Podcasts about San Francisco Bay

Oran Canfield's upbringing took him across various locations, including Massachusetts, Philadelphia, Central America, New Mexico, Arizona, and the San Francisco Bay area. While attending the San Francisco Art Institute, Oran began his career as a drummer and became heavily involved in San Francisco's underground music and art communities. Along with his involvement as a drummer for numerous bands, including Child Abuse and Chaser, he also owned and operated a recording studio and cooperated a music venue featuring experimental and creative jazz music. He has also been a bike messenger, piano restorer, housecleaner, limo driver, and sex-toy maker. Early in 2001, after seven separate stints in rehab, he got clean after attending an experimental treatment center in the Caribbean islands. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and works as a musician and freelance art handler. Oran's memoir, Long Past Stopping, chronicles his personal journey, including his upbringing, involvement in the underground music scene, battles with addiction, and eventual path to recovery. On another note, today(June 2nd) is Lydia's Birthday. Happy Birthday Lydia!    

Sean O'Hara recently won an audition for a double bass section position in the Fort Worth Symphony.  In this episode, we talk about Sean's journey from the San Francisco Bay area to UCLA to study with Chris Hanulik, his time working with Brian Johnson at Cal State Fullerton, his with studying with Tim Pitts at Rice University, lessons learned after 33 auditions, getting into traditional Irish, music, and much more.  Enjoy!   Subscribe to the podcast to get these interviews delivered to you automatically!   Thank you to our sponsor, Dorico! It is my favorite software for music notation and composition. Designed for MacOS, iPad, and Windows, Dorico's workflow allows you to spend more time making music. Download Dorico 5, their free iPad app, or their free version (forever), Dorico SE 5.   Get Dorico: https://www.steinberg.net/dorico/   Connect with us: all things double bass double bass merch double bass sheet music   Listen to Contrabass Conversations with our free app for iOS, Android, and Kindle. Check out my Beginner's Classical Bass course and Intermediate to Advanced Classical Bass course, available exclusively from Discover Double Bass.   theme music by Eric Hochberg

It's 2006. TEDx announces that they're holding the first-ever TEDx University. They invite all of us who are attendees to submit a description of what we want to share and teach the group. And a handful will be selected to do Talks. At this point, I'm not a speaker; I'm still in the technology industry. Still, I know exactly what I want to do. I want to teach the other attendees something that makes me feel like a badass whenever I do it... I'm going to teach them how to break boards with their bare hands! So I present my crazy idea for selection: Mind Over Wood. And… I get chosen as one of only 30 speakers out of over a thousand people! Excited, I get to work right away on writing my Talk and start picturing myself speaking in front of world leaders, neuroscientists, and billionaires... Wait. World leaders. Neuroscientists. Billionaires. I start thinking, “Who am I to teach anything to a roomful of those people? What if they laugh at me, or even worse, walk right out of the room?” So on the day of TEDx University, I'm nervously standing in front of the room. I see the editor of Forbes to the left, three rows back. I see the founder of Flickr walk into the room on the right. I realize there's a Nobel Prize winner sitting in the front row. But I'm also feeling good about my Talk because I've been rehearsing it relentlessly. So OK, it's go time! I take a deep breath and begin.  And I can't tell you how many people came up afterward to tell me how impactful my presentation was. Wow. At that moment I realize how fun this was and am astonished that people get to do this… for a living... including my incredible guest today! Adiel Gorel is sought-after as an international speaker and recently joined the TEDx stage. In this episode of the Storytelling School Podcast, he talks about how discovering something that exists only in the U.S. motivated him to help others change one area of their unfolding life story. He also answers questions such as: What's the biggest financial gift you can add to your story in the U.S. (if you're not already)? What should you do before you close your story in a Talk (which many people don't do)? Why does storytelling belong in the real estate industry? And what do you want to have at the ready when someone asks you a question like, “What do you do?” What you will learn in this episode: How sharing a more relatable story in drier subject areas helps with your message Why the short story form is a more effective format for spreading your message today How breaking the rules can open doors and create an even better story Who is Adiel? Adiel Gorel is a CEO, author, and international speaker with a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and a lifetime passion for engaging audiences of all sizes in multiple languages. His company International Capital Group (ICG) is a leading real estate investment firm in the San Francisco Bay. With over 35 years of experience in the industry, he has not only invested in hundreds of properties for his own portfolio but also successfully assisted thousands of investors with purchasing more than 10,000 properties in the U.S. As a six-time published author, Adiel's books cover topics ranging from building wealth to breathing correctly. From being a Computer Science instructor at Stanford to creating public TV specials, his life's work is to challenge conventions in order to offer insight on how everyone can improve their health, build their wealth, and live a better life. He has two grown kids and currently resides in the Bay Area. Links and Resources: Adiel Gorel ICG Real Estate Investments Adiel Gorel's TEDx Talk - From Fear to Fortitude: Inflation, Time, and Debt for Lifelong Wealth @adielgorel on Instagram @AdielGorelSpeaker on Facebook @adielgorel on LinkedIn @ICGRE on Twitter @AdielGorel on Youtube Storytelling School Website @storytellingschool on Instagram @storytellingSchool on Facebook

May 24, 2023 by Corinna In today's podcast, I interview Camilla Lombard, co-owner of SeaForager -- a community supported fishery located in the San Francisco Bay area. Camilla is doing a lot of things intrinsically right with her marketing. Her location is ideal for her product. As the author of a renowned seaforager's guide, her husband has authority in the fishing space which helps them attract new clients. And with a "fun" brand that includes singing sea shantys and leading seashore foraging tours, her weekly seafood membership is an obvious next step for her ideal clients. In this interview, we talk through her marketing funnel, what she's learned about her ideal customer, and how she nails her website messaging. No matter what kind of business you are, you'll see the classic marketing principles at play that you can apply to your own farm business! This podcast was sponsored by Local Line, the leading e-commerce platform for the local food system. Try Local Line for your farm today! Local Line is offering a free premium feature for free for one year on top of your paid subscription. Claim your discount by signing up for a Local Line account today and using the coupon code: MDF2023. Head to my special affiliate link to get started: www.mydigitalfarmer.com/localline Who is Camilla Lombard? Camilla Lombard is the co-founder and executive Fishwife of Sea Forager, the community supported fishery (CSF) and coastal foraging tour business that she runs with her husband Kirk Lombard in the San Francisco Bay Area. They are sustainable fishmongers, educators, and champions of sustainable fisheries, and they partner with small-scale hook and line fishermen to provide sustainable and delicious seafood to passionate home cooks. Kirk is the author of The Sea Forager's Guide to the Northern California Coast (Heyday Press), and also leads coastal fishing and foraging walking tours in San Francisco and Half Moon Bay, helping people enjoy and conserve their local bounty. Camilla manages the operations, website, marketing, promotions, events, customer service, recipes, morale, and plays the accordion and hollers with their sea shanty band, The Fishwives. The seafood operation is based in Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco, and they live and raise their two kids in Half Moon Bay, California. Visit the Seaforager website here Some of the resources mentioned in this episode: Join my free email list! I have a great "email onboarding sequence" that will guide you through the marketing jungle over the course of several months. Each week, you'll get a new email with suggestions and tips to make your marketing better. Join the wait list for Accelerator -- my 3-month mastermind and small group coaching program for farm business owners, who are ready to build the marketing systems required for a strong farm business.  Sign up for my CSA Academy -- and get access to my CSA member resource library to use for your own CSA (as long as you're a paying member). Use coupon code TRIAL to get your first month for $1. Find my Facebook group for farmers! Follow me on Instagram for a daily IG story tip on marketing! @mydigitalfarmer Subscribe and Review in Apple Podcast I'd love for you to subscribe to my podcast! I don't want you to miss an episode. Click here to subscribe in Apple Podcasts!

In this powerful episode of the podcast, I interview two wonderful guests, Michael DiPietro and Marcey Donnelly. Our conversation covers many different topics including how to deepen your meditation practice and different and creative ways to practice gratitude. Their book, The Inside Guide: Breaking Through to Intuitive Wisdom & Inspired Living, is a practical tool to help you do the inner work and achieve the breakthroughs you've been seeking.  This episode will be my last one for a few months. I love doing the podcast and need a break in order to continue enjoying it. To stay in touch, please find me at http://bit.ly/GratitudeLoveLetter For over 20 years, Michael DiPietro has been guiding individuals and groups to authenticity, fulfillment, and life purpose. He has a B.S. degree in Engineering, is a certified Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), a Martial Art Instructor, skilled bodyworker, meditation teacher and has spent time in both Buddhist and Benedictine Monasteries. Through his extensive training and deep intuition, he guides clients and readers to truly know themselves, transform challenges, find meaning in life and live with purpose. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Marcey Donnelly has a 30-year career in finance and is a Senior Vice President at a leading financial institution. She specializes in process improvement, communication, facilitation and project management. She studied at San Jose State University, is certified in Six Sigma Design and is a Reiki Master. She has a passion for helping others, leading volunteers for local PTAs and other youth organizations. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area with her husband and two children. https://linktr.ee/insideguide  https://loveguides.us/ To book a free introductory session with Michael   Wake Up With Gratitude Resources *New* Gratitude Habit Tracker https://wakeupwithgratitude.com/products/gratitudehabittracker Sunrise Gratitude Meditation YouTube: https://youtu.be/76HXNJO1_y4  Free Gratitude Meditation download: http://bit.ly/GratitudeLoveLetter Contact me directly: juliecmboyer@gmail.com  Check out other episodes the podcast: https://wakeupwithgratitude.com/pages/podcast  More freebies here: https://campsite.bio/juliecmboyer https://www.tiktok.com/@juliecmboyer https://facebook.com/juliecmboyer https://facebook.com/wakeupwithgratitudephoto https://www.instagram.com/juliecmboyer https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliecmboyer/  

We have an incredible conversation to share with you today! Introducing our new friend, the eminent Dr. Emma Bragdon. Emma has been a pioneer in body-mind-spirit wellness for 50 years. She has written 7 books and co-produced two documentary films on topics related to mental health and healing. In fact, she's been a teacher in experiential learning for adults since 1985.  Dr. Bragdon is the Founder and Executive Director of the Foundation for Energy Therapies, Inc (FET), a not for profit dedicated to education and research. Integrative Mental Health University, IMHU, is a project of FET. Prior to graduate school, Emma trained with some of the best bio-energetic and neo-Reichian therapists in the San Francisco Bay area! Her advanced training in breathwork, bodywork and energy work became central in her understanding of how to support personal growth and wellness. By 1988, Emma was licensed as a Marriage, Family, and Child Therapist, had earned her PhD in Transpersonal Psychology, and specialized in private practice around issues of Spiritual Emergency. She continues to coach individuals online from all continents in the world, as well as consult with organizations regarding identifying and managing spiritual emergencies. And in fact, we're considering training with Dr. Bragdon on how to become a spiritual emergence coach at her online Integrative Mental Health University. There is an increasing need for this work in our communities. And, we artists, yogis, and podcast listeners are ripe for the exchange! FOLLOW Dr.Emma: WEBSITE I INTEGRATIVE MENTAL HEALTH UNIVERSITY I INSTAGRAM JOIN ME IN JUNE! JUNE 1 - 12, 2023 - All-Inclusive Turkey Retreat!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ GET DETAILS⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ -⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ harmonyslater.com/yoga-retreat-turkey⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ JUNE 16 - 18, 2023 - WORKSHOP in Munich, Germany - ⁠GET DETAILS⁠ ⁠- harmonyslater.com/events⁠ DONATE $1 and doTERRA will MATCH the funds! All money goes to YOGA GIVES BACK ⁠⁠⁠⁠Girls Scholarship for Higher Education with Digital Access in India⁠⁠⁠⁠ - ⁠yogagivesback.info/givetogirls⁠ A big heart of thanks to our friends, family, and students from around the world, who've generously supported this podcast through your comments, sharing, and financial donations. If you've enjoyed today's podcast, please consider supporting our future episodes by making a donation. Every little bit goes a long way and we are immensely grateful for any and all of your support. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠    Make A Donation   ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠harmonyslater.com/donate⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Don't forget to subscribe and leave a review!  ❤  Give us a 5★ rating! Opening and closing music by Nick Evans from his album “for Morgan.” Listen to the entire album on Spotify ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Purchase your own copy ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

Laura Parent is representing 59 North on the Pacific coast of the US, and teaches sailing on the famous bay. She knows a lot about the waters, culture and history of the area, and thoroughly convinces August to come visit. -- Join us on The QUARTERDECK, 59º North's online platform, to continue the conversation, and to access the resources mentioned in this podcast! First two weeks free! 

Jen Kem is an ultra-quotable entrepreneur. She is full of incredible wisdom based on her rich experiences in business - learning how to live her values, maintain her confidence, and empower others. Jennifer "Jen" Kem is a San Francisco Bay area-based brand building and leadership expert who gets entrepreneurs seen, heard, and paid for being themselves. She's the creator of the Master Brand Method: a framework to develop powerful brands that win customers' hearts, which she uses in strategic consulting for emerging entrepreneurs, celebrity brands like the Oprah Winfrey Network and Steve Harvey, and other major corporations including Verizon, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Bank of Hawaii. She is a successful owner of three multimillion-dollar businesses and the proud mother of three children. The seeds of entrepreneurship were planted early Jen Kem had no intention of building a business, much less multiple successful businesses. But a long and winding path led her here.  At a young age, Jen was in search of one thing: Knowledge. Growing up in Hawaii, she went to her local library in search of information and a world outside her small island community. After devouring the entire children's section, she worked her way through the adult books - and wished for more.  Sitting on her Grandmother's shaggy 1970's carpet, she was handed the business section of the newspaper and her eyes lit up. She began to realize that the world was impacted by business decisions.  Even in school, when asked what she wanted to become, she answered precociously that she wanted to become the General Counsel of Coca-Cola International. The adults in her life were stunned.  Jen never became a lawyer, but what she became is incredibly powerful - a high-level Business Strategist and creator of The Master Brand Method. Passed up for a promotion inspired her Jen was working in the corporate world before she became an entrepreneur. She was happy there - until a white male coworker got a promotion over her.  Regardless of her respect for him, she realized that her qualifications would never be enough in her industry. It was time for her to pave her own path and create the kind of world she wanted to live in.  She left behind her corner office and charted a new path - a path of trying new things, rediscovering herself again and again, and using her values as a path to the life she wanted. Doing what works, quitting what doesn't Jen has owned multiple businesses, and they didn't all work out. In fact, she uses her story as a teachable moment to us entrepreneurs - to show us that sometimes, a failure is actually an important lesson.  Before there was Doordash, there was Webvan, and Jen Kem was on the launch team. It was a great idea back in the late 1990's! But the market wasn't ready - and the idea flopped.  Jen watched the Founder of Webvan recover and go on to do great things. When Doordash became popular, she laughed at the timing: Sometimes an idea is great, but the market just isn't ready.  Before she founded The Master Brand Institute, Jen launched an underwear store in Hawaii. It was a great idea, since there weren't any others like it at the time! Women on the Hawaiian islands were traveling back to the mainland and shopping at Victoria's Secret for their options in underwear, because they didn't have any local options. But when the recession hit, her store went under - and she subsequently lost her house, her marriage, and her confidence. Jen fell into a deep depression.  It would have been easy for Jen to tell herself negative stories about her “failures.” She could have decided that she was bad at business, and that she shouldn't try again. Instead, her ten-year-old daughter gave her a big pep talk. Jen began seeing a therapist and gaining back her mental and emotional health. It inspired one of her best pieces of advice for us: Focus on what you're great at.  When Jen asked herself the hard questions, she realized that she didn't actually love retail! Was it really a failure if she wasn't passionate about it long-term? Retail was limiting, and one of Jen's key principles is autonomy - and her business wasn't in alignment with that value. This realization made Jen realize that it was time to create a company that was, and she bounced back.  Values are a verb Jen's core values are autonomy, justice, generosity, leadership of self, and legacy. Now, her business clearly reflects those values.  While businesses frequently feature their values as words on a wall, Jen reminds us that values are how we live, not what we preach.  Your values can help you make important business decisions. For example, Jen's biggest goal is to be autonomous; To be in charge of herself and in control of her life. Now, when presented with a choice, she filters it through her values before coming to a conclusion. Does this option give her more autonomy, or take it away? Does it require so much of her time that she loses too much freedom in order to participate? Does this serve the legacy she is trying to create?  Jen's work to live her values inspires us to do the same. What are your personal values, and how do you actively use them in your business? Quotes “I am obsessed with learning. Reading is my favorite thing to do. Every morning my grandmother would drink her Lipton tea and I would sit on her shaggy 70's carpet. She would give me the business section of the newspaper, so I started reading about business. I started to understand that that was what made the world move.” “As a visionary, we do see the future. Sometimes the ideas aren't ready. Sometimes the market is not ready, but that doesn't mean the idea isn't good.” “The system wasn't set up to support people like me - women of color, women ingenral. The system was set up to support people who played golf with our boss.” “I made the big scary decision to leave my corporate job. I took 9 months to create an exit plan. I had to, because I had two young kids. I spent the entire 9 months putting away half my paycheck. I had no reason to leave, I was making $400,000 a year in a corner office with a disco ball in it. I had the trophies and triumphs.” “Entrepreneurs are the reason we solve problems in the world.” “I wanted to help others like me get rich, respected and recognized for the fact they could see the future.” “I'm committed, not attached. Not every business I build is my dream home. We get so attached to our dream home. But a real estate investor never gets attached! So I look at my business like a real estate investor. I put all the elements inside it to make it work, but if it's not working and I've tried everything, I can elegantly shut it down.” “Courage is a muscle. It's something you have to keep training. People ask me if I lose confidence. I am still scared to do things! But what I can trust is what I know. I would rather fail fast than fail slow. It doesn't mean I'm not scared.” “Values aren't what you wish for. They are who you are and how you're behaving right now.” “Legacy isn't about the future - legacy is what you're doing right now to create the world you want to live in. Every decision I make runs through that filter.” “Maybe is a place we use as an excuse. It slows us down. I only say a clean yes or a clean no. When I filter things through ym values, I don't have regrets. You start to feel like yourself.” Links mentioned in this episode: Visit Jen Kem's website at www.JenniferKem.com    Connect with Jen Kem on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferkem  Follow Jen on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JenniferKemComm  Follow Jen on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/jennifer.kem/?hl=en  Follow Jen on Twitter at https://twitter.com/_JenniferKem_

This week, we're setting sail for Alcatraz, the infamous island prison once deemed inescapable. But in 1962, three men dared to challenge this notion and embarked on a daring escape that continues to captivate the world to this day.  Join us as we delve into the lives of these audacious inmates, explore their meticulously planned breakout, and dive into the icy waters of mystery that surround their fate. Did they make it to freedom, or did the relentless San Francisco Bay claim their lives? Written By Chris Linn Hosted By Jason Epperson Sponsored by LLBean www.llbean.com/guide and Campendium www.campendium.com

Vineyard manager and owner of Enterprise Vineyards, Phil Coturri has spent nearly his entire life as a mountain man, of sorts. He grew up on Sonoma Mountain, then started working on Moon Mountain in the 1970s. Between the two prominent ranges is the world-class wine-producing region of Sonoma Valley. Phil started learning about organic farming as a teenager, so it's no surprise he is referred to as a wizard and a guru, possibly even a vine whisperer. In this podcast, Phil talks about his background, traditional organic farming, and what makes Moon Mountain so distinctive.    It's no surprise the Moon Mountain District Association chose Phil to be my guest when I offered to promote the “Reach for the Moon” Master Class and Grand Tasting event. It's likely no one knows more about Mountain than Phil. The June 3rd event is going to be spectacular - tasting and learning about the wines that are the end product from the grapes that are grown in every direction, with unobstructed views from the mountain to San Francisco Bay. See the impressive list of winemakers who are attending and the wineries who will be sharing their wines by visiting MoonMountainDistrict.org, then click Events. You can bet I accepted their offer to attend!  I hope to see you there, too.

