British rock musician, member of The Rolling Stones
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Send us a textJames and Jack conclude their discussion with rock guitarist Paul Warren in this special PT 2 segment. Paul talks about working for Rod Stewart, Pacific Gas & Electric, (almost) with Bob Seger, and bit about Ron Wood , Jeff Beck and others...
Original air date: August 1, 2025 First off, we highly reccomend that you listen to part one before you listen to this half of the interview. If you've ever wondered what it's like to work in the rock and roll business at the highest level, this guest has the answers to all of your questions. Paul Rappaport started out as just a regular guy from Southern California - someone who loved ledgendary concerts and played guitar in his own band. But as fate would have it, a recommendation led him to apply for a college rep position at Columbia Records, and he only moved up from there. In the episode, Paul tells incredible stories about the Rolling Stones (Ron Wood & Keith Richards), Pink Floyd's David Gilmour, Elvis Costello and more. Paul just released his critically acclaimed book, "Gliders Over Hollywood" and he is happy to share many of those stories on this episode of our podcast. For more information and to view the show notes, visit: www.rockandrollconfessional.rocks
Une longue émission pour couvrir les années 2002 à 2008 de la discographie du groupe.Les différentes chroniques portent sur :Jimmy Page & The Black Crowes - Live At The GreekHeather Nova - Breath And AirNeil Young - Oceanside CountrysideLarkin Poe - BloomCymande - RenascencePink Floyd Animals - livre de Philippe Gonin aux éditions Le Mot Et Le ResteRetrouvez nous sur sympathyforthedevils.com pour les infos stoniennes et sur chronicast.com pour découvrir tous nos podcasts.Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.
The Best Radio You Have Never Heard Podcast - Music For People Who Are Serious About Music
NEW FOR APRIL 1, 2025 Fiddling with this and that . . . Fiddlin' About - The Best Radio You Have Never Heard Vol. 505 1. Selections from Tommy (live) - The Who 2. Young Man Blues (live) - Foo Fighters 3. The Seeker - Rush 4. Getting In Tune (live) - The Who w/ Eddie Vedder 5. Baba O'Reily - Nektar and Jerry Goodman 6. Alaska / Time To Kill (live) - U.K. 7. Travels With Myself - And Someone Else (live) - Bruford 8. The Gates Of Delirium (live) - Jon Anderson and The Band Geeks 9. Objects Outlive Us Objects Meanwhile - Steven Wilson 10. In My Room - Catherine Campbell 11. Girl From The North Country (live) - Crosby, Stills and Nash 12. Fall At Your Feet (live unplugged) - Crowded House 13. Under The Milky Way - The Church 14. Poor Poor Pitiful Me (live) - Warren Zevon and Timothy B. Schmidt 15. The Spy - The Doors 16. Highland Sweetheart - Love Tractor 17. Soon - My Bloody Valentine 18. Little Wing (live) - Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, Steve Winwood, Ron Wood et al The Best Radio You Have Never Heard. Home of the fiddlers three. Accept No Substitute. Click to leave comments on the Facebook page.
Marv Ross is an American musician, best known as the lead guitarist and primary songwriter for the 1980s rock band Quarterflash. With a distinctive style blending rock, jazz, and blues influences, Ross helped craft the band's signature sound. His work on hits like "Harden My Heart" and "Take Me to Heart" showcased his skillful guitar playing and lyrical depth, earning Quarterflash widespread acclaim. Beyond his success with the band, Ross is also recognized for his contributions as a composer and producer in the music industry. On this episode of Dystopia Tonight, Marv Ross and I dive into a fascinating conversation about his diverse musical career. He shares stories from recording an album at the iconic Jersey Shore, finding inspiration in John Denver, working with renowned producer John Boylan, and recalls touring with major acts like Elton John, Loverboy, Sammy Hagar, Starship, and Night Ranger. We also touch on his experience writing music for Ron Howard's film Night Shift, and Marv tells a memorable story about Burt Bacharach's obsession with Pac-Man. Additionally, he opens up about his time at The Record Plant, with stories of Ron Wood, Rod Stewart, Giorgio Moroder, Randy Newman, Fleetwood Mac, and Dolly Parton come rushing back to memory.
Ep. 446: Primer ‘Nadie Sabe Nada' de 2025 que hemos perpetrado con ahínco. Dicen que si algo funciona no lo toques y eso es lo que hacen Andreu Buenafuente y Berto Romero: no salirse del guion de lo que es el ‘Nadie' por muy nuevo año que sea.Todo sigue en absoluta normalidad: Berto baila como Dua Lipa, ensalzamos aún más la figura del actor Eduard Fernández, se destapa la leyenda urbana de que Aretha Franklin vivía en Barcelona, dicen que también Ron Wood, escuchamos las vivécdotas de los encuentros de Andreu con Woody Allen y se reivindica que el programa necesita ya una línea de juegos de mesa para las personas cárnicas.CITA: «Tengo una edad de cuando mi madre decía que era muy mayor» Andreu Buenafuente
Ep. 446: Primer ‘Nadie Sabe Nada' de 2025 que hemos perpetrado con ahínco. Dicen que si algo funciona no lo toques y eso es lo que hacen Andreu Buenafuente y Berto Romero: no salirse del guion de lo que es el ‘Nadie' por muy nuevo año que sea.Todo sigue en absoluta normalidad: Berto baila como Dua Lipa, ensalzamos aún más la figura del actor Eduard Fernández, se destapa la leyenda urbana de que Aretha Franklin vivía en Barcelona, dicen que también Ron Wood, escuchamos las vivécdotas de los encuentros de Andreu con Woody Allen y se reivindica que el programa necesita ya una línea de juegos de mesa para las personas cárnicas.CITA: «Tengo una edad de cuando mi madre decía que era muy mayor» Andreu Buenafuente
Guitarist Jesse Ed Davis (Kiowa) was an in-demand session player starting in the mid 1960s, appearing on dozens of recordings with artists such as Taj Mahal, Johnny Cash, Eric Clapton, and Jackson Browne. He appears on solo albums by three of the four Beatles. Davis toured with The Faces, alongside Rod Stewart and Ron Wood. The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Okla., is mounting an exhibition celebrating Davis' life and work along with a tribute concert featuring Jackson Browne, Taj Mahal, and Joy Harjo. We'll hear from some of the people who knew and worked with the man Bonnie Raitt called “one of the most original, and soulful, and cool guitar players.” We hear about Davis and the exhibition honoring him in this encore show (we won't be taking live telephone calls from listeners).
¡Hola! ¿Cómo estás? Esperamos que muy bien. ¡Llegamos al Season Finale! Y lo dedicamos por completo al segundo volumen del proyecto Anthology. A casi 30 años de su lanzamiento nos zambullimos a hablar de las 45 canciones que componen este disco doble. De Real Love a Across The Universe. De Help! a Sgt. Pepper's y Magical Mystery Tour. De la reunión de los Threetles a las demos de Strawberry Fields Forever. Todo Anthology 2 en más de 3 horas... ¿Hay más? Si, cubrimos el final del Got Back Tour 2024 con los shows en Londres y Manchester. Estuvo Ringo, Ron Wood y el primer bajo de Paul... ¡Ah! Además charlamos mucho sobre Karate Kid (? Gracias por bancarnos este año. Nos vemos en 2025. *ruido de mate*
Guitarist Jesse Ed Davis (Kiowa) was an in-demand session player starting in the mid 1960s, appearing on dozens of recordings with artists such as Taj Mahal, Johnny Cash, Eric Clapton, and Jackson Browne. He appears on solo albums by three of the four Beatles. Davis toured with The Faces, alongside Rod Stewart and Ron Wood. The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Okla., is mounting an exhibition celebrating Davis' life and work along with a tribute concert featuring Jackson Browne, Taj Mahal, and Joy Harjo. We'll hear from some of the people who knew and worked with the man Bonnie Raitt called “one of the most original, and soulful, and cool guitar players.” We hear about Davis and the exhibition honoring him in this encore show (we won't be taking live telephone calls from listeners). GUESTS Joy Harjo (Mvskoke), 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate, musician, playwright, and co-curator of the Jesse Ed Davis: Natural Anthem exhibition Chebon Tiger (Seminole and Mvskoke), musician Douglas Miller, author of Washita Love Child: The Rise of Indigenous Rock Star Jesse Ed Davis and co-curator of the Jesse Ed Davis: Natural Anthem exhibition Steven Jenkins, director of the Bob Dylan Center
It's been a long time coming and finally this week we deliver! It's another Shoulda Been Huge episode that has been promised since the show's first year. We had to go big with this one, so please welcome to the show, Mr. “Perfectly Rated” himself, BAKKO from the Cobras & Fire Podcast to discuss a classic punk & alternative band from his town: HÜSKER DÜ. Join us as we take you on their journey from hardcore punk to alternative rock. If you're new to this band open your mind and prepare for a zen-like experience! Like Bakko says, they Shoulda Been Huge!!!This episode is rooted in our Should Have Been category. This is a band that we mentioned before on the show and one that both hosts are very familiar with. We wanted to talk in-depth with another fellow podcaster who's a fan and intimately aware of the Twin City scene that came from, so enter Bakko! Do yourself a favor and check them out! We Hüsker, Dü Ü?Songs this week include:Hüsker Dü - “Everything Falls Apart” from Everything Falls Apart (1983)Hüsker Dü - “Pink Turns To Blue” from Zen Arcade (1984)Hüsker Dü - “New Day Rising” from New Day Rising (1985)Hüsker Dü - “Every Everything” from Flip Your Wig (1985)Hüsker Dü - “Hardly Getting Over It” from Candy Apple Grey (1986)Hüsker Dü - “Don't Want To Know If You Are Lonely” from Candy Apple Grey (1986)Hüsker Dü - “Ice Cold Ice” from Warehouse: Songs And Stories (1987)Please subscribe everywhere that you listen to podcasts!Visit us: https://inobscuria.com/https://www.facebook.com/InObscuriahttps://x.com/inobscuriahttps://www.instagram.com/inobscuria/Buy cool stuff with our logo on it!: https://www.redbubble.com/people/InObscuria?asc=uCheck out Robert's amazing fire sculptures and metal workings here: http://flamewerx.com/If you'd like to check out Kevin's band THE SWEAR, take a listen on all streaming services or pick up a digital copy of their latest release here: https://theswear.bandcamp.com/If you want to hear Robert and Kevin's band from the late 90s – early 00s BIG JACK PNEUMATIC, check it out here: https://bigjackpnuematic.bandcamp.com/
Guitarist Jesse Ed Davis (Kiowa) was an in-demand session player starting in the mid 60s, appearing on dozens of recordings with artists such as Taj Mahal, Johnny Cash, Eric Clapton, and Jackson Browne. He appears on solo albums by three of the four Beatles. Davis toured with The Faces, alongside Rod Stewart and Ron Wood. The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Okla., is mounting an exhibition celebrating Davis' life and work along with a tribute concert featuring Jackson Browne, Taj Mahal, and Joy Harjo. We'll hear from some of the people who knew and worked with the man Bonnie Raitt called “one of the most original, and soulful, and cool guitar players.” GUESTS Joy Harjo (Mvskoke), 23rd U.S. Poet Laureate, musician, playwright, and co-curator of the Jesse Ed Davis: Natural Anthem exhibition Chebon Tiger (Seminole and Mvskoke), musician Douglas Miller, author of Washita Love Child: The Rise of Indigenous Rock Star Jesse Ed Davis and co-curator of the Jesse Ed Davis: Natural Anthem exhibition Steven Jenkins, director of the Bob Dylan Center
Pacific St Blues & AmericanaOctober 13, 2024Spotlight on Jeff Beck & The YardbirdsEnjoy the Extended Version of our Show - NOW on podcasthttps:www.podomatic.com/podcasts/KIWRbluesContact: Spotlight Shows focus on the music and legacy of the focused artist. We examine their influences, who they covered, who they influenced, and those who covered them, and their music. It's an in-depth, music -centric look at the artists you know and love. 1. Buddy Guy (feat Jeff Beck) / Mustang Sally (Wilson Picket) 2. Jeff Beck (feat Joss Stone) / I Put A Spell on You (Screaming Jay Hawkins . CCR) 3. Jeff Beck (feat Imelda May) / Sitting on Top of the World (Les Paul & Mary Ford)4. Roy Buchanan / My Friend Jeff5. Howlin' Wolf / I Ain't Superstitious 6. Freddy King / The Stumble 7. Jeff Beck Group (feat Rod Stewart) / Rock My Plimsoul (BB King, Rock Me Baby)8. Joe Bonamassa / Blues Deluxe9. Tiny Bradshaw / Train Kept a Rollin'10. Jeff Beck w/ Jonny Lang / Be Bop a Lula11. All the King's Men (feat Scotty Moore, D.J. Fontana, Ron Wood, & Jeff Beck) / 12. The Honeydrippers (feat Robert Plant, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page / Good Rockin' at Midnight13. Chris Issac / Heartful of Soul14. David Bowie / Shapes of Things15. Terry Knight & The Pack (Mark Farner, Don Brewer [Grand Funk Railroad]) / Mister You're a Better Man Than I 16. The Pixies / Evil Hearted You (in Spanish) 17. The Tridents / Nursery Rhyme (Bo Diddley) 18. The Yardbirds / For Your Love19. Jeff Beck / Hi Ho Silverlining20. The Animals / House of The Rising Sun21. Donavan w/ Jeff Beck Group / Barabbajagal
durée : 00:20:07 - Le Feuilleton - Comment les Rolling Stones, en 1975, sont à nouveau confrontés au choix d'un guitariste, présentation de Ron Wood, et l'affaire de Toronto qui s'ensuit.
This week, we talk to actor, writer, and improviser DAVID PASQUESI (Strangers With Candy, Lodge 49, At Home With Amy Sedaris, Veep, TJ & Dave) about Martin Scorsese's concert film about THE BAND, THE LAST WALTZ !!!We discuss David's connection with The Band and the the sadness inherent in the film, how every member of The Band can be the coolest depending on which way you're watching, how the film can be tainted by their history, how David discovered and watched the entire evening of music and what's missing from the film, marveling in how long the night actually lasted and imagining what the turkey dinner tasted like, Scorsese's secretive approach to intially making the film, how they got all these masters of cinematography to participate, The Staple Singers &Van Morrison, how the first song seen in the film is the last song they performed that night, The Basement Tapes, Chris's family's 3 generation admiration of David's work & how David uses silence in his work, how The Band seemed small town-ish while being one of the biggest rock bands in the world, the debate on who wrote the actual lyrics, how heavily Scorsese storyboarded and prepared for this film, how they had to transform the Filmore to film the concert, the song Stage Fright and if David ever gets that when performing, Joni Mitchell stealing the show, gettting Neil Young's rare ability to smile and his cocaine nose booger removal techinolgoy, the accidents that happen in this film and why they are magical, the band/gang mentality vs. being a loner, the fear of public humilation, Dylan's decision at the last minute that he didn't want to be filmed for the movie and how they got him to change his mind, the endless end of night jams with Ringo and Ron Wood, Scorsese's flawed Rolling Stones film and more!So let's fill up on a turkey, waltz, and dance to The Band on this week's episode of Revolutions Per Movie!!!DAVE PASQUESI:https://www.davidpasquesi.com/https://www.tjanddave.com/REVOLUTIONS PER MOVIE:Host Chris Slusarenko (Eyelids, Guided By Voices, owner of Clinton Street Video rental store) is joined by actors, musicians, comedians, writers & directors who each week pick out their favorite music documentary, musical, music-themed fiction film or music videos to discuss. Fun, weird, and insightful, Revolutions Per Movie is your deep dive into our life-long obsessions where music and film collide.The show is also a completely independent affair, so the best way to support it is through our Patreon at patreon.com/revolutionspermovie. By joining, you can get weekly bonus episodes, physical goods such as Flexidiscs, and other exclusive goods.Revolutions Per Movies releases new episodes every Thursday on any podcast app, and additional, exclusive bonus episodes every Sunday on our Patreon. If you like the show, please consider subscribing, rating, and reviewing it on your favorite podcast app. Thanks!SOCIALS:@revolutionspermovieX, BlueSky: @revpermovieTHEME by Eyelids 'My Caved In Mind'www.musicofeyelids.bandcamp.com ARTWORK by Jeff T. Owenshttps://linktr.ee/mymetalhand Click here to get EXCLUSIVE BONUS WEEKLY Revolutions Per Movie content on our Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
David's seventh book in his ‘orange series' is just out and you're guaranteed to love it. He and Mark discussed ‘Hope I Get Old Before I Die' at a sold-out launch event at Waterstones in Piccadilly on the evening of September 3, recorded here. Among the highlights you'll find … … the rock career as a three-act play. … the tour that started the Age Of Spectacle. … why Live Aid was the dawn of pop nostalgia. … the rock star who retired from retirement. … Woodstock – “the Somme with Santana”. … the terrible fallout in the Byrds. … why no act is ever forgotten. … Nick Lowe and the few others who got even better as they got older. … band reunions are about symbolism not music. … how the rock generation took power. … why Ron Wood's memoir can be read as either comedy or tragedy. … bands that will achieve immortality. … why Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous seems like period drama. … the worst group ever. … and the only act that became bigger than the Beatles. Order David's new book here:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hope-Get-Old-Before-Die/dp/1787632784 https://linktr.ee/dhepworthFind 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.
David's seventh book in his ‘orange series' is just out and you're guaranteed to love it. He and Mark discussed ‘Hope I Get Old Before I Die' at a sold-out launch event at Waterstones in Piccadilly on the evening of September 3, recorded here. Among the highlights you'll find … … the rock career as a three-act play. … the tour that started the Age Of Spectacle. … why Live Aid was the dawn of pop nostalgia. … the rock star who retired from retirement. … Woodstock – “the Somme with Santana”. … the terrible fallout in the Byrds. … why no act is ever forgotten. … Nick Lowe and the few others who got even better as they got older. … band reunions are about symbolism not music. … how the rock generation took power. … why Ron Wood's memoir can be read as either comedy or tragedy. … bands that will achieve immortality. … why Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous seems like period drama. … the worst group ever. … and the only act that became bigger than the Beatles. Order David's new book here:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hope-Get-Old-Before-Die/dp/1787632784 https://linktr.ee/dhepworthFind 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.
David's seventh book in his ‘orange series' is just out and you're guaranteed to love it. He and Mark discussed ‘Hope I Get Old Before I Die' at a sold-out launch event at Waterstones in Piccadilly on the evening of September 3, recorded here. Among the highlights you'll find … … the rock career as a three-act play. … the tour that started the Age Of Spectacle. … why Live Aid was the dawn of pop nostalgia. … the rock star who retired from retirement. … Woodstock – “the Somme with Santana”. … the terrible fallout in the Byrds. … why no act is ever forgotten. … Nick Lowe and the few others who got even better as they got older. … band reunions are about symbolism not music. … how the rock generation took power. … why Ron Wood's memoir can be read as either comedy or tragedy. … bands that will achieve immortality. … why Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous seems like period drama. … the worst group ever. … and the only act that became bigger than the Beatles. Order David's new book here:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hope-Get-Old-Before-Die/dp/1787632784 https://linktr.ee/dhepworthFind 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.
Peter Sears (born 27 May 1948) is an English rock music musician. In a career spanning more than six decades, he has been a member of many bands and has moved through a variety of musical genres, from early R&B, psychedelic improvisational rock of the 1960s, folk, country music, arena rock in the 1970s, and blues. He usually plays bass, keyboards, or both in bands. Pete Sears played on the Rod Stewart albums Gasoline Alley, Every Picture Tells A Story (which was listed high in Rolling Stone's top 500 best albums of all time), Never a Dull Moment, and Smiler. He also played on the hit singles "Maggie May", and "Reason to Believe". During this period, Sears toured the US with Long John Baldry blues band, and played with John Cipollina in Copperhead. Sears joined the band Jefferson Starship in 1974 and remained with the group through the transition to Starship, before departing in 1987. After leaving Starship he worked with bluesman Nick Gravenites, and many other artists including Jerry Garcia, Mickey Hart, Bob Weir, Maria Muldaur, Rich Kirch, Taj Mahal, and Mimi Farina. (1992 to 2002) he played keyboards in the Jorma Kaukonen Trio with Kaukonen and Michael Falzarano, and with Kaukonen, Falzarano, and Jack Casady and Harvey Sorgen in Hot Tuna. Sears has played with many other musicians through the years, including Dr. John, John Lee Hooker, Leigh Stephens and Micky Waller in Silver Metre; Long John Baldry, Copperhead with John Cipollina, Jerry Garcia, Chris Robinson Brotherhood, Levon Helm, Steve Kimock, Dave Hidalgo, Sons of Fred, Fleur de Lyse, Sam Gopal Dream, Jimi Hendrix, Pete Brown, Bob Weir, Los Cenzontles, Phil Lesh, Leftover Salmon, and Los Lobos.[5][6] Currently, he divides his time between the David Nelson Band, Chris Robinson and Green Leaf Rustlers, Zero, California Kind, Harvey Mandel, and Moonalice. Sears has also written and recorded the original score for many documentary films, including the award-winning "The Fight in the Fields" – Cesar Chávez and the Farmworkers Struggle directed by Ray Telles and Rick Tehada Flores. His most recent film, also directed by Ray Telles and co-produced by Ken Rabin, is called The Storm That Swept Mexico (2011) about the Mexican Revolution.
