Podcasts about polydor

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Lucas Brêda RIO DE JANEIRO Eram os primeiros meses de 1970, e Cassiano desfilava seu "black power" reluzente por São Paulo quando conheceu outro cabeludo chamado Paulo Ricardo Botafogo, de aspecto e ideologia hippie, fã de Marvin Gaye como ele. Nos alto-falantes de uma lanchonete, o locutor da rádio anunciava a nova música de Tim Maia, que deixou seu novo amigo boquiaberto. Ao som de "Primavera (Vai Chuva)", a dupla pagou a conta, mas o dinheiro de Cassiano acabou. Ele estava sem lugar para dormir e pediu abrigo a Botafogo. Voltava de uma excursão, quando viu calças de homem no varal de sua mulher e não quis conversa. Também fez uma revelação. "Olha, essa música é minha, mas por favor não fale para ninguém." Dita como um pedido singelo, a frase se tornou uma maldição para Cassiano. Autor de sucessos na voz de Tim Maia e Ivete Sangalo, o paraibano fascinou músicos, virou "sample" e rima dos Racionais MCs e gravou discos até hoje cultuados. Mas morreu há quatro anos como um gênio esquecido —a dimensão de seu talento é um segredo guardado por quem conviveu e trabalhou com ele.  Reprodução de foto do músico Cassiano, morto em 2021 - Eduardo Anizelli/Folhapress Isso não quer dizer que Cassiano tenha sido um desconhecido. Bastião do movimento black e precursor do soul brasileiro, angariou uma legião de fãs, vem sendo redescoberto por novas gerações e acumula milhões de "plays" no streaming. Sua obra que veio ao mundo, no entanto, é só uma parcela do que produziu de maneira informal durante toda a vida —e que segue inédita até hoje. Cassiano, morto aos 78, deixou um disco de inéditas incompleto, gravado em 1978 e hoje em posse da Sony. Também tem gravações "demo" feitas nas décadas de 1980 e 1990 que há anos circulam entre fãs e amigos. Isso fora o que William Magalhães, líder da banda Black Rio, chama de "baú do tesouro" —as dezenas de fitas cassete com gravações caseiras nunca ouvidas. "Ele nunca parou. Só parou para o mundo", diz Magalhães, que herdou do pai, Oberdan, não só a banda que reativou nos anos 2000, mas a amizade e o respeito de Cassiano. "Todo dia ele tocava piano, passeava com gente simples, trocava ideia. Era tão puro que às vezes a gente duvidava da bondade dele." O tal baú, ele diz, contém "coisas que fizemos em estúdio, composições dele tocando em casa, ideias, tudo inédito". "E só coisa boa. Cassiano nunca fez nada ruim, musicalmente falando. Com ou sem banda, arrasava. A voz, o jeito de compor. Era uma genialidade ímpar." Acervo de Cassiano Esse material está na casa que Cassiano dividiu com a mulher, Cássia, e a filha, Clara, no fim da vida, no bairro de Santa Teresa, no Rio de Janeiro. Há também registros escritos de memórias, recortes de revistas e jornais, filmagens de performances no palco e em casa, diversos instrumentos e até desenhos e colagens que ele costumava fazer. A viúva conta que o marido saía às vezes para o bar e para conversar na rua, mas "não era um homem de multidões". "Gostava de música e queria trabalhar o tempo todo, não era tanto de atividade social. Mas, se chamasse para o estúdio ou para o palco, esse era o grande sonho. Ele queria estar entre os músicos." Por volta de 2016, na reunião com o presidente da Sony, Paulo Junqueiro, para negociar o lançamento do disco de 1978, Cassiano estava mais interessado em apresentar o material mais novo que vinha criando. Não se opôs ao lançamento do álbum engavetado, mas suas prioridades eram diferentes daquelas da gravadora, e o papo esfriou. Descoberto antes desse encontro pelo produtor Rodrigo Gorky, hoje conhecido pelo trabalho com Pabllo Vittar, o disco chegou aos ouvidos de Junqueiro, fã declarado do cantor, que logo se interessou. Kassin, produtor que trabalhou na finalização póstuma do álbum "Racional 3", de Tim Maia, foi chamado para ajudar. No primeiro contato com as músicas, ele diz, sentiu que tinha "um negócio enorme na frente". O produtor conta que o trabalho que ele e Gorky fizeram foi apenas de "limpar e viabilizar", além de reorganizar e mixar as músicas, sem edições ou acréscimos. Em sua opinião, o álbum não precisa de muitos retoques para ser lançado. Segundo Junqueiro, ainda há o que ser feito. "Chamei Cassiano para ouvir, ele se lembrava de tudo, mas concordava que faltava muito. O que existe é uma pré-mixagem e, a partir dela, terminar o disco, caso a família queira finalizar. Na minha opinião, não está terminado. Mas, se a família achar que está terminado, tudo bem. Estamos tentando encontrar uma maneira de chegar lá." Um dos impeditivos para que o disco perdido de 1978 seja lançado é a falta de créditos aos músicos que participaram das gravações. Claudio Zoli, no entanto, lembra não só que gravou "backing vocals", mas sabe de vários dos instrumentistas envolvidos no disco. Tinha 14 anos e mal tocava violão, mas Cassiano vislumbrou um futuro para ele na música. "A gente se reunia numa casa lá em Jacarepaguá", diz Zoli. "Era aquele clima meio Novos Baianos, todo mundo dormindo lá, ensaiando. Nos reunimos para gravar esse disco da CBS, que não saiu, e o Cassiano fazia um ‘esquenta' antes de entrar em estúdio. Ficava tocando violão, falando sobre harmonia." Há alguns registros desses momentos de "esquenta" e também de estúdio feitos por Paulo Ricardo Botafogo, que é fotógrafo. Ele acreditava, sem muita certeza, que eram imagens da gravação de "Cuban Soul", disco de Cassiano do qual fez a foto da capa, gravado há 50 anos. Mas é bastante improvável que Zoli, nascido em 1964, tivesse apenas 11 anos nas imagens. Produtor que trabalhou com Tim Maia e foi amigo de Cassiano, Carlos Lemos se mudou da Philips, hoje Universal, para a CBS, hoje Sony, na segunda metade dos anos 1970. Pelas fotos, ele diz ter certeza que as gravações aconteceram no estúdio Haway, que era alugado pela CBS. Ele também confirma as identidades dos músicos lembrados por Zoli. São eles os guitarristas Paulinho Roquette, Paulinho Guitarra, Beto Cajueiro e Paulo Zdan, além de Dom Charles no piano e Paulo César Barros no baixo. Quem também corrobora as lembranças de Zoli é Paulo Zdan, médico de Cassiano, de quem se tornou grande amigo e foi letrista do disco "Cuban Soul". Morto há um ano, ele deu uma entrevista a Christian Bernard, que preparava um documentário sobre Cassiano —o filme acabou não autorizado pela família. A reportagem ouviu uma pré-mixagem desse disco de 1978, que destaca a faceta mais suingada de Cassiano. É um registro coeso de 12 faixas, mais funk do que soul, com vocais simultâneos cheios de candura e um flerte com a música disco daquela época. Para Kassin, é um registro "mais pop". "Se tivesse saído na época, teria feito sucesso", ele diz. Junqueiro, da Sony, concorda que as faixas mantêm uma coerência, mas que não é possível saber se isso se manteria caso Cassiano continuasse o trabalho no álbum. "Não tem nenhuma música que eu imagino que o Cassiano não botaria no disco. Talvez ele colocasse mais músicas. É um disco mais para cima, mas para ser mais dançante faltam arranjos." Clara, filha de Cassiano, lembra que o pai não tinha boas memórias da época que fez esse disco. "Não sei o que ele estava sentindo, mas não era um momento feliz para ele", ela diz. "Ele já não se via mais tanto como aquele Cassiano de 1978. Mas hoje reconheço a importância de lançar. Acho que todo mundo merece, mesmo que ele não tenha ficado tão empolgado assim com a ideia."  Retrato do cantor Cassiano em 1998 As gravações foram pausadas depois que Cassiano teve tuberculose e passou por uma cirurgia para a retirada de uma parte do pulmão. Mas as pessoas ouvidas pela reportagem também relatam um hábito constante do artista —demorar para finalizar seus trabalhos, ao ponto de as gravadoras desistirem de bancar as horas de estúdio e os músicos caros, pondo os projetos na geladeira. Bernard, o documentarista, também afirma que foi logo após as gravações desse álbum da CBS que Cassiano rompeu com Paulo Zdan e ficou 40 anos sem falar com ele. "Zoli depois tocou na banda do Cassiano, no show ‘Cassiano Disco Club'. Mas na verdade não tocou. Só ensaiou e, como nunca faziam shows, ele e o Zdan saíram e montaram a banda Brylho." A década de 1980 marcou o período de maior dificuldade para Cassiano, que passou a gravar esporadicamente, parou de lançar álbuns e enfrentou dificuldades financeiras. Cassiano nasceu em Campina Grande, na Paraíba, e no fim dos anos 1940 se mudou para o Rio de Janeiro com o pai, que ganhava a vida como pedreiro e era também um seresteiro e amigo de Jackson do Pandeiro. O menino acompanhava, tocando cavaquinho desde pequeno. Conheceu Amaro na Rocinha, onde morava, e formou com ele e o irmão, conhecido como Camarão, o Bossa Trio, que deu origem à banda Os Diagonais. O forte do trio eram os vocais simultâneos. Chegaram a gravar até para Roberto Carlos. "Ele era um mestre em vocalização. Era impressionante, um talento", diz Jairo Pires, que foi produtor de diversos discos de Tim Maia e depois diretor de grandes gravadoras. "Foram pioneiros nessa música negra. Esse tipo de vocalização era muito moderna. Ele já tinha essa coisa no sangue. Por isso que o Tim amava o Cassiano." Não demorou até que o lado compositor do artista fosse notado por gente da indústria. Em 1970, ele assinou quatro músicas do primeiro disco de Tim Maia e ainda é tido como um arranjador informal, por não ter sido creditado, daquele álbum. O Síndico havia voltado dos Estados Unidos impregnado pela música negra americana, e a única pessoa que tinha bagagem suficiente para conversar com ele era Cassiano. "Cassiano tinha esse dom", diz Carlos Lemos, que foi de músico a assistente de produção e depois produtor nessa época. "Ele era muito criativo e teve momentos na gravação que ele cantou a bola de praticamente o arranjo todo. Ele não escrevia, mas sabia o que queria. Praticamente nos três primeiros discos do Tim Maia ele estava junto." Dali em diante, o paraibano despontou numa carreira solo que concentra nos anos 1970 sua fase mais influente. São três discos —"Imagem e Som", de 1971, "Apresentamos Nosso Cassiano", de 1973, e o mais conhecido deles, "Cuban Soul: 18 Kilates", de 1976, que teve duas músicas em novelas da Globo. São elas "A Lua e Eu", o maior sucesso em sua voz, e "Coleção", que há 30 anos virou hit com Ivete Sangalo, na Banda Eva. Lemos se recorda de que chegou a dividir apartamento com Cassiano e outros músicos na rua Major Sertório, no centro de São Paulo, nos anos 1970. O artista estava apaixonado por uma mulher chamada Ingrid, para quem compôs algumas músicas. Era uma época inspirada para o cantor, que em 1975 atingiu sucesso com "A Lua e Eu", produzida por Lemos e feita ao longo de seis meses. "Produzir um disco com Cassiano demorava uma infinidade", afirma Carlos Lemos. "Ele entrava em estúdio, falava que queria assim e assado, chamava os músicos. Quando voltava para o aquário [espaço onde se ouvem as gravações], já tinha outra coisa na cabeça. Era difícil gravar. Você tinha que administrar uma criatividade excessiva. Ele falava ‘isso pode ficar muito melhor', e realmente ficava. Mas quem tem paciência? A gravadora quer vender logo. Mas era nessa essência que estava a verdade dele —e também seu sucesso." Lemos calcula que, na época em que faziam "A Lua e Eu", deixaram mais de 20 músicas prontas, mais de 500 horas de gravações em estúdio, uma quantidade de fitas suficiente para encher um cômodo inteiro. Procurada pela reportagem desde o fim do ano passado, a Universal, que hoje detém o acervo da Philips, onde essas gravações aconteceram, não respondeu sobre o paradeiro das fitas. O antigo assistente lembra que Jairo Pires, então um dos diretores da Philips, ficava desesperado com essa situação. "Ele tinha um temperamento difícil", diz Pires. "Fora do estúdio, era maravilhoso, um doce de criatura, mas, quando entrava no estúdio, era complicado." Cassiano era especialmente preocupado com o ritmo e a química entre baixo e bateria, com os quais gastava dias e mais dias fazendo e refazendo. Claudio Zoli diz que ele gravava cada parte da bateria separadamente para depois juntar, o que para Ed Motta era "uma invenção da bateria eletrônica antes de ela existir". Lemos conta que Cassiano tinha uma precisão detalhista. "Ele tinha uma visão de matemática forte, de como as frequências combinavam. E era o grande segredo de tudo, porque nem sempre o resultado da sonoridade é o que está na imaginação. Só vi coisa parecida em João Gilberto. E também com Tim Maia —que não respeitava quase ninguém, mas respeitava Cassiano." Outras duas pessoas ouvidas pela reportagem lembraram o pai da bossa nova para falar de Cassiano. Uma delas é Claudio Zoli, que destaca sua qualidade como compositor. O outro é Ed Motta, que foi amigo do paraibano e tentou diversas vezes viabilizar sua carreira. "Ele era o João Gilberto do soul brasileiro", afirma. "Mas, você imagine, um João Gilberto que não é abraçado pelos tropicalistas. Claro que ele tinha um gênio difícil, mas e a Maria Bethânia não tem?" Cassiano chegou a integrar a mesma gravadora de Bethânia e Caetano Veloso, a Philips, mas no braço da firma dedicado à música mais popular, a Polydor. Lemos, o assistente de produção, diz que o paraibano, na época, era humilde e não tinha rancor, mas não dava tanta importância aos baianos, "porque sua qualidade musical era muito superior à de todos eles".  Capa do álbum 'Cuban Soul: 18 Kilates', de Cassiano, de 1976 - Reprodução "Ainda tinha uma rivalidade interna dentro da Philips, criada naturalmente. Poucos sabem que quem sustentava toda a estrutura da gravadora para os baianos serem os caras eram os artistas da Polydor. A Philips gastava e tinha nome, amava os baianos, mas eles nunca venderam como Tim Maia. Vendiam coisa de 50 mil cópias", diz o produtor. Os desentendimentos com a indústria foram gerando mais problemas com o passar do tempo. Paulo Ricardo Botafogo conta que Cassiano recusava oportunidades de aparecer em programas de TV, dar entrevistas e ser fotografado. "Não sei se foi sacaneado, mas ele era um cara muito fácil de enganar. Era muito puro, quase uma criança", afirma. "Cassiano ganhava dinheiro e distribuía entre os músicos. E imagine o que ele passou. Preto, pobre e nordestino. Ele se achava feio. Chamavam ele de ‘Paraíba'", diz Paulo Ricardo Botafogo. Quando "Cuban Soul" foi lançado, depois das centenas de horas de gravações lembradas por Carlos Lemos, o cantor deixou a gravadora. Há na capa do disco um detalhe que, segundo Botafogo, Cassiano interpretou como uma indireta sutil contra ele —é um espaço entre as sílabas da primeira palavra do título do álbum, deixando um "cu" em destaque. Uma reportagem deste jornal de 2001 retratou a dificuldade de Cassiano para gravar. "Levamos para várias gravadoras, mas nenhuma teve interesse, até por ele estar há muito fora da mídia. Mas sua participação em ‘Movimento' prova que ele está a mil, numa fase criativa. Ele tem umas 150 músicas no baú", disse William Magalhães na época.  CD com músicas inéditas do músico Cassiano, morto em 2021 - Eduardo Anizelli/Folhapress "Movimento", o disco que marcou o retorno da Black Rio sob o comando do filho de Oberdan, traz composições, arranjos e a voz de Cassiano, como a faixa "Tomorrow". É uma das músicas que a dupla trabalhou em conjunto, incluindo uma gravação dela apenas com o paraibano cantando, além de duas canções já famosas de maneira informal entre fãs e amigos do artista, "Pérola" e "Maldito Celular". Feitas entre 1993 e 1995, foram gravadas como "demo" e nunca lançadas comercialmente. Magalhães já havia tocado teclado e piano com Cassiano alguns anos antes. Foi quando Ed Motta conseguiu convencer um italiano chamado Willy David a bancar um disco do cantor. "Falei que ele era um gênio, o Stevie Wonder brasileiro", diz. "George Benson era amigo desse David e ia participar do disco. Chegou até a ouvir algumas músicas." Eles gravaram as "demos" no estúdio de Guto Graça Mello, no Rio de Janeiro. As fitas em melhor qualidade dessas gravações, nunca lançadas, estariam com David, que nunca mais foi localizado depois de ter ido morar em Cuba. Nem mesmo por Christian Bernard, que o procurou exaustivamente nos últimos anos para seu documentário. Há, no entanto, cópias dessas faixas em qualidade pior com amigos do cantor. "São umas oito músicas inéditas, coisas que ele já tinha guardado por anos", diz Ed Motta. "Não era um disco pronto, mas tinha qualidade de disco." Na segunda metade da década de 1980, Cassiano passava por dificuldades financeiras até para conseguir o que comer. Tinha apenas um violão antigo, de estrutura quadrada, que o pai fez, ainda na Paraíba, e que a família guarda até hoje. Morava no Catete, no Rio de Janeiro, e costumava gravar em estúdios liberados por amigos nas horas vagas —caso da estrutura do músico e produtor Junior Mendes, na Barra da Tijuca.  Violão feito pelo pai do músico Cassiano, morto em 2021 - Eduardo Anizelli/Folhapress Cassiano viveu um breve renascimento artístico na virada dos anos 1980 para os 1990. Ele se casou com Cássia, aprendeu a tocar piano e fez um show lotado no Circo Voador, registrado em vídeo. Gravou também o álbum "Cedo ou Tarde", com um repertório de canções antigas, que saiu pela Sony em 1991 e tem participações de Djavan, Marisa Monte, Sandra de Sá e Luiz Melodia, entre outros. Esse álbum não vendeu tão bem, o que frustrou os planos de gravar material novo, mas, com o sucesso de "Coleção" na voz de Ivete Sangalo, há 30 anos, Cassiano conseguiu comprar um apartamento às margens da lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, no Rio de Janeiro. Praticamente não fazia shows e sobrevivia dos direitos autorais que ganhava com suas composições. No início da década de 2000, William Magalhães chegou a viabilizar a gravação de um disco para Cassiano. Diretor da gravadora Regata, Bernardo Vilhena tinha US$ 140 mil para um álbum de Claudio Zoli, que acabou indo para outro selo. Com isso, decidiu redirecionar todo esse dinheiro ao paraibano. "Quando Cassiano soube disso, disse ‘US$ 140 mil é só a luva'", diz Magalhães. "Ele era muito orgulhoso, queria que as pessoas o tratassem à altura que ele se via. Seria o dinheiro para começar a produzir. A gente conseguiria fazer, mas ele recusou por causa dos traumas que tinha da indústria. Quando soube que o dinheiro era do Zoli, ainda se sentiu desmerecido, por ser um discípulo dele. Não tirando o direito dele, mas acho que ele viajou um pouco nesse trauma." Ao longo das últimas décadas, Magalhães diminuiu o contato com Cassiano, mas eles se reaproximaram no fim da vida do cantor. Falaram sobre fazer novos projetos, e o paraibano disse que o líder da Black Rio, que ele admirava por ser um grande músico negro, era uma das poucas pessoas com quem ele aceitaria trabalhar àquela altura. "O que eu posso dizer é que o Cassiano ainda vai dar muito pano para manga", afirma Magalhães. "O dia que a Cássia abrir esse baú dele, eu sou o primeiro da fila." Há muitas razões pelas quais Cassiano não conseguiu deixar uma obra mais volumosa, e elas não têm a ver com o respeito que ele tem até hoje no meio da música. Mas o ícone da soul music brasileira encarava essa devoção com ceticismo. "Mestre é o cacete. Não adianta falar isso. Me bota no estúdio", ele dizia, segundo Cássia, a viúva. "Era assim. Todo mundo pira nas ideias do cara, mas ninguém deixa ele gravar. O empresário André Midani chegou a declarar que as gravadoras devem um disco ao Cassiano", afirma ela. "Tudo bem, é ‘cult', é um nicho, mas é um nicho importante e não é tão pequeno assim." O último "não" que Cassiano ouviu de uma gravadora talvez tenha sido nos momentos posteriores à reunião de 2016 com Paulo Junqueiro. Depois de falar à reportagem, o presidente da Sony pediu para marcar uma nova entrevista, em que admitiu ter ouvido o material novo que o paraibano queria lançar e não quis apostar naquelas músicas. A Sony passava por um período complicado, ele diz. Tinha feito uma reestruturação em que perdeu muita gente de sua equipe. "Do que ouvi, não fiquei tão fascinado e, quando pensei em fazer discos inéditos do Cassiano àquela altura, disse ‘não consigo'. Não tinha estrutura financeira nem emocional." Posto isso, ele acrescenta que se arrepende profundamente. "Ajoelho no milho todos os dias. Tive uma oportunidade de ouro nas mãos, de registrar as últimas obras dele, e a perdi. Não tenho nem palavras para pedir desculpas à família, aos fãs e a mim mesmo. Não tenho como ser mais honesto do que estou sendo. Se gostei ou não, foda-se. Se vai vender para caralho ou não, foda-se." Junqueiro se põe à disposição da família para lançar o disco de 1978, diz que tinha seus motivos para fazer o que fez, mas errou. "Se alguém tivesse me contado essa história, eu ia falar ‘olha que filho da puta, não gravou as coisas do Cassiano'. Então, se eu teria essa visão sobre alguém, eu no mínimo tenho que ter essa visão sobre mim também." Hoje, Cassiano vive no imaginário por sua produção nos anos 1970 e pelos fragmentos que deixou espalhados em fitas e memórias. Dizia que fazer música era como o mar —"ondas que vêm e vão, mas nunca estão no mesmo lugar". Os fãs, por sua vez, aguardam uma movimentação das marés que traga para a superfície pelo menos algumas dessas pérolas submersas.

A (relatively) in-depth analysis of the single Rip It Up by Orange Juice (as well as some other general stuff) in just under thirty minutes.After releasing a series of singles on the independent Postcard label, the debut album by Orange Juice 'You Can't Hide Your Love Forever', was realeased by Polydor in February 1982. The album received mixed reviews. Retrospectively, however, it is often regarded as a classic of the era and a key influence on the C86 generation. The group's second album 'Rip It Up', issued in November 1982 featured the single of the same name, which reached number 8 on the UK Singles Chart in February 1983. Referencing both Chic and the Buzzcocks, the record galvanised Orange Juice's reputation as one of the brightest bands in the 'new pop' scene. In this episode I am in discussion with Dr. Andrew Webber.I do hope you enjoy this episode.Mathew Woodallhttps://buymeacoffee.com/lownoiseWhy buy me a coffee?Low Noise is proudly ad-free. If you would like to to say thank you for any of the content you have enjoyed (and help support the continuation of creating more), the above link provides a way to make a small donation of your choice (I also function on coffee!).Feel free to leave a note with your donation to let me know what you enjoy about the podcast or any topics you would like me to discuss in the future.

My DJ set recorded live at Ro-Loz, Oswestry, 31st January 2025 1. RL Grime – Pressure ft Anna Lunoe (Valentino Khan remix) WeDidIt. 2. Miss Mad – Tell Me Your Story (original mix) GaGa Records. 3. Simian Mobile Disco – Hustler (original mix) Wichita Recordings. 4. Noir – All About House Music (Marc Spence bootleg) 5. Hannah Wants, Chris Lorenzo – Girls (original mix) Food Music. 6. Helen&Boys – Topic (original mix) Monotonik Cutz. 7. Beth Lydi – Spilled Beans (original mix) SNOE. 8. Missy, Gettoblaster, Tomfisk – Freak Hoes (original mix) WyldCard. 9. Anna Lunoe, Born Dirty – Badass (Tombz remix) Mad Decent. 10. Jerome Price – Escape (original mix) The Myth of Nyx. 11. Invinta – Protein (original mix) Self-release. 12. Hannah Wants – Close to You (original mix) Etiquette. 13. Michael Felix – Flight to the Moon (original mix) Hungry Koala Records. 14. Green Velvet, Detlef – Alright (original mix) Relief. 15. Helen&Boys – DA (original mix) Monotonik Cutz. 16. Will Clarke, HoneyLuv, Moxie Knox – Move Your Body (original mix) Polydor. 17. Rob Gritton – Drifter (original mix) Moon Island Records. 18. Miguel Bastida – Come on Everybody (Wade remix) Be One Records. 19. Helen&Boys – I Made This (original mix) Monotonik Cutz. 20. Born Dirty – In the Shadows (original mix) Insomniac. 21. Gene Farris – Move Your Body (original mix) Defected. 22. Valy Mo, Avi Sic – The Music (original mix) Seeing is Believing. 23. Shaggy – It Wasn't Me (Chris Ultranova bootleg) Free Download https://soundcloud.com/chrisultranovamusic/shaggy-it-wasnt-me-chris-ultranova-remix-free-download 24. The Police – Message in a Bottle (Kadenza Klub bootleg) Free Download https://soundcloud.com/kadenzahousemusic/the-police-message-in-a-bottle-kadenza-klub-mix-analogue-master 25. The Killers – Mr. Brightside (Just Fine, Gorje Hewek bootleg) Glasgow Underground. 26. Tapia, Alexia Malo – Déconnecté (Alexey Union remix) Phisica. 27. Anna Lunoe, Wuki – What You Need (original mix) Mad Decent. 28. Walker & Royce, VNSSA – Word (Chris Lorenzo remix) HotBOi Records 29. Fatboy Slim – Right Here, Right Now (Camelphat remix) Toolroom Records. 30. Arielle Free – Feels So Good (original mix) Defected. 31. Selena Fader – With the Music (original mix) That's Why You're Dancing. 32. Invinta – Gud (original mix) Self-release. 33. Marie Davidson – Work It (Soulwax remix) Ninja Tune. 34, Georgia – About Work, The Dancefloor (Krystal Klear remix) Domino Records. 35. Khira Li – Saint (original mix) Hexagon. 36. Sara Bluma – Hollaback Girl (original mix) Sanctuary Lab. 37. Keepin' It Heale – Teardrops ft Michaela May (original mix) DeeVu Records. 38. Remady – Plata o Plomo (original mix) Kallias. 39. Charlie Lane – There for You (original mix) DeeVu Records. 40. Anna Lunoe – 303 (original mix) Mad Decent. 41. Adventures of Stevie V, Pawsa – Dirty Cash, Money Talks (original mix) Altra Moda. 42. Cheesecake Boys – Holiday ft Betty Love (Lollypop remix) PromoStar Records.