Are you an Accredited Investor that's tired of getting crushed by paying so much in income tax? Find out how we're helping others like you keep Uncle Sam out of your pocket. Click the link HERE.  Going Long Podcast Episode 314: How a 'Wealth Matters' Mindset will Turbo-Boost Your Investing Success ( To see the Video Version of today's conversation just CLICK HERE. ) In the conversation with today's guest, Alpesh Parmar, you'll learn the following:   [00:36 - 03:37] Show introduction with comments from Billy. [03:37 - 07:02] Guest introduction and first questions. [07:02 - 12:17] The backstory and decisions made that led Alpesh to this point in his journey. [12:17 - 15:52] Alpesh shares his perspective on having debt, and how he managed to navigate the pitfalls of ‘bad debt' while also benefiting from leveraging ‘good debt'.  [15:52 - 20:17] Alpesh explains how he was able to overcome problems and challenges and progress to find great success with his own business. [20:17 - 23:17] The importance of networking and building relationships to fast-track your path to success and financial freedom. [23:17 - 27:24] How Alpesh came to focus so much on how ‘Wealth Matters' and why it is the name and key phrase behind both his business and podcast.  [27:24 - 29:17] What inspired Alpesh to co-author and publish a book. Here's what Alpesh shared with us during today's conversation:    Where in the world Alpesh is currently based: San Francisco Bay, California.  The most positive thing to happen in the past 24 hours: Alpesh took his daughter to a Scouts meeting and they had a great time! Favourite city in Europe: Basel, Switzerland. A mistake that Alpesh would like you to learn from so that you don't have to pay full price:  Make sure you research enough, particularly the market location!  Book Recommendation: The Go Giver, by Bob Burg. - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Go-Giver-Little-Story-Powerful-Business/dp/0141049553    Be sure to reach out and connect with Alpesh Parmar by using the info below:      Website: http://wealthmatrs.com/  Youtube / Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqYPtS7EhDFt93EnscFtG4Q    To see the Video Version of today's conversation just CLICK HERE.   How to leave a review for The Going Long Podcast: https://youtu.be/qfRqLVcf8UI     Start taking action TODAY so that you can gain more Education and Control over your financial life.   Are you an Accredited Investor that's tired of getting crushed by paying so much in income tax? Find out how we're helping others like you keep Uncle Sam out of your pocket. Go to https://www.firstgencp.com/goinglong   Be sure to connect with Billy!  He's made it easy for you to do…Just go to any of these sites:   Website: www.billykeels.com Youtube: billykeels Facebook: Billy Keels Fan Page Instagram: @billykeels Twitter: @billykeels LinkedIn: Billy Keels  

Pedro Ordenes is an Alcatraz legend, having swum the famous route over 1000 times!! Pedro runs Water World Swim that organizes many swims in San Francisco Bay, California and across the world. I was lucky enough to swim Alcatraz with Water World Swim recently in April 2023. Pedro is an exceptionally accomplished open water swimmer, perhaps the highlight being swimming the Strait of Magellan in South America, in 3.5°C with 60 km/hr winds and 3-5 feet swells against 12-14 knot currents! He has also swum a double crossing of the Beagle Channel between Chile and Argentina. Pedro is now also a very well respected open-water coach. Songs in this episode - all licensed under a Creative Commons License: Out In The Sticks - Escape From The Alcatraz - CVMR Prisonnier D Alcatraz - Deadline313 Sonus Locus: Doors of Alcatraz - Analog Soul Jail - J-Seiei Beatz Sapphire - Tobu Image from Water World Swim

This podcast hit paid subscribers' inboxes on May 4. It dropped for free subscribers on May 7. To receive future pods as soon as they're live, and to support independent ski journalism, please consider an upgrade to a paid subscription. You can also subscribe for free below:WhoDee Byrne, President and Chief Operating Officer of Palisades Tahoe, CaliforniaRecorded onApril 24, 2023About Palisades TahoeClick here for a mountain stats overviewOwned by: Alterra Mountain CompanyPass affiliations: Unlimited access on the Ikon Pass; unlimited access with holiday blackouts on the Ikon Base PassLocated in: Olympic Valley, CaliforniaYear founded: * Palisades/Olympic side (as Squaw Valley): 1949* Alpine Meadows: 1961Closest neighboring ski areas: Granlibakken (14 minutes from Palisades base), Homewood (18 minutes), Northstar (23 minutes), Tahoe Donner (24 minutes), Boreal (24 minutes), Soda Springs (28 minutes), Donner Ski Ranch (28 minutes), Kingvale (29 minutes), Sugar Bowl (30 minutes), Diamond Peak (39 minutes), Mt. Rose (45 minutes), Sky Tavern (50), Heavenly (1 hour) - travel times vary dramatically given weather conditions and time of dayBase elevation | summit elevation | vertical drop:* Alpine Meadows side: 6,835 feet | 8,637 feet | 1,802 feet* Olympic Valley side: 6,200 feet | 9,050 feet | 2,850 feetSkiable Acres: 6,000* Alpine Meadows side: 2,400* Olympic Valley side: 3,600Average annual snowfall: 400 inches (713 inches for the 2023-24 ski season through May 3!)Trail count: 270-plus* Alpine Meadows side: 100-plus (25% beginner, 40% intermediate, 35% advanced)* Olympic Valley side: 170-plus (25% beginner, 45% intermediate, 30% advanced)Lift count: 42 (10-passenger tram, 28-passenger funitel, 8-passenger gondola, 8 six-packs, 5 high-speed quads, 1 fixed-grip quad, 10 triples, 8 doubles, 7 carpets - view Lift Blog's inventory of Palisades Tahoe's lift fleet)* Alpine Meadows: 13 (1 six-pack,  3 high-speed quads, 2 triples, 5 doubles,  2 carpets)* Palisades/Olympic: 28 (120-passenger tram, 28-passenger funitel, 7 six-packs, 2 high-speed quads, 1 quad, 8 triples, 3 doubles, 5 carpets)* Shared lifts: 1 (8-passenger Base-to-Base Gondola)Why I interviewed herImagine this: I'm a Midwest teenager who has notched exactly three days on skis, on three separate 200-vert bumps. I know vaguely that there is skiing out West, and that it is big. But I'm thinking Colorado, maybe Wyoming. California? California is Beach Boys and palm trees. Surfboards and San Diego. I have no idea that California has mountains, let alone ski resorts. Anticipating the skis, boots, and poles that I've requested as the totality of my Christmas list, I pick up the December 1994 issue of Skiing (RIP), and read the following by Kristen Ulmer:Nothing is random. You live, die, pay taxes, move to Squaw. It's the place you see in all the ski flicks, with the groovy attitudes, toasty-warm days, wild lines, and that enormous lake. It's California! Squallywood! It's the one place where every born-to-ski skier, at some point or other, wants to move to; where people will crawl a thousand miles over broken glass for the chance to ski freezer burn. The one place to make it as a “professional” skier.My friend Kent Kreitler, a phenomenal skier who doesn't live anywhere in particular, finally announced, “I think I'm move to Squaw.”“So Kent,” I said, “let me tell you what the rest of your life will be like.” And I laid it out for him. …You're curious to find out if you're as good a skier as you think. So you find a group of locals and try to keep up. On powder days the excitement builds like a pressure cooker. Move fast, because it only takes an hour for the entire mountain to get tracked up. There's oodles of cliff jumps and psycho lines. You'd better just do it, because within seconds, 10 other yahoos will have already jumped and tracked out the landing pad.If you're a truly amazing skier (anything else inspires only polite smiles and undisguised yawns), then you land clean on jumps and shred through anything with style. If not, the hyperactivity of the place will motivate you to ski the same lines anyway. Either way is fulfilling.Occasionally a random miracle occurs, and the patrol opens the famed Palisades on Squaw Peak. On those days you don't bother with a warm-up run – just hike 15 minutes from the top of Siberia Express chair and coolly launch some hospital air off Main Chute.There are other places to express your extreme nature. When everything else gets tracked, you hike up Granite Peak for its steep chutes. If the snowpack is good, you climb 10 minutes from the top of the KT-22 chair to Eagle's Nest. And jumping the Fingers off KT-22 seems particularly heroic: Not only do you need speed to clear the sloping rocks, but it's right (ahem) under the lift.At the conclusion of that ski season, teenage Stuart Winchester, a novice skier who lived in his parents' basement, announced, “I think I'm moving to Squaw.” “No D*****s,” his mom said, “you're going to college.”Which doesn't mean I ever forgot that high-energy introduction to California extreme. I re-read that article dozens of times (you can read the full bit here). Until my brain had been coded to regard the ski resort now known as Palisades Tahoe (see why?) as one of the spiritual and cultural homelands of U.S. lift-served skiing.Ulmer's realm, hyperactive as it was, looks pokey by today's standards. An accompanying essay in that same issue of Skiing, written by Eric Hanson, describes a very different resort than the one you'll encounter today:Locals seem proud that there's so little development here. The faithful will say it's because everything that matters is up on the mountain itself: bottomless steeps, vast acreage, 33 lifts and no waiting. America's answer to the wide-open ski circuses of Europe. After all these years the mountain is still uncrowded, except on weekends when people pile in from the San Francisco Bay area in droves. Squaw is unflashy, underbuilt, and seems entirely indifferent to success. The opposite of what you would expect one of America's premier resorts to be.Apparently, “flashy” included, you know, naming trails. Check out this circa 1996 trailmap, which shows lift names, but only a handful of runs:Confusion reigned, according to Hanson:Every day, we set off armed with our trail map and the printed list of the day's groomed runs in search of intermediate terrain – long steep runs groomed for cruising, unmogulled routes down from the top of the black-diamond chairs. It wasn't easy. The grooming sheet named runs which weren't marked on the trail map. The only trail named on the map is The Mountain Run, an expressway that drops 2,000 feet from Gold Coast to the village. And most of the biggest verticals were on the chairs – KT-22, Cornice II, Headwall, Silverado, Broken Arrow – marked “experts only.” We didn't relish the idea of going up an expert chair looking for a particular groomed route down, if the groomed route wasn't to be found. I began feeling nostalgic for all those totem poles of green and blue and black trail signs that clutter the landscapes of other ski resorts, but at least keep the skier oriented.I asked a patroller where I could find some of the runs on the groomed list. He wasn't sure. He told me that the grooming crew and the ski patrol didn't have the same names for many of the runs.Just amazing. While Palisades Tahoe is now a glimmering model of a modern American ski resort, that raw-and-rowdy past is still sewn into the DNA of this fascinating place.What we talked aboutTahoe's megaseason; corn harvest; skiing into July and… maybe beyond; why Alpine will be the later operator this summer; why the base-to-base gondola ceased operation on April 30; snow exhaustion; Cali spring skiing; reminiscing on Pacific Northwest ski culture; for the love of teaching and turning; skiing as adventure; from 49 Degrees North to Vail to Aspen to Tahoe; Tahoe culture shock; Palisades' vast and varied ski school; reflections on the name change a year and a half later; going deep on the base-to-base gondola; the stark differences between the cultural vibe on the Alpine Meadows and Palisades sides of the resort and whether the gondola has compromised those distinctions; why the gondola took more than a decade to build and what finally pushed it through; White Wolf, the property that hosts an unfinished chairlift between Palisades and Alpine; how the gondola took cars off the road; why the base-to-base gondola didn't overload KT-22's terrain; the Mothership; the new Red Dog sixer; why Palisades re-oriented the lift to run lower to the ground; why the lift was only loading four passengers at a time for large parts of the season; snowmaking as fire-suppression system; how Palisades and Mammoth assisted Sierra-at-Tahoe's recovery; candidates for lift upgrades at Alpine Meadows; “fixed-grip lifts are awesome”; an Alpine masterplan refresh incoming; which lift could be next in line for upgrades on the Palisades side; the “biggest experience bust on the Palisades side of the resort”; why Silverado and Granite Chief will likely never be upgraded to detachable lifts; why the Silverado terrain is so rarely open and what it takes to make it live; whether Palisades Tahoe could ever leave the unlimited-with-blackouts tier on the Ikon Base Pass; and paid parking incoming.             Why I thought that now was a good time for this interviewThis was the second time I've featured Palisades Tahoe on The Storm Skiing Podcast. The first was a conversation with then-resort president Ron Cohen in September 2020, shortly after the ski area announced that it would ditch the “Squaw Valley” name. We spent the entire 49-minute conversation discussing that name change. At the time, the podcast was mostly focused on New England and New York, and a deep exploration of a distant resort would have been a little off-brand.But The Storm has evolved, and my coverage now firmly includes the State of California. Thank goodness. What an incredible ski state. So many huge resorts, so much wide-open terrain, so much snow, so much energy. The Northeast tugs skiing from the earth through technology and willpower, pasting white streaks over brown land, actualizing the improbable in a weird algorithm that only pencils out because 56 million people camp out within driving distance. California is different. California delivers skiing because it's lined top to bottom with giant mountains that summon ungodly oceans of snow from the clouds. It just happens Brah. There aren't even that many ski areas here – just 28, or 29 if you count the uber-dysfunctional Mt. Waterman – but there seems to be one everywhere you need one – LA (Big Bear, Baldy, Mountain High), Fresno (China Peak), Modesto (Dodge Ridge), Stockton (Bear Valley), Sacramento and the Bay Area (all of Tahoe). Among these are some of the largest and most-developed ski areas in America.And none is bigger than Palisades Tahoe. Well, Heavenly was until this year, as I outlined earlier this week, but the base-to-base gondola changed all that. The ski area formerly known as Squaw Valley and the ski area still-known as Alpine Meadows are now officially one interconnected ski goliath. That's a big deal.Add a new six-pack (Red Dog), a sufficient period to reflect on the name change, a historic winter, and the ongoing impacts of the Covid-driven outdoor boom and the Ikon Pass, and it was a perfect time to check in on one of Alterra's trophy properties.Why you should ski Palisades TahoeOne of the most oft-dished compliments to emphasize the big-mountain cred of a North American ski resort is that it “feels like Europe.” But there just aren't that many ski areas around these parts worthy of that description. Big Sky, with its dramatic peaks and super-duper out-of-base bubble lifts. Snowbird-Alta, with their frenzied scale and wild terrain and big-box tram (though they get way too much snow to mistake for Europe). Whistler, with its village and polyglot vibe. And then there's Palisades Tahoe:Nowhere else in America do you stand in the base area and wonder if you should hop on the tram or the gondola or the other big-gondola-thingy-that-you're-not-quite-sure-what-it-is (the funitel) or the most iconic chairlift in the country (KT-22). Or Wa She Shu. Or Exhibition or Red Dog. And go up and up and then you never need to see the base area again. Up to Headwall or Gold Coast or so help-you-God Silverado if it's open. Or up and over to Alpine and another whole ski area that used to be a giant ski resort but is now just a small part of a giant-er ski resort.It's too much to describe or even really try to. In our conversation, Byrne called Palisades a “super-regional” resort. One that most people drive to, rather than fly to. I'm telling you this one is worth the flight. From anywhere. For anyone. Just go.Podcast NotesOn the name changeThe last time I interviewed Byrne, it was for an article I wrote on the name change in 2021:The name change, promised more than a year ago, acknowledges that many Native Americans consider the word “squaw” to be a racist and sexist slur.“Anyone who spends time at these mountains can feel the passion of our dedicated skiers and riders,” said Ron Cohen, former president and COO of Palisades Tahoe, who moved into the same position at Alterra's Mammoth Mountain in June. “It's electric, exciting, reverential, and incredibly motivating. However, no matter how deep, meaningful, and positive these feelings are and no matter how much our guests don't intend to offend anyone, it is not enough to justify continuing to operate under a name that is deeply offensive to indigenous people across North America.”The former resort name was perhaps the most prominent modern use of the word “squaw” in America, skiing's equivalent to the Cleveland Indians or Washington Redskins, two professional sports teams that are also in the process of replacing their names (Cleveland will become the Guardians, while Washington will announce its new name early next year). The update broadcasts a powerful signal to an American mainstream that still largely regards the word “squaw” as an innocuous synonym for a Native American woman.“We know the founders of our resort had no intention of causing offense in choosing this name for the resort, nor have any of our patrons who have spoken this word over the last seven decades,” said Cohen. “But as our society evolves, we must acknowledge the need for change when we are confronted with harsh realities. Having our name be associated with pain and dehumanization is contrary to our goal of making the outdoors a welcoming space for all people. I feel strongly that we have been given the rare opportunity to effect lasting, positive change; to find a new name that reflects our core values, storied past and respect for all those who have enjoyed this land.”It's a long piece, and my opinion on it stands, but I'll reiterate this bit:I realize that many of us learned something different in grade school. I am one of them. Until last year, I did not know that Native Americans considered this word to be offensive. But the resort, after extensive research and consultation with the local Washoe Tribe, made a good case that the name was an anachronism.Cohen came on my podcast to further elaborate. The arguments made sense. What I had learned in grade-school was wrong. “Squaw” was not a word that belonged on the masthead of a major ski resort.The immediate reaction that this is some PC move is flimsy and hardly worth addressing, but OK: this is not a redefining of history to cast a harmless thing as nefarious. Rather, it is an example of a long-ostracized group finding its voice and saying, “Hey, this is what this actually means – can you rethink how you're using this word?”If you want to scream into the wind about this, be my guest. The name change is final. The place will still have plenty of skiers. If you don't want to be one of them, there are plenty of other places to ski, around Tahoe and elsewhere. But what this means for the ski terrain is exactly nothing at all. The resort, flush with capital from Alterra, is only getting bigger and better. Sitting out that evolution for what is a petty protest is anyone's mistake to make.“We want to be on the right side of history on this,” said Byrne. “While this may take some getting used to, our name change was an important initiative for our company and community. At the end of the day, ‘squaw' is a hurtful word, and we are not hurtful people. We have a well-earned reputation as a progressive resort at the forefront of ski culture, and progress cannot happen without change.”Apparently there are still a handful of Angry Ski Bros who occasionally track Byrne down on social media and yell about this. Presumably in all-caps. Sometimes I think about what life would be like right now had the commercial internet failed to take off and honestly it's hard to conclude that it wouldn't be a hell of a lot better than whatever version of reality we've found ourselves in.On federal place names eliminating the use of the word “squaw”Byrne mentioned that the federal government had also moved to eliminate the word “squaw” from its place names. Per a New York Times article last March:The map dots, resembling a scattergram of America, point to snow-covered pinnacles, remote islands and places in between.Each of the 660 points, shown on maps of federal lands and waterways, includes the word “squaw” in its name, a term Native Americans regard as a racist and misogynistic slur.Now the Interior Department, led by Deb Haaland, the first Native American cabinet secretary, is taking steps to strip the word from mountains, rivers, lakes and other geographic sites and has solicited input from tribes on new names for the landmarks.A task force created by the department will submit the new names for final approval from the Board on Geographic Names, the federal body that standardizes American place names. The National Park Service was ordered to take similar steps.By September, the Biden administration had completed the project. The word persists in non-federally owned place names, however. One ski area – Big Squaw in Maine – still officially carries the name, even though the state was among the first to ban the use of the word “squaw,” back in 2000. While a potential new ownership group had vowed to change the ski area's name, they ultimately backed out of the deal. As long as the broken-down, barely functional ski area remains under the ownership of professional knucklehead and bootleg timber baron James Confalone, the ski area – and the volunteer group that keeps the one remaining chairlift spinning – is stuck with the name.On White Wolf If you've ever looked off the backside of KT-22, you've no doubt noticed the line of chairlift towers standing empty on the mountain:This is White Wolf, a long-envisioned but as-yet-incomplete private resort owned by a local gent named Troy Caldwell, who purchased the land in 1989 for $400,000. Byrne and I discuss this property briefly on the podcast. The Palisades Tahoe blog posted a terrific history of Caldwell and White Wolf last year:So, they shifted to the idea of a private ski area, named White Wolf. In 2000, Placer County issued Caldwell a permit to build his own chairlift. A local homeowners' association later sued the county for issuing him that permit, but, in 2005, the lift towers and cables went in, but construction slowed on the private chairlift as Caldwell weighed his options for a future interconnect between the resorts. To date, the chairlift has yet to operate—but that may be changing if Caldwell's long-term plan comes to fruition.In 2016, Caldwell submitted plans to Placer County for a 275-acre private-resort housing project on his land that would include the construction of dozens of fire-safe custom homes, as well employee housing units, a pool, an ice-skating rink, and two private chairlifts, including the one that's already constructed.After the Palisades Tahoe resorts came under the same ownership in 2012, the plan to physically link them has now become reality. Caldwell is the missing piece enabling the long-awaited gondola to connect the two mountains over his land. Roughly half of the Base to Base Gondola and its mid-stations are on property owned by the Caldwells.“Sure, we could have sold the land for $50 million and moved to Tahiti,” Caldwell says with a laugh. “But we made the decision that this is our life, this is what we wanted to do. We wanted to finish the dream, connect the ski areas and do what we initially set out to do.”Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the general public will ever be able to ski White Wolf.On Alpine Meadows' masterplanByrne and I discuss several proposed but unbuilt lifts at Alpine Meadows, including the Rollers lift, shown here on the 2015 masterplan:And here, just for fun, is an old proposed line for the gondola, which would not have crossed the KT-22 Express:On Sierra-at-Tahoe and the Caldor FireI discussed this one in my recent article for the Heavenly pod.Parting shotThe Storm explores the world of lift-served skiing year-round. Join us.The Storm publishes year-round, and guarantees 100 articles per year. This is article 41/100 in 2023, and number 427 since launching on Oct. 13, 2019. Want to send feedback? Reply to this email and I will answer (unless you sound insane, or, more likely, I just get busy). You can also email skiing@substack.com. Get full access to The Storm Skiing Journal and Podcast at www.stormskiing.com/subscribe

