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Director and producer Kriv Stenders is a true Australian film legend, and has directed films like Red Dog and his new one, political thriller The Correspondent. He's also a The Last Video Store fan, so it's only natural he finally graced the halls of our fine establishment! Kriv lives and breathes film, especially Australian cinema, and has picked out some absolute classics to mull over with Alexei. His film The Correspondent is in cinemas now! BOOK TICKETS for Alexei’s comedy fest show REFUSED CLASSIFICATION with Zach Ruane in MELBOURNE, SYDNEY, PERTH and BRISBANE Follow ALEXEI TOLIOPOULOS on Letterboxd for all the rental combo lists. Follow Kriv on Letterboxd. GUEST PICKS: The Correspondent (Drama), Dogs In Space (Cult), Love Serenade (Cult)STAFF PICKS: Out Of The Blue (Cult)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Today a bonus pod where we open up the Talk Birdie To Me 'book club'. We originally considering discussing Red Dog, or Little Women, or Pride and Prejudice, but then we thought we'd discuss golf books instead. Seems to make sense.So today, Nick and Mark discuss some of their favourite books (listed below) and then we chat to film-maker and author Peter Dickson about his new golf book 'The Embedded Lie', which he describes as his 'love letter to golf'. So sit in your favourite chair, whack your feet up on a poufle, pour a lazy drink - and join the Talk Birdie To Me book club.And Mark tells a great story about Jean van de Velde in The Open!Nicks' favourite books:Harvey Penick - Little Red BookMark Fisher - The Golfer and the MillionaireDr Bob Rotella - Putting Out Of Your MindJohn Feinstein - A Good Walk SpoiledMarks' favourite books:Nick O'Hern - How to Play Your Best GolfNick O'Hern - Tour MentalitySteve Keipert and Tony Webeck- Aussies at The OpenPeter Thomson - Lessons I Have LearnedPaul Daley - Ben Hogan: The Yardstick of Golfing GreatnessPeter Dickson's book The Embedded Lie can be purchased here.We do the show from Titleist and FootJoy HQ, thanks to our great partners:Titleist, the #1 ball in golf;FootJoy, the #1 shoe and glove in golf;The watchMynumbers app, play smarter and use your data. Download from the App Store or Google Play;PING will help you play your best. See your local golf shop or professional for a PING club fitting;Golf Clearance Outlet, visit them online here to find your nearest store, they're all over the country;Betr, the fastest and easiest betting app in Australia.Southern Golf Club - now with their brand new Simulator Room including Trackman.Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok, send a voicemail here, and see us on YouTube here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In Part 4 of this series, Cooper Lee & Kennedy Rizzo discuss more lovable canine characters like Fleegle, Toto, Beethoven, Clifford the Red Dog, Barnyard Dog, Brain, and Professor Pops! The hosts also engage in a trivia segment about a Barnyard Dog, revealing the answer to be quite chuckleworthy. The conversation highlights the love for dogs, especially service dogs, and concludes with a reminder to appreciate pets. Listen in to join in on the caramelicious fun...WOOF!!What canine you'll find baked into Part 4 of this week's discussion?- Fleegle- Toto- Balto- Beethoven- Clifford the Big Red Dog- Barnyard Dog-Lady and the Tramp- Brain -Max & DukeSubscribe, rate and leave us a 5-star written review on Apple Podcasts, Deepcast.fm or Spotify. If you enjoyed what you heard this week, contact us on our official website retrotrekcaramelapples.com or send us a message, requests and/ or experiences you'd like to hear featured in a future episode at Spotify for Podcasters-->https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/retro-trek-the-caramel-applesHit us up on social media! Stop by and say hi! Leave a comment & share with us some of your favorite retro topics! May every bite be sweet!!X: @CaramelApples16The Gram (Instagram): @retrotrekthecaramelapplesTikTok: @retrotrekcaramelapplesYouTube: @thestickycaramelapplesOur Official Website: retrotrekcaramelapples.com
3/10/25: Amherst Prof Ilan Stavans: "Lamentations of Nezahualcoyotl,” translations from the Aztec, stories from an extraordinary, flawed empire. Megan Zinn w/ Nathaniel Miller whose new novel is “Red Dog Farm,” tomorrow at the Odyssey. Holyoke Mayor Joshua Garcia: feds denying his city $20 Million, sanctuary, school receivership, & St. Paddy's Day celebration. UMass Prof Amilcar Shabazz & Tom Weiner, co-authors of ““In Defiance: 20 Abolitionists You Were Never Taught in School.”
Tom Zaunmayr speaks to Sam Jones about Red Dog's vet Rick Fenny, who has built one of WA's most eclectic large family businesses. Plus: The last week for 2025 state election; Wesfarmers; and a Wembley building sale.
Beth Golay recently poke with Nathaniel Ian Miller about the relationship dynamics in "Red Dog Farm," and how he accidentally wrote a second book set in a cold and remote environment.
Northisle Copper and Gold CEO Sam Lee joined Steve Darling from Proactive to announce the results of a positive Preliminary Economic Assessment for the company's North Island Project, highlighting strong economics from a two-phase development approach. The 2025 PEA outlines the staged development of the Northwest Expo and Red Dog deposits, followed by the Hushamu deposit alongside a plant expansion. Lee explained that the PEA considers processing 753 million tonnes of mineable material from three open-pit deposits over a 29-year mine life. Phase 1 targets a throughput of 40,000 tonnes per day, requiring an initial capital expenditure of approximately $1.1 billion. During this phase, production will include gold doré and gold-rich copper concentrate, with a rapid payback period of just 1.9 years and operating cash flows of approximately $400 million annually—enabling self-funding for Phase 2 construction beginning in year five. In Phase 2, the company plans to twin the mill, doubling throughput to 80,000 tpd by year six. This phase will focus on producing copper concentrate containing significant payable gold, additional gold doré, and molybdenum concentrate. The phased approach is designed to maximize cash flow and enhance long-term project viability. Looking beyond the PEA, Northisle sees significant exploration upside across its property. The company is fully funded for its 2025 exploration program, with a budget of $7 million focused on the Northwest Corridor. Exploration efforts will include testing for the causative intrusion at Northwest Expo, expanding the footprint of West Goodspeed both along strike and through fault offsets, and infill drilling to improve resource continuity. The discoveries within the Northwest Corridor have already contributed to improving overall resource grade and margin, with near-surface mineralization presenting an opportunity to further enhance the project's economics. #proactiveinvestors #northislecopperandgoldinc #tsxv #ncx #mining #CopperGoldMining #MiningNews #PEA #BritishColumbia #GoldInvesting #CopperProjects #SamLee #ProactiveInvestors #ResourceExploration
Kitchener's I, the Mountain, pick an album by their kindred souls, Toronto's The Strumbellas.Formed in 2009, they soon picked up residencies at legendary Toronto clubs like The Cameron House and The Horseshoe Tavern before releasing their debut albumMy Father and the Hunter. They then signed with Six Shooter records and brought on The Lumineers' producer Ryan Hadlock to make their sophomore releaseWe Still Move on Dance FloorsJoin us as we chat with I, the Mountain, about The Strumbellas, The Red Dog in Peterborough, and community.
In this new Tasting Talk on Distilling the West, Dan and Dave explore Devils Creek Red Dog Rye. They break down its bold and spicy profile, highlighting the rye grain's signature peppery bite balanced with hints of caramel, oak, and a touch of sweetness. The hosts discuss how it stands out among other rye whiskeys, its smoothness, and its potential for both sipping and cocktails. With their usual insightful tasting notes and entertaining banter, this episode is a must-listen for rye whiskey fans!
Interview with Sam Lee, President & CEO of NorthIsle Copper & Gold Inc.Our previous interview: https://www.cruxinvestor.com/posts/northisle-copper-gold-tsxvncx-strategic-phasing-reduces-capital-requirement-6133Recording date: 11th December 2024NorthIsle Copper & Gold (TSX-V: NCX) is advancing one of British Columbia's largest copper-gold porphyry deposits not currently owned by a major mining company. The company is implementing a strategic phased development approach at its North Island Project, focusing initially on higher-margin resources to optimize project economics.The company recently secured a significant $10 million financing from two major institutional investors - one from the US and one from Canada - demonstrating strong market confidence in the project. These funds will support ongoing exploration and development activities throughout 2025.The initial development phase targets the Northwest Expo and Red Dog zones, which contain approximately 70-100 million tonnes grading 0.50-0.55% copper-equivalent, with a notably higher gold component. This strategic focus on higher-grade mineralization aims to enhance early-stage project economics while reducing initial capital requirements.CEO Sam Lee has outlined the company's transition from its earlier development concept. The previous 2021 PEA envisioned a larger operation with $1.1 billion NPV and $1.4 billion capex, producing approximately 100 million pounds of copper and 100,000 ounces of gold annually. The new approach aims for a more manageable 40,000 tonnes per day operation, compared to the original 70,000-80,000 tonnes per day plan, with increased gold production in the early phase.The project benefits from its location in British Columbia, historically recognized as Canada's copper mining hub. The site leverages over $100 million in existing infrastructure, including paved roads, a deep-water port, and hydroelectric power, significantly reducing development risks and capital requirements.A key upcoming catalyst is the updated Preliminary Economic Assessment, scheduled for Q1 2025. This study will incorporate recent exploration successes and demonstrate the economic advantages of the phased development approach.The investment thesis is supported by strong macro fundamentals, particularly the growing copper demand driven by global electrification and decarbonization initiatives. With few large-scale copper projects available in stable jurisdictions, NorthIsle is well-positioned to benefit from these market dynamics.The company's strategy follows the successful model implemented by Artemis Gold at their Blackwater project, focusing on a phased approach to reduce initial capital requirements while maximizing returns. This approach, combined with strong institutional backing and significant infrastructure advantages, positions NorthIsle to potentially deliver substantial value as it advances toward development.The updated PEA in early 2025 is expected to be a significant milestone in quantifying the economic benefits of this revised development strategy.View NorthIsle Copper & Gold's company profile: https://www.cruxinvestor.com/companies/northisle-copper-goldSign up for Crux Investor: https://cruxinvestor.com
And were back! Its been a few weeks but the crew is back together to catch up on everything that has been going on. Lester and Red Dog attended the Le Petite Brevet, KB went to the Ignition MTB festival in Australia and Chris... well we're not really sure, he probably went running. All the hot topics are covered this week, whats the difference between a brevet and a gran fondo? how long does it take to dry a chamois? What ever happened to bus stops? You know, the important stuff! Brought to you by: Maxxis Tyres - New Zealand's tyre of choice! To see the full line up from Maxxis, check out www.marleen.co.nz/brands/maxxis.html If you enjoy the OTB Podcast and would like to support, please consider joining us on Patreon and help keep the podcast alive. This isn't even close to a job for us and is done for your enjoyment! https://www.patreon.com/TheOTBPodcast
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Some lost tapes of Jeffrey Epstein have surfaced where he talks about being great friends with Donald Trump. Filling in for Bob Kelly, Mike Finoia and Jay go through the dynamics of having an underage sex island. Jay was in Oklahoma for shows and stopped by the world famous Red Dog strip club. He hung out with fans and the talented ladies did not disappoint. *To hear the full show to go www.siriusxm.com/bonfire to learn more FOLLOW THE CREW ON SOCIAL MEDIA: @thebonfiresxm @louisjohnson @christinemevans @bigjayoakerson @robertkellylive @louwitzkee @jjbwolfSubscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.
Interview with Sam Lee, President & CEO of NorthIsle Copper & Gold Inc.Our previous interview: https://www.cruxinvestor.com/posts/northisle-copper-gold-tsxvncx-high-grade-expansion-drilling-in-major-copper-gold-porphyry-5445Recording date: 28th October 2024NorthIsle Copper & Gold (TSXV:NCX) is advancing a district-scale gold-copper project in British Columbia through a strategically phased development approach that prioritizes higher-margin zones while maintaining significant expansion potential.The company controls a 35-kilometer mineralized trend containing indicated resources of 7 million ounces of gold and 3.5 billion pounds of copper. Rather than pursuing immediate large-scale development, NorthIsle is following the successful model demonstrated by Artemis Gold's Blackwater project, focusing initially on higher-grade areas to reduce capital requirements and enhance project economics.The first phase of development will center on the Northwest Expo and Red Dog deposits, which contain rock with an average NSR value of $45 per tonne against a cutoff of $11.50, indicating robust margins. The company is evaluating throughput scenarios between 20,000 and 40,000 tonnes per day for this initial phase, with results to be detailed in a Preliminary Economic Assessment due in early Q1 2025.A key differentiator for NorthIsle is the project's significant gold content, representing approximately 44% of the resource value. As CEO Sam Lee notes, "Gold is the most critical currency out there right now. You could fund big projects with very low cost capital because gold acts like a currency, not a commodity." This gold component provides financing flexibility and potential funding options for future copper development.Recent exploration success at the West Goodspeed zone has extended mineralization to a one-kilometer strike length, with results suggesting potential connectivity to the Red Dog deposit. This could create a seven-kilometer mineralized trend, significantly enhancing the project's scale and economics.The project benefits from extensive existing infrastructure, including roads, power, and port facilities, representing hundreds of millions in prior government investment. This significantly reduces capital requirements and development timelines.Beyond the near-term development focus, NorthIsle's Pemberton Hills target represents a deeper porphyry opportunity characterized by a 6.5km by 1.5km lithic cap. The company is in discussions with potential partners to advance this exploration target while maintaining focus on their primary development priorities.Near-term catalysts include PEA delivery in Q1 2025, ongoing exploration results from West Goodspeed, potential partnership announcements for Pemberton Hills and additional drilling results from Northwest Expo. The company's phased development strategy addresses key investor concerns about capital risk in mining development while maintaining exposure to both gold and copper upside. The location in British Columbia, a stable mining jurisdiction, adds another positive dimension to the investment thesis.With the company currently valued at approximately C$120 million market capitalization, successful execution of the phased development strategy could provide significant re-rating potential, following the path of similar projects like Blackwater which saw substantial value appreciation through development.View NorthIsle Copper & Gold's company profile: https://www.cruxinvestor.com/companies/northisle-copper-goldSign up for Crux Investor: https://cruxinvestor.com
Red Dog, or Horse (for his big doodle), joins the boys to tell us his best Woosha stories, being a dour backman, the advice that changed his career and so much more! One of the good ones, don't miss it! Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Gene-ology gives Gene Roddenberry's "Charley Red Dog" episode of Have Gun - Will Travel a fresh watch and finds the classic Roddenberry elements, messages aplenty for the audience, and a hard-to-ignore casting issue.
The prodigal son, friend of the show, former Downhill World Champion, Cam Cole returns! KB, Red Dog and Chris are joined by Cam to talk about a bit of everything and then eventually get on to the topic of World Champs that is happening this weekend. As always, Cam is full of excellent insights into the sport!
In our latest episode we get to know co-host Christ Vanderkolk, with KB, Red Dog and Lester putting him in the hot seat to find out how he got into riding and his peak as a 4x specialist. Full of yarns, tangents and all of the usual entertainment!
HOW MANY BABIES ARE YOU PLANNING TO HAVE?! Turns out, we've been fielding that question for over a decade... Next: did you know the very first automobile was tested in our town of Kokomo, Indiana? Well... that's because it's not actually true. But Kokomo still loves to call itself the City of Firsts. (And we really are responsible for that loveable Big, Red Dog!) Still no McBaby... The Big Kids are drinking "coffee." And John wants to talk about the Presidential Debate that he didn't watch. Later: a shocking number of people can't figure out when they're talking to a robot...or when they're sharing photos of a "missing person" who is actually a plastic doll. How does THAT affect the voting situation? Join us at the table, Neighbor!
HOW MANY BABIES ARE YOU PLANNING TO HAVE?! Turns out, we've been fielding that question for over a decade... Next: did you know the very first automobile was tested in our town of Kokomo, Indiana? Well... that's because it's not actually true. But Kokomo still loves to call itself the City of Firsts. (And we really are responsible for that loveable Big, Red Dog!) Still no McBaby... The Big Kids are drinking "coffee." And John wants to talk about the Presidential Debate that he didn't watch. Later: a shocking number of people can't figure out when they're talking to a robot...or when they're sharing photos of a "missing person" who is actually a plastic doll. How does THAT affect the voting situation? Join us at the table, Neighbor!
HOW MANY BABIES ARE YOU PLANNING TO HAVE?! Turns out, we've been fielding that question for over a decade... Next: did you know the very first automobile was tested in our town of Kokomo, Indiana? Well... that's because it's not actually true. But Kokomo still loves to call itself the City of Firsts. (And we really are responsible for that loveable Big, Red Dog!) Still no McBaby... The Big Kids are drinking "coffee." And John wants to talk about the Presidential Debate that he didn't watch. Later: a shocking number of people can't figure out when they're talking to a robot...or when they're sharing photos of a "missing person" who is actually a plastic doll. How does THAT affect the voting situation? Join us at the table, Neighbor!
