it happened, while Oliver! was extraordinarily lucrative, Bart didn't see much of the money from it -- he sold the rights to it, and his other musicals, to the comedian Max Bygraves in the mid-sixties for a tiny sum in order to finance a couple of other musicals, which then flopped horribly and bankrupted him. But by that time Oliver! had already been the first big break for three people who went on to major careers in music -- all of them playing the same role. Because many of the major roles in Oliver! were for young boys, the cast had to change frequently -- child labour laws meant that multiple kids had to play the same role in different performances, and people quickly grew out of the roles as teenagerhood hit. We've already heard about the career of one of the people who played the Artful Dodger in the original West End production -- Davy Jones, who transferred in the role to Broadway in 1963, and who we'll be seeing again in a few episodes' time -- and it's very likely that another of the people who played the Artful Dodger in that production, a young lad called Philip Collins, will be coming into the story in a few years' time. But the first of the artists to use the Artful Dodger as a springboard to a music career was the one who appeared in the role on the original cast album of 1960, though there's very little in that recording to suggest the sound of his later records: [Excerpt: Steve Marriott, "Consider Yourself"] Steve Marriott is the second little Stevie we've looked at in recent episodes to have been born prematurely. In his case, he was born a month premature, and jaundiced, and had to spend the first month of his life in hospital, the first few days of which were spent unsure if he was going to survive. Thankfully he did, but he was a bit of a sickly child as a result, and remained stick-thin and short into adulthood -- he never grew to be taller than five foot five. Young Steve loved music, and especially the music of Buddy Holly. He also loved skiffle, and managed to find out where Lonnie Donegan lived. He went round and knocked on Donegan's door, but was very disappointed to discover that his idol was just a normal man, with his hair uncombed and a shirt stained with egg yolk. He started playing the ukulele when he was ten, and graduated to guitar when he was twelve, forming a band which performed under a variety of different names. When on stage with them, he would go by the stage name Buddy Marriott, and would wear a pair of horn-rimmed glasses to look more like Buddy Holly. When he was twelve, his mother took him to an audition for Oliver! The show had been running for three months at the time, and was likely to run longer, and child labour laws meant that they had to have replacements for some of the cast -- every three months, any performing child had to have at least ten days off. At his audition, Steve played his guitar and sang "Who's Sorry Now?", the recent Connie Francis hit: [Excerpt: Connie Francis, "Who's Sorry Now?"] And then, ignoring the rule that performers could only do one song, immediately launched into Buddy Holly's "Oh Boy!" [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "Oh Boy!"] His musical ability and attitude impressed the show's producers, and he was given a job which suited him perfectly -- rather than being cast in a single role, he would be swapped around, playing different small parts, in the chorus, and occasionally taking the larger role of the Artful Dodger. Steve Marriott was never able to do the same thing over and over, and got bored very quickly, but because he was moving between roles, he was able to keep interested in his performances for almost a year, and he was good enough that it was him chosen to sing the Dodger's role on the cast album when that was recorded: [Excerpt: Steve Marriott and Joyce Blair, "I'd Do Anything"] And he enjoyed performance enough that his parents pushed him to become an actor -- though there were other reasons for that, too. He was never the best-behaved child in the world, nor the most attentive student, and things came to a head when, shortly after leaving the Oliver! cast, he got so bored of his art classes he devised a plan to get out of them forever. Every art class, for several weeks, he'd sit in a different desk at the back of the classroom and stuff torn-up bits of paper under the floorboards. After a couple of months of this he then dropped a lit match in, which set fire to the paper and ended up burning down half the school. His schoolfriend Ken Hawes talked about it many decades later, saying "I suppose in a way I was impressed about how he had meticulously planned the whole thing months in advance, the sheer dogged determination to see it through. He could quite easily have been caught and would have had to face the consequences. There was no danger in anybody getting hurt because we were at the back of the room. We had to be at the back otherwise somebody would have noticed what he was doing. There was no malice against other pupils, he just wanted to burn the damn school down." Nobody could prove it was him who had done it, though his parents at least had a pretty good idea who it was, but it was clear that even when the school was rebuilt it wasn't a good idea to send him back there, so they sent him to the Italia Conti Drama School; the same school that Anthony Newley and Petula Clark, among many others, had attended. Marriott's parents couldn't afford the school's fees, but Marriott was so talented that the school waived the fees -- they said they'd get him work, and take a cut of his wages in lieu of the fees. And over the next few years they did get him a lot of work. Much of that work was for TV shows, which like almost all TV of the time no longer exist -- he was in an episode of the Sid James sitcom Citizen James, an episode of Mr. Pastry's Progress, an episode of the police drama Dixon of Dock Green, and an episode of a series based on the Just William books, none of which survive. He also did a voiceover for a carpet cleaner ad, appeared on the radio soap opera Mrs Dale's Diary playing a pop star, and had a regular spot reading listeners' letters out for the agony aunt Marje Proops on her radio show. Almost all of this early acting work wa s utterly ephemeral, but there are a handful of his performances that do survive, mostly in films. He has a small role in the comedy film Heavens Above!, a mistaken-identity comedy in which a radical left-wing priest played by Peter Sellers is given a parish intended for a more conservative priest of the same name, and upsets the well-off people of the parish by taking in a large family of travellers and appointing a Black man as his churchwarden. The film has some dated attitudes, in the way that things that were trying to be progressive and antiracist sixty years ago invariably do, but has a sparkling cast, with Sellers, Eric Sykes, William Hartnell, Brock Peters, Roy Kinnear, Irene Handl, and many more extremely recognisable faces from the period: [Excerpt: Heavens Above!] Marriott apparently enjoyed working on the film immensely, as he was a fan of the Goon Show, which Sellers had starred in and which Sykes had co-written several episodes of. There are reports of Marriott and Sellers jamming together on banjos during breaks in filming, though these are probably *slightly* inaccurate -- Sellers played the banjolele, a banjo-style instrument which is played like a ukulele. As Marriott had started on ukulele before switching to guitar, it was probably these they were playing, rather than banjoes. He also appeared in a more substantial role in a film called Live It Up!, a pop exploitation film starring David Hemmings in which he appears as a member of a pop group. Oddly, Marriott plays a drummer, even though he wasn't a drummer, while two people who *would* find fame as drummers, Mitch Mitchell and Dave Clark, appear in smaller, non-drumming, roles. He doesn't perform on the soundtrack, which is produced by Joe Meek and features Sounds Incorporated, The Outlaws, and Gene Vincent, but he does mime playing behind Heinz Burt, the former bass player of the Tornadoes who was then trying for solo stardom at Meek's instigation: [Excerpt: Heinz Burt, "Don't You Understand"] That film was successful enough that two years later, in 1965 Marriott came back for a sequel, Be My Guest, with The Niteshades, the Nashville Teens, and Jerry Lee Lewis, this time with music produced by Shel Talmy rather than Meek. But that was something of a one-off. After making Live It Up!, Marriott had largely retired from acting, because he was trying to become a pop star. The break finally came when he got an audition at the National Theatre, for a job touring with Laurence Olivier for a year. He came home and told his parents he hadn't got the job, but then a week later they were bemused by a phone call asking why Steve hadn't turned up for rehearsals. He *had* got the job, but he'd decided he couldn't face a year of doing the same thing over and over, and had pretended he hadn't. By this time he'd already released his first record. The work on Oliver! had got him a contract with Decca Records, and he'd recorded a Buddy Holly knock-off, "Give Her My Regards", written for him by Kenny Lynch, the actor, pop star, and all-round entertainer: [Excerpt: Steve Marriott, "Give Her My Regards"] That record wasn't a hit, but Marriott wasn't put off. He formed a band who were at first called the Moonlights, and then the Frantiks, and they got a management deal with Tony Calder, Andrew Oldham's junior partner in his management company. Calder got former Shadow Tony Meehan to produce a demo for the group, a version of Cliff Richard's hit "Move It", which was shopped round the record labels with no success (and which sadly appears no longer to survive). The group also did some recordings with Joe Meek, which also don't circulate, but which may exist in the famous "Teachest Tapes" which are slowly being prepared for archival releases. The group changed their name to the Moments, and added in the guitarist John Weider, who was one of those people who seem to have been in every band ever either just before or just after they became famous -- at various times he was in Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Family, Eric Burdon and the Animals, and the band that became Crabby Appleton, but never in their most successful lineups. They continued recording unsuccessful demos, of which a small number have turned up: [Excerpt: Steve Marriott and the Moments, "Good Morning Blues"] One of their demo sessions was produced by Andrew Oldham, and while that session didn't lead to a release, it did lead to Oldham booking Marriott as a session harmonica player for one of his "Andrew Oldham Orchestra" sessions, to play on a track titled "365 Rolling Stones (One For Every Day of the Year)": [Excerpt: The Andrew Oldham Orchestra, "365 Rolling Stones (One For Every Day of the Year)"] Oldham also produced a session for what was meant to be Marriott's second solo single on Decca, a cover version of the Rolling Stones' "Tell Me", which was actually scheduled for release but pulled at the last minute. Like many of Marriott's recordings from this period, if it exists, it doesn't seem to circulate publicly. But despite their lack of recording success, the Moments did manage to have a surprising level of success on the live circuit. Because they were signed to Calder and Oldham's management company, they got a contract with the Arthur Howes booking agency, which got them support slots on package tours with Billy J Kramer, Freddie and the Dreamers, the Kinks, and other major acts, and the band members were earning about thirty pounds a week each -- a very, very good living for the time. They even had a fanzine devoted to them, written by a fan named Stuart Tuck. But as they weren't making records, the band's lineup started changing, with members coming and going. They did manage to get one record released -- a soundalike version of the Kinks' "You Really Got Me", recorded for a budget label who rushed it out, hoping to get it picked up in the US and for it to be the hit version there: [Excerpt: The Moments, "You Really Got Me"] But the month after that was released, Marriott was sacked from the band, apparently in part because the band were starting to get billed as Steve Marriott and the Moments rather than just The Moments, and the rest of them didn't want to be anyone's backing band. He got a job at a music shop while looking around for other bands to perform with. At one point around this time he was going to form a duo with a friend of his, Davy Jones -- not the one who had also appeared in Oliver!, but another singer of the same name. This one sang with a blues band called the Mannish Boys, and both men were well known on the Mod scene in London. Marriott's idea was that they call themselves David and Goliath, with Jones being David, and Marriott being Goliath because he was only five foot five. That could have been a great band, but it never got past the idea stage. Marriott had become friendly with another part-time musician and shop worker called Ronnie Lane, who was in a band called the Outcasts who played the same circuit as the Moments: [Excerpt: The Outcasts, "Before You Accuse Me"] Lane worked in a sound equipment shop and Marriott in a musical instrument shop, and both were customers of the other as well as friends -- at least until Marriott came into the shop where Lane worked and tried to persuade him to let Marriott have a free PA system. Lane pretended to go along with it as a joke, and got sacked. Lane had then gone to the shop where Marriott worked in the hope that Marriott would give him a good deal on a guitar because he'd been sacked because of Marriott. Instead, Marriott persuaded him that he should switch to bass, on the grounds that everyone was playing guitar since the Beatles had come along, but a bass player would always be able to find work. Lane bought the bass. Shortly after that, Marriott came to an Outcasts gig in a pub, and was asked to sit in. He enjoyed playing with Lane and the group's drummer Kenney Jones, but got so drunk he smashed up the pub's piano while playing a Jerry Lee Lewis song. The resulting fallout led to the group being barred from the pub and splitting up, so Marriott, Lane, and Jones decided to form their own group. They got in another guitarist Marriott knew, a man named Jimmy Winston who was a couple of years older than them, and who had two advantages -- he was a known Face on the mod scene, with a higher status than any of the other three, and his brother owned a van and would drive the group and their equipment for ten percent of their earnings. There was a slight problem in that Winston was also as good on guitar as Marriott and looked like he might want to be the star, but Marriott neutralised that threat -- he moved Winston over to keyboards. The fact that Winston couldn't play keyboards didn't matter -- he could be taught a couple of riffs and licks, and he was sure to pick up the rest. And this way the group had the same lineup as one of Marriott's current favourites, Booker T and the MGs. While he was still a Buddy Holly fan, he was now, like the rest of the Mods, an R&B obsessive. Marriott wasn't entirely sure that this new group would be the one that would make him a star though, and was still looking for other alternatives in case it didn't play out. He auditioned for another band, the Lower Third, which counted Stuart Tuck, the writer of the Moments fanzine, among its members. But he was unsuccessful in the audition -- instead his friend Davy Jones, the one who he'd been thinking of forming a duo with, got the job: [Excerpt: Davy Jones and the Lower Third, "You've Got a Habit of Leaving"] A few months after that, Davy Jones and the Lower Third changed their name to David Bowie and the Lower Third, and we'll be picking up that story in a little over a year from now... Marriott, Lane, Jones, and Winston kept rehearsing and pulled together a five-song set, which was just about long enough to play a few shows, if they extended the songs with long jamming instrumental sections. The opening song for these early sets was one which, when they recorded it, would be credited to Marriott and Lane -- the two had struck up a writing partnership and agreed to a Lennon/McCartney style credit