Podcasts about rubber ball

Balls swell, Bowie's Rubber Ball bounces and we ask does Disney actually make anything themselves?

As children we loved playing with rubber balls. These are balls made of hard rubber that bounce back with almost the same energy when they hit a resistance. So you can simply drop them on the floor and they bounce back to almost the same height. Only the force of gravity takes a certain amount of energy away from them, so that it is not quite enough for a complete return. However, they also have the property that if you don't control them or drop them unintentionally, they go their own way and wherever they bump into something, they can continue on their way uncontrollably and either become difficult to find or, in the worst case, cause damage. It is sometimes similar with the influence and power that we are given in various areas of life: in relationships, organisations, in our own lives alone: it is fascinating what we can achieve - but this also entails the necessary care and responsibility. Are you aware of this? I wish you an extraordinary day!

RUBBER BLUE BALLS, LARGE POOL INFLATABLES, AND SO MUCH MORE IS WHAT OUR NEXT GUEST DISCUSSES ON THIS LATEST EPISODE OF MISTRESS MIA'S DUNGEON. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/mistress-mia8/support

Parshat Tzav

Listen as Sonny reaches into his radio archives to share one of his most treasured interviews with an American music icon: Bobby Vee. Their visit took place on Sonny's show at KMPC Radio in Los Angeles in 1974. Bobby shares his journey of being catapulted into the world of popular music and then looking back, a decade later, as he set out to reinvent himself. He was born Robert Velline in Fargo, ND, and, although he started playing music when he was just a young teenager, it was country music, not rock. However, he, his brother and some friends eventually formed a rock band, "The Shadows", and began to attract some attention in the Fargo area. His big "break" came when rock legends Ritchie Valens, The Big Bopper and Buddy Holly died in a plane crash in 1959 en route to a concert in Minnesota. The concert's promoters decided to put on the show anyway, and asked for help from local talent. Bobby, who knew the words to all of the songs that were to be played, found himself on stage and, at 15 years old, began his career as a rock star. He and his group had a local hit with "Susie Baby", which came to the attention of executives at Liberty Records in Hollywood, and he and The Shadows were signed to the label. The next few records they cut went basically nowhere, however, and Liberty was all set to cancel their contract when a DJ in Pittsburgh played the "B" side to one of their records, a remake of an old ballad by The Clovers called "Devil or Angel". It became a hit in Pittsburgh and then spread throughout the Northeast, eventually hitting #6 on the national pop charts. Liberty then signed Vee to a five-year contract. He had a string of hits for the label, such as "Take Good Care of My Baby", "Rubber Ball", "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes" and "Come Back When You Grow Up, Girl". The rest, as they say is history. *Bobby died on October 24, 2026 from complications of Alzheimer's disease, but not before leaving a legacy unforgettable music, lasting friendships and wonderful memories as a husband, father and grandfather. May he rest in peace.

The Cyrkle hit the top of the charts in 1966 with two big hits: "Red Rubber Ball", co-written by Paul Simon, which reached #2, and "Turn Down Day", which reached #16. The band had a special relationship with The Beatles - they were managed by Brian Epstein, got the unique spelling of their name from John Lennon, and opened for The Beatles on their 1966 U.S. tour including their last live stadium concert appearance at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Don Dannemann is an original member of the band, and together with Mike Losekamp and Pat McLaughlin, they tell the Cyrkle's story.My featured song is “To The Zoo!”. Spotify link. ---------------------------------------------The Follow Your Dream Podcast:Top 1% of all podcasts with Listeners in 200 countries!For more information and other episodes of the podcast click here. To subscribe to the podcast click here.To subscribe to our weekly Follow Your Dream Podcast email click here.To Rate and Review the podcast click here.“Dream With Robert”. Click here.—----------------------------------------“MILES BEHIND”, Robert's first album, was recorded in 1994 but was “lost” for the last 30 years. It's now been released for streaming. Featuring Randy Brecker (Blood Sweat & Tears), Anton Fig (The David Letterman Show), Al Foster (Miles Davis), Tim Ries (The Rolling Stones), Jon Lucien and many more. Called “Hip, Tight and Edgy!” Click here for all links.—--------------------------------------‘THE SINGLES PROJECT” is Robert's new EP, featuring five of his new songs. The songs speak to the ups and downs of life. From the blissful, joyous “Saturday Morning” to the darker commentary of “Like Never Before” and “The Ship”. “This is Robert at his most vulnerable” (Pop Icon Magazine)Reviews: “Amazing!” (Top Buzz Magazine)“Magical…A Sonic Tour De Force!” (IndiePulse Music)“Fabulously Enticing!” (Pop Icon Magazine)“A Home Run!” (Hollywood Digest)Listener Reviews:Saturday Morning:”A neat and simply happy song!””It's so cute and fun. It's describing a world I wish I lived in every day!”Like Never Before:”Great message!””Great song, very perceptive lyrics!”Click here for all links.—--------------------------------------“IT'S ALIVE!” is Robert's latest Project Grand Slam album. Featuring 13 of the band's Greatest Hits performed “live” at festivals in Pennsylvania and Serbia.Reviews:"An instant classic!" (Melody Maker)"Amazing record...Another win for the one and only Robert Miller!" (Hollywood Digest)"Close to perfect!" (Pop Icon)"A Masterpiece!" (Big Celebrity Buzz)"Sterling effort!" (Indie Pulse)"Another fusion wonder for Project Grand Slam!" (MobYorkCity)Click here for all links.Click here for song videos—-----------------------------------------Audio production:Jimmy RavenscroftKymera Films Connect with the Cyrkle:www.sundazed.com Connect with the Follow Your Dream Podcast:Website - www.followyourdreampodcast.comEmail Robert - robert@followyourdreampodcast.com Follow Robert's band, Project Grand Slam, and his music:Website - www.projectgrandslam.comPGS Store - www.thePGSstore.comYouTubeSpotify MusicApple MusicEmail - pgs@projectgrandslam.com

In this episode, Ed Frawley shares a question from the Ask Cindy database. Today's question is about a 6 month old pup that loves to chew on sticks and branches but the main big thing that worries the owners is that the pup swallows pieces of the sticks and branches and later on vomits out pieces of wood chips. | Links mentioned: Leerburg Foam Ball with BioThane Strap: https://leerburg.com/foam-ball.php | Leerburg Foam Ball with Leather Strap: https://leerburg.com/foamball-strap.php | Leerburg's Rubber Ball with Nylon Handle: https://leerburg.com/rubberball-nylon-handle.php | Puller Ring: https://leerburg.com/puller-ring.php | Your Puppy 8 Weeks to 12 Months: https://university.leerburg.com/Catalog/viewCourse/cid/91 | Developing A Relationship With Your Dog with Michael Ellis: https://university.leerburg.com/Catalog/viewCourse/cid/159 | Raising Your Puppy with Michael Ellis: https://university.leerburg.com/Catalog/viewCourse/cid/85

Chest and shoulders, Boxing Helena, Julian Sands, celebrity sex tapes, celebrity dick, printers, Vanna White, game shows, and more.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week we include the usual Ami with an added serving of Erin.  We talk about online dating and the Rubber Ball.  Yes, it is something dirty. As always, this episode contains (a lot of) salty language. Consider yourself warned.   Please consider giving us all (or some) of your moneyz on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/secularsoup     Patrons can watch us live every Sunday at 6pm CST on Patreon You can also give on PayPal at PayPal.me/delightfulbitchcraft Now you can call and leave us a message! (218) 270-8292 Go listen to our NEW SHOW, I'd Date Me! And tell your friends!  You can find everything at www.delightfulbitchcraft.com Facebook Secret Soup Talk Facebook group! Twitter secularsouppodcast@gmail.com Instagram  YouTube Channel! There's merch here: https://delightfulbitchcraft.threadless.com/ Check out Amy's other podcast - "Okay Then, A Fargo Retrospective"   Follow Amy's cats on Instagram! @chappychouchou   We should probably thank Mr. Eli Bosnick for recording the Secular Soup Creed. Thanks to our Golden Voice of the Pod, Deanna Joy Lyons, for making us sound more legit.  

THE GLORY CLOUD WAS SO THICK GRANNY BOUNCED BACK LIKE A RUBBER BALL TRYING TO GO THROUGH THE DOOR OF GLORY…..DR BARBARA JENNISON CONTACT windofspirit@yahoo.com --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/dr-barbara-jennison/message

THIS IS BOB'S WORLD… GOOD MORNING I'M BOB WELCH AND IF YOU'RE ANYWHERE IN NORTHEASTERN NORTH AMERICA.. YOU'RE NO DOUBT WAKING UP TO A SMOKY MORNING.. WHAT'S IT DOING TO US? SOME ANSWERS IN A MINUTE.. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/bobwelch/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/bobwelch/support

Welcome to this  episode of Just Havin a CrackChris Dittmar, in addition to his squash career, is known for his work as a commentator in both squash and Australian rules football. After retiring from professional squash, Dittmar transitioned into sports media and became a commentator for squash events. He has provided analysis and commentary for various squash tournaments around the world.In addition to his involvement in squash, Dittmar has also worked as a commentator for Triple M, an Australian radio station known for its sports coverage. He has specifically provided commentary for Australian rules football matches, sharing his insights and analysis with listeners during the games. Dittmar's experience as a former athlete and his knowledge of the sport has made him a respected and valued commentator in both squash and football.