In this mid-season finale episode, Sam and Shell discuss Red Dog Road in Harlan, KY. From mysterious lights, to a 55 year old murder case, find out what makes this one of the scariest roads in Appalachia. Is it truly haunted? Listen and find out! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/appalachianspookyhour/support
This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on June 4. It dropped for free subscribers on June 11. To receive future pods as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe to the free tier below:Who* Scott Bender, operations and business advisor to Blue Knob ownership* Donna Himes, Blue Knob Marketing Manager* Sam Wiley, part owner of Blue Knob* Gary Dietke, Blue Knob Mountain ManagerRecorded onMay 13, 2024About Blue KnobClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Majority owned by the Wiley familyLocated in: Claysburg, PennsylvaniaYear founded: 1963Pass affiliations: Indy Pass and Indy+ Pass – 2 days, no blackouts (access not yet set for 2024-25 ski season)Closest neighboring ski areas: Laurel (1:02), Tussey (1:13), Hidden Valley (1:14), Seven Springs (1:23)Base elevation: 2,100 feetSummit elevation: 3,172 feetVertical drop: 1,072 feetSkiable Acres: 100Average annual snowfall: 120 inchesTrail count: 33 (5 beginner, 10 intermediate, 4 advanced intermediate, 5 advanced, 9 expert) + 1 terrain parkLift count: 5 (2 triples, 2 doubles, 1 carpet – view Lift Blog's inventory of Blue Knob's lift fleet)Why I interviewed themI've not always written favorably about Blue Knob. In a state where shock-and-awe snowmaking is a baseline operational requirement, the mountain's system is underwhelming and bogged down by antiquated equipment. The lower-mountain terrain – Blue Knob's best – opens sporadically, sometimes remaining mysteriously shuttered after heavy local snows. The website at one time seemed determined to set the world record for the most exclamation points in a single place. They may have succeeded (this has since been cleaned up):I've always tried to couch these critiques in a but-damn-if-only context, because Blue Knob, considered purely as a ski area, is an absolute killer. It needs what any Pennsylvania ski area needs – modern, efficient, variable-weather-capable, overwhelming snowmaking and killer grooming. No one, in this temperamental state of freeze-thaws and frequent winter rains, can hope to survive long term without those things. So what's the holdup?My goal with The Storm is to be incisive but fair. Everyone deserves a chance to respond to critiques, and offering them that opportunity is a tenant of good journalism. But because this is a high-volume, high-frequency operation, and because my beat covers hundreds of ski areas, I'm not always able to gather reactions to every post in the moment. I counterbalance that reality with this: every ski area's story is a long-term, ongoing one. What they mess up today, they may get right tomorrow. And reality, while inarguable, does not always capture intentions. Eventually, I need to gather and share their perspective.And so it was Blue Knob's turn to talk. And I challenge you to find a more good-natured and nicer group of folks anywhere. I went off format with this one, hosting four people instead of the usual one (I've done multiples a few times before, with Plattekill, West Mountain, Bousquet, Boyne Mountain, and Big Sky). The group chat was Blue Knob's idea, and frankly I loved it. It's not easy to run a ski area in 2024 in the State of Pennsylvania, and it's especially not easy to run this ski area, for reasons I outline below. And while Blue Knob has been slower to get to the future than its competitors, I believe they're at least walking in that direction.What we talked about“This was probably one of our worst seasons”; ownership; this doesn't feel like PA; former owner Dick Gauthier's legacy; reminiscing on the “crazy fun” of the bygone community atop the ski hill; Blue Knob's history as an Air Force station and how the mountain became a ski area; Blue Knob's interesting lease arrangement with the state; the remarkable evolution of Seven Springs and how those lessons could fuel Blue Knob's growth; competing against Vail's trio of nearby mountains; should Vail be allowed to own eight ski areas in one state?; Indy Pass sales limits; Indy Pass as customer-acquisition tool; could Blue Knob ever upgrade its top-to-bottom doubles to a high-speed quad?; how one triple chair multiplied into two; why Blue Knob built a mile-long lift and almost immediately shortened it; how Wolf Creek is “like Blue Knob”; beginner lifts; the best ski terrain in Pennsylvania; why Mine Shaft and Boneyard Glades disappeared from Blue Knob's trailmap, and whether they could ever return; unmarked glades; Blue Knob's unique microclimate and how that impacts snowmaking; why the mountain isn't open top-to-bottom more and why it's important to change that; PA snowmaking and how Blue Knob can catch up; that wild access road and what could be done to improve it; and the surprising amount of housing on Blue Knob's slopes. Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewSo here's something that's absolutely stupid:That's southeastern Pennsylvania. Vail Resorts operates all of the ski areas in blue font. Ski areas in red are independent. Tussey, a local bump serving State College and its armies of sad co-eds who need a distraction because their football team can't beat Michigan, is not really relevant here. Blue Knob is basically surrounded by ski areas that all draw on the same well of out-of-state corporate resources and are stapled to the gumball-machine-priced Epic Pass. If this were a military map, we'd all say, “Yeah they're fucked.” Blue Knob is Berlin in 1945, with U.S. forces closing in from the west and the Russians driving from the east. There's no way they're winning this war.How did this happen? Which bureaucrat in sub-basement 17 of Justice Department HQ in D.C. looked at Vail's 2021 deal to acquire Seven Springs, Hidden Valley, and Laurel and said, “Cool”? This was just two years after Vail had picked up Whitetail, Liberty, and Roundtop, along with Jack Frost and Big Boulder in eastern Pennsylvania, in the Peak Resorts acquisition. How does allowing one company to acquire eight of the 22 public ski resorts in one state not violate some antitrust statute? Especially when six of them essentially surround one independent competitor.I don't know. When a similar situation materialized in Colorado in 1997, Justice said, “No, Vail Resorts, you can not buy Keystone and Breckenridge and Arapahoe Basin from this dog food company. Sell one.” And so A-Basin went to a real estate conglomerate out of Toronto, which gut-renovated the mountain and then flipped it, earlier this year, to Vail arch-frenemy Alterra. And an independent ski area operator told me that, at some point during this ongoing sales process, the Justice Department reached out to ask them if they were OK with Alterra – which already operates Winter Park, owns Steamboat, and has wrapped Copper, Eldora, and the four Aspen mountains into its Ikon Pass – owning A-Basin (which has been on the Ikon Pass since 2019). Justice made no such phone call, Blue Knob officials tell me on this podcast, when Vail was purchasing the Seven Springs resorts.This is where Colorad-Bro reminds me that Pennsylvania skiing is nothing compared to Colorado. And yes, Colorado is unquestionably the epicenter of American skiing, home to some of our most iconic resorts and responsible for approximately one in four U.S. skier visits each winter. But where do you suppose all those skiers come from? Not solely from Colorado, ranked 21st by U.S. population with just 5.9 million residents. Pennsylvania, with Philly and Pittsburgh and dozens of mid-sized cities in-between, ranks fifth in the nation by population, with nearly 13 million people. And with cold winters, ski areas near every large city, and some of the best snowmaking systems on the planet, PA is a skier printing press, responsible not just for millions of in-state skier visits annually, but for minting skiers that drive the loaded U-Haul west so they can brag about being Summit County locals five minutes after signing their lease. That one company controls more than one-third of the ski areas – which, combined, certainly account for more than half of the state's skier visits – strikes me as unfair in a nation that supposedly maintains robust antitrust laws.But whatever. We're locked in here. Vail Resorts is not Ticketmaster, and no one is coming to dismantle this siege. Blue Knob is surrounded. And it's worse than it looks on this map, which does not illuminate that Blue Knob sits in a vast wilderness, far from most population centers, and that all of Vail's resorts scoop up skiers flowing west-northwest from Philadelphia/Baltimore/D.C. and east from Pittsburgh. So how is Blue Knob not completely screwed? Answering that question was basically the point of this podcast. The mountain's best argument for continued existence in the maw of this Epic Pass blitzkrieg is that Blue Knob is a better pure ski area than any of the six Vail mountains that surround it (see trailmap above). The terrain is, in fact, the best in the State of Pennsylvania, and arguably in the entire Mid-Atlantic (sorry Elk Mountain partisans, but that ski area, fine as it is, is locked out of the conversation as long as they maintain that stupid tree-skiing ban). But this fact of mountain superiority is no guarantee of long-term resilience, because the truth is that Blue Knob has often, in recent years, been unable to open top to bottom, running only the upper-mountain triple chairs and leaving the best terrain out of reach.They have to fix that. And they know it. But this is a feisty mountain in a devilish microclimate with some antiquated infrastructure and a beast of an access road. Nothing about this renovation has been, or likely will be, fast or easy.But it can be done. Blue Knob can survive. I believe it after hosting the team on this podcast. Maybe you will too once you hear it.What I got wrong* When describing the trail network, I said that the runs were cut “across the fall line” in a really logical way – I meant, of course, to say they were cut down the fall line.* I said that I thought the plants that sprouted between the trees in the mothballed Mine Shaft and Boneyard Glades were positioned “to keep people out.” It's more likely, however, based upon what the crew told us, that those plants are intended to control the erosion that shuttered the glades several years ago.* I mentioned “six-packs going up in the Poconos at the KSL-owned mountains.” To clarify: those would be Camelback and Blue Mountain, which each added six-packs in 2022, one year before joining the Ikon Pass.* I also said that high-speed lifts were “becoming the standard” in Pennsylvania. That isn't quite accurate, as a follow-up inventory clarified. The state is home to just nine high-speed lifts, concentrated at five ski areas. So yeah, not exactly taking over Brah.* I intimated that Blue Knob shortened the Beginners CTEC triple, built in 1983, and stood up the Expressway triple in 1985 with some of the commandeered parts. This does not appear to be the case, as the longer Beginners lift and Expressway co-exist on several vintage trailmaps, including the one below from circa 1989. The longer lift continues to appear on Blue Knob trailmaps through the mid-1990s, but at some point, the resort shortened the lift by thousands of linear feet. We discuss why in the pod.Why you should ski Blue KnobIf we took every mountain, fully open, with bomber conditions, I would rank Blue Knob as one of the best small- to mid-sized ski areas in the Northeast. From a rough-and-tumble terrain perspective, it's right there with Berkshire East, Plattekill, Hickory, Black Mountain of Maine, Ragged, Black Mountain (New Hampshire), Bolton Valley, and Magic Mountain. But with its Pennsylvania address, it never makes that list.It should. This is a serious mountain, with serious terrain that will thrill and challenge any skier. Each trail is distinct and memorable, with quirk and character. Even the groomers are interesting, winding nearly 1,100 vertical feet through the trees, dipping and banking, crisscrossing one another and the lifts above. Lower Shortway, a steep and narrow bumper cut along a powerline, may be my favorite trail in Pennsylvania. Or maybe it's Ditch Glades, a natural halfpipe rolling below Stembogan Bowl. Or maybe it's the unmarked trees of East Wall Traverse down to the marked East Wall Glades. Or maybe it's Lower Extrovert, a wide but ungroomed and mostly unskied trail where I found wind-blown pow at 3 p.m. Every trail is playful and punchy, and they are numerous enough that it's difficult to ski them all in a single day.Which of course takes us to the reality of skiing Blue Knob, which is that the ski area's workhorse top-to-bottom lift is the 61-year-old Route 66 double chair. The lift is gorgeous and charming, trenched through the forest on a narrow and picturesque wilderness line (until the mid-station, when the view suddenly shifts to that of oddly gigantic houses strung along the hillside). While it runs fast for a fixed-grip lift, the ride is quite long (I didn't time it; I'll guess 10 to 12 minutes). It stops a lot because, well, Pennsylvania. There are a lot of novice skiers here. There is a mid-station that will drop expert skiers back at the top of the best terrain, but this portal, where beginners load to avoid the suicidal runs below, contributes to those frequent stops.And that's the reality when that lift is running, which it often is not. And that, again, is because the lower-mountain terrain is frequently closed. This is a point of frustration for locals and, I'll point out, for the mountain operators themselves. A half-open Blue Knob is not the same as, say, a half-open Sugarbush, where you'll still have access to lots of great terrain. A half-open Blue Knob is just the Expressway (Lift 4) triple chair (plus the beginner zone), mostly groomers, mostly greens and blues. It's OK, but it's not what we were promised on the trailmap.That operational inconsistency is why Blue Knob remains mostly unheralded by the sort of skiers who are most drawn to this newsletter – adventurous, curious, ready for a challenge – even though it is the perfect Storm mountain: raw and wild and secretive and full of guard dog energy. But if you're anywhere in the region, watch their Instagram account, which usually flashes the emergency lights when Route 66 spins. And go there when that happens. You're welcome.Podcast NotesOn crisscrossing chairliftsChairlifts are cool. Crisscrossing chairlifts are even cooler. Riding them always gives me the sense of being part of a giant Goldbergian machine. Check out the triple crossing over the doubles at Blue Knob (all videos by Stuart Winchester):Wiley mentions a similar setup at Attitash, where the Yankee Flyer high-speed quad crosses beneath the summit lift. Here's a pic I took of the old Summit Triple at the crossover junction in 2021:Vail Resorts replaced the triple with the Mountaineer high-speed quad this past winter. I intended to go visit the resort in early February, but then I got busy trying not to drop dead, so I cancelled that trip and don't have any pics of the new lift. Lift Blog made it there, because of course he did, and his pics show the crossover modified but intact. I did, however, discuss the new lift extensively with Attitash GM Brandon Swartz last November.I also snagged this rad footage of Whistler's new Fitzsimmons eight-pack flying beneath the Whistler Village Gondola in February:And the Porcupine triple passing beneath the Needles Gondola at Snowbasin in March:Oh, and Lift 2 passing beneath the lower Panorama Gondola at Mammoth:Brah I could do this all day. Here's Far East six-pack passing beneath the Red Dog sixer at Palisades Tahoe:Palisades' Base-to-Base Gondola actually passes over two chairlifts on its way over to Alpine Meadows: the Exhibition quad (foreground), and the KT-22 Express, visible in the distance:And what the hell, let's make it a party:On Blue Knob as Air Force baseIt's wild and wildly interesting that Blue Knob – one of the highest points in Pennsylvania – originally hosted an Air Force radar station. All the old buildings are visible in this undated photo. You can see the lifts carrying skiers on the left. Most of these buildings have since been demolished.On Ski Denton and LaurelThe State of Pennsylvania owns two ski areas: Laurel Mountain and Ski Denton (Blue Knob is located in a state park, and we discuss how that arrangement works in the podcast). Vail Resorts, of course, operates Laurel, which came packaged with Seven Springs. Denton hasn't spun the lifts in a decade. Late last year, a group called Denton Go won a bid to re-open and operate the ski area, with a mix of state and private investment.And it will need a lot of investment. Since this is a state park, it's open to anyone, and I hiked Denton in October 2022. The lifts – a double, a triple, and a Poma – are intact, but the triple is getting swallowed by fast-growing trees in one spot (top two photos):I'm no engineer, but these things are going to need a lot of work. The trail network hasn't grown over too much, and the base lodge looks pristine, the grasses around it mowed. Here's the old trailmap if you're curious:And here's the proposed upgrade blueprint:I connected briefly with the folks running Denton GO last fall, but never wrote a story on it. I'll check in with them soon for an update.On Herman Dupre and the evolution of Seven SpringsBender spent much of his career at Seven Springs, and we reminisce a bit about the Dupre family and the ski area's evolution into one of the finest mountains in the East. You can learn more about Seven Springs' history in my podcast conversation with the resort's current GM, Brett Cook, from last year.On Ski magazine's top 20 in the EastSki magazine – which is no longer a physical magazine but a collection of digital bits entrusted to the robots' care – has been publishing its reader resort rankings for decades. The list in the West is fairly static and predictable, filled largely with the Epkonic monsters you would expect (though Pow Mow won the top place this year). But the East list is always a bit more surprising. This year, for example, Mad River Glen and Smugglers' Notch claimed the top two spots. They're both excellent ski areas and personal favorites, with some of the most unique terrain in the country, but neither is on a megapass, and neither owns a high-speed lift, which is perhaps proof that the Colorado Machine hasn't swallowed our collective souls just yet.But the context in which