A Ghost Blimp Mystery, it began as a routine surveillance mission in the early months of World War II and ended in a mystery that remains unsolved after eight decades. At about 6 a.m. on August 16, 1942, the United States Navy blimp L-8 took off from a small airfield on Treasure Island, an artificial island built in San Francisco Bay for the World's Fair. On board were two men: Lieutenant Ernest DeWitt Cody and Ensign Charles Ellis Adams, bot seemed to vanish...without a trace! What happened to the two men remains a mystery to this day.  Was it murder or as some put forward, Alien Abduction? The Searchers, Shane Pittman, Ray Causey and #TheBigPurv take to the skies to dissect this story and strangeness around it.  Later in the show, the team discusses PROJECT FEAR with Dakota Laden and the work involved in seeing a dream to fruition. Building a program from the bottom up. The Paranormal Mind: A Searchers Podcast - The Ghost Blimp MysteryThe Searchers are long-time friends and collaborators whose mission is to seek the truth surrounding claims of the paranormal and beyond.Visit their YouTube Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@searchersbelieveFor even more exclusive content and video versions of the podcast join & support the show on their Patreon Page here: http://patreon.com/user?u=89961824JOIN SHANE PITTMAN & DAVE SCHRADER FROMTHE HOLZER FILES FOR THIS UPCOMING PUBLIC GHOST HUNTThe Palmer House Hotel in Minnesotahttps://www.darknessradio.com/spiritsofsummerpalmerhouseSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Episode 379 of The Outdoor Biz Podcast and my conversation with Steve Lee, Hot Chillys Senior VP of Sales. Steve has been with Hot Chillys in one form or another since 1988. From outdoor and snow sports to running and cycling, their high-quality, durable base layer and winter accessories are ideal for staying warm and dry during your favorite cold weather activities. Facebook Twitter Instagram The Outdoor Biz Podcast Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Sign up for my Newsletter HERE. I'd love to hear your feedback about the show! You can contact me here: email: rick@theoutdoorbizpodcast.com or leave me a message on Speakpipe! Presented to by: Show Notes Show Notes How'd you get into the outdoors? Steve got into the outdoors with some friends in high school. They went on a backpacking trip up to Desolation Wilderness and fell in love with it. They then took a 21-day backpacking and climbing course, which culminated in their love for the outdoors. Where, where'd you learn how to ski? What was your first snow experience? Steve learned to ski at a Tyrolia Ski School in Minnesota and then moved to Northern California before high school, where they used to go skiing at North Star. Steve's first experience with Hot Chilly's He was working in the San Francisco Bay area after graduating from Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. Steve and some friends then moved to the San Luis Obispo area and found work in an accounting and operations role for the company making Hot Chillys. So you've held a leadership role there since 2006. How has your leadership style evolved over the years? Steve said he has become more mature and learned to embrace the power of relationships, not just with people in the industry or reps, but also with their salespeople. “I will support them as best I can and not be another cook in the kitchen.” Over the years, what do you think have been the two or three most significant changes in our business? The two or three most significant changes in the business over the past 32 years include the introduction of online retail and direct-to-consumer, as well as the consolidation of specialty retail customers and the need for larger retailers to sell sports and outdoor products. Additionally, the eco influence on all aspects of the business is more prominent today than it was back then too. So your mission for Hot Chillys now is to keep you so comfortable you forget they're even there. How do you deliver on that? Hot Chillys is the first body fit performance base layer, created by two guys in Southern California who wanted to keep themselves comfortable while skiing and fishing. They partnered up with a guy who was manufacturing running tights for Nike and Adidas and had machines that could do the flatlock stitch. The three of 'em came up with the idea of making a base layer that hugs the body and performs better. The first product they came up with was the original, which was packaged in a can. They focused on sourcing and developing fabrics that are ultra-soft, comfortable, and comfortable on the body, so the focus is on having fun outdoors. I love your warmth ratings. How are those developed? The brand name Hot Chillys is an homage to their love of Mexico, and the warm factor thermometer is meant to mimic the mild, medium, hot thermometer found on a jar of salsa. Every product has a different rating. Do you guys have anything new in the pipeline you could talk about? We've always been known a little bit more on the Wintersports side and a lot of that product is body fit and comes in a variety of different weights and fabrications. But we've had a few products that have always done well, that were more on the relaxed fit side. So we have developed a line of relaxed fit products, such as Clima-Tek and Clima-Wool. Clima-Tech is made of what we call M T F Moisture Transfer Fiber polyester with activated carbon which make it even softer and perform better, and gives it some antimicrobial properties. And so that kind of launched us into this series of products that are more relaxed fit. They have great performance characteristics but the cut of them and the colors and the styling is very appropriate for like street wear as well. It's not just pure on mountain base layer. It's meant to be something you could wear as a lifestyle piece, whether it's in a crew neck or a zip tee or a hoodie or a jogger or what have you. What outdoor activities do you still participate in? Steve gets out and does a lot of skiing, hiking, ocean kayaking, fishing, and camping. Do you have any suggestions and/or advice for folks wanting to get into the outdoor biz and/or grow their career? It doesn't seem like there's as many youth getting into the business as there once was. I think like I said before, the relationships are really key, it requires an investment of time. I don't think that success in our industry comes quickly, you know? So if you're passionate about the outdoors, which is a big reason why I've, I've stayed in the industry. Then you kind of gotta find where does that passion really lie or where is it most well expressed? Are you a retail person? Are you into developing product and, do you know, kind of like to invent stuff? Or are you more manufacturing and logistical minded? What's kind of your path to go down Do you have any, daily routines you use to keep your sanity? My daily routines include getting up early, having quiet time, reading and meditation, and taking our small dog for a walk along the beach. Do you have a favorite book or a couple of favorite books? Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is one of my favorite books. Recently, I've been reading more business-oriented books, such as The Three Chairs and Never Split the Difference, written by an FBI negotiator which is primarily about negotiating to a solution. What's your favorite piece of outdoor gear? Under a hundred dollars? Steves favorite piece of outdoor gear is a fanny pack, It is making a comeback. It's efficient and has everything they need for hiking, biking, and dog activities. It may not be the coolest look on the block, but it is a great addition to your outdoor gear. As we wrap up, is there anything else you'd like to say to our listeners or ask of our listeners? Check out Hot Chillys, it's a brand that's been around since 1985, always evolving, we have lots of new stuff. As I'm traveling, I'll have conversations with people in airports or on the plane and, you know, tell 'em what I do, and they're, oh yeah, I love Hot Chillys, I've had Hot Chillys forever and they know us from, from way back when and there's a lot of new and exciting stuff coming out this next year. So I would just encourage people to take a look at what we've got.  

Jeff takes the pod solo this week to talk to Matt Matrisian, chief channel officer at AssetMark. They evaluate the current structure of fees and look at how advisors can use benchmarking to optimize their fee-based practice. They also consider how advisors can approach raising their fees. Guest Bio: Matt Matrisian serves as the senior vice president and chief channel officer for AssetMark. Matt started at AssetMark in April of 2010. Matt is based in the San Francisco Bay area.

Knowing when to form and build a Board of Directors is a challenge for many startup founders.Once the Board is formed, how to manage and communicate with the Board presents an additional burden on founders.Our guest, Mahendra Ramsinghani, co-authored Startup Boards: Getting the Most of Your Board of Directors with Brad Feld, and has all the insights and advice you need to skillfully navigate this important segment of your startup's structure.Currently, Mahendra is the Founder of Secure Octane - a cybersecurity seed fund based in the San Francisco Bay area.He's invested in over fifty pre-seed and seedstage companies and, as the former Director of Venture Capital Initiatives for Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC), Mahendra led the legislation for two Fund-of-Fund programs in Michigan. Mahendra is also the author of two additional books - The Business of Venture Capital and The Resilient Founder.To purchase a copy of Startup Boards: A Field Guide to Building and Leading an Effective Board of Directors, please visit: https://amzn.to/3N7YfjzConnect with Mahendra via these links:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mahendraram/Website: https://www.thebusinessofvc.com/Thank you for carving out time to improve your Founder Game - when you do better, your startup will do better - cheers from Boston!Ande ♥https://andelyons.com#boardofdirectors #startupboards #buildingeffectivestartupboards #founderadvice WHAT WE LEARNED00:00 - Meet Seasoned Startup Investor Mahendra Ramsinghani09:00 - Mahendra's origin story13:00 - Not knowing what to do can be either paralyzing or empowering18:00 - Mahendra's investor journey - how it began and how it's going25:00 - Secure Octane32:00 - When does a startup need to establish a Board34:00 - Who should be on a Board and how many members are needed based on stage of funding: Seed/Series A-D36:30 39:00 - Legal requirements for Boards and fiduciary responsibilities41:00 - What are the Board's responsibilities and what are the Founder's responsibilities43:20 - Who is in charge45:00 - Communication strategies and intellectual honesty48:00 - How does a Founder deliver bad news to a Board of Directors54:00 - Board of Director's Compensation Packages57:00 - How to off-ramp a toxic Board MemberJOIN STARTUP LIFE LIVE MEETUP GROUPGet an alert whenever I post a new show!https://bit.ly/StartupLifeLIVEWBENC APPLICATION SUPPORTLearn more here: https://bit.ly/GetWBENCSend me an email: ande@andelyons.comCONNECT WITH ME ONLINE: https://twitter.com/AndeLyonshttps://www.linkedin.com/in/andelyons/ https://www.instagram.com/ande_lyons/ TikTok: @andelyonsANDELICIOUS ANNOUNCEMENTSJoin Innovation Women here: https://bit.ly/AndeInnoWomenArlan's Academy: https://arlansacademy.com/Scroobious - use Ande15 discount code: https://www.scroobious.com/How to Raise a Seed Round: https://bit.ly/AAElizabethYinTune in to Mia Voss' Shit We Don't Talk About podcast here: https://shitwedonttalkaboutpodcast.com/SPONSORSHIPIf you resonate with the show's mission of amplifying diverse founder voices while serving first-time founders around the world, please reach out to me to learn more about making an impact through sponsoring the Startup Life LIVE Show! ande@andelyons.com.

Have you ever wondered how bird banding works? How the birds are captured, safely handled, and released? And why is it done at all?Thanks to Dr. Katie LaBarbera, Science Director for the Land Bird Program at the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory (SFBBO), we have you covered.Banding is specifically the scientific technique used to study bird behavior, migration, and populations. By safely capturing and placing bands on birds' legs, researchers can track their movements and gain valuable insights for conservation efforts.Today's episode is a unique one - it's part field recordings and part traditional Nature's Archive interview. We'll jump into the entire banding process, from capture and extraction to the measurements taken and placing the band on it.We'll then discuss the outcomes and observations from this long term monitoring effort, along with some fascinating observations about birds ranging from American Goldfinch to Bewicks Wrens.Katie also tells us about MOTUS, an exciting telemetry technology that will help create a network of automated observation stations to further advance bird migration monitoring. This technology promises to augment and amplify the work performed by banding stations.And just one more thing. This was a really fun episode to produce, though challenging at times. A big thanks to Katie for allowing these visits despite a challenging season of weather disruptions, and having to re-record parts of it. Thank you to Wendy Gibbons, who walked us through the netting and extraction processes, as well as several other SFBBO volunteers who provided insights and information on my first visit in February.See the FULL Show Notes for some amazing photos from the banding station!Also find SFBBO on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Thanks to Emily Smith for production assistance in this episode. Links To Topics DiscussedWendy Gibbons - an SFBBO volunteer who walked me through the capture and extraction process in today's episode.The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan WeinerMOTUS Wildlife Tracking SystemThe following music was used for this media project:Music: Spellbound by Brian Holtz MusicFree download: https://filmmusic.io/song/9616-spellboundLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist website: https://brianholtzmusic.com Support the show

Bita and Beata are deep diving into the controversial Persian ingredient called Kashk. They are honored to have Omid, The Caspian Chef as a special guest today to help them demystify the origination, different forms, and flavor notes of kashk. Omid even teaches Bita and Beata how to make kashk at home! Lastly, the trio share some of their favorite dishes to serve with a drizzle of kashk plus some new and innovative ideas for adding kashk in non-expected soups and sides.   This episode has been sponsored by Oyna Natural Foods. Fresh, authentic Persian Flavors.  San Francisco Bay delivery or order from GoodEggs.    All Modern Persian Food podcast episodes can be found at: Episodes Reference to MPF Episode 31 Caspian Sea Regional Foods Kashk recipe by The Caspian Chef: Kashk - Persian whey sauce - The Caspian Chef - Omid Roustaei   Sign up for the email newsletter here!   Subscribe+ to the Modern Persian Food podcast on your favorite podcast player, and tell a friend.   Podcast production by Alvarez Audio

Jeremy Stalnecker is the CEO of the Mighty Oaks Foundation. The Mighty Oaks Foundation is dedicated to helping America's military warriors and their families who are suffering from the unseen wounds of combat such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).While growing up in San Jacinto, CA, Jeremy's only goal in life was to leave home and join the Marine Corps. This dream was finally realized with an active duty commission in 1999. Following Infantry Officer Course in Quantico, VA, Jeremy was assigned to First Battalion, Fifth Marines, First Marine Division as an infantry platoon commander. Serving first as a rifle platoon commander in a helicopter company and then as the platoon commander of the counter-mechanized platoon, Jeremy learned valuable leadership and communication skills that he continues to use today. In January 2003, Fifth Marines, as a part of the First Marine Division, deployed to Kuwait in support of what would become Operation Iraqi Freedom. As the war began, First Battalion, Fifth Marines was the infantry battalion used to breech the berm separating Kuwait and Iraq and secured the first major objective of the war. This led to a road march that ended with the battalion occupying Baghdad and seizing the presidential palace in northern Baghdad on the Tigris River. Throughout this movement, Jeremy and the counter-mechanized platoon provided navigation and lead security for the battalion.While in the Marine Corps, God was working in Jeremy's life to turn his heart toward full-time ministry. Just one month after returning from Iraq, Jeremy became a staff member of his home church at Coastline Baptist in Oceanside, CA. Here he gained ministry experience that would equip him for the further leading of God. In his role as an Assistant Pastor, he counseled and mentored many couples and individuals while also maintaining other church responsibilities. It was a great privilege for him to be able to serve in this capacity so close to Camp Pendleton since most of the people he worked with were either Marines or the family members of Marines.In 2008, Jeremy and his family took on a new responsibility when he became the Senior Pastor, just east of San Francisco Bay at Bay Area Baptist Church in Fremont, CA. In this capacity, he continued to minister to families and individuals in a wide range of areas. After serving in the role of senior pastor for nearly seven years, the door leading to a full-time position with the Mighty Oaks Foundation opened. This move brought together both his ministry experience and military background in a way that allows him to serve and minister to many hurting veterans, service members and their families. Along with his wife Susanne and their four children, Jeremy works to reach the hurting and provide the healing found in Christ.www.jeremystalnecker.com 

Listen to Part 2 of this conversation with Cameron Eversole. Cameron is the director of AMS Relocation, a Bekins agent out of the San Francisco Bay area that's been in business since 1949.  They average 6-7 million per year in revenue, and have recently discovered a sales tactic that allowed them to go from a 15% onsite conversion rate to 65% virtually overnight! 

