Podcasts about Richard Pryor

Who decides what is funny in today's society?  Did you see Dave Chapelle's SNL opening monologue and his comments about the Kanye controversy?  George and callers discuss if comedians like Don Rickels and Richard Pryor could work today and how do we define what is "funny".   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Secret Movie Club Team (Connor Lloyd Crews, Daniel Ott, and Craig Hammill) takes stage to talk at you about stand-up superstar Richard Pryror and his classic 1982 concert film Live on the Sunset Strip! The conversation then broadens out to talk about comedians in film and what they can bring to movies both in front of and behind the camera. Daniel explains why he thinks Eddie Murphy elevates Walter Hill's 48 Hrs. Connor comes clean about his anti-stand-up and pro-sketch bias. Craig mourns the loss of Robin Williams.

Charles Skaggs & Xan Sprouse discuss the 2022 Criterion Collection release of Lost Highway, the 1997 neo-noir film directed by David Lynch, exploring the special features and interviews with David Lynch, Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Robert Loggia, Balthazar Getty, and more! Find Us Here: Twitter: @GhostwoodCast @CharlesSkaggs @udanax19 Facebook: Facebook.com/GhostwoodPodcast Email: GhostwoodPodcast@gmail.com Listen and subscribe to us in Apple Podcasts and leave us a review!

Ramon Hervey II, legendary entertainment manager, shares insight from his book- The Fame Game- An Insider's Playbook for Earning Your 15 Minutes. He has worked with iconic talent like Vanessa Williams, The Jacksons, The Commodores, Bette Midler, Richard Pryor and many others. Fame is simply an accolade. Get the inside story on the Beatles reunion that was orchestrated with Richard Pryor. Hear the many life lessons from Ramon including his Daddy advice to his children.."concentrate and focus." You will be struck with the smart collaboration skills of Ramon Hervey II highlighted by Quincy Jones, George Benson, Bette Midler, Andre Crouch, and Rick James. Enjoy.

Welcome to another episode of The Modern Moron… my guest is producer, writer, actor Larry Dorf, yes, that Larry Dorf.  We have a very light early fall chat about a few subjects, namely:  We talk a little about some of the Modern Moron's more successful shows, one being on Phil Hendrie and his mastery of deception with his characters improvising with each other and his work on various animation projects from King of the Hill to Rick and Morty.   I refer to a story Larry told about an audition he had where he was being asked to play NBA legend Larry Bird's father, a story I will get to next time.  I'm sort of giving you this conversation backwards and here's why. Larry Brings up Adnan Syed, who has been released from prison after doing 20 years for a murder he did not commit.  His story was made famous by a podcast called “Serial” which was developed by “This American Life” that you know from NPR.  The podcast “Serial” is owned however, by The New York Times. You already know I'm a moron, so you won't be surprised to find that I am way late to the party on damn near everything and such is the case with the show “Only Murders In The Building”, which is a show about a podcast about a murder.  It's on Hulu and is into production of it's 4th season and I'm told that the show was based on the real podcast “Serial”.  I didn't realize how much… you hear that?  That's the theme music of the podcast “Serial” about Adnan Syed… And this… is the theme song to the Hulu series, “Only Murders in the Building”... Jezz, they could have at leas changed the key it's played in right? This brings up a subject I've been wanting to get to for some time and it's the concept of the Morally Dubious Podcaster.  It probably has other names, but i found an article with that phrase and I thought, “Morally Dubious?  Modern Moron”  They're synonymous. I read an article, have an unqualified opinion about it, say it into a microphone, bam; Morally dubious podcaster.  Only I'm not a celebrity and I don't have guests who are celebrities so, there's only the two of you listening and it works out about the same, just on a much, much smaller scale.  Plus I'm not pretending to try and crack a cold case or find a murderer.   So, Larry explains to me the case of Adnon Syed, and I'm oblivious as you can hear… like a typical old man, I can't seem to get the story straight…  Then Larry turns this into a potential gameshow along the lines of, “How much prison time would you do for a million dollars?”   This is what Hollywood people do for a living. We join our conversation basking in the glory of the first episode Larry did with us called “The Mystery of Mike Tyson” referring to the Adult Swim Animated series “Mike Tyson Mysteries” which is still our most downloaded episode.  Until this one…  CLOSE - And that, friends, is how a game show is created…  in South Korea.  Isn't that a little like the show “Squidgame”?  I couldn't stick with that show… it was too sad and dark for me.  I have enough of that crap running around in my head without watching a tv show about it.   Now that I've had two seconds to think about it, I would not do any time in a prison for any amount of money.  The subculture that goes on in prison is not something I want to pretend like I could tolerate even for a minute.  I did look up some of the lovely prisons both in California and across the country.  Pelican Bay and San Quentin are both nasty, gnarly prisons and so is the downtown county jail in Los Angeles.  Other residences I would not spend a minute in for any amount of money is the ADX, also known as the SuperMax in Colorado.  One article I read on the internet-so-it's-true… says that the structure is built in a way that inmates never see a guard or another prisoner.  I don't know if it's true, I don't want to know, I just trust that I don't want to go there.  Throw in Sing, Sing and Rikers Island in New York, and a few of the prisons in the deep south like The Holman Correctional Facility in Alabama and it just makes me want to be a law abiding citizen.  Why am I going on and on about prisons?  Well, I see in the news recently that a real sweetheart of a guy named Steve Bannon has been recommended to spend four months in prison for contempt of congress.  Hmm.  I wonder if one of the neighborhoods I just mentioned might be a good place for him?  Is anyone else thinking of the movie Deliverance right now?  Does anyone see a similarity between Ned Beaty's character and Steve Bannon?...  A couple of housekeeping items I'd like to pass along starting with two documentaries I'd like to recommend..  The first one is called “A Trip to Infinity” on Netflix.  I found it fascinating, I've watched it twice and am currently forcing my daughter to watch it in 10 minute increments.  Mathematicians, Cosmologists and physicists contemplate the concept of infinity… and it's broken up into different chapters: Infinity is very small, it's very large,infinity as a number in an equation, that the speed of light is both very fast and also very slow, that a circle is actually a polygon with an infinite number of points and in terms of time, infinity is a very very long time and that if you put an apple in an air tight box and wait for infinity years, that apple will eventually morph into anything and everything you could possibly imagine.  Even live versions of Rick and Morty.  So I highly recommend “A Trip to Infinity.” The other documentary is called “All Things Must Pass: The Rise and Fall of Tower Records”.  This subject matter is perfect for our demographic!  I'm sure you spent hours in Tower Records going up and down the isles looking at the amazing Album art that we took for granted then.  Isle after isle until you decided which album you were going to plunk down five dollars and change for, and then I think seven or eight and change and then I lost track.  But that was an important purchase.  And then I would have to sneak by the living room with my bright yellow and red plastic bag hoping my parents wouldn't ask me what I got.  They never did, but if my dad knew I was buying Cheech and Chong, Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy albums?  No way.   And we also had Tower Books and Tower Posters across the street which was actually a head shop where you got everything from bongs to rolling paper to posters of fruits and vegetables doing disgusting things, incense, trippy candles with psychedelic waxes, macrame'd hanging plant holders… Tower records was the best.  The documentary is available on YouTube and I believe right now you can stream it for free.  It's a great documentary.  The only woman who made it as an executive at Tower back in the 70's put it best when she said that whatever Tower records was the one you went to, you thought it was the first Tower Records they ever had.  The documentary is directed by Tom Hanks' son Colin and he does a great job bringing the nostalgia of Tower Records back, whether you found their store in San Francisco on Columbus Avenue or the one on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, Greenwich Village in New York or wherever you grew up, there was probably a Tower Records where you hung out. Elton John, Bruce Srpingsteen and Dave Grohl, who also worked at a Tower Records in Seattle, all reminisce about how special it was to roam the isles of a Tower Records.  Hanks also does a good job of not letting the documentary end on a downer, even though the internet and a little thing called Napster caused the Tower to crumble, the Japanese stores became independent and are still huge today.  Okay sports fans, that's it, enjoy post season baseball, college football and lots of Halloween candy!  We'll see you next time on the Modern Moron and… the old man show at the oldman-dot-show. The Rise of the 'Morally Dubious Podcaster' in Pop Culture | KQED  All Things Must Pass (1080p) FULL MOVIE - Documentary, Music - YouTube   A Trip To Infinity - Netflix  

GUY TORRY is not only a fantastic actor but from movies like American History X, LIFE, The Animal, Pearl Harbor, RIDE, TRIPPIN', and many more, he's an innovative and hilarious stand-up comedian. Guy is currently on the nationally syndicated Tom Joyner Morning Show. A native of St. Louis, Mo, and Torry followed in his brother's (Joe Torry) footsteps and stepped on stage, grabbed a mic, and began "Killing Them Laughing." Guy is a 27-year veteran whose comedy has crossed over to mainstream America. In 1995 Guy created the hottest and most crucial comedy night in comedy, Phat Comedy Tuesdays at the World Famous Comedy Store. He was recently featured on TV One's “UNSUNG HOLLYWOOD” His style is like a pot of Gumbo. It's a slice of Lenny Bruce, a pinch of Chris Rock, a dash of his brother and Martin Lawrence, a clove of Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor, and stirred with some Kings of Comedy and George Carlin. It all comes together to tease your pallet with flavor and will have you sucking on the funny bone. Follow Guy Torry on all social media platforms at @guytorry Join the E-Club now for exclusive content just for subscribers: https://camillekauer.com/ #amazonprime #guytorry #lifemovie #guytorryinterview #comedy --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/camillekauer/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/camillekauer/support

As a kid, Scotty Schwartz made his big screen debut alongside Hollywood legends Richard Pryor and Jackie Gleason in the film, “The Toy”…and while he made his name in that movie, he became a true part of the fabric of pop culture as Flick in the holiday classic, “A Christmas Story”! But, once he hit his teens, his career hit a wall. He took a brief a brief detour into the adult film industry with the film “Scotty's X Rated Adventure”…but he's spent most of his adult years working in the sports and celebrity memorabilia industry....a fact which set off a nerd-fest on this morning's show! And now, he's reprising his role as Flick in the upcoming HBOMax film “A Christmas Story Christmas”…and he's coming to town to do a meet and greet at the Peculiar Winery on November 5th!!!

