Canadian multi-instrumentalist
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20 episodes with Rick Danko
12 episodes with Rick Danko
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2 episodes with Rick Danko
2 episodes with Rick Danko
2 episodes with Rick Danko
3 episodes with Rick Danko
We're thrilled to have a true legend of American roots music on The Someone You Should Know Podcast! He is a multi-instrumentalist, an award-winning producer, and an essential figure in The Band's history, having collaborated with legends like Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Graham Parker, and Jose Feliciano. For over 25 years, his group, Professor Louie & The Crowmatix, has been producing exceptional music that preserves the essence of roots and blues. In this episode, we will highlight tracks from their latest album, Crowin' Around. Prepare for an incredible journey through music history. Please join me in welcoming my new friend, Professor Louie. He's Someone You Should Know Click here to buy Rik Anthony a cold one.Show Links:Click here to go to Professor Louie's WebsiteClick here to go to Professor Louie's FacebookClick here to go to Professor Louie's Twitter/XClick here to go to Professor Louie's YouTube ChannelClick here to hear Woodstock Rockin' Review on WKZE-FMClick here to hear the album "Crowin' Around"All music used with permission from the artistSomeone You Should Know 2025 // CatGotYourTongueStudios 2025Feedback: Send us a text.How to Contact Us:Official Website: https://Someoneyoushouldknowpodcast.comGmail: Someoneyoushouldknowpodcast@gmail.comTwitter: @RIKANTHONY1Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rikanthonyInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/someoneyoushouldknowpodcast/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rik-anthony2019/TikTok: @SomeoneYouShouldKnow2023YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@someoneyoushouldknowpodcastThank you for listening!Theme music "Welcome to the Show" by Kevin MacLeod was used per the standard license agreement.
Dave Pegg joined Fairport Convention 56 years ago and fully deserves some sort of medal. They're playing their 49th Cropredy in August and touring the UK later in the year. He talks to us here about the first gigs he ever saw and played which, delightfully, involves … … the night Hank Marvin took him to see Bjork. … an all-nighter in Birmingham with John Mayall, Eric Clapton, Chris Farlowe and Spencer Davis. … memories of his “school hero” Denny Laine. … the fine art of getting it together in the country: life at the Angel pub in Little Hadham – “flea-bitten, enough hot water for one person and a lorry crashed through the wall into Dave Swarbrick's bedroom”. … the link between ticket sales and high blood pressure. … what not to do when you meet McCartney. … a night on the whisky with Rick Danko that ended in hospital. … how a band lasts 58 years without falling out. … the Island albums that made their reputation but never earned them any money. … unsung Birmingham acts: Denny Laine & the Diplomats (Bev Bevan on drums), Steve Gibbons in the Uglys, Jeff Lynne in the Idle Race. … narrowboats, pewter ale jugs, outdoor settees, Matty Groves, Meet On The Ledge and other cornerstones of the Cropredy experience.… Dave Swarbrick's “small holding” and further assorted knob gags. Fairport Convention tickets here: https://www.davepegg.co.uk/gigs/fairportgigs/ Cropredy tickets here: https://www.fairportconvention.com/Find out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Dave Pegg joined Fairport Convention 56 years ago and fully deserves some sort of medal. They're playing their 49th Cropredy in August and touring the UK later in the year. He talks to us here about the first gigs he ever saw and played which, delightfully, involves … … the night Hank Marvin took him to see Bjork. … an all-nighter in Birmingham with John Mayall, Eric Clapton, Chris Farlowe and Spencer Davis. … memories of his “school hero” Denny Laine. … the fine art of getting it together in the country: life at the Angel pub in Little Hadham – “flea-bitten, enough hot water for one person and a lorry crashed through the wall into Dave Swarbrick's bedroom”. … the link between ticket sales and high blood pressure. … what not to do when you meet McCartney. … a night on the whisky with Rick Danko that ended in hospital. … how a band lasts 58 years without falling out. … the Island albums that made their reputation but never earned them any money. … unsung Birmingham acts: Denny Laine & the Diplomats (Bev Bevan on drums), Steve Gibbons in the Uglys, Jeff Lynne in the Idle Race. … narrowboats, pewter ale jugs, outdoor settees, Matty Groves, Meet On The Ledge and other cornerstones of the Cropredy experience.… Dave Swarbrick's “small holding” and further assorted knob gags. Fairport Convention tickets here: https://www.davepegg.co.uk/gigs/fairportgigs/ Cropredy tickets here: https://www.fairportconvention.com/Find out more about how to help us to keep the conversation going: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Woodstock, NY Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter Professor Louieof Professor Louie and the Crow Matix talks about the latest release “Crowin'Around” featuring “Elevate Yourself”, “Too Much Fun”, “A Million”, “MondayBoogaloo” etc., plus previous works “Strike Up The Band”, “Whispering Pines”,“Wings on Fire” and more! Professor Louie talks about his amazing career of 5+decades as a seasoned live performer, prolific recording artist, versatilemulti-instrumentalist, award-winning record producer/engineer, collaboratedwith The Band from '85-'99 until Rick Danko's death and inducted into the NYCChapter Blues Hall-of-Fame plus Canda South Blues! Professor Louie has beenperforming with the current group since 2000 at numerous festivals, theatres,club and art centers averaging 150+ shows a year, plus shares the storiesbehind the music and working with many famous artists! Check out the amazingProfessor Louie and the Crow Matix and their latest on all major platforms and www.professorlouie.com and www.woodstockrecords.com today!#professorlouie #professorlouieandthecrowmatix #woodstocknewyork#grammynominatedsingersongwriter #crowinaround #elevateyourself #toomuchfun#amillion #mondayboogaloo #strikeuptheband #theband #rickdanko #spreaker#iheartradio #spotify #applemusic #youtube #anchorfm #bitchute #rumble#mikewagner #themikewagnershow #mikewagnerprofessorlouie #themikewagnershowprofessor#mikewagnerprofessorlouieandthecrowmatix#themikewagnershowprofessorlouieandthecrowmatix
Woodstock, NY Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter Professor Louieof Professor Louie and the Crow Matix talks about the latest release “Crowin'Around” featuring “Elevate Yourself”, “Too Much Fun”, “A Million”, “MondayBoogaloo” etc., plus previous works “Strike Up The Band”, “Whispering Pines”,“Wings on Fire” and more! Professor Louie talks about his amazing career of 5+decades as a seasoned live performer, prolific recording artist, versatilemulti-instrumentalist, award-winning record producer/engineer, collaboratedwith The Band from '85-'99 until Rick Danko's death and inducted into the NYCChapter Blues Hall-of-Fame plus Canda South Blues! Professor Louie has beenperforming with the current group since 2000 at numerous festivals, theatres,club and art centers averaging 150+ shows a year, plus shares the storiesbehind the music and working with many famous artists! Check out the amazingProfessor Louie and the Crow Matix and their latest on all major platforms and www.professorlouie.com and www.woodstockrecords.com today!#professorlouie #professorlouieandthecrowmatix #woodstocknewyork#grammynominatedsingersongwriter #crowinaround #elevateyourself #toomuchfun#amillion #mondayboogaloo #strikeuptheband #theband #rickdanko #spreaker#iheartradio #spotify #applemusic #youtube #anchorfm #bitchute #rumble#mikewagner #themikewagnershow #mikewagnerprofessorlouie #themikewagnershowprofessor#mikewagnerprofessorlouieandthecrowmatix#themikewagnershowprofessorlouieandthecrowmatix
Woodstock, NY Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter Professor Louie of Professor Louie and the Crow Matix talks about the latest release “Crowin' Around” featuring “Elevate Yourself”, “Too Much Fun”, “A Million”, “Monday Boogaloo” etc., plus previous works “Strike Up The Band”, “Whispering Pines”, “Wings on Fire” and more! Professor Louie talks about his amazing career of 5+ decades as a seasoned live performer, prolific recording artist, versatile multi-instrumentalist, award-winning record producer/engineer, collaborated with The Band from '85-'99 until Rick Danko's death and inducted into the NYC Chapter Blues Hall-of-Fame plus Canda South Blues! Professor Louie has been performing with the current group since 2000 at numerous festivals, theatres, club and art centers averaging 150+ shows a year, plus shares the stories behind the music and working with many famous artists! Check out the amazing Professor Louie and the Crow Matix and their latest on all major platforms and www.professorlouie.com and www.woodstockrecords.com today! #professorlouie #professorlouieandthecrowmatix #woodstocknewyork #grammynominatedsingersongwriter #crowinaround #elevateyourself #toomuchfun #amillion #mondayboogaloo #strikeuptheband #theband #rickdanko #spreaker #iheartradio #spotify #applemusic #youtube #anchorfm #bitchute #rumble #mikewagner #themikewagnershow #mikewagnerprofessorlouie #themikewagnershowprofessor #mikewagnerprofessorlouieandthecrowmatix #themikewagnershowprofessorlouieandthecrowmatixBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-mike-wagner-show--3140147/support.
Marv and I talk a bit about the new "Living in the Material World" box, mostly Disc Two - EXTRAS! Alternate versions of the entire record, remixes of "Miss O'Dell", and a brand new recording of "Sunshine Life For Me (Sail Away Raymond)" featuring a George Harrison lead vocal, and guest appearances from Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, and Rick Danko from The Band, alongside Ringo Starr.
Send us a textA classic Tools of the Trade feature from the early days of TFTRR radio show and podcast. In this episode we shine the spotlight on Rick Danko's fretless Ampeg bass guitar. Deep cuts, rare tracks and Rock Room hi jinx prevails.Support the show
Cindy Cashdollar has been called the Wonder Woman of the Dobro, Lap Steel Guitar and Steel Guitar. She's a 5x Grammy winner for her work with Asleep At The Wheel. She's played with Paul Butteerfield and with Levon Helm and Rick Danko of The Band. She's performed with Bob Dylan, George Strait, Willie Nelson and others. Her latest album, Waltz For Abilene, features a slew of great guest artists including John Sebastian, Albert Lee and Amy Helm.My featured song is “My Love” from the album Bobby M and the Paisley Parade. Spotify link.---------------------------------------------The Follow Your Dream Podcast:Top 1% of all podcasts with Listeners in 200 countries!For more information and other episodes of the podcast click here. To subscribe to the podcast click here .To subscribe to our weekly Follow Your Dream Podcast email click here.To Rate and Review the podcast click here.“Dream With Robert”. Click here.—----------------------------------------“THE GIFT” is Robert's new single featuring his song arranged by Grammy winning arranger Michael Abene. Praised by David Amram, John Helliwell, Joe La Barbera, Tony Carey, Fay Claassen, Antonio Farao, Danny Gottlieb and Leslie Mandoki.Click HERE for all links.—-------------------------------------“LOU'S BLUES” is Robert's recent single. Called “Fantastic! Great playing and production!” (Mark Egan - Pat Metheny Group/Elements) and “Digging it!” (Peter Erskine - Weather Report)!Click HERE for all links.—----------------------------------------“THE RICH ONES”. Robert's recent single. With guest artist Randy Brecker (Blood Sweat & Tears) on flugelhorn. Click HERE for all links.—---------------------------------------“MILES BEHIND”, Robert's debut album, recorded in 1994, was “lost” for the last 30 years. It's now been released for streaming. Featuring Randy Brecker (Blood Sweat & Tears), Anton Fig (The David Letterman Show), Al Foster (Miles Davis), Tim Ries (The Rolling Stones), Jon Lucien and many more. Called “Hip, Tight and Edgy!” Click here for all links.—--------------------------------------“IT'S ALIVE!” is Robert's latest Project Grand Slam album. Featuring 13 of the band's Greatest Hits performed “live” at festivals in Pennsylvania and Serbia.Reviews:"An instant classic!" (Melody Maker)"Amazing record...Another win for the one and only Robert Miller!" (Hollywood Digest)"Close to perfect!" (Pop Icon)"A Masterpiece!" (Big Celebrity Buzz)"Sterling effort!" (Indie Pulse)"Another fusion wonder for Project Grand Slam!" (MobYorkCity)Click here for all links.Click here for song videos—-----------------------------------------Audio production:Jimmy RavenscroftKymera Films Connect with Cindy at:www.cindycashdollar.com Connect with the Follow Your Dream Podcast:Website - www.followyourdreampodcast.comEmail Robert - robert@followyourdreampodcast.com Follow Robert's band, Project Grand Slam, and his music:Website - www.projectgrandslam.comYouTubeSpotify MusicApple MusicEmail - pgs@projectgrandslam.com
In this episode, Craig shares his recent discovery of Bobby Charles, spotlighting the Louisiana singer-songwriter's self-titled 1972 album. Craig dives into the unique blend of swamp pop, R&B, and roots rock that defines Charles' sound, highlighting his laid-back style and knack for storytelling. He explores how the album, though overlooked at the time, has since gained cult status, with contributions from legendary musicians like Dr. John and members of The Band. Craig reflects on the soulful charm and quiet brilliance of Bobby Charles' music, making it a must-hear for fans of Americana and roots music.Shawn turns the spotlight to one of his all-time favorite bands, Crowded House, featuring their 1993 album Together Alone. He delves into how the album marked a creative peak for the band, blending lush arrangements with introspective lyrics. Shawn highlights tracks like "Private Universe", "Black And White Boy" & his favorite Crowded House song "Distant Sun", discussing how Together Alone showcases the band's ability to combine pop sensibility with emotional depth. He reflects on the enduring appeal of Crowded House and how this album, in particular, captures the magic of their sound.Join Craig and Shawn as they celebrate both hidden gems and timeless classics, offering thoughtful insights into the music of Bobby Charles and Crowded House. Whether you're a fan of roots rock or sophisticated pop, this episode has something for everyone.