split, though in these early days Marriott was doing far more of the writing than Lane was. But "You Need Loving" was... heavily inspired... by "You Need Love", a song Willie Dixon had written for Muddy Waters: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "You Need Love"] It's not precisely the same song, but you can definitely hear the influence in the Marriott/Lane song: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "You Need Loving"] They did make some changes though, notably to the end of the song: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "You Need Loving"] You will be unsurprised to learn that Robert Plant was a fan of Steve Marriott. The new group were initially without a name, until after one of their first gigs, Winston's girlfriend, who hadn't met the other three before, said "You've all got such small faces!" The name stuck, because it had a double meaning -- as we've seen in the episode on "My Generation", "Face" was Mod slang for someone who was cool and respected on the Mod scene, but also, with the exception of Winston, who was average size, the other three members of the group were very short -- the tallest of the three was Ronnie Lane, who was five foot six. One thing I should note about the group's name, by the way -- on all the labels of their records in the UK while they were together, they were credited as "Small Faces", with no "The" in front, but all the band members referred to the group in interviews as "The Small Faces", and they've been credited that way on some reissues and foreign-market records. The group's official website is thesmallfaces.com but all the posts on the website refer to them as "Small Faces" with no "the". The use of the word "the" or not at the start of a group's name at this time was something of a shibboleth -- for example both The Buffalo Springfield and The Pink Floyd dropped theirs after their early records -- and its status in this case is a strange one. I'll be referring to the group throughout as "The Small Faces" rather than "Small Faces" because the former is easier to say, but both seem accurate. After a few pub gigs in London, they got some bookings in the North of England, where they got a mixed reception -- they went down well at Peter Stringfellow's Mojo Club in Sheffield, where Joe Cocker was a regular performer, less well at a working-man's club, and reports differ about their performance at the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, though one thing everyone is agreed on is that while they were performing, some Mancunians borrowed their van and used it to rob a clothing warehouse, and gave the band members some very nice leather coats as a reward for their loan of the van. It was only on the group's return to London that they really started to gel as a unit. In particular, Kenney Jones had up to that point been a very stiff, precise, drummer, but he suddenly loosened up and, in Steve Marriott's tasteless phrase, "Every number swung like Hanratty" (James Hanratty was one of the last people in Britain to be executed by hanging). Shortly after that, Don Arden's secretary -- whose name I haven't been able to find in any of the sources I've used for this episode, sadly, came into the club where they were rehearsing, the Starlight Rooms, to pass a message from Arden to an associate of his who owned the club. The secretary had seen Marriott perform before -- he would occasionally get up on stage at the Starlight Rooms to duet with Elkie Brooks, who was a regular performer there, and she'd seen him do that -- but was newly impressed by his group, and passed word on to her boss that this was a group he should investigate. Arden is someone who we'll be looking at a lot in future episodes, but the important thing to note right now is that he was a failed entertainer who had moved into management and promotion, first with American acts like Gene Vincent, and then with British acts like the Nashville Teens, who had had hits with tracks like "Tobacco Road": [Excerpt: The Nashville Teens, "Tobacco Road"] Arden was also something of a gangster -- as many people in the music industry were at the time, but he was worse than most of his contemporaries, and delighted in his nickname "the Al Capone of pop". The group had a few managers looking to sign them, but Arden convinced them with his offer. They would get a percentage of their earnings -- though they never actually received that percentage -- twenty pounds a week in wages, and, the most tempting part of it all, they would get expense accounts at all the Carnaby St boutiques and could go there whenever they wanted and get whatever they wanted. They signed with Arden, which all of them except Marriott would later regret, because Arden's financial exploitation meant that it would be decades before they saw any money from their hits, and indeed both Marriott and Lane would be dead before they started getting royalties from their old records. Marriott, on the other hand, had enough experience of the industry to credit Arden with the group getting anywhere at all, and said later "Look, you go into it with your eyes open and as far as I was concerned it was better than living on brown sauce rolls. At least we had twenty quid a week guaranteed." Arden got the group signed to Decca, with Dick Rowe signing them to the same kind of production deal that Andrew Oldham had pioneered with the Stones, so that Arden would own the rights to their recordings. At this point the group still only knew a handful of songs, but Rowe was signing almost everyone with a guitar at this point, putting out a record or two and letting them sink or swim. He had already been firmly labelled as "the man who turned down the Beatles", and was now of the opinion that it was better to give everyone a chance than to make that kind of expensive mistake again. By this point Marriott and Lane were starting to write songs together -- though at this point it was still mostly Marriott writing, and people would ask him why he was giving Lane half the credit, and he'd reply "Without Ronnie's help keeping me awake and being there I wouldn't do half of it. He keeps me going." -- but for their first single Arden was unsure that they were up to the task of writing a hit. The group had been performing a version of Solomon Burke's "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love", a song which Burke always claimed to have written alone, but which is credited to him, Jerry Wexler, and Bert Berns (and has Bern's fingerprints, at least, on it to my ears): [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love"] Arden got some professional writers to write new lyrics and vocal melody to their arrangement of the song -- the people he hired were Brian Potter, who would later go on to co-write "Rhinestone Cowboy", and Ian Samwell, the former member of Cliff Richard's Drifters who had written many of Richard's early hits, including "Move It", and was now working for Arden. The group went into the studio and recorded the song, titled "Whatcha Gonna Do About It?": [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Whatcha Gonna Do About It?"] That version, though was deemed too raucous, and they had to go back into the studio to cut a new version, which came out as their first single: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Whatcha Gonna Do About It?"] At first the single didn't do much on the charts, but then Arden got to work with teams of people buying copies from chart return shops, bribing DJs on pirate radio stations to play it, and bribing the person who compiled the charts for the NME. Eventually it made number fourteen, at which point it became a genuinely popular hit. But with that popularity came problems. In particular, Steve Marriott was starting to get seriously annoyed by Jimmy Winston. As the group started to get TV appearances, Winston started to act like he should be the centre of attention. Every time Marriott took a solo in front of TV cameras, Winston would start making stupid gestures, pulling faces, anything to make sure the cameras focussed on him rather than on Marriott. Which wouldn't have been too bad had Winston been a great musician, but he was still not very good on the keyboards, and unlike the others didn't seem particularly interested in trying. He seemed to want to be a star, rather than a musician. The group's next planned single was a Marriott and Lane song, "I've Got Mine". To promote it, the group mimed to it in a film, Dateline Diamonds, a combination pop film and crime caper not a million miles away from the ones that Marriott had appeared in a few years earlier. They also contributed three other songs to the film's soundtrack. Unfortunately, the film's release was delayed, and the film had been the big promotional push that Arden had planned for the single, and without that it didn't chart at all. By the time the single came out, though, Winston was no longer in the group. There are many, many different stories as to why he was kicked out. Depending on who you ask, it was because he was trying to take the spotlight away from Marriott, because he wasn't a good enough keyboard player, because he was taller than the others and looked out of place, or because he asked Don Arden where the money was. It was probably a combination of all of these, but fundamentally what it came to was that Winston just didn't fit into the group. Winston would, in later years, say that him confronting Arden was the only reason for his dismissal, saying that Arden had manipulated the others to get him out of the way, but that seems unlikely on the face of it. When Arden sacked him, he kept Winston on as a client and built another band around him, Jimmy Winston and the Reflections, and got them signed to Decca too, releasing a Kenny Lynch song, "Sorry She's Mine", to no success: [Excerpt: Jimmy Winston and the Reflections, "Sorry She's Mine"] Another version of that song would later be included on the first Small Faces album. Winston would then form another band, Winston's Fumbs, who would also release one single, before he went into acting instead. His most notable credit was as a rebel in the 1972 Doctor Who story Day of the Daleks, and he later retired from showbusiness to run a business renting out sound equipment, and died in 2020. The group hired his replacement without ever having met him or heard him play. Ian McLagan had started out as the rhythm guitarist in a Shadows soundalike band called the Cherokees, but the group had become R&B fans and renamed themselves the Muleskinners, and then after hearing "Green Onions", McLagan had switched to playing Hammond organ. The Muleskinners had played the same R&B circuit as dozens of other bands we've looked at, and had similar experiences, including backing visiting blues stars like Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, and Howlin' Wolf. Their one single had been a cover version of "Back Door Man", a song Willie Dixon had written for Wolf: [Excerpt: The Muleskinners, "Back Door Man"] The Muleskinners had split up as most of the group had day jobs, and McLagan had gone on to join a group called Boz and the Boz People, who were becoming popular on the live circuit, and who also toured backing Kenny Lynch while McLagan was in the band. Boz and the Boz People would release several singles in 1966, like their version of the theme for the film "Carry on Screaming", released just as by "Boz": [Excerpt: Boz, "Carry on Screaming"] By that time, McLagan had left the group -- Boz Burrell later went on to join King Crimson and Bad Company. McLagan left the Boz People in something of a strop, and was complaining to a friend the night he left the group that he didn't have any work lined up. The friend joked that he should join the Small Faces, because he looked like them, and McLagan got annoyed that his friend wasn't taking him seriously -- he'd love to be in the Small Faces, but they *had* a keyboard player. The next day he got a phone call from Don Arden asking him to come to his office. He was being hired to join a hit pop group who needed a new keyboard player. McLagan at first wasn't allowed to tell anyone what band he was joining -- in part because Arden's secretary was dating Winston, and Winston hadn't yet been informed he was fired, and Arden didn't want word leaking out until it had been sorted. But he'd been chosen purely on the basis of an article in a music magazine which had praised his playing with the Boz People, and without the band knowing him or his playing. As soon as they met, though, he immediately fit in in a way Winston never had. He looked the part, right down to his height -- he said later "Ronnie Lane and I were the giants in the band at 5 ft 6 ins, and Kenney Jones and Steve Marriott were the really teeny tiny chaps at 5 ft 5 1/2 ins" -- and he was a great player, and shared a sense of humour with them. McLagan had told Arden he'd been earning twenty pounds a week with the Boz People -- he'd actually been on five -- and so Arden agreed to give him thirty pounds a week during his probationary month, which was more than the twenty the rest of the band were getting. As soon as his probationary period was over, McLagan insisted on getting a pay cut so he'd be on the same wages as the rest of the group. Soon Marriott, Lane, and McLagan were all living in a house rented for them by Arden -- Jones decided to stay living with his parents -- and were in the studio recording their next single. Arden was convinced that the mistake with "I've Got Mine" had been allowing the group to record an original, and again called in a team of professional songwriters. Arden brought in Mort Shuman, who had recently ended his writing partnership with Doc Pomus and struck out on his own, after co-writing songs like "Save the Last Dance for Me", "Sweets For My Sweet", and "Viva Las Vegas" together, and Kenny Lynch, and the two of them wrote "Sha-La-La-La-Lee", and Lynch added backing vocals to the record: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Sha-La-La-La-Lee"] None of the group were happy with the record, but it became a big hit, reaching number three in the charts. Suddenly the group had a huge fanbase of screaming teenage girls, which embarrassed them terribly, as they thought of themselves as serious heavy R&B musicians, and the rest of their career would largely be spent vacillating between trying to appeal to their teenybopper fanbase and trying to escape from it to fit their own self-image. They followed "Sha-La-La-La-Lee" with "Hey Girl", a Marriott/Lane song, but one written to order -- they were under strict instructions from Arden that if they wanted to have the A-side of a single, they had to write something as commercial as "Sha-La-La-La-Lee" had been, and they managed to come up with a second top-ten hit. Two hit singles in a row was enough to make an album viable, and the group went into the studio and quickly cut an album, which had their first two hits on it -- "Hey Girl" wasn't included, and nor was the flop "I've Got Mine" -- plus a bunch of semi-originals like "You Need Loving", a couple of Kenny Lynch songs, and a cover version of Sam Cooke's "Shake". The album went to number three on the album charts, with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the number one and two spots, and it was at this point that Arden's rivals really started taking interest. But that interest was quelled for the moment when, after Robert Stigwood enquired about managing the band, Arden went round to Stigwood's office with four goons and held him upside down over a balcony, threatening to drop him off if he ever messed with any of Arden's acts again. But the group were still being influenced by other managers. In particular, Brian Epstein came round to the group's shared house, with Graeme Edge of the Moody Blues, and brought them some slices of orange -- which they discovered, after eating them, had been dosed with LSD. By all accounts, Marriott's first trip was a bad one, but the group soon became regular consumers of the drug, and it influenced the heavier direction they took on their next single, "All or Nothing". "All or Nothing" was inspired both by Marriott's breakup with his girlfriend of the time, and his delight at the fact that Jenny Rylance, a woman he was attracted to, had split up with her then-boyfriend Rod Stewart. Rylance and Stewart