Flashback Episode of The Father Time Podcast with Jamie KalerStevie D is one of my favorite people in Hollywood. His upbeat positivity shines through in everything he does. Growing up in a small town in Kentucky required a lot of imagination for a kid to entertain himself. While other kids spent their days playing sports and doing homework, Stevie D. was creating mischief and dreaming of becoming a rock star. This could involve jumping trash cans in the middle of the streets on his BMX bike (no helmet, of course), or perfecting the art of blow-drying his hair. Hey, he was the only boy in a house with a single mom and three sisters. He also spent a lot of time watching variety shows and secretly listening to Richard Pryor, which he would recite to the amusement of his friends at school (although their parents were not so amused).After visiting Panama City Beach on a spring break, Stevie vowed to return there after high school and become a DJ, which is exactly what he did. Maybe he should've set his goals a little higher, but none the less, after achieving phase one, Stevie decided to make his next move. With two suitcases and a framed Elvis movie poster, he packed his car and headed to Hollywood.Stevie knew there were two things he really wanted: muscles and to entertain people. Chippendales was out of the question, so after a few years of struggling, his sense of humor and perseverance eventually paid off – he was appearing in fitness videos and telling jokes on stage. Unlike a few of his friends, his misspent youth did not lead to a life of crime, and the dreams of becoming a rock star have somewhat come true. After more than a decade performing in the world's most famous comedy clubs, Stevie executive produced and starred in “Rockstars of Comedy,” a live concert film starring some of the most recognizable comics in the business, including Whitney Cummings (NBC's “Whitney”) and Steve Byrne (TBS's “Sullivan and Son”).At age 44, Stevie was diagnosed with prostate cancer, which is usually associated with older men. After undergoing life-saving surgery, he decided to write a book about his experience, “The Trans Am Diaries: A Hillbilly's Road Trip from Stand Up Comedy to Cancer…and Back Again.”Stevie has appeared on television as a comic and host, interviewing some the biggest stars in Hollywood, before starting his own production company. He has created TV projects for OWN network, with more in the works. However, Stevie says his greatest achievement has been that of being a husband and father. When he's not conquering all media platforms, he's busy teaching valuable life lessons to his two little rock stars – blow drying and jumping trash can (with helmets)!Find him at StevieDRocks.com or on twitter and instagram @Steviedrocks. #theparentslounge #fathertime #fathertimepodcast #jamiekaler #jasongowin #katemulligan #clarekramer #stevied #transamdiaries #comedian #standupcomedy #parentingpodcast #parentinghumor #parenthoodMark Overanalyses FilmA podcast about what great films mean, and how they go about meaning it.Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify Scarswell-On-SeaCreepy tales from an English seaside town no one can ever leave.Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify

Decision-making expert, bestselling author, and former professional poker player Annie Duke chats with Trey Elling about QUIT: THE POWER OF KNOWING WHEN TO WALK AWAY. Topics include: Why we have have a hard time quitting (2:17) Richard Pryor (5:26) Why NYC cabbies in the 1990s were bad quitters (8:17) The difficulty of quitting in the red (13:03) California's high speed train money pit (16:22) Monkeys and pedestals (21:13) Sears not being able to quit itself (24:48) Daniel Kahneman providing a blurb for QUIT (29:29)

December 4-10, 1982 This week Ken welcomes writer and creator/host of The Bastard Tapes Podcast, Tim Harrod. Ken and Tim discuss the unique spite of people from New England, video games, Atari, walking to the arcade, Charlottesville, pinball companies trying to take on video games, how Nintendo temporarily killed arcades, Dragon's Lair, Saturday Supercade, Q*Bert, Steve Allen, stand up on TV, the influence of MTV, Solid Gold, Tim Thomerson, the weird MTV influenced syndicated sketch comedy show, Laugh Tracks, Gallagher, Gallagher II, Cinemax Comedy Experiment, Martin Mull, Rich Hall, Joe Piscapo and his mysterious Halloween Special, Dead Heat, Disney's Christmas Gift, Life's Most Embarrassing Moments, Foul Ups, Bleeps and Blunders, the influence of Letterman, Dennis Wolfberg, how you rarely saw Burt Reynolds and Tom Selleck together, Fridays, being conscripted into Circus of the Stars, Charlie Brown Christmas, Doctor Who,  The Year Without a Santa Claus, Joanie Loves Chachi, the missing Cunningham, RapCity Kids Christmas, M*A*S*H, Three's Company, Dolly Parton's Sister, Jane Curtain's Cousin, Newhart, Real People, Christmas Eve on Sesame Street, Follow that Bird, Family Ties, Cheers, Facts of Life, Diff'rent Strokes, always going for comedy, fake bands on real TV shows, The Urkel, The Guys Next Door, Chip and Pepper's Comedy Madness, Meatballs and Spaghetti, the fame of Nelson, Taxi, Too Close for Comfort, Sneak Previews, Siskel and Ebert's dog vs skunk, The Toy, Richard Pryor, a good story about Jackie Gleason, Chris Elliot, Action Family, The Powers of Matthew Star, Yes Virginia There is a Santa Claus, Mr. Magoo's Christmas Special, Sledge Hammer, losing the car horn, Wonder Bug and Schlep car, and the changes of the Incredible Hulk. 

For full episode https://anchor.fm/donnathon-dobson/episodes/Whatever-Talk-165-We-Retarded-e1lca6r/a-a891ak5

On this weeks episode: George and Gil sit down with comedian Jesus Sepulveda to talk about his special Mr. Tough Life on HBO Max, trying to impress his dad, being a loner, the Why You Crying effect, Richard Pryor, running into your bully, the brilliance of Mikelti Williamson, Lee Trevino, being undeniable, and so much more! Follow him @jesusthecomedian

For Beyond 50's "Celebrity" talks, listen to an interview with Ramon Hervey III. He is a globally recognized entertainment manager, representing superstars like Paul McCartney, Richard Pryor, Bee Gees, Muhammad Ali, Michael Jackson, Bette Midler and so many more. He's also the ex-husband of actress and singer, Vanessa Williams. Hervey will talk about his collaborations with prominent Black and White entertainers, philosophy on fame, and invaluable lessons learned. Tune in to Beyond 50: America's Variety Talk Radio Show on the natural, holistic, green and sustainable lifestyle. Visit https://www.Beyond50Radio.com and sign up for our Exclusive Updates.

Ramon Hervey II is a manager, publicist, and trusted confident to heavyweights like Richard Pryor, Bette Midler, Little Richard, Quincy Jones, Don Cornelius, the Bee Gees, Herb Alpert, Andrae Crouch, Vanessa Williams, Rick James, Paul McCartney, Luther Vandross, Peter Frampton, James Caan, Aaliyah and more. He joins Questlove Supreme to talk about his experiences in the entertainment industry, and discuss his new book, The Fame Game.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Kevin Lehane and Will Collins from The Best Bits Podcast return to Flixwatcher to review Kevin's choice See No Evil, Hear No Evil. See No Evil, Hear No Evil is a 1989 Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder comedy directed by Arthur (Love Story) Hiller. Pryor plays Wallace "Wally" Karew, a blind man and Wilder plays David "Dave" Lyons, a deaf man who end up on the run from the police after “witnessing” a murder. Kevin Spacey also stars in one of his earlier roles. It received a mixed response on its release - mostly negative reviews but was a relative box office success and would be Pryor and Wilder's last financially successful film together. While See No Evil, Hear No Evil might offer a nostalgia watch for anyone who watched it as a child in the 1980s it will probably offer little - and quite possibly offend anyone watching with 2022 eyes. Scores for See No Evil, Hear No Evil were mixed from Flixwatcher and guests (there may have also been some tactical scoring going on!) but it still manages an overall rating of 3.55.   [supsystic-tables id=281] Episode #269 Crew Links Thanks to Episode #269 Crew of Will Collins (@WillumsFillum) and Kevin Lehane (@KevinLehane) from The Best Bits Podcast Find their Websites online at https://t.co/vCWc79ISYv And at https://www.kevinlehane.com/ And at https://www.casarotto.co.uk/clients/collins-will Please make sure you give them some love   More about See No Evil, Hear No Evil For more info on See No Evil, Hear No Evil, you can visit See No Evil, Hear No Evil IMDb page here or See No Evil, Hear No Evil Tomatoes page here. Final Plug! Subscribe, Share and Review us on iTunes If you enjoyed this episode of Flixwatcher Podcast you probably know other people who will like it too! Please share it with your friends and family, review us, and join us across ALL of the Social Media links below. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Comedy has been one of the greatest art forms of expression in history, pushing boundaries and turning everyday topics into laughs. From comedy legends like Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, George Carlin, Kevin Hart and Dave Chappelle, many comedians test the limit of free speech while also delivering a powerful message for the audience. In this episode, we discuss the recent controversy of comedic talents Aries Spears and Tiffany Haddish, who recently went under fire for their MADTv skit addressing pedophilia. We also discuss whether comedy is under attack and all things Stand Up, Sitting Down. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/princeoffreshair/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/princeoffreshair/support

Podcast No Pasa Nada Ep.154: Desde Marylin Monroe hasta Jeffrey Dahmer: Cómo sufrir en Netflix En este episodio hablamos de: Por qué el trailer de “Deadpool 3” quebró el internet. “Dahmer - Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story”: una redundante serie sobre un criminal de la vida real. Hablamos más tiempo sobre “Blonde” que el que Manuel invirtió en verla. El problema de los filmes biográficos, y la mejor manera de descubrir a Marylin Monroe. “Meet Cute”: Kaley Cuoco y Pete Davidson en una comedia romántica con un giro mortalmente serio. “Bandit”: Josh Duhamel es el ladrón de bancos más osado…¡del Canadá! “Blue Collar”: una actuación clásica de Richard Pryor. “The Empty Man”: una pieza de horror del bueno, invisibilizada por la pandemia. “The Rookie” y “The Rookie Feds”: de dos series, no se saca ni una. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/no-pasa-nada/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/no-pasa-nada/support

 It's Up, Up and Away to our 100th episode. This week, Shawn and Colin welcome back 'RPG Academy' and 'Smallville: Farm To Fable' host Michael Ross to take a look at the abysmal superhero classic 'Superman III'. We discuss all the important topics such as swapping out evil billionaires, the actual movie just under the surface, the brilliant hilarity of Richard Pryor, a chameleon Clark, turning a Superman evil, new love interests, wonky effects and so verry much more. Has Shawn recovered from the traumatization this movie caused him as a child? Where does this fall in our overall Superman mythos? Is it good? Tune in to find out! 5 Star reviews help drive us up the charts. Please take a minute and review us.If you would like to contact or donate to us: iusedtolikethisone@gmail.com www.patreon.com/iusedtolikethisoneWebsite: www.iusedtolikethisone.comInstagram: @iusedtolikethisoneTwitter: @iused2likethis1Facebook: I Used To Like This One Snapchat: @iused2likethis1Created/Produced/Hosted by: Shawn Wells and Colin Stewart Edited by: Shawn WellsOriginal Music by: Lindon Carter (look for his band 'Carter & the Capitals' on all music streaming platforms)Website design: David SonSpecial Thanks To: Tracy Sheremeta, Lindon Carter, Kris Wells and Graham Wells for their contributions to the show.Hear more content from Shawn with his other podcast 'In Front Of The Yellow Line'.Guest: Michael RossTwitter: @TheRpgAcademy @Farm2Fable©️2022 And Sometimes Why? Productions.

You can support me on Paypal https://www.paypal.me/crimson60620 Patreon https://www.patreon.com/crimson60620ps4gaming Streamlabs https://www.streamlabs.com/crimson60620 You can purchase my artwork at https://www.etsy.com/shop/lonesageartor https://www.deviantart.com/crimson60620 You can watch me live on https://www.twich.tv/crimson60620Follow me on Twitter @ crimson60620 --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/crimson60620/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/crimson60620/support

Steve and Reno are back at the historic Zanies in Nashville to break down stand up from Jeff Foxworthy, Richard Pryor, Lenny Clarke and we tear apart some of Reno's old material.    Live Dates - www.stevebyrnelive.com  IG - instagram.com/stevebyrnelive  Twitter - twitter.com/stevebyrnelive  Facebook - Facebook.com/stevebyrnelive

“He was way ahead of the game.” Sir Lenny tells Nihal why Richard Pryor was such an influence on him.

Get ready to meet one of my comedy heroes, but only if you can handle a LOT of profanity. George Carlin, following the path of his mentor, Lenny Bruce, kicked the doors of censorship down so people like myself could have careers in comedy, and not worry about being arrested for saying something "obscene."  Today, we learn about the amazing, prolific, inspiring life of George Carlin - how a boy raised by a single mother in New York City grew up to become a radio DJ, then part of two man comedy team, then a solo nightclub act who first achieved success after some early struggles as a clean-cut, mainstream comic. He next decided to follow his counterculture leanings only to lose it all, rebuild into something better, nearly lose it all again, and then become the Carlin of legend. Carlin battled a crippling cocaine addiction, domestic problems at home, a business that wrote him off numerous times, battles with a government that tried to censor him over and over again, and much more to end up with fourteen HBO comedy specials and the designation of one of the best, if not THE best to ever do it - the father of modern standup. Myself and the rest of the comedy community owe him a huge debt of gratitude, and I'm excited to share his life with you here today, on another biographical episode, of Timesuck. Bad Magic Productions Monthly Patreon Donation:  In honor of the passing of Jeff Burton from the Rizzuto Show aka the Rizz Show on 105.7 FM in St Louis, we are donating $16,640 to Jeff's charity of choice - Kids Rock Cancer. Through the proven healing power of music therapy, Kids Rock Cancer helps children combat feelings of anxiety, depression, uncertainty, and helplessness.  To find out more, go to KidsRockCancer.org  We also are donating $1850 to our scholarship fund! Watch the Suck on YouTube: https://youtu.be/lJkZj_F42uIMerch: https://www.badmagicmerch.comDiscord! https://discord.gg/tqzH89vWant to join the Cult of the Curious private Facebook Group? Go directly to Facebook and search for "Cult of the Curious" in order to locate whatever happens to be our most current page :)For all merch related questions/problems: store@badmagicproductions.com (copy and paste)Please rate and subscribe on iTunes and elsewhere and follow the suck on social media!! @timesuckpodcast on IG and http://www.facebook.com/timesuckpodcastWanna become a Space Lizard?  Click here: https://www.patreon.com/timesuckpodcastSign up through Patreon and for $5 a month you get to listen to the Secret Suck, which will drop Thursdays at Noon, PST. You'll also get 20% off of all regular Timesuck merch PLUS access to exclusive Space Lizard merch. You get to vote on two Monday topics each month via the app. And you get the download link for my new comedy album, Feel the Heat. Check the Patreon posts to find out how to download the new album and take advantage of other benefits.

Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor star in Stir Crazy, where they are accused and convicted of robbing a bank, even though they are completely innocent. Join Jimbo and Kyle as the discuss this great comedy from the 80's Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Comedian Fahim Anwar joins George, Gil, and Grant on today's episode of OMG. The guys go deep from the jump, delving right into Fahim's high school impressions of Michael Jackson for the talent show – which goes nicely with George's story of having to testify at MJ's trial years later – and even with George's theory that the skeleton emoji is actually Michael Jackson's face without the skin. Where would Fahim see his perfect self down the line? What was it like to eulogize Richard Pryor? What IS manifest destiny… and is it really any different than manifesting your own destiny? Find out all this and more on today's OMG HI! 

James, Jerah and Jonathan along with special guest Sura Khan, review the 1972 Oscar-nominated Billie Holiday biopic “Lady Sings the Blues”. It follows the iconic jazz singer's life from childhood into her controversial music career and eventual drug addiction. The film is co-written by Suzanne de Passe and stars Diana Ross, Richard Pryor, Billy Dee Williams, and Virginia Capers.  Produced by Melisa D. Monts Edited by Diane Kang Executive produced by Brett Boham, Joe Cilio, Alex Ramsey Listen to Black Men Can't Jump [In Hollywood] Ad-Free on Forever Dog Plus: https://foreverdogpodcasts.com/plus FOLLOW BLACK MEN CAN'T JUMP [IN HOLLYWOOD]: https://twitter.com/blackmenpodcast https://www.instagram.com/blackmenpodcast BUY BLACK MEN CAN'T JUMP [IN HOLLYWOOD] MERCH: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/black-men-can-t-jump-in-hollywood SUPPORT BLACK MEN CAN'T JUMP [IN HOLLYWOOD] ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/BMCJ BLACK MEN CAN'T JUMP [IN HOLLYWOOD] IS A FOREVER DOG PODCAST: https://foreverdogpodcasts.com/podcasts/black-men-cant-jump-in-hollywood Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Quizmasters Lee and Marc meet for a trivia quiz with topics including Botany, Logos, Astronomy, Cars, Movies, Periodic Table, Engineering, Symbols and more! Round One BOTANY - What type of plant will only bear fruit after digesting the corpse of a female wasp? LOGOS - What color is the 'l' in the Google logo? HOT ONES - The popular hot sauce challenge web series Hot Ones by Complex Networks is filmed in which U.S. state? ASTRONOMY - ‘Oceanus' and ‘Janus' were suggested names for what planet? CARS - What high-performance sports car by Dodge debuted in the 90's and was inspired by the Shelby Cobra in name and appearance? 2010's MOVIES - Slowmo is a drug that appears in what 2012 action adaptation of a comic book character? Round Two PERIODIC TABLE - Which common seven letter element has the atomic number 20? FIREARMS - Founded in the 16th Century, what Italian firearms manufacturer is the oldest active manufacturer of firearm components in the world? THE BIBLE - What is the fifth book of the New Testament? STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING - In structural engineering, what is the term for a structure's connection points or nodes? SYMBOLS - The international symbol of lb. for pound is an abbreviation for what latin word? NASA - What "lucky snack" is present at every mission event controlled from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (due to its presence at a successful landing of Ranger 7 on the moon)? Rate My Question JURASSIC PARK - The dilophosaurus is famously but inaccurately portrayed in Jurassic Park spitting venom. What does "dilophosaurus" mean in Greek? Final Questions 70's MOVIES - What 1979 comedy film sees its protagonist headed to Hollywood to become a star and features cameos by Milton Berle, Mel Brooks, Bob Hope, Elliott Gould, Carol Kane, Cloris Leachman, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor and Orson Welles, among others? CELEBRITY FAMILIES - What actor from Cheers is the maternal actor of Jason Sudeikis? HORROR MOVIES - In which Friday the 13th movie does Jason first don his iconic hockey mask? Upcoming LIVE Know Nonsense Trivia Challenges September 14th, 2022 - Know Nonsense Challenge - Point Ybel Brewing Co. - 7:30 pm EST September 15th, 2022 - Know Nonsense Trivia Challenge - Ollie's Pub Records and Beer - 7:30 pm EST September 17th, 2022 - UPSIDE DOWN TRIVIA: STRANGER THINGS PUB QUIZ - Ollie's Pub Records and Beer - 7:30 pm EST You can find out more information about that and all of our live events online at KnowNonsenseTrivia.com All of the Know Nonsense events are free to play and you can win prizes after every round. Thank you Thanks to our supporters on Patreon. Thank you, Quizdaddies – Gil, Tim, Tommy, Adam, Brandon, Blake Thank you, Team Captains – Kristin & Fletcher, Aaron, Matthew, David Holbrook, Mo, Lydia, Rick G, Skyler Thank you, Proverbial Lightkeepers – Elyse, Kaitlynn, Frank, Trent, Nina, Justin, Katie, Ryan, Robb, Captain Nick, Grant, Ian, Tim Gomez, Rachael, Moo, Rikki, Nabeel, Jon Lewis, Adam, Lisa, Spencer, Luc, Hank, Justin P., Cooper, Sarah, Karly, Lucas, Mike K., Cole, Adam Thank you, Rumplesnailtskins – Mike J., Mike C., Efren, Steven, Kenya, Dallas, Issa, Paige, Allison, Kevin & Sara, Alex, Loren, MJ, HBomb, Aaron, Laurel, FoxenV, Sarah, Edsicalz, Megan, brandon, Chris, Alec, Sai, Nathan, Tim, Andrea, Ian If you'd like to support the podcast and gain access to bonus content, please visit http://theknowno.com and click "Support."

Comedian Eleanor Kerrigan joins the gang in the studio to talk about the past, present, and future of The Comedy Store and tells a story of when she served Richard Pryor a fake martini. Gina Grad reports the news of today including: Juul reaching a $439 million settlement over e-cigarette marketing, Jason Momoa shaving his hair for a cause, and Chris Rock blasting Will Smith for his 'hostage' apology video. THANKS FOR SUPPORTING TODAY'S SPONSORS: Geico.com Etsy.com enter code HELLO10 The Jordan Harbinger Show Keeps.com/ADAM Con-Cret.com/PODCAST

Peter & Phil finish the season by discussing the A&E documentary, Right to Offend' and all the comedian greats the film covers. Join us for another great conversation regarding Bill Cosby, Flip Wilson, Ed Sullivan, The Smothers Brothers, Robin Williams, Richard Pryor, and many more! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/ppcourageousconversation/message