we discuss the list is this: each year, three small ski areas punch their way into an Eastern lineup that's otherwise filled with monsters like Stowe and Sugarbush. Those are: Seven Springs; Holiday Valley, New York; and Wachusett, Massachusetts. These improbable ski centers all make the list because their owners (or former owners, in Seven Springs' case), worked for decades to transform small, backwater ski areas into major regional destinations.On Vail's Northeast Value Epic PassesThe most frightening factor in the abovementioned difficulties that Blue Knob faces in its cagefight with Vail is the introduction, in 2020, of Northeast-specific Epic Passes. There are two versions. The Northeast Value Pass grants passholders unlimited access to all eight Vail Resorts in Pennsylvania and all four in neighboring Ohio, which is a crucial feeder for the Seven Springs resorts. It also includes unlimited access to Vail's four New Hampshire resorts; unlimited access with holiday blackouts at Hunter, Okemo, and Mount Snow; and 10 non-holiday days at Stowe. And it's only $613 (early-bird price was $600):The second version is a midweek pass that includes all the same resorts, with five Stowe days, for just $459 ($450 early-bird):And you can also, of course, pick up an Epic ($1,004) or Epic Local ($746) pass, which still includes unlimited Pennsylvania access and adds everything in the West and in Europe.Blue Knob's season pass costs $465 ($429 early-bird), and is only good at Blue Knob. That's a very fair price, and skiers who acted early could have added an Indy Pass on at a pretty big discount. But Indy is off sale, and PA skiers weighing their pass options are going to find that Epic Pass awfully tempting.On comparisons to the liftline at MRGErf, I may have activated the Brobots at Mad Brother Glen when I compared the Route 66 liftline with the one beneath their precious single chair. But I mean it's not the worst comparison you could think of:Here's another Blue Knob shot that shows how low the chairs fly over the trail:And here's a video that gives a bit more perspective on Blue Knob's liftline:I don't know if I fully buy the comparison myself, but Blue Knob is the closest thing you'll find to MRG this far south.On Wolf Creek's old summit PomaHimes reminisced on her time working at Wolf Creek, Colorado, and the rattletrap Poma that would carry skiers up a 45-degree face to the summit. I was shocked to discover that the old lift is actually still there, running alongside the Treasure Stoke high-speed quad (the two lifts running parallel up the gut of the mountain). I have no idea how often it actually spins:Lift Blog has pics, and notes that the lift “very rarely operates for historic purposes.”On defunct gladesThe Mine Shaft and Bone Yard glades disappeared from Blue Knob's trailmap more than a decade ago, but this sign at the top of Lower Shortway still points toward them:Then there's this sign, a little ways down, where the Bone Yard Glade entrance used to be:And here are the glades, marked on a circa 2007 trailmap, between Deer Run and Lower Shortway:It would be rad if Blue Knob could resurrect these. We discuss the possibility on the podcast.On Blue Knob's base being higher than Killington'sSomewhat unbelievably, Blue Knob's 2,100-foot base elevation is higher than that of every ski area in New England save Saddleback, which launches from a 2,460-foot base. The five next highest are Bolton Valley (2,035 feet), Stowe (2,035), Cannon (2,034), Pico (2,000), and Waterville Valley (1,984). Blue Knob's Vail-owned neighbors would fit right into this group: Hidden Valley sits at 2,405 feet, Seven Springs at 2,240, and Laurel at 2,000. Head south and the bases get even higher: in West Virginia, Canaan Valley sits at 3,430 feet; Snowshoe at 3,348-foot base (skiers have to drive to 4,848, as this is an upside-down ski area); and Timberline at 3,268. But the real whoppers are in North Carolina: Beech Mountain sits at 4,675, Cataloochee at 4,660, Sugar Mountain at 4,100, and Hatley Pointe at 4,000. I probably should have made a chart, but damn it, I have to get this podcast out before I turn 90.On Blue Knob's antique snowmaking equipmentLook, I'm no snowmaking expert, but some of the stuff dotting Blue Knob's slopes looks like straight-up World War II surplus:The Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 41/100 in 2024, and number 541 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.stormskiing.com/subscribe
Interview with Robin Tolbert, VP Exploration, and Sam Lee, President & CEO of NorthIsle Copper & Gold Inc.Our previous interview: https://www.cruxinvestor.com/posts/northisle-copper-gold-tsxvncx-leveraging-the-rising-copper-gold-market-on-path-to-production-5205Recording date: 29th May 2024NorthIsle Copper and Gold is advancing a significant copper-gold porphyry project on northern Vancouver Island in British Columbia. The project boasts an impressive resource base, with over 4.9 million ounces of indicated gold resources and approximately 2.5 billion pounds of indicated copper resources. This forms a strong foundation to build upon in a rising commodity price environment.With copper and gold prices at attractive levels, NorthIsle is taking steps to grow the project further and optimize the potential development scenario. The company is currently undertaking trade-off studies to determine the optimal path forward, with a focus on delineating a potential starter pit operation on the higher-grade Red Dog and Northwest Expo zones.CEO Sam Lee highlighted the opportunity in a recent interview, stating, "We obviously saw recent highs on not only copper and gold, it's to grow the project right, it's to make it bigger, it's to make it obviously better, and that's what we are doing through the drill right now."This year's 10,000 meter drill program is following up on successful programs in 2022 and 2023 and will target high-grade zones that could enhance the overall project economics. VP Exploration Robin Tolbert sees big potential, especially at Northwest Expo."At Northwest Expo, we have of course the resource in there, which is where those red drill holes are," said Tolbert. "What we find is the mineralization to the south, which is to the left, is very high grade but that currently is in the inferred category. We are planning to drill seven holes through this red area which is the high grade, and that will increase the grade and tonnage of high grade."A key advantage for NorthIsle is the existing infrastructure in the area, including power, roads, and port facilities, thanks to the historical BHP Island Copper mine that operated in the 1970s. This is a major benefit that could allow the project to be advanced efficiently. While a lot of work is going into expanding and upgrading resources at known zones, NorthIsle also sees tremendous blue sky exploration potential on the wider property package. Initial drilling at the Pemberton Hills target indicates a very large porphyry system could be present, and this area will see more drilling in 2024.For investors bullish on copper and gold, NorthIsle presents a compelling opportunity, with a large existing resource base in a top-tier jurisdiction, ongoing drilling to expand high-grade zones, and district-scale upside potential. With demand for copper forecast to grow significantly in the coming years, NorthIsle is well positioned to create value as it continues to advance and de-risk this major project.View NorthIsle Copper & Gold's company profile: https://www.cruxinvestor.com/companies/northisle-copper-goldSign up for Crux Investor: https://cruxinvestor.com
In this episode of Stories From the Roof, host Megan Ellsworth sits down with Patrick Cochran, owner of Red Dog's Roofing and third generation roofing professional, to talk about his vision, expansion into five states, and dedication to serving his community with integrity, service and craftsmanship. Patrick's goal has always been to create a brand that would help change the way the roofing industry was perceived. Join them as Patrick shares with Megan how he has accomplished so much and how he intends to keep moving toward that goal. Learn more at RoofersCoffeeShop.com! Are you a contractor looking for resources? Become an R-Club Member today! https://www.rooferscoffeeshop.com/rcs-club-sign-up Follow Us! https://www.instagram.com/rooferscoffeeshop/?hl=en https://www.facebook.com/rooferscoffeeshop/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/rooferscoffeeshop-com https://www.tiktok.com/@rooferscoffeeshop #RoofersCoffeeShop #RedDogsRoofing #RoofingProfessionals #RoofingContractors #RoofingIndustry
Interview with Sam Lee, President & CEO of NorthIsle Copper & Gold Inc.Our previous interview: https://www.cruxinvestor.com/posts/northisle-copper-gold-ncx-exciting-copper-gold-porphyry-in-british-columbia-3223-8180eRecording date: 2nd April 2024NorthIsle Copper & Gold (TSXV:NCX) is advancing the North Island Project, a district-scale copper-gold porphyry discovery located on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. With a large established resource, extensive existing infrastructure, and strong government and First Nations support, NorthIsle offers investors an attractive opportunity to gain exposure to rising copper and gold prices.The company's flagship North Island Project covers over 34,000 hectares of mineral claims prospective ground and hosts several porphyry copper-gold deposits, including the advanced-stage Hushamu and Red Dog deposits. These deposits host combined Indicated resources of 5 million ounces of gold and 3 billion pounds of copper, positioning North Island among the largest undeveloped copper-gold projects in Canada.Importantly, the project benefits from extensive existing infrastructure, including paved road access, a deep-water port, and an ample supply of low-cost hydroelectric power. This infrastructure advantage significantly reduces the capex and development timeline compared to more remote projects. NorthIsle has also established strong relationships with the local First Nations, signing consent agreements that provide a clear framework for consultation and economic participation. While the 2021 PEA demonstrated robust economics for a large-scale, 22-year mine at North Island, NorthIsle has recently pivoted to a phased development approach to fast-track the project to production. The company plans to first develop a smaller, higher-grade starter pit operation focused on the Red Dog and Northwest Expo zones, with the larger Hushamu deposit serving as a longer-term growth opportunity.Recent drilling at Northwest Expo has intercepted multiple zones of near-surface, high-grade copper-gold mineralization, including 96 m grading 1.42 g/t gold eq. and 87m grading 1.46g/t gold eq. These results underscore the potential for NorthIsle to develop a low-cost, high-margin initial mining operation with a small footprint and low strip ratio. By starting small, the company can significantly reduce upfront capital costs and accelerate the timeline to first production and cash flow.Importantly, NorthIsle is fully funded to execute on this strategy after raising $6.4 million in an oversubscribed private placement in December 2023. The financing was anchored by several prominent resource-focused funds and positions the company to aggressively advance the project through drilling, economic studies, and permitting in 2024.Looking ahead, NorthIsle offers investors multiple paths to value creation. In the near-term, the company is focused on expanding and upgrading the resource at Northwest Expo and Red Dog to support the development of the starter pit operation. Continued exploration success and the completion of engineering studies and permitting milestones should help to re-rate the stock as the project advances towards a construction decision.Longer-term, NorthIsle has significant optionality to expand the operation to incorporate the larger Hushamu resource as market conditions warrant. The company also controls a large prospective land package with several untested exploration targets that could deliver new discoveries to further enhance the project. With a proven management team, a world-class copper-gold asset, and a clear path forward, NorthIsle is well-positioned to capitalize on the strong long-term fundamentals for critical metals.View NorthIsle Copper & Gold's company profile: https://www.cruxinvestor.com/companies/northisle-copper-goldSign up for Crux Investor: https://cruxinvestor.com
KB, Red Dog, Lester and Chris are back and just when we thought the mountain bike world was a bit quiet, the slopestyle riders at crankworx decide to form a union and stage a walk out! Throw in some Sam Hill rumours, Whaka 100 news and the usual tangents we head off on and its a banger of an episode! Brought to you by: www.troyleedesigns.co.nz www.smothoptics.co.nz www.filthy.net.nz --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kieran-bennett4/message
In this episode of Rewatchables we dive into the iconic New Zealand downhill movie Pusher - KB, Red Dog, Lester and Chris are joined by Byron Scott who co produced the movie to talk about how it came about and dive into stories of the 2005 New Zealand National Downhill Mountain Bike Series. Sit back and enjoy some great stories, or if you want to watch the movie and listen we have that up over on our YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/@TheOTBPodcast --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kieran-bennett4/message
The great one has returned! No, it's not The Rock, it's Bourbon Bob! After a year on the sidelines, Bourbon Bob has FINALLY made his return to Bumming with Bobcat! What did Bourbon Bob bring along to the podcast? Tune in to find out!What's the verdict on a $24.99 bourbon whiskey? Reminiscing about RED DOG, Victoria Lager, and much MORE!GET READY! The 2024 BumWineBob.Com Battle Of The Booze tournament is tipping off SOON! Watch the FULL VIDEO episode below on YouTube and SMASH that subscribe button!https://youtu.be/eNzchY8YhGMSupport the blog and podcast by picking up a shirt or some other great merchandise at the Bumming with Bobcat Merch Store (http://store.bumwinebob.com) on TeePublic!All that and MORE featured on this weeks episode! Make sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast apps to get the latest episodes! Tell your friends to check us out, grab a drink, and give the podcast a listen. Press the play button below to tune in on Premier Podcast Network! Cheers!
In this episode of The PodCask: a Podcast About Whiskey, hosts Will and Greeze bring their signature blend of humor and whiskey expertise to the forefront as they dive into a wide array of topics that spin traditional whiskey discussions on their head. The episode takes listeners on a rollercoaster of anecdotes, tasting notes, and industry insights that ultimately culminate in a balanced mix of entertainment and informative content. Kicking off the episode, the hosts draw parallels between the concept of finding joy in minimalistic living, popularized by Marie Kondo, and the pursuit of exhilarating whiskey experiences. They playfully propose activities like a Plinko game with whiskey pumping and drinking challenges, setting the tone for an engaging and lighthearted conversation. Venturing into the realm of bourbon, Will and Greeze reflect on the changing dynamics of the bourbon community, lamenting the declining interest in bottle-sharing and the frenzy surrounding rare bottle hunts. They share personal experiences of braving long lines in the cold to secure coveted whiskey bottles, acknowledging the logistical challenges brought on by parenthood. Amidst the casual banter, the hosts turn their attention to a variety of whiskey tastings, dissecting the nuances of different proofs and flavors. From discussing George C. Stagg's 2020 release to sampling Jack Daniels bonded rye and Maker's Mark, Will and Greeze deliver in-depth commentary that appeals to both connoisseurs and casual enthusiasts. As the episode unfolds, the hosts seamlessly weave in diversions into the Euro's exchange rate, a drone incident involving Canadian geese, and amusing encounters at store checkouts, creating an engaging and relatable listening experience. The conversation dips into the hosts' childhood memories, prompting musings about creating a whiskey that captures the essence of a communion experience and reminiscences about swimming with whale sharks in Mexico. This blend of personal anecdotes and offbeat ideas serves to humanize the hosts, grounding the podcast in authenticity and relatability. Of course, no whiskey podcast would be complete without the main event – whiskey tastings. Listeners are treated to a detailed breakdown of different whiskey batches, from the distinct flavors of a 12-year-old whiskey to the easy-drinking qualities of a 10-year-old counterpart. Will and Greeze's candid and unfiltered assessments lend an air of sincerity to the episode, fostering trust and connection with their audience. In a self-referential nod, the hosts reflect on a past whiskey purchase that didn't quite deliver on expectations, highlighting the unpredictable nature of whiskey exploration. This transparency underscores their commitment to delivering honest appraisals and genuine recommendations for their listeners. The episode draws to a close with lively promotions of Patreon memberships, Greeze's podcast, and Will's burgeoning YouTube channel, cementing the hosts' dedication to cultivating a vibrant community around whiskey appreciation. Wrapping up with their trademark sign-off, "We don't know Jack. Well, we'll drink it," Will and Greeze captivate and entertain, leaving listeners eagerly anticipating the next episode of The PodCask. 00:00 Grocery store saga: expired ID, outdoor Yeti. 05:43 Avoiding clerk, got license, good until 2032. 07:35 Shift in sentiment toward whiskey's limited releases. 10:23 Bourbon groups and their expensive requirements for whiskey. 16:03 Friendship fading, smaller gatherings becoming the norm. 17:28 Whiskey interest remains strong over time. 20:35 Long-term disappointments in relationships, communities, and media. 23:32 Suggest specific rules for a bottle share. 28:18 Waiting in line at Red Dog early. 30:27 Complaint about mustard on breakfast sandwich. 33:36 Never hosted a communion, but reminisced past. 38:03 Weight distribution affects how seahorses give birth. 42:10 Tasting whiskey, noting subtle differences, finding similarities. 44:04 Rich earthy flavor with hints of chocolate. 48:47 High proof can mask imperfections in whiskey. 50:47 Failed attempt at making an old fashioned. 54:27 Excited about Patreon, more interaction to come. 56:15 Patrick made intro, fishing, flies, comedy, weather.