La maison mitoyenne de deux chambres où David Bowie a vécu enfant à Bromley est désormais sur le marché pour 449.500 livres sterling. Un enregistrement inédit de Yes reprenant "Eleanor Rigby" des Beatles vient d'être dévoilé en ligne. Après AC/DC : INXS, Dua Lipa a tenu sa promesse de reprendre une chanson d'un artiste local dans chaque ville où s'arrête sa tournée ‘'Radical Optimism'', en interprétant sa version du classique "Never Tear Us Apart" d'INXS à la Qudos Bank Arena de Sydney, en Australie, le 26 mars. Après plus de 25 ans d'absence discographique, Bachman-Turner Overdrive fait son grand retour avec "60 Years Ago''. Bien que Sum 41 ait terminé sa tournée d'adieu en janvier et sorti son dernier album ‘'Heaven : x : Hell'' l'an dernier, le groupe punk canadien offre encore quelques surprises à ses fans. Mots-Clés : icône, 1953, famille, East End, propriété, quartier résidentiel, Bickley, frontière, annonce immobilière, tranquillité, 1969, sessions, studios, Polydor, Londres, direction, producteur, John Anthony, publié, document d'archives, version, introduction psychédélique, guitariste, Peter Banks, claviériste, Tony Kaye, basse, Chris Squire, relais, performance, Jon Anderson, fin, morceau, rappel, chanteuse, coup d'envoi, tournée mondiale, Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne, héros locaux, pop star,Highway To Hell, Extraordinaire, foule,extrait, Randy Bachman, genèse, hommage, Winnipeg, ville, Tal Bachman, KoKo Bachman, Fred Turner, chant, solo, Neil Young, scène musicale, local, créativité, Liverpool, Amérique du Nord, véritable, melting-pot, talent, Victoria, Colombie-Britannique, États-Unis, reprise explosive, Sleep Now in the Fire, Rage Against the Machine, version acoustique, Landmines", extrait, sessions, communiqué, gratitude, fans, session, célébrer, monde. --- Classic 21 vous informe des dernières actualités du rock, en Belgique et partout ailleurs. Le Journal du Rock, en direct chaque jour à 7h30 et 18h30 sur votre radio rock'n'pop. Merci pour votre écoute Plus de contenus de Classic 21 sur www.rtbf.be/classic21 Ecoutez-nous en live ici: https://www.rtbf.be/radio/liveradio/classic21 ou sur l'app Radioplayer BelgiqueRetrouvez l'ensemble des contenus de la RTBF sur notre plateforme Auvio.be Et si vous avez apprécié ce podcast, n'hésitez pas à nous donner des étoiles ou des commentaires, cela nous aide à le faire connaître plus largement. Découvrez nos autres podcasts : Le journal du Rock : https://audmns.com/VCRYfsPComic Street (BD) https://audmns.com/oIcpwibLa chronique économique : https://audmns.com/NXWNCrAHey Teacher : https://audmns.com/CIeSInQHistoires sombres du rock : https://audmns.com/ebcGgvkCollection 21 : https://audmns.com/AUdgDqHMystères et Rock'n Roll : https://audmns.com/pCrZihuLa mauvaise oreille de Freddy Tougaux : https://audmns.com/PlXQOEJRock&Sciences : https://audmns.com/lQLdKWRCook as You Are: https://audmns.com/MrmqALPNobody Knows : https://audmns.com/pnuJUlDPlein Ecran : https://audmns.com/gEmXiKzRadio Caroline : https://audmns.com/WccemSkAinsi que nos séries :Rock Icons : https://audmns.com/pcmKXZHRock'n Roll Heroes: https://audmns.com/bXtHJucFever (Erotique) : https://audmns.com/MEWEOLpEt découvrez nos animateurs dans cette série Close to You : https://audmns.com/QfFankxDistribué par Audiomeans. Visitez audiomeans.fr/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Floid Maicas presenta. Remember 90´s Radio Show #176 Programa de radio con la mejor música Dance Remember de los 90s y comienzo de los 2000, presentado por Floid Maicas, secciónes "Conexión Castellón" con Dj Rusclo y el "Megamix de la Semana" con Óscar Prado. Artistas, Dj´s, formaciones de la época nos envian saludos al programa. 1. Lutricia McNeal - 365 Days (M12's Extended Mix) 2. Paps N Skar - You Want My Love (Din Don Da Da) (Extended Mix) 3. DJ Dado & Simone Jay - Ready Or Not (Stockhouse Club Mix) 4. Jayne Montgomery - ...Baby One More Time (Definitive Mix) 5. Tina Cousins - Killin' Time (Sash! Maxi Mix) Sección "Conexión Castellón" con Dj Rusclo, ésta semana nos trae en exclusiva la nueva producción musical del artista, Just Luis, una cover del mítico "Lover Why", además nos envía saludos al programa. 1. Renegade - The Sparrows & The Nightingales (Factory "8" Edit) 2. Da Tekno Warriors Feat. DJ Bam Bam - Pump Up Da Bass (Original Mix) 3. Saint Etien - I Believe (Head Horny's & Dani Daniel Rmx) 4. Invisible Limits - Golden Dreams (New Order Edit) 5. System F - Out Of The Blue (Original Mix) Sección "El Megamix de la Semana" con Óscar Prado, en ésta ocasión nos trae el recopilatorio "Eurodance 3" de la discográfica Polydor en el año 1994, mezclado por David Ferrero y Pedro del Moral. 1. D 4 MA - Indie (Up Mix) 2. Skudero - Dehlia (Remix '98) 3. Xque? - Vol. 6 + info: web: www.remember90sradioshow.com facebook: www.facebook.com/Remember90sradioshow twitter: www.twitter.com/90sradioshow instagram: www.instagram.com/remember90sradioshow

Speellijst Zondag 23 maart 2025 Boekenweek Een heel verschil (Gershwin/Long) Robert Long, Margriet Hermans 2'55 Van de cd Uit liefde en respect voor Gershwin Universal 477 234-0 Lied over woorden (Leemans/Leemans, Dusault) Sara Leemans 2'16 Van de cd Hier is 't Eigen beheer Onze taal (Nieuwint) Pieter Nieuwint 2'52 Van cd/boekje Pieter Nieuwint dicht en zingt Mirasound Moedertaal (De Haas) Alex de Haas 6'33 Van de LP Alex de Haas, de dichter-zanger Polydor 656 010 De commissie klemtonen (Van Kooten, De Bie) Van Kooten & De Bie 3'57 Van de cd Willen niet dood SVCD 7 Nazi van de taal (Verburg) Roel C. Verburg 3'20 eigen opname Dierentaal (De Corte) Jules de Corte 2'00 Eigen opname Meppelerbroek (De Jonge) Freek de Jonge 3'02 Van de cd De toehoorder Eigen beheer Smartlap (Bannink/Wilmink) Piet Hendriks 2'09 Van de LP De Taalstraat Ariola 301.327 Goon (Van Roozendaal) Maarten van Roozendaal 5'00 Van de cd Noem het maar vrienden DODO 015 Bergen bergen (Torn) Kees Torn 4'32 Eigen opname De dubbele punt (Polzer) Drs. P 2'30 Van de cd Hoep hoep hoezee voor Drs. P Philips 832 944-2 De zachte g (Bannink/Boerstoel) Gerard Cox 2'19 Van de LP De Taalstraat Ariola 301.327

From the audio to the visual, we delve into the wondrous world of the album sleeve with Bill Smith, of Bill Smith Studios, responsible for some wonderful images in the 80s. 1. THE JAM (1977-1981) After getting his foot in the door at Polydor in the 70s, Bill has a breakthrough with The Jam. He is responsible for the artwork for all their albums up to and including Sound Affects as well as a number of single sleeves. More importantly, he has one shot at the iconic The Jam logo. RIP Rick. 2. THE CURE (1979-80)From mod to goth, Bill moves from the immediacy of The Jam to the more surreal, indie world of The Cure. Bill discusses working on their first three  LP's. One a bit of an outlier in their back catalogue,  the other more typical.But which household appliance WAS Robert Smith??3. GENESIS (1980-83)  Another contrast, this time the prog-rockers entering their 80s pop period with some truly iconic sleeves for Duke, Abacab and Genesis. Fortuitious accidentslead to the iconic Abacab sleeve. AI won't/can't do that shit.Discussion moves onto discussing copyright and who owns the rights to artwork; the artist or the designer. Then talk on the general LP artwork package; sleeve, back sleeve, inner sleeve, disc labels, etc ending on why he didn't do the cover to Invisible Touch.4. THOMAS DOLBY (1981-82)A very special collaboration with former guest, Thomas Dolby, leads to uniquely brilliant artwork for The Golden Age of Wireless and related singles.5. NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL MUSIC (1983)Nowt more iconic in the UK than the Now series and Bill was there from Vol 1.billsmithstudios.com80sography@gmail.comTwitter @80sographyBlue Sky @80sographySend us a text

Speellijst Zondag 2 maart 2025 Kus me met je ogen (E. Schmimscheimer/C. van Doesburgh) Willeke Alberti 4'08 Van de cd Live in Carré Dino DNCD 1480 Je veux de l'amour R. Charlebois/R. v. h. Groenewoud) Raymond van het Groenewoud 4'14 Van de cd Maan bij nacht Polygram 534 982-2 Dialoog (Van Luyn, Boddé) Mike Boddé en Thomas van Luyn 2'25 Van de dvd Ajuinen en Look PIAS Geen slechte moeder (Jasper Slijderink/Lisa Ostermann) Lisa Ostermann 3'27 Spotify Heel even klein (Merlot) Tess Merlot 2'49 Eigen opname Dochter (Van Roozendaal) Maarten van Roozendaal 1'34 Van cd bij boek De gemene deler DODO 022 Water bij de wijn (J. Blok/A. Schmidt) Wim Sonneveld 5'30 Van de cd Theatershows 1 Mercury 838 467-2 De vleugelman (Bomans) Godfried Bomans 5'45 Eigen opname Self-fulfilling Prophecy (Verburg) Roel C. Verburg 2'30 Oom Bastiaan (G. Vleugel/J. Stokkermans) Jasperina de Jong 3'40 Van de cd Uit de shows van de jaren '70 EMI 7949412 Klaartjes moeder (Wilmink/Bannink) Cilly Dartell, Harry Bannink 2'18 Eigen opname Wij vonden elkaar (Dolman/Van Mechelen) Margreet Dolman en dokter Valentijn 3'34 Van de cd Wij vonden elkaar Munich CDJD07MD De eerste klant (Speenhoff) Gerard Cox 3'24 Van de cd Wat je zingt dat ben je zelf NN 500.203-2 Maarten Maarten (H. v. Veen, E. Leerkes) Herman van Veen, Jannemien Cnossen viool Van de cd Je zoenen zijn zoeter Polydor 543 009-2

durée : 00:25:07 - Bernard de Bosson, pianiste de jazz, ancien directeur de Warner Music et président des victoires de la musique (2/5) - par : Jérôme Badini - Bernard de Bosson aime les gens et cela s'entend. En particulier les artistes qui le lui rendent bien, appréciant ce personnage de roman, tout en superlatif. Il est la mémoire vivante de la musique enregistrée des soixante dernières années et il en demeure l'un des producteurs les plus respectés. - réalisé par : Béatrice Trichet

Speellijst 9 februari 2024 Het menselijk lichaam Spam en sneu (I. de Wijs) Ivo de Wijs 1'02 Eigen opname Ik ben een wonder! Michiel Wetzer 4'00 Spotify Voor een naakt iemand (Wilmink/Bannink) Joost Prinsen 1'08 van de cd Een kop die je zelf niet bevalt BASTA 309139-2 Oh mijn lichaam (F. Mulder/M. v. Dijk) Adèle Bloemendaal 3'23 Van de cd Adèle CNR 655.336-2 Lien (Van Roozendaal) Maarten van Roozendaal 6'25 Van de cd Aan gezelligheid ten onder DODO 4 Het lichaam van de vrouw (P. v. Vliet/P. Eskes) Paul van Vliet 4'25 Van de cd Er is nog zoveel niet gezegd EMI 7956142 Kaal (Van Kooten, de Bie) Koot en Bie 4'36 Van de cd De tweede langspeelplaat van het Simplistisch verbond SVCD 2 Gek op je nek (Kappers) Marnix Kappers 2'20 Van de LP Als je het niet erg vindt ELF 1591 Oren (Drs. P) Drs. P 1'20 Van de cd Drs. P compilé sur cd Polydor 847 920-2 Arme penis (Van het Groenewoud) Raymond van het Groenewoud 3'35 van de cd Omdat ik van je hou EMI 50999 Het lid van Jan Smit (Wiersma) Dorine Wiersma 2'25 Van de cd Dat doet ze anders nooit Eigen beheer Alie (Sonneveld) Wim Sonneveld 3'27 Van de cd Theatershows – 3 Mercury 838-469-2 De voorkant (Wilmink/Bannink) Wieteke van Dort 3'10 Van de LP J.J. de Bom Polydor 2441 027 Ik ben onzeker (Klaasen en Sandifort) Alex Klaasen, Martine Sandifort 3'38 Van de cd Volgend jaar lach je d'r om CD HSP 52 KS De oren van koning Maggelhaan (A. Schmidt/H. Bannink) Harry Bannink 3'33 Van de cd Hary Bannink zingt! QS 900.915-2

Hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot pay tribute to the late president Jimmy Carter by revisiting a discussion on his character and love for music with the director of the documentary, Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President. Plus, they will bid farewell to music journalist Stanley Booth, the most profound chronicler of the Rolling Stones.Join our Facebook Group: https://bit.ly/3sivr9TBecome a member on Patreon: https://bit.ly/3slWZvcSign up for our newsletter: https://bit.ly/3eEvRnGMake a donation via PayPal: https://bit.ly/3dmt9lUSend us a Voice Memo: Desktop: bit.ly/2RyD5Ah Mobile: sayhi.chat/soundops Featured Songs:Bob Dylan, "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," Bringing It All Back Home, Columbia, 1965The Beatles, "With A Little Help From My Friends," Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Parlophone, 1967The Allman Brothers Band, "Ramblin' Man," Brothers and Sisters, Capricorn, 1973Bob Dylan, "Maggie's Farm," Bringing It All Back Home, Columbia, 1965Bob Dylan, "Gotta Serve Somebody," Slow Train Coming, Columbia, 1979The Rolling Stones, "Gimme Shelter," Let It Bleed, Decca, 1969The Rolling Stones, "No Expectations," Beggars Banquet, Decca, 1968The Rolling Stones, "Street Fighting Man," Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!, Decca, 1970The Rolling Stones, "Around And Around," 12 x 5, London, 1964The Rolling Stones, "Honky Tonk Women," Honky Tonk Women (Single), Decca, 1969The Rolling Stones, "You Gotta Move," Sticky Fingers, Polydor, 1971The Rolling Stones, "Sympathy For the Devil," Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!, Decca, 1970The Rolling Stones, "Wild Horses," Sticky Fingers, Polydor, 1971Robyn Hitchcock, "The Man Who Loves the Rain," Shufflemania!, Tiny Ghost, 2022See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speellijst Zondag 19 januari 2025 Knuffelbeer (Ko de Laat) Erik van Os 1'00 Facebook Boevenlied (Wilmink/Bannink) Edwin Rutten 1'00 Van de LP De Film van Ome Willem Philips 6440 202 Snoepie (Donaldson/Cahn/Geelen) Edwin Rutten 3'30 Van de LP Rutten troef Relax 33.005 Koningen zijn te rijk (Van Otterloo/Geelen) Edwin Rutten 3'14 Van de LP Rutten troef Relax 33.005 Adam en Eva (T. v. Verre) Edwin Rutten 2'43 Van de LP Hoe later op de avond VARAGram 0031 De ouwe Jacob (Schmidt/Bannink) Edwin Rutten 3'25 Van de cd Een nieuwe jas COL 4690832 Bruidje trek je truitje uit (C. Porter/H. Geelen) Edwin Rutten 2'34 Van de cd Met mij, that's all JBTD 9309 Radio (Lemaire/Schmidt) Sophie Stein, Hetty Blok, Rob de Vries 2'53 Eigen opname Kaas (Visser) Joop en Jessica 3'00 Youtube De lente (P. Schaap) Peter Andreas 2'34 Van de LP Al wat verzwegen is Polydor 656 005 Don Juan (Seunnenga) Jankobus Seunnenga 2'23 Van de cd Voor de eeuwigheid Eigen beheer Concrete R&B over goede seks (Jasper Slijderink/Lisa Ostermann/Teije Bartstra) Lisa Ostermann 5'12 Spotify Doden met verlof (M. v. Roozendaal) Manuela Kemp 3'38 Van de cd Slapeloze nachten CNR 2004950 Een kras in de tijd (Lars Boom/Martin van Dijk) Rob van de Meeberg 2'33 Van de cd Een kras in de tijd Eigen beheer Sarah (L. Kuhr) Lenny Kuhr 3'12 Van de cd Lenny Kuhr Excel96675

Speellijst Zondag 22 december 2024 Kerst Vegan Flappie (Van 't Hek/Kokken, Ensink) Diederick Ensink 3'08 Spotify. Bakske vol met stro (Urbanus) Urbanus 3'46 Van de cd Tien jaar Live Philips 814 533-2 Alles werd anders Vlucht (H. v. Veen/E. Leerkes) ) Herman van Veen 0'52  Een beter land (L. Spee, W. Wilmink) Herman van Veen 3'08 Een wonder (H. v. Veen) Herman van Veen 1'27 Van de cd Er was eens… Polydor 543 418-2 De ster van Bethlehem (Vermeulen/De Jonge) Neerlands Hoop 4'03 Van de cd Neerlands Hoop in Panama EMI 0946 342345 2 8 December (De Corte) Jules de Corte 3'24 Eigen opname Christmas bij de Hendersons (Hermans) Toon Hermans 6'18 Van de cd Altijd zal ik van je houden NN 9811907 Omstreeks Kerst (T. Lehrer/J. v.d. Merwe) Lenny Kuhr 2'16 Youtube De laatste kerstboom (Spinvis) Spinvis 3'00 Van de cd Lutke Krub en zeven kerstliedjes Excel96826 Jaloers op Jezus (S. Gaaikema/B. Zimmerman) Marjolein Sligte 2'38 Van de LP Publiek Sphinx KLP 2291 Hete kerst (Dorrestijn) Hans Dorrestijn 2'34 Eigen opname Kerstfeest zonder hondje (Klaasen/Groenteman) Alex Klaasen 4'07 Van de cd Santa Klaasen Eigen beheer Natte kerst (P. Simon/S. Paulis) Ida de Nijs 2'44 Van de cd Mijn Kerstwens Eigen beheer  Kerstwereld (Long) Robert Long 2'40 Van de cd in die dagen… Universal 477 233-8

Hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot share favorite tracks that they loved as TV show theme songs. Plus, the hosts review the new album from Kendrick Lamar.Join our Facebook Group: https://bit.ly/3sivr9TBecome a member on Patreon: https://bit.ly/3slWZvcSign up for our newsletter: https://bit.ly/3eEvRnGMake a donation via PayPal: https://bit.ly/3dmt9lUSend us a Voice Memo: Desktop: bit.ly/2RyD5Ah Mobile: sayhi.chat/soundops Featured Songs:The Handsome Family, "Far from Any Road," Singing Bones, Carrot Top, 2003The Beatles, "With A Little Help From My Friends," Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Parlophone, 1967Kendrick Lamar, "squabble up," GNX, PGLang and Interscope, 2024Kendrick Lamar, "reincarnated," GNX, PGLang and Interscope, 2024Kendrick Lamar, "tv off (feat. Lefty Gunplay)," GNX, PGLang and Interscope, 2024Kendrick Lamar, "gloria," GNX, PGLang and Interscope, 2024Kendrick Lamar, "wacced out murals," GNX, PGLang and Interscope, 2024Mick Jagger, "Strange Game," Strange Game (Single), Polydor, 2022Johnny Rivers, "Secret Agent Man," ...And I Know You Wanna Dance, Imperial, 1966Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, "Red Right Hand," Let Love In, Mute, 1994Massive Attack, "Teardrop," Mezzanine, Virgin, 1998Gavin DeGraw, "I Don't Want To Be," Chariot, J, 2004Carole King and Louise Goffin, "Where You Lead I Will Follow," Our Little Corner of the World: Music from Gilmore Girls, Rhino, 2002RJD2, "A Beautiful Mine," Magnificent City Instrumentals, Decon, 2006The Coup, "My Favorite Mutiny (feat. Black Thought and Talib Kweli)," Pick a Bigger Weapon, Epitaph, 2006Norma Tenaga, "You're Dead," Walkin' My Cat Named Dog, Rhino, 1966Godfather of Harlem, "Just in Case (feat. Swizz Beatz, Rick Ross & DMX)," Just in Case (feat. Swizz Beatz, Rick Ross & DMX) (Single), Epic, 2019The High Strung, "The Luck You Got," Moxie Bravo, Paper Thin, 2005Blind Boys of Alabama, "Way Down In the Hole," The Spirit Of The Century, Real World, 2001Regina Spektor, "You've Got Time," You've Got Time (Single), Sire, 2013Quincy Jones, "Sanford & Son (The Streebeater)," You've Got It Bad Girl, A&M, 1973Aloe Blacc, "I Need a Dollar," Good Things, Stones Throw, 2010Bob Dylan, "Buckets of Rain ," Blood on the Tracks, Columbia, 1975See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This week, hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot welcome Andy Cirzan, their favorite collector of offbeat holiday music, for their annual celebration of all things strange and festive.Join our Facebook Group: https://bit.ly/3sivr9TBecome a member on Patreon: https://bit.ly/3slWZvcSign up for our newsletter: https://bit.ly/3eEvRnGMake a donation via PayPal: https://bit.ly/3dmt9lUSend us a Voice Memo: Desktop: bit.ly/2RyD5Ah Mobile: sayhi.chat/soundops Featured Songs:Unknown, "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," Unknown, Unknown, UnknownThe Beatles, "With A Little Help From My Friends," Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Parlophone, 1967Herman Apple, "Let It Snow," (Single), Unknown, UnknownJohnny Dollar, "Truck Drivers Lament," (Single), Chart, 1970Vin Bruce, "Christmas on the Bayou," (Single), Swallow, UnknownRed Ellis and the Huron Valley Boys, "Christmas Is Not Far Away," (Single), Unknown, UnknownBuddy Thornton, "Ole Santa Is Coming to Town," (Single), Four Star, 1953Unknown, "EZ Listening," (Single), Unknown, UnknownThurmon McKinney, "Santa & the Truck Driver," (Single), MCW, 1974Bobby Allen & the Exceptions, "Lonely Christmas Tears," (Single), Soul Sound, UnknownGene Adkins & the Tune Toppers, "What Christmas Is," (Single), SRC, 1952Jimmie Davis, "Christmas Choo Choo," (Single), Decca, 1953Unknown, "Sleigh Ride," Unknown, Unknown, UnknownJimmy Wheeler, "Snowflakes Falling On My Head," (Single), Unknown, UnknownMimi Rogers, "Snow Blossoms," (Demo), Unknown, UnknownOriginal Sons Of Christ, "Christmas Comes But Once A Year," (Single), Unknown, UnknownClyde Lasley, "Santa Came Home Drunk," (Single), Sundown, 1967Cordell Jackson, "Rock N' Roll Christmas," (Single), Moon, 1956Cordell Jackson, "Beboppers Christmas," (Single b-side), Moon, 1956Unknown, "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer," Unknown, Unknown, UnknownMick Jagger, "Strange Game," From the Apple TV+ Original Series Slow Horses, Polydor, 2022See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

A dope mix from Sydney's Jazz Funk Bootleg Don, DJ CMAN, one of the original selectors from our musical family since 2009. CMAN takes us on a journey through funk, soul, jazz, hip-hop party recorded live at the Soul of Sydney 13th Birthday Party, this set is a celebration of everything that has made these iconic parties legendary. From dance-floor jazz grooves to modern edits and bootlegs. DJ CMAN take you on a journey through the sounds that define Soul of Sydney. This is more than music—it's a movement. SOUL OF SYDNEY's resident vibe creator DJ CMAN laying down a dope 1-hour selection of heavy FUNK, SOUL & JAZZY HIP HOP REMIXEs, EDITS & BOOTLEGS to close out the 13th Birthday celebration last month for podcast episode #418. Be sure to check out DJ CMAN's for dope mixes, remixes and edits which he has become so well known for around the world. Check out more of his stuff here. https://soundcloud.com/djcmanmusic Track List / 1. War - Galaxy 2000** (1977, MCA Records) 2. Arrested Development - Mama's Always On Stage** (1992, Chrysalis Records) 3. Junior Wells X CMAN - Mama's Finally Off Stage ... Junior's Bluebreak (CMAN Edit)** (Edit, Release Details Unknown) 4. p-rallel, Jords - One Time** (2023, PLATOON) 5. dialE - AOT** (Details Unknown) 6. Common X George Benson - Go** (Mashup, Common's "Go" (2005, Geffen Records), George Benson Track Uncredited) 7. George Benson - On Broadway (Mikeandtess Edit 4 Mix)** (Original: 1978, Warner Bros.; Edit, Unofficial Release) 8. Jodie Abacus - Good Feeling (CMAN Edit)** (Edit, Original: 2017, Label Unknown) 9. Hidden Jazz Quartett Feat. Omar - High Heels (Lack Of Afro Remix)** (2014, Agogo Records) 10. Nina Simone - See Line Woman** (1964, Philips Records) 11. Theophilus London - Calypso Blues (Nat King Cole Cover)** (2011, Reprise Records) 12. The Bamboos - Ride On Time** (2006, Tru Thoughts) 13. DJ Nu-Mark, The Traffic - Hot In Herre** (2019, Hot Plate Records) 14. Nat King Cole - Day In - Day Out (Cut Chemist Mix)** (2005, Capitol Records – Verve Remixed 3) 15. Big Daddy Kane X Chic - Good Times** (Mashup, Details Unknown) 16. Michael Jackson x James Brown - Wanna Get Up And Start Being A Sex Machine** (Mashup, Details Unknown) 17. Legacy - I'm So Glad (CMAN Edit)** (Edit, Release Details Unknown) 18. Stevie Wonder - Happy Birthday** (1980, Motown) 19. Harry Belafonte - Jump In The Line** (1961, RCA Victor) 20.James Brown - Feel Good (Pays Bass Disco Mix)** (Edit, Original: 1972, Polydor) 21. Janet - All For You (Remix)** (2001, Virgin Records; Remix, Unofficial Release) 22. Blackstreet X Cameo - No Diggity (Word!)** (Mashup, Original Tracks: 1996 Interscope & 1986 Atlanta Artists/PolyGram) 23. Cameo - Candy** (1986, Atlanta Artists/PolyGram) 24. Monie Love - Don't Funk Wid The Mo** (1990, Warner Bros. Records) 25. Robson Jorge & Lincoln Olivetti - Aleluia** (1982, Som Livre) 26. Sharon Redd - Can You Handle It** (1980, Prelude Records) 27. Salif Keita - Madan (Petko Afrobeat Edit)** (Edit, Original: 2002, Universal Music) 28. Kanye West - Gold Digger** (2005, Roc-A-Fella Records) 29. Tems + Foxy Brown ft. Blackstreet - Free Mind** (Mashup, Original Tems: 2020, Leading Vibes LLC) 30. Black Thought, Juls, Worlasi, Kofi Mole - Focus** (2023, Details Unknown) 31. Big Pun - Still Not A Player** (1998, Loud Records) 32. Gospel Gods Got A Blend (Big Pun "Playa" Sample)** (Blend/Mashup, Details Unknown) 33. Black Men United - U Will Know** (1994, MCA Records) 34. Billy Stewart - Summertime** (1966, Chess Records) 35. Louis Prima - Buono Sera** (1956, Capitol Records)

Sintonía: "Circus" - The Jam"Funeral Pyre" - "Disguises" (Pete Townshend) - "Absolute Beginners" - "Town Called Malice" - "Happy Together" - "Ghosts" - "Just Who Is The 5 O´Clock Hero?" - "Running On The Spot" - "The Planner´s Dream Goes Wrong" - "The Gift" - "Beat Surrender" - "Shopping" - "Stoned Out Of My Mind" (Barbara Acklin, Eugene Record) - "Carnation" - "Trans-Global Express" Todas las músicas compuestas e interpretadas por The Jam mientras no se diga lo contrarioTodas las músicas extraídas del Book CD-Set (5xCD) "Direction Reaction Creation" (Polydor,1997) de la banda inglesa The Jam Relación de fechas de emisión de los 3 programas anteriores:The Jam (1/4) emitido el 12/09/2024 ("In The City" y "This Is The Modern World", 1977)The Jam (2/4) emitido el 02/10/2024 ("All Mod Cons" + singles, 1978)The Jam (3/4) emitido el 11/11/2024 ("Setting Sons" de 1979 y "Sound Affects" de1980) El monográfico con lo mejor de The Style Council (1983-89) se emitió el 23/04/2024Escuchar audio

Les copains, il vient de se passer un truc incroyable. Robert Smith et ses deux copains d'école, Lol et Michael, déambulent sur un trottoir de Londres sans pouvoir prononcer la moindre parole. Cela n'a jamais été la spécialité de Robert mais là, après le rendez-vous qu'ils viennent d'avoir avec ce gars d'une maison de disques dans un pub, il y a de quoi raconter : il leur a proposé d'enregistrer un album et de faire une tournée. Carrément. A 19 ans, c'est tout ce dont ils rêvaient : faire du rock et quitter leur ville paumée de Crawley. Pour Robert, c'est la fin de l'angoisse depuis qu'il a posté leur cassette à l'adresse de plusieurs labels. S'en était suivi de longues semaines de silence radio et de questions à sa mère : « Alors ? » « Non, rien ». Jusqu'au jour où : « Robert, on te demande au téléphone ». Et puis ce gars, Chris, qui travaille chez Polydor et qui lui dit avoir aimé leurs trois titres, surtout la petite chanson pop Boys don't cry. Remontés dans le train, Robert se décide enfin à parler Il va falloir que vous laissiez tomber votre boulot, si vous voulez que The Cure vive. Ca va bouger. Bon, c'est une évidence : leur job est si petit que cela ne leur posera pas de problème. Mais qui voilà. Mais c'est le monstre ! Les trois musiciens se retournent pour découvrir l'ancien tortionnaire de leur école primaire, Dennis, qui après la fameuse bagarre avait été viré de l'école et avait disparu des radars. Le voilà douze ans plus tard devenu un skinhead et, bien évidemment, il est à la tête d'une bande.On a toujours un œuf à peler nous deux. Et ben dis-donc, t'as toujours l'air d'avoir aussi peur de moi, on dirait, raille-t-il.Fous-nous la paix, casse-toi, répond Robert.Ouais, va te faire foutre avec tes nazillons de copains, renchérit Lol.Dennis crache sur Robert en guise de réponse et de provocation. La bagarre s'engage alors que les portes du train s'ouvrent en gare de Crawley. Les trois gars de Cure sortent en trombe et détalent du plus vite qu'ils peuvent, poursuivis par la bande armée de je ne sais quoi, allez savoir avec les skinheads. Au bout de quelques minutes d'une course de fond improvisée, ils reprennent leur souffle les bronches en feu. Robert et ses potes ont semé leurs assaillants. Douze ans sans croiser ce sinistre individu et ils tombent dessus le jour où ils réalisent leur rêve. Décidément, il faut quitter cette ville pourrie. Leur vie est ailleurs.Demain, j'appelle Chris et je lui demande de nous verser un salaire. S'il est OK, on marche avec lui.Alors, malgré le fait que ce fameux Chris ait omis de leur dire qu'il quitte Polydor pour les produire seul avec ses économies, malgré un premier album plié en quelques jours sans budget avec une pochette et un son qui vont horrifier Robert et le mettre en colère, oui, ils ont trouvé la bonne personne, celle qui va les propulser d'emblée au sommet de ce nouveau mouvement musical qu'est la New Wave.