It's summer of 1989 and for the first time in history not one but TWO former Beatles are on tour! And for the newly sober Ringo Starr, these live shows were a helpful reminder of his skills as an artist and his importance to the world of music -- hitting the road with an all-star band of friends and like-minded creatives for a triumphant North American leg in July. Joe Walsh, Nils Lofgren, Dr. John, Billy Preston, Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Clarence Clemons, Jim Kelter and a host of special guests and rave reviews accompanied this All-Star Band on tour, and reinvigorated a wave of Beatles nostalgia...just in time for Paul McCartney to hit the road himself... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
By the end of the 1970s, Rick Danko found himself in an unexpected place. After the release of his first solo album on Arista Records didn't sell well, and with management in flux, Arista dropped him. Despite this, Danko continued to tour, collaborate, and perform in smaller, more intimate venues, showcasing his character and musicianship. Collaborations with former Beach Boy Blondie Chaplin, Richard Manuel, Paul Butterfield, and even actor Gary Busey highlighted his versatility. Woodstock ‘79, a smaller and less impactful event than the original, featured Danko performing with Butterfield. This era also saw Danko contributing to Joe Cocker's chaotic version of “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” and Larry Lee's album “Marooned.” This period of triumph and tribulation is a testament to Danko's enduring spirit and love for music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Remembering Bill Walton: Basketball Star and Grateful Dead SuperfanIn this episode of the Deadhead Cannabis Show, Larry Mishkin covers various topics, including a historic Grateful Dead show, personal concert experiences, and music news. Larry starts with a deep dive into the Grateful Dead's June 3, 1976, concert at the Paramount Theater in Portland, Oregon. This show marked the band's return after a year-long hiatus, featuring five new songs and a revived tune from a four-year break. He highlights the opening track, written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, which nostalgically reflects on the band's Festival Express tour, a legendary 1970 train journey across Canada with prominent rock bands.Larry then discusses the song "Lazy Lightning," introduced at the same 1976 concert. Written by Bobby and John Perry Barlow, it became a fan favorite for its melody and message of living in the moment, though it was retired from the Grateful Dead's repertoire by 1984. He transitions into music news by honoring Doug Ingle of Iron Butterfly, who recently passed away. Larry reminisces about the band's iconic 1968 track "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" and its influence on the late 60s music scene.The podcast also pays tribute to Bill Walton, the legendary basketball player and devoted Deadhead who passed away at 71. Larry shares stories of Walton's deep connection with the Grateful Dead, including his record of attending 869 concerts, significantly more than his total basketball games played. Larry recounts Walton's influence on fellow athletes and his unique presence at Dead shows.Finally, Larry describes his recent experience at a Dead & Company concert at the Sphere in Las Vegas. He marvels at the venue's immersive visual technology, which enhanced the concert experience, likening it to a planetarium. Despite the advanced visuals sometimes overshadowing the music, Larry enjoyed the performance and the unique atmosphere. He also mentions a mini-exhibition featuring Dave Lemieux's tape collection and the significance of tape trading in Grateful Dead fandom.In summary, this episode covers a blend of Grateful Dead history, personal concert experiences, tributes to influential music figures, and the latest in concert technology, providing a rich narrative for Deadheads and music enthusiasts alike. Grateful DeadJune 3, 1976 (48 Years Ago)Paramount TheaterPortland, ORGrateful Dead Live at Paramount Theatre on 1976-06-03 : Free Borrow & Streaming : Internet Archive First show back after 1975 year offPrior show: Sept. 28, 1975 – last of the four shows in 1975, this show is 9 months later. Long wait for Deadheads. Dead did not disappoint with five new songs and a breakout after a 4 year hiatus. INTRO: Might As Well Track #1 1:15 – 2:50 “Take that ride again” Might as Well” is a song written by Jerry Garcia with lyrics penned by Robert Hunter. Released on Garcia's 3d solo album, Reflections, in February, 1976. It's one of the tracks from Garcia's solo career, showcasing his musical versatility and unique ability to transform personal experiences into joyful music. The song takes a nostalgic look back at the Grateful Dead's time on the Festival Express Tour, a memorable rail trip that brought together prominent artists of the '60s for a raucous, whisky-fueled journey across America. Festival Express is the 1970 train tour of the same name across Canada taken by some of North America's most popular rock bands, including Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, The Band, Buddy Guy, Flying Burrito Bros, Ian & Sylvia's Great Speckled Bird, Mountain and Delaney & Bonnie & Friends. Later made into a movie Festival Express was staged in three Canadian cities: Toronto, Winnipeg, and Calgary (Montreal and Vancouver were also originally scheduled but both dropped) during the summer of 1970. Rather than flying into each city, the musicians traveled by chartered Canadian National Railwaystrain, in a total of 14 cars (two engines, one diner, five sleepers, two lounge cars, two flat cars, one baggage car, and one staff car).[5] The train journey between cities ultimately became a combination of non-stop jam sessions and partying fueled by alcohol. One highlight of the documentary is a drunken jam session featuring The Band's Rick Danko, the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir, New Riders of the Purple Sage's John Dawson, as well as Janis Joplin. Here, it is played as the show opener. Ultimately, became more of a first set closer, a popular one along with Deal, another Garcia solo tune. Played 111 times First: June 3, 1976 at Paramount Theatre, Portland, OR, USA THIS SHOW 19 times that year Last: March 23, 1994 at Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, Uniondale, NY, USA – only time played that year, 6 times in ‘91 SHOW No. 1: Lazy Lightning Track #6 0:00 – 1:46 Written by Bobby and John Perry Barlow, paired with Supplication in concert and released with Supplication as the opening tracks on the album, Kingfish, released in March, 1976. Lazy Lightning is often interpreted as a metaphorical representation of the pursuit of a carefree and leisurely lifestyle amidst the chaos and hardships of reality. The lyrics depict a whimsical scenario where the protagonist encounters a bolt of lightning that transforms into a woman, symbolizing the allure and transitory nature of fleeting pleasures. The song encourages listeners to embrace the present moment and let go of the rigid expectations and responsibilities that burden their lives. It is a celebration of spontaneity, freedom, and the pursuit of personal bliss. Lazy Lightning became a fan favorite due to its infectious melody, poetic lyrics, and the sense of liberation it evoked. Grateful Dead fans often resonated with the song's message of embracing the present moment and shedding societal expectations. It became a rallying cry for those seeking to live life on their own terms, igniting a sense of camaraderie and freedom among concert-goers. Usually, a late first set number. Unfortunately, dropped from the repertoire in 1984. I got to hear it three or four times. A fun number. Played: also played 111 timesFirst: June 3, 1976 at Paramount Theatre, Portland, OR, USA THIS SHOW!!Last: October 31, 1984 at Berkeley Community Theatre, Berkeley, CA, USA MUSIC NEWS – Intro music: In A Gadda Da Vida: IRON BUTTERFLY - IN A GADDA DA VIDA - 1968 (ORIGINAL FULL VERSION) CD SOUND & 3D VIDEO (youtube.com)Start - :45 is a song recorded by Iron Butterfly, written by band member Doug Ingle and released on their 1968 album of the same name.At slightly over 17 minutes, it occupies the entire second side of the album. The lyrics, a love song from the biblical Adam to his mate Eve, are simple and are heard only at the beginning and the end. The middle of the song features a two-and-a-half-minute Ron Bushy drum solo. Famously featured on a Simpson's episode when Bart switches the organist's regular music for this tune and hands out the words to the congregation who sing along. The older organ player plays the entire organ solo (although they only feature a part of it) and then at the end promptly slumps over at the keyboard. Featured today as a tribute to Doug Ingle, songwriter, keyboard player and vocalist for the song, who passed away on May 24th at the age of 78. He was the last surviving member of the original band lineup.Bill Walton passed away on last Monday, May 27th at the all too young age of 71. Couldn't miss him at the shows, 7 foot redhead dancing away or else up on stage.Dead & Co. at the Sphere, saw the June 1st show. SHOW No. 2: Supplication Track #7 2:00 – 3:30 Written by Bobby and John Perry Barlow, paired with Lazy Lightning in concert and released with Lazy Lightning as the opening tracks on the album, Kingfish, released in March, 1976. The song delves into the universal theme of the human experience, specifically emphasizing the concept of surrender and humility. It explores the idea of surrendering oneself to a higher power, relinquishing control, and embracing the unknown. The lyrics touch upon the vulnerability and humility required to let go and trust in something beyond our comprehension. Supplication encourages listeners to reflect upon their own lives, urging them to question their beliefs, values, and the significance of surrendering to a greater force. Played: 111 times (a good number for the lottery, keeps coming up), always paired with Lazy LightningFirst: June 3, 1976 at Paramount Theatre, Portland, OR, USA THIS SHOW!!Last: October 31, 1984 at Berkeley Community Theatre, Berkeley, CA, USA SHOW No. 3: Dancin In the Streets Track #11 0:00 – 1:42 "Dancing in the Street" is a song written by Marvin Gaye, William Stevenson, and Ivy Jo Hunter. It first became popular in 1964 when recorded by Martha and the Vandellas whose version was released on July 31, 1964 and reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for two weeks, behind "Do Wah Diddy Diddy" by Manfred Mann and it also peaked at No. 4 on the UK Singles Chart. It is one of Motown's signature songs and is the group's premier signature song.A 1966 cover by the Mamas & the Papas was a minor hit on the Hot 100 reaching No. 73. In 1982, the rock group Van Halen took their cover of "Dancing in the Street" to No. 38 on the Hot 100 chart and No. 15 in Canada on the RPM chart. A 1985 duet cover by David Bowie and Mick Jagger charted at No. 1 in the UK and reached No. 7 in the US. The song has been covered by many other artists, including The Kinks, Tages, Black Oak Arkansas, Grateful Dead, Little Richard, Myra and Karen Carpenter. I saw it as the first night show opener on June 14, 1985 at the Greek Theater as part of the band's 20 Anniversary celebration. A really fun concert tune. The 1970's versions always had strong Donna support backing up Bobby's lead vocals. This show was the first time the band had played the song since Dec. 31, 1971 (203 shows) Played: 131 timesFirst: July 3, 1966 at Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, CA, USALast: April 6, 1987 at Brendan Byrne Arena, East Rutherford, NJ, USA MJ NEWS Blake Schneider passed away May 27th at 69. Legendary cultivator who created the best strain of marijuana I ever smoked. We just called it Blake weed and put it up against any other strain, anywhere, any time. Folks would say they had the best weed until I let them smoke some of the Blake weed. They never failed to concede. Eccentric, temperamental, hospitable, mentor and good friend. And self titled “best joint roller in the worlds.” Was one of my Bulls season ticket partners during the Jordan era. Every home game began with a pregame at Blake's loop residences including great wines, gourmet appetizers and snacks, top shelf liquor (on the way out the door we always did our “Go Bulls” shots) and more marijuana than anyone should ever smoke. With four of us in the room, he would have 3 joints circulating at all times. With his ever present life partner, Jeanne, an evening at Blakes was as much fun as the actual game itself. Ran into a problem with the Green County Sheriff, but gave them the finger when the feds took the case over and Blake only had to serve 11 months at a fed minimum risk prison instead of the 20 years that Green County said was a done deal given the number of plants he was growing at his farm house in Argyle, WI. They were not happy campers when the feds moved in to take over the case due to the value of the property they could sieve and force Blake to buy back from them. Blake was a true party legend and will be sorely missed by those of us that knew him, loved him and tolerated him. 2. Marijuana Terpenes Are ‘As Effective As Morphine' For Pain Relief And Have Fewer Side Effects, New Study Finds 3. CBD Is Effective In Treating Anxiety, Depression And Poor Sleep, Study Finds4. Marijuana And Hemp Businesses At Odds Over Consumable Cannabinoid Ban In House Farm Bill SHOW No. 4: Samson and Delilah Track #12 0:00 – 1:45 "Samson and Delilah" is a traditional song based on the Biblical tale of Samson and his betrayal by Delilah. Its best known performer is perhaps the Grateful Dead, who first performed the song live in 1976, with Bobby singing lead vocals and in the ‘70's with Donna joining in. It was frequently played on Sundays due to the biblical reference. Released by the band in 1977 on their album Terrapin Station. Although Weir learned the song from Reverend Gary Davis, several earlier versions had been recorded under various titles, including "If I Had My Way I'd Tear the Building Down"/"Oh Lord If I Had My Way" by Blind Willie Johnson in 1927.[1] The song has since been performed by a wide variety of artists ranging from Dave van Ronk, Bob Dylan, Charlie Parr, The Staple Singers, Ike and Tina Turner, Clara Ward, Dorothy Love Coates & The Gospel Harmonettes, to Peter, Paul and Mary, The Washington Squares, The Blasters, Willie Watson, Elizabeth Cook, Robert Randolph and the Family Band, and Bruce Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions Band (in Verona, Italy 2006). Guest star Simon Oakland sings the song with the drovers around a campfire in the Rawhide episode "Incident of the Travellin' Man", aired in season six on October 17, 1963. A long time favorite tune with a distinctive drummers intro that tipped off the song and got the crowd fired up. Settled into a set opener, more frequently a second set opener and often played on Sundays due to its biblical reference with Bobby's “This being Sunday . .” Played: 365 timesFirst: June 3, 1976 at Paramount Theatre, Portland, OR, USA THIS SHOWLast: July 9, 1995 at Soldier Field OUTRO: The Wheel Track #22 2:48 – 4:30 One of their most beloved songs, “The Wheel,” holds a special place in the hearts of fans worldwide. Written by Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter, and Bill Kreutzmann, this folk-rock anthem has captivated listeners with its enigmatic lyrics and catchy melody. The song's meaning has been widely debated among enthusiasts, and its cryptic nature has allowed for multiple interpretations. “The Wheel” reflects the transient nature of life, offering a philosophical perspective on the cycles we all experience. The lyrics suggest that life is like a wheel, constantly turning and repeating itself. The song evokes a sense of impermanence and reminds us of the cyclical patterns we encounter throughout our existence. This theme resonates strongly with the band's philosophy and their connection to the spiritual and psychedelic culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s. “The Wheel” was released on the Grateful Dead's album “Garcia” in 1972. “The Wheel” is characterized by its infectious melody and intricate guitar work. The song showcases the Grateful Dead's ability to seamlessly blend folk, rock, and improvisational elements into a cohesive piece of music. Normally, a second set tune, into or out of drums/space although it moved around a bit in the second set. Here it is the encore which is more of a rarity. Played 259 times First: June 3, 1976 at Paramount Theatre, Portland, OR, USA THIS SHOW Last: May 25, 1995 at Memorial Stadium, Seattle, WA .Produced by PodConx Deadhead Cannabis Show - https://podconx.com/podcasts/deadhead-cannabis-showLarry Mishkin - https://podconx.com/guests/larry-mishkinRob Hunt - https://podconx.com/guests/rob-huntJay Blakesberg - https://podconx.com/guests/jay-blakesbergSound Designed by Jamie Humiston - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamie-humiston-91718b1b3/Recorded on Squadcast
50 vuotta sitten ilmestyi hienoja levyjä tärkeiltä artisteilta. Vuoden 1974 albumeista Sami Ruokankaan ja Pauli Kauppilan tarkastelussa on tässä jaksossa kolme: Bob Dylanin Planet Waves, Robin Trowerin Bridge of Sighs ja Deep Purplen Burn. Jakson kuuntelemalla selviää, miten näihin albumeihin liittyvät mm. Heartin Ann Wilson, Tikkurilan Old Story, Zakk Wylde ja Lapin Kulta -olut… Kuuntele, viihdy ja sivisty! Jakson soittolista: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/18CIgpniU1UjWojOgOgnGX?si=f43bec159a7449d7 Menossa ovat mukana Musiikkitalo, Rush, Kansas, Bad Company, Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell, Rolling Stones, Deep Purple, Ian Gillan, Ritchie Blackmore, Ian Paice, David Coverdale, Glenn Hughes, Jon Lord, Bob Dylan, Robin Trower, Robbie Robertson, The Band, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Levon Helm, Manfred Mann´s Earth Band, Sweden Rock, Gregg Allman, The Hawks, Ronnie & The Hawks, Procol Harum, Pepe Willberg, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, James Dewar, Paul Rodgers, Matthew Fisher, Jussi Niemi, Waldemar Wallenius, Bobby ”Blue” Bland, Sari Schorr, James Brown, B.B. King, Albert King, Opeth, Down, Heart, Ann Wilson, Joe Bonamassa, Aki Blomberg, Steve Lukather, Toto, UFO, Warren Haynes, Quasimodo, Davey Pattison, Ronnie Montrose, Michael Schenker, Zakk Wylde, Ozzy Osbourne, Black Label Society, Kansas, Jack Daniels, Bryan Ferry, David Gilmour, Roger Glover, Black Sabbath, Tapani Tapanainen, Tapani Talo, Bonita Pietila, Simpsons, David Uosikkinen, Oodi, Phil Lynott, Thin Lizzy, Baby Face, Rainbow, Ricky Nelson, George Gershwin, Jimmy Page, Johann Sebastian Bach, Santana, Faces, Whitesnake, Spancer Davis Group, Mikko Aalatalo, Harry Nilsson, California Jam, The Eagles, Trapeze, Beatles, Ronnie James Dio, Joe Lynn Turner, Old Story, Megasnake, Tipe Johnson, Megadeth, Twist Twist Erkinharju, Gringos Locos, Leningrad Cowboys, Peer Günt ja Red Hot Chili Peppers.
