Podcast appearances and mentions of sergeant pepper

Once A DJ is brought to you by:https://www.sureshotshop.com/ - Record adapters (including customs) & accessorieshttps://myslipmats.com/ - Custom and off the shelf Slipmats, dividers and more.Once A DJ is a https://remote-ctrl.co.uk productionOther ways to support the showFollow the show on Spotify or Apple PodcastsAny feedback or questions? Hit up the Once A DJ Instagram PageSubscribe to the Once A DJ PatreonBuy your Once A DJ Sureshot 45 adapter clampsGreg on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/dj_greg_wilson/ Greg on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/DJGregWilson Record Mirror Disco Chart Podcast - https://shows.acast.com/record-mirror-disco-charts This week, we had the absolute pleasure of diving into the fascinating journey of the legendary Greg Wilson! He took us way back to his childhood in Merseyside, where the magic of the 60s and the ever-present soundtrack of The Beatles became deeply ingrained. It wasn't a distraction from anything, but more of an exploration of that incredible era's creativity and optimistic spirit. Imagine growing up a stone's throw from the Tower Ballroom where The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were tearing it up!Greg shared how his deep dives into artists like Bowie and Dylan fueled his passion for understanding the evolution of music. This meticulous approach would later come into play in unexpected ways.Then, we took a turn into the vibrant world of early UK street dance with Broken Glass. Greg recounted how a chance encounter with Kermit (later of the Rap Assassins and Black Grape) led to managing this groundbreaking breakdancing crew. Their "street tour" of the Northwest sounds legendary, breaking down barriers and even sparking connections across racial lines in a time when such interactions were less common in some areas. He fondly remembers seeing young white and black kids connecting over the music and dance – a real moment of positive social impact.The conversation then shifted to the emergence of the Ruthless Rap Assassins. Greg vividly described the raw energy and unique attitude of their early tapes, particularly the track "We Don't Care." Their originality and unexpected humor immediately grabbed him, leading to him taking on management and production duties. He walked us through their journey, from getting studio time to eventually signing with EMI – a "mad" move for such an uncompromising act.The story of their time with EMI is a rollercoaster, from creative freedom with their first album ("Sample City" with its insane sample layering – think Hendrix, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ringo Starr, Happy Mondays, and even Sergeant Pepper!) to the clash with the main marketing department who, fresh off the success of MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice, didn't...

In this epic two-hour episode, Jan Gorski-Mescir ("Fydsy") guides us through Liverpool FC's dramatic 1966–67 season, weaving together footballing highs and cultural milestones with his signature storytelling. From European heartache against Ajax in the fog of Amsterdam to thrilling league clashes with Leeds and Manchester United, the episode captures a club on the cusp of transformation. But this isn't just a tale of football—it's also a reflection on the era, as Jan poignantly recounts the Aberfan disaster and its deep national impact, before closing on the musical revolution sparked by The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper. A powerful, moving blend of history, sport, and soul. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Our guest today is writer  Ralph Dartford who works for the National Literacy Trust and is the poetry editor of literary journal Northern Gravy.   Ralph kindly made the journey from Bradford to the Lockwood residence in Sheffield, and we settled down in my living room with mugs of tea and a plate of biscuits, surrounded by books and looked down upon by at least three pictures of Larkin. Ralph also co-organises the fantastic Louder Than Words festival that takes place in Manchester every autumn, and is a celebration of writing about music. They gather together amazing writers, broadcasters and musicians to discuss, explore and debate all things music and music industry related.  I hope we will continue to see Ralph at more PLS events.Larkin poems mentioned:The Whitsun Weddings, Dockery and Son, Mr Bleaney, For Sidney Bechet, High Windows, Cut Grass, To The Sea, MCMXIV, Here, BroadcastAll What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961-1971 (1985) by Philip LarkinThe Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse - ed.  Philip Larkin (1973) I am happy to see Mr. Larkin's taste in poetry and my own are in agreement ... I congratulate him most warmly on his achievement. - W. H. Auden, The GuardianPoets/writers/musicians mentioned by RalphKae Tempest, Joelle Taylor, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Vicky Foster, Steve Ely, Chris Jones, Ian Parks, John Betjeman, John Cooper Clarke, John Hegley, Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy, Michael Stewart, Blake Morrison, Count Basie, John Coltrane, Sidney Bechet, Alan Bennett, Stewart Lee, David Quantick, Ray Davis, Blur,  Van Morrison,  Hang Clouds, Evelyn Glennie, Kingsley Amis, Andrea Dunbar, Helen MortOther references:Adlestrop (1914) by Edward Thomas https://www.edwardthomaspoetryplaces.com/post/adlestropArthur Scargill:  “Arthur Scargill, the miners' leader and socialist, once told The Sunday Times, ‘My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says your life depends on your power to master words.” Martin H. Manser, The Penguin Writer's ManualBob Monkhouse https://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/dec/30/guardianobituaries.artsobituariesLongbarrow Press https://longbarrowpress.com/Valley Press https://www.valleypressuk.com/Kes (1968) by Barry HinesRalph is Poetry Editor for Northern Gravy https://northerngravy.com/Ralph reads Geese and England's Dreaming from House Anthems  https://www.valleypressuk.com/shop/p/house-anthemsGareth Southgate https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-57816651 Simon Armitage Larkin Revisited Radio 4 https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/m0019yy2Nick Cave- Honorary Vice President for the Philip Larkin Society- Desert Island Discs https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0027cglLyn's English teacher 1982-1989 https://petercochran.wordpress.com/remembering-peter/The Ted Hughes Network https://research.hud.ac.uk/institutes-centres/tedhughes/James Underwood https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/early-larkin-9781350197121/Albums mentioned:OK Computer (1997) by Radiohead , Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) and The White Album (1968) by The Beatles, Park Life (1994) by BlurSummertime in England by Van Morrison https://www.vice.com/en/article/summertime-in-england-a-monologue-on-van-morrison/Events:https://louderthanwordsfest.com/"My Friend Monica": Remembering Philip Larkin's Partner Monica JonesSat 22 Mar 2025 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM Ken Edwards Lecture Theatre 2, University of Leicester, LE1 7RHhttps://www.tickettailor.com/events/literaryleicester/1538331A celebration marking 70 years of Philip Larkin's 'The Less Deceived'For World Poetry Dayhttps://www.eventbrite.com/e/a-celebration-marking-70-years-of-philip-larkins-the-less-deceived-tickets-1235639173029?aff=oddtdtcreatorProduced by Lyn Lockwood and Gavin HoggPlease email Lyn at ⁠plsdeputychair@gmail.com ⁠ with any questions or commentsPLS Membership, events, merchandise and information: philiplarkin.com

Att förmedla känslor med pixlar är en svår konst. I mitten på 90-talet fanns det inget annat spelföretag som bemästrade den lika självklart som Square. I Final Fantasy VI finns några av spelhistoriens mest ikoniska karaktärer, vars begränsade animationer gav upphov till storslagna känslouttryck med finkänsligt stumfilmsmanér.Och sen skadar det ju inte att Nobuo Uematsu var i absolut högform och producerade ett album av samma dignitet som Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club, Pet Sounds och London Calling.Gäster: Tobias Bjarneby och Victor Sjöström

The Beatles' rise to fame (1962-63): The podcast covers their signing to EMI, recording their first single, and early TV appearances. https://youtu.be/Go4X-3aZDv0 Context matters: Early 1960s Britain shaped The Beatles' development, with the podcast highlighting the social and cultural factors at play. Personality & charisma: The Beatles' humor and charm were as crucial as their music in winning over fans and the industry. Collaboration: Brian Epstein, George Martin, and others were instrumental in The Beatles' success, which the podcast examines in detail. Historical accuracy: The podcast stresses credible sources and distinguishes facts from myths when exploring The Beatles' history. The Beatles' Early Days Hamburg's influence: Their time in Hamburg was transformative, improving their music and stage presence. Quote: “Hamburg very much unlike Liverpool… they don't know how to do Beatles tourism.” The podcast contrasts Hamburg's handling of Beatles history with Liverpool's. Early rejections: The podcast recounts labels like Decca and EMI turning them down, showcasing their uncertain early career. The Decca Audition: It analyzes the audition's recordings, providing insight into their pre-fame sound. Brian Epstein's role: As their manager, he refined their image and secured a record deal, remaining honest even under pressure. The Beatles and EMI George Martin's initial reaction: Martin was initially skeptical but grew interested after meeting the band. Quote: “Martin didn't know it, but he was as lucky as The Beatles were.” This reflects the chance nature of their collaboration. June 6th recording session: A pivotal moment in Martin's perception, marking a turning point in the band's journey. Recording dynamics: The podcast explores how The Beatles and Martin created a shared vision and changed industry practices. Methods of Historical Research Primary sources: The podcast relies on interviews, letters, and news articles for authenticity. Fact vs. fiction: It emphasizes being critical of sources and separating myths from reality. Avoiding presentism: The podcast warns against modern interpretations of past events, stressing historical context. Quotes of Note • “The interwebs are full of empty infotainment in the same old, same old about Beatles trivia. You deserve the real story.” - Ariana Grande • “The Beatles didn't quite achieve their stylistic target. It was their failure that made them succeed.” • “They wanted their live and studio set of songs to sound something like American Pop R&B… but they failed. They sort of created their own genre.” • “Think of Jed Clampett out shooting at some food… He missed what he was aiming at… but up from the ground, he found oil under his land to make him very rich.” • “There would be no Beatles without R&B. In fact, there would have been no rock and roll at all.” - John Lennon • “Black music is my life. The Beatles and Sergeant Pepper and all that jazz—it doesn't mean a thing. All I talk about is 1958 when I heard Little Richard's ‘Long Tall Sally' and when I heard Chuck Berry's ‘Johnny B. Goode' and when I heard Bo Diddley. That changed my life completely.” - John Lennon • “The Beatles are like rock and soul men singing their pop with boy-man energy that matches girl-group energy.” • “They weren't whitening the music like a bunch of Pat Boons. It becomes a thing of its own but it remains soulful.” • “For us in the group, all that matters is that we try to get it right. If we make an error, we don't dig in. It's really just the opposite. We love to get corrections.” • “We treat ourselves and each other as knowers who might know something, to have something to offer, have some insight that's worth hearing potentially. We're all students… there are no teachers. We're all fallible. We're all students.” • “So much of Britain was black and white and bleak until The Beatles came along.”

When The Beatles came out with Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, it seemed like music had changed forever. Out with the days of 78s and random singles compiled into LPs. Now the act of listening to music was an art in itself! Until it wasn't. In this episode, Hannah and Maia look past their musical differences to take you on a journey through music history as it collides with technology. As major innovations in music - disco, punk, MTV, pirating, the predetermination of music streaming - slowly erode the art of the concept album, it's hard not to wonder what, if anything, has been lost. Technology pushes music forward, but can music push back? Tangents include: hating on Shoppers Drug Mart; The Beatles originating the “rodent boyfriend” trend; and Maia putting a nickel into the “Don't Talk About Youtube” jar.  Support us on Patreon and get juicy bonus content: ⁠https://www.patreon.com/rehashpodcast⁠ Intro and outro song by our talented friend Ian Mills: ⁠https://linktr.ee/ianmillsmusic

We ended the last episode with a quick look at the groundbreaking Beatles album, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and the powerful effect it had on popular music and on Western Culture in general. For many reasons, the album, which was released on May 26, 1967, seemed to elevate the mass consciousness of a significant segment of society to a new and higher level. And then a month later, on June 25, 1967, the old Fab Four took things up another notch.   On the first internationally broadcast television program to be beamed simultaneously around the world by satellite, the Beatles introduced their classic masterpiece, “All You Need is Love,” which became an instant anthem for those amazing days. They had invited a bunch of guests to be on stage with them as they performed the song, including the Rolling Stones, the Who and many others. It turned out to be an incredible celebration and along with the music and the expanding tenor of the times, a new form of appearance had come into the world as well. It was the hippy look and it quickly became known as the uniform of the counter culture. It's hard to describe because of its individualized, free and unencumbered, styleless style. But one popular phrase of the times sums it up - you just “let it all hang out.” And the Beatles, along with everyone else who joined them on the stage, all wore it well. Now, there was nothing subtle about what was going on. They were clearly making a statement and the entire Western world reacted. Shortly thereafter, the remarkable summer of love got under way, with its happenings, be-ins and other mass gatherings, boldly celebrating the emergence of this newly liberated way of being. The concept of Flower Power had been born and spread like wildfire, verifying the old adage that, “Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”           Now, I haven't mentioned anything about what I was doing personally back then, but it was a pretty incredible year for me as well.  As a senior, I was elected president of our high school, (which was a relatively big deal for its time and place), I had also met and fallen in love with my high school sweetheart, Sally, and we had our own magnificent, teenaged summer of love. And to top it off, the basketball team that my father had founded only a few years earlier, the Philadelphia 76ers, won the NBA Championship. By the way, that high school romance of ours is still in full swing. We went on to get married, had a wonderful daughter, and as Sonny and Cher sang long ago, “the beat goes on.”  However, for the purposes of this podcast narrative, what's important here is that from my little perspective, everything seemed right with the world. Finally, the endless summer came to an end and I soon departed to Washington, DC and entered American University. One of the very first things that happened to me there presents an accurate picture of both the nature of the times and of my personal state of mind. I was living in a dorm and on one of the first nights, we had a meeting of the residents of our floor. There were about sixty of us and it went on for over an hour. Towards the end, the floor supervisor summed up the dorm rules and then added, “So when it comes to alcohol, as long as you're not too drunk, you're going to be okay. If you are too drunk though, you're going have to go before the disciplinary committee. Okay, so I guess you're asking – “What is the definition of being too drunk?” he asked with a smirk. “Well, if you get on the elevator and you're too drunk to remember what floor you live on, or if you're too drunk to remember what your room number is, or if you're so drunk that you pass out in the hall before you even make it to your room - then you're too drunk. If you're less drunk than that, you'll be fine.” Everyone had a good laugh, like hey, we didn't know college was going to be this much fun. But then, his entire demeanor changed and, sounding like a tough cop on the beat, in a curt, strict tone, he said, “Of course, if you're caught smoking marijuana, you're immediately expelled. We have no tolerance for that here.” There was dead silence in the room and I thought to myself, “Who the hell is going to come to college and smoke marijuana?” It seemed like the most absurd idea in the world. “Why would anybody do that?” The mixture of college and marijuana seemed completely incongruous. As you might deduct, at eighteen and a half years old, to coin an old phrase, I was as straight as they came. I had never smoked anything at all and had never had an alcoholic drink of any kind in my entire life. And that was fine with me. I had other plans. I was enrolled in the School of Government and Public Administration and following graduation; I would go to law school and then join my brother in the law firm my father had founded. Anyway, it turned out to be a terrific opening semester for me. I went home for winter break to enjoy some sorely missed, extended time with Sally, and as the year came to an end, the only bad thing that I have to say about 1967 is that it turned into 1968. So, here we go. But this takes us into some rather dark territory and intestinal fortitude becomes an absolute must. By now, you probably know that the first place to start talking about this year is with the ever-deepening quagmire of Vietnam.  Although I hadn't been particularly aware of it, besides everything else that had happened in 1967, it was also the year that a small, but significant portion of the American public had begun to question our involvement in that war. Through it all, Lyndon Johnson kept reassuring the country that even though the financial and human costs had been high, our effort in Vietnam was proving to be more than justified and things continued to go quite well for us over there. However, his rosy picture darkened considerably when something called the Tet Offensive broke out at the end of January of 1968. Without warning, the North Vietnamese launched a massive, well-coordinated attack throughout the entire country, including the South's capital city of Saigon.    As the brutal fight continued to rage on, it became an enormous blow to US public opinion in two significant ways. First, it showed that the optimistic spin that had been put on the war was deeply flawed. And secondly, it prompted something revolutionary in TV news. Due to enhanced technology, all of the networks began to cover the war in graphic detail, and kept it in the lead position of their major broadcasts.    This constant exposure brought the bloodshed home in a way that had never been seen before. Horrible images, filled with violent battle scenes brought the war into the living rooms of the American public on a nightly basis, which was deeply disturbing to the entire country. Suddenly, Lydon Johnson began to seem like a major liar and his approval ratings, which had always been robust, began to tank. At its peak, his approval rating had been 74% with only a 15% disapproval. By the end of February 1968, primarily due to his mishandling of Vietnam, his approval rating had sunk to a dismal 41% with a seriously significant disapproval of 48%. On a personal side note, I used to take the train to Philadelphia on a fairly regular basis to visit Sally, who was still in high school. I would travel to and from Union Station in Washington DC and I began noticing something eerie. On every trip. I would walk by a restricted area where there would be about 20 – 30 rather small, flag draped metal boxes with a military official standing nearby. Soon, I became aware that these were coffins carrying the bodies of US soldiers coming back from Vietnam, and the human toll of it all began to dawn on me. I soon realized that these weren't just some metal boxes in the hallway of a train station. No. In a very short time, each one of them would become the sad focus of deep mourning, as the family and friends of the fallen would try to make sense of their dear young ones taken far before their time. All of this death! And what was it that what we were we fighting for again?  At this point, to set the stage for what was about to come, it's important to look back to 1967 once again, at three events that were to have an impact on the anti-war movement. The first one took place on April 4, 1967, when something truly extraordinary happened. After months of agonizing deliberations, and in a move that was incredibly controversial for the time, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. firmly and unequivocally announced his staunch opposition to the war. In order to understand the significance of this, let's remember that there have been very few people in American history who can match his moral and ethical standing. Of course, he is mainly remembered for his groundbreaking actions in the realm of Civil Rights, but as lofty as those accomplishments were, they are only a small part of who he really was. For in essence, he had always considered himself to be primarily a preacher who had dedicated himself to doing God's work. And as such, he stood for peace, equality, and dignity for all people, everywhere, not just for those aligned with the American point of view.   In a major address before a packed house at the Riverside Church in New York City, Dr. King meticulously outlined his reasons for taking his anti-war stance. He then began to address the issue of non-violence. Throughout his life, King had been deeply influenced by the work of Mahatma Gandhi and had espoused the path of non-violence in everything he did, especially in the inner cities of America. And because of that, he now couldn't justify the hypocrisy of not opposing this massive war effort.  “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government,” he said. With those deeply striking and incredibly powerful words, let's let this be the end of this episode. We're just beginning this part of the story, so as always, keep your eyes, mind and heart open, and let's get together in the next one.

In the last episode, I briefly described my grandfather, who was a lifelong mystic, and his reactions to the dream I'd had about my father and his ring, which was followed by its mysterious disappearance. I also mentioned another unusual incident concerning the ring that took place about twenty years later, when a friend told me about a vivid dream he'd had where my father had given him a message for me, saying that I should “remember the ring.” Now this wasn't a childhood friend, he knew nothing about my father, and had no idea if this message was going to mean anything to me at all.  As you can imagine, the fact that it had come through a completely objective third party and had happened a full twenty years after the original incident made quite an impact on me. So, that completes this part of the narrative. In summary, even though my life had been turned upside down by the sudden death of my father, which had been accompanied by two inexplicable events that had defied all logic, I put it all behind me, or so I thought. I continued with my eleventh-grade life, which basically meant that I returned to my everyday state of constant activity.           Now, as I've mentioned a few times earlier, this podcast narrative focuses on the massive evolution of consciousness that began in the early1960s, as experienced through my own individual lens, which brings us now to the middle of 1966. On a larger level, at this time two huge influences were beginning to shake American society to its core – First, the enormous evolution of the Beatles and their profound impact on popular culture, and second, the war in Vietnam.           With the Beatles, as we mentioned in the last episode, at the end of 1965, they had come out with their revolutionary album, Rubber Soul, which George Harrison said was the first music they made when they were all regularly smoking marijuana. It had enormous appeal and was having a major effect on all of popular music.           By the way, their old friend Bob Dylan was breaking some new ground of his own. In March of 1966, he brought out a radical new song that caught everyone's attention. Its free-wheeling, raucous sound was far more in the style of a New Orleans Dixieland band than of rock and roll. And in the wild chorus, with his background musicians singing along in high hysterics, he kept repeating the signature line, “Everybody must get stoned.” The song was over four and a half minutes long and got a ton of airplay on almost every pop radio station.  So, on a daily basis, with a clever twist of words and a message that was unmistakable, millions of music fans would listen to Dylan constantly urge them to try marijuana. It was quite an advertisement.           A few months later, the Beatles took it all one step further when they released their groundbreaking album, Revolver. Again, according to George Harrison, while Rubber Soul was the first album they made under the influence of marijuana, Revolver was the first one they made under the regular influence of LSD.           The easiest way to describe this remarkable collection of songs is that it was incredibly trippy. One song, “Love to You” followed the form of a classic Indian raga, complete with sitar and tablas. Nothing like it had ever been heard in the west before. Another major breakthrough was the soul-stirring “Eleanor Rigby,” which brought an entirely new level of depth to the Beatles repertoire. All the other songs on the album became instant classics as well, but one track, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” deserves some special attention because it was specifically designed to boost the evolution of consciousness.           Apparently, John Lennon had been influenced by a book called, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner. The book claimed that under the influence of LSD, it was possible to shed the limiting nature of constant ego identification and emerge into a higher, more enlightened level of awareness. And it gave step by step instructions on how to do it.           Supposedly, after Lennon bought the book, he took LSD and followed the instructions to a tee. Soon after that, he wrote the song, with the psychedelic nature of the music combined with the mind-expanding lyrics. He said he wanted to sound like the Dalai Lama chanting on top of a mountain, as he enlightened the public to the message of possible God realization that underlies the LSD experience. “Turn off your mind relax and float downstream,” he sang.  “It is not dying, it is not dying. Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void. It is shining, it is shining. That you may see the meaning of within. It is being, it is being. That love is all and love is everyone. It is knowing, it is knowing…” Some years later, George Harrison offered an interesting perspective on the song as well as on their evolving perspective at the time. “From birth to death all we ever do is think: we have one thought, we have another thought, another thought, another thought,” he said.  “Even when you are asleep you are having dreams, so there is never a time from birth to death when the mind isn't always active with thoughts. But you can turn off your mind. “The whole point is that…the self is coming from a state of pure awareness, from the state of being. All the rest that comes about in the outward manifestation of the physical world. . . is just clutter.” Then he concluded, “The true nature of each soul is pure consciousness. So, the song is really about transcending, and about the quality of the transcendent.” Of course, this understanding about the higher nature of our consciousness was extremely advanced for its time. And whether the public understood it or not, the message was still pouring out to millions of people on a daily basis, subtly or not so subtly affecting their consciousness. The innovative album caught on in a flash and the influence of psychedelic music began to grow significantly. Over the next few months, the Grateful Dead, the Byrds, the Jefferson Airplane, the Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, Traffic, Jimi Hendrix and the Doors all gained enormous popularity, along with many, many other groups. A new idea of a higher, more evolved state of being was clearly being born in the culture. And speaking of the culture, in a larger context, something called the “counter culture” was beginning to emerge, which not only challenged the mainstream norms and values, but also advocated for social change. Embracing ideals of peace, love, and unity, it was all vibrant, inspiring, alive, and unmistakably - young. But at the same time, another enormous, yet rather sinister influence was in the early stages of taking over the consciousness of the country as well. As you probably know, it was the ever-broadening tragedy of the war in Vietnam.  Even though no one seemed to be paying much attention to it, like an undiagnosed cancer, it just kept metastasizing. President Lyndon Johnson continued to insist that the constant build-up of US troops was the right thing to do because at all costs, we had to prevent communism from taking over the Pacific Rim. And the costs were getting pretty serious.  In 1964, we spent $53.4 billion on the effort in Vietnam. In 1965, we spent another $54.5 billion and in 1966, it escalated to 66.4 billion. That's a total of $174.4 billion. Not that anyone looked at it this way, but in those three years, instead of being used for warfare, that amount of money could have abundantly fed well over a billion people. And the human costs were building as well. The US troops which had numbered 23,300 in 1964, grew to 184,300 in 1965, then onto 385,300 by the end of 1966. And with that, the truly horrible number - how many people actually died there – kept swelling. In 1964, 216 US soldiers died. It grew to 1,928 in 1965, then onto 6,350 in 1966. Now that's just US troops. When it comes to how many of the North and South Vietnamese people died, no one really knows for sure, but an estimate of 10-1 is used as a conservative approximation. So here are the basically revolting numbers related to those three years of war - $174.43 billion just plain wasted on destruction, with a total of over 96,000 human beings needlessly killed. Even so, at that point, there still was very little opposition to the war and President Johnson stood resolute and strong. Afterall, he wasn't about to let the Pacific Rim go communist. And on a side note, he was damned if he was going to be the first US President to ever lose a war. So that brings us to 1967, which would go down in history as a truly magical year. Many volumes have been written about it and there's not a whole lot to say that hasn't already been said. On the grim side, the US involvement in Vietnam got much worse, to nobody's surprise. We went up another 100,000 troops to a deployment of a staggering 485,600 soldiers. And US deaths went up an additional five thousand to 11,363. That's 17,713 families who buried their young sons and daughters who had died trying to protect the Pacific Rim from going communist. Not that any of us even knew what that concept meant. So. the dark side had gotten darker.  But incredibly, the light side was about to get much lighter. On May 26, 1967, the Beatles released what was probably the most monumental album of their entire career, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band. This major phenomenon, turned the pop world completely upside down. The album was filled with references to transcendent states of consciousness that were being now being experienced by millions of baby boomers around the world.  It featured the most psychedelic song anyone had ever heard yet, called “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” The music was absolutely hypnotic and the mind-altering lyrics broke radical new ground on many levels. The initials of the title happened to be LSD, but according to John Lennon, that was just a coincidence. However he always said it with a smile. George Harrison took his Indian raga theme one step further in his song, “Within You, Without You.” It was what is called a “Satsang Song” in the Indian tradition because it expresses some of the deeper truths of their ancient wisdom. “Try to realize that it's all within yourself, no one else can make you change,” he sang. “When you see beyond yourself you may find that peace of mind is waiting there. And the time will come when you realize that we're all one and life flows on within you and without you.” Meanwhile, on the very last song of the album, “A Day in the Life,” after a mind-blowing journey through some seemingly random news of the day, to mesmerizing music played by a 40-piece orchestra John hypnotically repeats the stanza, “I'd love to turn you on.” By then, several million people knew exactly what he was talking about. Now, I still wasn't one of them yet, but that part of the story is coming up soon. Which makes this an ideal place to end this episode. As you might guess, things keep on evolving, so as always, keep your eyes, mind and heart opened and let's get together in the next one.