Greg Minnaar joins the podcast this week to discuss his move to Norco after 16 years with Santa Cruz Bicycles, KB and Red Dog cover off how the switch happened, his thoughts on the new bike, his longevity in the sport, tales of the past with team mates like Missy Giove, Steve Peat, Nathan Rennie and Josh Bryceland and of course, it wouldn't be The OTB Podcast if we didn't discuss the era of 26" downhill bikes! A very special thank you to Spoke Magazine, Advance Traders and Norco for making this episode happen! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/kieran-bennett4/message
For the second episode of There Is No Planet Earth Stories I'm joined by guest DJ Heather representing stories from Chicago. We discuss a range of topics from the celebration of her 35 year DJ career, her experiences in the Chicago House Music Scene of the 80's and 90's, working at Gramophone records, as well as her experiences over the years as a DJ and Producer."DJ Heather is a highly respected and talented DJ from Brooklyn who has made a name for herself in the Chicago music scene. She got her start at the Artful Dodger, a neighborhood pub with a small dance floor, and quickly progressed to more prominent gigs, including a three-year residency at Red Dog and a stint at the famous Gramaphone Records. She is known for her versatile style, which incorporates a wide variety of genres including hip hop, house, jazz, soul, R&B, disco classics, and rare groove. Despite her success, Heather considers becoming a DJ to be a “happy accident” and a hobby that developed into a full-time pursuit. Throughout her career, she has focused on developing her skills and versatility as an entertainer, and is considered one of the premier selectors in the nation.DJ Heather's dedication and hard work have earned her a reputation as a skilled and talented DJ. Her ability to seamlessly blend different genres of music and create a unique and engaging experience for her audience has made her a favorite among music lovers in Chicago and around the world. Her performances are known for their energy and passion, as well as her ability to connect with the crowd and create a sense of community on the dance floor."https://soundcloud.com/dj-heatherhttps://www.djheatherchicago.com/Support the show
Media Roots Special DatesThe Age of Transitions and Uncle 1-26-2024 Robbie Martin AOT #411Robbie Martin returns to the show to talk a bit about the strange and ever-changing landscape of online media. Media Roots spread deep and sure, but new and evermore beguiling media outlets, personalities, and trends keep emerging at a breakneck pace. Robbie and Aaron do their best to make some kind of sense of it all here. Topics include: Media Roots, podcasting, Masonic history, alternative media, UFO community, monetization schemes, over saturation, Lex Friedman, Joe Rogan, copies of copies, old conspiracies and hoaxes have lasting power, far right extremism and mainstream convergence, family upheavals, mental health, MAGA, Project 2025, strategy of tension, Jan 6, ruling class factions at war with each other, civil war, QAnon, Julian Assange, Wikileaks, Podesta emails, counterintelligence, Accelerationism, Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, rightwing influencers, glomming onto fringe topics, 9/11 Truth, Flat Earth, Alex Jones, Singularity, AI, Kurzweil, transhumanism, virtual spaces, fictionally augmented digital realities, LLM fueled disinformation campaigns, NeuralinkUTP #321A lively night of calls, chatting in the crack room, and wild discussion ensued on this episode of the broadcast. Remember, we are live every Friday night, and you can join us. Topics include: NFL talk, Blackjack live app investigation, chat, Twitch live-stream aesthetic, Love on the Spectrum, autism, dating shows, humor, comedy shows, normal people, dating etiquette, neurodiversity, Trader Jose dark beer, Uncle QR code, Giant Rock, Skinwalker Ranch, VHS watch party, Bowflex video tape, Thighmaster, Suzanne Sommers, Kobe Bryant shirts, MST shirt, Guiness beer, Red Stripe beer, Red Dog beer, Jagermeister girls promoting in bars, Columbus Ohio FRANZ MAIN HUB:https://theageoftransitions.com/PATREONhttps://www.patreon.com/aaronfranzUNCLEhttps://unclethepodcast.com/ORhttps://theageoftransitions.com/category/uncle-the-podcast/FRANZ and UNCLE Merchhttps://theageoftransitions.com/category/support-the-podcasts/KEEP OCHELLI GOING. You are the EFFECT if you support OCHELLIhttps://ochelli.com/donate/Ochelli Link Treehttps://linktr.ee/chuckochelliBASIC MONTHLY MEMBERSHIP$10. USD per Month Support Ochelli & in 2024 Get a Monthly Email that deliversThe 1st Decade of The Ochelli Effect Over 5,000 Podcasts by 2025BASIC + SUPPORTER WALL$150. USD one time gets same all The Monthly Benefits for 1 Year+a spot on The Ochelli.com Supporters Wallhttps://ochelli.com/membership-account/membership-levels/
A lively night of calls, chatting in the crack room, and wild discussion ensued on this episode of the broadcast. Remember, we are live every Friday night, and you can join us. Topics include: NFL talk, Blackjack live app investigation, chat, Twitch live-stream aesthetic, Love on the Spectrum, autism, dating shows, humor, comedy shows, normal people, dating etiquette, neurodiversity, Trader Jose dark beer, Uncle QR code, Giant Rock, Skinwalker Ranch, VHS watch party, Bowflex video tape, Thighmaster, Suzanne Sommers, Kobe Bryant shirts, MST shirt, Guiness beer, Red Stripe beer, Red Dog beer, Jagermeister girls promoting in bars, Columbus Ohio
Xochi grew up in the movie business with parents who were well known in the industry. In 1987, she joined the business working with the assistant directors. In 1991, she joined the DGA and has worked on such films as (TERMINATOR 2, DEMOLITION MAN, & LETHAL WEAPON 4) and tv show primarily as a 1st AD. She has a documentary feature in the works called RED DOG & BATES. Throwback episode - first recorded in August of 2020 Hosted by Zef Cota
Welcome to another episode of Haunt and Cold where we tell you stories of mystery, crime, and the supernatural. Nestled in the capital of Delaware sits the Woodburn Mansion, which has homed many of the state's Senators and Governors. Katie tells us about it's fascinating history and the spirits that were left behind, but what goes on behind the gates now, is truly is a mystery. Afterwards, April tells us about the gruesome death of Hugh Pennington and the torture his mother endured at the hands of serial killer, Jim Red Dog. We hope you enjoy this episode before we take a short Holiday Hiatus! Spend time with your loved ones and we will be back in January with more spooky, sinister stories! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/hauntandcold/support
Episode 169 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Piece of My Heart" and the short, tragic life of Janis Joplin. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode available, on "Spinning Wheel" by Blood, Sweat & Tears. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources There are two Mixcloud mixes this time. As there are so many songs by Big Brother and the Holding Company and Janis Joplin 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 . For information on Janis Joplin I used three biographies -- Scars of Sweet Paradise by Alice Echols, Janis: Her Life and Music by Holly George-Warren, and Buried Alive by Myra Friedman. I also referred to the chapter '“Being Good Isn't Always Easy": Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, Dusty Springfield, and the Color of Soul' in Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination by Jack Hamilton. Some information on Bessie Smith came from Bessie Smith by Jackie Kay, a book I can't really recommend given the lack of fact-checking, and Bessie by Chris Albertson. I also referred to Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday by Angela Y. Davis And the best place to start with Joplin's music is this five-CD box, which contains both Big Brother and the Holding Company albums she was involved in, plus her two studio albums and bonus tracks. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, this episode contains discussion of drug addiction and overdose, alcoholism, mental illness, domestic abuse, child abandonment, and racism. If those subjects are likely to cause you upset, you may want to check the transcript or skip this one rather than listen. Also, a subject I should probably say a little more about in this intro because I know I have inadvertently caused upset to at least one listener with this in the past. When it comes to Janis Joplin, it is *impossible* to talk about her without discussing her issues with her weight and self-image. The way I write often involves me paraphrasing the opinions of the people I'm writing about, in a mode known as close third person, and sometimes that means it can look like I am stating those opinions as my own, and sometimes things I say in that mode which *I* think are obviously meant in context to be critiques of those attitudes can appear to others to be replicating them. At least once, I have seriously upset a fat listener when talking about issues related to weight in this manner. I'm going to try to be more careful here, but just in case, I'm going to say before I begin that I think fatphobia is a pernicious form of bigotry, as bad as any other form of bigotry. I'm fat myself and well aware of how systemic discrimination affects fat people. I also think more generally that the pressure put on women to look a particular way is pernicious and disgusting in ways I can't even begin to verbalise, and causes untold harm. If *ANYTHING* I say in this episode comes across as sounding otherwise, that's because I haven't expressed myself clearly enough. Like all people, Janis Joplin had negative characteristics, and at times I'm going to say things that are critical of those. But when it comes to anything to do with her weight or her appearance, if *anything* I say sounds critical of her, rather than of a society that makes women feel awful for their appearance, it isn't meant to. Anyway, on with the show. On January the nineteenth, 1943, Seth Joplin typed up a letter to his wife Dorothy, which read “I wish to tender my congratulations on the anniversary of your successful completion of your production quota for the nine months ending January 19, 1943. I realize that you passed through a period of inflation such as you had never before known—yet, in spite of this, you met your goal by your supreme effort during the early hours of January 19, a good three weeks ahead of schedule.” As you can probably tell from that message, the Joplin family were a strange mixture of ultraconformism and eccentricity, and those two opposing forces would dominate the personality of their firstborn daughter for the whole of her life. Seth Joplin was a respected engineer at Texaco, where he worked for forty years, but he had actually dropped out of engineering school before completing his degree. His favourite pastime when he wasn't at work was to read -- he was a voracious reader -- and to listen to classical music, which would often move him to tears, but he had also taught himself to make bathtub gin during prohibition, and smoked cannabis. Dorothy, meanwhile, had had the possibility of a singing career before deciding to settle down and become a housewife, and was known for having a particularly beautiful soprano voice. Both were, by all accounts, fiercely intelligent people, but they were also as committed as anyone to the ideals of the middle-class family even as they chafed against its restrictions. Like her mother, young Janis had a beautiful soprano voice, and she became a soloist in her church choir, but after the age of six, she was not encouraged to sing much. Dorothy had had a thyroid operation which destroyed her singing voice, and the family got rid of their piano soon after (different sources say that this was either because Dorothy found her daughter's singing painful now that she couldn't sing herself, or because Seth was upset that his wife could no longer sing. Either seems plausible.) Janis was pushed to be a high-achiever -- she was given a library card as soon as she could write her name, and encouraged to use it, and she was soon advanced in school, skipping a couple of grades. She was also by all accounts a fiercely talented painter, and her parents paid for art lessons. From everything one reads about her pre-teen years, she was a child prodigy who was loved by everyone and who was clearly going to be a success of some kind. Things started to change when she reached her teenage years. Partly, this was just her getting into rock and roll music, which her father thought a fad -- though even there, she differed from her peers. She loved Elvis, but when she heard "Hound Dog", she loved it so much that she tracked down a copy of Big Mama Thornton's original, and told her friends she preferred that: [Excerpt: Big Mama Thornton, "Hound Dog"] Despite this, she was still also an exemplary student and overachiever. But by the time she turned fourteen, things started to go very wrong for her. Partly this was just down to her relationship with her father changing -- she adored him, but he became more distant from his daughters as they grew into women. But also, puberty had an almost wholly negative effect on her, at least by the standards of that time and place. She put on weight (which, again, I do not think is a negative thing, but she did, and so did everyone around her), she got a bad case of acne which didn't ever really go away, and she also didn't develop breasts particularly quickly -- which, given that she was a couple of years younger than the other people in the same classes at school, meant she stood out even more. In the mid-sixties, a doctor apparently diagnosed her as having a "hormone imbalance" -- something that got to her as a possible explanation for why she was, to quote from a letter she wrote then, "not really a woman or enough of one or something." She wondered if "maybe something as simple as a pill could have helped out or even changed that part of me I call ME and has been so messed up.” I'm not a doctor and even if I were, diagnosing historical figures is an unethical thing to do, but certainly the acne, weight gain, and mental health problems she had are all consistent with PCOS, the most common endocrine disorder among women, and it seems likely given what the doctor told her that this was the cause. But at the time all she knew was that she was different, and that in the eyes of her fellow students she had gone from being pretty to being ugly. She seems to have been a very trusting, naive, person who was often the brunt of jokes but who desperately needed to be accepted, and it became clear that her appearance wasn't going to let her fit into the conformist society she was being brought up in, while her high intelligence, low impulse control, and curiosity meant she couldn't even fade into the background. This left her one other option, and she decided that she would deliberately try to look and act as different from everyone else as possible. That way, it would be a conscious choice on her part to reject the standards of her fellow pupils, rather than her being rejected by them. She started to admire rebels. She became a big fan of Jerry Lee Lewis, whose music combined the country music she'd grown up hearing in Texas, the R&B she liked now, and the rebellious nature she was trying to cultivate: [Excerpt: Jerry Lee Lewis, "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On"] When Lewis' career was derailed by his marriage to his teenage cousin, Joplin wrote an angry letter to Time magazine complaining that they had mistreated him in their coverage. But as with so many people of her generation, her love of rock and roll music led her first to the blues and then to folk, and she soon found herself listening to Odetta: [Excerpt: Odetta, "Muleskinner Blues"] One of her first experiences of realising she could gain acceptance from her peers by singing was when she was hanging out with the small group of Bohemian teenagers she was friendly with, and sang an Odetta song, mimicking her voice exactly. But young Janis Joplin was listening to an eclectic range of folk music, and could mimic more than just Odetta. For all that her later vocal style was hugely influenced by Odetta and by other Black singers like Big Mama Thornton and Etta James, her friends in her late teens and early twenties remember her as a vocal chameleon with an achingly pure soprano, who would more often than Odetta be imitating the great Appalachian traditional folk singer Jean Ritchie: [Excerpt: Jean Ritchie, "Lord Randall"] She was, in short, trying her best to become a Beatnik, despite not having any experience of that subculture other than what she read in books -- though she *did* read about them in books, devouring things like Kerouac's On The Road. She came into conflict with her mother, who didn't understand what was happening to her daughter, and who tried to get family counselling to understand what was going on. Her father, who seemed to relate more to Janis, but who was more quietly eccentric, put an end to that, but Janis would still for the rest of her life talk about how her mother had taken her to doctors who thought she was going to end up "either in jail or an insane asylum" to use her words. From this point on, and for the rest of her life, she was torn between a need for approval from her family and her peers, and a knowledge that no matter what she did she couldn't fit in with normal societal expectations. In high school she was a member of the Future Nurses of America, the Future Teachers of America, the Art Club, and Slide Rule Club, but she also had a reputation as a wild girl, and as sexually active (even though by all accounts at this point she was far less so than most of the so-called "good girls" – but her later activity was in part because she felt that if she was going to have that reputation anyway she might as well earn it). She also was known to express radical opinions, like that segregation was wrong, an opinion that the other students in her segregated Texan school didn't even think was wrong, but possibly some sort of sign of mental illness. Her final High School yearbook didn't contain a single other student's signature. And her initial choice of university, Lamar State College of Technology, was not much better. In the next town over, and attended by many of the same students, it had much the same attitudes as the school she'd left. Almost the only long-term effect her initial attendance at university had on her was a negative one -- she found there was another student at the college who was better at painting. Deciding that if she wasn't going to be the best at something she didn't want to do it at all, she more or less gave up on painting at that point. But there was one positive. One of the lecturers at Lamar was Francis Edward "Ab" Abernethy, who would in the early seventies go on to become the Secretary and Editor of the Texas Folklore Society, and was also a passionate folk musician, playing double bass in string bands. Abernethy had a great collection of blues 78s. and it was through this collection that Janis first discovered classic blues, and in particular Bessie Smith: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Black Mountain Blues"] A couple of episodes ago, we had a long look at the history of the music that now gets called "the blues" -- the music that's based around guitars, and generally involves a solo male vocalist, usually Black during its classic period. At the time that music was being made though it wouldn't have been thought of as "the blues" with no modifiers by most people who were aware of it. At the start, even the songs they were playing weren't thought of as blues by the male vocalist/guitarists who played them -- they called the songs they played "reels". The music released by people like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Son House, Robert Johnson, Kokomo Arnold and so on was thought of as blues music, and people would understand and agree with a phrase like "Lonnie Johnson is a blues singer", but it wasn't the first thing people thought of when they talked about "the blues". Until relatively late -- probably some time in the 1960s -- if you wanted to talk about blues music made by Black men with guitars and only that music, you talked about "country blues". If you thought about "the blues", with no qualifiers, you thought about a rather different style of music, one that white record collectors started later to refer to as "classic blues" to differentiate it from what they were now calling "the blues". Nowadays of course if you say "classic blues", most people will think you mean Muddy Waters or John Lee Hooker, people who were contemporary at the time those white record collectors were coming up with their labels, and so that style of music gets referred to as "vaudeville blues", or as "classic female blues": [Excerpt: Mamie Smith, "Crazy Blues"] What we just heard was the first big blues hit performed by a Black person, from 1920, and as we discussed in the episode on "Crossroads" that revolutionised the whole record industry when it came out. The song was performed by Mamie Smith, a vaudeville performer, and was originally titled "Harlem Blues" by its writer, Perry Bradford, before he changed the title to "Crazy Blues" to get it to a wider audience. Bradford was an important figure in the vaudeville scene, though other than being the credited writer of "Keep A-Knockin'" he's little known these days. He was a Black musician and grew up playing in minstrel shows (the history of minstrelsy is a topic for another day, but it's more complicated than the simple image of blackface that we are aware of today -- though as with many "more complicated than that" things it is, also the simple image of blackface we're aware of). He was the person who persuaded OKeh records that there would be a market for music made by Black people that sounded Black (though as we're going to see in this episode, what "sounding Black" means is a rather loaded question). "Crazy Blues" was the result, and it was a massive hit, even though it was marketed specifically towards Black listeners: [Excerpt: Mamie Smith, "Crazy Blues"] The big stars of the early years of recorded blues were all making records in the shadow of "Crazy Blues", and in the case of its very biggest stars, they were working very much in the same mould. The two most important blues stars of the twenties both got their start in vaudeville, and were both women. Ma Rainey, like Mamie Smith, first performed in minstrel shows, but where Mamie Smith's early records had her largely backed by white musicians, Rainey was largely backed by Black musicians, including on several tracks Louis Armstrong: [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, "See See Rider"] Rainey's band was initially led by Thomas Dorsey, one of the most important men in American music, who we've talked about before in several episodes, including the last one. He was possibly the single most important figure in two different genres -- hokum music, when he, under the name "Georgia Tom" recorded "It's Tight Like That" with Tampa Red: [Excerpt: Tampa Red and Georgia Tom, "It's Tight Like That"] And of course gospel music, which to all intents and purposes he invented, and much of whose repertoire he wrote: [Excerpt: Mahalia Jackson, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord"] When Dorsey left Rainey's band, as we discussed right back in episode five, he was replaced by a female pianist, Lil Henderson. The blues was a woman's genre. And Ma Rainey was, by preference, a woman's woman, though she was married to a man: [Excerpt: Ma Rainey, "Prove it on Me"] So was the biggest star of the classic blues era, who was originally mentored by Rainey. Bessie Smith, like Rainey, was a queer woman who had relationships with men but was far more interested in other women. There were stories that Bessie Smith actually got her start in the business