The moment you've all been waiting for has finally arrived – it's time to build the ultimate rock supergroup. That's right, after six gruelling months, 60 decades of music, 24 albums and six episodes of the Groovy Guys rambling on - it all comes down to this. How did we get here? The rock supergroup challenge featured each decade from the 1960s to the 2010s, with each episode focussing on four albums from one era, hand-picked from the Groovy Guys' collections. From those four iconic albums, a decade-strong supergroup was built. From those six supergroups, a final boss, an ultimate rock supergroup will be born. Welcome to the final episode - 35 musicians will enter the Thunderdome, only seven will leave to be proclaimed the Crate Expectations Ultimate Rock Supergroup. But first, a recap of the series. 1960s Albums: The Band - Self Titled, The Beatles - Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Electric Ladyland, The Rolling Stones - Let It Bleed. Supergroup: THE TRIP - Mick Jagger, Jimi Hendrix, Keith Richards, Rick Danko, Ringo Starr, Garth Hudson. 1970s Albums: Black Sabbath - Paranoid, Fleetwood Mac - Rumors, Led Zeppelin - III, Queen - A Night at the Opera, Supergroup: WITCHY WAYS - Freddy Mercury, Jimmy Page, Tony Iommi, John Paul Jones, John Bonham, Stevie Nicks. 1980s Albums: AC/DC - Back in Black, Prince - Purple Rain, Rush - Moving Pictures, Van Halen - 1984. Supergroup: PRINCE'S COCAINE POOL PARTY (PCP²) 1980s - David Lee Roth, Eddy Van Halen, Mal Young, Geddy Lee, Neil Peart, Prince. 1990s Albums: Alanis Morissette - Jagged Little Pill, Nirvana - Nevermind, Red Hot Chili Peppers - Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Soundgarden - Superunkown. Supergroup: LORNE GREEN'S DOG AND THE CAPTAIN'S LOG - Chris Cornell, John Frusciante, Kurt Cobain, Flea, Dave Grohl, Alanis Morissette. 2000s Albums: Blink-182 - Self titled, The Strokes - Is This It, The White Stripes - Elephant, Muse - Origins of Symmetry. Supergroup: UNIVERSAL SUPER BAND (USB) - Julian Casablancas, Matt Bellamy, Jack White, Chris Wolstenholme and Travis Barker. 2010s Albums: The Black Keys - Brothers, David Bowie - Blackstar, HAIM - Women in Music Pt. III, John Mayer - Paradise Valley. Supergroup: LIGHT IN A BLACK HOLE - David Bowie, John Mayer, Dan Auerbach, Este Haim, Patrick Carney, Danielle Haim. Show notes: 00:00:00 - 00:06:10 Intro and recap 00:06:10 - 00:07:06 The rules for building the ultimate supergroup 00:07:06 - 00:09:20 Vocalist 00:09:20 - 00:10:33 Lead guitarist 00:10:33 - 00:15:39 Rhythm guitarist 00:15:39 - 00:22:46 Bassist 00:22:46 - 00:32:30 Drummer 00:32:30 - 00:48:00 Wildcards 00:48:00 - 00:57:42 Finally, the ultimate rock supergroup. Now time for ‘the name' and ‘the song'. 00:57:42 - 00:59:34 Wrap up and outro About Crate Expectations Crate Expectations is a podcast for vinyl record collectors and music fans - featuring Groovy Guys Tom, Dan, Matt and Chris rambling on about vinyl culture, new and old bands, the music industry, gigs… and bunnies. Email | Insta | Episode archive | Send us a voicemail --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/crate-expectations/message
Making a Scene Presents an Interview with Chest FeverThe Band left behind a timeless legacy of unforgettable music and a vast catalog of fabled songs. Band members Garth Hudson, Levon Helm, Richard Manuel, Rick Danko and Robbie Robertson embodied a musical alchemy that has been firmly cemented in myth and legend. Their impact on rock music and culture is permanently etched in the hallowed halls of American history. http://www.makingascene.org
Aaron L. Hurwitz, known by the stage name Professor Louie, is an American singer-songwriter, musician, and record producer who is best known for producing three studio albums for The Band, as well as being the founder and producer for the Grammy nominated musical group, Professor Louie & The Crowmatix. He is the founder of Woodstock Records, which has released albums by New Riders of the Purple Sage, Rick Danko and Waydown Wailers, among others. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in New York Chapter in 2016.________________"Musicians Reveal" Podcast BioRock and Roll Hall of Famer Prince featured the "Upper Room with Joe Kelley and Gi Dussault" on his official website www.npgmusicclub.com. This is the first radio show to have ever received that honor. "Musicians Reveal with Joe Kelley" has been on the radio airwaves since 1982. Joe Kelley and Gi Dussault co-host the show and are well-respected in the music business as creative air personalities and supporters of independent musicians . Our web site is located at www.musiciansreveal.com . The show features creative music in funk, R&B, jazz, blues, rock, hip-hop, latin, and gospel. In addition, Joe Kelley has interviewed renowned musicians such as Victor Wooten, Sheila E. , Foley, Robin Duhe, Jef Lee Johnson, Jellybean Johnson, Monte Moir, Rhonda Smith, Bernie Worrell, Cyndi Lauper, Michael Bland, Larry Graham, Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth, Steve Smith, St. Paul Peterson, JD Blair, Tori Ruffin, Kat Dyson, Eric Person, actor Jeff Daniels, Junior Giscombe, John Scofield, EC Scott, John Blackwell, Mystic Bowie, and many others.
Wanted. America. Dead or Alive. Glen Rockney of Rare Candy and The Back Wall joins me for a dance to the haunting tunes and portents of Martin Scorcese's THE LAST WALTZ (1978), a documentary classic about the historic final concert where The Band and friends staged several of the greatest rock performances of all time. For the full 2.5 hour episode, subscribe to the show at patreon.com/filthyarmenian to get access to twice as many adventures and support this travel agency for the soul. In memory of Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, Muddy Waters, Dr. John, Paul Butterfield, Pops Staples, Neil Young, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Ray Charles. In thankfulness to Garth Hudson, Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Mavis Staples, Joni Mitchell, Ringo, and all the other stars at Winterland. Get your tickets to FAA presents WHITE CHRISTMAS at a hidden historic shrine to adventure in Los Angeles on January 6, a live show and festivity starring Amanda Milius, Richard Hanania, Santa and many other friends of the show. Please rate, review, wherever you listen. Follow us on X/insta @filthyarmenain
For the Season Five finale, Kirk takes a look at The Band and Martin Scorsese's beloved 1978 concert film The Last Waltz - "The beginning of the beginning of the end of the beginning."Featuring music by The Band: Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Richard Manuel, and Garth HudsonDirected by: Martin ScorseseAlbum: The Last Waltz (1978)Listen/Buy via SongwhipALSO DISCUSSED/REFERENCED:"The Weight" by Robbie Robertson as covered by The Staple Singers and Aretha FranklinStudio versions of several songs from the show, featured on The Band (1969) and Northern Lights - Southern Cross, 1975A 2014 New Yorker interview with Mavis Staples"Rockin' in Rhythm" by Duke Ellington, first recorded 1931"The Next Waltz," a concert event held every November in Portland, ORThe Jeremy Wilson Foundation, helping support local musicians in need----LINKS-----SUPPORT STRONG SONGS!Paypal | Patreon.com/StrongsongsMERCH STOREstore.strongsongspodcast.comSOCIAL MEDIAIG: @Kirk_Hamilton | Threads: @Kirk_HamiltonNEWSLETTERhttps://kirkhamilton.substack.com/subscribeJOIN THE DISCORDhttps://discord.gg/GCvKqAM8SmOUTRO SOLO PLAY-A-LONG:https://soundcloud.com/kirkhamilton/strong-songs-outro-music-no-soloSTRONG SONGS PLAYLISTSSpotify | Apple Music | YouTube Music--------------------DECEMBER 2023 WHOLE-NOTE PATRONSBrian TempletCesarCorpus FriskyBen BarronCatherine WarnerDamon WhiteKaya WoodallDan AustinJay SwartzMiriam JoySEAN D WINNIERushDaniel Hannon-BarryChristopher MillerJamie WhiteChristopher McConnellDavid MascettiJoe LaskaKen HirshJezMelanie AndrichJenness GardnerDave SharpeSami SamhuriJeremy DawsonAccessViolationAndre BremerDave FloreyDECEMBER 2023 HALF-NOTE PATRONSJames McMurryEthan Laserbrianjohanpeter@outlook.comChris RemoMatt SchoenthalAaron WilsonDent EarlCarlos LernerMisty HaisfieldAbraham BenrubiChristopher BrunoChris KotarbaCallum WebbLynda MacNeilDick MorganBen SteinSusan GreenSean MurphyJake YumatillaAlan BroughRandal VegterGo Birds!Whit SidenerRobert Granatdave malloyNick GallowayHeather Johnsonjohn halpinPeter HardingDavidMeghan O'LearyJohn BaumanMartín SalíasStu BakerSteve MartinoCarolinaGary PierceMatt BaxterLuigi BocciaE Margaret WartonCharles McGeeCatherine ClauseEthan BaumanKenIsWearingAHatJordan BlockAaron WadeJeff UlmJamieDeebsPortland Eye CareCarrie SchneiderRichard SneddonDoreen CarlsonDavid McDarbyWendy GilchristElliot RosenLisa TurnerPaul WayperBruno GaetaKenneth JungAdam StofskyZak RemerRishi SahayJason ReitmanAilie FraserRob TsukNATALIE MISTILISJosh SingerAmy Lynn ThornsenAdam WKelli BrockingtonVictoria Yumino caposselaSteve PaquinDavid JoskeEmma SklarBernard KhooRobert HeuerMatthew GoldenDavid NoahGeraldine ButlerMadeleine MaderJason PrattAbbie BergDoug BelewDermot CrowleyAchint SrivastavaRyan RairighMichael BermanOlivia BishopLinda DuffyBonnie PrinsenLiz SegerEoin de BurcaKevin PotterM Shane BordersDallas HockleyJason GerryNathan GouwensLauren ReayEric PrestemonCookies250Damian BradyAngela LivingstoneSarah SulanDiane HughesMichael CasnerLowell MeyerStephen TsoneffJoshua HillWenGeoff GoldenRob FPascal RuegerRandy SouzaClare HolbertonDiane TurnerTom ColemanDhu WikMelEric HelmJonathan DanielsMichael FlahertyJarrod SchindlerCaro Fieldmichael bochnerNaomi WatsonDavid CushmanAlexanderChris KGavin DoigSam FennTanner MortonAJ SchusterJennifer BushDavid StroudAmanda FurlottiAndrew BakerAndrew FairL.B. MorseBill ThorntonBrian AmoebasBrett DouvilleJeffrey OlsonMatt BetzelNate from KalamazooMelanie StiversRichard TollerAlexander PolsonEarl LozadaJustin McElroyArjun SharmaJames JohnsonKevin MorrellColin Hodo
Une scène où tu perdras peut-être certains moyens, ce qui te poussera à forcer et donc rater le geste, le geste ultime qui te fera passer du paradis d'un vieux rêve enchanté au cauchemar d'une triste réalité.. « Stage fright », connaissez-vous cette chanson magnifiquement interprétée par le si touchant bassiste de The Band ? Toute la poésie qui sortait de la voix de Rick Danko, c'est de lui qu'il s'agit, parti si tôt, et rejoint il y a quelques jours d'ailleurs par le grand Robbie Robertson.. (que de soirées pasta mes aïeux avant cette fameuse dernière valse « The Last Waltz ».. après aussi remarquez.. ) « See the man with the stage fright, just standin'up there to give it all his might.. », je vous remets ici tout ça au goût du jour par rapport à un geste qui a fait pleurer tout un pays mais aussi le monde entier (hormis un évidemment, celui qui remportait à ce moment précis la Coupe du Monde) du football, enfin celui qui se fait une certaine idée de ce sport on dira.. C'est l'histoire les enfants, la grande histoire du Football..