We lobbed the feathered arrows of enquiry at the rock and roll dartboard this week and these got the highest scores … … rock stars v the new league of the Super-Rich. … package tours of the mid-‘60s – eight acts, an interval, a compere plus God Save the Queen. … ‘Hits, Flops and Other Illusions' by Edward Zwick and the fantastic tale about arrogance, money-squandering and Julia Roberts at the Halcyon Hotel.... pop music used to be about persuading people to cut loose; now it's about getting them to tighten up. … why you can read Ron Wood's memoir as either comedy or tragedy. .. Chris Blackwell's post-production trickery that sold Bob Marley to a rock audience. … Master Tape Rescue: the arduous task of panning for gold. ... and why there should be a movie about the making of Shakespeare in Love. Plus birthday guest Chuck Loncon in Savannah, Georgia – Neil Young v Spotify, Lady Antebellum, the Dixie Chicks and the tangled world of political correctness.Subscribe to Word In Your Ear via Patreon for early - and ad-free - access to all of our content, plus a whole load more!: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
We lobbed the feathered arrows of enquiry at the rock and roll dartboard this week and these got the highest scores … … rock stars v the new league of the Super-Rich. … package tours of the mid-‘60s – eight acts, an interval, a compere plus God Save the Queen. … ‘Hits, Flops and Other Illusions' by Edward Zwick and the fantastic tale about arrogance, money-squandering and Julia Roberts at the Halcyon Hotel.... pop music used to be about persuading people to cut loose; now it's about getting them to tighten up. … why you can read Ron Wood's memoir as either comedy or tragedy. .. Chris Blackwell's post-production trickery that sold Bob Marley to a rock audience. … Master Tape Rescue: the arduous task of panning for gold. ... and why there should be a movie about the making of Shakespeare in Love. Plus birthday guest Chuck Loncon in Savannah, Georgia – Neil Young v Spotify, Lady Antebellum, the Dixie Chicks and the tangled world of political correctness.Subscribe to Word In Your Ear via Patreon for early - and ad-free - access to all of our content, plus a whole load more!: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
We lobbed the feathered arrows of enquiry at the rock and roll dartboard this week and these got the highest scores … … rock stars v the new league of the Super-Rich. … package tours of the mid-‘60s – eight acts, an interval, a compere plus God Save the Queen. … ‘Hits, Flops and Other Illusions' by Edward Zwick and the fantastic tale about arrogance, money-squandering and Julia Roberts at the Halcyon Hotel.... pop music used to be about persuading people to cut loose; now it's about getting them to tighten up. … why you can read Ron Wood's memoir as either comedy or tragedy. .. Chris Blackwell's post-production trickery that sold Bob Marley to a rock audience. … Master Tape Rescue: the arduous task of panning for gold. ... and why there should be a movie about the making of Shakespeare in Love. Plus birthday guest Chuck Loncon in Savannah, Georgia – Neil Young v Spotify, Lady Antebellum, the Dixie Chicks and the tangled world of political correctness.Subscribe to Word In Your Ear via Patreon for early - and ad-free - access to all of our content, plus a whole load more!: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The Best Radio You Have Never Heard Podcast - Music For People Who Are Serious About Music
NEW FOR APRIL 1, 2024 Have a mouthful of this . . . Like Chewing Shoes - The Best Radio You Have Never Heard Vol. 481 1. Wasted On The Way (live) - Crosby, Stills and Nash 2. No Expectations (live) - The Rolling Stones 3. Wanting and Waiting - The Black Crowes 4. Doctor My Eyes / These Days (live) - Jackson Browne 5. Joan In The Garden - The Decemberists 6. Innocence Pt. 1 - Peter Garrett 7. When A Blind Man Cries - Deep Purple 8. Once The Dust Settles - Cosmic Bull 9. Frame By Frame (alt) - King Crimson 10. 21st Century Schizoid Man - Todd Rundgren, Arthur Brown, Ian Paice, Mel Collins et al 11. Twilight / Out Of Control (live) - U2 12. Change (alt) - Tears For Fears 13. Crime Don't Pay (live) - Joe Jackson 14. Big Yellow Taxi - Counting Crows 15. A Legal Matter (live) - Richard Thompson 16. Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere (live) - Pete Townshend 17. Presence Of The Lord (live) - Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, Steve Winwood, Ron Wood et al 18. Babooshka - Kate Bush 19. Enter Sandman (live unplugged) - Metallica 20. Lifebeats / Prelude / The Silver Chord / Re-Assuring Tune - Jethro Tull The Best Radio You Have Never Heard. Like fine leather served with a warm pink center. Accept No Substitute Click to leave comments on the Facebook page.
Simon Kirke of Bad Company Live on Game Changers With Vicki I was Live with Simon Kirke, co-founder of Free and Bad Company, two of the greatest rock bands in history. A huge lifelong fan, it was a thrill to sit down and hear how it all went down, including how Snuffy, a guitar player kinda close to my heart, ended up playing on Free's Heartbreaker. We heard about Simon's very humble beginnings with neither running water nor electricity, talk about building character, his transistor radio, listening to big bands, pre-Beatles, making his own drumsticks, and finding his way back to London from the countryside with a time limit to make it and joining Paul Kossoff's Black Cat Bones just under the wire. How they formed Free, All Right Now, the song that made them, and perhaps, destroyed them. The unrelenting touring, and then Kosoff's unrelenting drugs. How the band evolved before imploding. Ultimately, in part, morphing into Bad Company, one of the greatest straight-up rock bands of all time with Simon co-writing its anthem. He's the only member of the band to be in every lineup since its inception, including the band's last tour. We heard about them all. Thrilling! I so love Simon's solo effort, All Because of You, written for Maria, his wife of 6 years. Reminiscent of Roger Daltry for me, it's in heavy rotation in my kitchen. He's guested on recordings by Wilson Pickett, Jim Capaldi, and Ron Wood, and has toured with Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, Bo Diddley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, and Ringo Starr & His All-Star Band. The best with the best. We heard great stories about Chuck, Ringo, Peter Frampton, Jack Bruce, Dave Mason, and of course, Kossoff and Rodgers. We talked at length about addiction––the drinking, the drugs, the debauchery, some great stories there, and recovery, tried more than once, and how it was too long ago for Kossoff. But, has gratefully stuck for Simon, who is doing much to give back. Simon works with Road Recovery, aiding teens to get and hopefully stay sober, is on the board of a Rehab facility, Right Turn, and is in the process of writing a Rock Opera about recovery with its CEO. Simon fears with Paul Rodgers' health issues, this is the end of Bad Company after 50 years. He's scored a few films and looks forward to a lot more of that in his future, mirroring another musician turned composer we know who's fared pretty well. They say, be careful meeting your heroes. No worries here. Simon Kirke exceeded all my very high (but sober) hopes, as a person and a rock star. What fun! Can't Get Enough! Simon Kirke Live on Game Changers with Vicki Abelson Wednesday, February 7, 5 PM PT, 8 PM ET Streamed Live on my Facebook Replay here: https://bit.ly/42vW0w0
EPISODE 105: Simon Frederick St George Kirke (born 28 July 1949) is an English rock drummer best known as a member of Free and Bad Company, the latter of which he has been the only continuous member since their inception. In addition to his work with Free and Bad Company, Simon has guested on a long list of recordings by other artists over the years, including albums by Wilson Pickett, Faces, Gov't Mule, Jim Capaldi and Ron Wood, among countless others and he is often found drumming live on tour with acts like Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, Bo Diddley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and Ringo Starr & His All-Star Band. Simon recently toured with Bad Company and The Eagles' Joe Walsh, and recorded a soul-baring solo record, "All Because of You," with Chicago band, The Empty Pockets, released by The End Records/BMG (2017). officialsimonkirke.com Contact us: makingsoundpodcast.comFollow on Instagram: @makingsoundpodcastFollow on Threads: @jannkloseJoin our Facebook GroupPlease support the show with a donation, thank you for listening!
Ronnie Wood has been a prominent music figure in British Blues Rock since the late 1960s. At a time when The Beatles were at their height, Wood lived in the basement of Ringo Starr's house near Grosvenor Square in London with Jimi Hendrix while John & Yoko lived upstairs. At the same time, Mick Jagger lives in the "mews" at the back of the house. From The Birds, to The Jeff Beck Group (feat: Rod Stewart), to The Faces (Ian McLagan, Kenny Jones, Ronnie Lane, Rod Stewart, & Ronnie Wood), to replacing Mick Taylor in the Rolling Stones (1975), Ron Wood has mixed and mingled with rock royalty for more than six decades. Join us on this podcast only exploration of Ronnie "he would if he could" Woods' Rollin' Stones. 1. Angry2. Start Me Up 3. Hey Negrita4. Hand of Fate 5. Etta James / Miss You6. Respectable 7. Waiting on a Friend8. Down in the Hole9. All About You10. Ronnie Wood / Am I Groovin' You (Feat: Mick Jagger)11. Ronnie Wood / Take a Look at the Guy (Feat: Rod Stewart)12. It's Only Rock n Roll (David Bowie, Ronnie Wood)13. Too Tough14. Undercover of the Night 15. Too Much Blood16. Key to the Highway 17. One Hit to the Body 18. Back to Zero (Cowrite w/Chuck Leavell feat Jimmy Page; Scarlet) 19. New Barbarians / Let's Go Steady (Neil Sedaka/H. Greenfield)
Rob Chapman likes The Rolling Stones. Wait…check that. Rob Chapman loooooves The Rolling Stones. Not only that, but he regularly corresponds with a couple of the guys in the band. Several years ago Rob wrote a book about a very interesting period in the band's history, Ron Wood and Keith Richards' side project The New Barbarians. Rob went deep on this project and the result is the book “New Barbarians: Outlaws, Gunslingers and Guitars”. So what does this have to do with Tower Records, you're asking?It just so happens that Rob Chapman called on many of the Sacramento and South Bay area stores as a rep for Navarre and then MCA Records from 1993-1997. Rob quickly learned to pop into Sacramento's main office to get to know the players there and to make himself known to the people who can help rally support behind a project. This week's episode covers alot of the daily goings on of working the Sacramento market, the feeling of coming into Sacramento as an outsider, being taken in by Watt Avenue's Mike Jerrick only to experience his passing away as Rob was leaving the area and the many trials and tribulations of being a Sales Rep calling on the Tower accounts. Rob also takes behind us behind the scenes and into the world of Ron Wood and Keith Richards while he worked on his New Barbarians book. We discuss actual riots in the midwest when suggested “friends” like Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger didn't show up to play with Ron & Keith. The book comes with a live CD of New Barbarians performances from the 70's. Rob explains why some songs made the cut and others didn't. We loved talking to Rob and think that you'll enjoy this episode immensely.
Christian Ulrich ist Journalist und durfte die Rolling Stones zu ihrem neuen Album „Hackney Diamonds“ treffen und interviewen. Wie sind die Urgesteine des Rock'n'Roll nach über 60 Jahren Bandgeschichte drauf? Wie klingt das neue Album – auch ohne den 2021 verstorbenen Drummer Charlie Watts? Und wie geht es für die Band weiter?
Ron Wood, Chief Operating Officer for MDI joins Vineeta to talk about their recent award for providing services to help the disabled find work.
Beau Hill is a music producer best known for his work with Ratt, Alice Cooper, Warrant, Winger, Europe and Kix. In this episode we discuss a variety of things throughout his career and his life. He tells stories of working with music legends like Stevie Nicks, Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton. We also discuss his thoughts on Poison's CC Deville doing the solo on Cherry Pie, the music business, and his path to success. A must listen to episode for music fans! 0:00:00 - Intro0:00:13 - Golf 0:03:00 - Traveling to Antartica 0:06:00 - Beau's Journey 0:08:35 - Jon Keyworth, Denver Broncos 0:09:45 - Production Techniques 0:12:42 - Keith Olsen & Stevie Nicks 0:17:45 - Beau's Band Airborne 0:23:13 - Audition for Foreigner & Spider 0:26:02 - Co-Producing Demos with Sandy Stewart 0:32:05 - Call to Produce Ratt 0:34:40 - Working with Stevie Nicks 0:39:26 - Working with Ratt 0:47:00 - Alice Cooper & Michael Wagener 0:48:24 - Producer Sam Taylor 0:51:15 - Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton & Ron Wood 0:59:30 - Warrant's Cherry Pie & Don Ienner 1:02:30 - CC Deville's Solo on Cherry Pie 1:08:10 - Jani Lane 1:13:07 - Producing, Remixing & Arranging 1:20:20 - Uncle Tom's Cabin 1:22:35 - Job at Interscope 1:27:25 - Black Bambi & Unruly Child 1:31:30 - Elements of a Hit Record 1:33:19 - Oliver Anthony 1:35:55 - Social Media & Connections 1:40:03 - Drinks & Big Parties 1:43:50 - Tunnel to Towers 1:44:50 - Working with New Bands 1:46:30 - Outro Beau Hill Productions website:https://beauhillproductions.com/Tunnels to Towers website:https://t2t.org/Chuck Shute website:https://chuckshute.com/Support the showThanks for Listening & Shute for the Moon!
Ed Berenhaus joined me to discuss his influences: Jack Benny, Sonny Fox, Chuck McCann, Soupy Sales, Jay Ward; seeing the Beatles at Shea Stadium and being able to hear them; going to Stony Brook University to be a director but segueing to TV and radio; the many rock acts he saw; growing up in Kew Gardens and having Art Garfunkel's school dictionary; becoming an NBC page when befriended by Cousin Brucie; giving the NBC tour; working with Sonny Fox on NBC children's programming; working on Saturday Night Live; Aykroyd & Belushi shower with the pages; meeting Bill Murray; doing an extra rehearsal the day before the October 11, 1975 premiere; being with Chevy at the 1976 DNC at MSG; the NBC logos; the original idea for SNL (Albert Brooks, Jim Henson); seeing Billy Crystal get cut from the first episode; the Candice Bergen episode being the first one to look like SNL today; watching the theme song be written; checking out the musical guests; working on the Tomorrow show and giving pointers to Dan Aykroyd on his Tom Snyder impression; putting the younger better looking audience members up front; seating celebrities; taking Mick Jagger and Ron Wood to the bathroom during the Eric Idle show; making promos for the news; watching the SNL promos being taped; the problems of writing talk show promos; taking Sean Connery to the bathroom when the door won't open; leaving NBC to go to Satellite Network News; SNN being bought out by Ted Turner; moving to Harpo to make promos for The Oprah Winfrey Show; making fun promos for Nick at Nite; memorable promos for The Donna Reed Show and I Dream of Jeannie used in the movie "As Good as it Gets"; worked for Broadway Video on Sunday Night; meeting Miles Davis; the legacy of SNL; trying to give away tickets to a spontaneous Paul Simon / George Harrison performance; SNL being both original and running ideas into the ground; working for The Jeremy Kyle Show and The Joan Rivers Show; the generosity of working with Joan Rivers; meeting George Burns
durée : 00:20:07 - Le Feuilleton - Comment les Rolling Stones, en 1975, sont à nouveau confrontés au choix d'un guitariste, présentation de Ron Wood, et l'affaire de Toronto qui s'ensuit.
Hey it's Arroe and this is Pod-fest Episode 36 Three back to back conversations with real people of entertainment, politics, science, medical or cooks in their own kitchen. Pod-fest 36 features my conversation with professional wrestler Nyla Rose From All Elite Wrestling. Then we'll spend few moments with baseball legend Ron Darling talking about that one moment historians are still in shock over. Then we'll it up with a man that knows a lot about hits and homeruns. Mr. Ron Wood from the Rolling Stones. This is Pod-fest 36
Hey it's Arroe and this is Pod-fest Episode 36 Three back to back conversations with real people of entertainment, politics, science, medical or cooks in their own kitchen. Pod-fest 36 features my conversation with professional wrestler Nyla Rose From All Elite Wrestling. Then we'll spend few moments with baseball legend Ron Darling talking about that one moment historians are still in shock over. Then we'll it up with a man that knows a lot about hits and homeruns. Mr. Ron Wood from the Rolling Stones. This is Pod-fest 36
From August 3, 2020: Dave Mason and friends have taken the downtime during quarantine to remake one of Mason's most iconic and heavily covered songs since its release in 1968 - "Feelin' Alright." Dubbed "Dave Mason and the Quarantines," the group's new song features Mason singing along with Mick Fleetwood, Sammy Hagar, Michael McDonald, and The Doobie Brothers: John McFee, Tom Johnston, John Cowan, and Pat Simmons. Dave's longtime drummer, Alvino Bennett, also lends a hand as does Pat Simmons Jr., Pat's son, joining in the fun.ABOUT DAVE MASONRock and Roll Hall of Famer Dave Mason's career spans over half a century and encompasses producing, performing and song writing. Fans and critics alike hail Dave as one of the most talented songwriters and guitarists in the world - which is why he is still performing over 100 shows a year to sold-out crowds. Mason has been playing guitar most of his life. By 15, Dave had founded two bands: The Deep Feeling and The Hellions. At 18, the Worcester, England native teamed up with Steve Winwood, Jim Capaldi and Chris Wood to form the legendary band Traffic. At 19, Mason penned the song "Feelin' Alright". The rock anthem, first recorded by Traffic and then covered by dozens of other artists (including Joe Cocker), cemented both Dave's and Traffic's legacy and had a profound influence over rock music that continues today.Mason left Traffic in 1969 to pursue a solo career in the US. Dave has penned over 100 songs, has 3 gold albums: Alone Together, Dave Masonand Mariposa De Oro and a platinum album Let it Flow, which contained the top-ten single "We Just Disagree".In addition to cranking out hits, Dave has performed on or contributed to a number of famous albums, including: The Rolling Stones' Beggars Banquet, George Harrison's All Things Must Pass, Paul McCartney and Wings Venus and Mars and Jimi Hendrix's Electric Ladyland. Mason is featured playing acoustic guitar in "All Along the Watchtower" on Electric Ladyland, a favorite in Dave's live shows!Dave, a prolific artist in his own right, has collaborated with an enviable list of the who's who in the music industry. Jimi Hendrix, George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Graham Nash, Stephen Stills, Rita Coolidge, Delaney & Bonnie, Leon Russell, Ron Wood, Steve Winwood, Eric Clapton, and Jim Capaldi, just to name a few. In addition to his own productions, Mason's distinctive work is featured on numerous gold and platinum albums such as:Jimi Hendrix Electric Ladyland "All Along The Watchtower" (acoustic guitar) and "Crosstown Traffic" (vocals)George Harrison All Thing Must Pass (various tracks)The Rolling Stones Beggars Banquet "Street Fighting Man" (shehnai and mellotron)Paul McCartney and Wings Venus And Mars "Listen To What The Man Said" (guitar)Graham Nash Songs For BeginnersDavid Crosby & Graham Nash, Graham Nash David CrosbyDave Mason & Cass Elliot (Mamas & Papas) Dave Mason & Cass ElliotThe Spencer Davis Group "Somebody Help Me", "Gimme Some Lovin'" and "I'm A Man" (vocals)Fleetwood Mac Time(guitar, vocals)Eric Clapton Crossroads (guitar)When Dave is not touring, he spends his time writing and producing music in his home studio, as well as tirelessly supporting philanthropic efforts for Rock Our Vets, a non-profit he co-founded.