later reconciled, but would break up again and Rylance would become Marriott's first wife in 1968: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "All or Nothing"] "All or Nothing" became the group's first and only number one record -- and according to the version of the charts used on Top of the Pops, it was a joint number one with the Beatles' double A-side of "Yellow Submarine" and "Eleanor Rigby", both selling exactly as well as each other. But this success caused the group's parents to start to wonder why their kids -- none of whom were yet twenty-one, the legal age of majority at the time -- were not rich. While the group were on tour, their parents came as a group to visit Arden and ask him where the money was, and why their kids were only getting paid twenty pounds a week when their group was getting a thousand pounds a night. Arden tried to convince the parents that he had been paying the group properly, but that they had spent their money on heroin -- which was very far from the truth, the band were only using soft drugs at the time. This put a huge strain on the group's relationship with Arden, and it wasn't the only thing Arden did that upset them. They had been spending a lot of time in the studio working on new material, and Arden was convinced that they were spending too much time recording, and that they were just faffing around and not producing anything of substance. They dropped off a tape to show him that they had been working -- and the next thing they knew, Arden had put out one of the tracks from that tape, "My Mind's Eye", which had only been intended as a demo, as a single: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "My Mind's Eye"] That it went to number four on the charts didn't make up for the fact that the first the band heard of the record coming out at all was when they heard it on the radio. They needed rid of Arden. Luckily for them, Arden wasn't keen on continuing to work with them either. They were unreliable and flakey, and he also needed cash quick to fund his other ventures, and he agreed to sell on their management and recording contracts. Depending on which version of the story you believe, he may have sold them on to an agent called Harold Davison, who then sold them on to Andrew Oldham and Tony Calder, but according to Oldham what happened is that in December 1966 Arden demanded the highest advance in British history -- twenty-five thousand pounds -- directly from Oldham. In cash. In a brown paper bag. The reason Oldham and Calder were interested was that in July 1965 they'd started up their own record label, Immediate Records, which had been announced by Oldham in his column in Disc and Music Echo, in which he'd said "On many occasions I have run down the large record companies over issues such as pirate stations, their promotion, and their tastes. And many readers have written in and said that if I was so disturbed by the state of the existing record companies why didn't I do something about it. I have! On the twentieth of this month the first of three records released by my own company, Immediate Records, is to be launched." That first batch of three records contained one big hit, "Hang on Sloopy" by the McCoys, which Immediate licensed from Bert Berns' new record label BANG in the US: [Excerpt: The McCoys, "Hang on Sloopy"] The two other initial singles featured the talents of Immediate's new in-house producer, a session player who had previously been known as "Little Jimmy" to distinguish him from "Big" Jim Sullivan, the other most in-demand session guitarist, but who was now just known as Jimmy Page. The first was a version of Pete Seeger's "The Bells of Rhymney", which Page produced and played guitar on, for a group called The Fifth Avenue: [Excerpt: The Fifth Avenue, "The Bells of Rhymney"] And the second was a Gordon Lightfoot song performed by a girlfriend of Brian Jones', Nico. The details as to who was involved in the track have varied -- at different times the production has been credited to Jones, Page, and Oldham -- but it seems to be the case that both Jones and Page play on the track, as did session bass player John Paul Jones: [Excerpt: Nico, "I'm Not Sayin'"] While "Hang on Sloopy" was a big hit, the other two singles were flops, and The Fifth Avenue split up, while Nico used the publicity she'd got as an entree into Andy Warhol's Factory, and we'll be hearing more about how that went in a future episode. Oldham and Calder were trying to follow the model of the Brill Building, of Phil Spector, and of big US independents like Motown and Stax. They wanted to be a one-stop shop where they'd produce the records, manage the artists, and own the publishing -- and they also licensed the publishing for the Beach Boys' songs for a couple of years, and started publicising their records over here in a big way, to exploit the publishing royalties, and that was a major factor in turning the Beach Boys from minor novelties to major stars in the UK. Most of Immediate's records were produced by Jimmy Page, but other people got to have a go as well. Giorgio Gomelsky and Shel Talmy both produced tracks for the label, as did a teenage singer then known as Paul Raven, who would later become notorious under his later stage-name Gary Glitter. But while many of these records were excellent -- and Immediate deserves to be talked about in the same terms as Motown or Stax when it comes to the quality of the singles it released, though not in terms of commercial success -- the only ones to do well on the charts in the first few months of the label's existence were "Hang on Sloopy" and an EP by Chris Farlowe. It was Farlowe who provided Immediate Records with its first home-grown number one, a version of the Rolling Stones' "Out of Time" produced by Mick Jagger, though according to Arthur Greenslade, the arranger on that and many other Immediate tracks, Jagger had given up on getting a decent performance out of Farlowe and Oldham ended up producing the vocals. Greenslade later said "Andrew must have worked hard in there, Chris Farlowe couldn't sing his way out of a paper bag. I'm sure Andrew must have done it, where you get an artist singing and you can do a sentence at a time, stitching it all together. He must have done it in pieces." But however hard it was to make, "Out of Time" was a success: [Excerpt: Chris Farlowe, "Out of Time"] Or at least, it was a success in the UK. It did also make the top forty in the US for a week, but then it hit a snag -- it had charted without having been released in the US at all, or even being sent as a promo to DJs. Oldham's new business manager Allen Klein had been asked to work his magic on the US charts, but the people he'd bribed to hype the record into the charts had got the release date wrong and done it too early. When the record *did* come out over there, no radio station would play it in case it looked like they were complicit in the scam. But still, a UK number one wasn't too shabby, and so Immediate Records was back on track, and Oldham wanted to shore things up by bringing in some more proven hit-makers. Immediate signed the Small Faces, and even started paying them royalties -- though that wouldn't last long, as Immediate went bankrupt in 1970 and its successors in interest stopped paying out. The first work the group did for the label was actually for a Chris Farlowe single. Lane and Marriott gave him their song "My Way of Giving", and played on the session along with Farlowe's backing band the Thunderbirds. Mick Jagger is the credited producer, but by all accounts Marriott and Lane did most of the work: [Excerpt: Chris Farlowe, "My Way of Giving"] Sadly, that didn't make the top forty. After working on that, they started on their first single recorded at Immediate. But because of contractual entanglements, "I Can't Make It" was recorded at Immediate but released by Decca. Because the band weren't particularly keen on promoting something on their old label, and the record was briefly banned by the BBC for being too sexual, it only made number twenty-six on the charts. Around this time, Marriott had become friendly with another band, who had named themselves The Little People in homage to the Small Faces, and particularly with their drummer Jerry Shirley. Marriott got them signed to Immediate, and produced and played on their first single, a version of his song "(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me?": [Excerpt: The Apostolic Intervention, "(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me?"] When they signed to Immediate, The Little People had to change their name, and Marriott suggested they call themselves The Nice, a phrase he liked. Oldham thought that was a stupid name, and gave the group the much more sensible name The Apostolic Intervention. And then a few weeks later he signed another group and changed *their* name to The Nice. "The Nice" was also a phrase used in the Small Faces' first single for Immediate proper. "Here Come the Nice" was inspired by a routine by the hipster comedian Lord Buckley, "The Nazz", which also gave a name to Todd Rundgren's band and inspired a line in David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust": [Excerpt: Lord Buckley, "The Nazz"] "Here Come the Nice" was very blatantly about a drug dealer, and somehow managed to reach number twelve despite that: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Here Come the Nice"] It also had another obstacle that stopped it doing as well as it might. A week before it came out, Decca released a single, "Patterns", from material they had in the vault. And in June 1967, two Small Faces albums came out. One of them was a collection from Decca of outtakes and demos, plus their non-album hit singles, titled From The Beginning, while the other was their first album on Immediate, which was titled Small Faces -- just like their first Decca album had been. To make matters worse, From The Beginning contained the group's demos of "My Way of Giving" and "(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me?", while the group's first Immediate album contained a new recording of "(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me?", and a version of "My Way of Giving" with the same backing track but a different vocal take from the one on the Decca collection. From this point on, the group's catalogue would be a complete mess, with an endless stream of compilations coming out, both from Decca and, after the group split, from Immediate, mixing tracks intended for release with demos and jam sessions with no regard for either their artistic intent or for what fans might want. Both albums charted, with Small Faces reaching number twelve and From The Beginning reaching number sixteen, neither doing as well as their first album had, despite the Immediate album, especially, being a much better record. This was partly because the Marriott/Lane partnership was becoming far more equal. Kenney Jones later said "During the Decca period most of the self-penned stuff was 99% Steve. It wasn't until Immediate that Ronnie became more involved. The first Immediate album is made up of 50% Steve's songs and 50% of Ronnie's. They didn't collaborate as much as people thought. In fact, when they did, they often ended up arguing and fighting." It's hard to know who did what on each song credited to the pair, but if we assume that each song's principal writer also sang lead -- we know that's not always the case, but it's a reasonable working assumption -- then Jones' fifty-fifty estimate seems about right. Of the fourteen songs on the album, McLagan sings one, which is also his own composition, "Up the Wooden Hills to Bedfordshire". There's one instrumental, six with Marriott on solo lead vocals, four with Lane on solo lead vocals, and two duets, one with Lane as the main vocalist and one with Marriott. The fact that there was now a second songwriter taking an equal role in the band meant that they could now do an entire album of originals. It also meant that their next Marriott/Lane single was mostly a Lane song. "Itchycoo Park" started with a verse lyric from Lane -- "Over bridge of sighs/To rest my eyes in shades of green/Under dreaming spires/To Itchycoo Park, that's where I've been". The inspiration apparently came from Lane reading about the dreaming spires of Oxford, and contrasting it with the places he used to play as a child, full of stinging nettles. For a verse melody, they repeated a trick they'd used before -- the melody of "My Mind's Eye" had been borrowed in part from the Christmas carol "Gloria in Excelsis Deo", and here they took inspiration from the old hymn "God Be in My Head": [Excerpt: The Choir of King's College Cambridge, "God Be in My Head"] As Marriott told the story: "We were in Ireland and speeding our brains out writing this song. Ronnie had the first verse already written down but he had no melody line, so what we did was stick the verse to the melody line of 'God Be In My Head' with a few chord variations. We were going towards Dublin airport and I thought of the middle eight... We wrote the second verse collectively, and the chorus speaks for itself." [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Itchycoo Park"] Marriott took the lead vocal, even though it was mostly Lane's song, but Marriott did contribute to the writing, coming up with the middle eight. Lane didn't seem hugely impressed with Marriott's contribution, and later said "It wasn't me that came up with 'I feel inclined to blow my mind, get hung up, feed the ducks with a bun/They all come out to groove about, be nice and have fun in the sun'. That wasn't me, but the more poetic stuff was." But that part became the most memorable part of the record, not so much because of the writing or performance but because of the production. It was one of the first singles released using a phasing effect, developed by George Chkiantz (and I apologise if I'm pronouncing that name wrong), who was the assistant engineer for Glyn Johns on the album. I say it was one of the first, because at the time there was not a clear distinction between the techniques now known as phasing, flanging, and artificial double tracking, all of which have now diverged, but all of which initially came from the idea of shifting two copies of a recording slightly out of synch with each other. The phasing on "Itchycoo Park" , though, was far more extreme and used to far different effect than that on, say, Revolver: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Itchycoo Park"] It was effective enough that Jimi Hendrix, who was at the time working on Axis: Bold as Love, requested that Chkiantz come in and show his engineer how to get the same effect, which was then used on huge chunks of Hendrix's album. The BBC banned the record, because even the organisation which had missed that the Nice who "is always there when I need some speed" was a drug dealer was a little suspicious about whether "we'll get high" and "we'll touch the sky" might be drug references. The band claimed to be horrified at the thought, and explained that they were talking about swings. It's a song about a park, so if you play on the swings, you go high. What else could it mean? [Excerpt: The Small Faces, “Itchycoo Park”] No drug references there, I'm sure you'll agree. The song made number three, but the group ran into more difficulties with the BBC after an appearance on Top of the Pops. Marriott disliked the show's producer, and the way that he would go up to every act and pretend to think they had done a very good job, no matter what he actually thought, which Marriott thought of as hypocrisy rather than as politeness and professionalism. Marriott discovered that the producer was leaving the show, and so in the bar afterwards told him exactly what he thought of him, calling him a "two-faced", and then a four-letter word beginning with c which is generally considered the most offensive swear word there is. Unfortunately for Marriott, he'd been misinformed, the producer wasn't leaving the show, and the group were barred from it for a while. "Itchycoo Park" also made the top twenty in the US, thanks to a new distribution deal Immediate had, and plans were made for the group to tour America, but those plans had to be scrapped when Ian McLagan was arrested for possession of hashish, and instead the group toured France, with