Karen Lechelt, 50, is a mother, wife and a returned East coaster after two decades in the San Francisco Bay area and a few years in Amsterdam in between. Their childhood in New Jersey was marked with feeling not quite fitting wherever she was, and having to always adapt themself. Because of the loss of their first family, Karen says there's always been a feeling of not being anchored. That changed with the birth of their daughter.

Cameron Eversole is the director of AMS Relocation, a Bekins agent out of the San Francisco Bay area that's been in business since 1949.  They average 6-7 million per year in revenue, and have recently discovered a sales tactic that allowed them to go from a 15% onsite conversion rate to 65% virtually overnight! Stay tuned for Part 2 of this interview with Cameron.

For human beings, Earth is a supremely human place. A world of concrete, steel, glass, plastic, cars, paved streets and highways, and lots of other human beings, generating mountains of waste. Here and there, pockets of nature for human beings.Dutch chemist Paul Crützen coined a term for Earth's human age — the Anthropocene. Crützen proposed that it be declared a new epoch in Earth history, terminating the one geologists say we've been in for the past 12,000 years, the Holocene.This summer, a scientific panel will shift Crützen's proposal up a notch.The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) was set up in 2009 by a commission of the International Union of Geological Sciences. Its task — defining the Anthropocene, geologically.Crützen's idea was that the Anthropocene began with the 18th-century Industrial Revolution. In 2019, a decade of research under its belt, the AWG decided it actually began around 1950, at the start of what American environmental historian John McNeill dubbed the Great Acceleration, in the wake of World War II; a period marked by massive fossil-fuel burning, resource extraction, pollution, global trade and population growth, and the parallel rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide, surface temperature, biosphere degradation and so on.The AWG's next task was to identify one spot on Earth where the telltale signs of human activity are best observed in mid-20th-century sediments. The technical term for this is a mouthful — a Global Stratotype Section and Point. The more popular one: a “Golden Spike.”To be precise, that Golden Spike would be the thin sequence of layers in a core pulled from the bottom sediments of a lake, bay or estuary, or from a peat bog, ice sheet, coral reef or stalagmite, somewhere on Earth, containing the chemical and material signatures of human activity dating to the mid-20th century. Key among these — spheroidal carbonaceous particles (fly ash) from coal burning, microplastics, heavy metals, isotopes of carbon and nitrogen associated with fossil fuel burning, and radioactive Plutonium-239 from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing that peaked in the 1950s.After years of investigation, the AWG came up with a list of 12 candidate Golden Spikes — in Japan, China, Canada, the US, Denmark, Italy, Poland, Australia and the Antarctic. Each candidate site assembled a scientific team to study their cores in the minutest detail.Francine McCarthy, lead scientist for Crawford Lake, in southern Ontario, is proud of her sedimentary cores.“We do have the best site,” McCarthy said. “I have to accept some kind of maternal pride.”McCarthy has reason to be proud. Crawford Lake has been recording human activities for thousands of years. That's because it's very deep, and its bottom sediments are permanently isolated. Those sediments consist of many layers, laid down year after year, all precisely dated.They record the history of coal burning, the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide and atmospheric nuclear weapons tests, all peaking around 1950.So do sediments from the Baltic Sea, Japan's Beppu Bay, Sihailongwan crater lake in China and the Śnieżka peat bog at the heart of Poland's polluted “Black Triangle.” San Francisco Bay estuary cores are rich in invasive species, mercury and SCPs. Coral samples from the Gulf of Mexico and Cairns, Australia, are also competitive.The competition is tense. To be chosen as the Anthropocene's Golden Spike, a candidate site must receive 60% of votes from the AWG's 23 voting members. Multiple rounds of voting have taken place over the past year.As the AWG prepares to announce its choice, prominent geologists disagree that the Holocene Epoch ended, and the Anthropocene began, a mere 70 years ago.“In geological terms, that's today. It's just yesterday morning,” said Phil Gibbard, a geologist at Cambridge University. ”We have no clue about, seen from thousands of years in the future, whether this would be more than a blip.”Only time will tell if the Anthropocene is a blip, said Simon Turner, AWG's secretary. Turner, standing in a hallway at University College London, around the corner from the geology department, reflects on the popularity of the Anthropocene idea in nonscientific circles.“The thing with the Anthropocene, people get it,” Turner said. “They get the idea of, like, human activity on the planet. The Holocene … I can probably pull someone over here now and say, 'have you heard of the Holocene?' And they will not have heard of it … and geology is just down the corner, so you would hope someone has.”The Anthropocene Working Group will announce its winning Golden Spike sometime this summer, or in the early fall, in Berlin. Its proposal will then pass up the geo-bureaucratic hierarchy — first to the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, then the International Commission on Stratigraphy and finally, the International Union of Geological Sciences.However, approval of that Golden Spike — either as the base of a new epoch, the Anthropocene, or just the latest stage of the Holocene (in which case, it would be named after its Golden Spike; the Crawfordian, for instance) — could take years.

In this heartwarming and invigorating episode, I had the privilege of sitting with the incredible Elaine LaLanne, the 94-year-old wife of fitness legend Jack LaLanne. With a journey over seven decades, Elaine shared mesmerizing stories about her husband's extraordinary fitness achievements, such as his handcuffed swim from San Francisco Bay to Alcatraz Island. As a motivational speaker, author, and television pioneer, Elaine has touched the lives of countless individuals, motivating them to adopt healthier and more active lifestyles. During our conversation, she offered an exclusive preview of her new book, Pride & Discipline: The Legacy of Jack LaLanne, which explores the principles that drove her husband's incredible success in the fitness world. Elaine also opened up about her secrets to staying fit and full of life well into her 90s! Her infectious passion inspired me to strive for youthfulness at any age, and she shared practical tips for maintaining good physical health. Don't miss my fascinating conversation with Elaine LaLanne, a woman who embodies vitality and youth. Her stories of Jack LaLanne's legendary feats and her own path to wellness left me feeling inspired, motivated and educated. Listen in and discover how you can tap into the power of pride and discipline to lead a healthier, more fulfilling life. To see a lifestyle physician: https://www.mora.com/ To get Elaine's new book: https://www.amazon.com/Pride-Discipline-Legacy-Jack-LaLanne/dp/B0BPZ6FJG4/ref=sr_1_1?crid=21RGQEUB11YV0&keywords=jack+lalanne+book&qid=1680291034&sprefix=jack+lalanne+book%2Caps%2C178&sr=8-1

Blair Abee is an observer, a yogi and a toolmaker. An ordinary mystic. His six books reflect this state of being. Blair was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, though he has spent much of his life in the San Francisco Bay area. He never intended to be an author. Instead, he spent most of his working life as an entrepreneur and business consultant despite having begun yoga and meditation practices more than 45 years ago. Website: https://www.hicmeditation.com/

Rekdal's multimedia piece, "West: A Translation" -- which she'll read from here on campus -- employs translations, archival research, essays, poems, videos, and images in order to document the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay, where many Chinese migrants were detained after the implementation of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882.

In this interview, San Francisco Bay area architect Richard Gage, AIA, member of the American Institute of Architects and founder & former CEO of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, joins us to discuss the destruction of all 3 World Trade Center skyscrapers on 9/11. Mr. Gage, along with his wife and assistant Gail, continues to lead the charge towards a real investigation into this event. With over 30 years of experience as an architect, Mr. Gage has worked on various types of building construction, including fire-proofed steel-framed buildings. Most notably, he worked on a $400M mixed-use urban project with 1.2 million square feet of retail, parking structure, and mid-rise office space. Join us as we delve into Mr. Gage's unyielding quest for the truth about 9/11 and the work of AE911Truth, an organization he founded that now numbers over 3,500 architects and engineers. Tune in to this fascinating discussion with Richard Gage, AIA, Architect, at RichardGage911.org.

There's a stretch of Highway 101 between South San Francisco and Candlestick Park where the road gets very straight and runs right next to the Bay. Even though there are lot of 'No Parking' signs in the area, some people are willing to risk a ticket for the good fishing in that particular spot. What are they catching, and what other treasures are fisher folk pulling out of San Francisco Bay and beyond? We sent producer Katrina Schwartz out to reel in the answer, and dip her own toes into the water. Additional Reading: Why Do People Fish off Highway 101 Near Brisbane? Read a transcript of this episode Get tickets for the Bay Curious book launch! This episode was reported by Katrina Schwartz. Bay Curious is made by Olivia-Allen Price, Amanda Font, and Christopher Beale. Additional support from Paul Lancour, Cesar Saldaña, Jen Chien, Jasmine Garnett, Carly Severn, Jenny Pritchett and Holly Kernan.

This week we're doing things a little differently, the main difference being that you won't hear me in this episode! I asked previous guests, Jack and Sonya, from Two the Horizon to send us a bit of a real-life update as they approach their one-year anniversary of being on the move. In their first year of cruising, they left California, went up to Canada and then south to Mexico on their Passport 42. In the first episode I did with Sonya and Jack you learned that they had lived aboard in the San Francisco Bay area for many years and operated their own boat detailing business. In this episode, Sonya and Jack flow freely from one topic to another as they look back at their first year of cruising. They talk about some of the surprises they found out about Mexico, and they share some good tips on boat maintenance while on the go. There's also an insightful look at social media as cruisers. Also heads up for anyone interested in electric sailboats, listen to the end to hear Sonya and Jack's update. Links mentioned in this episode ⬇️

Wyoming is the first to explicitly ban abortion pills by law. Will Walkey of Wyoming Public Media explains the new law and the legal challenges that lie ahead. And, NPR news editor Larry Kaplow was a print reporter living and working in Baghdad 20 years ago. Kaplow joins us to mark the 20th anniversary of the start of the U.S. war in Iraq. Then, the San Francisco Chronicle's Cecilia Lei spoke with Asian seniors in the San Francisco Bay area, two months after 11 people were killed at an Asian ballroom dance studio in Monterey Park. Lei discovered that "this isn't just about mental or physical exercise, it's about community connection" and joy in the face of tragedy.

San Francisco Bay area public transportation Bart -also known as Bay Area rapid transit has hit the wall hard… and what did I do on the train to keep the freaky daddies away from me? --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/sanfranciscodamn/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/sanfranciscodamn/support

Matt has over 22 years of experience in affordable housing and community development. He has developed hundreds of affordable homes including rental and for sale in the Sacramento, San Francisco Bay and Monterey Bay Areas. In his consulting capacity he serves in several leadership roles including as the Director of Northern CA for PATH Ventures and as Senior Advisor for the Monterey Bay Economic Partnership. He has led nationally recognized housing programs including a HUD Certified Counseling Agency and Fannie Mae 1st Mortgage Seller and Servicer as the former Executive Director of Neighborhood Housing Services Silicon Valley. Matt serves on the Boards of the Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California Action Fund and the California Coalition for Rural Housing. He earned a B.S. in Community and Regional Development from the University of California at Davis where he also served as the President of the Associated Students during his senior year. Matt is based in Salinas where he enjoys spending time outdoors with his wife and 3 young children. HealthCare UnTold honors Matt for his dedication to improving the lives and health of our communities by committing his career to building Affordable Housing and Community Development.#matthuertaconsulting#housingishealth#housingisaright   

Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order that curbs water flow from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to the San Francisco Bay.