by being kidnapped by Ma Rainey, and forced into performing on the same bills as her in the vaudeville show she was touring in, and that Rainey taught Smith to sing blues in the process. In truth, Rainey mentored Smith more in stagecraft and the ways of the road than in singing, and neither woman was only a blues singer, though both had huge success with their blues records. Indeed, since Rainey was already in the show, Smith was initially hired as a dancer rather than a singer, and she also worked as a male impersonator. But Smith soon branched out on her own -- from the beginning she was obviously a star. The great jazz clarinettist Sidney Bechet later said of her "She had this trouble in her, this thing that would not let her rest sometimes, a meanness that came and took her over. But what she had was alive … Bessie, she just wouldn't let herself be; it seemed she couldn't let herself be." Bessie Smith was signed by Columbia Records in 1923, as part of the rush to find and record as many Black women blues singers as possible. Her first recording session produced "Downhearted Blues", which became, depending on which sources you read, either the biggest-selling blues record since "Crazy Blues" or the biggest-selling blues record ever, full stop, selling three quarters of a million copies in the six months after its release: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Downhearted Blues"] Smith didn't make royalties off record sales, only making a flat fee, but she became the most popular Black performer of the 1920s. Columbia signed her to an exclusive contract, and she became so rich that she would literally travel between gigs on her own private train. She lived an extravagant life in every way, giving lavishly to her friends and family, but also drinking extraordinary amounts of liquor, having regular affairs, and also often physically or verbally attacking those around her. By all accounts she was not a comfortable person to be around, and she seemed to be trying to fit an entire lifetime into every moment. From 1923 through 1929 she had a string of massive hits. She recorded material in a variety of styles, including the dirty blues: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Empty Bed Blues] And with accompanists like Louis Armstrong: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith with Louis Armstrong, "Cold in Hand Blues"] But the music for which she became best known, and which sold the best, was when she sang about being mistreated by men, as on one of her biggest hits, "'Tain't Nobody's Biz-Ness if I Do" -- and a warning here, I'm going to play a clip of the song, which treats domestic violence in a way that may be upsetting: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "'Tain't Nobody's Biz-Ness if I Do"] That kind of material can often seem horrifying to today's listeners -- and quite correctly so, as domestic violence is a horrifying thing -- and it sounds entirely too excusing of the man beating her up for anyone to find it comfortable listening. But the Black feminist scholar Angela Davis has made a convincing case that while these records, and others by Smith's contemporaries, can't reasonably be considered to be feminist, they *are* at the very least more progressive than they now seem, in that they were, even if excusing it, pointing to a real problem which was otherwise left unspoken. And that kind of domestic violence and abuse *was* a real problem, including in Smith's own life. By all accounts she was terrified of her husband, Jack Gee, who would frequently attack her because of her affairs with other people, mostly women. But she was still devastated when he left her for a younger woman, not only because he had left her, but also because he kidnapped their adopted son and had him put into a care home, falsely claiming she had abused him. Not only that, but before Jack left her closest friend had been Jack's niece Ruby and after the split she never saw Ruby again -- though after her death Ruby tried to have a blues career as "Ruby Smith", taking her aunt's surname and recording a few tracks with Sammy Price, the piano player who worked with Sister Rosetta Tharpe: [Excerpt: Ruby Smith with Sammy Price, "Make Me Love You"] The same month, May 1929, that Gee left her, Smith recorded what was to become her last big hit, and most well-known song, "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out": [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out"] And that could have been the theme for the rest of her life. A few months after that record came out, the Depression hit, pretty much killing the market for blues records. She carried on recording until 1931, but the records weren't selling any more. And at the same time, the talkies came in in the film industry, which along with the Depression ended up devastating the vaudeville audience. Her earnings were still higher than most, but only a quarter of what they had been a year or two earlier. She had one last recording session in 1933, produced by John Hammond for OKeh Records, where she showed that her style had developed over the years -- it was now incorporating the newer swing style, and featured future swing stars Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden in the backing band: [Excerpt: Bessie Smith, "Gimme a Pigfoot"] Hammond was not hugely impressed with the recordings, preferring her earlier records, and they would be the last she would ever make. She continued as a successful, though no longer record-breaking, live act until 1937, when she and her common-law husband, Lionel Hampton's uncle Richard Morgan, were in a car crash. Morgan escaped, but Smith died of her injuries and was buried on October the fourth 1937. Ten thousand people came to her funeral, but she was buried in an unmarked grave -- she was still legally married to Gee, even though they'd been separated for eight years, and while he supposedly later became rich from songwriting royalties from some of her songs (most of her songs were written by other people, but she wrote a few herself) he refused to pay for a headstone for her. Indeed on more than one occasion he embezzled money that had been raised by other people to provide a headstone. Bessie Smith soon became Joplin's favourite singer of all time, and she started trying to copy her vocals. But other than discovering Smith's music, Joplin seems to have had as terrible a time at university as at school, and soon dropped out and moved back in with her parents. She went to business school for a short while, where she learned some secretarial skills, and then she moved west, going to LA where two of her aunts lived, to see if she could thrive better in a big West Coast city than she did in small-town Texas. Soon she moved from LA to Venice Beach, and from there had a brief sojourn in San Francisco, where she tried to live out her beatnik fantasies at a time when the beatnik culture was starting to fall apart. She did, while she was there, start smoking cannabis, though she never got a taste for that drug, and took Benzedrine and started drinking much more heavily than she had before. She soon lost her job, moved back to Texas, and re-enrolled at the same college she'd been at before. But now she'd had a taste of real Bohemian life -- she'd been singing at coffee houses, and having affairs with both men and women -- and soon she decided to transfer to the University of Texas at Austin. At this point, Austin was very far from the cultural centre it has become in recent decades, and it was still a straitlaced Texan town, but it was far less so than Port Arthur, and she soon found herself in a folk group, the Waller Creek Boys. Janis would play autoharp and sing, sometimes Bessie Smith covers, but also the more commercial country and folk music that was popular at the time, like "Silver Threads and Golden Needles", a song that had originally been recorded by Wanda Jackson but at that time was a big hit for Dusty Springfield's group The Springfields: [Excerpt: The Waller Creek Boys, "Silver Threads and Golden Needles"] But even there, Joplin didn't fit in comfortably. The venue where the folk jams were taking place was a segregated venue, as everywhere around Austin was. And she was enough of a misfit that the campus newspaper did an article on her headlined "She Dares to Be Different!", which read in part "She goes barefooted when she feels like it, wears Levi's to class because they're more comfortable, and carries her Autoharp with her everywhere she goes so that in case she gets the urge to break out into song it will be handy." There was a small group of wannabe-Beatniks, including Chet Helms, who we've mentioned previously in the Grateful Dead episode, Gilbert Shelton, who went on to be a pioneer of alternative comics and create the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, and Shelton's partner in Rip-Off Press, Dave Moriarty, but for the most part the atmosphere in Austin was only slightly better for Janis than it had been in Port Arthur. The final straw for her came when in an annual charity fundraiser joke competition to find the ugliest man on campus, someone nominated her for the "award". She'd had enough of Texas. She wanted to go back to California. She and Chet Helms, who had dropped out of the university earlier and who, like her, had already spent some time on the West Coast, decided to hitch-hike together to San Francisco. Before leaving, she made a recording for her ex-girlfriend Julie Paul, a country and western musician, of a song she'd written herself. It's recorded in what many say was Janis' natural voice -- a voice she deliberately altered in performance in later years because, she would tell people, she didn't think there was room for her singing like that in an industry that already had Joan Baez and Judy Collins. In her early years she would alternate between singing like this and doing her imitations of Black women, but the character of Janis Joplin who would become famous never sang like this. It may well be the most honest thing that she ever recorded, and the most revealing of who she really was: [Excerpt: Janis Joplin, "So Sad to Be Alone"] Joplin and Helms made it to San Francisco, and she started performing at open-mic nights and folk clubs around the Bay Area, singing in her Bessie Smith and Odetta imitation voice, and sometimes making a great deal of money by sounding different from the wispier-voiced women who were the norm at those venues. The two friends parted ways, and she started performing with two other folk musicians, Larry Hanks and Roger Perkins, and she insisted that they would play at least one Bessie Smith song at every performance: [Excerpt: Janis Joplin, Larry Hanks, and Roger Perkins, "Black Mountain Blues (live in San Francisco)"] Often the trio would be joined by Billy Roberts, who at that time had just started performing the song that would make his name, "Hey Joe", and Joplin was soon part of the folk scene in the Bay Area, and admired by Dino Valenti, David Crosby, and Jerry Garcia among others. She also sang a lot with Jorma Kaukonnen, and recordings of the two of them together have circulated for years: [Excerpt: Janis Joplin and Jorma Kaukonnen, "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out"] Through 1963, 1964, and early 1965 Joplin ping-ponged from coast to coast, spending time in the Bay Area, then Greenwich Village, dropping in on her parents then back to the Bay Area, and she started taking vast quantities of methamphetamine. Even before moving to San Francisco she had been an occasional user of amphetamines – at the time they were regularly prescribed to students as study aids during exam periods, and she had also been taking them to try to lose some of the weight she always hated. But while she was living in San Francisco she became dependent on the drug. At one point her father was worried enough about her health to visit her in San Francisco, where she managed to fool him that she was more or less OK. But she looked to him for reassurance that things would get better for her, and he couldn't give it to her. He told her about a concept that he called the "Saturday night swindle", the idea that you work all week so you can go out and have fun on Saturday in the hope that that will make up for everything else, but that it never does. She had occasional misses with what would have been lucky breaks -- at one point she was in a motorcycle accident just as record labels were interested in signing her, and by the time she got out of the hospital the chance had gone. She became engaged to another speed freak, one who claimed to be an engineer and from a well-off background, but she was becoming severely ill from what was by now a dangerous amphetamine habit, and in May 1965 she decided to move back in with her parents, get clean, and have a normal life. Her new fiance was going to do the same, and they were going to have the conformist life her parents had always wanted, and which she had always wanted to want. Surely with a husband who loved her she could find a way to fit in and just be normal. She kicked the addiction, and wrote her fiance long letters describing everything about her family and the new normal life they were going to have together, and they show her painfully trying to be optimistic about the future, like one where she described her family to him: "My mother—Dorothy—worries so and loves her children dearly. Republican and Methodist, very sincere, speaks in clichés which she really means and is very good to people. (She thinks you have a lovely voice and is terribly prepared to like you.) My father—richer than when I knew him and kind of embarrassed about it—very well read—history his passion—quiet and very excited to have me home because I'm bright and we can talk (about antimatter yet—that impressed him)! I keep telling him how smart you are and how proud I am of you.…" She went back to Lamar, her mother started sewing her a wedding dress, and for much of the year she believed her fiance was going to be her knight in shining armour. But as it happened, the fiance in question was described by everyone else who knew him as a compulsive liar and con man, who persuaded her father to give him money for supposed medical tests before the wedding, but in reality was apparently married to someone else and having a baby with a third woman. After the engagement was broken off, she started performing again around the coffeehouses in Austin and Houston, and she started to realise the possibilities of rock music for her kind of performance. The missing clue came from a group from Austin who she became very friendly with, the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, and the way their lead singer Roky Erickson would wail and yell: [Excerpt: The 13th Floor Elevators, "You're Gonna Miss Me (live)"] If, as now seemed inevitable, Janis was going to make a living as a performer, maybe she should start singing rock music, because it seemed like there was money in it. There was even some talk of her singing with the Elevators. But then an old friend came to Austin from San Francisco with word from Chet Helms. A blues band had formed, and were looking for a singer, and they remembered her from the coffee houses. Would she like to go back to San Francisco and sing with them? In the time she'd been away, Helms had become hugely prominent in the San Francisco music scene, which had changed radically. A band from the area called the Charlatans had been playing a fake-Victorian saloon called the Red Dog in nearby Nevada, and had become massive with the people who a few years earlier had been beatniks: [Excerpt: The Charlatans, "32-20"] When their residency at the Red Dog had finished, several of the crowd who had been regulars there had become a collective of sorts called the Family Dog, and Helms had become their unofficial leader. And there's actually a lot packed into that choice of name. As we'll see in a few future episodes, a lot of West Coast hippies eventually started calling their collectives and communes families. This started as a way to get round bureaucracy -- if a helpful welfare officer put down that the unrelated people living in a house together were a family, suddenly they could get food stamps. As with many things, of course, the label then affected how people thought about themselves, and one thing that's very notable about the San Francisco scene hippies in particular is that they are some of the first people to make a big deal about what we now call "found family" or "family of choice". But it's also notable how often the hippie found families took their model from the only families these largely middle-class dropouts had ever known, and structured themselves around men going out and doing the work -- selling dope or panhandling or being rock musicians or shoplifting -- with the women staying at home doing the housework. The Family Dog started promoting shows, with the intention of turning San Francisco into "the American Liverpool", and soon Helms was rivalled only by Bill Graham as the major promoter of rock shows in the Bay Area. And now he wanted Janis to come back and join this new band. But Janis was worried. She was clean now. She drank far too much, but she wasn't doing any other drugs. She couldn't go back to San Francisco and risk getting back on methamphetamine. She needn't worry about that, she was told, nobody in San Francisco did speed any more, they were all on LSD -- a drug she hated and so wasn't in any danger from. Reassured, she made the trip back to San Francisco, to join Big Brother and the Holding Company. Big Brother and the Holding Company were the epitome of San Francisco acid rock at the time. They were the house band at the Avalon Ballroom, which Helms ran, and their first ever gig had been at the Trips Festival, which we talked about briefly in the Grateful Dead episode. They were known for being more imaginative than competent -- lead guitarist James Gurley was often described as playing parts that were influenced by John Cage, but was equally often, and equally accurately, described as not actually being able to keep his guitar in tune because he was too stoned. But they were drawing massive crowds with their instrumental freak-out rock music. Helms thought they needed a singer, and he had remembered Joplin, who a few of the group had seen playing the coffee houses. He decided she would be perfect for them, though Joplin wasn't so sure. She thought it was worth a shot, but as she wrote to her parents before meeting the group "Supposed to rehearse w/ the band this afternoon, after that I guess I'll know whether I want to stay & do that for awhile. Right now my position is ambivalent—I'm glad I came, nice to see the city, a few friends, but I'm not at all sold on the idea of becoming the poor man's Cher.” In that letter she also wrote "I'm awfully sorry to be such a disappointment to you. I understand your fears at my coming here & must admit I share them, but I really do think there's an awfully good chance I won't blow it this time." The band she met up with consisted of lead guitarist James Gurley, bass player Peter Albin, rhythm player Sam Andrew, and drummer David Getz. To start with, Peter Albin sang lead on most songs, with Joplin adding yelps and screams modelled on those of Roky Erickson, but in her first gig with the band she bowled everyone over with her lead vocal on the traditional spiritual "Down on Me", which would remain a staple of their live act, as in this live recording from 1968: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Down on Me (Live 1968)"] After that first gig in June 1966, it was obvious that Joplin was going to be a star, and was going to be the group's main lead vocalist. She had developed a whole new stage persona a million miles away from her folk performances. As Chet Helms said “Suddenly this person who would stand upright with her fists clenched was all over the stage. Roky Erickson had modeled himself after the screaming style of Little Richard, and Janis's initial stage presence came from Roky, and ultimately Little Richard. It was a very different Janis.” Joplin would always claim to journalists that her stage persona was just her being herself and natural, but she worked hard on every aspect of her performance, and far from the untrained emotional outpouring she always suggested, her vocal performances were carefully calculated pastiches of her influences -- mostly Bessie Smith, but also Big Mama Thornton, Odetta, Etta James, Tina Turner, and Otis Redding. That's not to say that those performances weren't an authentic expression of part of herself -- they absolutely were. But the ethos that dominated San Francisco in the mid-sixties prized self-expression over technical craft, and so Joplin had to portray herself as a freak of nature who just had to let all her emotions out, a wild woman, rather than someone who carefully worked out every nuance of her performances. Joplin actually got the chance to meet one of her idols when she discovered that Willie Mae Thornton was now living and regularly performing in the Bay Area. She and some of her bandmates saw Big Mama play a small jazz club, where she performed a song she wouldn't release on a record for another two years: [Excerpt: Big Mama Thornton, "Ball 'n' Chain"] Janis loved the song and scribbled down the lyrics, then went backstage to ask Big Mama if Big Brother could cover the song. She gave them her blessing, but told them "don't" -- and here she used a word I can't use with a clean rating -- "it up". The group all moved in together, communally, with their partners -- those who had them. Janis was currently single, having dumped her most recent boyfriend after discovering him shooting speed, as she was still determined to stay clean. But she was rapidly discovering that the claim that San Franciscans no longer used much speed had perhaps not been entirely true, as for example Sam Andrew's girlfriend went by the nickname Speedfreak Rita. For now, Janis was still largely clean, but she did start drinking more. Partly this was because of a brief fling with Pigpen from the Grateful Dead, who lived nearby. Janis liked Pigpen as someone else on the scene who didn't much like psychedelics or cannabis -- she didn't like drugs that made her think more, but only drugs that made her able to *stop* thinking (her love of amphetamines doesn't seem to fit this pattern, but a small percentage of people have a different reaction to amphetamine-type stimulants, perhaps she was one of those). Pigpen was a big drinker of Southern Comfort -- so much so that it would kill him within a few years -- and Janis started joining him. Her relationship with Pigpen didn't last long, but the two would remain close, and she would often join the Grateful Dead on stage over the years to duet with him on "Turn On Your Lovelight": [Excerpt: Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead, "Turn on Your Lovelight"] But within two months of joining the band, Janis nearly left. Paul Rothchild of Elektra Records came to see the group live, and was impressed by their singer, but not by the rest of the band. This was something that would happen again and again over the group's career. The group were all imaginative and creative -- they worked together on their arrangements and their long instrumental jams and often brought in very good ideas -- but they were not the most disciplined or technically skilled of musicians, even when you factored in their heavy drug use, and often lacked the skill to pull off their better ideas. They were hugely popular among the crowds at the Avalon Ballroom, who were on the group's chemical wavelength, but Rothchild was not impressed -- as he was, in general, unimpressed with psychedelic freakouts. He was already of the belief in summer 1966 that the fashion for extended experimental freak-outs would soon come to an end and that there would be a pendulum swing back towards more structured and melodic music. As we saw in the episode on The Band, he would be proved right in a little over a year, but being ahead of the curve he