Jordan and Alex commemorate the recent loss of Robbie Robertson by taking a load off, Fanny, and revisiting The Band's iconic 1968 debut, 'Music from Big Pink.' They trace the group's path from Canadian bar-band hellraisers to woodsy Woodstock balladeers and the album that launched 1,000 Americana bands. Also featuring patented TMI detours that include Alex getting way too excited about Rick Danko's use of the fretless bass and a meditation on the very nature of what collaborative music making means in a capitalist society that demands having the least amount of people on the paperwork. And hey, why not let Alex get a little too angry at a recently deceased icon whose creative output he'd never be able to surpass if he worked ten lifetimes...as a treat? Also, Jordan brings up the Beach Boys at least twice! It's Too Much Information: Tears of Rage edition!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Episode one hundred and sixty-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Weight" by the Band, the Basement Tapes, and the continuing controversy over Dylan going electric. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode available, on "S.F. Sorrow is Born" by the Pretty Things. 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/ Also, a one-time request here -- Shawn Taylor, who runs the Facebook group for the podcast and is an old and dear friend of mine, has stage-three lung cancer. I will be hugely grateful to anyone who donates to the GoFundMe for her treatment. Errata At one point I say "when Robertson and Helm travelled to the Brill Building". I meant "when Hawkins and Helm". This is fixed in the transcript but not the recording. Resources There are three Mixcloud mixes this time. As there are so many songs by Bob Dylan and the Band excerpted, and Mixcloud won't allow more than four songs by the same artist in any mix, I've had to post the songs not in quite the same order in which they appear in the podcast. But the mixes are here — one, two, three. I've used these books for all the episodes involving Dylan: Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties by Elijah Wald, which is recommended, as all Wald's books are. Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades. I've also used Robert Shelton's No Direction Home, which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan. Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan is a partial, highly inaccurate, but thoroughly readable autobiography. Information on Tiny Tim comes from Eternal Troubadour: The Improbable Life of Tiny Tim by Justin Martell. Information on John Cage comes from The Roaring Silence by David Revill Information on Woodstock comes from Small Town Talk by Barney Hoskyns. For material on the Basement Tapes, I've used Million Dollar Bash by Sid Griffin. And for the Band, I've used This Wheel's on Fire by Levon Helm with Stephen Davis, Testimony by Robbie Robertson, The Band by Craig Harris and Levon by Sandra B Tooze. I've also referred to the documentaries No Direction Home and Once Were Brothers. The complete Basement Tapes can be found on this multi-disc box set, while this double-CD version has the best material from the sessions. All the surviving live recordings by Dylan and the Hawks from 1966 are on this box set. There are various deluxe versions of Music From Big Pink, but still the best way to get the original album is in this twofer CD with the Band's second album. Transcript Just a brief note before I start – literally while I was in the middle of recording this episode, it was announced that Robbie Robertson had died today, aged eighty. Obviously I've not had time to alter the rest of the episode – half of which had already been edited – with that in mind, though I don't believe I say anything disrespectful to his memory. My condolences to those who loved him – he was a huge talent and will be missed. There are people in the world who question the function of criticism. Those people argue that criticism is in many ways parasitic. If critics knew what they were talking about, so the argument goes, they would create themselves, rather than talk about other people's creation. It's a variant of the "those who can't, teach" cliche. And to an extent it's true. Certainly in the world of rock music, which we're talking about in this podcast, most critics are quite staggeringly ignorant of the things they're talking about. Most criticism is ephemeral, published in newspapers, magazines, blogs and podcasts, and forgotten as soon as it has been consumed -- and consumed is the word . But sometimes, just sometimes, a critic will have an effect on the world that is at least as important as that of any of the artists they criticise. One such critic was John Ruskin. Ruskin was one of the preeminent critics of visual art in the Victorian era, particularly specialising in painting and architecture, and he passionately advocated for a form of art that would be truthful, plain, and honest. To Ruskin's mind, many artists of the past, and of his time, drew and painted, not what they saw with their own eyes, but what other people expected them to paint. They replaced true observation of nature with the regurgitation of ever-more-mannered and formalised cliches. His attacks on many great artists were, in essence, the same critiques that are currently brought against AI art apps -- they're just recycling and plagiarising what other people had already done, not seeing with their own eyes and creating from their own vision. Ruskin was an artist himself, but never received much acclaim for his own work. Rather, he advocated for the works of others, like Turner and the pre-Raphaelite school -- the latter of whom were influenced by Ruskin, even as he admired them for seeing with their own vision rather than just repeating influences from others. But those weren't the only people Ruskin influenced. Because any critical project, properly understood, becomes about more than just the art -- as if art is just anything. Ruskin, for example, studied geology, because if you're going to talk about how people should paint landscapes and what those landscapes look like, you need to understand what landscapes really do look like, which means understanding their formation. He understood that art of the kind he wanted could only be produced by certain types of people, and so society had to be organised in a way to produce such people. Some types of societal organisation lead to some kinds of thinking and creation, and to properly, honestly, understand one branch of human thought means at least to attempt to understand all of them. Opinions about art have moral consequences, and morality has political and economic consequences. The inevitable endpoint of any theory of art is, ultimately, a theory of society. And Ruskin had a theory of society, and social organisation. Ruskin's views are too complex to summarise here, but they were a kind of anarcho-primitivist collectivism. He believed that wealth was evil, and that the classical liberal economics of people like Mill was fundamentally anti-human, that the division of labour alienated people from their work. In Ruskin's ideal world, people would gather in communities no bigger than villages, and work as craftspeople, working with nature rather than trying to bend nature to their will. They would be collectives, with none richer or poorer than any other, and working the land without modern technology. in the first half of the twentieth century, in particular, Ruskin's influence was *everywhere*. His writings on art inspired the Impressionist movement, but his political and economic ideas were the most influential, right across the political spectrum. Ruskin's ideas were closest to Christian socialism, and he did indeed inspire many socialist parties -- most of the founders of Britain's Labour Party were admirers of Ruskin and influenced by his ideas, particularly his opposition to the free market. But he inspired many other people -- Gandhi talked about the profound influence that Ruskin had on him, saying in his autobiography that he got three lessons from Ruskin's Unto This Last: "That 1) the good of the individual is contained in the good of all. 2) a lawyer's work has the same value as the barber's in as much as all have the same right of earning their livelihood from their work. 3) a life of labour, i.e., the life of the tiller of the soil and the handicraftsman is the life worth living. The first of these I knew. The second I had dimly realized. The third had never occurred to me. Unto This Last made it clear as daylight for me that the second and third were contained in the first. I arose with the dawn, ready to reduce these principles to practice" Gandhi translated and paraphrased Unto this Last into Gujurati and called the resulting book Sarvodaya (meaning "uplifting all" or "the welfare of all") which he later took as the name of his own political philosophy. But Ruskin also had a more pernicious influence -- it was said in 1930s Germany that he and his friend Thomas Carlyle were "the first National Socialists" -- there's no evidence I know of that Hitler ever read Ruskin, but a *lot* of Nazi rhetoric is implicit in Ruskin's writing, particularly in his opposition to progress (he even opposed the bicycle as being too much inhuman interference with nature), just as much as more admirable philosophies, and he was so widely read in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that there's barely a political movement anywhere that didn't bear his fingerprints. But of course, our focus here is on music. And Ruskin had an influence on that, too. We've talked in several episodes, most recently the one on the Velvet Underground, about John Cage's piece 4'33. What I didn't mention in any of the discussions of that piece -- because I was saving it for here -- is that that piece was premiered at a small concert hall in upstate New York. The hall, the Maverick Concert Hall, was owned and run by the Maverick arts and crafts collective -- a collective that were so called because they were the *second* Ruskinite arts colony in the area, having split off from the Byrdcliffe colony after a dispute between its three founders, all of whom were disciples of Ruskin, and all of whom disagreed violently about how to implement Ruskin's ideas of pacifist all-for-one and one-for-all community. These arts colonies, and others that grew up around them like the Arts Students League were the thriving centre of a Bohemian community -- close enough to New York that you could get there if you needed to, far enough away that you could live out your pastoral fantasies, and artists of all types flocked there -- Pete Seeger met his wife there, and his father-in-law had been one of the stonemasons who helped build the Maverick concert hall. Dozens of artists in all sorts of areas, from Aaron Copland to Edward G Robinson, spent time in these communities, as did Cage. Of course, while these arts and crafts communities had a reputation for Bohemianism and artistic extremism, even radical utopian artists have their limits, and legend has it that the premiere of 4'33 was met with horror and derision, and eventually led to one artist in the audience standing up and calling on the residents of the town around which these artistic colonies had agglomerated: “Good people of Woodstock, let's drive these people out of town.” [Excerpt: The Band, "The Weight"] Ronnie Hawkins was almost born to make music. We heard back in the episode on "Suzie Q" in 2019 about his family and their ties to music. Ronnie's uncle Del was, according to most of the sources on the family, a member of the Sons of the Pioneers -- though as I point out in that episode, his name isn't on any of the official lists of group members, but he might well have performed with them at some point in the early years of the group. And he was definitely a country music bass player, even if he *wasn't* in the most popular country and western group of the thirties and forties. And Del had had two sons, Jerry, who made some minor rockabilly records: [Excerpt: Jerry Hawkins, "Swing, Daddy, Swing"] And Del junior, who as we heard in the "Susie Q" episode became known as Dale Hawkins and made one of the most important rock records of the fifties: [Excerpt: Dale Hawkins, "Susie Q"] Ronnie Hawkins was around the same age as his cousins, and was in awe of his country-music star uncle. Hawkins later remembered that after his uncle moved to Califormia to become a star “He'd come home for a week or two, driving a brand new Cadillac and wearing brand new clothes and I knew that's what I wanted to be." Though he also remembered “He spent every penny he made on whiskey, and he was divorced because he was running around with all sorts of women. His wife left Arkansas and went to Louisiana.” Hawkins knew that he wanted to be a music star like his uncle, and he started performing at local fairs and other events from the age of eleven, including one performance where he substituted for Hank Williams -- Williams was so drunk that day he couldn't perform, and so his backing band asked volunteers from the audience to get up and sing with them, and Hawkins sang Burl Ives and minstrel-show songs with the band. He said later “Even back then I knew that every important white cat—Al Jolson, Stephen Foster—they all did it by copying blacks. Even Hank Williams learned all the stuff he had from those black cats in Alabama. Elvis Presley copied black music; that's all that Elvis did.” As well as being a performer from an early age, though, Hawkins was also an entrepreneur with an eye for how to make money. From the age of fourteen he started running liquor -- not moonshine, he would always point out, but something far safer. He lived only a few miles from the border between Missouri and Arkansas, and alcohol and tobacco were about half the price in Missouri that they were in Arkansas, so he'd drive across the border, load up on whisky and cigarettes, and drive back and sell them at a profit, which he then used to buy shares in several nightclubs, which he and his bands would perform in in later years. Like every man of his generation, Hawkins had to do six months in the Army, and it was there that he joined his first ever full-time band, the Blackhawks -- so called because his name was Hawkins, and the rest of the group were Black, though Hawkins was white. They got together when the other four members were performing at a club in the area where Hawkins was stationed, and he was so impressed with their music that he jumped on stage and started singing with them. He said later “It sounded like something between the blues and rockabilly. It sort of leaned in both directions at the same time, me being a hayseed and those guys playing a lot funkier." As he put it "I wanted to sound like Bobby ‘Blue' Bland but it came out sounding like Ernest Tubb.” Word got around about the Blackhawks, both that they were a great-sounding rock and roll band and that they were an integrated band at a time when that was extremely unpopular in the southern states, and when Hawkins was discharged from the Army he got a call from Sam Phillips at Sun Records. According to Hawkins a group of the regular Sun session musicians were planning on forming a band, and he was asked to front the band for a hundred dollars a week, but by the time he got there the band had fallen apart. This doesn't precisely line up with anything else I know about Sun, though it perhaps makes sense if Hawkins was being asked to front the band who had variously backed Billy Lee Riley and Jerry Lee Lewis after one of Riley's occasional threats to leave the label. More likely though, he told everyone he knew that he had a deal with Sun but Phillips was unimpressed with the demos he cut there, and Hawkins made up the story to stop himself losing face. One of the session players for Sun, though, Luke Paulman, who played in Conway Twitty's band among others, *was* impressed with Hawkins though, and suggested that they form a band together with Paulman's bass player brother George and piano-playing cousin Pop Jones. The Paulman brothers and Jones also came from Arkansas, but they specifically came from Helena, Arkansas, the town from which King Biscuit Time was broadcast. King Biscuit Time was the most important blues radio show in the US at that time -- a short lunchtime programme which featured live performances from a house band which varied over the years, but which in the 1940s had been led by Sonny Boy Williamson II, and featured Robert Jr. Lockwood, Robert Johnson's stepson, on guiitar: [Excerpt: Sonny Boy Williamson II "Eyesight to the Blind (King Biscuit Time)"] The band also included a drummer, "Peck" Curtis, and that drummer was the biggest inspiration for a young white man from the town named Levon Helm. Helm had first been inspired to make music after seeing Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys play live when Helm was eight, and he had soon taken up first the harmonica, then the guitar, then the drums, becoming excellent at all of them. Even as a child he knew that he didn't want to be a farmer like his family, and that music was, as he put it, "the only way to get off that stinking tractor and out of that one hundred and five degree heat.” Sonny Boy Williamson and the King Biscuit Boys would perform in the open air in Marvell, Arkansas, where Helm was growing up, on Saturdays, and Helm watched them regularly as a small child, and became particularly interested in the drumming. “As good as the band sounded,” he said later “it seemed that [Peck] was definitely having the most fun. I locked into the drums at that point. Later, I heard Jack Nance, Conway Twitty's drummer, and all the great drummers in Memphis—Jimmy Van Eaton, Al Jackson, and Willie Hall—the Chicago boys (Fred Belew and Clifton James) and the people at Sun Records and Vee-Jay, but most of my style was based on Peck and Sonny Boy—the Delta blues style with the shuffle. Through the years, I've quickened the pace to a more rock-and-roll meter and time frame, but it still bases itself back to Peck, Sonny Boy Williamson, and the King Biscuit Boys.” Helm had played with another band that George Paulman had played in, and he was invited to join the fledgling band Hawkins was putting together, called for the moment the Sun Records Quartet. The group played some of the clubs Hawkins had business connections in, but they had other plans -- Conway Twitty had recently played Toronto, and had told Luke Paulman about how desperate the Canadians were for American rock and roll music. Twitty's