Welcome to Open Form, a weekly film podcast hosted by award-winning writer Mychal Denzel Smith. Each week, a different author chooses a movie: a movie they love, a movie they hate, a movie they hate to love. Something nostalgic from their childhood. A brand-new obsession. Something they've been dying to talk about for ages and their friends are constantly annoyed by them bringing it up. In this episode of Open Form, Mychal talks to Deesha Philyaw (The Secret Lives of Church Ladies) about the 1976 film Car Wash, directed by Michael Schultz and starring Franklyn Ajaye, Bill Duke, George Carlin, The Pointer Sisters, and Richard Pryor. Deesha Philyaw's writing on race, parenting, gender, and culture has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, McSweeney's, the Rumpus, Brevity, TueNight, and elsewhere. Originally from Jacksonville, Florida, she currently lives in Pittsburgh with her daughters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At this point, you know the drill. After some much needed time off, we're back with another quality episode of that audio dogfood. This week, we talk Serena Williams and her legacy, Jay Z's GOD DID verse, the Cavs trading for Spida Mitchell, House of the Dragon or Dem Dragonz. We also bust out a new segment and draft our teams of best TV Theme Songs. And of course, L's of the Week. As always, follow the Twitter (@BewareTheLs), subscribe to the pod, leave us a rating and give us feedback. Much love! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Episode 152 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “For What It's Worth”, and the short but eventful career of Buffalo Springfield. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" by Glen Campbell. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As usual, there's a Mixcloud mix containing all the songs excerpted in the episode. This four-CD box set is the definitive collection of Buffalo Springfield's work, while if you want the mono version of the second album, the stereo version of the first, and the final album as released, but no demos or outtakes, you want this more recent box set. For What It's Worth: The Story of Buffalo Springfield by Richey Furay and John Einarson is obviously Furay's version of the story, but all the more interesting for that. For information on Steve Stills' early life I used Stephen Stills: Change Partners by David Roberts.  Information on both Stills and Young comes from Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young by David Browne.  Jimmy McDonough's Shakey is the definitive biography of Neil Young, while Young's Waging Heavy Peace is his autobiography. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before we begin -- this episode deals with various disabilities. In particular, there are descriptions of epileptic seizures that come from non-medically-trained witnesses, many of whom took ableist attitudes towards the seizures. I don't know enough about epilepsy to know how accurate their descriptions and perceptions are, and I apologise if that means that by repeating some of their statements, I am inadvertently passing on myths about the condition. When I talk about this, I am talking about the after-the-fact recollections of musicians, none of them medically trained and many of them in altered states of consciousness, about events that had happened decades earlier. Please do not take anything said in a podcast about music history as being the last word on the causes or effects of epileptic seizures, rather than how those musicians remember them. Anyway, on with the show. One of the things you notice if you write about protest songs is that a lot of the time, the songs that people talk about as being important or impactful have aged very poorly. Even great songwriters like Bob Dylan or John Lennon, when writing material about the political events of the time, would write material they would later acknowledge was far from their best. Too often a song will be about a truly important event, and be powered by a real sense of outrage at injustice, but it will be overly specific, and then as soon as the immediate issue is no longer topical, the song is at best a curio. For example, the sentencing of the poet and rock band manager John Sinclair to ten years in prison for giving two joints to an undercover police officer was hugely controversial in the early seventies, but by the time John Lennon's song about it was released, Sinclair had been freed by the Supreme Court, and very, very few people would use the song as an example of why Lennon's songwriting still has lasting value: [Excerpt: John Lennon, "John Sinclair"] But there are exceptions, and those tend to be songs where rather than talking about specific headlines, the song is about the emotion that current events have caused. Ninety years on from its first success, for example, "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" still has resonance, because there are still people who are put out of work through no fault of their own, and even those of us who are lucky enough to be financially comfortable have the fear that all too soon it may end, and we may end up like Al begging on the streets: [Excerpt: Rudy Vallee, "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?"] And because of that emotional connection, sometimes the very best protest songs can take on new lives and new meanings, and connect with the way people feel about totally unrelated subjects. Take Buffalo Springfield's one hit. The actual subject of the song couldn't be any more trivial in the grand scheme of things -- a change in zoning regulations around the Sunset Strip that meant people under twenty-one couldn't go to the clubs after 10PM, and the subsequent reaction to that -- but because rather than talking about the specific incident, Steve Stills instead talked about the emotions that it called up, and just noted the fleeting images that he was left with, the song became adopted as an anthem by soldiers in Vietnam. Sometimes what a song says is nowhere near as important as how it says it. [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "For What It's Worth"] Steve Stills seems almost to have been destined to be a musician, although the instrument he started on, the drums, was not the one for which he would become best known. According to Stills, though, he always had an aptitude for rhythm, to the extent that he learned to tapdance almost as soon as he had learned to walk. He started on drums aged eight or nine, after somebody gave him a set of drumsticks. After his parents got sick of him damaging the furniture by playing on every available surface, an actual drum kit followed, and that became his principal instrument, even after he learned to play the guitar at military school, as his roommate owned one. As a teenager, Stills developed an idiosyncratic taste in music, helped by the record collection of his friend Michael Garcia. He didn't particularly like most of the pop music of the time, but he was a big fan of pre-war country music, Motown, girl-group music -- he especially liked the Shirelles -- and Chess blues. He was also especially enamoured of the music of Jimmy Reed, a passion he would later share with his future bandmate Neil Young: [Excerpt: Jimmy Reed, "Baby, What You Want Me To Do?"] In his early teens, he became the drummer for a band called the Radars, and while he was drumming he studied their lead guitarist, Chuck Schwin.  He said later "There was a whole little bunch of us who were into kind of a combination of all the blues guys and others including Chet Atkins, Dick Dale, and Hank Marvin: a very weird cross-section of far-out guitar players." Stills taught himself to play like those guitarists, and in particular he taught himself how to emulate Atkins' Travis-picking style, and became remarkably proficient at it. There exists a recording of him, aged sixteen, singing one of his own songs and playing finger-picked guitar, and while the song is not exactly the strongest thing I've ever heard lyrically, it's clearly the work of someone who is already a confident performer: [Excerpt: Stephen Stills, "Travellin'"] But the main reason he switched to becoming a guitarist wasn't because of his admiration for Chet Atkins or Hank Marvin, but because he started driving and discovered that if you have to load a drum kit into your car and then drive it to rehearsals and gigs you either end up bashing up your car or bashing up the drum kit. As this is not a problem with guitars, Stills decided that he'd move on from the Radars, and join a band named the Continentals as their rhythm guitarist, playing with lead guitarist Don Felder. Stills was only in the Continentals for a few months though, before being replaced by another guitarist, Bernie Leadon, and in general Stills' whole early life is one of being uprooted and moved around. His father had jobs in several different countries, and while for the majority of his time Stills was in the southern US, he also ended up spending time in Costa Rica -- and staying there as a teenager even as the rest of his family moved to El Salvador. Eventually, aged eighteen, he moved to New Orleans, where he formed a folk duo with a friend, Chris Sarns. The two had very different tastes in folk music -- Stills preferred Dylan-style singer-songwriters, while Sarns liked the clean sound of the Kingston Trio -- but they played together for several months before moving to Greenwich Village, where they performed together and separately. They were latecomers to the scene, which had already mostly ended, and many of the folk stars had already gone on to do bigger things. But Stills still saw plenty of great performers there -- Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonius Monk in the jazz clubs, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, and Richard Pryor in the comedy ones, and Simon and Garfunkel, Richie Havens, Fred Neil and Tim Hardin in the folk ones -- Stills said that other than Chet Atkins, Havens, Neil, and Hardin were the people most responsible for his guitar style. Stills was also, at this time, obsessed with Judy Collins' third album -- the album which had featured Roger McGuinn on banjo and arrangements, and which would soon provide several songs for the Byrds to cover: [Excerpt: Judy Collins, "Turn, Turn, Turn"] Judy Collins would soon become a very important figure in Stills' life, but for now she was just the singer on his favourite record. While the Greenwich Village folk scene was no longer quite what it had been a year or two earlier, it was still a great place for a young talented musician to perform. As well as working with Chris Sarns, Stills also formed a trio with his friend John Hopkins and a banjo player called Peter Tork who everyone said looked just like Stills. Tork soon headed out west to seek his fortune, and then Stills got headhunted to join the Au Go Go Singers. This was a group that was being set up in the same style as the New Christy Minstrels -- a nine-piece vocal and instrumental group that would do clean-sounding versions of currently-popular folk songs. The group were signed to Roulette Records, and recorded one album, They Call Us Au-Go-Go Singers, produced by Hugo and Luigi, the production duo we've previously seen working with everyone from the Tokens to the Isley Brothers. Much of the album is exactly the same kind of thing that a million New Christy Minstrels soundalikes were putting out -- and Stills, with his raspy voice, was clearly intended to be the Barry McGuire of this group -- but there was one exception -- a song called "High Flyin' Bird", on which Stills was able to show off the sound that would later make him famous, and which became so associated with him that even though it was written by Billy Edd Wheeler, the writer of "Jackson", even the biography of Stills I used in researching this episode credits "High Flyin' Bird" as being a Stills original: [Excerpt: The Au-Go-Go Singers, "High Flyin' Bird"] One of the other members of the Au-Go-Go Singers, Richie Furay, also got to sing a lead vocal on the album, on the Tom Paxton song "Where I'm Bound": [Excerpt: The Au-Go-Go Singers, "Where I'm Bound"] The Au-Go-Go Singers got a handful of dates around the folk scene, and Stills and Furay became friendly with another singer playing the same circuit, Gram Parsons. Parsons was one of the few people they knew who could see the value in current country music, and convinced both Stills and Furay to start paying more attention to what was coming out of Nashville and Bakersfield. But soon the Au-Go-Go Singers split up. Several venues where they might otherwise have been booked were apparently scared to book an act that was associated with Morris Levy, and also the market for big folk ensembles dried up more or less overnight when the Beatles hit the music scene. But several of the group -- including Stills but not Furay -- decided they were going to continue anyway, and formed a group called The Company, and they went on a tour of Canada. And one of the venues they played was the Fourth Dimension coffee house in Fort William, Ontario, and there their support act was a rock band called The Squires: [Excerpt: The Squires, "(I'm a Man And) I Can't Cry"] The lead guitarist of the Squires, Neil Young, had a lot in common with Stills, and they bonded instantly. Both men had parents who had split up when they were in their teens, and had a successful but rather absent father and an overbearing mother. And both had shown an interest in music even as babies. According to Young's mother, when he was still in nappies, he would pull himself up by the bars  of his playpen and try to dance every time he heard "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie": [Excerpt: Pinetop Smith, "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie"] Young, though, had had one crucial experience which Stills had not had. At the age of six, he'd come down with polio, and become partially paralysed. He'd spent months in hospital before he regained his ability to walk, and the experience had also affected him in other ways. While he was recovering, he would draw pictures of trains -- other than music, his big interest, almost an obsession, was with electric train sets, and that obsession would remain with him throughout his life -- but for the first time he was drawing with his right hand rather than his left. He later said "The left-hand side got a little screwed. Feels different from the right. If I close my eyes, my left side, I really don't know where it is—but over the years I've discovered that almost one hundred percent for sure it's gonna be very close to my right side … probably to the left. That's why I started appearing to be ambidextrous, I think. Because polio affected my left side, and I think I was left-handed when I was born. What I have done is use the weak side as the dominant one because the strong side was injured." Both Young's father Scott Young -- a very famous Canadian writer and sports broadcaster, who was by all accounts as well known in Canada during his lifetime as his son -- and Scott's brother played ukulele, and they taught Neil how to play, and his first attempt at forming a group had been to get his friend Comrie Smith to get a pair of bongos and play along with him to Preston Epps' "Bongo Rock": [Excerpt: Preston Epps, "Bongo Rock"] Neil Young had liked all the usual rock and roll stars of the fifties  -- though in his personal rankings, Elvis came a distant third behind Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis -- but his tastes ran more to the more darkly emotional. He loved "Maybe" by the Chantels, saying "Raw soul—you cannot miss it. That's the real thing. She was believin' every word she was singin'." [Excerpt: The Chantels, "Maybe"] What he liked more than anything was music that had a mainstream surface but seemed slightly off-kilter. He was a major fan of Roy Orbison, saying, "it's almost impossible to comprehend the depth of that soul. It's so deep and dark it just keeps on goin' down—but it's not black. It's blue, deep blue. He's just got it. The drama. There's something sad but proud about Roy's music", and he would say similar things about Del Shannon, saying "He struck me as the ultimate dark figure—behind some Bobby Rydell exterior, y'know? “Hats Off to Larry,” “Runaway,” “Swiss Maid”—very, very inventive. The stuff was weird. Totally unaffected." More surprisingly, perhaps, he was a particular fan of Bobby Darin, who he admired so much because Darin could change styles at the drop of a hat, going from novelty rock and roll like "Splish Splash" to crooning "Mack The Knife" to singing Tim Hardin songs like "If I Were a Carpenter", without any of them seeming any less authentic. As he put it later "He just changed. He's completely different. And he's really into it. Doesn't sound like he's not there. “Dream Lover,” “Mack the Knife,” “If I Were a Carpenter,” “Queen of the Hop,” “Splish Splash”—tell me about those records, Mr. Darin. Did you write those all the same day, or what happened? He just changed so much. Just kinda went from one place to another. So it's hard to tell who Bobby Darin really was." And one record which Young was hugely influenced by was Floyd Cramer's country instrumental, "Last Date": [Excerpt: Floyd Cramer, "Last Date"] Now, that was a very important record in country music, and if you want to know more about it I strongly recommend listening to the episode of Cocaine and Rhinestones on the Nashville A-Team, which has a long section on the track, but the crucial thing to know about that track is that it's one of the earliest examples of what is known as slip-note playing, where the piano player, before hitting the correct note, briefly hits the note a tone below it, creating a brief discord. Young absolutely loved that sound, and wanted to make a sound like that on the guitar. And then, when he and his mother moved to Winnipeg after his parents' divorce, he found someone who was doing just that. It was the guitarist in a group variously known as Chad Allan and the Reflections and Chad Allan and the Expressions. That group had relatives in the UK who would send them records, and so where most Canadian bands would do covers of American hits, Chad Allan and the Reflections would do covers of British hits, like their version of Geoff Goddard's "Tribute to Buddy Holly", a song that had originally been produced by Joe Meek: [Excerpt: Chad Allan and the Reflections, "Tribute to Buddy Holly"] That would later pay off for them in a big way, when they recorded a version of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates' "Shakin' All Over", for which their record label tried to create an air of mystery by releasing it with no artist name, just "Guess Who?" on the label. It became a hit, the name stuck, and they became The Guess Who: [Excerpt: The Guess Who, "Shakin' All Over"] But at this point they, and their guitarist Randy Bachman, were just another group playing around Winnipeg. Bachman, though, was hugely impressive to Neil Young for a few reasons. The first was that he really did have a playing style that was a lot like the piano style of Floyd Cramer -- Young would later say "it was Randy Bachman who did it first. Randy was the first one I ever heard do things on the guitar that reminded me of Floyd. He'd do these pulls—“darrr darrrr,” this two-note thing goin' together—harmony, with one note pulling and the other note stayin' the same." Bachman also had built the first echo unit that Young heard a guitarist play in person. He'd discovered that by playing with the recording heads on a tape recorder owned by his mother, he could replicate the tape echo that Sam Phillips had used at Sun Studios -- and once he'd attached that to his amplifier, he realised how much the resulting sound sounded like his favourite guitarist, Hank Marvin of the Shadows, another favourite of Neil Young's: [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Man of Mystery"] Young soon started looking to Bachman as something of a mentor figure, and he would learn a lot of guitar techniques second hand from Bachman -- every time a famous musician came to the area, Bachman would go along and stand right at the front and watch the guitarist, and make note of the positions their fingers were in. Then Bachman would replicate those guitar parts with the Reflections, and Neil Young would stand in front of him and make notes of where *his* fingers were. Young joined a band on the local circuit called the Esquires, but soon either quit or was fired, depending on which version of the story you choose to believe. He then formed his own rival band, the Squires, with no "e", much to the disgust of his ex-bandmates. In July 1963, five months after they formed, the  Squires released their first record, "Aurora" backed with "The Sultan", on a tiny local label. Both tracks were very obviously influenced by the Shadows: [Excerpt: The Squires, "Aurora"] The Squires were a mostly-instrumental band for the first year or so they were together, and then the Beatles hit North America, and suddenly people didn't want to hear surf instrumentals and Shadows covers any more, they only wanted to hear songs that sounded a bit like the Beatles. The Squires started to work up the appropriate repertoire -- two songs that have been mentioned as in their set at this point are the Beatles album track "It Won't Be Long", and "Money" which the Beatles had also covered -- but they didn't have a singer, being an instrumental group. They could get in a singer, of course, but that would mean splitting the money with another person. So instead, the guitarist, who had never had any intention of becoming a singer, was more or less volunteered for the role. Over the next eighteen months or so the group's repertoire moved from being largely instrumental to largely vocal, and the group also seem to have shuttled around a bit between two different cities -- Winnipeg and Fort William, staying in one for a while and then moving back to the other. They travelled between the two in Young's car, a Buick Roadmaster hearse. In Winnipeg, Young first met up with a singer named Joni Anderson, who was soon to get married to Chuck Mitchell and would become better known by her married name. The two struck up a friendship, though by all accounts never a particularly close one -- they were too similar in too many ways; as Mitchell later said “Neil and I have a lot in common: Canadian; Scorpios; polio in the same epidemic, struck the same parts of our body; and we both have a black sense of humor". They were both also idiosyncratic artists who never fit very well into boxes. In Fort William the Squires made a few more records, this time vocal tracks like "I'll Love You Forever": [Excerpt: The Squires, "I'll Love You Forever"] It was also in Fort William that Young first encountered two acts that would make a huge impression on him. One was a group called The Thorns, consisting of Tim Rose, Jake Holmes, and Rich Husson. The Thorns showed Young that there was interesting stuff being done on the fringes of the folk music scene. He later said "One of my favourites was “Oh Susannah”—they did this arrangement that was bizarre. It was in a minor key, which completely changed everything—and it was rock and roll. So that idea spawned arrangements of all these other songs for me. I did minor versions of them all. We got into it. That was a certain Squires stage that never got recorded. Wish there were tapes of those shows. We used to do all this stuff, a whole kinda music—folk-rock. We took famous old folk songs like “Clementine,” “She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain,” “Tom Dooley,” and we did them all in minor keys based on the Tim Rose arrangement of “Oh Susannah.” There are no recordings of the Thorns in existence that I know of, but presumably that arrangement that Young is talking about is the version that Rose also later did with the Big 3, which we've heard in a few other episodes: [Excerpt: The Big 3, "The Banjo Song"] The other big influence was, of course, Steve Stills, and the two men quickly found themselves influencing each other deeply. Stills realised that he could bring more rock and roll to his folk-music sound, saying that what amazed him was the way the Squires could go from "Cottonfields" (the Lead Belly song) to "Farmer John", the R&B song by Don and Dewey that was becoming a garage-rock staple. Young in turn was inspired to start thinking about maybe going more in the direction of folk music. The Squires even renamed themselves the High-Flying Birds, after the song that Stills had recorded with the Au Go Go Singers. After The Company's tour of Canada, Stills moved back to New York for a while. He now wanted to move in a folk-rock direction, and for a while he tried to persuade his friend John Sebastian to let him play bass in his new band, but when the Lovin' Spoonful decided against having him in the band, he decided to move West to San Francisco, where he'd heard there was a new music scene forming. He enjoyed a lot of the bands he saw there, and in particular he was impressed by the singer of a band called the Great Society: [Excerpt: The Great Society, "Somebody to Love"] He was much less impressed with the rest of her band, and seriously considered going up to her and asking if she wanted to work with some *real* musicians instead of the unimpressive ones she was working with, but didn't get his nerve up. We will, though, be hearing more about Grace Slick in future episodes. Instead, Stills decided to move south to LA, where many of the people he'd known in Greenwich Village were now based. Soon after he got there, he hooked up with two other musicians, a guitarist named Steve Young and a singer, guitarist, and pianist named Van Dyke Parks. Parks had a record contract at MGM -- he'd been signed by Tom Wilson, the same man who had turned Dylan electric, signed Simon and Garfunkel, and produced the first albums by the Mothers of Invention. With Wilson, Parks put out a couple of singles in 1966, "Come to the Sunshine": [Excerpt: The Van Dyke Parks, "Come to the Sunshine"] And "Number Nine", a reworking of the Ode to Joy from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: [Excerpt: The Van Dyke Parks, "Number Nine"]Parks, Stills, and Steve Young became The Van Dyke Parks Band, though they didn't play together for very long, with their most successful performance being as the support act for the Lovin' Spoonful for a show in Arizona. But they did have a lasting resonance -- when Van Dyke Parks finally got the chance to record his first solo album, he opened it with Steve Young singing the old folk song "Black Jack Davy", filtered to sound like an old tape: [Excerpt: Steve Young, "Black Jack Davy"] And then it goes into a song written for Parks by Randy Newman, but consisting of Newman's ideas about Parks' life and what he knew about him, including that he had been third guitar in the Van Dyke Parks Band: [Excerpt: Van Dyke Parks, "Vine Street"] Parks and Stills also wrote a few songs together, with one of their collaborations, "Hello, I've Returned", later being demoed by Stills for Buffalo Springfield: [Excerpt: Steve Stills, "Hello, I've Returned"] After the Van Dyke Parks Band fell apart, Parks went on to many things, including a brief stint on keyboards in the Mothers of Invention, and we'll be talking more about him next episode. Stills formed a duo called the Buffalo Fish, with his friend Ron Long. That soon became an occasional trio when Stills met up again with his old Greenwich Village friend Peter Tork, who joined the group on the piano. But then Stills auditioned for the Monkees and was turned down because he had bad teeth -- or at least that's how most people told the story. Stills has later claimed that while he turned up for the Monkees auditions, it wasn't to audition, it was to try to pitch them songs, which seems implausible on the face of it. According to Stills, he was offered the job and turned it down because he'd never wanted it. But whatever happened, Stills suggested they might want his friend Peter, who looked just like him apart from having better teeth, and Peter Tork got the job. But what Stills really wanted to do was to form a proper band. He'd had the itch to do it ever since seeing the Squires, and he decided he should ask Neil Young to join. There was only one problem -- when he phoned Young, the phone was answered by Young's mother, who told Stills that Neil had moved out to become a folk singer, and she didn't know where he was. But then Stills heard from his old friend Richie Furay. Furay was still in Greenwich Village, and had decided to write to Stills. He didn't know where Stills was, other than that he was in California somewhere, so he'd written to Stills' father in El Salvador. The letter had been returned, because the postage had been short by one cent, so Furay had resent it with the correct postage. Stills' father had then forwarded the letter to the place Stills had been staying in San Francisco, which had in turn forwarded it on to Stills in LA. Furay's letter mentioned this new folk singer who had been on the scene for a while and then disappeared again, Neil Young, who had said he knew Stills, and had been writing some great songs, one of which Furay had added to his own set. Stills got in touch with Furay and told him about this great band he was forming in LA, which he wanted Furay to join. Furay was in, and travelled from New York to LA, only to be told that at this point there were no other members of this great band, but they'd definitely find some soon. They got a publishing deal with Columbia/Screen Gems, which gave them enough money to not starve, but what they really needed was to find some other musicians. They did, when driving down Hollywood Boulevard on April the sixth, 1966. There, stuck in traffic going the other way, they saw a hearse... After Steve Stills had left Fort William, so had Neil Young. He hadn't initially intended to -- the High-Flying Birds still had a regular gig, but Young and some of his friends had gone away for a few days on a road trip in his hearse. But unfortunately the transmission on the hearse had died, and Young and his friends had been stranded. Many years later, he would write a eulogy to the hearse, which he and Stills would record together: [Excerpt: The Stills-Young Band, "Long May You Run"] Young and his friends had all hitch-hiked in different directions -- Young had ended up in Toronto, where his dad lived, and had stayed with his dad for a while. The rest of his band had eventually followed him there, but Young found the Toronto music scene not to his taste -- the folk and rock scenes there were very insular and didn't mingle with each other, and the group eventually split up. Young even took on a day job for a while, for the only time in his life, though he soon quit. Young started basically commuting between Toronto and New York, a distance of several hundred miles, going to Greenwich Village for a while before ending up back in Toronto, and ping-ponging between the two. In New York, he met up with Richie Furay, and also had a disastrous audition for Elektra Records as a solo artist. One of the songs he sang in the audition was "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing", the song which Furay liked so much he started performing it himself. Young doesn't normally explain his songs, but as this was one of the first he ever wrote, he talked about it in interviews in the early years, before he decided to be less voluble about his art. The song was apparently about the sense of youthful hope being crushed. The instigation for it was Young seeing his girlfriend with another man, but the central image, of Clancy not singing, came from Young's schooldays. The Clancy in question was someone Young liked as one of the other weird kids at school. He was disabled, like Young, though with MS rather than polio, and he would sing to himself in the hallways at school. Sadly, of course, the other kids would mock and bully him for that, and eventually he ended up stopping. Young said about it "After awhile, he got so self-conscious he couldn't do his thing any more. When someone who is as beautiful as that and as different as that is actually killed by his fellow man—you know what I mean—like taken and sorta chopped down—all the other things are nothing compared to this." [Excerpt: Neil Young, "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing (Elektra demo)"] One thing I should say for anyone who listens to the Mixcloud for this episode, that song, which will be appearing in a couple of different versions, has one use of a term for Romani people that some (though not all) consider a slur. It's not in the excerpts I'll be using in this episode, but will be in the full versions on the Mixcloud. Sadly that word turns up time and again in songs of this era... When he wasn't in New York, Young was living in Toronto in a communal apartment owned by a folk singer named Vicki Taylor, where many of the Toronto folk scene would stay. Young started listening a lot to Taylor's Bert Jansch albums, which were his first real exposure to the British folk-baroque style of guitar fingerpicking, as opposed to the