EPISODE 1348: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to WITHOUT A DOUBT author and Y Combinator healthcare investor Surbhi Sarna about the current state of the American medical system and how young female entrepreneurs and technologists can go from underrated to unbeatable Surbhi Sarna is an entrepreneur, partner at Y Combinator, advocate for innovation in healthcare, and investor. She has worked as an engineer before becoming CEO and founder of nVision Medical. nVision developed a catheter-based device for early detection of ovarian cancer and after obtaining FDA clearance, was purchased by Boston Scientific. Sarna also sits on both nonprofit and for-profit company boards, has been featured in publications such as Bloomberg, Forbes, Entrepreneur magazine, and Inc., and has received numerous awards, including being named on the Forbes 30 under 30 list and the Inc. Female Founder 100 list. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area with her husband and two children. Her latest book is WITHOUT A DOUBT: How to Go from Underrated to Unbeatable (2023) Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's hard to deny that we are in a recession, but how can you put your brand and business in a position to still succeed? Can you even succeed in a recession?Three Things You'll Learn in This EpisodeHow can your site convert clients?How to generate more referrals.What being authentic looks like in the marketing world.ResourceCheck Out LeadpopsReal Estate Marketing DudeThe Listing Advocate (Earn more listings!)REMD on YouTubeREMD on InstagramTranscript:So how do you track new business, you constantly don't have to chase it. Hi, I'm Mike Cuevas to real estate marketing. And this podcast is all about building a strong personal brand people have come to know, like trust and most importantly, refer. But remember, it is not their job to remember what you do for a living. It's your job to remind them. Let's get started.What's up ladies and gentlemen, welcome to their episode of the real estate marketing, dude, podcast. Books we're chatting about.Today is a very important topic, I get this question quite a lot, but maybe not as much as our guest. And people always asked me like, kind of, what should I do with like, what do I do when I have a site? First they asked me is do I need a site? And I say, yes, absolutely. If you want to have any type of an online presence, you need something, because people will go visit your site before they ever call you because they want to see what you're all about. They want to see if they can relate to you and they're whatnot. But beyond just having a glorified online business card, which a lot of people do in this market, how do you actually have a site that converts? What do you do with it? How do you massage it? How do you work it out, like, if I want a six pack, I'm gonna do less situps. And I'm going to eat healthier, probably stop drinking beer and doing all the above? Well, if you want your site to, you know, start spitting you out business, you need to add to it as well, no differently. Like I have this podcast, you're listening to this podcast right now, because we're getting about 40 to 45,000 listens a month. Thank you to you guys. And a result of this content that goes on my website drives people back to our website. And some of you might schedule a demo with a marketing dude this week, because of this podcast. That's what content creation is. But I create content to consistently add value to our audience. And to keep people coming in this is marketing the same way that we teach you how to market your business on the show, and as a client and whatnot. So what we're gonna chat about today is that subject, what can you do? What can you do? What can you push? What what do you do with a website? Let's just sit there. You just look at it. Do you talk to it? How do you massage your website? Make it work for you? Right? So I couldn't think of a better guest. I want to introduce our guests today. My friend Mr. Jason Fraser with lead pops, Jason wants to say hello to everybody. Hey, what's up, everyone, I'm excited to be here. Thank you. Thank you, my friend for having me on. I appreciate it. watched everyone a little bit. We are your frickin marketing whiz. He's like the mark. He's like a genius at a lot of his marketing ways. And he might be too modest to tell you that. But once you tell him a little bit about your background, cuz you do a lot in the mortgage space and whatnot. But tell us a little quick. And then we'll get into thisshow. And I want to ask you a bunch of questions on how you're making websites work for people that create clients. Yep, absolutely. Yeah. So my name is Jason Fraser. I go but just by Fraser and I've been in the industry since oh nine. I was born into the housing industry. My family owned a mortgage company and also had a family members who were real estate agents as well. So the housing industry is in my blood, but I didn't get into it till oh nine. Prior to that I worked for Peter Thiel, who some of you may know as the founder of PayPal. So I come I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay area. So I came from Silicon Valley, technology startups venture capital world, that's kind of where I lived and then decided to join the family business in oh nine. And I've been a part of that I've held several executive roles. Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Strategy Officer,CTO, I've run sales teams are in Consumer Direct Marketing, I've coached or I am a coach, and I have coached both on the real estate side and the mortgage side. And right now I am the EVP of growth for lead pumps.Cool, man, so he has a lot of experience. Right now you guys are doing a bigthing and in showing people on how to deal with their sites I want to start with with this and get your first opinion. We're start at the very basics. Do we need to have a website in our business? Do a mortgage brokers or lenders or real estate agents? If you're an independent contractor or small business, do you need a website? Yes, you absolutely do. And it's it's funny look. And hopefully, if you have a lot, I mean, it sounds like you got a good amount of listeners per month. And so I probably don't have to let people know this. But if you are one of the Yeah, buts like, oh, yeah, but I'm doing this and yeah, but I'm doing this and yeah, but yeah, you need a website, right? I mean, you're you're absolutely insane. If you don't feel that you need a website right now, I'm not saying you need our one of ours that we do, because honestly, we're not a website company. But but we provide that but because it's important, but you absolutely need a website. It's it the we're going we're not backtracking from an online world, right. You need to your online property and websites, how you do it. And, and so, you know, I know we're gonna talk about a lot of different things. But this is what I want every listener to write down right now because it's going to be the foundation of everything I talked about because look, there's alwaysis a reason to say, hey, but I could do this, I could do that. But here, just because you're getting business does not mean that you're losing business. So I'm going to say that again, just because you're getting business does not mean you're losing business, right? And so when you don't have an offer, when you don't have a website, you're absolutely missing out on opportunities. There's no debate in that at all. Look, if websites didn't matter, you wouldn't how many times you go to website in a given day? Right? Case Closed? Let's let's, let's stop playing around with that websites are important. But wait, I, I have a pageon my broker's website.Why isn't that suffice? Well, well, actually, there's two things for that. One is, you can have that. But what I will say and I said this, even during recruiting calls and whatnot to other loan officers, is that you're not the lenders brand. The lenders brand is you so you're the face of everyone you're talking to. If I'm talking to real estate professionals, you're the face of a kW and exp real what wherever your compass whoever brokerage and look, even though they may have a big bite, and people have heard that name before the consumers and dealing with them, their consumers dealing with you, right, and if you're a mortgage professional, guess what agents consumers, they're dealing with you and right and, and I can tell you 100% And the mortgage space, there's only one main mortgage brand, and that's rocket. But when people referring people, they don't say hey, I'm referring movement mortgage, I'm referring loan depot, they're not referring the company that referring you. And and here's the plain truth, even if you love the company, chances are you're not going to work there forever. So you never want to tie everything to your brokerage or your your lender, yes, have that directory page, use it and get an actual we have a solution to help lenders because lenders are definitely not leveraging those those pages. But you need to have your own property where you could tell your own story that can be moved with you otherwise, because guess what, what happens if forget, let's say you don't leave them What if they go out of business and look in this market, we're seeing a lot of people kind of go belly up. And then what happens then if all you've been using is something that you don't control. And if you don't control the way people can get to you, then you don't have a business?Absolutely, you're the brand. No one's hiring the bank. That's why the worst thing you could do as an independent contractor is make your broker more money or more brand. The best thing you could do as an independent contractor is make your broker more money or more brand. You can't really go wrong either way. Exactly. But you are the brand, guys. So thank you for reinforcing that message. Alright, so yes, spokespeople are gonna go to your site to check you out first, especially if you don't know them, you know, maybe not so much in the relationship game. Oh, I trust my god, trust by God, great. But let's be honest, even the people that trust you still go to your website? You just don't know it yet. Because they're just sort of like, dude, do I really trust Mike? I mean, last time I saw him, he was pretty drunk. Am I gonna trust him with his house? Like, sometimes you need that little more professional? Not that I got wrong. But you know what I mean? Yeah. But people know you personally don't always know you don't always see you in the same light professionally. And it's more of an authority type thing. So walk me through it, though. Where do most of us go wrong? Because it we both agree on this guy's you need to say, yep, stop playing the game. If you don't have a site, you don't have a brand. If you don't have a brand, you don't have a business, and you're just another salesperson chasing the challenge, just a matter of time till shift takes you out. And that's what's happening right now across the industry. So let's go through and talk about how many people that have a brand during the shift.Are weathering the storm a little bit better? I mean, have you ever noticed like everyone who has a site has a lot of content on it? You see, I'm pretty active consistently on social media, their marketing consistently? Like, sure business might be down a little bit, but they're not starving. Is that a coincidence? Is that what is that? No, I mean, absolutely not. And look, there's what I always say, because as a coach, in fact, I just had this as a call a few days ago, is that it's never just one thing. It's a combination of things that you do from a marketing perspective, right? So let me put it this way. If you signed up with lead pops today and got our website and funnels, that would do absolutely nothing for you. Right, I'm gonna say that again. It will do absolutely nothing for you, right? You got to drive traffic to it, you got to use it, you got to put it in your marketing strategy, you got to have a plan for it. You got to do all these different things. And so what I would say for those that are weathering the storm and they say well, I know this guy knew that his website doesn't look nice or whatever and we'll get into that of what matters on the website and what doesn't but the but the point is is that the people that I see it hands down the people that I see that have weathered the storm that are doing deals in markets where someone else some someone's telling me oh, there's no deals that have there's no purchase business. Oh, really? Oh, then how come you know how come Doug's got 12 loans in his pipeline, right like and six of those are under contract and in a market that you told me is doesn't have any inventory and not deals because of marketing, right? And that takes all fourMost people think of marketing they're think, Oh, I gotta be on social media marketing is flyers. Marketing is Billboards, radio marketing is talking to freaking people at the supermarket is doing anything and everything to have conversations with people. That's what increased conversations equals opportunities. Right. So like, that's what people need to understand is the people that are actually doing okay right now is because it's, it's a consistent long term effect, right? Like they're trading on stuff that they did 90 days ago, 120 days ago, two months ago, two years ago, right? Those are the people that are okay, right now I have, I have a friend that just got his loan officer license like six months ago, and here and then we're in a pretty damn competitive market. And he's doing deals that I know other people have been in this business for two years that are are dying. And it's like, what's the difference? Oh, maybe because he's on social media everyday doing videos, how he's talking, he's going out there, he's doing anything and everything to create to create a sphere of influence, right. So that's what people are doing. And yes, driving traffic back to his website, so that you could capture that information.The only recession proof or shift proof business model is your personal brand, you guys, you can't like not feed the beast, because when you don't, and you rely on lead sources or other things you don't control, like a lot of the people. And I don't know how you might see this more in the mortgage space. But I know a lot of people who are relying on Zillow leads or realtor.com leads once that market shifts and the consumer mentality shifts, well, you can no longer rely on that source of just independent business, because it just you know, the numbers just don't work anymore. So you can never rely on stuff you can't control. And it's only a matter. It's a house of cards waiting for when you do that. And I like how you said that it's a cumulative cumulative that I say that correctly approach to marketing, it's direct mail, it's flyers, it's the picture you have, it's the consistent of videos you're doing. And it's a it's an overall communication strategy. Marketing is not advertising, is it? No, advertising is a form of marketing. But can you explain the difference so that people see that? Because you can't you do a little bit of both, right. ButI think people often confuse that. Yeah, cuz so I mean, to put it simply, right, it's because in look, we could get into the full stack of marketing, but advertising is AP, is that, right? Like, it's putting your replays on a billboard, it's doing something at a supermarket, it's, it's running ads, right? That is advert to putting something in a magazine or a paper or whatever that is advertising. That's a part of marketing. But like I said, marketing is you having conversations marketing is, is an extension of sales. In fact, I always like break down those barriers, sales is marketing, marketing and sales, right? Anytime you're having a conversation, guess what you're selling yourself, you're selling your services, you're selling your products, that is marketing, right? Like it's putting any type of positive and positive spin or diagnosing of like a challenge and solution to someone so that you can bring them in and help them right. So that's the difference. Really, when it comes down to marketing and advertising. They're not one in the same. Advertising is a piece of marketing. But marketing is not a piece of advertising, right? And it's one of those things, it's just one comes before the other and if you're just doing advertising and nothing else, you're gonna have a hard time. It's very tough. Very tough, because you're just, it's hard. It's almost impossible nowadays. Alright, so what am I what should I be doing now? You know, like, what, what should I be doing right now? I'm all I create content. Okay, so get really loud gets super loud. What do you tell all your peeps? Yeah, I mean, for, you know, kind of going back to one of the original questions as far as like, you know, what you should be doing is, is, is when it's your website, and what, when what you think is important or what not? It like, it's not like, Guess what, consumers don't care, right? They don't care about your as much as people like, look, Simon Sinek has done a great job at like, doing the why and having those talks and everyone feels good and wants to hug each other afterward. But guess what? The consumer cares about three things write themselves in the morning noon, and after supper, right? I think Dell Carnegie said that. That's the consumer doesn't care about your why that they don't buy why you do things, right. They don't know you yet. So they don't give a crap about you and why you do things until they know you and like you, then they will learn about you and your why and all that other stuff. But instead, people make all these websites to make it all pretty and nice and do all these things when the consumer doesn't care about that. And look, I have the data because we have 2500 plus customers of websites that I look at the heat maps to see where people are paying their pay attention to and all they care about is above the fold, meaning your hero section which is like your image, video, whatever, you got to have a strong headline, sub headline, a call to action and tell them where they need to go. That's what lead pops. We don't focus on making very pretty websites even though we do we focus on conversion, because that's all that matters. Do you want a nice looking website? Or do you want a nice looking website that converts? Right, I think and if you said if you don't then get out of the business because you're going to you're going to starve right unless you have someone else to speak and a lot of money for you andAnd so when it comes to that guy's like people actually on the mortgage side, you know, for your all your mortgage listenersget choked up about this. But when the is that you send people to your Apply Online link, we call that apply or die. It's, it's the worst thing you could do you put someone that doesn't know you, like you, or even trust you into an instant buying decision of something that's going to be their biggest financial transaction in their life.So like, give me your it's like, an ask for like, the social security number and like, like, yeah,why not? Right? Yeah, let's just let's just do that. Like, look, guys, like, that's, that's not how we do it, you know, we evolve, things change. And so. So that's, that's the what you guys got to figure out. And that's what we focus on. We focus on conversion, we focus on you know, soft, yes. Ladders and stuff to get people saying yes, yes, yes. And then you hit him. And then eventually you it's just it's funnel marketing, very simplistic. And then, you know, to your, you know, to your question about content. Look, right now, I'll tell you right now, who's going to win in this market, the people with the largest databases with the highest amount of trust, right you want if you want to create a never ending, and look this, this is future proof, right? It doesn't matter and a down market, up market, middle market, it doesn't matter where you are, Phil, if you want to have a never ending pipeline, you need to talk to people and put people in your database. And here's one fundamental rule of marketing that everyone needs to understand. And look, you could anyone could argue with me, debate me challenge me on it, but I will throw right back at him the proof that I'm right, and that is whoever spends the most amount to acquire customer wins. Right?And if you see that with like, like, look at look at how many, you mentioned Zillow earlier, right? There's a reason why an agency you actually helped this happen and mortgage providers mortgage lenders to, but that no one gets more real estate traffic than Zillow. Right? And there's a reason for that, right? Because they spent the money they did what they did they did the you know, the the frog and kind of a slow boil pot. Right, you know, it didn't know that it was getting boiled, but it did. And then on the mortgage side, same with like rocket right. Even though they've been they've been knocked down, you know, by UW M. That it's, it's they spent money on marketing, right? Zillow spent a lot of money on marketing, rockets, biggest expense is marketing. But there's a reason for that. So you got to understand that you got to put yourself out there, you got to be marketing every single day because you got to be filling that database, and then understand this very fundamental rule when it comes to lead generation. Everybody's a lead, but not everyone's a prospect. Right? And you got to you got to differentiate to everyone, like just talk to someone, they raise their hand and automatically they're a prospect before you qualify and renew anything to do it. Right. This is sells one on one. Right? So you just got to understand that you're having conversations with everyone, because you want everyone you can in your database. Because the more conversations you have, the more deals you're going to do. Yep, books 10 to 15% of the people on your Facebook feed. Following you connect with on Instagram you run across in the grocery store you see at your kids soccer games, and baseball games, they're moving this year. Most of them don't know it yet. But all 100% of them have referral for you. In a referral dominated business, like don't overthink this stuff. But if you're not thought of firstyou that gets passed up, that's just an opportunity. So like 80% of people I don't do you know, the number for the mortgage space. I know in the real estate agents 80% of people over it's like 80, for some like that hire the first person they meet with, you know, what that is in the lending space is similar? It? I don't know, I don't know what it is in the mortgage space. I've never really i But to me, I kind of take that as like, because I look at look at it this way. A consumer is a consumer regardless of product, right? So I would imagine those percentages are roughly going to be the same because I will say this and you may you'll probably notice on the real estate side, at large and and in the mortgage space, the retention of that once you do a deal with the consumer, the retention is about 23% or 22% of that customer and I think in the real estate, it's in the teens last time I saw that you do a good job doesn't mean that they're coming back, right? Yeah, well, that's because people stopped talking to him in the real estate space, like 80% of people forgot their agents name like the agents name, they don't even know the first name anymore after six months, because we don't stay in touch with them. And if you're having a problem with that, guys, I'm going to take a shameless plug real quick you need to get to referral sweet.com All right referral suite.com Because all we do is farm your database and make it really simple. I just need one to two hours a month from you and that's about it. And people stop forgetting you exist but back to the show.Yes, that's it's crazy that we don't stay in front of them but we don't look at past business as future transactions because we're too short sighted. You don't spike the football on loan number one you spike the football and referral number four from the person you sold loan when were one four years ago. That's when you spike the football in these types of relationship based businesses guys, don't be so short sighted.it.Alright, so what do you do now? Give me some advice. What are we going to do with the market? How do I get loud? What do I how do I get more and more conversations? What kind of activities specifically should I be doing?Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. And to me, I think it's like I mentioned the beginning, it's a combination of things that you need to have a an omni channel, attack writer strategy, and that's social media. And that doesn't mean you have to be on everything doesn't mean you have to be on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, whatever, every channel is different. For first and foremost, it's understand where your audience is, right? That's, that's first and look, I could even go even back more and say, hey, you need to have a CRM and all that other stuff. But look, that the fact that it's 2023, and we're still having the conversation and trying to convince, I'm still trying to convince people on social media, which is stupid, but I've also got to the point, I don't know if it's my age, or just because I've been in this industry long enough. But like, I stopped trying to convince, as soon as I get into any type of conversation, I'm like, is this not for me?Okay, good, fantastic. There's no nothing for me to talk about, because we're already going to lose. And so either you're gonna lose today, you're gonna lose down the road, but you will lose, right? And, and soyou need to be you need to be putting yourself out there right in and look, I could get into the stupid stuff of like, hey, you need to be telling stories. And, and obviously, you know, we're on this podcast to be doing video, right? The fact that we're still having conversations about the importance of video is freaking ridiculous to me, too. But that's what you need to be doing and understanding where one understand your audience. Who are you trying to reach? Where are they at? And then what problem you're solving for them and under and going deep. And I have this issue with loan officers all the time, is that there's reasons people are buying and selling, right? It's not simply because they want to move, there's a reason why they want to move. Understand that because the more the more specific right and personalise your messaging is, is going to be 10x to 20x more effective than what your competition is doing. Right. In fact, I'd say it's even more and it's because our competition looks for the least path of resistance, they look for the easy way out, they look for shortcuts, they look for hacks, they want to do anything but work when it comes to marketing and putting stuff out there, right? Or they'll buy leads because they think that's deals on a platter. It isn't right and so and I've done this both on the real estate side and the mortgage side, andso you should be putting content out there you absolutely should be using hyperlocal marketing strategies and your business because people care about where they live. You should also be using email marketing, right? Like that kind of went out of style was starting to go out of style not too long ago, but now it's it's made a pretty big comeback. And I'll tell you this email is your only one to one connection that you're going to have because guess what you do not you This is why you don't build a mansion on rented land, right? Like you don't control Facebook, you don't control Instagram, every time I hear someone complain about the Facebook algorithm or the you know, the Instagram algorithms like what do you think they were going to do? Do you think they were just going to be free and fun and fair for their entire life, they're a business they need to make money so just get over it so that but but if you have an online property, you have that one to one connection via email, that's how you stay in front of it. That's how you control you track your traffic because if you don't do that, then you could get slapped by Google with an algorithms change and if you're running ads, those I remember running like Zillow long form in the beginning when I was doing Consumer Direct, right oh, it was really nice getting those 12 to $14 leads but guess what, when two years went by and those were 60 the ad right and then you're looking at a three to 4% conversion rate maybe a six to nine month nurture right like that's real money we're talking about except but guess what, you just completely went into their basket you are completely dependent on them so you had no you know, no choice but the pay to play none of these companies are evil right we make them evil because of what of the of their practices but what we gave them the power to do it so what are we complaining complaining about beat them right compete don't just stop doing it. I I have people I hate and it's crazy to me like I get it on the real estate side. Not really but I do.On the mortgage side. If you are paying any type of money to Zillow, you are insane, you are insane and your main bread and membrane will shout out to Cypress Hill. They're for dinosaurs like me, but Cypress Hill, but But it's insane because on a lender, they're they they are a lender. Zillow is a mortgage lender. And then when everyone comes back, man, it's like well, this and that. And I'm like me ask you this. You're at loan depot, right? Yeah. Malone depot, would you pay movement? Would you pay movement mortgage for leads? Oh, absolutely not. What's the difference? Extra zero. And so that that's what I'm saying, Guys, you got to control your traffic. You got to control your sources of income. You got to control where the consumer is going to find you. Because that's the only way you're going to stay relevant long term and not be dependent on someone else for your success. Because that's never a winning formula.He hit it on the head.So many people aren't using email, we're video emailing consistently, every month, we're going to 40% open rate. And the videos have nothing to do with real estate or lending or anything. They're like talking about a restaurant, their community, their local. And it's just reminders, you don't need to, like when we're just there's different types of databases andthe warm database are like all the list of people who all have the potential to refer or do business with you. And staying in touch with that audience. And those people the 200 to 300 400 people you invite to your wedding or funeral with an unlimited budget on both are the ones that you just nurture and you're not nurturing, like, just staying in touch with people, if you don't own your own data, you're in the data collection business, just like I am, like, I listened to my stats, I want to build my email list because the larger my list or my database grows, the more opportunity I have to sell more people our services. So we don't in the industry don't nurture any of the relationships we have. And then they get pissed when you log on the Facebook Like fuck, they just bought a house and they forgot I was in the business. Dude, you gotta like farm these people, you farm them with content, it's very simple. And you have to nurture and keep in touch with people because it's a giant popularity contest. Nobody wants to go interview a bunch of lenders or realtors, like, that's like the last thing I want to do. Can you imagine like, going on a speed dating round with a bunch of mortgage brokers like I'd rather watch fucking paint dry. And same thing with realtors, they just want to know they could trust the first person they meet with will start becoming the first person they meet with you do that by getting really loud, you're adding value to other people's lives connecting with people. You don't have to pitch them or sell your freakin interest rates or, or go see a house and every conversation you have. But you do need to remind them what you do for a living. And that's very simple to do.Well, that dude, very well said, Any closing thoughtsyou have here for people? Yeah, and you know, I'll put my coaching hat on here for a second is Look, I told you what to write down in the beginning, which was you know, just because you're making you're doing business doesn't mean you're losing business. And I'll tell you this is you gotta write, it's kind of like a Venn diagram, you gotta write two circles. One is what you want to hear and what you need to hear, right? And be very honest with yourself and what you want to be told and what you need to be told, right, and then the intersection of those two, that's where the gold is, right? Because that's something that you're going to lean into and do. And if you don't find that, then you got an issue, and you got it. And you gotta kind of audit yourself on what you're doing. But you know, to a lot of the stuff that we talked about, about, you know, being you know, one is the nurture processes, you should be spending as much money, if not more on your retention, and your post close as you do trying to acquire that customer, right, you spend more money on the people you do know, as opposed to the people you don't know. And we don't do that at all. Because it's not sexy. It's not instant gratification. It's not instant ROI. So we you know, we forget about it, we leave it to some you know, crappy CRM post drip about winterizing your pipes, pumpkin pie recipes, you know, fall back, spring forward, all that other nonsense that turn back the clock and turn back to you know, we're, that's not going to keep you top of mind. Right. And that's why that community piece is so relevant is because as as a sales professional, especially in a community, is that is that you all you care about is attention and awareness of who you are. That's all you should care about. Right? It doesn't have to be about your house, or being a mortgage professional or any of that other stuff. Right? Yes, tell them what you do make sure that that's part of your content strategy. But if someone just does did it, if you just sold someone's house, right, they don't care about the rest of the houses you're selling or any of that other stuff, right? You got a segment that database and talk to him about stuff that they're going to care about, right? Because one of the things that we have going for us more than any other sales profession, is that we that we help people achieve dreams create stickiness, create generational wealth, right fame, you know, really create happy situations that go to the emotion and heart. So there's automatic stickiness there. So the only reason that we screw that up is because we screw that up. Right? So that you know, so that's what's super important to all you guys know, you know, for all you guys to know. And then this is the last thing that I'll leave you with, is that you got to understand that your marketing starts before that consumer consumer even knows who you are, right? That is when your marketing starts. Because you never know when they're saying and before you could tell me that you sold something over list and over the last two years. Congrats, I'm sure that was very hard. But like, you know, doing stuff over list, you know, sell stuff in 10 days, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, before they're to close the credit clinicals before you can tell me any of that. I have to know who you are. If I don't know who you are, then you're not relevant. Right? And don't let the last two are 2020 and 2021. Don't let that unicorn yours fool you into thinking you have something that you don't and look Don't Don't get me wrong. I say all of this out of passion and love for this industry. I mentioned my story in the beginning. I'm here for life. And so I want all of the true professionals to win.But here's the thing gotta understand is don't let those things for you. Right? You got to understand that the markets are going. And we could be in a market like this. If you look at historical data, and look, everyone wants to be rosy. Everyone wants the interest rates to be what they are, and inventory and all that stuff. If you look at swings, this could be a five to 10 year swing of being this being the normalized market. So guess what? Guess what? Get dressed, put, roll up your sleeves, put in the work and do what needs to be done. But marketing is going to be the most important thing that you do for your business from now on going forward. Why don't you tell them where they can find you guys? They want to learn more. Yeah, if you guys want to, you guys could always look I'm all over social media. So you know Frazier real I'm the real cmo on all social media channels. And then you can also check us out at lead pops.com. Appreciate it folks. If you're going to struggle with what to create Why don't you join the next content creator challenge you can visit www dot real estate content creator challenge will give you 30 days of content was from video email to memes to creating short form real to long form videos, you're actually going to take action do them, learn how to do them. It's not as hard as you think it is. But that's why we do these challenges. And it's only $49 to go ahead and visit WWW dot real estate content creator challenge.com and join this month's challenge which starts on March 14. Dude, appreciate you coming on to the show. We had a great time. Folks. Listen, this is like feel like we speak the same language man keep it up and folks just take action. Get Loud, start creating a whole lot of content. It's how you start marketing its content marketing, make sure everyone when they think of real estate or lending thinks of your name. When that term comes up, and as long as that happens, you will always attract business despite market conditions. So you guys next week, thank you for watching another episode of the real estate marketing dude podcast. If you need help with video or finding out what your brand is, visit our website at WWW dot real estate marketing dude.com We make branding and video content creation simple and do everything for you. So if you have any additional questions, visit the site, download the training and then schedule time to speak with a dude and get you rolling in your local marketplace. Thanks for watching another episode of the podcast. We'll see you next time.Transcribed by https://otter.ai