wanted to put together a supergroup that would be able to ride that coming wave, a group that would play old-fashioned blues. He'd got together Stefan Grossman, Steve Mann, and Taj Mahal, and he wanted Joplin to be the female vocalist for the group, dueting with Mahal. She attended one rehearsal, and the new group sounded great. Elektra Records offered to sign them, pay their rent while they rehearsed, and have a major promotional campaign for their first release. Joplin was very, very, tempted, and brought the subject up to her bandmates in Big Brother. They were devastated. They were a family! You don't leave your family! She was meant to be with them forever! They eventually got her to agree to put off the decision at least until after a residency they'd been booked for in Chicago, and she decided to give them the chance, writing to her parents "I decided to stay w/the group but still like to think about the other thing. Trying to figure out which is musically more marketable because my being good isn't enough, I've got to be in a good vehicle.” The trip to Chicago was a disaster. They found that the people of Chicago weren't hugely interested in seeing a bunch of white Californians play the blues, and that the Midwest didn't have the same Bohemian crowds that the coastal cities they were used to had, and so their freak-outs didn't go down well either. After two weeks of their four-week residency, the club owner stopped paying them because they were so unpopular, and they had no money to get home. And then they were approached by Bob Shad. (For those who know the film Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, the Bob Shad in that film is named after this one -- Judd Apatow, the film's director, is Shad's grandson) This Shad was a record producer, who had worked with people like Big Bill Broonzy, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, and Billy Eckstine over an eighteen-year career, and had recently set up a new label, Mainstream Records. He wanted to sign Big Brother and the Holding Company. They needed money and... well, it was a record contract! It was a contract that took half their publishing, paid them a five percent royalty on sales, and gave them no advance, but it was still a contract, and they'd get union scale for the first session. In that first session in Chicago, they recorded four songs, and strangely only one, "Down on Me", had a solo Janis vocal. Of the other three songs, Sam Andrew and Janis dueted on Sam's song "Call on Me", Albin sang lead on the group composition "Blindman", and Gurley and Janis sang a cover of "All Is Loneliness", a song originally by the avant-garde street musician Moondog: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "All is Loneliness"] The group weren't happy with the four songs they recorded -- they had to keep the songs to the length of a single, and the engineers made sure that the needles never went into the red, so their guitars sounded far more polite and less distorted than they were used to. Janis was fascinated by the overdubbing process, though, especially double-tracking, which she'd never tried before but which she turned out to be remarkably good at. And they were now signed to a contract, which meant that Janis wouldn't be leaving the group to go solo any time soon. The family were going to stay together. But on the group's return to San Francisco, Janis started doing speed again, encouraged by the people around the group, particularly Gurley's wife. By the time the group's first single, "Blindman" backed with "All is Loneliness", came out, she was an addict again. That initial single did nothing, but the group were fast becoming one of the most popular in the Bay Area, and almost entirely down to Janis' vocals and on-stage persona. Bob Shad had already decided in the initial session that while various band members had taken lead, Janis was the one who should be focused on as the star, and when they drove to LA for their second recording session it was songs with Janis leads that they focused on. At that second session, in which they recorded ten tracks in two days, the group recorded a mix of material including one of Janis' own songs, the blues track "Women is Losers", and a version of the old folk song "the Cuckoo Bird" rearranged by Albin. Again they had to keep the arrangements to two and a half minutes a track, with no extended soloing and a pop arrangement style, and the results sound a lot more like the other San Francisco bands, notably Jefferson Airplane, than like the version of the band that shows itself in their live performances: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Coo Coo"] After returning to San Francisco after the sessions, Janis went to see Otis Redding at the Fillmore, turning up several hours before the show started on all three nights to make sure she could be right at the front. One of the other audience members later recalled “It was more fascinating for me, almost, to watch Janis watching Otis, because you could tell that she wasn't just listening to him, she was studying something. There was some kind of educational thing going on there. I was jumping around like the little hippie girl I was, thinking This is so great! and it just stopped me in my tracks—because all of a sudden Janis drew you very deeply into what the performance was all about. Watching her watch Otis Redding was an education in itself.” Joplin would, for the rest of her life, always say that Otis Redding was her all-time favourite singer, and would say “I started singing rhythmically, and now I'm learning from Otis Redding to push a song instead of just sliding over it.” [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "I Can't Turn You Loose (live)"] At the start of 1967, the group moved out of the rural house they'd been sharing and into separate apartments around Haight-Ashbury, and they brought the new year in by playing a free show organised by the Hell's Angels, the violent motorcycle gang who at the time were very close with the proto-hippies in the Bay Area. Janis in particular always got on well with the Angels, whose drugs of choice, like hers, were speed and alcohol more than cannabis and psychedelics. Janis also started what would be the longest on-again off-again relationship she would ever have, with a woman named Peggy Caserta. Caserta had a primary partner, but that if anything added to her appeal for Joplin -- Caserta's partner Kimmie had previously been in a relationship with Joan Baez, and Joplin, who had an intense insecurity that made her jealous of any other female singer who had any success, saw this as in some way a validation both of her sexuality and, transitively, of her talent. If she was dating Baez's ex's lover, that in some way put her on a par with Baez, and when she told friends about Peggy, Janis would always slip that fact in. Joplin and Caserta would see each other off and on for the rest of Joplin's life, but they were never in a monogamous relationship, and Joplin had many other lovers over the years. The next of these was Country Joe McDonald of Country Joe and the Fish, who were just in the process of recording their first album Electric Music for the Mind and Body, when McDonald and Joplin first got together: [Excerpt: Country Joe and the Fish, "Grace"] McDonald would later reminisce about lying with Joplin, listening to one of the first underground FM radio stations, KMPX, and them playing a Fish track and a Big Brother track back to back. Big Brother's second single, the other two songs recorded in the Chicago session, had been released in early 1967, and the B-side, "Down on Me", was getting a bit of airplay in San Francisco and made the local charts, though it did nothing outside the Bay Area: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Down on Me"] Janis was unhappy with the record, though, writing to her parents and saying, “Our new record is out. We seem to be pretty dissatisfied w/it. I think we're going to try & get out of the record contract if we can. We don't feel that they know how to promote or engineer a record & every time we recorded for them, they get all our songs, which means we can't do them for another record company. But then if our new record does something, we'd change our mind. But somehow, I don't think it's going to." The band apparently saw a lawyer to see if they could get out of the contract with Mainstream, but they were told it was airtight. They were tied to Bob Shad no matter what for the next five years. Janis and McDonald didn't stay together for long -- they clashed about his politics and her greater fame -- but after they split, she asked him to write a song for her before they became too distant, and he obliged and recorded it on the Fish's next album: [Excerpt: Country Joe and the Fish, "Janis"] The group were becoming so popular by late spring 1967 that when Richard Lester, the director of the Beatles' films among many other classics, came to San Francisco to film Petulia, his follow-up to How I Won The War, he chose them, along with the Grateful Dead, to appear in performance segments in the film. But it would be another filmmaker that would change the course of the group's career irrevocably: [Excerpt: Scott McKenzie, "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)"] When Big Brother and the Holding Company played the Monterey Pop Festival, nobody had any great expectations. They were second on the bill on the Saturday, the day that had been put aside for the San Francisco acts, and they were playing in the early afternoon, after a largely unimpressive night before. They had a reputation among the San Francisco crowd, of course, but they weren't even as big as the Grateful Dead, Moby Grape or Country Joe and the Fish, let alone Jefferson Airplane. Monterey launched four careers to new heights, but three of the superstars it made -- Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, and the Who -- already had successful careers. Hendrix and the Who had had hits in the UK but not yet broken the US market, while Redding was massively popular with Black people but hadn't yet crossed over to a white audience. Big Brother and the Holding Company, on the other hand, were so unimportant that D.A. Pennebaker didn't even film their set -- their manager at the time had not wanted to sign over the rights to film their performance, something that several of the other acts had also refused -- and nobody had been bothered enough to make an issue of it. Pennebaker just took some crowd shots and didn't bother filming the band. The main thing he caught was Cass Elliot's open-mouthed astonishment at Big Brother's performance -- or rather at Janis Joplin's performance. The members of the group would later complain, not entirely inaccurately, that in the reviews of their performance at Monterey, Joplin's left nipple (the outline of which was apparently visible through her shirt, at least to the male reviewers who took an inordinate interest in such things) got more attention than her four bandmates combined. As Pennebaker later said “She came out and sang, and my hair stood on end. We were told we weren't allowed to shoot it, but I knew if we didn't have Janis in the film, the film would be a wash. Afterward, I said to Albert Grossman, ‘Talk to her manager or break his leg or whatever you have to do, because we've got to have her in this film. I can't imagine this film without this woman who I just saw perform.” Grossman had a talk with the organisers of the festival, Lou Adler and John Phillips, and they offered Big Brother a second spot, the next day, if they would allow their performance to be used in the film. The group agreed, after much discussion between Janis and Grossman, and against the wishes of their manager: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Ball and Chain (live at Monterey)"] They were now on Albert Grossman's radar. Or at least, Janis Joplin was. Joplin had always been more of a careerist than the other members of the group. They were in music to have a good time and to avoid working a straight job, and while some of them were more accomplished musicians than their later reputations would suggest -- Sam Andrew, in particular, was a skilled player and serious student of music -- they were fundamentally content with playing the Avalon Ballroom and the Fillmore and making five hundred dollars or so a week between them. Very good money for 1967, but nothing else. Joplin, on the other hand, was someone who absolutely craved success. She wanted to prove to her family that she wasn't a failure and that her eccentricity shouldn't stop them being proud of her; she was always, even at the depths of her addictions, fiscally prudent and concerned about her finances; and she had a deep craving for love. Everyone who talks about her talks about how she had an aching need at all times for approval, connection, and validation, which she got on stage more than she got anywhere else. The bigger the audience, the more they must love her. She'd made all her decisions thus far based on how to balance making music that she loved with commercial success, and this would continue to be the pattern for her in future. And so when journalists started to want to talk to her, even though up to that point Albin, who did most of the on-stage announcements, and Gurley, the lead guitarist, had considered themselves joint leaders of the band, she was eager. And she was also eager to get rid of their manager, who continued the awkward streak that had prevented their first performance at the Monterey Pop Festival from being filmed. The group had the chance to play the Hollywood Bowl -- Bill Graham was putting on a "San Francisco Sound" showcase there, featuring Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, and got their verbal agreement to play, but after Graham had the posters printed up, their manager refused to sign the contracts unless they were given more time on stage. The next day after that, they played Monterey again -- this time the Monterey Jazz Festival. A very different crowd to the Pop Festival still fell for Janis' performance -- and once again, the film being made of the event didn't include Big Brother's set because of their manager. While all this was going on, the group's recordings from the previous year were rushed out by Mainstream Records as an album, to poor reviews which complained it was nothing like the group's set at Monterey: [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Bye Bye Baby"] They were going to need to get out of that contract and sign with somewhere better -- Clive Davis at Columbia Records was already encouraging them to sign with him -- but to do that, they needed a better manager. They needed Albert Grossman. Grossman was one of the best negotiators in the business at that point, but he was also someone who had a genuine love for the music his clients made. And he had good taste -- he managed Odetta, who Janis idolised as a singer, and Bob Dylan, who she'd been a fan of since his first album came out. He was going to be the perfect manager for the group. But he had one condition though. His first wife had been a heroin addict, and he'd just been dealing with Mike Bloomfield's heroin habit. He had one absolutely ironclad rule, a dealbreaker that would stop him signing them -- they didn't use heroin, did they? Both Gurley and Joplin had used heroin on occasion -- Joplin had only just started, introduced to the drug by Gurley -- but they were only dabblers. They could give it up any time they wanted, right? Of course they could. They told him, in perfect sincerity, that the band didn't use heroin and it wouldn't be a problem. But other than that, Grossman was extremely flexible. He explained to the group at their first meeting that he took a higher percentage than other managers, but that he would also make them more money than other managers -- if money was what they wanted. He told them that they needed to figure out where they wanted their career to be, and what they were willing to do to get there -- would they be happy just playing the same kind of venues they were now, maybe for a little more money, or did they want to be as big as Dylan or Peter, Paul, and Mary? He could get them to whatever level they wanted, and he was happy with working with clients at every level, what did they actually want? The group were agreed -- they wanted to be rich. They decided to test him. They were making twenty-five thousand dollars a year between them at that time, so they got ridiculously ambitious. They told him they wanted to make a *lot* of money. Indeed, they wanted a clause in their contract saying the contract would be void if in the first year they didn't make... thinking of a ridiculous amount, they came up with seventy-five thousand dollars. Grossman's response was to shrug and say "Make it a hundred thousand." The group were now famous and mixing with superstars -- Peter Tork of the Monkees had become a close friend of Janis', and when they played a residency in LA they were invited to John and Michelle Phillips' house to see a rough cut of Monterey Pop. But the group, other than Janis, were horrified -- the film barely showed the other band members at all, just Janis. Dave Getz said later "We assumed we'd appear in the movie as a band, but seeing it was a shock. It was all Janis. They saw her as a superstar in the making. I realized that though we were finally going to be making money and go to another level, it also meant our little family was being separated—there was Janis, and there was the band.” [Excerpt: Big Brother and the Holding Company, "Bye Bye Baby"] If the group were going to make that hundred thousand dollars a year, they couldn't remain on Mainstream Records, but Bob Shad was not about to give up his rights to what could potentially be the biggest group in America without a fight. But luckily for the group, Clive Davis at Columbia had seen their Monterey performance, and he was also trying to pivot the label towards the new rock music. He was basically willing to do anything to get them. Eventually Columbia agreed to pay Shad two hundred thousand dollars for the group's contract -- Davis and Grossman negotiated so half that was an advance on the group's future earnings, but the other half was just an expense for the label. On top of that the group got an advance payment of fifty thousand dollars for their first album for Columbia, making a total investment by Columbia of a quarter of a million dollars -- in return for which they got to sign the band, and got the rights to the material they'd recorded for Mainstream, though Shad would get a two percent royalty on their first two albums for Columbia. Janis was intimidated by signing for Columbia, because that had been Aretha Franklin's label before she signed to Atlantic, and she regarded Franklin as the greatest performer in music at that time. Which may have had something to do with the choice of a new song the group added to their setlist in early 1968 -- one which was a current hit for Aretha's sister Erma: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] We talked a little in the last episode about the song "Piece of My Heart" itself, though mostly from the perspective of its performer, Erma Franklin. But the song was, as we mentioned, co-written by Bert Berns. He's someone we've talked about a little bit in previous episodes, notably the ones on "Here Comes the Night" and "Twist and Shout", but those were a couple of years ago, and he's about to become a major figure in the next episode, so we might as well take a moment here to remind listeners (or tell those who haven't heard those episodes) of the basics and explain where "Piece of My Heart" comes in Berns' work as a whole. Bert Berns was a latecomer to the music industry, not getting properly started until he was thirty-one, after trying a variety of other occupations. But when he did get started, he wasted no time making his mark -- he knew he had no time to waste. He had a weak heart and knew the likelihood was he was going to die young. He started an association with Wand records as a songwriter and performer, writing songs for some of Phil Spector's pre-fame recordings, and he also started producing records for Atlantic, where for a long while he was almost the equal of Jerry Wexler or Leiber and Stoller in terms of number of massive hits created. His records with Solomon Burke were the records that first got the R&B genre renamed soul (previously the word "soul" mostly referred to a kind of R&Bish jazz, rather than a kind of gospel-ish R&B). He'd also been one of the few American music industry professionals to work with British bands before the Beatles made it big in the USA, after he became alerted to the Beatles' success with his song "Twist and Shout", which he'd co-written with Phil Medley, and which had been a hit in a version Berns produced for the Isley Brothers: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Twist and Shout"] That song shows the two elements that existed in nearly every single Bert Berns song or production. The first is the Afro-Caribbean rhythm, a feel he picked up during a stint in Cuba in his twenties. Other people in the Atlantic records team were also partial to those rhythms -- Leiber and Stoller loved what they called the baion rhythm -- but Berns more than anyone else made it his signature. He also very specifically loved the song "La Bamba", especially Ritchie Valens' version of it: [Excerpt: Ritchie Valens, "La Bamba"] He basically seemed to think that was the greatest record ever made, and he certainly loved that three-chord trick I-IV-V-IV chord sequence -- almost but not quite the same as the "Louie Louie" one. He used it in nearly every song he wrote from that point on -- usually using a bassline that went something like this: [plays I-IV-V-IV bassline] He used it in "Twist and Shout" of course: [Excerpt: The Isley Brothers, "Twist and Shout"] He used it in "Hang on Sloopy": [Excerpt: The McCoys, "Hang on Sloopy"] He *could* get more harmonically sophisticated on occasion, but the vast majority of Berns' songs show the power of simplicity. They're usually based around three chords, and often they're actually only two chords, like "I Want Candy": [Excerpt: The Strangeloves, "I Want Candy"] Or the chorus to "Here Comes the Night" by Them, which is two chords for most of it and only introduces a third right at the end: [Excerpt: Them, "Here Comes the Night"] And even in that song you can hear the "Twist and Shout"/"La Bamba" feel, even if it's not exactly the same chords. Berns' whole career was essentially a way of wringing *every last possible drop* out of all the implications of Ritchie Valens' record. And so even when he did a more harmonically complex song, like "Piece of My Heart", which actually has some minor chords in the bridge, the "La Bamba" chord sequence is used in both the verse: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] And the chorus: [Excerpt: Erma Franklin, "Piece of My Heart"] Berns co-wrote “Piece of My Heart” with Jerry Ragavoy. Berns and Ragavoy had also written "Cry Baby" for Garnet Mimms, which was another Joplin favourite: [Excerpt: Garnet Mimms, "Cry Baby"] And Ragavoy, with other collaborators
Lekdog & Tim Michell from the Official Supercoach Podcast sit down and chat through all of the latest Supercoach news, the run home for 2023 & lessons to take into 2024. Make sure you follow Damo & Clarky's new Supercoach pages @FootyMailbag! Get down to Crown on the 18th for a fun night of live Supercoach action! Time Codes: 00:00 - Tim Michell says G'day 02:00 - Announcements 05:00 - Charlie Curnow a top-5 forward? 08:00 - George Hewett saves the day 10:45 - Darcy, Ridley, Walsh, Ashcroft...injuries galore 12:00 - Affordable replacements 15:00 - Josh Kelly's run home 18:30 - Red Dog & Dogga 20:00 - Ruck flexibility might be key in the run home 23:00 - Trade lessons for 2024 25:30 - 2023 the year of patience 32:00 - Premium targets from her on out 36:00 - Harry Sheezel & our attitude towards high-end rookies 45:00 - Is the end of the year the time to jump the ranks?