support from a group called the Herd: [Excerpt: The Herd, "From the Underworld"] Marriott became very friendly with the Herd's guitarist, Peter Frampton, and sympathised with Frampton's predicament when in the next year he was voted "face of '68" and developed a similar teenage following to the one the Small Faces had. The group's last single of 1967 was one of their best. "Tin Soldier" was inspired by the Hans Andersen story “The Steadfast Tin Soldier”, and was originally written for the singer P.P. Arnold, who Marriott was briefly dating around this time. But Arnold was *so* impressed with the song that Marriott decided to keep it for his own group, and Arnold was left just doing backing vocals on the track: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Tin Soldier"] It's hard to show the appeal of "Tin Soldier" in a short clip like those I use on this show, because so much of it is based on the use of dynamics, and the way the track rises and falls, but it's an extremely powerful track, and made the top ten. But it was after that that the band started falling apart, and also after that that they made the work generally considered their greatest album. As "Itchycoo Park" had made number one in Australia, the group were sent over there on tour to promote it, as support act for the Who. But the group hadn't been playing live much recently, and found it difficult to replicate their records on stage, as they were now so reliant on studio effects like phasing. The Australian audiences were uniformly hostile, and the contrast with the Who, who were at their peak as a live act at this point, couldn't have been greater. Marriott decided he had a solution. The band needed to get better live, so why not get Peter Frampton in as a fifth member? He was great on guitar and had stage presence, obviously that would fix their problems. But the other band members absolutely refused to get Frampton in. Marriott's confidence as a stage performer took a knock from which it never really recovered, and increasingly the band became a studio-only one. But the tour also put strain on the most important partnership in the band. Marriott and Lane had been the closest of friends and collaborators, but on the tour, both found a very different member of the Who to pal around with. Marriott became close to Keith Moon, and the two would get drunk and trash hotel rooms together. Lane, meanwhile, became very friendly with Pete Townshend, who introduced him to the work of the guru Meher Baba, who Townshend followed. Lane, too, became a follower, and the two would talk about religion and spirituality while their bandmates were destroying things. An attempt was made to heal the growing rifts though. Marriott, Lane, and McLagan all moved in together again like old times, but this time in a cottage -- something that became so common for bands around this time that the phrase "getting our heads together in the country" became a cliche in the music press. They started working on material for their new album. One of the tracks that they were working on was written by Marriott, and was inspired by how, before moving in to the country cottage, his neighbours had constantly complained about the volume of his music -- he'd been particularly annoyed that the pop singer Cilla Black, who lived in the same building and who he'd assumed would understand the pop star lifestyle, had complained more than anyone. It had started as as fairly serious blues song, but then Marriott had been confronted by the members of the group The Hollies, who wanted to know why Marriott always sang in a pseudo-American accent. Wasn't his own accent good enough? Was there something wrong with being from the East End of London? Well, no, Marriott decided, there wasn't, and so he decided to sing it in a Cockney accent. And so the song started to change, going from being an R&B song to being the kind of thing Cockneys could sing round a piano in a pub: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Lazy Sunday"] Marriott intended the song just as an album track for the album they were working on, but Andrew Oldham insisted on releasing it as a single, much to the band's disgust, and it went to number two on the charts, and along with "Itchycoo Park" meant that the group were now typecast as making playful, light-hearted music. The album they were working on, Ogden's Nut-Gone Flake, was eventually as known for its marketing as its music. In the Small Faces' long tradition of twisted religious references, like their songs based on hymns and their song "Here Come the Nice", which had taken inspiration from a routine about Jesus and made it about a drug dealer, the print ads for the album read: Small Faces Which were in the studios Hallowed be thy name Thy music come Thy songs be sung On this album as they came from your heads We give you this day our daily bread Give us thy album in a round cover as we give thee 37/9d Lead us into the record stores And deliver us Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake For nice is the music The sleeve and the story For ever and ever, Immediate The reason the ad mentioned a round cover is that the original pressings of the album were released in a circular cover, made to look like a tobacco tin, with the name of the brand of tobacco changed from Ogden's Nut-Brown Flake to Ogden's Nut-Gone Flake, a reference to how after smoking enough dope your nut, or head, would be gone. This made more sense to British listeners than to Americans, because not only was the slang on the label British, and not only was it a reference to a British tobacco brand, but American and British dope-smoking habits are very different. In America a joint is generally made by taking the dried leaves and flowers of the cannabis plant -- or "weed" -- and rolling them in a cigarette paper and smoking them. In the UK and much of Europe, though, the preferred form of cannabis is the resin, hashish, which is crumbled onto tobacco in a cigarette paper and smoked that way, so having rolling or pipe tobacco was a necessity for dope smokers in the UK in a way it wasn't in the US. Side one of Ogden's was made up of normal songs, but the second side mixed songs and narrative. Originally the group wanted to get Spike Milligan to do the narration, but when Milligan backed out they chose Professor Stanley Unwin, a comedian who was known for speaking in his own almost-English language, Unwinese: [Excerpt: Stanley Unwin, "The Populode of the Musicolly"] They gave Unwin a script, telling the story that linked side two of the album, in which Happiness Stan is shocked to discover that half the moon has disappeared and goes on a quest to find the missing half, aided by a giant fly who lets him sit on his back after Stan shares his shepherd's pie with the hungry fly. After a long quest they end up at the cave of Mad John the Hermit, who points out to them that nobody had stolen half the moon at all -- they'd been travelling so long that it was a full moon again, and everything was OK. Unwin took that script, and reworked it into Unwinese, and also added in a lot of the slang he heard the group use, like "cool it" and "what's been your hang-up?": [Excerpt: The Small Faces and Professor Stanley Unwin, "Mad John"] The album went to number one, and the group were justifiably proud, but it only exacerbated the problems with their live show. Other than an appearance on the TV show Colour Me Pop, where they were joined by Stanley Unwin to perform the whole of side two of the album with live vocals but miming to instrumental backing tracks, they only performed two songs from the album live, "Rollin' Over" and "Song of a Baker", otherwise sticking to the same live show Marriott was already embarrassed by. Marriott later said "We had spent an entire year in the studios, which was why our stage presentation had not been improved since the previous year. Meanwhile our recording experience had developed in leaps and bounds. We were all keenly interested in the technical possibilities, in the art of recording. We let down a lot of people who wanted to hear Ogden's played live. We were still sort of rough and ready, and in the end the audience became uninterested as far as our stage show was concerned. It was our own fault, because we would have sussed it all out if we had only used our brains. We could have taken Stanley Unwin on tour with us, maybe a string section as well, and it would have been okay. But we didn't do it, we stuck to the concept that had been successful for a long time, which is always the kiss of death." The group's next single would be the last released while they were together. Marriott regarded "The Universal" as possibly the best thing he'd written, and recorded it quickly when inspiration struck. The finished single is actually a home recording of Marriott in his garden, including the sounds of a dog barking and his wife coming home with the shopping, onto which the band later overdubbed percussion, horns, and electric guitars: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "The Universal"] Incidentally, it seems that the dog barking on that track may also be the dog barking on “Seamus” by Pink Floyd. "The Universal" confused listeners, and only made number sixteen on the charts, crushing Marriott, who thought it was the best thing he'd done. But the band were starting to splinter. McLagan isn't on "The Universal", having quit the band before it was recorded after a falling-out with Marriott. He rejoined, but discovered that in the meantime Marriott had brought in session player Nicky Hopkins to work on some tracks, which devastated him. Marriott became increasingly unconfident in his own writing, and the writing dried up. The group did start work on some new material, some of which, like "The Autumn Stone", is genuinely lovely: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "The Autumn Stone"] But by the time that was released, the group had already split up. The last recording they did together was as a backing group for Johnny Hallyday, the French rock star. A year earlier Hallyday had recorded a version of "My Way of Giving", under the title "Je N'Ai Jamais Rien Demandé": [Excerpt: Johnny Hallyday, "Je N'Ai Jamais Rien Demandé"] Now he got in touch with Glyn Johns to see if the Small Faces had any other material for him, and if they'd maybe back him on a few tracks on a new album. Johns and the Small Faces flew to France... as did Peter Frampton, who Marriott was still pushing to get into the band. They recorded three tracks for the album, with Frampton on extra guitar: [Excerpt: Johnny Hallyday, "Reclamation"] These tracks left Marriott more certain than ever that Frampton should be in the band, and the other three members even more certain that he shouldn't. Frampton joined the band on stage at a few shows on their next few gigs, but he was putting together his own band with Jerry Shirley from Apostolic Intervention. On New Year's Eve 1968, Marriott finally had enough. He stormed off stage mid-set, and quit the group. He phoned up Peter Frampton, who was hanging out with Glyn Johns listening to an album Johns had just produced by some of the session players who'd worked for Immediate. Side one had just finished when Marriott phoned. Could he join Frampton's new band? Frampton said of course he could, then put the phone down and listened to side two of Led Zeppelin's first record. The band Marriott and Frampton formed was called Humble Pie, and they were soon releasing stuff on Immediate. According to Oldham, "Tony Calder said to me one day 'Pick a straw'. Then he explained we had a choice. We could either go with the three Faces -- Kenney, Ronnie, and Mac -- wherever they were going to go with their lives, or we could follow Stevie. I didn't regard it as a choice. Neither did Tony. Marriott was our man". Marriott certainly seemed to agree that he was the real talent in the group. He and Lane had fairly recently bought some property together -- two houses on the same piece of land -- and with the group splitting up, Lane moved away and wanted to sell his share in the property to Marriott. Marriott wrote to him saying "You'll get nothing. This was bought with money from hits that I wrote, not that we wrote," and enclosing a PRS statement showing how much each Marriott/Lane
1968 was a year of disappointments for the Monkees. During this year their television series was cancelled, their first motion picture effort failed at the box office, and band member Peter Tork would leave the group at the end of the year. Despite all this they would still find success in their fifth studio album, The Birds, The Bees & the Monkees. This album would chart at number 3 in the United States and would sell over a million copies.Members Mickey Dolenz, Davy Jones, Michael Nesmith, and Peter Tork had gained artistic control and the right to play their own instruments by 1967, and all band members were credited as producers for the songs on this album. However, much of the music on this album was created by members going their own separate ways and working with session musicians to create the tracks, with few collaborative efforts represented on the album. Nevertheless, the album shows a diverse range of styles from broadway pop, to country & western, to psychedelia. Songs from Mickey Dolenz, Davy Jones, and Michael Nesmith are represented on the album, and only Peter Tork is excluded. Tork would contribute piano work to the song “Daydream Believer,” but little else on the album.Friend of the show Mike Fernandez brings us this album in Wayne's absence. Daydream BelieverJohn Stewart of the Kingston Trio wrote this song, and it was originally performed by the Monkees with Davy Jones singing lead. It hit number 1 on the US charts. The original lyrics were “and now you know how funky I can be,” but “funky” was changed to “happy” due to concerns that funky might have drug or other unsavory references.Auntie's Municipal Court Mickey Dolenz sings lead on this track composed by Michael Nesmith and Keith Allison. We feel it has a “jangle pop country feel.” The title doesn't appear in the lyrics, and writer Michael Nesmith has no recollection why it was named as it was. It was not the only song whose title was not referenced in the song. Valleri Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart wrote this song with Davy Jones on lead. It reached number 3 on the US charts and would be the last top 10 showing for the Monkees. Guitar work is done by Louie Shelton, a session guitarist with the Wrecking Crew.Zor and Zam Bill and John Chadwick penned this track, sung by Mickey Dolenz. It is an unusual anti-war song in the Monkee's catalogue. The lyrics describe preparation for a war between two kingdoms, but no one shows up when the war is supposed to happen. This psychedelic track closes the album. ENTERTAINMENT TRACK:Main theme from the television series “The Andy Griffith Show”This long running series on the life and time of Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry, North Carolina ended its run in this month. STAFF PICKS:Kiss Me Goodbye by Petula ClarkBrian's leads off the staff picks with a Les Reed and Barry Mason composition. This song would reach number 15 on the US Billboard Hot 100, and would be the last time Petula Clark reached into the top 30 on that chart. Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In) by The First Edition Bruce brings us a psychedelic rock song recorded by the First Edition as their second single, and the first to feature Kenny Rogers on lead vocals. It peaked at number 5 on the Billboard Charts and was Rogers' first top 10 hit. The solo is played by Glen Campbell with heavy compression and tremolo to get the psychedelic feel. The lyrics are a warning about the dangers of LSD.Lady Madonna by the Beatles Rob's staff pick is a well-known tune. This was written by Paul McCartney, and marked a change into a more rock sound from the psychedelic sound they had previously explored. It talks about a working class mother who has something to do every day of the week. A Beautiful Morning by the RascalsMike features a very optimistic tune from a prolific group. This easy breezy song was written by Rascals members Felix Cavaliere and Eddie Brigati, Jr. in Honolulu, Hawaii, where beautiful mornings are a common occurrence. INSTRUMENTAL TRACK:2001: A Space Odyssey (Also Sprach Zarathustra by Ricard Strauss)Stanley Kubrick would make this Richard Strauss theme famous in his epic science fiction movie based on the Arthur C. Clarke book. The film as released this month in 1968....and we couldn't pronounce it either!!