2 Guys. 1 Rubber Ball. 0 Dead Birds. - The Good Guys: Regan, Rob, and Ryan Myers - Producer: Eric 'e0n' Chung - Engineers: Regan & Eric - Social Media Strategist: @Syndicate0n - Trailer Music and FX courtesy of Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio - The Pledge - The Turn - The Presto - Featured trailer music Stargazing- by White Bat Audio - Theme music is Battle (Boss) by BoxCat Games and is licensed under CC BY 3.0 - Additional music is Against the Wall by BoxCat Games and is licensed under CC BY 3.0 - http://coisgpod.com/ - --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/come-on-its-still-good/support

The Alchemist magically battle our rival in The Prestige.  Key Elements: Hat Collection, Rubber Ball, The Transportated Man Join the Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/filmalchemistpod Find DeVaugh online:  Twitter and Instagram: @_daddydisco Find The Spectre Cinema Club Podcast:  https://linktr.ee/bloodybluntscinemaclub  

Today Davin and Tim dive into the discussion of prioritizing life, and how to juggle a lot of things at once with some great advice. Enjoy!  Instagram: @bobbleheadpodcast Facebook: @bobbleheadmedia Youtube: bobbleheadmedia Tik Tok: @bobbleheadmedia Podcast Apps: Bobblehead Podcast Have a question? Email us at hello@bobbleheadpodcast.com

My history of The Cyrkle starts in the fall of 1961 at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa. when I met Tom Dawes in line to get a medical checkup which I guess must have been required for all freshmen. But before I continue I'd like to share a bit of my personal musical history leading up to that time.My mom tells me that at the age of 10 months she was surprised to hear me hum “Little Brown Jug” back to her after singing it to me while being diapered. But that spurt of musicality gave me no interest in the guitar and piano lessons that I had for a short time in early grade school.There were two events that happened around the fifth grade that really turned me on to music. The first occurred in the car on family trips when we listened to music on the radio and if we were in the car at the right time we would hear Martin Block's “Make Believe Ballroom” which played the current hits of the day. I found myself harmonizing to Rosemarie Clooney's “This Old House” It was weird at first but after hearing it several times on different trips I began to own the experience really enjoyed my mastering of the ability to harmonize. The second event occurred on our back porch in Brooklyn after receiving a portable transistor radio for my birthday. I was with friends tuning to different stations and came across Alan Freed's rock and roll radio show. I had never heard anything like it and I was totally mesmerized. I listened all evening and happily missed some of my favorite tv shows. One particular song that stands out that evening is “Story Untold” by The Nutmegs. It's a typical 4 chord doowop song but it was mind blowing to me. From that moment on I was one with rock and roll. As I'm writing this a third event came to my mind. It's not significant in my musical development but is an indication of my perception relative to music. There was a tv show called “Your Hit Parade”. They had a house band and house singers that would perform the nations current hits. It was after my bedtime but I could hear it as I was falling asleep. Most of the songs came under the heading of “standards” and the performers and arrangements were fine. One day they performed a rock and roll song that had made it to the national charts. I don't remember the song but I have a clear memory of noting how poor the performance was. They clearly didn't understand how to do rock music and I remember saying to myself “this show is over”. It went off the air not long after that.We moved from Brooklyn to Eastchester, N.Y. in 1955 where I began the 7th grade. I took piano lessons for a while during this time but changed over to guitar, inspired cause I so loved seeing Elvis singing with a guitar in his hand. I also introduced myself to rudimentary recording techniques. I was given a tape recorder followed by a second tape recorder on subsequent birthdays. The first recorder allowed me to record songs off the radio and also to record myself singing and playing. But the coolest thing happened when I got the second machine. I sang a background part of “In The Still Of The Night” into the first recorder. I then put my head next to the speaker of machine #1 and played back that part while singing the second part with the microphone from the second machine in front of “us”. When finished I had 4 background parts and a lead vocal recorded. The quality was awful but the parts and the concept were correct. Today we simply call it overdubbing and it is taken for granted in the music industry but at the time it was really cool. In high school I had a decent f hole acoustic guitar with an electric pickup and a decent guitar amp. My friend and next door neighbor played accordion in a band which also had a guitar player. They were scheduled to play at a high school dance when the guitar player's amp broke. He asked if they could borrow my amp for the evening. Encouraged by my mom, I told them ok if they let me

Welcome to Business Mentorship; Keepin' It Real, live, unscripted interviews with entrepreneurs and enterprise leaders who have participated in ShareYourStories.online As part of our "live" coffee series, Trish Tonaj will introduce you to the person behind the logo...discussing lightbulb moments and 3 words of advice. If you believe in mentorship and sharing great ideas this is an opportunity to increase your visibility, encourage collaboration and connect with your community by introducing YOU the person behind the logo. A great way to support and learn from one another! Join us with your story and visit shareyourstories.online Read Edita's Feature

This tale from football's past travels back to the game's humble beginnings, the foundational root of the game itself. Miss our football by the day of the year podcasts, well don't because they can still be found at the https://pigskindispatch.com/ (Pigskin Dispatch website). Come join us at the https://pigskindispatch.com/ (Pigskin Dispatch website) to see even more Positive football news! Sign up to get daily football history headlines in your email inbox @ https://pigskindispatch.com/home/Email-subscriber (Email-subscriber) Go to https://my.captivate.fm/SportsHistoryNetwork.com/Row1 (SportsHistoryNetwork.com/Row1 )for access to the full Row One catalog for gallery prints and gift items. Plus, get a 15% discount off all prints on the Row One Pictorem Gallery with coupon code SHN15. Get a free one week subscription to Newspapers.com by visiting http://SportsHistoryNetwork.com/newspapers (SportsHistoryNetwork.com/newspapers). And with a paid subscription, you'll also be helping to support the production of this and other Sports History Network shows.  We also feature great music by Mike and Gene Monroe along with Jason Neff & great graphics from time to time from the folks at http://www.gridiron-uniforms.com/GUD/controller/controller.php?action=main (Gridiron-Uniform Database). Want more Sports History delivered to your ears, come see this podcast and many more at the https://sportshistorynetwork.com/ (Sports History Network - The Headquarters of Sports' Yesteryear!) We would like to thank the https://footballfoundation.org/ (National Football Foundation), https://www.profootballhof.com/players/ (Pro Football Hall of Fame), https://www.onthisday.com/ (On this day.com) and https://www.pro-football-reference.com/ (Pro Football Reference) Websites for the information shared with you today. Support this podcast

During this conversation, Kevin shares unique insight on DE&I best practices, how to story tell and be an engaging speaker with your staff and how the pandemic should provide a “reset” for how companies treat their employees, including onboarding them as if they are new employees. Kevin Carroll is on a mission to empower greatness in individuals and organizations through the power of positivity, creativity, and play. Since 2004, more than 350,000 people from 200+ corporations and 150+ non profit organizations and dozens of schools around the world have been inspired by Kevin's dynamic speaking engagements, coaching, facilitating, and content creation. Author of the Best-Selling book “Rules of the Red Rubber Ball”, Kevin is also a former Nike executive. Learn more about Kevin's work at KCKatalyst.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

... or mend it again. Sung by Gene Pitney. This is about needing to know the song before standing in front of an audience on Karaoke Night (or afternoon). I had no idea what was needed to do this. Thanks for listening. "Only Love Can Break a Heart" published in 1962, performed by the American singer-songwriter Gene Pitney. The song was written by Hal David (words) and Burt Bacharach (music) and appears on Pitney's second album Only Love Can Break a Heart. Pitney had enjoyed some success as a songwriter prior to breaking through as a performer in his own right. He wrote the songs "Hello Mary Lou", "Rubber Ball", and "He's a Rebel", the last a number-one Billboard Hot 100 hit for The Crystals in 1962. PLEASE LET ME HOLD YOU AND LOVE YOU FOR ALWAYS AND ALWAYS. ONLY LOVE CAN BREAK A HEART. ONLY LOVE CAN MEND IT AGAIN..

Unscripted with Mary Ann and Kris talking nonsense as usual but we laugh our heads off.... and she can't find hers

David Trotter is a Business Growth Consultant dedicated to helping soul-inspired coaches and entrepreneurs rise above the overwhelm and procrastination to start their online business, stand out from the crowd, and serve their dream clients - all while fulfilling their divine purpose and generating financial freedom. David is the founder of Rise Up Business Academy and Rise Up Creatives as well as the host of the Inspiration Rising Podcast with over 220 episodes featuring female entrepreneurs and leaders sharing their experience and wisdom. His latest book is entitled “Empowered to Rise: The Secret to Embracing Your True Identity, Uncovering Your Super Powers, and Bringing Your Inspiration to the World.” David and his wife, Laura, have been married over 27 years and live in southern California with their two almost-grown kids.Get help starting and growing your soul-inspired online business - www.RiseUpBusinessAcademy.comConnect with David:SOULARISESOULARISE7 WorksheetRise Up Business AcademyRise Up CreativesFacebook (Inspiration Rising)Facebook Group (Soul-Inspired Coaches and Entrepreneurs)InstagramYouTubeTwitterLinkedInDon't Miss A Single Episode:Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher.Leave a quick review on any of the podcast apps to tell people what you think about the show.Take a screenshot of the podcast and post it on Instagram or Instagram Stories. Tag us @insporising. We'll repost and give you a shoutout!Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/inspiration-rising/donations

On this episode: Joe and the guys discuss the most anticipated fight of year between Mike Tyson and Roy Jones Jr. but somehow Nate Robinson's clash with Jake Paul was the main event (16:44). Joe then mentions a hypothetical Verzuz between two New York legends, Mase and Cam'ron (38:12 & 54:55), a recap of the Soul Train Award winners/performers (1:07:55), and the guys educate themselves on the controversy surrounding Mulatto's name (1:35:40). Joe then asks for predictions from the crew if there was a scenario where Dipset battled G-Unit and/or the LOX in a Verzuz (2:01:38) and more!   Sleeper Picks Joe | N.O.R.E. - “Grimey”  Rory | J Warner - Belong to You Mal | Jae Millz - “High Rollers” (Ft. Anthiny King) Parks | Roc Marciano - “Butterfly Effect”