Germain Récamier est l'auteur d'une pièce dans laquelle il met en scène l'ultime fictive rencontre entre Paul McCartney et John Lennon une dizaine de jours avant la mort de ce dernier. Deux vieux copains se retrouvent et font le point sur les 10 années qui ont suivi la séparation des Beatles. Nous avons parlé de ce groupe que nous avons découvert sur cassettes au travers des albums bleu et rouge, bien avant de découvrir les albums mythiques comme Sergeant Pepper ou Abbey Road. ===== Dans Le Volume sur 11, je vais à la rencontre de nouveaux sons, de nouveaux noms. Dans chaque épisode, une nouvelle rencontre. Une interview. Un artiste qui parle de son parcours et présente sa musique. Avec de la pop, du rock, de l'electro, du metal, du punk, du rap… Ouvrez vos chakras!

It was six Ty years ago today Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play, wait, no …. it was the day “I want to hold your hand” hit number one on the billboard chart in the United States. And Beatlemania took over the world.

Unlock the truth behind a rock 'n' roll enigma that has captivated fans for decades: Is the Paul McCartney we know a double? Join us with our insightful guests, Johnnie and Chad, as we unravel the "Paul McCartney is Dead" conspiracy, examining its inception from an odd phone call to a radio show in 1967. We scrutinize every clue, from Beatles' album covers to backmasked messages, and weigh the reality of a world-famous musician being replaced unnoticed. This episode promises a riveting mix of historical anecdotes and critical skepticism, all while honoring the incredible legacy of McCartney and the Fab Four.Venture with us into the lesser-known histories of the Beatles, where we dissect their transition from live performances to studio pioneers during the "Sergeant Pepper" days. With Johnnie and Chad, we contemplate the "what-ifs" of Paul's impromptu college gigs and the potential of live shows in the Beatles' zenith. We also scrutinize the authenticity of McCartney's portrayal in recent documentaries. Prepare for an audio journey that's as much about the legend of McCartney as it is about the enduring mystique surrounding the Beatles' extraordinary journey through music and culture.Music by Konrad: Fearclearing

In the last two episodes, I discussed the Higher Mind Training, which is a unique personal growth program that is being prepared for release by the Better Angels Publishing Company. I also mentioned that for the past six months I have been teaching some of its basic understandings and techniques to the counselors and residents of the James A. Casey House in Wilkes-Barre, PA, which is an innovative halfway house where about fifty men live, recovering from the effects of severe alcohol and substance abuse.           This effort has been kind of an experiment because although I have been speaking about and teaching the fundamentals of the training for many years, I have never exposed it to a population of this kind and had no idea what to expect. The results have been deeply inspiring. It's been obvious that these guys have never heard anything about their greater inner potential before. Neither well-educated nor well-funded, most of them have been beaten down by the external world for most of their existence. They've been told that they are losers, that they've basically ruined their lives and that the road ahead of them is a dangerous, thorny, uphill climb, with a high probability that they'll fail in their efforts to recover.   Suddenly, they're being given new information - that they were born geniuses and that they still have the genius potential inside of them. And most importantly, that they're not their minds, Even though it may be filled with anger, fear and thousands of other forms of negativity, their finite mind with its vicious inner critic is not who they are. It's just one part of a much larger intelligence that they have. And they don't have to buy into the miserable story that it's telling them all day long. They can let it go and move on, because there's a bright road ahead of them if they choose to choose it.   We also show them a few simple inner exercises and even though they may get only a brief introduction to inner freedom, it's clearly a liberating experience for them and it's been an incredible phenomenon to watch. After one exercise, a resident smiled at me in disbelief and said, “I have never felt anything like this before in my life.” During these months, as I began to prepare for the return of the podcast schedule, I decided to make some of the key points of the training available to all our podcast subscribers. There is still quite a lot of work to be done prior to the program's release and I wanted to make this information available to you now. You may find it to be quite helpful and there's no reason for you to have to wait. Now although a lot of what I am going to present to you may seem basic at first, just take it in. I have found that most people have never had a clear introduction to these inner fundamentals and having a clear understanding of them can be critical to our long-term happiness. Afterall, they pertain to the achievement of our highest human potential, which will enhance every area of our lives.  So, let's begin with a somewhat tricky problem that can be a real barrier to the growth of our inner awareness and that is – on a certain level, we're know-it-alls. We think we already know everything. Now I'm only talking about a relatively small part of our mind, but it has a pretty loud voice. And there is a companion trait that comes along with being a know-it-all  and that is - we like to be right.  Actually, we love to be right, but we make far too much out of it. And it's not just an annoying trait, it can be downright dangerous. When it gets out of hand, wars can start with terrible catastrophes following. Sometimes you have to wonder: why are we so proud about being right, anyway? Being right isn't such a big accomplishment. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. This particular part of our mind isn't really such a big deal. It's bark is much worse than its bite, but if we want to grow, we really do need to grow beyond it. It reminds me of a story from the old days, and I mean the thousands of years old days, when a student approached a master and asked to be taught knowledge of the inner self. “Let's have some tea first,” the master said. He then poured the student a cup of tea. When the cup was full, he stopped for a few seconds and said, “Here, let me give you a little more.”  The master then poured more tea on top of the filled cup and the tea ran onto the saucer. The master kept pouring more tea onto the cup and it ran onto the table. He kept pouring and it ran over the table onto the ground. He kept pouring for a few more moments, then he looked at the would-be student. “You see, all the tea that was poured into your filled cup just ran off and ended up on the ground. It was a complete waste and never did you or anybody else any good. Is that right?” he asked, and the student nodded. “You see, you have to empty your cup before you can fill it.” So typical of Ancient Wisdom - an extremely simple statement with an extremely profound meaning.   By the way, this know-it-all, love-to-be-right trait isn't bound to only individuals. Every culture throughout history seems to think that it's completely advanced. Even the most appalling barbaric ones thought they were great. So, both as individuals and as societies we remain proud of our so-called knowledge. And this always leads me to one of my favorite quotes, which comes from Thomas Edison, who is still considered to be one of the greatest inventors of all times. He is credited with over a thousand patented inventions including the light bulb, the phonograph, the motion picture, and the telegraph. Pretty impressive! Probably one of the smartest humans ever! Well, here's his view about the state of our knowledge. “We don't know one millionth of one percent about anything,” he said. Hearing that phrase and knowing that it comes from him always makes me humble. And when it comes to inner growth, humility is one of the most reliable allies we have.   With that, let's quickly recall that famous study that was commissioned by NASA in which Dr. George Land found that 98% of us begin life as creative geniuses and remain that way though the age of five. Then it progressively diminishes until by our early twenties, only two percent of us are in the genius category. But according to Dr. Land, this remarkable level of intelligence remains within us and can be recovered relatively quickly. Personally, the thought that there are advanced levels of consciousness within our intelligence that we have not yet discovered has always intrigued me and through research I have found that this concept has been expressed in every culture and religion throughout human history. I have mentioned in a previous episode that one of my favorite ideas about this is the inner state called Satchitanand, as expressed in Vedantic philosophy. The term can be broken down into three components: Sat, which is truth. Chit, which is consciousness and Anand, which is bliss. The ancient teaching is that although we may not be aware of it, there is a profound state within us which is connected to eternal truth, unending happiness, and immortal contentment. Together, they represent the ultimate reality or supreme principle, which exists both within and without. George Harrison expressed the concept in his classic song, “Within You Without You.” Personally, I fell in love with the idea when I first heard the song on the Sergeant Pepper album. I was in college at the time, it was the late sixties and chaos had become the societal norm. Things were falling apart as quickly as they were coming together, but as George put it, “When you see beyond yourself you may find that peace of mind is waiting there.” Now, with the idea that there is a pristine state of peace, consciousness and bliss within our awareness, along with Dr. Land's conclusion that we are in a genius state of consciousness from birth through age five, I started thinking about our early years, especially before the age of three. It seemed to me that if a toddler is not hungry, tired or in need of being changed, and nothing external is bothering them, they seem to exist in a most amazing state of being. They're creative, expressive and completely aware. And they're incredibly happy. Indeed, according to current research the average toddler laughs about 300 times a day. Of course, we can blow right by that number but stop and think about it.  That's a lot of laughter. So, what are they laughing about? They don't have much of an understanding about anything in the so-caller real world, so they're not laughing at a good joke or because they just found out they unexpectedly came into a ton of money. No. The fact is they're not laughing at anything at all. They don't need a reason to be happy. They just exist in a state of consciousness that is inherently joyful. And a countless number of masters and teachers over thousands of years, have told us that this state of consciousness is within us now. In that regard, I'm reminded of a poem called “Samadhi” that was written by the great teacher Paramhansa Yogananda. Samadhi is a term that refers to the highest meditative state where the individual achieves union with the Divine. He wrote it after he first experienced it as a yogi and this is the ending - “Spotless is my mental sky. Below, ahead, and high above - Eternity and I, one united ray. I, a tiny bubble of laughter, have become the Sea of Mirth Itself.”  Can you imagine that? Living in a state of inner consciousness where you have transcended the bonds of earth life and merged with the Divine. And what about that term - the Sea of Mirth itself? The dictionary defines “mirth” as abundant gladness expressed by laughter. I don't know about you, but with all the ideas about God and heaven that I've been taught throughout my whole life, and believe me, that's a lot of ideas – I never came across the idea of God being abundantly happy and expressing it with laughter. The big guy they taught me about seemed to be pretty pissed most of the time and was always ready to smite somebody. Well, so much for concepts. But also, to appreciate the incredible state of being that we have within us, we don't have to go looking for some arcane, yogic, meditative state. It's much simpler than that. We can just look within our own heart, which is already filled with what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.” There are hundreds of average, everyday traits that we have within our awareness that are miraculous in their own way. Love, gratitude, kindness, generosity, integrity, and compassion are just a few. So, if we start out life in this incredible state of consciousness and it is all within us right now, a most obvious question comes up: What happened to us? And more importantly, what can happen for us? Well, we've covered a lot of ground here and as you might guess, this will be the topic of the next episode. As always, keep your eyes, mind and heart open and let's get together in the next one…

In a swirling world dominated by miniskirts, feather boas, posh photographers, youth culture, Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles, London has been transformed, and avant-garde “boutiques” have taken over areas left empty in the wake of the demise of local manufacturing. Join Tom and Dominic in the second part of our series on Sixties Fashion, as they explore the birth of the miniskirt, Sergeant Pepper's, hippies, the legacy of the 60s, and much more - all you need is love! *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Long live the Queen of Rock 'n' Roll, Tina Turner!With heavy hearts, we share the news of Tina Turner's passing at the age of 83, as announced by her management team today.Tina Turner, a symbol of resilience, left an indelible mark on the sound of rock and roll for generations. From her iconic collaborations with Ike Turner in the '60s and '70s ("A Fool in Love" and "Proud Mary") to her solo projects like "River Deep Mountain High" in the '60s and the timeless "What's Love Got to Do with It?" in the '80s, her influence was undeniable.But Tina's talents extended beyond music. She graced the silver screen, portraying the unforgettable Acid Queen in The Who's "Tommy" (1975) and the post-apocalyptic warlord Aunty Entity in "Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome" (1985). She also appeared as the Mayor in Arnold Schwarzenegger's "Last Action Hero" (1993) and made a notable cameo in the ill-fated film adaptation of "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" by The Bee Gees (1978).On television, Tina brightened various TV variety shows, including The Cher Show and Hollywood Nights with Olivia Newton-John. As the first black woman to grace the cover of Rolling Stone, Tina Turner shattered boundaries and solidified her place as one of the best-selling recording artists of all time.Today, we come together to celebrate the extraordinary life of Tina Turner. In honor of her legacy, we invite you to enjoy this encore presentation of "The Tea on Tina Turner," which originally aired in April of 2021.------Everyone expected 1984 to be a strange dystopian future, but it turned out to be an amazing year for pop culture with Tina Turner reigning supreme as the Queen of Rock and Roll.Although the press described Tina Turner's chart topping album Private Dancer as a comeback, Tina considered it her debut album, free from the control and abuse she faced from her ex-husband Ike Turner.In the new documentary film, Tina, the Queen of Rock and Roll has the final word on her extraordinary life from growing poor and Black in Nutbush, TN, to her relationship with Ike Turner and how she broke free to become one of the world's most celebrated artists.The new documentary is gonna get you hooked on Tina all over again.But despite it being an in depth look at the pop icon's life, many amazing things were briefly touched on or left on the cutting room floor.Today is Tina Turner day! We're looking at the life and legacy of the Queen of Rock and Roll, from the incredible year she had back in 1984, to her rock and roll roots with Ike Turner. Who made her iconic wigs? How did Cher save Tina's career? And what celebrities made her want to say “you better be good to me.”

We have another banger HOT off the presses. It's the newest album by British rap royalty, Lil Simz, NO THANK YOU... But today, we can't say no thank you because we are doing the Season 19 Hot Ones Sauces again while listening to this 10 track album. How will we fare in the second attempt? No Thank You Short Film: https://youtu.be/GqwOCq0MXPU MUSIC MOVIES TONIGHT episode 4 - Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (starring the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton - https://youtu.be/TCb9rwuQSGk OUR DISCORD: https://discord.gg/2stA2P7pTC Flyover State Hotline - 1 608 HIT-NERD (608-448-6373) EVERYTHING ELSE: https://linktr.ee/FlyoverStatePark --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/albumconcepthour/support