agent Harold Kudlets booked the group in to a Toronto club, Le Coq D'Or, and soon the group were alternating between residencies in clubs in the Deep South, where they were just another rockabilly band, albeit one of the better ones, and in Canada, where they became the most popular band in Ontario, and became the nucleus of an entire musical scene -- the same scene from which, a few years later, people like Neil Young would emerge. George Paulman didn't remain long in the group -- he was apparently getting drunk, and also he was a double-bass player, at a time when the electric bass was becoming the in thing. And this is the best place to mention this, but there are several discrepancies in the various accounts of which band members were in Hawkins' band at which times, and who played on what session. They all *broadly* follow the same lines, but none of them are fully reconcilable with each other, and nobody was paying enough attention to lineup shifts in a bar band between 1957 and 1964 to be absolutely certain who was right. I've tried to reconcile the various accounts as far as possible and make a coherent narrative, but some of the details of what follows may be wrong, though the broad strokes are correct. For much of their first period in Ontario, the group had no bass player at all, relying on Jones' piano to fill in the bass parts, and on their first recording, a version of "Bo Diddley", they actually got the club's manager to play bass with them: [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins, "Hey Bo Diddley"] That is claimed to be the first rock and roll record made in Canada, though as everyone who has listened to this podcast knows, there's no first anything. It wasn't released as by the Sun Records Quartet though -- the band had presumably realised that that name would make them much less attractive to other labels, and so by this point the Sun Records Quartet had become Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks. "Hey Bo Diddley" was released on a small Canadian label and didn't have any success, but the group carried on performing live, travelling back down to Arkansas for a while and getting a new bass player, Lefty Evans, who had been playing in the same pool of musicians as them, having been another Sun session player who had been in Conway Twitty's band, and had written Twitty's "Why Can't I Get Through to You": [Excerpt: Conway Twitty, "Why Can't I Get Through to You"] The band were now popular enough in Canada that they were starting to get heard of in America, and through Kudlets they got a contract with Joe Glaser, a Mafia-connected booking agent who booked them into gigs on the Jersey Shore. As Helm said “Ronnie Hawkins had molded us into the wildest, fiercest, speed-driven bar band in America," and the group were apparently getting larger audiences in New Jersey than Sammy Davis Jr was, even though they hadn't released any records in the US. Or at least, they hadn't released any records in their own name in the US. There's a record on End Records by Rockin' Ronald and the Rebels which is very strongly rumoured to have been the Hawks under another name, though Hawkins always denied that. Have a listen for yourself and see what you think: [Excerpt: Rockin' Ronald and the Rebels, "Kansas City"] End Records, the label that was on, was one of the many record labels set up by George Goldner and distributed by Morris Levy, and when the group did release a record in their home country under their own name, it was on Levy's Roulette Records. An audition for Levy had been set up by Glaser's booking company, and Levy decided that given that Elvis was in the Army, there was a vacancy to be filled and Ronnie Hawkins might just fit the bill. Hawkins signed a contract with Levy, and it doesn't sound like he had much choice in the matter. Helm asked him “How long did you have to sign for?” and Hawkins replied "Life with an option" That said, unlike almost every other artist who interacted with Levy, Hawkins never had a bad word to say about him, at least in public, saying later “I don't care what Morris was supposed to have done, he looked after me and he believed in me. I even lived with him in his million-dollar apartment on the Upper East Side." The first single the group recorded for Roulette, a remake of Chuck Berry's "Thirty Days" retitled "Forty Days", didn't chart, but the follow-up, a version of Young Jessie's "Mary Lou", made number twenty-six on the charts: [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, "Mary Lou"] While that was a cover of a Young Jessie record, the songwriting credits read Hawkins and Magill -- Magill was a pseudonym used by Morris Levy. Levy hoped to make Ronnie Hawkins into a really big star, but hit a snag. This was just the point where the payola scandal had hit and record companies were under criminal investigation for bribing DJs to play their records. This was the main method of promotion that Levy used, and this was so well known that Levy was, for a time, under more scrutiny than anyone. He couldn't risk paying anyone off, and so Hawkins' records didn't get the expected airplay. The group went through some lineup changes, too, bringing in guitarist Fred Carter (with Luke Paulman moving to rhythm and soon leaving altogether) from Hawkins' cousin Dale's band, and bass player Jimmy Evans. Some sources say that Jones quit around this time, too, though others say he was in the band for a while longer, and they had two keyboards (the other keyboard being supplied by Stan Szelest. As well as recording Ronnie Hawkins singles, the new lineup of the group also recorded one single with Carter on lead vocals, "My Heart Cries": [Excerpt: Fred Carter, "My Heart Cries"] While the group were now playing more shows in the USA, they were still playing regularly in Canada, and they had developed a huge fanbase there. One of these was a teenage guitarist called Robbie Robertson, who had become fascinated with the band after playing a support slot for them, and had started hanging round, trying to ingratiate himself with the band in the hope of being allowed to join. As he was a teenager, Hawkins thought he might have his finger on the pulse of the youth market, and when Hawkins and Helm travelled to the Brill Building to hear new songs for consideration for their next album, they brought Robertson along to listen to them and give his opinion. Robertson himself ended up contributing two songs to the album, titled Mr. Dynamo. According to Hawkins "we had a little time after the session, so I thought, Well, I'm just gonna put 'em down and see what happens. And they were released. Robbie was the songwriter for words, and Levon was good for arranging, making things fit in and all that stuff. He knew what to do, but he didn't write anything." The two songs in question were "Someone Like You" and "Hey Boba Lou": [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, "Hey Boba Lou"] While Robertson was the sole writer of the songs, they were credited to Robertson, Hawkins, and Magill -- Morris Levy. As Robertson told the story later, “It's funny, when those songs came out and I got a copy of the album, it had another name on there besides my name for some writer like Morris Levy. So, I said to Ronnie, “There was nobody there writing these songs when I wrote these songs. Who is Morris Levy?” Ronnie just kinda tapped me on the head and said, “There are certain things about this business that you just let go and you don't question.” That was one of my early music industry lessons right there" Robertson desperately wanted to join the Hawks, but initially it was Robertson's bandmate Scott Cushnie who became the first Canadian to join the Hawks. But then when they were in Arkansas, Jimmy Evans decided he wasn't going to go back to Canada. So Hawkins called Robbie Robertson up and made him an offer. Robertson had to come down to Arkansas and get a couple of quick bass lessons from Helm (who could play pretty much every instrument to an acceptable standard, and so was by this point acting as the group's musical director, working out arrangements and leading them in rehearsals). Then Hawkins and Helm had to be elsewhere for a few weeks. If, when they got back, Robertson was good enough on bass, he had the job. If not, he didn't. Robertson accepted, but he nearly didn't get the gig after all. The place Hawkins and Helm had to be was Britain, where they were going to be promoting their latest single on Boy Meets Girls, the Jack Good TV series with Marty Wilde, which featured guitarist Joe Brown in the backing band: [Excerpt: Joe Brown, “Savage”] This was the same series that Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent were regularly appearing on, and while they didn't appear on the episodes that Hawkins and Helm appeared on, they did appear on the episodes immediately before Hawkins and Helm's two appearances, and again a couple of weeks after, and were friendly with the musicians who did play with Hawkins and Helm, and apparently they all jammed together a few times. Hawkins was impressed enough with Joe Brown -- who at the time was considered the best guitarist on the British scene -- that he invited Brown to become a Hawk. Presumably if Brown had taken him up on the offer, he would have taken the spot that ended up being Robertson's, but Brown turned him down -- a decision he apparently later regretted. Robbie Robertson was now a Hawk, and he and Helm formed an immediate bond. As Helm much later put it, "It was me and Robbie against the world. Our mission, as we saw it, was to put together the best band in history". As rockabilly was by this point passe, Levy tried converting Hawkins into a folk artist, to see if he could get some of the Kingston Trio's audience. He recorded a protest song, "The Ballad of Caryl Chessman", protesting the then-forthcoming execution of Chessman (one of only a handful of people to be executed in the US in recent decades for non-lethal offences), and he made an album of folk tunes, The Folk Ballads of Ronnie Hawkins, which largely consisted of solo acoustic recordings, plus a handful of left-over Hawks recordings from a year or so earlier. That wasn't a success, but they also tried a follow-up, having Hawkins go country and do an album of Hank Williams songs, recorded in Nashville at Owen Bradley's Quonset hut. While many of the musicians on the album were Nashville A-Team players, Hawkins also insisted on having his own band members perform, much to the disgust of the producer, and so it's likely (not certain, because there seem to be various disagreements about what was recorded when) that that album features the first studio recordings with Levon Helm and Robbie Robertson playing together: [Excerpt: Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, "Your Cheatin' Heart"] Other sources claim that the only Hawk allowed to play on the album sessions was Helm, and that the rest of the musicians on the album were Harold Bradley and Hank Garland on guitar, Owen Bradley and Floyd Cramer on piano, Bob Moore on bass, and the Anita Kerr singers. I tend to trust Helm's recollection that the Hawks played at least some of the instruments though, because the source claiming that also seems to confuse the Hank Williams and Folk Ballads albums, and because I don't hear two pianos on the album. On the other hand, that *does* sound like Floyd Cramer on piano, and the tik-tok bass sound you'd get from having Harold Bradley play a baritone guitar while Bob Moore played a bass. So my best guess is that these sessions were like the Elvis sessions around the same time and with several of the same musicians, where Elvis' own backing musicians played rhythm parts but left the prominent instruments to the A-team players. Helm was singularly unimpressed with the experience of recording in Nashville. His strongest memory of the sessions was of another session going on in the same studio complex at the time -- Bobby "Blue" Bland was recording his classic single "Turn On Your Love Light", with the great drummer Jabo Starks on drums, and Helm was more interested in listening to that than he was in the music they were playing: [Excerpt: Bobby "Blue" Bland, "Turn On Your Love Light"] Incidentally, Helm talks about that recording being made "downstairs" from where the Hawks were recording, but also says that they were recording in Bradley's Quonset hut. Now, my understanding here *could* be very wrong -- I've been unable to find a plan or schematic anywhere -- but my understanding is that the Quonset hut was a single-level structure, not a multi-level structure. BUT the original recording facilities run by the Bradley brothers were in Owen Bradley's basement, before they moved into the larger Quonset hut facility in the back, so it's possible that Bland was recording that in the old basement studio. If so, that won't be the last recording made in a basement we hear this episode... Fred Carter decided during the Nashville sessions that he was going to leave the Hawks. As his son told the story: "Dad had discovered the session musicians there. He had no idea that you could play and make a living playing in studios and sleep in your own bed every night. By that point in his life, he'd already been gone from home and constantly on the road and in the service playing music for ten years so that appealed to him greatly. And Levon asked him, he said, “If you're gonna leave, Fred, I'd like you to get young Robbie over here up to speed on guitar”…[Robbie] got kind of aggravated with him—and Dad didn't say this with any malice—but by the end of that week, or whatever it was, Robbie made some kind of comment about “One day I'm gonna cut you.” And Dad said, “Well, if that's how you think about it, the lessons are over.” " (For those who don't know, a musician "cutting" another one is playing better than them, so much better that the worse musician has to concede defeat. For the remainder of Carter's notice in the Hawks, he played with his back to Robertson, refusing to look at him. Carter leaving the group caused some more shuffling of roles. For a while, Levon Helm -- who Hawkins always said was the best lead guitar player he ever worked with as well as the best drummer -- tried playing lead guitar while Robertson played rhythm and another member, Rebel Payne, played bass, but they couldn't find a drummer to replace Helm, who moved back onto the drums. Then they brought in Roy Buchanan, another guitarist who had been playing with Dale Hawkins, having started out playing with Johnny Otis' band. But Buchanan didn't fit with Hawkins' personality, and he quit after a few months, going off to record his own first solo record: [Excerpt: Roy Buchanan, "Mule Train Stomp"] Eventually they solved the lineup problem by having Robertson -- by this point an accomplished lead player --- move to lead guitar and bringing in a new rhythm player, another Canadian teenager named Rick Danko, who had originally been a lead player (and who also played mandolin and fiddle). Danko wasn't expected to stay on rhythm long though -- Rebel Payne was drinking a lot and missing being at home when he was out on the road, so Danko was brought in on the understanding that he was to learn Payne's bass parts and switch to bass when Payne quit. Helm and Robertson were unsure about Danko, and Robertson expressed that doubt, saying "He only knows four chords," to which Hawkins replied, "That's all right son. You can teach him four more the way we had to teach you." He proved himself by sheer hard work. As Hawkins put it “He practiced so much that his arms swoll up. He was hurting.” By the time Danko switched to bass, the group also had a baritone sax player, Jerry Penfound, which allowed the group to play more of the soul and R&B material that Helm and Robertson favoured, though Hawkins wasn't keen. This new lineup of the group (which also had Stan Szelest on piano) recorded Hawkins' next album. This one was produced by Henry Glover, the great record producer, songwriter, and trumpet player who had played with Lucky Millinder, produced Wynonie Harris, Hank Ballard, and Moon Mullican, and wrote "Drowning in My Own Tears", "The Peppermint Twist", and "California Sun". Glover was massively impressed with the band, especially Helm (with whom he would remain friends for the rest of his life) and set aside some studio time for them to cut some tracks without Hawkins, to be used as album filler, including a version of the Bobby "Blue" Bland song "Farther On Up the Road" with Helm on lead vocals: [Excerpt: Levon Helm and the Hawks, "Farther On Up the Road"] There were more changes on the way though. Stan Szelest was about to leave the band, and Jones had already left, so the group had no keyboard player. Hawkins had just the replacement for Szelest -- yet another Canadian teenager. This one was Richard Manuel, who played piano and sang in a band called The Rockin' Revols. Manuel was not the greatest piano player around -- he was an adequate player for simple rockabilly and R&B stuff, but hardly a virtuoso -- but he was an incredible singer, able to do a version of "Georgia on My Mind" which rivalled Ray Charles, and Hawkins had booked the Revols into his own small circuit of clubs around Arkanasas after being impressed with them on the same bill as the Hawks a couple of times. Hawkins wanted someone with a good voice because he was increasingly taking a back seat in performances. Hawkins was the bandleader and frontman, but he'd often given Helm a song or two to sing in the show, and as they were often playing for several hours a night, the more singers the band had the better. Soon, with Helm, Danko, and Manuel all in the group and able to take lead vocals, Hawkins would start missing entire shows, though he still got more money than any of his backing group. Hawkins was also a hard taskmaster, and wanted to have the best band around. He already had great musicians, but he wanted them to be *the best*. And all the musicians in his band were now much younger than him, with tons of natural talent, but untrained. What he needed was someone with proper training, someone who knew theory and technique. He'd been trying for a long time to get someone like that, but Garth Hudson had kept turning him down. Hudson was older than any of the Hawks, though younger than Hawkins, and he was a multi-instrumentalist who was far better than any other musician on the circuit, having trained in a conservatory and learned how to play Bach and Chopin before switching to rock and roll. He thought the Hawks were too loud sounding and played too hard for him, but