Speellijst Zondag 24 november 2024 Terug bij af (Jekkers, Meinderts/Jekkers) Harrie Jekkers 4'07 Van cd bij het boekje 20 jaar Annie Annie M.G. Schmidtprijs Eigen beheer Jij zit in mijn hoofd (C. de Boer/Y. Schieman) Yentl en De Boer 4'25 Van cd bij het boek Leven in een lied van Mylou Frencken Vader en zoon (Groot) George Groot en Fred Florusse 2'43 Eigen opname Ik de vader, jij de zoon (Walschaerts/Walschaerts, Bauters) Kommil Foo 4'06 van de cd Kommil Foo CNR AL 324295 Balkenende Freek de Jonge 1'27 Mevrouw V. (Vermeulen) Bram Vermeulen 4'36 Van de cd Polonaise Virgin 7243 8429592 0 Alzheimergrap Youp 0'58 Meneer Alzheimer (Van 't Hek/Scherpenzeel) Youp van 't Hek 3'50 Van de cd Wigwam CNR 22 24473 2 De geriater (Fokkema) Marjolein Fokkema 3'08 Eigen beheer De sneeuwman (F. Wiegersma/F. Halsema) Lenette van Dongen 4'00 Eigen opname De snoek (H. v. Veen) Herman van Veen 1'23 Van de cd Alles in de wind Polydor 537 444-2 Stil de tijd (H. v. Veen) Herman van Veen 2'58 Van de cd Vandaag Harlekijn 183039600005 Korsakov (Kaandorp) Brigitte Kaandorp 3'27 Van de cd Kunst BIS 055 Het te late einde (M. v. Roozendaal) Maarten van Roozendaal 3'20 Van de cd Barmhart DODO 009 Vrouwe Dementia (Van Dijk/Van der Wal) Hessel van der Wal 4'15 Van de cd Onbedekt Eigen beheer

Label: Polydor 881008Year: 1984Condition: MPrice: $12.00From a warehouse find, this is a new, unplayed stock copy, in its original Polydor factory sleeve. This appealing Techno/Disco dancer cried out for an mp3 "snippet" so you can have a listen... Enjoy! The B side is the "Dub Version" of the tune. Note: This beautiful 45 has no notable flaws, grading Mint across the board (Labels, Vinyl, Audio).

Salve! This is a bonus episode for paid subscribers!Every episode is a different song. This is the song today:"Maracatu Atômico" by Jorge Mautner (written by Mautner/Nelson Jacobina)Gilberto Gil released this song as a single (compact), then produced Jorge Mautner's sophomore album, released in 1974 via Polydor. Before making music, Mautner was a controversial writer, with his Trilogy of Kaos banned by the military regime. Born in Rio, and raised in Sao Paulo to immigrant parents from Yugoslavia who escaped the Holocaust, Mautner was partially raised by his nanny from whom he learned much about Brazilian Afro religions. "Maracatu Atômico" is a mix of samba, funk, MPB, maracatu (a regional folklore rhythm from Pernambuco), and even Easter European music, as Mautner was primarily a violin player. The song was revitalized in the 1990s by Chico Science and Nação Zumbi, a crucial point for the manguebeat movement. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sintonía: "Music For The Last Couple" - The Jam"Girl On The Phone", "Thick As Thieves", "Little Boy Soldiers", "Wasteland", "Burning Sky" y "Saturday´s Kids", extraídas del 4º álbum de The Jam, titulado "Setting Sons" (Polydor, 1979)"Going Underground" y "The Dreams Of Children", extraídas del single "Going Underground""Start!" es la cara A del single "Start!""Pretty Green", "But I´m Different Now", "That´s Entertainment", "Dream Time", "Boy About Town" y "Set The House Ablaze", extraídas del 5º LP ("Sound Affects", Polydor, 1980)  Este programa está dedicado a la memoria de Tito y Maru Hernanz. Los que tuvimos la suerte de conoceros, os seguimos echando mucho de menos...Escuchar audio

What's up, dudes? It's a Siouxsie and the Banshees Christmas, as Rikki Meece from the Sleigh Bells and Mistletoe Podcast and I break down two songs from goth rock band! Yep, it's “Israel” v ”Il Est Né Le Divin Enfant” in the Thunderdome! We talk the band's catalogue, their Christmas music, their look and sound, and definitely their lyrics! In other words, we get into it all! Two songs enter, one song leaves!"Israel" was released as a stand-alone single in between the albums Kaleidoscope (1980) and Juju (1981) on November 28, 1980 by record label Polydor. While touring in Europe in autumn 1980, the band wanted to write a Christmas song to be released on time for December of that year. They composed it on the road, which was quite unusual for them. It was the first time that Siouxsie Sioux and Steven Severin composed a single with guitarist John McGeoch and drummer Budgie. The song was co-produced by Nigel Gray: it prominently featured a 30 singer Welsh choir on backing vocals. It soon became a classic of their repertoire and was regularly performed during encores at each of their tours.Subsequently, “Il Est Né Le Divin Enfant” was released as B-side to “Melt” on November 26, 1982. The tune for this carol can be found in R. Grosjean's Airs des noêl lorrain (1862), where it is called 'Ancien air de chasse', and it is indeed the case that an old Normandy hunting tune 'Tête bizarde', though in 6/8, is melodically very similar. The Shorter New Oxford Book of Carols editors postulated that the tune is an 18th century composition in a rustic style. The text of this carol was first published in Dom G. Legeay's Noêls anciens (1875-6). Most Common translation is from Edward Bliss Reed from 1930.Synths? Check. ‘80s Goth videos? Yup. 19th century carol with a quasi-canon? Definitely! So put on your makeup, grab your mic, and sing along with this post-punk goth episode! It's a Siouxsie and the Banshees Christmas!Sleigh Bells and MistletoeFB: @Sleigh Bells & Mistletoe PodcastTwitter: @BellsSleighIG: @bellssleighchristmasGive us a buzz! Send a text, dudes!Check us out on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Totally Rad Christmas Mall & Arcade, Teepublic.com, or TotallyRadChristmas.com! Later, dudes!

Episode 134 From Organ to Synthesizer: The Evolution of the Yamaha Electone Playlist   Time Track Time Start Introduction –Thom Holmes 06:56 00:00 Electone E-1, home style cabinet, transistorized oscillators, analog, two manuals, pedalboard, two built-in speakers.     1.Hidemi Saito, Tadashi Yoshida, “Kiriko No Tango” from Enchanting Mood (Electone Sound) (1963 Nivico). Composed by Tadashi Yoshida; Electone organ, Hidemi Saito. Used the Electone E-1 The highest-end Electone model at that time, with a starting price of ¥647.000 in 1962. 03:32 07:14 2.Hidemi Saito, Tadashi Yoshida, “Furare Jyozu Ni Hore Jyozu” from Enchanting Mood (Electone Sound) (1963 Nivico). Composed by, Tadashi Yoshida; Electone organ, Hidemi Saito. Used the Electone E-1 The highest-end Electone model at that time, with a starting price of ¥647.000 in 1962. 02:54 10:42 Electone B-6, home style cabinet, transistorized oscillators, analog, two manuals (44 notes each), pedalboard, two built-in speakers.     3.Koichi Oki, “September In The Rain” from  Swingin' Electone! (1967 Takt). Arranged by, Electone organ, Koichi Oki; Bass, Masanaga Harada; Drums, George Otsuka, Akira Ishikawa; Guitar, Masaaki Fujita; Tenor Saxophone, Yasushi Ashida. The Electone model is not specified but it had two manuals and is likely a model A-3. 03:22 13:38 Electone EX-42, space age cabinet, like the GX-1, integrated circuits, Pulse Analog Synth (PASS) technology, three manuals, portamento strip, pedalboard.     4.Shiro Michi, “Hey Jude” from Let's Learn Electone/Shiro Michi Electone Course Vol. 5/ "All About The Rhythm" (1970 CBS/Sony). Drums, Takeshi Inomata; Electone, Yuri Tashiro; Percussion – Tokyo Cuban Boys Percussion Group. Used the EX-42, Yamaha's first commercially available stage model Electone, and the commercial successor to the EX-21. It is likely that less than 200 of these were built. 03:29 16:56 5.Shiro Michi, “Summertime” from Let's Learn Electone/Shiro Michi Electone Course Vol. 6 Jazz Standards and New Hits (1971 CBS/Sony).1970 — EX-42. Yamaha's first commercially available stage model Electone, and the commercial successor to the EX-21. It was the first Electone to use integrated circuits, although it was still based on analogue technology. Famous Electone players such as Shigeo Sekito used this instrument to make the "Special Sound Series.” Used the EX-42, Yamaha's first commercially available stage model Electone, and the commercial successor to the EX-21. It is likely that less than 200 of these were built. 02:17 20:20 6.Koichi Oki, “Light My Fire” from Yamaha Superstar! (1972 Universal Summit). Oki was known as the “world's leading Yamaha Electone player” in the liner notes. Uses the Yamaha Electone EX-42. 02:59 22:32 7.Koichi Oki, “Spring” and “Summer” (side 1) from Exciting Keyboards - Four Seasons (1973 CBS/Sony). Arranged by, ARP Synthesizer, Electone [Electone  Koichi Oki;Drums, Akira Ishikawa; Guitar, Ken Yajima. Music by Vivaldi, Koichi Oki. This release was dated 1978 but the recordings were made in 1973. Oki was a musician working for Yamaha in the early seventies, providing demonstrations of their Electone organ. The model used here was an EX-42, Yamaha's first commercially available stage model Electone, and the commercial successor to the EX-21. It was the first Electone to use integrated circuits, although it was still based on analogue technology. 21:34 25:30 8.Yuri Tashiro, “Summertime” from Beautiful Electone (1973 Polydor). Japanese jazz organist, pianist, and Electone artist from the 1970s. She also made some albums with the Hammond and its influence on her jazz playing is illustrated here in these Electone tracks. The side musicians are uncredited. 04:00 47:16 9.Yuri Tashiro, “Jazz Samba” from Beautiful Electone (1973 Polydor). Japanese jazz organist, pianist, and Electone artist from the 1970s. She also made some albums with the Hammond and its influence on her jazz playing is illustrated here in these Electone tracks. The side musicians are uncredited. 04:35 52:28 10.   Archie Ulm, “Popcorn” from At The Yamaha EX-42 (1976 Private release). Ulm was another American lounge player equipped with the “electronic marvel” of the Yamaha EX-42. The classic Gershon Kingsley Moog tune played on the Electone EX-42. Percussion by Paul Hergert. 03:55 55:48 11.   Archie Ulm, “Harlem Nocturne” from At The Yamaha EX-42 (1976 Private release). Ulm was another American lounge player equipped with the “electronic marvel” of the Yamaha EX-42. Percussion by Paul Hergert. 05:20 59:42 Electone E-70, home style cabinet, integrated circuits, Pulse Analog Synth (PASS) technology, two manuals, pedalboard, built-in speakers. Same circuit board as used in the Yamaha CS-80 synthesizer.     12.   Denny Hinman, “How Deep is Your Love?” from Denny Plays The Yamaha Electone E-70 (1980 Yamaha). Ued the E-70 One of the first home-based organs to feature Yamaha's PASS (Pulse Analog Synthesis System) in a console cabinet. The E-70's architecture resembled the famous CS-80 synthesizer, though it lacked analog VCOs. Its original price tag was ¥1,800,000. 02:46 01:04:58 Electone D-80, home style cabinet, integrated circuits, Pulse Analog Synth (PASS) technology, three manuals, pedalboard, built-in speakers.     13.   Bob Hacker, “Rocky Top” "One Man Opry" Bob Hacker Plays The Yamaha Electone D-80 (1980 Yamaha). Used the three-manual Yamaha Electone D-80. 04:01 01:07:46 Electone FX-1, space age cabinet, like the GX-1, integrated circuits, program cartridges, three manuals, pedalboard.     14.   Claude Dupras, “Pulstar” from Interface Yamaha FX-1 (1983 Yamaha). Arranged for the Yamaha Electone FX-1 by Claude Dupras. An interesting rendition of a Vangelis song. 03:22 01:11:44 15.   Claude Dupras, “The Spring” from Interface Yamaha FX-1 (1983 Yamaha). Arranged for the Yamaha Electone FX-1 by Claude Dupras. A little bit of Vivaldi. 03:32 01:15:06 Electone 7000, home style cabinet, integrated circuits, Pulse Analog Synth (PASS) technology, two manuals, pedalboard, two speakers.     16.   Jim Levesque, “Moonlight Sonata/Night and Day” from Record Breaking Performances Featuring The Yamaha Electone 7000. (1981 Yamaha). The Electone 7000 (aka E-75 in Europe/Japan) was a synthesizer-based electric organ produced by Yamaha in 1981. It featured two keyboards and a foot pedal board with a total of 28 voices of polyphony. 03:49 01:18:36 17.   Tracy Hammer, “Top Banana” from Record Breaking Performances Featuring The Yamaha Electone 7000. (1981 Yamaha). Used the Electone 7000 (aka E-75 in Europe/Japan), a synthesizer-based electric organ produced by Yamaha in 1981. It featured two keyboards and a foot pedal board with a total of 28 voices of polyphony. 01:43 01:22:22 18.   Debbie Culbertson, “Ice Castles” from  Record Breaking Performances Featuring The Yamaha Electone 7000. (1981 Yamaha). The Electone 7000 (aka E-75 in Europe/Japan) is a synthesizer-based electric organ produced by Yamaha in 1981. It featured two keyboards and a foot pedal board with a total of 28 voices of polyphony. 04:09 01:23:58 Electone EL-90, home style cabinet, integrated circuits, disc recording of programming, two manuals, pedalboard, two built-in speakers. Introduced new synthesizers, filtering, and expression technologies that made instrument voices on the Electone closer to digital samples.     19.   Unknown Artist, “Prime Time,” Yamaha Electone EL-90 the Demonstrations (1991 Yamaha). A cassette demonstration tape showcasing the Electone EL-90 in various musical settings. 03:50 01:28:04   Opening background music: Hidemi Saito, Tadashi Yoshida, side 1 from Enchanting Mood (Electone Sound) (1963 Nivico). Composed by Tadashi Yoshida; Electone organ, Hidemi Saito. Used the Electone E-1. Introduction to the podcast voiced by Anne Benkovitz. Additional opening, closing, and other incidental music by Thom Holmes. My Books/eBooks: Electronic and Experimental Music, sixth edition, Routledge 2020. Also, Sound Art: Concepts and Practices, first edition, Routledge 2022. See my companion blog that I write for the Bob Moog Foundation. For a transcript, please see my blog, Noise and Notations. Original music by Thom Holmes can be found on iTunes and Bandcamp. Electone Museum online. Electone Technology The Organ Forum  

Episode 126 The Japanese Shigin Vocal Tradition—and Electronics Playlist   Track Time Start Time Introduction –Thom Holmes 04:46 00:00 1.     Mix of Susumu Yokota, “Saku” from Sakura (1999 Skintone) plus Abe Shũfu II, “Mount Fuji” from Music Of The Shigin: Chanting To Chinese Poetry (1975 Folkways). Album of electronic music from the late composer Susumu Yokota and a track from Folkways of Japanese shingin folk music. 05:42 04:54 2.     Mix of Shiro Michi,“マドンナの宝石 (Intermezzo From "The Jewels Of The Madonna)” from エレクトーン 名曲アルバム (Electone Masterpiece Album)(1965 Polydor). Plus a female shigin performer accompanied by koto from a Japanese collection of shigin singers (1973 Toshiba TY-40077), side 2, track 6. Shiro Michi, Shiro Michi, was a popular Japanese Hammond organist in the 1950s, and Electone artist from the 1950s-2000s since 1958. This track was performed on the Yamaha Electone. 03:02 10:34 3.     Mix of Shiro Michi, “ドナウ川の漣 (Danube Waves Waltz)” from エレクトーン 名曲アルバム (Electone Masterpiece Album)(1965 Polydor). Plus a male shigin performer accompanied by bamboo flute and koto from a Japanese collection of shigin singers (1973 Toshiba TY-40077), side 1, track 2. 04:46 13:34 4.     Mix of a fragment of Shiro Michi and shigin, which I have called “Shigin Skip Organ” because of the prominence of the LP skip throughout. “ドナウ川の漣 (Danube Waves Waltz)” from エレクトーン 名曲アルバム(Electone Masterpiece Album)(1965 Polydor) plus a skipping record of a male shigin performer with koto. 04:08 18:17 5.     Omoide Hatoba, “Alternative Funkaholic” from Kinsei (1995 Earthnoise). 02:30 22:24 6.     Omoide Hatoba, “Satellite Groove” from Kinsei (1995 Earthnoise). 03:53 24:52 7.     Neohachi, “Dog More Than Cat” from Lovecadio Hearn (2013 White Paddy Mountain). Neohachi is a Japanese female duo, formed in 2005 and featuring Lily (Shigin Vocals) and Elly (Synthesizers). 06:09 28:40 8.     Neohachi, “Eternal, Eternal, Eternal” from Lovecadio Hearn (2013 White Paddy Mountain). 02:31 34:36 9.     和楽器バンド (Wagakki Band), “Akatsuki no Ito”from    八奏絵巻(Wildflowers Scroll). Bass, 亜沙 (Asa); Drums, 山葵 (Wasabi); Guitar, 町屋 (Machiya); Koto, [箏], いぶくろ聖志(Ibukuro Masashi); Shakuhachi, [尺八], 神永大輔 (Kaminaga Daisuke); Shamisen, [津軽三味線], 蜷川べに(Ninagawa Beni); Taiko, [和太鼓], 黒流 (Kurona); Shigin Vocals, 鈴華ゆう子 (Suzuhana Yuko). Suzuhana Yuko provides the shigin vocals in this convergence of hard rock and traditional Japanese music. The whole outfit is outstanding but I like the pre-eminence of female musicians. For example, check out this Japanese video of Ninagawa Beni shredding the Shamisen. Here's a 2023 performance by Wagakki Band featuring a vocal by Yuko. 03:28 37:22 10.   和楽器バンド (Wagakki Band), “Nadeshiko Zakura” from 八奏絵巻(Wildflowers Scroll). Bass, 亜沙 (Asa); Drums, 山葵 (Wasabi); Guitar, 町屋 (Machiya); Koto, [箏], いぶくろ聖志(Ibukuro Masashi); Shakuhachi, [尺八], 神永大輔 (Kaminaga Daisuke); Shamisen, [津軽三味線], 蜷川べに(Ninagawa Beni); Taiko, [和太鼓], 黒流 (Kurona); Shigin Vocals, 鈴華ゆう子 (Suzuhana Yuko). 04:44 40:48 11.   Shigenori Kamiya(神谷重徳), “ファラオの墓 (Farao (Pharaoh) No Haka)” from Digital Trip ファラオの墓 シンセサイザ ファンタジ (Digital Trip Pharaoh's Tomb Synthesizer Fantasy). Composed By, Synthesizer, Shigenori Kamiya (神谷重徳). 03:12 45:28 12.   Gagaku Shigenkai, Ryōō from Unesco Collection, A Musical Anthology of the Orient: Japan II (1962 Musicaphon). "Ryōō" was recorded in Tokyo in 1962. Shigenkai, was a traditional Japanese music ensemble attached to the Imperial Household Agency, playing flutes, drums, and string instruments. I did a remix of this, adding delay and some droning tones and then double-tracking the whole piece as a way to transforms these lovely, acoustic tonalities into an electronic mélange. 07:18 48:38 13.   Otomo Yoshihide (大友良英), “Film Maker From Kreuzberg,” from We Insist? (1992 Sound Factory). Turntables, Sampler, Tapes, Guitar, Otomo Yoshihide. 02:55 55:50 14.   After Dinner, “An Accelerating Etude” from After Dinner (1984 Recommended Records). Engineer, Producer, Voice, Synthesizer, Tape, Koto (Miniature 13 String, Taisho-goto), Plastic Flute, Percussion, Haco. Vocalist/lyricist-composer/multi-instrumentalist/sound-artist. Album compiled for the UK release from the original Japan records known as the Glass Tube LP and an After Dinner 7.” 04:11 58:42 15.   After Dinner, “Sepia-Ture II” from After Dinner (1984 Recommended Records). Alto Saxophone, Kaname Nakagawa; Arranged by, Y. Utsunomia; Bass, Drum, Miyuki Komori; Bass, Violin, Tadahiko Yokokawa; Koto (Taisho-goto), Yasushi Utsunomia; Snare, Masaaki Kawaguchi; Soprano Saxophone, Masaharu Ito; Tenor Saxophone, Seiichi Kuroda; Voice, Haco. 02:25 01:02:50 16.   Wha Ha Ha, “Keiro No Hibi” and “On The Floor” from 死ぬ時は別 (It's Different When You Die) (1981 Better Days). The second part of this combination track is a different of “On the Floor” that is sung by Mishio Ogawa. The version I am most familiar with was sung by a man so this is a refreshing variation. Computer, Takafumi Fuse; Effects [Sound Effects], Fujio Akatsuka; Engineer, Kazuhiro Tokieda, Takafumi Fuse; Guitar, Shigenori Kamiya; Keyboards, Shuichi Chino; Percussion, Kiyohiko Senba; Saxophone, Voice, Akira Sakata; Voice, Mishio Ogawa. 11:57 01:05:09   Opening background music: Ryuichi Sakamoto, “Nuages” from Heartbeat (1991 Virgin Japan). Written by Sakamoto, the vocal is delivered by the remarkable Algerian singer Houria Aichi (2:15).   Opening and closing sequences voiced by Anne Benkovitz. Additional opening, closing, and other incidental music by Thom Holmes. My Books/eBooks: Electronic and Experimental Music, sixth edition, Routledge 2020. Also, Sound Art: Concepts and Practices, first edition, Routledge 2022. See my companion blog that I write for the Bob Moog Foundation. For a transcript, please see my blog, Noise and Notations.    

Episode 122 Electronic Music for Babies Playlist   Track Time Start Time Introduction –Thom Holmes 09:56 00:00 1.     Raymond Scott, “Lullaby” (14:06) and “Sleepy Time” (4:25) from Soothing Sounds For Baby Volume I: 1 To 6 Months (1964 Epic). Monophonic recording. Mine includes the insert. 18:30 09:56 2.     Raymond Scott, “Tempo Block” (3:15) and “The Happy Whistler” (10:45) from Soothing Sounds For Baby Volume II: 6 To 12 Months (1964 Epic). Monophonic recording. Mine includes the insert. 14:12 28:22 3.     Raymond Scott, “Little Tin Soldier” (9:24) and “Little Miss Echo” (7:23) from Soothing Sounds For Baby Volume III: 12 To 18 Months (1964 Epic). Monophonic recording. Insert is missing. 17:10 42:17 4.     Rosemary, “Undiscovered Island” from Rosemary And Little Andy, Lullaby From "Rosemary's Baby" (Sleep Safe And Warm) (45 RPM) (1968 Columbia). Written by, arranged and conducted by Stan Applebaum; Producer, Wally Gold. This single was not from the movie soundtrack to Rosemary's Baby, but was inspired by the movie and featured an alternative version of the lullaby from the film. I found that track to be a little too unsettling for a podcast about music for babies, but I did find that the B side, “Undiscovered Island” had a much more calming effect. I believe the instrument heard is a Moog Modular keyboard with the glide feature. Wally Gold, who produced this album, is known to have use the Moog Modular on other recordings. Monophonic recording. 02:57 59:17 5.     Steven Halpern, “Brahams Lullaby Part 3” from Lullabies & Sweet Dreams (1984 Halpern Sounds). Grand Piano, String Synthesizer, Steven Halpern; Violin, Daniel Kobialka. I couldn't help but include a track from Steven Halpern, one of the founding fathers of new age music. As for electronics on this one, there is a string synthesizer. 02:25 01:02:21 6.     Luke Slater, “Dreams of Children” from X-Tront Vol. 2 (1993 Peacefrog Records). This track is a little bit manic for relaxing babies, but it has a minimalist repetition that becomes trance-inducing. And one could find solace in that sound. 07:50 01:04:44 7.     Howie B., “Music for Babies” from Music For Babies (1996 Polydor). Keyboards and treatments, Howie B. 05:27 01:12:24 8.     N., Tracks 12, 19, 22, 23” from Memories From Before Being Born (2005 + Belligeranza). This is a solo work of one Davide Tozzoli, who lives in Italy. An unusual disc of glitch sounds, processed two empty tape recorders an echo machine, and minimal synthetic filters. I selected four of the more mesmerizing tracks and strung them together. “Two empty tape-recorders, one connected to the other, no sound if not the distortion produced by the tape-recorders themselves in play/rec. On this recording of Nothing the modulations of vintage analogic effects: emptied frequencies, prenatal sounds without any sonic grain, audio for a flat electroencephalogram. Memories from before being born," a possible conceptual-noize manifesto.” 05:41 01:17:41 9.     Pete Namlook, Music for Babies (excerpt) from Music for Babies (2009 Fax +49-69/450464). On Christmas 2011 "Music For Babies" CD release without cover or catalog# was sent out as a give-away with orders directly from the label. All tracks written, mixed, and produced by Pete Namlook. We have hear prenatal heartbeats mixed with electronic music. Perfect! 15:39 01:23:18 10.  Chris Kimbell, “Sleepwave” from Ultrasound / Sleep (2007 Pause). A mellow ambient tune but without any detectable prenatal ultrasounds, as the title might indicate to some. 11:04 01:38:50 11.  Lee Rosevere, “Dreaming” from The Ambient Baby (2009 Kazoomzoom). Composed, performed, produced by Lee Rosevere. All original material designed specifically for infants from birth to about two years of age. “Little ones are engaged early on by rhythmic sounds at the start. The sounds then weave into a gentle and soothing environment to help babies fall asleep.” 05:59 01:49:50 12.  Lullaby Movement, “Ru-Ru (Sleep Little Baby)” from David Holmes – LateNightTales (2016 LateNightTales). An eclectic mix of tracks from DJ David Holmes, includes this muted little lullaby with a haunting vocal. 03:55 01:55:42 13.  Dana Falconberry, “Sea Stones” from Dreamland (Songs For Lulling) (2017 Not on label). Falconberry explains why she created the private recording: “Years ago, I made an album of lullabies for a friend of mine who had just had her first baby. She encouraged me to release a lullaby album to the public, since it helped her with her child so much, which was the main inspiration for this album (thanks Lisa!!). . . . People have been telling me for as long as I can remember that my voice puts them to sleep. Even more common has been fans approaching me at the merch table after a show and telling me that they use my albums to put their babies to sleep. Now, I can say that is a complicated thing for a songwriter to digest, but ok babies, I hear you, let's go. Here's a full album of songs to take you off to Dreamland.” 04:39 01:59:30   Opening background music: Pete Namlook, “Attracting Attention” and “The Womb” from Music for Babies (2009 Fax +49-69/450464). Excerpt (12:57) Opening and closing sequences voiced by Anne Benkovitz. Additional opening, closing, and other incidental music by Thom Holmes. My Books/eBooks: Electronic and Experimental Music, sixth edition, Routledge 2020. Also, Sound Art: Concepts and Practices, first edition, Routledge 2022. See my companion blog that I write for the Bob Moog Foundation. For a transcript, please see my blog, Noise and Notations.

The PM team welcome back Gary Foalle and Edwin Ammerlaan to take an in-depth look at Fish's "Suits" album. Hear tales of the "Toile", "Outpatients" and "Suits" tours, from the albums inception in 1992 through to the 1994 release. Along the way chat includes the split from Polydor records, the ill fated supergroup and the formation of Dick Brothers Records. Not to mention a track by track review and the return of "Just for the Record"!

Twitter: @podgaverockInsta: @podgaverockSpecial Guest Hosts: Nick BaetzThe Who “Baba O'Riley" from the 1971 album "Who's Next" released on Polydor. Written by Pete Townshend and produced by The Who.Personel:Roger Daltrey – lead vocals and harmonica (live versions only)Pete Townshend – Lowrey organ, piano, electric guitar and co-lead vocalsJohn Entwistle – bassKeith Moon – drumsAdditional Personnel:Dave Arbus – violin (member of East of Eden)Cover:Performed by Neal Marsh and Josh BondIntro Music:"Shithouse" 2010 release from "A Collection of Songs for the Kings". Written by Josh Bond. Produced by Frank Charlton.Other Artists Mentioned:Men At Work "Overkill"

Twitter: @podgaverockInsta: @podgaverockSpecial Guest Hosts: Nick BaetzThe Who “Baba O'Riley" from the 1971 album "Who's Next" released on Polydor. Written by Pete Townshend and produced by The Who.Personel:Roger Daltrey – lead vocals and harmonica (live versions only)Pete Townshend – Lowrey organ, piano, electric guitar and co-lead vocalsJohn Entwistle – bassKeith Moon – drumsAdditional Personnel:Dave Arbus – violin (member of East of Eden)Cover:Performed by Josh BondIntro Music:"Shithouse" 2010 release from "A Collection of Songs for the Kings". Written by Josh Bond. Produced by Frank Charlton.Other Artists Mentioned:Damien MarleyStephen MarleyBob MarleyPearl Jam “Dark Matter”Pearl Jam “Evenflow”Bill SimmonsChuck KlostermanTaylor SwiftLed Zeppelin “Stairway to HeavenThe Eagles “Hotel California”Journey “Don't Stop Believin'”Queen “Another One Bites the Dust”Queen “We Are the Champions”AC/DCEarth, Wind, and Fire “September”Pink Floyd “Wish You Were Here”Pink Floyd “Comfortably Numb”Pink Floyd “Another Brick in the Wall Pt 2”Deep Purple “Smoke on the Water”Dire Straits “Money for Nothing”The White Stripes “Seven Nation Army”Bon Jovi “Livin' on a Prayer”Sly and the Family Stone “Everyday People”Buffalko Springfield “For What It's Worth”Bob Dylan “Lik a Rolling Stone”Bob Dylan “Times They Are A-Changin''Bob Dylan “Knocking on Heaven's Door”Bob Dylan “Tambourine Man”Marvin GayThe Temptations “My Girl”Aretha Franklin “Respect”Otis Redding “Sitting On the Dock of the Bay”Aretha Franklin “Think”Ben E King “Stand By Me”Gary Glitter “Rock and Roll”CSIThe Who “Pinball Wizard”Meher BabaTerry RileyEast of EdenRobert PlantIsle of WightWoodstockThe Girl Next DoorMetallicaFuture IslandsVan Halen “Jump”Pearl Jam “Rearview Mirror”Pink Floyd “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”One Direction “The Best Song Ever”The Moddy BluesU2 “With or Without You”The Beatles “A Day in the Life”The Beatles “Hey Jude”The KinksThe Beatles “Norwegian Wood”The Rolling Stones “Gimme Shelter”Hall and Oates “Rich Girl”Eddie VedderStone GossardMike McCreadyAcoustic SyndicateHoneysucklePaul Revere Is Not DeadThe Avett BrothersThe Grateful DeadBob WeirBruce HornsbyBrent MidlandGuided By VoicesThe Flaming LipsThe Zac Brown Band

Michael Milosh (RHYE) is a lifelong musician from Toronto, Canada. He learned to play cello at 3 years old, having had a father who dedicated his life to teaching and playing music. RHYE is the musical project of Mike's that has garnered the most worldwide success, but as I reveal in this bath, I have been listening to his music since I was 18, when I first heard his song ‘The City' under the moniker, Milosh.In this bath, we uncover so much about how Mike makes music, why Mike makes music, and what music has unlocked in his life. Music is Mike's journal entries - but he only writes about positive things, things that he wants to bring into the world. In this sense, music is also spiritual and he aligns it with his spiritual beliefs. Often, he has found that his lyrics reveal some truth that already exists underlyingly, or will come true. In this episode, we learn about his songwriting process, and where songs come from. For example, the most recent RHYE EP, Passing, is specifically a dedication to his father, who passed away from cancer in 2022. In writing this EP about loving his father, Mike felt it was important to digest grief in the only way he knew how: writing songs. Grief was something he felt he was not alone in, and album became birdsongs to whomever might be feeling loneliness their own experiences of loss. We discuss loss and love in depth, speaking for the first time about our experience of being attacked online by his ex-wife, and how that has impacted our relationship and work. Mike shares about how we've deepened our understanding of radical self-reliance and how that plays into making art and putting it into the world. It is a story of resilience, and choosing to continue living a good life, in spite of what life throws at you. Mike talks about life and lemons, into lemonade. This tub talks is a joy for me to share because I get to sit with someone I admire and know intimately. I am excited to share his heart with you. Welcome to our tub!