If you've been to the City of Alameda, you've probably noticed its beautiful Victorian homes lining the shore of the San Francisco Bay. This has been by design. For decades the city has fought against building new housing, but last November, members of Alameda City council agreed that it was time for a change. They passed a plan to build over 6400 new housing units on the island, making Alameda the first Bay Area city to get its housing plan approved by the state. The state requires cities to come up with these new plans, called “housing elements,”every 8 years. Until recently, cities have ignored them. But now, more pressure is coming from voters, developers, and Gov. Gavin Newsom — and cities that don't comply could face steep consequences.  Guest: Adhiti Bandlamudi, KQED housing producer/reporter  Links:  To Meet State Housing Goals, One Bay Area City Had to Overcome Its NIMBY Past The Bay Listener Survey!

We have a special episode for you today. In today's episode, Christine MacMillan speaks with both Captain Trevor Bozina and Captain Sandy Bendixen from Puget Sound Pilots. They share their experiences and path to becoming pilots while speaking about maternity leave offshore. This is a podcast you don't want to miss! After growing up on the water and attending Maine Maritime Academy, Captain Bendixen sailed from Third Mate to Captain on RORO, heavy-lift and container ships from the United States to the Middle East. At the age of 29, Captain Bendixen was given her first command. Captain Bendixen sailed as the Master of the largest heavy lift ship in the U.S. Fleet. In September 2018 at 36 years old, after a rigorous training program and drawing every chart of Puget Sound from memory, Captain Bendixen became the first female Puget Sound Pilot. Captain Bendixen spends her days piloting ships and working as a Washington State Pilot Commissioner. There are approximately 1,100 harbor pilots in the United States and less than 3% of the pilots in the United States are female.Captain Trevor grew up in San Francisco, CA sailing with his family in San Francisco Bay. He graduated from the California Maritime Academy in 2006 and went to work on tugs. Working in San Francisco Bay for Baydelta Maritime, he became a Captain when he was 26 operating tractor tugs for ship assist and escort work. The most memorable experiences in his career have been the ones he has shared with his family aboard the tug, and how excited they were for him when he passed the Washington State Pilot exam. Have a Listen & SubscribeThe Women Offshore Podcast can also be found on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and most podcast apps. Make sure to subscribe to whatever app you use, so that you don't miss out on future episodes.What did you think of the show?Let us know your thoughts by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also reach out by sending us an email at hello@womenoffshore.org. 