American Travis-picking style, and Young would soon start to incorporate that style into his own playing: [Excerpt: Bert Jansch, "Angie"] Another guitar influence on Young at this point was another of the temporary tenants of Taylor's flat, John Kay, who would later go on to be one of the founding members of Steppenwolf. Young credited Kay with having a funky rhythm guitar style that Young incorporated into his own. While he was in Toronto, he started getting occasional gigs in Detroit, which is "only" a couple of hundred miles away, set up by Joni and Chuck Mitchell, both of whom also sometimes stayed at Taylor's. And it was in Detroit that Neil Young became, albeit very briefly, a Motown artist. The Mynah Birds were a band in Toronto that had at one point included various future members of Steppenwolf, and they were unusual for the time in that they were a white band with a Black lead singer, Ricky Matthews. They also had a rich manager, John Craig Eaton, the heir to the Eaton's department store fortune, who basically gave them whatever money they wanted -- they used to go to his office and tell him they needed seven hundred dollars for lunch, and he'd hand it to them. They were looking for a new guitarist when Bruce Palmer, their bass player, bumped into Neil Young carrying an amp and asked if he was interested in joining. He was. The Mynah Birds quickly became one of the best bands in Toronto, and Young and Matthews became close, both as friends and as a performance team. People who saw them live would talk about things like a song called “Hideaway”, written by Young and Matthews, which had a spot in the middle where Young would start playing a harmonica solo, throw the harmonica up in the air mid-solo, Matthews would catch it, and he would then finish the solo. They got signed to Motown, who were at this point looking to branch out into the white guitar-group market, and they were put through the Motown star-making machine. They recorded an entire album, which remains unreleased, but they did release a single, "It's My Time": [Excerpt: The Mynah Birds, "It's My Time"] Or at least, they released a handful of promo copies. The single was pulled from release after Ricky Matthews got arrested. It turned out his birth name wasn't Ricky Matthews, but James Johnson, and that he wasn't from Toronto as he'd told everyone, but from Buffalo, New York. He'd fled to Canada after going AWOL from the Navy, not wanting to be sent to Vietnam, and he was arrested and jailed for desertion. After getting out of jail, he would start performing under yet another name, and as Rick James would have a string of hits in the seventies and eighties: [Excerpt: Rick James, "Super Freak"] Most of the rest of the group continued gigging as The Mynah Birds, but Young and Palmer had other plans. They sold the expensive equipment Eaton had bought the group, and Young bought a new hearse, which he named Mort 2 – Mort had been his first hearse. And according to one of the band's friends in Toronto, the crucial change in their lives came when Neil Young heard a song on a jukebox: [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "California Dreamin'"] Young apparently heard "California Dreamin'" and immediately said "Let's go to California and become rock stars". Now, Young later said of this anecdote that "That sounds like a Canadian story to me. That sounds too real to be true", and he may well be right. Certainly the actual wording of the story is likely incorrect -- people weren't talking about "rock stars" in 1966. Google's Ngram viewer has the first use of the phrase in print being in 1969, and the phrase didn't come into widespread usage until surprisingly late -- even granting that phrases enter slang before they make it to print, it still seems implausible. But even though the precise wording might not be correct, something along those lines definitely seems to have happened, albeit possibly less dramatically. Young's friend Comrie Smith independently said that Young told him “Well, Comrie, I can hear the Mamas and the Papas singing ‘All the leaves are brown, and the skies are gray …' I'm gonna go down to the States and really make it. I'm on my way. Today North Toronto, tomorrow the world!” Young and Palmer loaded up Mort 2 with a bunch of their friends and headed towards California. On the way, they fell out with most of the friends, who parted from them, and Young had an episode which in retrospect may have been his first epileptic seizure. They decided when they got to California that they were going to look for Steve Stills, as they'd heard he was in LA and neither of them knew anyone else in the state. But after several days of going round the Sunset Strip clubs asking if anyone knew Steve Stills, and sleeping in the hearse as they couldn't afford anywhere else, they were getting fed up and about to head off to San Francisco, as they'd heard there was a good music scene there, too. They were going to leave that day, and they were stuck in traffic on Sunset Boulevard, about to head off, when Stills and Furay came driving in the other direction. Furay happened to turn his head, to brush away a fly, and saw a hearse with Ontario license plates. He and Stills both remembered that Young drove a hearse, and so they assumed it must be him. They started honking at the hearse, then did a U-turn. They got Young's attention, and they all pulled into the parking lot at Ben Frank's, the Sunset Strip restaurant that attracted such a hip crowd the Monkees' producers had asked for "Ben Frank's types" in their audition advert. Young introduced Stills and Furay to Palmer, and now there *was* a group -- three singing, songwriting, guitarists and a bass player. Now all they needed was a drummer. There were two drummers seriously considered for the role. One of them, Billy Mundi, was technically the better player, but Young didn't like playing with him as much -- and Mundi also had a better offer, to join the Mothers of Invention as their second drummer -- before they'd recorded their first album, they'd had two drummers for a few months, but Denny Bruce, their second drummer, had become ill with glandular fever and they'd reverted to having Jimmy Carl Black play solo. Now they were looking for someone else, and Mundi took that role. The other drummer, who Young preferred anyway, was another Canadian, Dewey Martin. Martin was a couple of years older than the rest of the group, and by far the most experienced. He'd moved from Canada to Nashville in his teens, and according to Martin he had been taken under the wing of Hank Garland, the great session guitarist most famous for "Sugarfoot Rag": [Excerpt: Hank Garland, "Sugarfoot Rag"] We heard Garland playing with Elvis and others in some of the episodes around 1960, and by many reckonings he was the best session guitarist in Nashville, but in 1961 he had a car accident that left him comatose, and even though he recovered from the coma and lived another thirty-three years, he never returned to recording. According to Martin, though, Garland would still sometimes play jazz clubs around Nashville after the accident, and one day Martin walked into a club and saw him playing. The drummer he was playing with got up and took a break, taking his sticks with him, so Martin got up on stage and started playing, using two combs instead of sticks. Garland was impressed, and told Martin that Faron Young needed a drummer, and he could get him the gig. At the time Young was one of the biggest stars in country music. That year, 1961, he had three country top ten hits, including a number one with his version of Willie Nelson's "Hello Walls", produced by Ken Nelson: [Excerpt: Faron Young, "Hello Walls"] Martin joined Faron Young's band for a while, and also ended up playing short stints in the touring bands of various other Nashville-based country and rock stars, including Patsy Cline, Roy Orbison, and the Everly Brothers, before heading to LA for a while. Then Mel Taylor of the Ventures hooked him up with some musicians in the Pacific Northwest scene, and Martin started playing there under the name Sir Raleigh and the Coupons with various musicians. After a while he travelled back to LA where he got some members of the LA group Sons of Adam to become a permanent lineup of Coupons, and they recorded several singles with Martin singing lead, including the Tommy Boyce and Steve Venet song "Tomorrow's Gonna Be Another Day", later recorded by the Monkees: [Excerpt: Sir Raleigh and the Coupons, "Tomorrow's Gonna Be Another Day"] He then played with the Standells, before joining the Modern Folk Quartet for a short while, as they were transitioning from their folk sound to a folk-rock style. He was only with them for a short while, and it's difficult to get precise details -- almost everyone involved with Buffalo Springfield has conflicting stories about their own careers with timelines that don't make sense, which is understandable given that people were talking about events decades later and memory plays tricks. "Fast" Eddie Hoh had joined the Modern Folk Quartet on drums in late 1965, at which point they became the Modern Folk Quintet, and nothing I've read about that group talks about Hoh ever actually leaving, but apparently Martin joined them in February 1966, which might mean he's on their single "Night-Time Girl", co-written by Al Kooper and produced and arranged by Jack Nitzsche: [Excerpt: The Modern Folk Quintet, "Night-Time Girl"] After that, Martin was taken on by the Dillards, a bluegrass band who are now possibly most famous for having popularised the Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith song "Duellin' Banjos", which they recorded on their first album and played on the Andy Griffith Show a few years before it was used in Deliverance: [Excerpt: The Dillards, "Duellin' Banjos"] The Dillards had decided to go in a country-rock direction -- and Doug Dillard would later join the Byrds and make records with Gene Clark -- but they were hesitant about it, and after a brief period with Martin in the band they decided to go back to their drummerless lineup. To soften the blow, they told him about another band that was looking for a drummer -- their manager, Jim Dickson, who was also the Byrds' manager, knew Stills and his bandmates. Dewey Martin was in the group. The group still needed a name though. They eventually took their name from a brand of steam roller, after seeing one on the streets when some roadwork was being done. Everyone involved disagrees as to who came up with the name. Steve Stills at one point said it was a group decision after Neil Young and the group's manager Frazier Mohawk stole the nameplate off the steamroller, and later Stills said that Richey Furay had suggested the name while they were walking down the street, Dewey Martin said it was his idea, Neil Young said that he, Steve Sills, and Van Dyke Parks had been walking down the street and either Young or Stills had seen the nameplate and suggested the name, and Van Dyke Parks says that *he* saw the nameplate and suggested it to Dewey Martin: [Excerpt: Steve Stills and Van Dyke Parks on the name] For what it's worth, I tend to believe Van Dyke Parks in most instances -- he's an honest man, and he seems to have a better memory of the sixties than many of his friends who led more chemically interesting lives. Whoever came up with it, the name worked -- as Stills later put it "We thought it was pretty apt, because Neil Young is from Manitoba which is buffalo country, and  Richie Furay was from Springfield, Ohio -- and I'm the field!" It almost certainly also helped that the word "buffalo" had been in the name of Stills' previous group, Buffalo Fish. On the eleventh of April, 1966, Buffalo Springfield played their first gig, at the Troubadour, using equipment borrowed from the Dillards. Chris Hillman of the Byrds was in the audience and was impressed. He got the group a support slot on a show the Byrds and the Dillards were doing a few days later in San Bernardino. That show was compered by a Merseyside-born British DJ, John Ravenscroft, who had managed to become moderately successful in US radio by playing up his regional accent so he sounded more like the Beatles. He would soon return to the UK, and start broadcasting under the name John Peel. Hillman also got them a week-long slot at the Whisky A-Go-Go, and a bidding war started between record labels to sign the band. Dunhill offered five thousand dollars, Warners counted with ten thousand, and then Atlantic offered twelve thousand. Atlantic were *just* starting to get interested in signing white guitar groups -- Jerry Wexler never liked that kind of music, always preferring to stick with soul and R&B, but Ahmet Ertegun could see which way things were going. Atlantic had only ever signed two other white acts before -- Neil Young's old favourite Bobby Darin, who had since left the label, and Sonny and Cher. And Sonny and Cher's management and production team, Brian Stone and Charlie Greene, were also very interested in the group, who even before they had made a record had quickly become the hottest band on the circuit, even playing the Hollywood Bowl as the Rolling Stones' support act. Buffalo Springfield already had managers -- Frazier Mohawk and Richard Davis, the lighting man at the Troubadour (who was sometimes also referred to as Dickie Davis, but I'll use his full name so as not to cause unnecessary confusion in British people who remember the sports TV presenter of the same name), who Mohawk had enlisted to help him. But Stone and Greene weren't going to let a thing like that stop them. According to anonymous reports quoted without attribution in David Roberts' biography of Stills -- so take this with as many grains of salt as you want -- Stone and Greene took Mohawk for a ride around LA in a limo, just the three of them, a gun, and a used hotdog napkin. At the end of the ride, the hotdog napkin had Mohawk's scrawled signature, signing the group over to Stone and Greene. Davis stayed on, but was demoted to just doing their lights. The way things ended up, the group signed to Stone and Greene's production company, who then leased their masters to Atlantic's Atco subsidiary. A publishing company was also set up for the group's songs -- owned thirty-seven point five percent by Atlantic, thirty-seven point five percent by Stone and Greene, and the other twenty-five percent split six ways between the group and Davis, who they considered their sixth member. Almost immediately, Charlie Greene started playing Stills and Young off against each other, trying a divide-and-conquer strategy on the group. This was quite easy, as both men saw themselves as natural leaders, though Stills was regarded by everyone as the senior partner -- the back cover of their first album would contain the line "Steve is the leader but we all are". Stills and Young were the two stars of the group as far as the audience were concerned -- though most musicians who heard them play live say that the band's real strength was in its rhythm section, with people comparing Palmer's playing to that of James Jamerson. But Stills and Young would get into guitar battles on stage, one-upping each other, in ways that turned the tension between them in creative directions. Other clashes, though were more petty -- both men had very domineering mothers, who would actually call the group's management to complain about press coverage if their son was given less space than the other one. The group were also not sure about Young's voice -- to the extent that Stills was known to jokingly apologise to the audience before Young took a lead vocal -- and so while the song chosen as the group's first A-side was Young's "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing", Furay was chosen to sing it, rather than Young: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing"] On the group's first session, though, both Stills and Young realised that their producers didn't really have a clue -- the group had built up arrangements that had a complex interplay of instruments and vocals, but the producers insisted on cutting things very straightforwardly, with a basic backing track and then the vocals. They also thought that the song was too long so the group should play faster. Stills and Young quickly decided that they were going to have to start producing their own material, though Stone and Greene would remain the producers for the first album. There was another bone of contention though, because in the session the initial plan had been for Stills' song "Go and Say Goodbye" to be the A-side with Young's song as the B-side. It was flipped, and nobody seems quite sure why -- it's certainly the case that, whatever the merits of the two tracks as songs, Stills' song was the one that would have been more likely to become a hit. "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing" was a flop, but it did get some local airplay. The next single, "Burned", was a Young song as well, and this time did have Young taking the lead, though in a song dominated by harmonies: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Burned"] Over the summer, though, something had happened that would affect everything for the group -- Neil Young had started to have epileptic seizures. At first these were undiagnosed episodes, but soon they became almost routine events, and they would often happen on stage, particularly at moments of great stress or excitement. Several other members of the group became convinced -- entirely wrongly -- that Young was faking these seizures in order to get women to pay attention to him. They thought that what he wanted was for women to comfort him and mop his brow, and that collapsing would get him that. The seizures became so common that Richard Davis, the group's lighting tech, learned to recognise the signs of a seizure before it happened. As soon as it looked like Young was about to collapse the lights would turn on, someone would get ready to carry him off stage, and Richie Furay would know to grab Young's guitar before he fell so that the guitar wouldn't get damaged. Because they weren't properly grounded and Furay had an electric guitar of his own, he'd get a shock every time. Young would later claim that during some of the seizures, he would hallucinate that he was another person, in another world, living another life that seemed to have its own continuity -- people in the other world would recognise him and talk to him as if he'd been away for a while -- and then when he recovered he would have to quickly rebuild his identity, as if temporarily amnesiac, and during those times he would find things like the concept of lying painful. The group's first album came out in December, and they were very, very, unhappy with it. They thought the material was great, but they also thought that the production was terrible. Stone and Greene's insistence that they record the backing tracks first and then overdub vocals, rather than singing live with the instruments, meant that the recordings, according to Stills and Young in particular, didn't capture the sound of the group's live performance, and sounded sterile. Stills and Young thought they'd fixed some of that in the mono mix, which they spent ten days on, but then Stone and Greene did the stereo mix without consulting the band, in less than two days, and the album was released at precisely the time that stereo was starting to overtake mono in the album market. I'm using the mono mixes in this podcast, but for decades the only versions available were the stereo ones, which Stills and Young both loathed. Ahmet Ertegun also apparently thought that the demo versions of the songs -- some of which were eventually released on a box set in 2001 -- were much better than the finished studio recordings. The album was not a success on release, but it did contain the first song any of the group had written to chart. Soon after its release, Van Dyke Parks' friend Lenny Waronker was producing a single by a group who had originally been led by Sly Stone and had been called Sly and the Mojo Men. By this time Stone was no longer involved in the group, and they were making music in a very different style from the music their former leader would later become known for. Parks was brought in to arrange a baroque-pop version of Stills' album track "Sit Down I Think I Love You" for the group, and it became their only top forty hit, reaching number thirty-six: [Excerpt: The Mojo Men, "Sit Down I Think I Love You"] It was shortly after the first Buffalo Springfield album was released, though, that Steve Stills wrote what would turn out to be *his* group's only top forty single. The song had its roots in both LA and San Francisco. The LA roots were more obvious -- the song was written about a specific experience Stills had had. He had been driving to Sunset Strip from Laurel Canyon on November the twelfth 1966, and he had seen a mass of young people and police in riot gear, and he had immediately turned round, partly because he didn't want to get involved in what looked to be a riot, and partly because he'd been inspired -- he had the idea for a lyric, which he pretty much finished in the car even before he got home: [Excerpt: The Buffalo Springfield, "For What it's Worth"] The riots he saw were what became known later as the Riot on Sunset Strip. This was a minor skirmish between the police and young people of LA -- there had been complaints that young people had been spilling out of the nightclubs on Sunset Strip into the street, causing traffic problems, and as a result the city council had introduced various heavy-handed restrictions, including a ten PM curfew for all young people in the area, removing the permits that many clubs had which allowed people under twenty-one to be present, forcing the Whisky A-Go-Go to change its name just to "the Whisk", and forcing a club named Pandora's Box, which was considered the epicentre of the problem, to close altogether. Flyers had been passed around calling for a "funeral" for Pandora's Box -- a peaceful gathering at which people could say goodbye to a favourite nightspot, and a thousand people had turned up. The police also turned up, and in the heavy-handed way common among law enforcement, they managed to provoke a peaceful party and turn it into a riot. This would not normally be an event that would be remembered even a year later, let alone nearly sixty years later, but Sunset Strip was the centre of the American rock music world in the period, and of the broader youth entertainment field. Among those arrested at the riot, for example, were Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda, neither of whom were huge stars at the time, but who were making cheap B-movies with Roger Corman for American International Pictures. Among the cheap exploitation films that American International Pictures made around this time was one based on the riots, though neither Nicholson, Fonda, or Corman were involved. Riot on Sunset Strip was released in cinemas only four months after the riots, and it had a theme song by Dewey Martin's old colleagues The Standells, which is now regarded as a classic of garage rock: [Excerpt: The Standells, "Riot on Sunset Strip"] The riots got referenced in a lot of other songs, as well. The Mothers of Invention's second album, Absolutely Free, contains the song "Plastic People" which includes this section: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Plastic People"] And the Monkees track "Daily Nightly", written by Michael Nesmith, was always claimed by Nesmith to be an impressionistic portrait of the riots, though the psychedelic lyrics sound to me more like they're talking about drug use and street-walking sex workers than anything to do with the riots: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daily Nightly"] But the song about the riots that would have the most lasting effect on popular culture was the one that Steve Stills wrote that night. Although how much he actually wrote, at least of the music, is somewhat open to question. Earlier that month, Buffalo Springfield had spent some time in San Francisco. They hadn't enjoyed the experience -- as an LA band, they were thought of as a bunch of Hollywood posers by most of the San Francisco scene, with the exception of one band, Moby Grape -- a band who, like them had three guitarist/singer/songwriters, and with whom they got on very well. Indeed, they got on rather better with Moby Grape than they were getting on with each other at this point, because Young and Stills would regularly get into arguments, and every time their argument seemed to be settling down, Dewey Martin would manage to say the wrong thing and get Stills riled up again -- Martin was doing a lot of speed at this point and unable to stop talking, even when it would have been politic to do so. There was even some talk while they were in San Francisco of the bands doing a trade -- Young and Pete Lewis of Moby Grape swapping places -- though that came to nothing. But Stills, according to both Richard Davis and Pete Lewis, had been truly impressed by two Moby Grape songs. One of them was a song called "On the Other Side", which Moby Grape never recorded, but which apparently had a chorus that went "Stop, can't you hear the music ringing in your ear, right before you go, telling you the way is clear," with the group all pausing after the word "Stop". The other was a song called "Murder in my Heart for the Judge": [Excerpt: Moby Grape, "Murder in my Heart for the Judge"] The song Stills wrote had a huge amount of melodic influence from that song, and quite a bit from “On the Other Side”, though he apparently didn't notice until after the record came out, at which point he apologised to Moby Grape. Stills wasn't massively impressed with the song he'd written, and went to Stone and Greene's office to play it for them, saying "I'll play it, for what it's worth". They liked the song and booked a studio to get the song recorded and rush-released, though according to Neil Young neither Stone nor Greene were actually present at the session, and the song was recorded on December the fifth, while some outbursts of rioting were still happening, and released on December the twenty-third. [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "For What it's Worth"] The song didn't have a title when they recorded it, or so Stills thought, but when he mentioned this to Greene and Stone afterwards, they said "Of course it does. You said, 'I'm going to play the song, 'For What It's Worth'" So that became the title, although Ahmet Ertegun didn't like the idea of releasing a single with a title that wasn't in the lyric, so the early pressings of the single had "Stop, Hey, What's That Sound?" in brackets after the title. The song became a big hit, and there's a story told by David Crosby that doesn't line up correctly, but which might shed some light on why. According to Crosby, "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing" got its first airplay because Crosby had played members of Buffalo Springfield a tape he'd been given of the unreleased Beatles track "A Day in the Life", and they'd told their gangster manager-producers about it. Those manager-producers had then hired a sex worker to have sex with Crosby and steal the tape, which they'd then traded to a radio station in return for airplay. That timeline doesn't work, unless the sex worker involved was also a time traveller,  because "A Day in the Life" wasn't even recorded until January 1967 while "Clancy" came out in August 1966, and there'd been two other singles released between then and January 1967. But it *might* be the case that that's what happened with "For What It's Worth", which was released in the last week of December 1966, and didn't really start to do well on the charts for a couple of months. Right after recording the song, the group went to play a residency in New York, of which Ahmet Ertegun said “When they performed there, man, there was no band I ever heard that had the electricity of that group. That was the most exciting group I've ever seen, bar none. It was just mind-boggling.” During that residency they were joined on stage at various points by Mitch Ryder, Odetta, and Otis Redding. While in New York, the group also recorded "Mr. Soul", a song that Young had originally written as a folk song about his experiences with epilepsy, the nature of the soul, and dealing with fame. However, he'd noticed a similarity to "Satisfaction" and decided to lean into it. The track as finally released was heavily overdubbed by Young a few months later, but after it was released he decided he preferred the original take, which by then only existed as a scratchy acetate, which got released on a box set in 2001: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Mr. Soul (original version)"] Everyone has a different story of how the session for that track went -- at least one version of the story has Otis Redding turning up for the session and saying he wanted to record the song himself, as his follow-up to his version of "Satisfaction", but Young being angry at the idea. According to other versions of the story, Greene and Stills got into a physical fight, with Greene having to be given some of the valium Young was taking for his epilepsy to calm him down. "For What it's Worth" was doing well enough on the charts that the album was recalled, and reissued with "For What It's Worth" replacing Stills' song "Baby Don't Scold", but soon disaster struck the band. Bruce Palmer was arrested on drugs charges, and was deported back to Canada just as the song started to rise through the charts. The group needed a new bass player, fast. For a lipsynch appearance on local TV they got Richard Davis to mime the part, and then they got in Ken Forssi, the bass player from Love, for a couple of gigs. They next brought in Ken Koblun, the bass player from the Squires, but he didn't fit in with the rest of the group. The next replacement was Jim Fielder. Fielder was a friend of the group, and knew the material -- he'd subbed for Palmer a few times in 1966 when Palmer had been locked up after less serious busts. And to give some idea of how small a scene the LA scene was, when Buffalo Springfield asked him to become their bass player, he was playing rhythm guitar for the Mothers of Invention, while Billy Mundi was on drums, and had played on their second, as yet unreleased, album, Absolutely Free: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Call any Vegetable"] And before joining the Mothers, Fielder and Mundi had also played together with Van Dyke Parks, who had served his own short stint as a Mother of Invention already, backing Tim Buckley on Buckley's first album: [Excerpt: Tim Buckley, "Aren't You the Girl?"] And the arrangements on that album were by Jack Nitzsche, who would soon become a very close collaborator with Young. "For What it's Worth" kept rising up the charts. Even though it had been inspired by a very local issue, the lyrics were vague enough that people in other situations could apply it to themselves, and it soon became regarded as an anti-war protest anthem -- something Stills did nothing to discourage, as the band were all opposed to the war. The band were also starting to collaborate with other people. When Stills bought a new house, he couldn't move in to it for a while, and so Peter Tork invited him to stay at his house. The two got on so well that Tork invited Stills to produce the next Monkees album -- only to find that Michael Nesmith had already asked Chip Douglas to do it. The group started work on a new album, provisionally titled "Stampede", but sessions didn't get much further than Stills' song "Bluebird" before trouble arose between Young and Stills. The root of the argument seems to have been around the number of songs each got on the album. With Richie Furay also writing, Young was worried that given the others' attitudes to his songwriting, he might get as few as two songs on the album. And Young and Stills were arguing over which song should be the next single, with Young wanting "Mr. Soul" to be the A-side, while Stills wanted "Bluebird" -- Stills making the reasonable case that they'd released two Neil Young songs as singles and gone nowhere, and then they'd released one of Stills', and it had become a massive hit. "Bluebird" was eventually chosen as the A-side, with "Mr. Soul" as the B-side: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Bluebird"] The "Bluebird" session was another fraught one. Fielder had not yet joined the band, and session player Bobby West subbed on bass. Neil Young had recently started hanging out with Jack Nitzsche, and the two were getting very close and working on music together. Young had impressed Nitzsche not just with his songwriting but with his arrogance -- he'd played Nitzsche his latest song, "Expecting to Fly", and Nitzsche had said halfway through "That's a great song", and Young had shushed him and told him to listen, not interrupt. Nitzsche, who had a monstrous ego himself and was also used to working with people like Phil Spector, the Rolling Stones and Sonny Bono, none of them known for a lack of faith in their own abilities, was impressed. Shortly after that, Stills had asked Nitzsch