Equal parts myth and legend, the New Barbarians are one of the greatest bands many people have never heard — or heard of! Put together by Ron Wood, the band featured fellow Stone Keith Richards, the Faces' Ian MacLagan, sax player Bobby Keys, and a legendary rhythm section of the Meters Ziggy Modeleste and jazz great Stanley Clarke. If you missed this the first time around, tune in to hear Rob Chapman tell wild and rollicking stories featuring behind-the-scenes anecdotes about the band members, dirt on its famous tour, and background on the widespread influence of the band's music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Equal parts myth and legend, the New Barbarians are one of the greatest bands many people have never heard — or heard of! Put together by Ron Wood, the band featured fellow Stone Keith Richards, the Faces' Ian MacLagan, sax player Bobby Keys, and a legendary rhythm section of the Meters Ziggy Modeleste and jazz great Stanley Clarke. If you missed this the first time around, tune in to hear Rob Chapman tell wild and rollicking stories featuring behind-the-scenes anecdotes about the band members, dirt on its famous tour, and background on the widespread influence of the band's music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
We answer questions about Willy Clark and Clarence Reid, the Ron Wood tribute concert to Jimmy Reed, and the sound of soul music in the 70s. Nilly the Dog concludes each segment with some brief pooch dog thoughts.
On this memorial episode of This Is Vinyl Tap, we discuss the life and legacy of one of rock's most unique and imaginative guitarists, Beck. We focus on his 1968 groundbreaking album Truth. After his very successful, but short-lived, stint in the Yardbirds, Beck began to work on his next project. Finding an amazing supporting cast in singer Rod Stewart, bassist Ron Wood, and drummer Mickey Waller, Beck recorded an album that used the foundation of the blues to build something that was unlike anything else at the time. Beck was often called a “guitar player's guitar player” and Truth, full of guitar wizardry, definitely backs that sentiment up. Truth was heavier, dirtier, and louder than anything that had come before it and remains an album whose impact and influence continues to be far reaching.
Maggie LePique's longtime producer and music journalist Jerry Ough celebrates Jimi Hendrix's 80th Birthday with Jimi's sister, Janie Hendrix and longtime producer and Archivist John McDermott. Jerry, Janie and John discussThe Jimi Hendrix Experience – Los Angeles Forum: April 26, 1969, legendary 1969 performance includes “Purple Haze” and an incendiary 17-minute medley of “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” and Cream's “Sunshine Of Your Love.” The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Los Angeles Forum: April 26, 1969, released on 2LP vinyl, CD and all digital platforms, was recorded in the spring of 1969 before a raucous, sold-out audience. This captivating performance of the original lineup (singer/guitarist Jimi Hendrix, drummer Mitch Mitchell, bassist Noel Redding) has never before been released in its entirety.Jerry, Janie and John also discuss the new book, JIMI, the ultimate tribute to the greatest guitar player in rock and roll history, celebrating what would have been Jimi Hendrix's 80th birthday on November 8, 2022. This comprehensive visual celebration is an official collaboration with Jimi's sister, Janie Hendrix, and John McDermott of Experience Hendrix L.L.C. JIMI significantly expands on the authors' previously published titles, including An Illustrated Experience, and features a new introduction by Janie, extensive biographical texts, and a trove of lesser known and never-before-published photographs, personal memorabilia, lyrics, and more. Additionally, JIMI includes quotations by legendary musicians, such as Paul McCartney, Ron Wood, Jeff Beck, Lenny Kravitz, Eric Clapton, Drake, Dave Grohl, and others who have spoken about Hendrix's lasting influence.Janie L. Hendrix is the president and CEO of Seattle-based Experience Hendrix L.L.C. and Authentic Hendrix L.L.C., the family companies of Jimi Hendrix, which were founded by James "Al" Hendrix in 1995, as a means of keeping Hendrix's legacy alive. Janie ushered the companies into the 21st century with the dream of her father and brother in mind.John McDermott is the director, writer, and producer who has long been associated with the legacy of Jimi Hendrix. He has served as the catalog director for Experience Hendrix L.L.C. for nearly three decades. Together with Janie Hendrix and Eddie Kramer, McDermott has coproduced every Jimi Hendrix CD and DVD release, including 1999's Grammy Award–winning Band of Gypsys, 2014's Emmy Award–winning Hear My Train A Comin', and the recent Grammy-nominated Music, Money, Madness: Jimi Hendrix In Maui.Source: https://www.jimihendrix.com/music/los-angeles-forum-april-26-1969/Source: https://www.authentichendrix.com/product/Y3AMJI122Source: https://www.chroniclebooks.com/products/jimiThis episode is from an archive from the KPFK program Profiles adapted for podcast.Host Maggie LePique, a radio veteran since the 1980's at NPR in Kansas City Mo. She began her radio career in Los Angeles in the early 1990's and has worked for Pacifica station KPFK Radio in Los Angeles since 1994.Support the show
Hello, Lit Listeners. If you dig the crazy, down-and-dirty (and deafening), let-it-all-hang out, have-a-nice-day, far out 1970s, you're in for a treat. Music journalist-cum-rock novelist Robert Duncan is here doing double duty as both author and music guru—because why wouldn't he?—and he dishes on some folks whose records are in your collection. You DON'T want to miss this episode! EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:The blurred lines between the novel ‘Loudmouth' and Robert's real lifeRobert's wild boy big brother—“the original rock ‘n roll guy”—RustyScratch inspections and Robert's friend with a special talent at summer camp (get ready to laugh)Robert and I playing a drinking game on the episode, and the phrase I coined for itRobert having tea with Lester Bangs at MC5's Rob Tyner's houseGetting drunk at Patti Smith's and Allen Lanier's apartment near Washington Square in NYC with Jim Carroll, author of ‘The Basketball Diaries'How Robert became a music journalist and got the job at ‘CREEM'Lester Bangs—and Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal of him in ‘Almost Famous'The time Legs McNeil took the last beer from Robert's NYC apartment fridge and Robert and Lester's subsequent fightThe day Lester diedRobert's interactions with various rock stars, including Ron Wood and Keith Richards, Iggy Pop and David Bowie, KISS, Ozzy Osbourne, The Clash, etc.Partying at Liza Minnelli's apartment in NYC with tons of celebritiesDriving around Cleveland with a young Bruce SpringsteenThe tragic genesis of the novel ‘Loudmouth'Robert Duncan's one and only Jimmy Page encounter MUSIC IN THE EPISODE IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE:[No Copyright Music] Retro ‘70s Funky Jazz-Hop Instrumental (Copyright Free) Music—FunkmanThe Beatles—Live at Shea Stadium, New York (August 23, 1966)—cheering“My Foolish Heart” by Bill Evans“I Am A Scientist” by Guided By Voices“Hound Dog” by Elvis Presley“Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh!” by Allan Sherman“I Touch Myself” by the Divinyls“I Wanna Be Your Dog” by The Stooges‘Metal Machine Music' by Lou Reed“Holy Ghost” by Albert Ayler“Breathe On Me” by The New Barbarians, live 1979 Washington, DC“Detroit Rock City” by KISS“Upside Down” by Diana Ross“The River” by Bruce SpringsteenClip of Jimmy Page talking to Robert Duncan“Tommy's Holiday Camp” by The Who“Rock and Roll Radio” by The Ramones LINKS: Robert Duncan's website, https://www.duncanwrites.com/Robert Duncan on Twitter, @robertduncansfRobert Duncan on Instagram, @rduncansfRobert Duncan on Mastodon, @Rduncan@newsie.social Christy Alexander Hallberg's website: https://www.christyalexanderhallberg.com/Christy Alexander Hallberg on Twitter, @ChristyHallbergChristy Alexander Hallberg on Instagram, @christyhallbergChristy Alexander Hallberg's YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfSnRmlL5moSQYi6EjSvqag
Hello, Lit Listeners. If you dig the crazy, down-and-dirty (and deafening), let-it-all-hang out, have-a-nice-day, far out 1970s, you're in for a treat. Music journalist-cum-rock novelist Robert Duncan is here doing double duty as both author and music guru—because why wouldn't he?—and he dishes on some folks whose records are in your collection. You DON'T want to miss this episode! EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: The blurred lines between the novel ‘Loudmouth' and Robert's real life Robert's wild boy big brother—“the original rock ‘n roll guy”—Rusty Scratch inspections and Robert's friend with a special talent at summer camp (get ready to laugh) Robert and I playing a drinking game on the episode, and the phrase I coined for it Robert having tea with Lester Bangs at MC5's Rob Tyner's house Getting drunk at Patti Smith's and Allen Lanier's apartment near Washington Square in NYC with Jim Carroll, author of ‘The Basketball Diaries' How Robert became a music journalist and got the job at ‘CREEM' Lester Bangs—and Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal of him in ‘Almost Famous' The time Legs McNeil took the last beer from Robert's NYC apartment fridge and Robert and Lester's subsequent fight The day Lester died Robert's interactions with various rock stars, including Ron Wood and Keith Richards, Iggy Pop and David Bowie, KISS, Ozzy Osbourne, The Clash, etc. Partying at Liza Minnelli's apartment in NYC with tons of celebrities Driving around Cleveland with a young Bruce Springsteen The tragic genesis of the novel ‘Loudmouth' Robert Duncan's one and only Jimmy Page encounter MUSIC IN THE EPISODE IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE: [No Copyright Music] Retro ‘70s Funky Jazz-Hop Instrumental (Copyright Free) Music—Funkman The Beatles—Live at Shea Stadium, New York (August 23, 1966)—cheering “My Foolish Heart” by Bill Evans “I Am A Scientist” by Guided By Voices “Hound Dog” by Elvis Presley “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh!” by Allan Sherman “I Touch Myself” by the Divinyls “I Wanna Be Your Dog” by The Stooges ‘Metal Machine Music' by Lou Reed “Holy Ghost” by Albert Ayler “Breathe On Me” by The New Barbarians, live 1979 Washington, DC “Detroit Rock City” by KISS “Upside Down” by Diana Ross “The River” by Bruce Springsteen Clip of Jimmy Page talking to Robert Duncan “Tommy's Holiday Camp” by The Who “Rock and Roll Radio” by The Ramones LINKS: Robert Duncan's website, https://www.duncanwrites.com/ Robert Duncan on Twitter, @robertduncansf Robert Duncan on Instagram, @rduncansf Robert Duncan on Mastodon, @Rduncan@newsie.social Christy Alexander Hallberg's website: https://www.christyalexanderhallberg.com/ Christy Alexander Hallberg on Twitter, @ChristyHallberg Christy Alexander Hallberg on Instagram, @christyhallberg Christy Alexander Hallberg's YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfSnRmlL5moSQYi6EjSvqag Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Pastor Ron Woods | Online at www.theassembly.org
Episode 159 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Itchycoo Park” by the Small Faces, and their transition from Mod to psychedelia. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "The First Cut is the Deepest" by P.P. Arnold. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources As so many of the episodes recently have had no Mixcloud due to the number of songs by one artist, I've decided to start splitting the mixes of the recordings excerpted in the podcasts into two parts. Here's part one and part two. I've used quite a few books in this episode. The Small Faces & Other Stories by Uli Twelker and Roland Schmit is definitely a fan-work with all that that implies, but has some useful quotes. Two books claim to be the authorised biography of Steve Marriott, and I've referred to both -- All Too Beautiful by Paolo Hewitt and John Hellier, and All Or Nothing by Simon Spence. Spence also wrote an excellent book on Immediate Records, which I referred to. Kenney Jones and Ian McLagan both wrote very readable autobiographies. I've also used Andrew Loog Oldham's autobiography Stoned, co-written by Spence, though be warned that it casually uses slurs. P.P. Arnold's autobiography is a sometimes distressing read covering her whole life, including her time at Immediate. There are many, many, collections of the Small Faces' work, ranging from cheap budget CDs full of outtakes to hundred-pound-plus box sets, also full of outtakes. This three-CD budget collection contains all the essential tracks, and is endorsed by Kenney Jones, the band's one surviving member. And if you're intrigued by the section on Immediate Records, this two-CD set contains a good selection of their releases. ERRATUM-ISH: I say Jimmy Winston was “a couple” of years older than the rest of the band. This does not mean exactly two, but is used in the vague vernacular sense equivalent to “a few”. Different sources I've seen put Winston as either two or four years older than his bandmates, though two seems to be the most commonly cited figure. Transcript For once there is little to warn about in this episode, but it does contain some mild discussions of organised crime, arson, and mental illness, and a quoted joke about capital punishment in questionable taste which may upset some. One name that came up time and again when we looked at the very early years of British rock and roll was Lionel Bart. If you don't remember the name, he was a left-wing Bohemian songwriter who lived in a communal house-share which at various times was also inhabited by people like Shirley Eaton, the woman who is painted gold at the beginning of Goldfinger, Mike Pratt, the star of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), and Davey Graham, the most influential and innovative British guitarist of the fifties and early sixties. Bart and Pratt had co-written most of the hits of Britain's first real rock and roll star, Tommy Steele: [Excerpt: Tommy Steele, "Rock with the Caveman"] and then Bart had gone solo as a writer, and written hits like "Living Doll" for Britain's *biggest* rock and roll star, Cliff Richard: [Excerpt: Cliff Richard, "Living Doll"] But Bart's biggest contribution to rock music turned out not to be the songs he wrote for rock and roll stars, and not even his talent-spotting -- it was Bart who got Steele signed by Larry Parnes, and he also pointed Parnes in the direction of another of his biggest stars, Marty Wilde -- but the opportunity he gave to a lot of child stars in a very non-rock context. Bart's musical Oliver!, inspired by the novel Oliver Twist, was the biggest sensation on the West End stage in the early 1960s, breaking records for the longest-running musical, and also transferred to Broadway and later became an extremely successful film. As it happened, while Oliver! was extraordinarily lucrative, Bart didn't see much of the money from it -- he sold the rights to it, and his other musicals, to the comedian Max Bygraves in the mid-sixties for a tiny sum in order to finance a couple of other musicals, which then flopped horribly and bankrupted him. But by that time Oliver! had already been the first big break for three people who went on to major careers in music -- all of them playing the same role. Because many of the major roles in Oliver! were for young boys, the cast had to change frequently -- child labour laws meant that multiple kids had to play the same role in different performances, and people quickly grew out of the roles as teenagerhood hit. We've already heard about the career of one of the people who played the Artful Dodger in the original West End production -- Davy Jones, who transferred in the role to Broadway in 1963, and who we'll be seeing again in a few episodes' time -- and it's very likely that another of the people who played the Artful Dodger in that production, a young lad called Philip Collins, will be coming into the story in a few years' time. But the first of the artists to use the Artful Dodger as a springboard to a music career was the one who appeared in the role on the original cast album of 1960, though there's very little in that recording to suggest the sound of his later records: [Excerpt: Steve Marriott, "Consider Yourself"] Steve Marriott is the second little Stevie we've looked at in recent episodes to have been born prematurely. In his case, he was born a month premature, and jaundiced, and had to spend the first month of his life in hospital, the first few days of which were spent unsure if he was going to survive. Thankfully he did, but he was a bit of a sickly child as a result, and remained stick-thin and short into adulthood -- he never grew to be taller than five foot five. Young Steve loved music, and especially the music of Buddy Holly. He also loved skiffle, and managed to find out where Lonnie Donegan lived. He went round and knocked on Donegan's door, but was very disappointed to discover that his idol was just a normal man, with his hair uncombed and a shirt stained with egg yolk. He started playing the ukulele when he was ten, and graduated to guitar when he was twelve, forming a band which performed under a variety of different names. When on stage with them, he would go by the stage name Buddy Marriott, and would wear a pair of horn-rimmed glasses to look more like Buddy Holly. When he was twelve, his mother took him to an audition for Oliver! The show had been running for three months at the time, and was likely to run longer, and child labour laws meant that they had to have replacements for some of the cast -- every three months, any performing child had to have at least ten days off. At his audition, Steve played his guitar and sang "Who's Sorry Now?", the recent Connie Francis hit: [Excerpt: Connie Francis, "Who's Sorry Now?"] And then, ignoring the rule that performers could only do one song, immediately launched into Buddy Holly's "Oh Boy!" [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "Oh Boy!"] His musical ability and attitude impressed the show's producers, and he was given a job which suited him perfectly -- rather than being cast in a single role, he would be swapped around, playing different small parts, in the chorus, and occasionally taking the larger role of the Artful Dodger. Steve Marriott was never able to do the same thing over and over, and got bored very quickly, but because he was moving between roles, he was able to keep interested in his performances for almost a year, and he was good enough that it was him chosen to sing the Dodger's role on the cast album when that was recorded: [Excerpt: Steve Marriott and Joyce Blair, "I'd Do Anything"] And he enjoyed performance enough that his parents pushed him to become an actor -- though there were other reasons for that, too. He was never the best-behaved child in the world, nor the most attentive student, and things came to a head when, shortly after leaving the Oliver! cast, he got so bored of his art classes he devised a plan to get out of them forever. Every art class, for several weeks, he'd sit in a different desk at the back of the classroom and stuff torn-up bits of paper under the floorboards. After a couple of months of this he then dropped a lit match in, which set fire to the paper and ended up burning down half the school. His schoolfriend Ken Hawes talked about it many decades later, saying "I suppose in a way I was impressed about how he had meticulously planned the whole thing months in advance, the sheer dogged determination to see it through. He could quite easily have been caught and would have had to face the consequences. There was no danger in anybody getting hurt because we were at the back of the room. We had to be at the back otherwise somebody would have noticed what he was doing. There was no malice against other pupils, he just wanted to burn the damn school down." Nobody could prove it was him who had done it, though his parents at least had a pretty good idea who it was, but it was clear that even when the school was rebuilt it wasn't a good idea to send him back there, so they sent him to the Italia Conti Drama School; the same school that Anthony Newley and Petula Clark, among many others, had attended. Marriott's parents couldn't afford the school's fees, but Marriott was so talented that the school waived the fees -- they said they'd get him work, and take a cut of his wages in lieu of the fees. And over the next few years they did get him a lot of work. Much of that work was for TV shows, which like almost all TV of the time no longer exist -- he was in an episode of the Sid James sitcom Citizen James, an episode of Mr. Pastry's Progress, an episode of the police drama Dixon of Dock Green, and an episode of a series based on the Just William books, none of which survive. He also did a voiceover for a carpet cleaner ad, appeared on the radio soap opera Mrs Dale's Diary playing a pop star, and had a regular spot reading listeners' letters out for the agony aunt Marje Proops on her radio show. Almost all of this early acting work wa s utterly ephemeral, but there are a handful of his performances that do survive, mostly in films. He has a small role in the comedy film Heavens Above!, a mistaken-identity comedy in which a radical left-wing priest played by Peter Sellers is given a parish intended for a more conservative priest of the same name, and upsets the well-off people of the parish by taking in a large family of travellers and appointing a Black man as his churchwarden. The film has some dated attitudes, in the way that things that were trying to be progressive and antiracist sixty years ago invariably do, but has a sparkling cast, with Sellers, Eric Sykes, William Hartnell, Brock Peters, Roy Kinnear, Irene Handl, and many more extremely recognisable faces from the period: [Excerpt: Heavens Above!] Marriott apparently enjoyed working on the film immensely, as he was a fan of the Goon Show, which Sellers had starred in and which Sykes had co-written several episodes of. There are reports of Marriott and Sellers jamming together on banjos during breaks in filming, though these are probably *slightly* inaccurate -- Sellers played the banjolele, a banjo-style instrument which is played like a ukulele. As Marriott had started on ukulele before switching to guitar, it was probably these they were playing, rather than banjoes. He also appeared in a more substantial role in a film called Live It Up!, a pop exploitation film starring David Hemmings in which he appears as a member of a pop group. Oddly, Marriott plays a drummer, even though he wasn't a drummer, while two people who *would* find fame as drummers, Mitch Mitchell and Dave Clark, appear in smaller, non-drumming, roles. He doesn't perform on the soundtrack, which is produced by Joe Meek and features Sounds Incorporated, The Outlaws, and Gene Vincent, but he does mime playing behind Heinz Burt, the former bass player of the Tornadoes who was then trying for solo stardom at Meek's instigation: [Excerpt: Heinz Burt, "Don't You Understand"] That film was successful enough that two years later, in 1965 Marriott came back for a sequel, Be My Guest, with The Niteshades, the Nashville Teens, and Jerry Lee Lewis, this time with music produced by Shel Talmy rather than Meek. But that was something of a one-off. After making Live It Up!, Marriott had largely retired from acting, because he was trying to become a pop star. The break finally came when he got an audition at the National Theatre, for a job touring with Laurence Olivier for a year. He came home and told his parents he hadn't got the job, but then a week later they were bemused by a phone call asking why Steve hadn't turned up for rehearsals. He *had* got the job, but he'd decided he couldn't face a year of doing the same thing over and over, and had pretended he hadn't. By this time he'd already released his first record. The work on Oliver! had got him a contract with Decca Records, and he'd recorded a Buddy Holly knock-off, "Give Her My Regards", written for him by Kenny Lynch, the actor, pop star, and all-round entertainer: [Excerpt: Steve Marriott, "Give Her My Regards"] That record wasn't a hit, but Marriott wasn't put off. He formed a band who were at first called the Moonlights, and then the Frantiks, and they got a management deal with Tony Calder, Andrew Oldham's junior partner in his management company. Calder got former Shadow Tony Meehan to produce a demo for the group, a version of Cliff Richard's hit "Move It", which was shopped round the record labels with no success (and which sadly appears no longer to survive). The group also did some recordings with Joe Meek, which also don't circulate, but which may exist in the famous "Teachest Tapes" which are slowly being prepared for archival releases. The group changed their name to the Moments, and added in the guitarist John Weider, who was one of those people who seem to have been in every band ever either just before or just after they became famous -- at various times he was in Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Family, Eric Burdon and the Animals, and the band that became Crabby Appleton, but never in their most successful lineups. They continued recording unsuccessful demos, of which a small number have turned up: [Excerpt: Steve Marriott and the Moments, "Good Morning Blues"] One of their demo sessions was produced by Andrew Oldham, and while that session didn't lead to a release, it