The unmistakable voice of Jon Anderson on this episode of the Takin A Walk Podcast.Jon was the lead singer of progressive rock group Yes and currently performs with "The Band Geeks" doing Yes epics and classics.Here are show notes for the episode.Takin A Walk is listed on the top 100 list of music podcasts to follow in 2023 by Feedspot.Jon Anderson Music Journey- Founding Member, And Lead Singer of Yes BandSurvival goes down to music, and music is the healing force of our very being. If you can get to your next level of consciousness about music, that is the survival you need as an artist. It makes you want to make more music. Whether it reaches people or not that's not the point. It's about making new music, especially now that the internet has made things easy for us. As a musician, music should never stand still in your consciousness. Get it out there and go to the next level. Join today's walk with Jon Anderson, an iconic member of Rock Royalty. He's the founding member and lead singer of the English Progressive Rock Band, Yes.  The Yes band was formed in London in 1968 and has been a popular soundtrack to many of us. In this episode, Jon shares his stepping stones to music discovery since 1968, the great artists he met and worked with along the journey, and his upcoming music show in April 2023. Tune in! Key Highlights from the Show;[00:01] Episode intro and a bit about Jon Anderson[01:31] When Jon realized he was a musician and stuck in the business[05:22] The first time John heard ‘Sergeant Pepper' and his reaction   [06:21] The musical styles in 1968 when Yes was being formed[08:41] Jon review of a band that influenced him, The Mahavishnu Orchestra[10:09] Jon's encounter with Jimi Hendrix[11:53] How Jon gives tribute to great artists through the music he produces[16:57] Jon's favorite places and venues that he still enjoys playing[18:59] Getting music out of the unconscious level [22:38] What Lee Abrams means to Jon and the Yes band[29:11] Jon's reflections on the loss of Jeff Beck[30:58] About the show Jon has coming up in April[32:30] Ending the show Notable quotesEvery day we keep learning the structure and implementing ideas.No matter where you play, the audience is your greatest focusIf you can get to your next level of consciousness about music, that is the survival thing. It makes you want to make music.Music is a healing force.Connect With Jon AndersonAbout Jon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Anderson_discography About the Show *****Thank you so much for listening to the TAKIN' A WALK PODCAST SHOW hosted by Buzz Knight! Listen to more honest conversations with a compelling mix of guests ranging from musicians, authors, and insiders with their own stories. Get inspired, get motivated, and gain insights from honest conversations every week that can help you with your own journey. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and be part of this blessed family. Please consider subscribing, leaving a review, and sharing it with your friends and family!                        Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode 162 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Daydream Believer", and the later career of the Monkees, and how four Pinocchios became real boys. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-minute bonus episode available, on "Born to be Wild" by Steppenwolf. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this time, as even after splitting it into multiple files, there are simply too many Monkees tracks excerpted. The best versions of the Monkees albums are the triple-CD super-deluxe versions that used to be available from monkees.com , and I've used Andrew Sandoval's liner notes for them extensively in this episode. Sadly, though, none of those are in print. However, at the time of writing there is a new four-CD super-deluxe box set of Headquarters (with a remixed version of the album rather than the original mixes I've excerpted here) available from that site, and I used the liner notes for that here. Monkees.com also currently has the intermittently-available BluRay box set of the entire Monkees TV series, which also has Head and 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee. For those just getting into the group, my advice is to start with this five-CD set, which contains their first five albums along with bonus tracks. The single biggest source of information I used in this episode is the first edition of Andrew Sandoval's The Monkees; The Day-By-Day Story. Sadly that is now out of print and goes for hundreds of pounds. Sandoval released a second edition of the book in 2021, which I was unfortunately unable to obtain, but that too is now out of print. If you can find a copy of either, do get one. Other sources used were Monkee Business by Eric Lefcowitz, and the autobiographies of three of the band members and one of the songwriters — Infinite Tuesday by Michael Nesmith, They Made a Monkee Out of Me by Davy Jones, I'm a Believer by Micky Dolenz, and Psychedelic Bubble-Gum by Bobby Hart. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript When we left the Monkees, they were in a state of flux. To recap what we covered in that episode, the Monkees were originally cast as actors in a TV show, and consisted of two actors with some singing ability -- the former child stars Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz -- and two musicians who were also competent comic actors, Michael Nesmith and Peter Tork.  The show was about a fictional band whose characters shared names with their actors, and there had quickly been two big hit singles, and two hit albums, taken from the music recorded for the TV show's soundtrack. But this had caused problems for the actors. The records were being promoted as being by the fictional group in the TV series, blurring the line between the TV show and reality, though in fact for the most part they were being made by session musicians with only Dolenz or Jones adding lead vocals to pre-recorded backing tracks. Dolenz and Jones were fine with this, but Nesmith, who had been allowed to write and produce a few album tracks himself, wanted more creative input, and more importantly felt that he was being asked to be complicit in fraud because the records credited the four Monkees as the musicians when (other than a tiny bit of inaudible rhythm guitar by Tork on a couple of Nesmith's tracks) none of them played on them. Tork, meanwhile, believed he had been promised that the group would be an actual group -- that they would all be playing on the records together -- and felt hurt and annoyed that this wasn't the case. They were by now playing live together to promote the series and the records, with Dolenz turning out to be a perfectly competent drummer, so surely they could do the same in the studio? So in January 1967, things came to a head. It's actually quite difficult to sort out exactly what happened, because of conflicting recollections and opinions. What follows is my best attempt to harmonise the different versions of the story into one coherent narrative, but be aware that I could be wrong in some of the details. Nesmith and Tork, who disliked each other in most respects, were both agreed that this couldn't continue and that if there were going to be Monkees records released at all, they were going to have the Monkees playing on them. Dolenz, who seems to have been the one member of the group that everyone could get along with, didn't really care but went along with them for the sake of group harmony. And Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, the production team behind the series, also took Nesmith and Tork's side, through a general love of mischief. But on the other side was Don Kirshner, the music publisher who was in charge of supervising the music for the TV show. Kirshner was adamantly, angrily, opposed to the very idea of the group members having any input at all into how the records were made. He considered that they should be grateful for the huge pay cheques they were getting from records his staff writers and producers were making for them, and stop whinging. And Davy Jones was somewhere in the middle. He wanted to support his co-stars, who he genuinely liked, but also, he was a working actor, he'd had other roles before, he'd have other roles afterwards, and as a working actor you do what you're told if you don't want to lose the job you've got. Jones had grown up in very severe poverty, and had been his family's breadwinner from his early teens, and artistic integrity is all very nice, but not as nice as a cheque for a quarter of a million dollars. Although that might be slightly unfair -- it might be fairer to say that artistic integrity has a different meaning to someone like Jones, coming from musical theatre and a tradition of "the show must go on", than it does to people like Nesmith and Tork who had come up through the folk clubs. Jones' attitude may also have been affected by the fact that his character in the TV show didn't play an instrument other than the occasional tambourine or maracas. The other three were having to mime instrumental parts they hadn't played, and to reproduce them on stage, but Jones didn't have that particular disadvantage. Bert Schneider, one of the TV show's producers, encouraged the group to go into the recording studio themselves, with a producer of their choice, and cut a couple of tracks to prove what they could do. Michael Nesmith, who at this point was the one who was most adamant about taking control of the music, chose Chip Douglas to produce. Douglas was someone that Nesmith had known a little while, as they'd both played the folk circuit -- in Douglas' case as a member of the Modern Folk Quartet -- but Douglas had recently joined the Turtles as their new bass player. At this point, Douglas had never officially produced a record, but he was a gifted arranger, and had just arranged the Turtles' latest single, which had just been released and was starting to climb the charts: [Excerpt: The Turtles, "Happy Together"] Douglas quit the Turtles to work with the Monkees, and took the group into the studio to cut two demo backing tracks for a potential single as a proof of concept. These initial sessions didn't have any vocals, but featured Nesmith on guitar, Tork on piano, Dolenz on drums, Jones on tambourine, and an unknown bass player -- possibly Douglas himself, possibly Nesmith's friend John London, who he'd played with in Mike and John and Bill. They cut rough tracks of two songs, "All of Your Toys", by another friend of Nesmith's, Bill Martin, and Nesmith's "The Girl I Knew Somewhere": [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (Gold Star Demo)"] Those tracks were very rough and ready -- they were garage-band tracks rather than the professional studio recordings that the Candy Store Prophets or Jeff Barry's New York session players had provided for the previous singles -- but they were competent in the studio, thanks largely to Chip Douglas' steadying influence. As Douglas later said "They could hardly play. Mike could play adequate rhythm guitar. Pete could play piano but he'd make mistakes, and Micky's time on drums was erratic. He'd speed up or slow down." But the takes they managed to get down showed that they *could* do it. Rafelson and Schneider agreed with them that the Monkees could make a single together, and start recording at least some of their own tracks. So the group went back into the studio, with Douglas producing -- and with Lester Sill from the music publishers there to supervise -- and cut finished versions of the two songs. This time the lineup was Nesmith on guitar, Tork on electric harpsichord -- Tork had always been a fan of Bach, and would in later years perform Bach pieces as his solo spot in Monkees shows -- Dolenz on drums, London on bass, and Jones on tambourine: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (first recorded version)"] But while this was happening, Kirshner had been trying to get new Monkees material recorded without them -- he'd not yet agreed to having the group play on their own records. Three days after the sessions for "All of Your Toys" and "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", sessions started in New York for an entire album's worth of new material, produced by Jeff Barry and Denny Randell, and largely made by the same Red Bird Records team who had made "I'm a Believer" -- the same musicians who in various combinations had played on everything from "Sherry" by the Four Seasons to "Like a Rolling Stone" by Dylan to "Leader of the Pack", and with songs by Neil Diamond, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, Leiber and Stoller, and the rest of the team of songwriters around Red Bird. But at this point came the meeting we talked about towards the end of the "Last Train to Clarksville" episode, in which Nesmith punched a hole in a hotel wall in frustration at what he saw as Kirshner's obstinacy. Kirshner didn't want to listen to the recordings the group had made. He'd promised Jeff Barry and Neil Diamond that if "I'm a Believer" went to number one, Barry would get to produce, and Diamond write, the group's next single. Chip Douglas wasn't a recognised producer, and he'd made this commitment. But the group needed a new single out. A compromise was offered, of sorts, by Kirshner -- how about if Barry flew over from New York to LA to produce the group, they'd scrap the tracks both the group and Barry had recorded, and Barry would produce new tracks for the songs he'd recorded, with the group playing on them? But that wouldn't work either. The group members were all due to go on holiday -- three of them were going to make staggered trips to the UK, partly to promote the TV series, which was just starting over here, and partly just to have a break. They'd been working sixty-plus hour weeks for months between the TV series, live performances, and the recording studio, and they were basically falling-down tired, which was one of the reasons for Nesmith's outburst in the meeting. They weren't accomplished enough musicians to cut tracks quickly, and they *needed* the break. On top of that, Nesmith and Barry had had a major falling-out at the "I'm a Believer" session, and Nesmith considered it a matter of personal integrity that he couldn't work with a man who in his eyes had insulted his professionalism. So that was out, but there was also no way Kirshner was going to let the group release a single consisting of two songs he hadn't heard, produced by a producer with no track record. At first, the group were insistent that "All of Your Toys" should be the A-side for their next single: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "All Of Your Toys"] But there was an actual problem with that which they hadn't foreseen. Bill Martin, who wrote the song, was under contract to another music publisher, and the Monkees' contracts said they needed to only record songs published by Screen Gems. Eventually, it was Micky Dolenz who managed to cut the Gordian knot -- or so everyone thought. Dolenz was the one who had the least at stake of any of them -- he was already secure as the voice of the hits, he had no particular desire to be an instrumentalist, but he wanted to support his colleagues. Dolenz suggested that it would be a reasonable compromise to put out a single with one of the pre-recorded backing tracks on one side, with him or Jones singing, and with the version of "The Girl I Knew Somewhere" that the band had recorded together on the other. That way, Kirshner and the record label would get their new single without too much delay, the group would still be able to say they'd started recording their own tracks, everyone would get some of what they wanted. So it was agreed -- though there was a further stipulation. "The Girl I Knew Somewhere" had Nesmith singing lead vocals, and up to that point every Monkees single had featured Dolenz on lead on both sides. As far as Kirshner and the other people involved in making the release decisions were concerned, that was the way things were going to continue. Everyone was fine with this -- Nesmith, the one who was most likely to object in principle, in practice realised that having Dolenz sing his song would make it more likely to be played on the radio and used in the TV show, and so increase his royalties. A vocal session was arranged in New York for Dolenz and Jones to come and cut some vocal tracks right before Dolenz and Nesmith flew over to the UK. But in the meantime, it had become even more urgent for the group to be seen to be doing their own recording. An in-depth article on the group in the Saturday Evening Post had come out, quoting Nesmith as saying "It was what Kirshner wanted to do. Our records are not our forte. I don't care if we never sell another record. Maybe we were manufactured and put on the air strictly with a lot of hoopla. Tell the world we're synthetic because, damn it, we are. Tell them the Monkees are wholly man-made overnight, that millions of dollars have been poured into this thing. Tell the world we don't record our own music. But that's us they see on television. The show is really a part of us. They're not seeing something invalid." The press immediately jumped on the band, and started trying to portray them as con artists exploiting their teenage fans, though as Nesmith later said "The press decided they were going to unload on us as being somehow illegitimate, somehow false. That we were making an attempt to dupe the public, when in fact it was me that was making the attempt to maintain the integrity. So the press went into a full-scale war against us." Tork, on the other hand, while he and Nesmith were on the same side about the band making their own records, blamed Nesmith for much of the press reaction, later saying "Michael blew the whistle on us. If he had gone in there with pride and said 'We are what we are and we have no reason to hang our heads in shame' it never would have happened." So as far as the group were concerned, they *needed* to at least go with Dolenz's suggested compromise. Their personal reputations were on the line. When Dolenz arrived at the session in New York, he was expecting to be asked to cut one vocal track, for the A-side of the next single (and presumably a new lead vocal for "The Girl I Knew Somewhere"). When he got there, though, he found that Kirshner expected him to record several vocals so that Kirshner could choose the best. That wasn't what had been agreed, and so Dolenz flat-out refused to record anything at all. Luckily for Kirshner, Jones -- who was the most co-operative member of the band -- was willing to sing a handful of songs intended for Dolenz as well as the ones he was meant to sing. So the tape of "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You", the song intended for the next single, was slowed down so it would be in a suitable key for Jones instead, and he recorded the vocal for that: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You"] Incidentally, while Jones recorded vocals for several more tracks at the session -- and some would later be reused as album tracks a few years down the line -- not all of the recorded tracks were used for vocals, and this later gave rise to a rumour that has been repeated as fact by almost everyone involved, though it was a misunderstanding. Kirshner's next major success after the Monkees was another made-for-TV fictional band, the Archies, and their biggest hit was "Sugar Sugar", co-written and produced by Jeff Barry: [Excerpt: The Archies, "Sugar Sugar"] Both Kirshner and the Monkees have always claimed that the Monkees were offered "Sugar, Sugar" and turned it down. To Kirshner the moral of the story was that since "Sugar, Sugar" was a massive hit, it proved his instincts right and proved that the Monkees didn't know what would make a hit. To the Monkees, on the other hand, it showed that Kirshner wanted them to do bubblegum music that they considered ridiculous. This became such an established factoid that Dolenz regularly tells the story in his live performances, and includes a version of "Sugar, Sugar" in them, rearranged as almost a torch song: [Excerpt: Micky Dolenz, "Sugar, Sugar (live)"] But in fact, "Sugar, Sugar" wasn't written until long after Kirshner and the Monkees had parted ways. But one of the songs for which a backing track was recorded but no vocals were ever completed was "Sugar Man", a song by Denny Randell and Sandy Linzer, which they would later release themselves as an unsuccessful single: [Excerpt: Linzer and Randell, "Sugar Man"] Over the years, the Monkees not recording "Sugar Man" became the Monkees not recording "Sugar, Sugar". Meanwhile, Dolenz and Nesmith had flown over to the UK to do some promotional work and relax, and Jones soon also flew over, though didn't hang out with his bandmates, preferring to spend more time with his family. Both Dolenz and Nesmith spent a lot of time hanging out with British pop stars, and were pleased to find that despite the manufactured controversy about them being a manufactured group, none of the British musicians they admired seemed to care. Eric Burdon, for example, was quoted in the Melody Maker as saying "They make very good records, I can't understand how people get upset about them. You've got to make up your minds whether a group is a record production group or one that makes live appearances. For example, I like to hear a Phil Spector record and I don't worry if it's the Ronettes or Ike and Tina Turner... I like the Monkees record as a grand record, no matter how people scream. So somebody made a record and they don't play, so what? Just enjoy the record." Similarly, the Beatles were admirers of the Monkees, especially the TV show, despite being expected to have a negative opinion of them, as you can hear in this contemporary recording of Paul McCartney answering a fan's questions: Excerpt: Paul McCartney talks about the Monkees] Both Dolenz and Nesmith hung out with the Beatles quite a bit -- they both visited Sgt. Pepper recording sessions, and if you watch the film footage of the orchestral overdubs for "A Day in the Life", Nesmith is there with all the other stars of the period. Nesmith and his wife Phyllis even stayed with the Lennons for a couple of days, though Cynthia Lennon seems to have thought of the Nesmiths as annoying intruders who had been invited out of politeness and not realised they weren't wanted. That seems plausible, but at the same time, John Lennon doesn't seem the kind of person to not make his feelings known, and Michael Nesmith's reports of the few days they stayed there seem to describe a very memorable experience, where after some initial awkwardness he developed a bond with Lennon, particularly once he saw that Lennon was a fan of Captain Beefheart, who was a friend of Nesmith, and whose Safe as Milk album Lennon was examining when Nesmith turned up, and whose music at this point bore a lot of resemblance to the kind of thing Nesmith was doing: [Excerpt: Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, "Yellow Brick Road"] Or at least, that's how Nesmith always told the story later -- though Safe as Milk didn't come out until nearly six months later. It's possible he's conflating memories from a later trip to the UK in June that year -- where he also talked about how Lennon was the only person he'd really got on with on the previous trip, because "he's a compassionate person. I know he has a reputation for being caustic, but it is only a cover for the depth of his feeling." Nesmith and Lennon apparently made some experimental music together during the brief stay, with Nesmith being impressed by Lennon's Mellotron and later getting one himself. Dolenz, meanwhile, was spending more time with Paul McCartney, and with Spencer Davis of his current favourite band The Spencer Davis Group. But even more than that he was spending a lot of time with Samantha Juste, a model and TV presenter whose job it was to play the records on Top of the Pops, the most important British TV pop show, and who had released a record herself a couple of months earlier, though it hadn't been a success: [Excerpt: Samantha Juste, "No-one Needs My Love Today"] The two quickly fell deeply in love, and Juste would become Dolenz's first wife the next year. When Nesmith and Dolenz arrived back in the US after their time off, they thought the plan was still to release "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" with "The Girl I Knew Somewhere" on the B-side. So Nesmith was horrified to hear on the radio what the announcer said were the two sides of the new Monkees single -- "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You", and "She Hangs Out", another song from the Jeff Barry sessions with a Davy vocal. Don Kirshner had gone ahead and picked two songs from the Jeff Barry sessions and delivered them to RCA Records, who had put a single out in Canada. The single was very, *very* quickly withdrawn once the Monkees and the TV producers found out, and only promo copies seem to circulate -- rather than being credited to "the Monkees", both sides are credited to '"My Favourite Monkee" Davy Jones Sings'. The record had been withdrawn, but "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" was clearly going to have to be the single. Three days after the record was released and pulled, Nesmith, Dolenz and Tork were back in the studio with Chip Douglas, recording a new B-side -- a new version of "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", this time with Dolenz on vocals. As Jones was still in the UK, John London added the tambourine part as well as the bass: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (single version)"] As Nesmith told the story a couple of months later, "Bert said 'You've got to get this thing in Micky's key for Micky to sing it.' I said 'Has Donnie made a commitment? I don't want to go there and break my neck in order to get this thing if Donnie hasn't made a commitment. And Bert refused to say anything. He said 'I can't tell you anything except just go and record.'" What had happened was that the people at Columbia had had enough of Kirshner. As far as Rafelson and Schneider were concerned, the real problem in all this was that Kirshner had been making public statements taking all the credit for the Monkees' success and casting himself as the puppetmaster. They thought this was disrespectful to the performers -- and unstated but probably part of it, that it was disrespectful to Rafelson and Schneider for their work putting the TV show together -- and that Kirshner had allowed his ego to take over. Things like the liner notes for More of the Monkees which made Kirshner and his stable of writers more important than the performers had, in the view of the people at Raybert Productions, put the Monkees in an impossible position and forced them to push back. Schneider later said "Kirshner had an ego that transcended everything else. As a matter of fact, the press issue was probably magnified a hundred times over because of Kirshner. He wanted everybody thinking 'Hey, he's doing all this, not them.' In the end it was very self-destructive because it heightened the whole press issue and it made them feel lousy." Kirshner was out of a job, first as the supervisor for the Monkees and then as the head of Columbia/Screen Gems Music. In his place came Lester Sill, the man who had got Leiber and Stoller together as songwriters, who had been Lee Hazelwood's production partner on his early records with Duane Eddy, and who had been the "Les" in Philles Records until Phil Spector pushed him out. Sill, unlike Kirshner, was someone who was willing to take a back seat and just be a steadying hand where needed. The reissued version of "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You" went to number two on the charts, behind "Somethin' Stupid" by Frank and Nancy Sinatra, produced by Sill's old colleague Hazelwood, and the B-side, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", also charted separately, making number thirty-nine on the charts. The Monkees finally had a hit that they'd written and recorded by themselves. Pinocchio had become a real boy: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "The Girl I Knew Somewhere (single version)"] At the same session at which they'd recorded that track, the Monkees had recorded another Nesmith song, "Sunny Girlfriend", and that became the first song to be included on a new album, which would eventually be named Headquarters, and on which all the guitar, keyboard, drums, percussion, banjo, pedal steel, and backing vocal parts would for the first time be performed by the Monkees themselves. They brought in horn and string players on a couple of tracks, and the bass was variously played by John London, Chip Douglas, and Jerry Yester as Tork was more comfortable on keyboards and guitar than bass, but it was in essence a full band album. Jones got back the next day, and sessions began in earnest. The first song they recorded after his return was "Mr. Webster", a Boyce and Hart song that had been recorded with the Candy Store Prophets in 1966 but hadn't been released. This was one of three tracks on the album that were rerecordings of earlier outtakes, and it's fascinating to compare them, to see the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches. In the case of "Mr. Webster", the instrumental backing on the earlier version is definitely slicker: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Mr. Webster (1st Recorded Version)"] But at the same time, there's a sense of dynamics in the group recording that's lacking from the original, like the backing dropping out totally on the word "Stop" -- a nice touch that isn't in the original. I am only speculating, but this may have been inspired by the similar emphasis on the word "stop" in "For What It's Worth" by Tork's old friend Stephen Stills: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Mr. Webster (album version)"] Headquarters was a group album in another way though -- for the first time, Tork and Dolenz were bringing in songs they'd written -- Nesmith of course had supplied songs already for the two previous albums. Jones didn't write any songs himself yet, though he'd start on the next album, but he was credited with the rest of the group on two joke tracks, "Band 6", a jam on the Merrie Melodies theme “Merrily We Roll Along”, and "Zilch", a track made up of the four band members repeating nonsense phrases: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Zilch"] Oddly, that track had a rather wider cultural resonance than a piece of novelty joke album filler normally would. It's sometimes covered live by They Might Be Giants: [Excerpt: They Might Be Giants, "Zilch"] While the rapper Del Tha Funkee Homosapien had a worldwide hit in 1991 with "Mistadobalina", built around a sample of Peter Tork from the track: [Excerpt: Del Tha Funkee Homosapien,"Mistadobalina"] Nesmith contributed three songs, all of them combining Beatles-style pop music and country influences, none more blatantly than the opening track, "You Told Me", which starts off parodying the opening of "Taxman", before going into some furious banjo-picking from Tork: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "You Told Me"] Tork, meanwhile, wrote "For Pete's Sake" with his flatmate of the time, and that became the end credits music for season two of the TV series: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "For Pete's Sake"] But while the other band members made important contributions, the track on the album that became most popular was the first song of Dolenz's to be recorded by the group. The lyrics recounted, in a semi-psychedelic manner, Dolenz's time in the UK, including meeting with the Beatles, who the song refers to as "the four kings of EMI", but the first verse is all about his new girlfriend Samantha Juste: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Randy Scouse Git"] The song was released as a single in the UK, but there was a snag. Dolenz had given the song a title he'd heard on an episode of the BBC sitcom Til Death Us Do Part, which he'd found an amusing bit of British slang. Til Death Us Do Part was written by Johnny Speight, a writer with Associated London Scripts, and was a family sitcom based around the character of Alf Garnett, an ignorant, foul-mouthed reactionary bigot who hated young people, socialists, and every form of minority, especially Black people (who he would address by various slurs I'm definitely not going to repeat here), and was permanently angry at the world and abusive to his wife. As with another great sitcom from ALS, Steptoe and Son, which Norman Lear adapted for the US as Sanford and Son, Til Death Us Do Part was also adapted by Lear, and became All in the Family. But while Archie Bunker, the character based on Garnett in the US version, has some redeeming qualities because of the nature of US network sitcom, Alf Garnett has absolutely none, and is as purely unpleasant and unsympathetic a character as has ever been created -- which sadly didn't stop a section of the audience from taking him as a character to be emulated. A big part of the show's dynamic was the relationship between Garnett and his socialist son-in-law from Liverpool, played by Anthony Booth, himself a Liverpudlian socialist who would later have a similarly contentious relationship with his own decidedly non-socialist son-in-law, the future Prime Minister Tony Blair. Garnett was as close to foul-mouthed as was possible on British TV at the time, with Speight regularly negotiating with the BBC bosses to be allowed to use terms that were not otherwise heard on TV, and used various offensive terms about his family, including referring to his son-in-law as a "randy Scouse git". Dolenz had heard the phrase on TV, had no idea what it meant but loved the sound of it, and gave the song that title. But when the record came out in the UK, he was baffled to be told that the phrase -- which he'd picked up from a BBC TV show, after all -- couldn't be said normally on BBC broadcasts, so they would need to retitle the track. The translation into American English that Dolenz uses in his live shows to explain this to Americans is to say that "randy Scouse git" means "horny Liverpudlian putz", and that's more or less right. Dolenz took the need for an alternative title literally, and so the track that went to number two in the UK charts was titled "Alternate Title": [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Randy Scouse Git"] The album itself went to number one in both the US and the UK, though it was pushed off the top spot almost straight away by the release of Sgt Pepper. As sessions for Headquarters were finishing up, the group were already starting to think about their next album -- season two of the TV show was now in production, and they'd need to keep generating yet more musical material for it. One person they turned to was a friend of Chip Douglas'. Before the Turtles, Douglas had been in the Modern Folk Quartet, and they'd recorded "This Could Be the Night", which had been written for them by Harry Nilsson: [Excerpt: The MFQ, "This Could Be The Night"] Nilsson had just started recording his first solo album proper, at RCA Studios, the same studios that the Monkees were using. At this point, Nilsson still had a full-time job in a bank, working a night shift there while working on his album during the day, but Douglas knew that Nilsson was a major talent, and that assessment was soon shared by the group when Nilsson came in to demo nine of his songs for them: [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, "1941 (demo)"] According to Nilsson, Nesmith said after that demo session "You just sat down there and blew our minds. We've been looking for songs, and you just sat down and played an *album* for us!" While the Monkees would attempt a few of Nilsson's songs over the next year or so, the first one they chose to complete was the first track recorded for their next album, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, and Jones, Ltd., a song which from the talkback at the beginning of the demo was always intended for Davy Jones to sing: [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, "Cuddly Toy (demo)"] Oddly, given his romantic idol persona, a lot of the songs given to Jones to sing were anti-romantic, and often had a cynical and misogynistic edge. This had started with the first album's "I Want to Be Free", but by Pisces, it had gone to ridiculous extremes. Of the four songs Jones sings on the album, "Hard to Believe", the first song proper that he ever co-wrote, is a straightforward love  song, but the other three have a nasty edge to them. A remade version of Jeff Barry's "She Hangs Out" is about an underaged girl, starts with the lines "How old d'you say your sister was? You know you'd better keep an eye on her" and contains lines like "she could teach you a thing or two" and "you'd better get down here on the double/before she gets her pretty little self in trouble/She's so fine". Goffin and King's "Star Collector" is worse, a song about a groupie with lines like "How can I love her, if I just don't respect her?" and "It won't take much time, before I get her off my mind" But as is so often the way, these rather nasty messages were wrapped up in some incredibly catchy music, and that was even more the case with "Cuddly Toy", a song which at least is more overtly unpleasant -- it's very obvious that Nilsson doesn't intend the protagonist of the song to be at all sympathetic, which is possibly not the case in "She Hangs Out" or "Star Collector". But the character Jones is singing is *viciously* cruel here, mocking and taunting a girl who he's coaxed to have sex with him, only to scorn her as soon as he's got what he wanted: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Cuddly Toy"] It's a great song if you like the cruelest of humour combined with the cheeriest of music, and the royalties from the song allowed Nilsson to quit the job at the bank. "Cuddly Toy", and Chip Douglas and Bill Martin's song "The Door Into Summer", were recorded the same way as Headquarters, with the group playing *as a group*, but as recordings for the album progressed the group fell into a new way of working, which Peter Tork later dubbed "mixed-mode". They didn't go back to having tracks cut for them by session musicians, apart from Jones' song "Hard to Believe", for which the entire backing track was created by one of his co-writers overdubbing himself, but Dolenz, who Tork always said was "incapable of repeating a triumph", was not interested in continuing to play drums in the studio. Instead, a new hybrid Monkees would perform most of the album. Nesmith would still play the lead guitar, Tork would provide the keyboards, Chip Douglas would play all the bass and add some additional guitar, and "Fast" Eddie Hoh, the session drummer who had been a touring drummer with the Modern Folk Quartet and the Mamas and the Papas, among others, would play drums on the records, with Dolenz occasionally adding a bit of acoustic guitar. And this was the lineup that would perform on the hit single from Pisces. "Pleasant Valley Sunday" was written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King, who had written several songs for the group's first two albums (and who would continue to provide them with more songs). As with their earlier songs for the group, King had recorded a demo: [Excerpt: Carole King, "Pleasant Valley Sunday (demo)"] Previously -- and subsequently -- when presented with a Carole King demo, the group and their producers would just try to duplicate it as closely as possible, right down to King's phrasing. Bob Rafelson has said that he would sometimes hear those demos and wonder why King didn't just make records herself -- and without wanting to be too much of a spoiler for a few years' time, he wasn't the only one wondering that. But this time, the group had other plans. In particular, they wanted to make a record with a strong guitar riff to it -- Nesmith has later referenced their own "Last Train to Clarksville" and the Beatles' "Day Tripper" as two obvious reference points for the track. Douglas came up with a riff and taught it to Nesmith, who played it on the track: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday"] The track also ended with the strongest psychedelic -- or "psycho jello" as the group would refer to it -- freak out that they'd done to this point, a wash of saturated noise: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday"] King was unhappy with the results, and apparently glared at Douglas the next time they met. This may be because of the rearrangement from her intentions, but it may also be for a reason that Douglas later suspected. When recording the track, he hadn't been able to remember all the details of her demo, and in particular he couldn't remember exactly how the middle eight went. This is the version on King's demo: [Excerpt: Carole King, "Pleasant Valley Sunday (demo)"] While here's how the Monkees rendered it, with slightly different lyrics: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Pleasant Valley Sunday"] I also think there's a couple of chord changes in the second verse that differ between King and the Monkees, but I can't be sure that's not my ears deceiving me. Either way, though, the track was a huge success, and became one of the group's most well-known and well-loved tracks, making number three on the charts behind "All You Need is Love" and "Light My Fire". And while it isn't Dolenz drumming on the track, the fact that it's Nesmith playing guitar and Tork on the piano -- and the piano part is one of the catchiest things on the record -- meant that they finally had a proper major hit on which they'd played (and it seems likely that Dolenz contributed some of the acoustic rhythm guitar on the track, along with Bill Chadwick, and if that's true all three Monkee instrumentalists did play on the track). Pisces is by far and away the best album the group ever made, and stands up well against anything else that came out around that time. But cracks were beginning to show in the group. In particular, the constant battle to get some sort of creative input had soured Nesmith on the whole project. Chip Douglas later said "When we were doing Pisces Michael would come in with three songs; he knew he had three songs coming on the album. He knew that he was making a lot of money if he got his original songs on there. So he'd be real enthusiastic and cooperative and real friendly and get his three songs done. Then I'd say 'Mike, can you come in and help on this one we're going to do with Micky here?' He said 'No, Chip, I can't. I'm busy.' I'd say, 'Mike, you gotta come in the studio.' He'd say 'No Chip, I'm afraid I'm just gonna have to be ornery about it. I'm not comin' in.' That's when I started not liking Mike so much any more." Now, as is so often the case with the stories from this period, this appears to be inaccurate in the details -- Nesmith is present on every track on the album except Jones' solo "Hard to Believe" and Tork's spoken-word track "Peter Percival Patterson's Pet Pig Porky", and indeed this is by far the album with *most* Nesmith input, as he takes five lead vocals, most of them on songs he didn't write. But Douglas may well be summing up Nesmith's *attitude* to the band at this point -- listening to Nesmith's commentaries on episodes of the TV show, by this point he felt disengaged from everything that was going on, like his opinions weren't welcome. That said, Nesmith did still contribute what is possibly the single most innovative song the group ever did, though the innovations weren't primarily down to Nesmith: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daily Nightly"] Nesmith always described the lyrics to "Daily Nightly" as being about the riots on Sunset Strip, but while they're oblique, they seem rather to be about streetwalking sex workers -- though it's perhaps understandable that Nesmith would never admit as much. What made the track innovative was the use of the Moog synthesiser. We talked about Robert Moog in the episode on "Good Vibrations" -- he had started out as a Theremin manufacturer, and had built the ribbon synthesiser that Mike Love played live on "Good Vibrations", and now he was building the first commercially available easily usable synthesisers. Previously, electronic instruments had either been things like the clavioline -- a simple monophonic keyboard instrument that didn't have much tonal variation -- or the RCA Mark II, a programmable synth that could make a wide variety of sounds, but took up an entire room and was programmed with punch cards. Moog's machines were bulky but still transportable, and they could be played in real time with a keyboard, but were still able to be modified to make a wide variety of different sounds. While, as we've seen, there had been electronic keyboard instruments as far back as the 1930s, Moog's instruments were for all intents and purposes the first synthesisers as we now understand the term. The Moog was introduced in late spring 1967, and immediately started to be used for making experimental and novelty records, like Hal Blaine's track "Love In", which came out at the beginning of June: [Excerpt: Hal Blaine, "Love In"] And the Electric Flag's soundtrack album for The Trip, the drug exploitation film starring Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper and written by Jack Nicholson we talked about last time, when Arthur Lee moved into a house used in the film: [Excerpt: The Electric Flag, "Peter's Trip"] In 1967 there were a total of six albums released with a Moog on them (as well as one non-album experimental single). Four of the albums were experimental or novelty instrumental albums of this type. Only two of them were rock albums -- Strange Days by the Doors, and Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, & Jones Ltd by the Monkees. The Doors album was released first, but I believe the Monkees tracks were recorded before the Doors overdubbed the Moog on the tracks on their album, though some session dates are hard to pin down exactly. If that's the case it would make the Monkees the very first band to use the Moog on an actual rock record (depending on exactly how you count the Trip soundtrack -- this gets back again to my old claim that there's no first anything). But that's not the only way in which "Daily Nightly" was innovative. All the first seven albums to feature the Moog featured one man playing the instrument -- Paul Beaver, the Moog company's West Coast representative, who played on all the novelty records by members of the Wrecking Crew, and on the albums by the Electric Flag and the Doors, and on The Notorious Byrd Brothers by the Byrds, which came out in early 1968. And Beaver did play the Moog on one track on Pisces, "Star Collector". But on "Daily Nightly" it's Micky Dolenz playing the Moog, making him definitely the second person ever to play a Moog on a record of any kind: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daily Nightly"] Dolenz indeed had bought his own Moog -- widely cited as being the second one ever in private ownership, a fact I can't check but which sounds plausible given that by 1970 less than thirty musicians owned one -- after seeing Beaver demonstrate the instrument at the Monterey Pop Festival. The Monkees hadn't played Monterey, but both Dolenz and Tork had attended the festival -- if you watch the famous film of it you see Dolenz and his girlfriend Samantha in the crowd a *lot*, while Tork introduced his friends in the Buffalo Springfield. As well as discovering the Moog there, Dolenz had been astonished by something else: [Excerpt: The Jimi Hendrix Experience, "Hey Joe (Live at Monterey)"] As Peter Tork later put it "I didn't get it. At Monterey Jimi followed the Who and the Who busted up their things and Jimi bashed up his guitar. I said 'I just saw explosions and destruction. Who needs it?' But Micky got it. He saw the genius and went for it." Dolenz was astonished by Hendrix, and insisted that he should be the support act on the group's summer tour. This pairing might sound odd on paper, but it made more sense at the time than it might sound. The Monkees were by all accounts a truly astonishing live act at this point -- Frank Zappa gave them a backhanded compliment by saying they were the best-sounding band in LA, before pointing out that this was because they could afford the best equipment. That *was* true, but it was also the case that their TV experience gave them a different attitude to live performance than anyone else performing at the time. A handful of groups had started playing stadiums, most notably of course the Beatles, but all of these acts had come up through playing clubs and theatres and essentially just kept doing their old act with no thought as to how the larger space worked, except to put their amps through a louder PA. The Monkees, though, had *started* in stadiums, and had started out as mass entertainers, and so their live show was designed from the ground up to play to those larger spaces. They had costume changes, elaborate stage sets -- like oversized fake Vox amps they burst out of at the start of the show -- a light show and a screen on which film footage was projected. In effect they invented stadium performances as we now know them. Nesmith later said "In terms of putting on a show there was never any question in my mind, as far as the rock 'n' roll era is concerned, that we put on probably the finest rock and roll stage show ever. It was beautifully lit, beautifully costumed, beautifully produced. I mean, for Christ sakes, it was practically a revue." The Monkees were confident enough in their stage performance that at a recent show at the Hollywood Bowl they'd had Ike and Tina Turner as their opening act -- not an act you'd want to go on after if you were going to be less than great, and an act from very similar chitlin' circuit roots to Jimi Hendrix. So from their perspective, it made sense. If you're going to be spectacular yourselves, you have no need to fear a spectacular opening act. Hendrix was less keen -- he was about the only musician in Britain who *had* made disparaging remarks about the Monkees -- but opening for the biggest touring band in the world isn't an opportunity you pass up, and again it isn't such a departure as one might imagine from the bills he was already playing. Remember that Monterey is really the moment when "pop" and "rock" started to split -- the split we've been talking about for a few months now -- and so the Jimi Hendrix Experience were still considered a pop band, and as such had played the normal British pop band package tours. In March and April that year, they'd toured on a bill with the Walker Brothers, Cat Stevens, and Englebert Humperdinck -- and Hendrix had even filled in for Humperdinck's sick guitarist on one occasion. Nesmith, Dolenz, and Tork all loved having Hendrix on tour with them, just because it gave them a chance to watch him live every night (Jones, whose musical tastes were more towards Anthony Newley, wasn't especially impressed), and they got on well on a personal level -- there are reports of Hendrix jamming with Dolenz and Steve Stills in hotel rooms. But there was one problem, as Dolenz often recreates in his live act: [Excerpt: Micky Dolenz, "Purple Haze"] The audience response to Hendrix from the Monkees' fans was so poor that by mutual agreement he left the tour after only a handful of shows. After the summer tour, the group went back to work on the TV show and their next album. Or, rather, four individuals went back to work. By this point, the group had drifted apart from each other, and from Douglas -- Tork, the one who was still keenest on the idea of the group as a group, thought that Pisces, good as it was, felt like a Chip Douglas album rather than a Monkees album. The four band members had all by now built up their own retinues of hangers-on and collaborators, and on set for the TV show they were now largely staying with their own friends rather than working as a group. And that was now reflected in their studio work. From now on, rather than have a single producer working with them as a band, the four men would work as individuals, producing their own tracks, occasionally with outside help, and bringing in session musicians to work on them. Some tracks from this point on would be genuine Monkees -- plural -- tracks, and all tracks would be credited as "produced by the Monkees", but basically the four men would from now on be making solo tracks which would be combined into albums, though Dolenz and Jones would occasionally guest on tracks by the others, especially when Nesmith came up with a song he thought would be more suited to their voices. Indeed the first new recording that happened after the tour was an entire Nesmith solo album -- a collection of instrumental versions of his songs, called The Wichita Train Whistle Sings, played by members of the Wrecking Crew and a few big band instrumentalists, arranged by Shorty Rogers. [Excerpt: Michael Nesmith, "You Told Me"] Hal Blaine in his autobiography claimed that the album was created as a tax write-off for Nesmith, though Nesmith always vehemently denied it, and claimed it was an artistic experiment, though not one that came off well. Released alongside Pisces, though, came one last group-recorded single. The B-side, "Goin' Down", is a song that was credited to the group and songwriter Diane Hildebrand, though in fact it developed from a jam on someone else's song. Nesmith, Tork, Douglas and Hoh attempted to record a backing track for a version of Mose Allison's jazz-blues standard "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Mose Allison, "Parchman Farm"] But after recording it, they'd realised that it didn't sound that much like the original, and that all it had in common with it was a chord sequence. Nesmith suggested that rather than put it out as a cover version, they put a new melody and lyrics to it, and they commissioned Hildebrand, who'd co-written songs for the group before, to write them, and got Shorty Rogers to write a horn arrangement to go over their backing track. The eventual songwriting credit was split five ways, between Hildebrand and the four Monkees -- including Davy Jones who had no involvement with the recording, but not including Douglas or Hoh. The lyrics Hildebrand came up with were a funny patter song about a failed suicide, taken at an extremely fast pace, which Dolenz pulls off magnificently: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Goin' Down"] The A-side, another track with a rhythm track by Nesmith, Tork, Douglas, and Hoh, was a song that had been written by John Stewart of the Kingston Trio, who you may remember from the episode on "San Francisco" as being a former songwriting partner of John Phillips. Stewart had written the song as part of a "suburbia trilogy", and was not happy with the finished product. He said later "I remember going to bed thinking 'All I did today was write 'Daydream Believer'." Stewart used to include the song in his solo sets, to no great approval, and had shopped the song around to bands like We Five and Spanky And Our Gang, who had both turned it down. He was unhappy with it himself, because of the chorus: [Excerpt: John Stewart, "Daydream Believer"] Stewart was ADHD, and the words "to a", coming as they did slightly out of the expected scansion for the line, irritated him so greatly that he thought the song could never be recorded by anyone, but when Chip Douglas asked if he had any songs, he suggested that one. As it turned out, there was a line of lyric that almost got the track rejected, but it wasn't the "to a". Stewart's original second verse went like this: [Excerpt: John Stewart, "Daydream Believer"] RCA records objected to the line "now you know how funky I can be" because funky, among other meanings, meant smelly, and they didn't like the idea of Davy Jones singing about being smelly. Chip Douglas phoned Stewart to tell him that they were insisting on changing the line, and suggesting "happy" instead. Stewart objected vehemently -- that change would reverse the entire meaning of the line, and it made no sense, and what about artistic integrity? But then, as he later said "He said 'Let me put it to you this way, John. If he can't sing 'happy' they won't do it'. And I said 'Happy's working real good for me now.' That's exactly what I said to him." He never regretted the decision -- Stewart would essentially live off the royalties from "Daydream Believer" for the rest of his life -- though he seemed always to be slightly ambivalent and gently mocking about the song in his own performances, often changing the lyrics slightly: [Excerpt: John Stewart, "Daydream Believer"] The Monkees had gone into the studio and cut the track, again with Tork on piano, Nesmith on guitar, Douglas on bass, and Hoh on drums. Other than changing "funky" to "happy", there were two major changes made in the studio. One seems to have been Douglas' idea -- they took the bass riff from the pre-chorus to the Beach Boys' "Help Me Rhonda": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Help Me Rhonda"] and Douglas played that on the bass as the pre-chorus for "Daydream Believer", with Shorty Rogers later doubling it in the horn arrangement: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daydream Believer"] And the other is the piano intro, which also becomes an instrumental bridge, which was apparently the invention of Tork, who played it: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daydream Believer"] The track went to number one, becoming the group's third and final number one hit, and their fifth of six million-sellers. It was included on the next album, The Birds, The Bees, and the Monkees, but that piano part would be Tork's only contribution to the album. As the group members were all now writing songs and cutting their own tracks, and were also still rerecording the odd old unused song from the initial 1966 sessions, The Birds, The Bees, and the Monkees was pulled together from a truly astonishing amount of material. The expanded triple-CD version of the album, now sadly out of print, has multiple versions of forty-four different songs, ranging from simple acoustic demos to completed tracks, of which twelve were included on the final album. Tork did record several tracks during the sessions, but he spent much of the time recording and rerecording a single song, "Lady's Baby", which eventually stretched to five different recorded versions over multiple sessions in a five-month period. He racked up huge studio bills on the track, bringing in Steve Stills and Dewey Martin of the Buffalo Springfield, and Buddy Miles, to try to help him capture the sound in his head, but the various takes are almost indistinguishable from one another, and so it's difficult to see what the problem was: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Lady's Baby"] Either way, the track wasn't finished by the time the album came out, and the album that came out was a curiously disjointed and unsatisfying effort, a mixture of recycled old Boyce and Hart songs, some songs by Jones, who at this point was convinced that "Broadway-rock" was going to be the next big thing and writing songs that sounded like mediocre showtunes, and a handful of experimental songs written by Nesmith. You could pull together a truly great ten- or twelve-track album from the masses of material they'd recorded, but the one that came out was mediocre at best, and became the first Monkees album not to make number one -- though it still made number three and sold in huge numbers. It also had the group's last million-selling single on it, "Valleri", an old Boyce and Hart reject from 1966 that had been remade with Boyce and Hart producing and their old session players, though the production credit was still now given to the Monkees: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Valleri"] Nesmith said at the time he considered it the worst song ever written. The second season of the TV show was well underway, and despite -- or possibly because of -- the group being clearly stoned for much of the filming, it contains a lot of the episodes that fans of the group think of most fondly, including several episodes that break out of the formula the show had previously established in interesting ways. Tork and Dolenz were both also given the opportunity to direct episodes, and Dolenz also co-wrote his episode, which ended up being the last of the series. In another sign of how the group were being given more creative control over the show, the last three episodes of the series had guest appearances by favourite musicians of the group members who they wanted to give a little exposure to, and those guest appearances sum up the character of the band members remarkably well. Tork, for whatever reason, didn't take up this option, but the other three did. Jones brought on his friend Charlie Smalls, who would later go on to write the music for the Broadway musical The Wiz, to demonstrate to Jones the difference between Smalls' Black soul and Jones' white soul: [Excerpt: Davy Jones and Charlie Smalls] Nesmith, on the other hand, brought on Frank Zappa. Zappa put on Nesmith's Monkee shirt and wool hat and pretended to be Nesmith, and interviewed Nesmith with a false nose and moustache pretending to be Zappa, as they both mercilessly mocked the previous week's segment with Jones and Smalls: [Excerpt: Michael Nesmith and Frank Zappa] Nesmith then "conducted" Zappa as Zappa used a sledgehammer to "play" a car, parodying his own appearance on the Steve Allen Show playing a bicycle, to the presumed bemusement of the Monkees' fanbase who would not be likely to remember a one-off performance on a late-night TV show from five years earlier. And the final thing ever to be shown on an episode of the Monkees didn't feature any of the Monkees at all. Micky Dolenz, who directed and co-wrote that episode, about an evil wizard who was using the power of a space plant (named after the group's slang for dope) to hypnotise people through the TV, chose not to interact with his guest as the others had, but simply had Tim Buckley perform a solo acoustic version of his then-unreleased song "Song to the Siren": [Excerpt: Tim Buckley, "Song to the Siren"] By the end of the second season, everyone knew they didn't want to make another season of the TV show. Instead, they were going to do what Rafelson and Schneider had always wanted, and move into film. The planning stages for the film, which was initially titled Changes but later titled Head -- so that Rafelson and Schneider could bill their next film as "From the guys who gave you Head" -- had started the previous summer, before the sessions that produced The Birds, The Bees, and the Monkees. To write the film, the group went off with Rafelson and Schneider for a short holiday, and took with them their mutual friend Jack Nicholson. Nicholson was at this time not the major film star he later became. Rather he was a bit-part actor who was mostly associated with American International Pictures, the ultra-low-budget film company that has come up on several occasions in this podcast. Nicholson had appeared mostly in small roles, in films like The Little Shop of Horrors: [Excerpt: The Little Shop of Horrors] He'd appeared in multiple films made by Roger Corman, often appearing with Boris Karloff, and by Monte Hellman, but despite having been a working actor for a decade, his acting career was going nowhere, and by this point he had basically given up on the idea of being an actor, and had decided to start working behind the camera. He'd written the scripts for a few of the low-budget films he'd appeared in, and he'd recently scripted The Trip, the film we mentioned earlier: [Excerpt: The Trip trailer] So the group, Rafelson, Schneider, and Nicholson all went away for a weekend, and they all got extremely stoned, took acid, and talked into a tape recorder for hours on end. Nicholson then transcribed those recordings, cleaned them up, and structured the worthwhile ideas into something quite remarkable: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Ditty Diego"] If the Monkees TV show had been inspired by the Marx Brothers and Three Stooges, and by Richard Lester's directorial style, the only precursor I can find for Head is in the TV work of Lester's colleague Spike Milligan, but I don't think there's any reasonable way in which Nicholson or anyone else involved could have taken inspiration from Milligan's series Q.  But what they ended up with is something that resembles, more than anything else, Monty Python's Flying Circus, a TV series that wouldn't start until a year after Head came out. It's a series of ostensibly unconnected sketches, linked by a kind of dream logic, with characters wandering from one loose narrative into a totally different one, actors coming out of character on a regular basis, and no attempt at a coherent narrative. It contains regular examples of channel-zapping, with excerpts from old films being spliced in, and bits of news footage juxtaposed with comedy sketches and musical performances in ways that are sometimes thought-provoking, sometimes distasteful, and occasionally both -- as when a famous piece of footage of a Vietnamese prisoner of war being shot in the head hard-cuts to screaming girls in the audience at a Monkees concert, a performance which ends with the girls tearing apart the group and revealing that they're really just cheap-looking plastic mannequins. The film starts, and ends, with the Monkees themselves attempting suicide, jumping off a bridge into the ocean -- but the end reveals that in fact the ocean they're in is just water in a glass box, and they're trapped in it. And knowing this means that when you watch the film a second time, you find that it does have a story. The Monkees are trapped in a box which in some ways represents life, the universe, and one's own mind, and in other ways represents the TV and their TV careers. Each of them is trying in his own way to escape, and each ends up trapped by his own limitations, condemned to start the cycle over and over again. The film features parodies of popular film genres like the boxing film (Davy is supposed to throw a fight with Sonny Liston at the instruction of gangsters), the Western, and the war film, but huge chunks of the film take place on a film studio backlot, and characters from one segment reappear in another, often commenting negatively on the film or the band, as when Frank Zappa as a critic calls Davy Jones' soft-shoe routine to a Harry Nilsson song "very white", or when a canteen worker in the studio calls the group "God's gift to the eight-year-olds". The film is constantly deconstructing and commenting on itself and the filmmaking process -- Tork hits that canteen worker, whose wig falls off revealing the actor playing her to be a man, and then it's revealed that the "behind the scenes" footage is itself scripted, as director Bob Rafelson and scriptwriter Jack Nicholson come into frame and reassure Tork, who's concerned that hitting a woman would be bad for his image. They tell him they can always cut it from the finished film if it doesn't work. While "Ditty Diego", the almost rap rewriting of the Monkees theme we heard earlier, sets out a lot of how the film asks to be interpreted and how it works narratively, the *spiritual* and thematic core of the film is in another song, Tork's "Long Title (Do I Have to Do This All Over Again?)", which in later solo performances Tork would give the subtitle "The Karma Blues": [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Long Title (Do I Have To Do This All Over Again?)"] Head is an extraordinary film, and one it's impossible to sum up in anything less than an hour-long episode of its own. It's certainly not a film that's to everyone's taste, and not every aspect of it works -- it is a film that is absolutely of its time, in ways that are both good and bad. But it's one of the most inventive things ever put out by a major film studio, and it's one that rightly secured the Monkees a certain amount of cult credibility over the decades. The soundtrack album is a return to form after the disappointing Birds, Bees, too. Nicholson put the album together, linking the eight songs in the film with collages of dialogue and incidental music, repurposing and recontextualising the dialogue to create a new experience, one that people have compared with Frank Zappa's contemporaneous We're Only In It For The Money, though while t