Helm kept on at Hawkins to meet any demands Hudson had, and Hawkins eventually agreed to give Hudson a higher wage than any of the other band members, buy him a new Lowry organ, and give him an extra ten dollars a week to give the rest of the band music lessons. Hudson agreed, and the Hawks now had a lineup of Helm on drums, Robertson on guitar, Manuel on piano, Danko on bass, Hudson on organ and alto sax, and Penfound on baritone sax. But these new young musicians were beginning to wonder why they actually needed a frontman who didn't turn up to many of the gigs, kept most of the money, and fined them whenever they broke one of his increasingly stringent set of rules. Indeed, they wondered why they needed a frontman at all. They already had three singers -- and sometimes a fourth, a singer called Bruce Bruno who would sometimes sit in with them when Penfound was unable to make a gig. They went to see Harold Kudlets, who Hawkins had recently sacked as his manager, and asked him if he could get them gigs for the same amount of money as they'd been getting with Hawkins. Kudlets was astonished to find how little Hawkins had been paying them, and told them that would be no problem at all. They had no frontman any more -- and made it a rule in all their contracts that the word "sideman" would never be used -- but Helm had been the leader for contractual purposes, as the musical director and longest-serving member (Hawkins, as a non-playing singer, had never joined the Musicians' Union so couldn't be the leader on contracts). So the band that had been Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks became the Levon Helm Sextet briefly -- but Penfound soon quit, and they became Levon and the Hawks. The Hawks really started to find their identity as their own band in 1964. They were already far more interested in playing soul than Hawkins had been, but they were also starting to get into playing soul *jazz*, especially after seeing the Cannonball Adderley Sextet play live: [Excerpt: Cannonball Adderley, "This Here"] What the group admired about the Adderley group more than anything else was a sense of restraint. Helm was particularly impressed with their drummer, Louie Hayes, and said of him "I got to see some great musicians over the years, and you see somebody like that play and you can tell, y' know, that the thing not to do is to just get it down on the floor and stomp the hell out of it!" The other influence they had, and one which would shape their sound even more, was a negative one. The two biggest bands on the charts at the time were the Beatles and the Beach Boys, and as Helm described it in his autobiography, the Hawks thought both bands' harmonies were "a blend of pale, homogenised, voices". He said "We felt we were better than the Beatles and the Beach Boys. We considered them our rivals, even though they'd never heard of us", and they decided to make their own harmonies sound as different as possible as a result. Where those groups emphasised a vocal blend, the Hawks were going to emphasise the *difference* in their voices in their own harmonies. The group were playing prestigious venues like the Peppermint Lounge, and while playing there they met up with John Hammond Jr, who they'd met previously in Canada. As you might remember from the first episode on Bob Dylan, Hammond Jr was the son of the John Hammond who we've talked about in many episodes, and was a blues musician in his own right. He invited Helm, Robertson, and Hudson to join the musicians, including Michael Bloomfield, who were playing on his new album, So Many Roads: [Excerpt: John P. Hammond, "Who Do You Love?"] That album was one of the inspirations that led Bob Dylan to start making electric rock music and to hire Bloomfield as his guitarist, decisions that would have profound implications for the Hawks. The first single the Hawks recorded for themselves after leaving Hawkins was produced by Henry Glover, and both sides were written by Robbie Robertson. "uh Uh Uh" shows the influence of the R&B bands they were listening to. What it reminds me most of is the material Ike and Tina Turner were playing at the time, but at points I think I can also hear the influence of Curtis Mayfield and Steve Cropper, who were rapidly becoming Robertson's favourite songwriters: [Excerpt: The Canadian Squires, "Uh Uh Uh"] None of the band were happy with that record, though. They'd played in the studio the same way they played live, trying to get a strong bass presence, but it just sounded bottom-heavy to them when they heard the record on a jukebox. That record was released as by The Canadian Squires -- according to Robertson, that was a name that the label imposed on them for the record, while according to Helm it was an alternative name they used so they could get bookings in places they'd only recently played, which didn't want the same band to play too often. One wonders if there was any confusion with the band Neil Young played in a year or so before that single... Around this time, the group also met up with Helm's old musical inspiration Sonny Boy Williamson II, who was impressed enough with them that there was some talk of them being his backing band (and it was in this meeting that Williamson apparently told Robertson "those English boys want to play the blues so bad, and they play the blues *so bad*", speaking of the bands who'd backed him in the UK, like the Yardbirds and the Animals). But sadly, Williamson died in May 1965 before any of these plans had time to come to fruition. Every opportunity for the group seemed to be closing up, even as they knew they were as good as any band around them. They had an offer from Aaron Schroeder, who ran Musicor Records but was more importantly a songwriter and publisher who had written for Elvis Presley and published Gene Pitney. Schroeder wanted to sign the Hawks as a band and Robertson as a songwriter, but Henry Glover looked over the contracts for them, and told them "If you sign this you'd better be able to pay each other, because nobody else is going to be paying you". What happened next is the subject of some controversy, because as these things tend to go, several people became aware of the Hawks at the same time, but it's generally considered that nothing would have happened the same way were it not for Mary Martin. Martin is a pivotal figure in music business history -- among other things she discovered Leonard Cohen and Gordon Lightfoot, managed Van Morrison, and signed Emmylou Harris to Warner Brothers records -- but a somewhat unknown one who doesn't even have a Wikipedia page. Martin was from Toronto, but had moved to New York, where she was working in Albert Grossman's office, but she still had many connections to Canadian musicians and kept an eye out for them. The group had sent demo tapes to Grossman's offices, and Grossman had had no interest in them, but Martin was a fan and kept pushing the group on Grossman and his associates. One of those associates, of course, was Grossman's client Bob Dylan. As we heard in the episode on "Like a Rolling Stone", Dylan had started making records with electric backing, with musicians who included Mike Bloomfield, who had played with several of the Hawks on the Hammond album, and Al Kooper, who was a friend of the band. Martin gave Richard Manuel a copy of Dylan's new electric album Highway 61 Revisited, and he enjoyed it, though the rest of the group were less impressed: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Highway 61 Revisited"] Dylan had played the Newport Folk Festival with some of the same musicians as played on his records, but Bloomfield in particular was more interested in continuing to play with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band than continuing with Dylan long-term. Mary Martin kept telling Dylan about this Canadian band she knew who would be perfect for him, and various people associated with the Grossman organisation, including Hammond, have claimed to have been sent down to New Jersey where the Hawks were playing to check them out in their live setting. The group have also mentioned that someone who looked a lot like Dylan was seen at some of their shows. Eventually, Dylan phoned Helm up and made an offer. He didn't need a full band at the moment -- he had Harvey Brooks on bass and Al Kooper on keyboards -- but he did need a lead guitar player and drummer for a couple of gigs he'd already booked, one in Forest Hills, New York, and a bigger gig at the Hollywood Bowl. Helm, unfamiliar with Dylan's work, actually asked Howard Kudlets if Dylan was capable of filling the Hollywood Bowl. The musicians rehearsed together and got a set together for the shows. Robertson and Helm thought the band sounded terrible, but Dylan liked the sound they were getting a lot. The audience in Forest Hills agreed with the Hawks, rather than Dylan, or so it would appear. As we heard in the "Like a Rolling Stone" episode, Dylan's turn towards rock music was *hated* by the folk purists who saw him as some sort of traitor to the movement, a movement whose figurehead he had become without wanting to. There were fifteen thousand people in the audience, and they listened politely enough to the first set, which Dylan played acoustically, But before the second set -- his first ever full electric set, rather than the very abridged one at Newport -- he told the musicians “I don't know what it will be like out there It's going to be some kind of carnival and I want you to all know that up front. So go out there and keep playing no matter how weird it gets!” There's a terrible-quality audience recording of that show in circulation, and you can hear the crowd's reaction to the band and to the new material: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Ballad of a Thin Man" (live Forest Hills 1965, audience noise only)] The audience also threw things at the musicians, knocking Al Kooper off his organ stool at one point. While Robertson remembered the Hollywood Bowl show as being an equally bad reaction, Helm remembered the audience there as being much more friendly, and the better-quality recording of that show seems to side with Helm: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Maggie's Farm (live at the Hollywood Bowl 1965)"] After those two shows, Helm and Robertson went back to their regular gig. and in September they made another record. This one, again produced by Glover, was for Atlantic's Atco subsidiary, and was released as by Levon and the Hawks. Manuel took lead, and again both songs were written by Robertson: [Excerpt: Levon and the Hawks, "He Don't Love You (And He'll Break Your Heart)"] But again that record did nothing. Dylan was about to start his first full electric tour, and while Helm and Robertson had not thought the shows they'd played sounded particularly good, Dylan had, and he wanted the two of them to continue with him. But Robertson and, especially, Helm, were not interested in being someone's sidemen. They explained to Dylan that they already had a band -- Levon and the Hawks -- and he would take all of them or he would take none of them. Helm in particular had not been impressed with Dylan's music -- Helm was fundamentally an R&B fan, while Dylan's music was rooted in genres he had little time for -- but he was OK with doing it, so long as the entire band got to. As Mary Martin put it “I think that the wonderful and the splendid heart of the band, if you will, was Levon, and I think he really sort of said, ‘If it's just myself as drummer and Robbie…we're out. We don't want that. It's either us, the band, or nothing.' And you know what? Good for him.” Rather amazingly, Dylan agreed. When the band's residency in New Jersey finished, they headed back to Toronto to play some shows there, and Dylan flew up and rehearsed with them after each show. When the tour started, the billing was "Bob Dylan with Levon and the Hawks". That billing wasn't to last long. Dylan had been booked in for nine months of touring, and was also starting work on what would become widely considered the first double album in rock music history, Blonde on Blonde, and the original plan was that Levon and the Hawks would play with him throughout that time. The initial recording sessions for the album produced nothing suitable for release -- the closest was "I Wanna Be Your Lover", a semi-parody of the Beatles' "I Want to be Your Man": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan with Levon and the Hawks, "I Wanna Be Your Lover"] But shortly into the tour, Helm quit. The booing had continued, and had even got worse, and Helm simply wasn't in the business to be booed at every night. Also, his whole conception of music was that you dance to it, and nobody was dancing to any of this. Helm quit the band, only telling Robertson of his plans, and first went off to LA, where he met up with some musicians from Oklahoma who had enjoyed seeing the Hawks when they'd played that state and had since moved out West -- people like Leon Russell, J.J. Cale (not John Cale of the Velvet Underground, but the one who wrote "Cocaine" which Eric Clapton later had a hit with), and John Ware (who would later go on to join the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band). They started loosely jamming with each other, sometimes also involving a young singer named Linda Ronstadt, but Helm eventually decided to give up music and go and work on an oil rig in New Orleans. Levon and the Hawks were now just the Hawks. The rest of the group soldiered on, replacing Helm with session drummer Bobby Gregg (who had played on Dylan's previous couple of albums, and had previously played with Sun Ra), and played on the initial sessions for Blonde on Blonde. But of those sessions, Dylan said a few weeks later "Oh, I was really down. I mean, in ten recording sessions, man, we didn't get one song ... It was the band. But you see, I didn't know that. I didn't want to think that" One track from the sessions did get released -- the non-album single "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?"] There's some debate as to exactly who's playing drums on that -- Helm says in his autobiography that it's him, while the credits in the official CD releases tend to say it's Gregg. Either way, the track was an unexpected flop, not making the top forty in the US, though it made the top twenty in the UK. But the rest of the recordings with the now Helmless Hawks were less successful. Dylan was trying to get his new songs across, but this was a band who were used to playing raucous music for dancing, and so the attempts at more subtle songs didn't come off the way he wanted: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Hawks, "Visions of Johanna (take 5, 11-30-1965)"] Only one track from those initial New York sessions made the album -- "One Of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)" -- but even that only featured Robertson and Danko of the Hawks, with the rest of the instruments being played by session players: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan (One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)"] The Hawks were a great live band, but great live bands are not necessarily the same thing as a great studio band. And that's especially the case with someone like Dylan. Dylan was someone who was used to recording entirely on his own, and to making records *quickly*. In total, for his fifteen studio albums up to 1974's Blood on the Tracks, Dylan spent a total of eighty-six days in the studio -- by comparison, the Beatles spent over a hundred days in the studio just on the Sgt Pepper album. It's not that the Hawks weren't a good band -- very far from it -- but that studio recording requires a different type of discipline, and that's doubly the case when you're playing with an idiosyncratic player like Dylan. The Hawks would remain Dylan's live backing band, but he wouldn't put out a studio recording with them backing him until 1974. Instead, Bob Johnston, the producer Dylan was working with, suggested a different plan. On his previous album, the Nashville session player Charlie McCoy had guested on "Desolation Row" and Dylan had found him easy to work with. Johnston lived in Nashville, and suggested that they could get the album completed more quickly and to Dylan's liking by using Nashville A-Team musicians. Dylan agreed to try it, and for the rest of the album he had Robertson on lead guitar and Al Kooper on keyboards, but every other musician was a Nashville session player, and they managed to get Dylan's songs recorded quickly and the way he heard them in his head: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine"] Though Dylan being Dylan he did try to introduce an element of randomness to the recordings by having the Nashville musicians swap their instruments around and play each other's parts on "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35", though the Nashville players were still competent enough that they managed to get a usable, if shambolic, track recorded that way in a single take: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35"] Dylan said later of the album "The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the Blonde on Blonde album. It's that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up." The album was released in late June 1966, a week before Freak Out! by the Mothers of Invention, another double album, produced by Dylan's old producer Tom Wilson, and a few weeks after Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys. Dylan was at the forefront of a new progressive movement in rock music, a movement that was tying thoughtful, intelligent lyrics to studio experimentation and yet somehow managing to have commercial success. And a month after Blonde on Blonde came out, he stepped away from that position, and would never fully return to it. The first half of 1966 was taken up with near-constant touring, with Dylan backed by the Hawks and a succession of fill-in drummers -- first Bobby Gregg, then Sandy Konikoff, then Mickey Jones. This tour started in the US and Canada, with breaks for recording the album, and then moved on to Australia and Europe. The shows always followed the same pattern. First Dylan would perform an acoustic set, solo, with just an acoustic guitar and harmonica, which would generally go down well with the audience -- though sometimes they would get restless, prompting a certain amount of resistance from the performer: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Just Like a Woman (live Paris 1966)"] But the second half of each show was electric, and that was