Episode 163 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay", Stax Records, and the short, tragic, life of Otis Redding. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-three minute bonus episode available, on "Soul Man" by Sam and Dave. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Redding, even if I split into multiple parts. The main resource I used for the biographical details of Redding was Dreams to Remember: Otis Redding, Stax Records, and the Transformation of Southern Soul by Mark Ribowsky. Ribowsky is usually a very good, reliable, writer, but in this case there are a couple of lapses in editing which make it not a book I can wholeheartedly recommend, but the research on the biographical details of Redding seems to be the best. Information about Stax comes primarily from two books: Soulsville USA: The Story of Stax by Rob Bowman, and Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion by Robert Gordon. Country Soul by Charles L Hughes is a great overview of the soul music made in Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and Nashville in the sixties. There are two Original Album Series box sets which between them contain all the albums Redding released in his life plus his first few posthumous albums, for a low price. Volume 1, volume 2. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before I begin -- this episode ends with a description of a plane crash, which some people may find upsetting. There's also a mention of gun violence. In 2019 the film Summer of Soul came out. If you're unfamiliar with this film, it's a documentary of an event, the Harlem Cultural Festival, which gets called the "Black Woodstock" because it took place in the summer of 1969, overlapping the weekend that Woodstock happened. That event was a series of weekend free concerts in New York, performed by many of the greatest acts in Black music at that time -- people like Stevie Wonder, David Ruffin, Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, the Staple Singers, Sly and the Family Stone, Nina Simone, and the Fifth Dimension. One thing that that film did was to throw into sharp relief a lot of the performances we've seen over the years by legends of white rock music of the same time. If you watch the film of Woodstock, or the earlier Monterey Pop festival, it's apparent that a lot of the musicians are quite sloppy. This is easy to dismiss as being a product of the situation -- they're playing outdoor venues, with no opportunity to soundcheck, using primitive PA systems, and often without monitors. Anyone would sound a bit sloppy in that situation, right? That is until you listen to the performances on the Summer of Soul soundtrack. The performers on those shows are playing in the same kind of circumstances, and in the case of Woodstock literally at the same time, so it's a fair comparison, and there really is no comparison. Whatever you think of the quality of the *music* (and some of my very favourite artists played at Monterey and Woodstock), the *musicianship* is orders of magnitude better at the Harlem Cultural Festival [Excerpt: Gladys Knight and the Pips “I Heard it Through the Grapevine (live)”] And of course there's a reason for this. Most of the people who played at those big hippie festivals had not had the same experiences as the Black musicians. The Black players were mostly veterans of the chitlin' circuit, where you had to play multiple shows a day, in front of demanding crowds who wanted their money's worth, and who wanted you to be able to play and also put on a show at the same time. When you're playing for crowds of working people who have spent a significant proportion of their money to go to the show, and on a bill with a dozen other acts who are competing for that audience's attention, you are going to get good or stop working. The guitar bands at Woodstock and Monterey, though, hadn't had the same kind of pressure. Their audiences were much more forgiving, much more willing to go with the musicians, view themselves as part of a community with them. And they had to play far fewer shows than the chitlin' circuit veterans, so they simply didn't develop the same chops before becoming famous (the best of them did after fame, of course). And so it's no surprise that while a lot of bands became more famous as a result of the Monterey Pop Festival, only three really became breakout stars in America as a direct result of it. One of those was the Who, who were already the third or fourth biggest band in the UK by that point, either just behind or just ahead of the Kinks, and so the surprise is more that it took them that long to become big in America. But the other two were themselves veterans of the chitlin' circuit. If you buy the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of Monterey Pop, you get two extra discs along with the disc with the film of the full festival on it -- the only two performances that were thought worth turning into their own short mini-films. One of them is Jimi Hendrix's performance, and we will talk about that in a future episode. The other is titled Shake! Otis at Monterey: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Shake! (live at Monterey Pop Festival)"] Otis Redding came from Macon, Georgia, the home town of Little Richard, who became one of his biggest early influences, and like Richard he was torn in his early years between religion and secular music -- though in most other ways he was very different from Richard, and in particular he came from a much more supportive family. While his father, Otis senior, was a deacon in the church, and didn't approve much of blues, R&B, or jazz music or listen to it himself, he didn't prevent his son from listening to it, so young Otis grew up listening to records by Richard -- of whom he later said "If it hadn't been for Little Richard I would not be here... Richard has soul too. My present music has a lot of him in it" -- and another favourite, Clyde McPhatter: [Excerpt: Billy Ward and the Dominoes, "Have Mercy Baby"] Indeed, it's unclear exactly how much Otis senior *did* disapprove of those supposedly-sinful kinds of music. The biography I used as a source for this, and which says that Otis senior wouldn't listen to blues or jazz music at all, also quotes his son as saying that when he was a child his mother and father used to play him "a calypso song out then called 'Run Joe'" That will of course be this one: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan, "Run Joe"] I find it hard to reconcile the idea of someone who refused to listen to the blues or jazz listening to Louis Jordan, but then people are complex. Whatever Otis senior's feelings about secular music, he recognised from a very early age that his son had a special talent, and encouraged him to become a gospel singer. And at the same time he was listening to Little Richard, young Otis was also listening to gospel singers. One particular influence was a blind street singer, Reverend Pearly Brown: [Excerpt: Reverend Pearly Brown, "Ninety Nine and a Half Won't Do"] Redding was someone who cared deeply about his father's opinion, and it might well have been that he would eventually have become a gospel performer, because he started his career with a foot in both camps. What seems to have made the difference is that when he was sixteen, his father came down with tuberculosis. Even a few years earlier this would have been a terminal diagnosis, but thankfully by this point antibiotics had been invented, and the deacon eventually recovered. But it did mean that Otis junior had to become the family breadwinner while his father was sick, and so he turned decisively towards the kind of music that could make more money. He'd already started performing secular music. He'd joined a band led by Gladys Williams, who was the first female bandleader in the area. Williams sadly doesn't seem to have recorded anything -- discogs has a listing of a funk single by a Gladys Williams on a tiny label which may or may not be the same person, but in general she avoided recording studios, only wanting to play live -- but she was a very influential figure in Georgia music. According to her former trumpeter Newton Collier, who later went on to play with Redding and others, she trained both Fats Gonder and Lewis Hamlin, who went on to join the lineup of James Brown's band that made Live at the Apollo, and Collier says that Hamlin's arrangements for that album, and the way the band would segue from one track to another, were all things he'd been taught by Miss Gladys. Redding sang with Gladys Williams for a while, and she took him under her wing, trained him, and became his de facto first manager. She got him to perform at local talent shows, where he won fifteen weeks in a row, before he got banned from performing to give everyone else a chance. At all of these shows, the song he performed was one that Miss Gladys had rehearsed with him, Little Richard's "Heeby Jeebies": [Excerpt: Little Richard, "Heeby Jeebies"] At this time, Redding's repertoire was largely made up of songs by the two greats of fifties Georgia R&B -- Little Richard and James Brown -- plus some by his other idol Sam Cooke, and those singers would remain his greatest influences throughout his career. After his stint with Williams, Redding went on to join another band, Pat T Cake and the Mighty Panthers, whose guitarist Johnny Jenkins would be a major presence in his life for several years. The Mighty Panthers were soon giving Redding top billing, and advertising gigs as featuring Otis "Rockin' Robin" Redding -- presumably that was another song in his live repertoire. By this time Redding was sounding enough like Little Richard that when Richard's old backing band, The Upsetters, were looking for a new singer after Richard quit rock and roll for the ministry, they took Redding on as their vocalist for a tour. Once that tour had ended, Redding returned home to find that Johnny Jenkins had quit the Mighty Panthers and formed a new band, the Pinetoppers. Redding joined that band, who were managed by a white teenager named Phil Walden, who soon became Redding's personal manager as well. Walden and Redding developed a very strong bond, to the extent that Walden, who was studying at university, spent all his tuition money promoting Redding and almost got kicked out. When Redding found this out, he actually went round to everyone he knew and got loans from everyone until he had enough to pay for Walden's tuition -- much of it paid in coins. They had a strong enough bond that Walden would remain his manager for the rest of Redding's life, and even when Walden had to do two years in the Army in Germany, he managed Redding long-distance, with his brother looking after things at home. But of course, there wasn't much of a music industry in Georgia, and so with Walden's blessing and support, he moved to LA in 1960 to try to become a star. Just before he left, his girlfriend Zelma told him she was pregnant. He assured her that he was only going to be away for a few months, and that he would be back in time for the birth, and that he intended to come back to Georgia rich and marry her. Her response was "Sure you is". In LA, Redding met up with a local record producer, James "Jimmy Mack" McEachin, who would later go on to become an actor, appearing in several films with Clint Eastwood. McEachin produced a session for Redding at Gold Star studios, with arrangements by Rene Hall and using several of the musicians who later became the Wrecking Crew. "She's All Right", the first single that came from that session, was intended to sound as much like Jackie Wilson as possible, and was released under the name of The Shooters, the vocal group who provided the backing vocals: [Excerpt: The Shooters, "She's All Right"] "She's All Right" was released on Trans World, a small label owned by Morris Bernstein, who also owned Finer Arts records (and "She's All Right" seems to have been released on both labels). Neither of Bernstein's labels had any great success -- the biggest record they put out was a single by the Hollywood Argyles that came out after they'd stopped having hits -- and they didn't have any connection to the R&B market. Redding and McEachin couldn't find any R&B labels that wanted to pick up their recordings, and so Redding did return to Georgia and marry Zelma a few days before the birth of their son Dexter. Back in Georgia, he hooked up again with the Pinetoppers, and he and Jenkins started trying local record labels, attempting to get records put out by either of them. Redding was the first, and Otis Redding and the Pinetoppers put out a single, "Shout Bamalama", a slight reworking of a song that he'd recorded as "Gamma Lamma" for McEachin, which was obviously heavily influenced by Little Richard: [Excerpt: Otis Redding and the Pinetoppers, "Shout Bamalama"] That single was produced by a local record company owner, Bobby Smith, who signed Redding to a contract which Redding didn't read, but which turned out to be a management contract as well as a record contract. This would later be a problem, as Redding didn't have an actual contract with Phil Walden -- one thing that comes up time and again in stories about music in the Deep South at this time is people operating on handshake deals and presuming good faith on the part of each other. There was a problem with the record which nobody had foreseen though -- Redding was the first Black artist signed to Smith's label, which was called Confederate Records, and its logo was the Southern Cross. Now Smith, by all accounts, was less personally racist than most white men in Georgia at the time, and hadn't intended that as any kind of statement of white supremacy -- he'd just used a popular local symbol, without thinking through the implications. But as the phrase goes, intent isn't magic, and while Smith didn't intend it as racist, rather unsurprisingly Black DJs and record shops didn't see things in the same light. Smith was told by several DJs that they wouldn't play the record while it was on that label, and he started up a new subsidiary label, Orbit, and put the record out on that label. Redding and Smith continued collaborating, and there were plans for Redding to put out a second single on Orbit. That single was going to be "These Arms of Mine", a song Redding had originally given to another Confederate artist, a rockabilly performer called Buddy Leach (who doesn't seem to be the same Buddy Leach as the Democratic politician from Louisiana, or the saxophone player with George Thorogood and the Destroyers). Leach had recorded it as a B-side, with the slightly altered title "These Arms Are Mine". Sadly I can't provide an excerpt of that, as the record is so rare that even websites I've found by rockabilly collectors who are trying to get everything on Confederate Records haven't managed to get hold of copies. Meanwhile, Johnny Jenkins had been recording on another label, Tifco, and had put out a single called "Pinetop": [Excerpt: Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers, "Pinetop"] That record had attracted the attention of Joe Galkin. Galkin was a semi-independent record promoter, who had worked for Atlantic in New York before moving back to his home town of Macon. Galkin had proved himself as a promoter by being responsible for the massive amounts of airplay given to Solomon Burke's "Just Out of Reach (of My Two Open Arms)": [Excerpt: Solomon Burke, "Just Out of Reach (of My Two Open Arms)"] After that, Jerry Wexler had given Galkin fifty dollars a week and an expense account, and Galkin would drive to all the Black radio stations in the South and pitch Atlantic's records to them. But Galkin also had his own record label, Gerald Records, and when he went to those stations and heard them playing something from a smaller label, he would quickly negotiate with that smaller label, buy the master and the artist's contract, and put the record out on Gerald Records -- and then he would sell the track and the artist on to Atlantic, taking ten percent of the record's future earnings and a finder's fee. This is what happened with Johnny Jenkins' single, which was reissued on Gerald and then on Atlantic. Galkin signed Jenkins to a contract -- another of those contracts which also made him Jenkins' manager, and indeed the manager of the Pinetops. Jenkins' record ended up selling about twenty-five thousand records, but when Galkin saw the Pinetoppers performing live, he realised that Otis Redding was the real star. Since he had a contract with Jenkins, he came to an agreement with Walden, who was still Jenkins' manager as well as Redding's -- Walden would get fifty percent of Jenkins' publishing and they would be co-managers of Jenkins. But Galkin had plans for Redding, which he didn't tell anyone about, not even Redding himself. The one person he did tell was Jerry Wexler, who he phoned up and asked for two thousand dollars, explaining that he wanted to record Jenkins' follow-up single at Stax, and he also wanted to bring along a singer he'd discovered, who sang with Jenkins' band. Wexler agreed -- Atlantic had recently started distributing Stax's records on a handshake deal of much the same kind that Redding had with Walden. As far as everyone else was concerned, though, the session was just for Johnny Jenkins, the known quantity who'd already released a single for Atlantic. Otis Redding, meanwhile, was having to work a lot of odd jobs to feed his rapidly growing family, and one of those jobs was to work as Johnny Jenkins' driver, as Jenkins didn't have a driving license. So Galkin suggested that, given that Memphis was quite a long drive, Redding should drive Galkin and Jenkins to Stax, and carry the equipment for them. Bobby Smith, who still thought of himself as Redding's manager, was eager to help his friend's bandmate with his big break (and to help Galkin, in the hope that maybe Atlantic would start distributing Confederate too), and so he lent Redding the company station wagon to drive them to the session.The other Pinetoppers wouldn't be going -- Jenkins was going to be backed by Booker T and the MGs, the normal Stax backing band. Phil Walden, though, had told Redding that he should try to take the opportunity to get himself heard by Stax, and he pestered the musicians as they recorded Jenkins' "Spunky": [Excerpt: Johnny Jenkins, "Spunky"] Cropper later remembered “During the session, Al Jackson says to me, ‘The big tall guy that was driving Johnny, he's been bugging me to death, wanting me to hear him sing,' Al said, ‘Would you take some time and get this guy off of my back and listen to him?' And I said, ‘After the session I'll try to do it,' and then I just forgot about it.” What Redding didn't know, though Walden might have, is that Galkin had planned all along to get Redding to record while he was there. Galkin claimed to be Redding's manager, and told Jim Stewart, the co-owner of Stax who acted as main engineer and supervising producer on the sessions at this point, that Wexler had only funded the session on the basis that Redding would also get a shot at recording. Stewart was unimpressed -- Jenkins' session had not gone well, and it had taken them more than two hours to get two tracks down, but Galkin offered Stewart a trade -- Galkin, as Redding's manager, would take half of Stax's mechanical royalties for the records (which wouldn't be much) but in turn would give Stewart half the publishing on Redding's songs. That was enough to make Stewart interested, but by this point Booker T. Jones had already left the studio, so Steve Cropper moved to the piano for the forty minutes that was left of the session, with Jenkins remaining on guitar, and they tried to get two sides of a single cut. The first track they cut was "Hey Hey Baby", which didn't impress Stewart much -- he simply said that the world didn't need another Little Richard -- and so with time running out they cut another track, the ballad Redding had already given to Buddy Leach. He asked Cropper, who didn't play piano well, to play "church chords", by which he meant triplets, and Cropper said "he started singing ‘These Arms of Mine' and I know my hair lifted about three inches and I couldn't believe this guy's voice": [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "These Arms of Mine"] That was more impressive, though Stewart carefully feigned disinterest. Stewart and Galkin put together a contract which signed Redding to Stax -- though they put the single out on the less-important Volt subsidiary, as they did for much of Redding's subsequent output -- and gave Galkin and Stewart fifty percent each of the publishing rights to Redding's songs. Redding signed it, not even realising he was signing a proper contract rather than just one for a single record, because he was just used to signing whatever bit of paper was put in front of him at the time. This one was slightly different though, because Redding had had his twenty-first birthday since the last time he'd signed a contract, and so Galkin assumed that that meant all his other contracts were invalid -- not realising that Redding's contract with Bobby Smith had been countersigned by Redding's mother, and so was also legal. Walden also didn't realise that, but *did* realise that Galkin representing himself as Redding's manager to Stax might be a problem, so he quickly got Redding to sign a proper contract, formalising the handshake basis they'd been operating on up to that point. Walden was at this point in the middle of his Army service, but got the signature while he was home on leave. Walden then signed a deal with Galkin, giving Walden half of Galkin's fifty percent cut of Redding's publishing in return for Galkin getting a share of Walden's management proceeds. By this point everyone was on the same page -- Otis Redding was going to be a big star, and he became everyone's prime focus. Johnny Jenkins remained signed to Walden's agency -- which quickly grew to represent almost every big soul star that wasn't signed to Motown -- but he was regarded as a footnote. His record came out eventually on Volt, almost two years later, but he didn't release another record until 1968. Jenkins did, though, go on to have some influence. In 1970 he was given the opportunity to sing lead on an album backed by Duane Allman and the members of the Muscle Shoals studio band, many of whom went on to form the Allman Brothers Band. That record contained a cover of Dr. John's "I Walk on Guilded Splinters" which was later sampled by Beck for "Loser", the Wu-Tang Clan for "Gun Will Go" and Oasis for their hit "Go Let it Out": [Excerpt: Johnny Jenkins, "I Walk on Guilded Splinters"] Jenkins would play guitar on several future Otis Redding sessions, but would hold a grudge against Redding for the rest of his life for taking the stardom he thought was rightfully his, and would be one of the few people to have anything negative to say about Redding after his early death. When Bobby Smith heard about the release of "These Arms of Mine", he was furious, as his contract with Redding *was* in fact legally valid, and he'd been intending to get Redding to record the song himself. However, he realised that Stax could call on the resources of Atlantic Records, and Joe Galkin also hinted that if he played nice Atlantic might start distributing Confederate, too. Smith signed away all his rights to Redding -- again, thinking that he was only signing away the rights to a single record and song, and not reading the contract closely enough. In this case, Smith only had one working eye, and that wasn't good enough to see clearly -- he had to hold paper right up to his face to read anything on it -- and he simply couldn't read the small print on the contract, and so signed over Otis Redding's management, record contract, and publishing, for a flat seven hundred dollars. Now everything was legally -- if perhaps not ethically -- in the clear. Phil Walden was Otis Redding's manager, Stax was his record label, Joe Galkin got a cut off the top, and Walden, Galkin, and Jim Stewart all shared Redding's publishing. Although, to make it a hit, one more thing had to happen, and one more person had to get a cut of the song: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "These Arms of Mine"] That sound was becoming out of fashion among Black listeners at the time. It was considered passe, and even though the Stax musicians loved the record, Jim Stewart didn't, and put it out not because he believed in Otis Redding, but because he believed in Joe Galkin. As Stewart later said “The Black radio stations were getting out of that Black country sound, we put it out to appease and please Joe.” For the most part DJs ignored the record, despite Galkin pushing it -- it was released in October 1962, that month which we have already pinpointed as the start of the sixties, and came out at the same time as a couple of other Stax releases, and the one they were really pushing was Carla Thomas' "I'll Bring it Home to You", an answer record to Sam Cooke's "Bring it On Home to Me": [Excerpt: Carla Thomas, "I'll Bring it Home to You"] "These Arms of Mine" wasn't even released as the A-side -- that was "Hey Hey Baby" -- until John R came along. John R was a Nashville DJ, and in fact he was the reason that Bobby Smith even knew that Redding had signed to Stax. R had heard Buddy Leach's version of the song, and called Smith, who was a friend of his, to tell him that his record had been covered, and that was the first Smith had heard of the matter. But R also called Jim Stewart at Stax, and told him that he was promoting the wrong side, and that if they started promoting "These Arms of Mine", R would play the record on his radio show, which could be heard in twenty-eight states. And, as a gesture of thanks for this suggestion -- and definitely not as payola, which would be very illegal -- Stewart gave R his share of the publishing rights to the song, which eventually made the top twenty on the R&B charts, and slipped into the lower end of the Hot One Hundred. "These Arms of Mine" was actually recorded at a turning point for Stax as an organisation. By the time it was released, Booker T Jones had left Memphis to go to university in Indiana to study music, with his tuition being paid for by his share of the royalties for "Green Onions", which hit the charts around the same time as Redding's first session: [Excerpt: Booker T. and the MGs, "Green Onions"] Most of Stax's most important sessions were recorded at weekends -- Jim Stewart still had a day job as a bank manager at this point, and he supervised the records that were likely to be hits -- so Jones could often commute back to the studio for session work, and could play sessions during his holidays. The rest of the time, other people would cover the piano parts, often Cropper, who played piano on Redding's next sessions, with Jenkins once again on guitar. As "These Arms of Mine" didn't start to become a hit until March, Redding didn't go into the studio again until June, when he cut the follow-up, "That's What My Heart Needs", with the MGs, Jenkins, and the horn section of the Mar-Keys. That made number twenty-seven on the Cashbox R&B chart -- this was in the period when Billboard had stopped having one. The follow-up, "Pain in My Heart", was cut in September and did even better, making number eleven on the Cashbox R&B chart: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Pain in My Heart"] It did well enough in fact that the Rolling Stones cut a cover version of the track: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Pain in My Heart"] Though Redding didn't get the songwriting royalties -- by that point Allen Toussaint had noticed how closely it resembled a song he'd written for Irma Thomas, "Ruler of My Heart": [Excerpt: Irma Thomas, "Ruler of My Heart"] And so the writing credit was changed to be Naomi Neville, one of the pseudonyms Toussaint used. By this point Redding was getting steady work, and becoming a popular live act. He'd put together his own band, and had asked Jenkins to join, but Jenkins didn't want to play second fiddle to him, and refused, and soon stopped being invited to the recording sessions as well. Indeed, Redding was *eager* to get as many of his old friends working with him as he could. For his second and third sessions, as well as bringing Jenkins, he'd brought along a whole gang of musicians from his touring show, and persuaded Stax to put out records by them, too. At those sessions, as well as Redding's singles, they also cut records by his valet (which was the term R&B performers in those years used for what we'd now call a gofer or roadie) Oscar Mack: [Excerpt: Oscar Mack, "Don't Be Afraid of Love"] For Eddie Kirkland, the guitarist in his touring band, who had previously played with John Lee Hooker and whose single was released under the name "Eddie Kirk": [Excerpt: Eddie Kirk, "The Hawg, Part 1"] And Bobby Marchan, a singer and female impersonator from New Orleans who had had some massive hits a few years earlier both on his own and as the singer with Huey "Piano" Smith and the Clowns, but had ended up in Macon without a record deal and been taken under Redding's wing: [Excerpt: Bobby Marchan, "What Can I Do?"] Redding would continue, throughout his life, to be someone who tried to build musical careers for his friends, though none of those singles was successful. The changes in Stax continued. In late autumn 1963, Atlantic got worried by the lack of new product coming from Stax. Carla Thomas had had a couple of R&B hits, and they were expecting a new single, but every time Jerry Wexler phoned Stax asking where the new single was, he was told it would be coming soon but the equipment was broken. After a couple of weeks of this, Wexler decided something fishy was going on, and sent Tom Dowd, his genius engineer, down to Stax to investigate. Dowd found when he got there that the equipment *was* broken, and had been for weeks, and was a simple fix. When Dowd spoke to Stewart, though, he discovered that they didn't know where to source replacement parts from. Dowd phoned his assistant in New York, and told him to go to the electronics shop and get the parts he needed. Then, as there were no next-day courier services at that time, Dowd's assistant went to the airport, found a flight attendant who was flying to Memphis, and gave her the parts and twenty-five dollars, with a promise of twenty-five more if she gave them to Dowd at the other end. The next morning, Dowd had the equipment fixed, and everyone involved became convinced that Dowd was a miracle worker, especially after he showed Steve Cropper some rudimentary tape-manipulation techniques that Cropper had never encountered before. Dowd had to wait around in Memphis for his flight, so he went to play golf with the musicians for a bit, and then they thought they might as well pop back to the studio and test the equipment out. When they did, Rufus Thomas -- Carla Thomas' father, who had also had a number of hits himself on Stax and Sun -- popped his head round the door to see if the equipment was working now. They told him it was, and he said he had a song if they were up for a spot of recording. They were, and so when Dowd flew back that night, he was able to tell Wexler not only that the next Carla Thomas single would soon be on its way, but that he had the tapes of a big hit single with him right there: [Excerpt: Rufus Thomas, "Walking the Dog"] "Walking the Dog" was a sensation. Jim Stewart later said “I remember our first order out of Chicago. I was in New York in Jerry Wexler's office at the time and Paul Glass, who was our distributor in Chicago, called in an order for sixty-five thousand records. I said to Jerry, ‘Do you mean sixty-five hundred?' And he said, ‘Hell no, he wants sixty-five thousand.' That was the first order! He believed in the record so much that we ended up selling about two hundred thousand in Chicago alone.” The record made the top ten on the pop charts, but that wasn't the biggest thing that Dowd had taken away from the session. He came back raving to Wexler about the way they made records in Memphis, and how different it was from the New York way. In New York, there was a strict separation between the people in the control room and the musicians in the studio, the musicians were playing from written charts, and everyone had a job and did just that job. In Memphis, the musicians were making up the arrangements as they went, and everyone was producing or engineering all at the same time. Dowd, as