Today we take part in an age old practice, of which the internet is built on. Today we went through pain for internet points. Join us in this experimental episode where we listen to 10 tracks of an album and eat 10 wings using the HOT ONES season 19 package of hot sauces. There will be laughter. There will be tears. There will be long trips to the toilet... links: The Skolars/Telegraph - 10 Songs and More: https://youtu.be/xof0aBPgqfc MUSIC MOVIES TONIGHT episode 4 - Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (starring the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton - https://youtu.be/TCb9rwuQSGk OUR DISCORD: https://discord.gg/2stA2P7pTC Flyover State Hotline - 1 608 HIT-NERD (608-448-6373) EVERYTHING ELSE: https://linktr.ee/FlyoverStatePark --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/albumconcepthour/support

I remember you was conflicted... Join us for one of the greatest hip hop, rap, and concept albums of all time. It's got sounds from across time and space and it's themes can be interpreted in a multitude of ways. Although it received seven Grammy nominations, it was infamously snubbed for the best rap album... which was probably just because the music industry was mad Kendrick called them out for pimping their artists. Go figure. links: MUSIC MOVIES TONIGHT episode 4 - Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (starring the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton - https://youtu.be/TCb9rwuQSGk OUR DISCORD: https://discord.gg/2stA2P7pTC Flyover State Hotline - 1 608 HIT-NERD (608-448-6373) EVERYTHING ELSE: https://linktr.ee/FlyoverStatePark --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/albumconcepthour/support

The Nylon Curtain turned 40 last September, and we can't help but take one last look at it as we start the new year.      Back in September, we did our album spotlight where we discussed the history and making of the album along with our track-by-track commentary. This time, we're speaking with two people who helped make the album into the classic we all know today.      Our guests for this episode are Larry Franke and Bradsahw Leigh. Both were engineers at A&R Recording where Billy worked with Phil Ramone to produce his string of hit albums from the late 70s through the mid-80s.      Larry and Brad were involved with many of those records. And, for this episode, they're taking us through what it was like creating Billy Joel's most sonically ambitious album.      You'll hear about the studio tricks they used for sound effects, how they used analog effects well before today's digital plugins, and how the band and studio crew went about fulfilling Billy's goal of making an album inspired by the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's.      With track-by-track commentary, stories from the sessions, and deep dives into the recording technology of the day, it's the closest you can get to being a fly on the wall of the live room and mixing booth back in 1982.     Join us for another look behind The Nylon Curtain.   ------   Email us: glasshousespodcast@gmail.com   Glass Houses - A Billy Joel Podcast on the web / social media: Website: http://www.glasshousespod.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/glasshousespodcast/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/glasshousespod/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/glasshousespod  Discord: https://discord.gg/6G6cMRFu7T   Support the podcast: Paypal: https://paypal.me/glasshousespod Venmo: @MGrosvenor   Produced by Michael Grosvenor & Jack Firneno for Groove Music Marketing    

Old Man Pepper likes Misty. As for the others, he has a different opinion. -----*-----It's the road trip to un-die for….When all of the grownups are killed or zombie-fied, sixteen-year-old Sarah Burrows finds herself thrust into a world of crazy, shouldering responsibilities she didn't ask for or want. The only known survivors are a handful of kids who desperately need her help, but none more than her baby sister—who wants nothing more than to connect with their father again. Their undead father who just happens to be hanging around the back yard in hopes of connecting with her too. Or anyone with a brain.As the day-to-day struggle for survival begins to wear on her—and everyone in her charge, Sarah comes up with a plan. One almost guaranteed to get them killed—or turn them into the monsters bent on wiping out the human race. But if it means even a small chance of saving her sister, it's worth the risk.Join Sarah and a ragtag group of kids as they journey through the zombie apocalypse searching for Johnny Rokkets, a rock 'n roll superstar who died twenty years ago. Or did he?-----*-----ONE TIME DONATION3 bucks - one time: https://ko-fi.com/philmwrites-----Reach Out and Drop In:On RedditOn FacebookOn DiscordOn TwitterOn InstagramOn YouTubeOn PinterestOther ways you can support the show:-----Buy some of my E-Books (or print books) which are also available as a podcast right here: https://deadland.captivate.fm/listenThe Books:SUBSTATION: THE LAST STAND OF GARY SYKES LIBERATIONand TEST SUBJECT.Click the link, pick your favorite store.https://books2read.com/laststandhttps://books2read.com/testsubjecthttps://books2read.com/theliberation**IF YOU WANT THE KINDLE VERSION (.MOBI FILE), CLICK THE LINK AND CHOOSE THE PAYHIP STORE. INSTRUCTIONS FOR LOADING THE BOOK ON YOUR KINDLE / KINDLE APP ARE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE BOOK DESCRIPTION. These and my other books are available almost everywhere eBooks are sold and in print on Barnes & Noble. Again, click the link below and pick your store. Philip A. McClimon (books2read.com)-----LEAVE A RATING ON PODCHASER-----*-----Host your own podcast: https://www.captivate.fm/signup?ref=philipmcclimonI do receive a small kickback, but you will receive the best possible...