On this episode of Adventures In Vinyl, we discuss the best-selling album of 2006, in the UK and the 15th best selling album of the 2000s. That band is Snow Patrol and the album is "Eyes Open".Song of The Week!They Fray - Over My Head (Cable Car)Kurt Vile - Another good year for the rosesSnow Patrol - Eyes OpenGenre: Alternative RockRelease Date: May 1, 2006 (UK) & May 9, 2006 (US)Stuido(s): Grouse Lodge Studios (Ireland), The Garage (Kent), The Garden (London), Angel Recording Studios (London)Producer: Jacknife LeeLabel(s): Fiction, Polydor, A&MLength: 45:05Number of Tracks: 11For more information on the band Snow Patrol be sure to check out their website at www.snowpatrol.com and give the album “Eyes Open” a listen on your preferred streaming platform of choice. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast on your platform of choice to stay up to date on new episodes. Follow us on instagram @adventures.in.vinyl and check out our website at www.adventuresinvinyl.com where you can see links to our other podcasts and if you want to support and help promote the channel there is a link under the support section where you can buy an awesome Adventures In Vinyl T-Shirt!

djbigdirty.com 1.  [00:00] Intro 2. [00:39] Vintage Culture with Coach Harrison- Hear You Calling {Vintage Culture} 3. [05:09] Disclosure & Eliza Doolittle- You & Me (Rivo Remix) {Geffen} 4. [09:53] Florence + The Machine- You've Got The Love (Sonny Noto Private Mix) {White} 5. [15:00] Meduza X Ferreck Dawn X Clemetine Douglas- I Got Nothing {Defected} 6. [19:17] Kaskade- On My Way {Arkade} 7. [24:25] Lufthaus- Ringo (Miss Monique Remix) {Armada} 8. [29:36] SeeMeNot- Deception (Hot Since 82 Remix) {Brainstream} 9. [34:12] Space Motion & Angel Sanchez feat Magnus- Moonlight (Space Motion Remix) {Space Motion} 10. [38:26] Ladytron- Destroy Everything You Touch (Space Motion Remix) {Ladytron} 11. [43:02] CHRSTPHR- Anomaly {Clubsonica} 12. [48:17] Marvin Gaye, Tiesto & R3HAB- Heard It Through The Grapevine (Pat C's Run Free Edit) {White} 13. [50:04] Tiesto, R3HAB & Deborah Cox- Leave The World Run (Jean Luc & Nick Jay Mashup) {White} 14. [52:05] Heerhorst- Wimbo (6am Mix) {Drumcode} 15. [55:53] Grimix- Feel Me Too {Gemstone} 16. [59:52] John Summit, Hayla, Artbat, Camelphat & Mau P- Where You Are Metro For a Feeling (Djs From Mars Mashup) {White} 17. [01:03:30] Becky Hill, Chase & Status- Disconnect (Tiesto remix) {Polydor} 18. [01:06:28] Genix & flowanstasia- Dependent on You {Anjunabeats} 19. [01:10:43] Dom Dolla- Saving Up {Three Six Zero} 20. [01:15:23] Audien & Xira- One Last Dance (Farius Remix) {Armada} 21. [01:20:24] Pretty Girl- Sun Phase {Gallery}

Having first captured our attention with Monolithic Nuance (2018) for Longform Editions, Megan Mitchell's Cruel Diagonals has continued to impress with each new work. With Fractured Whole, she set herself the task of producing an album using nothing but her voice as raw material. While she deserves recognition as a gifted vocalist, she deserves at least as much praise for her production work, alchemically transmuting her voice into a wide range of instruments and textures. In this episode, she discusses the production challenges posed by Fractured Whole, her background in musical theatre, her work with the feminist archive Many Many Women, and much more. Read more at www.acloserlisten.com TRACKLIST ARTIST – “TITLE” (ALBUM, LABEL, YEAR) Cruel Diagonals - “Penance” (Fractured Whole, Beacon Sound, 2023) INTRO Cruel Diagonals - “Monolithic Nuance” (Monolithic Nuance, Longform Editions, 2018) Mika Vainio - “Se On Olemassa (It Is Existing)” (In The Land Of The Blind One​-​Eyed Is King, Touch, 2003) Matthewdavid - “Phased Moon” (Mycelium Music, Leaving, 2023) Cruel Diagonals - “Monolithic Nuance” (Monolithic Nuance, Longform Editions, 2018) Cruel Diagonals - “Render Arcane” (Disambiguation, Drawing Room Records, 2018) Cruel Diagonals & Jon Carr - “Fall Back Into Earth” (Fall Back Into Earth, 2022) Asmus Tietchens - “Club of Rome” (The Emergency Cassette Vol. 2, Los Angeles Free Music Society, 1981) Faust - “Why don't you eat carrots?” (Faust, Polydor, 1971) Can - “One More Night” (Ege Bamyasi, Liberty, 1972) Demdike Stare - “Black Sun” (Voices of Dust, Modern Love, 2010) Andy Stott - “Luxury Problems” (Luxury Problems, Modern Love, 2012) Porter Ricks - “Biokinetics 2” (Biokinetics, Chain Reaction, 1996) Anne Gillis - “A6” (Monetachek, Rangehen, 1985) Techno Animal - “Bionic Beatbox (Tortoise version)” (Techno Animal Versus Reality, City Slang, 1998) Cruel Diagonals - “Intuit Sensate [edit]”  (Fractured Whole, Beacon Sound, 2023) Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, Panaiotis - “Lear” (Deep Listening, New Albion, 1989) Eliane Radigue - “L'​Î​le re​-​sonante (2000)” (L'​Î​le re​-​sonante, Shiiin, 2005) Annea Lockwood - “For Ruth” (T​ê​te​-​à​-​t​ê​te by Ruth Anderson & Annea Lockwood, Ergot, 2023) Petr Kotik – S.E.M. Ensemble – Many Many Women – Part 13 (That being uncovered) (Many Many Women, Labor, 1981) Cruel Diagonals - “Fluvial” (A Dormant Vigor, 2021) Laurie Spiegel - “Three Sonic Spaces II” (Unseen Worlds, Scarlett/Infinity, 1991) Lana Del Rabies - “Grace the Teacher (Cruel Diagonals remix)” (Becoming Everything: STREGA BEATA Remixed, 2024) Cruel Diagonals - “Live in Los Angeles - March 2023 pt.1” (Live in Los Angeles, March 2023, Beacon Sound, 2023) Cruel Diagonals - “Vestigial Mythology (remix)” (Live in Los Angeles, March 2023, Beacon Sound, 2023) Cruel Diagonals - “Vestigial Mythology” (Fractured Whole, Beacon Sound, 2023) Andy Stott - “Submission” (We Stay Together, Modern Love, 2011) Andy Stott - “Promises” (It Should Be Us, Modern Love, 2019) Luc Ferrari - “Music Promenade” (Music Promenade / Unheimlich Sch​ö​n, Recollection GRM, 2019) Cruel Diagonals - “Soporific Return” (Disambiguation, Drawing Room, 2018) Cruel Diagonals - “Decimated Whole” (Fractured Whole, Beacon Sound, 2023) Pauline Oliveros, Roscoe Mitchell, John Tilbury, Wadada Leo Smith - “Part III [Encore]” (Nessuno, I Dischi Di Angelica, 2016) Demdike Stare - “We have already died” (Elemental, Modern Love, 2012) Can - “Call Me” (Saw Delight, Mute/Spoon, 1977/1991) Silent Servant - “Violencia” (Violencia, Sandwell District, 2008) Realivox Ladies (2015) Bjork - “It's Not Up To You” (Vespertine, Polydor, 2001) Pauline Oliveros - “Sound Patterns” (Extended Voices, Odyssey, 1967) Maxwell - “This Woman's Work” (Now, 2001) Richard Maxwell - “Pastoral Symphony” (An Anthology of Noise & Electronic Music Volume 5, 2008) Cruel Diagonals - “Live in Los Angeles - March 2023 pt.2” -—- Sound Propositions produced by ⁠⁠Joseph Sannicandro⁠⁠. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/soundpropositions/support

Hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot share favorite songs that they loved as TV show theme songs. Plus the hosts review the new album from Peter Gabriel.Join our Facebook Group: https://bit.ly/3sivr9TBecome a member on Patreon: https://bit.ly/3slWZvcSign up for our newsletter: https://bit.ly/3eEvRnGMake a donation via PayPal: https://bit.ly/3dmt9lUSend us a Voice Memo: Desktop: bit.ly/2RyD5Ah Mobile: sayhi.chat/soundops Featured Songs:The Handsome Family, "Far from Any Road," Singing Bones, Carrot Top, 2003Peter Gabriel, "Panopticom (Bright-Side Mix)," I/O, Real World, 2023Peter Gabriel, "Playing For Time (Bright-Side Mix)," I/O, Real World, 2023Peter Gabriel, "Road to Joy (Bright-Side Mix)," I/O, Real World, 2023Mick Jagger, "Strange Game," (Single), Polydor, 2022Johnny Rivers, "Secret Agent Man," ...And I Know You Wanna Dance, Imperial, 1966Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, "Red Right Hand," Let Love In, Mute, 1994Massive Attack, "Teardrop," Mezzanine, Virgin, 1998Gavin DeGraw, "I Don't Want To Be," Chariot, J, 2004Carole King and Louise Goffin, "Where You Lead I Will Follow," Our Little Corner of the World: Music from Gilmore Girls, Rhino, 2002RJD2, "A Beautiful Mine," Magnificent City Instrumentals, Decon, 2006The Coup, "My Favorite Mutiny (feat. Black Thought and Talib Kweli)," Pick a Bigger Weapon, Epitaph, 2006Norma Tenaga, "You're Dead," Walkin' My Cat Named Dog, Rhino, 1966Godfather of Harlem, "Just in Case (feat. Swizz Beatz, Rick Ross & DMX)," Just in Case (feat. Swizz Beatz, Rick Ross & DMX) (Single), Epic, 2019The High Strung, "The Luck You Got," Moxie Bravo, Paper Thin, 2005Blind Boys of Alabama, "Way Down In the Hole," The Spirit Of The Century, Real World, 2001Regina Spektor, "You've Got Time," You've Got Time (Single), Sire, 2013Quincy Jones, "Sanford & Son (The Streebeater)," You've Got It Bad Girl, A&M, 1973Aloe Blacc, "I Need a Dollar," Good Things, Stones Throw, 2010Jamila Woods, "Tiny Garden (feat. duendita)," Water Made Us, Jagjaguwar, 2023See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

"Tunes of the Season: Phish, Grateful Dead, and Merry Jams"Larry Mishkin   discusses Christmas-themed songs performed by various artists, including The Who and Grateful Dead. Larry delves into The Who's rock opera "Tommy," particularly focusing on the song "Christmas" and its critical reception. He transitions to discussing Grateful Dead's rendition of Chuck Berry's "Run, Rudolph, Run" performed at the Felt Forum in 1971 and analyzes its significance in the band's repertoire.Larry further explores the potential residency of bands like Dead & Company at the Sphere in Las Vegas, following U2's shows there. He touches on Phish's upcoming performances at the same venue and discusses the difficulty in acquiring tickets for these highly anticipated shows.Later, Larry reminisces about New Year's Eve shows by various bands, specifically mentioning Grateful Dead's memorable performances during the countdown. He also features unconventional Christmas renditions by Phish and Jerry Garcia with David Grisman..Produced by PodConx   Theme – Rock n Roll ChristmasIf you were in the Mishkin household earlier this morning, you might have heard this blasting out of the speakers:INTRO:               ChristmasThe WhoFebruary 14, 1970University of Leeds, Leeds, England  aka  “Live At Leeds”The Who - Christmas - Live At Leeds (with Footage) (youtube.com)2:00 – 3:17 "Christmas" is a song written by Pete Townshend and is the seventh song on The Who's rock opera Tommy. On the original LP, it opens the second side of the album.  Tommy is the fourth studio album by the English rock band the Who, first released on 19 May 1969.[2] Primarily written by guitarist Pete Townshend, Tommy is a double album and an early rock opera that tells the story of Tommy Walker and his experiences through life. The song tells how on Christmas morning, Tommy's father is worried about Tommy's future, and soul. His future is jeopardized due to being deaf, dumb, and blind.[2] The lyrics contrast religious themes such as Christmas and Jesus Christ with Tommy's ignorance of such matters. The rhetorical question, "How can he be saved from the eternal grave?" is asked about Tommy's condition and adds speculation as to the nature of original sin and eternal salvation. In the middle of the song, "Tommy can you hear me?" is repeated, with Tommy responding, "See me, feel me, touch me, heal me." "Christmas" was praised by critics. Richie Unterberger of AllMusic called it an "excellent song."[5]Rolling Stone's Mac Randall said it was one of several "prime Pete Townshend songs" on the album.[6] A review in Life by Albert Goldman considered it beautiful and highlighted the song's "croaking chorus".[7] James Perone said it was "perhaps one of the best sleeper tracks of the collection." Townshend came up with the concept of Tommy after being introduced to the work of Meher Baba, and he attempted to translate Baba's teachings into music. Recording on the album began in September 1968, but took six months to complete as material needed to be arranged and re-recorded in the studio. Tommy was acclaimed upon its release by critics, who hailed it as the Who's breakthrough. Its critical standing diminished slightly in later years; nonetheless, several writers view it as an important and influential album in the history of rock music. The Who promoted the album's release with an extensive tour, including a live version of Tommy, which lasted throughout 1969 and 1970. Key gigs from the tour included appearances at Woodstock, the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival, the University of Leeds, the Metropolitan Opera House, and the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival. The live performances of Tommy drew critical praise and revitalised the band's career. Live at Leeds is the first live album by English rock band the Who. It was recorded at the University of Leeds Refectory on 14 February 1970, and is their only live album that was released while the group were still actively recording and performing with their best-known line-up of Roger Daltrey, Pete Townshend, John Entwistle and Keith Moon. The album was released on 11 May 1970 by Decca and MCA in the United States,[2] and by Track and Polydor in the United Kingdom. It has been reissued on several occasions and in several different formats. Since its release, Live at Leeds has been ranked by several music critics as the best live rock recording of all time SHOW No. 1:                   Run Rudolph RunGrateful DeadFelt Forum at MSG, NYCDecember 7, 1971Track No. 10Grateful Dead Live at Felt Forum, Madison Square Garden on 1971-12-07 : Free Borrow & Streaming : Internet Archive0:11 – 1:54 Run Rudolph Run"[2][3][4] is a Christmas song written by Chuck Berry but credited to Johnny Marks and M. Brodie due to Marks' trademark on the character of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.[5][note 1] It was published by St. Nicholas Music (ASCAP) and was first recorded by Berry in 1958, released as a single on Chess Records.It has since been covered by numerous other artists, sometimes with the title "Run Run Rudolph".[16] The song is a 12-bar blues, musically similar to Berry's popular and recognizable song "Johnny B. Goode", and melodically similar to his song "Little Queenie", the latter of which was released shortly after, in 1959.During its initial chart run, Berry's 1958 recording peaked at number 69 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in December 1958.[22] Sixty years later, the single re-entered the Hot 100 chart at number 45 (on the week ending January 5, 2019), reaching an overall peak position of number 10 on the week ending January 2, 2021, following its third chart re-entry, becoming Berry's third top-ten hit and his first since 1972's "My Ding-a-Ling". In doing so, it broke the record for the longest climb to the top 10 since its first entry in December 1958, at 62 years and two weeks.This Ciip:Out of Brokedown Palace and into You Win AgainPlayed a total of 7 times.This was the first timeLast:  December 15, 1971 Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor, MI  SHOW No. 2:     Little Drummer BoyPhishJuly 3, 1999Coca Cola Lakewood Amphitheatre, Atlanta, GAPhish - The Little Drummer Boy - 7/3/1999 - Atlanta, GA (youtube.com)Start to 1:30 Out of Contact to close the second set.  Played it again as the first encore (into, Won't You Come Home Bill Bailery starring Page's dad, Jack, on vocals and kazoo. "The Little Drummer Boy" (originally known as "Carol of the Drum") is a Czechoslovakian popular Christmas song written by American composer Katherine Kennicott Davis in 1941.[1] First recorded in 1951 by the Austrian Trapp Family, the song was further popularized by a 1958 recording by the Harry Simeone Chorale; the Simeone version was re-released successfully for several years, and the song has been recorded many times since.[2] In the lyrics, the singer relates how, as a poor young boy, he was summoned by the Magi to the Nativity of Jesus. Without a gift for the Infant, the little drummer boy played his drum with approval from Jesus' mother, Mary, recalling, "I played my best for him" and "He smiled at me". Phish has only performed the song three times during the month of December – the debut performance segueing out of “Mike's Song” and into “Whipping Post,” a tease during the 12/28/94 “Weekapaug Groove,” and jammed out of the “YEM” vocal jam (12/2/99) (which melted down until Jon was left singing it to close the set). But the song was jammed out of season during “My Friend, My Friend” (3/18/93) and “Stash” (7/15/93), and teased during “Weekapaug Groove” and “Big Ball Jam” (4/9/94), “Wilson” (8/13/97), “Silent in the Morning” (7/4/99), and "Wilson" (4/16/04). This version is generally considered to be Fishman's most memorable version.  SHOW No. 3:     God Rest Ye Merry GentlemenJerry Garcia and David GrismanNovember 9, 1991Warfield Theater, S.F.God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen - Jerry Garcia - Bing videoStart – 1:37Out of The Two Sisters to close second set "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen" is an English traditional Christmas carol. It is in the Roxburghe Collection (iii. 452), and is listed as no. 394 in the Roud Folk Song Index. It is also known as "Tidings of Comfort and Joy", and by other variant incipits. An early version of this carol is found in an anonymous manuscript, dating from the 1650s it appeared in a parody published in 1820 by William Hone.               Story here is the way Jerry and David play so tight, trading off leads and filling in gaps.  A great sound for a traditional tune.  There are many sides of Jerry and we don't get to see all of them.  Nice to take a break from the traditional Dead stuff and take a look in at what else Garcia was doing during that creative period of his life. SHOW No. 4:                   Stagger LeeGrateful DeadDecember 30, 1985Track No. 6Grateful Dead Live at Oakland Coliseum on 1985-12-30 : Free Borrow & Streaming : Internet ArchiveStart – 1:32 As is made clear by the opening lyrics, this is a tale about events that unfolded and played out on Christmas: “1940 Xmas Eve with a full moon over town”.  On some occasions, Jerry was  known to substitute in “Christmas” Eve. "Stagger Lee", also known as "Stagolee" and other variants, is a popular American folk song about the murder of Billy Lyons by "Stag" Lee Shelton, in St. Louis, Missouri, at Christmas 1895. The song was first published in 1911 and first recorded in 1923, by Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians, titled "Stack O' Lee Blues". A version by Lloyd Price reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1959. The historical Stagger Lee was Lee Shelton, an African-American pimp living in St. Louis, Missouri, in the late 19th century. He was nicknamed Stag Lee or Stack Lee, with a variety of explanations being given: he was given the nickname because he "went stag" (went to social events unaccompanied by a person of the opposite sex); he took the nickname from a well-known riverboat captain called Stack Lee; or, according to John and Alan Lomax, he took the name from a riverboat owned by the Lee family of Memphis called the Stack Lee, which was known for its on-board prostitution.[2] Shelton was well known locally as one of the Macks, a group of pimps who demanded attention through their flashy clothing and appearance.[3] In addition to those activities, he was the captain of a black Four Hundred Club, a social club with a dubious reputation. On Christmas night in 1895, Shelton and his acquaintance William "Billy" Lyons were drinking in the Bill Curtis Saloon. Lyons was also a member of St. Louis' underworld, and may have been a political and business rival to Shelton. Eventually, the two men got into a dispute, during which Lyons took Shelton's Stetson hat.[5]Subsequently, Shelton shot Lyons, recovered his hat, and left.[6] Lyons died of his injuries, and Shelton was charged, tried, and convicted of the murder in 1897. He was paroled in 1909, but returned to prison in 1911 for assault and robbery. He died in incarceration in 1912. The Grateful Dead frequently played and eventually recorded a version of the tale which focuses on the fictionalized hours after the death of "Billy DeLyon", when Billy's wife Delia tracks down Stagger Lee in a local saloon and "she shot him in the balls" in revenge for Billy's death. Based on the traditional song "Stagger Lee", "Stagolee" or "Stack O'Lee." Robert Hunter wrote a version that he performed solo, and Jerry Garcia subsequently re-ordered the lyrics and rewrote the music for the Grateful Dead's version. More recently Bob Weir has also been performing some of the older traditional versions with Ratdog. Dead released it on Shakedown Street, Nov. 8, 1978 Played 146 times by the Dead1st:  August 30, 1978Last:  June 18, 1995 Giants Stadium  OUTRO:              Santa Clause Is Coming To TownBruce Springsteen and the E Street BandCW Post University, Greenvale, NYDecember, 19756Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town (Live at C.W. Post College, Greenvale, NY - December 1975) - Bing video2:15 - 4:00               Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town" is a Christmas song featuring Santa Claus, written by J. Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie and first recorded by Harry Reser and His Band.[1] When it was covered by Eddie Cantor on his radio show in November 1934 it became a hit; within 24 hours, 500,000 copies of sheet music and more than 30,000 records were sold.[2][3] The version for Bluebird Records by George Hall and His Orchestra (vocal by Sonny Schuyler) was very popular in 1934 and reached the various charts of the day.[4] The song has been recorded by over 200 artists including Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters, the Crystals, Neil Diamond, Fred Astaire, Bruce Springsteen, Frank Sinatra, Bill Evans, Chris Isaak, the Temptations, The Pointer Sisters, the Carpenters, Michael Bublé, Luis Miguel, and the Jackson 5 A rock version by Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band was recorded on December 12, 1975, at C. W. Post College in Brookville, New York, by Record Plant engineers Jimmy Iovine and Thom Panunzio.[14][15] This version borrows the chorus refrain from the 1963 recording by the Crystals.[16] It was first released as a track on the 1981 Sesame Street compilation album, In Harmony 2, as well as on a 1981 promotional, radio-only, 7-inch single (Columbia AE7 1332).[17][18] Four years later, it was released as the B-side to "My Hometown," a single off the Born in the U.S.A. album.[19] Springsteen's rendition of the song has received radio airplay perennially at Christmastime for years; it appeared on Billboard magazine's Hot Singles Recurrents chart each year from 2002 to 2009 due to seasonal air play. Live performances of the song often saw the band encouraging the audience to sing some of the lyrics with—or in place of—the band's vocalists (usually the line "you'd better be good for goodness sake", and occasionally the key line "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town" as well). Sometimes, concert crowds would sing along with the entire song, and the band, who were known to encourage this behavior for the song, would do nothing to dissuade those audiences from doing so, instead welcoming the crowds' enthusiasm. This version remains a Springsteen concert favorite during the months of November and December (often concluding the show), and the band is among the few that keep it in their roster of songs during the holidays. Dead & Co at the Sphere?Phish – sold out fast Merry ChristmasHappy Holidays .Produced by PodConx Deadhead Cannabis Show - https://podconx.com/podcasts/deadhead-cannabis-showLarry Mishkin - https://podconx.com/guests/larry-mishkinRob Hunt - https://podconx.com/guests/rob-huntJay Blakesberg - https://podconx.com/guests/jay-blakesbergSound Designed by Jamie Humiston - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-humiston-91718b1b3/Recorded on Squadcast

Label: Polydor 14575Year: 1979Condition: MPrice: $12.00From a warehouse find, this is a new, unplayed stock copy, in its original Polydor factory sleeve. A masterpiece of New Wave power pop... Check out the mp3 "snippet" of it! Note: These 45s have a touch of storage wear, which lowers their Label and Vinyl grades to Near Mint. After a good cleaning, the audio sounds pristine!