Episode one hundred and forty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Hey Joe" by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and is the longest episode to date, at over two hours. Patreon backers also have a twenty-two-minute bonus episode available, on "Making Time" by The Creation. 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 As usual, I've put together a Mixcloud mix containing all the music excerpted in this episode. For information on the Byrds, I relied mostly on Timeless Flight Revisited by Johnny Rogan, with some information from Chris Hillman's autobiography. Information on Arthur Lee and Love came from Forever Changes: Arthur Lee and the Book of Love by John Einarson, and Arthur Lee: Alone Again Or by Barney Hoskyns. Information on Gary Usher's work with the Surfaris and the Sons of Adam came from The California Sound by Stephen McParland, which can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks Information on Jimi Hendrix came from Room Full of Mirrors by Charles R. Cross, Crosstown Traffic by Charles Shaar Murray, and Wild Thing by Philip Norman. Information on the history of "Hey Joe" itself came from all these sources plus Hey Joe: The Unauthorised Biography of a Rock Classic by Marc Shapiro, though note that most of that book is about post-1967 cover versions. Most of the pre-Experience session work by Jimi Hendrix I excerpt in this episode is on this box set of alternate takes and live recordings. And "Hey Joe" can be found on Are You Experienced? Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Just a quick note before we start – this episode deals with a song whose basic subject is a man murdering a woman, and that song also contains references to guns, and in some versions to cocaine use. Some versions excerpted also contain misogynistic slurs. If those things are likely to upset you, please skip this episode, as the whole episode focusses on that song. I would hope it goes without saying that I don't approve of misogyny, intimate partner violence, or murder, and my discussing a song does not mean I condone acts depicted in its lyrics, and the episode itself deals with the writing and recording of the song rather than its subject matter, but it would be impossible to talk about the record without excerpting the song. The normalisation of violence against women in rock music lyrics is a subject I will come back to, but did not have room for in what is already a very long episode. Anyway, on with the show. Let's talk about the folk process, shall we? We've talked before, like in the episodes on "Stagger Lee" and "Ida Red", about how there are some songs that aren't really individual songs in themselves, but are instead collections of related songs that might happen to share a name, or a title, or a story, or a melody, but which might be different in other ways. There are probably more songs that are like this than songs that aren't, and it doesn't just apply to folk songs, although that's where we see it most notably. You only have to look at the way a song like "Hound Dog" changed from the Willie Mae Thornton version to the version by Elvis, which only shared a handful of words with the original. Songs change, and recombine, and everyone who sings them brings something different to them, until they change in ways that nobody could have predicted, like a game of telephone. But there usually remains a core, an archetypal story or idea which remains constant no matter how much the song changes. Like Stagger Lee shooting Billy in a bar over a hat, or Frankie killing her man -- sometimes the man is Al, sometimes he's Johnny, but he always done her wrong. And one of those stories is about a man who shoots his cheating woman with a forty-four, and tries to escape -- sometimes to a town called Jericho, and sometimes to Juarez, Mexico. The first version of this song we have a recording of is by Clarence Ashley, in 1929, a recording of an older folk song that was called, in his version, "Little Sadie": [Excerpt: Clarence Ashley, "Little Sadie"] At some point, somebody seems to have noticed that that song has a slight melodic similarity to another family of songs, the family known as "Cocaine Blues" or "Take a Whiff on Me", which was popular around the same time: [Excerpt: The Memphis Jug Band, "Cocaine Habit Blues"] And so the two songs became combined, and the protagonist of "Little Sadie" now had a reason to kill his woman -- a reason other than her cheating, that is. He had taken a shot of cocaine before shooting her. The first recording of this version, under the name "Cocaine Blues" seems to have been a Western Swing version by W. A. Nichol's Western Aces: [Excerpt: W.A. Nichol's Western Aces, "Cocaine Blues"] Woody Guthrie recorded a version around the same time -- I've seen different dates and so don't know for sure if it was before or after Nichol's version -- and his version had himself credited as songwriter, and included this last verse which doesn't seem to appear on any earlier recordings of the song: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, "Cocaine Blues"] That doesn't appear on many later recordings either, but it did clearly influence yet another song -- Mose Allison's classic jazz number "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Mose Allison, "Parchman Farm"] The most famous recordings of the song, though, were by Johnny Cash, who recorded it as both "Cocaine Blues" and as "Transfusion Blues". In Cash's version of the song, the murderer gets sentenced to "ninety-nine years in the Folsom pen", so it made sense that Cash would perform that on his most famous album, the live album of his January 1968 concerts at Folsom Prison, which revitalised his career after several years of limited success: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "Cocaine Blues (live at Folsom Prison)"] While that was Cash's first live recording at a prison, though, it wasn't the first show he played at a prison -- ever since the success of his single "Folsom Prison Blues" he'd been something of a hero to prisoners, and he had been doing shows in prisons for eleven years by the time of that recording. And on one of those shows he had as his support act a man named Billy Roberts, who performed his own song which followed the same broad outlines as "Cocaine Blues" -- a man with a forty-four who goes out to shoot his woman and then escapes to Mexico. Roberts was an obscure folk singer, who never had much success, but who was good with people. He'd been part of the Greenwich Village folk scene in the 1950s, and at a gig at Gerde's Folk City he'd met a woman named Niela Miller, an aspiring songwriter, and had struck up a relationship with her. Miller only ever wrote one song that got recorded by anyone else, a song called "Mean World Blues" that was recorded by Dave Van Ronk: [Excerpt: Dave Van Ronk, "Mean World Blues"] Now, that's an original song, but it does bear a certain melodic resemblance to another old folk song, one known as "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" or "In the Pines", or sometimes "Black Girl": [Excerpt: Lead Belly, "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?"] Miller was clearly familiar with the tradition from which "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" comes -- it's a type of folk song where someone asks a question and then someone else answers it, and this repeats, building up a story. This is a very old folk song format, and you hear it for example in "Lord Randall", the song on which Bob Dylan based "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall": [Excerpt: Ewan MacColl, "Lord Randall"] I say she was clearly familiar with it, because the other song she wrote that anyone's heard was based very much around that idea. "Baby Please Don't Go To Town" is a question-and-answer song in precisely that form, but with an unusual chord progression for a folk song. You may remember back in the episode on "Eight Miles High" I talked about the circle of fifths -- a chord progression which either increases or decreases by a fifth for every chord, so it might go C-G-D-A-E [demonstrates] That's a common progression in pop and jazz, but not really so much in folk, but it's the one that Miller had used for "Baby, Please Don't Go to Town", and she'd taught Roberts that song, which she only recorded much later: [Excerpt: Niela Miller, "Baby, Please Don't Go To Town"] After Roberts and Miller broke up, Miller kept playing that melody, but he changed the lyrics. The lyrics he added had several influences. There was that question-and-answer folk-song format, there's the story of "Cocaine Blues" with its protagonist getting a forty-four to shoot his woman down before heading to Mexico, and there's also a country hit from 1953. "Hey, Joe!" was originally recorded by Carl Smith, one of the most popular country singers of the early fifties: [Excerpt: Carl Smith, "Hey Joe!"] That was written by Boudleaux Bryant, a few years before the songs he co-wrote for the Everly Brothers, and became a country number one, staying at the top for eight weeks. It didn't make the pop chart, but a pop cover version of it by Frankie Laine made the top ten in the US: [Excerpt: Frankie Laine, "Hey Joe"] Laine's record did even better in the UK, where it made number one, at a point where Laine was the biggest star in music in Britain -- at the time the UK charts only had a top twelve, and at one point four of the singles in the top twelve were by Laine, including that one. There was also an answer record by Kitty Wells which made the country top ten later that year: [Excerpt: Kitty Wells, "Hey Joe"] Oddly, despite it being a very big hit, that "Hey Joe" had almost no further cover versions for twenty years, though it did become part of the Searchers' setlist, and was included on their Live at the Star Club album in 1963, in an arrangement that owed a lot to "What'd I Say": [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Hey Joe"] But that song was clearly on Roberts' mind when, as so many American folk musicians did, he travelled to the UK in the late fifties and became briefly involved in the burgeoning UK folk movement. In particular, he spent some time with a twelve-string guitar player from Edinburgh called Len Partridge, who was also a mentor to Bert Jansch, and who was apparently an extraordinary musician, though I know of no recordings of his work. Partridge helped Roberts finish up the song, though Partridge is about the only person in this story who *didn't* claim a writing credit for it at one time or another, saying that he just helped Roberts out and that Roberts deserved all the credit. The first known recording of the completed song is from 1962, a few years after Roberts had returned to the US, though it didn't surface until decades later: [Excerpt: Billy Roberts, "Hey Joe"] Roberts was performing this song regularly on the folk circuit, and around the time of that recording he also finally got round to registering the copyright, several years after it was written. When Miller heard the song, she was furious, and she later said "Imagine my surprise when I heard Hey Joe by Billy Roberts. There was my tune, my chord progression, my question/answer format. He dropped the bridge that was in my song and changed it enough so that the copyright did not protect me from his plagiarism... I decided not to go through with all the complications of dealing with him. He never contacted me about it or gave me any credit. He knows he committed a morally reprehensible act. He never was man enough to make amends and apologize to me, or to give credit for the inspiration. Dealing with all that was also why I made the decision not to become a professional songwriter. It left a bad taste in my mouth.” Pete Seeger, a friend of Miller's, was outraged by the injustice and offered to testify on her behalf should she decide to take Roberts to court, but she never did. Some time around this point, Roberts also played on that prison bill with Johnny Cash, and what happened next is hard to pin down. I've read several different versions of the story, which change the date and which prison this was in, and none of the details in any story hang together properly -- everything introduces weird inconsistencies and things which just make no sense at all. Something like this basic outline of the story seems to have happened, but the outline itself is weird, and we'll probably never know the truth. Roberts played his set, and one of the songs he played was "Hey Joe", and at some point he got talking to one of the prisoners in the audience, Dino Valenti. We've met Valenti before, in the episode on "Mr. Tambourine Man" -- he was a singer/songwriter himself, and would later be the lead singer of Quicksilver Messenger Service, but he's probably best known for having written "Get Together": [Excerpt: Dino Valenti, "Get Together"] As we heard in the "Mr. Tambourine Man" episode, Valenti actually sold off his rights to that song to pay for his bail at one point, but he was in and out of prison several times because of drug busts. At this point, or so the story goes, he was eligible for parole, but he needed to prove he had a possible income when he got out, and one way he wanted to do that was to show that he had written a song that could be a hit he could make money off, but he didn't have such a song. He talked about his predicament with Roberts, who agreed to let him claim to have written "Hey Joe" so he could get out of prison. He did make that claim, and when he got out of prison he continued making the claim, and registered the copyright to "Hey Joe" in his own name -- even though Roberts had already registered it -- and signed a publishing deal for it with Third Story Music, a company owned by Herb Cohen, the future manager of the Mothers of Invention, and Cohen's brother Mutt. Valenti was a popular face on the folk scene, and he played "his" song to many people, but two in particular would influence the way the song would develop, both of them people we've seen relatively recently in episodes of the podcast. One of them, Vince Martin, we'll come back to later, but the other was David Crosby, and so let's talk about him and the Byrds a bit more. Crosby and Valenti had been friends long before the Byrds formed, and indeed we heard in the "Mr. Tambourine Man" episode how the group had named themselves after Valenti's song "Birdses": [Excerpt: Dino Valenti, "Birdses"] And Crosby *loved* "Hey Joe", which he believed was another of Valenti's songs. He'd perform it every chance he got, playing it solo on guitar in an arrangement that other people have compared to Mose Allison. He'd tried to get it on the first two Byrds albums, but had been turned down, mostly because of their manager and uncredited co-producer Jim Dickson, who had strong opinions about it, saying later "Some of the songs that David would bring in from the outside were perfectly valid songs for other people, but did not seem to be compatible with the Byrds' myth. And he may not have liked the Byrds' myth. He fought for 'Hey Joe' and he did it. As long as I could say 'No!' I did, and when I couldn't any more they did it. You had to give him something somewhere. I just wish it was something else... 