On the radar this week in an enquiring, celebratory or goat-getting capacity … … has the World Cup balloon already been unmendably punctured? … and is the same thing happening to Twitter? … “if social media had come along earlier would Sergeant Pepper exist?” … Richard Osman-created fictional sleuth or rock stars' real names: you decide. … a chance meeting with Jaco Pastorius. … speaker-testing moments of bass guitar brilliance. … the general public armed with a mouse are infinitely crueller and more aggressive than the very worst journalists: discuss.   … plus two thousand years of gruesome mortal combat.Subscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon and receive every future Word Podcast before the rest of the world - and with full visuals!: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On the radar this week in an enquiring, celebratory or goat-getting capacity … … has the World Cup balloon already been unmendably punctured? … and is the same thing happening to Twitter? … “if social media had come along earlier would Sergeant Pepper exist?” … Richard Osman-created fictional sleuth or rock stars' real names: you decide. … a chance meeting with Jaco Pastorius. … speaker-testing moments of bass guitar brilliance. … the general public armed with a mouse are infinitely crueller and more aggressive than the very worst journalists: discuss.   … plus two thousand years of gruesome mortal combat.Subscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon and receive every future Word Podcast before the rest of the world - and with full visuals!: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On the radar this week in an enquiring, celebratory or goat-getting capacity … … has the World Cup balloon already been unmendably punctured? … and is the same thing happening to Twitter? … “if social media had come along earlier would Sergeant Pepper exist?” … Richard Osman-created fictional sleuth or rock stars' real names: you decide. … a chance meeting with Jaco Pastorius. … speaker-testing moments of bass guitar brilliance. … the general public armed with a mouse are infinitely crueller and more aggressive than the very worst journalists: discuss.   … plus two thousand years of gruesome mortal combat.Subscribe to Word In Your Ear on Patreon and receive every future Word Podcast before the rest of the world - and with full visuals!: https://www.patreon.com/wordinyourear Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

He's a reasonable Philatelist, Not an Apathetic Nihilist  He's a Dead Cross massive influence for The Locust,He's a Wild scene Iguana, No Tequila in Tijuana!He just picked up the monitor and tore off his thumb4 pm is an angry time for NIN to be on stageThe Opposite of Love Is Apathy, Not Nihilism or Rage  When Lol saw the same back in 76 and 77  He went down to his local pub to meet people already in Heaven.Love on one hand and Hate on the other, Apathy doesn't fit  Punk to Drunk, Humanity can't govern, What else to do with it?  The Decline of Western civilization, Bill Grundy, and the Bromley ContingentSecond World War imagery, Notting Hill Gate carnival, Reaction for Attention.Weird Energy, No guitar solos, Wire 12XU delivery!Goth and double kicks, Robotic drumming and Gypsy Eyes thievery!Succinct at 17, Eye-catching at 18, Noticed at 19, Twisted at 20.Self-imposed boundaries, strange beats and TonesWe made sound into pop songs, We embraced our limitations  What were your influences?Skateboarding culture and Siouxsie Sioux, as a pioneer of gender equality for Justin.Lol had Sylvia Plath to inform his thinking as a young man discovering how to play.Female singers, and female musicians helped Budgie's evolution.How does it make you feel?Boys Don't Cry was a strange thing for Justin as a child.Important to deal with toxic masculinity. Be ahead of yourself, say what's wrong, do what's right,Female musicians still have to fight.We remain Grateful for what happened on the planetJust after Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play…Remembering: ‘Gypsy Eyes' Recorded: May – August 1968 by, The Jimi Hendrix ExperienceCONNECT WITH US:Curious Creatures:Website: https://curiouscreaturespodcast.comFacebook: @CuriousCreaturesOfficialTwitter: @curecreaturesInstagram: @CuriousCreaturesOfficialLol Tolhurst: Website: https://loltolhurst.comFacebook: @officialloltolhurst Twitter: @LolTolhurst Instagram: @lol.tolhurst Budgie: Facebook: @budgieofficial Twitter: @TuWhit2whooInstagram: @budgie646 Curious Creatures is a partner of the Double Elvis podcast network. For more of the best music storytelling follow @DoubleElvis on Instagram or search Double Elvis in your podcast app.

Le Sgt Pepper souhaitait vous informer de l'importance de Manger du Poulet https://www.patreon.com/undernierdisque