EP 576 featuring a discussion with vocalist David Glen Eisley

EP 576 featuring a discussion with vocalist David Glen Eisley

On this episode of The Paul Weller Fan Podcast, I am joined by music journalist Adrian Thrills.Adrian became a fan of The Jam from 1976 - pre-Polydor record deal - seeing them at the 100 Club, upstairs at Ronnie Scotts, The Marquee, Red Cow in Hammersmith and at many more gigs... Together with his friend, Shane McGowan, Adrian did one of the very first interviews with the band for own 48 Thrills fanzine (One of the original punk fanzines that launched in '76).As a friend, and journalist, he became part of the inner-circle, even joining the band on the road with gigs in Dunstable, Crawley, Malvern, Falkirk and Barrow-in-Furnesss...Adrian spent the 1980s at NME, where he continued to feature and review The Jam, even conducting one of the final interviews with Paul before the split at the end of 1982.Look closely at the rear sleeve for live album Dig the New Breed for a brilliant shout-out too!"A brief six years , sweaty frantic Red Cow residency, 1st week 50 people, 2nd week 100, by the fourth week. A queue around the block! SWITCH the marquee with Shane, Claudio and Adrian dancing on stage to the confusion of the usual Marquee hippies!"In more recent years, Adrian has been a music writer for The Daily Mail and he's reviewed plenty of Paul Weller albums in his time there.He also created sleeve notes on The Very Best of The Jam, The Jam Live at the BBC and the Hit Parade boxset in 2006. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The guys give us 60 minutes of non-stop club ready beats from the likes of Fedde Le Grand, SIDEPIECE, Eli Brown, their own track with Gian Varela and also a triple A Track from Kino Todo and Trillion. 1. Mochakk - Jealous [CircoLoco Records]2. Steve Angello - Monday (Sunnery James & Ryan Marciano, Magnificence Remix) [SIZE]3. Fedde Le Grand - Elektro [Spinnin']4. Thomas Newson & Novak - Do My Thing 5. Sunnery James & Ryan Marciano x Gian Varela feat. Bla-De - Keloke [SONO Music]:::TRIPLE A TRACK:::6. Kino Todo & Trilion 'Raver' [Higher Ground]7. Kideko - Dingdading [Solotoko]8. Simon Fava & Yvvan Back - Se Danza (ft. Martina Camargo) [White Label]9. SIDEPIECE - Westside [D4 D4NCE]10. Go Freek & Dope Earth Alien - Turning It Up (Ben Miller Remix) [Club Sweat]11. James Hype & Major Lazer - Number 1 [STEREOHYPE]12. DJ Minx - The Throne [Higher Ground]13. Kyle Watson - See Your Truth [No Context Records]14. Breach - Jack (Jonathan Kaspar Remix) [Defected]15. Eli Brown 'Diamonds On My Mind' [Polydor]16. Lohrasp Kansara - Follow Me feat. Norman Alexander

Hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot share some of their favorite songs about work in honor of Labor Day. They also review the new album from Big Freedia and add a song to the Desert Island Jukebox. Join our Facebook Group: https://bit.ly/3sivr9T Become a member on Patreon: https://bit.ly/3slWZvc Sign up for our newsletter: https://bit.ly/3eEvRnG Make a donation via PayPal: https://bit.ly/3dmt9lU Send us a Voice Memo: Desktop: bit.ly/2RyD5Ah  Mobile: sayhi.chat/soundops   Featured Songs: Donna Summer, "She Works Hard For the Money," She Works Hard for the Money, Mercury, 1983The Beatles, "With A Little Help From My Friends," Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Parlophone, 1967Big Freedia, "Gin In My System," Central City, Queen Diva, 2023Big Freedia, "Booty Like A Drummer," Central City, Queen Diva, 2023Big Freedia, "Life Lessons," Central City, Queen Diva, 2023Big Freedia, "Pepto Interlude," Central City, Queen Diva, 2023Mitski, "Working for the Knife," Laurel Hell, Dead Oceans, 2022Margo Price, "Pay Gap," All American Made, Third Man, 2017Dolly Parton, "9 To 5," 9 to 5 and Odd Jobs, RCA Victor, 1980The Animals, "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place," Animal Tracks, MGM, 1965John Lennon, "Working Class Hero," John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Apple, 1970Van Morrison, "Cleaning Windows," Beautiful Vision, Mercury, 1982Rhymefest, "Good Ass Job," Rhymefest Presents Raw Dawg, Self Released, 2001Sam Cooke, "Chain Gang," Swing Low, RCA Victor, 1961R.E.M., "Finest Worksong," Document, I.R.S., 1987The Clash, "Career Opportunities," The Clash, CBS, 1977Bob Marley & The Wailers, "Night Shift," Rastaman Vibration, Island, 1976Lou Reed, "Don't Talk To Me About Work," Legendary Hearts, RCA , 1983The Jam, "Smithers Jones," When We're Young (Single), Polydor, 1979Flaming Lips, "Bad Days," Clouds Taste Metallic, Warner Bros, 1995Al Green, "Perfect Day," Perfect Day (Single), Fat Possum, 2023Lou Reed , "Perfect Day," Transformer, RCA, 1972Support The Show: https://www.patreon.com/soundopinionsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this episode of The Paul Weller Fan Podcast, I chat with Bob Manton and 'Just Jeff' Shadbolt from Purple Hearts. Formed in 1978, they were a mod-influenced band that blended elements of post-punk, new wave, and mod revival, creating a distinct and energetic sound that resonated with a wide audience beyond the confines of the mod scene.We talk about their discovery of The Jam as punk loving teenagers in Essex, to the creation of their first band The Sockets and an original punk rock opera inspired by a NME cartoon strip that poked fun of Paul, Bruce and Rick...That band turned into Purple Hearts and a more mod-influenced sound, which, thanks largely to The Jam, was beginning to capture public attention.The band even went on to support The Jam in 1981 - and Paul Weller even produced and played on a couple of songs for what would have been their second album...As you'll hear on the podcast, whilst they were often associated with the mod scene, Purple Hearts transcended categorization, leaving an indelible mark on the hearts of their audience that continues to beat strong over four decades later. Their unique blend of music and passion for mod culture set them apart, making them not just a mod band, but a band that truly loved and embodied the mod spirit.For the latest news on the band - head to their Facebook group here...The BandBob's distinct vocals and Jeff's skilled bass-guitar work formed the foundation of the band's sound with guitarist, Simon Stebbing and Gary Sparks on drums. Their partnership went beyond just musical collaboration – it was a meeting of minds that allowed Purple Hearts to craft songs that resonated deeply with their audience.The FansPurple Hearts' connection with their audience wasn't just ephemeral; it was deeply personal and lasting. The band's lyrics spoke to the realities of everyday life, love, and the struggles of youth, resonating with fans across generations. Their relatable songs weren't confined to a specific time or place, giving them a timeless appeal that continues to draw listeners in. This connection wasn't solely about the music; it was about sharing experiences and emotions that have universal relevance.The Weller ConnectionPurple Hearts signed to Chris Parry's Fiction Records label in 1979.You may remember Chris from Episode 76 as the man who signed The Jam to Polydor!.When that deal came to an end, Paul Weller produced a couple of demos for the band - also playing and providing backing vocals on Plane Crash and Concrete Mixer.In February 1981, Purple Hearts supported The Jam on tour dates at Sheerwater Youth Club Woking, Norwich University, Nottingham University and Crawley Leisure Centre. Bob and Jeff also mentioned Brighton, although I haven't managed to find a live date in 1981 for that in the archives.... do let me know people!Photo on the cover - Martyn Goddard (Podcast Guest 41) also took the shot for the cover of their single "My Life's a Jigsaw" on Safari Records.In 2021, Bob and Jeff created PH2 (Internationally known as Purple Hearts 2) and released a couple of new singles - Produced, Engineered and Mixed by Steve Cradock - 1974 / You Can't Tell Me Lies and Urban Soul / Livin' in the 70's.In a further link with The Jam , you can see Purple Hearts on the road in 2023 and 2024 supporting Bruce Foxton and Russell Hasting's From The Jam... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For July, TNT has gone back to the well of 1970 to focus on someone who MLK famously called the “Queen of American Folk music,” and someone who influenced a generation of folk and pop musicians in her time - we're talking about the album “Odetta Sings” by Odetta. Her cover of Randy Newman's "Mama Told Me (Not to Come)" is worth the price of admission alone