'Hey Joe' I was bitterly opposed to. A song about a guy who murders his girlfriend in a jealous rage and is on the way to Mexico with a gun in his hand. It was not what I saw as a Byrds song." Indeed, Dickson was so opposed to the song that he would later say “One of the reasons David engineered my getting thrown out was because I would not let Hey Joe be on the Turn! Turn! Turn! album.” Dickson was, though, still working with the band when they got round to recording it. That came during the recording of their Fifth Dimension album, the album which included "Eight Miles High". That album was mostly recorded after the departure of Gene Clark, which was where we left the group at the end of the "Eight Miles High" episode, and the loss of their main songwriter meant that they were struggling for material -- doubly so since they also decided they were going to move away from Dylan covers. This meant that they had to rely on original material from the group's less commercial songwriters, and on a few folk songs, mostly learned from Pete Seeger The album ended up with only eleven songs on it, compared to the twelve that was normal for American albums at that time, and the singles on it after "Eight Miles High" weren't particularly promising as to the group's ability to come up with commercial material. The next single, "5D", a song by Roger McGuinn about the fifth dimension, was a waltz-time song that both Crosby and Chris Hillman were enthused by. It featured organ by Van Dyke Parks, and McGuinn said of the organ part "When he came into the studio I told him to think Bach. He was already thinking Bach before that anyway.": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "5D"] While the group liked it, though, that didn't make the top forty. The next single did, just about -- a song that McGuinn had written as an attempt at communicating with alien life. He hoped that it would be played on the radio, and that the radio waves would eventually reach aliens, who would hear it and respond: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Mr. Spaceman"] The "Fifth Dimension" album did significantly worse, both critically and commercially, than their previous albums, and the group would soon drop Allen Stanton, the producer, in favour of Gary Usher, Brian Wilson's old songwriting partner. But the desperation for material meant that the group agreed to record the song which they still thought at that time had been written by Crosby's friend, though nobody other than Crosby was happy with it, and even Crosby later said "It was a mistake. I shouldn't have done it. Everybody makes mistakes." McGuinn said later "The reason Crosby did lead on 'Hey Joe' was because it was *his* song. He didn't write it but he was responsible for finding it. He'd wanted to do it for years but we would never let him.": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Hey Joe"] Of course, that arrangement is very far from the Mose Allison style version Crosby had been doing previously. And the reason for that can be found in the full version of that McGuinn quote, because the full version continues "He'd wanted to do it for years but we would never let him. Then both Love and The Leaves had a minor hit with it and David got so angry that we had to let him do it. His version wasn't that hot because he wasn't a strong lead vocalist." The arrangement we just heard was the arrangement that by this point almost every group on the Sunset Strip scene was playing. And the reason for that was because of another friend of Crosby's, someone who had been a roadie for the Byrds -- Bryan MacLean. MacLean and Crosby had been very close because they were both from very similar backgrounds -- they were both Hollywood brats with huge egos. MacLean later said "Crosby and I got on perfectly. I didn't understand what everybody was complaining about, because he was just like me!" MacLean was, if anything, from an even more privileged background than Crosby. His father was an architect who'd designed houses for Elizabeth Taylor and Dean Martin, his neighbour when growing up was Frederick Loewe, the composer of My Fair Lady. He learned to swim in Elizabeth Taylor's private pool, and his first girlfriend was Liza Minelli. Another early girlfriend was Jackie DeShannon, the singer-songwriter who did the original version of "Needles and Pins", who he was introduced to by Sharon Sheeley, whose name you will remember from many previous episodes. MacLean had wanted to be an artist until his late teens, when he walked into a shop in Westwood which sometimes sold his paintings, the Sandal Shop, and heard some people singing folk songs there. He decided he wanted to be a folk singer, and soon started performing at the Balladeer, a club which would later be renamed the Troubadour, playing songs like Robert Johnson's "Cross Roads Blues", which had recently become a staple of the folk repertoire after John Hammond put out the King of the Delta Blues Singers album: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Cross Roads Blues"] Reading interviews with people who knew MacLean at the time, the same phrase keeps coming up. John Kay, later the lead singer of Steppenwolf, said "There was a young kid, Bryan MacLean, kind of cocky but nonetheless a nice kid, who hung around Crosby and McGuinn" while Chris Hillman said "He was a pretty good kid but a wee bit cocky." He was a fan of the various musicians who later formed the Byrds, and was also an admirer of a young guitarist on the scene named Ryland Cooder, and of a blues singer on the scene named Taj Mahal. He apparently was briefly in a band with Taj Mahal, called Summer's Children, who as far as I can tell had no connection to the duo that Curt Boettcher later formed of the same name, before Taj Mahal and Cooder formed The Rising Sons, a multi-racial blues band who were for a while the main rivals to the Byrds on the scene. MacLean, though, firmly hitched himself to the Byrds, and particularly to Crosby. He became a roadie on their first tour, and Hillman said "He was a hard-working guy on our behalf. As I recall, he pretty much answered to Crosby and was David's assistant, to put it diplomatically – more like his gofer, in fact." But MacLean wasn't cut out for the hard work that being a roadie required, and after being the Byrds' roadie for about thirty shows, he started making mistakes, and when they went off on their UK tour they decided not to keep employing him. He was heartbroken, but got back into trying his own musical career. He auditioned for the Monkees, unsuccessfully, but shortly after that -- some sources say even the same day as the audition, though that seems a little too neat -- he went to Ben Frank's -- the LA hangout that had actually been namechecked in the open call for Monkees auditions, which said they wanted "Ben Franks types", and there he met Arthur Lee and Johnny Echols. Echols would later remember "He was this gadfly kind of character who knew everybody and was flitting from table to table. He wore striped pants and a scarf, and he had this long, strawberry hair. All the girls loved him. For whatever reason, he came and sat at our table. Of course, Arthur and I were the only two black people there at the time." Lee and Echols were both Black musicians who had been born in Memphis. Lee's birth father, Chester Taylor, had been a cornet player with Jimmie Lunceford, whose Delta Rhythm Boys had had a hit with "The Honeydripper", as we heard way back in the episode on "Rocket '88": [Excerpt: Jimmie Lunceford and the Delta Rhythm Boys, "The Honeydripper"] However, Taylor soon split from Lee's mother, a schoolteacher, and she married Clinton Lee, a stonemason, who doted on his adopted son, and they moved to California. They lived in a relatively prosperous area of LA, a neighbourhood that was almost all white, with a few Asian families, though the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson lived nearby. A year or so after Arthur and his mother moved to LA, so did the Echols family, who had known them in Memphis, and they happened to move only a couple of streets away. Eight year old Arthur Lee reconnected with seven-year-old Johnny Echols, and the two became close friends from that point on. Arthur Lee first started out playing music when his parents were talked into buying him an accordion by a salesman who would go around with a donkey, give kids free donkey rides, and give the parents a sales pitch while they were riding the donkey, He soon gave up on the accordion and persuaded his parents to buy him an organ instead -- he was a spoiled child, by all accounts, with a TV in his bedroom, which was almost unheard of in the late fifties. Johnny Echols had a similar experience which led to his parents buying him a guitar, and the two were growing up in a musical environment generally. They attended Dorsey High School at the same time as both Billy Preston and Mike Love of the Beach Boys, and Ella Fitzgerald and her then-husband, the great jazz bass player Ray Brown, lived in the same apartment building as the Echols family for a while. Ornette Coleman, the free-jazz saxophone player, lived next door to Echols, and Adolphus Jacobs, the guitarist with the Coasters, gave him guitar lessons. Arthur Lee also knew Johnny Otis, who ran a pigeon-breeding club for local children which Arthur would attend. Echols was the one who first suggested that he and Arthur should form a band, and they put together a group to play at a school talent show, performing "Last Night", the instrumental that had been a hit for the Mar-Keys on Stax records: [Excerpt: The Mar-Keys, "Last Night"] They soon became a regular group, naming themselves Arthur Lee and the LAGs -- the LA Group, in imitation of Booker T and the MGs – the Memphis Group. At some point around this time, Lee decided to switch from playing organ to playing guitar. He would say later that this was inspired by seeing Johnny "Guitar" Watson get out of a gold Cadillac, wearing a gold suit, and with gold teeth in his mouth. The LAGs started playing as support acts and backing bands for any blues and soul acts that came through LA, performing with Big Mama Thornton, Johnny Otis, the O'Jays, and more. Arthur and Johnny were both still under-age, and they would pencil in fake moustaches to play the clubs so they'd appear older. In the fifties and early sixties, there were a number of great electric guitar players playing blues on the West Coast -- Johnny "Guitar" Watson, T-Bone Walker, Guitar Slim, and others -- and they would compete with each other not only to play well, but to put on a show, and so there was a whole bag of stage tricks that West Coast R&B guitarists picked up, and Echols learned all of them -- playing his guitar behind his back, playing his guitar with his teeth, playing with his guitar between his legs. As well as playing their own shows, the LAGs also played gigs under other names -- they had a corrupt agent who would book them under the name of whatever Black group had a hit at the time, in the belief that almost nobody knew what popular groups looked like anyway, so they would go out and perform as the Drifters or the Coasters or half a dozen other bands. But Arthur Lee in particular wanted to have success in his own right. He would later say "When I was a little boy I would listen to Nat 'King' Cole and I would look at that purple Capitol Records logo. I wanted to be on Capitol, that was my goal. Later on I used to walk from Dorsey High School all the way up to the Capitol building in Hollywood -- did that many times. I was determined to get a record deal with Capitol, and I did, without the help of a fancy manager or anyone else. I talked to Adam Ross and Jack Levy at Ardmore-Beechwood. I talked to Kim Fowley, and then I talked to Capitol". The record that the LAGs released, though, was not very good, a track called "Rumble-Still-Skins": [Excerpt: The LAGs, "Rumble-Still-Skins"] Lee later said "I was young and very inexperienced and I was testing the record company. I figured if I gave them my worst stuff and they ripped me off I wouldn't get hurt. But it didn't work, and after that I started giving my best, and I've been doing that ever since." The LAGs were dropped by Capitol after one single, and for the next little while Arthur and Johnny did work for smaller labels, usually labels owned by Bob Keane, with Arthur writing and producing and Johnny playing guitar -- though Echols has said more recently that a lot of the songs that were credited to Arthur as sole writer were actually joint compositions. Most of these records were attempts at copying the style of other people. There was "I Been Trying", a Phil Spector soundalike released by Little Ray: [Excerpt: Little Ray, "I Been Trying"] And there were a few attempts at sounding like Curtis Mayfield, like "Slow Jerk" by Ronnie and the Pomona Casuals: [Excerpt: Ronnie and the Pomona Casuals, "Slow Jerk"] and "My Diary" by Rosa Lee Brooks: [Excerpt: Rosa Lee Brooks, "My Diary"] Echols was also playing with a lot of other people, and one of the musicians he was playing with, his old school friend Billy Preston, told him about a recent European tour he'd been on with Little Richard, and the band from Liverpool he'd befriended while he was there who idolised Richard, so when the Beatles hit America, Arthur and Johnny had some small amount of context for them. They soon broke up the LAGs and formed another group, the American Four, with two white musicians, bass player John Fleckenstein and drummer Don Costa. Lee had them wear wigs so they seemed like they had longer hair, and started dressing more eccentrically -- he would soon become known for wearing glasses with one blue lens and one red one, and, as he put it "wearing forty pounds of beads, two coats, three shirts, and wearing two pairs of shoes on one foot". As well as the Beatles, the American Four were inspired by the other British Invasion bands -- Arthur was in the audience for the TAMI show, and quite impressed by Mick Jagger -- and also by the Valentinos, Bobby Womack's group. They tried to get signed to SAR Records, the label owned by Sam Cooke for which the Valentinos recorded, but SAR weren't interested, and they ended up recording for Bob Keane's Del-Fi records, where they cut "Luci Baines", a "Twist and Shout" knock-off with lyrics referencing the daughter of new US President Lyndon Johnson: [Excerpt: The American Four, "Luci Baines"] But that didn't take off any more than the earlier records had. Another American Four track, "Stay Away", was recorded but went unreleased until 2006: [Excerpt: Arthur Lee and the American Four, "Stay Away"] Soon the American Four were changing their sound and name again. This time it was because of two bands who were becoming successful on the Sunset Strip. One was the Byrds, who to Lee's mind were making music like the stuff he heard in his head, and the other was their rivals the Rising Sons, the blues band we mentioned earlier with Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder. Lee was very impressed by them as an multiracial band making aggressive, loud, guitar music, though he would always make the point when talking about them that they were a blues band, not a rock band, and *he* had the first multiracial rock band. Whatever they were like live though, in their recordings, produced by the Byrds' first producer Terry Melcher, the Rising Sons often had the same garage band folk-punk sound that Lee and Echols would soon make their own: [Excerpt: The Rising Sons, "Take a Giant Step"] But while the Rising Sons recorded a full album's worth of material, only one single was released before they split up, and so the way was clear for Lee and Echols' band, now renamed once again to The Grass Roots, to become the Byrds' new challengers. Lee later said "I named the group The Grass Roots behind a trip, or an album I heard that Malcolm X did, where he said 'the grass roots of the people are out in the street doing something about their problems instead of sitting around talking about it'". After seeing the Rolling Stones and the Byrds live, Lee wanted to get up front and move like Mick Jagger, and not be hindered by playing a guitar he wasn't especially good at -- both the Stones and the Byrds had two guitarists and a frontman who just sang and played hand percussion, and these were the models that Lee was following for the group. He also thought it would be a good idea commercially to get a good-looking white boy up front. So the group got in another guitarist, a white pretty boy who Lee soon fell out with and gave the nickname "Bummer Bob" because he was unpleasant to be around. Those of you who know exactly why Bobby Beausoleil later became famous will probably agree that this was a more than reasonable nickname to give him (and those of you who don't, I'll be dealing with him when we get to 1969). So when Bryan MacLean introduced himself to Lee and Echols, and they found out that not only was he also a good-looking white guitarist, but he was also friends with the entire circle of hipsters who'd been going to Byrds gigs, people like Vito and Franzoni, and he could get a massive crowd of them to come along to gigs for any band he was in and make them the talk of the Sunset Strip