did lead to Oldham booking Marriott as a session harmonica player for one of his "Andrew Oldham Orchestra" sessions, to play on a track titled "365 Rolling Stones (One For Every Day of the Year)": [Excerpt: The Andrew Oldham Orchestra, "365 Rolling Stones (One For Every Day of the Year)"] Oldham also produced a session for what was meant to be Marriott's second solo single on Decca, a cover version of the Rolling Stones' "Tell Me", which was actually scheduled for release but pulled at the last minute. Like many of Marriott's recordings from this period, if it exists, it doesn't seem to circulate publicly. But despite their lack of recording success, the Moments did manage to have a surprising level of success on the live circuit. Because they were signed to Calder and Oldham's management company, they got a contract with the Arthur Howes booking agency, which got them support slots on package tours with Billy J Kramer, Freddie and the Dreamers, the Kinks, and other major acts, and the band members were earning about thirty pounds a week each -- a very, very good living for the time. They even had a fanzine devoted to them, written by a fan named Stuart Tuck. But as they weren't making records, the band's lineup started changing, with members coming and going. They did manage to get one record released -- a soundalike version of the Kinks' "You Really Got Me", recorded for a budget label who rushed it out, hoping to get it picked up in the US and for it to be the hit version there: [Excerpt: The Moments, "You Really Got Me"] But the month after that was released, Marriott was sacked from the band, apparently in part because the band were starting to get billed as Steve Marriott and the Moments rather than just The Moments, and the rest of them didn't want to be anyone's backing band. He got a job at a music shop while looking around for other bands to perform with. At one point around this time he was going to form a duo with a friend of his, Davy Jones -- not the one who had also appeared in Oliver!, but another singer of the same name. This one sang with a blues band called the Mannish Boys, and both men were well known on the Mod scene in London. Marriott's idea was that they call themselves David and Goliath, with Jones being David, and Marriott being Goliath because he was only five foot five. That could have been a great band, but it never got past the idea stage. Marriott had become friendly with another part-time musician and shop worker called Ronnie Lane, who was in a band called the Outcasts who played the same circuit as the Moments: [Excerpt: The Outcasts, "Before You Accuse Me"] Lane worked in a sound equipment shop and Marriott in a musical instrument shop, and both were customers of the other as well as friends -- at least until Marriott came into the shop where Lane worked and tried to persuade him to let Marriott have a free PA system. Lane pretended to go along with it as a joke, and got sacked. Lane had then gone to the shop where Marriott worked in the hope that Marriott would give him a good deal on a guitar because he'd been sacked because of Marriott. Instead, Marriott persuaded him that he should switch to bass, on the grounds that everyone was playing guitar since the Beatles had come along, but a bass player would always be able to find work. Lane bought the bass. Shortly after that, Marriott came to an Outcasts gig in a pub, and was asked to sit in. He enjoyed playing with Lane and the group's drummer Kenney Jones, but got so drunk he smashed up the pub's piano while playing a Jerry Lee Lewis song. The resulting fallout led to the group being barred from the pub and splitting up, so Marriott, Lane, and Jones decided to form their own group. They got in another guitarist Marriott knew, a man named Jimmy Winston who was a couple of years older than them, and who had two advantages -- he was a known Face on the mod scene, with a higher status than any of the other three, and his brother owned a van and would drive the group and their equipment for ten percent of their earnings. There was a slight problem in that Winston was also as good on guitar as Marriott and looked like he might want to be the star, but Marriott neutralised that threat -- he moved Winston over to keyboards. The fact that Winston couldn't play keyboards didn't matter -- he could be taught a couple of riffs and licks, and he was sure to pick up the rest. And this way the group had the same lineup as one of Marriott's current favourites, Booker T and the MGs. While he was still a Buddy Holly fan, he was now, like the rest of the Mods, an R&B obsessive. Marriott wasn't entirely sure that this new group would be the one that would make him a star though, and was still looking for other alternatives in case it didn't play out. He auditioned for another band, the Lower Third, which counted Stuart Tuck, the writer of the Moments fanzine, among its members. But he was unsuccessful in the audition -- instead his friend Davy Jones, the one who he'd been thinking of forming a duo with, got the job: [Excerpt: Davy Jones and the Lower Third, "You've Got a Habit of Leaving"] A few months after that, Davy Jones and the Lower Third changed their name to David Bowie and the Lower Third, and we'll be picking up that story in a little over a year from now... Marriott, Lane, Jones, and Winston kept rehearsing and pulled together a five-song set, which was just about long enough to play a few shows, if they extended the songs with long jamming instrumental sections. The opening song for these early sets was one which, when they recorded it, would be credited to Marriott and Lane -- the two had struck up a writing partnership and agreed to a Lennon/McCartney style credit split, though in these early days Marriott was doing far more of the writing than Lane was. But "You Need Loving" was... heavily inspired... by "You Need Love", a song Willie Dixon had written for Muddy Waters: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "You Need Love"] It's not precisely the same song, but you can definitely hear the influence in the Marriott/Lane song: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "You Need Loving"] They did make some changes though, notably to the end of the song: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "You Need Loving"] You will be unsurprised to learn that Robert Plant was a fan of Steve Marriott. The new group were initially without a name, until after one of their first gigs, Winston's girlfriend, who hadn't met the other three before, said "You've all got such small faces!" The name stuck, because it had a double meaning -- as we've seen in the episode on "My Generation", "Face" was Mod slang for someone who was cool and respected on the Mod scene, but also, with the exception of Winston, who was average size, the other three members of the group were very short -- the tallest of the three was Ronnie Lane, who was five foot six. One thing I should note about the group's name, by the way -- on all the labels of their records in the UK while they were together, they were credited as "Small Faces", with no "The" in front, but all the band members referred to the group in interviews as "The Small Faces", and they've been credited that way on some reissues and foreign-market records. The group's official website is thesmallfaces.com but all the posts on the website refer to them as "Small Faces" with no "the". The use of the word "the" or not at the start of a group's name at this time was something of a shibboleth -- for example both The Buffalo Springfield and The Pink Floyd dropped theirs after their early records -- and its status in this case is a strange one. I'll be referring to the group throughout as "The Small Faces" rather than "Small Faces" because the former is easier to say, but both seem accurate. After a few pub gigs in London, they got some bookings in the North of England, where they got a mixed reception -- they went down well at Peter Stringfellow's Mojo Club in Sheffield, where Joe Cocker was a regular performer, less well at a working-man's club, and reports differ about their performance at the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, though one thing everyone is agreed on is that while they were performing, some Mancunians borrowed their van and used it to rob a clothing warehouse, and gave the band members some very nice leather coats as a reward for their loan of the van. It was only on the group's return to London that they really started to gel as a unit. In particular, Kenney Jones had up to that point been a very stiff, precise, drummer, but he suddenly loosened up and, in Steve Marriott's tasteless phrase, "Every number swung like Hanratty" (James Hanratty was one of the last people in Britain to be executed by hanging). Shortly after that, Don Arden's secretary -- whose name I haven't been able to find in any of the sources I've used for this episode, sadly, came into the club where they were rehearsing, the Starlight Rooms, to pass a message from Arden to an associate of his who owned the club. The secretary had seen Marriott perform before -- he would occasionally get up on stage at the Starlight Rooms to duet with Elkie Brooks, who was a regular performer there, and she'd seen him do that -- but was newly impressed by his group, and passed word on to her boss that this was a group he should investigate. Arden is someone who we'll be looking at a lot in future episodes, but the important thing to note right now is that he was a failed entertainer who had moved into management and promotion, first with American acts like Gene Vincent, and then with British acts like the Nashville Teens, who had had hits with tracks like "Tobacco Road": [Excerpt: The Nashville Teens, "Tobacco Road"] Arden was also something of a gangster -- as many people in the music industry were at the time, but he was worse than most of his contemporaries, and delighted in his nickname "the Al Capone of pop". The group had a few managers looking to sign them, but Arden convinced them with his offer. They would get a percentage of their earnings -- though they never actually received that percentage -- twenty pounds a week in wages, and, the most tempting part of it all, they would get expense accounts at all the Carnaby St boutiques and could go there whenever they wanted and get whatever they wanted. They signed with Arden, which all of them except Marriott would later regret, because Arden's financial exploitation meant that it would be decades before they saw any money from their hits, and indeed both Marriott and Lane would be dead before they started getting royalties from their old records. Marriott, on the other hand, had enough experience of the industry to credit Arden with the group getting anywhere at all, and said later "Look, you go into it with your eyes open and as far as I was concerned it was better than living on brown sauce rolls. At least we had twenty quid a week guaranteed." Arden got the group signed to Decca, with Dick Rowe signing them to the same kind of production deal that Andrew Oldham had pioneered with the Stones, so that Arden would own the rights to their recordings. At this point the group still only knew a handful of songs, but Rowe was signing almost everyone with a guitar at this point, putting out a record or two and letting them sink or swim. He had already been firmly labelled as "the man who turned down the Beatles", and was now of the opinion that it was better to give everyone a chance than to make that kind of expensive mistake again. By this point Marriott and Lane were starting to write songs together -- though at this point it was still mostly Marriott writing, and people would ask him why he was giving Lane half the credit, and he'd reply "Without Ronnie's help keeping me awake and being there I wouldn't do half of it. He keeps me going." -- but for their first single Arden was unsure that they were up to the task of writing a hit. The group had been performing a version of Solomon Burke's "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love", a song which Burke always claimed to have written alone, but which is credited to him, Jerry Wexler, and Bert Berns (and has Bern's fingerprints, at least, on it to my ears): [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love"] Arden got some professional writers to write new lyrics and vocal melody to their arrangement of the song -- the people he hired were Brian Potter, who would later go on to co-write "Rhinestone Cowboy", and Ian Samwell, the former member of Cliff Richard's Drifters who had written many of Richard's early hits, including "Move It", and was now working for Arden. The group went into the studio and recorded the song, titled "Whatcha Gonna Do About It?": [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Whatcha Gonna Do About It?"] That version, though was deemed too raucous, and they had to go back into the studio to cut a new version, which came out as their first single: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Whatcha Gonna Do About It?"] At first the single didn't do much on the charts, but then Arden got to work with teams of people buying copies from chart return shops, bribing DJs on pirate radio stations to play it, and bribing the person who compiled the charts for the NME. Eventually it made number fourteen, at which point it became a genuinely popular hit. But with that popularity came problems. In particular, Steve Marriott was starting to get seriously annoyed by Jimmy Winston. As the group started to get TV appearances, Winston started to act like he should be the centre of attention. Every time Marriott took a solo in front of TV cameras, Winston would start making stupid gestures, pulling faces, anything to make sure the cameras focussed on him rather than on Marriott. Which wouldn't have been too bad had Winston been a great musician, but he was still not very good on the keyboards, and unlike the others didn't seem particularly interested in trying. He seemed to want to be a star, rather than a musician. The group's next planned single was a Marriott and Lane song, "I've Got Mine". To promote it, the group mimed to it in a film, Dateline Diamonds, a combination pop film and crime caper not a million miles away from the ones that Marriott had appeared in a few years earlier. They also contributed three other songs to the film's soundtrack. Unfortunately, the film's release was delayed, and the film had been the big promotional push that Arden had planned for the single, and without that it didn't chart at all. By the time the single came out, though, Winston was no longer in the group. There are many, many different stories as to why he was kicked out. Depending on who you ask, it was because he was trying to take the spotlight away from Marriott, because he wasn't a good enough keyboard player, because he was taller than the others and looked out of place, or because he asked Don Arden where the money was. It was probably a combination of all of these, but fundamentally what it came to was that Winston just didn't fit into the group. Winston would, in later years, say that him confronting Arden was the only reason for his dismissal, saying that Arden had manipulated the others to get him out of the way, but that seems unlikely on the face of it. When Arden sacked him, he kept Winston on as a client and built another band around him, Jimmy Winston and the Reflections, and got them signed to Decca too, releasing a Kenny Lynch song, "Sorry She's Mine", to no success: [Excerpt: Jimmy Winston and the Reflections, "Sorry She's Mine"] Another version of that song would later be included on the first Small Faces album. Winston would then form another band, Winston's Fumbs, who would also release one single, before he went into acting instead. His most notable credit was as a rebel in the 1972 Doctor Who story Day of the Daleks, and he later retired from showbusiness to run a business renting out sound equipment, and died in 2020. The group hired his replacement without ever having met him or heard him play. Ian McLagan had started out as the rhythm guitarist in a Shadows soundalike band called the Cherokees, but the group had become R&B fans and renamed themselves the Muleskinners, and then after hearing "Green Onions", McLagan had switched to playing Hammond organ. The Muleskinners had played the same R&B circuit as dozens of other bands we've looked at, and had similar experiences, including backing visiting blues stars like Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, and Howlin' Wolf. Their one single had been a cover version of "Back Door Man", a song Willie Dixon had written for Wolf: [Excerpt: The Muleskinners, "Back Door Man"] The Muleskinners had split up as most of the group had day jobs, and McLagan had gone on to join a group called Boz and the Boz People, who were becoming popular on the live circuit, and who also toured backing Kenny Lynch while McLagan was in the band. Boz and the Boz People would release several singles in 1966, like their version of the theme for the film "Carry on Screaming", released just as by "Boz": [Excerpt: Boz, "Carry on Screaming"] By that time, McLagan had left the group -- Boz Burrell later went on to join King Crimson and Bad Company. McLagan left the Boz People in something of a strop, and was complaining to a friend the night he left the group that he didn't have any work lined up. The friend joked that he should join the Small Faces, because he looked like them, and McLagan got annoyed that his friend wasn't taking him seriously -- he'd love to be in the Small Faces, but they *had* a keyboard player. The next day he got a phone call from Don Arden asking him to come to his office. He was being hired to join a hit pop group who needed a new keyboard player. McLagan at first wasn't allowed to tell anyone what band he was joining -- in part because Arden's secretary was dating Winston, and Winston hadn't yet been informed he was fired, and Arden didn't want word leaking out until it had been sorted. But he'd been chosen purely on the basis of an article in a music magazine which had praised his playing with the Boz People, and without the band knowing him or his playing. As soon as they met, though, he immediately fit in in a way Winston never had. He looked the part, right down to his height -- he said later "Ronnie Lane and I were the giants in the band at 5 ft 6 ins, and Kenney Jones and Steve Marriott were the really teeny tiny chaps at 5 ft 5 1/2 ins" -- and he was a great player, and shared a sense of humour with them. McLagan had told Arden he'd been earning twenty pounds a week with the Boz People -- he'd actually been on five -- and so Arden agreed to give him thirty pounds a week during his probationary month, which was more than the twenty the rest of the band were getting. As soon as his probationary period was over, McLagan insisted on getting a pay cut so he'd be on the same wages as the rest of the group. Soon Marriott, Lane, and McLagan were all living in a house rented for them by Arden -- Jones decided to stay living with his parents -- and were in the studio recording their next single. Arden was convinced that the mistake with "I've Got Mine" had been allowing the group to record an original, and again called in a team of professional songwriters. Arden brought in Mort Shuman, who had recently ended his writing partnership with Doc Pomus and struck out on his own, after co-writing songs like "Save the Last Dance for Me", "Sweets For My Sweet", and "Viva Las Vegas" together, and Kenny Lynch, and the two of them wrote "Sha-La-La-La-Lee", and Lynch added backing vocals to the record: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Sha-La-La-La-Lee"] None of the group were happy with the record, but it became a big hit, reaching number three in the charts. Suddenly the group had a huge fanbase of screaming teenage girls, which embarrassed them terribly, as they thought of themselves as serious heavy R&B musicians, and the rest of their career would largely be spent vacillating between trying to appeal to their teenybopper fanbase and trying to escape from it to fit their own self-image. They followed "Sha-La-La-La-Lee" with "Hey Girl", a Marriott/Lane song, but one written to order -- they were under strict instructions from Arden that if they wanted to have the A-side of a single, they had to write something as commercial as "Sha-La-La-La-Lee" had been, and they managed to come up with a second top-ten hit. Two hit singles in a row was enough to make an album viable, and the group went into the studio and quickly cut an album, which had their first two hits on it -- "Hey Girl" wasn't included, and nor was the flop "I've Got Mine" -- plus a bunch of semi-originals like "You Need Loving", a couple of Kenny Lynch songs, and a cover version of Sam Cooke's "Shake". The album went to number three on the album charts, with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the number one and two spots, and it was at this point that Arden's rivals really started taking interest. But that interest was quelled for the moment when, after Robert Stigwood enquired about managing the band, Arden went round to Stigwood's office with four goons and held him upside down over a balcony, threatening to drop him off if he ever messed with any of Arden's acts again. But the group were still being influenced by other managers. In particular, Brian Epstein came round to the group's shared house, with Graeme Edge of the Moody Blues, and brought them some slices of orange -- which they discovered, after eating them, had been dosed with LSD. By all accounts, Marriott's first trip was a bad one, but the group soon became regular consumers of the drug, and it influenced the heavier direction they took on their next single, "All or Nothing". "All or Nothing" was inspired both by Marriott's breakup with his girlfriend of the time, and his delight at the fact that Jenny Rylance, a woman he was attracted to, had split up with her then-boyfriend Rod Stewart. Rylance and Stewart later reconciled, but would break up again and Rylance would become Marriott's first wife in 1968: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "All or Nothing"] "All or Nothing" became the group's first and only number one record -- and according to the version of the charts used on Top of the Pops, it was a joint number one with the Beatles' double A-side of "Yellow Submarine" and "Eleanor Rigby", both selling exactly as well as each other. But this success caused the group's parents to start to wonder why their kids -- none of whom were yet twenty-one, the legal age of majority at the time -- were not rich. While the group were on tour, their parents came as a group to visit Arden and ask him where the money was, and why their kids were only getting paid twenty pounds a week when their group was getting a thousand pounds a night. Arden tried to convince the parents that he had been paying the group properly, but that they had spent their money on heroin -- which was very far from the truth, the band were only using soft drugs at the time. This put a huge strain on the group's relationship with Arden, and it wasn't the only thing Arden did that upset them. They had been spending a lot of time in the studio working on new material, and Arden was convinced that they were spending too much time recording, and that they were just faffing around and not producing anything of substance. They dropped off a tape to show him that they had been working -- and the next thing they knew, Arden had put out one of the tracks from that tape, "My Mind's Eye", which had only been intended as a demo, as a single: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "My Mind's Eye"] That it went to number four on the charts didn't make up for the fact that the first the band heard of the record coming out at all was when they heard it on the radio. They needed rid of Arden. Luckily for them, Arden wasn't keen on continuing to work with them either. They were unreliable and flakey, and he also needed cash quick to fund his other ventures, and he agreed to sell on their management and recording contracts. Depending on which version of the story you believe, he may have sold them on to an agent called Harold Davison, who then sold them on to Andrew Oldham and Tony Calder, but according to Oldham what happened is that in December 1966 Arden demanded the highest advance in British history -- twenty-five thousand pounds -- directly from Oldham. In cash. In a brown paper bag. The reason Oldham and Calder were interested was that in July 1965 they'd started up their own record label, Immediate Records, which had been announced by Oldham in his column in Disc and Music Echo, in which he'd said "On many occasions I have run down the large record companies over issues such as pirate stations, their promotion, and their tastes. And many readers have written in and said that if I was so disturbed by the state of the existing record companies why didn't I do something about it. I have! On the twentieth of this month the first of three records released by my own company, Immediate Records, is to be launched." That first batch of three records contained one big hit, "Hang on Sloopy" by the McCoys, which Immediate licensed from Bert Berns' new record label BANG in the US: [Excerpt: The McCoys, "Hang on Sloopy"] The two other initial singles featured the talents of Immediate's new in-house producer, a session player who had previously been known as "Little Jimmy" to distinguish him from "Big" Jim Sullivan, the other most in-demand session guitarist, but who was now just known as Jimmy Page. The