Episode 166 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Crossroads", Cream, the myth of Robert Johnson, and whether white men can sing the blues. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a forty-eight-minute bonus episode available, on “Tip-Toe Thru' the Tulips" by Tiny Tim. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I talk about an interview with Clapton from 1967, I meant 1968. I mention a Graham Bond live recording from 1953, and of course meant 1963. I say Paul Jones was on vocals in the Powerhouse sessions. Steve Winwood was on vocals, and Jones was on harmonica. Resources As I say at the end, the main resource you need to get if you enjoyed this episode is Brother Robert by Annye Anderson, Robert Johnson's stepsister. There are three Mixcloud mixes this time. As there are so many songs by Cream, Robert Johnson, John Mayall, and Graham Bond excerpted, and Mixcloud won't allow more than four songs by the same artist in any mix, I've had to post the songs not in quite the same order in which they appear in the podcast. But the mixes are here -- one, two, three. This article on Mack McCormick gives a fuller explanation of the problems with his research and behaviour. The other books I used for the Robert Johnson sections were McCormick's Biography of a Phantom; Up Jumped the Devil: The Real Life of Robert Johnson, by Bruce Conforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow; Searching for Robert Johnson by Peter Guralnick; and Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald. I can recommend all of these subject to the caveats at the end of the episode. The information on the history and prehistory of the Delta blues mostly comes from Before Elvis by Larry Birnbaum, with some coming from Charley Patton by John Fahey. The information on Cream comes mostly from Cream: How Eric Clapton Took the World by Storm by Dave Thompson. I also used Ginger Baker: Hellraiser by Ginger Baker and Ginette Baker, Mr Showbiz by Stephen Dando-Collins, Motherless Child by Paul Scott, and  Alexis Korner: The Biography by Harry Shapiro. The best collection of Cream's work is the four-CD set Those Were the Days, which contains every track the group ever released while they were together (though only the stereo mixes of the albums, and a couple of tracks are in slightly different edits from the originals). You can get Johnson's music on many budget compilation records, as it's in the public domain in the EU, but the double CD collection produced by Steve LaVere for Sony in 2011 is, despite the problems that come from it being associated with LaVere, far and away the best option -- the remasters have a clarity that's worlds ahead of even the 1990s CD version it replaced. And for a good single-CD introduction to the Delta blues musicians and songsters who were Johnson's peers and inspirations, Back to the Crossroads: The Roots of Robert Johnson, compiled by Elijah Wald as a companion to his book on Johnson, can't be beaten, and contains many of the tracks excerpted in this episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we start, a quick note that this episode contains discussion of racism, drug addiction, and early death. There's also a brief mention of death in childbirth and infant mortality. It's been a while since we looked at the British blues movement, and at the blues in general, so some of you may find some of what follows familiar, as we're going to look at some things we've talked about previously, but from a different angle. In 1968, the Bonzo Dog Band, a comedy musical band that have been described as the missing link between the Beatles and the Monty Python team, released a track called "Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?": [Excerpt: The Bonzo Dog Band, "Can Blue Men Sing the Whites?"] That track was mocking a discussion that was very prominent in Britain's music magazines around that time. 1968 saw the rise of a *lot* of British bands who started out as blues bands, though many of them went on to different styles of music -- Fleetwood Mac, Ten Years After, Jethro Tull, Chicken Shack and others were all becoming popular among the kind of people who read the music magazines, and so the question was being asked -- can white men sing the blues? Of course, the answer to that question was obvious. After all, white men *invented* the blues. Before we get any further at all, I have to make clear that I do *not* mean that white people created blues music. But "the blues" as a category, and particularly the idea of it as a music made largely by solo male performers playing guitar... that was created and shaped by the actions of white male record executives. There is no consensus as to when or how the blues as a genre started -- as we often say in this podcast "there is no first anything", but like every genre it seems to have come from multiple sources. In the case of the blues, there's probably some influence from African music by way of field chants sung by enslaved people, possibly some influence from Arabic music as well, definitely some influence from the Irish and British folk songs that by the late nineteenth century were developing into what we now call country music, a lot from ragtime, and a lot of influence from vaudeville and minstrel songs -- which in turn themselves were all very influenced by all those other things. Probably the first published composition to show any real influence of the blues is from 1904, a ragtime piano piece by James Chapman and Leroy Smith, "One O' Them Things": [Excerpt: "One O' Them Things"] That's not very recognisable as a blues piece yet, but it is more-or-less a twelve-bar blues. But the blues developed, and it developed as a result of a series of commercial waves. The first of these came in 1914, with the success of W.C. Handy's "Memphis Blues", which when it was recorded by the Victor Military Band for a phonograph cylinder became what is generally considered the first blues record proper: [Excerpt: The Victor Military Band, "Memphis Blues"] The famous dancers Vernon and Irene Castle came up with a dance, the foxtrot -- which Vernon Castle later admitted was largely inspired by Black dancers -- to be danced to the "Memphis Blues", and the foxtrot soon overtook the tango, which the Castles had introduced to the US the previous year, to become the most popular dance in America for the best part of three decades. And with that came an explosion in blues in the Handy style, cranked out by every music publisher. While the blues was a style largely created by Black performers and writers, the segregated nature of the American music industry at the time meant that most vocal performances of these early blues that were captured on record were by white performers, Black vocalists at this time only rarely getting the chance to record. The first blues record with a Black vocalist is also technically the first British blues record. A group of Black musicians, apparently mostly American but led by a Jamaican pianist, played at Ciro's Club in London, and recorded many tracks in Britain, under a name which I'm not going to say in full -- it started with Ciro's Club, and continued alliteratively with another word starting with C, a slur for Black people. In 1917 they recorded a vocal version of "St. Louis Blues", another W.C. Handy composition: [Excerpt: Ciro's Club C**n Orchestra, "St. Louis Blues"] The first American Black blues vocal didn't come until two years later, when Bert Williams, a Black minstrel-show performer who like many Black performers of his era performed in blackface even though he was Black, recorded “I'm Sorry I Ain't Got It You Could Have It If I Had It Blues,” [Excerpt: Bert Williams, "I'm Sorry I Ain't Got It You Could Have It If I Had It Blues,”] But it wasn't until 1920 that the second, bigger, wave of popularity started for the blues, and this time it started with the first record of a Black *woman* singing the blues -- Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues": [Excerpt: Mamie Smith, "Crazy Blues"] You can hear the difference between that and anything we've heard up to that point -- that's the first record that anyone from our perspective, a hundred and three years later, would listen to and say that it bore any resemblance to what we think of as the blues -- so much so that many places still credit it as the first ever blues record. And there's a reason for that. "Crazy Blues" was one of those records that separates the music industry into before and after, like "Rock Around the Clock", "I Want to Hold Your Hand", Sgt Pepper, or "Rapper's Delight". It sold seventy-five thousand copies in its first month -- a massive number by the standards of 1920 -- and purportedly went on to sell over a million copies. Sales figures and market analysis weren't really a thing in the same way in 1920, but even so it became very obvious that "Crazy Blues" was a big hit, and that unlike pretty much any other previous records, it was a big hit among Black listeners, which meant that there was a market for music aimed at Black people that was going untapped. Soon all the major record labels were setting up subsidiaries devoted to what they called "race music", music made by and for Black people. And this sees the birth of what is now known as "classic blues", but at the time (and for decades after) was just what people thought of when they thought of "the blues" as a genre. This was music primarily sung by female vaudeville artists backed by jazz bands, people like Ma Rainey (whose earliest recordings featured Louis Armstrong in her backing band): [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, "See See Rider Blues"] And Bessie Smith, the "Empress of the Blues", who had a massive career in the 1920s before the Great Depression caused many of these "race record" labels to fold, but who carried on performing well into the 1930s -- her last recording was in 1933, produced by John Hammond, with a backing band including Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Give Me a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer"] It wouldn't be until several years after the boom started by Mamie Smith that any record companies turned to recording Black men singing the blues accompanied by guitar or banjo. The first record of this type is probably "Norfolk Blues" by Reese DuPree from 1924: [Excerpt: Reese DuPree, "Norfolk Blues"] And there were occasional other records of this type, like "Airy Man Blues" by Papa Charlie Jackson, who was advertised as the “only man living who sings, self-accompanied, for Blues records.” [Excerpt: Papa Charlie Jackson, "Airy Man Blues"] But contrary to the way these are seen today, at the time they weren't seen as being in some way "authentic", or "folk music". Indeed, there are many quotes from folk-music collectors of the time (sadly all of them using so many slurs that it's impossible for me to accurately quote them) saying that when people sang the blues, that wasn't authentic Black folk music at all but an adulteration from commercial music -- they'd clearly, according to these folk-music scholars, learned the blues style from records and sheet music rather than as part of an oral tradition. Most of these performers were people who recorded blues as part of a wider range of material, like Blind Blake, who recorded some blues music but whose best work was his ragtime guitar instrumentals: [Excerpt: Blind Blake, "Southern Rag"] But it was when Blind Lemon Jefferson started recording for Paramount records in 1926 that the image of the blues as we now think of it took shape. His first record, "Got the Blues", was a massive success: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "Got the Blues"] And this resulted in many labels, especially Paramount, signing up pretty much every Black man with a guitar they could find in the hopes of finding another Blind Lemon Jefferson. But the thing is, this generation of people making blues records, and the generation that followed them, didn't think of themselves as "blues singers" or "bluesmen". They were songsters. Songsters were entertainers, and their job was to sing and play whatever the audiences would want to hear. That included the blues, of course, but it also included... well, every song anyone would want to hear.  They'd perform old folk songs, vaudeville songs, songs that they'd heard on the radio or the jukebox -- whatever the audience wanted. Robert Johnson, for example, was known to particularly love playing polka music, and also adored the records of Jimmie Rodgers, the first country music superstar. In 1941, when Alan Lomax first recorded Muddy Waters, he asked Waters what kind of songs he normally played in performances, and he was given a list that included "Home on the Range", Gene Autry's "I've Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle", and Glenn Miller's "Chattanooga Choo-Choo". We have few recordings of these people performing this kind of song though. One of the few we have is Big Bill Broonzy, who was just about the only artist of this type not to get pigeonholed as just a blues singer, even though blues is what made him famous, and who later in his career managed to record songs like the Tin Pan Alley standard "The Glory of Love": [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "The Glory of Love"] But for the most part, the image we have of the blues comes down to one man, Arthur Laibley, a sales manager for the Wisconsin Chair Company. The Wisconsin Chair Company was, as the name would suggest, a company that started out making wooden chairs, but it had branched out into other forms of wooden furniture -- including, for a brief time, large wooden phonographs. And, like several other manufacturers, like the Radio Corporation of America -- RCA -- and the Gramophone Company, which became EMI, they realised that if they were going to sell the hardware it made sense to sell the software as well, and had started up Paramount Records, which bought up a small label, Black Swan, and soon became the biggest manufacturer of records for the Black market, putting out roughly a quarter of all "race records" released between 1922 and 1932. At first, most of these were produced by a Black talent scout, J. Mayo Williams, who had been the first person to record Ma Rainey, Papa Charlie Jackson, and Blind Lemon Jefferson, but in 1927 Williams left Paramount, and the job of supervising sessions went to Arthur Laibley, though according to some sources a lot of the actual production work was done by Aletha Dickerson, Williams' former assistant, who was almost certainly the first Black woman to be what we would now think of as a record producer. Williams had been interested in recording all kinds of music by Black performers, but when Laibley got a solo Black man into the studio, what he wanted more than anything was for him to record the blues, ideally in a style as close as possible to that of Blind Lemon Jefferson. Laibley didn't have a very hands-on approach to recording -- indeed Paramount had very little concern about the quality of their product anyway, and Paramount's records are notorious for having been put out on poor-quality shellac and recorded badly -- and he only occasionally made actual suggestions as to what kind of songs his performers should write -- for example he asked Son House to write something that sounded like Blind Lemon Jefferson, which led to House writing and recording "Mississippi County Farm Blues", which steals the tune of Jefferson's "See That My Grave is Kept Clean": [Excerpt: Son House, "Mississippi County Farm Blues"] When Skip James wanted to record a cover of James Wiggins' "Forty-Four Blues", Laibley suggested that instead he should do a song about a different gun, and so James recorded "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues": [Excerpt: Skip James, "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues"] And Laibley also suggested that James write a song about the Depression, which led to one of the greatest blues records ever, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues": [Excerpt: Skip James, "Hard Time Killing Floor Blues"] These musicians knew that they were getting paid only for issued sides, and that Laibley wanted only blues from them, and so that's what they gave him. Even when it was a performer like Charlie Patton. (Incidentally, for those reading this as a transcript rather than listening to it, Patton's name is more usually spelled ending in ey, but as far as I can tell ie was his preferred spelling and that's what I'm using). Charlie Patton was best known as an entertainer, first and foremost -- someone who would do song-and-dance routines, joke around, play guitar behind his head. He was a clown on stage, so much so that when Son House finally heard some of Patton's records, in the mid-sixties, decades after the fact, he was astonished that Patton could actually play well. Even though House had been in the room when some of the records were made, his memory of Patton was of someone who acted the fool on stage. That's definitely not the impression you get from the Charlie Patton on record: [Excerpt: Charlie Patton, "Poor Me"] Patton is, as far as can be discerned, the person who was most influential in creating the music that became called the "Delta blues". Not a lot is known about Patton's life, but he was almost certainly the half-brother of the Chatmon brothers, who made hundreds of records, most notably as members of the Mississippi Sheiks: [Excerpt: The Mississippi Sheiks, "Sitting on Top of the World"] In the 1890s, Patton's family moved to Sunflower County, Mississippi, and he lived in and around that county until his death in 1934. Patton learned to play guitar from a musician called Henry Sloan, and then Patton became a mentor figure to a *lot* of other musicians in and around the plantation on which his family lived. Some of the musicians who grew up in the immediate area around Patton included Tommy Johnson: [Excerpt: Tommy Johnson, "Big Road Blues"] Pops Staples: [Excerpt: The Staple Singers, "Will The Circle Be Unbroken"] Robert Johnson: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Crossroads"] Willie Brown, a musician who didn't record much, but who played a lot with Patton, Son House, and Robert Johnson and who we just heard Johnson sing about: [Excerpt: Willie Brown, "M&O Blues"] And Chester Burnett, who went on to become known as Howlin' Wolf, and whose vocal style was equally inspired by Patton and by the country star Jimmie Rodgers: [Excerpt: Howlin' Wolf, "Smokestack Lightnin'"] Once Patton started his own recording career for Paramount, he also started working as a talent scout for them, and it was him who brought Son House to Paramount. Soon after the Depression hit, Paramount stopped recording, and so from 1930 through 1934 Patton didn't make any records. He was tracked down by an A&R man in January 1934 and recorded one final session: [Excerpt, Charlie Patton, "34 Blues"] But he died of heart failure two months later. But his influence spread through his proteges, and they themselves influenced other musicians from the area who came along a little after, like Robert Lockwood and Muddy Waters. This music -- or that portion of it that was considered worth recording by white record producers, only a tiny, unrepresentative, portion of their vast performing repertoires -- became known as the Delta Blues, and when some of these musicians moved to Chicago and started performing with electric instruments, it became Chicago Blues. And as far as people like John Mayall in Britain were concerned, Delta and Chicago Blues *were* the blues: [Excerpt: John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "It Ain't Right"] John Mayall was one of the first of the British blues obsessives, and for a long time thought of himself as the only one. While we've looked before at the growth of the London blues scene, Mayall wasn't from London -- he was born in Macclesfield and grew up in Cheadle Hulme, both relatively well-off suburbs of Manchester, and after being conscripted and doing two years in the Army, he had become an art student at Manchester College of Art, what is now Manchester Metropolitan University. Mayall had been a blues fan from the late 1940s, writing off to the US to order records that hadn't been released in the UK, and by most accounts by the late fifties he'd put together the biggest blues collection in Britain by quite some way. Not only that, but he had one of the earliest home tape recorders, and every night he would record radio stations from Continental Europe which were broadcasting for American service personnel, so he'd amassed mountains of recordings, often unlabelled, of obscure blues records that nobody else in the UK knew about. He was also an accomplished pianist and guitar player, and in 1956 he and his drummer friend Peter Ward had put together a band called the Powerhouse Four (the other two members rotated on a regular basis) mostly to play lunchtime jazz sessions at the art college. Mayall also started putting on jam sessions at a youth club in Wythenshawe, where he met another drummer named Hughie Flint. Over the late fifties and into the early sixties, Mayall more or less by himself built up a small blues scene in Manchester. The Manchester blues scene was so enthusiastic, in fact, that when the American Folk Blues Festival, an annual European tour which initially featured Willie Dixon, Memhis Slim, T-Bone Walker, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, and John Lee Hooker, first toured Europe, the only UK date it played was at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, and people like Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones and Jimmy Page had to travel up from London to see it. But still, the number of blues fans in Manchester, while proportionally large, was objectively small enough that Mayall was captivated by an article in Melody Maker which talked about Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies' new band Blues Incorporated and how it was playing electric blues, the same music he was making in Manchester. He later talked about how the article had made him think that maybe now people would know what he was talking about. He started travelling down to London to play gigs for the London blues scene, and inviting Korner up to Manchester to play shows there. Soon Mayall had moved down to London. Korner introduced Mayall to Davey Graham, the great folk guitarist, with whom Korner had recently recorded as a duo: [Excerpt: Alexis Korner and Davey Graham, "3/4 AD"] Mayall and Graham performed together as a duo for a while, but Graham was a natural solo artist if ever there was one. Slowly Mayall put a band together in London. On drums was his old friend Peter Ward, who'd moved down from Manchester with him. On bass was John McVie, who at the time knew nothing about blues -- he'd been playing in a Shadows-style instrumental group -- but Mayall gave him a stack of blues records to listen to to get the feeling. And on guitar was Bernie Watson, who had previously played with Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages. In late 1963, Mike Vernon, a blues fan who had previously published a Yardbirds fanzine, got a job working for Decca records, and immediately started signing his favourite acts from the London blues circuit. The first act he signed was John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, and they recorded a single, "Crawling up a Hill": [Excerpt: John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, "Crawling up a Hill (45 version)"] Mayall later called that a "clumsy, half-witted attempt at autobiographical comment", and it sold only five hundred copies. It would be the only record the Bluesbreakers would make with Watson, who soon left the band to be replaced by Roger Dean (not the same Roger Dean who later went on to design prog rock album covers). The second group to be signed by Mike Vernon to Decca was the Graham Bond Organisation. We've talked about the Graham Bond Organisation in passing several times, but not for a while and not in any great detail, so it's worth pulling everything we've said about them so far together and going through it in a little more detail. The Graham Bond Organisation, like the Rolling Stones, grew out of Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated. As we heard in the episode on "I Wanna Be Your Man" a couple of years ago, Blues Incorporated had been started by Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, and at the time we're joining them in 1962 featured a drummer called Charlie Watts, a pianist called Dave Stevens, and saxophone player Dick Heckstall-Smith, as well as frequent guest performers like a singer who called himself Mike Jagger, and another one, Roderick Stewart. That group finally found themselves the perfect bass player when Dick Heckstall-Smith put together a one-off group of jazz players to play an event at Cambridge University. At the gig, a little Scottish man came up to the group and told them he played bass and asked if he could sit in. They told him to bring along his instrument to their second set, that night, and he did actually bring along a double bass. Their bluff having been called, they decided to play the most complicated, difficult, piece they knew in order to throw the kid off -- the drummer, a trad jazz player named Ginger Baker, didn't like performing with random sit-in guests -- but astonishingly he turned out to be really good. Heckstall-Smith took down the bass player's name and phone number and invited him to a jam session with Blues Incorporated. After that jam session, Jack Bruce quickly became the group's full-time bass player. Bruce had started out as a classical cellist, but had switched to the double bass inspired by Bach, who he referred to as "the guv'nor of all bass players". His playing up to this point had mostly been in trad jazz bands, and he knew nothing of the blues, but he quickly got the hang of the genre. Bruce's first show with Blues Incorporated was a BBC recording: [Excerpt: Blues Incorporated, "Hoochie Coochie Man (BBC session)"] According to at least one source it was not being asked to take part in that session that made young Mike Jagger decide there was no future for him with Blues Incorporated and to spend more time with his other group, the Rollin' Stones. Soon after, Charlie Watts would join him, for almost the opposite reason -- Watts didn't want to be in a band that was getting as big as Blues Incorporated were. They were starting to do more BBC sessions and get more gigs, and having to join the Musicians' Union. That seemed like a lot of work. Far better to join a band like the Rollin' Stones that wasn't going anywhere. Because of Watts' decision to give up on potential stardom to become a Rollin' Stone, they needed a new drummer, and luckily the best drummer on the scene was available. But then the best drummer on the scene was *always* available. Ginger Baker had first played with Dick Heckstall-Smith several years earlier, in a trad group called the Storyville Jazzmen. There Baker had become obsessed with the New Orleans jazz drummer Baby Dodds, who had played with Louis Armstrong in the 1920s. Sadly because of 1920s recording technology, he hadn't been able to play a full kit on the recordings with Armstrong, being limited to percussion on just a woodblock, but you can hear his drumming style much better in this version of "At the Jazz Band Ball" from 1947, with Mugsy Spanier, Jack Teagarden, Cyrus St. Clair and Hank Duncan: [Excerpt: "At the Jazz Band Ball"] Baker had taken Dobbs' style and run with it, and had quickly become known as the single best player, bar none, on the London jazz scene -- he'd become an accomplished player in multiple styles, and was also fluent in reading music and arranging. He'd also, though, become known as the single person on the entire scene who was most difficult to get along with. He resigned from his first band onstage, shouting "You can stick your band up your arse", after the band's leader had had enough of him incorporating bebop influences into their trad style. Another time, when touring with Diz Disley's band, he was dumped in Germany with no money and no way to get home, because the band were so sick of him. Sometimes this was because of his temper and his unwillingness to suffer fools -- and he saw everyone else he ever met as a fool -- and sometimes it was because of his own rigorous musical ideas. He wanted to play music *his* way, and wouldn't listen to anyone who told him different. Both of these things got worse after he fell under the influence of a man named Phil Seaman, one of the only drummers that Baker respected at all. Seaman introduced Baker to African drumming, and Baker started incorporating complex polyrhythms into his playing as a result. Seaman also though introduced Baker to heroin, and while being a heroin addict in the UK in the 1960s was not as difficult as it later became -- both heroin and cocaine were available on prescription to registered addicts, and Baker got both, which meant that many of the problems that come from criminalisation of these drugs didn't affect addicts in the same way -- but it still did not, by all accounts, make him an easier person to get along with. But he *was* a fantastic drummer. As Dick Heckstall-Smith said "With the advent of Ginger, the classic Blues Incorporated line-up, one which I think could not be bettered, was set" But Alexis Korner decided that the group could be bettered, and he had some backers within the band. One of the other bands on the scene was the Don Rendell Quintet, a group that played soul jazz -- that style of jazz that bridged modern jazz and R&B, the kind of music that Ray Charles and Herbie Hancock played: [Excerpt: The Don Rendell Quintet, "Manumission"] The Don Rendell Quintet included a fantastic multi-instrumentalist, Graham Bond, who doubled on keyboards and saxophone, and Bond had been playing occasional experimental gigs with the Johnny Burch Octet -- a group led by another member of the Rendell Quartet featuring Heckstall-Smith, Bruce, Baker, and a few other musicians, doing wholly-improvised music. Heckstall-Smith, Bruce, and Baker all enjoyed playing with Bond, and when Korner decided to bring him into the band, they were all very keen. But Cyril Davies, the co-leader of the band with Korner, was furious at the idea. Davies wanted to play strict Chicago and Delta blues, and had no truck with other forms of music like R&B and jazz. To his mind it was bad enough that they had a sax player. But the idea that they would bring in Bond, who played sax and... *Hammond* organ? Well, that was practically blasphemy. Davies quit the group at the mere suggestion. Bond was soon in the band, and he, Bruce, and Baker were playing together a *lot*. As well as performing with Blues Incorporated, they continued playing in the Johnny Burch Octet, and they also started performing as the Graham Bond Trio. Sometimes the Graham Bond Trio would be Blues Incorporated's opening act, and on more than one occasion the Graham Bond Trio, Blues Incorporated, and the Johnny Burch Octet all had gigs in different parts of London on the same night and they'd have to frantically get from one to the other. The Graham Bond Trio also had fans in Manchester, thanks to the local blues scene there and their connection with Blues Incorporated, and one night in February 1963 the trio played a gig there. They realised afterwards that by playing as a trio they'd made £70, when they were lucky to make £20 from a gig with Blues Incorporated or the Octet, because there were so many members in those bands. Bond wanted to make real money, and at the next rehearsal of Blues Incorporated he announced to Korner that he, Bruce, and Baker were quitting the band -- which was news to Bruce and Baker, who he hadn't bothered consulting. Baker, indeed, was in the toilet when the announcement was made and came out to find it a done deal. He was going to kick up a fuss and say he hadn't been consulted, but Korner's reaction sealed the deal. As Baker later said "‘he said “it's really good you're doing this thing with Graham, and I wish you the best of luck” and all that. And it was a bit difficult to turn round and say, “Well, I don't really want to leave the band, you know.”'" The Graham Bond Trio struggled at first to get the gigs they were expecting, but that started to change when in April 1963 they became the Graham Bond Quartet, with the addition of virtuoso guitarist John McLaughlin. The Quartet soon became one of the hottest bands on the London R&B scene, and when Duffy Power, a Larry Parnes teen idol who wanted to move into R&B, asked his record label to get him a good R&B band to back him on a Beatles cover, it was the Graham Bond Quartet who obliged: [Excerpt: Duffy Power, "I Saw Her Standing There"] The Quartet also backed Power on a package tour with other Parnes acts, but they were also still performing their own blend of hard jazz and blues, as can be heard in this recording of the group live in June 1953: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Quartet, "Ho Ho Country Kicking Blues (Live at Klooks Kleek)"] But that lineup of the group didn't last very long. According to the way Baker told the story, he fired McLaughlin from the group, after being irritated by McLaughlin complaining about something on a day when Baker was out of cocaine and in no mood to hear anyone else's complaints. As Baker said "We lost a great guitar player and I lost a good friend." But the Trio soon became a Quartet again, as Dick Heckstall-Smith, who Baker had wanted in the band from the start, joined on saxophone to replace McLaughlin's guitar. But they were no longer called the Graham Bond Quartet. Partly because Heckstall-Smith joining allowed Bond to concentrate just on his keyboard playing, but one suspects partly to protect against any future lineup changes, the group were now The Graham Bond ORGANisation -- emphasis on the organ. The new lineup of the group got signed to Decca by Vernon, and were soon recording their first single, "Long Tall Shorty": [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Long Tall Shorty"] They recorded a few other songs which made their way onto an EP and an R&B compilation, and toured intensively in early 1964, as well as backing up Power on his follow-up to "I Saw Her Standing There", his version of "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Duffy Power, "Parchman Farm"] They also appeared in a film, just like the Beatles, though it was possibly not quite as artistically successful as "A Hard Day's Night": [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat trailer] Gonks Go Beat is one of the most bizarre films of the sixties. It's a far-future remake of Romeo and Juliet. where the two star-crossed lovers are from opposing countries -- Beatland and Ballad Isle -- who only communicate once a year in an annual song contest which acts as their version of a war, and is overseen by "Mr. A&R", played by Frank Thornton, who would later star in Are You Being Served? Carry On star Kenneth Connor is sent by aliens to try to bring peace to the two warring countries, on pain of exile to Planet Gonk, a planet inhabited solely by Gonks (a kind of novelty toy for which there was a short-lived craze then). Along the way Connor encounters such luminaries of British light entertainment as Terry Scott and Arthur Mullard, as well as musical performances by Lulu, the Nashville Teens, and of course the Graham Bond Organisation, whose performance gets them a telling-off from a teacher: [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat!] The group as a group only performed one song in this cinematic masterpiece, but Baker also made an appearance in a "drum battle" sequence where eight drummers played together: [Excerpt: Gonks Go Beat drum battle] The other drummers in that scene included, as well as some lesser-known players, Andy White who had played on the single version of "Love Me Do", Bobby Graham, who played on hits by the Kinks and the Dave Clark Five, and Ronnie Verrell, who did the drumming for Animal in the Muppet Show. Also in summer 1964, the group performed at the Fourth National Jazz & Blues Festival in Richmond -- the festival co-founded by Chris Barber that would evolve into the Reading Festival. The Yardbirds were on the bill, and at the end of their set they invited Bond, Baker, Bruce, Georgie Fame, and Mike Vernon onto the stage with them, making that the first time that Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Jack Bruce were all on stage together. Soon after that, the Graham Bond Organisation got a new manager, Robert Stigwood. Things hadn't been working out for them at Decca, and Stigwood soon got the group signed to EMI, and became their producer as well. Their first single under Stigwood's management was a cover version of the theme tune to the Debbie Reynolds film "Tammy". While that film had given Tamla records its name, the song was hardly an R&B classic: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Tammy"] That record didn't chart, but Stigwood put the group out on the road as part of the disastrous Chuck Berry tour we heard about in the episode on "All You Need is Love", which led to the bankruptcy of  Robert Stigwood Associates. The Organisation moved over to Stigwood's new company, the Robert Stigwood Organisation, and Stigwood continued to be the credited producer of their records, though after the "Tammy" disaster they decided they were going to take charge themselves of the actual music. Their first album, The Sound of 65, was recorded in a single three-hour session, and they mostly ran through their standard set -- a mixture of the same songs everyone else on the circuit was playing, like "Hoochie Coochie Man", "Got My Mojo Working", and "Wade in the Water", and originals like Bruce's "Train Time": [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Train Time"] Through 1965 they kept working. They released a non-album single, "Lease on Love", which is generally considered to be the first pop record to feature a Mellotron: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Lease on Love"] and Bond and Baker also backed another Stigwood act, Winston G, on his debut single: [Excerpt: Winston G, "Please Don't Say"] But the group were developing severe tensions. Bruce and Baker had started out friendly, but by this time they hated each other. Bruce said he couldn't hear his own playing over Baker's loud drumming, Baker thought that Bruce was far too fussy a player and should try to play simpler lines. They'd both try to throw each other during performances, altering arrangements on the fly and playing things that would trip the other player up. And *neither* of them were particularly keen on Bond's new love of the Mellotron, which was all over their second album, giving it a distinctly proto-prog feel at times: [Excerpt: The Graham Bond Organisation, "Baby Can it Be True?"] Eventually at a gig in Golders Green, Baker started throwing drumsticks at Bruce's head while Bruce was trying to play a bass solo. Bruce retaliated by throwing his bass at Baker, and then jumping on him and starting a fistfight which had to be broken up by the venue security. Baker fired Bruce from the band, but Bruce kept turning up to gigs anyway, arguing that Baker had no right to sack him as it was a democracy. Baker always claimed that in fact Bond had wanted to sack Bruce but hadn't wanted to get his hands dirty, and insisted that Baker do it, but neither Bond nor Heckstall-Smith objected when Bruce turned up for the next couple of gigs. So Baker took matters into his own hands, He pulled out a knife and told Bruce "If you show up at one more gig, this is going in you." Within days, Bruce was playing with John Mayall, whose Bluesbreakers had gone through some lineup changes by this point. Roger Dean had only played with the Bluesbreakers for a short time before Mayall had replaced him. Mayall had not been impressed with Eric Clapton's playing with the Yardbirds at first -- even though graffiti saying "Clapton is God" was already starting to appear around London -- but he had been *very* impressed with Clapton's playing on "Got to Hurry", the B-side to "For Your Love": [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Got to Hurry"] When he discovered that Clapton had quit the band, he sprang into action and quickly recruited him to replace Dean. Clapton knew he had made the right choice when a month after he'd joined, the group got the word that Bob Dylan had been so impressed with Mayall's single "Crawling up a Hill" -- the one that nobody liked, not even Mayall himself -- that he wanted to jam with Mayall and his band in the studio. Clapton of course went along: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Bluesbreakers, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] That was, of course, the session we've talked about in the Velvet Underground episode and elsewhere of which little other than that survives, and which Nico attended. At this point, Mayall didn't have a record contract, his experience recording with Mike Vernon having been no more successful than the Bond group's had been. But soon he got a one-off deal -- as a solo artist, not with the Bluesbreakers -- with Immediate Records. Clapton was the only member of the group to play on the single, which was produced by Immediate's house producer Jimmy Page: [Excerpt: John Mayall, "I'm Your Witchdoctor"] Page was impressed enough with Clapton's playing that he invited him round to Page's house to jam together. But what Clapton didn't know was that Page was taping their jam sessions, and that he handed those tapes over to Immediate Records -- whether he was forced to by his contract with the label or whether that had been his plan all along depends on whose story you believe, but Clapton never truly forgave him. Page and Clapton's guitar-only jams had overdubs by Bill Wyman, Ian Stewart, and drummer Chris Winter, and have been endlessly repackaged on blues compilations ever since: [Excerpt: Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton, "Draggin' My Tail"] But Mayall was having problems with John McVie, who had started to drink too much, and as soon as he found out that Jack Bruce was sacked by the Graham Bond Organisation, Mayall got in touch with Bruce and got him to join the band in McVie's place. Everyone was agreed that this lineup of the band -- Mayall, Clapton, Bruce, and Hughie Flint -- was going places: [Excerpt: John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with Jack Bruce, "Hoochie Coochie Man"] Unfortunately, it wasn't going to last long. Clapton, while he thought that Bruce was the greatest bass player he'd ever worked with, had other plans. He was going to leave the country and travel the world as a peripatetic busker. He was off on his travels, never to return. Luckily, Mayall had someone even better waiting in the wings. A young man had, according to Mayall, "kept coming down to all the gigs and saying, “Hey, what are you doing with him?” – referring to whichever guitarist was onstage that night – “I'm much better than he is. Why don't you let me play guitar for you?” He got really quite nasty about it, so finally, I let him sit in. And he was brilliant." Peter Green was probably the best blues guitarist in London at that time, but this lineup of the Bluesbreakers only lasted a handful of gigs -- Clapton discovered that busking in Greece wasn't as much fun as being called God in London, and came back very soon after he'd left. Mayall had told him that he could have his old job back when he got back, and so Green was out and Clapton was back in. And soon the Bluesbreakers' revolving door revolved again. Manfred Mann had just had a big hit with "If You Gotta Go, Go Now", the same song we heard Dylan playing earlier: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] But their guitarist, Mike Vickers, had quit. Tom McGuinness, their bass player, had taken the opportunity to switch back to guitar -- the instrument he'd played in his first band with his friend Eric Clapton -- but that left them short a bass player. Manfred Mann were essentially the same kind of band as the Graham Bond Organisation -- a Hammond-led group of virtuoso multi-instrumentalists who played everything from hardcore Delta blues to complex modern jazz -- but unlike the Bond group they also had a string of massive pop hits, and so made a lot more money. The combination was irresistible to Bruce, and he joined the band just before they recorded an EP of jazz instrumental versions of recent hits: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] Bruce had also been encouraged by Robert Stigwood to do a solo project, and so at the same time as he joined Manfred Mann, he also put out a solo single, "Drinkin' and Gamblin'" [Excerpt: Jack Bruce, "Drinkin' and Gamblin'"] But of course, the reason Bruce had joined Manfred Mann was that they were having pop hits as well as playing jazz, and soon they did just that, with Bruce playing on their number one hit "Pretty Flamingo": [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "Pretty Flamingo"] So John McVie was back in the Bluesbreakers, promising to keep his drinking under control. Mike Vernon still thought that Mayall had potential, but the people at Decca didn't agree, so Vernon got Mayall and Clapton -- but not the other band members -- to record a single for a small indie label he ran as a side project: [Excerpt: John Mayall and Eric Clapton, "Bernard Jenkins"] That label normally only released records in print runs of ninety-nine copies, because once you hit a hundred copies you had to pay tax on them, but there was so much demand for that single that they ended up pressing up five hundred copies, making it the label's biggest seller ever. Vernon eventually convinced the heads at Decca that the Bluesbreakers could be truly big, and so he got the OK to record the album that would generally be considered the greatest British blues album of all time -- Blues Breakers, also known as the Beano album because of Clapton reading a copy of the British kids' comic The Beano in the group photo on the front. [Excerpt: John Mayall with Eric Clapton, "Ramblin' On My Mind"] The album was a mixture of originals by Mayall and the standard repertoire of every blues or R&B band on the circuit -- songs like "Parchman Farm" and "What'd I Say" -- but what made the album unique was Clapton's guitar tone. Much to the chagrin of Vernon, and of engineer Gus Dudgeon, Clapton insisted on playing at the same volume that he would on stage. Vernon later said of Dudgeon "I can remember seeing his face the very first time Clapton plugged into the Marshall stack and turned it up and started playing at the sort of volume he was going to play. You could almost see Gus's eyes meet over the middle of his nose, and it was almost like he was just going to fall over from the sheer power of it all. But after an enormous amount of fiddling around and moving amps around, we got a sound that worked." [Excerpt: John Mayall with Eric Clapton, "Hideaway"] But by the time the album cane out. Clapton was no longer with the Bluesbreakers. The Graham Bond Organisation had struggled on for a while after Bruce's departure. They brought in a trumpet player, Mike Falana, and even had a hit record -- or at least, the B-side of a hit record. The Who had just put out a hit single, "Substitute", on Robert Stigwood's record label, Reaction: [Excerpt: The Who, "Substitute"] But, as you'll hear in episode 183, they had moved to Reaction Records after a falling out with their previous label, and with Shel Talmy their previous producer. The problem was, when "Substitute" was released, it had as its B-side a song called "Circles" (also known as "Instant Party -- it's been released under both names). They'd recorded an earlier version of the song for Talmy, and just as "Substitute" was starting to chart, Talmy got an injunction against the record and it had to be pulled. Reaction couldn't afford to lose the big hit record they'd spent money promoting, so they needed to put it out with a new B-side. But the Who hadn't got any unreleased recordings. But the Graham Bond Organisation had, and indeed they had an unreleased *instrumental*. So "Waltz For a Pig" became the B-side to a top-five single, credited to The Who Orchestra: [Excerpt: The Who Orchestra, "Waltz For a Pig"] That record provided the catalyst for the formation of Cream, because Ginger Baker had written the song, and got £1,350 for it, which he used to buy a new car. Baker had, for some time, been wanting to get out of the Graham Bond Organisation. He was trying to get off heroin -- though he would make many efforts to get clean over the decades, with little success -- while Bond was starting to use it far more heavily, and was also using acid and getting heavily into mysticism, which Baker despised. Baker may have had the idea for what he did next from an article in one of the music papers. John Entwistle of the Who would often tell a story about an article in Melody Maker -- though I've not been able to track down the article itself to get the full details -- in which musicians were asked to name which of their peers they'd put into a "super-group". He didn't remember the full details, but he did remember that the consensus choice had had Eric Clapton on lead guitar, himself on bass, and Ginger Baker on drums. As he said later "I don't remember who else was voted in, but a few months later, the Cream came along, and I did wonder if somebody was maybe believing too much of their own press". Incidentally, like The Buffalo Springfield and The Pink Floyd, Cream, the band we are about to meet, had releases both with and without the definite article, and Eric Clapton at least seems always to talk about them as "the Cream" even decades later, but they're primarily known as just Cream these days. Baker, having had enough of the Bond group, decided to drive up to Oxford to see Clapton playing with the Bluesbreakers. Clapton invited him to sit in for a couple of songs, and by all accounts the band sounded far better than they had previously. Clapton and Baker could obviously play well together, and Baker offered Clapton a lift back to London in his new car, and on the drive back asked Clapton if he wanted to form a new band. Clapton was as impressed by Baker's financial skills as he was by his musicianship. He said later "Musicians didn't have cars. You all got in a van." Clearly a musician who was *actually driving a new car he owned* was going places. He agreed to Baker's plan. But of course they needed a bass player, and Clapton thought he had the perfect solution -- "What about Jack?" Clapton knew that Bruce had been a member of the Graham Bond Organisation, but didn't know why he'd left the band -- he wasn't particularly clued in to what the wider music scene was doing, and all he knew was that Bruce had played with both him and Baker, and that he was the best bass player he'd ever played with. And Bruce *was* arguably the best bass player in London at that point, and he was starting to pick up session work as well as his work with Manfred Mann. For example it's him playing on the theme tune to "After The Fox" with Peter Sellers, the Hollies, and the song's composer Burt Bacharach: [Excerpt: The Hollies with Peter Sellers, "After the Fox"] Clapton was insistent. Baker's idea was that the band should be the best musicians around. That meant they needed the *best* musicians around, not the second best. If Jack Bruce wasn't joining, Eric Clapton wasn't joining either. Baker very reluctantly agreed, and went round to see Bruce the next day -- according to Baker it was in a spirit of generosity and giving Bruce one more chance, while according to Bruce he came round to eat humble pie and beg for forgiveness. Either way, Bruce agreed to join the band. The three met up for a rehearsal at Baker's home, and immediately Bruce and Baker started fighting, but also immediately they realised that they were great at playing together -- so great that they named themselves the Cream, as they were the cream of musicians on the scene. They knew they had something, but they didn't know what. At first they considered making their performances into Dada projects, inspired by the early-twentieth-century art movement. They liked a band that had just started to make waves, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band -- who had originally been called the Bonzo Dog Dada Band -- and they bought some props with the vague idea of using them on stage in the same way the Bonzos did. But as they played together they realised that they needed to do something different from that. At first, they thought they needed a fourth member -- a keyboard player. Graham Bond's name was brought up, but Clapton vetoed him. Clapton wanted Steve Winwood, the keyboard player and vocalist with the Spencer Davis Group. Indeed, Winwood was present at what was originally intended to be the first recording session the trio would play. Joe Boyd had asked Eric Clapton to round up a bunch of players to record some filler tracks for an Elektra blues compilation, and Clapton had asked Bruce and Baker to join him, Paul Jones on vocals, Winwood on Hammond and Clapton's friend Ben Palmer on piano for the session. Indeed, given that none of the original trio were keen on singing, that Paul Jones was just about to leave Manfred Mann, and that we know Clapton wanted Winwood in the band, one has to wonder if Clapton at least half-intended for this to be the eventual lineup of the band. If he did, that plan was foiled by Baker's refusal to take part in the session. Instead, this one-off band, named The Powerhouse, featured Pete York, the drummer from the Spencer Davis Group, on the session, which produced the first recording of Clapton playing on the Robert Johnson song originally titled "Cross Road Blues" but now generally better known just as "Crossroads": [Excerpt: The Powerhouse, "Crossroads"] We talked about Robert Johnson a little back in episode ninety-seven, but other than Bob Dylan, who was inspired by his lyrics, we had seen very little influence from Johnson up to this point, but he's going to be a major influence on rock guitar for the next few years, so we should talk about him a little here. It's often said that nobody knew anything about Robert Johnson, that he was almost a phantom other than his records which existed outside of any context as artefacts of their own. That's... not really the case. Johnson had died a little less than thirty years earlier, at only twenty-seven years old. Most of his half-siblings and step-siblings were alive, as were his son, his stepson, and dozens of musicians he'd played with over the years, women he'd had affairs with, and other assorted friends and relatives. What people mean is that information about Johnson's life was not yet known by people they consider important -- which is to say white blues scholars and musicians. Indeed, almost everything people like that -- people like *me* -- know of the facts of Johnson's life has only become known to us in the last four years. If, as some people had expected, I'd started this series with an episode on Johnson, I'd have had to redo the whole thing because of the information that's made its way to the public since then. But here's what was known -- or thought -- by white blues scholars in 1966. Johnson was, according to them, a field hand from somewhere in Mississippi, who played the guitar in between working on the cotton fields. He had done two recording sessions, in 1936 and 1937. One song from his first session, "Terraplane Blues", had been a very minor hit by blues standards: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Terraplane Blues"] That had sold well -- nobody knows how well, but maybe as many as ten thousand copies, and it was certainly a record people knew in 1937 if they liked the Delta blues, but ten thousand copies total is nowhere near the sales of really successful records, and none of the follow-ups had sold anything like that much -- many of them had sold in the hundreds rather than the thousands. As Elijah Wald, one of Johnson's biographers put it "knowing about Johnson and Muddy Waters but not about Leroy Carr or Dinah Washington was like knowing about, say, the Sir Douglas Quintet but not knowing about the Beatles" -- though *I* would add that the Sir Douglas Quintet were much bigger during the sixties than Johnson was during his lifetime. One of the few white people who had noticed Johnson's existence at all was John Hammond, and he'd written a brief review of Johnson's first two singles under a pseudonym in a Communist newspaper. I'm going to quote it here, but the word he used to talk about Black people was considered correct then but isn't now, so I'll substitute Black for that word: "Before closing we cannot help but call your attention to the greatest [Black] blues singer who has cropped up in recent years, Robert Johnson. Recording them in deepest Mississippi, Vocalion has certainly done right by us and by the tunes "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" and "Terraplane Blues", to name only two of the four sides already released, sung to his own guitar accompaniment. Johnson makes Leadbelly sound like an accomplished poseur" Hammond had tried to get Johnson to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts we talked about in the very first episodes of the podcast, but he'd discovered that he'd died shortly before. He got Big Bill Broonzy instead, and played a couple of Johnson's records from a record player on the stage. Hammond introduced those recordings with a speech: "It is tragic that an American audience could not have been found seven or eight years ago for a concert of this kind. Bessie Smith was still at the height of her career and Joe Smith, probably the greatest trumpet player America ever knew, would still have been around to play obbligatos for her...dozens of other artists could have been there in the flesh. But that audience as well as this one would not have been able to hear Robert Johnson sing and play the blues on his guitar, for at that time Johnson was just an unknown hand on a Robinsonville, Mississippi plantation. Robert Johnson was going to be the big surprise of the evening for this audience at Carnegie Hall. I know him only from his Vocalion blues records and from the tall, exciting tales the recording engineers and supervisors used to bring about him from the improvised studios in Dallas and San Antonio. I don't believe Johnson had ever worked as a professional musician anywhere, and it still knocks me over when I think of how lucky it is that a talent like his ever found its way onto phonograph records. We will have to be content with playing two of his records, the old "Walkin' Blues" and the new, unreleased, "Preachin' Blues", because Robert Johnson died last week at the precise moment when Vocalion scouts finally reached him and told him that he was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall on December 23. He was in his middle twenties and nobody seems to know what caused his death." And that was, for the most part, the end of Robert Johnson's impact on the culture for a generation. The Lomaxes went down to Clarksdale, Mississippi a couple of years later -- reports vary as to whether this was to see if they could find Johnson, who they were unaware was dead, or to find information out about him, and they did end up recording a young singer named Muddy Waters for the Library of Congress, including Waters' rendition of "32-20 Blues", Johnson's reworking of Skip James' "Twenty-Two Twenty Blues": [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "32-20 Blues"] But Johnson's records remained unavailable after their initial release until 1959, when the blues scholar Samuel Charters published the book The Country Blues, which was the first book-length treatment ever of Delta blues. Sixteen years later Charters said "I shouldn't have written The Country Blues when I did; since I really didn't know enough, but I felt I couldn't afford to wait. So The Country Blues was two things. It was a romanticization of certain aspects of black life in an effort to force the white society to reconsider some of its racial attitudes, and on the other hand it was a cry for help. I wanted hundreds of people to go out and interview the surviving blues artists. I wanted people to record them and document their lives, their environment, and their music, not only so that their story would be preserved but also so they'd get a little money and a little recognition in their last years." Charters talked about Johnson in the book, as one of the performers who played "minor roles in the story of the blues", and said that almost nothing was known about his life. He talked about how he had been poisoned by his common-law wife, about how his records were recorded in a pool hall, and said "The finest of Robert Johnson's blues have a brooding sense of torment and despair. The blues has become a personified figure of despondency." Along with Charters' book came a compilation album of the same name, and that included the first ever reissue of one of Johnson's tracks, "Preaching Blues": [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Preaching Blues"] Two years later, John Hammond, who had remained an ardent fan of Johnson, had Columbia put out the King of the Delta Blues Singers album. At the time no white blues scholars knew what Johnson looked like and they had no photos of him, so a generic painting of a poor-looking Black man with a guitar was used for the cover. The liner note to King of the Delta Blues Singers talked about how Johnson was seventeen or eighteen when he made his recordings, how he was "dead before he reached his twenty-first birthday, poisoned by a jealous girlfriend", how he had "seldom, if ever, been away from the plantation in Robinsville, Mississippi, where he was born and raised", and how he had had such stage fright that when he was asked to play in front of other musicians, he'd turned to face a wall so he couldn't see them. And that would be all that any of the members of the Powerhouse would know about Johnson. Maybe they'd also heard the rumours that were starting to spread that Johnson had got his guitar-playing skills by selling his soul to the devil at a crossroads at midnight, but that would have been all they knew when they recorded their filler track for Elektra: [Excerpt: The Powerhouse, "Crossroads"] Either way, the Powerhouse lineup only lasted for that one session -- the group eventually decided that a simple trio would be best for the music they wanted to play. Clapton had seen Buddy Guy touring with just a bass player and drummer a year earlier, and had liked the idea of the freedom that gave him as a guitarist. The group soon took on Robert Stigwood as a manager, which caused more arguments between Bruce and Baker. Bruce was convinced that if they were doing an all-for-one one-for-all thing they should also manage themselves, but Baker pointed out that that was a daft idea when they could get one of the biggest managers in the country to look after them. A bigger argument, which almost killed the group before it started, happened when Baker told journalist Chris Welch of the Melody Maker about their plans. In an echo of the way that he and Bruce had been resigned from Blues Incorporated without being consulted, now with no discussion Manfred Mann and John Mayall were reading in the papers that their band members were quitting before those members had bothered to mention it. Mayall was furious, especially since the album Clapton had played on hadn't yet come out. Clapton was supposed to work a month's notice while Mayall found another guitarist, but Mayall spent two weeks begging Peter Green to rejoin the band. Green was less than eager -- after all, he'd been fired pretty much straight away earlier -- but Mayall eventually persuaded him. The second he did, Mayall turned round to Clapton and told him he didn't have to work the rest of his notice -- he'd found another guitar player and Clapton was fired: [Excerpt: John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, "Dust My Blues"] Manfred Mann meanwhile took on the Beatles' friend Klaus Voorman to replace Bruce. Voorman would remain with the band until the end, and like Green was for Mayall, Voorman was in some ways a better fit for Manfred Mann than Bruce was. In particular he could double on flute, as he did for example on their hit version of Bob Dylan's "The Mighty Quinn": [Excerpt: Manfred Mann "The Mighty Quinn"] The new group, The Cream, were of course signed in the UK to Stigwood's Reaction label. Other than the Who, who only stuck around for one album, Reaction was not a very successful label. Its biggest signing was a former keyboard player for Screaming Lord Sutch, who recorded for them under the names Paul Dean and Oscar, but who later became known as Paul Nicholas and had a successful career in musical theatre and sitcom. Nicholas never had any hits for Reaction, but he did release one interesting record, in 1967: [Excerpt: Oscar, "Over the Wall We Go"] That was one of the earliest songwriting attempts by a young man who had recently named himself David Bowie. Now the group were public, they started inviting journalists to their rehearsals, which were mostly spent trying to combine their disparate musical influences --

Norcos y Horchata / aloha motherfuckers norcos y Horchata / everyones a expert . detroit . ep album last year..damn missed it got to check it outLas Yakets / San Jose / Regresa El Rocanrol ....costa rico... june Gunk / back in line / first demo sessions .....tokyo...may nypriceRancid / New American / tomorrow never comes fastbacks / ramblin Rose / z2fastbacks / roll away the stone / bike toy clock giftthe bobbyteens / hurt for you / estrus kamikaze ass chomp n stompj fred & the playboys / boogie children / red hot boppers vol 2TRASH / Nnervous / this is complete trash .....UK Punk band formed 1976 in Weybridge, Surrey. Signed to Polydor and released two singles on the label. Auditioned in front of Roger Daltrey and John Entwistle for the role as a mod group in the film 'Quadrophenia', but didn't get the part. Split in 1979cretin 66 / farmer john / burnin rubber out of hells garage....99 kansas brimstone howl / solitary man / mammon b side 09the interlectuals / the girl the cow and the country / black! Domina ! Now!  04 Italian garage punk band from Rome started in 1999 as a duothe come ons / promise me / salvo of 24 gunshots ....garage rock band founded in 1999 in Detroit.creamrs / baltic lover..may single jersey cityMonomen / swampland / set it on fire ..tribute to scientistPrecious few / train kept a rollin USPunk from the 60'srancid / hellbound train / tomorrow never comes fall-outs / dug my grave / the estrus lunch bucket / seatlethe electras / action woman / Nuggets : original artifacts from the first pyschedellic erathe rollers / jack the ripper / trans world punk rave upthe courettes . hop the twig / Boom! Dynamite - An introduction to The Fabulous Courettes good comp to introduce us and canadian dm bob and the deficits / mother of earth / salvo of 24 gunshots tribute to gunclubhamburg german doing louisianna swampthe bottle rockets and the sermon / vb and a cigarette / bside girl my girl goblin records / austrialiacheater slicks / cany't you hear my heartbeat 09 bside erotic womenpaul revere and the raiders / steppin out / nuggets original artyfacts from first pysch erashelley stevens / secret love / heroes of the night vol 2 the locomotions / come and get it / the loco,otions 03 columbia neckties / hot butt love / wht change you moves / Aalborg, Denmark. 02gino and the goons / free and easy split lp with dirty coal train ...garagem records portugalLos Paniks / blue moon / The Panik Kontroversy ...family spree recordings spainhexxers / bones by my bedside / Freaks With The Savage Beat 04angry adults / nothing gonna change my mind / dust and weight ep june nyp finlandthe outcasts / smokestack lightning / texas punk groups from the sixtiesloli and the clones / i hate your guts / P.S. we hate youthe pleasers / dont give me no lip child / trans world punk rave upthe yellnuts / young punks / split single with mutant love single 2019denvermotorbike / pressure cooker / motorbike vocals burriedthe cowboys / pie in my eye / the bottom of a rotten flower                       