where the problems would arise. The Hawks were playing at the top of their game -- some truly stunning performances: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Hawks, "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues (live in Liverpool 1966)"] But while the majority of the audience was happy to hear the music, there was a vocal portion that were utterly furious at the change in Dylan's musical style. Most notoriously, there was the performance at Manchester Free Trade Hall where this happened: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone (live Manchester 1966)"] That kind of aggression from the audience had the effect of pushing the band on to greater heights a lot of the time -- and a bootleg of that show, mislabelled as the Royal Albert Hall, became one of the most legendary bootlegs in rock music history. Jimmy Page would apparently buy a copy of the bootleg every time he saw one, thinking it was the best album ever made. But while Dylan and the Hawks played defiantly, that kind of audience reaction gets wearing. As Dylan later said, “Judas, the most hated name in human history, and for what—for playing an electric guitar. As if that is in some kind of way equitable to betraying our Lord, and delivering him up to be crucified; all those evil mothers can rot in hell.” And this wasn't the only stress Dylan, in particular, was under. D.A. Pennebaker was making a documentary of the tour -- a follow-up to his documentary of the 1965 tour, which had not yet come out. Dylan talked about the 1965 documentary, Don't Look Back, as being Pennebaker's film of Dylan, but this was going to be Dylan's film, with him directing the director. That footage shows Dylan as nervy and anxious, and covering for the anxiety with a veneer of flippancy. Some of Dylan's behaviour on both tours is unpleasant in ways that can't easily be justified (and which he has later publicly regretted), but there's also a seeming cruelty to some of his interactions with the press and public that actually reads more as frustration. Over and over again he's asked questions -- about being the voice of a generation or the leader of a protest movement -- which are simply based on incorrect premises. When someone asks you a question like this, there are only a few options you can take, none of them good. You can dissect the question, revealing the incorrect premises, and then answer a different question that isn't what they asked, which isn't really an option at all given the kind of rapid-fire situation Dylan was in. You can answer the question as asked, which ends up being dishonest. Or you can be flip and dismissive, which is the tactic Dylan chose. Dylan wasn't the only one -- this is basically what the Beatles did at press conferences. But where the Beatles were a gang and so came off as being fun, Dylan doing the same thing came off as arrogant and aggressive. One of the most famous artifacts of the whole tour is a long piece of footage recorded for the documentary, with Dylan and John Lennon riding in the back of a taxi, both clearly deeply uncomfortable, trying to be funny and impress the other, but neither actually wanting to be there: [Excerpt Dylan and Lennon conversation] 33) Part of the reason Dylan wanted to go home was that he had a whole new lifestyle. Up until 1964 he had been very much a city person, but as he had grown more famous, he'd found New York stifling. Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary had a cabin in Woodstock, where he'd grown up, and after Dylan had spent a month there in summer 1964, he'd fallen in love with the area. Albert Grossman had also bought a home there, on Yarrow's advice, and had given Dylan free run of the place, and Dylan had decided he wanted to move there permanently and bought his own home there. He had also married, to Sara Lowndes (whose name is, as far as I can tell, pronounced "Sarah" even though it's spelled "Sara"), and she had given birth to his first child (and he had adopted her child from her previous marriage). Very little is actually known about Sara, who unlike many other partners of rock stars at this point seemed positively to detest the limelight, and whose privacy Dylan has continued to respect even after the end of their marriage in the late seventies, but it's apparent that the two were very much in love, and that Dylan wanted to be back with his wife and kids, in the country, not going from one strange city to another being asked insipid questions and having abuse screamed at him. He was also tired of the pressure to produce work constantly. He'd signed a contract for a novel, called Tarantula, which he'd written a draft of but was unhappy with, and he'd put out two single albums and a double-album in a little over a year -- all of them considered among the greatest albums ever made. He could only keep up this rate of production and performance with a large intake of speed, and he was sometimes staying up for four days straight to do so. After the European leg of the tour, Dylan was meant to take some time to finish overdubs on Blonde on Blonde, edit the film of the tour for a TV special, with his friend Howard Alk, and proof the galleys for Tarantula, before going on a second world tour in the autumn. That world tour never happened. Dylan was in a motorcycle accident near his home, and had to take time out to recover. There has been a lot of discussion as to how serious the accident actually was, because Dylan's manager Albert Grossman was known to threaten to break contracts by claiming his performers were sick, and because Dylan essentially disappeared from public view for the next eighteen months. Every possible interpretation of the events has been put about by someone, from Dylan having been close to death, to the entire story being put up as a fake. As Dylan is someone who is far more protective of his privacy than most rock stars, it's doubtful we'll ever know the precise truth, but putting together the various accounts Dylan's injuries were bad but not life-threatening, but they acted as a wake-up call -- if he carried on living like he had been, how much longer could he continue? in his sort-of autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan described this period, saying "I had been in a motorcycle accident and I'd been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses." All his forthcoming studio and tour dates were cancelled, and Dylan took the time out to recover, and to work on his film, Eat the Document. But it's clear that nobody was sure at first exactly how long Dylan's hiatus from touring was going to last. As it turned out, he wouldn't do another tour until the mid-seventies, and would barely even play any one-off gigs in the intervening time. But nobody knew that at the time, and so to be on the safe side the Hawks were being kept on a retainer. They'd always intended to work on their own music anyway -- they didn't just want to be anyone's backing band -- so they took this time to kick a few ideas around, but they were hamstrung by the fact that it was difficult to find rehearsal space in New York City, and they didn't have any gigs. Their main musical work in the few months between summer 1966 and spring 1967 was some recordings for the soundtrack of a film Peter Yarrow was making. You Are What You Eat is a bizarre hippie collage of a film, documenting the counterculture between 1966 when Yarrow started making it and 1968 when it came out. Carl Franzoni, one of the leaders of the LA freak movement that we've talked about in episodes on the Byrds, Love, and the Mothers of Invention, said of the film “If you ever see this movie you'll understand what ‘freaks' are. It'll let you see the L.A. freaks, the San Francisco freaks, and the New York freaks. It was like a documentary and it was about the makings of what freaks were about. And it had a philosophy, a very definite philosophy: that you are free-spirited, artistic." It's now most known for introducing the song "My Name is Jack" by John Simon, the film's music supervisor: [Excerpt: John Simon, "My Name is Jack"] That song would go on to be a top ten hit in the UK for Manfred Mann: [Excerpt: Manfred Mann, "My Name is Jack"] The Hawks contributed backing music for several songs for the film, in which they acted as backing band for another old Greenwich Village folkie who had been friends with Yarrow and Dylan but who was not yet the star he would soon become, Tiny Tim: [Excerpt: Tiny Tim, "Sonny Boy"] This was their first time playing together properly since the end of the European tour, and Sid Griffin has noted that these Tiny Tim sessions are the first time you can really hear the sound that the group would develop over the next year, and which would characterise them for their whole career. Robertson, Danko, and Manuel also did a session, not for the film with another of Grossman's discoveries, Carly Simon, playing a version of "Baby Let Me Follow You Down", a song they'd played a lot with Dylan on the tour that spring. That recording has never been released, and I've only managed to track down a brief clip of it from a BBC documentary, with Simon and an interviewer talking over most of the clip (so this won't be in the Mixcloud I put together of songs): [Excerpt: Carly Simon, "Baby Let Me Follow You Down"] That recording is notable though because as well as Robertson, Danko, and Manuel, and Dylan's regular studio keyboard players Al Kooper and Paul Griffin, it also features Levon Helm on drums, even though Helm had still not rejoined the band and was at the time mostly working in New Orleans. But his name's on the session log, so he must have m
Josh's guests: Tracy Slepcevic - author, Warrior Mom How you can help your child with Autism George Grossberg, MD New thinking about the causes of Alzheimer's and the lifestyle and new drug therapies now in use Rich Ulloa - Music Producer, Pete Ham Tribute Album Pete Ham, singer/songwriter Badfinger, new album with contributions by Melanie, Janis Ian, Scarlett Rivera, Rick Danko, Lenny Kaye and many others highlight the musical magic of Pete Ham find us at: www.HeresToYourHealthWithJoshuaLane.com
“Sitting around my house in Malibu and walking around the beach. I've been doing that for a long time, and frankly, I'm tired of it.” Rick Danko's quote in 1978 could accurately reflect the temperate of a few members of The Band as the end of the decade neared. A purgatory of sorts had settled over The Band. Following The Last Waltz in 1976, The Band lay dormant. Was it over? Well, not officially. Danko, Helm and Robertson all talked publicly about recording again, downplaying that they hadn't been seen in the studio since The Last Waltz. Levon and Rick had already set motion to their solo careers, Helm with the RCO All-Stars and Danko with his first album on Arista Records. Robbie hadn't technically left the world of The Band, he kept steady with post-production on The Last Waltz with the film and album, and Garth Hudson was busy building his new life and session work. Manuel took things slower, struggling with his demons; he sought to fight them. 1997 through 1978, continued the perplexing situation surrounding The Band was still lurking in the background. Robertson and Danko continued with heavy schedules throughout the year. Still, The Band members did overlap at various points throughout the year. The Band: A History is produced, written and hosted by Tyrell William Lisson and post-production sound and editing by Michael Koehler. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Sports highlights of 2022, Happy Birthday to the late Rick Danko from the Band, BC vents about the bad weather and flight cancellations and people stealing luggage, things that happened for the 1st time in history in 2022, On This Day with Led Zeppelin and Vanilla Fudge, your phone calls and BC remembers those in the music industry who we lost in 2022…
If you were to build a band from ANY artist of all-time... Who would it be? We discuss who our BASS PLAYER would be in this episode. We discuss Mike Gordon, Rick Danko, Cliff Burton, Sting, Paul McCartney, and MANY other Bass Players. We talk about what makes a bass player and what qualities we would want in OUR bass player. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/album4theday/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/album4theday/support
The night before Thanksgiving, Hanif has a special invented tradition: every year, he makes a batch of cupcakes and watches The Last Waltz—and every year, he finds new things to love about the film. Directed by Martin Scorsese, The Last Waltz is a 1978 concert film documenting the final performance of The Band. To Hanif, the movie is not just a collection of great performances, but a study in exquisite tenderness, and how to say goodbye. Hrishikesh Hirway joins Hanif to discuss the film in this special episode recorded live at On Air Fest LA Annex 2022. For the playlist of songs curated for this episode, head over to radio.sonos.com. Music In This Week's Episode: Sip the Wine - Rick DankoDon't Do It - The BandMy Love - Rick Danko and Richard ManuelDown South in New Orleans - The Band, Bobby CharlesFalse Hearted Lover Blues - Levon HelmTura Lura Lural (That's an Irish Lullaby) - The Band, Van Morrison All Our Past Times - Rick DankoShowdown at Big Sky - Robbie Robertson Show Notes:This special episode of Object of Sound was recorded live at On Air LA Annex.Check out the clips from the Last Waltz that Hanif shared with Hrishi on stage: the Band performing Caravan with Van Morrison, Helpless with Neil Young, The Weight with the Staples Singers. Plus, the clip of Rick Danko's interview with Martin Scorsese. Photos from Hanif and Hrishi's conversation on stage at On Air LA Annex can be found on our instagram, @objectofsound. The artwork for Music from Big Pink inspired Hanif to pick up the Band's music at his local library. Credits:This show is produced by work by work: Scott Newman, Jemma Rose Brown, Kathleen Ottinger, Rhiannon Corby, and by Hanif Abdurraqib. The show is mixed by Sam Bair. Extra gratitude to Joe Dawson and Saidah Blount at Sonos.
“I was looking for a simpler, fresher routing... I really like this new group. I can go out and perform the record now.”Rick Danko was now out on his own. Nearly two decades with The Band left him wanting more. More music, more touring and more control. He told Harvey Kubernick in 1978, “I'm the focal point on stage this time, and it doesn't bother me. I put this new group together, I telephoned them all. I sought out personalities who could bus and fly together and continue to put up with each other. What I do is collect performances from everyone. I make quicker decisions in this position than when I am a member of the Band.”Outro song by Ian James Bain, stream his music everywhere.
“I was looking for a simpler, fresher routing... I really like this new group. I can go out and perform the record now.” Rick Danko was now out on his own. Nearly two decades with The Band left him wanting more. More music, more touring and more control. He told Harvey Kubernick in 1978, “I'm the focal point on stage this time, and it doesn't bother me. I put this new group together, I telephoned them all. I sought out personalities who could bus and fly together and continue to put up with each other. What I do is collect performances from everyone. I make quicker decisions in this position than when I am a member of the Band.” Outro song by Ian James Bain, stream his music everywhere.
Gillian Welch "Red Clay Halo"Neil Young "Walk On"John Lee Hooker "Sally Mae"Drive-By Truckers "Forged In Hell And Heaven Sent"Amanda Shires "Bad Behavior"John Prine "Illegal Smile"Chris Knight "Mexican Home (feat. John Prine)"Sam & Dave "You Got Me Hummin"Black Joe Lewis "Come to My Party"Margo Price "Ain't Livin Long Like This"Arlo McKinley "Back Home (feat. Logan Halstead)"Beck "Sin City"James McMurtry "Ain't Got a Place"Betty Davis "If I'm In Luck I Might Get Picked Up"John Coltrane "Straight Street"Valerie June "Look At Miss Ohio"Mavis Staples "You Got To Move"James Booker "Junco Partner"Tedeschi Trucks Band "Playing With My Emotions"Col. Bruce Hampton "Fixin' to Die"George Jones & Tammy Wynette "We Go Together"Louis Armstrong "On The Sunny Side Of The Street (Recording 1947)"Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong "On The Sunny Side Of The Street"Richard Swift "If The Sun Stops Shinin'"Billy Bragg "Greetings to the New Brunette"The Blasters "I'm Shakin'"The Blasters "I'm Shakin'"The Blasters "Border Radio"Gillian Welch "Dry Town (Demo)"John Moreland "Claim Your Prize"Willie Dixon "Sittin' and Cryin' the Blues"Charlie Musselwhite "Hello Stranger"Krista Shows "Ain't Your Fault"The Derek Trucks Band "Already Free (Live)"Rick Danko "Java Blues"JD McPherson "It's All Over but the Shouting"Alex Chilton "Come By Here"The Glands "Pleaser"boygenius "Souvenir"Maggie Bell "Comin' on Strong"Koko Taylor "Wang Dang Doodle"Billy Joe Shaver "Chicken On The Ground"Connie Smith "If That Ain't Strong Enough"Porter Wagoner "Daddy Was an Old Time Preacher Man"
The Band: A History sits down with Chest Fever, the official revival of The Band. If you remember my interview a few months ago with Mrs. Henry, a great band from California. In that case, they are back with a new project, Chest Fever, a band that has been given the stamp of approval to carry on the musical legacy of The Band. They are taking their show on the road for the fiftieth anniversary of The Band's live album Rock of Ages, touring across the United States and Canada. I chat with them about how Chest Fever was created, the preparation for the tour and the balance of replicating The Band's sound and making the music their own. Find out more about Chest Fever and their tour dates on their official website: http://www.chestfeverofficial.com.
The Band: A History sits down with legendary recording engineer, mixer and record producer Bob Clearmountain, whose innovative approach has led him to work with industry-heavy-hitters like Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, and The Rolling Stones. Having mixed Robbie Robertson's first solo album in 1987 and sharing a working relationship since it made sense to bring him aboard when tackling the 50th anniversary of Music From Big Pink in 2018. Bob has been back, working on all subsequent anniversary releases by The Band, including the most recent, Cahoots. The Band: A History talks to him about his working relationship with Robertson, the challenges of re-mixing records from five decades ago and the new technology he brings to the remixes.