first was a version of Pete Seeger's "The Bells of Rhymney", which Page produced and played guitar on, for a group called The Fifth Avenue: [Excerpt: The Fifth Avenue, "The Bells of Rhymney"] And the second was a Gordon Lightfoot song performed by a girlfriend of Brian Jones', Nico. The details as to who was involved in the track have varied -- at different times the production has been credited to Jones, Page, and Oldham -- but it seems to be the case that both Jones and Page play on the track, as did session bass player John Paul Jones: [Excerpt: Nico, "I'm Not Sayin'"] While "Hang on Sloopy" was a big hit, the other two singles were flops, and The Fifth Avenue split up, while Nico used the publicity she'd got as an entree into Andy Warhol's Factory, and we'll be hearing more about how that went in a future episode. Oldham and Calder were trying to follow the model of the Brill Building, of Phil Spector, and of big US independents like Motown and Stax. They wanted to be a one-stop shop where they'd produce the records, manage the artists, and own the publishing -- and they also licensed the publishing for the Beach Boys' songs for a couple of years, and started publicising their records over here in a big way, to exploit the publishing royalties, and that was a major factor in turning the Beach Boys from minor novelties to major stars in the UK. Most of Immediate's records were produced by Jimmy Page, but other people got to have a go as well. Giorgio Gomelsky and Shel Talmy both produced tracks for the label, as did a teenage singer then known as Paul Raven, who would later become notorious under his later stage-name Gary Glitter. But while many of these records were excellent -- and Immediate deserves to be talked about in the same terms as Motown or Stax when it comes to the quality of the singles it released, though not in terms of commercial success -- the only ones to do well on the charts in the first few months of the label's existence were "Hang on Sloopy" and an EP by Chris Farlowe. It was Farlowe who provided Immediate Records with its first home-grown number one, a version of the Rolling Stones' "Out of Time" produced by Mick Jagger, though according to Arthur Greenslade, the arranger on that and many other Immediate tracks, Jagger had given up on getting a decent performance out of Farlowe and Oldham ended up producing the vocals. Greenslade later said "Andrew must have worked hard in there, Chris Farlowe couldn't sing his way out of a paper bag. I'm sure Andrew must have done it, where you get an artist singing and you can do a sentence at a time, stitching it all together. He must have done it in pieces." But however hard it was to make, "Out of Time" was a success: [Excerpt: Chris Farlowe, "Out of Time"] Or at least, it was a success in the UK. It did also make the top forty in the US for a week, but then it hit a snag -- it had charted without having been released in the US at all, or even being sent as a promo to DJs. Oldham's new business manager Allen Klein had been asked to work his magic on the US charts, but the people he'd bribed to hype the record into the charts had got the release date wrong and done it too early. When the record *did* come out over there, no radio station would play it in case it looked like they were complicit in the scam. But still, a UK number one wasn't too shabby, and so Immediate Records was back on track, and Oldham wanted to shore things up by bringing in some more proven hit-makers. Immediate signed the Small Faces, and even started paying them royalties -- though that wouldn't last long, as Immediate went bankrupt in 1970 and its successors in interest stopped paying out. The first work the group did for the label was actually for a Chris Farlowe single. Lane and Marriott gave him their song "My Way of Giving", and played on the session along with Farlowe's backing band the Thunderbirds. Mick Jagger is the credited producer, but by all accounts Marriott and Lane did most of the work: [Excerpt: Chris Farlowe, "My Way of Giving"] Sadly, that didn't make the top forty. After working on that, they started on their first single recorded at Immediate. But because of contractual entanglements, "I Can't Make It" was recorded at Immediate but released by Decca. Because the band weren't particularly keen on promoting something on their old label, and the record was briefly banned by the BBC for being too sexual, it only made number twenty-six on the charts. Around this time, Marriott had become friendly with another band, who had named themselves The Little People in homage to the Small Faces, and particularly with their drummer Jerry Shirley. Marriott got them signed to Immediate, and produced and played on their first single, a version of his song "(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me?": [Excerpt: The Apostolic Intervention, "(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me?"] When they signed to Immediate, The Little People had to change their name, and Marriott suggested they call themselves The Nice, a phrase he liked. Oldham thought that was a stupid name, and gave the group the much more sensible name The Apostolic Intervention. And then a few weeks later he signed another group and changed *their* name to The Nice. "The Nice" was also a phrase used in the Small Faces' first single for Immediate proper. "Here Come the Nice" was inspired by a routine by the hipster comedian Lord Buckley, "The Nazz", which also gave a name to Todd Rundgren's band and inspired a line in David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust": [Excerpt: Lord Buckley, "The Nazz"] "Here Come the Nice" was very blatantly about a drug dealer, and somehow managed to reach number twelve despite that: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Here Come the Nice"] It also had another obstacle that stopped it doing as well as it might. A week before it came out, Decca released a single, "Patterns", from material they had in the vault. And in June 1967, two Small Faces albums came out. One of them was a collection from Decca of outtakes and demos, plus their non-album hit singles, titled From The Beginning, while the other was their first album on Immediate, which was titled Small Faces -- just like their first Decca album had been. To make matters worse, From The Beginning contained the group's demos of "My Way of Giving" and "(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me?", while the group's first Immediate album contained a new recording of "(Tell Me) Have You Ever Seen Me?", and a version of "My Way of Giving" with the same backing track but a different vocal take from the one on the Decca collection. From this point on, the group's catalogue would be a complete mess, with an endless stream of compilations coming out, both from Decca and, after the group split, from Immediate, mixing tracks intended for release with demos and jam sessions with no regard for either their artistic intent or for what fans might want. Both albums charted, with Small Faces reaching number twelve and From The Beginning reaching number sixteen, neither doing as well as their first album had, despite the Immediate album, especially, being a much better record. This was partly because the Marriott/Lane partnership was becoming far more equal. Kenney Jones later said "During the Decca period most of the self-penned stuff was 99% Steve. It wasn't until Immediate that Ronnie became more involved. The first Immediate album is made up of 50% Steve's songs and 50% of Ronnie's. They didn't collaborate as much as people thought. In fact, when they did, they often ended up arguing and fighting." It's hard to know who did what on each song credited to the pair, but if we assume that each song's principal writer also sang lead -- we know that's not always the case, but it's a reasonable working assumption -- then Jones' fifty-fifty estimate seems about right. Of the fourteen songs on the album, McLagan sings one, which is also his own composition, "Up the Wooden Hills to Bedfordshire". There's one instrumental, six with Marriott on solo lead vocals, four with Lane on solo lead vocals, and two duets, one with Lane as the main vocalist and one with Marriott. The fact that there was now a second songwriter taking an equal role in the band meant that they could now do an entire album of originals. It also meant that their next Marriott/Lane single was mostly a Lane song. "Itchycoo Park" started with a verse lyric from Lane -- "Over bridge of sighs/To rest my eyes in shades of green/Under dreaming spires/To Itchycoo Park, that's where I've been". The inspiration apparently came from Lane reading about the dreaming spires of Oxford, and contrasting it with the places he used to play as a child, full of stinging nettles. For a verse melody, they repeated a trick they'd used before -- the melody of "My Mind's Eye" had been borrowed in part from the Christmas carol "Gloria in Excelsis Deo", and here they took inspiration from the old hymn "God Be in My Head": [Excerpt: The Choir of King's College Cambridge, "God Be in My Head"] As Marriott told the story: "We were in Ireland and speeding our brains out writing this song. Ronnie had the first verse already written down but he had no melody line, so what we did was stick the verse to the melody line of 'God Be In My Head' with a few chord variations. We were going towards Dublin airport and I thought of the middle eight... We wrote the second verse collectively, and the chorus speaks for itself." [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Itchycoo Park"] Marriott took the lead vocal, even though it was mostly Lane's song, but Marriott did contribute to the writing, coming up with the middle eight. Lane didn't seem hugely impressed with Marriott's contribution, and later said "It wasn't me that came up with 'I feel inclined to blow my mind, get hung up, feed the ducks with a bun/They all come out to groove about, be nice and have fun in the sun'. That wasn't me, but the more poetic stuff was." But that part became the most memorable part of the record, not so much because of the writing or performance but because of the production. It was one of the first singles released using a phasing effect, developed by George Chkiantz (and I apologise if I'm pronouncing that name wrong), who was the assistant engineer for Glyn Johns on the album. I say it was one of the first, because at the time there was not a clear distinction between the techniques now known as phasing, flanging, and artificial double tracking, all of which have now diverged, but all of which initially came from the idea of shifting two copies of a recording slightly out of synch with each other. The phasing on "Itchycoo Park" , though, was far more extreme and used to far different effect than that on, say, Revolver: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Itchycoo Park"] It was effective enough that Jimi Hendrix, who was at the time working on Axis: Bold as Love, requested that Chkiantz come in and show his engineer how to get the same effect, which was then used on huge chunks of Hendrix's album. The BBC banned the record, because even the organisation which had missed that the Nice who "is always there when I need some speed" was a drug dealer was a little suspicious about whether "we'll get high" and "we'll touch the sky" might be drug references. The band claimed to be horrified at the thought, and explained that they were talking about swings. It's a song about a park, so if you play on the swings, you go high. What else could it mean? [Excerpt: The Small Faces, “Itchycoo Park”] No drug references there, I'm sure you'll agree. The song made number three, but the group ran into more difficulties with the BBC after an appearance on Top of the Pops. Marriott disliked the show's producer, and the way that he would go up to every act and pretend to think they had done a very good job, no matter what he actually thought, which Marriott thought of as hypocrisy rather than as politeness and professionalism. Marriott discovered that the producer was leaving the show, and so in the bar afterwards told him exactly what he thought of him, calling him a "two-faced", and then a four-letter word beginning with c which is generally considered the most offensive swear word there is. Unfortunately for Marriott, he'd been misinformed, the producer wasn't leaving the show, and the group were barred from it for a while. "Itchycoo Park" also made the top twenty in the US, thanks to a new distribution deal Immediate had, and plans were made for the group to tour America, but those plans had to be scrapped when Ian McLagan was arrested for possession of hashish, and instead the group toured France, with support from a group called the Herd: [Excerpt: The Herd, "From the Underworld"] Marriott became very friendly with the Herd's guitarist, Peter Frampton, and sympathised with Frampton's predicament when in the next year he was voted "face of '68" and developed a similar teenage following to the one the Small Faces had. The group's last single of 1967 was one of their best. "Tin Soldier" was inspired by the Hans Andersen story “The Steadfast Tin Soldier”, and was originally written for the singer P.P. Arnold, who Marriott was briefly dating around this time. But Arnold was *so* impressed with the song that Marriott decided to keep it for his own group, and Arnold was left just doing backing vocals on the track: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Tin Soldier"] It's hard to show the appeal of "Tin Soldier" in a short clip like those I use on this show, because so much of it is based on the use of dynamics, and the way the track rises and falls, but it's an extremely powerful track, and made the top ten. But it was after that that the band started falling apart, and also after that that they made the work generally considered their greatest album. As "Itchycoo Park" had made number one in Australia, the group were sent over there on tour to promote it, as support act for the Who. But the group hadn't been playing live much recently, and found it difficult to replicate their records on stage, as they were now so reliant on studio effects like phasing. The Australian audiences were uniformly hostile, and the contrast with the Who, who were at their peak as a live act at this point, couldn't have been greater. Marriott decided he had a solution. The band needed to get better live, so why not get Peter Frampton in as a fifth member? He was great on guitar and had stage presence, obviously that would fix their problems. But the other band members absolutely refused to get Frampton in. Marriott's confidence as a stage performer took a knock from which it never really recovered, and increasingly the band became a studio-only one. But the tour also put strain on the most important partnership in the band. Marriott and Lane had been the closest of friends and collaborators, but on the tour, both found a very different member of the Who to pal around with. Marriott became close to Keith Moon, and the two would get drunk and trash hotel rooms together. Lane, meanwhile, became very friendly with Pete Townshend, who introduced him to the work of the guru Meher Baba, who Townshend followed. Lane, too, became a follower, and the two would talk about religion and spirituality while their bandmates were destroying things. An attempt was made to heal the growing rifts though. Marriott, Lane, and McLagan all moved in together again like old times, but this time in a cottage -- something that became so common for bands around this time that the phrase "getting our heads together in the country" became a cliche in the music press. They started working on material for their new album. One of the tracks that they were working on was written by Marriott, and was inspired by how, before moving in to the country cottage, his neighbours had constantly complained about the volume of his music -- he'd been particularly annoyed that the pop singer Cilla Black, who lived in the same building and who he'd assumed would understand the pop star lifestyle, had complained more than anyone. It had started as as fairly serious blues song, but then Marriott had been confronted by the members of the group The Hollies, who wanted to know why Marriott always sang in a pseudo-American accent. Wasn't his own accent good enough? Was there something wrong with being from the East End of London? Well, no, Marriott decided, there wasn't, and so he decided to sing it in a Cockney accent. And so the song started to change, going from being an R&B song to being the kind of thing Cockneys could sing round a piano in a pub: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "Lazy Sunday"] Marriott intended the song just as an album track for the album they were working on, but Andrew Oldham insisted on releasing it as a single, much to the band's disgust, and it went to number two on the charts, and along with "Itchycoo Park" meant that the group were now typecast as making playful, light-hearted music. The album they were working on, Ogden's Nut-Gone Flake, was eventually as known for its marketing as its music. In the Small Faces' long tradition of twisted religious references, like their songs based on hymns and their song "Here Come the Nice", which had taken inspiration from a routine about Jesus and made it about a drug dealer, the print ads for the album read: Small Faces Which were in the studios Hallowed be thy name Thy music come Thy songs be sung On this album as they came from your heads We give you this day our daily bread Give us thy album in a round cover as we give thee 37/9d Lead us into the record stores And deliver us Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake For nice is the music The sleeve and the story For ever and ever, Immediate The reason the ad mentioned a round cover is that the original pressings of the album were released in a circular cover, made to look like a tobacco tin, with the name of the brand of tobacco changed from Ogden's Nut-Brown Flake to Ogden's Nut-Gone Flake, a reference to how after smoking enough dope your nut, or head, would be gone. This made more sense to British listeners than to Americans, because not only was the slang on the label British, and not only was it a reference to a British tobacco brand, but American and British dope-smoking habits are very different. In America a joint is generally made by taking the dried leaves and flowers of the cannabis plant -- or "weed" -- and rolling them in a cigarette paper and smoking them. In the UK and much of Europe, though, the preferred form of cannabis is the resin, hashish, which is crumbled onto tobacco in a cigarette paper and smoked that way, so having rolling or pipe tobacco was a necessity for dope smokers in the UK in a way it wasn't in the US. Side one of Ogden's was made up of normal songs, but the second side mixed songs and narrative. Originally the group wanted to get Spike Milligan to do the narration, but when Milligan backed out they chose Professor Stanley Unwin, a comedian who was known for speaking in his own almost-English language, Unwinese: [Excerpt: Stanley Unwin, "The Populode of the Musicolly"] They gave Unwin a script, telling the story that linked side two of the album, in which Happiness Stan is shocked to discover that half the moon has disappeared and goes on a quest to find the missing half, aided by a giant fly who lets him sit on his back after Stan shares his shepherd's pie with the hungry fly. After a long quest they end up at the cave of Mad John the Hermit, who points out to them that nobody had stolen half the moon at all -- they'd been travelling so long that it was a full moon again, and everything was OK. Unwin took that script, and reworked it into Unwinese, and also added in a lot of the slang he heard the group use, like "cool it" and "what's been your hang-up?": [Excerpt: The Small Faces and Professor Stanley Unwin, "Mad John"] The album went to number one, and the group were justifiably proud, but it only exacerbated the problems with their live show. Other than an appearance on the TV show Colour Me Pop, where they were joined by Stanley Unwin to perform the whole of side two of the album with live vocals but miming to instrumental backing tracks, they only performed two songs from the album live, "Rollin' Over" and "Song of a Baker", otherwise sticking to the same live show Marriott was already embarrassed by. Marriott later said "We had spent an entire year in the studios, which was why our stage presentation had not been improved since the previous year. Meanwhile our recording experience had developed in leaps and bounds. We were all keenly interested in the technical possibilities, in the art of recording. We let down a lot of people who wanted to hear Ogden's played live. We were still sort of rough and ready, and in the end the audience became uninterested as far as our stage show was concerned. It was our own fault, because we would have sussed it all out if we had only used our brains. We could have taken Stanley Unwin on tour with us, maybe a string section as well, and it would have been okay. But we didn't do it, we stuck to the concept that had been successful for a long time, which is always the kiss of death." The group's next single would be the last released while they were together. Marriott regarded "The Universal" as possibly the best thing he'd written, and recorded it quickly when inspiration struck. The finished single is actually a home recording of Marriott in his garden, including the sounds of a dog barking and his wife coming home with the shopping, onto which the band later overdubbed percussion, horns, and electric guitars: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "The Universal"] Incidentally, it seems that the dog barking on that track may also be the dog barking on “Seamus” by Pink Floyd. "The Universal" confused listeners, and only made number sixteen on the charts, crushing Marriott, who thought it was the best thing he'd done. But the band were starting to splinter. McLagan isn't on "The Universal", having quit the band before it was recorded after a falling-out with Marriott. He rejoined, but discovered that in the meantime Marriott had brought in session player Nicky Hopkins to work on some tracks, which devastated him. Marriott became increasingly unconfident in his own writing, and the writing dried up. The group did start work on some new material, some of which, like "The Autumn Stone", is genuinely lovely: [Excerpt: The Small Faces, "The Autumn Stone"] But by the time that was released, the group had already split up. The last recording they did together was as a backing group for Johnny Hallyday, the French rock star. A year earlier Hallyday had recorded a version of "My Way of Giving", under the title "Je N'Ai Jamais Rien Demandé": [Excerpt: Johnny Hallyday, "Je N'Ai Jamais Rien Demandé"] Now he got in touch with Glyn Johns to see if the Small Faces had any other material for him, and if they'd maybe back him on a few tracks on a new album. Johns and the Small Faces flew to France... as did Peter Frampton, who Marriott was still pushing to get into the band. They recorded three tracks for the album, with Frampton on extra guitar: [Excerpt: Johnny Hallyday, "Reclamation"] These tracks left Marriott more certain than ever that Frampton should be in the band, and the other three members even more certain that he shouldn't. Frampton joined the band on stage at a few shows on their next few gigs, but he was putting together his own band with Jerry Shirley from Apostolic Intervention. On New Year's Eve 1968, Marriott finally had enough. He stormed off stage mid-set, and quit the group. He phoned up Peter Frampton, who was hanging out with Glyn Johns listening to an album Johns had just produced by some of the session players who'd worked for Immediate. Side one had just finished when Marriott phoned. Could he join Frampton's new band? Frampton said of course he could, then put the phone down and listened to side two of Led Zeppelin's first record. The band Marriott and Frampton formed was called Humble Pie, and they were soon releasing stuff on Immediate. According to Oldham, "Tony Calder said to me one day 'Pick a straw'. Then he explained we had a choice. We could either go with the three Faces -- Kenney, Ronnie, and Mac -- wherever they were going to go with their lives, or we could follow Stevie. I didn't regard it as a choice. Neither did Tony. Marriott was our man". Marriott certainly seemed to agree that he was the real talent in the group. He and Lane had fairly recently bought some property together -- two houses on the same piece of land -- and with the group splitting up, Lane moved away and wanted to sell his share in the property to Marriott. Marriott wrote to him saying "You'll get nothing. This was bought with money from hits that I wrote, not that we wrote," and enclosing a PRS statement showing how much each Marriott/Lane