We had the pleasure of interviewing Shaun Farrugia over Zoom video!Rising artist and songwriter Shaun Farrugia recently released his long awaited debut EP ‘Heaven Like Mine' via Polydor.‘Heaven Like Mine' is tinged with emotion that's both elevating yet deeply poignant, and continues to showcase the rising star's effortlessly rich and raspy vocals against a backdrop of alt-pop goodness. Lined five tracks deep, the EP is delicately furnished with themes surrounding love, acceptance and modern day anxieties. Featuring previous singles ‘Dear God' and ‘Count On You', title track ‘Heaven Like Mine' is abundant with uplifting folk inspired acoustics, which transitions seamlessly into the ethereal ‘Recognise Me' - leading to the beautifully climatic final track ‘Vertigo'.Quickly emerging as a frequenter on BBC Radio 1 including multiple plays from Jack Saunders and Maia Beth on BBC Radio 1's Future Pop, bringing Shaun's catalogue to 30 million streams to date. His previous cover of The Weeknd's Billboard Chart topping #1 hit Blinding Lights flew straight to #1 on the Shazam Discovery Charts, after featuring on Love Island, the biggest reaction to any song in the latest season of the show.The 26-year-old Maltese native dropped his life on the island to fly to London in 2019, quit his job, sell everything he owned and showed up on the doorstep of Sigala after being invited to come and meet the producer during an Instagram Live. The gamble paid off, Shaun was quickly snapped up by Polydor. As a regular guy doing extraordinary things Shaun scores high on the likability scale, but he manages to balance his modest nature with an ambition that's hard to ignore — and is right there in his extraordinary songwriting.From Shaun's early songwriting credits for artists as diverse as Mimi Webb (‘I'll Break My Heart Again') and The Script (‘Hot Summer Nights'), to two collaborations with the likes of renowned DJ Martin Garrix ('Starlight ‘Keep Me Afloat'' and 'If We'll Ever Be Remembered'), to co-signs from some of the biggest tunesmiths in the business, and at the start of 2022 hitting a brand new milestone with Sigala's top 40 record 'Melody'.Over the summer of 2022, Shaun made his live performance debut at MTV's Isle of MTV in his home of Malta on July 19th, joining Marshmello, French Montana and Mae Muller on the lineup. With more music set for release over the coming months, this gifted lyricist and superstar-in-the-making is already on his way to become one of the most exciting prospects this year. Definitely one-to-watch.We want to hear from you! Please email Hello@BringinitBackwards.com.www.BringinitBackwards.com#podcast #interview #bringinbackpod #ShaunFarrugia #HeavenLikeMine #NewMusic #ZoomListen & Subscribe to BiBhttps://www.bringinitbackwards.com/follow/Follow our podcast on Instagram and Twitter!https://www.facebook.com/groups/bringinbackpodThis show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/4972373/advertisement

Hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot dissect De La Soul's iconic debut 3 Feet High and Rising. They discuss the innovative sampling and rapping style, as well as the legal troubles that plagued the record for decades. They also pay tribute to the late De La Soul rapper Trugoy the Dove and hear from some listeners.   Join our Facebook Group: https://bit.ly/3sivr9T Become a member on Patreon: https://bit.ly/3slWZvc Sign up for our newsletter: https://bit.ly/3eEvRnG Make a donation via PayPal: https://bit.ly/3dmt9lU Send us a Voice Memo: Desktop: bit.ly/2RyD5Ah  Mobile: sayhi.chat/soundops   Featured Songs: De La Soul, "Me Myself and I," 3 Feet High And Rising, Tommy Boy, 1989The Beatles, "With A Little Help From My Friends," Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Capitol, 1967De La Soul, "Plug Tunin'," Plug Tunin' / Freedom Of Speak (Single), Tommy Boy, 1988De La Soul, "Tread Water," 3 Feet High And Rising, Tommy Boy, 1989De La Soul, "Intro," 4 Feet High And Rising, Tommy Boy, 1989Joe Bataan, "Rap-O Clap-O," Rap-O Clap-O (Single), Salsoul, 1979Eric B. & Rakim, "Eric B. Is President," Paid in Full, 4th & Broadway, 1987James Brown, "Funky President (People It's Bad)," Reality, Polydor, 1974Stetsasonic, "Sally," In Full Gear, Tommy Boy, 1988De La Soul, "Plug Tunin (Last Chance To Comprehend)," 3 Feet High And Rising, Tommy Boy, 1989Johnny Cash, "Five Feet High and Rising," Songs of Our Soil, Columbia, 1959The Invitations, "Written on the Wall," Hallelujah (Single), DynoVoice, 1965De La Soul, "Potholes In My Lawn," 3 Feet High And Rising, Tommy Boy, 1989Bob Dorough, "Three Is a Magic Number," Schoolhouse Rock! Rocks, Lava, 1996De La Soul, "The Magic Number," 3 Feet High And Rising, Tommy Boy, 1989De La Soul, "Jenifa Taught Me (Derwin's Revenge)," 3 Feet High And Rising, Tommy Boy, 1989De La Soul, "Say No Go," 3 Feet High And Rising, Tommy Boy, 1989Funkadelic, "Not Just Knee Deep," Uncle Jam Wants You, Casablanca, 1979Ohio Players, "Funky Worm," Funky Worm (Single), Westbound, 1972Edwin Birdsong, "Rapper Dapper Snapper," Funktaztik, Salsoul, 1981Loose Ends, "Gonna Make You Mine," Zagora, MCA, 1986Doug E. Fresh, "The Original Human Beatbox," The Original Human Beatbox (12" Single), Vintertainment, 1984The Turtles, "You Showed Me," You Showed Me (Single), White Whale, 1966The Mothers of Invention, "Louie Louie (Live At the Royal Albert Hall In London)," Uncle Meat, Reprise, 1969Buddy Guy, "First Time I Met the Blues," I Got My Eyes On You (Single), Chess, 1960Gilbert O'Sullivan, "Alone Again (Naturally)," Alone Again (Naturally) (Single), MAM, 1972Biz Markie, "Alone Again ," I Need A Haircut, Cold Chillin', 1991De La Soul, "Buddy," 3 Feet High And Rising, Tommy Boy, 1989Nico Segal & The Social Experiment, "Windows," Windows, (self-released), 2015Common, "I Am Music," Electric Circus, MCA, 2002Frank Ocean, "Sweet Life," Channel ORANGE, Island Def Jam Music, 2012Puff Daddy & Faith Evans, "I'll Be Missing You (feat. 112)," Tribute to the Notorious B.I.G. - EP, Bad Boy, 1989A Tribe Called Quest, "Electric Relaxation," Midnight Marauders, Jive, 1993Jungle Brothers, "Because I Got It Like That," Straight Out the Jungle, Warlock, 1988Black Star, "Brown Skin Lady," Mos Def and Talib Kweli Are Black Star, Rawkus, 1999Lupe Fiasco, "Kick Push," Lupe Fiasco's Food & Liquor, Atlantic, 2006Kanye West, "Spaceship," The College Dropout, Roc-A-Fella, 2004Murs, "The Pain," Murs 3:16: The 9th Edition, Definitive Jux, 2004Lady Gaga, "Paparazzi," The Fame, Interscope, 2008Richard Buckner, "Lil Wallet Picture," Devotion + Doubt, MCA, 1997The Speedies, "Let Me Take Your Photo," Let Me Take Your Photo (Single), Golden Disc, 1979The Cure, "Pictures of You," Disintegration, Fiction, 1989boygenius, "Not Strong Enough," the record, Interscope, 2023  Support The Show: https://www.patreon.com/soundopinionsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot talk with Dr, Ricky Rodriguez about the cultural exchange between Latino fans and British bands in the 1980s. Plus, Jim and Greg review new albums by Kelela and Yo La Tengo.    Join our Facebook Group: https://bit.ly/3sivr9T Become a member on Patreon: https://bit.ly/3slWZvc Sign up for our newsletter: https://bit.ly/3eEvRnG Make a donation via PayPal: https://bit.ly/3dmt9lU Send us a Voice Memo: Desktop: bit.ly/2RyD5Ah  Mobile: sayhi.chat/soundops   Featured Songs: Siouxsie & The Banshees, "Spellbound," Juju, Polydor, 1981The Beatles, "With A Little Help From My Friends," Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Capitol, 1967Kelela, "Washed Away," Raven, Warp, 2023Kelela, "Raven," Raven, Warp, 2023Kelela, "Enough for Love," Raven, Warp, 2023Kelela, "On the Run," Raven, Warp, 2023Kelela, "Bruises," Raven, Warp, 2023Yo La Tengo, "Sinatra Drive Breakdown," This Stupid World, Matador, 2023Yo La Tengo, "Fallout," This Stupid World, Matador, 2023Yo La Tengo, "Aselestine," This Stupid World, Matador, 2023Yo La Tengo, "This Stupid World," This Stupid World, Matador, 2023Yo La Tengo, "Until It Happens," This Stupid World, Matador, 2023Adam Ant, "Juanito the Bandito," Juanito the Bandito (Single), CBS, 1982Blue Rondo À La Turk, "Me and Mr. Sanchez," Me and Mr. Sanchez (Single), Virgin, 1981Holly Johnson, "Americanos," Blast, MCA, 1989Duran Duran, "The Reflex (The Dance Mix)," The Reflex (The Dance Mix) (Single), EMI, 1984Orchestral Manœuvres In The Dark, "So In Love," So In Love (Single), Virgin, 1985Pat Boone, "Speedy Gonzales," Speedy Gonzales (Single), Dot, 1962John Cale, "Story of Blood feat. Weyes Blood," Mercy, Double Six, 2023Support The Show: https://www.patreon.com/soundopinionsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode 163 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay", Stax Records, and the short, tragic, life of Otis Redding. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on "Soul Man" by Sam and Dave. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Redding, even if I split into multiple parts. The main resource I used for the biographical details of Redding was Dreams to Remember: Otis Redding, Stax Records, and the Transformation of Southern Soul by Mark Ribowsky. Ribowsky is usually a very good, reliable, writer, but in this case there are a couple of lapses in editing which make it not a book I can wholeheartedly recommend, but the research on the biographical details of Redding seems to be the best. Information about Stax comes primarily from two books: Soulsville USA: The Story of Stax by Rob Bowman, and Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion by Robert Gordon. Country Soul by Charles L Hughes is a great overview of the soul music made in Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville in the sixties. There are two Original Album Series box sets which between them contain all the albums Redding released in his life plus his first few posthumous albums, for a low price. Volume 1, volume 2. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before I begin -- this episode ends with a description of a plane crash, which some people may find upsetting. There's also a mention of gun violence. In 2019 the film Summer of Soul came out. If you're unfamiliar with this film, it's a documentary of an event, the Harlem Cultural Festival, which gets called the "Black Woodstock" because it took place in the summer of 1969, overlapping the weekend that Woodstock happened. That event was a series of weekend free concerts in New York, performed by many of the greatest acts in Black music at that time -- people like Stevie Wonder, David Ruffin, Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, the Staple Singers, Sly and the Family Stone, Nina Simone, and the Fifth Dimension. One thing that that film did was to throw into sharp relief a lot of the performances we've seen over the years by legends of white rock music of the same time. If you watch the film of Woodstock, or the earlier Monterey Pop festival, it's apparent that a lot of the musicians are quite sloppy. This is easy to dismiss as being a product of the situation -- they're playing outdoor venues, with no opportunity to soundcheck, using primitive PA systems, and often without monitors. Anyone would sound a bit sloppy in that situation, right? That is until you listen to the performances on the Summer of Soul soundtrack. The performers on those shows are playing in the same kind of circumstances, and in the case of Woodstock literally at the same time, so it's a fair comparison, and there really is no comparison. Whatever you think of the quality of the *music* (and some of my very favourite artists played at Monterey and Woodstock), the *musicianship* is orders of magnitude better at the Harlem Cultural Festival [Excerpt: Gladys Knight and the Pips “I Heard it Through the Grapevine (live)”] And of course there's a reason for this. Most of the people who played at those big hippie festivals had not had the same experiences as the Black musicians. The Black players were mostly veterans of the chitlin' circuit, where you had to play multiple shows a day, in front of demanding crowds who wanted their money's worth, and who wanted you to be able to play and also put on a show at the same time. When you're playing for crowds of working people who have spent a significant proportion of their money to go to the show, and on a bill with a dozen other acts who are competing for that audience's attention, you are going to get good or stop working. The guitar bands at Woodstock and Monterey, though, hadn't had the same kind of pressure. Their audiences were much more forgiving, much more willing to go with the musicians, view themselves as part of a community with them. And they had to play far fewer shows than the chitlin' circuit veterans, so they simply didn't develop the same chops before becoming famous (the best of them did after fame, of course). And so it's no surprise that while a lot of bands became more famous as a result of the Monterey Pop Festival, only three really became breakout stars in America as a direct result of it. One of those was the Who, who were already the third or fourth biggest band in the UK by that point, either just behind or just ahead of the Kinks, and so the surprise is more that it took them that long to become big in America. But the other two were themselves veterans of the chitlin' circuit. If you buy the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of Monterey Pop, you get two extra discs along with the disc with the film of the full festival on it -- the only two performances that were thought worth turning into their own short mini-films. One of them is Jimi Hendrix's performance, and we will talk about that in a future episode. The other is titled Shake! Otis at Monterey: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Shake! (live at Monterey Pop Festival)"] Otis Redding came from Macon, Georgia, the home town of Little Richard, who became one of his biggest early influences, and like Richard he was torn in his early years between religion and secular music -- though in most other ways he was very different from Richard, and in particular he came from a much more supportive family. While his father, Otis senior, was a deacon in the church, and didn't approve much of blues, R&B, or jazz music or listen to it himself, he didn't prevent his son from listening to it, so young Otis grew up listening to records by Richard -- of whom he later said "If it hadn't been for Little Richard I would not be here... Richard has soul too. My present music has a lot of him in it" -- and another favourite, Clyde McPhatter: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, "Have Mercy Baby"] Indeed, it's unclear exactly how much Otis senior *did* disapprove of those supposedly-sinful kinds of music. The biography I used as a source for this, and which says that Otis senior wouldn't listen to blues or jazz music at all, also quotes his son as saying that when he was a child his mother and father used to play him "a calypso song out then called 'Run Joe'" That will of course be this one: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Run Joe"] I find it hard to reconcile the idea of someone who refused to listen to the blues or jazz listening to Louis Jordan, but then people are complex. Whatever Otis senior's feelings about secular music, he recognised from a very early age that his son had a special talent, and encouraged him to become a gospel singer. And at the same time he was listening to Little Richard, young Otis was also listening to gospel singers. One particular influence was a blind street singer, Reverend Pearly Brown: [Excerpt: Reverend Pearly Brown, "Ninety Nine and a Half Won't Do"] Redding was someone who cared deeply about his father's opinion, and it might well have been that he would eventually have become a gospel performer, because he started his career with a foot in both camps. What seems to have made the difference is that when he was sixteen, his father came down with tuberculosis. Even a few years earlier this would have been a terminal diagnosis, but thankfully by this point antibiotics had been invented, and the deacon eventually recovered. But it did mean that Otis junior had to become the family breadwinner while his father was sick, and so he turned decisively towards the kind of music that could make more money. He'd already started performing secular music. He'd joined a band led by Gladys Williams, who was the first female bandleader in the area. Williams sadly doesn't seem to have recorded anything -- discogs has a listing of a funk single by a Gladys Williams on a tiny label which may or may not be the same person, but in general she avoided recording studios, only wanting to play live -- but she was a very influential figure in Georgia music. According to her former trumpeter Newton Collier, who later went on to play with Redding and others, she trained both Fats Gonder and Lewis Hamlin, who went on to join the lineup of James Brown's band that made Live at the Apollo, and Collier says that Hamlin's arrangements for that album, and the way the band would segue from one track to another, were all things he'd been taught by Miss Gladys. Redding sang with Gladys Williams for a while, and she took him under her wing, trained him, and became his de facto first manager. She got him to perform at local talent shows, where he won fifteen weeks in a row, before he got banned from performing to give everyone else a chance. At all of these shows, the song he performed was one that Miss Gladys had rehearsed with him, Little Richard's "Heeby Jeebies": [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Heeby Jeebies"] At this time, Redding's repertoire was largely made up of songs by the two greats of fifties Georgia R&B -- Little Richard and James Brown -- plus some by his other idol Sam Cooke, and those singers would remain his greatest influences throughout his career. After his stint with Williams, Redding went on to join another band, Pat T Cake and the Mighty Panthers, whose guitarist Johnny Jenkins would be a major presence in his life for several years. The Mighty Panthers were soon giving Redding top billing, and advertising gigs as featuring Otis "Rockin' Robin" Redding -- presumably that was another song in his live repertoire. By this time Redding was sounding enough like Little Richard that when Richard's old backing band, The Upsetters, were looking for a new singer after Richard quit rock and roll for the ministry, they took Redding on as their vocalist for a tour. Once that tour had ended, Redding returned home to find that Johnny Jenkins had quit the Mighty Panthers and formed a new band, the Pinetoppers. Redding joined that band, who were managed by a white teenager named Phil Walden, who soon became Redding's personal manager as well. Walden and Redding developed a very strong bond, to the extent that Walden, who was studying at university, spent all his tuition money promoting Redding and almost got kicked out. When Redding found this out, he actually went round to everyone he knew and got loans from everyone until he had enough to pay for Walden's tuition -- much of it paid in coins. They had a strong enough bond that Walden would remain his manager for the rest of Redding's life, and even when Walden had to do two years in the Army in Germany, he managed Redding long-distance, with his brother looking after things at home. But of course, there wasn't much of a music industry in Georgia, and so with Walden's blessing and support, he moved to LA in 1960 to try to become a star. Just before he left, his girlfriend Zelma told him she was pregnant. He assured her that he was only going to be away for a few months, and that he would be back in time for the birth, and that he intended to come back to Georgia rich and marry her. Her response was "Sure you is". In LA, Redding met up with a local record producer, James "Jimmy Mack" McEachin, who would later go on to become an actor, appearing in several films with Clint Eastwood. McEachin produced a session for Redding at Gold Star studios, with arrangements by Rene Hall and using several of the musicians who later became the Wrecking Crew. "She's All Right", the first single that came from that session, was intended to sound as much like Jackie Wilson as possible, and was released under the name of The Shooters, the vocal group who provided the backing vocals: [Excerpt: The Shooters, "She's All Right"] "She's All Right" was released on Trans World, a small label owned by Morris Bernstein, who also owned Finer Arts records (and "She's All Right" seems to have been released on both labels). Neither of Bernstein's labels had any great success -- the biggest record they put out was a single by the Hollywood Argyles that came out after they'd stopped having hits -- and they didn't have any connection to the R&B market. Redding and McEachin couldn't find any R&B labels that wanted to pick up their recordings, and so Redding did return to Georgia and marry Zelma a few days before the birth of their son Dexter. Back in Georgia, he hooked up again with the Pinetoppers, and he and Jenkins started trying local record labels, attempting to get records put out by either of them. Redding was the first, and Otis Redding and the Pinetoppers put out a single, "Shout Bamalama", a slight reworking of a song that he'd recorded as "Gamma Lamma" for McEachin, which was obviously heavily influenced by Little Richard: [Excerpt: Otis Redding and the Pinetoppers, "Shout Bamalama"] That single was produced by a local record company owner, Bobby Smith, who signed Redding to a contract which Redding didn't read, but which turned out to be a management contract as well as a record contract. This would later be a problem, as Redding didn't have an actual contract with Phil Walden -- one thing that comes up time and again in stories about music in the Deep South at this time is people operating on handshake deals and presuming good faith on the part of each other. There was a problem with the record which nobody had foreseen though -- Redding was the first Black artist signed to Smith's label, which was called Confederate Records, and its logo was the Southern Cross. Now Smith, by all accounts, was less personally racist than most white men in Georgia at the time, and hadn't intended that as any kind of statement of white supremacy -- he'd just used a popular local symbol, without thinking through the implications. But as the phrase goes, intent isn't magic, and while Smith didn't intend it as racist, rather unsurprisingly Black DJs and record shops didn't see things in the same light. Smith was told by several DJs that they wouldn't play the record while it was on that label, and he started up a new subsidiary label, Orbit, and put the record out on that label. Redding and Smith continued collaborating, and there were plans for Redding to put out a second single on Orbit. That single was going to be "These Arms of Mine", a song Redding had originally given to another Confederate artist, a rockabilly performer called Buddy Leach (who doesn't seem to be the same Buddy Leach as the Democratic politician from Louisiana, or the saxophone player with George Thorogood and the Destroyers). Leach had recorded it as a B-side, with the slightly altered title "These Arms Are Mine". Sadly I can't provide an excerpt of that, as the record is so rare that even websites I've found by rockabilly collectors who are trying to get everything on Confederate Records haven't managed to get hold of copies. Meanwhile, Johnny Jenkins had been recording on another label, Tifco, and had put out a single called "Pinetop": [Excerpt: Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers, "Pinetop"] That record had attracted the attention of Joe Galkin. Galkin was a semi-independent record promoter, who had worked for Atlantic in New York before moving back to his home town of Macon. Galkin had proved himself as a promoter by being responsible for the massive amounts of airplay given to Solomon Burke's "Just Out of Reach (of My Two Open Arms)": [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Just Out of Reach (of My Two Open Arms)"] After that, Jerry Wexler had given Galkin fifty dollars a week and an expense account, and Galkin would drive to all the Black radio stations in the South and pitch Atlantic's records to them. But Galkin also had his own record label, Gerald Records, and when he went to those stations and heard them playing something from a smaller label, he would quickly negotiate with that smaller label, buy the master and the artist's contract, and put the record out on Gerald Records -- and then he would sell the track and the artist on to Atlantic, taking ten percent of the record's future earnings and a finder's fee. This is what happened with Johnny Jenkins' single, which was reissued on Gerald and then on Atlantic. Galkin signed Jenkins to a contract -- another of those contracts which also made him Jenkins' manager, and indeed the manager of the Pinetops. Jenkins' record ended up selling about twenty-five thousand records, but when Galkin saw the Pinetoppers performing live, he realised that Otis Redding was the real star. Since he had a contract with Jenkins, he came to an agreement with Walden, who was still Jenkins' manager as well as Redding's -- Walden would get fifty percent of Jenkins' publishing and they would be co-managers of Jenkins. But Galkin had plans for Redding, which he didn't tell anyone about, not even Redding himself. The one person he did tell was Jerry Wexler, who he phoned up and asked for two thousand dollars, explaining that he wanted to record Jenkins' follow-up single at Stax, and he also wanted to bring along a singer he'd discovered, who sang with Jenkins' band. Wexler agreed -- Atlantic had recently started distributing Stax's records on a handshake deal of much the same kind that Redding had with Walden. As far as everyone else was concerned, though, the session was just for Johnny Jenkins, the known quantity who'd already released a single for Atlantic. Otis Redding, meanwhile, was having to work a lot of odd jobs to feed his rapidly growing family, and one of those jobs was to work as Johnny Jenkins' driver, as Jenkins didn't have a driving license. So Galkin suggested that, given that Memphis was quite a long drive, Redding should drive Galkin and Jenkins to Stax, and carry the equipment for them. Bobby Smith, who still thought of himself as Redding's manager, was eager to help his friend's bandmate with his big break (and to help Galkin, in the hope that maybe Atlantic would start distributing Confederate too), and so he lent Redding the company station wagon to drive them to the session.The other Pinetoppers wouldn't be going -- Jenkins was going to be backed by Booker T and the MGs, the normal Stax backing band. Phil Walden, though, had told Redding that he should try to take the opportunity to get himself heard by Stax, and he pestered the musicians as they recorded Jenkins' "Spunky": [Excerpt: Johnny Jenkins, "Spunky"] Cropper later remembered “During the session, Al Jackson says to me, ‘The big tall guy that was driving Johnny, he's been bugging me to death, wanting me to hear him sing,' Al said, ‘Would you take some time and get this guy off of my back and listen to him?' And I said, ‘After the session I'll try to do it,' and then I just forgot about it.” What Redding didn't know, though Walden might have, is that Galkin had planned all along to get Redding to record while he was there. Galkin claimed to be Redding's manager, and told Jim Stewart, the co-owner of Stax who acted as main engineer and supervising producer on the sessions at this point, that Wexler had only funded the session on the basis that Redding would also get a shot at recording. Stewart was unimpressed -- Jenkins' session had not gone well, and it had taken them more than two hours to get two tracks down, but Galkin offered Stewart a trade -- Galkin, as Redding's manager, would take half of Stax's mechanical royalties for the records (which wouldn't be much) but in turn would give Stewart half the publishing on Redding's songs. That was enough to make Stewart interested, but by this point Booker T. Jones had already left the studio, so Steve Cropper moved to the piano for the forty minutes that was left of the session, with Jenkins remaining on guitar, and they tried to get two sides of a single cut. The first track they cut was "Hey Hey Baby", which didn't impress Stewart much -- he simply said that the world didn't need another Little Richard -- and so with time running out they cut another track, the ballad Redding had already given to Buddy Leach. He asked Cropper, who didn't play piano well, to play "church chords", by which he meant triplets, and Cropper said "he started singing ‘These Arms of Mine' and I know my hair lifted about three inches and I couldn't believe this guy's voice": [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "These Arms of Mine"] That was more impressive, though Stewart carefully feigned disinterest. Stewart and Galkin put together a contract which signed Redding to Stax -- though they put the single out on the less-important Volt subsidiary, as they did for much of Redding's subsequent output -- and gave Galkin and Stewart fifty percent each of the publishing rights to Redding's songs. Redding signed it, not even realising he was signing a proper contract rather than just one for a single record, because he was just used to signing whatever bit of paper was put in front of him at the time. This one was slightly different though, because Redding had had his twenty-first birthday since the last time he'd signed a contract, and so Galkin assumed that that meant all his other contracts were invalid -- not realising that Redding's contract with Bobby Smith had been countersigned by Redding's mother, and so was also legal. Walden also didn't realise that, but *did* realise that Galkin representing himself as Redding's manager to Stax might be a problem, so he quickly got Redding to sign a proper contract, formalising the handshake basis they'd been operating on up to that point. Walden was at this point in the middle of his Army service, but got the signature while he was home on leave. Walden then signed a deal with Galkin, giving Walden half of Galkin's fifty percent cut of Redding's publishing in return for Galkin getting a share of Walden's management proceeds. By this point everyone was on the same page -- Otis Redding was going to be a big star, and he became everyone's prime focus. Johnny Jenkins remained signed to Walden's agency -- which quickly grew to represent almost every big soul star that wasn't signed to Motown -- but he was regarded as a footnote. His record came out eventually on Volt, almost two years later, but he didn't release another record until 1968. Jenkins did, though, go on to have some influence. In 1970 he was given the opportunity to sing lead on an album backed by Duane Allman and the members of the Muscle Shoals studio band, many of whom went on to form the Allman Brothers Band. That record contained a cover of Dr. John's "I Walk on Guilded Splinters" which was later sampled by Beck for "Loser", the Wu-Tang Clan for "Gun Will Go" and Oasis for their hit "Go Let it Out": [Excerpt: Johnny Jenkins, "I Walk on Guilded Splinters"] Jenkins would play guitar on several future Otis Redding sessions, but would hold a grudge against Redding for the rest of his life for taking the stardom he thought was rightfully his, and would be one of the few people to have anything negative to say about Redding after his early death. When Bobby Smith heard about the release of "These Arms of Mine", he was furious, as his contract with Redding *was* in fact legally valid, and he'd been intending to get Redding to record the song himself. However, he realised that Stax could call on the resources of Atlantic Records, and Joe Galkin also hinted that if he played nice Atlantic might start distributing Confederate, too. Smith signed away all his rights to Redding -- again, thinking that he was only signing away the rights to a single record and song, and not reading the contract closely enough. In this case, Smith only had one working eye, and that wasn't good enough to see clearly -- he had to hold paper right up to his face to read anything on it -- and he simply couldn't read the small print on the contract, and so signed over Otis Redding's management, record contract, and publishing, for a flat seven hundred dollars. Now everything was legally -- if perhaps not ethically -- in the clear. Phil Walden was Otis Redding's manager, Stax was his record label, Joe Galkin got a cut off the top, and Walden, Galkin, and Jim Stewart all shared Redding's publishing. Although, to make it a hit, one more thing had to happen, and one more person had to get a cut of the song: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "These Arms of Mine"] That sound was becoming out of fashion among Black listeners at the time. It was considered passe, and even though the Stax musicians loved the record, Jim Stewart didn't, and put it out not because he believed in Otis Redding, but because he believed in Joe Galkin. As Stewart later said “The Black radio stations were getting out of that Black country sound, we put it out to appease and please Joe.” For the most part DJs ignored the record, despite Galkin pushing it -- it was released in October 1962, that month which we have already pinpointed as the start of the sixties, and came out at the same time as a couple of other Stax releases, and the one they were really pushing was Carla Thomas' "I'll Bring it Home to You", an answer record to Sam Cooke's "Bring it On Home to Me": [Excerpt: Carla Thomas, "I'll Bring it Home to You"] "These Arms of Mine" wasn't even released as the A-side -- that was "Hey Hey Baby" -- until John R came along. John R was a Nashville DJ, and in fact he was the reason that Bobby Smith even knew that Redding had signed to Stax. R had heard Buddy Leach's version of the song, and called Smith, who was a friend of his, to tell him that his record had been covered, and that was the first Smith had heard of the matter. But R also called Jim Stewart at Stax, and told him that he was promoting the wrong side, and that if they started promoting "These Arms of Mine", R would play the record on his radio show, which could be heard in twenty-eight states. And, as a gesture of thanks for this suggestion -- and definitely not as payola, which would be very illegal -- Stewart gave R his share of the publishing rights to the song, which eventually made the top twenty on the R&B charts, and slipped into the lower end of the Hot One Hundred. "These Arms of Mine" was actually recorded at a turning point for Stax as an organisation. By the time it was released, Booker T Jones had left Memphis to go to university in Indiana to study music, with his tuition being paid for by his share of the royalties for "Green Onions", which hit the charts around the same time as Redding's first session: [Excerpt: Booker T. and the MGs, "Green Onions"] Most of Stax's most important sessions were recorded at weekends -- Jim Stewart still had a day job as a bank manager at this point, and he supervised the records that were likely to be hits -- so Jones could often commute back to the studio for session work, and could play sessions during his holidays. The rest of the time, other people would cover the piano parts, often Cropper, who played piano on Redding's next sessions, with Jenkins once again on guitar. As "These Arms of Mine" didn't start to become a hit until March, Redding didn't go into the studio again until June, when he cut the follow-up, "That's What My Heart Needs", with the MGs, Jenkins, and the horn section of the Mar-Keys. That made number twenty-seven on the Cashbox R&B chart -- this was in the period when Billboard had stopped having one. The follow-up, "Pain in My Heart", was cut in September and did even better, making number eleven on the Cashbox R&B chart: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Pain in My Heart"] It did well enough in fact that the Rolling Stones cut a cover version of the track: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Pain in My Heart"] Though Redding didn't get the songwriting royalties -- by that point Allen Toussaint had noticed how closely it resembled a song he'd written for Irma Thomas, "Ruler of My Heart": [Excerpt: Irma Thomas, "Ruler of My Heart"] And so the writing credit was changed to be Naomi Neville, one of the pseudonyms Toussaint used. By this point Redding was getting steady work, and becoming a popular live act. He'd put together his own band, and had asked Jenkins to join, but Jenkins didn't want to play second fiddle to him, and refused, and soon stopped being invited to the recording sessions as well. Indeed, Redding was *eager* to get as many of his old friends working with him as he could. For his second and third sessions, as well as bringing Jenkins, he'd brought along a whole gang of musicians from his touring show, and persuaded Stax to put out records by them, too. At those sessions, as well as Redding's singles, they also cut records by his valet (which was the term R&B performers in those years used for what we'd now call a gofer or roadie) Oscar Mack: [Excerpt: Oscar Mack, "Don't Be Afraid of Love"] For Eddie Kirkland, the guitarist in his touring band, who had previously played with John Lee Hooker and whose single was released under the name "Eddie Kirk": [Excerpt: Eddie Kirk, "The Hawg, Part 1"] And Bobby Marchan, a singer and female impersonator from New Orleans who had had some massive hits a few years earlier both on his own and as the singer with Huey "Piano" Smith and the Clowns, but had ended up in Macon without a record deal and been taken under Redding's wing: [Excerpt: Bobby Marchan, "What Can I Do?"] Redding would continue, throughout his life, to be someone who tried to build musical careers for his friends, though none of those singles was successful. The changes in Stax continued. In late autumn 1963, Atlantic got worried by the lack of new product coming from Stax. Carla Thomas had had a couple of R&B hits, and they were expecting a new single, but every time Jerry Wexler phoned Stax asking where the new single was, he was told it would be coming soon but the equipment was broken. After a couple of weeks of this, Wexler decided something fishy was going on, and sent Tom Dowd, his genius engineer, down to Stax to investigate. Dowd found when he got there that the equipment *was* broken, and had been for weeks, and was a simple fix. When Dowd spoke to Stewart, though, he discovered that they didn't know where to source replacement parts from. Dowd phoned his assistant in New York, and told him to go to the electronics shop and get the parts he needed. Then, as there were no next-day courier services at that time, Dowd's assistant went to the airport, found a flight attendant who was flying to Memphis, and gave her the parts and twenty-five dollars, with a promise of twenty-five more if she gave them to Dowd at the other end. The next morning, Dowd had the equipment fixed, and everyone involved became convinced that Dowd was a miracle worker, especially after he showed Steve Cropper some rudimentary tape-manipulation techniques that Cropper had never encountered before. Dowd had to wait around in Memphis for his flight, so he went to play golf with the musicians for a bit, and then they thought they might as well pop back to the studio and test the equipment out. When they did, Rufus Thomas -- Carla Thomas' father, who had also had a number of hits himself on Stax and Sun -- popped his head round the door to see if the equipment was working now. They told him it was, and he said he had a song if they were up for a spot of recording. They were, and so when Dowd flew back that night, he was able to tell Wexler not only that the next Carla Thomas single would soon be on its way, but that he had the tapes of a big hit single with him right there: [Excerpt: Rufus Thomas, "Walking the Dog"] "Walking the Dog" was a sensation. Jim Stewart later said “I remember our first order out of Chicago. I was in New York in Jerry Wexler's office at the time and Paul Glass, who was our distributor in Chicago, called in an order for sixty-five thousand records. I said to Jerry, ‘Do you mean sixty-five hundred?' And he said, ‘Hell no, he wants sixty-five thousand.' That was the first order! He believed in the record so much that we ended up selling about two hundred thousand in Chicago alone.” The record made the top ten on the pop charts, but that wasn't the biggest thing that Dowd had taken away from the session. He came back raving to Wexler about the way they made records in Memphis, and how different it was from the New York way. In New York, there was a strict separation between the people in the control room and the musicians in the studio, the musicians were playing from written charts, and everyone had a job and did just that job. In Memphis, the musicians were making up the arrangements as they went, and everyone was producing or engineering all at the same time. Dowd, as someone with more technical ability than anyone at Stax, and who was also a trained musician who could make musical suggestions, was soon regularly commuting down to Memphis to be part of the production team, and Jerry Wexler was soon going down to record with other Atlantic artists there, as we heard about in the episode on "Midnight Hour". Shortly after Dowd's first visit to Memphis, another key member of the Stax team entered the picture. Right at the end of 1963, Floyd Newman recorded a track called "Frog Stomp", on which he used his own band rather than the MGs and Mar-Keys: [Excerpt: Floyd Newman, "Frog Stomp"] The piano player and co-writer on that track was a young man named Isaac Hayes, who had been trying to get work at Stax for some time. He'd started out as a singer, and had made a record, "Laura, We're On Our Last Go-Round", at American Sound, the studio run by the former Stax engineer and musician Chips Moman: [Excerpt: Isaac Hayes, "Laura, We're On Our Last Go-Round"] But that hadn't been a success, and Hayes had continued working a day job at a slaughterhouse -- and would continue doing so for much of the next few years, even after he started working at Stax (it's truly amazing how many of the people involved in Stax were making music as what we would now call a side-hustle). Hayes had become a piano player as a way of getting a little extra money -- he'd been offered a job as a fill-in when someone else had pulled out at the last minute on a gig on New Year's Eve, and took it even though he couldn't actually play piano, and spent his first show desperately vamping with two fingers, and was just lucky the audience was too drunk to care. But he had a remarkable facility for the instrument, and while unlike Booker T Jones he would never gain a great deal of technical knowledge, and was embarrassed for the rest of his life by both his playing ability and his lack of theory knowledge, he was as great as they come at soul, at playing with feel, and at inventing new harmonies on the fly. They still didn't have a musician at Stax that could replace Booker T, who was still off at university, so Isaac Hayes was taken on as a second session keyboard player, to cover for Jones when Jones was in Indiana -- though Hayes himself also had to work his own sessions around his dayjob, so didn't end up playing on "In the Midnight Hour", for example, because he was at the slaughterhouse. The first recording session that Hayes played on as a session player was an Otis Redding single, either his fourth single for Stax, "Come to Me", or his fifth, "Security": [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Security"] "Security" is usually pointed to by fans as the point at which Redding really comes into his own, and started directing the musicians more. There's a distinct difference, in particular, in the interplay between Cropper's guitar, the Mar-Keys' horns, and Redding's voice. Where previously the horns had tended to play mostly pads, just holding chords under Redding's voice, now they were starting to do answering phrases. Jim Stewart always said that the only reason Stax used a horn section at all was because he'd been unable to find a decent group of backing vocalists, and the function the horns played on most of the early Stax recordings was somewhat similar to the one that the Jordanaires had played for Elvis, or the Picks for Buddy Holly, basically doing "oooh" sounds to fatten out the sound, plus the odd sax solo or simple riff. The way Redding used the horns, though, was more like the way Ray Charles used the Raelettes, or the interplay of a doo-wop vocal group, with call and response, interjections, and asides. He also did something in "Security" that would become a hallmark of records made at Stax -- instead of a solo, the instrumental break is played by the horns as an ensemble: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Security"] According to Wayne Jackson, the Mar-Keys' trumpeter, Redding was the one who had the idea of doing these horn ensemble sections, and the musicians liked them enough that they continued doing them on all the future sessions, no matter who with. The last Stax single of 1964 took the "Security" sound and refined it, and became the template for every big Stax hit to follow. "Mr. Pitiful" was the first collaboration between Redding and Steve Cropper, and was primarily Cropper's idea. Cropper later remembered “There was a disc jockey here named Moohah. He started calling Otis ‘Mr. Pitiful' 'cause he sounded so pitiful singing his ballads. So I said, ‘Great idea for a song!' I got the idea for writing about it in the shower. I was on my way down to pick up Otis. I got down there and I was humming it in the car. I said, ‘Hey, what do you think about this?' We just wrote the song on the way to the studio, just slapping our hands on our legs. We wrote it in about ten minutes, went in, showed it to the guys, he hummed a horn line, boom—we had it. When Jim Stewart walked in we had it all worked up. Two or three cuts later, there it was.” [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Mr. Pitiful"] Cropper would often note later that Redding would never write about himself, but that Cropper would put details of Redding's life and persona into the songs, from "Mr. Pitiful" right up to their final collaboration, in which Cropper came up with lines about leaving home in Georgia. "Mr Pitiful" went to number ten on the R&B chart and peaked at number forty-one on the hot one hundred, and its B-side, "That's How Strong My Love Is", also made the R&B top twenty. Cropper and Redding soon settled into a fruitful writing partnership, to the extent that Cropper even kept a guitar permanently tuned to an open chord so that Redding could use it. Redding couldn't play the guitar, but liked to use one as a songwriting tool. When a guitar is tuned in standard tuning, you have to be able to make chord shapes to play it, because the sound of the open strings is a discord: [demonstrates] But you can tune a guitar so all the strings are the notes of a single chord, so they sound good together even when you don't make a chord shape: [demonstrates open-E tuning] With one of these open tunings, you can play chords with just a single finger barring a fret, and so they're very popular with, for example, slide guitarists who use a metal slide to play, or someone like Dolly Parton who has such long fingernails it's difficult to form chord shapes. Someone like Parton is of course an accomplished player, but open tunings also mean that someone who can't play well can just put their finger down on a fret and have it be a chord, so you can write songs just by running one finger up and down the fretboard: [demonstrates] So Redding could write, and even play acoustic rhythm guitar on some songs, which he did quite a lot in later years, without ever learning how to make chords. Now, there's a downside to this -- which is why standard tuning is still standard. If you tune to an open major chord, you can play major chords easily but minor chords become far more difficult. Handily, that wasn't a problem at Stax, because according to Isaac Hayes, Jim Stewart banned minor chords from being played at Stax. Hayes said “We'd play a chord in a session, and Jim would say, ‘I don't want to hear that chord.' Jim's ears were just tuned into one, four, and five. I mean, just simple changes. He said they were the breadwinners. He didn't like minor chords. Marvell and I always would try to put that pretty stuff in there. Jim didn't like that. We'd bump heads about that stuff. Me and Marvell fought all the time that. Booker wanted change as well. As time progressed, I was able to sneak a few in.” Of course, minor chords weren't *completely* banned from Stax, and some did sneak through, but even ballads would often have only major chords -- like Redding's next single, "I've Been Loving You Too Long". That track had its origins with Jerry Butler, the singer who had been lead vocalist of the Impressions before starting a solo career and having success with tracks like "For Your Precious Love": [Excerpt: Jerry Butler, "For Your Precious Love"] Redding liked that song, and covered it himself on his second album, and he had become friendly with Butler. Butler had half-written a song, and played it for Redding, who told him he'd like to fiddle with it, see what he could do. Butler forgot about the conversation, until he got a phone call from Redding, telling him that he'd recorded the song. Butler was confused, and also a little upset -- he'd been planning to finish the song himself, and record it. But then Redding played him the track, and Butler decided that doing so would be pointless -- it was Redding's song now: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "I've Been Loving You Too Long"] "I've Been Loving You Too Long" became Redding's first really big hit, making number two on the R&B chart and twenty-one on the Hot One Hundred. It was soon being covered by the Rolling Stones and Ike & Tina Turner, and while Redding was still not really known to the white pop market, he was quickly becoming one of the biggest stars on the R&B scene. His record sales were still not matching his live performances -- he would always make far more money from appearances than from records -- but he was by now the performer that every other soul singer wanted to copy. "I've Been Loving You Too Long" came out just after Redding's second album, The Great Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads, which happened to be the first album released on Volt Records. Before that, while Stax and Volt had released the singles, they'd licensed all the album tracks to Atlantic's Atco subsidiary, which had released the small number of albums put out by Stax artists. But times were changing and the LP market was becoming bigger. And more importantly, the *stereo* LP market was becoming bigger. Singles were still only released in mono, and would be for the next few years, but the album market had a substantial number of audiophiles, and they wanted stereo. This was a problem for Stax, because they only had a mono tape recorder, and they were scared of changing anything about their setup in case it destroyed their sound. Tom Dowd, who had been recording in eight track for years, was appalled by the technical limitations at the McLemore Ave studio, but eventually managed to get Jim Stewart, who despite -- or possibly because of -- being a white country musician was the most concerned that they keep their Black soul sound, to agree to a compromise. They would keep everything hooked up exactly the same -- the same primitive mixers, the same mono tape recorder -- and Stax would continue doing their mixes for mono, and all their singles would come directly off that mono tape. But at the same time, they would *also* have a two-track tape recorder plugged in to the mixer, with half the channels going on one track and half on the other. So while they were making the mix, they'd *also* be getting a stereo dump of that mix. The limitations of the situation meant that they might end up with drums and vocals in one channel and everything else in the other -- although as the musicians cut everything together in the studio, which had a lot of natural echo, leakage meant there was a *bit* of everything on every track -- but it would still be stereo. Redding's next album, Otis Blue, was recorded on this new equipment, with Dowd travelling down from New York to operate it. Dowd was so keen on making the album stereo that during that session, they rerecorded Redding's two most recent singles, "I've Been Loving You Too Long" and "Respect" (which hadn't yet come out but was in the process of being released) in soundalike versions so there would be stereo versions of the songs on the album -- so the stereo and mono versions of Otis Blue actually have different performances of those songs on them. It shows how intense the work rate was at Stax -- and how good they were at their jobs -- that apart from the opening track "Ole Man Trouble", which had already been recorded as a B-side, all of Otis Blue, which is often considered the greatest soul album in history, was recorded in a twenty-eight hour period, and it would have been shorter but there was a four-hour break in the middle, from 10PM to 2AM, so that the musicians on the session could play their regular local club gigs. And then after the album was finished, Otis left the session to perform a gig that evening. Tom Dowd, in particular, was astonished by the way Redding took charge in the studio, and how even though he had no technical musical knowledge, he would direct the musicians. Dowd called Redding a genius and told Phil Walden that the only two other artists he'd worked with who had as much ability in the studio were Bobby Darin and Ray Charles. Other than those singles and "Ole Man Trouble", Otis Blue was made up entirely of cover versions. There were three versions of songs by Sam Cooke, who had died just a few months earlier, and whose death had hit Redding hard -- for all that he styled himself on Little Richard vocally, he was also in awe of Cooke as a singer and stage presence. There were also covers of songs by The Temptations, William Bell, and B.B. King. And there was also an odd choice -- Steve Cropper suggested that Redding cut a cover of a song by a white band that was in the charts at the time: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] Redding had never heard the song before -- he was not paying attention to the white pop scene at the time, just to his competition on the R&B charts -- but he was interested in doing it. Cropper sat by the turntable, scribbling down what he thought the lyrics Jagger was singing were, and they cut the track. Redding starts out more or less singing the right words: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] But quickly ends up just ad-libbing random exclamations in the same way that he would in many of his live performances: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] Otis Blue made number one on the R&B album chart, and also made number six on the UK album chart -- Redding, like many soul artists, was far more popular in the UK than in the US. It only made number seventy-five on the pop album charts in the US, but it did a remarkable thing as far as Stax was concerned -- it *stayed* in the lower reaches of the charts, and on the R&B album charts, for a long time. Redding had become what is known as a "catalogue artist", something that was almost unknown in rock and soul music at this time, but which was just starting to appear. Up to 1965, the interlinked genres that we now think of as rock and roll, rock, pop, blues, R&B, and soul, had all operated on the basis that singles were where the money was, and that singles should be treated like periodicals -- they go on the shelves, stay there for a few weeks, get replaced by the new thing, and nobody's interested any more. This had contributed to the explosive rate of change in pop music between about 1954 and 1968. You'd package old singles up into albums, and stick some filler tracks on there as a way of making a tiny bit of money from tracks which weren't good enough to release as singles, but that was just squeezing the last few drops of juice out of the orange, it wasn't really where the money was. The only exceptions were those artists like Ray Charles who crossed over into the jazz and adult pop markets. But in general, your record sales in the first few weeks and months *were* your record sales. But by the mid-sixties, as album sales started to take off more, things started to change. And Otis Redding was one of the first artists to really benefit from that. He wasn't having huge hit singles, and his albums weren't making the pop top forty, but they *kept selling*. Redding wouldn't have an album make the top forty in his lifetime, but they sold consistently, and everything from Otis Blue onward sold two hundred thousand or so copies -- a massive number in the much smaller album market of the time. These sales gave Redding some leverage. His contract with Stax was coming to an end in a few months, and he was getting offers from other companies. As part of his contract renegotiation, he got Jim Stewart -- who like so many people in this story including Redding himself liked to operate on handshake deals and assumptions of good faith on the part of everyone else, and who prided himself on being totally fair and not driving hard bargains -- to rework his publishing deal. Now Redding's music was going to be published by Redwal Music -- named after Redding and Phil Walden -- which was owned as a four-way split between Redding, Walden, Stewart, and Joe Galkin. Redding also got the right as part of his contract negotiations to record other artists using Stax's facilities and musicians. He set up his own label, Jotis Records -- a portmanteau of Joe and Otis, for Joe Galkin and himself, and put out records by Arthur Conley: [Excerpt: Arthur Conley, "Who's Fooling Who?"] Loretta Williams [Excerpt: Loretta Williams, "I'm Missing You"] and Billy Young [Excerpt: Billy Young, "The Sloopy"] None of these was a success, but it was another example of how Redding was trying to use his success to boost others. There were other changes going on at Stax as well. The company was becoming more tightly integrated with Atlantic Records -- Tom Dowd had started engineering more sessions, Jerry Wexler was turning up all the time, and they were starting to make records for Atlantic, as we discussed in the episode on "In the Midnight Hour". Atlantic were also loaning Stax Sam and Dave, who were contracted to Atlantic but treated as Stax artists, and whose hits were written by the new Stax songwriting team of Isaac Hayes and David Porter: [Excerpt: Sam and Dave, "Soul Man"] Redding was not hugely impressed by Sam and Dave, once saying in an interview "When I first heard the Righteous Brothers, I thought they were colored. I think they sing better than Sam and Dave", but they were having more and bigger chart hits than him, though they didn't have the same level of album sales. Also, by now Booker T and the MGs had a new bass player. Donald "Duck" Dunn had always been the "other" bass player at Stax, ever since he'd started with the Mar-Keys, and he'd played on many of Redding's recordings, as had Lewie Steinberg, the original bass player with the MGs. But in early 1965, the Stax studio musicians had cut a record originally intending it to be a Mar-Keys record, but decided to put it out as by Booker T and the MGs, even though Booker T wasn't there at the time -- Isaac Hayes played keyboards on the track: [Excerpt: Booker T and the MGs, "Boot-Leg"] Booker T Jones would always have a place at Stax, and would soon be back full time as he finished his degree, but from that point on Duck Dunn, not Lewie Steinberg, was the bass player for the MGs. Another change in 1965 was that Stax got serious about promotion. Up to this point, they'd just relied on Atlantic to promote their records, but obviously Atlantic put more effort into promoting records on which it made all the money than ones it just distributed. But as part of the deal to make records with Sam and Dave and Wilson Pickett, Atlantic had finally put their arrangement with Stax on a contractual footing, rather than their previous handshake deal, and they'd agreed to pay half the salary of a publicity person for Stax. Stax brought in Al Bell, who made a huge impression. Bell had been a DJ in Memphis, who had gone off to work with Martin Luther King for a while, before leaving after a year because, as he put it "I was not about passive resistance. I was about economic development, economic empowerment.” He'd returned to DJing, first in Memphis, then in Washington DC, where he'd been one of the biggest boosters of Stax records in the area. While he was in Washington, he'd also started making records himself. He'd produced several singles for Grover Mitchell on Decca: [Excerpt: Grover Mitchell, "Midnight Tears"] Those records were supervised by Milt Gabler, the same Milt Gabler who produced Louis Jordan's records and "Rock Around the Clock", and Bell co-produced them with Eddie Floyd, who wrote that song, and Chester Simmons, formerly of the Moonglows, and the three of them started their own label, Safice, which had put out a few records by Floyd and others, on the same kind of deal with Atlantic that Stax had: [Excerpt: Eddie Floyd, "Make Up Your Mind"] Floyd would himself soon become a staff songwriter at Stax. As with almost every decision at Stax, the decision to hire Bell was a cause of disagreement between Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton, the "Ax" in Stax, who wasn't as involved in the day-to-day studio operations as her brother, but who was often regarded by the musicians as at least as important to the spirit of the label, and who tended to disagree with her brother on pretty much everything. Stewart didn't want to hire Bell, but according to Cropper “Estelle and I said, ‘Hey, we need somebody that can liaison between the disc jockeys and he's the man to do it. Atlantic's going into a radio station with six Atlantic records and one Stax record. We're not getting our due.' We knew that. We needed more promotion and he had all the pull with all those disc jockeys. He knew E. Rodney Jones and all the big cats, the Montagues and so on. He knew every one of them.” Many people at Stax will say that the label didn't even really start until Bell joined -- and he became so important to the label that he would eventually take it over from Stewart and Axton. Bell came in every day and immediately started phoning DJs, all day every day, starting in the morning with the drivetime East Coast DJs, and working his way across the US, ending up at midnight phoning the evening DJs in California. Booker T Jones said of him “He had energy like Otis Redding, except he wasn't a singer. He had the same type of energy. He'd come in the room, pull up his shoulders and that energy would start. He would start talking about the music business or what was going on and he energized everywhere he was. He was our Otis for promotion. It was the same type of energy charisma.” Meanwhile, of course, Redding was constantly releasing singles. Two more singles were released from Otis Blue -- his versions of "My Girl" and "Satisfaction", and he also released "I Can't Turn You Loose", which was originally the B-side to "Just One More Day" but ended up charting higher than its original A-side. It's around this time that Redding did something which seems completely out of character, but which really must be mentioned given that with very few exceptions everyone in his life talks about him as some kind of saint. One of Redding's friends was beaten up, and Redding, the friend, and another friend drove to the assailant's house and started shooting through the windows, starting a gun battle in which Redding got grazed. His friend got convicted of attempted murder, and got two years' probation, while Redding himself didn't face any criminal charges but did get sued by the victims, and settled out of court for a few hundred dollars. By this point Redding was becoming hugely rich from his concert appearances and album sales, but he still hadn't had a top twenty pop hit. He needed to break the white market. And so in April 1966, Redding went to LA, to play the Sunset Strip: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Respect (live at the Whisky A-Go-Go)"] Redding's performance at the Whisky A-Go-Go, a venue which otherwise hosted bands like the Doors, the Byrds, the Mothers of Invention, and Love, was his first real interaction with the white rock scene, part of a process that had started with his recording of "Satisfaction". The three-day residency got rave reviews, though the plans to release a live album of the shows were scuppered when Jim Stewart listened back to the tapes and decided that Redding's horn players were often out of tune. But almost everyone on the LA scene came out to see the shows, and Redding blew them away. According to one biography of Redding I used, it was seeing how Redding tuned his guitar that inspired the guitarist from the support band, the Rising Sons, to start playing in the same tuning -- though I can't believe for a moment that Ry Cooder, one of the greatest slide guitarists of his generation, didn't already know about open tunings. But Redding definitely impressed that band -- Taj Mahal, their lead singer, later said it was "one of the most amazing performances I'd ever seen". Also at the gigs was Bob Dylan, who played Redding a song he'd just recorded but not yet released: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Just Like a Woman"] Redding agreed that the song sounded perfect for him, and said he would record it. He apparently made some attempts at rehearsing it at least, but never ended up recording it. He thought the first verse and chorus were great, but had problems with the second verse: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Just Like a Woman"] Those lyrics were just too abstract for him to find a way to connect with them emotionally, and as a result he found himself completely unable to sing them. But like his recording of "Satisfaction", this was another clue to him that he should start paying more attention to what was going on in the white music industry, and that there might be things he could incorporate into his own style. As a result of the LA gigs, Bill Graham booked Redding for the Fillmore in San Francisco. Redding was at first cautious, thinking this might be a step too far, and that he wouldn't go down well with the hippie crowd, but Graham persuaded him, saying that whenever he asked any of the people who the San Francisco crowds most loved -- Jerry Garcia or Paul Butterfield or Mike Bloomfield -- who *they* most wanted to see play there, they all said Otis Redding. Redding reluctantly agreed, but before he took a trip to San Francisco, there was somewhere even further out for him to go. Redding was about to head to England but before he did there was another album to make, and this one would see even more of a push for the white market, though still trying to keep everything soulful. As well as Redding originals, including "Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)", another song in the mould of "Mr. Pitiful", there was another cover of a contemporary hit by a guitar band -- this time a version of the Beatles' "Day Tripper" -- and two covers of old standards; the country song "Tennessee Waltz", which had recently been covered by Sam Cooke, and a song made famous by Bing Crosby, "Try a Little Tenderness". That song almost certainly came to mind because it had recently been used in the film Dr. Strangelove, but it had also been covered relatively recently by two soul greats, Aretha Franklin: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Try a Little Tenderness"] And Sam Cooke: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Live Medley: I Love You For Sentimental Reasons/Try a Little Tenderness/You Send Me"] This version had horn parts arranged by Isaac Hayes, who by this point had been elevated to be considered one of the "Big Six" at Stax records -- Hayes, his songwriting partner David Porter, Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn, Booker T. Jones, and Al Jackson, were all given special status at the company, and treated as co-producers on every record -- all the records were now credited as produced by "staff", but it was the Big Six who split the royalties. Hayes came up with a horn part that was inspired by Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come", and which dominated the early part of the track: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Try a Little Tenderness"] Then the band came in, slowly at first: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Try a Little Tenderness"] But Al Jackson surprised them when they ran through the track by deciding that after the main song had been played, he'd kick the track into double-time, and give Redding a chance to stretch out and do his trademark grunts and "got-ta"s. The single version faded out shortly after that, but the version on the album kept going for an extra thirty seconds: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Try a Little Tenderness"] As Booker T. Jones said “Al came up with the idea of breaking up the rhythm, and Otis just took that and ran with it. He really got excited once he found out what Al was going to do on the drums. He realized how he could finish the song. That he could start it like a ballad and finish it full of emotion. That's how a lot of our arrangements would come together. Somebody would come up with something totally outrageous.” And it would have lasted longer but Jim Stewart pushed the faders down, realising the track was an uncommercial length even as it was. Live, the track could often stretch out to seven minutes or longer, as Redding drove the crowd into a frenzy, and it soon became one of the highlights of his live set, and a signature song for him: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Try a Little Tenderness (live in London)"] In September 1966, Redding went on his first tour outside the US. His records had all done much better in the UK than they had in America, and they were huge favourites of everyone on the Mod scene, and when he arrived in the UK he had a limo sent by Brian Epstein to meet him at the airport. The tour was an odd one, with multiple London shows, shows in a couple of big cities like Manchester and Bristol, and shows in smallish towns in Hampshire and Lincolnshire. Apparently the shows outside London weren't particularly well attended, but the London shows were all packed to overflowing. Redding also got his own episode of Ready! Steady! Go!, on which he performed solo as well as with guest stars Eric Burdon and Chris Farlowe: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, Chris Farlowe and Eric Burdon, "Shake/Land of a Thousand Dances"] After the UK tour, he went on a short tour of the Eastern US with Sam and Dave as his support act, and then headed west to the Fillmore for his three day residency there, introducing him to the San Francisco music scene. His first night at the venue was supported by the Grateful Dead, the second by Johnny Talbot and De Thangs and the third by Country Joe and the Fish, but there was no question that it was Otis Redding that everyone was coming to see. Janis Joplin turned up at the Fillmore every day at 3PM, to make sure she could be right at the front for Redding's shows that night, and Bill Graham said, decades later, "By far, Otis Redding was the single most extraordinary talent I had ever seen. There was no comparison. Then or now." However, after the Fillmore gigs, for the first time ever he started missing shows. The Sentinel, a Black newspaper in LA, reported a few days later "Otis Redding, the rock singer, failed to make many friends here the other day when he was slated to appear on the Christmas Eve show[...] Failed to draw well, and Redding reportedly would not go on." The Sentinel seem to think that Redding was just being a diva, but it's likely that this was the first sign of a problem that would change everything about his career -- he was developing vocal polyps that were making singing painful. It's notable though that the Sentinel refers to Redding as a "rock" singer, and shows again how different genres appeared in the mid-sixties to how they appear today. In that light, it's interesting to look at a quote from Redding from a few months later -- "Everybody thinks that all songs by colored people are rhythm and blues, but that's not true. Johnny Taylor, Muddy Waters, and B.B. King are blues singers. James Brown is not a blues singer. He has a rock and roll beat and he can sing slow pop songs. My own songs "Respect" and "Mr Pitiful" aren't blues songs. I'm speaking in terms of the beat and structure of the music. A blues is a song that goes twelve bars all the way through. Most of my songs are soul songs." So in Redding's eyes, neither he nor James Brown were R&B -- he was soul, which was a different thing from R&B, while Brown was rock and roll and pop, not soul, but journalists thought that Redding was rock. But while the lines between these things were far less distinct than they are today, and Redding was trying to cross over to the white audience, he knew what genre he was in, and celebrated that in a song he wrote with his friend Art