Episode 104 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “He’s a Rebel”, and how a song recorded by the Blossoms was released under the name of the Crystals.  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 “Sukiyaki” by Kyu Sakamoto. 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/ —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. A lot of resources were used for this episode. The material on Gene Pitney mostly comes from his page on This is My Story. Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building Era by Ken Emerson is a good overview of the Brill Building scene. Girl Groups by John Clemente contains potted biographies of many groups of the era, including articles on both The Crystals and the Blossoms. I’ve referred to two biographies of Spector in this episode, Phil Spector: Out of His Head by Richard Williams and He’s a Rebel by Mark Ribkowsky. And information on the Wrecking Crew largely comes from The Wrecking Crew by Kent Hartman. There are many compilations available with some of the hits Spector produced, but I recommend getting Back to Mono, a four-CD overview of his career containing all the major singles put out by Philles.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A brief note — there are some very brief mentions of domestic abuse here. Nothing I think will upset anyone, but you might want to check the transcript if you’re at all unsure. Up to this point, whenever we’ve looked at a girl group, it’s been at one that had, to a greater or lesser extent, some control over their own career. Groups like the Marvelettes, the Chantels, and the Bobbettes all wrote their own material, at least at first, and had distinctive personalities before they ever made a record. But today, we’re going to look at a group whose identity was so subsumed in that of their producer that the record we’re looking at was released under the name of a different group from the one that recorded it. We’re going to look at “He’s a Rebel”, which was recorded by the Blossoms and released by the Crystals. [Excerpt: “The Crystals” (The Blossoms), “He’s a Rebel”] The Crystals, from their very beginnings, were intended as a vehicle for the dreams of men, rather than for their own ambitions. Whereas the girl groups we’ve looked at so far all formed as groups of friends at school before they moved into professional singing, the Crystals were put together by a man named Benny Wells. Wells had a niece, Barbara Alston, who sang with a couple of her schoolfriends, Mary Thomas and Myrna Giraud. Wells put those three together with two other girls, Dee Dee Kenniebrew and Patsy Wright, to form a five-piece vocal group. Wells seems not to have had much concept of what was in the charts at the time — the descriptions of the music he had the girls singing talk about him wanting them to sound like the Modernaires, the vocal group who sang with Glenn Miller’s band in the early 1940s. But the girls went along with Wells, and Wells had good enough ears to recognise a hit when one was brought to him — and one was brought to him by Patsy Wright’s brother-in-law, Leroy Bates. Bates had written a song called “There’s No Other Like My Baby”, and Wells could tell it had potential. Incidentally, some books say that the song was based on a gospel song called “There’s No Other Like My Jesus”, and that claim is repeated on Wikipedia, but I can’t find any evidence of a song of that name other than people talking about “There’s No Other Like My Baby”. There is a gospel song called “There’s No Other Name Like Jesus”, but that has no obvious resemblance to Bates’ song, and so I’m going to assume that the song was totally original. As well as bringing the song, Bates also brought the fledgling group a name — he had a daughter, Crystal Bates, after whom the group named themselves. The newly-named Crystals took their song to the offices of Hill and Range Music, which as well as being a publishing company also owned Big Top Records, the label that had put out the original version of “Twist and Shout”, which had so annoyed Bert Berns. And it was there that they ended up meeting up with Phil Spector. After leaving his role at Atlantic, Spector had started working as a freelance producer, including working for Big Top. According to Spector — a notorious liar, it’s important to remember — he worked during this time on dozens of hits for which he didn’t get any credit, just to earn money. But we do know about some of the records he produced during this time. For example, there was one by a new singer called Gene Pitney. Pitney had been knocking around for years, recording for Decca as part of a duo called Jamie and Jane: [Excerpt: Jamie and Jane, “Faithful Our Love”] And for Blaze Records as Billy Bryan: [Excerpt: Billy Bryan, “Going Back to My Love”] But he’d recently signed to Musicor, a label owned by Aaron Schroeder, and had recorded a hit under his own name. Pitney had written “(I Wanna) Love My Life Away”, and had taken advantage of the new multitracking technology to record his vocals six times over, creating a unique sound that took the record into the top forty: [Excerpt: Gene Pitney, “(I Wanna) Love My Life Away”] But while that had been a hit, his second single for Musicor was a flop, and so for the third single, Musicor decided to pull out the big guns. They ran a session at which basically the whole of the Brill Building turned up. Leiber and Stoller were to produce a song they’d written for Pitney, the new hot husband-and-wife songwriting team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil were there, as was Burt Bacharach, and so were Goffin and King, who wrote the song that *Spector* was to produce for Pitney. All of them were in the control booth, and all of them were chipping in ideas. As you might expect with that many cooks, the session did not go smoothly, and to make matters worse, Pitney was suffering from a terrible cold. The session ended up costing thirteen thousand dollars, at a time when an average recording session cost five hundred dollars. On the song Spector was producing on that session, Goffin and King’s “Every Breath I Take”, Pitney knew that with the cold he would be completely unable to hit the last note in full voice, and went into falsetto. Luckily, everyone thought it sounded good, and he could pretend it was deliberate, rather than the result of necessity: [Excerpt: Gene Pitney, “Every Breath I Take”] The record only went to number forty-two, but it resuscitated Pitney’s singing career, and forged a working relationship between the two men. But soon after that, Spector had flown back to LA to work with his old friend Lester Sill. Sill and producer/songwriter, Lee Hazelwood, had been making records with the guitarist Duane Eddy, producing a string of hits like “Rebel Rouser”: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, “Rebel Rouser”] But Eddy had recently signed directly to a label, rather than going through Sill and Hazelwood’s company as before, and so Sill and Hazelwood had been looking for new artists, and they’d recently signed a group called the Paris Sisters to their production company. Sill had decided to get Spector in to produce the group, and Spector came up with a production that Sill was sure would be a hit, on a song called “I Love How You Love Me”, written by Barry Mann with another writer called Jack Keller: [Excerpt: The Paris Sisters, “I Love How You Love Me”] Spector was becoming a perfectionist — he insisted on recording the rhythm track for that record at one studio, and the string part at another, and apparently spent fifty hours on the mix — and Sill was spending more and more time in the studio with Spector, fascinated at his attitude to the work he was doing. This led to a breakup between Sill and Hazelwood — their business relationship was already strained, but Hazelwood got jealous of all the time that Sill was spending with Spector, and decided to split their partnership and go and produce Duane Eddy, without Sill, at Eddy’s new label. So Sill was suddenly in the market for a new business partner, and he and Spector decided that they were going to start up their own label, Philles, although by this point everyone who had ever worked with Spector was warning Sill that it was a bad idea to go into business with him. But Spector and Sill kept their intentions secret for a while, and so when Spector met the Crystals at Hill and Range’s offices, everyone at Hill and Range just assumed that he was still working for them as a freelance producer, and that the Crystals were going to be recording for Big Top. Freddie Bienstock of Hill & Range later said, “We were very angry because we felt they were Big Top artists. He was merely supposed to produce them for us. There was no question about the fact that he was just rehearsing them for Big Top—hell, he rehearsed them for weeks in our offices. And then he just stole them right out of here. That precipitated a breach of contract with us. We were just incensed because that was a terrific group, and for him to do that shows the type of character he was. We felt he was less than ethical, and, obviously, he was then shown the door.” Bienstock had further words for Spector too, ones I can’t repeat here because of content rules about adult language, but they weren’t flattering. Spector had been dating Bienstock’s daughter, with Bienstock’s approval, but that didn’t last once Spector betrayed Bienstock. But Spector didn’t care. He had his own New York girl group, one that could compete with the Bobbettes or the Chantels or the Shirelles, and he was going to make the Crystals as big as any of them, and he wasn’t going to cut Big Top in. He slowed down “There’s No Other Like My Baby” and it became the first release on Philles Records, with Barbara Alston singing lead: [Excerpt: The Crystals, “There’s No Other Like My Baby”] That record was cut late at night in June 1961. In fact it was cut on Prom Night — three of the girls came straight to the session from their High School prom, still wearing their prom dresses. Spector wrote the B-side, a song that was originally intended to be the A-side called “Oh Yeah, Maybe Baby”, but everyone quickly realised that “There’s No Other Like My Baby” was the hit, and it made the top twenty. While Spector was waiting for the money to come in on the first Philles record, he took another job, with Liberty Records, working for his friend Snuff Garrett. He got a thirty thousand dollar advance, made a single flop record with them with an unknown singer named Obrey Wilson, and then quit, keeping his thirty thousand dollars. Once “There’s No Other” made the charts, Spector took the Crystals into the studio again, to record a song by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil that he’d got from Aldon Music. Spector was becoming increasingly convinced that he’d made a mistake in partnering with Lester Sill, and he should really have been working with Don Kirshner, and he was in discussions with Kirshner which came to nothing about them having some sort of joint project. While those discussions fell through, almost all the songs that Spector would use for the next few years would come from Aldon songwriters, and “Uptown” was a perfect example of the new kind of socially-relevant pop songwriting that had been pioneered by Goffin and King, but which Mann and Weil were now making their own. Before becoming a professional songwriter, Weil had been part of the Greenwich Village folk scene, and while she wasn’t going to write anything as explicitly political as the work of Pete Seeger, she thought that songs should at least try to be about the real world. “Uptown” was the first example of a theme which would become a major motif for the Crystals’ records — a song about a man who is looked down upon by society, but who the singer believes is better than his reputation. Mann and Weil’s song combined that potent teen emotion with an inspiration Weil had had, seeing a handsome Black man pushing a hand truck in the Garment District, and realising that even though he was oppressed by his job, and “a nobody” when he was working downtown, he was still somebody when he was at home. They originally wrote the song for Tony Orlando to sing, but Spector insisted, rightly, that the song worked better with female voices, and that the Crystals should do it. Spector took Mann and Weil’s song and gave it a production that evoked the Latin feel of Leiber and Stoller’s records for the Drifters: [Excerpt: The Crystals, “Uptown”] By the time of this second record, the Crystals had already been through one lineup change. As soon as she left school, Myrna Giraud got married, and she didn’t want to perform on stage any more. She would still sing with the girls in the studio for a little while — she’s on every track of their first album, though she left altogether soon after this recording — but she was a married woman now and didn’t want to be in a group.  