scene, he was soon in the Grass Roots, and Bummer Bob was out. The Grass Roots soon had to change their name again, though. In 1965, Jan and Dean recorded their "Folk and Roll" album, which featured "The Universal Coward"... Which I am not going to excerpt again. I only put that pause in to terrify Tilt, who edits these podcasts, and has very strong opinions about that song. But P. F. Sloan and Steve Barri, the songwriters who also performed as the Fantastic Baggies, had come up with a song for that album called "Where Where You When I Needed You?": [Excerpt: Jan and Dean, "Where Were You When I Needed You?"] Sloan and Barri decided to cut their own version of that song under a fake band name, and then put together a group of other musicians to tour as that band. They just needed a name, and Lou Adler, the head of Dunhill Records, suggested they call themselves The Grass Roots, and so that's what they did: [Excerpt: The Grass Roots, "Where Were You When I Needed You?"] Echols would later claim that this was deliberate malice on Adler's part -- that Adler had come in to a Grass Roots show drunk, and pretended to be interested in signing them to a contract, mostly to show off to a woman he'd brought with him. Echols and MacLean had spoken to him, not known who he was, and he'd felt disrespected, and Echols claims that he suggested the name to get back at them, and also to capitalise on their local success. The new Grass Roots soon started having hits, and so the old band had to find another name, which they got as a joking reference to a day job Lee had had at one point -- he'd apparently worked in a specialist bra shop, Luv Brassieres, which the rest of the band found hilarious. The Grass Roots became Love. While Arthur Lee was the group's lead singer, Bryan MacLean would often sing harmonies, and would get a song or two to sing live himself. And very early in the group's career, when they were playing a club called Bido Lito's, he started making his big lead spot a version of "Hey Joe", which he'd learned from his old friend David Crosby, and which soon became the highlight of the group's set. Their version was sped up, and included the riff which the Searchers had popularised in their cover version of "Needles and Pins", the song originally recorded by MacLean's old girlfriend Jackie DeShannon: [Excerpt: The Searchers, "Needles and Pins"] That riff is a very simple one to play, and variants of it became very, very, common among the LA bands, most notably on the Byrds' "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better"] The riff was so ubiquitous in the LA scene that in the late eighties Frank Zappa would still cite it as one of his main memories of the scene. I'm going to quote from his autobiography, where he's talking about the differences between the LA scene he was part of and the San Francisco scene he had no time for: "The Byrds were the be-all and end-all of Los Angeles rock then. They were 'It' -- and then a group called Love was 'It.' There were a few 'psychedelic' groups that never really got to be 'It,' but they could still find work and get record deals, including the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, Sky Saxon and the Seeds, and the Leaves (noted for their cover version of "Hey, Joe"). When we first went to San Francisco, in the early days of the Family Dog, it seemed that everybody was wearing the same costume, a mixture of Barbary Coast and Old West -- guys with handlebar mustaches, girls in big bustle dresses with feathers in their hair, etc. By contrast, the L.A. costumery was more random and outlandish. Musically, the northern bands had a little more country style. In L.A., it was folk-rock to death. Everything had that" [and here Zappa uses the adjectival form of a four-letter word beginning with 'f' that the main podcast providers don't like you saying on non-adult-rated shows] "D chord down at the bottom of the neck where you wiggle your finger around -- like 'Needles and Pins.'" The reason Zappa describes it that way, and the reason it became so popular, is that if you play that riff in D, the chords are D, Dsus2, and Dsus4 which means you literally only wiggle one finger on your left hand: [demonstrates] And so you get that on just a ton of records from that period, though Love, the Byrds, and the Searchers all actually play the riff on A rather than D: [demonstrates] So that riff became the Big Thing in LA after the Byrds popularised the Searchers sound there, and Love added it to their arrangement of "Hey Joe". In January 1966, the group would record their arrangement of it for their first album, which would come out in March: [Excerpt: Love, "Hey Joe"] But that wouldn't be the first recording of the song, or of Love's arrangement of it – although other than the Byrds' version, it would be the only one to come out of LA with the original Billy Roberts lyrics. Love's performances of the song at Bido Lito's had become the talk of the Sunset Strip scene, and soon every band worth its salt was copying it, and it became one of those songs like "Louie Louie" before it that everyone would play. The first record ever made with the "Hey Joe" melody actually had totally different lyrics. Kim Fowley had the idea of writing a sequel to "Hey Joe", titled "Wanted Dead or Alive", about what happened after Joe shot his woman and went off. He produced the track for The Rogues, a group consisting of Michael Lloyd and Shaun Harris, who later went on to form the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, and Lloyd and Harris were the credited writers: [Excerpt: The Rogues, "Wanted Dead or Alive"] The next version of the song to come out was the first by anyone to be released as "Hey Joe", or at least as "Hey Joe, Where You Gonna Go?", which was how it was titled on its initial release. This was by a band called The Leaves, who were friends of Love, and had picked up on "Hey Joe", and was produced by Nik Venet. It was also the first to have the now-familiar opening line "Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand?": [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe Where You Gonna Go?"] Roberts' original lyric, as sung by both Love and the Byrds, had been "where you going with that money in your hand?", and had Joe headed off to *buy* the gun. But as Echols later said “What happened was Bob Lee from The Leaves, who were friends of ours, asked me for the words to 'Hey Joe'. I told him I would have the words the next day. I decided to write totally different lyrics. The words you hear on their record are ones I wrote as a joke. The original words to Hey Joe are ‘Hey Joe, where you going with that money in your hand? Well I'm going downtown to buy me a blue steel .44. When I catch up with that woman, she won't be running round no more.' It never says ‘Hey Joe where you goin' with that gun in your hand.' Those were the words I wrote just because I knew they were going to try and cover the song before we released it. That was kind of a dirty trick that I played on The Leaves, which turned out to be the words that everybody uses.” That first release by the Leaves also contained an extra verse -- a nod to Love's previous name: [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe Where You Gonna Go?"] That original recording credited the song as public domain -- apparently Bryan MacLean had refused to tell the Leaves who had written the song, and so they assumed it was traditional. It came out in November 1965, but only as a promo single. Even before the Leaves, though, another band had recorded "Hey Joe", but it didn't get released. The Sons of Adam had started out as a surf group called the Fender IV, who made records like "Malibu Run": [Excerpt: The Fender IV, "Malibu Run"] Kim Fowley had suggested they change their name to the Sons of Adam, and they were another group who were friends with Love -- their drummer, Michael Stuart-Ware, would later go on to join Love, and Arthur Lee wrote the song "Feathered Fish" for them: [Excerpt: Sons of Adam, "Feathered Fish"] But while they were the first to record "Hey Joe", their version has still to this day not been released. Their version was recorded for Decca, with producer Gary Usher, but before it was released, another Decca artist also recorded the song, and the label weren't sure which one to release. And then the label decided to press Usher to record a version with yet another act -- this time with the Surfaris, the surf group who had had a hit with "Wipe Out". Coincidentally, the Surfaris had just changed bass players -- their most recent bass player, Ken Forssi, had quit and joined Love, whose own bass player, John Fleckenstein, had gone off to join the Standells, who would also record a version of “Hey Joe” in 1966. Usher thought that the Sons of Adam were much better musicians than the Surfaris, who he was recording with more or less under protest, but their version, using Love's arrangement and the "gun in your hand" lyrics, became the first version to come out on a major label: [Excerpt: The Surfaris, "Hey Joe"] They believed the song was in the public domain, and so the songwriting credits on the record are split between Gary Usher, a W. Hale who nobody has been able to identify, and Tony Cost, a pseudonym for Nik Venet. Usher said later "I got writer's credit on it because I was told, or I assumed at the time, the song was Public Domain; meaning a non-copyrighted song. It had already been cut two or three times, and on each occasion the writing credit had been different. On a traditional song, whoever arranges it, takes the songwriting credit. I may have changed a few words and arranged and produced it, but I certainly did not co-write it." The public domain credit also appeared on the Leaves' second attempt to cut the song, which was actually given a general release, but flopped. But when the Leaves cut the song for a *third* time, still for the same tiny label, Mira, the track became a hit in May 1966, reaching number thirty-one: [Excerpt: The Leaves, "Hey Joe"] And *that* version had what they thought was the correct songwriting credit, to Dino Valenti. Which came as news to Billy Roberts, who had registered the copyright to the song back in 1962 and had no idea that it had become a staple of LA garage rock until he heard his song in the top forty with someone else's name on the credits. He angrily confronted Third Story Music, who agreed to a compromise -- they would stop giving Valenti songwriting royalties and start giving them to Roberts instead, so long as he didn't sue them and let them keep the publishing rights. Roberts was indignant about this -- he deserved all the money, not just half of it -- but he went along with it to avoid a lawsuit he might not win. So Roberts was now the credited songwriter on the versions coming out of the LA scene. But of course, Dino Valenti had been playing "his" song to other people, too. One of those other people was Vince Martin. Martin had been a member of a folk-pop group called the Tarriers, whose members also included the future film star Alan Arkin, and who had had a hit in the 1950s with "Cindy, Oh Cindy": [Excerpt: The Tarriers, "Cindy, Oh Cindy"] But as we heard in the episode on the Lovin' Spoonful, he had become a Greenwich Village folkie, in a duo with Fred Neil, and recorded an album with him, "Tear Down the Walls": [Excerpt: Fred Neil and Vince Martin, "Morning Dew"] That song we just heard, "Morning Dew", was another question-and-answer folk song. It was written by the Canadian folk-singer Bonnie Dobson, but after Martin and Neil recorded it, it was picked up on by Martin's friend Tim Rose who stuck his own name on the credits as well, without Dobson's permission, for a version which made the song into a rock standard for which he continued to collect royalties: [Excerpt: Tim Rose, "Morning Dew"] This was something that Rose seems to have made a habit of doing, though to be fair to him it went both ways. We heard about him in the Lovin' Spoonful episode too, when he was in a band named the Big Three with Cass Elliot and her coincidentally-named future husband Jim Hendricks, who recorded this song, with Rose putting new music to the lyrics of the old public domain song "Oh! Susanna": [Excerpt: The Big Three, "The Banjo Song"] The band Shocking Blue used that melody for their 1969 number-one hit "Venus", and didn't give Rose any credit: [Excerpt: Shocking Blue, "Venus"] But another song that Rose picked up from Vince Martin was "Hey Joe". Martin had picked the song up from Valenti, but didn't know who had written it, or who was claiming to have written it, and told Rose he thought it might be an old Appalchian murder ballad or something. Rose took the song and claimed writing credit in his own name -- he would always, for the rest of his life, claim it was an old folk tune he'd heard in Florida, and that he'd rewritten it substantially himself, but no evidence of the song has ever shown up from prior to Roberts' copyright registration, and Rose's version is basically identical to Roberts' in melody and lyrics. But Rose takes his version at a much slower pace, and his version would be the model for the most successful versions going forward, though those other versions would use the lyrics Johnny Echols had rewritten, rather than the ones Rose used: [Excerpt: Tim Rose, "Hey Joe"] Rose's version got heard across the Atlantic as well. And in particular it was heard by Chas Chandler, the bass player of the Animals. Some sources seem to suggest that Chandler first heard the song performed by a group called the Creation, but in a biography I've read of that group they clearly state that they didn't start playing the song until 1967. But however he came across it, when Chandler heard Rose's recording, he knew that the song could be a big hit for someone, but he didn't know who. And then he bumped into Linda Keith, Keith Richards' girlfriend, who took him to see someone whose guitar we've already heard in this episode: [Excerpt: Rosa Lee Brooks, "My Diary"] The Curtis Mayfield impression on guitar there was, at least according to many sources the first recording session ever played on by a guitarist then calling himself Maurice (or possibly Mo-rees) James. We'll see later in the story that it possibly wasn't his first -- there are conflicting accounts, as there are about a lot of things, and it was recorded either in very early 1964, in which case it was his first, or (as seems more likely, and as I tell the story later) a year later, in which case he'd played on maybe half a dozen tracks in the studio by that point. But it was still a very early one. And by late 1966 that guitarist had reverted to the name by which he was brought up, and was calling himself Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix and Arthur Lee had become close, and Lee would later claim that Hendrix had copied much of Lee's dress style and attitude -- though many of Hendrix's other colleagues and employers, including Little Richard, would make similar claims -- and most of them had an element of truth, as Lee's did. Hendrix was a sponge. But Lee did influence him. Indeed, one of Hendrix's *last* sessions, in March 1970, was guesting on an album by Love: [Excerpt: Love with Jimi Hendrix, "Everlasting First"] Hendrix's name at birth was Johnny Allen Hendrix, which made his father, James Allen Hendrix, known as Al, who was away at war when his son was born, worry that he'd been named after another man who might possibly be the real father, so the family just referred to the child as "Buster" to avoid the issue. When Al Hendrix came back from the war the child was renamed James Marshall Hendrix -- James after Al's first name, Marshall after Al's dead brother -- though the family continued calling him "Buster". Little James Hendrix Junior didn't have anything like a stable home life. Both his parents were alcoholics, and Al Hendrix was frequently convinced that Jimi's mother Lucille was having affairs and became abusive about it. They had six children, four of whom were born disabled, and Jimi was the only one to remain with his parents -- the rest were either fostered or adopted at birth, fostered later on because the parents weren't providing a decent home life, or in one case made a ward of state because the Hendrixes couldn't afford to pay for a life-saving operation for him. The only one that