someone with more technical ability than anyone at Stax, and who was also a trained musician who could make musical suggestions, was soon regularly commuting down to Memphis to be part of the production team, and Jerry Wexler was soon going down to record with other Atlantic artists there, as we heard about in the episode on "Midnight Hour". Shortly after Dowd's first visit to Memphis, another key member of the Stax team entered the picture. Right at the end of 1963, Floyd Newman recorded a track called "Frog Stomp", on which he used his own band rather than the MGs and Mar-Keys: [Excerpt: Floyd Newman, "Frog Stomp"] The piano player and co-writer on that track was a young man named Isaac Hayes, who had been trying to get work at Stax for some time. He'd started out as a singer, and had made a record, "Laura, We're On Our Last Go-Round", at American Sound, the studio run by the former Stax engineer and musician Chips Moman: [Excerpt: Isaac Hayes, "Laura, We're On Our Last Go-Round"] But that hadn't been a success, and Hayes had continued working a day job at a slaughterhouse -- and would continue doing so for much of the next few years, even after he started working at Stax (it's truly amazing how many of the people involved in Stax were making music as what we would now call a side-hustle). Hayes had become a piano player as a way of getting a little extra money -- he'd been offered a job as a fill-in when someone else had pulled out at the last minute on a gig on New Year's Eve, and took it even though he couldn't actually play piano, and spent his first show desperately vamping with two fingers, and was just lucky the audience was too drunk to care. But he had a remarkable facility for the instrument, and while unlike Booker T Jones he would never gain a great deal of technical knowledge, and was embarrassed for the rest of his life by both his playing ability and his lack of theory knowledge, he was as great as they come at soul, at playing with feel, and at inventing new harmonies on the fly. They still didn't have a musician at Stax that could replace Booker T, who was still off at university, so Isaac Hayes was taken on as a second session keyboard player, to cover for Jones when Jones was in Indiana -- though Hayes himself also had to work his own sessions around his dayjob, so didn't end up playing on "In the Midnight Hour", for example, because he was at the slaughterhouse. The first recording session that Hayes played on as a session player was an Otis Redding single, either his fourth single for Stax, "Come to Me", or his fifth, "Security": [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Security"] "Security" is usually pointed to by fans as the point at which Redding really comes into his own, and started directing the musicians more. There's a distinct difference, in particular, in the interplay between Cropper's guitar, the Mar-Keys' horns, and Redding's voice. Where previously the horns had tended to play mostly pads, just holding chords under Redding's voice, now they were starting to do answering phrases. Jim Stewart always said that the only reason Stax used a horn section at all was because he'd been unable to find a decent group of backing vocalists, and the function the horns played on most of the early Stax recordings was somewhat similar to the one that the Jordanaires had played for Elvis, or the Picks for Buddy Holly, basically doing "oooh" sounds to fatten out the sound, plus the odd sax solo or simple riff. The way Redding used the horns, though, was more like the way Ray Charles used the Raelettes, or the interplay of a doo-wop vocal group, with call and response, interjections, and asides. He also did something in "Security" that would become a hallmark of records made at Stax -- instead of a solo, the instrumental break is played by the horns as an ensemble: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Security"] According to Wayne Jackson, the Mar-Keys' trumpeter, Redding was the one who had the idea of doing these horn ensemble sections, and the musicians liked them enough that they continued doing them on all the future sessions, no matter who with. The last Stax single of 1964 took the "Security" sound and refined it, and became the template for every big Stax hit to follow. "Mr. Pitiful" was the first collaboration between Redding and Steve Cropper, and was primarily Cropper's idea. Cropper later remembered “There was a disc jockey here named Moohah. He started calling Otis ‘Mr. Pitiful' 'cause he sounded so pitiful singing his ballads. So I said, ‘Great idea for a song!' I got the idea for writing about it in the shower. I was on my way down to pick up Otis. I got down there and I was humming it in the car. I said, ‘Hey, what do you think about this?' We just wrote the song on the way to the studio, just slapping our hands on our legs. We wrote it in about ten minutes, went in, showed it to the guys, he hummed a horn line, boom—we had it. When Jim Stewart walked in we had it all worked up. Two or three cuts later, there it was.” [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Mr. Pitiful"] Cropper would often note later that Redding would never write about himself, but that Cropper would put details of Redding's life and persona into the songs, from "Mr. Pitiful" right up to their final collaboration, in which Cropper came up with lines about leaving home in Georgia. "Mr Pitiful" went to number ten on the R&B chart and peaked at number forty-one on the hot one hundred, and its B-side, "That's How Strong My Love Is", also made the R&B top twenty. Cropper and Redding soon settled into a fruitful writing partnership, to the extent that Cropper even kept a guitar permanently tuned to an open chord so that Redding could use it. Redding couldn't play the guitar, but liked to use one as a songwriting tool. When a guitar is tuned in standard tuning, you have to be able to make chord shapes to play it, because the sound of the open strings is a discord: [demonstrates] But you can tune a guitar so all the strings are the notes of a single chord, so they sound good together even when you don't make a chord shape: [demonstrates open-E tuning] With one of these open tunings, you can play chords with just a single finger barring a fret, and so they're very popular with, for example, slide guitarists who use a metal slide to play, or someone like Dolly Parton who has such long fingernails it's difficult to form chord shapes. Someone like Parton is of course an accomplished player, but open tunings also mean that someone who can't play well can just put their finger down on a fret and have it be a chord, so you can write songs just by running one finger up and down the fretboard: [demonstrates] So Redding could write, and even play acoustic rhythm guitar on some songs, which he did quite a lot in later years, without ever learning how to make chords. Now, there's a downside to this -- which is why standard tuning is still standard. If you tune to an open major chord, you can play major chords easily but minor chords become far more difficult. Handily, that wasn't a problem at Stax, because according to Isaac Hayes, Jim Stewart banned minor chords from being played at Stax. Hayes said “We'd play a chord in a session, and Jim would say, ‘I don't want to hear that chord.' Jim's ears were just tuned into one, four, and five. I mean, just simple changes. He said they were the breadwinners. He didn't like minor chords. Marvell and I always would try to put that pretty stuff in there. Jim didn't like that. We'd bump heads about that stuff. Me and Marvell fought all the time that. Booker wanted change as well. As time progressed, I was able to sneak a few in.” Of course, minor chords weren't *completely* banned from Stax, and some did sneak through, but even ballads would often have only major chords -- like Redding's next single, "I've Been Loving You Too Long". That track had its origins with Jerry Butler, the singer who had been lead vocalist of the Impressions before starting a solo career and having success with tracks like "For Your Precious Love": [Excerpt: Jerry Butler, "For Your Precious Love"] Redding liked that song, and covered it himself on his second album, and he had become friendly with Butler. Butler had half-written a song, and played it for Redding, who told him he'd like to fiddle with it, see what he could do. Butler forgot about the conversation, until he got a phone call from Redding, telling him that he'd recorded the song. Butler was confused, and also a little upset -- he'd been planning to finish the song himself, and record it. But then Redding played him the track, and Butler decided that doing so would be pointless -- it was Redding's song now: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "I've Been Loving You Too Long"] "I've Been Loving You Too Long" became Redding's first really big hit, making number two on the R&B chart and twenty-one on the Hot One Hundred. It was soon being covered by the Rolling Stones and Ike & Tina Turner, and while Redding was still not really known to the white pop market, he was quickly becoming one of the biggest stars on the R&B scene. His record sales were still not matching his live performances -- he would always make far more money from appearances than from records -- but he was by now the performer that every other soul singer wanted to copy. "I've Been Loving You Too Long" came out just after Redding's second album, The Great Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads, which happened to be the first album released on Volt Records. Before that, while Stax and Volt had released the singles, they'd licensed all the album tracks to Atlantic's Atco subsidiary, which had released the small number of albums put out by Stax artists. But times were changing and the LP market was becoming bigger. And more importantly, the *stereo* LP market was becoming bigger. Singles were still only released in mono, and would be for the next few years, but the album market had a substantial number of audiophiles, and they wanted stereo. This was a problem for Stax, because they only had a mono tape recorder, and they were scared of changing anything about their setup in case it destroyed their sound. Tom Dowd, who had been recording in eight track for years, was appalled by the technical limitations at the McLemore Ave studio, but eventually managed to get Jim Stewart, who despite -- or possibly because of -- being a white country musician was the most concerned that they keep their Black soul sound, to agree to a compromise. They would keep everything hooked up exactly the same -- the same primitive mixers, the same mono tape recorder -- and Stax would continue doing their mixes for mono, and all their singles would come directly off that mono tape. But at the same time, they would *also* have a two-track tape recorder plugged in to the mixer, with half the channels going on one track and half on the other. So while they were making the mix, they'd *also* be getting a stereo dump of that mix. The limitations of the situation meant that they might end up with drums and vocals in one channel and everything else in the other -- although as the musicians cut everything together in the studio, which had a lot of natural echo, leakage meant there was a *bit* of everything on every track -- but it would still be stereo. Redding's next album, Otis Blue, was recorded on this new equipment, with Dowd travelling down from New York to operate it. Dowd was so keen on making the album stereo that during that session, they rerecorded Redding's two most recent singles, "I've Been Loving You Too Long" and "Respect" (which hadn't yet come out but was in the process of being released) in soundalike versions so there would be stereo versions of the songs on the album -- so the stereo and mono versions of Otis Blue actually have different performances of those songs on them. It shows how intense the work rate was at Stax -- and how good they were at their jobs -- that apart from the opening track "Ole Man Trouble", which had already been recorded as a B-side, all of Otis Blue, which is often considered the greatest soul album in history, was recorded in a twenty-eight hour period, and it would have been shorter but there was a four-hour break in the middle, from 10PM to 2AM, so that the musicians on the session could play their regular local club gigs. And then after the album was finished, Otis left the session to perform a gig that evening. Tom Dowd, in particular, was astonished by the way Redding took charge in the studio, and how even though he had no technical musical knowledge, he would direct the musicians. Dowd called Redding a genius and told Phil Walden that the only two other artists he'd worked with who had as much ability in the studio were Bobby Darin and Ray Charles. Other than those singles and "Ole Man Trouble", Otis Blue was made up entirely of cover versions. There were three versions of songs by Sam Cooke, who had died just a few months earlier, and whose death had hit Redding hard -- for all that he styled himself on Little Richard vocally, he was also in awe of Cooke as a singer and stage presence. There were also covers of songs by The Temptations, William Bell, and B.B. King. And there was also an odd choice -- Steve Cropper suggested that Redding cut a cover of a song by a white band that was in the charts at the time: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] Redding had never heard the song before -- he was not paying attention to the white pop scene at the time, just to his competition on the R&B charts -- but he was interested in doing it. Cropper sat by the turntable, scribbling down what he thought the lyrics Jagger was singing were, and they cut the track. Redding starts out more or less singing the right words: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] But quickly ends up just ad-libbing random exclamations in the same way that he would in many of his live performances: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction"] Otis Blue made number one on the R&B album chart, and also made number six on the UK album chart -- Redding, like many soul artists, was far more popular in the UK than in the US. It only made number seventy-five on the pop album charts in the US, but it did a remarkable thing as far as Stax was concerned -- it *stayed* in the lower reaches of the charts, and on the R&B album charts, for a long time. Redding had become what is known as a "catalogue artist", something that was almost unknown in rock and soul music at this time, but which was just starting to appear. Up to 1965, the interlinked genres that we now think of as rock and roll, rock, pop, blues, R&B, and soul, had all operated on the basis that singles were where the money was, and that singles should be treated like periodicals -- they go on the shelves, stay there for a few weeks, get replaced by the new thing, and nobody's interested any more. This had contributed to the explosive rate of change in pop music between about 1954 and 1968. You'd package old singles up into albums, and stick some filler tracks on there as a way of making a tiny bit of money from tracks which weren't good enough to release as singles, but that was just squeezing the last few drops of juice out of the orange, it wasn't really where the money was. The only exceptions were those artists like Ray Charles who crossed over into the jazz and adult pop markets. But in general, your record sales in the first few weeks and months *were* your record sales. But by the mid-sixties, as album sales started to take off more, things started to change. And Otis Redding was one of the first artists to really benefit from that. He wasn't having huge hit singles, and his albums weren't making the pop top forty, but they *kept selling*. Redding wouldn't have an album make the top forty in his lifetime, but they sold consistently, and everything from Otis Blue onward sold two hundred thousand or so copies -- a massive number in the much smaller album market of the time. These sales gave Redding some leverage. His contract with Stax was coming to an end in a few months, and he was getting offers from other companies. As part of his contract renegotiation, he got Jim Stewart -- who like so many people in this story including Redding himself liked to operate on handshake deals and assumptions of good faith on the part of everyone else, and who prided himself on being totally fair and not driving hard bargains -- to rework his publishing deal. Now Redding's music was going to be published by Redwal Music -- named after Redding and Phil Walden -- which was owned as a four-way split between Redding, Walden, Stewart, and Joe Galkin. Redding also got the right as part of his contract negotiations to record other artists using Stax's facilities and musicians. He set up his own label, Jotis Records -- a portmanteau of Joe and Otis, for Joe Galkin and himself, and put out records by Arthur Conley: [Excerpt: Arthur Conley, "Who's Fooling Who?"] Loretta Williams [Excerpt: Loretta Williams, "I'm Missing You"] and Billy Young [Excerpt: Billy Young, "The Sloopy"] None of these was a success, but it was another example of how Redding was trying to use his success to boost others. There were other changes going on at Stax as well. The company was becoming more tightly integrated with Atlantic Records -- Tom Dowd had started engineering more sessions, Jerry Wexler was turning up all the time, and they were starting to make records for Atlantic, as we discussed in the episode on "In the Midnight Hour". Atlantic were also loaning Stax Sam and Dave, who were contracted to Atlantic but treated as Stax artists, and whose hits were written by the new Stax songwriting team of Isaac Hayes and David Porter: [Excerpt: Sam and Dave, "Soul Man"] Redding was not hugely impressed by Sam and Dave, once saying in an interview "When I first heard the Righteous Brothers, I thought they were colored. I think they sing better than Sam and Dave", but they were having more and bigger chart hits than him, though they didn't have the same level of album sales. Also, by now Booker T and the MGs had a new bass player. Donald "Duck" Dunn had always been the "other" bass player at Stax, ever since he'd started with the Mar-Keys, and he'd played on many of Redding's recordings, as had Lewie Steinberg, the original bass player with the MGs. But in early 1965, the Stax studio musicians had cut a record originally intending it to be a Mar-Keys record, but decided to put it out as by Booker T and the MGs, even though Booker T wasn't there at the time -- Isaac Hayes played keyboards on the track: [Excerpt: Booker T and the MGs, "Boot-Leg"] Booker T Jones would always have a place at Stax, and would soon be back full time as he finished his degree, but from that point on Duck Dunn, not Lewie Steinberg, was the bass player for the MGs. Another change in 1965 was that Stax got serious about promotion. Up to this point, they'd just relied on Atlantic to promote their records, but obviously Atlantic put more effort into promoting records on which it made all the money than ones it just distributed. But as part of the deal to make records with Sam and Dave and Wilson Pickett, Atlantic had finally put their arrangement with Stax on a contractual footing, rather than their previous handshake deal, and they'd agreed to pay half the salary of a publicity person for Stax. Stax brought in Al Bell, who made a huge impression. Bell had been a DJ in Memphis, who had gone off to work with Martin Luther King for a while, before leaving after a year because, as he put it "I was not about passive resistance. I was about economic development, economic empowerment.” He'd returned to DJing, first in Memphis, then in Washington DC, where he'd been one of the biggest boosters of Stax records in the area. While he was in Washington, he'd also started making records himself. He'd produced several singles for Grover Mitchell on Decca: [Excerpt: Grover Mitchell, "Midnight Tears"] Those records were supervised by Milt Gabler, the same Milt Gabler who produced Louis Jordan's records and "Rock Around the Clock", and Bell co-produced them with Eddie Floyd, who wrote that song, and Chester Simmons, formerly of the Moonglows, and the three of them started their own label, Safice, which had put out a few records by Floyd and others, on the same kind of deal with Atlantic that Stax had: [Excerpt: Eddie Floyd, "Make Up Your Mind"] Floyd would himself soon become a staff songwriter at Stax. As with almost every decision at Stax, the decision to hire Bell was a cause of disagreement between Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton, the "Ax" in Stax, who wasn't as involved in the day-to-day studio operations as her brother, but who was often regarded by the musicians as at least as important to the spirit of the label, and who tended to disagree with her brother on pretty much everything. Stewart didn't want to hire Bell, but according to Cropper “Estelle and I said, ‘Hey, we need somebody that can liaison between the disc jockeys and he's the man to do it. Atlantic's going into a radio station with six Atlantic records and one Stax record. We're not getting our due.' We knew that. We needed more promotion and he had all the pull with all those disc jockeys. He knew E. Rodney Jones and all the big cats, the Montagues and so on. He knew every one of them.” Many people at Stax will say that the label didn't even really start until Bell joined -- and he became so important to the label that he would eventually take it over from Stewart and Axton. Bell came in every day and immediately started phoning DJs, all day every day, starting in the morning with the drivetime East Coast DJs, and working his way across the US, ending up at midnight phoning the evening DJs in California. Booker T Jones said of him “He had energy like Otis Redding, except he wasn't a singer. He had the same type of energy. He'd come in the room, pull up his shoulders and that energy would start. He would start talking about the music business or what was going on and he energized everywhere he was. He was our Otis for promotion. It was the same type of energy charisma.” Meanwhile, of course, Redding was constantly releasing singles. Two more singles were released from Otis Blue -- his versions of "My Girl" and "Satisfaction", and he also released "I Can't Turn You Loose", which was originally the B-side to "Just One More Day" but ended up charting higher than its original A-side. It's around this time that Redding did something which seems completely out of character, but which really must be mentioned given that with very few exceptions everyone in his life talks about him as some kind of saint. One of Redding's friends was beaten up, and Redding, the friend, and another friend drove to the assailant's house and started shooting through the windows, starting a gun battle in which Redding got grazed. His friend got convicted of attempted murder, and got two years' probation, while Redding himself didn't face any criminal charges but did get sued by the victims, and settled out of court for a few hundred dollars. By this point Redding was becoming hugely rich from his concert appearances and album sales, but he still hadn't had a top twenty pop hit. He needed to break the white market. And so in April 1966, Redding went to LA, to play the Sunset Strip: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Respect (live at the Whisky A-Go-Go)"] Redding's performance at the Whisky A-Go-Go, a venue which otherwise hosted bands like the Doors, the Byrds, the Mothers of Invention, and Love, was his first real interaction with the white rock scene, part of a process that had started with his recording of "Satisfaction". The three-day residency got rave reviews, though the plans to release a live album of the shows were scuppered when Jim Stewart listened back to the tapes and decided that Redding's horn players were often out of tune. But almost everyone on the LA scene came out to see the shows, and Redding blew them away. According to one biography of Redding I used, it was seeing how Redding tuned his guitar that inspired the guitarist from the support band, the Rising Sons, to start playing in the same tuning -- though I can't believe for a moment that Ry Cooder, one of the greatest slide guitarists of his generation, didn't already know about open tunings. But Redding definitely impressed that band -- Taj Mahal, their lead singer, later said it was "one of the most amazing performances I'd ever seen". Also at the gigs was Bob Dylan, who played Redding a song he'd just recorded but not yet released: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Just Like a Woman"] Redding agreed that the song sounded perfect for him, and said he would record it. He apparently made some attempts at rehearsing it at least, but never ended up recording it. He thought the first verse and chorus were great, but had problems with the second verse: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Just Like a Woman"] Those lyrics were just too abstract for him to find a way to connect with them emotionally, and as a result he found himself completely unable to sing them. But like his recording of "Satisfaction", this was another clue to him that he should start paying more attention to what was going on in the white music industry, and that there might be things he could incorporate into his own style. As a result of the LA gigs, Bill Graham booked Redding for the Fillmore in San Francisco. Redding was at first cautious, thinking this might be a step too far, and that he wouldn't go down well with the hippie crowd, but Graham persuaded him, saying that whenever he asked any of the people who the San Francisco crowds most loved -- Jerry Garcia or Paul Butterfield or Mike Bloomfield -- who *they* most wanted to see play there, they all said Otis Redding. Redding reluctantly agreed, but before he took a trip to San Francisco, there was somewhere even further out for him to go. Redding was about to head to England but before he did there was another album to make, and this one would see even more of a push for the white market, though still trying to keep everything soulful. As well as Redding originals, including "Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)", another song in the mould of "Mr. Pitiful", there was another cover of a contemporary hit by a guitar band -- this time a version of the Beatles' "Day Tripper" -- and two covers of old standards; the country song "Tennessee Waltz", which had recently been covered by Sam Cooke, and a song made famous by Bing Crosby, "Try a Little Tenderness". That song almost certainly came to mind because it had recently been used in the film Dr. Strangelove, but it had also been covered relatively recently by two soul greats, Aretha Franklin: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Try a Little Tenderness"] And Sam Cooke: [Excerpt: Sam Cooke, "Live Medley: I Love You For Sentimental Reasons/Try a Little Tenderness/You Send Me"] This version had horn parts arranged by Isaac Hayes, who by this point had been elevated to be considered one of the "Big Six" at Stax records -- Hayes, his songwriting partner David Porter, Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn, Booker T. Jones, and Al Jackson, were all given special status at the company, and treated as co-producers on every record -- all the records were now credited as produced by "staff", but it was the Big Six who split the royalties. Hayes came up with a horn part that was inspired by Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come", and which dominated the early part of the track: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Try a Little Tenderness"] Then the band came in, slowly at first: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Try a Little Tenderness"] But Al Jackson surprised them when they ran through the track by deciding that after the main song had been played, he'd kick the track into double-time, and give Redding a chance to stretch out and do his trademark grunts and "got-ta"s. The single version faded out shortly after that, but the version on the album kept going for an extra thirty seconds: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Try a Little Tenderness"] As Booker T. Jones said “Al came up with the idea of breaking up the rhythm, and Otis just took that and ran with it. He really got excited once he found out what Al was going to do on the drums. He realized how he could finish the song. That he could start it like a ballad and finish it full of emotion. That's how a lot of our arrangements would come together. Somebody would come up with something totally outrageous.” And it would have lasted longer but Jim Stewart pushed the faders down, realising the track was an uncommercial length even as it was. Live, the track could often stretch out to seven minutes or longer, as Redding drove the crowd into a frenzy, and it soon became one of the highlights of his live set, and a signature song for him: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Try a Little Tenderness (live in London)"] In September 1966, Redding went on his first tour outside the US. His records had all done much better in the UK than they had in America, and they were huge favourites of everyone on the Mod scene, and when he arrived in the UK he had a limo sent by Brian Epstein to meet him at the airport. The tour was an odd one, with multiple London shows, shows in a couple of big cities like Manchester and Bristol, and shows in smallish towns in Hampshire and Lincolnshire. Apparently the shows outside London weren't particularly well attended, but the London shows were all packed to overflowing. Redding also got his own episode of Ready! Steady! Go!, on which he performed solo as well as with guest stars Eric Burdon and Chris Farlowe: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, Chris Farlowe and Eric Burdon, "Shake/Land of a Thousand Dances"] After the UK tour, he went on a short tour of the Eastern US with Sam and Dave as his support act, and then headed west to the Fillmore for his three day residency there, introducing him to the San Francisco music scene. His first night at the venue was supported by the Grateful Dead, the second by Johnny Talbot and De Thangs and the third by Country Joe and the Fish, but there was no question that it was Otis Redding that everyone was coming to see. Janis Joplin turned up at the Fillmore every day at 3PM, to make sure she could be right at the front for Redding's shows that night, and Bill Graham said, decades later, "By far, Otis Redding was the single most extraordinary talent I had ever seen. There was no comparison. Then or now." However, after the Fillmore gigs, for the first time ever he started missing shows. The Sentinel, a Black newspaper in LA, reported a few days later "Otis Redding, the rock singer, failed to make many friends here the other day when he was slated to appear on the Christmas Eve show[...] Failed to draw well, and Redding reportedly would not go on." The Sentinel seem to think that Redding was just being a diva, but it's likely that this was the first sign of a problem that would change everything about his career -- he was developing vocal polyps that were making singing painful. It's notable though that the Sentinel refers to Redding as a "rock" singer, and shows again how different genres appeared in the mid-sixties to how they appear today. In that light, it's interesting to look at a quote from Redding from a few months later -- "Everybody thinks that all songs by colored people are rhythm and blues, but that's not true. Johnny Taylor, Muddy Waters, and B.B. King are blues singers. James Brown is not a blues singer. He has a rock and roll beat and he can sing slow pop songs. My own songs "Respect" and "Mr Pitiful" aren't blues songs. I'm speaking in terms of the beat and structure of the music. A blues is a song that goes twelve bars all the way through. Most of my songs are soul songs." So in Redding's eyes, neither he nor James Brown were R&B -- he was soul, which was a different thing from R&B, while Brown was rock and roll and pop, not soul, but journalists thought that Redding was rock. But while the lines between these things were far less distinct than they are today, and Redding was trying to cross over to the white audience, he knew what genre he was in, and celebrated that in a song he wrote with his friend Art