The girls needed a replacement, and they also needed something else — a lead singer. All the girls loved singing, but none of them wanted to be out in front singing lead. Luckily, Dee Dee Kenniebrew’s mother was a secretary at the school attended by a fourteen-year-old gospel singer named La La Brooks, and she heard Brooks singing and invited her to join the group. Brooks soon became the group’s lead vocalist on stage. But in the studio, Spector didn’t want to use her as the lead vocalist. He insisted on Barbara singing the lead on “Uptown”, but in a sign of things to come, Mann and Weil weren’t happy with her performance — Spector had to change parts of the melody to accommodate her range — and they begged Spector to rerecord the lead vocal with Little Eva singing. However, Eva became irritated with Spector’s incessant demands for more takes and his micromanagement, cursed him out, and walked out of the studio. The record was released with Barbara’s original lead vocal, and while Mann and Weil weren’t happy with that, listeners were, as it went to number thirteen on the charts: [Excerpt: The Crystals, “Uptown”] Little Eva later released her own version of the song, on the Dimension Dolls compilation we talked about in the episode on “The Loco-Motion”: [Excerpt: Little Eva, “Uptown”] It was Little Eva who inspired the next Crystals single, as well — as we talked about in the episode on her, she inspired a truly tasteless Goffin and King song called “He Hit Me And It Felt Like A Kiss”, which I will not be excerpting, but which was briefly released as the Crystals’ third single, before being withdrawn after people objected to hearing teenage girls sing about how romantic and loving domestic abuse is. There seems to be some suggestion that the record was released partly as a way for Spector to annoy Lester Sill, who by all accounts was furious at the release. Spector was angry at Sill over the amount of money he’d made from the Paris Sisters recordings, and decided that he was being treated unfairly and wanted to force Sill out of their partnership. Certainly the next recording by the Crystals was meant to get rid of some other business associates. Two of Philles’ distributors had a contract which said they were entitled to the royalties on two Crystals singles. So the second one was a ten-minute song called “The Screw”, split over two sides of a disc, which sounded like this: [Excerpt: The Crystals, “The Screw”] Only a handful of promotional copies of that were ever produced. One went to Lester Sill, who by this point had been bought out of his share of the company for a small fraction of what it was worth. The last single Spector recorded for Philles while Sill was still involved with the label was another Crystals record, one that had the involvement of many people Sill had brought into Spector’s orbit, and who would continue working with him long after the two men stopped working together. Spector had decided he was going to start recording in California again, and two of Sill’s assistants would become regular parts of Spector’s new hit-making machine. The first of these was a composer and arranger called Jack Nitzsche, who we’ll be seeing a lot more of in this podcast over the next couple of years, in some unexpected places. Nitzsche was a young songwriter, whose biggest credit up to this point was a very minor hit for Preston Epps, “Bongo, Bongo, Bongo”: [Excerpt: Preston Epps, “Bongo Bongo Bongo”] Nitzsche would become Spector’s most important collaborator, and his arrangements, as much as Spector’s production, are what characterise the “Wall of Sound” for which Spector would become famous.  The other assistant of Sill’s who became important to Spector’s future was a saxophone player named Steve Douglas. We’ve seen Douglas before, briefly, in the episode on “LSD-25” — he played in the original lineup of Kip and the Flips, one of the groups we talked about in that episode. He’d left Kip and the Flips to join Duane Eddy’s band, and it was through Eddy that he had started working with Sill, when he played on many of Eddy’s hits, most famously “Peter Gunn”: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, “Peter Gunn”] Douglas was the union contractor for the session, and for most of the rest of Spector’s sixties sessions. This is something we’ve not talked about previously, but when we look at records produced in LA for the next few years, in particular, it’s something that will come up a lot. When a producer wanted to make records at the time, he (for they were all men) would not contact all the musicians himself. Instead, he’d get in touch with a trusted musician and say “I have a session at three o’clock. I need two guitars, bass, drums, a clarinet and a cello” (or whatever combination of instruments), and sometimes might say, “If you can get this particular player, that would be good”. The musician would then find out which other musicians were available, get them into the studio, and file the forms which made sure they got paid according to union rules. The contractor, not the producer, decided who was going to play on the session. In the case of this Crystals session, Spector already had a couple of musicians in mind — a bass player named Ray Pohlman, and his old guitar teacher Howard Roberts, a jazz guitarist who had played on “To Know Him is to Love Him” and “I Love How You Love Me” for Spector already. But Spector wanted a *big* sound — he wanted the rhythm instruments doubled, so there was a second bass player, Jimmy Bond, and a second guitarist, Tommy Tedesco. Along with them and Douglas were piano player Al de Lory and drummer Hal Blaine. This was the first session on which Spector used any of these musicians, and with the exception of Roberts, who hated working on Spector’s sessions and soon stopped, this group put together by Douglas would become the core of what became known as “The Wrecking Crew”, a loose group of musicians who would play on a large number of the hit records that would come out of LA in the sixties. Spector also had a guaranteed hit song — one by Gene Pitney. While Pitney wrote few of his own records, he’d established himself a parallel career as a writer for other people. He’d written “Today’s Teardrops”, the B-side of Roy Orbison’s hit “Blue Angel”: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Today’s Teardrops”] And had followed that up with a couple of the biggest hits of the early sixties, Bobby Vee’s “Rubber Ball”: [Excerpt: Bobby Vee, “Rubber Ball”] And Ricky Nelson’s “Hello Mary Lou”: [Excerpt: Ricky Nelson, “Hello, Mary Lou”] Pitney had written a song, “He’s a Rebel”, that was very strongly inspired by “Uptown”, and Aaron Schroeder, Pitney’s publisher, had given the song to Spector. But Spector knew Schroeder, and knew that when he gave you a song, he was going to give it to every other producer who came knocking as well. “He’s a Rebel” was definitely going to be a massive hit for someone, and he wanted it to be for the Crystals. He phoned them up and told them to come out to LA to record the song. And they said no. The Crystals had become sick of Spector. He’d made them record songs like “He Hit Me and it Felt Like a Kiss”, he’d refused to let their lead singer sing lead, and they’d not seen any money from their two big hits. They weren’t going to fly from New York to LA just because he said so. Spector needed a new group, in LA, that he could record doing the song before someone else did it. He could use the Crystals’ name — Philles had the right to put out records by whoever they liked and call it the Crystals — he just needed a group. He found one in the Blossoms, a group who had connections to many of the people Spector was working with. Jack Nitzsche’s wife sometimes sang with them on sessions, and they’d also sung on a Duane Eddy record that Lester Sill had worked on, “Dance With the Guitar Man”, where they’d been credited as the Rebelettes: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, “Dance With the Guitar Man”] The Blossoms had actually been making records in LA for nearly eight years at this point. They’d started out as the Dreamers one of the many groups who’d been discovered by Johnny Otis, back in the early fifties, and had also been part of the scene around the Penguins, one of whom went to school with some of the girls. They started out as a six-piece group, but slimmed down to a quartet after their first record, on which they were the backing group for Richard Berry: [Excerpt: Richard Berry, “At Last”] The first stable lineup of the Dreamers consisted of Fanita James, Gloria Jones (not the one who would later record “Tainted Love”), and the twin sisters Annette and Nanette Williams. They worked primarily with Berry, backing him on five singles in the mid fifties, and also recording songs he wrote for them under their own name, like “Do Not Forget”, which actually featured another singer, Jennell Hawkins, on lead: [Excerpt: The Dreamers, “Do Not Forget”] They also sang backing vocals on plenty of other R&B records from people in the LA R&B scene — for example it’s them singing backing vocals, with Jesse Belvin, on Etta James’ “Good Rocking Daddy”: [Excerpt: Etta James, “Good Rocking Daddy”] The group signed to Capitol Records in 1957, but not under the name The Dreamers — an executive there said that they all had different skin tones and it made them look like flowers, so they became the Blossoms. They were only at Capitol for a year, but during that time an important lineup change happened — Nanette quit the group and was replaced by a singer called Darlene Wright. From that point on The Blossoms was the main name the group went under, though they also recorded under other names, for example using the name The Playgirls to record “Gee But I’m Lonesome”, a song written by Bruce Johnston, who was briefly dating Annette Williams at the time: [Excerpt: The Playgirls, “Gee But I’m Lonesome”] By 1961 Annette had left the group, and they were down to a trio of Fanita, Gloria, and Darlene. Their records, under whatever name, didn’t do very well, but they became the first-call session singers in LA, working on records by everyone from Sam Cooke to Gene Autry.  So it was the Blossoms who were called on in late 1962 to record “He’s a Rebel”, and it was Darlene Wright who earned her session fee, and no royalties, for singing the lead on a number one record: [Excerpt: The “Crystals” (The Blossoms), “He’s a Rebel”] From that point on, the Blossoms would sing on almost every Spector session for the next three years, and Darlene, who he renamed Darlene Love, would become Spector’s go-to lead vocalist for records under her own name, the Blossoms, Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, and the Crystals. It was lucky for Spector that he decided to go this route rather than wait for the Crystals, not only because it introduced him to the Blossoms, but because  he’d been right about Aaron Schroeder. As Spector and Sill sat together in the studio where they were mastering the record, some musicians on a break from the studio next door wandered in, and said, “Hey man. we were just playing the same goddam song!” Literally in the next room as Spector mastered the record, his friend Snuff Garrett was producing Vicki Carr singing “He’s a Rebel”: [Excerpt: Vicki Carr, “He’s a Rebel”] Philles got their version out first, and Carr’s record sank without trace, while “The Crystals” went to number one, keeping the song’s writer off the top spot, as Gene Pitney sat at number two with a Bacharach and David song, “Only Love Can Break a Heart”: [Excerpt: Gene Pitney, “Only Love Can Break a Heart”] The Crystals were shocked that Spector released a Crystals record without any of them on it, but La La Brooks had a similar enough voice to Darlene Love’s that they were able to pull the song off live. They had a bit more of a problem with the follow-up, also by the Blossoms but released as the Crystals: [Excerpt: “The Crystals”/The Blossoms, “He’s Sure the Boy I Love”] La La could sing that fine, but she had to work on the spoken part — Darlene was from California and La La had a thick Brooklyn accent. She managed it, just about. As La La was doing such a good job of singing Darlene Love’s parts live — and, more importantly, as she was only fifteen and so didn’t complain about things like royalties — the Crystals finally did get their way and have La La start singing the leads on their singles, starting with “Da Doo Ron Ron”. The problem is, none of the other Crystals were on those records — it was La La singing with the Blossoms, plus other session singers. Listen out for the low harmony in “Da Doo Ron Ron” and see if you recognise the voice: [Excerpt: The Crystals, “Da Doo Ron Ron”] Cher would later move on to bigger things than being a fill-in Crystal. “Da Doo Ron Ron” became another big hit, making number three in the charts, and the follow-up, “Then He Kissed Me”, with La La once again on lead vocals, also made the top ten, but the group were falling apart — Spector was playing La La off against the rest of the group, just to cause trouble, and he’d also lost interest in them once he discovered another group, The Ronettes, who we’ll be hearing more about in future episodes. The singles following “Then He Kissed Me” barely scraped the bottom of the Hot One Hundred, and the group left Philles in 1964. They got a payoff of five thousand dollars, in lieu of all future royalties on any of their recordings. They had no luck having hits without Spector, and one by one the group members left, and the group split up by 1966. Mary, Barbara, and Dee Dee briefly reunited as the Crystals in 1971, and La La and Dee Dee made an album together in the eighties of remakes of the group’s hits, but nothing came of any of these. Dee Dee continues to tour under the Crystals name in North America, while La La performs solo in America and under the Crystals name in Europe. Barbara, the lead singer on the group’s first hits, died in 2018. Darlene Love continues to perform, but we’ll hear more about her and the Blossoms in future episodes, I’m sure. The Crystals were treated appallingly by Spector, and are not often treated much better by the fans, who see them as just interchangeable parts in a machine created by a genius. But it should be remembered that they were the ones who brought Spector the song that became the first Philles hit, that both Barbara and La La were fine singers who sang lead on classic hit records, and that Spector taking all the credit for a team effort doesn’t mean he deserved it. Both the Crystals and the Blossoms deserved better than to have their identities erased in return for a flat session fee, in order to service the ego of one man.