We're taking a look at a couple of James Hong films. First up we learn about eternal life and wine! It's THE VINEYARD. Then hopping vampires fight the worst gang ever on-screen in THE JITTERS. Then we talk about some Richard Pryor movies, SHE-HULK, and THE FALL.

Joe Rogan vows to never return to Block Island and to tell comedians not to play there!An Aussie comic doing crowd work found out that the audience member with a mullet was a ranked UFC FighterA new Don Rickles bookNeal Brennan on his level of fameHow Ola Dada spends his moneyJo Koy's comedic influences include Richard Pryor and Eddie MurphyDon't bring your baby to a comedy showFacebook group: www.facebook.com/groups/dcnpod - join us to to discuss comedy and your favorite comedians.Instagram is @dailycomedynews https://www.instagram.com/dailycomedynews/?hl=enReddit https://www.reddit.com/r/dailycomedynews/AI generated transcripts at www.dailycomedynews.comTwitter is @dcnpod because the person with what I want tweeted onceSupport the show by Buying Me A Coffee: www.buymeacoffee.com/dailycomedynewsGoodpods: https://goodpods.app.link/2OUMliguTkb and I am @johnnymacEmail: john at thesharkdeck dot comDaily Comedy News is a production of The Shark Deck, the leading company in short form daily podcasts.www.linktr.ee/dailycomedynewsListen Ad-Free and get the episodes early with a premium subscription for $4.99/month on Apple Podcasts. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/daily-comedy-news-podcast-a-podcast-about-comedians/id1474309028