Nelumbo nucifera, or the sacred lotus, is a plant that grows in flood plains, rivers, and deltas. Their seeds can remain dormant for years and when floods come along, blossom into a colony of plants and flowers. Some of the oldest seeds can be found in China, where they're known to represent longevity. No surprise, given their level of nitrition and connection to the waters that irrigated crops by then. They also grow in far away lands, all the way to India and out to Australia. The flower is sacred in Hinduism and Buddhism, and further back in ancient Egypt. Padmasana is a Sanskrit term meaning lotus, or Padma, and Asana, or posture. The Pashupati seal from the Indus Valley civilization shows a diety in what's widely considered the first documented yoga pose, from around 2,500 BCE. 2,700 years later (give or take a century), the Hindu author and mystic Patanjali wrote a work referred to as the Yoga Sutras. Here he outlined the original asanas, or sitting yoga poses. The Rig Veda, from around 1,500 BCE, is the oldest currently known Vedic text. It is also the first to use the word “yoga”. It describes songs, rituals, and mantras the Brahmans of the day used - as well as the Padma. Further Vedic texts explore how the lotus grew out of Lord Vishnu with Brahma in the center. He created the Universe out of lotus petals. Lakshmi went on to grow out of a lotus from Vishnu as well. It was only natural that humans would attempt to align their own meditation practices with the beautiful meditatios of the lotus. By the 300s, art and coins showed people in the lotus position. It was described in texts that survive from the 8th century. Over the centuries contradictions in texts were clarified in a period known as Classical Yoga, then Tantra and and Hatha Yoga were developed and codified in the Post-Classical Yoga age, and as empires grew and India became a part of the British empire, Yoga began to travel to the west in the late 1800s. By 1893, Swami Vivekananda gave lectures at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago. More practicioners meant more systems of yoga. Yogendra brought asanas to the United States in 1919, as more Indians migrated to the United States. Babaji's kriya yoga arrived in Boston in 1920. Then, as we've discussed in previous episodes, the United States tightened immigration in the 1920s and people had to go to India to get more training. Theos Bernard's Hatha Yoga: The Report of a Personal Experience brought some of that knowledge home when he came back in 1947. Indra Devi opened a yoga studio in Hollywood and wrote books for housewives. She brought a whole system, or branch home. Walt and Magana Baptiste opened a studio in San Francisco. Swamis began to come to the US and more schools were opened. Richard Hittleman began to teach yoga in New York and began to teach on television in 1961. He was one of the first to seperate the religious aspect from the health benefits. By 1965, the immigration quotas were removed and a wave of teachers came to the US to teach yoga. The Beatles went to India in 1966 and 1968, and for many Transcendental Meditation took root, which has now grown to over a thousand training centers and over 40,000 teachers. Swamis opened meditation centers, institutes, started magazines, and even magazines. Yoga became so big that Rupert Holmes even poked fun of it in his song “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” in 1979. Yoga had become part of the counter-culture, and the generation that followed represented a backlash of sorts. A common theme of the rise of personal computers is that the early pioneers were a part of that counter-culture. Mitch Kapor graduated high school in 1967, just in time to be one of the best examples of that. Kapor built his own calculator in as a kid before going to camp to get his first exposure to programming on a Bendix. His high school got one of the 1620 IBM minicomputers and he got the bug. He went off to Yale at 16 and learned to program in APL and then found Computer Lib by Ted Nelson and learned BASIC. Then he discovered the Apple II. Kapor did some programming for $5 per hour as a consultant, started the first east coast Apple User Group, and did some work around town. There are generations of people who did and do this kind of consulting, although now the rates are far higher. He met a grad student through the user group named Eric Rosenfeld who was working on his dissertation and needed some help programming, so Kapor wrote a little tool that took the idea of statistical analysis from the Time Shared Reactive Online Library, or TROLL, and ported it to the microcomputer, which he called Tiny Troll. Then he enrolled in the MBA program at MIT. He got a chance to see VisiCalc and meet Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin, who introduced him to the team at Personal Software. Personal Software was founded by Dan Fylstra and Peter Jennings when they published Microchips for the KIM-1 computer. That led to ports for the 1977 Trinity of the Commodore PET, Apple II, and TRS-80 and by then they had taken Bricklin and Franston's VisiCalc to market. VisiCalc was the killer app for those early PCs and helped make the Apple II successful. Personal Software brought Kapor on, as well as Bill Coleman of BEA Systems and Electronic Arts cofounder Rich Mellon. Today, software developers get around 70 percent royalties to publish software on app stores but at the time, fees were closer to 8 percent, a model pulled from book royalties. Much of the rest went to production of the box and disks, the sales and marketing, and support. Kapor was to write a product that could work with VisiCalc. By then Rosenfeld was off to the world of corporate finance so Kapor moved to Silicon Valley, learned how to run a startup, moved back east in 1979, and released VisiPlot and VisiTrend in 1981. He made over half a million dollars in the first six months in royalties. By then, he bought out Rosenfeld's shares in what he was doing, hired Jonathan Sachs, who had been at MIT earlier, where he wrote the STOIC programming language, and then went to work at Data General. Sachs worked on spreadsheet ideas at Data General with a manager there, John Henderson, but after they left Data General, and the partnership fell apart, he worked with Kapor instead. They knew that for software to be fast, it needed to be written in a lower level language, so they picked the Intel 8088 assembly language given that C wasn't fast enough yet. The IBM PC came in 1981 and everything changed. Mitch Kapor and Jonathan Sachs started Lotus in 1982. Sachs got to work on what would become Lotus 1-2-3. Kapor turned out to be a great marketer and product manager. He listened to what customers said in focus groups. He pushed to make things simpler and use less jargon. They released a new spreadsheet tool in 1983 and it worked flawlessly on the IBM PC and while Microsoft had Multiplan and VisCalc was the incumbent spreadsheet program, Lotus quickly took market share from then and SuperCalc. Conceptually it looked similar to VisiCalc. They used the letter A for the first column, B for the second, etc. That has now become a standard in spreadsheets. They used the number 1 for the first row, the number 2 for the second. That too is now a standard. They added a split screen, also now a standard. They added macros, with branching if-then logic. They added different video modes, which could give color and bitmapping. They added an underlined letter so users could pull up a menu and quickly select the item they wanted once they had those orders memorized, now a standard in most menuing systems. They added the ability to add bar charts, pie charts, and line charts. One could even spread their sheet across multiple monitors like in a magazine. They refined how fields are calculated and took advantage of the larger amounts of memory to make Lotus far faster than anything else on the market. They went to Comdex towards the end of the year and introduced Lotus 1-2-3 to the world. The software could be used as a spreadsheet, but the 2 and 3 referred to graphics and database management. They did $900,000 in orders there before they went home. They couldn't even keep up with the duplication of disks. Comdex was still invitation only. It became so popular that it was used to test for IBM compatibility by clone makers and where VisiCalc became the app that helped propel the Apple II to success, Lotus 1-2-3 became the app that helped propel the IBM PC to success. Lotus was rewarded with $53 million in sales for 1983 and $156 million in 1984. Mitch Kapor found himself. They quickly scaled from less than 20 to 750 employees. They brought in Freada Klein who got her PhD to be the Head of Employee Relations and charged her with making them the most progressive employer around. After her success at Lotus, she left to start her own company and later married. Sachs left the company in 1985 and moved on to focus solely on graphics software. He still responds to requests on the phpBB forum at dl-c.com. They ran TV commercials. They released a suite of Mac apps they called Lotus Jazz. More television commercials. Jazz didn't go anywhere and only sold 20,000 copies. Meanwhile, Microsoft released Excel for the Mac, which sold ten times as many. Some blamed the lack os sales on the stringent copy protection. Others blamed the lack of memory to do cool stuff. Others blamed the high price. It was the first major setback for the young company. After a meteoric rise, Kapor left the company in 1986, at about the height of their success. He replaced himself with Jim Manzi. Manzi pushed the company into network applications. These would become the center of the market but were just catching on and didn't prove to be a profitable venture just yet. A defensive posture rather than expanding into an adjacent market would have made sense, at least if anyone knew how aggressive Microsoft was about to get it would have. Manzi was far more concerned about the millions of illegal copies of the software in the market than innovation though. As we turned the page to the 1990s, Lotus had moved to a product built in C and introduced the ability to use graphical components in the software but not wouldn't be ported to the new Windows operating system until 1991 for Windows 3. By then there were plenty of competitors, including Quattro Pro and while Microsoft Excel began on the Mac, it had been a showcase of cool new features a windowing operating system could provide an application since released for Windows in 1987. Especially what they called 3d charts and tabbed spreadsheets. There was no catching up to Microsoft by then and sales steadily declined. By then, Lotus released Lotus Agenda, an information manager that could be used for time management, project management, and as a database. Kapor was a great product manager so it stands to reason he would build a great product to manage products. Agenda never found commercial success though, so was later open sourced under a GPL license. Bill Gross wrote Magellan there before he left to found GoTo.com, which was renamed to Overture and pioneered the idea of paid search advertising, which was acquired by Yahoo!. Magellan cataloged the internal drive and so became a search engine for that. It sold half a million copies and should have been profitable but was cancelled in 1990. They also released a word processor called Manuscript in 1986, which never gained traction and that was cancelled in 1989, just when a suite of office automation apps needed to be more cohesive. Ray Ozzie had been hired at Software Arts to work on VisiCalc and then helped Lotus get Symphony out the door. Symphony shipped in 1984 and expanded from a spreadsheet to add on text with the DOC word processor, and charts with the GRAPH graphics program, FORM for a table management solution, and COM for communications. Ozzie dutifully shipped what he was hired to work on but had a deal that he could build a company when they were done that would design software that Lotus would then sell. A match made in heaven as Ozzie worked on PLATO and borrowed the ideas of PLATO Notes, a collaboration tool developed at the University of Illinois Champagne-Urbana to build what he called Lotus Notes. PLATO was more more than productivity. It was a community that spanned decades and Control Data Corporation had failed to take it to the mass corporate market. Ozzie took the best parts for a company and built it in isolation from the rest of Lotus. They finally released it as Lotus Notes in 1989. It was a huge success and Lotus bought Iris in 1994. Yet they never found commercial success with other socket-based client server programs and IBM acquired Lotus in 1995. That product is now known as Domino, the name of the Notes 4 server, released in 1996. Ozzie went on to build a company called Groove Networks, which was acquired by Microsoft, who appointed him one of their Chief Technology Officers. When Bill Gates left Microsoft, Ozzie took the position of Chief Software Architect he vacated. He and Dave Cutler went on to work on a project called Red Dog, which evolved into what we now know as Microsoft Azure. Few would have guessed that Ozzie and Kapor's handshake agreement on Notes could have become a real product. Not only could people not understand the concept of collaboration and productivity on a network in the late 1980s but the type of deal hadn't been done. But Kapor by then realized that larger companies had a hard time shipping net-new software properly. Sometimes those projects are best done in isolation. And all the better if the parties involved are financially motivated with shares like Kapor wanted in Personal Software in the 1970s before he wrote Lotus 1-2-3. VisiCalc had sold about a million copies but that would cease production the same year Excel was released. Lotus hung on longer than most who competed with Microsoft on any beachhead they blitzkrieged. Microsoft released Exchange Server in 1996 and Notes had a few good years before Exchange moved in to become the standard in that market. Excel began on the Mac but took the market from Lotus eventually, after Charles Simonyi stepped in to help make the product great. Along the way, the Lotus ecosystem created other companies, just as they were born in the Visi ecosystem. Symantec became what we now call a “portfolio” company in 1985 when they introduced NoteIt, a natural language processing tool used to annotate docs in Lotus 1-2-3. But Bill Gates mentioned Lotus by name multiple times as a competitor in his Internet Tidal Wave memo in 1995. He mentioned specific features, like how they could do secure internet browsing and that they had a web publisher tool - Microsoft's own FrontPage was released in 1995 as well. He mentioned an internet directory project with Novell and AT&T. Active Directory was released a few years later in 1999, after Jim Allchin had come in to help shepherd LAN Manager. Notes itself survived into the modern era, but by 2004 Blackberry released their Exchange connector before they released the Lotus Domino connector. That's never a good sign. Some of the history of Lotus is covered in Scott Rosenberg's 2008 book, Dreaming in Code. Others are documented here and there in other places. Still others are lost to time. Kapor went on to invest in UUNET, which became a huge early internet service provider. He invested in Real Networks, who launched the first streaming media service on the Internet. He invested in the creators of Second Life. He never seemed vindictive with Microsoft but after AOL acquired Netscape and Microsoft won the first browser war, he became the founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation and so helped bring Firefox to market. By 2006, Firefox took 10 percent of the market and went on to be a dominant force in browsers. Kapor has also sat on boards and acted as an angel investor for startups ever since leaving the company he founded. He also flew to Wyoming in 1990 after he read a post on The WELL from John Perry Barlow. Barlow was one of the great thinkers of the early Internet. They worked with Sun Microsystems and GNU Debugging Cypherpunk John Gilmore to found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF. The EFF has since been the nonprofit who leads the fight for “digital privacy, free speech, and innovation.” So not everything is about business.
KURT FULLER (Victor Kragston) Over his almost 40 year career, Kurt is proudest of his work as the grouchy and violent Mr. Brell (no first name) opposite Mr. Hulk Hogan in the actor/wrestler's starrer NO HOLDS BARRED. Produced by Vince McMahon, the film has been criminally ignored on every list of “ Best Films” ever compiled. Surprisingly, Fuller's performance was overlooked during 1989's awards season. WHO'S READY TO RUMBLE? Amanda Detmer (Fox's Empire), Kurt Fuller (CBS's Evil), Dana Ashbrook (Showtime's Twin Peaks), and Michael Hogan (Fox's The Resident) star in this no holds barred look at the dirty underbelly of professional wrestling. James Roday Rodriguez (ABC's A Million Little Things) joins with Legacy Theatre to produce Laurence Davis' riveting drama, taking you from the corner office to the top turnbuckle, daring to ask “Who are the Masters of Puppets?” This is the story of how the fate of a billionaire marriage and a wrestling empire are all decided in one night. Everything is on the line for everyone inside and outside of the ring. It's a winner take all battle that shows you what happens when money, love, and a real rough business fight it out on stage! There will be laughs. There will be tears. There could be blood. Born in San Francisco and raised in the agricultural heartland of California's San Joaquin Valley, Fuller became passionate about acting while attending UC Berkley, where he received a degree in English literature. After graduating, he made the move to Los Angeles with everything he owned stuffed into the back seat of a Dodge Dart (including a king size foam rubber mattress). For the next ten years he was a Realtor by day and a stage actor by night. Then, in 1986, he created the leading role in Steven Berkhoff's explosively successful "Kvetch", earning rave reviews on both coasts. Fuller has gone on to have a very successful career, working with some of Hollywood's best directors, including David O. Russell, Tony Scott, Harold Ramis, and Ivan Reitman, among others. His numerous film credits include "Auto Focus," "Ray," "Pushing Tin," "The Jack Bull," "Ghostbusters II," "Mr. Woodcock," "Nailed" and "The Pursuit of Happyness." Kurt still returns to the stage occasionally, most recently in the acclaimed "Greedy" for Red Dog squadron. He's also worked at the La Jolla Playhouse and the Mark Taper Forum.
We followed Stefanie Powers to The Rockford Files "The Real Easy Red Dog" and are SO happy that we did! We've also struck gold with a perfect casting for a reboot of this series.
This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on May 4. It dropped for free subscribers on May 7. To receive future pods as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe for free below:WhoDee Byrne, President and Chief Operating Officer of Palisades Tahoe, CaliforniaRecorded onApril 24, 2023About Palisades TahoeClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Alterra Mountain CompanyPass affiliations: Unlimited access on the Ikon Pass; unlimited access with holiday blackouts on the Ikon Base PassLocated in: Olympic Valley, CaliforniaYear founded: * Palisades/Olympic side (as Squaw Valley): 1949* Alpine Meadows: 1961Closest neighboring ski areas: Granlibakken (14 minutes from Palisades base), Homewood (18 minutes), Northstar (23 minutes), Tahoe Donner (24 minutes), Boreal (24 minutes), Soda Springs (28 minutes), Donner Ski Ranch (28 minutes), Kingvale (29 minutes), Sugar Bowl (30 minutes), Diamond Peak (39 minutes), Mt. Rose (45 minutes), Sky Tavern (50), Heavenly (1 hour) - travel times vary dramatically given weather conditions and time of dayBase elevation | summit elevation | vertical drop:* Alpine Meadows side: 6,835 feet | 8,637 feet | 1,802 feet* Olympic Valley side: 6,200 feet | 9,050 feet | 2,850 feetSkiable Acres: 6,000* Alpine Meadows side: 2,400* Olympic Valley side: 3,600Average annual snowfall: 400 inches (713 inches for the 2023-24 ski season through May 3!)Trail count: 270-plus* Alpine Meadows side: 100-plus (25% beginner, 40% intermediate, 35% advanced)* Olympic Valley side: 170-plus (25% beginner, 45% intermediate, 30% advanced)Lift count: 42 (10-passenger tram, 28-passenger funitel, 8-passenger gondola, 8 six-packs, 5 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 10 triples, 8 doubles, 7 carpets - view Lift Blog's inventory of Palisades Tahoe's lift fleet)* Alpine Meadows: 13 (1 six-pack, 3 high-speed quads, 2 triples, 5 doubles, 2 carpets)* Palisades/Olympic: 28 (120-passenger tram, 28-passenger funitel, 7 six-packs, 2 high-speed quads, 1 quad, 8 triples, 3 doubles, 5 carpets)* Shared lifts: 1 (8-passenger Base-to-Base Gondola)Why I interviewed herImagine this: I'm a Midwest teenager who has notched exactly three days on skis, on three separate 200-vert bumps. I know vaguely that there is skiing out West, and that it is big. But I'm thinking Colorado, maybe Wyoming. California? California is Beach Boys and palm trees. Surfboards and San Diego. I have no idea that California has mountains, let alone ski resorts. Anticipating the skis, boots, and poles that I've requested as the totality of my Christmas list, I pick up the December 1994 issue of Skiing (RIP), and read the following by Kristen Ulmer:Nothing is random. You live, die, pay taxes, move to Squaw. It's the place you see in all the ski flicks, with the groovy attitudes, toasty-warm days, wild lines, and that enormous lake. It's California! Squallywood! It's the one place where every born-to-ski skier, at some point or other, wants to move to; where people will crawl a thousand miles over broken glass for the chance to ski freezer burn. The one place to make it as a “professional” skier.My friend Kent Kreitler, a phenomenal skier who doesn't live anywhere in particular, finally announced, “I think I'm move to Squaw.”