Michelle Olley is host of Journey to Nutopia events, a member of the Cosmic Trigger production team, used to work for Skin Magazine and hosted the most famous fetish night of the 90's Rubber Ball. We talk about the first time we met, the works of Robert Anton Wilson, belief systems and much more. I can't recommend enough attending the (sort of) monthly Journey To Nutopia events and I'm sure after you've heard our conversation you'll want to be there.Find Michelle on Twitter @journey2_nu https://www.thecockpit.org.uk/journeytonutopiaFind me @JimthediamondMusic:Christian Death - When I was BedTheme tune by Daisy Eris Campbell and Tom Baker

  Episode ninety-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Song To Woody” by Bob Dylan, and at the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early sixties. 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 “Sherry” by the Four Seasons. 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/ —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This might not be available in the US, due to the number of Woody Guthrie songs in a row. Dylan’s first album is in the public domain in Europe, so a variety of reissues of it exist. An interesting and cheap one is this, which pairs it (and a non-album single by Dylan) with two Carolyn Hester albums which give a snapshot of the Greenwich Village scene, on one of which Dylan plays harmonica. The Harry Smith Anthology is also now public domain, and can be freely downloaded from archive.org.  I have used *many* books for this episode, most of which I will also be using for future episodes on Dylan: The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk and Elijah Wald is the fascinating and funny autobiography of Dylan’s mentor in his Greenwich Village period. Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald is the definitive book on Robert Johnson. Information on Woody Guthrie comes from Ramblin’ Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie by Ed Cray. Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan is a partial, highly inaccurate, but thoroughly readable autobiography. Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades. I’ve also used Robert Shelton’s No Direction Home, which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   1962 is the year when the sixties really started, and in the next few episodes we will see the first proper appearances of several of the musicians who would go on to make the decade what it was. By two weeks from now, when we get to episode one hundred and the end of the second year of the podcast, the stage will be set for us to look at that most mythologised of decades. And so today, we’re going to take our first look at one of the most important of the sixties musicians, the only songwriter ever to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, a man who influenced every single performer and songwriter for at least the next decade, and whose work inspired a whole subgenre, albeit one he had little but contempt for. We’re going to look at his first album, and at a song he wrote to his greatest influence. And we’re also going to look at how his career intersected with someone we talked about way back in the very first episode of this podcast. Today we’re going to look at Bob Dylan, and at “Song to Woody”: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “Song to Woody”] This episode is going to be a little different from several of the other episodes we’ve had recently. At the time he made his first album, Dylan was not the accomplished artist he quickly became, but a minor performer whose first record only contained two original songs. But he was from a tradition that we’ve looked at only in passing before. We’ve barely looked at the American folk music tradition, and largely ignored the musicians who were major figures in it, because those figures only really enter into rock and roll in a real way starting with Dylan. So as part of this episode, we’re going to have very brief, capsule, looks at a number of other musicians we’ve not touched on before. I’ll only be giving enough background for these people so you can get a flavour of them — in future episodes when we look at the folk and folk-rock scenes, we’ll also fill in some more of the background of these artists. That also means this episode is going to run a little long, just because there’s a lot to get through. Bob Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in the Minnesota Iron Range, an area of the US that was just beginning a slow descent into poverty, as the country suddenly needed a lot less metal after the end of World War II. He was born in Duluth, but moved to Hibbing, a much smaller town, when he was very young. As a kid, he was fascinated with music that sounded a little odd. He was first captivated by Johnnie Ray — and incidentally, Clinton Heylin, in his biography of Dylan, thinks that this must be wrong, and “Dylan has surely mixed up his names” and must be thinking of Johnny Ace, because “Ray’s main period of chart success” was 1956-58. Heylin’s books are usually very, very well researched, but here he’s showing his parochialism. Johnnie Ray’s biggest *UK* hits were in 1956-8, but in the US his biggest hits came in 1951, and he had a string of hits in the very early fifties.  Ray’s hits, like “Cry”, were produced by Mitch Miller, and were on Columbia records: [Excerpt: Johnnie Ray, “Cry”] Shortly after his infatuation with Ray’s music, he fell for the music of Hank Williams in a big way, and became obsessed with Williams’ songwriting: [Excerpt: Hank Williams, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”] He also became a fan of another Hank, Hank Snow, the country singer who had been managed by Colonel Tom Parker, and through Snow he became aware of the songs of Jimmie Rodgers, who Snow frequently covered, and who Snow admired enough that Snow’s son was named Jimmie Rodgers Snow.  But he soon also became a big fan of rhythm and blues and rock and roll. He taught himself to play rudimentary piano in a Little Richard style, and his ambition, as quoted in his high school yearbook, was to join Little Richard’s band. He was enough of a fan of rock and roll music that he went to see Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper on the penultimate date of their ill-fated tour. He later claimed to have seen a halo over Holly’s head during the performance. His first brush with fame came indirectly as a result of that tour. A singer from Fargo, North Dakota, named Bobby Vee, was drafted in to cover for Holly at the show that Holly had been travelling to when he died. Vee sounded a little like Holly, if you didn’t listen too closely, and he had a minor local hit with a song called “Suzy Baby”: [Excerpt: Bobby Vee, “Suzy Baby”] Dylan joined Vee’s band for a short while under the stage name Elston Gunn, playing the piano, though he was apparently not very good (he could only play in C, according to some sources I’ve read), and he didn’t stay in Vee’s band very long. But while he was in Vee’s band, he would tell friends and relatives that he *was* Bobby Vee, and at least some people believed him. Vee would go on to have a career as one of the wave of Bobbies that swarmed all over American Bandstand in the late fifties and early sixties, with records like “Rubber Ball”: [Excerpt: Bobby Vee, “Rubber Ball”] While Dylan made his name with a very different kind of music, he would always argue that Vee deserved rather more respect than he usually got, and that there was some merit to his music. But it wasn’t until he went to university in Minneapolis that Robert Zimmerman became Bob Dylan, and changed everything about his life. As many people do when they go to university, he reinvented himself — he took on a new name, which has variously been quoted as having been inspired by Marshall Dillon from the TV series Gunsmoke and by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. He stopped studying, and devoted his time to music and chasing women. And he also took on a new musical style. The way he tells it, he had an epiphany in a record shop listening booth, listening to an album by the folk singer Odetta. Odetta was an astonishing singer who combined elements of folk, country, and blues with an opera-trained voice, and Dylan was probably listening to her first album, which was largely traditional folk songs, plus one song each by Lead Belly and Jimmie Rodgers: [Excerpt: Odetta, “Muleskinner Blues”] Dylan had soon sold his electric guitar and bought an acoustic, and he immediately learned all of Odetta’s repertoire and started performing her songs, and Lead Belly’s, with a friend, “Spider” John Koerner, who would later become a fairly well-known folk blues musician in his own right: [Excerpt: Ray, Koerner, and Glover, “Hangman”] And then, at a coffee-shop, he got talking with a friend of his, Flo Castner, and she invited him to come round to her brother’s apartment, which was nearby, because she thought he might be interested in some of the music her brother had. Dylan discovered two albums at Lyn Castner’s house that day that would change his life. The first, and the less important to him in the short term, is one we’ve talked about before — he heard the Spirituals to Swing album, the record of the 1938 Carnegie Hall concerts that we talked about back in the first few episodes of the podcast: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner & Pete Johnson, “It’s Alright, Baby”] That album impressed him, but it was the other record he heard that day that changed everything for him immediately. It was a collection of recordings by Woody Guthrie. Guthrie is someone we’ve only mentioned in passing so far, but he was pivotal in the development of American folk music in the 1940s, and in particular he was important in the politicisation of that music. In the 1930s, there wasn’t really a distinction made between country music and folk — that distinction is one that only really came later — and Guthrie had started out as a country singer, singing songs inspired by the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, and other 1920s greats. For most of his early twenties he’d bummed around Oklahoma and Texas doing odd jobs as a sign painter, psychic, faith healer, and whatever else he could pick up a little money for. But then in 1936 he’d travelled out to California in search of work. When there, he’d hooked up with a cousin, Jack Guthrie, who was a Western singer, performing the kind of Western Swing that would later become rockabilly. We don’t have any recordings of Jack from this early, but when you listen to him in the forties, you can hear the kind of hard-edged California Western Swing that would influence most of the white artists we looked at in the first year or so of the podcast: [Excerpt: Jack Guthrie, “Oakie Boogie”] Woody and Jack weren’t musically compatible — this was when country and western were seen as very, very different genres, rather than being lumped into one — but they worked together for a while. Jack was the lead singer and guitarist, and Woody was his comedy sidekick, backing vocalist, and harmonica player. They performed with a group called the Beverly Hillbillies and got their own radio show, The Oakie and Woody Show, but it wasn’t successful, and Jack decided to give up the show. Woody continued with a friend, Maxine Crissman, who performed as “Lefty Lou From Old Mizzou”. The Woody and Lefty act became hugely popular, but Lefty eventually also quit, due to her health failing, and while at the time she seems to have been regarded as the major talent in the duo, her leaving the act was indirectly the best thing that ever happened to Guthrie. The radio station they were performing on was owned by a fairly left-wing businessman who had connections with the radical left faction of the Democratic Party (and in California in the thirties that could be quite radical, somewhere close to today’s Democratic Socialists of America), and when Lefty quit the act, the owner of the station gave Guthrie another job — the owner also ran a left-wing newspaper, and since Guthrie was from Oklahoma, maybe he would be interested in writing some columns about the plight of the Okie migrants?  Guthrie went and spent time with those people, and his shock at the poverty they were living in and the discrimination they were suffering seems to have radicalised him. He started hanging round with members of the Communist Party, though he apparently never joined — he wasn’t all that interested in Marxist theory or the party line, he just wanted to take the side of the victims against the bullies, and he saw the Communists as doing that. He was, though, enough of a fellow traveller that when World War II started he took the initial Communist line of it being a capitalist’s fight that socialists should have no part of (a line which was held until Russia joined the war, at which point it became a crusade against the evils of fascism). His employer was a more resolute anti-fascist, and so Guthrie lost his newspaper job, and he decided to move across the country to New York, where he hooked up with a group of left-wing intellectuals and folk singers, centring on Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, and Lead Belly. It was this environment, centred in Almanac House in Greenwich Village, that spawned the Almanac Singers and later the Weavers, who we talked about a few episodes back. And Guthrie had been the most important of all of them. Guthrie was a folk performer — a big chunk of his repertoire was old songs like “Ida Red”, “Stackolee”, and “Who’s Going to Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?” – but he also wrote songs himself, taking the forms of old folk and country songs, and reworking the lyrics — and sometimes, but not always, the music — creating songs that dealt with events that were happening at the time. There were songs about famous outlaws, recast as Robin Hood type figures: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “Pretty Boy Floyd”] There were talking blues with comedy lyrics: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “Talking Fishing Blues”] There were the famous Dust Bowl Ballads, about the dust storms that had caused so much destruction and hardship in the west: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “The Great Dust Storm”] And of course, there was “This Land is Your Land”, a radical song about how private property is immoral and unnatural, which has been taken up as an anthem by people who would despise everything that Guthrie stood for: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “This Land is Your Land”] It’s not certain which records by Guthrie Dylan heard that day — he talks about it in his autobiography, but the songs he talks about weren’t ones that were on the same album, and he seems to just be naming a handful of Guthrie’s songs. What is certain is that Dylan reacted to this music in a visceral way. He decided that he had to *become* Woody Guthrie, and took on Guthrie’s playing and singing style, even his accent. However, he soon modulated that slightly, when a friend told him that he might as well give up — Ramblin’ Jack Elliot was already doing the Guthrie-imitation thing. Elliot, like Dylan, was a middle-class Jewish man who had reinvented himself as a Woody Guthrie copy — in this case, Elliot Adnopoz, the son of a surgeon, had become Ramblin’ Jack the singing cowboy, and had been an apprentice of Guthrie, living with him and learning everything from him, before going over to Britain, where his status as an actual authentic American had meant he was one of the major figures in the British folk scene and the related skiffle scene. Alan Lomax, who had moved to the UK temporarily to escape the anti-Communist witch hunts, had got Elliot a contract with Topic Records, a folk label that had started out as part of the Workers’ Music Association, which as you can probably tell from the name was affiliated with the Communist Party of Great Britain. There he’d recorded an album of Guthrie songs, which Dylan’s acquaintance played for him: [Excerpt: Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, “1913 Massacre”] Dylan was shocked that there was someone out there doing the same thing, but then he just took on aspects of Elliot’s persona as well as Guthrie’s. He was going to be the next Woody Guthrie, and that meant inhabiting his persona utterly, and giving his whole repertoire over to Guthrie songs. He was also, though, making tentative efforts at writing his own songs, too. One which we only have as a lyric was written to a girlfriend, and was set to the same tune we just heard — Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre”. The lyrics were things like “Hey, hey Bonny, I’m singing to you now/The song I’m singing is the best I know how” Incidentally, the woman that was written for is yet another person in the story who now has a different name — she became a moderately successful actor, appearing in episodes of Star Trek and Gunsmoke, and changed her name to Jahanara Romney shortly after her marriage to the hippie peace activist Wavy Gravy (which isn’t Mr. Gravy’s birth name either). Their son, whose birth name was Howdy Do-Good Gravy Tomahawk Truckstop Romney, also changed his name later on, you’ll be unsurprised to hear. Dylan by this point was feeling as constrained by the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul as he had earlier by the small town Hibbing. In January 1961, he decided he was going to go to New York, and while he was there he was going to go and meet Woody Guthrie in person. Guthrie was, by this time, severely ill — he had Huntington’s disease, a truly awful genetic disorder that had also killed his mother. Huntington’s causes dementia, spasmodic movements, a loss of control of the body, and a ton of other mental and physical symptoms. Guthrie had been in a psychiatric hospital since 1956, and was only let out every Sunday to see family at a friend’s house.  