In the tradition of comedians who have made the transition from the stage to the screen, such as Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby, multi-talented Guy Torry has made the leap to comedic actor with great success. Guy has been seen on BET's Comic View, Comedy Central's Premium Blend, Showtime at the Apollo and Russell Simmons: Def Comedy Jam where he made his stand up debut to a national audience. Guy also hosted the enormously successful 52 city comedy tour The Kings of Comedy, which grossed over $37M. He created a unique concept called Phat Comedy Tuesdays which was a weekly showcase for up and coming comedians. This evolved into a weekly spotlight at the Comedy Store on the Sunset Strip entitled The Guy Torry Show where Guy hosts and produces a comedy showcase featuring an improv comedy troupe. This event was regularly attended by the comedy A-List including Eddie Murphy, Chris Tucker and Chris Rock. While attending Southeast Missouri State University, Guy had a curious desire to pursue a career in entertainment. Once in Los Angeles, he landed a job as a production assistant on the Fox comedy Martin. His quick wit captured the attention of the show's writers, producers and eventually the show's star Martin Lawrence. Guy became a contributing writer to the series and had subsequent writing stints on sitcoms such as Minor Adjustments and Moesha. The St. Louis native also received critical acclaim for his work on the small screen starring in the NBC mini-series The 70's, the HBO movie Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, and the UPN drama The Strip. He hosted BET's sports talk show Baller, with four-time NBA World Champion John Salley and three-time NFL Pro Bowler Hugh Douglas. Guy has made guest star appearances on television series including Blind Justice, The Shield, One On One, X Files and NYPD Blue. He also supplied his voice on the animated Nickelodeon series As Told By Ginger. Guy has appeared in such feature films as Funny Money, opposite Chevy Chase, Penelope Ann Miller and Chris McDonald, The Last Stand, starring Anthony Anderson, Darrin Henson, Kevin Hart and written and directed by Russ Parr, Dead and Deader, opposite Dean Cain and Susan Ward, and the independent thriller Slow Burn, opposite Ray Liotta, Taye Diggs, LL Cool J and Mekhi Phifer. Guy has also appeared with Matt Damon, Greg Kinnear and Eva Mendes in the 20th Century Fox Film, Stuck on You, and his other film credits include Runaway Jury, Don't Say A Word, Pearl Harbor, Life, The Animal and most notably American History X. Guy is currently performing in comedy clubs across the country, and resides in Los Angeles.