“So Kent,” I said, “let me tell you what the rest of your life will be like.” And I laid it out for him. …You're curious to find out if you're as good a skier as you think. So you find a group of locals and try to keep up. On powder days the excitement builds like a pressure cooker. Move fast, because it only takes an hour for the entire mountain to get tracked up. There's oodles of cliff jumps and psycho lines. You'd better just do it, because within seconds, 10 other yahoos will have already jumped and tracked out the landing pad.If you're a truly amazing skier (anything else inspires only polite smiles and undisguised yawns), then you land clean on jumps and shred through anything with style. If not, the hyperactivity of the place will motivate you to ski the same lines anyway. Either way is fulfilling.Occasionally a random miracle occurs, and the patrol opens the famed Palisades on Squaw Peak. On those days you don't bother with a warm-up run – just hike 15 minutes from the top of Siberia Express chair and coolly launch some hospital air off Main Chute.There are other places to express your extreme nature. When everything else gets tracked, you hike up Granite Peak for its steep chutes. If the snowpack is good, you climb 10 minutes from the top of the KT-22 chair to Eagle's Nest. And jumping the Fingers off KT-22 seems particularly heroic: Not only do you need speed to clear the sloping rocks, but it's right (ahem) under the lift.At the conclusion of that ski season, teenage Stuart Winchester, a novice skier who lived in his parents' basement, announced, “I think I'm moving to Squaw.” “No D*****s,” his mom said, “you're going to college.”Which doesn't mean I ever forgot that high-energy introduction to California extreme. I re-read that article dozens of times (you can read the full bit here). Until my brain had been coded to regard the ski resort now known as Palisades Tahoe (see why?) as one of the spiritual and cultural homelands of U.S. lift-served skiing.Ulmer's realm, hyperactive as it was, looks pokey by today's standards. An accompanying essay in that same issue of Skiing, written by Eric Hanson, describes a very different resort than the one you'll encounter today:Locals seem proud that there's so little development here. The faithful will say it's because everything that matters is up on the mountain itself: bottomless steeps, vast acreage, 33 lifts and no waiting. America's answer to the wide-open ski circuses of Europe. After all these years the mountain is still uncrowded, except on weekends when people pile in from the San Francisco Bay area in droves. Squaw is unflashy, underbuilt, and seems entirely indifferent to success. The opposite of what you would expect one of America's premier resorts to be.Apparently, “flashy” included, you know, naming trails. Check out this circa 1996 trailmap, which shows lift names, but only a handful of runs:Confusion reigned, according to Hanson:Every day, we set off armed with our trail map and the printed list of the day's groomed runs in search of intermediate terrain – long steep runs groomed for cruising, unmogulled routes down from the top of the black-diamond chairs. It wasn't easy. The grooming sheet named runs which weren't marked on the trail map. The only trail named on the map is The Mountain Run, an expressway that drops 2,000 feet from Gold Coast to the village. And most of the biggest verticals were on the chairs – KT-22, Cornice II, Headwall, Silverado, Broken Arrow – marked “experts only.” We didn't relish the idea of going up an expert chair looking for a particular groomed route down, if the groomed route wasn't to be found. I began feeling nostalgic for all those totem poles of green and blue and black trail signs that clutter the landscapes of other ski resorts, but at least keep the skier oriented.I asked a patroller where I could find some of the runs on the groomed list. He wasn't sure. He told me that the grooming crew and the ski patrol didn't have the same names for many of the runs.Just amazing. While Palisades Tahoe is now a glimmering model of a modern American ski resort, that raw-and-rowdy past is still sewn into the DNA of this fascinating place.What we talked aboutTahoe's megaseason; corn harvest; skiing into July and… maybe beyond; why Alpine will be the later operator this summer; why the base-to-base gondola ceased operation on April 30; snow exhaustion; Cali spring skiing; reminiscing on Pacific Northwest ski culture; for the love of teaching and turning; skiing as adventure; from 49 Degrees North to Vail to Aspen to Tahoe; Tahoe culture shock; Palisades' vast and varied ski school; reflections on the name change a year and a half later; going deep on the base-to-base gondola; the stark differences between the cultural vibe on the Alpine Meadows and Palisades sides of the resort and whether the gondola has compromised those distinctions; why the gondola took more than a decade to build and what finally pushed it through; White Wolf, the property that hosts an unfinished chairlift between Palisades and Alpine; how the gondola took cars off the road; why the base-to-base gondola didn't overload KT-22's terrain; the Mothership; the new Red Dog sixer; why Palisades re-oriented the lift to run lower to the ground; why the lift was only loading four passengers at a time for large parts of the season; snowmaking as fire-suppression system; how Palisades and Mammoth assisted Sierra-at-Tahoe's recovery; candidates for lift upgrades at Alpine Meadows; “fixed-grip lifts are awesome”; an Alpine masterplan refresh incoming; which lift could be next in line for upgrades on the Palisades side; the “biggest experience bust on the Palisades side of the resort”; why Silverado and Granite Chief will likely never be upgraded to detachable lifts; why the Silverado terrain is so rarely open and what it takes to make it live; whether Palisades Tahoe could ever leave the unlimited-with-blackouts tier on the Ikon Base Pass; and paid parking incoming. Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewThis was the second time I've featured Palisades Tahoe on The Storm Skiing Podcast. The first was a conversation with then-resort president Ron Cohen in September 2020, shortly after the ski area announced that it would ditch the “Squaw Valley” name. We spent the entire 49-minute conversation discussing that name change. At the time, the podcast was mostly focused on New England and New York, and a deep exploration of a distant resort would have been a little off-brand.But The Storm has evolved, and my coverage now firmly includes the State of California. Thank goodness. What an incredible ski state. So many huge resorts, so much wide-open terrain, so much snow, so much energy. The Northeast tugs skiing from the earth through technology and willpower, pasting white streaks over brown land, actualizing the improbable in a weird algorithm that only pencils out because 56 million people camp out within driving distance. California is different. California delivers skiing because it's lined top to bottom with giant mountains that summon ungodly oceans of snow from the clouds. It just happens Brah. There aren't even that many ski areas here – just 28, or 29 if you count the uber-dysfunctional Mt. Waterman – but there seems to be one everywhere you need one – LA (Big Bear, Baldy, Mountain High), Fresno (China Peak), Modesto (Dodge Ridge), Stockton (Bear Valley), Sacramento and the Bay Area (all of Tahoe). Among these are some of the largest and most-developed ski areas in America.And none is bigger than Palisades Tahoe. Well, Heavenly was until this year, as I outlined earlier this week, but the base-to-base gondola changed all that. The ski area formerly known as Squaw Valley and the ski area still-known as Alpine Meadows are now officially one interconnected ski goliath. That's a big deal.Add a new six-pack (Red Dog), a sufficient period to reflect on the name change, a historic winter, and the ongoing impacts of the Covid-driven outdoor boom and the Ikon Pass, and it was a perfect time to check in on one of Alterra's trophy properties.Why you should ski Palisades TahoeOne of the most oft-dished compliments to emphasize the big-mountain cred of a North American ski resort is that it “feels like Europe.” But there just aren't that many ski areas around these parts worthy of that description. Big Sky, with its dramatic peaks and super-duper out-of-base bubble lifts. Snowbird-Alta, with their frenzied scale and wild terrain and big-box tram (though they get way too much snow to mistake for Europe). Whistler, with its village and polyglot vibe. And then there's Palisades Tahoe:Nowhere else in America do you stand in the base area and wonder if you should hop on the tram or the gondola or the other big-gondola-thingy-that-you're-not-quite-sure-what-it-is (the funitel) or the most iconic chairlift in the country (KT-22). Or Wa She Shu. Or Exhibition or Red Dog. And go up and up and then you never need to see the base area again. Up to Headwall or Gold Coast or so help-you-God Silverado if it's open. Or up and over to Alpine and another whole ski area that used to be a giant ski resort but is now just a small part of a giant-er ski resort.It's too much to describe or even really try to. In our conversation, Byrne called Palisades a “super-regional” resort. One that most people drive to, rather than fly to. I'm telling you this one is worth the flight. From anywhere. For anyone. Just go.Podcast NotesOn the name changeThe last time I interviewed Byrne, it was for an article I wrote on the name change in 2021:The name change, promised more than a year ago, acknowledges that many Native Americans consider the word “squaw” to be a racist and sexist slur.“Anyone who spends time at these mountains can feel the passion of our dedicated skiers and riders,” said Ron Cohen, former president and COO of Palisades Tahoe, who moved into the same position at Alterra's Mammoth Mountain in June. “It's electric, exciting, reverential, and incredibly motivating. However, no matter how deep, meaningful, and positive these feelings are and no matter how much our guests don't intend to offend anyone, it is not enough to justify continuing to operate under a name that is deeply offensive to indigenous people across North America.”The former resort name was perhaps the most prominent modern use of the word “squaw” in America, skiing's equivalent to the Cleveland Indians or Washington Redskins, two professional sports teams that are also in the process of replacing their names (Cleveland will become the Guardians, while Washington will announce its new name early next year). The update broadcasts a powerful signal to an American mainstream that still largely regards the word “squaw” as an innocuous synonym for a Native American woman.“We know the founders of our resort had no intention of causing offense in choosing this name for the resort, nor have any of our patrons who have spoken this word over the last seven decades,” said Cohen. “But as our society evolves, we must acknowledge the need for change when we are confronted with harsh realities. Having our name be associated with pain and dehumanization is contrary to our goal of making the outdoors a welcoming space for all people. I feel strongly that we have been given the rare opportunity to effect lasting, positive change; to find a new name that reflects our core values, storied past and respect for all those who have enjoyed this land.”It's a long piece, and my opinion on it stands, but I'll reiterate this bit:I realize that many of us learned something different in grade school. I am one of them. Until last year, I did not know that Native Americans considered this word to be offensive. But the resort, after extensive research and consultation with the local Washoe Tribe, made a good case that the name was an anachronism.Cohen came on my podcast to further elaborate. The arguments made sense. What I had learned in grade-school was wrong. “Squaw” was not a word that belonged on the masthead of a major ski resort.The immediate reaction that this is some PC move is flimsy and hardly worth addressing, but OK: this is not a redefining of history to cast a harmless thing as nefarious. Rather, it is an example of a long-ostracized group finding its voice and saying, “Hey, this is what this actually means – can you rethink how you're using this word?”If you want to scream into the wind about this, be my guest. The name change is final. The place will still have plenty of skiers. If you don't want to be one of them, there are plenty of other places to ski, around Tahoe and elsewhere. But what this means for the ski terrain is exactly nothing at all. The resort, flush with capital from Alterra, is only getting bigger and better. Sitting out that evolution for what is a petty protest is anyone's mistake to make.“We want to be on the right side of history on this,” said Byrne. “While this may take some getting used to, our name change was an important initiative for our company and community. At the end of the day, ‘squaw' is a hurtful word, and we are not hurtful people. We have a well-earned reputation as a progressive resort at the forefront of ski culture, and progress cannot happen without change.”Apparently there are still a handful of Angry Ski Bros who occasionally track Byrne down on social media and yell about this. Presumably in all-caps. Sometimes I think about what life would be like right now had the commercial internet failed to take off and honestly it's hard to conclude that it wouldn't be a hell of a lot better than whatever version of reality we've found ourselves in.On federal place names eliminating the use of the word “squaw”Byrne mentioned that the federal government had also moved to eliminate the word “squaw” from its place names. Per a New York Times article last March:The map dots, resembling a scattergram of America, point to snow-covered pinnacles, remote islands and places in between.Each of the 660 points, shown on maps of federal lands and waterways, includes the word “squaw” in its name, a term Native Americans regard as a racist and misogynistic slur.Now the Interior Department, led by Deb Haaland, the first Native American cabinet secretary, is taking steps to strip the word from mountains, rivers, lakes and other geographic sites and has solicited input from tribes on new names for the landmarks.A task force created by the department will submit the new names for final approval from the Board on Geographic Names, the federal body that standardizes American place names. The National Park Service was ordered to take similar steps.By September, the Biden administration had completed the project. The word persists in non-federally owned place names, however. One ski area – Big Squaw in Maine – still officially carries the name, even though the state was among the first to ban the use of the word “squaw,” back in 2000. While a potential new ownership group had vowed to change the ski area's name, they ultimately backed out of the deal. As long as the broken-down, barely functional ski area remains under the ownership of professional knucklehead and bootleg timber baron James Confalone, the ski area – and the volunteer group that keeps the one remaining chairlift spinning – is stuck with the name.On White Wolf If you've ever looked off the backside of KT-22, you've no doubt noticed the line of chairlift towers standing empty on the mountain:This is White Wolf, a long-envisioned but as-yet-incomplete private resort owned by a local gent named Troy Caldwell, who purchased the land in 1989 for $400,000. Byrne and I discuss this property briefly on the podcast. The Palisades Tahoe blog posted a terrific history of Caldwell and White Wolf last year:So, they shifted to the idea of a private ski area, named White Wolf. In 2000, Placer County issued Caldwell a permit to build his own chairlift. A local homeowners' association later sued the county for issuing him that permit, but, in 2005, the lift towers and cables went in, but construction slowed on the private chairlift as Caldwell weighed his options for a future interconnect between the resorts. To date, the chairlift has yet to operate—but that may be changing if Caldwell's long-term plan comes to fruition.In 2016, Caldwell submitted plans to Placer County for a 275-acre private-resort housing project on his land that would include the construction of dozens of fire-safe custom homes, as well employee housing units, a pool, an ice-skating rink, and two private chairlifts, including the one that's already constructed.After the Palisades Tahoe resorts came under the same ownership in 2012, the plan to physically link them has now become reality. Caldwell is the missing piece enabling the long-awaited gondola to connect the two mountains over his land. Roughly half of the Base to Base Gondola and its mid-stations are on property owned by the Caldwells.“Sure, we could have sold the land for $50 million and moved to Tahiti,” Caldwell says with a laugh. “But we made the decision that this is our life, this is what we wanted to do. We wanted to finish the dream, connect the ski areas and do what we initially set out to do.”Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the general public will ever be able to ski White Wolf.On Alpine Meadows' masterplanByrne and I discuss several proposed but unbuilt lifts at Alpine Meadows, including the Rollers lift, shown here on the 2015 masterplan:And here, just for fun, is an old proposed line for the gondola, which would not have crossed the KT-22 Express:On Sierra-at-Tahoe and the Caldor FireI discussed this one in my recent article for the Heavenly pod.Parting shotThe Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 41/100 in 2023, and number 427 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com. 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Crack open a Red Dog! Comedian Mike Finoia's in the studio! Visit mikefinoia.com for a list of Mike's upcoming stand-up shows, and be sure to check out his podcast, Comes a Time, with co-host Oteil Burbridge. Mike will be performing with us at Impractical Jokers Staff Infection on March 31st at Soul Joel's Comedy Club in Pottstown, PA. Tickets are available at souljoels.com. We want to hear from YOU! Give us a call at 781-POD-SLAP, and be sure to sign up for our weekly newsletter. Celebrate ten years of Super Live Adventure with a special 4/20 live show followed by a performance by Staten Island's premiere jug band, the Wahoo Skiffle Crazies! It all takes place at The Little Victory Theatre in John's hometown of Travis, Staten Island, NY. Presented by Ross Brewing Company. Doors at 7:30 PM, show at 8:00 PM. Mature audiences only. Limited seating. Admission includes 2 drink tickets. Visit eventbrite.com for tickets. Li'l Chub Club members get 50% off admission with promo code listed at patreon.com/superliveadventure. Interested in joining the Li'l Chub Club? Visit patreon.com/superliveadventure to learn more. For a complete list of John's upcoming stand-up performances, visit johnszeluga.com. Follow @reelghostbusters on Instagram and be the first to know about exclusive print offers. Visit superliveadventure.com for past episodes, contact info, podcast merch, and more. And fit it where you s#!t it
HOUR 1: Did the Chiefs use the Eagles' aggressiveness against them? Your best audio of the day in Sound Check. Could the Jets end up with Tannehill?
Joy Reid leads this episode of The ReidOut with the fallout over the tragic death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of five Memphis police officers. Yet again, Black parents grieve a son's death from police brutality. It is a story that dates back to the very origins of America--a history that prominent conservatives are fighting to eliminate from our schools. Also in this episode, we probe the unanswered questions surrounding Tyre Nichols' death, and the police chief responsible for hyper-aggressive police units with names like "Scorpion" and "Red Dog." Next, we discuss the possibilty that a former FBI official, accused of secretly working for a Russian oligarch, could have played a role in tipping the 2016 election to Donald Trump. All this and more in this edition of The ReidOut on MSNBC.
On part TWO of my conversation with Kelli Aitken (quantonas_irish) we talk more field trials, breeding and a lot of red setters. Also Kelli and her husband have a YouTube channel where they fiim some field trials. For newcomers this is huge to be able to get a glimpse into this all. If you haven't listened to part one of this conversation go back and check out episode 73. ------------ Subscribe to the Upland Rookie YouTube Channel by clicking here. As a reminder, if you are enjoying the podcast, please go leave a rating and review on whichever podcast platform you listen on. Much appreciated. ----------- *TITLE SPONSOR - BPro Kennels* LISTENERS CAN SAVE 10% ON A DOG BOX FROM BPRO KENNESL USING PROMO CODE ROOKIE10) BPRO Kennels was founded with a vision to create a premium dog box that was customizable to fit any needs and stand the test of time. These hand-crafted kennels are proudly built in the USA with no corners cut, with your dog's safety as the first priority. These are made of high grade, lightweight aluminum that can be left raw or powder coated to whatever color combinations you can think of. The podcast is presented by: Final Rise - Preimum upland gear for the serious bird hunter. Check out the new Sidekick fest for ultra slim design and light weight. Every product is made in the USA and is durable season after season. Sponsor of the podcast: Trinity Bretons. Angels in the home and demons in the field. Trinity offer puppies, The Trinity Upland Academy with George Hickox, Started Dogs and Stud Service and some damn fine bird dogs. ---------- AFFILIATES: OnX Hunt. Save 20% off your subscription today by using promo code TUR20 ---------- CONNECT WITH ME: Email: uplandbritts@gmail.com Instagram: @upland_britts or @theuplandrookiepodcast Facebook: The Upland Rookie Podcast Twitter: @uplandrookiepod
Veteran captain Eric Kerber gets loose in the Bunka and trashes your 45-minute voice messages regarding booking a charter, Party Marty has a pike and a case of Red Dog with your wife's name on it, we say goodbye to the striper community's most famous holy water dealer, and explain why a bail-less spinning reel won't impress the guys at walleye camp.
(00:00) Albert Breer from theMMQB.com joins Toucher and Rich for his weekly hour-long in-studio appearance. Natty, Ice, Ice House, Red Dos and cheese parties in college CONNECT WITH TOUCHER & RICH Twitter: @Toucherandrich | @fredtoucher | @KenGriffeyRules Instagram: @Toucherandrichofficial | @fredtoucher Twitch: twitch.tv/thesportshub 98.5 The Sports Hub: Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram
This weekend is Pride in Atlanta and while I would have loved a new episode, I couldn't resist sharing one from two years ago this month, where I interviewed Charlie Paine and learned about Atlanta's LGBTQ history through the lens of the Atlanta Eagle, which in itself tells us the story of Ponce de Leon's transition from grand residential street to commercial corridor. There were stories about vibrating mattresses, Italian restaurants, punk rock, RuPaul and Red Dog raids. Shortly after the episode was released in 2020, the Atlanta Eagle closed its doors but it has recently reopened at Ansley Mall. It was also designated as a local landmark by the City of Atlanta and is now protected from demolition by the City's Historic Preservation Ordinance. It is the first structure In the Deep South protected under a Historic Zoning Protections for LGBTQ+ History! Want to support this podcast? Visit here Email: thevictorialemos@gmail.com Facebook | Instagram | Twitter
Big Jay is back from Oklahoma City and had the chance to experience the legendary Red Dog. As he's telling the gang about his experience he starts getting random phone calls from unknown callers. Stream "The Bonfire with Big Jay Oakerson & Dan Soder" for 3 months free on the SiruisXM app! Offer Details Apply: www.SiriusXM.com/BonfireFollow us on all social media @TheBonfireXM@DanSoder www.DanSoder.com@BigJayOakerson www.BigJayOakerson.com
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