Bob Dylan quickly became friendly with Guthrie, visiting him regularly in the hospital to play Guthrie’s own songs for him, and occasionally joining him on the family visits on Sundays. He only spent a few months doing this — Dylan has always been someone who moved on quickly, and Guthrie also moved towards the end of 1961, to a new hospital closer to his family, but these visits had a profound effect on the young man. When not visiting Guthrie, Dylan was spending his time in Greenwich Village, the Bohemian centre of New York. The Village at that time was a hotbed of artists and radicals, with people like the poet Allen Ginsberg, the street musician Moondog, and Tiny Tim, a ukulele player who sang Rudy Vallee songs in falsetto, all part of the scene. It was also the centre of what was becoming the second great folk revival. That revival had been started in 1952, when the most important bootleg ever was released, Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean”] Harry Smith was a record collector, experimental filmmaker, and follower of the occultist Aleister Crowley. His greatest work seems at least in part to have been created as a magickal work, with album covers designed by himself full of esoteric symbolism. Smith had a huge collection of old 78 records — all of them things that had been issued commercially in the late 1920s and early thirties, when the record industry had been in a temporary boom before the depression. Many of these records had been very popular in the twenties, but by 1952 even the most popular acts, like Blind Lemon Jefferson or the Carter Family, were largely forgotten. So Smith and Moe Asch, the owner of Folkways Records, took advantage of the new medium, the long-playing album, and put together a six-album set of these recordings, not bothering with trivialities like copyright even though, again, most of these had been recorded for major labels only twenty or so years earlier — but at this time there was not really such a thing as a market for back catalogue, and none of the record labels involved seem to have protested. Smith’s collection was an idiosyncratic one, based around his own tastes. It ran the gamut from hard blues: [Excerpt: Joe Williams’ Washboard Blues Singers, “Baby Please Don’t Go”] To the Carter Family’s country recordings of old ballads that date back centuries: [Excerpt: The Carter Family, “Black Jack Davey”] To gospel: [Excerpt: Sister Clara Hudmon, “Stand By Me”] But put together in one place, these records suggested the existence of a uniquely American roots music tradition, one that encompassed all these genres, and Smith’s Anthology became the favourite music of the same type of people who in the UK around the same time were becoming skifflers — many of them radical leftists who had been part of the US equivalent of the trad jazz movement (who were known as “mouldy figs”) and were attracted by the idea of an authentic music of the working man. The Harry Smith Anthology became the core repertoire for every American folk musician of the fifties, the seed around which the whole movement crystallised. Every folkie knew every single song on those records. Those folkies had started playing at coffee shops in Greenwich Village, places that were known as basket houses, because they didn’t charge for entry or pay the artists, but the performers could pass a basket and split whatever the audience decided to donate.  Originally, the folk musicians were not especially popular, and in fact they were booked for that reason. The main entertainment for those coffee shops was poetry, and the audience for poetry would mostly buy a single coffee and make it last all night. The folkies were booked to come on between the poets and play a few songs to make the audience clear out to make room for a new audience to come and buy new coffees. However, some of the people got good enough that they actually started to get their own audiences, and within a short time the roles were reversed, with the poets coming on to clear out the folk audience. Dylan’s first gigs were on this circuit, playing on bills put together by Fred Neil, a musician who was at this point mostly playing blues songs but who within a few years would write some of the great classics of the sixties singer-songwriter genre: [Excerpt: Fred Neil, “Everybody’s Talkin'”] By the time Dylan hit the scene, there were quite a few very good musicians in the Village, and the folk scene had grown to the point that there were multiple factions. There were the Stalinists, who had coalesced around Pete Seeger, the elder statesman of the scene, and who played a mixture of summer-camp singalong music and topical songs about news events. There were the Zionists, who were singing things like “Hava Nagilah”. There were bluegrass players, and there were the two groups that most attracted Dylan — those who sang old folk ballads, and those who sang the blues. Those latter two groups tended to cluster together, because they were smaller than the other groups, and also because of their own political views — while all of the scene were leftists, the blues and ballad singers tended either to be vaguely apolitical, or to be anarchists and Trotskyites rather than Stalinists. But they had a deeper philosophical disagreement with the Stalinists — Seeger’s camp thought that the quality of a song was secondary to the social good it could do, while the blues and ballad singers held that the important thing was the music, and any political or social good was a nice byproduct. There was a huge amount of infighting between these small groups — the narcissism of small differences — but there was one place they would all hang out. The Folklore Centre was a record and bookshop owned by a man named Izzy Young, and it was where you would go to buy every new book, to buy and sell copies of the zines that were published, and to hang out and find out who the new musicians on the scene were.  And it was at the Folklore Centre that Dylan met Dave Van Ronk: [Excerpt: Dave Van Ronk, “Cocaine Blues”] Van Ronk was the most important musician in the blues and ballads group of folkies, and was politically an anarchist who, through his connection with the Schachtmanites (a fringe-left group who were more Trotskyite than the Trotskyites, and whose views sometimes shaded into anarchism) was becoming converted to Marxism. A physically massive man, he’d started out as a traditional jazz guitarist and banjo player, but had slowly moved on into the folk side of things through his love of blues singers like Bessie Smith and folk-blues artists like Lead Belly. Van Ronk had learned a great deal from Rev. Gary Davis, a blind gospel-blues singer whose technique Van Ronk had studied: [Excerpt: Rev. Gary Davis, “Death Don’t Have No Mercy”] Van Ronk was one of the few people on the Village scene who was a native New Yorker, though he was from Queens rather than the Village, and he was someone who had already made a few records that Dylan had heard, mostly of the standard repertoire: [Excerpt: Dave Van Ronk, “See That My Grave is Kept Clean”] Dylan consciously sought him out as the person to imitate on the scene, and he was soon regularly sleeping on Van Ronk’s couch and being managed for a brief time by Van Ronk’s wife. Once again, Dylan was learning everything he could from the people he was around — but he had a much bigger ambition than anyone else on the scene. A lot of the people on that scene have been very bitter over the years about Dylan, but Van Ronk, who did more for Dylan than anyone else on the scene, never really was — the two stopped being close once he was no more use to Dylan, as so often happened, but they remained friendly, because Van Ronk was secure enough in himself and his own abilities that he didn’t need the validation of being important to the big star. Van Ronk was an important mentor to him for a crucial period of six months or so, and Dylan always acknowledged that, just as Van Ronk always acknowledged Dylan’s talent. And that talent, at least at first, was a performing talent rather than a songwriting one. Dylan was writing songs by now, but hardly any, and when he did perform them, he was not acknowledging them. His first truly successful song, a song about nuclear war, “Let Me Die in my Footsteps”, he would introduce as a Weavers song: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “Let Me Die in my Footsteps”] For the most part, his repertoire was still only Woody Guthrie songs, but people were amazed by his personal charisma, his humour — one comparison you see time and again when people talk about his early performances is Charlie Chaplin — and his singing. There are so many jokes about Dylan’s vocals that this sounds like a joke, but among the folk crowd, his phrasing in particular — as influenced by the R&B records he grew up listening to as by Guthrie — was considered utterly astonishing. Dylan started publishing some of his song lyrics in Broadside, a magazine for new topical songs, and in other magazines like Sing Out! These were associated with the Communist side of the folk movement, and Dylan had a foot in both camps through his association with Guthrie and Guthrie’s friends. Through these people he got to know Suze Rotolo, a volunteer with the Congress of Racial Equality, who became his girlfriend, and her sister Carla, who was the assistant to Alan Lomax, who was now back from the UK, and the Rotolos played a part in Dylan’s big breakthrough.  The timeline that follows is a bit confused, but Carla Rotolo recorded some of the best Village folk singers, and wrote to John Hammond about the tape, mentioning Dylan in particular. At the same time, Hammond’s son John Hammond Jr, another musician on the circuit and a friend of Dylan’s, apparently mentioned Dylan to his father. Dylan was also working on Robert Shelton, the folk critic of the New York Times, who eventually gave Dylan a massive rave review for a support slot he’d played at Gerde’s Folk City. And the same day that review came out, eight days after Carla Rotolo’s letter, Dylan was in the recording studio with the folk singer Carolyn Hester, playing harmonica on a few of her tracks, and Hammond was the producer: [Excerpt: Carolyn Hester, “I’ll Fly Away”] Hammond had, of course, organised the Spirituals to Swing concerts which had influenced Dylan. And not only that, he’d been the person to discover Billie Holiday, and Count Basie. And Charlie Christian. He was now working for Columbia Records, where he’d just produced the first secular records for a promising new gospel singer who had decided to turn pop, named Aretha Franklin: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “Today I Sing the Blues”] So Hammond was an important figure in many ways, and he had a lot of latitude at Columbia Records. He decided to sign Dylan, and even though Mitch Miller, Columbia’s head of A&R at the time, had no clue what Hammond saw in Dylan, Hammond’s track record was good enough that he was allowed to get on with it and put out an album. Hammond also gave Dylan an album to take home and listen to, a record which hadn’t come out yet, a reissue of some old blues records called “King of the Delta Blues Singers” by Robert Johnson: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, “Crossroads Blues”] There has been a hell of a lot of mythology about Johnson over the years, so much so that it’s almost impossible to give anyone who’s heard of him at all an accurate impression of Johnson’s place in music history. One question I have been asked repeatedly since I started this podcast is “How come you didn’t start with Robert Johnson?”, and if you don’t know about him, you’ll get an idea of his general perception among music fans from the fact that I recently watched an episode of a science fiction TV series where our heroes had to go back in time to stop the villains from preventing Johnson from making his recordings, because by doing that they could stop rock and roll from ever existing. There’s a popular perception that Johnson was the most important blues musician of his generation, and that he was hugely influential on the development of blues and R&B, and it’s simply false. He *was* a truly great musician, and he *was* hugely influential — but he was influential on white musicians in the sixties, not black musicians in the thirties, forties, and fifties. In his lifetime, his best selling records sold around five thousand copies, which to put it in perspective is about the same number of people who’ve listened to some of my more popular podcast episodes. Johnson’s biographer Elijah Wald — a man who, like I do, has a huge respect for Johnson’s musicianship, has said “knowing about Johnson and Muddy Waters but not about Leroy Carr or Dinah Washington [is] like knowing about, say, the Sir Douglas Quintet but not knowing about the Beatles.” I’d agree, except that the Sir Douglas Quintet were much, much, bigger in the sixties than Robert Johnson was in the thirties. Johnson’s reputation comes entirely from that album that Hammond had handed Dylan. Hammond had been one of the tiny number of people who had actually listened to Johnson at the time he was performing. Indeed, Hammond had wanted to get Johnson to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts, only to find that Johnson had died only a short time earlier — they’d got Big Bill Broonzy to play in his place, and played a couple of Johnson’s records from the stage. That had, in fact, kickstarted Broonzy’s later second career as a folk-blues musician playing for largely white audiences, rather than as a proto-Chicago-blues performer playing for Black ones. Hammond’s friend Alan Lomax had also been a fan of Johnson — he’d gone to Mississippi later, to try to record Johnson, also without having realised that Johnson had died. But far from Johnson being the single most important blues musician of the thirties, as he is now portrayed in popular culture, if you’d asked most blues musicians or listeners about Robert Johnson in the twenty-three years between his death and the King of the Delta Blues Singers album coming out, most of them would have looked at you blankly, or maybe asked if you meant Lonnie Johnson, the much more famous musician who was a big inspiration for Robert. When King of the Delta Blues Singers came out, it changed all that, and made Robert Johnson into a totemic figure among white blues fans, and we’ll see over the next year or two a large number of very important musicians who took inspiration from him — and deservedly so. While the myth of Robert Johnson has almost no connection to the real man, his music demonstrated a remarkable musical mind — he was a versatile, skilled guitarist and arranger, and someone whose musical palette was far wider than his recorded legacy suggests — Ramblin’ Johnny Shines, who travelled with Johnson for a time, describes him as particularly enjoying playing songs like “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby” and Jimmie Rodgers songs, and polkas, calling Johnson “a polka hound, man”. And even though in his handful of recording sessions he was asked only to play blues, you can still hear elements of that: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, “They’re Red Hot”] But the music wasn’t the main thing that grabbed Dylan. Dylan played the album for Dave Van Ronk, who was unimpressed — musically, Johnson just didn’t seem very original to Van Ronk, who played Dylan records by Skip James, Leroy Carr, and others, showing Dylan where Johnson had picked up most of his musical ideas. And Dylan had to agree with him that Johnson didn’t sound particularly original in that context — but he also didn’t care, reasoning that many of the Woody Guthrie songs he loved were rewrites of old Carter Family songs, so if Johnson was rewriting Leroy Carr songs that was fair enough. What got to Dylan was Johnson’s performance style, but also his ability with words. Johnson had a very sparse, economical, lyrical style which connected with Dylan on a primordial level. Most of those who became fans of Johnson following the release of King of the Delta Blues Singers saw Johnson as an exotic and scary figure — the myth commonly told about him is that he sold his soul at a crossroads to the Devil in return for the ability to play the guitar, though that’s a myth that was originally told about a different Mississippi blues man called Tommy Johnson, and there’s no evidence that anyone thought that of him at the time — and so these later fans see his music as being haunted. Dylan instead seems to see Johnson as someone very like himself — in his autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan talks about Johnson being a bothersome kid who played harmonica, who was later taught a bit of guitar and then learned the rest of his music from records, rather than from live performers. Dylan’s version of Johnson is closer to the reality, as far as we know it, than the Johnson of legend is, and Dylan seems to have been delighted when he found out much later that the name of the musician who taught Johnson to play guitar was Ike Zimmerman. Dylan immediately tried to incorporate Johnson’s style into his own songwriting, and we’ll see the effects of that in future episodes. But that songwriting wouldn’t be seen much on his debut album. And nor would his Woody Guthrie repertoire. Instead, Dylan performed a set of traditional ballads and blues numbers, most of which he never performed live normally, and at least half of which were arrangements that Dylan copied wholesale from Dave Van Ronk. [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “See That My Grave is Kept Clean”] The album was recorded quickly, in a couple of days. Hammond found Dylan incredibly difficult to work with, saying he had appalling mic technique, and for many of the songs Dylan refused to do a second take. There were only two originals on the album. One, “Talkin’ New York”, was a comedy talking blues about his early time in New York, very much in the style of Woody Guthrie’s talking blues songs. The other, “Song To Woody”, was a rewrite of his earlier “Song For Bonny”, which was itself a rewrite of Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre”. The song is a touching one, Dylan paying tribute to his single biggest influence: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “Song to Woody”] Dylan was moving on, and he knew he was moving on, but he had to say goodbye. Dylan’s first album was not a success, and he became known within Columbia Records as “Hammond’s Folly”, but nor did it lose money, since it was recorded so quickly. It’s a record that Dylan and Hammond both later spoke poorly of, but it’s one I rather like, and one of the best things to come out of the Greenwich Village folk scene. But by the time it came out, Dylan’s artistic heart was already elsewhere, and when we come back to him in a couple of months, we’ll be seeing someone who had completely reinvented himself.  