This week's episode looks at “All You Need is Love”, the Our World TV special, and the career of the Beatles from April 1966 through August 1967. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a thirteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Rain" by the Beatles. 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/ NB for the first few hours this was up, there was a slight editing glitch. If you downloaded the old version and don't want to redownload the whole thing, just look in the transcript for "Other than fixing John's two flubbed" for the text of the two missing paragraphs. Errata I say "Come Together" was a B-side, but the single was actually a double A-side. Also, I say the Lennon interview by Maureen Cleave appeared in Detroit magazine. That's what my source (Steve Turner's book) says, but someone on Twitter says that rather than Detroit magazine it was the Detroit Free Press. Also at one point I say "the videos for 'Paperback Writer' and 'Penny Lane'". I meant to say "Rain" rather than "Penny Lane" there. Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of songs by the Beatles. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them. All my Beatles episodes refer to: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For this episode, I also referred to Last Interview by David Sheff, a longform interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from shortly before Lennon's death; Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, an authorised biography of Paul McCartney; and Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey. Particularly useful this time was Steve Turner's book Beatles '66. I also used Turner's The Beatles: The Stories Behind the Songs 1967-1970. Johnny Rogan's Starmakers and Svengalis had some information on Epstein I hadn't seen anywhere else. Some information about the "Bigger than Jesus" scandal comes from Ward, B. (2012). “The ‘C' is for Christ”: Arthur Unger, Datebook Magazine and the Beatles. Popular Music and Society, 35(4), 541-560. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2011.608978 Information on Robert Stigwood comes from Mr Showbiz by Stephen Dando-Collins. And the quote at the end from Simon Napier-Bell is from You Don't Have to Say You Love Me, which is more entertaining than it is accurate, but is very entertaining. Sadly the only way to get the single mix of "All You Need is Love" is on this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but the stereo mix is easily available on Magical Mystery Tour. 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 start the episode -- this episode deals, in part, with the deaths of three gay men -- one by murder, one by suicide, and one by an accidental overdose, all linked at least in part to societal homophobia. I will try to deal with this as tactfully as I can, but anyone who's upset by those things might want to read the transcript instead of listening to the episode. This is also a very, very, *very* long episode -- this is likely to be the longest episode I *ever* do of this podcast, so settle in. We're going to be here a while. I obviously don't know how long it's going to be while I'm still recording, but based on the word count of my script, probably in the region of three hours. You have been warned. In 1967 the actor Patrick McGoohan was tired. He had been working on the hit series Danger Man for many years -- Danger Man had originally run from 1960 through 1962, then had taken a break, and had come back, retooled, with longer episodes in 1964. That longer series was a big hit, both in the UK and in the US, where it was retitled Secret Agent and had a new theme tune written by PF Sloan and Steve Barri and recorded by Johnny Rivers: [Excerpt: Johnny Rivers, "Secret Agent Man"] But McGoohan was tired of playing John Drake, the agent, and announced he was going to quit the series. Instead, with the help of George Markstein, Danger Man's script editor, he created a totally new series, in which McGoohan would star, and which McGoohan would also write and direct key episodes of. This new series, The Prisoner, featured a spy who is only ever given the name Number Six, and who many fans -- though not McGoohan himself -- took to be the same character as John Drake. Number Six resigns from his job as a secret agent, and is kidnapped and taken to a place known only as The Village -- the series was filmed in Portmeirion, an unusual-looking town in Gwynnedd, in North Wales -- which is full of other ex-agents. There he is interrogated to try to find out why he has quit his job. It's never made clear whether the interrogators are his old employers or their enemies, and there's a certain suggestion that maybe there is no real distinction between the two sides, that they're both running the Village together. He spends the entire series trying to escape, but refuses to explain himself -- and there's some debate among viewers as to whether it's implied or not that part of the reason he doesn't explain himself is that he knows his interrogators wouldn't understand why he quit: [Excerpt: The Prisoner intro, from episode Once Upon a Time, ] Certainly that explanation would fit in with McGoohan's own personality. According to McGoohan, the final episode of The Prisoner was, at the time, the most watched TV show ever broadcast in the UK, as people tuned in to find out the identity of Number One, the person behind the Village, and to see if Number Six would break free. I don't think that's actually the case, but it's what McGoohan always claimed, and it was certainly a very popular series. I won't spoil the ending for those of you who haven't watched it -- it's a remarkable series -- but ultimately the series seems to decide that such questions don't matter and that even asking them is missing the point. It's a work that's open to multiple interpretations, and is left deliberately ambiguous, but one of the messages many people have taken away from it is that not only are we trapped by a society that oppresses us, we're also trapped by our own identities. You can run from the trap that society has placed you in, from other people's interpretations of your life, your work, and your motives, but you ultimately can't run from yourself, and any time you try to break out of a prison, you'll find yourself trapped in another prison of your own making. The most horrifying implication of the episode is that possibly even death itself won't be a release, and you will spend all eternity trying to escape from an identity you're trapped in. Viewers became so outraged, according to McGoohan, that he had to go into hiding for an extended period, and while his later claims that he never worked in Britain again are an exaggeration, it is true that for the remainder of his life he concentrated on doing work in the US instead, where he hadn't created such anger. That final episode of The Prisoner was also the only one to use a piece of contemporary pop music, in two crucial scenes: [Excerpt: The Prisoner, "Fall Out", "All You Need is Love"] Back in October 2020, we started what I thought would be a year-long look at the period from late 1962 through early 1967, but which has turned out for reasons beyond my control to take more like twenty months, with a song which was one of the last of the big pre-Beatles pop hits, though we looked at it after their first single, "Telstar" by the Tornadoes: [Excerpt: The Tornadoes, "Telstar"] There were many reasons for choosing that as one of the bookends for this fifty-episode chunk of the podcast -- you'll see many connections between that episode and this one if you listen to them back-to-back -- but among them was that it's a song inspired by the launch of the first ever communications satellite, and a sign of how the world was going to become smaller as the sixties went on. Of course, to start with communications satellites didn't do much in that regard -- they were expensive to use, and had limited bandwidth, and were only available during limited time windows, but symbolically they meant that for the first time ever, people could see and hear events thousands of miles away as they were happening. It's not a coincidence that Britain and France signed the agreement to develop Concorde, the first supersonic airliner, a month after the first Beatles single and four months after the Telstar satellite was launched. The world was becoming ever more interconnected -- people were travelling faster and further, getting news from other countries quicker, and there was more cultural conversation – and misunderstanding – between countries thousands of miles apart. The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, the man who also coined the phrase “the medium is the message”, thought that this ever-faster connection would fundamentally change basic modes of thought in the Western world. McLuhan thought that technology made possible whole new modes of thought, and that just as the printing press had, in his view, caused Western liberalism and individualism, so these new electronic media would cause the rise of a new collective mode of thought. In 1962, the year of Concorde, Telstar, and “Love Me Do”, McLuhan wrote a book called The Gutenberg Galaxy, in which he said: “Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.…” He coined the term “the Global Village” to describe this new collectivism. The story we've seen over the last fifty episodes is one of a sort of cultural ping-pong between the USA and the UK, with innovations in American music inspiring British musicians, who in turn inspired American ones, whether that being the Beatles covering the Isley Brothers or the Rolling Stones doing a Bobby Womack song, or Paul Simon and Bob Dylan coming over to the UK and learning folk songs and guitar techniques from Martin Carthy. And increasingly we're going to see those influences spread to other countries, and influences coming *from* other countries. We've already seen one Jamaican artist, and the influence of Indian music has become very apparent. While the focus of this series is going to remain principally in the British Isles and North America, rock music was and is a worldwide phenomenon, and that's going to become increasingly a part of the story. And so in this episode we're going to look at a live performance -- well, mostly live -- that was seen by hundreds of millions of people all over the world as it happened, thanks to the magic of satellites: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "All You Need is Love"] When we left the Beatles, they had just finished recording "Tomorrow Never Knows", the most experimental track they had recorded up to that date, and if not the most experimental thing they *ever* recorded certainly in the top handful. But "Tomorrow Never Knows" was only the first track they recorded in the sessions for what would become arguably their greatest album, and certainly the one that currently has the most respect from critics. It's interesting to note that that album could have been very, very, different. When we think of Revolver now, we think of the innovative production of George Martin, and of Geoff Emerick and Ken Townshend's inventive ideas for pushing the sound of the equipment in Abbey Road studios, but until very late in the day the album was going to be recorded in the Stax studios in Memphis, with Steve Cropper producing -- whether George Martin would have been involved or not is something we don't even know. In 1965, the Rolling Stones had, as we've seen, started making records in the US, recording in LA and at the Chess studios in Chicago, and the Yardbirds had also been doing the same thing. Mick Jagger had become a convert to the idea of using American studios and working with American musicians, and he had constantly been telling Paul McCartney that the Beatles should do the same. Indeed, they'd put some feelers out in 1965 about the possibility of the group making an album with Holland, Dozier, and Holland in Detroit. Quite how this would have worked is hard to figure out -- Holland, Dozier, and Holland's skills were as songwriters, and in their work with a particular set of musicians -- so it's unsurprising that came to nothing. But recording at Stax was a different matter.  While Steve Cropper was a great songwriter in his own right, he was also adept at getting great sounds on covers of other people's material -- like on Otis Blue, the album he produced for Otis Redding in late 1965, which doesn't include a single Cropper original: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Satisfaction"] And the Beatles were very influenced by the records Stax were putting out, often namechecking Wilson Pickett in particular, and during the Rubber Soul sessions they had recorded a "Green Onions" soundalike track, imaginatively titled "12-Bar Original": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "12-Bar Original"] The idea of the group recording at Stax got far enough that they were actually booked in for two weeks starting the ninth of April, and there was even an offer from Elvis to let them stay at Graceland while they recorded, but then a couple of weeks earlier, the news leaked to the press, and Brian Epstein cancelled the booking. According to Cropper, Epstein talked about recording at the Atlantic studios in New York with him instead, but nothing went any further. It's hard to imagine what a Stax-based Beatles album would have been like, but even though it might have been a great album, it certainly wouldn't have been the Revolver we've come to know. Revolver is an unusual album in many ways, and one of the ways it's most distinct from the earlier Beatles albums is the dominance of keyboards. Both Lennon and McCartney had often written at the piano as well as the guitar -- McCartney more so than Lennon, but both had done so regularly -- but up to this point it had been normal for them to arrange the songs for guitars rather than keyboards, no matter how they'd started out. There had been the odd track where one of them, usually Lennon, would play a simple keyboard part, songs like "I'm Down" or "We Can Work it Out", but even those had been guitar records first and foremost. But on Revolver, that changed dramatically. There seems to have been a complex web of cause and effect here. Paul was becoming increasingly interested in moving his basslines away from simple walking basslines and root notes and the other staples of rock and roll basslines up to this point. As the sixties progressed, rock basslines were becoming ever more complex, and Tyler Mahan Coe has made a good case that this is largely down to innovations in production pioneered by Owen Bradley, and McCartney was certainly aware of Bradley's work -- he was a fan of Brenda Lee, who Bradley produced, for example. But the two influences that McCartney has mentioned most often in this regard are the busy, jazz-influenced, basslines that James Jamerson was playing at Motown: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "It's the Same Old Song"] And the basslines that Brian Wilson was writing for various Wrecking Crew bassists to play for the Beach Boys: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)"] Just to be clear, McCartney didn't hear that particular track until partway through the recording of Revolver, when Bruce Johnston visited the UK and brought with him an advance copy of Pet Sounds, but Pet Sounds influenced the later part of Revolver's recording, and Wilson had already started his experiments in that direction with the group's 1965 work. It's much easier to write a song with this kind of bassline, one that's integral to the composition, on the piano than it is to write it on a guitar, as you can work out the bassline with your left hand while working out the chords and melody with your right, so the habit that McCartney had already developed of writing on the piano made this easier. But also, starting with the recording of "Paperback Writer", McCartney switched his style of working in the studio. Where up to this point it had been normal for him to play bass as part of the recording of the basic track, playing with the other Beatles, he now started to take advantage of multitracking to overdub his bass later, so he could spend extra time getting the bassline exactly right. McCartney lived closer to Abbey Road than the other three Beatles, and so could more easily get there early or stay late and tweak his parts. But if McCartney wasn't playing bass while the guitars and drums were being recorded, that meant he could play something else, and so increasingly he would play piano during the recording of the basic track. And that in turn would mean that there wouldn't always *be* a need for guitars on the track, because the harmonic support they would provide would be provided by the piano instead. This, as much as anything else, is the reason that Revolver sounds so radically different to any other Beatles album. Up to this point, with *very* rare exceptions like "Yesterday", every Beatles record, more or less, featured all four of the Beatles playing instruments. Now John and George weren't playing on "Good Day Sunshine" or "For No One", John wasn't playing on "Here, There, and Everywhere", "Eleanor Rigby" features no guitars or drums at all, and George's "Love You To" only features himself, plus a little tambourine from Ringo (Paul recorded a part for that one, but it doesn't seem to appear on the finished track). Of the three songwriting Beatles, the only one who at this point was consistently requiring the instrumental contributions of all the other band members was John, and even he did without Paul on "She Said, She Said", which by all accounts features either John or George on bass, after Paul had a rare bout of unprofessionalism and left the studio. Revolver is still an album made by a group -- and most of those tracks that don't feature John or George instrumentally still feature them vocally -- it's still a collaborative work in all the best ways. But it's no longer an album made by four people playing together in the same room at the same time. After starting work on "Tomorrow Never Knows", the next track they started work on was Paul's "Got to Get You Into My Life", but as it would turn out they would work on that song throughout most of the sessions for the album -- in a sign of how the group would increasingly work from this point on, Paul's song was subject to multiple re-recordings and tweakings in the studio, as he tinkered to try to make it perfect. The first recording to be completed for the album, though, was almost as much of a departure in its own way as "Tomorrow Never Knows" had been. George's song "Love You To" shows just how inspired he was by the music of Ravi Shankar, and how devoted he was to Indian music. While a few months earlier he had just about managed to pick out a simple melody on the sitar for "Norwegian Wood", by this point he was comfortable enough with Indian classical music that I've seen many, many sources claim that an outside session player is playing sitar on the track, though Anil Bhagwat, the tabla player on the track, always insisted that it was entirely Harrison's playing: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] There is a *lot* of debate as to whether it's George playing on the track, and I feel a little uncomfortable making a definitive statement in either direction. On the one hand I find it hard to believe that Harrison got that good that quickly on an unfamiliar instrument, when we know he wasn't a naturally facile musician. All the stories we have about his work in the studio suggest that he had to work very hard on his guitar solos, and that he would frequently fluff them. As a technical guitarist, Harrison was only mediocre -- his value lay in his inventiveness, not in technical ability -- and he had been playing guitar for over a decade, but sitar only a few months. There's also some session documentation suggesting that an unknown sitar player was hired. On the other hand there's the testimony of Anil Bhagwat that Harrison played the part himself, and he has been very firm on the subject, saying "If you go on the Internet there are a lot of questions asked about "Love You To". They say 'It's not George playing the sitar'. I can tell you here and now -- 100 percent it was George on sitar throughout. There were no other musicians involved. It was just me and him." And several people who are more knowledgeable than myself about the instrument have suggested that the sitar part on the track is played the way that a rock guitarist would play rather than the way someone with more knowledge of Indian classical music would play -- there's a blues feeling to some of the bends that apparently no genuine Indian classical musician would naturally do. I would suggest that the best explanation is that there's a professional sitar player trying to replicate a part that Harrison had previously demonstrated, while Harrison was in turn trying his best to replicate the sound of Ravi Shankar's work. Certainly the instrumental section sounds far more fluent, and far more stylistically correct, than one would expect: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] Where previous attempts at what got called "raga-rock" had taken a couple of surface features of Indian music -- some form of a drone, perhaps a modal scale -- and had generally used a guitar made to sound a little bit like a sitar, or had a sitar playing normal rock riffs, Harrison's song seems to be a genuine attempt to hybridise Indian ragas and rock music, combining the instrumentation, modes, and rhythmic complexity of someone like Ravi Shankar with lyrics that are seemingly inspired by Bob Dylan and a fairly conventional pop song structure (and a tiny bit of fuzz guitar). It's a record that could only be made by someone who properly understood both the Indian music he's emulating and the conventions of the Western pop song, and understood how those conventions could work together. Indeed, one thing I've rarely seen pointed out is how cleverly the album is sequenced, so that "Love You To" is followed by possibly the most conventional song on Revolver, "Here, There, and Everywhere", which was recorded towards the end of the sessions. Both songs share a distinctive feature not shared by the rest of the album, so the two songs can sound more of a pair than they otherwise would, retrospectively making "Love You To" seem more conventional than it is and "Here, There, and Everywhere" more unconventional -- both have as an introduction a separate piece of music that states some of the melodic themes of the rest of the song but isn't repeated later. In the case of "Love You To" it's the free-tempo bit at the beginning, characteristic of a lot of Indian music: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] While in the case of "Here, There, and Everywhere" it's the part that mimics an older style of songwriting, a separate intro of the type that would have been called a verse when written by the Gershwins or Cole Porter, but of course in the intervening decades "verse" had come to mean something else, so we now no longer have a specific term for this kind of intro -- but as you can hear, it's doing very much the same thing as that "Love You To" intro: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Here, There, and Everywhere"] In the same day as the group completed "Love You To", overdubbing George's vocal and Ringo's tambourine, they also started work on a song that would show off a lot of the new techniques they had been working on in very different ways. Paul's "Paperback Writer" could indeed be seen as part of a loose trilogy with "Love You To" and "Tomorrow Never Knows", one song by each of the group's three songwriters exploring the idea of a song that's almost all on one chord. Both "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "Love You To" are based on a drone with occasional hints towards moving to one other chord. In the case of "Paperback Writer", the entire song stays on a single chord until the title -- it's on a G7 throughout until the first use of the word "writer", when it quickly goes to a C for two bars. I'm afraid I'm going to have to sing to show you how little the chords actually change, because the riff disguises this lack of movement somewhat, but the melody is also far more horizontal than most of McCartney's, so this shouldn't sound too painful, I hope: [demonstrates] This is essentially the exact same thing that both "Love You To" and "Tomorrow Never Knows" do, and all three have very similarly structured rising and falling modal melodies. There's also a bit of "Paperback Writer" that seems to tie directly into "Love You To", but also points to a possible very non-Indian inspiration for part of "Love You To". The Beach Boys' single "Sloop John B" was released in the UK a couple of days after the sessions for "Paperback Writer" and "Love You To", but it had been released in the US a month before, and the Beatles all got copies of every record in the American top thirty shipped to them. McCartney and Harrison have specifically pointed to it as an influence on "Paperback Writer". "Sloop John B" has a section where all the instruments drop out and we're left with just the group's vocal harmonies: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Sloop John B"] And that seems to have been the inspiration behind the similar moment at a similar point in "Paperback Writer", which is used in place of a middle eight and also used for the song's intro: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] Which is very close to what Harrison does at the end of each verse of "Love You To", where the instruments drop out for him to sing a long melismatic syllable before coming back in: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] Essentially, other than "Got to Get You Into My Life", which is an outlier and should not be counted, the first three songs attempted during the Revolver sessions are variations on a common theme, and it's a sign that no matter how different the results might  sound, the Beatles really were very much a group at this point, and were sharing ideas among themselves and developing those ideas in similar ways. "Paperback Writer" disguises what it's doing somewhat by having such a strong riff. Lennon referred to "Paperback Writer" as "son of 'Day Tripper'", and in terms of the Beatles' singles it's actually their third iteration of this riff idea, which they originally got from Bobby Parker's "Watch Your Step": [Excerpt: Bobby Parker, "Watch Your Step"] Which became the inspiration for "I Feel Fine": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Feel Fine"] Which they varied for "Day Tripper": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Day Tripper"] And which then in turn got varied for "Paperback Writer": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] As well as compositional ideas, there are sonic ideas shared between "Paperback Writer", "Tomorrow Never Knows", and "Love You To", and which would be shared by the rest of the tracks the Beatles recorded in the first half of 1966. Since Geoff Emerick had become the group's principal engineer, they'd started paying more attention to how to get a fuller sound, and so Emerick had miced the tabla on "Love You To" much more closely than anyone would normally mic an instrument from classical music, creating a deep, thudding sound, and similarly he had changed the way they recorded the drums on "Tomorrow Never Knows", again giving a much fuller sound. But the group also wanted the kind of big bass sounds they'd loved on records coming out of America -- sounds that no British studio was getting, largely because it was believed that if you cut too loud a bass sound into a record it would make the needle jump out of the groove. The new engineering team of Geoff Emerick and Ken Scott, though, thought that it was likely you could keep the needle in the groove if you had a smoother frequency response. You could do that if you used a microphone with a larger diaphragm to record the bass, but how could you do that? Inspiration finally struck -- loudspeakers are actually the same thing as microphones wired the other way round, so if you wired up a loudspeaker as if it were a microphone you could get a *really big* speaker, place it in front of the bass amp, and get a much stronger bass sound. The experiment wasn't a total success -- the sound they got had to be processed quite extensively to get rid of room noise, and then compressed in order to further prevent the needle-jumping issue, and so it's a muddier, less defined, tone than they would have liked, but one thing that can't be denied is that "Paperback Writer"'s bass sound is much, much, louder than on any previous Beatles record: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] Almost every track the group recorded during the Revolver sessions involved all sorts of studio innovations, though rarely anything as truly revolutionary as the artificial double-tracking they'd used on "Tomorrow Never Knows", and which also appeared on "Paperback Writer" -- indeed, as "Paperback Writer" was released several months before Revolver, it became the first record released to use the technique. I could easily devote a good ten minutes to every track on Revolver, and to "Paperback Writer"s B-side, "Rain", but this is already shaping up to be an extraordinarily long episode and there's a lot of material to get through, so I'll break my usual pattern of devoting a Patreon bonus episode to something relatively obscure, and this week's bonus will be on "Rain" itself. "Paperback Writer", though, deserved the attention here even though it was not one of the group's more successful singles -- it did go to number one, but it didn't hit number one in the UK charts straight away, being kept off the top by "Strangers in the Night" by Frank Sinatra for the first week: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra, "Strangers in the Night"] Coincidentally, "Strangers in the Night" was co-written by Bert Kaempfert, the German musician who had produced the group's very first recording sessions with Tony Sheridan back in 1961. On the group's German tour in 1966 they met up with Kaempfert again, and John greeted him by singing the first couple of lines of the Sinatra record. The single was the lowest-selling Beatles single in the UK since "Love Me Do". In the US it only made number one for two non-consecutive weeks, with "Strangers in the Night" knocking it off for a week in between. Now, by literally any other band's standards, that's still a massive hit, and it was the Beatles' tenth UK number one in a row (or ninth, depending on which chart you use for "Please Please Me"), but it's a sign that the group were moving out of the first phase of total unequivocal dominance of the charts. It was a turning point in a lot of other ways as well. Up to this point, while the group had been experimenting with different lyrical subjects on album tracks, every single had lyrics about romantic relationships -- with the possible exception of "Help!", which was about Lennon's emotional state but written in such a way that it could be heard as a plea to a lover. But in the case of "Paperback Writer", McCartney was inspired by his Aunt Mill asking him "Why do you write songs about love all the time? Can you ever write about a horse or the summit conference or something interesting?" His response was to think "All right, Aunt Mill, I'll show you", and to come up with a lyric that was very much in the style of the social satires that bands like the Kinks were releasing at the time. People often miss the humour in the lyric for "Paperback Writer", but there's a huge amount of comedy in lyrics about someone writing to a publisher saying they'd written a book based on someone else's book, and one can only imagine the feeling of weary recognition in slush-pile readers throughout the world as they heard the enthusiastic "It's a thousand pages, give or take a few, I'll be writing more in a week or two. I can make it longer..." From this point on, the group wouldn't release a single that was unambiguously about a romantic relationship until "The Ballad of John and Yoko",  the last single released while the band were still together. "Paperback Writer" also saw the Beatles for the first time making a promotional film -- what we would now call a rock video -- rather than make personal appearances on TV shows. The film was directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who the group would work with again in 1969, and shows Paul with a chipped front tooth -- he'd been in an accident while riding mopeds with his friend Tara Browne a few months earlier, and hadn't yet got round to having the tooth capped. When he did, the change in his teeth was one of the many bits of evidence used by conspiracy theorists to prove that the real Paul McCartney was dead and replaced by a lookalike. It also marks a change in who the most prominent Beatle on the group's A-sides was. Up to this point, Paul had had one solo lead on an A-side -- "Can't Buy Me Love" -- and everything else had been either a song with multiple vocalists like "Day Tripper" or "Love Me Do", or a song with a clear John lead like "Ticket to Ride" or "I Feel Fine". In the rest of their career, counting "Paperback Writer", the group would release nine new singles that hadn't already been included on an album. Of those nine singles, one was a double A-side with one John song and one Paul song, two had John songs on the A-side, and the other six were Paul. Where up to this point John had been "lead Beatle", for the rest of the sixties, Paul would be the group's driving force. Oddly, Paul got rather defensive about the record when asked about it in interviews after it failed to go straight to the top, saying "It's not our best single by any means, but we're very satisfied with it". But especially in its original mono mix it actually packs a powerful punch: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] When the "Paperback Writer" single was released, an unusual image was used in the advertising -- a photo of the Beatles dressed in butchers' smocks, covered in blood, with chunks of meat and the dismembered body parts of baby dolls lying around on them. The image was meant as part of a triptych parodying religious art -- the photo on the left was to be an image showing the four Beatles connected to a woman by an umbilical cord made of sausages, the middle panel was meant to be this image, but with halos added over the Beatles' heads, and the panel on the right was George hammering a nail into John's head, symbolising both crucifixion and that the group were real, physical, people, not just images to be worshipped -- these weren't imaginary nails, and they weren't imaginary people. The photographer Robert Whittaker later said: “I did a photograph of the Beatles covered in raw meat, dolls and false teeth. Putting meat, dolls and false teeth with The Beatles is essentially part of the same thing, the breakdown of what is regarded as normal. The actual conception for what I still call “Somnambulant Adventure” was Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments. He comes across people worshipping a golden calf. All over the world I'd watched people worshiping like idols, like gods, four Beatles. To me they were just stock standard normal people. But this emotion that fans poured on them made me wonder where Christianity was heading.” The image wasn't that controversial in the UK, when it was used to advertise "Paperback Writer", but in the US it was initially used for the cover of an album, Yesterday... And Today, which was made up of a few tracks that had been left off the US versions of the Rubber Soul and Help! albums, plus both sides of the "We Can Work It Out"/"Day Tripper" single, and three rough mixes of songs that had been recorded for Revolver -- "Doctor Robert", "And Your Bird Can Sing", and "I'm Only Sleeping", which was the song that sounded most different from the mixes that were finally released: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I'm Only Sleeping (Yesterday... and Today mix)"] Those three songs were all Lennon songs, which had the unfortunate effect that when the US version of Revolver was brought out later in the year, only two of the songs on the album were by Lennon, with six by McCartney and three by Harrison. Some have suggested that this was the motivation for the use of the butcher image on the cover of Yesterday... And Today -- saying it was the Beatles' protest against Capitol "butchering" their albums -- but in truth it was just that Capitol's art director chose the cover because he liked the image. Alan Livingston, the president of Capitol was not so sure, and called Brian Epstein to ask if the group would be OK with them using a different image. Epstein checked with John Lennon, but Lennon liked the image and so Epstein told Livingston the group insisted on them using that cover. Even though for the album cover the bloodstains on the butchers' smocks were airbrushed out, after Capitol had pressed up a million copies of the mono version of the album and two hundred thousand copies of the stereo version, and they'd sent out sixty thousand promo copies, they discovered that no record shops would stock the album with that cover. It cost Capitol more than two hundred thousand dollars to recall the album and replace the cover with a new one -- though while many of the covers were destroyed, others had the new cover, with a more acceptable photo of the group, pasted over them, and people have later carefully steamed off the sticker to reveal the original. This would not be the last time in 1966 that something that was intended as a statement on religion and the way people viewed the Beatles would cause the group trouble in America. In the middle of the recording sessions for Revolver, the group also made what turned out to be their last ever UK live performance in front of a paying audience. The group had played the NME Poll-Winners' Party every year since 1963, and they were always shows that featured all the biggest acts in the country at the time -- the 1966 show featured, as well as the Beatles and a bunch of smaller acts, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Yardbirds, Roy Orbison, Cliff Richard and the Shadows, the Seekers, the Small Faces, the Walker Brothers, and Dusty Springfield. Unfortunately, while these events were always filmed for TV broadcast, the Beatles' performance on the first of May wasn't filmed. There are various stories about what happened, but the crux appears to be a disagreement between Andrew Oldham and Brian Epstein, sparked by John Lennon. When the Beatles got to the show, they were upset to discover that they had to wait around before going on stage -- normally, the awards would all be presented at the end, after all the performances, but the Rolling Stones had asked that the Beatles not follow them directly, so after the Stones finished their set, there would be a break for the awards to be given out, and then the Beatles would play their set, in front of an audience that had been bored by twenty-five minutes of awards ceremony, rather than one that had been excited by all the bands that came before them. John Lennon was annoyed, and insisted that the Beatles were going to go on straight after the Rolling Stones -- he seems to have taken this as some sort of power play by the Stones and to have got his hackles up about it. He told Epstein to deal with the people from the NME. But the NME people said that they had a contract with Andrew Oldham, and they weren't going to break it. Oldham refused to change the terms of the contract. Lennon said that he wasn't going to go on stage if they didn't directly follow the Stones. Maurice Kinn, the publisher of the NME, told Epstein that he wasn't going to break the contract with Oldham, and that if the Beatles didn't appear on stage, he would get Jimmy Savile, who was compering the show, to go out on stage and tell the ten thousand fans in the audience that the Beatles were backstage refusing to appear. He would then sue NEMS for breach of contract *and* NEMS would be liable for any damage caused by the rioting that was sure to happen. Lennon screamed a lot of abuse at Kinn, and told him the group would never play one of their events again, but the group did go on stage -- but because they hadn't yet signed the agreement to allow their performance to be filmed, they refused to allow it to be recorded. Apparently Andrew Oldham took all this as a sign that Epstein was starting to lose control of the group. Also during May 1966 there were visits from musicians from other countries, continuing the cultural exchange that was increasingly influencing the Beatles' art. Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys came over to promote the group's new LP, Pet Sounds, which had been largely the work of Brian Wilson, who had retired from touring to concentrate on working in the studio. Johnston played the record for John and Paul, who listened to it twice, all the way through, in silence, in Johnston's hotel room: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows"] According to Johnston, after they'd listened through the album twice, they went over to a piano and started whispering to each other, picking out chords. Certainly the influence of Pet Sounds is very noticeable on songs like "Here, There, and Everywhere", written and recorded a few weeks after this meeting: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Here, There, and Everywhere"] That track, and the last track recorded for the album, "She Said She Said" were unusual in one very important respect -- they were recorded while the Beatles were no longer under contract to EMI Records. Their contract expired on the fifth of June, 1966, and they finished Revolver without it having been renewed -- it would be several months before their new contract was signed, and it's rather lucky for music lovers that Brian Epstein was the kind of manager who considered personal relationships and basic honour and decency more important than the legal niceties, unlike any other managers of the era, otherwise we would not have Revolver in the form we know it today. After the meeting with Johnston, but before the recording of those last couple of Revolver tracks, the Beatles also met up again with Bob Dylan, who was on a UK tour with a new, loud, band he was working with called The Hawks. While the Beatles and Dylan all admired each other, there was by this point a lot of wariness on both sides, especially between Lennon and Dylan, both of them very similar personality types and neither wanting to let their guard down around the other or appear unhip. There's a famous half-hour-long film sequence of Lennon and Dylan sharing a taxi, which is a fascinating, excruciating, example of two insecure but arrogant men both trying desperately to impress the other but also equally desperate not to let the other know that they want to impress them: [Excerpt: Dylan and Lennon taxi ride] The day that was filmed, Lennon and Harrison also went to see Dylan play at the Royal Albert Hall. This tour had been controversial, because Dylan's band were loud and raucous, and Dylan's fans in the UK still thought of him as a folk musician. At one gig, earlier on the tour, an audience member had famously yelled out "Judas!" -- (just on the tiny chance that any of my listeners don't know that, Judas was the disciple who betrayed Jesus to the authorities, leading to his crucifixion) -- and that show was for many years bootlegged as the "Royal Albert Hall" show, though in fact it was recorded at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. One of the *actual* Royal Albert Hall shows was released a few years ago -- the one the night before Lennon and Harrison saw Dylan: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone", Royal Albert Hall 1966] The show Lennon and Harrison saw would be Dylan's last for many years. Shortly after returning to the US, Dylan was in a motorbike accident, the details of which are still mysterious, and which some fans claim was faked altogether. The accident caused him to cancel all the concert dates he had booked, and devote himself to working in the studio for several years just like Brian Wilson. And from even further afield than America, Ravi Shankar came over to Britain, to work with his friend the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, on a duet album, West Meets East, that was an example in the classical world of the same kind of international cross-fertilisation that was happening in the pop world: [Excerpt: Yehudi Menuhin and Ravi Shankar, "Prabhati (based on Raga Gunkali)"] While he was in the UK, Shankar also performed at the Royal Festival Hall, and George Harrison went to the show. He'd seen Shankar live the year before, but this time he met up with him afterwards, and later said "He was the first person that impressed me in a way that was beyond just being a famous celebrity. Ravi was my link to the Vedic world. Ravi plugged me into the whole of reality. Elvis impressed me when I was a kid, and impressed me when I met him, but you couldn't later on go round to him and say 'Elvis, what's happening with the universe?'" After completing recording and mixing the as-yet-unnamed album, which had been by far the longest recording process of their career, and which still nearly sixty years later regularly tops polls of the best album of all time, the Beatles took a well-earned break. For a whole two days, at which point they flew off to Germany to do a three-day tour, on their way to Japan, where they were booked to play five shows at the Budokan. Unfortunately for the group, while they had no idea of this when they were booked to do the shows, many in Japan saw the Budokan as sacred ground, and they were the first ever Western group to play there. This led to numerous death threats and loud protests from far-right activists offended at the Beatles defiling their religious and nationalistic sensibilities. As a result, the police were on high alert -- so high that there were three thousand police in the audience for the shows, in a venue which only held ten thousand audience members. That's according to Mark Lewisohn's Complete Beatles Chronicle, though I have to say that the rather blurry footage of the audience in the video of those shows doesn't seem to show anything like those numbers. But frankly I'll take Lewisohn's word over that footage, as he's not someone to put out incorrect information. The threats to the group also meant that they had to be kept in their hotel rooms at all times except when actually performing, though they did make attempts to get out. At the press conference for the Tokyo shows, the group were also asked publicly for the first time their views on the war in Vietnam, and John replied "Well, we think about it every day, and we don't agree with it and we think that it's wrong. That's how much interest we take. That's all we can do about it... and say that we don't like it". I say they were asked publicly for the first time, because George had been asked about it for a series of interviews Maureen Cleave had done with the group a couple of months earlier, as we'll see in a bit, but nobody was paying attention to those interviews. Brian Epstein was upset that the question had gone to John. He had hoped that the inevitable Vietnam question would go to Paul, who he thought might be a bit more tactful. The last thing he needed was John Lennon saying something that would upset the Americans before their tour there a few weeks later. Luckily, people in America seemed to have better things to do than pay attention to John Lennon's opinions. The support acts for the Japanese shows included  several of the biggest names in Japanese rock music -- or "group sounds" as the genre was called there, Japanese people having realised that trying to say the phrase "rock and roll" would open them up to ridicule given that it had both "r" and "l" sounds in the phrase. The man who had coined the term "group sounds", Jackey Yoshikawa, was there with his group the Blue Comets, as was Isao Bito, who did a rather good cover version of Cliff Richard's "Dynamite": [Excerpt: Isao Bito, "Dynamite"] Bito, the Blue Comets, and the other two support acts, Yuya Uchida and the Blue Jeans, all got together to perform a specially written song, "Welcome Beatles": [Excerpt: "Welcome Beatles" ] But while the Japanese audience were enthusiastic, they were much less vocal about their enthusiasm than the audiences the Beatles were used to playing for. The group were used, of course, to playing in front of hordes of screaming teenagers who could not hear a single note, but because of the fear that a far-right terrorist would assassinate one of the group members, the police had imposed very, very, strict rules on the audience. Nobody in the audience was allowed to get out of their seat for any reason, and the police would clamp down very firmly on anyone who was too demonstrative. Because of that, the group could actually hear themselves, and they sounded sloppy as hell, especially on the newer material. Not that there was much of that. The only song they did from the Revolver sessions was "Paperback Writer", the new single, and while they did do a couple of tracks from Rubber Soul, those were under-rehearsed. As John said at the start of this tour, "I can't play any of Rubber Soul, it's so unrehearsed. The only time I played any of the numbers on it was when I recorded it. I forget about songs. They're only valid for a certain time." That's certainly borne out by the sound of their performances of Rubber Soul material at the Budokan: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "If I Needed Someone (live at the Budokan)"] It was while they were in Japan as well that they finally came up with the title for their new album. They'd been thinking of all sorts of ideas, like Abracadabra and Magic Circle, and tossing names around with increasing desperation for several days -- at one point they seem to have just started riffing on other groups' albums, and seem to have apparently seriously thought about naming the record in parodic tribute to their favourite artists -- suggestions included The Beatles On Safari, after the Beach Boys' Surfin' Safari (and possibly with a nod to their recent Pet Sounds album cover with animals, too), The Freewheelin' Beatles, after Dylan's second album, and my favourite, Ringo's suggestion After Geography, for the Rolling Stones' Aftermath. But eventually Paul came up with Revolver -- like Rubber Soul, a pun, in this case because the record itself revolves when on a turntable. Then it was off to the Philippines, and if the group thought Japan had been stressful, they had no idea what was coming. The trouble started in the Philippines from the moment they stepped off the plane, when they were bundled into a car without Neil Aspinall or Brian Epstein, and without their luggage, which was sent to customs. This was a problem in itself -- the group had got used to essentially being treated like diplomats, and to having their baggage let through customs without being searched, and so they'd started freely carrying various illicit substances with them. This would obviously be a problem -- but as it turned out, this was just to get a "customs charge" paid by Brian Epstein. But during their initial press conference the group were worried, given the hostility they'd faced from officialdom, that they were going to be arrested during the conference itself. They were asked what they would tell the Rolling Stones, who were going to be visiting the Philippines shortly after, and Lennon just said "We'll warn them". They also asked "is there a war on in the Philippines? Why is everybody armed?" At this time, the Philippines had a new leader, Ferdinand Marcos -- who is not to be confused with his son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, also known as Bongbong Marcos, who just became President-Elect there last month. Marcos Sr was a dictatorial kleptocrat, one of the worst leaders of the latter half of the twentieth century, but that wasn't evident yet. He'd been elected only a few months earlier, and had presented himself as a Kennedy-like figure -- a young man who was also a war hero. He'd recently switched parties from the Liberal party to the right-wing Nacionalista Party, but wasn't yet being thought of as the monstrous dictator he later became. The person organising the Philippines shows had been ordered to get the Beatles to visit Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos at 11AM on the day of the show, but for some reason had instead put on their itinerary just the *suggestion* that the group should meet the Marcoses, and had put the time down as 3PM, and the Beatles chose to ignore that suggestion -- they'd refused to do that kind of government-official meet-and-greet ever since an incident in 1964 at the British Embassy in Washington where someone had cut off a bit of Ringo's hair. A military escort turned up at the group's hotel in the morning, to take them for their meeting. The group were all still in their rooms, and Brian Epstein was still eating breakfast and refused to disturb them, saying "Go back and tell the generals we're not coming." The group gave their performances as scheduled, but meanwhile there was outrage at the way the Beatles had refused to meet the Marcos family, who had brought hundreds of children -- friends of their own children, and relatives of top officials -- to a party to meet the group. Brian Epstein went on TV and tried to smooth things over, but the broadcast was interrupted by static and his message didn't get through to anyone. The next day, the group's security was taken away, as were the cars to take them to the airport. When they got to the airport, the escalators were turned off and the group were beaten up at the arrangement of the airport manager, who said in 1984 "I beat up the Beatles. I really thumped them. First I socked Epstein and he went down... then I socked Lennon and Ringo in the face. I was kicking them. They were pleading like frightened chickens. That's what happens when you insult the First Lady." Even on the plane there were further problems -- Brian Epstein and the group's road manager Mal Evans were both made to get off the plane to sort out supposed financial discrepancies, which led to them worrying that they were going to be arrested or worse -- Evans told the group to tell his wife he loved her as he left the plane. But eventually, they were able to leave, and after a brief layover in India -- which Ringo later said was the first time he felt he'd been somewhere truly foreign, as opposed to places like Germany or the USA which felt basically like home -- they got back to England: [Excerpt: "Ordinary passenger!"] When asked what they were going to do next, George replied “We're going to have a couple of weeks to recuperate before we go and get beaten up by the Americans,” The story of the "we're bigger than Jesus" controversy is one of the most widely misreported events in the lives of the Beatles, which is saying a great deal. One book that I've encountered, and one book only, Steve Turner's Beatles '66, tells the story of what actually happened, and even that book seems to miss some emphases. I've pieced what follows together from Turner's book and from an academic journal article I found which has some more detail. As far as I can tell, every single other book on the Beatles released up to this point bases their account of the story on an inaccurate press statement put out by Brian Epstein, not on the truth. Here's the story as it's generally told. John Lennon gave an interview to his friend, Maureen Cleave of the Evening Standard, during which he made some comments about how it was depressing that Christianity was losing relevance in the eyes of the public, and that the Beatles are more popular than Jesus, speaking casually because he was talking to a friend. That story was run in the Evening Standard more-or-less unnoticed, but then an American teen magazine picked up on the line about the Beatles being bigger than Jesus, reprinted chunks of the interview out of context and without the Beatles' knowledge or permission, as a way to stir up controversy, and there was an outcry, with people burning Beatles records and death threats from the Ku Klux Klan. That's... not exactly what happened. The first thing that you need to understand to know what happened is that Datebook wasn't a typical teen magazine. It *looked* just like a typical teen magazine, certainly, and much of its content was the kind of thing that you would get in Tiger Beat or any of the other magazines aimed at teenage girls -- the September 1966 issue was full of articles like "Life with the Walker Brothers... by their Road Manager", and interviews with the Dave Clark Five -- but it also had a long history of publishing material that was intended to make its readers think about social issues of the time, particularly Civil Rights. Arthur Unger, the magazine's editor and publisher, was a gay man in an interracial relationship, and while the subject of homosexuality was too taboo in the late fifties and sixties for him to have his magazine cover that, he did regularly include articles decrying segregation and calling for the girls reading the magazine to do their part on a personal level to stamp out racism. Datebook had regularly contained articles like one from 1963 talking about how segregation wasn't just a problem in the South, saying "If we are so ‘integrated' why must men in my own city of Philadelphia, the city of Brotherly Love, picket city hall because they are discriminated against when it comes to getting a job? And how come I am still unable to take my dark- complexioned friends to the same roller skating rink or swimming pool that I attend?” One of the writers for the magazine later said “We were much more than an entertainment magazine . . . . We tried to get kids involved in social issues . . . . It was a well-received magazine, recommended by libraries and schools, but during the Civil Rights period we did get pulled off a lot of stands in the South because of our views on integration” Art Unger, the editor and publisher, wasn't the only one pushing this liberal, integrationist, agenda. The managing editor at the time, Danny Fields, was another gay man who wanted to push the magazine even further than Unger, and who would later go on to manage the Stooges and the Ramones, being credited by some as being the single most important figure in punk rock's development, and being immortalised by the Ramones in their song "Danny Says": [Excerpt: The Ramones, "Danny Says"] So this was not a normal teen magazine, and that's certainly shown by the cover of the September 1966 issue, which as well as talking about the interviews with John Lennon and Paul McCartney inside, also advertised articles on Timothy Leary advising people to turn on, tune in, and drop out; an editorial about how interracial dating must be the next step after desegregation of schools, and a piece on "the ten adults you dig/hate the most" -- apparently the adult most teens dug in 1966 was Jackie Kennedy, the most hated was Barry Goldwater, and President Johnson, Billy Graham, and Martin Luther King appeared in the top ten on both lists. Now, in the early part of the year Maureen Cleave had done a whole series of articles on the Beatles -- double-page spreads on each band member, plus Brian Epstein, visiting them in their own homes (apart from Paul, who she met at a restaurant) and discussing their daily lives, their thoughts, and portraying them as rounded individuals. These articles are actually fascinating, because of something that everyone who met the Beatles in this period pointed out. When interviewed separately, all of them came across as thoughtful individuals, with their own opinions about all sorts of subjects, and their own tastes and senses of humour. But when two or more of them were together -- especially when John and Paul were interviewed together, but even in social situations, they would immediately revert to flip in-jokes and riffing on each other's statements, never revealing anything about themselves as individuals, but just going into Beatle mode -- simultaneously preserving the band's image, closing off outsiders, *and* making sure they didn't do or say anything that would get them mocked by the others. Cleave, as someone who actually took them all seriously, managed to get some very revealing information about all of them. In the article on Ringo, which is the most superficial -- one gets the impression that Cleave found him rather difficult to talk to when compared to the other, more verbally facile, band members -- she talked about how he had a lot of Wild West and military memorabilia, how he was a devoted family man and also devoted to his friends -- he had moved to the suburbs to be close to John and George, who already lived there. The most revealing quote about Ringo's personality was him saying "Of course that's the great thing about being married -- you have a house to sit in and company all the time. And you can still go to clubs, a bonus for being married. I love being a family man." While she looked at the other Beatles' tastes in literature in detail, she'd noted that the only books Ringo owned that weren't just for show were a few science fiction paperbacks, but that as he said "I'm not thick, it's just that I'm not educated. People can use words and I won't know what they mean. I say 'me' instead of 'my'." Ringo also didn't have a drum kit at home, saying he only played when he was on stage or in the studio, and that you couldn't practice on your own, you needed to play with other people. In the article on George, she talked about how he was learning the sitar,  and how he was thinking that it might be a good idea to go to India to study the sitar with Ravi Shankar for six months. She also talks about how during the interview, he played the guitar pretty much constantly, playing everything from songs from "Hello Dolly" to pieces by Bach to "the Trumpet Voluntary", by which she presumably means Clarke's "Prince of Denmark's March": [Excerpt: Jeremiah Clarke, "Prince of Denmark's March"] George was also the most outspoken on the subjects of politics, religion, and society, linking the ongoing war in Vietnam with the UK's reverence for the Second World War, saying "I think about it every day and it's wrong. Anything to do with war is wrong. They're all wrapped up in their Nelsons and their Churchills and their Montys -- always talking about war heroes. Look at All Our Yesterdays [a show on ITV that showed twenty-five-year-old newsreels] -- how we killed a few more Huns here and there. Makes me sick. They're the sort who are leaning on their walking sticks and telling us a few years in the army would do us good." He also had very strong words to say about religion, saying "I think religion falls flat on its face. All this 'love thy neighbour' but none of them are doing it. How can anybody get into the position of being Pope and accept all the glory and the money and the Mercedes-Benz and that? I could never be Pope until I'd sold my rich gates and my posh hat. I couldn't sit there with all that money on me and believe I was religious. Why can't we bring all this out in the open? Why is there all this stuff about blasphemy? If Christianity's as good as they say it is, it should stand up to a bit of discussion." Harrison also comes across as a very private person, saying "People keep saying, ‘We made you what you are,' well, I made Mr. Hovis what he is and I don't go round crawling over his gates and smashing up the wall round his house." (Hovis is a British company that makes bread and wholegrain flour). But more than anything else he comes across as an instinctive anti-authoritarian, being angry at bullying teachers, Popes, and Prime Ministers. McCartney's profile has him as the most self-consciously arty -- he talks about the plays of Alfred Jarry and the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio: [Excerpt: Luciano Berio, "Momenti (for magnetic tape)"] Though he was very worried that he might be sounding a little too pretentious, saying “I don't want to sound like Jonathan Miller going on" --