In 1977, Richard Bachman published his first novel. In an unusual move for a first-time author, Bachman made his publisher promise to release his books with hardly any marketing. Bachman stacked the dice against himself Bachman's books were to skip the hardcover format and go straight to bargain-bin paperback – the kind you'd find mixed in with other nobody-authors, at a truck stop on I-80, somewhere near Grand Island. He also insisted he was unavailable for interviews, which cut his books off from a key marketing channel. Most publishers wouldn't agree to such bizarre terms, but they were especially excited to release Bachman's books. But he still did pretty well Today, forty-five years later, most people have unsurprisingly never heard of Richard Bachman. His books did alright, though: His fourth was optioned for film rights, his fifth sold 28,000 copies, and he got a couple letters a month from fans of his writing. Bachman wasn't Bachman But his books were so good, one Washington D.C. bookstore clerk was suspicious. Steve Brown dug through the Library of Congress copyright records, and confirmed his suspicion: Richard Bachman was Stephen King. Why did one of the world's hottest authors publish – in the same genre – under a pen name? At the time, King's publisher had an almost-superstitious belief that if they published more than one of his books in a year, they would distract readers from This Year's Book (that they let King publish Bachman books with so little fanfare speaks to their conviction in this belief). King later described it as like being married to someone with a drastically-smaller sexual appetite: He had to find an outlet somewhere else. “Either find an audience or disappear quietly” While he was publishing under a pen name, he figured he'd conduct an experiment. He wondered, to what degree was his massive success due to luck? So, as he has said, Stephen King “stacked the dice” against Richard Bachman. He wanted Bachman's books “to go out there and either find an audience or just disappear quietly.” After word got out that Richard Bachman was Stephen King, his books sold even better. That book that sold 28,000 copies for Richard Bachman – Thinner – quickly sold ten times that as a King title. Is seven years & five books long enough? At first glance, King's Bachman experiment is an open-and-shut case: Bachman's books sold way more copies with Stephen King's name on their covers. But King himself feels his experiment got cut short. He said of Bachman, who he killed off in a press release by “cancer of the pseudonym,” “He died with that question – is it work that takes you to the top or is it all just a lottery? – still unanswered.” Bachman worked in anonymity for seven years, and released five books – how is that not enough? Even the pros don't know William Goldman was a two-time Academy-Award-Winning screenwriter. He wrote the screenplays for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Princess Bride, and Misery (which was supposed to be Richard Bachman's sixth book, but instead was released by Stephen King). In Goldman's book, Adventures in the Screen Trade, he pointed out that in one typical movie season, sixteen major films were released by the major studios. One was a runaway success, and ten of those sixteen lost more than ten million dollars. Why did those studios bother making the stinkers? Because, as Goldman said: Nobody knows anything...... Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess and, if you're lucky, an educated one. Nobody knowing anything takes the appeal out of King's Bachman story. It sounded like the perfect story for aspiring creatives to point to and say, “Look, the universe is conspiring against me. If you don't have a big name already, you're screwed.” Nothing guarantees creative success But really, nothing can guarantee success. You could say you have to have connections, and I could point out that Richard Pryor's son played at the Apollo, and got booed off the stage. You could say you need name recognition, and I could tell you that the 28,000 copies Bachman's fifth book sold was four-thousand more than Stephen King's own fourth book sold. You could say all you need is your big break, and I could remind you that Steve Martin was on The Tonight Show – the big break in the comedy business at the time – sixteen times before someone recognized him in public. Nobody knows anything. If movie studios knew blockbusters, that's all they'd make. If record companies knew hits, that's all they'd release. If publishers knew bestsellers, that's all they'd launch. And if venture capitalists knew “unicorns,” they'd just be called capitalists. Quality can't hide Nobody knows anything, but somebody knows something. As Goldman himself said, you can make an educated guess. I bet he'd agree that a ninety-minute cellphone video of a ham sandwich sitting on a plate is unlikely to fill theaters. There was another author, named Robert Galbraith, whose debut novel didn't do great. It sold 1,500 copies in the first few months – not bad either. But there was something fishy about Galbraith's work. A journalist tweeted that she had enjoyed Galbraith's book, but it seemed way too well-written to be the debut novel of who was supposedly a retired military officer. An anonymous account tipped this journalist, saying That's because it's not a debut novel: Robert Galbraith is actually a really well-known author's pseudonym. That led to a computer linguistic analysis and the London Times confronted the alleged author. J. K. Rowling admitted that she was Robert Galbraith, then The Cuckoo's Calling, a crime novel, proceeded to sell like hotcakes. So, of course Rowling's name recognition helped the book sell, but try as she could to hide her identity, she couldn't hide her quality. Her writing was, to paraphrase Steve Martin, so good it couldn't be ignored. Stephen King got to enjoy the anonymity of his pen name for seven years. Rowling hers about three months. Maybe there's some others out there who never got caught, but it seems social media and computer linguistic analysis has shortened the life of pen names. But King and Rowling both had the same problem: You can't hide quality, and you can't hide voice. From the beginning, King got letters asking him if he was Richard Bachman. Bachman had the extra challenge that he wasn't merely copying the style of an author already dominating a genre – he literally was that author. Sometimes a copycat does better than the original, because they can't help but be different as they try to copy. For example, Kurt Cobain said he was trying to rip off the Pixies when he wrote Smells Like Teen Sprit. An exact copy doesn't have much chance, because the original already punctured the exact same vacuum. You can't know anything, so know your work Jerry Seinfeld likes to tell beginning comedians they'll never make it. Because if they hear that from a comedy legend and still do comedy, he figures, they might have a chance. Maybe it's not satisfying that nobody knows anything. It kind of makes you want to throw your hands up and say, What's the use?! But maybe that's a good thing. If you can know that nobody knows anything, and still be dedicated to your craft, maybe you have a shot. About Your Host, David Kadavy David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative. Follow David on: Twitter Instagram Facebook YouTube Subscribe to Love Your Work Apple Podcasts Overcast Spotify Stitcher YouTube RSS Email Support the show on Patreon Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »       Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/nobody-knows-anything/

Superman is a sidekick in this Richard Pryor comedy. Like podcasts try In The Wild https://apple.co/3TcCkICStream Orphan: First Kill https://bit.ly/3R4a1u3 now on Paramount+. Try it FREE!See Top Gun: Maverick in theaters and now bring it home on Digital. Tom Cruise stars in the spectacular, action-packed epic, which critics are calling "one of the greatest movies ever made". Buy Top Gun: Maverick on Digital now and dive into over 110 minutes of incredible behind-the-scenes bonus content! Available at participating retailers. Rated PG-13. From Paramount Pictures.Exploring why Superman 3 is secretly a great movie: Richard Pryor's scene eating performance and his love for Superman movies, Superman drinks, and Superman fights Superman. A brief history of why birthdays suck from Egypt to Rome to Greece and To Uncle Steve's BBQ. Dave gets sentimental over the leaning tower of pizza gag from The Goofy Movie as it relates to The Tower of Pisa. Jordan gets savagely quizzed over Ferris Bueller's Day Off and we finally discover a binge watchers qualifier. Gary Busey is in trouble again and we debate whether or not he is even aware of actions anymore, and we invent adult leashes.Listen now at: https://www.bwpodcast.com/recent-episodesSubscribe for new content: https://bit.ly/SUBBWPODHorror movies. Movie News. Movie Stories and More. Adventures in Binge-Watching From the Professional Binge-Watchers on this Late Night Comedy and Movie Podcast Hosted by JOHNNY SPOILER. Joined by his film-making buddies, DANGEROUS DAVE and JORDAN SAVAGESupport the show

Carole Montgomery is a respected veteran of the stand-up scene nationwide. She has over two dozen TV credits, has headlined clubs across the U.S., starred in two Las Vegas production shows, did eleven comedy tours with Armed Forces Entertainment, and has been a featured performer for Montreal Just for Laughs and Boston and New York Comedy Festivals.  Carole is also a director and producer. In 2017 she created the live stand-up comedy show Funny Women of a Certain Age which premiered on Showtime and became the network's highest rated comedy special for 2019 making TV history as the first comedy special to feature six women over the age of 50! In addition to her hilarious self, Carole has brought to the show some of the most respected names in comedy including Fran Drescher, Janeane Garofalo, Caroline Rhea, Julia Scotti and many more. In this episode, Carole openly shares the funny, touching, jaw dropping stories of her career. Don Rickles gave her the ultimate compliment of dissing her. Richard Pryor brought her to tears in the best of ways. Her stories of how she has faced ageism, sexism, and how she continues to persevere are compelling. Carole is still going strong at 64 years old bringing laughter to audiences across the country.