Everything has changed. In a blink we realize what we took for granted. I miss Dodgers games, yoga class, and Friday Morning Hike Club. In this episode of the Idea Fountain Kevin Carroll talks about the void left in our lives from the absence of sports and play during Covid-19. If quarantine has you in a rut - taking a few lessons from Kevin's Rules of the Red Rubber Ball may be exactly what you need.

On this episode we ask: Have you even considered the importance of play in leadership? What if it's the catalyst to the transformation you crave? Kevin Carroll: Author + Human Performance Coach + Creative Catalyst. Kevin brings a playful curiosity, an avid intellect, a keen understanding of human nature, and a lifelong love of competition to all of his endeavours. He sees humanistic potential + possibilities everywhere. He solves issues and challenges in surprising + unexpected ways. Kevin is an author of three highly successful books published by ESPN, Disney Press and McGraw-Hill. He has helped turn creative ideas into reality for organizations such as Nike, Starbucks, Adidas, Walt Disney, Target, Proctor & Gamble, Under Armour, Mattel, the National Basketball Association and many others. Kevin went from being a high school athletic trainer, to a college athletic trainer, to the athletic trainer for the Philadelphia 76ers in just 5 years. Oh, and did I mention, he speaks 5 languages. It's time for your organization to stop bleeding top talent. You can find out more about working directly with me by going to: http://DovBaron.com . P.S. Thank-you to you for making us the #1 podcast globally for Fortune 500 listeners! And with a potential reach of 2.5 to 4 million listeners for every show, we’re also honored and grateful to be cited in INC.com as The #1 Podcast To Make You a Better Leader.