In an era brimming with instant gratification, some things are worth the wait. This is an apt takeaway from our chat with photographer Charles Daniels about his long-outdated film from the legendary Boston Tea Party and other 60s-era music venues, rarely processed until recently. Joining Daniels in conversation is his long-time partner Susan Berstler, and Gerald Freyer from Film Rescue International, the unique image processing and digitization specialists entrusted with his mother lode of 4,000 plus rolls. Listen in as Daniels tells of his rise from club denizen to emcee to cultural ambassador, introducing 60s-era British invasion rockers to America, with a Leica, two Nikons and a mic in hand. Berstler describes how the unprocessed rolls stockpiled in their home became a COVID project, which then went viral after the launch of a Go-Fund-Me campaign. After a break, Freyer explains how Film Rescue International's unique processing and scanning technologies can breathe new life into lost and found film, saving untold stories from oblivion. Freyer also recounts his epic drive from Saskatchewan to Somerville (and back!) to safely collect the film for processing, without risking x-rays or other shipping hazards. As Daniels notes during the show, “For years, I never really developed any film, but I was shooting all the time. It was just there, and then at some point I realized that I needed to bring some of this older stuff to light.” With a nod to Daniels's 80th birthday on November 30th, the pictures may have been a long time coming—but what a fabulous gift to photographers and music aficionados alike! Guests: Charles Daniels, Susan Berstler, Gerald Freyer Photographs © Charles Daniels For more information on our guests and the gear they use, see: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/explora/podcasts/photography/master-blaster-charles-daniels-reveals-his-unseen-60s-era-photo-archive Guest Bios: Charles Daniels was born in segregated Alabama, where his parents ran a late-night speakeasy after farming cotton all day; maybe that's how outlaw music got into his blood. After moving to Boston's Roxbury neighborhood with his family in the 1950s and teaching himself photography with a camera he found in his parent's closet, Charles began capturing whatever caught his eye on city streets and in the era's legendary music venues. Soon he was serving as emcee for the bands, which provided unique access and strong friendships. This led to Lear Jets and tours with the likes of Rod Stewart, Ron Wood, and the Rolling Stones. Since his start in rock-and-roll, Charles has expanded his photography to embrace a wide range of subjects from music and fashion to dance, performance, and everything in between. Susan Berstler has a long history as a visual artist, curator, and arts producer, deeply immersed in the vibrant arts scene of Somerville, Massachusetts. One of her primary interests is transformative events and media, especially within public art. Her passion for this medium is further enhanced by her work as an Emerging Technology Specialist for Creative Technologies at Harvard University's Cabot Science Library. After a small grant from the Somerville Arts Council allowed her to begin developing Charles's treasure trove of film, the Go-Fund-Me campaign set up by a friend quickly went viral, raising more than $70,000 to date. Susan was referred to the company Film Rescue International, which became an ideal solution for film processing and creating high-resolution archival files from the negatives. At present, she is also in discussions with publishers and university archives to identify a final home for this unique image collection. Gerald Freyer is a technically trained photographer who also studied folklore, monument preservation and cultural history at the University of Bamberg in Germany. After working as a research assistant in museums, he became a consultant for digital imaging pioneer Phase One. Since 2007, Gerald has trained museum and archive staff in the use of high-end digitization systems, completing both archival and 360-degree photography projects for international museums and cultural institutions. In 2021, he joined Film Rescue International to work on digitization projects for its clients. Stay Connected: Charles Daniels Go-Fund-Me Website: https://www.gofundme.com/f/2500-rolls-Charles-Daniels Charles Daniels Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100088252000625 Film Rescue International Website: https://www.filmrescue.com Film Rescue International Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/filmrescueinternational/ Episode Timeline 4:15: Charles Daniels's start as a music emcee and his most productive years for photography: 1967 – 1969 6:36: A friendship with J. Geils Band front man Peter Wolf and coming up with his Woofa Goofa nickname 8:20: Hanging out with the bands during the day provided easy access and authentic pictures 10:07: Daniels's most enjoyable Rock & Roll subject and co-photographer mate: Alvin Lee from 10 Years After 13:26: How far to push black and white film for best results with concert pictures in low light 14:32: Using a handheld light meter, and shooting with Nikons and Leicas for best results 15:10: Daniels's go-to lens: a 21 mm wide-angle for a different look 15:41: The challenge of pushing black and white film and not labeling it with the ISO 18:34: Daniels's shooting strategy as emcee: a microphone in one hand and a camera in the other 20:53: Finding Charles's undeveloped film became a COVID project 21:55: Unprocessed color film includes several rolls of Kodachrome, which was developed as black and white 22:16: Juggling an active Go Fund Me campaign with Charles's recent health issues 24:30: Connecting with the lab Film Rescue International after developing initial rolls locally 25:35: Episode break 26:43: The back story to Canadian lab Film Rescue International in processing lost and found film 27:45: Effects to undeveloped film over time is based on cold storage and other environmental factors 28:46: A two-step process for developing old color film, including Kodachrome 30:35: The first step in Film Rescue's development process with lost and found film 33:34: Proprietary chemistry for film development, plus years of experience 34:22: Processing and scanning movie film, 16mm, and Kodachrome Super-8 with high end laser graphic film scanner 35:10: Do certain types of film hold up better over time than others? 36:05: The importance of scanning old transparencies to maintain color integrity and save the image 37:46: Digital scanning of slides and negatives can offer more detail and better quality than the original photo 39:50: Film Rescue International's workflow and time distribution between film development and scanning 41:14: Gerald Freyer's epic 7-day trip from Saskatchewan and Somerville to pick up Charles's film 43:08: Safety issues when shipping film and the risk of x-rays 45:59: Gerald's favorite picture from Charles's film: Joe Cocker 46:36: An update on Charles's project and the potential for a book and documentary 48:04: Susan's favorite roll of Charles's film: Jeff Beck Group on the tarmac 49:09: The thousands of stories Film Rescue discovers in its work, and how to reach them 50:54: Contact details for Charles Daniels and the project's Go-Fund-Me page
PAUL SEXTON is the author of a brand new book called,CHARLIE'S GOOD TONIGHT: The LifeThe TimesThe Rolling StonesThe Authorized Biography of Charlie WattsPaul Talks:-How Charlie missed ONE GIG in 60 years-Pete's first date with his wife:Sept 23, 1997 Soldier Field 'Bridges to Babylon Tour' Paul was there covering the Stones-What's it like seeing the Stones without Charlie-Charlie was never a fan of the Rolling Stones music-Charlie hated touring-How Mick, Keith & Ronnie felt about Charlie ... and so much more ...
The Best Radio You Have Never Heard Podcast - Music For People Who Are Serious About Music
NEW FOR SEPTEMBER 15, 2022 With a curtsy and a hip hip hooray . . . Pod Save The Queen - The Best Radio You Have Never Heard Vol. 443 1. God Save The Queen - Queen 2. The Queen Is Dead (alt) - The Smiths 3. Queen and Country - Jethro Tull 4. Acid Queen (live) - The Who 5. Power And The Passion (alt) - Midnight Oil 6. Pearly Queen (live) - Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Pete Townshend, Ron Wood et al 7. Queen Of Hearts (live) - Gregg Allman 8. Royals (live) - Bruce Springsteen 9. Queen Bitch - David Bowie 10. Queen Of The Highway - The Doors 11. The May Queen - Robert Plant 12. Drama Queen - Green Day 13. King (live) - Shimmer 14. Queen Of Hearts (live) - Rockpile 15. Killer Queen (droz alt mix) - Queen 16. Song For America (live) - Kansas 17. Celluloid Heroes (early) - Kinks 18. All Along The Watch Tower (live) - Bryan Ferry 19. July - Chris Connelly 20. W.Y.H.I.W.Y.G - Front 242 21. I Will Refuse - Pailhead 22. So What - Ministry 23. God Save The Queen - Sex Pistols The Best Radio You Have Never Heard. Music for both royals and commoners alike. Accept No Substitute. Click to join the conversation on the Facebook page.
Broken Record with Rick Rubin, Malcolm Gladwell, Bruce Headlam and Justin Richmond
Today we are revisiting one of our favorite early episodes of Broken Record with the legendary producer, Nile Rodgers. Over the course of his five decade-long career, Nile Rodgers has performed on, written, and produced some of the greatest dance songs of all time, including Diana Ross's “I'm Coming Out,” Daft Punk's “Get Lucky,” and Madonna's “Like A Virgin.” Back in Fall of 2018, Nile met up with Bruce Headlam at the same New York City recording studio where 35 years earlier, Nile recorded the Let's Dance album with David Bowie. This time around, Nile brought his famed disco funk band Chic to the interview to perform live renditions of their classic hits including, “Le Freak,” “Good Times,” and “Everybody Dance.” So all the music you will hear in today's episode was recorded live, just for us. In between performances, Nile shares exhilarating stories from his life, including how he found salvation as a young jazz guitarist whose teenage mom struggled with heroin addiction. Nile also talks about the night he played old James Brown tunes with Prince and Rolling Stones guitarist Ron Wood at a small club in London. And he explains what it was like going clubbing with Madonna as her star was starting to explode in the mid-'80s. You can listen to a playlist of some of our favorite songs produced by Nile Rodgers HERE.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
JEFFREY ROBINSON is the bestselling author of 30 books, and a popular speaker on the international after-dinner circuit. Born in Long Beach, NY (1945), he began selling freelance articles and stories to small magazines before his 15th birthday. Later, while attending Temple University in Philadelphia (BA-1967), he wrote for television and radio, was a staff writer at KYW-TV3 (1965), scripted a popular local children's show and was on the writing staff of "The Mike Douglas Show" (1966), a nationally televised daily talk show. After serving as a press and public relations officer in the United States Air Force (1967-1971), he took up residence in the south of France where he spent the next 12 years vagabonding around the world, writing articles and short stories for leading North American and British periodicals. In 1982, now earning his living as an established freelance journalist and short story writer, he moved to London England to write books. His money laundering tour de force, The Laundrymen (1993) was a headline-maker in 14 countries, establishing him as a recognized expert on organized crime, dirty money, fraud and money laundering. Actively maintaining that reputation through books, television programs and speaking engagements around the world, the British Bankers' Association has labeled him, "the world's most important financial crime author." In addition to books on dirty money, he has published investigative non-fiction, major biographies and novels. Source: jeffreyrobinson.com PLUS: Our weekly Future Shock 2.0 segment with IRA S. Wolfe about business and workforce trends caused by the convergence of people, business and technology. IRA is an author, workforce trends expert and Top 5 Global Thought Leader on the Future of Work and HR. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/john-aidan-byrne0/support
Episode one hundred and thirty-nine of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Eight Miles High” by the Byrds, and the influence of jazz and Indian music on psychedelic rock. This is a long one... Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Winchester Cathedral" by the New Vaudeville Band. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this time, as there were multiple artists with too many songs. Information on John Coltrane came from Coltrane by Ben Ratliffe, while information on Ravi Shankar came from Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar by Oliver Craske. For information on the Byrds, I relied mostly on Timeless Flight Revisited by Johnny Rogan, with some information from Chris Hillman's autobiography. This dissertation looks at the influence of Slonimsky on Coltrane. All Coltrane's music is worth getting, but this 5-CD set containing Impressions is the most relevant cheap selection of his material for these purposes. This collection has the Shankar material released in the West up to 1962. And this three-CD set is a reasonable way of getting most of the Byrds' important recordings. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript This episode is the second part of a loose trilogy of episodes set in LA in 1966. We're going to be spending a *lot* of time around LA and Hollywood for the next few months -- seven of the next thirteen episodes are based there, and there'll be more after that. But it's going to take a while to get there. This is going to be an absurdly long episode, because in order to get to LA in 1966 again, we're going to have to start off in the 1940s in New York, and take a brief detour to India. Because in order to explain this: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Eight Miles High"] We're first going to have to explain this: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "India (#3)"] Before we begin this, I just want to say something. This episode runs long, and covers a *lot* of musical ground, and as part of that it covers several of the most important musicians of the twentieth century -- but musicians in the fields of jazz, which is a music I know something about, but am not an expert in, and Hindustani classical music, which is very much not even close to my area of expertise. It also contains a chunk of music theory, which again, I know a little about -- but only really enough to know how much I don't know. I am going to try to get the information about these musicians right, but I want to emphasise that at times I will be straying *vastly* out of my lane, in ways that may well seem like they're minimising these musicians. I am trying to give just enough information about them to tell the story, and I would urge anyone who becomes interested in the music I talk about in the early parts of this episode to go out and find more expert sources to fill in the gap. And conversely, if you know more about these musics than I do, please forgive any inaccuracies. I am going to do my best to get all of this right, because accuracy is important, but I suspect that every single sentence in the first hour or so of this episode could be footnoted with something pointing out all the places where what I've said is only somewhat true. Also, I apologise if I mispronounce any names or words in this episode, though I've tried my best to get it right -- I've been unable to find recordings of some words and names being spoken, while with others I've heard multiple versions. To tell today's story, we're going to have to go right back to some things we looked at in the first episode, on "Flying Home". For those of you who don't remember -- which is fair enough, since that episode was more than three years ago -- in that episode we looked at a jazz record by the Benny Goodman Sextet, which was one of the earliest popular recordings to feature electric guitar: [Excerpt: The Benny Goodman Sextet, "Flying Home"] Now, we talked about quite a lot of things in that episode which have played out in later episodes, but one thing we only mentioned in passing, there or later, was a style of music called bebop. We did talk about how Charlie Christian, the guitarist on that record, was one of the innovators of that style, but we didn't really go into what it was properly. Indeed, I deliberately did not mention in that episode something that I was saving until now, because we actually heard *two* hugely influential bebop musicians in that episode, and I was leaving the other one to talk about here. In that episode we saw how Lionel Hampton, the Benny Goodman band's vibraphone player, went on to form his own band, and how that band became one of the foundational influences for the genres that became known as jump blues and R&B. And we especially noted the saxophone solo on Hampton's remake of "Flying Home", played by Illinois Jacquet: [Excerpt: Lionel Hampton, "Flying Home"] We mentioned in that episode how Illinois Jacquet's saxophone solo there set the template for all tenor sax playing in R&B and rock and roll music for decades to come -- his honking style became quite simply how you play rock and roll or R&B saxophone, and without that solo you don't have any of the records by Fats Domino, Little Richard, the Coasters, or a dozen other acts that we discussed. But what we didn't look at in that episode is that that is a big band record, so of course there is more than just one saxophone player on it. And one of the other saxophone players on that recording is Dexter Gordon, a musician who was originally from LA. Those of you with long memories will remember that back in the first year or so of the podcast we talked a lot about the music programme at Jefferson High School in LA, and about Samuel Browne, the music teacher whose music programme gave the world the Coasters, the Penguins, the Platters, Etta James, Art Farmer, Richard Berry, Big Jay McNeely, Barry White, and more other important musicians than I can possibly name here. Gordon was yet another of Browne's students -- one who Browne regularly gave detention to, just to make him practice his scales. Gordon didn't get much chance to shine in the Lionel Hampton band, because he was only second tenor, with Jacquet taking many of the solos. But he was learning from playing in a band with Jacquet, and while Gordon didn't ever develop a honk like Jacquet's, he did adopt some of Jacquet's full tone in his own sound. There aren't many recordings of Gordon playing solos in his early years, because they coincided with the American Federation of Musicians' recording strike that we talked about in those early episodes, but he did record a few sessions in 1943 for a label small enough not to be covered by the ban, and you can hear something of Jacquet's tone in those recordings, along with the influence of Lester Young, who influenced all tenor sax players at this time: [Excerpt: Nat "King" Cole with Dexter Gordon, "I've Found a New Baby"] The piano player on that session, incidentally, is Nat "King" Cole, when he was still one of the most respected jazz pianists on the scene, before he switched primarily to vocals. And Gordon took this Jacquet-influenced tone, and used it to become the second great saxophone hero of bebop music, after Charlie Parker -- and the first great tenor sax hero of the music. I've mentioned bebop before on several occasions, but never really got into it in detail. It was a style that developed in New York in the mid to late forties, and a lot of the earliest examples of it went unrecorded thanks to that musicians' strike, but the style emphasised small groups improvising together, and expanding their sense of melody and harmony. The music prized virtuosity and musical intelligence over everything else, and was fast and jittery-sounding. The musicians would go on long, extended, improvisations, incorporating ideas both from the blues and from the modern classical music of people like Bartok and Stravinsky, which challenged conventional tonality. In particular, one aspect which became prominent in bebop music was a type of scale known as the bebop scale. In most of the music we've looked at in this podcast to this point, the scales used have been seven-note scales -- do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti- which make an octave with a second, higher, do tone. So in the scale of C major we have C, D, E, F, G, A, B, and then another C: [demonstrates] Bebop scales, on the other hand, would generally have an extra note in, making an eight-note scale, by adding in what is called a chromatic passing note. For example, a typical bebop C major scale might add in the note G#, so the scale would go C,D,E,F,G,G#, A, B, C: [demonstrates] You'd play this extra note for the most part, when moving between the two notes it's between, so in that scale you'd mostly use it when moving from G to A, or from A to G. Now I'm far from a bebop player, so this won't sound like bebop, but I can demonstrate the kind of thing if I first noodle a little scalar melody in the key of C major: [demonstrates] And then play the same thing, but adding in a G# every time I go between the G and the A in either direction: [demonstrates] That is not bebop music, but I hope you can see what a difference that chromatic passing tone makes to the melody. But again, that's not bebop, because I'm not a bebop player. Dexter Gordon, though, *was* a bebop player. He moved to New York while playing with Louis Armstrong's band, and soon became part of the bebop scene, which at the time centred around Charlie Christian, the trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie, and the alto sax player Charlie Parker, sometimes nicknamed "bird" or "Yardbird", who is often regarded as the greatest of them all. Gillespie, Parker, and Gordon also played in Billy Eckstine's big band, which gave many of the leading bebop musicians the opportunity to play in what was still the most popular idiom at the time -- you can hear Gordon have a saxophone battle with Gene Ammons on "Blowing the Blues Away" in a lineup of the band that also included Art Blakey on drums and Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet: [Excerpt: Billy Eckstine, "Blowing the Blues Away"] But Gordon was soon leading his own small band sessions, and making records for labels like Savoy, on which you can definitely hear the influence of Illinois Jacquet on his tone, even as he's playing music that's more melodically experimental by far than the jump band music of the Hampton band: [Excerpt: Dexter Gordon, "Dexter Digs In"] Basically, in the late 1940s, if you were wanting to play bebop on the saxophone, you had two models to follow -- Charlie Parker, the great alto saxophonist with his angular, atonal, melodic sense and fast, virtuosic, playing, or Dexter Gordon, the tenor saxophonist, whose style had more R&B grease and wit to it, who would quote popular melodies in his own improvisations. And John Coltrane followed both. Coltrane's first instrument was the alto sax, and when he was primarily an alto player he would copy Charlie Parker's style. When he switched to being primarily a tenor player -- though he would always continue playing both instruments, and later in his career would also play soprano sax -- he took up much of Gordon's mellower tone, though he was also influenced by other tenor players, like Lester Young, the great player with Count Basie's band, and Johnny Hodges, who played with Duke Ellington. Now, it is important to note here that John Coltrane is a very, very, big deal. Depending on your opinion of Ornette Coleman's playing, Coltrane is by most accounts either the last or penultimate truly great innovator in jazz saxophone, and arguably the single foremost figure in the music in the last half of the twentieth century. In this podcast I'm only able to tell you enough about him to give you the information you need to understand the material about the Byrds, but were I to do a similar history of jazz in five hundred songs, Coltrane would have a similar position to someone like the Beatles -- he's such a major figure that he is literally venerated as a saint by the African Orthodox Church, and a couple of other Episcopal churches have at least made the case for his sainthood. So anything I say here about him is not even beginning to scratch the surface of his towering importance to jazz music, but it will, I hope, give some idea of his importance to the development of the Byrds -- a group of whom he was almost certainly totally unaware. Coltrane started out playing as a teenager, and his earliest recordings were when he was nineteen and in the armed forces, just after the end of World War II. At that time, he was very much a beginner, although a talented one, and on his early amateur recordings you can hear him trying to imitate Parker without really knowing what it was that Parker was doing that made him so great. But as well as having some natural talent, he had one big attribute that made him stand out -- his utter devotion to his music. He was so uninterested in anything other than mastering his instrument that one day a friend was telling him about a baseball game he'd watched, and all Coltrane could do was ask in confusion "Who's Willie Mays?" Coltrane would regularly practice his saxophone until his reed was red with blood, but he would also study other musicians. And not just in jazz. He knew that Charlie Parker had intensely studied Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, and so Coltrane would study that too: [Excerpt: Stravinsky, "Firebird Suite"] Coltrane joined the band of Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, who was one of those figures like Johnny Otis, with whom Vinson would later perform for many years, who straddled the worlds of jazz and R&B. Vinson was a blues shouter in the style of Big Joe Turner, but he was also a bebop sax player, and what he wanted was a tenor sax player who could play tenor the way Charlie Parker played alto, but do it in an R&B setting. Coltrane switched