Two Cow Garage "The Heart and the Crown"Richard Swift "Broken Finger Blues"JD McPherson "Just Around The Corner"Kitty Wells "Guilty Street"Adia Victoria "Devil Is A Lie"Blue Mountain "Bloody 98"Fats Domino "When I Was Young"Memphis Slim "We're Gonna Rock"Wilco "Falling Apart (Right Now)"Elvis Costello & the Roots "Sugar Won't Work"Eilen Jewell "Back to Dallas"Rick Danko "What A Town"Eddie Hinton "Brand New Man"Hot Water Music "Trusty Chords"Joan Shelley "Over and Even"Superchunk "Endless Summer"Joseph "Come On Up To The House"LaVern Baker "Bumble Bee"Little Brother Montgomery "Michigan Water Blues"Bob Dylan "Precious Angel"Labi Siffre "I Got The..."Kendrick Lamar "Auntie Diaries"Hank Crawford "Sister Sadie"Arthur Gunter "Baby Let´s Play House"The 40 Acre Mule "16 Days"Old 97's "Rollerskate Skinny"Nina Simone "Do I Move You?"Koko Taylor "I'd Rather Go Blind"Jack White "If I Die Tomorrow"Drive-By Truckers "Forged In Hell And Heaven Sent"R.E.M. "Swan Swan H"Cory Branan "Imogene"Sister O.M. Terrell "Life Is a Problem"Jkutchma & the Five Fifths "Sundown, Usa"Carl Perkins "Poor Boy Blues"Blue Lu Barker "I'll Give You Some Tomorrow"John Prine "Sweet Revenge"Buddy Guy "Outskirst of Town"Junior Walker & The All Stars "Way Back Home"Wynonie Harris "Mr Blues Is Coming To Town"Billie Holiday Orchestra "Summertime"Lucero "That Much Further West"
Assembling in the studio at various points during 1976 through 1977, The Band put together a plan for Islands. It was described later by Robbie as being similar to The Who's Odds & Sods album. In essence, it was a hodgepodge of older recordings along with some newer cuts to complete their eight album record deal with Capitol.Regardless of all of the exterior distractions, The Band were still professionals. They were incapable of putting out terrible music and they assembled ten tracks that while uneven still pack a serious punch. And with that, the original incarnation of The Band was done. It wasn't executed perfectly but nothing ever truly is. As many fans, critics and peers have mentioned, The Band was one of the finest groups of musicians that ever played and while they may have not gone out exactly as planned, their influence was never diminished. The Band: A History is produced, written and hosted by Tyrell William Lisson with additional research and writing by Alex McGillivray and post-production sound and editing by Michael Koehler.
Full-on post-production of The Last Waltz took place over an eighteen-month period from the winter of 1977 through the spring of 1978. It was a monstrous undertaking with many moving pieces between the studio, producers, technicians, crews and the musicians.Ultimately, the release of the film and soundtrack in April 1978 led Martin Scorsese and Robbie Robertson across the globe to promote their film. The Last Waltz, the imperfect masterpiece was a defining moment of their careers whether or not they knew it or wanted it to be. Forever on celluloid, one of the most important acts of the 1960s and 1970s was immortalized surrounded by their peers.The Band: A History is produced, written and hosted by Tyrell William Lisson with additional research and writing by Alex McGillivray and post-production sound and editing by Michael Koehler.
At first, the viewer sees nothing but a blank screen and hears only the voices of Rick Danko, Martin Scorsese and another member of the film crew as they run through a first take, Danko manages to only utter one word "cutthroat" The Last Waltz dragged on. With the concert wrapped and filming complete at the MGM soundstage, Martin Scorsese wanted to now add a series of interviews to further contextualize the footage shot. With the go-ahead and more budget from the studio interviews were filmed. Filming took place at The Band's clubhouse Shangri-La and most evenings didn't start until well after midnight. The goal was to reminisce about the “good old days” and play some instruments. It becomes quite evident through the various interviews littered between the concert footage, that much was being left unsaid. It's no surprise at this point The Band minus Robertson was uneasy with the whole proposition. In exchange, we get a series of uneven interviews but enough to glean new information and explore the everchanging dynamics of The Band, their relationships with each other and the music. The Band: A History is produced, written and hosted by Tyrell William Lisson with additional research and writing by Alex McGillivray and post-production sound and editing by Michael Koehler. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
At first, the viewer sees nothing but a blank screen and hears only the voices of Rick Danko, Martin Scorsese and another member of the film crew as they run through a first take, Danko manages to only utter one word "cutthroat" The Last Waltz dragged on. With the concert wrapped and filming complete at the MGM soundstage, Martin Scorsese wanted to now add a series of interviews to further contextualize the footage shot. With the go-ahead and more budget from the studio interviews were filmed.Filming took place at The Band's clubhouse Shangri-La and most evenings didn't start until well after midnight. The goal was to reminisce about the “good old days” and play some instruments. It becomes quite evident through the various interviews littered between the concert footage, that much was being left unsaid. It's no surprise at this point The Band minus Robertson was uneasy with the whole proposition. In exchange, we get a series of uneven interviews but enough to glean new information and explore the everchanging dynamics of The Band, their relationships with each other and the music.The Band: A History is produced, written and hosted by Tyrell William Lisson with additional research and writing by Alex McGillivray and post-production sound and editing by Michael Koehler.
Michael "Leroy" Bram is most known for his tenure as the drummer for Grammy Award winning singer-songwriter Jason Mraz. He served as Mraz' Musical Director from 2008-2010 during the "We Sing, We Dance, We Steal Things" world tour performing at Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall, Royal Albert Hall as well as performances on Saturday Night Live, Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, David Letterman and Ellen. Michael has also recently joined THE WEIGHT BAND as their new singer and drummer, singing and playing the parts of the legendary Levon Helm. The Weight Band performs the iconic music of "THE BAND" and features former members of THE BAND, as well as former members of Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, and Levon Helm's respective bands. He has also recently performed and recorded with artists such as WILLIE NELSON, JOSS STONE, JOHN POPPER, G.LOVE AND SPECIAL SAUCE, ZAC BROWN, CHRISTINA PERRI, COLBIE CALLAIT, and many more. mikebram.com
At first, the viewer sees nothing but a blank screen and hears only the voices of Rick Danko, Martin Scorsese and another member of the film crew as they run through a first take, Danko manages to only utter one word "cutthroat" The Last Waltz dragged on. With the concert wrapped and filming complete at the MGM soundstage, Martin Scorsese wanted to now add a series of interviews to further contextualize the footage shot. With the go-ahead and more budget from the studio interviews were filmed. Filming took place at The Band's clubhouse Shangri-La and most evenings didn't start until well after midnight. The goal was to reminisce about the “good old days” and play some instruments. It becomes quite evident through the various interviews littered between the concert footage, that much was being left unsaid. It's no surprise at this point The Band minus Robertson was uneasy with the whole proposition. In exchange, we get a series of uneven interviews but enough to glean new information and explore the everchanging dynamics of The Band, their relationships with each other and the music. The Band: A History is produced, written and hosted by Tyrell William Lisson with additional research and writing by Alex McGillivray and post-production sound and editing by Michael Koehler. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
At first, the viewer sees nothing but a blank screen and hears only the voices of Rick Danko, Martin Scorsese and another member of the film crew as they run through a first take, Danko manages to only utter one word "cutthroat" The Last Waltz dragged on. With the concert wrapped and filming complete at the MGM soundstage, Martin Scorsese wanted to now add a series of interviews to further contextualize the footage shot. With the go-ahead and more budget from the studio interviews were filmed.Filming took place at The Band's clubhouse Shangri-La and most evenings didn't start until well after midnight. The goal was to reminisce about the “good old days” and play some instruments. It becomes quite evident through the various interviews littered between the concert footage, that much was being left unsaid. It's no surprise at this point The Band minus Robertson was uneasy with the whole proposition. In exchange, we get a series of uneven interviews but enough to glean new information and explore the everchanging dynamics of The Band, their relationships with each other and the music.Part of Panteon PodcastsThe Band: A History is produced, written and hosted by Tyrell William Lisson with additional research and writing by Alex McGillivray and post-production sound and editing by Michael Koehler.
The Band: A History sits down with former guitarist of The Band Jim Weider. Jim joined The Band in 1985 and remained their lead guitarist until the group dissolved in 2000 after Rick Danko's death. Known as one of the premiere Fender Telecaster players in the world, outside of The Band, Weider has played with Robbie Dupree, Dr. John, Graham Parker, Keith Richards, Scotty Moore and Bob Weir. Weider was also a member of the Levon Helm Band from 2009 until Levon's death in 2012 and has since created The Weight Band, which originated inside the barn of Levon Helm in 2012 when Jim Weider and Randy Ciarlante (former members of The Band), were performing "Songs of The Band" with Garth Hudson, Jimmy Vivino and Byron Isaacs. The Weight Band is getting ready to release their second album "Shines Like Gold" on April 1, 2022. You can find out more about the band, their music and their tour dates here: https://www.theweightband.com/
The Band: A History sits down with former guitarist of The Band Jim Weider. Jim joined The Band in 1985 and remained their lead guitarist until the group dissolved in 2000 after Rick Danko's death. Known as one of the premiere Fender Telecaster players in the world, outside of The Band, Weider has played with Robbie Dupree, Dr. John, Graham Parker, Keith Richards, Scotty Moore and Bob Weir. Weider was also a member of the Levon Helm Band from 2009 until Levon's death in 2012 and has since created The Weight Band, which originated inside the barn of Levon Helm in 2012 when Jim Weider and Randy Ciarlante (former members of The Band), were performing "Songs of The Band" with Garth Hudson, Jimmy Vivino and Byron Isaacs. The Weight Band is getting ready to release their second album "Shines Like Gold" on April 1, 2022. You can find out more about the band, their music and their tour dates here: https://www.theweightband.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Band: A History sits down with former guitarist of The Band Jim Weider. Jim joined The Band in 1985 and remained their lead guitarist until the group dissolved in 2000 after Rick Danko's death. Known as one of the premiere Fender Telecaster players in the world, outside of The Band, Weider has played with Robbie Dupree, Dr. John, Graham Parker, Keith Richards, Scotty Moore and Bob Weir. Weider was also a member of the Levon Helm Band from 2009 until Levon's death in 2012 and has since created The Weight Band, which originated inside the barn of Levon Helm in 2012 when Jim Weider and Randy Ciarlante (former members of The Band), were performing "Songs of The Band" with Garth Hudson, Jimmy Vivino and Byron Isaacs. The Weight Band is getting ready to release their second album "Shines Like Gold" on April 1, 2022. You can find out more about the band, their music and their tour dates here: https://www.theweightband.com/
The Band: A History sits down with former guitarist of The Band Jim Weider. Jim joined The Band in 1985 and remained their lead guitarist until the group dissolved in 2000 after Rick Danko's death. Known as one of the premiere Fender Telecaster players in the world, outside of The Band, Weider has played with Robbie Dupree, Dr. John, Graham Parker, Keith Richards, Scotty Moore and Bob Weir. Weider was also a member of the Levon Helm Band from 2009 until Levon's death in 2012 and has since created The Weight Band, which originated inside the barn of Levon Helm in 2012 when Jim Weider and Randy Ciarlante (former members of The Band), were performing "Songs of The Band" with Garth Hudson, Jimmy Vivino and Byron Isaacs. The Weight Band is getting ready to release their second album "Shines Like Gold" on April 1, 2022. You can find out more about the band, their music and their tour dates here: https://www.theweightband.com/ Part of Pantheon Podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
With the show underway and a plethora of performances next up included Neil Young, who had the unfortunate experience of sporting a massive cocaine booger in his nostril as he floated through his set of numbers before more performances took place including Joni Mitchell, a controversial Neil Diamond, the electrifying performance of Van Morrison, who almost got to scared to go on stage, a collection of performances from beatniks, Hells Angles and poets, and their old friend Bob Dylan who was being difficult the night of the Waltz and almost didn't appear.At the close of the concert, the sudden rush of triumph and sadness washed over the exhausted group as they left the stage. Drenched in sweat, blood and tears, they had just completed the ultimate marathon, not only had they played over forty songs with their peers and friends, they had just completed the marathon that was their humble beginnings in Southern Ontario in 1957 when Robbie Robertson met Ronnie Hawkins and Levon Helm that eventually led to Levon Helm, Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson change the face of rock music.The Band that left the stage wouldn't perform live in the same iteration again, it was the end of an era, The Band, was the behemoth behind the curtain, never showy, never boastful, but always impactful. As the evening faded into the morning, the concert that was The Last Waltz was complete, but it was just the beginning of what it would become and what audiences today remember of the legendary moment of history.Produced, hosted and edited by Tyrell William Lisson. Additional writing and research by Oscar Ashley.
With the show underway and a plethora of performances next up included Neil Young, who had the unfortunate experience of sporting a massive cocaine booger in his nostril as he floated through his set of numbers before more performances took place including Joni Mitchell, a controversial Neil Diamond, the electrifying performance of Van Morrison, who almost got to scared to go on stage, a collection of performances from beatniks, Hells Angles and poets, and their old friend Bob Dylan who was being difficult the night of the Waltz and almost didn't appear.At the close of the concert, the sudden rush of triumph and sadness washed over the exhausted group as they left the stage. Drenched in sweat, blood and tears, they had just completed the ultimate marathon, not only had they played over forty songs with their peers and friends, they had just completed the marathon that was their humble beginnings in Southern Ontario in 1957 when Robbie Robertson met Ronnie Hawkins and Levon Helm that eventually led to Levon Helm, Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson change the face of rock music.The Band that left the stage wouldn't perform live in the same iteration again, it was the end of an era, The Band, was the behemoth behind the curtain, never showy, never boastful, but always impactful. As the evening faded into the morning, the concert that was The Last Waltz was complete, but it was just the beginning of what it would become and what audiences today remember of the legendary moment of history.Produced, hosted and edited by Tyrell William Lisson. Additional writing and research by Oscar Ashley.
The Band: A History sits down with Jan Høiberg, the curator and owner of https://theband.hiof.no, the number one resource for all things Band related. Started in 1994, the website grew to become the official website of The Band. As years passed Jan became friendly with Band members Rick Danko, Levon Helm and Garth Hudson, travelling to Woodstock, New York on several occasions.Høiberg has run the website from Norway for over twenty-seven years, and his obsession as an eighteen year old kid seeing The Last Waltz in 1980 has led to to creating one the finest resources on the web.This show is a part of Pantheon Podcasts.
The Band: A History sits down with Jan Høiberg, the curator and owner of https://theband.hiof.no, the number one resource for all things Band related. Started in 1994, the website grew to become the official website of The Band. As years passed Jan became friendly with Band members Rick Danko, Levon Helm and Garth Hudson, travelling to Woodstock, New York on several occasions.Høiberg has run the website from Norway for over twenty-seven years, and his obsession as an eighteen year old kid seeing The Last Waltz in 1980 has led to to creating one the finest resources on the web.This show is a part of Pantheon Podcasts.
Professor Louie has emerged in the music industry as the torch bearer of the true spirit of American Roots music. A seasoned live performer, prolific recording artist and versatile multi-instrumentalist who plays the Hammond B3 organ, piano, keyboards, accordion and sings vocals. He also wears the hat of an award-winning recording producer and engineer, capturing the talents of some of the world's most highly acclaimed musicians, among them Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, New Riders of The Purple Sage, Jesse McReynolds, Buckwheat Zydeco, Commander Cody and of course the Band.
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