In one of our strangest tales yet, a severed head is found in rural Pennsylvania. However, all the evidence indicates the head was severed and embalmed by a professional. Despite relying on the services of 20 experts, police are unable to identify the remains or even how the head got to Pennsylvania. Is this a evidence of a black market body market or something more sinister?https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-bodies-head-specialreport/special-report-a-womans-severed-head-was-found-in-the-woods-who-is-she-idUSKBN1D21B4https://medium.com/true-crime-by-cat-leigh/embalmed-head-found-in-the-woods-7764e1a23chttps://juxtapositivelyjen.weebly.com/247-crime-time-with-jen-presents-conundrums--conspiracies/not-just-any-body-the-mysterious-head-found-in-a-rural-pennsylvania-fieldhttps://www.investigationdiscovery.com/crimefeed/murder/cops-baffled-by-severed-head-found-with-red-rubber-balls-insteadhttps://archive.triblive.com/news/red-rubber-balls-in-eye-sockets-of-embalmed-head-found-in-beaver-county/https://www.brainerddispatch.com/news/3906186-severed-head-found-pennsylvania-may-be-linked-body-parts-market

I discussed Kevin Carroll's book what's your red rubber ball on Monday motivation episode --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/sherman-on/support

Weed and Cliff discuss the classic game played in PE Class - Dodgeball. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/weed-and-cliff-dot-com/support

Winter break is almost over and there are no more threats looming over Halcyon City. The team takes some time to relax, but that's easier said than done; people they care about are still at the mercy of AEGIS and the Rubber Ball, and maybe real heroes can't let that slide. CAST Sally Chan - Azure Storm Charlotte Elena - Pushpin Ray Goldberg - GM Noa Heinrich - Roxie Rapid Matthew Marquez - Dreamdancer Megan Scharlau - Project Ares Delta SOUNDTRACK Theme music by Riley Allen, rileyallen59.wixsite.com/music "Christmas Rap", "Dreams Become Real", "String Impromptu Number 1", and "Big Rock" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Learn more about Masks: A New Generation at http://www.magpiegames.com/masks/! Follow Tabletop Potluck on Facebook and Twitter Support the show at patreon.com/tabletoppotluck

Azure Storm, Pushpin, and Roxie Rapid visit a notorious supervillain jail called the Rubber Ball to interrogate their old foe Alan Kazam. Dreamdancer and Delta stake out the Green Knight's mansion to figure out what he's planning, and run into his houseguests instead.   CAST Sally Chan - Azure Storm Charlotte Elena - Pushpin Ray Goldberg - GM Noa Heinrich - Roxie Rapid Matthew Marquez - Dreamdancer Megan Scharlau - Project Ares Delta SOUNDTRACK Theme music by Riley Allen, rileyallen59.wixsite.com/music "Unease Piano", "Fairytale Waltz", and "Twisted" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Learn more about Masks: A New Generation at http://www.magpiegames.com/masks/! Follow Tabletop Potluck on Facebook and Twitter Support the show at patreon.com/tabletoppotluck

This episode concludes our conversation with Kevin Carroll. Kevin is an Air Force Veteran, a former trainer for the Philadelphia 76ers, and the founder of Kevin Carroll Katalyst. His clients include ESPN, Starbucks, and Disney. Kevin is also an author and motivational speaker. Listen to this amazing conversation on hard work and positive influences and stay tuned for our next episode!Support the show

This episode features the first half of our conversation with Kevin Carroll, author and founder of Kevin Carroll Katalyst. Before founding his consulting firm, Kevin was a trainer for the Philadelphia 76ers and a translator for the Air Force. His company has consulted with big names such as the NHL, ESPN, Starbucks, and more. Listen to this amazing conversation and stay tuned next week for more!Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/atribecalledyes)

Welcome to episode 79 of The PE Umbrella podcast! Joining me Under the Umbrella today is Middle School Physical Education teacher, Stephanie Sandino. During this episode, we discuss... - How Stephanie lives what she preaches and serves from a full vessel! - What I could expect from my first day in Stephanie's Physed class. - What Stephanie has learned about herself and the physed profession in the past 12 months. - Why Stephanie fosters the 'Red Rubber ball' outlook and how she helps her students find theirs. In addition to this, we discuss the show regulars and find out what her top instant activities are and her top class management tips. So what are you waiting for? Come on over and join us Under the Umbrella!

Matthew Bannister on Raine Countess Spencer. The daughter of Barbara Cartland and step mother of Princess Diana who nicknamed her "Acid Raine". Jimmy Perry who drew on his own life to co-write classic TV comedies including Dad's Army and Hi De Hi. General Stylianos Pattakos, a leading figure in the military junta that took power in Greece in 1967. The theatre director Howard Davies, acclaimed for his productions of twentieth century American classics and for the premiere of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. And Bobby Vee - the sixties pop idol whose many chart hits included Rubber Ball and Take Good Care of My Baby. Producer: Neil George.

Measure all the properties of a rubber ball.

List all the properties of a rubber ball.

This movie explores the positive and negative effects that a rubber ball has on the natural world.

Grade 4

Interview with author Kevin Carroll, author of "The Red Rubber Ball at Work: Elevate Your Game Through the Hidden Power of Play". Hosted by Herb Schaffner, Publisher at McGraw-Hill Professional Division. Produced and directed by PanRight Productions. Five minutes in length.

In the second part of our conversation with Kevin Carroll, we talk about the concept of "fail better". Part of the important aspect of play is that it lets you experiment and riff in a safe environment, where failing and retrying, tinkering, and treating things as your lab is well tolerated. In contrast, work environments tend to be much more high risk, and making mistakes are something full of shame- it's what makes people try to cover up errors, rather than own them, understand them, and do something different next time.Great companies that focus on design and innovation like IDEO (known for the ipod, swiffer, and other great products) they start with Understanding the problem or situation at hand, followed by detailed Observation, Brainstorming and prototyping solutions. We have to remember this same process can work for organizing our kitchens; talking to our kids about getting a homework center that works with them rather than against them, or any other problem at hand. Innovation comes from creativity and being willing to take risks and as Kevin states, being willing to Fail Better than ever before.Click here to listen or download Show 110- Kevin Carroll, Katalyst- Fail Better

"Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the singer-songwriter Gene Pitney. Gene grew up in Rockville, Connecticut, the middle child of a large family. His father worked in the local mills and the family sold fruit and vegetables from their garden to supplement this income. A shy child, Gene says that performing couldn't have been further from his mind, although he enjoyed singing. His first solo performance at school resulted in an embarrassing whimper as Gene was petrified by the expectant audience. In his teens he began to learn the guitar and piano, and formed a local band whilst at high school, finding that performing was a good way to overcome his shyness. Spotted by what Gene calls "the proverbial fat man with a cigar", he was taken to New York and recording contracts soon followed. Soon his songs were being recorded by some of the biggest stars of the time - Hello Mary Lou was released by Rick Nelson, Roy Orbison recorded Today's Teardrops as the B-side to his million-selling single, Blue Angel, and Rubber Ball became a worldwide hit for US artist Bobby Vee and UK artist Marty Wilde. By the mid sixties Gene had found international success with the Bacharach song Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa. In 1990 he had his first number one in this country with Something's Gotten Hold Of My Heart, a duet with Marc Almond.[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]Favourite track: The Last Song by Elton John Book: The Giant Book of Mensa Puzzles by Robert Allen Luxury: Case of Opus One wine

"Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the singer-songwriter Gene Pitney. Gene grew up in Rockville, Connecticut, the middle child of a large family. His father worked in the local mills and the family sold fruit and vegetables from their garden to supplement this income. A shy child, Gene says that performing couldn't have been further from his mind, although he enjoyed singing. His first solo performance at school resulted in an embarrassing whimper as Gene was petrified by the expectant audience. In his teens he began to learn the guitar and piano, and formed a local band whilst at high school, finding that performing was a good way to overcome his shyness. Spotted by what Gene calls "the proverbial fat man with a cigar", he was taken to New York and recording contracts soon followed. Soon his songs were being recorded by some of the biggest stars of the time - Hello Mary Lou was released by Rick Nelson, Roy Orbison recorded Today's Teardrops as the B-side to his million-selling single, Blue Angel, and Rubber Ball became a worldwide hit for US artist Bobby Vee and UK artist Marty Wilde. By the mid sixties Gene had found international success with the Bacharach song Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa. In 1990 he had his first number one in this country with Something's Gotten Hold Of My Heart, a duet with Marc Almond. [Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs] Favourite track: The Last Song by Elton John Book: The Giant Book of Mensa Puzzles by Robert Allen Luxury: Case of Opus One wine