from alto to tenor, and spent a year or so playing with Vinson's band. No recordings exist of Coltrane with Vinson that I'm aware of, but you can get an idea of what he sounded like from his next band. By this point, Dizzy Gillespie had graduated from small bebop groups to leading a big band, and he got Coltrane in as one of his alto players, though Coltrane would often also play tenor with Gillespie, as on this recording from 1951, which has Coltrane on tenor, Gillespie on trumpet, with Kenny Burrell and two of the future Modern Jazz Quartet, Milt Jackson and Percy Heath, showing that the roots of modern jazz were not very far at all from the roots of rock and roll: [Excerpt: Dizzy Gillespie, "We Love to Boogie"] After leaving Gillespie's band, Coltrane played with a lot of important musicians over the next four or five years, like Johnny Hodges, Earl Bostic, and Jimmy Smith, and occasionally sat in with Miles Davis, but at this point he was still not a major musician in the genre. He was a competent, working, sideman, but he was also struggling with alcohol and heroin, and hadn't really found his own voice. But then Miles Davis asked Coltrane to join his band full-time. Coltrane was actually Davis' second choice -- he really wanted Sonny Rollins, who was widely considered the best new tenor player around, but he was eventually persuaded to take Coltrane. During his first period with Davis, Coltrane grew rapidly as a musician, and also played on a *lot* of other people's sessions. In a three year period Coltrane went from Davis to Thelonius Monk's group then back to Davis' group, and also recorded as both a sideman and a band leader on a ton of sessions. You can get a box set of his recordings from May 1956 through December 1958 that comes to nineteen CDs -- and that's not counting the recordings with Miles Davis, which aren't included on that set. Unsurprisingly, just through playing this much, Coltrane had grown enormously as a player, and he was particularly fascinated by harmonics, playing with the notes of a chord, in arpeggios, and pushing music to its harmonic limits, as you can hear in his solo on Davis' "Straight, No Chaser", which pushes the limits of the jazz solo as far as they'd gone to that point: [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "Straight, No Chaser"] But on the same album as that, "Milestones", we also have the first appearance of a new style, modal jazz. Now, to explain this, we have to go back to the scales again. We looked at the normal Western scale, do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do, but you can start a scale on any of those notes, and which note you start on creates what is called a different mode. The modes are given Greek names, and each mode has a different feel to it. If you start on do, we call this the major scale or the Ionian mode. This is the normal scale we heard before -- C,D,E,F,G,A,B,C: [demonstrates] Most music – about seventy percent of the melodies you're likely to have heard, uses that mode. If you start on re, it would go re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do-re, or D,E,F,G,A,B,C,D, the Dorian mode: [demonstrates] Melodies with this mode tend to have a sort of wistful feel, like "Scarborough Fair": [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "Scarborough Fair"] or many of George Harrison's songs: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Me Mine"] Starting on mi, you have the Phrygian mode, mi-fa-so-la-ti-do-re-mi: [demonstrates] The Phrygian mode is not especially widely used, but does turn up in some popular works like Barber's Adagio for Strings: [Excerpt: Barber, "Adagio for Strings"] Then there's the Lydian mode, fa-so-la-ti-do-re-mi-fa: [demonstrates] This mode isn't used much at all in pop music -- the most prominent example I can think of is "Pretty Ballerina" by the Left Banke: [Excerpt: The Left Banke, "Pretty Ballerina"] Starting on so, we have so-la-ti-do-re-mi-fa-so -- the Mixolydian mode: [demonstrates] That mode has a sort of bluesy or folky tone to it, and you also find it in a lot of traditional tunes, like "She Moves Through the Fair": [Excerpt: Davey Graham, "She Moved Thru' The Bizarre/Blue Raga"] And in things like "Norwegian Wood" by the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Norwegian Wood"] Though that goes into Dorian for the middle section. Starting on la, we have the Aeolian mode, which is also known as the natural minor scale, and is often just talked about as “the minor scale”: [demonstrates] That's obviously used in innumerable songs, for example "Losing My Religion" by REM: [Excerpt: REM, "Losing My Religion"] And finally you have the Locrian mode ti-do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti: [demonstrates] That basically doesn't get used, unless someone wants to show off that they know the Locrian mode. The only vaguely familiar example I can think of is "Army of Me" by Bjork: [Excerpt: Bjork, "Army of Me"] I hope that brief excursion through the seven most common modes in Western diatonic music gives you some idea of the difference that musical modes can make to a piece. Anyway, as I was saying, on the "Milestones" album, we get some of the first examples of a form that became known as modal jazz. Now, the ideas of modal jazz had been around for a few years at that point -- oddly, it seems to be one of the first types of popular music to have existed in theory before existing in practice. George Russell, an acquaintance of Davis who was a self-taught music theorist, had written a book in 1953 titled The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization. That book argues that rather than looking at the diatonic scale as the basis for music, one should instead look at a chord progression called the circle of fifths. The circle of fifths is exactly what it sounds like -- you change chords to one a fifth away from it, and then do that again and again, either going up, so you'd have chords with the roots C-G-D-A-E-B-F# and so on: [demonstrates] Or, more commonly, going down, though usually when going downwards you tend to cheat a bit and sharpen one of the notes so you can stay in one key, so you'd get chords with roots C-F-B-E-A-D-G, usually the chords C, F, B diminished, Em, Am, Dm, G: [demonstrates] That descending cycle of fifths is used in all sorts of music, everything from "You Never Give Me Your Money" by the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "You Never Give Me Your Money"] to "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor: [Excerpt: Gloria Gaynor, "I Will Survive"] But what Russell pointed out is that if you do the upwards cycle of fifths, and you *don't* change any of the notes, the first seven root notes you get are the same seven notes you'd find in the Lydian mode, just reordered -- C-D-E-F#-G-A-B . Russell then argued that much of the way harmony and melody work in jazz could be thought of as people experimenting with the way the Lydian mode works, and the way the cycle of fifths leads you further and further away from the tonal centre. Now, you could probably do an entire podcast series as long as this one on the implications of this, and I am honestly just trying to summarise enough information here that you can get a vague gist, but Russell's book had a profound effect on how jazz musicians started to think about harmony and melody. Instead of improvising around the chord changes to songs, they were now basing improvisations and compositions around modes and the notes in them. Rather than having a lot of chord changes, you might just play a single root note that stays the same throughout, or only changes a couple of times in the whole piece, and just imply changes with the clash between the root note and whatever modal note the solo instrument is playing. The track "Milestones" on the Milestones album shows this kind of thinking in full effect -- the song consists of a section in G Dorian, followed by a section in A Aeolian (or E Phrygian depending on how you look at it). Each section has only one implied chord -- a Gm7 for the G Dorian section, and an Am7(b13) for the A Aeolian section -- over which Davis, Cannonball Adderley on alto sax, and Coltrane on tenor, all solo: [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "Milestones"] (For the pedants among you, that track was originally titled "Miles" on the first pressings of the album, but it was retitled "Milestones" on subsequent pressings). The modal form would be taken even further on Davis' next album to be recorded, Porgy and Bess, which featured much fuller orchestrations and didn't have Coltrane on it. Davis later said that when the arranger Gil Evans wrote the arrangements for that album, he didn't write any chords at all, just a scale, which Davis could improvise around. But it was on the album after that, Kind of Blue, which again featured Coltrane on saxophone, that modal jazz made its big breakthrough to becoming the dominant form of jazz music. As with what Evans had done on Porgy and Bess, Davis gave the other instrumentalists modes to play, rather than a chord sequence to improvise over or a melody line to play with. He explained his thinking behind this in an interview with Nat Hentoff, saying "When you're based on chords, you know at the end of 32 bars that the chords have run out and there's nothing to do but repeat what you've just done—with variations. I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from the conventional string of chords ... there will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them." This style shows up in "So What", the opening track on the album, which is in some ways a very conventional song structure -- it's a thirty-two bar AABA structure. But instead of a chord sequence, it's based on modes in two keys -- the A section is in D Dorian, while the B section is in E-flat Dorian: [Excerpt: Miles Davis, "So What"] Kind of Blue would become one of the contenders for greatest jazz album of all time, and one of the most influential records ever made in any genre -- and it could be argued that that track we just heard, "So What", inspired a whole other genre we'll be looking at in a future episode -- but Coltrane still felt the need to explore more ideas, and to branch out on his own. In particular, while he was interested in modal music, he was also interested in exploring more kinds of scales than just modes, and to do this he had to, at least for the moment, reintroduce chord changes into what he was doing. He was inspired in particular by reading Nicolas Slonimsky's classic Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns. Coltrane had recently signed a new contract as a solo artist with Atlantic Records, and recorded what is generally considered his first true masterpiece album as a solo artist, Giant Steps, with several members of the Davis band, just two weeks after recording Kind of Blue. The title track to Giant Steps is the most prominent example of what are known in jazz as the Coltrane changes -- a cycle of thirds, similar to the cycle of fifths we talked about earlier. The track itself seems to have two sources. The first is the bridge of the old standard "Have You Met Miss Jones?", as famously played by Coleman Hawkins: [Excerpt: Coleman Hawkins, "Have You Met Miss Jones?" And the second is an exercise from Slonimsky's book: [Excerpt: Pattern #286 from Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns] Coltrane combined these ideas to come up with "Giant Steps", which is based entirely around these cycles of thirds, and Slonimsky's example: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "Giant Steps"] Now, I realise that this is meant to be a history of rock music, not jazz musicology theory time, so I promise you I am just hitting the high points here. And only the points that affect Coltrane's development as far as it influenced the music we're looking at in this episode. And so we're actually going to skip over Coltrane's commercial high-point, My Favourite Things, and most of the rest of his work for Atlantic, even though that music is some of the most important jazz music ever recorded. Instead, I'm going to summarise a whole lot of very important music by simply saying that while Coltrane was very interested in this musical idea of the cycle of thirds, he did not like being tied to precise chord changes, and liked the freedom that modal jazz gave to him. By 1960, when his contract with Atlantic was ending and his contract with Impulse was beginning, and he recorded the two albums Olé and Africa/Brass pretty much back to back, he had hit on a new style with the help of Eric Dolphy, a flute, clarinet, and alto sax player who would become an important figure in Coltrane's life. Dolphy died far too young -- he went into a diabetic coma and doctors assumed that because he was a Black jazz musician he must have overdosed, even though he was actually a teetotal abstainer, so he didn't get the treatment he needed -- but he made such a profound influence on Coltrane's life that Coltrane would carry Dolphy's picture with him after his death. Dolphy was even more of a theorist than Coltrane, and another devotee of Slonimsky's book, and he was someone who had studied a great deal of twentieth-century classical music, particularly people like Bartok, Messiaen, Stravinsky, Charles Ives, and Edgard Varese. Dolphy even performed Varese's piece Density 21.5 in concert, an extremely demanding piece for solo flute. I don't know of a recording of Dolphy performing it, sadly, but this version should give some idea: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Density 21.5"] Encouraged by Dolphy, Coltrane started making music based around no changes at all, with any changes being implied by the melody. The title song of Africa/Brass, "Africa", takes up an entire side of one album, and doesn't have a single actual chord change on it, with Dolphy and pianist McCoy Tyner coming up with a brass-heavy arrangement for Coltrane to improvise over a single chord: [Excerpt: The John Coltrane Quartet: "Africa"] This was a return to the idea of modal jazz, based on scales rather than chord changes, but by implying chord changes, often changes based on thirds, Coltrane was often using different scales than the modes that had been used in modal jazz. And while, as the title suggested, "Africa" was inspired by the music of Africa, the use of a single drone chord underneath solos based on a scale was inspired by the music of another continent altogether. Since at least the mid-1950s, both Coltrane and Dolphy had been interested in Indian music. They appear to have first become interested in a record released by Folkways, Music Of India, Morning And Evening Ragas by Ali Akbar Khan: [Excerpt: Ali Akbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] But the musician they ended up being most inspired by was a friend of Khan's, Ravi Shankar, who like Khan had been taught by the great sarod player Alauddin Khan, Ali Akbar Khan's father. The elder Khan, who was generally known as "Baba", meaning "father", was possibly *the* most influential Indian musician of the first half of the twentieth century, and was a big part of the revitalisation of Indian music that went hand in hand with the growth of Indian nationalism. He was an ascetic who lived for music and nothing else, and would write five to ten new compositions every day, telling Shankar "Do one thing well and you can achieve everything. Do everything and you achieve nothing". Alauddin Khan was a very religious Muslim, but one who saw music as the ultimate way to God and could find truths in other faiths. When Shankar first got to know him, they were both touring as musicians in a dance troupe run by Shankar's elder brother, which was promoting Indian arts in the West, and he talked about taking Khan to hear the organ playing at Notre Dame cathedral, and Khan bursting into tears and saying "here is God". Khan was not alone in this view. The classical music of Northern India, the music that Khan played and taught, had been very influenced by Sufism, which was for most of Muslim history the dominant intellectual and theological tradition in Islam. Now, I am going to sum up a thousand years of theology and practice, of a religion I don't belong to, in a couple of sentences here, so just assume that what I'm saying is wrong, and *please* don't take offence if you are Sufi yourself and believe I am misrepresenting you. But my understanding of Sufism is that Sufis are extremely devoted to attaining knowledge and understanding of God, and believe that strict adherence to Muslim law is the best way to attain that knowledge -- that it is the way that God himself has prescribed for humans to know him -- but that such knowledge can be reached by people of other faiths if they approach their own traditions with enough devotion. Sufi ideas infuse much of Northern Indian classical music, and so for example it has been considered acceptable for Muslims to sing Hindu religious music and Hindus to sing songs of praise to Allah. So while Ravi Shankar was Hindu and Alauddin Khan was Muslim, Khan was able to become Shankar's guru in what both men regarded as a religious observance, and even to marry Khan's daughter. Khan was a famously cruel disciplinarian -- once hospitalising a student after hitting him with a tuning hammer -- but he earned the devotion of his students by enforcing the same discipline on himself. He abstained from sex so he could put all his energies into music, and was known to tie his hair to the ceiling while he practiced, so he could not fall asleep no matter how long he kept playing. Both Khan and his son Ali Akhbar Khan played the sarod, while Shankar played the sitar, but they all played the same kind of music, which is based on the concept of the raga. Now, in some ways, a raga can be considered equivalent to a mode in Western music: [Excerpt: Ali Akbar Khan, "Rag Sindhi Bhairavi"] But a raga is not *just* a mode -- it sits somewhere between Western conceptions of a mode and a melody. It has a scale, like a mode, but it can have different scales going up or down, and rules about which notes can be moved to from which other notes. So for example (and using Western tones so as not to confuse things further), a raga might say that it's possible to move up from the note G to D, but not down from D to G. Ragas are essentially a very restrictive set of rules which allow the musician playing them to improvise freely within those rules. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the violinist Yehudi Mehuin, at the time the most well-known classical musician in the world, had become fascinated by Indian music as part of a wider programme of his to learn more music outside what he regarded as the overly-constricting scope of the Western classical tradition in which he had been trained. He had become a particular fan of Shankar, and had invited him over to the US to perform. Shankar had refused to come at that point, sending his brother-in-law Ali Akbar Khan over, as he was in the middle of a difficult divorce, and that had been when Khan had recorded that album which had fascinated Coltrane and Dolphy. But Shankar soon followed himself, and made his own records: [Excerpt: Ravi Shankar, "Raga Hamsadhwani"] The music that both Khan and Shankar played was a particular style of Hindustani classical music, which has three elements -- there's a melody instrument, in Shankar's case the sitar and in Khan's the sarod, both of them fretted stringed instruments which have additional strings that resonate along with the main melody string, giving their unique sound. These are the most distinctive Indian instruments, but the melody can be played on all sorts of other instruments, whether Indian instruments like the bansuri and shehnai, which are very similar to the flute and oboe respectively, or Western instruments like the violin. Historically, the melody has also often been sung rather than played, but Indian instrumental music has had much more influence on Western popular music than Indian vocal music has, so we're mostly looking at that here. Along with the melody instrument there's a percussion instrument, usually the tabla, which is a pair of hand drums. Rather than keep a steady, simple, beat like the drum kit in rock music, the percussion has its own patterns and cycles, called talas, which like ragas are heavily formalised but leave a great amount of room for improvisation. The percussion and the melody are in a sort of dialogue with each other, and play off each other in a variety of ways. And finally there's the drone instrument, usually a stringed instrument called a tamboura. The drone is what it sounds like -- a single note, sustained and repeated throughout the piece, providing a harmonic grounding for the improvisations of the melody instrument. Sometimes, rather than just a single root note, it will be a root and fifth, providing a single chord to improvise over, but as often it will be just one note. Often that note will be doubled at the octave, so you might have a drone on both low E and high E. The result provides a very strict, precise, formal, structure for an infinitely varied form of expression, and Shankar was a master of it: [Excerpt: Ravi Shankar, "Raga Hamsadhwani"] Dolphy and, especially, Coltrane became fascinated by Indian music, and Coltrane desperately wanted to record with Shankar -- he even later named his son Ravi in honour of the great musician. It wasn't just the music as music, but music as spiritual practice, that Coltrane was engaged with. He was a deeply religious man but one who was open to multiple faith traditions -- he had been brought up as a Methodist, and both his grandfathers were ministers in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, but his first wife, Naima, who inspired his personal favourite of his own compositions, was a Muslim, while his second wife, Swamini Turiyasangitananda (who he married after leaving Naima in 1963 and who continued to perform as Alice Coltrane even after she took that name, and was herself an extraordinarily accomplished jazz musician on both piano and harp), was a Hindu, and both of them profoundly influenced Coltrane's own spirituality. Some have even suggested that Coltrane's fascination with a cycle of thirds came from the idea that the third could represent both the Christian Trinity and the Hindu trimurti -- the three major forms of Brahman in Hinduism, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. So a music which was a religious discipline for more than one religion, and which worked well with the harmonic and melodic ideas that Coltrane had been exploring in jazz and learning about through his studies of modern classical music, was bound to appeal to Coltrane, and he started using the idea of having two basses provide an octave drone similar to that of the tamboura, leading to tracks like "Africa" and "Olé": [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "Olé"] Several sources have stated that that song was an influence on "Light My Fire" by the Doors, and I can sort of see that, though most of the interviews I've seen with Ray Manzarek have him talking about Coltrane's earlier version of "My Favourite Things" as the main influence there. Coltrane finally managed to meet with Shankar in December 1961, and spent a lot of time with him -- the two discussed recording an album together with McCoy Tyner, though nothing came of it. Shankar said of their several meetings that month: "The music was fantastic. I was much impressed, but one thing distressed me. There was turbulence in the music that gave me a negative feeling at times, but I could not quite put my finger on the trouble … Here was a creative person who had become a vegetarian, who was studying yoga, and reading the Bhagavad-Gita, yet in whose music I still heard much turmoil. I could not understand it." Coltrane said in turn "I like Ravi Shankar very much. When I hear his music, I want to copy it – not note for note of course, but in his spirit. What brings me closest to Ravi is the modal aspect of his art. Currently, at the particular stage I find myself in, I seem to be going through a modal phase … There's a lot of modal music that is played every day throughout the world. It is particularly evident in Africa, but if you look at Spain or Scotland, India or China, you'll discover this again in each case … It's this universal aspect of music that interests me and attracts me; that's what I'm aiming for." And the month before Coltrane met Shankar, Coltrane had had a now-legendary residency at the Village Vanguard in New York with his band, including Dolphy, which had resulted not only in the famous Live at the Village Vanguard album, but in two tracks on Coltrane's studio album Impressions. Those shows were among the most controversial in the history of jazz, though the Village Vanguard album is now often included in lists of the most important records in jazz. Downbeat magazine, the leading magazine for jazz fans at the time, described those shows as "musical nonsense" and "a horrifying demonstration of what appears to be a growing anti-jazz trend" -- though by the time Impressions came out in 1963, that opinion had been revised somewhat. Harvey Pekar, the comic writer and jazz critic, also writing in DownBeat, gave Impressions five stars, saying "Not all the music on this album is excellent (which is what a five-star rating signifies,) but some is more than excellent". And while among Coltrane fans the piece from these Village Vanguard shows that is of most interest is the extended blues masterpiece "Chasin' the Trane" which takes up a whole side of the Village Vanguard