Jimi had any kind of regular contact with was the second brother, Leon, his parents' favourite, who stayed with them for several years before being fostered by a family only a few blocks away. Al and Lucille Hendrix frequently split and reconciled, and while they were ostensibly raising Jimi (and for a few years Leon), he was shuttled between them and various family members and friends, living sometimes in Seattle where his parents lived and sometimes in Vancouver with his paternal grandmother. He was frequently malnourished, and often survived because friends' families fed him. Al Hendrix was also often physically and emotionally abusive of the son he wasn't sure was his. Jimi grew up introverted, and stuttering, and only a couple of things seemed to bring him out of his shell. One was science fiction -- he always thought that his nickname, Buster, came from Buster Crabbe, the star of the Flash Gordon serials he loved to watch, though in fact he got the nickname even before that interest developed, and he was fascinated with ideas about aliens and UFOs -- and the other was music. Growing up in Seattle in the forties and fifties, most of the music he was exposed to as a child and in his early teens was music made by and for white people -- there wasn't a very large Black community in the area at the time compared to most major American cities, and so there were no prominent R&B stations. As a kid he loved the music of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, and when he was thirteen Jimi's favourite record was Dean Martin's "Memories are Made of This": [Excerpt: Dean Martin, "Memories are Made of This"] He also, like every teenager, became a fan of rock and roll music. When Elvis played at a local stadium when Jimi was fifteen, he couldn't afford a ticket, but he went and sat on top of a nearby hill and watched the show from the distance. Jimi's first exposure to the blues also came around this time, when his father briefly took in lodgers, Cornell and Ernestine Benson, and Ernestine had a record collection that included records by Lightnin' Hopkins, Howlin' Wolf, and Muddy Waters, all of whom Jimi became a big fan of, especially Muddy Waters. The Bensons' most vivid memory of Jimi in later years was him picking up a broom and pretending to play guitar along with these records: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "Baby Please Don't Go"] Shortly after this, it would be Ernestine Benson who would get Jimi his very first guitar. By this time Jimi and Al had lost their home and moved into a boarding house, and the owner's son had an acoustic guitar with only one string that he was planning to throw out. When Jimi asked if he could have it instead of it being thrown out, the owner told him he could have it for five dollars. Al Hendrix refused to pay that much for it, but Ernestine Benson bought Jimi the guitar. She said later “He only had one string, but he could really make that string talk.” He started carrying the guitar on his back everywhere he went, in imitation of Sterling Hayden in the western Johnny Guitar, and eventually got some more strings for it and learned to play. He would play it left-handed -- until his father came in. His father had forced him to write with his right hand, and was convinced that left-handedness was the work of the devil, so Jimi would play left-handed while his father was somewhere else, but as soon as Al came in he would flip the guitar the other way up and continue playing the song he had been playing, now right-handed. Jimi's mother died when he was fifteen, after having been ill for a long time with drink-related problems, and Jimi and his brother didn't get to go to the funeral -- depending on who you believe, either Al gave Jimi the bus fare and told him to go by himself and Jimi was too embarrassed to go to the funeral alone on the bus, or Al actually forbade Jimi and Leon from going. After this, he became even more introverted than he was before, and he also developed a fascination with the idea of angels, convinced his mother now was one. Jimi started to hang around with a friend called Pernell Alexander, who also had a guitar, and they would play along together with Elmore James records. The two also went to see Little Richard and Bill Doggett perform live, and while Jimi was hugely introverted, he did start to build more friendships in the small Seattle music scene, including with Ron Holden, the man we talked about in the episode on "Louie Louie" who introduced that song to Seattle, and who would go on to record with Bruce Johnston for Bob Keane: [Excerpt: Ron Holden, "Gee But I'm Lonesome"] Eventually Ernestine Benson persuaded Al Hendrix to buy Jimi a decent electric guitar on credit -- Al also bought himself a saxophone at the same time, thinking he might play music with his son, but sent it back once the next payment became due. As well as blues and R&B, Jimi was soaking up the guitar instrumentals and garage rock that would soon turn into surf music. The first song he learned to play was "Tall Cool One" by the Fabulous Wailers, the local group who popularised a version of "Louie Louie" based on Holden's one: [Excerpt: The Fabulous Wailers, "Tall Cool One"] As we talked about in the "Louie Louie" episode, the Fabulous Wailers used to play at a venue called the Spanish Castle, and Jimi was a regular in the audience, later writing his song "Spanish Castle Magic" about those shows: [Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "Spanish Castle Magic"] He was also a big fan of Duane Eddy, and soon learned Eddy's big hits "Forty Miles of Bad Road", "Because They're Young", and "Peter Gunn" -- a song he would return to much later in his life: [Excerpt: Jimi Hendrix, "Peter Gunn/Catastrophe"] His career as a guitarist didn't get off to a great start -- the first night he played with his first band, he was meant to play two sets, but he was fired after the first set, because he was playing in too flashy a manner and showing off too much on stage. His girlfriend suggested that he might want to tone it down a little, but he said "That's not my style". This would be a common story for the next several years. After that false start, the first real band he was in was the Velvetones, with his friend Pernell Alexander. There were four guitarists, two piano players, horns and drums, and they dressed up with glitter stuck to their pants. They played Duane Eddy songs, old jazz numbers, and "Honky Tonk" by Bill Doggett, which became Hendrix's signature song with the band. [Excerpt: Bill Doggett, "Honky Tonk"] His father was unsupportive of his music career, and he left his guitar at Alexander's house because he was scared that his dad would smash it if he took it home. At the same time he was with the Velvetones, he was also playing with another band called the Rocking Kings, who got gigs around the Seattle area, including at the Spanish Castle. But as they left school, most of Hendrix's friends were joining the Army, in order to make a steady living, and so did he -- although not entirely by choice. He was arrested, twice, for riding in stolen cars, and he was given a choice -- either go to prison, or sign up for the Army for three years. He chose the latter. At first, the Army seemed to suit him. He was accepted into the 101st Airborne Division, the famous "Screaming Eagles", whose actions at D-Day made them legendary in the US, and he was proud to be a member of the Division. They were based out of Fort Campbell, the base near Clarksville we talked about a couple of episodes ago, and while he was there he met a bass player, Billy Cox, who he started playing with. As Cox and Hendrix were Black, and as Fort Campbell straddled the border between Kentucky and Tennessee, they had to deal with segregation and play to only Black audiences. And Hendrix quickly discovered that Black audiences in the Southern states weren't interested in "Louie Louie", Duane Eddy, and surf music, the stuff he'd been playing in Seattle. He had to instead switch to playing Albert King and Slim Harpo songs, but luckily he loved that music too. He also started singing at this point -- when Hendrix and Cox started playing together, in a trio called the Kasuals, they had no singer, and while Hendrix never liked his own voice, Cox was worse, and so Hendrix was stuck as the singer. The Kasuals started gigging around Clarksville, and occasionally further afield, places like Nashville, where Arthur Alexander would occasionally sit in with them. But Cox was about to leave the Army, and Hendrix had another two and a bit years to go, having enlisted for three years. They couldn't play any further away unless Hendrix got out of the Army, which he was increasingly unhappy in anyway, and so he did the only thing he could -- he pretended to be gay, and got discharged on medical grounds for homosexuality. In later years he would always pretend he'd broken his ankle parachuting from a plane. For the next few years, he would be a full-time guitarist, and spend the periods when he wasn't earning enough money from that leeching off women he lived with, moving from one to another as they got sick of him or ran out of money. The Kasuals expanded their lineup, adding a second guitarist, Alphonso Young, who would show off on stage by playing guitar with his teeth. Hendrix didn't like being upstaged by another guitarist, and quickly learned to do the same. One biography I've used as a source for this says that at this point, Billy Cox played on a session for King Records, for Frank Howard and the Commanders, and brought Hendrix along, but the producer thought that Hendrix's guitar was too frantic and turned his mic off. But other sources say the session Hendrix and Cox played on for the Commanders wasn't until three years later, and the record *sounds* like a 1965 record, not a 1962 one, and his guitar is very audible – and the record isn't on King. But we've not had any music to break up the narration for a little while, and it's a good track (which later became a Northern Soul favourite) so I'll play a section here, as either way it was certainly an early Hendrix session: [Excerpt: Frank Howard and the Commanders, "I'm So Glad"] This illustrates a general problem with Hendrix's life at this point -- he would flit between bands, playing with the same people at multiple points, nobody was taking detailed notes, and later, once he became famous, everyone wanted to exaggerate their own importance in his life, meaning that while the broad outlines of his life are fairly clear, any detail before late 1966 might be hopelessly wrong. But all the time, Hendrix was learning his craft. One story from around this time sums up both Hendrix's attitude to his playing -- he saw himself almost as much as a scientist as a musician -- and his slightly formal manner of speech. He challenged the best blues guitarist in Nashville to a guitar duel, and the audience actually laughed at Hendrix's playing, as he was totally outclassed. When asked what he was doing, he replied “I was simply trying to get that B.B. King tone down and my experiment failed.” Bookings for the King Kasuals dried up, and he went to Vancouver, where he spent a couple of months playing in a covers band, Bobby Taylor and the Vancouvers, whose lead guitarist was Tommy Chong, later to find fame as one half of Cheech and Chong. But he got depressed at how white Vancouver was, and travelled back down south to join a reconfigured King Kasuals, who now had a horn section. The new lineup of King Kasuals were playing the chitlin circuit and had to put on a proper show, and so Hendrix started using all the techniques he'd seen other guitarists on the circuit use -- playing with his teeth like Alphonso Young, the other guitarist in the band, playing with his guitar behind his back like T-Bone Walker, and playing with a fifty-foot cord that allowed him to walk into the crowd and out of the venue, still playing, like Guitar Slim used to. As well as playing with the King Kasuals, he started playing the circuit as a sideman. He got short stints with many of the second-tier acts on the circuit -- people who had had one or two hits, or were crowd-pleasers, but weren't massive stars, like Carla Thomas or Jerry Butler or Slim Harpo. The first really big name he played with was Solomon Burke, who when Hendrix joined his band had just released "Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Empty Arms)": [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Just Out of Reach (Of My Two Empty Arms)"] But he lacked discipline. “Five dates would go beautifully,” Burke later said, “and then at the next show, he'd go into this wild stuff that wasn't part of the song. I just couldn't handle it anymore.” Burke traded him to Otis Redding, who was on the same tour, for two horn players, but then Redding fired him a week later and they left him on the side of the road. He played in the backing band for the Marvelettes, on a tour with Curtis Mayfield, who would be another of Hendrix's biggest influences, but he accidentally blew up Mayfield's amp and got sacked. On another tour, Cecil Womack threw Hendrix's guitar off the bus while he slept. In February 1964 he joined the band of the Isley Brothers, and he would watch the Beatles on Ed Sullivan with them during his first days with the group. Assuming he hadn't already played the Rosa Lee Brooks session (and I think there's good reason to believe he hadn't), then the first record Hendrix played on was their single "Testify": [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Testify"] While he was with them, he also moonlighted on Don Covay's big hit "Mercy, Mercy": [Excerpt: Don Covay and the Goodtimers, "Mercy Mercy"] After leaving the Isleys, Hendrix joined the minor soul singer Gorgeous George, and on a break from Gorgeous George's tour, in Memphis, he went to Stax studios in the hope of meeting Steve Cropper, one of his idols. When he was told that Cropper was busy in the studio, he waited around all day until Cropper finished, and introduced himself. Hendrix was amazed to discover that Cropper was white -- he'd assumed that he must be Black -- and Cropper was delighted to meet the guitarist who had played on "Mercy Mercy", one of his favourite records. The two spent hours showing each other guitar licks -- Hendrix playing Cropper's right-handed guitar, as he hadn't brought along his own. Shortly after this, he joined Little Richard's band, and once again came into conflict with the star of the show by trying to upstage him. For one show he wore a satin shirt, and after the show Richard screamed at him “I am the only Little Richard! I am the King of Rock and Roll, and I am the only one allowed to be pretty. Take that shirt off!” While he was with Richard, Hendrix played on his "I Don't Know What You've Got, But It's Got Me", which like "Mercy Mercy" was written by Don Covay, who had started out as Richard's chauffeur: [Excerpt: Little Richard, "I Don't Know What You've Got, But It's Got Me"] According to the most likely version of events I've read, it was while he was working for Richard that Hendrix met Rosa Lee Brooks, on New Year's Eve 1964. At this point he was using the name Maurice James, apparently in tribute to the blues guitarist Elmore James, and he used various names, including Jimmy James, for most of his pre-fame performances. Rosa Lee Brooks was an R&B singer who had been mentored by Johnny "Guitar" Watson, and when she met Hendrix she was singing in a girl group who were one of the support acts for Ike & Tina Turner, who Hendrix went to see on his night off. Hendrix met Brooks afterwards, and told her she looked like his mother -- a line he used on a lot of women, but which was true in her case if photos are anything to go by. The two got into a relationship, and were soon talking about becoming a duo like Ike and Tina or Mickey and Sylvia -- "Love is Strange" was one of Hendrix's favourite records. But the only recording they made together was the "My Diary" single. Brooks always claimed that she actually wrote that song, but the label credit is for Arthur Lee, and it sounds like his work to me, albeit him trying hard to write like Curtis Mayfield, just as Hendrix is trying to play like him: [Excerpt: Rosa Lee Brooks, "My Diary"] Brooks and Hendrix had a very intense relationship for a short period. Brooks would later recall Little