Helen and Bill disappear down the great internet rabbit hole of famous Shirleys to discover a treasure trove of fascinating facts about Shirley MacLaine, Temple, and Bassey, via Big Daddy, George Formby and Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.Related Links:Shirley MacLaine meets Fidel Castro.https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/photos/shirley-maclaine-years-46804747/image-46808414Shirley Temple's mother always gave her 56 curls, not 55, not 57.https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-xpm-2014-feb-12-la-et-mn-shirley-temple-life-fun-facts-20140211-story.html#:~:text=Temple's%20mother%20styled%20her%20daughter's,kept%20my%20head%20on%20straight.%E2%80%9DThe Partridge Family opening theme, starring Shirley Jones and her real life step son, David Cassidyhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOiKa51ll-kBig Daddy vs Giant Haystacks, Clash of the Titanshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sDBd6-SGo4Shirley Bassey performs Burn My Candle, considered too saucy for the BBC who banned ithttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epIdxoo4QcIBowie's Space Oddity set to pictures of Apollo 11's moon landinghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GVYwyWYpkUGeorge Formby performs My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock, too euphemistic for the BBC who banned ithttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KQ6Wmbi5igThe Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band iconic cover https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/whos-who-on-the-beatles-sgt-peppers-lonely-hearts-club-band-album-cover/Trailer for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman. Writer, Tennesse Williams purportedly hated the movie versionhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzogcorjLOI Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

For their next pick of an album that has been around awhile, Trevor and Shane go back 55 years to the date to break down an album that needs no introduction, The Beatles' “Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Recognizing this as an arduous task, Shane and Trevor were fortunate and grateful to have Authors James Campion and Katie Darby Mullins provide their thoughts on this iconic album on the episode. In addition, several listeners, friends, and fellow music podcasters chimed in on their favorite tracks. If you submitted audio for this purpose, listen for your contribution throughout the episode. Fittingly, Shane and Trevor realize by the end of this album exploration that they would not have been able to get by without a little help from their friends. Does this album live up to its reputation for Trevor and Shane by the end of their deep dive? Listen until the end to find out. ________________________________________________________________________________________________ HOW TO CONNECT WITH ALBUM DIVERS: *You can submit your questions or comments about this episode or anything else on your mind here via our text line at: (502) 792-8080 *Leave us an audio message here: https://www.speakpipe.com/AlbumDivers We promise to respond and may even feature your thoughts on a future episode. *Follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Album Divers *Email us at Albumdiverspodcast@gmail.com *Please subscribe and review wherever you get your podcasts!

"It was twenty years ago today - Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play" - well, ok, it was much longer ago than that, but it is the focus of today's THIS DAY ROCKS! Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles went to number 1 on the UK album chart on this day in 1967.  And with me to talk about this album that is still regarded as one of the greatest of all time, is Dan from The Story Song Podcast!  The Story Song Podcast is part of the Pantheon Podcast network, check it out on all good podcast platforms!

"It was twenty years ago today - Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play" - well, ok, it was much longer ago than that, but it is the focus of today's THIS DAY ROCKS! Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles went to number 1 on the UK album chart on this day in 1967.  And with me to talk about this album that is still regarded as one of the greatest of all time, is Dan from The Story Song Podcast!  The Story Song Podcast is part of the Pantheon Podcast network, check it out on all good podcast platforms!

"they couldn't hear themselves because of the screaming girls"

Thanks for getting us to our 100th episode. A groundbreaking album as a mile marker for this show. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/chris-levine/support

AKA Penny Lane is back for the third installment of our own tribute to The Fab Four. Yes we know there are a lot of Beatles podcasts out there, but here you've got two generations of fans with different views from different times geeking out. The first two episodes we did together are only available on YouTube, but the next three including this episode will be available as audio podcasts. This time around we talk about "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and rate the songs on this iconic album from bottom to top! Recorded on Zoom with additional recording and editing done by Mike Nash at Voice Motel, Somerville MA This episode was sponsored by Baby Loves Tacos, Pittsburgh PA Support the podcast www.patreon.com/twistedrico --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/blowingsmoketr/support

The third and final episode in our Get Back analysis is dedicated to Band Dynamics- the working and personal relationships within the Beatles and how all those conflicts, bonds and loyalties interact. We also take a look at the Get Back deadlines; Were they as crazy as we think? Join Phoebe, Daphne, Iris and Thalia for this lively, thoughtful and engrossing panel. SOURCES The Banality of Genius: Notes on Peter Jackson's Get Back, Ian Leslie (Jan 26 2022) Get Back, dir. Peter Jackson (2021) John Lennon Interview w/ DJ John Small (October 22nd, 1969) Beatles Anthology, dir. Geoff Wonfor; Bob Smeaton (1995) Peace and Love, Broken Record podcast w/ Rick Rubin (Sep 21, 2021) Ringo Interview from: Understanding McCartney/Ep 5, dir breathless345 (2020) Ringo Starr Interview w/ Howard Stern (2000) Felix Dennis quote from: You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles, Peter Doggett (2009) Playboy interview w/ Allen Klein (1971) Solid State, The Story of Abbey Road and the End of the Beatles, Ken Womack (2019) Maureen Starkey interview (published 1998) Tune In, Mark Lewisohn (2013) Beatles on the Roof, Tony Barrel (2017) With a Little Help from My Friends, the Making of Sergeant Pepper, George Martin (1994) Maximum Volume: The Life of Beatles Producer George Martin (The Early Years, 1926-1966) Ken Womack (2018) Philip Norman (?) Playback: An Illustrated Memoir, George Martin (2002) Let it Be, dir Michael Lindsay-Hogg (1970) George Harrison, Guitar World: When We Was Fab. (1992) THE LYRICS, Paul McCartney and Paul Muldoon (2021) Many Years From Now, Barry Miles (1997) Peter Jackson on Stephen Colbert (Nov 25, 2021)

Yes, you've heard plenty of concept albums from rock and rollers, but what about country? In 1975, Willie Nelson took it upon himself to respond to rock music's "Sergeant Pepper"s and "Tommy"s with his own protagonist on a journey. However, with Willie's "Red Headed Stranger", we got a much less fantastical, and much more harrowing western tale, rife with betrayal, murder, and eventually redemption. There's a very clear character arc and the story is pretty easy to follow, but there's something different about this concept album. It's almost entirely covers. Somehow, Willie was able to take pre-existing and historically significant songs and form them into a coherent story that sounds entirely his own. It's truly one of the most impressive concept albums we've tackled. This episode has Brad, Jon, and Jake! Links: OUR DISCORD: https://discord.gg/2stA2P7pTC Flyover State Hotline - 1 608 HIT-NERD FLYOVER STATE TV YOUTUBE live every other Tues. at 730pm CST: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClxl2ivi_eO93zL49QZDuqA (for local listeners) Under the Covers is Wednesday mornings from 6 to 8am on 91.7 WSUM FM, 92.5 WISY FM Sunday afternoons 1-3pm EVERYTHING ELSE: https://linktr.ee/FlyoverStatePark --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/albumconcepthour/support

Heute geht es um das achte Studioalbum der Beatles: Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Die konsequente Fortsetzung von Rubber Soul und Revolver, denn die Beatles nutzten das Studio mehr als jemals zuvor als Instrument. Und so schufen sie unter der Führung von Paul McCartney ein Jahrhundertalbum, das die Musikwelt in ihren Grundfesten erschütterte. Ein Album, das den Zeitgeist des Summer of Love traf, um das sich unzählige Mythen ranken und auf dem die beiden vielleicht besten Songs der Session gar nicht drauf sind. Sergeant Pepper ist ein Meisterwerk, das Fans und Kritiker gleichermaßen faszinierte, das Konkurrenten in den Wahnsinn trieb und sogar Verschwöerungstheoretikern und Hunden etwas zu bieten hatte.

Die Themen der Woche: - Turnierabsagen - Sergeant Pepper ist tot - Neue Weltranglisten - Ärger beim Holsteiner Verband - Verordnungs-Chaos in Reitställen

It was 20 years ago today, Sergeant Pepper taught the band… no, wait… different day. But 20 years ago today, America vowed never to forget. Problem is, though, that nowadays people can't seem to agree on what it was we were supposed to remember. Join Cognitive Dissidents Katie Massa Kennedy, “The Black Voice of Reason” Tymon Shipp, and Dr. David Robinson for a walk down memory lane from the tragedy of 20 years ago to the events of this past week! It's your weekly dose of newsy infotainment… GET DOSED!

Dave McArthur and Clint Lanier sip Brandy Alexanders while discussing the 1967 Beatles auditory opus Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Local rowers from the Inver Colpa club are looking forward to a surge in interest following our Olympic Medal glory. Colm McKeever from Meath who has been in New York since 1987, now running his own jarvey and real estate businesses, cautioned that the Big Apple needs sorting out again. McGranes Milk Barn opened recently and doing great business as Mark explained. We heard from three intrepid Dundalk fans who shouldn't be but are in Estonia for the club's European tie this evening. Conor Hughes expressed his gratitude to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital for the incubators that will save baby's lives in Ghana. And Gerry played a classic from Sergeant Pepper as his take on the Beatles continued... See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode, a polarising Porsche and the second most annoying yuppie couple from 1980s British TV adverts end up in the dock. Not to be outdone, John Lennon ends up in a ditch, Paul McCartney is the unwitting victim of Beatlemania (featuring a VW Beetle), and a 1970s BMW comes over all pugilistic. Elsewhere, David thinks it's his lucky day when he stumbles across a trio of British classics but it's James who drives off into the sunset with the girl.

Mono vs Stereo. Pet Sounds vs Sergeant Pepper. Paul vs Brian. The Beach Boys vs The Beatles, Taylor Swift vs Jon... Wait, back up. The rivalry between The Beach Boys and The Beatles is well known. Some say The Rolling Stones vs The Beatles, but those people don't know wtf they're talking about. These two groups of boys turned megastar heartthrobs were pushing the boundaries of what was possible in recording technology and what singer/songwriters were allowed to sing about. From the beginning of their respective careers until The Beatles came out with "Rubber Soul", their musical paths were fairly similar. Brian Wilson heard Rubber Soul and knew he needed to up the ante for their next album. The next year, in 1966, The Beach Boys released "Pet Sounds". Although it remained in mono, this Beach Boys albums was on another level to The Beatles and, although they were already in the midst of recording Revolover, it already had signs of "Pet Sounds"'s influence, with the culmination of that admiration clear in "Sergeant Pepper". Unfortunately, The Beach Boys didn't enjoy the excitement and continued success that The Beatles had for three more albums, as Brian Wilson withdrew from his music career for a time due to strains on his mental health. "Pet Sounds" is easily the peak of The Beach Boys' musical and recording ability and remains one of Rock music's classics. Today, with the whole crew! Brad, Jon, Dave, and Jake Foster!!! Links from ep: The Lone Girl Brewing Company: https://thelonegirl.com/ Daikaiju Live: https://youtu.be/2wgGo1h7-os Other Links: OUR DISCORD: https://discord.gg/2stA2P7pTC TACHP Desert Island Discord Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4wNErQHfrAYgSsIZlLJ6ym?si=dtrMJCuqQwa1Zt7RtwrXNg (YouTube Playlist): https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4Uk6UBPMYEs3BtK1HwWJMyXlKwPH93Qx EVERYTHING ELSE: https://linktr.ee/FlyoverStatePark --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/albumconcepthour/support

By 1967, the Beatles had endured quite the career. The British invasion ushered in Beatlemania and made them a cultural phenomenon very early in their career with their boyish good looks mixed with their years of experience crooning classics at clubs in the UK and Germany. Then, as the 60s went on, culture changed drastically, and the Beatles changed along with it. They experienced psychedelics, traveled to India to meditate and transcend, and each felt themselves becoming something more, as they began looking less and less like each other, and more like individuals with a variety of ideals. This was evident to diehard fans, and very controversial to their detractors, but it wasn't until "Sergeant Pepper" that average listeners found out what all the hub-bub was with the psychedelic movement in rock music. Creating completely new personas, with "Sergeant Pepper", the Beatles created a fully fleshed out concept album that was experimental in ways that people hadn't seen from them yet. It popularized psychedelia and experimentation in music, and it legitimized the growing genre of Rock music by being the first Rock album to win a Grammy for Album of the Year. Even if both film adaptations were/are universally panned, the original concept is gold and the entire album is full of stone cold classics, and it ushered in the last, and arguably best, chapter of the Beatles' journey together. Today we have the core crew with Brad, Jon, Dave, and Jake "the Snake" Foster! Links from ep: Joe Cocker (w/ John Belushi) on SNL - "Just a Little Help From My Friends": https://youtu.be/VmjWO7oY8LU Clip from Tom Dowd & the Language of Music: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3QRzd3wpQ2ADcFGAWGHhSvOVwhw66S06 Other Links: OUR DISCORD: https://discord.gg/2stA2P7pTC TACHP Desert Island Discord Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4wNErQHfrAYgSsIZlLJ6ym?si=dtrMJCuqQwa1Zt7RtwrXNg (YouTube Playlist): https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4Uk6UBPMYEs3BtK1HwWJMyXlKwPH93Qx EVERYTHING ELSE: https://linktr.ee/FlyoverStatePark --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/albumconcepthour/support

Caleb Clark and Shannon Clark discuss psychedelic rockers the Beatles and indie pop artists Everything But the Girl. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/caleb-clark6/support

We tackle the classic among classics-The Beatles Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band! Since 2003 perched high atop the Rolling Stone magazines' top 500 albums of all time, but dethroned in 2020. Who was able to topple them? Is this the greatest album of all time? Join us and find out! Links:InstagramFacebookTwitter

Into this stew i'm going to throw as many ingredients as I can as quickly as I can "I'll do my Dracula impression"

We're celebrating our 25th episode and last stream of 2020 with a tribute to the "Sergeant Pepper's of rap", the Beastie Boy's landmark 1989 LP Paul's Boutique. DJ Raj Mahal channels his inner Dust Brother and raids the dolla bins for an hour of samples used on the hip hop classic. Tons of sleazy, slick 70s grooves, drum breaks, funky soul, Blue Note fusion, etc. It's all vinyl and all live! Live Stream Performance: https://youtu.be/fFpnqLlP3sw Track List: Intro - DJ Raj Mahal Funky Snakefoot - Alphonse Mouzon Dancing Room Only (Drums) - Harvey Scales Tell Me Something Good - Ronnie Laws Born To Love You - Rose Royce 6 O'Clock DJ (Let's Rock)- Rose Royce Super Mellow - Louis Bellson Jazzy Sensation (Bronx Version)- Jazzy 5 Sharon - David Bromberg Magnificent Sanctuary Band - Donny Hathaway Momma Miss America - Paul McCartney Superfly - Curtis Mayfield Brave & Strong - Sly & the Family Stone Machine Gun - The Commodores So Ruff, So Tuff - Zapp & Roger Pumpin' It Up - P-Funk All Stars Shake Your Pants - Cameo Party Time - Kurtis Blow Sugarhill Groove - Sugarhill Gang Shuckin' The Corn Eric Weissberg Last Bongo In Belgium - Incredible Bongo Band Rien Ne Va Plus - Funk Factory I'll Bet You - The Jackson 5 Put On Train - Gene Harris Do Your Dance (Drums) - Rose Royce Loose Booty - Sly & the Family Stone Ask For Janice - Beastie Boys Burundi Black (Drums) - Burundi Black Save the World - Southside Movement Draw Your Brakes- - Scotty The Well's Gone Dry - Crusaders Outro

Cada mes en News Bytes, la experta en moda ética, sostenibilidad y trabajo artesanal, Sass Brown, nos comparte una marca de moda que se acerca al negocio desde un ángulo distinto e innovador, o bien que opera fuera de los principales sistemas y capitales de la moda. Saas fue la Decana de Arte y Diseño en el Fashion Institute of Technology y es la Decana fundadora del Dubai Institute of Design and Innovation. Este mes, Sass ha elegido a Zazi Vintage, una compañía basada en Ámsterdam, fundada por Jeanne de Kroon. De acuerdo con Sass, “la compañía se conoce por su uso de textiles ancestrales que han sido producidos a lo largo de la Ruta de la seda tradicional, incluyendo ikat de Uzbekistán, bordado de cachemira y bordados Suzanis”. Zazi Vintage produce una pequeña línea de ready-to-wear de piezas de moda contemporánea - coordinados, pero predominantemente vestidos. Esta colección se vende principalmente en línea, empleando un modelo directo al consumidor. Además, la marca ofrece opciones a la medida para clientes más exigentes. Al respecto Sass comenta que “Tienen una línea de abrigos suzanis, que son esos fabulosos abrigos Afganos con ribete de pelo. Con estos abrigos buscan evocar a los Beatles y el abrigo bordado del icónico Sergeant Pepper. Esos son hechos a la medida y es posible personalizarlos un poco, en cuanto a la elección del pelo que se utiliza, el color o el tipo de bordado”.  Al preguntarle a Sass qué es lo que otras marcas más populares pueden aprender de Zazi Vintage, ella comparte que cree que se puede hacer mucho con intención y motivación. Jeanne, la fundadora de la marca, es una de las personas más comprometidas que Sass ha conocido en cuanto a ética y a la manera en la que trabaja. Además de su pasión por los textiles y por contar historias. Adicionalmente, Sass subraya que Jeanne cuenta historias a través del tejido, a través de los hilos del bordado. Es por ello que Sass piensa que sus valores y su motivación son increíbles.  Cuando la pandemia de Covid-19 golpeó Europa, Sass comparte que Jeanne se acercó con los artesanos y les preguntó directamente qué es lo que necesitaban para sobrevivir el confinamiento y cómo cubrir sus costos a raíz de las órdenes canceladas de otras marcas. Pero no se detuvo en este punto. Sass cuenta que Jeanne se acercó a las otras marcas con las que los artesanos estaban trabajando y les dijo ‘esto es lo que necesitan para sobrevivir, para mantener un techo sobre sus cabezas y comida en sus mesas. ¿Cómo podemos armar un plan para trabajar juntos y asegurarnos que puedan sobrevivir a esto?' Sass describe el enfoque que Jeanne tiene con Zazi Vintage como centrado en ser humano, con capas que hablan de su entendimiento de la compleja cadena de suministro de la moda y de cómo esto afecta en exceso a los proveedores que están a merced de las marcas. Para conocer más acerca de Zazi Vintage, puedes visitar su sitio web zazivintage.com o seguirlos en su cuenta de Instagram @ZaziVintage.