LP, for our purposes we're most interested in one of the two tracks that was held over for Impressions. This was another of Coltrane's experiments in using the drones he'd found in Indian musical forms, like "Africa" and "Olé". This time it was also inspired by a specific piece of music, though not an instrumental one. Rather it was a vocal performance -- a recording on a Folkways album of Pandita Ramji Shastri Dravida chanting one of the Vedas, the religious texts which are among the oldest texts sacred to any surviving religion: [Excerpt: Pandita Ramji Shastri Dravida, "Vedic Chanting"] Coltrane took that basic melodic idea, and combined it with his own modal approach to jazz, and the inspiration he was taking from Shankar's music, and came up with a piece called "India": [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "India"] Which is where we came in, isn't it? [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Eight Miles High"] So now, finally, we get to the Byrds. Even before "Mr. Tambourine Man" went to number one in the charts, the Byrds were facing problems with their sound being co-opted as the latest hip thing. Their location in LA, at the centre of the entertainment world, was obviously a huge advantage to them in many ways, but it also made them incredibly visible to people who wanted to hop onto a bandwagon. The group built up much of their fanbase playing at Ciro's -- the nightclub on the Sunset Strip that we mentioned in the previous episode which later reopened as It's Boss -- and among those in the crowd were Sonny and Cher. And Sonny brought along his tape recorder. The Byrds' follow-up single to "Mr. Tambourine Man", released while that song was still going up the charts, was another Dylan song, "All I Really Want to Do". But it had to contend with this: [Excerpt: Cher, "All I Really Want to Do"] Cher's single, produced by Sonny, was her first solo single since the duo had become successful, and came out before the Byrds' version, and the Byrds were convinced that elements of the arrangement, especially the guitar part, came from the version they'd been performing live – though of course Sonny was no stranger to jangly guitars himself, having co-written “Needles and Pins”, the song that pretty much invented the jangle. Cher made number fifteen on the charts, while the Byrds only made number forty. Their version did beat Cher's in the UK charts, though. The record company was so worried about the competition that for a while they started promoting the B-side as the A-side. That B-side was an original by Gene Clark, though one that very clearly showed the group's debt to the Searchers: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better"] While it was very obviously derived from the Searchers' version of "Needles and Pins", especially the riff, it was still a very strong, original, piece of work in its own right. It was the song that convinced the group's producer, Terry Melcher, that they were a serious proposition as artists in their own right, rather than just as performers of Dylan's material, and it was also a favourite of the group's co-manager, Jim Dickson, who picked out Clark's use of the word "probably" in the chorus as particularly telling -- the singer thinks he will feel better when the subject of the song is gone, but only probably. He's not certain. "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better", after being promoted as the A-side for a short time, reached number one hundred and two on the charts, but the label quickly decided to re-flip it and concentrate on promoting the Dylan song as the single. The group themselves weren't too bothered about their thunder having been stolen by Sonny and Cher, but their new publicist was incandescent. Derek Taylor had been a journalist for the Daily Express, which at that time was a respectable enough newspaper (though that is very much no longer the case). He'd become involved in the music industry after writing an early profile on the Beatles, at which point he had been taken on by the Beatles' organisation first to ghostwrite George Harrison's newspaper column and Brian Epstein's autobiography, and then as their full-time publicist and liner-note writer. He'd left the organisation at the end of 1964, and had moved to the US, where he had set up as an independent music publicist, working for the Byrds, the Beach Boys, and various other acts in their overlapping social circles, such as Paul Revere and the Raiders. Taylor was absolutely furious on the group's behalf, saying "I was not only disappointed, I was disgusted. Sonny and Cher went to Ciro's and ripped off the Byrds and, being obsessive, I could not get this out of my mind that Sonny and Cher had done this terrible thing. I didn't know that much about the record business and, in my experience with the Beatles, cover versions didn't make any difference. But by covering the Byrds, it seemed that you could knock them off the perch. And Sonny and Cher, in my opinion, stole that song at Ciro's and interfered with the Byrds' career and very nearly blew them out of the game." But while the single was a comparative flop, the Mr. Tambourine Man album, which came out shortly after, was much more successful. It contained the A and B sides of both the group's first two singles, although a different vocal take of "All I Really Want to Do" was used from the single release, along with two more Dylan covers, and a couple more originals -- five of the twelve songs on the album were original in total, three of them Gene Clark solo compositions and the other two co-written by Clark and Roger McGuinn. To round it out there was a version of the 1939 song "We'll Meet Again", made famous by Vera Lynn, which you may remember us discussing in episode ninety as an example of early synthesiser use, but which had recently become popular in a rerecorded version from the 1950s, thanks to its use at the end of Dr. Strangelove; there was a song written by Jackie DeShannon; and "The Bells of Rhymney", a song in which Pete Seeger set a poem about a mining disaster in Wales to music. So a fairly standard repertoire for early folk-rock, though slightly heavier on Dylan than most. While the group's Hollywood notoriety caused them problems like the Sonny and Cher one, it did also give them advantages. For example, they got to play at the fourth of July party hosted by Jane Fonda, to guests including her father Henry and brother Peter, Louis Jordan, Steve McQueen, Warren Beatty, and Sidney Poitier. Derek Taylor, who was used to the Beatles' formal dress and politeness at important events, imposed on them by Brian Epstein, was shocked when the Byrds turned up informally dressed, and even more shocked when Vito Paulekas and Carl Franzoni showed up. Vito (who was always known by his first name) and Franzoni are both important but marginal figures in the LA scene. Neither were musicians, though Vito did make one record, produced by Kim Fowley: [Excerpt: Vito and the Hands, "Vito and the Hands"] Rather Vito was a sculptor in his fifties, who had become part of the rock and roll scene and had gathered around him a dance troupe consisting largely of much younger women, and also of himself and Franzoni. Their circle, which also included Arthur Lee and Bryan MacLean, who weren't part of their dance troupe but were definitely part of their crowd, will be talked about much more in future episodes, but for now we'll just say that they are often considered proto-hippies, though they would have disputed that characterisation themselves quite vigorously; that they were regular dancers at Ciro's and became regular parts of the act of both the Byrds and the Mothers of Invention; and we'll give this rather explicit description of their performances from Frank Zappa: "The high point of the performance was Carl Franzoni, our 'go-go boy.' He was wearing ballet tights, frugging violently. Carl has testicles which are bigger than a breadbox. Much bigger than a breadbox. The looks on the faces of the Baptist teens experiencing their grandeur is a treasured memory." Paints a vivid picture, doesn't it? So you can possibly imagine why Derek Taylor later said "When Carl Franzoni and Vito came, I got into a terrible panic". But Jim Dickson explained to him that it was Hollywood and people were used to that kind of thing, and even though Taylor described seeing Henry Fonda and his wife pinned against the wall by the writhing Franzoni and the other dancers, apparently everyone had a good time. And then the next month, the group went on their first UK tour. On which nobody had a good time: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Eight Miles High"] Even before the tour, Derek Taylor had reservations. Obviously the Byrds should tour the UK -- London, in particular, was the centre of the cultural world at that time, and Taylor wanted the group to meet his old friends the Beatles and visit Carnaby Street. But at the same time, there seemed to be something a little... off... about the promoters they were dealing with, Joe Collins, the father of Joan and Jackie Collins, and a man named Mervyn Conn. As Taylor said later "All I did know was that the correspondence from Mervyn Conn didn't assure me. I kept expressing doubts about the contents of the letters. There was something about the grammar. You know, 'I'll give you a deal', and 'We'll get you some good gigs'. The whole thing was very much showbusiness. Almost pantomime showbusiness." But still, it seemed like it was worth making the trip, even when Musicians Union problems nearly derailed the whole thing. We've talked previously about how disagreements between the unions in the US and UK meant that musicians from one country couldn't tour the other for decades, and about how that slightly changed in the late fifties. But the new system required a one-in, one-out system where tours had to be set up as exchanges so nobody was taking anyone's job, and nobody had bothered to find a five-piece group of equivalent popularity to the Byrds to tour America in return. Luckily, the Dave Clark Five stepped into the breach, and were able to do a US tour on short notice, so that problem was solved. And then, as soon as they landed, the group were confronted with a lawsuit. From the Birds: [Excerpt: The Birds, "No Good Without You Baby"] These Birds, spelled with an "i", not a "y", were a Mod group from London, who had started out as the Thunderbirds, but had had to shorten their name when the London R&B singer Chris Farlowe and his band the Thunderbirds had started to have some success. They'd become the Birds, and released a couple of unsuccessful singles, but had slowly built up a reasonable following and had a couple of TV appearances. Then they'd started to receive complaints from their fans that when they went into the record shops to ask for the new record by the Birds, they were being sold some jangly folky stuff about tambourines, rather than Bo Diddley inspired R&B. So the first thing the American Byrds saw in England, after a long and difficult flight which had left them very tired and depressed, especially Gene Clark, who hated flying, was someone suing them for loss of earnings. The lawsuit never progressed any further, and the British group changed their name to Birds Birds, and quickly disappeared from music history -- apart from their guitarist, Ronnie Wood, who we'll be hearing from again. But the experience was not exactly the welcome the group had been hoping for, and is reflected in one of the lines that Gene Clark wrote in the song he later came up with about the trip -- "Nowhere is there love to be found among those afraid of losing their ground". And the rest of the tour was not much of an improvement. Chris Hillman came down with bronchitis on the first night, David Crosby kept turning his amp up too high, resulting in the other members copying him and the sound in the venues they were playing seeming distorted, and most of all they just seemed, to the British crowds, to be unprofessional. British audiences were used to groups running on, seeming excited, talking to the crowd between songs, and generally putting on a show. The Byrds, on the other hand, sauntered on stage, and didn't even look at the audience, much less talk to them. What seemed to the LA audience as studied cool seemed to the UK audience like the group were rude, unprofessional, and big-headed. At one show, towards the end of the set, one girl in the audience cried out "Aren't you even going to say anything?", to which Crosby responded "Goodbye" and the group walked off, without any of them having said another word. When they played the Flamingo Club, the biggest cheer of the night came when their short set ended and the manager said that the club was now going to play records for dancing until the support act, Geno Washington and the Ramjam Band, were ready to do another set. Michael Clarke and Roger McGuinn also came down with bronchitis, the group were miserable and sick, and they were getting absolutely panned in the reviews. The closest thing they got to a positive review was when Paul Jones of Manfred Mann was asked about them, and he praised some of their act -- perceptively pointing to their version of "We'll Meet Again" as being in the Pop Art tradition of recontextualising something familiar so it could be looked at freshly -- but even he ended up also criticising several aspects of the show and ended by saying "I think they're going to be a lot better in the future". And then, just to rub salt in the wound, Sonny and Cher turned up in the UK. The Byrds' version of "All I Really Want to Do" massively outsold theirs in the UK, but their big hit became omnipresent: [Excerpt: Sonny and Cher, "I Got You Babe"] And the press seemed to think that Sonny and Cher, rather than the Byrds, were the true representatives of the American youth culture. The Byrds were already yesterday's news. The tour wasn't all bad -- it did boost sales of the group's records, and they became friendly with the Beatles, Stones, and Donovan. So much so that when later in the month the Beatles returned to the US, the Byrds were invited to join them at a party they were holding in Benedict Canyon, and it was thanks to the Byrds attending that party that two things happened to influence the Beatles' songwriting. The first was that Crosby brought his Hollywood friend Peter Fonda along. Fonda kept insisting on telling people that he knew what it was like to actually be dead, in a misguided attempt to reassure George Harrison, who he wrongly believed was scared of dying, and insisted on showing them his self-inflicted bullet wounds. This did not go down well with John Lennon and George Harrison, both of whom were on acid at the time. As Lennon later said, "We didn't want to hear about that! We were on an acid trip and the sun was shining and the girls were dancing and the whole thing was beautiful and Sixties, and this guy – who I really didn't know; he hadn't made Easy Rider or anything – kept coming over, wearing shades, saying, "I know what it's like to be dead," and we kept leaving him because he was so boring! ... It was scary. You know ... when you're flying high and [whispers] "I know what it's like to be dead, man" Eventually they asked Fonda to get out, and the experience later inspired Lennon to write this: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "She Said, She Said"] Incidentally, like all the Beatles songs of that period, that was adapted for the cartoon TV series based on the group, in this case as a follow-the-bouncing-ball animation. There are few things which sum up the oddness of mid-sixties culture more vividly than the fact that there was a massively popular kids' cartoon with a cheery singalong version of a song about a bad acid trip and knowing what it's like to be dead. But there was another, more positive, influence on the Beatles to come out of them having invited the Byrds to the party. Once Fonda had been kicked out, Crosby and Harrison became chatty, and started talking about the sitar, an instrument that Harrison had recently become interested in. Crosby showed Harrison some ragas on the guitar, and suggested he start listening to Ravi Shankar, who Crosby had recently become a fan of. And we'll be tracking Shankar's influence on Harrison, and through him the Beatles, and through them the whole course of twentieth century culture, in future episodes. Crosby's admiration both of Ravi Shankar and of John Coltrane was soon to show in the Byrds' records, but first they needed a new single. They'd made attempts at a version of "The Times They Are A-Changin'", and had even tried to get both George Harrison and Paul McCartney to add harmonica to that track, but that didn't work out. Then just before the UK tour, Terry Melcher had got Jack Nitzsche to come up with an arrangement of Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue (version 1)"] Nitzsche's arrangement was designed to sound as much like a Sonny and Cher record as possible, and at first the intention was just to overdub McGuinn's guitar and vocals onto a track by the Wrecking Crew. The group weren't happy at this, and even McGuinn, who was the friendliest of the group with Melcher and who the record was meant to spotlight, disliked it. The eventual track was cut by the group, with Jim Dickson producing, to show they could do a good job of the song by themselves, with the intention that Melcher would then polish it and finish it in the studio, but Melcher dropped the idea of doing the song at all. There was a growing factionalism in the group by this point, with McGuinn and to a lesser extent Michael Clarke being friendly with Melcher. Crosby disliked Melcher and was pushing for Jim Dickson to replace him as producer, largely because he thought that Melcher was vetoing Crosby's songs and giving Gene Clark and Roger McGuinn free run of the songwriting. Dickson on the other hand was friendliest with Crosby, but wasn't much keener on Crosby's songwriting than Melcher was, thinking Gene Clark was the real writing talent in the group. It didn't help that Crosby's songs tended to be things like harmonically complex pieces based on science fiction novels -- Crosby was a big fan of the writer Robert Heinlein, and in particular of the novel Stranger in a Strange Land, and brought in at least two songs inspired by that novel, which were left off albums -- his song "Stranger in a Strange Land" was eventually recorded by the San Francisco group Blackburn & Snow: [Excerpt: Blackburn & Snow, "Stranger in a Strange Land"] Oddly, Jim Dickson objected to what became the Byrds' next single for reasons that come from the same roots as the Heinlein novel. A short while earlier, McGuinn had worked as a guitarist and arranger on an album by the folk singer Judy Collins, and one of the songs she had recorded on that album was a song written by Pete Seeger, setting the first eight verses of chapter three of the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes to music: [Excerpt: Judy Collins, "Turn Turn Turn (To Everything There is a Season"] McGuinn wanted to do an electric version of that song as the Byrds' next single, and Melcher sided with him, but Dickson was against the idea, citing the philosopher Alfred Korzybski, who was a big influence both on the counterculture and on Heinlein. Korzybski, in his book Science and Sanity, argued that many of the problems with the world are caused by the practice in Aristotelean logic of excluding the middle and only talking about things and their opposites, saying that things could be either A or Not-A, which in his view excluded most of actual reality. Dickson's argument was that the lyrics to “Turn! Turn! Turn!” with their inflexible Aristotelianism, were hopelessly outmoded and would make the group a laughing stock among anyone who had paid attention to the intellectual revolutions of the previous few decades. "A time of love, a time of hate"? What about all the times that are neither for loving or hating, and all the emotions that are complex mixtures of love and hate? In his eyes, this was going to make the group look like lightweights. Terry Melcher disagreed, and forced the group through take after take, until they got what became the group's second number one hit: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Turn! Turn! Turn!"] After the single was released and became a hit, the battle lines in the group hardened. It was McGuinn and Melcher on one side, Crosby and Dickson on the other, with Chris Hillman, Michael Clarke, and Gene Clark more or less neutral in the middle, but tending to side more and more with the two Ms largely because of Crosby's ability to rub everyone up the wrong way. At one point during the sessions for the next album, tempers flared so much that Michael Clarke actually got up, went over to Crosby, and punched Crosby so hard that he fell off his seat. Crosby, being Hollywood to the bone, yelled at Clarke "You'll never work in this town again!", but the others tended to agree that on that occasion Crosby had it coming. Clarke, when asked about it later, said "I slapped him because he was being an asshole. He wasn't productive. It was necessary." Things came to a head in the filming for a video for the next single, Gene Clark's "Set You Free This Time". Michael Clarke was taller than the other Byrds, and to get the shot right, so the angles would line up, he had to stand further from the camera than the rest of them. David Crosby -- the member with most knowledge of the film industry, whose father was an Academy Award-winning cinematographer, so who definitely understood the reasoning for this -- was sulking that once again a Gene Clark song had been chosen for promotion rather than one of his songs, and started manipulating Michael Clarke, telling him that he was being moved backwards because the others were jealous of his good looks, and that he needed to move forward to be with the rest of them. Multiple takes were ruined because Clarke listened to Crosby, and eventually Jim Dickson got furious at Clarke and went over and slapped him on the face. All hell broke loose. Michael Clarke wasn't particularly bothered by being slapped by Dickson, but Crosby took that as an excuse to leave, walking off before the first shot of the day had been completed. Dickson ran after Crosby, who turned round and punched Dickson in the mouth. Dickson grabbed hold of Crosby and held him in a chokehold. Gene Clark came up and pulled Dickson off Crosby, trying to break up the fight, and then Crosby yelled "Yeah, that's right, Gene! Hold him so I can hit him again!" At this point if Clark let Dickson go, Dickson would have attacked Crosby again. If he held Dickson, Crosby would have taken it as an invitation to hit him more. Clark's dilemma was eventually relieved by Barry Feinstein, the cameraman, who came in and broke everything up. It may seem odd that Crosby and Dickson, who were on the same side, were the ones who got into a fight, while Michael Clarke, who had previously hit Crosby, was listening to Crosby over Dickson, but that's indicative of how everyone felt about Crosby. As Dickson later put it, "People have stronger feelings about David Crosby. I love David more than the rest and I hate him more than the rest. I love McGuinn the least, and I hate him the least, because he doesn't give you emotional feedback. You don't get a chance. The hate is in equal proportion to how much you love them." McGuinn was finding all this deeply distressing -- Dickson and Crosby were violent men, and Michael Clarke and Hillman could be provoked to violence, but McGuinn was a pacifist both by conviction and temperament. Everything was conspiring to push the camps further apart. For example, Gene Clark made more money than the rest because of his songwriting royalties, and so got himself a good car. McGuinn had problems with his car, and knowing that the other members were jealous of Clark, Melcher offered to lend McGuinn one of his own Cadillacs, partly in an attempt to be friendly, and partly to make sure the jealousy over Clark's car didn't cause further problems in the group. But, of course, now Gene Clark had a Ferrarri and Roger McGuinn had a Cadillac, where was David Crosby's car? He stormed into Dickson's office and told him that if by the end of the tour the group were going on, Crosby didn't have a Bentley, he was quitting the group. There was only one thing for it. Terry Melcher had to go. The group had recorded their second album, and if they couldn't fix the problems within the band, they would have to deal with the problems from outside. While the group were on tour, Jim Dickson told Melcher they would no longer be working with him as their producer. On the tour bus, the group listened over and over to a tape McGuinn had made of Crosby's favourite music. On one side was a collection of recordings of Ravi Shankar, and on the other was two Coltrane albums -- Africa/Brass and Impressions: [Excerpt: John Coltrane, "India"] The group listened to this, and basically no other music, on the tour, and while they were touring Gene Clark was working on what he hoped would be the group's next single -- an impressionistic song about their trip to the UK, which started "Six miles high and when you touch down, you'll find that it's stranger than known". After he had it half complete, he showed it to Crosby, who helped him out with the lyrics, coming up with lines like "Rain, grey town, known for its sound" to describe London. The song talked about the crowds that followed them, about the music -- namechecking the Small Faces, who at the time had only released two single
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