Pink Floyd - Candy and a Currant Bun (1967) Pink Floyd - Scream Thy Last Scream (1967) Pink Floyd - Vegetable Man (1968) The Cowsills - Anything Changes (1969) The Cowsills - II x II (1969) The Cowsills - The Prophecy of Daniel & John the Divine (1969) Can - Dizzy Dizzy (1974) Can - Paperhouse (1971) Can - Spoon (1971) Donny Osmond - I Can't Stand It (1977)  Donny Osmond - I Can't Put My Finger On It (1976) Written by the guy that wrote "Rock The Boat" for The Hues Corporation, perhaps the first disco song.  Donny Osmond - Old Man Auctioneer (1976) A strictly Osmond Brothers affair. Hilarious.  Pink Floyd - Lucy Leave (1965) Gentle Giant - Pantagruel's Nativity (1971)  Gino Vanelli - Mama Coco (1975) Moody Blues - Had To Fall In Love (1978)  Supertramp - Hide In Your Shell (1974) Renaissance - Scheherazade (1975) Awesome scope, melody, performance. One of the peaks of 70's prog. There are some records I think would have been stunning to hear in a big studio for the first time. This is one of them. Yes' "The Gates of Delirium", Stevie Wonder's "Innervisions", "Sergeant Pepper", and this for sure. A side-long song that never bores. Definitely their peak.   

For Trevor's pick of an album that has "been around awhile," he selected the Beach Boys classic 1966 release "Pet Sounds." Both Trevor and Shane had memories growing up of listening to the Beach Boys, but neither had dived into this iconic album and absorbed it like they knew they should have. It did not disappoint. The history, the stories, the relationships, and everything Brian Wilson led to endless information to research, connections with Beach Boys fans, and a newfound appreciation for this masterpiece. One of these times they will figure out how to talk about an album they both love in less time than 2 hours. This will not be one of those times. If you don't know the history of the Beach Boys, Brian Wilson, and the album that compelled the defeated Beatles back into the studio to create "Sergeant Pepper's," then buckle up because you are in for a ride.       

Robert Lauver, Pittsburgh Symphony Horn, talks about his jazzy Strauss Til Eulenspiegel posted on the Pittsburgh Symphony Extraordinary Measures website. His teacher who played on the Beatle's Sergeant Pepper album and worked with famous horn virtuoso Dennis Brain. Robert explains how he worked with horn star Barry Tuckwell, talks about the technology involved in online music making, and remembers Sir John Eliot Gardiner, who had four horn soloists in the Konzertstuck by Robert Shcumann at Heinz Hall and Robert salutes teachers with a personal favorite by Korngold.

Prince Charles has tested positive for Coronavirus and is working from home following his diagnosis. The Queen last saw the prince on March 12th and is said to be in “good health”. The Evening Standard's Royal Editor Robert Jobson spoke to The Leader podcast about what else Clarence House have said.Donald Trump's Easter plansThe US president has speculated that most families will be able to visit church on Easter Sunday. Despite the virus spreading fast in the United States the president has suggested relaxing the boundaries already. This discussion comes just one week into their 15-day social distancing plan. Does Donald Trump understand the science behind the disease?The Evening Standard's New York-based columnist Philip Delves Broughton reports on what we know of Trump administration's changing strategy. Rainbow of HopeSir Peter Blake who famously designed the cover for The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper album, has created an image of hope for London. The Evening Standard commissioned Blake to create an image to represent the capital at this time. We are encouraging Londoners to download the image for free HERE, and post in your window to show our strength a city. Art's correspondent Rob Dex joins The Leader podcast. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Nete episódio vamos terminar de falar sobre o oitavo álbum de estúdio do grupo, chamado “Sergeant Pepper’s lonely hearts club band”.

Neste episódio vamos continuar a falar do oitavo álbum de estúdio do grupo, chamado “Sergeant Pepper’s lonely hearts club band”.

Neste episódio vamos continuar a falar do oitavo álbum de estúdio do grupo, chamado “Sergeant Pepper’s lonely hearts club band”.

Neste episódio vamos continuar a falar do oitavo álbum de estúdio do grupo, chamado “Sergeant Pepper’s lonely hearts club band".

Neste episódio vamos começar a falar do oitavo álbum de estúdio do grupo, chamado “Sergeant Pepper’s lonely hearts club band”.

1967 was an eventful year. We lost a Prime Minister at Portsea; Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released; Elvis married Priscilla and Rob came to Melbourne to live. Popular songs were Itchycoo Park […] http://media.rawvoice.com/joy_yesterdayoncemore/p/joy.org.au/yesterdayoncemore/wp-content/uploads/sites/157/2019/10/2019-09-29-YesterdayOnceMore-1967.mp3 Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:04 — 45.8MB) Subscribe or Follow Us: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Podcasts | Spotify | RSS The post 1967 appeared first on Yesterday Once More.

The musical Avant-Garde in general and Avant-Garde jazz, in particular, have either misleading or no connotations at all for most listeners (and non-listeners.) Say the words "free jazz," and most will think of musical anarchy—sonic chaos. And then they'll run for their lives. But when you consider the most prominent practitioners of so-called "free jazz"—the likes of John Coltrane (late period), Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor—one thing should be clear: these are great musicians. So before you run, at least consider why they might be doing what they do, and what they're really doing. And also consider some of your favorite mainstream music may be imbued with musical ideas brought into the world by the so-called Avant-Gardists. The Choice By definition, there is not much in common in the music of artists like John Cage, John Coltrane, Edgar Varese, and Sun Ra. They are, after all, musical outliers: they don't hang out in the same clubs together. But all of them do have one thing in common: they made a choice, somewhere along the line, to create their own musical languages. Making such a choice can, of course, be artistically and personally dangerous, leading to ostracization within the artistic community, derision by fans, and diminished employment opportunities. So why do some do it, where others are satisfied to work solely within the "accepted" musical frameworks, seemingly passed on down for generations? Here's the thing: what we think of as the "accepted" frameworks are almost always languages created by some bold musical soul in the past. Now, I will be the first to admit that we will probably never walk around humming Cecil Taylor or Schoenberg tunes. This music is too extreme in its willingness to push boundaries to become part of the popular music culture in its own right. Seeping Into the Mainstream But these extremes of musical expression, if they are any good, do enter the musical lexicon, even if we're not consciously aware of them doing so. They have a way of filtering down into more mainstream forms, enriching them with surprising turns and details. Listen to the experimental elements in later albums by the Beatles, like Sergeant Pepper's, then go check out modern "classical" composers like Edgar Varése or Karlheinz Stockhausen. The Beatles did. Or, as a more recent example, check out Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly. Then check out late Coltrane,or Ornette Coleman. And movie music? Psychologically challenging scenes would be nowhere without Arnold Schoenberg's serialism. To be sure, Schoenberg created his twelve-tone system for reasons that had nothing to do with Hollywood (though ironically, he ended up living there) but the point is that once these new musical languages are let loose into the world, they find many "uses" beyond the composer's original intention. They simply add to to the ever-growing musical palette. So before you run away from the Avant Garde, seriously consider what it has given us. Artists Mentioned in this Podcast: Cecil Taylor: Conquistador certainly gets right down to it. Cecil's pianistic language is so distinctive as to be recognizable in about 3 seconds. If you're looking for traditional song structures, tunes, recognizable chord changes, etc., you've come to exactly the wrong place. But, try to get through it. There is a structure there, just not one you're used to. And, more importantly, it's simply beautiful music by an oft-maligned genius. Late Beethoven: I mentioned the Great Fugue(Grösse Fugue) in the podcast. It is really a strange and difficult piece of music. Fugues, in general, are intellectually challenging, and this is what's known as a double fugue (two themes interacting.) Also, check out Hammerklavier. The first movement is particularly challenging; the 2nd highlights an interesting trait in late Beethoven wherein he seems to be hinting at a swing (jazz) rhythm. What's up with that? Late Coltrane: Interstellar Space, is one of the last things John Coltrane recorded. It' a suite with just him and drummer, Rashied Ali. To say the least, it's relentless and challenging. But even as Coltrane was always pushing boundaries, there is always something of his lyrical side here. Carlo Gesualdo: The madrigal, Moro lasso al mioduolo, is so strange, and harmonically ahead of its time that people probably thought the composer was crazy. And he probably was. Edgar Varése: Perhaps Poem Eletronique sounds like so much noise and effects to our ears—sound design in modern terms, and pretentious sound design at that. But while it may not be something you put on to chill (or sing along with) it does prove my point about sounds of the Avant-Garde being incorporated into the mainstream. So you can easily hear elements of this being incorporated into a "chill vibe" if not being a very chilly vibe itself. I don't' know if that's good or bad. It just is. Follow: Podcast Homepage Episode Transcript Subscribe on Apple Podcasts Bandcamp Page Patreon Page Twitter Peter Saltzman Website Facebook Contact: info@petersaltzman.com

Author, journalist and broadcaster David Hepworth joins us today to discuss his new book – A Fabulous Creation – charting the history of the LP from Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band to Thriller. A former editor of Smash Hits, and presenter of The Old Grey Whistle Test, he was also front of camera on the BBC for Live Aid and shares his memories of that day of days 34 years ago. Oh, and we also learn why Chuck Berry's ‘You Never Can Tell' is probably the greatest single ever made. Links Buy David's new book here: https://tinyurl.com/y3kdhs4k A Pint With Seaniebee Please subscribe to support the podcast: www.patreon.com/seaniebee Audible Feast list of Best Podcast Series of 2016 & 2017: https://tinyurl.com/ya5yj9vs 50 Best Podcast Episodes list 2016 &2017: https://tinyurl.com/y7ryajat Release date: June 10th 2019 Runtime: 30m Recorded: London

When you are ready to start working on your communication skills, you might like this FREE workshop: 5 Communication SuperSkills that will change your career if you use them (and stall your career if you don't - https://www.greatspeech.co/workshop/Woohoo!My first podcast interview and how awesome to be joined by human behaviour and body language expert, Mark Bowden http://bit.ly/winningkeynote.Mark is human behaviour and body language expert. He is the founder of Truthplane, a communication training company and has been voted #1 body language expert in the world. His counterintuitive TED Talk on the 'Importance of Being Inauthentic' has well over 1 million YouTube views https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zpf8H_Dd40.He's the author of 4 brilliant bestselling books, Tame the Primitive Brain, Winning Body Language, Winning Body Language for Sales Professionals, and Truth & Lies (what people are really thinking). He has trained and coached pretty much everyone from CEOs of Fortune 500 companies to leaders of G8 countries. Oh, and his favourite album is Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band. Good man!This interview was amazing because Mark drops knowledge bombs all the way through with great tips and techniques on using and understanding body language in the context of leadership, dating, work and other situations.Mark has got a superb Free Workshop which you should definitely check out at http://bit.ly/winningkeynoteAnd if you're ready to improve your own presentation skills, you should register for my FREE LIVE WEBINAR: “How to become an outstanding public speaker even if you are not a natural performer and without being overwhelmed by fear” https://www.greatspeech.co/webinar/As always, thanks to Jaz Kahina https://www.instagram.com/jazkahina/ for contributing the intro rap.See you next time!

In Episode 55 of the Weird Tales Radio Show we have the second and concluding part of our interview with Tobias Churton about his latest book “The Spiritual Meaning of the Sixties - the Magic, Myth & Music of the Decade That Changed the World”. This week we discuss Aleister Crowley, the man whose thinking most closely defined the decade but who was written out of history - apart from an appearance on the cover of "Sergeant Pepper"

At long last, we discuss the Beatles, with a ranking of every song on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Which track does Sarah consider an all-time top 10? Which one makes Mark froth with rage? Listen on to find out! Our intro is by Andrew Byrne, and our outro is by The Monkees. Want to request a song, buy a birthday chart reading, or just say hello? Email us (talkaboutsongs@gmail.com), tweet us (@TalkSongs), or Facebook us (facebook.com/mastas.podcast). Want to get bonus content and vote in ranking episodes? Become a patron at patreon.com/mastas.

Jeremy and Chris Arnsby cast off the shackles of commercialism to watch How to Get Ahead in Advertising, the 1989 satire written and directed by Bruce Robinson and reuniting him with his Withnail, Richard E. Grant. Their discussion of this dark and disgusting comedy covers such rib-tickling topics as George Orwell, Franz Kafka, Sergeant Pepper, Blake's 7 and Thomas the Tank Engine.

Today I share my thoughts on the 50th anniversary Deluxe Edition of Sergeant Pepper. Happy Friday and thanks for listening! :-).

In this episode of Mental Illness in Pop Culture, Beach Boys superfan Mark McGowan joins us as we explore family dynamics, birth order, addiction, schizoaffective disorder, creative genius, Love and Mercy, Charles Manson, the ethics of 24-hour therapy, and cousin rivalry, related to Brian Wilson, the Wilson family, and Mike Love. Podcaster Scott tries to make a case that Pet Sounds IS “God Only Knows,” arguably the greatest pop song of all time, plus a bunch of other “really interesting” songs (in the same vein as “A Day in the Life” hypothetically would be to Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band) but gets overruled by Leanne, Joe, and Mark, who make a convincing point about those two records marking a drastic turn for albums needing to be heard as a complete unit as well as how personal and vulnerable all of Pet Sounds' songs are, combined with gorgeous harmonies and precise orchestration. In this podcast series, we focus on pop culture portrayals of mental health issues and professional helping, believing that public perception is both reflected and influenced by popular media. Next episode: Nebraska, with guest podcaster Ethan Conner!

Jann Haworth has had 22 solo shows in Europe/ US and is contributor/director of 4 mural projects in Salt Lake City. She holds two unusual distinctions: a female Pop Artist and Co-Designer for the Beatles' Sgt Pepper Album cover - for which she received a Grammy. Jann lives and works in Sundance, Utah. Watch Jann's TEDx Talk HERE.  Connect with Jann & her work HERE and HERE. BeTheTalk is a 7 day a week podcast where Nathan Eckel chats with talkers from TEDx & branded events. Tips tools and techniques that can help you give the talk to change the world at BeTheTalk.com !

Jann Haworth has had 22 solo shows in Europe/ US and is contributor/director of 4 mural projects in Salt Lake City. She holds two unusual distinctions: a female Pop Artist and Co-Designer for the Beatles' Sgt Pepper Album cover - for which she received a Grammy. Jann lives and works in Sundance, Utah. Watch Jann's TEDx Talk HERE.  Connect with Jann & her work HERE and HERE. BeTheTalk is a 7 day a week podcast where Nathan Eckel chats with talkers from TEDx & branded events. Tips tools and techniques that can help you give the talk to change the world at BeTheTalk.com !

CLR 1832.  It took a group of Baby Boomers unburdened by the prejudices of their parents to start a cultural revolution.  Are Millenials on the verge of doing the same?  

Our Beatles special concludes this week with Part 2 - Sergeant Pepper through Abbey Road. Alison and Rachel discuss the evolution and maturation from mop-top boy band to musical and cultural icons and their eventual breakup. We also answer the important questions: How can a lonely heart give a smile? How did Sgt. Pepper attain his rank? Will Alison and Rachel Come Together over their shared love of the Beatles, or will Rachel Say Hello and Goodbye?  Connect with us! Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/musicshemissed Twitter: @musicshemissed Spotify: search for Spotify:user:musicshemissed Web: http://musicshemissed.madewithopinion.com Music: “Jump for Joy” by Scott Holmes http://www.freemusicarchive.org/music/Scott_Holmes/ http://www.facebook.com/ScottHolmesMusic Cover Art provided by Merry Little Doodle https://www.etsy.com/shop/MerryLittleDoodle

  THE MAKING OF SERGEANT PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND   On June 1st 1967, The Beatles released what was and is still considered by many the greatest album of all time. It was an album of firsts. It featured the first gatefold sleeve, the first time lyrics had ever appeared on a record cover and it was the first album the band would release following their decision to stop touring. It was the most expensive sleeve design in record distribution history featuring a host of celebrities past and present and arguably it can be considered the first album by a musical artist to be discussed in terms of art. Within hours of its release it went multi-platinum and topped the charts around the world. The album spent 27 weeks at the top of the UK album chart and 15 weeks at number one in the USA. The album is regarded by some as an early concept album that advanced the use of extended form in popular music while continuing the artistic maturity seen on the Beatles previous two albums Rubber Soul and Revolver. One of the first art rock LPs it aided the development of progressive rock and is credited with marking the beginning of the album era The Beatles heralded in what would become known as the summer of love with a soundtrack that featured songs influenced by music hall, circus western and Indian music. We were asked to turn on tune in and drop out in a year that proved be a remarkable watershed in the social history of western youth. Ladies and Gentlemen, Rainbow Valley is proud to present the story of the making of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Thanks for listening   You can follow the podcast on Twitter @rv_podcast Join our Facebook group at facebook/rainbowvalleypodcast Website rainbowvalley.libsyn.com Or send us your thoughts and feedback to rainbowvalleypod@gmail.com   This has been a Stinking Pause production

https://improvisations.fr/wp-content/uploads/20170601aday.mp3   C'était il y a cinquante ans, "A day in the life", le dernier morceau de l'album Sergeant Pepper's. Un souvenir lointain et enfantin. Mais le souvenir d'un éblouissement, de la découverte émerveillée de quelque chose d'extraordinaire qui, ce jour là, advenait. De la joie de vivre devenue musique. Le clip de la chanson, superbe. Et les paroles : I read the news today, oh boy About a lucky man who made the grade And though the news was rather sad Well I just had to laugh I saw the photograph.  He blew his mind out in a car He didn't notice that the red lights had changed A crowd of people stood and stared They'd seen his face before Nobody was really sure If he was from the House of Lords.  I saw a film today, oh boy The English army had just won the war A crowd of people turned away But I just had to look Having read the book I'd love to turn you on.  Woke up, fell out of bed, Dragged a comb across my head Found my way downstairs and drank a cup, And looking up I noticed I was late.  Found my coat and grabbed my hat Made the bus in seconds flat Found my way upstairs and had a smoke, Somebody spoke and I went into a dream.  I read the news today oh boy Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire And though the holes were rather small They had to count them all Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall. I'd love to turn you on. Paroliers : John Lennon / Paul Mccartney Paroles de A Day in the Life © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

Walking in Scotland; Game Interrupted; Sergeant Pepper; Margaret Court; Could I have your attention please?; A reputation up in the air; You're Dunbarred!;An interview with Allegra McEvedy; Music from the Lost Hollow Band

Our cousins Jordan and Aneila join us again on the virgin journey of Sergeant Pepper (their custom truck camper). They got tired of paying rent when they were on the road and so the idea of ‘the searchers' was born. Now that dream has become a reality and The Searchers are full time nomads. You can find them on instagram and follow along with their journey @thesearchers.co + @jordantbaker + @aneilanoelle We would love to hear from you!!! Leave us a voicemail at: 1(805) 242-6559 Instagram: @thewayfampodcast Like us on:  facebook.com/thewayfam If you have questions or suggestions or jokes or ideas, ask us at: thewayfam.tumblr.com or email us at thewayfampodcast@gmail.com we love ya!! xoxoSupport the show (https://www.buymeacoff.ee/thewayfam)

Drei Tage im Juni 1967, die in der Pop-Geschichtsschreibung einen Vorher-/Nachher-Modus markieren: 1. Juni: The Beatles veröffentlichen ihr Album "Sergeant Pepper´s Lonely Hearts Club Band". 2. Juni: Bei einer Demonstration gegen den Besuch des Schahs von Persien wird der Student Benno Ohnesorg erschossen. 3. Juni: Aretha Franklin erreicht mit "Respect" die Spitze der amerikanischen Hitparade.

Have we poisoned our own kids with the postmodern, politically-correct Kool-Aid that streams 24/7 through all the digital devices that we've provided them? These indoctrination tools are creating a much different child and a much different America. Our guest today is Marybeth Hicks, she is a columnist, speaker and author of the book Don't Let the Kids Drink the Kool Aid. She was a weekly columnist for the Washington Times and currently writes a monthly column titled Teachable Moments in the Catholic Digest Magazine. She is currently a Fox News contributor for shows like Fox and Friends. Marybeth Hicks addresses issues about popular culture, media, faith and values. Her insights and experience help families understand the trends that influence the next generation and are shaping our nation's future. Speaking from the heart and from experience, sharing both the poignant and hilarious moments that punctuate family life, as well as the well-informed observer. Rapid Cultural Shifts and the Impact of Digital Devices During my lifetime, I remember tremendous cultural changes in the 1960s. I remember my parents squawking about it all the time. First it was the Beatles and their goofy haircuts and music. Then it was all about the hippies and their long hair and sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The world really was changing. In fact, I heard a former Vietnam POW put it in perspective. He said: “When I got shot down in Vietnam, America was watching Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore sleeping in twin beds as a married couple on a black and white TV, while the most popular movie in Hollywood was The Sound of Music. When I returned to the States, I came home to Sergeant Pepper, a psychedelic drug and hippie culture, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In on a color TV, and Dustin Hoffman's award-winning The Graduate.” That's an incredible amount of change in just a few short years! But, even those changes were nothing compared to what digital technology and the internet have done to our culture since then. Today, the world is changing at the speed of light. And now, we—and our kids—have acquired political and moral appetites for things that neither our founding fathers nor our God ever intended we should have appetites for. Marybeth Hicks and I confront this assault on our families, our faith, and our freedom as we discuss the following topics: What does Marybeth mean by not drinking the Kool-aid. There seems to be a unified message that is largely anti-Christian. What parents should do to address their kids getting misinformation. What can parents do to keep kids informed about public school's sex education. How school safety program is replacing sex education. The importance of context when determining media boundaries. How to train your child how to navigate media when you are not in the room. Why parents must know what is on their kid's devices. The contradiction of the feminist movement embracing Beyonce. Why parents need to know who is teaching their kids. Picture provided by: axelle b

Have we poisoned our own kids with the postmodern, politically-correct Kool-Aid that streams 24/7 through all the digital devices that we've provided them? These indoctrination tools are creating a much different child and a much different America. Our guest today is Marybeth Hicks, she is a columnist, speaker and author of the book Don't Let the Kids Drink the Kool Aid. She was a weekly columnist for the Washington Times and currently writes a monthly column titled Teachable Moments in the Catholic Digest Magazine. She is currently a Fox News contributor for shows like Fox and Friends. Marybeth Hicks addresses issues about popular culture, media, faith and values. Her insights and experience help families understand the trends that influence the next generation and are shaping our nation's future. Speaking from the heart and from experience, sharing both the poignant and hilarious moments that punctuate family life, as well as the well-informed observer. Rapid Cultural Shifts and the Impact of Digital Devices During my lifetime, I remember tremendous cultural changes in the 1960s. I remember my parents squawking about it all the time. First it was the Beatles and their goofy haircuts and music. Then it was all about the hippies and their long hair and sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The world really was changing. In fact, I heard a former Vietnam POW put it in perspective. He said: “When I got shot down in Vietnam, America was watching Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore sleeping in twin beds as a married couple on a black and white TV, while the most popular movie in Hollywood was The Sound of Music. When I returned to the States, I came home to Sergeant Pepper, a psychedelic drug and hippie culture, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In on a color TV, and Dustin Hoffman's award-winning The Graduate.” That's an incredible amount of change in just a few short years! But, even those changes were nothing compared to what digital technology and the internet have done to our culture since then. Today, the world is changing at the speed of light. And now, we—and our kids—have acquired political and moral appetites for things that neither our founding fathers nor our God ever intended we should have appetites for. Marybeth Hicks and I confront this assault on our families, our faith, and our freedom as we discuss the following topics: What does Marybeth mean by not drinking the Kool-aid. There seems to be a unified message that is largely anti-Christian. What parents should do to address their kids getting misinformation. What can parents do to keep kids informed about public school's sex education. How school safety program is replacing sex education. The importance of context when determining media boundaries. How to train your child how to navigate media when you are not in the room. Why parents must know what is on their kid's devices. The contradiction of the feminist movement embracing Beyonce. Why parents need to know who is teaching their kids. Picture provided by: axelle b